Under the Skin Read online

  I sighed loudly and got into bed; after a little, I reached across her. There was no point in wasting good food, as I said, aloud to the silent night. ‘There’s plenty of little children would be glad of your nice milk.’ Not a stir, not a flicker. I began to feel foolish, like an over-jolly uncle at a wake. ‘All right, have it your own way,’ I said grumpily and turned over, hunching the bedclothes. Sleepily, I began to worry – not much, no more than a dull, hypochondriacal ache. It was unlike Louise, this spiteful silence. I wondered if she was getting the curse but didn’t ask her. In the mood she was in, it was a question she was likely to resent.

  It didn’t occur to me that she might be jealous.

  She was up virtuously early. No dressing-gowned sloppiness this morning; when I woke she was making up her face as if she were going to a party. The lipstick, the woollen dress straight from the cleaner’s polythene bag, was a pointed reproach. ‘Breakfast in fifteen minutes,’ she said. A terrible, bright smile and she whisked from the room. Before we came down she called us twice from the bottom of the stairs. Her voice was like cracking ice. She was punishing us with her efficiency. I pulled a button off my shirt and Jay, I noticed, had cut himself shaving.

  She couldn’t keep it up. While we ate breakfast she picked at a piece of toast, pointedly un-hungry, miserably embarrassed; hunched up behind her newspaper like a small, brooding, angry animal. She was funny and frightening and sad. If Jay had not been there I would have kissed her, or shouted at her; either would have produced tears and eased the situation. I tried a smile and got back a gimlet glare.

  Suddenly, she said, ‘Tom, why don’t you take Jay with you to Whitstable?’

  It was Wednesday. I had forgotten. I said, ‘Why? Of course I could, but I hardly think it would be much fun for him.’

  She hesitated. Then she turned crimson, her eyes sparking like diamonds. She said, in a suffocating voice, ‘I wish you would. I’m going out this afternoon. I don’t want to have to rush back to get supper.’

  It was the crude, silly rudeness of a hurt child. She knew it – she couldn’t bear her own behaviour. She got up, holding the empty coffee-pot between shaking hands and left the room. I would have gone afer her – if only I had – but a look at Jay stopped me.

  Misery sat on his face like sullenness. But it was real misery, not a child’s cooked-up hysteria. Besides, Louise was not a child.

  ‘She’s a fool,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Jay.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s my fault,’ he said. ‘Last night, we – I have annoyed her.’

  ‘I know.’

  He looked at me doubtfully. ‘I did not mean.… There is nothing.’ ‘All right. Leave it for now.’ I looked at my watch. We were late.

  ‘She’s in a mood. Forget it.’

  All the same, I decided to take him to Whitstable. I could put him up at an hotel and it would give Louise a chance to calm down. It wasn’t her fault – by lunch-time I was able to take a superior, masculine view – all women were the same, poor creatures, at the mercy of the moon. Smugly forgiving, I telephoned her once or twice but there was no answer.

  I wasn’t sorry. There would have been recriminations, tears, apologies, and I was glad of an excuse to have Jay’s company on the long, bleak journey; extra glad, perhaps, because Louise would not be with us. (There is nothing sinister or suggestive in this remark. Louise, Jay and I had been very happy together, but I enjoyed being with him alone. At the bottom of any triangular relationship there is often a faint jealousy. In my case, it was infantile, not sexual: I felt Jay was my friend, my discovery.)

  It was a long time since I had felt the need of friends. There had been three or four boys at school; we had shared sweets, jokes, enmities, but I couldn’t, now, remember their names or faces. There had been others since, but I had married young, Louise was more sociable than I and though our friends were shared there was not one about whom I felt that curiosity, that desire to know, which had always been, for me, the essence of friendship.

