The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

I had to question several people in the department before I discovered how to find her address. ‘It’s somewhere off Holland Park Avenue,’ I was told.

Those were hungry days; I was always short of cash. On the next evening I left work, went back to my room to wash and spruce myself up, watering down my hair and all that, and then returned to the streets, passing the department again to get to a little pie-and-peas shop I had found. The pies were cheap and good. With luck, with will-power, I could make that meal my tea and supper; on a bad day, and they came fairly frequently, I would be I forced by the thought of closing time to burst out of my room again later in the evening, to seek another bite to eat.

Full of pie, I headed towards Notting Hill and Virginia. Now I worried chiefly over the precision of Virginia’s timing, as implied in her letter. She wished me to appear at 8.10. Exactly what was the nicety of her arrangements that eight should be too early for her and 8.15 presumably too late?

My morale – a word we were then beginning to hear frequently – had sunk still lower by the time I reached Virginia’s address; the several wrong turnings I had taken, my base hesitancy in approaching strangers to ask the correct way, had convinced me that I was destined always to take life’s wrong turnings. Now, there I was, forty-three minutes early, if my watch was correct – and even that could not be relied upon. Rain was falling. I wore my mac, since that happened to be the only outside garment I possessed.

The house in which Virginia lived was one of a long terrace of a kind prevalent in that area of London: three storeys high plus basement, with would-be-grand steps leading up to the front door under pretentious porches. Once these had been the residences of prosperous middle-class families; by the war they were already subdivided and mysterious people came and went by private doors. Nowadays they are still further divided, and the roof which once sheltered my frail Virginia now keeps the rain off a large family of solid and stern-faced blacks.

I stood under a porch from which I might survey Virginia’s porch and detested my hopes and fears.

At 8.08 I shovelled my thoughts back into place and went over and rang at Virginia’s bell.

A man, smiling and suave and of call-up age, confronted me, nodding and grinning even more widely as I declared whom I was after, but without actually speaking, which transformed his smiles into gems of hostility. He waved me into the hall, put his hands abruptly in his pockets, and led me upstairs, leaving me outside a door on the first floor. I tapped and went in, hating every moment.

Virginia was sitting on the sofa, smoking, wearing her customary clothes and a wry expression. Sitting in an armchair was another girl of about the same age, also smoking. The room was drab; a black paper blackout dominated the room. In the hearth a small electric fire burned; over the mantelpiece was a coloured print of a man sitting on a horse in a condition print dealers refer to as ‘somewhat foxed’. The only thing that heartened me was the sight of one of Virginia’s dabby landscape sketches on a side wall.

‘Hello, Horatio! What fun seeing you down in the wicked city! Rather different from the wilds of Derbyshire! Say hello to my friend Josie. She lives here.’

I said hello to Josie, and went and sat by Virginia. I got up and took my mac off without being asked. I sat down again by Virginia; she smiled quickly and looked away from me. Her face was thin and rather lined; for the first time I realized she was really pretty old, older than she claimed to be. She offered me a cigarette from the open packet on the sofa arm.

‘How’s life in the Nursing Service?’ I asked diffidently.

‘I haven’t joined yet. A friend of mine is trying to get me a good position.’ Or perhaps she said commission.

‘I thought you said you had joined.’

‘I’m hoping to join next week.’

Conversation died. I waited for Josie to go. She lit another cigarette, examining it with intense curiosity between puffs.

‘Look, Virginia, I’d naturally like to talk to you privately, if I could.’

It turned out this was Josie’s flat. Virginia was just looking round for a flat of her own. She had left her last one because the landlady was so horrid. Desperately, I asked her to come round to my place; it wasn’t far; we could walk. She said she did not want to go out; she was expecting someone to come and see her in a little while. I pressed her harder. She and Josie looked at each other, she nodded and led me into the adjoining bedroom.

The room was only dimly lit, but I observed that it was small and extremely untidy. Clothes hung everywhere. I clutched her and told her I loved her, needed her desperately, had come to London just to be near her. She put her arms round my neck and looked up at me, half-smiling, still taking nothing seriously. She started talking about Josie, who was in love with a captain in artillery, but I cut her off. I asked if she was in some sort of trouble.

