“Our days are as a hand-breadth,” striped trousers said.
“Then why don’t we bloody well do something about it?”
“I don’t know,” striped trousers said, slowly, beautifully, “I really don’t know.”
“Because we can’t,” his hair flopped into his eyes again. “We’re just pawns in this great bloody game that somebody’s playing, generation after generation. We feel sorry for prisoners, but aren’t we all in prison, except perhaps that we haven’t any bars? Are we free? Of course we aren’t. If we didn’t work day after day we’d starve and if we starved we’d die. We’ve no choice except to keep on and on and on. And if we have the choice, like Boothroyd must have had, what do we do about it? Nothing. And why? Because we’re prisoners. Our own, if nobody else’s.”
“You’re drunk,” Arthur said.
The young man pushed the hair out of his eyes.
“I know,” he said. “My wife’s just left me.”
“I’m sorry,” Arthur said.
“There’s no need to be.” He denied the misery in his bloodshot eyes.
There was a moment’s embarrassed silence for green jersey’s errant wife, then Cambridge said: “You’re too cynical. Life is worth living to some. Don’t you find life worth living?” he said, addressing the black-haired girl who sat with both hands round her drink.
The girl raised her long dark lashes from large blue eyes. She smiled and was quite fabulously pretty.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “did you say something to me?”
Black jacket said: “I asked you if you felt that life was worth living.”
“Why not?” The blue eyes grew larger. She did not appear to have given the matter a great deal of thought. She drank the last of her drink. “I think I’ve a cold coming on. I thought that this might help.” Her mouth was pursed prettily round the rim of the glass.
“Won’t you have another?” black jacket asked politely.
“No thank you. I have to go now or I shall be late for work.”
“You see!” green jersey said triumphantly. “The treadmill again. She daren’t even be late. And what an odd time to start work. What is it you do?”
The girl hesitated for a moment, than said: “I’m a singer. The show starts in twenty minutes.” She stood up.
“How can you sing with a cold?” black jacket said.
She gave him a curious look. “It won’t make any difference.”
She was very pretty.
“I’d better go. Goodbye.”
They watched her go, straight-backed, long-legged, hair round her shoulders. She was followed to the door by the eyes of the pink-faced young men. Afterwards they snickered into their drinks.
“I’d better be going, too,” Arthur said. He felt more himself, able to face Vera. The shock had been blunted by the drink and the talk. He was glad he had come into the pub. He stood up.
“Your newspaper!” black jacket said, holding it out. It seemed that Willie was reluctant to leave him.
At home Arthur closed the front door gently behind him hoping to have a few moments to himself.
“Arthur! Is that you, Arthur?” Vera’s voice sounded shrill, irritated.
He went slowly into the lounge.
“Arthur, I asked you particularly to be early; you know the Fergusons are coming to dinner and they’re always punctual and you have to change, and I managed to get seats for ‘Cry not the Angels’, it had the most wonderful write-up in the Telegraph this morning and there wasn’t a single seat to be had but my man in Webster’s… Arthur, what’s the matter? Are you all right?”
“Willie Boothroyd’s dead.”
“Willie! Dead? You can’t be serious. He was all right last night.” She took the newspaper Arthur held out. “Dropped dead in the street! I can’t understand it. I must sit down for a moment. Poor Polly, what a terrible, terrible shock. I must go round. Perhaps I’d better ring her first. What could have been the matter with him?”
Arthur shrugged. “Overwork perhaps.”
“Lord knows he had no need to work as he did.”
Arthur thought of the drunk young man in the pub. “Willie enjoyed working,” he said. “I don’t think he could have stopped. There was something in him that made him keep on and on and on… What are we going to do about the Fergusons? I don’t feel much like listening to that wretched woman’s cackle all the evening, or to Leonard’s pointless stories.”
“It’s too late to get in touch. She was meeting him in town.”
“I don’t know why we had to ask them. We don’t even like them.”
“They asked us.”
“And we ask them, then they ask us again, so we have to ask them again, and we still don’t care if we never saw each other again after all that, so I don’t quite see the point. I’m not going to the theatre anyway. You can take them. They’ll understand.”
“All right.” Vera got up. “I must go and phone Polly.”
When she came back, Arthur, who had been sitting staring at the same spot on the carpet, said: “Well?”
“The doctor’s given poor Polly something for the shock and she’s in bed,” Vera said, dabbing at her eyes. “All the family’s round there and there’s nothing we can do for the moment. The inquest’s tomorrow. It’s so dreadful. I keep seeing him last night, dancing with Vanessa.”
