New World in the Morning

by Stephen Benatar

  “Darling, it’s going to be all right, don’t worry,” I said. “Yes, all of it! I love you, Junie Moon.”

  10

  And I slept well. I awoke at half-past-six feeling refreshed and practically as optimistic as on the day before. Drew back the curtains to discover another bright sky, then immediately ran downstairs to take a look at Susie. She appeared inert but her breathing was less laboured. She really was on the road to recovery. I squatted and stroked and spoke to her as normal because although I naturally expected no reaction it would have seemed like betraying a trust if I hadn’t, and of course I hoped some emanation from my words and actions might be reaching her. I carried on our conversation as I filled the kettle. I doused my face in cold water. Then, buoyantly impulsive, I walked into the garden and had a long pee on the grass. It was the first time I’d ever done this and it made me feel romantically close to nature, standing there erect and naked in the early morning sun and watching my urine arch like a fountain from some Greek or Roman statue, shoot up prismatically before it frothed among the daisies; and if anyone in either of the next-door houses had happened to be looking from an upper window…well, just too bad. Or just too good: let them, for once, set eyes upon a real man. Waiting for the kettle to whistle I meandered round the garden; savouring the dew beneath my feet and the air between my loins. I did a few physical jerks, defiantly facing those same neighbouring windows: toe-touching, running on the spot, swivelling at the waist—with legs apart and arms in line with shoulders. I’d have done more but then the whistling came. I made the tea, put a couple of Petit Beurre on each of our saucers, was careful not to slop as I returned upstairs, and, having wiped my soles on the carpet, got exuberantly back into bed. I hadn’t bothered to take anything to the children; it wasn’t yet seven. As usual, Junie only properly came to whilst drinking her tea but even so she’d instantly asked about Susie and been relieved by what I’d told her. I fetched us both refills, despite not really wanting mine nor drinking more than half, made love to her (“What, first thing on a Monday morning!” she’d exclaimed, laughing)—and to a count of eight hundred and seventeen—then went to shave and have my bath. A perfect start to a second, potentially, perfect day…although, obviously, blocking out that bloody motorist and the effect of his swift uncaring passage through our lives. I wondered if he were feeling any remorse.

  Yes, it had to be a ‘he’. I found it impossible to believe that a woman wouldn’t have stopped.

  Reclining in my bath I thought about the possible openings to today’s entry. This morning I peed naked in the back garden and frightened the horseflies…? No. Perhaps not.

  I arrived at the shop a minute before nine. Mavis didn’t work on Mondays. Until high season she came in only on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. But at five-past-nine I rang her. Knowing she’d be up. Knowing she’d be worrying about her empty bank account. Basically, she was always worrying about her empty bank account. Or, more exactly, about the doleful insecurity of a probably loveless future.

  “You’re saying,” she repeated, “the whole week? Five days? Already?” She had a breathy voice. Her emissions fairly aspirated down the line.

  “Six, if you like.”

  “But, Mr G, you can’t afford it—not fulltime—you know you can’t! Not as early as this!”

  “Here,” I said. “You let me go bananas over my finances and I’ll let you go bananas over yours! Wouldn’t it be useful?”

  “Breathlessly.” This didn’t seem totally the right word but I felt glad to hear her say it. “And apart from the money you know how much I enjoy just being around.”

  “Great. Then when will you start? This morning?”

  “You really mean it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then I can be with you in thirty minutes! Or twenty, if you’re planning to go somewhere…?”

  “No, no, take your time. Why not come in after lunch and we’ll count it as a full day?”

  It occurred to me afterwards that I could simply have doubled her wages. But she might have viewed this as blatant charity and, besides, it gave her pleasure to be here—hadn’t she just said so? Got her out of the house. Provided escape from a querulous, demanding mum.

  And she’d have been coming in fulltime from the beginning of July, anyway. So if her wages became a problem then, rather than now, what difference did it make?

  Moreover, it had seemed the proper thing to do…and doubtless we’d survive. Live every day as though your last. Commit yourself, unreservedly.

