Eight Stories (New Directions Bibelot) Read online

  And what shall the terrified prig of a love-mad young man do next? he asked his reflection silently in the distorting mirror of the empty ‘Victoria’ saloon. His ape-like hanging face, with ‘Bass’ across the forehead, gave back a cracked sneer.

  If Venus came in on a plate, said the two red, melon-slice lips, I would ask for vinegar to put on her.

  She could drive my guilt out; she could smooth away my shame; why didn’t I stop to talk to her? he asked.

  You saw a queer tart in a park, his reflection answered, she was a child of nature, oh my! oh my! Did you see the dewdrops in her hair? Stop talking to the mirror like a man in a magazine, I know you too well.

  A new head, swollen and lop-jawed, wagged behind his shoulder. He spun round to hear the barman say:

  ‘Has the one and only let you down? You look like death warmed up. Have this one on the house. Free beer to-day. Free X’s.’ He pulled the beer handle. ‘Only the best served here. Straight from the rust. You do look queer,’ he said, ‘the only one saved from the wreck and the only wreck saved. Here’s looking at you!’ He drank the beer he had drawn.

  ‘May I have a glass of beer, please?’

  ‘What do you think this is, a public house?’

  On the polished table in the middle of the saloon the young man drew, with a finger dipped in strong, the round head of a girl and piled a yellow froth of hair upon it.

  ‘Ah! dirty, dirty!’ said the barman, running round from behind the counter and rubbing the head away with a dry cloth.

  Shielding the dirtiness with his hat, the young man wrote his name on the edge of the table and watched the letters dry and fade.

  Through the open bay-window, across the useless railway covered with sand, he saw the black dots of bathers, the stunted huts, the jumping dwarfs round the Punch and Judy, and the tiny religious circle. Since he had walked and played down there in the crowded wilderness excusing his despair, searching for company though he refused it, he had found his own true happiness and lost her all in one bewildering and clumsy half a minute by the ‘Gentlemen’ and the flower clock. Older and wiser and no better, he would have looked in the mirror to see if his discovery and loss had marked themselves upon his face in shadows under the eyes or lines about the mouth, were it not for the answer he knew he would receive from the distorted reflection.

  The barman came to sit near him, and said in a false voice: ‘Now you tell me all about it, I’m a regular storehouse of secrets.’

  ‘There isn’t anything to tell. I saw a girl in Victoria Gardens and I was too shy to speak to her. She was a piece of God help us all right.’

  Ashamed of his wish to be companionable, even in the depth of love and distress, with her calm face before his eyes and her smile reproving and forgiving him as he spoke, the young man defiled his girl on the bench, dragged her down into the spit and sawdust and dolled her up to make the barman say:

  ‘I like them big myself. Once round Bessy, once round the gasworks. I missed the chance of a lifetime, too. Fifty lovelies in the nude and I’d left my Bunsen burner home.’

  ‘Give me the same, please.’

  ‘You mean similar.’

  The barman drew a glass of beer, drank it, and drew another.

  ‘I always have one with the customers,’ he said, ‘it puts us on even terms. Now we’re just two heart-broken bachelors together.’ He sat down again.

  ‘You can’t tell me anything I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen over twenty chorines from the Empire in this bar, drunk as printers. Oh, les girls! les limbs!’

  ‘Will they be in to-night?’

  ‘There’s only a fellow sawing a woman in half this week.’

  ‘Keep a half for me.’

  A drunk man walked in on an invisible white line, and the barman, reeling in sympathy across the room, served him with a pint. ‘Free beer to-day,’ he said. ‘Free X’s. You’ve been out in the sun.’

  ‘I’ve been out in the sun all day,’ said the man.

  ‘I thought you looked sunburnt.’

  ‘That’s drink,’ said the man. ‘I’ve been drinking.’

  ‘The holiday is drawing to an end,’ the young man whispered into his glass. Bye-bye blackbird, the moment is lost, he thought, examining, with an interest he could not forgive, the comic coloured postcards of mountain-buttocked women on the beach and hen-pecked, pin-legged men with telescopes, pasted on the wall beneath the picture of a terrier drinking stout; and now, with a jolly barman and a drunk in a crushed cap, he was mopping the failing day down. He tipped his hat over his forehead, and a lock of hair that fell below the hat tickled his eyelid. He saw, with a stranger’s darting eye that missed no single subtlety of the wry grin or the faintest gesture drawing the shape of his death on the air, an unruly-haired young man who coughed into his hand in the corner of a rotting room and puffed the smoke of his doped weight.

