“You getting off, or what?”
Startled, we looked up to the front of the bus. The vehicle had stopped, apparently at random, fifty yards clear of the first dishevelled houses that stood on the land side of the road.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Bus stops here.”
I turned to Susan, and we laughed.
“What, it doesn’t go the extra hundred yards into the village?”
“Stops here,” the man said again. “Make your mind up.”
We clambered rather huffily down out of the bus onto the side of the road. Before the door was fully shut, the driver had the bus in reverse. He executed a three point turn at greater than his usual driving speed, and then sped off up the road away from the village.
“Extraordinary man,” said Susan.
“Extraordinary git, more like.” I turned and looked over the low wall we had been dumped beside. A stone ramp of apparent age led down to a stony strip of beach, against which the grey water was lapping with some force. “Now what?”
From where we stood the coast bent around to our left, enabling us to see the whole of the village in its splendour. Houses much like those just ahead accounted for most of the front, with a break about halfway along where there appeared to be some kind of square. Other dwellings went back a couple of streets from the front, soon required to cling to the sharp hills which rose less than two hundred yards from the shore. An air of gradual decay hung over the scene, of negligent disuse. The few cars we could see parked looked old and haggard, and the smoke issuing thinly from a couple of chimneys only helped to underline the general air of desertion. Susan looked contrite.
“I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come.”
“Of course we should. The answering machine will be half-full of messages already, and I’m glad it’s listening to them and we’re not.”
“But it’s so dismal.” She was right. Dismal was the word, rather than quiet. Anywhere can be quiet. Quiet just means that there isn’t much noise. Dawton was different. Noise wouldn’t have been an improvement.
“Dawton’s dismal,” I said, and she giggled. “Come on. Let’s find a disappointing guest house that doesn’t have a TV in each room, never mind tea and coffee-making facilities.”
She grabbed me by the hand, kissed my nose, and we turned to walk. Just a yard in front of us, obscured by sand and looking much older than the one on the wall we had seen, another swastika was painted on the pavement. Again it was the wrong way round. I shook my head, puzzled, and then walked over it on our way towards the houses.
***
“We could try this one, I suppose.”
“What d’you reckon?”
“It doesn’t look any nicer than the other one.”
“No.”
We were standing at one corner of Dawton’s square, outside the village’s second pub. We had already rejected one on the way from the guest house. We weren’t expecting a CD jukebox and deep-fried camembert, but we’d thought we could probably find better. Now we were beginning to doubt it.
Susan leaned forward to peer through the window.
“We could go straight to a restaurant,” I suggested.
“If there is one.”
In the end we nervously decided to have a quick drink in the pub. If nothing else the landlord should be able to tell us where the town restaurant was. Susan pushed the heavy wooden door, and I followed her in.
The pub consisted of a single bare room. Though it was cold no fire burned in the grate, and the predominance of old stained wood failed to bring any warmth to the ambience. A number of chairs surrounded the slab-like tables, each furnished with a tattered cushion for a seat. The floor was of much-worn boards, with a few faded rugs. There was no one to be seen, either in the body of the room or behind the bar.
After a searching look at each other, we walked up to the bar, and I leaned over. The area behind was narrow, almost like a corridor, and extended beyond the wall of the room we were in. By craning my neck I could see that there appeared to be another room on the other side of the wall. It could have been another bar except that it was completely dark, and there were no pumps or areas to store glasses. I pointed this out to Susan, and we frowned at each other. At the end of the bar area was a door, which was shut. After a pause, I shouted hello.
It wasn’t much of a shout, because I was feeling rather intimidated by the sepulchral quiet of the room, but it rang out harshly all the same. We both flinched, and waited for the door at the end of the corridor to be wrenched open. It wasn’t, and I said hello again, a little more loudly this time.
A faint sound, possibly one of recognition, seemed to come from behind the door. I say “seemed” because it was very faint, and appeared to come from a greater distance than you would have expected. Loath to shout again, in case we had already been heard, we shrugged and perched ourselves on two ragged barstools to wait.
The situation was strangely similar to that which we had encountered on entering the guest house in which we would be spending the night. We had only walked about ten houses down the line from where the bus had deposited us before we saw a sign nailed unceremoniously to the front of one of them, advertising rooms for the night. We’d entered, and loitered for a good few minutes in front of a counter before an elderly woman creaked out of a back room to attend to us.
The room we were shown was small, ill-favoured and faced away from the sea. Naturally it had neither a television nor drink-making facilities, and you could only have swung a cat in it if you had taken care to provide the animal with a crash helmet first. As the rest of the house seemed utterly deserted we asked the woman if we could have a room with a sea-view instead, but she had merely shaken her head. Susan, fiendish negotiator that she is, had mused aloud for a moment on whether a little extra money could obtain such a view for us. The woman had shaken her head again, and said they were “booked.”
