Last Landlady Read online

  Another man, fairly steeped in Aramis, was said to be an arms dealer. I only knew this much later. The kitchen whispers about him were very quiet. There was none of the appalled levity with which they discussed a pretty girl, ex-wife of one of the regulars, who was rumoured to work as a prostitute in a Mayfair hotel; or indeed the wife-killer, who was at least a known criminal quantity, and had served his time. An arms dealer was altogether different, casting a shadow too deep for accommodation, like that of a noose against a prison wall. Again, my grandmother was not comfortable. I can recall a preoccupied stillness when the man put his arm round her. But he rubbed her shoulder fondly and paid for his drinks – lots of them – so what was she to do? He had a saturnine face, crunched into watchful smiles, and a big body that women seemed to like. A rather flash, lean girlfriend would occasionally zoom up in her TR7 and stake her claim. More usually the man was surrounded by a harem of housewives, flirting with him rather anxiously; later I learned that a couple of babies, raised as legitimate, were in fact his; perhaps the husbands didn’t dare to say anything. Looking back, I think they were wise. I can see him now, a man whose appearance was just this side of respectable: huge, swarthy head bent to avoid the beams, eyes dark and hollow, hands like implements around a long glass of Bacardi and a female breast. I can feel the danger of him. One of his associates, an insignificant type occasionally seen in the pub, took the rap and went to jail on his account, then emerged to buy a nearby manor house the size of a small stately home. The man himself died quite young.

  Sundays at the pub were not days of rest – they did not exist, except when my grandmother escaped to the south of France – but they were her retreat from people of that kind. She asserted her own values, secular and sacred. When afternoon closing time came (‘P.O.!’ she would say gaily from the window, meaning piss off, as the customers lurched across the car park), there was no post-lunch submergence into the sitting room. Instead my grandmother took over her saloon bar, covered a couple of the wooden tables with a thick cloth and set up a card school. I can’t have spent so many Sundays at the pub, but for some reason this is one of my strongest memories. Crack, crack, went the door latch, a sound of joyful conspiracy at this hour, and into the plush silence came women of my grandmother’s rich vintage: heads tilted, eyes bird-bright, carrying their years not as burdens, but like suitcases on a still fascinating journey. One, pungent with charm and self-mockery, had learned to fly a plane and joined the ATA during the war. The others were sisters, May and Margot, both pub women. Margot had been walking back to her establishment after an air raid, and from the top of the road had watched a last stray bomb – an afterthought, as it were – fall straight onto the pub, killing her husband and mother. But she was jolly now, full of the pub’s quotidian valour. ‘Hallo, Vi, darling!’ she exclaimed as she waddled in, arms outstretched, her pink scalp visible beneath the Victorian-doll waves of her hair. ‘Oh your hair’s beautiful, Marg.’ Margot and her sister had dry carmine lips and puffed, floury cheeks. They wore close-fitting dresses in heavy textured stuff, the kind of material no longer seen, and court shoes gamely shoehorned onto plump feet. The ATA lady wore rakish trouser suits. ‘Don’t you look lovely, darling!’ ‘Don’t you.’ From their gold-clasped handbags they proffered pound notes for the kitty, which my grandmother would change at the till.

  In the soft maroon light the women played hand after hand of solo. This was the jazzed-up form of bridge that they favoured, with an opaque terminology – misère, misère ouvert (‘mizzair of air’, as they pronounced it), abondance, royal abundance – which I prided myself on understanding. Victor was usually there, a solitary male presence, adding a courtly zest to proceedings. He would play a hand or two; people took it in turn to sit out, nursing whichever of the dogs was not asleep on my grandmother. The visitors were extremely kind to me, especially when I handed round tea and cake in the dark blue-and-gilt Royal Albert (no alcohol was taken). But this was an adult occasion, and from my stool just inside the fireplace I simply breathed it all in.

