What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  Don’t ask me, the beggar says. You should have asked the man who knew. You might have saved the fisher king and your lily-white girl much suffering, but you’ll never help them now. You rode on none the wiser, and onwards you’ll ride the same, for that’s the lot of callow boys, who prattle on when they should listen, and gawk when they should ask, and one day end up wounded men, waiting for their own salvations –’

  As Michael wakes his eyes go wide. He heaves in breath just as, five hours ago, he heaved out Scotch and claret; as if he is or were about to drown on lack or excess. He hunches up on spine and elbows and peers, as if there might be someone there, a watcher or intruder, in the dark geography of the room he doesn’t know.

  His father’s voice comes back to him. Michael sinks down. He thinks, I’ll be in Birmingham, then. The old man has come to sit, is napping in a corner. The curtains are still drawn, the way they were after the stroke, all day. Except they don’t look right . . . they look like blinds, the slats kinked wide, with deep tiers of night sky behind them.

  Besides, the old man’s long dead.

  Michael thinks, Where am I, then? Not home; not Cyril’s either. The sky has the blacklight tinge of darkness on the edge of dawn. There’s a feel to the room that makes him think of hospitals. Unwillingly he reaches for his heart. Its beat is turgid, less comforting than the shirt and tie which clothe it. No physician has undone the garments Michael couldn’t work himself, last night, and with that thought the night comes back to him.

  He’s in a second-rate hotel, in the slagheap neighbourhood that clings to the railways of Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras. Tenners for the night porter, small change spilling from his pockets. He’d walked there all the way from Mayfair – heading homewards, if not home – through Soho and Bloomsbury and their throwing-out-time crowds, their parting shots and furtive gropes and boozy, flagrant kisses. And before the walk there was his own crowd, upstairs at Crockford’s Casino, in a private, wine-dark room: the company of men again, the brotherhood of old companions, all drinking to Mary. Cyril with an arm around him, mouthing nonsense in his ear, and Oscar with them on the steps, sober and faithful as a hound, ready to drive him home. He hadn’t wanted that. I’ll stretch my legs. Don’t go worrying, it’s a fine night for a stroll, I’ll get myself home when I’m good and done – I’ll just walk this off a bit, this . . . Look, look here, how much I’ve here, you all got the rounds in, didn’t you? What did you think you were you playing at? I’ve cash for a ride to John o’ Groats, let alone Highbury. Go on, I’ll see you all tomorrow . . .

  So he said. He didn’t mean it, that about home. He hadn’t wanted to go back alone to the empty house.

  Now he rises in the dark, fumbles at a light cord, pisses. He ducks his head to a tap and drinks, crabwise from the neck up. His feet are still chafed from the walk and his skull aches from the water’s cold and from the toxins in his blood. A scrap of dream comes back to him – hair around and eyes upcast – and he shuts his eyes and drives it down.

  He can’t get enough of the water. He walks to the bedroom’s window with a cup brimful in his hand. Down below, a sweeper machine is crawling up Cardington Street, its rotors scrubbing, busy-busy, cleaning up after London. Two men in donkey jackets come along behind like mourners.

  ‘You could clean me,’ Michael says.

  He has never liked hotels, their smell of loneliness. Those forms they have you filling in with name, birthplace, passport, address. Michael knows what they mean, those questions. Bad things happen in hotels. They’re careless, loveless places. If hotels were halfway honest they’d ask you for your next of kin – and who would he give them, then?

  Was he dreaming of family? The Lockhart men, in Birmingham. What was that his dad was telling? Something about a crippled king . . . the rest’s already fading. Did Dad ever tell such a story? It stands to reason he must have – else how could Michael dream it now? – but it isn’t something he remembers, now he’s himself again. He doesn’t like it much, either, now he has the wits to judge it. It makes no sense, the story of the wound; it has no point or end. You can’t get your teeth into it. Michael wills it to be gone, to be as faint as his own ghost in the window’s doubled glass.

  The sky is lightening. He has no business waking early. Later there’ll be enough to do. Later he’ll be needed and he’ll need to be up to it, but he has no use for these small hours today. It’s habit which forces them on him. It’s time or work, take your pick. Time does it to you, certainly: both kinds. You learn to sleep when the lights are put out for you. You’re taught to wake early and never forget the lesson.

