‘Are you mad?’ Gulban huffed. ‘Who wants to spend a holiday behind a six-foot wall?’
‘You could pull down the wall,’ Cookie suggested.
‘She’ll never get its price. I’m the only local man with the money to buy it. It’s too big for an outsider looking for a holiday home or even for a quiet place for retirement.’
‘If I had the money, I’d buy it,’ Cookie said.
‘You’re too young to shut yourself away. Fort Knox is for someone who wants to escape from life, like the man who built it. Sadly, after he’d locked the gate and bolted all the doors, life scaled his high wall and took him by the scruff of the neck when he thought he was impregnable.’
He told Joey what Gulban had said, and Joey thought carefully before replying.
‘Gulban is wrong. Fort Knox would remake you. There’s enough experience behind those walls to keep a man warm for a lifetime. You should count yourself lucky, Cookie. At least you had her to yourself for a day.’
He could tell that Joey was thinking of his own lack of success with Pauline. She glided from room to room. She watered her plants and carried trays upstairs to Gulban. She taught Cookie how to do the monthly accounts. She never seemed to consider Joey except when she wanted something from the shop.
As he looked out of the window, a sturdy, black donkey came down the road, sniffing the tarred surface, testing it with pouted lips. He lay down on his left side and tried to roll over. He failed and tried again. For a moment his four legs hovered in the air, while he balanced precariously on his backbone, which had become the keel of a boat out of water. Then he rolled on to his right side and lay exhausted with expense of effort. He struggled to his feet and shook himself, sending a cloud of dust into the bright air. With a look of boredom he walked out of the cloud and began cropping the selvage of the road.
For Cookie it was a moment of unsought magic. It was the first time since Alicia’s death that he had found himself reaching out for common experience with another moving, breathing body.
March was mild. On St Patrick’s Day she opened the windows in Gulban’s bedroom to let in the gentle air of spring. The green of young buds blurred the dark outline of the hedge at the end of the driveway. Corkscrews of blue smoke rose from chimneys on the other side of the river. Larks sang over the moor. People were booking for Easter, which was falling later this year than she would have liked.
She took down the curtains in Gulban’s room and washed them. She thought she might repaint the walls, then it occurred to her that a wallpaper with a puzzling design might beguile his eye and take his thoughts off his bedsores.
‘Wallpaper?’ He sounded doubtful.
‘We have some lovely patterns below in the shop.’
‘The wall at the far end has got a crack above the window. Have you noticed how it’s getting longer?’
‘That crack’s been there since I can remember. The wallpaper will cover it. You won’t have to look at it any more.’
‘If you paper over it, we won’t know if it’s getting worse. Before you do anything, I’d like to have a word with Cookie and Joey.’
She got them to come up after lunch, having warned them about his latest obsession.
‘What are you going to do about that crack?’ he asked.
‘It’s only a plaster crack,’ Joey said. ‘Nothing serious.’
‘It could be the start of something serious.’
‘If you like, I’ll fill it.’ Cookie tried to show willing.
‘Filling’s no good. It’s like patching old trousers.’
‘That crack has nothing to do with shrinkage or settlement,’ Joey assured him. ‘Cookie is right. Filling will cure it.’
‘Has it occurred to you that this hotel may be built on sand?’
‘You’re beginning to sound like Andy Early.’ Joey sniggered.
‘I want you to get a building surveyor to inspect the house from top to bottom.’
‘Why?’ Joey asked.
‘You think I’m cuckoo? You think that when I ask for my nose I mean it?’
‘When you ask for a surveyor’s report, do you mean it?’
‘The trouble with you two is that you have no imagination. You only see with your eyes, and even then you’re scared in case you see too much.’
‘You could be right.’ Cookie winked at Joey.
‘Which surveyor did you have in mind?’ Joey asked.
‘There’s only one in town. If you look hard, you may find him.’
‘I’ll ring him this afternoon,’ Joey promised.