  The traditions of solo were fiercely revered. There was, for instance, a special shuffle. Unorthodoxy was frowned upon – ‘What ever did you go misère for, with that hand?’ – as was the least lapse in attention. ‘What the bloody hell did you go and lead that spade for? You knew she didn’t have any.’ ‘How did I know that?’ ‘Well I bloody knew, I suppose I was paying attention.’ The worst sin was ‘revoking’: not following suit. ‘You revoked!’ Not that these women ever revoked (that was me, twenty years later). My grandmother used certain phrases when she played cards, sincerely but to droll comedic purpose. ‘Coo, hang,’ she would say, when she picked up a bad hand, and ‘You can sod orf,’ when she played a two, and ‘Oo-er’, when somebody played a trump. The game was deeply serious, but as a ritual. Post-mortems were conducted after each hand, sometimes with a degree of rancour instilled by Irene, but this meant little. What signified was a shared sensibility. Again there was nothing elegiac in the atmosphere; these people were too engaged with the present for that. They conjured memories in a spirit of self-affirmation, and buoyed themselves with a sense of lives fully lived: then and now, then as now.

  ‘Do you remember that pub we used to go to in London? Jack Straw’s, the Swiss, the York Minster? … That pub near Slough, where that lovely boxer went drinking, where we got tangled up with all those bloody villains?’ (thus the rogue evening was nullified) … ‘That pub round this way, old Frank’s, you know, who was after Vi?’ ‘Oh Frank, oh. He was a lovely feller. Oh tsk, I should love to see him again’ … ‘You’ll have to dig him up if you want to see him, Vi … You missed your chance there …’

  Laughter, warm rippling cascades of it, like the generous trickle of spirits into a glass. Frank was under the ground, and they were sorry about that, but they were still above it, in all their vigour: the landladies and their friends, enjoying a hand of solo and a bit of good company, celebrating the human urge towards pleasure. This was the pub code, all right. From my place inside the stone fire I entertained thoughts that were treacherous, observing the split seam beneath Margot’s armpit that crept further open with every mouthful of cake, the weary creases in Victor’s hitherto impeccable suit, the clownish black line of the ATA lady’s artificial eyebrows; and I wondered how they kept going with their rhythmic, throaty jokes when part of them (I could see it) longed for the enveloping dressing gown and the television screen. I was tired myself. I was finding it hard to hide the fact. But these people did, and how I admired them! Even in this out-of-hours gathering the women were putting on a show: for themselves, for the man with his head inclined attentively towards them, for each other. They all knew that life dropped bombs, but what went on in their dark hours they kept to themselves, because what made life bearable was the show, the façade; not the same thing as shallowness.

  The women would have a drink after opening. Naturally. The plate of cheese would come out of the larder with certain Sunday embellishments, perhaps olives from Harrods, which the ATA lady would examine as if with a wink. Like my grandmother, she could make every moment a priceless little nugget of fun. ‘Shall we drown a couple of those in a gin and French, Vi?’ Magic words. The modishness of gin today would have amused my grandmother: she knew that it was more important than that. Its thick translucence was the taste of life to her – melancholy, buoyancy – and the very idea of gin and French represented all about life that she loved: it was Wheeler’s and Sheekey’s and pools of city light; it was the moment in a day when the sky began to turn navy and time stood upon a brink; it was the rich red smear on a brittle glass, a dark piano played in a dusky room, Gershwin and Bix Beiderbecke and Dinah Washington. It was pleasure – an acute liver-deep sharpness, followed by a spread into warmth – for which a price was worth paying; indeed the price, the aftermath, was part of the pleasure.

  My grandmother made a martini in her own way, so strong that it tasted only of strength. It was, she averred – again in her own way, which admitted of
no dissent – the most beautiful drink known to man. ‘Hope I die with one in my hand.’ Both she and the ATA lady took their first sip with their eyes closed, in reverence.

