The man said over his shoulder, ‘We’ve got brandy.’ And he was left standing there in the porch. A moment later the door, rattling all its glass, was slammed in his face.
He stood there soaked through, dreadful tears of injustice rising. Now the boy was all right shouldn’t he, Tressiter, have some brandy too? Hadn’t he gone in after the kid? Here he was miles from home, wet, cold, exhausted … he went down the beach to his clothes, picked them up and started towards the distant huts. Mrs Albee, he thought, Mrs Albee. He could have gone to the café—but it was too near the beach, they would hear about it. ‘Mrs Albee!’ he cried, ‘Mrs Albee!’ stumbling through the weeds and the old cans and wire to her safe, creosoted door.
Eventide
SIX o’clock. A cold summer’s evening.
The bar was empty. Polished linoleum slid over the floor and the clock was stopped—not a tick to disturb the dustless quiet of dark shamrock curtains, dark-varnished wood, windows paned in neat squares of frosted glass: nothing glittered; all only shone dully in the grey evening light, and such gloom could not even be called subaqueous, it was so dry and dead. Yet this was the saloon bar of a public house; and now at six o’clock sat waiting, its clock stopped, for time to pass.
After a long while the door pressed open. The door never swung, there was a compressed air device screwed to the top, and a rubber wheel ensured further quiet. A man came in. First he was a shadow against the street light, than a man in a creased grey suit walking to the bar—as the door, his accomplice, bowed to a rubbery close behind him.
From behind the bar half a woman shot up, a cardiganed torso on a sudden spring-lift, glasses masking her eyes, cheek-bones gleaming white, a net dowsing dull brown hair. She stood facing the man, thin-lipped. Neither spoke.
The man stood chest-on to the bar, feet placed astride, planted like a passenger on a ship. He now sighed, as if a journey had been completed. He took a big sheet of a handkerchief from his pocket, buried his face in it, and blew. With no more than a quick glance at what he had blown, he braced his shoulders again and sucked in air through his teeth. Glancing sharply to left and right at the emptiness, making sure they were alone, again he faced the woman, who had been waiting, rigid and woolly, all this time.
Finally the man said: ‘Good evening.’
He cooed the ‘good’ high and the ‘evening’ low, so that it made a little song—but not so much a song of greeting as a lullaby of condolence.
The woman made no spoken reply. But her head inclined in the shade of a small bob, recognizing the greeting as an item ticked off on a list.
The man then took a pipe from his pocket, looked at it, shook it, and set it into his teeth so that it stuck out upside down like an odd piece of brown plumbing.
It must have given his molars a clenched, manly feel—he sucked in air again with a big-chested hiss: and now he said, as if it were all one long slow word:
‘Nice-glasser-best-Mrs-S.’
He spoke as if he had turned the condolence in upon himself: he ordered this beer not as if he desired it but as if he deserved it, and that it was not all he deserved, but he would be quite satisfied to accept it, he was not the man to ask for too much, his demands were reasonable and modest. Enough was quite enough for him. For the present. And nobody should deny it.
He was balding a little, thin sandy hair looked stranded over red ears, and his pale office-whipped face had a pleasing mildness. He received his drink, paid for it, fingering out the exact money, and remained standing, not touching the glass, satisfied simply by its presence.
Then again silence.
As he contemplated the glass, the woman returned to her evening paper. The clock stared paralysed. Only the little pipe, upside down cast a note of brown caprice into a scene otherwise still as death.
There would be hours of daylight yet. Double summer time had stolen the sundown hour. Day’s work ended, evening begun had lost its proper definition of approaching darkness: it was a neutral time.
The saloon bar had been furnished in the ’thirties in an attempt to be homely and be cheerful. A note once modern had impaled itself on the air once and forever, delineating time the more strongly for its recent passing—sad and near as the death of a promising child, and, in terms of the world and the passing years, as expendable.
The hopes, the abundant feeling that must have gone to make such a place! A horizontal oval mirror hung on thin brass chains over the fireplace. The fireplace itself had square mauve tiles that shone but did not reflect, and they were surrounded again by dark stained wood. A gas-pipe, bright-polished, fled like a killer-snake from the ladylike fender. The fire itself bared its boney sockets like a death-trap.
