Essential Stories (5 page)

After leaving my father’s house you have to go down to the tram terminus before you get on to the by-pass. There was always one or two drivers, conductors or inspectors there, doing up their tickets, or changing over the trolley arms. When we passed I saw two of them drop their jaws, stick their pencils in their ears and raise their hats. I was so surprised by this that I nearly raised mine in acknowledgment, forgetting that we had the coffin behind. I had not driven one of my father’s hearses for years.

Hearses are funny things to drive. They are well-sprung, smooth-running cars, with quiet engines and, if you are used to driving a smaller car, before you know where you are, you are speeding. You know you ought to go slow, say 25 to 30 maximum and it’s hard to keep it down. You can return empty at 70 if you like. It’s like driving a fire engine. Go fast out and come back slow—only the other way round. Open out in the country but slow down past houses. That’s what it means. My father was very particular about this.

Muriel and I didn’t speak very much at first. We sat listening to the engine and the occasional jerk of the coffin behind when we went over a pot hole. We passed the place where poor Colin—but I didn’t say anything to Muriel, and she, if she noticed—which I doubt—did not say anything to me. We went through Cox Hill, Wammering and Yodley Mount, flat country, don’t care for it myself. “There’s a wonderful lot of building going on,” Muriel said at last.

“You won’t know these places in five years,” I said.

But my mind kept drifting away from the road and the green fields and the dullness, and back to Colin,—five days before he had come down this way. I expected to see that Indian coming flying straight out of every corner. But it was all bent and bust up properly now. I saw the damned thing.

He had been up to his old game, following us, and that had put the end to following. But not quite; he was following us now, behind us in the coffin. Then my mind drifted off that and I thought of those nights at my parents’ house, and Muriel. You never know what a woman is going to be like. I thought, too, that it had put my calculations out. I mean, supposing she had a baby. You see I had reckoned on waiting eighteen months or so. I would have eight hundred then. But if we had to get married at once, we should have to cut right down. Then I kept thinking it was funny her saying “Colin!” like that in the night; it was funny it made her feel that way with me, and how it made me feel when she called me Colin. I’d never thought of her in that way, in what you might call the “Colin” way.

I looked at her and she looked at me and she smiled but still we did not say very much, but the smiles kept coming to both of us. The light-railway bridge at Dootheby took me by surprise and I thought the coffin gave a jump as we took it.

“Colin’s still watching us,” I nearly said.

There were tears in her eyes.

“What was the matter with Colin?” I said. “Nice chap, I thought. Why didn’t you marry him?”

“Yes,” she said. “He was a nice boy. But he’d no sense of humour.”

“And I wanted to get out of that town,” she said.

“I’m not going to stay there, at that hotel,” she said.

“I want to get away,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”

She had a way of getting angry with the air, like that. “You’ve got to take me away,” she said. We were passing slowly into Muster, there was a tram ahead and people thick on the narrow pavements, dodging out into the road. But when we got into the Market Square where they were standing around, they saw the coffin. They began to raise their hats. Suddenly she laughed. “It’s like being the King and Queen,” she said.

“They’re raising their hats,” she said.

“Not all of them,” I said.

She squeezed my hand and I had to keep her from jumping about like a child on the seat as we went through.

“There they go.”

“Boys always do,” I said.

“And another.”

“Let’s see what the policeman does.”

She started to laugh but I shut her up. “Keep your sense of humour to yourself,” I said.

Through all those towns that run into one another as you might say, we caught it. We went through, as she said, like royalty. So many years since I drove a hearse, I’d forgotten what it was like.

I was proud of her, I was proud of Colin and I was proud of myself. And, after what had happened, I mean on the last two nights, it was like a wedding. And although we knew it was for Colin, it was for us too, because Colin was with both of us. It was like this all the way.

“Look at that man there. Why doesn’t he raise his hat? People ought to show respect for the dead,” she said.

