‘Me and Bill will walk you back,’ said Juliette.
‘If Bill’s still alive. Do you think we should do something, Juliette?’
‘Perhaps Bill will knock him out,’ said Colette hopefully, ‘I can’t understand why it’s taking him so long, he’s usually so good at handling Janus. Where’s Aldous? Has he vanished again?’
Aldous had developed an ability to dematerialize in times of stress, reappearing a while later, usually in his red armchair by the bookcase in the front room, the Complete Works of Shakespeare open in his lap.
A period of silence followed from the rooms above, before Bill appeared once again at the top of the stairs. This time the ripped jacket sleeve had been removed entirely, revealing the white shirt beneath. Bill had the appearance of someone who’d been leaning out of the window of a high-speed train. He puffily and rather cautiously descended the stairs.
‘Are you hurt?’ said Veronica.
‘Not much,’ said Bill.
‘Where’s Janus?’
‘He’s having a lie down.’ Bill appeared ominously calm, ‘Graham’s reading to him.’
‘Reading to him?’ said Juliette.
‘It was the only way we could get him to stop thrashing about. I tried everything else, he just wanted a story.’
‘What’s he reading?’ said Colette, but the question was lost.
‘Bill, you’re bleeding,’ said Juliette, noticing a red stain in his beard. Bill touched it with his finger, looked at the blood thoughtfully and shrugged. There was a knock at the door. A sliced-up image of a policeman was visible in the warped glass.
‘That was quick,’ said Colette opening the door. It transpired that neighbours had already called the police before Colette had got to the phone box.
The situation was explained to the policeman, a bearded man in late middle age. Julian, who’d been in the hall all the time, experienced the fascination he always felt when seeing a policeman at close quarters, and marvelled at how the house always seemed to shrink and decay slightly in their presence. Colette and her daughter had an urgency in their voices, like advocates pleading a case, fearful the policeman would wonder what all the fuss was about, since the house had been calm and silent since his arrival. But the fact that neighbours had first called the police, and that a dressing table was lying in a nest of broken glass in the front garden, along with the testimony of Colette and Juliette, seemed enough to convince him that Janus could be taken away for the night. ‘For a breach of the peace?’ the policeman suggested, as if not caring which law he was arrested under.
He went upstairs to see Janus on his own, having been directed to his bedroom. Listening at the foot of the stairs the others could hear Janus’s voice talking with a cheery amiability to the policeman, as though to an old friend; they heard the deep, firm baritone of the policeman, equally amiable.
After a few moments the policeman came down the stairs.
‘Your son seems quite calm . . .’
‘No,’ Colette interrupted him, ‘it’s one of his tricks, as soon as a policeman’s on the scene he’s as meek as a baby. Don’t be fooled by him, as soon as you’ve gone and Bill’s gone and everyone else he’ll be back to how he was, and then it’ll just be me and my husband to manage him – he could kill us, you saw what he did to the dressing table.’
The policeman looked a little troubled, then went back upstairs.
‘I don’t think your mum and dad should be left here with Janus like this,’ said Veronica to Juliette, ‘if the police don’t take him away . . .’
The policeman returned.
‘Your son will come voluntarily with me to the station for the night. I’m not arresting him or charging him with anything. He’s just getting himself properly dressed.’
The party waited in the hall for a while. Veronica went into the kitchen to get her things. The policeman whistled, asked Colette, by way of conversation, where her husband was, was told he was probably in the front room. The policeman popped his head round the door and saw Aldous sitting in his red armchair reading from a large, thick book.
‘Good evening sir,’ the policeman said.
Aldous looked up, smiled, then continued reading his book.
Then Janus descended the stairs. He looked as if he’d spent his evening doing nothing more than sitting in a chair. His face was pale, dry, his clothes clean and untorn. He had no blood on him. He was wearing a brown shirt. Colette thought he looked thinner than she’d ever seen him, and that his head was made absurdly huge by the thickness of his hair and beard.
