The Liverpool Basque (33 page)

It was a joy to Manuel to walk into the spacious lobby of the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, to see his old friend waiting for him. Arnador was leaning on a walking-stick, but with such self-assurance that onlookers could be convinced that he did not really need such support. They greeted each other warmly. In some ways it was barely necessary to talk; after seventy-six years of friendship, carefully nursed through wars, depressions and uneasy peace, they knew each other more intimately than did men who lived closer to each other. Both Manuel and Arnador believed that you could express ideas and feelings in letters which you would never mention face to face.

They were to dine together, and, once they were seated in the restaurant, they spoke Basque, with old-fashioned idioms and exclamations no longer heard in the streets of Guernica or Bilbao or Pamplona. Although Arnador had had the advantage of speaking Basque with his wife, Francesca, and with his ancient sister, Josefa, his language was as outdated as was Manuel’s.

Manuel inquired after Josefa’s health, something he had forgotten to do when he had telephoned Arnador on his arrival at Ramon’s. He was told that she was still quite spry. ‘Her daughter – my niece, Josephine – you know her – keeps an eye on both of us, when she’s not on tour with her Chamber Music Group.’ He laughed when he added, ‘She’s not that young herself – must be over fifty now.’

‘Does she speak Basque?’

‘No, despite Grandma Ganivet’s best efforts when she was small.’

‘My Lorilyn’s the same. I suppose it’s the first thing that goes, with immigrants.’

Arnador carefully poised some green peas on his fork, and then, before he put them into his mouth, he replied philosophically, ‘It has to go – children want to be like the others round them – and they know that they must speak English to get a job.’

After a good dinner, and a bottle of wine split between them, they retired to the lounge for coffee. It was a fine Edwardian room, full of gilt and mirrors. The coffee drinkers already there seemed small and insignificant, drowned in the room’s huge proportions. After a while, Arnador began to fidget, and he remarked, ‘It’s too damned quiet. Let’s go over to the Big House. We could have a drink there.’ He put his coffee cup down and pushed it into the middle of the small table in front of him, as if to discard more than an empty cup.

Manuel hastily drained his cup, and got up. He beamed at Arnador, as he also rose, carefully using his stick to balance himself. In spite of being very bent, his head thrust forward from years of study, he still gave an impression of height. Manuel had always been shorter than him and was still fairly upright in his carriage, though half a bottle of wine and a liqueur had made his balance a trifle uncertain, and he held on to the back of a chair for a moment before setting out across the vast carpet to the door.

Arnador had insisted on paying the restaurant’s bill and for the coffee.

They tottered down the marble steps and across the fine lobby, oblivious of the stifled giggles of the girls behind the reservation counter; berets were not seen too often in Liverpool any more.

Chattering expansively in Basque, they descended a series of front steps, once trodden by kings and princes, and walked slowly along the pavement, to cross a narrow street to The Vines, known to seamen as the Big House. It
seemed a long way to both of them, and they sank thankfully into mahogany chairs in the bar, to sigh with satisfaction at a glittering array of bottles and mirrors and to notice and remark that the Victorian Walker paintings were still hanging there. This had been the haunt of seamen, flush with pay, since before they were born, and they opened their coats and settled back happily for a long session.

After a couple of measures of the best Jamaican rum that the house could provide, they fell into conversation with two retired excisemen, full of wild stories of their adventures in search of taxes. When the excisemen left they grinned at each other. The soft lighting glanced warmly off the fine wooden panelling; and the rise and fall of Liverpool voices around them added to their sense of well-being. Arnador said comfortably, as he looked around, ‘Just like old times!’

‘Remember when you were seventeen, and you bet you could get me and Joey Connolly into here and buy us both a drink?’ Manuel asked. ‘And we got kicked out in short order, because we were all too young – and you stood outside and called them everything you could think of – in Basque?’

Arnador giggled, like a young girl. ‘Of course I remember. I’d more courage in those days!’ He took another sip of his rum and savoured it, before letting it slide down his throat. ‘I’m getting old, Mannie!’

