Colette had not visited Janus. She had thought about it, but had decided against it. Brixton seemed to her a long way away, somewhere south of the river, in territory she’d never visited before. She had no intention of making the journey by herself on public transport, and Aldous refused point-blank to take her, so she had no choice. She explained all this in her letters to Janus, but he had never asked for a visit anyway.
The most noticeable change, however, was in Aldous. He had rediscovered his enthusiasm for life. His skin, which had faded to white, was now colouring. He had stopped drinking whisky, during the daytime, at least. He’d become interested in the garden, opening up a section of the lawn to grow vegetables. He had started painting again. He took Colette to the theatre, catching the Green Line bus down to the West End to see plays at the Aldwych, or concerts at the Wigmore Hall. They went for long, meandering drives in the country in a new car.
The Hillman Superminx’s useful life finally ended in July with a trip to Cambridge, where the car’s gearbox once more seized up while in reverse. Aldous had at first contemplated making the journey all the way home backwards, but soon found it too tiring on his neck, and so the car was abandoned to a Fenland garage, who kindly pointed out that the repairs would cost more than the car was worth.
By chance Juliette knew of a friend at the newspaper office where she was now working as a trainee journalist, who had a nearly new Hillman Hunter he was selling for a bargain price. The Hunter was white with red upholstery, which made it seem like the old car turned inside out. It gave a smoother, faster ride than the Superminx. The quality of the ride encouraged them to use it more. They discovered areas of Hertfordshire they’d never known before, lanes twisting through mazes of purple willowherb, byways trimmed with lacy cuffs of cow-parsley alongside harvested fields. Sometimes their meanderings would take them to the edge of the Chilterns, or the clay-bound foothills of mounds remotely related to the Chilterns, which they came to think of as a new boundary to their known world, beyond which the plains of the midlands began – Bedfordshire, that odd, unknown county, its rectangular fields of cabbages and sprouts. From the cowslip slopes of the hills above Barton Le Clay they would gaze out upon this plain like stout Cortés, and never venture into it, preferring instead to return to the known nooks and folds of their local hills.
One day, shortly before Julian was due to begin his course, Aldous and Colette took him and his new girlfriend, Myra, for a drive in the white Hunter to a village they had become fond of visiting, Little Wessingham, a hilltop settlement with a spike church and a view across the valley of the Lee towards the Shredded Wheat factory at Welwyn Garden City.
Colette had been very keen to meet Myra. Until now she’d only known her as a softly sweet but insistent voice on the telephone asking for her son. After much pestering and teasing Julian was finally persuaded to produce her. She’d arrived that morning and Colette had opened the front door to her. A tall, pretty, porcelain-faced creature with oval lips and oval eyes, the sweetness offset rather alarmingly by the Tutankhamun eye make-up she was wearing, and what appeared to be a grimy, silver-studded dog-collar around her neck.
‘Myra is in mourning for the death of Sid Vicious,’ Julian had explained.
Colette could only think that Sid Vicious was a pet dog.
There was a pub on the edge of the village that overlooked this valley. After a walk in the nearby woods they went to the pub and sat in the garden, where a heap of leaves was smouldering.
‘I hope you’ll talk Julian out of this stupid idea he’s got of running away to sea,’ Colette said to Myra while Julian was in the toilet.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, unhelpfully.
‘He has told you he’s running away to sea next week, hasn’t he?’
‘He said he’ll only be away during the week. He’ll come back every weekend. Or I might go down there . . .’
‘Oh might you?’ said Colette sarcastically, a little shocked to discover that plans had been formed without her knowledge. ‘And I suppose he’s told you all sorts of secrets and horrible things about me.’
‘No,’ Myra said, repositioning her dog-collar and scratching at the red rash it had produced, ‘he hasn’t told me anything.’
Colette wasn’t sure whether to feel glad or disappointed about this.
‘Tell me where you met Julian.’
Colette was keen to get as much information out of the girl as she could while Julian was absent.
‘At a school disco. My best friend’s brother goes to St Francis Xavier’s. I go to St Bernadette’s.’
‘So you’re a good Catholic girl?’
‘Not “good”.’
‘How odd that he should choose from within his religion.’
‘Why’s it odd?’ said Aldous.
‘Not odd. Encouraging,’ said Colette, ‘it’s become part of his identity when I never thought it mattered to him . . .’
‘It’s just coincidence,’ said Myra. ‘My school is the female version of Julian’s. Lots of the girls have brothers at St Frank’s, we’re always going to each other’s discos . . .’
‘So where does Julian take you?’
‘To the pictures sometimes. We saw The China Syndrome last week. Porridge the week before. The Bitch the week before that. Or we go out with O’Malley, or O’Hogarty . . .’
Colette moaned at the familiar names denoting the unfamiliar characters. They had stopped coming to The Volunteer recently, as had Julian.
‘Do they ever speak, those boys?’
‘Not much. O’Hogarty has fallen out with O’Malley. O’Hogarty wanted to go out with O’Malley’s sister, but O’Malley wasn’t keen because O’Hogarty’s a half-caste with epilepsy, and O’Malley’s a racist who plays rugby. I’ve told Julian to get rid of his friends, they’re too boring. He prefers mine anyway.’
