I’ll Go To Bed At Noon

by Gerard Woodward

  Not until the moving day itself did she finally relent. Not even with the help of Reg and his two sons, who were visiting, could Janus Brian manage. Also, there was surplus furniture to be had.

  In condensing his life from a three bedroom semi to a two bedroom bungalow, Janus Brian found he had much that couldn’t fit into his new house – beds, chairs, settees, tables, wardrobes. Aldous took a selection back to Fernlight Avenue in a hired van in the morning, while Reg and his sons helped Janus Brian with the rest of his things. By the time Aldous was back at midday Janus Brian’s house was almost empty, and the new family’s removal van had arrived. A fleet of cars – Reg driving Janus in Janus’s Renault 7, Reg’s two sons following in their cars, to bring their father back to London – was waiting to set off when Aldous and Colette had one last look around the empty rooms of Leicester Avenue. Colette felt tears come into her eyes, even though she’d hardly known this house in the time her brother had lived there, but the emptiness of a house is always sad, she felt. In just a matter of a few days it would be unrecognizable as Janus Brian’s old house, once that new family had moved in, with their plans for playrooms, their new furnishing and carpets. This house embodied the thirty-odd years of her brother’s marriage, contained its essence somehow, and yet it was to be completely erased. Surely it should be allowed to remain for ever as a sort of memorial to her brother’s life, there should be something permanent left behind, but no. Now she could see houses for what they really were, mere shells, to be discarded and re-used, and this made her cry.

  Then Aldous noticed the lampshades. In every room the lampshades had been left in situ.

  ‘What about the lampshades?’ he asked Janus Brian, who was about to get into the car.

  ‘I was going to leave them. There are lampshades in High Wycombe.’

  While Janus Brian shakily oversaw the loading of the last few boxes onto the removal van, Aldous took down the lampshades.

  ‘Stupid to leave them,’ he said to Colette. There were few lampshades at Fernlight Avenue, and those were getting rather dilapidated. In some rooms the bulbs hung naked and dazzling, but here were excess shades, little cylinders of printed fabrics, bubble glass, budget chandeliers, tulip shades, Aldous took them all and put them in the boot of his Superminx.

  At High Wycombe there followed an operation that was the reverse of the morning’s work, extracting the condensed life of Janus Brian from a removal van and allowing it to expand to fill the spaces of his new home.

  It was the first time Aldous and Colette had seen Janus Brian’s new home, and they were horrified. Sycamore Drive was a steeply climbing road branching off from the even steeper main road, curving slightly between rows of newish bungalows and then flattening out a little at the top, where it ended in a turning circle. Sycamore Drive was another cul-de-sac. In all it seemed little more than a slightly newer version of Leicester Avenue, with smaller buildings and without the benefits of being close to the capital. Janus Brian had moved from one dead-end to another.

  Colette managed to conceal her disappointment from her brother, but she could not help feeling distraught at the idea that Janus Brian, in moving into a bungalow, one of four radiating from the turning circle at the top of the cul-de-sac, had merely replicated his life in New Southgate. She wanted to ask him, why, why, why have you done it? Dead-ends are dead-ends, they are the root cause of all your problems, blind alleys, no through roads, that is what your childless life has always been. You need to break free, to live in a thoroughfare, somewhere with passing traffic, somewhere that leads somewhere else, don’t you see? But no, you’ve dug a tunnel from your prison cell only to come up in another one. But instead she helped Janus Brian settle into his bungalow, suggesting where the chairs went, where the telly should go. She made him tea, she made him dinner, while Aldous and Reg formed an uncomfortable, settee-shifting partnership, and her son sat on the floor reading John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. Eventually Reg left in one of his son’s cars, and it was just her and Aldous and Julian against Janus Brian’s loneliness. When the time came for them, too, to leave, she could see instantly the despair rise behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. My God, What have I done? He seemed to say. Too late now. Your house has been sold. This is where you live now. But with the frantic energy and drama of moving finished, there was nothing left now but the old, familiar prospect of endless solitude before him.

