Collected Stories

by Beryl Bainbridge

  After we had finished our pudding my wife said she was off to her bed.

  ‘You can’t go up now,’ I said. ‘I’ve paid good money to be here.’

  ‘If I’m to live through the excitement of visiting Constance and Mr Brownlow,’ she said, ‘I’ll need all the rest I can get.’ She fairly ran out of the grill room; she never had any staying power.

  I had a drink in the bar and asked the fellow behind the counter if he’d seen Smith, but he didn’t seem to know who I was talking about. That’s the trouble with shifting from one hotel to another – none of the staff know you from Adam. I looked into the smoking-room about ten o’clock and he wasn’t there either. I could have done with Smith. The hotel was crowded with guests, some in uniform, full of the Christmas spirit and anxious that everyone should join in. Several times I was almost drawn into one of those conversations about what branch of the services I’d been in during the hostilities. I’ll say that much for Smith; he never asked me what I’d done in the war. At a quarter past ten I went into the lounge and ordered myself another drink. There weren’t too many people in there. A dance was in progress in the French room; I could hear the band playing some number made popular by Carmen Miranda. The waiter had just set my glass down in front of me when the doors burst open at the side and a line of revellers spilled into the lounge and began doing the conga down the length of the pink carpet towards the Christmas tree at the far end. They wound in and out of the sofas and the tables, clasping each other at the waist and kicking up the devil of a noise. Mercifully, having snaked once round the tree, showering the carpet with pine-needles, they headed back for the dance floor. And suddenly, for a split second, before he disappeared behind the tree, I thought I saw Smith near the end of the line, clutching hold of a stout individual who was wearing a paper hat. The fat man appeared again, but I was mistaken about Smith. Oddly enough, he must have been on my mind because for the rest of the evening I fancied I caught glimpses of him – coming out of the gents, going into the lift, standing at the top of the stairs looking down into the lounge – but it was never him.

  Shortly after midnight I went upstairs to unpack my belongings. My room was on the first floor and overlooked Lewis’s department store. I’d changed into my pyjamas – such as they were – and was putting my Sunday suit on a hanger when I realised that my wife had forgotten to include my grey spotted tie among the rest of my things. It wasn’t that I gave a tinker’s cuss about that particular tie, it was just that Mr Brownlow had bought it for me the previous Christmas and my not wearing it on Boxing Day would undoubtedly cause an uproar.

  I went out into the corridor, determined to ask the wife what she meant by it. It wasn’t as if she had a lot on her mind. Unfortunately, I forgot that the door was self-locking and it shut behind me. I rapped on my wife’s door for what seemed like hours. I’ve never seen the point of chucking money away on pyjamas; the draw-string had gone from the trousers and there wasn’t one button left on the jacket. When my wife finally deigned to open up, she too stepped over the threshold, and in an instant her door had slammed shut as well. I admit I lost my head. I ran up and down, swearing, trying to find a broom cupboard to hide in; any moment those blighters from the French room could have come prancing along the corridor.

  ‘Fetch a porter,’ advised my wife.

  ‘Not like this,’ I shouted. ‘I’m not fit.’

  ‘Here,’ she said, and she took off her dressing-gown – it had white fur round the sleeves – and handed it to me.

  I had crept half way down the stairs when I heard carol singing one floor below. I just couldn’t face anyone, not wearing that damn-fool dressing-gown and my trousers at half mast. I hopped back upstairs and at that moment the wife called out to me from the doorway of her room; apparently her door hadn’t been locked after all.

  I spent an uncomfortable night in the wife’s bed – I don’t sleep well – and when I switched on the light to see if I could find anything to read, there was only the Bible. The room was a pig-sty; she hadn’t emptied her suitcase or hung anything up, and there was a slice of buttered bread on top of her fox fur. I woke her and asked if she had a library book handy.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘I’m worn out.’

  I was having afternoon tea the following day, on my own – the wife had gone window-shopping in Bold Street – when Smith arrived at the hotel. He said a relative had been taken ill and he’d had to visit them in hospital. Being Smith, he couldn’t leave it at that. He had to give me a lecture on some damn-fool theory of his that we thought ourselves into illnesses. Our minds, he said, controlled our bodies. Some blasted Greek or other had known it centuries ago.

