The Pyramid Read online

  When the yard behind the smithy altered between one week and the next—acquired shiny tools, vats of oil and cans of petrol—and I described this new triumph of Henry’s with excitement my mother cut me off.

  “Pooh! I haven’t any patience!”

  *

  Despite the death of her father, possession of a car seemed to make Bounce herself more amiable. She slept more soundly on the organ seat, her mouth lax and mobile as a baby’s. She even evolved a joke which we were accustomed to share from lesson to lesson. I had a new set of violin exercises by some foreigner called Kummer. The coincidence of my late arrival one evening and the arrival of this green volume with KUMMER on the front did it.

  “I shall call you ‘Kummer’,” she said, “because you don’t come!”

  She shook and cawed on the organ seat. After that, she would call me nothing else and we had many a good laugh together. When the vicar found us one day by the railing before the bow window, she got him to share our joke.

  “I call him Kummer because—”

  At the end of this term, however, she astonished me as much as she had ever done in her life. I was ten and had just begun at the local Grammar School. I carried a half-size violin now, which I played just as badly as the quarter-size one. I went to her front door, hearing from the yard Henry’s click! clink! though the blacksmith had shut down for the night and gone over to the Feathers. I tapped at the music room door and Bounce was ready for me, because she spoke at once, though softly.

  “Come in, Kummer!”

  I went in, and found myself with my nose a yard from her shirt front. I was opposite one of the pearly buttons on the band or front facing, whatever it was, down the middle. This in itself was a change, for I was used to seeing the brown tie there. But there was more to come. On either side, between the band and the shirt proper, there was now a frill of white and scalloped muslin. Her hands were raised; and more scalloped muslin projected from inside each cuff. As my eye followed the decorated band up to her neck, I discovered that the brooch now lay in a nest of frills where the knot of her tie had been; so in my astonishment I looked up to her face. It had softened and brightened mysteriously—a face if not young, at least with a hint, a memory of youth, of girlhood. Even her hair had flowered out of its severity, was enlarged and cloudy. Her eyes—but it did not take them long to read the incredulity in mine. Her lips sucked in their surround of wrinkles, the hollows defined themselves beneath each cheek bone; and for the first and last time in my experience of them, a round, pink flush appeared on each. As I watched, this flush spread, over her face till she was dusky from forehead to throat. She went abruptly to the piano so that I could tune my violin, left me with a scale to play, then positively—her face turned away—rushed out of the room. When she came back, her face was its usual pale yellow and quite unqualified by frills. She was severe and very critical of my playing. I never saw the frills again.

  For not long after this our whole situation altered. I was coming back from buying sweets in the High Street and stopped as usual to see if Henry was in his yard. This was always a matter of some anxiety for me since my mother did not approve of my pestering him. My time there had a feeling of forbidden fruit which as usual made it even more attractive. Sometimes, if he happened to be cleaning a car he would talk while I stood; and he would tell me for example what a sump was, or why tyres had patterns on them. But on this occasion Henry was not alone. There was a tall, blonde woman with him, a woman pale, adenoidal and gormless, who stood at the bottom of the ladder up to the loft with a baby in her arms. She was arguing with him.

  “Well I’m not going to, see? It’s no good, Henry. I got to have stairs!”

  I went away with my sweets while Henry was replying liquidly. The blonde and the baby were Henry’s quite unforeseen wife and child. I envied them very much, for it seemed a wonderful thing to me not to have a proper house but to camp in the loft like Gipsies. As for Bounce, I cannot tell down what chasms of humiliation and bitterness she was thrown or threw herself.

  “Poor soul!” said my mother, laughing and shaking her head pityingly. “You’d never believe it, would you?”

  “Believe what, Mother?”

