Portobello Notebook (7 page)

THEY ARGUED
about the strike on the mail boat, although he wasn’t interested. He had learned by now that he wasn’t cut out to teach. At Holyhead there was a hammering of shoes on the
platform
as young countrymen ran to the news stall to buy
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines. As Tom looked at them with pity, Justin saw that one reason he wasn’t a good teacher was that he had no interest in keeping discipline. As the train crossed Anglesey, Welsh navvies raised their shovels and called, ‘Good morning, Patrick!’ Tom didn’t smile. But Justin was glad of his orderly company. When they reached Euston, Tom went to the news stall and bought a paper. In a few hours they had found a room.

Next day they found jobs in hotel kitchens – Tom in The Dorchester and Justin in the Park Lane. In the evening the fog was so thick that he crossed Hyde Park step by step, both hands held before him, feeling his way into the great city. Again, everything was new and strange. One night in the Underground two
smooth-faced
young men were talking to each other in loud voices. Two rough-faced young men muttered remarks:

‘Couple of pouffs.’

‘Yeah, queering about.’

One of the smooth-faced young men laid his umbrella on the platform, took off his bowler hat and black jacket, opened his cufflinks and rolled up his white sleeves. But then the other one cried, ‘No, I say, Peter, don’t!’ Justin felt his disappointment. He was longing for some showdown that would set him free.

He stood at a sink all day washing dishes with a Pakistani boy named Shakir. They wore long aprons, but their shoes were always wet. None of the waiters and waitresses talked to Shakir, he noticed, but a couple talked to him.

‘No cure for that sickness,’ Beryl said when the still-room girl got sick one morning.

‘Why’s that?’ he said.

Beryl looked at him. ‘You Irish then?’

‘Don’t sound Irish.’ Cecil chewed his pork pie. ‘You sound educated-like.’

When he told them about the teachers’ strike, Beryl looked at him again. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You got a degree and all?’

‘Course it’s easier in Ireland,’ Cecil said.

Cecil had been a waiter since the War. He carried a weight of low wisdom as big as his belly. ‘There’s a nice fuck,’ he murmured, turning his thumb towards Shakir.

Justin was shocked. Everything in London seemed sinful, from Cecil’s yellow face to Beryl’s peroxide hair. His voice sounded plaintive against the definite English one. London seemed like a machine that would crush anything not adapted to its movements. But as he sat on a park bench one long Sunday afternoon and an old man sat down beside him, read a Greek newspaper from front page to back and then went away, all with an easy silence, the freedom of this life shone out like the Pole star. Again the great
thought returned: all this was his, if he wanted it. Another day, in Charing Cross, he stepped into a small bookshop, where a man in a bowler hat and dark coat was looking gravely through a tray of black and white photographs. Justin glimpsed one, of a naked girl with wire tied tightly about her breasts, and he hurried outside – where another man in a bowler hat and dark coat asked him directions, which he was able to give! He went suddenly into another shop, bought a card and posted it to Geraldine.

He didn’t mention her to Tom. They got on well together but hardly talked. It was only when the strike had ended and they were on the train to Holyhead, that Tom said he was leaving the school, and returning to university next year to study politics. Justin realized that their ways had parted, as smoothly as the points clicked on the railway.

JOY HAD
a baby now, and when classes ended George went to their cottage in the grounds. Tom went to study in his room. Mr Porter, his false teeth open, his yellow tongue hanging out, slept in an armchair by the fire. When payday came, Justin was glad to escape into the town.

‘We haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Geraldine’s father reached through the thin brass rails and shook his hand.

‘I was away.’

‘We heard that. We heard that.’

‘How is Geraldine?’

‘You’ll have to ask her that yourself.’ Her father smiled, stamped the back of the cheque, and said, ‘Why don’t you call one evening, visit us at home?’

He said, ‘Thank you,’ but he didn’t go. His life had been a running away from home. He had found a home here, a hiding place where he could find himself. He didn’t go to the bank again,
he didn’t go to the riding school, and yet he longed to see Geraldine. He couldn’t understand it.

‘Still wandering?’ the rector’s wife said when she met him on the road. ‘You’re still looking for your other half.’

He walked the back roads every evening, talking with Colonel Browne and Mike Reilly, with Bob and Rose, and Bill Galloway. Bill especially stood for all that he liked in this small place. Bill bought his newspaper in the pub, wasn’t afraid of Colonel Browne, gave Mike Reilly’s daughter work as a babysitter, and when it was raining he gave Rose a lift. In the same way, when the headmaster had finally asked his help in making a cricket pitch, Bill had agreed. By the time Justin returned from England, a field behind the farmyard had become a brilliant green.

