It's All Right Now: A Novel

By Charles Chadwick

Meet Tom Ripple, a man with an uncommon outlook on his common life. Through the vividness of his voice and his growing sense of the sorrow and absurdity of the world, Tom Ripple becomes an unusually appealing antihero, aware of his ordinariness and the limits of his intelligence, with a ribald sense of humor, and a clumsiness in his attempts at emotional connection with others. He is a bewildered everyman navigating his way through modern times.

By turns poignant, funny, heartbreaking, and profound, It's All Right Now is a towering achievement and a singular work of the imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061873492

Book preview

PART ONE

Chapter One

For a while the houses on either side of us were empty. Then at about the same time the ‘For Sale’ signs were taken away and people moved into them. We live in a (just) detached house in between, which I’ve come to assume, perhaps my wife has too, we’ll be living in for the rest of our lives…Well, one has to begin somewhere, on any old scrap of paper. I’m not sure what the point of it is. We shall have to see. It may take quite a time.

Webb, our neighbour on one side, suffers from too much curiosity but it lacks malice, I’m sure. On our other side live a man called Hamble and his wife who display in their demeanour a constant long-suffering which I suspect in each other’s company alone they find something of a strain. Webb is married too. His wife is hunched, wan and bespectacled and seems to keep out of the way as if in her time she has been too much the object of curiosity.

I often, not all that often, wish we could afford to live without close neighbours instead of here in this unnoteworthy north London suburb where to try to keep to oneself is to draw attention to oneself. Too much neighbourliness is forced upon me in my place of work without my having to put up with it in the long periods in between. My wife would regard such theories (if at all) as anti-social. She is whatever the opposite of that is. Society is something she is decidedly pro, having theories about anyway – both the one that is and the better one we should all be trying to bring into being. She practises what she preaches – the other way round too which some might find, well, anti-social perhaps the word is. I don’t. I admire what she does very much, namely good works in another neighbourhood, asking herself now and again, only in theory thank the Lord, whether she ought to be paid for them. Between us therefore you could say we are trying to bring a better world into being, a wider neighbourliness. At any rate that’s the theory and I won’t let it come between us.

When she sees the Webbs or the Hambles she waves briskly at them without pausing in what she is doing – mainly striding resolutely up or down our front path – and she answers Webb’s enquiries with a sideways pull of one half of her mouth that only Webb might mistake for a smile. My wife does not enjoy entering into discussion about our neighbours when there are topics more far-reaching to be talked about, such as our children’s progress and growing social awareness, my total lack of them (which are talked about only by implication) and the world’s way of falling somewhere in between.

It wouldn’t much matter to my wife where we lived, within limits of course; I think she’d prefer greater poverty and hardship to having to classify herself more evidently among the privileged. So, equally often, I am glad we live where we do, midway, roughly speaking, between the two i.e. not squalidly and not too stricken by her conscience. The neighbourhood where she works has a lot of squalor in it, about which she tells me as I go ‘Ts ts’, shake my head, silently count my blessings and say nothing. These are the early 1970s and things seem to be getting worse and worse which makes them better and better for her, I’m glad (sorry) to say.

Up to a point, I like to imagine that Webb married his wife purely out of curiosity, to discover what the intimacies of wedlock with someone so shy of them would be like, or because she seemed docile enough to experiment a lot with. I also imagine he is curious about my intimacies with my wife, though he might guess they wouldn’t make him curious for more ad infinitum. One of my speculations is that when we go up to bed he is in the bathroom opposite our bedroom window with the light off in the hope that one night we’ll forget to draw the curtains and turn our light out. This is not at all the kind of notion I can share with my wife. It would make her think me frivolous on top of lacking in imagination. It would also make her despise Webb for being somebody anybody could have that kind of thought about. So far I think I like Webb enough not to want him to be despised, especially (even?) by my wife. Also, without going to the lengths of hanging about in unlit bathrooms, I am not that much less curious than I imagine Webb to be to know what he and Mrs Webb get up to together. When I go to bed I sometimes slow down a lot without actually coming to a complete stop, and glance across at their bedroom to see if anything interesting is going on, on the off-chance they are more careless than we are. I mean than my wife is – it is she who draws our curtains and always with an extra two tugs to shut out the tiniest possible remaining chink of light between them. Generally speaking, my own curiosity is limited to holding myself in readiness not to turn the other way and hurry past should something going on present itself to me. When I go for walks after dark I look nonchalantly up at lit bedrooms with undrawn curtains. I’ve never seen anything.

I would like to satisfy Webb’s curiosity without necessarily laying it on for him, by, say, appearing naked and erect in front of his bathroom window, and making a grab at my wife just as she’s lowering her final undergarment or unhitching her bra, things she does in an increasingly businesslike as opposed to down-to-business manner these days. I would not mind if he saw the shadow of us on the wall doing it. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t much mind other people knowing how low (or narrowly I should say) in this area my wife sets the limits of acceptable behaviour – which appears to give me and society something else in common. Perhaps Webb thinks a woman as self-possessed as my wife abandons herself utterly in the throes of being possessed by another. Perhaps he’d like to ask her to go to bed with him just to see how she would react but I doubt his curiosity is, so to speak, that all-embracing. The truth is that I sometimes (very occasionally) think I’d like to ask Mrs Webb the same question, but in such a way that she wouldn’t know for sure that was what I was asking (sticking my head suddenly through her kitchen window and saying ‘How about it then?’), not because of her expression of shock but because she might tell Webb and excite his curiosity further, thus spurring him on to satisfy it in regard to my wife. All this is only fleetingly in my mind. Mrs Webb is skinny with a tendency towards bedragglement. I would not wish to upset her in any way. She is too timid and helpless. When you speak to her, which I’ve so far done only twice, her eyes describe a parabola from one shoulder to the other by way of your navel.

