The Tenement

by Iain Crichton Smith

  One day when Julia and Trevor were in Ilfracombe in Devon they made a mistake and instead of turning up a road which would take them back to the town, they turned up another one instead. They came to a farmhouse which had bright rough tables in front of it, and had in fact been converted into a restaurant. They sipped their iced drinks and then Trevor picked up from the table a brochure which told them the history of the farmhouse. It was called the Haunted House. Many years before, when the coast had been notorious for wreckers, a man used to light fires to bring ships on to the rocks. Then he would plunder them for their cargo. His daughter had left and gone to America to make her fortune. One night he saw a ship and set his illusory lights. The ship had gone on the rocks. He searched the cabins for jewellery and other plunder and found in one of them a woman who was dead and in fact his daughter. He took her body home with him and walled it up in his farmhouse.

  Many years later the wife of the farmer who then owned the house said she was going to market. Her husband sat on a bench outside in the sun reading his paper. After a while his attention wandered and he idly studied the house and saw the outline of a window where as far as he knew there was no room. Calculating that there had been a room there in the past, he got hold of some of his workmen and they broke down the wall. And there behind the wall was a room and on an ancient bed the skeleton of a woman. There was also some jewellery. It was some of the money from selling it that had been used to build the restaurant. The owner told the two of them that an American woman, who said that she had spiritual powers sensitive to auras, had been in the room—now open to visitors—and she had seen a woman in white, with seaweed in her hair, walking about; there was jewellery around her neck. Her face was green.

  As they walked away from the Haunted House in the bright sunlight, Julia ahead, Trevor imagined that he could see her very bones, so transparent she was in her light dress. She looked vulnerable, thin. He had shivered then in that bright sunshine, haunted by the past, its greed and selfishness.

  The postman was able to tell him where Mr Butcher lived.

  “Very tragic about Mrs Porter,” said Mr Butcher. “She used to come here of a Thursday afternoon and sometimes of a Tuesday afternoon as well.”

  He sat down opposite Trevor, holding a stick in his hands. “She used to make a cup of tea and bring me my messages.”

  His keen blue eyes stared unwinkingly at Trevor. There were soup stains on his jacket.

  “She was younger than us of course. I always felt better for talking to her.”

  What did they talk about?

  “Oh, I used to be a seaman. We talked about ports, Hong Kong, Auckland, places like that. I been all over the world. I think she wanted to move.”

  “What are you saying, you old bastard,” said Trevor under his breath. “She often wished she had a proper house and a garden. She talked about Devon. She talked about her son and her grand-daughter. She missed seeing her grand-daughter.”

  And all that time she never told me, thought Trevor. She wanted a part of her life which she could have for her own. He felt angry that she should have confided in this smelly old man.

  “A good woman,” the latter was saying. “She never complained. My legs is bad, you see. I have trouble climbing the stair. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Two old men together.

  No, I don’t want any of your tea. Trevor felt obscurely jealous of the old man, of the conversations that he had never heard. It was as if there had been a side to his wife that he had never known about, and it bothered him.

  “She would have made a good nurse,” Butcher was saying. “She told me once she’d wanted to be a nurse, but her parents were against it. So she became a secretary instead. That was how you met, wasn’t it, at school?”

  “Yes,” said Trevor between his teeth.

  In a short while you’re going to say, How old do you think I am? And I’ll say you’re sixty-five though you’re nearer eighty. The old man’s teeth lay in a cup on the window sill like sharks’ teeth under water.

  “She said you was very busy. ‘Always busy,’ she said. ‘A Head of a Department is always busy,’ she said.”

  The tears came into Trevor’s eyes. So that had worried her and yet she had told him it hadn’t. When they were romancing in their youth she had told him that they could live happily in a cottage together. Yet all this time she had been worried about a house and a garden and his position. A bee buzzed in the old man’s room, trying to get out. There were ships in bottles on the sideboard. So much he had seen of the world that Trevor hadn’t. All he had seen were the grey ships on wintry nights while below them like mice under floorboards the U-boats patrolled restlessly.

