Last Landlady

by Laura Thompson

  But this was a sideshow. The main players in the public bar – the last such set to generate proper interest, in the pub sense – were a group who gradually took possession of the mornings, ordering their sandwiches with much pomp and circumstance. At the centre was a fat, bearded, unhealthy, extremely rich old man, a Home Counties King Lear with a coterie of hangers-on. I never worked out who they all were, but the kitchen conversations identified a niece plus boyfriend, a housekeeper and a number of vague associates (‘I reckon he runs that garage for him, doesn’t he’). At the edge of the group was a civic dignitary, whose wife was the Mrs Big Tits to whom my grandmother would merrily wave from the window. This couple were tacitly accepted as almost the social equal of the old man, and they conversed across the rest like potentates. Everybody else was in the old man’s financial thrall (‘Course, she’s got nothing, the niece, but I reckon she’s the only family’). He bossed and dominated while they cravenly endured. ‘Now then, my pretties,’ he would say, ‘we shall all be having another drink, shan’t we, my pretty children.’ He knew, of course, that thoughts of loans and handouts and wills were jangling wildly behind their fixed smiles; even I, without benefit of kitchen wisdom, could see the game that he was playing, his amusement at their eager, unhappy faces, the gratification that he gained from sitting on his stool (my grandmother’s stool) and holding court. With luscious sadism he explained why death duties should be much higher, because inherited wealth was all wrong. He thrust £20 notes at his housekeeper and ordered her to buy everybody more drinks. He told jokes, often quite off-colour. When he did this, another member of the party – balding, fortyish, standing slightly apart, employed in some unknown capacity – would look at me with a sorrowing, searching gaze that I found far creepier than the jokes. He was one of those men who would wait as long as it took for a woman to meet his eye, if necessary until nightfall. ‘Sorry about the jokes, my lovely, not quite what a girl like you is used to, eh.’ His voice, perforce, was low. As always at these uncomfortable times, I tried to conjure my grandmother: her cool and breezy smile, her ability to dismiss without offence but with unanswerable finality. ‘Oh, well …’ I turned away and lit a Dunhill: a mistake. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear – you don’t want to be doing that, do you, does she, King Lear? Does she, with those healthy young lungs?’ The old man usually ignored me rather heftily, as somebody who could not be persuaded to be in his debt in any way. ‘We don’t want her doing it! Do we! Might get some of that ash in our glasses, mightn’t she, pretties?’

  Smoking had indeed become rather rare during morning opening. Hardly anybody smoked in the saloon, and the trio on the settle had been cowed into near abstinence by the new group in the public bar, who waved their hands about like conductors of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances if a customer lit up near their sandwiches. Backstage was another story, of course. My grandmother’s bronchitis grew worse every year, but she regarded a pub without smoke as decadent.

  As a diversionary tactic, however, smoking was not enough to deflect the balding man. One day he came into the pub alone. He drank a couple of pints at the counter, bowling the occasional ball towards the trio on the settle but returning, between deliveries, to face the bar and stare in his sadly smiling way. It was a near-empty morning, probably a Monday. There was nothing to constitute a diversion. As I pulled a third pint, praying that it would turn out in a way that left him nothing to remark upon, he said quietly: ‘I’d like you, my lovely, to think of me as your uncle.’ A pause. ‘I don’t have to be your favourite uncle. But I’d like to be your uncle. If you understand me.’

  Oh, it was nothing, although it is the sort of thing that today one could make a furore about, and I said nothing to my grandmother about it. I felt a sense of responsibility to our shared faith in the pub, as a place where standards were implicitly understood. I also felt that running off with tales was not what one did. She would have been enraged, and I disliked the idea of her having to be. With regard to issues like my inadequate pint-pulling, she was sternly inclined to take the customer’s side (‘Well, they’re entitled to a decent pint, I suppose’). And the folly of men was something that she knew all about; had the inappropriate behaviour happened elsewhere, as of course it did – to me, to other girls – she would have dismissed it with a knowing shrug (‘Soppy sods, take no notice’). But this was an act committed not just against me, which she would have considered bad enough. It was against my status as her granddaughter, thus against herself. It was lèse-majesté, the kind of transgression that made her obdurate and serious. It was as if all those years of creation – of drink not drunkenness, of fun not frenzy, of hand-polished glasses, customers as friends, publicans as local celebrities, warmth and standards and no jukeboxes; all the years in which my grandmother had been treated like a queen, the counter that she stood behind circling her like a magic ring – it had all been undermined, the respect that was due to the pub, by a creepy old bastard who had no understanding of what the pub signified.

