Grasshopper Read online

  So where does the coincidence come into all this? I’ll tell you. I’d been wishing for someone to tell my story to and he was up there all the time. He was up there with a story of his own.

  4

  Kissing faces through glass is no longer my style. But I still have that photograph of Daniel, still in its silver frame. I took it with me when I left old Mrs Fisherton’s, stole it, I suppose. After all, I had stolen the photograph in the first place. It and a lot of copies of it were on the table when I went to see Mrs Fleetwood after the hospital discharged me. I should really say when she summoned me to tell me what she thought of someone who’d sent a boy of sixteen, her only son, to his death. She went out of the room because she was crying so much and while she was away I took one of the photographs, rolled it up and put it inside my jacket. Poor thing, she’d have torn up those prints rather than give me one.

  That portrait stands in our living room now, along with one of Mum and Dad. There ought to be one of my husband but the only time he ever had his photograph taken was when we got married. Our wedding photograph has pride of place. But Daniel is there too and the one man who might be jealous doesn’t mind. When people ask me who the boy with the keen eyes and the cheerful grin is, I don’t tell them, I say in the words of Emmylou Harris’s song that it’s just someone I used to know.

  The days, the weeks, after that interview with Max have jumbled in my memory. The diary was abandoned for a long while. All sorts of things happened; it’s the order I can’t recall. I started at GUP in a daze, confused by everything, but at least my journey there was underground- and underpass-free, and I discovered buses for days when I didn’t feel like walking to Paddington Station. As for the place itself, the college, I was so deeply uninterested in what I was supposed to be doing and so unable to find my way around that I passed whole weeks in a trance-like state. Because the buildings were on opposite sides of a fairly important road, many rooms were reached by means of an overhead walkway and yes, of course, an underpass. I never used the underpass but toiled upstairs to the walkway, was late for lectures or sometimes hopelessly lost. I spoke to scarcely anyone and after a time people stopped making overtures to me. As early as that first term I was missing lectures, skiving off or not bothering to go in. Most people have bad dreams that are specifically about that sort of thing, dreams in which they find themselves back at school or college with tests or exams or finals looming, they have attended no classes, done no work, made no notes, and, barely knowing the basics of their subject, either retreat from the scene or fly into a panic. But it’s a dream and you wake up from it. For me it was real life.

  I told nobody. Max might have helped me but he was the last person I’d have told. On my way to phone my mother one Sunday I encountered him coming out of the drawing room. He stopped and asked me how I was progressing at my polytechnic in the tone some people use when asking children how they are getting on at school. I said everything was fine and he didn’t pursue it, only pursing his lips and frowning in the way that made him look like a cross pekinese.

  I was desperately lonely. That was when I started talking to old Mrs Fisherton. I don’t mean I believe in ghosts or ever did, I never really thought she was there, but we do talk to people in our heads, usually people we love, and we no more get answers from them than I did from her. I told her about GUP and how awful it was and sometimes I asked her what would become of me if I did no work, got no qualification, so that there was nothing for it in the end but to go back to Suffolk and my parents. I couldn’t talk to Daniel in his silver frame, he seemed in a strange way more dead than she was, perhaps because of my ever-present guilt.

  One morning when I should have been attending a lecture and demonstration on marketing but was lying in bed instead, looking at the segment of pale sky above the wall, something set the wire hangers in the wardrobe jangling and when I turned round I saw a small old woman standing in the doorway. I didn’t scream, I was paralysed with fright. A prior belief in ghosts isn’t necessary when you see a ghost. A ghostly manifestation would be a miracle and the laws of nature overturned. I thought, I’ve brought her back by talking to her. Like a medium might, I’ve conjured her up.

  ‘Sorry to intrude, love,’ she said, ‘but it’s my morning for cleaning down here.’

  Of course there were no ghosts and of course old Mrs Fisherton was dead and gone. I got up, I said to give me five minutes and I’d be dressed. I’d be ready and I’d make her a cup of tea. Her first name was Beryl and I never knew her by any other, though of course I found out later, when she gave me a home and looked after me, that she was called Mrs Collett. She is still one of my best friends.

