‘Why don’t you?’
‘It would come more convincingly from you, I think. As our literary man, you could quote her what Robbie Burns said about relentless promiscuity, and allow her to draw her own conclusions: “och; it hardens a’ within, and petrifies the feeling”.’
Last winter he and Joey had met Alicia out walking in the snow. The sun was sharp, the wind cold and keen. Alicia suddenly appeared in white: white coat, white beret, white scarf, white leg-warmers and white boots.
‘She should have gone for Pauline’s red and black today,’ said Joey. ‘Against the snow her coat looks a dirty cream, like one of Slash Gildea’s sheep on the hill.’
Cookie didn’t answer. All he saw was the sunlight making glinting pearls in the snow and Alicia’s cheeks a delicate red in the leaping, overwhelming white.
She was driving quickly now, not briskly, taking outrageous chances on hairpin bends. There was never much traffic on the road from town but you could conceivably meet another careless driver in the wrong place. They were coming down the hill towards the spot where Jack had had the accident. She gave no sign of slowing down and he refrained from warning her of the approaching bend. He knew that she knew that all he wanted for them both was to die. She never even tried to brake. The bonnet rose over the broken wall, they glided for a slow eternity, then gannet-dived through darkness towards a glowing green. They would land with a jolt. He turned to embrace her and found an empty seat.
Again they approached the bend, and again she gave no sign of slowing. At the last moment she hit the brake. As they slewed, he glimpsed the gap in the wall where Jack had gone off the road. Then she accelerated out of the bend and he breathed more freely, recalling a snowy day with a catch in the icy air.
‘Were you frightened?’ she asked.
‘No, not frightened.’
‘I thought I sensed you stiffen.’
‘I may have been excited. I wanted it to go on for longer. The bend came up too quickly, that was all.’
She pulled up outside the hotel.
‘You’re home,’ she said.
‘Come in and I’ll buy you a drink.’
‘Not today, thanks. My mother is waiting for the car.’
‘Why don’t we have dinner in town one evening? I’ll take you in the Land-Rover,’ he promised.
‘I thought you liked being driven by me!’
‘Will you come?’
‘It takes two hours to eat dinner. What on earth would we talk about all that time?’
A burly ram jumped out of a field on to the road. His black, insensitive face had the appearance of a Hallowe’en mummer’s mask, crude and makeshift, concealing a smaller face beneath. He looked a bit like Jack. They’re all the same, he seemed to say, who lift the tail and turn their fleecy backs to me.
‘If you’re worried, you could bring a book,’ he said.
‘Let me have a list of topics. I already know the menu in the Atlantic Grill. What I’d like to know is the agenda.’
‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome.’
She drove off without turning to acknowledge his goodbye.
Chapter 12
About five in the afternoon one of the chambermaids came running into the lounge bar where Pauline was trying to pacify a querulous Englishman who was hugging his stomach, clearly regretting his lunch.
‘Gulban’s fallen out of bed and he’s shouting his head off,’ she managed to stammer.
Pauline, followed by one of the barmen, hurried upstairs to find him lying on the floor, slavering with unavailing effort.
‘Now, relax,’ she said. ‘Just leave everything to us.’
They lifted him slowly and laid him on his back in the bed, while he angrily demanded to be put sitting by the window.
‘Later, perhaps,’ she told him. ‘You must rest first. We’ll get the doctor to examine you to make sure you haven’t broken any bones.’
‘Bugger the doctor, I want a glass of rum punch to warm me up.’
He looked pale and pinched about the gills. When she caught his hand, she could feel it shaking.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked.
‘I fell asleep after lunch and the next thing I knew I was on the floor.’
‘You’re sure you weren’t trying to get out of bed?’
‘There’s no need for an inquest, I’m not dead yet.’
She went downstairs to make the punch. Cookie had gone for a walk on the hill and, typically, had not said when he’d be back. She rang Joey who promised to come up as soon as he closed the shop for the night. She brought Gulban his drink and held the glass to his lips because his hands were still trembling.
