endless night

chapter 3

I don't know much about writing things down - not, I mean, in the

way a proper writer would do. The bit about that picture I saw, for

instance. It doesn't really have anything to do with anything. I

mean, nothing came of it, it didn't lead to anything and yet I feel

somehow that it is important, that it has a place somewhere. It was

one of the things that happened to me that meant something. Just

like Gipsy's Acre meant something to me. Like Santonix meant

something to me.

I haven't really said much about him. He was an architect. Of

course you'll have gathered that. Architects are another thing I'd

never had much to do with, though I knew a few things about the

building trade. I came across Santonix in the course of my

wanderings. It was when I was working as a chauffeur, driving the

rich around places. Once or twice I drove abroad, twice to

Germany - I knew a bit of German - and once or twice to France - I

had a smattering of French too - and once to Portugal. They were

usually elderly people, who had money and bad health in about

equal quantities.

When you drive people like that around, you begin to think that

money isn't so hot after all. What with incipient heart attacks, lots

of bottles of little pills you have to take all the time, and losing your

temper over the food or the service in hotels. Most of the rich

people I've known have been fairly miserable. They've got their

worries, too.

Taxation and investments. You hear them talking together or to

friends. Worry! That's what's killing half of them.

And their s*x life's not so hot either. They've either got long-legged

blonde sexy wives who are playing them up with boy-friends

somewhere, or they're married to the complaining kind of woman,

hideous as hell, who keeps telling them where they get off. No. I'd

rather be myself. Michael Rogers, seeing the world, and getting off

with good-looking girls when he feels like it!

Everything a bit hand-to-mouth, of course, but I put up with that.

Life was good fun, and I'd been content to go on with life being fun.

But I suppose I would have in any case. That attitude goes with

youth. When youth begins to pass fun isn't fun any longer.

Behind it, I think, was always the other thing - wanting someone

and something... However, to go on with what I was saying, there

was one old boy I used to drive down to the Riviera. He'd got a

house being built there. He went down to look how it was getting

on. Santonix was the architect. I don't really know what nationality

Santonix was. English I thought at first, though it was a funny sort

of name I'd never heard before. But I don't think he was English.

Scandinavian of some kind I guess. He was an ill man. I could see

that at once. He was young and very fair and thin with an odd face,

a face that was askew somehow. The two sides of it didn't match.

He could be quite bad-tempered to his clients. You'd have thought

as they were paying the money that they'd call the tune and do the

bullying. That wasn't so. Santonix bullied them and he was always

quite sure of himself although they weren't.

This particular old boy of mine was frothing with rage, I remember,

as soon as he arrived and had seen how things were going. I used

to catch snatches here and there when I was standing by ready to

assist in my chauffeurly and handy-man way. It was always on the

cards that Mr. Constantine would have a heart attack or a stroke.

"You have not done as I said," he half screamed. "You have spent

too much money. Much too much money. It is not as we agreed. It

is going to cost me more than thought?"

"You're absolutely right," said Santonix. "But the money's got to be

spent."

"It shall not be spent! It shall not be spent. You have got to keep

within the limits I laid down. You understand?"

"Then you won't get the kind of house you want," said Santonix. "I I

know what you want. The house I build you will be the house you

want. I'm quite sure of that and you're quite sure of it, too. Don't

give me any of your pettifogging middle-class economies. You

want a house of quality and you're going to get it, and you'll boast

about it to your friends and they'll envy you. I don't build a house

for anyone, I've told you that. There's more to it than money. This

house isn't going to be like other people's houses.

"It is going to be terrible. Terrible."

"Oh no it isn't. The trouble with you is that you don't know what you

want. Or at least so anyone might think. But you do know what you

want really, only you can't bring it out into your mind. You can't see

it clearly. But I know. That's the one thing I always know. What

people are after and what they want. There's a feeling in you for

quality. I'm going to give you quality."

He used to say things like that. And I'd stand by and listen.

Somehow or other I could see for myself that this house that was

being built there amongst pine trees looking over the sea, wasn't

going to be the usual house. Half of it didn't look out towards the

sea in a conventional way. It looked inland, up to a certain curve of

mountains, up to a glimpse of sky between hills. It was odd and

unusual and very exciting.

Santonix used to talk to me sometimes when I was off duty. He

said,

"I only build houses for people I want to build for."

"Rich people, you mean?"

"They have to be rich or they couldn't pay for the houses. But it's

not the money I'm going to make out of it I care about. My clients

have to be rich because I want to make the kind of houses that

cost money. The house only isn't enough, you see. It has to have

the setting. That's just as important. It's like a ruby or an emerald.

