The End Of Solomon Grundy (5 page)

Grundy laughed, a bellow that was an unseemly disturbance of the peace of The Dell. “That’s right. Guffy McTuffie’s been playing me up.”

Sunday in the Dell, Monday at the Office

If the inhabitants of The Dell had been asked what characterised them as a group, most of them would have been inclined to reply a little indignantly that they were not a group but individuals. Why, otherwise, would they have answered the advertisement in
The Observer
which appealed to “Individuals, who want to live in a community, but one that does not confine but actually enhances their own individuality; those who believe that a residential housing project – abominable phrase – can be a means to gracious, civilised living?” They would have claimed for themselves that they were liberal, unorthodox, tolerant – or rather, they would not have made the claim but would just have accepted it as a fact that they were forward-looking modern people who had no religious, sexual or other prejudices. Yet The Dell had its own orthodoxy, and a sociologist making an examination of the people who lived there, and in the dozens of other Dells built in England during the past few years, would have come to some firm conclusions about its inhabitants, although those conclusions would have been modified by the particular district in which each Dell was set. A Dell in semi-suburban Surrey, like this one, no doubt attracted different people from a Dell on the outskirts of a provincial town, but the similarities were more notable than the differences.

Dell-dwellers, the sociologist might have said in his report, were mostly those who regarded themselves as professional men, rather than tradesmen or manual workers. Their average age was the early thirties – the garage committee, which was composed of particularly responsible members of The Dell community, was distinctly over average age. Such occupations as advertising, architecture, medicine, the law, and technological engineering were well represented among them. There were a few artists and more near-artists, and a cluster of lively fresh-looking young business men who held managerial jobs in enormous corporations. A Dell-dweller would not be among the higher reaches of his profession, for as his income grew and his hairline receded he naturally moved on to a detached home of his own at Hampstead, Sunningdale or Gerrard’s Cross. He would have no more than two children, because the houses in The Dell were not built to accommodate larger families. He would own a number of books, but not too many because, as he might wistfully say, there was no room for them. He would have pictures on his walls, but they would probably be reproductions rather than originals. He almost certainly possessed a record player, and was fond of music. In politics some Dell-dwellers liked to call themselves Socialists, many were Liberals, few admitted to Conservative votes or feelings. About religion the Dell-dweller was generally agnostic, although he tended to go to church at Harvest Festival or Christmas time. He was a moderate drinker, he owned a medium-sized popular car, and he was tolerant in theory of much that he disapproved in practice, like anarchism or drug-taking. This was the male Dell-dweller. His wife, who very often had artistic feelings or inclinations, was totally in accord with her husband’s view that Dell-living was pleasant, labour-saving and comfortable. It left her time to prepare little meals which might almost – but not quite – have been prepared in France or Italy or Spain, to read reviews of books in the weekly magazines, to collect or work for at least one good social cause, and generally to play a part in the social and intellectual life of the community.

Dell-living, the sociologist might have summed it up, represented a progressive, leisured and easy way of life for a rising national group with cultural inclinations above their intellectual stations.

The Dell orthodoxy, of clothes and conduct, was apparent at week-ends. On Saturdays husbands and wives went out to shop together in the High Street, the husbands looking slightly raffish in corduroy trousers, cravats and rather jaunty caps, the wives uniformed in jeans and sweaters. On Sundays the heavies – that is, the serious weekly papers – were read to a late hour in the morning. Later the husbands, wearing tremendously informal but really rather smart old clothes, washed cars and played with children, while their wives cooked lunch. After lunch came washing up, after that visits to friends for tea.

On the Sunday after the garage committee meeting Dick Weldon, pipe in mouth, was washing and polishing his car in the gravel driveway outside his house. He was using a new flexihose combined washer-polisher which was not working very well. His neighbour Felix Mayfield, an advertising executive, came and watched.

“I hear we may be getting some real garages at last.”

“You do?” Dick grinned. “The grapevine’s been working overtime.”

“Arlene told Steffie there’d been a bit of bother.” Stephanie was Mrs Mayfield. Dick said nothing.

“What’s Grundy been up to now?”

Dick put down the flexihose, looked at his pipe, which had gone out, rubbed his nose with the pipe stem. “I don’t know that he’s been up to anything.”

