Holiday (23 page)

‘She’s still around,’ he answered.

‘You don’t want to talk about her, do you?’ A sentimental smirk disfigured her face as she swilled the gin round her cup.

As accurately as he could, as though at a grammatical exercise, he described Meg, her appearance, her hair, the bright clothes, the way she walked, her voice. He took his time, making it matter. When he’d finished, Lena Hollies, head on one side, a look of quizzical sympathy in the bright eye, said,

‘I think you love, her, Mr Fisher. Don’t you, now?’

‘I was married to her.’

‘That’s a different thing. The way you put it, why it was like a book.’

‘I’m used,’ he said, in untruth, ‘to talk in that fashion.’

‘Our Jack isn’t.’ She tilted the cup. ‘He can talk if he wants to. You’ve heard him. But not to me. “Get on that bed, Lena.” That’s all he can say. That’s all his love.’

‘Perhaps that’s as good.’

‘I’d like somebody to tell me things. Like you’ve done with your wife. He speaks about work, or unions, or jokes, and filth.’

‘You’re not happy, then?’

‘I don’t know about that. I don’t know who is.’ She spoke in a parody of his earlier precision, probing some philosophical difficulty. ‘But now and then I wished things was different.’ She wiped her face, briskly. ‘That’s nothing, I dare say.’

‘You’ve never thought of leaving him.’

‘Why should I?’ She smiled. ‘And to tell you the truth, it never crossed my mind until just recently. Now the children are grown up. Not that I bear him ill-will. He’s as he is, and never makes out otherwise. He’s strong still, but he’s not so quick as he was.’ She spoke now in autumnal mood, musing. ‘I married him at seventeen. Nearly thirty years. He was a sergeant in the army. I don’t like them Smiths,’ she said suddenly.

‘Why’s that?’

‘She looks down on her husband. She’d leave him if there was half the chance of anybody better.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘We’re getting to that stage,’ she spoke slowly again, ‘where he’ll begin to need me. It’s a funny thing to say, I reckon, but he will. He’s never been poorly, strong as a horse. But he had a tooth out not long before we come on holiday and it took him days to get over it. I had to nag at him. “It’s a tooth you’ve had out,” I said, “not a leg amputated.” But it floored him. It did really.’

‘He seems full of life.’

‘Here? And he is. He enjoys every minute. Mind you, sitting in a pub swilling and chewing about football isn’t much of a way.’

‘Better than bingo.’

‘Who told you I played that?’

‘Nobody. Don’t you?’

‘I’ve more sense. I go out doing a bit of charring three mornings a week.’

‘Does he mind?’

‘Why should he? Nice class of people. Like yourself. A solicitor, and teachers. Both out at work. And it makes a change for me.’

Fisher felt out of it, put in his place, an absentee employer.

‘More gin.’

‘No, thank you. I want to walk down to that pub. I don’t know; I don’t know.’ She keened, swaying slightly.

‘I shan’t be sorry to go home,’ he said. ‘Back.’

‘Promise me,’ she moved towards him, ‘promise me you’ll go and see her again.’ She stood over him, quite steady. ‘Make it up with her.’ She sketched reconciliation vaguely in the air with her mug. ‘Will you? Will you?’ He lifted the gin-bottle.

‘I’ll visit her.’

She drank again, then surprisingly, catching him out, sat on his knee, but primly, like a maiden aunt on a piano-stool. She perched lightly, feet above the floor, laughing at the reflections in the mirror.

‘You don’t like it, do you?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes.’ She laughed more shrilly.

‘You’re very nice. I could fall for you,’ she said. ‘All the people I like want somebody else. Oh, don’t pull that sour face. It’s not the end of the world.’

‘You’d be unfaithful to your husband?’

‘I didn’t say anything about that, did I, now?’ She blew breath out, got up, straightened her dress. ‘We’re on holiday. It’s a temptation for some. I caught him at it once. With a woman. Touching her up.’ She spoke without emphasis, now, almost without interest as if she’d started on a topic politeness only demanded she should complete.

‘You didn’t mind?’

‘Hard to say. Now. I could see he was frightened that he’d done something he’d regret. The woman, well, seemed quite educated, well-spoken. Husband there. Big, bald chap.’

‘Were they drunk?’

She flicked her hand mildly at his genitals.

‘Why should they be that? They liked a change. Jack’s the sort who’d get it. Wasn’t the first time. Won’t be the last. Not worth making a song about it.’

‘And you?’

