‘That is wonderful, Janus.’ Colette was genuinely overjoyed.
‘It’s good pay,’ he went on.
‘I’m so pleased, Janus.’
‘The only trouble is I have to work all day Saturday.’
‘Why’s that a problem?’
‘We won’t be able to meet any more.’
‘What about Sunday?’
‘This place doesn’t open on a Sunday.’
‘Oh. Well, we can meet somewhere else.’
‘Where though? I don’t want to meet in Brimstone Park. I don’t like that café.’
Colette thought. The district wasn’t rich in cafés. She couldn’t actually think of another one.
‘The only other thing would be to meet in a pub,’ said Janus, casually.
Colette spoke as if she hadn’t heard. ‘Isn’t there a Wimpy Bar down by The North Circular?’
‘You wouldn’t want to meet there, it’s full of noisy teenagers. We could meet for a quick lunchtime drink in a pub. I wouldn’t drink any alcohol, I promise. I’ve told you, I’ve given it up.’
‘I don’t think it would be good to meet in a pub, Janus.’
‘Okay. That’s okay. You’re probably right, it wouldn’t look good if anyone saw us. I suppose we’ll have to leave it then. We might as well say goodbye for good, then. Will you write to me?’
Colette was thinking.
‘Don’t be stupid, Janus, there must be a way round this . . .’
‘If you can think of somewhere to meet that’s convivial and easy for you to get to . . .’
Colette thought it over silently for a while, conscious of Janus’s expectant face bearing down on her lowered head.
‘If you promise,’ she said, ‘not to drink any alcohol. Not a drop. If you drink a drop I’m going straight home.’
‘I promise.’ He bent forward to kiss her again. The touch of the kiss, the pleasure on his face, this was enough in itself to make her decision worthwhile. ‘Shall we meet in The Coach and Horses? It’s the only pub I’m not banned from.’
‘Yes, okay, hang on though . . .’
‘What?’
‘Isn’t that within half a mile of the house?’
Janus shrugged dismissively.
‘Perhaps an inch. It’s borderline. Don’t worry, no one’s going to get out a tape measure. Anyway, I’ve got to rush. See you in a fortnight.’
And he was gone.
Colette looked at the map that evening at home. It was very difficult to work out exactly how far The Coach and Horses was from Fernlight Avenue, there were several corners and changes of direction that had to be taken into account. Then she wondered if half a mile was meant ‘as the crow flies’ or actual distance travelled. Surely it must mean ‘as the crow flies’. In which case it was definitely within the boundary, probably by an eighth of a mile. Though by road it was more like, as Janus had said, on the boundary. If something went wrong, if they were spotted, she could at least plead ignorance, say she thought it meant distance by road, and not as the crow flies. That bloody crow. That stupid crow.
She didn’t tell Aldous that she was meeting Janus in a pub. She didn’t tell anyone. She said she was going to Brimstone Park. To her horror Aldous came with her some of the way. On the days she met Janus, Aldous had taken to going on his own into London to visit the galleries. It was as if he couldn’t bear to be in the same neighbourhood as his son. Usually he made his own way there, but this time he took the bus with Colette, staying on for the tube at Wood Green while Colette got off at the Triangle, as if she had been going to Brimstone Park. In fact she had to walk back quite a way to The Coach and Horses, where she found Janus sitting in the saloon bar, early as usual, a glass of orange juice in front of him, a copy of the Sunday Times.
He had undergone another transformation of dress. The duffel coat and jeans had been discarded. He was wearing a tweed jacket, a white shirt, a green tweed tie, beige corduroy trousers. He had the sensible, professional air of a teacher, or a doctor. As she approached he noticed her gazing at the orange juice.
‘Do you want to test it?’ He offered her the glass, smiling. ‘Just orange juice, like I promised.’
Wordlessly Colette took a sip from the glass. It was just orange juice.
‘You just sit and watch me,’ Janus said, when he came back from the bar with an identical glass for his mother, ‘I’ll drink soft drinks all afternoon and enjoy it. Now would you like to hear my good news?’
