Arthur McCann

by William Pitt

  'Ah, you missed the performance then.'

  'The performance ? Oh, the wedding. Yes, I had to go to another wedding, and I said I'd just drop in as soon as I could.'

  'You're not from around here, are you? You sound a bit Welsh.'

  'I'm from Newport.' I thought the conversation was becoming dangerous. 'Want to dance?'

  She did not say anything, but leaned logically against me, looping casual arms around my neck, and moved me gently back among the other dancers.

  'Suppose you knew Ken, did you ? When he was in Wales?'

  'Ken,' I said. 'Yes, I knew him. Yes, in Wales.'

  'Just think of them now,' she sighed. 'Making love.'

  She glanced around the corner of my face and laughed at my expression. ' Well, they are,' she insisted. ' Down there in Bournemouth between the sheets. Ken will have fixed it all nice. Grand Hotel, champagne in the room. All that sort of thing. He's got a bit of style Ken, even if he's got no money. And I think you need a bit of style on a wedding night, don't you?'

  'Definitely,' I said.

  'You married?'

  'Well, sort of.'

  'Not getting on?' She sounded concerned more than just interested, as though she might be able to help.

  ' I suppose you could say that.'

  'Is she here then, your wife?'

  The suggestion made me jerk guiltily. ' Oh no,' I said, nevertheless glancing around. 'She's not here. We're sort of . .. apart. . . temporarily.'

  'That's how marriages should always be,' she sighed. 'Apart. It's better for a lot of people that way.'

  'And you're one ?'

  'I'm one of two,' she agreed. 'Now, when you're married you can't do the things you want to do, can you?'

  'You can say that again,' I agreed. How did it come about that on my wedding night my bride was drunk and unconscious in The Shunter's Arms, Swindon, and I was groping around a strange room with a strange girl who spoke with a voice like a farmyard.

  'You sound like Lorna Doone,' I said. 'You've got that voice.'

  'Not as far west as that,' she responded close to my ear. ' But far enough west. My old man says that with this voice I ought to be carrying a yoke and a couple of churns.'

  'I'm not really supposed to be here,' I heard myself confessing, ' I don't really know Ken or anybody. I just walked in just now. I gate-crashed. It was just that I happened to be going by.'

  'I know,' she said.

  'You saw me come in?'

  'Aye, because I walked in just before you. I don't know a bloody soul here either.'

  'You're kidding! How about Ken?'

  'Who's Ken?'

  'The bridegroom, isn't he? You said so. You said he's gone to Bournemouth with the bride.'

  ' I made it up,' she said flatly.' I knew you wouldn't know, so I just made it up. I could tell that you were sneaking in the way you came through the door. You looked like one of them spies.' I heard her laugh privately next to my ear.

  'I saw the lights,' I said. 'So I took the chance.'

  'There's no risk,' she assured. 'Not if it's as late as this. I do it all the time.'

  'All the time? Walking into people's parties?'

  'Every Saturday. I've been to more parties in Swindon than anybody in the town. Some people even recognize me from party to party. If they ask you how you came to be there it's easy to say that you came with George or Ronnie or Beryl, but they've gone home and left you.'

  'You must like parties a lot,' I said. 'You must be keen. I wouldn't have the guts.'

  'It's better than being by yourself.' We were shuffling, facing each other now. I looked closely at her. Her thin face was serious, her eyes still.

  'You're by yourself a lot then?' I said.

  'A fair amount. When you come to think about it, it's a bit strange that when you get married you start being by yourself.'

  I said I knew what she meant. 'Where is he then, your husband ?'

  'He just goes away. He's working. You won't believe this, but the council here send him all over the place.'

  'Swindon Council?'

  'Yes, he's a dustman.'

  'And he travels about? That's a new sort of dustman, isn't it?'

  ' Well, he's not just your ordinary, common or garden, pig-swill-humping dustman. He's one of the few who knows how to operate the new automatic refuse disposal machines. Or he says he is. That's what he tells me. They're very dangerous if they're not worked properly. Apparently they can just swallow up a dustman whole, and when they've finished all that's left is his flybuttons.'

