‘I think Janus Brian just says the past is a dream,’ said Aldous, as if to excuse his brother-in-law, ‘I’m sure he thinks the present is real.’
‘But then he did say “remember Dismal Desmond”,’ said Colette, ‘So he’s admitting the past is real. Life must be real, if I was making all this up, surely I’d make up a better life for myself.’
Quietly, while this discussion had progressed, Juliette and Bill were talking in an intense undertone.
‘We should have been home an hour ago,’ Juliette said.
‘But I’ve been playing the piano with Janus . . .’
‘Where did you get the drink from?’
‘What drink?’
‘Don’t be pathetic . . .’
At this point Janus entered the room. A stranger wouldn’t have known he’d been drinking, but everyone in the room could tell. There was something in his stance, his pace, as though gravity took to him more keenly, and because of this the atmosphere in the room changed as instantly as if a switch had been thrown, the air became more acute, sound became clearer, the colour of things deepened a shade, and there were long, uncomfortable pauses in the conversation where before it had flowed seamlessly.
‘We agreed that you wouldn’t go out tonight,’ Juliette said in a quietly angry voice. The room was now focusing on this hushed conversation.
Bill tried to sit on his wife’s knee, dislodging the handbag that had been there. There was an awkward shifting of weight.
‘Don’t be like that my little darling, I’ve just been conversing with my most esteemed brother-in-law.’
Juliette’s face winced as she caught the sour, beery breath that came from Bill’s mouth. Bill seemed to think she was amused.
Janus, who’d been standing next to Bill, squeezed past Juliette to another chair and sat down. He took a cigarette from his packet, lit it, and put the box in the breast pocket of his thin cotton shirt. The sharp oblong shape of it was distinct through the fabric.
‘I’ve got square tits,’ he said, laughing.
Juliette looked at him and scowled.
‘What did you say?’ she said loudly.
Janus, affronted by her effrontery, didn’t know how to reply at first.
‘What?’ he said, eventually.
‘What did you say about me?’
‘He didn’t say anything about you, my sweet,’ said Bill, crooningly, soothingly, ‘he was just making a joke about his cigarette packet, he said it made him look like he’d got square . . .’ and here Bill reddened and laughed childishly, bashfully unable to continue.
‘I thought he was talking about me,’ said Juliette.
‘Touchy aren’t we,’ said Janus.
‘How could Janus say that about you, my sweet little angel, you’ve got lovely little . . .’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake Bill,’ snapped Juliette, pushing back a hand that was moving towards her chest, and pushing her husband off her knee, ‘let’s go.’
‘Bill and me have got business,’ said Janus, blowing a smoke ring.
‘No you haven’t,’ said Juliette, standing up, ‘Bill is staying in tonight with me, that’s what we agreed, isn’t it?’
Bill shrugged apologetically.
‘Where are my fags,’ said Colette, ‘Ah, here they are.’
‘Those are mine,’ said James, triumphantly, ‘look, they’ve got my name on them.’
‘Why’ve you written your name on my fags?’
‘Those are yours, over there,’ said James.
Eventually cigarette ownership was established and fags lit.
‘Well I’m going,’ said Juliette, ‘are you coming with me?’
‘It’s not quite as simple as that, my angel, you see, there’s the question of the source of the Limpopo.’
Janus gave a shriek of laughter.
‘The pubs don’t open till seven,’ said Colette, wads of smoke coming from her nostrils.
‘What about the Limpopo, mate?’ Janus shouted.
‘So I’m going home on my own, am I?’
‘Why don’t you come with us?’
‘It’s Sunday,’ said Juliette, ‘we always stay in on Sunday evenings. We’ve got work tomorrow . . .’
‘I haven’t got work tomorrow,’ said Janus, even though he hadn’t been the subject of Juliette’s last sentence. Nevertheless, the statement caused a stir.
‘What do you mean,’ said Colette, ‘it’s not a Bank Holiday, is it?’
