No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (24 page)

Now see the advantage of age. Discover a submissive tendency in yourself when you’re seventeen and you have plenty to worry about. How will you describe yourself to your future wife? How will you be able to beat your children without wishing it were the other way round? Which clubs will you join? But when you’re one-twentieth as old as the millennium you don’t have any such anxieties. So you prefer the lower bunk. Who cares? What bearing can that have on the little that’s left of your life? Lie where you like! If Frank feared there was any real danger that he’d sink into senility – senility proper – in black stockings and a pinny, doing the dishes for a touch-me-not whore in a brushed nylon housecoat, that’d be another matter; but it would be with the housework as it had been with the ogling of male bodies in Covent Garden – he wouldn’t know where to start.

So nothing’s wrong, that’s where, on the fringes of sleep, on his last night in the next room to the fat comedian, he is content to leave it. He is not in any danger. All’s well. Nothing’s up. It can’t possibly do him anything but good, though, to be reminded of a time when he cracked the whip, when he was indubitably the top, and had the sovereignty not just of one bottom but of two, to prove it.

Little Cleverley it is, then.

‘ ’L
O, FRANK. YOU
all right?’

He has no sooner parked his Saab in the old familiar ferry car-park, locked, stretched, and once breathed the fishy air, than he is greeted by the owner of The Poldark Inn parking her car. When was he last here? Seven years ago? Eight? Yet she hails him as though she’d pulled him a pint only the night before.

Time moves differently down here.

‘You got a room for tonight, Vera?’

She’ll check for him. It’s a busy weekend coming. The last before the kids go back to school. The last weekend of emmet hell before the better class, freer-spending, childless mob descend.

It all comes flooding back to him, not only how differently time moved down here, but how it was mapped by the temperaments of the tourists. Invasion was always the name of the game, rape and pillage however you cut the deck; but at least when the marauding underclass had gone, in a last explosion of flying pasties and jemmied tills and howling snot-strewn babies, you could lie back and let the middle classes walk all over you in soft-soled cabin-creepers.

Is that why he’d enjoyed it down here – because it was a submissive, masochistic place?

Hang on, though. He hadn’t enjoyed it down here. It was Mel who had enjoyed it down here.

Mel who’d found it. Mel who’d wanted it. Mel who’d allowed him to join her only on the understanding that he’d go quietly.

The only part he’d unambiguously enjoyed was Clarice.

But then Mel had found her as well.

It didn’t answer to the truth of things, though, to separate Clarice, however she came about, from the place she came about in. Wasn’t there a sense in which Clarice
was
Little Cleverley? L’état, c’est moi; Nellie, I am Heathcliffe – that sort of sense. And yet Clarice wasn’t in the tiniest bit submissive or masochistic. She had a genius for acquiescence, which is quite different.

It’s her acquiescent nature that leads Frank to believe she will still be here. Elkin the slate painter will never leave Little Cleverley, never has left Little Cleverley, not even for a long weekend. He made it to the outskirts of Plymouth once and immediately turned back. Couldn’t hack the crowds. Clarice has been acquiescing to Elkin, on a personal as well as on a business level, for too long to think of leaving him now. Only if Elkin’s dead is there any chance Clarice won’t be here. And even if Elkin’s dead she will still go on running the Slate Gallery, because that’s what Elkin will have wanted her to do. She will never run out of original Elkins to sell; when Frank was last here it was Elkin’s boast that he had two hundred thousand slates painted, in reserve stock, as a safeguard against a sudden loss of limb or inspiration. He was getting on, moving into stroke territory, the country of the blind, arthritisville. He could wake up one morning and just not want to do it any more. Enough with the badgers and the blue tits. Enough with the fucking sailing ships. So while
he could, while he still had the stomach for it, he was knocking off one hundred and fifty slates a day, which was a third more than he needed to keep up with what the shop could shift even at the height of the season. In the event of his death, all Clarice would have to do was drill the holes, thread the cords, and hang the art. She was looked after beyond the grave. All this for the small price of acquiescing to a tedious old fart who sat humming in shorts and a smock the whole day, with his brushes pushed into his beard, breaking slates into unusual shapes and colouring them with sufficient skill for the form of a seal or a puffin to disclose itself to the astigmatic crap-watching clamjamphrie from Wolverhampton who trooped through their gallery with neither hope nor purpose for seven months of the wheeling year.

