Authors: Stanley Middleton

Holiday (3 page)

‘What do you think?’

‘You have.’ Fisher took spectacles from his pocket. ‘Did she say anything?’

‘Ah, that’s a question, now, isn’t it?’

‘Look,’ Fisher said. ‘I don’t want to make a meal of it. I’ve left her for good, and I think she knows that, and wants it. But I was married to her for six years, and that means something. If I could do anything for her, without going back or saying anything in person, I’d do it.’

‘How’s she managing financially?’

‘I’m continuing the mortgage and my solicitor’s arranging monthly payments.’

‘I’m not acting for her.’

‘I wondered.’

‘She’s an odd kid.’

They drank in silence now the pub seemed fuller of noise. Fisher set up fresh pints, and sitting said,

‘D’you know, I’d considered what I’d say to you if we met.’

‘Well, boy,’ Vernon answered, ‘we’re rational human beings, aren’t we? But Irene’s furious. She saw your marriage as perfect.’ He grinned, with mischief. ‘Perhaps she thinks Meg’ll be back, inflicting herself on us.’

‘Not much fear of that.’

‘You think not. Well, now. They didn’t get on; that is for certain. She’s a selfish bitch.’

‘Who?’

‘Naughty, naughty. You pays your money. Still, I was a bit surprised that it was you who went. If she’d have flipped off . . .’

‘She knows which side her bread’s buttered.’ Fisher.

‘Will she get a job, then?’

‘I imagine so.’

Again, they listened to the clatter of the pub. In the far room a piano clinked into hits from the musical comedies. Vernon, not without malice, hummed a snatch of ‘Love will find a way.’ In spite of his military appearance, his intelligence, Vernon’s tastes were simple; a drink, a television serial, Messiah at Christmas, hymn-singing half-hours on radio, watching some clever sod’s struggles in difficulty. On some good-badness scale how would one mark him? Though he was selfish, the trait wasn’t apparent. He did not scatter money about, but he was not obviously mean. He cared nothing for his wife and daughter; he never acted cruelly. He was an atheist who attended the parish church twice a month.

Now he sat, rubicund, bucolic, in a backstreet pub enjoying his evening drink and his son-in-law’s discomfiture. Fisher had no proof of this; he suspected that if he’d announced a reconciliation with Meg, Vernon would smile because he’d torment his wife with the news and guess, rightly, the date of their next major rumpus.

‘Penny for ’em,’ Vernon said.

‘Eh?’ Hard to hear in this din.

‘What are you thinking about?’

Fisher looked at the group of middle-aged patrons pulling up to their table, shedding caps, headscarves, coughing, ready to snatch shining drinks from the tray to toast each other.

‘You,’ he replied.

Vernon shook his head. The meat-faced leader of the new arrivals raised his glass, having handed out the gin-and-variables to his ladies, and said,

‘Here’s to all of you.’

Cheek dimpled, Vernon raised his glass to them, bowing with ceremony. This courtesy was well-received. In half-an-hour’s time he’d be explaining some point of law to them, with half the room agog, silent at his words.

‘And yours, sir.’ Meat-face.

Fisher gulped his beer away, wished Vernon good-night and made for bed.

Early next morning Fisher was up for a walk.

He’d woken uncomfortably before six and having shaved to the seven o’clock news on his transistor set, had shined his shoes and set out. Again there was an appearance of ceremonial to be kept up. His father had always taken him out for a trot on the promenade, a newspaper and a few improving words to the swing of a walking stick. The old man had been energetic; one granted that. As the pair gathered speed, and Fisher seemed to recall running quite desperately to keep abreast, his father would draw his attention to the clean air, the ozone, the smell of bacon frying, the morning sun’s sheen on the great windows of the sea-front hotels. He’d gesture with his walking-stick at the sand and reach some conclusion about last evening’s weather; they’d consult the tide-clocks and try to make head or tail of them, or the two-day old graphs of sunshine. ‘Finest hour of the day,’ Arthur Fisher would intone, handing his
Journal
with its inch-high headlines to his son. Edwin had not liked that; he was no dog. Besides if the paper were creased or rucked by a small sweaty hand, there’d be trouble when father, brushing his moustache bushy, sat down to page one and a few comments before the breakfast-gong.

