The Tenement (18 page)

He believed that nuns and priests slept with each other in convents and monasteries, and that their progeny was sent to South America. “That's the slave trade,” he would say. “These nuns are hot stuff.”

When he was drunk he sang anti-Catholic songs all the time. His jokes were sick. “What jumps up and down and falls apart,” he would ask. The answer: “A leper on a trampoline.” Or, “What is the picture of innocence? A nun who thought a French letter was a worm's bed.”

He remembered the days he would call his stepfather, very formally, Mr Williamson. “How is Mr Williamson today?” he would ask his mother while his stepfather stared at him with fixed hopeless fury. “Does Mr Williamson want the milk?”

He would never tell his wife this, but sometimes when he was alone, he would burst into tears for no reason, especially when he was drunk. And he would beat his head against the table as if he liked the pain. Like that time he had thrust his fist through the window and the red had been like a burning bush. It would have been better if the blood had been blue. Passers-by had been blamed for the broken window too: it had been repaired eventually by Mrs Floss out of her own pocket. Stupid woman.

The only person in the close he had any respect for was Mrs Miller. She went her own way and didn't care what people thought of her. Often she would refuse to pay her rent. She stood out there in the open. She was quite right not to let anyone into her flat. They said that she had been pretty once, though she was pretty haggard now. A true Proddy if there ever was one. “You should go to Rhodesia,” she had told him. “Put these guerillas down. You would like the life there.” But even if he had wanted to, his wife wouldn't have gone. And anyway you had to have a trade. You had to have a trade to get into any of these countries. Australia even, he had thought of Australia, but the same was true for that country. There was an Australian artist in the town and one night in the pub he had said he would swallow anyone's sock. “You give me one of your socks,” he had said to one of the lads, “and I'll swallow it.” And he had, too, though he was sick after it. Then he had picked up an ashtray and gone round the pub with it: “You put your dandruff in that,” he had said. He was a funny man. If more people were like that, life would be much happier for everybody. Though not all Australians were like that artist. One of them he had met in a pub had drunk his beer quietly, and looked like his stepfather.

He himself would sometimes dance on the tables and sing anti-I.R.A. songs. He had been put out of a few pubs for that. There was only the one pub in the town that he could go to now. Maybe eventually he wouldn't be able to go to any of them, and he would have to drink at home. To hell with them, he was one of the few honest people in the town.

“I loved my husband,” Mrs Brown was supposed to have said. Imagine that. Silly old git, going to the cemetery every Sunday. And in a taxi too. “We were so happy,” she used to say, apparently. But that was her story. Perhaps they hadn't been happy at all. Others said that she and her husband had quarrelled a lot. They owned a shop and he did all the paper work. After his death, she was lost. Nothing but death in this bloody tenement anyway. If only there were young people, girls preferably. Still it was better than some tenements he had seen.

Sometimes as Greta lay beside him in bed he would stare at her in amazement. How had he ever married her? She was like a statue. She had no life in her. He must have been mad. And yet that time she had been with her father for a fortnight, he had phoned her and even sent her flowers. He had sworn he would change if she came back. And she believed him too, and he had changed, for a month. But it hadn't lasted. The aggression inside him built up again. “I can't believe anything you say,” she would say to him. “Nothing.” But he needed help. Some being inside him was shouting out to her, “But can't you see that I need help. It isn't my fault. I'm dying of this aggression, this hatred. If I could help myself, do you think I would be acting like this?” And the moon shone down on her bloodless face with the black eye. It was as if she had been drained by a vampire. Somewhere there was a vampire eating them all up. It had green wings. It was a conspiracy of the Fenians; they were the enemy. They sucked the blood of Protestants.