‘I want a written structural report, remember, typed in double spacing so that I can read it without squinting.’
‘Whatever next?’ Cookie said when the three of them had left the room.
‘It’s one of his silly tests again,’ Joey remarked. ‘He wants to find out if we’re prepared to waste his money just to humour him.’
‘I think he’s being serious,’ said Cookie. ‘What do you think, Pauline?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know. You and Joey must do what you feel is best.’
They discussed their dilemma with Father Bosco at lunch the following day. He passed his hand over his ecclesiastical dome. His lips moved as if he were praying for divine guidance.
‘He is confusing the eternal with the merely temporal,’ he pronounced. ‘When he says that the hotel may be built on sand, he is speaking metaphorically, yet he expects to be taken literally. For the first time in his life his thoughts are turning to the eschatological. With one foot here and another there, he simply wants to make certain that the foot still here is resting on solid foundations. My advice to you is to ring the surveyor.’
‘And pour three hundred pounds down the drain?’
‘He’s our father. We must take him seriously till the end. It’s no more than the fourth commandment enjoins.’ Father Bosco spoke solemnly with just a hint of pulpit elocution.
‘I know what I’ll do,’ said Joey. ‘I’ll write the report myself.’
‘You’re not a surveyor, your opinion on building construction is as worthless as Cookie’s or mine.’
‘Not correct. I have a scientific cast of mind. I’ll carry out an inspection and put my findings on paper. No building surveyor could do more.’
‘If Gulban finds out, you’ll be up a gum tree,’ Father Bosco advised.
‘Has it occurred to you that he won’t find out unless you tell him?’
Pauline said nothing. It was obvious to her that none of the three had any idea how to talk to Gulban. Not one of them had the courage to insist that the crack was in the imagination rather than the wall.
Joey took his self-given commission seriously. He spent a morning going from room to room with jotter and pencil, and within three days he had written a 4,000-word report on the state of the building, including the roof, walls, foundations, plumbing, electrics and drainage. It was a workmanlike report, though somewhat deficient in technical jargon. Cookie said that it was too uncritical to deceive Gulban’s critical eye and he suggested that Joey find a few unimportant faults, ‘just for the sake of verisimilitude’. Within the hour Joey returned with one or two additional paragraphs which he read to Pauline and Cookie.
‘How about this?’ he laughed. ‘“The hotel is built on shallow, sloping ground which necessitates a flight of steps as access to the front entrance. This has occasioned the one structural fault in the building. The lounge bar and dining-room floors have apparently large depths of hardcore under the concrete floor slab, and these have settled, causing a gap of approximately six to eight millimetres to appear under the skirting. At present the movement is not significant, but if settlement should continue over a long period, some remedial work may have to be undertaken.”’
‘Excellent,’ said Cookie. ‘Now, that has the ring of truth.’
‘For good measure I have also included a reference to the creaking stairs: “Most of the joints have loosened and several of the treads have split. Furthermore, th
e joints between the newel posts and the strings are weak, and will weaken further with constant use. Little can be done to rejuvenate this structure short of complete replacement, which would be costly, so what I would recommend is that you employ a carpenter to brace up a number of the treads and newel posts as a temporary measure.”’
‘No, no, no. That’s too realistic,’ said Cookie. ‘The first paragraph about floor settlement is all we need.’
When Joey asked Pauline to type out the report, she said that she did not wish to be party to the deception. Then Cookie volunteered his help, promising to introduce a sufficient number of misspellings, non sequiturs and dubious grammatical constructions to enhance the professional appearance of the document.
She was making Gulban’s bed the following morning when Joey and Cookie entered. Cookie smiled breezily at the patient and Joey waved a large brown envelope above his head.
‘It’s come at last, the surveyor’s report which will set all doubt at rest for ever.’
‘I didn’t see any surveyor,’ Gulban said.
‘He came one afternoon over a week ago when you were sleeping,’ Cookie explained.