Now Fisher walked smartly, swinging
The Times.

As he’d bought this, he’d suddenly surprised himself making conversation with the stall-keeper in his father’s manner, friendly, hectoring, patronising. He’d totted up the change aloud, inquired about the wind’s direction, interpreted a sleepy reply and drawn the man’s attention to the photograph on the front page of a picture-daily. His dad had never worried himself about response; these dummies were scattered round his road to be harangued, or punned over. When Arthur Fisher holidayed, the whole world joined in, whether or not it noticed.

This morning the sea glittered in spoldges, ridges of shifting gold. The wind dipped from the east as the gulls spread wide wings and cawked. An artisan hurrying to work, leather snap-basket in hand, ignored Fisher’s cheerful greeting. Two girls on the far side of the road, skirt-ends lively, scurried prim-faced, one holding her hair in place with a spread right hand. The promenade was empty, and Fisher, tapping the metal railings with his newspaper had nothing to say or nobody to say it to. He lacked a son to race alongside him, to know the difference between a holiday father and a workaday, to admire, to be the recipient of convictions that would have evaporated with the day’s light.

His son had died.

Donald Everard Vernon Fisher was dead, had never visited this place, had not done much beyond crying for his mother and then, when she had needed him most to keep her sanity, and her husband, had failed to live.

A slap with
The Times
, a quick turn on the heel dismissed the dead.

At breakfast the young married woman on the next table made conversation. Her children had behaved well, but on leaving their stools had moved toward’s Fisher’s chair where they stood staring.

‘Hello, you young fellows,’ he said, deliberately sudden.

The deep voice startled them so that they gasped out loud and ran to their mother, clutching her slacks.

‘They aren’t being a nuisance, are they?’ He guessed she had assumed her most elegant accent, from the expression on her husband’s face.

‘Not at all.’

‘This is the first time they’ve been away. It’s strange for them.’

Fisher examined her fair shortish hair, gay jumper, straight back. She’d beautiful nails, but dyed to resemble black grapes. The husband, high-necked shirt, bushy long sideboards, collected the boys and ushered them upstairs.

‘Well trained,’ the girl said to Fisher.

‘So I see.’ She was determined to talk.

‘It’s nice to see the father taking a hand,’ the middle-aged man said, from nowhere.

‘He’s as good with them as I am.’

‘Why’s that?’ Fisher asked.

‘Well, he’s always done his share, and he can mend things. They’ve always got a job for him when he comes home.’

This was smilingly approved round the room, so that it seemed that even the children there applauded this paragon of a father. The middle-aged man monopolised conversation, while his wife smirked modestly into her cup of pale tea. Fisher, buttering his last triangle of toast, thought the young woman appeared disappointed at his silence and the other man’s loquacity. He, not a bad practice, put the notion into plain words, altered the first verb to ‘hoped’, the second to ‘was’ and found himself not displeased. She’d be twenty-five, perhaps. A shop-girl.

She stood, pulled her jersey down, little breasts out-thrust; her eyes were bright blue, large.

‘I’ll go and see what they’re up to,’ she announced.

When she’d gone, the middle-aged man’s wife commented favourably on the children’s behaviour, told Fisher it wasn’t often you saw fathers giving a hand like that, and then mischievously, added that her husband hadn’t.

‘There was a reason,’ he muttered.

‘Oh, yes. I’m not denying it.’

Home counties. Minor civil-servant. Teacher. Shopkeeper. Foreman.

Upstairs Fisher deplored the decoration of his bedroom, picking up, fiddling with a spray of false roses he’d just noticed. This place was dustless, windows bright and curtains fresh from the cleaners, but without taste, a collection of polished, veneered plywood, and cheap pastel plastics. On the way up he’d seen the young father leading the smaller boy into the lavatory, and through the open door next to his own, the mother brushing the elder’s bright hair. All the time she was talking: ‘And you can make a castle if you like, or a motor-car, or a horse for Tony to sit on . . .’ Both the monologue and the moving hand pictured so youthful an energy that he envied her.

He’d nothing to do.

Looking down on the street he watched a family filling the boot of their car. They quarrelled and worked without direction, silently to the watcher, from time to time on the pavement in attitudes of contemptuous amazement. In the end they handed Grandma down, parked her in the back seat, wrapped her legs in a blanket, slammed the door and left her.

