The Likes of Us (25 page)

His wife was vacuuming in one of the bedrooms. She came down when she heard the car, and the back door slam.

‘Did you find her, then?'

‘Aye, I found her. You know that betting slip you picked up? Halloran had backed a 33 to 1 winner. I called in at Mulholland's and took the money round to his wife. A hundred and fifty-nine quid.'

‘Good gracious! Wasn't he watching the racing when he collapsed?'

‘Yes, he was.'

‘You don't think the shock could have done it to him?'

‘Nay, I don't know.'

‘I expect his wife would be pleased to see all that money.'

‘She took no notice of it. She was more bothered about Halloran.'

‘Oh? Well, that's fitting, anyway.'

‘All the same, it's a lot of money.'

‘Yes. It'll come in useful with all that lot to feed and clothe. Twelve, is it?'

‘Eleven.'

‘What's one more or less when you've got so many? How do they manage with them all? He hardly ever works, yet he drinks and gambles. I'll bet it's a right muckhole. Isn't it?'

‘Oh, aye,' Marshall said.

‘And him. What she'll have to put up with him.'

Marshall gave a short exasperated snort of laughter. He looked at her, throwing out his hands.

‘They're as happy as pigs in shit,' he said.

‘Such language!' his wife said.

Estuary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘It comes in fast, doesn't it?' Parker said. He sat with his large soft-skinned hands holding his coffee cup at a table in the window of the caf
é
over the confectioner's shop and watched the rippling grey line of the bore as it swept silently up the channels between the low muddy sandbanks in the river-mouth.

It was the first time that one of his mid-morning visits to the caf
é
had given him such a good view of the tide at the most impressive stage of its sweep into the estuary. The first time, also, since he plodded up the lino-covered stairs three days ago, that he had addressed any words of conversation to the grey-haired, bespectacled waitress who stood beside him now with ballpen poised over her bill-pad.

He was a hefty young man, crouching bulkily, shoulders hunched, over the flimsy table. But his skin had the pallor of a recent illness and he looked as though he had lost some weight.

‘There won't be a bit of land to be seen in half an hour,' the waitress said. ‘It fills up quickly once it starts.'

Parker saw how the bore, its sweep broken by the concrete feet of the railway viaduct, encircled and isolated the smooth mounds of dark river sand.

‘It'd be an easy thing to get cut off, I reckon.'

‘They've to fetch people out every year,' the waitress said.

‘Don't they see the danger?'

‘Some people never see danger till it's too late,' the waitress said. ‘Of course, it isn't all that bad at this time of year. But you should see it in the spring. We get some real tides then. If anybody gets in then they don't stand much chance, I can tell you. They get caught in the current under the bridge and you can't get to them in time. We had a man drowned there this year.'

There was unconscious satisfaction in her voice: an involuntary touch of pride in this dangerous phenomenon on her doorstep.

Parker drained his cup and felt for some money.

‘It was two vanilla slices, wasn't it?'

‘Yes, two.'

He was reminded once again, with a pang, of his mother as the waitress made out the bill and laid it by his plate.

‘Pay downstairs at the desk, sir, if you please.'

He had always had a sweet tooth and every day when the local baker had delivered his tray of cakes and pastries to the little general shop, Parker's mother had kept her sharp eyes and tongue on guard. ‘You just keep your hands off them vanilla slices, Bernard my lad. I'm watching you and they're all accounted for.'

He put a threepenny bit on the table and went downstairs. When he had settled his bill at the counter he walked across the narrow promenade to the river wall and sat down on a bench to watch the tide.

A few small boats, grounded on the shore, moved and eventually floated as the water curled under and lifted them. A train rattled across the viaduct and Parker saw the anonymous faces of the passengers as they were carried over the deepening water swirling about the legs of the structure. The sun glistened on the water, and down on the narrowing shore a child laughed in a sudden spasm of joy. The menace of the tide fascinated Parker and held him there while the sandbanks slowly submerged and the estuary became an unbroken stretch of water, calm enough on the surface but current-corrupted beneath, from a few yards below his feet to the distant line of the far shore; and it was not until the noon sun clanged brassily off the water into his eyes and he stood up to walk back to his lodgings that his mind sank again into contemplation of the emptiness of his life.

