Wrote For Luck (9 page)

C
ome mid-August the light in Sheringham began to change. In the past it had hung in duck-egg blues and greys over the warm summer sand. Now it had turned gun-metal: cloudy even when there was no cloud. Morris watched it again that morning as he stood in the big, untidy room that looked out on to the beach, pulling a hand uncertainly over the three days of stubble on his chin. On the couch, a yard or two distant from the high windows, snug under blankets and Morris’s old parka jacket, the girl from the Marine Ballroom slept soundly on, orange hair thrown back over a makeshift pillow of supermarket bags.

It was about half-past eight. Outside there were terns massed on the sandbar: two hundred of them at least, Morris calculated. Further out, beyond the upturned boats and the wreck of a giant sandcastle built three days before, gulls skirmished over the breakers. Once, at dusk on a day such as this, Morris had seen what he assumed was a purple heron rooting through driftwood in the shallows, but for some reason the hastily palmed camera had realised only vague shapes of grey and cobalt, the bird itself gathered up and lost in shadow. Thinking of the heron made him remember the figure on the couch. Morris hadn’t meant to come home with the girl from the Marine Ballroom. To find her there eight hours later, pinched face white against the black cushions, was to
register a troubling shift in routine, like setting out along the coast path on the cliff to find it strewn with granite blocks from the sea defences.

Traipsing along the sea front on his way to get a paper – the door slammed sharply behind him by way of a hint – Morris watched the tern armies huddled against the breeze. In an hour or so they would head north to the flats at Cley or Brancaster. He walked back the way he had come, noting other routines that were undisturbed: fishermen hauling crab boats over the shale; an ice-cream van being restocked from a delivery truck; dog-walkers silhouetted against the shoreline. Back at the flat he found the girl from the Marine Ballroom sitting at the big deal table wearing one of his old tee-shirts and eating slices of unbuttered toast.

This bread must be a week old,’ she said. ‘Look, it’s got green bits growing out of it.’

Her hair was redder then he’d thought, Morris realised: a kind of scarlet orange with magenta tints. Seeing it bobbing above the table-top nonplussed him. It was outside his range. There was a rucksack he hadn’t noticed yet, half-open on the floor and spilling books and tissues out over the sandy hardboard.

‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ the girl went on. ‘Apart from the cafeteria.’

Morris reckoned she must be a year or two younger than himself: twenty-two maybe, or twenty-three. He lingered for a moment by the window, gently lashing the sill with the furled copy of the
Cromer Mercury
, meditating another hint.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘The Beeches. Out on the Holt Road. I don’t suppose you know how to get there?’

Morris nodded. Everyone in Sheringham knew about The Beeches. On Friday nights Range Rovers drove out from Norwich, Cambridge – even as far as London – dropping off gangs of moneyed teenagers at the gate. Two years ago there had been a scandal when a girl drowned in the swimming pool. Still rapping the sill with the newspaper, he gave directions. Beyond the window the sky threatened rain.

‘I’ve to go to work,’ he said, casting out the final hint.

‘That’s OK. I’ll let myself out.’

Morris left her there among the mouldy bread-crusts, the stacked crockery and the copies of
Norfolk Bird Club Bulletin
. Looking up at the window a moment or two later, as the flock of terns swept northward over his head, he could see her moving beyond the glass: a ball of orange flame bleeding into the nondescript greys and fawns behind. Down at the marina they were gearing up for the late-summer rush. Mr Silverton thought the season would last another fortnight. Then the schools would go back and the trippers start to disappear. Morris sold ice- cream, mended a catch that had come off one of the fun-pool cubicles and retrieved a Walkman that someone had dropped into the deep end. At the midmorning break he and Doug, the other assistant, sat and smoked cigarettes on upturned crates in the yard, hunched against the tubs of chlorine and the rusty generator spares, while Mr Silverton came down from the upstairs office and took a turn at the front desk. Outside fine rain fell against the Perspex dividing wall and they could see the shapes of the
holidaymakers clustered against the big overhanging sign that said SHERINGHAM’S NEWEST INDOOR AQUATIC EXPERIENCE.

