A Temporary Life, page 3
‘Not now,’ she says, and adds, ‘Perhaps one week-end.’
She’s been waiting in the hall. Beneath her arm she holds a leather pouch, tight, bulging. The leather is stained here and there with blobs of coloured ink.
‘It’s not very far,’ she says, and adds, ‘I can always pick you up. I have a car.’
‘Are you old enough to drive?’ I ask her.
‘Just about.’
She winds a strap from the pouch around her arm.
‘I’ll see when I can fit it in,’ I tell her.
‘I’d be grateful if you could,’ she says. She adds, ‘I shall have to dash. I’m being picked up myself in town.’
She runs across the hall, waves, then disappears to the street outside.
I can hear her running from the steps, the sound flung up against the buildings. When I reach the street I see not her but Pollard, walking along, arms swinging, his attention not on her but on a car which has just drawn out from the kerb a little way ahead. Bright pink, almost crimson, it turns into the stream of traffic, swings round, and disappears towards the town.
‘Told you,’ Pollard says when I catch him up. ‘Came fourth. Should have known. Not a favourite’s won today.’
He folds up an evening paper and puts it in his pocket.
‘Four certainties. One week. I can’t believe it.’ He adds, ‘What did Wilcox want?’
‘He’s invited me to dinner.’
‘Didn’t ask you for a fiver, then, as well?’ he says.
‘Just the invitation. Nothing else.’
‘Last bloke he had to dinner, Skipper sent him to the fish shop. “Salt and vinegar,” he says. Asks him what it comes to. Nods. Never pays him. Asks him, when he’s leaving, if he’d like to come again.’
‘Who was in the car?’ I ask him.
‘Never noticed, boy,’ he says. ‘Your friend the Newman girl got in. Apart from that, too dazzled by the colour.’
We reach the corner of the street. The centre of the town opens out before us, the corner of the cathedral close, the adjacent row of shops, a garden, the façade of a recently constructed hotel with glazed windows opening onto the street itself, a small edifice with the inscription mounted above the door, ‘Bingo Now Five Nights a Week’.
‘How are you making out?’ he says. ‘Flat, have you found yourself, boy? Or got yourself some digs?’
‘Flat,’ I tell him.
‘Wilcox-recommended, or otherwise?’ he says.
‘Otherwise,’ I tell him.
He laughs.
‘I went into Wilcox-recommended rooms when I first came here. I think he takes a cut, or, if given the choice, is allowed to decorate the walls himself. Nubile peasants, mules and treey vistas. Quite a Pre-Raphaelite in his way is Skip.’
‘Come and have a look,’ I tell him.
‘Wife would never allow it, boy,’ he says. ‘Hour late: seen nothing like it. Has a municipal timetable, trains and buses, pinned up beside the sink.’
‘Could send a telegram,’ I tell him.
‘Horses, boy, and an occasional run in a pre-war banger: that’s all this married man’s allowed.’
He winks, as if this limitation to his life is a well kept secret, turns, waves, calls, ‘See you, sonny,’ and sets off down the street.
I watch him to the corner: he joins the queue for a local bus, disappears for a moment in the mass of bodies as the bus draws up, then, reappearing, shuffles forward.
He climbs aboard; I see him at a window. The bus sweeps past: he doesn’t look up.
‘I suppose, Hendricks, you didn’t make a mistake in coming here?’ I say, later, sitting on the balcony at the front of the park attendant’s hut.
‘Coming here,’ Hendricks says, ‘in particular, or coming here in general?’
I gesture at the courts and then, more vaguely, in the direction of the town.
‘Coming here in general.’
‘I have a philosophy,’ Hendricks says, ‘which, amongst other things, embraces the belief that no one makes mistakes, merely that one does some things that are less interesting than others.’
He screws back the top of his thermos and returns the flask to his canvas hold-all.
‘For example, I might have gone abroad,’ he says. ‘Or stayed in London. And yet if – as I suspect – life is nothing more than an irrelevance, then to have pursued a purely rational, opportunistic course would have been to fly in the very face of what I, personally, have come to recognize as reason.’
