8

Aldous had become afraid of his front door. Whenever there was a knock he dreaded what it might portend, and he would always hesitate before answering it. He thought sometimes that he should change the knocker because the current one was too heavy – a broad grin of chrome-plated steel that, no matter how lightly it was used (a little girl asking for her ball back) always gave a deafening report, as though a giant was nailing the house down with a silver nail. Sometimes he felt a desire to wrap the knocker in wool, or replace it with something made from softer materials. A doorknocker of felt and feathers would have done. Sometimes he thought of wiring up a doorbell to ring softly in the kitchen, or one of those musical chimes, a couple of tubular bells that would ding-dong gently in the hall. You could adjust the volume of those, so Aldous understood. No matter how urgent or frantic the caller, always it would be the same gentle ding-dong in the hall.

Often the caller was a steeplejack offering to dismantle the tall redundant chimneys that teetered on the top of the house, or a tree surgeon with a truck full of ladders and saws offering to lop, pollard, topple and completely remove the acacia tree in the front garden, which had grown to a considerable size. Aldous had watched this tree grow from tender sapling to its present form, larger in volume than the house, and yet he’d not noticed its growth at all. As with his children, the last thing he knew he had a baby in his arms, now his house was full of men and women who claimed to be his offspring. Likewise Aldous hadn’t really noticed the acacia tree until the steeplejacks and lumberjacks and others with ladders had begun offering to cut it down. Where the hell had that tree come from? It was enormous, he had to admit. The roots were drying out the foundations, so they told him, desiccating the lower walls. A crack had appeared in the brickwork, zigzagging through the courses. On the pavement the stones had been upset, a little trap that could cost Aldous thousands of pounds in compensation should anyone injure themselves falling over them. That’s what the passing arborealists said, but Aldous always shut the door on them, murmuring that when the time came to lop the acacia he would do it himself. But he never did anything about the tree. It had grown so immense, had spread itself so widely, filling every window at the front of the house, extending scabby limbs of pale bark across the pavement and out into the road, that he felt reluctant to interfere with it. The roots of a tree mirror in size and spread the above-ground network of branches. Then the roots of the acacia must have a grip on next door’s foundations as well, and it was likely to have coiled its tubers around the sewerage, electrical conduits, gas mains, water pipes and telephone cables. Should Aldous saw some branches off, who knows what effects that might have on the subterranean self of the tree. It might cause the tree to tighten its grip on a gas main and thus rupture it. In truth he had an inkling that the tree was somehow holding the house up. Besides, he found the tree attractive. It was like having another garden in the sky. From the windows there was a view of a hanging tapestry of foliage that in the autumn became a collage of pale yellow sticker-dots stuck to the pavement.

It was a policeman’s knock that came that Saturday morning. Aldous was alone in the house, for once. Colette had taken Julian to buy a new pair of shoes, and was to be out for most of the morning. Aldous had taken the opportunity to work on his fountain in the back bedroom. With James away at university Aldous had gradually reclaimed a small portion of the territory they’d donated to their children. In the bay window of that room he’d set up a small worktable (in fact the dining table from Meg’s old house). There he kept his brushes in jars, his pens and their nibs in other jars, his pencils, boxes of charcoal, and his paints. There was a bottle of dried cow-parsley heads. He had a drawing board set at a pleasing slope on some old art books. He would retreat here to make paintings from the numerous sketchbooks he kept, or simply to draw the view of tangled trees and wedged-in gardens that filled the window. But this morning he was working on his fountain. He’d brought a pack of clay home from school and was assembling the model from the working drawings that he hoped had impressed the monks of Durham. Brother Head was still providing no definite answers to his letters. The bishop of Durham had prevaricated. He had committees and working parties to consult. Brother Head’s letters were always cheerily optimistic, a tone which unintentionally conveyed a kind of indifference to Aldous’s plight. No other commissions had come as a result of that piece in the Telegraph. This fountain was the only route he could take towards a future life of lucrative public art. Besides that, he could do with some money now, just for the amount of work he’d put into the design. Colette was always telling him, he had a right to some payment even if they never built the bloody fountain. Then another letter from the monastery would come: ‘My, don’t the months pass quickly . . .’