The difference between Webb and the Hambles, whom one always thinks of as a pair, is that if you asked Webb if you could borrow something, say a screwdriver or a length of wire, he would ask you what you wanted it for. Either of the Hambles would go off in a tremendous hurry to look for it, even though they knew they didn’t have it, and return later either happily bearing something else, say a pair of scissors or ball of string, or miserably empty-handed, so that you regretted not having asked them for a great deal more or something altogether different or of course nothing at all.

Webb says they emigrated to Canada when Churchill lost the election at the end of the war but soon came back on account of the prolonged absence of warmth there. Webb is probably making this up but if that is what they did do I suspect they didn’t enjoy a single moment of it but didn’t allow themselves even to think that, assuming that a general unenjoyability would have been their uppermost experience of life anywhere.

Sometimes I think I can hear the sound of sobbing from the Hambles’ house. Perhaps they are recalling the death a long time ago of a small pet or child. They are the sort of people who have a profound sorrow in their lives they cannot overcome, who turn their grief outwards into an expression of vague loving-kindness. They are old folk, plump and grey, who came to our street to see out their retirement. I imagine they have put all their savings into their house, live on a shrinking pension and worry themselves sick about how they are going to make ends meet. They are the kind of people who go away quietly into a corner to die. I see them lying side by side, hand in hand, on the kitchen floor by a gas stove, having first made themselves comfortable with cushions. Their final talk would be of what they had lost a long time ago or of what had never happened to them, though they would believe in reunions, in spirits meeting up in lush, sunny pastures shadowed by vast oaks and cedars. They are the sort of people one cannot help because they would worry about having nothing to offer in return and because what they really need – anonymous money – would be too much for you to give in sufficient quantities, to say nothing of the anxiety caused by not knowing where it had come from. In the meantime they tend an immaculate garden in which the vegetables grow evenly and are as neatly arrayed as the flowers. I sometimes see Webb in their garden pointing and talking but I doubt if they answer his questions. They suspect he has guessed too much already. He borrows gardening tools from them and twice I have seen him come away with a packet of seeds. I am sure he borrows things from them so as to have an excuse for going back to return them. I’d like to suggest that we swap houses with the Webbs because the Hambles evidently give him more to be curious about than we do.

My wife would think I was making a joke. She never laughs at my jokes. She ‘smiles’ at about half of them, the obvious ones, but because I hardly find them funny at all as soon as I’ve made them there’s no smirk or twinkle from which to tell whether I’ve made the other half or not. When I asked her to marry me and she agreed, I was so surprised I asked her why. I’d had the bulk of her clothing off her more than once by then (or ‘we’d’ and ‘our’ and delete the second ‘her’, this to remove any impression that over the years I’ve lost the initiative) and our gasping and grunting and doom-filled moaning had revealed no basic or physical discord leaving me in little doubt that the ultimate union would soon be reached, albeit disharmonious to all ears but our own. (Nowadays Webb would barely hear a thing unless he had an ear right up under our mattress.) So she had one reason I could be fairly confident of. But what she replied was: ‘You’re a very nice man. You have a dry sense of humour.’

The nicest of men, panting and flushed himself, scrabbling his way beneath straps and elastic, making soft surfaces damp with his foraging lips, having to breathe through his nose a variety of smells by no means all of which he prefers to his own, no man then should have his humour to the fore. ‘Something has to stay dry,’ I replied or mumbled, my ear by now in the region of her navel, then again, ‘Soon I’ll be in it nearly up to my waist.’ There was no responding tremble of laughter in her stomach – not that she could possibly have heard me. I was glad she hadn’t because, goodness knows, it was a solemn moment for me too and I didn’t want her to find out yet that my sense of humour didn’t rise to any old occasion, whatever the rest of me did. So if I said, ‘Let’s swap with the Hambles or Webbs,’ she’d say, ‘What a funny idea. Why?’ And I’d reply, ‘Houses I mean. To bring them closer together. So they don’t have to try to see through us.’ Or on those lines.

That is not the kind of conversation I can have with my wife. I could not even suggest we had the Webbs and the Hambles over for a meal or to watch television. Having no reason of her own to be especially thoughtful to people simply because they happen to be near by she’d wonder what reason I might have, my not having hitherto displayed much thoughtfulness of any variety. (‘If it’s all the same to you, dear.’) She’d suspect my motives, but get them wrong. She knows I’m not one for entering into unnecessary obligations, so she’d think I was trying to put on a dutiful aspect to impress my family (what was I hiding?), whereas I’d only be watching Webb’s curiosity at close quarters, in our midst, regretting that we’d so soon have to exhaust it, while the Hambles sat in an ever-widening pool of silence. I should add that we didn’t go the ‘whole way’ that evening either when she agreed to marry me. That came later when something else had come to an end too, the death of my father to be precise. I don’t feel able to say anything more about that for the moment.

