Portobello Notebook

by Adrian Kenny

  The staff room was empty on Saturday evening, except for old Mr Porter, who looked at Justin’s new black cord jacket, grey trousers, polished black shoes, white shirt and dark blue tie, then his teeth shifted into a smile. ‘You’re all dressed up.’

  ‘I asked a girl out to dinner.’

  ‘Good lad. Where are you going to take her?’

  ‘There’s a new restaurant. It’s called The Road House.’

  ‘How’ll you get there?’

  ‘George is lending me his car.’

  ‘That was nice of him,’ Mr Porter said, and his teeth made another smile.

  The lonely boys gathered, clapping his back as he crossed the high-walled yard, waving as he drove down the avenue and rattled over the cattle grid. When he called to the bank house, Geraldine’s mother led him upstairs to their rooms. She was tall and thin with a stiff anxious look, as if someone had a finger in her back. Her husband gave Justin a drink, had another himself and talked about golf. A sister of Geraldine’s, pretty but sharp-faced, talked to him about Dublin. Then Geraldine appeared, looking so beautiful that he became afraid, and then he was alone with her in George’s car driving to The Road House, wondering what they could talk about.

  He couldn’t ask what she did, in case she did nothing, which might have something to do with her limp. He couldn’t talk about his year abroad, in case that led to explaining why he had returned. They were silent as they sat at a window table with a view of the new main road. Her fair hair was brushed shining; her pale cheeks were as bright. She wore a dress open at the collar, showing the slightest parting of white breasts. He looked over her shoulder at the speeding cars, half-wishing he was in one of them; but all that was of his own making was here, scattered in the countryside he could see beyond the road, where he had begun to live again.

  He asked for wine and drank a glass, then talked about the school: how the boys were often hungry and stole potatoes to cook in the fields; how Mr Porter had come back from the city one night so drunk that he couldn’t walk up the avenue, until George had taken his arm and said that another man had climbed a hill once, though he had fallen three times.

  Geraldine said that she didn’t like wine. She blushed and said that she liked music, but knew only the elements; she and her mother belonged to the local music society. Last summer they had sung in Wicklow, where they had found beautiful shells scattered along the shore. But between each run of conversation he heard their silence, as loud as the conversation from the tables all around. He drank so much wine that he had to excuse himself. The two doors were marked Him and Hers. When he got back to the table, she had finished eating. It was so early when they got back to the town that he suggested they go for a walk.

  Sam Hutchinson, who worked in the big drapery shop and came out to the school every Sunday to play the harmonium at Evensong, said Hello to him. A woman smiled and said Hello to her. They walked up the long main street, stopping to look in each shop window. In the windows’ reflection he saw in her face the same imploring wish to talk as in his own. They walked as far as the canal bridge and looked down at the still water. She said that her father had said this was the exact centre of the country, what was called the Spine, so the water flowed from there both to the east and west. He couldn’t think of any reply. It was dark when they walked back down the main street, so they couldn’t see the shop windows, and couldn’t be seen. As they approached the bank they stood into the stationery shop doorway between two bay windows covered with amber cellophane, and they kissed goodbye. Somehow her tongue met his and then they put their arms around each other, swaying forwards and back.

  HE DIDN’T KNOW what to do next, and now he noticed his new loneliness. It was worst on Sundays, when the Protestants went home after church. The Catholics went to the pub after Mass, then home to dinner and then to a Gaelic football match. Their crowded cars roared down the small roads, and there was silence again. When he went to the pub it was empty except for the landlord, sitting on a bench with Mike Reilly’s daughter, a girl of fifteen. When Justin noticed that they were holding hands, he looked away. But it encouraged him. Then an excuse to do nothing came: there was a teachers’ strike. In his firm way Tom explained the union’s demands to the headmaster. The headmaster closed the school.