He shook hands with the policeman, as though greeting an old comrade, then made several requests that delayed his departure.
‘Can I just get my jacket?’ He went upstairs to get his jacket.
‘Can I say goodbye to my father?’ He popped his head round the front room door and said goodbye. Aldous didn’t look up.
‘Can I just say goodbye to my cat?’ He went upstairs and nuzzled his face into the silver fur of Scipio’s tummy.
Such requests may have gone on indefinitely had not the policeman finally put his foot down and left with Janus, pulling him gently by the arm.
A weight lifted. Aldous emerged from the front room.
‘Ah, you’ve resurfaced,’ said Colette.
Juliette scolded Bill.
‘You’re not going out with Janus any more,’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t think you’ll want to, will you?’ said Veronica.
Bill looked surprised.
‘Janus is my friend . . .’
‘Friends don’t give you nosebleeds,’ said Juliette.
‘That was an accident.’
‘An accident?’
‘The back of his head hit my nose, that’s all . . .’
‘What about your jacket?’
‘That was another accident.’
‘I can’t believe you’re defending him, after what he’s been like tonight . . .’
‘People don’t understand Janus, I’m the only one that does, and perhaps your mother as well. You don’t understand him . . .’
‘I understand him all right.’ The two were alone in the hall now, the others having removed to the kitchen.
‘No you don’t, because you don’t understand the artistic temperament.’
‘Ha! Is that what you call it? You think getting blind drunk and throwing dressing tables through windows amounts to artistic temperament. So those people who hurl roofing slates at each other and put traffic cones on their heads outside The Carpenters Arms every Friday night are all artists are they?’
The conversation went on like this, quietly, in the hallway, for some time, until eventually they left, with Veronica. Before closing the door Juliette had a word with her mother.
‘We’ve got to do something, he can’t live with you here any more . . .’
‘I’m sure things will settle down soon,’ said Colette, closing the front door on her daughter before she could disagree.
6
Colette had wanted to tell someone about the things Janus had stolen. But she felt unable to. She didn’t want to turn her family against him any more than they were already. Aldous would have been disgusted, guessing already, though without proof, that Janus had cut out the pipes. How would James feel if he’d known how his brother had sold his air pistol, his binoculars? How would Julian have felt about his steam engine? So she had kept quiet about the thefts, which meant that she grieved for them alone. Though she did find herself confiding in one person, Reg Moore, Janus Brian’s brother-in-law and only friend.
‘You don’t realize how important things are until you lose them,’ he’d said one evening at Fernlight Avenue. The phrase was a cliché, a truism, a banal platitude, and yet it had come to her as a fresh piece of wisdom – profound, resonant, enlightening, when Reg Moore had uttered it.
‘I didn’t realize how important Elizabeth was to me until she died.’
He had also lost a wife.
Colette and Re
g had known each other since childhood. In fact, when Janus Brian had married Reg’s sister Mary, Reg had assumed that this was to be part of a straight sister trade-off, and that he would marry Colette, and for a while Colette had allowed him to court her. But Colette had never seriously been interested in Reg, at least not once Aldous had arrived on the scene. Then there had followed a period of time in which she’d enjoyed the attentions of two men who, by a strange quirk, were of very similar appearance. Reg could easily have been the slightly younger brother of Aldous, both were tall men with dense coifs of black hair and deeply recessed eyes, although Reg’s, like his sister’s, were dark and mouselike, always darting about inquisitively, which gave him a shifty, sly, slightly devious appearance. Aldous’s eyes were grey and sleepy. ‘Come to bed eyes’ Colette’s sister Meg had called them.
Even after Colette married Aldous Reg lingered around in the background, on the off-chance that Colette might suddenly realize her mistake, and elope with him. But in the end, shortly after the war, Reg himself married, darkly handsome Elizabeth, who bore him two darkly handsome sons. That was nearly thirty years ago now, and Colette had seen Reg perhaps half a dozen times in all those years, usually at the wedding or funeral of a mutual friend, and whenever they met, if Reg could get her alone, he would resume, as if the days of their courtship had only been the week before, his still clumsy and gauche attempts to win her heart, which only confirmed for Colette that she’d made the right choice all those years ago.