It was a small and cosy life he had lived with his mother in the years since his father died. Unlike his father he had felt no pull from the world outside the little shop with the house behind it. He had never much cared for his father, whom he vaguely felt had held him in some contempt, and when his father died he had drawn closer than ever to his mother in an understanding where monosyllables and gestures conveyed almost all they wished to say. And he was content. There seemed no reason why anything should change. He never thought about it. But then he had contracted pneumonia and while he was in the period of crisis, fighting for his own life, his mother had two strokes in quick succession, the second one finishing her. They told him nothing until they felt him strong enough to take the news, and even so it was not until he went back to the closed shop and the empty house that full realization of it all broke into his stupefied mind.

He would be wise to go away for a while, the doctor said. Have a complete change; go somewhere quiet and stroll in the sun; sort himself out and come to terms with his new life. So he had come here to sit on the narrow promenade or drink coffee and eat vanilla slices in the caf
é
over the shop while the tide ran into the estuary from the sea.

 

Every day Parker came down the hill from his lodgings to watch the tide. He would have liked to explore the country inland but he still tired easily, and only during the second week did he venture along the river path that led off the promenade and gave onto a tree-lined stretch of shore out of sight of the village. Here he found that he could sit, away from people, in an almost mindless contemplation of the river in which the pain of the change in his life was curiously dulled. And here, on the third day, he saw the swimmer.

Men quite often bathed inshore off the promenade, but this head bobbed far out where the sea ran at its strongest into the basin. Parker stood there for some time, watching the tiny distant movements of the swimmer in the waste of water. Then he crunched slowly across the shingle to the pile of clothing which lay just above the high-water line. There seemed to be only one garment there: a bathrobe of soft red-and-white striped towelling. He could also see now, through the trees, a white-stuccoed house with a flat parapeted roof. When he turned back to the river it took him a moment to locate the swimmer and he saw that the man was making for the shore, swimming with strong sure strokes. Some minutes later he became aware that the swimmer wore a bathing cap and was not a man but a woman.

He wanted to move away but curiosity kept him there until she reached the shallows and stood up to walk out. Then it was too late to go without speaking. As she came towards him, removing the rubber cap and shaking her head to free the short dark hair, he said awkwardly, ‘I was just thinking you might be in trouble.'

Black, expressionless eyes met his briefly. ‘No, no trouble.'

‘They said it was dangerous to swim any way out.'

‘It's all right if you're a strong swimmer,' the woman said.

Though older than himself, she was still young: about thirty, Parker thought. As she dropped the cap and lifted her hands to her hair she stretched herself tall, rising slightly on her toes. Her whole body gave an impression of flatness in its width of hips and the smooth hardly developed curves of her breasts, which reminded Parker later of the gentle mounds of sand in the estuary, the cold rigid nipples like pebbles under the wet clinging skin of her black one-piece swimsuit. Her face was dark and sallow-skinned, and her black eyes seemed never to lose that constant inscrutable stare.

She took cigarettes from a pocket of the robe, offering them to Parker and, when he refused, lighting one for herself. Then she put on the robe and began to rub herself dry, the smoke from the cigarette between her pale lips making her narrow her eyes.

‘It's the only exciting thing round here,' she said suddenly. ‘Everything else is half dead.'

‘I was wondering if I ought to go for help,' Parker said.

‘It would have been too late,' she said. ‘They couldn't have got a boat to me in time.'

He looked after her when, a few moments later, she walked away with an easy, graceful swing of her body towards the trees, and she came into his mind from time to time during the rest of the day. Until, when he was undressing for bed, he found himself wondering why he should think of her. He had never needed women in his little world and, apart from a momentary flicker of sexual curiosity about some girl in the shop or a face glimpsed briefly on the television screen, thoughts of them had not troubled him. Yet he thought of this one, the flat body, the undeveloped breasts, and unfathomable black eyes coming to him time and again. Always he saw her lifting herself out of the water as he had seen her that morning, and it seemed to him that she had become inextricably associated with his thoughts of the tide and its fascination for him.

