‘Oh go on,’ pleaded Colette, ‘they’d like to hear from you. What about Agatha? Why don’t you send one to her?’
Janus Brian laughed.
‘I should think they’re glad to see the back of me. I wouldn’t want to upset them by reminding them of my existence with a postcard. On the other hand, perhaps I would, but I can’t be bothered.’
Colette shrugged.
‘I love writing postcards. I always have. It is strange, isn’t it? We so rarely express ourselves to people we know in writing, except when we’re on holiday. If we are judged in the future solely by our correspondence, they will only ever know us as people who live in tents and eat fish and chips. Look, I’ve written one to Janus, one to James, and one to Juliette and Bill.’
‘Juliette and Bill have split up,’ said Aldous, turning the pages of his Telegraph.
Colette put a hand to her cheek.
‘I keep forgetting. I’ll have to rewrite it. I can’t believe she’s living with someone called Vladimir.’
‘Boris,’ said Aldous.
‘Shall I read out the one to Janus?’
‘Do, dear,’ said Janus Brian abstractedly.
‘Do you have to send one to Janus?’ said Aldous, who was sitting beside his wife.
‘What do you mean? Of course I do.
Dear Janus, we arrived safely on Sunday evening and have found a lovely spot in the camp site overlooked by the tower of the Abbey. We hear it chiming all night, a beautiful sound. Weather v. hot. Grass all dead, bit like a desert. Do you remember the town? We used to stop here sometimes on the way to Wales. You must come here one day. Love Aldous, Colette, Julian and Janus Brian’
Aldous had his head in his hands.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he moaned, ‘what are you trying to do. Are you trying to ruin the holiday?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Telling him to come here.’
‘I’m not telling him to come here.’
‘That last sentence . . .’
‘I’m just suggesting he comes here one day. I’m not telling him to come here now. He’s not going to come here right now. Don’t be so stupid . . .’
‘But you just had to go that little bit too far didn’t you? Writing him a card, okay, write a card if you must. Be pleasant, okay, what else can you be on a postcard? But suggesting that he comes here, there was no need to put that in . . .’
‘Oh stop being so childish. And don’t sulk. I’ll write him another card. Okay? Happy now?’
Janus Brian raised his eyes from his newspaper, the front page of which was the single, enormous word PHEW!, and a picture of Blackpool Beach, carpeted with sunbathers.
‘Come now, Aldous,’ Janus Brian said, ‘I can’t think the prospect of a visit from my nephew can be all that dreadful . . .’
Aldous cast him a scowl that told him to mind his own business. Janus Brian returned to his newspaper.
Clouds were rare visitors to the skies above Tewkesbury, though some mornings would reveal exquisitely clear cumulus, heaps of vapour full of shadows, wonderfully three-dimensional. Julian watched one passing over the battlemented tower of the Abbey, where it seemed to pause, taking the exact shape, for a moment, of a human brain. He yearned for it to unload itself, to rain down on the parched flora of Gloucestershire. But the clouds were retentive, steadfastly so, hanging tantalisingly vast in the sky, enough liquid in some to keep a town like Tewkesbury in bathwater for a year. Where did they go, those morning clouds? By noon the skies were always empty. Where did they rain? Nowhere in England the papers said. Records were being set. The hottest day in history, the longest drought in history, ladybirds burgeoning, lizards multiplying, there were dust storms over Bedfordshire, bushfires in the Pennines.
The camp site itself, however, was lushly green. The camp warden had found a loophole in the hosepipe ban, which meant the site could be classified as farm land. He could water his lawns with impunity, and so the camp site nurtured the only green grass left in England.
‘Like the garden of Eden,’ Janus Brian remarked, ‘Or a Spanish golf course.’
Things went well for the first week of the holiday. They settled into a gentle routine of sauntering around the town, savouring its pubs, cafés and tea shops, perhaps an undemanding drive somewhere in the afternoon, a relaxing evening at the tent, after which Colette and Janus Brian would stroll up the lane from the camp site past the Abbey to Janus Brian’s B & B. By the end of the first week, however, there was a problem when Colette dropped Janus off. Mrs Brown was waiting for them, a look of concern on her small, stiff face. Her voice shook when she spoke.