Now however, as housekeeper and nursemaid to Janus Brian, she was brought into regular contact with Reg. Elizabeth had died of cancer three years before Mary, and his two sons had moved far away from home. When he met Colette now he used her as a confidante in whom he could talk about his loneliness, about the emptiness of his house, the emptiness of his days, the difficulties of finding a new partner, particularly when he was limited to his own age group.
‘Elizabeth and I didn’t grow old, not for each other. Elizabeth to me was still a woman of twenty-three when she died. But now that I’m looking for a wife from the same age group I’m suddenly finding myself courting the very old. It’s quite horrific. Sixty-year-old widows with purple rinses and surgical stockings, and I can’t believe we’re of the same generation. I’m drawn towards younger women, but no one under fifty is going to give me a second look, are they?’
Often Colette found herself cornered into having to compliment Reg like this.
‘Of course they are, Reg, there’s plenty of women who go for the older man . . .’
‘But not when they look as old as I do, do you think?’
‘You don’t look old, Reg, not to me . . .’
And this was true, as far as she was concerned. Aldous and Reg, having an almost sibling-like resemblance when young, had aged at equal rates. Their hair had admitted the encroachment of grey at exactly the same rate, their bodies had spread evenly, not into obesity, but into a comfortable, middle-aged paunchiness, and their skins were still both comparatively smooth, though Reg’s was a little darker, as it always had been. Both he and Mary had always borne some trace of a forgotten Mediterranean genealogy.
If in the race of life Reg and Aldous were still neck and neck, in terms of their personalities their divergence continued apace. Her husband still took an innocent and simple delight in the mundanities of life, which enlarged his imagination and preserved his humour, whereas Reg’s personality, after a lifetime of working in insurance, had shrunk. He’d become a chauvinist, a bigot and a pedant.
Where had it all come from, this bitterness of Reg’s? Colette at first took it as a joke, something he said to humour her, but she soon realized that he was expressing something he sincerely felt when he railed against Janus Brian for listening to Schubert on a Sony hi-fi. ‘What do you want to listen to music on that Japanese muck for?’ he would say, smiling, ‘Why can’t you listen to it on an English hi-fi?’ Then there would follow a long and, to Colette, immensely tedious discussion on the relative merits of Japanese and British music systems, where Janus Brian, if not exactly sticking up for the Japanese, would say that quality of music reproduction transcended patriotic considerations, and that if the Japanese made the best record players, he would buy them, while Reg’s contention seemed to be that British, or ‘English’ record players were the best simply by virtue of their national provenance, all the time giving Colette sideways glances. ‘All those nips are interested in is reproducing pop music for teenagers. You can’t get the layered quality of a symphony orchestra out of one of those tin-pot things. We were making record players while they were still running around on horseback . . .’
‘You can’t run around on horseback,’ interrupted Colette. Reg didn’t seem to understand. His preference for everything English knew no limits. Even to literature, to landscape, even to television detectives.
‘They’re pathetic, those American detectives,’ he would say, after Janus Brian had been enthusing about the latest episode of Kojak, Colombo, Ironside or McCloud, ‘they take a whole hour-long programme to work out something Sherlock Holmes would have solved in five minutes. They wouldn’t stand a chance against Father Brown, or Lord Peter Wimsey, or even Miss Marple . . .’
Had he always been like this, Colette found herself wondering, or was it something recent? A lifetime of actuarial considerations, of warning against risk, of permanently having in the back of one’s mind thoughts of flood, subsidence, epidemics, war, revolution, of calculating the life expectancies of young men just setting out in the world of paid employment, perhaps all these had had a narrowing effect on Reg’s mind. Whatever it was, she felt uncomfortable in Reg’s presence.
