A Book at Bedtime

by Barrie Shore

  She was a lady who looked like a witch, with a thin white face and long black hair, with trousers on her legs, and a velvet jacket with flowing sleeves, and a snow-white shirt with a frill at the front, and a silk scarf to her neck that shone like the night.

  Bob.

  The lady witch looked at him, up and down.

  ‘So, this is Jack Carter. The Saturday boy.’ Her voice was smooth and black as treacle.

  ‘Yes, miss, I am.’

  Of course, who else could it be, with that lopsided smile of his and that particular stance, posing for the photograph, pretending not to pose, as if he couldn’t care less. Posing somdomite. Arm in arm with the woman beside him and yet seeming to hold her at arm’s length. The woman beside him. Is it a woman? Jack peers closer. Oh, yes, no question at all, a woman with abundant hair and a smile that didn’t just smile but laughed.

  Francesca.

  *

  Castlebridge market never changed. The same stalls were erected in the square on Wednesdays and Saturdays, by the same traders, generation after generation of the same families, selling much the same produce, from the same suppliers as they’d always done.

  He had loved the market as a child. Wednesdays were the best, skirmishing round with the rest of the boys when school was over, pinching from the stalls, back-chatting the traders, breathing the pungent smells of raw fish, bloodied carcasses, the earthy damp of root vegetables, the dizzying sweetness of hot toffee and candy floss. Jack never stole, but he used to crawl under the stalls looking for fallen produce to take home to his mother, pretending his spoils had been given to him. His mother didn’t believe him, but the Devil tempted and she couldn’t resist, especially when it was something special. Like the orange he’d found, it must have been Christmas. It was like an orange but smaller and softer, and the skin was split. He didn’t know what it was until his mother told him. A tangerine, too expensive to buy. He’d watched her peeling it gravely, picking the pith from the segments, sharing them out, five each and an extra one that she gave to him. He remembered the sweet, stinging taste of it in his mouth, spitting out the pips, and the way she’d closed her eyes and laughed as the juice dribbled down her chin. No orange, no satsuma, no tangerine, ever again tasted so good.

  The market might not change, but Jack’s relationship with it did. One summer’s day in the school holidays when he was working full-time at the shop and Bob took him out to haggle at the bookstall. The stallholder was a woman, large and abundant, who wore flowing garments in astonishing colours and scarlet lipstick and armfuls of jewellery, and her name was Francesca. Francesca. It sounded like a poem. Except that she wasn’t an ode like Wordsworth or Keats or a sonnet by Shakespeare, she was a limerick.

  There once was a lady of Dorset,

  Who forgot to put on her corset.

  She went into town

  Where her knickers fell down…

  He’d written it on a slow afternoon while he was minding the shop, Bob and Francesca lounging about in the storeroom, drinking whisky, talking about art and theatre and classical music, making Jack half drunk with their scurrilous talk and raucous laughter. He was thirteen or fourteen, nervous, naïve, and although she was horribly ancient (thirty or so, he realised later on) he fell in love: with her lips, her breasts, her extravagant laughter. He hungered to see her, was mute when he did, drank up her smile and the stories she told, stories unlike any he’d ever read. About love. About sex. About a man and woman, naked together, making love, making a baby. How shocking, how exciting! And that he should have been conceived so disgracefully. How disgusting! In the cold light of day he sternly reminded himself of his mother’s tale, that he was brought into the world by angels as a gift from God, a miraculous delivery, no muck in it, no blood, no sweat, no sperm, no bodies writhing in ecstasy. Oh, but in the heat of the night, he was overwhelmed by the Francesca version as he succumbed to the brief glory of solitary passion.

  He learned too from Francesca why it was that people sniggered at Bob behind his back and called him ‘nancy boy’, ‘sissy’, ‘pansy’ and worse. Sex. More sex. But a man and a man? Sin incarnate, the Sin of Lust. And Bob did that? Sinned with a man? With men? With boys? Would sin with him if he could? Dear God, please save him from that!

  But it wasn’t God who saved him, it was Bob himself, who watched and laughed till he’d had enough.

  ‘Come with me.’