  The weekday transition into evening opening was entirely different, and from my position on the sofa I saw the effort with which it was made. It was the only time that I was aware of my grandmother’s mortality, when she trudged up the stairs with her back bent and a cup of tea rattling on its saucer in her hand. The doll’s house staircase lay behind a wooden door in the sitting room. The landing – a white stone tunnel, with a slanted ceiling and floorboards that seemed to bend beneath one’s feet – led to two bedrooms and an enormous bathroom; very little of this had existed when my grandmother took over the pub. The space that the bathroom now occupied had been a giant hole above the sitting room, where the ceiling had reached up to the roof. That was how basic the pub had been when she first went there, and how tough she had been not to be daunted by this alien rural place, but instead to fill it with her robust urban soul. The bathroom, for instance … what a bathroom she made for herself, on top of the ancient black beams! Like her it was luxurious, casually grand and unworried by bourgeois considerations: thickly carpeted and marbled, heady and humid from the airing cupboard, sweet with the smell of sodden soap and Gordon Moore toothpaste (magenta in colour, bought from Harrods). Tiny colourless spiders lived in every cracked corner, and danced in the bath every morning.

  Depending on her mood, I might sit on my grandmother’s satin bedspread – a deep rose colour, with pale, worn seams – and watch her making-up at her dressing table. Wonderful she looked, a businesslike enchantress in the relaxing gloom, surrounded by the paraphernalia of female transformation: tarnished silver brushes, heavy gold bracelets that she would push up on to arms as shiny as snakeskin. I frankly deified her at those times. She was nearly sixty but she was still bold, still worth looking at. Something of the essence of glamour had settled itself inside her. She rubbed and jabbed at her supple olive face while a Player’s leaked tar into an ashtray. Everything about my grandmother was made of a richer material than those of today – all that she wore, all that surrounded her was silken or satiny or iridescent or prismatic, substantial and dense and pierced with her life-force – she belonged to a world before the matte, the neutral, the greige and the minimalist. She was Harrods in the days when one walked in sumptuous silence on green patterned carpet, Selfridges in the days when one lunched in the stately high-ceilinged Orchard restaurant; she was life in the days when it was lived; the world to which she belonged was already passing, but with what admirable assurance she put the new one in its place!

  Downstairs Irene, whose red waves had at last sprung angrily free of their curlers, would be readying the pub for opening. Although the women were primed for this second performance, they were also oddly resistant; obliged though they were to unlatch the doors, they almost always exerted the power not to do so, reclaiming a few precious autonomous minutes during which they behaved in a quite extraordinary manner, like truanting schoolgirls. It was an evening thing, to do with the lights. By six these should have been switched on. But the pub remained defiantly dark, disguising itself (inn sign notwithstanding) as a shadowy old house by the side of the road. Both women would stand at a window – Irene in the sitting room, my grandmother in her bedroom – and watch who was approaching the pub. As in the morning, the first customer usually came on foot, their arrival timed precisely for six. If it was the wrong person, the sort of person who made punctuality into something irritating and a bit pitiable, the lights would not go on. The women would hiss up and down the stairs at each other – ‘It’s old Glyn!’; ‘Don’t open up, Rene. Let him P.O.!’ – and Irene would shield herself behind the sitting-room curtains. ‘Has he gorn, Rene?’ ‘Hang on – he's hanging about … Right, he's gone.’ ‘Greedy old sod, I’m not opening up for him.’

  How the customers put up with this, I have no idea, but they sort of loved it. Their power came from the fact that they knew exactly what was happening, and could see the dark female shapes peering and hiding at the windows. Again the whole performance was part of my grandmother’s landlady legend. Ten minutes later old Glyn, or old Pete, or old Clifford would be back, making his way along the road in a haze of hope, already mentally tasting his first sip of pint, all the more sublime for its deferral.

  Then the evening would begin. Slowly, at the start. I would hear the arrhythmic clicks of the door latches and the forced, halting conversation (‘All right?’ ‘Not too bad’; or, when the customer was of the waggish variety: ‘Not three bad’). This was the hour of the pub nuisance, such as the man who, when asked how he was – not that anybody wanted details – would eye the questioner sincerely and explain, with an air of jocund pedantry, that his day had been marred by a ‘traumatic experience’, which he would then describe.

