The Tenement (8 page)

Trevor pushed the sugar bowl across. “It's not good for me of course. I've tried to slim but I always surrender in the end. Always. I saw a diet in the
Express
the other day, melons and cucumbers mostly. They tell you to take milk, then they tell you not to take it. They tell you whisky is good for you. Mind you, it said in the paper the other day that a tot
is
good for you. I don't suppose you're in for the million pounds? They want to sell more papers, that's what it is. I don't know what I would do if I got a million pounds. So many people get a divorce when they become rich, don't you think? Look at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.”

Trevor considered them. He hated Elizabeth Taylor. He thought she was a totally selfish hardbitten survivor. He had a photograph of her on the wall opposite the toilet seat. She was smiling at her fifth husband and saying “This time it's for keeps.” She was as sweet as a young girl. How did they do it, these people? How did they walk through crashing marriages? He had never wanted anyone other than Julia. He had loved her and she had loved him.

“I have a card with my number on it for the million pounds,” said Mrs Blaney. “But the fact is, I've never won anything in a raffle. The number of raffle tickets I've bought you would never believe. I'm not a lucky person. Well, thank you for the tea. I'll be here again week after next. There's no pipe clay available, I told you that. I don't know where your wife got it from, I tried everywhere. No pipe clay, they told me, they don't make it now. It's like these coloured clips for spectacles, different colours. You stick them on the frames. Well, you can't get them any more. I've asked a lot of opticians. We've discontinued that line, they say. And they were beautiful and so handy. Still.”

She pulled on her gloves. “That woman next door, what's her name?”

“Mrs Floss,” said Trevor.

“Does she often wander about in her nightgown?”

“Not always. A lot of the time. She goes on world tours.”

“Oh, oh, well, some people have all the luck. Ta ta, then, see you week after next.”

Trevor picked the letter from the floor and glanced through it rapidly. “Pleased to ask you to talk to our group … small number of people interested in poetry … of course not as good as you and others like you. Would August the 7th be suitable? Will be done through. … Meet you at station if you wish. … Look forward to seeing you. … Such a treat for our people … real live author. … One of our members had a poem in the People's Journal, another a story in Nickety Nackety. … BBC programme. … Yours Very Sincerely, Marjorie Gillespie. PS Would be glad if you would consent to judge our entries for the
FLORA NICOLSON SHORT STORY CUP
.”

Trevor laughed quietly to himself. Sometimes he blew into small towns for poetry readings like a hit man with his briefcase. So many people he had met at draughty stations. So many had stood up and said, “Needs no introduction. One of Scotland's …” Sometimes there might be thirty people, sometimes three. Once a member of the audience had shouted “Are you a committed poet?” One of his poems which used fishing as a linguistic metaphor had led to a discussion with an old trawler man about cod … his voice echoed across empty seats. Was he the god they had come to see, the one touched by fire from heaven? Not at all. Once someone had asked him, “Do you feel yourself a poet when you get up in the morning?” “No,” Trevor had replied honestly.

Once he had been introduced as Hector Macmaster, a lyricist of note. At the end of the proceedings he shoved his cheque in his wallet and ran away, with his ancient briefcase.

After each poetry reading he washed his face. How unclean he felt. Unclean, unclean. Should he have a bell like a leper?

He wrote: “Pleased to visit your group. Thank you for asking me. Yes, the time stated will be suitable. Would be glad if you would meet me at the station bookstall at half past six. Will judge your short stories. Always wish to encourage creativity. Yours sincerely, Trevor Porter.”

Dynamo of the Muses, Road Traveller, Hit Man of the Poetry Society. Who is the best poet on your avenue?

Boycott had made twenty runs. Trevor couldn't understand why he liked watching cricket so much, even though he had never played it. He liked perhaps the leisurely desultory eternal hum of it, the commentators with their plummy voices, the old fashioned terminology, the ritual, the silences … the shadows cast on the ground by the white uniforms. Good old Boycott. Remain yourself at all costs. Don't let anyone hurry you.

