Arthur McCann

by William Pitt

  In the dizzy middle of it all I saw Madame Grasse come through the door. She came in like a ghost in her white suit. I couldn't see her properly but I could hear her crying through the whirling that was going on all around me.

  'Deux jambes!' she was howling. 'Deux jambes.'

  'Jambe today, jambe tomorrow!' I remember roaring and she seemed to stagger away from my screen. Out in the street I could hear her howling, the sound going from my mind as gradually as a dying wind.

  It was terrible then. Rum by the pint is not good for any young man, especially after champagne. I felt I was caught up in a great rushing of laughter and tricks and faces, carried off on a shrieking wind above the trees of the island, and dropped upon somebody's bed. I imagined that Mrs Nissenbaum had come back to me, or that I had been taken to her through the trees and the sky and the stars. God, Mrs Nissenbaum, you've got so thin! I suppose that's what being dead does for you. Thins you down no end. And you smell different. Not full and sweet, but hot and bitter. That's being dead as well, I suppose. It makes you smell. This waist! It's not that lovely, wide, white, soft waist. It's narrow and brown. And your hair has got so tough. Like tin. I can't get my face into it now. It pushes my face away. But I do still love you, despite all this. And this dead intercourse is nice. It's lovely to be with you again, darling, and I'm sorry about what happened to your dog. Poor Errol Flynn. Do you see a lot of him now? Is he with you in Heaven? Has he got over that nasty choking? Oh why, oh why? Oh why did you make me wear that thing, Mrs Nissenbaum? I told you I didn't like it. Like going to bed in your socks. How you laughed at that. Oh, my large, lovely, lady, what has happened to yoooooooooou ... ?

  Even though I had not been at sea for very long I had already acquired the sailor's clock, that inward alarm which goes off to tell you that you're drunk and your ship is about to sail. Hollow and filled with a nasty dust I woke at four and lay in a stiff frenzy, fearing that I had missed my ship. Then I looked at my watch. There was time, but I had to go now.

  I was lying in the middle of an extensive rough bed. I was naked and on one side of me Monique was lying naked also. It was necessary to lean closer in the dimness to make sure it was her. She slept quietly, her breasts poking their infant snouts over the single blanket we shared. On the other side of me, also sleeping, was a very old woman, face like a skull, hands behind head, a high pitched snore squeezing between two outpost teeth. I leaned closer to her but her breath caught me on the way down and I retreated quickly. There were other people in the room, all sleeping, propped against the walls or the bits of furniture, or stretched flat on the matting floor.

  Carefully, in the half light I climbed over the old woman and immediately, thankfully, found my trousers and shirt at the side of the bed. My shoes were sitting neatly alongside the pom-pom bedroom slippers that Monique had been wearing the night before.

  I got quickly into my clothes. The early air had a chill on it. My mouth felt foul and my eyes were gummed. As I was about to go from the room the old woman groaned and took her hands from behind her head. She said something in French without opening her eyes. I caught the word ' mer', which I knew, and I agreed quietly that I was going to sea.

  There was a narrow stairway, steep as a chute, outside the room and there were more people all lying, sleeping, on that. Almost at the door, back propped against one thin post, plastered legs thrust out like a ship's loading derricks, was Monsieur Grasse, plastered too, a bottle clutched like a baby to his breast. I wondered however he had come to be there.

  Out in the street I saw immediately, to my relief, the still lights of the ship. I ran towards her as though she were my mother, the violent and vivid dreams of the night coming back to me as I went. I boarded her with two minutes to spare and at the loss of two days' pay. An hour later we were picking our way into the mainstream of the channel that led from the harbour.

  I was working on the hatches on deck. The ocean spread flat and sweet before us, our bow going through it like scissors through silk.

  'La grande mer,' I said to the bosun cockily. 'The splendid sea.'

  'It means your grandmother,' he said. ' Get on with the job.'

  That's what she had said, the old woman. Grande mer. She meant the sea. Of course she meant the bloody sea.

