As Far as You Can Go Read online

  He gave one more tug to the door, then fled down the stairs. In his own flat there was no sign of damage as yet, but the ceiling was making suffering noises, like an animal in pain; joists groaned, planks creaked, there was a constant screaming as the warping floorboards pulled out their own nails.

  He put on gym-shoes, pocketed his money and keys, still cool and unmolten, thinking, At least I’ll be able to open the front door for them, they won’t have to smash it down. What in his room was worth saving? Watch, cuff-links, he owned nothing else of any value at all. Let the bloody place burn. But there were his books, too many to save. The firemen would be sure to soak them somehow. Too bad. He laid his macintosh tenderly over the bookcase, then went downstairs.

  When he came out on the steps of the house, blinking back the sweat and smarting tears, feeling his eyelashes slightly shorter than usual, there was a sympathetic surge towards him from the now quite sizeable crowd. There was even a small cheer, rapidly fading into general rhubarb noises such as “There he is” and “Well done, son” and “Is that the one?” and “He looks all right, doesn’t he?” Harold drew himself up, a genuine hero now, and was about to nod genially to the extras when a distant self-important clanging turned all heads towards Broadchurch Street. The clanging grew deafening as the engines turned into Craxton Street. They pulled up sharply, and at once the street was full of men uncoiling hoses, jumping down from the engines, shouting and gesticulating.

  “It’s in the kitchen on the third floor,” said Harold to a stout man who seemed to be in charge. “This one, number seventeen. The door’s open.”

  He was only just in time, as a fireman already had his axe half out of his belt, a look of cold pleasure in his eyes as he contemplated the legal and virtuous destruction of private property.

  Several firemen ran in, followed by the stout man. Harold followed slowly, hoping they wouldn’t swamp the whole house, depressed that his role was now over, wondering idly why firemen wore such funny helmets. He paused on the landing to enjoy his sense of failure. It had been an opportunity for the grand gesture, the instinctive assumption of those heroic poses demanded by an age-old calamity. And what had he done? He’d locked himself out of his own house. He’d yelled for help. To be a hero you have to have the right props. Nowadays you have to have a telephone, for instance, and a bucket. With those he could have fought the fire by himself, valiant and alone, a new Horatius, till help came clanging down the street, gleaming red. There would have been handclasps from the stout man in charge, possibly even public congratulations.

  But no, it was the man in the dressing-gown who had shown character; simply by having a telephone he had made himself important in the drama. Harold had been forced to allow him to take a good deal of the glory which should belong, by rights, to the man who discovers a fire. Any child can raise an alarm, but to dial 999 (a most desirable thing to do in any case) you have to have a bloody telephone. And then, though it had been fun breaking down two doors, they’d been invisible from the audience. Only the dressing-gown had been there to watch, and he only the first one. Besides, he’d probably only made things worse by breaking into Mrs Fanshaw’s. All that he’d saved were his watch, money and keys. And cuff-links. And the insurance people would probably make him pay for adding to the draught in Mrs Fanshaw’s flat. The fat officer would want to know about it, anyway. He would probably make some rude remark about leaving things to experts.

  Harold Barlow’s trouble, or rather one of the troubles he recognized in himself, was that he had an adolescent longing for the heroic pose. He wished, in the London of 1959, to share some of the glory of the freedom fighters of the world, no matter who they might be or from what part of the world. And they were not to be found anywhere in England at all and would almost certainly regard any Englishman with grave suspicion. It was having been brought up during the war that was responsible. All Harold’s childish dreams had been of magnificent daring with the Maquis, of secret raids behind the lines, swift Commando strikes of appalling danger—all for an absolutely unquestionably good cause. Then, when he was older, he found out about the Spanish Civil War and felt a strong sense of deprivation that a mere accident of time should have made him too young to have fought Franco, too young in fact to have been more than barely conscious of Spain, except as not-England and as a place which produced exotic postage-stamps. Not that Harold was a militarist. Two years in the Army made him quite certain that he never wanted to see any gun ever again, and besides, it wasn’t so much the dying for a cause that interested him as the having a cause in the first place. It was all very well marching to or from Aldermaston, South Africa House or Downing Street, but though that sort of exercise was splendid in its way, and showed one had principles and solidarity and sound liberal opinions, it was essentially negative and usually rather pointless, too. He felt uneasily that a token protest march in London merely eased the conscience of the marchers without doing anything at all about the fundamental injustices or immoralities they were marching against. And anyway, all the liberal causes seemed interchangeable, like the leaders of the protests, so that at times it was quite hard to remember which particular outrage was the subject of any given march.

