The Tenement (13 page)

“Does he wash the dishes?” she nearly asked him.

He was a funny man. He was a roadsweeper, she had seen him on the street in the early morning with his brush and his metal cart.

One night when she was drunk she shouted at him, “All you come here for is my money. You're an old hypocrite. My son told me about you. He takes drugs and has been to India. I wanted him to become a lawyer, but he didn't want to. First of all he drove a taxi and then he got a girl into trouble. I can't do anything with him. But he told me about you. You used to drink a lot yourself.”

“That is indeed true. I was an alcoholic, but I found the Lord. He showed me the correct path. You should do the same.” His voice was insufferably mild like Alex's: nothing she said to him offended him.

“Money is everything,” she said. “If I was poor I would be even worse off. I wouldn't have a flat. I know that.”

“God said that the meek shall inherit the earth. Look what happened to Dives, the rich man.” He spoke like a clock that had been wound up. Like one of those robots that she had once bought Stewart for a toy.

Eventually she slammed the door in his face, and drank a huge glass of vodka. He never came again. And when she passed him in the road, he would bow his head like Jesus on the cross.

Tinkers, too, would come to the door asking for rags, and she would give them good clothes. A tramp came and asked her if she wanted any knives or other instruments sharpened. Apart from that she had few visitors.

She used to watch the TV a lot, but she had gone off that too. She became fed up with Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies. The only films she really liked were horror ones but as they were on late at night and she was alone in the house, she thought twice about watching them. She had to take a lot of drink to tolerate the fear, but the difficulty was that then she couldn't see the screen very well. One of the horror films really terrified her. It was about a couple touring in a caravan who found themselves the victims of a Black Mass ceremony. Even the local minister was involved. The caravan was eventually ringed with mad addicts of the devil, while the faces of the man and wife looked out pale as chalk, as paper. That night she had an awful dream. Alex's face was peering out of a caravan which was going on fire. Alex had been cremated, that was what he had wanted. She herself would be buried. Alex's face was burning, the flesh was melting on it, and she was shouting as the curtains hissed and crackled. “We'll go bankrupt. The tourists are bringing their own caravans.” It seemed to her that the tenement was full of voices, clawed hands reached for her. Bony fingers. Oh, God, I can't bear any more, she would say, putting her fingers in her ears. But she did bear more and more. She had to. In the mornings she slept late. In the light of day, the world didn't look so bad. She went to Barrets' and ordered a new sideboard.

Her world would be like this for ever. She would pay for her sins, deceiving Alex. Her friends had been hypocritical, they had been waiting patiently for her downfall. The day that Alex had been cremated was in April. The ground flickered with shadow and light. The coffin slid into an inferno of flame. He winked at her, holding a book in his hand. The book burned leaf by leaf. And his face became vague as he, burning, read the burning book.

“Please give this to the baby,” she said to Linda one day. It was a beautiful white shawl which she had been given for Stewart, her first born. “Please take it.”

“Yes,” said Linda, “thank you. How beautiful, how really beautiful. Thank you very much.” T
REVOR STUDIED THE
diary day after day. It went back to his time in the war. It talked of his father, but not him, playing with Robin.

“My jealousy is great,” she wrote at one point. “Why is that?” She was referring to one night when that woman Lydia Lawson had visited them.

“You talked about education all night,” she had said to Trevor. “You never referred to me. Of course I was only a secretary. Is that it?”

“It never occurred to me that you felt like that,” said Trevor. As usual he was helpless before her. Her mind was keener, quicker than his. He had met her in his first school. She was young, fresh, enthusiastic. She had come to Scotland because she had read about the country as a girl and also, if the truth be told, to set some distance between herself and her mother. But latterly she began to miss Devon. She and Robin would sometimes go to the farm on holiday. The ducks with their proud red masks would strut past them: the hens would pick at the corn: and the pigs wallowed in a great grey ocean of their own. Trevor thought that perhaps he should apply for a small undemanding school in Devon. But he knew that he would miss the city, the town: he was an urbanite by nature.