His face is flushed; beads of sweat run down from his blond hair across his brow. Rust, from some recent fracas with the wire-netting surrounding the tennis court, has stained his shirt: damage which he obviates now by pulling on his sweater. It too is white, like his shorts, his socks and his court-stained plimsolls. On the front of the sweater is embroidered a yellow crest comprising two horizontal scimitars surmounted by a star. He leans down, slots his racket into its press, then tightens up the screws.
‘In any case, what’re you doing here?’ he says.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Your parents still alive?’
‘No,’ I say. I shake my head.
‘Your wife?’
‘She’s not on the scene, as they say, at present.’
‘Dead?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Divorced?’
‘Not that either, I’m afraid,’ I tell him.
‘Separated.’
He gazes off, abstracted, to where the sun-lit trees are fading into shadow.
‘There’s nothing really to keep you, then.’
‘I only got the job,’ I say, ‘for a year.’
‘A year?’
‘I didn’t tell Wilcox that, of course.’
‘The Skipper’s quite a decent man,’ he says. ‘Providing, of course, that you treat him right.’
‘He’s invited me to dinner.’
‘What?’
I can already see the words on Hendricks’s lips: ‘He’s never invited me. All the years I’ve known him. The service I’ve put in,’ etc.
‘I gather he’s notoriously remiss in ordering food on these occasions.’
‘Really?’
‘So I gather.’
‘I’m not familiar with his domestic habits.’ He fastens the string bag containing his tennis balls to the handle of his racket. ‘Ready?’
‘Sure,’ I say.
I add,
‘Would you mind, by the way, if I had a lift?’
It seems he would; he says nothing for a while.
We step down to the path together.
‘I can drop you off in town if you like.’ He looks at his watch. ‘I’ve got an appointment,’ he says, ‘in half an hour.’
‘That’ll suit me fine,’ I tell him.
‘I thought, as it was, you usually walked.’
‘Usually I do,’ I tell him. ‘But not tonight. I’m feeling tired.’
He swings the balls from the handle of his racket. We reach the car. I climb inside.
It’s like, for a moment, dropping off a cliff.
We drive out, in silence, between the gates.
‘I don’t intend staying for long, in any case,’ he says. We turn towards the town. A tree-lined boulevard opens out before us. ‘With a job like this, nowadays, I find, if you wish, you can always move around.’
‘Flexibility.’
‘It has.’
‘Like tennis.’
‘Like most things, if you look at them,’ he says.
We overtake a car: the news about Wilcox has, very slightly, set him back. We pass a second car. A motor-cycle overtakes us. Hendricks’s knees have reddened. His views, concerning the irrelevance of all decisions, appear for a moment to have been forgotten. The town, a mass of sun-lit towers and steeples, appears like a blur on the horizon immediately before us: scarcely has it registered, however, than a second motor-cyclist, attired in a policeman’s uniform, materializes by Hendricks’s elbow; a white-clad hand is raised and lowered.
The car slows down.
‘My God. All the times,’ Hendricks says, ‘I’ve been along this road.’
The policeman, as the car stops, dismounts a little way ahead.
‘The one time,’ Hendricks adds, ‘I go over the limit.’
‘Tell him,’ I say, ‘you were only doing twenty-five.’
‘Good God, Freestone,’ he says, ‘it was nearer sixty.’
‘Say twenty-five was all you saw.’
The policeman, removing his whitened gauntlet, is walking back towards the car.
He stoops down for a moment, examines the number plate, then, more attentively, the licence, then straightening, glances directly through the windscreen at Hendricks’s sweater, at the scimitar crest, and then at Hendricks’s racket with the bag of balls still fastened to its handle.
‘Got a sporting appointment, have you, sir?’
Hendricks shakes his head. ‘We’ve just been playing tennis, officer,’ he says.
‘Tennis?’
He looks at the car again.
‘Here? Or abroad was that?’
