Eight Stories (New Directions Bibelot) Page 5

  ‘And the curious thing is,’ said Tom, ‘that I love Norma and Walter doesn’t love Norma or Doris. We’ve two nice little boys. I call mine Norman.’

  We all shook hands.

  ‘See you again,’ said Walter.

  ‘I’m always hanging about,’ said Tom.

  ‘Abyssinia!’

  I walked out of the arch, crossed Trafalgar Terrace, and pelted up the steep streets.

  Old Garbo

  Mr. Farr trod delicately and disgustedly down the dark, narrow stairs like a man on ice. He knew, without looking or slipping, that vicious boys had littered the darkest corners with banana peel; and when he reached the lavatory, the basins would be choked and the chains snapped on purpose. He remembered ‘Mr. Farr, no father’ scrawled in brown, and the day the sink was full of blood that nobody admitted having lost. A girl rushed past him up the stairs, knocked the papers out of his hand, did not apologize, and the loose meg of his cigarette burned his lower lip as he failed to open the lavatory door. I heard from inside his protest and rattlings, the sing-song whine of his voice, the stamping of his small patent-leather shoes, his favourite swear-words—he swore, violently and privately, like a collier used to thinking in the dark—and I let him in.

  ‘Do you always lock the door?’ he asked, scurrying to the tiled wall.

  ‘It stuck,’ I said.

  He shivered, and buttoned.

  He was the senior reporter, a great shorthand writer, a chain-smoker, a bitter drinker, very humorous, round-faced and round-bellied, with dart holes in his nose. Once, I thought as I stared at him then in the lavatory of the offices of the Tawe News, he might have been a mincing-mannered man, with a strut and a cane to balance it, a watch-chain across the waistcoat, a gold tooth, even, perhaps a flower from his own garden in his buttonhole. But now each attempt at a precise gesture was caked and soaked before it began; when he placed the tips of his thumb and forefinger together, you saw only the cracked nails in mourning and the Woodbine stains. He gave me a cigarette and shook his coat to hear matches.

  ‘Here’s a light, Mr. Farr,’ I said.

  It was good to keep in with him; he covered all the big stories, the occasional murder, such as when Thomas O’Connor used a bottle on his wife—but that was before my time—the strikes, the best fires. I wore my cigarette as he did, a hanging badge of bad habits.

  ‘Look at that word on the wall,’ he said. ‘Now that’s ugly. There’s a time and a place.’

  Winking at me, scratching his bald patch as though the thought came from there, he said: ‘Mr. Solomon wrote that.’

  Mr. Solomon was the news editor and a Wesleyan.

  ‘Old Solomon,’ said Mr. Farr, ‘he’d cut every baby in half just for pleasure.’

  I smiled and said: ‘I bet he would!’ But I wished that I could have answered in such a way as to show for Mr. Solomon the disrespect I did not feel. This was a great male moment, and the most enjoyable since I had begun work three weeks before: leaning against the cracked tiled wall, smoking and smiling, looking down at my shoe scraping circles on the wet floor, sharing a small wickedness with an old, important man. I should have been writing up last night’s performance of The Crucifixion or loitering, with my new hat on one side, through the Christmas-Saturday-crowded town in the hopes of an accident.

  ‘You must come along with me one night,’ Mr. Farr said slowly. ‘We’ll go down the “Fishguard” on the docks; you can see the sailors knitting there in the public bar. Why not tonight? And there’s shilling women in the “Lord Jersey.” You stick to Woodbines, like me.’

  He washed his hands as a young boy does, wiping the dirt on the roll-towel, stared in the mirror over the basin, twirled the ends of his moustache, and saw them droop again immediately after.

  ‘Get to work,’ he said.

  I walked into the lobby, leaving him with his face pressed to the glass and one finger exploring his bushy nostrils.

  It was nearly eleven o’clock, and time for a cocoa or a Russian tea in the Café Royal, above the tobacconist’s in High Street, where junior clerks and shop assistants and young men working in their fathers’ offices or articled to stock brokers and solicitors meet every morning for gossip and stories. I made my way through the crowds: the Valley men, up for the football; the country shoppers, the window gazers; the silent, shabby men at the corners of the packed streets, standing in isolation in the rain; the press of mothers and prams; old women in black, brooched dresses carrying frails, smart girls with shining mackintoshes and splashed stockings; little, dandy lascars, bewildered by the weather; business men with wet spats; through a mushroom forest of umbrellas; and all the time I thought of the paragraphs I would never write. I’ll put you all in a story by and by.

