Grasshopper Read online

  Then, of course, when I confessed, he would have been angry. But I think he’d have been gratified too. I should never have gone to a polytechnic in the first place, as he had often said. His anger would have been for my idleness and indecision, his gratification because I had found out my error in time. Architecture, of course, wasn’t academic enough for his taste but it was a lot more academic than Psychology and Business Studies. He’d have to make inquiries. A course for me would be found at a ‘proper university’. I could start in October. Max would have been in his element researching this, it might even have distracted him from his book. And meanwhile? Surely I’d have been sent home to Suffolk for six months, there would have been no point in my remaining in London with nothing to do but get into mischief. After all, the architecture course would probably not even have been in London, I might first have to take another A-level. He’d have been full of plans, not the least of them very likely being legitimately to evict me from old Mrs Fisherton’s. I’m sure he and Selina regretted ever letting me into the place.

  I would have got into a course somewhere or other, maybe in Scotland or the north of England, and eventually got an architecture degree. And, who knows, perhaps it would have been me and not Richard Rogers designing the Millennium Dome. What is certain is that I’d never have met the people who lived at Silver’s and I’d never have climbed the roofs of Maida Vale. I’d never have met my husband.

  But Max didn’t see me. He was too busy with his book and, in the event, according to Selina, did meet its deadline of May 1st. Was there anyone else I could consult? My parents would simply urge me to keep on with Psychology and Business Studies. So, probably, would my supervisor at GUP. If I asked her, Caroline Bodmer would certainly ask me why she had scarcely seen me this past term, and then, hopeful of seeing the back of me, advise me to change to Social Anthropology or Media Studies. The first day of the new term was a Tuesday. I made an appointment to meet my supervisor and ‘talk about my future’ on the Thursday afternoon at two.

  Wednesday was a lovely day. I spent it walking Maida Vale from Carlton Hill to Park Place Villas, discovering for the first time streets or insertions into streets of houses apparently built in the twenties, and gathered in enclaves behind the towering Victorian terraces. Why were they there? What had been there before them? Some large villa standing in acres of grounds? Or simply fields? I went back to my old haunt, Paddington Recreation Ground, sat on a seat and ate my lunch and read a history of London in maps, which told me those houses owed their existence to First World War bombing. Zeppelins dropped a 660-pound bomb on Warrington Crescent in March 1918. It pulverized four houses and damaged a thousand others. I had had no idea. If I had ever thought about it, I had assumed aerial bombing was invented in 1939, before my parents were born. It amazed me to read that there were fifty-seven air raids on London between 1914 and 1918.

  I read that and then I got down to The Seven Lamps of Architecture. That was my trouble, I’d read Ruskin and then a library book on domestic building, then Cherry and Pevsner’s London North-West; I’d alternate a Peter Ackroyd novel with Kent’s The Lost Treasures of London and then go straight into something about Pugin and the Palace of Westminster. There was no plan to it and, of course, no guidance, which is why my knowledge of architecture today is a muddle, a catalogue of terms like ‘crocket’ and ‘squinch’ and ‘cantilever’, useless anecdotes and an abiding love of London houses. That’s one of the advantages of being an electrician, you get to go inside a lot of them.

  Walking back to old Mrs Fisherton’s I studied all those pathetic little posters people put up on lamp-posts asking if you’ve seen their cat Gismo or Benjy or Tara, a Blue Persian or an Abyssinian or a Silverpoint Siamese, who’s been missing for a day or a week or a fortnight. There were always several and I always looked at them and the sad little photographs on them. I was expecting to see a portrait and description of Mabel but there never was one and by then I was pretty sure there never would be. I was at the top of the iron staircase when a taxi pulled up and Selina got out of it. She came tripping up the path in her kitten-heel white shoes, her short white pleated skirt just brushing her knees, and looking as if about to take part in a women’s doubles match.

  ‘Just back from your college, darling?’

  I smiled.

  ‘One of those red-brick places wants to give Max an honorary degree. What do you think of that?’

  ‘It’s an honour, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘He’s turned it down, darling. Naturally. One must maintain one’s standards, he says. Polytechnics will be giving those things next.’

