Authors: Stanley Middleton
‘You wouldn’t go again?’
‘I’m not saying that. And when I see all the glass and glitter they’ve thrown up in this place. I can’t help thinking . . . Mark you, it’s what the public want. Bingo and beer-barrels. And if anything stops ’em going abroad it’s all this stuff I hate.’
‘How do you spend your time, then?’
‘Certain amount in the deck-chairs, I tell you. I have a drink. Bit o’ time off on the boat. Walk along if I feel like it. Meet new people. Get into conversation. Like us now. You won’t believe it but I’ve known the wife go into the kitchen after dinner at night to help wipe up, just for the talk.’
‘You’d think . . . ,’ Fisher started.
‘I understand it. She likes the landlady, known her for years, and they’ve got something to say. People, it’s people who make holdiays, in my view, not scenery.’
‘Nature,’ Fisher quoted, half-ironically, ‘is fine, but human nature is finer.’
‘Ah.’ The man seemed taken aback.
‘Keats.’
‘The poet. And yet there must be people here. Four-fifths of the holidaying population go to the coast, y’ know. Common sense. These speculators don’t build new places here for nothing. They’ll get their money back.’
This led, as they stumbled through the sand, past bodies and castles, to an argument about the ways of capitalism, land prices, inflation, great skyscrapers of office blocks left unoccupied. Interested. Fisher found it impossible to concentrate as he watched his staggering feet.
‘Ah, here we are,’ know-all said.
As Fisher expected, nothing was missing. Against the windscreen, the plastic ground-sheet, the blankets, the baskets and bags, and presiding from a deck-chair, the wife, buttering biscuits, vacuum flask at the ready.
‘Must be pushing,’ Fisher said.
‘Interesting, interesting,’ the man replied. ‘Ah, well.’
When Fisher looked back his companion had occupied the other deck chair, donned a panama, and was, against probability, smoking a cigarette. Goodbye, arthuritis.
Immediately after lunch, Fisher walked in the gardens, among the designs of house-leeks, the beds of Frensham and Peace, the nemesia and tagetes. A young man noisily mowed the lawns, while elderly groups sat, lined carefully, about the seats. ‘Presented by Coun. C. W. Goddard.’ ‘In Memoriam Lt. H. W. A. Scott, Sherwood Foresters, 1922-45.’ Though the motor-mower ripped the air, the place had the stillness of a waxworks. Sunshine on shrubs, on pale skins. A pretty housewife pushed her baby past in a bright orange pram, smiling, long legs tanned. A blackbird hopped, pecked, hopped.
Again, he knew nobody. Among these old faces not one he knew.
Then he must take pleasure in the exercise, march along these asphalt paths until he wanted nothing. No road had that length, so he made further along the promenade, in shallows of sifted sand to the amusement park.
Once inside, he was at a loose end in the casual afternoon. Amusements and stalls were not well patronised, and in spite of noise the place seemed languid. No life here, either. One or two men shouted across as he passed, inviting him to try his luck with a dart or rifle, but they cared as little as he. Whether it was merely the time of day he did not know, but the whole gave the appearance of running down, of being old-fashioned, unwanted. One-armed bandits, bingo halls with cups of tea and large, precise bonuses were here too, but they lacked the glitter, the faceless comfort of the newer palaces on the front. Human beings might walk in from time to time.
Fisher decided on the Big Dipper.
His father would never have allowed the family on this, invariably kept them out of the amusement park. Though Fisher often had walked through on his own, he’d never dared defy Arthur by riding on that huge public railway ridiculously fearing perhaps that the old man at peace on the sands would cast his beady eye at the swooping cars and recognise his son. The boy had guiltily lost pennies on the machines, crept in on the tattooed lady and the Egyptian belly-dancer, but they were shows in the musty dark.
As he mounted to the pay-box, he felt fear. Would he be able to bear the whirling eviscerating dash? Behind his heavy safety bar he soon had his answer; a mild exhilaration, tense attention before the dip, and then a disappointment momentarily disappearing at each acceleration of the car. It needed a girl’s arms round you and the carriage full of shrieking children. Hurled about alone, in middle-age. Thirty-two was not old. Guilt required; father’s forbidding voice; his own rabid appetite for excitement. The sixteen year old had some advantage over the grown man. He eyed the distant sands, black figures unaffected by the blare of pop-music; he might be in the boat again, cut off from human endeavour, habitation. The drop in his stomach recalled the present.
