Last Landlady Read online

  The kind, industrious Mrs Brennan (who in the 1980s would become the only worker in a family of five) lived in one of the council houses along the road, beyond the woodland and towards the town, by which point the village was no longer picturesque but instead one of those hard, flat, transitional areas – neither country nor urban – in which England abounds although no notice is paid to them. The houses brandished TV aerials like antlers, and their pale lawns were decorated with ornamental lions and the like. A couple of men from these houses got a bus to the pub in the early evenings (there was a stop directly opposite, carved bathetically into the ancient woodland). In the public bar they would commune with other customers, a sparse assortment at this time, in the sidelong, semaphore way of men who would normally have nothing to say to each other: ‘all right, boy?’; ‘what you having then, mate?’; the brusque, courteous democracy of the true pub. Now this would be called ‘community’. Then, again, nobody thought that way. They simply did things.

  By around nine in the morning, the day had lurched further forwards away from me, into normality, as an erratic timpani of rattling and clinking struck up to punctuate Mrs Brennan’s banging and singing. This was ‘bottling up’: the boy who did the garden – silent of person, rampantly noisy in his work – hurling the empties into crates, tipping rubbish into sacks. Soon the boy would be seated in the saloon, still silent beneath his abundance of sulky dark hair, eating the enormous savoury breakfast provided by my grandmother (she adored hungry young men) while Mrs Brennan smiled indulgently (‘bless him’) from her stool at the bar, blowing on her coffee cup in between puffs on her fag. The pair were positioned like customers, but they were a facsimile only, understudies on a stage that had lost its half-lit mystery but was not yet transfigured by performance. I had no interest in the pub at that point. As was my privilege, of which even then I was aware, I retreated backstage into the squashy warm embrace of my grandmother's sitting room.

  In this other world, all was comfort and plenitude. There was nothing ‘cosy’ about it, in the peculiarly English sense of the word; it was not a room in which to ‘curl up’ and read detective stories or listen to Book at Bedtime: there was still that bite of worldliness in the air. But the tiny space was as warm as cashmere, the sofa was the softest I have ever sat on and the armchair, my grandmother’s seat, reclined with a prolonged luxurious thud. Beside it was the old-fashioned dial telephone – the receiver grimed with foundation cream – which she answered in a strange voice (‘Hay-lloh-oo-agh?’) at the extreme edge of her low, full, croaky, part-London, part-exotic, part-theatrical vibrato. A carved oak cabinet from the old pub held decanters of heavy cut glass, filled with the liquid toffee of good whisky and brandy; on the marble tables were silver cigarette boxes, silver dishes glistening with Quality Street and After Eights. Wedged somewhere inside the sofa were the two chihuahua dogs, whom I loved with a near-unbearable passion. One, Tom, was pale and poignantly pretty. The other, Ted, was brown, fat-necked and sickly, with beseeching eyes; my grandmother had chosen him because she knew that nobody would want him (she was tough, but not about things like that). They sat either side of me, compact little heated armrests with soft bug ears aloft, while I looked through Harpers & Queen and listened, in uncomprehending and slightly wary pleasure, to the elliptical conversations going on in the kitchen.

  This was a doll-size strip of room which, like the bar, could fit no more than three people. Even then it seemed to smell of the past, of lard and Brillo and a robust disdain for food hygiene. It had a larder hung with fly papers, a venomous old oven and a high window through which (such was the downward tilt of everything) one could watch passing pedestrian feet. The air was hazy with frying-pan heat – my grandmother believed in breakfast – and the back door was usually left open. It led to an alley, reeking of old beer, among which the flicking tail of a rat might be seen.

