The Likes of Us (53 page)

 

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

 

‘The Apples of Paradise' is a re-working of Thomas Hardy's story ‘Fellow Townsmen'. I had brooded for some years about an alternative denouement to Hardy's tale, whose irony he either did not see or chose not to use, but which appealed strongly to my own artistic temperament. At first I saw the writing of my own version as no more than an interesting exercise in which I retained some elements of Hardy's plot and planted other clues to its origin in the names of its chief characters. Hardy's are Barnet, Downe and Lucy Savile. Barnet Fair is rhyming slang for hair, or in this case Hare. Downe becomes Fell, and Lucy Savile's initials are retained
in those of Laura Sherwood.

While this necessary acknowledgement of its source inevitably emphasises the similarities, and invites disparaging comparison, ‘The Apples of Paradise', in its execution, acquired enough independent life to persuade me to offer it for publication.

The Running and the Lame

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were people getting onto the bus before Mrs Brewster was safely off, and the driver was letting them. You got the odd one like that, careless, surly, as though they weren't lucky to have a job in times like these. Her walking stick and shopping bag slipped along the stretched arm whose hand clutched the rail while her foot felt for the ground. She wondered with a touch of panic if he would be heedless enough to close the doors on her before she was down and clear. The stick slid free and fell, coming to rest half on, half off the platform, as both her feet touched the ground and she stepped back onto the pavement and regained her balance. Then someone from behind nipped nimbly past her, grasped the stick and put it into her hand, his other hand supporting her elbow.

‘You all right, Ma?'

‘Thank you,' Mrs Brewster said. ‘Thank you very much.'

She peered at him as she waited for her heartbeat to slow, but she had on the wrong glasses for recognising anyone at this range. All she could make out was a youngish man with dark hair, wearing a blue anorak with a broad yellow stripe down the sleeve. God! She was a mess these days: overweight, short of breath, arthritic in her joints, half blind. Fit for nothing but the knacker's yard, Randolph might have said. It had been one of his ‘speaks' that he came out with whatever the company, asking what was vulgar about it when she chided him. She would have to stop coming into town if she couldn't get off a bus without danger. But her local shop had closed six months ago and the neighbours she'd been friendly with had lately moved away. She hated to be dependent on anyone, let alone strangers.

‘It's Mrs Brewster, isn't it?' the man asked, and she peered at the pale outline of his face once more.

‘Yes. Do I know you?'

‘I know you.'

There was no clue in the voice. ‘I'm sorry, but I can't place you.'

‘That doesn't matter.'

‘My eyes aren't what they were.'

She had known so many people in the old days, and many more had known her. Great heavens! She had been mayor of this town and a justice of the peace. All that had happened after Randolph had gone. While he was alive she had been content to back him up; then when he died the Labour Party had offered her his safe seat on the town council. She had taken the gesture as a great compliment, to Randolph as well as herself. How proud he would have been of her, and how distressed to see her now.

‘You can manage now, can you?'

‘Yes, I'm all right now.'

‘I'll be getting on, then.'

‘Yes. Thank you for your trouble.'

People weren't all bad, Mrs Brewster thought, as the man walked away. You could think otherwise from all that was reported in the newspapers and on television, and, of course, she had known a lot of cupidity and mischief while she was on the bench; but there was still some politeness and disinterested concern in the world. Helping lame dogs over stiles; helping fat old women off buses.

Mrs Brewster's first errand was to the post office, to draw her pension. On her way across the marketplace she was greeted a couple of times. Sometimes she didn't recognise people who spoke to her, but she always called out a cheery reply. Sometimes, she suspected, she responded when the greeting was not meant for her, but she would rather risk looking foolish than snub someone. ‘I saw old Mrs Brewster in town this morning,' she could imagine them saying. ‘Blind as a bat, but she still soldiers on'.

