Portobello Notebook (2 page)

I KNEW HIM
from somewhere. About fifty. A brown pinstripe suit, the tongue of a worn brown leather belt hanging from under the waistcoat; shoes the same dark orange as his hair, the big freckles on the backs of his big hands. He flipped a suitcase like a matchbox onto the luggage rack, lay back in the seat and rested an arm about his daughter’s neck. She was about eighteen, so beautiful that I couldn’t lift a finger to the No Smoking sign when he took out his cigarettes.

She shrugged off his arm and took a book from a hessian bag, blue-embroidered Virgo. He looked out the window in an agony of boredom as the first fields of County Dublin appeared, turning to his daughter as she slipped off her shoes and tucked bare feet up behind her blue-jeaned bottom.

‘Warm enough, love?’ He cupped a bare foot with his hand. She wriggled it off irritably, didn’t look up from her book. He turned to me in desperation. ‘Don’t they have no heating on these trains?’

‘It probably takes a bit of time to get going.’

He pressed his hand to the grille below the seat. ‘Freezing. Then they wonder why the tourists is falling off.’ He took out his cigarettes again. ‘Smoke?’

‘Thanks.’

He sat forward, elbows on knees, his strong face a foot from mine. ‘And what about the North then?’

‘What do they make of it in England?’

‘Every night on the telly. Then there’s the economic situation. What’s petrol over here now? Ooh it’s got dear here. Two cups of tea and two sandwiches in the Buffy – what was it, love, four-fifty?’

‘Mm.’ She glanced at me, frowned and went back to her book.

‘You’re on holidays?’ I said.

‘Jackie –’ he turned to her again with a smile, ‘– she saw this Getaway Special Offer. Of course it’s not so bad for us what with the sterling situation …’

‘You like Ireland?’ I tried to draw her into the conversation, but he was there before me again, one hand brushing a speck from her peasant-weave shirt.

‘Anything old, she likes it. Not like Trace, she’s like her Mum. Smoked glass, Scandinavian steel – that’s her, eh love?’

She nodded, staring in concentration at the page. He glanced at his watch, cleared his throat, and tapped his toes on the floor, looked at me and said, ‘Wonder if there’s a bar on these trains?’

I sat still as he got up. ‘Hang on,’ he said, and as he went out I placed him.

‘Where are you going to?’

She looked up at once; shut the book, smiling as she told me. I was right. ‘Same here,’ I said.

‘Really?’ A beautiful smile. Rose lips half-parted, wide-apart eyes.

She had taken my question as the opening of a conversation, so I said, ‘What are you reading?’

‘Fine Art. I’m at Salford –’

‘No, I mean –’ Even as we laughed, I found myself glancing over her shoulder at the door.

‘Oh, this?’ She turned her book face-up. The Pre-Raphaelites. She opened it again and resumed reading as her father appeared, his hands full with two cans of beer, a can of Coke, three packets of crisps. ‘Only cheese and onion, love.’

‘Mm-mm.’ She took them without looking up.

He handed me a can, snapped open his own. ‘Cheers.’

‘Thanks. Cheers.’

Tap-tap of his shoes on the floor. He pressed his hand again to the heater, shook his head, looked at me. He didn’t remember me. I risked it.

‘Your daughter was saying that you’re going to –’ I mentioned the station.

‘You know it then?’

‘Not really.’ I lied into his eyes. ‘I’m just visiting.’

‘Same as myself. I haven’t been back this long while.’

‘That’s where you’re from?’

‘A few miles out of the town. Lavally. You wouldn’t know it.’

I shook my head. I was right. Liam was his name.

I WAS THE LITTLE
Lord Fauntleroy then, a younger, boy version of this princess by his side. I spent my holidays with an aunt in Lavally. Liam helped about the place that summer, earning his fare to England. He cut and footed the turf, burnt the furze on the ditches, mowed thistles. He was seventeen; I was a few years younger. I have three memories of that summer.

The first. One day my aunt sent me down to the bog with a
bottle of tea and a sandwich for Liam. Before bringing back the bottle, I had been given a drag of his cigarette. He had gone on smoking the butt, holding it between his black nails until there was only the red tip. Then he had gone down into the cutaway bog, calling to me as he pulled down his trousers, ‘Do you want to see it coming out?’