Curiously, the girl – her name was Alice, he now remembered – was there again at lunchtime. From his eyrie above the soft drinks dispenser, where the wiring had begun to come away from the wall, he noticed her turning over the rubbish in the bargain swimwear trays that Mr Silverton bought in job lots on the back of Norwich market: nonchalantly, but with an undisguised sense of purpose. When she saw him she came over and stood by the dispenser, waiting for him to descend.

‘Does it always rain like this? In this part of the world, I mean.’

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Doug regarding him sardonically from the desk. ‘Pretty much.’

‘Do you get a lunch break?’

‘It’s another half an hour.’

Waiting in the foyer while he sold tickets to a cub pack superintended by two mountainous Akelas, she looked oddly out of place, Morris thought, like one of the birds you saw at the big reserves further up the coast: blown off course, not sure what the food was like or whether the natives were friendly. They had a ploughman’s in one of the pubs along the front, in a small room hemmed in by fishing nets and ancient lobster shells. Alice was a student, taking a year out between degrees. Mostly she lived at her parents’ house in London, but there was talk of Edinburgh, Exeter, places even further flung. There were other people from The Beeches in the pub: two girls in striped men’s shirts and sunglasses
and a boy carrying a copy of A
History of Western Philosophy
. At intervals their mobile phones went off, and they fished unselfconsciously in bags and pockets to answer them. Bored with the conversation, Morris stared out over the beach and its flotsam: marauding bands of children, an old man in an antique bathing dress tottering gamely towards the sea. ‘There’s a party on Wednesday at the house,’ Alice said, when he got up to go. Why don’t you come along?’ ‘I’ll do that,’ Morris said. Wednesday was the day he worked late.

Back at the marina he found Mr Silverton cross-legged on the floor beside the ice-cream cabinet, surrounded by a pile of melting choc-ices and sky-ray lollies, trying to mend an electrical fault. He was a plumpish, middle-aged man with thick, brindled hair like a badger, whom Morris and Doug had christened ‘The Fatman’. ‘There’s a bloke in the foyer wants to know about a party booking for the Bank Holiday,’ he said, without looking up. ‘You’d better go and talk to him.’ Heading off to reception, Morris found that Alice’s pale parched face, the flock of terns on the beach, had mysteriously coalesced in his head, so much so as to displace the other things that burned there.

The afternoon wore on. Mr Silverton finished repairing the ice-cream cabinet and went off to do errands in town.

‘What happens here in winter?’ Morris wondered over their tea-break.

Doug, who lived down the coast at Cromer, nodded at the imputation of local expertise. ‘You ever been here in November Morrie boy? Half the shops shut down. Fatman takes six weeks in Torremolinos. Day a week maintenance for the likes of us, if we’re lucky.’

Though we would never dream of interfering
, Morris’s sister Julie had written a couple of days before from her house in Slough,
Gary and I feel it is time you faced up to your responsibilities
. It all depended on what your responsibilities were, Morris thought. He had a memory of walking through the front door in Slough a year before and Gary instantly asking him to wipe his feet. There was a fifty pence piece lying on the scuffed lino beneath the reception desk, and he picked it up and put it in the till.

‘Soft bugger, you are,’ Doug said, without malice. Outside an ice-cream van’s klaxon rose like an air-raid warning over the silent streets.

Late summer came. Waking up in the flat, Morris could feel the time slipping away, like sand from the high dunes falling out of his hands, down to the distant beach. Alice had left a paperback novel behind her on the couch: puzzling, unrecognisable spoor, about a group of girls sharing a flat in Bayswater. Morris examined it a couple of times before he handed it back. There was nothing in it that he could fasten on, still less any clue to Alice. In the evenings they went exploring the empty Norfolk back-lanes to Holt, Happisburgh and Burnham Market. Here there were unexpected surprises: two blind men playing chess in a cafe near Wells; an artist in a graveyard near Gresham busily transforming the church into a terrifying surrealist skyscraper; an older world, turned in on itself, inviolate. Julie wrote again, gossip and warnings jumbled together. The children were doing well at school. His mother was ill. There was a bed for him whenever he wanted it. On the Bank Holiday it rained for seven hours. Mr Silverton sat
at the reception desk ostentatiously leafing his way through travel agents’ brochures. Doug had disappeared, gone off to Norwich or working at Yarmouth funfair: nobody quite knew. Julie’s letters lay face-up on the deal table, covered with beer can ring-pulls and postcards of Sheringham seafront. ‘Do you ever write back?’ Alice wondered, putting a pack of groceries down on the floor. She had taken to buying him things, Morris registered: bags of sugar; men’s magazines; Mars bars. There was a soft, proprietorial air to the way she moved round the flat. ‘What are you doing at the weekend?’ he asked, on a whim. ‘Nothing.’ ‘There’s somewhere we could go,’ he explained. ‘Somewhere I haven’t shown you.’ ‘OK,’ Alice said. ‘I like surprises.’ Morris could see that she was intrigued, that it was the right thing to have done.

