The End Of Solomon Grundy (3 page)

“We ought to do some washing up.” Caroline leaned back on the sofa, stretched like a cat.

“Saturday tomorrow. Leave it till the morning.”

Tentatively, a cat probing at some possibly forbidden feast of delicious fish, Caroline said, “Rather a flop tonight, I’m afraid.”

“Oh I don’t know. Do you know, I think I’m going to have my pipe.” Caroline watched with pleasure as he put out his half-smoked cigarette, stuffed tobacco into the pipe bowl, tamped it down, lit up and puffed. That pipe smoke rising at the end of the day had been the herald of some of their most cherished confidences. With the pipe properly going, Dick conceded: “It wasn’t too good. Not really our fault, though. After all, if you have chaps like old Sol going berserk, it’s enough to break up any party. I must say I thought it was rather much.”

“I really don’t know what got into him.”

“Pretty girl, wasn’t she?”

“If you say so.”

“You’re the one for me, you know that.” Dick leaned over and patted her sizeable thigh. “I just say she was a pretty girl, that’s all.”

“He’s a knock-out, Tony. I wouldn’t mind him knocking
me
out.” She coiled her legs under her.

“Naughty.” Dick wagged his pipe. “Still, he is a bit of a knock-out, I agree. Wonder where he found Sylvia.” With an archness not unusual to him he added, “Who is Sylvia, what is she? And what exactly happened to her for that matter? I’m still not clear.”

“I don’t know either, dear. There seems to have been a scream, and then there she was with her dress torn and Sol with his face scratched.”

“Still, I suppose there’s no doubt about the essential facts. Sol was looking for a bit of slap and tickle and got turned down. Might have happened to any of us. Great mistake to make it so public, though. Hard on Marion, I must say.”

“Oh,
Marion.
”

“I’d like to know what you’d be saying if I’d been playing games with Arlene.”

“She wouldn’t have screamed.”

Dick advanced in a mock-threatening manner upon his wife. “And what about you, would you have screamed?”

She looked up at him, smiling. “Try me.”

Later, when they were in bed, he said, “All the same, there’s something queer about old Sol.”

Sleepily, she asked, “How’s that?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes he talks to himself, walking along the street I mean.” Caroline made no reply. She was evidently asleep. Dick said to the ceiling, “He’s a queer fish, old Sol, he really is a queer fish.”

Family Lunch and the Garage Committee

On Saturday morning Marion got up at the same time as usual. It was not yet nine o’clock when she called out sharply: “Breakfast.” Grundy came down in his dressing-gown, ginger hair rumpled. They sat in the eating annexe with its picture window, which looked out across grass to the house opposite, where Peter Clements sat eating his breakfast. The television producer showed his big teeth, and waved. A couple of minutes later he was joined by the slender figure of Rex Lecky. Rex also waved. Marion and Grundy waved back. This was almost as much part of the routine of breakfast as brown toast popping up, Cooper’s Oxford, the electric percolator, crunch of solid, slurp of liquid, crackle of morning paper. On this morning, however, Grundy lowered his paper earlier than usual.

“I ought to explain. About last night.”

Marion said nothing. He buttered a piece of toast, spoke carefully and slowly.

“I went upstairs to the lavatory, but someone was in it. That girl – what’s her name, Sylvia – called to me from Dick’s bedroom. She said the zip on her dress had caught in those frilly curtains round the dressing-table, could I get it free. That’s why I went in there. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“The zip is at the back of her dress. I couldn’t get it free, I tugged it and as I tugged I tore the dress. Under those fish scales it was very thin stuff. When I did that she swore at me, screamed, then scratched my face.”

“There was the mark of your hand on her shoulder.”

“I got angry when she scratched my face, and I must have gripped her shoulder. I said something too, I can’t remember what it was. Then she ran out and down the stairs.”

Marion’s voice was painfully patient and reasonable.

“Please, Sol. I was at the bottom of the stairs. I saw the way you both looked. As I said last night, we’re both civilised people. We ought to be able to discuss these things sensibly. If you sometimes feel you want to make a – I suppose you’d call it a pass – at another woman, I can understand. We both know that monogamy isn’t—”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Grundy flung down his newspaper. It knocked his cup on to the floor. The cup broke. Liquid flowed from it on to the wood block floor. “For an intelligent woman you certainly are a bloody fool.”

He got up and went upstairs. Marion called after him, “Don’t forget Mum and Dad are coming to lunch.” Then she picked up the broken cup and wiped the floor. From across the way Peter and Rex watched with interest.