‘Resting, not sleeping. I only sleep at night. Now, what does it say?’
‘I’ve only glanced at it. I haven’t had time to digest it fully,’ Joey said.
‘It looks quite comprehensive to me,’ Cookie commented.
‘Let me be the judge of that.’ Gulban reached for the document.
With a little glint of mischief in his eye he asked for his nose, and Cookie dutifully handed him his specs, which he put on with difficulty. There was silence while he leafed through the eight-page report, until Joey could bear the silence no longer.
‘As you will see, he says specifically that the crack in this room is no deeper than the plaster.’
‘Who says?’ Gulban let his spectacles slide down his nose so that he could glare at Joey over the rims.
‘The surveyor Bernard Shovelin.’
‘He didn’t write this report, it isn’t typed on his headed notepaper.’
‘He was out of headed notepaper,’ Cookie explained. ‘As we needed the report urgently, and to save time, we agreed that he might type it on ordinary A4 bond. If you want it typed on his headed paper, we can always ask him to do it again.’
‘I don’t want it retyped, I can read it as it stands. What I do want is to go through it with him point by point and ask him certain questions. You see, he’s said nothing about the warped joist in the ceiling above the back office. Either he doesn’t know his job or he’s skimped it. Ring him up and tell him I want to see him. Ask him to come tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, before the weekend.’
‘It’s rather difficult, you see. He’s on holiday at the moment, we’ll have to wait till he comes back.’
‘Excuses, excuses, all I get is excuses!’ Gulban shouted.
‘Surveyors need a break like everyone else,’ Cookie said.
‘I’m not interested in surveyor’s breaks. What I want to know is which of you wrote this report.’
He looked from Cookie to Joey, both of whom looked non-committally at each other, and at Pauline. Gulban opened his mouth to speak but no word came. His cheeks flushed and the report shook in his hand. Pauline went to the bedside. He was seized by a fit of coughing that seemed to steal the breath from his lungs. He hunched his shoulders and gasped desperately for air. She put an arm round him, she was certain he would choke. Then came a wheeze and a rattle. He turned his perspiring face towards her. She relaxed as he found his breath again.
‘I happened to swallow, and my spittle went down my windpipe,’ he said.
He stared at Cookie and Joey, as she put another pillow to his back.
‘Which of you wrote the report?’ He spoke deliberately, with a moment’s pause after each word.
‘Joey wrote it and I typed it,’ Cookie replied.
‘It was meant as a joke,’ Joey explained.
‘It was meant to deceive me.’ Gulban raised his voice.
‘Now, don’t get yourself all worked up again,’ Pauline advised him.
‘It was only a jape,’ said Cookie. ‘It’s the 1st of April today.’
‘April Fool’s Day! Get it?’ Joey tried to laugh it off.
‘No one makes a fool of me. Now, get out of here, the two of you, and don’t come back unless I send for you.’
‘You shouldn’t allow yourself to get excited,’ she told him when they’d gone. ‘Try to relax while I go down and make you a nice cup of coffee.’
‘I don’t want coffee, I’ll have a glass of rum punch.’
‘It’s hardly ten, it’s too early for rum punch.’
‘I’m my own doctor. I only prescribe what’s good for me.’
She found Joey and Cookie arguing in the kitchen.
‘He’s a sick old man,’ she said. ‘He deserves better from both of you.’
‘It was Cookie who blew the gaff. What a stupid thing to do.’
‘It was hopeless denying it. He was going to send for the surveyor,’ Cookie objected.
‘The surveyor knows the score. He’d have kept up the fiction if we’d asked him to. Now it’s a right shambles. You’ve queered the pitch for us both.’
‘Leave it for a day or two,’ Pauline said. ‘When he cools down, I’ll make him see the funny side.’
Chapter 23
She gave Gulban his rum punch and went to her room while he drank it. A breeze from the moor was blowing through the curtains. She stood by the side of the window, looking through her binoculars at the random movements of sheep on the hill.