“It might have been me. We were the same age.”
“Don’t be morbid. Doctor Gurney says that you’re as fit as many men half your age.”
“Perhaps I should retire… Ease up a bit.”
Vera straightened the cushions that were already straight and shook the waiting dish of salted almonds. “There’s Victor, going up to Cambridge. And Vanessa’s coming-out dance, and I suppose before we know where we are her wedding and trousseau…”
“I hope I can manage all that before they find me dead on the pavement.”
“Arthur, dear, you seem awfully upset. Would you like me to ring Doctor Gurney? He could give you something for the shock.”
“It’ll pass. It was so sudden…just picking up the newspaper and reading it like that. I’d better go and change if we really can’t do anything about the Fergusons.”
After he’d gone Vera straightened the cushion on which he’d been sitting and took his empty whisky glass into the kitchen.
When the bell rang at eleven o’clock Arthur, who had been asleep in the armchair in front of the fire, thought it must be Vera back from the theatre. He crossed the large, parquet-floored, oak-panelled hall, buttoning his waistcoat as he went, and opened the front door. On the step stood Doctor Francis Gurney with his case and stethoscope.
“What’s the matter?” Arthur said.
“Your wife asked me to call in when I’d finished. She said you’d had a bit of a shaking this afternoon and she was worried about you. I’m not supposed to tell you she telephoned. I’m just passing by as it were.”
“Women!” Arthur said, and held the front door wide.
“What do you think Willie died of?” Arthur said, when Doctor Gurney had listened to his heart and taken his blood pressure and they were sitting opposite each other in the deep, tapestry covered armchairs.
“Difficult to say. Coronary thrombosis most likely, or cerebral haemorrhage. I suppose there’ll be an inquest?”
Arthur nodded. “What about overwork?” he said. “Willie always went at it like a madman.”
“As an indirect cause of death?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. There are schools of thought on both sides.”
“It would be nice to know something other than work before it was your turn. This has shaken me a bit. I suppose when one’s own generation starts disappearing…”
“Why don’t you retire?” Doctor Gurney said, looking round the room at the expensive furnishings, the money spent freely.
“Why? Do you think I may be next on the list?”
“Not at all. But if you’re fed up with working. You c
ould afford to, couldn’t you?”
Arthur looked into the fire. “I could,” he said, “if we were content to live differently. I would be willing to try, but Vera and the children…you get used to things. Victor and Vanessa are eighteen. There’s Cambridge and coming-out dances, and clothes, and riding, and parties, and Vera wants Vanessa to have a fur coat and a small car for Victor, and these curtains,” he waved his arm towards the windows, “are too old or too gold, I can’t remember… So you see it’s not quite so easy. Mine’s not a public company, remember, there’s only me.”
“Of course, I think you work too hard though…”
“We all do. Look at you, wasting time with me when you should be at home in bed. My wife should be ashamed of herself for bringing you out at nearly midnight. I suppose you haven’t sat down yet this evening?”
“No. I had four visits after evening surgery. It was just one of those nights.”
“It means nothing to Vera. ‘I’ll phone Doctor Gurney. That’s what we pay him for.’ The women don’t care. They expect us to keep on and on and on until they have to scrape us up off the pavement.”
Doctor Gurney smiled. “And then our widows will go romping off on sightseeing tours of Europe on the life insurance like the American women.”
“It’s not so funny. But why is it happening? Why has life suddenly become so hard, so fast and so earnest? Where are all the old men, puffing at their pipes, sitting on village seats?”
“The old men who were always on the village seats are still there. For the rest of us, I suppose we’re too greedy. We want it all and we want it quickly. I don’t know why. Perhaps the not so ludicrous thought of possible annihilation; perhaps because more things are within the reach of more people. We are a nasty, predatory lot.”
So it wasn’t only Green Jersey, Arthur thought.
“But why?” he said, “Why are we like this?”
Doctor Gurney shrugged. “Perhaps we’re trying to run too fast to keep up with all that has happened in the last ten years. Most probably, in a generation or two, things will settle down again.”
“We run so fast we leave our souls behind.” His mind was back in the pub with the young man in the green jersey.
Doctor Gurney stood up. “Maybe. Fortunately, I’m only responsible for the bodies. And I suggest you take yours to bed.”
Arthur said: “I shouldn’t have kept you talking.” He put his arm round the young man’s shoulders as they walked to the door. “It was good of you to come. I’m sorry it was unnecessary. Don’t work too hard.”
