Eight Stories (New Directions Bibelot) Page 6

  ‘More poison, Pa,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s the company tonight? gone to the Riviera?’

  ‘They’re in the snuggery, Mr. F., there’s a party for Mrs. Prothero’s daughter.’

  In the back room, under a damp royal family, a row of black-dressed women on a hard bench sat laughing and crying, short glasses lined by their Guinnesses. On an opposite bench two men in jerseys drank appreciatively, nodding at the emotions of the women. And on the one chair, in the middle of the room, an old woman, with a bonnet tied under her chins, a feather boa, and white gym-shoes, tittered and wept above the rest. We sat on the men’s bench. One of the two touched his cap with a sore hand.

  ‘What’s the party, Jack?’ asked Mr. Farr. ‘Meet my colleague, Mr. Thomas; this is Jack Stiff, the mortuary keeper.’

  Jack Stiff spoke from the side of his mouth. ‘It’s Mrs. Prothero there. We call her Old Garbo because she isn’t like her, see. She had a message from the hospital about an hour ago, Mrs. Harris’s Winifred brought it here, to say her second daughter’s died in pod.’

  ‘Baby girl dead, too,’ said the man at his side.

  ‘So all the old girls came round to sympathize, and they made a big collection for her, and now she’s beginning to drink it up and treating round. We’ve had a couple of pints from her already.’

  ‘Shameful!’

  The rum burned and kicked in the hot room, but my head felt tough as a hill and I could write twelve books before morning and roll the ‘Carlton’ barmaid, like a barrel, the length of Tawe sands.

  ‘Drinks for the troops!’

  Before a new audience, the women cried louder, patting Mrs. Prothero’s knees and hands, adjusting her bonnet, praising her dead daughter.

  ‘What’ll you have, Mrs. Prothero, dear?’

  ‘No, have it with me, dear, best in the house.’

  ‘Well, a Guinness tickles my fancy.’

  ‘And a little something in it, dear.’

  ‘Just for Margie’s sake, then.’

  ‘Think if she was here now, dear, singing One of the Ruins or Cockles and Mussels; she had a proper madam’s voice.’

  ‘Oh, don’t, Mrs. Harris!’

  ‘There, we’re only bucking you up. Grief killed the cat, Mrs. Prothero. Let’s have a song together, dear.’

  ‘The pale moon was rising above the grey mountain,

  The sun was declining beneath the blue sea,

  When I strolled with my love to the pure crystal fountain,’ Mrs. Prothero sang.

  ‘It was her daughter’s favourite song,’ said Jack Stiffs' friend.

  Mr. Farr tapped me on the shoulder; his hand fell slowly from a great height and his thin, bird’s voice spoke from a whirring circle on the ceiling. ‘A drop of out-of-doors for you and me.’ The gamps and bonnets, the white gym-shoes, the bottles and the mildew king, the singing mortuary man, the Rose of Tralee, swam together in the snuggery; two small men, Mr. Farr and his twin brother, led me on an ice-rink to the door, and the night air slapped me down. The evening happened suddenly. A wall slumped over and knocked off my trilby; Mr. Farr’s brother disappeared under the cobbles. Here came a wall like a buffalo; dodge him, son. Have a drop of angostura, have a drop of brandy, Fernet Branca, Polly, Ooo! the mother’s darling! have a hair of the dog.

  ‘Feeling better now?’

  I sat in a plush chair I had never seen before, sipping a mothball drink and appreciating an argument between Ted Williams and Mr. Farr. Mr. Farr was saying sternly: ‘You came in here to look for sailors.’

  ‘No, I didn’t then,’ said Ted. ‘I came for local colour.’

  The notices on the walls were: “’The Lord Jersey.” Prop.: Titch Thomas.’ ‘No Betting.’ ‘No Swearing, B——you.’ ‘The Lord helps Himself, but you mustn’t.’ ‘No Ladies allowed, except Ladies.’

  ‘This is a funny pub,’ I said. ‘See the notices?’

  ‘Okay now?’

  ‘I’m feeling upsydaisy.’

  ‘There’s a pretty girl for you. Look, she’s giving you the glad.’

  ‘But she’s got no nose.’

  My drink, like winking, had turned itself into beer. A hammer tapped. ‘Order! order!’ At a sound in a new saloon a collarless chairman with a cigar called on Mr. Jenkins to provide The Lily of Laguna.