‘I cannot have Mr Waugh staying here any more,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
She beckoned the two into her antiquated sitting room and produced a bedsheet for them to inspect. Two cigarette burns, like a pair of brown eyes, stared at them from the whiteness.
‘I made it very clear from the beginning that I didn’t allow smoking in this establishment. It is clear that Mr Waugh has been smoking in bed, I cannot allow it.’
She went into a long description of a fire at a building further along the terrace, exactly the same as hers, when a negligent smoker incinerated a houseful of guests.
‘Janus Brian, you didn’t tell me you’d taken up smoking again,’ Colette said for good effect, but it was too late.
‘Homeless again,’ Janus Brian said despondently as they stood on the pavement outside Mrs Brown’s, ‘I’m not going back to The Grapes. Definitely not.’
After some discussion back at the tent Colette came up with what she thought was a good solution to which the others agreed, and went back to speak to Mrs Brown.
‘This may sound rather odd,’ she said, ‘but could my husband take Mr Waugh’s room? I can absolutely guarantee he’s a non-smoker.’ A bemused Mrs Brown agreed.
Thereafter, for the rest of the holiday, Aldous stayed at Mrs Brown’s, while Janus Brian slept at the tent. It was an arrangement that worked surprisingly well. Aldous, in fact, seemed rather too keen to make his exit every evening, returning the next morning properly washed and breakfasted, bright and cheerful with a newspaper under his arm. He was enjoying a holiday of comparative luxury at the B & B, paid for by Janus Brian who, for his part, seemed relieved to be away from the restrictive, formal atmosphere of Mrs Pyrophobe’s, as he called her. He seemed comfortable on the foam rubber of the tent, or on the cotton and folding steel of the camping chairs.
Julian was bored. Agonizingly bored. The holiday had adapted itself to the pace of Janus Brian’s life, which was slow and parochial. If Janus Brian had had his way, the entire holiday would have been spent in the saloon of The Black Bear, the waterside pub he’d adopted as his own. Julian had to continually pressure his parents into allowing something else to happen, to drive somewhere, a circumnavigation of Bredon Hill and its ring of ancient churches, north to see the misericords at Ripple, or west towards the Forest of Dean, or east across the plains full of orchards towards the Cotswold scarp, and into the unfolding richness of the Cotswolds themselves.
Janus Brian was a reluctant passenger on these journeys, he had no interest in the landscape or the countryside at all and was, for the most part, utterly disinterested in church architecture. If ever inclined to comment on these subjects it was only to remark how poorly England compared to Spain. As a man who knew intimately the dramatic sweeps of the Iberian golf courses, he would remark how feeble the Cotswolds seemed in comparison to the Sierra Nevada, or what a poor manifestation of stone was Tewkesbury Abbey in comparison to the grandeur of the Alhambra.
Janus Brian’s interest in his surroundings perked up whenever pylons came into view, or an electrical substation, gas-works, sewage farm, or, if they were very lucky, a power station. Once, following the meandering Wye Gorge, happening upon the view of Tintern Abbey that had moved Wordsworth so, shattered stumps of sumptuous gothic beneath towering forests teetering on cliffs, Janus Brian missed the whole spectacle, dr
awn to the fixtures of an electrical switching yard just visible in the opposite direction. He saw the landscape solely in terms of its utilities, which he’d spent his working life depicting in working drawings, diagrams and blueprints. This process seemed to have instilled in him a heightened sense of their value, and he would often lecture the others in the car, alerting them to what he believed they were taking for granted.
‘We forget how important electricity is to our society. Or gas, where would we be without gas? And piped water? What about piped water?’
‘I liked the world before electricity,’ said Colette, ‘gas lighting. It was much cosier. Coal fires. I wouldn’t mind getting my water from a well, or cranking a village pump . . .’
‘You forget,’ said Janus Brian, showing a rare passion for something that wasn’t alcohol, ‘hauling buckets of filthy coal up from the cellar, having to nip out and buy tuppeny gas mantles, earth closets. You call that cosy? That’s living like peasants . . .’
