Mr. Newman spent most of the mornings in the greenhouse. And read two novels a week that Mrs. Newman brought back for him from W. H. Smith’s lending library. Then, instead of the club, it was the noonday drink in the saloon bar of the Antelope.
The only thing that I saw Mr. Newman show enthusiasm for was a large cactus, about eight feet high, that he had by the side of the house.
“It flowers only once in fourteen years,” he told me. “I’ve had it for almost five. And the person before me had it for nine. I keep looking. But I can’t see any signs that it is going to flower.”
That’s all that really happened that summer.
I left in the middle of September feeling fit and brown. And I didn’t return to this seaside town for five years. In that time I had a first novel published, married, and when I returned I brought my wife with me.
On the third day I walked over to the Newmans’ place. It looked much the same, though some of the trees were cut down and the lawns had roses growing in them. Then I saw the cactus. It was like a huge green banana with several skins peeled back and the centre part forced out like a telegraph pole for about twenty feet in the air. And there, on top, was a bright red flower.
I rang the bell.
A woman I had not seen before came to the door.
“Is Mr. or Mrs. Newman in?”
“They don’t live here,” the woman said.
She was joined by a small white yapping dog.
“I’m a friend,” I said. “Can you tell me where they live?”
“Mr. Newman died. And Mrs. Newman lives in town—in one of the terraces.”
I did see her next morning, in the street, by the post office.
“Hello, Mrs. Newman.”
She smiled and came close. Her legs slightly apart. She always stood like that. She looked pleased to see me.
“I went to call on you yesterday—”
“I don’t live there—not since Jack died. The place was too big and expensive for one person. I’m in the end house. At the foot of Windsor Hill. Come and see me.”
She hadn’t changed. The pastel silk scarf tied sideways on the neck, the new beige suit, the makeup, the hair. To look at her, I thought, you would think nothing had changed in her life.
“How’s Tom?”
“He’s in Vancouver. He’s had another promotion. He likes Canada. He married a general’s daughter. She comes from an old Canadian family. The family have a building named after them in Vancouver. I’m going out to see Tom and his wife next month.”
Next time I saw Mrs. Newman I was with my wife. I introduced them and hoped they would get on.
They did at the start.
Mrs. Newman would bring flowers, boxes of chocolates. And when I told her that my wife was pregnant, her immediate reaction was: “If you don’t want it, I have some pills—”
Three months went by.
We were still in this seaside town. I was trying to write my second novel. And it took longer than I thought it would.
I saw Mrs. Newman not long after she came back from Vancouver.
“How did you like Canada?”
“It was very pleasant. But it’s not home.”
Then my wife began to talk differently about Mrs. Newman. She now found her voice irritating. And she complained about her behaviour.
“She sees me in the street and tells me all about herself. Where she has been. What ailments she has. Then, when she is finished, and I want to tell her about myself, she suddenly remembers that she has somewhere to go. And she’s off.”
Another time my wife came back from the library.
“I saw Mrs. Newman. The way she’s turned out—she makes me feel like a hippie.”
A couple of days later she came back angry.
“She’s so boring,” she said putting down her shopping bags. “I met her in the street and we talked about nothing. Perhaps if you talk about nothing then nothing shows. The clothes, the makeup, the hair—it’s a gloss. A carefully prepared cover. It’s as if she believes that when others see you nothing must be shown or given away.”
“Aren’t you hard on her? It can’t be much fun living on your own, in a terraced house, after the life she had.”
“There are people a lot worse off than that,” my wife said.
Whenever I went out I now also saw Mrs. Newman, in different parts of the town, but always by herself.
One afternoon I saw her in a café, sitting by a table, having a coffee and looking anxiously at the door.
She saw me and smiled.
She looked stunning. If you didn’t know—you would think she was dressed for some occasion.
I went in.
“Hello, Mrs. Newman.”
“Come and sit down,” she said. “Have a coffee and a cake.”
And she told me about a trip. She had just come back from Scotland, touring with Tom and his wife. And I heard nothing about the scenery or where they went or what they saw. But it was an account of missed connections and other people’s human errors. Then she told me how to save money on British Rail by buying certain tickets at certain times.
“I don’t know why I stay here,” she said during a momentary silence. “I have friends near London. I could move up there.”
“Why don’t you, Mrs. Newman?”
“I may,” she said. “Shall we have another cup?”
While the waitress poured the coffee Mrs. Newman said, “Did you know there are a lot of three-legged dogs in this town?”
“No,” I said. And we both laughed. Something we didn’t often do together.
I went back with her to the end house of a street of terraced houses. The kind of house she grew up in. And where her parents lived out their lives. It was a long way from the surroundings of that first summer. An entire street of joined houses and every house the same. Some had a few yards of grass in front. Otherwise it was all stone. No trees.
And inside—the rooms were small and over-furnished.
She offered me a drink.
“Won’t you join me?”