‘I feel warmer now,’ he said at length.
‘You must have rolled over in your sleep.’ She thought he might relax if she could encourage him to talk.
‘I had a dream about a dream,’ he said. ‘I thought I dreamt that I could hear harp music and that you sent for the doctor to make sure I wasn’t dying. The doctor tested my hearing and told me that it was all an illusion, that at my age a man is further away from heavenly music than ever. Then he told me not to worry, that there was no after-life, and that even if there was my cards were stamped, and that I’d never given short measure. As soon as he left, a whirlwind came and whisked me up to heaven. Everyone was lolling about on Sleepeezee mattresses listening to piped music, drinking red wine and eating white wafers. They all looked childlike and happy. They were making small talk about cloud formations, and St Peter took me aside and explained that they had forgotten how to ask any of the big questions.
‘“Where is God?” I enquired.
‘He placed a cautionary finger over his lips and looked round, horrified, in case anyone had heard.
‘“You’ve come to the wrong place,” he said. “You should be down below. You’re still asking big questions.”
‘Then another whirlwind came and I found myself stretched on my bad side on the floor.’
Pauline laughed and Gulban caught her hand.
‘It was a lovely dream,’ she said. ‘Pity it made you fall out of bed.’
‘Sometimes I could laugh myself. Mostly I’m too sad. I’m not dead, but my life, my work, is over. I listen to sounds downstairs, I look across at my reservoir, I count the cars coming in the gate. That’s all there is left for me to do. Often I imagine I’m dead. Then I get a pain and realise that I’m still alive.’
His once ruddy face was now grey. He could barely move his right arm and leg. He kept falling asleep throughout the day and his eyelids kept drooping even when he was awake. He had lost his appetite, yet he hadn’t lost weight. Joey, with customary brutishness, said that he was living on hot air; Cookie, that, like the capitalist system, he was quite worn out; and the doctor, that he showed so many symptoms that they couldn’t conceivably represent one disease. They all sat in judgment, even Father Bosco who once offered the opinion over Sunday lunch that most men’s lives are only an accumulation of bad habits, histories of self-seeking and self-justifying prejudice. He wasn’t referring directly to his father, yet everyone present thought of Gulban in his bedroom, shorn of authority, hungering for sympathy and love.
‘I always kept busy,’ Gulban continued. ‘I never spent much time alone with myself. Now I know why. Some days I think I’d be better off dead.’
‘It’s wrong to talk like that.’
‘I’d never admit it to anyone but you.’
She stood by the window with her back to the bed. In a field of lush aftergrass beyond the road two of Slash Gildea’s rams were building themselves up for the tupping season in a month’s time. They advanced as they grazed, two old men with their heads down and their bottoms sticking out. The comparison took her aback. It was not a comparison that would have occurred to Slash, belonging as it did to a life of diminishment and non-participation. Out there was digging and sowing, reaping and gathering in season; cows and ewes giving birth; rain swelling clay and plants s
preading themselves in the sun; roots stretching and gripping; men, animals and plants conjoining in a dance of concelebration.
‘The wind is getting up,’ she said. ‘I like October because it’s lively.’
‘It’s the completion of all that’s good. After it the year can only go to the bad.’
She turned to him. He was propped against the pillows, his head back and his eyes closed. Now he needed her more and more. She was being drawn further into the family. At times she felt that she was being sucked towards a whirlpool which defied resistance, dragging all that entered it into unrelinquishing dark. He opened his eyes and closed them again.
‘In middle age a man needs sons to take his mind off the dead-end ahead, to give him a sense of family history still to be written. In old age he needs a daughter, a good warm caring woman. I’m grateful to you, Pauline, for everything you do. Without you now … I can’t bear to think.’
‘Don’t think, just rest. I’ll bring you up a cup of tea in an hour.’
‘Pauline.’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a nip in the air this evening. Time to light a fire in the public bar. I always liked the first fire of the dark season. It gave me a sense of comfort that made me remember women.’