I’m not being fair to my wife. I seldom am. She is an impossible woman to fault. She knows her own mind, is useful to the community, occupies her time gainfully, is an admirable parent, in short, God knows (she knows), is everything that I am not. She does not wish to nag me, let alone dominate me. It is simply that she has taken charge, has learnt to accept me as I am, an agreeable enough sort of fellow who does, alas, entirely what is expected of him. For example, we both vote Labour. In my wife’s case that goes without saying. (If only it did.) In my own, it might be because I recognise in myself the acquisitiveness of the Conservative animal and am taking it out on myself for the few actual acquisitions it seems to lead to. Also my boss is a Conservative, bound to be (not free to be anything else?). Or it might be because I prefer self-righteousness to self-satisfaction for a few seconds once every four years or so, bearing in my mind my preference for the rest of the time. Or it could be simply that I vote what my wife votes. I am outwardly a better hypocrite than liar. She would never forgive me if I voted otherwise and would wish to discuss the matter, in front of the children, what’s more. My cross in the wrong place would be a terrible burden for us all to have to bear. The Liberal party only makes my wife shrug. It is a word she mainly employs to go with ‘helping’ or ‘dose’ or ‘share’ meaning too much of a good, or bad, thing. It is a word that might worry me if I had to think about it, giving so much scope for good and bad, e.g. taking liberties. That goes for thinking too which wanders freely about all over the place and who knows where it will end? All very worrying. I should be free not to have to think about it – if it would have done me good, too bad. Let that be the end of it.

We have a small house, a small garden, a small car (which all go with the small job), two perfectly satisfactory children and every year take two weeks’ holiday by the water somewhere. I have no vices. I only smoke cheroots in the garden and even then my children, undiscouraged by my wife, may watch me from the window vigorously flapping their hands. I do not drink to excess nor have yet, in fact, committed adultery. In short, I give my wife no cause for concern. (Thereby doing my bit by not taking her attention away from those it is her business to be concerned about.) When at home, I busy myself with odd jobs such as painting walls, filling cracks with Polyfilla, tidying up the small garden and cleaning the small car. The only game I play is badminton because there is a badminton club within easy walking distance. My wife does not play games, perhaps on principle. I’m not sure; I’ve never asked her. I would have to travel four miles in thickish traffic to the nearest golf course and anyway I don’t think golf could be my game. The people who play it have a certain persistent levity that would weigh me down. Or all that paraphernalia would. Also, I have a feeling that however much I practised I would find myself quite frequently, in front of others, missing the ball altogether. Finally it’s a costly game, and would trouble my conscience in as much as I would feel obliged to ask myself from time to time for what better purpose the money might be spent – not only in the sense deriving from the concerns of my wife, but also better for me, or more enjoyable – which in my limited experience (compared with my wife’s) do not always (never) come to the same thing. No thank you – a case in point – I don’t jog either. To be willing to be seen doing it by so many others suggests a desire for self-betterment of heroic proportions, there being no enjoyment in it, or so it would appear – unless of course that is where the enjoyment lies: in letting other people know what fun you’re not having in feeling all the better for it. Even in a thick fog on a lonely moor I wouldn’t, not wishing to extend needlessly my visibility to myself either; besides, it’s not my body that seems to need the working out now.

Apart from the pottering and television I read books: thrillers and lives of the great explorers mainly. I fill my time quite nicely: a sort of involuntary pleasure-seeking you might say. ‘You old hedonist, you,’ my wife once called me. I looked the word up: ‘Ethical theory that pleasure is the chief good or the proper end of action.’ I was instantly heartened that my wife should have seen in me the exponent of a philosophy going back to the Greeks. But having taken the scholarly words out I was left with pleasure being the end of action, and in my case inaction is the word I would have to (become) plump for. Perhaps there is another definition for old hedonists.

I’ve never expected much of life, nor much of myself, which are the same thing my wife would say. I wouldn’t. I am not much given to wanting to take charge of things. If I was, my life would be less satisfying, I think, because I would then be brought into conflict with my wife. It is she who brings up the children. The way she goes about it does not bother me on the whole, though she does seem to me, rightly or wrongly, to have this tendency to see right or wrong at issue when they oughtn’t to be. It would not do at all if I had ideas of my own about how my children should be brought up. I wouldn’t like to disagree with my wife in that sensitive area. She is a better talker than I am and I doubt if I could sustain for long an argument directed at showing she was in error. Besides, I haven’t read any of the literature on the subject. She will lecture my children, too, about the distinction between wisdom and knowledge. I wish she wouldn’t. All they ultimately need to know, I decide sometimes, is that wisdom is a form of exhaustion, since that makes me wiser than she is.

At this juncture it occurs to me to ask myself again why I have started writing about my life like this – except that I have time in the office to do it and it helps to make me look busy. I suppose I might be curious to know where it will take me and want to try some exploring of my own perhaps, not knowing what I’ll find until I get there. In the meantime it gives clarity to, and saves the repetition of, all the talking to myself I do – no more or less than other people I don’t suppose. To think of all those imagined, unwritten lives one dwells amongst…

I get back from work at about half past six. As I hang up my coat in the hall I shout a word or two of greeting through to the living-room where my children are watching the news. I try to vary the greeting but doubt if they notice it. ‘Hi there!’ ‘Hallo, chaps!’ ‘Home again!’ ‘Evening, folks!’ are about the extent of my range. There seldom being a response, I put my head round the door and repeat myself. My children glance up, sometimes raise a hand, sometimes smile, what is known as a ghost of one, making me feel very much in the flesh, not to say lumpish. If my wife is there too, she says, ‘Hallo, dear,’ and to the children, ‘Say hallo to your father.’ Whereupon they say ‘Hi!’ in chorus without looking away from the television for even a split second. They have seen me before.

