The People on Privilege Hill Read Online Free PDF Page B

novels,” said the colourless couple. “We believe in the quest for absolute truth.”
    â€œThat is where you might find it.”
    â€œWhat—in a bathtub? In our roof?” And they scuttled away, having consumed a good deal of cake.
    Â 
    I decided that I had to climb Babette’s drainpipe.
    First I looked out my old catsuit.
    Then I decided that I would perhaps attend a gym.
    Then that I would choose the next but one most moonless night and to hell with the Times Literary Supplement . I would carry a torch between my teeth and under the eaves high above the treetops I would penetrate Babette’s attic with light.
    I never did.
    For on the next moonless night—just as well I hadn’t chosen it—the suburb resounded to the fall of Babette’s house of joy.
    Some great weight had fallen through the attic floor.
    The weight had fallen first through the ceiling of the colourless couple, then through their floor, and the ceiling of the Admiral and his missus, bringing with it mouldings, staircases, chimney and the roof; and leaving four bodies one-dimensional in the dust.
    There was no sign of the antique doll’s house or the rocking horse that were rumoured to have been recently discovered and transported to a top dealer. It was said that there had been builders about, opening up ceilings. The four, now dead, occupants had been planning a cruise together. A bath, stubborn, immovable in the dark, they had had to leave. But it was now restless and had taken matters into its own hands and descended.
    In the heap the bath raised its blunt head and was plucked out of the rubble like an oyster from chowder, and I am lying in it now.
    The brass taps, the chain, the plughole, the plug now gleam with polish. I have painted the body of the bath blue and its acanthus feet turquoise, and it stands in the middle of my bathroom like a barque upon a lake, as in all the classy magazines.
    I believe that Babette’s bathtub, like Babette’s one great novel, will last for ever and I lie in the steam and bubbles considering her, and all of us who try to write the truth.
    Â 
    Â 

THE LATTER DAYS OF MR. JONES
    Â 

1.
    Â 
    Â 
    T he last of his tribe, the last of his kind, Mr. Jones walked each day from his house next to the church up to the Common, as he had done for perhaps fifty years. He was well over eighty, upright, amiable, a military-looking man with the old soldier’s legacy of highly polished shoes. He walked, had always walked, with a couple of dogs held taut on a single lead: Yeoman and Farmer. They had tails that curled briskly over their backs and optimistic eyes. It was said that if Mr. Jones had had a tail and the dogs well-polished shoes, they would have made triplets. Alas. The last of the Yeomen and Farmers—generations of dogs had always had the same names—were gone. They had become too much for Mr. Jones and had begun to pull him over now and then. He had had a fall by the pond. When the time came for the last couple to go Mr. Jones did not replace them and he now strode forth with glazed eyes, brandishing only a walking stick. Some of his less sensitive neighbours stopped him to ask, “No dogs, Mr. Jones?” and he would stare them out and say, “No, I’m afraid not,” and talk about the weather, which was one of his few topics.
    When he reached the pond on the Common, Mr. Jones always sat down on a long green seat. In one of the houses that stood on the edge of the Common there had been an infant school ever since he was a boy, and twice a day, even now, at break times its big door opened to disgorge children who all made for the pond with a particular kind of shrill and shouting music. This they kept up steadily for half an hour. “Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones—how’s Yeoman? How’s Farmer?” They danced facetiously in front of him and crept up from behind the seat to pretend to throttle him. They quarrelled about who