Last Landlady Read online

  The older, more venerable townspeople came in the mornings. The men dressed like golf club presidents, or aldermen (one of them was indeed the local mayor). Their women were often very elegant. Hair lacquered and backcombed, as if by precision engineering. Stockings that were obviously stockings. False nails that occasionally fell into an ashtray. I recall one such woman, perched on a stool in the saloon bar, who had the high grey chignon of a former ballerina and the elocution of a Rank starlet; I was too young to understand how she could bear the company of a big, bluff, comfortable man whose navy blazer smelled of whisky and was scattered with dandruff, glinting festively in the pub daylight. They were not married. They lived in sin, in suburbia. Years later, when the man was dying, he severed every tie with his exquisite mistress and returned to his wife for absolution, whereupon the mistress crumbled with dramatic speed and took on the aspect of a bag lady.

  Dominant within the third set of customers were the youngish, urban regulars who arrived most evenings after nine o’clock. They looked very different from thirtysomethings nowadays, none of that aping of extreme youth. They all, men and women, had a trim sitcom smartness. The women wore neat blouses slung with gold chains; some of the men also wore gold chains – what my grandmother would have called ‘big ’uns’. Whereas the farmers drank beer and whisky, these people drank Bacardi and Coke, brandy and soda, or most popularly gin and slimline (gin when it was the norm, not the fashion); they were the two main sets of customers, and they rubbed along well together – this was my grandmother’s doing, really – although the farmers, very much alpha males, liked to fleece the townspeople at the Monday-night games of solo or brag. ‘Don’t play with them, boy, they’ll have your bloody arms off,’ was the warning from a sage old landowner to a sleek, suited man, who mused intelligently over each card – ‘I’ll keep that for future reference’ – as his opponents moved in to fill their poachers’ pockets.

  The townspeople were frequently called to the telephone in the sitting room. Sometimes I was the person who had to go and find them. I once asked a man to go to the phone, thinking that he must be Mr X because he had his hand discreetly pushed up the jacket of the woman I knew to be Mrs X. This time the smiles were half-sly, half-embarrassed, but they did not falter.

  Innately normal in their conversation and tastes, nonetheless these people inhabited a world of soap opera hysteria. It was as though they sought out melodrama – made it happen – as a constant act of rebellion against their Daily Mail and Marks & Spencer (St Michael) lives. Usually this took the tried and trusted form of adultery, played out half-publicly despite the reverence for concealment – car keys were seen to be thrown into ashtrays – and sometimes with an added extra, such as sleeping with two members of the same family. Such behaviour was in the scheme of things. Any damage done was absorbed into the next few drinks. However, there was one woman, thin as a child, whose life plays out in my memory like a series of Hogarthian tableaux. She was married to a well-to-do businessman, a womaniser but not with any especial intent. Although she drank gin like it was going out of fashion, she was immaculate and good-natured; nevertheless, it came to the point where the husband, for reasons much whispered about, had had enough. Their divorce felt like a great rupture in the natural, acceptably flawed order. This pair had looked so twinned, with their wide starched collars and their glasses glistening with clean iced liquid; without the protection of ritual, the façade of a marriage in which certain things are understood and accepted, what might be unleashed? Plenty, as it happened. The woman took up with a bisexual man (said to run a local brothel) and had a baby. A couple of years after their wedding, the groom’s boyfriend set fire to the marital home. The conflagration was blamed on the couple’s toddler son. By this time the woman was drinking white wine, which in terms of sheer quantities seemed somehow worse than gin, and her huge lemur eyes had become both sad and unnerving (sitting quietly on the settle, good-natured still, she nonetheless shimmered with the tragicomic unpredictability of the drunkard). She was dead at fifty: one of those people who cannot rest until absolute destruction has been achieved. Obviously she would have done better never to visit any pub at all. Given that this was not going to happen, my grandmother’s pub was probably her best option, something like a refuge.

  It was understandable, therefore, that the third set of customers should provide most of the subject matter for the kitchen chats.

  In between the sounds of sizzling oil and banging plates, sentences would float through the door to the sitting room.

  ‘She was properly gorn last night, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Oh yes. She’d been at it all day. And she gets nasty, in drink.’

  A pause.

