Читать книгу Kif - Elizabeth Mackintosh - Страница 9

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It was thick fog and one in the morning as they walked out of Victoria Station. They stood on the kerb and considered. Kif drew what was meant to be an ecstatic breath and choked. Barclay stamped his feet automatically. It was certainly a chill reception.

'After all,' said the Londoner suddenly, 'it can't be much more than four miles. Queer how far away you think the suburbs when there are buses and tubes, and you've never done a route march. And after all it's only a mile or two. I'm blowed if I'm going to spend the night here when there's a perfectly good bed only four miles away. Let's hoof it.'

'But we'll be rousing them in the middle of the night?'

'They'll be thrilled to the marrow,' predicted the son of the house, and stepped off into the fog.

They tramped steadily without remark for some time, both fully conscious of the wonder that the shadowy world about them was the London of their dreams. To Barclay this world of vague tall shapes had a silent watchful awareness. Aloof but aware. He had a sudden recollection of Torridon mountains as he had seen them during a Highland holiday, a slight scarf of mist rising slowly but with uncanny deliberation from their still, awful faces. Withdrawn but aware, he thought. To Kif the town was a sleeping place, and he the only aware thing in a world that dreamed. The thought intoxicated him. The town was his and the freedom of it. A royal thought. All round him a dim oblivious world, uncaring, negligible, and he alive, potent, eager.

Not that Kif analysed it that way. He analysed very little and himself not at all. If he had been asked what he thought of London on that foggy early morning all he would have said would have been that it 'gave him squirms'.

At the top of Baker Street it lightened suddenly and a minute later a stray taxi appeared. Their simultaneous whoop attracted the attention of the somnolent driver even more than their dash to him. If he had not been crawling circumspectly in the darkness there might have been two casualties that had not furthered the national cause in the least, a fact which he pointed out to them with a sleepy querulousness. It required all their powers of persuasion, monetary and otherwise, to make him abandon the thought of the bed that had seemed so near and turn back to the chilly northern heights. When he harped a third time on the little time he had had in bed for the last week Kif lost his temper.

'Blast you,' he said, 'when d'you think we were in a bed last? You turn your bus round and take us where my pal says, and be thankful you're doing it for dollars and not for fear, see?'

'Oh, well,' said the man, as Barclay, in answer to Kif's indicative elbow, climbed heavily with his kit into the taxi, 'if it wasn't that you were serving I wouldn't do it. As it is, I've no doubt I'll live to see you hanged, my lad.'

'You won't,' said Kif, 'you'll be the cause.' And he slammed the door behind him.

As they chugged slowly through the dark Barclay said: 'If the sound of this Methuselah doesn't waken them I'll knock up old Alison. She sleeps above the door, and she can get us some food without routing them all out. You'll like her. We've had her for ten years. If she left I think mother would go straight into a nursing home. She runs everything.'

He lapsed into silence. The taxi snuffed and snorted its distressed way northward and the two sat withdrawn, each busy with his thoughts. Presently Barclay stepped out on to the running-board and directed the driver through the gloom. After much fumbling they drew up definitely and Kif climbed out on to the pavement. He could see nothing but the black mass of a house that was evidently one of a row. The taxi-man mentioned without emotion the price of his services, a sum which had been the subject of his sleepy cogitations for the last fifteen minutes, and which was placed artistically within a shilling of what the weary warriors might be supposed to be willing to pay. Kif was quite ready to argue, but Barclay, to whom parley at that moment would have been like haggling at the gate of Heaven, shoved two notes at the man and led Kif away. They stumbled through a small garden and Kif stood breathing in the smell of wet earth and green things, and not realising why he felt welcomed, while Barclay felt about for appropriate missiles. As the gravel sprayed on the window for the second time the sash was gently raised and a melodious Glasgow voice inquired softly: 'Who is i'?'

'It's me—Tim, and I've got a friend. Come down and let us in without wakening the house, there's a dear.'

