The Tenement (14 page)

“Well, I'll have to go,” said Robin. He was leaving again and they hadn't really spoken to each other. They were still like Romans wearing their shields. He watched as Robin drove away.

Then he walked down town.

He would take a walk as far as the War Memorial which stood by the sea, a short distance from the centre of the town. Two soldiers were carved on it, one helping another through a field of stone. There was a water bottle slung at his side and a rifle in his hand. The sea stretched away from the War Memorial. Ships passed now and again, reflected in the water.

The town had changed since he had come to it. Shops had changed hands in a Darwinian struggle for survival. Since the recession the buildings were tattier, lacking a coat of paint. He used to have strange notions, such as that the town was like a theatre, a back cloth for continuing drama. One day he would see a young man pushing a pram, the next he was middle-aged and stout. The same people were perpetually changing roles. Oh, to be simple and see the world as it truly was! Once he thought he saw Mrs Cooper standing with a message bag at Liptons. He blinked but she was gone. The town seethed with ghosts. At other times he felt that, as he was walking along, there was a tall mirror in front of him.

He would go down to the quay and watch the boats. He would see sitting on a deck a man sewing a green net with a needle of bone. Orange buoys glowed. Seagulls stood on bollards staring out to sea.

It was a beautiful town, in the summer especially, but best of all he liked it in the autumn when the leaves were turning golden. October was the best month of all. At times like these he felt an elegiac sweetness in the air. The trees were surrendering their crowns, abdicating. It was the month of Keats, the month of the migrating birds. There was a touch of frost in the air: he could feel it crackling on his teeth. Julia on the other hand had preferred the spring: that was the difference between the Taurus and the Capricorn.

There were tourists from all over the world. He passed an Indian woman, delicate-boned and lovely; she reminded him of London where there had been an Indian family in the same tenement. He sat down on a bench and watched the sea.

A man wearing a white hat sat down beside him. It turned out that he was from Chicago, unmarried, but he saved his money for a trip abroad every year. He had been to Spain, New Zealand, Japan. New Zealand was his favourite country. During the winter he watched TV and read books, but never drank. He saved his money for his foreign trips. He had found the Londoners the most bad-mannered of all the people he had met. Once he had been looking for a street and had asked a flower seller where it was.

“It' not my business to give you directions,” the flower seller had told him.

He stayed in lodgings and only had his pension. But he saved every penny. Curiously enough, Trevor quite liked the little man: he somewhat resembled Cooper. He hadn't allowed himself to vegetate. He had the innocent curiosity of the American. Trevor himself had seen little of the world. This man had walked on his own through the streets of Tokyo: talked confidently and knowledgeably about various currencies, passports, visas.

Trevor had noticed before that he was a target for lonely people. Beggars always came to beg from him. It was as if they sensed in him a vulnerability like their own. If there were six people on the one street he could guarantee that the beggar would come over to him. He gazed out at the water: the wind was blowing over it, composing shadows. An island stood out in the bay. A tall white ship was being loaded with cargo.

He rose and walked over to the station to see what magazines they had. There were two drunks there, singing, waving bottles. He bought a
Listener
and was leaving, when he saw Mrs Miller sitting on a bench, a bottle beside her. She noticed him and turned away. He made as if to speak to her and then decided against it. She wouldn't want to speak. Her fur coat was open and her face was swollen with drink. A train was about to depart. Poor woman, this was her solution to her problem. He looked at her as if looking at himself.

The two drunks had begun to quarrel with each other. One was swearing at the other one and waving his bottle like a weapon. A policeman strolled quietly and sedately towards them. Trevor left.

It is not natural for a man to be alone, he thought. When Julia was alive he didn't know what loneliness was. In fact in those days he wanted to be alone but he hadn't then understood what this void was like, how deep it went, how unreal it made the world. All that was meaningful became meaningless.

One of the drunks was struggling with the policeman who was talking into his walkie-talkie.