  ‘By request,’ said Mr. Jenkins.

  ‘Order! order! for Katie Sebastopol Street. What is it, Katie?’

  She sang the National Anthem.

  ‘Mr. Fred Jones will supply his usual dirty one.’

  A broken baritone voice spoiled the chorus: I recognised it as my own, and drowned it.

  A girl of the Salvation Army avoided the arms of two firemen and sold them a War Cry.

  A young man with a dazzling handkerchief round his head, black and white holiday shoes with holes for the toes, and no socks, danced until the bar cried: ‘Mabel!’

  Ted clapped at my side. ‘That’s style! “Nijinsky of the Night-world,” there’s a story! Wonder if I can get an interview?’

  ‘Half a crack,’ said Mr. Farr.

  ‘Don’t make me cross.’

  A wind from the docks tore up the street, I heard the rowdy dredger in the bay and a boat blowing to come in, the gas-lamps bowed and bent, then again smoke closed about the stained walls with George and Mary dripping above the women’s bench, and Jack Stiff whispered, holding his hand in front of him like the paw of an animal: ‘Old Garbo’s gone.’

  The sad and jolly women huddled together.

  ‘Mrs. Harris’s little girl got the message wrong. Old Garbo’s daughter’s right as rain, the baby was born dead. Now the old girls want their money back, but they can’t find Garbo anywhere.’ He licked his hand. ‘I know where she’s gone.’

  His friend said: ‘To a boozer over the bridge.’

  In low voices the women reviled Mrs. Prothero, liar, adulteress, mother of bastards, thief.

  ‘She got you know what.’

  ‘Never cured it.’

  ‘Got Charlie tattooed on her.’

  ‘Three and eight she owes me.’

  ‘Two and ten.’

  ‘Money for my teeth.’

  ‘One and a tanner out of my Old Age.’

  Who kept filling my glass? Beer ran down my cheek and my collar. My mouth was full of saliva. The bench spun. The cabin of the ‘Fishguard’ tilted. Mr. Farr retreated slowly; the telescope twisted, and his face, with wide and hairy nostrils, breathed against mine.

  ‘Mr. Thomas is going to get sick.’

  ‘Mind your brolly, Mrs. Arthur.’

  ‘Take his head.’

  The last tram clanked home. I did not have the penny for the fare. ‘You get off here. Careful!’ The revolving hill to my father’s house reached to the sky. Nobody was up. I crept to a wild bed, and the wallpaper lakes converged and sucked me down.

  Sunday was a quiet day, though St. Mary’s bells, a mile away, rang on, long after church time, in the holes of my head. Knowing that I would never drink again, I lay in bed until midday dinner and remembered the unsteady shapes and far-off voices of the ten o’clock town. I read the newspapers. All news was bad that morning, but an article called ‘Our Lord was a Flower-lover’ moved me to tears of bewilderment and contrition. I excused myself from the Sunday joint and three vegetables.

  In the park in the afternoon I sat alone near the deserted bandstand. I caught a ball of waste paper that the wind blew down the gravel path towards the rockery, and, straightening it out and holding it on my knee, wrote the first three lines of a poem without hope. A dog nosed me out where I crouched, behind a bare tree in the cold, and rubbed its nose against my hand. ‘My only friend,’ I said. It stayed with me up to the early dusk, sniffing and scratching.

  On Monday morning, with shame and hate, afraid to look at them again, I destroyed the article and the poem, throwing the pieces on to the top of the wardrobe, and I told Leslie Bird in the tram to the office: ‘You should have been with us, Saturday, Christ!’

&
nbsp; Early on Tuesday night, which was Christmas Eve, I walked, with a borrowed half-crown, into the back room of the ‘Fishguard.’ Jack Stiff was alone. The women’s bench was covered with sheets of newspaper. A bunch of balloons hung from the lamp.

  ‘Here’s health!’

  ‘Merry Christmas!’

  ‘Where’s Mrs. Prothero?’

  His hand was bandaged now. ‘Oh! You haven’t heard? She spent all the collection money. She took it over the bridge to the “Heart’s Delight.” She didn’t let one of the old girls see her. It was over a pound. She’d spent a lot of it before they found her daughter wasn’t dead. She couldn’t face them then. Have this one with me. So she finished it up by stop-tap Monday. Then a couple of men from the banana boats saw her walking across the bridge, and she stopped half-way. But they weren’t in time.’