  Old Mrs Fisherton was past ninety when she died but Beryl wasn’t really old, though she seemed so to me then. I suppose she was still under sixty. She wore trousers that she called slacks and bright-coloured jumpers. Her face was old and her hair thin and grey but her figure was like a young girl’s, which I later learnt she attributed to never having put on weight and never having lost any. Food she thought one of life’s nuisances and she ate little, she ate to live. She showed no surprise at my being there and being still in bed at ten-thirty. It was what she expected from ‘the young’, of whom she had several of her own.

  ‘Nice smell,’ she said while we had our tea. ‘I like a place to smell of cigarettes, it reminds me of my late husband. I don’t smoke myself and nor do the two still at home. I’ve tried taking it up, mind, but it didn’t agree with me.’ She sniffed appreciatively. ‘Don’t you let the Professor catch you.’ She always called Max ‘the Professor’. Presumably he had asked her to, or Selina had. ‘He’s a raving fanatic when it comes to smoking.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘He said I wasn’t to smoke in here.’

  ‘Girls will be girls is what I always say.’

  It may have been that time or on her next visit that she remarked on the dim lighting. ‘Not very cheerful down here, is it, love? You’ll ruin your eyes, reading your college books.’

  I seldom did read them, but I wasn’t going to say so. I asked her what I could do about the light and she looked warily at me, the way you look at a person in the street who’s gesticulating or talking to himself. ‘You need stronger bulbs, don’t you? Like hundreds, not forties. It’ll be an outlay but worth it, I reckon.’

  I could get them round the corner, she said, at a store which had some fancy name but which everyone called ‘Superglue’ – a title instigated originally by Beryl, I expect – and that same day I did. She showed me how to put them in the lamp sockets. A couple of months ago I showed my gratitude (for that and a thousand other things) by rewiring the flat she has recently bought from the council. The 100-watt bulbs made a great difference to old Mrs Fisherton’s and if I still felt enclosed and oppressed, the breathlessness and the sensation of the ceiling sinking and crushing me were less bad.

  Beryl lived in a tower block on the Harrow Road and a son and a daughter lived with her. Neither of them could be induced to take up cigarette smoking, for as with their mother it didn’t agree with them. Her son was an electrician and her daughter sold cosmetics in one of the Oxford Street stores. Beryl had made a corner for herself in Russia Road, cleaning for Max and Selina and the people at Nos 13, 15 and 17.

  ‘Those Silvermans,’ she said, ‘they only come up for a weekend and not many weekends in a year. The place is like a palace, never a fingermark, I don’t know why they keep it on, really.’

  I asked her where they lived in the country and she told me. Did she mean No. 15 was empty most of the time?

  ‘Barring the top flat, love. Their son’s up there, him and I don’t know who else, half a dozen of them if you ask me. He gets rid of them or maybe he hides them under the beds when his mum and dad come but that’s only once in a blue moon.’

  The people at 17 and 13 were less interesting, an elderly doctor and his wife next door to us while 13 was divided into two flats whose occupants Beryl hardly ever saw, they were out all day and she had
keys. One couple she called, with a fine disregard for political correctness, ‘Indians and very dark’. The others had virtually no furniture but mattresses on the floor and steel chairs. It may have been minimalist (not Beryl’s word) or perhaps they could afford nothing better.

  The next time I went out, which was probably that afternoon, I stood on the other side of the road and looked up beyond the floral mouldings and the turbanned man to the top floor of 15. Three casement windows in hood-like dormers were tucked in the mansard just as they were in all the other houses in the terrace. It was November and all the windows were shut but the middle one had been closed carelessly, catching up a corner of a net curtain between casement and window frame. It flapped in the breeze, a thin greyish rag. This was the window that had caught the light from the setting sun that evening I had watched Jack and Erica Silverman leave in their car. I wondered what Beryl had meant by saying ‘half a dozen’ people lived up in that top flat but when I asked her she said, as she often did in answer to my questions, ‘I don’t know, love. I’ve told you everything I know and now you know as much as I do.’

