After Bathing at Baxters: Stories Page 4

  When she had gone, mother and son sat on the low stools behind the counter in a space made smaller by her absence, as motes of dust danced in the sunlight of the open door and shadow fell over the rows of shrimping nets and water pistols. Eventually the silence was broken by a gang of children squabbling over the ice-cream chiller. I expect we can get the cartridge paper from Norwich,’ Mrs Holroyd said vaguely. ‘She needs it for her work, you see …’ Mrs Holroyd added as an afterthought. ‘That lipstick …’

  It was a hot summer that year. Julian drew salmon-skinned children who romped on the worm-casted sand beneath the pier, or shrieked at the Punch and Judy. Old fat women swimming sedately like porpoises in the shallows. Mrs Holroyd chided him affectionately, small things and large things mixed: the condition of his room, the length of his hair, his self-absorption. Impending O-level results, she implied, were no excuse for sequestration. In the end he embarked on long, futile cycle rides out along the North Norfolk flat, towards Wells and Blakeney. These, too, had their Summer People: well-groomed schoolgirls playing tennis on windswept courts overlooking the sea; civil young men in boats. Miss Hoare turned up frequently on these excursions: seated, sketch pad on knee, in rock crannies on the cliff path or arranging her easel on the beach. Occasionally she smiled or waved a hand from which cigarette smoke trickled slowly into the dense air. Once Julian found the easel unattended halfway up the stone escarpment flanking the putting course. He had time to register an enticing impressionist’s vista of frothing waves and shipwrecked mariners before the sound of footsteps from below drove him away.

  Each night at supper Mr Holroyd uncovered the little cache of lore which the day’s traffic had afforded him. ‘I asked about that Miss Hoare. At the Saracen’s Head.’ They ate Cromer crabs, shrimps, salad, dyspeptic hunks of white bread. Mr Holroyd was an advocate of ‘plain English food’: a birthday dinner had once been ruined by the intrusion of alien sauces. ‘Apparently she’s made quite a name for herself. Exhibitions and so on. At any rate she seems to make a living out of it.’ Julian bent his head at the implied rebuke, which was, he knew, intended to emphasise the distance between an Art sanctified by commerce and feckless bohemian daydreaming. Later that evening Mrs Holroyd sought him out in a bedroom lined with neatly-executed Airfix kits and pictures of the England World Cup squad. ‘You mustn’t mind your dad,’ she said. ‘He just wants what’s best for you.’ The letter from Julian’s headmaster, pressing the claims of the sixth-form science course and stating the necessity of a speedy decision, lay on the sill next to the Collected Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, which Mr Holroyd had looked through with tolerant disdain. ‘And you could always keep up your drawing,’ Mrs Holroyd suggested timorously, ‘as a kind of hobby …’

  Once, the summer before, Julian had disappeared on his bicycle for an entire day, returning only at dusk, an hour after Mr Holroyd had telephoned the police. ‘Why did you do it?’ his father had asked, shocked and puzzled out of his evening routine of checking the stock cupboard and bundling up unsold copies of the Daily Mirror. ‘I did it to get away from you,’ Julian had answered, which was honest but scarcely sensible. Memories of this incident still rankled.

  The next evening his father said unexpectedly: ‘I saw that Miss Hoare the other day.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘A very interesting woman, that. Who was it she was telling me about? Some artist chap or other that she knew … Anyway, the upshot of it was that she wondered if you’d like some help with your drawing.’ ‘Perhaps,’ Julian heard himself saying, ‘she could have asked me herself.’ But Mr Holroyd was absorbed in the correspondence columns of the Cromer Mercury. ‘I don’t think there’s any call for that kind of remark,’ he said absently.

  Julian had little experience of women in early middle age, let alone artistic ones. Mrs Arkwright, the school’s art department, specialised in Norfolk landscapes populated by vast, Stubbsian horses. A spinster friend of his mother’s routinely dispensed faded, self-painted watercolours as Christmas presents. Miss Hoare, etching in the corners of her tumultuous seascapes, seemed infinitely removed from these pale exemplars. She painted putting courses filled with giant golfers waving their irons like weapons, a vortex of wind, debris and flailing black birds descending on the spire of St Peter’s church. ‘You can be honest with me,’ she told Julian. ‘Do you like them?’ ‘I don’t dislike them,’ Julian replied truthfully. ‘But in the sea picture you’ve put the gulls in the wrong place. You see, they always alight on the highest point.’ Miss Hoare was delighted. ‘A very good answer,’ she said. ‘If you’d said you liked them, I wouldn’t have believed you.’