‘We’ve had a fire in the lounge bar for the last three weeks.’
‘The lounge bar is for hothouse plants, it doesn’t count. Now, don’t forget to light a fire in the public bar this evening, and I’ll lie here in the dark imagining the flames.’
‘I won’t forget.’ She went quietly down the stairs.
When Joey returned from the shop, she recounted in detail all that had happened.
‘He’s a danger to himself,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to make sure it doesn’t occur again.’
Then he went up and told Gulban that they would have to put ropes round the bed to keep him from falling out.
‘You’ll be putting me in a straitjacket next,’ Gulban said.
‘If you don’t like the idea of ropes, I’ll have wooden grids made. It wouldn’t do to break an arm or a leg at your age.’
Joey asked Slash Gildea to get some timber from the shop and make two supports for Gulban’s bed. Slash slowly rolled up his shirt-sleeves as he considered.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Why?’ Joey demanded, the good side of his face going pale.
‘Because Gulban hasn’t asked me.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘I’ll make grids for your bed if you like, but not for Gulban’s.’
‘It’s Gulban who needs them.’
Pauline could see Joey stiffen from the effort of suppressing anger. Slash gazed down at him with the steadfast indifference she had thought he reserved for her alone.
‘You want me to make his bed into a baby’s cot. I’ve worked for him all my life. I’m not going to insult him now that he’s past his best.’
‘You’ll regret this,’ Joey said.
‘Regret is nothing compared with guilt.’ Slash walked away.
When Cookie came back from his walk, he and Joey went down to the village to see the carpenter. The carpenter came and measured the bed, and the following afternoon he returned with the grids.
‘What do you make of these hurdles?’ Gulban asked her.
‘They’re not my idea.’
‘They’re mine,’ said Joey.
‘They’re only for your own good,’ Cookie said.
‘You’re like two thrushes singing a duet. I suppose it must come from countersigning each other’s cheques.’
‘Try them for one night and see,’ Cookie suggested. ‘If you don’t like them, we’ll think of something else.’
‘Should I try them?’ he asked Pauline.
‘Once will do no harm.’
That night they were woken in their beds by a hysterical shouting and thumping. Startled guests opened doors to see what was going on. Pauline rushed to Gulban’s room to find Cookie and Joey standing speechless in a torrent of abuse from their father.
‘Get me out of this coffin, get me out, I say.’ He banged his fists against the heavy timber of the grids.
Cookie and Joey unhooked them and laid them against the wall.
‘Take them away. Out of my sight. I never want to see them again. When I put out my hands in the dark, I could feel the sides of the coffin. Men have been buried alive before. It can easily happen to an old man who’s barely warm.’
‘You only imagined it,’ Joey said.
‘You dreamt it,’ Cookie assured him.
‘Get back to bed, both of you … Pauline, will you get me a hot drink?’
Cookie and Joey left the room with Pauline.
‘They’ll do for me yet,’ Gulban told her when she returned with more rum punch.
‘They mean well. They were afraid you might fall out of bed again.’
‘It’s a hard choice between them. Pauline, you must help me decide.’
‘Don’t talk now. Just sip your drink and then go back to sleep.’
‘What do you think of Father Bosco?’
‘He’s a priest.’
‘He doesn’t have to remain a priest.’
‘It would be sinful to tempt him with possessions.’
‘He’s no fool, he took his talent like the others. Possessions and responsibilities might make a man of him.’
‘You mean the moral effort of rejecting them?’
‘He’s more capable than Cookie and Joey. He has chosen a different life, but he must be considered, especially now.’
‘The life he’s chosen is for good.’
‘Ah, Pauline, the only man among them had to die.’ He reached out and grasped her hand. ‘We know he had his failings and we mustn’t forget them. I must remember his secret drinking and you must remember his fornicating in every ditch, haystack and barn-loft in the county. Many’s the time I told him to have nothing to do with that windbroken old nag Mrs Bugler, and every time I mentioned her name he pretended I was talking about bridge.’
