by Paul Finch
I still wonder if he envied the fact that I went on to have a job I actually loved doing, rather than one that was a necessary penance, but unsurprisingly we never had anything remotely like that conversation. Usually he'd drive me back to Newport on Sunday evening and drop me off. It was only about half an hour. Again it was probably a bit controlling rather than letting me get a train.
When I returned the following Sunday night Mrs Bisp, Enid, still wasn't in evidence, peculiarly. It was only eight o'clock but Percy said she was tired. She'd gone to bed early. I thought no more of it.
Later, sitting up in bed reading, I heard him coming up the stairs, the wood creaking under his footfalls, and passing my door to cross the landing to the main bedroom. Soon afterwards I heard his voice through the wall between us.
"How you feeling, love? Can I get you anything? Temperature, you got."
I heard the ease of bedsprings. A gentle, barely audible kiss.
I realised I hadn't taken in a word of the last page of the novel I was reading, so closed it and turned off the bedside light.
Over the following few days I detected the tang of an unpleasant odour in the air, something akin to that of a broken toilet. Hardly looking up, Percy explained it matter-of-factly as the Damned Drains. Said he was so used to it now he hardly noticed it. Spraying copious air freshener around my head he described how he'd got various plumbers in over the years to try to fix the problem, but the buggers never did.
"Always gets bad after a bout of rain, it does." He said he'd run the taps in the scullery till he was blue in the face. "Didn't do any damn good. Tried bleach and whatnot. It comes then it goes, you'll see."
The next thing I recall is arriving back one afternoon and Percy coming out of the front room to tell me a doctor had been because Mrs Bisp was ill. I said I was very sorry to hear that. He looked like he was having difficulty conveying the fact. The racing was on in the background.
"She'll be up and about soon enough. Tough old bird, Enid. Got to look after me, for one thing. Always looked after me, see."
I passed him on the stairs the next morning as I was leaving for college. He was carrying a tray with toast and jam up to her. I said I hoped she was feeling a little better. He said "Aye". I closed the front door and walked off to some lecture on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or the importance of El Greco.
Later the same day I saw him in town having lunch in a café. He didn't see me. He was just stirring his coffee, sitting alone after finishing sausage, egg and chips. He didn't look perturbed in any way, or anxious, or even thoughtful, particularly. I would say it looked like the most natural thing to do in the world, to take the weight off your feet. Then I watched him buying a bunch of flowers. Daffodils. When I came home they were in a vase in the dingy hallway, a yellow beacon against the beige wallpaper. Percy was in the front room reading his paper. I asked if they'd eaten. I could see there were no dishes on the draining board in the kitchen.
"Aye, she's got a good appetite on her, I'll say that."
He didn't look up.
Without me pressing him or even going into the room he explained that they had their main meal at lunchtime nowadays.
"Can't be doing with this 'having dinner at night time' malarkey. Recipe for indigestion, that is. Let the food go down. So that's what we do. Might have a little bit of something later, about five if we're hungry. Beans on toast or something." He shook the Echo. "That team, they need a good kicking. Never mind the ball."
I chuckled and nodded. Never interested in rugby, I sort of pretended I was before absenting myself into the middle room to sit at my drawing board with ink and gouache, getting back to work on the cover of a Dennis Wheatley novel, They Used Dark Forces, featuring a goat-headed man in an SS uniform. Once the Stephen King of his era, Wheatley was on the wane by then but his Arrow paperbacks still sold in millions. Nazis, Satanism, the occult-it was an intoxicating mix, and part of my upbringing, I suppose. I loved plunging myself into that world of good versus evil supernatural forces. I lost myself in those well-thumbed paperbacks, just as I lost myself in my artwork sometimes. The room would get imperceptibly darker and it was only when I noticed I was straining my eyes that I realised I'd better switch on the overhead light because I was sitting in darkness.
