Petal looked up at him, the green eyes considering.
“OK,” she said. “Wednesday.”
“Wednesday,” he said. “I’ll call for you at eight o’clock?”
She nodded.
Victor felt a hand on his shoulder. It was heavy.
“That’ll do, sonny boy.” The face he looked into was pasty, the lips heavy, the shoe-string tie did not hide a grubby shirt.
“You’d better go, Vic,” Petal said, letting go of him. “This is my friend.”
“How do you do?” Victor said above the noise of the band.
“…Meetcher,” the Teddy boy said. He pushed Victor aside and, pulling Petal firmly to his large chest, glided off. At the door Victor had to pass the small group of his pals. They wore heavy boots and their eyes followed him out unblinking.
He walked back along the sea front, the lights and the people changing gradually to dark emptiness, and the green sward punctuated only by shelters in which pairs of lovers cuddled close.
At the door of the flats he met Louise. He could smell the gin on her breath. She looked as if she had been crying. Disinterested, because she was neither young nor beautiful, he hadn’t really noticed her much before, except to exchange the odd words in the café. He realised suddenly that other people, older people, might, too, have their problems. She seemed sad, not bright and polished as she usually did. He looked at the moon, three-quarters full.
“It’s a lovely night,” he said, not mentioning the pavilion bar. “I walked along the cliffs.”
“You can smell the sea,” Louise said, “even at night.”
Victor held the door open for her. “Good night, Louise.”
“Good night, Victor,” she searched in the dim vestibule light for her keys.
“See you in the morning,” Victor said, and went up the stairs to his flat.
Thirteen
The rain, which had fallen incessantly from a colourless sky since Friday night, showed no signs of stopping by Sunday morning.
The beaches were empty, sodden, puddled by water from the sea and the sky. There were pools of water in the green canvas shrouds of the deck-chairs on the promenade; the pedaloes were awash; it dripped sadly from the roof of ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ and from the tables in the garden. In the boarding-houses, despondent parents watched their year’s savings dissolve in rain and slapped or played with fractious children who wanted to know why they couldn’t go on the beach. In the village the cafés were full, steaming with humanity who came in gratefully from the wet with shiny mackintoshes and dripping umbrellas.
Arthur Dexter had decided, influenced by the weather, that it was time they all had a day off. Although the holiday-makers would certainly be in search of tea and coffee today, it was unlikely that they would come down to the beach to find it. If they did they would find ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ closed, as was the Corporation Café, and would have to go elsewhere.
The staff of ‘Le Casse-Croûte’ were taking a well-earned rest in their own or each other’s flats, sorry only that on this day of nothing to do, they were not lying indolently sunning on the beach.
In number Four, Arthur and Vera lay against their satin bed-heads, breakfast trays by their sides, reading the Sunday newspapers; Vanessa and Victor, in the manner of youth, were still asleep, waking now and then to hear the steady fall of the rain, then turning over to a new dream, a fresh sleep which, if undisturbed, would last till lunchtime.
In the bathroom of Number One, Louise, up to her elbows in soapsuds, her hair to the shoulders of her paisley dressing-gown, was washing under-garments and stockings for herself and her mother, and thinking of Uncle Harry. Occasionally she smiled at herself in the mirror above the basin in an attempt to see herself through his eyes.
Amanda and Jennifer Gurney in Number Three, having spent nearly an hour drawing on the steamy window with their fingers and grumbling at the rain, had now settled on the floor to a game of Monopoly at which both cheated unashamedly. They were supposed to be looking after the baby who, crooning to itself an unintelligible lullaby, was happily tearing up the latest copy of the British Medical Journal. Doctor and Mrs Gurney, taking advantage of the peace and the rain which obviated the necessity to get up and do anything, had remained in bed and locked the door of their bedroom.
Howard, in Number Five, having prepared himself a painstakingly cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs, with his own special brand of coffee despatched each week from the coffee man in South Molton Street, had gone back to bed with the Sunday Observer and Rousseau on inequality. He was indifferent to the fact that it was raining, and could think of no better way to pass the morning.
