Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (3 page)

But Simeon’s slender, delicately pointed nose was almost aquiver with sensibility, smelling something wrong, trouble in the wet air. The East Anglian air was bad for his weak lungs. The Boy David was talking about his club.

“Bit old world, the membership, really, though we get people in for the club from quite a way away—art students, even, and a few sharp youngsters, and leather jackets who come from miles on their motorbikes. But the local teds, well, they still even have sideboards and velvet collars to their jackets!”

There was a chorus of incredulous mirth and the boy at once became embarrassed and bought more drinks to cover his confusion. The band were to stay the night at the pub, which hid a number of bedrooms behind its unimposing façade. Simeon crept away from the bar to feel the sheets on his bed. They were damp. His throat immediately set up a sympathetic tickling.

Jameson, humping Lola, also crept away, to the back room where music and dancing were permitted. He unwrapped his instrument and sat huddled over it in the cold, caressing with his silken rag. The room around him waited for the club to open, the shabby lines of quiet chairs waited, the little platform for the musicians waited.

But there was a potent unease in the night. The musicians sensed it and their laughter became defiant as they tried to frighten the uneasiness away with their merriment. And they failed. Their young hosts caught the silent, depressed infection until they were all just sitting around, drinking for want of something else to do. But Jameson was happy; he was the only one happy, sitting away from them all, with Lola between his knees.

As the band assembled on the cramped platform, the first customers arrived and stood around with their first half pints of bitter. Music began; the customers waited passively for the first extrovert couple who would start to dance.

They were an easily recognisable type, these early ones. The boys wore pale, loose sweaters with paisley silk scarves tucked casually into the vee necks and the girls were tricked out in pseudo beat style, black or heavy mesh stockings, loose dresses heavily fringed. They were the children of local doctors, clergymen, teachers, retired soldiers, probably students in their last school year. They wore duffel coats and drove battered old cars and had a tendency to collect those little china ashtrays with veteran cars on them.

Just before the first break, a black-legged girl in a short little pleated skirt and a youth in cavalry twill trousers ventured, giggling, on to the floor to dance; they did so in a peculiarly self-conscious way that made the musicians wink and grin at one another. Gradually the room began to fill. Art students from a nearby town, sniggering at the bourgeois who aped them; a party of crop-haired modernists, who had also travelled some distance. The modernists had sharp, pointed noses and Italian suits. Their girls dressed with studied formality, faces stylised, pale cheeks and lips, vividly painted eyes, hair immaculate, stiff with lacquer.

The modernists chaffed Simeon, who lingered by the pay desk because the boys in charge were so young that he worried for them. The modernists joked about the grey top hats and the striped trousers and were patronising about “West End Blues” and, in fact, the whole trad setup altogether; they were here, they implied, just because there happened to be nothing else doing that night. Simeon smiled with professional warmth and wondered whether he dare slip away to spray his throat.

But his eyes slitted with suspicion when he saw a group of youths were parking motorcycles outside the pub; he could see them through the open door. They took off their crash helmets and left them under their cycles, where they gleamed whitely, like mushrooms or new laid eggs. Then the boys approached, plastic jackets creaking. Simeon personally tore off their jackets for them and watched them anxiously as they fought for brown ales at the bar.

“Now, those chaps are really far less potential trouble than those modernist friends of yours,” admonished the Boy David. Simeon sighed.

“You wouldn’t have, by any chance, such a thing as an aspirin—and perhaps, might it be possible, could I get a glass of hot milk?”

Inside the club room, a thick smoke haze dimmed the already low lighting and the room was in semi-darkness. Arms and legs flailed, beer slopped. The music was so loud it seemed almost a tangible, brazen wall. The West End Syncopators were half-way through another successful date.

But the leatherjackets kept apart from the main, happy crowd. They had taken over one particular corner for themselves and were not dancing but standing up to their beer, laughing and grinning.

The boys in the band played and sweated and gulped restorative bitter between choruses. They undid their silk waistcoats and their black ties and mopped the red indentations made on their foreheads by their top hats. It was just like any other date.

