Holiday (11 page)

Fisher, mildly interested, asked questions from his ignorance so that his companion began to answer at length. Sometimes, for he was slightly deaf, he misunderstood, and more often than not he meandered, once becoming angry, in a slow, mottled-faced way, at the politics of India and Pakistan where he’d served in the First War. He brusquely inquired about Fisher’s job, and said he knew the University’s Chancellor well and that he was acquainted with the Professor of Ancient History, who’d married a relative of his late wife. Was Fisher married?

The other’s spouse had died six years ago, but had been something of an invalid all her life, though she’d borne him three sons. ‘You any children?’

‘No. My son died. He was two years old.’

The man paused, frowned at Fisher, deeply, rolled uncomfortable in his chair, like a caricature Dr Johnson, and blubbered his lips. For a time his stiff-fingered right hand tapped the table, as if to call the company to order.

‘Your wife not here with you, then?’ he began.

‘No.’

He did not seem to notice Fisher’s reticence, but described his own sons, good boys in their way, who resented his longevity. ‘I’ve handed my house over, the farms. I don’t trouble them. Why should I? But they’d like nothing better than my money. I don’t blame them. They’re at an age when they’d use it merely for pleasure because they’re all established. And that’s the best way.’

Fisher mumbled about death duties.

‘I’ve straightened that out. As far as one can.’ But there followed no technical disquisition on the subject, and when Fisher said he must leave, the old man struggled up, brushing his tweeds, reaching for a black bowler on the hatstand. On his feet he seemed slower, more awkward, less monolithic, though Fisher did not offer assistance as he crab-crawled down the steps to the pavement.

‘I’m eighty next,’ he said, arriving, pulling car keys from his pocket. ‘Feel it too, sometimes.’ He glanced round the street. ‘Do you ever think you’ve wasted your time?’

‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t think it at your age. Certain amount of drink and cards. Nothing out of the ordinary. I’m not claiming that.’

‘One must have recreation.’

‘Eh? Eh? Oh. Recreation? Depends what sort. Drink. I looked at women.’ He spouted this to the whole street. ‘Now all I want to do is sleep. Even when I remember things I’m confused. I never trained myself for old age. Never believed it would come. Nobody does.’

The old man tipped his hard hat, hobbled over the road to his car, and drove off without so much as a glance backwards. Fisher noted the number-plate, but knew that would have left his memory inside ten minutes. The meeting sobered him; he’d no desire to laugh at the fellow, landed gent’s accent or not. It was as if he’d assembled a jig-saw only to find that key pieces were missing. By quizzing Arthur Mann, of the history department, he could probably get the fellow’s name, and, if Arthur acted normally, half-a-dozen anecdotes, but that could only darken counsel. A wealthy man drove twenty miles to drink a cup of cheap coffee because that was, perhaps, one of the few ways he had left to amuse himself. As a sentence, that made sense, but was deeply unmeaning, fatuous. He struggled to put his dissatisfaction into words, but found he could not. His formulation lacked subtlety, perhaps, needed qualification, but his dismay sprang from an unpalatable event, not from his inability to describe it. Nobody should be left unprotected as that old man appeared; yet he was one of the lucky, with money, care, fair health.

Fisher sat on a low stone wall under a sandy bank.

‘I never trained myself for old age.’ That was the nub, the heart-cry. Not many people prepare themselves, but they did not confess it out loud in the street to strangers. How did he know that? Was it a statistical judgement? One person in a thousand made such a statement in such circumstances twice every three years? No. A man of good family, with property, financially comfortable, with the bossy voice of his class, the unshakeable appearance of superiority, had spat it out to upset his listener’s prejudices and preoccupations. A bad omen. Someone about to meet his estranged wife walks warily away from ladders.

Chattering holiday-makers passed, repassed as he sat.

Terry Smith, with his two in tow, called out, ‘Midmorning break. Ice-cream and a tiddle,’ and moved on happily enough. Fisher occupied himself with mental accountancy, totting up the number of people he saw and did not know, and then listing the sea-side resorts where similar results obtained. The schema of tens of thousands of hurrying people, all unknown to him, appealed to his sense of what was right in the world, a huge complexity pursuing a simple unity. He knocked that on the head as useless.