  The kitchen was where my grandmother spent the early mornings. The first cup of tea came out of a Teasmade by the side of her bed, then she padded downstairs with a dog under each arm. She stood and sipped and talked without cease to her cousin, Irene, a sharp little red-haired woman who lived with her at the pub. My grandmother was a divorcée of many years standing; Irene was a widow: the arrangement must have had a kind of inevitability about it. Irene and her husband, Stan, had also run a pub, so were family in both senses. They had married at the end of the war, when he was flush and flash with the profits of buying whisky from GIs then selling it to customers (according to my father, who always knew these things, the ‘unkoshered’ cash was kept in a secret drawer in Irene’s dressing table). I later learned that Stan had paid serious court to my grandmother before moving on to Irene. This was never mentioned. Somehow it was clear that it was also never forgotten: the relationship between the two women was composed of an unbreakable bond of jealousy and solidarity. At the time, this was again something that I drank in without understanding.

  To the muted sound of Radio 2 the two women would bustle about the kitchen, getting in each other’s way, drinking tea and trying to fit too-thick slices of bread under the grill (my grandmother’s toast always had black edges, like mourning cards). They wore ageing silky wraps smeared with make-up, and lumpy hairnets over tight-screwed curlers. Naturally they smoked. There were cigarette burns on every surface; the satin quilt on my grandmother’s bed was pierced with little brown-black holes. In her view tipped cigarettes were not the real thing, and she smoked the Player’s Navy Cut of her youth. However, Irene, in the interests of health, had recently moved on to the menthol brand of St Moritz, which remained in her mouth when she was coating her head in Nice’n Easy auburn dye.

  Sometimes my grandmother would sit on a stool in an untypically dramatic pose, holding a flannel to her forehead. She was never able to tolerate hangovers and, although these did not happen often, they were the focus of the morning. ‘There isn’t a cure,’ she would say, irritably, when Irene proffered an Alka-Seltzer fizzing in a glass, or a Bloody Mary dense with celery salt. ‘Take it away, Rene. There isn’t a cure.’

  The two women talked in a way that I thought of as adult, as if in code. The volume dropped away at salient moments. Their tone was snappish yet intimate. Long silences brimmed with meaning. Their subject matter was almost entirely the customers; they were not the kind of women who openly discussed their own lives. They knew everything about each other but colluded in concealment. For instance my grandmother, who could be almost angrily loyal, went along with the rehabilitation of the spiv Stan as ‘a businessman’. Irene, who both respected and resented my grandmother’s essential decency, was more complex in her self-restraint; she was a repository of unpredictable emotions, which flicked out with the controlled suddenness of a snake’s tongue. She was in fact what my grandmother, in another context, would have called ‘an old tab’ (tabby cat = catty), but because of who she was this was accepted.

  During their conversations they fell into roles. Invariably Irene made the opening move, a small flare of spite (it was tacitly acknowledged that this was her skill), which my grandmother would then modify, contradict or enlarge upon.

  ‘Ron brought that little tart in here again, then?’

  ‘Oh well, Rene.’ I sensed one of my grandmother’s worldly shrugs. ‘You know a girl can wrap a man like that round her finger. You know what a girl can do, if she’s got a bit of sense.’

  There was a pause, while Irene turned bacon rashers with a quick, jabbing fork. Then she said:

  ‘He’s a silly sod, though, eh?’

  ‘Oh, proper soppy.’

  When she pronounced judgments of that kind, my grandmother’s tone was fatalistic, as if she were stating something obvious to all but the insane; also something that could never be changed, an immutable fact of life. She revered men but held them in contempt for their sexual susceptibility, which in those days they were more flagrant and fearless about. She regarded women as superior in sense, and liked their company, but she always put men first. They were the one
s, the people who mattered. There was no gainsaying it. At the same time she would raise a metaphorical eyebrow, as if to say, Ridiculous, isn’t it?

  While she would always pronounce ‘you’ve got to have a man’ (if for instance my father dealt with her VAT), she was living proof of her belief that a woman, ‘if she’s got a bit of something about her’, could do whatever she chose. The pub was her creation, with Irene as chief handmaiden and a procession of barmaids as industrious train-bearers. It was a place made by women. My grandmother, one might say, was a feminist before the age of feminism (as were most of her close friends). If I had told her this she would have understood the idea, in so far as she cared to do so, but at the same time have dismissed it as irrelevant. ‘Um … well, I ran a good house, I suppose.’ She had done what she did and that was that.