  It was like when you’d been the captain of a team and your eleven or fifteen players had all relied completely on your judgment. Now I had a crew of only four: Junie, Ella, Matt and Mavis. A tiny ship but for all hands, hopefully, a happy and secure one; responsibly navigated.

  Four people and a dog.

  Partly thinking about this, I walked slowly up and down our central aisle, renewing my acquaintance with the stock, picking up several objects at random, speculating on their history; studying a daguerreotype taken at the Great Exhibition; experiencing, as usual, pleasurably mixed feelings, an awareness of the transience of life but also a strong sense of sharing and connection.

  And this morning, too, for the second time, a boy’s catapult suddenly bore me back to childhood: to the remembered sunlight and long country days—to the big adventures and subconscious knowledge of my always being protected—to a stream where I’d gone fishing, the warm smell of a bakery long since closed.

  This morning, in addition, I saw the shop through someone else’s eyes. Moira had been here. Her feet had trodden this drugget, her eyes had seen these pictures—these paintings not only suspended from the walls but stacked against the skirting boards—seen the books, clothes, records, furniture; the glass-topped cases displaying jewellery, medals, coins; the various tables strewn with all the clutter of forgotten lives. Between the tables ran a network of passageways. Moira had traversed them all. Now I threaded them myself and imagined that this—consolidated by my present line of empathy—drew me closer to her.

  Of course, I was drawing closer in another sense. Only five days before she’d be coming back to Deal!

  Only?

  At half-past-twelve I rang home. Wanting to know what Mr Dodd had said.

  “In fact, he sounded rather hopeful. Susie’s drunk a little milk and eaten a few scraps of meat and she knew the garden was the right place to do her business. And she remembers where it is, too—I mean, on the other side of the back door. Also it’s obvious she can recognize her name. Mr Dodd seemed really pleased.”

  Oh, hadn’t I said! Hadn’t I said! I swivelled on my office chair and—free of the table on which the telephone rested—held my legs out straight and clicked my heels in celebration. “Where is she now?”

  “Back in her basket. She’s still a bit whiffy, though. Will you be able to bath her?”

  “You bet! There’s a meeting of the Players tonight but I can bath her before supper.”

  “Did you like your sandwiches?”

  “I’m sure they’ll be wonderful.”

  I always said Junie’s sandwiches were as varied, inventive and well-filled as the finest New York deli’s… although I often wished I’d been in a position actually to check. Neither she nor I had ever travelled further than Europe. Europe in the company of the clan.

  “Ambrosia on wholemeal,” I added now, conservatively. I used an American accent.

  “I’ve started on the wallpapering.”

  I still found that incredible: both oddly discomfiting and oddly reassuring. “Great,” I said. “I look forward to seeing it.”

  “Just don’t expect too much. I’m only a beginner.”

  “I’m only a little lamb, sir.” Tales of Toytown…passed on to me by my parents.

  “Well, I suppose I’d better let you go. I think I’ll stop and have some lunch, as well. You mustn’t worry about Susie.”

  Mavis came in soon afterwards. She was a large unwieldy type of woman who
affected a girlish manner but had a genuinely sweet expression which declared her both eager and easy to please. Yet she had absolutely no dress sense and more than a smattering of facial hair. She was only in her forties—I didn’t understand how anyone could be so careless. I suspected she was lesbian. I had taken her over with the shop some twelve years previously, when—with the aid of a loan from Lloyds, where up till then I’d still been working—I had managed to buy the business.

  Now, mercifully, that loan had been repaid.

  “Mr G,” she said, “you are the best boss ever! Did you know that? I shall write to the papers to suggest a nationwide survey: Boss of the Year Award! Presentation dinner at the Dorchester.” (And to keep me going until then, bless her heart, she had brought me a large bar of Cadbury’s Fruit-and-Nut.)

  Well!

  Yesterday, Uncle of the Year.

  Today, Boss.