On Saturday evenings Bill came to level it with the long iron roller he drew across his spring wheat, washed his hands until they were as red as the school’s carbolic soap, then went home. On Sundays he went to church with his family, morning and evening. On Mondays he began work again. Everything was slow and orderly. One evening he had the schoolboys pull an old garden roller, a solid drum of limestone, up and down the wicket until it was smooth and tight. Afterwards, excited by their freedom, the boys pushed the roller so hard that it ran off the field and down a slope where it shattered against the high wall. Bill’s face clouded – the only time Justin had seen him upset – and then it was clear again.

In a few weeks spring opened into summer. The fields
disappeared
behind growing walls of green; then hawthorn and
elderflowers
made the hedges white. When Rose walked the road, a smaller flock of birds circled overhead. As naturally, the cricket season began. Bill helped Justin to arrange a match – the school team against a county one – and as the players in their old whites stood in place about the pitch, it looked as if it had been there
forever, like the old trees standing in their pools of shade.

Justin was playing with the boys on the school team. The
headmaster
agreed gladly to play on the other side – for Bill had rounded up some old county gentlemen as well as ordinary folk. His wife supervised the tea. There was almost a crowd standing about the boundary. Colonel Browne and his wife sat on school chairs. Bob stood alone in his long brown tweed overcoat. Even Mike Reilly was there, looking uneasily about. His daughter and another girl left their bikes in the ditch outside the school gates and walked tiptoe up the avenue, as if into another land. The headmaster was in his element, talking to an old man with an Oxford accent and huge purple hands. He wore his old Trinity blazer, even as he went out to bat. A silence came over the field, and the match began.

Justin opened the bowling, and by a terrible fluke hit the stumps with his first ball. The silence remained for a moment, like a shot bird before it falls. Then the boys cheered suddenly, savagely, and – with a hurt, puzzled look at Justin – the headmaster walked away. The rest of the innings was a blur. It wasn’t until teatime that he saw Geraldine and her mother were there.

He went cold with fright and hot with excitement as he approached them. Bill’s wife introduced them as friends from the music society. Geraldine’s mother said that they had met already, and Bill’s wife left them alone.

‘I was away.’ He blushed. ‘Did you get my postcard?’

‘I did.’ She smiled and looked at his face, and then her mother moved away.

It was wonderful to find her in that small place. He told her about his job in London, and described the Park Lane Hotel. She laughed as he told her how he had gone there for tea one afternoon, and what the manager had said when he found out. He told her of going to a fish and chip shop in Piccadilly one night, where
an elegant man called, ‘Barrow in Furnace, Nineteen-Forty-Five?’ and a small man frying the chips looked up at him, then winked and said, ‘That’s right!’

Bill came by and said to her, ‘Don’t listen to that fella!’ His wife called them up to tea.

‘Would you like to join me?’ Geraldine smiled and looked at his face again.

He went on talking as they stood at the long trestle table. He could hear himself, as if he had a finger in one ear. It was as if all the energy of the past three years was being released. He told her how Mr Porter had been sacked. He described his many aunts. She began to talk of the local music society. He interrupted, asking if she still played the violin.

She smiled and said, ‘Sorry?’

‘Didn’t you learn it at school? In a glass box!’ He laughed, and talked again.

She smiled again, but not so much, and when more people came up for tea she stepped back quietly from the table. Her face changed and she said, ‘Thank you.’

‘You’ve had enough?’ he said.

She walked away. He hurried after her. ‘What did I say?’

‘Nothing.’ Her blushing embarrassment gave her voice a power that turned him cold.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I asked you to have tea with me.’ She said, ‘Thank you,’ again, then crossed the field and stood talking with her mother.

He stood, trying to remember what he had said, but all he could remember was her trembling ‘Nothing.’ It meant that his talk had held her at arm’s length, that he was afraid of being caught, that he didn’t take this place to heart, that it had been a place to
rest in, and that he was better now. But he couldn’t grasp that. When he looked again she had gone. The players went back onto the field and stood in the lengthening shadows of the trees. This was where his three years in the country had led him. He knew then he would leave.

THERE WAS
a shout from the wicket – one of the stumps was down. Bill was fielding on the boundary, bent forward, hands on thighs. He straightened slowly when the umpire raised his finger. Justin went over to the rope.