  I laughed, but she continued to look serious. 'It's the truth,' she said. 'And Bertram is one of the few in the country who knows all about them. So the council lend him out all over the place. Otherwise there would be hardly any dustmen left.'

  Somehow, with my set ideas about women in those days, I could not reconcile the way she talked, her accent, with the things she said. Until the record finished we said nothing then I said: 'Why don't you let me take you home?' I had been thinking of asking her for some time, but I had hesitated because, after all, it was my wedding night.

  Even then, at the moment I said it, I had a thought that I ought to get away from her and from that place, and creep back to The Shunter's Arms and my snoring bride. But she said 'All right.'

  'I'll get my coat,' she said. 'I shoved it in that hall cupboard when I came in. Is yours in there too?'

  I did not have a coat and I waited for her and helped her on with hers while she smiled convincing and familiar goodnights to everyone around. Then, from the door, she called to a girl who was pressed close to a youth on the stairs: 'See you at the clinic, then. 'Bye.'

  ' I thought you didn't know anyone,' I said when we were in the drizzling street again.

  'I didn't. Only you.'

  'What about the girl you're going to see at the clinic?'

  'I don't know her either,' she said shaking her rope of hair. 'I only said that on the spur of the moment.'

  I laughed with surprise. ' He backed away from her very quickly,' I said.

  'His expression changed a bit,' she agreed. 'But I didn't like her anyway. Accused me of drinking her gin when I first went into the place.'

  'And you did.'

  'Accident. You have to have a drink in your hand or you don't look as if you belong at the party. That's one of the secrets of being accepted.'

  'Being accepted,' I repeated. 'That's a bit of a job anywhere.'

  'Half life is being accepted. Look at us. My old man doesn't accept me, and your wife doesn't accept you. And we're married to the bastards.'

  I did not like her calling Pamela a bastard, because, after all they had never met. But I stopped myself saying anything about it. Instead I said: 'But we accepted each other right away. You and I, I mean.'

  'A thief to know a thief,' she laughed.

  'How far do you live?' I put my arm around her small waist. It felt strange and starved after Pamela's.

  'Just here,' she said. 'Be a bit quiet because that's a pet shop underneath and if I make the slightest row coming in it wakes up a crazy parrot they've got and he starts to scream and it wakes all the other things, so before you know what's happening it's like Noah's Ark.'

  We sidled up the stairs. My guilt was now effectively engulfed by my excitement. She went ahead of me and put a light on at the top, just within the door. On the stairs she had pulled up the skirt of the long coloured gipsy garment she was wearing, and I looked up to see it drawn tight across her slim backside. From behind the wall to my right I heard a clucking and put my head to the wallpaper.

  'Poultry,' she said.' Ducks, chickens. You can smell them. It's supposed to be a pet shop, but it's more like an indoor farm sometimes.'

  I went through the entrance. Two brand new metal dustbins were parked behind the door and another was a few feet up the short passage. 'My husband brings home his work,' she explained tapping the lid of the first one with her finger tips. ' He steals the good ones and sells them again. He couldn't
be a jeweller or something like that and bring home diamonds or emeralds, worse luck.'

  We went into a room furnished in such a haphazard fashion that everything looked as though it had been dumped anywhere. Books, hundreds of books, were in piles on the floor, while a line of bookshelves stood empty as the rungs of a ladder. A small table was lying on its side in one corner and casual chairs were standing around like loiterers.

  'You haven't been in long?' I concluded looking around.

  'Two years in June,' she shrugged. 'Like a drink?'

  'Yes, I will have one, thanks. What's your name? You didn't tell me.'

  'Belinda,' she said. 'Belinda Storey-Stroud. No, that's

  terrible. Belinda Brown. Does that sound better?'

  'The first one sounded all right to me,' I said.

  'I made it up. I'm a terrible liar, you'll have to realize that. I do it all the time.'

  'Well, I'm Arthur,' I said. 'Arthur McCann and that's the honest truth.'

  'I don't care if it isn't,' she said. 'Now, drinks.' She put her thin fingers to her mouth. ' Christ, darling, we've only got elderberry wine. My father sends it up from Somerset. I call it Parishes Food, because he's a vicar. Do you know any clergymen ?'

