The Itinerant Lodger

David Nobbs

The Itinerant Lodger

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by David Nobbs

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

A FEELING OF NERVOUS EXCITEMENT CREPT SHYLY over Wilson, and he rubbed his hands together. Here he was, at this very moment in time and space, old Wilson himself, standing in a bus queue in this exciting great city, waiting to be swept off to his new destination—38, Trebisall Avenue. Here he was, at last, after all these wasted years. It seemed too good to be true, and he took the letter from his pocket and read it for the third time, to make sure.

“Dear Mr Box 221/F2” it ran. “Having regard to your advertisement of third inst. late night final, I am pleased to be able to inform you that I am in possession of accommodation just such as you require. It is a nice, spacious bed-sitting room, affording a pleasant vista over my cosy little garden, with use of same. Heating is by gas fire and the furnishings are tasteful. All meals are provided, and I know how to cater for men. You will find no unnecessary restrictions here and will be very happy. If your arrival should be by train, the 91 bus leaves straight opposite (East exit). Ask for Pantons, and I am on left. The charge of four pounds per week is inclusive of meals, laundry and lighting—but not heat—and I hope to hear that this is to your satisfaction. I remain Mrs Pollard, etc.”

Yes, it was to his satisfaction all right, he thought, putting the letter back in his pocket. There would be peace and quiet here. Here he would be able to work, overlooking the garden. Already he felt certain that this city would provide the inspiration that had been lacking. Here at last was the land of opportunity, the new land in which it would be possible for him to discover the universal panacea for all mankind.

He had come far that day, over the hills. Already it was late afternoon, and there still remained the bus ride. Dusk would be falling—dusk, that exciting, nerve-racking season of the day—as he was shown into that vacant room where his life’s work was to begin. He picked up his suitcase impatiently, hoping to encourage the bus company by his example. It was all he had brought, that suitcase, and it contained everything that was his in the world. It was a case of medium size, with a floral lining. A plastic bag, joined to the inside of the case by buttons, served as a container for his washing things. It was a fine case, and he had packed it with a determined attempt at neatness, although there was nothing neat about the way in which the pyjamas were wrapped round the railway sandwich that he had not eaten, or about the green stains which were smeared over the book that he had not read. His toothpaste had fallen from the plastic bag during the journey, and there were green stains too upon his shirts, his three shirts, and upon the quarto sheets, on which as yet there were no poems.

At last the 91 arrived. He sat in the front seat upstairs, in order not to miss Pantons when it came, and also because he always did sit in the front seat upstairs, if it was empty. If there was so much as one person seated there he gave it a wide berth, but if it was empty he sat there, and it was empty now.

The streets were enclosed in the light from shop fronts and warmed by the bustle of the crowds as the gloom and mist of late afternoon thickened. On the left the land fell away towards the river and the canal, and beyond the river, beside the railway, the slender chimneys of the factories could still be seen against the fading sky. From time to time a molten splash of flame would roar from a chimney and send sparks of drama far over the valley. Wilson liked this, and he liked also the land on the right, where grimy cul-de-sacs lined the steep slopes of the hill, and the snow was edged by globules of soot. Above the streets rose the flinty, messy summit of the hill, scarred by open-cast mining and pocked with sunken air-raid shelters, as though the city had gone bald from shock. Wilson was becoming increasingly nervous, as he had known he would, and although he noted all this precisely it made no conscious impression on him.

Soon the moment of arrival would come. It was useless to tell himself that he was merely arriving at lodgings—and unknown lodgings at that. He was arriving at the beginning of life itself, and the dryness of his throat grew feverishly tight. He wished that the dusk could enfold him and the cheerful crowds could swallow him up.

He sat rigidly in his seat, wanting and ceasing to want, not wanting and ceasing not to want. Pantons was alongside before he noticed it, and by the time he had struggled to the top of the stairs, where the nearest bell was situated, the bus had carried him past Trebisall Avenue, past Ashton Road, and, did he but know it, almost to Tuffley Corner.