Some of the ewes were lying down placidly with their lambs. Those that had not yet given birth were grazing with their backs to the breeze, their bellies close to the ground and the teats of their swollen udders sticking out on either side. Next to a rock lay a torn piece of rag. It occurred to her that it could be a young lamb that had been killed by a mink or fox. As she refocused the binoculars for a clearer view, the rag shook itself into life on four thin legs and ran straight to its bedraggled mother. Pauline laughed with unexpected delight. The hill was alive with soft, white bodies, black faces and black legs with thick knee-joints.
The new-born lambs had hollow flanks, spindly legs and ears that looked too long for their narrow faces. In three or four weeks their bodies would fill out, their legs would look thicker and shorter. They would bleat and frisk from morning till night, jumping straight up into the air as if on springs and mounting each other in play while their mothers looked on uncomprehendingly.
Two young lambs came running after a solitary ewe. She gave a quick kick with her hind leg and off they ran in alarm. Another ewe came trotting and gave them her udder. They suckled with tails wriggling, but not for long. The mother lifted a hind leg in warning and slowly walked away. They followed her until she lay down, her udder now protected against their hard noses.
Slash had put all the twin lambs with their mothers together in one field. She took a keener interest in the ewes with twins because they looked more motherly than the others, and at the same time she pitied them. The lambs were the opposite of meek. They would butt their mother’s udder with their snouts till her hindquarters shook as they suckled. Both lambs and ewes inhabited a world of necessity which seemed both mechanical and unalterable.
With a sense of ineradicable imperfection, she remembered coming home early from school one afternoon and finding her mother in the garden asleep in the sun. She grasped her mother’s hand and waited. A hen that had just laid began to cackle under the trees. It was warm in the garden, there were beads of perspiration on her mother’s upper lip. She shook her mother’s hand and her mother opened her eyes. She smiled from under the wide brim of her sun-hat and said, ‘Is it that time already? I was far, far away.’
That evening her mother took her bicycle from the shed and said that she was going shopping. When she got back, the house was an upward-running river of flame, and then they were even poorer than befo
re.
While still a young girl, she often went over that scene in her mind: her mother asleep in the airless garden, the heavy scent of woodbine and hawthorn mingling; the silence broken by the cackling hen. She had experienced a moment of anxiety as she waited for her mother to open her eyes, yet in retrospect that day had come to represent a life of never-to-be-recovered perfection. Had memory invested it with its peculiar density of atmosphere and emotional coherence? Or did it now seem perfect because the fire that broke out a few hours later had altered her life for ever?
Increasingly, the best of her waking life lay in childhood remembrance, which awakened in her a desire to recover a lost intimacy with the physical world around her – with stones, streams, tree-stumps. At one time these were more than inanimate objects, they were living things invested with a personal magic that enriched and illumined her young, unexamined life. Growing up was a gradual withdrawal from the warmth of a world in which stones had hearts and in which there was no exterior that did not express an interior. Now all she saw were surfaces. She was cursed with the apprehension of relationships in which she herself had no part to play.
The winter that had gone was a time of further withdrawal into a world of disinterested observation. She noted Cookie’s silent trudge through each dark, short day; she could only guess at the pain of the endless nights that followed. He never once mentioned Alicia. He spoke drily of impersonal things, and in speaking of them made clear that nothing he said or did had any value. In his stoicism he had taken on an unsought dignity that placed him beyond the reach of Father Bosco and Joey and of Gulban, too.
Through her binoculars she watched a young man ploughing a north-facing slope. He was going back and forth on the tractor with his young wife perched on the mudguard behind him, both glancing over their shoulders at the brittle sod turning and the thin furrows glistening as they lengthened. She found herself weeping. She put down her binoculars and sat on the bed. She could not say what had caused her breasts to heave.
The Red Men Page 20