  ‘Agatha said she’ll be over tomorrow,’ Colette said, as she prepared to leave. Julian was already in the car.

  ‘Lovely,’ Janus Brian grimaced.

  ‘And I’m sure Lesley will be over soon, and Madeleine.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘And we’ll come over next weekend, I promise.’

  ‘I’ll defrost some faggots for you.’

  ‘He’s being so brave,’ Colette said, on the way home, a journey mostly in twilight, dark by the time they got home.

  They were about to settle down to bed but Aldous was in the grip of an idea. He had all the lampshades out of the boot, the ones from Janus’s house, and he was fixing them up, taking down the dusty, decrepit old shade from the front room, rigging up one of Janus Brian’s crystalware fans in its place. A floral print in the music room, lit from within, searingly bright daisies. A globe of prisms on the landing, where there hadn’t been a shade for many years.

  ‘Look,’ Aldous kept saying, flicking the light switches on and off, adjusting the shades so that great circles of light moved shakily from one spot to another. As Aldous consolidated and adjusted his inheritance of light, he had the childish triumph of a boy raiding an orchard.

  ‘It does look better,’ said Colette, somewhat reluctantly, ‘they do make the house look much better.’

  10

  Visiting Janus Brian was now a major undertaking. The journey to High Wycombe was a long and complicated one involving a perilous quarter arc of the North Circular with all its feeder lanes and flyovers, and then a miserable crawl along Western Avenue, past the Hoover Factory at Perivale, the Aladdin Lamp Factory at Northolt, the golf ball factory at Uxbridge, with its giant golf ball perched on a giant tee, then the heavy traffic through the sprawling dormitory towns of Gerrard’s Cross and Beaconsfield. After the first week they couldn’t manage a visit any more than once a month, and were soon down to less than even that.

  That first visit was encouraging, however. Janus Brian seemed to be coping rather well with his new life. With the money he was rolling in since the sale of his old house, he’d bought an organ, a mighty Wurlitzer of an instrument he’d seen when passing an antique dealers in town. It had come from one of High Wycombe’s last great cinemas, now a bingo hall, and filled a corner of his spacious living room.

  ‘I’m sometimes up all night playing the thing,’ he said, ‘it’s got an extraordinary range, you can play Bach toccatas on massed kazoos, or have “Colonel Bogey” sung by heavenly choirs, it’s fantastic.’ The first few visits centred around the organ, Colette and Janus sitting side by side playing duet versions of ‘I Do Love To Be Beside The Seaside’, ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’, and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. Colette would try all the different stops, hearing her versions of ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ in weepy strings, ‘Tico Tico’ on tom-toms and castanets, but the novelty of this massive, twinkling instrument did not last for very long, and as the summer passed into another autumn, Janus Brian became more and more despondent, until one weekend when Colette called, he answered the door in his old state – far gone, shaky, yellow.

  From one cul-de-sac to another. He said he liked the peace and quiet of dead-end roads, but it was the peace and quiet that was now driving him mad. ‘Peace and quiet is wonderful when you’re living with someone, but when you’re alone you need noise, movement, activity.’ The neighbours were unfriendly, worse than Leicester Avenue. His next door neighbours collared Colette as she went to the car, a look of slight despair in their eyes.

  ‘He plays music at full volume all night sometimes.’

  She
knew this was true. Janus Brian had said as much. He was playing Schubert symphonies on a new hi-fi at all hours. Janus Brian had a special affection for Schubert, and used to tell Colette that if he were ever to haunt her after his death, he would come as a melody from a Schubert symphony.

  ‘It’s not that we don’t appreciate the music,’ the neighbours went on to point out, ‘but there is a time and a place.’

  ‘He won’t listen to our complaints,’ said the man, ‘I did ask him very politely one morning if he’d mind showing some consideration, and his reply was a four letter word . . .’

  ‘It was eight letters, actually,’ corrected his wife.

  The man took a moment to count in his head.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘his reply was an eight letter word. What’s more, he answered the door stark – you know, completely naked. My wife standing beside me . . .’

