Last Landlady Read online

  Morning trade … the crack of the door-latches was always a sound of promise, but this was an extraordinary testament to the optimism generated by pubs. So often it was unfulfilled. The stage had been perfectly prepared, but the show was reluctant to take wing. The very light was uncertain of its role: the pub demanded that it dimple and glow, but pragmatic day refused to give way: the soft electric gleam behind the counter had not yet spread through the bars. They were rooms, rather than rich little treasure boxes. The air was parched. The darkness held no mystery; the wedges of sun that sliced through it showed up worn patches of carpet, ash stains, wrinkles, the creep of steel-grey at the hair roots, all the imperfections and weaknesses that the pub – in its infinite knowing humanity – was there to forgive. The thing had not yet come together. Irene, perched on a stool behind the bar like a tough old parrot, smoked her St Moritz and rustled viciously at the Daily Express as time moved at a stately andante pace: in accordance with pub tradition the clock above the fireplace was kept about eight minutes fast, so the joy of seeing its hands move was tempered by the knowledge that they told a permanent lie. Victor, his black coffee thick with undissolved sugar crystals, sat on a companion stool at the saloon bar counter, smiling gamely at nothing, blowing smoke into the emptiness. My grandmother, in her role of impresario, would march in and out from backstage, carrying cheese and gherkins with the chihuahuas pattering at her heels. The show looked like a failure, killed at birth in fact, but she was undaunted. She would assess the scene with a cool eye, as if faintly disgusted by the failure of her public to do its bit, before demanding that the music (muzac really, a bold lapse of taste) be turned up and illusions created. In the sitting room I would watch from the window, with its sumptuously sagging velvet curtains and half-covering of soft peach chiffon. And slowly, one by one, the morning regulars would come up the road, looking towards the pub as if it were their sole destiny, yet at the same time affecting a kind of nonchalance, as if they had just happened to be passing and thought, why not?

  Poignant, this was. I knew it even then, although I did not know why. There were three morning customers in particular who occupied the settle in the public bar, in alliance and yet in solitude. A sad little woman with scanty permed hair who drank Double Diamond. To her left, a man with a pipe, defiant in his lack of charm. To her right, a man who communed with his pint and his Embassy as if they alone could comprehend his memories of years as a POW. The little woman smiled sweetly and humbly at everybody who passed, including the chihuahuas. She could wring five minutes’ worth of activity from asking if somebody was ‘all right’ (shifting in her seat and repositioning her Double Diamond before saying it; getting her eye in properly with the person before saying it; actually saying it – almost inaudibly, as it happened, but with the urgent mouth movements of a novice practitioner of sign language; saying it again, if there was the slightest doubt that she had been received the first time; smiling with vehement satisfaction at the reply of ‘Yes, fine’; waiting with terrible eagerness for the retaliatory ‘Are you all right?’ which occasionally failed to come; deploying ever more urgent sign language for the reply of ‘Oh, I’m all right!’; sighing and settling back in her seat; casting half-embarrassed smiles around the bar at a mission successfully accomplished; exchanging a deprecatory glance with the pipe-smoker, who would be staring at her as if she had gone temporarily mad; taking a long sip of Double Diamond in the self-conscious manner of one who had just correctly intercepted a starter question on University Challenge; winding down with a quietly agitated half-minute of glass adjustment, beer mat study and fidgeting her soft-soled shoes). She bought her round, taking her money from a purse full of Green Shield stamps, although in a gesture of grudging gallantry the pipe-smoker would go to the bar on her behalf. When it was his turn to pay he would say to her: ‘You having another one, then? You’ll be on the floor with them dogs,’ or some such thing, at which she would laugh in a bruised, brave, ‘hark at him’ way with anybody who caught her eye. When the ex-POW went to the bar he would command the attention of Irene, or whoever it might be, with a sharply mumbled: ‘Achtung!’ Back in his seat he might say: ‘What’s today? … Today’s Freitag.’ Other than that he barely spoke.

