13
Aldous, Colette and Julian arrived at Janus Brian’s bungalow just after noon on the first day of their summer holiday. Net curtains were lifted in neighbouring bungalows about the turning circle, as Colette, after repeatedly ringing an unanswered doorbell, let herself in. Janus Brian had, of course, been constantly reminded of the fact that Aldous and Colette would be calling for him that morning. Only the day before yesterday she’d spoken to him on the phone to make sure he would be ready, and he’d sounded perky and optimistic, said he was looking forward to going away, that he would be ready with his suitcase at 12 o’clock, understanding how Aldous and Colette didn’t want to wait around, that they wanted to get to Tewkesbury in good time.
So she was surprised, for once, by the squalor in which they found him. Semi-conscious and semi-naked on the bed, he’d evidently urinated while lying down, merely aiming himself roughly over the side of the bed, because the carpet beneath was drenched with pee.
Colette slapped him about the face, showing a rare loss of patience with her brother. Aldous, too, was cross, and stomped about the bungalow, rooting out Janus Brian’s stock of alcohol, while Janus Brian wailed huskily.
‘I’m not going,’ he said, ‘I can’t do it. Buzz off without me.’
‘You’re coming with us,’ snarled Colette, ‘you’re coming with us if I have to tie this bed to the back of the car.’
She yanked her brother out of bed and he fell in a crumpled heap on the floor. She and Aldous dragged him, his feet trailing, to the bathroom, where he was stripped and dipped. The quietness of his voice did slightly worry Colette. It was almost as though he’d lost his voice completely, and although he was trying to shout, barely more than a whisper was coming out.
Aldous did his best to tidy the bungalow, while Julian drifted from room to room, sometimes reading from the paperback he’d brought with him, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, noting with interest the faecal deposits in the bedroom where, in the top drawer of the chest, he found two pornographic magazines, a Penthouse and a Men Only. Almost instinctively he stole one of these, the Penthouse, slipping it into his inside pocket, then pushing it down into the lining of his jacket.
Colette soaped her brother’s face and shaved it, sponged his scalp and brushed his hair. There were no clean clothes in which to dress Janus Brian, they had to make do with the least soiled elements of his meagre wardrobe, with the promise of clean clothes in Tewkesbury.
Aldous found several bottles of Beefeater gin, mostly empty, though one was nearly full. As Colette finished her grooming of Janus Brian in the living room, he caught a glimpse of Aldous passing the door with his arms full of bottles.
‘Christ,’ he whispered, ‘what’s he doing. No, don’t let him.’
‘No more gin now, Janus,’ said Colette, ‘not today.’
‘Stop him for fuck’s sake,’ he cried, faintly, as a clinking sound came from the kitchen, of several empty bottles falling into a bin. Somehow he mustered the energy to escape his rocking chair and make it into the hall, where he met Aldous returning from the kitchen. A brief tussle ensued which resulted in Janus Brian falling onto the floor, where he seemed to writhe mechanically, like a piece of expiring clockwork, his false teeth gnashing.
‘You bastard,’ he moaned, ‘you big bastard, you big bastard . . .’
Aldous and Colette conversed above Janus Brian, ignoring completely his floor-level invective.
‘Shall we let him have some?’
‘I’ve kept the full bottle, I suppose we could.’
‘It might settle him down.’
‘Okay. I’ll lock the rest away in the boot, let him have some now and then, once we’ve got underway.’
‘Okay.’
Janus Brian, still muttering expletives, was lifted back into the swivel chair. A cup of gin was put into his hand and he drank it lustily, spilling much out of the corners of his mouth. The transformation was instant. His voice returned, some colour (a pale violet) came to his face and his eyes began to focus.
He reached feebly across to a drawer in the television table and extracted a wad of five and ten pound notes, flipped through them rapidly, muttering, ‘that should do’, and pocketed them loosely.
‘He’s just been testing us, that’s all,’ said Colette to Aldous, ‘to see if we really wanted him to come.’
But his drunkenness was real. His filth and his lassitude were genuine. He could hardly stand, let alone walk. Aldous and Colette took an armpit each and carried Janus Brian to the car. Ridiculously light, he was easily lifted, and on his journey down the cement drive, though his feet went through the motions of walking, they didn’t actually touch the ground.
Janus Brian sat in the back of the car moaning weakly, Colette beside him, Julian in front with his father who locked the bungalow, under the covert observation of half a dozen other bungalows.
And then it was north, across the grain of the Chilterns, to Princes Risborough, Aylesbury and across the plain, all the way Janus Brian moaning in the back seat, occasionally uttering tremblingly assertive demands for gin, reaching out, when he could, to take hold of Aldous’s shoulder and shaking him. Aldous, ignoring him most of the time, now and then called over his shoulder for him to be quiet, saying he wouldn’t have any more gin before Bicester.
An American bomber passed low over the road towards its unmapped roost and everywhere there were the wintry carcasses of elms that had fallen to the disease that had recently sheared a layer off the English landscape. Colette was astonished and saddened by their abundance, so many dead trees, so suddenly dead.
Nearing Bicester Janus Brian’s demands for gin grew increasingly frantic until at one point he reached forward and took hold of the back of Aldous’s head, tugging weakly at his hair, while Colette tried pulling Janus back, and the car swerved into the path of an oncoming juggernaut, and then out again. Aldous yielded and pulled into a lay-by beneath pylons and, while traffic hurtled past, poured a cup of neat gin from the bottle in the boot, fed it to Janus Brian, who then slept.
After Bicester they left the busy roads, following the route Aldous and his sons had taken when they cycled to Wales. Aldous found himself looking out for cyclists as though seeking comfort in the idea that the art of cycling over long distances had not entirely died. All through the little villages in the increasingly complex landscape – Middleton Stoney, Lower Heyford, Middle Barton, Church Enstone, not a single cyclist.
By the time they reached Chipping Norton it had felt like a very long journey to everyone but Janus Brian, who now expressed a wish to urinate. They parked in the High Street while Aldous and Colette, again taking a shoulder each, escorted Janus Brian to the public lavatory under the limestone town hall. He walked with the cautious deliberation of someone who expected every pace to be the first step on a staircase, lifting each foot higher than necessary.
After Chipping Norton Janus Brian calmed, and began to accept his situation. He agreed to Aldous’s rationing of his gin, being allowed another cupful before they left the village, and agreeing to have no more before they reached Tewkesbury. He submitted himself to his sister’s summer holiday.
The rich verdure of the Cotswolds, starved of rain, had died. Everywhere there was yellow, that made it seem these dairy lands had become arable. But it was grass that shone golden in the fields, not wheat, grass that should have been lushly green, feeding the cows and sheep. Even the trees were beginning to wilt, apart from the elms that had already died, starkly vivid against the other trees, oaks and ash trees began to sicken, their leaves hanging loosely, shrivelling. Some people in the newspapers were talking about a permanent shift in the climate, that we may see the introduction into Britain of a Mediterranean, or even of a sub-tropical weather pattern, that the greenness of England may soon become a thing of the past, the land might dry up completely and be good only for the growing of olive groves and cork-oaks.