‘Here.’ He gestures behind us to the park.
‘Going that fast, sir, o’course, it might have been another country.’
‘I was only doing twenty-five.’
‘Twenty-five?’ The policeman, as if antagonized, removes his other glove. ‘O’course, if you’d come out with a straight confession I might have let you off. As it is, could I see your licence, sir?’ he says.
Hendricks groans.
He glances condemningly in my direction.
‘If you multiply twenty-five by two, and add one or two digits, sir, I think you’d get a fair appraisal,’ the policeman adds.
‘Twenty-five,’ Hendricks says, ‘was all I saw.’
‘Twenty-five you might, sir. But not when I was doing seventy to try and catch you up.’
‘I haven’t got my licence,’ Hendricks says.
‘In that case, sir,’ the policeman says, ‘could I have your name and address?’
Hendricks spells it out.
The policeman writes it down.
‘Honesty is the best policy.’ He looks across.
‘That’s right,’ I tell him. I nod my head.
‘You’ll be hearing from us in due course,’ the policeman says. He sets off back towards his bike.
‘My God, all the times I’ve been along this road.’
‘You should have insisted,’ I tell him, ‘on the twenty-five.’
‘My God, Freestone, what else could I have done? He might have booked me for something else.’
‘Always insist you’re right.’
‘You can see where your policy’s got me now.’
‘On the other hand,’ I tell him, ‘assuming that no one makes mistakes but merely that one does some things that are less interesting than others, you could say that that encounter was, in one sense, an unqualified success.’
‘Where do I drop you off?’ he says.
A small red shooting-brake is parked almost opposite the door. As I draw abreast, the door of the car itself is opened. The Newman girl gets out. She’s wearing jeans and a dark-blue jacket. There’s someone else in the car beside her though, since it’s almost dark, I can’t see who this is.
‘I thought I might catch you,’ she says, ‘if I waited here.’
‘Not too long, I hope,’ I tell her.
‘Just one or two minutes.’ She gestures at the door: the house, the central one of a terrace of nine, looks out over a dilapidated garden across the street to the slope of the valley immediately below the town; ancient Georgian squares and terraces fall, in symmetrical array, towards the concrete towers standing by the river.
‘I was wondering if next week-end might be convenient,’ she says.
‘For what?’
‘For seeing my work.’ She gestures to the car. ‘Saturday afternoon would suit me fine.’
‘Saturday afternoon,’ I tell her, ‘is a difficult time.’
‘I could pick you up in the car,’ she says.
‘Since I don’t know when I’m free, it might be better if I made my own way there,’ I tell her.
‘Whichever’s more convenient.’ She shakes her head. ‘I’ve written the address,’ she adds, ‘on this.’
She gives me a slip of paper, glances over once more towards the house, the crumbled brickwork, the peeling paint-work, then turns back to the car and climbs inside.
‘Till next Saturday,’ she says.
‘Till next Saturday,’ I tell her.
She waves.
The door is closed. With something of a lurch the car gets under way; veering from one side of the road to the other, it disappears towards the town.
I turn back to the house.
I get the key, find the door already open and, inside, a man with a red moustache waiting in the lighted hall. The door to the ground-floor flat is standing open; the sound of a gramophone floods out to the hall itself.
He nods his head, waits for some return or greeting and, getting none, watches with a look of quiet dismay as I mount up to the second landing. He coughs, lengthily, as I climb the stairs; then, after a moment’s silence, the door below is closed and the music fades.
I unlock my room and step inside.
It’s dark. Through the rear window I can see the black, silhouetted bulk of the cathedral spire, the glowing clock face set in the tower below it, and one or two odd street lights glowing, between the buildings in an adjoining street. Through the window at the front, a view of the town is revealed not dissimilar to the one glimpsed earlier that day from the life room window: the roofs of the buildings lower down the slope, interspersed with dark, silhouetted chimneys, fall in oblique, strangely angled steps to the tall concrete tenements standing by the river.
