Behind her, seated at one of the tables, a middle-aged woman was talking softly to an older man. Laurie had noticed them when she came in because the woman had been having some difficulty in helping the man into a chair. He was walking with two sticks and was clearly nervous about letting go of them. The woman had to guide him so that he was standing in front of the chair with his back to it, then she had pulled away the walking-sticks and gravity had let him fall safely onto the seat of the chair. Now she was leaning over the table holding his hand. Laurie couldn’t hear everything she was saying, but she was obviously trying to reassure him. Laurie heard her say, “I’ll only be five minutes, I promise,” and then she pushed her chair back and got up from the table. The man’s face was completely impassive, but he let out a little moan.
Laurie got down from the bar stool. “Excuse me,” she said. The woman turned to her. “Would you like me to keep an eye on him?”
The woman looked surprised. “That’s very kind of you.”
“It’s no trouble,” Laurie said. “I work in a hospital.”
“He’s my father. He had a stroke last year,” the woman said. “He’s fine, just a bit shaky on his legs.”
“I’ll take care of him.”
“You’re very kind. I’m just going to the loo. I won’t be long. He can’t talk, but he can understand everything.” She put her hand on the man’s shoulder. “Can’t you?” The man stared blankly ahead of him.
Laurie sat down in the woman’s chair and watched her leave the bar. The man looked as if he was trying to turn his head to see. He made a throaty sound. She touched his hand. “I’ll take care of you, honey,” she said, then after a second she added, “I’m Laurie.”
The man was still looking straight ahead. His eyes were watery. On his cheek, just below the hairline, there was a little patch of shaving foam that whoever had shaved him had missed.
“Honey, you’ve got a … you know, a …” Laurie couldn’t think what to call it, so she turned the side of her face towards him and patted her cheek “… shaving thing.” Now she had got used to his face, she realized it was just his eyes that showed any expression. She picked up a napkin and wiped the foam off his cheek. They sat in silence for a moment and then she said, “I’m American, I come from northern California. A place called Modesto.” She thought she saw movement in his eyes. She smiled. “People say we’ve got a lot to be modest about in Modesto.” He let out a moan, not of pain but an answering kind of moan. “I’m heading back there,” she said. He blinked. “Would you like me to read to you?” she asked him. She pulled the first Hayseed book out of her bag. “This was written by a friend of mine,” she said. She held up the cover so he could see it, then opened it at the beginning and began: “ ‘When you were young, or maybe not so long ago, not very far from where you live, or perhaps a little closer, Luke Hayseed lived in a big old house …’ ”
The martini seemed to have softened her voice, taken the grate out of it. As she read, the man made a light, low noise like a distant aeroplane. It was as if he was humming along to the words.
Arthur and Martha
Arthur and Martha’s flat on Shaftesbury Avenue was the second place they had lived since they were married. As chance would have it, it was not much more than a hundred yards from the corner where Arthur was to be mown down by a lorry over twenty-five years later. The block was called Alleyne House and the entrance was between an off-licence and an Italian restaurant from which, when they had something to celebrate, Arthur would order dinner for them and carry it up to their flat on the first floor.
The place they used to have off Gloucester Road had been too small and too damp, and anyway, after three years there, Martha’s relationship with their Polish landlord, who lived on the floor above them, had deteriorated to such an extent that their days were clearly numbered. The final acrimonious row about the state of what Martha called “the aptly named common parts” had resulted in a trail of smelly refuse being accidentally deposited outside their front door every time Mr. Bubek took his rubbish to the bins in the basement. On the day they finally left the flat, Martha had posted a representative selection of the garbage through Mr. Bubek’s letterbox, along with the last week’s rent and the keys.
The Shaftesbury Avenue flat had been Terry Tringham’s: he had had a lease on it, and it was he who suggested they might take it over. Arthur and Martha knew the flat, but not very well. When they met Terry, it tended to be at the Sphinx, or at one of his regular pub haunts in Soho. The flat seemed to be reserved for the microscopic portion of his life that revolved around his wife Eileen and their three children. Eileen had been a script girl—they had met when they both worked on the last film that Wally Carter had done before going to America—and had married as soon as the divorce from Terry’s first wife, Liz, had come through because Eileen was already pregnant. Arthur had been their best man.
Martha and Arthur had been to the flat a few times for parties, normally drunken end-of-shoot affairs, and had had dinner there occasionally when Terry and Eileen were having one of their periodic attempts to pretend that their lives were not in freefall. These awkward domestic evenings involved grubby, crying children who would not have their bath or would not go to bed, who wanted to be read to not by the parent who was offering to read to them but by the parent who was opening another bottle of wine or trying to pull the disparate elements of the meal into some kind of order.
At some point during one of these evenings, several things might happen: Eileen might leave the table when they sat down to eat and never return, or she might leave the table when they sat down to eat and return a few minutes later with tears on her face or a sleepy child in her arms. At some point before or after her departure there might be a sudden electrical charge in the air that seemed to cause a wine glass to tip over or a chair to fall backwards.