‘There is some trouble, Horatio, darling, but I would advise you to keep out of it. It’s grown-ups’ trouble, not for boys.’

‘Thanks, Virginia, but I am grown up or I wouldn’t be here.’

She frowned as if I had said something incomprehensible and continued, ‘The trouble is my cousin, a very bad cousin – I forget if I told you about him. You know my mother was an invalid for years. She died recently and there is some terrible trouble about the will – a lot of money is involved. My cousin is trying to get hold of it. I have to be very careful.’

‘Was that your cousin who showed me up here? The smarmy chap?’

‘That’s a cousin of Josie’s, and he’s really awfully jolly.’

She started telling me about him and what he was doing, and what other people who lived in the house were doing. By refraining from interrupting, I gained time with her, and time to try to adjust to the sensation I had that she was at once as she had always been and yet also entirely changed – a dual feeling that radiated from my mysterious intuitive source. Too restless to listen properly to what she was saying, I prowled about the encumbered room, dragging at my cigarette. There were several ashtrays in the room, most of them full of ash and stubs. By the side of one of the two single beds, a book lay open, face down; that was a habit of Virginia’s. It was a novel of Ethel Mannin’s, Venetian Blinds; by chance, I had recently read it myself and thought it rather daring. I stared down at it, trying to make it provide me with a clue to Virginia’s mood, and over my head flew details of strange lives, people getting exotic war jobs, mysterious and handsome refugees from Hungary, husbands and wives changing into uniform. In between all this, Virginia dropped only the most stray word about herself.

It was an infuriating meeting. I could not piece together what was happening. She seemed unable to explain properly, or to make up her mind. It even appeared to me that she was lying about intending to join the Q.A.I.M.S. I begged her to meet me at the British Museum, so that we could spend some time together and go somewhere where we could walk and talk. Eventually she gave me a kiss and said she would drop me a note. I had to insist that she wrote down my address and did not just rely on her memory; doing that entailed going back into the other room and borrowing a little diary pencil from Josie. Josie was still smoking in her armchair.

Virginia came out on to the landing, still smiling rather anxiously, glancing at her watch. We kissed goodbye, and I went down the dim stairs in a muddle of emotion.

I let myself out into the street. By now it was absolutely dark and raining slightly; my sense of time and place was disoriented. I stood for a moment and then started off along the pavement. Such was my misery that when I heard someone walking close behind I did not bother to look round. I turned a corner and as I did so my shoulder was grabbed. Turning, I was hit inaccurately in the chest.

The blow caught me off balance and I fell over. My attacker began kicking me. I grasped his legs, dragged him down, and reached out for his throat. He was about my size, by the feel of things. He was hitting me in the face, and we rolled into the gutter. Terror and anger seized me. He wore a slippery mac, buttoned up round the throat, so that I could not hold him properly. I banged his head on the road. He struggled away but I had hold of him.

A car passed down the road. By the dimmed light of its headlamps, I saw the man I was fighting with.

‘Spaldine!’ I exclaimed. I let go of him and he began running. But I ran after him and called his name again. He stopped and we confronted one another, fists clenched, in the middle of the roadway.

‘Oh, my Christ! Stubbs!’ he gasped.

We went into a little pub, mopped ourselves up in the Gents’, and then sat at a table and talked over half-pints of bitter and cigarettes.

Spaldine was full of jealousy and bile. Once he started the tale of his grievances, he could not stop. And the target of his love and hatred was Sister Traven – as he called her thoughout his account.

He had first made love to Sister at Branwells about three weeks before I did. He had been entirely more precipitate than I. He had gone up to her room sometimes in the early hours of the morning and had stayed till dawn. He was crazy about her.

No coherent feelings, apart perhaps from amazement at my own pain, came to me as he talked. Although I interjected remarks, and they came from numbed lips, they were innocuous remarks that apparently rendered him quite insensible to any effect he was having on me.

‘What about Pepper? He was the prefect in your dormitory. Didn’t he ever find you were missing?’

