by Peter Benson
1
Brighton’s houses stood like stones in fields of snow. Its streets were quiet, its lights shone in a dull light, and the sea washed its lonely shore. The Palace Pier creaked. The Pavilion froze. Gardens dreamed. Clocks stopped. An aeroplane droned overhead, and a ship hooted through a distant fog-bank.
Frank sat in his car and stared at a house. The client’s wife was inside, lying in bed with a woman.
Frank yawned and scratched his chin. The car smelt of cold coffee and snow.
He turned on the radio. A Christmas carol was playing, and then a woman began to talk about the importance of planning. Frank turned the radio off.
He looked at the house again, and the upstairs window on the left. The curtains were drawn, it was half-past two in the afternoon. The first two weeks of December had been warm, but now it was cold. Grit covered the roads and pavements, and the sky hung low. A man with a dog walked by; a cat on a wall crouched to watch them pass, then jumped down and disappeared into a garden. Frank rested his head in the palm of his left hand, and closed his eyes.
His mobile rang.
‘Frank?’
‘Bob.’ Bob sat with his feet on his office desk, swopped the receiver from his right hand to his left.
‘You at Austin’s place?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any change?’
‘No…’
‘Then come in. We’ve got another job.’
‘Now?’
‘Now, Frank,’ and Bob hung up.
Frank held the phone in his hand for a moment, then put it down. He took one last look at the house, then drove back to the office.
Bob was standing at the window with his hands behind his back, staring down at the street. He’d watched Frank park, he’d watched him sit in the car for a minute and he’d watched him smooth his hair down as he walked to the office. He’d heard his feet on the stairs, and a clatter as he opened the outer door.
Frank ambled into the office, hung his coat on the back of the door and sat down. His legs were too big for his body and the chair he sat in; he had never learnt what to do with them. One minute they stretched out straight, and then they were tucked under him like bags of rubbish. Or he crossed them, and the one on top swung like a clockwork part. Now, he had them out straight. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s the new job?’
Bob stared out of the window until a pair of shopping women had passed by, then bent down, picked a bottle of whisky off the floor and put it on the desk. ‘This,’ he said.
Frank bent his left leg up, picked at a loose cotton, looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s three o’clock.’
‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’
Frank looked at his oldest friend and shook his head. ‘Adventure?’ he said.
‘Sure,’ said Bob.
‘If I want adventure, I phone Austin and tell him his wife’s in bed with his sister.’
‘No kidding.’
Frank looked at the bottle, looked at Bob and then back at the bottle. It was full. A police car wailed beneath the window, and grey snow began to fall. The smell of burnt milk hung in the air. Bob shook his head and said, ‘It’s not meant to be this way.’ He opened a desk drawer and took out two glasses. He took the phone off the hook, unscrewed the bottle and kicked off his shoes.
At half-past nine, as the lightest shower of snow drifted in the air, Frank let himself into Mrs Platt’s house, stamped his feet on the mat, checked the hall table for post and began to climb the stairs. He had his left foot on the third step when Mrs Platt put her head around her door and said, ‘Long day, Frank?’ He heard her caged-bird cheep, leaned towards her and nodded. ‘Yes.’
Mrs Platt was a small woman with a stoop and pale, milky eyes. Her cheeks, chin, forehead and neck were criss-crossed with deep lines. Her skin looked as though it had been peeled from a pale tree and stuck on to her bones with imperfect glue. She had been a landlady for thirty years, a widow for ten, and had owned many budgies. She was seventy-seven, and had seen King Edward VIII sitting in a car at traffic lights in Brighton. His vacuous gaze and the classical set of his jaw had stunned her; at the time she’d sensed that he was heading for tragedy, but she’d told no one. She used eau-de-Cologne, and always wore something black. She lived on the bottom floor of her house, in four rooms. She often gave the impression of not being there, of being at odds with the world, but she knew who she was, where she was, and who lived in her house. Since Mr Platt had died, she had lived quietly, she didn’t impose herself on her tenants, and she ate simply. She avoided eggs but liked fresh vegetables. In the old days, she had kept an allotment, but she couldn’t dig any more. Now she bought her sprouts, purple sprouting, cabbage and carrots from a shop. She was a trusting woman, and watched Home and Away and Neighbours every day. She wore glasses to read, and had been abroad once. She had visited Calais in 1965, a treat Mr Platt had arranged. He had bought her a souvenir of the town, a sea-shell she kept on her mantelpiece next to a postcard of Brighton in the old days.
