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On his way to the guest bedroom, at the other end of the hall, David stopped at the door of his old room. With twilight drawing in, he had excused himself from the company of Agnes and Mrs Heep – loathe as he was to leave his dear sister under that watchful eye, only marginally less sinister than that of her son, he needed to clear his head. Now, however, all thoughts of taking the air left him, as he regarded the china door-knob, cracked where once he had knocked it with a candlestick. He felt a wave of childish indignation that this room – his room, as he could not help but still think of it – was now used by the vile creature who even now sat hunched over his desk downstairs, casting a pall over the entire household with his malign presence. It was, perhaps, this sense of indignation that propelled David to turn the cracked door-knob and enter his former domain.
The room was at once the same as ever, and vastly changed. There was the same bed, the same desk, the same chest of drawers. The same little curtains at the same little window. In fact, in material terms, the room looked almost exactly like it had when David had vacated it – every bit as plain and empty as it had looked then, devoid of all his things, as though its new occupant never used it at all. At length, David took a further step into the room; he did not, he told himself, intend to touch anything, but simply to look around. Uriah had offered to let him take this room for the duration of his visit, after all, so it hardly constituted an intrusion on his part – though it did, perhaps erroneously, feel rather like an intrusion on the part of Uriah.
This feeling was only compounded when, checking behind the door, David found the pencil-marks with which he had marked his own height at intervals from the ages of eleven to fifteen, when he had decided he was too grown-up to do it any longer. Finding them still there stirred a strange feeling in him, caught between fond nostalgia and a sense of violation. He was glad to see this memory preserved, marking the room as his, at least in a way – but at the same time, he felt a sharp twist in his stomach, something almost akin to shame. Had Uriah seen these marks, neatly labelled with the age they represented, down to the month? Had he sneered at them? David could hardly imagine him indulging in such a childish practice. Not Uriah, who had always seemed older than his years – indeed, for the first time, David wondered whether his youthful designation of fifteen as the proper age to begin acting like a grown-up had been at all influenced by his first impressions of Uriah, who at that very same age had seemed altogether a man, at least to David with his child’s eye.
Indeed, his memory refused to recall Uriah as ever having been any different from how he was now, for all he knew it was quite impossible that this was the case, almost ten years on. He tried to picture Uriah in his youth – he would have been shorter, surely, though far taller in relation to David then than now, for he seemed to recall the old mulberry great-coat once fitting, not better, but differently – better in length, worse in width. He must have been thinner, then, too, though it hardly seemed possible for a person to be thinner than Uriah was now, without disappearing entirely. He wore his hair the same way he always had, and seemed to be in the same clothes as ever – though David knew this not to be strictly true, for he had a distinct memory of turned-down cuffs, threadbare and still a little too short to hide the bony wrists protruding from them.
This line of thought discomfited him, and he put it aside. Perhaps Uriah had not inspected the room closely enough to notice this little sign of David’s presence. It seemed likely, the more he thought of it – the lines were only pencil, after all, and thus easily removed or covered up, which surely Uriah would have done, had he found them. This thought relieved him, enough to turn his attention to the rest of the room.
At first glance, it really did seem barely to be lived in. It was far tidier than it had ever been, during David’s own occupancy, tidy to the point of impersonality – there were the hooks upon which David had hung pictures, unused on the walls; there was the bed in which he had slept, upon which he had lain and daydreamed, its bright patchwork quilt replaced with a plain, decent coverlet; there was the writing-desk, upon which David had hardly ever had fewer than three different books open, alongside a quantity of loose sheets and pen-nibs, now almost bare, with a few books arranged neatly on the shelf above. It was as though the room itself stood testament to the great humility and ascetic self-denial of its inhabitant. For this reason, and for the blow it felt to find the cosy little idyll of his youth stripped of all that had made it his, this bareness irritated David far more than it might have done in a different room, belonging to a different person.
Spurred by this irritation, David thought to have a closer look around – surely there had to be some evidence of the room’s being occupied by a living person? He went over to the writing-desk – the books on the shelf were all law-books of some type or other, including the old dog-eared copy of Mr Tidd. Of course. The desk itself was almost empty, save for a small pot on the left-hand side which contained one pen and a few pencils, one of which was down to a stub and all of which had had their ends badly chewed. Without quite meaning to, David picked up one of these pencils and inspected it, feeling a shudder of revulsion as he ran his fingertip over the indentations Uriah’s teeth had made in the wood. Somehow, even the evidence of this fairly harmless, childish habit was rendered disturbing merely by Uriah’s having done it – the tooth-marks were deep and persistent, sometimes piercing straight through to the leaden core. Perhaps it was that David had not previously associated the habit with Uriah, had never once seen him do it, in all the years he’d known him, all the times he’d watched him work. It seemed even in this, Uriah was private and deliberate.
