Byron Easy (18 page)

Mandy had taken me out to buy a pair of flares, a suede jacket and some passable shades during the week. She was wearing exactly the same outfit. We looked like slightly decadent, recherche twins.

‘Apart from the clothes—awful. But I don’t care if he likes you or not. As long I get some cash out of him for the band, I’ll be happy. How’s your Spanish?’

‘Non-existent.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Gran pretends not to understand English, just like she pretends to be deaf.’

At that instant the door opened and the screaming abated. A warm gush of Mediterranean cooking hit me in the face, making me slightly nauseous. And there stood Ian Haste, Mandy’s father; ghoulishly tall, with liver-spotted hands the size of ping-pong bats, his straight hair coerced back from his forehead with oil and comb into something resembling a quiff. His huge right hand extended.

‘You must be Byron.’

His eyes scanned me for signs of previous marriages, sexually transmitted diseases, prison terms. If he had been in any way articulate he would have described me as a classic waster, or a narcissistic poseur of the highest stripe. Instead, his dislike merely registered in minute movements of his thin grey brows.

‘The one and only,’ I replied, my mouth filling with spittle.

‘Well, come in. You must be tired after Mandy’s driving.’

We went into the long-corridored house. The deep-pile carpets were scrupulously clean. On the living-room wall hung Renoir’s
La danse à la campagne
in an abysmal frame. I followed Mr Haste and Mandy into the cramped kitchen, and witnessed the detailed, extravagant hugs and kissings between my future wife and my future Spanish in-laws. Once they had disengaged, the talk turned to the huge paella simmering under a dustbin-lid, like an offering to Olympus. I sat with an inane grin sellotaped to my face and observed the company. Old Montserrat had a dignified, even regal gait, that I later found concealed great feminine deviousness. She seemed stooped and miniaturised by age, her eyes sometimes twinkling with that feral shrewdness old women are possessed of. She was dressed in a tan summer trouser suit, the type necessary to keep cool under the scalding Andalusian sun; a long string of pearls double-looped under her turkey neck. Her hands moved expressively in time with every crisp syllable. Leocadia, Mandy’s aunt, was pale and withdrawn in contrast, her hair cut into a greying wedge. She looked frail and malnourished, with a sense of self-neglect in her clothes and complexion. There was an aura of self-restraint and repression about her, of properness. I inspected her meek frame for any resemblance to the fiery Ramona, but could find none. As the three generations of women began to talk very rapidly in Spanish, I mopped my brow. The heat of the kitchen had caused the virulent sweat to virtually urinate from my face. Mr Haste lowered his gaze to me.

‘You’re sweating.’

‘So I am,’ I laughed, and pulled my cuff across my forehead, feeling unable to stand the Hades of the house for a moment longer. I must have looked like a human waterfall. ‘It’s not just the
proverbial
kitchen I should get out of!’ Mandy’s father examined me with a dead-eyed stare, not even the glimmer of a smile on his sallow face. Oh, Christ, I thought: uphill all the way.

‘Anyway. So what do you do?’

Of course, I was ready for this one. A week of preparation had gone into my answer. The almost fifties elegance of his clothes seemed to twitch slightly as he waited for my reply. His bathtub-defying legs stiffened impatiently.

‘Didn’t Mandy tell you? I work in a music shop.’ Best not to mention writing, I thought. Until you were lionised by the world at large, writing was an occupation that didn’t count as something you did. It was something that did things to you. It made you poor. It was an expensive hobby, a silly indulgence; something that prevented you from making a living, from
do
-ing. It wasn’t legitimate. It was a guilty, dirty secret, a form of self-abuse. I felt observed and vulnerable standing there with my world-competitive hangover, my height problem; like a moth under glass. Like Pip before Miss Havisham.

‘We tried to teach Mandy the piano. But she had no application. This thing she’s up to at the moment—I hope you don’t encourage her—hardly counts as music.’

‘Actually, I think she’s got what it takes.’

I felt a sudden surge of rebellion well up inside my aching guts. What the hell, I thought: he loathed me on sight. Ian Haste spoke softly, in measured tones that masked any clear accent. But behind the reticence was an overpowering arrogance. The arrogance of the tall man. He had a stubborn, over-manning presence. His physical carriage reminded me of my stepfather: stringy and dangerous. He pulled a pack of Dunhill from his jacket pocket and offered the filter ends towards me.

‘Cigarette?’