  What else. Not grandmere. Why didn't they teach us French at school? We ought to have done French. The sentence mumbled in the dark came back to my consciousness, almost easily. 'Bosun,' I said. 'Can I ask you something, please.' 'Look, McCann, you're here to work. What is it?' I told him the sentence as I remembered it. He laughed and said: 'Something like "I'm the bride's grandmother." Now will you get on with your bloody work?'

  Eleven

  One year two months and three and a half days later Pamela married me in St Chrisp's Church, overlooking the Bristol Channel. Wind and high rain beat about the church during the service so that to the ear it was like being at sea in a storm. The organist, carried away by the drama of the external sounds, played ' For Those In Peril On The Sea' while we were awaiting my bride. During the service my bastard father laughed so much he had to go outside and squat in the porch until he had quietened down.

  At first I thought flatteringly it was one of the six aunts in a spasm of traditional crying. It came from just over my right shoulder as I trembled next to my bride at the chancel steps. The vicar, who was telling us that all this was for begetting children, glanced up and the little noise ceased, but then it started again and I realized that it was a man giggling. I closed my eyes as though that would shut it out. The sounds were like little hiccoughs, spaced at first, but then crowding together until the fool was gurgling for all he could. Pamela did not seem to notice. She was staring at the vicar, a lean and sexy young man, as if waiting to hear more about the begetting of children. Eventually the sounds behind became insistent, and people in the pews began to complain, so I turned and saw him with his face in his hands, his shoulders heaving to the unremitting giggles.

  My mother, her face crumpled, forlorn, gave him a defeated push. He looked up face stained with hilarious tears, and then staggered, hooting like a drunk, down the aisle and out of the door. Then we got married.

  The night before was very strange. My mother told me to go to bed early because of the big day and I went up to the small room I had known since early childhood. The wind from the Channel still agitated the window and, as it was Friday, men going home drunk from the dock pubs came up the street at intervals, singing bravely against the wind as though it were life itself.

  I was eighteen then, but I had seen so much, done so much, done so much to so many women, that the childish room was too tiny for all my ghosts and memories. I tried to keep Mrs Nissenbaum firmly outside the door, but she came in with her spectre knock, floating on angelic pink chiffon, her hands reaching for me like clouds. Rose, sweet Rose of three years or a lifetime ago, seemed to sit bulkily on my bedside and read to me ponderously from Gone With The Wind. I heard the weeping of the sailor they called Rider Haggard in the Distressed Seamen's Home, and saw again the terrible red and white striped bottom of Mr Gander before it toppled beneath the sparkling sea. I even had a fleeting glimpse of Monique, shuffling on her pom-pom slippers about the Cockatoo Paradise Loungette and Bar, believing herself to be the wife of Arthur McCann. I still worried about that, but Port de Loupe was a long way across the world, and the Captain, an understanding sailor, to whom I confessed, a few days out, told me not to worry. He had heard that Creole women made bad wives anyway. 'Don't sign on any ship that's sailing for Port de Loupe, that's all,' he said. 'There's some places, lad, I dare not go myself.'

  I had sailed the world in the year and two months since then. Pamela had said that if I was going to be a sailor for ever then I should go to sea looking nice, so I became a cadet with a blue uniform which that night was hanging pressed across my bedroom chair waiting for the wedding march.

  The day I got the letter saying that I had been accepted as an officer cadet by the Blue Anchor Line I sho
wed it to Pamela and she exclaimed:' Oh, Alan, now you'll look really smart on our wedding day. I'll have the bridesmaids in pale blue to set it off.' We were getting married, and she still couldn't get my name right.

  This night, the night before our wedding, I tried to sleep and I was nearly there when Mr Wynn-Griffiths, a new neighbour across the street, attacked his own front door with a garden hoe because Mrs Wynn-Griffiths had locked him out. Some men in that street spent more time outside their front doors than inside.

  Hearing him choking and shouting frightened me in an ominous manner. I shivered in my single bed in the way I had once done as I waited for the firing squad sent by Winston Churchill to dispatch me. Even today I shudder at my imagination then of seeing my father showing them in and saying: 'Well, there he is gentlemen.'

