by Barrie Shore
CASTLEBRIDGE
Sunday, 3rd December, 2006
He struggles as always to lower the cot rail. Margaret manages with every appearance of ease, hoiking it up and letting it down in two deft movements; but for Jack it’s a battle he seems always to lose. After several attempts, he thumps the rail in exasperation, and down it drops with a resounding crash as if to belittle his age and incompetence.
‘Blast the damn thing.’
He tucks a bib under her chin, tests the tea with his knuckle, fits the lid to the beaker, cups his hand behind her head. She knows the ritual, opens her mouth like a fledgling bird, but as soon as he touches the spout to her lips, she closes it again in an obstinate line.
‘Come on, little bird.’
She likes little bird, opens her mouth, graciously accepts a sip of tea, swirls it about as if she were savouring vintage wine, and spits it out. Tea dribbles out and down her chin. He dabs her dry with the baby bib.
‘Ho-hum, ho-ho, what a funny old chap.’
As he tries once again to feed her, he thinks of the Great Man and what a mercy it is that he didn’t, after all, come to call, that he isn’t witness to this sorry performance: Eva opening her mouth, swirling her tea, spitting it out, tea and saliva dribbling down her chin, Jack dabbing her dry with the baby bib. He remembers his meeting with the Great Man so long ago, and his boyhood dreams, his aspirations of becoming a writer and the Great Man’s encouraging words; of the precious book in his pocket that has brought him such joy and consolation, whose every poem is written in his heart, and he is thankful that the Great Man never knew, cannot know, what a failure he is. After all, what is he but a writer manqué, a second-rate shopkeeper, and a minder, failing even at that.
She has tired of the game, refusing now to open her mouth at all. And the tea is cold. Jack’s patience is wearing thin, and Margaret’s voice is nagging in his ear. ‘She’s got to have fluids, Mr C, you know what she’s like when she gets dehydrated.’
‘I say, just bite the bullet and swallow it down, there’s a good chap.’
She smiles. Why should I?
‘Don’t smile at me with that fat look on your face. I’m the one that has to dispose of the evidence.’
He has an ongoing battle with Margaret about Eva’s consumption of food and drink and is required to monitor her daily intake and record the results on a nutrition chart. He was meticulous to begin with: 6.30 – tea, 2 sips. 8.30 – porridge, 3 spoonfuls. But lately he’s blatantly taken to cooking the books: 6.30 – tea, 2 beakers. 8.30 – juice, 3 cups; cereal – 1 pkt; toast – 6 slices. Margaret, who has no trouble at all with feeding Eva, is not amused.
‘Are you trying to take the piss, Mr C?’
‘No, Margaret.’ I love you, Margaret. Sadly, I can’t live without you, Margaret.
He fishes his glasses from his pocket and peers at the clipboard at the end of the cot, and sighs, heigh-ho. ‘What sort of fib shall we tell her today?’ He still cooks the books, but subtly now, fiendishly cunning: 6.30am – tea, 100mls. No, fifty, 50mls, not too much and not too little. ‘There, that should shut her up for once.’ He goes to the window, pulls back the curtains and lifts the sash, empties the beaker outside. A protesting yowl comes from the yard, and a security light blinks on as the cat from the shop next door jumps onto the wall.
‘Sorry, old chap, I didn’t know you were there.’
The cat glares up at him, swishing its tail, then leaps away to the other side of the wall. Jack stays at the window for a while sniffing the early air, and sees that the moon has gone and it’s spitting with rain. And he imagines for a moment, just a moment or two, as he stands at the window smelling the rain, how good it would be to go outside for a while, to take a walk in the rain and look for the moon.
Eva makes a plaintive sound, a chirrup, a cheep. Little bird Eva waiting for something that nobody knows. He turns back at once, obedient to her call, guilty of forgetting her and dreaming of the rain.
‘I say, what a bully you are this morning.’
‘Chip,’ she cheeps.
‘Well, yes, if you say so. Chipperychoo.’ He seizes the cot rail, determined to raise it by force if necessary. It slides obligingly into place, a small triumph of man over machine that makes him absurdly pleased with himself. ‘There you see, that’ll teach you who’s the boss.’
