Holiday (5 page)

‘Do you know I love you?’

The green eyes settled on him, widened, considered.

‘I don’t mind you.’

That sounded sufficient for the present, and he took her hand. She pulled off a pair of white gloves so that he noticed she was wearing an engagement ring.

Fisher straightened the shoes at the bottom of his wardrobe. He heard the family in the street drive off, checked that he’d a wallet in his pocket, his pack-a-mack to hand and went downstairs.

‘Last out?’ he asked his landlady as she hurried from dining room to kitchen.

‘I don’t think so, Mr. Fisher.’ I don’t spy, she implied. My guests enjoy themselves without my help. ‘The beach today, is it?’

‘Probably.’

‘The glass is high still. I think we’re in for some really settled weather.’

He deposited his mackintosh on the hallstand, nodded, and walked for the sunshine at the door.

‘Have a good time, Mr Fisher.’

The obsequious use of his name displeased him. As ever, he wondered what she’d report to her husband or the hirelings over the washing up. ‘Do you think he’s married?’ would occupy them to advantage, as she piled the plates and clashed the trays of cutlery. He’d forgotten his newspaper, bathing towel and trunks, but he didn’t think to slip back for a second inquisitorial burst of civility.

On the beach he sat watching arrivals. One needed occupation, a family to amuse, a wife to be bored with, a ball to kick around with your mates. Deliberately he searched, moved to a more populous part of the front where he hired a deckchair as becoming his status, there pulled his shirt off to sunbathe, and lay back.

Finding this unsatisfactory, he sat up, looked about. The young family from the next table already busied themselves behind a red and blue wind-break. Father on his knees dug furiously in the soft sand, while the boys trotted up and down, interfering, constantly commenting. Their father’s energy seemed expended so that their little forays elsewhere had a point of return; they circled, then dropped to knees, poked a finger into an already collapsing sand pie, laughed, denounced or questioned, staggered up and away. The mother busied herself in an unhurried persistence, unpacking or arranging her bags and carriers, laying articles out for the children. She wore an unattractive bikini and as she knelt up Fisher noticed the red scar of the elastic pants or tights around her waist. Her belly was slightly slack, un-young, not recovered from her last childbearing. The bright face was serious as if the whole success of the day depended on her.

Fisher waved; they did not notice.

The sun warmed him, as he slipped in and out of his shirt, now that the wind had dropped. Once he nodded off, but woke comfortably, with plenty to occupy himself with. The little boys licked ice-cream cornets, after which their mother scrubbed mouths with a flannel. Father loped down to the sea, but did not stay in long. When he returned his hair stood on end.

An elderly couple parked their deckchairs at the side of Fisher’s. There was no need for the beach was far from crowded but perhaps they’d chosen him as a suitable companion. He remembered his father pontificating. ‘The best thing about a holiday is that you meet interesting people. New places have something to be said for ’em, but it’s the new faces.’

‘Nature is fine,’ young Fisher had chimed in, ‘but human nature finer. Keats.’

‘That’s right.’ Arthur’s false teeth demonstrated his pleasure. And the old man set out for them, sorted them out, butted into conversations, was snubbed now and then, but generally ended with a catch of three or four ‘persons of learning’. Where he’d come across that expression Fisher did not know but by it his father meant able to dispense information that he considered cultural. There was one retired pharmacist who talked about poisons, but tried to keep young Edwin out of earshot; another, a schoolmaster, explained Roman burial rites, while another, a military-looking gentleman, was an expert on fossils and produced a handful of belemnites from his pocket, beautiful as bullets.

True enough, the elderly man after struggling with a mound of kit, remarked to Fisher that the wind had dropped. Within five minutes he confided that they had only just returned from a holiday in Greece.

‘And we’re here to get over that,’ the wife interrupted.

They had educated north-country voices, Manchester perhaps, and sounded honest, robustly so. Their knowledge of Greece impressed; the man had been there during the war, and laced his accounts with Modern Greek phrases.

‘We go every year,’ he said. ‘We’ve a daughter living in Athens. But it’s getting just a bit much for me. We’re not sure about next summer.’

‘Doesn’t your daughter visit you, then?’

The woman continued. Every May without fail; she was married to a high civil servant, but they had no children. It was a great disappointment. There followed the story of Phyllis’s courtship, she’d met her husband at Oxford, and ménage in high society. She spoke the language like a native, was often mistaken for a Greek.