  I still remember in fine detail that day and the one that followed it, just as I remember pylon day and a certain day walking by the canal in August. Whether other people’s memories work like that I don’t know, but I have always been able to recall all the circumstances and conversations and the feelings I had on momentous or terrible days, as if these things were written on tablets of stone for me to reread at will or in spite of myself. I don’t always need my diaries. So it was on that August day and that Thursday. Thursday was when I met Silver.

  Beryl came in in the morning. Her knowledge of honorary degrees was as sketchy as mine but she merited a first-class degree herself in listening at doors and overhearing private conversations. ‘The Professor’, she said, had written to a newspaper. The Times, she thought it was, one of those big papers, anyway, not the kind ‘normal people’ read, and told them this place had offered him whatever it was and he had turned it down. He was furious because they had neither printed his letter nor written anything about it in their pages. And she, Mrs that is, had said maybe they’d only write about it if it was Oxford or Cambridge and the Professor said not to be more stupid than she could help, if it had been Oxford or Cambridge he’d have accepted it. That was my first intimation that for Max and Selina, marriage might not be all sweetness and light.

  Beryl was wearing black leggings again, loose on her stick-like legs, and a bright lime-green jumper. She’d covered her hair with a turban which made her look like a 1940s factory worker I had seen pictured in one of my London books. She told me I wasn’t to worry about Mabel. She knew for a fact her owners had lived in Sutherland Avenue, moved out and left her with their old neighbours who had never really wanted her. I’d be doing everyone a kindness if I kept her. As to the Professor and Mrs, they were going to have their dining room done up, turquoise and black and white, very nice if you fancied cans of baked beans. The decorators would be in and out for months, leaving dirty footmarks. Beryl sniffed the air appreciatively. I had been smoking like a chimney, she could tell, ruining my young lungs, but it made a lovely perfume.

  She left at one and soon after I set off for GUP and my interview with my supervisor. To face the music but also to get advice. I went, as always, down the steps into the little garden in Warwick Avenue, through the shrubbery and out on to the canal bank. That something was wrong I could tell before I had gone under the bridge. On the other side of it, blocking the path, were a barrier strung with blue and white police crime tape and a policeman and a man in plain clothes who might have been another, standing in front of it. I stopped, looked at them and beyond. Up ahead, just behind where the flyover passes, at the point where I normally left the canal bank, were more policemen and something lying on the towpath. I couldn’t see any part of it but it was obviously a body. Someone had covered it with a big scarlet cloth. The policemen standing beside it were laughing about something and that shocked me, though not as much as the prospect before me.

  ‘Use the underpass, will you, love,’ the plain-clothes man said. ‘Just up there and cross the road.’

  I said I knew where it was, considered asking him if he’d let me through, saying I wouldn’t tell anyone and I wouldn’t linger, but I knew it would be hopeless. So I went back the way I had come and crossed Warwick Avenue. It was one-fifteen and my appointment with Caroline Bodmer was for two. If it hadn’t been for that and the hoped-for r
esolution of all my difficulties, I’d have gone back home. I wouldn’t have considered the underground route. Even so, I sat on a wall and thought about it. I sat there for a couple of minutes and told myself that I had made great strides towards conquering my claustrophobia at old Mrs Fisherton’s. I slept well, in spite of being in bed in a more or less subterranean room. I hardly ever felt the walls were closing in and crushing me. Panic no longer drove me to run up the iron staircase or lean out of the window and stare at the sky. I disliked the place but I was living in it, it was bearable. I got up, crossed Howley Place and went down the ramp to the underpass.

  There’s a Victorian pub on the way there. I passed it the other day and it’s being decorated, smartened up with cream paint. Everything else is that depressing sort of sixties modernity, big blocks of sand-coloured flats. The footpath dips down and just before the opening into the underpass is one of those barriers only pedestrians can pass through. A sign on it says: Cyclists Dismount. Up above is a three-tier rack of throughways, the exit road and the twin decks, one above the other, of the Westway. When I went down there at twenty-five past one on that Thursday it was the quietest time of the day for traffic but still the passing vehicles travelling at high speed made a continuous roar and throb. I saw someone come out of the tunnel mouth and turn up towards St Mary’s churchyard. Cautiously, I passed through the barrier.