  Justin went back to the city, to sleep in his old bedroom, and after one night it seemed as if he had never left. His mother still wrote weekly letters to his aunt in the country, and still dreaded that she might come to stay. His father listened on the phone to his sister who drank until his face was grey. His brothers went to the end of the garden and talked business as they drove golf balls into a net. His aunt came up for a week from the country; his mother withdrew to the kitchen and cooked big meals. When his aunt went into the kitchen to help, there were disagreements that became fantastic rows. One evening when the doorbell rang and his aunt tried to answer. His mother stopped her, and when his aunt insisted, his mother stood between her and the door. Looking at them locked in silent wrestling, he saw the confusion of courage and kindness, pettiness and timidity in which he had been reared. There was something in that tangle he loved and hated and needed, that imprisoned him still. When Tom phoned a few days later and said he was going to London until the strike was over, Justin was eager to go too.

  THEY ARGUED about the strike on the mail boat, although he wasn’t interested. He had learned by now that he wasn’t cut out to teach. At Holyhead there was a hammering of shoes on the platform as young countrymen ran to the news stall to buy Penthouse and Playboy magazines. As Tom looked at them with pity, Justin saw that one reason he wasn’t a good teacher was that he had no interest in keeping discipline. As the train crossed Anglesey, Welsh navvies raised their shovels and called, ‘Good morning, Patrick!’ Tom didn’t smile. But Justin was glad of his orderly company. When they reached Euston, Tom went to the news stall and bought a paper. In a few hours they had found a room.

  Next day they found jobs in hotel kitchens – Tom in The Dorchester and Justin in the Park Lane. In the evening the fog was so thick that he crossed Hyde Park step by step, both hands held before him, feeling his way into the great city. Again, everything was new and strange. One night in the Underground two smooth-faced young men were talking to each other in loud voices. Two rough-faced young men muttered remarks:

  ‘Couple of pouffs.’

  ‘Yeah, queering about.’

  One of the smooth-faced young men laid his umbrella on the platform, took off his bowler hat and black jacket, opened his cufflinks and rolled up his white sleeves. But then the other one cried, ‘No, I say, Peter, don’t!’ Justin felt his disappointment. He was longing for some showdown that would set him free.

  He stood at a sink all day washing dishes with a Pakistani boy named Shakir. They wore long aprons, but their shoes were always wet. None of the waiters and waitresses talked to Shakir, he noticed, but a couple talked to him.

  ‘No cure for that sickness,’ Beryl said when the still-room girl got sick one morning.

  ‘Why’s that?’ he said.

  Beryl looked at him. ‘You Irish then?’

  ‘Don’t sound Irish.’ Cecil chewed his pork pie. ‘You sound educated-like.’

  When he told them about the teachers’ strike, Beryl looked at him again. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You got a degree and all?’

  ‘Course it’s easier in Ireland,’ Cecil said.

  Cecil had been a waiter since the War. He carried a weight of low wisdom as big as his belly. ‘There’s a nice fuck,’ he murmured, turning his thumb towards Shakir.

  Justin was shocked. Everything in London seemed sinful, from Cecil’s yellow face to Beryl’s peroxide hair. His voice sounded plaintive against the definite English one. London seemed like a machine that would crush anything not adapted to its movements. But as he sat on a park bench one long Sunday afternoon and an old man sat down beside him, read a Greek newspaper from front page to back and then went away, all with an easy silence, the freedom of this life s
hone out like the Pole star. Again the great thought returned: all this was his, if he wanted it. Another day, in Charing Cross, he stepped into a small bookshop, where a man in a bowler hat and dark coat was looking gravely through a tray of black and white photographs. Justin glimpsed one, of a naked girl with wire tied tightly about her breasts, and he hurried outside – where another man in a bowler hat and dark coat asked him directions, which he was able to give! He went suddenly into another shop, bought a card and posted it to Geraldine.

  He didn’t mention her to Tom. They got on well together but hardly talked. It was only when the strike had ended and they were on the train to Holyhead, that Tom said he was leaving the school, and returning to university next year to study politics. Justin realized that their ways had parted, as smoothly as the points clicked on the railway.