  It signified less, by then. What is almost impossible to assess is how much the pub had changed, and how much my own perceptions. My real life had always been outside and beyond, but it now assumed proportions so great as to overwhelm the pub. I still liked going in there – I was, after all, a favoured regular – but its grip upon my imagination was loosening.

  I had feared that my grandmother would be thrown off balance by the behaviour of the balding man; in fact it was I who found it disorientating. Not upsetting (hardly worth that). But it slithered into my head and shifted a veil through which I had observed the pub realities. Similarly, I remember an evening in which the main customers were the townspeople, six of them sitting together in the saloon. The neatly belted flared suits of the 1970s, in which they had looked so sprightly, were replaced by weightier items: double-breasted jackets and silky patterned dresses with a bow at the side of the hip. Drink was doing its work, blurring their faces. ‘Oh, fuck, don’t I look rough,’ I heard one of the women whisper to herself, as I entered the ladies to find her painting the puffy canvas; it was a glimpse of the horror of ageing, when its measure was nothing more than one’s changing reflection in the same mirror. Her eyes slid across me like lizards. I had never liked serving these people, and was gladder than ever not to be doing it.

  Back at the saloon counter where I was sitting with a friend, I turned to blow smoke into the air and saw, actually saw, the moment of the car keys being thrown into the ashtray. A myth in action; I nearly said as much. Then I saw the identical expression on each man and woman’s face, a perfect blend of excitement and boredom, and imagined the comments the following night, whispered into a chosen ear. ‘She’s a bit of a girl, blimey, isn’t she.’ ‘He had a bit of trouble, I’m afraid, in the downstairs department.’ The pub had always shown adulthood to me as many-textured, worth the wait. These people made it into – what? A series of kicks against decline and routine. I had known as much, really, but now I felt it.

  So what, exactly, had been hallowed about it all? It had been life, no more, no less. That was the pub. It had never claimed to be anything else.

  And life was different now: as was I, but it wasn’t just me. The accretions of atmosphere were being slowly dispersed. There were still times when they merged and danced in the old way – parties, evenings that took flight because enough of the right people were present, evenings that became exhilarating and silly and lost in themselves – but all too often they refused, for the simple reason that the pub no longer meant what it once had. Its congregation was turning up, but without the faith. The world to which it belonged was changing; therefore even if the pub itself stayed the same – which this one did, sandwiches notwithstanding – it would still, inevitably, change because it was a performance, a mirage, vulnerable because dependent upon something it could not entirely control: the willingness to suspend disbelief.

  Of course as a child I had seen visions of wonder in the fairy-grotto dazzle of the counter, and an infinite magic in the softene
d light of the bars. Had I been older I would have seen them differently; how differently, I cannot know. I know that I didn’t imagine a place so full that one could scarcely move, the plenitude on offer, the laughter that cracked the air like thunder. Those were real, although I hallowed them. How much, again, I can’t know. But memories are not only what one remembers, they are the way in which one remembers. When I think of the pub, as I knew it in childhood, the chambers of my memory instantly fill with gold; and that, therefore, is the truth of how it was. I was a spectator at the great production created by my grandmother, and like the people who saw Olivier’s Richard III or Nijinsky’s Derby, I am defined, in part, by the memory.

  And after all, is it not in the nature of the pub to think of it elegiacally, to hallow it above its logical deserving, to shape it for the past even as one lives in its present? ‘What things have we seen done at the Mermaid.’ Francis Beaumont wrote that to Ben Jonson in the same spirit as my grandmother talked about the old pub, and as I now recall hers in its glory days. What is meant by it is as fluid and elusive as life itself. All I know is that I was lucky.

  It was remarkable that my grandmother, who was so alert to every nuance of behaviour in her customers, did not see what was coming in her own life.