  What were these three people doing there? Drinking, one might say: these were the days before alcohol could be bought at every pit-stop. Drinking, of course. But drink and pubs are not the same thing. Co-dependent, but different. The butcher’s desire for alcohol was clothed in a ritual courtesy, a public dimension imposed by the public house. The pub was doing something more for the threesome on the settle than selling them beer; it was assuaging something more complicated than mere loneliness.

  Not that it brought pleasure, exactly. The proper pub is about far more than having a good time. It accommodates the miserable, the misfits, those who are in their seats at curtain up, having nothing in their lives to make them late: from the moment of waking, they are waiting for the moment of opening. By the fireplace in the public bar was a small table with its own stool. This was the domain of another morning regular, an old farmer with a fearsome face beneath his tweed cap, who would bang on the table with his stick when he wanted a drink. He was the only person who didn’t approach the counter. He hated everybody – although he eased off a little at the sight of my grandmother – and apparently hated being in the pub. ‘How much?’ was his response to every request for payment. ‘Can’t drink that, woman, it’s flat as a bloody pancake/got too much bloody head on it,’ was the usual reaction to his pint.

  Yet his dogged appearance every day was courageous. In he staggered, on brittle legs, roaring and spitting and, in his way, doing his bit. ‘Old sod,’ my grandmother would say, when Irene reported the latest complaint about the beer, but this was token. In her early years at the pub, she and the farmer had shared a telephone line. They went way back, to the time when the pub had been patronised only by country people, and she took him for all in all. The same thing with the threesome on the settle. ‘Poor old sods.’ She had a brisk compassion for the needy, never dirtied by the urge to patronise. So too did the livelier people who began to gladden the look of the place around midday: the exquisite mistress with the high grey chignon, giving out smiles like a film star meeting the England football team; her blazered paramour, offering drinks all round in a pantomime of manly nods and winks. With this smooth invasion, the tick-tocking strain of the morning began to ease. Irene would hop from her stool and pour Victor a Guinness, which he sipped with his habitual air of experienced discrimination. From the sitting room I would hear the discreet hum, punctuated by little bursts of adult laughter, signifying that the show was on the road. Now came the comfortable crunch of wheels on the car park tarmac, the generous swoop of Rovers and Jaguars. Now the morning regulars, arranged around the edges of the bar, became so many staring gargoyles. They had played their part, nevertheless: more than anybody, they proved the value of the pub, and by turning up when it would have been easier to stay cloistered at home in front of Crown Court, they earned its venial sanctuary.

  ‘No place like home when you’ve got nowhere else to go,’ my great-grandfather used to say. He had understood very well the not-quite-home essence of the pub. The morning regulars did not leave the house tricked out with paint or charm; unlike most of the customers, they had no public self to offer up for consumption. Yet they were still, by the mere fact of being out, not quite their private selves. Something was on display, however little that was. It is brave, really, to want to enter a public arena without any of the conventional armour. The sad-eyed woman who drank Double Diamond displayed all the quotidian valour of my grandmother, with none of the scented swagger to help her along. In a way that she would not have bothered or wanted to explain, my grandmother recognised this, and respected the woman accordingly.

  At 2.30 p.m. the pub closed, and even in summer the air hung dully. In the little sitting room, where velvet now muffled the windows, Irene and my grandmother ate their proper lunches – the b
ig meal of the day – while the chihuahuas crouched hopefully at their feet (‘Christ, Vi, don’t give Ted anything, his belly’ll burst,’ Irene would remark). Then the women retreated into immobility, corpse-like, their cream-covered faces surrounded by a halo of curlers, their only movements the languid stretch of hands towards cups of tea. They dozed as some unspeakable television programme, such as Love Boat, murmured in the background and flickered greenish-indigo in the dusk.

  Saturdays were different: livelier. Victor was in attendance, seated at the gatefold table, his cufflinks catching the light as he manhandled the Sporting Life. He had a Ladbrokes telephone account that they all used for their bets. This was natural to them, a natural component of pub life. So too were days at the races. My grandmother had gone to the Derby before the war; people went en masse from the old pub, as did so many when the race was run on a Wednesday and briefly stopped the nation in a collective, pub-like way. From the sixties onwards she favoured a day out at Royal Ascot, which in those days was purposeful, smart and wonderfully unlike the fancy dress party cum al fresco nightclub that it now resembles. Sometimes she went with my parents, sometimes in a minibus with a driver. One year, a minibus year around the time that I am describing, she and a few friends – Irene and Victor included – stopped off for a couple of drinks on the way back from the racecourse. There was a particular pub, somewhere near Slough, that she remembered with her characteristic astringent affection; in fact she had visited it with one of her suitors, the well-known boxer whose bruised eyes had regarded her with such adoration.