  Some days, instead of going to GUP, I went for long walks. I specially did this when even the new lighting seemed unable to dispel that oppressive ceiling-coming-down-on-my-head feeling and I had to get out for a while. I walked Maida Vale up to Kilburn and stared in wonder at St Augustine’s Church, big as a cathedral, its tall spire visible for miles. How I would have liked to climb that spire! I walked St John’s Wood and Primrose Hill and Camden Town, always lifting up my eyes to the rooftops, and I walked the canal, from Camden Lock to the Portobello Road, being obliged, of course, and not at all unwillingly, to come up briefly on to the street at the Maida Hill tunnel. I admired the tall Gothic church of the Holy Catholic Apostolics in Maida Avenue and St Mary Magdalene in Woodchester Square with another high climbable spire and soaring tower blocks all round it. Eventually, I suppose, I’d have climbed one of those spires if I hadn’t met Silver.

  I walked in daylight but as winter came on and evening started earlier and earlier, I was often out after dark. Lighted streets and glowing lamps in warm depths behind windows make one long for companionship, for someone to sit with in those rooms, those restaurants and pubs and cafés. Clubbing as a way of life for the young was only just coming in then, but there are always places where teenagers and people in their twenties congregate.

  Young people were at GUP. In fact, apart from a few mature students doing a degree in mid-career, everyone was young. But I had got into the habit of going in for a lecture or a seminar and, immediately it was over, setting off for a walk. I had never been to a tutorial. We were expected to take part in group marketing sessions but no one ever asked me to answer a questionnaire or write an essay. I went there less and less and when the term ended I barely noticed. It had been two weeks since GUP had seen me.

  Days went by when I talked to no one. I looked forward to the days when Beryl came just for the sound of a human voice talking to me, not to someone else. As winter closed in I walked about less. It was always raining and it was cold outside. The flat, like the whole of 19 Russia Road, was very warm. It was dark long into the mornings and dark most of the afternoon. I talked to old Mrs Fisherton, I asked her how she had borne it, living down here for years on end. She never replied, I’d have known I was going mad if she had, but I answered for her. I answered that she was old and tired, walking wasn’t easy and nor was climbing stairs, she liked the warmth and the quiet, the cosiness of it. Besides, her beloved Max used to come down and talk to her, sit with her in the evenings sometimes and maybe they watched Streetwise together on the black and white television.

  Weeks passed without my seeing him or Selina. When it wasn’t actually raining, and sometimes when it was, he would set off for his run round Regent’s Park at eight in the morning. I was hardly ever up but I was by the time he got back and once or twice, carrying my rubbish bag up the iron staircase, I’d catch a glimpse of him jogging down Russia Road and turning in at our gate. When Selina went off to a shoot, a hired car would come for her even earlier, so I only saw her on Sunday evenings when I went upstairs to phone my parents, and not always then. She’d smile her little tight smile at me, her mouth quickly returning to its heart-shaped pout, and say, ‘You won’t be too long on the phone, will you, darling?’

  If I had done what I was supposed to be doing and concentrated on my studies and my course, made friends among my fellow students, I might have seen 19 Russia Road for what it was, a lodging, and Max and Selina my landlords. So it was all my own fault, but knowing that did nothing to help the loneliness. There was one person and only one who made contact with me and whom I sometimes saw. His name was Guy Wharton, he was a neighbour of ours in Suffolk. At any rate, he lived in a house just across the river from us, or his parents did, and when he wasn’t there he was in London in a flat he had in South Kensington. I had been at old Mrs Fisherton’s for about two months when he wrote to me. Anyone who wanted to get in touch with me had to write since phoning was impossible.

