Holiday

by Stanley Middleton

  ‘Could be. Are you?’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’ Her husband laughed.

  ‘I don’t know. Your wife showed Mrs Smith and myself up last night. She can run.’

  ‘Can she, by God?’ Hollies said. ‘She’ll be running away from me.’ He amused himself, nobody else, with a wry face. ‘I could go for a drink. How about it?’

  Fisher declined.

  ‘Tell you what, then,’ Hollies spoke expansively, doing the world a favour. ‘You keep my seat warm here with Lena while I go. Shan’t be half an hour.’

  ‘Perhaps your wife would . . .’

  ‘You don’t know her. That’s obvious. She’d as soon go in a church as in a pub at dinner time. You sit down. Keep her company.’

  Fisher did so, not pleased. Hollies pulled his jacket on, checked his pockets and stumped off.

  ‘Wouldn’t he have gone if I hadn’t arrived?’

  ‘Might.’

  ‘He enjoys himself.’

  ‘I’ll say this for him. He’ll stop only for the half hour. But he’ll pour beer into himself. And he’ll spend the whole afternoon trailing back and forward, back and forward to the urinals.’

  She passed Fisher a bag of fruit, from which he chose an apple.

  ‘He’s a man who knows his mind, I’d say. Sociable with it.’

  ‘More so now. When I first knew him, he was a devil for pushing his nose into an argument.’

  ‘You didn’t like that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But he was well-built. So he didn’t get into trouble. Now, at weekends they have a stripper, and they all sit staring.’

  ‘They don’t invite the ladies?’

  ‘No. Though some’d go.’

  ‘You don’t like the idea?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it myself, if that’s what you mean. But he does. All men’s the same. You would, I expect.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  She laughed, screwing up her eyes.

  ‘Have you never been to a strip-joint, then?’

  ‘No.’

  Slightly worried, she adjusted the hem of her dress.

  ‘How do you like that Mrs Smith, then? Sandra?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘She was setting her cap at you, you know. Last night.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  Mrs Hollies nodded, largely uglifying her face.

  ‘I bet she leads her husband a ta-ta.’

  ‘He seems a nice chap.’

  ‘Wet. Useful with the boys, which is more than you can say of my old man. But he’s got no go about him, no life. No nothing. I like a man who is a man. I’m not saying shouting and yelling his head off, but who lets you know he’s there.’

  ‘He’s too self-effacing?’ Fisher asked. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘You hadn’t time to notice much with milady playing you on.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ She mocked him exactly. ‘You want to watch her Mr Fisher.’

  By this time Mrs Hollies had completed a complicated operation involving starch-free biscuits, cheese-slices and tomatoes. Now she began to eat, carefully catching the crumbs in a paper serviette, edged with dim roses.

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ he said maliciously. She did not answer, but ate steadily, rather noisily, tongue licking lips clean.

  ‘I’m not blaming you,’ she said, dusting her hands. ‘it’s her. I known her sort. Different’s better. You’re married, aren’t you? Or have been?’ He nodded. ‘Your wife’s not here?’ Shook. ‘You know all about it. But I’ve seen her sort.’

  ‘Why don’t you like her?’

  The woman looked up, sharply, almost, he thought, ironically at the naive question, barely disguising a sneer, but not immediately answering.

  ‘I know her sort.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Fisher, ‘that you’re not judging her for anything she’s actually said or done, but that she reminds you of some people whom you consider disreputable, and you therefore think she’s something of that nature.’

  Mrs Hollies considered. She’d understood the question and grinned wickedly at Fisher’s impudent formality.

  ‘Was she nuzzling up to you behind that hut? On the sands? Rubbing her titties on your arm?’

  ‘Were you?’ he asked, sharp.

  She blushed, suddenly, redly, so that he felt ashamed, degraded.

  ‘I’d had one or two, but I didn’t go that far wrong,’ she said. Her voice was humorous, but he could not forget the little hot face. Malice with modesty. ‘I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy walking along clinging to a handsome young fellow.’

  ‘You flatter me.’

  ‘No, fair’s fair. And I could give you a better time than that little bit. But I know what you’d fancy. I don’t blame you.’