  If you see a woman looking warily about her before going into an underpass, you know she’s nervous of encountering someone down there who’ll mug her or rape her. Those perils never crossed my mind. There was no one, anyway, to see me enter the tunnel and stand on the threshold, close by the wall.

  An enormous relief came. The underpass was much shorter than I’d expected, surely no more than sixty feet long. I could see a brick wall facing me at the end and daylight. The passage is lined with tiles, whitish, ribbed, dirty. I made my way along it, my hands on the tiled wall, telling myself that six months before, when I had come here in the tube, I had been underground in the tube for half an hour, and survived without weeping or screaming. Compared to the tube this was nothing, this was a pussycat. Yet all my relief had gone. I still don’t understand why this airy, quite light, spacious passage frightened me so much, why it crippled me so that I could scarcely walk. I crept along, each instance of setting one foot an inch before the other a victory. The tiles felt cold and, worse, seemed to move a little, to wobble under my hands as if made of jelly, the walls and ceiling swelling and shrinking, and the floor like shifting sands.

  But the brick wall was just ahead, and the fresh air. I reached it, gasping, still pressed against that undulating, slightly sticky wall, and found myself in a roofless circular space, open to the sky. An amphitheatre without seats, it was also without windows, was interrupted only by the tunnel exit from which I had come – and a second opening leading to the rest of the underpass. I hadn’t reached the end, I was halfway through.

  I can’t account for my terror. It wasn’t dark or airless in there, I could even see natural light at the end of this second passage. It was no greater in length than the one I had just made my way through. But I was terribly afraid. Of what, I don’t know. The claustrophobic’s worst experiences are those where the fear has no name and no definition. It’s a dread of some unidentifiable nemesis. Trying to analyse it afterwards leaves you confused and angry and knowing it will be just the same next time.

  There, in the brickwork cylinder, pushing myself hard against the curve of the wall as if, like a secret panel, it might at the right kind of pressure open and let me out into sunlight and air, I clung, knowing I could neither go on nor go back. I leant against the wall, my back to it, my fingers holding the shallow ridges of mortar while I gazed up at the blue sky, my heart beating heavily, rhythmically, with blows that hurt my ribs.

  There was, of course, no longer any hope of getting to GUP by two, there was no hope of getting there at all, of getting anywhere. This was the end of the world. I was there for ever. I sank down slowly to the concrete floor, wrapping my arms round my knees and bowing my head against them. If his footfalls made any sound, it failed to reach me. He came through from the Paddington Station end, treading softly and cat-like in thick-soled trainers. I sensed someone was there and I lifted my head. Saying I knew who it was sounds impossible, but I did. It was his extreme fairness, so accurately described by Beryl, which identified him. I saw a face that was lightly tanned, with just a little colouring on its high forehead, regular features and short nose. His shapely mouth wasn’t full enough for a girl but was just right for a man. He had rainwater grey eyes and his hair was cut short and trim, white-blond as crystal. A tall, slim, wiry person of about my own age in blue jeans and a blue and green checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  He said it gently, almost tenderly. It was a peculiarity of our generation, I believe, that, largely indifferent to the fate of the middle-aged and elderly, we cared about the very old and we cared about our contemporaries. When Max was twenty or when my father was, I don’t think they’d have stopped and asked what was troubling a girl they had found hunched up on the floor of an underpass. They’d have been too inhibited, too callous and probably too busy. It wasn’t, after all, as if I was an attractive sight, with tears running down my face, tunnel-wall dirt all over my hands and streaked down my cheeks.

  I saw no point in pretence. ‘I get claustrophobia. I’m frightened of being underground.’

  The young Max and my father (if they had got this far) would have told me to pull myself together, to have a bit of spirit. Silver put out his hands to take my dirty ones and said, ‘Come on, then. I’ll get you out. Which way do you want to go?’