Meg had taken him abroad, except for the one holiday when Donald was alive, and, as he remembered, her main complaint had been that Athens or Florence were not exotic enough, had their quality adulterated by tourists.

‘There’s more English than Greek spoken here,’ she complained.

‘That’s as well for us.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes. This is the Parthenon. A great monument of antiquity. The crowds come from America and England to see it. They speak English. So do we. If we condemn them, we damn ourselves.’

‘You’re never very funny when you try to be,’ Meg said.

‘I understand your argument well enough. It’s too easy to come here on a package-tour. We should be the only ones, because we presumably are the only ones capable of benefiting. That’s snobbery.’

‘You’re not talking to one of your pupils now.’

‘I’m only pointing out that the Parthenon is either worth seeing or not. It’s a worthwhile aesthetic experience whether it’s easy to come by or hard.’

‘Most people wouldn’t agree.’ she said.

‘Most people are wrong, then.’ He’d smiled. ‘I’ll admit though, that no aesthetic experience is absolutely pure.’

She could not be mollified thus; both knew that.

‘Why are you always boasting then of these little places you find in the back-streets where they have charcoal fires and rough wines?’ she’d ask.

‘Because, my love, when I talk to people, socially, I give them what they want.’

‘That’s not what you give me.’

‘I would if I knew, or even if you knew.’

These arguments were rather formal, and, as he remembered then, sarcastically delivered on his part. He had, again as he recalled them, no difficulty in wiping the floor with her, but he was the one hurt. The more easily he scored, the sorer his lesions smarted. This caused his tartness, his sour pugnacity. He must beat her now and then because she had established a total superiority. This was no way to regard a wife, he was sure, and to be fair to himself, he did not hold this view consistently, but let her once advance a silly viewpoint, he was away, asserting himself at her expense.

Tomorrow he’d be penitent, look at his feet, attack nobody.

He quitted his wall, walked along the long stretch of beach down to the sea. On the hard sand left by the receding tide two land yachts rolled in the sharp breeze, sails slapping, moving as yet clumsily. Children shouted, kicked, splashed in the bright flatness of the water. The girls in bikinis and their young men romped their energetic chase after admiration while a black labrador, stick in its mouth, shook himself vigorously. He was remote from all this; he’d nothing to say, and this had always been so. As a boy he’d been invited to join a game of cricket, but as he’d batted or bowled or caught, more seriously perhaps than the lark-about on the sands required, he’d been himself, not one of them, nobody’s buddy, the outsider, He’d bowled out one father, not a bad swashbuckling bat, with a fast swinging yorker and had marked the hostility among the chaps. Nobody’s but his own. His dad never played cricket; he disapproved of dominoes. As a family they sat or made sand pies, nothing livelier.

Dissastisfied, he moved towards the queue for boats.

A straggle of visitors stood in the wind at the jetty’s end, subdued, eyes narrowed as if preparing themselves for the sea-shine.

‘One more. Just one more,’ the boatman shouted.

The queue wavered as heads turned.

‘Just the one. The other boat won’t be ten minutes. Are you on your own, sir?’

Fisher realised he was addressed as the heads swung again in inspection.

‘That’s it, sir. Then we’re full.’

They made way for him, though there was no need, to the wooden steps down to the boat. The single. The one. As the pierrots warbled, ‘One alone, to be my own.’ He climbed uncertainly into the swaying craft, and was directed to a vacant area of plank, ‘between the ladies there.’ He sat down as the boatmen administered comfort to those ashore, revved the stinking motor and headed them out to sea.

The boat lifted, dipped, lifted, but gently and the prevailing effects were brightness and cold. Fisher wedged between a middle-aged matron and a young married woman began to feel exhilaration; this summarised his adventurous spirit, half an hour on a calm North Sea on a summer noon. Children trailed their hands in the water while the boat made a heavy, quick progress, the iron roar of the engine strong all the time. Once, they without warning, crossed a wave so that a shiver of spray showered the passengers who squealed, burst into chatter.

‘You’ll wish you put them slacks on,’ the woman called over Fisher to the other girl. ‘It’s parky.’

The girl looked steadily forward at the backs of heads, the horizon. The woman nudged Fisher, pushing the message through him, repeated, becking, ‘You’re goin’ to be frozen there.’

