The Tenement (7 page)

Trevor was glad to see the back of his son. He didn't like being patronized. He and Robin had nothing in common. Robin calculated every move, saw his daughter's teachers, made sure that she contributed money to the blacks: some of her pocket money went to a girl in Nigeria. But there was nothing spontaneous about all that. It was in fact a sort of affectation. He is a monster, thought Trevor, but didn't blame himself. If you blamed yourself for everything you would go mad.

When he went to collect his pension he stared with nostalgia at the bums of the young girls in jeans. They looked like peaches, apples. Oh Lord, he thought, I'm growing old, and this was emphasized to him when, dropping his pension book one day in the post office, one of the young girls bent down and retrieved it for him. “There you are, sir,” she said.

Never again would he approach that remembered country, never again.

The woman phoned about the oak tree, but he put her off again. However, he went for a walk one day and sat under an oak tree in the small town where he lived. He loved the cool shade of its branches. Beside him on the green seat with bubbles of rain still on it was a military-looking man with a bristling moustache. The man talked to him about India, a subject apparently dear to his heart. He was simplistic, anachronistic. Trevor could hardly believe that such a person could exist. In his crushed hat he sat meekly listening. Yes, the British had ruled India well, hadn't they? The leaves of the oak stirred in the breeze. The tree was ancient too, presumably like the one in Edinburgh. But Trevor saw too many sides of a question. He was not a Fortinbras like this empire builder beside him, he was a Hamlet. After all, shouldn't buses have their right of way as well?

“Should never have come home,” said the military man. “Biggest mistake of my life.” He talked of how he had travelled one day by train to Glasgow. It had been two hours late. He ran to a phone to tell his hosts of his mishap but the phones were all broken, vandalized. What kind of country was this, falling about our ears? Just like an old tenement, thought Trevor, and recalled Cameron, that fat slob who beat up his wife at weekends. Others played golf, he beat up his wife. It was his recreation. Julia had told him to go to the police, but the police wouldn't do anything about it. Domestic problem, they had said. This great country of ours sheltered its brutes under the shade of its oak tree. He blamed Cameron for Julia's death. She never got any peace. And he hated Cameron, hated him with a deadly hatred, more than he hated Hitler. It was Cameron who wouldn't let Julia sleep. Yes, he agreed with the military man. Violence everywhere. Loss of standards and so the two of them sat under the oak tree, watching the pure white swans on the lake.

He had been tormented by a boy called Sherman in his classes. This Sherman would come in to school early and write his nickname on the blackboard. Then he would make animal noises at the back of the room and Trevor would never be able to pin him down. Sherman would say, “Please sir, I can't think of anything to write in my composition.” And Trevor would say, “But you must be able to think of something.” “I can't think of anything at all,” Sherman would say, smiling. And maybe Trevor would try and belt him and Sherman would pull his hand away. So Trevor would take him to the headmaster and Sherman, who was an actor, would tremble as if he were afraid of Trevor and the headmaster would say to himself, “Ah, there is more to this than meets the eye.” And he would regard Sherman, who wasn't at all loutish or terrifying, as a victim who patiently endured Trevor's sarcasm and beatings. And he would say to him, “Now you promise me that you will be a good boy”, and of course Sherman would say he would, not omitting the ‘sir'. Trevor thought that Sherman was evil, that he had never encountered unprincipled evil till he had met him. His cunning and his intelligence were extraordinary, his methods of putting Trevor in the wrong legion. Sometimes after he had pulled his hand away he would say that Trevor had broken his watch. He had an inexhaustible supply of broken watches. Trevor imagined a factory which produced broken watches, something like British Leyland. Sherman too had the knack of enticing him away from the theme of the lesson down byways of his own. Trevor hated him and hated also his mother and father whom he had encountered. Sherman was one of the reasons why he had left Newark. Sherman was the Robin Hood who ran about the green wood tormenting him, firing arrows at him, smiling at him, the outlaw hero. And he himself was the clumsy sheriff, always outwitted. In the free wood.

“Yes,” he said to the military looking man. “I agree with you totally.” He pulled down his hat and walked away.

