Читать книгу The Man Who Wanted To Smell Books - Elspeth Davie - Страница 9

MR GARRAD HAD rung rather late in the day – some time after tea when the disorder had shown itself. But it wasn’t as late as all that, and anyway they’d had it in writing that in an emergency someone could always come right away. It was urgent all right – not something to be cured at home by a bit of tinkering and on-the-spot treatment. It was not the first time it had happened either. Garrad looked pained when he came back from the phone. His wife sat on the sofa nursing a pillow for comfort. She knew instinctively it would be a comfortless evening. The son and daughter had emerged from their bedrooms and hung limply on the banister to hear the diagnosis.

‘They will come this evening,’ said Garrad sitting down at the other end of the sofa, ‘and they will do something about it, if possible.’ That was the devil of it – the ‘if possible’ which sounded the dirge on hope. How many ‘if possibles’ had these two not heard – and yet weren’t used to it yet.

‘If possible?’ muttered his wife as though testing out a foreign phrase in her mouth.

‘That’s it. I’m giving you their word for word.’ They sat in silence. ‘What will you do then? Will you go out?’ said the wife after a bit.

‘I’ll wait till they come. If they come. Then I’ll go out.’

They waited fifty minutes until, as by a miracle, two young men turned up. The family watched them as they knelt and tested and talked together. Nothing came of it. All the others could see was the odd red streak that made the heart jump till they saw it was only the reflection of the bus-stop sign on the other side of the street. The men answered Garrad’s questions. They were very young. But it wasn’t their age that bothered him. It was their politeness, their gentleness. They had the cheerful gentleness of stretcher-bearers on a serious case as they lifted the set in their arms and carried it out. This same pair had actually put in the colour. Now, for the second time, they were taking it away. ‘How long this time?’ Garrad asked as they went past him, carefully manoeuvring it round the corner of the passage and shielding it from the sharp edge of the hall table. They shook their heads and smiled. He watched them go through the front door, careful not to jolt or trip. He watched the colour being carried further and further away until it finally disappeared into the waiting van.

‘Well, that’s that!’ he cried coming back, falsely cheerful, into the living-room.

‘Nobody minds a couple of nights without,’ said his wife. ‘But there’s Friday. It’s Friday I’m thinking about.’

‘And Sunday,’ he added. On Friday there was a thriller serial two episodes from the end. There was also a cookery demonstration which they all watched hungrily week by week, never mind whether they’d had their meal or not. They were hungry for the colour of this food – the familiar yellow yolks of eggs being broken into scarlet bowls, white cream poured into chocolate sauce, and all stirred with a blue spoon. In the background tomatoes were piled against aubergines, polished to ebony – on the side, platters of apples, grapes and oranges. Now and then the demonstrator would wipe her hands on an apron striped green and blue. Garrad’s wife was a good cook herself. She used milk and eggs. She could have got a scarlet bowl if she’d wanted it. She’d have been the first to admit that her milk was whiter, the eggs yellower than the screen ones. But that was not the point. Where was the comfort in it? For Garrad, who liked the country, there was a regular Sunday series of different landscapes filmed hour by hour from dawn to moonrise, showing the changing colours of sky, field and river throughout one day. The colour was not bad, in Garrad’s estimation. It was as real as you could get unless you actually had the thing behind you in the window. Yes, they’d done a good job on colour and the chances were it would get better as time went on.

‘You’re going out then?’ said his wife.

‘Might just as well.’ He stepped out into the street, into a warm autumn evening. His own street was made up of small modern houses with long gardens, well-known in the district for their new-planted trees. Most people were tending a sapling. Garrad was proud of this himself but this evening he had no eyes for the spindly branches beside him. In spite of himself he kept looking up at the TV aerials growing overhead, frail-looking yet tough enough to withstand the most ferocious blast. Not a house without these magic roof-twigs. All the same he was the only man for a long way round these parts who had colour. The first man. A kind of Adam of the new vision. Very soon – perhaps in a year or so, possibly in a few months, they’d all have it. But he was the first. He strode along quickly at first, then gradually more and more slowly as the first fury of his frustration spent itself. He was able to smile at the few persons he knew who were sitting at windows or working in their gardens along the street. At one or two he stopped. A married couple he knew rather better than the rest were out staring at a bed of roses and Garrad stopped and stared too.

