The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘You haven’t been to work, I notice. You have to live.’

  ‘I’ve got enough to live on.’

  ‘All the more reason for taking it,’ Teddy laughed. ‘If you had nothing you could be proud and refuse. People get kicks out of that. But go on, take it, Frank. We’ve got to keep Albert in one piece, see that he gets back to a long stretch of work in Lincolnshire.’

  Frank took it: ‘I’d better give you a receipt so that it’ll come off your tax.’

  ‘We’ll settle that in the office,’ Teddy said. Big Teddy wasn’t only rolling in it – it was rolling in him. Every time he had an attack of asthma Frank expected great bundles of money to shoot out. He didn’t dislike him, for Teddy was generous, outspoken, intellectual and rich, and who could ask for pleasanter company in which to learn about this sort of world? Albert came back: ‘You haven’t ordered yet? I’m starving.’

  ‘We waited for you,’ Teddy said.

  ‘I’ve had no breakfast. I wouldn’t mind if you’d ordered for me.’

  Teddy guarded him like a prize dog. ‘How did I know what you’d want, Albert?’

  ‘If you’d ordered me the same as what you’re having I wouldn’t have gone far wrong.’ Teddy picked up the menu and signalled the waiter, who floated over like a female dancer from Azerbaijan. ‘What would you like, then?’

  The menu was so big it seemed like a fireguard in front of Albert’s face. ‘I think I’ll start with a little bit of pâté, go on to a Dover sole, and try a pepper steak. Maybe end up with crêpes Suzette – order it now because it takes them ages. How about you, Frank?’ He slid the menu over. Frank wanted cannelloni and chicken Portuguaise, then cheese. Teddy ordered, and arranged for the wine. When it came he picked off the cork like a true connoisseur, sniffed it judiciously, as if at one time it had been up somebody’s arse. He nodded to the waiter: ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I was reading my reviews again today,’ Albert said, ‘and the critics are so patronizing I could slay the bastards.’

  ‘They were good reviews though,’ Teddy said gently. ‘You’ve sold every picture in the exhibition. They’re clamouring for more.’

  ‘I know. But if there’s one thing I hate more than a bad review, it’s a good review. As for those who show superlative understanding of my whole artistic project and endeavour, unquote, I hate them most of all, and would stand them up against a wall and shoot them down like dogs if ever I got the chance. They’re my real enemies. They’re all dogs sniffing at the same wall. They turn my guts, I’m not joking. You’d think I’d just come out of the jungle, the way they talk.’

  ‘They’re only human,’ Teddy said. ‘They’re eating out of your hand at the moment, but don’t think it will stay like that, because it won’t.’

  ‘Don’t worry, if I keep on getting good reviews I’ll hang myself.’

  ‘It’s the space that counts,’ Teddy said, breaking his roll and spreading it with butter. ‘As long as you get the space, I’ll be happy.’

  ‘That’s all that matters. I realize that. I reckon six feet of space would make you even happier.’ The soft lighting of the midday restaurant pitched them into irritating candle-shadow in which nothing could be seen with real clarity. ‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘how you gave me lessons on what to say when I was interviewed? He was dead clever, Frank, was old Teddy-bear. Whatever they asked me, I was never to answer with a direct yes or no. That would be playing into their hands. If they ask if you’ve stopped beating your wife just go into a long spiel on the rights of women, such as I only go for her when she slings a sizzling flat-iron at my mug and scores a bull’s-eye. Teddy gave me two hours of his valuable time on that technique. I took it to heart, and talked so much with never a yes or no that I was bloody-well incoherent and the reporters had to bodge up their articles.’

  ‘Don’t sulk,’ Teddy said. ‘They’d have bodged them up anyway. You should be happy now.’