‘No,’ said Janus, ‘I’ve been given the sack.’
Suddenly everything that had seemed odd and unusual about the afternoon – Janus and Bill’s drinking, their removal to the music room, Janus’s quietness, fell into place.
‘What do you mean you’ve been given the sack?’ said Colette, above a barely audible groan from her husband.
‘I mean I went into work as usual yesterday morning and Mr Hawes said my services were no longer needed.’ Janus giggled.
‘He can’t just do that,’ said Colette, ‘what was he playing at?’
Janus was frequently in and out of work. He’d been sacked from Swallows before, then reinstated when Mr Hawes realised how much he needed Janus’s abilities at mental arithmetic. When he worked there was a rhythm to his drinking, a recognizable pattern, which meant the others would know where he was and when he was likely to be drunk. Out of work he would be around the house all day, sometimes drunk, sometimes not, with no way of telling where or when. This was the reason Janus’s news cast such a pall on the afternoon.
‘You weren’t drinking at work again, were you?’ said Colette.
Janus shrugged, not quite able to admit it.
‘You idiot, Janus,’ she said, then, less forcefully, ‘well, you won’t have any money for drinking, then.’
Janus reached into his back pocket and waved a handful of five pound notes.
‘Hawes settled up out of the till – back pay, holiday pay – this should see me alright for a while . . .’ He gave a sneaky, jeering laugh.
‘Get the money off him, James,’ Colette said to her other son, who was nearest Janus, with such urgency that James made for the money, before checking himself, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, mother,’ he said.
Colette had sprung out of her chair, ‘Bill, grab it,’ she nodded urgently at the wad Janus was still waving. Underestimating her seriousness, Bill seemed bemused, but by this time Colette was herself making a lunge for the cash. Janus repocketed it slowly and deliberately.
In the commotion Colette knocked a cup off the table. A glass smashed.
‘What are you doing, mother,’ said Juliette, annoyed that her own crisis had been overshadowed by Janus’s news.
‘Trying to get that money off him. There’s enough there to keep him drunk for weeks on end. And what about all the housekeeping he’ll owe me for when he’s on the dole? I’m entitled to most of it . . .’
‘There’s no point . . .’
‘Now we know what you’re really worried about,’ said Janus, grinning, ‘just worried about your own supplies of Gold Labels . . .’
‘I’m not the one who ends up in a police cell every other week. You don’t know how to handle money, or drink. So come on, hand it over.’
She held out her hand, palm up, a debtor demanding payment.
The hand was held just a little below Janus’s face, Colette leaning across the length of the table to reach. Juliette and Bill, on one side, watched amusedly. James, leaning against the wall on the other, observing with a half-smile on his face.
Janus bent his face towards Colette’s palm, as if to plant a kiss on it. Instead, he dropped a white bolus of spittle from his lips which Colette unwittingly caught. She slapped him, rather weakly, across the side of his face with her soiled hand. Bill stood up to restrain Colette, who was attempting further strikes.
‘Oh God,’ said Juliette, in a disgusted way, ‘let’s just go, Bill.’
‘Shut your face,’ Janus suddenly snapped, his lips curling, ‘Bill’s coming to t
he pub with me.’
‘If you’re going to the pub,’ said Juliette to her husband, ‘I’m bolting the door. You can sleep in the front garden.’
Janus by this time had managed to drag Bill to the door. Bill was shrugging to his wife apologetically, as if to say the situation was beyond his control.
‘We’re not going to the pub,’ shouted Janus, ‘We’re going to discover the source of the Limpopo!’
The last word was spoken with a rolling-eyed, growling voice, as Bill was pulled backwards through the door. Janus whooped loudly in the hall. Bill gave a loud ‘Shhh!’ Then the front door was slammed.
The kitchen was suddenly very quiet. Juliette stood up.
‘I’m going to get the bus,’ she said.
Aldous put a consoling arm around Colette’s shoulder, who seemed on the verge of tears. There was a sense of shock in the room at her reaction to Janus’s news. But she had quickly recovered herself.
