I Am Your Brother Read online

  “. . . and all is gone!” Why does nobody stop to give them a penny? They would move on then and disappear down another dark, short street off the Square. There seem to be hundreds of little streets in this part of London: Soho. But, of course, everyone is busy, as it is Thursday, and Thursday is market day. . . . Push-carts and burning oil-lamps and sizzling, whistling acetylene lights. A butcher’s shop: “J. Bellometti, Charcuterie.” Over there, in the background.

  Dangling electric bulbs glaring over ducks, pheasants—feathery goods; and hunks of meat dripping blood from rusty iron hooks. Kidneys, tripe, liver. Split waxen bodies of sheep. Decapitated bulls. Frozen. And huge signs: “Scotch Beef. Buy British. New Zealand Mutton.”

  In the foreground, right here, baskets of brussels sprouts and turnips and huge round cabbages, and small fingery parsnips, parsley and onions, not only in baskets, but squashed on the pavement. And shoes and ribbons and buttons sewn on cards and stockings in bundles and woollen socks. . . . And here again fishes: cold, slimy, dripping fish with dead, glazed eyes. Big, open-mouthed cod, and bundles of snaky eels, and glittering bodies of little herrings. Cut chunks of smoked salmon, four shillings and sixpence a pound. And all this is cooked, fried, boiled or stewed, and eaten, and liked.

  In between walking, tramping, sneaking, waddling women and children. And stocky-looking men in shirt sleeves: muscles and sweat, and dangerously-fat bull necks. There are hundreds of people, and a thousand voices. Arguing, fighting, quarrelling. Yet everything is subdued and almost ghostly, for cold, darkness, night, and thick November fog drowns the whole picture. A market in Soho. . . .

  Now, what’s this? What has happened? Why is everybody suddenly silent? Why do people suddenly seem to stop and interrupt their shouting and bargaining? It can’t be this old woman: not because an old woman with her pince-nez on her sharp, long, pointed nose shuffles along between those push-carts and barrows without paying the least attention to anything or any one? Just shuffles sloppily along, stopping now and then to pick up a dead mackerel fallen from the fishmonger’s cart, or a turnip from the pavement. Holding the fish close to her nose, her eyes closed, sniffing, smelling it ecstatically. Yet, all the same, people seem to move away from her. Quite silent with horror. She is such a hideous shrivelled-up old creature. And from time to time she shoves something in an old-fashioned bag dangling on a long string from her arm. Here! An apple! Again she smells at it and starts to eat: but quickly, hurriedly, like a scared animal afraid the keeper might take its food away. And then she walks off, is lost to sight, disappears. Talk goes on again. With a sigh of relief. . . .

  “Did you see her eating the apple?” says the woman who stands next to the fishmonger’s stand. “And she eats it!”—“I wouldn’t even touch it!”—“How she smells at it!”

  The market goes on. People talk, laugh, whisper. Men light cigarettes and tie their shoes, spit, and a coarse joke. And a pretty young woman pushes her little boy along, and he obviously wants a cheap sugar-stick, but it’s twopence, and times are hard.

  Nobody seems to be aware of the fact that this dis­gusting old woman has sneaked back again and has gone right into Bello­metti’s charcuterie. She asks for Bello­metti in a high-pitched voice. Bellometti himself. And the fat Italian rushes over to her. What is this all about? What does she whisper? Why does Bellometti wear a greasy smile on his moustachioed face?

  “At half-past eight,” he says. “As usual, Mrs. Spencer. But to-day dere is no liver. Just kidney, heart and tripe. It’s all I can do.”

  And this woman, Mrs. Spencer, takes a purse out of her old-fashioned bag, fumbles about, and hands Bellometti a perfectly good but slightly crumpled ten shilling note. And wait! Two half-crowns as well.

  “It’s getting very expensive,” she whistles, “but I can’t use frozen stuff. Fresh,” she says, picking up a piece of meat. “Fresh meat only.”

  Bellometti is disgusted, but he doesn’t show it. And, somehow, he is horrified, too: the strong, greasy Italian who probably weighs nineteen stone and not an ounce less, who likes his spaghetti, his Chianti, and his Mrs. Bellometti, sitting behind the cash-register—for there is a cash-register, as Bellometti’s is a high-class shop and certainly not cheap.

