Read Online Holiday by Stanley Middleton - Free Book Online

about his reading, and went away to the magazines downstairs.
    Tomorrow his father’d greet him, man to man, shake his arm as he invited him boyishly out for a pre-breakfast trot along the front.
    The godless boy called quietly on God, God, God.
    In the dining-room this evening, silence blossomed once the families began to eat. Fisher enjoyed the activity, the tucking of bibs, the wiping of mouths, the tipping of plates for the last spoonful, the pause between courses where one put on a small show for the other tables or angled for the correct snippet of conversation which would set the rest to chatter or laughing. These people worked hard, holding their fingers correctly, not marking the tablecloths and this ceremony pleased him. In this room decorated with dolls and paper flowers it was proper to act the gentleman, ape the lady. When the standard was judged, by Monday evening at the latest, there’d be a relaxation, a few aitches would topple, salacious asides allowed, confidences would be exchanged, but at this the first dinner after a complete day’s holiday matters were formal. That’s where his father had failed; he’d played Tuesday’s joker on Sunday. Odd, because the old man had never put a foot wrong in the shop. He licked every bugger’s boots there.
    Smiling, breaking his bread on to the plate, he wondered how the Vernons shaped in the Frankland. Too early for dinner yet, they’d be nattering each other gently to death, refusing to go downstairs for an apéritif, quite at home in comfortable warmth that did nothing for either.
    He and Meg had spent a week-end at the Frankland soon after they were married. For two or three months he’d been applying for jobs, filling in wearisome forms, stamping envelopes, naming referees and then he landed the headship of a large humanities department in a London comprehensive. He’d not interviewed well, and was certain that the headmistress, a woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it, had taken a dislike to him, so that when he’d been called back and offered the post, he’d stood flabbergasted, but without too much obvious turmoil, as if considering, or perhaps they thought praying, head lowered, before he’d thanked them, said he’d do his best, accepted. And as he rode back to the school in the headmistress’s car listening to her forthright commments on his rivals, the chairman of the education committee, his predecessor, he’d decided he’d take his wife out, do the heavy, be extravagant and that weekend whether she fancied or not.
    ‘Seaside,’ Meg decided. ‘Out of season. East coast. Bealthorpe. The Frankland Towers.’ She rolled the words round her palate, father’s daughter. He was surprised at her choice, expecting her to plump for London, the theatres, concerts. Curiously he did not remember the Frankland from his holidays, though he’d stared often enough into the long lighted windows of the big hotels. This must have been built in the last year or two; who’d patronise it he did not know and said as much.
    ‘You’ll see,’ she said, ‘when you get amongst the chinless wonders.’
    The service there matched the steep prices, and on both Friday and Saturday nights they went to bed in liquor. This surprised him, now, but he remembered that at the time it seemed sensible. To stagger along to the distant sea under the clusters of cloud-smudged stars or to sit comfortably in an armchair swigging whisky and water as he whispered verse to his wife:
    Perchaunce the lye wethered and old
    The Wynter nyghtes that are so cold,
    Playnyng in vain vnto the mone;
    Thy wisshes then dare not be told;
    Care then who lyst, for I have done,
    seemed a perfection, as if he’d mastered life, or ambition, even death. He did not drink over wildly, since he was less used to it than she, but he smiled and quoted in a fine dizziness. Perhaps this was the end of his youth; from this time he began to be himself. He doubted that. He’d achieved something,