One night he had been coming home down an empty street. There was a red kiosk and a yellow light shining on the road, like sickness. Oh, God, how he hated that yellow light, the colour of his stepfather's skin. It was as if he was walking through hell, through perpetual sickness. The post office was yellow in the light. He heard the din of his own footsteps. It was as if he was a picture made of cardboard. The kiosk was beaded with rain. The telephone cord hung down. There were wet newspapers on the floor. If he picked up the phone who would he be connected with? He stretched his hand out. It was shaking. His whole body was shaking. Little men jumped out of the telephone box. They were burning him. They were staring at him with scholastic eyes, quizzing him about the history of Ireland. Hundreds of little men. He shivered. The night pulsed round him. The yellow light was all over his clothes, mixed with the red. He was like a playing card. A diamond.

Christ Almighty, what was happening to him? His whole body was shaking. He couldn't control himself. He was the king of diamonds, glittering in the cold night.

The packet with the short stories came from Miss Gillespie with a brief note. She hoped that the reading of them would not be a chore. They were in fact a chore. There was nothing new or really creative in any of them. Many were of the standard that he had encountered from classes in school, written beside a radiator on a cold winter's morning. It was not easy to be a good writer. Was he himself a good writer? He pondered on that in the frosty autumn day. His work had appeared in a number of magazines. There had been a certain amount of notice taken of it. But all that he had written he had been in control of. None of it was hallucinatory, primitive, powerful. Much of it was orderly, metrical. He had never had time to work at it. But then again if he did work at it, would it be better? Chaucer had held down a job: so had many other poets.

He was brought face to face with the problem. Had he asked too much of his wife in support of a minor talent? It was an important question. He certainly didn't believe that good poetry should justify human suffering. There had been many times when he had walked into a small draughty hall to find six people gathered to listen to him. Most had never heard of him. Should he perhaps read professionally or should he show himself as the truly vulnerable person who had created the poems? Was that really how the poet gained over the actor in reading? Was this small man with the crushed hat the one who had really created these poems?

In the frosty autumn he thought about that question. Responsibility for the human being. Was a poem greater than a human being? How could he justify the sacrifices his wife had made? After all, she had not married the artist: she had married the human being. Perhaps he had killed her, had caused her cancer.

He had strange ideas about the tenement too. He thought of it as composed of cells instead of rooms. These cells were continually interchangeable. New blood flowed in, old blood flowed out. His wife, too, had lived in a cell, an outlaw one. It had rebelled against the other cells, was determined to destroy them: her whole body was a tenement. Cancer above all was a psychological disease. Her wanderings had been converted into the wanderings of cancer. Maybe he was as much to blame as Cameron. Maybe he had beaten his wife to the ground, to the final bed. He hadn't physically assaulted her, but perhaps he had mentally done so. Perhaps he had done the same to his son who had turned into a human calculator. His selfishness was just as bad as that of the stair-woman's son.

“He now wants to leave the university,” she told Trevor. “He says the digs are too expensive, and anyway he doesn't like the landlady. He wants more money from me, but I don't have any to give. ‘You get a good degree, you'll get a good job,' I tell him. ‘Who told you that?' he said. And of course that's true, to a certain extent. ‘Why don't we have a car?' he asks. He doesn't mind me being a stair-lady. He seems to think that this a fine thing. He wouldn't like me to be a teacher. That would be too middle class, he says.”

Robin, on the other hand had turned into a bourgeois. He himself was the poet who was supposed to regenerate the dead cells and he had instead created an aluminium mineral bourgeois. He had made his son into a shining middle class paragon. And all because he, the poet, had no real feeling. He had believed that poetry shouldn't show feeling in that sense. What was wrong with these stories that he had been reading was that they showed too much feeling: the feelings spilled over without discipline. The writers were exactly the kind of people who would weep for the characters in a film, in a book. Julia had often told him that he had no real feelings. If he had, he would have done something about Cameron a long time ago. Cameron showed feeling: perhaps Cameron was really a better person than he was himself. Who knew what selfishness really was?

Frosty autumn, his favourite season, burned down to its dregs. And all he could think of was an elegy for his wife. He had never really known her: that was a fact. He hadn't known what she had been doing when he was teaching. She had never told him. She hadn't trusted him. Why are you spending money on that old man, he might have asked. How are you disordering my life which must be kept static, so that I can work properly? Each poem, he now saw, was a loss of blood from his wife's body.