I think then, as often, how satisfactory by and large my children are, how well brought up etc. – apart, just possibly, from the fact that they don’t make more of my homecoming, without actually scurrying about in search of my smoking-jacket and slippers, which they would have to do since I do not possess either. It is a long time since my wife asked me if I have had a hard day. She knows I never have had. She’s the one who’s had that with her unmarried mothers and delinquents and the like. I never ask if she’s had a hard day because I know the answer and the length of it. (‘One-parent families’ is the correct phrase, I realise, but I avoid it, it being too close to home.)

I cannot blame my children, therefore, for not springing to their feet when I return from work as I (my wife too) would expect them to if I’d spent my day rescuing people from fires or performing operations on the brain or otherwise making the world a better place to live in. Moreover, the news is one of the programmes in the informative category that their school and their mother encourage them to watch as a window on to the world. I can appreciate that my familiar presence, my own ghostly smile, should not be permitted to distract them from the strangeness and pain of existence at large.

Television is one of the areas of our lives where my wife is more in charge than I am. It is the only one in which I would like to be solely in charge. Just about exclusively, I have a firm preference for the escapist tough stuff like Starsky and Hutch, Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, The Avengers and so forth. I really do enjoy that sort of programme and look forward to it all day. I hardly ever enjoy the sort of programme that is good for my children and ought to be good for me too. My wife is right when she ticks the programmes we ought to watch and forbids the children, who have homework and other mind-developing things to do, to watch anything else. BBC 2 has a lot to answer for, in my view.

My children go to bed promptly at nine, so the conflict is only between my tastes and their enlightenment up to a point. After they’ve gone to bed my wife may say, ‘I would rather like to watch so and so.’ And it doesn’t really enter my head (at the time) to reply, in a muffled manner, the lollipop roaming about in my mouth, ‘Isn’t that hard shit because I’ve a mind to watch the other thing.’

I usually don’t actively dislike the informative thing she’s improving herself with and sometimes have to confess afterwards to myself (out loud I merely stumble through a few worried adjectives) that it’s broadened my mind for a moment or two, though I do actively dislike the sensation of shrinkage that follows it, especially when I’m reminded of how my imagination kept on interfering with my intellect, if not moral sense (the other way round?), for example with car-chases missed and fist-fights unseen.

When she hasn’t ticked anything my wife often says how much she is looking forward to a good, long, quiet read. I then might say, ‘Mind if I stay up and watch so and so?’ To which she replies, ‘Of course not, dear.’ Without adding (thinking?), ‘If that’s the kind of rubbish you like.’

She can’t sleep until I’m in bed too, which is a snag, but here again she makes no fuss when my dreadful old movie keeps me up after the time by which she would otherwise have fallen asleep. She simply turns away from me as I pull the sheet up to my chin. She does not sigh. She is not a silent nagger, having boned up thoroughly on the whole marital rigmarole. She falls asleep almost as soon as I’ve turned off the light. She does not brood. However, the next night she yawns a lot and goes to bed earlier than usual so I can’t watch my kind of programme two nights running. My wife is an eminently reasonable woman. It is a key aspect of her eminence in general. She has had wide experience of what can happen when married couples fail to adjust to each other. She has studied the effect on their children. She does not believe in having rows. Nor do I. In so many ways we are a perfect pair. We agree entirely, without raising the subject, that it would be ill-advised to allow television or anything else, such as opinions, to come between us. I hold, generally speaking, with not arguing with people one may find oneself disagreeing with.

So when I look down at my children before pouring myself a glass of sweet, cheap sherry to take up to my bath, I may fleetingly regret the days when they were all over me when I came back from work, my son prodding me with a weapon and ordering me to fall about all over the place, my daughter hugging my legs and begging to be lifted up on to my shoulders; but my chief feeling is one of complacency. I do not scare them, they are more likely than not to be on the side of the angels. This is one of my wife’s expressions – I certainly keep on the right side of her in the here and now since she doesn’t believe in the hereafter; she believes this is it. She sometimes asks me to ‘Be an angel…’ or tells me my reward will be in heaven, carefully adding ‘as the saying goes.’ The thing is, she could conceivably be wrong, enabling me to tell her when we met up again, ‘As the saying goes, I don’t believe it!’. To return to my children: they will never have any cause to detest me and all I stand for since I stand for nothing – I never think ‘I won’t stand for it’ except, possibly, when the National Anthem is played. They will grow up to be sensible, industrious etc. people over whom I will lose no sleep. I do not stay awake worrying about them now, except on occasion when worrying about whether I should be.

My son will probably marry someone like my wife because, like me, he is not of forceful temperament, but he has his mother’s clarity of mind, which takes the form of argumentativeness for the time being, so perhaps he’ll choose a wife who’ll mainly be in charge when there’s no conversation going on. There’s something about him that worries me however – a certain lack of gaiety, or funlessness is it? I’d have to be a great deal more clear-minded about it than that to raise the matter with my wife.

My daughter who tends, at twelve, to a priggishness which will doubtless develop into my wife’s certainty as regards good and evil, will not marry someone like me if only because she’s going to be a good deal prettier than my wife and will have a wider choice, especially if she learns in the process to blur the distinction between good and evil a bit. Also, by the general inculcation of my wife’s standards over the years somebody like me will have descended quite a long way below her sights by then. What my children are likely to have is purpose as well as brightness. I have aspirations for them too, because I am curious to see how far they can go. I won’t mind waving until they are out of sight. As I sip my sherry, I give thanks to fate (to my wife) that I have fathered them, that they are not deformed or retarded or ugly, that they are unlikely to make demands on me. No, it does not bother me for long that they did not return my greeting.

