It was true. Another decade and Aldous would be an old man. He should, he knew, be looking forward to retirement. Just two more years. A lump sum and a decent pension awaited him. Days free to do as he liked. Time to paint. For the first time since his days as a student, when he’d lived in lodgings with Lesley Waugh, he would be able to devote nearly all his time to painting, or listening to music, or reading, or whatever he liked. But the thought filled him with dread. Any thoughts about the future filled him with dread.
It was always the same problem. He could picture a happy future for him and his family, himself in comfortable retirement out in the garden painting the trees, his children happily married, grandchildren playing on the grass, Colette enjoying the odd glass of cider but nothing stronger, baking pies and making jam. And then he would ask himself the question – where would Janus fit into this picture? Aldous’s thoughts about the future were always clouded by Janus. If Aldous pictured a future garden in which his family was happy, Janus would always emerge darkly from the bushes, a can of strong beer in his hands, whooping like an Apache, kicking over the flowers and card tables, screaming obscenities.
It was impossible to imagine Janus married, more impossible to imagine him a father. Almost laughable. Nor could he ever seriously imagine Janus having any sort of proper job, befitting a qualified musician. Occasionally the desperate hope would present itself, that Janus might settle down as a music teacher, but the thought was ridiculous. At times Aldous even wished that his son had never touched a piano, all it had done was give him a superiority complex, and had, via pub pianism, turned him into an aggressive and obnoxious drunk.
As Aldous shaved, observing the familiar faces he made to make the process easier (the sceptical philosopher, the affronted duchess, the smirking connoisseur), he could see his wife in the mirror, mottled slightly by the condensation on the glass. In the mountains of suds (how Colette loved bubble-bath, a bottle was gone in three or four sessions), she seemed like an angel reclining on a cloud, her breasts (plumper and rounder than he’d ever known them, even when she was pregnant) shining as though under a sheen of lacquer. Now and then he exchanged glances with her via the damp mirror, and smiled.
They were both revelling in the uniqueness of the morning. They didn’t normally use the bathroom together, but this morning was special.
For the last two or three years money, never in much abundance, had been especially scarce. At times Aldous feared falling behind with the mortgage, of losing the house. He fantasized that he would have to take their tent down from the loft and live somewhere in that. Everything he earned as a teacher seemed to vanish the moment it entered his bank account, as though that repository was made of some corrosive substance that dissolved money. Out of desperation he’d tried to make money from his paintings.
Not really knowing how to sell them, he’d entered them instead for the various competitions that it seemed fashionable now for certain companies to sponsor, and he’d had some success. First prize in a competition organised by Bukta, for a landscape painting that incorporated a tent. From memory Aldous had painted, during a few lunch hours, a portrait of their own Bukta tent as it stood in the farm at Llanygwynfa, where, up until 1970, they’d spent every summer for fifteen years. The prize was five hundred pounds and a small, two-person tent. Aldous wondered if they would ever use it.
Then there was a competition organised by the makers of Tia Maria for a painting that could be of any subject so long as it included the ‘distinctive image’ of a Tia Maria bottle. Aldous dredged up from the loft an old painting he’d done some time in the early Fifties, an interior of their old house in Edmonton, executed in the thick, impastoed style of the kitchen-sink school, of which Aldous was then an unacknowledged member. In the foreground, to the left there was the perfect space for a Tia Maria bottle, so, in the same style, he trowelled the image in, waited a while for the oils to dry, then sent it off. It won a thousand pounds and a five year supply of Tia Maria. Aldous was able to buy a car with the thousand pounds, and pay off some debts, but the supplementary prize caused him some anxiety. He hadn’t really thought about it when he entered, now the idea of endless alcohol pumped into the house horrified him. A mountain of crates filling the music room, Janus permanently drunk on liquor, Colette also. What quantity of spirit would they send to meet the five year capacity of a family of drunks?