She looks up at him. And smiles. And he makes believe that she’s smiling at him.
LONDON
Friday, 14th March, 1947
She stretched her lips at the mirror, put the compact and lipstick away, snapped the bag shut and smiled. That smile. ‘Right, where is it you’re off to this afternoon?’
‘What? I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I thought you said you had an appointment?’
‘Oh, damn, so I have. Oh, sorry.’
‘Don’t worry, I swear all the time. Hell’s bells, that’s what we used to say at school, hell’s bells and buckets of blood.’
She laughed. And he loved her. And she knew that he did and was pleased in the way people are when they know they’re admired and pretending not to notice. She blotted her lips on her serviette, took the primroses from the glass and wrapped them up in it.
‘So, well? Where are we going?’
We. She’d said we. He took the card from his pocket and almost sang the address. ‘The Brande and Barber Collection, 101 Eden Grove, London SW…’
‘Oh, yes, I know where you mean. Come on, then, we’ll take the bus…’
The lie that wasn’t a lie but wasn’t the truth, lay heavy in his heart as they walked down Whitehall. It loomed over him at the bus stop as he stared at the Cenotaph across the street. It sat between them on the top deck, up at the front, she with the primroses in one hand, cigarette in the other, reaching from side to side, showing him the sights; he scarcely noticing the places she wanted him to see, because of the weight of the lie.
Big Ben and Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey, Scotland Yard, Victoria Station, Pimlico, Sloane Street…and the gaping spaces in between… piles of rubble, clouds of dust… bulldozers, ball breakers… a one-legged tramp with a tray of matches… torn posters, Far Better to Face the Bullets… Britons Need… Who? You? Oh, no, anyone but you.
The weight shifted, lifted a little, as the bus lurched on; as he felt the warmth of her shoulder beside him, as he watched the cigarette between her fingers touching her mouth, the cork tip stubbed out on the floor (that same lipsticky butt that he pocketed surreptitiously and put to his lips later on when he was travelling home; her tobacco smell still on his jacket, her name singing in his head in time with the train, Evelyn Higgs, Evelyn Higgs, I love a woman called Evelyn Higgs…). And by the time they reached their journey’s end, the weight of the lie that wasn’t a lie but wasn’t the truth, had disappeared.
The World’s End.
Bleak as its name, battered and blitzed in body and spirit, the devastation begun by the soldiers of war finished now by the armies of peace.
Eden Grove was a proud street once, leading down to the river, lined with handsome Edwardian terraces, silent now, gapingly empty. Number a hundred and one was halfway along on the eastern side, the last house left in a rubble of bricks and broken walls, like a solitary tooth in a crumbling jaw.
They stood on the pavement outside, looking at flaking plaster, peeling paint, broken steps leading to lopsided pillars and a dilapidated door, heavy curtains drawn across dusty windows.
‘Brande and Barber,’ she said. He could smell the names on her smoky breath. ‘How jolly they sound, like a variety act in the music hall.’
‘I suppose they were in a way. They’re old friends of Bob’s, they all worked in the theatre together.’
‘Golly, how thrilling.’
‘They run some sort of museum now, theatrical stuff, I don’t really know, except that they’re closing it down
and there’s something of Bob’s they want me to have, too precious to put in the post apparently.’
‘To do with the theatre, you mean? A book? Play script? To go in the shop?’
‘I don’t know. It’s all very odd.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, Bob died five years ago, nearly six, and they’ve never been in touch since, they didn’t even come to his funeral. And then out of the blue, a few months ago, I started getting letters from Oliver Brande. They were frightfully fulsome: all about Bob, what a wonderful friend he was, how much they missed him, longing to meet me, and so on and so forth. And then he just sort of summoned me to fetch this thing they want me to have, whatever it is.’
‘I say, what fun.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
But it wasn’t. He went up the steps to the front door, pretending a confidence he didn’t feel; took off his hat, reached for the bell, hesitated.
She was still on the pavement. ‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t know. Something…’
Something that told him not to ring the bell. He looked back at her hoping, knowing it was too much to ask, that she would make the decision for him. But she didn’t. She watched him with a sad little smile, as if she had set him a test that she knew he would fail. Because she thought him a coward? Oh, no, not that, she must never think that.
