11 Back home

The daffodils had long gone, a memory faded brown in the thickening heat. The blossom had sallowed and dropped to the pavement, and summer flowers now towered in windowboxes. The birds, blown home by the blustering winds, basked in the swollen sun among the first-fallen rose petals. Because spring had turned into summer, and a heat, heavy like an overcoat, had descended on London. It was my first summer in London; I felt unprepared for unforeseen demands it might make upon me. I didn’t know what they were, I simply sensed the turning of the season was uncovering something new and challenging.

It’s hard to imagine now, but in those days a good holiday was two weeks at an English seaside. If you were short of cash or patience, it was one week at an English seaside. If you were totally devoid of both - as I was then - you simply stayed at home for two weeks. I was doing that and I had to say that I was enjoying it. For the first time someone - the editor of the newspaper which employed me - was giving me money to take time off. Time passes and changes the way you look at things. Now I resent having only six weeks in the year when I can go abroad and see new places. Back then, Ophelia Street was the new place, part of this other strange country called London, and it constantly surprised and intrigued me. Already it was home, the place where I felt comfortable, because I could live my life unnoticed by anybody else.

Now I’m not so sure. That might be one of London’s great deceptions. You are observed, you are noticed. People simply don’t let on that they are watching you. Just as I was watching them.

At the end of Ophelia Street the plane tree threw a cool shadow over the black statue of a cat, which seemed to lick its glaze in gratitude. Behind its back someone emerged quietly, almost furtively, into the noonday sun. Robert Johnson, sensitive to hay fever, brushed down his suit jacket and trousers as it to remove the last invisible traces of floating seed from his clothing.

It was a late July day of stifling heat. The dust and the heat combined to choke the breath of the wind. The whole street had the sound of a hot day; the vacant murmur issuing from every window, the distant rumblings of a city too hot to concentrate, the babble of a perspiring population drained of energy and interest. Nothing clear about the sound, nothing tangible; soporific, dreamy, remote. Even the children, home from school on their holidays, found it hard to pierce the hum, to free their buzzing eardrums, but sat about in the dust talking, on steps and pavements and kerbs, rising occasionally to play half-hearted games of hopscotch or marbles. I sat in my room at the window, trying to catch a breeze, watching the people come and go.

A car pulled into Ophelia Street in mid-afternoon, an old, blue saloon car that had been much younger and much cleaner in its prime. Keith Russell had bought the car six years earlier when he had been a student, and it had lasted him well, considering how little attention he gave to it. Keith looked upon motor cars with contempt; they were to him the supreme symbols of a materialistic age. He probably hated them all the more for the hypocritical position they placed him in as a car owner himself. His consolation was his constant one, in all things: ‘At least I’m not like them!’ They were the sedate, bald men nearing retirement; the plump, self-satisfied family men of middle age; the pushy young men in their flared jeans – all coming out in hordes on Sunday mornings to clean their cars. Or so he imagined them. ‘At least I’m not like them,’ and Keith scowled, his chin setting rigid, and secretly he took pride in the writing drawn by an unknown (perhaps his own) finger in the dirt on his car: ‘This car is filthy’.

So the dirty old car chugged into Ophelia Street through the lifeless air of that summer afternoon; Keith, Brenda and David were returning from a week’s holiday at the seaside. Doors were opened and doors were slammed, cases were carried and cases were dragged, as the mechanical business of unloading proceeded. Brenda stayed inside the flat to heat the kettle, Keith heaved cases and bags up the narrow staircase, and David ran up and down, in and out, getting in everyone’s way and enjoying the feeling of being home again. Windows were flung open to let in more air. But an hour or two, a tea or two later, there was nothing left to do and home was once again familiar and contemptible and confining.

‘What’s the time?’ asked Keith.

‘Half five. I’d better start getting something to eat. Do you want something hot?’

‘Fancy a drink?’

‘You mean out? I don’t fancy that pub.’

‘Why not? What’s wrong with it? Come on, Dave, do you want a drink?’

‘Keith, we’ve only just got home. Couldn’t you stay in this once?’

‘What for?’

‘I just thought it would be nice. We’ve only just got in…’

But Brenda could think of no other reason, and to herself as well as to Keith it was no reason at all. Their home was not sacred; Keith was not tied to it; he had asked her out too. All the same she cried quietly to herself, perhaps she cried for herself, as Keith and David closed the door behind them.

Keith walked into The Lady Ophelia and ordered a pint and a lemonade. The pub had only just opened and he was the first customer to arrive. He took his own drink and David’s to the pub doorstep where he had told his son to sit down and wait.

‘Here you are, Dave. Drink up, there’s a straw in it.’

David sucked through his straw, while Keith leaned against the pub doorway. A breeze, warm and sticky, licked at their faces.

‘It’s nice to do this, isn’t it?’ said Keith.

David pulled a face. ‘It’s all right.’

‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ Keith went on. ‘When I was your age this is what I always wanted to do. Just sit outside a pub with a lemonade while my dad was inside.’

‘What for?’

‘Well, I thought it would be fun. All the other kids used to do it, at least all my best friends did.’

‘Then why didn’t you, dad?’

‘Because my dad never went to the pub.’

While they were talking, Elaine came up and sat down next to David on the pub doorstep.

‘Want a drink, Elaine?’

Elaine nodded shyly. At times she could be shy, especially with teachers.

Keith went inside to buy the lemonade. There were now two other people in the pub, talking to each other at the bar. Keith made a point of ignoring them. He had quarrelled with them, before going on holiday, about the hostel and its inmates – the home for vagrants as they sneeringly called it. Keith had maintained that everyone should be doing more to make the hostel residents feel at home; they were all part of a community. He had found few people agreeing with him, but he could take some comfort from the fact that months had now passed since the doors of the hostel had first opened, and every day that passed represented a further step towards the hostel’s acceptance. Acceptance would be a kind of triumph. Yet he realised that many people were waiting and eager to exploit the first slip, the first fall from grace. Keith walked out with the lemonade.

