Towards the End of the Morning

by Michael Frayn

  ‘Incidentally,’ said Jannie, reappearing in the doorway, ‘they’ve been throwing stuff over the wall again.’

  Dyson jumped to his feet, the adrenalin instantly flushing into his bloodstream.

  ‘Which of them was it?’ he demanded excitedly.

  ‘I didn’t see them – I just found it there.’

  ‘You didn’t touch it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You left it exactly as it was?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘When I go out there now I’ll find it exactly as it landed?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. It’s just beyond the second apple-tree.’

  Dyson rushed out into the garden, without stopping to find a torch. It was a long, thin garden, set with blighted, infertile fruit trees which cowered between the yellow brick walls like sick dogs in an exercise yard. Dyson stumbled over loose bricks in the rank grass. There was a vague, yellowy urban nightglow in the air, and Dyson found what he was looking for at once. He got down on his hands and knees to examine it more closely, scarcely aware of the wetness of the grass. Old tin cans – twenty or thirty of them. Old Long Life beer cans. Dyson clenched his fists, and snarled aloud with rage. Not loudly, but definitely aloud.

  He wouldn’t have it. God knows he was kicked around by everyone, but he wasn’t going to have his own garden treated as a tip. Positive action was going to have to be taken. But against whom? That was the question. Was the stuff coming from the Coxes’ side or the West Indians’? The garden was so narrow it was impossible to tell.

  He didn’t think it was the West Indians. He didn’t know, of course. But he didn’t want to be the sort of man who went round believing that his West Indian neighbours were throwing old beer cans into his garden. That wasn’t the sort of person he was at all. If by some chance it was the West Indians, then tact was called for. A friendly word of advice, no more – and he didn’t want to raise the matter with them at all unless he was absolutely sure.

  But if it was the Coxes . . . ! Well, by God, he wasn’t putting up with this sort of nonsense from the Coxes! He’d asked Cox about it point blank, and Cox had denied it. But that proved nothing. If it was the Coxes he would get an injunction. He would damned well go round and post a load of rubbish through their letter-box.

  He examined the position of the cans carefully. They were slightly nearer the West Indian wall, but that proved nothing in itself. They were quite widely scattered. Now that was interesting. They would scarcely have been thrown over one by one; someone must have brought them out of the house in a box, and shot them over in one load. Since they were now scattered it argued a long trajectory. And as Dyson peered at them in the faint jaundiced light it seemed to him that they were to some extent radiating out from an epicentre on the Coxes’ side. They were! They had hit the ground on the Coxes’ side first – he could see some sort of darker mark in the grass! – and bounced towards the West Indian side, scattering as they went!

  In an excess of justified rage, now that he could permit himself some really justified rage, Dyson scooped up as many of the cans as he could and flung them back over the Coxes’ wall. Some of them rang out against stones or bricks as they landed. The noise made Dyson hesitate. He had flung enough back to teach the Coxes a lesson, he decided; he would put the rest in the dustbin. He bent down to gather them up. But at that moment he thought he heard the Coxes’ back door open. He decided that it would be better to collect up the rest of the cans in the daylight, when he could see what he was doing, and he straightened up and walked briskly back to the house. In his haste he missed his footing on the second of the wooden steps up to the kitchen door, and trod on the first with unnatural heaviness. It collapsed beneath his foot, with a scrunch of considerable self-satisfaction, as if God had been waiting for that little opportunity for some time.

  Bob crept upstairs and let himself into his flat as quietly as he could, in the hope that Mrs Mounce wouldn’t hear that he had come in. She didn’t always hear; it was worth a try. The flat was dark and cold. He took off his shoes and walked softly about in his overcoat, turning on the Anglepoise light over the desk, and various lamps made out of old brandy bottles. He found a cold, dusty shilling behind the jar of multicoloured spills on the mantelpiece, and lit the gas-fire. Then he drew the curtains, and put a long-playing record of someone’s dreaming strings on the gramophone, with the volume turned down very low. He looked round the room. It honestly didn’t look too bad.