‘Right, well, best get it over.’ He braced himself and rang the bell with a decisive flourish.
‘Tata, then.’ She’d said it before and changed her mind, but now she was saying it again and it sounded final. Tata then. ‘Ta for the lunch and flowers and things.’
‘What?’ He turned back. ‘You’re not going?’
‘Yep. It’s your business, you don’t need me.’ She gave a little wave and turned away.
He had to stop her. He must say something bold and arresting: a quotation from Shakespeare, a piece of Platonic philosophy, a Socratic argument delivered in Greek, an irrefutable statement that made it impossible for her to leave.
‘I can’t live without you!’ His cry rang out in the empty street.
She stopped. She turned. She looked up at him. Looked down at the primroses wrapped in the lipstick-stained serviette. Looked at him again with her head on one side and that sad little smile. ‘Oh, Mr Carter, how beguiling you are.’
Run. Now. Run down the steps, take her hand and run, run away to the future. Now, do it now. He took a step and another, but he was already too late. The front door opened behind him and a quavering voice thrilled in his ear.
‘John Carter. How perfectly marvellous to meet you at last.’
An old man in the doorway, leaning on a silver-topped cane. More than old, he was ancient: small, dry and skeletally thin with a hairless head that poked from the collar of his black leather cape like a tortoise peering out from its shell. Thin lips, snub nose, beady black eyes set wide apart that didn’t seem to blink.
‘Oliver Brande,’ he proclaimed in ringing tones, as if he were addressing the backmost row of a large auditorium. ‘And you are Robert’s boy.’ He held out his hand, palm down, as if waiting for it to be kissed, and when Jack took it and shook it, he didn’t let go. ‘How beautiful is this hand,’ he intoned, ‘so strong, so capable, so reassuringly masculine.’
‘Yes, he’s got nice hands, hasn’t he?’ Eva’s bright voice bounced in Jack’s ear. ‘It was the very first thing I noticed about him. Wasn’t it, darling?’
Darling. She’d called him ‘darling’. How astonishing, how wonderful, how… perfectly marvellous.
The turtle neck turned to her slowly. ‘And who,’ he said, stretching his lips into a mirthless smile, ‘is this delightful young lady?’
‘My name is Evelyn. Evelyn Higgs.’ She took Jack’s arm with a simper. ‘We’ve just got engaged.’
What? What? What? WHAT?
‘Haven’t we, darling?’
‘Yes, oh, yes!’ Jack went along with the glorious charade. ‘Yes,’ he shouted, ‘we’re engaged to be married.’
‘How quaint,’ said Brande, releasing Jack’s hand. ‘How very… unexpected.’ He looked from one to the other with his blinkless eyes. ‘Well, you’d better come in. Darling Jodie is simply dying to meet you.’
Joderell Barber was tall and muscular, bullishly masculine, with an abundance of hair surely too black, too glossy to be perfectly real; and if indeed he was dying to meet them, he disguised his emotion with cold aplomb.
Eva, in her role as gushing fiancée, made an effort to crack the conversational ice. ‘My closest friend is called Dodie,’ she said, with a girlish laugh. ‘Jodie and Dodie, isn’t that queer?’
‘It depends,’ said Barber, raising a finely plucked eyebrow, ‘what precisely you mean by “queer”.’
Jack was in a state of euphoria that bordered on lunacy. ‘Aren’t we all a little queer when it comes to the point? I know I am.’ He seized Barber’s hand and shook it, too long, too firmly. ‘In fact, I’m perfectly mad, mad with joy. But only,’ he said, putting a confidential arm round Barber’s hefty shoulders, ‘in the north-north-west. When the wind’s southerly…’
‘Yes, my sweet, you know a hawk from a handsaw.’
Oh, and she knew her Shakespeare as well! How unexpected, how astonishing, how prodigious she was! He abandoned Brande and fell to his knees before her. ‘Oh, shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
‘No, darling, not now.’
‘What’s the matter with him?’ said Brande, in a querulous tone. ‘Is he ill?’
‘No,’ said Barber, with a stilted smile, ‘he’s in love.’