  ‘You should,’ Albert said. ‘You’ve made as much money as I have, just about. Let’s climb out of our trenches and slam each other, you mudstained bugger.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Teddy said. ‘Let’s eat first, at any rate.’ Frank knew that this went on whenever they met, with sometimes such a mask of despair and loathing on Albert’s face that he wondered why he bothered to stay in London. The experience of it was eating into his soul. Yet he wouldn’t hear of leaving until the last day of his exhibition. ‘Why?’ Frank had asked. ‘You must have some good reason.’ ‘I want to keep my eye on Greensleaves.’ ‘Come off it. He’s honest enough.’ ‘All right, I’ll tell you. I want to get myself known to as many people as I can before I go back, because I don’t want to come down again for another two years, not at all if I can help it. I want people to come up and see me in Lincolnshire and buy paintings off me there. The less I sell to Greensleaves the better. I’ve got myself fixed up with an accountant and a lawyer as well – to help me with the tax bullies, and contracts.’

  ‘I’m fed-up with all this newspaper runaround,’ he said. ‘They even had Frank’s picture on that first-night spree, not to mention that woman he got acquainted with. I expect her husband blacked her eye when he saw it next morning.’

  ‘The meat’s raw in these cannelloni. I didn’t worry myself,’ Frank said. ‘She’s not the sort to marry a man like that. I hated seeing myself in the papers though.’

  Teddy said he didn’t think there was any harm in it. ‘I’ve got some blow-ups back at the office, which I forgot to give you. A souvenir of the big opening.’ He refilled their glasses, topped up his own. ‘I had some good mail this morning, Albert. They want some of your work at the Museum of Graphic Art in New York. Then there were a couple of feelers from Zürich. Of course I’ll put them off: “Mr Handley is far from prolific, but I shall be glad to see your representative when next in London in order to discuss terms should any of Mr Handley’s work become available in the meantime.” Something like that. One must be cool, or they’d never forgive us later. A publisher phoned me as well, wanted to do a book of reproductions. I told him it was too early to think about it yet, and to phone me back in a couple of years. A letter also came for you, Frank.’

  He was busy with his food. It surprised him how much people managed to talk during a meal, while his own mouth was too full to say much. A slow rhythm of death-jazz drifted through the restaurant, and Albert, thinking it interfered with his argument, told the waiter to can it. The music flowed away, and off. He took the letter with a plain thanks, puzzled as to whom it could be from. While Teddy and Albert discussed prospects and figures, made plans, he opened the letter and found it was from Myra, simply to say she’d be coming to London a week next Thursday to have a real look at Albert’s work, so maybe he could meet her at Paddington, the seven minutes past ten train, if, that is, he was still in London and hadn’t already taken off for other places, in which case he wouldn’t be reading this letter anyway.

  Teddy stopped talking, to point out a couple of famous actors. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Albert said. ‘Lick their boots or fall on my back? I’d rather see them on the stage, for a real thrill, to see if they’re really any good. The thing about famous people is that they just aren’t interesting.’

  It was impossible to say why Teddy baulked at certain moments and not at others, but Albert’s outrageous remarks weighed on him when he thought the actors may have heard them too. In the first week or so Teddy would simply blush pyjama-pink and lift up a hand to hide the giggles. But it wasn’t funny any more. It had certainly ceased to be funny. ‘You’ll have to learn to behave yourself.’

  Frank looked on, for after so long it bored him. Perhaps that’s what Myra had sensed when she thought he might already have left. Where can you go in this country? Bristol? Dover? Liverpool? Nowhere was where he was, because it was the same place she had left him in.

  ‘You think I can’t behave myself with the people I find in your sort of world?’ Albert ra
ged. ‘They’re either queers, frauds, playboys, or brainless public school sacks of blood living off newspapers and advertising.’

  ‘My sort of world is now your world,’ Teddy smiled, face reddening. There wasn’t enough truth in this to subdue Albert: ‘You’d never get half a foot in my world, not in a hundred years, mate. With all your lights and glitter you couldn’t come anywhere near it. I might be eating the food of your world, but that’s about all. It doesn’t even taste all that good. My only reaction to your sort of world, when you throw it at me like you did with the party, is to get drunk, have a black out so that in record time I don’t see it, I just don’t see it, hear it, or smell it.’ Albert had regained some of his youth. His sharp saturnine Norse face had given a Latin self-assurance to his eyes, a gesturing manner that comes of thinking you have a good reason for being alive. Before his success it had only occasionally flashed, but now it was part of him.

  ‘I’m not asking for thanks, Albert. But your steak’s getting chilled.’