Doctor Gurney grinned. “Facile dictu, difficile factu,” he said, “which is about all I remember of my Latin.”
Upstairs in his dressing-room Arthur wearily and mechanically removed the things from his pockets and laid them neatly on the top of the chest. Coppers in one pile, silver in another; keys, nail-file, diary, wallet, breast-pocket handkerchief, pen, pencil, cigar piercer, watch…a folded paper. This last should not have been in that particular pocket. He opened it out and remembered that he had intended to show it to his accountant. It was from Parker & Parker, estate agents, and contained the details of a property in Whitecliffs-by-the-Sea. ‘…a new block of six flats…one, two, and three beds…pleasant aspect…five minutes sea and shops…rents…suitable investment…’ Arthur put it down on the glass top then picked it up again. He stared at the paper, groping for the idea that flashed elusively through his mind. Suitable investment! But suppose, just suppose… They had spent holidays at Whitecliffs when the children were little, and he had always had a soft spot for it. No; of course it was impossible. Vera would say it was impossible. Thoughtfully, the paper still in his hand, Arthur left his dressing-room and crossed the landing. He opened his son’s bedroom door and peered into the darkness. “You in bed, Victor?”
Victor switched on the lamp by the bed. His face was rumpled with sleep. “What is it, Dad?”
“What does ‘Fackilly dicter diffickilly facter’ mean? It’s Latin.”
Victor smiled at his father’s pronunciation.
“‘Easy to say, difficult to do’, why?”
“Nothing. Thanks, Vic. Sorry for waking you. Good night.”
“Night, Dad.”
Arthur went back across the landing. “Easy to say, difficult to do,” he repeated as he removed his cuff-links. He put the paper from Parker & Parker into the pocket of his pyjamas ready to show Vera in the morning.
Two
Even in sleep Arthur and Vera Dexter bespoke their lack of nothing.
The curtains, weighty with lining and inter-lining that protected them from the cool April light, were satin; so were their eiderdowns, the facings of Arthur’s pyjamas and the pale blue dressing-gown that lay across the end of his wife’s bed. From Vera’s blue-rinsed beautifully shaped grey hair tidily in place on the embroidered pillow, to the dressing-table with its costly pots of anti-wrinkle oil and hormone creams, all was in order and of the very best. As far as Vera Dexter was concerned the money which had bought the top quality, rose Wilton carpet, the ormolu light fittings and the avant-garde collection of clothes in the built-in cupboards, was plucked effortlessly and frequently from trees. For Arthur it was not so simple. He had paid for the good things surrounding both himself and his wife, not only with pound notes, of which he had a fair number at his disposal, but with the deepening lines that creased his forehead, his inability to attain a state of unconsciousness unaided by the pills he swallowed nightly in varying quantities, and above all with the total exclusion from his mind of anything that was sweet and light and free. He was a man in chains, and the links were endless; his business, his home, his wife, his son, his daughter, their futures, his future, his wife’s (hysterectomy pending), his brother’s heart, worse of late and of course it would fall to Arthur to…the maids, the lack of maids, the subsidence of the house, the Rent Act, his case against Popular Plastics Ltd., his car, his income tax, his surtax, Schedule A, did he carry enough life insurance?… What would happen to the business if he dropped down dead?… His face even in sleep was harassed. For Arthur Dexter the ravelled sleeve of care was nothing like knit up. When he opened his eyes to the morning he was as tired as if he had not slept.
There was something about this day, he remembered, that was different. What it was he was unable to recall until he turned to look at the clock by his bedside and heard the crackle of paper in his pyjama pocket. He took out the letter from the estate agents and glanced towards his wife.
“Vera,” he said softly. And then again, “Vera.”
Vera stirred, moaned, yawned, and finally opened her eyes. When she realised that it was morning and that her husband had deliberately woken her up, a thing he never did, she said: “What is it, Arthur?” and listened to the astonishing things her husband had to say. When he had finished, Arthur, leaning towards her in his enthusiasm, propped up on one elbow, waited for her response.
“It’s quite out of the question, Arthur,” Vera said firmly, pulling the bedclothes up to her chin. And had it not been less than twenty-four hours ago that Willie Boothroyd had died, that might very well have been that.
Vera was unable all day to forget the strangeness that had come over her husband, whose every move she could usually accurately prophesy, with the sudden death of his friend.
“Can you imagine,” she said later as she paid her bill in the hairdresser’s, “my husband wants us to live, actually live, in some horrid little flat in a tiny, draughty little seaside town where there’s nothing; absolutely nothing at all but some sort of potty little village High Street.”