Number Six was empty. The bed had been slept in, but the bedroom looked as if a bomb had hit it, as did the rest of the flat. Its tenant was standing gloomily by the window downstairs in Number Two.
“You know something, Basil,” said Honey, who was in bed watching him. “You know all about me, but I really don’t know anything at all about you.”
Basil dug his fists into the pockets of his yellow wool cardigan until they were stretched almost to his knees.
“All I know is that I’m fed up,” he said, looking at the rain as it fell monotonously on to a sea-front empty except for a small, hooded child who sought every puddle with its Wellingtons.
“Why are you fed up?” Honey sat up and, drawing her knees up beneath the bedclothes, rested her head on the hump they made.
“I don’t know. This place gives me the creeps; the sea and the wind and the stupidity of the people in the shops and the slowness of the bus-conductors and the customers in the café not being able to make up their minds what they want, and parochialness of it all – once you’ve walked down the village street everyone knows who you are – and I’ve all day to think and all night to write, and you know how much I’ve written of the chapters and chapters I was going to? Nothing! Not a single, solitary word. I put the paper in the typewriter, then I read the newspapers or write a letter, or make a phone call, or change my socks, anything at all, to put off the moment. And when the moment comes, when there’s nothing else that I can possibly pretend to do, something happens to my brain. It freezes, atrophies, becomes utterly blank. All my plots, my brilliant, sensational ideas I came here to put on paper, just disappear. I sit there so long until there seems nothing left to do but weep, then I go out and get drunk. No, that’s not quite true, sometimes I stay home and get drunk. It doesn’t help anyway.” Basil turned round from the window. The bed was empty.
“Honey! Where are you, damn you? Have I been talking to myself?”
Honey came in, in her nightdress, with two tumblers of whisky. She gave one to Basil and got back into bed with hers.
“If it wasn’t for you, I’d go stark, staring mad,” Basil said.
“Tell me about Elisabeth.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to hear. You love her, don’t you?”
Basil drained his whisky. “Yes, I love her. Why don’t you bring the bottle in?”
“I’ll get it.”
“Stay where you are. I’ll get it myself.”
Back in the bedroom, Basil slumped into the armchair which was strewn with Honey’s clothes, filled his glass and put the bottle down on the floor beside him.
“The story of a failure,” he said, “Chapter One.” He closed his eyes. “The beginning was good,” he said. “The beginning has to be good or the whole bloody book’s no good. But this beginning was particularly good, real ‘happy ever after’ stuff. It just shows how you can’t tell, about anything, the plot runs away with you. I met Elisabeth while I was working in a bookseller’s in Knightsbridge. I’d always wanted to write, you see, so I never bothered to train for anything in particular, although I did a year of sheer purgatory on a local paper. Then after that I just took whatever job happened to be going so that I could keep myself, in order to be able to write. It had to be a job which didn’t entail very much thinking, so that I was able to keep myself fresh for
my writing in the evenings. The bookshop job was particularly good from that point of view. Anyway, one day after I’d been there only a few weeks I was checking our stock of French dictionaries (I remember clearly it was French dictionaries) when I looked up and I saw this girl come in. Being in Knightsbridge there were lots of pretty girls about, but usually they just walked by outside on the pavement and more often than not didn’t bother to glance in the window. Anyway this girl came in. She was quite tall and beautifully dressed and she had some sort of fur round her neck and a silly little dog under her arm as they do in Knightsbridge, and I supposed she had come for a book, ‘something light’ to ‘give to a friend in hospital’. You get used to summing them up as soon as they come into the shop. I said, ‘Can I help you, madam?’ and she said, ‘Have you got Victor Hugo’s Feuilles d’Automne’, in a very soft, sweet voice. And I said, ‘You mean in the translation?’ and she said, ‘No, the original’, and then she smiled and I just stood there gaping like an idiot. But she was so pretty, so quiet, yet so obviously full of hundreds of undiscovered things that for the moment I was completely paralysed. I did manage to move eventually, and went to find what she’d asked for. It took me longer than it should have. For one thing my hands were shaking and for another I kept peeping at her standing there behind the books. I didn’t want her to go, you see. I took as long as I could wrapping the book and taking the money and giving her her change, but then she had to go, and she did. After she’d gone I thought what an idiot I’d been. I should have said we were out of stock, that I’d let her know when it was in, or send it to her. I should at least have known then where she lived. I spent days after that at the window watching all the fashionable women go by, in the hope that among them would be one quite tall and very beautiful with a little brown dog under her arm. I spent so long at the window, in fact, that I lost my job. It didn’t worry me too much, as I had lost jobs before. I just decided to have a real lunch for once, with my last week’s wages. I was shown to a table at the smart Italian restaurant opposite Harrod’s, and the manageress asked me if I’d mind sharing and I said not at all and there, sitting at the table which I was to share, was Elisabeth. She smiled when she saw me, that wonderful smile, and took her dog off the chair so that I could sit down. I said ‘I don’t suppose you remember me?’ and she said, ‘What makes you think that? I enjoyed Feuilles d’Automne and I was coming in for something else. I think French lyric poetry so beautiful, don’t you?’ She smiled again and her eyes were a sort of deep violet, and I knew it couldn’t end with a copy of Victor Hugo and a shared table at lunch. There were difficulties, although not emotional ones. Elisabeth, in her quiet way, cared as much for me as I for her. She had, she admitted, been attracted to me that first morning in the bookshop, but hadn’t had the courage to come back. No, the difficulties were social. Elisabeth’s father turned out to be Sir Godfrey Bainbridge, MP, OBE, and lord knows what else. He took a pretty dim view of me, and I can’t say I blame him – no job, no prospects and no money. My only claims to fame were a story in Argosy, an article in John Bull and two paragraphs in Tit-Bits. Elisabeth was his only child though, and together, she and her mother, a charming woman, managed to get round him, and he gave us his blessing. He did more. He offered to give Elisabeth an allowance which was more than enough to keep us both for a year, in which time I should have completed my masterpiece.”
“Didn’t you mind your wife keeping you?” Honey said, wide-eyed, from the bed.
Basil sat up and refilled his glass. “No. You see, by the end of the year, with no worries and no living to earn, I was convinced that I could produce something so good that I would be able to keep her as she was accustomed to living, for many years. I was only, as it were, borrowing the money from Sir Godfrey.”
“And did you write your masterpiece?”
Basil finished his drink and lay back again in the chair. “By the end of the year I had forty-seven rejection slips from short stories I had submitted and five hundred pages of the most putrid drivel on God’s earth. I also had the unpleasant fact to face that my wife was no longer able to keep me. Elisabeth was good. She loved me, you see, and although her faith seemed to have been rather misplaced, she only said, gently, that I had better see about getting a job. I got several jobs and, just as before I was married, as fast as I got them I lost them. I was thinking all the time about writing, you see. Sir Godfrey, seeing how it was with me, didn’t want to have anything to do with me any more. Elisabeth was loyal, she said she wouldn’t see him either. We saw her mother and she tried to help us, although by the way she looked at me I could tell that she was thinking her daughter might have married anyone, and had landed herself with a failure like me. We moved from our flat in South Kensington to a very tiny one in Hampstead, and Elisabeth got a job selling baby clothes in a shop near the Heath. It was inevitable that we had rows. Elisabeth came home tired, she had never been used to working, and she wasn’t as patient as she used to be. I used to go out in order to avoid the rows. Usually I came home drunk – on Elisabeth’s money!”
“You’re a real rat, aren’t you?” Honey said. “I never believed you were like that.”