  Conscious of their roles as native and interloper, they strolled around the town in search of vantage points: the gallery of the church, the high ground to the north, the tiny station with its dozing porter. ‘Why Sheringham?’ Julian asked at one point. ‘I mean …’ He stopped for a second, crimson-faced. ‘I thought artists went to the South of France, places like that.’ ‘So they do,’ Miss Hoare said judiciously. ‘But my dear, I’ve had enough of Menton and Nice to last me a lifetime. Full of hopeless Englishmen thinking they’re Pierre Loti.’ Reaching the front again, they turned into the high street. Here the characteristic high summer smells hung in the air: fried fish, candyfloss, oil, each mixed with the pervasive tang of salt. ‘Do you suppose,’ Miss Hoare wondered, ‘there is anywhere we could get a drink? A proper drink, that is.’ ‘Not a chance,’ Julian told her cheerfully. ‘Everyone knows I’ve only just turned sixteen. If I went into a pub and ordered a half of cider they’d probably telephone my father.’ ‘Oh well, if that’s the difficulty,’ said Miss Hoare. At the bar of the Saracen’s Head she loomed brazenly above a knot of Summer People in khaki shorts and sunhats and announced: ‘Two glasses of white wine. And this young man is my nephew.’ Later, as they sat in an alcove looking out over the humped keels of upended crab boats, she said: ‘Will it matter? Saying you’re my nephew, I mean.’ ‘I shouldn’t think my father will be very pleased.’ ‘Will he find out?’ ‘Oh, I expect someone will tell him,’ Julian told her, elated by the wine and not caring very much. ‘They usually do.’

  August came, with flaring skies. An old man had a heart attack on the beach, and an air-sea rescue helicopter came to ferry him away. The O-level results were due in a week. ‘Exams,’ Miss Hoare pronounced, ‘are the curse of the educated classes.’ They were in the Saracen’s Head again, whose staff, curiously, had yet to complain to Mr Holroyd. ‘Are you still set on Art?’ She enunciated it as one would the name of a favourite relative or a honeymoon destination. ‘I don’t know,’ Julian wondered, realising that for all his disparagement of mathematics, physics, chemistry and the dreary people who taught them, he really did not know. ‘There’s an art school at Norwich,’ he explained. ‘Or even at Lowestoft. And then …’ Miss Hoare beamed back at him. Reckoning up the number of glasses of white wine she had consumed, Julian calculated it at six or perhaps seven. ‘You must lend me those sketchbooks of yours,’ she said. ‘Let me look at them and see what can be done. It may take a day or so because I’ve got a friend arriving, but then I’ll have a look and we’ll see what can be done.’ And Julian, glimpsing his face suddenly in the glass of the window, felt the kind of wild excitement he had once experienced as a child watching the Lancaster bombers veer inland from the sea towards the RAF stations of the Norfolk plain.

  Mr Castleton, Miss Hoare’s friend, was a thin, red-haired man in an outsize purple blazer and a cravat, who made himself unpopular in the town within half-an-hour of his arrival by parking his car across a narrow street entrance and then remonstrating with the people who tried to remove it. Subsequently he antagonised Mr Holroyd by asking for a copy of Health and Efficiency. ‘I told him,’ Mr Holroyd reported testily, ‘that if he wanted pornography he could go to Cromer for it.’ He and Miss Hoare dined noisily at the Saracen’s Head and were seen picnicking on the cliff. Once, passing them in the crowded market square, Julian was certain that they saw him, but the wave went unacknowledged. No
word came about the sketchbooks.

  The O-level results arrived on a grey Saturday morning. Julian felt his hand tremble a little as he turned over the brown, rectangular envelope he remembered addressing to himself six weeks before. He need not have worried. ‘An excellent set of results,’ Mr Holroyd crowed. ‘And especially in Science. I must confess I’m gratified.’ With some ceremony he presented Julian with a creased ten-shilling note. Knocking at the door of Miss Hoare’s cottage, an hour later, Julian realised that he had still made no decision, that the tangle of contending paths still ran away before him. Some time later the door was opened, with bad grace, by Mr Castleton. He wore a pair of ancient, buttonless pyjamas and was smoking a cigarette. Mr Castleton examined Julian without interest. ‘It’s your artist friend,’ he said over his shoulder. Back in the belly of the house came the noise of vague, indeterminate movement. ‘She’s sozzled,’ Mr Castleton said ruthlessly. ‘Pissed. You understand what I mean? One over the eight. Here. Better take these while you’re here.’ Stooping to retrieve the sketchbooks in their brown wrapping Julian saw, a room away, the lurching figure: nightdress awry, wild, staring face, one eye blinking in confusion. ‘Go on, piss off,’ Mr Castleton said equably.

