Cain’s Book (11 page)

The beer was cold and almost flat. He introduced me to the barman. “Just down from the university,” he said. Since I looked vaguely like a tramp both the barman and myself were a
little taken aback, but upon my father’s face there was a kind of waxen innocence, and no sign at all he was aware he was being inexact.

“What are you going to do now?” the barman said after a pause. He directed his question at me.

It was my father who answered.

“He’s training to be a journalist,” he said with a small, birdlike smile. He laid his finger at the deep hollow in his temple. There was a macabre irrelevance in all he said.
But I was glad enough not to have to say anything. The barman nodded his head, saying that the old days were over, tentatively, and my father, his Adam’s apple wobbling, tilted his head back
to drain the beer from his glass.

“Have another?”

“If you’re having one,” he said.

“Two more,” I said to the barman.

When they were placed before us I asked my father if he wouldn’t care to sit down. When we were in the company of a third person, whether it was a relative or a stranger, my father had a
trick of addressing himself to him and discussing me as though I weren’t present. In that way, adroitly placing me in some sense beyond them both, he was able at once to be proud of me and to
cut the listener down to his own size; then, when my pre-eminence was established, his little potato of a mouth split to show a cheap crescent of false teeth, and he asked after the other’s
offspring as though it were an old old story to which he condescended to listen out of sympathy for the other. From the point of view of the listener it was a disturbing game. If he was unskilful
enough to attempt to hit back, recounting the successes of his own offspring, my father had only to glance at the clock, whistle soundlessly through his thin lips, smile tolerantly to give the
impression that he would have been interested if only the subject had been more important, and say: “I don’t want to keep you late for that appointment, Joseph.” Then, with a
small bow to the other, he would usher me away, solicitous of my non-existent affairs. At this point, before we had gone two steps, he would play his ace. He turned round and said brightly to the
other: “I’m sorry I’ve got to rush him away like this, but you’ll probably have the opportunity of seeing him again before he leaves town. He’s going to be here for a
couple of weeks at least...” The other, if he wasn’t mortally offended, smiled weakly and nodded his head, for we were both looking at him, my father with an air of royal commiseration
and I, forcedly, with one of polite and distant recognition. When we were alone again my father would be humming to himself, usually some light operatic air. After a pause he would ask me where I
was going. If I was not doing anything in particular we could have a game of billiards.

I carried my beer over to one of the empty tables and he was forced to follow me with his own. I remember thinking that I shouldn’t grudge the old man his victories, nor even his using me
as a foil. They were more necessary to him than his bread.

He knew that he had displeased me and he laughed nervously when he sat down. “Good chap that,” he said most treacherously of the barman.

“Tell me, Dad, what does it feel like not to have worked for twenty-five years?”

“What? Pah... Ha ha! That’s not so! You’re a joker, you are! Hem... It’s true I’ve been out of a regular job since the Depression. Now, before that, son, as your
brothers will tell you, you went off every year for two months’ holiday, and all three of you were dressed in white... not like your cousins... with bonnets to match. Your mother
wouldn’t have you in anything but white, and neither would I. Always out of a bandbox, you children.”

“But in a way it’s an achievement, Dad.”

“What? What’s that? What’s an achievement, son?”

“Not working all that time.”

“Pah, it’s not true! I looked after the house! Who do you think looked after the house? The house couldn’t have been run without me. Your mother was always too soft. Good thing
she had me!”

The reverse was true. He always made things twice as difficult for my mother by generally getting in the way, scaring the lodgers with his ugly temper, by bursting constantly into the kitchen
like an angry bear and striking my mother, or in one way or another reducing her to tears, and by his habitual practice of seizing the bathroom and barricading it against all comers.

A bathroom-toilet is a vital place in a boarding house. If one person monopolizes it a queer kind of consternation overtakes the household. My father regarded the bathroom as his own.

He cleaned it and polished it and made every surface gleam. He arranged the coarse runner carpet lovingly as though it were fine rare Persian. He waxed the oilcloth and applied Brasso to the two
inefficient carpet rods which more or less kept the long strip of carpeting from gliding into folds across the oilcloth when you walked on it. He kept the windows spotless and changed the cream
curtains twice a week. (At the same time he grumbled if one of the lodgers wanted his curtains changed more than once a fortnight.)

He had four different locks on the bathroom door: a key, a snib, a snick and a hook-and-eye. He used all four when he was in there himself, I suppose in all about eight to twelve hours a day.
The kitchen was the family living room, and my father and mother slept there in a retractable bed. All the other rooms except “the boys’ bedroom” had been converted for the use of
lodgers, so he had no other room of his own in his own house. The major cleaning took three hours every morning. It began as soon as the lodgers (by preference “professional men”) went
to work and the children had gone to school.

An old couple who came eventually to stay were the bane of my father’s existence. The old man was crippled and had to be helped to the bathroom by his wife and my mother. Together they
supported him across the hall and down the passage which led to the bathroom. On a good day their passage from the room to my father’s lair took about three minutes each way. At the weekend
the children often timed it and placed bets. A good passage was usually assured if my father was in a tolerable humour. Then he would stand with a peculiar, fawning smirk of distaste in the open
kitchen doorway as the faltering procession passed, the old man wobbling on two sticks between the women. On a bad day the passage sometimes took as long as six minutes and was once clocked on a
stopwatch at 6 min. 48 secs. This occurred almost exclusively ’cause my father was in a foul temper. The old couple visited the bathroom twice a day, once in mid-morning between 10.30 and
11.00, and in the evening between 7.30 and 8.00.

