“– and you would oblige us by cashing a cheque for him. He’s left his cheque card at home.”
“Sorry,” said the barman, “there’s nothing I can do about that.”
He turned his back on us.
“I’m sorry too,” I told them helplessly.
“You,” Mish told me, “are a mean old fart. You are not only mean, you are a bore. You are totally uninteresting.” At these my words my embarrassment vanished and I cheered up. I no longer minded my social superiority. I felt boosted by it. With an air of mock sadness I said, “True! So I must leave you. Goodbye folks.”
I think the three men were also amused by the turn things had taken. They said cheerio to me quite pleasantly.
I left the Whangie and went toward Mackay’s bank, carefully remembering the previous ten minutes to see if I might have done better with them. I did not regret entering the Whangie with Mish. She had pleasantly excited me and I had not then known she only saw me as a source of free drink. True, I had talked boringly – had bored myself as well as them – but interesting topics would have emphasized the social gulf between us. I might have amused them with queer stories about celebrities whose private lives are more open to me than to popular journalism (that was probably how the duke entertained Mackay’s father between drams in the tool shed) but it strikes me as an unpleasant way to cadge favour with underlings. I was pleased to think I had been no worse than a ten-minute bore. I had made a fool of myself by wanting credit for a round of drinks I did not buy, but that kind of foolery hurts nobody. If Mish and her pals despised me for it good luck to them. I did not despise myself for it, or only slightly. In the unexpected circumstances I was sure I could not have behaved better.
The idea of taking a hundred-pound note from Mackay’s money and buying a round of drinks only came to me later. So did the idea of handing the note to Mish, saying, “Share this with the others,” and leaving fast before she could reply. So did the best idea of all: I could have laid five hundred-pound notes on the table, said, “Conscience money, a hundred each,” and hurried off to put the rest in Mackay’s account. Later I could have told him, “I paid back half what I owe today. You’ll have to wait till next week for the rest – I’ve done something stupid with it.” As he heard the details his mouth would open wider and wider or his frown grow sterner and sterner. At last he would say, “That’s the last interest-free loan you get from me” – or something else. But he would have been as astonished as the five in the pub. I would have proved I was not predictable. Behaving like that would have changed me for the better. But I could not imagine doing such things then. I can only imagine them since I changed for the worse.
I walked from the Whangie toward Mackay’s bank brooding on my recent adventure. No doubt there was a smug little smile on my lips. Then I noticed someone walking beside me and a low voice saying, “Wait a minute.”
I stopped. My companion was Roberta who stood staring at me. She was breathing hard, perhaps with the effort of overtaking me, and her mouth was set in something like a sneer. I could not help looking straight at her now. Everything I saw – weird hair and sneering face, shapeless leather jacket with hands thrust into flaps below her breasts, baggy grey jeans turned up at the bottoms to show clumsy thick-soled boots laced high up the ankles – all these insulted my notion of how a woman ought to look. But her alert stillness as her breathing quietened made me feel very strange, as if I had seen her years ago, and often. To break the strangeness I said sharply, “Well?”
Awkwardly and huskily she said, “I don’t think you’re mean or uninteresting. I like older men.”
Her eyes were so wide open that I saw the whole circle of the pupils, one brown, one blue. There was a kind of buzzing in my blood and the nearby traffic sounded fainter. I felt stronger and more alive than I had felt for years – alive in a way I had never expected to feel again after my marriage went wrong. Her sneer was now less definite, perhaps because I felt it on my own lips. Yes, I was leering at her like a gangster confronting his moll in a 1940 cinema poster and she was staring back as if terrified to look anywhere else. I was fascinated by the thin stubble at the sides of her head above the ears. It must feel exactly like my chin before I shaved in the morning. I wanted to rub it hard with the palms of my hands. I heard myself say, “You want money. How?”
