Holiday (7 page)

‘Have you got a watch?’

He held his wrist forward; the father’s eyes seemed to meet cruelly in his head as he slashed down at the outstretched hand. At the jar of bone on bone, the boy retreated a step.

‘Can’t you tell the time, yet?’

Now his father hit him, on the sleeve, with a flailing blow to each word. The pain was not great, but indignation and shame flared in him. He did not answer.

‘Are you deaf now, then?’

Again the windmill of smacks, one of which caught a nerve end, or muscle, wrenching him with pain. He stood, stock still, eyes glaring before the ridiculous little creature.

They stood, man against man, shambling youth, pouter pigeon with moustache.

‘Now get to your room, and stop there. If you can’t come back when I say you’ll do without your meal till tomorrow morning.’

He did not mind; he’d eaten chocolate. All he wanted was to clear his sight of this clown, but he needed to stay, only a moment, defy this goggle-eyed licorice stick. He did so, then walked out, bruising his shoulder on the door-post.

Inside that closet, his room, he stood in the yard-wide space between bed and wall before he took off his jacket and washed in the small sink. After changing his trousers and tie, he went on to the landing. From downstairs he could hear the clash of cutlery, crockery, the voices of guests, the bray of his father’s laughter.

He shut and locked the door, took a seat on the corner of the bed by the little window. The rooms in the houses over the road were blackly empty of visitors feeding below. He’d spent an hour at the pierrots’, a wooden stage with a roped off enclosure of deck-chairs, at the back, one of the shifting six-deep idlers amongst whom one of the comedians in striped blazer at least twice flourished a straw-hat with matching band for a collection. Thank you, sir. To him. To a boy struck by a ludicrous, fierce-whiskery father.

The actors wore monocles, and sang hoarse songs: ‘To Hell with Burgundy,’ ‘One alone to be my own’, and told feeble jokes, smiling themselves as they apologised for the quality. But it was the girls he waited for; two blonde-haired charmers with whirling flared skirts who kicked high as they danced, flaunting their knickers. A man next to him had fastened fingers into Edwin’s arm at the flash of white silk, sucking his breath in. Fisher would have been ashamed to show his feeling, blatantly, but he knew what that fellow meant. Beautiful girls in white shoes with flying hair showing themselves off to anybody on the sands, for a copper in the cady. Thank you, sir.

He read his library book, detective stories, about a clever, g-droppin’ surgeon, Mr Fortune, with a beautiful, beautiful wife.

Somebody rattled the door-knob, pushed. He ignored the signal.

‘Eddie.’ His mother. Sighing, like the man on the beach, he rose, turned the key. His mother carried paper napkins precariously. ‘Your dad’s wild.’

He held his shoulders stiff, not shrugging.

‘I’ve brought you a thing or two up,’ she said, unwrapping. A brown bread sandwich, a piece of fruit cake, a swiss tart, all unwholesome, handled. ‘Your dad said you weren’t very well, and Mrs Arrow told me to let you have these.’

‘Generous,’ he said. She looked at him in surprise.

‘Well, you were late.’

‘I was not.’

‘Your dad says you were.’

He’d no idea what his mother thought, how she judged between him and his father. It probably never entered her head to adjudicate; they were as they were and nothing she could do would change them. Edwin acted the nuisance no more than four times a year with the expected result: an explosion of Arthur’s bile. Thereafter, father behaved with exceptional politeness, even generosity. Elsie Fisher admired her husband because he made money; he might be an obsequious, penny-paring snivel of a shopkeeper, but his bank-account exceeded those of car-owning, property-proud clients whose lounges he supplied with arm-chairs and studio-couches.

His mother sat uncomfortably, asked about his reading, and went away to the magazines downstairs.

Tomorrow his father’d greet him, man to man, shake his arm as he invited him boyishly out for a pre-breakfast trot along the front.

The godless boy called quietly on God, God, God.