  Much more clear in my mind than my friends at school, clearer, even, than the young men I had known at college, were two old ladies who had lived in our street when I was young: Miss Florence and Miss Sylvia Doone. I don’t know how old they were then; they seemed ancient to me in their queer, high-necked, long-skirted dresses that were always decorated with a great deal of yellow lace. Miss Sylvia had thin white hair in a bun; through the silky strands her scalp showed baby-pink. Miss Florence always wore a hat in the house – she had a hairy mole or wart that quivered when she talked, on the right side of her puckered upper lip. Miss Sylvia did the housekeeping; Miss Florence taught the piano. ‘Martha and Mary Our Lord would call us,’ she once said to me. It was not a joke; they did not make jokes in that sense, though they were always laughing.

  Miss Sylvia gave me hot buns smelling of spice when I came for my piano lesson. We had prayers before it; they were members of some curious, religious sect called – I think this is right – the Little Brothers. We knelt down in their tiny, musty front parlour that smelt faintly and sweetly of escaping gas, our folded hands placed neatly on the red tablecloth of the round table. Miss Florence and Miss Sylvia prayed loudly in turn with their eyes closed – squeeezed tightly shut like children playing hide-and-seek.

  Whatever their religion, it was very cheerful. Sometimes after the piano lesson we sang hymns for a treat; rather jolly ones, I thought. ‘Oh, I’m HY, oh, I’m HY,’ was a favourite one. They sang it with gusto in their saw-edged, high voices, Miss Sylvia beating time with her chapped, knuckly hands.

  My mother disapproved of them because they were ‘odd’ and sometimes questioned me when I came home. ‘Still, she doesn’t charge much,’ she would half-grumble, when I told her – reluctantly, though I didn’t then understand why – about the hot buns and the hymn singing. When a friend of hers, the bachelor schoolmaster who cut her privet hedge, offered to teach me the piano for nothing, she was upset when I burst into tears. ‘Whatever’s the matter? Surely it’ll be much nicer. You don’t really want to go on going to that funny old lady? A big boy like you.’

  ‘What’ll you tell her?’ I choked.

  ‘Oh – she won’t mind, you funny child. She’s not qualified, she can’t expect to keep her pupils for long,’ she said with a callousness that was probably assumed to cheer me up.

  It produced a fresh storm of tears. I remembered my mother had said, when she arranged the small sum she was to pay for my lessons, ‘It’s not much, but it’ll help them out, poor old souls.’ Now they would be ‘helped out’no longer – Miss Florence had no other pupils. They would probably ‘end up in the workhouse’, a fairly distant bogey, even in those days, but one that I had heard mentioned by my mother and her friends when they were discussing other friends who were not as thrifty as they were.

  But the Misses Doone, apparently, were safe from such a fate.

  ‘Nonsense,’ my mother said when she had, as she thought, got to the bottom of my misery. ‘They’ve both got a pension. Not just the Old Age, but something a little extra. There was quite a nice insurance when old Mrs Doone died. Why, you old silly billy, the little they charged for your lessons could hardly pay their milk bill!’ I was silenced by my mother’s volte-face, but relieved. ‘Now,’ she said, taking my arm and giving it a little shake, ‘is that all?’

  It wasn’t all. But I was too young, eight, going on nine, to say that I would miss my evenings with the Misses Doone, too young to say that, in a sense, I loved them. And to tell the real truth would have been impossible for someone much older.…

  I can remember the evening now. We were kneeling for the prayers and I was peeping through my fingers as I usually did, looking first at the picture directly in my line of vision (a sepia reproduction of the Light of the World and a coloured one of Hope Blindfold on a Globe) then at Miss Florence, rapt-faced, her whiskery wart lifted to heaven. I wondered, idly, what it must feel like to have such a wart and then, whether I would feel differently from the way I d
id now, once I was grown and had hairs all over my chin. And then – it was like a light being switched on – did she? Did Miss Florence, ancient and hairy, feel the same as she had done when she was a little girl? Did she feel different from me?

  I had a curious, thrilling sensation, not of excitement, exactly; it was more as if a door had opened through which my mind had begun to flow. Somewhere inside Miss Florence there was someone hiding, as there was in me. Everyone was two people, the person outside, who changed, and the person inside, who didn’t. Later, when Miss Florence sang, ‘Up to Heaven our spirits soar’, it seemed to express my feeling exactly. Miss Florence’s wart, like my thin legs my mother despaired of, was only a part of her.

