Sheila, her husband, and his brother dined together in the Gryphon. The meal was good, and served by a young waitress, while the manager presided over his bar, bon soiring all and sundry. The food, wine, and service all had a benevolent effect; the trio was cheerful, and avoided the painful topics of the past.
After dinner, Joseph indicated that it was time he started to drive back to Acton. Clement and Sheila moved towards the hall with him, when he grasped his brother’s arm.
‘Here we are in my home town – not yours, I know, but it’s where our little clan originated, in a way. When are we likely to be here again? God knows, I don’t love the place, but there’s not another Nettlesham. Let’s have a quick canter round the back streets. Sheila won’t mind, will you, Sheila?’
‘Well … I take it from the locution that you’d rather be on your own with Clem. Do go, and don’t get lost.’
Nettlesham was rather dark and rather cold. Nettlesham was the eggshell left over when the chick had hatched, lying abandoned. It had known prosperity of a sort in the days, long past, when wool was important. Bygone people in Nettlesham had found wool interesting. Things had changed in the world; Nettlesham had remained. It wasn’t even on the road to anywhere. People came to Nettlesham to retire.
The brothers walked down a street of meagre houses interspersed with shops. ‘There used to be an advert featuring a Red Indian on that gable end,’ Joseph said. ‘It frightened me. I was easily frightened.’
He strolled along with his hands in his pockets. He had no coat. Clement was wrapped in a black overcoat. They walked in step.
They passed a modest Chinese take-away. A Chinese woman stood awaiting custom behind a wooden counter on which a small TV glittered. The woman stared blankly past it into the street.
Joseph gestured dismissively. ‘When I first got back to this country from Sumatra, Chinese and Indians were very scarce in England. If I saw one, particularly a Chinese, particularly a Chinese woman, I would follow her, just to get a look at those extraordinary planes of the face. Well, shit, that’s also all dead and buried. I hate talking about the past.’
‘People do it all the time as they get older. There should be another name for it.’ Clement laughed. ‘Something of the order of “The Present”, or “The Environment”. I’ve ceased to be amazed at how people love talking to me about the war. It often seems to be the most vivid part of their lives.’
‘It’s the jungle through which we move. I think about Burma as it was every week of my life, curse it.’ He pointed ahead down the street, to where a line of decorative red and blue lights burned. ‘Hey, Clem. The corner of Commercial Road. I’d forgotten. The Conversation Arms. It used to be pretty rough, or so father said. Not that he ever went in to drown his sorrows. Let’s pop in and have a pint.’
‘It’s getting late. You’ve got to get back to Acton.’
‘It’s the Conversation Arms, Clem, named after old Westlake’s poem. His most famous poem, or one of them. Come on, just a pint.’
The Conversation Arms presented a square, shiny exterior to the world. Up to the level of the first floor, it was clad in brown tiling broken here and there by bands of cream tiling. It looked like an ill-designed fancy cake. Its windows, small, frosted and barred, might have served on a prison were it not for the encouraging legend ‘Ales & Spirits’ engraved on them. The upper storey, in yellowing stucco, bore the words ‘Bullard’s Ales’ painted out, and an inn sign framed in wrought iron which showed two gentlemen with red noses tête-à-tête. They wore periwigs and tricorn hats.
The pub was already well occupied when the brothers entered. In the small room inside the door a group of youths of both sexes were standing shouting amiably at each other while drinking lager and smoking. Beyond – the pub was narrow but deep – was another room with a more extensive bar, where a number of men, mainly middle-aged, were talking more quietly over their drinks. Two women sat together on a bench, not speaking, surveying the scene with a docile air. Joseph bought two pints of bitter here and pushed into a third and rear room, where round tables and chairs were provided. A group of red-faced men were laughing heartily over a joke while asking each other if they ‘had heard that’. The brothers took a seat beside an empty fireplace in which stood a large jar bearing the words ‘Grimsby’s Foundry, 1903’.
Beside the fireplace hung a printed paper, framed in a walnut frame.
‘Look at that!’ exclaimed Joseph. ‘Literature – you see, Clem. Nettlesham remembers its most famous son. I like that. A touch of piety in this godless town.’
‘A copy of “The Conversation”, is it?’
They went over to look at the pamphlet. On close inspection, it proved to be merely a photocopy of the original poem, published in 1781.
‘Well, that’s typical. Everything’s a fake nowadays. I suppose they flogged the original and thought a copy was the same thing. Another symptom of tranny-culture. At least they still remember a good native poet. That’s something.’