‘How’s your dad? All right?’

‘Um,’ Elaine nodded, sucking at her straw. She was thirsty.

‘Too hot, isn’t it?’

‘I like it. It’s nice.’ She sucked again at her straw. ‘We’re goin’ away next week. To the seaside.’

‘Oh, we’ve just been,’ said David.

‘Where’d you go?’

‘We went to Clacton.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s a seaside.’

‘That’s where we’re goin’ too.’ Elaine finished her drink and stood up, pulling at David’s arm. ‘Come on, I’ll show you something.’

‘Can I go, dad?’

Keith nodded. He had just seen Joe Wheatley’s van turning into the street. For the first time that day he felt glad to be home. It was good to see Joe walking towards him.

‘Have a nice time, Keith?’ asked Joe.

‘What would you like? Come in and have a quick one.’

They went inside and stood at the bar. A fan was whirring noisily, but the breeze it circulated was welcome.

‘God, it was boring, Joe. Seven days of sand, paddling and deck chairs.’

‘Well, what did you expect? Me, I like that, but there you are. I told you what it’d be like.’

‘I know, I know. But I suppose David liked it. Though I’m not sure about that even. He seemed more pleased to get home than any of us.’

‘How’d Brenda like it?’

‘Brenda? Oh, she didn’t say much either way. I think she liked it. She got a good suntan, anyway.’

Just then Ernie Jack walked in. At the same time conversation seemed to walk out. Everyone turned to look at him. He was as scraggy as ever; no, scraggier. His greying moustache had grown a little and now drooped over his upper lip, giving his face an even more doleful appearance than before. His old, grey, double-breasted suit jacket seemed almost treble-breasted, there was so much room to spare inside it. His bovine eyes seemed perpetually on the verge of tears.

‘Hello, Ernie,’ said Keith, happy to make his point. ‘Can I buy you one?’

‘Thanks,’ he murmured, standing on the edge of the silence, fearful to splash in. He stood there impassive, erect, perspiring, waiting for the beer to be pulled. At last it was there: ‘Cheers,’ said Keith. They all raised glasses.

‘Very hot today,’ said Joe.

‘Um,’ Ernie nodded, almost mooing the answer in his deep voice and turning his large brown eyes towards Joe. ‘Very.’

‘This weather suit you?’ asked Joe. ‘The heat, you know?’

Did he treat him as though he were a child or deaf or merely simple? All of those things, thought Keith, horrified. Not even Joe could be natural with him. To Joe he was still someone from ‘the home’ – an alien.

‘Don’t like it much.’ Ernie was saying. ‘Not used to it, in this country.’

‘Need a good drop of rain to make us feel at home, eh?’ said Joe.

‘How many of you are there up there now?’ demanded Keith, determined as ever to skirt no issue.

Ernie stared down into his beer, shoulders crouched over the bar. He did not raise his eyes to reply: ‘About eight.’

‘I thought they were going to take more than that,’ Keith said, innocently turning up the heat.

Ernie shrugged and said nothing, feeling the bead of sweat rolling down the side of his nose and into the corner of his mouth. He gulped some beer, to swallow the salt of his sweat and his fear, and perhaps to deter further examination.

‘Fancy a game of darts, Keith?’ asked Joe.

Keith glanced sharply at Joe, taken aback by the question. The situation had a drama which Keith was trying to sustain without really knowing why, and which Joe was trying to deflate as easily as he could. The politics involved were not at all to his taste, nor to anyone’s except Keith’s. Keith simply loved to argue.

But Joe would not let him. ‘Come on,’ he said, to both of them. ‘Let’s take the weight off our legs.’

Keith drained his glass and left, nodding at them as he went. Outside, the evening was setting in. The sun was sinking, a bright orange in a shimmering sky; soon the sky would turn pink, as it had every evening for the last week. As the temperature fell, so the noise level rose; by now most people had arrived home from work. Keith pushed open the front door that stood ajar to let in what little breeze there was, and went up to his flat, where he found Brenda and David eating sandwiches. After the scorching heat of the day, and the previous days, with air trapped inside by locked windows and doors, everything smelt dry and old and dusty, as if a dropped match would send it all up in flames.

The evening wore on. Keith ate sandwiches. They turned the television on, watched lethargically. The World Cup had finished, summer repeats had taken over. Keith read David a story, and put him to bed. Outside, a cat on heat screamed like a crying baby, children rollerskated up and down the street, bumping over the paving stones. Keith read newspapers, disgusted by the pictures of the new Conservative ministers everywhere. Brenda worked hard at a crossword. And night fell, with them both sitting there, restless in the darkness.

‘Brenda?’

‘Yes?’ she replied from the shadows opposite.

‘Will you come here?’

She moved across to him, sat next to him where they could see more of each other.

‘You got a good tan,’ he said.

Her face smiled, teeth flashing in the darkness.

‘Show me,’ he said.

They could not, or would not, see each other’s faces. The body opposite Keith was warm though and glowing, as if releasing some of the sunshine it had stored. He loved the way the breasts stood out white, he stared at them in awe, the nipples like jewels in their setting, so proud as he kissed them, dipped into them. The body was soft, it parted, he melted into it, as if into butter, he could have wished never again to come out from it.

But he had to. The night air began to send shivers through both of them as they lay there on the carpet. They drew apart.

‘Glad to be home?’ asked Brenda, slipping on her dress. Pulling the curtains. Turning on the light. Moving away.