The Death of William Posters (15 page)

‘No thanks, I'm looking for the lavatory.'

‘It's always more interesting when a third nation intervenes. Have a shot at it.'

‘Another time. Not now. Thanks.'

‘Across the hall,' Richard said.

He shut the door quietly, stood by the dim landing. What a way to kill time. It's like Ludo, or Snakes-and-ladders. And who was that bloke at the wireless? A notice posted on the back of the lavatory door advised him to now wash his hands, but one of the kids had pencilled underneath: ‘All right, so where's the sink?' Another remark said: ‘But pull the chain first.' I suppose that bloke must have been a lodger, though I don't know why he turned a gun on me, when I'm on his side. Not that he was to know. It was so authentic it didn't look real.

He pulled the chain and went outside, collided with the girl he'd seen at the sink downstairs – Mandy – felt her breasts and arms against him. ‘Sorry,' he said, to step aside.

She took his hand: ‘Don't be. Come in here.'

‘Where?'

‘In here, quick.' Her hand turned the door knob, and he followed. It was a clean whitewashed room with a single unmade bed, a chair and chest of drawers, magazine pictures of musclemen and Tommy Steele on one of the walls. An ashtray of cigarette ends lay on the chair, and the room smelled as if she had smoked in it most of the day.

‘Quick,' she said, ‘please' – her arms around him, lips fastened thickly over his. He responded, and after a few minutes lay with her on the bed, his blood stiff and beating against her thighs, one hand gripping her long blonde hair. Would anyone come in? Was he safe in this madhouse? But he was ready, and didn't want to rush at it like a man who thinks he can't do it, or someone who doesn't think anything at all. On the other hand he didn't want his good luck to push off before he could get set. Her clothes were up and open, arms around him as he spread over her. Kissing her eyes, he felt her tears on them, which may have been proof of an uncontainable passion, or of some bleak snowbound despair, for her hands fell from his back, and she lay still, breathing softly. He was in no condition to ponder on her state of mind, exploded into her as if someone had pushed him violently from behind, and at this unmistakable impact her arms gripped him again.

After a few kisses she said: ‘Now get up.' The encounter had been so rare and dreamlike that he obeyed like a zombie. ‘Thanks,' she said.

‘I should be the one to say that.' He stood, while she stayed on the bed, tear marks still at her eyes. ‘Now give me some money,' she said. He took out his wallet: three pound notes, and some change in his pocket. He put all of it on the chair. His knees shook, as if all strength had gone at one blow. ‘It's too much,' she said. ‘I only want a token.'

‘Enjoy it,' he told her. ‘I did.'

‘Don't tell daddy,' she smiled. ‘Please go down now.'

‘It's hard to tear myself away.'

‘Please go.'

He walked to the stairhead, looked at his watch, and saw he hadn't been with her more than ten minutes. What sort of a family is this? In the hall he stopped again by Albert's picture of ‘Christ the Lincolnshire Poacher'. He'd lost the romantic imaginative clarity of an hour ago, and the landscape colours were sombre and meaningless, the figure of the hanging man desperate with the ages he'd been up there. Rabbits turned to foxes, biting at wood, hanging on with filed teeth, as if after such great efforts they were going to climb and run at the man's head, finish him off. Frank lit a cigarette, trying to fix himself somewhere on the picture, draw its totality right into him, meet it halfway at least. The face held, looked as if wanting a drink from the vague line of sea behind, aching to eat what landscape nine-tenths surrounded it, taste both before rabbits or foxes got there first. It wanted the world pushing into its mouth, to digest it and shit it oat. Yet no one was there to do it, or understand that it needed to be done, and he was hardly in a position to bend down and do it himself, scoop up earth and sea to cure his own agony.