  ‘Merry Christmas!’

  ‘We got a pair of gym-shoes on our slab.’

  None of Old Garbo’s friends came in that night.

  When I showed this story a long time later to Mr. Farr, he said: ‘You got it all wrong. You got the people mixed. The boy with the handkerchief danced in the “Jersey.” Fred Jones was singing in the “Fishguard.” Never mind. Come and have one to-night in the “Nelson.” There’s a girl down there who’ll show you where the sailor bit her. And there’s a policeman who knew Jack Johnson.

  ‘I’ll put them all in a story by and by,’ I said.

  One Warm Saturday

  The young man in a sailor’s jersey, sitting near the summer huts to see the brown and white women coming out and the groups of pretty-faced girls with pale vees and scorched backs who picked their way delicately on ugly, red-toed feet over the sharp stones to the sea, drew on the sand a large, indented woman’s figure; and a naked child, just out of the sea, ran over it and shook water, marking on the figure two wide wet eyes and a hole in the footprinted middle. He rubbed the woman away and drew a paunched man; the child ran over it, tossing her hair, and shook a row of buttons down its belly and a line of drops, like piddle in a child’s drawing, between the long legs stuck with shells.

  In a huddle of picnicking women and their children, stretched out limp and damp in the sweltering sun or fussing over paper carriers or building castles that were at once destroyed by the tattered march of other picnickers to different pieces of the beach, among the ice-cream cries, the angrily happy shouts of boys playing ball, and the screams of girls as the sea rose to their waists, the young man sat alone with the shadows of his failure at his side. Some silent husbands, with rolled up trousers and suspenders dangling, paddled slowly on the border of the sea, paddling women, in thick, black picnic dresses, laughed at their own legs, dogs chased stones, and one proud boy rode the water on a rubber seal. The young man, in his wilderness, saw the holiday Saturday set down before him, false and pretty, as a flat picture under the vulgar sun; the disporting families with paper bags, buckets and spades, parasols and bottles, the happy, hot, and aching girls with sunburn liniments in their bags, the bronzed young men with chests, and the envious, white young men in waistcoats, the thin, pale, hairy, pathetic legs of the husbands silently walking through the water, the plump and curly, shaven-headed and bowed-backed children up to no sense with unrepeatable delight in the dirty sand, moved him, he thought dramatically in his isolation, to an old shame and pity; outside all holiday, like a young man doomed for ever to the company of his maggots, beyond the high and ordinary, sweating, sun-awakened power and stupidity of the summer flesh on a day and a world out, he caught the ball that a small boy had whacked into the air with a tin tray, and rose to throw it back.

  The boy invited him to play. A friendly family stood waiting some way off, the tousled women with their dresses tucked in their knickers, the bare-footed men in shirt-sleeves, a number of children in slips and cut-down underwear. He bowled bitterly to a father standing with a tray before the wicket of hats. ‘The lone wolf playing ball,’ he said to himself as the tray whirled. Chasing the ball towards the sea, passing undressing women with a rush and a wink, tripping over a castle into a coil of wet girls lying like snakes, soaking his shoes as he grabbed the ball off a wave, he felt his happiness return in a boast of the body, and, ‘Look out, Duckworth, here’s a fast one coming,’ he cried to the mother behind the hats. The ball bounced on a boy’s head. In and out of the scattered families, among the sandwiches and clothes, uncles and mothers fielded the bouncing ball. A bald man, with his shirt hanging out, returned it in the wrong direction, and a collie carried it into the sea. Now it was mother’s turn with the tray. Tray and ball together flew over her head. An uncle in a panama smacked the ball to the dog, who swam with it out of reach. They offered the young man egg-and-cress sandwiches and warm stout, and he and an uncle and a father sat down on the Evening Post until the sea touched their feet.

  Alone again, hot and unhappy, for the boasting minute when he ran among the unknown people lying and running loudly at peace was struck away, like a ball, he said, into the sea, he walked to a space on the beach where a hell-fire preacher on a box marked ‘Mr. Matthews’ was talking to a congregation of expressionless women. Boys with pea-shooters sat quietly near him. A ragged man collected nothing in a cap. Mr. Matthews shook his cold hands, stormed at the holiday, and cursed the summer from his shivering box. He cried for a new warmth. The strong sun shone into his bones, and he buttoned his coat collar. Valley children, with sunken, impudent eyes, quick tongues and singing voices, chest thin as shells, gathered round the Punch and Judy and the Stop Me tricycles, and he denied them all. He contradicted the girls in their underclothes combing and powdering, and the modest girls cleverly dressing under tents of towels.