  ‘Fancy someone like that having a baby, eh, Vi.’

  ‘Um.’ My grandmother could be heard opening the back door. ‘That’ll only get gin out of those tits.’

  ‘I’m not sure Colin didn’t go orf with her mum, you know.’

  ‘Oh well—’ (comfortably) ‘—she’s a real tart, the mum.’

  Or:

  ‘I tell you what, Vi, I don't know how Sandra puts up with old Geoff, drive you mad, wouldn't he.’

  ‘Coo hell. Wants a stick of dynamite up him.’

  Or:

  ‘You got caught, didn’t you, Vi?’

  Sometimes I could sense that a pause was my grandmother’s way of wielding her power. Eventually, in a deliberately vague voice, she would concede: ‘How do you mean, Rene?’

  ‘I saw you got caught. Old what’s her name – old Frances! Showing you her photos, wasn’t she? I saw you there with her, she’d got you holed up in a corner.’

  ‘Um …’

  Bang, sizzle, bang. By my side the little dogs sighed and dreamed.

  ‘What was it, her bloody honeymoon photos?’

  Sometimes, by some means, I would catch on to whatever they were talking about: in this case I recalled that one of the old townsmen, named Eric, red and jolly and not unlike a bald Mr Punch, had recently married a woman named Frances, rather posh, as some of the customers were, and, like her husband, old and jolly. This marriage amazed me, of course, although I knew that I was wrong to think that way (‘It’s not only for young ’uns, you know’).

  What I also recalled, which I intuited would be relevant to this conversation, was an exchange some months earlier in which my grandmother had suggested, in her desultory way, that Eric was ‘after’ Irene. ‘I reckon he’s got his eye on you.’ Irene had exploded quietly: ‘Oh no, Vi, I couldn’t fancy him. Ooh no, his old mouth and all.’ ‘Um … no, I know. Course, some women don’t worry do they, they're not fussy …’ She trailed off, as usual when contemplating the mystery of human nature. Then, voice in neutral: ‘He’s got a few bob.’

  Now Irene was soliloquising: ‘Well, old Frances didn’t care about what he looked like, did she? Course he’s got plenty, I remember you saying, got a nice house hasn’t he, had a bit built on, didn't he, billiard room I reckon he said, bloody ridiculous but there you are, yes. I suppose she knew what she was doing …’ The note of rage that always plucked at her remarks was well and truly dominant. ‘Where’d they go, then, Madeira, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t have thought there was much to photograph there, a bit of sea, well we know what sea looks like …’

  There was a brief pause, then my grandmother said decisively: ‘I never said they were honeymoon photos, Rene. They weren’t honeymoon photos.’

  ‘Eh?’

  There was the sound of a cup clinking in its saucer, marking a deliberate shift in the atmosphere. In a suddenly confiding tone my grandmother said: ‘Tell you what though, they must be a right old pair, those two. I suppose that’s how they got together, they’re both sexy. Well, course, it’s never the ones you think.’

  ‘Eh? How do you mean?’ Irene's voice was hoarse with intensity.

  ‘She was only bloody showing me … you know, what she’d taken of him! Standing in the kitchen, he was. The kitchen! Hope there weren’t any knives about …
I’m sure I don’t know why she wanted me to see. Showing orf, I suppose.’

  ‘Showing off?’

  ‘Well, you know, that they were still at it, type thing.’

  A monumental clattering of the grill pan served to express Irene’s ineffable emotions. ‘Well, I’m sorry, Vi, but I’ve never heard the like. I mean, if they were young and, you know, nice – though why you’d want to do that, whatever for … But what a bloody liberty! Showing them to you!’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘I mean, whatever did you … No, that’s what I can’t get over, why she thinks you’d want to see him with nothing on … Him! I should have told her where she could stuff it …’ The conversation had moved way beyond an appreciation of double entendres. ‘Christ, you could chuck ’em out, nearly, for that …’

  ‘Now don’t be daft, Rene. They’re good customers.’

  ‘Good and bloody dirty.’

  ‘No harm in it, is there? If that’s what they want to do …’

  A warning note had entered my grandmother’s voice; again this was an obscure exertion of power. Then, after another short silence, she relented.