The only time we feel like a complete family is when we are on holiday. At any rate up till now, our holidays have been happy interludes. My children have gone back to calling me Daddy, have asked my permission as well as my wife’s to do things, have cavorted about with me at the water’s edge and have occasionally held my hand when walking along the beach or wherever. We have forgotten ourselves on holiday. No television, masses of fresh air and exercise and long deep sleeps. Even my wife throws herself into it and thrashes about in a most untypical manner. (I speak of the water.) We are a real family for those two weeks (all we can afford, more than a lot of people can afford, thank you, dearest). I expect we are pleasant to behold, chatting away, splashing about. I see other families like us and it occurs to me we compare well with them. We have a healthy look about us. Our inner voices seem to have gone silent. Two weeks are long enough for my wife. They are of course not anything like long enough for my children. I do not mind either way. As I’ve tried to convey, I like the holiday mood but there is always the television to look forward to when we are home again.

Chapter Two

I sometimes think I could do with more of Webb’s curiosity and the Hambles’ loving-kindness. As I’ve said, we live between them – two childless couples – and wondering if they think I feel sorry for them I sense their judgement, almost as much as my wife’s, continuously upon me.

There are times when I think of doing the disappearing trick. I wouldn’t worry about the family, oh no. But where would I go? I see myself leaving a pithy note on the mantelpiece, stealing up the garden path with a small black plastic suitcase, the only one that’s mine, turning left…then my steps falter. I see myself opening the Webbs’ front gate and going down their garden path (my wife has taken our children somewhere beneficial like the local youth club which they hate for the good it is failing to do them), knocking on their front door and inviting myself in. For good. Webb would welcome me, moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue, his nose twitching in a veritable paroxysm of curiosity. He would take me up to a small dim attic and there I would observe through a pair of binoculars how my family were managing without me – very well, thanks, refining their devotion to each other by sighs and glances betokening my lack of it. I have not worked out under what guise or guises I would come and go without being recognised. I haven’t thought it through that far. It’s the sort of thing I would have to leave to Webb. He would keep me posted. He would enjoy that. He has a marvellous eye for detail. I am not sure if his curiosity means he cares. I am not that curious about other people and I do not care enough about them.

For instance, one day I was hurrying down our front path pretending not to have noticed his face peering through a tangle of some creeper or other with small, undistinguished flowers that covers about four yards of our mutual fence. He had the look of some demented prowler concealing himself in the undergrowth.

‘Stye any better?’ he called out.

I went across and parted the creeper. He touched his right eye and I touched mine.

‘Beg your pardon? We keep the little old place quite nice and tidy I always thought,’ I said, baring my teeth as I tend to do when unsure how much humour there is in the air. Webb frowned.

‘Young Virginia’s.’ With exaggerated tenderness he touched his eye again.

My son’s name is Adrian. My wife chose our children’s names. Virginia’s other name is Clementine. Adrian’s other name is Toby. I didn’t argue with her. One of my suggestions for my son, having just read Lady Chatterley, were Thomas and John ‘in no particular order,’ I said. I didn’t smile then, wanting there to be a lot of humour in the air, wanting it badly, my wife being little amused by now after some of the other suggestions I’d made – Randolph Dick, S. Herbert, Bob S. Leigh, Ivor Willy, C. Ellery and the like – and had already told me not to be flippant, which I thought she was being since she kept on coming up with these high-falutin’ names which sounded odd on the lips of someone whose convictions rest in part on not putting on airs – though making, perhaps, too much of a song and dance of it. Aside from anything else, none of them went well with the name I’d brought into the family: Ripple. I also tried to get Edward past her, Ned for short, which she didn’t reject outright at first, my having given up Spooner some while before. Vanilla and Cherie were rejected for my daughter for some reason and she was least amused at the end when I said that Virginia and Clementine together would make her sound like something unusually revolting from the new ice-cream parlour on the High Street, unless in later years she were to make her name on the cornet.

Be that as it may, I frowned too, not having noticed anything wrong with my daughter’s eye, realizing too how little I actually look at her, taking into account the percentage of time when I’m around that her face is turned towards the television set or down over her homework etc. She has a sweet and innocent face albeit too often marred by expressions of sweetness and innocence and I ought to have noticed the smallest blemish on it.

‘Very much better thanks,’ I said.

Webb parted the foliage wider, snapping several twigs in the process, the ones I later discovered had the most promising buds on. Then he pushed his face further towards me, making me lean back.

‘Some amazing ointments these days,’ he said.

‘Certainly are.’

‘I’d watch your rear left tread if I were you.’

His little black eyes were flickering past me towards my car. He has this habit of suddenly changing the subject and often gives me advice about my car, having heard noises coming out of it which the garage had told me are perfectly normal – for a car of its age and had it received its telegram from the Queen yet? Oh very funny, I reply, and no, I don’t know where the man who walks in front of it waving a flag has got to.

I winced. ‘A touch of the old sciatica. Thanks all the same.’ Then walked away, bent forward and with a slight limp.

I went back into the house and had a look at my daughter who was helping with the housework. Her left top eyelid was very pink and swollen over about two-thirds of it, probably as bad as it could be before it started getting better. It glistened with ointment.

‘Hope you’re putting something on that eye,’ I shouted above the vacuum cleaner, touching my own left eyelid.

‘It’s only a silly stye,’ she shouted back. ‘I’ve only had hundreds of them already.’

