The Man In The Seventh Row (24 page)

'I'm afraid it's out of hours,' says the woman behind the bar.

The man in black is a man of few words, but he cannot help but comment on the woman's curious accent.

'You're not from Arizona, are you?' he says. 'Or Texas?'

'Whatever do you mean?' she says.

'You have a strange way of talking.'

'I don't know to what you can be referring,' says the barmaid, indignantly.

'I'll have a whisky,' he says, returning to the point.

'Look,' she says, 'I told you it's out of hours, and I'll have to send for Mr Godby if you don't mind your manners and Mr Godby is not a man to trifle with.'

The man in black slips his hand from the bar to rest it on the butt of the Colt at his side.

'Why don't you have a bun' she says, 'fresh this morning, and a nice cup of tea.'

The man says nothing, but his sparkling eyes, so obviously blue even in a black and white movie, never leave her face. She interprets his silence as a 'yes' and hands him a cup of tea and a plate with a bun on it.

'The sugar's in the spoon.'

He looks around, notices a woman with large eyes, a thin face and hair that is parted way over on one side and cascades across her head like a wave on the ocean. She is wearing a cap like a Confederate Civil War cap, but bigger, more flamboyant, more ridiculous. She is reading a book and does not look like the sort of girl you might expect to find in a saloon. He sits at an empty table as far from her as possible, though his gaze is curiously drawn to her by the appeal in her eyes or the slight bitterness and disappointment suggested in the line of her mouth. Or maybe his eyes are simply drawn to her by judicious editing.

The tea is a thin, disgusting brew, the bun stale, and the barmaid prattles away incessantly to her assistant Beryl and an elderly uniformed railway employee, who turns out to be the supposedly formidable Mr Godby. He does not even wear a gun.

The thin-faced woman seems a delicate, fussy type. She probably prefers Rachmaninoff to Morricone, reckons the man in black, and is 'happily married' to some drip called Dear Fred, who sits around the house doing crosswords, and has a couple of whey-faced kids who can't carry a simple scene about whether to go to the circus or the pantomime without impaling the words on their cut-glass accents.

He watches the woman with the wave on her head collect her several bags and leave the saloon, only to return, moments later, blinking, complaining of a speck of grit in her eye and demanding a glass of water to 'bathe' it. The barmaid claims to know someone who lost an eye from getting grit in it. The man in black wonders if he should offer to help – he is a doctor – but then decides that he would rather not get mixed up with these people. It starts with a simple act of kindness and it always ends in screaming, gunfire, bloodshed and bodies.

The barmaid suggests the woman pull her eyelid down as far as it will go. Mr Godby says she should blow her nose. The thin-faced woman moans on and on. The man in black can stand it no longer.

'Let me see,' he says, 'I'm a doctor.' He takes the black handkerchief from around his neck and wipes her eye clean. She is prettier close up ... in an ugly sort of way.

Anna tries hard to see herself as the woman playing opposite Roy, but the image remains resolutely that of Celia Johnson. Anna closes her eyes. She sees nothing, but hears Roy and Celia Johnson. She opens her eyes and sees Roy with Celia Johnson. She cannot see, cannot even imagine, herself as this woman with the skinny face and the wave on her head.

Roy, the man in black, looks straight at the skinny woman with an intensity that makes her go weak at the knees. But then most things make her go weak at the knees. A bell rings to announce an approaching train and he says he must go. Impulsively, rudely even, she inquires where he is going. With his forefinger he points straight ahead. He picks up his saddle, hoists it onto his shoulder and is gone; to catch a train for some unspecified destination, though she knows, full well, it is the train to Leeds.

'Well, I say,' says the matronly barmaid, 'what a card.'

Laura doubts if she will see him again, but a couple of weeks later, on her regular weekly outing to Milford, he walks into the Kardomah restaurant. He is dressed in black, exactly as before, though without the saddle on his shoulder. She is still wearing her Confederate Civil War cap. She invites him to share her table.