  Apparently the place retained its charm. Yet it was transfigured by the unnatural conviviality that arises when a pub is filled with customers who do not know each other but have all attended the same event. People at the bar jabbered hysterically about 20/1 wins, short-head losses, Lester Piggott, the Queen. Friendships were made, cards exchanged, rendezvous agreed and assuredly not kept. Meanwhile my grandmother’s party – a touch weary but still keeping its end up – had taken possession of a large table, which they bountifully shared with what at first seemed to be a smiling band of jolly, lairy, harmless cockneys, and were gradually revealed to be a smiling collection of serious London gangsters. Their true calling emerged, like sun with the dispersal of mist, as the supporting cast of innocent racegoers faded out of the pub and left it denuded, almost silent, with nothing to camouflage the unmistakable demeanour of these men. By then my grandmother’s party quite fancied leaving as well. However, the gangsters were the kind who didn’t let people do that. The pub grew quieter and quieter, the talk at the table more effortful and desultory, but the night, like Dorian Gray, remained horribly young. ‘Don’t be daft, you don’t want to go yet … what’re you having? Come on, put that away … don’t be daft … your money ain’t no good in here …’ Familiar pub talk – with a twist. From my grandmother’s telling of the story, what had bothered her most was this refusal to let her party buy a round. The breach of etiquette, the indebtedness, seemed especially heinous in such company. Eventually, after she had been winking crossly at him for about two hours, Victor managed to buy some champagne – ‘Go on then, feller, if you must’ – and once this was poured out, the landlord, thinking to hasten the evening to its longed-for conclusion, collected a long broom and began to sweep cautiously around the bar. It might have worked, but it didn’t. One of the gangsters put down his champagne (into which he had carefully mixed a very great deal of brandy), rose from his stool and walked over to the landlord. With his cigarette between his teeth he took hold of the broom, snapped it calmly in two and hurled both pieces through a closed window. ‘That’s fucking woman’s work,’ he said to the landlord, as one imparting a piece of vitally important advice.

  This incident, and the accompanying shatter of glass around the table, allowed my grandmother’s party to break the magnetic spell holding them to their seats at speed to the car park. I very much doubt that she was frightened. In all the time that I knew her she was never frightened of anything, and anyway she would have known that these men adhered to the gangster code – a brutish, sentimental variation on the pub code – that required them to respect ladies, and indeed old sorts like Victor.

  What perturbed her (because she lost her sense of humour when recalling the evening) was something harder to define, a kind of disrespect for this particular pub, which had been part of her legend, and with that for the whole concept of the ‘nice’ pub, the ‘good house’, which she herself represented. She probably also felt that the situation had been her fault, which it would have been. I could just imagine her sitting expansively at the table, dominating and bestowing herself, telling stories in her well-phrased, solipsistic way, conjuring the Slough pub in the old days, when it was run by a family (‘beautiful people’) and loved by the well-known boxer (‘Oh yes, we courted for a while, well I was a good looker then, you know’; ‘You still are my darling’; etc). The tough London men would have smiled at her in a rapt, glint-toothed manner, and all in all she would have greatly enjoyed holding them in her thrall. Few people liked an audience more than she. In fact she had been ‘showing orf’, as she called it, and in the end she had got what the gangsters would have called ‘her uppingtons’.

  I never actually heard Irene say, ‘Well it was you who got in with them, wasn’t it, Vi,’ but she might as well have done, because she would so obviously have been thinking it.

