‘Gracie,’ a boy grinned, ‘this is the cunt who used to teach me Shakespeare. You remember me don’t you? Back of the class, always getting detention.’
The boy couldn’t have been out of school for more than a couple of years, and yet to him such a great leap had been taken. Aldous knew it as well. Old boys who seem truly astonished, once they leave school, to find that their teachers continue to exist. They react almost as if they’ve seen a dead man walking, utter amazement, astonishment. Finding a former teacher drinking in their pub must have doubled or trebled that astonishment, hence Lesley’s local fame.
‘Absolutely. You were a little sod,’ Lesley laughed, and the boy laughed as well, donating another pint to the crop that had formed on the table.
Colette had never seen anyone sink a pint quite like Lesley. It just seemed to fall into his mouth. It made her think of a line from the nursery rhyme about the old lady who swallowed a fly – she just opened her throat, and swallowed a goat. Lesley seemed to drink exclusively with his throat, hardly using his mouth except as a mere portal. A pint was gone in a single visit to his lips.
‘Real ale,’ Lesley burped, ‘this is the only pub in the whole of High Wycombe to serve real ale. That’s why I come here. Gorgeous stuff. What do you think, Rex? Isn’t it beautiful? Not like any of that Double Diamond or Watney’s Red Barrel muck.’
‘Yes,’ said Aldous, who thought his pint of Old Roger vile, like treacle mixed with aspirins.
‘Hand-pumped,’ said Lesley, lifting a second pint to his mouth. That too was gone in a matter of seconds. Colette looked aghast as the glass was drained. ‘No bubbles,’ he went on, wiping his lips on his sleeve, reaching for his third.
‘Lesley,’ said Colette, imploringly.
After sinking his third pint in as many minutes, Lesley paused to catch his breath.
‘I feel sorry for my little brother,’ he said, ‘what a way to end up.’ And then he laughed. ‘Does he really think Madeleine, Agatha and I are going to be popping round every day to see how he is?’
‘You are a bastard, aren’t you,’ said Colette affectionately, ‘You’ve always hated Janus Brian.’
‘We’ve never been on the same wavelength, that’s all. You must remember he’s much younger than me. He was still a snivelling kid by the time I first became a teacher. I suppose we never had a chance to get to know each other.’
‘You’ve always looked down on him, haven’t you,’ said Colette. ‘Why is that? You’ve always thought him beneath you, and not just in terms of age.’
‘That’s not quite fair, my dear,’ said Lesley, ‘though I’m sure Janus Brian will say it was so. You and he were always the tear-aways of the family. You spent your childhoods making fun of Agatha and me, less so Meg.’
This was true, Colette thought. She and Janus Brian, against the studious, prudish elders of the family.
‘I think,’ Lesley continued, ‘that that must be part of the master plan at work here. Janus Brian is coming back for revenge, isn’t he,’ Lesley spoke good humouredly, ‘he is coming to High Wycombe to make our lives a misery. Well I can assure you that if he’s expecting me to go round and rinse the wee-wees out of his bedclothes every other day, he can think again. Madeleine likewise. And I doubt Agatha will have much time for him.’ Lesley embarked on his fourth pint, this time taking it more slowly, pausing between pulls. ‘In fact, I am totally baffled as to why he’s coming to High Wycombe at all. He knows we don’t particularly care for him, he doesn’t like countryside, as you said, so what’s he playing at?’
Colette couldn’t supply an explanation.
‘Here is my other theory,’ Lesley went on, emptying another glass, ‘My dear little sister Colette has put him up to it as a way of getting him off her hands and dumping him on ours, so that if he pegs out we’ll be to blame rather than her. This makes up, as she sees it, for what she perceives as my inadequacies regarding the care of our dear, late mother. Am I right?’
‘I’m glad to see you still feel guilty about it,’ said Colette, who had forgiven Lesley. When their mother had died, Colette had been on holiday in Wales and had left Lesley in charge of the funeral arrangements. To save money he’d had her buried in a common grave with strangers buried on top of her. Colette had had to take a job as a bus conductress to pay for her reburial in a private grave. The whole episode had precipitated Colette’s own breakdown, which she looked back on as the darkest period of her life. But still she had forgiven him. ‘I have had no influence on Janus Brian’s decision,’ she said, ‘it is something he has decided all by himself. I would stop him if I could, but I can’t. You know what he’s like. Obstinate. Worse than you.’