Now he smiled as he walked away, in part ashamed not of trying the ride but of yielding to temptation.
He sat on a bench, stretched his legs and considered how he could tell his wife what he had done. In the running chaos of his mind, that surfaced as sensible, was dismissed, rose once more. When a man who has deserted his wife meets her again all he can find to say is, ‘Do you know what I did yesterday? I went for a ride on the Big Dipper.’ Immediately he began to justify himself. There was little else to offer except that a man on the boat had made valuable informative statements about the British and American nautical miles, than to goad or strip so that in a few minutes they were back to former fighting, to cornered hatred. If he and that beautiful woman, he remembered her hair, were to attempt reconciliation they could do it only in humility, marginally at first, with sentences about fairgrounds and balding know-alls. He was slightly surprised that he could entertain the idea of, say, amnesty, olive-branches, without emotional perturbation. He switched his mind prudently elsewhere.
On a bank, sparsely covered with grass, three young men were lounging.
All wore long hair, beards, standard jeans; one, in round, gold-rimmed glasses strummed lazily at a guitar. Perhaps he even sang; it was impossible to tell. They sat as a group, idly watching, half-concentrated on the instrument, letting time pass so that when one pushed himself upright and strolled across, Fisher was mildly and pleasantly taken aback. The young man approached, took a casual position never looking the other in the eye square as he spoke.
‘Could you give me a light, please?’
Clear this time or clearer. A non-smoker, Fisher carried a lighter in his pocket because Meg had occasionally needed a cigarette but never had matches with her. He fiddled, handed it over.
‘Don’t know if it works. Might be dry.’
The young man flicked, shook, flicked so that the Red Indian strips along his arm and the hem of his coat bounced, then inhaled satisfactorily.
‘Thanks.’
Fisher pocketed it, waited for the boy to budge but he did not do so.
‘I’ve seen you before.’
‘Oh?’
‘You gave a lecture at our place.’ He named a technical college. ‘Education and Prejudice.’ He seemed pleased to recall the title.
‘Are you a teacher in training, then?’
‘No. I’m a lab technician. Went with a mate.’
The young man spoke barely moving his lips so that Fisher was reminded of film gangsters. This image was totally belied by the quietness of the voice, the mildness of the lad’s appearance, the spinelessness, perhaps. It looked as if he might collapse, clothes and all, any minute, crumple to the ground.
‘You made it quite interesting,’ the boy said, stroking his pale cheek with the back of the hand in which he held his fag.
Fisher nodded, began polite questioning about holidays. The three young men had a tent over on the dunes, from where they bathed twice a day and slept when they came back from the discos. All this the boy delivered in driblets, not hurrying himself, giving the impression that he tried to make the recital as dull as he could. Fisher, half amused, looked for the language of the youth cult, the words he’d learnt from the Sunday papers, ‘chick’, ‘pad’, ‘joint’, ‘turn on’, even the daft ‘psychedelic’, but found nothing. If these were already out of date the speaker had not replaced them with immediately recognisable neologisms, but used the flat language of the factory floor, the supermarket, the soccer pitch. They were, a leer, on the lookout for girls, the birds, and had been moderately successful because there were some right scrubbers about here, he could tell you. They’d just do the week and hitch back if they could. If they couldn’t? Have to be the bus, wouldn’t it?
Fisher wanted to know why they didn’t venture further, abroad, say.
‘You need time for abroad. We want to be idle, and our own bosses for a week. And we might stay another if the weather keeps up. We’re here, and we do as we like. We’ve got money, but we don’t want to spend it in clubs, downing ale.’
‘Do you not drink?’
‘Sometimes. But eight or nine pints a night like some of ’em is stupid.’
Although Fisher guessed they were shorter of money than they let on, this jerky, undemonstrative account of a seaside idyll attracted him. Immediately he checked himself because he could pinpoint the boring fish-suppers, the interminable talk of women, the sitting about in unattractive dumps like this waiting for something to happen, and the wary drag on when it didn’t. They were unlike him, making a little go a long way, because they’d neither the resources nor the energy to do anything more enterprising.
The lad took in a last lungful, dropped the cigarette to the gravel, didn’t heel it in, made some sort of noise and left. When he sat down again, exchanged for a few moments a word or two with his companions, Fisher could not be sure that they were discussing him. Embarrassed, he strolled away, raising a hand to the group.
