Holiday (24 page)

‘Don’t let him boss you about,’ Lena said.

‘It’s all right, missus.’

‘You say what you like.’

‘No. We are on ’oliday, though.’

She gave up, but without disgust, asking Fisher to read a cartoon and advertisement on the far side of the room. Smoke drifted. Terry issued new drinks as Hollies returned to the urinal. ‘Straight back to the brewery.’ Circles of moisture interlinked like weals on the red table top.

Near closing-time the piano seemed silent, though Fisher could not be sure that he had erased the sound himself. No, the pianist sat sideways to keyboard as if making a few more square inches was more important than a tune. As the landlord called time, Terry breathless as a landed fish, tried to explain a motor cycle accident he’d had. His attempt grew pathetic, with a wagging jaw unable to produce coherence, and hand parting the air to let a non-existent message swim through.

Fisher was sober, now, having drunk little in the past hour. So were the women, stiff perhaps disapproving. Hollies’ big face searched for sense from Terry. The neighbour shook hands, belching friendly inanities or promises, before taking the arm of a woman in a red straw hat, seashell with feather, whom he’d neglected all night. The pianist thumped Auld Lang Syne; some joined arms, but most sat, sodden-faced, staring ahead. Mrs Hollies’ eyes were large with tears so that Fisher felt suddenly ashamed.

The other two men made a ceremony of finishing final drinks, chiding Lena for leaving a half-glass.

‘Mr Fisher paid good money for that,’ Hollies, threatening.

‘Let Mr Fisher drink it, then.’

That summed the relationship.

Outside in the yard, Terry fell flat. Now he looked scared, hair unkempt, eye cocked for retribution. He had torn his trousers by his knee. Sandra’s face seemed to shrink so that she could not, perhaps, cry out. Lena hummed to herself as they waited again for her husband’s emergence from the lavatory.

They linked arms, filling the pavement. Fisher on the outside was glad that it was darkish now but they walked sedately enough. Even Hollies subdued himself, insisted on no dance-steps, shouted nothing, sang no songs, looked to his bed. Lena’s arm through Fisher’s hung soberly, chaste, even lethargically.

On the pavement outside the house Hollies began a speech which his wife interrupted.

‘Don’t wake the whole world.’

Hand-shaking ceremonies started quietly enough, though voices squeaked into excitement as Lena kissed Terry, then Fisher.

‘Not me, you notice,’ Hollies grumbled. Sandra made all well, embraced three.

‘This is the best holiday I ever had,’ Terry confided to Fisher, drunkenly, touching his arm, batting hair from his eyes.

Suddenly as they stood Fisher found himself detached, dispassionately in judgement. He wondered what his colleagues would make of this rite; they who would be hurtling round the motorways of Europe, tippling the wine, fighting the flies, flashing the phraseology, all, if they were to be believed, adept in bargains, cunning Europeans. Here in this mediocre street, nineteen thirties sunshine shoddy, he stood with a group of half-stoned people without culture or subtlety, chosen almost by chance not for their proclivities, listening, and weighing, sane enough, and yet puzzled how he’d arrived.

He touched a privet hedge, stroked its trimmed top.

Mountains, the high woods, fjords, glaciers, canyons, these he could afford, and yet he gawped over a hedge at a frilly curtained bow-window. These be your gods. Mind cool, he tried to work out if he were disappointed in himself, and why, and decided he was not. He had spent a week. That length gave away a secret; this was his parents’ holiday, one week, no more, carefully planned, provided for. Again he condemned himself for loose thinking; he’d shot here in a hurry, because he’d no idea what to do, how to fill in his time now he’d walked out from his wife. Oddly, he felt no depression about Meg, but a calm, as if reason would prevail in the end, and tomorrow they’d shake hands, make it up, without flurry or fuss or passion, though with delays, demands, small demurs, before they started life over again with the new term in October. Not likely; not on. A vision of the Vernons taking a fortnight’s rest in the glassy security of the Frankland Towers amused him, so that he laughed, said, ‘God save us all.’ They were great on abroad; Easter in Athens or Crete, Christmas in Morocco.

‘What did you say?’ Sandra pulled on his arm. They were all looking at him.

‘God save us all.’ Bold face on it.

‘Go’ save us all,’ Terry repeated, swaying.

