Birthday

FOURTEEN

Brian hoped never to drive over Basford Crossing again, at least not for the purpose he was set on now. The people you think will be the last to die are too often the first, and even when you’ve expected it for so long there’s no denying the shock. Many obituaries in the papers were about people younger than him, often with so few years they could be his children which, though not dispiriting, sometimes made him wonder how long his luck would last.

A glum and nondescript road over Sunrise Hill took him on to the dual carriageway and through more cheerful estates. He pulled in beyond the constabulary headquarters to look at the map and make sure he wouldn’t miss the turnoff to the cemetery. Rejoining traffic, a hooter screamed at his near miss, but he was too set on his errand to curse back.

‘It was a terrible way to go,’ Arthur said on the phone. ‘If I’d been able to get my hands on a gun I’d have put her away. Out of love I would have done it. She wanted me to, near the end, knowing she had to die, and suffering as she was. But there was nothing I could do. She was like an animal in pain, and life’s no longer precious when it comes to that. But I didn’t have a gun, and no poison either, so what could I do but watch? I helped her to the lavatory because she was too proud to do it in bed, and I wiped her — did everything I could. I kept on trying to get her to eat, but by then she’d stopped fighting to stay alive, and I could only wait for her to go. It’s awful when you have to be glad that the person you love most in the world is dead.’

He filtered by traffic lights on to the main road, put on his blinkers and cruised so as not to miss the inlet. Even so, typical for him, who always took turnings too soon, he drove into a cul-de-sac of newish houses, noting a twitch of the curtains from someone wondering who the cheeky devil could be, straying into their haven to rob them of their happy savings. Maybe she was waiting for her fancyman, and was disappointed at his three point turn back to the main road. A hundred yards further on, the cemetery was clearly indicated.

Cars were parked opposite the chapel not much bigger than a mountain refuge hut. He embraced Eileen by the door. ‘What a terrible time it is,’ Derek said. ‘I hoped it would never happen, and now it has.’

‘It’s a blessing she’s gone, that’s all I know.’ Eileen looked grim and concerned. ‘But I can’t tell you how sorry I am for Arthur.’ Pale and silent, she had nothing more to add, or let go of beyond tears. The weather wasn’t too cold for January, not the usual pissing down funeral scene. He was pulled from his drowsiness after the drive from London on seeing Jenny’s son Ronald holding the door open for her and his icily attractive wife Sylvia to get out.

‘It’s gone eleven, so the hearse is late.’ Derek looked at his cold pipe, but decided it would be disrespectful to light up. ‘They’re usually punctual to the minute.’

‘It should have left the house at half past ten,’ Eileen said, ‘and it’s only ten minutes away, so there’s no excuse.’

‘In that case,’ Brian nodded, ‘I’ll nip over and say hello to Jenny.’

Who smiled: ‘I knew you’d be here. But isn’t it awful for poor Arthur? I didn’t guess Avril was that badly when she came to my party. I know what it’s like though, having someone die.’

She had dragged out her widow’s weeds to get togged up in, a black that made her look much younger. He kissed her, and regretted that on shaking hands with Sylvia she too didn’t put her face forward for a kiss, but stood apart even from Ronald, as if they’d had their usual early morning bicker. ‘I’m glad you came,’ Brian called to her.

‘Couldn’t not, could I?’ She smiled, and he wondered how much wooing he would have to do, how much patience show, and persistence need, lies to tell and humour to spend before getting her to shed those clothes and come to bed where, once the sackcloth of reserve had gone, she would be as frisky as a Tasmanian kitten. ‘Don’t you find funerals just that little bit sexy?’

She looked stern, then laughed, the unusual sound bringing her husband across to find out what might be the matter.

Brian forestalled him. ‘I’m glad to see you.’

Ronald, wearing the same suit as at the party, shook his hand. ‘The lad needs support at a time like this. I’ve left a good chap in charge of the firm.’

Sylvia smiled as he shook her warm hand again, her eyes showing there was little call. ‘I’m sorry about your brother’s loss. Jenny wanted us to come, and in any case someone had to bring her.’

‘She’ll have to take up driving again,’ he said. ‘It’d be good for her to be free and mobile, though I expect you’d have to watch her when she went out on her own. She might meet a bloke and get married again.’

Sylvia was wondering how to reply, when the first car of the cortège came up the drive, heavy tyres crunching the gravel. Brian went with Derek and Eileen to greet Arthur.

He got out of the car and stood alone, straight-backed, head in the air, and stark with sorrow, as if he would remain through rain and snow in that stance for the rest of the winter until, recovering from his grief and realizing where he was, he would go home to as much of a normal life as could be made.

He looked around, knew he was by the chapel, that Avril’s body lay in a long box in the car, and that everyone was here to see her put out of sight forever. Sorrow was the common feeling as they placed arms around each other, squeezed hands, put pressure at the shoulders, nothing too violent with Arthur in case he crumbled, all regretting that his misfortune could not be shared, so much bereftness beyond the power to placate.

