I’ll Go To Bed At Noon

by Gerard Woodward

  Aldous didn’t say anything. He said very little these days. Not since he’d started drinking. The whisky binge of the previous week was not, as it turned out, a one-off act of desperation. Aldous drank whisky regularly now. Though he didn’t get blindly drunk, as he had done that day, he drank enough to deaden himself. He spent long hours in the red armchair in the front room. Where once he’d read Shakespeare in that chair, now he just watched television. He watched the racing on ITV. He watched Watch With Mother, Pebble Mill at One, General Hospital, Crown Court. Sometimes he dozed off.

  He came alive only in the late evening, when it was time to go over to Juliette’s. They had decided to spend the nights at Juliette’s permanently until Janus was evicted, sleeping on the floor. Juliette and Boris’s flat was out of bounds for Janus. They were fairly certain he didn’t even know where it was, and that he would have no means of finding out. Juliette and Boris had been careful to keep their address secret from him. Their friends and acquaintances knew enough about Janus to know that he wasn’t the sort of person to whom one could casually divulge an address. It was not safe to let him know such things. So Aldous and Colette felt that The Grange was a true haven from their son. They spent pleasant evenings there chatting, listening to music, watching television, secure in the knowledge of an uninterrupted night’s sleep before them.

  Janus’s behaviour, on the other hand, had not settled down.

  ‘He seems drunk now, even when I know he’s not,’ said Colette, one evening at Juliette’s, ‘it’s as though his personality has changed. He’s neither drunk nor sober, but somewhere in-between.’

  ‘Do you think he’s gone mad?’ said Boris.

  ‘Not mad,’ said Aldous. ‘He appears mad, but it’s because he can’t be bothered to behave conventionally. He knows he doesn’t need to in order to survive, because we’ve always looked after him. If he had to survive on his own, he’d soon find the energy to behave normally. His madness derives from laziness. It’s a kind of voluntary madness.’

  ‘I do agree that it takes a lot of energy to be normal,’ said Colette, ‘but I think his madness stems from deeper causes than mere laziness . . .’

  ‘Like what?’ said Aldous.

  Colette hesitated, knowing she was following an all too familiar argument that would have the others groaning at its predictability.

  ‘Please don’t use the word “genius” in your next sentence,’ said Juliette, ‘or talent, or gift, or any of those words . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’

  She was beginning to understand that defending Janus was a hopeless cause. The machinery was in motion. Aldous was drinking himself deeper and deeper into depression. If she stopped the machinery, or even hinted at slowing it down, Aldous would sink deeper. Already he was getting a yellowy, glazed look to his eyes.

  It troubled Colette that Janus appeared so happy. In the week following her visit to the solicitor, he seemed to have gained a new-found joy in life. He also, to her surprise, had taken a new job. He was a roadsweeper. This was news that delighted Juliette and the solicitor. Because he could support himself financially, the eviction was likely to be sooner rather than later. She had seen him from the car sweeping the gutters in Windhover Hill Road. He was still wearing his suede greatcoat and white panama, working a big bristly broom in the dust by the side of the road.

  When he was at home he played loud, vivacious jazz on the piano, and walked noisily about the house whistling and singing

  ‘I’m a hap-hap-happy guy . . .’

  Aldous and Colette were surprised at how much money Janus seemed to be earning. He spent large quantities on clothes, nearly every day displaying some new, expensively made garment or other. He’d never shown much interest in clothes before. In the past his clothes had been secondhand, and worn until they were rags. Now he’d become a regular customer at Houseman’s, the gentleman’s outfitters on the Parade.

  ‘Look at my trousers,’ he would say to his mother, having come home from a day’s sweeping, ‘look at the quality of them. Look at the lining.’ He would take his trousers down and show her the quality of the lining. Other times it was all-wool pullovers, silk shirts, suede waistcoats, brogues, insulated socks. Look at the stitching on this. Feel the quality of that. It confused Colette further. On the one hand a wanton disregard for his future, on the other a sudden interest in sensible clothing.