‘I always went up to Sister Traven’s room in my pyjamas and dressing-gown. Then if I met anyone I could say I was feeling sick, see? Pepper, he used to sleep till the Five-to Bell! From Sister’s room you can hear old Scrimbleshanks going across the quad to ring the Rising Bell. That was the signal for me to leave her. She never wanted me to leave her.’

‘Nobody ever caught you getting back to dorm?’

‘You can always make excuses, can’t you, Stubbs? Been for a shit, or something.’

That he could equate that with lying with Virginia!

Forgetting his anger, Spaldine began telling me some of the stories of her earlier life which I had heard. But there were alarming little differences between his accounts and the ones I had received, the only one of which I remember was that she told Spaldine (later in their relationship, this was) that when her family was living in Tanganyika she and her sister had been pursued by hornets and had had to jump into a lake with all their clothes on to avoid the insects. It was a distorted echo from my own life, coming back to me disturbingly now.

Spaldine had soon begun to guess that Sister was taking other lovers. At one time he suspected me, but his brief conversation with me in the sickroom had deflected his suspicions; frankly, he said, he regarded me as too yellow to try any such thing. So he had kept watch elsewhere.

‘Do you mean to say you deliberately spied on her?’

‘I wasn’t going to let anyone else get up her if I could help it, was I?’

‘Weren’t you?’ Several lifetimes of hatred drifted between us, mine only mitigated by sorrow for poor innocent Virginia, who had somehow been cozened into taking this lout into her bed. As I looked at the blunt and detestable features of the lout, I recalled how this was the fellow who used to toss himself off and press his fingers against the base of his beastly prick, so as to save his beastly semen; had he told her that, I wondered?

Hating to hear every word, I nevertheless needed to hear more, as if the poison never poisoned enough. Interrupting him curtly, I went and bought two more half-pints, thinking that that put paid to pie-and-peas for the next day.

When I set his drink in front of him he lifted the glass and sipped without a word of thanks, frowning, still involved with his hateful story.

Watching Sister became his obsession, and soon he found confirmation of his suspicions.

‘Who do you reckon was getting stuck across her? I’ll tell you! Angel-Face Knowles!’

‘Knowles! No! He was just a kid!’

‘He was getting stuck across her, I tell you, slimy little bastard!’

Knowles could only have been fifteen. Knowles’s parents were extremely rich. Knowles managed to hire a car from the village; he met Sister at a prearranged spot, and they were driven away somewhere – Spaldine never managed to find out where, but he saw them drive off in the general direction of Derby. He tackled Knowles about it later.

Apparently Knowles was eager to boast of his escapade. He said they had checked into a hotel and he had been registered as Sister’s son! I had no means of knowing whether this happened, or whether it was a fantasy of Knowles’s or of Spaldine’s. Spaldine was revealing himself as a highly unbalanced character.

He had threatened to report Knowles to the Head; Knowles, a cool customer, dared him to do it. Spaldine then hit him, and Knowles promised that if another blow landed then he would go to the Head and make his report on Spaldine. Checkmate.

Knowles lived over in Cheshire, so Spaldine at least had the holidays clear, as he imagined. He could think about nothing but Sister – his family considered him mad. He decided he must cycle over to Traven House to see her.

Another revelation was coming. I saw it in his eyes. My stomach was chilled with beer and anguish. I had to excuse myself and go into the Gents’ for a pee. As I stood there, I was saying to myself, half-aloud, ‘What’s he going to say next? What’s he going to say next?’

When I got back to the table Spaldine had craftily lit a fresh cigarette, thus saving himself the necessity of offering me one. He blew smoke out across the table and said, ‘You never went to Traven House, did you?’

‘I was going, but we changed our plans.’

‘Like that was it? Give over, Stubbs. I know who changed the plans! She did – she had to! She doesn’t live at Traven House any more than I do.’

‘You’re lying, Spaldine!’

