The Suburbs of Hell Page 2

  He could think of many favours which he had done for Frank, and for his withdrawn, unhappy wife. Favours, he saw on reflection, which he had rather thrust upon them; but that was his way, and people were used to him. If he had ever given the matter a thought, he would have counted Frank among his closer friends. But there was a matter of thirteen years between their ages, and it had dawned on him, after that sudden flash of malice, that this long pub-companionship was like the companionship of fellow-commuters, quite empty. If Frank sought him out, as in a passive way he did, it was because Frank was not liked. So (reasoned Harry) he get Muggins for his mate; soft-touch Harry, Harry the swede, that read a lot of books but get mixed up over the long words. Senile fuckin Harry.

  If Frank had a real friend, though that would be putting it strongly, it must be young Dave Stutton. Yet Harry had gathered from the air once or twice that they did not much like one another. So what thrust them into each other’s company so often must be business, after a fashion.

  A pint-pot was placed between his hands, and he lifted it and said: ‘Cheers.’ He smiled his open country-boy’s smile, not in hypocrisy, but because that was his way of dealing with friction, for a while. He did sincerely think the best of people, till the moment when something demanded to be done.

  Suddenly the mug’s rim clicked against his teeth as he started. Someone had goosed him.

  He swung round. ‘Why, you naughty old lady, Ena.’

  A bouncy little woman, bosomed like a bullfinch, stood beaming up at him. Old Tornwich knew her as Eddystone Ena: former ship’s stewardess, former barmaid, and for many years the solitary tenant of an urban lighthouse.

  As she opened her mouth to speak the jukebox, now surrounded by a knot of teenagers just come in, broke its silence with a scream, and he bent down to her. ‘Hullo, stranger,’ she yelled in his ear. ‘Give us a kiss.’

  He embraced her small plumpness, and kissed her on each cheek. ‘Oh, isn’t he a big strong fella,’ she cried to Frank De Vere, who was looking down on the scene with his usual sardonic expression, eyes glacier-blue in his pockmarked face.

  ‘Let me sit you on the bar,’ Harry offered, ‘where we can see you.’

  ‘You put me down, Harry Ufford!’ chortled Ena, enjoying herself. ‘No, I can’t stay, I was on my way round to speak to Doris when I saw you. It’s the first time for yonks. When a man cuts down on his beer he just seems to vanish. You look very well, Harry. Younger, thinner in the face.’

  Harry’s guileless vanity responded; he grinned.

  ‘Anyway,’ Ena rattled on, ‘you must come and see me some day at the lighthouse. We’re neighbours, after all.’

  ‘Will do,’ Harry said. ‘Thass a promise. But anyway, Ena, see you again before closin time, I hope.’

  She passed, and he turned back to Frank, his equivocal mate. ‘Thass a great little old gal,’ he said. ‘War widow, you know. She never had things easy, but always bright as a button.’

  ‘You’ve been into her lighthouse, have you?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Oh, yeh, two or three times. She keep that quite nice. All her gear is shabby, like, but thass homely.’

  ‘I and Dave have this fantasy,’ Frank said, ‘of going and knocking on her door. It would be a real Goon Show scene, we reckon. We’d hear her feet coming down a hundred and twelve stairs, then the door would creak open, horror-film stuff, and we’d say: “Is Fred in?” “Fred don’t live here,” she’d say, and the door would slam, and a hundred and twelve footsteps would go away again, into the sky.’

  ‘I can see how that would appeal to you and Dave,’ Harry said, ‘gettin a woman with sixty-one-year-old legs down all them stairs. But she don’t live in the light-room, as that happen. I doubt if she ever goo up there.’

  ‘I’d like to see inside that place,’ mused Frank.

  ‘Well, play your cards right, boy, and you might get an invitation to tea. But if I was you I should prepare myself for it by thinkin of her in a more friendly spirit. I expect you noticed that you dint get an invitation just now.’

  ‘Right,’ Frank said, gazing impassively into his beer.

  Behind Harry’s back retired Commander Pryke, lurching a little in passing, bumped into him. He wandered on with a courtly mutter, and went out by the door on to the quayside. Turning at the interruption, Harry saw Paul Ramsey looking at him from his table, and brightened. ‘There’s young Paul,’ he told Frank; ‘I got something to say to him.’

