Julian bawled something incoherently and fell on the floor, at the feet of Bill. He then began dragging himself up Bill’s legs as though he was climbing a rope.
‘It isn’t right,’ said Bill, still serious, ‘it’s just not right . . .’
‘What’s not?’ said Veronica.
Juliette was unwrapping the present, it was about as big as a suitcase and very light.
‘A suitcase,’ said Juliette, having unwrapped the present, ‘how. . . nice.’
‘It’s not right Julian being drunk like this, it’s just not right,’ said Bill again. Julian was burbling and warbling incoherently, having fallen back on the floor.
‘Do you know you could be arrested for corrupting a minor?’ said Hugo.
‘Dearest, there isn’t a miner within two hundred miles of this room.’
The silence following this remark changed Veronica’s tone.
‘You’re looking at these buttons – there are only three undone, how long have we been in here – Juliette, you saw us going out of the room, we’ve been in here about thirty seconds . . .’
‘Julian,’ his sister called from behind the men, ‘I’ll get Boris to take you home.’
‘Is he going to be sick?’ a more distant voice said.
‘Veronica has agreed to be my wife,’ Julian called from the floor, where he was writhing gently.
‘This is utterly ridiculous,’ said Veronica standing up, having finished fastening her buttons, ‘Juliette, you’re being stupid, the boy’s just drunk. And as for you,’ she turned to Hugo, ‘I don’t know how you can dare take that stern moral attitude with me when you sit on that couch with a schoolgirl oozing all over your big fat belly.’
‘Michelle is thirty-three,’ said Hugo quietly.
Boris entered, hoisted the now barely conscious Julian onto his shoulders in a fireman’s lift and carried him out of the room.
‘Goodbye my darling sweet gorgeous wife-to-be,’ said Julian, his head dangling upside down, ‘I look forward to our many happy years of marriage together. Our children will play cellos and feed us raspberries when we’re old . . .’
15
Aldous opened his eyes.
Close to his ear the knuckles of a policeman were rapping at the car window. Aldous had fallen asleep in the driver’s seat of the parked Hillman, his head resting against the window. He’d been having a long, complicated dream in which he’d been playing Lear at the Aldwych. Enjoyable at first, the dream had turned into a nightmare of anxiety when he’d become lost during the interval and couldn’t find his way back to the stage. He’d been climbing a rickety mountain of chairs when the policeman’s knock woke him.
Aldous felt a momentary panic, as he always did when waking from a car-bound sleep, fearing that the vehicle was in motion, that he had fallen asleep while driving and that he was waking in time to witness the last few yards of his life before it expired against the trunk of a tree, the pier of a bridge, or an oncoming family of four. When the peace of motionlessness fell upon Aldous, the realization that he was parked by the side of the road in Windhover Hill Parade, Aldous wondered what had aroused the interest of a policeman.
Colette, in the passenger seat beside him, was also asleep. Before her, the glove compartment door had been lowered to form a little shelf. On this shelf was an ashtray cut from a single piece of slate (an old souvenir from the mines at Corris), and a glass of whisky. Colette had abandoned the barley wines, believing they were responsible for her obesity. She began drinking whisky when Janus Brian died. Her weight had dropped considerably. She had regained the charming slimness of her youth. Her whisky figure, she called it. It had even improved her skin. Wrinkles had fallen from her face, bags from under her eyes, fatty tendrils from her neck. She had lost the double chin that had swollen her face for so many years. Aldous was pleased with his new wife. His whisky wife. She was much better than the unpredictable and gaunt, glue-sniffing Romac wife he’d known, and more attractive than the bloated barley wine wife of the last few years.
This may have been the cause of the policeman’s presence. Perhaps he suspected that the whisky was for Aldous. Perhaps it was illegal even for passengers to drink. After all, a drunkard in the passenger seat might easily loll and lurch across the steering wheel, though Colette never had. Perhaps he was facing a driving ban.