  Faced with him, and realising that he’d be dogging my footsteps for the next forty-eight hours, I grew irritated. Don’t forget, I hadn’t had much sleep, and there was some sort of expression on his face, some sort of light in his eyes that annoyed me. I don’t know how to explain it; he looked foolish, almost happy and it rubbed me up the wrong way. I wanted to get rid of him once and for all. It was no use insulting the man; I had done that often enough and it was like water off a duck’s back. Then an idea came to me. I had recognised right from the beginning that he was a prudish sort of fellow. I knew that he had never married, and I had never seen him strike up a conversation with an unescorted woman, apart from the wife. He preferred the company of married couples, providing they were respectable.

  ‘Blow me down,’ I said. ‘I’ve been getting pains in my legs for the past eight years. Now I know why.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘On account of the wife,’ I said.

  ‘Your wife?’ he said, tugging at his little ginger moustache.

  I implied that the wife had led me something of a dance. She was under the doctor for it, of course. It had gone on for years. She couldn’t be blamed, not exactly. That’s why I was forced to keep changing hotels … there had been various incidents of a somewhat scandalous nature with various men. As I spoke I stumbled over the words – I knew he wasn’t a complete fool. I expressed the hope that he wouldn’t betray my confidences. I didn’t feel bad telling lies about my wife. It wouldn’t get back. There was no danger of Smith repeating it to somebody he knew, who might repeat it to somebody we knew, because none of us knew anybody. It shut him up all right. The light went out of his eyes.

  At seven o’clock that evening, according to the waiter on duty, Smith came into the smoking-room and ordered a pot of tea. The waiter noticed that he kept clattering the ash-tray up and down on the table. When the tea was brought to him, he said, ‘Oh, and I’ll need some bread and butter if it’s all the same to you.’ While the waiter was gone Smith took out his service revolver and shot himself in the head. He died almost at once. He must have been more upset about his relative being ill than he let on.

  We never went back to the Adelphi, or to the Exchange for that matter. Not because of anything to do with Smith, but because less than a year later the wife began to show signs of instability; in any case the following August Constance passed on and there was certainly no call to clap eyes on Mr Brownlow ever again.

  One could say that my wife has passed on too, only in her case it’s more that she’s wandered out of reach. As Bread and Butter Smith might have put it: ‘All the world’s against her, so that Crete (alias Rainhill Mental Institution) is her only refuge.’

  CLAP HANDS, HERE COMES CHARLIE

  Two weeks before Christmas, Angela Bisson gave Mrs Henderson six tickets for the theatre. Mrs Henderson was Angela Bisson’s cleaning lady.

  ‘I wanted to avoid giving you money,’ Angela Bisson told her. ‘Anybody can give money. Somehow the whole process is so degrading … taking it … giving it. They’re reopening the Empire Theatre for a limited season. I wanted to give you a treat. Something you’ll always remember.’

  Mrs Henderson said, ‘Thank you very much.’ She had never, when accepting money, felt degraded.

  Her husband, Charles Henderson, ask
ed her how much Angela Bisson had tipped her for Christmas.

  Mrs Henderson said not much. ‘In fact,’ she admitted, ‘nothing at all. Not in your actual pounds, shillings and pence. We’ve got tickets for the theatre instead.’

  ‘What a discerning woman,’ cried Charles Henderson. ‘It’s just what we’ve always needed.’

  ‘The kiddies will like it,’ protested Mrs Henderson. ‘It’s a pantomime. They’ve never been to a pantomime.’

  Mrs Henderson’s son, Alec, said Peter Pan wasn’t a pantomime. At least not what his mother understood by the word. Of course, there was a fairy-tale element to the story, dealing as it did with Never-Never land and lost boys, but there was more to it than that. ‘It’s written on several levels,’ he informed her.

  ‘I’ve been a lost boy all my life,’ muttered Charles Henderson, but nobody heard him.

  ‘And I doubt,’ said Alec, ‘if our Moira’s kiddies will make head nor tail of it. It’s full of nannies and coal fires burning in the nursery.’

