The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two

‘Oh, good.’

‘And I am paid to watch them.’

‘You mean to tell me that you are standing in that unheated wooden hut in all this cold and snow just to guard the crocuses?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Isn’t this cotton any use, then?’

‘Cotton is effective against bird thieves. I am not saying anything about human thieves.’

‘But I wasn’t going to eat your crocuses!’

‘I am only doing my job.’

‘Your job is to be a crocus-watcher?’

Yes, madam, and it always has been and my father before me. When I was a little lad I knew the work I wanted to do and I’ve done it ever since.’

Not thus the youngsters, much less suspicious characters, understanding quite well how respectable citizens may envy them their jobs.

There was this incident when the geraniums had flowered once, and needed to be picked over to induce a second flowering. There were banks of them, covered with dead flowers. I myself had resisted the temptation to nip over the railings and dead-head the lot: another had not resisted. With a look of defiant guilt, an elderly man was crouching in the geraniums, hard at work. Leaning on his spade, watching him, was a summer gardener, a long-haired, barefooted, naked-chested youth.

‘What’s he doing that for?’ said he to me.

‘He can’t stand that there won’t be a second flowering,’ I said. ‘I can understand it. I’ve just dead-headed all mine in my own garden.’

‘All I’ve got room for is herbs in a pot.’

The elderly man, seeing us watching him, talking about him, probably about to report his crime, looked guiltier than ever. But he furiously continued his work, a man of principle defying society for duty.

On a single impulse, I and the gardener parted and went in different directions; we were not able to bear causing him such transports of moral determination.

But, of course, he was quite in the right: when all the other banks of geraniums were brown and flowerless, the bank he had picked over was as brilliant as in spring.

By now it had rained, and had rained well, and just as it was hard to remember the long cold wet of the early year in the cold drought, and the cold drought in the dry heat, now the long dryness had vanished out of memory, for it was a real English summer, all fitfully showery, fitfully cool and hot. Yet it was autumn; the over-fullness of everything said it must be. A strong breeze sent leaves spinning down, and the smell of the stagnant parts of the lakes was truly horrible, making you wonder about the philosophy of the park-keepers – it was against their principles to clear away the smelly rubbish? They couldn’t afford a man in a boat once a week to take it away? Or they had faith in the power of nature to heal everything?

In my garden, last year’s wasteland – so very soon to be left behind – the roses, the thyme, geranium, clematis, were all strongly flowering, and butterflies crowded over lemon balm and hyssop. The pear tree was full of small tasteless pears. The tree was too old. It could produce masses of blossom, but couldn’t carry the work through to good fruit. At every movement of the air, down thumped the pears. All the little boys from the Council flats came jumping over the walls to snatch up the pears, which they needed to throw at each other, not to eat. When invited to come in and pick them, great sullenness and resentment resulted, because the point was to raid the big rich gardens along the canal, into which hundreds of gardenless people looked down from the flats, to raid them, dart away with the spoils, and then raid again, coming in under the noses of furious householders.

One afternoon I was in a bus beside the park, and the wind was strong, and all the air was full of flying leaves. This was the moment, the week of real autumn. Rushing at once to the park, I just caught it. Everything was yellow, gold, brown, orange, heaps of treasure lay tidily packed ready to be burned, the wind crammed the air with the coloured leafage. It was cooling – the Northern hemisphere, I mean, not the park, which of course had been hot, cold and in between ever since the year had started running true to form, some time in July. The leaves were blown into the lakes, and sank to make streams of bubbles in which the birds dived and played. All around the coots’ battered nest lay a starry patterning of plane leaves in green and gold. You could see how, if this were wilderness, land would form here in this shallow place, in a season or two; how this arm of the lake would become swamp, and then, in a dry season, new earth, and the water would retreat. All the smelly backwaters were being covered over with thick soft layers of leaf; the plastic, the tins, the papers vanishing, as, no doubt, the park-keepers had counted on happening when autumn came.

I walked from one end of the park to the other, then back and around and across, the squirrels racing and chasing, and the birds swimming along the banks beside me in case this shape might be a food-giving shape, and this food shape might have decided to distribute largess around the next bend and was being mean now because of future plenty. There were many fewer birds. The great families bred that year off the islands had gone, and the population was normal again, couples and individuals sedately self-sufficient.

