Remembrance Day. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ in King’s Lynn and sold it all for ten times as much. Well, eight or nine. Not bad for one afternoon, hey, bor?’

      ‘Who was that then, Greg?’ asked Burton.

      ‘Woman name of Fox, whistles when she talks, looks at you out of one eye, keeps an old dog who smells like a bit of used toilet paper.’

      The ferret man laughed heartily. ‘That’s my missus’s aunt, Dot Fox. Funny thing happened to her some years back when she was married. She used to live over Happisburgh way, woke up one morning and found her back garden had fallen over the cliff. Apparently she’d been drinking so heavy the night before, she slept through one of the worst storms on the coast for twenty years. What was funny, was her husband Bert had gone out in his nightshirt to see to the chickens, what they kept in the garden shed, and he went over the cliff edge with the rest of ’em. Three in the morning, it was.’

      Everyone present roared with laughter. The ferret man followed up his success with a postscript. ‘They found Bert washed up on Mundesley beach a week later, they did, still wearing his nightshirt. Old Dot Fox kept that nightshirt for years as a souvenir. She’s probably still got it, ’less you bought it off her, Greg.’

      More laughter, and more drink called for.

      Yarker said to Tebbutt, when they were comfortable, ‘You know that line of poplars where you been digging this week? Me and Pauline been thinking. They’re getting on a bit, must be ninety year old, and poplars don’t last that long. We reckon they best come down.’

      Tebbutt frowned. ‘They look all right to me. They aren’t that old, are they?’

      ‘Ah, I can see the notion ent very poplar with you,’ Pauline said, leaning revealingly forward and bursting with laughter at her pun. Soon the whole table was laughing and making puns about trees. I knew a gell but she was a bit of a beech. I ent going to die yet ’cause I ent made no willow.

      It was quite an uproarious evening. The suicide was soon forgotten.

      Old Craske was unfolding a familiar tale about how, when he was a lad, he had seen a naked woman run through the village with a dog on a lead, and maybe it was a ghost or maybe it wasn’t.

      Tebbutt felt an impulse like lust blossom in him. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he announced to the company. ‘When I was in Birmingham, I knew a man by the name of Cracknell Summerfield. A real rough diamond. He made a packet of money at one time or another. I used to go down to this place near London, near Heathrow, where he gave lavish dinners for his clients.

      ‘Cracknell dealt in swimming pools in a big way. Mind, this was before the Obnoxious Eighties. This time I was down at his place, he was negotiating a deal with some Kuwaitis. There were three of them to dinner, very polite in lounge suits. They were going to finance hotels, Cracknell was going to build the pools and do the landscaping. I was going to print all the prospectuses and brochures. There was also a pretty young duchess there.’

      ‘Now comes the sexy bit,’ said Yarker, winking.

      ‘The duchess had a contract to supply all the internal decor of these Kuwaiti hotels. Worth millions. She’d begun the evening very off-hand with everyone, but we’d all had a lot of champagne. She was on Cracknell’s right. His wife was on his other side.’

      Am I to go on with this lie? Tebbutt asked himself, but already he heard his own voice continuing the tale.

      ‘At the end of the meal, Cracknell suddenly turns to the duchess and says, “Show us your quim”, just like that. Instead, she jumps up, pulls off her clothes, every last stitch, and climbs up on the table. There she dances a fandango among the plates, naked as the day she was born, and a sight more attractive.’

      Mutterings all round from the company, until Pauline asked, ‘What did the Kuwaitis do?’

      ‘Oh, they all thought it was a normal part of English home life.’

      ‘You Brummies had a rare old time,’ Yarker said, enviously.

      After closing time, the drinkers staggered into the night air. Langham lay about them, quiet and serious, with the great stone shoulder of the church looming darkly nearby. They stood outside the pub, in no hurry to say goodnight to each other.

      Offering to give Tebbutt a lift home, Yarker flung a heavy arm round his shoulders and propelled him in the direction of his car. He ignored Tebbutt’s protestations that he preferred to walk. As soon as her husband’s back was turned, Pauline Yarker grabbed young Georgie Clenchwarden and planted a big kiss on his lips.

      The drink had given the lad courage. Returning the kiss, he grabbed as much of her as he could. Someone cheered. In the dark, lit only by the light from the pub windows, in the middle of the road, the two danced slowly together. The others made way for them, muttering encouragingly. ‘Git in there, Georgie boy, it’s yer birthday!’ Slowly they gyrated, while Pauline sang ‘I am Sailing’ into Clenchwarden’s ear.

      Turning at the car, Yarker saw what was happening. A kind of war cry escaped him. He rushed forward. Warned by the roar, Clenchwarden let go of Pauline and started to run in the direction of Blakeney, yelling for help as he did so. Burton, the ferret man, with a wit quicker than anyone would have attributed to him, started up his stinking motorbike and ran it between Yarker and his quarry. A swearing match started. The landlady appeared and begged them to be quiet. Tebbutt took the opportunity to escape.

      He marched home in a cheerful frame of mind. Though darkness had fallen, the ambience of a summer’s sunset lingered, with a legacy of honeysuckle fragrance. Bats wheeled about the church where, in a few hours, a congregation would be gathering. A harmony of slight noises rose everywhere, from farm and field, comprising the orchestral silence of a Norfolk night. By the entrance to a lane, he halted to urinate under a tree, listening to a leaf fall within the circumference of the branches. He plucked another leaf, pricking himself in so doing. Holding it woozily before his eyes, he made out its sharp outline, with a green heart rimmed by yellow; without being able to determine the colours, he could distinguish their difference. It was a leaf of variegated holly.

      ‘That’s right, that’s the ticket,’ he said aloud, ponderously. ‘That’s life right enough. Variegated. Very variegated.’

      He was impressed by his own wit, and sober enough to stand for a minute listening to the night about him. Even at this distance from the coast, the presence of the sea could be felt, calming, chastening.

      That story of the dancing duchess, he reflected, had been an invention to make his past life seem more exciting than it was – to others, but to himself above all. The truth was, Parchment had always been a slog. His uncle had seen to it he was underpaid. He knew Cracknell Summerfield, but no dancing duchesses. Well, you had to make what you could of the moment, and no harm had been done.

      Truth was, he rather despised the company in the Bluebell, and despised himself for going there so regularly.

      When you think about it, they’re always running down women. What’s the matter with them? Is that just an English thing? Or maybe none of them have had my luck in finding a Ruby in their lives.

      It’s impossible to see how things will get better for us. I’m not likely to find a better job. Not at my age.

      But at least I’ve got Ruby …

      I suppose some would say I’ve made a mess of my life, seeing the family business go bankrupt; the economic climate was mainly to blame for СКАЧАТЬ