Cain’s Book (21 page)

After the prayers and the singing the two workmen moved forward self-consciously and threw the earth back into the grave, and the long block of raised earth was covered with
wreaths. “That’s ours,” my father said out of the side of his mouth at me quietly, “the one with the tulips...” and, feeling himself overheard by a sterner gentleman
at the other side of the family, coughed his little cough, and said: “Yeeeeees. I believe that’s it,” and he was suddenly looking at it with an almost pained expression on his
face, offensive thing, that at the beginning had delighted him... until amongst the others suddenly he had seen it small and less prepossessing than he had remembered. The clergyman shook hands
with the family, with Tina, whose goitre was bad and whose eyes had had a fixed, unaligned look for some weeks, with Angus who was blinking at the first day he had seen during seven years on the
nightshift, with Hector more solemn than I had known him – Tina must have been later, for of course, being a woman, she wouldn’t be at the graveside – the clergyman, muttering
comforts that sounded like apologies, went with his little leather case alone down the path without looking back.

The sobriety of Hector’s air caught my attention. Since he had become a commercial traveller he had adopted a permanently spoofing air, a professional light-heartedness which deserted him
now. But then his father was interred and he seemed to take hold of himself and to notice me for the first time. How was I? Were things going well? Lucky devil to live abroad these days! Why, the
taxes in this country were past belief! Overhearty, evasive... this the boy I had carried on my back over a dangerous ledge near Ben Nevis. Was it not funny how everything had turned out
differently, not as one expected? I had a vague idea he was referring to my clothes, informal, beginning to be threadbare – poor old Joe, gone the way of his father! My general air of
anonymity.

“Come and see us before you go,” Hector said, but he was already looking over my shoulder where one of his associates was buttonholing his boss. “Don’t forget now, old
man. Vivian and I would love to hear all about your travels, always talking about you. Marco Polo, eh? What wouldn’t I give to be in your shoes!”

“Next time,” my father said when we were alone at last, “it will be for me.”

“Nonsense. And I shan’t stay away so long this time, Dad.”

I thought then it was hardly a lie; there was no way of knowing.

We lingered long after the other mourners were gone, walking along the gravel footpaths between the graves, and the grave of my uncle with its covering of bright wreaths was nearly out of
sight.

“Your mother was buried here,” my father said. “Would you like to see the grave?”

“Not particularly.”

“You’ve never visited it.”

“No, I never have. Would you like a drink?”

“It’s just as you wish,” he said, not looking at me, “but I thought as we were here anyway.”

“I don’t want to see it, Dad. I have explained it to you before.”

Springtime, I remember thinking. To be in England. Casually I stooped to pick up a broken flower which had fallen on the path. It was quite fresh.

“From a wreath,” my father said.

We walked slowly, in silence, and the sky was low and white-grey like milk which has stood for a long time in a cat’s saucer, collecting dust, and as I looked up I felt a raindrop on my
face. “Looks as though it’s going to rain,” I said.

“I come here every month,” my father was saying. “Sometimes I miss a month, but not often. It’s the least I can do.”

I repressed the impulse to say something harsh. I glanced at him but he avoided my eye and there was a faint flush on his cheeks. It was as though my father had said: “I’m old now,
Joe, you must understand,” said that and not the other thing, which was not important and which was not really what he had meant to say. I wanted to put my arm round him and say:
“We’re like one another, Dad,” but I couldn’t make the gesture.

He was looking at me uncertainly.

“I’ve sometimes wondered, Joe, why you haven’t done something serious, you know, like Hector or your brother-in-law.”

“Have you?”

“You could be independent today.”

“I
am
independent.”

“Of course, I know,” he said. “But you know what I mean, Joe.”

“Money?”

Coughing. “And position, you know. Take Hector; he’s in a fine position now. He’s worked hard that boy.”

“You envy him?”

“Who? Me?”

His laugh was forced. I looked away at an urn on a pillar of white marble; the inscription was in Latin...
in vitam aeternam
...

“You know that’s not true, son.”

