This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  When I next spoke to Frank, he told me that the chapel at Tonbridge had burned down within hours of Joe’s death, and that he believed this was Joe’s doing. Joe had been expelled from the school. Now he had taken his revenge.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly in character,’ I said.

  I was thinking of the army building that had gone up in flames in Korea, but I also knew that Joe had been thrown out of his digs in Tamworth for regularly setting fire to the contents of his waste-paper basket. And then there were his various tirades against the residents of Penndale Lodge. You’re going to burn in hell, the lot of you.

  Some years later, in the mid-nineties, I had the idea of basing a novel on Joe’s life, but my grasp on his story was sketchy at best, and I drove up to Frank and Miriam’s house to see whether they could fill in any of the blanks. As usual, Frank dodged certain questions and dredged up anecdotes I had heard before, and occasionally, if pressed, he would shriek, ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ It occurred to me that he might be jealous of my interest in his brother – why couldn’t I show more interest in him?– and, feeling chastened, I sat in the kitchen and asked about his Japanese childhood, his war-time experiences, and his struggles at the mill.

  Not long before I left, and quite unexpectedly, he handed me an A4 envelope containing photocopies of two letters Joe had sent from South America. ‘Well,’ he said, looking away from me, ‘you wanted to know what he was like …’

  Written on headed airmail paper, and dated 18 February 1951, the first letter was more than forty pages long. Joe’s handwriting tilted forwards in a hurried scrawl, and there were places where the ink had smudged; I could sense the humidity, his pen gripped in fingers that were slippery with sweat. When Joe landed in Colombia to take up his job with the London Bank of South America, he had felt, he said, ‘like someone who’d been away for a long time and had finally come back’. I put the letter down, startled by what I’d just read. I had felt exactly the same when I arrived in Italy in 1982. I had given up everything – my job, my flat – and I was going to write. After driving down through France, I spent the night in a small white hotel on a rocky promontory a few miles west of Cannes – a miracle that it was open; everywhere else had closed for the winter – and when I crossed the border at Ventimiglia the next morning, my heart seemed to expand. I hadn’t expected such a rush of happiness. The empty autostrada, the glitter of the Mediterranean off to the right and far below. My first Italian service station, where I stood at a zinc counter and drank a cappuccino. It felt like a homecoming. Home isn’t the place you grow up in, or the place where your parents live. Home is a place you come across by chance, if you’re lucky.

  I picked up Joe’s letter again. ‘Sounds odd, doesn’t it,’ he had written, ‘but that’s the way it was.’ No, Joe, I thought, not odd at all. I could see him stepping off the plane, the night so lush and muggy that it seemed to wrap its arms around him. Downtown Bogotá. The Green Room at the Hotel Granada. The Copacabana Club. Girls deliberately brushing against him as they passed him in the street. Flashed glances. The looseness of everything. This is it, he must have thought. This is it – for ever.

  Within a few weeks, he had assembled ‘a wonderful set of friends and companions’, all of them Colombian. He claimed they loved and respected him more than any Englishman they had ever come across, and that they accepted him as one of their own, not just because he spoke the language fluently, but because he willingly adopted many of their attitudes and customs. He also happened to have a naturally dark complexion. His mother, Pim, had always referred to him, affectionately, as ‘little black Joe’, and Joe himself, in his letters to Frank, hypothesized that there must be Latin blood in the family, ‘which has come out particularly in me personally’. Smiling, I remembered how Frank had once told me, with great relish, that we were partly descended from the Aborigines. Granny Ellis – my great-grandmother – was half Aborigine, he had assured me, being the love-child of an illicit and scandalous union between an Ellis woman and an Aboriginal man. But there was also Beth’s startling revelation, on a recent visit, that Frank’s grandfather had been ‘a black man’. She had seen a photograph of him, she said, and he was ‘distinctly very, very dark’. Most telling for Beth was the fact that Frank had been unable – or unwilling – to trace the family on his father’s side, whereas on his mother’s side, apparently, he’d got all the way back to John of Gaunt. Whatever the reason for Joe’s skin colour, people in Bogotá were always mistaking him for a local. He described how an American woman had approached him at the club. ‘How is it,’ she asked, ‘that you speak such good English?’ According to Joe, his reply – ‘I am English’ – was delivered with a caustic edge, but I suspected that he found that kind of misapprehension flattering.