But whatever happened during one of those evenings, the outcome tended to be the same. At a certain point, sometimes during the meal or sometimes after it, sometimes with Eileen in the room or sometimes not, Terry would say, “Fuck it! Let’s go to the club. Come on,” and stand up, groping for his cigarettes and matches among the mess on the table.
If Martha suggested that she stay behind with Eileen while Terry and Arthur went out, Eileen would have none of it. She was tired, she had to do the washing, she wanted to tidy the flat, the baby might need changing, she wanted to go to bed. She would argue so vociferously against Martha staying that it seemed as if, out of all the possible unsatisfactory outcomes of the evening for her, that was the most unsatisfactory of all. Finally, as they were putting their coats on to go out, Terry might say, “Domestic bliss, dear,” then give what passed for a wry laugh that echoed down the gloomy stairwell as they went downstairs.
Despite, or because of, the eventual messy disentanglement of the marriage and Terry’s offhand disposal of the children to various grandparents and relations when it became clear that Eileen would have to stay in what everyone euphemistically called the Nursing Home for the foreseeable future, Terry became his old self again. After a few drinks had loosened him up he would sometimes describe his wife as being a few pages short of the full script, but Eileen’s story, which he dismissed so casually, had somehow lodged itself deep inside Arthur. He could not help wondering if those pages had ever been there in the first place or if they had been slowly torn out, one by one, by Terry’s drinking and violence and casual infidelities.
Terry had been offered the job of production manager on a film to be shot on location in Kenya. He would be away for four months and he had decided to look for a new and cheaper place when he returned. The Kenya job, which he had originally turned down because it sounded too much like hard work, had begun to seem like an attractive option: he had been receiving an increasing number of aggressive letters from the tax man questioning the earnings he had been declaring over the last couple of years; there was the potentially lethal husband of one of his girlfriends, whose anger over the affair seemed to be t
urning away from his wife in the direction of Terry. Being out of the country for a while might solve the problems: he took the job.
Despite their long friendship, Terry drove a hard bargain: to sign over the lease to Arthur he wanted key money and he refused to budge on the amount. There was no shortage of people—Martha included—telling Arthur that it was at least twice what it ought to have been, but nobody could offer a practical way to get Terry to reduce the price. Left to himself, Arthur might have withdrawn from the whole thing, not just because of the money but because the flat seemed tainted by what had gone on there between Terry and Eileen. But Martha, despite appearing to believe that the problem lay less with Terry’s intransigence than with Arthur’s inability to force down the key money, seemed so keen on it, had become so uncharacteristically positive about its perceived virtues—how central it was, how easy it would be to redecorate, how it might be a new start for them—that Arthur opted for the simplest solution: he agreed to pay Terry’s price.
They had already made major inroads into Arthur’s savings—of the two scripts he had been working on one had been rejected, leaving him only with the fee that had been paid on signature of the contract, and the other had been through so many rewrites that he despaired of ever getting the acceptance payment. One afternoon, without telling Martha, he had taken their secondhand Ford Consul down to a garage in Vauxhall and, after a short discussion over the price that only the most generous-spirited would have called a negotiation, sold it for a great deal less than it was worth. After accepting the money with as much dignity as he could muster, he felt he had at least achieved his purpose: he was returning home with a pocketful of soiled notes that made up the deficit of the key money Terry was demanding.
Martha took the loss of the car without complaint. Anyway, there would be no shortage of public transport near the new flat : from dawn onwards, buses rattled along Shaftesbury Avenue right under the sitting-room window. The truth was, they rarely drove the car now. They used to go sometimes to Linton to see Arthur’s father at the weekend, a journey that filled Arthur with dread at the thought of the gloomy, cold house and his gloomy, cold father, but curiously turned Martha into a friskier version of her usual self—pottering around in the garden, trying to make jam from the fruit on the scrawny raspberry canes, taking meals up on trays to Arthur’s father, who rarely left his bed even though there appeared to be nothing specifically wrong with him—but they could take the train if they had to go.
The morning they left Gloucester Road, Arthur had arranged for a couple of the props boys from Elstree to bring a van early and move their furniture to the new flat. At Bermondsey Market, when they’d first got married, he and Martha had bought a Victorian double bed, which was taken down to the van first. A set of dining-room chairs and the desk he had had as a child went next. When they were about to leave, after the last pieces had gone into the van—the kitchen table and utensils, two armchairs, and three or four packing cases filled with books—and after Martha had delivered the garbage through Mr. Bubek’s letterbox, she and Arthur stood for a moment on the curb, gazing forlornly at the possessions they had accrued in their three years of married life, huddled together at the far end of the large, empty van.
“That it? Is that all?” said one of the lads, Barry. “Only I could have brought the smaller van, couldn’t I? Had to get the big one specially.”
“Well, there are some suitcases with our clothes,” Arthur said. He had carried them downstairs himself. They stood next to him on the pavement.
Barry gave a hollow laugh. “Just as well we brought the big van, then.”
“We are going to pay you, you know,” Martha said pleasantly, but with a slight edge to her voice.