  And she had done it, primarily, for men, because it was they who truly needed pubs. Women merely liked them. Years later she remarked to me that, in the early days of her landlady life, a few female customers would come and drink in the saloon bar unaccompanied by men – then extremely unusual – and had told her that they felt comfortable enough to do this because the pub was run by women. I responded with some modern stuff of the kind that my grandmother never dealt in. ‘Um … they were on the pick-up, I suppose.’

  She was a mass of apparent contradictions, but the strength of her personality always resolved them. And I always knew what she meant. As a child I didn’t literally know, but I grasped that she was dealing in ambiguities and I trusted her to pull it off. I was mesmerised by her, really. Children are attracted to certainty, and she possessed this quality more than anybody I have ever met. One day she and Irene were in the kitchen examining a photo of a taut-faced Marlene Dietrich in the paper. ‘Had a good lift, she has,’ Irene said. ‘Be nice to have that done, eh, Vi?’ My grandmother never responded to cattiness. ‘Never thought there was much wrong with my old kisser,’ she said blithely.

  Those kitchen conversations were tremulously beautiful to my ears. I understood very little, and indeed still wouldn’t understand everything. I simply loved the rhythms, the measured ripples of female wisdom. I loved the way in which character was both distilled – ‘well, he’s an old boy, isn’t he’ – and left mysterious. Although I am incapable of that idiom, it is ingrained in me: variations on my grandmother’s phrases still dance through my head whenever the modern world threatens to overwhelm with its lunacies, and put it firmly back in its place.

  So who were the people that these two women discussed, in that way of theirs, which was not exactly gossipy, more as if they had made a long study of human nature and sought daily, regretful, satisfying confirmation of their worst conclusions? The pub customers divided roughly into three sets, overlapping of course (including in their sexual encounters), of whom the third set provided the most conversational material.

  The first set comprised the local country people, who had used the pub for generations. Even as a child I felt comfortable with them, they were so comfortable with themselves and with their reason for being alive. (I feel the same way now. ‘Done any writing lately, girl? Good on you.’) They were ribald, wholesome even in their lusts, and they could drink anybody under the table (‘oh we had bushels of drink’). Like the Starkadders they burned with an extraordinary life force; the huge laughter of the men threw not just their heads, but their chest and shoulders, up towards the beams. They were all in some way related to each other – the odder, Urk-like members of the dynasties tended to drink elsewhere; pubs call with animal accuracy to their own kind – and between them they owned thousands of acres. They were also clever with money: skilled manipulators of EEC regulations, expert gamblers and shrewd card players. Essentially they were all farmers, but one of them was also a successful amateur jockey, while another was a butcher who would call my grandmother behind the counter (‘Come on, Miss Vi!’) to choose from his cuts of meat. Their eccentricity was unforced. Stories abounded of behaviour that was quite normal to them but left outsiders with mouths agape. For example during a dinner at one of their rambling, roistering houses, a guest who went upstairs in search of a loo was confronted by a dead pig in the bath. They were, ostensibly, completely different from my grandmother; yet in vitality, in extroversion, in their disdain for all that was circumscribed and petty, the country people resembled her closely. They were made on the grand scale and they filled the pub in every sense. Many years later I was approached by one of them around the paddock at Royal Ascot, where amid all the flummery he had been examining the horseflesh with an experienced eye. ‘Vi’s granddaughter,’ he said, as one who perceived not just my name badge but my true identity, which in some inexplicable way made my day.

  The second set of customers was ‘passing trade’. It was a running joke that when anyone unfamiliar walked in, the entire place stopped dead, as if everybody were playing statues. It was part of the pub’s charm, this clubbishness, although there were inevitably those who disliked it. One night a young man strode into the saloon bar wearing a black leather jacket, looking, as he thought, rather cool and sexy. ‘Oo’er,’ I heard my grandmother say, in one of her famous stage whispers. ‘Saucebox.’ And only God could help the courting couples who came for a nice quiet romantic drink. ‘Who are those dozy young buggers in that inglenook, Vi?’ one of the farmers would say (there was a general belief that remarks made in the public bar could not be heard in the saloon). ‘Not bought a bloody drink all night.’ The farmers missed nothing. ‘Well, I say that, about two hours ago he ordered a half …’ Halves were things that you poured on top of five-eighths-empty pints (‘Stick us a half in there,’ meaning fill it up again). Bought specifically, they were suspect.

