The Collected Stories Page 7

  ‘Well, General, now, I don’t.’

  ‘When’s your birthday, Jock?’

  ‘August the 15th.’

  ‘A Leo, by Harry! It is quite something to be a Leo, Jock. I would never have guessed it.’

  Jock laughed loudly. ‘After all, General, it is not my doing.’

  ‘Fill up our glasses. Let me see what tomorrow holds for you.’ But examining the paper, he found it difficult to focus. ‘Here Jock, read it yourself.’

  And Jock read aloud:

  ‘You will gain a lot by mingling with friends old and new. Late evening particularly favours entry into new social circles.’

  ‘Hark at that then! Remember the words, my friend. Patrelli is rarely wrong. The best augur of the bunch.’ The General had become dishevelled. His face was flushed and his eyelids drooped intermittently and uncontrollably. He fidgeted with his clothes, as though nervous about the positioning of his hands. ‘A final whisky, Jock boy; and a half bottle to carry home.’

  On the road from the village to his cottage the General felt very drunk indeed. He lurched from one grass verge to the other, grasping his half bottle of whisky and singing gently under his breath. He knocked on the Frobishers’ door with his stick, and scarcely waiting for a reply knocked loudly again.

  ‘For God’s sake, man,’ Frobisher demanded, ‘what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘A little drink,’ explained General Suffolk. ‘You and me and Mrs Frob, a little drink together. I have brought some with me. In case you had run out.’

  Frobisher glared at him. ‘You’re drunk, Suffolk. You’re bloody well drunk.’

  General Suffolk loosed a peal of laughter. ‘Ha, ha, the old man’s drunk. Let me in, Frob, and so shall you be.’

  Frobisher attempted to close the door, but the General inserted his stick.

  He laughed again, and then was silent. When he spoke his voice was pleading.

  ‘One drink, Frob. Just one for you and me. Frob, when were you born?’

  Frobisher began to snort with anger: he was a short-tempered man, he saw no reason to humour this unwelcome guest. He kicked sharply at the General’s stick, then opening the door widely he shouted into his face: ‘Get the hell off my premises, you bloody old fool! Go on, Suffolk, hop it!’

  The General did not appear to understand. He smiled at Frobisher. ‘Tell me the month of your birth and I shall tell you in return what the morrow holds –’

  ‘God damn it, Suffolk –’

  ‘One little drink, and we’ll consult the stars together. They may well be of interest to Mrs –’

  ‘Get off my premises, you fool! You’ve damaged my door with your damned stick. You’ll pay for that, Suffolk. You’ll hear from my solicitors. I promise you, if you don’t go immediately I won’t hesitate to call for the police.’

  ‘One drink, Frob. Look, I’m a little lonely –’

  Frobisher banged the door. ‘Frob, Frob,’ General Suffolk called, striking the door with his stick. ‘A nightcap, my old friend. Don’t refuse a drink now.’ But the door remained closed against him. He spoke for a while to himself, then made his way unsteadily homewards.

  ‘General Suffolk, are you ill?’

  The General narrowed his eyes, focusing on the couple who stood before him; he did not recognize them; he was aware of feeling guilty because of it.

  ‘We are returning home from a game of cards,’ the woman of the two told him. ‘It is a balmy evening for a stroll.’

  The General tried to smile. Since leaving the Frobishers’ house he had drunk most of the whisky. The people danced a bit before him, like outsize puppets. They moved up and down, and from side to side. They walked rapidly, silently, backwards. ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ laughed the General. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Are you ill? You don’t seem yourself.’

  The General smiled at some little joke. ‘I have not been myself for many years. Today is just another day.’

  The people were moving away. He could hear them murmuring to each other.

  ‘You have not asked me about the stars,’ he shouted after them. ‘I could tell you if you asked.’ But they were already gone, and uncorking the bottle he drained the remains and threw it into a ditch.

  As he passed Mrs Hinch’s cottage he decided to call on her. He had it on his mind to play some joke on the woman, to say that she need not again attend to his household needs. He banged powerfully on the door and in a moment Mrs Hinch’s head, rich in curling pins, appeared at a window to his right.

  ‘Why, General dear,’ said Mrs Hinch, recognizing immediately his condition. ‘You’ve been on the razzle.’

  ‘Mrs Hinch, when is your birthday?’