The noise was such that these conversations were shouted across the small table with all the force Lesley and Colette could muster, sometimes shouting, like Humpty Dumpty to his messenger, right into each other’s ears. Colette was starting to get a headache and Aldous felt uneasy with Julian in the pub, even though it was only early evening, and he seemed quite happy sipping cokes and shandies. He surveyed the interior of the bar. Incredible to think there are so many black people in a town like High Wycombe, he thought to himself, in the heart of the leafy Chilterns. There were probably more black people in this one pub than there were in the whole of Windhover Hill, though not among the new populations of neighbouring suburbs like Wood Green, and the reaches of Tottenham and Stamford Hill where Aldous and Colette had grown up and which had once been devoid almost totally of black faces. Now these areas thrived with an imported culture, fascinating and frightening. Suddenly there were black people in generational layers, the older ones bringing along with them a barely comprehensible Caribbean patois, the younger speaking with the local inflections of north London.
Colette always felt comfortable amongst any diaspora – the Jews of Stamford Hill, the West Indians she worked with on the buses. They were somehow apart from the petty class distinctions and accumulated snobberies of Anglo-Saxon culture, and she could relax and be at ease among them. In the decor of The Bricklayers Arms there were the remains of that Anglo-Saxon culture, an array of stuffed deer heads on one wall, small and saintly, hardly bigger than cats’ faces, and on the windows, covered from the outside, frosted lettering spelling out the pub’s name, reassuringly old. But these were merely traces of the pub’s past as a hostelry for white working-class men. Now they were overlaid by new and, to Colette strange and incomprehensible imagery – posters of all-black pop groups, a national flag (‘Jamaica’, someone told her), in the corner a small performing stage was set up, with silver microphones on stands, scuffed, black amplifiers. An elderly Negro came and sat next to her, he had a thin, neatly trimmed moustache and a waxily dark face, as though made of stained raffia, then lacquered. A cigarette was tucked behind his ear. He spoke in a deep growl.
‘You smoke?’
Colette offered him one of her Players.
The man laughed, the interior of his mouth white and pink, shining like a lamp. He brought the cigarette out from behind his ear.
‘I mean you smoke these.’
‘Oh no,’ said Colette disapprovingly, ‘I could never smoke roll ups. Unfiltered, too strong for me.’
The man laughed again, a high, whimpering, choking sort of laugh.
‘Unfiltered,’ he said to himself, looking at the cigarette and laughing, ‘this is unfiltered weed, man.’ He holds out the cigarette to her, a crumpled, overbulky thing twisted to a point at each end. Cottoning-on, Colette feels shocked, but before she can react, Lesley is talking to her again.
‘Do you know, of these coloured chaps, I’ve persuaded a good half a dozen or more to become regulars at St John the Evangelist’s? And a good many more are members of their own Protestant churches, very religious people. When I first came in here, I thought I might be put in a pot and eaten by one of the lost tribes of High Wycombe, but they turn out to be most civilized. Do you mind if I take my trousers off?’ Suddenly he stood up, unfastened his trousers and let them fall
to his ankles. Baggy white pants were beneath. Lesley whooped, gave a salute and a grotesque forward thrust of the hips, then pulled his trousers up again. There was a loudly approving cheer from the regulars and some applause. No one seemed surprised, Lesley sat down as if nothing had happened.
‘Perhaps we should be getting back,’ said Aldous, who had only half drunk his pint of Old Roger, and was trying to avoid the attentions of some drunken girls who were pawing at him.
‘Absolutely,’ said Lesley, who had by now consumed more than a gallon of strong ale, ‘Sing up!’ He then began singing in a loud, operatic voice, his best Sunday-morning-in-church voice, though louder, a hymn, Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer.
‘Open thou the crystal fountain
Whence the healing streams do flow;
Let the fiery cloudy pillar
Lead me all my journey through . . .’