Marion’s father, Mr Hayward, was a big jovial red-faced man who looked as though he should have been a publican or a butcher, although he had in fact been the accountant to a firm of timber merchants. At the age of sixty he had retired, and he and his wife had sold their house in Croydon, and bought one just outside Hayward’s Heath. The coincidence of names never ceased to please him. “Doesn’t belong to me, this Heath, you know,” he would say to friends, adding with a mock-rueful shake of the head, “Wish it did,” or in a variant of this ploy he would say solemnly, “Used to be mine, this whole area, they even named it after me, did you know that? Had to sell it, though, when money got tight.” His wife was a little wispy woman, who was generally silent, but upon certain subjects became extraordinarily voluble. To outsiders it seemed remarkable that Marion, cool, logical, progressive Marion, should have had such parents, should be extremely fond of them and should call them Mum and Dad. To Grundy, however, who remembered the quiet, docile young librarian he had courted thirteen years earlier, a young woman who had been perfectly at home in what her family called the good residential part of Croydon where they lived and had been intent to console them for the loss of her elder brother Robert who had been killed on the Normandy beaches, what seemed strange was the metamorphosis of the Marion he had married into the woman who now sat opposite to him at meals. In the presence of her parents Marion was transformed again into the docile young lady of Croydon, the treasure her parents had been so unwilling to lose.

“You like this, then, do you? You like it here,” Mr Hayward said as he had said several times before, with a note of surprise. “Wouldn’t do for me, I can tell you that.”

Grundy nibbled nuts, drank sherry, made no reply. It was Marion who said, “Of course we like it, Dad, or we shouldn’t have come here.”

Mr Hayward walked over to the window, jingled the coins in his pocket. “No, wouldn’t do for me. Sharing everything with your neighbours, haven’t even got a bit of garden to call your own except for that pocket handkerchief out there. Living in a goldfish bowl.”

“It wouldn’t do for us all to like the same things though, would it?” Mrs Hayward said boldly.

“No, it wouldn’t. You’re just about right there, it wouldn’t,” her husband assented.

“I’d better make sure nothing’s boiling over.” Such a remark from Marion invariably preceded a lengthy period of absence.

“Well, Solomon, how are things?” Mr Hayward always spoke Grundy’s ridiculous Christian name in full, and did so with a sense of its absurdity, which was not less obvious because it was always repressed.

“All right.”

“Our little girl looking after you properly? That’s one thing she was brought up to do at home, isn’t that so, Mother? Got to feed the brute.” His tone changed.

“What have you done to your face?

“A cat scratched me.”

“Puss puss,” Mr Hayward called. “You haven’t got a cat.”

“A neighbour’s cat. Have some more sherry.”

They had some more sherry. Mr Hayward kept up a monologue about a holiday in Spain from which they had just returned, until Marion came back, becomingly flustered, to say that lunch was ready. They ate their steak, chips and salad sitting in the picture window. Peter and Rex were in their places opposite.

“That chap, he’s a TV producer, I think you told me,” Mr Hayward said. “Does he do
Emergency Ward 10
?”

“No. Plays of different sorts.”

“Ah. You get a lot of arty types here, don’t you? Shouldn’t care for it myself.”

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” This was Mrs Hayward.

“We get all sorts. Professional men mostly, I should think you’d call them.” Marion offered the remark, as it were, to her husband, but Grundy was not disposed to call them anything. Mr Hayward’s eye, which did not lack keenness, followed this exchange or lack of exchange.

After lunch, back to the living-room for coffee. “You don’t have to hurry away, do you?” Marion said, but her parents had promised to have tea with friends near Reigate. There was a lot of traffic on the road, Mr Hayward said, and they must start soon. The word
traffic
might have been a spring that released his wife’s tongue. She began to speak at once.

“The traffic I call a disgrace, really I do. What are they doing, putting more cars on the roads when they’re not fit to take the ones we’ve got already, that’s what I ask. And the learners, they should be kept off the road for a year if they fail their tests, they’re a real danger. This morning, we’d just come through Redhill and were turning on to the Banstead road—”

“Didn’t come through Redhill this morning,” her husband said.

“You know what I mean. It was just after we’d passed that black and white farmhouse—”

“Glyte’s old house, you mean?” Marion was leaning forward attentively.

“You turn down All Souls’ Lane, and then take the second right by Barrington Church—”

“Glyte?” her father said to Marion. “You mean old Ronnie Glyte? He never lived there.”

“No, no, not Ronnie. His cousin, the one you used to call Chappy. You took Robert and I there for the day once, don’t you remember? He was a friend of someone you knew, Dad, was his name Fairclough?”

“Yes, I remember. But his name wasn’t Fairclough. Let me see, now—”

“Just after the church there’s a sharp bend and this man, this learner, I don’t believe he had anyone with him in the car, was on the wrong side of the road.”

“There’s no left turn after the church, Mother,” Mr Hayward said severely.

“Of course there is. Not a turn, a bend. You go right round the churchyard.”

“Round Easonby Churchyard?” Her husband’s face was purple. “How can you go round it?”

“Not Easonby, Barrington.”

“Barrington.
But that wasn’t where we met the chap.”

“Fairweather,” Marion said triumphantly. “His name was Fairweather.”