Such worries melted away for Aldous when he worked, however. Drawing the radial structure of a cow-parsley head, or painting the buttressed architecture of a Hertfordshire church with its slender copper spire, required a level of engagement with the material world that made abstractions like money seem meaningless. This was how he felt as the doves took shape in his fingers. He had a baseboard fitted with a vertical copper pipe to represent the central pipe of the fountain, and he was assembling his doves, cut from rolled-out clay, shaped and textured with fingernails, a comb, a toothbrush, wire wool, anything Aldous had to hand, then moistened and fitted together in a clamouring spiral of ascending flight. When nearly dry he would cut the completed structure into sections that could be separated for firing and glazing in the school kiln, then reassembled again at home and made ready for despatch to Durham. Once they had the working model in their possession the monks could surely not refuse to offer the commission. Or at least some sort of payment.

The knock came when Aldous’s fingers were deep in clay. The knock was so loud and emphatic it was as though a cleaver had sundered Aldous’s work. Yet it could have been that little girl again, asking for her tennis ball back so that she could play fives against the garages. Aldous ignored it, tentatively put his fingers back into the clay. The knock came again. Five knocks – bang bang bang bang bang – that effectively chopped Aldous’s sculpture into five wet pieces. He had no alternative but to investigate.

He opened the front door while wiping the clay from his hands with a rag.

The policeman was of the old school, not one of these cocky young chaps they seemed to send round nowadays, but a gentle, portly greybeard.

‘Mr Aldous Jones?’

‘Yes.’

‘Father of Janus Jones.’

‘Yes.’ Aldous gave his affirmatives in a tone of weary anticipation

‘Your son was involved in a serious incident last night.’

‘Serious?’

‘We believe he deliberately created an obstruction in Parsons Lane, using materials from a nearby roadworks. This obstruction caused an accident, resulting in injury to a motorcyclist . . .’

‘Serious?’

‘The motorcyclist is currently in hospital. He’s not in danger, but he has a broken leg. And a broken wrist. Mr Jones has admitted to creating the obstruction. We have charged him with criminal damage and obstructing a public highway with intent to endanger life, both very serious offences if they result in injuries to members of the public. The magistrates have agreed. He will appear for sentencing next week.’

‘Will he go to prison?’ said Aldous, unable to disguise the hope in his voice. He failed so badly, in fact, that the policeman gave him a long, quizzical look.

‘It’s possible,’ said the policeman, still regarding Aldous thoughtfully, ‘it depends.’

Janus received a six-month prison sentence suspended for two years. Southgate Magistrates had viewed Janus’s drunken activities very seriously. He’d managed to avoid prison, but the threat of incarceration was to hang over him for the two year duration of his sentence, if he committed any further offence, no matter how minor. The motorcyclist’s testimony provided a full account of Janus’s activity that evening, because Janus had spent twenty minutes in close conversation with him while waiting for the ambulance (which he’d called) to arrive. He’d told the motorcyclist how he was angry because his friends had deserted him. He had gone to Redlands Park with another friend, but had lost her in the dark. He had wandered around in the woods for some considerable time, possibly falling asleep at one point. At around four-thirty A.M. he was in Parsons Lane. He used the stacked paving stones he’d found at a roadworks to build an obstruction across the road, which was at the time deserted of traffic. The obstruction was, in effect, a low wall, about ten inches high, covering both carriageways. The motorcyclist, a milkman on his way to work, had crashed into this wall at around five-thirty A.M. When asked why he’d done it, the motorcyclist reported that Janus had said something incoherent about starting a revolution.

He had asked for twenty-five other offences to be taken into consideration.

The magistrate told him that he was lucky not to be appearing on a manslaughter charge.

The Sunday following Janus’s court appearance, Aldous, Colette and Julian paid a visit to Lesley and Madeleine in High Wycombe. On the way Colette extracted from her youngest son a promise.

‘You won’t say anything about Janus to your aunt and uncle will you?’

Julian shook his head. He rarely spoke during these visits anyway. His mother needn’t have worried.

‘All in all it’s probably a good thing,’ she went on, ‘It’ll knock some sense into him maybe. The threat of going to prison is surely enough to make even someone like Janus toe the line. Don’t you think?’

Father and son gave no response.

It had been at Madeleine’s invitation that they were visiting. She seemed keen, having heard that Janus Brian was looking for a house in the area, to learn more about his plans.