‘Yes,’ said Colette, looking around her in case there was anyone she recognized among the customers. There wasn’t as far as she could see, though the pub soon filled and she couldn’t keep up with monitoring the new faces.
‘Well, someone came into the shop last week, heard me playing, and has booked me to play at a private do in a big house in Chiswick. His wife’s fortieth birthday party, she’s a big Chopin fan, and was a child in Auschwitz. And he’s going to pay me five hundred pounds. Aren’t you happy for me?’
‘I am,’ said Colette, as though in a daze, ‘though the news is somewhat overshadowed by what you said about Auschwitz. The poor woman . . .’
‘The poor woman is now married to a millionaire piano collector . . .’
‘But she probably lost her whole family . . .’
‘Anyway,’ Janus said, evidently wishing he hadn’t mentioned Auschwitz, ‘I’ve made other contacts as well. It’s amazing who comes in the shop. Vladimir Ashkenazy was in last week, I didn’t get a chance to speak to him. Artur Rubenstein is a regular customer, apparently. These people just get through pianos like trousers. The company loans pianos to people like Rubenstein just for the publicity. The only problem is I keep meeting people from college . . .’
‘Why’s that a problem?’
‘Because they’re so bloody happy. And they had jobs like mine when they’d left college and have moved on. Working there is a bit like a champion racing driver working in a petrol station.’
Janus kept to his promise, and drank nothing but orange juice until the pub closed at two o’clock.
The second time they met he did the same.
When he offered to buy Colette her second orange juice of the day she felt she couldn’t take any more.
‘This orange juice is playing havoc with my insides. After the last time I had terrible heartburn for the rest of the day.’
‘What do you want then, lemonade? Tomato juice? Barley wine?’
Colette looked sheepishly pleading. Janus was encouraging.
‘It’s okay for you to drink, you know. You don’t have to abstain in solidarity. They do Gold Labels here. Shall I get you one?’
Colette gave a tiny, frightened nod.
24
There was a knock at the front door.
‘It’ll be canvassers,’ said Colette, ‘you answer it Aldous, you’re so good with them.’
‘Can’t someone else answer it?’
He looked around at the company in the crowded kitchen. There were many who could have answered it. James and Marilyn were over for lunch. Julian was back for one of his weekends at home, and Myra had come round to visit. It was a warm Saturday in May 1979, a week before the general election, but no one was talking about politics. They were talking instead about Julian and Myra’s plans to hitch-hike around Europe.
‘I’m not sure if I really should allow you,’ had been Colette’s instant response once the two had unveiled their plan. Julian didn’t seem to take this remark seriously, as though her permission had been the least of their problems. Aldous had been keen.
‘The boy’s nearly a captain, he’s been on boats out in the North Sea for goodness’ sake . . .’
‘It’s not Julian I’m worried about, it’s this girl. Do you think we should leave her in the charge of this Beano-reading sailor, in all these desperado countries – where did you say you were going?’
Julian reiterated a well-rehearsed list.
‘France, West Germany, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Italy
and then France again.’
‘And where have you got all the money for a trip like this?’
Aldous, having delayed answering the door for as long as seemed acceptable, was beginning to hope whoever it was might have gone away, when a second, louder knock came, dragging him reluctantly out of his chair. No one else seemed to have heard it, apart from Colette.
On the doorstep he met a tall, thin man with pouting, feminine lips. A blue rosette was attached to his lapel.
‘Good afternoon sir, I’m calling on behalf of the Conservative Party.’
‘Oh. Are you?’
‘I was wondering whether we could count on your vote in the forthcoming election.’
Aldous hesitated for a moment.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve always voted for your party, actually.’
The man gave a beam of satisfaction that Aldous found rather rewarding.
‘That’s splendid sir. Thank you. Goodbye.’
Aldous returned to the kitchen feeling flushed.