Yes, it is Clarice’s fate to be here forever. Like the rocks beneath, the poor bitch.

But where is she? He’s been here ten minutes and already he’s seen half the village. From the window of the Slate Gallery you have a fair view of the car-park, and an even better one of the Poldark, and wasn’t Clarice always at her window? Is she frightened to come out? Is she reluctant to see herself in Frank’s ringing armour, for fear the mirror cracks?

Yes, Vera can do him a room, since it’s him. No Mel? No Mel with him?

No, Vera. No Mel.

She all right?

Yes, Vera. You know Mel.

She laughs. She does. The bugger!

That’s Mel who’s the bugger. Not that Vera isn’t a bugger herself. The bugger!

They’re all incorrigible buggers, those who have anything to do with Little Cleverley. Emmets if they’re visiting,
buggers if they stay. Frank suddenly feels homesick for the place. Maybe he liked being here more than he’s remembered. The embrace of community, that’s what he misses. Being a bugger in the eyes of those who know and understand you. Never to be forgotten. Remember that old bugger Frank?
Requiescat in pace,
the bugger!

He should go out on to the cliffs. That’s what Mel would insist they do if she were here. And that’s what she would want him to do solus. Cliffs first, Frank. Behold the wonder. But he can’t face it. What if there’s a bench out there with a dead girl’s name on it?

If he plunges in, towards the nautical riggers and all the other emmet memorabilia shops, he will pass the Slate Gallery. Then it will look to himself as though he’s come on only one errand. And if he should happen to be wrong in his calculations as to Clarice’s genius for acquiescence and she is no longer here, will he then turn tail and run? Wouldn’t it be better not to know for a while, isn’t there a virtue in keeping oneself in suspense?

A light rain has begun to fall. The first Frank has seen since he was expelled from his home. He had forgotten rain. Good to see it again. It cheers him up. Soon it will be dark at four in the afternoon. It brightens the coach parties and crap-watchers up too. There’s nothing for them to do in Little Cleverley when the sun shines, other than walk. Now at least they can huddle in the doorways of pasty huts, drip on to postcards, and complain. As though obeying one universal impulse, all at once the rain falls, the holiday gods exhale their watery relief, and every single emmet who was previously in shorts and taupe slip-ons is suddenly anoraked, hooded, zipped, toggled, as though for the Antarctic. Where do they carry these anoraks, Frank wonders. Where do they buy them from in the first place? And are they themselves paid, like sportsmen, to bear the makers’ names and logos,
the brands of racing cars and running shoes, across their chests? They are such mysteries to him, these creatures of the dreadful towns. That’s when they’re not standing at street corners in the whoring night, nodding their cunts at his car.
Then,
he has a better understanding of who they are. Or at least what they’re for.

This will be a bad hour for Clarice. Come the rain, the gallery fills, slates get knocked off the walls, and Elkin comes out to perform. This particular colour, he tells them, I get from mixing soot with urine. They all retch. Slate of the sort I paint on, he tells them, is half a million years old – so you’re not just getting a painting, you’re getting a genuine antique. An old master. They all laugh. Clarice retches. They hand her wet money. They don’t understand the principle of change. They ask who does the painting, though they’ve just watched Elkin paint. They huddle round to observe her wrap a slate. Look ma, a woman wrapping a slate! She is a heritage object, a rural craftsperson, a holiday treat, a goody. She is lucky they haven’t eaten her.

Frank is lucky because he has.

He retrieves an umbrella from the boot of his car, says ‘You all right?’ to Adrian the second-hand fruiterer, walks in the direction of the harbour, then shoots up the hill by the side of the church. St Poldark’s. This is going to be hard for him, though not as hard as the cliff would have been. This is the terrace in which he and Mel had their holiday cottage. And there
is
their holiday cottage, with someone else’s curtains hanging in the window – lace, to add insult to injury – and one of Elkin’s slate houseplates on the front door. A fieldmouse with its tail curled into a number 9. Painted in soot and urine.