It was easy to lose track of time as the house was generally quiet and now I could only hear the TV in the next room, no voices in conversation since Percy sat in there alone, though I'd periodically hear him go up to see how Enid was. Take up a cup of tea. Bring down the empty cup later, which I'd see him rinse in the sink with a bead of Fairy liquid, his finger curling round the inside as he ran it under the hot tap.
One Wednesday afternoon there was a brisk rap on the door knocker. I remember it was a Wednesday because that was my half-day, which explains why I was there. The two men said they were from the council. Percy looked understandably baffled. I explained I'd rung them. I said I just thought if they heard a different voice complaining they might feel they'd better do something. Percy slowly twigged it was about the sewers.
"The smell," I confirmed.
I detected a flicker of accusation. He didn't like the idea I'd done this behind his back.
One of the men said they could have a look, at least.
"Hell, aye, do what you want," Percy said, opening the door wider.
As they walked through the hallway, one sniffed the air with rodent curiosity and said he could see what we meant. Out the back yard, they lifted a manhole cover with a hook-like contraption and peered into the wet gloom below. No particular enthusiasm for exploring, though the one with the less-substantial midriff eventually descended. Percy, hands in pockets, asked the older one where he was from.
"Troedyrhiw."
"Never! Where I was born, that was! Know The White Hart? My father ran that, donkey's years. Conservative Club, after."
The man looked blank and Percy looked disappointed. He started jiggling his loose change.
"Support Cardiff?
"Not interested, to be honest with you."
The jiggling change became silent. Tea was offered, and supplied. Biscuits eaten. Those pink wafery ones, as well as the ones with jam in the middle. The men confessed they couldn't see any obvious cause of the problem.
"There you are, see." Percy turned to me as if vindicated. "Didn't believe me."
"It wasn't that I didn't believe you."
"What was it then?"
I didn't answer.
The men left and I felt bad. I went to my bedroom but I couldn't settle or concentrate. I kept thinking of the other bedroom. The one Enid was in.
Early evening I came down and said to Percy I was starving. "I'm going to get some fish and chips. D'you want some?"
"Aye, go on." He stood up and dug out his wallet to offer me money.
"Don't be daft."
He reluctantly put it away. "Pie for me. Snake and pygmy. Batter gives me heartburn terrible these days. Don't know why."
We sat at the kitchen table eating out of newspaper, the pungent scent of vinegar in the air. He hadn't asked me to get some for Enid. Now I asked if she'd like a chip or two but Percy shook his head vigorously. "No fear! Not with the stomach she's got. Sight of it…" His thought trailed off in a shiver.
Later that night, I heard him talking to her in their bedroom, though I couldn't make out the exact words. Not particularly lovey-dovey. Banal, probably. The duff-duff as he plumped the pillows. The dunk-dunk as his Marks and Spencer's slippers fell to the floor. The wheeze of the bed as he got into it, old springs protesting. Then the quiet settling as the light was switched off.
I didn't want to listen, but it was hard not to. Not because I thought anything untoward was going on. I was afraid of the normal, the everyday proximities between husband and wife, and the thin wall that separated us, and I was aware that it wasn't up to them to behave any differently, it was up to me. I was the usurper. I was the cuckoo in the nest. I was the one who had to try to be invisible.
I didn't think anything else. People later on said I should have. Naturally they did. They were astonished I didn't think of going to the police, but that's easy for them to say, because they think the whole situation must have been abnormal. And that's the thing. It wasn't abnormal at all.
By day I applied myself to bolstering my portfolio with life drawing and the like. To be honest, that took the majority of my attention. Requires a good deal of skill, life drawing-which is why it separates the men from the boys, as our head tutor said. You can't fake it with a flourish of the pencil or paint brush, the line has to be right-not messy or vague but precise, bold and confident. And only artists with outstanding talent make it look like it took no effort whatsoever. So I'd sit peering from behind my easel, trying to delineate the fatty folds of the belly of our sixty-year-old model: the purple tendrils of veins in her ankles, the sandy dapple of dried skin on her heels, the almost-yellow of cracked toe nails. I'd struggle to render in charcoal the sagging pouches of her breasts, the hidden pothole of her belly-button. And if I could, in a wash of watercolour, the bruise-blue ghost under the white over-garment of skin.