  The early evening might also attract a brighter breed, however: the man (it was always a man) who was on his way home from work, and who sought a calm, civilised, pint-enhanced breathing space. He could have had this drink at home, but the whole point was to have it at a pub. My father did this regularly. He and his suited kind brought in a stimulating air of elsewhere, of a day spent in taxing but satisfying business, of relaxation earned. As I now know, there is no taste like that of the first drink after a proper day’s work, the absolute sensuality with which alcohol pierces sobriety. The second drink is different altogether: a delightful continuation, imparting a sense of increase, of thickening and spreading; the third is like the second, except more so; then things start to change. Usually (not always) one drink was enough for my father. He went home, his state pleasantly altered. It was something that only pubs can do.

  By that time, the chief barmaid, Marian, would have arrived. She was a splendid Valkyrie dressed by Miss Selfridge, a single mother who lived with her baby in a caravan and whom I rather worshipped. My grandmother thought the world of her. ‘Smashing girl.’ Marian would take up her stance behind the counter, Benson & Hedges between two long fingers, bending this way and that to pull a pint or push a glass against an optic. She stood framed, dispenser of favours and recipient of admiration: a ‘proper’ barmaid, in my grandmother’s estimation, who could angle a glass beneath the pump and achieve the perfect three-quarter inch of clean white head. The remarks that were made to her – ‘Two large ones, girl. Nothing personal’ – would today lead to a lawsuit, but in those days were delivered almost in a spirit of duty, as part of the role in which men were then cast. Marian fenced with them all amiably, wryly, her eyes withdrawn behind their yashmak of cigarette smoke. One of her suitors was the man who went to jail for the arms dealer. He sat at the bar, full of his secrets, with apparently nothing on his mind beyond the conquest of Marian. The intensity of his gaze upon her was par for the course; nevertheless, my grandmother was on the alert to any customer who crossed the indefinable, yet to her perfectly clear, line between male silliness and male liberty-taking. ‘Would you like it if some feller spoke to your old woman like that?’ she once snapped. The man in question subsided, just like the head on a pint. I never saw anybody summon the guts to talk back to my grandmother.

  Having stood behind a bar from the age of fifteen, she knew the peculiar position in which the barmaid was placed, protected yet vulnerable, in command yet subservient: the very word serve, as in serving a customer, implied low status. Not that my grandmother had ever been so exposed. As landlady (before that as landlord’s daughter) she and the pub were an indissoluble entity. From her high-priestess position behind the counter she would address any unfamiliar man as ‘sir’, flourishing the word like a posy – ‘Evening, sir’; ‘Cold old night, sir’; ‘Now what can I get you, sir?’ – but she said it with an easy, emphatic, stagey courtesy that made of deference something dominant: the man thus addressed was somehow turned into the supplicant.

  By the time that I am describing, her appearances behind the bar had acquired the air of a star actress taking a brief cameo role. Mo
re usually it was Irene (her eyes occasionally narrowing in the direction of my grandmother’s stool) who lifted the hatch and ‘went round’, although supplementary to Marian was a second girl, Aileen, who worked three nights a week. She was full-figured and supremely efficient, apparently all set up to be a proper barmaid, but her dark eyes glowered at the customers beneath their plucked brows; one could imagine her face as the photofit of a suspected murderess. ‘Go on girl, crack a smile,’ the farmers would say. ‘Look, she’s got teeth, I knew they were in there.’ Aileen featured quite regularly in the kitchen conversations, although not as often as she would later do. It was suspected at first that her ill temper derived from hunger – she had confessed that she was ‘doing Slimfast’, a regime of diet drinks – but she remained so substantial that it was decided, by my grandmother, that she was having the drinks as adjuncts to her usual meals. Aileen’s dourness, it seemed, was her nature. ‘She upset old Pete,’ Irene would say. ‘Turned nasty when he said his pint was flat. Shame, eh?’ Despite herself, my grandmother would occasionally gulp down one of Irene’s tactically placed acid drops. ‘It’s not so easy, getting barmaids! What am I supposed to do? How many do you think there are like Marian, how would I find another one like her?’ ‘Oh, yes, I know.’ Irene always backpedalled, instantly emollient, in order to return with renewed momentum. ‘Course, Marian has to do it, doesn’t she, with the kid?’