The People on Privilege Hill Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    I phoned up.
    â€œHi,” said a strong, hard voice. “This is Babette. I am quite able to take your call at the moment if you will tell me, first, who you are so that I can decide if it will be worth my while. Please speak slowly after the tone. Oh, well, hello. I thought you’d ring. I’ll be right over.”
    â€œBut you’re—?”
    â€œDead? No. I’m living in Shepperton or Isleworth. Or somewhere. It’s all one. I used to live somewhere near you, I think.”
    â€œOh yes. I know. I know the house. Not far from the church.”
    â€œYou didn’t put that in your review.”
    â€œWell, I tried to write about the book.”
    â€œThat’s why I wrote to you. I want to give you a present. I shall come over and see you. And the old homestead.”
    â€œI ... can’t I come and fetch you? And drive you home again?”
    â€œDrive me? No. I’ve got my bus pass. I’m all of sixty now, you know, amazing as it may seem.”
    â€œYes. Well. But—”
    â€œI’ll be with you at twelve o’clock sharp.”
    â€œYes. Of course. When?”
    â€œToday,” she said.
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    There she stood. My house has steep steps up to the front door and she stood below them on the gravel, bearing in her right hand a six-foot stave. I saw her begin to strike the ground with the butt of the stave, as if, at a given sign, it would pluck her up into the air and drop her on my doormat. I ran quickly down to her. She was a creature of tatters and wisps, in a long coat and none-too-clean balaclava helmet.
    â€œLet’s go,” she cried and set off towards the gate, me trotting behind, wishing for a muffler in the cool spring air.
    There is all about the divine south London suburb in which I live a network of little passages thought to have once been the tracks around the edges of fields. They run now between fine gardens of many mansions. They are three feet wide and their clapboard walls are six feet high, flimsy and sometimes almost swaying in the wind. One can slink secretly about the town along these old sheep-runs. They are called “The Slips.”
    Dark things occur there and at night many a soul has wished that she had kept to the high street. Many a slip.
    Babette stopped dead in the middle of the first Slip and examined the rich graffiti on the wooden walls. “Do you remember that boy?” she said. “He drew a crucifix here. He wrote beneath it ‘What a way to spend Easter.’ He’s a bishop now.”
    â€œNo. I don’t.”
    â€œMy son could get rid of all these,” she said of the graffiti. (Son? Babette? A family life?) “He’s a specialist with the airbrush, though of course he is retired now. Tell me—can one still hear—?” and she began to thump the stout oak on the tarmacadam among the condoms and the chickweed. “Ah! There!” she said. “You can still hear the little streams in the chalk that eventually reach the Thames.”
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    We came out among affluent mansions and palm trees bought at Harrods. Then we plumbed into the next Slip. Then another. Then we burst out near the church and opposite stood the tall sentry box of a house that I’d always heard had been Babette’s.
    â€œNo blue plaque,” she said and I was surprised to see eyes full of tears. I could have died for her.
    â€œIt’s too soon,” I told her. “You’re too young. You have to have been dead fifty years before you get a blue plaque.”
    She gave me a look through the slit in the balaclava. “Well, there it is,” she said. “Place of my joys. He died, you know, my Romeo. He never left me. Two apartments under one roof. What is called a ‘successful conversion.’ Like St. Paul. We were the top one. Only the roof above us. We got in at the side. Through a side door. The ground floor with the columns and the fanlight and the bust