THE LANDLORD

Keith Ridgway

He came at the weekends in the afternoons, usually on Saturday, occasionally Sunday. He would leave his plump car glowing in front of the building, half on the footpath, half on the road. Once he came unannounced on a Friday evening, a little the worse for wear, and leaned heavily against the door jamb, struggling to write in my rent book, laughing about something behind me, or on my shoulder perhaps. Giggling. Just the once, this was, on a Friday. I watched him drive off and then come to a stop after only a few metres. The car crouched there like a dropped fruit, a lime from its tree, for example, or an unripe apple, and it didn’t move, not until some other sort of car pulled up behind it and sounded a tentative horn. At which point my landlord, with a squeal of tyres, accelerated away at high speed.

In the summer he often came with his son, an overweight boy of about twelve, who would cut the grass in front of the house while his father made his calls. The sudden noise of the lawn mower would rouse me, and I would glance out the window and see the boy, and the car, and go then and stand at the door to my flat and wait. Sometimes I put my ear to the door. Sometimes I put my forehead to it. I would at these times be tense in my body and vacant in my mind, as if there was nothing else I could possibly be doing. It was possible to estimate his proximity from the voices, the knocking, the noises, and it was possible to get it wrong.

I lived at the top of the house, in what was probably once an attic but which consisted then of a very small bathroom, a larger storeroom where the landlord kept old furniture and bits and pieces, and my single room with its broken bed, its table, a sink and cooker, a fridge and the chairs. Several chairs, only one of them comfortable. There were shelves on the sloping walls which could not bear the weight of more than a few dusty paperbacks and various mementos—photographs, little tins and boxes, my father’s letters. The electricity came and went and in the summer the sun made the place impossible during most of the day. I would go to the park and walk there amongst the cool trees and see the swimmers in the lake and nod at men like myself who walked in the shade or lingered near the ruins of the old fort. In winter I would sit close to the gas heater.

He wanted always to talk. To take my money—the rent—of course, but also to talk, to pass the time, to ask my advice, to worry sometimes about his son, the boy in the garden, but more often to talk about his wife.

Sometimes it was the mower I heard first. Usually though it was the front door slamming in a way that was distinctly his. Slamming is too strong a word. A door let go, not closed. Not careless, but not entirely careful. The tenants closed the door. He let it go, with perhaps a small push of his hand, perhaps a couple of fingers. Then the loud, no-nonsense knocking at other doors as he made his way upstairs. I had the top-floor flat, as I say, at the front. I could see the road, the garden, the path, the first of the steps. I was rarely taken by surprise. I’ve said that. The car sometimes, the boy’s voice, the lawn mower, the letting go of the front door, the knocking. And I would stand waiting. Sometimes I might drift off, and the knock then came like blows against the body, and I would flinch, winded for a moment, as if toppled while out on the wide grass.

I wanted nothing more than a place to live, you understand, nothing other than a place to be.

I was terribly timid as a child. My father raised me. He was a gentleman. Overly gentle, I would say. He has left me also gentle, and afraid sometimes. Fearful. Which people find unattractive in a man. I played sport, was good at football, and I swam. But as I grew older, my health. Now I walk. I walk great distances. And when I can, when there is no one to be seen, I run.

His voice at other doors seemed brusque. Occasionally raised. What my neighbours did to displease him I have no idea. I rarely spoke to them. But with me he had a quiet, respectful tone. He mispronounced my name. But he did it consistently and confidently, so that after some time I began to suspect that his pronunciation was correct and mine was not. At first he would just stand at the door. Lean sometimes against the jamb. He would greet me smiling and I would hand him my yellow rent book, the bank notes inside, marking the page. He would always deftly, quickly, with two or three fingers of one hand fan out the notes to count them, and fold and vanish them, content. He would write then in the book—the date, the amount, his initials—and hand it back to me. All the time talking, speaking, saying my name, flitting his eyes over my shoulder at the room, at the heater in the corner and the stale bed, the shirts hanging mildewed on the rail, the journals and plates on the table, and at some point he began to ask to come in.

May I come in?

Sometimes it was to take some small piece of furniture out of the storeroom. Or to put something in there. A hat stand. A mirror. A rug rolled up and tied. Maybe that is how it started. Him rummaging around in there. Me offering him something. Would you like something?