‘So he’s really going to go through with it? He’s really going to move all the way out here, to High Wycombe?’ Madeleine spoke from the comfort of her modern rocking chair, which filled a gap in her living room between the ceramic mantelpiece and the colour television.

‘Yes,’ said Colette, ‘He’s made up his mind. I’ve tried talking him out of it a hundred times but he’s very stubborn. I think it’s a stupid idea . . .’

Lesley gave a resigned laugh but said nothing. Aldous lifted a cup from his saucer, drank and replaced it, the clink of porcelain sounding uncomfortably loud. Aldous always felt discomfort at Madeleine and Lesley’s house. Everything there seemed to be breakable. He and Colette and Julian were sitting in a row on the couch, Lesley was in the armchair.

‘Well I think it’s marvellous,’ Madeleine said, ‘That he’s decided to make a fresh start. It’ll be just what he needs.’

Colette was silent. They hadn’t visited Lesley and Madeleine for a long time, and may never have visited again had not Madeleine written to invite them. Madeleine now seemed to have the upper hand. Colette felt sure that her sister-in-law was reading the situation as follows – Colette has failed to bring Janus Brian through his crisis and so he has to resort to moving house to High Wycombe so that he can be under the more responsible care of his older brother and sister.

‘Those vases,’ Colette said, noticing a line of little ceramic pots lined up on top of the pelmet above the French windows, ‘I like the way you’ve arranged them. We’ve done that in the back bedroom.’ This was true, a line of ceramic pots on the pelmet of the back bedroom, the only difference being that Aldous had made their pots himself.

‘Yes, dear,’ said Lesley, ‘we’re copying you. Now tell me, Rex, about these windows you designed. I saw the piece in the Telegraph. Have you had any more commissions?’

‘Not really,’ Aldous replied.

‘The bishop of Durham wants him to design a fountain,’ said Colette, quickly. ‘For a monastery.’

‘How exciting, Rex, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Well, it’s still not settled . . .’

‘And this commission came about as a result of the piece in the Telegraph?’

‘Yes.’

‘And have there been any more?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, there will be, I’m sure. It’ll be just the start, Rex. Dear,’ (meaning his wife), ‘I think at last this man’s talents will be recognized. One day we’ll be going to see his work in the Tate.’

‘That’s unlikely,’ said Aldous.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Unless I put them on the walls myself.’

A little round of laughter quickly died.

‘I wonder if you could tell me,’ Madeleine began after a short pause, ‘I mean, I don’t know anything about alcoholics. How does one deal with them? I’ve been to the library but I couldn’t find much. I didn’t really like to ask the librarian . . .’

‘Why not?’ said Colette.

‘Well, I mean . . .’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s a little bit delicate, isn’t it?’

Colette shrugged but didn’t speak. Seeing that she’d reached a dead end with Colette, Madeleine turned to Aldous, ‘I just wonder what I should need to know. It’s difficult isn’t it?’ She beamed that ingratiating smile at Aldous, and Aldous and his family grimaced inwardly.

‘What makes you think we should be such experts?’ Colette snapped.

‘I just meant,’ said Madeleine, with a hint of ‘here we go again’ irritation in her voice, ‘that since you’ve been looking after Janus Brian for all this time (and I do commend your dedication) you must have a lot of experience by now of dealing with alcoholics . . .’

‘An alcoholic,’ said Colette, ‘and for your information, we were just as much in the dark about it as you supposedly are, but I’ll tell you this, it would be a waste of time nosing through libraries and doing your homework from books on the subject, because there is no book that could describe what it’s like to have a chronic alcoholic on your hands, or that could describe what I’ve been through this past year or so.’

‘Exactly my point, Colette. So why can’t you tell me, from your point of view? All I’m asking for is a little help, a little guidance . . .’ here she gestured towards Colette generously, as though handing her an invisible bouquet, ‘from someone with experience.’

Colette sulked for a few seconds. Inwardly she was seething. It was not an unreasonable request from her sister-in-law, of course, but in its delivery every word was barbed and poisoned, every phrase contained the hidden message ‘I am a better mother and wife than you are, have been, or ever will be.’