One day Julia's sister, Patricia, and her husband, James, drove all the way from Devon in James' car. James wasn't in the habit of speaking much, though he could drive a tractor, repair it, run a farm, build a house, sing when requested to at concerts, cook and do innumerable other things. His wife, Patricia, said, “I only came to collect the brooch my mother passed on to Julia, I hope you don't mind.”

“Not at all,” said Trevor.

James stared down at the floor with its blue linoleum. When Trevor and Julia had visited them in Devon they would be wakened by a cock crowing. He had been taught how to drive a tractor, but wasn't really interested in the farm. On the other hand he could do any electrical repairs required.

“So sad,” said Patricia. “James drove me up. It's a holiday for me but James here doesn't like taking holidays. He hasn't had a holiday for fifteen years, have you, James?” James stared down at the floor, his face red and ripe like a fruit. “I wouldn't really want anything,” said Patricia, “but the brooch has a sentimental value.” Trevor took her into Julia's room. There were brushes, pots of powder, lipstick, bath salts, soaps, lying on the dressing table.

“So sad,” Patricia repeated. “Julia wanted a house. Did you know that? She hated living in a flat. Why didn't you take a school in Devon? She wanted to return there. There was a young boy she nearly married. He had a motor cycle, but mother never liked him. She thought motor cycles were dangerous.”

Together we walked along the cliffs, thought Trevor, as in Hardy's poems. He too had never known how much he had loved his wife until he lost her, selfish, bald, old man. Yet those heartbreaking poems! By the cliffs. There was a flash of Julia turning her face towards him against the blinding yellow of the mustard seed.

“… naturally she thought of you as well. We corresponded regularly. She was the only one of my sisters I wrote to. Ah, well.”

James hadn't spoken at all. Perhaps he felt ashamed of his wife with her bright seeking eyes.

“Take anything you like,” said Trevor. “I'm sure she would like you to take anything.”

“Are you sure? Well, then, this other brooch … I like it very much. So unusual. It will be a memory of her.”

“Certainly.”

“You won't be moving to a smaller flat?”

“No.”

“Wasn't there a couple here who were making a lot of noise? It got on Julia's nerves, I remember her telling me.”

“Yes.”

“Are they still as bad?”

“Yes. Unfortunately.”

“She did so much travelling, poor dear. She hated packing, unpacking. Didn't she, James?”

James muttered some incomprehensible words. His red hands lay on his knees. The cleverest of the lot of us, thought Trevor, he doesn't speak at all. Everything comes so easily to him and yet his wife leads him by the hand. Odd. What does he really think about? Is he a philosopher in his deepest being?

“Of course I don't drive myself,” said Patricia brightly. “We came through London. I don't know how James does it. First time we came through London in the car and he had no difficulty. No, thanks, we won't wait for a cup of tea really. You see so many foreign cars driving in the middle of the road. Isn't that right, James? They have no idea. Of course we don't leave Devon much.”

Take the jewellery and go, thought Trevor viciously.

“There weren't many at the funeral,” said Patricia. “I thought there might have been more.”

“I shall be cremated myself,” said Trevor irrelevantly.

“Oh? She should have been sent to Devon among her own people. That's what I was saying to James.”

They left, James shaking Trevor's hand in an embarrassed manner. Trevor slammed the door, thought of the bare dressing table and wept.

He listened to the din above his head. The Camerons fighting again. “Bugger you,” he shouted in fury and banged at the ceiling with his broom. There was silence for a while, then the noise restarted as if Cameron were moving wardrobes, sideboards, gravestones, from corner to corner. What on earth was he doing? Could a man be as evil as to do that, create noise for the sake of doing so? Trevor wept tears of shame and anger. He should have confronted that lout long ago, but he had never had the courage. “You killed my wife,” he shouted. There was another silence and then the TV was turned on full blast. Cameron was undoubtedly a psychopath.

One afternoon, quite by chance, he found what his wife had been looking for when she had painfully left her bed. It was a diary, hidden between two sheets in a drawer. It had a pink cover. Trevor withdrew it carefully: he wouldn't have found it unless he had been looking for sheets to change the bed.