May I come in?

My mouth opened and closed and I shook, I think, my head, not in refusal, but in that way we do, a lip distorted, a small shrug of the shoulders, men like me, as much as to say, of course, if you like, certainly, I suppose, if you really want to, I don’t know why you would, but yes, I’m hardly going to say no, am I?, come in, come in, you own the place after all, and I stay here at your generous indulgence. Certainly, please, I apologise for the mess. There was never any mess. A chair. Please. Have a seat. Some tea? Some tea?

In the summer when it was very hot he would walk over to the window and look out at the boy mowing the lawn, and complain about the heat, and complain about the boy, and he would see all my windows open and turn down the tea and seem puzzled by something. He would turn down tea in the summer. But sometimes in the winter he would say yes, and he might have one sip or none but he never drank it all. I offered him food but he seemed to have no interest in food. He was stout nevertheless. A belly hung over his belt, and his head was fat, puffy, his hair hanging down at the sides, bald on top, turning from a dirty brown to a clean-looking silver. He wore shirts typically, never particularly clean, always a little tight, and trousers the same. He was not in any way a handsome or elegant man, but he did not seem to know this, and so carried himself confidently. In my room anyway. Coming up the stairs. In the house. In the garden. In and out of his car. Maybe there were places where his confidence dipped, I’m sure there were, but I have no access to places like that. Not then, not since. Places where you can come and go as you please, and hang pictures on the wall, and paint, or ask friends around for dinner or to stay. Of course my father, in his letters, upbraided me for this state of affairs, insisting that a lack of initiative on my part explained these deficiencies, that I was nothing if not to blame. The landlord was never so direct. He would ask me politely how my work was going, whether I had had any luck, whether the gods or the angels or fate or fortune had deigned to smile on me in some way, that sort of generic enquiry. Always enquiring, as if to enquire, why are you still here?

I used to think that he and my father would get on famously.

His wife, he told me, was terribly depressed. She waited by the window all day. He woke in the morning and found himself alone, and went downstairs and into the front room that overlooks the gardens, the gardens of their house, and his wife sat there, in an armchair she had turned around, looking out over the grounds, down the long driveway to the gate. She did not stir at his voice. She did not say anything as he placed his hand on her shoulder, but she put her own small hand over his, and gently squeezed it, and he was relieved that her hand was warm, relieved that she could bring herself to touch him, relieved and of course distraught. She told him to leave the door open. He went to the kitchen and made the boy his breakfast. He would not name his wife. Or his son. They were “my wife,” “my son.” He asked me what he should do, how he should get through to her. I asked him if something had happened to his wife, or whether her depression was—as can often be the case, of course—without discernible cause. He looked at me curiously. He ran his hand over his forehead and sighed. And thanked me for the glass of water and stood up to leave. Pausing at the door, he turned to me and said that I had asked a very interesting question, one that had not occurred to him, and that he would give it a great deal of thought, and he looked forward to seeing me the following week.

She was waiting, his wife, perhaps, for someone to call. Hence the chair at the window. Hence the long driveway, the grounds, some sort of tree, a large tree, around which a path, that sort of thing. Someone or perhaps anyone. I thought I might call. Or at least . . .

I wondered where they lived. I looked through the documents. Tenancy agreement, rental contract. Itemisation of property contents, fixings, fixtures, furniture and ambient status. Condition thereof. Non-alteration declaration. Schedule of payments. Deposit receipt. Conditions of forfeiture. Proof of entitlement. Proof of good standing. Responsibilities of tenancy. Break-clause parameters. I looked for an address. But there was nothing but my address. For my landlord just a name, a telephone number. His name, that ambiguity. I wasn’t sure I was reading it correctly. And I had dialled the telephone number once, when the woman in the basement fell. When she fell on the steps that time. I don’t know what I thought I’d say to him, but in any case the number was not in service. A voice said that, or something like it. This number is not in service. This number does not exist.

At least walk up their driveway. So that she would see me. A figure, slouching up through the rain, hunched, solitary, a foul smell in the garden, the corpse of some animal. Or in the sunshine, obscured by a parasol, moving slowly as if dragging a foot, as if injured, looking for somewhere to rest for a while, pausing to lean against the tree. The big tree. I was curious what would happen. She would gasp and rise and go to the door. His wife. Would he be in? No. She would gasp and rise and go to the door. The door first of the room she was in, the door then of the house. She would gasp and rise and go to the door.