  A year or so after the introduction of food, which by then was a daily norm no more vexing than a low-level hangover, she went out for an evening with Victor. This now happened far less often. Trips to London, usually to Harrods beauty salon and thence to the food hall, were managed by my mother. It still amazed my grandmother that she could not park on Bond Street or ‘just pull up’ outside the Sea Shell on Lisson Grove. Her loyalty to Wheeler’s had been superseded by a passion for Langan’s Brasserie, which was indeed very smart and buzzy in those days, and to which we would go en famille for birthdays. By degrees, Victor had been absenting himself from the more feminised scene of the pub; it seemed that he had no desire to recline in the sitting-room armchair, amid thick drifts of steam and the sound of strained womanly banter; nor did he want to sit in his familiar place at the saloon counter inhaling vinaigrette. He sometimes turned up near closing time, for a Guinness and a short walk with Tom, whom he adored (as did everybody except the deadly lunchers). Then as the pub finally cleared he went off again. I hardly noticed this reduced presence because he would have seemed so out of place anyway: a eunuch in a pinafored harem.

  His evening with my grandmother was not in London but at a pub a few miles away, which like so many had been run by a couple of her friends. Now their son had taken over. Full of the zest of youth, he had crossed the chasm and was offering dinner to his customers. My grandmother was extremely keen to see this in action, but the evening was not as expected: it ended in an almighty row because Victor had made a fuss, to this poor novice restaurateur, about the cooking of his steak (he was a rare-meat fetishist). He dropped my grandmother at the pub and drove straight home. My parents were there – locum publicans for the night – and to them she expressed, in her typically forceful yet meandering way, a mixture of fury, embarrassment and fundamental boredom about the whole strange incident.

  Not long afterwards she went on holiday, staying with friends in the Algarve, while Irene, Victor and Sally looked after the pub. When she returned it was to the news that Victor had asked Sally to marry him.

  I don’t think that my grandmother minded; not at all. If anything, I think that she was relieved – she had far too high an opinion of herself to feel slighted – and in retrospect there was no surprise about what had happened. ‘Oh dear,’ I heard her saying to Irene. ‘Poor old Sally, she was worried to death … Her poor face peering at me when she asked if I was all right about it … oh dear, oh dear. Well, he’s got a few quid – decent sort of house – she’s not done too badly …’ It seemed to me – because I was getting a little better at these things – that Victor had been waiting nearly forty years for his revenge upon my grandmother, who had turned him down but kept him around, had wanted him but only on her own terms. He had truly appreciated her: that was beyond all doubt. I found myself thinking that he should have carried on appreciating her, for what she was, on whatever basis, instead of seeking a cosy little set-up with a banal wife fifteen years his junior and floating islands every night. Irene shared my view, rather angrily; that too I perceived. Beneath her acidity she was good to my grandmother. The bond between them was impregnable, far more than whatever had existed with Victor. Irene was family, when all was said and done, and family was at the heart of my grandmother’s belief system: it was because of her father that she believed so unquestioningly in the pub. The tumour that had begun to rattle inside Irene’s lung would cause her far more anguish, over the next year or so, than Victor’s late-life bid for autonomy. A few months later he returned to the pub, without Sally and with an air of urbanity that he did not quite carry off; I saw my grandmother watch as he buried his papery face for a few moments in Tom’s neck. She herself was blithe, fond, quite perfect. She was always able to accept when things were over; that too was part of her genius.

  What I found oddest was not that Victor had turned the tables on my grandmother, because I didn’t really think that he had. The true reversal was in my grandmother’s role, which – as with any true publican – had always been that of observer. Now, for the first time in my life, she was the story, the person whom she would have discussed with rigorous zeal with Irene in the kitchen. ‘Well, she never really wanted him, else she’d have married him, wouldn’t she.’ ‘Well, he fancied a nice little wife, someone to look after him I suppose, didn’t he.’ ‘Well, she was always on the lookout, eyeing up all those men who came in to lunch, wasn’t she.’ Did other people talk about her in those terms? I found the idea shocking, an affront to the natural order. Even now I find myself protecting her. I remind myself, console myself, that very few customers would have known the nature of her relationship with Victor, which over the years had become ever more detached and imprecise. I did once hear her talking to somebody about this sudden marriage of his, but she was in fact lamenting the loss of Sally – ‘My lovely cook, my wonderful waitress! What am I going to do without her?’

