‘Nowhere,’ said Colette, ‘it doesn’t look like it anyway. It was designed for a monastery up north but the bishop of Durham wouldn’t come up with the money, and the monks don’t answer our letters.’
‘Should go somewhere though,’ said Butcher, thoughtfully. Then he laughed. ‘I’ve got a small foundry in my back garden. I use it to mould parts for my model railways, usually in cast iron – nothing on a big scale – just things like couplings and name plates. I’ll have to look into doing something like this in bronze . . .’
A technical conversation followed between Aldous and Butcher, concerning the feasibility of casting the fountain in bronze in a small, backyard foundry. Butcher seemed very keen on the idea of casting the piece for a feature in his extensive back garden railway.
‘Your back garden’s enormous,’ said Colette, remembering.
‘I was very lucky,’ said Butcher, ‘bought the place thirty years ago for one thousand five hundred pounds. Tiny house but a garden the size of a park. I built a small lake in it for the railway to go round. This would look very nice in that lake. Very nice indeed.’
Aldous and Colette exchanged silent giggles as they followed Butcher to the bathroom.
The bathroom was Butcher’s masterpiece. A triumph of sanitary engineering. Matching the colour of the lavatory, a sea-green bath with silver taps, streamlined and smooth as though cut from a slab of unveined marble. A pedestal washbasin, a little font on a pillar of onyx. It stunned Colette, the sheer newness of it, the perfection of it, even though there was still the detritus of Butcher’s work, a litter of screwed-up tape, offcuts of moulding, a hacksaw lying on the floor.
Butcher stood in the middle of the room, gathered a few of the tools that were still in there. It amazed Colette that someone so filthy could have produced something so coruscatingly clean.
‘I’ll be off now then, my loves,’ said Butcher, ‘back in the morning to finish off the boiler.’
And after a slow gathering of his things and a general noise of his great weight moving around the house, he left.
There was a tankful of hot water, jacketed, in the cupboard.
‘I think I’ll have a bath,’ said Colette, as though she’d only just grasped the purpose of these newly installed objects.
‘Okay,’ said Aldous, whispering, ‘but be careful not to wake Janus. Remember, he’s only through that wall.’
‘Will you shut up about waking Janus?’
‘I’ll go and get the rest of the things from the car.’
Colette was alone in the bathroom. She turned on the hot tap. In a matter of seconds the water was painfully hot. The bath filled. Steam rose and fogged the windows. Colette undressed while the water thundered, echoing off the empty walls, a wild yet contained noise, as though the room had been built around a waterfall.
Colette had no bath salts, bubble bath or anything like that to add to the water, so the water remained perfectly clear. Entering it was like stepping into a window. She sank up to her neck and looked down at her body, bent and shortened by the distorting water, so that it looked like something preserved in a bottle.
‘An average glass of water will almost certainly contain a molecule that has passed through the lips of Aristotle, such is the distribution and multitude of water molecules in the world.’
Janus Brian had said that, in one of his many water eulogies. Odd then, that his death had brought about this bathroom.
‘What about Jesus?’ Colette had replied.
‘Jesus as well. Anyone, really.’
‘Every glass of water you drink will contain a drop that was used in the miracle at Cana?’
‘True,’ Janus Brian had chuckled, ‘that is very true, dear.’
Colette felt she was bathing in miraculous wine.
Money. She’d never had so much of it, not in her entire life, and it had never occurred to her that Janus Brian should leave her any, but then, who else was there? Expectations among her children in the weeks following his death had become silly. Perhaps she would be sole heir to her dead brother’s estate. That bungalow was worth quite a bit, and he still had heaps left over from the sale of Leicester Avenue. Supposing she had got the whole lot? Forty thousand or more? In the end her brother’s will, a very carefully considered document, divided his estate between a large number of inheritors. There was some for Agatha, some for Lesley, some for Reg and some for Reg’s sons. Colette’s was the biggest share, however. Eight thousand pounds, or just over. Money she had never dared hope for.