As she passed under the bulk of the town hall, the clock in its tower struck a quarter after eleven. Oh! but they'd had some times inside those walls: Mayors' Balls, Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club dances; brass band concerts and choirs; the small parties and receptions she herself had held in the Mayor's Parlour during her year of office. She had met Randolph at a dance in there over fifty years ago. He had only recently come into the town to manage his uncle's foundry, which he later inherited. When they had been introduced and had danced together, he took her down to supper in the Winter Gardens. He didn't seem to want to leave her. She felt his gaze on her all evening and he came back to her every time she was for a moment unattended. He told her then that he fancied standing for the council and astounded her by telling her he was a member of the Labour Party. Men who owned or managed businesses stood as Conservatives, or Independents – which was the same thing under another name. Randolph overturned the natural order. Her father, himself a Liberal, said as much later when she wanted to ask Randolph to the house. Randolph had laughed. ‘They don't know how to weigh me up. Even my uncle looks at me a bit sideways. “As long as you do your work and don't start wanting to hand the business over to a commune”, he says, “l don't see as it makes much difference. Except, o' course, I shan't be able to put you up for t' Conservative Club.
”
'

But the local branch of the party had thought him a catch and let him show what he could do in a ward held by a long-standing and popular Independent whom not even Ernest Bevin or Herbert Morrison could have ousted. He increased the Labour turn-out and its vote; then, when John Henry Waterhouse died, they gave him the prize of his safe seat, and she had inherited it in her turn.

Mrs Brewster needed a couple of postage stamps. She hesitated, then paid for first class. She owed
a letter to her widowed sister-in-law, who lived in the south, and though what little news she had to write was in no way urgent, she felt that second class post for personal letters looked mean. The management of the Post Office irritated Mrs Brewster. She could understand their advertising on their own vans, but not their making long and costly TV commercials for overseas telephone calls, or taking quarter-page advertisements in the newspapers for services in which they held a monopoly. It was all a vexation – like the gas bill she went to pay through her bank when she had finished in the post office. She had expected it to be bigger than usual because of the extra heat she had used in the house during that prolonged spell of ferocious weather before Christmas. Bigger it had proved to be, but when she examined it closely and compared it with the equivalent quarter of twelve months before, she found that she had in fact used little more gas, and the extra cost was almost entirely due to increased charges. Oh, she could manage. The provision Randolph had made was, with her pension, sufficient to see her through the time left to her, which couldn't be all that long. She could manage; but there were others to whom the increasing cost of living was one never-ending fret, and she did not like to imagine what anxiety she
might have had to live with were she, say, ten years younger.

From the bank she made her way to the outdoor market where she bought some greens and a small piece of fish. Then to the butcher for a lamb chop and some bacon. Enough to supplement what she kept in her small freezer – which she liked to keep in case she couldn't get out of the house – but not too much to weight her bag till it became a burden.

Now Mrs Brewster could address herself to her shopping-day treat: a bottle of Guinness and a pub lunch, followed, if she felt in the mood, by a glass of port. There was nearly always someone in the Bird in Hand whom she could chat with, though she almost always waited until she was invited before offering her opinion, for she did not want to become one of those boring old people who chipped into every exchange.

 

The old woman he had helped at the bus stop came into the Bird in Hand as he was sitting up at the bar counter enjoying his first pint of lager. She moved warily in from the door as though expecting traps for her feet, and the landlord called to his black labrador, which had flopped half under one of the tables. ‘Now then, Satan,' the old lady said as the dog stood up in her path. He sniffed at then licked the hand which held the walking stick. Transferring the stick, she let the dog nuzzle into the bent fingers. ‘Snottynose,' the old woman said. ‘Old snottynose.' ‘He knows you, all right,' the landlord said. He had already uncapped a small bottle of Guinness and was carefully pouring it as, casually wiping her hand on the rough tweed of her coat, she approached the counter. ‘Oh, he knows me,' she said. Mrs Brewster. After all these years. She'd felt she ought to know him. And so she should.

‘Will you be partaking of lunch?' the landlord asked as he picked out the money for the drink from the loose change she had spread on the counter and rang open the till.

‘Steak sandwich and chips,' Mrs Brewster said. ‘Ask Maisie to brown the onions. No hurry. Whenever she's ready. I'm not to ten minutes.'

The landlord went and called the order into the back and Mrs Brewster took her glass and turned to choose a seat, nodding ‘Good morning' as she faced the man at the bar. There was no one else in the room.

‘Morning.'