  It wasn’t the first letter I had ever had from him. He wrote to me when I was in hospital after the pylon and again when I was back home and going through that long miserable depression. And of course he came to see me. Guy was the only person who didn’t blame me for what happened or lecture me about it or ask why, why, why? He never talked about it at all unless I raised the subject. When I did, he managed to suggest that this adventure which went so disastrously wrong was just an unfortunate episode in my life I was lucky enough to have come out of physically unhurt, and that Daniel’s death was nothing to do with me but his own fault.

  Somehow I never dared agree with that. If I didn’t take responsibility for it, I had a strange superstitious feeling that he’d die all over again, and die reproaching me. But it was a comfort to hear Guy say it, the only one who did. And it was good too to have one friend who treated me as a normal ordinary human being and not a monster.

  The letter I got in November was asking me questions like, was I settling in, getting on all right, enjoying the course? Guy was older than me, about the age I am now, and he had got beyond that time of life when people don’t ask others how they are or tell them they’re looking well or, come to that, ask them if they’re settling in. He was grown up. The letter didn’t ask me out anywhere, I had never been out with him, but it said I knew where he was if I wanted him and please to give him a ring sometime. Could he have my phone number? It would be nice to meet before Christmas.

  My mother was fond of Guy. She had that peculiar respect for him women in her situation – suburban-type house outside a country village, professional but underpaid husband, no career of her own, no status in the country – have for a young man whom they’ve known since he was a child and who is educated, well-off and the heir to landed property. Guy was all those things. He was also the man who, if he hadn’t been able to save Daniel’s life, had tried to do so and could tell himself he had saved mine. At any rate, I don’t know if I’d have acted as I did if he hadn’t come up the field from the river at that crucial time.

  If he had come ten minutes earlier, as he almost did, I wouldn’t be writing this story at all.

  5

  The first thing I ever climbed was a tree. Elms are the best for climbing, an old man in our village told me, they have footholds, branches and twigs growing out of their trunks at intervals from the bole all the way up. But the elms began dying before I was born and Dutch elm disease had killed them all by the time I was ten. The first tree I climbed was an oak, and after that horse chestnuts and limes and more oaks. Ash trees are hard to climb because they are at the other extreme from the elm and have no small branches or twigs growing out of their trunks. Much the same goes for beeches and planes, which I called camouflage trees when I first came to London.

  I was about twelve when I first climbed a pylon.

  I didn’t go far up, only as high as the first crossbar that time. The guard on the uprights a little w
ay above daunted me. That was in the days before I carried wire cutters as a matter of course. I stood on the bar and read the small yellow rectangular notice on which was printed in black: Danger of Death. Keep Off. when you’re twelve you don’t believe there’s such a thing as death or you believe it’s for old people, not for you and your friends.

  It occurs to me that though you’ve seen pylons, you may not have looked at them too closely. You may find them an eyesore. Most people do, and quite a lot are adept at ‘not seeing’ them, in other words pretending they’re not there. So I’ll describe a typical one and give you, if you’ll bear with me, a bit of pylon history. And I’ll try not to be too technical. But, after all, I am an electrician.

  Pylons first appeared in this country during the construction of the National Grid in the late twenties and early thirties, but those used for the 132,000-volt network at the time were much smaller than the kind we have now. I expect they were like the ones Spender describes in the other piece of poetry I know, we had to learn it at school:

  Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete

  That trails black wire;

  Pylons, those pillars

  Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret.

  Our modern pylons don’t look like naked girls, I doubt if any ever did really. They look like insects, not just any insects but the cicada or cricket type.

  ‘An insect has six legs,’ Daniel said, ‘and so does a pylon. It’s a grasshopper hopping across the fields.’

  Strictly speaking, pylons have six arms with dangling insulators on the ends of them for carrying the conductors and they stand upright as if about to take huge leaps. The hanging insulators resemble the creature’s claws and the pylon’s small head is insect-like too. Ugly to some but not to me. I loved pylons. I loved them more than trees or church steeples or any other tall things, loved the strength of them, the power of them and the danger.