‘I just fancy men quietly, say nothing. In my mind. That’s better.’ She put her mug on the sink. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go if we’re going. And don’t forget what I tell you.’

‘I’ll see her.’

She made him race to the pub, her arms swinging, as if she wanted to get off the streets.

Hollies was crushed into the corner with the Smiths, who shouted explanations of their presence. A piano banged; Jack procured seats; at the next table an old man, thin white hair neat, hummed and conducted ‘The Rose of Tralee’. In spite of the bustle, the noise, the emphatic gestures and demands, drinks appeared only slowly, were shuffled through the crowd.

Sandra twittered how the landlady had persuaded them. ‘This is your last chance, love. You make the most of it. I’ll see to the boys.’ Beautifully laundered blouse, pink mini-skirt; hair that seemed young and alive compared with Lena’s elaborations of curls as Mrs Hollies’ wary face watched, took it all in, muttered approval, but kept her counsel.

Fisher drank slowly, listened in to conversations round him, marvelled at the shifting facial expressions about what he could not guess. Though the place was crowded, thick with movement, he for the moment sat listlessly, but as if at a concert, eyeing the orchestral players as they drifted in and knowing that excitement was close at hand. At the next table a man and his wife described in contradictory duet how a fight had broken out that afternoon on the beach between two well-dressed West Indians and how some woman had intervened, ordered them to clear off. Racist talk flowed; a street fight in which somebody had cracked his skull open on the edge of the kerb was argued over until the words flew like knuckly fists. Nearer home, Hollies, chest expanded, very slowly spelt out to Sandra what he understood by a good holiday, and why he was more likely to find it here than abroad. The pint in his hand stood supreme, that and the food. ‘When I want to grease my tripes, I’ll walk down to the chemist’s an’ buy a bottle of olive oil and drink it. And not before. I happen to know what sort of lubrication suits me.’ Sandra smiled, lips parted slightly from her white teeth, intent on his every syllable. He did not speak loudly, almost fastidiously quiet in this mêlée, but hypnotically, with authority. Terry, face brick red and burning, twitched at his open collar envying the older man.

Now Fisher grew detached, immersed in his own thoughts.

Slightly dizzy he considered his play. That was the way to think a non-existent work of art into being, in a happy tipsiness, that paid no attention to decision, or alternatives, or the bore of writing, the chore of flogging oneself to get down on paper ideas that expand grandly while they’re vague.

As he sipped, he considered his conception, his great drama of a family. They were as yet innominate, but started back with the Luddites, where one young father was taken and hanged, a strong figure with the voice of righteousness in his clenched fist. Then his children, the Victorians, washed with the blood of Jesus, but running the bawbees up so that one of the grandsons killed in the trenches left a tidy fortune. Now his children lived richly in London, with grandchildren, awkward as the first ancestor under the veneer of public school and Anglican agnosticism.

How this would be crammed on stage he did not know. Brechtian scenes with lines of verse, shouts of song, revolutionary coarseness at the end against the polite southern voices. Impossible as King Lear, but in the daze and rumpus of a public house the design unfolded into symphonic proportions. He must catch and stop up time. That was the right, true end of a swaying man in a bar: to make his peculiar scratch on the flying scud of years. The green leaf and the twig, oh. Anticipation was all. Her husband smiled as Sandra rubbed her left breast on Fisher’s upper arm. Nothing could be held. All flew, evaporated, shredded into fine mist and from this tenuous stuff the poets wove their solidity of memory. Christmas Day, damp and dark, but the whisky bottles stood ready on sideboards, and the television, and the nut crackers, to spoil another landmark until words stiffened the banality, made something of nothing, scarred that initial on the expanding universe. The broken knife and the boy’s end.

The two women either side pressed into him, became part of the pleasure. Hollies described the strip show at his club on Sunday lunch time to Terry Smith, who smirked stupidly, character wiped from his face by beer and fellowship. A vigorous guffaw rewarded a story two tables away and the ancedotalist sat back, justified. Sandra’s scent, the tang of lacquer on Lena Hollie’s hair. A group round the piano wailed in chorus; Fisher neither recognised the tune nor the words.

‘Better than pop,’ Hollies said. ‘On in the clubs now.’

‘You switch the telly on,’ Terry started, slurred, sagged back.

‘I know, if you want a decent act you’ve got to sit through hours of shouting and bawling by these long-hairs. All bloody deaf.’

‘I like it,’ said Lena.

‘You don’t. You’re always telling me to turn it down.’

‘Some of it’s good,’ Sandra ventured, close to Fisher.