A beautiful stone is only a beautiful stone. It doesn't lead you

anywhere further. It doesn't mean anything, it has no form or

significance until it has its setting. And the setting has to have a

beautiful jewel to be worthy of it. I take the setting, you see, out of

the landscape, where it exists only in its own right. It has no

meaning until there is my house sitting proudly like a jewel within

its grasp." He looked at me and laughed. "You don't understand?"

"I suppose not," I said slowly, "and yet - in a way - I think I do..."

"That may be." He looked at me curiously.

We came down to the Riviera again later. By then the house was

nearly finished. I won't describe it because I couldn't do it

properly, but it was - well - something special - and it was beautiful.

I could see that. It was a house you'd be proud of, proud to show to

people, proud to look at yourself, proud to be in with the right

person perhaps. And then suddenly one day Santonix said to me, "I

could build a house for you, you know. I'd know the kind of house

you'd want."

I shook my head.

"I shouldn't know myself," I said, honestly.

"Perhaps you wouldn't. I'd know for you." Then he added, "It's a

thousand pities you haven't got the money."

"And never shall have," I said.

"You can't say that," said Santonix. "Born poor doesn't mean

you've got to stay poor. Money's queer. It goes where it's wanted."

"I'm not sharp enough," I said.

"You're not ambitious enough. Ambition hasn't woken up in you,

but it's there, you know."

"Oh well," I said, "some day when I've woken up ambition and I've

made money, then I'll come to you and say 'build me a house'."

He sighed then. He said,

"I can't wait... No, I can't afford to wait. I've only a short time to go

now. One house or two houses more. Not more than that. One

doesn't want to die young... Sometimes one has to... It doesn't

really matter, I suppose."

"I'll have to wake up my ambition quick."

"No," said Santonix. "You're healthy, you're having fun, don't

change your way of life."

I said: "I couldn't if I tried."

I thought that was true then. I liked my way of life and I was having

fun and there was never anything wrong with my health. I've driven

a lot of people who've made money, who've worked hard and

who've got ulcers and coronary thrombosis and many other things

as a result of working hard. I didn't want to work hard. I could do a

job as well as another but that was all there was to it. And I hadn't

got ambition, or I didn't think I had ambition. Santonix had had

ambition, I suppose. I could see that designing houses and

building them, the planning of the drawing and something else that

I couldn't quite get hold of, all that had taken it out of him. He

hadn't been a strong man to begin with. I had a fanciful idea

sometimes that he was killing himself before his time by the work

he had put out to drive his ambition. I didn't want to work. It was as

simple as that. I distrusted work, disliked it. I thought it was a very

bad thing, that the human race had unfortunately invented for

itself.

I thought about Santonix quite often. He intrigued me almost more

than anyone I knew. One of the oddest things in life, I think, is the

things one remembers. One chooses to remember, I suppose.

Something in one must choose.

Santonix and his house were one of the things and the picture in

Bond Street and visiting that ruined house, The Towers and

hearing the story of Gipsy's Acre, all those were the things that I'd

chosen to remember! Sometimes girls that I met, and journeys to

the foreign places in the course of driving clients about. The

clients were all the same. Dull. They always stayed at the same

kind of hotels and ate the same kind of unimaginative food.

I still had that queer feeling in me of waiting for something, waiting

for something to be offered to me, or to happen to me, I don't quite

know which way describes it best. I suppose really I was looking

for a girl, the right sort of girl, by which I don't mean a nice,

suitable girl to settle down with, which is what my mother would

have meant or my Uncle Joshua or some of my friends. I didn't

know at that time anything about love. All I knew about was s*x.

That was all anybody of my generation seemed to know about. We

talked about it too much, I think, and heard too much about it and

took it too seriously. We didn't know - any of my friends or myself

what it was really going to be when it happened. Love I mean. We

were young and virile and we looked the girls over we met and we

appreciated their curves and their legs and the kind of eye they

gave you, and you thought to yourself: 'Will they or won't they?

Should I be wasting my time?' And the more girls you made the

more you boasted and the finer fellow you were thought to be, and

the finer fellow you thought yourself.

I'd no real idea that that wasn't all there was to it. I suppose it

happens to everyone sooner or later and it happens suddenly. You

don't think as you imagine you're going to think: 'This might be the

girl for me. This is the girl who is going to be mine.' At least, I didn't

feel it that way. I didn't know that when it happened it would

happen quite suddenly. That I would say: 'That's the girl I belong

to. I'm hers. I belong to her, utterly, for always.' No. I never

dreamed it would be like that. Didn't one of the old comedians say

once - wasn't it one of his stock jokes? "I've been in love once and

if I felt it coming on again I tell you I'd emigrate." It was the same

with me. If I had known, if I had only known what it could all come

to mean I'd have emigrated too! If I'd been wise, that is.