  But as the drunk man weaved towards him on wilful feet, carrying his dignity as a man might carry a full glass around a quaking ship, as the barman behind the counter clattered and whistled and dipped to drink, he shook off the truthless, secret tragedy with a sneer and a blush, straightened his melancholy hat into a hard-brimmed trilby, dismissed the affected stranger. In the safe centre of his own identity, the familiar world about him like another flesh, he sat sad and content in the plain room of the undistinguished hotel at the sea-end of the shabby, spreading town where everything was happening. He had no need of the dark interior world when Tawe pressed in upon him and the eccentric ordinary people came bursting and crawling, with noise and colours, out of their houses, out of the graceless buildings, the factories and avenues, the shining shops and blaspheming chapels, the terminuses and the meeting-halls, the falling alleys and brick lanes, from the arches and shelters and holes behind the hoardings, out of the common, wild intelligence of the town.

  At last the drunk man had reached him. ‘Put your hand here,’ he said, and turned about and tapped himself on the bottom.

  The barman whistled and rose from his drink to see the young man touch the drunk on the seat of the trousers.

  ‘What can you feel there?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That’s right. Nothing. Nothing. There’s nothing there to feel.’

  ‘How can you sit down then?’ asked the barman.

  ‘I just sit down on what the doctor left,’ the man said angrily. ‘I had as good a bottom as you’ve got once. I was working underground in Dowlais, and the end of the world came down on me. Do you know what I got for losing my bottom? Four and three! Two and three ha’pence a cheek. That’s cheaper than a pig.’

  The girl from Victoria Gardens came into the bar with two friends: a blonde young girl almost as beautiful as she was, and a middle-aged woman dressed and made up to look young. The three of them sat at the table. The girl he loved ordered three ports and gins.

  ‘Isn’t it delicious weather?’ said the middle-aged woman.

  The barman said: ‘Plenty of sky about.’ With many bows and smiles he placed their drinks in front of them. ‘I thought the princesses had gone to a better pub,’ he said.

  ‘What’s a better pub without you, handsome?’ said the blonde girl.

  ‘This is the “Ritz” and the “Savoy,” isn’t it, garçon darling?’ the girl from the Gardens said, and kissed her hand to him.

  The young man in the window seat, still bewildered by the first sudden sight of her entering the darkening room, caught the kiss to himself and blushed. He thought to run out of the room and through the miracle-making Gardens, to rush into his house and hide his head in the bed-clothes and lie all night there, dressed and trembling, her voice in his ears, her green eyes wide awake under his closed eyelids. But only a sick boy with tossed blood would run from his proper love into a dream, lie down in a bedroom that was full of his shames, and sob against the feathery, fat breast and face on the damp pillow. He remembered his age and poems, and would not move.

  ‘Tanks a million, Lou,’ said t
he barman.

  Her name was Lou, Louise, Louisa. She must be Spanish or French or a gipsy, but he could tell the street that her voice came from; he knew where her friends lived by the rise and fall of their sharp voices, and the name of the middle-aged woman was Mrs. Emerald Franklin. She was to be seen every night in the ‘Jew’s Harp,’ sipping and spying and watching the clock.

  ‘We’ve been listening to Matthews Hellfire on the sands. Down with this and down with that, and he used to drink a pint of biddy before his breakfast,’ Mrs. Franklin said. ‘Oh, there’s a nerve!’

  ‘And his eye on the fluff all the time,’ said the blonde girl. ‘I wouldn’t trust him any further than Ramon Navarro behind the counter.’

  ‘Whoops! I’ve gone up in the world. Last week I was Charley Chase,’ said the barman.

  Mrs. Franklin raised her empty glass in a gloved hand and shook it like a bell. ‘Men are deceivers ever,’ she said. ‘And a drop of mother’s ruin right around.’

  ‘Especially Mr. Franklin,’ said the barman.

  ‘But there’s a lot in what the preacher says, mind,’ Mrs. Franklin said, ‘about the carrying on. If you go for a constitutional after stop-tap along the sands you might as well be in Sodom and Gomorrah.’

