Last Landlady Read online

  Then my grandmother, with an eagle swoop, reclaimed the place. Earlier she would have escorted me to the low camp bed in her room and arranged beside me yet more offerings: Horlicks, Harper’s, digestives … her generosity was remorseless, her hostess’s gift would have exercised itself on an escaped convict (‘Now, what are you going to have, sir’). Although the evening was effectively over, she would twist at the sleek gold stick of Estée Lauder and paint her lips at the dressing-table mirror. In apparent contradiction, she would say: ‘Drunken buggers, they’ll be orf soon.’ Sometimes she dissociated herself from the pub. She had created it, but it was not always the creation that she held in her mind (that was the old pub: the template). She disliked drunkenness, despite being the person who facilitated it. Although she worshipped the mellow state, and loved alcohol with a tender and respectful passion – ‘Oh, a drink’s beautiful’ – if drink took over from the pub, she would withdraw. It was a paradox, sort of. As ever, her personality resolved it.

  After closing, when the bars were empty but throbbing with echoes, I again pictured what was beneath me. Victor, if he were still on the scene: sitting on the stool next to my grandmother’s, smoking his sixtieth untipped Senior Service and contemplating, as if it were a work of art, the brandy glass whose stem lay between the upturned second and third finger of his hand. My grandmother and Irene: collecting glasses in perilously assembled towers, cascading cigarette butts into the little bin, disdainfully crumpling crisp packets tacky with Worcester sauce, floating to and from the kitchen with the dogs at their heels in order to fashion supper. All this was done in a brisk, delicate, almost unconscious way, their heads rising clear above the hands performing their female tasks (‘You’ve got to be a bit of a woman’ was one of my grandmother’s odd phrases, meaning do these necessary jobs without fuss and with a modicum of style). I can see her hands now, wrinkled and with a couple of heirloom diamond rings wedged deep in her fingers, trimming the crusts from salt-beef sandwiches, quartering tiny tomatoes, making a simple meal into a careless work of art.

  Then the spark of the pub was rekindled in her sitting room, in the modulated way that she understood and loved. I knew this, because I would sometimes go down and sit behind the door at the bottom of the little staircase. There was a long crack in the wood, wider in the middle, through which I had a part-view of my grandmother, Irene and Victor, seated on the sofa and armchair, angled around a low table sumptuously weighted with decanters and tumblers. Everything in the pub was about a quality of light. Here it was full, voluptuous, a chequering of heavy gleam and foggy aquamarine. As they painted mustard into their sandwiches with a miniature silver spoon, the three people discussed the evening – ‘Christ, did he now’; ‘Yes, I heard her say that’; ‘Bugger me, he must have had a few’ – in a way that created a particular weave of sound: Irene’s barks, my grandmother’s dry responses, Victor’s conciliatory mediations. The mood was more judicious and expansive than in the morning kitchen conversations but there were the same ellipses, that same sense of the shared unspoken.

  Around and about the conversation was music from the old gramophone beside the fireplace. The dusty buzz of my grandmother’s records – still occasionally played – takes me instantly to the last but one step of the tiny staircase. Even if I play the same songs on download, I hear the premonitory dance of needle on vinyl; the sound still comes at me in a remote, mysterious, veiled way. I see again the stacked LPs with their tatty inner sleeves, their worn covers bearing beautified faces, marmoreal and mask-like, from a time when women contained limitless pain within moiré and pride. I inhabit that sense of synaesthesia, as curlicues of trumpet wove in and out of trailing smoke. On these private occasions the music was remote and austere: thin threads that pierced the heart and grew inside it. Early Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, the sainted Bessie Smith. Out came the big female phrases, the terrible erotic fatalism:

  … St Louis woman with her diamond rings/ She pulls my man around by her apron strings

  … Someday, when you grow lonely/ Your heart will break like mine and you’ll want me only

  … I ain’t gonna marry, ain’t gonna settle down/ I’m going to drink good moonshine …

