with clean white bed-linen, shrines to the unknown traveller. The small dining-room was seldom used, since pub lunches were the only meals ever in demand. The Red Lion scavenged a lean life from the takings of the public bar.
Like alcohol for a terminal alcoholic, the bar was both the means of the hotel’s survival and the guarantee that it couldn’t survive much longer. It seemed helplessly set in its ways, making no attempt to adapt itself to a changing situation. There were no fruit-machines, no space-invaders. There was a long wooden counter. There were some wooden tables and wooden chairs set out across a wide expanse of fraying carpet. There was, dominating a room that could feel as large as a church when empty, the big gantry like an organ for the evocation of pagan moods. Quite a few empty optics suggested that the range of evocation now possible was not what it had been.
It had its regulars but they were mainly upwards of their thirties and there weren’t many women among them. Except for occasional freak nights when the pub was busy and briefly achieved a more complicated sense of itself the way a person might when on holiday, its procedures were of a pattern. The people who came here were, after all, devotees of a dying tradition. They believed in pubs as they had been in the past and they came here simply to drink and talk among friends, refresh small dreams and opinionate on matters of national importance. It was a talking shop where people used conversation the way South American peasants chew coca leaves, to keep out the cold.
Most of the men who drank in the Red Lion couldn’t afford to drink much. Sometimes a pint took so long to go down you might have imagined each mouthful had to be chewed before it was swallowed. They had all known better times and were fearing worse. The room they stood in was proof of how bad things were. It was common talk that Alan Morrison’s hold on the premises was shaky and every other week, as the property mouldered around him, another rumour of the brewers buying him out blew through it like a draught. The more uncertain his tenure grew to be, the more determinedly his regulars came. It was a small warmth in their lives and they were like men reluctant to abandon their places round a fire, though they know it’s going out.
Alan Morrison shared their feeling. He was simply holding out as long as he could. He knew that his monthly accounts were an unanswerable argument, but buying the hotel twenty years ago, after years of careful saving, had never been primarily an act of commercial logic. It had been the fulfilment of a dream for him and, being a stubborn man, he simply refused to wake up, though these days it was taking more and more whisky to keep him like that. For a while, knowing how badly things were going and lacking sufficient belief in new ways to change, he had settled for being a pedant of his own condition, a theorist about why things were so bad.
At one time he had blamed the Miners’ Welfare Club. Everybody wanted to be a capitalist, he said. When that closed down, he decided that television was the cause. People sat at home drinking out of cans, he said. That annoyed him for a while. Some evenings in the quietness of the pub, he would stand with an abstracted air, tuned out of whatever muffled conversation was taking place, as if listening for the chorus of beer cans hissing open in all the houses of the town. When the television set he installed in the bar didn’t help, he retired further into his whisky for deeper contemplation of the problem.
The answer he came out with was an old man’s frozen reflex to the changes in the world, not so much a rational process as a mental snarl, the rictus of an animal that has died trying to intimidate the trap which has caught it. He became a kind of King Lear with a hotel, dismissive of all the world except his clientele. The commercial failure of his hotel wasn’t the reason for his baffled anger, merely its rostrum. His wife had died of cancer. His only son emigrated. His own heart was giving out. The state of his trade was just external confirmation, like an official letter from the fates.
His son became his scapegoat. Alan Morrison somehow managed to hallucinate a great inheritance for his son if he hadn’t gone to Australia. If he had stayed, everything would have been all right. The reason for Alec’s going became in his father’s mind something that he had caused. From there it was but a short tirade to Alan’s main theme, a sweeping dismissal of the young. They loved going to loud places. ‘Noise isny meaning’ was one of his darker utterances. They smoked strange cigarettes in groups. He would talk of the dangers of such practices while he was downing a double whisky. It was as if they, too, had emigrated, not geographically but socially, to other customs, to new attitudes, to more exotic pleasures.
Like his son, they never came regularly to his place, except for one. Vince Mabon was a student. ‘Politics’ was his cryptic answer to anyone in the bar who asked him what he was studying. He often said it with a cupping gesture of his hands that seemed to imply a casual encompassing of the world and all it might contain. Vince had a kind of deliberate intensity, a way of turning forensically into any question, even if you were asking him the time. No conversation seemed trivial with him. He always gave the impression of being on a mission of some sort. He didn’t drink here so much as he came among them.
He was in the bar that Sunday. He had explained to nobody in particular that, as he had no lectures the next morning, he had managed to stay in Thornbank another night. The news was received without a display of fireworks. The only others present at the time, besides old Alan behind the bar, were the three domino players and Fast Frankie White.
The domino players were always looking for a fourth because as purists they hated sleeping dominoes. With not all the dominoes in use, arguments frequently broke out among them, arguments that almost always came back to theatrical complaints about the impossibility of deploying the full complexity of their skills when not every domino was brought into play. They sounded like Grand Masters being asked to play without the queen. Tonight there seemed no possibility of their artistry being given full range. Alan was engaged in trying to get Vince Mabon to admit the folly of being young. Fast Frankie White was drinking with his customary self-consciousness, as if checking the camera-angles.
He was an outsider in his home town, Frankie White, and perhaps everywhere. Nobody was even sure where the nickname ‘Fast’ had come from, maybe from the publicity agent he carried around in his head. Most people in Thornbank knew that whatever he did it wasn’t strictly legal. But since they knew of nobody he had harmed, except for breaking his mother’s heart (and what son didn’t?), they tolerated him. He might be able to sell the image he had made of himself elsewhere but they knew him too well to take him seriously. He was a performance and they let it happen, as long as it didn’t interfere significantly with them. Tonight he had kept to himself, drinking his whisky with a nervous expectation, and seeming to listen with sophisticated amusement to Vince and Alan.
Vince’s mushroom hairstyle was nodding heatedly at Alan and he had spilled some of his light beer on his UCLA tee-shirt. Alan was holding his whisky glass to the optic and shaking his head.
‘Well, I wouldn’t go, anyway,’ Vince said. ‘And that’s for sure.’
‘But they’re payin’ his way,’ Alan said, and dropped a token bead of water in his glass. The whole trip won’t cost him a penny.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.’
‘It’s his son and his wife, for God’s sake. Bert’s got two grand-daughters out there he’s never even seen.’
‘His son could bring them over.’
‘It’s not like he’s goin’ to stay in South Africa. Ah could see the force of yer objections then. It’s just a holiday.’
‘He’s still sanctioning an oppressive regime,’ Vince said.
Alan emptied an ashtray that had nothing in it, wiped it with a cloth that made it slightly less clean and replaced it on the bar. He looked at his glass for advice.
‘You ever been to Prestwick for the day?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘You ever been to Prestwick for the day?’
Vince looked round, appealing to a non-existent public. He smiled to himself since nobody else was available.
‘I think that’s what they call a non sequitur, Alan,’ he said.
‘That’s