It was much colder in these residential streets, but despite the cold Wilson walked slowly through the fading light. Soon, all too soon, he found Trebisall Avenue. Somewhere up there was number 38, and somewhere in number 38 was Mrs Pollard, who had answered his advertisement. She had Italic handwriting.

He paused at the door of number 38, delaying his knock. He was near to panic now. Then, without being aware of it, he had knocked. There was the sound of slow footsteps, and heavy breathing. A face flattened itself against the frosted glass, and the door was slowly opened. Mrs Pollard stood before him.

“You’ll be Mr Barnes,” she said.

Chapter 2

THE HOUSE WAS FILLED WITH THE AURA OF IMPENDING stew. Mrs Pollard led Barnes to his room and pointed out the sofa which it would be his task to convert into a bed each night.

“I hope you’ll be comfortable,” she said. “It makes all the difference when you’re away from home, whether you’re comfortable. Not that there’ll be any need for you to feel away from home in this house. There’s an hour left in the fire, so you’ll be all right for a bit.”

“Thank you, Mrs Pollard.”

“You’ll be hungry after your long journey. I’ve a meal on for you. Stew.”

“Thank you. That’ll be nice.”

“Yes. You’d as well to let me know if you don’t like it. Not that I approve of fads, but there it is, if you don’t like it you’d as well to let me know. We’re very partial to stews in this house.”

“We?”

“The old man upstairs. Not that he eats.”

There was a brief silence. Then, uneasily, Mrs Pollard asked him: “Will you take your dinner in with me, Mr Barnes, or would you rather have it in here?”

“In here would be very nice, thank you,” he replied, glancing mechanically round the room.

“As you wish,” she said, and she closed the door behind her.

Barnes lit the fire with one of his seven remaining matches. Then suddenly he felt that a spell of breathing was about to assail him. He lay back on the sofa, in the manner that he had found most suitable, and awaited it. Quite soon it came. Wave after wave of breathing flooded him, and sent all his thoughts to his brain, where they jostled for the best positions. It was useless to attempt to pick any of them out. There was nothing for it but to lie there and wait for them to stop.

Soon it was all over, and he went to the window. It was dark, and the lights of the houses were patterned all over the hills. His thoughts were settling down now, and as he stood there, gazing into the darkness, he thought of his life to date. An education, that was all it had been. Cambridge and Winchester. Fine names. The Pay Corps. A fine regiment. And then, after Cambridge, the hard school of life. A brief spell on the newspaper, serving the interests of Droitwich and its environs. A short while detecting earthquakes. A stint in the kitchens, specialising in savouries and nougat. A variety of little jobs, of odds and ends of one kind and another, all performed with varying degrees of utter incompetence. It had all been nothing but a preparation. Now, in this great city, Barnes, thirty-nine, of no fixed abode, would discover the purpose of existence. Here, in this bed-sitting room, the humiliations and trials of the past would serve their purpose. He knew it. Already much of his nervousness had passed away, for the arrival had been smoother than he had dared to hope.

He was still by the window when Mrs Pollard returned with the silver casserole—a prize for lupins. Proudly she placed it on the table, and then she removed the lid, with its valued inscription in the best Latin that money could buy.

“I’ve brought you your dinner,” she said, and he came over from the window and took his position behind it. He felt suddenly hungry, and he ate, as always, with frenzied, uncritical zeal. He was well liked wherever he ate. Mrs Pollard sat opposite, presiding over him intently, and the long, heavy silence was broken only by the steady munch of his eating. As the meal drew to a close, and the eating ceased to occupy all his attention, he began to wish that she was not in the room with him. He felt that it was not the done thing, in the early stages of a landlady-lodger relationship, and he felt doubly glad that he had not chosen to eat in her room.

His nervousness had returned, and he felt a shock when Mrs Pollard asked him how he had found the stew.

“Very good,” he said hastily.

“Say if it’s not,” she said. “We may as well get things straight from the start.”

“No,” he assured her. “I meant it.”