  Following the foot dipping upstairs. To his room. His bedroom.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Perching on the bed, ready for flight, Bob at his side. Now, it was going to happen now…

  ‘You know who this is?’

  A photograph in a silver frame. Of a man with long black hair and a soft mouth who looked like Bob. One of his brothers? But no.

  ‘You will one day. He was a great poet, the most wonderful man I’ve ever known, the only man that I’ve loved or ever will. So if it’s seduction you’re after, don’t look at me. I’m sure your friend Francesca will be happy to oblige.’

  And she did. But not then. First there was war, then there was death. Then he was creeping about in the Home Guard with a lot of old men, despised by them all, filled with self-loathing. And she was his only friend. She’d slapped one of the traders once, a woman – nearly all of them women during the war, and old men, and cripples and creeps. And conchies. The woman had a lazy eye, so when she sneered at Jack, jeered at him, called him a coward, she seemed to be talking to someone behind his back. He had looked behind him wondering who it was, so that he heard but didn’t see the sharp slap of a hand across a cheek, the grunt of shock. But he’d seen the woman slinking away and Francesca, blood high in her cheeks as if it were she who had taken the slap, shouting like a fishwife, ‘Ignorant bitch.’

  Francesca. Who had loved and hated in equal proportion; who gave with the whole of her heart; who absorbed his grief and took it away; who was at his side through Bob’s autopsy, funeral, probate; who persuaded him to take over the shop, move into the flat, leaving his guilt behind in Temperance Terrace. And his mother, who had surprised him.

  ‘My son,’ she said, as she prodded the washtub with more than her usual vigour, ‘my son, you are a man of property now, a person of note in the town.’ She was wet with sweat and her colour was high. ‘It is right, therefore, very meet and right, nay, it is your bounden duty, to live in a manner that befits your position.’

  He almost loved his mother in that moment, for her devotion, for the lonely role of his only mother who, like Mary before her, sacrificed her only one, her lonely son, to a sinful world. She had no intention of letting him go, but she did that first night, leaving a pot of stew that he never ate because Francesca was there with a candle-lit dinner for two. They sat at either end of the Bob’s old table in the storeroom eating an exotic dish with garlic and herbs that Jack wasn’t quite sure if he liked or not, drinking champagne. With an unseen guest at the table that neither acknowledged.

  When they’d finished, Francesca raising her glass in a toast. ‘To you, dearest Jack, to your very first home. To the future.’

  He was giddy with the champagne, euphoric, hallucinatory. There were three Francescas at the other end of the table, three scarlet mouths smiling at him, three glasses in three hands. He was happy in a way he’d never been happy before, longing for her, lifting his glass, watching her wavering in bubbles of wine, sick with lust. Next minute crying, great silent tears dropping onto his plate, painful sobs heaving his shoulders, tight in his throat. Happy again when she came to him, dancing as she came, took his face in her hands, licked his tears, kissed his worries, folded him to her bosom, invited him in.

  And it wasn’t the champagne that made their lovemaking fail, or the strangeness of the flat, or that this was the bed in which Bob had so lately slept; it wasn’t the winey, garlicky taste of her mouth, or the size and heat of her astonishing breasts, or the shock of the shrub betwe
en her legs; it wasn’t her abandonment to joy, her delight at his arousal and the anticipated pleasure of their coupling. It was the unseen guest in the corner of the room whose name was Guilt.

  Oh, mother of mine, why did you bind the knots so tight?

  He avoided the market after that just as she avoided the shop; when they met accidentally, they were both constrained, he too young and self-obsessed for it to occur to him that she might be hurt. She disappeared soon after the war, the stall too; he never found out what happened to her or where she’d gone; not one of the traders knew or cared, and no Bob to ask any more. He had mourned her for a while in the easy way that you do when something is over with no chance of revival, and after another while forgot. Because then there was Eva.

  Francesca. Who had taught him so much, whom he’d loved and desired and hasn’t thought of her for years, whose last name he can’t even remember.

  There once was a lady of Dorset,

  Who forgot to put on her corset.

  She went into town

  Where her knickers fell down…

  He never could find a last line for that limerick but, as he tucks the photograph into his trouser pocket, he thinks of one now.