You poor man. You are soaked. Come in. Undress. I will dry you.

She wouldn’t say that.

I have been waiting for you. I realise now that you are a cripple, so I must I suppose not be angry with you and yet I am. I have been waiting. Waiting for you and you have taken up too much of my time crawling to my lair.

She wouldn’t say lair. Why would she say lair? She wouldn’t say cripple. She would think it. But these people.

I have been waiting for you. My husband tells me that you are an ideal tenant. He says that you pay your rent every week in full, that you have never been late with a payment, that you keep the flat in good order, that the neighbours have made no complaints, that you do not hang pictures or make noise or have a trail of people coming and going at all hours, visitors, unsocial hours, music, you do not have music, that there is very little evidence that you are there at all most of the time, perhaps the glow of a light late at night, but dim, seen only from across the street, not unattractive in a house like that, better than a cold blank darkness in the upper windows, and you sometimes leave it on, don’t you? Overnight. Why? Because you think that some sign that someone lives there is good for everyone, good for my husband, good for his investment, my son, good for my son, who is my husband’s chief investment, good for me, as my husband’s beneficiary, good for your neighbours, not to live in a house that looks empty, and good for you, as a sign in the world that you are in the world. A simple sign. A low warm light. Some warmth. Let’s not romanticise things. It is a single bulb that casts an orange sort of glow over your shelves and the black glass, the book you read, your plate and cup, your table top, your bedclothes, your skin.

She would praise me for my humility, my acquiescence, my gentility. The gentility I posses by virtue of her cushions, her throws, her paintings, her sets of crockery, her glassware, her cornices and rugs, her books, her cases of books, biographies of sporting people, politically successful people, actors and painters, dead saints. There are no living saints, she says, laughing, throwing back her head and laughing, a glass in her hand, a hand at her neck.

She raised her hand to my cheek. She placed a glass in front of me. Had me sit by her side. She asked me about my childhood. She told me about her charity work and asked me to praise her generosity, to say that it was extraordinary, almost shocking, that she would give so much of herself to those who were dying, to the orphans, to the innocent victims of the war in Europe. A war in Europe, she said, sadly, aping distress, shaking her hands and her head, imagine, can you imagine such a thing?

Why would I go there? Why would I sit on the tram? On the bus. Why would I sit on the bus, the sun on the side of my face the whole way, why would I sit there against the glass, my shoulder against the glass, the sun on the side of my face, my clothes too warm? Why would I get off the bus and walk the miles down the lanes and the edgeless roads, pushed by the cars, the sun on my legs, my clothes not warm enough, bright rain blowing at me from the north and the sun never dipping, the sun ranting in my ears, why would I walk all that way, travel all that way, my stomach empty, my head thin, to their home? To the gate and the driveway, the solid gate, the sweeping drive, the path around the tree, the big tree, and my slouching into view like an old smell, an axe in my trouser leg, a knife in my sleeve. I can tie knots. My father in his letters asks me continually to tie knots. Her hand on her throat. He means that I need to make connections. That I need to establish ties with networks of people who may be able to help me to become . . . I don’t know what he thinks. But he says “tie knots.” His English was always poor.

Perhaps they would like me. He likes me. In a certain sense, he likes me. Perhaps I could live in their house, a painter. Perhaps I could paint forgeries for them. Imitations of great artists. A lost Soutine, a Schiele drawing, a sketch by Pascin. An arrangement. He would know a dealer in the city, or a string of other men, a route. A way of taking my product and placing it just so. Provenance, history, pedigree. All of these things, forged. Interesting word. I mean it in the sense of counterfeit. Forfeit, counterfeit. Perhaps we could come to some arrangement. In return for my health, my meals, a bed, a walk in the grounds.

The grounds would be abandoned. Their son, perhaps, mowing the lawn. A fat child. I wonder is there a daughter? He is the sort of man to leave a daughter at home with her mother, to bring only his son to collect the rents. Jesus gave comfort to the rent collectors. Or was it the tax collectors? It was the tax collectors, of course. Not even Jesus had time for the rent collectors. Perhaps they would think of me like that. As a sort of Jesus. A Christ of the landlords.