Mostly their drives turned into urgent searches for pubs. Colette only drank at Whitbread pubs, because they served Gold Labels, so these searches were often tense and frustrating. In the wizened, yellow desert that England had become, pubs were like dark, shaded oases, and the family would spend hours in them. So what would start off promisingly for Julian as a day of exploration, would often congeal into a long noon and afternoon spent in the malty, shadowy environs of a pub. Julian’s boredom would intensify.
He spent much of the time alone at the tent, declining the offer of a drink in a pub with the elders. He watched the habits and routines of families made transparent by the flimsiness of their habitations.
A family of four were opposite, a streetwise Birmingham woman with prolapsed stomach muscles and a face that carried a scar (a violet zigzag that indented her lower lip and continued down to her chin) of some previous catastrophe (a car crash?), her husband, also with prolapsed stomach muscles, but from binge-drinking rather than childbearing, and their two teenage children. The woman spent a good portion of every day sunbathing in front of her tent, tummy-down, the undone straps of her bikini top trailing either side like the loose ribbons of an opened present, revealing that moment where ordinary skin fills out to become the breast. Julian was watchful for any accidental disclosure, though the woman was annoyingly skilful in maintaining the concealment of her breasts, even when once, surprised by her husband dolloping a morsel of ice cream into the small of her back, and she quickly lifted herself up, she managed the manoeuvre without revealing herself.
In all his furtive hours of watching this family, Julian never once had any indication that they returned his curiosity. They carried on their lives as though Julian and his parents and Janus Brian and their tent were invisible. Yet they were barely thirty feet away.
The daughter was roughly Julian’s age, perhaps a little older. Flouncy brown hair hung about her face in big licks and curls, but her eyes were small and a little mean-looking. Her mouth was thin and set. The boy was somewhat younger, fair-haired and dressed always in the ridiculous fashions of the day – calf-length voluminous trousers, not unlike the plus-fours Aldous sometimes wore in his youth, hooped socks and platform shoes.
The little flecks of tartan that trimmed some of the girl’s clothes marked her as a Bay City Rollers fan. Both of them seemed to be, in fact, and for this reason Julian disliked them, though he kept an attentive eye on the girl in case at any time she should inadvertently reveal herself. For most of the time, however, she wore T-shirts over her bikini tops, which concealed her small breasts and rendered them uninteresting. Sometimes she wore bikini bottoms, and Julian tried hard to see if her pubic hair caused any impression on the fabric. He wasn’t sure that it did.
Janus Brian continued to eat. He ate more than was merely necessary to avoid dying, he ate enough to lay down some fatty deposits, the first few subcutaneous cells were beginning to fill in a tentative reinstatement of his long-lost bulk. Almost daily his appetite increased, passing through the safety of dairy products to carbohydrates and even some protein. Half way through the second week of their three week (so long as the money lasted) holiday, Janus Brian was onto red meat. He even tried a small fillet steak in The Black Bear one evening, cooked rare. He managed half of it before sitting back and downing a double gin and tonic, gasping, with a look on his face of one who’d just come up from a long spell underwater, red eyed and breathless. Once, in Sam’s Café, in a moment of utter gastronomic recklessness, he went for the London Grill, a platter of chops, rashers and offal rounded off with baked beans and tinned tomatoes in the midst of which Janus Brian was soon floundering.
His body, having closed down in order to make the best of the diet of alcohol and reconstituted savouries it had been fed for the last few years, was having trouble adapting to this new iron and protein and fat-rich diet. His digestive system generated great quantities of gas, so that Janus Brian was continually bubbling and burping, like a kettle coming to the boil. He was soon passing wind without a second thought; sitting in Sam’s Café eating a buck rabbit, he would lean sideways slightly and let rip an anal eructation of table-shaking, floor-vibrating intensity, three or four times during a single meal. These solecisms, originally followed by a murmured apology, now passed without remark. Colette welcomed them, like the mythical sheikhs who considered the breaking of wind after a meal to be the highest possible compliment, they were signs of the reawakening of his body’s metabolism.
‘I’m really happy, dear,’ he said to her one evening at the tent as he pawed his way through a packet of fish and chips, ‘I never thought I’d be happy in this funny little town, but I am. You’ve made me happy.’