  There were three other Englishmen at the bank who were in their twenties, but they steadfastly refused to mix with Colombians outside the office. ‘Poor things!’ Joe wrote. ‘How much they missed!’ His father, James Gausden, had spent more than thirty years in the Far East, and James – or ‘Gentleman Jim’, as he was sometimes known – had made a point of immersing himself in Japanese culture and tradition. Joe, too, plunged headlong into his new environment, but unlike his father he had a reckless streak and a profound disdain for convention. In expatriate society, such behaviour could be dangerous, a fact of which he was not unaware. ‘If any little bit of scandal gets around or in the papers,’ he wrote, ‘the man is ruined – quite literally ruined.’

  While dining at his boarding-house, Joe met a Colombian from ‘a very good family’. A few days later, he ran into the man again, on Avenida de la República, and the man invited him to the house of a friend who lived nearby. They drank superior rum, and the man’s friend played the piano and sang opera and popular Spanish and Colombian songs. He also had a number of female companions who were considered ‘reliable’. Joe became a regular visitor to this lavish Spanish-colonial-style house. There would be eating, drinking, dancing amasisado – or ‘belly-to-belly’, as he explained, ‘with the leg of the man between the legs of the woman’ – and later there would be sex. The men introduced him to several acquaintances of theirs, two of whom lived in the upper fringes of the city, beneath the mountains. In their atmospheric apartment, with its dark, heavily furnished rooms, they showed him albums filled with pictures of half-naked girls, all of whom were readily available. The parties would continue on into the small hours – Joe would often stay the night and turn up at the bank the following day without having gone home at all – but since everything was happening in exclusive neighbourhoods, and behind closed doors, his reputation remained intact.

  And then, as Joe put it, he ‘got into a jam with a tart’. Shortly after arriving in Bogotá, he had picked up a girl near the Calle Real, not knowing she had served prison sentences for blackmail, drugs and theft. Almost a year later, he had the misfortune to run into the girl again on his way to work. From then on, she began to accost him outside the bank. She told him, among other things, that she’d had a child, and that he was the father. He bribed her to stay away, but the matter had already come to the attention of his superiors. Before reassigning him to a more obscure branch of the bank in Guayaquil, the manager gave Joe a lecture about his conduct. ‘I laughed openly,’ Joe wrote, ‘right in his face.’ Joe had lost interest in his job, and had sorely tried the patience of his employers, upon whose good will he was dependent, and yet, at the same time, he was telling Frank that he wanted to settle in South America, and that he didn’t have the slightest intention of returning home.

  Both the letters Frank had photocopied for me had been posted in Guayaquil – after Joe’s demotion, in other words. In this remote, unsophisticated city, Joe had far less opportunity to indulge his vices, and deeply regretted his removal from Bogotá, where life had been such an endless round of pleasure. Apart from the Phoenix Club and the Hotel Crillon, there was nowhere to go, and before too long he found himself drawn to the red-light district, which even he adm
itted was ‘extremely sordid’. As a precaution, he adopted a Spanish name, posing as an unemployed Colombian, but somebody saw through him and once again he was caught up in a web of intrigue and blackmail. Within a month, he was arrested and charged with offences so ‘vile and shameful’ that he couldn’t bring himself to go into any detail. Rather than pay off the two detectives who appeared at his hotel, he insisted they escort him to the bank, where his superiors were eventually able to sort the matter out with the chief of police. ‘The boss was furious,’ Joe wrote, ‘and said that if I was ever involved in any kind of scandal again, whether I was innocent or not, I would be thrown out of the bank on the spot and sent back to England.’

  Which is precisely what happened, of course.