‘You’re out early,’ the man remarked, stepping across the bed towards him.

‘Yes. Good to get a breath of air after the office.’

‘And the wife?’

‘Fine. Or not bad is more like it. She gets easily put out, thrown off her stroke …’

‘But she’s well?’

‘She worries.’

‘Like the rest of us. And yourself?’

‘All right. Rather dull, as you see.’

‘Sorry to hear your wife has worries,’ said the woman.

‘Not serious ones, I hope.’

‘Nothing much. It’s the colour trouble again. Have you thought about colour yourself?’

They immediately stripped themselves of all frivolity, let go of the roses. ‘Colour? I may say we read and listen to everything that’s being said on that particular issue,’ the man said. ‘I think you know my views on the colour question.’

‘It wasn’t that though. It’s colour TV I’m talking about.’

‘Oh, I see. No, I’ve no views on that, I’m afraid. Not yet. Haven’t got the money to have any views on that at the moment. Now, this colour question. As I said before – I think you know my views on that.’

‘Certainly I know them. I share them.’

‘I hope you do.’

‘That’s a queer way to put it, and not particularly complimentary to Mr Garrad here,’ said his wife coming nearer. ‘You’re implying he may have prejudices of one kind or another or that he’s afraid to come out with them.’

‘That’s utter nonsense! But there is a queer thing. Here we all are airing our views about colour, with lowered voices. Some day, looking back, the world will think it’s unbelievably ludicrous. We’ll be all colours and thankful to be. It’ll be a disgrace to be pure white, pure black, brown or yellow. That’s how it’ll be in the world to come.’

‘In a future world you mean,’ said his wife.

‘The same.’

‘Because “world to come” usually means “next life”. Which is a very different matter.’

‘I have no views about a next life, none whatever. Except there’s said to be no marriage or giving in marriage and that’s all that interests me.’

‘So you can see where your colour views get us,’ said his wife to Garrad. ‘I hope your wife doesn’t get what I have to put up with. And by the way, what about a bunch of roses to take back?’

‘Lovely,’ said Garrad quickly. ‘Lovely. But I’ll get them on the way back if it’s all the same …’

He moved on past other gardens competing in brightness and neatness, past doors painted blue, white and green, down to the busy corner and round it and on towards that part which grew more and more congested near the crossing of main roads but where, miraculously, on clear days, in a minute closed-in wedge between a pub and a church, you could just see the blue line of distant sea. When he was a young man Garrad had cherished this almost invisible wedge of the town. There was some fractional romance about it which he occasionally remembered nowadays when he was struggling through the rush-hour crowds or waiting in longer and longer queues. There was sometimes a pin-pointing of clouds over this sea, now and then the fleck of a ship. Sometimes it was no more than the narrow dazzle of light between black brick. He seldom looked for it now. When he looked he seldom saw it. Twenty more years of traffic had nearly obscured it. A smart addition to the church and a new signboard on the pub had pared it to an even smaller piece of sea and sky. He went further and further in towards the centre and slowly out again on the other side where most of the town’s public buildings stood – banks, town hall, libraries and Technical College – all with a sizeable bit of green in front. He came to the main modern school with its huge glass frontage where you could look right into empty classrooms and corridors and see flowers blazing along the sills, and maps, mobiles, posters on the opposite walls. A late janitor strolled up to the gates as he went past. ‘Ah … the young devils … they’re in luck, aren’t they?’ Garrad said. ‘They’re never done looking. They can see the whole world go past as they do their sums. When I think how we had to fix our eyes on a two feet by three block of blackboard. There wasn’t anywhere else to look. What wouldn’t we have given to see all this!’

‘But would you say it was a good thing?’ said the janitor, leaning his elbow on a spike of railing.

‘I was just coming to that. Is it?’ said Garrad. ‘Does it help them concentrate? Does it help them choose what things to look at out of all the stuff going past the window? Does it make them selective? Selective!’ Garrad rolled and relished the word on his tongue. The janitor took his elbows off the spike. ‘And these are going too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The spikes are going.’

