Hot Water Man Read Free Page A

His face was blunt and regular; unmemorable unless you loved him. The question was: did she still? His nose was burnt red; so was hers. They resembled each other; people in the past had taken them for brother and sister.
    We’re alone now, she thought. A new country, a huge new sky. A stucco house with eight rooms and a flat roof. Its only familiarity was the decorated shawl she had fixed with masking tape to their bedroom wall. A trunkful of clothes, and themselves. Would this improve their marriage? It must change it.
    Outside the sun was sinking. From this window you could see between the neighbouring houses. Way beyond, three miles away, lay the city; here and there blocks rose into the polluted evening sky. Turning to the left, you saw the last few houses of the suburb. Beyond lay the desert. Drab during the day, those scrub flats turned molten in the sunset. Future roads were already laid out, leading nowhere, and building plots were marked out with posts. The posts had turned pink in the light; they stretched into the distance and made the landscape look shabby and temporary. Beyond them lay the silver thread of the Indian Ocean.

4
    Donald had grown up on the edge of the ocean. It was a tamed sea. Brinton, on the Kentish coast, was not far from Broadstairs. It was a holiday resort of pebble-dash semis, bus shelters and a windy esplanade. Old dears sat in the tea shops. Along Marine Drive the sea could be glimpsed, a grey strip between the parked cars.
    It stretched for miles, bungalows and retirement homes, electric fires on throughout the year and chairs in crescents around the picture window. Between them and the sea were the amusements to keep people busy. There was a clock-golf course, Brinton Bowls Green with thoughtful men in braces, and the Happyland Caravan Park about which complaints were made.
    Only regulars went. Brinton had not moved with the times. There were topless buses for brave souls and the Gaumont which showed
Carry On
pictures. Next door, the one-armed bandits were out of order. In winter the holidaymakers went and the gales blew the notices down. Donald loved it then. He loved it in all seasons, it was secure and yet there was the ocean to set him yearning. Along safe streets a van delivered bread, but above it clouds massed over a troubled Channel.
    He lived with his mother and grandparents; his father had been killed in the war. His father was a photo on the mantelpiece, and sighed asides. He himself was the man of the family. The responsibility had pleased him; as a boy he had grown up serious and adult for his age, out of step with his schoolfriends. He had always hurried home to Durradee.
    And especially to Grandad. Grandad was like a father who was never too busy. He was always there, unchanging; he frequently told Donald that he took the same size in suits he had taken forty years before. Unlike Granny he never seemed to get older; unlike Mother, who was essential of course but usually out at work or preoccupied, he was always at hand. He was the only person who treated Donald as an adult, man to man. In fact he spoke to Donald as he spoke to nobody else in the household – proper conversations, just the two of them, while the women clattered in the kitchen. It was with Grandad that he did the things he remembered – the hikes along the cliffs, scurrying to keep up with Grandad’s longer strides, tense with remembering the birds’ names so he did not disappoint. By some unspoken family law, it was only himself who was allowed in the greenhouse where Grandad stooped, too tall for the roof, lifting the seedlings. Donald lifted them too, trying not to spill the earth. He had his father to live up to. His father had served in the R.A.F. Sometimes when a plane droned overhead Grandad paused, looking up through the glass.
    He himself, though diligent, did badly at school. Grandad used to recite the names of famous men whose academic performance had been undistinguished.