She looked round the lecture hall. Everyone she’d ever known was present: girls from the convent whom she’d long forgotten, tourists from France and Germany, light-keepers who’d stayed at the hotel in the days before the lighthouse went nuclear. The lecturer was smoking compulsively, flicking ash all over his rock samples.
‘Women are country rock,’ he said. ‘They predate men, who are best described as younger intrusions. Will all country rocks present who have suffered invasion by a mass of plutonic igneous rock please raise their right hands?’
Mrs Bugler put up her hand in spite of Mr Bugler’s attempt to pin it to her side.
‘Isn’t it wonderful that women share a history with the earth itself,’ she shouted through his muffling palm.
Pauline tried to make sense of the scene. She was obviously at university reading a subject of someone else’s choosing. She felt old and tired. Her intellect had abdicated its responsibility for finding harmony and order wherever she turned, and knowledge was cacophony and confusion. She had come to a place where the greatest pain was the memory of a better world forsaken, where punishment was not eternal fire but eternal anxiety – the consciousness of things gone wrong for ever.
Gregory Bugler was weeping over his canvas.
‘There is no greater grief than to remember a happy time in misery and to remember it every day,’ he moaned.
The lecturer put a record on an ancient gramophone which he wound laboriously with both hands, a shepherd hauling up a bucket from a cavernous mountain well.
‘Now, take your partners for the next intrusion,’ he shouted.
She woke in terror before the music boomed. She had slept for over an hour. She looked out across the sea, struggling to overcome the feelings of revulsion with which she had awoken. A cloud of sea fowl had descended on a dark patch of water. They were diving on sprat or mackerel, she could not say which. She got out her binoculars and scanned the scene of gluttonous havoc. Then, inexplicably, she found herself studying a young man and a girl on the edge of the cliff, in a spot she had known before.
He touched her breasts, first one, then the other, quite mechanically, and the girl never took her eyes off the carnage below. With a seagull swoop he touched her between the knees. She leant back, supporting herself with both hands, her face raised blankly to the sky. He kissed her on the mouth. His scorpion-hand crept up her thigh, a knot of active legs and fingers.
Pauline looked away. She felt hot and ashamed, which she blamed on the series of disconnected actions. In a nearby field young rabbits were playing among dog daisies. She returned to the cliff-edge, aware of white scuts flashing. The girl took his hand and placed it firmly on his knee. Then she got up and walked coolly away, flipping her long hair over both shoulders. His eyes followed her but he did not move. The girl was Alicia Bugler. The young man was staying at the hotel. He shared a room with another young man and they both drove about in an ancient car that never started without a push. They seemed to find fun in everything they did. That morning she’d overheard one say to the other, ‘She’s a real dish. If only her kissing didn’t lack vibrato.’
She and Bosco had sat in that same spot on a June night before she’d ever thought of Jack. Now the memory of it was not so much painful as embarrassing. There had been no glint in the darkness to the north, and no glint in the west, except for the monotonous flashing of the lighthouse across the Sound. Below them the sea was far away. They waited for the dawn. It came shortly after three, and they walked back through the fields picking mushrooms, which were flat and cool and damp with dew. First they filled their pockets. Then he took off his shirt and they emptied the mushrooms into it in case they got crushed. They went straight to the kitchen and she cooked them in butter with a perspex plate over the frying-pan. They sat down to eat them with buttered toast. They were lovely mushrooms, full of the most delicious juice. He ate only one. With the second like a stinging nettle in his mouth, he got up and spat into the sink.
‘Did you get a bad one?’ she asked.
‘I’m not hungry,’ he said.
It was an odd way to behave. She realised then that he was not like other men. Jack used to say that there were two types of men: those who’d been disappointed in their first kiss and those who’d been overwhelmed by it. ‘You recover from the second condition but there’s no getting over the first,’ he’d say with an ambiguous grin.
Alicia had walked out of sight. The young man had remained on the cliff-edge, gazing out over the sea to the north. In the field behind him a cow was standing with her hind legs apart, head down and back arched, her raised tail stiff and straight. She was urinating on the grass, making bright froth in the evening sun.
