He led the way upstairs and unlocked the door. It was an airless room with a single unmade bed by a window that faced the moor and the road running east to town. There was a small writing table in one corner, two easy chairs, a bookcase and some open shelves displaying lumps of rock ranged in rows. On the walls were coloured posters showing the internal organs and reproductive systems of animals, insects and birds, many of them drawn by Joey himself. Above the writing table hung a square of cardboard with the following inscription in large Gothic letters:
To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by Experiments – (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick).
‘I can see why you call it your den.’ Father Bosco looked round at the clutter of the room.
‘It’s a den of science,’ said Joey proudly.
‘Science being the measure of all things,’ Cookie smiled.
‘We’ll say nothing about that,’ said Joey. ‘At least not today.’
He went to a little cupboard by his bed and got out a bottle and three glasses.
‘Is he sane or not? That’s what I’d like to know,’ he went on, as he poured the brandy. ‘When he’s at his most serious, he’s usually at his most outrageous.’
‘He’s sane,’ said Father Bosco.
‘It’s a difficult question,’ Cookie said. ‘He’s got such a strong personality that everything he says commands assent while he’s saying it. It’s only when you go away and think about it that you realise the absurdity of it. Wherever he is, he creates his own world with its own laws and forces, and in his presence there’s no escaping the pull of it. Isn’t that why we always talk about him when his back is turned? In a way we ourselves are to blame. We talk about him as if he were a kind of god.’
‘The Day of the Talents … Let me be your judge … To each according to his ability: it all adds up to a deity of sorts. What interests me is the size of our respective talents. If he’s omniscient, what price-tag has he put on you, Bosco? Are you worth more than Cookie, for example?’
‘It might be amusing to find out,’ said Cookie. ‘I’m willing to reveal mine, if you two promise to do the same.’
‘Would you tell the truth? And would we?’ Joey asked. ‘We’ve all got an interest in deception. What I propose is this. Each of us will write down his sum on a slip of paper and put it in a box. There will be no names, just the amounts. When we open the box, each of us will know how much he got in relation to the other two. At the very least it will be a start.’
‘Your backhand will give you away, Cookie,’ Father Bosco said.
‘Then we’ll all type out the sum on identical slips of paper. Are you game, Bosco?’
‘You know I never play games. You and Cookie play if you like.’
‘Two isn’t enough. For anonymity we need three. Come on, Bosco, where’s your sense of humour?’ Joey demanded.
‘It’s obvious, at least to me, that he must have given us all the same talent. It’s only fair.’
‘Isn’t that what we’re trying to establish? The nature of the beast.’
‘I wouldn’t doubt him for a moment,’ said Father Bosco.
‘Yet you won’t put him to the test,’ Joey said.
‘To shame you both for being so suspicious, I’ll play.’
One after the other they went to Joey’s typewriter and placed their slips in an old shoe-box. Then Joey shook the box and opened it. When they examined the slips, they found the sum of £10,000 typed on each of them.
‘You were right, Bosco,’ said Joey. ‘So he sees us all as equals in ability! What a travesty of the truth! Or is it just a cop-out?’
‘He sees us as equal in his love,’ Father Bosco reproved him.
‘Ability was what he himself called it. He’s a trickster, is Gulban. He was out to mislead us,’ Cookie said.
‘We’re all in the race with an equal chance,’ Joey smiled. ‘The next question is: are we going to play his game?’
‘I’ve told him already, I’m not in the running,’ said Father Bosco.
‘You are in the running, you accepted your talent,’ Joey reminded him.
‘Well, I’m not making the running. I leave that to you and Cookie.’
‘Can we believe you?’ Joey nudged Cookie.
‘I must go now. That’s enough idle talk for one day.’
As soon as Father Bosco had left, Joey poured another drink and, with his glass raised to the ceiling in both hands, walked round in a circle singing:
O and A and A and O
Cum cantibus in choro.
Let the merry organ go,
Benedicamus Domino.
