Deliverance Read online

  Georgie stepped in, and his Aunt at once shut and locked and bolted the door behind him. It was dark in the little narrow hall, brown dark, not black dark, or blue-black dark; like being enfolded in very thick brown paper. For a moment Georgie could hardly see anything. His aunt was a fat shadow rather than a person. He could tell where she was: that was all. After a pause, he made a tentative move forward, afraid of knocking into the hallstand which he knew was there. Then his eyes adjusted themselves, he went forward, past the awesome doorway that led into the shop, with its shrouded counters and brown parchmenty gloom, to the tall slit of light through the part-open door of the parlour.

  A small fire blazed in the middle of the great wide fireplace, chattering happily to itself, and sending flickering orange shafts to finger the old carved mantelpiece. By the side of Aunt Butters’ chair stood a little loaded tea-table. It was the scene of welcome he had pictured and looked forward to for a whole month, the scene which the workman on the tram had disturbed. With a smile of pure pleasure, he turned to his aunt, who had followed him in and was closing the door.

  “Well, Georgie. Have you been a good boy?”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  She had so little gift for receiving affection, this short plump white-haired woman, that even the uprush from the heart of a small orphan was somehow checked. Chilled would be too strong a word. Georgie’s gratitude was there always. He would have poured devotion on anyone who was kind and could absorb it: but he did not consciously feel a rebuff from his aunt. All he felt, in so far as the matter reached his mind at all, was that his aunt belonged to a stately order of beings who had to be treated with very great respect and could not be hugged, much less romped with, as he knew happened sometimes with less exalted people. So he had to suppress, as if they were a breach of manners, those sudden uprisings of warm feeling that would have made him rush at her, if she had given him half a chance, and bury his face in the folds of her grey rustling dress.

  She was looking at him now, never directly, but in a series of quick sideways glances broken by the rapid blinking of her pale eyes. Everything about her was pale: her long face, with its slip-away chin that fell into loose folds and was caught sternly up in a high collar with a little narrow frill of lace. The skin of her face was pale almost to whiteness, and very soft, its smoothness fissured by scores of minute lines as frail as the traces of small birds’ feet in snow. Her hair was pulled tightly back from a central parting, which was getting wider as the years went on. The whole effect, mild yet decided, suggested a sheep, but a sheep of strong character, like one of those ewes that stamps her foot indignantly when a dog comes too near the lamb that is sheltering behind her. Georgie knew, with a sense of fascinated horror at the sacrilege, that some of her country customers privately called her “Yaw-lamb”: yaw being the Western name for ewe. Yaw-lamb Butters! It was awful, it was most wrong and rude: he had never dared mention it to a soul, not even to Uncle Eddie Penberthy: but he couldn’t help seeing what they meant.

  “Would you like your tea?”

  None of Aunt Butters’ questions sounded like questions. Her voice didn’t go up at the end like other peoples’. You had to decide by the sense.

  “Yes, please, Auntie.”

  “Very well.”

  Now that she had him there, she didn’t seem to know what to say to him. She’d planned, and waited for him, ready a full forty minutes before he was due. Ten minutes at least before he could possibly be there she’d unbolted the door. But something, a sort of shyness, stopped her from showing her eagerness. Still, she could ply him with food: and she sat back, blinking with relief, and more at ease each minute, as Georgie gave himself religiously to the serious business of eating. For twenty minutes, not a word passed, except a murmured invitation or two and a polite thank you in reply: but, three or four times, exhaling a sigh of pure content, Georgie smiled at his aunt, and she flickered him a little shy smile in return. There was an understanding between them, and it reached its best in these periods of silence when neither had to do anything about it. With the need to speak, stiffness came back again.

  “What would you like to do now, Georgie? Would——”

  Georgie gulped. “When is Uncle Eddie coming?”

  “Not for quite a while. Would you like to see the pictures?”

  “Yes, please, Auntie.”