‘He was a pretty awful poet, wasn’t he?’
Joseph eyed his brother suspiciously, before going to sit down, offended, by his glass.
‘Who are you to judge? Are you an expert on poetry, Clem? Why do you find him pretty awful? Did you ever read him? Doesn’t he rhyme? Doesn’t he scan? What’s your objection?’
‘Oh … he’s a bit sententious, isn’t he?’
‘Did you ever read him? No. Yet you judge. I happen to like Westlake. At least, that is the position I took up many years ago, and it’s too late to change now. It’s true he thought peasants led a happy life, but that was a common eighteenth-century illusion. I happen to have a tolerance of sententiousness, and all the poor sod’s other imputed faults.’
‘I don’t read much poetry.’
‘You ought to try Westlake’s “A Summer Stroll Through Parts of Suffolk”. Really. He sets sail from the old iambic pentameter, defies Alexander Pope, and even looks forward to poets like Hardy.’
When Clement made no response, Joseph shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
‘He was a poet and he went mad in Nettlesham, and that’s good enough for me. I drink to William Westlake.’
They drank in silence, elbows on table. The silence extended itself uncomfortably until suddenly Joseph plunged into talk.
‘I suppose you’ll mourn mother. I shall, despite all I may say. Bravado speaking. I’ll miss her. This whole pathetic business about the dead child – “stillborn”… Funny to discover that little bit of truth on the very day we bury her, funny the way these secrets leak out. I’ll be very happy to work all that business out of my system.
‘Twelve years difference between us – we’ve never been very close. You don’t think much of me, do you?’
‘That’s not so, though it’s true we’ve not been close. I suppose you don’t think a great deal of me.’
‘Oh, you’re so cautious, Clem. There’s one thing for which I admire you very very greatly, if you want to know.’ Joseph leaned forward and tapped the table with a finger for emphasis. ‘I admire you for the way you stuck by Sheila when your daughter died in that car crash. I admire the way you comforted each other. That sort of thing goes beyond marriage. People are almost incapable of fucking comforting each other. I speak as one uncomforted. You two comforted each other. There was no blame about who was driving when it happened – or not as far as I know. You simply comforted each other, and so you got over it, and so you have achieved – I say this seriously and not without envy – a good marriage.’
He drained his glass and, as he rose, said, ‘Now we’ll talk about father, but first we’ll fortify ourselves with another pint of the same. At least the Conversation Arms has Adnam’s Ale …’
Clement sat rather helplessly where he was until his brother came back. As he set his beer down neatly on the wet ring left by the previous pint, he blurted out, ‘Before you say anything, I was very fond of father. Of course I remember him only in Bude, when he was getting on in years. There was no doubt that losing his share of the business here to Uncle Hereward told against him. He lived for the shop.’
‘I’ve always thought there was more to that than met the eye. Father was swindled in some way – that’s what I think.’ Joseph laughed. ‘When I was in Burma, father wrote to me precisely once. To tell me how Uncle Hereward and Aunt Hermione had been up in London with their three sons, at a Noel Coward play, when a bomb fell on the theatre and killed them all outright. Father made no comment beyond relaying the bare facts, but I could tell he thought justice had been done.’
‘It does seem to say something for the war.’
‘And for Noel Coward.’ They laughed.
‘That probably wouldn’t stop him feeling that he had let grandad down. Grandad being a self-made man and all that. I say “probably” because he never talked about it. I respected him—’
‘There you have the whole key to father’s character. He never talked about anything. As an analyst, you must have your opinions on that. Don’t you remember how, even in your time, all his remarks came to us through mother? He was the officer, she was the NCO. We were the bloody privates. Why he was so silent, we’ll never know, I suppose. But that seems to have been his character. Very withdrawn. Maybe it was his experiences during the first war.
‘Immediately after the war, marriage. Then that bloody stillborn kid. God, the mess that accident made of our lives. How all my days have been tarnished – never mind, you’ve heard that tune before. The fact that sticks out a mile is that mother had to make up a fantasy that the kid lived for six months. She had to console herself. Why? Because father didn’t console her. He couldn’t bring himself to do as you did when you lost a child. You have to forget yourself a bit and give in such circumstances. He couldn’t give. I can just imagine it and I swear that’s what happened, that he simply went back to the shop and got on with work. Never said a word about the matter again. Not a word. They probably didn’t even screw each other for years after the death.’
As Joseph paused to drink, Clement said, ‘This is all your imagination. Of course he’d have tried to comfort her. They were only just married, they’d have been in love. You don’t know—’
‘You think it’s mother I hate, for all she did to me. It’s not. It’s father, for all he didn’t do.