“He really is a bloody barbarian.”

“Sol sometimes has an unfortunate way of putting things, that’s all.”

“If he’s trying to stop us getting garages—”

“Look, he wants garages, we all want garages. There was a stupid argument about coloured people, nothing else. Sol puts people’s backs up.”

“I’ll say he does. And he wants to look out for himself with that coloured chap, Kabanga. I hear he was with that woman of Kabanga’s last night.”

“Who was?”

“Grundy.”

“That’s nonsense. You can take it from me. I said good night to him at about half past nine. He was going home then.”

“This was later, about eleven.”

“Where did you hear that tale from?”

Felix looked a little uncomfortable. “Never mind. They were together, over by the shrubbery near Kabanga’s house. He was kissing her. That’s the story.”

“I don’t believe a word of it.” Dick Weldon was naturally polite, but now he very nearly turned his back on Felix Mayfield, and picked up his flexihose again.

This bit of gossip had been given to Felix and Steffie Mayfield by their fourteen-year-old daughter Jill. Just off the High Street there was a coffee bar called the Aficionado. The interior of this bar was filled with posters of bull fights, around the walls were photographs of matadors, and the bar was a meeting-place for the local teenagers. Jill Mayfield had gone there that morning with Adrienne Facey, who was fifteen, and Jennifer Paget. It was Jennifer who had broken into her juniors’ discussion of pop music with the news.

“What were they doing?” asked Adrienne, a girl startlingly like her mother.

Jennifer looked down at her coffee. “Well, you know.” Adrienne whispered. “Oh, no. You know, they were – he was holding her tight.”

“Kissing?” asked Jill.

“Yes, they were kissing. And he was holding her.”

“I don’t see how you could see them,” Adrienne said. “It’s jolly dark.”

“Well, I could. I’d taken Puggy out for a walk.”

“You must have been close.”

“I was close enough. You can’t mistake him, with that ginger hair.”

“In the dark?”

“The street light isn’t that far away, and Puggy went near them.”

“I think he’s very attractive for an old man,” Jill said dreamily. “I mean, I like old men myself.”

“How could you see it was that girl? If she was kissing him, I mean,” Adrienne asked.

Jennifer’s spotty face was flushed. “I could see and it was her. I saw them both.”

The subject was dropped, but both Jill and Adrienne repeated the story when they got home, Jill delightedly and Adrienne sceptically. It was already a subject of discussion in the Paget household.

“I do quite honestly think that chap’s a bit much,” Peter Clements said.

“What chap?” Rex Lecky was reading the script of a new television play in which he had a part. He sat sideways in a great vessel of a chair, with one leg cocked over the side. His shoes were hand-made, his trousers tight and narrow. He looked even younger than he was. His dark hair was brushed forward in a manner currently fashionable.

“Grundy. He really wrecked that meeting last night. I said we ought not to agree to pay more money for those garages. Those of us who’d got them already. Of course it’s not really a charge for the garages, it’s for upkeep. I wonder if I was right.” There was silence. “You might say something.”

Rex looked up. “Sorry. I thought it was Clements soliloquising.”

“After all, we’re part of a community, and I suppose it’s not unreasonable really. I wonder if I ought to have a word with other people to see what they think.”

“Dear Peter. So public spirited.” Peter glared at him. Rex put down his script. “He’s a terrific roughneck, Grundy, but in that roughneck way he’s got a lot of charm, wouldn’t you agree?”

“You’re just trying to needle me.”

“No, I honestly think it. A tremendous lot of charm.”

“I’m going out.” Rex nodded, and returned to his script. At the door his friend paused. “I think Grundy’s a boor and a bore.”

Peter picked up his rather elegant walking-stick, which stood in the hall, and went out into the September sunshine. He spent the next hour and a half in calling on several Dell-dwellers who lived in the numbers between 1 and 50, telling them about the committee meeting and Grundy’s atrocious behaviour, and asking whether they would be prepared to pay the extra money involved. To his surprise most of them felt that the waste patch was such an eyesore that they would do almost anything, including paying the extra upkeep cost, to get rid of it.

Grundy spent that afternoon with his friend Theo Werner, in the first-floor room that in most Dell houses served as a bedroom, but which Grundy had turned into a working study. They discussed the problems of Guffy McTuffie.