  It was all part of the ritual, and, really, though they weren’t all very interesting, and he knew them by heart now, the pictures were rather wonderful. Each was double, two identical prints of the same view. You put them in the rack of a queer heavy frame which had two big magnifying eyeholes set in a thick curved wooden screen. Then you looked through, and, lo and behold, the two pictures sprang together into one, in which the figures and the trees and houses had depth, looked solid, and stood out vividly from each other. So, even though now he couldn’t work up much excitement over A View of Cordova, or the Chain Pier, Brighton, or the Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells, Georgie conscientiously obliged himself to marvel at the way the Spanish man at the corner of the road looked just as if he was starting to cross, and the ladies in their crinolines seemed to have stood still and solidified in the middle of their shopping. That Spanish man had been a bit of a worry to Georgie, earlier on. He had so active an air Georgie got the feeling that, if he looked long and hard enough, the man would move. This was awful, because it at once knotted Georgie’s inside up in a tight, tense effort, and he began to feel that the man was a prisoner, glued to his place, for want of the effort that would release him. It was like the fairy stories of princes or princesses frozen under a spell which only the kindness of a passer-by could break. Move, move, move! Oh please, Spanish man, oh please, oh please! But it was no good. Georgie’s eyes began to smart and ache.

  “Wouldn’t you like the next picture, Georgie?”

  And Georgie never had the courage to stick it out and perhaps set the poor man free. This was deep guilt and shame, to be thought over miserably in bed at night, and to put in one’s prayers for forgiveness. The only way out finally was to pray for the Spanish man, who for a long time was embedded in the special litany which followed Our Father in the morning and Gentle Jesus at night. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could ask Aunt Butters about. It remained a horrid secret, a worry, till one day he had worked round to it indirectly, when Aunt Butters was safely out of the way.

  “Uncle Eddie.”

  “Georgie, pal o’ my ‘eart.”

  “Those pictures are funny, aren’t they?”

  “Funny?” This was a novel idea. “How? What way?”

  “The way—” Georgie gave a huge gulp. Here we go. “—the way they look as if the people in them were just going to move.”

  “Oh, like that. Yes, partner. There is pictures, nowadays, that does move.”

  “Are there?” Oh. This was dangerous. Georgie licked his dry lips. “Where are they?”

  “On the bioscope. Down at Stradbury’s. In the big hall. They throws ‘em on a screen; like that magic lantern I took you to. Only they move.”

  “Oh.” A pause. This was better: but he wasn’t yet safe. “Are they the only ones that move?”

  “That’s right.”

  Georgie gulped again. One more word, to make quite sure.

  “These pictures—this sort of picture—they couldn’t move? However long you watched them?”

  “Not if you was to watch them till your eyes fell out.”

  Oh, joyful, cool relief! and a warning, too, against watching any one of them too long. That must have been what the smarting and aching meant: his eyes were getting ready to fall out.

  But all that was long ago, a whole year nearly up, and Georgie could smile now at those outgrown anxieties. All the same, the Spanish man stayed in his prayers. It seemed unkind to put him out. Georgie felt quite fond of him, now that he knew he couldn’t move. He continued to look at the pictures, while Aunt Butters cleared the tea things and washed them and dried them and put them away. She would never let
Georgie help, though it was one of the things the boys were all trained to do at the Orphanage. She said he ought to have a holiday, but Georgie guessed the real reason was that she didn’t trust him not to drop the things or break them. He told Uncle Eddie, who shook his head wisely and said there was no fathoming the ways of women: a profound saying which made Georgie love him very much. That was one of the many grand things about Uncle Eddie. You loved him all the time, and yet he kept doing and saying things which made you start loving him all over again.

  Georgie finished the pictures: there were twenty-three not counting the two torn ones, which he always put in all the same, though they didn’t work properly, because it seemed so unfair to pass them over: just as if you didn’t give Walter Ellsworthy or Johnnie Hockley their tea because they were lame and couldn’t keep pace in the line. Johnnie was a wonder, the way he could sidle and jerk on his crutches and give the football a sort of kick when it came near him in the playground. Georgie and he were friends. He got cross sometimes, and used bad language, but he was always nice to Georgie.

  “Now would you like the shells?”

  “Yes, please, Auntie.”

