I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Read online

  Gerard Woodward

  I’LL GO TO BED

  AT NOON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Also By Gerard Woodward

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Four

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Five

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407087184

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2005

  6 8 10 9 7

  Copyright © Gerard Woodward 2004

  Extract on p.vii from Petersburg: A Novel in Eight Chapters with a Prologue and an Epilogue by Andrei Bely, translated with an introduction by David McDuff (Penguin 1995) Copyright © David McDuff, 1995

  The publishers would like to thank Whitbread, Diageo (including the GUINNESS beer brand), Diners Club and Interbrew (Mackeson) for permission to use their brand names and logos. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders.

  Gerard Woodward has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Chatto & Windus

  Vintage Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney New South Wales 2061, Australia

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  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage

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

  ISBN 0 099 28693 9

  Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Limited, Reading, Berkshire

  To the memory of my brother

  Francis Woodward

  I’LL GO TO BED AT

  NOON

  Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961. He has published four acclaimed collections of poetry: Householder, After the Deafening, Island to Island and When We Were Pedestrians. His first novel, August, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Gerard Woodward lives near Bath where he teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

  ALSO BY GERARD WOODWARD

  Fiction

  August

  Poetry

  Householder

  After the Deafening

  Island to Island

  When We Were Pedestrians

  The author would like to thank the Royal Literary Fund for their support during the writing of this novel.

  The rooms were – small rooms, each was occupied by only one enormous object: in the tiny bedroom the bed was the enormous object; in the tiny bathroom it was the bath; in the drawing-room it was the bluish alcove; in the dining room it was the table-cum-sideboard; in the maid’s room the object was her maid; in her husband’s room the object was, of course, her husband.

  Andrei Bely, Petersburg

  Part One

  1

  28 Polperro Gardens

  Wood Green

  London

  N.22

  March 30th 1974

  Wednesday

  Dear Janus

  I am very sorry that I have not been able to see you, or even write to you before this. I have been rather ill – since Sunday afternoon, in fact. I’ve had a very bad cold combined with asthma and have hardly been able to breathe. After a visit to the doctor’s on Tuesday morning I was given a great variety of pills etc and am now a little better. (Lobo is crawling over me.) (I’ll have to stop for a moment as she now wants to go out.) Of course, not being at work, I am imprisoned here in this box impersonating a room (I hope I’m going to get paid from work as I’m skint). Still, I am hoping that I shall be able to come and see you on Friday. If I don’t, I hope that you will write to me as soon after you receive this letter as possible. I shall look forward to it!

  Of course, what with so many demons flying around forcing gentlemen such as us to take too many drinks and whoop too loud and too often and even more strange and ludicrous actions! And even the changing of names as the mad women of Tierrapaulita do (to change themselves) does not one bit of good – and the changing of Billbaorosta or Januscjeckarama to: violas one day or violets the next or even after a while cirfrusias, cifrernas, tirrenas, mabrofordotas, frabicias, fabiolas, quitanias, pasquinas, shoposas, zozimas, zangoras and that’s the end of the alphabet! (apart from the missing tenaquilas and pogaliras). So think not of changing, my friend, (name or anything) and be damned to devils! For happy are those who whoopeth too loud and delirious are those who ludicrous are!

  Now I have heard it said that the natives in the Northern part of Windhover Hill (so far unexplored) speak of a most monstrous Red Lion, that lives in those parts, and its roars can be heard echoing about the eucalyptus and Banyan trees in the valley of the source of the Limpopo. To my mind it is in the national interest that an expedition to discover the Red Lion must be mounted but that it should be properly funded. Many pleas to the Royal Geographical society have been fruitless so far and others snatch away the mountains of the Shangri-las but to the valley of the Red Lion a path must soon be made, and it is we that shall make it.

  I hope very much so that dear Scipplecat is well and happy and I hope that you will convey my best regards to the aforesaid furry creature. Lobo also sends her best wishes.

  Now look after yourself JJ and take care till I see you again. I’m afraid coughing and spluttering I must bring this letter to its terrible and inevitable end.

  Try not to drink too much till I see you.

  You must save some money so that we can go a-boozing. (Lobo is sitting on my head, my nose is full of whiskers)

  I think the drink is getting the better of this letter

  PAX Vobiscum

  Lobo says goo
dbye for now

  also adios from myself

  Bill

  Janus didn’t usually leave his letters from Bill lying around, but this one had been left on the kitchen table, out of its envelope, half-unfolded, beside the glass cider tankard that held a posy of wilting daffodils, in a way that suggested, to Colette at least, that she was being invited, along with anyone else in the house, to read it.