During her break she'd slip on a silk dressing gown and smoke a Benson and Hedges, running her fingers through her aggressively dyed pitch-black hair. We used to think she went a bit doe-eyed whenever one of our younger tutors, Prosser, supervised the lesson. As a working sculptor, Prosser sported a regulation mop of curly hair and a hedge-like, unruly beard, looking something between a mad pop star and Alan Bates in Far From the Madding Crowd . Sometimes the woman-whose name I forget-would sidle up quite close to him and stand swivelling on one foot coquettishly, making it cringingly obvious that she fancied him. The context of her being nude under the material of the skimpy robe suddenly made us far more uncomfortable than her being nude during the formality of the drawing class, which was strange.
By now I was used to getting home and finding Percy alone in the front room watching the TV, with the door closed or sometimes open. Occasionally I'd see a copy of The Weekly News or Woman's Weekly on the hall stand, which I knew he got for his wife with diligent regularity. I never saw him reading any magazine himself other than the Radio Times, which he guarded fiercely on the arm of his chair, every programme he intended to watch circled in Biro.
One night Enid's sister arrived unannounced and unexpected, the machine-gun volley of the door knocker rousing us both. Percy was faintly alarmed. Who would be knocking the door at nine o'clock in the evening, apart from Jehovah's flaming Witnesses? But the woman on the doorstop wasted no time with pleasantries, telling him straight off the bat and in a tone lacking in warmth that she wanted to talk to her sister.
"You can't," Percy said equally curtly. "She's bad. You can talk to her when she's better, and that's that." Without asking her in, or even prolonging the niceties of conversation, he shut the door in her face. "Bloody woman. Always trouble. Never liked her…"
I thought it weird that after having a door closed in your face you wouldn't knock the door a second time, but there you are. I didn't know either of these people and I didn't know their past relationship. I didn't know Enid for that matter, but I wondered to myself why she didn't shout downstairs to ask Percy what was going on. She must've heard her sister's voice after all. Mustn't she? I waited a minute standing in the hall but I didn't hear her voice from upstairs. I thought perhaps she must be sleeping.
Thinking Percy was irritated and perhaps upset by the attempted intrusion-he'd mumbled all the way to the kitchen and back-I decided to sit down with him. I asked if he minded. He said he didn't, but he seemed disrupted under the surface. Riled, but not prepared to admit it. I suggested we gave the TV a rest for once, had a game of chess instead. Or draughts.
"Aye."
So draughts it was. Percy won. Repeatedly.
"I like you," he chortled. "You can come again."
"Snakes and ladders is my expertise," I said.
"Strip Jack Naked." A glint reflected in his glasses as he got out a pack of cards from the sideboard. "Never lost at this." He seemed to relax as the evening wore on, the games liberating him from any internal angst. We didn't talk much, if at all, then suddenly he looked up at me. "Cocoa? I got in it special. Thought…"
"Go on then." Watching him making it in the scullery I said, "How's Enid?"
"Mending lovely." He looked at the ceiling as he stirred. "Lovely, she is."
When we sat down again sipping our milky drinks, he became thoughtful for a long time, and instead of switching on News at Ten sank back in his armchair and, to my surprise, talked about their honeymoon.
He said that when they'd got married, he'd told her straight: "Don't have any ideas about doing anything on a Saturday because on Saturdays I'll be going to a match or watching one on telly. Any other day of the week, you can do what you like." I asked if she was happy with that. He said, "Married me, didn't she?
"I booked our honeymoon at a big hotel near Swindon where Dai Jenkins at the cricket had stayed with his wife. A way that was, in them days. Swindon. One of these small cottages down by a river. Tremendous. And the weather was glorious. I'll never forget it." His eyes clouded as he allowed himself to savour the memory. "Always say to ourselves, we'll have to go back one day. See if it's the same." He rubbed one eye behind the lens with his index finger. "The old girl would love that. Love it."
