I couldn’t glean much of interest from the booklet, which had been typeset with extraordinary inaccuracy, to the point where some of it didn’t even look as if it was in English. Most of the scant pages were filled with small advertisements for businesses whose purposes remained obscure. There was no mention of a restaurant. The centre spread featured a number of terribly reproduced photographs purporting to show various notables of the town, including, believe it or not, a “Miss Dawton.” Her photograph in particular had suffered from being badly photocopied too many times, and was almost impossible to make out. Her figure blended with the background tones, making her appear rather bulky, and the pale ghost of her face was so distorted as to appear almost misshapen.
I was about to shout again, this time audibly, when the door at the end of the bar seemed to tremble slightly. Susan started, and I stood up in readiness.
The door didn’t open. Instead we both heard a very distant sound, like that of footsteps on wet pavements. It sounded so similar, in fact, that I turned to look at the outer door of the pub, half-expecting to see the handle turn as one of the locals entered. It didn’t, though, and I returned to looking at the door. The sounds continued, getting gradually closer. They sounded hollow somehow, as if they were echoing slightly. Susan and I looked at each other, frowning once more.
The footsteps stopped on the other side of the door, and there was a long pause. I was beginning to wonder whether we wouldn’t perhaps have been better off with the first pub we’d seen when the door suddenly swung open, and a man stepped out behind the bar.
Without so much as glancing in our direction he shut the door behind him and then turned his attention to the ancient till. He opened it by pressing on some lever, and then began to sort through the money inside in a desultory fashion.
I think we both assumed that he would stop this after a moment or so, despite the fact that he had given no sign of seeing us. When he didn’t, Susan nudged me, and I coughed a small cough. The man turned towards us with an immediacy and speed which rather disconcerted me, and stood, eyebrows raised. After a pause I smiled in a way I hoped looked friendly rather than nervous.
“Good evening,” I said. The man didn’t move. He just stood, half-turned towards us, with his hands still in the till and his eyebrows still in the air. He didn’t even blink. I noticed that his eyes were slightly protuberant, and that the skin round his ears looked rough, almost scaly. His short black hair was styled as if for pre-war fashion, and appeared to have been slicked back with Brylcreem or something similar. A real blast from the past. Or from something, anyway.
After he’d continued to not say anything for a good ten seconds or so, I had another shot.
“Could we have two halves of lager, please?”
As soon as I started speaking again the man turned back to the till. After I’d finished there was a pause, and then finally he spoke.
“No.”
“Ah,” I said. It wasn’t really a reply. It was just a response to the last thing I was expecting a publican to say.
“Don’t have any beer.”
I blinked at him.
“None at all?”
He didn’t enlarge on his previous statement, but finished whatever he was doing, closed the till, and started moving small glasses from one shelf to another, still with his back to us. The glasses were about three inches high and oddly shaped, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out either what one might drink from them or why he was choosing to move them.
“A gin then,” Susan’s voice was fairly steady, but a little higher than usual, “with tonic?” She normally had a slice of lemon too, but I think she sensed it would be a bit of a long shot.
She got no reply at all. When all of the small glasses had been moved, the man opened the till again. Beginning to get mildly irritated, in spite of my increasing feeling of unease, I glanced at Susan and shook my head. She didn’t smile, but just stared back at me, face a little pinched. I looked back at the man, and after a moment leant forward to see more closely.
His hair hadn’t been slicked back, I realised. It was wet. Little droplets hung off the back in a couple of places, and the upper rim of his shirt was soaked. There had been a fine drizzle earlier on, enough to make the pavements damp. We’d walked most of the way from the guest house in it, and suffered no more than a fine dusting of moisture. So why was his hair so wet? Why, in fact, had he been out at all? Shouldn’t he have been tending his (surprisingly beer-free) pumps?
He could have just washed it, I supposed, but that didn’t seem likely. Not this man, at this time in the evening. And surely he would have dried it enough to prevent it dripping off onto his shirt, and running down the back of his neck? Peeking forward slightly I saw that his shoes were wet too, hence the wet footsteps we had heard. But where had he come from? And why was his hair wet?
Suddenly the man swept the till shut and took an unexpected step towards me, until he was right up against the bar. Taken aback, I just stared at him, and he looked me up and down as if I was a stretch of old and dusty wallpaper.
“Do you have anything we could drink?” I asked, finally. He frowned slightly, and then his face went blank again.
“Is there a place round here we can buy food?” Susan asked. She sounded halfway to angry, which meant she was very frightened indeed.
The man stared at me for a moment more, and then raised his right arm. I flinched slightly, but all he was doing, it transpired, was pointing. Arm outstretched, still looking at me, he was pointing in the opposite direction to the door. And thus, I could only assume, in the direction of somewhere we could buy some food.
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you.” Susan slid off her stool and preceded me to the door. I felt the back of my neck tickle all of the way there, as if I was frightened that something might suddenly crash into it. Nothing did, and Susan opened the door and stepped out. I followed her, and turned to pull the door shut. The man was still standing, arm outstretched, but his face had turned to watch us go, his eyes on Susan. Something about the way the light fell, or about the strangeness of his behaviour, made me think that there might be something else about his face, something I hadn’t really noticed before. I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be.
When I stepped out onto the pavement the first thing I saw was that it had started to rain a little harder, a narrow slant of drizzle which showed in front of the few and dingy streetlights. The second thing was Susan, who was standing awkwardly, her body turned out towards the street, head and shoulders faced to me. She was staring upwards, and her mouth was slightly open.
“What?” I said, a little sharply. I wasn’t irritated, just rather spooked. She didn’t say anything. I took a step towards her and turned to see.
I never really notice pub signs. Most of the time I go to pubs I know, and so they’re of no real interest to me. On other occasions I just, well I just fail to notice them. They’re too high up, somehow, and not terribly interesting. So I hadn’t noticed the one hanging outside this pub either, before we went in. I did now.
The sign was old and battered, the wood surround stained dark. A tattered and murky painting showed a clumsily rendered ship in the process of sinking beneath furiously slashing waves. Below there was a name. The pub was called The Aldwinkle.
***
Ten o’clock found us pushing plates away, lighting cigarettes, and generally feeling a little better. With nothing to go on apart from the publican’s scarcely effusive directions, we’d wandered along the front for a while, coats wrapped tight around us and saying little. We were in danger of running out of front and considering turning back when we came upon a small house in which a light was glowing. The window had been enlarged almost the full width of the house, and inside we could see a few tables laid out. All the tables were empty.