Colette tried to imagine it as they descended the Cotswold scarp and proceeded through the Vale of Evesham (even more emaciated, it seemed, than the previous hills), peasants taking in the wine harvest, orchards of lemon and peach, or perhaps banana plantations growing around the country pubs, the tower of a perpendicular church peeking above the orange groves. Or perhaps just desert. The Cotswolds eroded to rocky stumps above a dustbowl, cacti and vultures, the bleached skeletons of horses recumbent on the plain . . .
When they arrived at Tewkesbury, Aldous and Julian pitched the tent at the municipal site overlooked by the venerable Norman tower of the Abbey, while Colette went into the town to seek accommodation for her brother, who slumbered in the car. The town’s B & Bs turned out to be full. The best Colette could find was a room in a guest house that wouldn’t be available until the following day. The house was a quaint old Georgian place on the High Street, all varnished panelling and ancient furnishings, run by a tubby little woman called Mrs Brown, who wore her hair as Colette had worn hers in the 1940s.
‘Does your brother smoke?’ she said, after showing Colette the room.
‘No,’ said Colette, wondering if she could persuade Janus Brian to abstain from the habit for a while, or how she might explain his stained fingers and his blackened teeth.
‘Are you quite sure?’ Mrs Brown went on. She must have detected some hesitation in Colette’s voice, ‘because I really can’t have a smoker staying here, this house is a firetrap . . .’
‘Is it?’
‘Oh yes. The only exit is the front door. All this varnished wood, it’s very flammable. It may as well be soaked in petrol.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Colette, handing over a deposit taken from the wad of cash Janus Brian had given her charge of, ‘my brother is a model of clean living.’
Mrs Brown seemed pleased.
There was still the problem of where to accommodate Janus Brian that night, however. The only bed Colette could find in the whole town was in The Grapes, an overpriced, pretentious hotel on the main street, which traded on an obscure association with Dr Johnson (at The Grapes they dined on beef and oysters was a line from Boswell the hotel displayed on a small plaque by the entrance). The staff were cool and aloof, beyond the reach of Colette’s charm, on whom they looked down with sour, disdainful eyes as she booked her brother in for the night.
‘Are you sure you’ll be okay?’ Colette said as she settled Janus Brian into his room that night after an evening spent in the bar, under the mildly disapproving glances of both customers and staff.
‘I suppose so,’ said Janus Brian, taking off his stained tweed jacket, ‘why the hell have you brought me here?’
‘Shall I take this jacket for you?’ said Colette, choosing to ignore her brother’s remark, ‘I can get it dry cleaned tomorrow morning.’
Janus Brian handed her the jacket, then took his trousers off.
‘Where are we again?’ he asked.
‘The Grapes.’
‘I mean what town?’
‘Tewkesbury.’
Janus Brian muttered the name to himself several times, as though trying hard to memorize it.
Eventually Colette left her brother semi-conscious on top of the bed clothes, half naked, with a tumbler of gin on the bedside table. She skipped down the narrow corridor as quickly as she could, knocking loudly on all the doors as she passed them, a quick thump-thump, left and right, with the flat of her hand as she ran past.
When she went to collect him in the morning she was relieved to find him up and dressed and looking far better than he had done the day before.
He told her how he’d spent the night searching for water. He’d woken in the middle of the night with a raging thirst. ‘My tongue was like a parrot’s cage.’ He’d had no idea where he actually was. It took him half an hour just to find the light switch. He’d tried getting a cup of tea from the teasmade, but all he could get was the World Service Shipping Forecast, which made him feel even more thirsty.
Eventually, remembering that he was in a hotel, though he had forgotten in which town, he went to the bathroom for some water but had locked himself out of his room in the process. He was dressed only in his underpants. He couldn’t find the bathroom either. He went wandering all round the hotel in the middle of the night, up creaking spiral staircases, along the warren of twisting corridors that led nowhere. Eventually he found the hotel bar, but the drinks were all locked away behind a metal grille. He stood there with his tongue hanging out, his fingers curled through the grating, staring longingly at bottles of bitter lemon and cream soda.
‘Then I found myself in a truly wonderful place, which was the dining room, and everything was laid out ready for breakfast. There was a reverential quality about the place, as though I’d happened upon a small chapel or other holy place – all these crystal tumblers and folded napkins like little angels, shiny knives and forks, everything sparkling in almost darkness, it suddenly all looked very mysterious and almost sacred. And I walked between the set tables, creeping, as it were, looking at the tables as I passed between them in a state of wonderment. And then I discovered, on a large serving table beneath some tea-towels, an array of tiny little china jugs of milk. There must have been twenty or thirty of them, each enough for one or two cups of tea. So I drank them. One by one I drank the lot. They were lovely and cold. I found a napkin and wrote a little message,
Sorry, but I was so thirsty
and left it on the table amongst the empty jugs. They’d satisfied my thirst, and I laughed to myself on the way back to my bedroom, to think of the happenings at breakfast when they found the empty jugs, and my note.’
Eventually he found a night-porter who, having no access to a spare key, had had to crawl along a sloping extension roof and in through a window into Janus Brian’s room.
‘Very nice chap he was. Very helpful. Not like the day staff.’
Even after only two days there was a visible improvement to Janus Brian’s state. His first night in the bed and breakfast went well and he was glad to be out of The Grapes (he said he couldn’t afford more than a single night) and he reported that he even managed to eat the precisely cooked egg that Mrs Brown had provided for his breakfast. His first breakfast for months and he’d kept it down. He even seemed to be enjoying himself.
They had found somewhere to eat – Sam’s Café, a snazzy little luncheonette on the High Street, a few doors down from The Grapes. The swanky modishness of the interior – red melamine table-tops, wallpaper with a crimson zigzag motif, chromium jukebox in a corner, seemed at odds with the character of the proprietor, a small, portly, ageing gentlemen with a bald head and a grey, handlebar moustache. He took their orders on a little pad of paper.
Janus Brian seemed quite keen to eat. On the laminated menu there was listed, under ‘Lite Bites’, a buck rarebit and a welsh rarebit. These dishes were rarities now, and evoked, for the elders, memories of pre-war suppers lovingly prepared by long since dead mothers.
‘Do you know, I quite fancy a buck rabbit,’ said Janus, using that fond old contraction.
‘One buck rarebit,’ said the waiter as he wrote, relishing the full version of the phrase, rolling it on his tongue. He was of their generation, the waiter, and knew food as they knew food, as something safe and predictable, without any of the dangers and threats posed by lasagnes and bologneses.
Many lunchtimes, afternoons and evenings were spent at Sam’s Café. Janus Brian ate buck rarebits, scrambled eggs, beans on toast. As the days passed his appetite grew. He managed a shepherd’s pie, a plaice and chips, ham and cheese omelettes. Of larger meals he always left a substantial percentage uneaten, but at least he was trying, thought Colette, at least he was interested in food, at least he was thinking about it. After eating they would sometimes sit in the café for hours, while Julian wandered off on his own, and they would read papers, or write postcards. One afternoon Colette wrote several cards while they sat at a table next to the rarely played jukebox.
‘There,’ she said when she’d finished the third one, shuffling them together, ‘that’s those done. Janus, are you going to send a card to Lesley and Madeleine?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Janus Brian without looking up from his tabloid newspaper.
‘Oh go on,’ pleaded Colette, ‘they’d like to hear from you. What about Agatha? Why don’t you send one to her?’
