The Tenement (19 page)

But, no, Mrs Floss told them instead about her trip round the world. She was happy sitting there in her red velvet dress which she had bought especially for the occasion. Mrs Cameron wore a blue blouse which made her face look old, haggard. She was shyer than the rest, unused to company.

“I crossed Canada by plane,” said Mrs Floss. “Niagara is really as big as they say it is.”

“By plane?” said John. “Why not by bus? I thought you could go by Greyhound.”

“You can, but I didn't,” said Mrs Floss. “But of all the places I visited the one I would have liked to stay in was New Zealand. Auckland is the most beautiful city I've seen.”

“How about it?” said John to Linda. “Hong Kong next year, eh? After we've paid the rates and the TV.”

Cooper was still thinking about Grant. “A funny boy,” he said. “Very fond of his mother. She would put him to his bed if he was tired. He was hardly ever out of his bed.”

The baby slept. According to Linda, it was very good, never gave them any trouble.

She felt that he was bright, would grow up to be intelligent. She was sorry for Mrs Cameron, for Mrs Floss, even for Cooper, though he always looked at her legs when she was bending down for the coal. John passed the drink round. Cooper drank a lot, his face reddening like flame. He told Mrs Floss he had a brother in America and was thinking of visiting him. “I haven't seen him for thirty years. Last time he was home he thought we still went round in carts. I have to send him Scottish calendars every year: I don't know what he does with them. Sells them to his friends maybe.”

Mrs Cameron said, “They never forget their home, do they?” She had no one abroad. She hadn't been abroad herself. She couldn't talk to Mrs Floss, envied her. Mrs Floss had been everywhere, looked confident, assured.

“I went to the White House too,” said Mrs Floss. “I stayed in Washington at the time. Hotels in America are expensive. You don't get your breakfast in them.”

“Where do you get your breakfast?” said John.

“Oh, you find a restaurant in the morning.” He too had never been abroad. Even old Cooper had been abroad, had served in the war.

“When I was in Africa,” he said on cue, “during the war, I saw an Italian soldier lying in the desert. I was alone and he was lying there dead. I bent down. He had a photograph of his family in a wallet. Very strange, I thought, what is he doing here? What am I doing here? I told Marconi about it.” (Referring to the owner of the cafe near them.) “Very musical people, the Italians, but not good soldiers.”

“They're good at playing the spaghetti,” said John laughing. “They put it over their shoulder like bagpipes. Hey, want a tune on my spaghetti? What do you think of that, Mrs Floss?” Mrs Floss laughed and held out her glass for another gin. John couldn't drink gin at all: he thought it was like perfume.

Porter suddenly said, “I can only drink whisky myself.” They looked at him. He writes poetry, John would say to Linda. He could only remember from school a poem about a skylark and another one about a blacksmith. He had preferred Mrs Porter to her husband: so had Linda.

“Whisky is the best drink,” said Cooper. “The Irish call it a paddy. Did you know that? Whisky's the healthiest drink you can get. They say that people who drink whisky are healthier than people who don't. You should take a nip before you go to bed at night,” he said wickedly to Mrs Floss.

“My husband used to drink it,” she said. “I never drink it. I drink gin.”

“And very nice too,” said John, filling her glass. The sooner everybody got drunk the better. Porter reminded him of a teacher he had once had: you never felt easy in his presence. “Boy,” he would say, “you should take up woodwork. It would suit your head.” He didn't know what to make of Porter, what subject would interest him. He sat there with his glass in his hand as if warming himself at a fire. Funny little man with that hat he wore summer and winter. He wondered if he wore it to bed. When the roof was being repaired, he, John, had volunteered to climb up and see that it had been done properly. Porter had stared at him in amazement.

“You mean, you would go up there?”

“Why not?”

“Well, it's pretty high.”

“So is rotten meat,” John had laughed.

“Hey, Mrs Cameron, you're not drinking,” he said. “Orange juice then? We've got everything. I'm doing my waiter okay?” he said to Linda.