  That exotic and beautiful, funny peculiar, that exceptional woman of Dorset.

  Did he keep it, the limerick? And the rest of his writing? His father’s stories, his own first, stilted attempts? He can still see that little boy, head down at the storeroom table, tongue between teeth, lost in a world of delicious romance. The titles come back as if he had written them yesterday: The Earl of Enterprise, Prince Caspar of the Caribbean, Pirates of the Pacific, The Miracles of Mandibar, The Dastardly Deeds of Captain Daring and His Drastic End; the later stories maturing as he left school but all of them filched from his favourite authors, Stevenson, Scott, Defoe, Swift, Marryat, Verne, Wells, Hope. Now the young man, seventeen, seizing brief moments between his studies and work in the shop, copying Dickens now, Sterne, Butler, Thackeray, James, Trollope, Bennett and his favourite, Hardy. Then the war and the angst-ridden verse, after Brooke, Graves, Owen, Sassoon. And later, the sonnets to Eva, inspired by Browning, Rossetti, the Bard himself.

  Oh, shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  No, darling, not now.

  Eva had believed in him. Admired his writing, encouraged him to more. I shall work and you shall study, and I’ll toast your slippers in front of the fire and you’ll be a famous writer one day. Oh, Jack, how happy we’ll be.

  And is it too late to start again? To recapture that yearning ache, the desperate need to write from the heart, the near despair of getting it wrong, the explosion of joy when the words flowed and it all came right, the afterwards fulfilment, the lust for more. The tyranny of writing. The glory of it.

  He must have kept something, surely he did? Yes, there are the shelves on the far wall, the wall adjoining the gift shop, the one that’s damp; and there are the boxes, sagging together in sorry, neglected rows; he remembers labelling them all, with Francesca, was it, when he first moved in? Or was it later with Eva, after his mother’s death, when the baby was due: Father, Mother, Temperance Terrace, Brewery; Jack – School, Jack – Studies, Jack – Shop… and hiding at the back, as if it were ashamed, Jack – Writing.

  It’s surprisingly light as he pulls it out to the front of the shelf, and his hands tremble a little as he eases the lid, lifts it off and peers inside.

  And finds nothing. No notebooks, no laborious writing, no boyhood dreams. Nothing at all.

  ‘Jack?’

  Was it Eva who had destroyed the notebooks? And is she come now to confess? To gloat? Or did he do it himself in a fit of despair?

  ‘I say, Jack…’

  ‘Yes, hello?’ His old response, hoping for the best, expecting the worst.

  ‘What the devil are you doing down there?’

  A square silhouette in the cellar doorway. Not Eva. Dodie demanding, Dodie informing. ‘I’m heating some soup.’

  ‘Jolly good.’

  ‘Leek and potato.’

  ‘Splendid.’

  ‘Do you want some?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you can’t stay down here all afternoon, it’s perishing. And what on earth is that ghastly smell?’

  ‘Mice.’ And rats. And the rancid stink of failure.

  ‘Oh, heavens.’ She steps back to the safety of the doorway. Dodie, frightened of mice – how unexpected, how rather endearing. ‘Oh, and another thing, what are those things she’s got on her thumbs?’

  What things? Whose thumbs?

  ‘They’re jolly grubby whatever they are.’

  Oh, hell. The mittens. He’d forgotten the mittens. Ah, well, he’s damned already in Dodie’s eyes, he might as well tell her the truth. Or not. ‘They’re thumb warmers.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Eva has poor circulation, she likes to keep her thumbs warm.’

  ‘I see.’ And she goes, with a tut and a sigh and a God Almighty, leaving Jack with an empty box and a thousand tales that would never be told.

  What was it the Great Man had said? ‘I was sorry that you abandoned your writing.’ The truth is, it was the writing that abandoned him. That small boat of ambition had drifted away from its fragile mooring and was drowned in the sea of the second rate.

  Jack – Writing, RIP.

  So. What’s left for him now? Soup. Is that all there is? Still, Dodie is right for once, it’s freezing down here, and better a belly that’s full than a frozen heart. He takes a last look round and turns to go. But there’s another box calling. A box called Bob.