I discovered a possible reason for this when down in the sitting room of the house, waiting for Susan to finish dressing for the evening. It was a dark and poky room, notwithstanding its large window, and I would not have chosen to spend much time there. The idea of simply sitting in it was frankly laughable. The chairs were lumpy and ill-fashioned, their archaic design so uncomfortable it seemed scarcely conceivable that they had been designed with humans in mind, and the window gave directly out onto a gloomy prospect of dark grey sea and clouds. I was there only because I had already seen enough of our small room, and because I hoped I might be able to source some information on likely eating places in the village.
At first I couldn’t find anything, which was odd. Usually the guest houses of small towns on the coast are bristling with literature advertising local attractions, produced in the apparent hope that the promise of some dull site thirty miles away might induce the unwary into staying an extra night. The house we were staying in, however, clearly wished to be judged on its own merits, or else simply couldn’t be bothered. Though I looked thoroughly over all the available surfaces, I couldn’t find so much as a card.
I was considering without much enthusiasm the idea of tracking down the old crone to ask her advice when I discovered something lying on the sill in front of the window. It was a small pamphlet, photocopied and stapled together, and the front bore the words Dawton Festival. It also mentioned a date, the 30th of October, which happened to be the following day.
There was nothing by way of editorial on the Festival itself, bar the information that it would start at three o’clock in the afternoon. Presumably the unspecified festivities continued into the evening, hence the drabness of our berth. The guest house’s more attractive rooms had obviously been booked for two nights in advance, by forthcoming visitors to what promised to be the west coast’s least exciting event.
I couldn’t glean much of interest from the booklet, which had been typeset with extraordinary inaccuracy, to the point where some of it didn’t even look as if it was in English. Most of the scant pages were filled wit
h small advertisements for businesses whose purposes remained obscure. There was no mention of a restaurant. The centre spread featured a number of terribly reproduced photographs purporting to show various notables of the town, including, believe it or not, a “Miss Dawton.” Her photograph in particular had suffered from being badly photocopied too many times, and was almost impossible to make out. Her figure blended with the background tones, making her appear rather bulky, and the pale ghost of her face was so distorted as to appear almost misshapen.
I was about to shout again, this time audibly, when the door at the end of the bar seemed to tremble slightly. Susan started, and I stood up in readiness.
The door didn’t open. Instead we both heard a very distant sound, like that of footsteps on wet pavements. It sounded so similar, in fact, that I turned to look at the outer door of the pub, half-expecting to see the handle turn as one of the locals entered. It didn’t, though, and I returned to looking at the door. The sounds continued, getting gradually closer. They sounded hollow somehow, as if they were echoing slightly. Susan and I looked at each other, frowning once more.
The footsteps stopped on the other side of the door, and there was a long pause. I was beginning to wonder whether we wouldn’t perhaps have been better off with the first pub we’d seen when the door suddenly swung open, and a man stepped out behind the bar.
Without so much as glancing in our direction he shut the door behind him and then turned his attention to the ancient till. He opened it by pressing on some lever, and then began to sort through the money inside in a desultory fashion.
I think we both assumed that he would stop this after a moment or so, despite the fact that he had given no sign of seeing us. When he didn’t, Susan nudged me, and I coughed a small cough. The man turned towards us with an immediacy and speed which rather disconcerted me, and stood, eyebrows raised. After a pause I smiled in a way I hoped looked friendly rather than nervous.
“Good evening,” I said. The man didn’t move. He just stood, half-turned towards us, with his hands still in the till and his eyebrows still in the air. He didn’t even blink. I noticed that his eyes were slightly protuberant, and that the skin round his ears looked rough, almost scaly. His short black hair was styled as if for pre-war fashion, and appeared to have been slicked back with Brylcreem or something similar. A real blast from the past. Or from something, anyway.
After he’d continued to not say anything for a good ten seconds or so, I had another shot.
“Could we have two halves of lager, please?”
As soon as I started speaking again the man turned back to the till. After I’d finished there was a pause, and then finally he spoke.
“No.”
“Ah,” I said. It wasn’t really a reply. It was just a response to the last thing I was expecting a publican to say.
“Don’t have any beer.”
I blinked at him.
“None at all?”
He didn’t enlarge on his previous statement, but finished whatever he was doing, closed the till, and started moving small glasses from one shelf to another, still with his back to us. The glasses were about three inches high and oddly shaped, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out either what one might drink from them or why he was choosing to move them.
“A gin then,” Susan’s voice was fairly steady, but a little higher than usual, “with tonic?” She normally had a slice of lemon too, but I think she sensed it would be a bit of a long shot.
She got no reply at all. When all of the small glasses had been moved, the man opened the till again. Beginning to get mildly irritated, in spite of my increasing feeling of unease, I glanced at Susan and shook my head. She didn’t smile, but just stared back at me, face a little pinched. I looked back at the man, and after a moment leant forward to see more closely.