  Now it was Mr Wynn-Griffiths, a married man locked out in the blowy street, I sat up in bed and then I stood up and went to the window. The street was as empty as a drained canal. At the far end I could see the lights like flowers on the masts of the ships lying at the adjacent docks. Mr Wynn-Griffiths had stopped attacking his front door with the hoe and was sitting weeping on his doorstep.

  When I went down the hoe was lying outside in the road where he had flung it, so I picked it up and carried it across to him. He glanced up from his wet forearms and looked half-pleased, half-surprised, but not shy or ashamed, even though he hardly knew me.

  'Is this your garden hoe, Mr Wynn-Griffiths?' I asked casually, pretending it was not one o'clock of a deserted morning.

  'Ah, so it is, boy,' he said wiping his wrists across his eyes and giving a quick sniff and snivel. 'That's my hoe.'

  'Found it out there,' I said nodding towards the roadway.

  'What, in the street? Wonder how it got in the street?'

  'Can't think. Anyway here it is.'

  'All right boy, thanks.' He seemed to think some explanation for his situation might be necessary. I could see that there were great bites out of the front door where the attacking hoe had been striking. 'Came out for a breather,' he said. 'These little houses get very stuffy, I find, don't you?'

  'They do a bit,' I agreed. 'Mind I'm not in ours very much now.'

  'At sea you are,' he said suddenly, very Welsh.' Best place at sea, I think. You can breathe at sea. You can't breathe in these houses.' I was still looking at the door. 'Thought I'd scrape a bit of the paint off,' he explained casually. 'Could do with a new coat of paint. So I had a bit of a go at it. I'll have to finish it tomorrow. Or today, I suppose it is now.'

  'I'm getting married tomorrow. That is, today,' I said.

  He looked at me as though I had said I was volunteering for vivisection. 'Oh no, boy,' he groaned. 'Not married.'

  'Yes,' I confirmed. 'St Chrisp's at three o'clock.'

  'Don't do anything like that,' he whispered. 'It's a dreadful thing, you know. You don't realize until you've actually gone and committed it.'

  'You make it sound like a crime,' I said wheezing an uncertain laugh.

  'Oh, it is,' he moaned.' It is. Crime against mankind. And I mean mankind. Run while you've got the chance, boy.'

  As though to comfort me he shuffled along the doorstep making room for me to sit down. Hardly had I done so, however, than the door backed open to reveal Mrs Wynn-Griffiths in her nightgown holding a big brown teapot. For one moment of idiot optimism I thought she might be bringing us some refreshment, but instead she swung it violently. The lid was missing and a cold thick stream of tea looped through the air hitting me in the face and Mr Wynn-Griffiths in the back of the neck. She then shut the door firmly and quietly.

  'That's Mrs Wynn-Griffiths,' said Mr Wynn-Griffiths, unnecessarily. 'I was a bit slow in turning round, or I'd have got it in the face as well as you.'

  He became suddenly angry and was all for another attack with the hoe supplemented by a spade, but I pulled him away and took him across to my house where we cleaned off the rash of tea leaves with the South Wales Echo and one of my mother's towels. He would not stay, but set off morosely down the draughty street to the house of a friend who, he said, would give him a bed.

  'Goodbye Mr McCann,' he said sincerely before he went. 'May God protect you.' He paused, shook my hand passionately and added:' We can always say we had tea together, I suppose.'

  This thought seemed to revive him for he went quite jauntily towards the houses at the dockside. I turned the other way and began to walk towards the middle of the town. I did not know why.

  There was a tight, small, feeling of truancy within me as I walked, like the excitement of the forbidden journeys I had known on those juvenile summer nights when, best-suited, I crept to my rendezvous with Rose Kirby at the barrage balloon.

  I had no idea why I was walking now, or where, only that I required to be free from the trap of the pressing walls of my room. Waiting in there before a wedding night was like being a greyhound held in a trap for the race.

