The Underground Man (3 page)

It was getting on towards sunset when I received orders to prepare a carriage for His Grace, in order to take him and his valet, Clement, on a visit to see old Mr Snow. That day is fixed most firmly in my memory, seeing as how our return journey was set to be the first one underground and there being quite some excitement at the prospect. So I brought the carriage around to the front of the house and sat and watched the sun go down with a chew of tobacco in my mouth. And I sat and I chewed and I waited, as I seem to have done half my life.

Now, I'd be dishonest if I didn't come straight out and say how that big house hasn't, on more than the odd occasion, made me most uncomfortable just by looking it over, so that I might find myself shifting in my seat, if you take my meaning, and I'm not usually the fidgety type. It is a many pinnacled affair – to my eyes, very ugly – spires and towers all over the place and a roof needing constant repair. There's no doubt that it is large and impressive. A mountain of stone, with who knows how many windows. But I couldn't call it pretty. No. It never seemed to me a jolly place to live.

In olden days, I am told, it was a monastery where many monks would creep about in sackcloth and eat naught but nuts. It was them who built the first underground tunnels, in fear of … now, would I be right in saying the boys of Henry the Eighth? Well, whoever's boys they were, they were dreadful enough to scare the monks into having escape
tunnels dug. Two or three of them, I believe, and very narrow, which, in emergency, they would run along to come up out of the ground in the woods.

So I imagine I must have sat there the usual quarter-hour before they finally emerged … His Grace with his famous beaver hat on and Clement close behind. I shall always think of His Grace as a pointy little man, with his trowel of a beard and his sharp blue eyes. To my mind, he was always a collection of angles – all elbows and knuckles and knees. Generally speaking, Clement accompanied His Grace on such trips and together they made a curious pair, what with Clement being so very large and silent and His Grace so small and always chattering on.

I might also just say here, if I may, that while I have always myself been very fond of the horses, it's my opinion His Grace went too far in giving them a graveyard of their own. I was brought up Christian and I have to say it seemed somehow unholy to me. I believe they should have gone to the knacker's yard and been got rid of in the usual way. Not given headstones with their names carved on 'em and poetry quotations and all.

Sometimes, like that evening, when the light was all but gone and we left the estate by Horses' Graveyard, my mind would take it upon itself to dwell most morbidly on all the horse corpses resting there. The thought of those tired old nags all a-mouldering would end up giving me a most sickly feeling inside. Would make me grip the reins extra tightly and get my living horses to gee-up, double quick.

Old Mrs Snow had been staring at me through her spectacles for what seemed like a good long while. She had yet to make any utterance, being so wholly taken up with observing me standing on her doorstep in the dark. Her right hand clung tightly to the door latch, as if I might be a robber and it a tiny pistol, and as the silence deepened I could feel the warmth of the cottage seeping slowly past me and out into the night.

Clement stood close behind me and I heard him take a breath to introduce us a second time when, at last, some connection registered in Mrs Snow's bespectacled eyes and she opened up her neat little mouth.

‘It's the Duke,' she said.

‘It is,' I replied, and bowed my bare head towards her. She nodded back at me – three or four times, maybe more. Then, just as I feared we might be in for a further period of standing about, she embarked on a series of shuffled backward steps, dragging the heavy door with her, then asked why we did not come in.

With Clement's aid, she managed to hang our coats on a hook behind the door. Then the three of us organized ourselves into a caravan, with Mrs Snow at the head and Clement at the rear, and we all set off at a funereal marching pace towards the parlour's orange light.

I'm afraid I could not help but notice the poor state of Mrs Snow's legs – bandier even than mine – and as we processed through the cottage I saw how her hand took support from, first, a stair banister, then the jamb of a door. At the threshold to the parlour Mrs Snow halted, in order to gather her wits, which gave me ample opportunity to look over her shoulder and take in the tiny room. A great deal of space was given over to a thickly-varnished sideboard, laden with all manner of gaudy crockery and assorted ornaments. Both the proportions and shining timber of the thing called to mind a small steamer on Lake Windermere. A dining table and various sitting chairs took up most of the remaining space.

Having herded all her thoughts together, Mrs Snow announced, ‘It's the Duke,' again (this time, I assumed, for her husband's benefit rather than mine) then stooped off towards a stool which allowed me to catch my first glimpse of old Mr Snow, held in place by a great many cushions in an armchair by the fire. He smiled a curious half-smile and tried vainly to raise himself up, so I hurried over, took his hand in mine and Clement brought me over an upright chair.