Sometimes he would stand at the door and watch the stair-woman at her cleaning. She was as meticulous as himself. She stayed for the hour that he paid her, and wouldn't leave till the hour was over. You can go now, he would say, but no, she wouldn't go. Her time wasn't complete.

In school he had seen a vision of the future. The pupils no longer wanted to work. Work was no longer an ideal. Idleness was the ideal. Work was unpleasant, and idleness was pleasant. They would not tackle anything demanding. They did not feel in literature the resonance he did. He was antiquarian, and he had refused to see it. He was a dinosaur who couldn't change: what was needed now was not scholars but human beings. In the past there had been teachers who transmitted a culture to those who came after. But now there was no culture to transmit. Everyone lived in the present. He hadn't seen that. He had worked hard while destroying his wife. Sometimes he wouldn't even take a holiday so that he could carry on with his poetry during the school vacation. And even when he did go on holiday, he was writing, sometimes in the open air. He took a writing pad with him all the time and a pen. No, he wasn't a great poet, it was probably true that he wasn't a good poet. He had perhaps taken up poetry because he had read poetry books.

He stared out at the autumn day. Why did his wife have to be dead before he could see what was wrong with him? He had tried to write about her, but couldn't think of anything to say. Certainly he had feelings now, but couldn't transform them into art. Once he saw her putting stamps into a book. They happened to be Greek stamps and had black profiles on them. Perhaps, he thought, that could be Antigone, Agamemnon. But no, she hadn't thought in that way at all, she patiently put the stamps into her album. She had lived for the present, in the present. He had lived in the past and sometimes in the future. And in the process the living water had flowed past him.

He had wept for her especially the day that Red Cross woman had come for her clothes. As he handed them over there was a finality about the gesture that almost broke his heart. Someone else would wear those clothes, someone whom he would never know, a perfect stranger. What tragedy! Was that not tragedy?

The tenement sweated, as Julia had done in her pale bed. It looked gaunt and tall, as she had done. Life was shifting, changing continually. It was composed of water, blood, not stone or earth. He must break out of the cell. He must do something about the oak tree, about the Camerons, about so many things. He must become a human being. I
T WAS A
celebration for the baby's birth, and John had invited Mrs Floss, Mrs Cameron, Mr Cooper (after some reluctance): he had been unable to contact Mrs Miller.

“… really odd,” Linda was saying to Mr Cooper, “There was no photograph, but John says that I can never work the camera properly.” She looked fulfilled, happy, after the birth of the child. John was doing his waiter from a sideboard where there was whisky, vodka, gin, beer; he himself drank beer only.

“Think it was a ghost then?” he grinned at Cooper.

“Well, there
was
a family here called Grant. Mother and son. The son would have been over thirty right enough. He was sixteen when I knew them. Thanks,” he said, accepting a whisky.

“Lemonade?” John couldn't resist. He thought taking lemonade with whisky was like taking sugar with porridge. He opened the door to Trevor Porter, who had brought a bottle of whisky. The latter took his hat off and placed it on a hook on the hall-stand.

All had admired the baby: Porter made no move to ask to see it. He felt unsure of himself, not knowing what to say. Mrs Floss and Mrs Cameron had left some money on the cot. So had Cooper. Mrs Cameron looked nervous: she had slipped downstairs from the flat above while her husband was out. She hoped he wouldn't come back early and make trouble. Linda, however, had insisted on inviting her since she had given a present to the baby.

The conversation drifted on to ghosts. No one had ever seen a ghost. Porter didn't believe in them. He talked pompously for a while about the unlikelihood of their existence and then became silent. He could sense that Linda felt uneasy in his presence. In a short while they would begin to talk about teachers: he hoped they wouldn't. Everyone talked about teachers: everyone had been taught. Stories were exaggerated, grew into monstrous legends.