This June Saturday morning he stares off into the dissipating London fog. High in the sky, not long there, there’s half an orange sun on display, a shy sort of glow, wreathed with silvery strips of cloud.
He finds his thoughts alternating between drifting and focusing, and while he does not mind the drifting so much, the focusing bothers him – he wonders if he is staring as his father used to stare in the weeks before he died: into a remote distance?
The future is honest – it holds the date and precise time of his death. That is fact, a truth. The past he can’t change, and he would oh so dearly love to alter some of its aspects. Mostly small things, some major: to speak less coldly to her; to smother a habit before it had set up home within him; to have spent time … more time with Eleanor … he would love to own these as truths. Honest truths. The future is easier to shy away from, because it holds little for him by way of charm. At least it is so for the elderly. Youth owns the future. They grow into it, very often pass it by.
He wonders if a truth originally shaped as one is viewed forever by people as such? There’s a thought. Truth change? Or is it how we perceive truth? Constantly on the search for ways and means to make a truth palatable for our conscience to digest? Dilute?
‘Questions, questions,’ he whispers. Stop tormenting yourself. Live in the present. It is the only truth left to him: that he is breathing London air – he can neither take a breath back nor plan for two ahead. Advice imparted to him by a man fifty years his junior at a talk presented by one of the circle’s invited guest speakers.
Distort the truth. Historians do it all the time ….
Stop!
He takes a deep breath, holds, exhales.
He is an old man with time on his hands, but little of it left to him. He is not dying, but is at an age where death has forfeited its sting of surprise. At least he thinks so, but he is occasionally uncertain of this: he suspects it is possible for an old person expecting death, on the lookout for it, to be taken completely unawares when it eventually arrives.
Traffic noise is beginning to grow. London – he has always loved the city, its people, its essence – Dublin is his birth city, but it has no place in his heart: he would afford it none. He is Irish, born of English parents who spent their working lives in Ireland. Considers himself Irish because you can’t lie away an accent.
By nature, he is not morbid. By nature, he is even-tempered, and quiet-spoken. A week past his seventy-eighth birthday, a day he spent alone in his Russell Square apartment, he counts his blessings: he is well, apart from the occasional turn – his mind is clear; no muddied memories, no bouts of confusion. At my age, what else should I expect? It is very much a case of a worn-out body in need of running repairs.
He had a wife and a daughter, one of whom he knows for certain he has outlived. He has a tiny circle of friends that are engaged in a slow diminishing. Usually, three or four of them die within a couple of weeks of each other, and this generally happens in November, which his circle calls ‘The Month of Sorrows’. He does not miss them when they are gone; he is not cold, but he has learned how to distance himself from sorrow, to look at it from a remove of himself, something he tried to explain to a friend, since deceased, but wasn’t sure if he quite understood his point.
‘I don’t follow,’ Ed Harty said.
‘It’s like I’m outside my body, and looking at myself looking at what’s going on … does that make sense?’
‘No.’
He was 53 when he sold the Stand House. A broken man, alcoholic, smoker, gambler – the latter three addictions he eventually managed to see off, the former … well, he doubts if broken people can ever be fully mended. There are days on which they can feel they are on the mend; he has learned that these are watering holes of respite, no more. ‘Being a broken man can become an addiction, too,’ he told Harty. ‘One can get to like wallowing in self-pity.’
‘I doubt that. Something remains not right, you know. But what is it that remains broken?’ Harty had asked.
Albert said, ‘I … I don’t know. I suppose soul, spirit, heart, mind … all four?’
Over a mug of tea, he tallies the spend of his years: twenty-five in Dublin, twenty-eight at the Stand House, a pub opposite the Curragh Racecourse. He had lived above the pub and lounge, rented out a couple of rooms too, because outside of the flat racing season business was less than brisk, and the money earned from letting came in handy. And it was a comfort not to think he was alone in those spacious upstairs living quarters. Especially after ….
His customers were mostly men from surrounding horse racing stables, of which there were many: jockeys and grooms, professional punters, losers, winners, drinkers and non-drinkers, passers-by, historians, hard-bitten ladies, murderers, rapists … they all walked through the doors of the pub he had bought with his parents’ legacy and a slender bank loan. Summer race meetings at the Curragh, Derby and Guineas’ day, but no jump meets: the racecourse and its stand and paddocks a trio of winter ghosts.