  Sometimes there would be a short outburst from my grandmother’s confident, rather tuneless voice, half-singing half-talking a favoured lyric – ‘ … ain’t got nobody/ And nobody cares for me …’ That was Crosby, worshipped by the women (‘He’s got dirty eyes’). Victor, meanwhile, was steeped in Bix and Bing, Billie and Lester, Frank and Nelson, in the gorgeous sorrowing yelps of José Feliciano, to whom he introduced my grandmother; as he listened he inclined his head to a particular knowing angle, or flicked at a solitary air guitar string; but he did it with humility. He had the musician’s true respect for his own kind. He shared the soundtrack of my grandmother’s life; it was a bond that I would later understand, the sense that their ears echoed with the same cadences. And these songs, played at this hour, heard in the hunched darkness of the staircase with its wavering crack of light, seemed like a deeper expression of the pub code, in which everything was known, everything about life and sex and sin – there was nothing that this music didn’t know or hadn’t seen – and everything was accepted. It was forgiving music: spirit-soaked and slow-smiling and forgiving. In old age, my grandmother (who in her black-haired exotic thirties had looked very much like Billie Holiday) would sit at the kitchen table and listen to the records, her expression oddly wide-eyed, her thoughts a mystery.

  She also had a taste for less elevated stuff, unabashed in its punch-the-air climaxes, orchestrated as if in the deep-pink velvet of her bedroom: Brenda Lee, Timi Yuro, tiny women with pulsating diaphragms and a majestic, maudlin sincerity. These records were played when the company was larger, perhaps including the solo school or other favoured customers, all of them crammed into the sitting room, with the dogs’ ears quivering as the tight-knit band raised their glasses and begged each other to ‘make the wo …rld go away’ or urged themselves ‘u-u-up the lazy river …’ ‘Lazy River’ was anthemic, adored, the pub’s song. My grandmother had versions by Bobby Darin and the Mills Brothers, but it was Brenda Lee’s sweet little girl’s heckle that sent people into a frenzy. Her swooping rises and falls had the sublime cadences of drunkenness. Not even a 33/1 winner could make my father look as happy as the moment before he went up the lazy river, that momentary back-pedal as the horns set the scene for the vocal, the glass raised and then the divine plunge …

  There were rogue elements within my grandmother’s record collection. Being completely unselfconscious, she simply bought what she liked. Among her battered singles were David Cassidy’s ‘Daydreamer’, Chas and Dave’s ‘Ain’t No Pleasing You’, and Barry White’s ‘You’re the First, the Last, My Everything’. She loved Harry Nilsson, and treasured an album in which he covered old standards in his propping-up-the-bar tremble: ‘ … another bride, another groom, another sunny, honeymoon …’ This was wildly popular at Christmas and New Year’s Eve: aged eight I knew every word. On those days of celebration the gramophone was transported into the bar, and the pub became an absolute expression of my grandmother’s tough bright soul.

  Indeed I have never since known Christmases quite like those at the pub. I remember how, on my return to school in January, my friends at this excitable, ladylike establishment would chatter about church, and presents after lunch, and walks through snow; we were mostly the same kind of girls, privileged little beasts dreaming of dancing Giselle at Covent Garden, yet a different England ran in our separate veins – they had no way of knowing the pictures in my head, of the pub in its proud and gaudy innocence. It was not the whole of my life, nothing like, but it was a backdrop that made me feel luckier than they; I couldn’t actually imagine Christmas in a private house. It seemed pallid (still does) unless enclosed within the adult grotto of the pub. The word still conjures green leaves pricked with half-hidden points of light, an immense silver-white tree on the stone flags of the fi
replace, baubles of incomparable size and swell, little windows misty with expectation, Johnny Mathis asking if reindeer really know how to fly …

  We – my parents and brother and I – spent the whole day there. In the morning was a tumultuous party, at which the air of munificence that my grandmother gave to the most ordinary situations became as thick as golden cloth. Only regulars were welcome, and nobody else came; it was one of the pub’s characteristics, for which some people disliked it, that it was able to shut up shop against non-members.

