Meanwhile, it should go without saying that my mother, like some Little Minstrel Boy, remains one lone and faithful heart as regards Lennie O’Halloran. Despite everything, he’s still up there with the heroes, as far as she’s concerned. Doing that flicking thing in the sink with her Marigolded hands, she’ll still occasionally stare mistily out of the kitchen window as she remembers him.
‘I don’t know why you didn’t marry Lennie,’ she’ll say.
‘Um, let me think. There must be a reason. Oh, I remember. Because he cheated on me and left me with twenty grand’s worth of debts …’
Oh, you.
You’re so picky, Riley.
* Lao Tzu’s answer: ‘ The dragon who swims is not a dragon’ and ‘He who sits beneath the cherry tree will still see the tiger’ being particularly unhelpful.
* Just kidding. The ONS may be burrowing down into our lives but they haven’t got that far down yet. Actually it was a survey in Cosmopolitan.
* A word here about the TR6, which anyone not possessed of a heart of steel could not help but love and desire from the bottom of their being. Straight six engine, four speed with optional overdrive, independent rear suspension steering and an all-synchromesh gear box, the last two both innovations. Top speed 120 m.p.h., but never mind that. Oh, the styling, the styling. A revamp of the Michelotti 4 and 5 version by Kartmann of Germany gave the body of the 6 even crisper, cleaner lines (dear God, that this thing of beauty should have been supplanted by the wedge-shaped monstrosity that was the 7). And the downside to all this, given that as with all the great things in life, there has to be a downside? Well, I’ll merely mention the words fuel injection. This a phrase which, even years on, will strike fear into the hearts of anyone lucky enough to have owned a 6. Truth to tell, you pushed a TR6 more than you drove it, and this thanks to the ‘notoriously troublesome’ Lucas system as one (highly restrained) classic car book has it. I can think of several occasions where, weighed down with shopping, I bumped into Lennie and he offered me a lift. Each time, when we got to the car park, the TR wouldn’t start.
Each time, Lennie would say, ‘OK. We’ll see if we can get her going again … You push, and I’ll steer.’
God knows why that didn’t tell me something.
R is for … Regret
There’s one thing you need to know before we go any further.
I don’t do regret.
I don’t do regret like I don’t do poker-work, or petit point or any of that other hokey-pokey, pointy-nosed patronising crap that’s supposed to attach to the single, childless older woman.
I’m heavy on regret and this is why. Because regret is another of those clichés dogging the feet of the spinster. It translates into that ‘air of sadness, of loss’ wished upon us by the likes of that celebrity interviewer.*
It’s a popular view of the spinster, this, and not least because it keeps her safely and firmly in her place, in post-World War One mode, victim of missed opportunity, of dispossession and skewed demography, an enduring image too, positively iconographic, but unborn out by the very statistics that claim to substantiate it. For how do we know how many of those spinsters ‘left’ by the war might have had ample opportunity to become wives and mothers later on in life, but decided against it, their spinsterhood therefore not due in the end to the tragedy of the trenches but to a liking for their single state?
There’s a terrible whiff of the Madonna about the spinster left by the war. It turns her into what some would like her to be, sexless, the eternal virgin, her spinsterhood equally and eminently suitable for grubby jokes and sickly worship, and this with the added advantage that she can be patronised and in the classic fashion, any dignity and honour that she’s granted only as much as others will allow. And then there’s the safeness of it all, which Olive Jepson had discovered and which kept that picture on top of the piano.
Sometimes it’s really useful to have a dead fiancé, Riley … I don’t know why but some people just seem happier if you can give them a good reason why you’re single.
She knew why. The knowing satirical smile said that. She knew, although doubtless didn’t care, that this long-gone fiancé bought her a place in our town, that with him she slotted neatly into its scheme of things.