She peered at him, her eyes narrowing. ‘Are you the young man who rescued my walking stick?'

‘Yes.'

‘You've still got the advantage of me.'

‘You were well known at one time.'

‘At one time, yes. Those days are over now, though.'

‘Nobody gets any younger, Mrs Brewster,' the landlord put in as he came back and started to pull another half-pint into his own glass.

‘You two have still a bit further to go than me,' Mrs Brewster said.

‘That's something nobody can be sure of.'

‘No, you're quite right,' Mrs Brewster conceded. ‘And it wouldn't do for us to know such things.' She stood for a moment, turned in on her thoughts, before asking the man at the bar, ‘Do you live here?'

‘I used to.'

He saw that she was still no wiser. It would nag her now, but he thought she wouldn't like to pester him with more direct questions.

She turned away and moved to sit down as he looked past her and through the window to where Eric was getting out of the rusting L-registered Marina he had just driven into the yard. Eric ran his hand round the waistband of his trousers, tucking in his shirt, then hoicking the trousers up as he walked out of sight round the corner of the building. The man at the bar had emptied his glass and ordered a refill and was holding money when Eric stuck his head and one shoulder round the door.

‘Now then.'

‘How do, Eric. What'll you have?'

‘Oh, the same as you.'

Eric was holding his hands as though he half expected to be asked to shake; then he employed them to go again through the motion of tucking down his shirt and pulling up his trousers which, like his jacket, were stained with engine oil.

‘Been losing weight, or do you buy your suits secondhand?'

Eric rested one hand on his belly. ‘Got rid of a bit o' beer gut.'

‘Not much chance of a beer gut where I've been.'

Eric shot a quick glance at the landlord, who was at the till, as the other man took a deep swig of his fresh pint.

‘You don't look too bad on it, anyway.'

‘Like the tan, do you?'

Eric drank. ‘What's on your mind, then?'

‘Let's go where we can talk.' He got off the stool and led the way to a table down the room.

‘It won't be as quiet as this for long,' Eric said, following.

‘Perhaps it won't take long.'

Eric took out a green tobacco tin. He slipped a paper from its packet, laid tobacco along it and began to roll a smoke. The other man watched him fumble for a couple of seconds then reached across. ‘Give it here.' His deft fingers evened the lie of the tobacco, then closed the paper into a neat cylinder. He held it out to Eric with the gummed edge free. ‘Lick.'

Eric said ‘Thanks' and pushed the box across the table. The other man pushed it back.

‘Broke that habit long since.'

Eric lit up, inhaled, took a drink of lager, all with quick, restless movements. The other man sat hunched at the table, both hands lightly touching the cold moist outside of his glass.

‘What made you come back here?' Eric asked. ‘Been me, this is the last place I'd 've come to.'

‘Been you, Eric, you wouldn't have been where I've been.'

‘Been me, there'd 've been no need for any for it.'

‘Still kidding yourself about that, are you? Still think if she'd married you first she wouldn't have taken somebody else on?'

‘She's been all right with me all this time.'

‘But she'd had the fright of her life, lad.' His gaze took in Eric's jacket. ‘That's a good whistle and flute. Or it was at one time. Still like to dress nice, I see.'

‘Never took in the jeans bit,' Eric said. ‘I've spent enough time in overalls. I like to make an effort when I go out.'

‘Does she still like her nights out?'

‘Well...' Eric looked at his hands. ‘You can't do all you might like when you've got young 'uns.'

‘Oh, yes, the young 'uns. Two, aren't there?'

‘That's right. Two lads.'

‘Two lads. Happy families.'

‘You had your chance.'

‘What chance was that?'

‘If you couldn't make her happy...'

‘You self-satisfied bastard. You think you'd 've done any better? She'd have made mincemeat of you, the woman she was then.'

‘Happen so. Happen not.'

‘You got the leavings, mate. What was left after me and that other bastard.'

‘You're still not sorry, I see.'

‘I'd 've swung for the bastard. Her an' all.'

‘There were plenty thought you should have.'

‘Well, I didn't. And now I'm out.'

‘So what's it all been for? What are you after, coming back here?'

‘That's what I thought I'd find out.'

‘It's all done with, a long time ago.'