THE EVILS OF SPAIN

We took our seats at the table. There were seven of us.

It was at one of those taverns in Madrid. The moment we sat down Juliano, the little, hen-headed, red-lipped consumptive who was paying for the dinner and who laughed not with his mouth but by crinkling the skin round his eyes into scores of scratchy lines and showing his bony teeth—Juliano got up and said, “We are all badly placed.” Fernando and Felix said, “No, we are not badly placed.” And this started another argument shouting between the lot of us. We had been arguing all the way to the restaurant. The proprietor then offered a new table in a different way. Unanimously we said, “No,” to settle the row; and when he brought the table and put it into place and laid a red and white check tablecloth on it, we sat down, stretched our legs and said, “Yes. This table is much better.”

Before this we had called for Angel at his hotel. We shook his hand or slapped him on the back or embraced him and two hung on his arm as we walked down the street. “Ah, Angel, the rogue!” we said, giving him a squeeze. Our smooth Mediterranean Angel! “The uncle!” we said. “The old scoundrel.” Angel smiled, lowering his black lashes in appreciation. Juliano gave him a prod in the ribs and asked him if he remembered, after all these years, that summer at Biarritz? When we had all been together? The only time we had all been together before? Juliano laughed by making his eyes wicked and expectant, like one Andalusian reminding another of the great joke they had had the day poor So-and-So fell down the stairs and broke his neck.

“The day you were nearly drowned,” Juliano said.

Angel’s complexion was the colour of white coffee; his hair, crinkled like a black fern, was parted in the middle, he was rich, soft-palmed and patient. He was the only well-dressed man among us, the suavest shouter. Now he sat next door but one to Juliano. Fernando was between them, Juan next to me and, at the end, Felix. They had put Caesar at the head of the table, because he was the oldest and the largest. Indeed at his age he found his weight tiring to the feet.

Caesar did not speak much. He gave his silent weight to the dinner, letting his head drop like someone falling asleep, and listening. To the noise we made his silence was a balance and he nodded all the time slowly, making everything true. Sometimes someone told some story about him and he listened to that, nodding and not disputing it.

But we were talking chiefly of that summer, the one when Angel (the old uncle!) had nearly been drowned. Then Juan, the stout, swarthy one, banged the table with his hairy hands and put on his horn-rimmed glasses. He was the smallest and most vehement of us, the one with the thickest neck and the deepest voice, his words like barrels rumbling in a cellar.

“Come on! Come on! Let’s make up our minds! What are we going to eat? Eat! Eat!” he roared.

“Yes,” we cried. “Drink! What are we going to drink?”

The proprietor, who was in his shirt sleeves and braces, said it was for us to decide. We could have anything we wanted. This started another argument. He stepped back a pace and put himself in an attitude of self-defence.

“Soup! Soup? Make up your minds about soup! Who wants soup?” bawled Juan.

“Red wine,” some of us answered. And others, “Not red, white.”

“Soup I said,” shouted Juan. “Yes,” we all shouted. “Soup.”

“Ah,” said Juan, shaking his head, in his slow miserable disappointed voice. “Nobody have any soup. I want some soup. Nobody soup,” he said sadly to the proprietor.

Juliano was bouncing in his chair and saying, God he would never forget that summer when Angel was nearly drowned! When we had all been together. But Juan said Felix had not been there and we had to straighten that matter out. Juliano said:

“They carried him on to the beach, our little Angel on to the beach. And the beach superintendent came through the crowd and said, ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Nothing,’ we said. ‘A man knocked out.’ ‘Knocked out?’ said the beach superintendent. ‘Nothing,’ we said. ‘Drowned!’ A lot of people left the crowd and ran about over the beach saying, ‘A man has been drowned.’ ‘Drowned,’ said the beach superintendent. Angel was lying in the middle of them all, unconscious, with water pouring out of his mouth.”

“No! No!” shouted Fernando. “No. It wasn’t like that.”