‘The diarrhoea is the worst thing,’ said Colette, after a pause, ‘worse than the vomit. That’s the first thing I’ve learned. The second is that Janus Brian tends to neglect his toenails. Every few months he starts to look like Nebuchadnezzar. You need to trim them for him once a fortnight. The third thing is not to be bothered by nakedness. Janus Brian likes to walk around in the nude. If he’s very far gone he is likely to take hold of your breast. He will eat steamed fish, nothing else. Also, he needs to be talked to, for hours on end, sometimes. Or read to. I’m in the middle of reading him the complete works of Dickens, but so far we’re still only on Bleak House. You will need to visit him every other day. If you leave it any longer he is likely to die. And he won’t thank you for anything that you do for him. Not a word of thanks. Is that enough information for you? Do you think you can cope with that?’

‘Well, I’m sure we’ll do our best, but I’m also sure that there must be people, I mean, social services or something, that can help . . .’

Madeleine’s sentence drifted into the room and faded away, leaving an edgy silence in its place, interrupted by Lesley.

‘Perhaps when he’s started breathing in the air of the Chilterns he’ll start feeling better, you know there are some very good bus companies in the town that do little excursions into the countryside, Madeleine and I have been on several . . .’

‘Janus Brian doesn’t like the countryside,’ Colette interrupted, ‘and he’s not coming here for the fresh air. He’s coming here so that you and you,’ she pointed in turn at Madeleine and Lesley, whose eyes were now closed, ‘and Agatha can all take turns in looking after him, so that if he gets so sozzled, as I can guarantee he will, that he passes out in a pool of his own piss, there will be someone on hand to pick him out of it. Though why he should think any of you should bother, when you clearly couldn’t give tuppence, any of you, for the well-being of your younger brother, and you,’ Colette pointed at Madeleine whose eyes were also closed by now, ‘you with your library books, making out you’re all concerned and caring when we all know full well that you’ll visit him once when he’s moved in and then never see him again . . .’ Colette could have gone further but she’d run out of steam, and concluded her tirade with a dismissive hand gesture.

‘Well, I think that’s a little unfair, Colette,’ said Madeleine, rocking back in her chair, ‘We only want to do our best for Janus Brian, I’m sure once we get into the swing of it, and we gain some experience of coping with an alcoholic . . .’

‘For God’s sake!’ Colette snapped, ‘will you stop saying alcoholic as though you’ve only just learnt the word?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean will you for once drop this pretence, this sham, when everyone knows you’ve turned my brother into a nervous wreck?’

‘I think it’s a bit rich blaming me for Janus Brian’s . . .’

‘I don’t mean Janus Brian, I mean this man here, Lesley, who’s sitting here acting the role of contented husband, when we all know what’s really going on.’

‘Do we?’ Madeleine seemed genuinely puzzled. Lesley turned to the little row of books on the cabinet by his chair, a concession, Colette thought, after years of booklessness, and fingered through a crumbling, leather-bound volume of poetry.

‘It would be a good thing,’ said Colette, ‘if he took his trousers off and chased you round the bedroom, once in a while.’

After a shocked pause, Madeleine gave a high-pitched series of chuckles.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you really have excelled yourself this time. The banality of your remarks are matched only by their vulgarity.’

‘Well it’s true isn’t it? He won’t say anything because you’ve got him tamed like a poodle,’ she nodded at Lesley, who was reading poetry intently through his bifocals, ‘but we all know how he’s suffering . . .’

‘Suffering?’ Madeleine laughed, ‘Your family know all about suffering, of course, how one must suffer to have a son like Janus . . .’

‘Janus is doing very well, thank you,’ said Colette, passing over the fact of his newly acquired criminal conviction.

‘Is he? You will let me know when his next concert is won’t you – where will it be, the Royal Albert Hall? The Royal Festival . . .’

‘You . . .’

‘How about,’ said Lesley with suddenness, snapping his poetry book shut, ‘we all go out for a drink?’

‘Good idea,’ said Colette, reaching for her handbag and spilling the teacup that was cradled in her lap. Cold tea spilt onto her trousers, she didn’t seem to notice, ‘the atmosphere has got rather stuffy in here.’

‘It certainly has,’ said Madeleine, waving away the blue fog of cigarette smoke that Colette had produced that afternoon, then she said to Lesley, ‘I don’t think I’ll come with you.’