Just like any other date until one of the leatherjackets spilled his beer all over the olive green buttocks of a thin girl in a sheath dress who jived backwards into him. She turned, angry. He apologised with profuse irony and that made her more angry still. The girl complained to her sharp, short-jacketed escort and the leatherjackets stood all round and leered.

“And aren’t you going to say sorry to this young lady, then, mate?” the girl’s dancing partner shouted above the music.

The leatherjackets closed ranks like a snapped clasp-knife. Their indistinguishable, pallid, slack-jawed faces all grinned at once.

“And what if I ain’t particularly sorry? Wasted all my beer, I have.”

A group of Italian youths deserted their girls to gather behind the olive-sheathed girl’s defender. And that was how it started. The quarrel boiled up into a fine ragout of cries, shouts, blows and the dim interior whirled with thrusting limbs and crashing bottles as the eager youths met in fight. A bottle smashed the single, red-painted electric bulb and there was a horror of darkness. In the chaos, a pair of leatherjackets launched an attack on the musicians who were moaning and terrified and striking little matches to see something of the battle.

“That such a thing should happen when we’re in the top twenty!” gasped Simeon.

The Young Conservatives came scurrying past shepherding frightened Susans, Brendas, and Jennifers. But the art students clustered safely at the door to giggle. The tight-skirted teddy girls dropped their impassivity; like valkyries they rode the battle, cheering the fighters on. Their exalted faces flickered in and out of the light that trickled through from the public bar.

Now the musicians cast aside their top hats, their instruments and their neutrality. Simeon saw Len Nelson—as jerky and uncertain in the intermittent light as a man in an early film—leap from the dais and seize an Italian youth by his narrow and immaculate lapels and shake, shake, shake him until the boy’s mouth gaped open, howling.

“Nothing like it ever happened before!” the Boy David kept exclaiming in an apologetic frenzy. There were crashes and splinterings and the landlord appeared, trembling. Simeon took him into the private bar to soothe him with his own Scotch.

“Quite like the old days, before we got famous,” panted Nelson, defending the microphone.

But it was all over very quickly, when someone shouted something about the police and the room emptied like a bath when the plug is pulled out. The musicians’ heavy breathing and little exclamations of triumph and sighs were the only sounds in the room.

“Would I be such a fool as to call the police?” demanded Simeon rhetorically. So they all laughed and went for a drink.

“Here,” said someone later, “has anyone seen Jameson?”

“Not since the lights went out.”

“Well, what does it matter? I’m going to bed,” said Simeon. “I’ve a dreadful cold coming, I feel it. Not that going to bed will do me much good; wringing wet, the sheets are …”

Then they all of them forgot about Jameson until very much later, when all but Geoff and Nelson had finally followed Simeon up the stairs to bed. Geoff and Nelson, decently happy, decided to go and have a look at the damage in the club room. They took a light bulb from the bar and plugged it into the socket where the red light had once been. And into focus leapt all the shattered glass and broken chairs and brown beer puddles soaking into the floor.

Sobered at once, Geoff climbed on to the stage and poked anxiously among the instruments remaining. Miraculously, the drum and its accessories had survived and—he sighed—there seemed not a casualty on the dais. Then he found a terrible thing. Where Jameson had sat with Lola, there remained nothing on the floor but a heap of chestnut-coloured firewood.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. Nelson looked up, startled at the tone of the other’s voice. “Jameson, how are we going to tell Jameson, Len? His bass …”

They stood together and gazed at Lola’s pathetic fragmented corpse. Both were touched with a cold finger of awe and dread and a superstitious sorrow; the lady who did not go into public bars was suddenly no more than a few graceless splinters.

“Do you know if he knows?” whispered Nelson. It did not seem right to talk in a loud voice.

“I haven’t seen him since the trouble began.”

“Even if he does know, well, he ought to have a bit of company, at a time like this, a few friends around him …”

“Maybe he’s up in his room.”

