Titus Awakes

30

Happening in a Side Street

NOT FOR THE first time in his life Titus felt the void that parting opens up so violently, but in this case it was not he who had left. He could feel a little of the sense of loss he had inflicted on so many people. An emptiness when he awoke, and when he went to bed, and all during the day when he was working. An ache he had only once before felt. He had lost something irreplaceable, but no rational explanation came to him as to why he should have such strong feelings for a man who had not spoken, whose outer life was destroyed, but whose eyes and inner life haunted him.

He knew that he wanted to leave the hospital and let his life drift wherever it took him. He spoke to Peregrine, who only expressed surprise that he had stayed at all. There were no formalities and nothing to await, no farewells, no broken hearts. He left, walking down the long drive, and as he reached the lodge and the large iron gates, which shut in or out this world within a world, the heavy sense of his own secret and unexplained loss became intolerable, and he let his legs lead him, for neither his head nor his heart could do so.

As he walked along the isolated road, he could just see the tower on the hill to his right, which brooded over the enclosed world he had left. As far as he could see, in every other direction was scrubland. Barren and bleak and unbeloved. Gorse bushes and bracken. He was in tune with this landscape as he walked. He saw no human beings and very little in the way of traffic. He was passed once by an old woman riding an antiquated tricycle. In the front of it was a basket from which appeared the heads of a motley collection of dogs, their bodies covered by an old blanket.

His feet led him along the road, and he felt neither tired nor active. He refused to think of anything. Ahead of him he began to see the lights of a town. He had money in his pocket with which to find some place to stay, and he continued walking. It must have been a couple of hours, and the light began to go as he neared the outskirts. A few scattered dwellings to begin with, then the dreary uniform dinginess of terraced houses.

As the daylight faded, so he saw ahead of him the rectangles of yellow-lit windows, and the skyline of the town taking on its untidy silhouette, with here and there the ugly uncompromising blocks, which seemed to bear no relation to the rest of the townscape. Coming closer to human beings, he started to feel an intense hunger, and despite his mental lethargy, he began to increase his speed of walking.

As on the outskirts of most towns and cities, there seemed little life, on or out of the street. The lights from the windows were gradually extinguished by the drawing of curtains. Towards the end of a line of houses he noticed that one of them had its curtains drawn to display two large candles in the window, and there was a certain amount of activity; people in ones and twos and threes making their way to its front door, which was ajar, and disappearing behind it. Titus heard the murmur of voices and muted footsteps overtaking him. A man and a woman drew level with him, ‘Good evening. A sad evening this – yes, yes. She was a fine woman. A fine woman.’

Titus found himself on the inside of the pavement and had no choice but to turn towards the partly open front door as the two strangers turned inevitably in the same direction. The man was small and aggressive and the woman, a head taller, held his arm, seemingly more to protect him from his own aggressiveness than herself against the butts of others. Titus now saw that she held a wreath in her other hand, as they pushed open the door and entered the house.

There was a strong smell of incense and a low murmur, the drone of people at prayer. The hall was narrow and dark, and to the left was a closed door, but passing this, Titus was slowly propelled to a second door at the farther end of the narrow passage. All three entered the room, which retained an atmosphere of a bygone age. It was cluttered with the past. The walls and the tables and the chairs were sepia. There were gas jets and a flounce over the fireplace.

As the incongruous companions were shown to some upright chairs, an elderly lady took their hands in turn. She was dressed in unrelieved black. Her severe hair was black, and drawn tightly behind her ears into a bun at the nape of her neck. Jet earrings and a high jet collar must have all but choked her. Her eyes were like two beads from the collar, and the only thing which was not black were the red rims of her eyes.

‘You would like to see her, of course, before you take tea.’

People were sitting in rows of chairs facing a sliding door, which separated the back room from the front, and as it slid slowly open, those in the front row moved forward, and everyone else moved, as in some game for children, so that there was an all change, but done with no laughter, and no sound apart from a sigh and a sob and a sniff of stifled tears from one or other of the women present.

As some departed, others came in to take their places, and soon Titus found himself in the front row. He was the only person with no offering, but the absorption of sorrow precluded any kind of censure. He had at least come to pay his respects.

It was now his turn to go behind the door, into the front room. He had no wish to encounter death again. He entered the room he had seen from the outside, lit by two candles. Incense, and the flowers that were laid in banks all around the room, nearly felled Titus by their power, and his hunger pangs turned to nausea and a longing to run away from the raised open coffin he was to look into.

The tall lady gave a sob, as she leaned over and touched the cheek of the mourned. Titus closed his eyes as he passed, but with the native curiosity of human beings he was unable to prevent himself from opening them as he himself came near.

He looked, and was filled once more with the unexplained mystery of death. Although he neither knew nor cared about the being that was laid out so carefully in its solid coffin, what lay there surely bore little relation to what it had been. He remembered the deaths of people he had known and loved, known and hated, known and cared little about. But in them all was the common denominator. The enigma. Where were they? They did not all look peaceful. In some it seemed their torments were not all over. They did not look like real people, but they did not look like wax people either. They were not there, in that body left behind, to be disposed of in such a variety of ways, yet the idea of any kind of physical desecration or insult was unthinkable, like deliberately pulling the wings off a butterfly, or destroying a flower for the sake of it. The dead must be handled with care.

So, in this ordinary little house, the death of one of its former inmates had bestowed on everyone living the magic wand of mystery. As Titus left the room of the dead, he was shown out of the door and pointed to a room at the end of the narrow passage. On a table in the middle were plates of sandwiches and numerous cups. This whole room gleamed with cleanliness, and another lady with black hair and eyes and earrings and dress poured tea into the small delicate cups from a very large silver teapot.

No one spoke as they stood around the table, passing plates to each other. An occasional murmur of ‘a wonderful woman. We shall not see her like again’ brought hankies out to gather up the tears such words inevitably cause to flow.

Titus ate and longed to escape from this strange little interlude. As he turned to leave, the elderly second dark lady turned to him and quietly thanked him for coming. An old overfed dog looked at him, with eyes that seemed to gut him. He moved along the passage and to the front door. Two old ladies, and an old man, were on their way out. They turned to Titus as they stood on the pavement and said, ‘You must be the great-nephew. How sad you came too late. She was a fine woman.’

As they turned and walked away, the old man on the arm of each old lady, Titus had a strong feeling that he would for ever be an onlooker in life and death.