The Watchers on the Shore (12 page)

'No wonder he was an odd bod himself.'

'Yeh, that's what I thought afterwards.'

'Is he going strong up there, still?'

'As far as I know.'

Conroy grunts. 'And the best of British luck to him.'

'To him
and Lady
MacHassop.'

'Anyway, you think you'll manage here for a bit? It's not exactly three star.'

'I can't afford three star prices.'I shift round on the bed and lie with my hands behind my head. 'I shan't be here all that long. Just till I can get settled down to the job and have a look round. I think a little flat's the thing to go for. There's only the two of us. We can take our time about finding a house then. Look for something nice.'

And Mr Van Huyten's legacy will come in nicely for a deposit.
Very comforting it is to have the promise of a bit of money.

I let my eyes run over as much of the room as I can see from
where I'm lying: the faded green wallpaper, the mushroomy paint
on the door and skirting, the curtained-off alcove with a rail for
hanging clothes up, a washbasin and a gas fire. The shape of the
room is odd, not a square or a rectangle but trapezoidal, with
three good strides from door to window along the longest side and a slope in the ceiling over the alcove where the wall butts up to the
pitch of the roof. It'll do for me for a while, though it is small and
Conroy, by the window, broad-shouldered and burly, seems to
shut out most of the light and fill the room with his bulk.

'You couldn't have many friends in for a chat, that's for sure.'

'No, it's not made for parties.'

'What's your room like?'

'A bit bigger than this. Want to look?'

I say yes, getting up off the bed. He takes me down to the next
floor and into a room at the front of the house. Different wallpaper,
same paint. Square. Not big, but more room to walk about in than in mine.

'You can tell somebody lives here, anyway,'I say, standing in the doorway.

'Yeh, it's due for a clean-up. You can get to be ;an untidy sod when you live on your own.'

'I didn't mean that, actually. It's comfortable, though, homely ... When did you take up the rich man's game?'I point to the heads of the golf clubs sticking up behind the fireside chair in the corner.

'What, golf? Come off it, mate. All kinds of people play nowa
days. Haven't you seen the colliers on the courses up north?'He takes a club out of the bag, and a ball which he putts across the
carpet.

'I play with Franklyn on Sunday mornings sometimes. He's a lot better than I am, though. My handicap's colossal. I've tried to get Jimmy interested but I can't. What about you? Why not take up a pastime beneficial to mind, body and spirit?'

'I've got one,'I tell him, grinning. 'Anyway, I wouldn't be any
good.'

'How do you know till you try?'

'You can't just barge on to a golf course slamming balls all over
the place. It'd spoil it for everybody else.'

'We could pick quiet times and I'd show you the ropes. Who
knows, you might have a hidden talent. And it would do my ego
good to play with somebody worse than myself for a change.'

'Playing the gramophone's more in my line.'I go over to Conroy's record-player and look at the rack of L.P.'s in their bright-coloured sleeves. Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert's Great C-Major, the Verdi Requiem, Bach, Vivaldi, Purcell, Vaughan Williams - the serious stuff, with a
strong classical and English streak running through it - and some jazz, Ellington and Basie among it but most of it by small pick-up groups.

'You've got some good stuff here.'

'Well, of course I have. You don't think I spend my hard-earned loot on crap, do you?'

'One man's crap is another man's caviare. You'd be surprised
the amount of money the kids pass across the counter for stuff that
won't be worth listening to a fortnight next Thursday.'

'I reckon it's fine. Let them buy all they want. It subsidises the
stuff we want, doesn't it?'

'True enough: There's more of that being sold than ever before
as well, though. We had a chap used to come into the shop. Mind
you, he wasn't typical, but he used to come in Saturday mornings
and spend a couple of hours or more poking about among the
racks and playing records in the booths. He always bought some
thing and usually it amounted to four or five quid. He was a
bachelor, a working chap, without much to say for himself. He
didn't drink or smoke and he lived on his own, him and his hi-fi. I
think he must have had the standard repertory a couple of times over. One time he thought he'd have a real go at Mahler so I
ordered him all the symphonies there were on record. A nice little
packet that cost him.'

'I'm just coming round to Mahler meself,'Albert says.'I suppose I'm a slave of fashion.'

'Yeh, he is on the up and up. And Sibelius is going down. To read some of the critics you'd think he was going for ever.'

'But you don't think so?'

'Well, honestly, Albert, all you need is a pair of ears to know
that he's in a direct line that goes back to Mozart and Haydn.
Carrying on the great symphonic tradition. I don't see how
anybody can deny him his permanent place.'

'Aw they'll change their minds in a few years' time. When he's been dead long enough.'

'And then they'll realize what nits they are.'

'Oh, they won't do that. They'll say they told you so all the time,
even though they're on record as saying something else. Human
nature, Vic.'

'Have you got anything?'

'Only the Second.'

'Well, that's all right. Very exciting and all that, but you want the Fourth, Sixth and Seventh. They're the ones. Marvellous. Christ!'

Conroy's watching me with a little smile on his face.