‘And I think,’ Hollies at his most deliberate, tonguing each word, ‘sometimes as he needs to.’

‘You’ll have me crying next.’ Lena.

‘That’ll be the day.’ Her husband now rumbled without conviction. ‘Roll on a big boat. And a Merry Christmas to all our readers.’

‘If that’s the case,’ said Fisher tartly, ‘then it’s time we went inside.’

They obeyed meekly, negotiating the garden path, the short hall, the stairs without overmuch commotion. On the top landing they grouped themselves again, though Terry toppled off for the W.C. while his wife tiptoed to look at the boys.

‘Come on in our room for a drink,’ Hollies invited.

‘As long as we’re quiet,’ Lena warned.

Fisher refused, but took Hollies’ hand in both of his own.

‘It’s been a pleasure to meet you, and your wife.’ They stood together, locked.

Terry emerged, a sheepish grin as he tugged his zip upwards.

‘You’ll join us.’ Hollies turned to Fisher. ‘A pleasure and a privilege, sir.’

‘Thank you.’ Fisher genuinely touched held his hand to Lena who shook it, quickly, like uninterested royalty. She had reservations, now, he could see, was ready to push him out of her mind without regret.

‘I have been to some places,’ Hollies said, not loudly, controlled and in command, ‘at home and abroad, but I have never met a person that I would . . .’ Syntax disintegrated. ‘A man I appreciated. That’s so, Lena?’

She did not answer. Sandra reappeared.

‘Last drink,’ Hollies told her, ‘in my boudoir.’

That word surprised Fisher again, even though his father had exhibited curious knick-knacks of vocabulary from time to time. As the others trooped off, he felt deserted, sorry that he’d refused. Behind the closed doors, the others made no sound, but he wondered if they criticised him for unsociable behaviour. The men had drunk too much; the women did not care enough.

A note had been slipped into his bedroom.

Call on Mr Vernon, 10 a.m., Frankland T. Phone call. Important.

That summed the matter, for while they had been in cloud-cuckoo land at the ‘Feathers’ messages had been relayed, received; somebody had assumed responsibility. Life had progressed. He removed his shoes. The phrase, ‘life had progressed’ reiterated itself in his head, in the buzzing subdued activity, near words, that always spun, whirred there. He saw again the distant mountains, the snow peaks, the sage plains, the rising dust, föhn, tundra, the places he had never seen.

A startling laugh distantly burst the silence.

The gin bottle stood on his dressing table still. He put that away, completed his packing, strapping the cases. Then, sober, in his wrong mind, he went to bed.

Friday night. No thanks to God.

Saturday’s breakfast was business-like.

They’d paid their dues, and the staff prepared to forget them. New faces that afternoon when the rush of bundling sheets had been scrambled through. Last corn-flakes, bacon for the zombies, final jokes as if the holiday were still on, still provided pleasure.

Fisher felt a stiffness as he braced himself against parting. It seemed entirely bodily, a matter of nerves, not reasoned, not even imagined. The flesh, the sense organs did not wish to lose contact with these good people. The conceit slightly cheered him for here was something to be pondered, some innate method of feeling he did not want but could not control.

Car boots were jampacked, slammed with twitters of ill-temper; children assumed the expression of boredom that was to characterize the day’s travel while fathers became important again, men, with a status. The Hollies had decided to spend the morning on the beach, to lunch out and then catch their train and had therefore piled luggage on the concrete square outside the front window ready for the ordered taxi. They were subdued, not with hangover, but with the end of the holiday, said so. Lena cheered herself because in three weeks she was off again to stay with a married daughter in the country. Pathetically she described woods ‘right behind the house’ the slow existence amongst mud and animals, the vegetables, fresh, rich, the neighbourly greetings. It appeared that both daughter and husband worked, in Reading, and the holiday reduced itself to a thorough clean of the house between two spendthrift weekends but it served to bandage the smart of this parting.