Janus Brian laughed.
‘I should think they’re glad to see the back of me. I wouldn’t want to upset them by reminding them of my existence with a postcard. On the other hand, perhaps I would, but I can’t be bothered.’
Colette shrugged.
‘I love writing postcards. I always have. It is strange, isn’t it? We so rarely express ourselves to people we know in writing, except when we’re on holiday. If we are judged in the future solely by our correspondence, they will only ever know us as people who live in tents and eat fish and chips. Look, I’ve written one to Janus, one to James, and one to Juliette and Bill.’
‘Juliette and Bill have split up,’ said Aldous, turning the pages of his Telegraph.
Colette put a hand to her cheek.
‘I keep forgetting. I’ll have to rewrite it. I can’t believe she’s living with someone called Vladimir.’
‘Boris,’ said Aldous.
‘Shall I read out the one to Janus?’
‘Do, dear,’ said Janus Brian abstractedly.
‘Do you have to send one to Janus?’ said Aldous, who was sitting beside his wife.
‘What do you mean? Of course I do.
Dear Janus, we arrived safely on Sunday evening and have found a lovely spot in the camp site overlooked by the tower of the Abbey. We hear it chiming all night, a beautiful sound. Weather v. hot. Grass all dead, bit like a desert. Do you remember the town? We used to stop here sometimes on the way to Wales. You must come here one day. Love Aldous, Colette, Julian and Janus Brian’
Aldous had his head in his hands.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he moaned, ‘what are you trying to do. Are you trying to ruin the holiday?’
‘Telling him to come here.’
‘I’m not telling him to come here.’
‘That last sentence . . .’
‘I’m just suggesting he comes here one day. I’m not telling him to come here now. He’s not going to come here right now. Don’t be so stupid . . .’
‘But you just had to go that little bit too far didn’t you? Writing him a card, okay, write a card if you must. Be pleasant, okay, what else can you be on a postcard? But suggesting that he comes here, there was no need to put that in . . .’
‘Oh stop being so childish. And don’t sulk. I’ll write him another card. Okay? Happy now?’
Janus Brian raised his eyes from his newspaper, the front page of which was the single, enormous word PHEW!, and a picture of Blackpool Beach, carpeted with sunbathers.
‘Come now, Aldous,’ Janus Brian said, ‘I can’t think the prospect of a visit from my nephew can be all that dreadful . . .’
Aldous cast him a scowl that told him to mind his own business. Janus Brian returned to his newspaper.
Clouds were rare visitors to the skies above Tewkesbury, though some mornings would reveal exquisitely clear cumulus, heaps of vapour full of shadows, wonderfully three-dimensional. Julian watched one passing over the battlemented tower of the Abbey, where it seemed to pause, taking the exact shape, for a moment, of a human brain. He yearned for it to unload itself, to rain down on the parched flora of Gloucestershire. But the clouds were retentive, steadfastly so, hanging tantalisingly vast in the sky, enough liquid in some to keep a town like Tewkesbury in bathwater for a year. Where did they go, those morning clouds? By noon the skies were always empty. Where did they rain? Nowhere in England the papers said. Records were being set. The hottest day in history, the longest drought in history, ladybirds burgeoning, lizards multiplying, there were dust storms over Bedfordshire, bushfires in the Pennines.
The camp site itself, however, was lushly green. The camp warden had found a loophole in the hosepipe ban, which meant the site could be classified as farm land. He could water his lawns with impunity, and so the camp site nurtured the only green grass left in England.
‘Like the garden of Eden,’ Janus Brian remarked, ‘Or a Spanish golf course.’
Things went well for the first week of the holiday. They settled into a gentle routine of sauntering around the town, savouring its pubs, cafés and tea shops, perhaps an undemanding drive somewhere in the afternoon, a relaxing evening at the tent, after which Colette and Janus Brian would stroll up the lane from the camp site past the Abbey to Janus Brian’s B & B. By the end of the first week, however, there was a problem when Colette dropped Janus off. Mrs Brown was waiting for them, a look of concern on her small, stiff face. Her voice shook when she spoke.
‘I cannot have Mr Waugh staying here any more,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
She beckoned the two into her antiquated sitting room and produced a bedsheet for them to inspect. Two cigarette burns, like a pair of brown eyes, stared at them from the whiteness.
‘I made it very clear from the beginning that I didn’t allow smoking in this establishment. It is clear that Mr Waugh has been smoking in bed, I cannot allow it.’
She went into a long description of a fire at a building further along the terrace, exactly the same as hers, when a negligent smoker incinerated a houseful of guests.
‘Janus Brian, you didn’t tell me you’d taken up smoking again,’ Colette said for good effect, but it was too late.
‘Homeless again,’ Janus Brian said despondently as they stood on the pavement outside Mrs Brown’s, ‘I’m not going back to The Grapes. Definitely not.’
After some discussion back at the tent Colette came up with what she thought was a good solution to which the others agreed, and went back to speak to Mrs Brown.
‘This may sound rather odd,’ she said, ‘but could my husband take Mr Waugh’s room? I can absolutely guarantee he’s a non-smoker.’ A bemused Mrs Brown agreed.
Thereafter, for the rest of the holiday, Aldous stayed at Mrs Brown’s, while Janus Brian slept at the tent. It was an arrangement that worked surprisingly well. Aldous, in fact, seemed rather too keen to make his exit every evening, returning the next morning properly washed and breakfasted, bright and cheerful with a newspaper under his arm. He was enjoying a holiday of comparative luxury at the B & B, paid for by Janus Brian who, for his part, seemed relieved to be away from the restrictive, formal atmosphere of Mrs Pyrophobe’s, as he called her. He seemed comfortable on the foam rubber of the tent, or on the cotton and folding steel of the camping chairs.
Julian was bored. Agonizingly bored. The holiday had adapted itself to the pace of Janus Brian’s life, which was slow and parochial. If Janus Brian had had his way, the entire holiday would have been spent in the saloon of The Black Bear, the waterside pub he’d adopted as his own. Julian had to continually pressure his parents into allowing something else to happen, to drive somewhere, a circumnavigation of Bredon Hill and its ring of ancient churches, north to see the misericords at Ripple, or west towards the Forest of Dean, or east across the plains full of orchards towards the Cotswold scarp, and into the unfolding richness of the Cotswolds themselves.
Janus Brian was a reluctant passenger on these journeys, he had no interest in the landscape or the countryside at all and was, for the most part, utterly disinterested in church architecture. If ever inclined to comment on these subjects it was only to remark how poorly England compared to Spain. As a man who knew intimately the dramatic sweeps of the Iberian golf courses, he would remark how feeble the Cotswolds seemed in comparison to the Sierra Nevada, or what a poor manifestation of stone was Tewkesbury Abbey in comparison to the grandeur of the Alhambra.
Janus Brian’s interest in his surroundings perked up whenever pylons came into view, or an electrical substation, gas-works, sewage farm, or, if they were very lucky, a power station. Once, following the meandering Wye Gorge, happening upon the view of Tintern Abbey that had moved Wordsworth so, shattered stumps of sumptuous gothic beneath towering forests teetering on cliffs, Janus Brian missed the whole spectacle, drawn to the fixtures of an electrical switching yard just visible in the opposite direction. He saw the landscape solely in terms of its utilities, which he’d spent his working life depicting in working drawings, diagrams and blueprints. This process seemed to have instilled in him a heightened sense of their value, and he would often lecture the others in the car, alerting them to what he believed they were taking for granted.
