Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pathé Pictorial, one of those delightfully exportable Technicolor furbelows full of Cotswold centenarians, and Chelsea Pensioners who’ve made the Brighton Pavilion out of matchsticks. I sat down. The lights dimmed. And onto the screen, in several shades of grey, came Waterloo Station, wrapped up by Edward Anstey and John Schlesinger in a package called ‘Terminus’. Leaden-faced people milled about in the gritty air; a small boy sat on a battered trunk, and howled; queues of people moaned about trains that had left ages before, and failed to arrive. I pulled up my coatcollar. I heard the familiar dark laughter breaking out around me. And when a party of convicts appeared and shuffled into a carriage labelled: ‘HOME OFFICE PARTY’, I stood up slowly, mumbled; ‘Excuse me’ in a deep southern accent, and left. The manager was still in the lobby.
    â€˜Where’re you going?’ he said. ‘You’ll miss “Terminus”.’
    â€˜You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I’ve been there before. It’s where I get off.’
    He looked at me. ‘You British and your sense of humour,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘Personally, I never went for it. But, by God, I guess you need it, huh?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess we do.’

3
Through a Glass, Darkly
    T he man who owned the papershop came out onto the pavement and watched me copying down addresses from his board. He didn’t say anything; he had been studying me from inside the shop for a long time; I’d seen his eyes in the slit between the halfdrawn blind and the Coca-Cola sign.
    I took down half a dozen names and numbers and closed my notebook. He stepped forward.
    â€˜Excuse me,’ he said, a little hesitantly. He was a short, tubby, midfortyish negro in a pinstripe blue suit, white shirt.
    â€˜Yes?’ I said.
    â€˜Look buddy, maybe it ain’t none of my business, but you sure – I mean, like absolutely sure – you wanna look up them addresses? What I mean is, you wanna live there?’
    â€˜That’s right.’
    â€˜Y’ain’t looking up for somebody else, maybe?’
    â€˜No. For me.’
    He plucked a small cigar from his breast pocket, picked a hair off it carefully, struck a match on his window, and lit up, watching me through the smokeclouds.
    â€˜We – ell –’ he said, soft southern, rolling the word, ‘– guess you know y’own mind. Good luck.’
    â€˜Thanks,’ I said, and would have probed him, but he’d disappeared inside the shop again, and I was left on my blasted heath wondering whether, perhaps, he couldn’t have fitted me out with a quiet little country thaneship somewhere.
    Nowhere, actually, could be less like a blasted heath than Harlem; it is perhaps the most undeserted area in the world, if you know what I mean. Sixlane avenues are whittled down to alleyways by the permanent overflow from the pavements, solid, sluggish streams of people, whose reasons for being there at all seem incomprehensible – they walk too slowly to be actually going from A to B; they are too far from the shops and bars to have any possible interest in them; and they never appear to cross from one side of the street to the other; instead, they roll on, as if on some enormous conveyor-belt, with no apparent purpose, and no pause. Naturally, this sort of jay-walking would be treated in downtown New York as an offence located somewhere on the books between child-rape and dope-addiction; but here, a crack regiment would be needed to enforce the laws; it’s left to the motorist to keep up a constant cacophonous alert to save himself from being devoured. It’s an odd sensation to stand in the centre of one sidewalk looking across the slowly passing heads towards the other; the mass of humanity makes the traffic invisible, so that one seems to be cut off from the opposite bank by an open chasm filled with a