  He took his drink and went over to sit himself in the Commander’s vacated chair, considering the bearded face opposite with benevolence. ‘Well, young man?’

  The beard on the young man’s face produced a not uncommon effect, the line of the moustache making Paul Ramsey seem melancholy and resigned.

  ‘Well what, Harry?’

  ‘Well, whass that you’re smokin in that pipe? That smell to me like King Henry the Eighth’s bedsocks.’

  ‘It’s what I can afford,’ Paul said. ‘Unlike you, I pay duty on what I smoke.’

  ‘Well, less not goo into that. There’s some old customs in this place that a boy of your class and education don’t want to know about.’

  ‘You’re fairly right,’ Paul said. ‘Bourgeois, we Ramseys are. If a policeman knocked on my door, I’d never feel easy with the neighbours again.’

  Outside, the mist was thickening, and the bobbing, gyrating masts had become hard to see.

  ‘Have you had a right rave-up with Captain Bligh?’

  ‘He was okay,’ Paul said. ‘A touch of pepper when he noticed Frank De Vere. He objects to his surname—thinks it’s far too good for him.’

  ‘So that is. De Veres was great people in these parts once. The cream.’

  ‘I could tell the Commander,’ Paul said, ‘something funny about his own name. But he probably knows it.’

  ‘Pryke?’ Harry pondered. ‘Whass funny about Pryke?’

  ‘A few years ago,’ Paul said, ‘I was going through some parish registers for a paper I was writing. In one village I found two families that kept intermarrying. Their names were Prick and Balls.’

  ‘Oh, schoolmaster!’ Harry exclaimed. ‘Goo and wash your mouth out, boy.’

  ‘It’s gospel truth. The village was Boxford. In mid-Victorian times one family of Pricks started spelling their name “Pryke”, and by the end of the century they’d all done the same. Now, if you look in the telephone book, you’ll find a lot of Prykes, but the Pricks don’t dare raise their heads.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ Harry said, ‘that your interests make you a very suitable person to have charge of the minds of our children.’

  Paul looked surprised. ‘You haven’t any children—have you, Harry?’

  ‘That was just a way of speakin,’ Harry said. ‘But I think I have. I might have. One. From before I was married, thass why I int sure.’

  ‘You were married?’

  ‘Well—not for long. The divorce went on for years, the marriage dint. But before that there was a gal what had a son I think was mine. I like to think he’s mine. There’s his name,’ Harry said, pushing up his sleeve. Tattooed on his forearm was a red rose with a label across the stem saying PAUL. ‘Thass why I like that name,’ Harry confided.

  Paul stared at the tattoo. ‘You’re full of surprises, Harry,’ he said. ‘What if it’s me? Perhaps I was left on the doorstep of the bourgeois Ramseys.’

  ‘Could be, for all I know,’ Harry said. ‘I never sin him. She wouldn’t let me. He’d be about twenty-five now.’

  ‘Not me, then. I’m thirty-one.’

  ‘Are you? Blokes with beards, you just can’t tell.’

  He looked at the beard with such candid affection that the younger man sheepishly smiled at him.

  ‘Do you know what I think about your face?’ Harry asked. ‘I think if I met you in the middle of the Go-By Desert, I should say: “Scoose me, boy, int you a Morris-dancer?”’

  Paul spluttered into his beer. ‘If that had come from any other man,’ he said, ‘I’d ca
ll him a bitch.’

  Harry merely beamed at him, and shook his head. After a pull at his pint he asked, grave now: ‘Are you comfortable in that old house of yours?’

  ‘All right, thanks,’ Paul said, sounding cagey.

  ‘Thass something big. Draughty, I should think. Draughty as arseholes.’

  ‘It’s not too bad. Of course, it’s not—we were going to take years to get it civilized. That’s rather come to a stop.’

  ‘Thass sad. Still, that happen.’

  ‘I get the impression,’ Paul said, ‘that it’s happened a lot in Old Tornwich. I’ve never seen so many deserted husbands and lifelong bachelors. I ask myself whether all these little pubs are cause or effect.’

  ‘I think thass the sea,’ Harry said. ‘Seamen’s marriages are often a bit dodgy, like.’