“That’s what Elisabeth said every time we had a slanging match. She believed better of me. Knew I was capable of holding a job, staying long enough to be promoted. She didn’t understand, and you won’t either, but if I take a job to which I must put my whole mind, I am sunk. As a writer, that is. I know, as well as you do and Elisabeth did, that there are daubers who delude themselves that one day they will be hung in the Royal Academy, strummers with dreams of Salzburg and the Festival Hall, rhymesters with absolute convictions of immortality. I don’t class myself among those. They have only hopes. I have certainty. I know that one day you will be able to read my soul in books, as surely as you can see Rembrandt’s soul on canvas, and hear Beethoven’s every day, if a little distorted, on the radio. This knowledge is the strongest thing I have, my only good, the one thing I must hang on to, and because I was unwilling to let it go, unable to let it go, I sacrificed Elisabeth.”
“What happened?” Honey said.
“She was tired. Fed up with working. She got me a job with her uncle in Industrial Chemicals, a good job.”
“Well?”
“He threw me out. He said I was brainless, shiftless and incapable of earning a living, in addition to one or two less complimentary things I wouldn’t care to repeat.”
“Hard on Elisabeth.”
“Of course it was hard on Elisabeth. She was a saint to have stood it as long as she did. But don’t you see it was Elisabeth or my own integrity? Once you throw away your integrity, what you know you are destined to do, to be, you have nothing. You are nothing.”
“What happened to Elisabeth?”
“She went back home. Her father didn’t mind that as long as I wasn’t around.”
“And you?”
“I came down here. You know the rest. You know how much I have written. Nothing, nothing at all. And you know why? Laugh, if you like. It’s because I can’t do a thing without Elisabeth. I’m lost, half alive. I’ve all the leisure in the world to do exactly what I’ve always wanted to, and I can do precisely nothing. It’s a bloody paradox, but that’s how it is.”
“You had a whole year before, when Elisabeth’s father was keeping you. You had no worries then, and you had Elisabeth. Why didn’t you write?”
“I’ll tell you. Every time I sat at the typewriter I could feel Elisabeth’s father hanging over me with a whip, watching, waiting for the end of the year. And the days slipped away and the weeks, until it grew nearer and nearer the time when he could say to Elisabeth, ‘I told you so’. It’s impossible to work at the end of a pistol, for an artist with any sensibility.”
“It looks as though you find it impossible to work at all,” Honey said. “I feel really sorry for Elisabeth.”
“Oh God!” Basil said, putting his head in his hands. “Women!”
Like a shot Honey, who did not
like to see anyone miserable, was out of bed. She knelt beside Basil and stroked his hair.
“You know what the trouble with you is?” she said, but didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re stale. In show business, when we get stale we’re useless; we’re out if we don’t do something about it. So we rest. But not just a rest while we look for another job. We really rest. We don’t live the theatre, eat, sleep and dream the theatre. We forget it; kick over the traces. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Then suddenly you wake up one morning and you’re better. The lights and the make-up and music have crept back into your veins, but fresh and throbbing and full of life, and you’re capable of anything again. How long have you been writing your famous book?”
“Ten years.”
“You’re crazy.” Honey pulled his hands from his face. “Burn all that rotten paper in your room, lock up the typewriter, concentrate on your toffee-apples and the café, and write to Elisabeth.”
“I keep writing to Elisabeth.”
“Write to her again.” Honey crossed the room and turned on the radio. The fast blare of a rock and roll rhythm filled the room. Honey, laughing, her limbs gleaming through the transparent nightdress, contorted her lips and jerked her long, black hair back and forth over her shoulders in time to the music. She didn’t stop until Basil was laughing at her exaggerated gyrations.
“…‘A star danced and under that I was born.’ You should have been called Beatrice. Does nothing ever get you down, Honey?”
Honey stopped dancing, and for the first time Basil saw her face serious. “When you have to look out for yourself,” she said, “you don’t let it. You mustn’t.”
Basil, standing up, took her in his arms. “For a Maharajah’s daughter you’re a lovely girl.”
Honey blushed. “I didn’t think you’d swallow that. Would you like to know the truth?”
We All Fall Down Page 13