Janus Brian’s death shouldn’t have come as such a shock, but it did. Barely two months after they got back from Tewkesbury he’d died. It was always what she’d feared, and what he himself seemed to predict. The trouble with lifting someone like that onto a high is that afterwards they plummet deeper than before. The higher you lift them, the deeper they fall. In the autumn Janus Brian had fallen into a chasm of despair and died in a pathetic heap on its floor.
The doctor said he’d barely any working liver left, just a wedge of dead matter where it had been. He had drunk himself to death. Just as he had intended, right from the start.
What Colette likes about the bath is its depth. She can stretch right out in it. She could almost float in it. It’s like having your own private ocean. She likes sinking into the water up to her eyes, and looking along the flatness of the water and seeing what degree of stillness she can bring it to. If she holds her breath there isn’t a ripple at all. Or almost. Just her heartbeat causing a tremor on the surface of the water.
But then a larger ripple comes from somewhere, sending water into her eyes. It is Janus getting out of bed in the next room.
16
When Aldous and Colette first became rich, they celebrated by going out for a drink at The Goat and Compasses. They took Julian with them, and invited Juliette and her boyfriend Boris as well. Juliette and Boris had in turn invited some of their friends. This gathering at The Goat and Compasses had been so successful that it became a regular event on Saturday nights, and the number of people gathered slowly increased over the weeks.
James had moved back into Fernlight Avenue, having taken up postgraduate studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury. Though he was often out late, or spending the nights somewhere else, he usually came to the pub on Saturday nights, often with a girlfriend in tow. Julian would usually bring two or three of his friends – O’Hogarty, O’Malley and O’Flaherty. The gatherings could sometimes number over a dozen people, taking up three tables and a third of the saloon space of The Goat and Compasses, Aldous and Colette at its centre, stately, monarchical, rarely leaving their seats.
Towards the end of the evenings, when the maximum number of people had gathered, Colette would take a bunch of money out of her purse and offer it to whoever was nearest, asking them to get the next round in.
Colette and Aldous had not enjoyed a social life as rich as this since before the war. In those days they’d been part of a circle as large, if not larger, whose core was Colette and Lesley. It disappointed her to think of it, how that life had so abruptly ended thanks partly to the war, but mainly to the production of children. Their children came in such a chronological sprawl that it was, from the birth of Janus, more than thirty years before their youngest, Julian, was of an age to go in pubs. The old friendships in that time had long since evaporated. Their friends now were their children, and their children’s friends. Once the cause of their isolation and solitude, their children now placed them at the hub of a bubbling, lively community.
At first they felt at home in the small bar of The Goat and Compasses. They got to know its clientele – Harry the Dust, the ex-con who’d made a model of the pub out of matchsticks while he’d been in prison, and which was now proudly displayed on the shelf behind the bar – Old Tom, the thick-spectacled gent with a club foot who never removed his cap, and whose slow journey along Hoopers Lane with the aid of crutches and sticks seemed to take most of the afternoon – Miss Steed, the ol
d dear in the overcoat who drank two halves of shandy every evening, finding the cost of the beer less than the cost of the electricity she would have used if she’d stayed at home, especially since she always got a nearby stranger to buy her the second half, offering an inadequate few new pence as payment (‘I can never understand this new money’).
At about ten o’clock the shellfish woman would arrive, distributing tubs of cockles, mussels and jellied eels from a large wicker basket. Colette would always buy a tub of something, mostly to the disgust of the others. One evening she bought two tubs of jellied eels, one for herself, and one for Julian, who seemed keen to try them. Colette and her youngest son were sitting at opposite ends of the table, and later in the evening they began flicking little particles of jelly at each other, using the plastic spoons that came with the tubs, whose elasticity was such that the jelly could be propelled at quite a speed, and if clumsily aimed could shoot across the pub. As the two were quite drunk by this time, they began flicking jelly indiscriminately around the pub so that it landed in peoples’ hair, their clothes, in their drinks. Or else it stuck to the ceiling where it hung for a while before dropping, at random intervals, on whoever was below.