  Mrs. Constable, laden and red with shopping, recognized me as she charged out of Woolworth’s like a bull. ‘I haven’t seen your mother for ages! Oh! this Christmas rush! Remember me to Florrie. I’m going to have a cup of tea at the “Modern.” There,’ she said, ‘I’ve lost a pan!’

  I saw Percy Lewis, who put chewing gum in my hair at school.

  A tall man stared at the doorway of a hat shop, resisting the crowds, standing hard and still. All the moving irrelevancies of good news grew and acted around me as I reached the café entrance and climbed the stairs.

  ‘What’s for you, Mr. Swaffer?’

  ‘The usual, please.’ Cocoa and free biscuit.

  Most of the boys were there already. Some wore the outlines of moustaches, others had sideboards and crimped hair, some smoked curved pipes and talked with them gripped between their teeth, there were pin-stripe trousers and hard collars, one daring bowler.

  ‘Sit by here,’ said Leslie Bird. He was in the boots at Dan Lewis’s.

  ‘Been to the flicks this week, Thomas?’

  ‘Yes. The Regal. White Lies. Damned good show, too! Connie Bennett was great! Remember her in the foam-bath, Leslie?’

  ‘Too much foam for me, old man.’

  The broad vowels of the town were narrowed in, the rise and fall of the family accent was caught and pressed.

  At the top window of the International Stores across the street a group of uniformed girls were standing with tea-cups in their hands. One of them waved a handkerchief. I wondered if she waved it to me. ‘There’s that dark piece again,’ I said. ‘She’s got her eye on you.’

  ‘They look all right in their working clothes,’ he said. ‘You catch them when they’re all dolled up, they’re awful. I knew a little nurse once, she looked a peach in her uniform, really refined; no, really, I mean. I picked her up on the prom one night. She was in her Sunday best. There’s a difference; she looked like a bit of Marks and Spencer’s.’ As he talked he was looking through the window with the corners of his eyes.

  The girl waved again, and turned away to giggle.

  ‘Pretty cheap!’ he said.

  I said: ‘And little Audrey laughed and laughed.’

  He took out a plated cigarette case. ‘Present,’ he said. ‘I bet my uncle with three balls has it in a week. Have a best Turkish.’

  His matches were marked Allsopps. ‘Got them from the “Carlton” he said. ‘Pretty girl behind the bar: knows her onions. You’ve never been there, have you? Why don’t you drop in for one to-night? Gil Morris’ll be there, too. We usually sink a couple Saturdays. There’s a hop at the “Melba.”’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m going out with our senior reporter. Some other time, Leslie. So long!’

  I paid my threepence.

  ‘Good morning, Cassie.’

  ‘Good morning, Hannen.’

  The rain had stopped and High Street shone. Walking on the tram-lines, a neat man held his banner high and prominently feared the Lord. I knew him as a Mr. Matthews, who had been saved some years ago from British port and who now walked every night, in rubber shoes with a prayer book and a flashlight, through the lanes. There went Mr. Evans the Produce through the side-door of the ‘Bugle.’ Three typists rushed by for lunch,
poached egg and milk-shake, leaving a lavender scent. Should I take the long way through the Arcade, and stop to look at the old man with the broken, empty pram who always stood there, by the music store, and who would take off his cap and set his hair alight for a penny? It was only a trick to amuse boys, and I took the short cut down Chapel Street, on the edge of the slum called the Strand, past the enticing Italian chip shop where young men who had noticing parents bought twopennyworth on late nights to hide their breath before the last tram home. Then up the narrow office stairs and into the reporters’ room.

  Mr. Solomon was shouting down the telephone. I heard the last words: ‘You’re just a dreamer, Williams.’ He put the receiver down. ‘That boy’s a buddy dreamer,’ he said to no one. He never swore.

  I finished my report of The Crucifixion and handed it to Mr. Farr.

  ‘Too much platitudinous verbosity.’

  Half an hour later, Ted Williams, dressed to golf, sidled in, smiling, thumbed his nose at Mr. Solomon’s back, and sat quietly in a corner with a nail-file.