Silence fell again, heavier even than before. This time there was no eating to disturb it, and at length, with a great effort, Mrs Pollard spoke.

“Would you like some coffee?” she inquired. “Or some tea?”

“Coffee would be very nice, thank you.”

“I’ll fetch you some coffee.”

Over coffee they talked a little.

“You’re familiar with these parts?” she asked.

“I’ve not been here before, no.”

“We were new to it too.”

“We?”

“Pollard. He was Birmingham and I’m Hornchurch.”

Why didn’t she go, now, back to Hornchurch, or at least to her kitchen, where a landlady belongs? He longed for her to go.

“What part do you come from?” she asked at length.

“London and Margate and Evesham and Barnstaple and the Isle of Wight.”

“Well, I never. And it’s the Isle of Wight you’ve come from now, is it? Quite a change for you, this must be.”

“No. I’ve come from Birmingham.”

“Oh. Like Pollard.” There was another pause, broken once more by Mrs Pollard. “You had a good job in Birmingham, I suppose?”

“I was a teacher.”

“Oh. Very nice.”

“I taught scripture and games.”

“And now you’re going to be a teacher here too.”

“No. No, I’m starting afresh. I’m going to be a writer.”

“Oh. Very nice. What sort of thing will you write, if it isn’t a rude question?”

It wasn’t a rude question, and so he felt that he ought to reply. “Poems,” he said, somewhat surlily.

“A poem is a lovely thing.”

“Yes.”

An impasse! Mrs Pollard made no attempt to get round it. She sensed that further inquiries might not be welcome yet, and for this he was grateful. He was also grateful to her for making no reference to the rent.

“I’ll go and put the kettle on for your bottle,” she said. “You want to feel well-aired after a long journey.”

While she was gone Barnes fetched from his suitcase a sheet of blank quarto writing paper. On it he wrote: “Poem, by Barnes,” and then he placed it in the middle of his table, where it would await him in the morning.

“I’ll show you how to make your bed,” Mrs Pollard said on her return, and he followed her to the sofa. She lifted the back of the sofa to its full extent, and then she brought the seat forward and at the same time lowered it, to reveal, where previously there had been only a sofa, a bed. She then pursued the reverse process, taking care to lift the under-bar so that the springs wouldn’t catch and be torn to ribbons. She then asked Barnes to demonstrate, just for her peace of mind. He proved a most unresponsive pupil, and it was several minutes before she felt that she could safely leave him. To him these minutes were as charged with the torture of practical anguish as those dreadful hours that he had spent making and remaking his bed pack, in the Pay Corps, long ago, during his formative years. He was in no doubt, at moments like these—and there were many such—that one of the primary causes of his arrested development had been the diversity and complexity of the sleeping arrangements that he had been required to master. There was a certain hammock, in particular, that he would never quite forget.

“Well,” said Mrs Pollard at last, “there it is. That’s the best I can do for you.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s not a bad bed, really. Pollard won it in a newspaper. He arranged ten hardy annuals in the order in which he would like to be given them for Christmas. We used to sleep in it. I suppose it has a sentimental value for me. It’s really quite a good bed. Big, too. Big enough for two, wouldn’t you say?”

But Barnes did not tell her what he would have said. He was polite enough to wait until she had returned with his stone hot water bottle, and then, when she had finally left the room, he fainted.

Chapter 3

THE MORNING WAS CRISP AND WHITE, IDEAL FOR shaving. Barnes had slept well, as he always did after fainting, and as he shaved he felt in excellent form. The quarto sheets were waiting for him, the water was hot, and soon his work would begin. He could hear Mrs Pollard going about her morning tasks in another part of the house, and for a moment he felt uneasy. He hoped that she wasn’t going to make demands on him. Then he dismissed the thought and turned to more important things.

When he had shaved he dressed and when he had dressed he raised the main part of his bed and slid it back towards the head, to reveal, where previously there had been only a bed, a sofa. Then Mrs Pollard brought him his breakfast. She asked him how he was, how he had slept, what were his plans, but they had little conversation, and he hardly minded her presence. He ate fast, for he was intoxicated by the infinite possibilities that were whirring about in his head. He had never before felt as strong as he did at this moment.