‘Did she learn it at the university?’ Fisher asked.

‘No. She knew Daddy was keen on Greece. Perhaps that’s why she took notice of Eleutherios in the first place.’

They needed no prompting, these two; insisted that he join them in a cup of coffee, even seemed to have carried down spare cups for suitable strangers. While they talked, he considered these two decent people. At this moment their daughter was in Athens, thinking probably in Greek as she listened to her husband, a friend, the radio. How did she make contact with her parents? ’Phone? Weekly letter?

‘It was hard for us,’ the woman said, ‘especially Daddy.’

He pulled a serious-comical face, blubbering his lips out.

‘It’s a very different thing being interested in a country, spending holidays, and, and, having your daughter live there, marrying. If Daddy hadn’t talked about it, and had books, then perhaps Phyllis wouldn’t . . . Well, we don’t know, do we?’

Fisher put questions, offered comfort, said he saw his sister at most once a year and she lived a mere hundred and twenty miles off.

‘We bring a family up, and they split, never meet,’ the man said. ‘We’re odd.’

‘Except at funerals.’

They laughed at the wife’s wry remark.

‘We’d only the one child,’ the woman continued, ‘and she’s none. She’s happy enough, and I tell myself that it’s not much of a misfortune not to bring children into this world we’ve got. Made.’

‘They might do better,’ the husband chided mildly.

‘They could hardly do worse.’

Fisher liked the couple with their sharp platitudes. In some small way they seemed alive, keeping their eye on humanity. Through such as these common sense prevailed, against gelignite and napalm, double-talk and pollution. After an hour, of course, he became bored, knew too much. A retired headmaster and his wife, lacking the expected captive audience. When they learnt that he worked in a university education department, they flashed names. Did he know Professors Whitemoor of Liverpool, Thorpe of Manchester, Winstanly of Hull?

Disappointed in himself Fisher left them about three. While they were two strangers, with a daughter in Greece, he could accept their hospitality, admire their bluntness. But now they talked schoolrooms and staff, they became dull, were grey and he excused himself. He concluded, as he walked towards a caravan park, that he liked only the products of his own imagination. That did not displease him; on the concrete slabs, between the caravans and chalets, the lines of jigging bathing suits and nappies, he congratulated himself on being able to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

He had now reached a road, headed townwards when he heard his Christian name called. Obstinately he failed to turn.

‘Edwin.’

On this second time he recognised the voice, that of his mother-in-law. He stopped, but could not see her. Mrs Vernon stepped out from a car among a parked row, posed for him.

A handsome women, not unlike her daughter in colouring but heavier, she had nothing of Meg’s vagaries, volatility. She smiled now, announced plummily that she was glad to see him. He made appropriate noises, shook her hand.

‘David wanted your address,’ she said.

He did not answer that.

‘A coincidence, wasn’t it?’ she laughed. ‘Meeting like that. A scruffy little pub, David said, not the sort of place either of you might be expected to patronise.’ For a second, he detected a Welshness of intonation, a parody of her husband in the sentence’s formality. He dismissed the suspicion; Irene Vernon carried no satire round with her.

Fisher stood, suspiciously. He’d not spoken to Irene since he’d deserted her daughter, and could see no reason why she should show him affability. She knew what Meg was like, had spent many years in contumely with her, but she expected matrimonial cracks, her own and others’ well papered over. Mrs Vernon paid attention to appearances; she was English, middle-class, a rich solicitor’s only daughter. Her husband could drink in back street pubs, gamble a few quid away at the tables or the courses, make tricky use of information form crooked clientele, play, it was said, with fancy young foreign vaginas, providing the office finances were straight, the Law Society unworried, and her own public pride undamaged. It wasn’t much of a marriage, but the joint bank account swelled. Fisher felt he ought to be sorry for the woman, but she showed no sign of needing his pity. The right man had married her, she’d told him often, and they’d achieved a modus vivendi, and though this appeared to allow her husband the pleasure of doing what he liked when and where he wanted, she seemed completely satisfied. Perhaps Meg’s tantrums developed from her mother’s calm.