This was the beginning of their falling out of favour at The Goat and Compasses. Harry the Dust grumbled under his tousled, boyish hair, in which bright particles glittered, that such things shouldn’t be allowed. Miss Steed complained that her lemon shandy had ‘gone queer’. Old Tom’s cap glistened. Such a small thing, Colette lamented, the harmless scattering of congealed eel juice. Over the weeks she had taken a particular dislike to the moustachioed Irish barmaid that had admonished her and her son for their jelly-flicking that evening. She hadn’t liked the tone the woman used. She hadn’t liked her cheap make-up and jewellery, her cedar-red dyed hair, her Silvikrin bouffant hairdo. She began mocking and teasing this woman quietly behind her back as she came round to collect the glasses. The woman in her turn remained stoically tight-lipped, occasionally taking away glasses that were not quite empty, becoming stricter with the closing time routine, insisting that glasses were drained in good time for the closing of the pub.
‘It’s because she can’t have children,’ Colette said to the others one evening at closing time.
‘How do you know she can’t have children?’ said Aldous.
‘How else do you account for her behaviour?’ said Colette.
The woman, who’d several times asked Colette to finish her drink, finally took Colette’s quarter-full glass. Colette grabbed at it. An undignified tug-of-war ensued between the two women, which Colette won. As a sort of victory cry she blew a raspberry at the retreating barmaid, and this raspberry seemed to act as a final straw. The woman turned, snatched the glass away. Her lips were quivering with anger, but she couldn’t find any words other than ‘you . . . you . . .’
A few minutes later the barmaid returned with the landlord Gordon, a mild, quiet man in his sixties, his grey hair stylishly parted in the style of Edward VIII.
In the row that followed, the two women accused each other of having had too much to drink, an accusation that infuriated the sober barmaid, coming from Colette’s slurred mouth. They may have come to blows had not Gordon intervened. Colette and her circle still felt a sense of betrayal, however, when Gordon quietly and politely told them not to drink in his pub again.
The following Saturday they took up residence in The Coach and Horses at the bottom of Owl Lane, a large, gloomy pub with a slightly rougher clientele – some bearded men with leather jackets always occupied one corner, Colette understood that they were called Hell’s Angels, a youth cult of which she’d vaguely heard. Elsewhere there were sour looking old men in stained overcoats, or wan youths in shiny shirts and luminous socks. They didn’t drink at The Coach and Horses for long. Although its space and noise meant that their presence didn’t cause the disturbance it had at The Goat and Compasses, things became too noisy with the advent of live music. At nine o’clock every Saturday a lonesome cowboy would whoop and yodel through a wall of feedback while twanging a badly tuned electric guitar.
Colette and Aldous, after a few weeks, moved north with their entourage along Owl Lane to The Owl itself, a quieter pub. Its customers were the well-to-dos of Windhover Hill, the squires who owned the mansions of Parsons Lane. But its smallness and quietness meant their presence was soon causing an unwelcome disturbance. Colette for the first time became conscious of people looking at Julian in an odd way. She wondered if this was because some nights he brought his school homework to the pub and would sip halves of cider while solving problems of trigonometry, or discussing certain issues arising from the Russian Revolution, or whether it was because they recognized Janus in Julian. He was, as his adolescence progressed, bearing a stronger and stronger resemblance to his older brother.
‘Put that homework away Julian, for Christ’s sake,’ said Colette one evening, feeling an unusual sense of shame at seeing Julian with his six inch ruler, his protractor, drawing circles with his compass, measuring angles, all the while munching dry-roasted peanuts and drinking Woodpecker.
Veronica Price was also made uncomfortable when Julian did his homework, especially when Julian would ask her for help, which he usually did, having manoeuvred himself into position beside her, so that he could show her the translation from French he was working on, or the plotted co-ordinates on a Cartesian graph.
