No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (18 page)

A sign outside the only cafe that isn’t full entices him in with its promise of a
VERY SPECIAL TEA CAKE OFFER.

‘What is that?’ he asks the waitress.

‘I’ll just ask,’ she says, disappearing into the kitchen. Half a minute later she is back. ‘It’s a tea cake,’ she says.

‘And the very special part?’

She hesitates, as though it might come to her if she can temporarily quieten everything else that is happening in her brain. There is something airy and ballooning about her. Unlocated. She wears a little frilly maid-of-all-work apron over black jeans and running shoes. It’s not her fault, Frank thinks. She is unimproved by country life.

‘I’ll just ask,’ she says. Half a minute later she is back. ‘It comes with tea,’ she says.

‘I’ll have it,’ Frank says.

He pulls a face to himself, meaning all I want is a quiet life. But all he really wants is crap.

And he gets it.

How can you crappify a tea cake?

You can, that’s all. A rural thing. After which, he has a further sensual errand to attend to. One of his machines needs to be replaced. His hair drier. Along with much else he finds it hard to be without, the old one blew up in Cheltenham. Ever since Mel got him out of his Palermo suits and taught him how to imprison his hair in a pony tail, and
then, when times changed and men were expected to look more like minstrels than their mothers, to free it from a pony tail and coif it down over his eyes and ears in dreadlock-like corkscrews, he has gone nowhere without a drier. The moment he takes his drier out of his luggage, Mel is with him. Now, like the golden bowl of virtue, it’s broken.

As is the heart of the woman who runs the only electrical shop he can find. She sits behind the counter in her coat, with her head down, staring at the linoleum floor, unmoved by the appearance of a customer. There is no light on in the shop. But then there is nothing in the shop you’d want to see. In a matter of seconds Frank is able to do a complete stock check. One iron, one kettle, two toasters, one set of curling tongs, a box of fuse wire, a dozen lightbulbs in dented cartons, three jars of locally made runner-bean chutney, and a hair drier. Since a hair drier is all he wants, enough is a feast. He hands the woman a twenty pound note. She gasps, thinks about holding the note to the light, remembers that she doesn’t know what to look for and that she doesn’t care anyway, and then gasps again when she sees she has no change. Her fingers hover like little starving birds over the empty chambers of the till. ‘Oh,’ she says. Frank finds her the right money. ‘Oh,’ she says again. She doesn’t once raise her eyes to Frank. She is his age. And once would have been pretty, in the crushed-petal-under-the-heel-of-an-infantry-officer style. Being cast away in a dead shop, Frank thinks, is the same as being marooned in a body you don’t want to employ for fucking any more. Neither of us has anything to sell. Neither of us wants customers. Re-training – that’s all we require.

As he’s closing the door behind him, he hears the woman say, ‘Oh, I must – ‘ But she doesn’t bother to finish.

After dumping his new drier back at the hotel and pausing to watch Oprah talking to grannies in filmy frocks who mean
to fuck till they drop, he takes the cliff railway down to Lynmouth – that’s assuming he’s been in Lynton – where there’s a sea wall with lines of grannies on it, puffing hard, showing their bloomers and eating pasties in the heat. He takes the cliff railway back up again and wonders whether to risk the Valley of the Rocks where, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge ran out bareheaded in a thunderstorm ‘to enjoy the commotion of the elements’.

Does Frank need any more commotion just this minute? The sea roars and froths at the edges, otherwise it’s a millpond; there is not a cloud in the sky, not a whiffle of wind; if you jumped from the cliff you could determine the precise parabola of your descent, and not make a mark on the imperturbable surface of the water. No thunderstorm looks likely on this benign Gulf-stream-touched day. So Frank decides to give it a go. What he hasn’t calculated is the effect the benches are going to have on him. The North Walk is not a demanding ascent, but this is retirement country and retirees like to know there’s going to be a bench to sit on every couple of yards. He’s not averse to a comfortable sea-view bench himself. But on the third or fourth he tries he notices a brass plaque. These are memorial benches. To the memory of George and Mabel Wonnacott. To Ron Creacombe from his sister Alice. In loving memory of Lucy Pomeroy (1948-1983) who loved the sea, from her darling husband Frank.

He has nothing but respect for the memory of Mr and Mrs Wonnacott, and for Ron Creacombe come to that, but it’s Lucy Pomeroy who finds him. She died when she was only thirty-five. A child. She was born the same year Mel was born. She loved the sea, Mel loves the sea. She had a darling husband Frank, Mel has – But what does Mel have?