Harty, the week before he died, mooted the Curragh trip at the circle’s weekly meeting in their local. Every year, Harty said, it was either the beaches at Normandy, the war cemeteries, or someplace else that reminded them of the dead. ‘Why not a bleedin’ change for a change?’
Albert finds nothing at all wrong with the annual outings to France. He believes it’s important to remember the fallen; it would be a sin not to. Harty proposed the Derby at the Curragh as an alternative event and destination, having remembered speaking with Albert about the pub he had once owned there. But Harty didn’t genuinely want a new destination; he was getting a dig at Vize Hickory, who had dropped him from the pub’s snooker team. To Harty’s disgust, Vize said it sounded like a fucking jolly good idea. In any regard, Harty won’t be coming along to the Curragh. Vize, a decorated war hero, a former high-ranking military police officer, is organising the three-day visit.
It’s a little chilly on the balcony. He is three storeys up. He loves his apartment, its warm colours, his paintings of racehorses, places he has visited down the years. His retirement is long, having quit on a working life after selling up the pub in Ireland for a handsome profit. Not a man for risk investment, he bought six properties, and these he rents through a property agency. Who will inherit them when he dies is a matter that now and then causes him a degree of bother, though he is aware that it should not, as he will be beyond caring.
In the kitchen, he boils up the kettle and puts a teabag into a green mug. He drinks copious amounts of tea. Everyone encourages him to drink water for his health, to aid his pipeworks, but he can’t bring himself to unless it is flavoured, though of late he has begun to sip at sparkling clear water.
It is mid-June, and in three weeks he’ll be back in a country he hasn’t set foot in for decades, or thought much about either. There have been times when he resolved to visit, but the resolve melted for one reason or another: usually trepidation. At least with a group of people, as with the Normandy tours, there is a sharing of sorrows and a little banter, a sense of togetherness; Ireland though, if he’d went alone, would be another matter entirely. Resurrections of all sorts might occur.
The Circle is called ‘The Red Lion’s Inn Circle’. Harty used to say, ‘The in circle,’ on a chuckle. A pity he’s dead. He was good for a laugh and getting a rise out of people. His family buried him with his snooker cue and a cube of blue chalk. Vize didn’t mention the fact that he had dropped Harty from the snooker team, skirting around the issue by saying, ‘Ed was a valued member of our circle and a fine snooker player, turning out to represent the Red Lion even when he didn’t feel the Mae West …’.
‘Eight members will be travelling to the Derby,’ Vize says when he rings in the afternoon, disturbing Albert during his nap, ‘in total. I tried to book the Stand House Hotel, but bloody hell … they’ve gone out of business, though their site is still on
the web, old boy.’
It is the first he has heard of his pub being a hotel. The new owners must have extended.
‘A fine hotel too, good-looking leisure centre, the width of the road from the racecourse. Bloody recession is what I say, Albert. Goddamn awful tripe.’
He does not know whether he likes or dislikes Vize. He is 70, or has been for the three years Albert has known him. He wears a tweed jacket, and a handlebar moustache he keeps waxed. Uses snuff. Drinks whiskey, always Jack Daniels. Twice divorced. Two grown-up daughters who shun him – things Albert learned from Harty, who was good at finding out things about people. Whether his information is true or not is a different matter.
Albert is the most senior member travelling to Ireland, and as such, like their president, he won’t be expected to share a room. It used be a circle policy for all members to share hotel rooms, but members had voted to add rules to the circle’s charter after Michael Harty, Harty’s older brother, went walkabout in the middle of the night, stole into Vize’s bed and groped his genitalia before proceeding to drown him in vomit. A lurid business, which saw the elder Harty banned from the circle for twenty-four months; in effect a lifetime banishment, as Michael has about six months to live. Another likely victim to the Month of Sorrows. Neither is it lost on Albert that Vize may have also punished Ed for his brother’s night-time violation. Murky people do murky things – another Harty observation.
