The Tenement (5 page)

He had started teaching when English heads of department demanded that he inculcate ideas such as general analysis and figures of speech into youths who walked through Clydeside on grey mornings. When had they ever met an example of synecdoche or metonymy? Trevor had once mentioned to his chief that he felt that the curriculum was inept, absurd.

“We have to educate them out of their environment,” the man, whose name was Trivett, had said.

“But they're not Greeks or mediaevalists,” Trevor maintained. “They don't count the angels on the point of a needle.”

“They will have to learn to write good English,” said Trivett angrily. He had composed the curriculum himself. It was his only creative contribution to English Studies and he was rather proud of it.

Trevor spent some of his time in London teaching, among others, Arabs and Jews, and Cypriots. He was interested in puns at that time, describing a fight between an Arab and a Jewish boy, and saying that the Arab had turned the other sheikh. These puns he thought funny, perhaps because he was a poet, but no one else did. Once he had found in the store a large consignment of the poetry of Dorothy Hemans. There was also an anthology called
Laurel and Gold
, which he called Laurel and Hardy. He felt that he was always having to teach texts that he could summon up no interest in.

As well as teaching in London he taught in Newark, Robin Hood country. One day walking with Julia in a wood he had said to her, “I don't think I can stay here much longer. They have asked me to produce plays. I can't produce plays.”

“But it's a good school,” said Julia.

“I know that,” he said, “but I can't produce plays.”

“You can't have everything,” she said, through the dapple of shadows. “After all, the pupils are well behaved. Do you want well behaved pupils and perhaps more work to do, or do you want badly behaved pupils and finish at four?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I can't produce plays. Nor do I like supervising cricket.”

Julia was silent. Her whole life had been spent in packing, leaving one school and going on to another. She herself had been a school secretary when she met Trevor. She originally came from Devon, but he had met her in Glasgow.

She knew that her husband was a failure as a teacher though it was said he was a good poet. Even in London after the war he would send some of his poems home to Scotland to be published. She had once found a love poem that he had written to a sixth form girl but had never mentioned it to him.

In any case they had left Newark and had gone to Glasgow. Now they were in this smallish town to which they had retired. Above them lived the Camerons, beside them Mrs Floss. Mr Cameron beat his wife up regularly. There were hideous screams and screeches on Saturday nights, and then silence. Often and often Trevor had made up his mind he would go upstairs and have it out with Cameron, but he never had the nerve. He thought that Mr Cameron would think up unimaginable methods of torment for him later, become much more evil, bang on the ceiling all night with a broom handle. He was quite capable of it. Sober he was fine, drunk he was intolerable.

Julia had wanted him to leave but he couldn't be bothered to shift any more. He was tired of shifting, and eventually she had acquiesced. So that they had to endure the Camerons. Trevor believed that it was Cameron with his din who had killed his wife. She had died of cancer.

One day shortly after Julia died the minister came to see him. He was a stooped man who looked like a superannuated scholar and who rode a bicycle.

“We have to endure what God sends us,” he said. “Your wife used to do the flowers. She asked me to put up a prayer for you if anything happened to her.”

“Oh,” said Trevor.

“We never know the day nor the hour,” said the minister. “She was sometimes embarrassed because she didn't have a proper garden. I think she would have liked a garden. And then again she often talked of Devon.”

You old bastard, thought Trevor. You ancient hypocrite. He offered tea and biscuits which the minister had taken.

“It's an awful thing,” said the minister, “but women compete about the flowers and even the playing of the organ.” The last time Trevor had been in church he had thought that the organ pipes looked like atomic missiles laid end to end. As the minister inveighed against nuclear warfare, he had stroked back a stray curl.

“I hope you're managing,” he said to Trevor.

“Yes,” said Trevor. In fact he was inordinately practical for a poet. It was he who had wired the whole flat having lifted up the floorboards first before the carpets had been put down. He had also torn out a black range and put in a tiled fireplace. But of course he was absent-minded about his clothes. He wore a crushed hat always, and the same blue suit, shiny from use. Julia had long given up advising him on his dress.