‘I really don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be doing your homework in a pub, Julian,’ she said, ‘what would your teachers say?’
‘But you’re a teacher, and you don’t mind.’
‘But I do mind. And I’m not your teacher.’
‘I wish you were. Can I kiss you?’
‘No.’
Julian kissed her anyway and giggled. Veronica feigned indignation.
‘Anyway, how would my teachers know?’
‘Well, they might . . .’ Veronica paused, trying to think the problem through, ‘. . . they might smell cider on your homework.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Julian, sniffing his graphs.
Scott joined in.
‘You might spill some on it, get your quadratic equations smudged.’
‘Yes, and then what would your teachers say if they saw beer stains on your homework?’
‘I’d say my girlfriend spilt it, and she’s a teacher . . .’
‘I’m not your girlfriend, Julian,’ said Veronica, turning to the schoolboy and trying to speak with firmness. Seeing that her words had no effect she repeated them, but they were distracted by the intervention of Colette.
‘Why do you have to do it now?’ she said, ‘when you’ve had all Saturday to do it – why do you have to leave it till we’re in the pub?’
Julian didn’t answer.
‘Just so that you can embarrass me, isn’t it?’
‘Mother,’ intervened Juliette, ‘when it comes to embarrassment . . .’
Things came to a head one weekend when Colette had made a special plea to Julian not to bring his homework to the pub, and he had promised. But when they got to The Owl he sat there properly, drinking the pint of Stella she had bought him (Colette always got the first round in), and he’d waited until the others arrived – Veronica, Rita, Scott, Juliette, Boris, James – and had as usual managed to sit close to Veronica and quickly became engaged in some sort of intimate whispering and giggling that Colette wasn’t sure that she approved of. When she saw Julian take out a school exercise book, a pencil with an eraser at its tip, and a ruler and begin measuring and drawing something in the book, having cleared a space amongst the empties, crumpled crisp packets and flecks of cigarette ash, Colette felt a blinding rush of anger that caused her to eject a half-finished glass of barley wine over the opened book, splashing generously across the open pages and beyond, into Julian’s lap, which caused Julian to jump and squirm in his seat as though he’d been electrocuted.
‘There, explain that to your teachers . . .’ said Colette, scowling. The dr
enched book, half a term’s mathematics, smelling of fermented barley, a soggy mess on the table.
They stopped going to The Owl shortly after that, and migrated west along Taunton Drive to The Lemon Tree in Windhover Hill’s leafiest quarter where, across a stretch of preserved lawns, the cemetery lay, and it was this fact that made The Lemon Tree only a brief interlude in the history of their Saturday nights, because whenever Colette left the pub she found herself in the vicinity of her dead loved ones, which at first she thought might be a comfort to her, but which turned out to be a source of intense pain which had her crying herself to sleep afterwards, and a sad Sunday to follow.
They moved back to the heart of Windhover Hill, to The Marquis of Granby on Hoopers Lane, a red brick, red tiled building with dormer windows, which had become the favourite drinking spot of young people on the make, whose Ford Capris were always parked outside like a regiment of streamlined infantry. The interior had been modernized, the furniture was bamboo and wickerwork, there was foliage everywhere. Here, at last, was a pub where Colette and her party didn’t attract attention. Their various follies passed unnoticed by the self-absorbed, nouveau riche braggadocios that filled the bar – young men in T-shirts with tinted hair and neat moustaches, their girlfriends in leather jackets with short skirts and ice-cream hairdos. In one corner an older generation of drinkers gathered, who’d been drinking there since before the pub’s refurbishment in favour of a younger clientele, but who remained and regarded their surroundings with the wide-eyed wonder and fear of someone witnessing visions of the future.
Aldous was a little worried at first about drinking in The Marquis of Granby. He had a feeling that Janus had been a regular in the past. But then he’d been a regular of every pub in the past.
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 32