‘I worshipped him, modelled myself on him. I wanted to be his little slave. My ambition was to be just like him, take the dog for walks, go shooting rabbits, church on Sundays, smoke a pipe with a jaunty air. Even sell buckets. Everything he did, I wanted to do. I craved to learn. I craved to be in his company. He had no patience. He didn’t want me there. To him I was a perfect nonentity, a blank. He took me into an outfitter’s once, to buy me a shirt – I can’t remember why, because mother used to do that sort of thing. I tried on one of the shirts – I suppose I was about eight years old – and for some reason didn’t like it. I said, “It doesn’t suit me, daddy.” He put his finger between my neck and the collar and gave it a sort of impatient wrench, saying, “Of course it suits you if I say so.”
‘You see, he had no concept of me at all. It never occurred to him that I might possibly have an individual life.’
Clement listened as his brother went on in the same vein, often laughing as he spoke. Outside the window near which they were sitting was a wooden post, standing at an angle and illuminated by the light from the pub; for the rest, the darkness allowed only a vague impression of the walls of a back yard. The two women on the bench came within the line of his observation; they were talking confidingly together over their gins, the slightly older woman, wearing a pink coat, dominating the conversation, while the younger one, who wore trousers and a sweater with the word ‘Oklahoma’ across her breasts, confined her contribution to a series of nods and exclamations of disgust. It occurred to Clement that the younger one was quite pretty, despite fashionably straggly hair. The red-faced men drinking at the round table nearby kept casting glances at her, glances of which the Oklahoma lady seemed totally unaware.
‘Do you want a whisky?’ Joseph asked, interrupting himself. ‘The cup that cheers and inebriates?’
‘No, I don’t want to get drunk, Joe. You’ve got to drive back to Acton, haven’t you?’
‘Christ, I must have a smoke. Where’s their bloody cigarette machine?’ As he asked the question, Joseph rose and plunged towards the far end of the pub, where the youths were still in voluble conversation. At almost the same moment, the Oklahoma lady said something to her companion and rose; she too headed towards the door. Clement, draining off his pint, watched as his brother and the woman met at the cigarette machine. Joseph immediately began talking to her. Somehow, they became entangled with the youths. One of the bigger lads exchanged words with Joseph, who gave, even at a distance, a convincing imitation of a very angry man. The lad backed off and returned to the chatter with his mates.
Joseph and the woman, who was possibly in her late thirties, stood talking by the machine, and moved together towards their seats, joking amiably and smiling as they lit their cigarettes. The Conversation Arms was now filling up. Joseph took the woman’s arm and guided her back to her bench, sitting down beside her, smiling, as Oklahoma introduced him to the older woman, who did not look particularly pleased at the intervention, to judge by the way she wrapped her pink coat more tightly round her middle.
Finding himself abandoned, Clement was so annoyed that he went up to the bar and ordered himself a whisky-and-soda, by no means his usual tipple, standing there to drink it with his back to the room.
He had almost finished the whisky when Joseph nudged him on one arm, saying cheerfully, ‘Sorry about that. What are you drinking?’
His manner had changed. He puffed away on a cigarette in obvious good humour, His jacket was unbuttoned, his tie slightly awry, his hair slightly ruffled. He ordered himself a whisky on the rocks, saying almost at the same time, by way of an aside to his brother, ‘Come on over and meet a couple of nice women. Iris and – Christ, what was the other one’s name? Susan, I think she said. Sarah. No, maybe Sophie. Josie? Anyhow, Iris is mine.’
‘Come on, Joe, you must be pissed. You nearly got into a fight then, didn’t you? Bit old for that sort of thing, aren’t you?’
Joseph laughed. ‘If you’ve got grey hair or you’re wearing a tie, they think they can take advantage of you. Iris is the one with Oklahoma written across her tits.’ He sang a line of song and laughed, ‘“You’re doing fine, Oklahoma …”’
‘Let’s get out of here. You are pissed. Picking up women at your age. It’s ridiculous!’
