The Belltower

The stone belltower, set apart a little from the town, housed a small room at the top where the bell hung on its beam. Havlov, on his knees, stared at the tower. He was a little out of breath yet he could still clearly focus and make out the spare decoration and weather-stains on its exterior. If he leant forward he could also see into its mouth.

Aloft, the room lay muffled in dust. A bell-rope dropped from the beam through a round hole in the floorboards. The walls were open to the sky, slats pointing sharply groundwards (to let the sound out, Havlov thought) such that even if one wished, it was quite impossible to see more than a narrow strip of green near the tower base. Would the dust tremble if the bell was rung, he wondered? And the noise? If he were to stay here he'd need some muslin to put in his ears. The room was bare except for a small wooden box nailed to the floor in one corner, which he opened. It contained one large spanner. Havlov could see the nut it was meant to turn on the beam end. He lay on his back and closed his eyes. All sounds were distant - a farmer hailing; a cart down below; a little wind in the treetops.

The room welcomed no man; it wasn't made for him. One of those few rooms - H. realised - where no man had any business. It was for a thing - a bell. Elsewhere, dwellings always had the stamp of someone: the chosen wallhangings, the photographs. Even a functional room - a signal box - that also had the stamp of man: the curved wooden chair with padded armrests and the nearby stove and coffee-pot. This room saw no purpose in his being there.  

And at last he felt comfortable. The place suited him for it was something he was familiar with. Being unwelcome tracked his life. Here was the same, but he'd not to respond nor to fight his corner. It ignored him but how could he get angry with it, like he had with people (and anyway, why shouldn't they have ignored him)? Yes he'd stay. He'd stay. More - he'd never retrace his steps down the ladder. He'd already drawn it up. The trapdoor was shut now. He'd rest. Here.

The Trombone

In the café the man who had come in carrying a polished brass trombone and a crate which, overturned, doubled as a usable rostrum, singled out a young man, D, from the crowd, a confident and apparently a most suitable customer for his demonstration. The trombone player wearing a purple buttoned-up top-coat and scarlet velvet knee-breeches above yellow stockings, while pointing his short beard at the audience to left and to right, stood with one arm akimbo and the other beckoning D. to come up. The urgers-forward, most of them friendly admirers of D, slapped their thighs and called him towards them, then pointed at the rostrum with one arm and with the other waved him forward until, seeing his private battle between his eagerness and his sense, were forced to pass him over their heads to the front. They set him on his feet. D. was thinking forward. He was seeing another D. The D. in his mind was grasping the trombone, was gazing in concentration to the floor, was setting the instrument to his lips then, taken over by a secret genius which had always been there laying undiscovered yet secretly hoped for, this D. played magnificent in his anger and his pride. He stepped up to the front. 

Half a minute later, the playful protestations of the audience over, the nervous little laugh which he uttered as he leapt from the toppling crate, had within it the horror of a well overdue awareness of his own limitations.

The Numbers

Edward made the suggestion in the very earliest days of their marriage - they should put a number to the depth of their love for one another. And more - that they should wear it not on their sleeves of course, but rather as a badge and thus on the chest. He knew (better than she) that their separate loves would ebb and flow in their separate rhythms, and that only rarely would the two of them love each other equally. He knew that very often he would love his wife more deeply than she did him; he knew that; but he was confident that later, perhaps some years later even, her love was bound to surpass his love immeasurably.

He had determined that they should know one another's feelings; yes and they should know the temporary imbalances in feeling too (whenever they were there). Why not? It is a cowardly creature that lives on fictions and wilful ignorance. The 'best left unsaid' mentality was not to be his world. And so he had decided upon the numbers nought to ten, and in the early days rather amateur badges made of card were worn by husband and wife, but later he had two sets of proper badges made up out of tin. The number to be worn was to be reconsidered at the start of every week; and so a kind of stock must be taken every Sunday night, something which in itself was very important to Edward.  

On these Monday mornings she was always up earlier than he. He would clump down the wooden steps leading round a curve to the latched door into their kitchen. Of course he wouldn't at first dare to look at the number blazing on her chest. Every Monday the same drama would play itself out. Seated at the wooden table, his wife would be bending to her breakfast and as she chewed, looking with preoccupation through the window, apparently oblivious to the excited turmoil within Edward, but no doubt actually aware of it in an accepting fashion. When unable to contain himself longer, he would rush with short steps before her, part her elbows and stare at the week's chosen badge always with a gasp of relief.