Locals joined in, approaching with pints, as Lesley continued.
‘Bread of Heaven,
Bread of Heaven,
Feed me till I want no more . . .’
Lesley leant back in his chair so far that he fell backwards onto the floor, arms outstretched, still singing, his mouth gaping with song. The locals poured Old Roger down Lesley’s open throat, laughing as they did so, ‘Feed me till I want no more’. They rejoined as Lesley ecstatically gargled and spumed on the cascading beer. The manner in which this event occurred suggested to Aldous and Colette that it was a regular occurrence on Lesley’s visits to The Bricklayers. The reason for his popularity here was his willingness, their former English master, to debase himself so abjectly on the floor of their pub.
Thereafter Lesley was barely conscious, and had to be more or less carried home by Aldous and Colette, taking a shoulder each, which was difficult, as Lesley was taller than either of them, his feet trailed along the ground, and it was mostly up hill back to Cedar Way. Lesley continued to burble and sing quietly.
When Madeleine opened the door she looked horrified.
‘What have you done to the poor man? I knew this would happen if he went out with you.’
Colette became angry with Madeleine for keeping up the pretence that Lesley wasn’t an alcoholic, that this sort of thing didn’t happen every week at their house, Lesley rolling home utterly blotto in the small hours, just as Janus Brian had described. Madeleine insisted it had never happened before. A furious row ensued, Colette sitting on the settee, Madeleine in the armchair, Lesley in between on the carpet, lying on his back, singing hymns.
‘Well I think you’ve got a jolly cheek, Colette,’ said Madeleine, ‘to sit on my couch in my house and tell me that my marriage is a sham, as you put it. But of course, you don’t know, do you, the work I had to put into this relationship to make it work. You may idolize your older brother, but you don’t see the side of him I see. He can be a hell of a lot of work, I can tell you that. If it wasn’t for his work in the church I don’t know what would have happened. As for sex, you seem to think you invented the thing. Where do you think our children came from, Green Shield Stamps? You have noticed we’ve got three haven’t you? Alright, I admit he’s got a drink problem, like all his bloody family, like his father and his brother, yes, and you, and your son. Well there isn’t a single alcoholic on my side of the family so I’d say that pins the blame fairly fair and square on the Waughs. Every time we come into contact with your family there’s trouble. Oh yes, you can smell it a mile off. As for Janus, well, I’ve never forgiven him for what he did to Christine, he nearly gave the poor girl a nervous breakdown. And I don’t care what you say about art, yes, Rex does some lovely paintings, and Janus can play the piano very well, but that doesn’t mean you can go around throwing your weight about and behaving disgracefully, (I don’t mean you, Rex, of course), but if you think Lesley . . .’
Madeleine stopped in the middle of her tirade because she had been hit in the face by Colette, a broad slap across the right cheek, and she was about to launch a subsequent attack on the left cheek but Madeleine grabbed her hands, and there followed an undignified bout of wrestling.
‘How dare you! How dare you!’ Madeleine shrieked, incredulous, as Aldous moved in to separate the two women, but Colette was incensed, and the fighting went on for some time, over the recumbent body of Lesley, who by now was snoozing peacefully on the floor, Colette making perpetual lunges at Madeleine, who sheltered, when she could, behind Aldous, who eventually managed to wrestle his wife under some control, having to lock her arms behind her back.
‘I do apologize,’ said Aldous, as Colette snarled quietly in his arms, ‘I think she may have had more to drink than I thought.’
Although Aldous shared many of Colette’s opinions about Madeleine, he was far too polite ever to express them, and indeed, Madeleine seemed to think of him as some sort of ally, the put-upon husband suffering at the hands of the drug-addicted, alcoholic wife. Madeleine made Aldous feel tragic, a feeling he found disagreeable.
‘Yes, well,’ said Madeleine, trying as best she could to compose herself, ‘at least we’ve got everything nicely out in the open. At least we all know where we stand. Goodbye, Colette, I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing much of each other again.’
‘Not if I can help it,’ Colette growled.