For what better justification or mitigation can there be, will there ever be, for those too scared or just too downright lazy to get out of an unsuitable and/or unrewarding relationship than this ever-present picture of the Grim Alternative, this Warning of a Worse Fate, the Spectre of the Solitary Spinster, complete with obligatory ‘air of sadness’ lying like a cobwebby shawl about her shoulders. Regret like Miss Havisham’s unused bridal wreath, wilting on her brow.
‘It’s not about regret.’ That’s what I said to Danny.
‘What’s it about then, girlfriend?’
‘Roads you didn’t take, doors you didn’t open. That sort of thing.’
‘And that’s not regret?’
‘No.’
Something else, something more subtle. A grey area. Pearl grey. Translucent. Shimmering. Like the early morning mist I’d see, a wicked mix of heat and pollution, from Nathan’s hotel window …
I slightly bastardised the quote that day to Danny. It’s actually the ‘passage’ we did not take, not road. It’s from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, from the first of the four, ‘Burnt Norton’, and it’s been a lamp to my feet over the last few months, thinking of all that’s happened.
Smart alecks among you probably recognised the quote straight away. More to my shame, then, that I so recently discovered it.
More reason to offer up my grateful thanks, albeit posthumously, to Mervyn.
Mervyn was the first of us to join this paper. Except, of course, it wasn’t this paper then. Then the Free Press was a bona fide weekly people cared about enough to buy, its name a proud boast, advertising its credentials. Now that name says it all, spelling out exactly what it is, a two-bit give-away, which comes through the door regardless.
‘Once they rang to complain when they didn’t get it,’ Mervyn said gloomily one day, banging down the phone on a complainant. ‘Now they only ring to say they do,’ ‘they’ being the second home owners who visit their cottages so rarely that by the time they arrive, bearing their rocket and their Parmesan shavings, nerves equally shredded by the queues on the M4, there’s a wall of Free Presses so high and so wide behind their front door they can’t actually get it open.
‘Like I care,’ Mervyn said, screwing up the paper on which he’d noted the name and address, hurling it in the bin. ‘They’re the bastards who’ve pushed the price of a dog kennel beyond the reach of the rest of us.’
The more I think about Mervyn’s life and career, the more I think of the rings on the trunk of a tree, or layers of strata in rock, each one representing an age: the Jurassic, the Palaeolithic, the Neolithic.
The Jurassic was the mid-sixties (for surely dinosaurs ruled the earth at this time and none more so than Mervyn). He had a column on the paper then, ‘Pop Sounds’, which was Harry Oates’ rather touching response to the seismic shift that had replaced the likes of Alma Cogan with the Beatles. At the time, Mervyn ‘managed’ bands for whom great things were always predicted.
‘Ready Steady Go!’ he’d say with a nod and a tap to his nose. ‘Just watch. Any time now.’ You can still see those same band members today. Unfortunately they’re working in the local butcher’s shop or the filling station, or driving a bus up the High Street.
The seventies was Mervyn’s punk period. A photo still graces the wall proudly next to his old desk, no one having had the heart to take it down: Mervyn with a safety pin where no safety pin should be, particularly on a man already too old for it.
Cometh the eighties, cometh the man. He moved into politics, standing for the Green Party, unsuccessfully, but – this to his credit – taking 836 votes off the Tory incumbent. As the eighties gave way to the nineties he metamorphosed into Serious Intellectual and Man of Letters. In this capacity he
ran the Writers’ Circle, which met weekly in the local library. Invited by him to give my first public appearance there in my own new persona as author, I never actually got round to reading my carefully selected extracts from The Importance of Aunts, thanks to him using the time available to declaim the latest chapter of Priapus Unbound, his own as yet unpublished novel.*
Lunch times during this period were spent browsing Hanrahan’s for obscure Latin American novels and/or collections of Eastern European poetry or sitting over several espressos in Hocus Pocus (he only drank espressos now) where he would drag me to debate the burning topics of the day such as Whither The Novel, or more commonly, Why Won’t Some Bastard Publish Me?