His wife, he tells me, is unwell. There is something wrong with her heart. It cannot go on. It has had enough. It is winding down like a clock losing time, slowly but surely becoming useless, unmoored, toying with hesitation and suspense, stuttering, slower and slower, seeming many times to stop, but going on, and on, fitfully and formlessly, etc. He uses this sort of language—the simile and metaphor and analogy—but is incapable of pity. His wife, he worries, will die. He asks me if I have lost anyone to death. Have you lost anyone to death? I shake my head. No one has died. No one. Older relatives I did not know. A grandparent I cannot remember. A woman in the neighbourhood when I was a child but I had never seen her, never known her. She was the mother of a boy who knew my friends but whom I did not know. I saw him once, afterwards, playing football, the boy with the dead mother. A pal pointed him out. I watched him for a while but he seemed no different to the rest of us, indifferent, tired. Death has not touched me. Perhaps that makes me useless to him. Or perhaps the inverse is true.

He sits in the chair, slouched, his shoulders slumped, his belly pushed out, his hands lying usually in his lap, his eyes on the table top, on me, on the walls, sometimes on the windows. He sits as if exhausted. And sometimes he yawns. His mouth opens in a slow rictus distortion of his doughy face. He has small eyes, a country accent. He seems sometimes to doze off. I sit as still as I can. I wait. His eyes droop and his head nods. He says nothing, just breathes, is almost completely still.

But what do you think, he says suddenly, of the international situation? It worries my wife. Everything worries my wife. He laughs, scratches the dry skin of his forearm. Everything worries her. Noise worries her and silence worries her and the war worries her but if she didn’t have the war to worry about she would be worried by the fragility of the peace, or the peace itself would worry her. All those men of fighting age, she would say. With no fighting for them to do. That is a tinderbox, she would say. All those young men not dying, being allowed to live, in society, with no outlet. She would worry about that. If not that, something else.

When I met her first the worry was much smaller, a much smaller, more personal thing. She would worry about how she looked. She would worry about not hearing from me for a day or two. Imagine that. She would worry about saying something stupid in company, about her parents not liking me, about money, about our lack of money in those days, it was no joke I can tell you, until I learned the laws and got to know how they’re made. I can tell you it was hard times then, you wouldn’t believe the amount of worry that I had, real worry, not the idle, not the juvenile, not the fripperies, the fripperous worries of my darling wife, if only she’d known how worried I was, she would have died then of worry, but maybe she picked it up a little, from me, no man can conceal everything, and I am no actor, I can tell you, I am a pretty open book, I think you’ll find, and until I learned the law and met my local representatives, got to know the men in the party, the women in the party, all the parties, the lawmakers, got to know them, learned the ins and outs of the laws, until I understood how to operate the machinery of the law, the dials and switches as it were, like driving an old—ha—Massey Ferguson, or breeding horses, esoteric knowledge, well. Back then we had things to worry about but she worried about fripperies. Now we have nothing to worry about and she worries about war. I ask you.

Sometimes he pats his pockets. He rolls a little to one side and his hand pats his pockets. I think perhaps that he used to smoke. He pats his pockets, and rolls upright again. Never actually puts his hands into his pockets. Never does that. I can see the bulge of a wallet. His keys he puts on my table. A huge number of keys, more than there are flats in the building. His building. More than double, I would say. Perhaps he has another building. We sit and hear the sound of the lawn mower. If I pour him a glass of water he does not drink it. He wants to talk about his wife. He talks, and looks at the table top, at the walls, at the glass that makes the windows, at the cupboards, the sink, the door. He does not look at the bed.

One day he said that his wife might be dying. A hot day. The boy mowing the lawn, the flies on the glass, his water untouched. She was, he said, unable to move any longer. She needed care. He had to employ a person to come to the house every day to help her do various things. He was vague about it, waved his hand back and forth, then laid it again in his lap. A very hot day. He might need to hire someone to move in. To care for her around the clock. Two people, he supposed, or even three. Constant care.