She murmured that I could visit my bank before we went to her place – or afterward, if I preferred. My leer became a wide grin. I patted my inner pocket and said, “No need for a bank, honey. I got everything you want right here. And we’ll take a taxi to my place, not yours.” I spoke with an American accent, and the day turned into one of the worst in my life.
MISTER GOODCHILD
NOBODY OVER FIFTY can tell where or how they’ll live a few months hence Mrs ... Mrs?”
“Dewhurst.”
“Look at me, for instance. A year ago I was headmaster of a very good comprehensive school in Huddersfield. My wife made me take early retirement for the good of her health – not mine. She thought the warmer climate in the south would suit her so down to Berkshire we came. Fat lot of good that did. A fortnight after settling into the new house she died of a stroke. Since I do not intend to follow her example I will pause here for a few seconds Mrs ... Mrs?”
“Dewhurst. Let me carry that,” she said, pausing at a bend in the staircase.
“No no!” he said putting a cumbersome suitcase down on a higher step without releasing the handle. “I was talking about losing my wife. Well my son has a garage with five men working under him in Bracknell. ‘Come and live with us, Dad,’ says he, ‘we’ve tons of room.’ Yes, they have. New house with half an acre of garden. Huge open-plan living-room with dining alcove. Five bedrooms no less, one for marital couple, one each for my two grandchildren, one for guests and one for poor old grandad. But poor old grandad’s bedroom is on the small side, hardly bigger than a cupboard and although I have retired from education I have not retired from public life. I am now ready to proceed – to continue proceeding – upward Mrs ... Dewhurst.”
They continued proceeding upward.
“I edit the You See Monthly Bulletin, the newsletter of the Urban Conservation Fellowship and that requires both space and privacy. ‘Use the living-room!’ says my son, ‘it’s big enough. The kids are at school all day and if you work at the sun patio end Myra won’t disturb you.’ Myra did. How could I get a steady day’s work done in a house where lunch arrived any time between twelve and one? I didn’t complain but when I asked for a shelf in the fridge where I could keep my own food to make my own lunch she took it for a slight on her housekeeping. So this!” said Mr Goodchild putting the suitcase down, “is my fourth home since last September. I’m glad my things arrived.”
He stood beside Mrs Dewhurst in a high-ceilinged room that had been the master bedroom eighty years earlier when the mansion housed a family and six servants. An ostentatiously solid bed, wardrobe, dressingtable and set of chairs survived from that time. The gas heater in the hearth of a white marble fireplace was recent, also a Formica-topped table, Laura Ashley window curtains, wall-to-wall fitted carpet with jagged green and black pattern. The carpet was mostly covered by twenty-three full cardboard boxes, a heap of metal struts and shelving, a heavy old typewriter, heavier Grundig tape player, a massive black slide and picture projector called an epidiascope which looked as clumsy as its name.
“I am monarch of all I survey, my right there is none to dispute,” said Mr Goodchild. “Forgive me for stating the obvious Mrs Dewhurst, but you are NOT the pleasant young man who showed me this room two days ago and asked for – and received! – what struck me as an unnecessarily huge advance on the rent.”
He smiled at her to show this was a question. Without smiling back she told him the young man was an employee of the letting agency and she did not know his name because that sort come and go; she, however, lived in the basement with her husband who cleaned the hall and stairs and shared bathroom. He also looked after the garden. It
was her job to collect the rent, change sheets, pillowcases and towels once a fortnight and also handle complaints.
“You will hear no complaints from me or about me, Mrs Dewhurst. A quiet, sensible, sober man I am, not given to throwing wild parties but tolerant of neighbours who may be younger and less settled. Who, exactly, are my neighbours on this floor?”
“A couple of young women share the room next door. They do something secretarial in the office of the biscuit factory.”
“Boyfriends?”
“I haven’t bothered to ask, Mr Goodchild.”
“Admirable! Who’s above and who’s below?”
“The Wilsons are above and the Jhas are below: both married couples.”
“My age or yours Mrs Dewhurst? For I take you to be a youthful thirty-five or so.”