Again the girl gave no indication she’d heard, but then shifted, very slightly, away from Fisher to mutter, ‘Uh. Knickers,’ through unopened lips. He could not be sure she’d spoken, but her companion shrugged, said aggressively,

‘It’s always cold, out here.’

‘Aw, shut up, Lil,’ the girl answered. ‘Stop moanin’ for Christ’s sake.’

She was fair, with a pale face, handsomely trim as the wind pressed her light mac round her. Her nails were bitten dirty. Neither paid the slightest attention to Fisher who wondered why they’d allowed him to sit between them as they took their pleasures morosely.

In the back of the boat some passenger had asked their speed and the boatman had guessed twelve knots. This led to argument about the exact measurement of a knot which enabled the man who first raised the question to announce that a nautical mile, a term loosely translated by ‘knot’ was 6080 feet in Britain, but slightly more, 6082 feet 8 inches in the U.S.A. This he offered so glibly that Fisher wondered if he hadn’t looked the information up first and then broached the subject to air his knowledge. There fell a small silence of admiration, and Fisher guessed that the girl on his right, though she made no sign, was impressed.

It reminded him of his father. That was the sort of snippet Arthur Fisher had stored away by the thousand, but he would have spoiled it all by some atrocious pun. ‘They’re not the knots we have in Notts.’ He experienced an acute spasm of embarrassment at the word play he’d fathered so easily. When he’d recovered they were arguing in the back about water-speed records and whether one appeared to be travelling faster than was the case.

‘It’s obvious,’ said the know-all passenger. ‘When you’re driving down the Ml your speed seems comparatively low because there are no near land-marks, hedges or palings or houses.’ The voice whined on, not unlike his father’s. Fisher resisted the temptation to turn round and check.

Conversation became desultory; the boatman laconic. The whole object of the trip was to enjoy the sea air, the movement of the boat, the sound of the water so that when they turned about and passengers pressed for information about the coast, grudgingly given, mildly argued about, this, Fisher thought, lacked propriety. He himself only, wedged between women, appreciated the solitariness, away from the hum of the flat shore, the sprawl or activity of bodies. Inland, the pubs were open, men considered themselves; out here, one rocked, a chilled nobody.

He was glad to step on to the jetty, stiff, none too warm. The woman next to him told the girl they’d ‘have to find the others now.’ She replied she knew, sulkily as ever, face mask-still. As he set off Fisher was joined by the know-all passenger, whom he recognised at once from the voice.

‘Ah. Glad to use my limbs again.’ Fifty perhaps, hornrimmed glassed, bald patch.

‘We didn’t see much,’ Fisher answered.

‘Except the sea’. Was that a father-type word? Arthur would now have been humming to himself that he’d ‘joined the Navy to see the sea, and what did he see, he saw the sea.’ No. None of that. ‘It’s something. Quiet in its way, but satisfactory.’

‘Yes. It is.’ The man smiled agreeably at this support.

‘I think it’s what you make of it.’ They were trudging in the loose sand in front of beach chalets. ‘Take the town itself. I’ve seen changes here. I tell you one thing. There aren’t so many visitors as there were seven or eight years back.’

‘Really?’ The man glanced up at the bourgeois question.

‘No. It’s the package tour. Stripped our coast, y’ know. Ibiza, Majorca, Costa Brava, Costa del Sol.’

‘Is that good?’

‘Depends on you. We had a holiday in Italy. I was there in the war. Always said I wanted to go back. We fly out. There in no time. Hotel, quite good. Meals not exactly what we’d choose, but well, it’s what you’d expect. Weather. Sunshine every day, day in, day out. We have breakfast. Walk across the road, on to the beach. Had to pay for our spot. I’d go in the sea three or four times, that warm, like a bath. Back to the hotel. Eat. Beach again. And that was it.’

‘Restful.’

‘Real rest’s very often doing something different, I think.’ The father-tone again. Cue for hymn. ‘Rest for the weary, rest for the sad.’ ‘We didn’t show much initiative, I grant you. Have you been to that part of the world?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you know, then. There are plenty of trips. Hotel caters for you. Early breakfast, packed lunch, late dinner. Nothing too much trouble. But my wife suffers from arthritis,’ he pronounced it arthur-itis to Fisher’s grim amusement, ‘and doesn’t want to sit all day cramped up, nor traipse round buildings and galleries. That’s why she’s not with me now. So we didn’t get out of it what we might.’