Julian was back by this time. Colette’s interrogation of Myra continued.
‘And what do your parents do?’
‘My mum’s just a housewife . . .’
‘Just a housewife?’
‘Yes. My father – he left when I was little. I’m not sure what he does. I see him every now and then. My mum’s living with a bloke, he’s got a blotchy face – we don’t like him much . . .’
Colette was pleased to detect promising signs of dysfunction in Myra’s family. She always felt relieved to hear about unstable families, broken marriages, step-parents, absent fathers – it cast her own family in a better light. She may have a son in prison but at least she and Aldous were still together and the rest of their children thriving.
‘Does your mother take you to church?’
‘Once in a blue moon.’
‘You’re asking a lot of questions,’ said Julian.
‘I’m only interested. Did you go to church as a child?’
‘Nearly every week.’
‘Same as us,’ said Julian.
‘Tony, that’s mum’s boyfriend, he’s more strict. He goes every Sunday and tries to make us go too, but mum won’t go any more, though she still believes in God and all that . . .’
‘Can’t we just look at the Shredded Wheat factory?’ said Julian, ‘Myra hasn’t seen it yet,’ he began directing her gaze, ‘can you see that white strip between the yellow fields, just behind that forest? I once came here with binoculars and I could see that it was the Shredded Wheat factory . . .’
‘I can’t see anything . . . Do you come here a lot?’
‘We have this last few weeks. It’s what we like about the suburbs. In half an hour you can drive to beautiful countryside like this, or half an hour in the other direction and you can be at the door of St Paul’s.’
‘We never come out here,’ said Myra, ‘but then we haven’t got a car.’
Aldous suddenly held forth –
As one who long in populous city pent
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
Among the
pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight
The smell of grain, of tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, or Shredded Wheat, each rural sound . . .
‘Be quiet, darling,’ Colette said to her husband as he’d gigglingly recited, then, to Myra. ‘Forgive my husband, he’s prone to these outbursts.’
‘But I’ve never realized before what a paradise Hertfordshire is. We’ve always felt the need to go beyond – to Bucks or Berks for their hills and woods, or out the other way into Suffolk for its shingles and churches. I’d always thought of Hertfordshire as a bit boring, but it just takes longer to appreciate . . .’
Later, when Aldous had driven them all back to London, Myra and Julian went off on their own to The Bamboo Palace for a meal. As usual, they were the only customers. A red-tasselled, frosted panelled Chinese lampshade rotated solemnly above their heads, almost identical to the one that had sat on a bookcase in Janus’s bedroom for several years. The Bamboo Palace had been Windhover Hill’s first Chinese restaurant. Before then Chinese food couldn’t be obtained outside Soho. Its opening, therefore, had caused a stir. The whole family had pored over a takeaway menu James had brought home one evening, and lively discussions followed as to the meaning of Sweet and Sour, or what exactly Spring Rolls were. It must have been around that time that Janus had stolen the lampshade. By now The Bamboo Palace was just one amongst many exotic restaurants, and the crowds had gone elsewhere, leaving the waiters and chefs looking forlorn and lonely.
A waiter in white shirt and bow tie, a permanent look of shock and disgust on his face, observed Julian and Myra from a safe distance, and occasionally delivered food to their table.
‘Always the same, always the same,’ said Myra pityingly as Julian poured orange sauce over his battered pork, ‘why do you never try anything different?’
‘Because I know I’ll like this.’
‘But you might like something you haven’t tried before even more.’
‘But I might hate it, and then I’ll have wasted all that money . . .’
‘But you’ve got to take the chance.’
‘Are you saying I’m unadventurous?’
Myra’s food arrived, an indecipherable mêlée of things looped together in a bowl, and something else sizzling dangerously on a hot plate.
‘Yes, I think you are.’
‘You can’t say that. I’m just about to join the navy. I’m going to be off around the world soon . . .’
‘So what will you do if you land in Shanghai or Bangkok and you need to get something to eat?’
‘They’ll do sweet and sour pork out there won’t they?’
‘Not like that they won’t. Not with chips.’
They laughed and were silent for a while as they ate.
‘Your mother seemed very interested in me today, she kept asking me all these things.’
‘I know.’
‘All the way home she was asking me. Her sharp little elbows were digging into me. Why’s she so interested?’
‘Just being nosy.’
‘What did she mean when she said she hoped you hadn’t told me all your secrets?’
‘Oh,’ Julian thought carefully, chewing pork, what had she meant? ‘Probably . . . I’ve got a brother who’s in prison. We slept in his bed last night.’
‘Prison?’ Myra’s eyes rounded, ‘that’s fantastic. You’ve really got a brother in prison?’
Julian nodded cautiously, not quite sure of how to read Myra’s response.
‘That’s just so brilliant. You live in that big house in that posh street and you’ve got a brother in prison, while I live in a broken home on a council estate in Enfield Highway, and my brother’s training to be an accountant. What’s he in prison for?’
Previously unaware that Janus’s incarceration might be something with which to impress young women, Julian exaggerated his brother’s crime.