The diary began at the time when he was in the Navy and told of the birth of Robin, of his schooling, of his beginning work. (Trevor asks him to give money to me but he refuses!) Later, however, he read that Robin had been sending money to his mother secretly. (But nothing for the old bugger, so he calls him. I wish he wouldn't speak like that. It's just that Trevor is occupied with his poetry. If there is no mail he's in a bad temper for the rest of the day. He talks about how others worse than him have a better literary reputation. He says he should never have left Scotland, that was his mistake.)

She confided her longings to her diary. She wanted a house. She hated the continual shifting. She wrote, “I don't want to tell him I've got cancer. It'll worry him: it doesn't worry me as much as I thought it would.” (But, thought Trevor, if she had really been happy, would it not have worried her?)

“The fact is, he can't face reality,” Julia wrote. “He wouldn't be able to face the fact of cancer any more than he could demand that repairs should be done to the roof.”

She wrote, “I don't think he likes Robin because he's different from himself. He never really wanted a child, that's the tragedy of it.” She underlined the words, “He must be protected.” “I worry what will happen when I die and he won't be able to cope. These poetry groups, why is it always women who are in charge of them?”

“That was an odd incident at Ilfracombe,” she wrote. “Unbelievable really. I thought he might have used it in a poem. But he didn't. He wants to forget about it for some reason.
I think I know
. He actually thinks I don't understand him but to me he's as clear as water, as crystal.”

“I don't think he ever recovered from his experiences on the convoy. He's not really very brave. But he can endure, oh, he can certainly endure.”

“I was ashamed about the flowers for the church. I should really have my own garden. I always loved gardens.”

“Mrs Floss isn't too bad. Drinks too much of course but we've had lots of conversations. She's very lonely too. She told me she once fell in love with a Spaniard. And Mr Cameron. Why does he hurt his wife so much? He must know he's doing it.”

“I think I should destroy this diary. I can't bring myself to do it today. Maybe tomorrow.”

And that was the last entry. In the diary were details of all the places they had been to, from London to Newark to Glasgow. It detailed his continual complaints about his jobs. If it was not one thing, it was another. The entries grew shorter as Julia weakened. She had even told the doctor not to inform Trevor of what was wrong with her. But did she really love him? Would she have gone so gladly to her death if she had? He had the impression of a tired exhausted woman who wished to go to a place where there would be no more removals.

Trevor stared open eyed at the terrible naked day.

So gladly into that good night.

Her eyes at the end followed him everywhere as if she were wanting to ask a question.

The woman phoned about the oak tree again. He discovered that her name was Mrs Ross. He prevaricated, said he would give an answer in a few days' time. Could she leave her phone number? Time was short, she insisted. The oak tree had been there for a long time. Why could he not give an answer, he asked himself. He must change. He must change.

Travelling on the train to the poetry reading he gazed out at the fields which were orderly, neat. Suddenly he had an idea. He combined the neat fields with Dante's poetry. Dante's head like the sun appearing through the haze stared down at these geometrical fields. He took out his pen and began to write.

“These orderly fields. What would Dante say?”

The sun glared down on them, the harvesters waved out of the inferno. Who was that old woman scarfed like a tinker who was waving her handkerchief at the train? This however, unlike Dante's, was not a Catholic country. This was a sparse Protestant country. And yet Dante's verse hadn't been ornate: on the contrary, it too had been sparse.

His mind left the fields, concentrated on the train. Its carriages were like segments of worms. Dante headed through the fields like a great poet who was composed of heat, of the worm. He felt for the first time since Julia's death that a poetic idea was writhing within him. He would lay it carefully in the back of his mind as into a drawer, and let it ferment there.

Marjorie Gillespie met him at the station. She was a tall definite woman who wore tweeds.

“Would you like some dinner?” she said, skilfully negotiating the traffic in her Renault. “I booked a table for two in the Oriel Hotel.”

For some reason Trevor told her that his wife had died recently. “Oh, I am so sorry. I didn't know. Did you notice that fellow driving straight through the lights and they talk of woman drivers. Sorry, you were saying. Oh, about your wife. If I had known of course I wouldn't have intruded on you.”