Holiday by Stanley Middleton Read Free Book Online Page A

like originals of sketches in ink and wash by Rembrandt. He stood on the grass-thick platform of a disused railway station and peered over the hedges at the neat gardens of bijou bungalows. In one an old man picked beans, but broke off to describe winter to Fisher until a shriek from indoors sent him hurrying back between the luxuriant rows. An engine-driver he claimed, who’d retired here and never felt so well in his life. ‘I was brought up on steam, a skilled job, where it depended on you and your fireman whether the train ran or not. These diesels, now. A schoolkid could drive one.’ He spat behind the canopy of bean-leaves and bright red dots of flower. ‘Talkin’ again,’ the howl from the house. ‘I think she’s lonely,’ the old boy said, but he paused only a moment for Fisher to admire the size of his produce before waddling off.
    This was the place to see the sky, the great sweep of blue with its combed-out wisps of cloud. The land squatted, flattened, ironed out into, huddling into, bottom-low inches under the broad, eye-widening spaces of the sky. Man crawled like an insect; his houses seemed two dimensional, without height; trees brushed the ground, bowed. Fisher liked it best under piling cloud, but today the sky stretched like blue-glass breathed on, bright, hard on the eye, broadly impressive, but without the mountainous changes that he loved most.
    Here he’d walked as a boy, escaping from the everlasting banalities of his father, and his mother’s watchfulness; here, legging it, he’d hoped to meet those admired girls from the beach, those brown, bleached, long-legged young women who’d toppled his heart without ever noticing him. Now, today, without benefit of wife, he filled in his time walking the same roads, stopping at the same dusty clumps of hedge, the same sour stretch of dyke, thinking of something to do. His play, when he wrote it, would feature a man, half-way to age, sitting on a sand-dune calling out, like the young Tennysons at Mablethorpe, swooping lines of verse to the sea whose choppy wind would bundle the syllables back shattered and shredded. O, Beckett, Beckett.
    The dullness of the walk, the final street lengths amongst Rose Garth, San Remo, Mon Abri, Seldumin, Sea Holly tired him so that he was glad to pull his shoes off, lie on the bed for half and hour before dinner.
    That had been a good day.
    He’d tried the sun, taken exercise, spoken to strangers and risked his privacy when he handed the address to his mother-in-law. He had satisfied himself in his own circumscribed way.
    He debated casually what the Vernons would do. David would certainly act; no doubt about that, but how? At first they had no time for him as a son-in-law; however presentable he was a schoolmaster without great projects, because at best he’d end as a headmaster, or inspector, or in a chair of education, none of which was lucrative in Vernon’s eyes. Of course, he’d private investments from his father, which improved matters, but not much. Moreover, they had just, after miracles of self-deception, accustomed themselves to this bearded, mincing, velvet-jacketed Malcolm from the training college, when Meg had ditched him and presented his successor, the slow-spoken, handsome usher from the high school.
    He remembered Malcolm’s dismissal.
    On a Saturday afternoon, he’d turned down a game of cricket, he and Meg were sitting on a rustic seat in front of ribbon-built commuter houses outside a village. Lawn-mowers whined, and gloved ladies forked weeds before returning to coloured garden-chairs. The pair had walked since eleven, lunched in a pub, and Fisher still dizzy with beer needed to empty his bladder.
    ‘Are you comfortable?’ he asked. She did not reply.
    ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
    Meg’s face was turned towards a roof of emerald slates, staring wooden-jawed.
    ‘I don’t want to say anything,’ she said, childishly.
    ‘Let’s walk, then.’
    She stood, sluggishly and they