‘Attempted murder,’ he said, quietly and casually.
‘Christ,’ said Myra, twiddling her silver earring, then giggling, ‘fantastic.’
‘Before he went inside I couldn’t have taken you round to my house. It would have been too dangerous. He was very violent, and very unpredictable. He used to drink . . . If he was around now I would be worried all the time that he would know we were here and would come and find us and cause trouble, we’d have had to have taken steps to make sure he didn’t know where we were going . . .’
Julian spent the rest of the meal offering more details of Janus’s career, exaggerating the violence once he’d learnt it brought low whistles and ‘wows’ of wonder from Myra.
‘But your house seems so calm. Your mum and dad are so calm. And it’s such an interesting house. It’s so full of things. All those paintings. And that mural of a waterfall in the hall. That piano. Do you play the piano?’
‘No. My brother was the pianist.’
‘The one in prison? He was a pianist?’
Julian nodded.
‘Quite a famous one, or he could have been . . .’ Julian added the second part of the sentence below the level of Myra’s hearing.
‘Does anyone else play it?’
‘Mum and dad play a little bit, although they seem to have stopped now. It never gets used.’
‘Why don’t you start learning it? It’s such a waste of a piano.’
‘Me?’
‘Let me look at your hands . . .’
She grabbed hold of Julian’s hands and spread the fingers out.
‘You’ve got piano-playing hands. You should learn. Did you know I could read palms?’
She turned Julian’s hands over, and read through the lines with her fingertips as though tracing text. Suddenly she discarded the hands and returned to the remains of the meal.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me what they said?’
‘They said you’re going to drown in the South China Sea.’
22
It had not crossed Colette’s mind that she should do anything with Janus’s bedroom. She had hardly been in there since his eviction from the house, and perhaps might never have gone in there again had her daughter not said to her one day, ‘Did I tell you the lease is expiring on Boris’s flat soon?’
‘No.’
‘Well, it is. I wanted to ask you if you’d mind if we moved in here. Just for a short while. A temporary thing while we look for somewhere else to live. Boris is on the waiting list for a council flat and he thinks he could get one in a few months.’
‘But which room will you have?’
‘The front bedroom of course. That’s the only one available isn’t it?’
‘Janus’s room?’
‘Yes. His old room. Why are you looking so shocked? He’s not going to be using it any more is he? Or were you and Dad going to move back into it?’
‘No. I just wish you hadn’t asked me, that’s all. Not yet.’
But Janus had been in prison for three months. Her daughter’s suggestion was not unreasonable, and Juliette felt justified in feeling a little cross that her mother should not have been delighted by the proposal.
Aldous was more keen.
‘It sounds like a good idea to me.’
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit disrespectful? It’s as though we’re dancing on his grave. It’s almost as if she made us go through all this just so she could have his room . . .’
But even Colette could see that these protestations were rather weak. A large empty room was going to waste. Juliette and Boris would fill a painful, ugly gap in the house.
At first Colette had intended to clear the front bedroom herself, but when she saw the quantities of junk stockpiled in there she had to enlist the help of Aldous who in turn enlisted the help of Julian and James. They had to abandon the first attempt because of the cat fleas that pounced on them, hungry after their long, patient wait. Not really knowing what to do about them, Colette and her family made a second attempt, this time wearing trousers tucked into
socks. If they bent down too close to floor level, the fleas would jump onto their faces. ‘They can sense the warmth,’ Boris said, who seemed to know about fleas.
Most of the junk could be disposed of immediately. There was a crumpled bicycle, rusting drain covers, hurricane-lamps, dented car doors, fenders, fire-place ironwork, dustbin lids – all things Janus thought he could sell for scrap if he ran out of money. Then there were the clothes, the books, music manuscripts, piles of shoes and boots, slithering heaps of pornographic magazines. Colette tried to sort out what should be thrown away and what should be saved. She continually had to restrain the others who seemed determined to put everything in the skip Juliette and Boris had hired.
‘He’s not dead, you know,’ she shouted to Boris, who was dragging a bag full of clothes out to the skip, ‘he might still want some of these things when he comes out . . .’
Colette took some things downstairs and stored them under the piano in the music room. Bulging bin-liners full of clothes, stacks of books, notebooks, maps, box files filled with letters and assorted paperwork. The space under the piano became a sort of temporary abode for Janus’s belongings, although the clutter soon began to spread and take up space in the room.
With the floorspace clear in Janus’s bedroom the little single bed suddenly seemed disproportionately small. The bare floorboards gave the room an echoey, chapel-like atmosphere, enhanced by the mural that still covered the main wall – Janus as Adam, Angelica Sweetman as Eve.
Colette hadn’t expected Juliette to move in so soon, but a day later she and Boris arrived with a car full of boxes. Janus’s last few belongings were removed from the bedroom and dumped in the music room with the rest of his things and Boris set to work installing a latch-key lock on the door.
‘Why are you putting a lock on the door?’ Colette asked her daughter.
‘Daddy said we could . . .’
‘But no one’s going to come in without knocking, no one’s going to steal anything while you’re out . . .’
‘Aren’t they? Look, we’re entitled to some privacy.’
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 38