‘Come and sit in my car’ she said. He followed, meekly enough. ‘I don’t suppose it’s any use asking you anything, about Margaret, is it?’ No one else called his wife that; Meg, the father’s contraction, was not as he’d thought, from the Welsh. Margaret Adelina Savile Vernon.

‘I’ve left her.’

‘I know. Could you help us out? A little? You see, she tells us nothing. She swears, and shrugs, but we don’t get any sense from her.’

‘Not her father?’

‘David’s both furious, and blind, as far as she’s concerned. He’d do anything for that girl, and he can’t do anything with her.’

‘That’s quite witty,’ Fisher said.

‘It’s not meant to be.’ Usually she basked in flattery. ‘What have you been up to?’

Fisher considered, made her wait. In this large comfortable saloon car he could stretch his legs out to full length. Bridling, he determined to confess nothing. Immediately he rejected this; the woman had every right to question him, and deserved, at least, some sense in his answers. He laughed, laid a hand on her arm.

‘I’ve never been married to anyone else,’ he said, indicating objectivity by preciosity of diction, ‘and so I can’t say whether our home life was normal or not. But I’d had enough.’

‘Did she not love you, Edwin?’ He grinned at her voice, act one, scene two.

‘She hated the sight of me. And vice versa.’ Detemined on flippancy. ‘It was either the door or the poison-bottle for one or the other of us.’

Mrs Vernon did not move, or nod, settled massively in her seat, wearing a bright straw hat. Her legs, in immaculate tights, were large, but beautifully shaped, tapering to fine ankles, small feet. The ringed hands on her lap lay dead, motionless, white, unlined, delicate, plump.

‘Disappointing,’ she said, in the end, on an outgoing breath.

They talked, guardedly, for ten minutes, before she asked,

‘Are you willing to give me your address?’

‘Why?’ Rude.

‘David likes you.’ She took no offence. ‘He also hopes that this’ll mend. He’ll help if he can, and being able to track you down immediately might be of assistance.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘That’s what he said, Edwin. He’s optimistic. More so than I am. He’s also clever. And very experienced in this sort of affair. Not that that means much with Margaret.’

She talked on, equably, about her husband, as if she were making discoveries. Sometimes Vernon described himself in the same sane, careful way, laying out the evidence before nailing the yet unreached conclusion. Small solicitor’s office in Wrexham; University College, Aberystwyth, First Class Honours in Law; with Evans and Gough-Jones, Swansea, Law Society Prize in Finals. And then he described how these had meant working fifteen hours a day, killing religion, sex, drink and social grace to win these baubles he now thought nothing of. ‘Maimed as a human being, ruined as an immortal soul,’ he’d intone, his face bright with irony.

Fisher had enjoyed this performance more than once, and was not adverse to comparing it with the gentility of an anglicised version. Finally, apologising to himself, he’d written down his address in Bealthorpe, and back home, before opening the door into the freshness of sunlit air. Mrs Vernon smiled at him, adjusting her white gloves, and drove off when he was a bare dozen steps from the car. He’d done wrong, he was sure, but it couldn’t matter.

He walked inland into the dull fields and the poky houses, both solid and ramshackle, like originals of sketches in ink and wash by Rembrandt. He stood on the grass-thick platform of a disused railway station and peered over the hedges at the neat gardens of bijou bungalows. In one an old man picked beans, but broke off to describe winter to Fisher until a shriek from indoors sent him hurrying back between the luxuriant rows. An engine-driver he claimed, who’d retired here and never felt so well in his life. ‘I was brought up on steam, a skilled job, where it depended on you and your fireman whether the train ran or not. These diesels, now. A schoolkid could drive one.’ He spat behind the canopy of bean-leaves and bright red dots of flower. ‘Talkin’ again,’ the howl from the house. ‘I think she’s lonely,’ the old boy said, but he paused only a moment for Fisher to admire the size of his produce before waddling off.

This was the place to see the sky, the great sweep of blue with its combed-out wisps of cloud. The land squatted, flattened, ironed out into, huddling into, bottom-low inches under the broad, eye-widening spaces of the sky. Man crawled like an insect; his houses seemed two dimensional, without height; trees brushed the ground, bowed. Fisher liked it best under piling cloud, but today the sky stretched like blue-glass breathed on, bright, hard on the eye, broadly impressive, but without the mountainous changes that he loved most.