‘Adores me?’ Colette was allowing herself to be convinced.
‘Of course he does. Probably why Aldous hates him so much.’
‘Aldous doesn’t hate him, he just hates his drinking . . .’
‘Ah well there’s your problem, you see. I said you should never have married a Methodist, and never trust a man who’ll change his religion for the sake of a woman, didn’t I say that to you the day before you got married?’
Colette didn’t recall Reg ever saying any such thing. Reg went on.
‘No Protestant can really understand what booze is all about. Alcohol is at the centre of the Catholic mass. Christ turned his own blood into wine for heaven’s sake . . .’
‘Don’t Protestants believe that?’
‘Of course they don’t. They don’t believe in anything. How could anyone take their faith seriously when it was founded by Henry VIII?’
‘Aldous drinks,’ said Colette defensively, ‘though he never gets drunk . . .’
‘Of course he does. One drink and anyone’s drunk, the effects begin with the first mouthful. The problem with your son is he drinks that fizzy muck they put in cans. He should try some real ale. Proper beer, like we used to drink before the war and the Krauts bombed all the breweries. That’s what he should be drinking. Fizzy booze just sends you bonkers, but real ale enhances all your senses and aptitudes. You think better, you drive better, you make love better . . .’
Sometimes the conversations between Colette and Reg became so engrossing for the pair of them that Reg would lose track of the time, and Aldous would come home to hear their laughter coming from the kitchen, noticing how it quietened as he entered the room. Sometimes he would meet Reg in the doorway as he left, or on the front garden path, or would see his white Triumph Dolomite pulling away as he came up the road. And he grew increasingly impatient of Reg’s visits and did his best to make him feel unwelcome, not returning his pleasantries but for gruff grunts and grumbles. Reg wouldn’t be put off, however, and continued his almost nightly visits to Fernlight Avenue. Aldous finally lost his patience when he found that Reg had taken Janus out for a drink.
Janus had been sober for a fortnight, and such times were to be treasured. Reg was keen to prove that Janus’s aggression was not to do with his drinking too much, but with the type of beer he was drinking.
‘I promise you, Colette, let me take him to The Farmers Arms and I’ll bring him back and he’ll be as pleasant and charming as he always is.’
And so Reg had taken him to The Farmers Arms, a glossy, modern pub in New Southgate that sold real ale. The two of them returned at two o’clock the following morning. Reg was sober, bloody and frightened. Janus was bloody, bruised and only semi-conscious.
From Reg’s hysterical, confused ramblings they got a vague and familiar picture of what had happened. Janus had begun insulting the wives and girlfriends of various drinkers in The Farmers Arms. Someone had taken Janus outside and battered him with roofing tiles. Reg had had to take Janus to the local casualty, where he had fallen asleep after raving and raging at nurses and doctors.
‘He’s a damn madman. I’ll never be able to set foot in that pub again thanks to your son and it’s the only real ale pub in Southgate,’ Reg wailed.
Aldous snapped. He took Reg by the lapels and hurled him at the hall wall.
‘Ouch,’ said Reg, screwing his face up as the back of his head took a knock, repeating the word less emphatically when it seemed Aldous had ignored it.
‘If you set foot in this house again,’ said Aldous in a quiet growl, ‘or interfere with my family again . . .’
New chins appeared around Reg’s face as Aldous’s grip created a concertina effect.
‘I’m not . . .’ Reg gurgled. Aldous tightened his grip, stifling the protest.
‘I don’t want you poking your fat nose around here again. Do you understand?’
Aldous gave Reg an underscoring shove before releasing his grip, and Reg hurriedly retreated through the front door and down the path.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Reg, emboldened by distance, though pale and shaky, almost crying, ‘You wouldn’t get me back in this house if you paid me,’ he coughed and then gave a big, self-controlling sigh, ‘you’re all bloody mad. You take a look, Aldous, and see what you’ve made here. It’s a bloody madhouse.’
It wasn’t the last time they were to meet, however. Colette’s regular visits to Leicester Avenue made that inevitable, and shortly after The Farmers Arms incident she found herself phoning Reg from her brother’s house.