‘That’s why I made this trip. Feeling old myself. Don’t have the steam I used to have,’ Manuel replied with studied solemnity. ‘Felt I might not be able to do it – next year.’ He ruminated on this sad fact, and then added dejectedly, ‘Wish I’d never left Liverpool. Could’ve brought Kathleen here.’

‘Come on. You live in a lovely place.’

‘Boring. Full of old people,’ Manuel announced with the certainty of the very drunk.

They had a heated and laborious argument about why one man’s boredom was another man’s paradise; and Manuel invited Arnador to come with him, when he returned to Victoria, to spend the rest of the summer with him. ‘I’ve still got a car – take you all over the island,’ he promised. ‘Beautiful to look at – you’re right there. And good fishing.’

Arnador considered this offer, and then responded dampeningly, ‘We’ve already done it.’ He stopped, to collect words which seemed to be fluttering disorientingly around his brain. Then he suggested, ‘We could go to Vizcaya from here. Strange – but I’ve never been there – and, come to think of it, neither did Frannie.’

‘Except when she was a baby.’ Manuel drained his glass, as he remembered a little boy looking down into a flawless, fairytale valley, from a shepherd’s hut. ‘Most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen most places.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Let’s have another drink.’

While another two rums were ordered, the idea of going to Bilbao began to be discussed between them. ‘We could stay in a hotel there,’ suggested Arnador, ‘and take bus tours wherever we wanted to go. Easier than trying to rent a car – I’ve not had a driving licence for years, anyway.’

And so the idea grew. They planned to meet the following day for lunch and then go together to Thomas Cook’s to discuss the details of the journey.

‘I want to go down to Wapping,’ Manuel announced suddenly. ‘Never seem to get there when I come on a visit. Ramon always wants to go to Wales or up to the Lakes, when I suggest it!’

‘That’s easy,’ responded Arnador promptly, though his speech was slurred. ‘Remember the Baltic Fleet? Josephine mentioned recently that it’s a very nice restaurant, now. We could meet there for lunch, and you can see your old home.’ He stopped to yawn mightily. ‘And then we can go into town and see about going to Spain. Haven’t been
down to Wapping since your mother went to live in Toxteth.’

When the barman called, ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ and put a white cloth over his beer pumps, they could barely stand on their feet as they got up from their seats.

‘Like me to call you a taxi?’ asked a barmaid as she quickly mopped their table.

They looked at each other, and giggled foolishly as they clung swaying to the edge of the bar.

‘Yes, please,’ Manuel said to the girl. ‘Wanna go Aigburth – and then Grassendale, for this gentleman.’

That night, helped by a laughing Julie, it was with a huge sense of satisfaction that Manuel climbed the stairs to bed, while singing an unprintable song in Basque.

Around two in the morning, moonlight flooding into the room woke him.

Though his jacket and shoes had been removed, he still wore the rest of his clothes. An eiderdown had been tucked around him. He had no idea where he was.

Disoriented, he found it difficult to breathe, and his mouth was dry and foul. He felt he was suffocating, and he threw off the eiderdown.

It did not help.

He lay very still, taking short breaths, while his brain went round and round like a roundabout. Where was he? And why was there such a sense of weight on his chest – as if old Mr Wing was pressing his big iron down on him?

He began to be frightened and to sweat. Maudlin tears ran down his face.

‘Drunk!’ he suddenly recollected. ‘Very tight!’

He must have made some slight noise, because a rumpled Ramon in striped pyjamas came quietly into the room, bringing with him the usual slight tang of fish. ‘You all
right, Mannie?’ He came over to the bedside and peered down at the old man.

His presence was comforting. Manuel whispered, ‘Could you open the window – and give me a drink of water?’

Ramon took a glass of water from the side table and Manuel sipped it eagerly, while Ramon steadied him with an arm round his back. Then he laid the old man back on his pillow, and went to open the window.