‘Bill?’

‘I was thinking it was you.’ The same slow Westmeath accent. ‘I saw you there and I said to myself, that’s Justin Kelly.’

‘How are you?’ He looked at the thin grey hair, the glasses so unlikely on his out-of-doors face.

‘Still playing. We have our own team now.’ The same reserved smile. ‘That was my son bowling. I’d better go over to him.’ Bill turned away and ran slowly across the field.

It had been too small. He had been too young. He had hardly known her. It could never have worked out. He had been hiding from life. He would have died of boredom, drunk like Mr Porter. There had been many more years of travelling before he grew up enough to settle down. He could never have knitted the tangled sides of his life together if he had stayed … But seeing Bill run slowly back to a tall skinny young man in his twenties and embrace him, he felt a small stupid disappointment, as if he had arrived at a station just as the train pulled out.

WE STOOD
on the pavement as the coffin was taken from the house. It’s a time when you speak to those neighbours you usually just nod to. Mr Gray said, ‘What’s it all about at all?’ Miss Byrne said, ‘She knows now. She’s saying to herself – So that’s what it is.’ It’s a time when you realize that the past, which seemed so solid, was no different from this; that this is your home now, and these people will come to your funeral. We walked behind the hearse down to the church. Someone said, ‘It’s like Belfast.’ A dog trotted alongside. Afterwards I went for a drink with Alex. He didn’t want to go back to the house alone.

A young woman came in, wearing a 1920s’ cloche hat, pink and black, flattened like a beret; black eyeshadow; a black thin sweater showing low, heavy breasts; black stockings and boots; about 5’8”. She was followed by a young man, about 3’8”, so small that he climbed onto the bar stool rung by rung. Sitting, they were equal. Eating crisps, he dropped one, climbed down and came up
with it in his mouth. She looked about coldly, rolling a cigarette, and saw me stare – for a moment I thought she was going to come over and slap my face. After one drink they left. The barman said, ‘She’s only going out with him for show.’

The new bar girl – low-cut dress, intelligent face – was gazing out the window at the dark. The barman went over to the window and joined her. As he went back behind the counter he said, ‘A taxi driver riding the arse off a girl in his car.’

Someone said, ‘The landscape’s changed since our day.’

A lot has changed since I came here as a boy. It seemed a shabby, out-of-the-way place then, where no one would find me as I savoured bitter Guinness, a Bristol cigarette and the newspaper list of banned books. We were so oppressed then, we didn’t know we were oppressed. The titles were like gifts from a munificent ruler:
Sins of Cynthia
…
Velvet-Tongued Suzi
…
Nurse’s Weakness
…
Wicked Work
. Even when I came here to live, this pub was the same: bare walls and partitions, lino on the floor. I was in the bar the night the news of John Lennon’s murder came through. The car park was still a harbour then.

I wanted to say to Alex, ‘I slept with her once.’ It would draw a circle around everything. But you can’t say that.

SHE WAS COMING ALONG
the canal bank. I hadn’t seen her for years. Her hair was dyed brown, she had some crazy brown lipstick on. She looked terrible. ‘Triona,’ I said, ‘how are you?’

She said, ‘I’m fucking separated.’ She took a big scissors from her handbag, stooped and snipped at the grass. Her laugh was too loud.

‘Would you like a drink?’ She noticed my wedding ring. ‘Oh God, you’re married.’

I was working in the language school. I had stepped out between
classes for a breath of air. I said I’d call to see her one evening. She was back home.

We had hardly known each other, but growing up in the same suburban road, walking to Mass, seeing our parents nod to each other had made us part of one family. You heard things somehow. Her father was supposed to go through
The Observer
on Sunday morning with a scissors, cutting out unsuitable bits. We think when we are young that no one notices us, but she had noticed me, as I had noticed her. I remember her sailing over Portobello Bridge on her bike one day, as if going into town for some adventure. ‘You looked so serious,’ she said afterwards. I was probably going to the Lower Deck, to read the latest list of banned books.

When I called she was in the kitchen, sitting beside the Aga in a small armchair. Her mother asked about my parents, made tea, mouthed the word
depressed
, then left us alone. Triona hardly raised her head. I had never seen anyone bite their knuckles before. I didn’t see her again for about a year.

I was at an auction; she was sitting behind. Afterwards I showed her an old painting I had bought, of two boys riding horses into the sea. ‘Are you serious?’ she said. She had a dry sad tone that was attractive. We chatted as we walked down the road.