  The blonde girl laughed. ‘Hark to Mrs. Grundy! I see her with a black man last Wednesday, round by the museum.’

  ‘He was an Indian,’ said Mrs. Franklin, ‘from the university college, and I’d thank you to remember it. Every one’s brothers under the skin, but there’s no tarbrush in my family.’

  ‘Oh, dear! oh, dear!’ said Lou. ‘Lay off it, there’s loves. This is my birthday. It’s a holiday. Put a bit of fun in it. Miaow! miaow! Marjorie, kiss Emerald and be friends.’ She smiled and laughed at them both. She winked at the barman, who was filling their glasses to the top. ‘Here’s to your blue eyes, garçon!’ She had not noticed the young man in the corner. ‘And one for grand-dad there,’ she said, smiling at the swaying, drunk man. ‘He’s twenty-one to-day. There! I’ve made him smile.’

  The drunk man made a deep, dangerous bow, lifted his hat, stumbled against the mantelpiece, and his full pint in his free hand was steady as a rock. ‘The prettiest girl in Carmarthenshire,’ he said.

  ‘This is Glamorganshire, dad,’ she said, ‘where’s your geography? Look at him waltzing! mind your glasses! He’s got that Kruschen feeling. Come on, faster! give us the Charleston.’

  The drunk man, with the pint held high, danced until he fell, and all the time he never spilt a drop. He lay at Lou’s feet on the dusty floor and grinned up at her in confidence and affection. ‘I fell,’ he said. ‘I could dance like a trooper when I had a beatyem.’

  ‘He lost his bottom at the last trump,’ the barman explained.

  ‘When did he lose his bottom?’ said Mrs. Franklin.

  ‘When Gabriel blew his whistle down in Dowlais.’

  ‘You’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure, Mrs. Em. Hoi, you! get up from the vomitorium.’

  The man wagged his end like a tail, and growled at Lou’s feet.

  ‘Put your head on my foot. Be comfy. Let him lie there,’ she said.

  He went to sleep at once.

  ‘I can’t have drunks on the premises.’

  ‘You know where to go then.’

  ‘Cru-el Mrs. Franklin!’

  ‘Go on, attend to your business. Serve the young man in the corner, his tongue’s hanging out.’

  ‘Cru-el lady!’

  As Mrs. Franklin called attention to the young man, Lou peered shortsightedly across the saloon and saw him sitting with his back to the window.

  ‘I’ll have to get glasses,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll have plenty of glasses before the night’s out.’

  ‘No, honest, Marjorie, I didn’t know anyone was there. I do beg your pardon, you in the corner,’ she said.

  The barman switched on the light. ‘A bit of lux in tenebris.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Lou.

  The young man dared not move for fear that he might break the long light of her scrutiny, the enchantment shining like a single line of light between them, or startle her into speaking; and he did not conceal the love in his eyes, for she could pierce through to it as easily as she could turn his heart in his chest and make it beat above the noises of the two friends’ hurried conversation, the rattle of glasses behind the counter where the barman spat and polished and missed nothing, and the snores of the comfortable sleeper. Nothing can hurt me. Let the barman jeer. Giggle in your glass, our Em. I’m telling the world, I’m walking in clover, I’m staring at Lou like a fool, she’s my girl, she’s my lily. O love! O love! She’s no lady, with her sing-song Tontine voice, she drinks like a deep-sea diver; but Lou, I’m yours, and Lou, you’re mine. He refused to meditate on her calmness now and twist her beauty into words. She was nothing under the sun or moon but his. Unashamed and certain, he smiled at her; and, though he was prepared for all, her answering smile made his fingers tremble again, as they had trembled in the Gardens, and reddened his cheeks and drove his heart to a gallop.

  ‘Harold, fill the young man’s glass up,’ Mrs. Franklin said.

  The barman stood still, a duster in one hand and a dripping glass in the other.

  ‘Have you got water in your ears? Fill the young man’s glass!’

  The barman put the duster to his eyes. He sobbed. He wiped away the mock tears.

  ‘I thought I was attending a première and this was the royal box,’ he said.

  ‘He’s got water on the brain, not in his earhole,’ said Marjorie.