Edward always agonised over the numbers he must choose for his feelings for her. Often he worried about it for days beforehand. Just how much did he feel? Could it always be a ten? How different did a nine feel? And horrors! What, if ever he were to wear an eight, what would he have to do to regain his nine feelings for his wife, and would he have to say anything about it? Sadly his wife nearly always wore a six, though Edward could clearly remember three sevens during foreign holiday years. And he always tried to earn a higher number from his wife the following week. He thought about it most of the time at work. The fact of the matter was that he saw it to be his role to be so pleasing to her that she could not wish for more out of him. It was his purpose.

Their mutual friends were always mildly amused at their number-badges, and should they see the couple about the city, the men in particular would put down their bags for a moment, walk over while chuckling greetings and tap the badges laughing good-naturedly at Edward's ten. This grading raised in Edward (and he assumed in his wife as well) the question of just what love is. Do you wish to define love as a feeling for instance? Then if you are not experiencing a feeling at any one moment (say you are absorbed in a conversation for instance) does that mean you are not in love during that conversation? No? Well what exactly do you mean by 'a feeling' then? Edward, unlike most people, tried never to be preoccupied by matters other than his love for her.

Then one day his wife told him - this was during one of her more and more frequent drunken stupors - that she was never going to wear anything over a six. That she wanted the number low. And in this way she felt he always wanted her more than she wanted a partner. A man's craving for her was permanently important.

Edward stumbled out of the family home and wandered aimlessly around the streets for an evening. But eventually he focused his mind again. So much so in fact, that he set off right away back to his drunken wife. After all he now knew something he should know of his wife's makeup. This side of her could easily, easily, have remained hidden for ever if he had never introduced his numbers.

The Hoop

Howard runs slavering into the parlour. He has heard his name called. They want him to do something; something tricky perhaps; something Howard won't want to do, and so they'll cajole him with a treat. And being a young man still, and therefore sometimes sparked into action by the prospect of a treat, he finds himself eagerly bounding up to them. 

A hoop is being held upright for him. "A hoop" mutters Howard. He wriggles back from it. "A yellow plastic hoop." In the parlour, the chairs have been collected and crowded in a pile at one end of the room. The table has been pushed back against the wall (Howard raises his eyebrows at this, for the table is cumbersome and they have gone to some trouble) and onto the table has been lifted the standard-lamp. He looks up. And above him the family have arranged themselves about this standard-lamp. There! His father is slapping his thighs, then pointing at the hoop, then jerking his chin. And there squat his two younger brothers, bending low, hands on knees, shouting "Whoosh! Whoosh!" Grandmother, behind them, tilts her old-orange head up to the ceiling, rubs her hands and laughs. The only possibly sympathetic face he can see, is his mother's, for she wears a concerned expression, averts her eyes and bites her lip. 

His friends are there. They perch on more furniture (a sideboard and something Howard doesn't recognise for it's been turned upside-down) which has been pushed to the wall opposite the table with its lamp-clutching family. His friends stand in a line, like bar-room boys, leaning on their elbows against the parlour wall, and he has no time to scrutinise them. Howard whimpers. He rolls onto his back, curls up his limbs, and squirms from one side to the other inviting play instead. Even the postman is there (he now sees) urged to come inside and witness Howard's performance; he's in his uniform, encouraging Howard with shouts and beating his postman's cap against his leg.

The narrow space between the two piles of furniture is cunning - the only way forward is to jump this hoop. But Howard, undecided whether to approach the contraption, walks on his toes, wiggles his haunches, and looks up into the circle of faces. The faces begin to plead and complain. Howard treads forward hesitantly, ducking his head and trembling, raises his foot then sets it down again on the same spot. It is a hoop: and not a stick. Now a stick is easy. What is the point of jumping sticks? Around him he sees so many pointless lives jumping sticks and he's in the habit of dismissing those people as stupid. Howard will not jump a stick: up to now, that has been his party trick. He can amuse the others with his refusals. He can duck beneath it, or skirt round. But a hoop is a different level of problem; and a cold fear comes over him.

This time, Howard cannot immerse himself in this question of stupidity; a diversionary question he now realises; a blinker; this time there is only one way to move on and that is to jump the hoop - Howard had seen that at the first glance. He is stuck to the spot. Horrible! That stick, bent round (what fiendish cunning) until the ends meet, transformed into a hoop and presented to him without warning. Horrible!

The postman is getting impatient. He jumps down and grips Howard by the ears, pulls Howard's head to his chest and, walking backwards, drags him towards the hoop. Howard sees his mother smile at last, smile and look at the faces around her. He straightens his legs out in front of him and is dragged forward on his heels. Howard would have tired the postman, so he assures himself afterwards, and escaped were it not for the two pairs of hands which suddenly hold him by the rear and, with one overwhelming shove, push him forward to the line where his instinct forces him to spring upwards and ahead. He gently hops through the ring and lands with a plop.