Pauline put down her binoculars. It seemed to her that there was nothing in the whole world she wished to see. She went into Gulban’s room again. He was sitting by the open window, sleeping in his chair, and below in the driveway Cookie was trying to discourage an old tramp from coming in the gate. The tramp was a broad, heavy man with a white sack on his shoulder and a cudgel which he kept pointing at Cookie as if it were a finger. She had seen him before. He usually arrived during the winter and Gulban always gave him a bed for a week or two, when there were no other guests staying except one or two commercial travellers and the local schoolmaster. He wasn’t quite as old as Gulban but he was just as headstrong. He neither washed nor shaved and his lumpy jacket was made up of patches of many shapes, colours and materials. He was known locally as Big Andy but Gulban always referred to him by his proper name, Andy Early.
She stole out of the room so as not to disturb Gulban and went down to lend Cookie some much-needed moral support.
‘I must see Gulban,’ the tramp was saying.
‘I told you, he’s had a stroke. He’s very ill,’ Cookie insisted.
‘He’s lost a son. I heard the news in town and I came straight away to sympathise. Gulban is a dear old friend.’
‘He’s sleeping now,’ Pauline said. ‘We mustn’t disturb him, he isn’t strong.’
‘Gulban not strong! Like me, he’s got the constitution of an ox and always had.’
Big Andy towered over Cookie, his slack, unshaven cheeks ruddy with broken veins. He was wearing a heavy pullover underneath the jacket which was making him sweat profusely. The uppers of his shoes were cracked, and his short-legged trousers revealed a right ankle with a yellow sock and a left ankle with no sock at all. Pauline could see that the combination of height and sartorial eccentricity was undermining Cookie’s will to resist.
‘If Gulban’s asleep, I’ll wait till he wakes up. I’ll go into the bar and have a drink on the house. It’s the custom whenever I call.’
‘You usually call in winter when things are quiet here. We’re full up now. Gulban would take a poor view of anyone disturbing the guests.’
‘So there’s no room for Early at the inn. I’d like to have that from Gulban himself.’
‘He needs to be quiet,’ Pauline intervened. ‘The doctor said that he must not get excited. This evening I’ll tell him you called. If he’s well enough to see you tomorrow, he’ll send for you.’
‘And where am I to spend the night?’ Big Andy glared at her with bloodshot eyes.
Cookie drew a rolled fiver from his wallet and held it out, as if he were offering a cigarette. Big Andy looked cynically at the note, giving a distinct impression that he was capable of refusing it.
‘You’ll get board and lodging in the village,’ Cookie said.
Big Andy took the fiver between two fingers and slipped it into his breast-pocket.
‘I’m not fit to walk to the village,’ he said.
‘It’s downhill,’ Cookie reminded him.
‘And it’s uphill back.’
‘I’ll give you a lift,’ said Cookie. ‘I’m about to go down to the shop.’
‘I accept your offer but only because you’re Gulban’s son. He’s always been a friend to me. If it wasn’t for Gulban, I’d shake this house to its foundatio
ns. No one knows it but me and him. It’s built on sinking sand.’
He climbed into the hotel Land-Rover beside Cookie, still muttering about the precarious condition of the building. As they drove off, he waved to Pauline.
‘Give my regards to all and sundry,’ he shouted. ‘I was always a generous man.’
Chapter 10
‘How is he today?’ Father Bosco enquired.
‘Paler than yesterday,’ Pauline replied.
‘Did he have breakfast?’
‘Only a bar of fruit and nut. He’s beginning to take a fancy to things he’s never looked at before.’
‘I wonder if he’d like an orange. I brought him some juicy Jaffas from town.’
‘He’s upset about Big Andy. He called yesterday while Gulban was sleeping, and Cookie and I turned him away.’
‘I can never figure out what he and Big Andy have in common. He was never an admirer of loafers, yet he treats Big Andy like a brother.’
Joey and Cookie joined them on the steps before the front entrance, where two or three guests were sitting on summer seats, gazing at the purple-patched hill to the south and across the luminous Sound to the island in the west. The bedroom windows were open, their white net-curtains making swag bellies in the breeze.
