Talking to Strange Men (11 page)

‘He didn't really give a reason, just said he couldn't go
through with it. I didn't believe what I was hearing. I thought it was some sort of joke. We were at my place – well, my mother's. My aunt was staying with us, she'd come from Ireland for the wedding.'

‘You knew it wasn't a joke though,' John had said.

‘After a while I did. I said was it all the fuss, I mean a white wedding and all those people coming, I said was it that which was upsetting him. I said it didn't matter, we could get married in a registry office, we didn't have to do what Mother wanted. He said no, it wasn't that. It was just the idea of being married, of marriage itself he couldn't face, he wasn't the kind of person who could ever be married. And suddenly there wasn't any more to say. Can you understand that, John? There was nothing to say. We just stared at each other and then he said, well, goodbye then, and he walked out of the house and closed the front door behind him. My mother came in and said Peter hadn't gone, had he, without being introduced to Auntie Katie. I said he'd gone and there wouldn't be any wedding and she started laughing and crying and screaming. Those repressed people, they're the worst when they break out. I didn't cry, not then. I was stunned, I wasn't even angry.'

‘I can't imagine you angry,' he had said to her.

John parked the bike down a side street called Collingbourne Road. A pub called the Gander was advertising something called a ‘Neez-up Nite' for the coming Saturday but for all that it had a gloomy look, its lights dim. Between it and the road where he had parked stood a terrace of Victorian houses, tall, bleak, the rough grey plaster with which they were faced cracked or broken away, their lower windows, rectangular and of uniform size, sealed with boards. Sheets of corrugated metal covered where the front doors should have been. Number 53 was the middle house of this row of five. It was the only one with a gable and in the centre of this gable, on a circular plaque of smoother stone, were engraved the name Pentecost Villas and the date, 1885.

For a moment or two John doubted if he had come to the right place. But this was Ruxeter Road and Pentecost Villas were not separately numbered from the rest of the houses in
this long street. Carrying his crash helmet and visor, he walked back along Collingbourne Road to see if there might be a way in at the side but the long gardens of those grey houses were separated from the pavement by a high wall of yellow bricks unbroken by any gateway. When the wall came to an end he turned left along Fontaine Avenue. The gardens ended in a fence here and in the fence were five solid-looking gates. He could see this by the light from a series of street lamps on the opposite pavement, behind which instead of more houses was the green space called Fontaine Park. John couldn't recall having been down here since he was about ten. He was alone in the street. As usual there was no one about, the only sign that people were in the vicinity, those inevitable parked cars.

He tried the first gate in the fence but it was bolted as he had feared, and probably locked too. So was the next one. They all would be and that would be that. But because he had come all this way and must when he started out surely have intended to find out what this ‘safe house' business was all about, he tried the third door. The latch yielded and it opened.

John looked round. He looked to the right and the left and behind him but there was no one. He went into the garden and closed the gate. A wilderness met his eyes, a waste land of rough grass and sprawling shrubs, tree stumps and trees overgrown with rampant ivy. The back of the house seemed boarded up too where it wasn't festooned with a cobweb-like creeper. As he approached it the shadow of the fence loomed up behind him, rising up the house, quelling the light, until by the time he reached it he and it were in darkness. He shouldn't have come at night, or he should have brought a torch. But he had hardly expected something like this. What had he expected? He didn't know.

Down a shallow flight of steps he could just make out a door, the only door in the whole block surely that wasn't boarded up. John had a feeling this door was painted green though he couldn't in fact see what colour it was.

As he went down the steps he thought, suppose the door is unlocked and I open it and go in and the whole place is a blaze of light and there are twelve men sitting at a round table and one of them gets up with a gun in his hand . . .?
By the time he had thought that, he had tried the door and it yielded and he was inside. There was no light though and when he fumbled on the wall for a switch and found it and pressed it, nothing happened. It was deathly dark in there, as dark as a mine or a tomb. He didn't even know if he was in some sort of a living room or in a kitchen. The strong smell was of mould. The dampness touched the skin of his face like cold rubber. He moved warily across a floor which had a slippery feel, realizing before he reached the far side of the room that it was hopeless. In the absence of light or access to any source of light, he could go no further.