I saw tears well in his eyes.
Later that night I heard his weeping-gentle, as if semi-stifled. It nevertheless woke me.
On the pretext of going to the bathroom, from the landing I saw the light on in their bedroom. Then, as if in reaction to hearing me pull the light switch cord, it was switched off.
Shortly afterwards I went home for half term, glad to get away. Like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now I always looked forward to going home, but the moment I got there I wished I could be back in Newport. I think I was at the point of feeling dislocated from my stifling and parochial past but lacking in confidence about my baby steps into the future. My old school friends had either moved away or felt distant strangers who resented or envied my escape-and I didn't want to think of it as either. My dad was in work and I didn't want to get under my mother's feet so I did a lot of walking, down the park, up the woods, and found myself, inexplicably, spending most of my time thinking about Percy.
One night in the front room after tea, and out of earshot of my family, I phoned him. He hadn't expected it to be my voice and sounded a little flustered. I said I was ringing to ask how Enid was.
I heard a pause and a sigh at the end of the phone. For a good few seconds I thought he wasn't going to say anything at all.
"Took a turn for the worst, to be honest."
"Have you called out the doctor?"
"Not… Not sure the doctor will do that much good, see." I wondered what he was trying to tell me. On one level, perhaps I knew.
"Will you… Will you call her sister?"
"No, it'll be all right…"
"Her sister will know what to do," I said. "I'm sure she will."
"Aye. The thing is…"
"Percy. You know what to do, don't you?" I let what I'd just said sink in and waited for his reply for what seemed aeons. "Percy?" Had he heard me, or was he choosing to ignore my question because it was too loaded? Too unbearable? "Percy?"
"Aye. I know. I'm listening. What do you think I am? Dull?"
He hung up, his receiver hitting the cradle with such a bang I held my own at arm's-length.
I was concerned that I'd upset him. I'd clearly angered him. I'd crossed the line into what he thought to be private, but I had to. I'd had no choice. I couldn't envisage any other possibilities. But I'd not intended to hurt him-far from it. Yet for all my noble intentions, his last word made my stomach turn over and I felt I'd somehow betrayed him, even though I knew I hadn't. It made me hate words and my inability to use them properly, and my cowardice in not talking to him face to face, and the geographical distance between us. And the stupid room I sat in tha
t was kept for best, the curtains drawn to stop the sunlight from fading the carpet, in spite of the fact no bugger set foot in here except my Uncle and Aunt for a sherry and mince pie every Christmas Eve.
When I next returned to Newport, I found him slumped in his chair, as if the stuffing had been knocked out of him. No tie, and unshaven. I pocketed my front door key. He didn't look up.
"She's gone, son. Gone."
I didn't know what to say. I couldn't hug or even touch him. We'd barely even shaken hands when we met. Men were like that in those days. I came into the room. My throat constricted, I asked if I could help.
Percy shook his head.
I thought for some reason the burden would be lifted then, but it wasn't. I thought it might all be over, but chance would be a fine thing.
The next morning walking to art school I saw two dowdy women across the road chatting, eyeing the house pointedly.
"What are you looking at?"
They didn't answer, backs stiffening as if affronted. The blonde one unfolded her thick arms, but they refused to move, as if doing so might enact some kind of defeat. I rounded the corner without giving them the satisfaction of a second glance.
It won't come as a vast surprise to learn that soon the whole business was the gossip of the life drawing class as soon as it hit the Echo. Things like that don't happen in Newport without everyone talking about it and making a meal of it. And that included my fellow students.
"God alive! Can you believe this? Man slept with his dead wife for three weeks after she died. Christ Almighty…"
"Give us that paper."
"Good God."
"Bastard must be sick in the head."
"Don't talk about it! I don't want to think about it! It's disgusting!"
"Can you imagine the niff? Christ! What a pervert! Musta been proper mad."
Nose to her crayon sketch, the Irish girl with the long hair pronounced matter-of-factly, "He'll be damned in Hell for it, that's for absolutely certain."