  ‘Mind you. It wasn’t much, his old thing.’

  After a scuffling outburst of laughter the voices were definitively lowered, as if walls truly did have ears, and rose again only for a polite, innocuous remark that seemed to negate the previous conversation.

  ‘Cup of rubbish, Rene?’

  Rubbish was what my grandmother called Nescafé. Mostly the women drank gunpowder-strength coffee made in a huge percolator, but the palaver of filters was sometimes too much for them.

  ‘Go on then, Vi.’

  Oddly enough, my grandmother was herself something of a nudist. Some years later, at my parents’ house, she wandered into the kitchen wearing only her anklet on her way to find a bath towel. Drinking tea at the table was a man who had come to do some building work. As a member of one of the farming families, he knew my grandmother very well from the pub, and he was a gentleman. ‘Morning Violet,’ he said, before returning to his Racing Post.

  This nudism was, of course, nothing to do with sex. She was uninhibited, but she was never lewd. The private photoshoots of the old newlyweds – those sort of kicks, giggly and secretive but also seeking an audience – were not her style. I once asked her if she had enjoyed a particular night at the theatre, a revue show starring Mickey Rooney (she loved Hollywood), and she gave one of her slow, smiling, sorrowing shrugs. ‘Um … Everything’s here, you know’ (pointing to her trouser zip). Max Miller, though … she had a passion for him. She had one of his concerts on an LP, a gift from her bank manager. Max Miller did innuendo like nobody else (‘Cockfosters, lady? Go on, make something of that …’) but with a quality that was utterly sane and healthy, as if shot through with the ozone of his native Brighton; like my grandmother he was louche but not prurient. Like her he celebrated and embraced human frailty with a warm cackle and a raised glass. The English used to be that way, robust and rich of blood; now, not so much.

  My grandmother, who at the old pub had lent her black velvet evening dresses to the local homosexual couple, minded nothing about sex as long as people didn’t make a display of themselves. Unnecessary, she thought, in a pub. Canoodling couples she hated. ‘Oh, we’ve all done that,’ she would say, actually shoving her way between them. ‘We’ve all had abortions!’ She was given to remarks of that airily unexplained kind. Respecting her code as I did, I would never have asked what she meant by them.

  For although I am nostalgic for her – something she would have liked but not really understood – I have no desire to research her. I simply present her, as she presented herself to me, as I remember her at the pub.

  *

  In the school holidays, while waiting for my mother (who visited the pub regularly but as family; she was not a pub person), I went on errands to ‘the shop’, a tiny general store at the end of the village road, where the woodland cast its heavy shadows. The woman who ran it was eccentric. She kept the place locked until a customer was pressing their face against the window. My grandmother’s lists – in her dreadful handwriting, the product of her non-schooling – were magnificent and to me slightly frightening: 3 or 4 BIG lemons. Vim. Pickle. Big Jar Gerkins. Pears SOFT. Anything nice. I would sometimes see Irene examining my offerings with narrow eyes, testing a pear for ripeness, finding it inadequate.

  On school days my grandmother would drive me in the MG, or sometimes Victor would do so. In so far as she had one, he was her man.

  Their long affair had begun during the war, when she had returned to her favoured status of dauphine – queen in all but name – at the old pub. There Victor encountered her, gleaming behind the bar: her hair, like her floor-length dresses, raven-black. Victor had a wife, to whom he quite literally never spoke, and as soon as he was free he offered marriage to my grandmother, also newly divorced. She refused (‘never again’). This was the irony: for all her repetition of ‘you’ve got to have a man’, her own life was independent. She and Victor remained together, however, despite numerous other suitors including a headmaster, a well-known boxer, a handsome farmer from a neighbouring village who later hanged himself, the captain of a ship on which she took a cruise, and an impresario named Nat Tennens, who owned the Kilburn Empire. He was very rich. She could have given up work and shopped at Harrods every day. ‘I took him to the Licensed Victuallers’ ball. Oh, he was mad after me … I told him I was married.’ It was true, in a way: she was married to the pub.

