‘It’s not necessary.’
‘That will be all right then, Sir.’
He waited for a moment and then remembered what he was waiting for. ‘Could I please have my key?’ he asked.
She looked at him in amazement and said, ‘You don’t need a key here, Sir. Nobody steals anything. Room 101 is on the first floor. You can’t miss it.’ He took his cases and walked up the stairs. He heard them discussing a dance as he left.
He opened the door and put the cases down and went to the window. In front of him he could see the ship and the bay with the red lights on it and the fishing boats and the large clock with the greenish face.
As he turned away from the window he saw the Gideon Bible, picked it up, half smiling, and then put it down again. He took off his clothes slowly, feeling very tired, and went to bed. He fell asleep very quickly while in front of his eyes he could see Bingo signs, advertisements for Russian watches, and seagulls flying about with open gluttonous beaks. The last thought he had was that he had forgotten to ask when breakfast was in the morning.
2
The following day at two o’clock in the afternoon he took the bus to the village that he had left so many years before. There were few people on the bus which had a conductress as well as a driver, both dressed in uniform. He thought wryly of the gig in which he had been driven to the town the night he had left; the horse was dead long ago and so was his own father, the driver.
On the seat opposite him there was sitting a large fat tourist who had a camera and field-glasses slung over his shoulder and was wearing dark glasses and a light greyish hat.
The driver was a sturdy young man of about twenty or so. He whistled a good deal of the time and for the rest exchanged badinage with the conductress who, it emerged, wanted to become an air stewardess. She wore a black uniform, was pretty in a thin, sallow way, and had a turned-up nose and black hair.
After a while he offered a cigarette to the driver who took it. ‘Fine day, Sir,’ he said and then, ‘Are you home on holiday?’
‘Yes. From America.’
‘Lots of tourists here just now. I was in America myself once. I was in the Merchant Navy. Saw a baseball team last night on TV.’
The bus was passing along the sparkling sea and the cemetery which stood on one side of the road behind a grey wall. The marble of the gravestones glittered in the sun. Now and again he could see caravans parked just off the road and on the beach men and children in striped clothing playing with large coloured balls or throwing sticks for dogs to retrieve. Once they passed a large block of what appeared to be council houses, all yellow.
‘You’ll see many changes,’ said the driver. ‘Hey, bring us some of that orangeade,’ he shouted to the conductress.
‘I suppose so.’
But there didn’t seem all that many in the wide glittering day. The sea, of course, hadn’t changed, the cemetery looked brighter in the sun perhaps, and there were more houses. But people waved at them from the fields, shielding their eyes with their hands. The road certainly was better.
At one point the tourist asked to be allowed out with his camera so that he could take a photograph of a cow which was staring vaguely over a fence.
If the weather was always like this, he thought, there wouldn’t be any problem . . . but of course the weather did change . . . The familiar feeling of excitement and apprehension flooded him again.
After a while they stopped at the road end and he got off with his two cases. The driver wished him good luck. He stood staring at the bus as it diminished into the distance and then taking his case began to walk along the road. He came to the ruins of a thatched house, stopped and went inside. As he did so he disturbed a swarm of birds which flew out of the space all round him and fluttered out towards the sky which he could see quite clearly as there was no roof. The ruined house was full of stones and bits of wood and in the middle of it an old-fashioned iron range which he stroked absently, making his fingers black and dusty. For a moment the picture returned to him of his mother in a white apron cooking at such a stove, in a smell of flour. He turned away and saw carved in the wooden door the words MARY LOVES NORMAN. The hinges creaked in the quiet day.
He walked along till he came to a large white house at which he stopped. He opened the gate and there, waiting about ten yards in front of him, were his brother, his brother’s daughter-in-law, and her two children, one a boy of about seventeen and the other a girl of about fifteen. They all seemed to be dressed in their best clothes and stood there as if in a picture. His brother somehow seemed dimmer than he remembered, as if he were being seen in a bad light. An observer would have noticed that though the two brothers looked alike the visitor seemed a more vivid version of the other. The family waited for him as if he were a photographer and he moved forward. As he did so his brother walked quickly towards him, holding out his hand.
‘John,’ he said. They looked at each other as they shook hands. His niece came forward and introduced herself and the children. They all appeared well dressed and prosperous.
The boy took his cases and they walked towards the house. It was of course a