The dark wood that everywhere predominated had a cheap brittle texture, a sense of varnished creosote. Even the dart-board was nicely enclosed in a dark wood cabinet. Someone had had the ideas ‘sunny’ and ‘cheerful’—there was a dado of whipped-up copper-brown plaster waves and above this a wallpaper of embossed gamboge shells: the effect was of the awful yellow glow that precedes a great tropic storm, the colour of the end of the world.
Spattered about were cheerful trifles: paintings of Cornish fisher-villages, a gold basket sprouting paper flowers, cardboard beermats. Advertisement cards mounted on their own props snapped and yelped.
But no room could be so uniformly dreadful as this: there was indeed one note of relief that might have cheered the trapped customer. On one window appeared in bright red letters the lightly mad, enchanting message: TUOTƧ.
Suddenly the woman behind the bar closed her paper with a rustle like a thunderclap.
‘You don’t know my biggest boy,’ she said. ‘He’s grown a beard.’
The man looked anxious. ‘There now,’ he said, and clutched the pockets at the side of his coat. And then the woman began to fish urgently in a bag. Her breathing got short. The man looked more than ever anxious. He peered over. Would she find it, what was it, would it be lost forever?
But she suddenly snapped out a bruised brown wallet. ‘Here we are,’ she said and bent her glasses down fingering at photographs inside. She drew out two of these. One she put on the bar for the man to see. It showed a young cleanshaven sailor smiling against a brick barrack building.
‘That’s how he is really,’ said the woman and then showed him the other photograph, of a similar young sailor, but with a beard.
‘And that’s how he really is,’ said the woman.
The man nodded. They both gazed at the photographs, at little grey different worlds somewhere far away where the sun had once shone.
‘He’s a sailor,’ the woman explained.
‘Ah,’ the man said.
And the silence like a hungry black spore came gliding up from nowhere and gathered itself hammering huge. It had waited like dust in this room where there was no speck of real dust, and now it rained down dry dew all over them. The man struggled to say something—but the silence was falling too heavy.
Then at the last moment his eye caught a picture in the paper she had put down. His short fat forefinger came from his pocket and like a squat sausage held in his hand pointed all by itself at the representation of a kingfisher.
‘We had one of them come in the garden once,’ he said. ‘Little blue bird.’
He raised his eyebrows and smiled straight at the woman. Her glasses stared back reflecting nothing. The silence began to shroud over again.
‘Went away after a couple of days,’ the man sighed. ‘Never saw it no more.’
And down clapped the silence. The man raised his glass and slid some of the beer down inside him. It made no sound whatever. The woman picked up the photographs and tucked them away. A thin sunbeam slid in over a patch of linoleum, shivered, turned grey, and disappeared.
*
But twenty minutes later the door opened and one, two, three, four quite separate people came in. A train might have arrived, disgorging sudden passengers. Yet there was no train near, nor any particular bus.
They exchanged civilities. They said about the weather. One of the men winked and murmured, ‘Mind how you go’ to the woman with the string bag raising gin to her lips.
There was nothing said that had not been said a hundred million times before. Yet how precious, how preposterous a load of lovely human litter, like a confetti of coloured bus tickets! How warmly and lightly these simple communications hit upon the air!
Even the death of the furniture died away.
The man in the grey suit coughed, eased his shoulders as if throwing off a chill, blew out a deep breath of relief and suddenly winked and leaned across to the woman behind the bar.
‘And how is that boy of yours these days‚’ he said, ‘your sailor-boy with the beard?’
Cat up a Tree
A WILD, glassy morning—all winds and glitter … the sun glared low between the chimneys, through black winter branches, blinding you at a slant, dazzling white and bright straight in the eyes—it made a splintering dance of everything, it made for squints and sniggering….