‘Next week,’ Alice said, as they sped out on the coast road that Sunday, ‘I shall have to be getting back. Really and truly.’ Morris nodded, hoping that this would absolve him from speech. There were teal flying alongside the car, a long line of them heading north to the Wash. The sanctuary at Titchwell was just as he remembered it: a pinewood shop selling bird books and pairs of binoculars, elderly men in waders and soft felt hats drinking coffee out of thermos flasks in the yard. On the sheet of card tacked to the wall there were details of the passage migrants: stone curlews, avocets, an osprey that had flown in that morning with a Swedish ring tag round one of its claws. Later they wandered off along the path to the sea, past the twitchers’ hides and the observation points. The light had gone grey again, Morris saw, turning the sky the colour of the filing cabinets in Mr Silverton’s office.

What was that?’ Alice wondered, tugging suddenly at his sleeve. Morris felt rather than saw the blur of movement at his feet – like a brightly coloured paper bag, he thought later, lofted skywards by the wind. Watching it come to rest, a dozen yards down the path, orange crest bobbing above the dark wings, he felt a surge of exhilaration. ‘It’s a hoopoe,’ he said. ‘Look! I never saw one before.’ There was a file of middle-aged women in mackintoshes coming along the path towards them. Boxed in, the hoopoe took flight again, westward over the salt marshes. Morris watched it go. Not long after it began to rain again and they retired to the car. ‘That festival I was telling you about in Devon,’ Alice said briskly. ‘Once I’ve parked my stuff in town I’m off down there. You ought to come.’

Morris stared through the streaming window as the birdwatchers’ cars manoeuvred through the mud. The hoopoe would be somewhere over the north sea now, far away from the cam-corders and the binocular arcs, out where he couldn’t follow. ‘Sorry,’ he said, seeing the beach in winter, snow on the breakers, blanketing the rock pools in soft white fur. ‘Things to do.’

—2001

T
he Terrapin Club was finally run to earth in the northernmost quadrant of Covent Garden, stuck between a unisex hairdresser and a shop that sold filing cabinets. Even then there was a difficulty, as the staircases ran both up and down, with only a Post-it-note-sized notice stamped TERRAPIN CLUB: MEMBERS ONLY to show the way. In the dining room a waiter in a white coat stood polishing a tray of tumblers, and a radio played Mantovani’s ‘The Song from the Moulin Rouge’. Mr Brancaster sat at the far end, fat white hand curved solicitously around a wineglass. When he saw Patrick he raised his forefinger up to the level of his temple and gave a mock-salute.

‘You’re three minutes late,’ he said, ‘so I took the liberty of ordering a drink.’ Mr Brancaster was a stickler for seemly cliché. He was the kind of man who partook of spirituous refreshment and availed himself of public transport. At some point in the past he had enjoyed marital relations, and Patrick was there to prove it.

‘Meeting with a client,’ Patrick told him, stowing his briefcase beneath the table. ‘Couldn’t get away.’

‘It matters not,’ Mr Brancaster said, loftily. He had never taken any interest in his children’s jobs. Chartered accountancy; estate management; rat-catching: it was all the same to him. Snapping his fingers, with a noise that broke the room’s
silence as effectively as a dropped brick or a banshee’s wail, he exclaimed: ‘Waiter!
Garçon! Jugend!
Another glass of the wine that maketh glad the heart of man,
if
you please.’

It seemed that the waiter was used to Mr Brancaster’s foibles. He brought a glass of wine on a brass salver, so tiny that it might have been an ashtray, and then went back to burnishing his tumblers. There was still no one else in the room.

‘Who are the Terrapins?’ Patrick asked, taking a sip of the wine and regretting the partners’ dining room in Eastcheap. He had a vision of a shoal of miniature tortoises quietly manoeuvring their way up the rickety staircase. ‘Do they ever show themselves?’