  Tomorrow? Husband, Father or—hey, now!—how about the relevant body trying this one on for size? Lover?

  Or should I settle all-inclusively—perhaps a shade more modestly—for Man? Who cared about specifics?

  Anyhow, as a foretaste of this greater glory Mavis had also brought me a rum baba, to eat with my sandwiches. (She liked to dole out her surprises one at a time: something I could well appreciate, since I often did the same, both at home and in the shop.) She was ebullient and this fact alone, even more than the chocolate or the baba or the Dorchester award—no, actually we had decided on the Ritz—provided ample justification for what had been, after all, a mainly impetuous phone call.

  But I had learned from experience about the danger of not acting when the spirit moved. The road from Deal, I’d used to claim, would be paved with good intentions. Such a copout. As far as I was concerned, the road from Deal would now be paved with nothing but ordinary asphalt—and the road from Deal could like it! No future tense permissible.

  With this in mind, I made out two cheques during the afternoon, one for the homeless and one for disease-prone children in Africa. When later I popped out to the post office, I left the shop hard on the heels of three old ladies who had paused to rearrange their headgear and didn’t realize I was right behind. “What a delightful young man! My dears, don’t you wish there were a few more like him in this world?” I ducked back through the door and was sure they hadn’t noticed. But I think I must have blushed.

  Returning from the post office, driven by impulse, I made a detour into the small old-time stationer’s around the corner. That journal. At home I’d found a book which—though it dated back to school—hadn’t ever been used and was moderately substantial. But, unsurprisingly, it was a bit scruffy. It seemed to me now that perhaps this brand-new project deserved as much respect as this brand-new fellow who aimed to make it so reflectively his own.

  And almost at once I saw something in Ramsey &Whittaker’s that my heart could leap up and respond to.

  It was a tooled leather book in green, thick enough to contain an average-sized novel—say, Catcher in the Rye or For Whom the Bell Tolls—the tops of its pages gloriously gilt-edged. And it was shockingly expensive. But an objet d’art, I told myself, which might either end up as an heirloom or else as a channel for communicating truths to strangers; in both cases making it possible that the best of me, the zest of me, would survive. Something compact, something a person could easily hold in one hand, something which in years to come—whether in two or two hundred—would tell the world that I had once been here and what my being here had meant to me. A unique record. Unique testimony. If it were ever to be published, it might ensure that I could still make friends, share my experience of this otherwise impermanent existence, give my life importance, long after I was dead.

  Besides. Whereas on the one hand I could always have it near me, even on my deathbed, this precious distillation, this gilt-edged memorial—on the other, if I suppressed my current instinct, I’d soon lose track of the money I had saved, might even end my days regretting it, such a very small form of saving. Clichéd but true: with us ordinary individuals it was the things we didn’t do which had the greater power to nag.

  So I took a breath and clutched the book and bore it to the counter.

  When I got home that evening (with an attractively chunky bracelet for Ella, since, whether or not Matt had spoken of his ten pounds, one obviously had to do one’s best to equalize), when I got home that evening I was fervently hoping that Susie would come ambling—at least ambling—around the side of the house to greet me. But, no, as I walked into the kitchen she remained leaden in her basket, awake but not raising her head. She had eaten her supper, however, and had apparently spent a good part of her day in the garden, though often only blundering across the flowerbeds and even crashing through the shrubs to stand there with her muzzle pressed against the wall—just staring at the brickwork until such time as she was turned around and so could lumber off mechanically towards the subsequent obstruction.

  I stroked her now for several minutes without obtaining much response.

  “Perhaps Mr Dodd was right,” said Junie, as I stood propped against the Aga with my ritual glass of Martini, “when he thought in the first place it might be kinder just to have her put to sleep.”

  “No. He wasn’t right. Nothing about it would have been right.”

  “Oh, Mum, we can’t,” cried Ella. “We can’t!”

  “In any case,” I said, “it’s still very early days. We’ve got to give her a fair chance.”