  Of course I couldn’t have explained any of this, even if I had had the words at the time, to my mother. She had already complained of my friends that they ‘filled me up with religion’as if it was some kind of unwholesome pudding. My revelation, if you can call it that, wasn’t religious. Nor did it seem to have very much to do with me; it was a feeling so intense that it seemed to have a life of its own, mysterious and magical. It gave me an exultant affection and pride in Miss Florence (some of it spilled over onto Miss Sylvia) which was quite different in quality from anything I had felt before, for my mother, for my friends at school, for anyone I had known. Once, when we saw Miss Florence out shopping, my mother pulled me into Woolworth’s to avoid meeting her. ‘Really,’ she said in shamed, angry explanation, ‘why does she make herself look such a guy? She’s too ridiculous.’

  I was deeply hurt, as if she had spoken slightingly of me. ‘She’s not,’ I cried, ‘she’s not like that.’

  But what was she like? I longed to know. I developed a fantasy of a magic button which, when twisted in a special way, would transport me inside Miss Florence’s body, to think with her mind, look out through her eyes. Though it fascinated me, this exercise blurred the original, un-physical vision: the shared greatness of the human spirit. What had started as a passion, became a game. I would ask my school-friends, what do you really think, what do you really feel – a kind of questioning which became, of course, more acceptable once I had reached the university. The memory of what I felt for Miss Florence had deteriorated into vulgar curiosity: it remained the touchstone by which I judged friendship.

  I said, ‘What were you doing when you were eight, Jay?’ and he laughed.

  ‘Minding my father’s cows,’ he said.

  I have said it was a long, bleak journey. That was an objective statement; I didn’t find it bleak. For me, that hideous stretch out of London, the narrow roads, the small, crowded towns, the known delays and irritations were all a series of dear, familiar landmarks, pointing the way to the sea. With the first glimpse of it, of that flat, grey sweep beyond the white fields – hop fields bound in winter, fields of sour-smelling brussel tops raising their frosted heads above the snow – I always felt the old sense of excitement: I was coming home.

  I didn’t drive fast; I wanted to savour that sense of excitement. It was good to have someone to point out the landmarks to, particularly someone like Jay who, once he had got over his morning depression, was as eager to come as he was eager for everything new; looking forward to the journey with the excitement of a child hoping for the lucky charm in the Christmas pudding. If Louise had been with me, we would have been in a hurry to get there, and getting there would have meant nothing to her except (though she would never have said this) a tedious, duty visit to an old, senile woman who had once thrown an inkstand at her. As it was, Jay and I stopped at a couple of pubs and drank quite a lot of beer – not enough to be drunk, but enough to relax and loosen the tongue. My tongue, anyway. What did we talk about? People, politics – my job, mainly, I think. It was something that bored Louise though she tried not to show it. I remember that by the time we turned onto the coastal road, ten miles from home, I felt smoothed out, lazily content. In half an hour, we would be at the sea. It didn’t matter that it was winter; I had been happy in winter, playing among the closed and shuttered bathing huts, with the sea sucking on the pebbles like someone sweeping broken glass. I wound the window down a little and fancied I could smell seaweed and sewage – the smell of childhood and innocence.

  Jay said suddenly, ‘Tom, we should talk about last night. I have tried to explain to Louise, I should explain to you. I have met Veronica several times in the coffee-bar and once taken her to the cinema, but we have never been alone, we have never really spoken in private. I would never take advantage of such a young girl.’

  ‘I know you wouldn’t. It’s a lot of nonsense.’

  ‘Apparently Mr Augustus Trim did not think so. I am deeply sorry—’

  ‘Louise told you Augustus was worried?’ Though I did not want to discuss the matter – it was like some irrelevant old bore sitting between us in the car – this shocked me deeply. It was unlike Louise to be so tactlessly unkind.

