Boys and Girls Read online

  Contents

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2014 Joseph Connolly

  The moral right of Joseph Connolly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  HB ISBN 978 1 78087 722 8

  TPB ISBN 978 1 78087 723 5

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78087 724 2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  By the same author

  Fiction

  POOR SOULS

  THIS IS IT

  STUFF

  SUMMER THINGS

  WINTER BREAKS

  IT CAN’T GO ON

  S.O.S.

  THE WORKS

  LOVE IS STRANGE

  JACK THE LAD AND BLOODY MARY

  ENGLAND’S LANE

  Non-fiction

  COLLECTING MODERN FIRST EDITIONS

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  JEROME K. JEROME: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY

  MODERN FIRST EDITIONS: THEIR VALUE TO COLLECTORS

  THE PENGUIN BOOK QUIZ BOOK

  CHILDREN’S MODERN FIRST EDITIONS

  BESIDE THE SEASIDE

  ALL SHOOK UP: A FLASH OF THE FIFTIES

  CHRISTMAS

  WODEHOUSE

  FABER AND FABER: EIGHTY YEARS OF BOOK COVER DESIGN

  THE A-Z OF EATING OUT

  To the boy and girl

  Charles and Victoria

  Boys and girls come out to play,

  The moon doth shine as bright as day.

  Come with a whoop and come with a call,

  Come with good will or not at all.

  (Traditional nursery rhyme)

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I got up at the crack of noon – show a bit willing, make a kind of effort – but it seemed to be far too late for, oh – just everything. I was still in my pyjamas, had them bunched up at the scruff of the waist – no slippers on, or anything – and then she just hit me with it. I was stunned, and I had to look down, trying to avoid any sight of my feet. Hate them in general, feet, and my two especially. I have to say I was stunned, though: stunned.

  ‘Why are you leaving me? I thought we were happy.’

  ‘It isn’t really a question of happy, though, is it Alan? Really.’

  ‘Is it not? I thought it was. Oh God I’m so miserable. Don’t leave me, Susan. Please don’t leave me. I never thought you would, just walk out and leave me.’

  ‘I want another husband. It’s simple, really.’

  I think I must have been pinkly blinking – maybe a true white innocence suddenly awake and crawling all over me.

  ‘Oh God. Oh God. You’re leaving me. You’re really going to do it …’

  ‘You’re not listening to me, are you Alan my sweet? My sugar. I’ve not even mentioned it, have I? I said nothing about leaving you. Did I? Mm? All I said is, I want another husband. You see? Yes? No. You don’t, do you? Just look at your face: total blank. Well let me explain it to you, yes? Shall I, Alan?’

  ‘That would be … nice …’

  ‘Well listen, then. I want another husband. With me so far? Good, Alan: good. But not instead of, Alan – no. Not instead. As well as … You see? Oh do shut your mouth, Alan, for heaven’s sake do. You look just like a fish. Gaping like that. And don’t for goodness sake start worrying about having to do anything, or anything – I’ll take care of all the details, just as I always do. I’ll arrange it all. You could give me away, if you liked. Would you like that, Alan my sweet? And of course you wouldn’t really be giving me away, would you? Because I’ll still be here. And so will he.’

  ‘He … ?’

  ‘He. Whoever he may be. Don’t know yet. Must be rich, of course. I’m rather fed up with being the breadwinner, now. It’s really a bit late for breakfast, anything proper. Why don’t you just have some cereal, or something? Apple, maybe.’

  Mm. So that, I suppose, was the start of it all. That, I think, must surely have been the moment. And I tried to think that she’s joking maybe, is she? But she didn’t much – joke, my Susan. Can it be, then, that she’s merely mad? She certainly could seem so, at times, my Susan, and never more so than just lately. It was my being out of work that could have triggered it. I think that’s what it must have been. The nub of it. I used to be in advertising, you know.

  ‘It’s a shame, I think Alan, that you had to go and be one of the creatives. Because you aren’t really, are you my sweet? Creative. My sugar.’

  ‘McVitie’s Bake a Better Biscuit didn’t just tumble out of an actor’s mouth, you know …’

  ‘Mm yes of course I know that, Alan – of course I do. It was terribly clever of you to think of it, terribly terribly clever. But it was rather a long time ago, wasn’t it? That one. And the agency, well … they can’t really have thought you were, can they? Very. Creative, I mean. Because it’s hardly the way, is it? Generally speaking. To reward a valued creative by giving him the sack. It’s roundabout, isn’t it? Oblique. Praise-wise.’

  ‘They were downshifting …’

  ‘Yes. That’s what you said at the time. Well they certainly shifted you anyway, didn’t they Alan? Out if not down.’

  ‘I think you said that at the time also, you know. More than once, as I recall.’

  ‘Well it’s no help at all if you’re just going to get into one of your sulks now, is it Alan? Really. And it’s not as if your next endeavour was exactly a runaway success now, is it? If we’re being honest. Writing the things in Christmas crackers. Didn’t scoop you the Nobel Prize, did it? Wasn’t the great novel, was it, that we were always hearing about.’