  ‘I put so much into that old wreck of a house,’ Paul said, and frowned down at a beermat which he was twisting between his fingers. ‘I thought about it all the time. I suppose I thought that we both thought that was the most important thing about us: that one day we’d sit in our Georgian house that I’d bought for a song and entertain our slightly Bohemian, mostly schoolteaching friends. When she was in the process of being swept off her feet by a real Bohemian, I didn’t even notice.’

  ‘She might come back, mightn’t she?’

  ‘No,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t think that affair is likely to last, but she won’t move backwards now.’

  ‘Well, listen, Paul—’

  Paul’s eyes, looking up at him, were grey-blue and rather blank, or guarded. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I mean to say, don’t be lonely, you know—’

  ‘No, I’m not going to be. I think Greg is probably coming to live here for a while.’

  ‘Greg? Oh, the little brother. The stoodent.’

  ‘Not a student now. Another unemployable Ph.D.’

  ‘Whass that—Ph.D?’

  ‘Doctor of Philosophy.’

  ‘Ah, you’re pullin my pisser,’ Harry exclaimed. ‘That skinny scruff with the guitar, you call him doctor?’

  ‘I call him Skinny Scruff,’ Paul said. ‘So can you.’

  ‘Well, they’re rum places, these universities,’ said Harry. ‘But thass nice for you. I don’t see that much of my own brothers, but we’re pals when we meet. I should say for myself that I’m quite good at bein a brother.’

  ‘I expect you are, Harry,’ Paul said, with a straight face. ‘If I met you in the Gobi Desert, that’s what I’d guess about you.’

  ‘Now you are pullin it,’ Harry detected.

  The big room, created not many years before from small ones which had been secretive and snug, was crowded and smoky by now, and conversations from many directions mingled in a throbbing hum like a ship’s engine. The small dog was again navigating the legs with a lost look. ‘Why,’ said Harry, sitting with spraddled legs in his captain’s chair and reviewing his fellow-citizens like a fleet, ‘I believe thass Ena’s dog, that.’

  ‘You know everything,’ Paul said. ‘That reminds me: could you give Greg and me some advice about a boat?’

  ‘To buy, you mean? Well, I know something, not a lot. But I can tell you who not to buy boats from. The hooman element, thass where I can always be a help.’

  ‘Harry—what do you make of Frank?’

  ‘Why, does he say he have a boat to sell? That can’t be true.’

  ‘No, nothing to do with boats. It’s just that you put me in mind of people who offer to flog you things.’

  Harry considered. ‘I don’t know all that much about him. We was both on the Hamburg once—we overlap by a foo months. And he stayed in my top room for a while, part-time, like. But I dint hardly know him then, and I don’t think I do now, not to say know. When he get married, he come ashore and start this sort of handyman business: carpenterin and house-paintin and that. What are you tryin to find out? Do you know something against him?’

  ‘No,’ Paul said, doubtfully: and then: ‘Better drop it. He saw me looking at him. He’s coming over.’

  Harry twisted in his chair and looked over his shoulder at Frank approaching. ‘Come to join us, mate?’

  ‘No, I’m off,’ Frank said. ‘I just remembered something. You’re invited to a party, at Dave’s.’

  ‘At Dave’s?’ Harry said. ‘I don’t know where Dave live.’

  ‘It’s twenty-three High Street,’ Frank said. ‘A bit after eleven. Bring a bird, if you know one, and enough to drink for yourselves.’

  ‘Well, I might,’ Harry said. ‘Shall I ask Ena? She always like a party, but I don’t think a party of Dave’s would be up her street.’

  ‘Bring her,’ Frank said, beginning to drift away. ‘You’re invited too,’ he added to Paul, and then pushed his way through the crowd to the door.

  ‘Well,’ Harry said to Paul, ‘shall you come?’

  ‘I don’t think so. If Ena goes, I might.’

  ‘I know whass in Dave’s mind,’ Harry said, ‘invitin us Old Age Pensioners. He reckons we shall get discouraged before we empty the bottles we bring. Stone me, boy, int you never gooin to finish that? What are you doin, spittin into it to make that last?’

  ‘Just a half,’ Paul said, handing over his pint. ‘Harry, do you like Frank?’

  Harry, standing with a pot in each hand, gave the matter his attention. He said: ‘Thass not a question I often ask myself. I like most people till they teach me different. Far as I’m concerned, the whole hooman race is on probation. Nice to see you smile, boy.’

  ‘Prat,’ said Paul. ‘Soppy prat.’