Ah, we’re making progress. He likes a bit of resistance, of opposition. But—I could sense—not too much. He was beginning to loathe me less, despite himself. I later found out that Ian Haste was also an only child and had become a successful businessman the hard way, with all the unbending conceit that confers on a man. He had been born into poverty in Bow, and had managed to disguise his accent with elocution lessons, fudging and the shining example of Terence Stamp. His parents had run an East End pub, but he saw the real money was with the breweries. In his early twenties he had become a buyer for one of the major companies, snapping up half the boozers in Bethnal Green within a year. He had met Ramona while staying in a Bayswater hotel on business. At that point she was just a maid, whereas he had swaggered in all spivved-out in his skinny black Krays’ tie and Carnaby spats; a high-roller full of vulgar, vertiginous charm. I accepted a cigarette, and he led me outside to show me the new lawn he’d put down in the spring. He stood there like a king before his realm, as the merciful air soothed my frying face.

‘Once the topsoil’s full of stones you’re done for. Trust me, it needs constant attention. Compost, weedkiller, hosing. I don’t suppose you have a garden in, where is it?’

‘Archway.’

‘Oh, yes, that grotty little dump. I went there once. Won’t be going back. By the way, they’re not as scary as they look.’

For a moment I thought he was referring to the red-hot pokers bordering his immaculate lawn. He was standing next to me, studiedly smoking, rarely making eye contact, in the pose of the loner. The man apart: circumspect, masculine. Then I realised he was talking about Montse and Leo.

‘Oh, they seem very … vibrant.’

His eyebrows shifted disagreeably. Not a word in his vocabulary, I imagined. Anyone who used words such as vibrant were highly suspect. And probably communist. I was dying to get a look at his bookshelves. You could tell a lot about someone from their books. In fact, I was of the opinion you could tell everything worth knowing.

‘The old girl’s a bit of a handful, but you won’t get much trouble from Leo. Nothing like Mandy’s mother.’

‘I heard she was quite a personality. And very beautiful.’

‘Too beautiful for me,’ stated Mr Haste, ruefully. Then he drew himself up, remembering his reserve. But it didn’t last long. He let loose a bizarre chuckle: ‘Her mother spoilt Mandy something rotten. Now she needs someone steady. You seem fairly steady, Byron.’

I couldn’t believe I had heard him correctly. In my advanced state of dilapidation, the last thing I felt was steady. But then, I was beginning to suffer auditory hallucinations. My forehead-constricting headache was starting to buckle my temples, upset my sense of balance. He continued, ‘By the way, I can tell you were a bit worse for wear last night. Don’t worry, I used to be in the pub game before I retired. You’re a dead giveaway. But I can see you’ve got your head screwed on straight.’

‘Thanks,’ I muttered, the effort of doing so almost causing my head to fall from my shoulders. Did this count as his assent, his blessing? Man to so-called man?

‘You’ve no money, mind. But neither had I, really, when I met Mandy’s mother. It was all front. You can’t do it with just front these days, more’s the pity. Come on, let’s go inside before they ruin dinner with their rabbiting.’

Soon we were all seated around a circular pine table, the broiling paella sitting heavily at its centre. Montse took command of the serving, and, despite a personal attack of delirium tremens (precipitated by the sight of a glass of red wine), and the equatorial heat, the meal went as well as could be expected. Marriage was only mentioned once, and then it was in the context of a
fait accompli
, as if we’d tied the knot a month ago. I managed a couple of sentences with the verbs and subjects in the right order (in English, of course—what did you expect, Castilian?), and tried not to appear as dangerously ill as I felt. An hour later the old lady addressed me in Spanish with a tigerish smile.

‘
Mariscos, bien?
’

Mandy leaned over and whispered in my ear. Under the table she clasped my perspiring palm. ‘That’s seafood.’

‘Oh, non. Merci,’ I managed to stammer. Another mouthful, I feared, would bring me face to face with all the others.

Montse looked back and forth between me and Mandy, the feline grin still beaming.

‘Ah, they look such elegant young ones! A dynamic couple!’

I was startled by this burst of English. Up until that point she had bewildered me with the machine-gun rattle of her Spanish. There was the old girl arrested before us, ladle in hand, bearing a clump of bilious
gambas
and steaming rice, speaking fluently a language of which I had assumed she was completely ignorant. I returned her smile. Then there was no stopping her. ‘I remember when I met my Pepe. Everyone said he was the village idiot, ai, ai, ai! And you know what they said? Eh? They said that I should no marry.
Nunca.
Not never. And look at us, God bless him in heaven, sixty years of bliss. Let us hope you two make the same marriage. We were like two shoes on the foots of the same person!’