Winds swept from nowhere, scooping up leaves and hustling them round the corner, knocking little dogs sideways, snatching and flapping at your trouser-legs. Cold nipped at noses and pinched ears red … it sang with cold in the keen bright light. Under a white sky the walls, roads, people, trees shone brightly coloured, red, green, blue, grey colours, as in a folk-tale, as if everything were made of coloured glass. Behind white cloud the sun hung and fiercely glowed, a monstrous incandescent mantle. A gentleman crossing the road moved like a puppet, parts of him glittering—one feared that by his own tread he might smash to smithereens his polished boots on the brittle macadam….
Gentleman? He was no gentleman, he was a fireman. A jerky, puppety fireman, in blue trousers piped red, black jogging topboots, and in his braces and white sleeves. He carried a broom. He looked like a puppet because he was then crossing the road in the light—he walked so slowly against the hustling and swirling of the leaves, the dust, the winds, the shattering light.
Hindle Rice, alias Pudden Rice, number sefenty-too-fife, going then through the big red door into the Appliance Room, white-tiled like a scrubbed lavatory for motor-cars, where big top-heavy engines stood and waited, where now Pudden Rice would sweep together over the tiled floor a few small piles of dust, leaving these neat pyramids for the officers to see as they passed in their peaked caps, while in the shelter of such evidence of work proceeding Pudden Rice would for the rest of the morning lean on his broom and think or chat or smile to the good-mornings, or break-for-tea, or perhaps if he felt brave drop the precious broom altogether and abandon his alibi to collect and break up twigs for firewood at home.
Rice soon dropped the broom. Out in front of the station the black wintry twigs cracked and snapped in his hands. That sunlight caught his eyes, so he could see nothing in front but bright light, as of a halo; and to each side things moved too quickly and glittered like glass. A cat went dashing past, its fur ruffled forward by a following gust of wind. Up the street two navvies were hitting at a metal spike with steel hammers—the blows came ringing on the wind like sharp bells distorted. An old woman in black scurried by with her veil blown fast into her teeth: she mouthed as this tickled under her nose, grimacing at Pudden Rice with her head tilted queerly to one side. Yet in a little garden opposite a girl sat reading, sheltered by a bush in a warm pocket of sunlight! A paper bag sailed like a wingless pouter suddenly out from some trees and on over her head—then disappeared abruptly over the top of a bush. The girl waved at its shadow, as if it might have been a fly, and remained throughout reading unconcerned.
Rice smiled to see the girl sitting so quietly. Then he saw a pile of leaves on the pavement in front form suddenly into a single file, trickle round in a wide circle, then run for the shelter of a tree-trunk.
A window above banged open and a voice piped: ‘Rice! Rice!’
Pudden dashed for his broom and then carrying it walked slowly to the stairs. He climbed the stone steps, circling with them the black-barred well down which hung long grey hose-lengths and ropes, and muttered to these shiplike hangings: ‘Now what’s the matter? Now what’s up? I swept the tiles, didn’t I? I done my job?’
He had reached the landing and was about to turn in through the green swing doors—when the whole station leapt alive with sound, sudden as a thunderclap, high-pitched and vibrating for ever, flashing off the tiles, reverberating round the brass, BRNNNNNNNNG—the deafening alarm bell gripped in its electric circuit and ringing on and on for ever….
Rice flung down his broom and dived through the swing doors. Across the room and into a passage—to a sudden end where two brass rails stood flanking a steel pole. Now the clatter of footsteps everywhere, and the alarm bell still jangling. Rice stamped his foot on a brass doorknob, a spring trap-door shot open upwards—and there was the hole! He jumped over it and gripping the smooth steel pole disppeared flying down. A rubber mat at the bottom, and all around suddenly the Appliance Room’s white tiles again, with the engine of the Pump already roaring, men scrambling into boots, and more coming sailing down the pole, on that light-headed morning like a rain of heavy angels. But angels with funny faces—Nobby redhaired and pointed like a fox. Graetz with his comic round moon-face sprouting high up like a sunflower, Sailor with no neck and like John Bull washed white by a bad liver, Curly with his bright bald head, fairhaired Teetgen like a fresh blank Apollo with black teeth. These all came sliding down and scrambled for the Pump, Rice among them. He jumped up on to one of the high side seats and started to pull up his leggings. The automatic doors flew open and the Pump clanged out into the sunshine, as into a fog of white crystal, so that as they turned and roared off down the street light struck up from each brass fitting and from the axes and silver buttons—and somehow the heaviness was washed away.