  He turns back to the room. The bed looks torn apart. Around it – on bureaux, in corners – sit the modern conveniences, the Corby, clock radio, TV and phone, all of them overly familiar but in the half-light altered, foreign. Michael tastes bile in his throat. He drains the cup he holds and swallows hard to seal the deal.

  He’d like to call someone. Mary, he thinks, but there’s no mod-con for that. Iris, then – Iris as the next best thing, the surrogate – but no. Let her sleep, good girl. He won’t go troubling her.

  Cyril. It’s too early, but there’s no one else. He picks up, dials, waits, waits. Cyril’s missus kneeing him, grumbling him out of bed, packing him off down the stairs, out in suburbia.

  ‘Noakes,’ the receiver says, the name like an oath in the face, and Michael grins his crooked grin.

  ‘Slept well, I hope.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Mickey. Fuck off back up north, will you? What time is it?’

  ‘It’s light.’

  ‘My arse it is. Mickey . . .’

  ‘How’s Trish?’

  ‘Needing her beauty sleep. Tell you what, you get some too, then you can ask her later.’

  Michael sits. One leg lies straightened, less out of need than habit. Though his face still bears a slant he has no stick, has had no need of one for many years. It’s Cyril who walks with one now, whose breath is heavy from the stairs. ‘I fancied a talk,’ he says.

  ‘You can talk in your sleep. Go back to bed, will you? Your car ain’t till eleven.’

  ‘It’ll have to find me first.’

  ‘Right,’ Cyril says, without surprise. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘King’s Cross, thereabouts.’

  ‘Got company?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Not really the day for it, is it, for the local variety.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘You’ll need a shave,’ Cyril says, ‘clean schmutter.’

  Michael reaches for a brochure, leafs through its offerings. ‘They’ve laundry service.’

  ‘Overnight, always is. Besides, it won’t be right, will it? You’ll want to look your best.’

  ‘I could do with the right shoes.’

  ‘I’ll send one of the boys round yours. Jack’ll do it. The car too. I’ll fix it. Where do I tell them?’

  ‘Ibis, Euston,’ Michael reads, and Cyril laughs, hur hur.

  ‘You’re a rich man, Mickey.’

  ‘No point spending it all at once.’ On the clock radio, numerals shift: five on the dot. ‘Cyril, I was thinking you might happen to know a story. There’s a knight who’s still a boy, and a fisherman who it turns out he’s king . . . do you know that one?’

  ‘Not ringing any bells.’

  ‘He was houghed.’

  ‘You what? Who was what?’

  ‘No one. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Not really my department, dreams. Trish was reading something about how they don’t mean nothing. All that stuff they talk about, doing your mum up the chuff, it’s all wrong, they’re saying now. Brain cells ticking over, that’s all it is, electricity. Sometimes a dream is just a dream. Mickey . . .’

  ‘I’m keeping you.’

  ‘You’re entitled. You know I’m not forgetting that. Anything you need –’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘– You’ve earned it, Mickey, always. But get some rest. It�
��s a long day you got coming. You sit there thinking, you’ll do your head in before you get started.’

  ‘Wise words.’

  ‘Get out of it. You alright, son?’

  ‘Never better. Go to bed.’

  ‘I’ll see you there, then, shall I?’

  ‘You will.’

  He listens until the line goes dead. The room reasserts itself. Someone is stirring through the wall, or else something is stirring in it. A TV comes on midflow: Mrs T on the morning news, muted but immutable. Mr President, as someone once said, the people had nothing to lose but their chains. They had a world to win. And they are winning it . . .

  There’s a throwaway razor in the bathroom. Michael sheds his shirt and tie, wets his face and tends to it, listening to the rooms around him, the telephones and televisions coming alive one by one, the crowd of early morning wallahs and Midlands commercial travellers waiting for their trains back home. The smell of fried toast from the kitchens.

  Yesterday there were crowds out. It was the weather, they’d have said, it’s the summer coming, we love summer, but Michael looked at them and thought: What is it you’re all doing? What do you think’s the point of all your comings and goings? What is it? By the Union Chapel there was this girl on a step, dreadlocked and dishevelled, feeding a burger to her kid, stuffing his teeth with reconstituted meat.