  Towards lunchtime, as the wind whipped up, he stood on the low, rocky promontory overlooking the station, where Summer People with bags and suitcases laboured towards the waiting train. Then, with one of those sharp, decisive gestures that define our lives, he began to tear up the books, one by one, casting each fragment out onto the swelling breeze. Later the rain came in, noisily, across the long bar of the sea.

  Taking an Interest

  My mother lived in the Breckland for thirty years: at Brandon, Feltwell, Northwold; always in the same rackety houses looking out over the heath. During that time she devised theories about her neighbours: theories of closeness, obduracy, idiosyncrasy. Trammelled by poverty, inertia and isolation, she suggested, the Brecklanders reverted to an inbred, primordial oddity. My mother told stories of elderly men bicycling twenty miles to Norwich on a whim, middle-aged sisters found together in a bed that also contained their father’s corpse, lawless children running unchecked through a landscape of virid sedge.

  Few of these legends survived. Returning to the western seam of Norfolk a decade after her death, I found a world grown matter-of-fact. The tied cottages, refurbished and extended, housed Cambridge dons and their families; the farm workers had migrated to the soft fruit factories near the coast; shiny new estates edged out the pre-war warrens. A handful of the bicycling old men endured, but they did so with extreme self-consciousness, as vain and dignified as artists’ models. Even then, though, I was not discouraged. I knew how slowly time passes out there on the windblown heaths, in the lee of the fens, and, sure enough, only a month had passed before I turned up Thetford Jim.

  ‘Always take an interest,’ my mother had said of her dealings with the Breckland people, ‘never interfere.’ To this end she had patronised village charities, exhibited cakes in draughty barns and church halls, and very occasionally – for my mother was a liberal-minded woman – circulated leaflets on contraception. Thetford Jim loomed into view late one Saturday night at a pub talent evening in Brandon, in the slipstream of two stand-up comedians and a xylophonist, when a deedy-looking ancient clambered onto the makeshift stage to announce ‘Here’s something for you old-timers to enjoy’. There was a smattering of applause and a short, spare man in middle age began to sing in a reedy tenor, accompanying himself with a limping acoustic guitar. The first half-minute of the performance escaped me, so absorbed was I with the singer’s appearance: knobby forehead, horn-rimmed glasses, disappearing hair; an ageless peasant’s face, toothy, preoccupied, innocent and conniving by turns. To begin with he played a couple of country and western numbers, but there was a song called ‘The Squire’s Walk’, about harvesting in the 1930s, so far as I could deduce, another called ‘We Got Married in Church’, with a chorus of a register office woudn’t suit for her ma. He had a clipped west-of-the-county accent which pronounced ‘do’ as du, and the songs were clearly self-penned as I noticed he had a handwritten lyric sheet unravelled on the sidetable next to his half-pint of Adnams.

  Who to ask for information? The vicar had been there for four years, a grain in the hourglass of this remote, rural life. The local lore accumulated by the handful of solicitors and bureaucrats with whom I was on nodding terms rarely exceeded the London train timetable. Fortunately Mrs Nokes, who cleaned for me two mornings a week, had the story. ‘It was a shame really, that Jim – and his name’s not really Jim, it’s Trevor, Trevor Bell. His dad used to work over at Watton in the painting and decorating line. His mother, she was a Fisher, big local family they was sixty or seventy years back, all gone now. But Jim’s dad, he died young, and Jim’s mum, she took on over Jim. Never would leave him be. He joined the Navy once, but he came back in three months on account of she said she missed him. And then when she died, five years back, people thought Jim wouldn’t stand it. Rode that motorbike of his round the place at all hours. Calmed down a bit now, Jim has. Still lives in the old house, but I hear he does carpentering work out Garboldisham way.’ I saw it all, or I thought I did: the slow, intent life, the long-burning fuse suddenly exploding. I remembered, too, a few subdued remarks heard in the pub. ‘Did they? I mean …’ Mrs Nokes shrugged tolerantly, in the way that I recalled my mother shrugging when confronted with a broken gate, a badger killed on the swarming roads. ‘You don’t want to believe talk,’ she pronounced. ‘Jim was struck on his mum, and they was close as peas in a pod, but that’s as far as it went and don’t let anyone tell you different.’ I had the feeling that Mrs Nokes was holding something in reserve about Jim, some prized nugget of data not to be vouchsafed to writers in four-bedroomed houses with city minds.