'I must say it does my old heart good to hear somebody enthusiastic about summat worth-while. What does Ingrid say when you carry on like that?'

'Ingrid? Oh, I don't talk to her about music... Can we have something on?'

'If you like. What do you fancy?'

'I dunno.'I have another look through the rack. 'You don't have any trouble playing the thing, then?'

'Oh, I've got to keep the volume down a bit, you know. And I
never play it after ten at night unless I know I'm in on my own. It's
a bit restricting.'

'I know what you mean. I like to belt it out meself. Here.'I pass him an L.P. of mixed overtures and short pieces. 'Let's have the
Roman Carnival,
eh?'

Albert puts the record on the turntable and drops the stylus on to the Berlioz track. The old Wizard's orchestration flashes into
the room like a drawn sword. Then on it winds through that lovely cor anglais tune and climbs to a climax that's all snapping, snarling
brass...
doo-ah rratatah dee doo doh dah, rrumdidumdidumdidum-
didumdumdah Dooooh daaaAH!

In the electric silence that follows, Conroy and I grin at each other like a couple of kids.

Part Two

7

Starting a new job is like any other big change in your life. It's a time when you begin thinking about turning over new leaves, chucking out the bad old habits and approaching life full of conscientiousness, vim and vigour. No more pushing it till the last
minute in a morning: you'll be up with the sparrows and have time to spare. You'll see that your shoes are polished the night
before and that your trousers are always pressed. There's a new
orderliness and with it a fresh enthusiasm for little things. You
decide to have your hair cut regularly and wash your feet before
you go to bed; and perhaps this is a good time to cut down on
smoking, or even pack it in altogether. The novelty of the whole
situation means you can carry it through. For a while, at any rate.
Then you probably slide back into the sort of sloppy ways you had before.

The first couple of weeks slip by quickly while I'm working my
way into the new routine, finding my way about, sizing up the job,
and generally taking things steady till I know who's who and what's what. Conroy and Jimmy are a great help. Knowing I've
been off the board for a few years they do all they can to smooth the
way back for me. And with the people they're in a position to show
me that certain little bits of behaviour that might seem odd can be
put down to our old friend factory politics - the petty intrigues,
enmities and spites that no works (in fact, no collection of human
beings) seems to be free of. Not that Joyce's is riddled with plots and backbiting and so on - or if it is it doesn't show all that much
on the surface. By and large the people I come in contact with
seem decent enough and ready to help the new boy, some of them
to the extent of going out of their way to do it.

This goes for Martin, too, the other draughtsman in the office, who keeps himself to himself unless he's approached, when he's
very careful and correct. He's been a soldier at some time or other and it shows in his appearance. He'll be in his middle forties, with greying hair and a neat moustache. His favourite dress seems to be
a navy blue double-breasted blazer with an R.A.S.C. badge, dark
grey slacks and an R.A.S.C. tie. He hasn't come very far in the
engineering world, having taken some sort of crash course in
draughtsmanship when he left the Service, and he sticks to detailing.
That's to say, he breaks down into detail component drawings
somebody else's design schemes. This is the kind of work I start on
to get my hand in again.

When I go home at the end of the fortnight I find Ingrid very loving and glad to see me because she's missed me. She's also
happier about things in general. Her mother's been examined by a
specialist and booked for a hysterectomy. I don't know what this is
till Ingrid explains and then I remember hearing my mother talk
about women having it done, only she called it having everything
taken away. It's no picnic and it'll knock Mrs Rothwell up for a bit; but as far as I can gather it's not usually something women
die from, and once it's done it's done.

I find myself going out in the evenings a lot more than I did at
home. There's no telly to gawp at and my room isn't really" a suitable place to just put your feet up and read. It's possible to
turn one room into a kind of home, but this place is somewhere to
keep your clothes and sleep. What reading I do I do in bed, but
this grows less and less because a couple of pints are a marvellous
nightcap and as I'm having a couple nearly every night I find that
two or three pages are all I can manage before my eyes are too
heavy to take any more.

I begin to wonder how I spent my evenings at home. I never went out much except to take Ingrid to the pictures perhaps once a week; and I didn't often go into a pub. But I suppose that in your own home, even if it is only a flat, with all your things around you, you can always spend a pleasant evening pottering about doing nothing very much. Having somebody around helps as well. You couldn't exactly call Ingrid and me exponents of bright intelligent conversation, but idle chit-chat about nothing in particular takes up a fair bit of time and there's comfort in a matey silence.

Conroy being a lone wolf, and living in the same house, he and I
go out a lot together. We never see much of Jimmy outside working
hours. He's knocking this bird off, the daughter of the people he's
lodging with on the other side of town. He's the only lodger they
have, and treated like one of the family. In fact, he's as good as married and living with his in-laws, except that he doesn't sleep
with the bird. I think it's a very funny situation for a bloke to get
himself into. The maximum of temptation with the minimum of
opportunity. You might say he's at least in a position to get the
full inside story and know the worst before he commits himself;
but for my money he's committed already and the only way out for
him if he ever changes his mind is through the bedroom window
at dead of night.