Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

Once, on some errand of my aunt’s, I intruded on the two of them watching a TV game show. James was in his armchair, Sheila kneeling at his feet with her hand inside his fly.

‘Oops,’ he said, pushing her away.

‘Bad moment.’ But even then, he smiled.

On the next floor lives a man named Doug. He’s now in his fifties, like Sheila, but I gather he spent most of his early life in some kind of institution, a hospital for the mentally retarded or some such thing, from which he was discharged in his twenties into what is called The Community. Even after thirty years, he still misses that place. He’s told me many times that he used to work in the laundry there, and the highlight of his day was riding round on the back of an electric vehicle from ward to ward, picking up sacks of dirty clothes, and dropping off clean ones. Everyone knew him, he says. Staff and patients, high grades and low grades: everyone in the whole hospital knew Doug the laundryman.

Perhaps surprisingly, in view of his laundry experience, Doug doesn’t go in for washing things. Every time I see him, he’s wearing the same black suit which has become shiny with the particles of grease that now fill in each gap between one fibre and the next. The flat stinks of cigarette smoke, old chip fat, urine and sour stale sweat.

Doug’s not much good with money either. From what he tells me, he pawns his wristwatch for a few quid at the end of most weeks and then buys it back again for twice as much when his benefits come through. Sometimes, when I call on him, he asks me for a loan: ‘just a couple of quid, mate, to tide me over till Friday’. I never get the money back, but that doesn’t stop him, a week or two later, making the same request without so much as a mention of the existing debt.

Next to Doug is a bedsit which Dr Hodgson – the Doctor, as his tenants call him – keeps for his own use on his visits to Bristol. He was born in the city and used to live and work here, but these days he’s a reader in mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. At first glance, he’s quite imposing to look at – well over six feet tall, strong, broad-shouldered and boyishly handsome for a man in his early sixties – but at second glance you see that the man himself barely inhabits this body. It’s like a suit of clothes that’s several sizes too big for him, and way too flashy. Someone much smaller and more diffident peeps out of its eyes, someone more like his own tenants, and more like me.

He’s a considerate landlord. He doesn’t keep the house in brilliant repair, but this is down to his unworldliness, rather than meanness or indifference to the well-being of the residents. He always gets problems fixed as soon as they’re raised with him without a quibble, and his rents are extremely low.

My aunt Angelica has the whole top floor to herself, so that her place isn’t a bedsit like the others but a proper flat, with a bedroom, living room, small kitchen and even a tiny spare room. She became quite friendly with the Doctor for a while, about a decade ago, at a time when he was based in Oxford for a year and came over to Bristol pretty much every weekend. The two of them had tea together a few times, apparently, and on one occasion – one fateful occasion – she even cooked him a meal.

Now Angelica stares at me with her enormous eyes. Her cup of tea has come to a standstill halfway to her mouth.

‘He’s visiting again?’

‘That’s right, Aunty. He phoned me to let me know.’

I replace my own slightly grubby teacup on its chipped saucer.

‘This is his house, after all,’ I point out. ‘He is entitled to come.’

I live about two miles away and visit every couple of days. It’s a duty I perform at the request of my mother, Angelica’s younger sister. (‘I’m so sorry to put this onto you, David, but I really need you to do it for me. Angelica needs a lot of support, but for all kinds of reasons to do with our childhood relationship – don’t worry, darling, I won’t bore you with it now! – I’m just not up to taking it on.’)

‘He might be entitled to come here in a legal sense,’ Aunt Angelica says. ‘But that’s entirely beside the point. Why does he need to come, that’s what I want to know?’

As in the rest of the building, there’s a faint whiff of decay in Angelica’s flat. She adds considerably to the general dinginess by keeping the curtains drawn and the windows firmly closed, but it’s all very genteel. There’s a three-piece suite in a slightly threadbare floral print, a dresser with a dinner set on display, and a china shepherdess on the mantelpiece above the small gas fire.

‘He must know how much it upsets me,’ she says. ‘And it unsettles the others too, particularly that poor old Doug who of course he should never have taken on in the first place.’

Angelica sees herself, among other things, as Doug’s protector. He comes up to her flat quite often, and she meets him at her door to dispense handfuls of coins as grandly as if she was the lady of the manor and he was some kind of grateful peasant. But as far as I’ve been able to gather, neither Doug nor the other two tenants are troubled in any way by their landlord’s visits. Quite the contrary, in fact: James enjoys the contact with another educated man, Sheila thinks he’s ‘lovely’ and ‘a perfect gent’, and, perhaps because of his institutional background, Doug is quite obsessed with him, to the point where much of his conversation seems to revolve around what the Doctor said last time, what he said in reply, and what he’s going to say to the Doctor when he visits next. None of this, however, is of any interest to Angelica.

‘There’s no real reason for him to come,’ she insists. ‘It’s not as if he works in this town any more.’

Like her eyes, her mouth is very large in comparison to her tiny face and frame and is tremendously expressive in an almost cartoon-like way.

‘And in any case,’ she adds quickly, before I can point out that in fact he does still have academic commitments down here, even if he is based in Scotland, ‘there are such things as hotels, and the man is absolutely made of money. I really don’t see why I should endure this, year after year after year!’

Anxiety eats at her constantly, and almost literally so, for it’s anxiety that burns up the calories and makes her so painfully thin. But Aunt Angelica is much too proud to ever speak of fear, and so she talks instead about irritation and displeasure, about feelings trampled, and rights infringed.

‘You don’t have to see him, though, Aunty,’ I point out. ‘He’ll stay downstairs. He won’t call on you. Remember we agreed that with him? He won’t disturb you in any way.’

My aunt lowers her cup, her large eyes bright, her large lips curling in patrician scorn.

‘He won’t call on me, you say? Oh really, is that so? Honestly, David, how can I be expected to believe that, in view of the history? Have you forgotten that he once came right up here – right up! – expecting to be invited in?’

‘Yes he did, but that was five years ago. And I spoke to him afterwards, if you remember. I explained to him that you didn’t like it, and that you wanted to be left alone. If you recall, he was very apologetic. He told me that he was just trying to be friendly, as he is with his other three tenants, and he hadn’t understood how you felt. And, as you know, he promised faithfully he’d never do it again.’

‘“Oh Angelica! Angelica!”’ Angelica distorts her whole face as she mocks Dr Hodgson’s soft voice, making it sound not just mild and tentative, as it certainly is in reality, but weak and wheedling too. ‘“I wondered if I might pop in for a chat?” And it was three years ago, anyway. Get your facts right, David. Three years, nine months and twenty days, to be exact.’