‘It’s been a long day,’ said Frank.
‘You work too hard,’ she said.
‘I work too hard,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
‘You should have a holiday.’
Frank felt this idea dive into his head and thrash about. It churned up memories, fears and worry. ‘What?’ he said.
‘A holiday,’ said Mrs Platt. ‘We used to go to Whitby.’
‘Whitby?’ said Frank.
‘Oh yes. Every year. It’s lovely there.’
The bird stopped cheeping, and Mrs Platt edged back into her room and closed the door without another word. Frank stood on the third step for half a minute as the idea of a holiday began to fail and then drown; then he climbed to the first landing, leant on the banister and stared at Lisa’s door.
Strings of light bled from its edges, and the sound of a television. Frank had lived above her for three years. She worked in a chemist’s, collected teapots and had a boyfriend called Adrian. She would come up and talk. She had a sharp nose, and had holidayed in six Mediterranean countries. She had perfect fingernails, and the ghosts of freckles covered her face. Frank looked at his own fingernails, then climbed the stairs to the second floor. He let himself in, took a bottle of Volvic from the fridge and pulled a chair to the window. He sat down, put his feet on the sill and stared at the winter.
Half an hour later, there was a knock on the door. The snow had stopped and settled, and now threads of fog were gathering around the streetlights. A car slewed up the street below, and a cold dog barked. The knock dropped into his mind like a stone in a still lake; he knew what it was, but as the ripples of sound began to spread out, he began to forget. A knock or someone dropping a saucepan downstairs? It came again. He stood up and opened the door. It was Lisa. She smiled and said, ‘Hey, Frank! Don’t answer it if you don’t want to.’ She flicked her right hand at her hair.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘Sorry!’ She patted his arm and laughed.
‘Come in,’ he said.
‘Thanks.’ She took two steps, and stood in the middle of Frank’s room.
It was tidy. There was a carefully made bed against one wall, and a typewriter on a table against the other. There was a stack of plain paper next to the typewriter, and a mug of pens. The window was opposite the door. A screened alcove hid a sink, draining-board, fridge and cooker, and a neat row of knives attached to a magnetic strip. Cups and saucers were washed, dried and stacked in glass-fronted cupboards. A door at the foot of the bed led to a tiny bathroom. Frank had shelves of books and a small collection of records, mainly classical favourites. The room had a fresh smell, it was dusted and vacuumed. It was homely but antiseptic, a particular type of man’s room. There was a picture of a mountain l
ake over the table, and a map of the world over the bed. There were pins stuck in the map, but Lisa had never asked Frank what the pins meant. She sat in an easy chair by the window, he slumped in his, crossed his legs and she said, ‘Got anything to drink?’
He held up the Volvic.
‘Water?’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Again?’ she said, and she pulled a bottle of Scotch out of her pocket. ‘Come on, I’ve got news for you.’
‘News?’
‘You bet. Want to try and guess?’
‘Guess?’
She put the bottle on the floor and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Are you going to repeat every last word I say?’
‘No,’ he said, and he rubbed his forehead. ‘I’m…’
‘Careful…’
Frank pointed. ‘Bob made me drink half a bottle of that this afternoon; I don’t know.’
‘Please,’ she said, and she tapped his knee. ‘We’re celebrating!’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got to guess!’
‘Oh yes,’ said Frank. ‘A guessing game. I don’t like them. Guessing’s gambling dressed like a kid; no.’ He shook his head, and uncrossed his legs. He tried to tuck them to the left, then to the right, then crossed them again. ‘You tell me, Lisa. What are we celebrating?’
‘Frank; how long have we known each other?’
‘Three years last October.’
‘And we’re friends, right?’
‘I hope so.’ Bob’s whisky had stalled Frank’s head and rearranged fuses; now Lisa banged the fuses back, and the shadows on her face froze his haze. He sat up, repeated, ‘I hope so,’ and added, ‘Of course we’re friends.’
‘Good.’