‘I just can’t stand the thought of him loafing about the house all day, cadging money and fags off me, and then getting half-cut whenever he likes . . .’
‘Why don’t you chuck him out then,’ said Juliette, with the impatient air of someone who’s been through scenes like these countless times.
Colette glared at her daughter, ‘Oh it’s oh-so simple, isn’t it? – just sling him out . . .’
‘What was all that about the Limpopo?’ said James, still laughing with incredulity at the exit of Janus and Bill. Juliette raised her eyes to heaven, then shook her head in controlled despair.
‘Bill has been obsessed with Victorian explorers ever since that series on BBC2 – The Great Explorers. Stupidly I bought him the book for Christmas, now he and Janus have this silly fantasy about being Richard Burton or John Hanning Speke, or Mungo Park. It was funny at first, but like everything with Bill, he just takes it too far. One night him and Janus explored the end of Hugo and Veronica Price’s back garden, saying they were searching for the source of some river, not the Limpopo – the Irrawaddy, I think it was. They took a box of Kleenex tissues with them and left a trail down the side of the garden so they could find their way back. Another night they climbed over the barbed wire beside the New River and followed the canal for miles, Bill came home caked in mud. If he does anything like that again he can sleep in the front garden, like I said.’
‘The big kid,’ said Colette, restored to a level of calmness by Juliette’s anecdotes.
Juliette eventually left the house to catch her bus home, a look of stoical resolve on her face as she marched off down the road. James went out later to see some friends.
Aldous and Colette spent the evening alone together in the front room, Colette, a glass of barley wine by her side, reading Dombey and Son, Aldous doing some pencil sketches of the palms he’d been given that morning in church, and which he had placed in the lotus vase (of his own making), on top of the blank television. They formed a pleasing, unusual display, these tall, tapering leaves sprouting from the curled geometry of the vase. The lamp on the mantelpiece gave them a large shadow, which loomed on the wall behind them. Julian sat with his chessboard going through the moves of Capablanca v Eliskases.
It was how they spent many evenings when Janus was out. They were distracting themselves from what would be a long evening of waiting, of listening – for the footsteps on the path, for the key in the lock, trying to determine from these sounds the mood of their eldest son.
They went to bed around midnight, unfolding the bed settee on which Colette had spent the evening reading. They could have slept upstairs, in the large back bedroom, which they’d used intermittently since James had gone to university, but in truth they preferred sleeping downstairs in the front living room, they’d grown used to it in the years when there’d been nowhere else for them to sleep.
Colette swallowed six Nembutals, downed the dregs of her last Gold Label of the day, and settled down to sleep. Even with the drink and the pills it took her a long time to finally drift off. She heard noises outside, the front door open, some suppressed laughter. She instantly recognised James’s voice. He must have brought a friend home. She heard them giggling in the kitchen. Aldous heard them too. With James home there was little to worry about. He could handle drunken Janus on his own. And so they went to sleep.
3
Nearly three weeks had passed since Mary’s funeral. In that time there had been no communication from Janus Brian other than a black-bordered, slightly blurred photo of Mary that came in the post one morning, about a week after her burial. It showed her in a summery blue frock standing in the shade of an orange tree. She was smiling. On the back was written, in Janus Brian’s economical but rather shaky hand – The Gardens of the Alhambra, Granada, 1972.
Colette had propped the photo against the clock on the kitchen mantelpiece, the first port of call of most of the letters that came to the house. Since there was little post in the days that followed, the photo enjoyed a prominent position for some time, and Colette frequently found herself, as if in a dream, transfixed by its presence – and would just stand there, staring at it.