  There was a show Michael saw once: Mary will have had it on. When it all got started – people – no one had the time for anything much more than food. Killing it, eating it, keeping it from decay. Then some bright spark got farming going and bingo, there was time to spare. Not much, though; not enough to go round to just anyone. Time to think, like this, to stare back into the mirror – that was the privilege, the greatest luxury. The kings had it, and what, the priests. The rest went on as before. Their work was the stuffing of mouths, their own and those they served. And that’s still it, Michael thinks, looking back at his eyes (which are blue as they ever were, undimmed in fierceness, aquiline). That’s all there is to it, that’s all they’re ever doing, people – it’s all we really want. Give us all the time in the world, we won’t know how to spend it. It scares us, we hate it, time, it bores us, so what we do? We stuff ourselves and one another. We get our heads back down, chop chop, the way it used to be, like animals, like blind things, stuffing, licking, blowjobbing, troughing . . .

  Often, this last week, he’s caught himself dwelling on strangers. Always they’re young. Mainly they’re girls, like the young mother on the steps. His thirst for them seems unquenchable. Sometimes they catch him looking. Dirty old man, their eyes say. He disgusts or amuses them: at worst they pity him. A few of them take stock of what he drives or what he wears: you can have it, if you pay for it, their looks say, or they dare him: come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough. The youngest are afraid of him, walk on more hurriedly or run. None of them know better. They mistake his intensity. They imagine their plush eyes and skins are all that he could want, that only lust could move an old man to stare after them.

  They don’t know how he hates them, how their daring to exist fills him with loathing and amazement. None of them has an inkling that he begrudges them their lives. It turns his stomach to see them, so wasteful and rich in years, when those of his own wife are spent.

  His hand is trembling. Carefully he sets down the razor. He’s nicked himself – there, on the neck – but a spit and a lick and the blood is gone. ‘No harm done,’ he says, and though his eyes are troubled it’s only the truth. The wound is so slight, and the blade so fresh, that he hardly feels it.

  2. Noon

  The hearse is punctual, as hearses somehow always are. In it comes Jack, as promised, with Michael’s mourning suit and shoes. He’s a decent boy, Jack, quick all round and grateful for a chance in life: a Swan, with Alan’s zeal for business but less malice in his bones. The hearse makes him nervous, though, makes him overly familiar, searching after small talk well past the point when a grown man might understand his master wants nothing more than the car’s cloistered, meditative silence.

  ‘I’ve a mate does this, the driving part of it. They’re top notch, these, Daimlers, all the best fittings – you wouldn’t believe the sound they’ve got, sir. Quadrophonic in the back, see. So my mate says, when he’s finished a job, when he’s driving round the lockup, he looks out for couples. Like he cruises up, gives them a sound track, a love song, you know, a serenade. Lionel Ritchie, Hot Chocolate. They love it. Makes them laugh, he says. Brightens up their days.’

  They’re navigating the snarl of traffic east of the King’s Cross terminus. Michael sees why they make good time, now: drivers give them a wide berth, wave them by, as if their vehicle were a person touched by harm.

  ‘I believe in miracles,’ Jack says, and Michael turns to stare.

  ‘Do you?’

  The boy flushes. ‘No, it’s a line,’ he says, ‘a song.’

  ‘I see.’

  Jack ploughs on. ‘Nice day, isn’t it? Hot. The weather said for rain but they’re always wrong half the time. Sure to be a good turnout.’

  Dimly, it occurs to Michael that the boy is trying to make an impression; that this journey is, to him, not essentially funereal, but rather an opportunity, a chance to get ahead. You snooze, as they say now, you lose. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Oh, you can count on it, I would have thought. I mean it’s as nice as it can be, considering. I wouldn’t mind some air,’ Jack says. ‘Sir, could I –?’

  The undertaker meets his eye – Michael’s – in the rear view mirror: Jack’s window sheathes itself in the body of the door. In another time or place it would gratify Michael, this small exchange. The unspoken understanding, and the tacit recognition of their places – the Swan boy’s, the driver’s, his. He is a man men look to, still, as he has always been. On another day he would warm his hands on that.