He does not feel well, in a general sense – there is no specific pain, nothing for which he can dispatch a painkiller to conquer. He is not sure if he is up to attending the meeting at the Red Lion this evening. It’s only round the corner from the apartment block, but it may as well be in Siberia when he feels like this. He has learned to listen to his body, and from experience understands that the times he did not were the times he ended up in dock, strapped to a heart monitor.
Wandering into his bedroom, he takes out the small leather suitcase he had bought for a song some years back at a January sale in Harrods. Packs what he thinks will be enough, and a little over enough in the case of underwear. Iris had said she would help, but he has a thing about doing as much as possible for himself.
His computer confirms what Vize had told him earlier about the Stand House Hotel, Conference and Leisure Centre. What he hadn’t said is that the whole lot had been demolished and turned into a car park. No. Surely they mean that the hotel has been levelled, not the pub?
Back … when? He’d once submitted a planning application to remove the porthole windows and Ionic-design archway at the entrance, but later withdrew it, such had been the ructions created by the authorities and locals – later, the Council placed a preservation order on some of the property’s features. How can something deigned as having historical significance and subsequently afforded cultural protection come to lose its status? Cui bono? As Vize would say.
It bothers him, even at the Red Lion that evening, when he is distracted enough not to have heard several questions posed to him by members, to the extent that they grew worried for him.
Vize intrudes quietly into the silence.
‘You’re not with us this evening, Albert. Is everything all right?’
‘My apologies … they knocked down my pub. I can’t believe it.’
‘Nothing’s permanent,’ Vize says, consolingly.
So very true, Albert thinks. It is a fact he always loses sight of.
‘Deposits in by the end of the week, gentlemen,’ Vize says, glancing at his watch. Albert thinks that Harty might have been right about Vize having a woman in his life.
‘She’s ’bout fifty … he’s giving her socks I’m told.’
His voice alive in his ear as ever. As with other ghosts long dead, he knows that Harty’s voice will fade and eventually disappear.
They congregate outside the Red Lion on a misty morning, waiting for the minibus to arrive and bring them to the airport. He knows they are there waiting solely for the bus, and not for him to join them. He has decided to listen to his body and to his mind. Yesterday evening he had broken the news to Vize, who promptly called around to the apartment. He sat there, legs crossed. A reach of sunlight in through the window failed to touch his canvas desert shoes. Concern etched wavy lines across his forehead.
‘Albert,’ he had said, with a shrug, after listening, ‘I completely understand.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes.’
Understood that he had googled and viewed the flattened site where his pub once stood, where his daughter had died, where his wife had walked out and never returned – he doesn’t know to this day where she got to or if she’s alive, because her letter had begged him to leave her alone, not to come looking. Of course he did go searching for her, a year later, but she had not changed her mind. He and his drinking, the distance at which he had put himself from her when Lynn died, had chased Eleanor away.
‘I’m puzzled though about something …’, Vize said. ‘You say the hotel was gifted to this racing authority, and they proceeded some time later to level it?’
‘Yes, it appears so.’
‘And you had a preservation order lodged against you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, these the new owners must have managed to get around that obstacle in some way.’
‘Obviously, Vize, they did.’
‘Hmm …’.
‘What?’
‘It smells.’
‘Yes, it does. Frankly.’
Vize had served in Intelligence in Northern Ireland.
He said, ‘Do you know what, old boy? I often say this about the Irish … they do apathy very well, except for your northern brothers.’
‘Your thoughts?’
‘For what they’re worth … vested interests. It had to be in someone or some party’s interests to knock a spanking new hotel to the ground … one that had a profitable leisure centre, too. But …’.
‘But?’
‘It may well be all above board. I know quite a few hotels that have fallen shut and silent. If you can knock a white elephant, why wouldn’t you?’
It is Albert’s turn to say, ‘Hmm …’.
‘Best to let it go, Albert. Nothing lasts, isn’t that so? And things come to light when they’re ready to and not before.’
It is not in him to dance with the devils that are some of his memories, to explore what dirty truths lie behind the demolishment of his former pub, if any. There is a not a lot of time left for him to do or care about much – a truth that greatly pains him.
Deadly Confederacies Page 23