Linda laughed. Mrs Cameron took some orange juice. Suddenly he thought, that would suit her husband all right. Orange juice. The UDA bastard, the poor woman looks frightened out of her wits.

“Haven't heard anything of Mrs Miller recently,” said Mr Cooper. “Is she okay?” No one else had seen much of her either. “She looks very pale,” said Linda. “She's growing older.”

“A lovely woman that, when she was young,” said Cooper. “Half the town was after her. But she would have nothing to do with them. Her family should take her away from here and look after her. One of these days she's going to drop dead in the street.”

“She's getting queer,” said Mrs Floss. “One day I heard her shouting at a policeman, out of the window.”

“What for?” said Mrs Cameron, shyly.

“I don't know. Some people grow queer as they become old.”

“That's right,” said Cooper. “There was a queer woman who lived here years ago. She thought if you waved your arms you were talking about her. Maybe that was what Mrs Miller thought. The policeman would be waving his arms.”

“That's right,” said Mrs Floss, “he was directing the traffic. I knew a woman once and she grilled a slipper. I think she must have thought it was bacon. Some people shouldn't be left on their own.”

“Old age is an awful thing,” said John, slapping Linda playfully on the back. They all laughed. “When I'm eighty I'll pee out of the window on to the passers by.”

Suddenly Porter said to Mrs Floss, “My wife used to take coffee with you, didn't she?”

“That's right. She was a fine woman. Many a coffee we had together. Every morning at eleven o'clock. I miss her. She used to come after she had finished brushing the stairs.”

“Just like the matron used to do,” said Cooper, gazing meditatively into his glass. “Of course all these matrons, all these people who work in hospitals, they're very particular. And they often have bad backs from lifting people. Surprising the number of them have bad backs.”

“That's right,” said Mrs Cameron. They waited for her to continue, but she said nothing more. She kept glancing at her watch as if she intended leaving.

“I had a friend once,” said Porter, “and he came to visit me here. Of course he was a mad poet. He leaned out of the window and he delivered a sermon to the passers by. He asked them if they had been saved. Some of them looked up at him, in amazement. Others thought he was quite reasonable.” Everyone laughed, except for Mrs Cameron who was remembering her own father.

Porter wanted to tell them some more stories about his “mad” friends, but felt that they wouldn't like them. Some of his friends were nice, some were not. There was one he didn't like, one who in fact had a thin moustache rather like John's. He was an expert on Scottish dialect and was inclined to become intellectually cruel when he was drunk. “Nobody likes me,” he once said to Trevor, weeping. He was always drunk, always borrowing money, arriving at people's houses at four in the morning. He was what Trevor would have called a tramp. “I'll send you the money,” he would say to him, after he had borrowed it, but he never did. Why was he thinking of him now? Perhaps it was John's moustache that had brought him to mind. Some of his friends weren't pleasant people really. Egotists. Compulsive talkers about their own subjects, like that man about Scottish dialects. Who apart from himself cared?

“… a fine fellow her husband.” Cooper was still talking about Mrs Miller. “He was burnt, you know. He was repairing a telephone line. And lightning hit him. Funny thing that.”

Crucified up there, thought Porter, turning blue. Hung on the wire. Mrs Cameron thought of a sick joke of her husband's. What was Christ doing at Easter? Answer: hanging around. She felt suddenly sick and went to the bathroom. There was a window glowing with colour, a stained glass window.

“What do you think of it,” said Linda, who had followed her to see if she was all right. “It's just paper you know. I got it in a supermarket in Glasgow. I thought it would be nice.” The window glowed and burned with its reds and greens.

“It's beautiful,” said Mrs Cameron, though she was obscurely troubled by it. “Some people are so clever.” She had never been clever herself. She had always been clumsy.

If she had been clever she would have taken a job. But she had been too nervous to. She sweated.

When she and Linda went back, Cooper was saying … “In the old days rich women used to have companions. You should have a companion,” he said to Mrs Floss.

“Shut up, you oaf,” said Mrs Floss good-naturedly.

“Why not? Mrs Cameron could be your companion. She could bring you your gin in the mornings.”