‘For a holy man, he is surprisingly unfree of pomposity,’ Cookie remarked.
‘If he were holy, we could believe him. It is not his pomposity that worries me but his lack of frankness.’
‘He may be telling the truth. He’s never had any interest in business. And what on earth would he do with a hotel? Turn it into a monastery or a nunnery?’
‘You know what that means?’
‘It’s between you and me,’ said Cookie.
‘Question: Which of us will get it?’
‘You could get the shop and I could get the hotel and farm. That arrangement would work.’
‘No, Cookie, in the game of the talents winner takes all. To put it differently, you could lose.’
‘So could you.’
‘Which is why I’ve thought up a little proposition. We’ll make a pact. Whichever of us inherits will share with the other. No need to take risks. There’s world enough and time for both of us. What do you think?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘It makes sense. Consider the alternatives. We’d both have to begin reading the financial pages of the newspapers; you’d have to neglect literature and I’d have to neglect science. If we make a pact, neither of us need run and we’ll both win.’
‘How will we share the estate?’ Cookie asked.
‘You will have the hotel and farm, and I’ll have the shop. I love the shop, the clutter of little items in drawers, the things you seldom sell. Things you sell every day lose their novelty. The true pleasure of shopkeeping is when a customer once in a blue moon comes looking for something unusual and after a ten-minute search you find it.’
‘The hotel wouldn’t stand without the shop to prop it up.’
‘Then we shall hold all things in common. Is it a deal?’
‘Yes,’ said Cookie, offering Joey his hand. ‘Now nothing can go wrong.’ Joey refilled Cookie’s glass.
‘Nothing can go wrong provided Bosco is out of the race.’
‘Bosco disappoints me as a priest; his respect for the truth is less than total. You heard his address today, a litany of little untruths, all adding up to a great untruth that cried out to heaven for refutation.’
‘What would you have said?’
‘Something ferociously true,’ said Joey. ‘I’d mount the pulpit and look out over the heads of the people, waiting till every ear was cocked in expectation. Then I’d say: “Jack was first and last a hard man, utterly devoid of compassion for his kind. He was an egotist who was well on the way to becoming a monstrous egotist in middle age. So this funeral of ours is a lie from start to finish: Pauline playing the inconsolable widow in black, the gloomy undertaker, the sleek hearse. It’s all a command performance, and the command was given by an even greater egotist than Jack. The only truth is that Jack is dead; at least that is not a performance. Surely the dead can be laid to rest without causing the living to bend double under the weight of self-aggrandisement and self-deception.”’
‘It wasn’t a funeral,’ said Cookie. ‘It was a black wedding. Gulban walked up the nave with Pauline on his arm. In his own mind he was giving her away. Now he wants her to remain The Widow for evermore. He’d be horrified, for example, if she were to marry either of us.’
‘She’
ll marry without marrying either you or me,’ Joey smiled lopsidedly.
‘For her only a man of steel will do.’ Cookie placed his empty glass on the writing table. From the door he looked back and said, ‘She may not have iron in the soul but she’s got iron filings.’
‘Now, if she were a hydrangea, they’d turn her hair the loveliest shade of blue.’ Joey laughed and Cookie looked puzzled as he raised his hand in farewell.
Joey washed the glasses in the handbasin with the good side of his face towards the mirror, yet he could still see the red blotch burning under his left eye, which was small and yellowy with a puckered lid. He hated that side of his face. It was a scar on his consciousness that throbbed day and night. He spoke directly to his good eye, measuring the words:
‘A man who suffers too much passes beyond the known boundaries of life. He becomes a ghost at a window looking in. Some pain is chronic, and some acute. Luckily for Pauline, an acute pain is soon forgotten. She’ll forget Jack and go off and marry. Cookie and I have made a pact to share the spoils. We can’t make a pact to share Pauline. There he stands the better chance. When she looks at me, she drops her gaze. Embarrassment? Guilt? A painful memory? She owes me more than she’ll ever owe to any other man.’
