10

Visiting Janus Brian was now a major undertaking. The journey to High Wycombe was a long and complicated one involving a perilous quarter arc of the North Circular with all its feeder lanes and flyovers, and then a miserable crawl along Western Avenue, past the Hoover Factory at Perivale, the Aladdin Lamp Factory at Northolt, the golf ball factory at Uxbridge, with its giant golf ball perched on a giant tee, then the heavy traffic through the sprawling dormitory towns of Gerrard’s Cross and Beaconsfield. After the first week they couldn’t manage a visit any more than once a month, and were soon down to less than even that.

That first visit was encouraging, however. Janus Brian seemed to be coping rather well with his new life. With the money he was rolling in since the sale of his old house, he’d bought an organ, a mighty Wurlitzer of an instrument he’d seen when passing an antique dealers in town. It had come from one of High Wycombe’s last great cinemas, now a bingo hall, and filled a corner of his spacious living room.

‘I’m sometimes up all night playing the thing,’ he said, ‘it’s got an extraordinary range, you can play Bach toccatas on massed kazoos, or have “Colonel Bogey” sung by heavenly choirs, it’s fantastic.’ The first few visits centred around the organ, Colette and Janus sitting side by side playing duet versions of ‘I Do Love To Be Beside The Seaside’, ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’, and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. Colette would try all the different stops, hearing her versions of ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ in weepy strings, ‘Tico Tico’ on tom-toms and castanets, but the novelty of this massive, twinkling instrument did not last for very long, and as the summer passed into another autumn, Janus Brian became more and more despondent, until one weekend when Colette called, he answered the door in his old state – far gone, shaky, yellow.

From one cul-de-sac to another. He said he liked the peace and quiet of dead-end roads, but it was the peace and quiet that was now driving him mad. ‘Peace and quiet is wonderful when you’re living with someone, but when you’re alone you need noise, movement, activity.’ The neighbours were unfriendly, worse than Leicester Avenue. His next door neighbours collared Colette as she went to the car, a look of slight despair in their eyes.

‘He plays music at full volume all night sometimes.’

She knew this was true. Janus Brian had said as much. He was playing Schubert symphonies on a new hi-fi at all hours. Janus Brian had a special affection for Schubert, and used to tell Colette that if he were ever to haunt her after his death, he would come as a melody from a Schubert symphony.

‘It’s not that we don’t appreciate the music,’ the neighbours went on to point out, ‘but there is a time and a place.’

‘He won’t listen to our complaints,’ said the man, ‘I did ask him very politely one morning if he’d mind showing some consideration, and his reply was a four letter word . . .’

‘It was eight letters, actually,’ corrected his wife.

The man took a moment to count in his head.

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘his reply was an eight letter word. What’s more, he answered the door stark – you know, completely naked. My wife standing beside me . . .’

‘This is a very quiet neighbourhood,’ said the woman, ‘a very, very quiet neighbourhood. You ask anyone around here what it is they like about the neighbourhood and they’ll all say it’s the quietness.’

‘My brother is a frail man whose wife has just died,’ Colette said, ‘perhaps you could help him instead of criticize him.’

The neighbours didn’t ask her about Janus Brian again. Whenever she visited, however, she was conscious of their observing eyes.

Lesley had visited once, so Janus Brian told her. He came on his own about a month after Janus Brian had moved in.

‘Bloody stuck-up fool, expected me to make him a cup of tea. I was lying in bed and he was tapping at the window, so I had to pull myself up and answer the door, then he just strolled in, took a look at me, then at his watch, said something like “what time of day do you call this?” Said something about the fact I wasn’t dressed, then just sat in the kitchen waiting for me to make some tea for him, holding a hanky over his nose because of the smell, he said. Then he left, telling me about some church he goes to or other, said I should come along. Bloody fool.’

Agatha had been over as well.

‘Telling me about her lodger, telling me how rich he was. She said he drove a Ferrati! I just fell down laughing, I said what’s that? A cross between a Bugati and a Ferrari? She got cross, of course. She is such a daft woman. Do you know what she said the other week? I was looking for my Guinness Book of Records, I wanted to look something up, I can’t remember now, and I asked Agatha, I said Agatha, have you seen my Guinness Book of Records? And she looked blank for a moment and then said, “Is that classical or Jazz?” Classical or Jazz! Can you believe it?’

