Low life
Last orders
Jeremy Clarke
Under a low oak-beamed ceiling, three middle-aged men were perched on stools around the bar. One of these greeted me, walked around to the other side of the bar and asked me what I was having. He wasn’t the landlord, he said. The landlord was busy out at the back for a moment. There was a small selection of real ales. I chose the Badger’s Todger. He poured me a pint and returned to his stool and rejoined his muted three-cornered conversation.
The bar was cosy enough but the quietness was oppressive. A big mistake coming to this place, I thought, as I took a sip. Nice pint, though. Then the landlord materialised behind the bar. He was a large man, well manicured, conservatively dressed. You could tell how he voted in the last general election just by looking at him. He greeted me warmly — or was it just loudly? — and there was something Fawlty-esque — that peculiar mixture of fear, anger and resignation — in his stare as he sized me up.
I had on a suit and tie, so that went down well with him, I imagined. But my regional accent, when he heard it, made him visibly blanche. And yet I didn’t appear to be intimidated in the slightest by a man of his size, style, social class and private education. I was a conundrum. To solve it, he went the direct route. ‘What do you do for a living?’ he demanded. I told him I was a journalist. ‘Who do you write for?’ I told him the Devon Association of Smallholders quarterly magazine and The Spectator — had he heard of either? My goodness he’d heard of The Spectator, all right. I thought he was going to throw himself on me weeping for joy. And then the usual excited questions about Boris. Had I met him? He’d make an excellent prime minister, wouldn’t he? Surely the idiocy was just a façade, wasn’t it?
Now that he had my political persuasion clear in his mind, or so he thought, he became affable. Actually, my political views are very far to the right of the Conservative party. They are so far to the right they’re almost left. So as we chatted about what a joke Gordon Brown has become, and so forth, I condescendingly allowed this landlord his political camaraderie in the same way that Julius Streicher might have politely assented to the political opinions of his local vicar.
Why hadn’t he seen me in his pub before, he said, as if slightly hurt by my previous absence. I said I didn’t enjoy going to local pubs because they were either full up with people eating or they were dead like this one. ‘Dead is the word,’ he said quietly. Then he seemed to come to a decision about whether or not to speak candidly with me. Lowering his voice, he said, ‘I’ve stuck it here for long enough and now I’m leaving. I’m going next week.’ I asked him where to, and to do what, and he said to a pub in Oxfordshire. It was all arranged. He’d done his best here, he said, it hadn’t worked out, and now it was time to go. ‘Well, it’s time I went as well,’ I said, knocking back the dregs. I wished him the best for the future, shook his hand, went home, and immediately forgot about him.
Last week an ex-pat aunt and uncle came to stay, as they normally do in August. They live on the Algarve and every year bore us rigid about how my aunt misses nothing at all about the old country, while my uncle misses one thing only — a pint of bitter. And every year I take my uncle to a pub selling real ale and watch the look of bliss extending across his nut-brown face as he takes his first sip.
Remembering the excellent pint of bitter I’d had just a few days before, and the conservative instincts of the landlord, both of which well suited my uncle’s tastes, I drove him yesterday to the pub with the fairy lights. Surprisingly, the place was packed and the atmosphere noisy and convivial. Cards lined up along the mantelpiece and deep windowsills suggested the landlord had unfortunately left already.
The regular that had served me on my first visit was there again, only this time he was officially serving behind the bar. He remembered me. ‘You’ve heard what happened?’ he said gravely. ‘No?’ I said. The landlord was found hanging from a tree in front of the pub last Friday morning, he said; funeral the day after tomorrow. I didn’t know quite what to say to that, so I said, ‘Two pints of Todger, please.’ ‘Jugs or sleevers?’ he said, suddenly cheerful again. ‘One in a sleeve, if you don’t mind,’ I said.
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