Aldous didn’t like the thought of being banned from driving. He relied on the car now. He’d stopped cycling to school a couple of years ago. The car was his only transport. He would miss their afternoon trips to the Chilterns for a whisky picnic in a bluebell wood, or a bottle of Corrida amongst the rabbit droppings on the cropped nub of some chalky hill, or even a crazy meander through the residential tributaries of north London which, to Aldous, were becoming as interesting and as strangely beautiful as countryside – as hedge-rich, grassy and flower-filled as any of the lanes they drove along in Herts and Bucks, probably more so.
Why was the policeman knocking? Was it a crime to be asleep in charge of a parked car? Aldous had become quite the car park rêveur, nodding off at the wheel while Colette did the shopping. This time though, as Aldous slowly remembered, he was on the open highway, parked by the side of Windhover Hill Parade, a few doors down from Angad’s, the Indian grocery store where they did most of their shopping. Nearby was the lingerie shop above which Bill Brothers now lived.
Perhaps it was the booty in the back that had interested the policeman. There was quite a stash of things. They had spent most of the day shopping. It gave them an excuse to be out of the house while the plumber was doing the new bathroom and toilet. They’d spent the morning in Enfield, and Colette had finally bought a record player to replace the one Janus had smashed. It was the sight of Julian one evening, playing a Beatles 45 (‘Strawberry Fields’?) with a darning needle on the still-working turntable of the old radiogram that had finally persuaded her it was time for a new record player. The poor boy had even made a little amplifying trumpet out of paper and had Sellotaped it to the needle, holding the whole thing carefully in position over the spinning disc.
Now the record player, or at least the box that contained it, filled the back seat of their car. Colette had been attracted by a table lamp as well, a pottery thing with bubbly, running glazes in blues and greens and a tall, swirly shade. In the afternoon they’d driven down to Wood Green to wander among the fridges and cookers of the domestic showrooms. Colette was wondering about more things for the kitchen. A washing machine? A food processor? A deep freeze? Such items were taking things a little too far – not in terms of money, they could have afforded them easily – but in terms of technology. Neither would have felt comfortable with so much machinery in the house, so much science. They opted instead for a little blender, principally so that they could make milk shakes.
That was on the back seat in its box as well. It could have looked odd, Aldous supposed, that stack of brand new goods. It was not Christmas, they could hardly be taken for newlyweds furnishing a starter home. But they had a perfectly good excuse for such lavish expenditure – Aldous and Colette were rich.
Years with repeated numbers always seemed to be lucky for Aldous – 1933 was the year he finally made it into art school, 1944 was the year he got married, 1955 was the year he discovered the farm at Llanygwynfa – now 1977 was the year he retired and came into his fortune – his retirement lump sum which had coincided with Colette’s inheritance of her share of Janus Brian’s estate. They had thousands in the bank. Colette had an account of her own for the first time in her life. The bank staff knew them by name, the bank manager would come over and greet them personally when they made their twice weekly visits to withdraw cash, to put money in their purse.
Strange then, that at a time like this, Colette should have taken to shoplifting. Aldous suddenly shivered as the policeman knocked again (all these thoughts had taken place in a moment) – there were stolen goods in the car, in the shopping bag on the floor at the back. Perhaps the staff at Angad’s had finally cotton
ed-on and had sent the police after them. If a policeman went through the receipt he would find that a third of the items in the shopping bags had not been paid for.
Aldous didn’t quite understand it. His wife had begun stealing from their local grocer’s, at the same time as developing an amicably chatty relationship with the different generations of the Indian family that owned it; the mother who dressed like a princess in jewels and dazzling make-up, the father under his slightly tatty turban, the sweet daughter in her golden sari. With them Colette would exchange stories about their relations, their holidays, events in the news, the weather. Sometimes behind the strip curtain at the back of the shop she would catch glimpses of an older generation who never came out into the shop – an old man in a stiff-backed chair, handsomely white-bearded – and sometimes a crop of children in flowing clothes and sandals, who would peep out from doorways and cubbyholes, tittering and chanting.
