Nor was there ever any. Never.
Mrs Poulter continued to come on deck, and nod and smile, her hands hidden in the sleeves of her cardigan, above the fuchsias and geraniums which attempted to disguise her houseboat. The sight, and the thought of it all, made Waldo sweat.
So he got to resent Mrs Poulter, and everyone else who made mysteries as the Peace declined. He began to hate the faces leering and blearing at him in the streets. He hated, in retrospect, Crankshaw and his priests. He hated his brother Arthur, although, or perhaps because, Arthur was the thread of continuity, and might even be the core of truth.
Some years later, when they got them, he hated Arthur’s dogs — though technically one of them was his own. If anyone, thinking of his good, had been interested enough to accuse Waldo Brown of neglecting his responsibilities to his fellow men, nobody could have accused the dogs of neglecting theirs: in being, in reminding at least one of their owners of the exasperation, the frustration of life, in farting and shitting under his nose, in setting beneath his feet traps of elastic flesh and electric fur, to say nothing of iron jaws, in chewing up bank notes, and far more precious, the sheets of thoughts which escaped from his mind — lost for ever. So the whole purpose of the dogs, together with Arthur, seemed to be to remind, constantly to remind.
Then there was the visit, more ominous still, because less expected, more oblique in execution, undoubtedly malicious in conception.
It was a couple of years after they got the dogs that the strange man pushed the gate which never quite fell down. It was a Sunday, Waldo would remember, the silence the heavier for insects. The thickset man came up the path. He was the colour and texture of certain vulgar but expensive bricks, and was wearing tucked into his open shirt one of those silk scarves which apparently serve no other purpose than to stop the hair from bursting out. If it had not been for his vigour, the burly stranger, who inclined towards the elderly by Waldo’s calculating, might have been described as fat. But with such purposefulness animating his aggressive limbs, solid was the more accurate word. Waldo had begun to envy the artificial gloss which streamed from the stranger’s kempt head, and the casual fit of his fashionable clothes, so that it came as a relief to spot one of those zips which might one day get stuck beyond retrieve in some public lavatory, and to realize that, with such a build, in a year or two, a stroke would probably strike his visitor down.
If visitor he were. And not some busybody of an unidentified colleague. Or blackmailer in search of a prey. Or or. Waldo racked his memory, and was racked.
He found himself by now in the dining-room, that dark sanctuary at the centre of the house, from the safety of which on several occasions he had enjoyed watching with Mother the antics of someone unwanted, Mrs Poulter for instance, roaming round by congested paths, snatched at by roses. Only now, with Mother gone, the game had lost some of its zest, he had forgotten some of the rules. The Peace, moreover, had so far receded he couldn’t help wishing the dogs hadn’t gone trailing after Arthur, that they might appear round the corner, and while Scruffy held the stranger up, Runt tear the seat out of his insolent pants.
For the man had begun to knock, and ask: “Anyone at home?” then growing braver, or showing off, to rattle, and shout: “Anyone in hiding?”
Waldo sincerely wished Mother had been there to deal with things, especially as a woman, more of a female, whether the stranger’s wife or not, was following him up the path. She walked with the quizzical ease of a certain type of expensive woman Waldo had never met, only smelt, and once touched in a bus. She walked smiling, less for any person, than for the world in general and herself. Which was foolish of her when you knew how the axe could fall.
“Perhaps you’ve made a mistake,” the woman said rather huskily, touching her hair, and looking around at nothing more than a summer afternoon.
She was wearing a lime-green dress of more than necessary, though diaphanous, material. Raised to her hair, her arm, exposing the dark shadow of its pit, was a slightly dusty brown. Under his dressing-gown, Waldo got the shivers.
“No, I tell you!” the man insisted.
He continued rattling the door-knob, till he left off to thwack a window-pane with the crook of one of his blunt fingers.
“I can’t believe anyone really lives in it,” said the woman in her inalterably husky voice.
Waldo was sure he had heard somewhere that huskiness of voice was an accompaniment of venereal disease. So however good the stranger might be having it with his wife or whore there was retribution to come. Waldo nearly bit his lip.
But much as he regretted the stranger’s presence and relationship, he thrilled to the evocations of the woman’s voice as she stood amongst the lived-out rosemary bushes, humming, smelling no doubt of something exotic, Amour de Paris out of the pierrot bottle, holding her head up to the light, which struck lime-coloured down, at her breasts, and into her indolent thighs. The result was he longed to catch that moment, if he could, not in its flesh, oh no, but its essence, or poetry, which had been eluding him all these years. The silver wire was working in him ferociously now.
At least the long cry in his throat grew watery and obscure. Mercifully it was choked at birth.
Again memory was taking a hand. He remembered it was that boy, that Johnny Haynes, they could have cut each other’s throats, telling him behind the dunny to watch out for hoarse-voiced men and women, they were supposed to be carriers of syph.
Waldo might have continued congratulating himself on this piece of practical information, if the man hadn’t just then shouted at the woman:
“But I know it is! It’s the place all right. I’d bet my own face. There’s that erection they had my old man stick on top because they wanted what Waldo’s dad used to call a ‘classical pediment’. I ask you!”
But the woman apparently did not care to be asked. She remained indifferent. Or ignorant.
It was Waldo who was moved, not by the materialization of Johnny Haynes, but by the motion of his own life, its continual fragmentation, even now, as Johnny, by his blow, broke it into a fresh mosaic. All sombre chunks, it seemed. Of an old blue-shanked man under his winter dressing-gown, which he wore because the house was dark and summer slow in penetrating.
So it was only natural he should continue hating Haynes, clopping like a stallion with his mare all round the house, staring vindictively at it from under his barbered eyebrows — what vanity — as though he intended to tear bits of the woodwork off. Waldo remembered reading some years earlier, before the demands of his own work had begun to prevent him following public affairs, that Johnny Haynes was going to the top, that he had become a member of parliament — if you could accept that sort of thing as the top — and been involved in some kind of shady business deal. Exonerated of course. But. You could tell. Only gangsters dressed their women like that.
Then, edging round the secure fortress of the dining-room, Waldo saw that Johnny had come to a stop in the yard. After kicking at the house once or twice, to bring it down, or relieve his frustration, the visitor appeared the victim of a sudden sentimental tremor.
“I would have been interested,” he grumbled, “to take a look at old Waldo. And the dill brother. The twin.”
Waldo had never hated Johnny Haynes so intensely as now, for trying to undermine his integrity in such seductive style, and when Johnny added: “I was never too sure about the twin; I think he wasn’t so loopy as they used to make out” — then Waldo knew he was justified.