“I’m not supposed to,” she said. “I haven’t been able to sleep—not since Jack died. I have to take sleeping pills every night or else I don’t sleep.”
She looked nervous. I thought, for a moment, she was going to cry. But she made a visible effort and pulled herself together.
“Would you like to see the tennis at Wimbledon?” And quickly walked over to switch on the colour TV set. “It’s the semi-finals today.”
A few days later I saw her, by herself, standing outside a newsagent’s.
“Hello, Mrs. Newman,” I called out as I walked over.
Tears were in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking of my mother. I miss her.”
January is a depressing time here. Rain. The place is empty. And the emptiness is heightened by the large empty sand beaches, the sea, and the sky. They built the streets small and the houses small. And the effect of these small turning streets and small houses is to try to give—to those who live here—some feeling of importance against all the emptiness.
In February for two weeks it drizzled every day. And it was during this time that I heard, on the local news, that Mrs. Newman’s body was found in the sea washed up by the far shore fields. No one knew what had happened.
The funeral was in a small plain chapel in the cemetery. It was attended by about thirty people—most of the diminishing colony of ex-Empire builders who lived here. The men had put on weight, their hair was turning grey. Though the wives still looked attractive and well turned out. The few local people I talked to didn’t have anything nice to say about her.
But I liked Mrs. Newman. I don’t know why. All the social things that seemed important to her don’t matter to me now. But then perhaps in the end they didn’t matter t
o her either. Perhaps I liked her because we were both reminders of a time that was gone. Perhaps because we were both displaced people. And it was harder for her—this was her town. And I liked her for the way she put on a performance whenever she went outside.
Tom had come over. Though he was a Canadian citizen he looked and behaved like a conventional Englishman. Standing outside the chapel—shaking hands with each one of us as we came out.
“It was good of you to come,” he repeated.
I walked with Mrs. Holland, all in black, to the car park and to her car.
“She and I were to play bridge on Wednesday. We arranged that weeks ago,” she said. “She was also planning another trip to Canada. But we don’t know people. Do we?”
And in the narrow main street of the town I met the sturdy widow of a former bank manager in Pakistan. I thought she may not have heard. So I told her about Mrs. Newman either walking or falling into the sea.
“What a sensible thing to do,” she said briskly and went on.
And later, along the front, I saw Mrs. Miller, the wife of a former judge in Burma. We walked for a while in silence. Then she said,
“If only she could have held on until the spring.”
A TRUE STORY
I got into riverside as the first grey light of the dawn came. It was too early to go to the address I had. So I walked around the place trying to find somewhere open for a cup of coffee. There was nothing. Just this river that went through the place with sloping muddy banks. You could smell the mud. And empty streets with lovely names like Gay and Joy.
Shortly after eight a small café opened in the town square and I went in. A woman was on her hands and knees washing the floor. She went behind the counter and from a steaming urn gave me some weak coffee in a glass. I sat by the wall radiator with my hands around the glass of coffee and tried to get some warmth into me.
At nine I took a taxi across the bridge and up a hill to what looked like a suburb. But it was deceptive. For the suburb extended only to the depth of one street. Behind it lay fields, as far as the horizon. The taxi driver found the address and I went down a country road to a wooden detached house that had its top overhanging the bottom.
Within minutes of meeting my landlady—a tiny woman but bright, like a bird—she told me she was a widow (“not bad for fifty-four”), that her relations were in Australia and she was thinking of going there herself.
I had a small kitchen, a bedroom, and a sitting room above her. It all looked new, especially the floors, which were highly polished.
Outside the window there was a nice-looking tree with yellow-green leaves, a field with apple trees. And on the road that I had come on I saw a girl in a light raincoat; a whippet was beside her. I watched until the road turned and the girl and the dog disappeared. Then I began to unpack.
The widow said she was pleased that I was a schoolmaster. They thought a great deal of the man I was replacing. She began to tell me useful tips about Riverside: how to get to the post office, the school, the Palace Hotel . . .
I went out hoping to see the girl with the whippet.
I didn’t see her until the weekend when I was out walking on the country road. We both had a good look at each other. She was tall, around five foot eight, with short blond hair, a broad face, but it looked very white. I thought she had anaemia.
On Monday I got up early and walked into Riverside. I hadn’t realized how wealthy it was. Street after street of large wooden houses, painted mostly white. Squirrels on the lawns, the sidewalks, the trees. I came to one of the two main streets. The stores were still closed. Only by the drugstore was a neon sign working, telling the time and the temperature. I went through an empty park with flower beds and children’s swings. And past the park was the school. A brick building with white windows. It stood on high ground and on its side were fields that went down to the river.
In the staff room I was introduced to the other masters. All were wearing black academic gowns except myself and the new biology master, a New Zealander, who was also starting this term. He was soft-spoken, wore glasses, and kept to himself. But once when he had a free period and we were alone in the staff room he told me that he believed in reincarnation. He was sure he was going to come back in some other form.