‘I know his faults as well as you.’
‘On good days I recall the good things: his straightforward character, his firmness, his loyalty to me. When I listen to Cookie and Joey pretending to be businessmen, the heart inside me sinks. Those two never grew up, they’re only playing games. They don’t believe in what they’re doing. At least schoolboys believe in their games. If Slash Gildea had had half their education, he’d be running the country by now.’
She took his mug from between his hands and tucked in the bedclothes round his feet.
‘Pauline, will you do me a favour? Will you ring Father Bosco first thing in the morning and tell him I want to see him?’
Chapter 13
Father Bosco arrived on Sunday morning. He pulled up in the driveway as Cookie was making for the gate.
‘You’ll find that Joey and I are personae non gratae. He’s convinced we tried to bury him alive,’ Cookie warned.
‘He sent for me. I’ve brought my stole in case he wants confession.’
‘Hardly. In his case the need of confession will be preceded by fear of the conflagration. That’s a fear to come.’
‘It’s a pity you and Joey can’t show him a little humanity.’
‘In return for reason and justice?’ Cookie smiled. ‘Father, I must leave you. I shan’t be in for lunch, I’m feasting at Fort Knox.’
‘Taking up where Jack left off?’
‘I never play cards, they’re the Devil’s prayer-book.’ He waved an exaggerated farewell.
He had met Mrs Bugler in the village the previous evening. He observed her coming towards him, tall and strong, thick-waisted and thick-ankled, sure-footed in thick-soled shoes. Her Jack Russell paused to sniff the base of a telegraph pole. She turned to study the fascia of Heron’s General Stores across the street, a sturdy figure in a white mac with a tightly drawn leather belt.
‘What a coincidence!’ she smiled at him. ‘I was planning to ring you this evening. It’s Alicia,
you see. I’m so worried about her that I don’t know where to turn. She should have gone back to university last week, she’s taking her Second Med. next year, but she says she’ll never open another medical book again. She’s obsessed with her father’s paintings. She wants to become an artist and paint like him.’
‘Is there anything wrong with that?’
‘Giving up her studies after three years! If she had a talent for the brush, I wouldn’t mind. I thought that if you had a word with her you might make her see reason.’
‘I don’t know how I can help, I’m no admirer of the academic life.’
‘But you’re taking your doctorate very shortly.’
‘I may not.’
‘Alicia needs someone intelligent to talk to. She spends far too much time on her own. She stays in bed till noon and has breakfast for lunch. She paints in the afternoons and practises croquet alone. She’s simply not with us half the time. At night she goes down to the sea to walk along the cliffs in the dark. She comes back after twelve and reads till three in the morning – light French novels, cookery books, fashion magazines, anything that won’t stretch the mind. I thought that if you came to lunch on Sunday it might make a change for her. Owen Forker will be coming, and he’s a sweetie. If it’s mild, we’ll eat al fresco. It could be fun.’
‘I’d love to come.’
‘It’s a date, then.’
She smiled with in-turned teeth, all chin and nose, expressing extremes of self-will and self-command. From a doorway he watched her military walk, the measured strides contrasting oddly with the dainty trot of her long-bodied dog.
He had been contemplating the lunch with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. He didn’t know whether to sport an open collar or a tie, so in a spirit of uncertain compromise he settled for a silk cravat. He walked to the village and had a drink in the only pub before taking the south-running road through wire-fenced grazing fields to Fort Knox. He had never been inside the gate before. He plucked a sprig of red Virginia creeper and put it in his breast-pocket for luck. On the other side was stillness, shelter, and a hint of geometrical exactitude reflecting in miniature the rectangularity of the fenced fields around. Here he felt a thousand miles from the gaunt and solitary hotel and a million miles from the drably huddling cottages of the village. Pock! On the lawn in front of him Alicia had hit a wooden ball with a mallet.
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