On the desk-chair, its frayed strap hooked over the back, sat Uriah’s old blue bag, slumped over as though it, too, found the spare appearance of its surroundings to be oppressive. The sight of it drew a sigh from David. It was obviously patched – badly, in some places – and he thought he could tell where Mrs Heep had repaired it, and where Uriah had done it himself, his long, spidery hands clumsy with the needle. Really, it ought to have been replaced long ago. Surely Uriah could afford to do it, by now – what, indeed, was the point of all his plotting if he did not intend to make use of his ill-gained prosperity? Unnecessary nearness might be forgiven in such a man as Mr Barkis, where it was born out of care, but in Uriah it looked merely like miserliness.
Discomfited, David wandered over to the window – his window, as it had been. It seemed almost odd, he reflected, looking out, that the view outside should have changed so little, when hardly anything within remained as it had been. The street below looked picturesque as it had ever done, though in his present mood, David found it sombre. This, too, was no longer his – like everything else, like the whole house, its memory was shadowed by the knowledge of the creature now residing within its walls. Did Uriah stand here, at this window, in his spare moments? Did he ever sit, as David had once been accustomed to do, on the sill, reading a book or gazing out at the street below? David thought it unlikely – at the very least, difficult to picture. It was difficult to picture Uriah alone at all, for all he was such a strange and solitary figure. Everything he did – every word he said and the manner in which he said it, every obtrusively deferential movement of his skeleton frame – seemed almost entirely for the benefit (or, rather, the discomposure) of those around him. He was a mystery altogether, seeming so full of secrets that David suspected he would not uncover them all if he’d a lifetime to do it. Try as he might, David could not construct a satisfactory image of Uriah truly at leisure, could not begin to imagine what he did with no task to complete and no audience to confound. Perhaps he really did scheme and plot all day long, and never leave off for a moment.
A sound downstairs served to jolt him out of his ruminations; he realised he was still holding the pencil, absentmindedly running his thumb up and down its length, and hurriedly restored the offending article to its place. Dimly, he knew that he ought to leave – that, for all he’d told himself, he did not altogether think it right to be nosing about in this way. On the other hand, he was suddenly, terribly, curious. No harm could come of taking a few moments longer, surely? Never one to encroach on someone’s privacy, even someone he disliked so intensely, it was likely that David would not have formed this conclusion had there not been a lingering feeling in his breast that this was his room, and he’d a right to be there, and that it was Uriah whose usurping presence did not belong.
As he turned from the desk, looking about, he did, at last, see various other indications of a human life being contained within these walls. These indications, like the pen-pot and the bag, did not serve so much to allay the discomfiture he felt with the bareness of the room as to amplify it. Each item, innocuous in itself – the old worn slipper poking out from under the bed, the little Bible (mostly for show, David thought, uncharitably) on the bedside table, the very stub of a candle in an old-fashioned candle-stick – seemed a liberty. It was easier, now, with these little evidences, to imagine Uriah here; sitting at that writing-desk, not hunched as he ever was in his office, but sprawled in the chair, his pale brow creased in concentration on some problem or other, chewing on the end of a pencil. The image made David shudder, and he distracted himself by going over to inspect the little Bible. The book itself was old, the binding worn but well cared-for. The placement of it was almost laughable, seemingly laid there deliberately to signify the great piety of its owner. It was difficult to credit Uriah with any such thing – David couldn’t begin to guess what drove him, but would have been willing to bet money it wasn’t anything so virtuous.
Out of curiosity, David bent to open the bedside drawer. In it, he found a couple of books – odd, given the space left on the shelf above the desk – and, perhaps even more surprisingly, a small rosary. Without thinking, he picked this article up, and inspected it: it was plain, with round wooden beads, though the little crucifix was carved in minute detail. It, like the Bible, looked to be old, the wood’s varnish worn away in several places. David had not even known that Uriah was Catholic – was he, in fact, or was the rosary some sort of family heirloom, significant for some reason other than Uriah’s own faith? It seemed presumptuous to guess either way, somehow, though he would have felt it a safe enough bet with another person. As with the Bible, though, it felt strange to imagine Uriah as a person with any particular affinity for religion. Unlike the Bible, of course, the rosary had not been on display, but almost hidden in the back of the drawer, secreted away in a place and manner that seemed to suggest it held some importance after all. Perhaps those reasons were sentimental, though Uriah did not strike David as any more sentimental than religious.