  ‘Don’t talk rot,’ fumed Charles Henderson. ‘They’ve seen coal fires on television.’

  ‘Shut up, Charlie,’ said Alec. His father hated being called Charlie.

  ‘Does it have a principal boy?’ asked Mrs Henderson, hopefully.

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Alec. ‘Not in the sense you mean. Don’t expect any singing or any smutty jokes. It’s allegorical.’

  ‘God Almighty,’ said Charles Henderson.

  When Alec had gone out to attend a Union meeting, Mrs Henderson told her husband he needn’t bother to come to the theatre. She wasn’t putting up with him and Alec having a pantomime of their own during the course of the evening and spoiling it for everyone else. She’d ask Mrs Rafferty from the floor above to go in his place.

  ‘By heck,’ shouted Charles Henderson, striking his forehead with the back of his hand, ‘why didn’t I think of that? Perish the thought that our Alec should be the one to be excluded. I’m only the blasted bread-winner.’ He knew his wife was just mouthing words.

  Mrs Rafferty’s answer to such an outlandish invitation was a foregone conclusion. She wouldn’t give it houseroom. Mrs Rafferty hadn’t been out of the building for five years, not since she was bashed over the head coming home from Bingo.

  All the same, Charles Henderson was irritated. His wife’s attitude, and the caustic remarks addressed to him earlier by Alec brought on another attack of indigestion. It was no use going to his bed and lying flat. He knew from experience that it wouldn’t help. In the old days, when they had lived in a proper house, he could have stepped out of the back door and perambulated up and down the yard for a few minutes. Had there been anything so exalted as a back door in this hell-hole, going out of it certainly wouldn’t improve his health. Not without a parachute. He couldn’t even open the window for a breath of air. This high up there was generally a howling gale blowing in from the river – it would suck the Christmas cards clean off the sideboard. It wasn’t normal, he thought, to be perpetually on a par with the clouds. People weren’t meant to look out of windows and see nothing but sky, particularly if they weren’t looking upwards. God knows how Moira’s kiddies managed. They were stuck up in the air over Kirby. When Moira and Alec had been little they’d played in the street – Moira on the front step fiddling with her dolly, Alec on one roller-skate scooting in and out of the lamp-posts. Of course there was no denying that it had been nice at first to own a decent bathroom and have hot water coming out of the tap. After only a few weeks it had become unnecessary to scrub young Alec’s neck with his toothbrush; the dirt just floated off on the towel. But there was surely more to life than a clean neck. Their whole existence, once work was over for the day, was lived as though inside the cabin of an aeroplane. And they weren’t going anywhere – there wasn’t a landing field in sight. Just stars. Thousands of the things, on clear nights, winking away outside the double glazing. It occurred to Charles Henderson that there were too many of them for comfort or for grandeur. It was quality that counted, not quantity.

  At the end of the yard of the terraced house in which he had once lived, there had been an outside toilet. Sitting within the evil-smelling little shed, its door swinging on broken hinges, he had sometimes glimpsed one solitary star hung motionless above the city. It had, he felt, given perspective to his situation, his situation in the wider sense – beyond his temporary perch. He was earthbound, mortal, and a million light-years separated him from that pale diamond burning in the sky. One star was all a man needed.

  On the night of the outing to the theatre, a bit of a rumpus took place in the lift. It was occasioned by Moira’s lad, Wayne, jabbing at all the control buttons and giving his grandmother a turn.

  Alec thumped Wayne across the ear and Charles Henderson flared up. ‘There was no cause to do that,’ he shouted, though indeed there had been. Wayne was a shocking kiddie for fiddling with things.

  ‘Belt up, Charlie,’ ordered Alec.

  Alec drove them to the Empire Theatre in his car. It wasn’t a satisfactory arrangement as far as Charles Henderson was concerned but he had no alternative. The buses came and went as they pleased. He was forced to sit next to Alec because he couldn’t stand being parked in the back with the children and neither Moira nor Mrs Henderson felt it was safe in the passenger seat. Not with Alec at the wheel. Every time Alec accelerated going round a corner, Charles Henderson was swung against his son’s shoulder.