  They’ve done well out of him, the Swans. Since Alan died, twelve years ago, it’s Michael who has run the business, managing the Swan concerns and Cyril’s alongside his own. The street markets are dying – are pale shadows now of what they were after the war – but Michael foresaw their demise and got out of them years ago, moving capital off the streets into the shops and flats above them. They are all landlords, his people, now, and property developers. He has made money out of money, as he always knew he could, and the Swans, Noakeses and Lockharts are all free of Shoreditch, gone forth and multiplied to the ends of the Tube lines. Their fields bloom, Michael thinks, his own, Cyril’s, dead Alan Swan’s. Their seeds are sown, and so they reap.

  They come up Pentonville to Angel. On the corner, by the bank, a foreigner is hawking tat from a blanket at his feet. What’s he selling? Yellow plastic, formed into the shapes of birds. The man is filling one with water, cupping it to his lips, dancing as it sings.

  ‘Come all, buy my wares,’ Michael murmurs, and feels the Swan boy shift beside him in his ill-fitting, ill-suited suit.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It’s just a rhyme. I used to be a coster.’

  ‘What,’ Jack says, startled, ‘like that?’

  ‘More or less. Flowers and razors. Not round here, East End. You should ask your folks about it. You ever go down the markets, Jack?’

  ‘Not much,’ the boy says, unable to feign enthusiasm even for his gaffer. ‘My nan does her shopping there.’

  Michael nods. ‘They’re not what they used to be,’ he says. ‘There used to be more life in them. It was my wife’s, that rhyme. It got the girls to sleep. They used to beg for it. Come all, buy my wares. Come buy my nuts and plums and pears. Here’s the Devil and the Pope, and here’s a little girl, just going on a rope. Here are the booths where the high Dutch maid is, and here are the bears, that dance like any ladies . . .’

  He stops. Already it is too much, this small recitation. Cyril was right: it’s a long day coming, and he is faltering too soon.

  They pass through Highbury and Archway, Highgate and East Finchley. By the gates of Islingt
on Cemetery and Crematorium, Cyril is waiting for them. He leans by Michael’s window, all seamed face and sovereign rings.

  ‘I’ll walk you up. Jack, good boy, you drive on and lend a hand,’ he says, and pats the roof as Michael gets out beside him. They watch the hearse move off. Cyril shakes out cigarettes.

  ‘Thought you might need a breath of fresh air,’ he says, and Michael takes one, bows to the flame. They start after the car. The path meanders, cutting off within its loops dense banks of shrub and cedar, in which, as he and Cyril walk, Michael glimpses hidden structures: chapels and columbaria, outhouses, furnaces.

  ‘There’s a crowd down there. Your girls arrived.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  Cyril stops, puts out his smoke. ‘I thought you’d want to know.’

  He does, is gladdened by it. He hoped Floss would show, for Mary’s sake, or for appearances. Not since her childhood have he and Floss been on speaking terms, and Mary always took his side. Not even in the hospice, when Floss visited, did one forgive the other, or the other him.

  ‘Who else?’ he asks, and Cyril glances up from his trodden butt.

  ‘No one from the old days.’

  ‘Good,’ Michael says, and on they go.

  Their allotted chapel isn’t far. Around its pocket portico stand relatives from London, Birmingham and north of the border; from Elvanfoot and Muirkirk, Musselburgh and Edinburgh. Faces turn his way, with his features or with hers, the more open of them both pitying and relieved – and why relief, he wonders? Do they think he might not have come? It’s as if, with Mary gone, some mishap might have befallen him, some fatal symmetry; or as if he might have left her here, waiting at her last altar.

  Oscar trudges up with Jack in tow. ‘All set?’ Cyril asks Oscar, and the man nods, sour as ever. Oscar never changes: it’s a certainty they all rely on. Oscar’s main claim to fame these days – it is typical of him – is having kept all his hair.

  An uncertain silence falls. Jack was right: it couldn’t be a better day, considering. Sunlight falls warm through the cedars. The air is scented, sedative. Jack is waiting on his word, Oscar and Cyril too. Needing orders, Michael thinks, though just now he has none to give.