‘Just so long as…’

Whereupon she shoved the vacuum cleaner either side of my legs, then swivelled round to do under the dining-room table. I trotted back down the garden path, swiping hard at a Michaelmas daisy with my badminton racket and disapproving of myself for only having got so far as asking myself what a stye was to get so worked up about. Turning round at the gate I saw my daughter staring at me past the rag she’d begun cleaning the living-room window with. I thought: I bet she raises the subject at supper.

She did. Addressing her mother, she said, ‘I saw Dad hitting the top off a flower with his badminton racket.’

‘Sheer wanton vandalism,’ I said, trying to remember what social injustice was usually the cause of that.

My son said, ‘Why did you do that? He shouldn’t, should he, Mum?’

‘It’s hardly your place to question what your father does in his own garden,’ my wife said.

But she gave me one of her looks, a fleeting frown or slow blink, which is supposed to be perceptible only to me but which my children never fail to perceive.

‘Practising my service,’ I said, raising my fingertips to my chin and closing my eyes in a holy expression. ‘Let us pray…’

But a solemnity had descended on the table and the chances of raising a laugh were nil. I had been guilty of undisciplined conduct. I could hear my wife thinking (she almost certainly wasn’t): no wonder, he watches all that piffle on television. Beneath the calm there is violence. He is letting us all down.

Anyway, I could count on Webb keeping me informed of how my family were doing without me, the things my wife ought to be having done to the car to prevent their having a fatal accident, what success they were having with amazing ointments and so forth. I could see Mrs Webb bringing me supper in my darkened room, never saying anything, never looking at any part of me, wondering if the scribbling I was doing was all about her. Perhaps she would leave the tray outside the door. Each time I adopted one of Webb’s new disguises she might pretend to herself that I had become a different person. There was the whole street to be walked up and down without being recognized by people who’d mention me to my family as having been observed behaving in a peculiar manner. The whole plan was flawed of course: Webb and I taking it in turns in unlit bathrooms, Mrs Webb not having the first idea what we were up to, whether I would have my own television set, what rent I would pay, a whole host of details like that. It is such flights of fancy, not seeing them through to a conclusion, that keep us out of trouble perhaps – instead of the down-to-earth detail of things, the sense of conclusions already having been reached, that this is it, that it’s not worth the trouble.

To follow that train of thought for a bit, conclusively I hope. What I said about happy holidays by the waterside was a lie in so far as when I look back on them I imagine more intensely than usual those fatuous but exhilarating fancies that take some effort to put down. Let’s see: a path of moonlight narrowing to the horizon from a beach of white sand, the rustle of palm fronds over my head as I lie back on my chaise lounge (as Mrs Hamble called it when she told the removal men, or rather asked them very apologetically, to put it by the window) and sip a mint julep (whatever that might be) while young ladies made duskier by the moonlit dark walk past me, their grass skirts swaying, then stop and stoop to top up my glass so that my eye is level with collars of flowers dangling in front of, not altogether concealing…the imagination should be able to manage the rest but makes a flop of it. Well, not exactly. What I mean is it’s difficult to keep up or at least I have this difficulty about getting much beyond the moonlit, tropical setting to the actual action, the full exposure – beyond, that is, the nudge-nudge-pfft-there’s-a-pair-for-you-whoops-get-an-eyeful-of-that stage. So that’s the type of twerp one remains, is stuck with. I could not reveal to my wife that I entertained thoughts of this nature (or the other way round if you like playing with words not to mention yourself). She would only reply that that was perfectly natural/normal, dear. She would not be aghast since they did not have a ‘social dimension’, though ‘poverty of imagination’ is what is usually wrong there, she says, which is what seems to be wrong with me too, my fancies petering out like that, lacking altogether ‘the creative urge’ which society also needs badly, I’m told, though they may amount to the same thing as they evidently do in my case. So there again society and I seem to have something in common. Anyway, as I was about to say, I am sure my wife assumes I do not have thoughts of this nature and am contented with the few that I do have. Perhaps my fantasies would only worry her in so far as I started bringing magazines home that my children might happen upon, since she has a habit of sending them to find things that involves delving in drawers. They’d not be so fantastic then.

The magazines in question I buy in the lunch hour, hide away in the only drawer in my desk I can lock, and look at during the lunch break on the following day when I have so much on my plate that I must do without lunch. (I ought to add that I am ashamed, on reflection, not of the lust, naturally, but to be abetting the manner of life and person that satisfies it in that fashion, the degradation of women too of course. I shouldn’t have needed to add that either; but ‘ought to’ you will have noticed. Thus one’s sense of right and wrong may be muddled up in a word. That is to say, I’m not sure if I’m ashamed or not; knowing one ought to be ought to be the next best thing, but is it?)

Talking of dirty pictures, my wife has been overtly cross with me only once. It had to do with a comment I made about a reproduction of the Mona Lisa hanging above the mantelpiece in the house of a colleague – of hers, need I add – namely that I considered the expression neither wry nor mysterious nor inscrutable nor serene nor any of that, but plain horny (I swiftly added ‘flirtatious’ but words have a way of supplementing rather than supplanting each other). On the way home my wife asked why I had to make a ‘perverse’ point of reacting differently from everyone else, and in the field of the arts about which I knew little. It was nothing, I replied, thereby killing two birds with one stone. Be that as it may, I haven’t accompanied her on any of her visits to houses of colleagues since then. I shouldn’t have snickered, I know, thinking of finding myself at a loss in the midst of a variety of cultural goings-on in a large grassy space with a high fence around it – remembering too a silence of the most unjovial sort that fell around that lovely mischievous face and my wife receiving glances of pitying wonderment that someone like her should be married to someone like me. (I quite accept that joviality would not appear anywhere on the list of desired qualities for the kind of work my wife and her colleagues do. This is as it should be. ‘How amusingly awful’ doesn’t sound right somehow. There are a number of phrases that will never cross my wife’s lips, one of which is ‘You’ve got to laugh.’)