  He was furious with the old man. God damn him! What was that about being Head of a Department? His wife had gone to him for talk like a beggar, she had felt the time long; it was she perhaps who needed therapy.

  The old man limped over to the window and opened it. The bee still battered itself against the glass. Stupid insect, blind, blundering, honeyed.

  “I was shattered when I heard of her death. Of course she told me she had cancer. But she wasn’t frightened. She had worked out how long she had. She was a brave lady. Nothing but cancer wherever you look. I’ve no reason to complain. I’ve only got arthritis.”

  No reason to complain. The sentimental sweetness of it. We are summoned into this world, catapulted on our mission as if with a parachute: youth deceives us, age makes us cynics: the grandeur departs and we lie in harbour becalmed.

  There was a verse of poetry above the old man’s side-board.

  Build a little fence of trust

  around today.

  Fill the space with loving work

  and therein stay.

  Look not through the sheltering bars

  upon tomorrow.

  God will help thee bear what comes

  of joy or sorrow.

  What immortal poetry, what resonance, what Miltonic sonority! And yet it had probably helped the old man more than Shakespeare would have done.

  “My own wife died two years ago. She didn’t know me at the end. She would sit opposite me and say, ‘Who is that man? Who are you? Go away, I don’t want to see you. I want my Ralph back’ (that’s me). And she would say, ‘What house is this? I want to go back to my own house’. She would sometimes hear the cry of a baby in the bedroom during the night. ‘Why don’t you look after the baby’, she would say. Most of the time I was abroad, you see. I was an engineer. She thought I was a stranger who had got into the house. She would say funny things like, ‘What am I to do with my face?’ ‘What do you want to do with your face’, I’d say, and she would say, ‘I want to put it out’. You would give her an ashtray for her cigarette and she would still put the ash on the floor. One time she said, ‘Who do I have to ask permission from to stop smoking?’ ‘No one’, I’d say, but she wouldn’t believe me. She would make you really laugh. Still, she liked the ships in the bottles.”

  Trevor got to his feet, saying, “I just came along to see you.”

  “Welcome any time,” said the old man. “Very good of you.” Two old men together, thought Trevor again.

  Butcher was lighting his pipe as he left. Trevor walked down stairs which weren’t pipecleaned. He heard the roar of a TV from one of the flats. A woman was shouting, “Can’t you give me a moment’s peace?” Clothes hung on a rope on the back green, flat and geometrical.

  “Would you believe it?” said Mrs Blaney, balancing the cup of tea on her knee. “I asked him for the loan of fifty pence to pay the papers the other day and he wouldn’t give it to me. Refused point blank. Said he was going to a dance. Sometimes he comes in at seven o’clock in the morning. I have to keep awake all night. He’ll throw me a jacket and say ‘Sew a button on for me’, no please or anything else, as if I was a servant. Do this, do that, that’s their style. They’re like seagulls, never satisfied. A little touch of sugar, please.”

  Trevor pushed the sugar bowl across. �
�It’s not good for me of course. I’ve tried to slim but I always surrender in the end. Always. I saw a diet in the Express the other day, melons and cucumbers mostly. They tell you to take milk, then they tell you not to take it. They tell you whisky is good for you. Mind you, it said in the paper the other day that a tot is good for you. I don’t suppose you’re in for the million pounds? They want to sell more papers, that’s what it is. I don’t know what I would do if I got a million pounds. So many people get a divorce when they become rich, don’t you think? Look at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.”

  Trevor considered them. He hated Elizabeth Taylor. He thought she was a totally selfish hardbitten survivor. He had a photograph of her on the wall opposite the toilet seat. She was smiling at her fifth husband and saying “This time it’s for keeps.” She was as sweet as a young girl. How did they do it, these people? How did they walk through crashing marriages? He had never wanted anyone other than Julia. He had loved her and she had loved him.