  ‘This is a very quiet neighbourhood,’ said the woman, ‘a very, very quiet neighbourhood. You ask anyone around here what it is they like about the neighbourhood and they’ll all say it’s the quietness.’

  ‘My brother is a frail man whose wife has just died,’ Colette said, ‘perhaps you could help him instead of criticize him.’

  The neighbours didn’t ask her about Janus Brian again. Whenever she visited, however, she was conscious of their observing eyes.

  Lesley had visited once, so Janus Brian told her. He came on his own about a month after Janus Brian had moved in.

  ‘Bloody stuck-up fool, expected me to make him a cup of tea. I was lying in bed and he was tapping at the window, so I had to pull myself up and answer the door, then he just strolled in, took a look at me, then at his watch, said something like “what time of day do you call this?” Said something about the fact I wasn’t dressed, then just sat in the kitchen waiting for me to make some tea for him, holding a hanky over his nose because of the smell, he said. Then he left, telling me about some church he goes to or other, said I should come along. Bloody fool.’

  Agatha had been over as well.

  ‘Telling me about her lodger, telling me how rich he was. She said he drove a Ferrati! I just fell down laughing, I said what’s that? A cross between a Bugati and a Ferrari? She got cross, of course. She is such a daft woman. Do you know what she said the other week? I was looking for my Guinness Book of Records, I wanted to look something up, I can’t remember now, and I asked Agatha, I said Agatha, have you seen my Guinness Book of Records? And she looked blank for a moment and then said, “Is that classical or Jazz?” Classical or Jazz! Can you believe it?’

  Soon he was pretending to be out if Agatha knocked, only that didn’t work. If he didn’t answer the door she’d think he was dead and have the police round kicking the front door in in no time. He had no alternative but to tell her to her face.

  ‘I said, I’m sorry, Agatha, I know you’re doing your best and you’re only trying to help, but I must insist that you piss off and never darken my door again. It was the way she nagged. On and on and on. She’d go round the house hunting for gin bottles, and if she found any she’d pour them down the sink. She told me off about everything – the house, my clothes, my smell, everything. Do you know she used to walk over from Ickfield Park, all the way up that hill? Terrifying. Still, seems to have done the trick. I haven’t heard from her since. Thank Christ.’

  Such stories delighted Colette, the failures of her rival siblings, humourless Agatha, hypocritical Lesley. How could they ever hope to understand Janus Brian? But at the same time she felt the distress of sole responsibility for Janus Brian’s state. Later he said he knew from the day he moved in he’d made a terrible mistake.

  ‘I wanted to be haunted,’ Janus Brian said, ‘I wanted Mary’s ghost to visit me, but she never came, not to this sterile little bungalow, her ghost would never come here. In Leicester Avenue her shadows gave me the creeps, but now I miss them. And I want there to be an upstairs. I miss the upstairs. My life has been robbed of a dimension. There is no verticality to it, everything is flat and on a level.’

  He bought a clock. Of all things, a clock. But he said he didn’t have a decent one, and he went out to buy one. It occupied pride of place on the living room mantelpiece, a naked nymph, about six inches high, rendered in a ghastly, imitation gold, holding aloft, as though it were a torch of liberty, a clock-face which pitched back and forth, its own pendulum. The horror of this timepiece rendered Colette almost speechless when she saw it. The gaudiness of the figurine, her golden bosoms so pathetically exposed, the sheer awkwardness of the design, with its clockface bobbing back and forth, almost impossible to read, a piece of pornographic kitsch unworthy of her brother’s tastes. Did he really derive some thrill, however abstruse and rarefied, from the contemplation of this revolting statue, this faceless, bare-breasted nymphet of wasted time? Did he imagine her, even in his most drunken hours, coming to life and frolicking, all gold, about the carpet? Did he think that she might put down her weighty clock and creep into his bed, vivid and smooth, to press her tiny nippleless paps into his face? Whatever it was, Janus Brian seemed inordinately proud of his new clock.

