For Love & Money by Jonathan Raban

Author:Jonathan Raban [Jonathan Raban]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780601489
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2018-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

For the dance on Christmas Night, Frances, emboldened by her success at the games, had put on her spangle-frosted winklepickers and exposed her cleavage. In the bar lounge a local trio, of organ, drums and bass guitar, were setting up their gear. Brenda was wearing a little-girly party frock, purple, high waisted, with a yoke of frilly lace around her bust. In the dining-room, people were taking photographs of the buffet. For the Cliff Courters, who had grown up through the Crash and the Depression, food was pre-eminent among the symbols of their new affluence. A good spread on the table was worth a string of frames of anyone’s colour film.

Brenda caught me drinking Scotch alone.

‘Not eating, dear? What’s happened to your appetite?’

‘I’m quite happy, thank you, Brenda.’

‘Have you looked at the buffet, yet? At least you ought to look at the buffet, dear, before it gets spoiled.’

The trio started up with a bumpy foxtrot. Stanley the Beetle, no dancer, was looking daggers at the world and trying to reconstitute his gang. He dumped a double whisky on me and sat down.

‘Some of my best friends are Spaniards,’ said Stanley, rooting for an argument. ‘That’s what we need in this country, a dictator. Know what happens when they get a strike in Spain? Say the tram drivers strike. They’re asking for twenty pesetas more a week, right? There’s an argy-bargy, the government says they can have ten. They go on striking. Know what Franco does? He takes six of them out to the market place and shoots them. They all go back to work. They got their extra ten pesetas a week. Everybody’s happy.’

‘But Stanley, a peseta is worth about a ha’penny. Are you saying that we ought to shoot people over issues of five pence a week?’

‘It’s the principle of the thing I’m talking about,’ said Stanley. ‘Anyway, everybody knows that you only get half of what you ask for. If you want eight pounds a week, you ask for sixteen, don’t you? So they only wanted ten pesetas a week in the first place.’

‘So why didn’t they go back to work when they were offered it?’

‘Because they were bloody stupid,’ said Stanley triumphantly, beginning to cheer up. ‘All this mess at Chryslers. Franco would sort that out soon enough.’

‘Franco’s dead:’

‘His son, then. Juan Carlo. He’d know what to do with Chryslers.’

At eight, Cyril slipped back into the hotel with his dog. He’d been walking since five.

‘You must have gone miles,’ I said.

‘With a dog,’ said Cyril, ‘you don’t notice the distance, do you?’

The dog collapsed on the stairs, its tongue lolling.

‘They use up a lot of energy, dogs. A human being, on two legs, goes in a straight line. But a dog spends a lot of time going sideways.’ Cyril shimmied with his hands. ‘That’s where all his energy goes. Sideways.’

The dancing was proper Locarno/Palais style – stiff-armed, perfectly synchronised, a world away from my own grubby nightclub shuffle. The couples marched and spun in a tight circle, doing turns too intricate for me to follow their feet.

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