But it was not to be a one-off delivery. Instead, once every three months, a bottle of Tia Maria arrived by special delivery, and would do so for another four years. Never exactly the same day of the month, so chance dictated who answered the door and received the drink. If Janus got there first, the bottle was gone in a day and he would fall to a sickly state of drunkenness. Tia Maria, for some reason, affected Janus particularly badly, and nearly always caused him to utter a most tedious sequence of slow and nasty insults which gnawed at the consciousness of the listener until their selfhood seemed to pop, and they became someone else, equally aggressive.
Janus always maintained (quite wrongly, Aldous believed) that he never initiated the violence that erupted when he was drunk. His skill, he claimed, on those rare occasions when he would talk about it, was to incite other people to aggressive acts against him.
‘It gives me a parallel into their minds,’ he said once, holding his index fingers vertically and moving them against each other to signify two minds coming into contact, ‘provoking people to violence is like undressing their minds,’ he said, ‘if you are violently out of control you are mentally naked.’
Aldous had scoffed loudly at the idea. He no longer trusted anything his son said, sober or drunk.
Aldous now dreaded the arrival of his prize, the menstrual ingress of alcohol, uninvited, into his house. It somehow ensured that even if his wife and son gave up the bottle completely, there would always be something to tempt them back.
Recently, however, Aldous had won a rather spectacular prize. The town council of a resort on the south coast had organized a competition to design windows for its new crematorium. There were two windows, one at each end, both eight feet tall, both with triangular arches at the top. Aldous had made designs based on an ascending flock of doves, circling round a sun, on one window, and a moon on the other. Semi-abstract, expressionistic, with the textural feel of fabric designs, Aldous’s doves had won first prize, beating many hundreds of entrants, including the design departments of several colleges (including the Hornsey, Aldous’s old college), and attracting a surprising amount of publicity.
The designs had appeared in the Daily Telegraph with a short paragraph about Aldous underneath. That was six months ago. Now the windows had been made and were installed. Aldous had taken a day off school and was to travel to the south coast resort for a special lunch with the mayor and other local dignitaries to be followed by the unveiling ceremony where Aldous would see his windows in situ, and would know at last how they would appear when transparent, how well they would catch the light, something that had troubled Aldous since he had made the designs. It is, after all, very difficult to imagine how something on paper will look on glass with the sun shining behind it.
Aldous and Colette wondered if this marked a turning point in their fortunes, because shortly after the article had appeared in the Telegraph a letter came from a monastery in Durham inviting Aldous to submit designs for a fountain to decorate a monastic quadrangle. Aldous had already made a design, a scaled down version of which he was currently sculpting in terracotta, which was really a three dimensional version of his windows, with ascending doves fluttering around a central fount of water which then crashed and spilt over them beautifully, or so he hoped. As with windows, it is hard to imagine what a fountain, on paper, will look like when water is pouring through it.
Money had not yet been discussed, although the oddly named commissioner of the piece, Brother Head, had warned that he had first to seek the approval of the bishop of Durham before they could talk about fees.
What future commissions might th
ese projects open doors to! Aldous might become a celebrated designer of ecclesiastical windows, reglazing the vandalized churches of England with many-coloured glass, the cathedrals even. How charming it would be to become part of the thousand-year narrative of an English church.
That was a hope, at least. Colette was as excited about it. She was always exasperated by Aldous’s unwillingness to exploit the lucrative side of art. Her fantasy was that they should tour the countryside, paying their way by painting pictures of any pretty pubs they happened upon, then selling them to the licensees. She half-imagined they could live like that indefinitely. But Aldous could not be cajoled into hawking his art, not because he had any qualms about the morality of the thing, he just lacked any ability whatsoever as a salesman. Now Colette hoped that her husband was beginning to be recognized for the extraordinary talent she believed him to be, so she made sure he shaved properly, closely, accurately.
And Aldous felt like singing as he dabbed and patted his uncut face dry, removed the earrings of soap that always grew on his lobes, the collar of foam that always grew round his neck and lowered a hand into the creamy, clotted water to pull the plug.