‘Ahead of my time, Riley, that’s the problem. Always the same for a writer who wants to take chances …’
In all this he liked to imply that he and I represented an island of intellect and culture in a sea of Philistinism, this last being a direct reference to what he liked to term ‘wet-behind-the-ears young whippersnappers off media courses’, these being the trainee reporters who, since we were taken over by the conglomerate that gave us Sophie, now pass through our office in a steady stream, and so quickly we scarcely get to know their names before forking out for a farewell present.
Mervyn’s death shocked us all, no question, and not least Magda, in the middle of planning her wedding.
‘I shall postpone it, of course,’ she said. ‘It’s the least I can do. As a mark of respect.’†
I guess the only consolation in Mervyn’s death, if consolation there be, is that at least he went the way he would have wanted to go, pitching forward in the press box of the magistrates’ court, knocking his trademark black fedora on to the floor where it rolled in a full slow dignified circle like a last lap of honour.
On the face of it, it might seem to be pushing the bounds of credibility to have Royston’s court case the very one in progress when Mervyn keeled over. On the other hand, the thing becomes considerably less coincidental bearing in mind Mervyn’s position as court reporter and the sheer regularity with which Royston appears at the magistrates’ court on account of his careless/dangerous driving.
Just how Royston has managed to hang on to his licence over the years, given the number of his convictions, is a mystery to us all. It can only be thanks to the Fraser name, which, as we know, he drops on every conceivable occasion, a habit his solicitor was slavishly copying (‘Now, Mr Fraser, you are, of course, marketing manager at Frasers, and you had just pulled out of the Fraser car park …’) when Mervyn made that queer guttural noise in his throat and slumped forward over his notebook.
‘Poor boy. He was quite traumatised.’
This from our mother, and the subject of a great deal of hollow laughter from the rest of us, i.e., Cass and Fergie and me, believing as we do that maybe, just maybe, the Texas Chain Saw Massacre staged live in front of Royston would bring on symptoms of trauma, but even then it wouldn’t be a pushover.*
Meanwhile, by the time of his death Mervyn had been through several marriages and liaisons, the last and most important of these being with Irena, with whom he took up a decade or so ago, in his own glum words, ‘like some old train shunted into a siding’, a rather touching and lyrical phrase, I always thought, and certainly one considerably more resonant than any of those he force-fed me during lunch time from his magnum opus.
How Mervyn and Irena met has remained a mystery to all. Since she’s Russian, and since she appeared in his life around the end of the Cold War, most of us assumed she was some sort of mail-order acquisition. Not that there was ever the slightest indication of détente between them. A further mystery to us is how they managed to remain together during the last decade, or more especially, how they failed to murder each other. Personally, I’ve always believed that they were cemented by a sort of affectionately mutual loathing. This I judge from the way he always referred to her, which was generally as ‘that mad bitch’, but always with a certain air of admiration. In the same vein, he appeared to take a sort of patriarchal pride in the colourful insults she would hurl at him in foaming Russian, her favourite, which I can neither spell nor pronounce, loosely translating as mean bastard whose mother does unmentionable things with soldiers.
It came as no surprise to anyone that Irena had Mervyn cremated.
‘Not taking any chances,’ said Sophie, as we stood together on the steps of the crematorium.
The funeral service was a grim affair, not enhanced by a number of self-penned pieces by members of the Writers’ Circle, including Magda:
‘priapus
unbound
and for ever now …’
Irena sat through the whole thing with a bad-tempered look on her face, this being her normal expression. The only time she smiled was at the end, when she pulled off the final indignity by using the excuse of his punk years to send him out through the red curtains into the hereafter to the sound of Sid Vicious singing ‘My Way’.
Being editor, and with the excuse of a paper to bring out, Sophie was able to slide off after offering her condolences to the widow at the crematorium door. Not so Riley Gordon, her arm being caught in a claw-like grip by Irena.
‘You vill come to the house,’ she said in the manner of a woman who may indeed have worked as a guard in the Gulag, this being among Mervyn’s favourite insults and the one that more usually followed her allegation about his mother and the soldiers.