Perched high up on the side, Pudden struggled into his coat. It flapped and blew out its short tails. He was just able to see the girl in the garden smile—and then his helmet fell down over his eyes. One legging flapped loose. The engine tore along, accelerating faster and faster, until it seemed to Pudden high up above the windshields that perhaps they had left the ground and were scudding through the air itself. The officer in front clanged the clapper of the brass bell as fast as a hand could move. Up England’s Lane they tore, down Downshire Hill, through the Crescent, up Flask Walk, down Well Walk, sweeping along the middle of the wide roads like an angry brass beetle, roaring up the narrow streets and scattering dogs and cats and barrows and once an old lady carrying even in November a lilac parasol.
That morning the weather had made poets of the people. It sometimes happens—an angular trick of the sun, a warmness of a wind, something stirs an exultation in the most unexpected hearts. Not in the heart of all the people ever, but sometimes in those ready to be stirred, and sometimes also in dull hearts of which this would never have been imagined, but these people too receive a sudden jerk, a prod in the spirit, a desire for more than they usually want. Memories arise of things that have never been, tolerance arrives. They laugh—but perhaps that is only because they are nervous at the odd look of things. A trick of the weather has transformed the street, the hour, life. Perhaps this trick is a more powerful agent than the liver or even the libido. Perhaps one day it will be agreed that finally the most critical words of all are ‘good morning’.
The passers-by smiled, one waved his hat, and a middle-aged butcher brandished a chop at them. Pudden still struggled with his uniform—how it eluded him! The belt and axe caught in the hooks behind him, his round helmet kept falling over an eye, an ear—and once his foot missed its support on the running-board and he nearly fell off the machine. He gripped the brass rail just in
time. Yet, awkwardly as these things tugged at him—the wind, the clothes, the belt—he began to grin: ‘What an odd engine—how peculiar that on most days it seems so heavy, so oiled and dully heavy with its iron extinguishers, its massive suction pipes, its hard wood ladders—yet today … all I can see about it is light, and how high it seems, how topheavy, and most striking of all are the brass rails and the red leather cushions! It’s as upright as a queen’s coach! And here we are—Nobby, Graetz, Teetgen, Sailor and me and the officer—all sitting and standing high up on top, like exuberant boy scouts, or tin soldiers, or travellers packed up on top of an old-fashioned coach! Ridiculous!’
But it was really so. The engine was built higher than cars are built usually, and brass rails armed the erect leather seats, vestiges of the horse days, a tradition to be surrendered unwillingly.
The bare trees skidded past. Rows of front doors approached and receded, innumerable windows winked and flashed in the fierce glare. The skyline of roofs and chimneys stood out black, giantly as against a milk-white sunset. Far off there appeared a church spire, it grew into a pointed little church, into a large grey church, and then this too was gone, veering off to the left. At last Pudden got himself straight. He then stood up and faced the wind, one leg crouched up by the ladders. This made him feel a dashing fellow. Phlegmatic usually, this pose in the wind and this clinging to a precarious rail excited him, never failing to rouse in him old postures of bravado learnt from early adventure books. Then, in the sharp sunlight, with the little houses flashing by, he thought suddenly: ‘Good Lord—we’re going to a fire! Perhaps to a real fire! It may possibly be a false alarm pulled by a boy or a drunk or someone. (He saw a sheet of figures—over 1,000 False Alarms Malicious last year—one of them fatal—a fireman was killed, crushed against the garage door in the rush for somebody’s funny joke.) But … perhaps it really is a fire, this one time, by chance the real thing? Asphyxia, boiling, frying—I saw a fireman frizzled up in burning oil till he was like a little black monkey, a charred little monkey wearing a helmet several sizes too big for him. And when Sailor tripped in the molten rubber—his arm. Andy’s neck after that sulphuric acid job….’
The Stories of William Sansom Page 46