His friends rush forward from the wall. His mother claps her hands loudly and calls "Hurrah! Hurrah!" After Howard's father has, rather solemnly Howard thinks, chucked him under the chin and laughed, the others overlooking his unease, beam down with pleasure upon him as if he had had no help at all, and was quite entitled to lap up all the credit for himself.

The Warren

While walking across a field, along a short-cut to the high-road, Jan stumbled upon some people living in a warren, and she jumped back startled. The two heads which had surfaced at her feet emitted a short scream of surprise; then after the initial shock of this encounter, they tried to cast surreptitious glances at the stick which the woman was carrying. She, having decided not to move from the spot just yet, watched the two keenly. The heads, which belonged to two men, left off worrying about the stick and began to grin broadly, the younger following the older man's lead. Jan glanced quickly across the marshy fields crossed by dyke banks, where long coarse grass lay flattened and bent in many directions. The bank into which this hole was an obvious entrance, was marked by many other holes: very likely a large nest of these people was living inside there. At least, thought Jan, these people haven't neglected their appearance; look! their faces are quite clean, their hair not matted at all. For a moment she felt a surge of admiration for them.

A disturbance from below elicited groans from the two men and caused them to crane their necks downwards until a further head, that of another man, having forced its way behind that of the first two, popped up and grinned at Jan. The older man, jostled and irritated by this new arrival, and now quite uncomfortable in the narrow hole, addressed Jan - "We are doing no harm" he said, "on the contrary we, almost all of us, harbour no ill-will towards anyone. Look at us!"  he opened his arms expansively. "Look now! Do you think we can hurt you? Oh dear what a joke. Eh? Now be reasonable, I implore you." Jan looked at the man's outstretched arms. "You don't look harmful, I'll admit," she answered. "But anyway, I'm not interested in that. I don't think that harmfulness is the point, is it." She began to circle the hole slowly, staring in amazement, taking slow measured steps unconsciously, for she was not paying the least attention to her feet.

The two younger men, willing to let their companion be the spokesman for the three, poked him repeatedly in the back with their fingers. The man bristled with fury which he diverted on to the girl. "Hey!" he shouted, twisting his torso in the hole so that he could face Jan again, "You! What do you think you're doing? Be off! It'll be the worse for you if you don't - it'll go bad for you with the authorities, don't you realise that? We are not without any influence at all, you know. Don't you think that. I say don't you think that. You!" One of the younger ones hugged the man from behind, encircling his neck (Jan wondered whether he was the man's son) and after he'd rested his chin on the man's arm, gazed up at Jan a little sheepishly. He in his turn was being hugged by the other young man who began to whisper something close in his ear. Jan stepped back a pace, crossed her chest with her arm and gripped her shoulder nervously. "I didn't mean to anger anybody," she explained. "Yes; of course, I'll go. I'll leave right now, if that's what you wish. Yes; I'll do that now." She looked up into the grey skies and viewed the horizon slowly from one side to the other. The older man began to run his hand across his head, letting the thick fingers of hair pass through it, and followed Jan's gaze towards the horizon. He wiped his mouth with his palm, then looked across the bleak fields. "Anyway" he complained, "it's rude of you to stand over us like this; as if you were something and we were not; as if you were not like us. Have we no right to privacy, us? Well? Are you not intruding, just a little my girl? Won't you grant me this one point?"

Jan nodded slowly. "Ah! I see you do" continued the man; "We have some of our dignity left, do we?" The man's indignation spent, the other two who had been watching his face closely, now looked glumly at Jan. The man also raised his eyes to hers, to make of it a tripartite defence. She stared at them, uncomfortable, and took a couple of hesitant steps backwards and forwards once more. The warren-dwellers held her gaze. She started to speak, spluttered, and cleared her throat. However, before she could utter a clear word, the three had lowered their eyes to the ground and looked away from one another. Suddenly one of the three opened his mouth wide and with his thick wide red tongue, gave one of his companions a lick stretching from his chin to his hair, a cow's lick.

Jan's eyes sprang into life. She seized upon the lick. "There! Caught you!" she cried. She jumped into the air, fists clenched. "Disgusting! Diseased people. That's it. Diseased! Oh why didn't I see it straight off? Ha! I have it now. You disgust me, yes, that's it; I wasn't sure what I had against you; but now I see it. You're depraved and you disgust me." For a moment the older man's head rose a little, but when Jan looked at him it sank again. Laughing uproariously Jan began to swing her leg, and to toe clods of earth from the ground. Long spurts of earth soared from her foot to the hole entrance, making the three heads sink suddenly out of sight. With the side of her foot, Jan shovelled stones, twigs, and earth into the hole until it filled. "There!" she cried, "I'll not stay here any longer," and she hurried down the bank humming to herself and snapping her fingers.

