The Death of William Posters Page 11

  ‘Someone from Grantham offered me forty pounds for it last week, but I asked fifty – what with the time it took, and materials I had to find. I think he’ll be back. Not that I’m worried. I could use the money, but I wouldn’t like to see it go either. I like it myself, and that means it might be good.’

  ‘It’s really got something,’ Frank said. ‘I can understand it, you know, but I can’t say much about it.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s saying a lot in itself. I take small ones to Skegness in the summer, sell ’em for a few pounds on the front, but it’s hard. Every month or two I raffle one in the village, send my kids out with books of tickets at a shilling a throw. I clear twenty quid on a system like that. Then the odd few people come and buy one now and again. They must be scattered all over the county by now. I used to think it a funny thing, me being a painter, but I got over that long ago. I don’t know what sort you’d call me, a sort of primitive surrealistic realist I suppose – which means keck-all, but sounds like something. I just go on painting though, because I can’t do much else. I started during the war, saw some reproductions of modern stuff in a big book, bought an ordinary box of water-paints and some cartridge paper. An officer saw me one day and encouraged me, got me books, oils, canvas. Went out to Burma and got killed. He said I had talent, but also I’d got idleness, and that made it better.’

  They went up to Albert’s studio, opened the beer. ‘I didn’t know there was somebody like you in the village.’

  ‘I keep low,’ Albert said. ‘I’m busy and harassed most of the time, and can’t be bothered with people.’ The room was bitterly cold, the floor carpeted with newspapers which Frank felt like kneeling down to read, as if one might contain the message of his life. He’d never been in an artist’s studio, looked at the vast square table scattered with utensils and bric-à-brac, all kinds of pictures leaning against it and the four walls. Some canvases were primed, others finished, but most were still raw wounds of thought split and laid open among odours of turps and damp dust. ‘I haven’t been in for a couple of days, that’s why it’s so cold. I might get back to it tomorrow, but I’m like a bloody motor car – can’t start in such weather. Maybe the wife’s got a bit of dinner, so bring the bottles.’

  They walked along the corridor and down by the shaking banister. Two children, pinch-faced and happy, lay on the bare floor playing Monopoly. ‘It’s time you went to school,’ Albert said. ‘Don’t think you can stay away just because of a bit of snow. The vicar told me you played truant from Bible class last Sunday. If you don’t keep it up we won’t get another parcel at Christmas. See that you go.’

  Via a bare parlour they entered a kitchen. A fire burned at the range, and down the middle of the room was a table flanked by wooden forms. Under the window was a huge pram, in which a baby played with blocks and rattles. A twelve-year-old girl with short straight hair and a face like her father’s was reading a book at the table, and an eighteen-year-old sister was washing up at the sink. Frank fixed his eyes on her. She was fair-haired with a sulky, thin face that didn’t altogether match her fine bust and mature hips well held by shirt and skirt. Her feet in carpet slippers, legs without stockings, she glanced at him with large blue eyes, a slight sneer on her lips.

  Albert’s wife sat at the table, a white-skinned, large-boned middle-aged blonde. ‘Hello, Ina,’ he said, ‘this is Frank. He’s the man staying at Nurse Shipley’s.’ The girl by the sink, and the mother, looked again. ‘I brought him up for something to eat.’

  A wireless-eye glowed green from the top of a low-lying pot-cupboard, one of its connections faulty. It kept coming on, staying for half a minute, then cracking out softly again in the middle of some B B C parlour game that would have sounded like the apotheosis of boredom had anyone been listening to it. ‘There’s something left,’ she said, ‘if you’ll wait while it warms. It’s rabbit stew as usual.’

  ‘There wasn’t any post,’ Albert informed her. ‘I would have got through. He’s a bit soft, the postman we’ve got now. In the last big freeze-up the postman made a sledge. Never missed a day – till he died of pneumonia. Still, they say it’ll be in either late tonight, or in the morning. Mandy can go down at six.’

  The girl by the sink said: ‘She can’t. She does enough for this house as it is.’

  ‘We can’t exist without letters,’ her mother said, ‘you know that. We haven’t paid the grocer yet for that wine. Nor have we settled the newsagent.’

  ‘I didn’t drink the wine,’ Mandy said. ‘You two did. I didn’t read the papers either. You light the fire with them before I get up.’

  ‘You should get up before midday then,’ her mother said mildly.

  ‘Tell me what for, and I will.’

  ‘They’ll have to wait for their money,’ Albert said. ‘They won’t get blood out of a stone. Anyway, I’ll write a few more letters after I’ve eaten. Mandy can hand them in when she goes down.’

  ‘I’m not going down,’ Mandy said, coming to the table and looking at Frank as if seeing him for the first time. ‘I told you already.’

  ‘I’ll knock you about one of these days,’ Albert said.

  ‘Drop dead. Take an overdose.’

  ‘You rotten little sybarite,’ he called. ‘Get out of my way.’