'I'm afraid we haven't been properly introduced,' she says. 'I'm Laura Jesson. You're Doctor…? I remember you said you were a doctor that day you saved my life at the station. Doctor…?'

There is that look again, the one that makes her feel all jumbled up inside.

'Holliday,' he says. 'Doc Holliday.'

Laura orders soup and fried sole. Holliday asks for tortillas and refried beans, with a shot of tequila on the side. The waitress looks blank.

'They don't do Continental dishes at the Kardomah,' whispers Laura.

He asks for a steak..

They go to the pictures. She suggests
The Loves of Cardinal Richelieu
at the Palace, or something at the Palladium, the title of which proves impossible to make out because she sounds like she is talking with marbles in her mouth. But Holliday says
Stagecoach
is on at the Empire, so they go to see that instead.

'That was lovely,' says Laura, over teas in the refreshment room at Milford Junction station. 'Much better than I expected from a cowboy film. Thank you so much for suggesting it. Claire Trevor was excellent and that dashing young actor who played the Ringo Kid ... What was his name?'

'Roy Batty,' says Holliday.

'He looked like you,' she says. 'Just a little.'

She tries to engage him in conversation about his work as a doctor. But he says he does not practise anymore, and offers no further details.

'What do you do?'

'I play cards, gamble a little. I ride herd occasionally – though there's not much call for that around Milford Junction and Leeds. Sometimes I work over the border.'

'In Scotland?' she says. 'How exotic. Or do you mean in Wales?'

'Wherever the action is,' he says. 'I rode shotgun on a hearse this morning, with Steve McQueen.'

'Where was that?' she asks, with a look that suggests she suspects he is having a little joke at her expense, though she is not entirely sure.

'Boot Hill.'

She laughs gaily. 'Oh, you are so droll, Dr Holliday.'

'Call me Doc,' he says, rising to go for his train. 'Meet me next week at the Kardomah.'

'I'll be there,' she says, as Rachmaninoff roams over the soundtrack, but she is not sure he heard. He did not appear to need confirmation.

They go boating, she says she loves him, but is not free to love him. She says they must stop seeing each other. She cries and witters on about 'being sensible'.

Be sensible? How can you be sensible when you're a gunfighter in a Noel Coward romance?

He knows one thing. He knows that one day, if he stays, he and Dear Fred must face each other on the street at high noon. But he cannot just ride on, not yet, for one simple reason. He does not have a horse.

At the station, in the darkness of an underpass, he embraces Laura and kisses her. She can provide him with companionship and that sort of thing, until he gets a horse.

The following week she says she did not mean to come. But she is there. What a strange little creature she is, so much more difficult than half-breed girls and horses. They lunch at the Royal Hotel. Laura had not been there since Violet's wedding reception. Holliday tells Laura he has a surprise for her. He has borrowed some transport from a friend. She guesses it is a sports car, one of those showy little two-seaters. But she is wrong. There is only one seat and it is not a sports car. There, at the kerb, outside the hotel, is the saddle Laura remembers from the first time she saw Dr Holliday, in the refreshment room at Milford Junction station. And beneath it is a piebald mare he has borrowed from a friend called Stephen, not Steve McQueen with whom he had ridden shotgun on the hearse at Boot Hill, but someone called Stephen Lynn.

He has also borrowed Stephen's flat for the evening. Laura refuses to go up to the apartment. Holliday says he will be there if she changes her mind, knowing she probably will. He kisses her at the station, just to make sure, and goes back to the flat to wait. As a card player Holliday has learned patience. She actually gets on the train before finally jumping from her third class compartment and running back, swept along on a deluge of Rachmaninoff.

Holliday opens the door without saying a word, helps her off with her coat and takes her Confederate Civil War cap. They kiss. She says she must go.

'Look, Laura,' he says, beginning to lose patience. 'I've had enough of your silliness. Let's just get on with it.'

It is at this moment Stephen Lynn appears, a supercilious Englishman, who expresses disappointment in Dr Holliday being in his flat with a woman.

'I think I should leave,' says Laura.