I had the first and the last years in English. The older ones were already set in their ways. I don’t think it mattered who was there in front of them. But the young ones were different. I set them an essay to write. When I got their books back I was surprised to see how very old-fashioned was their use of language. They spoke like boys of their age. But they wrote in such an archaic way that anyone would think they were brought up on bad Victorian novels. I decided to try and break this. For their next essay I told them to walk outside where they lived, with a watch, and write down what they saw and when they saw it.
The change in their writing was dramatic. Even if all it had at the start was “5:10 p.m. A herd of Jersey cows come down the road. The farmer is at the back. There are sixteen cows. A crow flies over them.” Another had: “I went fishing after school by the river. The river is at the bottom of our farm. I got a bite at 4:42. It was a large pike.”
School stopped at four but I never got back to the widow’s house until after five, when it was too late to see her walking on the road. Only on weekends when I went out in the afternoon would I meet her. We now said hello and a few words about the weather. She spoke English with a French accent. But she gave me no further encouragement.
My stay with the widow was temporary—the headmaster had sent me her address as a place to stay until I could find something for myself. At the beginning of November I moved to a farm in the country. It was owned by the Browns. They let a small wing of their farmhouse in the summer to tourists. I took it until June. The place was six miles from Riverside but as Mrs. Brown drove in every morning to bring her son to the school she would take me as well. And I would take the bus back.
The farm was in a valley in the richest farming country I had ever seen. Low hills all around, cows and horses on the slopes and in the lush grass at the bottom. There were also apple orchards and countless rabbits. And at dusk I would watch a pair of buzzards working their territory. The Browns were Anglo-Irish. And what they were doing out here seemed ridiculous. You expected them to live somewhere like Surrey, Sussex, or Bucks. To go to Henley and Wimbledon, read the Tatler. But I have, since, come across others like the Browns, who have come from sophisticated societies in Europe, and have chosen to live out their lives in obscure provincial Canadian towns. Mrs. Brown looked like a tall Girl Guide with a ruddy complexion and loose curly brown hair. Although she was in her forties she thought she was still a girl and I would sometimes see her skipping with a rope and breathlessly calling out children’s rhymes. She named all their cows after flowers. And every morning, as I had breakfast, I would watch Daisy, Rose, Lily, Buttercup, going by the door. Mr. Brown was an ex-colonel. A very tall thin man with a moustache and a porkpie hat that he wore with the brim down. He spoke of gels for girls. And looked more at home with horses than anything else. Although Mrs. Brown would tell me on Saturday mornings he was still in bed lying with their youngest daughter. They had been farming here only a few years. And I heard that none of the local farmers gave them more than another three. But they were wrong. They didn’t know how tough this breed was. Although going by appearances their farm looked hopeless. Everything inside their house was in a continual state of untidiness. Mrs. Brown had her mother down for two weeks. And the old woman took a broom and began to go after the cobwebs while all around her was disorder.
Then things seemed to go wrong for the Browns. They had their own water supply but it often froze in winter. They had their own electricity, but the generator or pump went wrong and Brown couldn’t fix it. He tried kicking the machinery, and sometimes that helped. Though often I made my meals by candlelight using a Primus. But the oddest sight wa
s to see the Browns deliver milk. They would load up the small Ford with milk bottles that he had filled up. And then the ex-colonel and the ex-Girl Guide Leader, both well over six feet, drove into Riverside and began to deliver small bottles of milk from door to door . . .
Late one Friday afternoon I was waiting for the bus in the square to take me back to the farm when I saw the girl, but without the whippet.
“I thought you had gone,” she said. “I haven’t seen you. Have you been sick?”
I told her that I moved and suggested that we meet for a drink tomorrow in the Palace Hotel.
Next evening I came into the hotel a few minutes early but she was already there, sitting in the darkened lounge.
“Could we,” she said, “have coffee instead of a drink?”
“Of course,” I said.
We went into the coffee bar. And while we had coffee she told me her name was Marie Yuneau. I told her mine.
“The new teacher?”
“Yes,” I said.
She told me that she had not long come out of a sanatorium and was living with her married sister.
I told her I came from Ottawa but I had never seen such rich farming country until I arrived here.
She said her sister’s husband was out of work.
“It must be depressing,” I said.
“I had a lovely dress,” she said. “Blue and white. It was very gay. I liked it very much. Then I had to wear it every day and watch it get worn out and shabby.”
I don’t know what it was. Whether being in a sanatorium for so long or living in this backwater. But there was an awkwardness about her, something incomplete.
“I break things easily,” she said. “I leave jam jars undone . . . toothpaste tubes off . . . My sister gets angry and follows me . . . just doing up things I leave undone.”
“Why do you do it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
We left the Palace Hotel and walked towards the other main street for a Chinese meal. There are five restaurants in Riverside, all run by Chinamen. I led her through a narrow connecting side street. It was very dark. I didn’t want to bump into anyone from the school. I put my hand around her waist and drew her closer.
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