  ‘Why, my dear? Have you a present for little Hinchie?’

  ‘Give me the information and I will let you know what tomorrow brings.’

  ‘May the 3rd. I was born at two o’clock in the morning.’

  But in his walk he had somewhere mislaid the newspaper and could tell her nothing. He gripped the doorstep and seemed about to fall.

  ‘Steady now,’ said Mrs Hinch. ‘I’ll dress myself and help you home.’ The head was withdrawn and the General waited for the company of his unreliable servant.

  She, in the room, slipped out of her nightdress and buttoned about her her everyday clothes. This would last her for months. ‘Ho ho, my dear,’ she would say, ‘remember that night? Worse for wear you were. Whatever would you have done without your little Hinchie?’ Chortling and crowing, she hitched up her skirts and paraded forth to meet him.

  ‘Oh General, you’re naughty! You shouldn’t be allowed out.’

  The General laughed. Clumsily he slapped her broad buttocks. She screamed shrilly, enjoying again the position she now held over him. ‘Dirty old General! Hinchie won’t carry her beauty home unless he’s a good boy tonight.’ She laughed her cackling laugh and the General joined in it. He dawdled a bit, and losing her patience Mrs Hinch pushed him roughly in front of her. He fell, and in picking him up she came upon his wallet and skilfully extracted two pounds ten. ‘General would fancy his Hinchie tonight,’ she said, shrieking merrily at the thought. But the General was silent now, seeming almost asleep as he walked. His face was gaunt and thin, with little patches of red. ‘I could live for twenty years,’ he whispered. ‘My God Almighty, I could live for twenty years.’ Tears spread on his cheeks. ‘Lor’ love a duck!’ cried Mrs Hinch; and leaning on the arm of this stout woman the hero of Roeux and Monchy-le-Preux stumbled the last few yards to his cottage.

  Memories of Youghal

  He did not, he said, remember the occasion of his parents’ death, having been at the time only five months old. His first memory was of a black iron gate, of his own hand upon a part of it, and of his uncle driving through the gateway in a Model-T Ford. These images, and that of his uncle’s bespectacled face perspiring, were all in sunshine. For him, so he said to Miss Ticher, the sunlight still glimmered on the dim black paint of the motor-car; his uncle, cross and uncomfortable on hot upholstery, did not smile.

  He remembered also, at some later time, eating tinned tomato soup in a house that was not the house of his aunt and uncle; he remembered a tap near a greenhouse; he remembered eating an ice-cream outside Horgan’s Picture House while his aunt engaged another woman in conversation. Pierrots performed on the sands; a man who seemed to be a priest gave him a Fox’s Glacier Mint.

  ‘The gate was tarred, I think,’ he said. ‘A tarred black gate. That memory is the first of all.’

  The elderly woman to whom he spoke smiled at him, covering with the smile the surprise she experienced because a stout, untidy stranger spoke to her so easily about his memories.

  ‘I recall my uncle eating the tomato soup,’ the man said, ‘and my aunt, who was a severe woman, giving him a disapproving glance because of the row he was kicking up with it. The tap near the greenhouse came from a pipe that rose crookedly out of the ground.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, smiling a little more. She added
that her own earliest memory, as far as she could remember, was of a papier-mâché spotted dog filled with sweets. The man didn’t comment on that.

  ‘Horgan’s Picture House,’ he said. ‘I wonder is it still going strong?’

  She shook her head. She said she didn’t know if Horgan’s Picture House was still standing, since she had never been to the town he spoke of.

  ‘I first saw Gracie Fields there,’ he revealed. ‘And Jack Hulbert in a funny called Round the Washtub.’

  They were reclining in deck-chairs on a terrace of the Hôtel Les Galets in Bandol, looking out at the Mediterranean. Mimosa and bougainvillaea bloomed around them, oranges ripened, palm trees flapped in a small breeze, and on a pale-blue sky the sun pushed hazy clouds aside. With her friend Miss Grimshaw, Miss Ticher always came to Bandol in late April, between the mistral and the season, before the noise and the throbbing summer heat. They had known one another for more than thirty years and when, next year, they both retired at sixty-five they planned to live in a bungalow in Sevenoaks, not far from St Mildred’s School for Girls, where Miss Ticher taught history and Miss Grimshaw French. They would, they hoped, continue to travel in the spring to Bandol, to the quiet Mediterranean and the local bouillabaisse, their favourite dish.