Shortly before she died she looked for something. He found her wandering about the flat in her nightgown at three in the morning. But whatever she was searching for she stopped doing so when she saw that he was staring at her palely from the bars of red and white pyjamas.

He watched the TV. Boycott hadn't scored for an hour. The cat which he had found at the bins one morning, and which he had adopted, was sitting blinking on the window sill. He had called it Blackie. It caught mice around the back of the house, and sometimes, to his disgust, birds. Once he had taken a bird away from it and released it. The cat had gone frantically searching for it all over the flat. But the bird had flown away on its second life.

Shortly after his wife died Mrs Floss, who stayed next door, rang the doorbell.

“About the light,” she said.

“The light?” said Trevor.

“Yes, every second week you put the light on. It's your turn this week. Julia knew all about it.” He didn't like her calling his wife Julia with such familiarity.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I could leave it on every night if you like. Otherwise, I might forget.”

“Not at all,” she said. Her false teeth glittered at him, filling her mouth. She was a fat woman who swanned about in a haze of drink. She was a widow: her husband had owned an hotel.

“Oh no, that wouldn't do at all,” she said.

“All right then, I'll put my light on for my own week,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

“The stair,” she said.

“What about the stair?”

“It has to be washed every second week.” So this was what Julia had been spending her life doing, seeing to trivialities like the stair and the light while he was writing his poetry.

“Julia used pipeclay,” said Mrs Floss. “I don't know where she got it from. But I know she used pipe clay.”

“Pipe clay?” said Trevor.

“Yes, that's right.”

So he made sure that the light was on every second week and that the stair was cleaned every second week. Responsibilities were descending on him.

One night he heard a voice in the corridor. He couldn't think at first where it was coming from. It was Mrs Floss speaking through the letter box, reminding him that he should turn his light off as it wasn't his week. Before she could get back to her own flat he switched his light off, thus plunging her into the dark. The silly old git. If that was all that was worrying her, let her crawl through the black night.

The first letter he wrote after Julia's death was to Dr Barnardo's telling them that he would no longer be able to keep up charitable payments.

The second letter he wrote was to a company which had been sending a book a month to Julia. They had maintained for some time that she was behind with her payments which wasn't true. Any letter that was sent to them seemed to cross another one: it was like trying to send notes to a monster in the centre of a maze. Trevor wrote an angry letter.

“Dear Sirs, You advertise the works of Dickens and Trollope and other famous writers. You call them the finest spirits of their age and say we should all read the classics, because we are such helpless uneducated oafs in comparison with you. I don't understand why, if you are so civilized, you are still sending demand notes to my wife who is now dead. You can take your Dickens and your Trollope and stuff them. Yours sincerely, Trevor Porter.”

He gained great satisfaction from this letter, and hoped it would arrive at the Managing Director's desk. He never heard from them again.

Boycott had made one run in half an hour. There was a spurt of ironical applause. The cat blinked and stared coolly at him.

He composed a letter to the local paper.

“I should like a woman who can pipe-clay a stair and speak a little Greek.”

He changed it.

“Lady who can pipe-clay a stair and speak good English required.”

He changed it again.

“Lady required for modest writer of moderate means and who likes listening to Bach. Must be able to pipe-clay a stair.”

He thought of poems in which the word ‘clay' would occur, he thought of Joyce's short story with that title.

The clayey faces of the shadowy Greeks.

He thought of the pipes of Pan made of clay.

“Lady of certain years required to pipe-clay stairs. Should be literate, numerate, moderate.” This woman would bend down and clean the stair, decorate it. She would play on her clay pipe. Maybe, however, there was no pipe clay any more. You never knew. Maybe whoever had made pipe clay had ceased to make it. He imagined him as a small man with a beard who also played the violin in a back room in a tenement. These pipes of clay were sent all over the world. This man who had been made redundant had started his enterprise fearlessly and now he was making millions of pounds. Chinese, Indians, bought his product. His pipes told of mortality, of the earth. Pipe clay. What a wonderful combination.