Anyway, there was no one here. More accustomed now to the darkness, he peered about him searching for what he thought those sort of people would leave behind them, empty bottles, cigarette stubs, half-smoked joints perhaps, though he doubted if he would recognize these. Pinned to one wall, to peeling wallpaper and squashy rotted plaster, was a sheet of paper that seemed to have writing on it. Impossible to read the writing here. He pulled it down, folded it and put it into his pocket, opened the door and went out the way he had come. Something about the garden, its desolation, its rough grass, its air of absolute neglect, reminded him of cats' green. Only there were no cats, there was nothing alive.

He felt curiously relieved to be out in Fontaine Avenue once more, the neat little park opposite, its hedges and trim trees lit by splashes of yellow light. What a fool I am, he thought, coming all the way out here. Like a schoolboy. Like a kid. And for what? What did I hope to find? He retrieved the Honda, put on his visor and crash helmet, and started back.

WHEN HE WAS
going to get married John had bought only one new piece of furniture and that was a bed. All his life, up till then, he had slept in the three-foot-wide single bed in
the smallest of the three bedrooms. His parents had slept in the large bedroom at the front and Cherry in the large bedroom at the back. When she died, or at any rate after she had been dead a few months, he might have taken over her room but he never had. No one ever again slept in that room, and it began to be kept as a sort of shrine. John suspected his mother sometimes went up and sat there. Colin had once suggested he ought to find a tenant for it, people were always on the look-out for rooms, but to John the idea was sacrilegious.

Jennifer and he would of course use his parent' room but to sleep in his parents' bed seemed grotesque. He and Cherry had been born in that bed and no doubt conceived there too. His bride and he couldn't sleep there. Without consulting Jennifer he went out and bought a big double bed, a bed the shop assistant called queen-sized. Now when he lay alone in this bed it seemed enormous.

John told himself he respected Jennifer too much to attempt to make love to her before they were married. But wherever else he failed he tried to be honest and he knew in his heart it was not respect, whatever that might really mean, which stood in his way, but fear. He was thirty-seven years old and he had never made love to any woman, he was a virgin.

It was not all that unusual, he suspected. He wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Colin was too, and still was. Somehow, if you didn't get to go with a girl when you were sixteen or seventeen, you sort of missed the boat and unless you got engaged and married that was it. There were no opportunities, especially in a place like this and if you lived with your parents. Suppose, he asked himself, he had met a girl and they had wanted to sleep together and she was living at home too, what would they have done? He had no car, he couldn't have afforded an hotel room and would have baulked at the open air. Anyway he never seemed to meet any girls. After Cherry died happy things, normal things, ceased to happen in their family. They were crushed and frozen, cowed and driven indoors to be together, but not to share their exclusive sorrow, to deal separately with grief.

He admitted quite freely to himself that he was afraid to try making love to a woman. How did you go about it? How did you begin? How would you know you were doing right? He could not imagine the first move. Well, the kiss he could imagine. By then he had kissed Jennifer many times. But how to take the next step? And what would the next step be? Her breasts, the books said. He shrank with diffidence and shyness at the thought. It seemed an assault. How could you get hold of a girl's breasts and feel them? By what right? She was not a virgin, he knew that. She had lived with Peter Moran. Therefore she would know what was due to her, she would know what men who were real lovers did . . .

