Collected Stories

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Rather,’ said Norman, wishing he had the courage to go to a main-line station and take a train in any direction.

  At one o’clock the merry-go-round, the slide, the racks of second-hand clothing were in their allotted spaces. The home-made cakes, the bags of fudge and toffee, the rag dolls and the tea-cosies lay spread along the trestle tables. From behind each privet hedge wafted a smell of frying sausages and hamburgers, of kebabs roasting above charcoal. A man on stilts, thin arms held wide, stood like a pylon in the middle of the road. Hordes of little children, pursued by parents, ran between his legs, screaming.

  The Lady Mayoress opened the proceedings, standing on J. J. Roberts’s balcony and shouting through a loudspeaker. Norman was crouched at a rickety table inside a wigwam anchored precariously in the gutter. He wore a flouncy dress loaned to him by the accountant’s wife, dark glasses and a Davy Crockett hat. No one had recognised him when he appeared in the street. He was straining to hear the Mayoress’s words when some children pushed against the wigwam. The table collapsed, sending the crystal ball flying into the gutter. When he picked it up there were tiny hair-line cracks upon its surface. It made all the difference.

  His first customers were a man and a woman, neither of whom had he ever seen before, and he was able to tell them that they were going on a long journey, somewhere hot, without vegetation.

  ‘Good heavens,’ breathed the woman.

  Encouraged, Norman studied the scratches carefully and, screwing up his eyes, fancied he saw the marks of tyre tracks.

  ‘It’s not going to be all plain sailing,’ he said. ‘I foresee trouble.’ He charged the couple ten pence and realised, too late, that he could have asked for fifty. He heard them outside the tent, informing someone that the crystal gazer was incredible, absolutely incredible. She had told them all about that documentary they had made for ‘War on Want’, when the crank shaft went and David, but for the champagne, would almost certainly have died of dehydration.

  A queue began to form outside the wigwam. The noise, the jostling, was tremendous.

  ‘Stop it,’ Norman protested, as a youth with a plug of cotton-wool in his ear insisted on entering with two of his friends.

  ‘There’s no room,’ he warned, hanging on to his Davy Crockett hat as the tent lurched sideways.

  ‘Get on with it,’ ordered the youth belligerently.

  ‘Well,’ said Norman. ‘You’ve been ill recently, with headaches.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ sneered the youth.

  ‘Earache, then,’ said Norman. ‘I see a tall man with very long legs. He’s waving his arms.’

  ‘Bugger me,’ said the youth, all the cockiness gone from him.

  ‘You were mugged,’ said Norman confidently, staring at a wavy line that looked not unlike the handle of a teacup. ‘Attacked in some way.’

  ‘Gerroff,’ cried the youth, recovering. ‘I weren’t attacked, you stupid bag. Me Dad hit me with a poker.’

  When Betty Taylor came into the wigwam, Norman found himself telling her that she had not had much of a life.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘You’ve never had it easy, right from a child.’

  ‘No,’ she sniffed. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘And I can’t see anything better in the future,’ Norman said. ‘You’re not one of Nature’s darlings. I wish I could pretend otherwise, but the crystal ball never lies.’

  Betty Taylor left the wigwam in tears. Norman felt dreadful the moment she had gone, and wondered what had made him so peculiarly truthful. After all, she had done nothing to him.

  Nevertheless he enjoyed himself; it was simple once he’d got the hang of it. Nicotine stains on the fingers pointed to a death-wish, blood-shot eyes denoted too much dependence on the bottle, nervous laughter was a sure sign of inferiority. It was all a matter of observation.

  Half way through the afternoon a woman in a white dress squeezed into the wigwam. She was coughing. ‘You’re supposed to be frightfully good,’ she said huskily. ‘Do tell what’s in store for me.’

  Norman looked at her face, at her eyes, and then peered into the crystal ball. ‘Sometimes,’ he told her, ‘I find it’s not altogether wise to pass on the information. It might upset people – some people – if the exact picture were given.’

  ‘Oh, come now,’ she said. ‘You can tell me. I’ve paid my ten pence.’