“Going out for a walk,” Grundy said. “Got a headache. If you’ll excuse me.”

There was silence, then Mrs Hayward said, “I think we ought to be going, Dad.” Her husband agreed.

He took Grundy by the arm, led him outside. “I must do a Jimmy Riddle before I go. Everything all right?”

“Why not?”

“Thirteen years you’ve been married now, is that right? They say the first twenty-one years are the worst.” They were standing outside the door of the lavatory. Mr Hayward laughed, then became grave. “I want my little girl to be happy. Is she happy?”

“You’d better ask her.”

“I shouldn’t like it if I thought she was worried by – cats.” Mr Hayward’s face lost its usual beefy jovial look, and became almost menacing. Then he stepped into the lavatory and locked the door. Five minutes later he and his wife had crunched away in their Rover down the gravel drive of The Dell.

Marion waved them away, smiling. When she came back into the house, she said, “Why do you have to spoil everything?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“How often do they come to see us? Once a month, for a few hours. Can’t you be polite to them even for that little time?” Her voice was as cool as usual, but a note of strain moved through it like a red thread in a neutral pattern.

“I had a headache.”

“You can’t bear to see me enjoying myself, why not say so?”

“I can’t help it if your father and mother are bores, and you know very well that they are.”

Now her voice did rise, as though the thin red line had widened, was spreading over into the neutral part of the pattern. “Bores, are they? And what did you say that was so brilliant?”

“How can you be brilliant with bores? They wouldn’t understand.”

Her upper lip was raised from her teeth, she was snarling at him like an animal. “What makes you think you’re anything but a bore yourself? What are you but a cheap commercial artist doing a comic strip for morons, a sort of prostitute—”

His large hand, swung back from a distance, struck the left side of her face. It was the first time he had struck her.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She put one hand to her cheek as though he had wounded her, then ran out of the room and upstairs. Grundy began to collect the coffee things, his big hands placing them gently upon the tray.

That evening Grundy attended a meeting of the garage committee. The question of the garages had become a matter of increasingly bitter discussion during the past months. When The Dell had been built seven years earlier, neat modern garages had been provided for the houses numbered 1 to 50. The houses numbered from 51 to 100 had not been ready for occupation until eighteen months later, and by that time the price of land had increased. The SGH Trust, the company which financed the building, had suggested that part of the ground which had been designed as a lawn should be used for garages, so that they might save the cost of the extra ground, belonging to a man named Twissle, which would have to be bought. This proposal had, naturally enough, been resisted by the residents of the houses with numbers above 50, since through it they would be losing the amenities of a large lawn. The matter had drifted on from month to month, and even year to year, with nothing done. What should have been a green lawn was a patch of waste ground, on which what were understood to be temporary car ports had been erected. These car ports, roofed with corrugated iron, were undoubtedly an eyesore, but they did provide garage space, and the price of the ground on which the garages might in the first place have been built increased every year. The SGH Trust now demanded an extra sum from each resident if they had to buy this ground and use it for garages. They offered to put up permanent garages to replace the temporary ones on the waste ground, but this met with strong objections, especially from those who lived in the houses that faced the car ports. It was possible theoretically for any householder to attend committee meetings by giving notice in advance, but in practice this right was never exercised. Twice a year a public meeting was held, at which severe criticism of the SGH Trust and of the committee was voiced. One or two committee members resigned each year, and new blood, which soon grew as thin as the old, was injected.

The garage committee met that evening in the Jellifers’ house.

The members, besides Jellifer, were Dick Weldon, Peter Clements, Felicity Facey, Grundy, and Edgar Paget. Felicity Facey was the wife of a local chemist with artistic inclinations. She was herself an enthusiastic painter of abstract pictures. The Faceys lived in one of the houses directly opposite to the waste ground.

The Jellifers, the Weldons and the Grundys all lived in the upper numbers, and so were directly concerned with the garage question, Peter Clements, who was not, had been included to show that those lucky enough to possess proper garages were sympathetic to the fate of their unfortunate neighbours.

Paget was present as a representative of the SGH Trust. Finally, the committee chairman was Sir Edmund Stone, a retired civil servant who lived in Brambly Way and thought The Dell architecturally detestable, but had taken the position of chairman because he felt it his duty to preserve local amenities.

The Committee meetings were informal. They sat around in chairs and on sofas, grouped to face the abstract painting with its suggestion of a fish, its vaguer hint of a bottle. Arlene came in with a tray of varied bits of liver sausage and salami and cheese, placed on slices of rye bread, and decorated by fragments of pickled cucumber. When she had departed Jack solemnly made coffee in a machine with a special filtering device, which he said produced the only coffee worth drinking. While he superintended this, poured the coffee into minute cups, and handed it round, Edgar Paget was talking. Almost every meeting ended with Edgar reporting back to the SGH people, and the next meeting began with their reactions.