It surprised Colette herself that she had made such a habit of placing items – tins of corned beef, pots of shrimp paste, sardines, jars of Marmite into her shopping bag instead of her basket. At home she would spread the stolen goods out on the kitchen table and total up their value, she and Aldous doing the sums together with pencil and paper, comparing the totals with their shopping of previous days and weeks. If the daily total was higher than ever before Colette would feel a sense of triumph, elation, pride. She had done something useful for her family. She had made up for her deficiencies as a mother, for the money she had wasted over the years on booze and fags.
Aldous suspected it was the essential thrill of stealing that motivated his wife into these petty crimes, and Aldous himself, who tried not to see Colette’s legerdemain with packets of Uncle Ben’s and tins of meatballs, felt that his wife’s activities made shopping a more adventurous, even dangerous operation than could normally be expected, and he felt a vicarious sense of excitement as they – the ageing Bonnie and Clyde of Windhover Hill, looted their way through Angad’s every other day.
Aldous didn’t know quite what to do about the policeman, and was half-hoping he might go away if he ignored him, but the policeman was making a circling gesture with his hand, indicating that he wanted Aldous to wind the window down.
The glass fallen from his face, the policeman could speak.
‘Are you aware that you are parked on zigzag lines?’ he said, not seeming to see the whisky, and thankfully uninformed on the matter of Colette’s shoplifting.
Aldous was only vaguely aware of what zigzag lines were, and it was true that they were parked close to a zebra crossing. Aldous apologized, the policeman smiled and walked away, while Aldous hurriedly reversed, then found that he was stuck in reverse. He had to drive backwards, slowly and carefully, all the way home.
Although Colette woke up during this journey, taking a sip of whisky then sitting up, straightening her clothes and her hair, she made no remark on the fact that they were travelling backwards. She looked dreamily out of the window, watching the houses and hedges and lime trees in their back-to-front procession as though nothing unusual was happening.
She looked over her shoulder at the approaching house and admired the lusciousness of its front garden.
The undergrowth of the front garden had grown very thick. Pyracantha, holly, sumac, orange blossom. Several unidentified flowering shrubs, some ferns, exotic grasses. Now, laid crookedly across some bushes which it flattened, was a bath. The old bath brought down from the bathroom. A white enamel tub filled with grime and dust, the streaked stain of verdigris just below the taps from the decades-old copper pipes that Janus had cut out. Blood stains from some of the birds that had died in it. It sat in the garden listing like the wreck of a lifeboat that had cast off from the house.
The front door was ajar so that Butcher, their plumber, could get in and out from his van which was parked outside.
Butcher had been their plumber ever since they’d moved into Fernlight Avenue. It was he who’d replumbed the kitchen sink, who’d repaired the storage tank in the loft when it froze one winter, who’d even reflashed the leaking chimney stack over the back bedroom. Colette liked him. She admired him, as she admired anyone who could work with their hands. Butcher was a model-maker in his spare time and had constructed a fully working model steam engine, big enough to seat him and his grandchildren as they chugged around his back garden. Once, when the kids were small, she’d met him by chance near to where he lived, and he’d invited them in and they’d spent an afternoon on the trains. He was a dog lover also, owner of two Dobermans, Minnehaha and Hiawatha, shark-like beasts Colette sometimes saw Butcher walking on the ends of two leather leashes.
Despite his tinkering with toy trains, however, Butcher professed to despise children.
‘Children are cruel,’ he frequently said, ‘I’ve seen what children can do to animals.’ He would then give an example, recounted from his own childhood, which usually featured the extended torturing of a cat by some backstreet kids.
‘Not all children are like that,’ said Colette, who couldn’t recall her own children ever harming animals, except out of an innocent curiosity. James, it was true, used to like drowning wood lice in treacle, and she remembered Julian eating a caterpillar, but never had they been wilfully cruel. Juliette had wept, once, when she saw her mother annihilating bluebottles with a newspaper, and Janus had devoted himself to the care of sick Scipio.
‘Children are born cruel. We all are. We have to learn to be civilized. Most of us don’t manage it.’
There was such bitterness in Butcher, but a sort of resignation as well, a grudging acceptance of humanity’s essential badness as something one had to live with. His children, Colette understood, were all outstanding successes. One had read law at Oxford, another was a journalist on a serious paper, another was a doctor, yet Butcher seemed to take no parental satisfaction from their achievements, putting them down entirely to the re-emergence of some long suppressed genetic trait. Butcher himself could barely read.