‘Right-ho dear,’ said Lesley, all eager suddenly. It was well known that Madeleine never went in pubs.

Wearing a countryman’s cap and a long woollen coat with a tweed scarf, Lesley walked Aldous, Colette and Julian through the crisp, autumnal streets of High Wycombe to a pub he knew.

‘Have you been drinking already, dear?’ he said to Colette as they walked side by side.

‘Only four Gold Labels in the car on the way here.’

Lesley and Madeleine lived in Cedar Way, a road which did not contain, nor was on the way to any cedars. It was a genteel thoroughfare, and looked as though it had been designed by the same architects who engineered the spread of the north London suburbs in the 1930s, for it had the same appearance of rustic comfort as Leicester Avenue or The Limes, or any of the roads of New Southgate and Cockfosters. The houses were set back behind long front gardens and were pebbledashed and bay-windowed, some with token half-timbering in their front gables. Lesley and Madeleine’s house was a paragon of its kind, a front lawn in stripes, a border of well-pruned roses, a rockery of rare alpines, and a pond where a solitary plaster gnome, brightly painted and varnished, sat fishing. Their front door had a sunrise in stained glass, radial spokes of light over a landscape of ploughed fields. There was more stained glass in the bathroom, and in a little side window up the stairs, of seagulls in flight. All the houses in Cedar Way had stained glass.

There were views of hills in all directions, topped by stately beechwoods which were yellowing with the season.

The pub Lesley had in mind was twenty minutes walk, and was in a district of the town Colette and Aldous didn’t know. He called it his local, and from his descriptions Aldous and Colette were expecting some quaint mock country tavern, but The Bricklayers Arms, a tatty looking building of flaking paintwork and blacked-out windows, was quite different. It stood on a busy corner of the A40, passed continually by juggernauts and other traffic. The door to the saloon opened onto an intense noise and odour, a dimly lit interior crowded with people. The floor was scrappy lino, there was a threadbare pool table, a jukebox. A sort of cheer went up as Lesley entered, as though he was a visiting celebrity. The clientele of The Bricklayers Arms was almost exclusively black, they wore brown leather jackets or frilly shirts, gold chains, their hair topiarised into extravagant globular hairstyles Colette understood were called Afros.

‘Fine fellows,’ Lesley said to Colette, having to shout above the chanting rhythms of the loud music as they sat down on stools around a circular table in the corner of the pub. Aldous was reaching for his wallet to buy a round of drinks when a friendly Negro beamed into his face and asked him what he wanted.

‘Most of the chaps in here were my pupils a few years ago. Astonishing, isn’t it? When they were at school they spent most of their time trying to make my life hell. I sometimes thought I must be the most hated man in High Wycombe. Do you know, I even, at one time, found myself agreeing with that man Powell, and thinking they should all be sent back to wherever the hell they came from,’ here Lesley afforded himself a long, chortling laugh, ‘but now we’re all out of school they treat me like some sort of hero, and instead of throwing paper darts at the back of my head, they buy me drinks. I’ve been coming here for over a year and I’ve never once had to buy my own drink. It has restored my faith in humanity. Oh yes indeed. Fine chaps these . . .’

There was almost a queue forming to supply Lesley with drinks. The table quickly filled with brimming pints of dark, headless beer. Negroes shook Lesley’s hand, patted him on the back, hugged him. Boys brought their girlfriends over, tall lean women resplendent with tacky jewellery and great spheres of hair about their heads, and introduced them.

‘Gracie,’ a boy grinned, ‘this is the cunt who used to teach me Shakespeare. You remember me don’t you? Back of the class, always getting detention.’

The boy couldn’t have been out of school for more than a couple of years, and yet to him such a great leap had been taken. Aldous knew it as well. Old boys who seem truly astonished, once they leave school, to find that their teachers continue to exist. They react almost as if they’ve seen a dead man walking, utter amazement, astonishment. Finding a former teacher drinking in their pub must have doubled or trebled that astonishment, hence Lesley’s local fame.

‘Absolutely. You were a little sod,’ Lesley laughed, and the boy laughed as well, donating another pint to the crop that had formed on the table.