  Within a year of writing the letters, Joe was deported from South America. He claimed the charges that had been brought against him were fabrications – ‘the most filthy calumnies’ – but as he himself had already pointed out, the whole question of innocence had become irrelevant. Since Frank was vague on the subject – he either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me the full story – it was hard to know what to believe, but it seemed Joe had been co-operating with, or even orchestrating, his destiny from the very beginning, and I imagined his downfall had more to do with a long history of rebellious behaviour than with any one particular event.

  I pictured him on the flight back to England, staring through the window as the plane banked to the north-east, the continent he had fallen in love with seeming for a few moments to move closer, to press itself against him, a last slow dance, but his one-line reference from the bank would have been in his pocket all the while, like a millstone. Like a death sentence. Did he realize that he had wasted the best chance he would ever be given? Did he sense that the odds were now stacked against him? ‘It was a terrible blow,’ Frank said of his brother’s deportation. ‘He was very upset by it and shaken. Very bitter. He never recovered, really.’

  From that point on, Joe contrived an ever-tightening cage for himself. He sold his comfortable house in Birmingham and bought one that was smaller. Then he swapped the smaller house for something smaller still. He moved into digs by the railway arches in Tamworth. There were dead-end jobs. Months of living rough. A two-up two-down in Whitmore Reans, the poorest part of Wolverhampton. That threadbare, smoke-filled lounge in Penndale Lodge. A coffin made of fruit crates on the side of a hill. I still had so many questions, and wished I had put them to him when I had the chance. But you don’t, do you? It’s only when people have died that you realize what you wanted to know. Only when they cannot answer.

  Years later, while staying with Frank and Miriam, I happened to mention Joe’s funeral. ‘It was completely foreign,’ Miriam told me. ‘More like Baghdad than Birmingham.’

  That same weekend, thinking of visiting the grave, I asked Frank where Joe was buried. He could no longer remember.

  Beautiful Day

  I stand by Dad’s bedroom window. Outside, the cherry trees are in full bloom, their branches loaded with extravagantly frothy pale pink blossoms. From somewhere nearby comes the sleepy drone of a motor mower. In the distance, above the hedge, are the Downs, the top of the ridge lost in the heat haze. We have been living in the house for almost four months.

  I hear a voice in the garden and peer down. Below me, on the lawn, are Vivian and Greta. Vivian is wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, and she is propped on her elbows with her legs stretched out in front of her. Greta sits nearby, a sun hat at a jaunty angle on her head. Just then, Ralph emerges from the sitting-room in a white shirt and white trousers. He has rolled his sleeves back to the elbow. His arms are even paler than his face.

  He kneels down, chin almost touching his right knee, and says something to Greta. His hair is receding, revealing the widow’s peak he had when he was born. It looks as if he might go bald even before I do. He kisses Greta, then turns and speaks to Vivian. I can see how proud he is, and how happy, and if I stay where I am, half hidden by the curtain, it’s only because I would like to understand a bit more about their lives, and what goes on in Paradise, behind that sealed door. Arranged on the grass, and barely moving, they might be sitting for a portrait, and as I watch they suddenly seem vulnerable, exposed. To have a family is like asking for it. Tempting fate. There’s just so much that can go wrong, and there isn’t a lock in the world that can protect you.

  I step forwards into the open window and lean on the sill. Still crouching, Ralph is alive to the movement and glances up at me, over his shoulder. In that instant, my viewpoint alters, and I see myself as he must see me, positioned high above him, like some kind of predator. How long have you been there? Have you been spying on us? I wouldn’t try anything if I were you.

  Perhaps I’m being melodramatic.

  I take a deep breath of the blossom-scented air, then let it out again. ‘Beautiful day,’ I say.

  Ralph looks away into the garden. ‘It’s perfect.’

  Vivian reaches for Greta.

  Letter from Shanghai

  A few months after visiting Uncle Frank and looking at his pictures of Ralph, I sat at my kitchen table in Barcelona with a blank sheet of paper in front of me. The thermometer on the wall said 35° Celsius, and my wrist kept sticking to the plastic tablecloth. Outside, in the small, tiled courtyard, the marquesa’s spade-shaped leaves gleamed in the humid air. I was trying to write to Ralph, but I knew so little about him that I was having trouble finding a tone of voice. I had already crumpled up my first three efforts.