  ‘Cookies …’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Alan? What did you say?’

  ‘Fortune cookies. They weren’t for Christmas crackers, as well you know. They were for fortune cookies.’

  ‘Oh yes of course they were – they were, they were, of course they were. How could I be forgetting a simple thing like that? Because we got them, didn’t we? Boxes and boxes of them. Crates of the things. Maybe in lieu of a fee, were they Alan? I never did ask. Did you think those little crackers were better than money, did you Alan my sweet? But of course the electricity people, the gas people, all the rest of them – they’re terribly old-fashioned when it comes right down to it, aren’t they really? Will insist on money, won’t they? No matter how sweetly you offer them a box of cookies, they still seem to prefer hard cash. Yes … those little cookies … our life seemed rather to depend on them, didn’t it? For a long while. Biscuits, of one sort or another. Poor
Amanda, she practically had to live off them – took nothing else to school with her for months on end. She said she wouldn’t mind, but the mottoes, jokes inside, were just so very awful. Were they jokes, Alan? That you wrote? Were they meant to be funny?’

  ‘Not especially …’

  ‘Oh good. Well this is good to know. I maybe should tell her, Amanda, should I? Amanda, dearest – they weren’t actually meant to be funny, all those little things your father put into the biscuits. They were in fact meant to be … um, what were they meant to be in fact, Alan my sweet? Wise, were they? Were they meant to be wise, do you suppose? Alan? My sugar?’

  On and on. Then I got into hardware – don’t ask me how. I don’t mean computers, or anything. Just, you know – hardware. Simple things. Tools, and so on. I quite like them, respond to them, simple things, if I’m honest. Yearn for the days, really, when the only thing that was the size of a cigarette packet was a bloody packet of cigarettes. That wouldn’t up and rattle you with a nursery jingle, when you least expected it. But it’s what they say about the genie, isn’t it? When it’s out of the thing – bottle, is it? Or was it a lamp? Anyway – when it’s out of the thing. Can’t go back, can you? No matter how much you’d like to. Just can’t do it. I don’t think it can have been a lamp though, you know. Not what they came in, is it? Genies. Can’t think it can be. Anyway. Hardware. There was this shop going, you see, just off the high street. Cheap. Scruffy. Had a bit of money left over from the agency, borrowed the rest at a quite startling rate of interest – the reason for its so being, it was patiently and even rather cruelly explained to me, was the fact that I did not actually own anything as collateral – something, say, in the way of the sort of business I was seeking to acquire. I didn’t decide that here I would found a hardware shop – it already was one.

  ‘But did you never pause for even just the most fleeting of milliseconds, Alan my sweet, to ask yourself frankly why it should be that the owner was selling? Could the fact that it was tiny and dingy and at the end of a perfectly filthy little alleyway off the high street and a large new branch of Robert Dyas poised upon opening at the very epicentre of the high street itself – could these facts have had the merest scintilla of bearing, do you imagine Alan? Or that the local paper was just full to bursting with the likelihood of a Homebase being built on the old airfield not five minutes drive away? Do you think that Mr Greasy thought he would dearly love to call it a day, if only some complete and utter dunderhead would appear from out of a fairy tale and actually give him money for the dump?’

  ‘Greasby was his name. His name was Greasby …’

  ‘But notwithstanding, Alan my sweet, does the thrust of my proposition still not stand?’

  ‘It wasn’t the best thing I could have done. I’m not all sure, you know, that a thrust can stand …’

  ‘Not your finest hour, you think on reflection? How very generous-spirited of you, Alan. How noble in defeat. It was the proposition I was referring to. Not the thrust. And what element of your daring foray into the fabulous world of hardware would you imagine became the very nadir? The lowest ebb. The rock bottom, the ultimate in ridiculous, would you say? Because me, I have long cherished my personal favourite, and it would be just so wonderful if it were yours as well. Shall I go first? Shall I, Alan my sweet? Well all right, then. Now leaving aside the moment, of course, when you managed to sell what was remaining on the lease for a pitiful fraction of what you were sagacious enough to pay for the thing – to a wily developer who had the wisdom to raze the little hole to the ground, and sell on the land for a fortune—’

  ‘Nor am I convinced, Susan, that you can raze a hole to the ground …’

  ‘Alan. Do you wish me to lose my temper? Do you, my sweet? Because I am, I promise you, just this close. Now where were we? Oh yes. The low point of your seemingly unfathomable incompetence. And do please know that if you dare to suggest to me, that a state of unfathomability can be possessed of no low point, then I think I might be moved to terminate this discussion by the simple expedient of just killing you with a knife. Is that clear? I do very much hope so. Now then. To my way of thinking, I think the point must have been reached when the local paper picked up on the story that you were attempting to sell these sad little packets upon which you had written: screws, 3 approx. Too sad. Too too sad. I ask you, Alan: 3 approx!’