Appalled, I had stood as far away as I could and watched an orange banana of excrement slide out. ‘Now let me see yours,’ he said, but I could produce only a pale comma. Then I had washed my hands in the bog hole and dried them with sedge. Liam had spat on his hands and taken up the slane again.

HERE I WAS
, a middle-aged man sitting opposite him, knees to knees in the train, and I couldn’t introduce myself. Everything I remembered him by was unspeakable.

THE NEXT
. Was he burning furze or mowing thistles? Anyway, it had begun to rain.

‘Hi! Stand in out of that!’ He backed into the ditch under the bushes, his hands on my shoulders, looking out over my head at the downpour. ‘And may it never stop,’ he said. Branches cracked behind him as he backed further into shelter and lit one of his precious Woodbines, offering me a drag if I sang him a song. I sang something I’d heard on the radio:

‘That’s all I know,’ I said.

‘Good man yourself.’ He gave me the drag.

‘Now you sing.’

‘Sure I’ve no song.’ He stood looking out at the rain, talking about England, and how he’d be off in the autumn. And then – the second thing I remembered, as clearly detailed as one of those Pre-Raphaelite paintings his daughter was gazing at now – ‘Come here till I show you.’ He had backed deeper into the bushes, so we were in a hut almost of furze and hawthorn, where he opened his trousers and released a large sallow cock that sprang up rigid. He pulled a handful of ivy and woodbine off the ditch and handed it to me. ‘Give me a stroke of that.’

Timidly I had taken the strands and brushed them across his cock.

‘Arra, do it right.’ Taking the ivy and woodbine whip, he had lashed down at himself. ‘Like that. Or will I do it to you?’

‘No, no.’ Frightened by that, I had given a few stronger strokes, and the cock swelled and rose still more, but he was not satisfied.

‘Go on, hit it can’t you.’

What would have happened if the rain had not stopped then and the sun shone out again? And seeing that I would whip him no harder, he had buttoned up his trousers and let me out into the field.

LEANING FORWARDS
, elbows on knees, beer can in one hand, cigarette in the other, he was chatting about the Pakistanis now, and the Blacks. He said the black man was a fine man, but the bloody Paki would live in your ear. His daughter stared unblinking at her book as she turned a page. I thought of my last memory of him.

IT WAS THE END
of my summer holidays and I was going back to school. The train was crowded with men going back to England, so I had to stand in the corridor in pools of spilt Guinness and tobacco spit. Ballinlough … Ballymoe at each small station – we
were shooting back through them now, each closed up, derelict – another small crowd of men was waiting, filling the train even more.

Then – ‘I think you could squeeze in beside me’ – a terribly familiar voice: Father Burke, my Latin teacher at school. He was coming back from holidays too, from further west. He moved and made space for me, I had sat down before I noticed Liam sitting opposite. He was with some older men and gave me only a nod, then returned to listening to their stories – of landladies in Sparkhill, of blankets so thin that a sneeze lifted them to the ceiling; of a man offered onions every evening for his tea until he said, ‘Ma’am, I don’t eat fruit.’ Their laughter stopped as we approached Athlone. The men stood up seriously and made to reach down their cases, calling to Liam, ‘Are you right? Come on, hurry up!’

‘What?’ Liam jumped up.

‘Holyhead. They don’t waste time over here, boy. The train only stops a minute in Holyhead.’

The train rolled over the Shannon. Liam stood, one hand white-tight on the handle of his case, staring down at the dark wide river and bobbing boats.

‘You’re over now, Liameen!’

His face blazed red as he reached for the door-strap, and as the train pulled into Athlone station he sprang out onto the platform. ‘Lads! Lads! Hurry on, we’re landed!’ he called in another window to friends from home.

‘I think they’re pulling your leg,’ Father Burke murmured, but it wasn’t until the whistle blew, when someone shouted, ‘Get in, you bloody
amadán
!’ that Liam understood and came back into the carriage. That was my last memory of him, for Father Burke had brought me with him to the dining car, where we spent the rest of the journey.

