Fowlers End (3 page)

Meanwhile the young bloods of Fowlers End were strutting, in their indescribably repulsive hangdog, drag-heeled way, in the High Street. And what a High Street it
was, in my time! Except for a few clumps of rusty television antennae, I don’t imagine that the place will have changed much unless some German bomb, well placed for once, happened to fall nearby—in which case, good riddance to it! It wouldn’t have taken much more than a five-hundred-pounder to make rubble of the entire High Street, which, when I last measured it when I stepped out of the Pantheon to clear my lungs with a whiff of comparatively healthful carbon monoxide and sulphuric acid after a Children’s Matinee, measured exactly eighty-five long paces from God-bolts Corner
to the end of the tram line where Fowlers End begins. And, bestially primitive as this cloaca of a street is, it must needs have two or three vermiform appendices, blind alleys! One of these was Godbolts, where the Pantheon stood. It was named after the real-estate magnate and general capitalist, a pious man who kept Godbolts Emporium on the other side of the street. He was a quick, hideously ugly little man, cold and viscous about the hands, with a gecko’s knack of sticking to plane surfaces. Once, when I went into his shop to buy a handkerchief, Godbolt, telling me that he didn’t have much ca
ll for that kind of thing nowadays but thought he had a few in stock, went to get one from a high shelf. It may have been the effect of the fog but I will swear I saw him run up the wall. He had a black-cotton fly of a wife who was always buzzing at him from a distance; she never came within less than five feet of him—for fear, presumably, that he might thrust out a glutinous green tongue and catch her. He was always watching her out of the corners of his horny-lidded, protuberant eyes. They lived, according to local report, on stale bread and margarine and tea, but I always thought that he found
a source of nutriment in his mustache; otherwise, why should he be perpetually sucking it with such relish?

He owned the building in which the Pantheon was housed. It had been a church, once upon a time, built at con
siderable cost by the infatuated devotees of a demented tinker named John Nakedborn, who not only preached the Second Coming but more than hinted that he was It. It seems that he “married” the entire choir and then ran off to America; whereupon the sect broke up and the church stood empty until Sam Yudenow happened to pass that way. Always anxious, as he put it, “a good turn to do a feller,” he was employing at that time for a pound a week a crosseyed, clubfooted chauffeur who, sometimes, according to Sam Yudenow, “went two different diractions at once.” He took his employer
to Fowlers End under the impression that he was going to Chingford. There was no cinema at Fowlers End then; the nearest one was the ill-fated Hippodrome at Ullage.

Sam Yudenow, who was always intrigued by any vacant drill hall, barn or warehouse, however ratty, was fascinated by the naked, empty church: it had Gothic doors and windows and, instead of a spire, an onion-shaped dome. For the sake of that dome alone, if the building had been situated in the middle of Salisbury plain, Sam Yudenow would have been attracted to it. A dome like that who could resist? It was Class, it was Oriental, it was up-to-date. Besides, these were the days of the first cinema boom, when (if you believe the old-timers) all you had to do was find an old stable, pai
nt it blue, call it the Majestic Picture Palace, paste up a forty-eight sheet saying
Opening
Shortly—and sell it for twenty thousand pounds.

Sam Yudenow said to his wife, “Lily—look! May you drop down dead this minute if this ain’t the loveliest little site for a show you ever saw in your life! May you never live to see your children again!”

“You should five so sure,” said she, looking at the place with horror.

“It’s gudgeous!” cried Sam Yudenow. “Like ... like ... like an Indian tomb—artistic like an oil painting!” Then
he sought out Mr. Godbolt and he said, “Uxcuse me, please. That place across the road, that ruin, it gives me the creeps. What is it? Why is it? What’s the name o’ this ‘ere place? Where is it? How do I get out from ‘ere? This ‘ere place—
is
there such a place? I never
‘eard
of it!”

“That’s a church,” said Mr. Godbolt.

“Achurch?
What
for a church? How
comes,
church? Who goes there, black men? What do you mean, church? What place
is
this, anyway?”

“This is Fowlers End, sir.”

“What do you mean, Fowlers End? ...
A church, yet!”

“That’s my property, sir.”

“No jokes? Then I’m sorry for you,” said Sam Yudenow.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” asked Mr. Godbolt from behind the counter.

“A pair braces I want. I want a pair braces. Green braces. A pair green braces I want.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I have no braces in green,” said Mr. Godbolt. “But I’ve got a lovely brace in a nice shade of mauve.”