One day he had a phone call from a woman he had never heard of and who, for some reason, he decided, on the basis of the voice alone, was fat and wore a string of pearls. She said that she had taken his name from a poetry directory. She was trying to save an oak tree whose branches and leaves had spread out across a road in Edinburgh and was a danger to the traffic. The tree had been planted in the eighteenth century by a Professor of Theology whose wife had committed suicide. It was a mark of respect to his wife whom he hadn't loved enough while she was alive but loved just like Thomas Hardy, after she was dead. The woman wanted to gather together a number of signatures of poets etc. in order to save the tree. She also wanted to form a committee.

“I would be no good on a committee,” said Trevor.

“You never know till you try,” said the woman briskly. “It would be a great help. You see, there are some little men who are complaining that the tree is an obstruction to buses.”

“Oh,” said Trevor.

“Yes. People with moustaches, I shouldn't wonder. I have written to them but to no avail. I suggested that they should reroute their buses; this is the oldest oak tree left in Edinburgh.”

“An oak tree,” thought Trevor. Ships were made of oak trees in the past. Old England was built on the oak. It cast its marvellous solid shadows. It reminded him of Newark, of Robin Hood. In the middle of the wood … Dante. A poem swam into his head. It was to do with Dante and an oak tree. Dante's three-lined verses were shadows cast by the oak tree.

“I'll think about it,” he said. The woman seemed disappointed. She kept on at him, she said people were needed urgently. He repeated that he would think about it and put down the phone. That had been the story of his life, thinking about things, but never doing them, leaving them to his wife.

For instance, when they had come to this flat first, the roof had let in water. The tenants had told the owner it wasn't their fault. It was only a short time before that they had paid for roof repairs. Trevor didn't want to be bothered. He would have paid so that the owner would go away. If he ever thought about a problem of this nature it grew so complicated that it went to the heart of the world, the fall from Eden, and so on. It became a deep philosophical question deriving from Plato. It was a rabbinical enigma. Julia, however, was more direct. She went round the other tenants, looking for signatures. She asked Trevor to glance over the letter which she had typed impeccably and addressed to the owner. She said that none of the people in the flat would pay a penny. Not long before, they had paid £300 for repairs to the roof. Trevor was frightened that they would be evicted.

However, the owner had surrendered. Trevor felt that Julia despised him for his neutrality, but she didn't say anything. Everyone else in the flats knew that she had got them off and for a while she was very popular. Of course Mrs Miller would never have paid anyway: she would have refused on principle.

He didn't know whether he should have anything to do with the oak tree. Probably not. He had other things to do with his time. Like finding out about his life which had passed in a dream. He had never believed that Julia would die before him. Now that he was alone he felt suspended in mid-air.

One day when Julia was away for a week in Devon he locked himself out by mistake. He didn't know what to do. Then he remembered that Mrs Brown, who at that time lived above him, had a ladder and he had gone to ask for it. She had ushered him into a crowded room and said, “You will have a wee sherry?” He had sipped his sherry, looking about him all the time. The room was like a museum frozen in time. There was a radio, ornaments (mostly copper), magazines, newspapers, a stool, sideboards, mirrors, fire-irons, a pouffe. In the middle of all this Mrs Brown had offered him a sherry.

And of course the ladder.

“When you are finished, put the ladder back in the shed and throw the key through my letter box. I am going out.”

Trevor steadied the ladder against the side of the house and dived in through the window, landing on the sofa. Then he opened the door and replaced the ladder in the shed. When he told Mrs Floss about the incident she roared with maniac laughter, thinking it hilariously funny. Not at all funny, thought Trevor. Julia would never have forgotten her key. He saw himself plunging on to the sofa from the blue sky like Icarus with wounded wings. Another time he left a steak in a pan and when he went to look at it, it had dwindled to a black mass the size of a piece of coal.