Sometimes he met Mrs Miller on the stair, but she never talked to him. At first there had been Mrs Brown and then there were the Camerons. He often ran into Cooper when he was putting stuff in the bin, but Cooper always seemed to be in a hurry. His work in the summer was looking after lavatories.

It was Mrs Floss who told him about the old man, Mr Butcher, of whose existence Trevor had been entirely unaware. But apparently Julia used to visit him and help him as best she could.

“I don't know where he stays but it's somewhere on the street,” said Mrs Floss, who had come back from a world cruise paid for with her dead husband's money. “She used to tell me about him. We had a coffee together now and again. Your wife was a wise, kind woman. I used to tell her about Stewart when he was on drugs and she would give me good advice. She was never too busy to pass you by.” Mrs Floss thought that about Trevor, however. She felt that he was snooty, superior, but then on the other hand, it might just be that he was shy. Still, his wife was worth ten of him any day. She was human, warm, she even tried to help Mrs Miller, that selfish old bag upstairs. But Trevor never helped anyone. He would pass her on the stair muttering under his breath as if he were thinking furiously. And yet he had only been a teacher. He hadn't seen as much of the world as she had and yet he had this absurd sense of superiority. She could tell him a thing or two. And he hardly ever remembered about the light, no matter how often she reminded him. And why didn't that stair-woman use pipe clay: Julia used to make beautiful patterns on the stair: she was very artistic. Always patient too, and long suffering. She didn't know where Mr Butcher stayed. Trevor could ask the postman.

One day when Julia and Trevor were in Ilfracombe in Devon they made a mistake and instead of turning up a road which would take them back to the town, they turned up another one instead. They came to a farmhouse which had bright rough tables in front of it, and had in fact been converted into a restaurant. They sipped their iced drinks and then Trevor picked up from the table a brochure which told them the history of the farmhouse. It was called the Haunted House. Many years before, when the coast had been notorious for wreckers, a man used to light fires to bring ships on to the rocks. Then he would plunder them for their cargo. His daughter had left and gone to America to make her fortune. One night he saw a ship and set his illusory lights. The ship had gone on the rocks. He searched the cabins for jewellery and other plunder and found in one of them a woman who was dead and in fact his daughter. He took her body home with him and walled it up in his farmhouse.

Many years later the wife of the farmer who then owned the house said she was going to market. Her husband sat on a bench outside in the sun reading his paper. After a while his attention wandered and he idly studied the house and saw the outline of a window where as far as he knew there was no room. Calculating that there had been a room there in the past, he got hold of some of his workmen and they broke down the wall. And there behind the wall was a room and on an ancient bed the skeleton of a woman. There was also some jewellery. It was some of the money from selling it that had been used to build the restaurant. The owner told the two of them that an American woman, who said that she had spiritual powers sensitive to auras, had been in the room—now open to visitors—and she had seen a woman in white, with seaweed in her hair, walking about; there was jewellery around her neck. Her face was green.

As they walked away from the Haunted House in the bright sunlight, Julia ahead, Trevor imagined that he could see her very bones, so transparent she was in her light dress. She looked vulnerable, thin. He had shivered then in that bright sunshine, haunted by the past, its greed and selfishness.

The postman was able to tell him where Mr Butcher lived.

“Very tragic about Mrs Porter,” said Mr Butcher. “She used to come here of a Thursday afternoon and sometimes of a Tuesday afternoon as well.”

He sat down opposite Trevor, holding a stick in his hands. “She used to make a cup of tea and bring me my messages.”

His keen blue eyes stared unwinkingly at Trevor. There were soup stains on his jacket.

“She was younger than us of course. I always felt better for talking to her.”

What did they talk about?

“Oh, I used to be a seaman. We talked about ports, Hong Kong, Auckland, places like that. I been all over the world. I think she wanted to move.”

“What are you saying, you old bastard,” said Trevor under his breath. “She often wished she had a proper house and a garden. She talked about Devon. She talked about her son and her grand-daughter. She missed seeing her grand-daughter.”

And all that time she never told me, thought Trevor. She wanted a part of her life which she could have for her own. He felt angry that she should have confided in this smelly old man.