‘Well that’s good I suppose. No spikes, eh? All this and spikeless too. Makes you wonder how we came through at all at their age.’ He walked on gravely, passing one or two acquaintances on his way. He made this distinction with middle-age. Real friends got fewer and fewer while acquaintances grew and multiplied. These days he used the word ‘real’ a lot. Real. He hung on grimly to reality like an acrobat with a metal plug between the teeth hanging over a void. Real friends, real food, real entertainment, real service, real flavour, real bread, real leather, real hair, real love, real money, real women. They were all whizzing away from him. Some things he’d missed out. Real colour. It was not yet added to his list.

It was cooler now and the street quieter. At another crossing of streets a miniature market was packing up its stalls. Men and women, untying aprons blotched with juice, were getting ready to heave up piles of empty crates onto lorries or into their own shops behind, while round about a few left-over baskets of battered fruit were being fingered by late-comers. A few stalls were still intact. One was slung round like an Arabian tent with purple and crimson cloth, overhung by long red and blue nylon dresses with flowered sashes. Rows of boots, dangling from their laces round the top of the stall, kicked half-heartedly in the breeze as though engaged in some mild, disembodied game of football.

A couple who were hurrying past stopped suddenly beside Garrad. They were coming from their shop where, over a long time-span of changing fashions, every single object there had changed from junk to antique and back to junk again. They kept their spirits up. ‘Hullo Mr Garrad. Very thoughtful you look. Are you contemplating the skating boots up there or what?’ asked the husband.

‘Well I might yet. Right now I’m only out for a stroll.’

‘Good. But don’t forget to be back for seven, will you?’

‘Seven. What’s that?’

‘What’s seven! Don’t tell me you were thinking of giving a miss to the last of the Great Gardens?’

‘I’ve no choice. It’s broken down on us.’ Garrad told the tale again. Of how colour was brought and taken back, and brought and taken back again. He didn’t fuss – simply told it with a wry smile while they exclaimed in sympathy. But they were still leaning at a steep angle towards home. ‘So we’d have been better to stay with plain black and white for a while,’ Garrad went on. ‘That way we’d never have known what we were missing.’

‘Do you think so?’ Their faces lost a little sympathy. They had no colour. Garrad knew he’d been tactless.

‘It’s just,’ he said, ‘that it doesn’t take long to get used to colour.’

‘I suppose so,’ said the wife. ‘Do you find it true?’

‘True?’

‘Yes, I believe it varies a lot. Some say they’ll never get it true to life.’

‘Well it’s different of course.’

‘They’re never going to get it absolutely true. That’s what I heard.’

‘I wouldn’t say never. It depends what you mean by true. It’s going to get better and better.’

‘Does anything?’ said the man. ‘I’m afraid I’m a pessimist. And I’m rather odd about colour. I don’t believe I’d like it unless it was absolutely true. I suppose it’s because you could call me a bit of an artist. Isn’t that right, Cath?’

‘That’s right,’ said his wife without enthusiasm.

‘Not in anything I do, of course. But in how I look at things.’

‘And everyone sees things differently,’ said Garrad.

‘But not as differently as colour TV sees them,’ said the other with a laugh. Garrad said nothing. He pretended to look around him at the world. He didn’t tell this couple that he’d come to like the blue-tinged eggs, the etherialized pink of TV flesh. He’d had half a mind to tell them, if only they had been more sympathetic, that these days he found the world painfully hard-edged, almost too real, too steadily bright for comfort.

‘And anyway,’ the husband was saying. ‘Do I want it all in colour? Why not save something I can discover for myself.’

‘Such as …?’ his wife asked.

‘Well, let’s say the foothills of the Himalayas.’

‘You’ve left that pretty late,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re going to make it. And anyway I’m not worrying about what you might or might not discover. What about all the invalids who can’t get around at all? Don’t you want them to get the benefit of seeing the world in colour?’

‘Listen! That’s the first time she’s ever mentioned invalids and TV. It’s all a ruse to make me sound selfish. And talking of invalids, I may say it’s the operations she’ll go for first if ever we get the colour. I mean the open heart and the bisected brain are going to look quite something, don’t you think?’ They moved swiftly on their way towards home.