  JOY HAD a baby now, and when classes ended George went to their cottage in the grounds. Tom went to study in his room. Mr Porter, his false teeth open, his yellow tongue hanging out, slept in an armchair by the fire. When payday came, Justin was glad to escape into the town.

  ‘We haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Geraldine’s father reached through the thin brass rails and shook his hand.

  ‘I was away.’

  ‘We heard that. We heard that.’

  ‘How is Geraldine?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask her that yourself.’ Her father smiled, stamped the back of the cheque, and said, ‘Why don’t you call one evening, visit us at home?’

  He said, ‘Thank you,’ but he didn’t go. His life had been a running away from home. He had found a home here, a hiding place where he could find himself. He didn’t go to the bank again, he didn’t go to the riding school, and yet he longed to see Geraldine. He couldn’t understand it.

  ‘Still wandering?’ the rector’s wife said when she met him on the road. ‘You’re still looking for your other half.’

  He walked the back roads every evening, talking with Colonel Browne and Mike Reilly, with Bob and Rose, and Bill Galloway. Bill especially stood for all that he liked in this small place. Bill bought his newspaper in the pub, wasn’t afraid of Colonel Browne, gave Mike Reilly’s daughter work as a babysitter, and when it was raining he gave Rose a lift. In the same way, when the headmaster had finally asked his help in making a cricket pitch, Bill had agreed. By the time Justin returned from England, a field behind the farmyard had become a brilliant green.

  On Saturday evenings Bill came to level it with the long iron roller he drew across his spring wheat, washed his hands until they were as red as the school’s carbolic soap, then went home. On Sundays he went to church with his family, morning and evening. On Mondays he began work again. Everything was slow and orderly. One evening he had the schoolboys pull an old garden roller, a solid drum of limestone, up and down the wicket until it was smooth and tight. Afterwards, excited by their freedom, the boys pushed the roller so hard that it ran off the field and down a slope where it shattered against the high wall. Bill’s face clouded – the only time Justin had seen him upset – and then it was clear again.

  In a few weeks spring opened into summer. The fields disappeared behind growing walls of green; then hawthorn and elderflowers made the hedges white. When Rose walked the road, a smaller flock of birds circled overhead. As naturally, the cricket season began. Bill helped Justin to arrange a match – the school team against a county one – and as the players in their old whites stood in place about the pitch, it looked as if it had been there forever, like the old trees standing in their pools of shade.

  Justin was playing with the boys on the school team. The headmaster agreed gladly to play on the other side – for Bill had rounded up some old county gentlemen as well as ordinary folk. His wife supervised the tea. There was almost a crowd standing about the boundary. Colonel Browne and his wife sat on school chairs. Bob stood alone in his long brown tweed overcoat. Even Mike Reilly was there, looking uneasily about. His daughter and another girl left their bikes in the ditch outside the school gates and walked tiptoe up the avenue, as if into another land. The headmaster was in his element, talking to an old man with an Oxford accent and huge purple hands. He wore his old Trinity blazer, even as he went out to bat. A silence came over the field, and the match began.

  Justin opened the bowling, and by a terrible fluke hit the stumps with his first ball. The silence remained for a moment, like a shot bird before it falls. Then the boys cheered suddenly, savagely, and – with a hurt, puzzled look at Justin – the headmaster walked away. The rest of the innings was a blur. It wasn’t until teatime that he saw Geraldine and her mother were there.

  He went cold with fright and hot with excitement as he approached them. Bill’s wife introduced them as friends from the music society. Geraldine’s mother said that they had met already, and Bill’s wife left them alone.

  ‘I was away.’ He blushed. ‘Did you get my postcard?’

  ‘I did.’ She smiled and looked at his face, and then her mother moved away.