A very slight softening in Mrs Dewhurst’s manner confirmed Mr Goodchild’s guess that she was nearly his own age. She told him that the Wilsons were young doctors and would soon be leaving for a bigger place because Mrs Wilson was pregnant; that Mr Jha had a grocery in a poorer part of town, his wife was much younger than him with a baby, a very quiet little thing, Mr Goodchild would hardly notice it.
“Jha,” said Mr Goodchild thoughtfully. “Indian? Pakistani? African? West Indian?”
“I don’t know, Mr Goodchild.”
“Since I have no prejudice against any people or creed on God’s earth their origin is immaterial. And now I will erect my possessions into some kind of order. Cheerio and off you go Mrs Dewhurst.”
Off she went and Mr Goodchild’s air of mischievous good humour became one of gloomy determination.
He hung his coat and jacket in the wardrobe. He unpacked from his suitcase a clock and radio which he put on the mantelpiece, underwear he laid in dressingtable drawers, pyjamas he placed under the pillow of the bed. Carrying the still heavy suitcase into a kitchenette he took out bottles, packets, tins and placed them in a refrigerator and on shelves. This tiny windowless space had once been the master’s dressing-room and had two doors, one locked with a putty-filled keyhole. This useless door had once opened into the bedroom of the mistress, a room now rented by the secretaries. Mr Goodchild laid an ear to it, heard nothing and sighed. He had never lived alone before and sounds of occupancy would have soothed him.
In the main room he rolled up shirtsleeves, produced a Swiss army knife, opened the screwdriver attachment and by twenty minutes to six had efficiently erected four standing shelf units. Returning to the kitchenette he washed hands and put a chop under the grill. Faint voices from the next room showed it was occupied though the tone suggested a television play. He opened tins of soup, peas and baby potatoes and heated them in saucepans which he clattered slightly to let the secretaries know they too were no longer alone. Ten minutes later he ate a three-course dinner: first course, soup; second, meat with two vegetables; third, cold apple tart followed by three cups of tea. Meanwhile he listened to the six o’clock news on the BBC Home Service. Having washed, dried and put away the kitchenware he brooded long and hard over the positions of the rented furniture.
The Formica-topped table would be his main work surface so had better stand against the wall where the wardrobe now was with his shelf units on each side of it. He would shift the small bedside table to the hearthrug and dine on that. The dressingtable would go beside the bed and support the bedside lamp and his bedtime cup of cocoa. The wardrobe could then stand where the dressingtable had been. The boxes on the floor would make these shifts difficult so he piled as many as possible onto and under the bed. The hardest task was moving the wardrobe. It was eight feet high, four wide and a yard deep. Mr Goodchild, though less than average height, was proud of his ability to make heavy furniture walk across a room by pivoting it on alternate corners. The top part of the wardrobe rested on a base with a deep drawer inside. He discovered these were separate when, pivoting the base, the top section began sliding off. He dropped the base with a floor-shuddering thump. The upper part teetered with a jangling of wire coathangers but did not topple. Mr Goodchild sat down to recover from the shock. There came a tap upon the door and a voice with a not quite English accent said, “Are you all right in there?”
“Yes yes. Yes yes.”
“That was one heck of a wallop.”
“Yes I’m ... shifting things about a bit Mr ... Jha?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve just moved in and I’m shifting things about. I’ll be at it for another hour or two.”
“Exercise care please.”
Mr Goodchild returned to the wardrobe and wrestled with it more carefully.
Two hours and several heavy thumps later the furniture was where he wanted it and he unpacked his possessions, starting with a collection of taped music. After putting it on a shelf beside the Grundig he played Beethoven symphonies in order of composition while unpacking and arranging books and box files. Handling familiar things to familiar music made him feel so completely at home that he was surprised by rapping on his door and the hands of his clock pointing to midnight. He switched off the third movement of the Pastoral and opened the door saying quietly but emphatically, “I am very very very very –”
“Some people need sleep!” said a glaring young woman in dressing-gown and slippers.