Stephen asks Holliday for his key back. He talks with a confidence, arrogance even, out of place in one so ugly, for he seems unable to open his eyes fully and his mouth is curiously reminiscent of that of a wooden puppet. Holliday proffers, not the key, but the barrel of his Colt.

'No, Laura. It's Stephen who's leaving.'

Stephen had looked only slightly bemused at the discovery of Holliday and Laura. Now he looks horrified.

'Ride, I said,' says Holliday.

'Alright. I'm going. But I'll be back, Holliday, and I'll have the sheriff, I mean the police, with me.'

As he slams the door, Holliday turns to Laura. 'Take off your clothes.'

'Oh darling,' she says, 'turn away while I undress.'

'No,' he says, 'I want to watch.' And he watches her as she slowly, deliberately, coquettishly, unbelts and unbuttons her jacket, unzips and slips out of her skirt, peels back one stocking and then the other, and removes an entire lingerie store of white undergarments, until, finally, she stands before him, naked, slim, white as new-fallen snow.

'Now,' he says, 'one more thing. Put the cap on.'

'The cap?' she says, momentarily confused. 'Don't you have eh, um, a, um ...'

'The Confederate cap. Put the cap on your head.'

She puts the cap back on and they fuck on the carpet. He takes her from behind. It reminds him of the night they drove old Dixie down. Gettysburg. That was one wild night.

Stephen is standing in the doorway holding a small pistol in a shaking hand.

'Now,' he says, 'the tables are turned.' But the confidence has gone from his voice, which is as shaky as his hand.

'No one draws on me,' says Holliday, reaching across the floor for his gunbelt. Stephen's whole arm shakes as if in the grip of an epileptic fit. He pulls the trigger and a bullet smacks into the ceiling. Holliday would have fired first, but for some strange reason he is moving in slow motion, defying the laws of physics as he rolls slowly through the air. Of course! Peckinpah. A decent gunfighter would have got in a second or even a third shot before Holliday fired but Stephen is slow – even without the handicap of slow-mo. In one, single motion, Holliday reaches his gunbelt, draws the Colt and fires a bullet through Stephen's heart, spraying the wall behind him with a fountain of red blood, for the screen suddenly bursts into colour.

'I have to go,' says Holliday, rather unnecessarily.

'But where?' says Laura. 'Where will you go?'

'There's a small town in Mexico advertising for a security consultant. I was head-hunted for the job. It doesn't pay much, but the package includes tortillas and beans. I'm going to take it.'

'Take that bloody Rachmaninoff off the gramophone. I'm sick of it.' She pronounces 'bloody' very deliberately, as if unsure of the word, not quite certain she can get her tongue around it.

So they go to the refreshment room at Milford Junction station to say goodbye. Laura tries to be brave and not cry or whinge. Holliday says little. Mr Godby is chattering away at the counter, telling the barmaid some story about a man who travelled first class with a third class ticket. He told him he would have to pay the excess and when the villain refused he sent for Mr Saunders who ticked him off proper. It crosses Holliday's mind that he would be doing them both a favour to shoot them, but it is not worth the cost of the bullets. Let them be, he thinks, let them lead their little lives, and if they're lucky they might just end up in an Ealing comedy or something like that. But stay out of Tombstone, Mr Godby, stay out of Tombstone, for you would never last five minutes there.

Laura asks if Holiday thinks they will ever see each other again. Holliday just shakes his head. She says she wants to die. He tells her to pull herself together. The barmaid announces that time and tide wait for no man, portentously. Just then a middle-aged woman arrives, with a dead animal around her neck and her arms full of shopping bags. Her name is Dolly Messiter, an acquaintance of Laura's. She asks Holliday to fetch her tea and he overhears her telling Laura that Phyllis has left her. So not quite the respectable matron she seems, thinks Holliday. He wonders if he hadn't seen her once in the whorehouse in Wichita. Dolly – it certainly sounds like a whore's name. She waffles on about shopping and makes Laura seem the strong, silent type.