‘Look, I turned up there about twelve o’clock. Great big house all going to pot, it is! An old man answered the door, some sort of a butler, I suppose. I asked for Sister and the old boy said there was nobody of that name there, very poker-faced. Of course, I said I knew better. They’d got birds nesting under the porch affair. I kicked up a bit of a fuss. The old bloke started shouting. Eventually a chap calling himself Captain Traven turned up. He could have been sixty or seventy, I suppose. Anyhow, he sent the aged retainer away and tried to sort things out a bit. I told him why I was there, and he asked me in for a beer. He was civil enough – he’d been in the Army, he said. Walked with a limp. It was a funny house, a lot of sporting what’s-its on the walls. As I say, he gave me a beer. I needed it. And we had a chat. They’d got a kind of a billiard room there.’

‘What relation was this captain to Virginia?’

From what Spaldine said, I gathered that the captain squeezed more information out of Spaldine than Spaldine squeezed out of him. The captain sounded a shady character, the way Spaldine told it, but a few words from Spaldine could have made the Archbishop of Canterbury sound like a cheap crook.

The captain had evaded Spaldine’s question about Virginia, much as Spaldine evaded mine about her. He had talked about the failure of business interests. A hag-like woman with dyed red hair had appeared, lit a cigarette, and inspected Spaldine; she asked him if he was staying for lunch (to which the captain had sharply said ‘No’), and then drifted off without another word; Spaldine said he was willing to bet that the hag was not the captain’s wife.

‘What did he say about Virginia?’

Spaldine had led the conversation round to Virginia, and the captain told him that she was his daughter – his only daughter; after his second marriage she had become very difficult; eventually she had left under a cloud – this many moons ago, Spaldine gathered – with mutual vows that she would never return. She had tried to set the house on fire.

The repulsiveness of this story owed much to the obnoxious character of the man who was telling it, but it had certain features in its own right that exercised very little appeal on me. Even supposing Spaldine had inserted no lies of his own into the account, there was no telling how much of the story was a fabrication of the captain’s. Spaldine had said of him, by way of description, that he wore ‘a sort of military dressing-gown’; and somehow this detail alone was enough to conjure up in my eyes a whole career of unscrupulousness. I felt myself close to the dusty source of that terrible ill which I always knew had been done Virginia at some period in the past.

No such reflections detained Spaldine. He was pressing on with his tale of disenchantment.

Still on the trail of Sister – and now more savagely than ever, I gathered – he had cycled in to Nottingham and hammered on the door in Union Street. The slut (described by Spaldine as ‘a little honey in sexy pink slippers’) had opened up to him and shown him Virginia’s room upstairs. Virginia was in, and alarmed to see him. He was furious and created a big scene, during which she wept. Later she soothed him and said that even if her situation was not quite as she had represented it, it was certainly not as her father had represented it. He was a cruel man who had turned out her and her mother, so that he might live in sin with the red-haired woman. He was currently trying to disinherit her from the money due to her in her grandfather’s will.

All the time Spaldine raved on about the lies Sister had told him and the damage she had done him, I was aware how my hatred of him was growing. He referred to her as a snake-in-the-grass, using the expression several times, but he was my snake-in-the-grass; plainly, he had bullied Virginia, and had still been screwing her in Union Street, even when he had begun, by his own admission, to hate her. To think I’d met him in Nottingham, that very day, shortly after he had been seeing her, had bought him a cup of coffee, had never suspected a thing!

How I felt about Virginia was another matter. I was then unsure how I felt; an immense lake of sorrow was growing inside me, but partly it was because I regretted she had become involved with Spaldine.

However, it was clear that many of Spaldine’s charges against her were correct in essence. Virginia had deceived everyone. The wealthy upper-class background she had sketched was a myth – as I should have seen, had I had more experience, from her worn clothes and the shabby rooms in which she had to live.

‘You realize that the bitch is even now having it off with somebody else?’ Spaldine said. ‘She came down here because she couldn’t get enough round Nottingham.’

‘She’s allowed to choose, isn’t she?’

‘Don’t give me that stuff! She’s got an obligation to me – to us, let’s say, hasn’t she? To me, anyhow. Just because she was sacked from school …’

‘What? She was sacked? Are you sure? She never told me she was sacked!’

‘She never told you a bloody thing, Stubbs!’

‘She told me she wanted to join the Nursing Service.’

‘Oh did she! She told me she had to come to London to act as principal witness in some involved divorce case concerning a friend.’

