Both Looking Down

Ruth,

They lifted the grating outside number eleven on Tuesday. The rain had been standing across Bell Street all morning, carrying cigarette ends and pink petals from Mrs. Vale’s tree. A man in orange trousers put his arm into the drain and said there was something solid beneath the silt.

I stayed because I had nowhere particular to be. The house is empty now. I had gone there to wipe the cupboards and choose which cups to keep.

You will remember the grating. I used to lie beside it with my chin on my sleeves while you spoke from underneath. Mother disliked the black stripes it left on my pinafore. She thought you were a game, like the shop I kept behind the sofa, and later I let myself think so too.

You had a clear voice, though the water sometimes covered it. You told me about your father’s boiled eggs, your green bedroom, and the fat white cat that slept in the coal bucket. I told you what we were having for tea. We exchanged things by lowering a biscuit tin on string.

I still have the glass bead you sent up. It was in Mother’s button jar, blue among all that brown and pearl. For years I remembered it as something I had given you.

The men found a second grating beneath the first.

It lay flat under the silt, with its bars facing the other way. When they raised it, the water dropped suddenly and went on falling for a long time. One of the men fetched a lamp. Another said there were steps.

They would not let me climb down, but they let me kneel at the opening. The air smelled of wet brick, old soap, and the cold ashes left in a grate overnight.

Below was a pavement.

It ran beneath Bell Street from one end to the other, clean except for a little mud where our drain had leaked onto it. There were kerbstones, basement windows, and narrow front gates. The houses stood downward from the pavement, their chimneys disappearing into the dark. Washing hung from a line outside number eleven. A child’s red stocking was pegged by the toe.

The men argued about cellars. I did not.

Beside the lower grating stood a rusted biscuit tin. Its string had rotted away. Inside were the things I sent you: the yellow marble, half a comb, Mother’s silver thimble, and the paper bird I folded from the grocer’s bill. They were dry.

Someone had written on the lower pavement in blue chalk. The letters were square and careful, just as I remember yours.

LUCY LIVES UNDER THE ROAD.

The arrow pointed upward.

That is the part I cannot fit into any sensible memory. You always insisted I was below you. I thought you were teasing, because your voice came from the dark and my face was in the daylight. Now I understand that you had not misunderstood me.

We were both looking down.

The men closed the lower grating before evening. They said the steps were unsafe. When I asked about the washing, they said there had been no washing. This was not unkind. They were tired, and the rain had got inside their collars.

I brought the blue bead home. It warms quickly in the hand.

I am leaving this letter in the biscuit tin tonight, with two ginger biscuits wrapped in waxed paper. The upper grating has been bolted shut, but behind Mother’s pantry there is an old square vent at floor level. I had forgotten it until the cupboards were bare.

When I put my ear to it, I can hear a cat purring.