  ‘I know, but all this meat-eating makes me feel like Eric-the-bleedirig-Bloodaxe. I’m not being too personal, Teddy, but there’s got to be people like you in the world, otherwise how could I show my paintings?’

  ‘Not to mention sell them. You put it in a very charming way,’ Teddy said, temper smoothed, half smiling. Albert jumped up, smashing knife and fork on his plate: ‘Will you stop patronizing me, you overfed fuck-monk?’

  A wave of distress passed through Teddy. He also stood, his great body shaking. ‘I’m not patronizing you,’ he cried, almost weeping. ‘That’s the only way I can talk.’

  Frank looked up at them: ‘If you don’t drop dead I’ll kill you. I’ve had my fill of this. I’ll go back to the jungle if this goes on.’

  A waiter drifted close. ‘Anything else, gentlemen?’

  ‘Not at the moment,’ Teddy said, still glaring into Albert’s demonic eyes.

  ‘The manager would appreciate it then,’ the waiter said, ‘if you two gentlemen would stop quarrelling.’

  They sat, unable to say who had broken off the staring match. Albert cheered up over his crêpe Suzette. ‘You see,’ Teddy said to him, ‘you’re a fairly rich man, so you may as well begin to accept the responsibility of it.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do everything I can to see that I end up in the gutter. It’ll be cleaner than this place. Sure, I can slosh down this stuff and smoke a fat cigar that stinks like arse-shit, drink from a skull-cup till I’m as bricked as a wall, but a mutton stew and a Woodbine would keep me just as happy, has done this last twenty years, hasn’t it, Frank?’

  ‘True,’ he muttered, thinking of Myra and wondering why she had bothered to write, glad that she had. He remembered, on his way back from the station, a nagging agreeable need to see her again, and next day, the first time ever, he deliberately stopped himself hoping for it, cut off his wish at the roots and went on working as Albert’s bodyguard. The letter had reopened all that, showed him the river again, the broad curving descending flood of the arterial river on whose bank he stood. Bodies, houses, trees were carried forcefully down it in the grey unearthly light of dawn, everything flowing away in the silence, the bleak scene composed of a single indefinable mood. He had often seen the river in his dreams, water clipping his feet and wanting him to be sucked in and swept away – as if he hadn’t been in it all his life.

  ‘I’ll have no liver left by the time I get back,’ Albert said cheerfully.

  Teddy poured more coffee, drew on his cigar. ‘Grow another in your rural retreat. It sounds idyllic, the way you talk about it.’

  ‘It is,’ Frank put in. ‘I lived in the same place for a while.’

  ‘You aren’t going back there?’ Teddy asked him.

  ‘I’m not. Don’t ask me where I am going though. Maybe I’ll get a job in some factory around London. Settle down, sort of.’

  ‘Why do that? I can find use for you. At a better wage, I should think.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Frank said.

  ‘I think you’ll end up back in Nottingham,’ Albert said.

  ‘I might if I was born in Timbuctou.’

  ‘He’s got a wife and two kids up there.’

  ‘I had. She’s in with somebody else now.’

  ‘It’s shocking,’ Teddy winked.

  ‘You could always get her back,’ Albert suggested.

  ‘That’s all finished. Nobody wants anybody back.’

  ‘You people from the north,’ Teddy said, ‘make everything sound so final and full of fate.’

  ‘They’re exactly like people in the south,’ Frank said. ‘You see the gut-ache written on their faces just the same. The difference about London though is the underground. Have you ever been in it at rush-hour, Teddy?’

  ‘Not in thirty years,’ he admitted, ‘and it wasn’t such a rush-hour then – or so I understand.’

  ‘I stood near a phone box once watching ’em come down the steps. I just looked at their faces. First, I thought they were dead people going into corned-beef tins. Then I saw that underneath these death-masks was a joy, a happiness that they’d accepted even though they felt wicked about it: this tragic face was put on to hide it, but it didn’t kid me. They were going back into the tripes of the earth like worms, into these tapeworms that scoot around in the real guts of London. That’s what they lived for every day. In their offices or shops they keep looking at the clock, thinking it’s because they want to knock off, but it’s only to get back for half an hour into these tripes, to be worms for a bit inside Great Mother Tripe. I wouldn’t like to get caught down there if the four-minute warning went.’