“I meant mauve.... ‘Ow much you asking for these ‘ere braces?”

“This superfine elastic brace is elevenpence ha’penny,” said Mr. Godbolt.

“What, elevenpence ha’penny? What do you
mean,
elevenpence ha’ penny for such braces? Miv the church thrown
in,
for elevenpence ha’penny?”

At this Mr. Godbolt looked hurt and said that this church, dome and all, was a very desirable property; to which Sam Yudenow replied, “So I dessay maybe God pays the rent praps?”

“Don’t take His name in vain, if you don’t mind,” said Mr. Godbolt. “Fowlers End is expanding. The church would make a fine warehouse.”

Sam Yudenow, who loved a play on words, said, “Warehouse for what wares where? What wares to house, and for why? Who for, warehouse? When, where? No jokes!”

Later that day he left Fowlers End, having taken a lease on the old church for ninety-nine years at eighty pounds a year. He managed to convey to Mr. Godbolt and his solicitor that he wanted to use the old church to store surplus cinema supplies.

But, loutish and obtuse as he may have been in almost every other respect, Sam Yudenow was a micrographer in contractual small print, and something of a master in the conveyancing of leases. He got away with a bargain, that day, but said to Mr. God-bolt on parting, “I’m temperamental—that’s the ruination of me. What for did I
do
this, what for? Mr. Cobalt, you hyptonized me.

For a while Mr. Godbolt really believed that he had hypnotized Sam Yudenow and got the better of him. Accordingly, he conducted himself with all the condescension and magnanimity of a “good neighbor.” To be a good neighbor you must feel, fundamentally, that while you are independent of the man next door, he had better not try to get along without you. The good neighbor is a kind of emotional pawnbroker, a usurer in everyday kindnesses who manages to sell you his undesirable proximity on the installment plan, and exacts a consultant’s fee for every word of unsolicited advice.
Good fences make good
neighbors— nobody ever spoke a truer word. There never was a good neighbor who did not try to take some mean advantage of the newcomer to his neighborhood. It stands to reason: if your neighbor is socially your superior, you must live up to him and ruin yourself, or remain his inferior and abase
yourself. Either way you must secretly hate him, belittle his success or magnify his failure. If he happens to be your equal, you will manage, if only by the weight of a snort, to tip the balance. He who has a neighbor has an enemy.

I hold no brief for Sam Yudenow, but it seems to me that God-bolt got exactly what he deserved. He and his wife rejoiced, at first, at what they thought was their victim’s discomfiture. First of all, Sam Yudenow was bitten by a rat where the pulpit used to be. With ill-concealed glee, they commiserated and gave him a cup of tea. Then, when a green-and-orange truck came into the High Street and workmen started to put up ladders, they hugged themselves. Mrs. Godbolt winked at her husband with some of her several hundred eyes, while he treated himself to a double mouthful of mus
tache. Before long, however, Sam Yudenow was bellowing orders from the street while an army of lame, blind, and misanthropic scab laborers covered the dome with aluminum paint. Soon the whole front of the church was painted “Oriental Pink,” and the door and window frames were brushed with orange and green. At night workmen labored by the light of naphtha flares. Then, on the decaying hoarding that advertised an adjacent quagmire as
A Desirable Factory Site,
appeared, in orange letters on a green ground, this slogan:

CHEER UP! THE SUPER CINEMA IS COMING!

Mr. Godbolt went to Sam Yudenow and said, “I say. What’s the idea, if I may ask?”

“What’s what idea, what?”

“Super Cinema,” said Mr. Godbolt.

“So? So what you want Sam Yudenow should open? A rab-bidge hutch? A pig stile? Of course a Super Cinema, of course. What then? What you want I should edvertise? A flea-pit? Nothing but the best is good enough for Sam Yudenow.”

“Now look here, I can’t let these premises for a picture palace, sir.”

“Read the lease.”

“You said you wanted to store cinema accessories in these here premises.”

“So? A few hundred seats? A couple projectors? A ticket machine?
Not
accessories? No? So if the County Council gives me a license to show a couple pictures Monday through Saturday, what’s the matter, what? Read the lease, read!”

“I’ve been had,” said Mr. Godbolt.

“The lease, read,” said Sam Yudenow.

“I’ll consult my solicitor, you swindler!”

“Consult your solicitor, but you can’t consult me with your ‘swindlers.’ Read your lease; the lease, read.”