  What did he have in stock to go with the chops for dinner? Still in his overcoat and socks, he went across and opened the kitchenette up to look. His gaze wandered vaguely along the shelf. The shelf was lined with old newspaper, and the sight of the newspaper, still greyly excited about the daily trivia of six months before, made him feel suddenly dismal. My God, he thought, I must find another flat, I really must. He lit a cigarette, and got down the tin of brown sugar. He drifted across to the mirror over the bookcase and looked at his reflection, holding the cigarette in his left hand, and eating a spoonful of sugar with his right.

  He looked a bit tired, he thought. Been getting a little too much sleep recently, perhaps. Coming home and watching the television, instead of refreshing mind and spirit at the cinema. He was also getting a little paunchy, a little soft around the face. He ate another spoonful of sugar, and smiled experimentally. He had rather prominent eyelids, which came down when he smiled and made him look even sleepier than usual.

  It was terrible to be getting paunchy at twenty-nine. He had been young all his life, and now suddenly youth seemed to be leaking out of him. He ate another spoonful of sugar. He’d have to go swimming at the St Bride’s Institute in the lunch-hour occasionally with Ralph Absalom and that crowd. A few lengths a week – soon get the weight down. But my God, he thought, to find the fabric was beginning to need attention already, with another forty or so years still to go!

  There was a soft scratching at the door. Mrs Mounce had heard him come in. He ate some more sugar, and looked at himself sombrely in the mirror.

  ‘Bob?’ said Mrs Mounce quietly.

  Bob sighed.

  ‘Bob?’ said Mrs Mounce, rather anxiously.

  He went across and opened the door.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, with polite surprise.

  ‘Bob, darling,’ said Mrs Mounce, holding a cigarette in her specially sophisticated way, with the whole flat of the hand upraised beside the face, as if for a one-handed salaam. ‘Am I disturbing?’

  Her bright little brown eyes looked past him into the room to see if he had a visitor.

  ‘Come in,’ said Bob.

  ‘I really just looked in to see if you could possibly spare me some matches, darling,’ she said, gliding across to the armchair and immediately curling herself up in it with her legs beneath her. She was wearing trousers, noted Bob, with relief. Mrs Mounce’s knees and thighs were beginning to exercise a definite hold over him.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to a drink, sweetest,’ she said.

  ‘There’s nothing to drink,’ said Bob. ‘You can have a spoonful of sugar, if you like.’

  ‘Sweetest!’ she protested.

  Bob pulled the chair away from the desk and sat down on it back to front, like a cautious lion-tamer. He nibbled another half spoonful of sugar.

  ‘Reg working late?’ he said.

  ‘He’s away overnight on a business trip.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Did I hear a naughty note in your voice, darling?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because I shall have my door bolted and barred, sweetest, never you fear. I’ll tell you that now.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘I know you men.’

  She laughed, and blew out smoke knowingly. Bob licked a few loose grains of sugar off the back of the spoon.

  ‘There’s not much you can teach me about men, darling,’ she said.

  ‘No?’ said Bob absently. He was wondering exactly how old she was. About forty, he would have supposed, but in rather be
tter working order than he was himself. She was slight and spry, with beady brown eyes. She had sharply pointed breasts, or at any rate a sharply pointed brassière, and a sharply pointed nose, around which the rest of her face gathered itself expectantly, the upper lip lifting to reveal two sharp upper incisors like a beaver’s. She smoked almost continuously, the right hand poised in its salaam, the left hand brought across the body to support the right elbow.

  ‘I’ve had such an awful day, darling,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ said Bob. The room was getting quite warm. He took off his overcoat and hung it up behind the door, then lay down on the bed, which served as a divan, with his cigarette and his tin of sugar.

  ‘Don’t you want to hear about my awful day?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Bob. ‘Tell me about your awful day.’

  ‘Try and look interested, darling.’

  ‘I am looking interested.’

  ‘There’s no earthly reason why you should have to listen to my troubles, of course, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I do.’

  She thought.

  ‘Well, we’ve got the builders upstairs doing one or two tiny things which I should have thought could have been finished in a week, and they’ve been up there seven weeks now, and still not a sign! Dotty’s been peering out of her door all day, as if it was my fault! As if I wanted them hanging around for two months – as if I asked them to hammer on the pipes . . . !’