  As the winter progressed, visiting became more difficult. Colette herself became ill shortly before Christmas, bringing up, to her and Julian’s terror, a bellyful of blood into the kitchen sink. Julian was so terrified he ran out of the room, returning a few moments later, pretending he hadn’t seen it. The cause turned out to be a duodenal ulcer, and Colette was in hospital for several weeks, an experience which she enjoyed. Colette loved hospitals, she liked being among the ill, the deprived, the lost. In a National Health hospital everyone is levelled, as in a prison, to a common social strata, a sort of aggregate of all ages and classes, which meant that Colette could befriend Judy, a fifteen-year-old West Indian schoolgirl who talked nothing but pop music and boys, or Ruth, an academic with gallstones.

  ‘They don’t know what causes ulcers,’ Colette told Aldous, ‘No one has said anything about the drink causing them, although I know that’s what you all think.’

  ‘But they’ve told you to stop drinking?’

  ‘They’ve said not to drink while I’ve got the ulcer, because it aggravates it and causes acidity. But once the ulcer’s gone, there’s no reason why you can’t drink.’

  Aldous looked disappointed. He was hoping for a stronger warning from the doctors, take another drink and you’ll die, or something like that, but the doctors seemed positively encouraging of Colette’s drinking, especially with Christmas approaching. Don’t worry, they seemed to be saying, we’ll soon have you drinking again for Christmas, don’t worry about that.

  It was a bleak time. Janus, since his arrest the year before, had been subdued. The threat of imprisonment had had a sobering effect on him, and if he drank now, he mostly managed to moderate it to a few cans imbibed in the solitude of his bedroom, but his overall mood was sullen and hostile. He no longer spent time with Bill Brothers, and rarely went out drinking. In effect there was no longer anywhere he could drink legitimately in Windhover Hill or surrounding areas. Aldous couldn’t help thinking that Janus was waiting, with immense patience, for his two year suspended sentence to expire, so that he could resume his life of wild inebriation. Occasionally he would lose patience and go out on the town, returning noisily at an ungodly hour, having miraculously escaped the attentions of the police, though the threat of an encounter with them was a new and effective means of controlling Janus, for he knew Aldous only had to make one call to them and he would be in prison for six months, even from the most deranged depths of his drunkenness he could perceive the brutal simplicity of this.

  Aldous and Julian visited Colette in hospital every other day. It was a winter of dense fogs. One night the roads were immovably clogged with stranded traffic, they had to leave the car somewhere near the North Circular and walk the rest of the way to the hospital.

  Colette came out just before Christmas. Throughout January there was hard snow on the ground, and they didn’t get to High Wyc
ombe until early February, having not visited for over two months. It was a novelty for them to see the Chilterns under snow. As they feared, Janus Brian had sunk into an even deeper despair than the one he’d experienced in New Southgate. In the two months of Colette’s absence he’d barely seen another human being. He was drinking perhaps two or three bottles of gin a day and hardly eating anything. He had grown a ridiculous, white, fluffy beard that looked as though it had been made by a child out of cotton wool. His hair had bushed out into a spiky grey crown surrounding his bald pate, but most concerning of all was his thinness, his leanness. Janus Brian had always been a thin man, but this was not so much thinness as hollowness. It was as though someone had removed a layer of something from under his skin, which now hung loose around the vacuity. He had deflated, sunken, crumpled. His body had hardly any muscle and he walked with a shaky, almost crippled stance. Amazingly he still drove his car, and would pop to the shops once a week for frozen food and a week’s supply of gin and fags, which nearly filled his whole boot.

  ‘I don’t understand Janus Brian,’ Aldous said to Colette one day as they were driving back from another visit. ‘If I was in the same situation I’d develop some sort of scheme to get me through it. He likes drinking, so why doesn’t he go to a pub to drink?’

  ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t like pubs.’

  ‘But he could walk to the nearest pub. There’s one at the bottom of his road. He could make that his aim each day. Then he could aim for the next nearest pub and make that his goal, and so on and so on. Eventually he would be walking out into the countryside to go to the pub. He should do something like that. He would meet people and get fit. That’s what I would do if I was him. But he just sits there swigging gin until he blacks out.’