Eight Stories (New Directions Bibelot) Page 4

Jack’s tears had dried. ‘I don’t like Gwilym, he’s barmy.’

  ‘No he isn’t. I found a lot of poems in his bedroom once. They were all written to girls. And he showed them to me afterwards, and he’d changed all the girls’ names to God.’

  ‘He’s religious.’

  ‘No he isn’t, he goes with actresses. He knows Corinne Griffith.’

  Our door was open. I liked the door locked at night, because I would rather have a ghost in the bedroom than think of one coming in; but Jack liked it open, and we tossed and he won. We heard the front door rattle and footsteps in the kitchen passage.

  ‘That’s Uncle Jim.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘He’s like a fox, he eats pigs and chickens.’

  The ceiling was thin and we heard every sound, the creaking of the bard’s chair, the clatter of plates, Annie’s voice saying: ‘Midnight!’

  ‘He’s drunk,’ I said. We lay quite still, hoping to hear a quarrel.

  ‘Perhaps he’ll throw plates,’ I said.

  But Annie scolded him softly. ‘There’s a fine state, Jim.’

  He murmured to her.

  ‘There’s one pig gone,’ she said. ‘Oh, why do you have to do it, Jim? There’s nothing left now. We’ll never be able to carry on.’

  ‘Money! money! money!’ he said. I knew he would be lighting his pipe.

  Then Annie’s voice grew so soft we could not hear the words, and uncle said: ‘Did she pay you the thirty shillings?’

  ‘They’re talking about your mother,’ I told Jack.

  For a long time Annie spoke in a low voice, and we waited for words. ‘Mrs. Williams,’ she said, and ‘motor car,’ and ‘Jack,’ and ‘peaches.’ I thought she was crying for her voice broke on the last word.

  Uncle Jim’s chair creaked again, he might have struck his fist on the table, and we heard him shout: ‘I’ll give her peaches! Peaches, peaches! Who does she think she is? Aren’t peaches good enough for her? To hell with her bloody motor car and her bloody son! Making us small.’

  ‘Don’t, don’t Jim!’ Annie said, ‘you’ll wake the boys.’

  ‘I’ll wake them and whip the hell out of them, too!’

  ‘Please, please, Jim!’

  ‘You send the boy away,’ he said, ‘or I’ll do it myself. Back to his three bloody houses.’

  Jack pulled the bedclothes over his head and sobbed into the pillow: ‘I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to hear. I’ll write to my mother. She’ll take me away.’

  I climbed out to close the door. Jack would not talk to me again, and I fell asleep to the noise of the voices below, which soon grew gentle.

  Uncle Jim was not at breakfast. When we came down, Jack’s shoes were cleaned for him and his jacket was darned and pressed. Annie gave two boiled eggs to Jack and one to me. She forgave me when I drank tea from the saucer.

  After breakfast, Jack walked to the post office. I took the one-eyed collie to chase rabbits in the upper fields, but it barked at ducks and brought me a tramp’s shoe from a hedge, and lay down with its tail wagging in a rabbit hole. I threw stones at the deserted duck pond, and the collie ambled back with sticks.

  Jack went skulking into the damp dingle, his hands in his pockets, his cap over one eye. I left the collie sniffing at a molehill, and climbed to the tree-top in the corner of the lavatory field. Below me, Jack was playing Indians all alone, scalping through the bushes, surprising himself round a tree, hiding from himself in the grass. I called to him once, but he pretended not to hear. He played alone, silently and savagely. I saw him standing with his hands in his pockets, swaying like a Kelly, on the mudbank by the stream at the foot of the dingle. My bough lurched, the heads of the dingle bushes spun up towards me like green tops, ‘I’m falling!’ I cried, my trousers saved me, I swung and grasped, this was one minute of wild adventure, but Jack did not look up and the minute was lost. I climbed, without dignity, to the ground.

  Early in the afternoon, after a silent meal, when Gwilym was reading the scriptures or writing hymns to girls or sleeping in his chapel, Annie was baking bread, and I was cutting a wooden whistle in the loft over the stable, the motor car drove up in the yard again.