  There were a lot of people involved in that kind of protest whom Harold found incomprehensible. People who seemed, for instance, to be against the high standard of living for obscure political or aesthetic reasons. He rather enjoyed living in an affluent society, and he certainly hoped to be pretty affluent himself, one day. No, his sense of failure, or lack, came from something more than social anger; it was a personal sense of outrage that he had all sorts of capabilities that weren’t being used. He would feel it acutely sometimes, particularly on evenings when he was alone in Craxton Street, with Mrs Fanshaw’s gas seeping down and Mr Blackthorn’s pipe seeping up to meet it in the gloomy bed-sitter. Then he would look out of his window at the scratched gardens, limp with half-living flowers, or at the pleasantly decaying façades of the houses in Craxton Street, needing paint and pointing, and he would think that this was no way to spend a life, moving from bed-sitter to flat to service flat to suburban house to country house (perhaps) to grave, with nothing to show for it all but a car and a wardrobe of good sensible suits and a wife and some children, no doubt, and so to bed, every night of his life, passing through it like a stone dropped from a boat in the middle of an ocean, falling through ever gloomier light at a regular speed, to sink at last in the primeval mud, damned glad it was all over. There ought to be more, he felt, to the business of living than this regularity, predictability, tedium. There should be some sense of purpose. But hard as he tried he couldn’t scrounge one out of religion or philosophy or sex or art or any of the other panaceas for his condition. He would be enjoying himself, he would be happily at work or relaxing, and then suddenly this absence of point would drift through his mind, leaving a dirty mark across his pleasure, like the trail of a slug, sticky and spoiling. And he would stop being happily at work or relaxing and wonder what else he could be doing that would make him feel better, and decide that there was nothing, really, the whole business was pointless and speculation about its pointlessness still more pointless, and that he’d better face up or down or in or out to it, and get on with earning his way to an idle old age. Things might look a good deal better by then, you never could tell. But it was pretty doubtful. No, it was very doubtful indeed.

  Glooming on the landing, he watched the busily efficient firemen appearing from time to time through the smoke and steam. That might be a job which gave one a sense of purpose. A little too negative, though, like everything else, too much stopping of destruction rather than creation itself, though valuable, worthy, even important. And certainly useful. Almost everything one did was useful in one way or another. Even bill-broking. And at least at his office Harold had a telephone.

  In ten minutes the fire was sizzling a disappointed fury and the stout officer came out of Mrs Fanshaw’s flat, taking off his hat and mopping his brow with a large
handkerchief.

  “Are you the one that called us out?” he said.

  “Yes. I live on the floor below.”

  “Good thing you woke up, then. The whole place would’ve gone up in another half an hour.”

  Harold felt slightly bucked. “Yes. I just woke up and heard it crackling.”

  The officer turned back to Mrs Fanshaw’s flat and said, “Let me know when you’ve finished, lads.” Then he said to Harold, “We’d better get the details, if you don’t mind. For the report, you know. Won’t take a minute.”