‘I’m not picking them up. I simply got talking to them. That’s what pubs are for. I liked the look of her. She’s a nice girl. It’s always been easy for me to get friendly with women. Women are very approachable. They don’t have the hang-ups – I mean, you should hear women talk about how difficult it is to get friendly with men. Men have all the hang-ups. Women see the world in a completely different light. I admit it’s true of me, too. I’m as bad as the rest. I find it easy to get friendly with women. I love women. My trouble is, that I’m terrified of them leaving me. So I always concoct some difficulty, some quarrel or other, so that we break up. I can’t tell you …
‘Well, yes, I can fucking tell you. That’s really why I admire you, Clem. You and Sheila have stuck together, despite everything. Do you reckon she’s easier to live with because she’s got writing as a hobby? Well, hardly a hobby … Now, me, I suppose you think I’m a terrible womanizer, nearly sixty, ought to settle down. It’s not so at all. Sex soon palls, don’t you think? Perhaps you don’t think so? It’s better in anticipation, like most things.’ He looked glancingly into Clem’s face as he said this, with a smile. Clement felt himself charmed; even behind his brother’s most cynical remarks lay a kind of spirit resembling light-heartedness.
‘It’s just my terrible insecurity forces me to chuck them out just when everything seems rosy. I suppose it’s because – this only recently dawned on me – this is juvenile experience fucking me up all over again. I’m always secretly afraid they’ll desert me, just as mother did. Until recently, I didn’t even realize I had that fear. That’s progress, at least, identifying the thing. No doubt it helps a bit. If only I could get over it. Don’t think I wouldn’t have been married long ago.’ He paused and drank.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘You mean you don’t know what attitude to take to me,’ said Joseph, with a sudden flare of anger, bowing his head to light a cigarette. ‘You never did. You’re buggered up, not me. Your profession has buggered you up. We’ll never agree, I’m Dionysiac, you’re Apollonian. I don’t want pity. I’m proud of it. Well, not proud. But you have to fill a lifetime with something, don’t you?’
Blowing out the smoke, he remembered the women. ‘I’m supposed to be buying them gins. Come on over and meet them. Iris and Sophie. I think it’s Sophie.’
It was Josie. Clement sat with Josie on his right and Iris on his left. Joseph was on Iris’s left.
‘I’m Apollonian,’ Clement told Josie with dignity.
Josie had her problems. Her husband was working for the Saudi-Arabians, while she was left in Nettlesham with two young teenage children to look after. She lived in a semi-detached, and the people in the other half of the semi, the Dowkers, were making her life a misery. Mr Dowker had three strong teenage lads, about whom Josie had been to the police several times. She had proof they had killed her cat and hung it from her clothes line. They drilled holes through the bedroom wall in order to spy on her daughter.
Joe had his arm round Iris and was telling her of ways to be happy. ‘I don’t want to be happy,’ she said, protestingly. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I just want to enjoy life. I’m still young, but this bloke Eddie won’t let me alone. He keeps popping up. I told him, I said, I am not interested any longer, and I hate the smell of kebabs, but he said to me, Where I come from it’s never a case of not being interested, you can’t be not interested once you’ve started. So I told him, I said, Well, this is England, and in England it’s quite usual for people not to be interested any old day of the week they please, but then you see he says—’
‘Why don’t you look at it this way, Iris? I’ve had a lucky life, really, done a lot of things I wanted to do, though sometimes I think it has been a pretty miserable one, until I see how other people are getting on. And I believe that you have to fill your life with something. The truth is that in evolutionary terms, the human race was not properly created. We’re neither animal nor angel, and we just don’t know what to do with our lives. I’ll get you another gin in a minute.
‘Your generation wasn’t brought up on the Bible, but I was, and I think that human life’s like the Third Day. You know God is supposed to have created the world in seven days. On the Third Day, he created the sea in one place and the dry land in another, and he caused grass to grow everywhere. It was a terribly boring dump, and evidently the Almighty had to have a bloody good think before he decided what to do next. The human mind’s like that. Just grass and dry land and the odd patch of ocean to begin with. We each of us have to think what else should go there. And we actually have the option. We stock it with obsessions, assumptions. I won’t go into mine, but basically I was rejected at birth and from that rejection I’ve managed to fill my mind. The point I’m trying to make is that we’re actually in charge from the Third Day on – we can choose what to put in all that space. We have to choose unless we’re to become basket cases. We have to choose whether to be educated, to accept education, we have to choose whether to be good or bad, we have to choose whether to be happy or miserable. As a French philosopher once said, we are neither as happy nor as miserable as we think. We really do make choices in all the vital areas DNA doesn’t predetermine. The difficulty is, that the choices we make are based emotionally on all the chance things that happened to us on Day One and Day Two, which we don’t remember because we were too young and unformed. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘Sort of. You mean the Bible’s true, after all?’