David wondered whether the article had used to belong to Uriah’s father before he passed – whether his mother had given it to him, or perhaps some other relative – had he any other relatives? Putting this question to himself, David was made very aware of how little he actually knew about Uriah. Not only of the inner workings of his mind, for it was doubtful that anyone could piece that out, but other things, things which had never crossed his mind before, but which he suddenly felt were very queer things not to know about a person he had all but lived with from eleven to seventeen. But then, of course, he’d no reason to know whether Uriah Heep was a Papist or not, or his familial situation beyond that which was immediately apparent. They had never discussed either subject, though David flushed to realise that Uriah probably knew far more about him than vice versa. David had always been too ready to divulge information when it was asked of him, out of a desire to be obliging – and perhaps, though he blushed to admit it even to himself, a desire to be liked and found interesting, even to the same intense degree he often held for certain others.
He could not quite decide why he was annoyed at being so in the dark on the subject of Uriah’s private life. It grated, certainly, against his natural inclination to collect little details of his acquaintances’ lives, and even those of strangers – his desire to know about them, about everyone, to take in as much of the human experience as was offered him – but that wasn’t all. Uriah had an infuriating ability to extract information without ever offering anything of himself in return – to speak effusively and at length, saying only what was untrue or inconsequential, or both. David had not felt much inclined to be friendly with Uriah for some time, now, but well recalled how, even in their youth, Uriah had evaded any real question David put to him, how he had always possessed the power to make any conversation change its course to one that suited him. Uriah had always been able to persuade David to let on more than he should have liked, and it chagrined him somewhat that Uriah never seemed to divulge a scrap more than he set out to.
As he considered all this, David threaded the rosary through his fingers over and over again, watching the reflections the waning light from the window cast on the varnish of the beads. The discovery of this article felt half a triumph – something discovered on his own terms, rather than Uriah’s – and half a trespass. It seemed such a personal thing that David was not at all sure he could justify looking at it, touching it as he was doing, even despite his stubborn insistence in his own mind that if Uriah wanted privacy, he ought not to have encroached on the lives of David’s friends. All the same, he put the rosary back in its place, careful to arrange it as closely as he could to how it had been. He intended to close the drawer and leave, but one of the books in the drawer caught his eye – it was his.
Not his, of course, he knew a split second later, for his copy was in London, but a similar copy of the same book he had. A collection of poems by Blake. He frowned and, against his own better judgement, picked it up. It wasn’t even the same edition as his – an older print, it looked like, and significantly cheaper from the feel of the cover – but similar enough at a glance to be taken for it. There were no fewer than three different bookmarks, each apparently made from parts on a envelope. Uriah’s favourites, David supposed, with no little surprise. He wouldn’t have taken Uriah for the sort of person who cared for poetry, any more than he would have credited him with much religious feeling. It was queer, too, that these books were kept in a drawer, when there was plenty of room on the bookshelf. It could be for easy access, David supposed – did Uriah like to read before bed? Perhaps this was evidence that he did. He tried to picture it, recalling how Uriah had looked in the nightcap David had lent him that night, what seemed like an age ago. The image his fancy provided him did not feel altogether right; too mundane by half to suit such a bizarre subject. He left it, rather put out by this failure of his imagination. Why must Uriah always be so difficult to piece together?
Then again, there was the sensation that these things were private, were personal. That Uriah kept them hidden deliberately. Holding the book in his hand, he wondered which the bookmarked poems were – whether this, finally, might be an insight into Uriah’s labyrinthine mind that David could make something of. He began to open the book at the first marked page – and stopped short. This was too much, he realised, too personal, and he could not justify it to himself. David knew he did not and likely could not understand Uriah, but he could understand poetry, and he could understand that, if he opened that book, he would not be able to go back from it. He felt suddenly frightened at the thought of intruding on someone’s, anyone’s privacy to that degree – even to the degree he already had done. There was another fear there, too, lurking at the back of his mind, but he dared not inspect it. He replaced the book, hastily, almost slammed the drawer shut, and hurried from the room, too aware of his own heartbeat.
Back in the safety of the spare room, he readied himself to go out, and resolved to forget the whole business. He could not, of course, but he could try.