At last the breakfast things were cleared, and he was alone. He seated himself at the table and gazed proudly round the room. There was the sofa, the piano, the table, the easy chair and the hard chair. He noted with delight the Scottish glen above the piano, the Dresden hyenas on the mantelpiece, the tapestried axioms above the sofa, the two ivory ospreys, between which there were as yet no books, and the old polished range in the middle of which, like a neon cat, his absurdly small gas fire sat hissing. During the night there had been virtually no vacant floor space even to put his shoes and socks in, and even now, when the bed had become a sofa, the room was small. And although there was a window behind the sofa, affording a pleasant vista over Mrs Pollard’s cosy little garden, it afforded very little light, the cosiness being caused by high walls and surrounding houses. Yet despite all this he looked around him with joy. Here was the haven that he had sought, in which he could distil the experience of a long and lonely life. Here was something that was his, and yet did not belong to him, and would not clutter him up.

The sheet of quarto writing paper lay on the table where he had left it. Beside it was his HB pencil, and beside the pencil lay his souvenir rubber, on which the letters “ME TO MA” suggested a filial devotion that circumstance had, in fact, denied him. Originally the rubber had read “WELCOME TO MARGATE.”

He picked up his pencil. It was a moment to savour, and he was still savouring it an hour and a half later when Mrs Pollard brought him his coffee. Then, after his coffee, he began to write.

For the next ten days he sat at the table, free. He ate egg and bacon for breakfast, stews for lunch and cold meats for supper, and between meals he wrote. Every now and then he would add a word to the collection that he was gathering in front of him, and every now and then he would discard a sheet of paper into the waste paper basket. Every now and then Mrs Pollard would take the waste paper basket to the dustbin, and twice a week the dustman, who had no knowledge of poetry, would empty the bin into a lorry. So there was no chance of the dustman bursting in and exclaiming: “I can’t accept this. It isn’t rubbish. It’s a masterpiece.” No, once it was gone it was gone. And each time he arrived at the end of a sheet it was gone, gone for ever. For nothing that he wrote seemed good enough to keep.

Often he would sit for many minutes without writing. It was not so much that he could not think of a word. That, with the dictionary to help him, presented no problem. It was rather that he found it impossible to decide which word to choose, of all those that were available to him in such abundance. His hopes were so high, his possibilities so infinite, that each actual word crushed him with its puniness. The moment a word was conveyed to paper, it seemed ridiculous. Why, he would ask himself, should he start with that? Or finish with it, for that matter? So that he was for ever adding words at both ends, until the original word had become lost in a welter of qualifications and preambles, and had to be discarded. And once it was discarded the whole structure around it collapsed, and it was necessary to begin again.

But how? He tried several methods. He tried selecting at random the first word of each line, and then working forwards, or selecting the last word, and working backwards. He tried writing the first word of the first line, the second word of the second line, the third word of the third line, and so on, and then going back and filling in the gaps, just as he had done with his impots at prep school. He tried writing down words which he knew to be conducive of poetic inspiration, words like “spring” and “autumn” and “corpses” and “e’er” and “o’er”. All to no avail. As those ten long days passed, the moments when he wrote no words grew longer, and longer, and longer.

And all the while Mrs Pollard was finding excuses to visit his room. She would leave things there and have to return for them. She would think she heard the shilling finish in his fire. She would bring him a cup of tea and an assortment of sweet biscuits. Each time she came she seemed to hover over him, and each time, had there been a train to his thought, she would have broken it.

Finally, towards dusk on the tenth day, when he had not added a word for many hours, she remarked: “Still working, then?”

“Er, yes.” He was annoyed at the interruption, although it interrupted nothing.

“You’ll get round shoulders. Still, it’s none of my business.”

“No.”