  Out of the house Jack, in his best suit, ran to meet his mother, and I heard him say as she stepped, raising her short skirts, on to the cobbles: ‘And he called you a bloody cow, and he said he’d whip the hell out of me, and Gwilym took me to the barn in the dark and let the mice run over me, and Dylan’s a thief, and that old woman’s spoilt my jacket.’

  Mrs. Williams sent the chauffeur for Jack’s luggage. Annie came to the door, trying to smile and curtsy, tidying her hair, wiping her hands on her pinafore.

  Mrs. Williams said, ‘Good afternoon,’ and sat with Jack in the back of the car and stared at the ruin of Gorsehill.

  The chauffeur came back. The car drove off, scattering the hens. I ran out of the stable to wave to Jack. He sat still and stiff by his mother’s side. I waved my handkerchief.

  Just Like Little Dogs

  Standing alone under a railway arch out of the wind, I was looking at the miles of sands, long and dirty in the early dark, with only a few boys on the edge of the sea and one or two hurrying couples with their mackintoshes blown around them like balloons, when two young men joined me, it seemed out of nowhere, and struck matches for their cigarettes and illuminated their faces under bright-checked caps.

  One had a pleasant face; his eyebrows slanted comically towards his temples, his eyes were warm, brown, deep, and guileless, and his mouth was full and weak. The other man had a boxer’s nose and a weighted chin ginger with bristles.

  We watched the boys returning from the oily sea; they shouted under the echoing arch, then their voices faded. Soon there was not a single couple in sight; the lovers had disappeared among the sandhills and were lying down there with broken tins and bottles of the summer passed, old paper blowing by them, and nobody with any sense was about. The strangers, huddled against the wall, their hands deep in their pockets, their cigarettes sparkling, stared, I thought, at the thickening of the dark over the empty sands, but their eyes may have been closed. A train raced over us, and the arch shook. Over the shore, behind the vanishing train, smoke clouds flew together, rags of wings and hollow bodies of great birds black as tunnels, and broke up lazily; cinders fell through a sieve in the air, and the sparks were put out by the wet dark before they reached the sand. The night before, little quick scarecrows had bent and picked at the track-line and a solitary dignified scavenger wandered three miles by the edge with a crumpled coal sack and a park-keeper’s steel-tipped stick. Now they were tucked up in sacks, asleep in a siding, their heads in bins, their beards in straw, in coal-trucks thinking of fires, or lying beyond pickings on Jack Stiff’s slab near the pub in the Fishguard Alley, where the methylated-spirit drinkers danced into the policemen’s arms and women like lumps of clothes in a pool waited, in doorways and holes in the soaking wall, for vampires or firemen. Night was properly down on us now. The wind changed. Thin rain began. The sands themselves went out. We stood in the scooped, windy room of the arch, listening to the noises from the muffled town, a goods train shunting, a siren in the docks, the hoarse trams in the streets far behind, one bark of a dog, unplaceable sounds, iron being beaten, the distant creaking of wood, doors slamming where there were no houses, an engine coughing like a sheep on a hill.

  The two young men were statues smoking, tough-capped and collarless watchers and witnesses carved out of the stone of the blowing room where they stood at my side with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and all the raining, almost winter, night before them. I cupped a match to let them see my face in a dramatic shadow, my eyes mysteriously sunk, perhaps, in a startling white face, my young looks savage in the sudden flicker of light, to make them wonder who I was as I puffed my last butt and puzzled about them. Why was the soft-faced young man, with his tame devil’s eyebrows, standing like a stone figure with a glow-worm in it? He should have a nice girl to bully
him gently and take him to cry in the pictures, or kids to bounce in a kitchen in Rodney Street. There was no sense in standing silent for hours under a railway arch on a hell of a night at the end of a bad summer when girls were waiting, ready to be hot and friendly, in chip shops and shop doorways and Rabbiotti’s all-night café, when the public bar of the ‘Bay View’ at the corner had a fire and skittles and a swarthy, sensuous girl with different coloured eyes, when the billiard saloons were open, except the one in High Street you couldn’t go into without a collar and tie, when the closed parks had empty, covered bandstands and the railings were easy to climb.

  A church clock somewhere struck a lot, faintly from the night on the right, but I didn’t count.