They found out from the landlord that Jameson had been lodged in an attic room high at the top of the old rabbit-warren of a place. Fenland mist had crept into the pub and it blurred their vision as Geoff and Nelson climbed flight after flight of stairs. It was very late, now, and cold, with a bone-chilling, wet, cold. Then, without warning, every light went out. Stricken, Nelson clutched at Geoff.

“Len, it’s all right, don’t take on. It must be a fuse, or something, perhaps the wiring—rotten old wiring they have in houses as old as this.”

But he himself was badly scared. They both felt an alien, almost tangible something in the darkness, felt it in the damp kiss of the mist-soaked air on their cheeks.

“A light, Geoff, now.”

Geoff clicked his cigarette lighter. The tiny flame only intensified the darkness around them. They reached the topmost landing.

“Here we are.”

The door swung open. Geoff held his lighter high. They saw first a chair, overturned on the floor. Then they saw the open, empty case of a double bass on the cheap taffeta bedspread. The case was shaped for all the world like a coffin. But Lola would not lie in it, although it was her own.

And in the still circle of light, swung a pair of feet, gently, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards … Geoff raised his lighter above his head until they could see all of Jameson, hanging from a disused gas bracket, his gentle face black and twisted. Bedded deep in his neck was a brilliant silken rag, the rag he had used for so long to polish his bass. Something glinted on the floor beneath him—his glasses, dropped, broken.

A sodden wind came in through the open window and swallowed the lighter flame at once. Then there was engulfing darkness and in the darkness no noise but the slow creak, creak, creak. And the two men grabbed at each other’s hands like frightened children.

In a room beneath them, the same little wind trickled through an ill-fitting window frame and tickled Simeon Price’s throat so that he coughed and stirred a little, uneasily, in his sleep.

“When I was adolescent, my mother taught me a charm, gave me a talisman, handed me the key of the world. For I lived in terror, I, so young, so shy of so many people—i.e. those who spoke with soft voices and sounded the h in ‘which’; cinema usherettes who, in those days wore wide satin pyjamas which mocked my unawakened sex with unashamed lasciviousness; suave men who put cold hands on my defenceless, barely formed breasts on the tops of lonely November buses. So many, many people.

“My mother said: ‘Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable.’ And she whispered to me a great, universal truth:
‘THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS.’

“She was a rough woman, my mother. She picked her teeth ceaselessly with a fork and she would take off her felt slippers, in the evenings, and probe out the caked, flaked skin and dirt from between her toes with a sensual, inquisitive finger. But she was possessed of great wisdom—the brutal, yet withal vital, wisdom of a peasant.”

The woman’s voice, high and clear as the sound of a glass rapped with a spoon to summon a waiter, ceased in meditation for a moment. Only two endlessly long miraculously slender legs emerged from the pool of coagulated shadow in the corner where she sat.

Petals dropped from a red rose in a silver bowl on to the low, round, blood-coloured mahogany table with a soft, faint, exhausted sound, as of a pigeon’s fart. The woman recrossed her legs; rasping planes of silk flashed out as they caught the light, like the blades of scissors, slicing all that came between them. She resumed her narrative.

“I had been a shy child. A lonely child, lost in the middle of a large family—twenty-three children, of whom eighteen reached maturity!—cooped up in a meagre dwelling, the loft above my father’s stable. Ah!” she cried, “how often I lay awake at night comforted by the gentle whickering of great, grey Dapple, with the ruffs over his hooves, like a pierrot!”

Again she paused for a moment’s recollection; then resumed her narrative.

“By tragic paradox, so crowded was our home, so continual the to-ing and fro-ing, that my isolation was total. I was alone, so alone; so tentative, unable to grasp the fact of myself as an entity, a personality.

“I was introverted to the point of extinction, and in that great, surging melee of humanity—my family—only behaviour extroverted to the point of sheer exhibition drew attention to oneself.

“I remember how one of my brothers—or perhaps it was a sister: one forgets, one forgets—plunged his little bare feet in the suppertime soup one night, to bring to my parents’ attention how great his need was for new boots. Or shoes. Or sandals. Or socks …”

The voice died away and then welled out again in passionate regret: “The significant detail—one forgets it! One forgets it!” But soon she resumed her narrative.