  “I have a card with my number on it for the million pounds,” said Mrs Blaney. “But the fact is, I’ve never won anything in a raffle. The number of raffle tickets I’ve bought you would never believe. I’m not a lucky person. Well, thank you for the tea. I’ll be here again week after next. There’s no pipe clay available, I told you that. I don’t know where your wife got it from, I tried everywhere. No pipe clay, they told me, they don’t make it now. It’s like these coloured clips for spectacles, different colours. You stick them on the frames. Well, you can’t get them any more. I’ve asked a lot of opticians. We’ve discontinued that line, they say. And they were beautiful and so handy. Still.”

  She pulled on her gloves. “That woman next door, what’s her name?”

  “Mrs Floss,” said Trevor.

  “Does she often wander about in her nightgown?”

  “Not always. A lot of the time. She goes on world tours.”

  “Oh, oh, well, some people have all the luck. Ta ta, then, see you week after next.”

  Trevor picked the letter from the floor and glanced through it rapidly. “Pleased to ask you to talk to our group … small number of people interested in poetry … of course not as good as you and others like you. Would August the 7th be suitable? Will be done through. … Meet you at station if you wish. … Look forward to seeing you. … Such a treat for our people … real live author. … One of our members had a poem in the People’s Journal, another a story in Nickety Nackety. … BBC programme. … Yours Very Sincerely, Marjorie Gillespie. PS Would be glad if you would consent to judge our entries for the FLORA NICOLSON SHORT STORY CUP.”

  Trevor laughed quietly to himself. Sometimes he blew into small towns for poetry readings like a hit man with his briefcase. So many people he had met at draughty stations. So many had stood up and said, “Needs no introduction. One of Scotland’s …” Sometimes there might be thirty people, sometimes three. Once a member of the audience had shouted “Are you a committed poet?” One of his poems which used fishing as a linguistic metaphor had led to a discussion with an old trawler man about cod … his voice echoed across empty seats. Was he the god they had come to see, the one touched by fire from heaven? Not at all. Once someone had asked him, “Do you feel yourself a poet when you get up in the morning?” “No,” Trevor had replied honestly.

  Once he had been introduced as Hector Macmaster, a lyricist of note. At the end of the proceedings he shoved his cheque in his wallet and ran away, with his ancient briefcase.

  After each poetry reading he washed his face. How unclean he felt. Unclean, unclean. Should he have a bell like a leper?

  He wrote: “Pleased to visit your group. Thank you for asking me. Yes, the time stated will be suitable. Would be glad if you would meet me at the station bookstall at half past six. Will judge your short stories. Always wish to encourage creativity. Yours sincerely, Trevor Porter.”

  Dynamo of the Muses, Road Traveller, Hit Man of the Poetry Society. Who is the best poet on your avenue?

  Boycott had made twenty runs. Trevor couldn’t understand why he liked watching cricket so much, even though he had never played it. He liked perhaps the leisurely desultory eternal hum of it, the commentators with their plummy voices, the old fashioned terminology, the ritual, the silences … the shadows cast on the ground by the white uniforms. Good old Boycott. Remain yourself at all costs. Don’t let anyone hurry you.

  One day Julia’s sister, Patricia, and her husband, James, drove all the way from Devon in James’ car. James wasn’t in the habit of speaking much, though he could drive a tractor, repair it, run a farm, build a house, sing when requested to at concerts, cook and do innumerable other things. His wife, Patricia, said, “I only came to collect the brooch my mother passed on to Julia, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” said Trevor.

  James stared down at the floor with its blue linoleum. When Trevor and Julia had visited them in Devon they would be wakened by a cock crowing. He had been taught how to drive a tractor, but wasn’t really interested in the farm. On the other hand he could do any electrical repairs required.

  “So sad,” said Patricia. “James drove me up. It’s a holiday for me but James here doesn’t like taking holidays. He hasn’t had a holiday for fifteen years, have you, James?” James stared down at the floor, his face red and ripe like a fruit. “I wouldn’t really want anything,” said Patricia, “but the brooch has a sentimental value.” Trevor took her into Julia’s room. There were brushes, pots of powder, lipstick, bath salts, soaps, lying on the dressing table.