‘We forget how important electricity is to our society. Or gas, where would we be without gas? And piped water? What about piped water?’
‘I liked the world before electricity,’ said Colette, ‘gas lighting. It was much cosier. Coal fires. I wouldn’t mind getting my water from a well, or cranking a village pump . . .’
‘You forget,’ said Janus Brian, showing a rare passion for something that wasn’t alcohol, ‘hauling buckets of filthy coal up from the cellar, having to nip out and buy tuppeny gas mantles, earth closets. You call that cosy? That’s living like peasants . . .’
Mostly their drives turned into urgent searches for pubs. Colette only drank at Whitbread pubs, because they served Gold Labels, so these searches were often tense and frustrating. In the wizened, yellow desert that England had become, pubs were like dark, shaded oases, and the family would spend hours in them. So what would start off promisingly for Julian as a day of exploration, would often congeal into a long noon and afternoon spent in the malty, shadowy environs of a pub. Julian’s boredom would intensify.
He spent much of the time alone at the tent, declining the offer of a drink in a pub with the elders. He watched the habits and routines of families made transparent by the flimsiness of their habitations.
A family of four were opposite, a streetwise Birmingham woman with prolapsed stomach muscles and a face that carried a scar (a violet zigzag that indented her lower lip and continued down to her chin) of some previous catastrophe (a car crash?), her husband, also with prolapsed stomach muscles, but from binge-drinking rather than childbearing, and their two teenage children. The woman spent a good portion of every day sunbathing in front of her tent, tummy-down, the undone straps of her bikini top trailing either side like the loose ribbons of an opened present, revealing that moment where ordinary skin fills out to become the breast. Julian was watchful for any accidental disclosure, though the woman was annoyingly skilful in maintaining the concealment of her breasts, even when once, surprised by her husband dolloping a morsel of ice cream into the small of her back, and she quickly lifted herself up, she managed the manoeuvre without revealing herself.
In all his furtive hours of watching this family, Julian never once had any indication that they returned his curiosity. They carried on their lives as though Julian and his parents and Janus Brian and their tent were invisible. Yet they were barely thirty feet away.
The daughter was roughly Julian’s age, perhaps a little older. Flouncy brown hair hung about her face in big licks and curls, but her eyes were small and a little mean-looking. Her mouth was thin and set. The boy was somewhat younger, fair-haired and dressed always in the ridiculous fashions of the day – calf-length voluminous trousers, not unlike the plus-fours Aldous sometimes wore in his youth, hooped socks and platform shoes.
The little flecks of tartan that trimmed some of the girl’s clothes marked her as a Bay City Rollers fan. Both of them seemed to be, in fact, and for this reason Julian disliked them, though he kept an attentive eye on the girl in case at any time she should inadvertently reveal herself. For most of the time, however, she wore T-shirts over her bikini tops, which concealed her small breasts and rendered them uninteresting. Sometimes she wore bikini bottoms, and Julian tried hard to see if her pubic hair caused any impression on the fabric. He wasn’t sure that it did.
Janus Brian continued to eat. He ate more than was merely necessary to avoid dying, he ate enough to lay down some fatty deposits, the first few subcutaneous cells were beginning to fill in a tentative reinstatement of his long-lost bulk. Almost daily his appetite increased, passing through the safety of dairy products to carbohydrates and even some protein. Half way through the second week of their three week (so long as the money lasted) holiday, Janus Brian was onto red meat. He even tried a small fillet steak in The Black Bear one evening, cooked rare. He managed half of it before sitting back and downing a double gin and tonic, gasping, with a look on his face of one who’d just come up from a long spell underwater, red eyed and breathless. Once, in Sam’s Café, in a moment of utter gastronomic recklessness, he went for the London Grill, a platter of chops, rashers and offal rounded off with baked beans and tinned tomatoes in the midst of which Janus Brian was soon floundering.
His body, having closed down in order to make the best of the diet of alcohol and reconstituted savouries it had been fed for the last few years, was having trouble adapting to this new iron and protein and fat-rich diet. His digestive system generated great quantities of gas, so that Janus Brian was continually bubbling and burping, like a kettle coming to the boil. He was soon passing wind without a second thought; sitting in Sam’s Café eating a buck rabbit, he would lean sideways slightly and let rip an anal eructation of table-shaking, floor-vibrating intensity, three or four times during a single meal. These solecisms, originally followed by a murmured apology, now passed without remark. Colette welcomed them, like the mythical sheikhs who considered the breaking of wind after a meal to be the highest possible compliment, they were signs of the reawakening of his body’s metabolism.
‘I’m really happy, dear,’ he said to her one evening at the tent as he pawed his way through a packet of fish and chips, ‘I never thought I’d be happy in this funny little town, but I am. You’ve made me happy.’
The evening was one of predictable tranquillity. In a summer of constantly reiterated weather when each day was a carbon copy of the one before, with a cloudless sky and a high, naked sun, the evenings likewise followed an identical pattern – long shadows, still air, dust, an uncomplicated sunset, the sun withdrawing with as little fuss as possible, shortly to return in the morning before the world had barely had a chance to cool down. Aldous had retreated to the tranquillity of the B & B. Julian was listening to the conversation from the comfort of the back seat of the car.
‘I think that when we die,’ Janus Brian went on, ‘we return to that point in our lives when we were happiest, and we relive it for ever.’ He paused while he worked on digesting a piece of fish, then he licked his shining fingers. ‘In which case, I think that when I die, I will spend eternity eating fish and chips in Tewkesbury.’
Colette laughed.
‘Either that,’ he went on, ‘or I will be watching Arnold Palmer on the eighteenth tee at Valderrama, with a jug of sangria and Mary . . .’
‘I’m glad you’re happy,’ said Colette, ‘perhaps you could look on this holiday as a fresh start.’
‘No,’ said Janus Brian flatly, ‘I’m afraid that when all this is over and I’m back in that God-forsaken bungalow in that Godforsaken town, I know that within a couple of days I’ll be back to where I was. I wish it wasn’t true but there it is. This is nothing more than a respite, dear, it’s not a new direction. It doesn’t lead anywhere. I wish this holiday could go on for ever, but it won’t. All things come to an end.’
‘You mustn’t talk like that, Janus,’ said Colette, ‘you can come away with us again next year, or before then . . .’
Julian, invisible in the car, winced.
‘Next year? I doubt I’ll be alive, dear. I’m rather astonished to find that I’m alive now, to be honest. When I’m in High Wycombe, alone in that bungalow, I sometimes sit there thinking, if I’m dead, how would I actually know? It’s not like now. I’m definitely alive now. The fish and chips are telling me I’m alive. The chiming of the Abbey. You. But in that bungalow, there’s nothing.’
‘You need to move back to London,’ Colette urged, while Janus Brian farted loudly, shifting position in the camping chair to ease the expulsion of gases, ‘sell the bungalow and move back to London . . .’
Janus replied immediately and emphatically.
‘No. I can’t move back to London. That would be moving backwards. I have to go forwards, I can’t go backwards.’