When the new bed came he put the old one, his parents' bed, into Cherry's room beside her single divan. Cherry had been innocent, a modest, chaste girl. He had thought her plainness kept her that way until he had seen her with Mark Simms and seen the way Mark looked at her, with passion, with devotion. Then he knew she was naturally pure or pure by conscious choice. One day she said to their mother that she and Mark planned to save their money, they wouldn't have a honeymoon. Holidays abroad could wait till later on, till they had their home together. And their mother said maybe that would be too late, maybe she would have other commitments, and though he had known what she meant, that Cherry might have children, Cherry herself hadn't. There had been explanations and Cherry had seemed quite put out, offended even, which was almost unheard of for her, and their mother had said – very practically, John thought – that children would come unless Cherry took precautions to see they didn't. He had made some excuse and left the room after that. He was not so much embarrassed as somehow aware of the affront to Cherry's modesty. It was strange though that all the time he had sensed Cherry's underlying anger and something impatient or even derisive in her manner.

Perhaps there was something about their family, something in the individual members of it, that shied away from sex. Jennifer had been so kind to him, so good. Once she understood what the problem was, the lack, she had been patient and caring and together they had . . . He pushed the memory
of it along a shelf in his mind until it crashed off the end. No more of that! He turned over in the empty queen-sized bed, seeking elusive sleep, not unhappy though, full of hope.

It was possible, indeed it was likely, she might be back with him here on Saturday night. Those terrors were gone now. Thanks to her, with her, he would be masterly and knowledgeable. As he thought of it his penis uncurled itself inside his pyjama leg, stiffened. Not for the first time he thought, why was it arranged this way, this awkward embarrassing way, by God or whatever? Why couldn't it all have been done by lips and hands or even by thoughts?

Or as flowers managed, or fish. It wasn't long ago, a matter of months, that he had discovered the way fishes procreated, the males merely releasing spermatozoa into the water in which the fecund females swam. Trying as an experiment to grow galia melons at the garden centre, he had fertilized the female flowers with a pastry brush – clean, hygienic, fastidious!

John knew very well how inhibited he was. He longed for a perfect himself in a perfect world in which he would not be ashamed or shy or pained and he knew also he had a possibility of finding this with Jennifer. He laid his hand upon his stiff penis and, contrary to what should have happened, it shrank under his touch. He turned his face into the pillow, his arms crossed now, a hand on each shoulder, and felt like a child waiting for his mother to come in and say goodnight.

FERGUS ALWAYS DROVE
a Volvo, kept it five years and then turned it in for a new one. The latest came from Mabledene's, which had opened its city branch about two years before.

‘Extraordinary name,' said Fergus.

‘Is it?' said Mungo. ‘There's a Charles Mabledene in my house at school.'

‘It must be the same family. Poor chap. I daresay he gets teased.'

‘Teased? Why would he?'

Fergus gave him a look indicative of sorrow that his youngest son was simple-minded. ‘Well, Mabel. I suppose he gets called Mabel, doesn't he? He would have been in my day.'

Mungo didn't know what his father meant. He had never heard of Mabel as a girl's name.

‘Things have changed since your day,' said Lucy.

Girls in the Sixth Form, she meant. People called by their christian names. They had girls in at all levels at Utting, and Stern's new second-in-command was a girl. Mungo thought what a funny thing it was that his father and he didn't seem to speak the same language. It was rather as if, while both speaking English, they had each learned it in parts of the world separated by thousands of miles, in countries where the customs and traditions were totally disparate. He sat at breakfast after his father had gone off to his morning surgery, trying to fathom what he had meant about someone deserving pity because they might be called by a girl's name no one had ever heard of. But after a while he gave up. You couldn't, anyway, imagine feeling sorry for Charles Mabledene, he wasn't that sort of person. Charles Mabledene had defected and Stern had been furious. No wonder. Agents of Charles's brilliance didn't grow on trees. He had been in the junior school at Utting, in Andrade House with Stern's brother Michael, and it was just after they had both taken the Common Entrance that he phoned Mungo. The situation, Angus said when told about it later, rather paralleled his own experience with Guy Parker. For the nub of Charles's conversation with Mungo that evening was that, without saying a word to Ivan or Michael Stern, or indeed anyone but his own parents and the powers-that-were at Rossingham, he had elected to come to Rossingham not Utting when term started in September.