Julian was explaining how cheaply they could live in Eastern Europe.
‘It would cost us practically nothing. Myra’s saved some money from her Saturday job, and I’ve got some saved . . .’
‘Surely you’re having enough adventures at sea without having to gallivant over dry land as well . . .’ Colette protested. But she suspected Julian was suffering some mild disillusion with his chosen career. He seemed to come home more and more, almost every weekend. He was gradually coming to understand that his Sealink sponsorship meant he had little prospect of working on anything other than cross-channel ferries for the foreseeable future. There was a chance of more exciting routes, such as Felixstowe to Copenhagen, or Hull to Bergen and other Scandinavian ports, but there were several years of cadetship to endure before that prospect. After the summer he was due to spend six months on the ferry from Dover to Calais, mainly on bridge-watch duties. He didn’t seem to be looking forward to it much.
‘You’ll need visas,’ said James, who was also in the kitchen, with Marilyn, ‘Half these countries might not let you in.’
‘I went to the Polish embassy yesterday, I’ve got all the forms . . .’
‘Who was at the door, darling?’ Colette called across the room to her husband.
‘Someone from the Conservative Party.’
‘I hope you told them to get lost,’ said James.
‘I certainly did.’
‘Because I’m leaving the country if they let that woman in.’
‘You’ll be leaving the country anyway,’ said Marilyn.
‘Why, where are you going?’ said Colette.
‘He’s my new research assistant,’ said Marilyn, laying a protective hand on James’s shoulder. ‘He’s coming with me to Venezuela in the summer.’
‘Only for a few weeks,’ said James.
‘What has happened to my family?’ moaned Colette, ‘Why are you all leaving the country? Juliette’s said she’s going to France in the summer . . .’
‘Everyone goes abroad these days,’ said Julian, ‘it’s not a big thing . . .’
There was another knock at the door. To everyone’s surprise Aldous went to answer it without a fuss.
There was a stocky, whiskery man on the doorstep with a Bobby Charlton combover. He had a red rosette on his lapel.
‘Good afternoon sir, I’m wondering if the Labour Party can rely on your vote this coming election.’
‘Of course,’ said Aldous, ‘I’ve always voted Labour actually.’
The man checked himself, as though he’d been prepared for an argument, then beamed, giving Aldous an even stronger sense of satisfaction than before. He’d found a foolproof way of dealing with political canvassers – express support and they simply disappear. He returned to the kitchen feeling slightly giddy.
‘I hope you told him I’ve got five pounds riding on this election,’ said James.
He went on to explain that he’d placed a bet with William Hill, at odds of six to one, on a Labour victory. Easy money, he said. He should have put more on, now he’d come to think about it.
‘Five pounds?’ said Marilyn, ‘I heard the Tories were ten points ahead.’
‘Yes, but if you compare the personal ratings of the leaders, Callaghan’s miles in front. When it comes to the crunch the British public would never let that stuck-up woman run the country.’
‘I don’t know why everyone’s getting so worked up about this election,’ said Colette, ‘nothing’s going to change.’
‘I suppose you’ll be voting for her,’ James then said to his mother. But Colette pulled a face of disgust at the idea, which delighted her children. For once mother and sons had found common political ground.
When a third knock was heard, Aldous thought he was entitled to delegate the answering to someone else. James agreed, and shortly returned.
‘There’s an enormous Irishwoman at the door asking for Myra,’ he said.
Myra went white.
‘Oh no. It’s my mum. Don’t tell her I’m here, please don’t.’
Colette went to the front door.
‘I’ve come for my daughter,’ the woman said. Colette saw Myra’s prettiness hidden somewhere in the puffy, worn features of the woman on the doorstep.
It turned out that Myra had been lying to her mother, saying that she was sleeping at a friend’s house. Her mother had discovered the deceit, so here she was.
‘She’s not here.’
Brown eyes stared at Colette, mother to mother.
‘You must understand, I can’t allow this to go on . . .’