  And so she had read it, alone in the kitchen, waiting for Aldous to return after a morning at school to get ready for the funeral that afternoon. It was written in a painstakingly rendered Gothic script using a broad, italic nib and illustrated with exquisite marginal drawings. It was like a drunkard’s version of the Book of Kells. The ‘D’ of ‘Dear Janus’ had been drawn as a D-shaped pub, with a little chimney, creeping ivy and an inn-sign hanging (she even recognised the decapitated Elizabethan on the sign as The Quiet Woman). The remainder of the word had been supplemented by a punning human ear, painted in such pure, Renaissance detail it could have been lifted from a Botticelli portrait. All around the margins of the letter were pen and ink drawings of almost-empty bottles and glasses, some tipped over and spilling the last of their contents, but again drawn beautifully. By the end of the letter the calligraphy, so crisp and rigid at the beginning, had broken down into a scruffy, barely legible scrawl, though Bill’s signature was accompanied by what looked like a woodcut, in blood-red ink, of a clenched fist.

  Colette tried to imagine the time it must have taken to produce a letter like this, picturing her son-in-law sitting at the little writing desk she’d seen in his and Juliette’s bedroom, that was a small forest of pens and brushes, bottles of ink, little wrinkled tubes of watercolour, boxes of nibs. It must have taken him several evenings. An act of devotion. Colette found the sheer effort Bill had put into this letter to her son rather touching. At least someone in the world loved him.

  By the time Aldous had come home, fresh and fluffy from cycling, Colette had long finished reading the letter, but she pretended to be reading it for the first time as he came in, to make it easier for her to show it to him.

  But Aldous only gave the letter a cursory glance, reading the first few lines, and admiring Bill’s graphic skills, giving a half-hearted, rather hopeless laugh at the D-shaped pub, before handing the letter back to his wife.

  ‘What a load of rubbish,’ he sighed, strolling towards the sink to fill a small saucepan with water. Colette felt briefly annoyed by her husband’s indifference. He might not like the way his son had been behaving recently, the drunken tantrums, the wanton neglect of his talents as a pianist, but he could at least be interested in him. For the sake of the funeral they were to attend that day, however, she decided to be on his side.

  ‘At least he won’t be around to spoil things today,’ she said, folding the letter, wondering if she should replace it on the table as though it had never been touched, then realising her son could hardly expect her to have ignored it for a whole day, ‘thank Christ he went to work.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past him to turn up out of the blue,’ said Aldous, lighting a ring beneath the pan he’d just filled, ‘you know how he gets if he thinks there’s a chance of free drink.’

  They both recalled Christine’s wedding, a couple of years before – the trampled-on wedding cake, the shattered bouquets, the drenched, sobbing bridesmaids.

  ‘He won’t,’ said Colette, ‘he doesn’t even know the funeral’s today.’

  Aldous gave his wife a withering look, meaning to say you could never be sure what Janus knew and what he didn’t.

  ‘So it will be just you and me representing the Jones family,’ Colette said, ‘I hope there aren’t lots of our nephews and nieces there, it’ll make our children look so mean . . .’

  The funeral of Mary, the wife of Colette’s favourite brother, Janus Brian, was not thought worthy of James breaking his second term as an anthropology student at the University of Lincoln, nor of Juliette losing a day’s pay at Eve St John’s Toy Emporium, nor even of Julian, their youngest, missing out on double geography and P.E. at St Francis Xavier’s. Of all their children Janus would have been the one most likely to have taken a day off work, had he known about it.

  Aldous took a small package of newspaper from his jacket pocket, untwisted it, and tipped the contents into a mug. He hadn’t had a chance to use it at school, the instant coffee powder he always packed at the last minute before leaving the house for work, tearing off a corner of the Telegraph and spooning on some Maxwell House, folding the paper over in a neat, airtight package, the clever origami of which always delighted his wife when she saw it. He emptied the bubbling saucepan into the mug. They hadn’t had a kettle for years. The little, lidless, gaudily enamelled pots that came to a boil with a gradually strengthening wail of despair, always seemed to boil dry, thus melting the cheap alloys of their bases. So they only used pans now.

  ‘Do you think I should wear a black tie?’ said Aldous, sipping cautiously the black, sugarless coffee.