That night she laughed a little more, standing at her window, yet felt compelled to put on a coat and run out into the dark to head across the fields again. From behind a stunted bush she spied upon the warren-dwellers, squatting with hands placed on knees. When they surfaced she gritted her teeth and watched. Two women, short-haired women who talked to one another in an unhurried and reflective manner, something which Jan instantly admired in them, walked in her direction hands on hips. They sat down at the foot of their bank, put their arms around one another's shoulders and conversed in the half-dark, one leaning forward slightly to catch the words of the other. The one who talked the most playfully squeezed the neck of the other at one point. An older woman approached, getting their attention. She sighed and shrugged, making the others smile; then she knelt at the feet of her companions, took the toes of one of them in her mouth and gently sawed off the nails with her front teeth, an attention which made both women close their eyes with pleasure for a while. Her disgust confirmed, Jan almost threw her arm up in the air in excitement. She scuttled across the fields, crouching low, keeping at hedge height and swinging her arms until she reached home.

It was several days before the drowning-party could be organized. A pump had to be ordered from a town quite distant, Jan was told; then wheels had to be made in order to pull it across fields. As the group set off on its journey to the warren, the drowning-party walked behind Jan. The party leader stayed on her shoulder the whole way, somewhat hopeful of her love in spite of her obvious preoccupation with these warren-dwellers about whom she had started talking even before she had opened the door of his office. He freely admitted to himself that it was probably his love for the girl that had made him listen to her story and order this drowning-party. In the centre of the party the pump was pulled over hills and tracks by three men, who had to endure the loud criticisms and mock bullying of the others. Every half mile the team had to be changed and the hounding renewed - the free-walkers took it in turns to shoulder the nozzles and carry the hoses which they wore around their bodies.

Jan and the man at her shoulder set a fast pace, for the journey would take several hours. After a while the men began a game of leap-frog, each chasing the others and trying to fold one of them over so that he could win a vault. They wandered off, sometimes raced off, at tangents to the direction they needed to follow, not thinking about the delays they were causing at all. Ahead, Jan and the leader of the party had to stop. The leader turned to watch them and smiled. He turned to Jan and saw that she was frowning intermittently, nervous and darting her eyes from side to side. He skipped over to his charges, clapped his hands and, happy not to conceal his amusement, reprimanded them with good humour. Stepping up to his favourite in the party, he ruffled the man's hair and tried to get Jan to notice he was doing so.  

The warren looked deserted when they got there. Some of the men bent down, ostrich fashion, placed their palms on either side of a hole and poked their heads inside to peer into these novel homes. It was too dark to see anything, they complained. Some seemed unhappy with the job and lay down their pipes for a few moments to talk with the others. A few walked a little distance away and addressed the leader of the party. None worked with enthusiasm. Slowly, hoses were pushed firmly down those holes the men could discover, and screwed to the several nozzles on the pump. A longer fatter hose was run from the pump, over a distant ridge, and into the dyke waters behind. The starting of the pump was left to the leader of the party.  

The pump throbbed dully. The men of the party stood all around the bank, hands in pockets, listening in silence to the water bubbling quietly beneath the bank. Jan rushed up to the nearest man, took him by the ears and forced his face up to hers. "Listen!" she shouted. "You must hurry. You must now pack your machinery away. It is nearly four o'clock. Quickly now. It's important." She ran in front of the circle of men, shook the shoulders of another one. "You are expected back before evening. You know that; so come along. Don't forget that you're paid only until dusk." The men began to stir from their inactivity and to gather their equipment. 

A naked leg appeared, at a high angle, from one of the holes. It began to bob stiffly. The hoses were heavier now. The men passed the hose segments down the hill from one to another. The body, at last pushed out by the pressure of water beneath, began to slide down the bank revolving slowly on its descent. Before it had been washed to the bottom, several more corpses from various holes, some of them previously unnoticed ones, had been floated to the surface and commenced their slide down the bank.

It was getting cold. The party huddled together on the return journey. The work was harder now, the equipment heavier. The men were tired and didn't say a lot. When Jan reached the outskirts of the town, she fell into step behind a pair of girls who had emerged from a noisy house. She vaguely knew them. One had her arm round the shoulders of the other, said something to her then protruded her thick red tongue, and gave her a lick which stretched from her chin all the way up to her hair, a cow's lick. Jan stopped in her tracks. So it had always been there in her people too, only she hadn't noticed it. Or perhaps she had? Despite all this new awareness, she reasoned that the warren people deserved their fate nevertheless. For they had no effective defence - it was clear to her now. That was it. Their only ploy was to try to hide themselves away (and that not very effectively). Thus she had decided that they always were going to suffer this fate of theirs, at some point or other and from some quarter or other.