2. Another sip of tea

2. Another sip of tea


The man took another sip of tea from his cup. The oil lamp was flickering gently now, making it very peaceful, calm and cosy. He looked at his guest, sitting in the armchair opposite him. Poor soul; he was drifting into sleep now after a long round of talking. Tea did that to his guests, but never to him – he was always up and aware. When he wasn’t talking, he was thinking, and right now he was thinking about the guest on the other armchair who was falling to sleep.

This guest had come from Dublin in Ireland. Ran quite a successful business by the end of his life. Very shrewd, some felt ruthless – but the guy did feel some guilt. Earlier in life he’d been a bit of a lad - a drinker and a clown. All the girls loved him. He sang up and down the pubs, really well. ‘Music and alcohol’, he’d kept saying, ‘the two things I most wish I’d avoided.’ He’d had a great charm though, an ease with people that stayed throughout his life, something he felt had cursed him. Could be very generous, but very, very shrewd, and not always generous to those he should have been.

He did a bit of everything to begin with, never earning much but building up a bit of a reputation for himself. Very self-reliant, a good quality for when he set up on his own. An excellent persuader. Came with the voice, you see, a singing voice. Made people like him, made them crave his approval. He regrets that now, says it let him walk over other people and make too many mistakes. Says he hopes next time he has an awful voice.

Next time he wants to be more solitary. Had enough of people in this life. Wants to be educated and to learn, and to create things people will remember him by. Not just money, money, money.

He tried at being a scholar later in life. Went to classes at the club, and enrolled for some courses. Mostly musical ones, to begin with. This chap could play the guitar, piano and banjo - really could have been a musician when he was younger.

‘But music is bad, no good, does nothing,’ he had kept saying before he drifted off.

Maybe he associated music with things he disliked about himself. Anyway, after a while he gave up music, and became fascinated by politics and philosophy, which he felt was what really mattered. Read all of Marx and Engels. Briefly admired Mussolini, a person many people thought was onto a good thing at the time, but then became interested in all these unusual anarchists.

The man watched his guest’s head fall back, breathing, not properly snoring. He needed rest, and could have plenty of that here in the hut. And talk, and tea, of course.

Around the time of these anarchists, the man recalled, his guest had said he began to suffer from an affliction that would cause him tremendous frustration and make him very irritable with his poor wife for the remainder of her life, which he now deeply regrets. His eyesight began to go, which made it harder and harder for him to read, when he wanted so much to read. He felt he ought to have done reading years ago. The thought that it was too late to read now was too much to bear.

Younger people at the club, and even people his own age, were learning and understanding far more than he was. He became jealous, secretly. The others still all revered him like before, but he felt himself becoming more and more at sea, not understanding anything he was shown. The comfortable leather sofas, the racks filled with newspapers and magazines, the talking and the smoking of pipe after pipe had been something he’d loved once. Not being a drinker, unlike the others, he had a little bit of an advantage, one that had served him well in business much of his life.

Now though, he couldn’t go to his club, even though they still wanted him. He didn’t want them to see how deadened his intellect was now. Besides, he felt guilty about how the sofas and the pipes and the chat and the indulgent self-importance that went along with it all had drawn him away from the woman he ought to have been looking after better.

The man filled his guest’s cup with tea. He was asleep, but that didn’t matter much here; everybody still got tea.

Right at the end, the man carried on recalling, his guest had started reading the Bible. ‘For research purposes,’ mind you. He didn’t believe in all that; he had fallen out with the Church as a young man, but didn’t want to talk about that. The Bible was hard to read though, with his eyes and concentration going. More and more he read little children’s stories, with great big black letters and colourful illustrations. He had really laughed when he mentioned that, and said he really and honestly thought those little children’s books he read were more important than ‘all of the other pretentious old stuff.’

The guest began to stir, his heavy breathing returning to normal as he sat up again in his chair. There was the cup of tea in front of him on the table, and there was the man on the other armchair, ready to chat. Sooner or later he'd be ready to leap off the edge of the world and be reborn again.