  ‘Get over, can’t you?’ cried Alec. ‘Stop leaning on me, Charlie.’

  When they passed the end of the street in which they had lived a decade ago, Mrs Henderson swivelled in her seat and remarked how changed it was, oh how changed. All those houses knocked down, and for what? Alec said that in his opinion it was good riddance to bad rubbish. The whole area had never been anything but a slum.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right, son,’ said Mrs Henderson. But she was pandering to him.

  Charles Henderson was unwise enough to mention times gone by. He was talking to his wife. ‘Do you remember all the men playing football in the street after work?’

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  ‘And using the doorway of the Lune Laundry for a goalpost? It was like living in a village, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A village,’ hooted Alec. ‘With a tobacco warehouse and a brewery in the middle of it? Some village.’

  ‘We hunted foxes in the field behind the public house,’ reminisced Charles Henderson. ‘And we went fishing in the canal.’

  ‘You did. You were never at home,’ said Mrs Henderson, without rancour.

  ‘What field?’ scoffed Alec. ‘What canal?’

  ‘There was a time,’ said Charles Henderson, ‘when we snared rabbits every Saturday and had them for Sunday dinner. I tell no lies. You might almost say we lived off the land.’

  ‘Never-Never land, more like,’ sneered Alec, and he drove, viciously, the wrong way down a one-way street.

  When they got to the town centre he made them all get out and stand about in the cold while he manoeuvred the Mini backwards and forwards in the underground car park. He cursed and gesticulated.

  ‘Behave yourself,’ shouted Charles Henderson, and he strode in front of the bonnet and made a series of authoritative signals. Alec deliberately drove the car straight at him.

  ‘Did you see what that madman did?’ Charles Henderson asked his wife. ‘He ran over my foot.’

  ‘You’re imagining things,’ said Mrs Henderson, but when he looked down he saw quite clearly the tread of the tyre imprinted upon the Cherry Blossom shine of his Sunday left shoe.

  When the curtain went up, he was beginning to feel the first twinges of his indigestion coming on again. It wasn’t to be wondered at, all that swopping of seats because Moira had a tall bloke sitting in front of her, and the kiddies tramping back and forth to the toilet, not to mention the carry-on over parking the car. At least he hadn’t got Alec sitting next to him. He found the first act of Peter Pan a bit of a mystery. It was very old-fashioned and
cosy. He supposed they couldn’t get a real dog to play the part. Some of the scenery could do with a lick of paint. He didn’t actually laugh out loud when Mr Darling complained that nobody coddled him – oh no, why should they, seeing he was only the bread-winner – but he did grunt sardonically; Mrs Henderson nudged him sharply with her elbow. He couldn’t for the life of him make out who or what Tinkerbell was, beyond being a sort of glow-worm bobbing up and down on the nursery wall, until Wendy had her hair pulled for wanting Peter to kiss her, and then he more or less guessed Tinkerbell was a female. It was a bit suggestive, all that. And at the end of the first scene when they all flew out of the window, something must have gone wrong with the wires because one of the children never got off the ground. They brought the curtain down fast. Wayne was yawning his head off.

  During Acts Two and Three, Charles Henderson dozed. He was aware of loud noises and children screaming in a bloodthirsty fashion. He hoped Wayne wasn’t having one of his tantrums. It was confusing for him. He was dreaming he was fishing in the canal for tiddlers and a damn big crocodile crawled up the bank with a clock ticking inside it. Then he heard a drum beating and a voice cried out ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’ He woke up then with a start. He had a pain in his arm.

  In the interval they retired to the bar, Moira and himself and Alec. Mrs Henderson stayed with the kiddies, to give Moira a break. Alec paid for a round of drinks. ‘Are you enjoying it then, Charlie?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a bit loud for me,’ said Charles Henderson. ‘But I see what you mean about it being written on different levels.’

  ‘You do surprise me,’ said Alec. ‘I could have sworn you slept through most of it.’

  Moira said little Tracy was terrified of the crocodile but she loved the doggie.

  ‘Some doggie,’ muttered Charles Henderson. ‘I could smell the moth balls.’

  ‘But Wayne thinks it’s lovely,’ said Moira. ‘He’s really engrossed.’