“I don’t want to talk about Hector, Dad. Poor guy with his infinite quotas.”

“It’s just as you wish, Joe. I didn’t mean to upset you. Only you were close when you were kids. Follow the leader it was when you were boys. He followed you
everywhere.”

“Yes, I remember.”

I wanted simply to change the subject which bored me but my father had crumpled and his mouth had fallen. I had an impulse to explain myself to him... that I would not have had it otherwise, at
no point would I have gone back on the past... didn’t he see? But he would not have understood. “We’re alike, son, you and I.” He might have said that. His son, after all.
The second generation.

“I realize of course,” he said at last, “that I haven’t been much help to you.”

The irrelevance shocked me. He would always believe that; my son, my world; at least he could claim guilt.

I found myself saying, somewhat drily: “You needn’t blame yourself, Dad,” and I was going to add: “You didn’t decide me one way or the other,” but the
defensive smile of disbelief was already there, like a vizor over the eyes.

We walked on.

And then I noticed that my father’s hat seemed too big for him. It was. It didn’t fit him. I took his arm:

“Your hat’s too big for you, Dad!”

He laughed. “Can’t afford another, Joe! D’you know, when I bought my first hat they cost 12/6d... the best mind you. The same hat costs 62/6d today. Money’s not worth
what it was as Hector was saying only a few days ago. The cheap hats are no good, no good at all. This is a Borsalino.”

A Borsalino. He had halted, removed his hat, and pointed with his finger at the discoloured silk lining. “Borsalino. Made in Italy. You see?”

“Must be a good one.”

“The best,” my father said.

We were walking towards the main gate of the cemetery. The cortège had already broken up and the last of the cars was gone. The porter at the gate nodded to us as we walked out onto the
street.

“I suppose those shops do good business,” I said to my father, referring to the row of shops which sold graveside ornaments and flowers.

“Capital,” he replied. “I bought a vase there once for your grandmother’s grave but one day when I went back somebody had broken it. That’s a long time ago now, of
course. Must be twenty years.”

“And shells,” I said.

“Yes, you can buy shells with inscriptions.”

“Eternity in shells,” I said. But my father was looking straight ahead and walking quickly as he always did on the street, and he seemed to have forgotten what we were talking
about.

“Will you go abroad again immediately?”

“I suppose so. There’s nothing for me here at the moment. I may spend a day or two in London.”

“And then where? France?”

“North Africa perhaps.”

“Was there during the first war,” he said mechanically, “Alexandria.”

“Yes.”

“I know! It was the day before your Aunt Eleanor died.”

“What was?”

“The day I found the vase broken. Sheer vandalism.”

“Yes, it was a pity.”

“I paid 17/6d for it. It wasn’t cheap. Come on, we’ll get a drink across the road there.” And we crossed the street to a green-painted public house.

It was easy there with a glass of whisky in front of us to recreate the surface intimacy which, years before, I had assented to during a game of billiards – never pot your opponent’s
ball – our having even then little to talk about and our inexpertness at the game causing us to smile, to laugh, to be together, until, in the sun again, we took leave of each other, I to go
to some class or other at the university, my father to drink coffee in his favourite smoke room and to read and reread the local paper.

My father, like my uncle, used to talk about his memories of Cairo, Jaffa – the oranges were tremendous, like small melons – and Suez, to speak of a head wound he had received,
shrapnel – fingering the scalp tenderly – which had resulted in his being “sent down the line” to the base hospital and thence home to Blighty, and, as he uttered the word
lovingly I used to wonder how he could have failed to relate the homecoming to those things to which he
came
home – or did he come home? – for it seemed to me that those years
and those vague memories were the only positive thing in his entire life – he invariably returned to them after a few drinks – and that from the day he had set foot again in England he
had known nothing but humiliation. I was brought up in a world in which we could refer to my father’s unemployment only in a discreet whisper and never in the presence of guests. Those were
the days, Joe! You were too young of course! Good Scotch, what was it? 7/6d a bottle, yes! Jaffa oranges, pick them off the trees, get a nigger to do it for you for an acker,
³²
the price of second-hand furniture, too bad you’re not setting up house, I know where you could get some cheap, know a dealer, Silverstein, good business in the East
End, trust the Jews, see a man was convicted at the Old Bailey,
fifteen
thousand gold watches, that’s smuggling! No wonder, income tax, bloody robbers... conversations which in the
end always came to his noting that someone had died, to his search in the deaths column, as though the printed notices informed him, quietly bringing desolation to his eyes, that time was running
out.