  ‘I see a house,’ he said. ‘It’s painted white. It’s not here … it’s somewhere abroad.’ He glanced at her sunburnt arms and went on, ‘You’ve only recently returned. You weren’t alone.’

  ‘Go on,’ said the woman. ‘You’re awfully good so far.’

  ‘This other person,’ he said, ‘is unhappy. It’s a woman. Her surname begins with P, I think. Yes, it’s definitely P.’

  ‘What does this P person do?’ asked the woman. She was holding a little fold of skin at the base of her neck, twisting it between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Nothing at the moment,’ said Norman, ‘that’s the trouble. She used to look after someone, but then she walked out.’

  The woman stared at Norman.

  ‘I think it was her mother,’ he said. ‘Someone close, anyway. At any rate they took it badly. I see a station platform and a figure standing very near the rails. There’s a train coming.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ said the woman.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Norman said, ‘something else coming through. I’ve got it. I’ve a picture of a woman lying down and someone bending over her, someone in a white coat. Is she at the dentist’s, I wonder?’ He took his time; he was sweating and his dark glasses kept sliding on the bridge of his nose. At last he said, ‘The woman has a sore … no, not a sore, more like a small lump just beneath her adam’s apple. It’s serious.’

  After a moment the woman asked, ‘Which one is it? The woman at the station or the one with the name beginning with P?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Norman, ‘I’m only the projector, not the identifier. I leave it to those who consult me to work out whose life is in danger.’

  The woman put a pound note on the table and ducked out into the street. Norman could hear her coughing above the noise of the Steel Band on the corner.

  When it was all over and he’d been congratulated on his success – more than one member of the Committee asked if he was free next week for drinks, for supper – Norman went home, and removing the suitcase from the wardrobe took out the photograph and tore it in half across the throat.

  Then he sat at the table and wrote a note to the divorcee, telling her that she could pull down his wall whenever she felt like it. If necessary he would pay for the whole caboodle.

  Life wasn’t all roses.

  BREAD AND BUTTER SMITH

  Whenever the Christmas season approaches I always think of the good times we had, my wife and I, at the Adelphi Hotel just after the war. When I say ‘times’ I wouldn’t like to give the impression that we were regular visitors to the hostelry at the foot of Mount Pleasant – that would be misleading. As a matter of fact we only stayed there twice. Before and in between those occasions we put up at the Exchange Hotel in Stanley Street, next door to the station.

  Though born and brought up in Liverpool, I had crossed the water and gone to live on the Wirral at the earliest opportunity – you did if you came from Anfield – but I was in the habit of popping over on the ferry each Christmas to carve the turkey, on Boxing Day, for my sister Constance. She was, apart from my wife, my only surviving relative. Leaving aside the matter of Mr Brownlow, Constance’s house in Belmont Road wasn’t a suitable place to stay – to be accurate, it was one up and one down with the WC in the backyard – and as the wife and I found it more convenient to occupy separate bedrooms I always booked into an hotel. I could afford it. I was in scrap metal, which was a good line of business to be in if you didn’t mind being called a racketeer, which I didn’t. The wife minded, but as I often tell her, where would she be today if I hadn’t been. She’
d soon buck up her ideas if she found herself languishing in the public ward of a National Health hospital.

  If it hadn’t been for Smith, we’d have stuck with the Exchange and not gone on switching hotels the way we did. Not that it achieved anything; he always ferreted us out. I fully believe that if we had changed venues altogether and given Blackpool or Hastings a whirl he’d have turned up in the grill room on the night before Christmas Eve, wearing that same crumpled blue suit, as though drawn by a magnet. I don’t want to malign the poor devil, and don’t think I’m being wise after the event, but I always found him a bit of a strain, not to mention an aggravation, right from the moment we met him, which was that first year we stayed at the Exchange.

  We’d had our dinner, thank God, main course, pudding and so forth, and the waiter had just brought us a bowl of fruit. No bananas or tangerines, of course – too soon after the end of hostilities – but there was half a peach and a few damsons and some apples nicely polished.

  ‘Shall I have the peach?’ my wife said.