  “So sad,” Patricia repeated. “Julia wanted a house. Did you know that? She hated living in a flat. Why didn’t you take a school in Devon? She wanted to return there. There was a young boy she nearly married. He had a motor cycle, but mother never liked him. She thought motor cycles were dangerous.”

  Together we walked along the cliffs, thought Trevor, as in Hardy’s poems. He too had never known how much he had loved his wife until he lost her, selfish, bald, old man. Yet those heartbreaking poems! By the cliffs. There was a flash of Julia turning her face towards him against the blinding yellow of the mustard seed.

  “… naturally she thought of you as well. We corresponded regularly. She was the only one of my sisters I wrote to. Ah, well.”

  James hadn’t spoken at all. Perhaps he felt ashamed of his wife with her bright seeking eyes.

  “Take anything you like,” said Trevor. “I’m sure she would like you to take anything.”

  “Are you sure? Well, then, this other brooch … I like it very much. So unusual. It will be a memory of her.”

  “Certainly.”

  “You won’t be moving to a smaller flat?”

  “No.”

  “Wasn’t there a couple here who were making a lot of noise? It got on Julia’s nerves, I remember her telling me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they still as bad?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately.”

  “She did so much travelling, poor dear. She hated packing, unpacking. Didn’t she, James?”

  James muttered some incomprehensible words. His red hands lay on his knees. The cleverest of the lot of us, thought Trevor, he doesn’t speak at all. Everything comes so easily to him and yet his wife leads him by the hand. Odd. What does he really think about? Is he a philosopher in his deepest being?

  “Of course I don’t drive myself,” said Patricia brightly. “We came through London. I don’t know how James does it. First time we came through London in the car and he had no difficulty. No, thanks, we won’t wait for a cup of tea really. You see so many foreign cars driving in the middle of the road. Isn’t that right, James? They have no idea. Of course we don’t leave Devon much.”

  Take the jewellery and go, thought Trevor viciously.

  “There weren’t many at the funeral,” said Patricia. “I thought there might have been more.”

  “I shall be cremated myself,” said Trevor irrelevantly.

  “Oh? She should have been sen
t to Devon among her own people. That’s what I was saying to James.”

  They left, James shaking Trevor’s hand in an embarrassed manner. Trevor slammed the door, thought of the bare dressing table and wept.

  He listened to the din above his head. The Camerons fighting again. “Bugger you,” he shouted in fury and banged at the ceiling with his broom. There was silence for a while, then the noise restarted as if Cameron were moving wardrobes, sideboards, gravestones, from corner to corner. What on earth was he doing? Could a man be as evil as to do that, create noise for the sake of doing so? Trevor wept tears of shame and anger. He should have confronted that lout long ago, but he had never had the courage. “You killed my wife,” he shouted. There was another silence and then the TV was turned on full blast. Cameron was undoubtedly a psychopath.

  One afternoon, quite by chance, he found what his wife had been looking for when she had painfully left her bed. It was a diary, hidden between two sheets in a drawer. It had a pink cover. Trevor withdrew it carefully: he wouldn’t have found it unless he had been looking for sheets to change the bed.

  The diary began at the time when he was in the Navy and told of the birth of Robin, of his schooling, of his beginning work. (Trevor asks him to give money to me but he refuses!) Later, however, he read that Robin had been sending money to his mother secretly. (But nothing for the old bugger, so he calls him. I wish he wouldn’t speak like that. It’s just that Trevor is occupied with his poetry. If there is no mail he’s in a bad temper for the rest of the day. He talks about how others worse than him have a better literary reputation. He says he should never have left Scotland, that was his mistake.)

  She confided her longings to her diary. She wanted a house. She hated the continual shifting. She wrote, “I don’t want to tell him I’ve got cancer. It’ll worry him: it doesn’t worry me as much as I thought it would.” (But, thought Trevor, if she had really been happy, would it not have worried her?)