  When they arrived outside they found the crowd had gone back to its beds or breakfasts. Two more fire-engines had arrived and a police car. The policeman got out when he saw the fire officer, and they exchanged first-name greetings. The two unwanted engines were sent away. Everything seemed to have happened very quickly, and already the usual morning passivity was settling over the street. Harold felt extremely tired. He explained what he knew of the details to the fire officer and the policeman, who both wrote things down in notebooks. The policeman had a fierce black moustache like a regiment of crack troops on parade with sloped arms and fixed bayonets. He noted the address of Mrs Fanshaw’s sister and looked rather hopeless about Mr Blackthorn’s coach trip to Rome. A journalist appeared and took some persuading that nothing of any interest to anyone at all anywhere had happened. After a while Harold found himself alone in the street again.

  He went up to inspect the damage. Axes had ripped out a section of the kitchen floor and wall, and charred bits of wood and plaster lay mournfully about. The cooker and refrigerator looked like discards, left for years on some rubbish tip. Where the wall and floor had been gouged open there were wires and slats and pipes, the essentials of modern living which it is not considered quite decent to show. Harold thought, boring himself with the idea, that someone could make a nice and wholly unimportant analogy between the habit of hiding pipes and the refusal to see what one doesn’t want to see in society as a whole. Later in the day the idea might seem more interesting.

  “What’s the time?” he asked a fireman.

  “Quarter past six, I’d say. Near enough.”

  “God, I feel as though I’ve been up all night.”

  “I have,” said the fireman politely, not asking for or getting sympathy.

  “What started it?”

  “The fridge. The wiring’s pretty bad, you know.”

  “Yes, so I’ve been told.”

  He went down to his own flat, about which he had completely forgotten. There were dirty dribblings all down his walls, but otherwise no sign of fire, only about an inch of water sloshing about the floor. By some quirk of construction, or perhaps as a result of the strains put on the walls by the blaze above, the water was all coming down his bookcase. Though the tops of his books had been protected by his macintosh, the pages were already sticking together at the edges where the water had poured between them and the wall. Also all his letters from Helen Gallagher were completely soaked. It didn’t matter that most of them were illegible anyway, they were the nearest things to love-letters he’d ever had. All his shoes were sopping too, though his clothes were all right inside the wardrobe. What was infuriating was that the water didn’t seem to want to go on down to Mr Blackthorn’s, it stayed where it was, swilling at every step he took. It would take hours to get the place dry.

  Harold felt angry rather than sad about the spoliation of what little he owned. Everything seemed to have been ruined, but not ruined beyond repair, not even the books. There was bound to be some way in which they could be dried out legibly, so that they’d simply be warped and ugly and unsaleable. The insurance people would certainly have some clause stuck in somewhere in invisible ink about them not being responsible for the damage caused by fire-hoses. Firemen probably counted as acts of God. He sloshed towards the door and opened it to find an act of God about to knock.

  “We’ll need to clear up in here a bit, I expect,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Any real damage?”

  “Well, my shoes don’t look too good, and my entire library seems to have been inundated.”

  “Ah,” said the fireman, looking at the shoes. “They’ll dry out all right, I dare say.” He went over to the bookcase and shook his head. “Lucky it’s only books, sir. Might have been something valuable.”

  Harold was about to protest, but didn’t. Instead he went downstairs to number fifteen to thank the man in the dressing-gown. He answered the door in a white shirt and striped trousers with what looked like old school braces. He was in the middle of shaving and wore neither collar nor tie.

  “I just came to thank you,” said Harold. “The fire brigade came really very quickly.”

  “They’d have been here a damned sight sooner if that idiot girl at the exchange hadn’t put me on to Ambulance,” said the man, waving his shaving-brush about. “Sorry, old boy, did I spatter you? Come in and have a cup of tea. Didn’t seem any point in going back to bed again, did there? Yes, it was simply monstrous,” he went on without pausing, “to make a fool mistake like that when people might have been burning to death.”

  Then we should have needed an ambulance, Harold thought. But he said, “I must say she doesn’t sound any too bright.”