  ‘Yes. I think she had not meant to tell me, in the beginning, but she – she was very angry,’ he said, apologizing for her. ‘She said Mr Trim thought it unwise because Veronica’s father might object.’ He paused and then said in a quite different tone of voice, a tone I had never heard from him before, ‘Because I am a black man who cannot, of course, be expected to behave in a decent and civilized manner.’

  ‘Louise didn’t say that.’

  ‘No. Of course she would not.’

  ‘Then I don’t suppose Augustus meant anything of the sort. He only—’

  ‘I think he did,’ Jay said, not indignantly, but gently, as if explaining something to a child.

  I said, with a craven attempt at innocence, ‘Aren’t you being a bit over-sensitive? After all, if he felt like that, he wouldn’t have had us all to lunch, would he?’

  ‘He is an extremely polite man,’ Jay said. He smiled without humour: he saw through politeness now. ‘I think there are a great many gentlemen like him, in England. You believe they are your friends – they even behave like friends – but you find that in the end they cannot quite overlook the unfortunate little matter of your dirty black skin. It is better to have enemies than to make friends of such people.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said uselessly.

  ‘I am not ungratful for the lunch and the pleasant day,’ Jay said. ‘I wouldn’t like you to think I was. I liked Mrs Trim – the second Mrs Trim, very much. She is a gentle old lady. Philip liked her too. She said she would like to have Philip to stay.’

  ‘I’m sure she would. I think he’d enjoy it, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ His profile was heavy and sullen.

  ‘It would be a great kindness to her.’

  ‘She would like to have a little black boy to show off to her friends? So she can say, look how nice and liberal I am! I am putting him in my good bed, feeding him at my table, just as if he were a white child?’

  I bit back an angry answer. He had every justification for almost anything he chose to say. ‘I don’t think Georgie has all that many friends.’

  He was silent for a moment, then he said in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry, Tom. Mrs Trim is not like that. I was wrong to say it.’

  ‘No. She isn’t.’ Poor Georgie. She wouldn’t care if you were pink or green or yellow as long as you were nice to her. No – she was less demanding than that – as long as you would graciously allow her to be nice to you. People didn’t come much humbler than Georgie; if there were more people like her, the world would be a happier place. The snag was, no one would ever think of modelling themselves on Georgie so it didn’t matter a hoot what she was like or what she thought; the meek don’t inherit the earth. Or not this earth, anyway. ‘Georgie’s about as colour blind as you’ll get,’ I said. ‘Without being physically blind, that is. After all, you can’t expect anyone actually not to notice the colour of your skin, you black Nilotic, you!’

  He laughed then and said he was sorry, he hadn’t meant to lose his temper and spoil our trip, he hadn’t meant to upset me when I’d been so good to him, etc.
, etc.; of course Philip must go and stay with the Trims, he knew he wanted to. He went on talking and apologizing – as if he need apologize, I thought wearily – but I wasn’t really listening. I felt as if I had unintentionally stumbled up against an unpleasant truth. Racial hatred was a universal infection, a common virus in the blood; if you lived in the world you were bound to contract it in one form or another. Very young children might be immune, perhaps, and oddities like Georgie, but no one else. I wasn’t, certainly. Surely, even the fact that I could talk so easily to Jay was a symptom of the disease? It is always simpler to talk to people you look down on a little, people you don’t feel any need to impress. Of course I didn’t consciously look down on Jay but the habit of superiority is there, in every white man, and habits are hard to break. The thought was unwelcome like the sense of defeat; I wound the window down to its fullest extent and slammed my foot on the accelerator.

  I decided to announce my arrival before I took Jay to the hotel. I left him sitting in the car and pushed open the wooden gate with the tarnished brass plaque: ‘Dunrovin.’ There was the familiar, rusty squeak, the familiar door knocker in the shape of a bearded man. Lifting the beard to knock, I stepped happily back into childhood – it had always seemed such a tremendous, side-splitting joke.

  Miss Foley answered the door. She looked like a character in a child’s book: a small owl, dressed in a badly knitted grey jersey. Her voice twittered like an excited bird’s. ‘We’ve been expecting you, Mr Grant, we’ve been quite excited, but we’re watching telly just now.’