  I went to look at Junie’s wallpapering; called from the landing with unfeigned admiration; then stripped down to my shorts and returning to the kitchen carried Susie to her bath, which I’d already prepared. Normally, knowing all too well what lay ahead, she put up a good deal of resistance, but this evening she let herself be borne upstairs without even a token splaying of her legs. After that, she simply stood in the warm water and neither made any attempt to escape nor raised any objection to the shower attachment. As I applied the shampoo, I sang to her, songs like I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair, which perhaps didn’t seem incredibly appropriate unless the driver of the car were the man being referred to, and How much is that doggie in the window? which I hurried to point out didn’t mean we were looking for her replacement, merely harked back to a time when she had been that doggie in the window, all huge black patch and fluffy white fur, climbing over and tumbling around her much less frolicsome companions. Now she stood there in rigid acceptance (trembling as usual and as usual disconcertingly whippet-like beneath the rinsed, still dripping hair) but what was more normal, and therefore greatly reassuring, she afterwards ate with every appearance of enjoyment the handful of sweet biscuits that was always her reward for enduring bathtime, and also settled on the rug before the Aga to complete the drying-off process with an air at least of comprehension if not of actual contentment.

  I asked Matt to clean and disinfect the bath, a process which took nearly as long as the bathing itself, for at eight o’clock I needed to be at Ruth Minton’s. Tonight the Dover and District Players were to be reading and casting The Deep Blue Sea.

  In recent years I’d played in two other Rattigans: a small part in Separate Tables and a far larger one in The Browning Version. Indeed, my roles were getting better all the time and I’d found so much satisfaction in performing them that, until early on Sunday morning, this belated discovery of a real vocation had been turning into a probably very silly but certainly very serious regret.

  Yet now (it had suddenly come to me again while I was washing Susie) I didn’t believe any longer in belatedness, nor in the harbouring of regrets, either silly or serious.

  “Supposing I were to apply to RADA?” I asked Junie at supper. “It’s a dream, I know—madness even to mention it—but overlooking all of that, don’t you consider I possess the talent? I mean—just maybe. And the looks?”

  “Ha!” said Matt.

  “Pipe down. I’m talking to your mother.”

  “The looks for the Hunchback of Notre Da
me?” he suggested.

  Ella, though, was more encouraging. “Don’t listen to him, Daddy. I think that’s a pretty cool idea.”

  “Children, your father’s only joking,” announced my wife, wearily.

  “Half joking,” I amended. “Remember, every joke contains an element of truth.” I smiled at Ella, gave her a fond wink. I liked it when she called me Daddy, when she forgot to be acerbic. It was my handling of her which must so frequently have been misguided—tonight, she’d been delighted with the bracelet, touchingly pleased it hadn’t just come out of stock but had been chosen with great care at a jeweller’s in the High Street. (All right, this was a fabrication but one which had given an immense amount of pleasure; whatever I did, I must on no account forget to mention it to Mavis.) And I resolved to cultivate Ella’s friendship more assiduously than I feared had often been the case.

  “So how precisely would we live?” asked Junie.

  “Why, very much as we do now. You yourself could run the shop.” I was talking wholly impromptu but growing more and more convinced as I did so. “I don’t know why we’ve never thought of that before.”

  “Well, I do. I do! You’ve always told me you don’t approve of working wives. You’ve always said it’s the man who ought to earn the living.”

  “Just like I’ve always said it’s the man who ought to decorate the house.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then maybe I’ve been wrong. My God! Haven’t I just been shown some pretty overwhelming evidence?”

  “What! Can I quote you on that?” asked my son.

  “May I quote you on that? My young Matthias, I hope I never mind admitting if I’ve been at fault. Old-fashioned—anachronistic—whatever. I’m not always that bright. I make mistakes. I know I’m superficial. But people change. People do change. You’ve got to give me that.”

  He was pretending to write it down; using his tablemat as a reporter’s notepad. “What came after ‘not always that bright’? What came before ‘not always that bright’? I need to do you justice.”