A man in a city coat with a blotchy face was standing in the background, at the end of the path, looking with disdain at the tangled, rotting mess of the front garden.
‘Allow what to go on?’
‘I know you have different standards from us . . .’
Colette was suddenly absorbed by the woman’s clothes. A navy blue dress that ballooned around her enormous bosom, to which a red carnation was pinned. She had a sort of neckerchief affair around her neck – blue dots on white. It was as though she was en route to a wedding. She had dressed in her Sunday best to come here. How odd, thought Colette, that these council estate dwellers from the marshes of the Lee basin should feel such a frisson of feudal inferiority, that they should need to dress up to visit the avenues of Windhover Hill. Did they think they would be laughed at otherwise, would have the dogs set on them? It annoyed Colette deeply.
A small row ensued, sparked by the sense that she had of being criticized by this woman for being a drunk, a lapsed Catholic, for having her hair too long, for not keeping her front garden tidy, for the peeling paint on her front door. Seeing that Colette was about to slam it on her, the woman appealed again to their shared burden of motherhood.
‘Myra told me she preferred your house to her own home. How do you think that makes a mother feel? We’ve never seen eye to eye I’m afraid. She’s a very wilful girl . . .’
I wish I could trust you, thought Colette. I wish you were a real friend, and that I could talk to you about Janus, and we could share our sorrows about children slipping away from us. I wish that you weren’t the bloated, varicosed, uneducated, God-fearing, narrow-minded fool that you evidently are.
‘Myra is a nice girl. She’s a good girl,’ said Colette, ‘she is very sensible.’
Colette wished that Janus was here. He could have given this woman such a fright she would never have come back. As it was she bore the woman’s words, spoken, as they were, in a rough, southern Irish brogue, until the woman had said all she had to say, and then closed the door on her, promising to pass her message on to Myra if she saw her.
‘What’s all this about you two spending nights together without Myra’s mum’s permission?’ said Colette, half-laughing. Myra’s trembling face had become something she now treasured, in the light of what her mother had said. That she preferred this house to her own. Myra had said that to her own mother.
‘The w
oman’s mad,’ Julian said. ‘Since Myra spent a weekend at Gravesend she’s refused to talk to me. If I call for Myra at her house, her mother gives me hand-written notes instead. Look – I’ve still got one on me.’ He took a crumpled scrap of paper from his pocket.
Myra don’t want to see you
‘She doesn’t know I’m spending some weekends here. But now it’s the only way we can meet up.’
‘So that’s why you’ve been coming back so much. I thought it was because you were fed up with Gravesend.’
‘No,’ said Julian, surprised, ‘I love Gravesend.’
No one in the room was sure if he was serious.
‘So what does your mother think about you hitch-hiking around Europe with Julian?’ said Colette, turning her attention to Myra, who had now changed colour to lobster-red, deeply embarrassed at hearing her mother’s voice at the front door. ‘But I don’t suppose you’ve told her yet have you? What if she says no?’
‘Then Myra will make a rope of bed sheets . . .’ said Julian.
Colette thought about Myra’s mother a lot after that. She toyed with the possibility that the woman was right, that the two should be kept apart, not allowed to sleep with each other. But at the same time the thought was ridiculous. Myra was leaving school this summer. Julian was a sailor-to-be, living half away from home. And young people had different expectations these days.
‘There’s no point in trying to impose the standards of our generation on our own children,’ Aldous had said when she’d raised the matter with him. She thought it was true. There had been such sweeping changes since they were young, those prewar childhoods they’d spent seemed to belong to a remote past which today’s schoolchildren now studied in their history classes. But Colette didn’t really like it. She didn’t like the way children were growing up so fast.
‘Soon there won’t be any children. There will be babies, and then there will be small adults. That can’t be right, can it? We should be doing the opposite. Childhood should be made to last for as long as possible.’
And it did make her feel uncomfortable when her children would suddenly talk openly about sex.
‘I have just realized that music and sex are the same thing.’
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 41