  ‘What would you say if I told you, Mrs Hollies, you surprised me?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  She held the fruit bag out again, and neatly took the core from his fingers to drop into a litter-box. Now she sat quite composed, enjoying herself.

  ‘You don’t mind my talking to you like this, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, then.’ She laughed, richly in her throat.

  ‘I thought you were a quiet little woman, under your husband’s thumb, so that you did surprise me last night.’

  Mrs Hollies returned to eating as if she needed time and mastication to deal with his statements. She finished another elaborate biscuit sandwich.

  ‘I like you, Mr Fisher. Not only in that way. There’s something about you I don’t always get. I’d give you a pound to a penny on what my Jack’d say or do at any time. But not you. What are you laughing at?’

  ‘Something you said last night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘About Jack?’ She fiddled again in a receptacle for a knife and a fruit tart. ‘I said he’d want his sex, didn’t I? And you wonder if we had it. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact . . .’

  ‘Well, we did. I don’t mind telling you. It’s a natural thing, and I don’t see why I should keep it secret. We enjoyed it.’

  ‘I see.’ Fisher looked away. Nearly naked sunbathers trotted or sprawled round him.

  ‘You think I’m dirty to tell you. You wouldn’t let on to me, would you?’

  ‘No. I don’t think I would.’

  ‘Not with your wife, even? I don’t mean Sandra.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, blowing sugar-grains from her lips, ‘we’re all made different. Wouldn’t do if we were all alike would it?’ Her voice changed; she had read his warning signal and prepared for generalities. She chatted about her home, its value, its deficiencies; she recalled the terrace in Woolwich where she’d been brought up; she sketched her father’s skill, her mother’s compulsion to work.

  Interesting as he found this, he guessed that she talked to win back favour, to excuse a moral lapse. He examined her. A few years back she’d have been pretty, but now she was thin, thinly lined, her bosom too large for the small, lively body. Her slender legs were well shaped, hairless, lightly tanned, those of a young woman. He could have stroked them. She recalled a rabbit she’d kept in a back-garden hutch, and a cat. Her neck stretched stringy, a tense bundle of nerves. Her fingers scraped skin off the air.

  Humming, nodding, he encouraged her reminiscence.

  When her husband returned, exactly on time, she became quiet, immersed in preparation of his meal. Embarrassed Fisher excused himself, wasted time in an expensive fish restaurant where silver knives and forks were heavy and the waitresses skipped in black frocks and lace caps. Free again, he sat on a bench in the street, picking up scraps of conversation.

  Thursday, now he strolled towards the Methodist Church where the iron gates were padlocked, and posters of scragribbed refugees faded in the sunshine. Thursday.

  When he was on holiday as a boy the first three days had passed slowly, but b
y Thursday time flew. Friday flashed a nothing. One bought presents; one ventured into the sea, but home, wash-day, errands reestablished themselves in the mind.

  Thursday, of a week at Bealthorpe, on the North Sea. Thursday on the German Ocean.

  Ye cannot serve God and Mammon (Matt. 6, 24). He served neither. A time-server. A person of no consequence.

  He remembered Meg shouting at him, ‘Don’t you believe anything?’ Round them the Yorkshire valleys and a criss-cross of fields, small mills on the rivers, the ruins of railway tracks and beyond the bald mountains, hunched and ugly, scowling in the summer sun, the moors. The two of them sat, he remembered, under a fantastic pile of rocks, like pillars of grey toffee, curiously smooth amongst the grass, the tall willow-herb, the sycamore bushes that would soon be trees, tired, angry with each other because they’d clambered up a steep road, and kicked about a disused quarry and now at midday were miles from a drink. They’d sat, eating dry sandwiches, swatting at flies, searching for a subject to quarrel over. Money. They were not paying enough for their keep, she claimed.

  ‘I wouldn’t put you up for that. Clean linen – Dinner. You kicking your muddy feet round the carpets.’

  ‘Mrs Knight looks well on it.’

  ‘That’s all you think about.’

  ‘No. Their small holding will provide a living. This will spread the jam.’