‘My conscience is clear,’ Joey announced. ‘Cookie and Pauline must live in the odium, not of having discovered sodium, but of having refused bed and board to a drunken bum. For I was hungry and you gave me no cake, I was thirsty and you gave me no Scotch, I was a stranger and you refused me B and B. Forgive me, Father Bosco, if I misquote. We are not so much a generation of vipers as a generation of vulgarians. Even the Holy Book is not proof against our attentions. I wonder what Jerome up above makes of it all.’
Ignoring him, Father Bosco turned to Pauline.
‘He’s making slow progress. Perhaps we should get another doctor to give a second opinion.’
‘I’ll plant the idea in his mind. The only way he’ll agree is if he thinks he thought of it himself first.’
‘He needs a lawyer more urgently than a doctor,’ Joey said. ‘It would be tragic if he died intestate with the Year of the Talents still in the first quarter.’
‘Perhaps you should remind him.’ Father Bosco spoke without looking in Joey’s direction.
‘That kind of advice might appear more disinterested if it came from a priest,’ suggested Cookie.
‘The man who reminds him of death will be the loser,’ Joey replied. ‘Only those listed as non-runners can afford to confront him with even a milligram of that precious metal called the truth.’
After lunch the three brothers went up to his bedroom. They found him propped among pillows, stroking Balor, the hotel cat. Balor had only one eye. According to Gulban, the other had been scratched out by a rat while he was still a kitten, but Slash Gildea, who knew about animals, claimed that Balor had caught a chill out tom-catting one hard winter, that the eye closed with mucus and never reopened.
Gulban surveyed them individually as they trooped in.
‘Why do you wear such roomy trousers, Cookie?’ he demanded. ‘There’s enough surplus cloth in one leg to make a pair of togs for a lump of a boy. And you, Joey, why do you have such a long vent in your jacket?’
‘What I want to know is why Father Bosco wears his collar back to front,’ Joey replied. ‘As a dresser, he’s almost as snappy as Big Andy.’
The three of them pulled up their chairs and sat in a circle round the bed.
‘Do you hear anything?’ Gulban asked with a look of alarm.
‘No,’ said Father Bosco.
‘There’s an animal in the room,’ said Gulban. ‘And I don’t mean Balor.’
‘There’s no animal here,’ said Father Bosco.
‘I can hear him breathing,’ Gulban insisted.
‘Where is he, then?’ Father Bosco asked.
‘He’s hiding, I can hear him. Only a huge behemoth could breathe like that.’
‘You must be imagining it,’ said Father Bosco.
‘It’s heavy breathing with a rasping sound and now and again a rattle. I wonder if he’s wounded and dying.’
Joey got another pillow and made him sit up straight in the bed.
‘He’s gone now,’ Gulban said with what seemed like relief.
‘He was never here,’ Father Bosco assured him.
‘It was frightening,’ said Gulban. ‘I don’t want to hear him ever again.’
‘Your ear was against the pillow, you were hearing your own heartbeats,’ Joey said.
‘You all think I’m potty,’ Gulban shouted. ‘Well, I’m not. I’m still warm, and I still pull the drawstring of the purse.’
‘Don’t get excited.’ Father Bosco tried to calm him. ‘Excitement is bad for a man in your condition.’
‘Which of you turned away Andy Early?’ Gulban assumed the severity of a Grand Inquisitor.
‘I did,’ said Cookie. ‘Pauline said you were asleep and I didn’t want him disturbing you.’
‘Lies, lies. He didn’t smell sweet enough to your fastidious sniffers.’
‘If you mean he stinks, you’re too right, so you are,’ said Joey. ‘If he had any respect for his hosts, he would have washed in a stream or polluted the sea itself before entering these pearly gates.’
‘I didn’t let him go empty-handed,’ Cookie explained. ‘I gave him a fiver of my own money.’
‘How much would you have given?’ Gulban asked.
‘It depends on how highly he stank. Judging by the bouquet he brought to the village, I’d have given at least a tenner to see the back of him,’ said Joey.