  But my mother went on laughing and shaking her head. This was a most exhilarating time for everyone; and I shared the exhilaration without understanding its source, perhaps on the unconscious principle that one should get any enjoyment that was going. But just when the exhilaration was lifted to a new height I found myself alone in the enjoyment of it. For only a few weeks after Mary Williams turned up with baby Jacky, they all three moved into the big house and shared it with Bounce. This made me particularly happy, gave me the peace of exorcism and I no longer dreamed of the long corridor and the empty rooms for I knew that Henry lived in them. Now, when I took a bottle of tonic across for Mary’s anaemia, I did not turn right into the music room but left, down into the yard beside the kitchen and scullery with a glimpse of a long, unkempt garden; and there would be a pram on the flagstones with Jacky squealing in it and an invisible Mary clattering dishes. Yet my mother did not share my peace and happiness. She was unaccountably bitter when she spoke of Henry, and exasperated when she spoke of Bounce. I could not understand precisely how I was to adjust my attitude in this matter. When I was not in Bounce’s presence I imitated my mother; and got an astonishing rebuke from Henry of all people. I took my bicycle into his yard one day to have the handlebars firmed up, and I spoke about Bounce as if he and I and all of us were on one side of a fence, and she on the other, with the Stilbourne eccentrics. He looked up at me out of a face smudged with oil, and with eyes swimming as ever in glycerine.

  “Indeed,” he said, “Miss Dawlish is a dear, kind lady.”

  So I stood, silent and blushing a little.

  My father acquired a primitive wireless set and a little later, a gramophone. I began to understand what music might be, and what playing might be. Kreisler, Paderewski, Cortot, Casals—despite the hiss from the clumsy discs, despite the permanent frying crackle and bursts of morse from the headphones of the wireless set, music came through. But Bounce—when I tried to share this new happiness with her—attacked my father, attacked me, with a savage indignation.

  “Why has your father done this, Oliver? He’s supposed to like music! I would never, never listen to anything so cheap, nasty, vulgar, blasphemous—”

  I stood, nodding and smiling, in a half-embarrassed, half-ingratiating way and hoped only that she would stop. There came a knock at the music room door; and after her exit I heard her shouting.

  “I must not be interrupted, Mary, when I’m teaching! Very well. I’ll have the steak and kidney warmed up.”

  Indeed, we were changing, all of us. Bounce was becoming more manly and abrupt, less elastic in stride, and a little fatter. With Henry and Mary she was rough, proprietary. Sometimes she would refer to them as ‘My family’. Henry had changed too. He was solider. Instead of the shiny blue serge and peaked cap, he sometimes wore an overcoat and trilby, like the other business men of the town. As for me, I was becoming devious, secretive and cynical. It was a generation later that I discovered, on looking back, why I felt myself to be full of dishonesty and guilt. As for Mary Williams, she simply became more faded, more adenoidal; and sourer. Once, when I took over her bottle of tonic, and let myself into the yard, I saw Bounce standing on the flagstones and Mary Williams akimbo in the doorway of the scullery. They were both talking loudly at the same time; and then Mary raised her voice in a kind of whining scream that came through loud and clear.

  “All I say is, Auntie Cis, I got to have my kitchen!”

  Then they saw me, standing by the door from the hall, holding out the bottle. There was silence, except for Jacky, who threw a rattle out of his chair and made a loud remark.

  “Bub! Bub!”

  I delivered the tonic without a word said, and went away in the silence.

  Once, when I sat in the dicky seat of her car—we were going over to Calne, to
play and sing in the Elijah—Bounce and Henry were sitting in front. The hood was down and I halfheard a long, muttered conversation, which built up to the point where Henry cried out vehemently.

  “No, Auntie Cis! It’s not like that at all, at all!”

  After more mutter, he spoke out clearly again.

  “But then, like you always say, you got your music.”

  “—Kummer, there in the back—”

  She slewed in her seat and shouted at me.

  “Don’t you think, Kummer?”

  “What, Miss Dawlish?”

  “Can’t you hear what we’re saying?”

