Читать книгу Mr Alfred, M.A. - James Kennaway - Страница 9

CHAPTER TWO

Mr Alfred sagged at the bar, sipped his whisky and quaffed his beer, smiled familiarly to the jokes exchanged across the counter, and lit his fifth cigarette in an hour. His hand wavered to put the flame to the fag and his lips wobbled to put the fag to the flame. The man at his elbow chatted to the barmaid. The barmaid chatted to the man at his elbow. Propinquity and alcohol made him anxious to be sociable. He waited for an opening to slip in a bright word. After all, he knew the man at his elbow and the man at his elbow knew him. They had seen each other often enough. But neither admitted knowing the other’s name, though he must have heard it countless times from Stella, who knew them all.

It grieved Mr Alfred. Sometimes he thought he was making a mistake frequenting a common pub with common customers and a common barmaid when he had nothing in common with them. In every pub he went to he recognised anonymous faces. For besides being a bachelor and a schoolmaster, a Master of Arts and the author of a volume of unpublished poems, the only child of poor but Presbyterian parents and now a middleaged orphan, he was a veteran pubcrawler. But it was his weakness to stand always on the fringe of company, smiling into the middle distance, happy only with a glass in his hand. He had been a wallflower since puberty. He wanted to love his fellow men. When he was young he even hoped to love women. Now every door seemed locked, and without a key he was afraid to knock.

Stella drew a pint. The beer was brisk. She brought the glass down slowly from the horizontal to the vertical. She was pleased with the creamy head on it, not too much, not too little. With pride she served her customer.

‘There! How’s that for a good top? See what I do for you!’

The man at Mr Alfred’s elbow put a big hand round the pint-measure. He grinned.

‘Nothing to what I could do for you.’

‘Ho-ho,’ said Stella. ‘I’m sure.’

Her frolic smile said enough for a book on sex without fear. Mr Alfred caught a reprint tossed to him free. He jerked and fumbled for something to say. Distracted to find nothing, he missed what they said next. When they stopped laughing Stella turned to him as if he had heard.

‘This man brings out the worst in me.’

Mr Alfred smiling tried again to find a mite to contribute. By the time he was ready to catch the speaker’s eye she was slanted from him, sharing another joke with the man at his elbow. She ended it laughing.

‘Aye, I know. The doctor says it’s good for you.’

Mr Alfred meditated. Alcohol always made him meditate. His cigarette smouldered at an angle of fortyfive. There was a glow in his middle and a halo round his head. He was getting what he came out to buy. An anaesthetic between the week’s drudgery behind and the week’s drudgery ahead. Stella was his world for the moment. Stella and what she said and the way she said it. His daily thoughts assured him he was the victim of a coarse and even foul mind. He accepted it, as a redhaired man accepts his red hair. He was willing to believe Stella was never guilty of an equivocation and to blame himself for thinking her conversation was loaded with a wrapped freight of allusions to sexual intercourse. He wondered how he would get on if he tried to make love to her. But he had a good idea what would happen. Even if she ever gave him the chance he would muck it up somehow. He would be sitting an examination in a practical subject when all he had was a little book-learning. He drooped.

When he came out of his soulsearching the man at his elbow was turning to go.

‘Good night, sir,’ Stella called out, moving up from the other end of the bar to give him a wave.

‘You never call me sir,’ he said as she came level.

He thought his joking pretence of jealousy would amuse her.

Stella strolled down the bar again and threw him a vague smile over her shoulder. It said she heard him say something but didn’t quite know what and didn’t think it mattered.

He staggered out on the bell to wintry streets and shivered. Between tall tenements and down dark lanes, his cigarette out, he talked to himself. He criticised the chaste loneliness of his habits. He muttered Milton’s question. He had a habit of thinking in quotations when he had a drink on him.

Were it not better done as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles in Neaera’s hair?

When he recited the pleasant alternative suggested by the great puritan poet he remembered an old surmise that with should be withe, meaning bind or pleat. It seemed an idea worth lingering over. But at that point in his erotic meditation he was interrupted by a woman who had no resemblance to Amaryllis or any other nymph. She linked her arm in his.

‘Coming home, darling?’

He recognised her as the reason for his wandering, and he knew the trembling of his lean body when he left the cosy pub was due less to the chill of a sleety wind than to the hope of finding her. But the moment she opened her mouth and touched him he was as empty as all the glasses he had drained. Still, with his usual politeness he answered insincerely, or with his usual insincerity he answered politely.

‘Yes, of course.’

There was a public convenience, doublestaired, a dozen steps ahead. He disengaged his arm from hers with a gentlemanly apology.

‘You wait here. I’ll be right back.’

He descended, leaving her loitering at the top of the stairs. When he had emptied his bladder he returned to the street by the other staircase and weaved home to his single bed.