  After Mrs. Spencer has gone, coughing, sneezing, sniffing, Bello­metti turns to his wife. “Ten pounds, Julia, of de tripe and de stinky liver! Madonna mia, more customers like Signora Spencer and Bellometti is de rich man!”

  No one sees Mrs. Spencer again. She disappears in the dark as the clock of St. Anne’s chimes eight.

  Closing time. And the crowd breaks up and hurries away. One after another, the lights are put out. All those faces bending over their lamps with puffed up cheeks. . . . The shuffle of feet on cobble stones ceases and even the fog grows tired of hanging about over all these houses and streets. The fog, too, melts and dies away.

  Deep silence. Street lanterns are lit. And here and there a friendly glow shining from some small curtained window.

  Quite suddenly a song, a beautiful song, almost unreal, played, probably, on a cheap upright piano, somewhere in one of these houses, floats out across the dark and empty streets: part of the deep silence of the dark sky, clear now, with little stars sprinkled over it.

  Roof tops. Chimneys. Roof tops again. Streets deep underneath. A single figure here and there. A cat. A man with a chestnut barrow. Little sparks blowing as he walks silently along the street. And here is this window, where the music comes from. . . .

  Walls with strips of cheap, old-fashioned wall-paper. Torn plush curtains. A mantelpiece and a clock, and dead hands pointing at a quarter to twelve. And standing by the piano a thin young man, who looks consumptive, and seems to be about twenty-eight or thirty.

  Though what do such details matter? Only his hands, his eyes and a lock of light hair fallen over his forehead make him any different from other people.

  “Beautiful,” says a voice from a broken-down couch in the room. “Oh, so beautiful, Julian! I have never heard you play like this. It makes one forget. . . .”

  “What does it make you forget?”

  Julian sits down by the side of the girl on the couch. It is Viva. She is very pretty, not more than nineteen or twenty. Though it is hard to tell exactly, as she has too much cheap make-up on her face, like all those little dancers you see coming to or going from the Stage Door of the Windmill or any other non-stop Variety Music-hall in London and suburbs.

  She is obviously as moved and stirred as any hard-working, struggling, and sometimes starving girl of her age could possibly be.

  Julian puts his long arms about her. “Darling! Viva, darling!”

  But he has hardly spoken before he jumps up. What is the matter with him? What has he heard? The shuffle of feet on the landing of the stairs outside?

  “You must go now. She mustn’t find you here! You know how she is!”

  But it is too late. Viva has no time to pick up her hat or coat before Mrs. Spencer appears on the threshold. Faintly, through the open door, floats the husky voice of that street singer . . . “and broke my heart and left me so alone! It was so beautiful and all is gone!”

  “Who is this?” croaks Mrs. Spencer. “Who is this with you, Julian? What do you want here?”

  “We are working in the same show,” says Viva.

  “Work? Work?” repeats Mrs. Spencer like a parrot, taking off her shabby little bonnet and coat. Suddenly she laughs hysterically: “Prancing about on a piano? Hammering to make people laugh? A shame! That’s what it is. Ha! Ha! Work, you call it? Work!”

  And she slumps down heavily on the couch. Obviously her shoes hurt her.

  “Go on working, Julian,” she finishes, more mildly. “Get out and work!”

  She closes her eyes, ecstatically again, and her sharp long nose points towards the ceiling. Her hand reaches into her old bag and she takes out three single grapes, probably picked up in the market this afternoon. She smacks her lips, smells at the grapes, and eats them. She has forgotten her s
urroundings. She has forgotten everything. Even her son, Julian.

  “Good-night, Mother!”

  But even his ‘Good-night, Mother’ goes unheard.

  They close the door, Julian and Viva, and hurry, oh, so quickly down the stairs and reach the street with a deep sigh of relief.

  “She’s terrible,” says Viva. “How she looked at me, with those dead eyes she never opens. And how she talked! And how she even looked at you!”

  “She hates me,” says Julian quietly. “She would do anything to get rid of me. And now you understand, Viva, why I sit in the cold, dark orchestra pit after you are all gone? Just sit and wait and say to myself: ‘It’s eleven, and in half an hour she will go downstairs and lock the door, and at twelve she will sit in front of the fireplace for an hour, as if she were waiting for something. And she will look at the ceiling. Yes, as if she were listening and waiting for something—something awful to come!’ ”

  “Why don’t you go away? Why don’t you go away and take another room? Don’t see her. Live somewhere else, and never see her again.”