They’d been through all this before. Colette hoped that the happiness he was now experiencing would contrast so sharply with the loneliness of High Wycombe, that he would see sense and move back to London. She would have to wait and see.
‘I think tomorrow I may go for a walk round the Abbey,’ Janus went on. ‘I’m not going to go back to religion or anything like that. I just really feel like walking round the building, looking at all the old tombs, all the old stuff that’s in there . . .’
They were distracted by the arrival of a motorbike on the camp site, a rather loud, old motorbike that was driving slowly round and round the driveways.
‘That’s an old Vincent,’ said Janus Brian, ‘my word. Haven’t seen one of those for years.’
‘A what?’
‘A Vincent motorbike. Don’t make them any more. Not since the Japs came along. Reg had one years ago.’
Janus Brian was having to shout because the motorbike had slowed to a halt on the drive not far from their tent. The driver seemed to be looking at them. He was wearing an old-fashioned crash helmet with goggles and had black leather gauntlets on his hands.
‘It’s a bloody noisy one,’ replied Colette, ‘no wonder they stopped making them.’
The motorbike gave a sudden noisy rev, then steered towards Janus and Colette as they sat in the doorway of the tent.
‘Hallo,’ said Janus Brian, ‘he’s coming over.’
The motorcyclist slowly drove his machine right up to the tent, until his front wheel was almost touching Colette’s foot. She was mildly amused. The motorcyclist killed his engine and dismounted. As he stood, goggled, beneath the silver dome of his crash helmet, he burst into a cackle of laughter and whooped.
‘Janus?’ said Colette, breathless with disbelief.
The motorcyclist unbuckled his helmet and lifted his goggles, then lifted the whole lot as one from his head.
‘It is you,’ said Colette, seeing her son standing before her. The helmet that had formerly contained his head was now under his arm, and he slowly pulled off his gauntlets. It took Colette a few moments to be sure it was Janus, because he looked very different. The beard and long hair that had enveloped his face for several years was gone. As a result his face looked small and raw, almost embryonic. The short hair Janus had cut himself, Colette could tell by the ridged, patchy quality of the cut.
‘Where the hell did you get that?’ she indicated with her eyes that she meant the motorbike.
‘This? Just a bloke I know. He wanted to get rid of it. Threw in the helmet and gloves and goggles for nothing. She’s my little darling. What do you think of her, Janus Brian, I’ll take you out for a ride on her later.’
‘No thanks,’ Janus Brian laughed weakly, not stirring from his chair, nor hardly looking up from the mess of his fish and chips, unsurprised by his nephew’s arrival, as he was unsurprised by everything.
‘You’re not staying here, surely.’ Colette said to her son.
‘Why not? I’ve brought the small tent with me.’
‘You can’t stay here.’
‘But you said on your card, woman. “Come and visit”.’
‘No I didn’t. I didn’t. Not now. Not this minute. I didn’t mean that.’
‘Oh,’ said Janus, ‘In that case my feelings are rather hurt. Why shouldn’t I come on holiday with my family? I’ve got every right.’
‘But Aldous . . . daddy – he would be so upset to see you here. He would be devastated, to be frank. It would ruin the holiday for him, just as he’s starting to relax . . .’
‘Where is he anyway?’
‘He’s at a bed and breakfast in the town.’
‘What? So Janus Brian . . . you don’t mean Janus Brian is sleeping here in the tent.’
‘Yes. And Julian in the car.’
Janus gave a sigh of disbelief.
‘I told you he was up to something didn’t I? He’s finally got you into bed with him.’
‘Don’t be so filthy-minded, Janus,’ said Colette.
‘You’re the one who’s filthy . . .’
‘Don’t make smutty remarks, boy,’ said Janus Brian through a mouth full of batter.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘Everything.’
‘Don’t talk to your uncle like that.’
‘I’ll talk to him how I like.’
‘Oh Christ.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I can’t believe it. Just as things were starting to work out. Just as Janus Brian was starting to feel better and daddy was starting to look cheerful, you have to come along out of the blue and louse everything up.’
‘I haven’t done anything . . .’
‘You haven’t been here five minutes and we’re already rowing. I think you should turn that machine around and drive straight back to London, straight back to where you came from.’
‘Too late,’ said Janus brightly, ‘I’ve already paid for a night from that nice old gentleman in the office. He said I had the pick of the site. I can camp anywhere I like. And, looking around, I chance to see that there is an ideal spot for a tent just there,’ he pointed to an area of empty grass next to the car.
‘No, Janus,’ said Colette, pleading, as though against an act of wilful cruelty, ‘you can’t stay here. I won’t have it.’
Janus teased his mother for a little while longer until finally he agreed to go. After all, he’d only come over to the tent once he was certain his father wasn’t around, and now he quickly mounted his motorbike, kick-started it, and trundled off, his mother recanting, ‘You don’t have to go this minute,’ she called, ‘I didn’t mean . . .’
She watched her son as he returned to the crunchy drive, and then slowly trundled around the camp site. It soon became evident that he wasn’t heading for the exit. Slowly the awfulness of what Janus was doing dawned on her, as he passed out of sight behind distant caravans, emerging on the far side from behind the toilet block, he drew up on an empty patch of grass and began assembling his tent.
‘The cheeky swine,’ said Colette, ‘he’s putting his tent up over there so he can spy on us. He’s in full view. What’ll Aldous say?’
‘Shall I go over and tell him to shift his butt?’ said Janus Brian.
‘It wouldn’t do any good. He’d just laugh. Oh God. When Aldous comes over in the morning, what’ll happen then?’
What happened was nothing. Janus spent the morning sitting on the grass outside his tent, no bigger, from Colette’s perspective, than a cat, and Aldous came over at about half past nine, bright and cheerful as he always was since moving into the bed and breakfast. He made no secret of the fact that he was really enjoying himself there, especially those meticulous little breakfasts Mrs Brown served him. A night of pure silence and solitude, then the descent to a table of white linen, toast in a silver toast rack, fried eggs and bacon on white porcelain, tea in a china pot, jars of marmalade. It was civilised and solitary, and Aldous had experienced these conditions rarely in his life.
And Janus remained at his tent, invisible to Aldous who would not, from that range, have picked him out from the dozens of other nondescript tents and caravans that populated the distant areas of the camp site. As Aldous merrily chatted, Colette was conscious of her son watching, and became aware, instantly, that this was to become part of a larger strategy of torment by observation. Janus watched his family continually, becoming a voyeur, almost, of his own life.
Colette, observed, felt continually intruded upon and yet was powerless to do anything about it. She felt guilty for not telling Aldous that his son was so close by and watching his every move. She felt almost as if she’d been adulterous, and felt a strong urge to confess, but resisted, because if her husband had caught wind of his son’s presence, the holiday would have been ruined entirely.
She stole glances at distant Janus whenever Aldous wasn’t looking, and noticed something odd about him, something she couldn’t quite define at first, but it looked as though her son was wearing a mask. Sitting at his tent, staring in their direction, holding a mask to his face. Of all the odd things Janus had done in his life, had he done anything odder? What sort of mask was it? But she realized it was not a mask but a pair of binoculars. He was watching them through binoculars.
