This was Tom’s homecoming and he’d gone for cheapness. But it wasn’t Tom who’d be staying here.
The Globe was little more than a pub, but its lack of any style was vaguely comforting and as he entered, there, briefly, was Tom again, behind the cubicle-like reception desk. As if his brother was there to welcome him (though with a chin-strapped helmet on). He was standing with his hands resting on the wooden counter. Then he was gone.
Jack pressed the bel on the counter—though without supposing this would resummon his brother—and a woman waddled into view and smiled. This also comforted Jack and made him put aside his feeling of foolishness at having booked in advance.
He gave his name and heard it being drawled back to him. “Lu-uxton.” He had a momentary terror of being found out. She’d surely have read the name in the local paper, where it must have been a story. But the voice (which had something in common with his own) had no particular meaning in it. She took a key from the rack behind her and smiled again. “Breakfast in the back bar—that way—seven to half-past nine.” He wondered if he were the only guest.
The room was better than he’d expected, much better than the mere cel he felt was his due. There was a large window, beneath it a radiator that was barely warm. He found a plug-in heater that made ticking noises, and drew the curtains. Then he lay sprawled for several moments on his back on the bed, closing his eyes. The bed seemed to tremble and rock under him as if he were stil travel ing. He saw the plane parked out on the tarmac.
He got up again quickly, as if to rest was fatal. His watch showed it had just gone five. In his bag he had a change of clothes, for this one evening, so that he could preserve his suit, with a fresh white shirt for the morning. The medal had been in his top pocket when he entered the hotel. He put it now on the bedside table. He undressed and hung up his suit. In the bathroom his nakedness, in a strange mirror, among strange angles and surfaces, suddenly perplexed and alarmed him. Would that hearse have arrived yet?
Should he have been there for it, waiting in the twilight? He wouldn’t have liked to drive a big hearse through the high, narrow lanes around Marleston, let alone with darkness coming on. He saw its headlights rippling along the rooty banks.
What was in that coffin? He ran the tap. And those other two coffins—with their flags stil wrapping them —where were they now? Pickering, Ful er. He’d scarcely given them a thought.
He lay in the bath, his knees raised so it could contain his length. The water had gushed and was hot. How had Tom died? The bath was better, safer than the swaying bed. He felt like a man on the run. He felt a great desire not to know who he was.
IT WAS BARELY SEVEN when he went out. There was no waddling woman, though there was chatter from along the hal way and the noise of a TV. So he hung on to his key.
He’d picked up the medal again and put it in the zip-up pocket of his parka jacket. He didn’t dare not have it about his person. It was like carrying a key. He had only one plan.
To find a pub—definitely not the Globe itself—a pub that did food. To drink as much as it took, then to get back and crash into bed with as little as possible stil stirring in his brain.
He was lucky with the pub. It was cal ed the Fox and Hounds and was barely three minutes from his hotel. It had, at this early-evening hour, just the right number of customers, so that he wouldn’t stand out nor, on the other hand, be swamped. Furthermore, one of the other customers, he almost casual y observed now, was Tom.
Stil in his battle kit, but leaning against the bar like some regular, one hand plunged into one of many pockets as if he might have been jingling loose change, or perhaps a hand grenade. He’d looked round as his brother came in, as if to say, “Jack! What’l you have?” Then, as before, he was gone.
Jack ordered a pint and saw that there were plastic menus on the tables. He didn’t care: any food. He took a table by the wal . The wal had fake black beams running down it and in between were framed pictures of hunting scenes that were standard issue for pubs in country towns.
He drank the first pint fairly quickly, then, when he went to the bar for a second, ordered the steak and chips. Fox and hounds, steak and chips. From the feel of the beer inside him, he reckoned another pint after this, or a large scotch, should be sufficient. He general y knew his limits. As many of the Lookouters who went to the Ship at Sands End could vouch, Jack wasn’t a big drinker—two pints sipped slowly.
His big body seemed to contain them easily, but not to need any more. But now he was drinking to a purpose.
Someone had left a convenient copy of the
He didn’t want to look at the television when he got back to his room. There was no television—it was something he’d consciously checked—in this bar. He wanted to be disconnected. Yet the voices around him were like voices he’d once known and he had the feeling again that he might suddenly be recognised. Equal y, he had the thought that he was sitting—quite unnoticeably, in fact—in an ordinary pub in Okehampton when only seven or eight hours ago he’d been mingling with lords and ladies and generals and God knows who. He’d been where drums had been beaten, bugles blown and swords had flashed.
Guess where I’ve been today?
Was it the beer starting to work? In the wrong direction?
While he waited for his food and looked at the
That sort of thing could happen, after al , at the Lookout (it could happen in the Ship, but then it was not his business).
The furies that a fortnight’s holiday could sometimes, oddly, release. The pressure-cooker of a caravan under three days of rain. It seemed strange to Jack that he could actual y exert a calming influence in such situations—or maybe just look like a man no one would want to take on. A gangster even, apparently. He’d entered that hardly intimidating hotel like a mouse.