  As Mr. Matthews cast down the scarlet town, drove out the bare-bellied boys who danced around the ice-cream man, and wound the girls’ sunburnt thighs about with his black overcoat—‘Down! down!’ he cried, ‘the night is upon us’—the young man in dejection stood, with a shadow at his shoulder, and thought of Porthcawl’s Coney Beach, where his friends were rocking with girls on the Giant Racer or tearing in the Ghost Train down the skeletons’ tunnel. Leslie Bird would have his arms full of coconuts. Brenda was with Herbert at the rifle-range. Gil Morris was buying Molly a cocktail with a cherry at the ‘Esplanade.’ Here he stood, listening to Mr. Matthews, the retired drinker, crying darkness on the evening sands, with money hot in his pocket and Saturday burning away.

  In his loneliness he had refused their invitations. Herbert, in his low, red sports car, G.B. at the back, a sea-blown nymph on the radiator, called at his father’s house, but he said: ‘I’m not in the mood, old man. I’m going to spend a quiet day. Enjoy yourselves. Don’t take too much pop.’ Only waiting for the sun to set, he stood in the sad circle with the pleasureless women who were staring at a point in the sky behind their prophet, and wished the morning back. Oh, boy! to be wasting his money now on the rings and ranges of the fair, to be sitting in the chromium lounge with a short worth one and six and a Turkish cigarette, telling the latest one to the girls, seeing the sun, through the palms in the lounge window, sink over the promenade, over the Bath chairs, the cripples and widows, the beach-trousered, kerchiefed, week-end wives, the smart, kiss-curled girls with plain and spectacled girl friends, the innocent, swaggering, loud bad boys, and the poms at the ankles, and the cycling sweet-men. Ronald had sailed to Ilfracombe on the Lady Moira, and, in the thick saloon, with a party from Brynhyfryd, he’d be knocking back nips without a thought that on the sands at home his friend was alone and pussyfoot at six o’clock, and the evening dull as a chapel. All his friends had vanished into their pleasures.

  He thought: Poets live and walk with their poems; a man with visions needs no other company; Saturday is a crude day; I must go home and sit in my bedroom by the boiler. But he was not a poet living and walking, he was a young man in a sea town on a warm bank holiday, with two pounds to spend; he had no visions, only two pounds and a small body with its feet on the littered sand; serenity was for old men; and he move
d away, over the railway points, on to the tramlined road.

  He snarled at the flower clock in Victoria Gardens.

  ‘And what shall a prig do now?’ he said aloud, causing a young woman on a bench opposite the white-tiled urinal to smile and put her novel down.

  She had chestnut hair arranged high on her head in an old-fashioned way, in loose coils and a bun, and a Woolworth’s white rose grew out of it and drooped to touch her ear. She wore a white frock with a red paper flower pinned on the breast, and rings and bracelets that came from a fun-fair stall. Her eyes were small and quite green.

  He marked, carefully and coldly in one glance, all the unusual details of her appearance; it was the calm, unstartled certainty of her bearing before his glance from head to foot, the innocent knowledge, in her smile and the set of her head, that she was defended by her gentleness and accessible strangeness against all rude encounters and picking looks, that made his fingers tremble. Though her frock was long and the collar high, she could as well be naked there on the blistered bench. Her smile confessed her body bare and spotless and willing and warm under the cotton, and she waited without guilt.

  How beautiful she is, he thought, with his mind on words and his eyes on her hair and red and white skin, how beautifully she waits for me, though she does not know she is waiting and I can never tell her.

  He had stopped and was staring. Like a confident girl before a camera, she sat smiling, her hands folded, her head slightly to one side so that the rose brushed her neck. She accepted his admiration. The girl in a million took his long look to herself, and cherished his stupid love.

  Midges flew into his mouth. He hurried on shamefully. At the gates of the gardens he turned to see her for the last time on earth. She had lost her calm with his abrupt and awkward going, and stared in confusion after him. One hand was raised as though to beckon him back. If he waited, she would call him. He walked round the corner and heard her voice, a hundred voices, and all hers, calling his name, and a hundred names that were all his, over the bushy walls.