Colette felt furious. Whenever Aldous’s back was turned she gestured frantically at Janus for him to put the binoculars away. She made a rejection gesture of two hands sweeping away invisible nonsense, and the gesture drew an immediate response from Janus, a friendly wave, a thumbs-up sign that showed not only how alert he was to Colette’s movements, but how much he seemed to be enjoying himself.
He was enjoying the blindness he had instilled in his father, a quality he intensified over the coming days by approaching ever closer to Aldous’s lines of sight, while remaining unseen. When the family traipsed off into the town, Janus would follow, sometimes only a few feet behind, resplendently invisible to Aldous. Daringly he would sometimes sidestep through alleyways and shops to emerge in front of the party, and Colette’s heart would jump into her mouth as Janus passed before them, one amongst a crowd, a ghost, sniggering, as his father gazed indifferently into shop windows. Once he went on ahead, waited in a bakery for the family to approach, emerging so suddenly and close to Aldous that he could have knocked him over, and then passing swiftly. Colette could hardly believe that Aldous had not seen him, and looked at him carefully, looking for any sign that her husband had been disturbed by a subliminally caught glimpse of his son. But there was nothing in her husband’s face but that sunburnt, lazy, relaxed countenance he’d borne for the last week and a half.
In the evenings Janus would come over to the tent after his father had gone to the bed and breakfast.
‘You’ll be going home tomorrow, won’t you Janus,’ said Colette.
‘Actually’, Janus said, ‘I was thinking of staying here for some time. I could live here through to September. I like it here. I really do like it here. I think I’ll live here for ever.’
‘Janus, you’re going back tomorrow. Just go away. We don’t want you here.’
‘Who doesn’t want me here?’
‘No one wants you here.’
‘Janus Brian?’ said Janus, ‘Do you want me here?’
Janus Brian looked as though he was about to say he would be delighted if Janus stayed, but then, remembering Colette’s predicament, thought better of it.
‘If it’s bothering your mother, I think you should go.’
‘Julian?’
Julian, sitting in the car, pretended not to hear. Janus repeated.
‘Julian!’
‘Don’t ask Julian, it’s not fair,’ said Colette, ‘just tell me why you’re here. Is it just to torment us or what?’
Janus gave one of his incredulous laughs.
‘I’m on holiday. Like you. I’m enjoying the charms of this little Tudor town. I’m enjoying the Abbey and the Avon. My only criticism is that we are in a place so far from the sea. We could hardly be further from the sea here.’
‘The sea’s for kids,’ said Janus Brian, somewhat despondently.
‘A human being needs water. Eight pints of it every day. Anything less and we’re little more than caskets of dust. Booze doesn’t count.’
‘I like water,’ said Colette. ‘Doctors say we’re ninety per cent water don’t they?’
‘Yes, except in Janus Brian’s case they say he’s ninety per cent gin.’
‘Don’t be rude to your uncle.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s your uncle.’
Janus gave a cackly laugh and patted Janus Brian’s pate.
‘Sorry your grace,’ he said.
When Janus had returned to his tent, Janus Brian said, ‘You worship that kid don’t you.’
‘I do not,’ said Colette immediately, ‘why do you say that?’
‘Just the way you talk to him. It’s your manner. You worship him and he knows it. He knows he can make you do or say anything. He works you like a puppet.’
‘Don’t talk such rubbish,’ said Colette, ‘he’s my son. For all his faults – and he’s got plenty, I’ll be the first to admit, he’s still my son.’
‘You’ve got other children.’
‘I had noticed.’
‘You don’t worship Julian,’ he lowered his voice in case Julian should hear.
‘I do worship Julian,’ said Colette, realizing, as she said it, it was no longer true. She worshipped Julian as a child, as she’d worshipped all her children. But he was no longer a child. Colette could never understand where children went when they became adults.
‘I worship all my children,’ the sentence hung in the air for a while, both parties examining it closely to see if there was any truth in it.
‘All your children,’ said Janus Brian, ‘have a sort of arrogance about them. I don’t know what it is. Janus, of course, is arrogant beyond compare, but the others, too; James, Juliette, Julian as well, in his way. It must be something to do with how you’ve always told them they are better than other people.’
‘But Janus is better than most other people. How many people can play the piano like he can? Perhaps a handful in the whole world – that is, if he’d kept it up, if he’d developed properly instead of throwing it all away, he could have been the greatest pianist of his generation. It’s true . . .’ Colette raised her voice to cover Janus Brian’s mocking laughter, ‘I heard it from one of his own tutors, years after he left the Academy . . . And what does he do now? Boozes his life away and plays plink-plonk jazz in pubs. That is why Aldous won’t have anything to do with him . . .’
‘I’ll grant you that Janus has a special talent,’ said Janus Brian, ‘I’ll certainly grant you that. There are, as you say, very few people around who can play like he does. But to play the piano truly well you have to know something about life, and I think that Janus does not yet know enough about life. He knows he doesn’t know it, and that’s why he drinks and why he’s so arrogant, to cover up that profound ignorance of his.’
‘You’re going to say he needs a wife, aren’t you?’
‘He needs to have found someone, and to have lost someone, that’s all. He’s done neither.’
Julian’s observations of the Birmingham family opposite were becoming obsessive. Some days the daughter of the tent, still oblivious to Julian’s existence, played Swingball with her little brother, and once, the whole family gathered on the dead grass for a game of badminton doubles. Briefly their territorial range expanded right up to the skirts of Julian’s own tent, the shuttlecock claiming new ground each time a wayward shot sent it toppling to earth out of reach of the players. Julian withdrew cautiously into the mouth of the tent in case that feathered ball should somehow hook him into a relationship with the family. The thought of friendship with the daughter was too terrifying to contemplate, the little brother also, with his fashionable gear, was menacingly confident. But Julian loved to watch them, the girl especially, even though he felt no desire for her, but her bodily presence was something he felt impelled to constantly monitor.
It was something of a relief when the fishermen arrived. They’d been deposited there by their father in a swish car, a Jaguar XJ6. Two loutish-looking youths with fair hair and red skin, permanently unbuttoned shirts revealing shallow chests, voluminous trousers. They were a source of mild, localized disturbance in that corner of the camp site, laughing loudly late at night, leaving empty beer cans outside their tent door. They were, it gradually transpired, keen anglers who spent their nights on the banks of the Avon hoping to hook wild salmon, trout, or whatever breeds of fish swam in those waters. They would usually return in the small hours of the morning, belching and farting, sniggering and stuttering, talking in loud whispers. By day their tent was a sealed prism of nylon in which they slept deeply, emerging in the late afternoon, bleary and phlegm-filled.
One evening adult presence was absent from that corner of the camp site. The two Birmingham kids were chuckling in the porch of their frame tent, the night-anglers were smoking and drinking Harp in the mouth of their little bivouac, and Julian was writing his novel next to the car. About fifty feet of dead grass separated the Birmingham children from the night-anglers. How brave of that little boy then, to strut over to them, puffing out his little tank-topped chest, brandishing his green flares and saying
‘Would you like to play cards with us?’
Suicide, Julian thought. To go over to those angling toughs, a snivelling little kid, and invite them to play cards. Pure suicide. And yet these large fair-haired boys did not smack the little one in the chops, stamp on his face, or kick him in the bottom. They didn’t even tweak his nose and jeer at him. What they said was
‘Yeah, alright.’