  I knew all too well the reality of the preparations behind the party. I was in the kitchen in the morning when the gleaming deposits of caviar were scooped from the floor, almost out of the chihuahuas’ mouths; I was in the saloon bar on the dark afternoon in mid-December, listening to the curses – ‘sodding vicious bastard stuff’ – as the holly refused to be nailed into the ceiling beams. Yet what was created was a concentration of magic. Of course I was a child, and illusion was what I dealt in. But then so too did the pub. I don’t think I am misremembering it.

  The party was a ritualistic affair: every year the same, every year another accretion of familiarity. The tables in front of the settles were covered with a Stilton, a ham, a pork pie the size of a wheel, vol-au-vents that bloomed and shed their hot petals. My father made a champagne punch, thick with slices of orange, to which (as he knew she would) my grandmother added great surreptitious glugs of brandy. Ladled into silver goblets it looked merely festive, beaded daintily with bubbles, but it was completely lethal. The customers barged and roared, their bodies locked together in a mosh pit of merriment that kept them from falling sideways. Such a party! One could not move, one could scarcely breathe, one’s back and arms were pricked with holly, one had to fight and jab in order to get through and replenish the vast plates of food, which were fighting their own battle against the lunch in the violent old oven (‘How’s Bill doing?’ my grandmother would ask as she breezed swiftly through to the kitchen; she meant the turkey. ‘Bill’ was her generic name for anything male). The party was more than I could deal with as a child, although if sent out on an errand I could wind in and out of people without them knowing I was there, so lost were they in their fierce dedication to pleasure. Returning to the sitting room from the bars, the atmospheric change was so strong that the door in between seemed to fall like a blade. The noise beyond the wooden door had a clogged quality, as if every space and every second had been filled with urgent life.

  It was around three o’clock, when the steam from the oven was forming a white mist that drifted into the sitting room, when the last customers would topple out of the pub. From the window I would watch them circling the car park like people lost in an invisible maze (one regular was rumoured to fall in the turkey every year as he stood to carve). But for us, the people in privileged possession, it was the next phase of the pub-hallowed day: the tables were moved to the centre of the saloon bar and I – this was my ‘job’ – laid out the Royal Albert, the tall wine glasses in different jewel colours, the crackers from Harrods and the candelabras. I see it now, the sparkling profusion and the faces merrily indistinct around it. I recall the splash of Courvoisier over the pudding, the flick of my father’s lighter, and then the wavering little blue flame above the pudding, advancing and dancing through the darkened saloon. Cards might follow, or even shove ha’penny, which none of us except my grandmother could play properly; the board had belonged to the old pub. We were kept alert by the knowledge that there would be evening opening, although the assemblage was sparse (in my father’s analysis, ‘a few old boys who’ve had a bull-and-a-cow with the wife’) and impossible to take seriously. A couple of friends would turn up. Victor, who had spent the day with his son, would good-humouredly man the bar while everybody else was crammed, glass in hand, in front of Morecambe and Wise. Certain people at the morning party would have stated, with the unarguable intensity of the drunk, that they would be back later. This threat always hung over us, but it never materialised.

  Yet the next day the customers had indeed returned: full of febrile hair-of-the-dog energy, darting in and out to watch the racing at Kempton, ready for more of whatever was going. This was aftermath indeed, in which the poor old body exhaled booze at every turn and was slapped and sprayed and trussed into a civilised state, only to be overwhelmed once again. ‘What a life, eh’; ‘What a bloody shower we are’; ‘Ah well, only here once.’ In this faux-rueful, in fact wholly unregretful way, Boxing Day also held the essence of the pub: being a reminder of the human necessity of pulling oneself together and going back out there for the second act, because one was a hell of a long time offstage.