ALL I WANTED
to ask about the past thirty years in between, and couldn’t. He looked at me, his face innocent of the knowledge I had; then looked at his daughter, and her beautiful eyes still fixed on that book. He looked out the window, tapped his toes, looked at his watch, and drank the last drops of beer.

‘My round,’ I said. I stood up.

‘Ta!’ He almost sprang to his feet. ‘Does you good to have a bit of a chat, eh?’ He looked down at his daughter. ‘I’ll be in the dining car, love, if you need anything.’ He led the way along the corridor. I nodded a smile at his treasure child, turned cold as I got back an adult’s smile of complicity, a raising of eyes to heaven. Then I went down to the dining car to talk about nothing with Liam.

THE COACH STOPPED
in the market square, just beside a phone box. The noise of the coach made it hard to hear what she was saying.

‘Where are you now?’ She sounded as if she was smiling.

‘In a phone box in the square.’

‘Look out – can you see The Golden Lion?’

‘I can.’

‘I’ll meet you there in half an hour.’

HE WALKED
about the town, enjoying the pleasure of waiting. He walked as he had once walked to her flat, but without excited anxiety now. He looked at a Saxon church with a Norman tower, then at a Georgian market house. She had settled in a place very different from Ireland, but walking down the street he passed a pretty thatched house and remembered, tried to remember, a kiss they had had one wet Irish midland morning in the shelter of a thatched gable. He walked back to The Golden Lion, admiring the
soft red-brick facade curtained with mauve wisteria. He made a stab at dating it Queen Anne.

He had been on his way home when he decided to visit her. He had spent the last of his English money on the coach fare, and had to buy his drink with a credit card.

‘Now, if you’ll just give me a swipe of your plastic,’ the receptionist said, and he stepped out of the past back into the present.

He sat in a bar darkened by copper pans, stuffed trout and hunting prints, and tried to imagine what she would look like now. He couldn’t, any more than he could remember the feeling of that kiss. He could remember her only as she had been the last night they met, fifteen years ago, but he still remembered the way she had sat when he stopped outside her house, the way her skirt had slipped between her parted knees as she sat back in the seat for a moment – then she had stepped out of the car and walked in her gate, not looking back.

‘
HELL-O
.’ Her voice was jokey.

He didn’t recognize her for a second. She was thinner than she had been, but more handsome. As he stood up he glimpsed a look of envy from the barman.

‘Sorry I’m late. The traffic’s a bugger.’ Her voice was still Irish, but the manner was English.

‘Will we stay here?’

‘God no.’

He picked up his bag and they went out to her car. She wore stockings and high heels, which had never suited her. Two girls in school uniform coming up the street glanced at them, said, ‘Hello, Miss’, and hurried past, laughing, leaning against each other, whispering.

Smiling, but leaning away from any suggestion of intimacy,
she got into the car. A shivery grey dog standing on the back seat nuzzled her neck. ‘Hello, dear,’ she said.

‘What sort of dog is that?’

‘A whippet.’ She tilted back her head against the dog’s
delicate
nose. Her hair was turning grey but the impression was still blonde.

‘That’s where I teach.’ She pointed to the school as she drove out of the town. ‘You’re not wearing too badly.’ She glanced at him as she overtook a lorry.

‘Nor you,’ he said, and as they cruised past the lorry’s long side he studied the way her features had changed, trying to relate them to the face he had known.

‘What were you doing in London?’

‘I was doing some work in the British Library.’

‘Are you famous now?’

‘God no.’

She laughed. ‘I got fed up with London,’ she said.

‘You never thought of working in Ireland?’

She shook her head.

‘Do you ever go back?’

‘Just for a week or two in summer.’

‘You never look me up.’

She shook her head again. ‘I’m glad you came though. How long have you got?’

‘The plane goes at eight.’

‘That’s OK. There’s a nice place to have lunch down here.’

She turned off the motorway and they both relaxed into silence. They had assured each other they could talk easily. He looked out at the tidy Berkshire countryside.

They ate in a pub by a river. The food didn’t taste as good as it looked, or the beer, but after lunch he bought two more glasses
and they sat outside. There were fat tame ducks on the riverbank and in the shallows.

‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

‘Eight years now.’

‘You must like it.’

‘It’s all right, if you can stand the people.’

He smiled. ‘Anyone special?’

‘There is.’

‘I’m glad. For long?’

‘For a few years now.’

‘You might get married.’

She smiled. ‘You recommend it, do you?’

‘It works.’ He put down his glass of beer, so did she, and with the whippet trotting daintily behind they walked along the riverbank. Her high heels caught in the soft turf, so they sat down again by a sluice gate.

‘I was amazed when I heard you were married.’

He nodded, and they talked as they looked at the water rushing against the timbers of the sluice gate, eddying back in foamy circles into the river. He thought that if he was with his wife now they would sit in peaceful silence looking at the water, enjoying the warmth of the spring sun and the scent of wet earth and marsh mint. He was about to say that his wife gave him the large lonely space that he craved. He was about to say – She leaves me alone.

‘The grass is wet.’ She pressed a hand to her skirt and sat up on the sluice gate.

‘Do you remember the morning I jumped out of bed?’ he said suddenly.

‘In Brighton Road?’

‘Guess where I went to? I went down to the church.’

She laughed. He felt the warmth of that intimacy he craved,
but wasn’t able for. It was as warm, real and simple as the river in the sunshine. ‘God, I was screwed up then,’ he said.

She made no confession in exchange. He watched a boy and girl walk along the river path, hand in hand. He watched them duck their heads under the trailing leaves of a willow tree, and he looked up at the shape of the big blue-green tree for some consolation.

‘That’s where I live.’ She pointed to a village across the fields.

He felt envy as he looked at a grey spire rising from
dark-green
trees. ‘Does he live with you?’

‘Who?’ She turned to him.

‘Your boyfriend.’

‘No. No, he lives in the town.’

His envy settled down and he looked at the Constable
landscape
and said, ‘Will you stay here?’

‘I expect so. It’s strange, I know more people here than at home.’

‘Through the school?’

‘And I go out a lot. I play in a quintet now.’

‘You still play?’

‘More than ever. And I’m singing in the village choir.’

‘It sounds like Thomas Hardy.’

‘I’m playing over there tonight.’ She pointed to the Constable horizon, broken by a giant concrete shape. ‘That’s the nuclear power station.’

There was less difference now between her humorous and her ironic voice. That was what had changed in her face, he decided – the smile and the frown had become one. It made him thirsty for the intimacy they had once shared.

‘You were the first woman in my life, you know.’

‘It was very short. A few months.’

‘Then I ran away,’ he said. He got up from the wet grass. To
stop him from sitting beside her on the sluice gate – he thought – she stood up too and they walked back to the car.

‘Where did you meet your wife?’

‘She was friendly with a girl I was after.’

She laughed again, less ironically, and then shut her eyes to the sun. He took the chance to look at her – her simple stubborn upper lip, her unsuitable clothes. He remembered her long yellow cardigan with the zip, her small breasts and the width of her hips; and his helpless horror as he looked at the thirst he had provoked but could not satisfy – her own helpless frenzy hammering the bed board against the wall, the perspiration glistening on her upper lip.

‘Oh that sun is lovely.’ She opened her eyes suddenly, caught him looking at her and she laughed openly, naturally. ‘How does your wife put up with you?’

Their ease continued as they drove back to her house.

‘What’s your boyfriend like?’

‘In looks? Big forehead. Fair hair – not much on top, but he grows it long at the back.’ The ironic jokey tone had returned to her voice. ‘He’s a doctor.’

‘Is he in the choir?’

‘No. We go walking together.’

‘I hope I’m not –’

‘No. We just go away at the weekends. He’s married, you see. Here we are.’ She stopped outside a pretty terraced house of old dark-rose brick.

He felt dazed as he followed her inside. She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. Her manner showed that she had wanted to tell him the truth, but didn’t want to talk about it. She was a mistress, someone who waited. He stood in the sitting room looking at tastefully spaced objects. Even her violin seemed part of the arrangement. The mantelpiece was bare except for a
pale-silver carriage clock. He wished that the hands would turn faster, so that he could be gone, home to his wife.