As the morning visit forced my father to interrupt his cleaning it was usually the more perilous. He would stamp and rage in the kitchen, shouting: “Always the bloody same! Got to clean
the bloody place twice! Leave towels all over the bloody place!”

On such days the frail group quivered perceptibly as it neared the kitchen door. Then, when they had come and gone, my father would move with a cry of triumph like a beast to his lair. On bad
days he was still cleaning the bathroom when those of us who came home for lunch returned. And then my mother would go nervous and angry to the door and knock on it: “Louis! Would you please
finish up in there! Mr Rusk wants to use the bathroom before he eats lunch!”

A cry of pained protest from my father. “Bloody people keeping me back! Can’t get my bloody work done! Messing up the bloody toilet seat with powder!”

Sometimes he came out almost immediately and sometimes he lingered so long that my mother, with children and lodgers all clamouring to use the bathroom, had to go tearfully again to the
door.

Every moment someone else was in the bathroom was an agony for my father. Even when he was eating (and he ate quickly, like a wolf) he kept one ear cocked for sounds from the bathroom next
door.

“What the bloody hell was that! What’s he doing in there anyway? I thought he was going to eat his bloody lunch! When are you going to get a chance to eat yours, eh?”

“I’ve already eaten. Now eat your lunch and forget about Mr Rusk.” She was not convinced by his concern for her eating. She knew that as soon as the lodgers and the children
had gone out again he would return to the bathroom and lock himself in until around five, professedly performing his own ablutions.

In the evening my father was out and in between baths, cursing the last visitor who had disarranged towels, who, if he were a child, had drawn “bloody silly faces” on the
steam-clouded mirror. “Annie, will you come and see this pigsty!”

So when my father said with throaty conviction that the house couldn’t have been run without him I grinned.

“I’m telling you the God’s honest truth, son. Your poor mother was too soft. Everybody said that.”

I laughed. “She was certainly too soft with you, Dad. Now why don’t you just admit it? You haven’t worked for a quarter of a century. Now I’m not working either, so
I’m following in your footsteps. You ought to be proud of me. When we meet one of your friends you should say: ‘This is Joe, my youngest son. He’s unemployed. Of course he’s
not quite up to his dad’s standard yet because he’s not unemployable, but I have great hopes for him because he’s had a much better education than I ever got.’”

That amused him. “You’re a devil, son!” He wagged his head. He became more serious. “But you’ll have to make up your mind to do something soon.”

“You didn’t. That’s the only difference... I knocked off a little earlier than you did. Strictly speaking, I never began. The trouble with you, Dad, is that you’ve always
been ashamed of being unemployed and so you never learnt to enjoy your leisure. For God’s sake, even when we were starving you wouldn’t even collect the dole!”

“Queue up with that bloody tribe!”

“The proletariat?”

He smiled his little potato smile, distant, the better not to focus.

I went on: “You always pretended to be cleaning that bathroom of yours. That’s what made you the bad-tempered rascal you were!”

“I kept that bathroom spotless,” my father said rather gloomily.

“You want me to engrave that on your tombstone?”

“Don’t talk like that, son.”

“I’m not ashamed of you, Dad.”

“I know... I know...” He had begun to whistle soundlessly in the abstracted way he had. He drank another beer and then he said he was tired.

“You won’t come into town with me then?”

“No, I think I’ll go to bed early tonight, son. I think I have a cold coming on.”

I shook hands with him at the corner of the block where he lived. As he walked away I thought his room was always neat, the gas ring cleaned with Vim and steel work. And “electric fires
are not dirty...” He eats one thin slice of bread with a cup of tea before retiring.

On the tramcar on the way home I wondered if it was mere fantasy that I was reliving the life of my father, except that my attitude was different. I wondered whether I was kidding myself. I had
just quarrelled with Moira. It was the same New Year.

“R
EAD IT,” GEO SAID.
“But don’t be long. I don’t know when they’re coming for me. I’m
tied up at the other side of the pier. Come across as soon as you can.”

He didn’t need to tell me what for. It was one of Geo’s peculiarities to turn up like that when you were least expecting him.

“I’ll be over in five minutes.”

“See you.” He went out.

It was as though someone had just said: “You have won first prize in a lottery.”

I opened the letter quickly. My father’s spidery handwriting:

I read it over twice and then dropped it in the table drawer. I locked up the cabin, climbed onto the dock and went to look for Geo’s scow. I recognized it at once by the
emblem nailed to the mast. The bluebird of happiness, Geo called it. He had painted a sixteen-ounce can white and on the white can he had painted the bluebird.

Geo was on the quarterdeck making up a dockline which was no longer in use.

“You go on in and I’ll be in in a minute,’’ he said. “It’s on the ledge near the bed. You go ahead and cook up enough for both of us.”

A bag of horse, a spoon, a dropper, a spike, and a book of matches. I was fixing when he came in. He locked the door behind him.

“Here, I’ll clean it,” he said, as I moved the empty dropper towards the glass of water.