He couldn’t help but laugh, whether or not he was meant to. But at the same time he felt that it didn’t matter whether he laughed or not, since he understood it now — it was rather like the worn-smooth wrinkled leather coat — the man was inured to the reactions of audiences, be they friendly, hostile, hard-to-please or indifferent. Or perhaps absent.
But the man laughed too.
‘How you going to be my straight-man, man, you keep laughing like that? You have a name? You save my life, you haven’t told me your name.’
‘Ken,’ he said. Now he too held out his hand a second time, but with concealed caution. He desperately wanted to avoid giving his second name. It was Black. He was Kenneth Black. Lots of people are called Black, but he shuddered to think of the comic repercussions.
‘Johnny Dewhurst and Kenny — Coastguard. I see it, man. I see it!’
He hid his relief. ‘Is it your real name, “Johnny Dewhurst”?’
‘Hey, you tink I’s a liar, man? You tink I gives you joke name? I have a card made up with some joker’s name?’
The shoulders shook, he hee-hawed and he was off again. It bubbled out of him. It was hard to see where the one thing stopped and the other thing began. He’d always supposed that comedians (was there truly a section of humanity called comedians?) were really hard-nosed crafty individuals. There was a gap between the act and the person. But with this man you couldn’t tell. There even seemed to be something wished-for in the confusion.
‘Johnny Dewhurst, it no joker’s name, it a butcher’s name. I say, “First Johnny tell de joke, then — he get butchered for it!”’
He reached inside his jacket again, pulled out a folded slip of paper and handed it over. It was a flyer, a flyer for a tour—‘The Johnny Dewhurst Tour’. It was a list, a remarkably long one, of places and dates. The places criss-crossed and circumscribed England. The tour began — or had begun — in Scarborough, then had taken in several northern locations, then worked circuitously south. It had networked the Midlands, then struck south-west. It had touched Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Shrewsbury, Rugby. . as well as towns he couldn’t exactly place. The first date was in late June and there was still over a month to go. It had still to track the length of the south coast and to reach such venues as Lowestoft and Skegness. It was a list of theatres, corn exchanges, seaside palaces and pavilions, and indeterminate halls. And it must be a very ambitious list, because he’d never heard of Johnny Dewhurst, though he’d met him now, and at many of these places, some of them even having a faint hint of glamour, Johnny Dewhurst must be very far from star billing—‘on tour’ as he was — he must be a very short spot a long way down the programme.
And now he was stranded, or he was rescued, on Exmoor.
‘Johnny Dewhurst wish he were back in Leeds, man. Johnny Dewhurst wish he were back in Dewsbury.’
He seemed to speak from the depths of his soul. But you really couldn’t tell.
A moment had come. They both upended their thermos cups, both making the same, mutually accepted, grimace. They shook out the dregs, roadside fashion. It was a piece of perfect mime. There was no one to see it.
‘You come to my show in Ilfracombe, if you like. Il-frah-coombe! Bring your Missis Coastguard. I don’t have a bag of money to give you, I don’t have any free tickets. But you come if you want. Johnny Dewhurst entertain you.’
A challenge? A genuine invitation? A forlorn hope?
‘Then I know I have an audience?’ He screeched and hissed and pistoned his shoulders again.
Then, by more mutual, resigned understanding, they turned to their cars.
‘You go first, Mister Coastguardman. Johnny Dewhurst have to water Exmoor. Three-nine-nine. I remember. I see it, man! I see it up in lights!’
He couldn’t think of anything witty or memorable to say, but then he was the straight-man, apparently. He said, ‘Take care now.’ It was what coastguards said when they put some foolish member of the public right. Take care now.
He started his car and drove slowly by with a final wave, then continued along the straight, gradually rising road. He didn’t speed. He would make it. He also needed to think. Now he was back in his car, with his lights on, it seemed that dawn had retreated, it was semi-dark again. He looked in the rear-view mirror. The other car remained stationary.
How did someone decide to be a comedian? He’d wanted to be a coastguard since he was small. It was no more than a boy’s yen, perhaps, for the seaside, for things maritime, though he hadn’t wanted, clearly, the perils of the open sea. He’d wanted perhaps the taste of adventure, but with a good measure of its opposite. He’d never wanted to be a sailor, a soldier — or even a policeman. He’d seen himself, yes, with a vigilant stare and a mug of cocoa. It was a commendable, if not necessarily a courageous thing, to guard the nation’s coastline. He’d wanted, if he were honest, to be a preserver of safety, while having — and perhaps the one thing conferred the other — a large slice of safety himself.
Was being a coastguard courageous? No. It was ninety-five per cent not courageous. There were incidents, some of them nasty, there were rescues. You were in the business of rescue. Was rescue courageous?
But it was certainly courageous, it was unfathomably courageous to do what Johnny Dewhurst did. Could he, a man from Somerset, possibly go to Leeds (he’d never been to Leeds, he’d only twice been to London) and, with his West Country voice, his joke of a voice, get up in front of a local audience? And make them laugh. His knees buckled at the thought of it.
He looked in the rear-view mirror. The car hadn’t moved. It was just a distant twinkle. The poor man had hundreds of miles yet to drive. Did he really sleep in it? What the hell would he do in Ilfracombe at six in the morning? But what the hell was he doing anyway, there, at five?
He hadn’t done enough, surely, not nearly enough, just to lift him back onto the road.
But, as he mounted another ridge and the car behind disappeared, it seemed somehow that its existence and everything that had happened, from the ghostly deer onwards, became obscure and doubtful too. Had it really all happened?
He should now be eagerly working out how he’d tell the story, to his colleagues, his fellow coastguards, and then, later, Ruth. You’ll never guess, you’ll never guess. On the Culworthy road, at five in the morning. I met a comedian.
But the more he reflected, the more it seemed impossible. How to begin, how to be believed? How to convey every important detail? It was a story he didn’t have the power of telling. So, better not to tell it. It was one of those stories you didn’t tell. He wondered, already, if he believed it himself.
He reached the main road, which he would briefly follow before turning off again. There was the conspicuous sign: ‘Barnstaple, Ilfracombe’. The man could hardly get lost. To his right now were bigger, broader pockets of sea, touched, as the land wasn’t yet, by rays of pink-gold light from the east. It was the Bristol Channel. It was also the Atlantic Ocean. It was, at this point, a satisfying expanse of water. Swansea lay beyond the horizon, further away than Calais from Dover. Ships, he knew, had once sailed up the Bristol Channel with cargoes of sugar. On the way out they’d made for Africa. Then sailed west.
He took the familiar right turn, the narrow twisting road. In a while he’d see the white buildings with the lighthouse. On some mornings it could still take his breath away. And if you arrived at sunset. .