“How do you mean, it wasn’t like that?” cried Juliano. “I was there.” He appealed to us, “I was there.”

“Yes, you were there,” we said.

“I
was
there. I was there bringing him in. You say it wasn’t like that, but it was like that. We were all there.” Juliano jumped protesting to his feet, flung back his coat from his defying chest. His waistcoat was very loose over his stomach, draughty.

“What happened was better than that,” Fernando said.

“Ah,” said Juliano, suddenly sitting down and grinning with his eyes at everyone, very pleased at his show.

“It was better,” he said. “How better?”

Fernando was a man who waited for silence and his hour. Once getting possession of the conversation he never let it go, but held it in the long, soothing ecstasy of a pliable embrace. All day long he lay in bed in his room in Fuencarral with the shutters closed, recovering from the bout of the day before. He was preparing himself to appear in the evening, spruce, grey-haired and meaty under the deep black crescents of his eyebrows, his cheeks ripening like plums as the evening advanced, his blue eyes, which got bloodshot early, becoming mistier. He was a man who ripened and moistened. He talked his way through dinner into the night, his voice loosening, his eyes misting, his walk becoming slower and stealthier, acting every sentence, as if he were swaying through the exalted phase of inebriation. But it was an inebriation purely verbal; an exaltation of dramatic moments, refinements upon situations; and hour after hour passed until the dawn found him sodden in his own anecdotes, like a fruit in rum.

“What happened was,” Fernando said, “that I was in the sea. And after a while I discovered Angel was in the sea. As you know there is nothing more perilous than the sea, but with Angel in it the peril is tripled; and when I saw him I was preparing to get as far away as possible. But he was making faces in the water and soon he made such a face, so inhuman, so unnatural, I saw he was drowning. This did not surprise me for Angel is one of those men who, when he is in the sea, he drowns. There is some psychological antipathy. Now when I see a man drowning my instinct is to get away quickly. A man drowning is not a man. He is a lunatic. But a lunatic like Angel! But unfortunately he got me before I could get away. There he was,” Fernando stood up and raised his arm, confronting the proprietor of the restaurant, but staring right through that defensive man, “beating the water, diving, spluttering, choking, spitting, and, seeing he was drowning, for the man
was
drowning, caught hold of me, and we both went under. Angel was like a beast. He clung to me like seaweed. I, seeing this, awarded him a knock-out—zum—but as the tenacity of man increases with unconsciousness, Angel stuck to me like a limpet, and in saving myself there was no escape from saving him.”

“That’s true,” said Angel, admiring his finger nails. And Caesar nodded his head up and down twice, which made it true.

Juan then swung round and called out, “Eat! Food! Let us order. Let us eat. We haven’t ordered. We do nothing but talk, not eat. I want to eat.”

“Yes, come on,” said Felix. “Eat. What’s the fish?”

“The fish,” said the proprietor, “is bacalao.”

“Yes,” everyone cried. “Bacalao, a good bacalao, a very good one. No, it must be good. No. I can’t eat it unless it’s good, very good
and
very good.”

“No,” we said. “Not fish. We don’t want it.”

“Seven bacalaos then?” said the proprietor.

But Fernando was still on his feet.

“And the beach inspector said, ‘What’s his name and address and has he any identity papers?’ ‘Man,’ I said, ‘he’s in his bathing dress. Where could he keep his papers?’ And Juan said, ‘Get a doctor. Don’t stand there asking questions. Get a doctor.’ ”

“That’s true,” said Juan gloomily. “He wasn’t dead.”

“Get a doctor, that was it,” Angel said.

“And they got a doctor and brought him round and got half the Bay of Biscay out of him, gallons of it. It astonished me that so much water could come out of a man.”

“And then in the evening,” Juliano leaped up and clipped the story out of Fernando’s mouth, “Angel says to the proprietor of the hotel . . .”

Juan’s head had sunk to his chest. His hands were over his ears.