When the Hambles moved in we went round to ask if there was anything we could do to help. It was my wife’s idea, co-sponsored by my daughter. The Hambles blushed and Mrs Hamble said to her husband, ‘Isn’t that kind of them, Alf?’

‘It is that,’ he replied.

There was nothing, they said, though even I could see there was. For example, they couldn’t get their stove to work, a sink was blocked and a trunk with bedding in it had been mislaid by the removal people. As we were leaving I heard them discussing these misfortunes in that surreptitious way they have, not wanting their worries to leak out so that others would pity them, thereby allowing them to pity themselves less. It was a shameful thought. Inaccurate too I think now.

As we returned up our front path, my wife said, ‘No problems there. They’ll be all right. Did you notice Webb watching from that upstairs window? Nosy little beast.’

Webb of course was waiting for us to leave. He was round there like a shot, leaving almost at once and returning with a plunger, then spent a long time with them, doubtless getting their stove to work and later bringing them blankets.

I mention this episode to show that my wife is less skilled at noticing things under her nose, while being very perceptive indeed about people further afield, or in so far as they are an example of a general social problem; which leads me to wonder, after not noticing whether I am there or not for much of the time, how long it would take her to notice that I was there for none of it – much more interesting though I might then have become as an example, while remaining the opposite of that to my children.

It was different at the outset when we were living in a garden flat a muscular stone’s throw away from the North Circular Road and I made an effort to do my bit (admittedly not a lot) with the housework etc. One evening I offered to help with the supper to the extent of slicing the beans, peeling the potatoes, decanning the pea soup and putting them all on the boil. There were steaks too in a frying pan on a lower setting. Thereafter I joined my wife in the garden where I jabbed at weeds with a trowel, becoming distracted by, amongst other things, her brisk and domineering motions while raking leaves (had we so soon reached the autumn of our lives?), those other things being, in the form of a rapid series of comparisons, the somewhat idler charms of another young lady in the next garden who was only visible in snatches, though at exactly the right levels, through two missing slats in the fence. The comparison had reached the highly original notion that what is glimpsed has more allure than what is continuously beheld when my wife dropped her rake (no more than the bounder deserved, I reflected) and passed me at the trot. Indeed for an instant I believed the trots were precisely what it was because as she bounced by, the words I heard her cry were, ‘Can’t stop crapping.’ For a second or two I stayed crouched where I was at the level of the lower missing slat until I realized she had in fact asked a question: ‘God, what’s happening?’ So I turned and watched for a while the steam wafting prettily away through the kitchen window before following her slowly in to allow her sufficient time to make a start on sorting out the difficulty in her own way. (‘We’ll do it your way’ became a handy phrase from approximately Day Two. No resentment to be read into that: anything to save time on a conversation whose end was clearly in view from the outset.) Eventually after a redundant pee and a meticulous hand-wash, I found myself in the doorway of the kitchen where she was flapping one arm about to clear the air and doing something with the other that caused a series of clanking sounds. ‘Oh, really,’ she was muttering – or was it ‘Whatever next?’ I do not recall. I was at a loss (witness to a funeral), could hardly charge forward into such a pea-souper without, I felt, the words and equipment suitable for a search party. The air began to clear and I opened the window a fraction wider, as far as it would go. Turning then, I saw her flushed face and the tears in her eyes.

‘All mist to your grill, what?’ I said.

It might have been then she said, ‘Oh really,’ or, ‘Whatever next?’

There was no smile to detect on that pink and watery countenance, though we were newly wed and there was love between us then, a very great deal of it. Later she made light of the episode over spaghetti and scrambled eggs. I offered to clean the stove and pans with steel wool but she would have none of the rough stuff. It was so very much all right in those days long ago, any mutual occurrence at dusk or thereabouts being a likely prelude to foreplay or lifting the safety-curtain. She put a hand on my arm and smiled with forgiveness and affection, very much in that order. I grinned back and shook my head, having decided to shoulder the entire blame myself and not even hint it was all the fault of the woman next door. Virginia could have been conceived that night, along with much else. I internalized the problem, as my wife calls it in relation to her disadvantaged; the fire that might have been went to my loins. It was my passion in the end that steamed.

Perhaps Webb, Hamble and I should go off somewhere together. Webb would do the scout-work, stepping ahead, our lookout in all directions like one of those nervous, strutting birds. Hamble would waddle along behind, genial and appreciative, the beast who would bear all our burdens of body and spirit. And I, who had most to lose, would contribute nothing but a little poor wit – except that, without me, we wouldn’t be there at all, going out into the world at last, myself neutral in the middle of the restless and inquisitive in front and the obliging and passive at the back. Thus I would be protected though I do not see myself lying between them in a bed. Webb couldn’t be that inquisitive, nor Hamble that obliging. Also, I would have to do much of the talking. Webb only asks questions and points things out, while Hamble mainly communicates by statements of agreement and pensive movements of the head.

