The Tenement

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He had a friend still teaching who would come and see him. This friend was called Richardson. He was tall, vague, unpromoted. The two of them would play chess and Richardson would fall asleep over the board and snore. After about an hour he would shake his head like a horse and apologize. By this time Trevor had forgotten why he had made his last move. Richardson wouldn’t leave till three in the morning. Short of putting on his pyjamas Trevor didn’t know how he should hint that it was time for him to go. He would sometimes feel that he ought to hit him with a poker.

  Richardson would say, “They are thinking of making the school into a community centre. Older people would attend classes. But what are you going to do? Are you going to tell them to walk single file in the corridors?” Questions like this on the margin of things bothered him. He had applied for many promoted posts but had failed to get them. He was always complaining he had no money. “Do you see what the police are getting?” He lost and mislaid things, was a vague wandering presence. And yet Trevor had never beaten him at chess.

  “You play chess like draughts,” Richardson would say to him. It was true. He had never made any strategic conquests. His wars were always fought piece-meal. Actually he preferred to do chess problems than play against live opponents. Yet he didn’t like Richardson saying this, for he prided himself on his intelligence.

  “The high heid yins were at the school today,” Richardson would say. “The litter was cleaned up. It’s all a con game.”

  A woman called Mrs Blaney answered the advertisement for stair-woman. She was neatly dressed and wore gloves.

  “I don’t mind if I have a cup of tea,” she said, looking round her at the roomy kitchen. “I have to go and see a friend of mine later,” she said, glancing at her slim watch. The class of stair-woman had gone up, thought Trevor. This isn’t what it used to be like.

  “What time do you wish me to come,” said Mrs Blaney in a businesslike manner. She might have been a secretary waiting with pencil poised.

  “Oh, any day would suit me,” said Trevor.

  “Tuesday then,” said Mrs Blaney.

  “Tuesday would do fine,” said Trevor. “And what about pipe clay?”

  “Pipe clay?”

  “Yes, I believe my wife used pipe clay on the stair. So Mrs Floss says.”

  “Who’s Mrs Floss?” (Suspicious, defensive.)

  “She stays next door. She’s been here for only a short time.”

  “I doubt if pipe clay will be available now,” said Mrs Blaney decisively.

  “Oh, you mean whoever made it has stopped?”

  “Possibly. An hour, I think, should be sufficient. I have other places to attend to as well.” She sounded like a nurse. Stairs were like decaying patients.

  “I imagine,” said Trevor.

  “Tuesday then for an hour,” said Mrs Blaney, making a note in her diary. Trevor didn’t wish to introduce the sordid subject of money and she possibly assumed that he knew the going rates.

  “I usually like my cup of tea afterwards,” said Mrs Blaney. “My clients know that. I read the newspaper from cover to cover. That is how I noticed your advertisement.”

  “I hoped it might be seen,” said Trevor.

  “Things are not what they used to be,” said Mrs Blaney, as if excusing herself for taking such a menial job, and at the same time showing Trevor that she wasn’t just any old staircleaner.

  “I have a son in university. They are so selfish nowadays, the young. Do you find that? Have you any children?”

  “One son.”

  “I see. Much more selfish than we were. I was brought up in the country and when I was young I used to cut bracken all day for a shilling. I used to give my wages to my mother. The young don’t pay for their keep nowadays, and if you ask them they say they didn’t want to be brought into the world anyway. And they talk of nuclear war. As if that had anything to do with it.”

  “I agree with you,” said Trevor.

  “You ask them for money or anything of theirs and they won’t give it to you, but all your possessions are theirs if they want them. Have you noticed that? I have never seen such selfishness. Do you know what my son was doing when he was home last weekend? Looking for the gold watch my husband left. He kept searching in all the drawers. I said to him, ‘That watch isn’t yours.’ ‘Why not,’ he said. ‘That watch is a mason’s watch.’ I told him. ‘And the ring is the same. It’s got G written on it. You’re not a mason, are you?’ But he kept looking for it just the same.”