  ‘Have what you like,’ I told her. I’ve never been enamoured of fruit.

  It was then that this fellow at the next table, who seemed to have nothing in front of him but a plate of bread and butter, leaned forward and said to me: ‘The waiter is doing what King Alcinous may have done to the storm-beaten Greeks.’

  That’s exactly what he said, give or take a few words. You meet a lot of loopy individuals among the educated classes, and at the time I mistook him for one of those. Loopy, that is.

  I ignored him, but the wife said: ‘It’s a thought, isn’t it?’ She was nervy that far back. Once she’d been foolish enough to respond, we couldn’t get shot of him. I’m an abrupt sort of person. I don’t do things I don’t want to do – never have – whereas the wife, long before her present unfortunate state manifested itself, is the sort of person who apologises when some uncouth lout sends her reeling into the gutter. Don’t get me wrong, Smith was never a scrounger. He paid his whack at the bar, and if he ever ate with us it was hardly an imposition because he never seemed to order anything but bread and butter. Even on Christmas Day all he had was a few cuts of the breast and his regular four slices. He wasn’t thin either. He had more of a belly on him than me, and he looked well into his fifties, which I put down to his war experiences. He was in the desert, or so he told the wife, and once saw Rommel through field glasses.

  All along, I made no bones about my feelings for Smith. That first night, when he intruded over the fruit, I turned my face away. Later on, whenever he began pestering us about the Maginot line, or the Wife of Andros, or his daft theory that the unknown soldier was very probably a woman who had been scurrying along the hedgerows looking for hens’ eggs when a shell had blown her to pieces at Ypres, I just got to my feet and walked away. My wife brought it on herself. She shouldn’t have sat like patience on a monument, listening to the fool, her left eyelid twitching the way it does when she’s out of her depth. His conversation was right over her head.

  Not that he seemed to notice; he couldn’t get enough of us. When we said we wouldn’t be available on Boxing Day, he even hinted that we might take him along to Belmont Road. I was almost tempted to take him up on it. Mr Brownlow was argumentative and had a weak bladder. Constance had picked him up outside the Co-op in 1931. It would have served Smith right to have had to sit for six hours in Constance’s front parlour, two lumps of coal in the grate, one glass of port and lemon to last the night, and nothing by way of entertainment beyond escorting Mr Brownlow down the freezing backyard to the WC.

  The following year, to avoid the possibility of bumping into Smith, we went to the Adelphi. And damn me, he was there. There was a dance on Christmas Eve in the main lounge, and I’ll never forget how he and the wife began in a melancholy and abstracted manner to circle the floor, her black dress rustling as she moved, and he almost on tiptoe because he was shorter than her. Every time he fox-trotted the wife in my direction he gave an exaggerated little start of surprise, as though I was the last person he expected to see. When he fetched her back to the table, he said, ‘I do hope you have no objection to my dancing with your lady wife. I wouldn’t like to give offence.’

  ‘No offence taken,’ I said. I’ve never seen the point of dancing. ‘Do as you please.’

  ‘We shall, we shall,’ the wife said, laughing in that way she has.

  We had to play cards with the blighter on Christmas Day. On Boxing Day it was almost a relief, which was saying something, to travel out on the tram to Anfield for the festivities with Constance and Mr Brownlow.

  The next year we tried the Exchange again, never thinking that lightning would strike twice, or three times for that matter but, blow me, it did. Smith turned up an hour after we arrived. I did briefly begin to wonder who was avoiding who, but it was obvious that he was as pleased as punch to see us.

  ‘My word,’ he cried out. ‘This is nice. My word, it is.’

  I sensed he was different. There was nothing I could put my finger on; his suit was the same and he still blinked a lot, but something had changed in him. I mentioned as much to the wife. ‘He’s different, don’t you think?’ I said.

  ‘Different?’ she said.

  ‘Cocky,’ I said. ‘If you know what I mean?’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Something in the eye,’ I insisted.

  But she wouldn’t have it.