  And indeed Sally, then Irene, then all the customers who succumbed at last to a duller reality, did prove impossible to replace.

  I’m not sure that my grandmother gave the pub a backward glance as she walked into the car park with Tom in her arms, leopard-print coat streaming behind her, and got into my mother’s car. It was a brisk day in early spring. Also in the car were cardboard boxes packed with the paraphernalia from the sitting room: the decanters, with the silver tags slung about their necks engraved with the words ‘whisky’ and ‘brandy’; the heavy tumblers and the bottles of good booze; the Schweppes soda siphon the Royal Albert; the records of Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington, Brenda Lee, Timi Yuro. At her feet was her blue tin box full of make-up and a bottle of champagne, which we drank that evening.

  I had visited the pub a couple of times beforehand and run my hands along every possible inch of the brick and stone. I remember particularly the rough yet comforting feel of the wall along the landing, where I now had to stoop, and then the fat humid heat of the pink and marble bathroom. I remember everything, or so it seems to me, which comes to the same thing. Most of all I remember the settles, pulled away from the wall for the first time in almost forty years, leaving a complexity of spiders’ webs from which hung catkins of cigarette ash. They stood in the middle of the bars with an air of obedient displacement, their ebony backs gleaming dully in the triangles of natural light, waiting to be taken to auction and thence to who knows.

  Soon after my grandmother’s move into my parents’ house, there was a further change in the laws relating to drinking. It was no longer compulsory for pubs to close in the afternoons: for those that wished to remain open, the light-and-shade separation between matinée and evening was over. ‘Christ, I’m well out of that,’ she said, dealing the cards smartly for a hand of solo.

  She was seve
nty by this time, and had spent most of what she had earned at the pub. She was intensely respectful of my father’s money, without which I have no idea what would have happened to her. She never exactly displayed gratitude, however, and he certainly never sought it: he liked her too much. She paid for her keep, anyway. The large bedroom that she used is still filled with her white and gold furniture (with the leopard-print coat hanging in the wardrobe, a thin ridge of Estée Lauder foundation hardened at the neck), and the photographs from the old pub hang on the wall. She watched television in the room, with Tom by her side, absorbing anomalous hours of Ironside. She went shopping with my mother, spending the few thousands that had been invested for her. And as if without volition she transformed the house into an approximation of the pub: card games and drinks and worldly stories punctuated with ‘oo-ers’, decanters and glasses arranged once more on a cabinet in the sitting room, music swooping and swelling from the gramophone in the kitchen. She acquired a taste for sherry, and poured herself a wineglassful at around midday. Every Saturday she would try to persuade my brother, a high-level rugby player, that he should join her before going off to his match, as sherry would warm his blood for the scrum. She was still the hostess, unable to be otherwise. If a man came to read the meter, she would chuck an entire packet of biscuits impatiently onto a plate, longing to serve in that powerful old way. If friends or family visited, she let loose her personality with a kind of vast sigh. She longed, always, for an occasion to rise to, and she would fashion one out of almost nothing: a trip to the supermarket or the doctor.

  I no longer lived at home, but when I visited we might go out to a pub that she had once known – ‘Oh, this was old Joyce and Ray’s, oh tsk, oh dear’ – and that had been transmuted into something fit for the modern world. For some time, her famous presence could send publicans into a bustle of hysteria. At one establishment the food arrived on the table, and it transpired that a couple of orders for chips had been forgotten; no matter, said the proprietor, I’ll get them for you; a couple of minutes later he returned, sweating as one newly released from a sauna, holding in front of his apron a deep-fat fryer from which he shook chips directly on to the plates. As time went on, however, the anxious old publicans disappeared. It became accepted that what had been a pub was now a restaurant, an informal and no worries kind of place, a not-quite-home in which Reeboks could be worn and children could squawk. Aspirational had embraced casual: what one might call a Blairite ethos.