Soon he was pretending to be out if Agatha knocked, only that didn’t work. If he didn’t answer the door she’d think he was dead and have the police round kicking the front door in in no time. He had no alternative but to tell her to her face.

‘I said, I’m sorry, Agatha, I know you’re doing your best and you’re only trying to help, but I must insist that you piss off and never darken my door again. It was the way she nagged. On and on and on. She’d go round the house hunting for gin bottles, and if she found any she’d pour them down the sink. She told me off about everything – the house, my clothes, my smell, everything. Do you know she used to walk over from Ickfield Park, all the way up that hill? Terrifying. Still, seems to have done the trick. I haven’t heard from her since. Thank Christ.’

Such stories delighted Colette, the failures of her rival siblings, humourless Agatha, hypocritical Lesley. How could they ever hope to understand Janus Brian? But at the same time she felt the distress of sole responsibility for Janus Brian’s state. Later he said he knew from the day he moved in he’d made a terrible mistake.

‘I wanted to be haunted,’ Janus Brian said, ‘I wanted Mary’s ghost to visit me, but she never came, not to this sterile little bungalow, her ghost would never come here. In Leicester Avenue her shadows gave me the creeps, but now I miss them. And I want there to be an upstairs. I miss the upstairs. My life has been robbed of a dimension. There is no verticality to it, everything is flat and on a level.’

He bought a clock. Of all things, a clock. But he said he didn’t have a decent one, and he went out to buy one. It occupied pride of place on the living room mantelpiece, a naked nymph, about six inches high, rendered in a ghastly, imitation gold, holding aloft, as though it were a torch of liberty, a clock-face which pitched back and forth, its own pendulum. The horror of this timepiece rendered Colette almost speechless when she saw it. The gaudiness of the figurine, her golden bosoms so pathetically exposed, the sheer awkwardness of the design, with its clockface bobbing back and forth, almost impossible to read, a piece of pornographic kitsch unworthy of her brother’s tastes. Did he really derive some thrill, however abstruse and rarefied, from the contemplation of this revolting statue, this faceless, bare-breasted nymphet of wasted time? Did he imagine her, even in his most drunken hours, coming to life and frolicking, all gold, about the carpet? Did he think that she might put down her weighty clock and creep into his bed, vivid and smooth, to press her tiny nippleless paps into his face? Whatever it was, Janus Brian seemed inordinately proud of his new clock.

As the winter progressed, visiting became more difficult. Colette herself became ill shortly before Christmas, bringing up, to her and Julian’s terror, a bellyful of blood into the kitchen sink. Julian was so terrified he ran out of the room, returning a few moments later, pretending he hadn’t seen it. The cause turned out to be a duodenal ulcer, and Colette was in hospital for several weeks, an experience which she enjoyed. Colette loved hospitals, she liked being among the ill, the deprived, the lost. In a National Health hospital everyone is levelled, as in a prison, to a common social strata, a sort of aggregate of all ages and classes, which meant that Colette could befriend Judy, a fifteen-year-old West Indian schoolgirl who talked nothing but pop music and boys, or Ruth, an academic with gallstones.

‘They don’t know what causes ulcers,’ Colette told Aldous, ‘No one has said anything about the drink causing them, although I know that’s what you all think.’

‘But they’ve told you to stop drinking?’

‘They’ve said not to drink while I’ve got the ulcer, because it aggravates it and causes acidity. But once the ulcer’s gone, there’s no reason why you can’t drink.’

Aldous looked disappointed. He was hoping for a stronger warning from the doctors, take another drink and you’ll die, or something like that, but the doctors seemed positively encouraging of Colette’s drinking, especially with Christmas approaching. Don’t worry, they seemed to be saying, we’ll soon have you drinking again for Christmas, don’t worry about that.

It was a bleak time. Janus, since his arrest the year before, had been subdued. The threat of imprisonment had had a sobering effect on him, and if he drank now, he mostly managed to moderate it to a few cans imbibed in the solitude of his bedroom, but his overall mood was sullen and hostile. He no longer spent time with Bill Brothers, and rarely went out drinking. In effect there was no longer anywhere he could drink legitimately in Windhover Hill or surrounding areas. Aldous couldn’t help thinking that Janus was waiting, with immense patience, for his two year suspended sentence to expire, so that he could resume his life of wild inebriation. Occasionally he would lose patience and go out on the town, returning noisily at an ungodly hour, having miraculously escaped the attentions of the police, though the threat of an encounter with them was a new and effective means of controlling Janus, for he knew Aldous only had to make one call to them and he would be in prison for six months, even from the most deranged depths of his drunkenness he could perceive the brutal simplicity of this.