‘No, I bloody don’t. Look, I’ll explain. You’re so involved with this Eddie because whether you realize it or not you need to be. Something in his foreignness attracts you, but you could chuck it all if you really wanted. Throw it off like a coat. Be someone different tomorrow. Character isn’t permanent, choice is. I nearly married a Chinese girl once, just because she was so unlike my mother I thought she wouldn’t skip out and leave me.’ He roared with laughter.
‘What do you do?’ Iris asked. ‘What’s your job?’
‘I’m a historian of the Far East.’
‘I think maybe Josie and me had better be going. It’s getting late.’
When the pub closed, and Clement and Joseph were ushered out into the cold, they proceeded up the dark street arm in arm, Joseph at least in the best of spirits.
‘I don’t know what Sheila will say,’ Clement remarked.
‘She was nice, wasn’t she? Iris. Sweet little person, easy-going at heart, I’d say, but pretty stupid.’
‘What on earth were you telling her?’
‘What she needs is a good man. No, maybe not – who knows what people need? She wouldn’t come with me. What was I saying? Just trying to cheer her up. She’s got problems.’
‘You should hear Josie’s problems. One feels so compassionate. You were giving Iris some nonsense about choosing the way you live. It was nonsense, utter nonsense – well, I thought it was nonsense, although I didn’t catch exactly what you were saying. Anyhow, you were very optimistic.’
‘I’m always optimistic. This parental stuff – it isn’t going to bite so hard from now on. I’m determined.’
‘Why don’t you go and see someone?’
Joseph did not answer. He gave his brother’s shoulders an affectionate squeeze. They turned a corner and the Gryphon lay ahead.
‘Glad I left this fucking town.’ He sketched with a free hand what passed in the gloom for an airy eighteenth-century gesture. ‘Remember Westlake – “I was a crippled goat that lost its way. But took delight in being all astray.”’
Sheila was sitting in the cosy bar of the Gryphon, saying farewells to a young couple who were about to leave. Joseph went up to her and became heavily gallant in a drunken way, clutching her about the waist, while Clement looked on, laughing.
‘Get off me, Joe! You’d better not drive back to Acton in that state.’
He persisted. ‘We’ve just been celebrating the great event, Sheila, dear Sheila – burying the old girl, you know. She’ll be with the angels this evening!’ He put his hands together in mock-piety and rolled his eyes upwards, allowing Sheila to stand back and confront him. Something changed in the generous planes of her face. Suddenly, she was Green Mouth, standing no nonsense from anyone.
‘Joe, I’ll tell you something. You are just a baby, and a rather noxious one at that. Why can’t you show some love, or at least respect, for your mother? Have you ever had a moment’s pity for her, poor woman? You’re a self-dramatizing bastard, entirely self-centred—’
‘I know all this,’ he broke in. ‘Known it ages … Not again, old girl. Virtue makes me want to throw up.’
She pushed Clement away as he moved to her side.
‘Throw up if you like, but first listen to me. The way you go on and on about that dead sister of yours! The first Clem ever told me about you was that you had this hang-up. It’s become your signature tune, your cue for sympathy, your cue to grab centre stage. Can’t you think of something better? Do you like going about acting the cripple? Do you do it so that women can mother you? God, you must be a real mess in bed! You never spare one single thought for how your mother might have felt when her first little baby died, do you? Do you know that the death of a baby is about the worst thing a mother can ever suffer, worse than losing a partner, worse even than rape? Feelings of guilt, inadequacy, failure, utter loneliness—’
‘Sheila!’ Clement took her arm. He could see that she also had been drinking. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she was winding herself up to say more. The young couple stood by the door, ready to leave but longing to hear.
‘Keep out of this, Clem. You only encourage Joe. He has never made any attempt to understand how callously his mother might have been treated by everyone, back whenever it was. It was regarded as a disgrace to give birth to a dead baby. A disgrace. Ernest’s attitude was all important, and he may have blamed her, who knows? Instead of consoling her. The doctor certainly didn’t even let her see or hold the little baby – it would be taken away and shovelled under, and she’d be left to grieve with no memory of it. And then the agony for her, a religious woman, of having the burial in unconsecrated ground …’ She turned on Joseph. ‘When I saw you, when I watched you today, telling your pathetic tale with such relish, such venom – oh, such delicious excitement, I realized your true character—’
‘Stow it, you pompous, preaching woman,’ said Joseph, clenching his fists. ‘You love a scene, don’t you? You’re jealous because I took your precious husband off for a couple of hours. Get back to your best-sellers and leave the legions of the lost to look after themselves.’
Making a disgusted face at Clement, he turned, barged past him, and staggered out into the darkness of the Nettlesham night.