“F . . k off,” the drunk shouted.

The policeman's arm was strong and steady on his.

The sun blazed on the water. An auctioneer was selling fish, boxes stacked around him. Some visitors were taking photographs. The white ship was beginning to move away. Minute by minute we create the world, minute by minute we make pictures, thought Trevor, we are artists of the universe.

The man from Chicago had left his seat. Trevor could see him in the distance entering a shop that sold tweeds. The shops hung out their webs to attract the flies. Everything preyed on everything else. The theatre produced its endless play.

When he had come to the town first he used to go for long walks along the cliffs, where jackdaws played with each other, diving and ascending. Boats' engines had hummed with a sound like bees, like pots on boil on a lazy Sunday.

A Chinaman stood outside his restaurant, inhaling the fresh air. Yellow man, yellow lamps, yellowness. He liked Chinese restaurants. They reminded him of churches; music leaked from their walls. Always there were ancient black telephones and dragons painted on the walls. He didn't like the food though he liked the building. Julia had liked Chinese food, Indian food; she was a true Taurus.

The Chinaman returned to his restaurant to continue his work. They worked like slaves, these people. They were perhaps from Hong Kong, not communists: on the contrary they believed in capitalism, who more? How did they like living in a country which was not their own? Exiles. He remembered reading in a paper recently of a North Vietnamese who had settled in Northern Ireland: he thought that the place was quiet and decent and pleasant. All was relative.

Maybe he should get out more. There was a chess club in the town. Perhaps he could attend it with his sleeping dozing friend. But he had never liked playing chess against people; he preferred solving problems: white to mate in two no matter what black did. That was another way in which he spent his Sundays.

Or again, he could join that committee about the oak tree. Or maybe he could phone Miss Gillespie who had hosted his poetry reading. He had liked her: she was quite like Julia.

Or …

He must make an opening into the world or he would end up like Mrs Floss, Mrs Miller. If he could not join the world, how could he call himself a poet? Milton had written, even though blind, Beethoven had composed, though deaf. After all he had his health and his faculties: he must make an effort. Why, he might even go to Cambridge to visit his computer son, take a pilgrimage to ask for forgiveness among the beautiful colleges becalmed in their world of knowledge, good and virtuous. Maybe he would like Cambridge. He felt restless somehow, as if the weather itself were demanding action from him. If he stayed day after day in the flat he would become useless, immobile. He might even lose the use of his legs. ‘Poet loses legs after sitting in ivory tower composing lyrics.'

Self, self, self. The waves followed each other on to the shore, each perhaps separate, sufficient. The boats were selves, clear cut, definite. The auctioneer was a dramatist conscious of the admiration of the tourists. The world was a paean of selves; demanding to be heard, to be known. The stones lay on their shadows, impenetrable, austere. To break free from the self, to heal the wounded consciousness. To himself each ordinary man was as important as Beethoven. Even that stair-woman provided herself with an alibi as to why she had ‘stooped' to what she was doing.

A policeman and a policewoman paced the pavement side by side, soberly, sedately. The drunk who had been taken away to jail was a self: his feelings cried out for mercy, audience. Selves bloomed at him from all directions. Even the seagulls pecking at old bones like dead crosswords had their shrieking crying selves. He steadied himself against stone, passing his hand across his brow. Even the tenement was a self, arising in stone from out of the undifferentiated nothingness. The worms nodding their heads were selves. Like the U-boats they seethed under the earth, under the stone, like a choir swaying to a baton.

Self, self, self. All those years he had justified his own self, leaving bloodstains and havoc behind him. He was responsible for his son turning into a computer, his wife dying. And for what? For a few poems that would soon be forgotten. Only genius could justify such inhumanity. If that.

Once he had seen Julia weeping at a film that she was watching on TV. “What's wrong?” he asked her.