He wondered if Cookie felt Jack’s death in the way he himself did, not the pang of bereavement but a chilly sense of exposure. Jack, like Gulban, was solid. He was present even when he was absent, a windbreak that sheltered those he worked with. Cookie was the opposite, fluid and unstable, bookish and solitary, never himself unless alone. Today he looked shaky and unready. He’d never make a hotelier or anything requiring practical common sense. He’d become a lecturer, then a professor. He’d leave the running of the hotel to his partner and brother. He’d come back on holiday and draw an annual dividend, in every way a perfect arrangement for them both.
From the window he looked down on the flowing road and a red car gliding between the green clumps of rushes on either side. The driver was Alicia Bugler, an unwitting dispenser of constriction and pain.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have made a deal with Cookie,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should try my hand at machination.’
Cookie sat above the slip, a crude concrete structure sheltered from the west by a sloping sea-wall and strewn with tangled nets, old lobster creels, broken oars and black lengths of plastic tubing. Alongside the slip were two split-level stages with rusty mooring rings set in concrete, and on the pebbled slope near by lay five white boats with green, blue and red gunwales. Two of the boats no longer in use were upturned and two schoolboys were sitting astride their keels, crouched forward in imitation of competing jockeys. Behind the sea-wall two punts lay at anchor with their outboard engines cocked and propellers glinting.
He often wandered down to the slip in the evening to watch the lobster fishermen returning and the seagulls soaring. It was a quiet and creative time of day. He would pick his way down the slip over the embedded skids, balance metal and plastic buoys in his hand, or stick his head into one of the black barrels to inhale the stinging smell of bait in pickle. It was the kind of aimless activity on which Jack would have poured scorn and ridicule, yet it gave Cookie a sense of communion with the world and himself that both soothed and surprised him.
This evening he did not go through his ritual of touching discarded objects. He thought of Jack driving off alone in his red sports car on Sundays, going from village to village, stopping at pubs, chatting up likely women – or so the gossips had it. How could Pauline delude herself into believing that she loved him? ‘Sex is sport, and so are women’ was his motto, though he had probably omitted to tell her.
One day, as Jack saw a girl bending down to draw water from a well, he had jumped two feet in the air, clicked his heels together, and shouted ‘Hooh’ like a madman, before finding the earth again. That for him was women. That for him was Pauline. He was a fraud who owed his success to the fact that no one really knew him. Would Gulban admire him if he had known that he seldom drank less than half a bottle of whiskey a day? Perhaps not even Pauline knew that.
He was cruel as well, contemptuous of anyone who showed hurt. Life wasn’t life, it was a game. One summer evening he and Cookie and a young boy from the village were sitting above the beach watching two sisters bathing. The boy was in love with the younger sister and everyone in the village knew it.
‘They must feel lonely, two women on their own,’ Jack said. ‘I wonder which of them I should try?’
‘The older one,’ said the boy. ‘She’s the prettiest.’
‘Anyone could tumble her. I’ll go for the virgin, she’s more of a challenge.’ Jack winked at Cookie.
‘It’s a bit early in the day for courting.’ Cookie tried to deter him.
‘Not early but a bit bright. The take is always better on a dull day with a light breeze.’ Jack walked down the beach to where the girls were drying off. The following evening he told the boy that the younger sister was slow to begin and red hot once she warmed up.
‘If you don’t believe me, try her yourself and see.’ He smiled as he turned the gully-knife in the wound.
When he had gone, Cookie told the boy that Jack had been making fun, that he had not been out with the girl at all.
‘It wouldn’t matter to him, even if he had,’ the boy said. ‘He never feels anything. Nothing does him any good.’
A seal broke water and swam round the store-box in which the fishermen kept live lobsters for market. Cookie watched the dark head bobbing and wondered if he had shown weakness in making a pact with Joey. It was an easy way out. What surprised him was that Joey, who was by nature competitive, should have suggested such a cautious arrangement.