In the dining-room this evening, silence blossomed once the families began to eat. Fisher enjoyed the activity, the tucking of bibs, the wiping of mouths, the tipping of plates for the last spoonful, the pause between courses where one put on a small show for the other tables or angled for the correct snippet of conversation which would set the rest to chatter or laughing. These people worked hard, holding their fingers correctly, not marking the tablecloths and this ceremony pleased him. In this room decorated with dolls and paper flowers it was proper to act the gentleman, ape the lady. When the standard was judged, by Monday evening at the latest, there’d be a relaxation, a few aitches would topple, salacious asides allowed, confidences would be exchanged, but at this the first dinner after a complete day’s holiday matters were formal. That’s where his father had failed; he’d played Tuesday’s joker on Sunday. Odd, because the old man had never put a foot wrong in the shop. He licked every bugger’s boots there.

Smiling, breaking his bread on to the plate, he wondered how the Vernons shaped in the Frankland. Too early for dinner yet, they’d be nattering each other gently to death, refusing to go downstairs for an apéritif, quite at home in comfortable warmth that did nothing for either.

He and Meg had spent a week-end at the Frankland soon after they were married. For two or three months he’d been applying for jobs, filling in wearisome forms, stamping envelopes, naming referees and then he landed the headship of a large humanities department in a London comprehensive. He’d not interviewed well, and was certain that the headmistress, a woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it, had taken a dislike to him, so that when he’d been called back and offered the post, he’d stood flabbergasted, but without too much obvious turmoil, as if considering, or perhaps they thought praying, head lowered, before he’d thanked them, said he’d do his best, accepted. And as he rode back to the school in the headmistress’s car listening to her forthright commments on his rivals, the chairman of the education committee, his predecessor, he’d decided he’d take his wife out, do the heavy, be extravagant and that weekend whether she fancied or not.

‘Seaside,’ Meg decided. ‘Out of season. East coast. Bealthorpe. The Frankland Towers.’ She rolled the words round her palate, father’s daughter. He was surprised at her choice, expecting her to plump for London, the theatres, concerts. Curiously he did not remember the Frankland from his holidays, though he’d stared often enough into the long lighted windows of the big hotels. This must have been built in the last year or two; who’d patronise it he did not know and said as much.

‘You’ll see,’ she said, ‘when you get amongst the chinless wonders.’

The service there matched the steep prices, and on both Friday and Saturday nights they went to bed in liquor. This surprised him, now, but he remembered that at the time it seemed sensible. To stagger along to the distant sea under the clusters of cloud-smudged stars or to sit comfortably in an armchair swigging whisky and water as he whispered verse to his wife:

seemed a perfection, as if he’d mastered life, or ambition, even death. He did not drink over wildly, since he was less used to it than she, but he smiled and quoted in a fine dizziness. Perhaps this was the end of his youth; from this time he began to be himself. He doubted that. He’d achieved something, though his wife was not impressed, and in this state of half inebriation could imagine that she celebrated with him. They made love languidly last thing at night, but she lay relaxed, pleased with him, delighted to be his love, his wife.

In the morning both were edgy with headache, fearing the size of the bill, but by lunch-time they’d walked, skimmed stones and were ready to make fun of the residents. Meg mimicked their voices, or rather fluffed them up out of her imagination. She growled comically military for a moustachioed man with oiled hair.

‘Two yahs in the Grenadahs for you.’ She pointed at her husband, who’d failed because of acne to do national service. ‘Set you up, young fellah, sloppin’ about like a stretch of four-by-two in a watah-closet.’ Where she’d learnt that expression he’d no idea. One black-beaded old lady with round glasses and a pinched mouth she specially watched, and then, in the bedroom suddenly squeaked, so that Fisher knew immediately whom she mocked, head nodding, ‘I would never allow my late husband, the bishop, to enjoy his conjugal rights unless there were an ‘o’ in the month.’

‘Why, madam?’ Fisher said, catching the spirit.

Meg pursed her lips.

‘It is not for you, young man, to know the times and seasons.’

The old voice crackled, but he reflected uncomfortably that he seemed to be only a casually admitted spectator to her satirical self-entertainment. In her head he’d be bleating some banality, or worse some magnificence of poetry that would ring ridiculously pretentious as she imitated his voice or her walk.

Not that she gibed all day. She could laugh so that her beauty, which was statuesque, transformed itself into an adolescent helplessness. The green eyes flashed as she giggled; shoulders shook and she clutched him for support. He loved her, then.