  I whispered: ‘What was he slanging you for?’

  ‘I went out on a suicide, a tram conductor called Hopkins, and the widow made me stay and have a cup of tea. That’s all.’ He was very winning in his ways, more like a girl than a man who dreamed of Fleet Street and spent his summer fortnight walking up and down past the Daily Express and looking for celebrities in the pubs.

  Saturday was my free afternoon. It was one o’clock and time to leave, but I stayed on; Mr. Farr said nothing. I pretended to be busy scribbling words and caricaturing with no likeness Mr. Solomon’s toucan profile and the snub copy-boy who whistled out of tune behind the windows of the telephone box. I wrote my name, ‘Reporters’ Room, Tawe News, Tawe, South Wales, England, Europe, The Earth.’ And a list of books I had not written: ‘Land of My Fathers, a Study of the Welsh Character in all its aspects’; ‘Eighteen, a Provincial Autobiography.’; ‘The Merciless Ladies, a Novel.’ Still Mr. Farr did not look up. I wrote ‘Hamlet.’ Surely Mr. Farr, stubbornly transcribing his council notes had not forgotten. I heard Mr. Solomon mutter, leaning over his shoulder: ‘To aitch with Alderman Daniels.’ Half-past one. Ted was in a dream. I spent a long time putting on my overcoat, tied my Old Grammarian’s scarf one way and then another.

  ‘Some people are too lazy to take their half-days off,’ said Mr. Farr suddenly. ‘Six o’clock in the “Lamps” back bar.’ He did not turn round or stop writing.

  ‘Going for a nice walk?’ asked my mother.

  ‘Yes, on the common. Don’t keep tea waiting.’

  I went to the Plaza. ‘Press,’ I said to the girl with the Tyrolean hat and skirt.

  ‘There’s been two reporters this week.’

  ‘Special notice.’

  She showed me to a seat. During the educational film, with the rude seeds hugging and sprouting in front of my eyes and plants like arms and legs, I thought of the bob women and the pansy sailors in the dives. There might be a quarrel with razors, and once Ted Williams found a lip outside the Mission to Seamen. It had a small moustache. The sinuous plants danced on the screen. If only Tawe were a larger sea-town, there would be curtained rooms underground with blue films. The potato’s life came to an end. Then I entered an American college and danced with the president’s daughter. The hero, called Lincoln, tall and dark with good teeth, I displaced quickly, and the girl spoke my name as she held his shadow, the singing college chorus in sailors’ hats and bathing dresses called me big boy and king, Jack Oakie and I sped up the field, and on the shoulders of the crowd the president’s daughter and I brought across the shifting-coloured curtain with a kiss that left me giddy and bright-eyed as I walked out of the cinema into the strong lamplight and the new rain.

  A whole wet hour to waste in the crowds. I watched the queue outside the Empire and studied the posters of Nuit de Paris, and thought of the long legs and startling faces of the chorus girls I had seen walking arm in arm, earlier that week, up and down the streets in the winter sunshine, their mouths, I remembered remarking and treasuring for the first page of ‘The Merciless Ladies’ that was never begun, like crimson scars, their hair raven-black or silver; their scent and paint reminded me of the hot and chocolate-coloured East, their eyes were pools. Lola de Kenway, Babs Courcey, Ramona Day would be with me all my life. Until I died, of a wasting, painless disease, and spoke my prepared last words, they would always walk with me, recalling me to my dead youth in the vanished High Street nights when the shop windows were blazing, and singing came out of the pubs, and sirens from the Hafod sat in the steaming chip shops with their handbags on their knees and their ear-rings rattling. I stopped to look at the window of Dirty Black’s, the Fancy Man, but it was innocent; there were only itching and sneezing powders, stink bombs, rubber pens, and Charlie masks; all the novelties were inside, but I dared not go in for fear a woman should serve me, Mrs. Dirty Black with a moustache and knowing eyes, or a thin, dog-faced girl I saw there once, who winked and smelt of seaweed. In the market I bought pink cachous. You never knew.

  The back room of ‘The Three Lamps’ was full of elderly men. Mr. Farr had not arrived. I leant against the bar, between an alderman and a solicitor, drinking bitter, wishing that my father could see me now and glad, at the same time, that he was visiting Uncle A. in Aberavon. He could not fail to see that I was a boy no longer, nor fail to be angry at the angle of my fag and my hat and the threat of the clutched tankard. I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.