The cool night air flooded in, and Manuel immediately felt easier. ‘Bevvied,’ he announced carefully to the younger man, and closed his eyes.

‘It were just like holding a bird,’ Ramon told Julie the next morning. ‘No weight in him at all.’

Resplendent in a red silky-looking dressing-gown, Julie woke Manuel about nine o’clock the next morning. She carried a steaming cup of tea.

He smiled weakly at her, as he eased himself slowly upright. He felt tremendously, overwhelmingly tired.

‘How’s your head?’ There was a gurgle of laughter in her voice.

‘Fine,’ he answered truthfully, as with a trembling hand he took the cup of tea from her. ‘We drank good stuff. I feel a bit tired, that’s all.’ The effects of the rum had not yet worn off.

While he drank the tea, she sat down on the bed. ‘What do you want to do today?’

He grinned his wide, slow grin at her over his cup, as he told her about the luncheon engagement. ‘Would you like to come?’ he asked her.

‘I can’t. It’s Friday,’ she said regretfully. ‘I’ve got to help Ramon and young Leo in the shop. Funny how a lot of people still eat fish on Fridays – but never go near a church! And we’re one of the few places, now, that still sells really fresh fish – so we get a big crowd – I should be down there now.’

She made him promise to take a taxi down to Wapping. ‘I’ll leave the telephone number on the kitchen counter for you,’ she said.

Manuel was resigned to the idea that Liverpool had altered greatly since the days of his youth; but he was ill-prepared for the shock, when his taciturn taxi driver drew up in Hurst Street at the entrance to the Baltic Fleet. Before descending, he paid the driver. When the man had left, he stood, bewildered and forlorn, with his back to the restaurant, surveying, with unbelieving eyes, the view across the narrow street.

He could not locate a single familiar landmark, except that at the side of a narrow road leading off Hurst Street to his right, a rusty street sign, hanging by a single bolt on a block of stone, declared
Sparling Street
. Other than that, there was nothing but rubble, which had been used to fill up the cellars of the demolished buildings. It was like the scene of an air raid, a tumbled sweep of brick, stone and concrete, through which a few blades of grass and dandelion leaves announced that, one day, nature would repair the damage.

His head bent towards the gusty wind, he slowly walked round the tiny Baltic Fleet, which stood alone beside the huge highway along which the taxi had brought him. He wanted to see what lay across the roaring river of traffic.

Where once had been the Salthouse Dock, there was a car park, and beyond it he could see the familiar bulk of the Albert Dock Warehouse. The great walls that had protected the docks had gone. Slightly to his left should have been the Wapping Basin. If it were still there, he could not see it through eyes blurred with tears.

Since he was early for his appointment with Arnador, he walked slowly back along Hurst Street and up and down the traces of the tiny side streets.

After carefully pacing distances, he saw what he had
been looking for; two steps leading from the narrow pavement up into the rubble – and, a foot or two away, two more steps.

He stood looking down at them, feeling dizzily confused and very tired. After a few moments of hesitation, he squatted down on one of the steps, and rested his arms on his knees. Then he put his head down and cried, cried on his mother’s doorstep, and cried again because the next doorstep was that of Bridget, who had comforted them all.

Not a soul passed him, not a vehicle went up and down the narrow lanes which had been his childhood playground; the Baltic Fleet was locked in pre-lunchtime calm.

After a while, he took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes with a paper handkerchief, and then cleaned his glasses before putting them back on. He stared down at the street where he and Joey Connolly, Brian Wing and Andy Pilar had played at marbles or flicking ciggie cards, or, later with Arnador, had played cricket with a couple of beer bottles as stumps, much to the alarm of various beshawled housewives, who had visions of the ball going through their windows.

Except for the traffic roaring along the busy new road, which once had been the dock road, there was no noise, no thudding machinery, no horses’ hooves, no clanging bell of the railway train that used to run along the other side of the street under the overhead railway – no overhead railway, either.