Colette’s visits to Janus Brian had become part of a regular routine, almost daily at one point. She now tried to visit only two or three times a week. If she left Janus Brian alone for more than three days, she found, it was likely that her brother would relapse into a state of depravity, naked and asleep in a nest of his own filth, the mattress swollen with faeces, the carpet slushy with urine, the bitter stench of vomit everywhere.
He was becoming a baby. He reminded her of when James was a child, and how he would, when cross, turn his food bowl upside down and tip its contents all over the table, or the floor, or his own head. Janus Brian was now tipping his food bowl over, the only difference being in the contents of the bowl. She hadn’t had to deal with human faeces since her children had grown up, but Janus Brian, despite his meagre diet, still managed to produce regular amounts of pungent, watery matter.
And it was with an expectation of filth that Colette had approached the house alone one early summer morning after nearly five days absence, having herself been down with a stomach bug, yet the house, she discovered, was surprisingly tidy. The floor in the living room had a spruced-up feel, as though recently hoovered. The kitchen surfaces had been wiped, the food, what little there was, correctly stowed. As she wandered through the house calling for Janus Brian, she began to think something dreadful had happened. In her brother’s inverted world tidiness and cleanliness must surely be signs of catastrophe, and when she reached the main bedroom, where Janus Brian usually slept in the big double bed he’d shared for nearly thirty years with Mary, she allowed herself a little scream, because hanging from the ceiling was a noose.
A pear-shaped loop of rope tied with a skilful approximation of that difficult hangman’s slipknot, hanging from a hook that had once held a macramé plant holder. The mere shape of it Colette found hideous, just as the mere shape of a spider can be hideous. Repulsively macabre, yet thankfully empty. Empty, she hoped, meaning unused. Yet Janus Brian was not in the house. Surely, if he’d been found hanging, she would have been informed. Or had his body, hanging from the noose, somehow evaporated where it swung? The only person she could think of asking was Reg, and so she phoned him. He popped over a few minutes later.
‘It was my fault, I think,’ he said, as they walked upstairs, ‘he did it on my advice.’
‘But you said he’s okay.’
She could smell that Reg had already been drinking.
‘I don’t mean he’s done it, I mean he sought to do it. I was going to drive over and tell you, but what with the way things are . . . When are you going to get a phone?’
‘Tell me what happened to Janus.’
Reg’s usually perfect hair was unsettled, his lower lip was glistening.
‘I wish you had a phone, Colette. Then I could talk to you. I’d love to have a chat with you over the phone one day, just you and me and the wires . . .’
‘Aldous won’t have a phone. He thinks they are intrusive.’
‘Yes, he’s built a little castle there at Fernlight Avenue, hasn’t he,’ said Reg as they walked into Janus Brian’s bedroom, where the noose still hung, ‘and he’s got you behind a moat and drawbridge locked in a tower with a big silver key . . .’
‘No he hasn’t.’
‘Come on,’ said Reg, suddenly impatient, taking hold of Colette by her shoulders.
‘What are you doing?’
‘For God’s sake Colette, we’ll be dead before long, all of u
s. The Russians have got a forest of missiles with our names on them. What the hell does it matter?’
Suddenly Reg’s hot face was right up against hers, and she could see that his shiny, wet lips were bunched up and making to kiss her own. She pushed him away. He pushed back. They struggled lamely, then fell onto the bed. For just a second, perhaps less, it crossed Colette’s mind that she might as well let Reg get on with it, instead of struggling against him. There was a time after all, in those innocent years before the war, when she could have found herself married to him. So similar to Aldous – in stature, hairstyle, complexion, even in certain aspects of personality (a vagueness, a boyish charm) and yet now, on the bed, Reg breathless on top of her, groping like a teenager at the buttons of her coat, the smell of stale beer in his mouth, he came across as a mere shadow of her husband, his weaker, darker self, and she found him repulsive. Apart from that, lying on her back, she had an intolerable viewpoint – Reg’s face gormless with lust and, behind it, the noose, unused, hanging from the ceiling. She pushed him off and slapped him hard across the face, and Reg rolled backwards, gasping.
Too bashful, drunk and stupid to make any further advance Reg lay on his back and spoke between gurgling noises.