  ‘Same again, miss.’ She was middle-aged. ‘One for you, miss?’

  ‘Not during hours, ta all the same.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Was that an invitation to drink with her afterwards, to wait at the back door until she glided out, and then to walk through the night, along the promenade and sands, on to a soft dune where couples lay loving under their coats and looking at the Mumbles lighthouse? She was plump and plain, her netted hair was auburn and wisped with grey. She gave me my change like a mother giving her boy pennies for the pictures, and I would not go out with her if she put cream on it.

  Mr. Farr hurried down High Street, savagely refusing laces and matches, averting his eyes from the shabby crowds. He knew that the poor and the sick and the ugly, unwanted people were so close around him that, with one look of recognition, one gesture of sympathy, he would be lost among them and the evening would be spoiled for ever.

  ‘You’re a pint man then,’ he said at my elbow.

  ‘Good evening, Mr. Farr. Only now and then for a change. What’s yours? Dirty night,’ I said.

  Safe in a prosperous house, out of the way of the rain and the unsettling streets, where the poor and the past could not touch him, he took his glass lazily in the company of business and professional men and raised it to the light. ‘It’s going to get dirtier,’ he said. ‘You wait till the “Fishguard.” Here’s health! You can see the sailors knitting there. And the old fish-girls in the “Jersey.” Got to go to the w. for a breath of fresh air.’

  Mr. Evans the Produce came in quickly through a side door hidden by curtains, whispered his drink, shielded it with his overcoat, swallowed it in secrecy.

  ‘Similar,’ said Mr. Farr, ‘and half for his nibs.’

  The bar was too high class to look like Christmas. A notice said ‘No Ladies.’

  We left Mr. Evans gulping in his tent.

  Children screamed in Goat Street, and one boy, out of season, pulled my sleeve, crying: ‘Penny for the guy!’ Big women in men’s caps barricaded their doorways, and a posh girl gave us the wink at the corner of the green iron convenience opposite the Carlton Hotel. We entered to music, the bar was hung with ribbons and balloons, a tubercular tenor clung to the piano, behind the counter Leslie Bird’s pretty barmaid was twitting a group of young men
who leant far over and asked to see her garters and invited her to gins and limes and lonely midnight walks and moist adventures in the cinema. Mr. Farr sneered down his glass as I watched the young men enviously and saw how much she liked their ways, how she slapped their hands lightly and wriggled back, in pride of her prettiness and gaiety, to pull the beer-handles.

  ‘Toop little Twms from the Valleys. There’ll be some puking to-night,’ he said with pleasure.

  Other young men, sleek-haired, pale, and stocky, with high cheek-bones and deep eyes, bright ties, double-breasted waistcoats and wide trousers, some pocked from the pits, their broad hands scarred and damaged, all exultantly half-drunk, stood singing round the piano, and the tenor with the fallen chest led in a clear voice. Oh! to be able to join in the suggestive play or the rocking choir, to shout Bread of Heaven, with my shoulders back and my arms linked with Little Moscow, or to be called ‘saucy’ and ‘a one’ as I joked and ogled at the counter, making innocent, dirty love that could come to nothing among the spilt beer and piling glasses.

  ‘Let’s get away from the bloody nightingales,’ said Mr. Farr.

  ‘Too much bloody row,’ I said.

  ‘Now we’re coming to somewhere.’ We crawled down Strand alleys by the side of the mortuary, through a gas-lit lane where hidden babies cried together and reached the ‘Fishguard’ door as a man, muffled like Mr. Evans, slid out in front of us with a bottle or a black-jack in one gloved hand. The bar was empty. An old man whose hands trembled sat behind the counter, staring at his turnip watch.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Pa.’

  ‘Good evening, Mr. F.’

  ‘Drop of rum, Pa.’

  A red bottle shook over two glasses.

  ‘Very special poison, son.’

  ‘This’ll make your eyes bulge,’ said Mr. Farr.

  My iron head stood high and firm, no sailors’ rum could rot the rock of my belly. Poor Leslie Bird the port-sipper, and little Gil Morris who marked dissipation under his eyes with a blacklead every Saturday night, I wished they could have seen me now, in the dark, stunted room with photographs of boxers peeling on the wall.