The John Snow before me, packed all around with cushions, was a very different man to the one I had last come across. For one thing, and I can say this without fear of contradiction, the man had visibly shrunk. Yes, indeed. His body had been emptied like a sack. And though he had never been particularly portly his skull now seemed to push at the flesh of his face. The tuft of hair sticking up at the back of his head, his greatly bewildered air, his elbows pinned to his ribs with cushions all put me in mind of a nest-bound, flightless chick waiting to be fed.

‘How are you, my friend?' I asked him, pulling my chair right up close to him.

The room was perfectly quiet but for the middle finger of Mr Snow's left hand, which drummed out a complicated
rhythm on the arm of the chair which kept him captive. He nodded his head at me, just as his wife had done, but with Mr Snow it seemed not so much an attempt at communication as a man attempting to balance the weight of his head on his neck. He blinked at me – once, twice, three times – and then he nodded some more.

‘Mr Snow has suffered a stroke,' announced Mrs Snow.

‘So I hear,' I replied over my shoulder, before returning my attention to her husband, saying, ‘We are all at sixes and sevens since you left, you know. Not nearly so many blooms.'

I waited for him to take up the conversation but he simply smiled his half-smile again. I went on, ‘You remember your lovely gardens?'

His middle finger continued to tap out its frantic message. It was as if he had found a spot on the chair arm and was desperate to scratch it away.

At long last his dry lips parted. He said, ‘I am not quite sure.'

Well, this knocked the wind right out of me. Forgotten the gardens? Impossible. How could a man not remember the place he had spent his every working day? I was hurt – I don't mind admitting it – as if the old fellow had actually landed a blow on me. His failure to retrieve any memory of the gardens seemed almost wilful. But I did my best to hide my disappointment and hung on to his withered hand.

I told him how we now had three men doing his job and how they were not doing half so well. I reminded him of his trip to the parks at Battersea and Kew and Crystal Palace after new combinations of bedding plants. I talked of tulips and crocuses and other spring bulbs, hoping to cast some healing light into the dark corners of his mind. And in the same way, perhaps, that a fly fisherman attempts to lure his catch with brightly coloured twists of feathers, so I attempted to reel in my frail old gardener with talk of blossoms and
exotic fruit. ‘You remember the black muscat grapes you grew me? The pineapples and the peaches?'

I smiled a full, broad smile for the both of us but felt the ground beneath me crack and part. I had an awful need for anchorage. Felt myself slipping away. And I found that I was soon talking ten to the dozen about any old thing that came to mind, while John Snow wore on his face an expression of utter perplexity, broken only by an apologetic raising of the brows. His eyes were terribly distant and though they once or twice flickered with what I hoped might be some sign of revelation, they remained lost and as cold as a pair of pebbles and revelation refused to come. ‘The glasshouses are still there,' I told him.

‘The glasshouses … Yes,' he replied.

This small affirmation reassured me. Gave me some small hope to hang on to. In time, I reasoned, his memory might restore itself; like a damaged muscle which requires gentle exercise before it will properly function again. Then he leaned awkwardly over towards me and whispered in my ear.

‘Much of it is gone,' he confided, and gripped me weakly on my arm. ‘It's all there,' and here he took another bewildered breath, ‘… but there's no getting at it.'

I stared back at him, quietly horrified. His face had buckled into a scowl. His eyes looked anxiously at me as if over some abyss.

Only two years ago I had trouble getting a word in edgeways with John Snow. Forever marching up and down his garden paths he was, picking at every plant along the way. But some awful event inside him, some tiny blockage or severage or flaw, had caused the man's entire capacity to be irreparably reduced. He had been halved; had been more than halved. A lifetime's memory all but gone. Great expanses now underwater, whole continents washed away.

‘Mr Snow has suffered a stroke,' said Mrs Snow, and this
time I turned and properly took her in. Two small flames shone in her spectacle lenses – reflections of the lamp's yellow light – but the face itself was as blank as a sheet. The only vitality about the poor woman was her tiny chest which pumped laboriously in and out and trawled the room for air. And in that single moment I became aware how both the Snows had suffered the stroke. How, one way or another, they had both been swept away.

We returned home in silence, save for my asking Clement to be sure the Snows' supply of food and fuel be kept in order and to ask Dr Cox to pay them a visit and give me a full report. I was so upset by the whole affair I was obliged to postpone the tunnels' christening and had Grimshaw take us home down the Eastern avenue, though from what little I could make out through the carriage window and with my state of mind being so black we might as well have been travelling a mile or two beneath the ground.