‘Why?’ Frank was sober now and he was on the case. He smelt trouble and he tasted worry, and all the honed edges of his work stood up. ‘Lisa?’
‘No,’ she said, and she hid her mouth behind her hand. ‘No trouble,’ she said, and she smiled a smile that stretched from water to whisky. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Frank had been around. He’d met a man who’d filled a surfboard with dope and left it on a train, and he’d met children who’d sneaked into a zoo and stolen a penguin. He’d spent ten years working through continental Europe, and had seen a small Italian woman knock out an enormous German with one punch, and he’d watched a French woman climb a thousand feet of sheer rock with only suntan oil for protection. He’d seen Albanian children fighting over a crushed Coke tin, and he’d watched dozens of Irishmen fall asleep on a cold beach. He was fifty-two; he had worked for a firm that fitted special floors in hospitals, and he had worked as an orderly in a home for children with cerebral palsy. He had slept with two women. He could play the mouth organ. He had raked the gravel in the Tuileries, and sorted fish in Ostend. He was not malicious, deceitful or dangerous. He had expressive hands and used them when he talked. He liked people, but he could not sustain a relationship. He was neat, he hated mess. He didn’t abuse his body, and did not enjoy eating in restaurants. He had grey hair, and had worked for Bob, an old friend from the army, for twelve years. He enjoyed cooking fish and used to collect stamps. He’d never married, and he had never been to Australia. He’d seen a man shoot another man in Rome and walk out of the restaurant whistling. He’d seen Frank Sinatra carrying a Duty Free bag through Frankfurt airport, and watched a three-legged dog race in Wales, but he’d never spent more than twenty minutes with a pregnant woman.
‘Pregnant?’ he said.
Lisa nodded, smiled, picked up the bottle and her eyes began to crease. ‘Yes.’
‘And it’s, it’s…’ Frank struggled to find the word. It was there, but it wasn’t. There was something you said, a key, and with it a pregnant woman knew she could trust you. He uncrossed his legs, bundled them under the chair and said, ‘It’s…’ again.
‘Time you got some glasses?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and he put out his hand to Lisa as he stood up. ‘You’re okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good,’ he said, and his inadequacy boiled into his head. He took two glasses from a cupboard, fetched a tea-cloth and wiped them; as he held one up to the light, he said, ‘When’s it due?’
‘July.’
‘And Adrian, he’s…’
‘Oh yeah.’ She picked up the bottle and Frank held out a glass. ‘He’s over the moon,’ she said. Adrian loved her, and she loved him. She poured the whisky, and Frank sat down again. He looked at his legs and decided to leave them as they were, sticking out in a friendly way. ‘He can’t wait,’ she said, and she took a drink, and rubbed her lips with the side of her forefinger. ‘But father…’
Frank knew about Lisa’s father. The man had throttled her greyhound to death with a parsnip.
‘Have you told him?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What’s he going to say?’
Lisa shrugged. ‘Good question.’
Lisa’s father was in Maidstone gaol, locked up for five years for burglary, his third offence.
‘Answer?’ Frank swilled his whisky around the glass and took a sip.
‘I’m going to write to him; it’ll be all right. He can’t get to me.’
‘That bad?’
‘That bad,’ said Lisa, and she poured some more whisky. ‘But I don’t care.’ She looked at Frank. ‘How old are you?’
‘Fifty-one… two.’
‘You could be him,’ she said.
‘No I couldn’t,’ he said, and as she stared at him but didn’t say anything else, he glanced out of the window. The snow was falling again, and the lights of the city cast a dome of orange light into the night that hung like a caul. The sound of slow-moving traffic drifted to where they sat, high in Mrs Platt’s house in the third week of December.
2
In the morning, Frank sat in Bob’s office and waited. The phone rang but he didn’t answer it. The phone wasn’t his responsibility.
He looked at his watch. It was half-past ten. He sipped a cup of coffee and thought about Lisa and her father. How does having children change a man, and how could a man think a child was his property? Was a daughter yours, or a small person who’s come to stay for a while? Would a child make me feel important, or inadequate? When you’re pregnant, can you feel the child feeding off you? Would Lisa and Adrian let him take the baby for a walk? Frank ran his fingers around the rim of his coffee cup, and coughed.