Only a week later, that perfection of autumn was over, and stripped boughs were showing the shape of next spring. Yet, visiting Sweden, where snow had come early and lay everywhere, then leaving it to fly home again, was flying from winter into autumn, a journey back in time in one afternoon. The aircraft did not land when it should have done, owing to some hitch or other, and, luckily for us, had to go about in a wide sweep over London. I had not before flown so low, with no cloud to hide the city. It was all woodland and lakes and parks and gardens, and a highly coloured autumn still, with loads of russet and gold on the trees. All the ugly bits of London you imagine nothing could disguise were concealed by this habit of tree and garden.

In the park, though, from the ground, the trees looked very tall, very bare, and wet. The lakes were grey and solid. When the birds came fast across to see if there was food, they left arrow shapes on the water spreading slowly, and absolutely regular, till they dissolved into the shores: there were no boats out now, for these had been drawn up and lay overturned in rows along the banks, waiting for spring.

And the dark had come down.

The park in winter is very different from high, crammed, noisy summer. A long damp path in early twilight … it is not much more than three in the afternoon. Two gentlemen in trim dark suits and tidy, slightly bald heads, little frills of hair on their collars – a reminiscence of the eighteenth century or a claim on contemporary fashion, who knows? – two civil servants from the offices in the Nash terraces walk quietly by, their hands behind their back, beside the water. They talk in voices so low you think it must be official secrets that they have come out to discuss in privacy.

The beds are dug and turned. New stacks of leaf are made every day as the old ones burn, scenting the air with guilt, not pleasure, for now you have to remember pollution. But the roses are all there still, blobs of colour on tall stems. All the stages of the year are visible at once, for each plant has on it brightly tinted hips, then dead roses, which are brown dust rose-shaped, then the roses themselves, though each has frost-burn crimping the outer petals. Hips, dead roses, fresh blooms – and masses of buds, doomed never to come to flower, for the frosts will get them if the pruner doesn’t: Pink Parfait and Ginger Rogers, Summer Holiday and Joseph’s Coat, are shortly to be slashed into anonymity.

For it will be the dead of the year very soon now, soon it will be the shortest day.

I sit on a bench in the avenue where in summer the poplars and fountain make Italy on a blue day, but now browny-grey clouds are driving hard across from the north-east. Crowds of sparrows materialize as I arrive, all hungry expectation, but I’ve been forgetful, I haven’t so much as a biscuit. They sit on the bench, my shoe, the bench’s back, rather hunched, the wind tugging their feathers out of shape. The seagulls are in too, so the sea must be rough today, or perhaps there is an oil slick.

Up against the sunset, today a dramatic one, gold, red and packed dark clouds, birds slowly rotate, like jagged debris after a whirlwind. They look like rooks, but that’s not possible, they must be more gulls. But it is nice to imagine them rooks, just as, on the walk home, the plane trees, all bent one way by the wind, seem, with their dappled trunks, like deer ready to spring together towards the northern gates.

Mrs Fortescue (#ulink_4dd27455-a54e-5fc7-aaa9-c8d76670d0c3)

That autumn he became conscious all at once of a lot of things he had never thought about before.

Himself, for a start …

His parents … whom he found he disliked, because they told lies. He discoveed this when he tried to communicate to them something of his new state of mind and they pretended not to know what he meant.

His sister who, far from being his friend and ally, ‘like two peas in a pod’ – as people had been saying for years – seemed positively to hate him.

And Mrs Fortescue.

Jane, seventeen, had left school and went out every night. Fred, sixteen, loutish schoolboy, lay in bed and listened for her to come home, kept company by her imaginary twin self, invented by him at the end of the summer. The tenderness of this lovely girl redeemed him from his shame, his squalor, his misery. Meanwhile, the parents ignorantly slept, not caring about the frightful battles their son was fighting with himself not six yards off. Sometimes Jane came home first; sometime Mrs Fortescue. Fred listened to her going up over his head, and thought how strange he had never thought about her before, knew nothing about her.

The Danderlea family lived in a small flat over the off-licence that Mr and Mrs Danderlea had been managing for Sanko and Duke for twenty years. Above the shop, from where rose, day and night, a sickly reek of beers and spirits they could never escape, were the kitchen and the lounge. This layer of the house (it had been one once) was felt as an insulating barrier against the smell, which nevertheless reached up into the bedrooms above. Two bedrooms – the mother and father in one; while for years brother and sister had shared a room, until recently Mr Danderlea put up a partition making two tiny boxes, giving at least the illusion of privacy for the boy and the girl.