  Then: the New Year’s Eve party, with its exquisitely uncool congas and hokey-cokeys, its u-uupp the lazy rivers and Bill Bailey won’t you please come homes, and incidentally my first proper experience of the evening pub. I was thirteen; I looked older, because I would not have dared show a party face to my grandmother without lipstick, and I was treated with an elaborate and careful gallantry. At some point that same year I had been given my first gin and tonic. I can still picture the tumbler on the counter, the watery gleam of the hammered copper reflected in the glass, the crescent of lemon lounging like an odalisque upon fat cubes of ice. My grandmother would have mixed ‘a good drink’. I did think it delicious, and told her so, at which she nodded with cursory approval. ‘Not like your mother,’ she said (it was a family joke that my mother, a lifelong teetotaller, was the black sheep among us). As I recall, it had little effect on my head, although today if I drink gin I am instantly silly. Probably the bracing presence of the landlady impelled me to hold my own. The obligations of the adult pub, which for as long as I could remember I had observed, were beginning to apply. From that first drink I had a vague, cavernous sense of something falling away from me, the afternoons amid the thick blossomy apple trees, the illusion that time was infinitely on my side; I was aware, quite suddenly, of the concept of last orders, in all their necessary laughing tragedy.

  In the nature of things, closing came very late on New Year’s Eve, so late as to represent a dwindling, rather than the pub’s usual fight against the customers’ urge to continue. An hour or so previously, the chimes of midnight had been relayed from a stout wireless placed on the saloon bar counter: the solid sound of the pub had momentarily dissolved as a crackle emerged from between the near-silent spaces, blooming into the thick distant roar of Trafalgar Square, where in my other life I had held out a handful of seed for the descending pigeons; and then at the last chime life began again, not exactly renewed but reinvigorated, not with resolutions but with a tatty rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in which my hands were again descended upon: a confusion of indiscriminate intimacy, heightened and encouraged by the pub, whose stone and brick walls held us so firmly.

  I recall one New Year’s Eve in particular, early in my pub career when I was aged perhaps fifteen. I don’t remember anything about the party. It is the breath of aftermath that remains inside me. The gathering had thinned to an irregular circle in the public bar, the barmaid Aileen had stepped outside with a sober goodnight nod (‘There goes cheerful Charlie’), and the last headlights had been swallowed into the country darkness. The night hung on its brink, swinging gently by its shortening thread: time passing, time suspended.

  From the fireplace, the voice of Peggy Lee trailed its lethal sweetness into the air. Is that all there is, she asked, as her band played its mocking little two-step; to which came no considered reply from her listeners, merely the murmured litany of collective response: Is that all there is? Behind the counter sat Irene, upright on a stool, eating olives and placing the stones on a beer mat. Occasionally she would receive my grandmother’s glass of champagne and fill it with a short black stream of Guinness. Her movements had a steady automatic efficiency, which I watched, half-mesmerised, from my low stool beside the fireplace. Otherwise the evening had slowed almost to immobility: people nodded their heads wisely at the music, inhaled and sipped with the air
of connoisseurs; the frenzy of earlier consumption was now quietened.

  The lights in the bar were very dim. Smoke drifted and spiralled in thin whorls. The atmosphere had mellowed into something soft, full and gold-grey, in which the pub and the people became configurative as a painting.

  Who was there? My memory is inexact, as ever looming and receding in its precious way, but I can see the close circle made by the counter, the fireplace and the dark wooden furniture, and within it a few figures: Victor with his West End bravura and new silk tie, eyes half-closed as he mouthed the song quietly and respectfully; my father, wearing his habitual expression of shrewd good humour but with eyes a little widened, relaxation making him look both older and younger; one of the farmers, who had earlier commanded the room by reciting the whole of ‘If’, and now stood tamed, becalmed, but still eager for whatever snatch of fun might be going; a couple of the townspeople, heads tilted gamely as they sang into each other’s faces, the savagery of their life together absorbed into this lax benevolent dusk; my grandmother on her stool, casually nursing the glass that rested on her thigh, her face in enigmatic smiling shadow, her head shining beneath the wall lamp like Lili Marlene.

  The moment held an essence both ephemeral and eternal, as all such moments do. Through the amber mist came clarity: a sense of the dying falls that lay within delight, of the terrible poignancy that lay within human beings, and of the stern generosity of the pub in allowing this revelation.