  They argued prices. Supermarkets charged here no less than those in London. Tourists flashed their loose coin and spread inflation, Meg argued. Fisher knew she didn’t care. Just as she’d please Mrs Knight by a townswoman’s expected raptures over the cade lamb, she’d get her own back on a husband who’d forgotten the map, who’d delivered her to this dust-dry hill top.

  ‘Why don’t you enjoy your holiday,’ he asked, ‘and forget other people?’

  ‘It hits you in the face.’

  ‘It hits you.’

  He moodily lobbed three stones at the rock tower, hating the clang, the ricochet or the failure to reach target. Nobody else had climbed; they seemed alone in a dry stream-bed, chewing unpalatable bread and foreign apples.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said pacifically.

  ‘I don’t like to see people cheated.’

  ‘My impression is that Mrs Knight’s got her head screwed on. She knows what people will pay, what will fetch ’em in.’

  ‘We’re exploiting her.’

  So she blurted away at him, accusing him of hypocrisy, a Britisher living at the expense of sweated labour, short life-expectancy, misery, plague. As he lay back in the brightness of the sky, springy grass under the hands clasped behind his head, he could barely believe she was serious. Yet she seemed so. Before long he feared she’d throw her scone at him, but he became drowsy, immune to the attack, not answering.

  In the end, he’d reached out, touched her bare knee, expecting a repulse. He pushed, stroking up the smooth warmth of her thigh as she opened to him.

  ‘That’s all you believe in,’ she said.

  ‘Better than nothing.’

  She answered his love there on the quiet top of the world, powerfully submissive under him, and then sat wide-eyed, sun-drunk, fulfilled, her head against his pack.

  ‘It’s hot,’ she hummed.

  ‘Don’t blame me for that.’

  ‘I shan’t argue.’

  She laid herself flat, primly, her skirt smoothed down now, blouse fastened, fell asleep, quiet beautiful, no harshness, no plangency, naturally in the grass. She had discovered one belief he thought. That claim was shameful, but her temper, her principles had withered, flowered themselves out of existence.

  Grass-stalk between teeth, he watched the birds swoop about the rocks, and the hints of mist smudge the far surface of the valley, and his wife asleep, red-bright hair heavy over her hand.

  10

  He posted his card to Meg, then fetched his car out for the first time this week.

  It was four o’clock now and he’d little joy as he ran out of the town into the flat countryside along a road that seemed composed of sandy dust. Why he bothered he did not know. He stopped by a house, built out on its own, surrounded by sheds, hen-coops, while in the untended square of ground in front a broken boat lay, massive, but holed, paintwork grubbily overlaid with pale dirt. Nobody moved in the place; no dog barked, cat slunk. He wound the window down to brood on this dump.

  The house which might have been lifted from an industrial town had at one time been daubed white, but now the paint peeled from the bricks as from the woodwork of the sash-windows, the dull green doors, the drainpipes.

  Still nobody moved, as the sun’s brightness emphasised the shabby exterior, the litter, the trodden grass, the ruts. Fisher leaned out for relief, patted the hot metal of his car. On this Thursday he did not feel depression, merely inertia, a lack of determination. He had decided, in a rush, to spend a week at the seaside, the kind of holiday he’d not known since he was a boy, and here he lounged, bored, staring at a pile of old wood, slightly distracted by a buzzing by his head. That was all he could expect; he’d deserved it.

  He pulled himself up short.

  A week or two back he had walked out on his wife.

  After a series of nightly quarrels, none serious taken singly, but indulged in by both with an energy that now seemed mad, he said, steadying his voice,

  ‘The best thing I can do is leave you to it.’

  He wondered now in what sense he’d meant that. The words were clearly enunciated, in a moderate tone, demanding and deploying reason, and yet he had not designed them seriously, to be aswered. The sentence merely attacked his wife from a new direction, suggesting that he, unlike her was willing to discuss their dilemma, act with an eye to the advantage of both. Thus, put in her place, her shouts and insults, her flounces and swearing, tantrums, gestures were shown for what they were, the infantile behaviour of an unbalanced woman.