'Goad bless us, is i' you?' The voice mounted on the last word in a swoop of amazement. 'Ay, well, stop you a minute just and I'll be down to you.'

It was less than a minute after that the light was switched on in the hall and the door carefully unbarred. It was opened by a little woman with her dark hair bundled hastily into a tight knot at the back of her neck. Barclay's 'old' must have been an epithet of affection, for she was not over forty. She seized both Barclay's hands and shook them endlessly while she gazed at him, but uttered nothing but one long low liquid 'Well!'

Barclay laughed at her under his breath and said: 'Well, Ailie, there'll be toffee-making to-morrow!'

Her big brown eyes twinkled at him. She smiled over his shoulder at Kif and led the way into a small dining-room at the back, a place of cream walls, gleaming mahogany and shaded gold lights. As she lit the gas fire she said:

'I doubt the bath wa'er won' be ho', bu' by the time you've had something to ea' i'll be all right.'

'Glory! Anyone staying? I suppose Mr Vicar can have the spare room?'

Kif wondered for a moment who Mr Vicar was. Someone else to meet! Then he realised with a shock that Barclay was referring to him. Mister! How funny! He, Kif Vicar, had suddenly grown up. Mister!

'Ooh ay,' she said, 'it's all ready. I'll away now an' see about yer food.' And she left them.

The fire, a large one of simulated coals, was already glowing. Barclay pulled up a chair and indicated one to Kif. Kif, following his host's example, added his belt to the heap of accoutrements in the corner and sat down. He regarded with a faint horror the indifferent way Barclay used the cream tiles as props for his army boots and refrained from following him so far. These were the things Barclay was used to, he thought; the kind of thing he had grown up with. All the years he, Kif, had been eating his meals off a rough table in a flagged untidy farmhouse kitchen Barclay had eaten his here. His eyes wandered over all he could see without moving his head. He gravely considered a framed piece of petit point that hung beside the mantelpiece, wherein two shepherdesses eternally toyed with a plump and ruddy swain over a stile. Was that beautiful? Why had they framed it? On the mantelpiece itself were two yellowish jars covered all over with a queer pattern, and another shepherdess whose bodice was not as modest as her demeanour, and a roughish blue and yellow bowl exactly like the one Simone kept her soap in in Bethune. What did they have that there for? And over the row of china there was a picture in a thin gold frame. The picture was so dark that it might as well not have been a picture, but it made a nice dark restful patch on the wall. The whole room was restful. The whole house. Beatitude filled him. Presently he would sleep in a bed.

There was a faint sound as of a breeze outside, and the door swung open. A girl in a dressing-gown stood in the dark oblong for an uncertain moment, and then came in to them with a glad cry of 'Tim!'

Barclay met her halfway and kissed her resoundingly.

'Hullo, Ann, old lady,' he said, 'have we spoiled your beauty sleep? We meant to sneak to bed and appear "the morrn's morrn", as MacIntyre says.' He turned to Kif, who was standing awkwardly by the fire, but before he could begin an introduction she had crossed the room with her hand outstretched.

'It's Kif, isn't it?' she said. Her handshake was firm, like a man's. 'It is nice to know you are not just an invention of Tim's.'

Her eyes went back to her brother and lingered on him, and Kif's lingered on her. The black silk garment that wrapped her writhed with sprawling dragons and contrasted oddly with the demureness of the smooth brown hair parted in the middle and coiled in plaits round her ears. Her hairdressing, in turn, contrasted with the aliveness and strength of her face; a piquant, short-nosed, wide-mouthed face with a low forehead, level brows and a stubborn chin. In this garb she looked about twenty, but was in reality twenty-two. Kif's eyes slid shyly away from her bare feet thrust into slim things of scarlet leather.

'Who is MacIntyre?' she was saying as she pushed her brother back into the chair from which he had risen, and seated herself on the arm of it.

'MacIntyre is a private of the line and a natural philosopher whose acquaintance I regret you may never make. When he says "morn's morn" you could grind a knife on the noise he makes. But his real métier is scrounging.'