The evening was one of predictable tranquillity. In a summer of constantly reiterated weather when each day was a carbon copy of the one before, with a cloudless sky and a high, naked sun, the evenings likewise followed an identical pattern – long shadows, still air, dust, an uncomplicated sunset, the sun withdrawing with as little fuss as possible, shortly to return in the morning before the world had barely had a chance to cool down. Aldous had retreated to the tranquillity of the B & B. Julian was listening to the conversation from the comfort of the back seat of the car.
‘I think that when we die,’ Janus Brian went on, ‘we return to that point in our lives when we were happiest, and we relive it for ever.’ He paused while he worked on digesting a piece of fish, then he licked his shining fingers. ‘In which case, I think that when I die, I will spend eternity eating fish and chips in Tewkesbury.’
Colette laughed.
‘Either that,’ he went on, ‘or I will be watching Arnold Palmer on the eighteenth tee at Valderrama, with a jug of sangria and Mary . . .’
‘I’m glad you’re happy,’ said Colette, ‘perhaps you could look on this holiday as a fresh start.’
‘No,’ said Janus Brian flatly, ‘I’m afraid that when all this is over and I’m back in that God-forsaken bungalow in that Godforsaken town, I know that within a couple of days I’ll be back to where I was. I wish it wasn’t true but there it is. This is nothing more than a respite, dear, it’s not a new direction. It doesn’t lead anywhere. I wish this holiday could go on for ever, but it won’t. All things come to an end.’
‘You mustn’t talk like that, Janus,’ said Colette, ‘you can come away with us again next year, or before then . . .’
Julian, invisible in the car, winced.
‘Next year? I doubt I’ll be alive, dear. I’m rather astonished to find that I’m alive now, to be honest. When I’m in High Wycombe, alone in that bungalow, I sometimes sit there thinking, if I’m dead, how would I actually know? It’s not like now. I’m definitely alive now. The fish and chips are telling me I’m alive. The chiming of the Abbey. You. But in that bungalow, there’s nothing.’
‘You need to move back to London,’ Colette urged, while Janus Brian farted loudly, shifting position in the camping chair to ease the expulsion of gases, ‘sell the bungalow and move back to London . . .’
>
Janus replied immediately and emphatically.
‘No. I can’t move back to London. That would be moving backwards. I have to go forwards, I can’t go backwards.’
They’d been through all this before. Colette hoped that the happiness he was now experiencing would contrast so sharply with the loneliness of High Wycombe, that he would see sense and move back to London. She would have to wait and see.
‘I think tomorrow I may go for a walk round the Abbey,’ Janus went on. ‘I’m not going to go back to religion or anything like that. I just really feel like walking round the building, looking at all the old tombs, all the old stuff that’s in there . . .’
They were distracted by the arrival of a motorbike on the camp site, a rather loud, old motorbike that was driving slowly round and round the driveways.
‘That’s an old Vincent,’ said Janus Brian, ‘my word. Haven’t seen one of those for years.’
‘A what?’
‘A Vincent motorbike. Don’t make them any more. Not since the Japs came along. Reg had one years ago.’
Janus Brian was having to shout because the motorbike had slowed to a halt on the drive not far from their tent. The driver seemed to be looking at them. He was wearing an old-fashioned crash helmet with goggles and had black leather gauntlets on his hands.
‘It’s a bloody noisy one,’ replied Colette, ‘no wonder they stopped making them.’
The motorbike gave a sudden noisy rev, then steered towards Janus and Colette as they sat in the doorway of the tent.
‘Hallo,’ said Janus Brian, ‘he’s coming over.’
The motorcyclist slowly drove his machine right up to the tent, until his front wheel was almost touching Colette’s foot. She was mildly amused. The motorcyclist killed his engine and dismounted. As he stood, goggled, beneath the silver dome of his crash helmet, he burst into a cackle of laughter and whooped.
‘Janus?’ said Colette, breathless with disbelief.
The motorcyclist unbuckled his helmet and lifted his goggles, then lifted the whole lot as one from his head.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 26
