Titus Awakes

21

An Affectionate Welcome

WHEN TITUS AWOKE, he was aware of a slight weight on his chest and, opening his eyes, he met the steady gaze of two yellow ones and a sound of what he thought had been a distant beat of drums. His feet were also constricted, and as he moved to free them a cat sailed gently into the air and landed in a hollow of the bed, which might have been a ready-made cats’ nest. He slowly remembered where he was and with whom.

As he turned his head to see if Ruth was awake, he thought that he was in a pale mist, until he saw, first of all a cigarette, then that it was attached to her lower lip.

‘Good morning, Titus.’

‘Good morning, Ruth, and good morning, room.’

‘How wonderful it is to be alive, to be home, even for a bit, not to be alone.’

‘But you have your friends.’

‘Oh, yes, they’re my best friends. They know all my secrets, and what’s more, they never divulge them. They won’t tell a soul you’re here if you don’t want them to.’

‘I don’t think I know a soul, but Ruth, thank you for having me, or perhaps I should say thank you for letting me stay.’

‘But what else could you have done? Where could you have gone? Besides, you haven’t really told me who you are.’

‘Perhaps if I do, you won’t believe me. There is so much to tell, so much that I almost don’t want to remember, so many people I crave to see, whom I cannot. So much that I have done, and so much that I have not done. Perhaps, in time, I may be able to tell you a fraction, but I feel a tenderness for you, which is something to do with some of my past. My sister Fuchsia had a room, or rooms, something like yours. Full of love, her love. The only way she could express her abundant loving was for her things that she had collected: her books, her paintings, the flowers she picked and forgot to look after . . .’

‘Titus, why don’t you put your arms round me, and forget or remember with me? I believe you. I would like to enter your world. Come closer, gently and slowly. Close your eyes again.’

As Ruth’s voice grew softer and her body closer, Titus felt not so much passion as tenderness, and it was with an infinite gentleness that he made love. A mutual loneliness ached through their bones, and their fulfilment ushered them back into a dreamless sleep.

They slept again for several hours, and it was the restless movement on the bed from hungry felines that woke Ruth, and a soft paw on Titus’s face, which brought them back to a reality where, although they had few responsibilities, one was certainly to feed the creatures in their care, and see to all their other basic needs.

As they threw on the clothes so carelessly discarded the night before, neither felt embarrassment, but a kinship that drew them to each other.

‘Well, Titus, although I am not a very practical person, one thing we can’t do is to live very long without money. I’m sure that there isn’t much in your pockets, and there’s very little in mine. I have my emergency shelf for the moment, and I think after we’ve fed the cats, we’ll take Dog for a walk and have some breakfast in a little place I know.’

As she was talking, Ruth climbed on to one of the tables, underneath a triangular corner shelf, and as she dislodged enough dust to cover a billiard table, there was the sound of coins being heaped together and pushed on to the table, falling and clattering like hailstones, and landing on the floor as well. She climbed off the table, pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and left a grey track of dust from chin to forehead. Gathering up the coins and counting them, her light-heartedness returned, and with her cigarette almost dancing with excitement on her lower lip she said, ‘Well, at least there’s enough here for a day or two, or three or four, what’s more, oh Lor’, hee-haw – come on, Titus, let’s go and spend it, thrift not, and then we’ll talk about what you must do, and mustn’t do, what you have done, and what you haven’t done, because if you stay a little while with me I can help you meet some people who might give some work for some money.’

‘I want to stay for a little, but you’ve already given me so much.’

‘Let’s not talk any more, but go out. Poor Dog, he’s so patient and so loving and I’m so hungry now. Come on, Titus.’

The cats were fed and they left the studio, leaving the key hanging on the string, Ruth knowing that none of her possessions was of much interest to an intruder.