  Miss Ticher was a thin woman with a shy face and frail, thin hands. She had been asleep on the upper terrace of Les Galets and had wakened to find the untidy man standing in front of her. He had asked if he might sit in the deck-chair beside hers, the chair that Miss Grimshaw had earlier planned to occupy on her return from her walk. Miss Ticher felt she could not prevent the man from sitting down, and so had nodded. He was not staying in the hotel, he said, and added that his business was that of a detective. He was observing a couple who were at present in an upstairs room: it would facilitate his work if Miss Ticher would kindly permit him to remain with her and perhaps engage in a casual conversation while he awaited the couple’s emergence. A detective, he told Miss Ticher, could not be obvious: a detective must blend with the background, or at least seem natural. ‘The So-Swift Investigation Agency’, he said. ‘A London firm’. As he lowered himself into the chair that Miss Grimshaw had reserved for herself he said he was an exiled Irishman. ‘Did you ever hear of the Wild Geese?’ he enquired. ‘Soldiers of fortune? I often feel like that myself. My name is Quillan.’

  He was younger than he looked, she thought: forty-five, she estimated, and seeming to be ten years older. Perhaps it was that, looking older than he was, or perhaps it was the uneasy emptiness in his eyes, that made her feel sorry for him. His eyes apologized for himself, even though he attempted to hide the apology beneath a jauntiness. He wouldn’t be long on the terrace, he promised: the couple would soon be checking out of the hotel and on behalf of the husband of the woman he would discreetly follow them, around the coast in a hired Renault. It was work he did not much care for, but it was better than other work he had experienced: he’d drifted about, he added with a laugh, from pillar to post. With his eyes closed in the warmth he talked about his childhood memories while Miss Ticher listened.

  ‘Youghal,’ he said. ‘I was born in Youghal, in County Cork. In 1934 my mother went in for a swim and got caught up with a current. My dad went out to fetch her and they both went down.’

  He left his deck-chair and went away, and strangely she wondered if perhaps he was going to find a place to weep. An impression of his face remained with her: a fat red face with broken veins in it, and blue eyes beneath dark brows. When he smiled he revealed teeth that were stained and chipped and not his own. Once, when laughing over a childhood memory, they had slipped from their position in his jaw and had had to be replaced. Miss Ticher had looked away in embarrassment, but he hadn’t minded at all. He wasn’t a man who cared about the way he struck other people. His trousers were held up with a tie, his pale stomach showed through an unbuttoned shirt. There was dandruff in his sparse fluff of sandy hair and on the shoulders of a blue blazer: yesterday’s dandruff, Miss Ticher had thought, or even the day before’s.

  ‘I’ve brought you this,’ he said, returning and sitting again in Miss Grimshaw’s chair. He proffered a glass of red liquid. ‘A local aperitif.’

  Over pots of geraniums and orange-tiled roofs, across the bay and the green sea that was ruffled with little bursts of foam, were the white villas of Sanary, set among cypresses. Nearer, and more directly below, was the road to Toulon and beyond it a scrappy beach on which Miss Ticher now observed the figure of Miss Grimshaw.

  ‘I was given over to the aunt and uncle,’ said Quillan, ‘on the day of the tragedy. Although, as I’m saying to you, I don’t remember it.’

  He drank whisky mixed with ice. He shook the liquid in his glass, watching it. He offered Miss Ticher a cigarette, which she refused. He lit one himself.

  ‘The uncle kept a shop,’ he said.

  She saw Miss Grimshaw crossing the road to Toulon. A driver hooted; Miss Grimshaw took no notice.

  ‘Memories are extraordinary,’ said Quillan, ‘the things you’d remember and the things you wouldn’t. I went to the infant class at the Loreto Convent. There was a Sister Ita. I remember a woman with a red face who cried one time. There was a boy called Joe Murphy whose grandmother kept a greengrocer’s. I was a member of Joe Murphy’s gang. We used to fight another gang.’

  Miss Grimshaw passed from view. She would be approaching the hotel, moving slowly in the warmth, her sunburnt face shining as her spectacles shone. She would arrive panting, and already, in her mind, Miss Ticher could hear her voice. ‘What on earth’s that red stuff you’re drinking?’ she’d demand in a huffy manner.