  Trevor had made the mistake of giving her a mug with her tea. She kept staring at it and sometimes touching the rim with the tip of her finger as if it was infected. He made a note that next time he would give her the special cups with the blue and white stripes.

  “And they’re so unmannerly. A friend of mine has a sister who is very hoity toity and she came to visit them. Her son came in drunk and tried to dance with her. She was so ashamed, so embarrassed. He also tried to borrow money from her.

  “Oh, there is one thing,” she said. “You could give me my fare for the bus as well as the money for the stair, which I think should be three pounds. I hope you consider that reasonable.”

  “I’m sure,” said Trevor, who didn’t know much about the economics of stair-washing.

  Mrs Blaney got to her feet, slipping on her gloves again. “I shall start next week since you tell me this is not your week for the stair. I shall be here at three o’clock prompt in the afternoon. My son will be back in university. His lecturers of course are as bad as the students. One of them said as he fell over a paper basket in the classroom, ‘You want me to kick the bucket, I suppose.’ He comes in late and I believe he’s a Communist. Sometimes he doesn’t appear at all. They are as selfish as the students. And then I’ve to make his bed whenever he comes home. He always leaves his room in a mess and the bathroom light on during the night. You can’t tell them anything, they know it all. Recently I heard of a girl of twelve who wanted to bring ten friends home for a birthday party. And their boy friends as well, she said. ‘No way,’ said her mother. ‘In that case, I’ll book an hotel room,’ she said. At twelve years old! Well, thank you for the tea.” And she made her way to the door which Trevor opened for her as if she were royalty.

  Trevor’s son was called Robin. He was married to a primary school teacher and they now lived in Cambridge with a little daughter whom they were bringing up to be exactly like themselves.

  One day she said to Trevor, “You owe me ten pence.” It had all arisen from a complicated transaction involving ice cream. But it struck him that at a very early age she was showing the ugly face of capitalism.

  His son had been born when he was in the war fighting for Britain. His mother idolized him. His grandfather, who had been a miner, fought with him in mock sport.

  When he was ten he asked his father, “Why are we always moving about?”

  Trevor had not answered him. The continual shifting had made Robin nervous and the consequence was that he became remote and enclosed. He was now a computer operator. He had always been good at maths but not at English. In fact he constantly failed his English exams till the final year when he had somehow passed his Highers.

  His mother would say to him, “Your father will help you with your poetry”, but he refused help. He hated poetry. People were always reading into poetry what wasn’t there, or only tenuously.

  When he was fourteen he started work in the Co-op in the evenings. He would never give Trevor any money: he turned out to be very mean. Trevor wondered if that was because he felt insecure and felt sorry for him, but later the meanness made him angry. He was always asking what he would get for his birthday, but never gave Trevor a present for his.

  He had been laughed at, by the other children, when his father had been teaching in the same school. They bullied him. When he complained, his father told him that he would have to learn to defend himself, but his mother, from a sense of outraged justice, said that she would go and see the headmaster. Trevor
knew that his own reason for saying what he said was that he was a coward and afraid to interfere. However, he had prevented Julia from visiting the headmaster. Ever since then Robin despised him as he had expected protection and received none. Trevor felt that Julia despised him as well, as she watched her son being miserable and ignoring his lessons.

  That meanness, that egocentricity, where had it come from? Had it come from pain? Did he not have enough energy to think of other people?

  Eventually Trevor didn’t like his son at all. He thought of him as some kind of monster, mathematical, silent, spoiling his daughter who would become a monster as well. There were one or two occasions when Julia had pointed out a good review of Trevor’s poems in a newspaper but Robin wouldn’t read them. In fact he made a point of ignoring them.

  After his wife died, Trevor had a nightmare. He was in Newark, and firing arrows through a wood, he hit Julia and Robin whose faces were like giant dartboards. Suddenly Robin had the sheriff’s face and his wife had a greenish tinge on hers as she ran away from him bleeding among the leaves like a deer. He had wakened up in a sweat.

  One day Robin came to visit him. They sat together in the big kitchen with the jars arranged and labelled on the shelves, just as Julia had left them.