I drop the racket, cross over to the bed, lie down and, gazing at the yellowish face of the cathedral clock, with its roman numerals and black, elongated-diamond hands, soon fall asleep and, but for a vague recollection of the red-moustached figure in the hall below, joined in some curious way with that of the helmeted policeman gazing in through Hendricks’s sports car window, remember nothing, it seems, for several hours.
5
The gates themselves have long since been removed: the hinges still remain, and the rust which has stained the inside of the posts, a layer of ochrish-brown against the black.
From the drive itself it’s impossible to see the house, or any of its numerous shed-like extensions. To my left is a playing field owned, reputedly, by the local council: pitches have been marked out and posts set down, and, at the very centre, stands a brick pavilion, blackened by soot and falling into ruin. At the far side of the field a line of trees stands up, faintly, against a low bank of mist and cloud.
To my right the view’s completely obscured by a tall brick wall, a hedge and several trees. The drive itself runs straight ahead; I’ve never followed it, in fact, to its furthest end; it comes out, allegedly, by a shallow stream and from a wooden bench, according to Yvonne, you can gaze out, across the river and the fields, towards the town.
The drive broadens to my right: white lines have been drawn across the tarmac; parking places, marked out and numbered. Only two of the places are occupied today. Directly ahead appears the entrance to the house, an architraved porch set at the top of a flight of steps. A man with a broom is working on a lawn at the side of the house; a mound of leaves he’s swept up is being loaded by a tall, broad-shouldered man into a wooden barrow.
I let the glass door bang to behind.
On each visit I remind myself to close the door behind me; each time, forgetting, I let it crash, wincing, half-turning to see the view outside – the drive, the trees, the vista opening to the field – tremble as the glass vibrates in the loose, ill-fitting, wooden frame.
I nod to the receptionist behind her counter and turn off, to my right, along the corridor leading to the ward itself.
The floor, evidently, has just been polished: it reflects the bowls of flowers standing in the window-bays, chrysanthemums, irises, a bunch of roses; I can hear the music from a wireless, a concert, coming from one of the private rooms.
The corridor, beyond a wooden door, opens out directly into a dining-room. It’s set out like a small cafeteria, with yellow, plastic-covered tables and yellow, plastic-covered chairs. A nurse, in a white apron and a blue dress, is setting the tables: she looks up, smiles, and nods towards the door leading, past the kitchen and the matron’s office, to the common-room.
‘Watching telly.’
A woman is lying on a couch, opposite the kitchen door, her head propped on her hand. In the common-room beyond, a crowd of women are gathered round the television set. I catch a glimpse of several horses, hear the commentator’s voice, then see Yvonne, tall, slender, walking up and down in the corridor which leads through from the common-room to the ward itself.
She’s smoking, her head bowed, gazing at the floor. A nurse, in a white apron and a blue dress, is fastening up a cupboard on the wall.
‘There’s your husband here now, Mrs Freestone,’ the nurse has said.
She closes the cupboard door: it has two locks, one in the centre of the door, exactly like a safe. The shelves inside, I notice, before the door clicks to, are full of transparent plastic boxes, each one labelled with a name, and containing a variety of coloured pills and capsules.
Yvonne looks up, nods, her gaze abstracted.
‘Is it today you were coming, then?’ she says.
I glance over to the nurse. ‘Is it all right if we go out for a meal?’ I ask.
‘Not today.’ The nurse has returned the keys of the cupboard to the pocket of her apron. ‘I can ask if you like. Your wife was asking this morning. We thought it best she stayed today.’
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ Yvonne has said. She continues pacing up and down. Through the window of the ward beyond I can see the lawn at the front of the house and the man with the broom sweeping up the leaves and the tall, broad-shouldered man loading up the barrow.
‘You can have a spot of dinner here,’ the nurse has said. ‘I’ll fix it up. We’ll put you on the table at the end.’ She adds this to Yvonne, stooping slightly so that she can see into her face. ‘Would you like that, Mrs Freestone? Have a spot of lunch with your husband, then?’