All these days he had underestimated Julia. Because he was a poet he had thought her in some way inferior: he was an unconscious élitist. But in fact she was more intelligent than him, more acute in seizing the essentials of a practical problem and solving it. And now he was discovering her secret life that had been hidden from him.

Love, what was it? Often at night she would say, “Do you love me?” And he had never been able to say the words. Why was that? Some deep instinct, spare and Puritan, had kept his lips shut. And yet he had loved his wife. Now he knew it. She had held his life together. And she had been so brave at the end, keeping from him exactly what was wrong with her, though of course he suspected. “Are you in pain?” he would say to her.

“No, I'm not in pain.” And yet she must have been. The crab had been gnawing at her. The outlaw restless cells had been proliferating.

She had bought a lot of plants for the house. These were her substitute for a garden. She was more superstitious than him, and had even spoken to the plants. She had a strange theory about the afterlife: she didn't believe that either of them would die. She believed that when Jesus said, “In my father's house are many mansions”, he had meant that the mansions were planets, arranged in a special order. To the best planets the perfected spirits migrated. Trevor himself had no belief in an afterlife. On the contrary, he believed that, when one died, that was the end. He would never meet Julia again. And this bothered him; and made him feel an ultimate desolation.

I am Robinson Crusoe on his island, he thought. There is desert, sand, all about me. I have to begin again, rebuild. He began to paint the walls and the doors and the sills of the windows and the ceilings. He bought huge cans of green paint. He wanted to start again but something was preventing him. The Camerons haunted him. He felt he should have confronted Cameron while Julia was still alive. But he had been too frightened. Now, he didn't want to move because he felt that by doing so he would have taken advantage of Julia. He must suffer like her, to the end.

“You should do something about Mrs Cameron,” Julia had often said to him.

“What can I do? It's none of our business. Even the police won't interfere unless she charges him.”

“But she won't do it. Where can she go?”

“Well, I can't do anything about it.”

He had cringed away from all decisions, leaving them in the end to her. At times he felt that he should leave the flat and go on some sort of tour. At other times he was tempted to drink heavily. But he did neither of these things. On the contrary he spent part of his time in doing crosswords, puzzles. He remembered their Sundays together when he would tackle the Azed crossword in the
Observer
.

“Is there a word ‘pavis'?” he would say. “It means a shield for the whole body.”

“How should I know,” she would say, looking up from her knitting.

And then again, “Is there a word ‘paxwax'?” Then he would say, “This is a brilliant man, Azed.” And she would answer without looking up from her knitting (she was always knitting things for her grand-daughter), “You're only saying that because you've solved the crossword.” He would spend hours on the Azed crossword as if it was the most important thing in the world. But he would never try to solve the puzzles presented by their daily lives.

One day they had stood at the window watching a wedding. The bride was in white and her husband stood beside her. The photographer was bending down as if about to shoot. The taxi, like a hearse loaded with flowers, was ready. Tired women stood at the wall staring at the bride with envious eyes. That too had been the greatest day of their lives, the only day when they had been the centre of attention. The wind blew the bride's gown about. The husband nearly always had a suit that didn't quite fit him. The minister held up a benevolent hand. Julia loved weddings, christenings. She had looked forward with so much eagerness to the birth of their grandchild: Trevor hadn't. He hadn't realized how much the birth had meant to her. But then his son was in Cambridge, and he was here.

Robin came to visit him again and they had a cup of coffee, in the huge kitchen, out of two mugs, one of which had Taurus inscribed on it, the other Capricorn. (Capricorn was the goat who lived frugally, was determined to attain its purpose, was mean and persistent. Taurus was the fleshly one who loved comfort, the sensual flesh.)

“Everything okay?” said Robin again. It was clear that he was visiting his father from a sense of duty and would rather have been elsewhere.