Brian didn’t know whether the ache in his heart and stomach was for Avril (who had been dead a fortnight because of the Christmas holidays) or for Arthur living in his vacuum of pain, or even because he was hungry after the drive from London. But he registered anguish for his brother who was trapped into a state he could hardly imagine, since he hadn’t experienced it, and hoped he never would.

Four men from the burial firm slid the coffin out of the hearse, and pulled it on a fragile trolley into the chapel as if afterwards they would drag it to the South Pole like one of Captain Scott’s crew. People filed in behind, and Brian took a place at the back from which to look at the ceremony.

Arthur sat at the front, next to Harold dressed in a suit like the other men; his hair was cut short. On the other side of Arthur was Melanie and Barry, then Avril’s son Jonah, a slim man with a moustache, and now the foreman at an electrical components firm. Avril’s daughter Rachel, who had come from London, sat by her brother, while behind were Jenny and her family, and a stocky elderly man Eileen pointed out as Oliver, Arthur’s friend from his allotment days. A few other acquaintances almost filled the little chapel.

The minister (or whatever he was: Brian had never sorted out the titles or hierarchy of those in the church industry) was a tall, pale, balding man who said a few words about ‘our sister Avril’ as if he had known her all his life. Brian thought what a hypocrite, but he was only doing his job, and he supposed it comforted Arthur to hear Avril’s name mentioned in a public place.

Passages were read from a softened down version of the Bible, too much mention of Jesus for Brian, though he supposed you had to expect it at a service for sending a dead body into the ground.

Everyone got back into their cars and drove a few hundred yards to the far end of the cemetery, lips of dull earth around an oblong hole, the box already in position. He had to remind himself that Avril’s body lay inside. The wind blew colder, and clouds ran across the sky as if to bring news of rain before the ritual finished.

Arthur stood tall and dignified, his face looking raw, eyes as if unseeing, alone as only he could be. After the words ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’ (mud, more like it, not being in the desert for which the words were written) he picked up a handful of heavy soil from the spade given to him, and sent his last goodbye clattering onto the box. Others in turn did the same, the only part of the procedure that brought Brian close to tears. A vivid picture of Avril smiling and talking in her prime vanished when he stooped to lift a handful of soil from the ground, muttering farewell as he let it fall.

Arthur stood in the garden among the dead midwinter plants, staring as if to bring back all their colours after he and Avril had tended them into growth. Harold laid a hand around his shoulders, and said something which made Arthur smile, and take his son’s arm to come into the house.

Brian sipped his coffee, for the first time in years stirring sugar into it. Few people bothered with alcohol, as if it was out of place, but all were talking in the same old lingo, telling stories and reminiscing. He recalled a remark by Hannah Arendt that ‘the homeland of the Jews is in their language’, and being again among people he had grown up with, he realized that their idiom was his home base as well.

More people were at the house than had been at the funeral, because some neighbours had come in. Arthur looked as if a ponderous weight had been taken from his back now that the interment was over, but Brian realized that a year would need to elapse before he could be anything like himself.

Harold was telling them about driving to Calverton one winter’s dusk, a northerly drizzle slewing against the windscreen of his white Mercedes van as he went over the Dorket Head crossroads. ‘After so many houses on the edge of town you’re suddenly on your own in the middle of nowhere. You all know where I mean. I went down the hill and the lane got narrower, or it seemed to, because there was hedges on either side. Then the drizzle changed to sleet, as if somebody was chucking it in buckets.’

To encourage him, a darkly clouded sky threw rain against the living room window. ‘There’s a sharp right hand bend, and after a few hundred yards another bend to the left. Then the lane goes down steep, through the wood.’ He turned to Arthur: ‘Then I saw her, as plain as I’m looking at you.’

Arthur nodded, and told him to get on with it.

‘Are you sure you weren’t sloshed?’ Derek said.

‘Not then I wasn’t. I had to go slow, and put the main beams on. She came from the trees, right across my path. I couldn’t believe it, but I had to, because she looked at me. The fucking ponytail I wore in them days stood up on its hind leg. She had a white face, and big dark circles under her eyes. I thought she was going to do a header through the windscreen, she was that close. I shouted. Talk about panic, and I’m not like that. Screamed, more like it. I braked, and nearly hit a tree. Missed it by inches. Then I pressed on, but I was shaking like a leaf. I hadn’t had anything to drink the night before either.’

‘I can’t believe in ghosts,’ Ronald smiled

‘So what was it?’ Eileen said.

‘Maybe she’d broken out of Mapperley Asylum,’ Arthur suggested.

Harold’s hands shook while lighting a cigarette. ‘Say what you like. When I got to the village I delivered my packages. Then I had to go in the pub for a sit down and a drink, I was so shaken up. An old chokka at the bar asked why I was looking so white at the gills, and when I told him he laughed, his false teeth doing a dance from one side of his mouth to the other. “There’s been a lot of accidents at that spot,” he said, “but it’s nothing to worry about. You’ve only seen the ghost. People do from time to time.”