“– very very sorry. I was so busy putting my things in order that I quite forgot the time and how sound can propagate through walls. Perhaps tomorrow – or some other day when you have a free moment – we can discover experimentally the greatest volume of sound I can produce without disturbing you, Miss ... Miss?” “Shutting your kitchen door will halve the din where we’re concerned!” hissed the girl. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard from the Jhas. He’s up here complaining if we drop as much as a book on the floor.” She hurried away.
With a rueful grimace Mr Goodchild closed the door, crossed the room, closed the kitchen door and pondered a moment. He was not sleepy. The encounter with the young woman had pleasantly excited him. Sitting at his newly arranged work table he wound paper into what he thought of as “my trusty Remington” and, starting with the boarding-house address and date in the top right-hand corner, typed this.
My Very Dear Son,
You receive this communication at your work-place because I am no stranger to married life. If it arrived with other personal mail on your breakfast table Myra might feel hurt if you did not let her read it and equally hurt if you did. I must not offend either partner in a successful marital arrangement. My fortnight in Foxdene was a worthwhile but unsuccessful experiment. It has proved me too selfishly set in my ways to live without a room where I can work and eat according to my own timetable, a timetable which others cannot
He was interrupted by hesitant but insistent tapping and went to the door full of lively curiosity.
The young dressing-gowned woman outside was different from the previous one. He smiled kindly and asked, “How can I help you Miss ... ?”
“Thomson. Gwinny Thomson. My friend can’t sleep because of the clattering your machine makes. Neither can I.”
“To tell the truth Gwinny, when typing I get so engrossed in words that it’s years since I noticed my machine made any noise at all. Your room-mate must be flaming mad with me.”
Gwinny nodded once, hard.
“What’s her name, Gwinny?”
“Karen Milton.”
“Tell Karen that from now on my name is not George Goodchild but Mouse Goodchild. She won’t hear a squeak from the kitchen tonight for I will go to bed with a small malt whisky instead of my usual cocoa and toasted cheese. But she must first endure the uproar of a flushing toilet if that sound also pierces your walls. Does it? And YOU must remember to call me George.”
“We’re used to the flushing so it doesn’t bother us, Mr ... George.”
“Then Karen may now rest in peace. Good night, sleep tight Gwinny.”
Gwinny retired. Mr Goodchild changed into slippers and pyjamas, took towel and toilet bag to bathroom, brushed teeth, was
hed, shat and smiled approvingly into the lavatory pan before flushing it. Sleek fat droppings showed that his inside still harmonized with the universe.
Next morning he arose, shaved, washed, dressed, breakfasted and waited until he heard the girls leave for work. Then he switched on the end of the Pastoral symphony, read the last six lines of his interrupted letter and completed it.
My fortnight in Foxdene was a worthwhile but unsuccessful experiment. It has proved me too selfishly set in my ways to live without a room where I can work and eat according to my own timetable, a timetable which others cannot be expected to tolerate.
This is my second day of boarding-house life and I am settling in nicely. My closest connections so far have been with Mrs Dewhurst our saturnine housekeeper, Mr Jha an excitable Asiatic shopkeeper, and two young secretaries in the room next door. Karen Milton is sexy and sure of herself and thinks I’m a boring old creep. No wonder! Gwinny Thomson is a sort teachers recognize at a glance: less attractive than her friend because less confident and needing someone she feels is stronger to hide behind. I’m afraid Karen bullies her sometimes. Gwinny ought to “shack up” (as the Americans say) with an experienced man who thoroughly appreciates her, then she might blossom. But I’m far too old for that little job.
So have no fear, son o’ mine. When I kick the bucket all I have will be yours, apart from £2500 for the UCF who will probably spend half of it renovating a Victorian drinking fountain on Ilkley Moor and waste the rest attaching a bronze plaque inscribed to my memory. I should put a clause in my will forbidding such wicked waste but there are uglier ways to be remembered.
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 24