  “No, no, I can’t! That I can’t do!”

  “But you hate her,” Viva insists.

  Julian only nods. “I do. I do.”

  They walk along to an Underground Station, and before they descend Julian explains timidly, ashamedly: “Thirty shillings a week is very little, Viva. I couldn’t pay for a room and give her some money, too. Now do you see?”

  “For God’s sake, piano, pianissimo!” hisses Ritornelli, the conductor, and goes on violently conducting the small orchestra at the Melody Theatre, Hammersmith. His awkward movements, like a drunken grasshopper’s, try hard to nag some rhythmical, dusty tunes out of old violins and dimly-sparkling brass.

  “You are late,” he hisses again.

  “Sorry,” says Julian, sitting down at the piano and picking up with ease the last bar of the overture he had missed so far. “Sorry, Mr. Ritornelli, it won’t happen again.”

  “One, two, and two,” is the only answer the grass­hopper gives, brushing aside with his left fingery hand the outburst of the trombone, and wiggling his behind ecstatically.

  A half-dressed woman in a three-cornered hat with a waving, slightly moth-eaten ostrich feather, appears carrying an enormous cardboard with a stupid No. 1 figure written up. She walks across the stage, more with her hips than with her feet. As she disappears, a sailor with the head of a freak potato claps his hands loudly, obviously under the impression that the girl herself was No. 1 of the elaborate programme they have at these theatres in London. There is a short hiss from something like a travelling salesman in the row behind, and Julian, in the orchestra pit, starts playing softly and completely out of key with his surroundings—that is, very beauti­fully—the first bars of a popular tune.

  The curtain rises on three rather Jewish-Hawaiian girls with brassières and skirts made of the same material as the straw-wrappings of expensive port-wine bottles.

  They wait for Mr. Ritornelli’s signal and then start singing a monotonous note like idiotic babies. In fact, they only seem to be able to produce this one hideous and obviously exotic tone. They have little paper mandolines which they caress with their fingers. A stupid right to left and left to right movement.

  Suddenly they stop, as Viva is dragged on to the stage by a Spanish-looking Hawaiian with sleek, shining hair.

  Viva doesn’t want to come on the stage: decidedly not. She dislikes being made love to in public; she probably prefers to stay in the depths of the jungle, that is, back-stage, where Mr. Kraut, Sullivan Kraut, the strong man of the show, is talking to Mr. Shark, stage-manager, about Hitler, De Valera, and great men in general. Mr. Shark switches on another spotlight, as Viva is ready to sing something heart-breaking about red roses and sunset on the Hawaiian coast.

  Mr. Ritornelli has shrunk almost to nothing, for the piano alone has this musical stunt and he wouldn’t for the world interfere with Julian’s timing of Viva’s song.

  The sailor in the audience tries to hire a pair of opera-glasses, and one of the Hawaiian girls quickly arranges the strap of her brassière. Mr. Sturton, the drummer, quietly winds up a toy mouse—eyes, ears, tail and all—to scare Ritornelli, who has almost gone to sleep. Sturton winds the spring, the mouse, owing to its inner mechanism, starts sizzling in his hands, but alas! clack—Ritornelli, mouse-eared himself, wakes up. Sturton drops the mouse instantly and violently beats the drum: he is two bars late again, as he is full of good jokes, though they don’t always come off.

  Kraut says: “Mosley? Not a chance.”

  And Shark lowers the curtain on this grave statement.

  Applause. The Hawaiian girls disappear to the left where they have their so-called dressing-rooms. Viva, as she is the star of the show, says “Hallo!”

  Kraut says: “Good-evening,” with rather an awkward bow; and Shark: “Hurry, we are two minutes late!”

  The orchestra starts playing: ‘I have no luck with you’ accompanied by shouts of “Ices! Chocolates! Cigarettes!” And laughter, coughs, sneezes.

  “Kraut! Kraut!” shouts Mr. Shark. But Kraut can’t hear him, as he is standing on the pavement outside the Stage Door, a cigarette in one hand, in the other a glass of beer, as the execution of those two vices, smoking and drinking, is prohibited on the stage or in the dressing-rooms by law. His number is coming on in a minute: the church clock in the distance strikes a quarter-to-nine.