  ' I was with one this afternoon,' I admitted.

  ' Mine's enough to put you off vicars, the Archbishop, the Pope, the Holy Ghost, Jesus, God himself. When I was a little girl I found him urinating against the tombstone of a churchwarden he had disliked. Rotten bugger. Don't you think that's a low thing to do?'

  'Well, for a vicar, I suppose so,' I said. 'But it couldn't have hurt a dead churchwarden.'

  She looked thoughtful. She poured the pale elderberry wine from a stone bottle into two dusty glasses. 'Well it hurt me,' she said. ' I was only a kid, and I'd liked that man very much, the churchwarden. I used to stay with him a lot of the time and I thought it was my fault he was dead.'

  I sat on the edge of a divan covered with a large, red check tablecloth. The wine tasted like syrup. She sat next to me, nursing her drink in her lap, looking far away beyond the walls.

  'Why was that?' I asked.

  'Why was what?' She shook her head, rousing herself.

  'What you said. That you thought it was your fault he was dead.'

  ' Oh, that. Well, I used to have this funny idea when I was a little girl. I really thought I killed people. Just by being with them. First my mother. I loved her, of course, and she died, and I went to live with my grandparents, and they were both under the ground in a year. Then we had a housekeeper who committed suicide by tipping herself into the rain butt, and then Mr Jenkins, the churchwarden, who was a dear friend. If you ever thought of doing yourself in, by the way, the rain butt is the thing. Once you've tipped over there's no getting out because your legs stick straight up into the air. I can still see poor Mrs Powell's legs standing up out of the barrel. Even now.' She made the point seriously and in her yokel's voice it sounded all the more serious. 'They all went, one after the other,' she went on, 'and I truthfully thought that it was me who was knocking them off, that I was having this effect on them. You can probably understand that I was very upset about this and I couldn't tell anybody because I was only a child and thought you could be put to death for killing people like that. Anyway I asked my father if I could live with him and nobody else and, of course, he kept on living and that made me think that I wasn't really to blame after all. Either that or I'd lost the gift.'

  'You don't feel that you do that now, do you?'

  'Oh no,' she smiled. 'Don't worry. You're safe with me.'

  'I didn't mean that.'

  I felt that in the normal order of things I ought to kiss her or throw her on the bed or do something similarly masculine but, for once, my instincts played fair, I held back, and it was right.

  'Why did you come to live here?' I asked. Then I realized she might have thought I meant that particular slovenly room, so I said: 'In Swindon.'

  'Bertram thought the streets might be paved with gold,' she laughed. She sat down on the divan and patted the quilt-tablecloth at her side and I sat down beside her. We conversed sitting upright like strangers in a railway compartment.

  'That's London, I always thought,' I said.

  'Where the streets are paved with gold?' she asked, absent from me again. 'Yes, I know now. But we only had enough fare to get here. Poor Bertram. All he found in the streets of Swindon was garbage. And it's his job to pick it up. He's too good for that, really. Bertram's got brains, but he never seems to find a job where they need them. When we first came he worked in the new crematorium. He used to call himself the "creme de la crematorium". He's clever, you see. But he lost that. Some mix up with the bodies, as though it matters who's next.'

  She revolved the elderberry wine in her glass reflectively and said: 'Still, I don't mind. I like towns. They're nice and hugging all around you. It's the country that scares me. All those trees and manglewurzles and men in the fields with bare chests calling after little girls, and all that singing over marrows in the church at harvest time. All is safely gathered in. Christ, I couldn't stand it! Every time I heard my father preaching to those people and telling them to live better lives I could see him pissing up against that churchwarden's headstone. And he was wearing his cassock. It must have been quite difficult in that because he had to lift it up like some old lady.'

  Slowly I said: 'I don't think I've ever met anyone like you, before.' I meant it.

  'Probably you haven't,' she agreed glumly. 'But I'll do for tonight, won't I?'

  The bald honesty of the statement stunned me. I sat holding my drink down by my knees as though it were some sort of ticket that someone would be collecting soon. I felt urged to say something equally honest in return.

  'Actually,' I said, looking down at the floor through the glass. 'This is my wedding night.'