He drifted into a heavy, dream-laden sleep in which he found himself down in the estuary, walking on one of the sandbanks at night. He became aware of the bore, silver in the moonlight, sweeping silently along the channels on either side and in sudden fear he turned one way and another, to find water all round him. He began to run across one of the channels, feeling the water deepening round his legs until all at once there was nothing under his feet and he was thrashing madly, in panic, trying to keep his head and shouting at the top of his voice, ‘I can't swim. I can't swim.' The woman's voice answered him. ‘It's all right if you're a strong swimmer.' He had a sense of someone near him, and then he began to shout again as a terrible pressure forced him under the surface. The water flooded his lungs and the blood beat in his head until he thought his brain would burst.

He was crouching near the foot of the bed when he woke, the clothes spilling over on to the floor. He dragged them up round him and lay shivering in the dark, his body clammy with sweat, his heart beating with sickening force.

 

Behind the house where Parker was staying were fields trailing off into common land which ran up into the wooded headland that cut off the view of the bay and the open sea. For some time he had felt a desire to watch the full sweep of the tide as it rolled in across the sands. The rim of the headland looked to be no more than a mile and a half away, and on a hot afternoon towards the end of the second week he set out to walk up there.

Crossing the common, climbing steadily all the time, he felt the sun on his back and he took off his jacket and carried it over his arm. By the time he reached the edge of the trees he was tired and thirsty. His thighs ached and his armpits were soaked in sweat. The distance to the headland, foreshortened in the view from his bedroom window, was twice his original estimate and it was only the thought that it would be cooler under the trees which kept him going forward. The paths he had seen seemed to lead away from his objective and he had ignored them, climbing in what he judged to be a direct line to the headland across the rough tussocky grass. Now, at the edge of the wood, his view of the higher ground cut off, he faced the way he wanted to go and walked straight in under the trees.

Five minutes later he seemed to be lost, and looking back he could not make out the way he had come. He was entirely alone and even the occasional bird-calls seemed a part of the silence which surrounded him. When he saw two sets of initials cut into the trunk of a silver birch he reached out to them as if for reassurance. RF-GL: friends who had been this way, stood on this same spot, ten years ago. Or, more likely, lovers, welcoming the solitude of the wood. Parker gazed pensively at the letters as his relaxed fingers traced their outline.

He went on, hoping for some break in the trees which would allow him to get his bearings, and came presently into an open space that turned out to be a trap of grass-covered brambles into which he blundered and entangled his legs, falling forward and slashing his hands and face before he pulled himself clear and lay flat on the ground, his heart hammering, his breath coming in short painful gasps.

As his body relaxed he closed his eyes and slept for a time, waking with dry hard lips and a raging desire for water. He got on to his feet and clutched at a tree as the wood reeled before his eyes in a blur of sunlight and shadow. When he felt steadier he began to move down through the trees. It was rough going: he clambered down steep banks and skirted impenetrable thickets, not knowing where he was going but always heading downhill, his throat parched, his head swimming from over-exertion. He had done too much, he kept telling himself; a lot too much. He was a fool for having taken it on. His mother would—no, not his mother. He stopped abruptly in his thinking at the inescapable fact that his mother would never rebuke him again. There was no-one to rebuke him. He could do as he liked. His behaviour and his welfare were matters for himself now. He was on his own. ‘Are them shoes wet, Bernard? Changed your clothes? You're asking for pneumonia delivering orders in them wet things.' Never again. She'd always said he had a stubborn, foolhardy streak that he'd inherited from his father...

Ten minutes of downhill stumbling and scrambling brought him, almost exhausted, first to signs of tree-felling and then a vehicle-width track with the impressions of heavy tyres in the soft black earth. Now the going was easier. He caught glimpses of the river through the trees and then the glare of sunlight on the white walls of a house. The sun caught him again as he emerged from the shade of the trees and he wondered if he dare ask at the house for water. He shrank from it, but he had never known such a thirst. Still thinking of it, he went along under a tall cedarboard fence until he came to a gate. He was standing there in indecision when the woman he had watched swimming in the estuary two days before came up the lane from the direction of the shore.

Her feet were bare except for rope sandals. She wore a pale blue cotton beach-dress, tied at the waist and reaching halfway down her thighs.

Parker saw as she came nearer that her hair was damp, and he knew she had been swimming. For some reason the knowledge started small fluttering tremors of excitement in the bottom of his stomach.