Colette had never seen anyone sink a pint quite like Lesley. It just seemed to fall into his mouth. It made her think of a line from the nursery rhyme about the old lady who swallowed a fly – she just opened her throat, and swallowed a goat. Lesley seemed to drink exclusively with his throat, hardly using his mouth except as a mere portal. A pint was gone in a single visit to his lips.

‘Real ale,’ Lesley burped, ‘this is the only pub in the whole of High Wycombe to serve real ale. That’s why I come here. Gorgeous stuff. What do you think, Rex? Isn’t it beautiful? Not like any of that Double Diamond or Watney’s Red Barrel muck.’

‘Yes,’ said Aldous, who thought his pint of Old Roger vile, like treacle mixed with aspirins.

‘Hand-pumped,’ said Lesley, lifting a second pint to his mouth. That too was gone in a matter of seconds. Colette looked aghast as the glass was drained. ‘No bubbles,’ he went on, wiping his lips on his sleeve, reaching for his third.

‘Lesley,’ said Colette, imploringly.

After sinking his third pint in as many minutes, Lesley paused to catch his breath.

‘I feel sorry for my little brother,’ he said, ‘what a way to end up.’ And then he laughed. ‘Does he really think Madeleine, Agatha and I are going to be popping round every day to see how he is?’

‘You are a bastard, aren’t you,’ said Colette affectionately, ‘You’ve always hated Janus Brian.’

‘We’ve never been on the same wavelength, that’s all. You must remember he’s much younger than me. He was still a snivelling kid by the time I first became a teacher. I suppose we never had a chance to get to know each other.’

‘You’ve always looked down on him, haven’t you,’ said Colette. ‘Why is that? You’ve always thought him beneath you, and not just in terms of age.’

‘That’s not quite fair, my dear,’ said Lesley, ‘though I’m sure Janus Brian will say it was so. You and he were always the tear-aways of the family. You spent your childhoods making fun of Agatha and me, less so Meg.’

This was true, Colette thought. She and Janus Brian, against the studious, prudish elders of the family.

‘I think,’ Lesley continued, ‘that that must be part of the master plan at work here. Janus Brian is coming back for revenge, isn’t he,’ Lesley spoke good humouredly, ‘he is coming to High Wycombe to make our lives a misery. Well I can assure you that if he’s expecting me to go round and rinse the wee-wees out of his bedclothes every other day, he can think again. Madeleine likewise. And I doubt Agatha will have much time for him.’ Lesley embarked on his fourth pint, this time taking it more slowly, pausing between pulls. ‘In fact, I am totally baffled as to why he’s coming to High Wycombe at all. He knows we don’t particularly care for him, he doesn’t like countryside, as you said, so what’s he playing at?’

Colette couldn’t supply an explanation.

‘Here is my other theory,’ Lesley went on, emptying another glass, ‘My dear little sister Colette has put him up to it as a way of getting him off her hands and dumping him on ours, so that if he pegs out we’ll be to blame rather than her. This makes up, as she sees it, for what she perceives as my inadequacies regarding the care of our dear, late mother. Am I right?’

‘I’m glad to see you still feel guilty about it,’ said Colette, who had forgiven Lesley. When their mother had died, Colette had been on holiday in Wales and had left Lesley in charge of the funeral arrangements. To save money he’d had her buried in a common grave with strangers buried on top of her. Colette had had to take a job as a bus conductress to pay for her reburial in a private grave. The whole episode had precipitated Colette’s own breakdown, which she looked back on as the darkest period of her life. But still she had forgiven him. ‘I have had no influence on Janus Brian’s decision,’ she said, ‘it is something he has decided all by himself. I would stop him if I could, but I can’t. You know what he’s like. Obstinate. Worse than you.’

The noise was such that these conversations were shouted across the small table with all the force Lesley and Colette could muster, sometimes shouting, like Humpty Dumpty to his messenger, right into each other’s ears. Colette was starting to get a headache and Aldous felt uneasy with Julian in the pub, even though it was only early evening, and he seemed quite happy sipping cokes and shandies. He surveyed the interior of the bar. Incredible to think there are so many black people in a town like High Wycombe, he thought to himself, in the heart of the leafy Chilterns. There were probably more black people in this one pub than there were in the whole of Windhover Hill, though not among the new populations of neighbouring suburbs like Wood Green, and the reaches of Tottenham and Stamford Hill where Aldous and Colette had grown up and which had once been devoid almost totally of black faces. Now these areas thrived with an imported culture, fascinating and frightening. Suddenly there were black people in generational layers, the older ones bringing along with them a barely comprehensible Caribbean patois, the younger speaking with the local inflections of north London.