  Even that did not shake her. 'I had an idea it was,' she said. 'That suit you're wearing is a wedding suit if I ever saw one. It's a wonder it's not embroidered with bells. Those creases! If you crossed your legs you'd cut one off just above the knee.'

  I examined my trouser creases. She was right.

  'Has she gone home to mum?'

  'No, not that. Pamela wouldn't do that. She'd be sure we stayed away for the week even if we never even passed a civil word. Just for the appearance of the thing, you see. No, I'm afraid she got herself well plastered this evening and she's flat out at the hotel.'

  'And you didn't stay with her like a good bridegroom

  should?'

  'No. No, I didn't. I was fed up. There's other things . ..'

  She nodded. 'There's always "other things",' she said. 'As soon as you get married you start opening up little cubby holes in the other person and seeing things you never knew about before.'

  'I don't think I can say it was quite like that,' I said, defending Pamela.' But I was just fed up. I only meant to go out for a walk tonight. I didn't mean to get involved, or anything.'

  'Go on with you,' she admonished, her voice deep and rural again. 'Nobody goes out at this time of night not meaning to get into trouble. Not half-hoping to meet somebody. They might not even admit it to themselves. But you haven't even got the excuse of a dog to walk.'

  'Well, I'm here anyway,' I shrugged.

  'And I am too,' she said, all at once with tenderness added to her practical observation. She had remained sitting formally at my side, but now she rose and turned and sank almost with relief down in front of me, kneeling and laying her thin body against my trembling legs and her head in my lap. Her hair sprawled out between my thighs like a black sporran. I was still holding my glass and I tried to reach for a side table with it but it was minutely out of reach. I plunged my left hand gently into her hair and swung around carefully but helplessly with the elderberry wine in my right.

  Finding no solution and fearful less the magic opportunity should be broken by such a stupid inconvenience, I swigged back the rest of the wine, and tossed the glass gently so that it
landed on the only rug in the place, a few feet away. For once I did not miss.

  Both of my hands now searched through her mass of hair and ran down to the soft plank of her neck. Then I rubbed her shoulders and finally let both hands loop beneath her armpits with the palms against the flanks of her breasts. Her

  face came up to me and she said: 'I'll give you a wedding night, Arnold.'

  'Arthur,' I said, but not caring this time.

  'I can usually cry at this stage,' she said frankly. 'I can do it to order. If I just squeeze my eyes in a certain way the tears just ooze out. It's a very good technique, but I don't seem to want to do it with you. While my head's been down there I've been squeezing away like buggery and I can't get one drip out of them.'

  'Do you want to have another go?' I said. 'Put your head back there if you like and try again.'

  ' No, we'll do without the tears. Perhaps it's a good omen. Perhaps it will be more like the real thing.'

  'It will be the real thing,' I promised. When I remember saying that I feel embarrassed for myself because I did not know what I was saying. Her idea of the real thing and mine were so distant that I have to laugh.

  Perversion had hardly entered my young life. My only experience of those frightening shadows had been with the bloated Mr Gander and I had remained triumphant, unsullied, and without shame. Apart, of course, from the fact that I murdered him. Before that my only remembrance of anything the least murky and exotic was in an early childhood dream in which I saw myself pushing my protesting mother up our chimney. For some reason it gave me a thrill of infantile sexual pleasure to be shoving her up the flue and to hear her bleating through the cascading soot.

  My guilt over this absurdity had long before evaporated and, in any case, at that period, my lifelong efforts to get the maximum of ordinary sex, sufficient for the day without needing the evil, had left little time or room or, truthfully, desire for anything more complicated. Although at eighteen, I had experienced more women and quixotic situations than most men enjoy, or fail to enjoy throughout their life, I had been, in fact, building up a balance of normal unexotic experience. I had sought numbers not variations.

  Now, this long faced girl with the black hair, asked me to undo the small toadstool buttons down her back and I did so carefully, savouring the widening gap in her gipsy dress at every moment. The bamboo bumps of her neckbone, gently curved towards me, increased in number with each released button. She remained bent in front of me and when my fingers had finished the buttons and had reached her tail, she dropped her hands to her sides and in three almost petulant wriggles had the dress lying about her knees.