“Can I help you, love?” Despite the heat, the landlord was wearing a white shirt and a tie that suggested membership of some kind of club. He kept the place neat and tidy, and he’d decorated the walls with what looked like family photos and mementoes of his holidays. This stout man’s private life was on display, and I imagined that the young couple in the corner might well be holding back their enthusiasm out of respect for this fact.
“I’ll have a half of Guinness, please.” As the landlord carefully pulled the beer, I heard a loud cry and yet more jackalling from outside. The landlord glared through the leaded windows.
“Bloody hooligans.” Without looking in my direction he set the half-pint of Guinness before me. “One pound forty.” He continued to stare through the window, but his open hand snaked across the bar. I put two one-pound coins into his palm and his hand first bounced, as if to weigh the coins, and then it closed around them. “Thanks, love.”
An hour later I adjusted myself on the bar stool as he set a second half-pint before me. It was dark now, but the youngsters were still making their noise in the garden, and in the corner behind me the courting couple had set aside decorum and were now practically sitting one on top of the other. Having finished my first drink I had stood up from the stool, but the landlord would hear nothing of my leaving. “No, love, have one on the house. Call it a welcome if you like.” I still had to unpack, and the removal men had left the place in a tip, but I thought it would be rude to turn down his kind offer. I climbed back onto the stool and watched as he pulled the second glass.
“We used to have a doctor here. A young woman, but she didn’t last long. The women didn’t like the men seeing her.”
“But she’s a doctor,” I said, taking a careful sip of the new drink.
“Yes, but she’s a woman doctor, and you know how people are.”
I couldn’t be sure if he was agreeing with the attitude of the villagers, or being critical, but then our attention was seized by the sound of breaking glass. During the past hour the landlord had twice been outside to ask the youngsters to calm down, but things were clearly out of control. I understood his frustration. This was his clientele and to bar them would be to effectively lose his business. The landlord tried to ignore the breaking glass and turned back towards me.
“These days if you need to see a doctor for anything then you have to go into town. You’ve got a doctor there, right?”
I nodded. I looked at the landlord and wished that we had happened upon another subject for casual conversation. But he was hooked now, and it was proving difficult to shake him free and onto a different topic.
“There’s a young Irish nurse who comes around to the health centre four afternoons a week, but with her you’re not talking about proper treatment. She can take your blood pressure and tell you what to eat and all that, but not much more.”
Again I nodded. He paused, then looked over my shoulder at the courting couple in the corner.
“Everything all right back there with you two love-birds?” I didn’t turn around, but I heard the sound of their nervous laughter. The landlord smiled at them, and then he glanced outside where he could see the hooligans tearing around his garden. Almost imperceptibly he shook his head, and then he swivelled his attention back towards me.
“Don’t get me wrong. I liked Dr. Epstein. Nice woman.” The landlord fell silent, and his eyes glazed over as if his thoughts were drifting aimlessly. I looked through the window and could see that two of the louts were now playing on the children’s swings. They were swinging high, but in opposite directions to each other, and when the swings crossed they were anointing each other with beer. Their girlfriends looked on and screeched with laughter.
“But like I said, folks didn’t take to Dr. Epstein, what with her being a woman. Made her life a misery, and that of her husband and kids. Young they were, maybe five or six, a boy and a girl. Rachel and Jacob. Funny thing is they might be happier if they came here today. You know, now that Stoneleigh or whatever you call it is finished. Up there they might have fit in better, but living down here with us, well, it was difficult for them to mix.” Again he paused. “Nobody cares much in the town, but around here they don’t blend in. I mean, Rachel and Jacob. They weren’t even trying. You know what it’s like, you’ve got to make an effort. You’ve lived around these parts all your life, haven’t you?”
“Well, like I said, mainly in town, but never out here.”
“Well, welcome again to Weston.” He raised his glass. “To a long and happy retirement in Weston.”
I picked up my glass and smiled. I thought to myself, I’m glad that I live in a cul-de-sac. There’s something safe about a cul-de-sac. You can see everything when you live near the far end of a cul-de-sac.
That night I walked up the hill under the moonlight. I think Mum would have liked Stoneleigh, but Dad would have hated it. She would have liked the idea that by living up the hill you’d moved on with your life and left something behind. But Dad wasn’t burdened by her ambitions, which is one of the reasons why they argued and why Mum ultimately fell silent. But Mum should have known better, for Dad wasn’t the type to take kindly to disagreement. Almost to the end there was a fire within him which only needed a conversational push, or the prod of an ill-timed comment, for the flames to start roaring. Dad liked to talk, but even as a girl it was obvious to me that Mum had given up on his temper. Instead Dad talked to me, and he tried to treat me like the son he’d never had. He loved nothing more than to sit with his pipe and his tobacco pouch, pressing rubbed flake into the bowl, and tell me about how he’d lost his own dad in the war, and how his mum had struggled to make ends meet.
He was twenty when the war ended, but by that time he’d started as a draughtsman and he’d decided to marry Mum, whom he always described as “the prettiest of all the local lasses.” Whenever he said this he would look at her as though asking himself what on earth had happened to his “pretty lass,” but Mum never looked back and she would just carry on with whatever she was doing. Dad’s responsibilities, and the lack of money, meant that he never went to university, and although he claimed to be glad that he had been spared the upheaval of leaving his home town, I never really believed him. When I finally went off to university at eighteen, I could see how proud he was, but he never did say anything to me, nor did he ever travel, apart from the one disastrous trip that he and Mum made to Majorca. His dad fell in Belgium and this seemed to have soured his attitude to anything that lay outside the orbit of his home-town life. So much so that whenever he swore, which he seldom did, he was always quick to say “pardon my French,” which, of course, made no sense unless one viewed it through the prism of contempt.
Unfortunately, while I seemed to get on with Dad, Sheila barely spoke to him. To begin with they used to get on. I may have been the “son,” but she was definitely the much-loved daughter. I was actually jealous of her for he used to dote on her, and take her to the allotments, and buy her presents, so much so that I used to call her “Daddy’s little pet.” But as she got older, and grew to know her own mind, Dad seemed to change towards her. I could see what she meant when she said that he seemed to be going out of his way to pick on her, but she didn’t help herself. Any chance to misbehave, she took it, and of course that only made things worse. Mum sided with Sheila, but her voice didn’t count for much with Dad, and so Sheila began to resent Mum’s impotence in the household. And where was I in all of this? Either doing my homework or playing the piano. I knew I wasn’t much use to Sheila, but when my sister started to smoke, and then stay out late, even though Dad had told her that she had to be back by ten, then I began to see his point of view. She was acting up, there was no question about it, and then I went and made it all worse by going off to university and leaving her alone with the two of them. I often wonder if things would have worked out differently if I’d stayed at home, or gone to the local college, or just got a job. Maybe I could have been more help to them all.