  “How are you,” said Robin. He was dressed in a new suit and looked like an executive, his black shining hair neatly brushed.

  “I’m fine,” said Trevor gruffly. “How are you all?”

  “Fine. Sheila sends her love. Are you managing on your own?”

  “I’m managing.”

  “Still writing?” said Robin contemptuously.

  “Not much.”

  “I see. I thought when you were once on your own you would write a great deal.”

  “Well, I don’t. Do you yourself computerize much?”

  “I’m here for a meeting. I’ll be going back tonight. I thought I’d call in and see how you were.”

  “Well, I’m fine. Look around you. Can’t you see that everything is neat and tidy? I can look after the flat.”

  “You should maybe sell it. It’s very large. You should perhaps move into a smaller flat.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought it would be more manageable and cheaper.”

  “No, I shall stay here,” said Trevor firmly.

  “I see.”

  Was he wondering why he had ceased to move only after his mother died? Sometimes Trevor wondered whether he himself had caused his wife’s cancer. Perhaps if you moved too much during your life you got cancer. It was the disease of the wandering deviant cells. Maybe his own poetry had saved him from the cancer. It was true he hadn’t written much recently. Loneliness wasn’t conducive to great art. Why had Robin come to torment him? Had he come to gloat over him in his solitude? Had he hoped to see the flat in a mess as his own room had once been, with socks lying over chairs, sweaty jerseys and ties lying on the bed, football boots lying aslant on the floor?

  “I have a woman who comes to do the stair,” said Trevor mischievously. “She has a son at university doing Business Studies. She is well spoken. I wouldn’t be surprised if she read Beckett.”

  “I see,” said Robin again. He was always saying ‘I see’. Why did he look like a comic executive? Why was he so humourless, why did he think so slowly, calculate so much? He was perhaps working out that his father would leave him the flat which would fetch a good price on the market. Unless he married the stair-woman. Was that why he had come? He was always thinking about money, he wore a kind of silver armour. Maybe he thinks the stair-woman and myself will live together forever, with our pipe clay, thought Trevor. He smiled and Robin didn’t know what he was smiling at, and he felt uneasy. He was an old selfish bastard. He had killed his mother, that was for sure. He didn’t know that he and his mother had kept up a close correspondence and phoned each other three times a week. He, Robin, gave her some money but nothing to his old man with his stupid poetry, as if it mattered a damn.

  Trevor was glad to see the back of his son. He didn’t like being patronized. He and Robin had nothing in common. Robin calculated every move, saw his daughter’s teachers, made sure that she contributed money to the blacks: some of her pocket money went to a girl in Nigeria. But there was nothing spontaneous about all that. It was in fact a sort of affectation. He is a monster, thought Trevor, but didn’t blame himself. If you blamed yourself for everything you would go mad.

  When he went to collect his pension he stared with nostalgia at the bums of the young girls in jeans. They looked like peaches, apples. Oh Lord, he thought, I’m growing old, and this was emphasized to him when, dropping his pension book one day in the post office, one of the young girls bent down and retrieved it for him. “There you are, sir,” she said.

  Never again would he approach that remembered country, never again.

  The woman phoned about the oak tree, but he put her off again. However, he went for a walk one day and sat under an oak tree in the small town where he lived. He loved the cool shade of its branches. Beside him on the green seat with bubbles of rain still on it was a military-looking man with a bristling moustache. The man talked to him about India, a subject apparently dear to his heart. He was simplistic, anachronistic. Trevor could hardly believe that such a person could exist. In his crushed hat he sat meekly listening. Yes, the British had ruled India well, hadn’t they? The leaves of the oak stirred in the breeze. The tree was ancient too, presumably like the one in Edinburgh. But Trevor saw too many sides of a question. He was not a Fortinbras like this empire builder beside him, he was a Hamlet. After all, shouldn’t buses have their right of way as well?