  It was worse than she knows. On some of the packets I had written Longish Nails, Several, And Other Things Too. The problems arose when the shelves that had borne these vast open tins of all the bits and pieces for centuries just simply gave way the very day I came to own them – rot and woodworm, said the chippie I had to bring in, near enough crying with laughter – and there was no way at all I could bring myself to sort them all out. I had attempted to buy some little transparent bags, but these, apparently, have yet to be invented, and so all in the end I could latch on to were hundreds upon hundreds of small manila envelopes. I had no idea in those days that woodscrews, say, were classified in girth by means of a simple number – one to eight, I think it is. My sizes ranged from Really Teeny Weeny to Very Big Indeed, but mostly tended to be labelled Assorted. And things like 3 approx. Oh dear me. But she’s right though, Susan – of course she is. It wasn’t brilliant. Nothing I touch ever seems to be. Or never mind brilliant, for Christ’s sake – adequate would easily do, but these days even that seems surely to elude me. So it’s not too surprising, is it? Really. On the whole. That she wants another husband. The only mystery, if I’m being honest with myself, is why she should want me as well, and not instead of … What good am I to her, after all? Oh well. But she’s set on doing it – I know her, Susan. Some way or another, she’ll do it, I just know she will. So we’ll just have to wait, I suppose: see how it all works out.

  I am a sensualist. Not at all, you see, how Alan I suppose must now have come to regard me. He may remember how it was I used to be, how he once saw me, though I somehow doubt it. And he has to be spoken to like that, you know, however unkind it might appear. I very rarely, of course, would subject him to anything like it in public – on extreme occasions, well yes, but only quite mildly. With him not having worked for so terribly long, you see (not in the proper sense, not in the sense of actually bringing in some bloody money) he has more than been given his proverbial inch, wouldn’t you say? Really? And I cannot – not just for my sake, no, because there is always Amanda to be considered, if Alan only knew it – still just fourteen, but seeing everything before her, and I am sure quite horribly clearly – and so as I say, I cannot, can I? Simply can’t. Sit idly by and watch him take the yard. Because in common with many men, I suspect, he is at base quite thoroughly idle. He will do what he is permitted to get away with. But Alan, you see, as with all the very most pitiable cases, he is not, as you might say, the idler par excellence, in the sense of just loafing about. I mean he drinks too much, obviously – maybe even more than I am aware of – and he staggers out of his bed ever later and later in the … well, I was going to say morning, but so often now it can easily be lunchtime, and especially at the weekends. In many ways I don’t really mind it, to be truthful, because then he’s not constantly under my feet. This is part of what I was saying, you see, about his own quite particular brand of idleness (it is peculiar to him) – he’s a bustler, Alan, always active, some fool thing on the go, but never actually getting around to achieving an end. Either because he quickly loses interest (you can actually see it die, behind his eyes) or else the task in hand – whatever little thing it might be – will have simply, and yet once again, proved to be utterly beyond him.

  I should love to be able to say that on the day I first met him, I was breathless and slammed by the wall of his charm, the wit and dazzle in the eyes, his savage good looks that made me pulsate. Sometimes, indeed – during my cold and older moments, alone, so often in the night, when I have needed not just a lustful comforting but the grain of an explanation as to why I have actually or ever gone through or along with anything at all i
n the whole of my life – I have wilfully and falsely remembered, almost inveigling myself into unquestioningly swallowing all of this as truth. But here is mere embroidery, for decoration’s sake – more than that, in truth, for no embroidery, no matter how gaudy nor intricate, could ever be so ornate as my own imaginings, their contrasts picked out sharply. For I am a sensualist – a sensualist, yes: I love the feel of things, you see, and not just deeply.

  He was not, of course, a man without qualities. Alan was always then and still I suppose is, a perfectly reasonably handsome man – as Maria, my very oldest friend (who I almost know is also quite dear to me), will sometimes rather swinishly indicate, if ever she senses a chink in my composure, a hairline that she can agitate with a cold and fine-gauged needle. He is intelligent (I could not have lived with a fool) though not, we don’t think (do we?) in any way – intellectual: even to whisper the word into Alan’s atmosphere, the soft breath catches within you and the moment seems immediately to me to be one of regret, but also quite giddily humorous. A rich man? Powerful? Oh no – but I did detect the bare bones of a prospect, you see. I was completely prepared to have faith, wanting it to devour me. To faith though, I have found, there is most certainly a very closely proscribed perimeter – the limit, my boundaries. Beyond them it becomes almost Catholic and hysterical in its purposeful blindness; in order to remain yourself, the demands of faith must not encompass your leaving behind all reason. So I could go on believing in Alan, you see, only up until the moment when he faltered and doubted himself – then, I think, we both of us felt immediately rather stupid, for having wandered, wide-eyed and parallel in a dream of our own concoction, and for quite so long. We should all know, really, shouldn’t we, that the defining features of dreams are that they are not real and that one does wake up, and out of them. And yet their warm and languorous embrace (the harlot promise of a ready bliss) is so very headily seductive that we are tricked every time into believing the illusion – then comes the plummet, and we are grasping blindly and with such desperation, at the scattering spangles of a now dowdy mirage, mocking us and fading before our very eyes. There can be few crueller moments than a rough and reluctant awakening. I would never say this, or anything like it, if Alan were around. I always do, though, think it.