He had one memory of his father, a faded image of a smiling khaki figure standing against a blue sky holding a fishing rod. There was sea in the memory, and tall cliffs. The sea was calm and the weather was warm. There were seagulls in the sky, and vapour trails. It was 1945, Frank was four, and his father was going away to die in Germany. He had a moustache and smelt of carbolic, and he kissed Frank’s mother on the lips. Frank could take this memory and examine its detail, but he controlled himself. Once he had felt betrayed by his father’s death, and later, as he watched his mother struggle to hold on, he had despaired; now he was dispassionate. Life was a mistake that happened. Do people favours, give yourself a present every week and don’t be the first to raise your voice. A mistake can be corrected. You come alone, you go alone, you are alone. Tell no one anything and eat fish. Feed your brain, read a lot and go for one long walk a week. Enjoy your work.
Frank enjoyed his. He liked helping people. Matrimonial, bona fides, surveillance, proof of evidence, missing persons, insurance investigation; all these words were bells to him. When Bob had asked him to bring his experience to Brighton and work for the agency, he had known. There had been no break between the desire and the possibility; the sun had been shining, and Bob had smiled. Bob had stopped smiling seven years later, for no reason he wanted to explain. Now it was snowing, and the phone in the office stopped ringing; Frank took the receiver off the hook and laid it on its side. It buzzed at the desk for half a minute, then stopped. The silence was light and drifted in the air.
Bob sat in his car and looked
up at the office. He was smoking a cigarette, but didn’t want to. He was tired but he had a dream, his heart’s construction, and this kept him awake. It had kept him awake for a year, but he didn’t mind. He played with it, tweaked its edges and gently rearranged its clothes. He wanted to give up the agency and put his past behind him. He was divorced, had three children he hadn’t seen for five years and owed the bank sixty thousand pounds. He had pains in his back that shot into his neck, and he coughed for five minutes every morning. He wanted to get healthy, to flush his body and feel his cheeks burn. He thought about soap and water, and all the different ways you could clean your body. He wanted to be able to spend a whole day feeding ducks, or on the beach, and a whole night asleep. He wanted to be able to spend two hours over a meal, and he wanted to watch television programmes that started at half-eight in the morning. Now, he flicked his cigarette into the gutter, said, ‘Shit!’ to himself, and then, ‘No.’ He rubbed his eyes, climbed out of the car, slammed the door and crossed the road.
When he reached the pavement, he put his left foot on a plate of ice, held his balance for a moment and then fell over.
First, he hit his knee; he put his hand out, tried to break the fall, but the hand hit more ice and he went down on his head. He cracked himself above the right eye, and a pavement edge cut him. He bled easily; within seconds, blood was blinding him. He flayed his arms, struggled up and staggered to the office door. A woman pushing a baby in a pram stopped to watch him cross in front of her, and a man with a plastic bag turned and shook his head. The sky was full of the yellow darkness that feeds snow; Bob took a handkerchief from his pocket, mopped his face and climbed the stairs to the office. He saw Frank waiting for him, he felt hot and then he felt cold. He dreamed of a world where telephones didn’t ring, and he wanted a world of wild salmon. Life was a mistake but you had to live it by degrees; ‘Frank,’ he said.
‘What happened to you?’ said Frank.
Snow in winter. The Innuit have a hundred words for ‘snow’ and one word for ‘tree’. The English have one word for ‘snow’ and a thousand words for ‘tree’. The sky began to belch over Bob and Frank’s office; as Bob washed his cut in a small sink, he thought about Innuit squatting over holes in the ice, and he thought about how fish can smell bait from miles away, through freezing salt water. He tasted his blood and thought how natural it was. He thought about Frank and wondered how he was. Frank lived alone, Frank had no family, Frank cooked fish and drank water, and listened to classical favourites. Frank never said anything about his private life. Frank was an island. I am an island, thought Bob, but I have a well on my west coast. Frank has to rely on rain-water. He has to remember to put buckets out before he goes to bed. He has to catch his life, but mine is bubbling up around my feet. All I have to do is bend down and drink. Bob turned off the taps, shook his hands dry and stood up and dabbed at his face with a towel. ‘Yes,’ he said.