  “Simply scandalous to employ people in responsible positions who aren’t up to it. Public money, too.”

  “Yes. It looks as though everything’s turned out all right, though, except for Mrs Fanshaw. And there’s a good deal of water in my flat, too.”

  “Bad luck. Who’s Mrs Fanshaw?”

  “The woman whose fridge caught alight. You were absolutely right about that.”

  “Ah. Now something can be done about that. The landlord may find himself in court, if he’s not careful. Come in, then, if you’re coming. Shan’t be a jiffy. Just got the chin to do.” The man led the way into a sitting-room. There was a sofa which Harold guessed to be a divan, covered with yellow and green cushions which looked as though they had been hurled at it in a fit of temper. On a small table stood a teapot. There was a regimental photograph on the wall and a very old one of a school or college rugger team, otherwise no pictures at all.

  “What happened to the Fanshaw woman?” said the man, applying the shaving-brush vigorously to his chin. He then immediately left the room. Harold wasn’t sure whether he was expected to reply or not.

  “Well?” said the man, putting his head back round the door, then withdrawing it again.

  “She’s gone to Poole to look after her invalid sister.”

  “Poole,” came the voice, amid scraping noises. It sounded disappointed. “Never been to Poole.” There was a long pause full of scraping, then, “That girl ought to be sacked, don’t you think?” This was followed by prolonged tap sounds, then distinct face-mopping and something Harold guessed must be underwater nose-cleaning.

  “The worst of the whole thing from my point of view,” said the man, coming back into the room and putting on his collar and tie, “is that I always take a sleeping-pill on Thursday nights. It’s the only decent night’s sleep I get in the whole week. And of course it was ruined. It’s those hours from five to seven that really do you good, you know.”

  “I’m sorry. Couldn’t you take another pill tonight to make up for it?”

  “No. Mustn’t break routine. Bad for discipline. By the way, my name’s John Douglas.”

  “Harold Barlow.”

  “How do you do?”

  There seemed no possible intelligent answer, so Harold simply cleared his throat as a token of goodwill and respect.

  “Milk and sugar?’

  “Yes, please.”

  Douglas began a long story about how he couldn’t sleep, and how these new pills were absolutely first class as long as you didn’t allow yourself to become addicted to them, because if you took them too regularly they ceased to be any good, which was why he only took them once a week. Harold half-listened, thinking how awful it must be to be fifty-five, which was the tentat
ive age he assigned to Douglas, and still living in a poky flat by oneself. When sleep had been exhausted as a topic of conversation, he asked, “What do you do, Mr Douglas, if it’s not a rude question?”

  Douglas’s face took on a look of devotion to duty and he said he was secretary to a military charity and spent his time making sure old soldiers weren’t dying of starvation.

  “The trouble is,” he said, “that they’re all so damned proud. You’d be amazed how many of them won’t come and ask for the ten quid which would set them back on their feet again. There’s one old boy, wounded in the Boer War, as a matter of fact, and never been able to work properly since. We have to force the money on the chap, practically. I go and see him once a month. Have to pretend the visit’s purely social or he wouldn’t let me in.”

  “I thought the welfare state was supposed to look after people like that.”

  “Well, it is,” said Douglas. “But it doesn’t. You try living on a pension and see how you make out.”

  “I know the pension is insultingly low,” said Harold, “but surely people aren’t actually starving?”

  “Sometimes they are. Or they can’t afford coal. Or the gas bill gets out of hand. There are quite a few little charities about, quietly looking after people.” Douglas looked into his tea. “May be glad of one of them myself before I’m dead.”

  Harold thought grimly about his notion that old age might be all right, might make things seem better. He finished his tea and said, “Well, thank you very much for the tea. I feel a bit stronger now. I’d better go and get ready for a day at the office.”

  “What do you do, old boy?”

  “I work as a bill-broker in the City. It’s money for jam.”

  “Good show. Good prospects?”