Frank saw the picture as painted on the surface of a common house-brick, one pictorial from thousands plain that made an enormous wall he had to breach or climb. Maybe that man flexed on the cross isn't Christ, but none other than my old friend William Posters, not dead yet, but surely dying, hanging as a warning for all to see. Bill Posters will be prosecuted, persecuted, gut-smashed, blinded, crucified: all those pictures of the cross and the bloke skewered on it stuck up at street corners with the common caption blazoned beneath. What was behind it? A wracked, hot-spring, wide-throwing black sea perhaps, God's all-spewing bile slung into it like a dye-pill and churning it crazy. You'd think so from this picture. It can't be a calm sea. No seas are calm except on postcards. It might look flat, but just peel back the top skin and look below, and that will be another matter. Or maybe there's land behind, land you can walk across in a straight line to your life's end and not get to the finish of, only rivers to swim, never a sea to reach. Or maybe one day I'll be looking along a rocky, storm-coast: spray bursting by the bottom cliffs, mushrooming up as if mermaids were planting sticks of dynamite all over the place and blowing white water sky-high into the air, the full dull burst of breaking water battering my ears time and time again, never subsiding into flatness even though I button my coat against it, light a fag and walk off inland with my head down thinking.

Someone tapped his elbow: ‘We wondered where you'd got to.' Albert wore a cap, as if against the cold in the hall.

‘I was caught in your picture. I can't get away from it.'

‘Take it, then, I don't need to have it up there. I'll make you a present of it.'

‘It's all right. I don't need to take it. Thanks, though. I can't take a man's work like that. It should belong to everybody, if at all.'

‘Ina's got the tea on. Come down and have a jamjar before you go.' He looked at the picture himself, then turned from it. ‘It's strange, but I've always wanted to be sickly and neurotic, yet can't because I'm so strong and tough. I've been out on the bitterest nights for rabbits and pheasants, chased by the toughest keepers in the land, but got back none the worse for it. It's bloody weird. Maybe I've got a super-duper built-in death-wish – which is why I gave my wife seven kids. I don't know, but I suppose there's some reason why I'm a painter. I'd like to explain it, being wedged out here in the wilds for a lifetime, and getting the whole lot of us by as best I can while I do my painting.'

His brown eyes glittered, feverish with the night behind them that, in his talent, struggle, and world-ignorance, he was trying to illuminate. ‘Come on down, and we'll get that tea.'

9

Keith was so disturbed after a sleepless night that he missed a left-fork in the interlacing roadwork of north London, got himself shunted towards Cambridge instead of the Letchworth–Peterborough axis. This latter would have aimed his Sports-Triumph straight at the heart of Lincolnshire and the dead-end village in which Pat had incarcerated herself in a futile act of self-abnegation. Misery and injured pride improved his vocabulary while doing little for his sense of direction: that's how Pat would have put it, sarcastic at the beginning and the end. Match that to a high moral tone and you have an untenable relationship as far as man and wife are concerned.

He'd set out early, in spite of blackening rain. Carruthers had been difficult about three days off from the office, saying that the new Watkins table-sauce account was in urgent need of smart treatment for the next T V series which, he added, is worth a lot to the firm. But Keith was just as likely to come up with an incontrovertible dead-set image racing along the open road, as he was locked in the super modern office block above High Holborn. So Carruthers had no option but to drop his hidden persuader technique on someone already a master of it – a prize copywriter who earned every penny of his three thousand a year.

Hearing all the arguments, his psychoanalyst also disapproved. ‘If you succeed, I'll be pleased and surprised. But the chances are that you'll fail, which will put you back two years' – as if advising a tubercular Sisyphus not to push his great stone once more up the mountain when the gods had ordained it.

But Keith had decided to isolate himself from all advice since Kevin called on his way through London and said Pat had a man in to share her bright little cottage. A high moral tone had always been her line, and now she wasn't only having an affair but had let Kevin go up and live in the same rotten nest. He at least had always kept that part of his life separate from what he termed his ‘permanent domestic cage'.

He filled the car with a homely stench of French cigarettes – which made him feel somehow safe. The wipers cleared his vision, swilled rain and dust against the outside screen. A youth and rucksack at the next hilltop held up a thumb and smiled, as if the thumb were injured and he were putting a good face on it. But Keith pointed to the right, as if turning off too soon to bother stopping. He felt guilty again, but couldn't stand fifty miles of chattering, having to think of that bloody image, as well as plan his gambits for when he bumped into Pat. Not that there'd be much room for manoeuvre. It's plain as all hell, getting Kevin up there while she's living with another man. I'm not against it, oh no, she can do what she likes for all I care, but not in front of my son, understand? Not in front of my son, for God's sake. Kevin hadn't even disliked the chap, which shows how successful she was at, well, corrupting him – there's no other word for it.