His hair hadn’t been slicked back, I realised. It was wet. Little droplets hung off the back in a couple of places, and the upper rim of his shirt was soaked. There had been a fine drizzle earlier on, enough to make the pavements damp. We’d walked most of the way from the guest house in it, and suffered no more than a fine dusting of moisture. So why was his hair so wet? Why, in fact, had he been out at all? Shouldn’t he have been tending his (surprisingly beer-free) pumps?
He could have just washed it, I supposed, but that didn’t seem likely. Not this man, at this time in the evening. And surely he would have dried it enough to prevent it dripping off onto his shirt, and running down the back of his neck? Peeking forward slightly I saw that his shoes were wet too, hence the wet footsteps we had heard. But where had he come from? And why was his hair wet?
Suddenly the man swept the till shut and took an unexpected step towards me, until he was right up against the bar. Taken aback, I just stared at him, and he looked me up and down as if I was a stretch of old and dusty wallpaper.
“Do you have anything we could drink?” I asked, finally. He frowned slightly, and then his face went blank again.
“Is there a place round here we can buy food?” Susan asked. She sounded halfway to angry, which meant she was very frightened indeed.
The man stared at me for a moment more, and then raised his right arm. I flinched slightly, but all he was doing, it transpired, was pointing. Arm outstretched, still looking at me, he was pointing in the opposite direction to the door. And thus, I could only assume, in the direction of somewhere we could buy some food.
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you.” Susan slid off her stool and preceded me to the door. I felt the back of my neck tickle all of the way there, as if I was frightened that something might suddenly crash into it. Nothing did, and Susan opened the door and stepped out. I followed her, and turned to pull the door shut. The man was still standing, arm outstretched, but his face had turned to watch us go, his eyes on Susan. Something about the way the light fell, or about the strangeness of his behaviour, made me think that there might be something else about his face, something I hadn’t really noticed before. I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be.
When I stepped out onto the pavement the first thing I saw was that it had started to rain a little harder, a narrow slant of drizzle which showed in front of the few and dingy streetlights. The second thing was Susan, who was standing awkwardly, her body turned out towards the street, head and shoulders faced to me. She was staring upwards, and her mouth was slightly open.
“What?” I said, a little sharply. I wasn’t irritated, just rather spooked. She didn’t say anything. I took a step towards her and turned to see.
I never really notice pub signs. Most of the time I go to pubs I know, and so they’re of no real interest to me. On other occasions I just, well I just fail to notice them. They’re too high up, somehow, and not terribly interesting. So I hadn’t noticed the one hanging outside this pub either, before we went in. I did now.
The sign was old and battered, the wood surround stained dark. A tattered and murky painting showed a clumsily rendered ship in the process of sinking beneath furiously slashing waves. Below there was a name. The pub was called The Aldwinkle.
***
Ten o’clock found us pushing plates away, lighting cigarettes, and generally feeling a little better. With nothing to go on apart from the publican’s scarcely effusive directions, we’d wandered along the front for a while, coats wrapped tight around us and saying little. We were in danger of running out of front and considering turning back when we came upon a small house in which a light was glowing. The window had been enlarged almost the full width of the house, and inside we could see a few tables laid out. All the tables were empty.
We stood outside for a moment, wondering whether we could face any more of Dawton’s version of hospitality, when a young man crossed the back of the room. He was tidily dressed as a waiter, and failed, at that distance, to give us any obvious reason for disquiet. His whole demeanour, even through glass, was so different from that which we had encountered so far that we elected to shoulder our misgivings and go in.
>
The waiter greeted us cordially and sat us, and the tension which, I realised belatedly, had been growing within us since the afternoon abated slightly. The young man was also the proprietor and cook, it transpired, and was moreover from out of town. He told us this when we observed, quite early into the meal, that he didn’t seem like the other villagers we’d met. Soon afterwards the main course arrived and he disappeared into the kitchen to leave us to it.
We drank quite a lot during the meal. As soon as we sat down we knew we were going to, and ordered two bottles of wine to save time. We hadn’t spoken much during the walk, not because we didn’t feel there was much to say, but almost as if there was too much. Susan hadn’t looked out over the sea, either, though there was once or twice when I thought she might be about to.
“Why would they call a pub that?”
Susan was still trembling slightly when she finally asked. Not a great deal, because it would take a lot to unseat her that much. But her hands are normally very steady, and I could see her fork wavering slightly as she waited for me to answer. I’d had time to think about it, to come up with what I hoped was a reasonable suggestion.
“I guess because it’s the most interesting thing which ever happened here.”
Susan looked at me and shook her head firmly, before putting another fork of the really quite passable lamb into her mouth. We’d looked for fish on the menu initially, assuming it would be the specialty of the house as in all small coastal towns, and were surprised to find not a single dish available. I’d asked the waiter about it, but he’d simply smiled vaguely and shaken his head.
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