Now Butcher had his biggest commission at Fernlight Avenue – the installation of a new bathroom suite, a new lavatory, the fitting of an immersion heater on the landing to replace the long defunct heating system that had once been powered by the boiler in the kitchen, which Butcher was also to remove. This was Butcher’s third day at the house. The lavatory had been the first to go. That old, white porcelain Howie unit, with its high cistern that only worked once out of every four or five pulls, had given Butcher such problems that in the end he had to take a sledgehammer to it. From downstairs it sounded like a cook had gone mad in his kitchen. Its replacement was a green enamel suite with a low-level cistern. Butcher was very proud of it. ‘Hasn’t it got a lovely flush?’ he kept saying, turning the handle repeatedly, watching the water crowd into the bowl where it formed a tongue of froth, ‘Perfect.’
Colette entered the kitchen and plonked her shopping bags on the table, relieved greatly to be unburdened. Aldous followed with the hi-fi in its box, leaning backwards slightly to take the weight, nudging his way into the music room. Butcher was on his knees before the boiler, poking at it with a spanner. Without looking up he said ‘Bathroom’s all done now my sweetheart. I think I’ll have to leave this little lot until tomorrow, though. One of the bolts has snapped off at the back and the rear panel’s rusted solid. Looks like another sledgehammer job.’ He briefly put his arms around the cold, brown iron of the stove, as though hugging it, and gave it a token pull. ‘Stuck fast. Thought I’d have been done today. Never mind.’
‘So there’s hot water?’
‘There is. I’ll show you how it all works,’ and Butcher stood up, slowly and with difficulty. He was a big man, bull-shaped, and had back pain, which made him wince whenever he bent over. Husband and wife followed their plumber upstairs. He opened the cupboard on the landing. It was filled almost entirely by the tank which now was wearing what looked like a big red anorak. Butcher reached in with his hand behind the corner, ‘there’s a little switch here, it’s on at th
e moment, and so there’s a red light here . . .’ He pointed, and Colette bent to see. ‘It’ll take an hour or so from switching on to get warm, another half an hour to be piping hot. Should last the good part of an evening, if you switch it on at, say, four o’clock, you’ll have hot water up until bedtime.’
‘Lovely,’ said Colette.
‘Feel it,’ said Butcher, pressing his hand into the lagging. Colette felt. It was warm.
‘Could we all speak a little quieter,’ said Aldous in a loud whisper, ‘we don’t want to wake Janus.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Colette, ‘It’s nearly time for him to wake up anyway . . .’
‘I’m afraid I’ve been hammering and drilling up here all day,’ said Butcher loudly, ‘I even had to go in Janus’s room a few times to get at the pipe run. He didn’t stir once. I clean forgot there was anyone in there.’
They were just about to proceed to the bathroom when Butcher made a detour through to the back bedroom.
‘I had to pop in here to get at the wiring behind the tank, and then I saw it . . .’
‘Saw what?’
‘That amazing thing. That thing on the table. What is it? Is it something you made Mr Jones?’
On the table near the window was Aldous’s model of the fountain he’d designed for Brother Head.
‘It’s a fountain,’ said Colette.
The piece did look impressive. A rising helix of doves, roughly cut from clay and speckled with viridian and white glazes, turning around a central stem where a pipe took the water to the top. Aldous claimed it was designed so that every dove would have water falling from its wing tips, the overall effect would have been magical in the full size version, a cascade of birds and water.
‘This is scaled down is it? A model?’
‘Yes,’ said Aldous, ‘it’s one sixth of the size. So the actual fountain would be about eight feet high, and bronze.’
‘Clever bloke aren’t you,’ said Butcher, fingering the sculpture delicately with filthy hands, ‘to look at you you wouldn’t think you had it in you, if you don’t mind my saying. But this is really lovely. I can admire something like this, I don’t go so much for your paintings, but something like this that’s solid and full of lovely shapes – it’s really beautiful. Where’s it going to be built?’
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 31