  At a quarter-to-nine, not in Hammersmith, but in Soho again, where the chimes are the chimes of St. Anne’s, something very strange is happening. J. Bellometti, the Italian butcher, appears with an enormous package in front of Mrs. Spencer’s house. A door is opened, two hands come out and grab the package even before Bellometti can say his customary and meant-to-be-funny “Buona sera!”

  After this a chink of light high up through the closed shutters of a window in the attic, and before Bellometti has even turned the corner of the street, the light goes out again.

  There is not a single gleam to be seen in all the windows of the house.

  Now, why should Mrs. Spencer grab a package of pounds and pounds of liver, kidney, tripe and whatever other intestinal products there are, disappear in a great hurry up to the attic which is obviously not inhabited? The kitchen is downstairs. If she wants to store the meat she would put it in the basement, where it is cold, and certainly not in the attic, which is close to the chimney, where it’s warm. She has bad feet, but there she runs, like a young woman: upstairs, downstairs.

  There is something very strange about all this. It might be worth while to look into the whole matter.

  Here is the staircase; dark; shadows like the bars of a prison. The big room on the first floor, dark again. Not a sound; and as the stairs wind round and the light from the street penetrates through a half blind oval window, there is a door to be seen, and in sharp contrast to the tumble-down house with broken windows and broken hinges, this door is brand-new, strongly built, with a shining Yale lock, hit by the light of the window.

  Voices. Two distinct voices. Mrs. Spencer’s, and another: dark, deep, rather melodious.

  “Come on. Get out of here. Don’t sulk.”

  Now this was Mrs. Spencer’s voice: high-pitched. “Here you are, it’s all I could get!”

  Silence. And then smacking, gulping, chewing, snapping. Hideous sounds. Something is feeding. Moving. Swaying. With a slimy, shuffling, slithering, dragging sound. And then this dark, melodious voice again. “It’s getting very cold up here. So cold, Mother.”

  “Yes, dear,” says Mrs. Spencer. “I shall light the fire and sit with you. Now, how’s that? It’s getting warm already. Now go to sleep.”

  “No, tell me a story, Mother. You didn’t finish the one yesterday, of the King and the Ugly Princess.”

  Mrs. Spencer’s high, sing-song voice. “Let me see. Where did we stop? Yes. The King said: ‘Take her away. She’s so ugly, and only beauty shall surround me.’ They took away the poor little Princess, far out into the
woods. And the little Princess cried and cried, because she thought they might do something very cruel to her. But they only locked her in a dark little hut so that the King wouldn’t see her!”

  “Was it very dark?” asks the deep, melodious voice.

  “It must have been,” replies Mrs. Spencer. “It must have been; but you shouldn’t interrupt me, dear.”

  “And then?” almost childishly anxious.

  “Then, one night,” continues Mrs. Spencer, “when she was very lonesome and tired of crying, she fell asleep. And the moon——”

  “Moon? What is the moon, Mother?”

  “The moon, my dear, is something very cold and round and far away. It’s like the sun, but only comes along at night.”

  “And the sun?” says the voice, sleepily.

  “Is something very warm,” whispers Mrs. Spencer, so as not to wake whomever she is telling the story to. . . .

  Quickly she opens the door. Just a faint image of an attic: heavy wooden beams, broken-down furniture, a table, a chair. All rather indistinct, as there is only a chink of light through the closed shutters. She shuts it again, locks it, disappears down the winding stairs. The chimes of St. Anne ring out the eleventh hour of the night, and a ship’s siren somewhere far away in the distance. . . .

  Hard, grey light. Short, stocky man in shirt sleeves drilling in the street. Splinters of stone, cement, and clouds of dust. Drilling, shouting; and the tooting of taxis jammed up at a crossing in Wigmore Street. A policeman: one hand vertical and one horizontal. The signal on the corner: “Stop” changes to “Go,” but the sign changes too quickly, as a woman tries to cross the street, not paying any attention to taxis, buses, or even the high coal-cart, which can’t possibly be overlooked by anybody. The driver, swearing heavily, tries to hold the horses back, and so does the taxi-man, but Mrs. Spencer doesn’t seem to take any notice, but crosses Wigmore Street like a hypnotised, paralysed chicken. She walks down the street without looking at the shop-windows, as any woman of her type would do. But suddenly she stops, cocks her head forward and tries to focus her eyes on a bundle of camel-hair blankets which are, as the sign declares: “Greatly Reduced.”