  ‘You’re pessimistic,’ Teddy nodded. ‘Life is hard for anyone, but there’s no need to make a virtue of it. I spent years keeping my head above water.’

  ‘Yes,’ Albert butted in, ‘and when you climbed out everybody was surprised to see how fat you were.’

  ‘They didn’t have time,’ Teddy said, pleased at such after-dinner wit. ‘I bought them all up.’

  ‘They must have had their backs to you.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Teddy said, flushed by the meal.

  ‘The trouble with you,’ Albert said, mustering all his London venom, ‘is that in that masculine great frame of yours there’s a spiteful little bitch doing its bi-sexual nut.’

  Teddy took it well: ‘I’m learning quite a bit from you, certainly. Have another cigar. You still haven’t explained why you’re so pessimistic, Frank. You’re always dark-browed and quiet.’

  ‘You’ve no right to ask questions like that,’ he said.

  ‘Are we bringing human rights into it already? I thought we were just talking?’

  Frank lit his cigar. ‘Nobody has the right to ask me why I am how I’m not. The only questions I’ll answer are those I’ve already asked myself and been able to answer. Those will be the ones I’ve spent my life answering – or trying to. Since coming to London I’ve not been getting very far.’

  ‘I’m with you there,’ Albert said. ‘It’s a dust bowl. All your time goes on drinking to keep alive. Any more wine in that bottle?’

  Teddy slid it over: ‘I get all my answers from other people. It’s the best I can do, but I’m satisfied.’

  ‘You have to be,’ Handley said.

  ‘I don’t know where mine come from,’ Frank said. ‘So I suppose they come from myself.’

  ‘The best thing is just to go on living, and doing the best sort of work you can,’ Albert reflected. ‘Pessimism is everybody’s right, as long as they earn it.’

  ‘You’ve got to break through that sort of thing though,’ Frank said, ‘unless you want to die young – or be dead in everything after a certain age, which is the same thing. That’s why I left home and lit off. Pessimism is an idleness inside you, a spiritual deadness, if you like. It’s a load on your back that you’ve got to throw off.’

  ‘Pessimism,’ Teddy said, ‘is a creative force for an artist. It puts spirit into his work. If he knows how to chann
el it properly it becomes genius.’

  ‘Well, I’m not an artist,’ Frank said. ‘Not that I believe you. If I did I wouldn’t want to read a book or look at a picture again.’

  ‘You’d be starved of culture if you didn’t,’ Teddy laughed.

  ‘That would be the fault of people like you, then.’

  Teddy called the waiter. ‘Why are you so quarrelsome, Frank? I suspect too much food does this to people, don’t you, Albert? Your brains can addle from rich food.’

  ‘Why don’t you lay off?’ Albert said. ‘Keep your nail file out of him. I’ve seen you do this to people before, and I don’t like it.’

  Frank felt as if his head were about to shatter. He had wit enough to counter Teddy’s low-powered stabs, but not the patience to tolerate Albert coming to his defence. ‘It’s time I was on my way,’ he said, standing up. ‘All the best of luck to you two money-faced bastards. I don’t think any harm will ever come to you.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ Teddy called. ‘We were only talking. Come on, Frank, sit down.’

  Albert caught him up at the door. ‘For God’s sake don’t take things like that. Teddy’s all right. He’s a good sort, you know that.’ He held his arm, to draw him back.

  ‘If you don’t let go of me,’ Frank said, ‘I’ll kick you into the floor.’ He went outside, and walked in the warm, humid sun down Greek Street.

  18

  Days drifted through warm and open weather, city air softened by spring, wind flapping between streets, getting a lift on the backs of red buses then jumping off to charge around the next corner at oncoming cars. He didn’t see Handley or Greensleaves again. Neither did he go back to work at the car park. For the moment, maybe for good, he had finished with all that. He still had money from saved wages, even from the sold car in Nottingham. Living on a few pounds a week he discovered in himself a talent for thrift which at one time he would have squashed with ridicule but now regarded as the equipment necessary for survival. He felt a healthy leanness, existed within a thinner casing of flesh which gave a more direct and brittle contact with the world.