‘Entertainers have got to cater for a large young public. They’re the majority. They’re the piper-payers.’ Fisher said. ‘They call the tune.’

‘Peter Piper,’ Mrs Hollies giggled.

‘I don’t call it tune at all,’ Hollies said, laughed. ‘Bloody noise.’

Meg liked pop, because she felt it, she claimed, in her muscles. ‘You move to it; it’s dance,’ and it was true that he’d find her jigging between the stereo speakers to the incomprehensible thump and squeal of a group. ‘This isn’t intellectual. It’s bicep music. Bone jigging. Vaginal. Testicle.’ He’d wondered at the truth of this. To him it had the rough sublety of the old fairground cake-walks, a bang up and down against which you imposed a counterpoint of steps that risked throwing you. Meg believed, cut herself off from him. His upbringing, education had blocked him from this pleasure. Yet she loved Mozart, played with an unaccustomed steadiness some early piano sonatas she’d learnt in her youth. But she’d shuffle away to this barbarism; wrong word, this boredom of noise. ‘Of course it’s mainly rubbish,’ she’d argue reasonably. ‘I know that. But it’s new rubbish.’ There, in her father’s courtroom manner, she mocked him. ‘Ninety per cent of human cultural production is worthless,’ he’d pontificated. She’d remembered and in the amplified bumble she’d danced and scorned him.

‘That chap as plays the piano can’t read a note o’ music.’ A leaning neighbour.

‘By ear.’

‘Ah. Learnt himself.’

‘He can tickle ’em,’ Hollies said.

‘What would he have been like if he’d had music lessons?’ Fisher asked. Why that question reared, was spoken, he’d no notion.

‘Might h’ spoilt him,’ Hollies said.

‘Been playin’ Bach opuses to nob’dy but himself.’ The neighbour.

‘That would have been bad?’ Fisher pursued his point.

‘He gi’s pleasure. To hundreds. Night after night.’

‘And swells the proceeds.’ Terry, joining the rush.

‘Swills.’ Hollies, cheerfully rough.

‘If he’d ’a been taught,’ Lena said slowly, ‘there’d still be dozens as wasn’t. You’d not go short in the pubs.’

‘Thank God,’ Hollies said.

‘And our lack of educational opportunity.’ Fisher.

This led then to schools, and all were talkative. Sandra, pert and assertive, argued that education was the means to social mobility; she wanted her boys in a grammar school so they’d become qualified, get on. The rest approved, but felt that this was a course for a favoured few, with brains, with aptitude. They did not argue this strictly, but hobbled through anecdotes about fortunes made by people thick as two short planks. Fisher, mildly, pressed for a culture which offered a fuller life. Hollies checked him magisterially.

‘You schoolmasters are all the same,’ he said.

‘He’s a lecturer,’ Sandra interrupted, a personage now.

‘Same kidney and fry. You don’t know what it’s like to do a hard day’s work. At the end of that you don’t want Beethoven and Rachmaninoff’s concerto, what you want’s an arm chair and entertainment. I’ve done both. I know.’

‘Have you taught all day?’

‘No. Nine till four. Two hours’ breaks. Forty weeks a year. You don’t know you’re born.’

They could not be serious. Eccentric teachers having a drag behind raised desk-lids. Navvies leaning on shovels, brewing tea. Straps and canes whistling. The difficulty of getting the simplest repair done. Voices shouted up in enjoyment of pessimism, and Fisher, king-happy, mused again, ruefully accusing himself of delayed adolescence. Tommorrow he’d see Meg, just as his Luddite ancestor met the hangman.

Over the far side of the room a man raised his hands above his head, then stood to demonstrate in no space a step or two from the hokey-cokey. A clap, a cough, cheer, punch and he sat, face into beer-mug. That symbolized all life; a gesture, on account of circumstances not properly completed, representing something beyond and equally trivial, for a short time, then over, done with, done for. His play would carry symbols, top-heavy as Ibsen. Gibbets and candle-sticks, fetters and table-napkins, a word in the cold dark, repartee over wine, and all life shone there. He sipped his beer for want of better occupation, moved, emotional over nothing, faculties softened by alcohol. Expansive he put a hand on Lena Hollies’ thigh; she wore suspenders; he felt the aphrodisiac rubber button.

He refused another drink as Terry fought up to his feet. A young man fell sideways from his stool, was replaced.

The neighbour, leaning across, frowning, half-pint held round the glass, began on industrial relations, was ordered by Hollies to shut up because they were on holiday.