‘Of course they show themselves,’ Mr Brancaster said. He was quiet for a moment and then went on: ‘The chairman of the wine committee is a Cinq Port baron.’

They had been having these birthday lunches for a dozen years: in carvery restaurants in the shadow of Holborn Viaduct; in pasta joints on the south side of Oxford Street; and now in the Terrapin Club. It was hard to know if this was a step up, or a retreat.

‘You’re looking well,’ Patrick said. It was a quarter past one. He would stay until 2.30, but no later.

‘I am well. My leech, never yet suspected of being a humbug, says he has never seen a fitter man of seventy-nine.’ As well as seemly cliché, Mr Brancaster liked professional archaisms. He was probably the last man in England to talk about barristers-at-law and water-bailiffs. Sappy, damson-faced and vigorous, white hair combed back from his forehead, blue-blazered and pink-shirted, he looked like a Butlin’s redcoat or the kind
of old-fashioned comedian who strode up and down a line of chorus girls singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man’.

‘And how’s Marjorie?’

Marjorie, as the younger generation of Brancasters never failed to remind each other, was dangerous territory. Without Marjorie there would have been no birthday lunches on neutral ground, and no Mrs Brancaster, still furious at her desertion, mouldering in the divorcée’s bungalow at Firle. But Mr Brancaster took this in his stride.

‘She keeps me young,’ he said, with what to anyone else might have been a glimmer of irony, but which Patrick knew to be absolute seriousness.

There were three or four other Terrapins in the dining room by now: innocuous-looking men in sober suits, who peered respectfully at the wine list and the framed photograph of the Duke of Windsor drinking a cocktail and looking as if he had just stepped in something nasty. A door in the corner opened and shut suddenly and the smell it released – mingled scents of cabbage, gravy and burnt sugar – was so like Patrick’s school canteen that he raised his head from the table and sniffed at it. Mr Brancaster, meanwhile, had summoned the waiter again (‘Waiter!
Garçon! Jugend!
’) and was putting on a tremendous performance – a really first-class show, even for him – about the lunch menu. Like the stink of the cabbage, this, too, brought back memories: of Mr Brancaster at school open days; at football matches; in saloon bars and on petrol station forecourts. No one, Patrick thought, had ever made such an exhibition of himself or failed to notice that an exhibition was being made.

‘It’s a pity the two of you don’t come and see us more often,’ he said, when the waiter had been sent scurrying away. ‘Marjorie’s often said so.’

But not even kind, tolerant Elaine could be persuaded to visit the house in Pinner where Mr Brancaster sat in state watching antiques programmes on the television more than once a year. ‘It’s not for me to complain,’ she had once said, ‘but people who go around deliberately ruining other people’s lives ought to be called to account every now and again.’

‘It’s a long way on a Sunday afternoon,’ he found himself saying, ‘and besides, the children have their own lives to lead these days.’ That was another effect that time spent in Mr Brancaster’s company had on you: he encouraged you to spout the same evasive language as himself. In fact there was no earthly reason why Patrick’s children could not have been forced to visit their grandfather on Sunday afternoons, other than their not liking him. For Mr Brancaster was an insensitive grandparent, who made bracing remarks about exam results, twitted the boys about non-existent girlfriends and, worse, could not see the damage he was doing. Looking at his father as he sat comfortably in his chair, the white hair so immaculately angled over his scalp that it might have been made of spun sugar – Marjorie was twenty years his junior – Patrick wondered, not for the first time, what he had wanted out of life. To be a success? Well, that depended on how you defined success. To be loved? Well, a fair number of people had, at one time or another, loved, admired, or at any rate tolerated him during the course of that seventy-nine years. No, he decided, what Mr Brancaster had really wanted to do,
and showed every sign of continuing to want to do, was to impress his personality on the world around him.

‘I hope it’s not one of those days where the chef pretends he’s feeling under the weather,’ Mr Brancaster said, a bit too loudly for comfort. ‘I once had to go into the kitchen and grill the sardines myself.’