  The other young man, less than two feet from me, should be shouting with the boys, boasting in lanes, propping counters, prancing and clouting in the Mannesmann Hall, or whispering around a bucket in a ring corner. Why was he humped here with a moody man and myself, listening to our breathing, to the sea, the wind scattering sand through the archway, a chained dog and a foghorn and the rumble of trams a dozen streets away, watching a match strike, a boy’s fresh face spying in a shadow, the lighthouse beams, the movement of a hand to a fag, when the sprawling town in a drizzle, the pubs and the clubs and the coffee-shops, the prowlers’ streets, the arches near the promenade, were full of friends and enemies? He could be playing nap by a candle in a shed in a wood-yard.

  Families sat down to supper in rows of short houses, the wireless sets were on, the daughters’ young men sat in the front rooms. In neighbouring houses they read the news off the table-cloth, and the potatoes from dinner were fried up. Cards were played in the front rooms of houses on the hills. In the houses on tops of the hills families were entertaining friends, and the blinds of the front rooms were not quite drawn. I heard the sea in a cold bit of the cheery night.

  One of the strangers said suddenly, in a high, clear voice: ‘What are we all doing then?’

  ‘Standing under a bloody arch,’ said the other one.

  ‘And it’s cold,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t very cosy,’ said the high voice of the young man with the pleasant face, now invisible. ‘I’ve been in better hotels than this.’

  ‘What about that night in the Majestic?’ said the other voice.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Do you often stand here?’ said the pleasant man. His voice might never have broken.

  ‘No, this is the first time here,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I stand in the Brynmill arch.’

  ‘Ever tried the old pier?’

  ‘It’s no good in the rain, is it?’

  ‘Underneath the pier, I mean, in the girders.’

  ‘No, I haven’t been there.’

  ‘Tom spends every Sunday under the pier,’ the pug-faced young man said bitterly. ‘I got to take him his dinner in a piece of paper.’

  ‘There’s another train coming,’ I said. It tore over us, the arch bellowed, the wheels screamed through our heads, we were deafened and spark-blinded and crushed under the fiery weight and we rose again, like battered black men, in the grave of the arch. No noise at all from the swallowed town. The trams had rattled themselves dumb. A pressure of the hidden sea rubbed away the smudge of the docks. Only three young men were alive.

  One said: ‘It’s a sad life, without a home.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a home then?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve got a home all right.’

  ‘I got one, too.’

  ‘And I live near Cwmdonkin Park,’ I said.

  ‘That’s another place Tom sits in in the dark. He says he listens to the owls.’

  ‘I knew a chap once who lived in the country, near Bridgend,’ said Tom, ‘and they had a munition works there in the War and it spoiled all the birds. The chap I know says you can always tell a cuckoo from Bridgend, it goes: “Cuckbloodyoo! cuckbloodyoo!’”

  ‘Cuckbloodyoo!’ echoed the arch.

  ‘Why are you standing under the arch, then?’ asked Tom. ‘It’s warm at home. You can draw the curtains and sit by the fire, snug as a bug. Gracie’s on the wireless to-night. No shananacking in the old moonlight.’

  ‘I don’t want to go home, I don’t want to sit by the fire. I’ve got nothing to do when I’m in and I don’t want to go to bed. I like standing about like this with nothing to do, in the dark all by myself,’ I said.

  And I did, too. I was a lonely nightwalker and a steady stander-at-corners. I liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the streets were deserted and the window lights out, alone and alive on the glistening tramlines in dead and empty High Street under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly Ebenezer Chapel. And I never felt more a part of the remote and overpressing world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity and humility, not for myself alone, but for the living earth I suffered on and for the unfeeling systems in the upper air, Mars and Venus and Brazell and Skully, men in China and St. Thomas, scorning girls and ready girls, soldiers and bullies and policemen and sharp, suspicious buyers of second-hand books, bad, ragged women who’d pretend against the museum wall for a cup of tea, and perfect, unapproachable women out of the fashion magazines, seven feet high, sailing slowly in their flat, glazed creations through steel and glass and velvet. I leant against the wall of a derelict house in the residential areas or wandered in the empty rooms, stood terrified on the stairs or gazing through the smashed windows at the sea or at nothing, and the lights going out one by one in the avenues. Or I mooched in a half-built house, with the sky stuck in the roof and cats on the ladders and a wind shaking through the bare bones of the bedrooms.