* * * * *

TITUS SAW HIS anchorage in daylight. The long corridor was not attractive: dark walls, where the paint had long ago flaked away, and at intervals double black doors, which opened, he assumed, on to other studios. The floor was of an undistinguishable colour, with what must have been paint stains making shapes that were not intentional. The open door through which they had passed the night before led to the steps on to the pavement, and there stood Ruth’s ancient car, which they had forgotten in their tiredness to empty of its pictures and stones and branches and flowers.

They turned left down the steps and Ruth said, ‘What friends I have live in these studios, but I’ll take you to meet them later, after we’ve exhausted each other. Shall I exhaust you first, I wonder. I want to know of all the things that you have only hinted at. There is nothing I have to tell you that could in any way compete. Tell me your story soon, Titus.’

‘It is not my story. It belongs to a great many others, but Ruth, you keep saying let’s not talk, then talking and asking questions. It will only be in my own time that I can tell you, that is if I can, only a minute particle. It might take a lifetime and neither you nor I have time for that . . . Now let me say that I am hungry – poor Dog is hungry and you said we would have breakfast soon.’

‘Of course, poor Titus, yes, it isn’t far. Only about five minutes and we’ll be there.’

They turned at the end of the road into a wider street that had some houses set back, with high walls and long deep windows, shuttered, rich and silent.

They walked along, past a graveyard with ancient headstones, some ivy-covered, and the names of the sleepers obliterated by time and the elements. The grass and weeds were high enough to hide some of the stones. At intervals there were wooden benches, on which sat old men and women, waiting, it seemed, to join their confrères underground, so inert and lackadaisical did they seem.

‘That is a music hall,’ said Ruth, and Titus mistook her remark for a rather sinister joke.

‘Oh, no, not that. I mean that,’ as she pointed to a red-brick building just past the graveyard. ‘Perhaps we could go some time.’

As they passed this building Ruth said, ‘Here we are,’ and pushed open a door. It led into a little room, with stalls on each side and tables where eccentric-looking groups of people sat.

When Ruth entered, she was greeted by several of these people, with friendliness, and no curiosity at seeing her with an unknown man and his dog. ‘Some time, if you like, you can meet them, but let’s keep ourselves to ourselves just now, eh, Titus? Do you want to meet anyone?’

‘Some time.’

‘Some time, who?’

‘Some time, Ruth.’

Food and hot drinks were put before them, without th eir asking, and a full plate for Dog was put on the floor, where he had waited so patiently.

‘How nice they are here. They must know you well.’

‘When I’ve enough money I come here every day, and they always know what I like. As you may have noticed, I am easily pleased, gastronomically, that is. Now, then, but what does ‘‘now, then’’, mean? Should it be then, now? How can it be now and then then, except that as soon as now is said it’s then. But what I really meant to say was let’s begin.’

‘I like your flights of fancy. They seem to come from nowhere, but they linger in that dusty attic of my brain, and I come across them when I’m looking for something else. There, I’ve almost taken a leaf out of your book – why leaf, why book? Yes, let’s begin.’

They both ate with pleasure, but with a certain unconcern for what they were eating. There was just enough to satisfy, so that they could now turn their thoughts to other matters.

‘Let’s go back to the studio. I have to do some work, which I will be paid for, and we can try to think what you can do.’

Ruth paid, and the three got up to leave. As they were passing the last table, the man who was sitting there called out, ‘I say, fancy doing a bit of modelling?’

Titus was not sure if it were he or Ruth who was being addressed, but she said, ‘This is Titus Groan. That is Herbert Drumm. He’s a painter, and he’s doing a mural for an old woman who only wants men in her bedroom, I mean on the walls, as she doesn’t seem able to have them anywhere else. Herbert’s always stopping men and asking them to pose for him and he pays too. What about that for your first job, eh, Titus? B Titus, you are, C Titus, you do?’

‘Well, I can’t say I’m the best person for standing still; in fact, I don’t remember ever having done so. It’s against nature, but I’ve never turned down a new experience. When would you like me, where would you like me and how would you like me?’