He had taken to calling at Fernlight Avenue at odd times, ostensibly to discuss Janus Brian, and what to do about him, but the conversation would always quickly slip away from that subject towards Reg himself. He would tell Colette and Aldous of his loneliness and of his attempts to find a new partner. He’d joined a Singles Club but was depressed by the people he met. He’d been on various dates with a number of widows and spinsters, but they had all ended in disappointment.
‘She sounds very nice,’ Colette said, after Reg had described an unusually attractive sixty-year-old he’d met, ‘will you be getting together, then?’
‘She’s not interested in sex,’ said Reg, ‘that’s the trouble. What is it about women when they get old? They seem to lose their sex drive. It just goes. Or is it that they’ve never had it, but have just been pretending all their lives, and when they get past childbearing they no longer feel the need to keep up the pretence? Have you puzzled that one out yet, Aldous? What are they up to, these women?’
Aldous endured these visits mostly in polite silence. Reg was often mildly drunk when he called, and Colette slowly gathered that he was almost as much a drinker as Janus Brian. Often his speech was slightly slurred and his lower lip shinily wet. After a while he learnt what nights Aldous taught his evening classes and then called only on those, always leaving before Aldous was home. And it was during these evening visits without Aldous and if Janus was out of the house, that she discovered Reg’s unexpected abilities as a sympathetic listener.
‘He’s apologized several times,’ Colette told him one evening, ‘and he says he’ll never do anything like that again, but I just keep thinking about the things he’s sold. Those little things of my mother’s. That picture she always used to have on her bedroom wall – a marquetry picture of an alpine scene, the mountains were made of different types of wood, and the water was made of walnut, because it looks ripply, and there was a single pine tree that was green. I can remember that picture from when I was a child, and I always used to wonder where the artist had got a piece of green wood, but later I realised it must have been stained green . . .’
‘It was just a picture, Colette, that’s all it was.’
‘No, it was more than a picture, Reg. It was part of my mother. Ever since she died the things she left in the world have slowly disappeared. There’s very little
left now. I used to think objects stuck around for ever if you just left them, but now I realize it actually takes lots of energy and effort just to keep things as they are. If you do nothing things just drift out of existence.’
‘But you can’t stop the world from changing.’
Colette thought for a while.
‘I sometimes say a prayer to St Anthony when I’ve lost something.’
‘I thought you were an atheist.’
‘I would be if it wasn’t for St Anthony. He keeps a tiny flicker of faith alive in me. The amount of times he’s found my cigarettes for me, or my matches . . . Now I keep thinking I should pray to him for those things Janus took. And then I think I should pray to him to find my mother, and then I think I should pray to him to find my childhood, because I’ve lost that just as much.’
‘Why do we pray to St Anthony? Was he always losing things? Or was he always finding things?’
Colette enjoyed these conversations, though she seemed to find it hard to convince Reg that there was anything wrong with Janus, her son. She didn’t tell him how he hit her. She hadn’t told anyone about that, but she told him about the drinking and the disruptive behaviour.
‘He’s a man who likes his beer, that’s all,’ Reg said, in a gently coaxing voice, urging Colette to agree with him, ‘there’s nothing wrong with that. He just has one too many every once in a while . . .’
‘No, it’s not just once in a while . . .’
‘You should think yourself lucky, Colette, to have a son who still cares about you. Look at mine, I don’t see them or hear from them for months on end. And then you’ve got the benefit of his musicianship. How many people can listen to music like that, live, in their own house . . .’ On this particular evening Janus was at home playing the piano, and the slightly muffled melodies of Schumann’s Kreisleriana were a pleasing background to their conversation.
’Do you think Janus cares about me?’
‘Of course he does, woman,’ Reg was sitting with his hands resting on his widely separated knees, which gave him an authoritative air, ‘you only have to look at him to see how he adores you . . .’
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