  The shells lived in a wide shallow drawer in a big sort of desk on the far side of the mantelpiece. They were of all sorts and sizes. Some of the biggest, smooth ones folded over into a long wrinkly slit, and when you held them to your ear, you heard the soft distant roaring of the sea. That was a holy sound, like being in church, but you could smile if you liked, while in church you couldn’t. There would be an awful row if Mr Entiknapp saw you, or Mr Rogers, the young assistant warden. Besides, it was wrong.

  Georgie’s way was to listen to these sea-sounding shells first, except the biggest of all, which he kept to the end. Then he hunted for one or two tiny little ones of the same shape, in which, tiny though they were, he could see the faintest little trace of wrinkles. He had on several occasions put these to his ear, hoping to hear the remotest tiniest ghost of a small whisper; but it was no good, and one day Aunt Butters, coming into the room, had exclaimed that it was very dangerous, he might let the shell slip, and it would get lost in his ear. She reinforced this warning with a most frightening story of a nephew of a friend of hers, called Arthur, who had got a pea in his ear and had to be taken in great pain to the hospital for the doctor to get it out. Still, even after that warning, Georgie had once or twice tried again when the sound of running water showed that his aunt was safely occupied at the sink. It was dangerous, you had to get the little shell between the nails of your finger and thumb to be able to hold it at all. Dangerous and wrong; thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Georgie knew that. There were so many things one needed to ask God for help with, that it was sheer wickedness to go out of one’s way to run a risk. Still, it was fascinating: and every time he did it, and safely put the tiny shell back in the drawer, Georgie felt a warm thrill. It was almost worth running a risk to feel so safe and happy afterwards.

  Then there were the other shells: the tall, spiral ones, pale and tinged with orange: one or two very long thin ones, like pins for pinning up seaweed, the long, streaming weed that waved lazily when the tide came in and tried to pull it along: fat, squat ones, like the old women with their skirts bunched up whom Georgie had seen paddling on that same wonderful visit to the seaside; yet no sooner had he thought of this and seen the likeness than he tried, almost angrily, to put it out of his mind, because it wasn’t right or fair to the shells, those lovely cool things, to compare them to anything fat and fussy and human. It didn’t fit. Things like the shells were special and holy, and it was wicked to mix them up in one’s mind with other things. Georgie sighed. What a terrible lot of temptations there were to be wicked. And how hard it was to be on guard against them. His heart began to beat fast, and he felt a big worry coming on. Telling himself to be cool, he sat back, breathing loudly, and began with trembling fingers to rearrange the shells. Dear shells, lovely shells, cool shells. Afraid all the time that it would be no good, seeing the worry smouldering in one layer of his mind, he did all he could to keep his attention on the top layer. He stared at the shells, told himself how beautiful they were, and forced himself to notice their details of colour, and the textures that varied from harsh little ridges to smoothness that caught the light in tender winking pools. Pools, not spots. He was sure of that, because——

  Troc-a-troc-TROC!

  The knocker leaped into life, startling the house and evoking a soft exclamation from the invisible Aunt Butters. Georgie’s heart gave a great throb of joy. Uncle Eddie!

  Without realizing he had moved, he found himself standing a yard from the table. All of him longed to go to the door and let Uncle Eddie in, but he controlled himself, listening in a delicious agony to Aunt Butters clicking her tongue and putting things down and drying her hands. You always knew when she was doing that, because of the chuckling noise of the roller towel. She had a queerness about the door on days when the shop was shut. No one else must go near it, and it must be kept locked and bolted. It was as much as she could do to undo the bolts in readiness for Georgie’s arrival, and, even so, she kept it on the chain, in case some evil-disposed person should counterfeit his knock.

  She came at last, rubbing the backs of her hands on her apron, and murmuring to herself. Through the room she went, not even glancing at Georgie, even though she knew it must be Uncle Eddie, and she’d been expecting him; and showing no excitement either. Georgie watched her. It was all part of the mystery of being grown up, one of the many things you couldn’t possibly understand, things that proved that grownups couldn’t be a bit like you; they didn’t feel the same things. He had come to believe this so strongly that, one Sunday, when his aunt burned her finger at the stove, he’d been half surprised to realize that hot things hurt her too; and had tried to make up for it by an extreme of sympathy which only annoyed his aunt, who hated what she called making a fuss.