  ‘I dreamt it was a beautiful tragi-comedy entitled “Love at First Sight, or, Another Good Man Gone Wrong.” Act one in a boozer by the sea.’

  The two women tapped their foreheads.

  Lou said, still smiling: ‘Where was the second act?’

  Her voice was as gentle as he had imagined it to be before her gay and nervous playing with the over-familiar barman and the inferior women. He saw her as a wise, soft girl whom no hard company could spoil, for her soft self, bare to the heart, broke through every defence of her sensual falsifiers. As he thought this, phrasing her gentleness, faithlessly running to words away from the real room and his love in the middle, he woke with a start and saw her lively body six steps from him, no calm heart dressed in a sentence, but a pretty girl, to be got and kept. He must catch hold of her fast. He got up to cross to her.

  ‘I woke before the second act came on,’ said the barman. ‘I’d sell my dear old mother to see that. Dim lights. Purple couches. Ecstatic bliss. Là, là chèrie!’

  The young man sat down at the table, next to her.

  Harold, the barman, leaned over the counter and cupped his hand to his ear.

  The man on the floor rolled in his sleep, and his head lay in the spittoon.

  ‘You should have come and sat here a long time ago,’ Lou whispered. ‘You should have stopped to talk to me in the Gardens. Were you shy?’

  ‘I was too shy,’ the young man whispered.

  ‘Whispering isn’t manners. I can’t hear a word,’ said the barman.

  At a sign from the young man, a flick of the fingers that sent the waiters in evening dress bustling with oysters about the immense room, the barman filled the glasses with port, gin, and Nutbrown.

  ‘We never drink with strangers,’ Mrs. Franklin said, laughing.

  ‘He isn’t a stranger,’ said Lou, ‘are you Jack?’

  He threw a pound note on the table: ‘Take the damage.’

  The evening that had been over before it began raced along among the laughter of the charming women sharp as knives, and the stories of the barman, who should be on the stage, and Lou’s delighted smiles and silences at his side. Now she is safe and sure, he thought, after her walking like my doubtful walking, around the lonely distances of the holiday. In the warm, spinning middle they were close and alike. The town and the sea and the last pleasure-makers drifted into the dark that had nothing to do wit
h them, and left this one room burning.

  One by one, some lost men from the dark shuffled into the bar, drank sadly, and went out. Mrs. Franklin, flushed and dribbling waved her glass at their departures. Harold winked behind their backs. Marjorie showed them her long, white legs.

  ‘Nobody loves us except ourselves,’ said Harold. ‘Shall I shut the bar and keep the riff-raff out?’

  ‘Lou is expecting Mr. O’Brien, but don’t let that stop you,’ Marjorie said. ‘He’s her sugar daddy from old Ireland.’

  ‘Do you love Mr. O’Brien?’ the young man whispered.

  ‘How could I, Jack?’

  He could see Mr. O’Brien as a witty, tall fellow of middle age, with waved greying hair and a clipped bit of dirt on his upper lip, a flash ring on his marriage finger, a pouched knowing eye, dummy dressed with a whalebone waist, a broth of a man about Cardiff, Lou’s horrible lover tearing towards her now down the airless streets in the firm’s car. The young man clenched his hand on the table covered with dead, and sheltered her in the warm strength of his fist. ‘My round, my round,’ he said, ‘up again, plenty! Doubles, trebles, Mrs. Franklin is a jibber.’

  ‘My mother never had a jibber.’

  ‘Oh, Lou!’ he said, ‘I am more than happy with you.’

  ‘Coo! coo! hear the turtle doves.’

  ‘Let them coo,’ said Marjorie. ‘I could coo, too.’

  The barman looked around him in surprise. He raised his hands, palms up, and cocked his head.

  ‘The bar is full of birds,’ he said.

  ‘Emerald’s laying an egg,’ he said, as Mrs. Franklin rocked in her chair.

  Soon the bar was full of customers. The drunk man woke up and ran out, leaving his cap in a brown pool. Sawdust dropped from his hair. A small, old, round, red-faced, cheery man sat facing the young man and Lou, who held hands under the table and rubbed their legs against each other.

  ‘What a night for love!’ said the old man. ‘On such a night as this did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew. Do you know where that comes from?’

  ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ Lou said. ‘But you’re an Irishman, Mr. O’Brien.’