All three acknowledged, surprisingly. Two nods and a finger. Gave them something to do in a half-hearted way.
Middle-aged people ate silently at a whelk-stall; youngsters tore wrappers from ice-cream, dropped them to the sand. In the distance a young couple silhouetted with all the banality of a television ad. ran hand in hand so that they seemed immediately conspicuous by their directed energy, their aim. The rest tottered or splashed in a few yards of shallow sea; these two swooped, on their way, due to arrive.
Fisher bought a cup of abominable, strong tea, burnt his tongue as he sipped and exchanged words with the stallkeeper, in the slack of the afternoon. There he learnt that they still rolled mint-rock on the front, set out to find the booth, which was deserted, though its placards proclaimed, recently repainted, that the ‘old firm’ had won diplomas of merit in 1934/5, 1936/7, 1939. Had they lost their touch in the last thirty-odd years, or had kill-joy dentists won the day so that diplomas of skill and purity were no longer awarded?
Young men climbed the high diving board in the inland seawater pool. He could see the top of the structure, which had not changed since his day, though he had neither lounged nor leapt up there, confining himself to breast or a few breathless strokes of crawl. In that place he had first seen a grown woman’s nipple in a flash so that he hardly believed what he saw, when her shoulder strap slipped and he had blushed, tingled with desperate pleasurable embarrassment while others noticed nothing, got on with their own rowdy devices. The observer, the man on the side, the peeping-Tom.
A bus on the promenade disgorded its complement of old-age pensioners who creaked off the step to stand bemused on the pavement. One old man, face brown as a brick, hair-remnants ruffled, turned round on the pavement in his braces, mouth agape, looking for something.
‘Won’t you want your coat, Mr Wardle?’ Female bossiness. The old chap mouthed sounds, turned obediently towards the bus. ‘Don’t you bother. I’ll get it for you. It can be quite cool here.’
The leaders, middle-aged women in flowered dresses and cardigans, ushered their charges into a semblance of order, and one, hectoring, shouted.
‘We shall walk down to a very nice little garden where we can sit. The flowers are beautiful. There are toilets there if you want to use them. It’s not far to the sands from there, but I don’t want you to go if you think you’ll tire yourselves. You’ll be able to see the sea, and it will be sunny and sheltered in the gardens. Now if you follow, Mrs Payne will show you the way down.’
Fisher watched the sand shuffle as they set off. The dictatorial woman took the arms of two bone-thin old ladies who were clearly delighted to be thus signalled out for honour.
‘They’ve got some rum ’uns there,’ the bus-driver said to Fisher. ‘Some of ’em have no more sense than babies. One old fellow was going to have a pee in the middle of the bus. Had it out in front of all these women. But most of them are as lively as you and me.’ The driver wiped his hands on his trousers back-side. ‘The old fellow was weak in the head. Been inside a ’sylum, they said. Queer, isn’t it, how old-age takes you? Gi’ me a nice, quick heart-attack any time. Over and done, then. Shock for them as is left, but I wouldn’t like to be like some of these.’
‘They won’t want to die,’ Fisher said.
‘No more shall I when my time comes,’ the driver answered. ‘Well, I’d better lock this bus up or they’ll have their handbags pinched. God bless ’em.’ He paused, added, keys appearing in his hand as if by conjuring, ‘The way some of these women get on to ’em. Worse than th’army. Stand up, sit down, polish your boots, wipe your arse. But I suppose if they weren’t like that they’d never organize these trips, and these clubs, and these poor old souls’d never get a niff o’ sea air. What a life.’ He flourished his keys. ‘Lovely, some o’ these old dears. “Has the driver had a cup o’ tea? Make sure the driver gets his dinner.” Can’t help liking ’em. I tell ’em, “Don’t you worry your ‘ead, my love.” I say. “If they’ve flung every tea-leaf in the place into the North Sea, I’ll get some’at to drink.” And they look at you wi’ round eyes, and cackle, and say, “Beer” like naughty school kids. “That’s it,” I tell ’em. “Pig’s ear an’ pickled onions. What us drivers lives on.” And then some o’d biddy says, “I think the driver’s drunk,” and, by God, they’re off. Ah, well.’
This time he went, locked up, slapped the back on his tour of inspection and made for the gardens after the procession, calling over his shoulder,