‘Well, she mentioned that to me too – perhaps both are true.’

‘Look, they’re neither true, you silly clot! I reckon she got bunked!’

‘You’ve no proof.’

‘I reckon the Head found out what she was up to. Christ, man, she must have had half the Upper School across her at one time or another. Someone on the staff would have been bound to find out!’

‘You’re just guessing, and you’ve no right to say that. I don’t see you’ve got any right to watch her house, either – much less clobber anyone who comes out.’

He shambled up to the bar and bought two more half-pints of beer and a packet of Woodbines. I watched him and saw what a radically unattractive fellow he was, his fair hair standing up in spikes, his nose pudgy and dismal and his trousers filthy from our scramble. No doubt I looked as bad myself. The knuckles of my left hand were bleeding badly, and I had wrapped them in a dirty handkerchief. Two sordid young men of seventeen, Virginia’s lovers! Poor dear Virginia!

Spaldine put the beer down and lit a fag. I cadged one off him. A couple of old women were watching us covertly, attracted by Spaldine’s vehement manner, doubtless. I gave them a good hard stare, mean-mouthed, and they looked away.

‘See, something fishy’s going on round at hers,’ Spaldine said. ‘I bloody know there’s some other bloke having it off with her. She put me off meeting her tonight, you know. She doesn’t want me any more, that’s for sure!’

‘Wouldn’t it be better to resign yourself to the worst? You can’t make her’ (I gulped) ‘love you.’

‘Are you bloody daft? Look, what I thought we’d do is this. We can have a plan of action, see? With two of us it’s easy. We take it in turn to watch her place. She generally goes out in the morning. Instead of following her, we could slip in there and one search her room while the other kept look-out. Then we could find this other bloke’s name and address …’

‘No! Spaldine, try and see this from a sensible angle …’

‘No, listen, you don’t know what I was going to say!’

‘I don’t want …’

‘Listen, never mind that! I wasn’t going to say we should go and beat him up. I reckon perhaps I was wrong there. Wrong tactics! We go round and see this other bloke and just scare him off, you see!’ He delivered this looking at me hard, his eyes blazing with inspiration, – watching to see the delight dawn on my face as I took in the brilliance of his plan.

‘Balls!’ I said.

‘No, don’t you see … Look, we can act a bit tough with him to show him we can’t be mucked about. But we tell him, just tell him, all about the downright lies Sister has told us. That should scare him off.’

‘Why? Has it scared you off, Spaldine?’

He looked away from me, let his gaze travel jerkily over the bar.

‘I’ll have to do it myself, then.’ He took a meditative sip of his beer. ‘You’re about as much good as a wet fish, Stubbs,’ he said. He drained the rest of his glass, set it down on the table and wiped his lips. ‘And I don’t want to see you round by hers again,’ he said. He stood up, nodded severely, and marched out through the door.

I sat there, finishing my beer more slowly, and went out into the streets; if I hurried I could get back to my pie-and-peas shop before it closed. There would be time enough to suffer when my stomach was less empty.

In fact, my stomach began to suffer directly it was full of pie-and-peas. My entrails, all my insides, had undergone awful contortions of coldness during the episode with Spaldine. Leaving the pie-and-peas shop, I had to make for the nearest public lavatory at the double.

It was one of those subterranean London affairs, and as I sank down on the seat in my stall, the subterranean nature of my life was borne in on me. My coming to the bloody capital was meant as a great gesture of love; but so submerged was everyone in the animal hurly-burly of their lives that nobody had noticed it. Nobody. Only my stomach, as it emptied, gave indications that the gesture had ever been made.

All round me were other declarations of abortive love. Beside, the usual boastings about length and frequency of climax and pleas for assignation with eighteen-year-old R.A.F. boys, several case histories were scrawled on the door and walls. One was about a fellow luring a news-girl into his kitchen on a Sunday morning and sucking her off on the table. One began, ‘My older brother is in the Merchant Navy and when he comes home he has to share my bed with me.’

I read them with detached interest as I wiped myself. Written large by my right-hand side was a pencilled notice: ‘Why Shit Here When There Are Better Stories in the Next Cubicle?’