She had gone to Barcelona straight after her Leaving. She would have gone anywhere, but she had done Spanish at school. She married some academic there and settled down. Her life passed in a daze of cooking and having sex all over the house. He used to put his hand up her skirt when she was on the phone to her mother. When he ran off with one of his students, she had come home.

‘You look better,’ I said. She did too. There was sparkle in her eye as she told me she had a new boyfriend. ‘Remember Alex?’

Things happen that can twist you. She had flown from home; thinking abroad would be like those parties we all gave when our
parents were out. But when no parents came home, she had been left alone with her innocent wildness. It had pulled her in, like a sleeve caught in a machine. All that was part of the nightmare became her definition of what life should be. It had to be –
otherwise
her flight would have been a failure.

She was living in a redbrick terrace, just a few streets from mine. When I told her that, she said, ‘Just like the old days,’ and gave another dry smile. She pointed to one of the houses. ‘That was a brothel until last week. Twenty quid for a ride. Not bad.’ Her eyes had that fixed sparkle again. ‘Do you want to come in?’

Of course she had been ‘wild’, but we all had been, like
butterflies
fluttering against a windowpane. The windows were open by the time she came back, but she was stuck fluttering inside. It was sad. The living room was shadowed by an old backyard wall of rubble-brick and stone. She set two mugs on a counter littered with envelopes. ‘You look busy,’ I said.

She was a dressmaker now, and while the kettle boiled she showed me her workroom, a big bright room upstairs, overlooking the yard. There was a table covered in cloths, pins and scissors. A mannequin was fitted with a silky evening gown. She picked up a ribbon of black velvet and tied it around her throat. She said, ‘Alex jumps on me when I wear this.’

She left it on while she made coffee. I looked at old prints and shelves of old books. ‘And you’re a collector,’ I said.

‘They belong to Alex.’ She raised her eyebrows in a way that made me feel guilty when he came in.

In the way of childhood we had been friends for a short while, walking home together after school. I remembered the shift and crunch of gravel on their front path, the big garden at the back. I had a memory of his mother gathering ripe blue damsons from a tree buzzing with wasps. Now Alex was a heavy-faced, middle-aged
man in a pinstripe suit, a red silk handkerchief spilling from the breast pocket. He wore a signet ring, God help him. He lay in an armchair, flopped one leg across the other and drawled, ‘I’ve seen you about.’

‘Strange,’ I said. ‘I never noticed you.’

A soft hurt smile showed through his manner. ‘I’m used to that.’

Triona turned to me. ‘What flirtatious socks you’re wearing.’

Alex looked up. ‘Sorry?’

‘I wasn’t talking to you.’

His voice slipped into something rougher. ‘You’ll find your head in your lap, if you’re not careful.’

She went up to her workroom, but her mocking presence remained. As if defying it, Alex talked of old school friends and what they were doing now, of priests and parents who had died. The books had been his father’s. Some of them, wrapped in brown paper, were first editions. He turned on the light and pointed out a rare print on the wall. Triona called down, ‘Don’t forget to show him the old school photo.’

Stubborn, Alex drawled back, ‘I won’t.’

She came down only when I was leaving, with pins between her teeth, a scissors in her hand. My heart went out to him. She was back with a man like her father to mind her, whom she could punish now.

Next time we met, she was walking along the canal bank. She had a dog on a leash, a fox terrier – she was doing her best to settle in. A handsome young man in white shirt and tight black trousers went by. ‘Yum, yum,’ she murmured. ‘Who’s that?’

‘He could be a waiter in the restaurant.’

She laughed. ‘That’s where I met Alex.’

‘There was money there all right.’

‘Not any more. He’s a waiter.’

‘Alex is a waiter?’

‘Head waiter, actually.’ She did a genteel voice.

‘What happened?’

‘The usual Irish. Drink.’

That explained a lot: Alex’s flushed face and guarded manner, the assertive prosperity, the turning back to the good old days. Passing the restaurant one night, I looked in the picture window and saw him showing people to tables, drawing out the chairs with little flourishes. His pinstripe suit and floppy red
handkerchief
seemed a big bluff, like the restaurant. It had been a
fashionable
place once, where businessmen with expense accounts brought clients for showy meals, the chef signed his name in vanilla scribbles along the side of square dessert plates, and a saucer of handmade chocolates took the sting from the rip-off bill. Lately, another smaller restaurant was taking its trade away.

