Read Online The Tenement by Iain Crichton Smith - Free Book Online

gruffly. “How are you all?”
    â€œFine. Sheila sends her love. Are you managing on your own?”
    â€œI’m managing.”
    â€œStill writing?” said Robin contemptuously.
    â€œNot much.”
    â€œI see. I thought when you were once on your own you would write a great deal.”
    â€œWell, I don’t. Do you yourself computerize much?”
    â€œI’m here for a meeting. I’ll be going back tonight. I thought I’d call in and see how you were.”
    â€œWell, I’m fine. Look around you. Can’t you see that everything is neat and tidy? I can look after the flat.”
    â€œYou should maybe sell it. It’s very large. You should perhaps move into a smaller flat.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI thought it would be more manageable and cheaper.”
    â€œNo, I shall stay here,” said Trevor firmly.
    â€œI see.”
    Was he wondering why he had ceased to move only after his mother died? Sometimes Trevor wondered whether he himself had caused his wife’s cancer. Perhaps if you moved too much during your life you got cancer. It was the disease of the wandering deviant cells. Maybe his own poetry had saved him from the cancer. It was true he hadn’t written much recently. Loneliness wasn’t conducive to great art. Why had Robin come to torment him? Had he come to gloat over him in his solitude? Had he hoped to see the flat in a mess as his own room had once been, with socks lying over chairs, sweaty jerseys and ties lying on the bed, football boots lying aslant on the floor?
    â€œI have a woman who comes to do the stair,” said Trevor mischievously. “She has a son at university doing Business Studies. She is well spoken. I wouldn’t be surprised if she read Beckett.”
    â€œI see,” said Robin again. He was always saying ‘I see’. Why did he look like a comic executive? Why was he so humourless, why did he think so slowly, calculate so much? He was perhaps working out that his father would leave him the flat which would fetch a good price on the market. Unless he married the stair-woman. Was that why he had come? He was always thinking about money, he wore a kind of silver armour. Maybe he thinks the stair-woman and myself will live together forever, with our pipe clay, thought Trevor. He smiled and Robin didn’t know what he was smiling at, and he felt uneasy. He was an old selfish bastard. He had killed his mother, that was for sure. He didn’t know that he and his mother had kept up a close correspondence and phoned each other three times a week. He, Robin, gave her some money but nothing to his old man with his stupid poetry, as if it mattered a damn.
    Trevor was glad to see the back of his son. He didn’t like being patronized. He and Robin had nothing in common. Robin calculated every move, saw his daughter’s teachers, made sure that she contributed money to the blacks: some of her pocket money went to a girl in Nigeria. But there was nothing spontaneous about all that. It was in fact a sort of affectation. He is a monster, thought Trevor, but didn’t blame himself. If you blamed yourself for everything you would go mad.
    When he went to collect his pension he stared with nostalgia at the bums of the young girls in jeans. They looked like peaches, apples. Oh Lord, he thought, I’m growing old, and this was emphasized to him when, dropping his pension book one day in the post office, one of the young girls bent down and retrieved it for him. “There you are, sir,” she said.
    Never again would he approach that remembered country, never again.
    The woman phoned about the oak tree, but he put her off again. However, he went for a walk one day and sat under an oak tree in the small town where he lived. He loved the cool shade of its branches. Beside him on the green seat with bubbles of rain still on it was a military-looking man with a bristling moustache. The man talked to him