‘Three good questions, old boy,’ said Herbert, who was nearer sixty than fifty, with black, bushy eyebrows that were in danger of impairing his vision, a grizzled moustache and beard that made up in quantity for what was lacking on his head. His nose was rather bulbous and his complexion decidedly mottled, and the impression he gave was not so much that of a man dedicated to creative activity as of one whose search for the meaning of life lay in more bibulous pastimes. His voice was baritone, and loud, with an intonation that was rather monotonous.

‘I’ve got to go and see the old bag now, to show her some more of her boys, her darling boys, as she calls them. My drawings – I’ll leave them with her, that’ll keep her quiet, and I’ll tell her about you, old boy. She likes them all, but most of all she likes the virile manly boys, like you, old boy. She has as much gold as double chins. But to get back to when, where and how, Ruth’ll tell you where, I’ll tell you how, and you tell me when.’

‘This afternoon, then. I’ll have to get into training for standing still, won’t I?’ said Titus.

‘That’s the idea, old boy, and bring your old hairy hound with you – she’ll like that too, the old bag. Well, see you this afternoon.’

Titus and Ruth turned for her home, and walked back past the graveyard.

‘Tell me about him,’ said Titus.

‘Who?’ asked Ruth.

‘Herbert Drumm.’

‘Well, nobody knows very much about where he came from, and he’s not all that helpful, but some say he was a sailor, which might be true, you’ll soon see when you go to his studio and he starts to sing – but I think I’ll leave that delight for you to find out for yourself.’

‘I can’t quite see him as a painter, though,’ said Titus.

‘Oh, painters aren’t set in identical moulds, you’ll soon see, but Mrs Sempleton-Grove thinks he looks the part. He wears a big bow and a large-brimmed black hat when he goes to see her, and although I’d hardly say he had a rare talent, what he lacks in that respect he makes up for with a kind of almost vulgar bravura. But he’s always got work, and his conscience and ethics very rarely clash. ‘‘Give ’em what they want, says I,’’ says he, and that’s just what he does.’

‘And where’s his studio?’

‘I’ll show you,’ said Ruth, as they turned into the street where she lived.

Just before the steps leading up to her studio there was a stone arch, which Titus had noticed but not wondered about.

‘This way,’ she said. They turned and went through the archway, which led into a rather dark, very wide passage, with a black brick wall on the right, which Titus recognised as the one seen from Ruth’s kitchen window. As his eyes grew used to the dark, he saw that on the left was a building or series of buildings that seemed to have been put together rather than following any sort of architectural design. They walked past these until they came to the end of the passage, which was one of the same haphazard constructions at right angles to the others. Hanging baskets of geraniums lent joyousness to the darkness. The front door was covered with brush marks and the front wall was more like a conservatory, being made of panes of glass that were painted white, to ensure a kind of privacy.

‘This is where Herbert lives, where this afternoon you will enter perhaps for you a new world, although, dear Titus, I already feel that there can be very little that would surprise you. I still long to hear about your world. I feel a closeness to it that I hardly feel for this one. I am bewildered by what you have left behind to become a wanderer, a watcher, an outcast; there are few who will find themselves in sympathy with you.’

‘I have felt that since I left my home. On overthrowing all that I possessed, all whom I loved or hated, I have become, as you say, an outcast. I stand by myself. I am alone, by my own action, perhaps by my own wish. I would like to stay with you for a little, but by my own nature I shall in time move on. I have hurt more people than I could ever hope to make reparation to, and although you might think it presumptuous of me, I shall hurt you, when I go, but I will hurt myself as well.’

‘I know that, Titus; I’ve known it since I met you, but there’s nothing I can do. How can anyone prevent what is ahead for us, and why should I want them to? While we can, without too much soul-searching, can’t we enjoy each moment now? I feel an exhilaration that so rarely comes, and I feel capable of being buffeted and coming up again for more. But until that time we must live in the present, and you must get yourself together in a new role, as a virile man for Mrs Sempleton-Grove, via Herbert, and I must get on with my work – so let’s go back now and let life drift away, becalmed, until the storms come again.’