  At every corner I turned in the town the wind turned with me, either pushing against my back, encouraging me to keep going, or hitting me in the face as it bent the other way. No one could be expected in the windowed streets at that hour and that weather and I went on an imaginary shopping journey inspecting carpets and staring at fifty-shilling suits, paints said to be the essential of every handyman, three-piece suites covered in cut flowers of uncut moquette. There were new daring colours in linoleum in the window of the Newport Floor Company and the little-boy-lost faces of the new nine-inch television sets in the South Wales Radio World Shop. Nursery furniture stood brightly waiting for babies; in blue and cream, embellished with cherubs and saucy-eyed deers. There were things on springs and strings like miniature pieces of gymnasium equipment and I wondered at the changes since the days when I was given a raw carrot to chew in my home-made high chair, the contraption built by my father which, inevitably, meant that it had a sadistic habit of collapsing when I was strapped into it. Abruptly I realized that getting married meant that Pamela and I would have children. To think, I had never looked more than a night beyond the wedding day.

  Then I arrived at a window full of postage stamps and I stood and gazed at them for half an hour. Seychelles, Fernando Po, Turks and Cocos, Ifni, Chad, Yemen, Gilbert and Ellice, Nauru, Somaliland Protectorate, and the Princely State of Negri Sembelan. Something wicked urged me to run then, to hurry down the narrow chutes of the streets to the docks and sail for Fernanado Po, Chad or even Milford Haven before the next daybreak. Anywhere distant from this place.

  I had seen no one. It was too chilly for policemen and the wind was rattling my trouser legs, so I shrugged away from the world in that window and turned towards my room and my wedding. Then I saw, at the distant end of the shopping road, a person hopping in and out of the pavement squares. She was playing the game conscientiously because I could hear her saying instructions to herself and laughing when she made a mistake. She was very tall and I knew by the lightness of her voice that she was young.

  Because she was intent on her game she did not see me until she was almost at the shop next to the stamps. Then she looked up and, unafraid, unsurprised, she smiled and said: 'It's Arthur McCann. You've grown 1'

  'Not as much as you,' I said.

  'That would take some doing,' she laughed. 'God, if I'd known I was going to get like this I wouldn't have drunk all that milk they made us swallow at school.'

  'That's years ago,' I said. 'Seems like it, anyway.'

  'It's years,' she said.

  We stood where the window light of the shop dropped on to the pavement, as though it were not the centre of a chill night, but that the townspeople were all around us and we had met at noon. She had a long face that looked all right on her because she was altogether long. Her hair was long and fair too, swooping over the collar of her coat.

  'Listen,' she said. 'Do you remember Ruby Martin in our class?'

  'Of course I do. There was that song about her.'

  Spontaneously we began to chant:

  'Ruby Martin
/>
  Fell down fartin'

  Got up stinkin'

  Went home thinkin".

  When it was finished we stood, beamed at each other and laughed wildly at the idiocy of it. Immediately a window screeched open above us and an ugly man put his head out. 'Bugger off,' he ordered. 'Making all that row in the middle of the night. Go on, bugger off.'

  'I think he wants us to bugger off,' she said.

  'Is that what he's hinting at?' I said. I lifted my face to the gargoyle. 'Five past two,' I called to him. 'Time you were asleep.'

  The sash came down with such anger that I thought the glass would be shivered out. Prudently we moved along the road. She was still making subdued laughing sounds but we did not talk again for a couple of minutes.

  'Mary Winters,' I said at last. 'Fancy seeing you again.'

  'Arthur McCann, fancy seeing you. What were you doing? Loitering with intent, I bet.'

  ' I suppose I was in a way. I was looking at the stamps in that window and thinking about the places, that's all. Wondering if I ought to get on a ship tonight and sail off.'

  'You always were one of those,' she said. 'Dreaming of funny things. You go to sea anyway, don't you? Somebody told me.'

  'That's right.'

  'Everybody does around here,' she said.' It's a wonder the girls don't end up climbing the masts or something. My father got killed last year. Fell into a dock at Marseilles. It was a dry dock too. And it was empty.'

  'Oh, I am sorry,' I said. Then: 'Mary. Would you mind walking in the gutter and I'll walk on the pavement? We'd be about level then. You've really sprouted up.'

  She giggled. 'All right, Shorty. If it makes you feel better. There's nobody to see us, anyway.'

  'It hurts my neck, looking up,' I said.

  'Hurts your pride more like it.' She smiled seriously and stepped daintily down into the gutter. We walked on, our heads now level.