  Aha, thinks Bear, ho-hum, hurrah! Here’s treasure at last! He can accept the cellar, forgive the mouse-ridden cot now that the prize is within his grasp; but his jubilation turns to alarm as he sees it receding, slowly but surely, up the stairs to the cellar door.

  Before the meeting adjourns, he says, I should like to raise the question of bears and their future accommodation. The proposed cellar seems decent enough as cellars go, but I would draw attention to the overriding presence of rodent. While I have no objection to a mouse as a bedtime companion, I draw the line absolutely at his larger cousin, the brown or domestic rat, bearing in mind the incontinence of his bladder and bowels, not to mention his expressed dietary preference for the innards or stuffing of bears. Further to which, if there is treasure to be had, in this case honey, I would suggest that bears have a part to play in its distribution. I invite comments from the floor.

  Things are looking up.

  T. Bear is appointed Guardian of the Treasure, a role he executes with a quiet composure that conceals butterflies of excitement tingling in his nose, making him want to sneeze. He sits on the till with his back to the keys and his legs sticking out over the cash drawer with the chessboard set on the counter before him and the Treasure Chest beyond. It’s a strong-box, small and sturdy, gunmetal grey, with the remains of a name in chipped black letters stuck to the lid: Robert Emmanuel Pride, a name that suitably reflects T. Bear’s pride in his newly elevated status.

  But Jack is a man who puts things off. There’s a jacket to fetch and soup to be had before he turns the key in the rusty lock. And he feels too a fluttering of disquiet, something making him wonder if the box that is Bob is better left alone. So he potters about in the kitchen dishing up soup, checking the baby alarm, listening to the monotonous drone of Dodie’s voice as she encourages Eva to eat, the satisfied slurp and smack of her response. And even when he carries his tray into the shop and sets it down on the counter, even as he makes a start on the soup which, despite its Dodie origin, is undeniably welcome, he eschews the box in favour of the chessboard and the new game waiting to be played.

  T. Bear’s patience is wearing thin. ‘It’s all very well, you with your soup, but can we get on? Address the box? Move on to number two on the agenda, to wit, treasure? In other word
s, honey, the consumption thereof by bears? The sooner the better, in other words, now.’

  But Bear is obliged to wait until Jack finishes his soup, wipes his chin, pushes the tray aside and makes an opening gambit. Queen’s Pawn to Queen Four. Only then, in the pause he takes to consider Black’s reply, does he make up his mind, only to find the box itself reluctant to part with its secrets: the key is stiff with disuse and the hinges groan as he lifts the lid at last.

  There’s nothing that he didn’t expect: the birth and death certificates, sundry correspondence from solicitors, bank, office of probate, and the Will. Both Wills: the first in favour of Bob’s oldest friend, Oliver Brande, the second, in an inexplicable change of mind the week before his death, leaving everything to Jack. Little else: a few family photographs: the fierce-looking father in clerical dress. ‘He was bishop of somewhere or other, somewhere unspeakable down in the country.’ Brande’s acid pronouncement drifts down the decades, followed by Joderell Barber’s dry retort: ‘Dean. Rural. Exeter.’ The timid mother with her soulful eyes; the trio of children, stiff and constrained in their Sunday suits, Bob and his brothers. Three lady men, three club feet. And the photograph in the silver frame that Bob had kept by his bed of the effete young man with the soulful face whom Bob so closely resembled. The Picture of Oscar Wilde.

  T. Bear can barely contain his disappointment. ‘Is that all? Take another look, there must be more.’

  And indeed there is. Jack had known all along: wasn’t it he, after all, who had hidden the envelope away at the bottom of the box? Brown paper envelope tied up with ribbon, addressed in green ink in a mincing hand: For Jack Carter, in Loving Memory of our Tragic Friend, Robert Emmanuel Pride. The envelope given him so long ago by Oliver Brande, the envelope that has never been opened.

  ‘Such a fuss and palaver he made, the silly old queen, you’d think he was handing over the crown jewels.’

  ‘I wonder what’s in it?’ Eva on the day that they met, alive with expectation, wanting a story.