‘I drive better when I’m drunk. It sharpens my reactions, it raises my alertness. It enhances my judgement of speed and distance . . .’
‘I’m not a car, Reg.’
‘That is my point. It is my mistake to think that I could operate you in the same way, if you see what I mean . . .’
‘Just tell me what happened to Janus.’
Reg sighed, and then sat up, with some difficulty. His hair, ruffled, was ridiculous, sticking up in big spikes. His tie was over his shoulder, his shirt hanging out of his trousers.
‘I’d been over here nearly every evening last week, and I just got fed up with his whingeing on and on about how miserable he was since Mary died. It got me annoyed, because he seemed to have forgotten that I’ve lost a wife as well. It was only four years ago Elizabeth died, and I felt pretty bad but I didn’t hit the bottle like he has and mope around getting on everyone’s nerves. It’s been nearly a year now, for heaven’s sake . . .’ Reg, who’d been working himself up to a long rant, checked himself and spoke more calmly. ‘So he kept saying he couldn’t see any future and what was the point of everything. So I said to him, why don’t you just do yourself in? Top yourself, I said, top yourself’, (there was a gently urging tone to his voice), ‘why don’t you just do yourself in, I said.’
‘What a thing to say to your best friend, Reg. How could you?’
Reg looked troubled, wiped his lower lip with the tip of his index finger, looked abstractedly at the dampness he had reaped.
‘Do you think I’ve done a bad thing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well I never thought he would do it. He’s too cowardly.’
‘But he’s completely drunk most of the time, he could do anything.’
‘When he’s drunk he couldn’t tie his shoelaces, let alone a hangman’s noose . . .’
‘So you told him to go and hang himself?’
‘Christ no,’ said Reg, offended, ‘I think hanging is one of the worst deaths imaginable. No, we discussed lots of alternatives. I said I could give him some pills that would do the trick. Elizabeth’s medication. You know she was in great pain for the last few months. Terrible pain. She was given these superpowerful painkillers, like little red and black torpedoes. Elizabeth always had a big stockpile of them, and when she died there were a lot left over. Several bottles full. I’ve hung onto them. I think of them as my escape route. I’ve enough there to send an army to sleep. They were Elizabeth’s only real legacy. She left me nothing else, apart from two sons I never see, of course, and a useless orange dog that wants nothing but to be fed and taken out for walks all the time. Anyway, we left it at that, but the next thing was he phoned me to tell me he’d rigged up a noose in the bedroom and he was going to hang himself, so I said don’t be a bloody fool, but he said no, he was going to hang himself, so I just got fed up and called the police and let them sort it out. And they took him off to a loony bin.’
‘Not the Hatch?’
‘No, it’s a place I’d never heard of before, out in the countryside in the middle of nowhere. The name’ll come to me in a minute.’
‘So he never got as far as actually trying to hang himself.’
‘No,’ said Reg, dismissively, ‘it was always just for show. Like I said, he’s too cowardly. Though, to be honest, it wouldn’t be that bad an idea, would it. I mean, what sort of life has he got now? He’s completely miserable, he’s no company, he’s got nothing to look forward to. The only reason I called the police was I didn’t want his blood on my hands, if it ever got out I’d persuaded him to top himself . . .’
Reg offered to take Colette to the asylum, whose name he’d remembered, Haverford, but Colette declined.
‘Don’t be like that. I told you, I drive better when I’m drunk. At least let me drive you home.’ This she agreed to, and wished she hadn’t, as it was a terrifying odyssey through narrow streets at sixty miles an hour, skidding round corners, and at one point, in Goat and Compasses Lane, coming off the road and veering onto the grass verge, narrowly missing a tree.
Haverford Psychiatric Hospital was tucked away behind a ridge of chalk that was thickly planted with barley, three miles to the north of London.