  ‘You can’t beat a good pair of trousers,’ he would say, ‘look at people in the street and at the terrible synthetic fabrics they’re wearing – polyester, crimplene, nylon. Let’s face it, if clothes aren’t made out of one hundred per cent organic materials they’re not worth putting on your body. What would you rather wear – a cashmere shawl or some sludge from the bottom of an oil refinery, because that’s what nylon is. I would rather wear trousers made of burlap or hessian than nylon. I would wear a shirt of sackcloth or gunny rather than polyester. I saw a leather coat in a shop once made of polyvinyl chloride, which I think is what they use to insulate electric cables. About as comfortable to wear as a suit of concrete. One day we’ll all be poisoned by our own clothes and the Russians won’t have to do anything unless we fight them in the nude.’

  But mostly he didn’t say anything. He carried on as though he lived in the house alone. He nearly knocked Julian over in a doorway by walking through him. He could not be engaged in conversation. If Colette tried talking to him, he would give little twitches of irritation, as though brushing away an annoying insect. If Colette persisted, the twitches would grow until they were almost convulsions, kicking his legs into the air, flicking his head back in one whole-body spasm of annoyance that was powerful in its effect.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Colette would say, almost disgusted, while Janus would only smile to himself.

  She felt she was giving him one last chance. One last opportunity to account for his behaviour. To explain himself. She was silently pleading with him to give her a good reason to cancel all this eviction business. But his manner only strengthened her resolve. While he slammed and sang about the house, and while her husband sank deeper and deeper into his red armchair, she felt a new resoluteness. Janus had had his last chance.

  ‘He doesn’t see us any more,’ Julian said, ‘he thinks he’s the only person here. He thinks he’s beaten us.’

  Janus had driven them all out of the house and lived there like some tyrannical, usurping duke, the giant in his castle scoffing the rations. He seemed to think it was a permanent arrangement, and had no inkling, as far as Colette could see, of the crisis that was about to erupt.

  The night of the delivery of the summons had been carefully arranged. Janus now usually stayed at home in the evenings. The solicitor’s clerk had arranged to call at the house on a Wednesday evening. Aldous would be out at his evening class, where he had continued teaching after his retirement. Julian would be at home, and it was his job to answer the door, and let the clerk know whereabouts in the house Janus was. Colette imagined that Janus might cotton-on and take fright when the clerk appeared and she wanted to keep him in the kitchen, whose back door she could lock. If he was playing the piano in the music room he could escape through the French windows. In the event, it all went smoothly. Janus was lounging in the kitchen, spread out on the armchair with his hands in his pockets staring into space while Colette pottered about at the sink. There was a knock at the door. Julian went and answered. A few moments later and the clerk appeared in the room. Rather a scruffy man, Colette thought, for a solicitor’s clerk. In contrast to the shiny neatness of the solicitor himself, the clerk was a bedraggled young man with long, lank hair and a crumpled mouth. Around his neck a kipper tie was loosely fastened.

  ‘Are you Janus Jones?’ the clerk said to Janus, unable to conceal the nervousness in his voice.

  ‘Yes. Who the hell are you?’ Janus replied.

  ‘I just need to give you this,’ the clerk said, and landed a folded document of white paper on Janus’s spread tummy.
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  Janus really didn’t understand what was happening. He looked down at the paper quizzically for a few moments.

  The clerk gave a brief nervous nod to Colette, and then left.

  Colette had for days been dreading Janus’s reaction to this incident. Julian had also, as he was Colette’s only protection that night. But in the event there was little reaction from Janus. Without altering his slumped posture in the chair he took the summons, unfolded it and read. Colette watched him carefully from the sink. He read carefully. He made a thoughtful, clicking noise with his teeth. He didn’t say anything.

  He stared at the document for a long time. He seemed to be in a trance. Colette felt impelled to break the silence.