He sits on Lucy Pomeroy’s bench and grieves for them both, Mel and Lucy. What a touching thing it is, to name a
bench after someone you love, to heave it up on to the cliffs, and to leave it there forever. Does he come here, then, Frank Pomeroy? Does he put on his suit and buy a bunch of flowers and come to visit her? Does he stretch himself out upon her and sob his heart out? Or is it comfort enough to know that she is always here, where she loved to be, bareheaded in the commotion of the elements?

And another question. Has Frank Pomeroy got over it? Do you ever?

He’s been having disaster dreams. Every time his head hits the pillow he imagines Mel on fire or being swallowed up by her own garden.
‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried, ‘If Lucy should be dead!’
He knows what Mel would say. If only Lucy
would
be dead! – that’s the way to understand the emotional grammar of
that
poem. It’s written in the wishful subjunctive, just as your dreams are. You’re only imagining me consumed by the elements because that’s what you secretly want to happen. Nothing’s changed. You’ve been murdering me in your head ever since you met me.

Is that what he’s doing? Is he sitting here visualising a bench in her name because he wants nothing but her name to be left of her? Her name and a few bleached slats of oak. Is this a murderer’s grief he’s feeling?

He’d be within his rights to want to murder her, lover or no lover. You can’t go on telling a man to shut the fuck up and not expect him to murder you eventually. But he sees it from her point of view as well; it’s precisely because he is a man – an M.A.N. with a D.I.C.K. – that she is so provoked by him.
{Was
so provoked by him. She is, of course, nothinged by him any more.) Her accusations were just: he did make a din. The racket of his dissatisfactions undermined her. Even when he kept his dick in his pants – which was often, which was most of the time if she was prepared to be fair about it – the sense he gave of a man jealous of his rights
to a dick-led life of picaresque adventures (whether he went on those adventures or not) could only destabilise her. So if he’d be within his rights to want to murder her, she surely was within her rights to have wanted to murder him. But all that’s water under the bridge. He doesn’t want to murder her. He has never wanted to murder her. He reveres her and misses her and imagines erecting a bench to her memory looking out over the Valley of the Rocks.
In celebration of the life of Melissa Paul, who preferred the commotion of the elements to the commotion of a man.
He sees himself coming here every year, a foolish bent-backed old dodderer, drenched in tears. He is drenched in tears now. Heartbreak-blue late summer afternoons overlooking the sea do this to him. So do benches dedicated to dead women.

He trudges gravely back to Lynton, or is it Lynmouth, the high one anyway, where he finds a dark pub with a dark corner to sob in. He is quickly drunk. Salty tears drizzled into cheap red Italian screwtop wine on a hot day always increases the alcoholic content. Don’t ask him how: he’s a man of feelings, not a chemist. When he stumbles out he doesn’t recognise the world. Which way to turn? And where is he making for anyway? He turns right, past a garden in which children are hitting one another with balloons, past another pub outside which a man is throwing beer mats for a dog to catch, past the open door of a centre for shiatsu which he thought was a form of gentle therapy but in this part of the United Kingdom seems to entail bowing and falling on a mat, and walks slap into Liz.

There is no mistake this time. He has not been looking for her, he has not been thinking about her, he has not conjured her out of the vapours of his expectation. And even if he’d known for sure that she was Mrs Billy Yuill, that Billy Yuill for sure still kept a holiday cottage here, and that Liz would,
for sure, be in it, he would not have been on the watch for someone in a belted white oriental combat outfit.

‘Liz!’

Her face falls into a mesh of distress lines. She looks away. If she can, she will walk on. Even run. She is fit. She throws people over her hip. She could outrun him.

He holds his ground. ‘Liz, it’s Frank. Frank Ritz.’

She raises her green eyes to him. The person he walked into was outside herself, free of time, cheerfully vacant after exercise. Now she is cruelly brought back to the dull oppression of interiority, memory, experience, bitterness. Thanks, Frank. He realises that he has done to her exactly what he has done so often to Mel – flung himself, like a brick through a screen, into the quiet blank of her attention when she was off happily with the fairies. Fuck the fairies, notice me!

‘I know who you are,’ Liz says. ‘I’m not likely to forget.’

‘You look good,’ he says.

‘Well, I was feeling good.’

She doesn’t tell him that he looks good himself. But then he doesn’t. He’s been unwell. And he’s just been blubbering on the cliffs. And mixing tears and booze. He must have red eyes. He must even have a red nose.