  Experience had honed my grandmother’s natural gift for cutting to the heart of character and situation. ‘Well, she’s like a tart, isn’t she,’ or, ‘He doesn’t know what time of day it is,’ or, ‘Course, she’s got all the money,’ or, ‘Oh yes, Uncle Arthur, he carried on with his niece, but he was lovely,’ or – a favoured diagnosis, used of anybody who talked too much or laughed too loudly: ‘Nerves.’ She did the same for people in books and films. ‘That’s told you, mate,’ I once overheard her say to the television screen, as she neared the end of a solitary viewing of Onegin, and watched Tatiana show the door to the now supplicant Eugene. These judgments left no room for ambivalence, but they always hit the mark. So, had she been discussing herself in the kitchen, with the same considered dispassion that she showed towards everybody else, she would undoubtedly have said: ‘Well, she never really wanted anyone, did she.’

  At the time I am describing, Victor’s role in my grandmother’s life was indeterminate. He was affable, and spry as a show dog, even as he ate the sweating triangles of the bacon sandwich served to him in the morning. For some reason I thought him slightly silly. He was displaced, no doubt, hanging around this little village. He lived nearby, was well-to-do, having inherited some business or other that he later sold, but like my grandmother he was London-born and carried an air of the city; also of what my father called ‘razzmatazz’. He had been a jazz guitarist and had played with Louis Armstrong – ‘Lewis’ – on a tour of England. He could wander down Denmark Street and be glad-handed by fellow musicians; could float backstage and be welcomed by bandleaders like Bert Ambrose. He knew people such as Harry Lewis, who had played in the Ambrose orchestra and married Vera Lynn. This was the kind of thing that my grandmother liked about Victor, and that he liked to talk about, although he maintained a certain elegant reticence. I had a place at ballet school, which meant that he would tell me about all about his brother, who had been a champion dancer alongside the young Lew Grade (‘you know, the telly feller’), and about the people he and my grandmother had ‘seen’: Hutch, Beatrice Lillie, Pearl Bailey, Danny Kaye (such a sell-out sensation that they had watched him standing at the back of the theatre, next to Harry and Vera). These names meant nothing to me, although I was keen on hearing about Fonteyn and Nureyev. Nevertheless, Victor’s papery skin and ‘Palladium suits’ (my father again) were a bit too much for me. At this point I could only deal with adultness when I was observing it from a protected position.

  Victor sp
ent pub mornings at a dapper loose end: rustling the paper, smoking with urbane dedication, walking a hundred yards up the road with Tom (not Ted) twinkling beside him on a diamanté-spangled lead. Meanwhile at around ten my grandmother – sallow-faced, silk scarf over her curlers – would emerge into the bar. With the air of concentration that made one slightly wary, she prepared for opening while I watched from my place on one of the settles. She was framed like a painting by the shelf of glasses overhead and the walls to either side, and her movements were dashing, efficient, superbly womanly. She would take down the bottles that hung behind the bar, unscrew the optics and top up the contents through a funnel – Gordon’s, Bells, Teacher’s, Courvoisier, Beefeater (not that anyone ever drank Beefeater) – as a thin, spirituous smell rose into the air like a spell. Then she would cut up slices of lemon, spear cherries, tip bags of sour coppers into the huge till. Her impatient hand rubbed a pad of Duraglit over the special tankards and wiped an old dishcloth around the ashtrays, which remained damp throughout the mornings. The bar was still grey at this point, its spark unlit.

  When she had applied her red lipstick, the only point of colour in the bar, she pulled back the heavy bolts on the pub doors. At the very moment of opening, the local butcher would enter in his apron.

  Civilly, with an air of mild surprise at his own request, he would ask for a whisky. ‘Large one, Vi, while you’re there.’

  Then he would have another double, meanwhile conversing about the weather or some such topic.

  Then he would have another. Then – it was by now about 11 a.m. – he would produce an empty half-bottle from his apron pocket, and pleasantly ask my grandmother to fill it with Teacher’s. This she did, as between them the atmosphere remained that of a garden tea party. Finally the butcher would walk, with a minimally lurching gait, out of the pub, and up towards the road.

  Once, after this performance, Irene had ventured the comment: ‘Drunken old bugger.’ It had not gone down well with my grandmother. The butcher, in her view, adhered to the code of the pub: he was an entirely gentlemanly alcoholic, and criticism was therefore entirely out of place.