Promise of Happiness

Chapter One Charles Judd has walked on the beach almost every day for the last four years. When it is cold---it's early spring, but freezing---he needs to pee more often than is natural. Away from the house, where Daphne is heroically trying to cook something fishy from Rick Stein's cookbook, he often pees in the open. There's nobody around, and it reassures him that when he's out of the house he can pee freely. There's none of that gush of youth, of course, and he has to be careful of the wind direction, but still he feels calmed. When he was a young man, peeing imperiously into the urinals at Fox and Jewell, he used to direct a strong stream at the cigarette butts or the blue cakes of deodorant that lay on little rubber mats. This deodorant had an unnatural glitter, and released an unnatural smell of pine. Why do deodorants smell worse than the odours they are disguising? Minicab drivers in London always make their cars stink of resin, issuing from little Christmas-tree things swinging from the rear-view mirror. When he used to send the company car to be washed, he told the fleet manager, Arnie Prince, to ask them not to wipe it down or spray it with Fruits of the Forest or Bavarian Conifer or whatever it was. But it always came back stinking: What canyer do, Mr Judd, they're Nigerians. I'll try sending a runner wif a cleft stick next time. Arnie Prince was a card. At this time of year at the beach the scents are deeply marine. The air itself is loaded with fishiness and iodine and dislocated mussels. He sees a fishing boat coming in over Doom Bar, trailed by freeloading seagulls. The sight still stirs him: that the basics of fishing haven't changed; that the fish lie in the boxes lustrous and dying; that the fishermen throw nets over the side. But he knows that the sight of the dumpy little boats coming up the Camel Estuary doesn't stir him quite as deeply as it used to when they first came down here. He tries to imagine the last breath he will take and the last view he will take in. (Although you don't 'take in' views in the way he had once imagined: science has shown that the brain assembles the images according to its own plan and that you have no control.) No, his last view is not going to be of The Maid of Padstow or The Cornish Princess butting up the estuary. He is trying to avoid these thoughts, which suggest the death of hope. He remembers with a pang the last uninhibited fuck he had with a young woman---she was a trainee at Fox and Jewel---and for a few weeks they had fucked blithely in the office after hours. He was so happy, and so was she. 'You love this, don't you?' he said. 'Yes, with you.' 'Come on, you love it anyway.' 'It's true, I love fucking,' she said, 'but I've got a steady boyfriend, you know.' He knew. That was twenty-three years ago. He walks up the path through the dunes across the tenth hole of the golf course, towards the church, which had once been buried in sand. A squall is coming in off the estuary and he shelters under the lychgate. The church still has a half-excavated look, as though they had dug it out of the advancing sand dunes only sufficiently to let the congregation in the door and some light in the windows. He goes to church occasionally, because Daphne is on the flower roster and helps with fund-raising. He once took charge of a donkey at the church fte. The donkey took off at a fast, determined scuttle and he had run along beside it holding on to a screaming child. When the donkey tried to duck under a barrier he had pulled the child off just in time. Daphne was horrified: God, you're useless. You're embarrassing. All you were askedCartwright, Justin is the author of 'Promise of Happiness ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780312348809 and ISBN 0312348800.