He turned and saw a lightly built girl in a yellow dress and white sun-hat coming down the shore road. She was wearing dainty blue shoes with flat heels and was carrying a rolled towel in one hand. As she passed, Cookie waved to her and she waved back without smiling. Then he watched her making for the strand, a slight figure against a landscape of jagged rock and fenced fields where ewes and lambs were grazing.
‘Alicia Bugler doesn’t belong here,’ he said. ‘I wonder if she’s fortunate enough not to know it.’
Chapter 6
For Pauline the days passed slowly. The world was an affront to her every sense; seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling were fraught with the pain of remembrance. There was no confluence, no ease, no comfort; nothing but distortion and jarring dissociation. Food was tasteless, and she could not drink. The thought of red wine or Scotch filled her with nausea and guilt. In the morning she’d wake up with a gripe in her stomach and no sense of having slept. Grief was the only reality, and she could not tell whether she was grieving for Jack’s death or her own.
She felt imprisoned in her skull which had become a pressure chamber of heavy, swirling liquid. During the day she went about her work with overt efficiency, yet in the evening she could barely recall the morning. She was normally observant. She would note the movement of clouds, the changing light on the sea, the covert resentments that the waitresses betrayed in their gossip, and the quirks of elderly guests intent on ensuring their comfort. Today, all she could recall having experienced of the external world was the sight of a donkey rolling in the road.
She was lucky to have Gulban. He was a tower of strength and a source of comfort and unspoken sympathy. The day after the funeral he had asked her if she would like some memento from among Jack’s things. There was no need to think. She said she’d like his new binoculars.
‘Nothing more personal?’ he asked.
‘I gave them to him for his thirtieth birthday. I think he valued them more than anything else I ever bought him.’
Now she opened the drawer and took them out of their leather case. She went to the south window of her bedroom, holding them at waist level. She wanted to look through them, yet she hesitated. A knot of sheep on the hill scattered before a lolloping dog. A heavy man dismounted from his bike and spoke to another ma
n driving a cow. A schoolboy with a hoop and rod came up the driveway. The sun was low over the sea. Rough tussocks cast spearlike shadows in a field where cattle were grazing. She trained the binoculars on the face of the heavy man, whose lips moved without smiling. His words were serious and soundless. The world had lost its voice.
South of the village Fort Knox gleamed blank and white, preserving a secret that Jack had not shared with her. If only she could talk to another woman. She had tried talking to Alicia Bugler when they’d met by accident on the road the day before. Alicia was intelligent. Her eyes sparkled with an inner life too intense for her body to communicate. Pauline wanted to sit with her above the sea and recall Jack’s characteristic expressions. She looked at Alicia, not knowing how to begin. Then Alicia said, ‘You miss Jack, I suppose’, and Pauline knew that they would go no further. Alicia was either too young or too remote from life to know.
She sat on the edge of the bed with the binoculars in her lap. On the back of the door hung a light cotton dress which she had worn to the Atlantic Grill. Looking at it now, she experienced an immediate and powerful sense of her own body within it. To a casual observer it was a blue dress with a white collar, white cuffs and white pannier pockets. To Jack it was her ‘sailor dress’. To her it was now a living object, and she could not imagine it as other than alive in her absence. It would enable her to be in two places at the same time. There would be two women rather than one to share the burden of grief.
Grief was not the only burden. There were also guilt and fear. The inquest was tomorrow. She felt guilt for having clothed herself in a lie, and fear that the coroner might strip her naked before Gulban and the rest.
From her seat in the village hall she waited to be called. The coroner was round-faced and pug-nosed with thin, white hair that failed to hide the pink scalp beneath. She gave evidence as briefly and as lucidly as she could, saying no more than the questions demanded. When she had finished, Forker, the landlord of the Spoke and Felly, described their brief visit to his pub on the evening in question. Jack had called with Pauline on their way to town. They talked about bridge and drank a nip of Scotch before leaving. Pauline relaxed. The other witnesses added little. Then the pathologist said that he had examined the body and found that it contained over three times the permitted amount of alcohol.
The Red Men Page 5