And they popped their smouldering dog ends into the open mouths of their beer cans and sauntered over to the Birmingham children’s tent. And they played cards. They played cards inside the tent. Julian could hear them. It all began with restrained formality. Quite soon, however, the laughter came. Giggling from the girl. Eager, excited yelps from the little boy. Manly, gruff guffaws from the anglers. They got on so well. Julian was amazed.
From that time on the anglers and the Birmingham children went everywhere together. The anglers lost interest in fishing and instead became keen on Swingball and Badminton. A frisbee was produced, which extended even further the territorial claim of these people, a new outpost added to their empire every time the frisbee floated into uncharted regions. The anglers were introduced to the Birmingham parents, who seemed to like them. Julian could rarely make out the words of their conversations. Instead he got a sense of their flavour, which was nervously jocular. And he was fascinated to see where this friendship would lead. Was the girl a virgin? Almost certainly yes. Was she about to lose her virginity? It was a possibility. It amazed Julian how these fishing yobs, having hooked not a salmon but a sweet young girl, had become gentlemanly in an almost old-fashioned way. But surely the taking of this young girl must have been high on these youths minds. The problem was to escape both the parents and the little brother, and then to sort it out between themselves which one was to have her. A mountain of obstacles. But one evening they seemed to have managed it. To Julian’s intense astonishment, though he couldn’t be sure, the girl and just one of the fishermen were alone together in the tent. He saw the rest of the family go off in the car, and he saw one of the fishermen saunter off alone into the town. The girl was alone in her tent, and just one of the fishermen was alone in his. And then, after perhaps half an hour of silence from each tent, the girl emerged from hers and skipped, ever so self-consciously, in her bikini bottoms and a yellow pullover, to the fisherman’s tent, and entered.
Julian’s heart faltered. He could not believe what he had just seen. This demure young virgin had entered the narrow space of the fisherman’s tent, skimpily clad. Surely she wasn’t going to give herself to such a boorish lout. Julian almost felt like marching over and ordering her back to her own tent. He felt like telling his mother and Janus Brian what he had just seen. He felt like sneaking over to the fisherman’s tent and listening at the wall.
But at that moment he was distracted by the arrival of his older brother, who’d come over on his motorbike.
Colette had observed that evening, with relief, that Janus was packing away his tent and was loading up his motorbike. She was glad because she didn’t think she could continue to deceive Aldous for much longer, and that the cruel trick they had been forced to play on him would soon be over. She assumed that he’d come to say his goodbyes. Janus Brian was dozing in the tent. He’d taken recently to wearing only his underpants while at the tent, the heat was so intense. To protect his scalp he wore a small, perky trilby hat with a feather in it. Though shading Janus Brian’s scalp, the heavy tweed of this garment caused the sweat to pour down his face. Janus Brian also continually wore sun shades that clipped onto his normal spectacles, and which could be raised and lowered according to the prevailing light conditions. When raised these twin dark lenses sat above and beyond his face, like a pair of cartoon eyebrows. And this was how he reposed. Socks, underpants, glasses with raised shades, tweed trilby. Exhausted.
When Janus came over to the tent, however, it was not to say his goodbye, but to announce that he was about to relocate his tent, and pitch it next door to their own.
‘I’d like to be here to welcome my father when he arrives in the morning.’
He settled his motorbike on its stand, and began pulling at the straps of his bundled-up tent.
‘I completely forbid it, Janus,’ said Colette, ‘if you put your tent here I’ll call the office and get them to throw you out.’
‘But I’ve paid. I want to live here for ever.’
Colette could see that, for the first time since his arrival in the town, Janus had been drinking.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not being ridiculous.’
Janus had unstrapped a part of the tent. Colette got up and replaced the strap. Janus laughed.
‘I’m begging you, Janus, go away from us. Go back to London. Why don’t you go and see Bill?’
Janus gave a loud, single-syllable laugh of derision.
‘Bill? Why should I want to see that bastard?’
‘He and Juliette have split up. Didn’t you know? I should think he’s lonely.’
Stupid of Colette to suggest that, she realized shortly afterwards. Estrangement from Bill had been responsible, at least in part, for the relatively even keel Janus had managed to keep for the time of his suspended sentence. But she was desperate. She would have suggested anything. It did not occur to her that there had been a falling out.
‘I do know,’ said Janus, ‘the bastard blames me for breaking up the marriage. I tried to kill him last week, but I chickened out at the last minute.’
‘But he’s your friend . . .’
‘Bill? My friend? Don’t make me laugh. That cardboard cut-out jumped-up Marxist? That two-bit artist, supermarket butcher, scribbler, dauber, talentless prick, that rambling, asthmatic shit-head? That pseudoLeninist mock-Stalinist, sham-Trotskyite, fungus-faced, fungus-backed, fungus-bollocked, cack-handed, simple-brained, colour-blind, pox-ridden block-and-cleaver merchant? That spineless, spleenless, mindless, skinless, boneless, brainless, prickless, pithless, bloodless, eyeless, fingerless, so-called artist? I wouldn’t be seen dead with him. I’d like to chop his head off. I’d like to gut him and feed his liver to the Scipplecat. I’d like to crush his bones into powder. I’d like to roll his skin up into a ball and throw it out of the window. That’s what I’d like to do to my so-called friend. Friend? He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Do you know what he does now? He sucks up to footballers in The Quiet Woman. He’s never watched a bloody football match in his life before now and he goes every week to the Spurs to watch his friends playing. He drools all over them. Gets driven around in their Ford BMWs. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word friendship. Blames me for the breakup of his marriage. Did I drag him to the pub every night? No, he used to come round and collect me. You saw him didn’t you? He’d sneak away from Juliette and come round to Fernlight Avenue. It was he who wrote me letters nearly every week saying ‘when are we going to get pissed? When are we going to get pissed?’ If I ever went round to Polperro Gardens I wasn’t allowed in. I slept there on the roses the other night. His precious fucking marriage. He punched me in the face. If that’s what friendship means I’m through with it. I’m finished with it. It’s all just putrid back-scratching. So vile. So false. Falseness. People are false. They’re not real. They never let you know what they are thinking. They won’t let you know who they really are. You’re all just puppets. You’re all clockwork. Everyone. You, you’re a dummy aren’t you. You’re a fucking waxwork . . .’
Janus went on like this, frightening his mother with an increasingly disturbed stream of invective (all through his speech she’d been saying, quietly ‘no, Janus, stop, stop’) and Janus didn’t stop until Janus Brian emerged from the tent, naked but for his socks, pants and his tweed, feathered trilby, his spectacles with their Groucho Marx eyebrows. He tottered confidently from the tent straight over to the motorbike where this conversation had taken place, almost tripping on the guy ropes, and said ‘Scram, sunbeam.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Janus, halted in his diatribe, all indignation.
‘You heard. Buzz off. Vamoose. Skedaddle.’
Janus Brian’s body was creamy white, with red at the extremities and a scarlet V at the neck, marking the ghost of a shirt. His absurd appearance somehow outranked his nephew’s ranting, trumped his drunkenness.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘You heard the lady, if you don’t beat it I’ll give you a smack in the mush.’