Aldous and Julian visited Colette in hospital every other day. It was a winter of dense fogs. One night the roads were immovably clogged with stranded traffic, they had to leave the car somewhere near the North Circular and walk the rest of the way to the hospital.

Colette came out just before Christmas. Throughout January there was hard snow on the ground, and they didn’t get to High Wycombe until early February, having not visited for over two months. It was a novelty for them to see the Chilterns under snow. As they feared, Janus Brian had sunk into an even deeper despair than the one he’d experienced in New Southgate. In the two months of Colette’s absence he’d barely seen another human being. He was drinking perhaps two or three bottles of gin a day and hardly eating anything. He had grown a ridiculous, white, fluffy beard that looked as though it had been made by a child out of cotton wool. His hair had bushed out into a spiky grey crown surrounding his bald pate, but most concerning of all was his thinness, his leanness. Janus Brian had always been a thin man, but this was not so much thinness as hollowness. It was as though someone had removed a layer of something from under his skin, which now hung loose around the vacuity. He had deflated, sunken, crumpled. His body had hardly any muscle and he walked with a shaky, almost crippled stance. Amazingly he still drove his car, and would pop to the shops once a week for frozen food and a week’s supply of gin and fags, which nearly filled his whole boot.

‘I don’t understand Janus Brian,’ Aldous said to Colette one day as they were driving back from another visit. ‘If I was in the same situation I’d develop some sort of scheme to get me through it. He likes drinking, so why doesn’t he go to a pub to drink?’

‘I don’t know. He doesn’t like pubs.’

‘But he could walk to the nearest pub. There’s one at the bottom of his road. He could make that his aim each day. Then he could aim for the next nearest pub and make that his goal, and so on and so on. Eventually he would be walking out into the countryside to go to the pub. He should do something like that. He would meet people and get fit. That’s what I would do if I was him. But he just sits there swigging gin until he blacks out.’

Blacked out was how they often found him. Eventually, towards the spring, Colette, after having picked her brother out of yet another swamp of his own filth, bathed him, shaved him, cut his toenails and dressed him, said ‘Janus, you’ve got no choice, sell up and move back to London. You don’t have to buy a house like the one in Leicester Avenue, you could buy a nice little flat near us. There’s even one over the road that’s going for sale.’

‘No, dear . . .’

‘But I just can’t cope with the journey out here any more. It’s just too much to ask of Aldous and Julian . . .’

‘The kid doesn’t have to come . . .’

‘But I can’t leave him at home with Janus for the weekend, it’s not fair . . .’

Janus sighed.

‘Shall we play the organ?’

‘No.’

‘Kojak’ll be on soon. I know it was a mistake to move out here,’ he said, consoling his sister’s weeping, ‘but it’s too late. I’ve done it. And I can’t move back, it would be too retrograde. One has to go forwards, one mustn’t go backwards in life . . .’

‘You call this forwards?’ snapped Colette. ‘You’re in a worse state now than you were in Leicester Avenue, it hasn’t done you any good at all . . .’

‘Let’s give it some more time. I haven’t even been here for a year yet. And you don’t have to come out here every other week, I’m coping, honestly. I may not look as though I am but I am.’

‘No you’re not, you’re drinking yourself to death.’

Janus Brian gave an apologetic laugh, then said nothing. After a while Colette, lowering her voice so that Julian in the other room couldn’t hear, said, ‘Janus, I want you to come on holiday with us this year, in the summer. We’re going camping in Tewkesbury. We went there a couple of years ago, there’s this lovely little campsite in the middle of the town, we could put you in a nice B & B for a couple of weeks, it’s a lovely town.’

‘Tewkesbury?’

‘Yes, have you been there?’

‘Near Gloucester, out that way isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, I don’t think I have. I may have passed through. No, I’d be in the way, dear, very nice of you to offer.’

‘You wouldn’t be in the way. Julian wouldn’t mind.’

‘Wouldn’t he?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I haven’t had a holiday for a long time,’ said Janus Brian thoughtfully, ‘a very long time indeed.’