On the top floor, the two rooms were occupied by Mrs Fortescue, and had been since before the Danderleas came. Ever since the boy could remember, grumbling went on that Mrs Fortescue had the high part of the house where the liquor smell did not rise; though she, if remarks to this effect reached her, claimed that on hot nights she could not sleep for the smell. But on the whole relations were good. The Danderleas’ energies were claimed by buying and selling liquor, while Mrs Fortescue went out a lot. Sometimes other old women came to visit her, and an old man, small, shrunken and polite, came to see her most evenings, very late indeed, often well after twelve.

Mrs Fortescue seldom went out during the day, but left every evening at about six, wearing furs: a pale shaggy coat in winter, and in summer a stole over a costume. She always had a small hat on, with a veil that was drawn tight over her face and held with a bunch of flowers where the fur began. The furs changed often: Fred remembered half a dozen blond fur coats, and a good many little animals biting their tails or dangling bright bead eyes and empty paws. From behind the veil, the dark, made-up eyes of Mrs Fortescue had glimmered at him for years; and her small old reddened mouth had smiled.

One evening he postponed his homework, and slipped out past the shop where his parents were both at work, and took a short walk that led him to Oxford Street. The exulting, fearful loneliness that surged through his blood with every heart-beat, making every stamp of shadow a reminder of death, each gleam of light a promise of his extraordinary future, drove him around and around the streets muttering to himself; brought tears to his eyes, or snatches of song to his lips which he had to suppress. For while he knew himself to be crazy, and supposed he must have been all his life (he could no longer remember himself before this autumn) this was a secret he intended to keep for himself and the tender creature who shared the stuffy box he spent his nights in. Turning a corner that probably (he would not have been able to say) he had already turned several times before that evening, he saw a woman walking ahead of him in a great fur coat that shone under the street lights, a small veiled hat, and tiny sharp feet that took tripping steps towards Soho. Recognizing Mrs Fortescue, a friend, he ran forward to greet her, relieved that this frightening trap of streets was to be shared. Seeing him, she first gave him a smile never offered him before by a woman; then looked prim and annoyed; then nodded at him briskly and said as she always did: ‘Well, Fred, and how are things with you?’ He walked a few steps with her, said he had to do his homework, heard her old woman’s voice say: ‘That’s right, son, you must work, your mum and dad are right, a bright boy like you, it would be a shame to let it go to waste’ – and watched her move on, across Oxford Street, into the narrow streets beyond.

He turned and saw Bill Bates coming towards him from the hardware shop, just closing. Bill was grinning, and he said: ‘What, wouldn’t she have you then?’

‘It’s Mrs Fortescue,’ said Fred, entering a new world between one breath and the next, just because of the tone of Bill’s voice.

‘She’s not a bad old tart,’ said Bill. ‘Bet she wasn’t pleased to see you when she’s on the job.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Fred, trying out a new man-of-the-world voice for the first time, ‘she lives over us, doesn’t she?’ (Bill must know this, everyone must know it, he thought, feeling sick.) ‘I was just saying hullo, that’s all.’ It came off, he saw, for now Bill nodded and said: ‘I’m off to the pictures, want to come?’

‘Got to do homework,’ said Fred, bitter.

‘Then you’ve got to do it then, haven’t you?’ said Bill reasonably, going on his way.

Fred went home in a seethe of shame. How could his parents share their house with an old tart (whore, prostitute – but these were the only words he knew), how could they treat her like an ordinary decent person, even better (he understood, listening to them in his mind’s ear, that their voices to her held something not far from respect) – how could they put up with it? Justice insisted that they had not chosen her as a tenant, she was the company’s tenant, but at least they should have told Sanko and Duke so that she could be evicted and …

Although it seemed as if his adventure through the streets had been as long as a night, he found when he got in that it wasn’t yet eight.

He went up to his box and set out his schoolbooks. Through the ceiling-board he could hear his sister moving. There being no door between the rooms, he went out to the landing, through his parents’ room (his sister had to creep past the sleeping pair when she came in late) and into hers. She stood in a black slip before the glass, making up her face. ‘Do you mind?’ she said daintily. ‘Can’t you knock?’ He muttered something, and felt a smile come on his face, aggressive and aggrieved, that seemed to switch on automatically these days if he saw his sister even at a distance. He sat on the edge of her bed. ‘Do you mind?’ she said again, moving away from him some black underwear. She slipped over her still puppy-fatted white shoulders a new dressing-gown in cherry-red and buttoned it up primly before continuing to work lipstick on to her mouth.