  Standing by the table, hopping from one foot to the other, trying to keep still, Georgie heard the bolts drawn back, the key turned, the clink of the chain, and then the special snoring noise of the door. Then Uncle Eddie’s voice, high, with a sort of thready wheeze at the back of it, filled the hall with cheerfulness.

  “Well now then. Well now then. ‘Ow are we? Wot d’ee take me for? Burglars? Eh?”

  He always said that. It was as much a part of Georgie’s afternoon as the pictures and the shells. And Aunt Butters always made the same half audible reply, which could be sorted out into “Go on with you now, Eddie Penberthy.”

  It was always an astonishment to Georgie, and a source of awe, the way in which Uncle Eddie would chaff his Aunt Butters. He simply couldn’t imagine anyone else venturing to talk to her in such a fashion, and on many occasions, after some especially daring sally, he had looked anxiously at her to see what she would do. But she never seemed to mind, indeed, she liked it—colouring a faint pink, blinking, shaping her thin lips into something between a smile and a simper, and murmuring, “What next, Eddie Penberthy,” or “Go on with you.”

  And now—blessed moment—Uncle Eddie came into the room, following Aunt Butters, overhanging her like a lean, bent tree. He always poked his head, and had to poke it more than ever to get it under the old low doorway without mishap.

  “Well now then! Who’s here? Georgie, I do declare! Georgie! How are you, Georgie? How goes it?”

  Georgie could hear his own voice shyly replying, but all his spirit was in his eyes, as they shone a welcome to the one person in the world he wanted to see. And Uncle Eddie, catching and interpreting the look, gave him a wink, so violent that the whole left side of his face seemed to collapse in a landslide. You could almost hear the wink. There was no pretence of secrecy about it: it wasn’t a sssh-not-a-word wink. Uncle Eddie could do those, on occasion, so quickly that you could hardly be sure anything had happened at all. This wink was as public as doing things to the awning in front of Henderson’s shop.

  But though the wink was public, all its meanings weren’t.
Publicly, it said Hullo Georgie. Uncle Eddie’s whole head and neck were convulsed with the effort of producing it, to an extent that would make anyone on the other side of him think he was in the throes of a seizure.

  It avowed male freemasonry, and a whole volume of private understanding. It included many terms of address which were never used in the presence of Aunt Butters—or of anyone else—plus an understood resolve to laugh together at a great number of sober and respectable persons, institutions, and events. It was a reminder of fun in the past and a promise of fun to come, topped up with all those assurances of affection and mutual respect which partnership implied. Naturally Georgie could never have expressed all this; but he knew it. The most he would probably have thought in words was that Uncle Eddie had come, and everything was all right.

  There was a ritual to be observed, even now. For a few minutes Uncle Eddie would sit and do the polite—his own phrase. Aunt Butters would say “You’ll have had your tea?” to which he would reply that he had, with a vast smacking of his lips and rolling of his eyes at Georgie. She would then go on, “Perhaps you’ll take a glass of cordial,” and Uncle Eddie would start forward eagerly in his chair, as if the prospect was so delightful he could hardly sit still until the glass was in his hand. Aunt Butters would go to the cupboard, fetch out an old cut-glass decanter—“Waterford, partner,” Uncle Eddie had whispered. “Pure Waterford. Worth poun’s ‘n’ poun’s ‘n’ poun’s”—and pour out a generous glassful. Eddie would receive it, cradle the glass in his long, bony hand, shoot out his lips into a trumpet, take a noisy sip, and behave as though transported to heaven.

  “Nectar,” he would proclaim. “Ambrosio. Nothing to touch it.”

  “Go on with you, Eddie Penberthy.”

  Delightedly Georgie watched it all happen again, loving the moment, the scene, and both actors of it: wishing it might last for hours, because of its warmth and friendliness and its particular glory, yet chafing under the surface for the next act in the ritual, when he would have Uncle Eddie all to himself. There would be one more the-two-of-them time, the drive in the van; but that would be the last event in the day, ending at the gates of the Orphanage. No, the next spell was the very best, the best of all. So, patiently, lovingly, and with happiness singing in his heart, he sat on the edge of his chair and gazed at Uncle Eddie.