“If I was rich I would have a companion,” Cooper went on, unabashed. He suddenly looked tired and clownish in spite of his jolly red face which burned among them.

“I've got a companion already,” said John, handing round more drink.

“He's my companion,” said Linda comfortably. John felt happy being the host to all these people. They weren't too bad really. Except that Mrs Cameron was glancing continually at her watch which hung loosely round her thin wrist.

Suddenly Porter put his hand in his wallet and said, “I forgot.” He took out a pound and gave it awkwardly to Linda. “For the baby,” he said. Linda thanked him. Nobody could say he was mean, apart from Robin.

“You mean old bastard,” Robin would say. And then Robin himself had become mean. When he came to visit he never brought anything, not even a cake. Could one be a poet and be mean? Most poets he had ever heard of had been prodigal with their personalities, with their possessions. They had poured their gifts on to the world. Mrs Floss wasn't mean, one couldn't say that about her. A lot of the people he knew were mean, mean in their minds, borrowing money all the time as if the world owed them a living. These artistic types whom he had once admired so much: he didn't admire them now at all.

The first poem he had ever had accepted—he had been invited to meet the editor of the relevant magazine in Glasgow. He thought it would be a big house with fine trees around it. Actually it had been a flat with a pub opposite it. There was a small room with poems scattered all over it. He remembered the editor as a bald serious man who had tried to impress him by making his five-year-old recite a section of ‘Lycidas'. The boy stared straight in front of him, as if he was reciting a lesson. Poets were poor, their houses were poor. They never had any money. They lived from hand to mouth, they weren't gods.

Linda was passing round sausage rolls, sandwiches, small cakes. He bit at one of them absently and swallowed some whisky after it. One night he had been drinking heavily when he had fallen from a chair. He had been having an argument with another poet, no, it wasn't another poet, it was a headmaster. This headmaster had been in the habit of phoning round to teachers late at night to come and talk to them at his house: he was an insomniac. He was big, bearish, and arrogant. He held court till the early hours of the morning. He used his power arbitrarily and summoned teachers, who came to him even though their wives weren't happy about it. That night he, Trevor, had fallen from his chair. What a humiliation. He couldn't even hold his drink. That had been in England somewhere. He hadn't liked that headmaster sitting in his chair like a king on a throne. Sleeplessly.

“… I'm not keen on religion myself,” Cooper was saying to Mrs Cameron. “I never go to church. Used to, but not now. You should never argue about religion, I always say. I heard a story about a Free Church minister once. When Christ came down to earth, he said, there was no vacancy in the trinity. And this fellow in the congregation said to me, ‘Please sir, can I apply for the vacancy in the trinity?' “

They shouldn't laugh about the church, thought Mrs Cameron. She remembered men in black coats, black hats. They were definite, single-minded. A young minister she heard of had hit his wife and they had put him out of the church. But you could never tell who was responsible, the wife or the husband. In this case it was the wife, but they had expelled him just the same. As a matter of fact the wife had been demanding new furniture, a washing machine, all the latest gadgets, and he couldn't afford them. He was a holy man too. He had died of cancer six years after the divorce, and there had been three hundred people at his funeral. He had entered the church late: before that he had been a merchant seaman. His wife was now in England and had a job.

She wished that she could talk as freely as Cooper. The fact was that she never had any opportunity for mixing in company. How could she? And she had always been shy. She could talk to people individually, but not in company. And yet if it wasn't for her husband she would enjoy listening to the conversation. Linda looked so happy, and so did John. They were both so young, the world was ahead of them.

“I think,” she said, making a movement to go, “I've left food in the …”

“Not at all,” said John. “Stay where you are. The night is yet young.”

“Oh God, don't let us have a singsong,” thought Trevor. “Amazing Grace, Danny Boy, The Wild Rover … I've heard them so often at a certain stage in the evening.” Amazing Grace would be more like it. He imagined someone sitting at the head of a table and the wife saying “Why don't you say your Amazing Grace?” God waited and listened. Perhaps he only listened sporadically. Even God must get bored sometimes.