  All the same, I was right. Why, he even had the blithering nerve to give me a present, wrapped up in coloured paper with one of those damn soft bows on the top. It was a book on golf, which was a lucky choice, inspired almost, as I’d only taken up the game a few months before. I didn’t run amok showing my gratitude, nor did I scamper upstairs and parcel up one of the handkerchiefs the wife had given to me. To be frank, I didn’t even say thank you.

  I didn’t need acquaintances, then. As long as I had the wife sitting there, reading a library book and smoking one of her Craven A cigarettes, I didn’t have to go to the bother of being pleasant. Not that Smith noticed my lack of enthusiasm for his company. It appeared to me that no matter where I was, whether in the corridor minding my own business, or coming out of the lift, or having a quiet drink in the Steve Donoghue Bar, he was forever bobbing up alongside me, or behind me – and always a mine of useful information. ‘Are you aware,’ he’d ask, eyeing the beer pitching in my glass as a train rumbled out of the station below, ‘that the first locomotive was so heavy that it broke the track beneath it?’

  He didn’t seem to know anybody in the city, but a couple of times I saw him going down in the lift very late at night with his hat and coat on. God knows where he was off to. Once, I saw him in the deserted booking-hall of the station. I was on the fourth floor of the hotel, in the small hours, looking out of the back windows at the arched roof beneath, estimating what price, per ton, the cast-iron ribs would fetch on the scrap market. It was raining and Smith was perambulating up and down, hatless, holding an umbrella in a cock-eyed way, followed by a flock of pigeons. While I was watching, Smith suddenly spun round and flourished his brolly at the pigeons. I took it that he was drunk. The birds flapped upwards in alarm. There wasn’t a pane of glass left intact in the roof – it had all been blasted to smithereens during the blitz. One of the pigeons in attempting to escape through the ribs must have severed a wing on the shards of glass. It sort of staggered in mid-air and then dropped like a lump of mud to the granite floor of the booking-hall. I couldn’t hear the noise it made, flopping down like that, but it obviously gave Smith quite a turn. He froze, his gamp held out to one side like some railway guard waiting to lower his flag for a train to depart. I couldn’t see his face because I was looking down on him, but I could tell by the stance of the man, one foot turned inwards, one arm stuck outwards, that he was frightened. Then he took a running kick at the thing on the ground and sent it skidding against the base of the tobacco kiosk. After a moment he went over to the kiosk and squatted down. He stayed like that for some time
, rocking backwards and forwards on his haunches. Then he took out his handkerchief, laid it over the pigeon, and walked away. He was definitely drunk.

  That final year, 1949, I switched back to the Adelphi. You’ve never clapped eyes on anything like that hotel. It’s built like a Cunarder. Whenever I lurched through the revolving doors into the lobby, I never thought I’d disembark until I’d crossed the Atlantic. The lounge is the size of a dry dock; there are little balconettes running the entire length of it, fronted by ornamental grilles. Sometimes, if the staff dropped a nickel-plated teapot in the small kitchen behind the rostrum, I imagined we’d struck an iceberg. I never used to think like that until Smith put his oar in. It was he who said that all big hotels were designed to resemble ocean liners. On another occasion – because he was a contrary beggar – he said that the balconettes were modelled after confessionals in churches. I never sat in them after that.

  We arrived at four o’clock on the 23rd December and went immediately into the lounge for tea and cakes. I had just told the wife to sit up straight – there’s nothing worse than a slouching woman, particularly if she’s got a silver fox fur slung round her shoulders – when I thought I saw, reflected in the mirrors behind the balconettes, the unmistakable figure of Smith. I slopped tea into my saucer.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked my wife.

  ‘I could swear I just saw that blighter Smith,’ I said. ‘Could I have been mistaken, do you think?’

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘You? Surely not.’ She was lifting up her veil and tucking it back over the brim of her hat, and you could tell how put out she was; both her cheeks were red with annoyance.

  The odd thing was that he never came into the grill room that night. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t him,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it was a trick of the light.’

  ‘Some trick,’ she said.

  ‘If he has the effrontery to present me with another little seasonal offering,’ I warned her, ‘I’ll throw it back in his face.’