  ‘You go, then.’

  ‘I’m serious, Meg.’

  ‘What the bloody hell d’you think I am?’

  He’d sat down, furious but determined to speak coldly. He’d considered the pattern in the carpet by his shoes, crossed his legs, interwined his fingers around his knees before looking at her.

  ‘I mean what I say, Meg.’

  ‘Do it, then.’

  ‘You realise just what this will mean, don’t you?’

  As he’d spoken he knew immediately that he’d not a notion of the significance of this.

  ‘What’s it matter?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Do you want me to leave you?’

  ‘You know best. You always do.’

  He’d noticed that her voice was as controlled as his, as cool, though her mouth seemed tightly held, almost frozen.

  ‘I’m asking you a question’ he’d said. ‘Do you want me to clear out?’

  ‘Make your own mind up.’

  The quarrel appeared to be petering out but as he’d sat a fiercer anger had flared, perhaps at his own ineptitude, perhaps at Meg’s casual disregard as she touched her nose in front of a mirror.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he’d said. The word barely lobbed out.

  ‘What?’ She continued her beauty treatment.

  ‘I’m going.’ His breath was constricted as if his chest has suddenly shrunk. The whole centre of his being seemed concentrated above his mouth, behind his nose, in a thick snot of ignorance.

  ‘Good riddance,’ she’d said. Childishly. And sat down.

  He’d jumped, leapt from the room, slamming the door shut. He slept in the guest room, drove at nine o’clock across to the university where he’d found Bill Price-Jones already in his lab, and demanded room in his flat. Price-Jones, pulling faces stroking his beard, asked Fisher if he was doing right.

  ‘How in bloody hell do I know?’

  ‘I can provide you with a bunk and a sitting room. Does it make sense, though? Meg’s your wife. I’m not married.’

  Bill’s thin voice, disconnected sentences, hurt.

  ‘I want to co
me,’ he’d said.

  ‘Please yourself.’

  Price-Jones sighed, returned to his page of mathematics, pushing his spectacles up. Fisher, deserted, sidled from the room, stood in the corridor before the heavy door of the laboratory, under the neat gold lettering, Dr W. A. C. Price-Jones, before pushing off to fidget in the library over a book he could not bring himself to understand. Now he was committed, had announced his decision, if Bill had not already forgotten it under a welter of integral scrolls.

  Now here, today, in front of this hutch of a house he reported progress to himself. In spite of the sun, mist seemed to seep from the land so that distant objects over the flat earth were blurred. He had the apartment to himself, for Bill was away at a scientific congress in Austria, but he had not stayed there, had come out on instinct to this razamataz of a place. But when, against liklihood. he’d run up against David Vernon on the first Sunday, he’d seen luck turn his way, his matrimonial problems settle. Then suspiciously he’d dismissed coincidence; Vernon had ferreted him out, had followed. His dismissed that summarily; whatever Vernon’s arts he’d not hypnotised his son-in-law into the pub. Fisher, in his car, tapping the door panel, enjoyed the notion. Thought-transference. Vernon, veins in forehead knotted with concentration, sweat dripping in, squeezing out the order over the resistant air, into the reluctant brain telepathically compelling him to go in.

  A young man had come from the back of the house to stare suspiciously. Fisher raised a hand, so that the other, screwing his eyes, dawdled over.

  ‘You all right?’

  Fisher thanked him.

  ‘Not broken down, nor nothing?’

  Greasy hair, not long, but combed back into swathes. Overall, with three cheap biros in the breast-pocket. A heavy pair of unpolished army boots.

  Fisher, at ease, began to question the man, who, with only a token of unwillingness, seemed glad of the company. Well, no, he didn’t live here; it was his dad’s house. No, not his own, rented. His dad had worked on the roads and the county council had provided him with the place, allowing him to keep it on his retirement. No, the road menders worked in gangs, nowadays, bounced out from the towns in lorries. Nobody would want to live in a dead-and-alive hole like this, would they? He was redundant, a month ago, but had another job laid on, starting next week, because his dad had had him apprenticed. He lived in Leicester, and he’d go back on Sat’day.