‘Heavens, how dreary.’ Brande poked Jack in the small of his back with the tip of his cane. ‘Young man, I beg you to rise from this semi-recumbent posture, it’s most indecorous.’
‘Yes, do get up, darling, you’re making the most frightful ass of yourself.’
‘Dost thou call me an ass?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, then I am a happy ass! I am a donkey, I am the fool of love.’
‘That’s not Shakespeare.’
‘Isn’t it? Who then?’
‘Don’t ask me.’
‘Hazlitt. William Hazlitt, 1778 to 1830. On the Pleasure of Hating.’
‘Oh, don’t be so boring, Jodie, darling. Go and make tea while I show them round.’
They followed Brande as he tottered through room after room over three floors, reciting a tired mantra in his quavering voice. Each room was designed as an elaborate stage set, crammed with theatrical memorabilia: play scripts, posters, programmes, paintings, photographs, autographs, sheet music, costume designs; collections of armour, daggers, cutlasses, pistols; banners and ensigns, crowns and coronets; shoes, gloves, elaborate fans, and case after case of oversized jewellery. Jack saw it all and saw nothing, only conscious of Eva, not hanging on to his arm now but to Brande’s, letting out oohs and ahs of appreciation as she bent to examine a poster, a programme, touch a dress, while Jack sulked behind, drawing their initials on a dusty cabinet with a heart in between that she didn’t bother to notice.
They took tea in a first floor drawing room decorated in faded crimson and tarnished gilt, dedicated, it seemed, to the Victorian theatre. Heavy curtains were drawn across the windows, the only light coming from a dusty chandelier hanging from the ceiling that seemed to deepen the gloom rather than enlighten it. An oversize portrait in an elaborate carved frame dominated one end of the room: a self-consciously soulful young man in fur-trimmed black holding a cane in one hand, a pensive finger propped at his cheek, who gazed across the room at an equally large mirror over the mantelpiece at the far end and, on catching sight of himself, seemed not entirely reassured.
‘Ah, the salon, my favourite room.’ Brande ushered Eva to a velvet-covered chaise longue before sinking into a gilded bergère that seemed too insubstantial to bear
even his negligible weight. Barber directed Jack to a low ottoman, little more than a stool, on the other side of the room, and proceeded to distribute tea in a curiously obsequious manner, as if he were playing a non-speaking waiter in a drawing-room comedy.
‘Everything you see comes from a West End production,’ said Brande, ‘ones with which Jodie and I were closely associated.’ He lifted his teacup as if for inspection. ‘This very china made its début in the original production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, the Adelphi, ninety-one.’
‘Two,’ said Barber, proffering thinly cut cucumber sandwiches served from a silver salver. ‘The twentieth of February, eighteen-ninety-two. And it was St James’s, not the Adelphi.’
Brande ignored him. ‘Dear Winifred gave a ravishing performance as Lady W, I recall, although a trifle shrill in the upper register.’ He selected a sandwich with fastidious fingers and sniffed it suspiciously. ‘You’ve put pepper in these,’ he said, accusingly. ‘You know I hate pepper.’
‘No, you don’t,’ said Barber, ‘you only pretend that you do.’
‘Do I?’ Brande nibbled the sandwich with unreliable teeth. ‘Oh, yes, so I do.’
Barber took up a position beside Brande’s chair, standing slightly behind him, like a bodyguard poised to deal with unexpected attack, his teacup incongruously small in his pugilist fists. Nobody spoke. The only sounds were the gentle chink of saucer and cup, the faint whistling of Brande’s teeth as he sipped his tea. Like actors who had forgotten their lines, waiting for the prompt to come.
Eva supplied it. ‘Jack tells me that you’re closing down. How frightfully sad.’ She sounded sincere but Jack couldn’t be sure. She had withdrawn from him completely, the wide brim of her hat once again obscuring her face as she gazed at Brande, hanging on his every word.
‘It’s a tragedy.’ Brande’s eyes glistened with tears. ‘The production is over, the curtain has fallen for the last time, all that’s left now is the get-out.’ The tears threatened, but failed, to spill to his cheeks.
‘But why?’ said Eva. ‘It’s the most wonderful collection.’