“A good woman,” the latter was saying. “She never complained. My legs is bad, you see. I have trouble climbing the stair. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Two old men together.

No, I don't want any of your tea. Trevor felt obscurely jealous of the old man, of the conversations that he had never heard. It was as if there had been a side to his wife that he had never known about, and it bothered him.

“She would have made a good nurse,” Butcher was saying. “She told me once she'd wanted to be a nurse, but her parents were against it. So she became a secretary instead. That was how you met, wasn't it, at school?”

“Yes,” said Trevor between his teeth.

In a short while you're going to say, How old do you think I am? And I'll say you're sixty-five though you're nearer eighty. The old man's teeth lay in a cup on the window sill like sharks' teeth under water.

“She said you was very busy. ‘Always busy,' she said. ‘A Head of a Department is always busy,' she said.”

The tears came into Trevor's eyes. So that had worried her and yet she had told him it hadn't. When they were romancing in their youth she had told him that they could live happily in a cottage together. Yet all this time she had been worried about a house and a garden and his position. A bee buzzed in the old man's room, trying to get out. There were ships in bottles on the sideboard. So much he had seen of the world that Trevor hadn't. All he had seen were the grey ships on wintry nights while below them like mice under floorboards the U-boats patrolled restlessly.

He was furious with the old man. God damn him! What was that about being Head of a Department? His wife had gone to him for talk like a beggar, she had felt the time long; it was she perhaps who needed therapy.

The old man limped over to the window and opened it. The bee still battered itself against the glass. Stupid insect, blind, blundering, honeyed.

“I was shattered when I heard of her death. Of course she told me she had cancer. But she wasn't frightened. She had worked out how long she had. She was a brave lady. Nothing but cancer wherever you look. I've no reason to complain. I've only got arthritis.”

No reason to complain. The sentimental sweetness of it. We are summoned into this world, catapulted on our mission as if with a parachute: youth deceives us, age makes us cynics: the grandeur departs and we lie in harbour becalmed.

There was a verse of poetry above the old man's side-board.

Build a little fence of trust

around today.

Fill the space with loving work

and therein stay.

Look not through the sheltering bars

upon tomorrow.

God will help thee bear what comes

of joy or sorrow.

What immortal poetry, what resonance, what Miltonic sonority! And yet it had probably helped the old man more than Shakespeare would have done.

“My own wife died two years ago. She didn't know me at the end. She would sit opposite me and say, ‘Who is that man? Who are you? Go away, I don't want to see you. I want my Ralph back' (that's me). And she would say, ‘What house is this? I want to go back to my own house'. She would sometimes hear the cry of a baby in the bedroom during the night. ‘Why don't you look after the baby', she would say. Most of the time I was abroad, you see. I was an engineer. She thought I was a stranger who had got into the house. She would say funny things like, ‘What am I to do with my face?' ‘What do you want to do with your face', I'd say, and she would say, ‘I want to put it out'. You would give her an ashtray for her cigarette and she would still put the ash on the floor. One time she said, ‘Who do I have to ask permission from to stop smoking?' ‘No one', I'd say, but she wouldn't believe me. She would make you really laugh. Still, she liked the ships in the bottles.”

Trevor got to his feet, saying, “I just came along to see you.”

“Welcome any time,” said the old man. “Very good of you.” Two old men together, thought Trevor again.

Butcher was lighting his pipe as he left. Trevor walked down stairs which weren't pipecleaned. He heard the roar of a TV from one of the flats. A woman was shouting, “Can't you give me a moment's peace?” Clothes hung on a rope on the back green, flat and geometrical.

“Would you believe it?” said Mrs Blaney, balancing the cup of tea on her knee. “I asked him for the loan of fifty pence to pay the papers the other day and he wouldn't give it to me. Refused point blank. Said he was going to a dance. Sometimes he comes in at seven o'clock in the morning. I have to keep awake all night. He'll throw me a jacket and say ‘Sew a button on for me', no please or anything else, as if I was a servant. Do this, do that, that's their style. They're like seagulls, never satisfied. A little touch of sugar, please.”