  ‘And you can talk,’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you at home?’

  ‘I don’t want to be home,’ said Tom.

  ‘I’m not particular,’ said his friend.

  When a match flared, their heads rocked and spread on the wall, and shapes of winged bulls and buckets grew bigger and smaller. Tom began to tell a story. I thought of a new stranger walking on the sands past the arch and hearing all of a sudden that high voice out of a hole.

  I missed the beginning of the story as I thought of the man on the sands listening in a panic or dodging, like a footballer, in and out among the jumping dark towards the lights behind the railway line, and remembered Tom’s voice in the middle of a sentence.

  ‘…went up to them and said it was a lovely night. It wasn’t a lovely night at all. The sands were empty. We asked them what their names were and they asked us what ours were. We were walking along by this time. Walter here was telling them about the glee party in the “Melba” and what went on in the ladies’ cloakroom. You had to drag the tenors away like ferrets.’

  ‘What were their names?’ I asked.

  ‘Doris and Norma,’ Walter said.

  ‘So we walked along the sands towards the dunes,’ Tom said, ‘and Walter was with Doris and I was with Norma. Norma worked in the steam laundry. We hadn’t been walking and talking for more than a few minutes when, by God, I knew I was head over heels in love with the girl, and she wasn’t the pretty one, either.’

  He described her. I saw her clearly. Her plump, kind face, jolly brown eyes, warm wide mouth, thick bobbed hair, rough body, bottle legs, broad bum, grew from a few words right out of Tom’s story, and I saw her ambling solidly along the sands in a spotted frock in a showering autumn evening with fancy gloves on her hard hands, a gold bangle, with a voile handkerchief tucked in it, round her wrist, and a navy-blue handbag with letters and outing snaps, a compact, a bus ticket, and a shilling.

  ‘Doris was the pretty one,’ said Tom, ‘smart and touched up and sharp as a knife. I was twenty-six years old and I’d never been in love, and there I was, gawking at Norma in the middle of Tawe sands, too frightened to put my finger on her gloves. Walter had his arm round Doris then.’

  They sheltered behind a dune. The night dropped down on them quickly. Walter was a caution with Doris, hugging and larking, and Tom sat close to
Norma, brave enough to hold her hand in its cold glove and tell her all his secrets. He told her his age and his job. He liked staying in in the evenings with a good book. Norma liked dances. He liked dances, too. Norma and Doris were sisters. ‘I’d never have thought that,’ Tom said, ‘you’re beautiful, I love you.’

  Now the story-telling thing in the arch gave place to the loving night in the dunes. The arch was as high as the sky. The faint town noises died. I lay like a pimp in a bush by Tom’s side and squinted through to see him round his hands on Norma’s breast. ‘Don’t you dare!’ Walter and Doris lay quietly near them. You could have heard a safety-pin fall.

  ‘And the curious thing was,’ said Tom, ‘that after a time we all sat up on the sand and smiled at each other. And then we all moved softly about on the sand in the dark, without saying a word. And Doris was lying with me, and Norma was with Walter.’

  ‘But why did you change over, if you loved her?’ I asked.

  ‘I never understood why,’ said Tom. ‘I think about it every night.’

  ‘That was in October,’ Walter said.

  And Tom continued: ‘We didn’t see much of the girls until July. I couldn’t face Norma. Then they brought two paternity orders against us, and Mr. Lewis, the magistrate, was eighty years old, and stone deaf, too. He put a little trumpet by his ear and Norma and Doris gave evidence. Then we gave evidence, and he couldn’t decide whose was which. And at the end he shook his head back and fore and pointed his trumpet and said: “Just like little dogs!”’

  All at once I remembered how cold it was. I rubbed my numb hands together. Fancy standing all night in the cold. Fancy listening, I thought, to a long, unsatisfactory story in the frost-bite night in a polar arch. ‘What happened then?’ I asked.

  Walter answered. ‘I married Norma,’ he said ‘and Tom married Doris. We had to do the right thing by them, didn’t we? That’s why Tom won’t go home. He never goes home till the early morning. I’ve got to keep him company. He’s my brother.’

  It would take me ten minutes to run home. I put up my coat collar and pulled my cap down.