  Bob let it wash over him, murmuring sympathetically from time to time, and spooning individual grains of sugar out of the tin to crunch. Mrs Mounce always had the builders in, and Dotty was always peering out of her door, a single, doubtful eye at the crack, because she owned the house, and no doubt wanted to keep some faint track on what was happening to it. Dotty’s real name was Avdotya, Mrs Avdotya Stypulkowski, but people didn’t want to make fools of themselves by going round calling someone Avdotya, and anyway she was rather dotty – rather old and rather Polish, and not entirely able to understand what was going on around her. Certainly she couldn’t understand what was happening to her house.

  The house was divided into seven furnished flats – one in the basement, and two on each of the other three floors. Mrs Stypulkowski lived in one of the ground-floor flats herself, and Bob in one of the pair on the first floor. The Mounces had first come to the house at Bob’s suggestion, when Reg arrived from the provinces to become Pictures Editor. The ground-floor flat next to Dotty’s was empty; they had moved in gratefully. Then gradually they had begun to colonize the house. First of all they had annexed the flat on the first floor, next to Bob’s. Then they had taken over each of the top-floor flats in turn. How they had got rid of the previous tenants Bob did not know, nor what arrangements they had come to with Dotty about the rent. Were they really paying her the full rent for all four flats? Or had Mrs Mounce talked her into accepting a wholesale price? It was Mrs Mounce who was the driving force behind this expansionism. Her husband was scarcely ever there; more and more often he was away for odd nights and whole weekends, on freelance jobs, perhaps to pay the extra rent. What did she want with the four flats? She didn’t sublet them. She never had friends to stay. She had no children – she told Bob once that she was unable to conceive. She went up and down the common stairs all day with a bunch of Yale keys, letting herself in and out of her colonies. Dotty stood with her door on the ground floor open a crack, watching her silently. A regular force of builders lived in the house almost permanently, moving slowly from flat to flat. They seemed to specialize in hardboard work. They installed hardboard partitions, covered up mantelpieces with hardboard panels, constructed hardboard kitchen units. They turned one of the second-floor flats into a den for Mr Mounce, by installing a hardboard hi-fi unit, and a suite of hardboard desks. They converted the first-floor flat next to Bob’s into a hardboard bar, with concealed lighting behind hardboard pelmets. On Sunday mornings when Mr Mounce was at home Bob would sometimes be invited into the bar for a drink. Reg would stand behind the counter and dispense vodkas, then lean over it like a philosophical barman and talk about what a lot of crap it was that people talked these days, while Bob and Mrs Mounce perched up on cocktail stools, their knees tangling and untangling a foot or two in front of Reg’s nose, and all around them Mrs Stypulkowski’s original furnishings mouldered on unchanged. Occasionally the Mounces gave Saturday-night parties, to which they invited a number of other couples rather like themselves – large, melancholic men with small, bright wives – who all got drunk very quickly. The small, bright wives shrieked with laughter and showed their suspenders. The large, melancholic men leaned heavily on the small, bright wives and felt their bottoms. Bob, who was always invited, usually left at about this point, conscious that it was not suitable entertainment for the young. Once when he got back to his flat he found that he had left the door open and that a large, melancholic man and a small, bright wife were lying on his bed. He apologized for intruding, and went out for a walk while they finished. In the hall he found Dotty peering through the crack of her door. Silently, accusingly, the single troubled eye followed him down the stairs. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Bob helplessly to the eye. It was he who had brought the Mounces into the house. One day, he knew, the white-faced wholesale butcher in the basement would be edged out. Sooner or later he would leave himself. After that it would not be long before the hardboard men moved into Dotty’s flat, to turn it into a sewing-room or a rumpus-­room, and Dotty found herself out on the pavement with her three cats, her silver crucifix, her late husband’s sword and medals, the active sympathy of the Polish Ex-Combatants’ Association, and no house.