'No, swinging the lead,' amended Kif. ''Member his broken toe?'

Ann was about to inquire further into the prevarications of MacIntyre when Alison returned with the beginnings of a meal and she said instead:

'Before you start eating I am going to tell Mother you are here. She'd never forgive me if I didn't waken her. Quite apart from missing a precious minute of you, she never approves of an act she's not on in, as you know. Father's in Birmingham for the night, by the way. I'll be back in a minute.'

'Little did I think I'd live to see the day that I should trail muddy boots over a carpet and not have Alison as much as glower at me,' said Barclay, stretching his legs to the glow again and giving the maid a sideways glance.

'Ay,' said Alison reflectively, laying forks and not looking at him. But there was a world of meaning in her monosyllable.

'Mother says would you go up to her, and would Kif forgive her if she doesn't appear till morning,' said Ann, returning. She shut the door behind her brother and settled herself down opposite Kif. 'I won't offer you a cigarette because Ailie thinks that anyone who will smoke immediately before a meal of her cooking is damned everlastingly. You're only having what she calls "cauld kail het again", but I'd rather have Alison's "cauld kail" than a Savoy luncheon.'

'And this'll be by way of asking me t' starch they belts you forgoat t'send t'the laundry,' remarked the maid as she departed to fetch another trayful.

Ann twinkled at Kif. 'One up to Alison. You haven't told me how you got here. It's pretty foggy, isn't it?'

Kif gave her the history of their arrival. It was wonderful to him to have this girl talk to him with the natural ease of a sister. She took him for granted so utterly. Not once did he catch a scrutinising look, an appraising glance. He had hoped for kindness, but he had not anticipated this. And when Barclay returned and they drew in to the table she helped Alison to bring the dishes and waited on their needs with such complete matter-of-factness that it helped Kif to resign himself to the strangeness of having a being like this, in a garment the like of which he had never seen, play waitress to him. When they had been supplied she sat down at the bottom of the table and drank weak tea while they disposed of Alison's 'kail'—fried sole that was to have been for breakfast, and stew tasting and smelling of all the flavours under heaven in just proportion, to which Alison had added leftover potatoes from last night's dinner.

The talk was all on the surface, laughing, bantering talk. To a stranger looking on it would have seemed that these three had come back from a theatre or a dance, and in the course of a belated meal were recounting the amusing incidents for the entertainment of each other. Only the uniforms spoke of war. Between them and the spearing reality of things as they were hung the armour of their British self-containedness. Where their Gallic allies would have laughed and wept and embraced till emotion was spent they covered up their vulnerable places with a protective shell of flippancy. It is not the prerogative of breeding or education, that play of not caring. It is due to the Briton's constitutional aversion to a scene, which is his fabled stolidness, his weakness and his strength.

'I have to be at the hospital at half past seven,' said Ann, 'so I'm going back to bed. If you hump your kits upstairs, though, I'll see you settled in before I go. I have sent Alison back to bed.'

They followed her up the stairs, and on the landing Barclay tossed Kif for the first bath and won. There was no host and guest relationship between these two veterans. Barclay disappeared to turn on the water and Ann led Kif to his room.

'This is yours, Kif,' she said as she switched on the light. 'I hope you'll find it comfortable. We are not going to call either of you in the morning, so you can sleep till the day after if you like.' She shoved her hand between the turned-back sheets to make sure that a hot-water bottle had been put in. 'If there's anything in the world you want that we might be able to supply, ask Tim for it when he has finished soaking himself. Sleep well!' and she was gone.

The quiet of the room flooded round him. He lowered himself gingerly on to the edge of the bed and considered it: primrose lights, daffodil curtains closely drawn, thick pale carpet—he moved his boots uneasily—and unpatterned pale walls warm in the glow that somehow filled the room. He slid contemplative fingers over the amber taffeta of the eiderdown and the cool uncreased bed-linen. Then his gaze went again to the carpet. He unbuttoned his tunic hastily and applied himself to the unwinding of his puttees.