Ahead of him at the till stood a customer in very dirty whitish overalls smoking a cigar and chatting to the senior of the two shopmen present while the junior cast up what he was buying.
"Is it worth it?" he asked a couple of times. "This is it. If it isn't, I don't want to know. If it isn't, I'm not interested. If it is, then this is it. I mean, this is it. Right?"
"Right."
"And it is. It bloody is. Like everything else." As he talked the overalled man took a roll of £20 notes from his side pocket and counted some out; Jake thought five but wasn't sure. "It bloody is. Twelve-year-olds better than eight-year-old and '61's going to be better than '62. I mean, you know, this is it. Ever tried Jack Daniel's Green Label?"
"No."
"Worth trying." Change was handed over, not much. "Ta. Yeah, worth trying. Shows you the Black's worth it. Green's good, though. Well, cheers."
"Cheers."
Jake moved along, put his two items down on the stub of counter and set himself to see which buttons on his machine the junior shopman would prod. 3, then one he missed, so he gave up and waited for the receipt slip to be torn off and wordlessly handed to him. He screwed up his eyes. 003.69, 002.17, 006.86. He went on looking while the senior shopman drew in air through his nose.
"Er, the..... You've charged the full price for the chocolates."
"Right."
"But your notice says 10p in the pound off everything."
"Everything bar chocolates and smokes."
"But it says everything."
"It means everything bar chocolates and smokes."
"But...."
"You want them, do you, squire?
".... Yes."
"Right."
After a short pause, during which he took a blow on the kneecap from the corner of a wire basket in the hand of a man in a blue boiler-suit, Jake paid, picked up his goods and left, remembering he should have said Cheers just as the exit door swung shut after him. Out in the street he noticed that away from the sunlight the air was chilly: the spring had begun late and wet. There were still a few dead leaves half beaten into the triangular patch of bare earth bounded by concrete, probably due to become a communal flower-bed any day, at the corner of the High Street and Burgess Avenue. The near end of the latter consisted of two longish brick terraces put up a hundred years before to house the workers at some vanished local industry and these days much in demand among recently married couples, pairs of homosexuals and older persons whose children had left or never existed. Jake had bought no. 47 in 1969; he couldn't have afforded to now.
2—The Farting Ploughboy
The house stood out among its neighbours by not having had anything done to its outside: no stucco, no curious chimneys, no colourful shutters, no trailing ferns in wire baskets, front door and window-frames and drain-pipes not painted cinnabar or orpiment or minimum or light mushroom, and garden neither turned into a tiny thicket nor altogether removed to accommodate a car. Having no car had made it comparatively easy for Jake to prevent that last option but some of the others had taken toll of his powers of resistance. He opened and then shut the gate, which was not of wrought iron or imitation bronze, walked up the eight yards of gravel path and let himself in.
A great deal had managed to get itself done to the inside of no. 47 because so much of it was in items small in themselves and capable of being introduced a bit at a time. He was also at the mercy of the view that whatever rights a man might have over the exterior of his dwelling lapse by definition once its threshold is crossed. The place was full of things. It had to be admitted that some of these weren't as small as all that, like the heavy-duty cheval glass near the front door and the giant's coffin-sized Dutch (or some such) clock in the alcove by the sitting room fireplace, but a lot were. No flat surface except the ceiling and parts of the floor was free of ashtrays bearing quotations from poem and song, serious souvenir mugs and antique paperweights, and screens supplemented the walls for the hanging of small pictures enclosed in large mounts and photographs of dead strangers. It was hard to find a square foot that hadn't been made nice.
The person who had brought all this about was Jake's fat wife Brenda, who stood up, brushing cake-crumbs off her knee-length fisherman's-knit cardigan, to be kissed on the cheek by him. He went over and greeted similarly her old friend Alcestis
Mabbott, who was fat too, not as fat as Brenda but short with it. And then Alcestis' hair stood away from her head in a stiff dun froth while Brenda's, though no more vivid, was smooth and abundant, so that almost anybody would have decided that Brenda had the better of things between the two of them.
"Hallo, Allie dear," said Jake. "What a nice surprise."
"I told you she was coming," said Brenda.
"Did you, darling? I must have forgotten."
One way or the other the presence of Alcestis was certainly a surprise to Jake. If it hadn't been he wouldn't have come carting his recent purchases into the sitting room like a boy back from the fair. It was on them, as he could have predicted without the least trouble, that Alcestis round-eyed gaze instantly fell.
"Been shopping, have we?" she asked gruffly. It wasn't a tone or vocal quality adopted for the occasion. On their first meeting, round about ten years earlier at a dinner-party in some cultural crapper south of the river, Jake had come really close to congratulating her on a marvellous imitation, unasked for though it was, of the way retired colonels were supposed to talk. All that had deterred him was puzzlement about why she thought it went well with the detailed account she was giving him of how she had made the unpleasant dress she had on. Then, soon after she had switched the focus of attention to the new wallpaper she was going to have in her dining room and kept her voice the same, he had got it. Whenever he considered he had done something particularly foolish, which wasn't often, he would cheer himself up by remembering that at least he'd never made a pass at Alcestis ("Smudger" to him in his thoughts).
He answered her question, or anyhow spoke while looking at her. "Just one or two odd things."
"One of them looks to me like a very odd thing indeed." She meant the bottle which, though wrapped in brown paper, was obviously either a bottle or an object shaped just like a bottle.
Forewarned of he knew not quite what, Jake put it down on a tiled coffee-table slightly to his rear and said to his wife, "Got you a little something."
"Ooh...." Brenda moved her spectacles from the top of her head to the region of her nose and uncovered the liqueur chocolates. "Oh, darling, you really shouldn't."
"Nonsense, everybody deserves a bit of a—"
"I mean you shouldn't, darling," said Brenda. Her eyes, unlike her friend's, were long from corner to corner and also bright, both in the intensity of their greenish colour and in the shining of their surfaces even through glass. Jake had never forgotten the first time they had been turned full on him: not where or when, just how they had looked. "You know, this is exactly what I'm not supposed to have because they're sugar and booze and I can't resist them. It's very sweet of you but honestly."