“Shampoo and set, trim, rinse, manicure, thirty-five-and-six, if you please, madame. I can’t think of anything nicer,” Louise Crosland said, sighing as she took the money with her elegant hands and thought how lucky her clients were even to be able to think of moving hither and thither while she remained stuck, year after year, in the semi-detached she shared with her mother in Cedars Avenue.
“For a weekend perhaps,�
� Vera said, picking up her change. “But to live! One would die of boredom. Now if it were Nassau or Jamaica…but an English seaside! My hair wouldn’t last five minutes in all that wind and wet. We had enough of it when the children were little.” She shuddered.
“It can be quite pleasant in the summer, Mrs Dexter.”
“Both days! No. I can’t understand what’s got into Arthur.” Vera put half-a-crown on the desk. “Would you give this to Alphonse,” she said. “I have to run.”
Louise picked it up. “With pleasure, madame. Goodbye, madame.” She watched the elegant head, above the elegant mink tie, above the elegant suit, leave the salon.
But if Vera was shocked at her husband’s outrageous early morning proposal, she was to be even more vexed with him before the day was out. At six o’clock he phoned home to say that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He had gone to a club, he said. A sort of a show. Vera looked at the telephone receiver as if it had gone mad.
“Arthur, what on earth are you talking about?” she said. “You know perfectly well you never go to shows by yourself. What sort of a show anyway?”
“Well, it’s a sort of striptease show. Cabaret – you know the idea…”
“Arthur!” Vera’s voice was shrill. “Arthur, please come home. You aren’t well…”
“Vera, I’m perfectly all right and I’ve got to rush. Sorry about the dinner. Keep it hot. I’ll explain when I get home.”
“Explain! Arthur… Arthur?” But he had rung off. Vera replaced the receiver slowly. She went into the kitchen upstairs to put on her coat and ring for a taxi.
All day in his office Arthur had been thinking. His thoughts ran back and forth across the same small field. He had a good, flourishing business whose profits were up fifteen per cent on the previous year, he was not a poor man, and yet it looked as if he would have to keep on and on, following the same routine until the day came when they would pick him up off the floor as they had Willie Boothroyd. His wife would mourn, his children would mourn and that would be that. When his friends remembered him it would be as ‘poor old Arthur Dexter, you remember poor Arthur?’ The more he thought about it the more he realised that it wasn’t good enough. He wanted to know something else before he died. That he was a great deal luckier than many people he appreciated. He was able to take a good holiday each year, and he and Vera had seen a fair bit of the world. But even their holidays were simply an extension of the never-changing round they followed at home. In Monte Carlo or in Cannes they ‘bumped into’ the Westburys or the Ridgeways and spent their days on the beach with them, their evenings together at the Casino. When they got home they’d get together again and discuss what a wonderful time they’d had. But had they? True it was a rest from the office, but why go to Monte Carlo or Cannes to meet no one but the Westburys or the Ridgeways who lived practically round the corner? Sometimes it was a cruise, with hot, day-excursions to Athens, Pompeii and Istanbul when Vera would be more preoccupied with her swollen feet than the ancient temples, the lava-covered survivals, the mosques and minarets; and he, the cine-camera heavy round his neck, his stomach protesting at the unfamiliar food, too worried that the dark-skinned taxi-driver had got the better of him, that the heat would be too much for Vera, to spare more than a cursory, uncomprehending glance at the marvels that surrounded them. They were always glad to get back to the ship and the couple they had met, who lived not far away from them at home and, wasn’t it a coincidence, he was in the same business as Arthur and she went to the same chiropodist as Vera! And it all sounded wonderful on the postcards they wrote home, and even more wonderful when, back in the comfort of their own surroundings, they unpacked the gifts they had brought for Victor and Vanessa and the maids, and remembered the Attic skies, the golden days, the white sands, and forgot the heat and the flies and the suspicious-looking natives, the shopkeepers who diddled them and the greasy food. True, they were holidays, but where was the repose? Vera, he knew, was in a perpetual turmoil. Had she bought the right clothes, did he think those dreadful people in the sausage business would collar them after dinner again, should she have brought a fur wrap, all the other women seemed to have brought more jewellery… It was no better for him. He seemed to be constantly changing from his shorts to his lightweight tropical slacks, from his slacks to his white dinner-jacket, and shaving, his beard grew so quickly in the tropics, and arguing with the purser and getting a different table because Vera was in a draught, and wishing he was back in the office. There must be something else, and the death of Willie Boothroyd had made him determined to find it.
We All Fall Down Page 2