He touches the sleeve of her jacket. ‘How long have you been doing this Shiatsu stuff?’ he asks.

‘It’s not Shiatsu. It’s tai chi.’

‘Whatever. So are you good at it?’

‘Tai chi is not a competitive sport, Frank,’ she says.

‘Unlike friendship,’ is what he wants to say; but he is not such a fool as that. Instead he asks her to have a drink with him.

She shakes her head.

‘Just one.’

‘No.’

‘We could have Chinese tea, if you’re into all that.’

‘What for, Frank?’

‘Old times’ sake.’

‘And you think we should drink to that?’ She starts to walk away. He follows, keeping up with her stride.

‘There were
some
good times, Liz.’ It upsets him to hear these words on his own lips. You always know that the hour is going to come when you will have to try to rescue the past in a sentence. You always know that trial waiting for you. Now, at last, he’s heard himself say it. Now he really is old.

She is softer, momentarily, than he’d expected her to be. But more final, too. ‘There were good times,’ she said. ‘Some. But that doesn’t mean you want the memory of them back.’

So fuck off, Frank. Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out.

‘How are your children?’ he asks.

‘My children,’ she says, ‘are fine. But since when were you curious about my children?’

Since meeting Hamish? No, it’s too soon for Hamish.

‘How’s Kurt?’ he asks instead, as he pursues her down a flight of steps leading, he is alarmed to notice, to Sinai Hill.

‘Ask him yourself, Frank.’

‘The last time I spoke to Kurt he told me never to speak to him, or have truck with anything that appertained to him, ever again.’

‘If you’re wondering whether he’s softened his attitude, he hasn’t. Neither have I softened mine. It’s been good to see you, Frank. Go home.’

He wants to kiss her. It seems an interminable time since he’s kissed anyone. He’s kissed Josh Green, of course, but he’s not counting what he does with men. Even before he was booted out he hadn’t kissed Mel in months. Months! – years rather, if we’re talking about kiss with the whole of the mouth, a kiss kiss which is different from a peck kiss. He may
have had his dick out in the presence of a couple of whores in the not too distant past, but you don’t get into kissing with whores. It is with whores as it is with wives and lovers – the kiss is the first thing to go.

But even if he’d kissed half of creation that very morning he would still want to kiss Liz now. Her face has begun to reassemble itself retrospectively; he can now recognise the creases he was once able to turn into channels for laughter to escape by. He feels affection for her, and, sentimentally, for himself through her. He could mourn his own youth in her face. But he can also celebrate his age in it. He wants to put his hand on her cheeks like a father. Yes, he likes it that she’s no longer young. Now young’s gone, who wants young any more? In a general way, he likes the blur that you see in mature faces, the suffusion of warm furry weariness; but it moves and stirs him especially to see that Liz is well on the way to looking like an old lion.

But if he’s going to kiss her he’s going to have to catch her. She is a lot further down Sinai Hill now than he is. He calls after her, but she is gone in a billow of Chinese canvas, in through the door of an end-of-terrace lime-coloured cottage which he is just close enough behind to hear her slam and double-bolt and chain.

Is that in fact a good sign, Frank wonders. Does it mean that Billy isn’t home? If Billy were home to protect her she wouldn’t need to double-bolt and chain her door, would she. She’d leave it ajar so that Frank could come barging through smack into her husband’s ukelele fist.

Ha, ha, ha. Turned out nice again.

He bangs at the brass door knocker. A yacht. Poor Liz, to have thrown herself away on a Yuill. He puts his nose to the ridged and frosted pane of glass. A common front door to a common little cottage. What’s the point in having a holiday place by the sea if you can’t see the sea? Was it his fault? Did
he ruin it for her with Kurt, and by confiding their subterfuge to Billy Yuill did he leave her only Billy Yuill to run to? Poor Liz. He can’t see or hear anything. He puts his eye to the letter box and is just able to make out four matching green wellingtons on a sanded floor. Nothing is easier to imagine than the life of a couple. One inanimate object, the spousal equivalent to a stool or a thimbleful of urine – that’s all you need to tell you everything there is to know. A single green wellington would have been plenty. But four! The odour of cohabitational hell wafts through the letter box. So is Billy Yuill at home or isn’t he? Frank doesn’t care now. He feels as if he’s been drinking. ‘Liz,’ he shouts through the letter box. ‘Liz, let me in!’