  ‘There’s still time, Janus,’ she said, ‘if you find a place on your own we won’t need to go through all this – and then you’ll still be allowed to visit us . . .’

  ‘Allowed to visit you?’ he said, as though the phrase was barely comprehensible.

  ‘Yes. If you’re evicted you won’t even be allowed to be within a half a mile of the house . . . It’s terrible, Janus, but it’s what you’ve driven us to.’

  ‘Allowed to visit you?’ Janus repeated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What the hell makes you think that I would want to visit you?’

  20

  How far was half a mile? Colette found herself pondering this question a great deal. She’d never had a very good sense of distance. She asked Aldous. He told her that it was about a mile to the Triangle. A mile to Southgate tube. A mile to The Grange. Half a mile, therefore, to the Parade. Half a mile to the solicitor’s office where Janus’s exile was being planned. Half a mile to The Green. Half a mile, or perhaps a little more, to The Owl.

  ‘How will they measure it?’ Colette said to her husband in the car a few days later. ‘Will the police have to get a map out and tell Janus if he takes another step in a certain direction they will have to arrest him? How precise will they have to be?’

  ‘The solicitor said they might make it a mile, or even two miles. He said in rural areas they can impose limits of up to ten miles. If you’re in a little village and you have to go shopping in the big town ten miles away every other day, a half mile exclusion zone won’t be much good.’

  ‘Ten miles is ridiculous,’ said Colette, ‘he couldn’t have a ten mile ban, he’d have to leave London altogether, or go south of the Thames, which is the same thing isn’t it?’

  They were heading for the Thames. Julian was in the back of the car. Aldous and Colette were driving him into London for his interview with the merchant navy. Every now and then Colette would turn and give her son a long look that was meant to be comforting and supportive, but which seemed to Julian more quizzical, as though she could not believe, quite, that he was her son.

  ‘Are you really leaving school this summer?’ she would say, incredulously, to which Julian would only raise his eyes to heaven, ‘I can’t believe this boy’s childhood has passed so quickly. It seems only last week that I was taking him up to St Nicola’s and he was making me come with him into the cloakroom because he was frightened of that teacher who used to dance the flamenco – what was her name?’

  ‘Mrs Buckley,’ said Aldous, whose memory of the woman was vivid.

  Colette turned again to face Julian as Aldous managed the heavy traffic.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather stay on at school, do your A Levels? Don’t you want to follow in your brother’s footsteps?’

  ‘Which one?’

  Colette laughed as though she’d been tricked. Not Janus, of course I don’t mean Janus, she thought, but couldn’t say.

  ‘You’re very bright aren’t you?’ Julian detected doubt in her voice. ‘You could go to university and do something clever, like James. You could do anything you wanted, couldn’t he Aldous? He could do anything.’

  Colette was finding it hard to disguise the shock she was feeling, not merely at her son’s choice of vocation, but that his schooling seemed to have passed without her noticing. And now he was about to embark on a career that could take him to the other side of the world for months, years at a time.

  Then, out of the blue it seemed, Colette turned to Julian and said ‘You know Veronica Price would have been far too old for you.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Julian snapped.

  ‘Well that’s why you’re doing this isn’t it? Just to get back at me for splitting you up, as you see it, though in fact I was trying to get you together. I think it would have been a perfect match, you and Veronica . . .’

  ‘You just said she was too old for me.’

  ‘Too old now, but age differences dissipate as one gets older . . .’

  Colette turned away and her thoughts returned to Janus’s eviction.

  ‘I still don’t understand how they will do it. If on the appointed day he hasn’t found anywhere to live, what happens then?’

  ‘That would be Janus’s problem.’

  ‘But what would the police do, just take him to a spot half a mile away from the house and dump him there?’

  ‘I’m trying to concentrate,’ said Aldous, who’d just been honked at.