Janus, collecting himself, laughed sarcastically. Janus Brian went on ‘I’ll give you such a wallop in the cake-hole you’ll be shitting your teeth, I’ll give you such a smack in the gearbox you’ll turn inside out.’
‘You’re an old man,’ said Janus, patronizingly, ‘and I don’t want to hurt you, so you just toddle off back to the tent, have some more gin, and let me talk with my mother . . .’
‘You need to show her some more respect, buster,’ Janus Brian said, ‘you think you can pull these cockamamie stunts on your mother – I’m not having it. The game’s up. You think you’re a big shot but I can remember you before you’d learnt to piss in the pot . . .’
That hat. Now Colette remembered where she’d seen it before. It was almost the same as the hat Kojak wore on television.
‘Janus,’ she said, meaning her brother, ‘don’t be silly.’
There was an awkward pause, where no one seemed to know what to do next. The younger Janus was waiting, it appeared, for his uncle’s next move, but his uncle didn’t seem to have thought that far ahead.
Suddenly, struck by an idea, Janus Brian crept swiftly over to his nephew’s motorbike, his Vincent HRD, which stood, leaning slightly on its rest, a few paces away. He put both his hands on the machine and leant his weight against it.
‘Scram,’ he said, ‘or this goes over.’
Janus seemed simultaneously amused and outraged by this act. Sensing the sincerity of his uncle’s threat, he went over to the other side of the motorbike, and braced himself against it, ready for his uncle’s push.
‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Janus kept saying, increasingly indignant that someone should stand so firmly against him. Janus Brian seemed to be concentrating, feeling up and down the length of the motorbike, perusing it, stroking it. Then suddenly he pushed.
‘Hey,’ said Janus, in an admonishing, now-let’s-not-be-silly voice, though he hardly needed to push against Janus Brian, whose slight body was barely able to stir the motorbike at all. Janus and Janus faced each other across the motorbike, the elder leaning steeply into the machine, finding at last a rush of strength enough to send the bike lurching towards his nephew, who then had to lean in opposition to stop the bike from falling. It shocked the younger Janus that his uncle had found that strength and had the will to carry out his threat. He was silently furious.
Janus Brian felt that he’d made his point and retired to one of the camping chairs, where Colette had also seated herself. He had a glow of satisfaction about him, as he picked up that day’s newspaper that had been folded next to the chair, and began reading it, pointedly oblivious of his nephew’s existence.
‘No one’s ever stood up to him before, that’s his trouble,’ he said to his sister, ‘if you ask me all he needs is a bloody good whipping.’
Meanwhile younger Janus mounted his motorbike and spurred her into life. It was twilight. He flicked on the headlight, illuminating Janus Brian and Colette in its beam. They continued to talk quietly, ignoring him. Janus, meanwhile, caught sight of Julian, who’d been watching the whole incident from a safe distance. Janus winked at his little brother and said, ‘I’m going to run that bastard over,’ in a way that seemed to invite Julian’s approval. Julian, however, was thinking about the telephone by the site office. He was thinking about another emergency call.
The motorbike gave a shrill scream, and shot forward at such a pace its front wheel rose into the air, tipping Janus off its seat and onto his bottom. The motorbike continued, riderless, missing Janus Brian and the tent by several feet, and headed off on its own swiftly snaking course across the grass towards the angler’s small tent, which it crashed into. Caught in the tangle of guy ropes and poles the bike somersaulted and fell on its side. The tent was writhing as though it contained frantic escapologists. A man was screaming.
When eventually the fisherman emerged, red faced and tangle-haired, he looked about the camp site with incomprehension, as though his tent, having been picked up by a tornado, had landed in another country. He looked at the fallen motorbike. Then he saw Janus, who by now was standing. Then he looked back inside the tent.
‘Look what you’ve done,’ the fisherman said, his voice almost a whisper, shaking with fright, not the voice of gruff admonishment they were expecting at all, ‘look what you’ve done. Look what you’ve done.’
Julian was already on his way to the phone box.
The fisherman carefully drew back the flaccid material of the tent further to reveal the reclining, unconscious head of the young girl. She was bare shouldered, and the fisherman, rather guiltily, revealed as little of this fact as he could. But her face was enough information. It was cut badly. The lips were as thick as plums. Blood was trickling from her nose. Then she gave a moan and ejected a spray of blood. The first sign that she was alive.
‘You’d better go now,’ said Colette to Janus, ‘Go now, quickly.’
Without a further word Janus ran to his motorbike, lifted it with difficulty, and rode off.
The fisherman was too concerned, too frightened, about the girl, to notice.
‘I told you,’ Janus Brian said to Colette, joining her at the fisherman’s tent, where the girl was now sitting up and crying through a mouthful of blood, ‘I told you ages ago that you should have left him to me. I could have sorted him out.’
Don’t know.
in a time of drought
Dear Janus
So, who saved who? Do you remember? I thought I’d better write and thank you, in case it was you that saved me. If it was me that saved you, I expect a letter in return, thanking me, plus a postal order for £10.
Will you believe me now when I say my drinking days are over? It is not as I would wish it, but you can see what happens. It’s the booze that’s causing the asthma, which means one drink and I’m short of breath. In effect, if I drink, I drown!! Thought I’d better set things straight, because I had the impression that you were expecting a revival of our great drinking sessions in the near future. Alas, it cannot be. If my condition is permanent I do not know. As you can imagine, the prospect of a lifetime on the shores of sobriety, while the great ocean of drunkenness lies before me, is one I can barely tolerate. In fact, I can’t tolerate it at all. Even writing about it now is causing me to weep. I’m sorry to say I’m missing the bottle far more than I’m missing your sister (don’t tell her that). Still, we are all prisoners of our bodies, when we are sober, at least.
As you can see I am no longer resident at Polperro Gardens. Had to move out sharpish once Juliette had left. Left most of my stuff there, which the landlady will no doubt flog in lieu of rent.
Don’t really think it would be a good idea for us to meet, Janus, old friend, life-saver though thou art. At least, not for a while. I’ve moved into Graham’s flat. I know you hate him, but he had space, and he’s an old square who’ll make sure I steer clear of the hard stuff.
So, so long, old buddy. No doubt our paths shall cross one day in the future, until then, adios. By the way, I don’t suppose you’ll take much notice of this, you old boozer, but you could think about going on the wagon yourself eh? What do you think?
Yours sincerely
Bill
High Wycombe
Bucks
27th October 1976
Dear Colette,
I am writing to thank you for the sensitivity and graciousness with which you handled the events of last Saturday. Since our relationship has become somewhat unsavoury over the last few years, I was anticipating that the experience might have been rather less agreeable than it was. In fact, you will not be surprised to learn, I had doubts about coming, and it was really only at the insistence of Lesley that I made the journey to Fernlight Avenue at all. But I needn’t have worried. You made me feel welcome, and I am grateful for that.
It took the events of the funeral to make me realise how much Janus Brian must have meant to you. Lesley, in fact, has been too upset since the funeral to talk about it, which is why he is presently unable to write to you. You will remember that it was Lesley who discovered your brother’s body. An awful shock. Sadly it has taken Janus’s death to make Lesley realize how much his little brother meant to him.
We are both praying for him.
I hope now that you and I, Colette, can start afresh. We have little time on this Earth. Let us not spend it in petty dispute or trivial altercation.
Yours affectionately
Madeleine