They were never any good, these birthday lunches, whether at the Holborn carveries, the Soho pasta joints or anywhere else. They were never any good because their effect was to focus attention on the past: a past in which Mr Brancaster, though conspicuous, would always be found wanting. Had he ever, Patrick wondered, made an original remark? Had he ever got beyond that fervently held first principle of pleasing yourself? And this was to ignore the spectre of Marjorie, which hung over everything the younger Brancasters had done, said, or plotted, in the past ten years like a giant bat. ‘It’s very
hard
,’ Mrs Brancaster had said, rather humbly and matter-of-factly, when the fact of Marjorie’s existence had first been drawn to her attention. There was no getting away from this, none. It was hard. And Mr Brancaster had made it harder still. It was not, Patrick thought, that you could excuse the things he did – had done – would continue to do – on grounds of increasing age. After all, you accepted that your parents’ behaviour would become more stylised as they grew older. Even his mother had adopted a high-pitched little-girl-lost voice and was keener than ever to talk about some quasi-aristocratic relatives whom they barely knew. It was just that his father’s behaviour – whether young, middle aged, or grandly decaying – had always been exactly the same.

‘
Cyril! Kenneth! Derek!
’ Mr Brancaster was calling out greetings to the other Terrapins, who stirred uncomfortably in the breeze of his salutations, like anguished dreamers. There was something terrifying about his bonhomie, Patrick thought, terrifying and somehow meaningless.

‘Happy birthday, dad,’ he said, remembering why he was there, still guilty despite all the evidence piled up in his favour.

‘Better than some,’ Mr Brancaster said. ‘Do you know there was a time in the RAF when they tried to serve me up with a plate of celery?’

The food began to arrive and they ate it: potted shrimps, which Mr Brancaster gnashed into fragments, like a lawnmower tearing up twigs; some bread rolls, which he tweaked out of their basket with his finger-ends and laid, one by one, on his plate like an oysterman displaying his catch. And then something odd happened. Caught in the wash of Mr Brancaster’s personality, and either anxious either to conciliate it or simply make some half-ironic comment, the waiter set down the next course – an outsize chunk of cod garnished with mange-tout – with what, in the context of the Terrapin Club, its dingy backdrops and dust-strewn carpet, amounted to a flourish. Something in the gesture struck home at Mr Brancaster. He said, suddenly and unselfconsciously:

‘This reminds me of the fish.’

‘Which fish?’ Patrick asked.

‘The fish. You, of all people, ought to remember the fish.’

Mr Brancaster had always been a high-grade exponent of private codes, crosswords solved by clues that only he had access to. This must be another one of them.

‘I remember all kinds of fish,’ Patrick said, a bit irritably. It was ten to two now: soon he would be gone.

‘No, the fish we caught that time at Happisburgh. On the beach. When the sea had gone out. And then we took it home and your mother cooked it.’

And, curiously enough, against all expectation, he did remember. Slowly, like a priceless carpet, the scene rolled out to fill his head. Long leagues of unmarked sand. The sea a distant, blue-white line. A commotion in a rock-pool, which turned out to be not, as they first thought, a cat but a three-pound cod left stranded by the departing tide. His father expertly despatching it with a rock-end to the head. He would have been seven, he supposed.

‘I do remember it,’ he said.

‘I knew you would,’ Mr Brancaster said. Vindicated, he grew quieter, less self-assertive. It would have been possible, had Patrick thought any of these things desirable, to borrow money from him, tell him a few home truths, even pass on a message from his wife. Outside the window the noise of Covent Garden boiled up from the street. A kind of calm settled on the proceedings. ‘All a long time ago,’ Mr Brancaster said, like a headmaster deciding for once to lay the imposition book aside. ‘Didn’t your mother say – didn’t she say it was the maddest thing I’d done in a long while?’

‘I expect she did,’ Patrick said. His mother, he remembered, had made the best of things, put her supper-plans aside and boiled up the cod in pint of milk.

‘All a long time ago,’ Mr Brancaster repeated, upping the level of his voice to a resonant, head-hunter’s chant.

After a while more food came, and Mr Brancaster attacked it with the same attritional fury. Patrick sat silent in his chair, his own meal untouched, oblivious to the Terrapins and their modest chatter, lost in this world of rolling sand, his father’s taut, eager, face, that blissful anaesthetic of endless skies, yachts dancing in the distance, time, for once, stood still, waiting for him to do whatever he wanted with it, and make it whole.

—2011