Who knows if she’s getting towards the end? The doctors don’t know. They come and examine her and they are bloody useless, I tell you. So who knows? It could go on years. It could go on years but every time I get out of the car and look at the windows I wonder what I’ll find. Who knows? Very weak. The cost of it all is preposterous really. Just at the moment. With the war. And the interest rates. Interest rates, of course. Inflation. My boy with his extra lessons, he has various issues. He’s a smart lad but there are challenges. Ah well, I won’t bore you with it. One thing after another. One thing on top of another. And I know of course that you’re not, that you yourself, you’re not, of course, well, I know that, of course. But nevertheless. So starting from next month. Is it next month?

He looked at his wristwatch. And told me that from next month the rent would be raised by such and such an amount per week. He said, looking around, that he would have the place painted. Painted and cleaned. Don’t worry about it, he said. Cleaned and painted, he corrected himself. I’ll sort that out for you no bother, don’t worry about that at all, a lovely fresh coat of paint. I’ll have a man come to you with colours.

It’s all, he said, very depressing. I mean the situation. With my wife. She’s lost a lot of weight. I’d say more than twenty kilograms. In the last few months. Well, I know it is twenty-four kilograms, just under three months, I know it’s that, there’s no guessing about it. I put her on the scales myself, every Wednesday. We weigh ourselves every Wednesday. She started that. Ages ago now. Keeping an eye on my belly, got the weighing scales. Insisted I weigh myself every Wednesday, and she joined in herself, a little bit of encouragement for me, and sure enough when you see the numbers it becomes a challenge. I like a bit of a challenge. Nothing too serious. Just keeping an eye on what I eat after that. Lost a little. She never had to. But she’s losing it now, let me tell you. She’s a featherweight now, my god.

He rubbed his hands over his face and told me he’d be in touch about the cleaning and the colours and the painting, and off he went.

I am not myself, entirely. How could I be? I am something else. I am an allocated life—here you are, live here. I am a permitted sort of person. Here, stand here. Sit here. Lie here. Walk here. A tenant. Do you see? Nothing I can do about it now. My father dead, the empty shelves, the old house long lost, and the open fields, the sky. Nothing I can do about it now. In the end he found some anger. A little rage at the end. I stood embarrassed at the foot his bed, the nurses giggling, his skin turning purple and his breath loud amongst the machines, the beeping, the smells, the giggling. Never myself. Some other, measured thing.

I went to the place where they lived. I simply asked him one day. Do you have far to go? He said a place on the edge of the country. A townland. And I went there, a tram then a bus, not knowing exactly where the house might be. I wore a hood, a pair of shoes, some sunglasses, the coat. The heat was tremendous, and a group of police officers sat around on the main street, indolent, staring, eating sandwiches and drinking from cans, caressing those yellow sticks they always carry. I found the postmaster but could think of no way of asking what I needed to know. Where does this man live? This, I think, being his name. I don’t know how to say it. He drives this car. A son, a wife. I wandered out into the lanes and the roads. A distance in all directions. I stared at the big houses, the small houses, looking for his car. A fat boy mowing the lawn. A woman at the window. You know what I know. I thought once or twice that I saw him, or his son, but these people are everywhere. People like these. We have our laws, our lawmakers, our large estates, our country, our time. But it is our that is the lie, of course. Of course it is, you don’t need me to tell you that.

I saw the car then. The unripe berry of his car, glowing cold on the ground between the hedges and the grass by the solid old stone of a mid-sized house, bow windows, a wide door between potted trees, a smokeless chimney, a still air, the scent of little apples, little limes, hidden. I stood and stared, my head on my shoulders. A gravel driveway. An iron gate, open. No path. No tree. Just hedgerows and empty beds, an agitation in the dusk that vanished when the eye sought it out. The windows all were empty. Blank and dark. I took several careful turns around them, and walked then, quickly, briskly, to the door and knocked. Or did not knock at all. Then I turned, ashamed, went back to the gate. Quickly. No sound. I went on. I went on to the corner where the lane turned towards the town. Quickly. I passed a frightened man, a running child. I ran myself. I found a meadow and galloped, a bridled man, yearning I suppose for some space unlimited by others, and behind me across the wide grass I saw the police officers go into the landlord’s house, and come out again immediately, shouting and pointing, and they mounted their raging horses and set off in my direction, yellow flashes in their raised fists.