  Occasionally what appeared to be passing trade was in fact somebody known to my grandmother, a person from the past who had come in to spring a lovely surprise upon her. Sometimes (not terribly often) she was indeed pleased to see whoever it was. Sometimes she had no idea who they were, a fact that she concealed with a fairly impressive faked ecstasy, before hissing for aid in one of her stage whispers. Sometimes she did not want to see the person at all. On one particular evening an old suitor came sidling into the pub, thinking to delight her with his presence; those who heard it never forgot the precise tone of her sotto voce ‘oh fuck’ as the aged dandy pranced towards her. When he left, a couple of hours later, he reversed his car into that of another customer and returned, laughing in an ill-judged way. ‘No, no, it’s quite all right,’ he said, to the seething car owner, ‘I’m a friend of Vi’s.’

  He was half-cut, of course, although probably the man whose car he pranged would have been too. Most people drove home over the limit. When the breathalyser was introduced, my grandmother – sensing trouble – abandoned her usual sports cars and bought a large Humber with which to transport customers to and from their homes. Then it became clear that not many of them were worried about the breathalyser. In the main they lived very close to the pub and could make the journey on autopilot. Nobody ever caused an accident, although my father, who regularly stopped for a drink on his way home from London, and occasionally became what he called ‘inveigled’, did once drive over a roundabout (as opposed to around it) and in so doing uprooted a sapling tree, which he found the next day underneath his Jensen Interceptor. He told the callow policeman who tracked him down that he had swerved to avoid a cat, and got away with it. This was not good, not to be condoned. But it was how it was.

  Prominent among the drink-drivers were the third set of customers, who came from the nearby town. On the whole they were well off, although not idle rich; even the retired among them carried an air of former industry, a knowledge of shop floors and ends that had not met. Most were very generous. Those who displayed the merest hint of carefulness were at the mercy of the farmers: ‘About time you bought a bloody drink, isn’t it, boy? You’ve been guzzling away …’ Some of the townspeople were publicans: always favoured. Some were ‘in the car trade’, or ‘the building trade’. One was ‘in s
acks’, a profitable industry, and would pay for a single light ale with a £20 note. One was ‘in tax’, and accordingly mistrusted. Another was ‘in antiques’, attended by a succession of brightly deferential young men with an eye to his Louis Quinze (much kitchen conversation about the fact that he dared not come out to his mother). Another, who inherited lot of money, would come in night after night, buying tumultuous rounds with much display of Rolex and American Express (both gold), until he had realised his subliminal aim of spending his way back to zero. He continued to haunt the pub, meekly accepting drinks, offering in return the provincial myth of his rise and fall. Yet another, a pleasant middle-aged man in slacks and steel-rimmed specs, the very image of reliable middle management, learned one day that his wife was having an affair, drove off in his Volvo and shot himself.

  Within this loose category of customer were subsets: for instance a gang of three who stood in the saloon bar (odd, for men), drank from special silver tankards (odd and twee), and were later revealed to be a homosexual couple plus an indeterminate other. A more elusive and glamorous group, adored by my grandmother, who had known them since they were ‘boys’, turned up on select Sundays in tight-belted denim (containing the loosening gut) and sports cars (roof down as soon as the temperature rose above fifteen degrees). For a time one of them drove a Ferrari, clearly the only thing on his mind and, he clearly hoped, on everybody else’s. They liked to congregate in the courtyard outside the front of the pub, where they could continue to stare lovingly at their low-slung vehicles; they carried an air of Silverstone and Marbella, and had school-of-Rod-Stewart girlfriends with whom they occasionally embarked upon slightly hysterical, short-lived marriages. They were also, essentially, sweet-natured and innocent; when I think of them now, I sense a lurking collection of Dinky cars.