So Mr. Godbolt went to see his solicitor in Edmonton, and they went over the lease clause by clause. It appeared that while the Said Samuel Yudenow had agreed not to conduct a Clay Pipe Burning Factory, a Brothel, a Tannery, a Soap Boiling Factory, a Public Slaughter House, or a Glue Boiling Factory on the Said Premises in the High Street—and much Fowlers End would have cared if he had conducted the whole lot singly or collectively—there was nothing in the lease about properly licensed places of public entertainment. The pebbled skin of Mr. Godbolt changed color, and his adhesive hands cont
racted, but he said nothing. Where a lion makes his kill and eats his fill, there must be pickings. A cinema must attract crowds. Where there are crowds there is a need for tobacco to smoke, sweets to suck, and tea to drink. Scuttling home, Mr. Godbolt conceived the idea of a cafe next door to Yudenow’s cinema, the only other place of this kind being a hut near the end of the tram line where stewed tea and mysterious pies were sold to tram drivers, punch-drunk with the jolting and deafened with the clangor of the run between there and Ponders End. Mr.
Godbolt had in mind a place with tables and chairs for the patrons of Yudenow’s cinema. So he went to Jack Gutter, the Fowlers End butcher, and said, “Now those empty premises of yours, Mr. Gutter, just by the old church. Now what would you call a rental for them there little premises, Mr. Gutter, may I ask?”

Shuddering in the bitter draft, shivering in his grove of dangling tripes and dripping lights and calcified kidneys and purple livers—all gently swaying on their bloody hooks as it were by their own volition—the consumptive butcher poised his scarred red fists on the scarred red chopping block and said, “Well neow, Mr. Godbolt, that’s not fur me to say.”

“Not for you to say, Mr. Gutter? Why, that little shop’s been on the market this past five year. Shop
and
upper part, I believe, Mr. Gutter. A matter of fifteen-and-six a week you were asking, wasn’t you?”

“I
was,”
said Gutter, playing with a pig’s eyelids. He could make a pig’s head appear to wink with one hand while with the other he slyly operated the muscles of its jaw so that it opened its mouth—what time he uttered, ventriloquially, an exact imitation of the squeal of the animal when it feels the knife go home. This trick amused the children and drew customers.

“Was?”

Gutter laughed in his frothy way and said, “Ah! But it’s a peownd a week neow, Mr. Godbolt.”

“Between neighbors, Mr. Gutter, I’ll give you sixteen shillings.”

“No, yeou won’t, ‘cause I let that thur shop and upper part this morning, Mr. Godbolt, fur a peownd a week on a twenty-yurr lease to Mr. Yudeneow. Bet hell rush yeou half a creown extra, heh-heh-heh!”

Mr. Godbolt said, “Now I wonder, Mr. Gutter, what Mr. Yudenow would be wanting these here premises for?”

“Why,” said Gutter, “that one’s got some ideer of opening up just a little caffey like, it being handy fur his picture palace. Pity yeou didden call yesturdee.” He split the pig’s head with a cleaver, fondled the brains, and said, “Ah, Mr. Godbolt, if we knew what was inside
them,
we’d be as weise as this yur piggy, wouldn’t we, Mr. Godbolt?”

“And what does Mr. Yudenow propose to do with the upper part, Mr. Gutter?”

“Ah! If I knew that I’d be as weise as Mr. Yudeneow,” said Gutter.

Frustrated, Mr. Godbolt went home and said to his wife, “Mrs. Godbolt, Lord love me—”

“Keep your mouth clean in this house, Godbolt, or I’ll scrub it with soap ‘n’ water!”

“I was saying, Mrs. Godbolt—you know that three-hundred-foot frontage lot where the signboard is? That factory site, so called? I’ve a good mind to buy it.”

“You think yourself clever, don’t you, Godbolt? Well, that man Yudenow has already bought it.”

“What the devil!”

“Speak of the devil and he’s sure to appear, Godbolt.”

“He has. How much a foot did he pay?”
“Ten shillings.”

“What is he going to do with it?” asked Mr. Godbolt.

“Something wicked, I dare say, just out of spite. Why, what were you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Godbolt. But with that man about, I thought it would be better to have it just in case.”

“In case what of?”

“I don’t know, I really don’t know,” said Mr. Godbolt. A little later, over his tea, he said, “And now, I dare say, I suppose we’d better get the shop painted up a bit.” He added heavily, “Sometimes I don’t know
what
to do.”