Frank has no right to think of Number 9 as
their
cottage. It never was
their
cottage. Mel had bought it with her porno-earnings – she was writing and selling faster then, when the
porn came softer and had happy endings – as a hole for her to bolt to from their house in London. Not a retreat, but an alternative. Not a holiday cottage either, originally. She meant to live here forever. To get away from him and his noise for all time. She’d quietened him down considerably after the ruse of getting him to fuck her every minute that God sent, but he was still too clamorous in his appetites. And too brutal. Still a man, in short. Little Cleverley was her last throw of the man-free romance dice. She’d been visiting the place for years, drawn to its secret coves and heaving seas, and of course to its Daphne du Maurier associations. ‘All that lesbian stuff, you mean,’ Frank said. See the problem? He couldn’t leave her to her yearnings. She had porno waiting for her on her desk each morning and porno lying next to her in bed each night.

She relented in the end. He could come down with her if he agreed to go quietly.

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Little Cleverley again,’ he said.

‘That’s not going quietly,’ she warned him.

She packed vases and photo frames and gardening gloves and walking boots and notepads and bottles of ink into the boot of the car. He’d wanted to bring his machines, but she forbade them. He reminded her he couldn’t do without a television. Make it small, then, she told him. And silent. He spent two thousand pounds on a television he could wear on his wrist and hold to his ear. It was no way to run a column. But he suffered the inconvenience, for her.

He stands in the rain, looking into the cottage garden, and sees Mel, still warm from the bed, still in her going quietly flesh-pink sarong with never-never Japanese flowers printed on it, still with duck feathers from her pillows in her hair, sitting out in the early morning with her pad on her lap, sucking up the first rays of the sun, marvelling at the light.
On those mornings she
was
the light. Flowers opened to her. Seagulls went quiet in her presence. At the first sound of her tread the worms came up out of the soil and showed her their backs. Stroke us, Mel. And she did.

‘’Lo, Frank. All right?’

It takes him a moment to realise that the voice is coming from the bedroom window of the cottage next door. Virna’s place.

‘You still here, Virna?’

‘Where’d you think I’d be, Frank?’

‘Somewhere wild, Virna.’

‘Me?’ She laughs. Just dangerously enough to show him she hasn’t changed. ‘Little Cleverley’s wild enough for me. Mel not with you?’

No, Virna. Mel not with me.

‘She all right?’

What did she think? She knew Mel, didn’t she.

She sure did. The bugger! They’d been pals, briefly, Mel and Virna. Mel had encouraged her, when she was dithering about ditching her husband, to dither no more. They’d met on the cliffs. Mel was sitting on one rock, writing about wet panties; Virna was sitting on another, sketching the sea. They were making each other’s art. What struck Mel was how angry Virna’s work was. She never felt she had finished a sketch until she had obliterated every memory of white from the page in a fury of charcoal. She seemed to see only black oceans. The other thing that struck Mel was how close to the surface of her skin Virna’s blood was. Even on the coolest afternoons, she boiled. Mel could feel the heat coming off her. It wasn’t the change of life that was doing it, it was the sameness of life. Virna lived on the edge of Bodmin Moor, washed shirts, made jam, saw to the flowers in her church, and accompanied her husband, a squeaky counter-tenor, when he sang away from home with the St Breward Choral
Society. She claimed she went because she loved the music and enjoyed the coach trips, but Mel deduced that she went because she was suspicious of the contraltos. She had a purple, crumpled face which crumpled further when she addressed the subject of adultery. There was always a lot of talk of adultery in Little Cleverley. Adultery was what they did there. It was a coastal thing. As an inland woman, Virna abominated adultery. Adulterers, she told Mel, as they sat on adjoining rocks and paused from their work, should be flogged … And then left to bleed to death … And then buried in unmarked graves …

‘It’s only a matter of time,’ Mel told Frank. ‘All she needs is a cottage.’

Then, quite out of the blue, the cottage next door came up, Mel mentioned it to Virna, Virna moved in her things, and overnight became coastal.

She raised the heels of her shoes but remained in every other aspect of her appearance, including the crumpled face, a shirt-washing, church-going Cornishwoman. The heels were all it took. The heels and a certain way of swinging her abdomen when she walked through the village. Within a week of her moving in, there was not a man in Little Cleverley that wasn’t hers for the asking. The illusion was too fascinating. The contrast between what they saw and what they got – like cracking open a crab and finding the flesh of pawpaw – drove them all to madness.