  ‘When I was thirteen years old I ran away from the aunt and uncle,’ Quillan said. ‘I hooked up with a travelling entertainments crowd that used to go about the seaside places. I think the aunt must have been the happy female that day. She couldn’t stand the sight of me.’

  ‘Oh surely now –’

  ‘Listen,’ said Quillan, leaning closer to Miss Ticher and staring intently into her eyes. ‘I’ll tell you the way this case was. You’d like to know?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘The uncle had no interest of any kind in the bringing up of a child. The uncle’s main interest was drinking bottles of stout in Phelan’s public house, with Harrigan the butcher. The aunt was a different kettle of fish: the aunt above all things wanted nippers of her own. For the whole of my thirteen years in that house I was a reminder to my aunt of her childless condition. I was a damn nuisance to both of them.’

  Miss Ticher, moved by these revelations, did not know what to say. His eyes were slightly bloodshot, she saw; and then she thought it was decidedly odd, a detective going on about his past to an elderly woman on the terrace of an hotel.

  ‘I wasn’t wanted in that house,’ he said. ‘When I was five years old she told me the cost of the food I ate.’

  It would have been 1939 when he was five, she thought, and she remembered herself in 1939, a girl of twenty-four, just starting her career at St Mildred’s, a girl who’d begun to feel that marriage, which she’d wished for, might not come her way. ‘We’re neither of us the type,’ Miss Grimshaw later said. ‘We’d be lost, my dear, without the busy life of school.’

  She didn’t want Miss Grimshaw to arrive on the terrace. She wanted this man who was a stranger to her to go on talking in his sentimental way. He described the town he spoke of: an ancient gateway and a main street, and a harbour where fishing boats went from, and the strand with wooden breakwaters where his parents had drowned, and seaside boarding-houses and a promenade, and short grass on a clay hill above the sea.

  ‘Near the lighthouse in Youghal,’ said Quillan, ‘there’s a shop I used buy Rainbow Toffees in.’

  Miss Grimshaw appeared on the terrace and walked towards them. She was a small, plump woman with grey hair, and short legs and short arms. Generations of girls at St Mildred’s had likened her to a dachshund and had, among themselves, named her appropriately. She wore now a flowered dr
ess and carried in her left hand a yellow plastic bag containing the fruits of her morning’s excursion: a number of shells.

  ‘At a later time,’ said Quillan, ‘I joined the merchant navy in order to get a polish. I knocked about the world a bit, making do the best way I could. And then a few years back I entered the investigation business.’

  Miss Grimshaw, annoyed because an unprepossessing man in a blazer was sprawling in her chair, saw that her friend was holding in her hand a glass of red liquid and was further annoyed because of this: they pooled their resources at the beginning of each holiday and always consulted each other before making a purchase. Ignoring the sprawling man, she asked Miss Ticher what the glass contained, speaking sharply to register her disapproval and disappointment. She stood, since there was no chair for her to sit on.

  ‘I never went back to Youghal,’ the man said before Miss Ticher could reply to Miss Grimshaw’s query. ‘I only have the childhood memories of it now. Unhappy memories,’ said the man to Miss Grimshaw’s amazement. ‘Unhappy memories of a nice little place. That’s life for you.’

  ‘It’s an aperitif,’ said Miss Ticher, ‘that Mr Quillan kindly bought for me. Mr Quillan, this is Miss Grimshaw, my friend.’

  ‘We were discussing memories,’ said Quillan, pushing himself out of the deck-chair. ‘Miss Ticher and myself were going down Memory Lane.’ He laughed loudly, causing the teeth to move about in his mouth. His shoes were scuffed, Miss Grimshaw noted; the blue scarf that was stuck into the open neck of his shirt seemed dirty.

  Again he walked abruptly away. He offered Miss Grimshaw no greeting and Miss Ticher no farewell. He moved along the terrace with the glass in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. His trousers bagged at the back, requiring to be hitched up.

  ‘Who on earth’s that?’ demanded Miss Grimshaw. ‘You never let him pay for that stuff you’re drinking?’

  ‘He’s a detective,’ said Miss Ticher. ‘He’s watching a couple for a husband. He followed them here.’