Vaguely Fisher approved.

He loved the man in the corner-shop, the fellow who lived six doors up and always cursed the wind, the chaps on the delivery vans, the obsequious butcher. For some reason they represented to him a kind of sanity, an ordered universe; if one of them broke his arm or got the sack, then a star was disturbed. That struck nowhere near the truth. Occasionally, as he glimpsed one of these people at work, he’d feel a rush of affection that would have evaporated inside a minute, completely forgotten until he either saw the person again or tried to make sense, as now of his own personality.

And yet he, Edwin Fisher, lecturer in education, this lover of mankind had walked out on his wife, was glad of it.

When he thought of Meg, now, in this hiatus of a bedroom, he remembered her body, beautifully flaunted, cared for, her face and then, the hate-drawn, spiteful mouth he’d deserted. Again he felt sick anger swill him, humiliation, a pain, almost physical, eating vitals out so the he wanted to hurt in return, to kick at inanimate objects, to restore his manhood by some childish display.

She’d won. He’d not admitted it before this moment, but now in a room he despised, in a town that offered him nothing, he confessed that his wife had won. Immediately his mind began on its usual hundred and one modifications to a thesis, slight qualifications, excuses not to be invented. Of course, if a man upped and left a wife he’d loved, he’d lost something. If he did this while she was still sore with a son’s death, he’d nothing to say for himself, but this was not that sort of defeat. She’d managed to destroy in him something he considered of value, his humanity, his sensibility, his himself.

As soon as he started with words, he smiled. ‘Put it into baby-talk,’ his university tutor had advised him, ‘and let’s see how the argument shapes then.’ Not bad advice for pretentious young jugglers such as he’d been. But not much cop now. Outside in the street the family were scrumming round the car, had in fact returned grandma to the pavement, and were intemperately laughing at the father who in open-necked shirt and cardigan gaped at a bottle he’d dropped, splashing his flannel-legs black as the beer.

Quizzing the mild chaos in the street below, Fisher wondered what Meg was doing now. He could not think that she’d upset herself because he’d left her; she’d hogged her share in the rows between them, and if not with enjoyment then at least unscathed. Like her father, she revelled in a quarrel, shouted, screamed, sulked or kicked merely to get her way, a mistress of tantrums. Again he checked himself. No human being could fight as they’d done, and be unhurt. She’d two advantages over him: she’d more fire and a complete conviction she was in the right. He felt his body flush with hate.

Carefully he turned his mind back to their first meeting.

He’d been standing in the foyer of the Playhouse, superior to the knots of chattering people, the crush at the bar, the coffee-stirring crowd down the steps. In front of the bookstall, blatantly eyeing him stood a young woman with auburn hair, a great mass, heavily thick down her back. She stared at him; no doubt. Green, wide eyes taking him in. He smiled. She wore a striking full length dress in dark green, with a cape, marked, or marred, with patterns of black lines, straight bunches of fasces. When he smiled she did not look away, made no pretence, merely continued to make her interest in him obvious. While he walked across she did not move, or flounce, showed no sign of approval or otherwise at his action, but waited, stock-still.

‘Hello,’ he said. He considered himself skilful in these matters.

‘Hello.’ The voice was very much softer than he’d expected, but she smiled slightly.

‘Making anything of Ibsen?’ he asked.
A Doll’s House.

‘I don’t know.’ Nothing hopeless in the answer. ‘It’s perhaps the translator’s fault, but it doesn’t seem the sort of conversation I hear, well, at home, for instance.’

Her voice warmed to the last four words.

‘Now, I think it is.’

‘Your home’s different from mine, then.’

‘I live in a flat, on my own.’

‘So do I,’ she said, ‘but you know what I mean.’

‘I don’t, to be frank.’

‘Don’t be awkward, for God’s sake,’ she said, ‘on a Friday night.’

A bearded young man in a velvet jacket arrived, presented her with a glass of gin. He looked without rancour at Fisher.

‘Cheers,’ she said, sipping. He responded. ‘I can’t introduce you. I don’t know his name. I could tell him your name.’

‘And yours,’ Fisher said.

‘Cheeky with it,’ Beardy said.

‘What do you think of Ibsen’s conversation?’ she asked.