So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [29]
“Hold this,” she said, shoved a stout rope in his hand, and disappeared inside through the large white wooden doors from which dangled a fat padlock off a black iron bar.
The house was a small converted stable in a light industrial alleyway behind the derelict Royal Agricultural Hall of Islington. As well as its large stable doors it also had a normal-looking front door of smartly glazed paneled wood with a black dolphin door knocker. The one odd thing about this door was its doorstep, which was nine feet high, since the door was set into the upper of the two floors and presumably had been used originally to haul up hay for hungry horses.
An old pulley jutted out of the brickwork above the doorway and it was over this that the rope Arthur was holding was slung. The other end of the rope held a suspended cello.
The door opened above his head.
“Okay,” said Fenchurch, “pull on the rope, steady the cello. Pass it up to me.”
He pulled on the rope, he steadied the cello.
“I can’t pull on the rope again,” he said, “without letting go of the cello.”
Fenchurch leaned down.
“I’m steadying the cello,” she said, “you pull on the rope.”
The cello eased up level with the doorway, swinging slightly, and Fenchurch maneuvered it inside.
“Come on up yourself,” she called down.
Arthur picked up his bag of goodies and went in through the stable doors, tingling.
The bottom room, which he had seen briefly before, was pretty rough and full of junk. A large cast-iron clothes wringer stood there, a surprising number of kitchen sinks were piled in a corner. There was also, Arthur was momentarily alarmed to see, a baby carriage, but it was very old and uncomplicatedly full of books.
The floor was old stained concrete, excitingly cracked. And this was the measure of Arthur’s mood as he started up the rickety wooden steps in the far corner. Even a cracked concrete floor seemed to him an almost unbearably sensual thing.
“An architect friend of mine keeps on telling me how he can do wonderful things with this place,” said Fenchurch chattily as Arthur emerged through the floor. “He keeps on coming round, standing in stunned amazement muttering about space and objects and events and marvelous qualities of light, then says he needs a pencil and disappears for weeks. Wonderful things have therefore so far failed to happen to it.”
In fact, thought Arthur as he looked about, the upper room was at least reasonably wonderful anyway. It was simply decorated, furnished with things made out of cushions and also a stereo set with speakers which would have impressed the guys who put up Stonehenge.
There were flowers which were pale and pictures which were interesting.
There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which, Fenchurch explained, you could actually swing a cat in, “But,” she added, “only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn’t mind a few nasty cracks about the head. So. Here you are.”
“Yes.”
They looked at each other for a moment.
The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly it was a very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.
For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who wakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savanna stretching gray and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.
He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed at her openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.
He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “yes.”
Fenchurch dropped her eyes away at last, with a tiny