  It was wonderful to find her in that small place. He told her about his job in London, and described the Park Lane Hotel. She laughed as he told her how he had gone there for tea one afternoon, and what the manager had said when he found out. He told her of going to a fish and chip shop in Piccadilly one night, where an elegant man called, ‘Barrow in Furnace, Nineteen-Forty-Five?’ and a small man frying the chips looked up at him, then winked and said, ‘That’s right!’

  Bill came by and said to her, ‘Don’t listen to that fella!’ His wife called them up to tea.

  ‘Would you like to join me?’ Geraldine smiled and looked at his face again.

  He went on talking as they stood at the long trestle table. He could hear himself, as if he had a finger in one ear. It was as if all the energy of the past three years was being released. He told her how Mr Porter had been sacked. He described his many aunts. She began to talk of the local music society. He interrupted, asking if she still played the violin.

  She smiled and said, ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Didn’t you learn it at school? In a glass box!’ He laughed, and talked again.

  She smiled again, but not so much, and when more people came up for tea she stepped back quietly from the table. Her face changed and she said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’ve had enough?’ he said.

  She walked away. He hurried after her. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Her blushing embarrassment gave her voice a power that turned him cold.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. I asked you to have tea with me.’ She said, ‘Thank you,’ again, then crossed the field and stood talking with her mother.

  He stood, trying to remember what he had said, but all he could remember was her trembling ‘Nothing.’ It meant that his talk had held her at arm’s length, that he was afraid of being caught, that he didn’t take this place to heart, that it had been a place to rest in, and that he was better now. But he couldn’t grasp that. When he looked again she had gone. The players went back onto the field and stood in the lengthening shadows of the trees. This was where his three years in the country had led him. He knew then he would leave.

  THERE WAS a shout from the wicket – one of the stumps was down. Bill was fielding on the boundary, bent forward, hands on thighs. He straightened slowly when the umpire raised his finger. Justin went over to the rope.

  ‘Bill?’

  ‘I was thinking it was you.’ The same slow Westmeath accent. ‘I saw you there and I said to myself, that’s Justin Kelly.’

  ‘How are you?’ He looked at the thin grey hair, the glasses so unlikely on his out-of-doors face.

  ‘Still playing. We have our own team now.’ The same reserved smile. ‘That was my son bowling. I’d better go over to him.’ Bill turned away and ran slowly across the field.

  It had been too small. He had been too young. He had hardly known her. It could never have worked out. He had been hiding from life. He would have died of boredom, drunk like Mr
Porter. There had been many more years of travelling before he grew up enough to settle down. He could never have knitted the tangled sides of his life together if he had stayed … But seeing Bill run slowly back to a tall skinny young man in his twenties and embrace him, he felt a small stupid disappointment, as if he had arrived at a station just as the train pulled out.

  The Lower Deck

  WE STOOD on the pavement as the coffin was taken from the house. It’s a time when you speak to those neighbours you usually just nod to. Mr Gray said, ‘What’s it all about at all?’ Miss Byrne said, ‘She knows now. She’s saying to herself – So that’s what it is.’ It’s a time when you realize that the past, which seemed so solid, was no different from this; that this is your home now, and these people will come to your funeral. We walked behind the hearse down to the church. Someone said, ‘It’s like Belfast.’ A dog trotted alongside. Afterwards I went for a drink with Alex. He didn’t want to go back to the house alone.

  A young woman came in, wearing a 1920s’ cloche hat, pink and black, flattened like a beret; black eyeshadow; a black thin sweater showing low, heavy breasts; black stockings and boots; about 5’8”. She was followed by a young man, about 3’8”, so small that he climbed onto the bar stool rung by rung. Sitting, they were equal. Eating crisps, he dropped one, climbed down and came up with it in his mouth. She looked about coldly, rolling a cigarette, and saw me stare – for a moment I thought she was going to come over and slap my face. After one drink they left. The barman said, ‘She’s only going out with him for show.’

  The new bar girl – low-cut dress, intelligent face – was gazing out the window at the dark. The barman went over to the window and joined her. As he went back behind the counter he said, ‘A taxi driver riding the arse off a girl in his car.’