Colette always felt comfortable amongst any diaspora – the Jews of Stamford Hill, the West Indians she worked with on the buses. They were somehow apart from the petty class distinctions and accumulated snobberies of Anglo-Saxon culture, and she could relax and be at ease among them. In the decor of The Bricklayers Arms there were the remains of that Anglo-Saxon culture, an array of stuffed deer heads on one wall, small and saintly, hardly bigger than cats’ faces, and on the windows, covered from the outside, frosted lettering spelling out the pub’s name, reassuringly old. But these were merely traces of the pub’s past as a hostelry for white working-class men. Now they were overlaid by new and, to Colette strange and incomprehensible imagery – posters of all-black pop groups, a national flag (‘Jamaica’, someone told her), in the corner a small performing stage was set up, with silver microphones on stands, scuffed, black amplifiers. An elderly Negro came and sat next to her, he had a thin, neatly trimmed moustache and a waxily dark face, as though made of stained raffia, then lacquered. A cigarette was tucked behind his ear. He spoke in a deep growl.

‘You smoke?’

Colette offered him one of her Players.

The man laughed, the interior of his mouth white and pink, shining like a lamp. He brought the cigarette out from behind his ear.

‘I mean you smoke these.’

‘Oh no,’ said Colette disapprovingly, ‘I could never smoke roll ups. Unfiltered, too strong for me.’

The man laughed again, a high, whimpering, choking sort of laugh.

‘Unfiltered,’ he said to himself, looking at the cigarette and laughing, ‘this is unfiltered weed, man.’ He holds out the cigarette to her, a crumpled, overbulky thing twisted to a point at each end. Cottoning-on, Colette feels shocked, but before she can react, Lesley is talking to her again.

‘Do you know, of these coloured chaps, I’ve persuaded a good half a dozen or more to become regulars at St John the Evangelist’s? And a good many more are members of their own Protestant churches, very religious people. When I first came in here, I thought I might be put in a pot and eaten by one of the lost tribes of High Wycombe, but they turn out to be most civilized. Do you mind if I take my trousers off?’ Suddenly he stood up, unfastened his trousers and let them fall to his ankles. Baggy white pants were beneath. Lesley whooped, gave a salute and a grotesque forward thrust of the hips, then pulled his trousers up again. There was a loudly approving cheer from the regulars and some applause. No one seemed surprised, Lesley sat down as if nothing had happened.

‘Perhaps we should be getting back,’ said Aldous, who had only half drunk his pint of Old Roger, and was trying to avoid the attentions of some drunken girls who were pawing at him.

‘Absolutely,’ said Lesley, who had by now consumed more than a gallon of strong ale, ‘Sing up!’ He then began singing in a loud, operatic voice, his best Sunday-morning-in-church voice, though louder, a hymn, Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer.

‘Open thou the crystal fountain
Whence the healing streams do flow;
Let the fiery cloudy pillar
Lead me all my journey through . . .’

Locals joined in, approaching with pints, as Lesley continued.

‘Bread of Heaven,
Bread of Heaven,
Feed me till I want no more . . .’

Lesley leant back in his chair so far that he fell backwards onto the floor, arms outstretched, still singing, his mouth gaping with song. The locals poured Old Roger down Lesley’s open throat, laughing as they did so, ‘Feed me till I want no more’. They rejoined as Lesley ecstatically gargled and spumed on the cascading beer. The manner in which this event occurred suggested to Aldous and Colette that it was a regular occurrence on Lesley’s visits to The Bricklayers. The reason for his popularity here was his willingness, their former English master, to debase himself so abjectly on the floor of their pub.

Thereafter Lesley was barely conscious, and had to be more or less carried home by Aldous and Colette, taking a shoulder each, which was difficult, as Lesley was taller than either of them, his feet trailed along the ground, and it was mostly up hill back to Cedar Way. Lesley continued to burble and sing quietly.

When Madeleine opened the door she looked horrified.