Half an hour later, doing that traditional funeral thing of trying to balance a piece of Battenburg on the side of a saucer while sipping my tea, I felt the claw catch my arm a second time. The words, ‘Heeeee liked you,’ hissed into my ear in a manner that made it sound like an accusation. I was still scrabbling around for an alibi when I found myself being marched down the corridor to what turned out to be Mervyn’s study, although judging by the amount of wine bottles still lying in the waste bin it was less reserved for late night addition to his novel than the drinking that almost certainly helped to kill him. She flung wide the door with a grand gesture that sent the several dozen gold bracelets shooting down her arm, and said in a throbbing ‘Song of the Volga’ voice, ‘Hisss books. You take them.’
Now Mervyn’s books rose in shelves to the ceiling. They also teetered in piles on the floor. Happily, however, Han was at the funeral, Mervyn being one of his customers. Thus I was able to persuade Irena that not only would my cottage not take Mervyn’s library, but returning the books from whence they came, i.e., to Han, would be a much better deal since he would pay her for the ones he wanted. This cheered her up considerably, but she still insisted, although tearfully now, since she was two-thirds of the way down a bottle of vodka, that I take a book to remember Mervyn by.
‘He vould like it. Yessss. Yessss.’
Thus it was that I grabbed the nearest thing lying on his desk, which turned out to be Four Quartets.
‘Gosh. Just imagine. It was probably the last thing he was reading,’ said Magda, tenderly stroking its cover. The wake had moved on to the Queen’s Arms by then, this mainly on account of Irena passed out on her sofa. ‘It’s as though it’s still warm, isn’t it, as though he’s still with us?’ this with the faintly tragic air of a woman who would have us all remember that she and Mervyn had, after all, once been lovers.
‘Oh, look.’ She’d opened it up. ‘He’s underscored some lines, made notes in the margin.’ She began intoning the words as indeed I knew she would. When she’d finished, her mouth fell open in a long aaah of grief and she raised her eyes like some praying saint, clasping the book to her bosom.
‘Imagine …’ she said. ‘It’s just like a message, isn’t it? A message from the other side. From Mervyn.’
I said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, give it a rest, Magda.’
Still, when I got home I couldn’t help looking at those underscored lines again and Mervyn’s ‘Yess’ scribbled next to them. And I had to admit there did seem to be something reaching out from the ether about them. Maybe it was the firm, even triumphan
t nature of the ‘Yess’. Who could tell why Mervyn had scrawled it? Still, it seemed to make the lines resound in some peculiar way, like the voice of Hamlet’s father coming from beneath the stage: Swear … swear …
Perhaps it was just that old intimation of mortality we all get at funerals, each man’s death, etc, etc. There again, perhaps it was the memory of Mervyn himself. He’d followed me pretty much through my life when I thought about it. And while he was as mad as a hatter in some respects, still there was something rather magnificent about all those different incarnations, those different rings on the trunk of his tree.
‘Here’s to you, Mervyn,’ I said, raising my glass, toasting him, seeing him stalking through the newsroom in that big black hat, his voice booming from behind the computer at those young whippersnappers.
‘Read and learn … read and learn,’ he’d tell them, summoning them to his screen to read his copy over his shoulder.
‘Read and learn,’ he’d said. And so I did, pouring myself another glass of wine, opening up his Four Quartets again, staring at the lines he’d underscored and his ‘Yess’ beside them
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened*
I read them over and over.
And before I knew where I was, I was thinking of Nathan.
When I think of how Nathan appeared to me over the years, I seem to see him as one of those small garishly painted figures in a little alpine chalet barometer, the sort my mother brought back from one of her coach trips with Tommy to Austria, and hung in the hall, a little figure in a green feather-cocked hat, sometimes in, sometimes out, but always there. Always present, which is how he seemed to me, even when I didn’t realise it, waiting at the back of my head.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 20