“Nothing. Leave me alone.” The film had been
Anna Karenina
. I could weep for Dido, Augustine had said. Not for my own soul, but for Dido. Such simple feelings. The only time he had ever wept was when Julia had died. That night he had asked himself, “What use my Dante now?” And of course Dante had been no use—in that blue raw morning with the birds beginning to sing.

Such simple feelings, and he had lost his. He had turned into a man of ice. He had built his shield and now it was melting. Better to weep than to be a man of ice. Better to shout, scream, than exist in silence. Better to strike out in passion than to be cold.

He was a comic, not a tragic man in his crushed hat. He saw himself limping along like a flawed anchorite. Poet as perpetual spy. Poet as spectator. Poet as metaphysical tramp. He imagined himself in a vast courtroom and a judge with a hearing aid bending down and saying, “What did you say, Life? Please explain?” (As if he were asking, who are the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. Judges were supposed not to know anything about the world outside the courtroom.)

“What is life?” this judge would ask, bending towards him. And he would say, “Life is … life is … life.” But he couldn't define it further no matter how much the people in the courtroom rocked with laughter.

“Life is.” And the audience slapped their sides. “Life is …” And the judge smiled, showing his false teeth. Everything about him false, his hearing aid, his teeth, his robe, his wig. They hid a skeleton. And a bird flew in through an open window. Life is life …

Linda and John were two years married. Linda had been a hairdresser before she married. John was working in a freezer shop and wanted to become an electrician, as his wages were small. He also had an ambition to own a TV repair shop one day. They had stayed in the middle flat for a while, then they had moved into the bottom flat when the matron died. They were, of course, the youngest couple in the tenement.

When John went to work in the morning Linda made herself a cup of coffee, but had stopped smoking since the baby was due shortly. She was radiant, happy. So was John who wanted a child too. Sometimes Linda felt sorry for the other people in the tenement: they were so old and so lonely most of them. She herself had never been lonely in her life: she came from a family of seven. Ever since she was eleven she wanted to be a hairdresser and had loved the job. It was clean and it was creative. It was also quite well paid. But when she became pregnant she decided that she would give up her job and John agreed. They would have less money, but it was important that the baby should have every chance. To bring up a child was what she wanted most in the world, what she had been born for. She was one of those women who are not greedy for possessions, her temperament was calm and tranquil.

One morning when she was drinking her coffee at about eleven o'clock, there was a knock on the door. She wondered at first whether it might be the milkman or the coalman, or the insurance man, but it was none of these. There was a tall gaunt man of about thirty-five standing on the doorstep: he wore rimless glasses. He stared at her and she stared back. There was something odd about the man, she felt immediately. It was as if he was staring through her, past her. She shivered slightly.

“What is it?” she asked.

He didn't answer. Then amazingly he said, “May I come in, please?”

His voice was dull, dead, without any expression in it.

“Are you selling something?” she said.

“No. May I come in?” Then before she could do anything to prevent him he had walked past her. Thinking about it afterwards, she couldn't understand quite how it had happened. It was as if somehow he slid past her without her noticing. She looked at Cooper's door, but remembered that he would be working in the toilets. She didn't know what to do. The man had not offered her any violence. He looked in fact pitiful, haggard. She followed him in. He was gazing round the lobby.

“The wallpaper's different,” he said. “This wasn't here,” and he pointed to the hall stand that she and John had bought at the market. It seemed to disturb him: he studied it for a long time.

She was so astonished that she didn't know what to say. He went into the bathroom and examined it. There were baby things already in the bathroom, for example a yellow duck that she had bought in Woolworth's. There were soaps, sponges, toothbrushes, shaving tubes, pink toilet paper. The bathroom suite was pink: the lampshade matched both it and the toilet paper. There were towels hung on silver rails. At a sale she had bought paper which she had placed on the window, and which gave an illusion of stained glass, so that the bathroom actually looked like a church, a shrine.

“And this is different, too,” he said. “The bath we had was very big, white.” He seemed stunned as if he had walked from one world into another one.

“Look,” she said, “who are you?”