‘What have you done to the poor man? I knew this would happen if he went out with you.’

Colette became angry with Madeleine for keeping up the pretence that Lesley wasn’t an alcoholic, that this sort of thing didn’t happen every week at their house, Lesley rolling home utterly blotto in the small hours, just as Janus Brian had described. Madeleine insisted it had never happened before. A furious row ensued, Colette sitting on the settee, Madeleine in the armchair, Lesley in between on the carpet, lying on his back, singing hymns.

‘Well I think you’ve got a jolly cheek, Colette,’ said Madeleine, ‘to sit on my couch in my house and tell me that my marriage is a sham, as you put it. But of course, you don’t know, do you, the work I had to put into this relationship to make it work. You may idolize your older brother, but you don’t see the side of him I see. He can be a hell of a lot of work, I can tell you that. If it wasn’t for his work in the church I don’t know what would have happened. As for sex, you seem to think you invented the thing. Where do you think our children came from, Green Shield Stamps? You have noticed we’ve got three haven’t you? Alright, I admit he’s got a drink problem, like all his bloody family, like his father and his brother, yes, and you, and your son. Well there isn’t a single alcoholic on my side of the family so I’d say that pins the blame fairly fair and square on the Waughs. Every time we come into contact with your family there’s trouble. Oh yes, you can smell it a mile off. As for Janus, well, I’ve never forgiven him for what he did to Christine, he nearly gave the poor girl a nervous breakdown. And I don’t care what you say about art, yes, Rex does some lovely paintings, and Janus can play the piano very well, but that doesn’t mean you can go around throwing your weight about and behaving disgracefully, (I don’t mean you, Rex, of course), but if you think Lesley . . .’

Madeleine stopped in the middle of her tirade because she had been hit in the face by Colette, a broad slap across the right cheek, and she was about to launch a subsequent attack on the left cheek but Madeleine grabbed her hands, and there followed an undignified bout of wrestling.

‘How dare you! How dare you!’ Madeleine shrieked, incredulous, as Aldous moved in to separate the two women, but Colette was incensed, and the fighting went on for some time, over the recumbent body of Lesley, who by now was snoozing peacefully on the floor, Colette making perpetual lunges at Madeleine, who sheltered, when she could, behind Aldous, who eventually managed to wrestle his wife under some control, having to lock her arms behind her back.

‘I do apologize,’ said Aldous, as Colette snarled quietly in his arms, ‘I think she may have had more to drink than I thought.’

Although Aldous shared many of Colette’s opinions about Madeleine, he was far too polite ever to express them, and indeed, Madeleine seemed to think of him as some sort of ally, the put-upon husband suffering at the hands of the drug-addicted, alcoholic wife. Madeleine made Aldous feel tragic, a feeling he found disagreeable.

‘Yes, well,’ said Madeleine, trying as best she could to compose herself, ‘at least we’ve got everything nicely out in the open. At least we all know where we stand. Goodbye, Colette, I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing much of each other again.’

‘Not if I can help it,’ Colette growled.

‘I just feel sorry for your poor husband,’ she was talking to Colette, still under Aldous’s restraint, as though she was some partially deaf elder relative, ‘And little Julian. What must he be making of all of this? Coming round to visit his uncle and aunt and then all this happening.’

Colette made a sudden attempt to free herself from Aldous’s grip, but Aldous pulled her away.

‘I’ll take her out to the car,’ he said, quietly.

He pulled his wife through the hall.

‘Oh, so you’re going to throw me out now, are you, my own husband acting as that cow’s bouncer, is that the idea?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

Aldous managed to take Colette out to the car, Madeleine following cautiously behind. She saw Julian in the front room, reading a book as he sat on the orange swirl of the carpet. She went over to him

‘You’ll still come and visit us, won’t you Julian,’ she said to him in a confidential tone, ‘Without . . . you know,’ she paused and nodded her head towards the hall, ‘when things have blown over, you’ll still come to see us in the years ahead, won’t you?’

He nodded. Madeleine’s words, and her manner, ate at him like some burrowing tick, getting into his skin, into his blood. Afterwards, in the car back to London, Colette falling asleep loudly in the back, he felt dirty. He felt a need to bathe, but he knew he was returning to a house with no bath.