I suppose we’d look ridiculous, walking along abreast or in single file across a field or up a street. The trouble is I feel fairly ridiculous already, trying for example to catch a glimpse of my daughter’s face, wondering how much (except on holiday) I enter my son’s thoughts and feeling the eye of my wife’s mind upon me, scanning me for signs of life. But without the least rancour. I give shape to whatever contentment she allows herself, thus playing my part. Compared with so many we have no troubles. I have no complaints so she cannot complain. It is ridiculous not to know why one feels ridiculous.

My wife is reading a book about immigrants and is asking herself what more she could do about them. Sometimes she tells us to listen to this. My children look worried, but they have the comfort of knowing there is nothing they can do, except try to be nicer to the darker children in their school. I am sure they are already nicer to them than most of the other children are. They try to feel guilty because their mother wants them to, as members of a society in which all responsibility for the wrongs of the world is shared. She does not say as much. She simply enunciates the sentences clearly and raises her voice at the end of them as if they were questions, looking at us in turn as if for an answer.

When she talks about what is wrong with the world I frown, which could mean either that I agree it’s a shocking business and something should be done about it, or that I wish she wouldn’t keep on interrupting my spy story – it’s complicated enough to follow the plot as it is. Or I could be frowning because I wish that she wouldn’t make it too easy for me to guess here and there what she’ll look like in extreme old age, that she hadn’t had her hair cropped short and done me the honour of touching up her features and complexion with some of the stuff in the tubes and jars which have needed increasingly less replenishment as the years pass, and pass they do. It is an aspect of liberation, I know, being taken for what one is, and that seems all right – though with the doubt there is about how far we should allow ourselves to be seen as we really are, there’s surely something to be said for keeping up appearances in the meantime. I speak only, of course, for myself. So I end this line of thought with the observation that she has more wrinkles than she should have at her age, surely? They’re from worrying too much about other people, of course; and how many more would there be if that included me? So my frown remains as I go over the various possibilities outlined above. They are a way of keeping my options open to evade her silent scanning and questioning voice. Truthfully, though, I’ve studied my frown in the mirror and it could mean anything. I sometimes think it’s the imitation of a frown, that’s all, trying to work up the feeling of how much I might care if I wanted to enough. If I smile at African and Asian people in the street and elsewhere, as I do occasionally when remembering what my wife has been reminding me of, my feeling is that they’d rather I didn’t, that I was sucking up for my sake rather than theirs. Though they always smile back, that being polite. A frown of concern, while more appropriate, would make them think I wanted them to bugger off back to where they came from or similar. They might prefer that to the sucking-up – having it confirmed that there are quite a lot of shits about to have to put up with, which there are. They probably tell their children, who reply that there are children in their school who are specially nice to them because of what their mother has told them. So that becomes all right. The truth is I hardly smile or frown at them at all. I don’t at anyone, not counting smiling at girls when what I’m most likely to get back is a frown, unless they’re African or Asian of course.

I’d miss my family a lot if I walked out on them, less so if they walked out on me. Could that be guilt making the heart grow fonder? If I left them my wife would be sure it wouldn’t be for long. ‘He’ll be back,’ she’d tell my children, not adding ‘with guilt written all over his face,’ then proceed to read them an article about one-parent families, some of them doing pretty nicely actually. That would be part of the guilt: not having done enough to make them miss me more. I’m staying put therefore – the guilt imagined, the fondness to that extent too, more’s the pity. Besides, it’s wrong to abandon people who need you; that should be the chief part of the guilt, the pain you have caused etc. Not an aspect I’ve covered, the higher considerations left till last as usual, if considered at all. There’s that guilt too – never taking the broader, less selfish view. ‘You only think of yourself’ – the commonest phrase in the English language I shouldn’t wonder. Goodness me, there seems no end to it when the matter of guilt comes up. Demands a long recurrent sentence. For the rest of your natural life in fact.

It wasn’t long before Webb told me that the Hambles had problems. The other day he said ‘Psst!’ to me through the fence, making me jump and hurry over to him lest he do it again. His thin eyebrows shot up a long way as if to rejoin his hairline and he jutted his chin towards the Hambles’ house.

‘They’re having a job, those two,’ he whispered.

‘I thought they’d retired.’

‘That’s precisely your difficulty, isn’t it? With the inflation and that, your pensions and savings…phut!’ This with a gesture like blowing a kiss.

‘Are you sure…?’

He tapped his head. ‘You know, I know, we all know what it’s like these days. For starters, how much do you reckon they still owe on the house?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest. Sure they’ll be all right,’ I said stumblingly.

But I didn’t believe it. There is something about them that smells of misfortune. They do not even have a television set. I have never seen more than one light on in their house at the same time. In winter I suspect they will try to do without heating. They never go out in the evening. I cannot imagine how they spend their time when they are not in their garden. I picture them huddled in blankets, listening to the radio, waiting for something to happen such as discovering once and for all which of them will pass on first.

‘She told me.’

‘Oh? What did she say exactly?’

‘Well, he was out of the room and she said, (here Webb did his class-bridging voice which sounded like someone like the Duke of Edinburgh trying to imitate someone like Stanley Holloway) "‘E did so loike ‘is

Reviews for It's All Right Now

[steve38 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A big chunk of a book at almost 700 pages. The ordinary life of an ordinary man. Told in great detail. But with musings on life and its events. It should be boring but it's not. It's amusing and it makes you think. You are just as ordinary, what would you have done in the circumstances? What would you have thought. The author has the cheek to write himself into his novel as a walk on part. Just like Alfred Hitchcock used to do in his films.