He'd intended stopping the car to consult the R A C book and find a way towards Peterborough, but whenever a layby was signalled his hands wouldn't react to the offer of it, and he held a steady sixty along the present road. I'll stop now, he kept saying, and draw in – but it was impossible. As long as I'm going north: he consoled himself for the strange state of his will, as if to stop would end his life, make him call off his expedition, fall asleep over the wheel, burst into tears, turn round, begin to doubt himself all over again. He pressed on the accelerator, nearly hit a grass verge at the next bend, then slowed to fifty on the straight because he had frightened himself.

Crossing London he'd licked through Highgate, and Muswell Hill – the place he was born and lived at most of his life. It hadn't altered, he saw, detouring along the avenue and stopping by his childhood house. The extrovert Keith loathed it, while the introvert tended a secret passion for the hidden depths and darknesses of it. He recalled those ideal days before the war, the long never-ending boyhood peace of them. Later he rebelled against all that house and suburb stood for, had even joined the Labour Party at one time. Who hadn't rebelled? Rebellion was the anaesthetic of youth, and that was the only way to get through it for some people; though if someone would kindly point out the anaesthetic for middle-age he'd be bloody glad.

Cambridge showed on the roadsigns: there was no point in turning off now, so he stopped for a legstretch and petrol. He wanted four gallons, watched the big hand of the meter slowly register, fascinated by its unclogged movement, an unattainable harmony that men got from machines but not themselves. A pity, but then, maybe they just sent machines ahead as an advance guard, and one day they'd catch up with the way machines worked now. Take this car: care for it, feed it with oil and fuel, drive it lovingly, and it would give good use and service for years. Why couldn't a man be like that? Because he can't. He's more mysterious, superstitious, clumsy, despondent, clever. There's too much we don't understand about the light and darknesses of his insides. Isolate a specimen, do everything right both flesh and mental, and what happens? He dies one day from something you can't trace. Not a hope. Even I'm like that, one time poet and now a mechanic of the wormy depths in the service of advertising, an instigator of conspicuous consumption which, as we all know, breeds spiritual cancer. But that's my job, so what the hell? I'm not one of those who paid cash for his house.

One time he travelled around in a Jag, but they were getting too common, so he preferred the distinction of anonymity in a souped-up sports. In any case he'd soon be a shade too old for a Jag. Maybe after forty he'd change to a Mini, just to be on the safe side. He walked impatiently along the pumps, his appearance that of a well-dressed young middle-aging man, fairly tall, with fair wavy hair and the troubled aspect of someone whom smallpox had thought to attack but changed its mind at the last minute, merely branding him as a person who had gone through the mill in some indefinable manner. He had a high forehead, lined to match, and hazel eyes that looked out from a man-created hell, imploring as they looked, not at those they turned on, but begging the furnace within to make them less imploring. Such eyes resented what the mirror of his soul had turned them into, without questioning the soul itself. His small mouth, the sort that didn't seem inclined to open often, would only say something if his soul in agony screamed at him to protest.

Working at the hidden springs of other people's slothfulness, he had no time (or perhaps, after all, no desire) to turn these perceptions on himself. This he left to a psychiatrist who hadn't till now made a good job of it. In spite of everything the expression of suffering was taken as sensitivity – which blended so well with his well-shaped chin and intelligent forehead that he not only inspired confidence in those he worked for, but was considered by women to be good looking.

The sun shone, driving through Trumpington, up past Fitzbilly's and Pembroke. The sun had shone on it too during his three years reading English after the troopship crawl from Burma in forty-eight. Cambridge hadn't altered. The students weren't quite the sort he would have mixed with then, and might make good salesmen at Harrods, he thought, observing a scarved knot of them on the street. After leaving the Labour Club he had prayed many days in King's chapel, entranced by the stained-glass windows, meditating on their pictures of Christ and the Virgin. Even in the bursting cold of midwinter he would behold them for hours, scribbling fervent impressions in his leatherbound notebook, nose red but scarf well drawn. After Burma he considered this extreme change good for his soul, and remembered Cambridge as part of a rich and varied life. While others were roistering and masturbating, he had revelled in the mellow, satisfying depths of tradition and scholarship.