I saw him another night having a smoke outside the kitchen door with an old waiter. His cheeks sucked in as he drew on the cigarette, then he threw it in the gutter and went back inside. One evening I saw him crouched double, looking across a tabletop to see that the knives and forks were aligned. Our eyes met, but he showed no recognition, as if he was ashamed.

‘I mean, it’s the ideal set-up for an affair,’ Triona said. ‘He’s out every night.’ She didn’t even disguise her indifference now.

‘Do you want that?’

‘I think staying with him would be a total cop-out.’

‘Alex is nice.’

‘Alex is nice. Everyone says that. But he doesn’t interest me.’

‘Why not find someone who does?’

‘I was down in the Clarence the other night, and this country guy asked me up to his room. I said, I suppose you want to fuck
me? Do you know, he turned crimson? Nothing has changed here. It’s just the same as when I left.’

She was just the same. She smiled to an old man walking a Yorkshire terrier. When he had passed, she said, ‘What’s the story there? That dog’s always on the go.’

It was a joke in the neighbourhood. The old couple clung together but didn’t get on. As soon as the husband came in from a walk, his wife set out for another one.

‘That’ll be me, if I stay with Alex.’

We came to her terrace, and though it was late she asked me in for tea. She didn’t turn on the light. When I kept my distance, she turned on the TV. A small tenor was singing some duet with a deep-chested soprano. ‘I’d say she’d be the one on top.’ Her eyes gave their sparkle. ‘What do you think?’

I shrugged but that seemed cold, and as I was leaving I kissed her cheek. She took my hand and placed it on her breast. Her eyes closed. She was like a child alone with a box of sweets. She looked relieved when I drew away.

Alex was right for her. There was something between them: her failed marriage, his comedown in the world; his old rarities; her silk gowns. I could see how they had come together. I wanted their dream to come true.

What had not happened between us made us friends. I was going for the paper one morning when she called me. She wore a black suit and carried a red plastic folder; she was talking with some builders who were gutting an old house. ‘Well, lads, I’ll leave you to it,’ she said in a voice that tried to be like theirs. As we walked down the street I heard her news. She had a job in a property business. Her dressmaking was too much work for too little return. She was settling down, growing up.

‘How’s the job?’ I said, next time we ran into each other.

‘OK.’

‘It’s better,’ I said. ‘Regular work, regular pay.’

‘That. And I’m having an affair with the boss.’

I felt sad, but just said, ‘He should be flattered.’

‘I don’t care if he is or not. I’m doing it for myself. We were in Madrid for the weekend.’

‘Does Alex know?’

‘He’s sleeping downstairs. Pathetic. He dragged the spare bed down the other night.’

I left them to it, glimpsing how things were now and then, as you glimpse bits of a programme in TV shop windows: Triona coming home in the morning, looking dreamy; Alex coming out of the pub, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, a
Times
clipped under his arm, his polished heavy black shoes crunching the grit. It brought home the struggle that was still going on. Neither would yield. But when I met him buying flowers in Camden Street one evening, it seemed a good moment to smile and say, ‘How’s Triona?’

He looked at me coldly and drawled, ‘I haven’t a clue.’

Passing the restaurant that night, I saw the flowers in a tall vase in the window. She had gone.

She was driven; she still needed excitement, trouble, as the boats needed locks to raise them in the canal. Without that, she couldn’t live. I soon heard more of the affair with her boss: it had been exciting, but she had been out of control. Her voice faltered, she had a frightened look in her eyes; she said, ‘Why do you think we do these things?’

‘I don’t know.’

She smiled again. Now it was over. She was back with Alex, the calm water of the canal. She said, ‘Why don’t you come over some evening?’

‘I must,’ I said.

‘You always say that. You don’t want to, do you?’

‘Of course I do.’

She was in the charity shop, buying men’s clothes: cord trousers, a tweed sports coat. When I saw them on Alex, he reminded me of her mannequin.

I didn’t recognize him for a moment. His hair was grey, and I realized that he had been dyeing it for years. The house had changed too. A velux window, a raised ceiling of new rafters made even his old books and prints look bright. Hands clasped behind his back like the Duke of Edinburgh, he studied a print of her own, a Schiele nude. Over a single glass of wine he talked of the old days. After a couple more, Triona was talking of a day she had cycled into town to look for work as a model, but turned back at the art college gate. ‘I was ashamed,’ she said.

Alex smiled, nodded. ‘That was natural then.’

‘No, I was ashamed my tits were so small.’