“Eat,” he bawled in a voice of despair so final that we all stopped talking and gazed at him with astonishment for a few moments. Then in sadness he turned to me appealing. “Can’t we eat? I am empty.”

“. . . said to the proprietor of the hotel,” Fernando grabbed the tale back from Juliano, “who was rushing down the corridor with a face like a fish, ‘I am the man who was drowned this morning.’ And the proprietor who looked at Angel like a prawn, the proprietor said, ‘M’sieu, whether you were drowned or not drowned this morning you are about to be roast. The hotel is on fire.’ ”

“That’s right,” we said. “The hotel was on fire.”

“I remember,” said Felix. “It began in the kitchen.”

“How in the kitchen?”

This then became the argument.

“The first time ever I heard it was in the kitchen.”

“But no,” said Angel, softly rising to claim his life story for himself. Juliano clapped his hands and bounced with joy. “It was not like that.”

“But we were all there, Angel,” Fernando said, but Angel who spoke very rapidly said:

“No and no! And the proof of it is. What was I wearing?” He challenged all of us. We paused.

“Tripe,” said Juan to me hopelessly wagging his head. “You like tripe? They do it well. Here! Phist!” he called the proprietor through the din. “Have you tripe, a good Basque tripe? No? What a pity! Can you get me some? Here! Listen,” he shouted to the rest of the table. “Tripe,” he shouted, but they were engrossed in Angel.

“Pyjamas,” Fernando said. “When you are in bed you wear your pyjamas.”

“Exactly, and they were not my pyjamas.”

“You say the fire was not in the kitchen,” shouted Fernando, “because the pyjamas you were wearing were not yours!” And we shouted back at Angel.

“They belonged to the Italian ambassador,” said Angel, “the one who was with that beautiful Mexican girl.”

Then Caesar, who, as I have said, was the oldest of us and sat at the head of the table, Caesar leaned his old big pale face forward and said in a hushed voice, putting out his hands like a blind man remembering:

“My God—but what a very beautiful woman she was,” he said. “I remember her. I have never in my life,” he said speaking all his words slowly and with grave concern, “seen such a beautiful woman.”

Fernando and Angel, who had been standing, sat down. We all looked in awe at the huge, old-shouldered Caesar with his big pale face and the pockets under his little grey eyes, who was speaking of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“She was there all that summer,” Caesar said. “She was no longer young.” He leaned forward with his hands on the table. “What must she have been when she was young?”

A beach, the green sea dancing down white upon it, that Mexican woman walking over the floor of a restaurant, the warm white houses, the night glossy black like the toe of a patent shoe, her hair black. We tried to think how many years ago this was. Brought by his voice to silence us, she was already fading.

The proprietor took his opportunity in our silence. “The bacalao is done in the Basque fashion with peppers and potatoes. Bring a bacalao,” he snapped to a youth in the kitchen.

Suddenly Juan brought his fists on the table, pushed back his chair and beat his chest with one fist and then the other. He swore in his enormous voice by his private parts.

“It’s eleven o’clock. Eat! For God’s sake. Fernando stands there talking and talking and no one listens to anybody. It is one of the evils of Spain. Someone stop him. Eat.”

We all woke up and glared with the defiance of the bewildered, rejecting everything he said. Then what he said to us penetrated. A wave roared over us and we were with him. We agreed with what he said. We all stood up and, by our private parts, swore that he was right. It was one of the evils of Spain.

The soup arrived. White wine arrived.

“I didn’t order soup,” some shouted.

“I said ‘Red wine,’ ” others said.

“It is a mistake,” the proprietor said. “I’ll take it away.” An argument started about this.

“No,” we said. “Leave it. We want it.” And then we said the soup was bad, and the wine was bad and everything he brought was bad, but the proprietor said the soup was good and the wine was good and we said in the end it was good. We told the proprietor the restaurant was good, but he said not very good, indeed bad. And then we asked Angel to explain about the pyjamas.