She tried to imagine Janus and Mary’s last-but-one holiday together. What did they do with their time, just the two of them, for that fortnight each year? A lot of it would have been spent watching golf, she supposed. That had been one of their passions, if passion was the right word. Their first visit to Spain had been to tour its golf courses, way back in the 1950s, when foreign travel, even to the Continent, had been a hazardous and rather daring enterprise – not something Janus Brian would have dreamt of before the war. But then the war had changed him in so many ways – three years in the Middle East escorting wage convoys, though never firing a shot in anger, had given him a confidence and self-assertiveness he’d never possessed before. Spain would have been a partial reliving of those desert years he always reminisced about so happily.
Where the passion for golf came from she never knew, but every summer postcards would come from Spain, bearing a King Juan Carlos stamp on the back, while on the front not a scene of exotic mountains or magnificent palaces – but the eighteenth green at Valderrama, Jack Nicklaus teeing off on the first at Valladolid or Arnold Palmer sinking a long putt before the clubhouse at Bilbao.
She remembered Janus Brian saying once how the golf courses of Spain – being lush, green lawns often in the middle of arid deserts – always made him think of the Garden of Eden.
Colette began to feel rather haunted by the picture of Mary under the orange tree. At first she thought her brother would want to be left alone in his grief. But his last words to her – Remember Dismal Desmond, and now this photograph, and the pleading, beseeching stance it seemed to take on her mantelpiece (Go on, go and visit your brother, see how he’s coping without me – it almost said), made her decide that it was time to pay Janus Brian a call.
Aldous had taken some persuading.
‘He’ll get in touch if he wants to see you,’ he said, ‘you know how he likes his privacy.’
‘But he has been in touch, he sent the photograph of Mary.’
‘That was just a formality. He likes to do everything correctly.’
‘I still think we should call round . . .’
‘Not just out of the blue,’ said Aldous, ‘shouldn’t you write a letter first?’
The conversation had taken place in the garden of The Owl, a small, country cottage of a pub near Redlands Park, where Colette and Aldous sometimes went for an early evening drink. They drank there because of its garden, which meant they could take Julian with them, and sit under the sprawling canopy of a chestnut tree, sipping their drinks and listening to the juggernauts on Goat and Compasses Lane.
Discussions about visiting friends or relatives often followed this course. Colette would be in favour of a spontaneous visit, an idea which usually appalled Aldous. Colette would become insistent, Aldous doggedly resistant. Since Colette couldn’t drive, however, Aldous usually got his way, and would only ever admit defeat if Colett
e went into a really desperate sulk, wailing in the passenger seat about her husband’s unfairness, how he always stopped her seeing her brothers and sisters, distant or half-forgotten cousins, old friends – how it was his fault – because of his cold unsociability – that they had no real friends now. And Aldous would reluctantly change course and visit the friends or relatives they hadn’t seen for years, and a usually deeply embarrassing evening would follow, where their hosts would politely try and make light of the disruption the visit had caused.
‘Of course, if we had a telephone,’ Colette would say on the way back, ‘this need never have happened.’
But Aldous didn’t like telephones.
He was persuaded, however, in the garden of The Owl, that a visit to Janus Brian might be appropriate. He was, after all, recently bereaved, and he lived alone with few friends. They had a duty to make sure he was coping, to see if he needed any help. And so, after finishing their drink, Aldous drove them to Leicester Avenue.
Leicester Avenue had, in the 1920s, been cut into a gently sloping hillside, which gave it the feel of a gradually deepening canyon, a small suburban gorge of rockeries and shrubs. The further into the canyon you penetrated, the higher the front doors hung above pavement level. Janus Brian’s was reached by a mossy concrete staircase that zigzagged between honesty bushes and lavender bushes. To the side of the front garden was a driveway leading to a garage that was set back a little, but Colette found this cemented approach too steep to walk safely, especially in the dark as it now was, and she opted instead to climb the concrete steps to her brother’s front door.
There was no reply to her ringing and knocking. She yoohooed through the letterbox and rapped on the windows. Julian lingered on the lower slopes of the front garden popping seed cases while Aldous nosed around the side of the house.
‘The car’s here,’ he said, peeking into the garage, ‘perhaps he’s gone for a walk.’
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