Free Holiday by Stanley Middleton Page B

countered with the man who offered them a ride in his Daimler.
    Now the piano hammered ‘Roses of Picardy’ which the pierrots sang so that Fisher, head dizzy, hummed as voices joined in. He felt ashamed to do so, and when they left not long afterwards with Sandra between them, arm-in-arm with both, he embarrassed himself by breaking out again almost fervently into the song, as if it mattered.
    ‘Are you a singer?’ Sandra asked, hugging his arm tight.
    ‘No.’
    ‘What song is it?’
    ‘The one they were playing in the pub.’
    ‘I’d never heard it. Had you, Terry?’ He had not.
    She wished, swaying, that she knew more about music, that she’d stuck at her piano lessons. Back in the house, he checked with them that the children were fast asleep, then considered inviting the husband out for more alcohol. But he had the sense to keep his mouth shut. He’d done them good, and they’d now sit downstairs smilingly trifling with the magazines or telly, and nipping, Terry at least, frequently into the lavatory. That sufficed.
    He did not join them downstairs, but lay flat on his bed celebrating the shining roses of the song. Three pints. With those and a gin or two, he and Meg had lifted themselves into equanimity, into content, so that once she had sat down at the piano her grandfather had left her and played, wildly, a Brahms Waltz. It sounded rich through the house, with a brazen clatter, on this huge dark instrument which had stretched along one wall from a door to a door in the living-room in Wales, on that small-holding. He knew she could play, had heard her, or had he? But now, swaying slightly in their London box, he’d been overwhelmed by the great chords and the hesitating lilt of the piece, and thus desperate with love for the player and her mystery, he’d slipped his hands up her skirt as she giggled on the piano stool. ‘Could I be drunk for ever, on liquor, love and fights?’ Her hair grew so thickly, so magnificently auburn that she seemed inhuman, a golden goddess, as she loved him, sprawled on the floor where he could make out the worn, dim gold of the pedals of her piano.
    Now he was alone.
    He remembered that semi-detached in south London to which they’d moved when he’d taken his second job, head of department in a comprehensive school. London he disliked, especially the travelling and here again Meg acted oddly. She had a job, as distant as his own, but claimed, with all her father’s perversity, that the time wasted on trains was well spent, kept her out of mischief, in form. Sometimes she visited two colleagues who lived in a flat near the school and what with his societies they never took their evening meal before nine. He looked back to this as a period of continual tiredness when they lay in bed till midday both Saturday and Sunday. In the holidays they travelled, to Athens, Tunis, often to France, once to the United States, returning burnt brown, weary with talk of local wines or prices to shoot at Meg’s parents on the one-day visit allotted to them. That became a game. ‘Impress your father.’
    Vernon took his expected stance, that everything worth knowing about the world could be found in Cefn where he had grown up. All varieties of humanity were there.
    ‘But beauty, daddy. Pictures, architecture, even weather.’
    ‘If we wanted the exotic, we had the cinema.’
    ‘Do you really think that seeing a film is the same as visiting a place?’
    ‘I do not. Often it is better, because it is done with a more selective eye than one’s own.’
    ‘You speak for yourself,’ Meg shouted.
    ‘I do, my dear. And I exempt you from ordinary mortality’s limitations. But I could have the Parthenon or the Alhambra Palace in sunshine, the Taj Mahal by moonlight, and then compare them almost at once with our little Bethels or the public library in rain.’
    ‘Who in his right mind would want to do anything so daft?’
    ‘I would, dearest.’
    ‘You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. You go