‘What about you, Bosco?’
‘You want me to outbid Joey, as Joey has outbidden Cookie. Well, I’m not playing.’
‘Would you have given him a room at the parochial house?’
‘No, my parish priest has a weak stomach. There’s no excuse for not washing. I wouldn’t inflict Big Andy’s hogo on anyone except another hobo or a walking saint.’
‘And you call yourself a Christian!’ Gulban sneezed.
Joey got up with a great show of concern and closed the window.
‘What I would like to know is how you got this obsession with Andy Early,’ Father Bosco interjected. ‘There are more deserving beggars who go out that gate as poor as they came in.’
‘I don’t advertise all my good works. I’ve got covenants you know nothing about.’
‘Tax fiddles,’ said Cookie.
‘Covenants are cold collations,’ said Joey. ‘There will be more honour in heaven for the rich man who gives alms by hand, looks the beggar in the eye and meets his accusing stare.’
‘I’m trying to find out which of you has the largest heart,’ said Gulban. ‘I had no idea what a task I’d set myself.’
‘You haven’t told us why Andy Early is special,’ Father Bosco reminded him.
‘You’re all too young and too lacking in the heart that comes from suffering and observing suffering to understand. Now, where did Andy Early sleep last night?’
‘He ended up in Old Gildea’s barn after drinking my fiver in the village before closing time,’ Cookie said.
‘He’ll be sleeping here tonight,’ said Gulban.
‘What will our guests think?’ Cookie wondered.
‘They don’t have to see him,’ Gulban replied.
‘He drinks like a fish, he’s bound to have to go to the toilet.’
‘Then put him in a room with bathroom en suite.’
‘We’ve only got two of those and they’re both taken.’
‘Put him in the best room that’s vacant and leave him a po,’ said Gulban. ‘Have his meals brought up and give him half a bottle of whiskey so that he doesn’t have to come down to the bar. A full bottle would be too much at his age.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Joey.
‘It’s bad for business,’ said Cookie.
‘I’m the businessman here,’ said Gulban. ‘I don’t want any more dis
cussion. You’ve all made me feel quite tired again with your niggardly moaning and groaning. I’m going to rest now. You’d better tell Pauline to come up and tuck me in.’
Big Andy turned up before nightfall. He was still carrying his hazel stick but he must have left his white sack in the last pub or in Old Gildea’s barn. Cookie, who had been looking out for him, met him at the gate and suggested that he do up his flies before entering.
‘Do up my flies in this weather!’ he growled. ‘I deliberately left them open to ventilate my bollocks.’
He was dishevelled and wide-eyed. He gazed down at Cookie with the self-possession of a hell-raiser who knows that his interlocutor would bend over backwards to avoid a scene.
‘I’ve put you in a west-facing room. You’ll be able to lie in bed and look out over the sea in the morning.’ Cookie conducted him as quietly as possible through the back entrance.
‘It’s too early for bed. I must have a drink and a bite of supper before turning in.’
‘Gulban said that you’re to stay in your room. I’ll have everything you want brought up. He’s resting now, he’ll see you first thing after breakfast.’
‘Why all this whispering and secrecy? You’re making me feel like a Russian spy.’
‘I don’t want you disturbing the other guests. They’re mainly middle-aged couples who come here for a rest.’
‘Middle-class bastards who need a good prod up the arse.’
He showed Early to a room which he had chosen because the bathroom and toilet were only two doors down the corridor.
‘It’s smaller than I’m used to,’ Early complained. ‘Gulban always gave me a double.’
‘It’s still the high season. It’s all we’ve got left.’
‘I’ll need a pair of pyjamas and a dressing-gown. I don’t think yours would fit me, you’re too thin, but an old pair of Gulban’s pyjamas would do, even if they are a bit short in the leg.’
‘I’ll see what I can find.’ Cookie tried not to betray any hint of incredulousness.
‘I’ll have a drink while I’m waiting. If you bring me a bottle of Scotch, it will save you having to come up again. No need for a mixer. I’ll have it as it comes. At my age a man can only taste the strongest flavours.’
The Red Men Page 8