  Colette sat down in her chair by the old cast iron boiler and opened a bottle of Gold Label barley wine with the bottle-opening end of a tin opener.

  ‘Have you got a black tie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then the question was academic, was it?’

  ‘I suppose I could buy one on the way. You know what Janus Brian’s like. How fussy he is about formalities like that . . .’

  That their eldest son, and Colette’s closest brother shared the same name, had never once been a source of confusion in their lives. At least, not once they’d started using her brother’s middle name in addition to his first, to help distinguish him. Now he was always referred to by these two names – Janus Brian – even when there was no doubt about to whom the name Janus referred, even, sometimes, to his face – Hello Janus Brian, how are you? And Janus Brian didn’t seem to mind. It was, after all, a permanent reminder of the compliment his sister had paid him in naming her first-born after him.

  ‘I don’t think he’d mind about a thing like that,’ said Colette, ‘I’m not wearing any black.’

  ‘Women can get away with it,’ said Aldous, ‘men are different. They read things into ties, especially men like Janus Brian.’

  Colette poured the Gold Label into a glass, where it fizzed half-heartedly, her second of the day. Colette had taken to this tipple recently, initially as a sedative, to reinforce the ever-weakening effect of her sleeping pills. She would drink two or three glasses in the evening, then take four or five Nembutals (the recommended dose was two), which would despatch her to a deep, dreamless sleep for eight hours. The problem was that awakening was a long, slow painful struggle. She woke as if from a pit of glue, always with a pounding headache and sensations of nausea, the only cure for which, she soon found, was a morning glass of barley wine. One of those and she was near instantly awake and fresh. A sedative in the evening, a pick-me-up in the morning. Barley wine was her wonder-drink.

  Aldous looked at himself in the little mirror that was fixed to the wall by the back door. His tie was pale blue. His shirt a dark grey, fraying at the collar. A jacket of light tweed. His teaching clothes. He hadn’t thought about it before, but it now struck him that he couldn’t possibly go to a funeral in his teaching clothes. Standards of dress among the pupils at the school Aldous had taught at for nearly three decades had declined rapidly in the last few years, a wave of slightly bashful permissiveness had allowed hair to creep over collars, ties to be worn loosely, top buttons to be left undone, and shoes of the ridiculously elevated kind to be worn, the effect being to give Aldous a distorted sense of his own sartorial smartness. Against the haystack slovenliness of his pupils he had appeared dapperly elegant, but here, in the mirror, he could see how inappropriate his clothes would be for a funeral. He needed a decent tie, at least.

  ‘I think I will get a new tie,’ he said to Colette, who was dressed in the pink pullover with white trimmings she had knitted years ago for Juliette, to which she’d pinned one of
her mother’s old fake ruby brooches. She had dark blue trousers, green sandals, ‘I’ll call at Houseman’s on the way.’

  Houseman’s was a gentleman’s outfitters on the Parade. In the days when Aldous and Colette had had some money Aldous had bought all his clothes from there, though as money had become increasingly scarce, his visits had become less frequent, until he only ever went there now for underwear, making do with jackets, shirts and trousers from the Oxfam shop that had recently opened near The Red Lion.

  ‘If you must,’ said Colette, ‘though it’ll be a waste of time and money.’

  Though secretly she was glad of the distraction and delay a detour to Houseman’s would take, since she was dreading the funeral. Or at least, she was dreading the actual interment, the lowering of the coffin into the grave. Janus Brian had chosen a spot for his wife in Ladore Lane Cemetery just across the path from where their mother and their sister Meg were buried. Colette found visiting these graves a painful experience at the best of times, that their deaths, both from natural causes (old age and a heart attack), had come so close together (Nana first, then Meg) had been a source of anguish in Colette’s life. To be there for another funeral, to witness the lowering of a coffin when it had troubled her so much before (so deep, so dreadfully deep) might, she feared, prove too much for her to bear. On the other hand, she was looking forward to the little gathering that was to take place at Janus Brian’s house afterwards, a meeting of sisters and brothers, brothers and sons, wives and daughters. It was so rare for them all to be gathered in a single place, especially with Janus Brian, who had become very reclusive in recent years. Though he lived only a mile away from Colette, visits to his house in Leicester Avenue, a cul-de-sac of pebbledashed semis, were often coldly received, and rarely reciprocated. In fact, he only ever visited Colette to announce one thing – the imminence of his own death.