  Bob became aware that a question had been asked. He took the sugar-spoon out of his mouth.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

  ‘I said, have you eaten, darling?’ said Mrs Mounce.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sweetest! You must be starving!’

  She jumped out of her armchair and snaked across to the kitchenette, rolling her bottom importantly.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Bob anxiously.

  ‘I’m going to cook your supper, pet.’

  Bob sat up quickly on the edge of the bed.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said.

  ‘Just put your feet up, darling, and tell me what there is.’

  ‘Well, look, I don’t know about this.’

  She came twinkling across, seized his legs, and put them back on the bed. She leant over him threateningly, and Bob lay back, frightened of putting his eye out on her nose or one of her breasts. Also, he was painfully hungry.

  ‘There’s a couple of pork chops in my overcoat pocket,’ he said, ‘and you’ll find a tin of peas or a tin of sweet corn next to the saucepans.’

  He gazed at the ceiling. Mrs Mounce turned the television on, and the booming of impartial expert voices filled the room, drowning the dreaming strings on the gramophone. Through the noise Bob heard her singing as she worked – the first few lines of ‘Jealousy’, over and over again. The old grease in the bottom of the grill-pan melted, and released its familiar aroma. From time to time she emerged from the kitchenette, and glided about the room, her cigarette still up by her right ear, a fish slice in her left hand, her bottom catching the light inordinately.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Bob gloomily. There was a stack of Vogue and Queen magazines on the bedside table. He picked one of them up, and began to study the advertisements for underclothing and support garments. The women in the photographs all appeared to combine education and breeding with stunted pelvic development. Their eyes were soft and remote with the contemplation of spiritual things, and they seemed unaware of Bob’s sleepy libidinous eyes following them as they wandered through the long summer grass in nothing but their matching sky-blue underwear, or magnolia pink roll-on and crossed arms. They didn’t have bottoms. Well, all right, they had bottoms, but bottoms with sunken cheeks and spiritual expressions. A woman like that to grill his pork chops, thought Bob, an
d he would be reasonably content.

  Dyson and his wife drank half a pint of bottled beer each with dinner, as they usually did. ‘Our only luxury,’ said Dyson, ‘our one self-indulgence.’ The warm pool of light shining down on the table enclosed them both against the darkness. They sat for a long time over their coffee, leaning their elbows on the table comfortably, gazing at the cheese, or at the dark green casserole which had contained the stew, or at each other, saying little.

  ‘Gawain walked into a tree on the way home from school,’ said Jannie, cutting another sliver of cheese to nibble. ‘He said sorry to it.’

  Dyson polished an apple on his sleeve, thinking about Gawain.

  ‘I think half this dreaminess of his is just a performance, you know,’ he said. ‘He’s playing up to us.’

  ‘I think that’s nonsense.’

  ‘Well, he always tells us about these incidents, doesn’t he? He thinks he’s a clown.’

  ‘He tells us just to reassure himself that we don’t mind.’

  ‘But we do mind.’

  ‘But we don’t let him see that we mind.’

  Dyson put the first apple back in the bowl, and began to polish another one. Ah, Gawain, Gawain! He was a thin, fragile child, who often walked about as if in a trance, his mouth slightly open, his eyes gazing into the distance, unaware of voices calling him or objects in his path. He seemed to get on all right in the Infants’ School, but Dyson was afraid he would start to be teased when he moved up into the Junior School the following year. Dyson blamed himself for calling the boy Gawain. It was scarcely surprising that a child called Gawain – or at any rate a child with parents who had the sort of attitudes that went with choosing the name Gawain – should turn out to be dreamy. Dyson saw that now. The intention had been romantic; to recall in the grey wastes of winter London those russet-autumn green-spring days when he and Jannie had been reading English together at Cambridge. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ – fertility symbolism – Green Men peering slyly through the lush Middle English forest – Courtly Love – the red-brick maiden towers of Newnham embowered in green summer lawns and burnished prunus – days of longing and possibility. Dyson now made sporadic attempts to reform Gawain by calling him Garry, but it was futile. One look at Gawain and you knew his name couldn’t possibly be Garry. Dyson was unable to suspend even his own disbelief.