“Not complaining,” the other lad, Ray, added huffily. “Easier for us, isn’t it?” he said, exchanging a glance with Barry.
The day, which had begun so full of hope, had already started to lose its lustre. Martha and Arthur sat in silence in the back of a cab as they followed Barry and Ray’s van along Piccadilly to the new flat. Once they were there, the day deteriorated further. As soon as Arthur opened the door—he had gone up there first after picking up the key from the caretaker—he knew there was a problem. It wasn’t just the smell, sweet and sickly and overlaid with decay, but the chaos Terry had left behind. There had been no specific discussion about it, but Arthur had assumed he would leave the flat more or less ready for them to move in. He wasn’t expecting spotless—he knew Terry too well for that—but he hadn’t expected Terry to have simply abandoned his life on the bare floorboards of a flat that was no longer his.
Arthur moved up the corridor, peering into the rooms that led off it—two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a sitting room—with an increasing sense of panic. The flat looked as if it had been rather inefficiently looted. Squashed cardboard boxes and slats from wooden crates were scattered across the floor. The carpet had been taken up, but patches of it were left behind where the nails holding it had been driven too strongly into the floor. In the kitchen there were dirty pots and pans in the sink; the gas cooker was covered with black, burned-on food. It was in the kitchen, too, that the smell was strongest: the fridge appeared to have been unplugged. Arthur put his handkerchief over his nose and opened it. There were bottles of milk, which had turned yellow and solid; open cans of Spam and corned beef were going rusty. A half-eaten tin of baked beans lay on its side dripping orange gunk. In the sitting room a chair with only two legs lay alongside a broken table that might have been chopped up for firewood. On the floor an empty goldfish bowl was turned on its side, with a selection of battered children’s toys and books around it. There were piles of newspapers and magazines everywhere. Spilling out of a cardboard box under the window, some white cards were crisp and bright against the stained floorboards. Arthur bent down and picked one up: they were unused invitations to Terry and Eileen’s wedding ten years before.
He could hear Martha’s footsteps coming into the flat. She made a breathy “Ohh” sound, and her feet quickened as she ran up the corridor. “Arthur!” she shouted, and then again, “Arthur!” She came into the sitting room. She did not cry often, but Arthur always became tense when she did. A feeling of powerlessness would sweep over him like an icy wave. He tried to take her in his arms, but she maneuvered herself out.
“It’s spoiled!” she shouted, her eyes flicking round the desolate room. “Terry’s spoiled it for us!” She brushed past him and went across the corridor to the kitchen.
“We could—”
She came back, kicking a broken tricycle out of her way, her hand over her mouth and nose. “We could what, Arthur?” she screamed, through clenched teeth. “We could do what?” She banged her fist on the wall.
He was still holding one of the wedding invitations. We could call Terry, he had been going to say, but he remembered that Terry had already gone. The other night, while Martha was out, the phone had rung. It was Terry calling on a ship-to-shore line that crackled so much Arthur could only catch some of what he was saying. “High seas, dear,” he kept shouting. “I’m on the high seas. On my way to the Dark Continent.” There was something Terry wanted him to pick up from somewhere, and as his voice ebbed and flowed, Arthur gradually understood it was a package he wanted delivered to his girlfriend, but what the package was or where the girlfriend could be found never came down the line with any clarity. Finally, Terry disappeared and Arthur was left with the receiver transmitting a sound that mimicked the echoey sea noise of a conch shell.
Martha had turned her face to the wall and was sobbing. A clatter came from down the corridor: Barry and Ray had begun to bring in the furniture. There was a bang as they tried to get the heavy bed through the front door, then a flurry of argument as they tried to decide which way round it should go. Barry came into the sitting room. Martha turned her back so he wouldn’t see her crying. “Where’s the bed going?” he said. Arthur saw a thought flit across Barry’s face. “This is Mr. Tringham’s flat, isn’t it?
”
“It’s ours now,” Arthur said, more loudly than he had meant to. Martha gave a hollow laugh and went into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. “The bed,” Arthur said, “on the left there. In the bedroom.”
But Barry wasn’t listening: he was smiling to himself. “Ray!” he called. “This is Mr. Tringham’s old flat. You remember that wrap party, the one where he got that girl to do the funny dance?” A roar of laughter echoed up the corridor from Ray. “What a state this place is in! When did Mr. Tringham move out? Looks like there’ve been burglars.”
“Excuse me,” Arthur said. He crossed the corridor and opened the kitchen door.
Martha was leaning out of an open window taking great gulps of air. Her arms were tightly folded across her chest as if she was trying to hold something in. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said. “We can go to an hotel.”
Arthur nodded. He was thinking of the key money he had paid Terry and the acceptance payment on the script that hadn’t been accepted.
Then she said, “I can’t live like this anymore.”
The icy wave that had engulfed Arthur when Martha started to cry closed over his head. His heart was racing. He wished she had moved her hands when she’d said the words, had gestured with them to indicate she might be talking about the state of the flat, but they had stayed folded and she had been very still as she had spoken.
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