Leaving London to the north Colette always had the impression that the city was an island of stone and glass in a sea of endless wheat. As soon as the buildings ended the great fields of dull yellow began. A foreigner travelling this way would not have a great impression of the English countryside. Even before the war it had been a featureless landscape of cereals and hardy crops – cabbages and potatoes, and since the post-war loss of hedgerows and the emergence of superfields the size of several parishes, The Great North Road had become a highway through sad prairies almost as far as Scotland. There was a sadness about that landscape, relentlessly simplified, big and empty when once it had been small and complicated. It had seemed more concentrated in those days somehow, more dense, so that, mile for mile, journeys were that much richer. Now, where horses had once worked the fields there were combine harvesters which produced so much grain it had to be stored in concrete silos, domed towers that marked the landscape more prominently than the ‘Hertfordshire spikes’ of the local churches.
Or the water towers. In these flat riverless tracts water was a scarce resource, soaking straight through the chalky soil into underground aquifers that could only be retrieved by the sinking of deep bores, then to be stored high above the ground. Odd, these water towers, it occurred to Colette. On the journey to Haverford they passed three or four, a modern concrete one near Cockfosters that looked like a piece of monstrous basketwork, another one was a black iron box on four legs with a ladder leading up to it. At the top of Stag Hill there was a Victorian brick tower that looked as though it had been converted into a house. Then, as they rounded the crest beyond Potters Bar and the flatlands towards St Albans were revealed, she could see them everywhere, scattered about the shimmering wheatfields, water towers, brimming with all their elevated liquid.
When Colette first saw Haverford Hospital, she noticed that it also had a tower, shaped rather like a modern grain silo, though square, and topped with a pyramidal cap of slate.
‘Why do these asylums always seem to have towers?’ she said to her husband as they pulled into the car park.
‘As a look-out for escapees, perhaps?’ offered Aldous. It seemed to Colette a quite likely explanation.
They found Janus Brian in a day room with magnificent, tall windows that gave onto a view of rolling parkland and beyond to the beginnings of the midland plains. Colette was astonished by how well Janus Brian seemed. In his light blue, monogrammed (an interlinking JBW) pyjamas and calf-leather slippers he seemed to have lost ten years. Blood had returned to illuminate his skin, which shone now in a way it had n
ever done before. His face had filled, he even seemed to have thicker, slightly darker hair. It was as though the half empty husk of the brother Colette had known had been refilled.
‘Apparently I screamed for the first two days without gin,’ Janus Brian told them, once he’d settled them into a pair of the red, PVC armchairs that furnished the day room, ‘and then I got the shakes, and started seeing things.’
‘What sort of things?’ asked Colette
‘Well,’ Janus was finding it hard to explain, ‘I never actually saw anything, not properly. It was always just outside my field of vision. For instance, looking at you, I can’t quite see the chair immediately to my right, but I would be conscious that there was something perched on one of the arms, but if I looked directly, it would vanish.’
‘But what sort of thing? A bird, you mean?’
‘No, it wasn’t a bird, dear. It was more like some sort of giant insect-like creature. Rather frightening. Like an enormous fly, or woodlouse, something like that. Lots of moving legs. But about the size of a cat. Perhaps it was a cat, there are cats here, you know. But sometimes I would be aware that the room was absolutely full of these blasted things, but whenever I looked for them they scuttled away and hid behind the chairs, or under the tables. Just my imagination, I realise now, but at the time they were sending me potty, and I kept screaming for nurses to take them away. But that only lasted a couple of days, and now, as you can see, I’m fully recovered, I haven’t had a drop of alcohol for nearly a week and I don’t feel the desire for any.’
Colette, who’d once spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital, knew about the spirit of self-confidence such places can inspire, and how quickly it can evaporate in the outside world.
‘The only craving I get now is for water,’ he said, ‘I love the stuff. I drink it by the jugful. The doctors tell me I’m dehydrated, all the years of boozing have sapped my body of all its reserves of water and I’m as dried up as an Egyptian mummy.’ Janus Brian had a plastic jug of water on the table beside him, with its white, hinged lid. He poured himself a glass as he spoke. ‘You don’t think of things like that, things so simple. A glass of water. Yet life is totally dependent on it. I read somewhere that an average glass of water will almost certainly contain a molecule that has passed through the body of Aristotle. It’s always the little things, isn’t it, it’s always the things that you take for granted that turn out in the end to be of life and death importance. Here we are worrying about nuclear bombs and Communism versus Capitalism, when it’s just a glass of water that matters.’
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 14