“Fine,” said Trevor. They drank their coffee in silence. Trevor didn't want to talk about intimate family things. He asked his son about computers: would they take over from men? Did they have a single-minded evil intelligence? Would they be able to write
King Lear
?

“Of course not,” said Robin, laughing. Trevor glanced at him. This was his son telling him about a new world, a world that he himself didn't understand, Robin was happy among his computers because his emotions had been amputated. He had turned away from the world of literature to that of mathematics, where everything remained constant, unchanging. His father belonged to the age of the dinosaur as far as he was concerned.

His son had never been able to look on him as a father. He had never come to him with his problems, only to his mother. How can I be a poet, Trevor asked himself, if I am not a human being? If I am a coward in life, will I not be a coward in poetry as well? There is a deep connection between all aspects of life. Was even his poetry programmed by his innate cowardice without his knowing it?

There was something he wished to say to his son. He wished to say, “I know my faults now. Is it too late to remedy them?” His stair-woman had talked about selfishness. Was he not the selfish one? Was there anyone more selfish than the artist? Did he not have blood on his hands daily? He existed in the world of reflection while others dealt with the real world. Others had sensed that his poetry was not real, that in a fundamental way he despised his reader: they sensed his lack of humanity. Was that not the root of his problem? After all, if he could not talk to his son, how could he reach the invisible reader who also was composed of blood and bones? All his life the U-boats had been waiting to attack, following him beneath the surface of the sea. And he was intensely vulnerable.

“Have you been to visit mother's grave yet?” said Robin. “I went there this morning.”

“No, I haven't,” said Trevor. In fact he wondered whether he could find her tombstone for which he had engraved verses of his own composition.

Robin was silent. He too wished to say something, but couldn't find the words. It was easier to programme a computer than to talk to his father. Once when he had come home from university for a weekend, Trevor had offered him five pounds but he wouldn't take the money.

“No, thanks,” he had said, “I have enough.” Was it Trevor rather than Robin who had been selfish, doling out his emotions sparsely like a miser? Robin would never forgive him for his mother's death: that was clear to Trevor.

“We had to make sure that Frances is not bullied in school,” he told Trevor.

“Oh?”

“Well, if you work at all in school nowadays the other pupils make a dead set at you. She's very scholarly and shy, if you see what I mean. She reads a lot. It worries me that she has so few friends.”

“She doesn't?”

“Maybe we've kept her too secure, sheltered her too much. One can make a mistake that way too.”

Trevor noted the last word, but didn't comment on it. Robin and his wife had built a shield of stainless steel around Frances: she was their prisoner. Maybe one could give too much love: or was it love? Robin was compensating for what had happened to himself: unto the third and fourth generation. … Perhaps he had made a fatal incorrigible mistake with Frances. Any time Trevor had seen her she struck him as remote, watchful.

“Does the woman still come to do the stair?” Robin asked.

“Yes, she's a true blue Tory. Very meticulous about the stairs. Very anti-working-class. Too much violence everywhere, she says, but her favourite programme is
The Sweeney
. She doesn't want to be a servant.”

“Does she bend down to wash them or does she use a squeegee?”

“I think she uses a squeegee.” Julia probably had bent down. In his mind's eye he could see her scrubbing carefully. He closed his eyes against the sight.

“Had you not better buy a smaller flat?” Robin persisted.

“No.” He didn't want to buy a flat somewhere else while the problem of the Camerons remained unsolved. It was like running away after his wife was dead. Perhaps he was a masochist. He wanted to suffer at least as much as she had. But anyway, he was prevented from leaving by the thought of the work of putting his books in cases, packing up curtains, moving the cooker.

“I see you've been painting,” said Robin.

“Yes.”

Sometimes when he stood on a chair or a stepladder to paint the ceiling he felt dizzy, as if he was about to fall. He trembled like a compass needle seeking true north. But he wasn't going to reveal his weakness to Robin.