  At the end of the quay the mist was thrumming with the engines of the unseen St Felix, and the streetlamps, reduced to dandelion-balls of light, made islands to be crossed by the dark sudden figures of men going home from the dozen pubs of the little town.

  ‘I always think,’ said Ena, tripping along in her court shoes with her King Charles spaniel behind her, ‘they could make a spooky film in Old Tornwich when it’s foggy.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Paul said, cheered up by the thought. ‘Nineteen-forties. Black and white. With—’

  ‘Basil Rathbone,’ Ena suggested. ‘Lon Chaney.’

  ‘I was thinking of Jean Gabin.’

  ‘Oh, foreign,’ Ena said. ‘Yes, and Valli.’

  ‘Boris Karloff,’ Harry contributed. ‘Bela Lugosi.’

  ‘I think we were being more subtle,’ said Paul.

  ‘There’s a monster about tonight,’ Harry said, taking no offence. ‘Young Killer—Jimmy Rigg—see him in the next street. Some bloke in a joke-shop mask, with them hands—you know? The sight of that in the mist redooce Killer to a twelve-year-old boy.’

  ‘Someone rehearsing for the Carnival,’ Ena said. ‘What was the number of the house, Harry?’

  Harry wrinkled his brow, and gave it up. ‘I forget. Do you remember, Paul?’

  ‘I didn’t hear him.’

  ‘I should have known better,’ sighed Ena.

  ‘No,’ protested Harry, ‘we shall find it. If we wait, we shall see other people arrivin.’ He came to a stop under a streetlamp, bottles cradled in his arms. ‘Just you have patience, Ena.’

  ‘It’s not very warm,’ Ena pointed out. She picked up her small dog and swept it to her bosom, and they nuzzled one another. ‘Choochy features. Oh, she’s shivering.’

  Paul said: ‘Do you think Frank was having a little joke? That there isn’t a party?’

  ‘No, I don’t think,’ Harry said shortly. ‘Bloody hell, boy, he’s a bit older than ten.’

  ‘Here’s a taxi slowing down,’ said Ena. ‘It must be near here.’

  The taxi came to a stop by the light, but no door opened. After a moment a voice called from its darkness: ‘Harry—you lost?’

  ‘Whass that you, Sam?’ Harry called back, and leaned in at the passenger window. ‘We’re lookin for a party, but thass hidin. Do you know where that is?’

  After a pause for thought, the voice replied: ‘No, but I know where there is a party. In
New Tornwich. I’ll take you there.’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ Ena objected. ‘Gatecrashing parties at our age—don’t talk so daft, Sam.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ promised the invisible driver. ‘That’s okay. She told me to bring people to her party. It’s a girl I know what’s celebratin her birthday, on the spur of the moment, like.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, I’m sure,’ said Ena. ‘I wonder if she’s got the police out scouting for her as well.’

  ‘Is this sort of thing common in Tornwich?’Paul wondered.

  ‘That’s not uncommon,’ said the voice of Sam.

  Harry made a decision and, opening a rear door, stood waiting. ‘Come on, Ena. If we don’t fancy it, Sam will drive us straight home.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Ena, ‘why not?’ She clutched her dog close and climbed into the car, Harry crowding behind her.

  No one was listening to Paul excusing himself from the unknown girl’s party, and after a moment he surrendered and got in beside the driver. He was surprised to find that Sam, who had the voice of a native of Ipswich, was a young black man. They nodded to one another, and Sam set off.

  Once past Ena’s lighthouse they were in the Victorian sprawl of New Tornwich, but the mist, stained by the crude lights of the main road, had made the houses retreat and become country hedgerows. Soon the taxi turned and crossed a railway line, and pulled up before a row of working-men’s cottages of clammy red brick, where an open front door spilled light and disco music.

  As the passengers were getting out, a blonde girl in jeans emerged from the house. ‘Who have you brought me, Sam?’ she called. ‘Why, Harry!’ She ran forward and was clasped to the black leather jacket with its perfume of good contraband tobacco.

  ‘Donna,’ Ena exclaimed. ‘I didn’t know it was your party. Happy birthday, love, give us a kiss.’

  While the women embraced, Paul edged nearer to Harry. ‘I don’t think I’ll come in,’ he muttered. ‘Not in the mood. Anyway, I’m expecting a phone call from Greg about midnight, I’d forgotten that.’