  “Should never have come home,” said the military man. “Biggest mistake of my life.” He talked of how he had travelled one day by train to Glasgow. It had been two hours late. He ran to a phone to tell his hosts of his mishap but the phones were all broken, vandalized. What kind of country was this, falling about our ears? Just like an old tenement, thought Trevor, and recalled Cameron, that fat slob who beat up his wife at weekends. Others played golf, he beat up his wife. It was his recreation. Julia had told him to go to the police, but the police wouldn’t do anything about it. Domestic problem, they had said. This great country of ours sheltered its brutes under the shade of its oak tree. He blamed Cameron for Julia’s death. She never got any peace. And he hated Cameron, hated him with a deadly hatred, more than he hated Hitler. It was Cameron who wouldn’t let Julia sleep. Yes, he agreed with the military man. Violence everywhere. Loss of standards and so the two of them sat under the oak tree, watching the pure white swans on the lake.

  He had been tormented by a boy called Sherman in his classes. This Sherman would come in to school early and write his nickname on the blackboard. Then he would make animal noises at the back of the room and Trevor would never be able to pin him down. Sherman would say, “Please sir, I can’t think of anything to write in my composition.” And Trevor would say, “But you must be able to think of something.” “I can’t think of anything at all,” Sherman would say, smiling. And maybe Trevor would try and belt him and Sherman would pull his hand away. So Trevor would take him to the headmaster and Sherman, who was an actor, would tremble as if he were afraid of Trevor and the headmaster would say to himself, “Ah, there is more to this than meets the eye.” And he would regard Sherman, who wasn’t at all loutish or terrifying, as a victim who patiently endured Trevor’s sarcasm and beatings. And he would say to him, “Now you promise me that you will be a good boy”, and of course Sherman would say he would, not omitting the ‘sir’. Trevor thought that Sherman was evil, that he had never encountered unprincipled evil till he had met him. His cunning and his intelligence were extraordinary, his methods of putting Trevor in the wrong legion. Sometimes after he had pulled his hand away he would say that Trevor had broken his watch. He had an inexhaustible supply of broken watches. Trevor imagined a factory which produced broken watches, something like British Leyland. Sherman too had the knack of enticing him away from t
he theme of the lesson down byways of his own. Trevor hated him and hated also his mother and father whom he had encountered. Sherman was one of the reasons why he had left Newark. Sherman was the Robin Hood who ran about the green wood tormenting him, firing arrows at him, smiling at him, the outlaw hero. And he himself was the clumsy sheriff, always outwitted. In the free wood.

  “Yes,” he said to the military looking man. “I agree with you totally.” He pulled down his hat and walked away.

  Sometimes he met Mrs Miller on the stair, but she never talked to him. At first there had been Mrs Brown and then there were the Camerons. He often ran into Cooper when he was putting stuff in the bin, but Cooper always seemed to be in a hurry. His work in the summer was looking after lavatories.

  It was Mrs Floss who told him about the old man, Mr Butcher, of whose existence Trevor had been entirely unaware. But apparently Julia used to visit him and help him as best she could.

  “I don’t know where he stays but it’s somewhere on the street,” said Mrs Floss, who had come back from a world cruise paid for with her dead husband’s money. “She used to tell me about him. We had a coffee together now and again. Your wife was a wise, kind woman. I used to tell her about Stewart when he was on drugs and she would give me good advice. She was never too busy to pass you by.” Mrs Floss thought that about Trevor, however. She felt that he was snooty, superior, but then on the other hand, it might just be that he was shy. Still, his wife was worth ten of him any day. She was human, warm, she even tried to help Mrs Miller, that selfish old bag upstairs. But Trevor never helped anyone. He would pass her on the stair muttering under his breath as if he were thinking furiously. And yet he had only been a teacher. He hadn’t seen as much of the world as she had and yet he had this absurd sense of superiority. She could tell him a thing or two. And he hardly ever remembered about the light, no matter how often she reminded him. And why didn’t that stair-woman use pipe clay: Julia used to make beautiful patterns on the stair: she was very artistic. Always patient too, and long suffering. She didn’t know where Mr Butcher stayed. Trevor could ask the postman.