There was an unusual sound. A loud cascading of liquid, as though there was a waterfall in the room. Then Aldous felt something warm and wet pattering on his feet. Bending down he saw that the water was falling through the plughole into empty space. There was no pipe to take it away.
‘Hey,’ he said, then noticed the spread of milky water out from under the bath. Colette had just got out and had pulled the plug and the same thing was happening there. Water had been released into the unpiped open, to spread as it liked across the floor, through the floorboards, down onto the ceiling of the hall. Thinking quickly Aldous leapt over and replugged the bath, but not before a gallon or so of bathwater had escaped.
Underneath the sink Aldous found that the pipes had been cut out. Two shiny o’s of freshly sliced copper. He found the same under the bath when he removed a panel. The bath was an old tub of enamelled iron with clawed feet. The waste pipe had been sawn off.
It took Aldous and Colette a while to understand what had happened. Colette dressed herself while Aldous hurried downstairs. In the hall he inspected the ceiling. A dark stain was growing in the plaster around the light fitting. He rummaged in the cupboard under the stairs for his hand drill, found a chair to stand on and began drilling holes in the ceiling.
‘What are you doing?’ said Colette as she came down the stairs.
‘Relieving the pressure,’ said Aldous, an irritable growl in his voice, ‘The weight of water could bring the whole ceiling down if it’s just left there – then there’s the electrics to worry about – what the hell’s been going on?’
The drill, with a little jolt, had made its first hole. A needle-thin stream of water fell.
‘Get a pot or something will you darling?’ said Aldous, repositioning his chair for another go with the drill, ‘. . . get several.’
Colette went into the kitchen and returned with an array of saucepans and bowls. For a few moments the two of them wordlessly concentrated on their task of draining the water from the ceiling – Aldous drilling little holes, Colette positioning pots and pans to catch the drops. After ten minutes or so there were half a dozen tiny waterfalls pouring out of the ceiling, and no sign of an end to the water trapped up there.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Aldous, standing back to watch the strange spectacle of rain indoors, ‘why would anyone want to saw the pipes out of the bathroom?’
‘I don’t know, but don’t worry about it now, you’ve got to get to Waterloo, you don’t want to miss the train.’
Aldous, as though having forgotten, rushed upstairs to finish dressing, leaving Colette to gaze into the little, deepening pools that were forming in the hall, seeing the milky traces of soap in the water, the scum of bubbles round the rim of each pan.
‘I’ll see you tonight then darling,’ said Aldous, coming back down the stairs, making for the front door, almost kicking a pot over.
‘I wish I was coming with you,’ said Colette, kissing him.
‘Janus Brian would never get over it,’ Aldous laughed, conscious that his wife was showing a rare level of interest in his work. She never came to the door normally to see him off but would usually just sit in her chair, calling goodbye as he left the kitchen, but here she was at the front door straightening his tie and brushing the dandruff off his lapels. It wasn’t just that he was setting off for the south coast to receive a prestigious prize. She had changed since Janus Brian had entered their lives. The regular visits she now made had instilled her with a new energy, and a sense of purpose, something she’d always felt an increasing lack of as the children grew older.
‘This is going to be the start of something big,’ she said, ‘don’t worry about the bathroom now, just think about your windows.’
Aldous was finding the worry in his face difficult to dislodge, Colette could see that. After he’d kissed her he saved his last glance for the falling water in the hall, before turning his back on the house. The flood had provided a dissonant underside to their happy, late morning in the bathroom, a kind of inversion of it, its antithesis – unwanted, intrusive water that upstairs had been a desired luxury.
Anything unusual about the house, anything strange, odd, out of place, was usually the work of Janus. He came down, as always, after his father had left the house. He passed Colette in the hall, and didn’t register the falling water at all, even though dribbles landed on him as he passed through. He washed at the sink in the kitchen, made himself a cup of tea. Scipio, who’d been asleep all morning on a chair, woke up, as he always did when Janus came down, and mewed seductively at his master’s feet, curling in and out of his legs. Janus opened a tin of cat food, pulled the meat onto a saucer and put it on the floor for the cat. Feeding Scipio had been Janus’s sole responsibility for all the years they’d had the cat.