“I’ve never really been creative myself.” She had taken the fact that he had replied as an invitation, and had seated herself on the sofa, setting off a series of twangings and screechings that irritated Barnes beyond measure. “I’ve never really had anything to say,” she continued. “But you….” she paused, and for the first time for ten days Barnes looked at her as if she existed.

“I?”

“You have something to say.”

“And how am I going to say it?”

“In your poems.”

“I’ve written no poems.”

“You said you were writing poems. I was led to believe that you were writing poems. I don’t expect my tenants to lock themselves away for days on end, not speaking to me, and not even a couplet to show for it.”

“I tried.”

With astonishing speed a soft maternity enveloped Mrs Pollard. “You’re new to this business, aren’t you?” she asked.

He blushed and fidgeted awkwardly. “Yes,” he admitted.

“You aren’t really a poet at all.”

“No.”

“As if I minded. You could have told me.”

“I didn’t know.”

“No offence, I hope. Some of my best friends haven’t been poets. But I said to myself when you mentioned it: ‘That one a poet? H’m. I wonder.’”

Barnes replied quite mechanically to her maternity. All the verse had gone out of him. Of infinite possibilities he no longer had the slightest inkling. He was a boy again, and he could think of nothing to say to this new mother of his.

“Perhaps you’ll think of something later on,” said Mrs Pollard. “Some blank verse, or a nice hexameter. There’s no harm in keeping on trying.”

“I’m just not a poet.”

“You mustn’t say things like that. Faint heart never won fair lady.”

His faint heart fluttered like a moth with thrombosis, and he lowered his eyes.

“I’ll make you a stew,” she said, as if it was a thought that had just occurred to her for the first time and had opened up visions far in excess of those she had ever imagined. “Perhaps that’ll cheer you up.”

“Thank you.”

“You do like my stews, don’t you? You aren’t tired of them?”

“Not at all, no.”

“You aren’t just saying that?”

“No, I—it would be very nice.”

Left to himself, he made a final great effort to concentrate on his work. It was no use giving up. What would Chaucer’s friends have said if he’d packed the whole thing up just before Strood? The possibilities were even more infinite than he had imagined. Well, he must be that much more determined. It was a challenge, and he must rise to it. Perhaps he had been trying in the wrong way. Perhaps there had been something over-deliberate in his approach. Well, he must try a more open method, make himself more receptive, allow his thoughts and images freedom to form in their own good time. He decided to make his mind go a complete blank. This it did instantly, and it was still a complete blank when Mrs Pollard returned.

“I wondered if you’d like a little garlic?” she inquired coyly.

“Yes, that would be very nice.”

“Only some do and some don’t.”

Garlic. No garlic. Could she really think he cared?

“You’ve done nothing yet, then?”

“Not yet.”

“Never mind. Keep trying. It’s a fine thing, poetry. It’s not anything about the house, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not because you’re not happy here?”

“Oh no. No.”

“I hope you’ll be happy. Mr Veal has never complained.”

“Mr Veal?”

“The old man upstairs.”

“Oh.”

“With garlic, then.”

He resumed his creative activities. Nothing happened. The possibilities became so infinite, and the infinite stretched so far, that it seemed as if it might burst into a million fragments. Instead it receded. Far into the distance, with infinite slowness, it slid. He had no power to follow it, and a flat despair came upon him. For a while he was aware of nothing at all, but then odours of stew began to impinge themselves on his misery. He realised that he was hungry.

The odours came from the kitchen, and were constantly changing in the strangest ways. Where was Mrs Pollard? Why did she not bring him his stew? A simple comfort would have been most welcome. He had had comforts in his time. Miss Potter, Mrs McManus of Barnstaple, Mrs Egham, Mrs McManus of Newport (I.O.W.) and Mrs Bell, they all had seen to that. And now there was Mrs Pollard. She was mothering him, and trying to make him happy in a thousand little ways. Her hair was growing white, and she wanted to make him happy. And yet he wondered. What lay behind it? Maternal instincts he had seen, but were there others? He waited and waited, and his uneasiness grew.