‘I just feel sorry for your poor husband,’ she was talking to Colette, still under Aldous’s restraint, as though she was some partially deaf elder relative, ‘And little Julian. What must he be making of all of this? Coming round to visit his uncle and aunt and then all this happening.’
Colette made a sudden attempt to free herself from Aldous’s grip, but Aldous pulled her away.
‘I’ll take her out to the car,’ he said, quietly.
He pulled his wife through the hall.
‘Oh, so you’re going to throw me out now, are you, my own husband acting as that cow’s bouncer, is that the idea?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
Aldous managed to take Colette out to the car, Madeleine following cautiously behind. She saw Julian in the front room, reading a book as he sat on the orange swirl of the carpet. She went over to him
‘You’ll still come and visit us, won’t you Julian,’ she said to him in a confidential tone, ‘Without . . . you know,’ she paused and nodded her head towards the hall, ‘when things have blown over, you’ll still come to see us in the years ahead, won’t you?’
He nodded. Madeleine’s words, and her manner, ate at him like some burrowing tick, getting into his skin, into his blood. Afterwards, in the car back to London, Colette falling asleep loudly in the back, he felt dirty. He felt a need to bathe, but he knew he was returning to a house with no bath.
9
A buyer for Janus Brian’s house had been found – a young accountant with a purple mouth and a squirrel-like wife.
It amused Janus Brian that this accountant worked for a firm in the same part of the city as he himself had done for nearly thirty years. He would commute by taking the same stroll every morning up the close and through the alleys and along the High Street to the tube, even changing at the same stop (King’s Cross) for the same destination (Liverpool Street).
‘Funny how things come around,’ he said to Colette after telling her the news, ‘but it brings it all back to me, how Mary and I bought this place all those years ago. How clever we thought we were, how brave, just like this young chap and his wife . . .’
Colette knew what he meant about bravery. She’d felt the same when they’d bought their first house just after the war, when renting was still the norm. In those days estate agents were a highly specialized and rather secretive breed, mostly elderly gentlemen inhabiting oak-panelled offices, writing things with fountain pens in enormous parchment ledgers. Buying a house was a slightly mysterious process rooted in the arcanities of ancestral endowments and the ancient traditions of property and land ownership. Today estate agents were young blokes on the make, spivs and wide boys who displayed their properties in shop windows like stacks of washing powder,
and as such had helped swell the value of properties like Janus Brian’s modest semi by, in his case, around sixteen hundred per cent.
There was one difference between Janus Brian and his young buyers however – they had children, a toddler with chubby legs and a little girl with white hair tied up with pink ribbons.
Colette still could not quite believe that her brother had managed it. That he’d maintained his resolve, on coming out of the asylum, to sell his house and move to High Wycombe. Secretly she blamed Reg Moore. Without Reg he couldn’t possibly have survived. He would have given up after his first gazumping. If Reg hadn’t driven him out to the Chilterns for countless weekends searching through all the mazy estates for suitable properties, he would never have lasted. It had taken a long time. All through the autumn, the winter and into the following spring before a swish bungalow was found near Amersham Hill.
Colette had to concede that the whole business of moving was doing her brother some good. It had focused his mind and given him a sense of purpose. He was drinking less, thinking more clearly. He looked less yellow.
Memory, for Janus Brian, was like an illness. That was the only explanation Colette could find for his improved health. With all its associated memories the house, and the neighbourhood, were making him ill. Colette at first found this hard to accept, since she regarded memory in quite the opposite way, as something nourishing. But with Janus Brian it was corrosive, malignant. That must be why, she thought, he so often regarded the past as a dream. By regarding the past as a dream he was inoculated against its virulent effects. But it worried her. What if, once he’d moved to High Wycombe, he came to regard his whole life in London, right up to his departure, as a dream as well? What would that do to her? Would she just become a kind of thing in his dream?
Colette had refused to have anything to do with Janus Brian’s move. She’d not once offered to help him, even when he’d read the solicitor’s letters out to her, explaining the various glitches and snags that emerged. But then again, Janus Brian never directly asked her for any help. Although he would sometimes drop strong hints – you know, I really need to get out to High Wycombe next this weekend, but Reg is away . . . Is he? How frustrating for you.
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