This sense of unease, of peril about his marriage did not deeply disturb him. His life had been a series of obstacles, O and A, Scholarship, Schools, and though he shaped excellently as an examination candidate, he’d always been nervous, grew to live with it, be glad of it, use it to advantage. Thus he did not expect his new life to be anything but dangerous. As his first at Oxford proved its worth in jobs and attention, so the beauty of his wife. But neither was gained without sacrifice. One got nothing for tramtickets as his father told him. And yet he felt immature, unready for marriage, only satisfied when the pair of them managed to share something, a game, a drinking-bout, sex, mindlessly, never in the abstract. Perhaps that was usual.

He eyed his married friends, and made nothing of them. They behaved with such variety that he could draw no conclusion. He observed only their public life. One husband did the washing; another bathed the children; one plangently described his sexual performances; another claimed drily to envy adulterers.

Of course he was verbally adroit enough to give himself satisfactory answers. This lack of equilibrium, this uncertainty would disappear, so that he and Meg would settle to a workaday routine of children, promotion, househunting, retirement with honour. He neither wanted nor believed that. The snag could be bluntly put: though he desperately loved his wife, he was not convinced that she returned his love. She said so, often enough; muffled his fear with kisses, dragged him into bed, shrilled fiercely for him, even lay tenderly by him when she was satisfied, but then he remembered when he’d not done so well and she’d cried for what he could not give, and beaten him, in a curse of tears. On no more than chance, then, than chance, success depended.

Marriage, that oath, that sanctified state seemed nothing to her.

She’d talk about Malcolm, or her other boy-friends, until he flushed, jealous, near mad with anxiety. If she’d seen them, and they could serve her, then that service could be taken at her pleasure, without reference to vows and solemn declarations. She had, she lived with, her husband, expressed her pleasure at the condition, but declined to make it a matter of eternity. He’d no proof of her infidelity, did not believe that she’d been unfaithful, but was driven by her to understand she was undeterred, immorally irresponsible.

The small boy on the next table had finished dinner and had been whisked away to bed by his father. Residents whispered congratulations to the wife, who queened it with her coffee, smiling openly at Fisher. Again he’d no idea why this was: perhaps she set her cap at him or perhaps her pleasure at being allowed ten minutes to herself in a beautiful dress with no dishes to wash left her so content that she demonstrated her pleasure to the nearest presentable male. Fisher returned the smile, but was surprised when she picked up her cup and came the three or four feet to sit at his table. The rest did not know how to take this, minded their own business openly.

Her conversation meant little.

She talked about a motor-boat trip they’d decided against, the number of ice-creams a child should be allowed, and finally she described her husband’s behaviour in an amusement arcade. Now she pitched her voice low, not publicly, as she sketched the feverish thrusting of coins into the one-armed bandits, his bad temper when she’d remonstrated with him, his childishness. ‘You allow him in there, and he goes beserk,’ she whispered. ‘Mad for money. He isn’t at home. He’s ever so generous. But there he’ll change a pound note and glue himself to the machine until it’s gone.’ She questioned him, keeping her voice small, in intimacy. Under the light dress her skin burnt in hot gold, matching the heat of words.

Fisher answered stiffly.

To tell the truth he was frightened. Viewed from a yard or two’s distance on the beach or in the house she was attractive, the belle. Now she approached, she changed, coarsened into the typist-suburban housewife who talked inanities or ironed in semi-detached houses the country over. This tested him. Why should she malign her husband, invite him to join in?

Her husband returned, showed mild amusement at her change of position, but not at the lack of coffee. The girl, clearing away from other tables, rushed to supply him.

‘Are they in bed?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ A slow monosyllable.

‘Tony asleep?’

‘Well away. Colin wants you to go up.’

She nodded, picked up her cup to drain the dregs, crooking her finger. She disassociated herself by that movement from demanding children, kitchen chores, but she soon left. The husband began to talk. A quantity surveyor he did not like holidays away from home, where he would have preferred straightening the garden, or working the lathe in his toolshed, but claimed he had to come away for his family’s sake.