  On my fourth attempt, I began by reminding him of what he had once said – namely that if I ever wanted to contact him, I should do so in writing. So here I am, I said, writing. I paused for perhaps a minute, then bent over the paper again. It was possible, I went on, that he had interpreted my silence as respect – I had allowed him the privacy he had insisted on – but if he looked at it from another angle he might equally see it as indifference. In obeying him as I had, in giving up so easily, had I confirmed some theory he had about me? Had I showed him that I didn’t care? I sat back. Did I care? It was difficult to know. I had become accustomed to not seeing him, to doing without. It wasn’t a hardship exactly. More like a habit. Nineteen years had gone by since we had spoken, twenty-two since we had stood in the same room.

  The last time I had talked to my wife, Kate, about the idea of getting in touch with Ralph, she had said, You know, you really should have agreed to be his best man. I sighed. We had been over this ground before, but Kate could never quite believe that I had turned Ralph down. Didn’t it ever occur to you, she’d said once, that he might have cut himself off from the world to such an extent that he still saw you as one of the people closest to him? Didn’t you realize that he might have had nobody else to turn to? I shook my head, but said nothing. Your brother’s supposed to be someone you can call on, she said, someone you can rely on, no matter what the circumstances. Maybe I was tired of being relied on, I said. Maybe I wanted to get away from all that. Well, you certainly chose your moment, she said. In times of need, she went on, you should be able to count on family. She paused. Or perhaps he was reaching out in the only way he knew how, she said slowly. Perhaps that letter he sent you was an olive branch of sorts. I never thought of that, I said. But now, of course – with hindsight … Kate had given me a steady look. I know, I murmured. I should have said yes.

  If I was finally writing to Ralph, though, it wasn’t out of guilt. While examining the photographs the previous December, a thought had occurred to me, and I decided to put that thought straight into the letter. It would be strange, wouldn’t it, I said, if we were to die without ever setting eyes on each other again? Yes, I might want to try and unravel the mystery of our estrangement, and I might even feel the need to apologize to him, but the urge simply to see him outweighed all that. I leaned over the paper again. He was living in Shanghai, I said, which was a place I had always longed to visit. If I were to happen to pass through the city at some point in the future, would he meet me fo
r a drink?

  I put my pen down and read through what I had written. I thought I had struck more or less the right note. I had been direct, though not intrusive. I wasn’t suggesting we should start living in one another’s pockets; I had merely presented him with a space he could walk into, if he so wished.

  The day after posting the letter, I flew to Australia, and when I returned home two weeks later I found a white envelope in my letter box. The stamps were Chinese. It looked as though Ralph had written back almost immediately, which seemed like a good sign – unless, of course, it was a snub; he might be telling me to bugger off, as Uncle Joe used to do when family members showed up on his doorstep in Wolverhampton. Still, at least I could say I had tried. I turned the letter in my hands, but found no clue as to what kind of reply it might contain. I held the envelope to my nose and got a whiff of fabric. Not new, though. Second-hand. Was that what Shanghai smelled like? I had flown overnight from Sydney, with a four-hour lay-over in Frankfurt, and I needed sleep, but I would read Ralph’s letter first.

  Dear Rupert, it began, Wow – that was a surprise.

  The tone was sincere throughout, and friendly, so much so that I fell to wondering why the estrangement had lasted as long as it had. I returned to the top of the page and saw that he too seemed bewildered. When I read your letter, it was weird because what I said some twenty years ago sounds all a bit, I don’t know, dramatic … After the 1987 phone call, I had assumed that any attempt to make contact would be interpreted as an aggressive act, and if, during the years that followed, I ever imagined a scenario in which I showed up outside Ralph’s house and rang the bell, the door would always be answered by Vivian, and she would be aiming a loaded shotgun at me. Dramatic, yes – a word Ralph had used himself – but not, I felt, beyond the bounds of possibility.