  Of course my grandmother, who covered life with strong brushstrokes, knew all about criminals. There were several in her pub, most of whom she treated with an impeccable guarded friendliness. One man went to jail, for reasons much whispered about in the kitchen (receiving, is my adult interpretation), and a year later returned to the pub with the same smile beneath fearful eyes. My grandmother was vaguely contemptuous of the legal system that had locked him up. ‘Poor old sod, he was just the one that got caught.’ This remark may have been obscurely aimed at Irene and the spiv husband – almost certainly Irene would have taken it that way – but it was also true that other pub customers did similar, or worse. When I look back I can pick out the apprehension in certain faces, the townsmen in supple leather whose largesse depended upon dodges and effrontery. In the kitchen there were subdued whisperings that I didn’t begin to understand – ‘He only rents that Jag, you know’; or ‘He put it all through the casino, didn’t he’; or ‘He did it in her name, I reckon’ – although as so often I caught something of what was meant, that such-and-such a person carried a weight of wary guilt beneath his bonhomie. It was the kind of behaviour that modern puritanism vilifies. The pub forgave it.

  It was human nature, after all, lax and imperfect and susceptible. My grandmother accepted it as such: c’était son métier. What she could not accept was conduct that transgressed against her code, such as brooms through windows. And nothing of that kind ever occurred in her establishment. A pub finds its level. She was vulnerable, in a way that a landlord would simply not have been – when all was said and done she was a small, middle-aged woman, with guard dogs the size of Toby jugs – but the threat of ‘trouble’ walking in remained existential. In some ineffable way my grandmother set standards as palpable as the strong brick walls of the bar. They did not preclude bad behaviour, but they frowned upon its display. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t displayed, but there was a knowledge that it should not have been.

  It can’t have been easy for her, embodying that code. Despite her bright confidence, her tough and elastic sense of self, she was surely aware that the pub, her own home after all, was an arena that absolutely anybody might enter; the edifice she had created was a mighty one but it was also a construct, built on faith, in which her customers had chosen to believe. It was a theatrical performance, an illusion that anybody, at any moment, could walk onstage and destroy. And there was – I now recall – a brief period, when the pub was patronised by a bunch of men who arrived on motorbikes, all smiles and ‘get one for the lady’, but importing a wayward, uneasy atmosphere, a shard of carelessness and
danger. Suddenly it seemed as if fragile little worlds, like that of the old threesome on the settle, could be shattered as easily as the painstakingly polished glasses above the counter. Which they could, in fact. Only a tacit respect for something impossible to define kept it all intact. The men did not stick around, so my grandmother must have won the battle of wills. She could not throw them out, but she could freeze them out. Not easy, as I say: this was her own house, but it was a public house, and balancing those two concepts – public versus house – was at the heart of her landlady’s gift.

  The threat of the motorbike men was very simple: there were too many of them. In ones or twos they would have been containable. It was a question of balance, as so often with pubs. Although my grandmother liked most of her customers (kitchen remarks notwithstanding), a few of them stood on the cusp of unacceptability, but as individuals they could be absorbed – just. She knew that her private judgments had to be weighed against the fact that the pub did not judge. And so – for instance – she smiled her welcome at a man whose family she had known for years, who one day killed his wife, and who returned to the pub after a sentence not much longer than that of the man who dealt in stolen goods (he had pleaded provocation). Quite soon he was flourishing a companion, an attractive woman whom he had met through a dating agency. He was liberated in every sense, wildly cheerful, his ebullience occasionally streaked with something jagged, like lightning in a sky. He troubled my grandmother. Morals were not her business, but they were when they equated to inappropriate pub conduct. Surely a wife-killer should not behave as this man did, drinking champagne like tap water, laughing uproariously then lapsing into sad, head-shaking memories of ‘when my wife died’? In the kitchen she would mutter over his bizarre chutzpah and worry away at the mentality of the woman who had assumed the role of his new companion and who, it was gradually established, knew his past (‘Um … kinky, I suppose’). She feared that customers would be put off by him, but of course everybody was deeply interested. Some years later – again at Ascot – my parents and I were transfixed by the sight of the wife-killer in high good humour, entertaining his lady friend in the Royal Enclosure. He was evicted quite quickly, not on account of being a murderer, but because he was wearing a borrowed badge.