I sat for a long time thinking of my father in the lounge of the hotel where, to discourage late drinkers, most of the lights had been turned out. Everyone else had gone,
except the one with the wen, and even she went away for long periods, through the pantry door. But I had begun to enjoy its bleakness and its emptiness.

The murderer entered and sat down some distance away at the only other table at which a light was burning. I noticed him come in at the moment at which he entered, but it was as though I
retained the visual image of his entering in a preconscious state and at a distance from what I was at the instant experiencing, the image of him flat and without contour, there during all those
ten minutes during which I was still following the hollow recesses of the room into their tawdry elaboration in the mind of a professional plasterer, amongst shadows, in the oblong gloom of the
ceiling, and its emptiness, and its dank, ash-laden smell, the spirals of blue smoke all ascended to a dripping unstable cloud under the roof, as in an auditorium deserted after a performance. Then
suddenly – I say ten minutes – I was aware of him seated at the table under the light, like a man waiting, as he was, a white blob of a face and a dark blue suit, and I had a sense that
he was elderly.

The wen came and went to his table a moment later. It might have been she who called my attention to him. I had felt her restlessness and the fact of there being another customer seemed to
enliven her. And it let me off a hook.

And then we were both sitting in all that emptiness and it occurred to me that if one of us wished to speak he would have to call out at the top of his voice. If I called out at the top of my
voice, officials would come from all directions, porters, night clerks, chambermaids, to witness the taking of the madman. But it wasn’t so. When the gentleman spoke, he did so in a high
voice but not loudly.

“Stranger in town?”

I had not expected him to address me and was caught off guard. I began to say yes but it trailed away into an anonymous gesture of the hand which was to indicate the enormity of the room, the
impracticality of carrying on an intelligent conversation at that great distance. He got up and came across. Sit here, no need to shout, he conveyed to me, and I found myself smiling acceptance.
– He is now here by your explicit request, I was thinking. Anything that happens now is your own doing. The table, the man, the dim light, the wen in the pantry stealing cakes. He was about
to say something but I dropped my right hand to his thigh, near the crotch, and looked him in the eye. He looked like a stunned fish, a big cod splayed chin flat on the marble. He goggled. Then he
pulled himself up, struggling to remove my hand which clung to the fat of his thigh like a hook to beef, and a sly, wheedling expression was suddenly jammed close to my own, an expression which
flashed intelligence of the pantry where the wen might walk. “Not here!” he said in a breathless whisper.

It occurred to me that if at that moment I were to lick his face as a cow might he would certainly scream.

When I got up to go to my room he was still at his table (which, of course, he had never left). I crossed the hall to the foyer and went outside into the street where there was a light rain. A
night in London, I was thinking. Well, for Christ’s sake go to bed, you don’t have to write it!

“C
APACITY FOR LOVE
?” G
EO
said. “I don’t know anything about that. I have
noticed Jody has a capacity for horse.”

Mona was trying to get a job in Indochina and the very thought of being in that country gave Geo wet dreams. I was hoping she would get it. She was on the scows only at
weekends, like some other women who had jobs during the week. As they are still employable they are usually better looking.

Mona said to me: “I’m not a kid any longer, Joe. I’m thirty-two. I know Geo can’t give up horse, not now anyway, but I want to know where I stand. I don’t care
whether he’s a good painter or not. He doesn’t paint. He hasn’t painted for over a year now. But I want to know if he wants me to be his woman. He doesn’t live on what he
makes on the scow. He’s always in debt and he doesn’t notice how much he’s really getting from me. I don’t mean only money, Joe,” etc.