Then Janus sat at the table with his tea. But he didn’t drink his tea at first. He liked to wait until it had cooled down. Sometimes he would leave it cooling for half an hour, and then drink it all, nearly stone cold, in one go. While waiting he just sat there, one arm resting on the tabletop, the other in his lap, his legs crossed. His head was inclined forward, slightly, so that his long hair fell across it. With his thick beard his face was almost completely obscured by hair.
Since losing his job he’d spent most of his time like that – just sitting. He sat in the same place, in the same position, for hours on end – one elbow on the table, his other arm in his lap. If he left the table – to use the lavatory, to make tea, he would return to the chair as soon as possible and resume the position, with almost a palace sentry’s sense of duty, almost as if the chair and the table had become body parts without which he couldn’t survive for long. He talked very little. When the evening came he would eat the dinner Colette had cooked, then he would return to his room, and begin drinking. They would hear, from downstairs, the metallic retching of beer cans being opened. Four or five in quick succession. Then the muffled downpour of vomit falling into the lavatory. Then Janus would leave the house, primed for an evening’s boozing in The Quiet Woman. Nearly every other night he went through this routine, returning noisily around midnight, usually too far gone to be any trouble. Drinking was the only thing that seemed to animate him now. Sober he was silent and inert, drunk he was alive, vociferous, energetic. What puzzled Colette most was where he was getting the money from. He’d been out of work for nearly two months. He handed over to her around half his National Assistance. That left him about five pounds a week to spend, which could pay for perhaps one night on the tiles, but not the four or five Janus was spending each week.
Colette thought she would leave it until the afternoon before asking her son about the bathroom. Janus Brian called for her exactly on time, pipping his horn perkily outside the house, and she walked through the small shower in the hall, to meet him.
She did worry sometim
es when Janus Brian came for her in his car, even though he’d promised he’d never drink prior to picking her up, and would only take her home again in the afternoon if he hadn’t had a drink in between. Colette could tell, by the quickening of his speech and the sweetening of his breath, he’d always had a drink before he’d set out. Probably just a swig of gin, a single mouthful, taken straight from the bottle, enough to prime him for life beyond the front door. But she didn’t say anything. Instead she sat down in the passenger seat of her brother’s Renault 7, still quite a new car, newer than any of the cars Aldous had ever owned and felt the soft, upholstered comfort of average luxury.
Janus Brian was unshaven, his tall head prickly with unkempt hair. As always, he did her seat belt for her, leaning across her to click the buckle into place.
‘Don’t think I’m mauling you dear,’ he said, ‘but it is better to be trapped than thrown out.’
Though only a mile separated Janus Brian’s house from Colette’s, there seemed an infinite variety of possible routes between the two. This was because their houses were on different spokes of London’s radial street pattern. Journeys across the city from one suburb to another were awkward and eccentric and involved lots of detours and short cuts through the grids of residential avenues that lead nowhere in particular. This time Janus Brian turned left at the top of the road, down Hoopers Lane, passing The Goat and Compasses, then right up the busy Goat and Compasses Lane, an arterial road, one of the spokes that brought traffic into London from the north. A sequence of nearly identical straight roads turned off from here to the left, all running parallel, leading to Owl Lane. It was down to Janus’s own whim which of these roads he chose. They were all named after places in Devon for some reason – Exeter Avenue, Honiton Road, Plymouth Drive. Janus Brian chose Wolfardisworthy Avenue, and put his foot down, a reckless burst of acceleration that had the bordering houses and parked cars flicking past with frightening velocity and which Colette endured in rigid silence. The needle passed sixty before Janus Brian took his foot off the pedal, then, turning right carefully into Owl Lane muttered, by way of explanation, ‘Nice to have a spurt occasionally.’
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 8