Fisher shook hands all round. The proprietor and his wife spoke effusively, obviously puzzled why he should have patronised them, but determined to make something of it. The girls simpered over their tips, thanking him with blushes as they realised they lacked the correct form of wording for this man. Other guests pushed up, declared themselves pleased to meet him, hoped it would not be the last time, but signed the book in the hall, ‘Made very welcome. Lovely food. Thanks. Mr and Mrs A Marriott and Susan, 23 Rice Avenue, etc.’ with less panache, perhaps he suspected, fearing his schoolmaster’s eye. ‘There’s a ‘c’ in excellent, as I’ve told you often enough.’ Terry Smith spoke offhandedly, looked pale, but Sandra putting a cool, damp palm into Fisher’s, handed him a slip of paper on which she had written their address. ‘It would be a shame if we never . . .’ she said, not looking him in the face. He was touched, dictated his own in return but warned that it would be only temporary; that was grudging, fobbing her off already. Outside one of the men lined the children for a group photograph. By eight tonight with the boys in bed, and a linen basket piled high with sandy clothes, Mrs Smith would have forgotten the holidays, be annoyed that her neighbours had neglected to order a loaf and the milkman had left bottles in the sun, would have started life again. Fisher indulged his imagination, saw Terry pulling out the three inches of sherry left over from Christmas, insisting that he and his wife had a celebratory drink on a ‘first-class holiday, but I’m glad to be back.’

‘You can always find me,’ Fisher said, ‘at the Department of Education.’

‘Yes,’ she shook her head, pushing further from him. What could she write to a scholar and a gentleman? Today I washed three pairs of Terry’s socks and took Tony to the clinic. The doctor says he’s slightly overweight, but nothing to worry about.

Fisher fingered her hand again, small and wet.

‘Will you come here next year?’ she asked, encouraged.

‘I don’t know.’

Silence, until the children broke from the garden, danced at their mother. Fisher followed them upstairs where he checked for the third time that he’d left nothing of his, stumbled round peering into mirrors, slightly disarranging curtains, nailing the insignificant pattern of the carpet into his memory.

He slipped quietly out to his already laden car, and drove towards the promenade, where he parked to stand by the railings peering at the distant, bright flatness of the sea. The sands gave an appearance of emptiness, but in fact plenty of families unpacked their belongings for the day. Carol and Tricia from behind wished him good morning. When he turned, he found their reddened faces uninteresting and honest; blue-eyed dolls ready for plastic-topped boxes.

‘Not going home, today, then?’ he asked.

‘No. Another week.’

‘Lucky girls.’

They smiled broadly, but hitched their shoulder bags and made for the concrete steps, with nothing to say to him this bright morning, nor he to them. He watched as they planted their well-fleshed legs solidly down, firm, well upholstered bosoms held steady. These were fine women, who offered him little, but who’d settle in Halifax or Batley or Bradford and bring up families and tend parents and know right answers occasionally at right times. He did not need them, did not despise them, but had chosen Meg who made her own erratic way, zigzagging through his sensibility until he lost sense of purpose or reason. That sounded wrong. He’d been drawn to Meg by a beauty which did not depend on her unstable ways. She and he, both, were father-fighters. Carol and Tricia, now at a distance, still stumped along the sands. If Meg flung herself naked into his naked arms, what would the consequence be? A few hours’ peace, a transient sense of satisfaction, but no promise beyond that. As he stood here in the shine of a bright late summer’s morning he could not clearly recall his wife’s face. He envied those witnesses who could drag together indentikit pictures of criminals they’d glimpsed in a fierce shortness of attack. He could not reimagine her right eye or nostril or chin, merely a darkened sketch of her features in a frock remembered in detail for its simplicity.

Yet the image was stored.

If Meg stepped from her car, here, he’d know her, would dwell with tenderness on this square inch of skin or that, not as a bit of design, a pattern, but as a deeply important part of reality fastening its fangs of attraction into him just so long as his eye rested on it, devoted its careful attention. He imagined the physical thump with which his body would respond to Meg’s presence, and found again that he could give it no sort of precision. An ache here, a tingle, a breathlessness, a pained excitement in heart, shoulders, stomach. And had it happened, the effect would have reduced his powers of observation and thus hidden itself again, cocooned itself from the accurate words that would have pinned it down like a specimen for future inspection. Even that, he told himself, would not do. Those words did not exist; any description would be at best a rough sketch done across creased paper with blunt pencil on a dark night. His body would answer to her real presence with gland, nerve, muscle, but to the smudged word, a smudged thought. He acknowledged only physical reality, be it merely a line in her handwriting or a garment from her back, with any vibrancy.