‘Oh come on, Gran,’ cajoled Mandy, ‘you couldn’t stand each other.’

Leo interrupted with her matter-of-fact voice: ‘They were very happy together, Amanda. I should know, I have had to listen to her all these years.’

Mandy turned to her aunt.

‘You were the lucky one. You had Spain, and the sunshine on tap all year round. I had to go to school in this dump.’

‘You mean England?’ I said, slightly offended.

‘That was your father’s decision,’ said Leo crisply.

‘Ah, Pepe!’ sighed Montserrat, not listening to us. ‘He looked so good in his uniform. Said he would die for the Republicans. And for me, of course!’

‘And now I feel like I am married to her,’ muttered Leo. There was scorn rather than resignation under her timidity.

A new tension entered the room. The old girl shot her daughter a venomous look and a sad passivity returned to Leo’s face. Mandy’s father sat back with a manly calm. He had heard all this before, many times. I saw his hand move towards the packet of Dunhill. Montserrat pointed the paella ladle towards Leo like a broadsword.

‘And what would you know about marriage? You could still find yourself a man—look at you. God made you beautiful once and you let it go to waste.’ Her twinkly eyes were now full of mad poison. Leo, I knew, had been briefly and traumatically married in her early twenties and was now a confirmed spinster. And also a slave to Montserrat. The situation was escalating. I felt suddenly asphyxiated. ‘If only Ramona were still with us, she give you a kick up the backside!’

Leo had a strange way of being unassertive and patronising at the same time. She spoke to everyone as if they were naughty children. Her sanguine face addressed Montserrat without meeting her eye.

‘Now stop it, mother. What will Byron think? You’ve only just met him, and you still cannot behave. You’ve had a very tiring day, insisting on cooking at your age. You should be resting. And this heat—it feels like Madrid in August.’

I could concur with her there. The raised passions were propelling more whisky-flavoured sweat onto my hairless scalp. Every time I dabbed my pate with the heavy napkin, Louis Armstrong-style, the foaming spa would be replenished seconds later. I must have looked like a glace cherry, sitting there; pooped, full of trapped pain and heat, and longing to go home. I glanced towards Mandy. She seemed to find the whole scene amusing. But the old woman’s blood was up.

‘Don’t give me orders! Do I take orders from my youngest daughter?
Imbécil! Muñón! La más puta de todas las putas del mundo mundial!’
She hurled the ladle into the sink. ‘How dare you be alive and Ramona dead?! And you …’ She pointed a curved forefinger at Mandy’s father, who was patiently smoking and rolling his eyes. ‘You devil. She could have found better than you. You are no man! Pepe—he was a man!’

Leo got up and walked towards Montserrat, in an endeavour of placation. Mandy had told me that Leo worked with the mentally ill back in Tarragona, so she was perfectly qualified to deal with the old battleaxe. Leo held out her arms as if to comfort a sobbing, petulant child. The stooped woman spun around and stood trembling by the sink, refusing all succour. I watched this scene through engorged eyelids. A waterfall of liquid turned my vision crimson. I felt faint. A crisis was coming. The couple in the Renoir on the wall seemed to be line-dancing rather than waltzing, their expressions of abandonment suddenly melancholy and confused. I was dimly conscious of Mandy next to me taking the opportunity to seize her father’s arm. Then her voice.

‘Now, Dad. Can you lend us a grand?’

But I didn’t hear his answer. I blacked out, face down in my still-molten plate of paella, like Agamemnon with the sword in his back.

Mandy didn’t get her thousand pounds. In fact, her father rarely gave her anything, whether it was attention, money, support. And he didn’t have any books on his shelf. Only the
Times
World Atlas, Yellow Pages and a tax guide. This in itself was not surprising. But his unfatherly parsimony ambushed me for a moment until I realised he was trying to teach Mandy a lesson. He had done it the hard way, so why shouldn’t she? I could never be so cruel to any offspring of mine. He was an odd, chilly fish. It is said that after men who own yachts, women most desire men who resemble their fathers. This cannot have followed with Mandy, as Ian Haste and I were about as different as could be imagined while still belonging to the same species.