  “What d’you say, Miss Dawlish? I can’t hear you. The wind makes so much noise—”

  A devious child; but I had my music too. For I had discovered the emotional confirmations and enlargements of music, not as a supposition, but as a fact of experience; and though I still endured the violin I had fallen in love with the piano and was bashing the last use out of our tinny upright. I had heard more music than Bounce already and realized the limitations of her musical world. It is worth considering what those limitations were. Her great occasions were inaccurate and not very lively performances of St. Paul, the Messiah, the Elijah, some Stanford, and Stainer’s Crucifixion every Easter. For the rest, it was Heller, Kummer, Matthay’s Relaxation Exercises, with Hymns Ancient and Modern on Sundays. As for me, I could only just bear—because it was inevitable—the contrast between my ingratiating exterior and the unvoiced thoughts and unanalysable feelings that flittered behind it as twice a week I passed my useless half-hour.

  “I don’t know what Oliver would do, without Miss Dawlish. He’s so devoted to her—”

  And I would think, confusedly, next time I hid behind my nods and smiles and listened to a diatribe about the Stravinsky she had never heard—

  “This is what devotion feels like.”

  She was broad now, her hair escaping sometimes from the bun behind the flat hat. She had acquired two gold teeth on one side that gleamed if she gave one of her no-nonsense laughs, in man-to-man jolliness. The pram was occupied now by Jacky’s little sister.

  “Come and look at my little niece. Ouji-ouji cluck, cluck! This is Kummer, Di. I call him Kummer because—”

  But one dreadful time, waiting for my lesson in the dark hall I heard her voice from the stairs, not manly but earnest and ludicrously pleading—

  “All I want is for you to need me, need me!”

  Indeed, my fading lessons on the violin were interrupted more and more frequently. It was not the rows that seemed to blow up daily in the old house, nor even the elaborate reconciliations. These did not interrupt my playing; they merely delayed it. The real trouble was the noise, sometimes rhythmically nagging, sometime suddenly shattering, that came from outside the house. It came from what had once been the yard and smithy next door, now turned as cheaply as possible into a workshop garage for Henry. Here were Dunlop advertisements, and old inner tubes hanging on the whitewashed walls like drying octopuses. Here were oil cans, oil drums, a compressor, a workbench and the few enigmatic instruments that were necessary to Henry’s mechanical surgery. The whole place had the shine of oily dirt that comes with internal combustion.

  I was, I remember, demonstrating my comparative ability to cope with the second position. Bounce was sitting on the long organ seat. Her square shoes were on the organ pedals, her tweed skirt and jacket hairy in the gaslight. As I played, her full chest swayed forward, her head dropped a little and her eyes closed. I was thankful and played carefully to her shut eyes and the unconscious sphincter movements of her mouth—

  And then the noises were in the room like cannon shells. The shells burst all around me. Bounce was awake and glaring at my music as if the gunner had been part of the score.

  “Henry,” I shouted fatuously, “Henry working late!”

  “So am I working late!”

  She swung her feet off the pedals, jumped up and flung the door open.

  “Mary! Mary!”

  There was a pause, in which the noises went on.

  “Mary! How am I to attend to my music with that hideous noise going on? He must stop it at once!”

  I could hear Mary whine her answer, but not what she said. Bounce’s voice, used to competing with choirs, came through strongly despite the cannonade.

  “You must go and speak to him at once!” Then, appassionata—“I won’t have it!” There was a brief, ragged duet in the hall which ended with two slammed doors as Mary whined back to bathing the baby and Bounce stamped on to the cobbles with a final fortissimo “I won’t have it!”

  I stood waiting, as numbers added up to sixty, to a hundred and twenty, to three hundred at last—and silent evening returned to Stilbourne. Six hundred seconds. Bounce came back, breathing heavily, her face shining, hair draggling from the bun. The cannon fire started again so that she had to shout the explanation.

  “It’s the Ewans’s car. He has an emergency call and Henry’s hired out his own. Mine’s in dock. There’s nothing to be done about it. You’ll have to go, Kummer. I can’t teach in a noise like this.”

  So off I went, pursued by cannon fire.