  ‘You’re not saying much,’ she said to Frank, ignoring her father.

  ‘I’m thinking though,’ he answered.

  ‘I suppose he’s one of your pub mates,’ she sneered. ‘That wireless is driving me potty’ – and went out of the room. Ina laid dishes: ‘Mrs Warlingham came today for that painting you promised, of her house and orchard she said. I told her you were still working on it.’

  ‘She’ll be lucky if she sees that,’ Albert said.

  ‘She paid you for it.’

  ‘Half. I’ll do it when it thaws. Otherwise I might just as well give her a piece of white board.’ He reached for the bread. ‘That’s not a bad idea. As long as I frame it. It’s been done before.’

  Frank opened the beer. ‘Got any glasses?’ Ina brought three – one for herself. ‘Are you any good at writing letters?’ Albert asked.

  ‘Only love letters,’ Frank said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I’m a great writer of begging letters, a born begging-letter writer. To edge-up my income (such as it is) I turn out a few every week. You’d be surprised at the results. With an old typewriter, a copy of Who’s Who, a few stamps and a bit of imagination, quite a bit trickles in. Where’s that rough draft I knocked off this morning, Ina?’ She passed him a sheet of paper from the shelf: ‘It needs polishing yet.’

  ‘Listen to this, though, it’ll make your blood run cold. “Dear Sir, As you know from my last communication I have seven children on the point of starvation, and so far you have done nothing to help me alleviate their condition. At least, I myself had the goodness to write to you and describe their plight. I have had many vicissitudes in my life. Once a successful coal merchant, I went bankrupt when rationing stopped, had to leave the semi-demi mock-tudor pebble-dash detached I was buying on a mortgage and come to this rural slum. My car is rotting at the end of the lane, and I haven’t had a smoke for a week. Apart from that, as aforesaid, my seven children are undergoing hardship in spite of the socialist benefits from this left-wing conservative government.” A remark like that usually puts on an extra five pounds. You’ve no idea what pig-rats they are.’

  ‘One day he’ll come to see you,’ Ina said.

  ‘No he won’t. They never do. They hate poverty even more than they like money.’

  ‘But we aren’t desperately poor.’

  ‘Not much. The longer I live the more I know I’m poor. If he told me to get a job I’d throw a fit.’ He turned to Frank: ‘I’m a full-time painter and a part-time epileptic. But I’m so good at begging letters that I posted one to myself once by mistake. It broke my heart, spoilt my day, and I was putting a ten bob note in an envelope before I realized my mistake. My eldest son’s going into the Church. I can’t thin
k of a better trade for a lad of mine. He’s at university already, thanks to a scholarship he was bright enough to get. He’s glad to be away from home because he doesn’t like my begging letters. I can’t think why: he never gets one. He calls them “charitable appeals”, the craven bloody hypocrite. Goes white as death when I talk about “begging letters” in front of his friends. They don’t get them, either, though I’ve toyed with the idea more than once, and he knows it as well. What can you do when you’re a painter? You can’t go out to work. Work is a killer, occupational disease number one for a bloke like me. If I do a stroke it puts me on national assistance for a year.’ He smoothed at his moustache, giving the same impression of sulkiness that had been on Mandy’s face, indicating dangerous temper in such a grown man.

  Frank stood: ‘I’ve got to empty some beer. Where is it?’

  ‘You’d better use the one upstairs,’ Albert said. ‘You’d sink without trace in the one outside. The door next to my studio. Show him up, Ina.’

  ‘Don’t bother, I can’t get lost.’

  He went through the hall – children still playing – and up the stairs. How could anyone live in a house so bleak? Snow beaded the windows, worried the chimneys with discordant yappings as the lifting wind hit them. It was a larger house than it looked, emphasizing the power of its protection as he reached the first floor.

  He opened a door by Albert’s studio, presumably the wrong one. When his eyes focused he saw a bald-headed thin-lipped man, illuminated by a table lamp in a room of drawn blinds, sitting at a transmitter-receiver with earphones on and fingers ac a morse-key. The man, wearing a good suit, was sweating, shivering as if in the first stages of malaria. He turned a panic-stricken look on Frank’s intrusion, then swivelled from the radio with a gun in his hand. ‘Get out!’ he screamed. ‘Get out!’ – an unforgettable picture.

  Frank slammed the door, went in the next before giving himself time to parry the surprise of his first incursion. It was a whitewashed room, open to milky daylight of the outside snow. Nearly the whole space was taken by a low table, over which was spread a vast taped-together ordnance survey map. Two youths were leaning across from opposite sides, moving different coloured symbols across the co-ordinates. One, wearing a black leather jacket and a ban-the-bomb badge, looked up and said: ‘I’m Adam. This is my brother, Richard. Do you want a game? We’re practising civil war on England’s green and pleasant land.’

  ‘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.’

&
nbsp; ‘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.