  ‘That way.’ I pointed behind me. ‘I’d have gone along the canal but there’s a dead person on the towpath.’

  ‘What an interesting life you lead. Do you mean you found a dead body?’

  ‘I found the policemen beside the body,’ I said. ‘They were laughing.’

  ‘The world’s a wicked place.’ He said it with deep seriousness, then, ‘Does it help to keep your eyes shut? Pretend you’re blind and I’m getting you across the street. Trust me.’

  ‘I trust you,’ I said, and then, as I closed my eyes, ‘You’re Silver. You live at 15 Russia Road.’

  He didn’t seem surprised. ‘Everyone knows me.’

  Instead of putting his arm round me, he took my arm the way people don’t seem to any more but just as he might have supported an old blind woman. ‘Right, we’re crossing the street now. Are you OK? There’s a bus coming so we’ll wait for it to go by, it’s a 16 going to Victoria, I like dodging in and out of traffic, don’t you, the driver’s shouting at me and sticking up two fingers, not very polite, and here comes a fire engine, it’s turned its siren on, wee-ha-wee-ha-wee-ha-wow-wow-wow-wow, and another one, make way for the fire engines, folks, oh my goodness, there’s a truck reversed smack bang into a Volvo, what a mess, and the poor lady driver in tears, her old man’s going to kill her when he sees that fender, but never mind, it’s not our business and we’re across the road in one piece. How’s that?’

  I was laughing by then, I who had been certain I’d never laugh again. At the same time, opening my eyes on the grey ramp, the pub and a cyclist dismounting at the barrier, I thought how little I had laughed these past six months. It was a wonder I remembered how to do it. Silver was looking at me with his head on one side.

  ‘D’you live in Russia Road, then?’

  ‘At 19,’ I said, ‘in the basement flat.’

  ‘That must be a bundle of laughs for a claustrophobic.’

  ‘I’m sort of getting used to it.’

  He nodded, not so much in agreement but as if he was beginning to gather the information he wanted. ‘The old fellow with the fluffy white hair who’s a teacher and the woman who’s a barmaid in Coronation Street.’

  ‘Streetwise.’

  ‘They’re not your parents, are they?’

  �
�He’s a sort of cousin.’

  We had gone through the footpath into Howley Place and were walking towards St Mary’s Gardens. Silver asked me if I was going home. It couldn’t be very attractive, he expected I’d be out a lot.

  ‘I’m a student at a place called the Grand Union Polytechnic,’ I said. ‘What I mean is, I was a student there, but I think I’ve blown it,’ and I told him about hardly ever going there and the missed appointment with Dr Bodmer. ‘I suppose that what it amounts to is I’ve dropped out. I’ll have to make decisions now. I’ll have to tell Max.’

  ‘Who’s Max?’

  ‘The old fellow with the fluffy white hair who’s a teacher.’ I started laughing again.

  ‘I’ll tell you what. Why not come home with me and I’ll show you my place. It’s on the top, not at all claustrophobic.’ He took my arm again and this time we crossed a real instead of a pretend road. ‘You don’t want to rush into decisions,’ he said confidingly. ‘I never do. Things have a way of deciding themselves for you if you leave them alone. It’s like messages left on the answerphone or letters people send you. If you don’t reply, nothing dreadful happens. If I were you, I’d forget about it and enjoy myself. I mean yourself. That’s the way to get through life, I find. Enjoy yourself. Have fun. And above all, don’t worry. I never do.’

  I learnt many good things from Michael Silverman but the most valuable was not to worry needlessly. If I had been the age I am now, it would have been too late, but twenty is young enough for a radical alteration to take place in the character. By example, Silver taught me not to fret about things I couldn’t change and he taught me to be patient, to ‘wait and see’. Hardly anyone enjoyed life, he said, but when you came to think of it, now no one believed in heaven any more, enjoyment of life was what everything we did aimed at. Doing the work we liked and were trained for, keeping healthy, making money, loving others, having children, eating and drinking, all this was designed to make us happy but it seldom did because people forgot what its purpose was. Silver said he had decided to be happy first, to get into the habit of happiness, and let the rest follow if it would.