  The journey into London had been a journey back in time for Colette. They were heading for somewhere called the Mercantile Marine Office, which Aldous said was in Whitechapel, and he had intended to drive from Tottenham straight down through Stoke Newington and Dalston to Shoreditch and then Whitechapel, a perfectly starightforward route following the ancient Roman thoroughfare of Ermine Street, but Colette had insisted on a number of detours. First, to see her birthplace off St Anne’s Road, to see if the sycamore tree (that she had planted) still grew in the backyard (it did), and then to deviate along Clapton Common Road to see where she’d walked her Airedales before the war, and where the Man Who Thought He Was Jesus had failed to turn the water into wine. Then Aldous became lost trying to regain the original route, and an unexpected one-way system near the Royal Mint meant that they were almost late for Julian’s interview.

  The Mercantile Marine Office was a dingy, rather sinister looking building in a narrow cobbled street surrounded by empty, decaying warehouses. Now it was Aldous’s turn to be nostalgic. He had had a job round here somewhere, for a few months after he left school and before Lesley got him into the Hornsey. An office job in the accounts department of a firm that manufactured confectionery, he couldn’t remember the name of it now. He peered down side roads looking for familiar buildings while looking for the narrow street that was the gateway to Julian’s future.

  ‘Shall we come in with you?’ said Colette as Aldous parked the car.

  ‘No,’ said Julian, getting out. ‘Meet me afterwards. They said I’ll be out by lunchtime.’

  ‘We’ll come in and see where we can wait,’ said Aldous, and so the three of them made their way towards the building. There was little on the outside to indicate what this building housed. Eventually they found a small, modern doorway in the edifice of Victorian brickwork, to the side was a plaque which incorporated a red ensign as a logo.

  They entered. Julian, seemingly embarrassed by the presence of his parents, hurried to a reception window and presented his appointment letter. The three of them were directed to a shabby, wooden lift which took them up three floors to a waiting area. Some other boys were sitting on chairs. There were no other parents.

  ‘Just leave me,’ Julian hissed before they became within earshot of the other interviewees, ‘I’ll meet you here or outside in a couple of hours.’

  Colette looked closely at the other boys. Crop-haired and in ill-fitting, uncomfortably smart clothes, Colette could see instantly that these were rough, uneducated kids. Toughs from the bottom class of their derelict comprehensives. Julian would stick out like a sore thumb among recruits like those. Colette took some comfort from the sight of them. Julian wouldn’t be the sort of person these retired, deskbound officers would be looking for. Or if they did take him, he would soon realize the mistake he’d
made, and leave.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re so against him joining the merchant navy,’ said Aldous as they made their way out of the building, passing a man in naval uniform, another in shirtsleeves but with epaulettes on his shoulders, ‘Can’t you just be thankful he’s found something he wants to do?’

  ‘Haven’t you read these leaflets? In the first year of training he could be at sea for up to six months.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘But he’s my son. My youngest. That little boy on the high seas? At his age?’

  ‘I seem to remember you were the one who suggested it?’

  ‘Me? When?’

  ‘When he was younger. When he was very young. You were always saying to him “why don’t you become a sailor like your great grandfather, you’ve got salt water in your veins, none of my other children have become sailors, you’re my last hope,” and countless other things like that.’

  ‘Did I? I don’t remember. It must have been when I was sniffing.’

  ‘The funny thing was Julian always said no, that he didn’t want to be a sailor, that he would never be a sailor, and that used to really upset you.’

  The pubs were open by now. After some wandering among the Dickensian ruins of the old Docklands, Colette and Aldous found an Edwardian pub called The Flag, where they stayed for two hours.

  They read through a brochure they had picked up at the offices, and which summarized the course Julian would be undertaking

  . . . entry as a deck rating onto a three year sandwich course leading to a Class Five Certificate and qualification as a deck officer up to a limit of 5,000 tons in home and western European waters, then a further three years before qualifying to take command of ships trading world-wide . . .

  . . . boat handling, rigging and maintaining cargo gear, steering, lookout and watch duties, engine room layouts, instruments, signalling, basic navigation, chartwork and meteorology, possible promotion to Petty Officer at end of course . . .