Guffy was a child of the small agency which Grundy had started when he came out of the Army after the war and discovered his complete lack of any obvious commercial talent. His father had been a moderately successful Irish actor, a big magniloquent expansive extroverted ginger man who never tired of telling about the part he had played in the glorious days of the Troubles, a part which varied from a major role in the storming of the Post Office to exploits as what he called the good right hand of Michael Collins. Holding out his own hairy freckled hand in front of him, Pat Grundy would repeat the words that Michael Collins had used so often: “I’d sooner lose this right hand than I’d lose Pat Grundy.” His hearers in bar rooms and boarding houses were only occasionally enthralled, and the small ginger-haired boy who knew the stories by heart passed through the usual stages of fascination, adoration and repulsion. He had been given the name of Solomon partly because of the nursery rhyme, which appealed to his father’s simple sense of humour, but also because Pat hoped that his son would combine, as he said with wearisome frequency, “the wisdom of a Solomon with the courage of a Grundy.”

Solomon Grundy spent his childhood in theatre dressing-rooms, among bits of stage scenery, in boarding houses, and in railway station waiting-rooms. His mother, an Irish woman who was frail, pathetic and often ill, could not bear that he should be parted from her. Sometimes he went to school, once he went to a boarding school for a couple of terms, but for the most part she educated him herself, teaching him to read and write. She took refuge in her son from the drunkenness and unfaithfulness of her husband. Pat Grundy made only a few appearances in the West End, but he could always obtain a place in touring repertory companies. Mrs Grundy died of cancer when her son was sixteen years old, and Pat was killed during the blitz on London, when a bomb scored a near miss on the shelter in which, a trouper to the end, he was entertaining the shelterers with dramatic impersonations of characters from Dickens. Solomon was called up, fought in Africa, Italy and France, took a commission and reached the rank of captain. In the mess his colleagues found him reticent and self-contained. He rarely joined in the good-natured horseplay that is common among soldiers, and when he did there was nothing good-natured about his violence. After he broke the arm of a fellow officer who had played a practical joke on him, everybody became a little afraid of Solomon Grundy.

He had read a good deal in the Army, and when he came out wrote a number of short stories, none of which was printed. He drifted into advertising, and after a couple of years as a copywriter started an art agency with an artist who worked in the same firm, Theo Werner. The agency led a struggling existence for some time, before the birth of Guffy McTuffie.

Guffy was a comic strip character. The essence of him was that, although a coward by nature, he was led to perform courageous actions. When, for instance, a gang of teenage bandits took over Slumside, where Guffy was paying a visit, he went down to their headquarters and talked to them, chattering with fear. When the gang attacked him, Guffy overthrew them with judo. When they practised judo on him it turned out that he had become proficient in oduj, a higher form of wrestling. This particular adventure ended with Guffy raising funds for a community centre, which, as created by Archie Accurit the architect with the new build-it-in-a-day material Prefabconstricuct, proved such an attraction that leaders of industry put up new factories, concert halls and theatres were erected, Slumside was transformed, and Charlie Corncrackle the teenage gangster found himself isolated, saw the error of his ways, became a missionary in the Noncongelical Church, and was last heard of in Congojumbaland where he was helping the natives to rule their own country.

Who had thought of Guffy McTuffie? This was something that Grundy himself could no longer remember. He had been elaborated in casual talk, drawn by Theo as a little man with a big head, an inquiring look and a single lock of hair that would never stay down, and had been sold at once to a national newspaper. As time passed Guffy had come to occupy more and more time, and to provide a larger share of Grundy’s and Theo Werner’s income. Guffy’s activities were protean. He had solved the problems of young lovers, obtained a new drainage system for Middletown, rescued a would-be suicide from the top of a tall building although terrified of heights himself, and exposed an atom spy group. Guffy had become much more concerned lately with politics, the fate of the world, and nuclear disarmament, and in the new series that was now being designed and drawn, “Guffy’s Sooperdooper Bomb”, he was going to bring the world leaders to a disarmament conference and then compel them to make peace by the threat of using his Sooperdoopernootral Bomb, designed by his friend Snowy Syentist, which had the effect of neutralising all other bombs and rendering them useless.