She said: “I’m afraid I haven’t very much in the refrigerator tonight, but I could give you soup and an omelette.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“The soup isn’t home-made, I’m afraid, but I mix two tins to make it more interesting and add a little something, chopped parsley or an onion. I think you will find it palatable. Did you want it in the dining-room, or here in the sitting-room, in front of the fire? That might be cosier for you.”
“I’d like to have it here.”
He settled himself in a low button-backed chair, stretching his legs out in front of the electric fire, watching the steam rise from his drying trousers. The food came quickly, the soup first—a mixture, he detected, of mushroom and chicken sprinkled with parsley. It was hot, and surprisingly good, and the roll and butter accompanying it were fresh. Then she brought in a herb omelette. She asked if he would like tea, coffee or cocoa. What he wanted was alcohol, but that seemed not to be on offer. He settled for tea and she left him to drink it alone, as she had left him for the whole of the meal.
When he had finished, she reappeared, as if she had been waiting at the door, and said: “I’ve put you in the back room. Sometimes it’s nice to get away from the sound of the sea. And don’t worry about the bed being aired. I’m most particular about airing the beds. I’ve put in two botties. You can kick them out if you’re too hot. I’ve turned on the immersion heater so there’s plenty of hot water if you want a bath.”
His limbs ached from the hours lying on the damp sand and the prospect of stretching them out in hot water was appealing. But, hunger and thirst appeased, tiredness took over. It was too much trouble even to run the bath.
He said: “I’ll bath in the morning, if I may.”
The room was on the second floor and at the back as she had promised. Standing aside as he entered, she said: “I’m afraid I haven’t any pyjamas large enough for you but there’s a very old dressing-gown which you could use. It used to belong to my husband.”
She seemed unsurprised and unworried that he had brought none of his own. An electric fire had been plugged in close to the Victorian grate. She bent to switch it off before leaving and he realized that what she was charging wouldn’t cover all-night heating. But he didn’t need it. Hardly had she closed the door after her than he tore off his clothes, drew back the bed-coverings and slid into warmth and comfort and oblivion.
Breakfast next morning was served to him in the ground-floor dining-room, at the front of the house. It was set with five tables, each with a pristine white table-cloth and a small vase of artificial flowers, but there were no other guests.
The room, with its cluttered emptiness, its air of promising more than could be provided, sparked a memory of the last holiday he had taken with his parents. He had been eleven and they had spent a week at Brighton staying in a bed-and-breakfast boarding house on the cliff top towards
Kemp Town. It had rained nearly every day and his memory of the holiday was of the smell of wet raincoats, of the three of them huddled in shelters looking out at the grey heaving sea, of walking the streets in search of affordable entertainment until it was half past six and they could return for the evening meal. They had eaten in just such a room as this, the family groups, unused to being waited on, sitting in mute embarrassed patience until the proprietress, determinedly cheerful, came in with the laden trays of meat and two vegetables. Throughout the holiday he had been resentful and bored. It occurred to him now, for the first time, how little joy his parents had had in their lives and how little he, their only child, had contributed to that meagre store.
She waited on him eagerly, providing a full breakfast of bacon, eggs and fried potatoes, obviously torn between her desire to watch him enjoy it and the realization that he would prefer to eat alone. He ate quickly, anxious to get away.
As he paid her he said: “It was good of you to take me in, a solitary man and without an overnight bag. Some people might have been reluctant.”
“Oh no, I wasn’t at all surprised to see you. I wasn’t worried. You were an answer to prayer.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before.”
“Oh, but you were. I haven’t had a B and B for four months now and one feels so useless. There’s nothing worse than feeling useless when you’re old. So I prayed that God would show me what I ought to do, whether there was any point in carrying on. And He sent you. I always find, don’t you, that when you’re in real trouble, faced with problems which seem too much for you, and just ask, He does answer.”
“No,” he said, counting out the coins, “no, I can’t say that’s been my experience.”
She went on as if she hadn’t heard him: “I realize, of course, that I shall have to give up eventually. The little town is dying. We aren’t scheduled as a population centre. So the newly retired don’t come here any more and the young leave. But we shall be all right. The Warden has promised that everyone at the end will be cared for. I expect I’ll be moved to a little flat in Norwich.”
He thought: Her God provides the occasional overnight customer, but it is the Warden she relies on for the essentials. On impulse he asked: “Did you see the Quietus here yesterday?”
“Quietus?”
“The one held here. The boats at the pier.”
She said, her voice firm: “I think you must be mistaken, Mr. Faron. There was no Quietus. We have none of that kind of thing in Southwold.”
After that he sensed that she was as anxious to see him go as he was to leave. He thanked her again. She hadn’t told him her name and he didn’t ask. He was tempted to say: “I’ve been very comfortable. I must come back and spend a short holiday with you.” But he knew that he would never return and her kindness deserved better of him than a casual lie.
Next morning he wrote the single word YES on a postcard and folded it carefully and precisely, running his thumb along the crease. The act of writing those three letters seemed portentous in ways he couldn’t as yet foresee, a commitment to more than his promised visit to Xan.
Shortly after ten o’clock he made his way over the narrow cobbles of Pusey Lane to the museum. A single custodian was on duty, seated as usual at a wooden table opposite the door. He was very old and he was sound asleep. His right arm, curved on the table-top, cradled a high-domed, speckled head spiked with bristles of grey hairs. His left hand looked mummified, a collection of bones loosely held together by a stained glove of mottled skin. Close to it lay an open paperback, Plato’s Theaetetus. He was probably a scholar, one of the unpaid band who volunteered to take turns and to keep the museum open. His presence, asleep or awake, was unnecessary; no one was going to risk deportation to the Isle of Man for the few medallions in the display case, and who could or would want to carry out the great Victory of Samafaya or the Wings of the Nike of Samothrace?
Theo had been reading history, yet it was Xan who had introduced him to the Cast Museum, entering it light-footed, as joyously expectant as a child with a new nursery of toys showing off its treasures. Theo, too, had fallen under its spell. Even in the museum their tastes differed. Xan liked best the rigour and the stern unemotional faces of the early-classical male statues on the ground floor. Theo preferred the lower room, with its examples of the softer, flowing Hellenistic lines. Nothing, he saw, was changed. Casts and statues stood ranked under the light of the high windows, like the closely packed lumber of a discarded civilization, the armless torsos with their grave faces and arrogant lips, the elegantly dressed curls above bound foreheads, eyeless gods secretly smiling, as if they were privy to a truth more profound than the spurious message of these ice-cold limbs: that civilizations rise and fall but man endures.