  More and more Henry worked late. His noises were always unavoidable. Since most of Bounce’s pupils had their lessons in the evening the collision was head on. I took my lessons in a house torn with quarrels, loud with mechanical noise, and hot with resentment. I began to notice how readily the lines on Bounce’s forehead could turn into deep grooves. There was an utter exhaustion in her gruffness and her sleep on the organ seat. Then, between one lesson and the next, the noises stopped and Mary was all “Dear Auntie Cis!” again.

  I learnt the reason at the tea table. My mother dropped a remark into our ruminative silence, which as usual, was a sign she had news for us.

  “He’s got what he wanted at last, then.”

  I looked up.

  “Who?”

  “Henry Williams. It makes me want to stamp my foot!”

  My father looked over his cup.

  “What’s Henry Williams got?”

  “Everything he wants. He’s going to take over the shop her father left her—and the cottage next to it—and build a garage!”

  I reflected on this for a while. No more cannon fire; and in consequence, a full thirty times sixty times sixty.

  “Bounce’ll be pleased, at any rate.”

  My mother clattered the teacups testily.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s using her own money to re-build her own property. He’ll have her last penny!”

  My father peered at her through his pebble glasses and wiped his grey moustache with both hands.

  “Young Williams works hard. She’ll get her money back.”

  My mother laughed with a bitter irony, that strangely enough seemed to include my father with Henry.

  “A likely story!”

  “Now come, Mother. She’s not a child. There must have been an agreement drawn up.”

  “Kiss me leg!” snapped my mother, using a childhood expression, the euphemistic nature of which always seemed to escape her, “Kiss me leg! You know old Wertwhistle’s half-seas over all the time!”

  “Well I don’t know, Mother—”

  My mother was remarkably angry.

  “Well I do!”

  We were cowed, both of us—he, perhaps, understanding her anger as she watched him plod back to the dispensary.

  So now there was a new thing to watch in the High Street, halfway between our Square and the Old Bridge. There was a forecourt of concrete where old Mr. Dawlish had lived and lunged, there was a garage and a pit for inspecting the entrails of cars. There was a tall, thin structure next to the road, by means of which Henry hand-pumped petrol. It was here, too, that I first saw the most remarkable and indeed significant notice of the twentieth century; FREE AIR. When I made a habit of having my bicycle tyres replenished at this machine I did not grasp the delicate economic implications; but Henry, who neve
r objected, understanding my innocence, was well on the way to affording all sorts of generosity. Sometimes he wore a suit at work and was cloistered in the little office. Then he was no longer Henry, but Mr. Williams. Very shortly after the move, he installed a Combine Harvester—the first in our area—on half the forecourt and hired it out to doubting farmers. They were converted. Behind the garage, in what had been long gardens running down to the river, the concrete spread.

  In the beginning, however, while the paint on the garage was still fresh, I got some idea of how the transaction seemed to Bounce. I had walked round and round our tiny lawn, thinking and wishing. I had pushed between the fruit trees in the vegetable part and stood facing a corner of brick wall, in the place which always seemed most private to me. It was as if I had to come here to make a decision, here to this privacy where nothing but the spiders between the bricks could influence me—where I was not only away from people, but as nearly as possible away from the pressure of them. I had had a cloudy illumination. All my feelings had run together. The names of pianists were better known to me than the names of footballers. Here, I could wrestle with my sense of rank indecency at wanting to play the piano seriously, play it properly the way Myra Hess and Solomon did. Already I knew the delight of finding that my fingers could get round music I had thought impossible for them. Yet next year I should begin to work for a scholarship at Oxford. Physics and Chemistry were the real, the serious thing. The world, my parents implied, was my oyster, by way of Chemistry and Physics. I went from the angle of brick wall to Bounce’s music room with a breath-taking purpose. I initiated a conversation! I talked about a career. I adopted the self-mocking tone I used when discussing anything with her that was important to me—a precaution that allowed me to leap on her side of the fence and treat the whole thing as a joke if she disapproved of it. Jeeringly then, I suggested that I might become a musician—a pianist, perhaps.