To the north of the house and clearly visible from my bedroom is a row of lime trees, each about fifty feet tall, which hum and fizz right through the summer with their own colony of bees. In June and July and August when the sun is at its peak they fairly work themselves up into a frenzy and the trees become lost in a blur. I suppose they are simply making honey. One cannot blame them for that. All the same, one has trouble thinking straight above their interminable noise.

The bees are perfectly silent now. All dead or deeply asleep. Their eggs secreted in the branches until the world grows warm again. Somewhere in those limes there must be the makings of an entire bee population. Locked away till spring.

The leaves are deserting those lime trees just as they desert every tree across the estate and this stirs in me a most dismal disposition. The walnuts and chestnuts, the ashes and oaks – all now close to naked in the cold and damp autumn air.

As the fall of leaves gradually reveals each tree's wooden skeleton I can sometimes detect how it has been marginally altered since it last stood bare. One tree in particular – an unrecognizable variety on the other side of the lake – looks even more peculiar this year than it did last wintertime. Some folk on the estate reckon it was once struck by lightning – a theory which makes a good deal of sense – yet, though some parts of the tree are certainly stunted, each year it just about manages to force out the odd flourish of sickly leaves. I recall how, several years ago, it looked to me very much like the hanging carcass of a pig. Last autumn it was no more than a monster, a great mass of carbuncles and sores. But this morning, as I strolled past it, I felt sure I saw a horse through its thinning veil of leaves. A wild horse raised right up on its hind legs, with its head and neck thrown back.

All day I kept myself busy. Before lunch, Clement helped me shift my bed around so that the headboard now faces due north. I have heard that positioning a bed in this manner encourages a body to sleep more soundly, so I dug out my old brass compass and we aligned the bed right along the old north–south. Inevitably, Clement did the lion's share of the work while I fussed about and contributed nothing but the odd grunt or two. But when we were done and I lay down
on the bed to recover I thought I registered a distinct improvement. A greater calmness of the mind.

Rearranged the tunnels' christening for nine o'clock tomorrow; returned a dozen shirts to Batt and Sons (they are three ounces overweight and the collars much too wide); had luncheon – a spicy celery soup – with young Mr Bowen, the stonemason, who is finishing the tunnel entrances and suchlike, then inspected the stables and the riding school. In this way I managed to plough an idle furrow right through the day and did not once give myself the opportunity to dwell on my recent visit to the Snows. From the moment I woke I kept myself occupied with the most trivial of tasks, but at the very back of my mind, I have no doubt, some part of me meditated wholeheartedly on the devastation I had seen.

By four o'clock – always my most miserable part of the day – I had run right out of steam and found myself in the upstairs study. Just me and the old tick-tock.

I sat there in the emptiness. I became aware of a slow wave of horror, all set to crash over me. I waited. I listened. And, in time, the wave came crashing down.

It raced to fill every corner of me. An awful boiling and thrashing in my head which, now I have had time to make some sense of it, I can articulate in the following way …

I sat here at my bureau for close on an hour with my hot head in my hands. Felt the darkness moving about me. A fearful inner darkness, it was.

The sun was up and out this morning and the whole world looked as sharp as a pin which, one way or another, encouraged a little brightness in myself. Wore my thick beige shirt, poplin waistcoat and Cossack trousers and had a fine breakfast of smoked haddock and eggs, lightly poached. But while cheered by the prospect of the tunnels' christening, found my body still very much at odds with itself and several thundering cups of strong Assam failed to set in motion my morning evacuation.

Asked Clement to round up Grimshaw, a coach and horses and a couple of stable lads then tracked down my new carriage coat and deerstalker. Picked out a yellow scarf along the way.

I now have a choice of four routes to the basement – by which I mean the tunnels – and two dumb waiters besides.
There's the original stone stairwell, via a small doorway beneath the staircase in the Great Hall, then what used to be known as the ‘service stairs' which I have had fitted out with new flags and banisters. I have also added a wrought-iron spiral stairwell which leads from a door by my bedroom fireplace directly down to the tunnels (and may be picked up by a tidy little door set into the panelling of the dining room) and, finally, a narrow passageway which wanders all about the house before descending by several flights of stone steps (and whose construction, I might add, caused a great number of complaints from all quarters of the house, to do with dust and general disturbance).