  Take an interest; never interfere. It was difficult to establish where these injunctions broke apart from one another. Once a bundle of my mother’s leaflets from the Brook Advisory Clinic had been pushed back through her letter box, doused in petrol and set aflame. After that I began to notice Jim, a small element in a wider tableau suddenly foregrounded by ulterior knowledge. I saw him astride his elderly Triumph motorcycle, labouring along the county backroads, buying groceries in Northwold. He had that vague, dreamy countryman’s look, the kind that does not so much see through one as round one, a nod that might have been an acknowledgment or a dismissal. On the pretext of wanting some shelves, I even drove over to the cottage, a mile out of Feltwell, halfway along a lane that went nowhere, crowded out by osiers and long-dead elms. He was cagey but affable, admitting that he did ‘carpenteering’, that shelves ‘wouldn’t be no trouble’. At close hand, I saw, his face had even more that rapt, simpleton’s stare. The cottage was small, dark, meekly furnished. From mantels, tables and wall-brackets, parched Norfolk faces stared out of their frames: old men in caps flanking dray horses, a labourer with pitchfork flung over his shoulder like a gun. Mrs. Bell hung above the fireplace: bolster figure, the same vague eyes, set in brick-red nutcracker features. Jim’s guitar lay propped against the table edge. Putting up the shelves took a couple of visits. He came early in the morning, tapping on the hall door at half-seven, quarter-to-eight. I imagined him caught in the old fieldhand routines mandated by his mother forty years before: rise at dawn, main meal at midday, bed at sunset. While he worked he smoked tiny, pungent cheroots: the inside of his right index finger was a long, mahogany smear. He was friendly enough, but I fancied that he half-despised me, wondered at the cossetted, idler’s life that could contract out the putting up of shelves. On the second visit I asked him about the songs. As I suspected, they were his own compositions, or at any rate familial. ‘My old dad now, he was a singer. Sung in the pubs, Watton way. Lot of them I got from him. Others are my own. “Sheringham train takes a fine long time”, now. I did that years ago, back when they were thinking on cutting the service.’ He pronounced it sarvice, in a way I hadn’t heard for twenty years.

  By d
egrees I discovered a context in which Jim’s songs lived and grew. The county radio station sometimes featured what it called ‘local entertainers’. They had stage names like Dandelion Joe or The Buttercup Boy, dressed up in smocks and other yokel appurtenances, sang irksome songs about shovelling muck and cows’ udders, and conducted beauty pageants at the village fêtes. Set against this tide of bucolic idiocy, Jim looked like a folk poet, a gentle elegist of bygone rural decencies. In amongst the book reviews and the grinning ‘middles’, I was writing a column for a Sunday newspaper called ‘Country Retreats’. I put Jim in it, talked about a few of the songs, mentioned some contemporary folk singers with whom I thought he could stand some kind of comparison. The piece was headed ‘Norfolk Voices’. Later, there was a clutch of letters, from people who wanted to buy records or claimed to have heard him singing in pubs. On the Monday morning I put a copy of the article through Jim’s rusting letterbox. Passing me on the road a day or two later he made a definite salutation, arm raised stiffly in greeting like a flipper.

  Mrs Nokes approved of my interest. ‘There were folks used to reckon Jim was simple,’ she explained cautiously. ‘Kids mostly. They used to stand in the lanes and shout at him when he went past. But you have to make allowances. Jim’s dad now, he could hardly write. And the old mawther, well, she’d die sooner than have to fill in a form. Come election time you couldn’t get her to vote for love nor money.’

  Another piece in the jigsaw of Jim’s early life clicked into place. Even now, I realised, beneath the surface old patterns of existence ran on, like black hounds under the moon. An old woman died in Watton that summer, aged eighty-seven, carrying a tumour on her abdomen that weighed eleven pounds. ‘We didn’t want to go bothering the doctor,’ her daughter was reported as saying.