Garrad remained looking around him for a while, then wandered slowly back along the way he’d come. The colour was beginning to go out of the streets and into the sky. Alleys, archways, back-courts were all a deeper grey, but the upper air was glowing. The open heart. He repeated it to himself. Now there was a phrase – a suggestive phrase if ever there was one. It had a life apart from the operating table. And there were some more prone to speak of hearts than others. Open hearts or broken hearts, warm hearts or cold ones – such words were easy for some people. But not to him. He never mentioned this heart to anyone, not even to himself. Yet it was real all right. In the world where he longed to put his hand on all real things – heart still had meaning. He slowed down. His heart was beating steadily as it had done for the last sixty years, as it would do for the next – how many more? ‘Well, I’m not so crazy about a long life,’ he had murmured out loud. In the doorway of his shop, near closing-time, James Byers heard him, heard the murmur ‘not so crazy’, and murmured very softly in reply:

‘Now who would ever call you crazy, Mr Garrad?’

Garrad stopped abruptly, turned to the doorway and saw the spread of the evening newspaper, dark with disaster, and above it Byers’ impassive face with its spectacled, secretive eyes watching him. The shop had no need of billboards. Here, morning and evening in the doorway Byers spread and read the paper. Passers-by read snippets hungrily and went in for more.

‘I said I’m not all that crazy about a long life,’ said Garrad. ‘Look at old Peterson now, fumigated and isolated in that high-class nursing-home. I dread what I’ll become. In his own home, my father – if he’s anything to go by – was such a nuisance to himself and everyone else from his eighty-eighth to his ninety-first, poor man, that his funeral went like a regular jamboree. The surprise was there was no cavorting and singing.’

‘You might be interested in a longer life when you come to it.’

‘I doubt that. Ask me if you’re still around.’

‘I’ll do that. This isn’t your usual time for walking, Garrad – on a Wednesday evening.’

‘It’s not. I’m running from a sort of hole in our house.’

‘A plumbing job?’

‘No, not plumbing.’

‘Hole? If my sister heard it she’d think of mice before you could say “tail”. Even rats. There are rats behind those stinking old station sheds and plenty of them.’

‘The hole I’m thinking of is a squared off bit of empty space.’

‘Ah … so we’re on the metaphysical plane, are we?’

‘Maybe. Our colour’s gone. The box is away.’

‘And you with it. Are you destroyed?’

‘No, but it makes you think.’

Byers folded his paper impatiently and held it together in one hand while he adjusted his glasses the better to see a clock some blocks further up the street. He was a reader. In the evenings, after listening for a certain self-specified time to the complaints of customers who rang him about his paperboys, he would go off to the library – the phone still buzzing behind him. Once there, he would go through a further set of papers and magazines and return near closing-time with a pile of books under his arm. Garrad sensed the impatience of this man, but he went doggedly on: ‘It makes you wonder about what’s real and what isn’t. Or whether it’s all one. A TV tree and one outside the window, for instance. Would it matter if you never saw the outside one again? Or is it better?’

‘So we’re on morals now,’ said Byers. ‘Good, bad and better has nothing to do with it.’

‘Maybe not. But I want to make sure I feel the difference between them.’

‘Pleasure’s the only thing that matters. The thing that gives you most – that’s the one to go for.’ There was a silence. Byers held his paper up again and they were joined by an old woman who scanned the headlines for a moment, decided against the full version, and shuffled off.

‘Women have this way of skimming the cream off everything,’ said Byers. ‘It seems to satisfy them and at the same time they get it for nothing. But you were saying . .?’

‘Real and unreal. One day at lunchtime, a while back, coming out of a restaurant I bent down to a table near the door and tried to smell a vase of those small, red artificial roses. Oh, very real they were! As I sniffed several people sitting near saw me, and guffawed.’

‘But did you get no pleasure?’

‘None. It was a very unpleasant sensation. What next? Maybe next time I’ll be asking the way of a scarecrow. I was afraid it would grow on me – mixing up real and unreal. I didn’t feel one hundred per cent human.’

‘Well who is? Don’t worry. And concentrate on pleasure.’