‘Then he told me what happened about a hundred years ago. He said that just off the first bend of the lane was a place called Abbey House. The owners were abroad at the time, and the housekeeper was living in, with her twenty-year-old daughter. Anyway, on a winter’s afternoon the mother took ill, didn’t she? The girl put on her cloak and bonnet to go and get a doctor from the village.’

Everyone was quietly waiting to hear what happened next, as Harold, now knowing that he could take his time, reached the arm of a chair and shook ash from his cigarette. An increasing ferocity of rain reminded him to get on with it. ‘She thought she’d take a short cut, down the fields and through the wood, and it was nearly dark when she got to the trees. She must have been wet through, because it was the worst afternoon you can imagine, and just as dark as it is today.

‘Anyway, she went into the wood, but she never came out. She was found next day, or her body was. She had been raped and murdered. A shepherd found her, and they never got the one as did it. The old bloke told me all this in the pub. Funnily enough, he said, all the accidents at that spot had been to men drivers, never to women, though these days with everybody having long hair you’d think she’d make a mistake now and again. But she never did. He told me to be extra careful on the way back, because she’d be angry I’d got away, and might have another go. She wants to kill all the men she can. “Fuck that,” I told him, “she ain’t going to get another chance with me. She’s blown it already. That was my lot.” I drove the other way out of the village, went like a bat out of hell, flashing everybody in front to get to the A614. And I’ve never been that way since. I never will, either. I don’t see why the daft bitch should want to do me in. It wasn’t me as raped and killed her.’

Oliver stood by the mantelpiece to fill his cold pipe. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t an hallucination?’

‘You bet I am. I wouldn’t even go that way on a bright summer’s day. I’m not a coward, but I was shit-scared. If she hadn’t had such big mad eyes I might have fancied her, but she looked like trouble, so I didn’t. I couldn’t clear out fast enough. Anyway, it’s you I love, ain’t it, duck?’ he said to Harriet.

She reached for his hand. ‘And I love you. Luckily, I talked you into getting rid of that poncy long hair and buying a proper suit, not to mention pulling out that daft earring.’

‘She nearly yanked my tab off over that.’ He sounded in no way regretful. ‘And I got a job as well, didn’t I? I ain’t had the sack yet, and I won’t either.’

She was a tall girl, wearing slimline trousers and a green duffel coat, and Brian saw a resemblance between her and Avril that wouldn’t be lost on Arthur. ‘You’d better not get the push, either,’ she said, ‘or you’ve seen the last of me. I go to work, so you’ve got to. I don’t need a house-husband yet. Not that I believe you ever saw that ghost. I’ve heard too many of your tales.’

‘There you go, showing me up in public again.’ He released her hand and straightened himself. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s being called a liar. It ain’t right. I tell everybody about the most terrifying experience of my life, and the one I love most says I didn’t see it.’

‘You’re worse than Arthur.’ Eileen helped Rachel to clear away cups and plates. ‘I’ve never heard such a daft story.’

‘I believe you: thousands wouldn’t.’

He laughed. ‘I don’t care about the thousands. All I know is I’m telling the truth.’

‘The place is on a hill that used to be an ancient camp,’ Brian said. ‘Or so it says on the map. Maybe there is something spooky about it.’

‘I’m glad you believe me, Uncle Brian.’ Harold reached for Harriet’s hand. ‘We’ve got to be off, though. I told the gaffer I’d do the afternoon shift, and he’s starting to rely on me.’ He embraced Arthur. ‘You’ll be all right, dad. We’ll see you at the weekend, won’t we, love?’

‘I like your dad, even though he’s wary about me because I’m a social worker.’

‘Don’t be so daft,’ he said.

She kissed Arthur. ‘We’ll see you in a few days.’

‘I thought Avril was marvellous,’ Harold said. ‘She was always good to me, and I’m dead sorry she’s gone. She was one of the best. She was lovely and generous.’

Arthur, unable to speak, kissed his son, and let him go. He looked gravely after him, Brian noticed, as if he couldn’t fully believe in Harold wearing a smart suit, and even regretted the lack of earrings, ponytail and jeans. Maybe Harold’s settling down — if you could call it that — in some way disappointed Arthur, who saw him as ceasing to rebel against the toffee-nosed poxed-up loudmouthed swivel-eyed fuckpigs who had plagued him all his life and would continue to do so. It was no good thing when a bloke stopped wanting to dynamite the Houses of Parliament. Nor was it so good that Harold no longer looked as Avril had secretly liked to see him, a saddening factor because she couldn’t see anybody from now on.

‘It’s like being in a submarine.’ Arthur sat in the front seat, Derek’s car smoothing its way through Burton Joyce and up the Trent Valley. ‘Round here, the sky sucks water out of the river and spews it on the road.’

Brian, sitting behind with Eileen, thought he might create a character called Joyce Burton. She’d be a bit of a tartar, tall, statuesque, with red hair, and wearing little gold-rimmed glasses, an opinionated woman always convinced she was right, but causing mayhem wherever she poked her sharp nose, ending in bed with someone totally unsuitable at the end of each episode.

It was main beams on and all systems go, though plenty of cars came with panache and confidence from the other way. Derek turned on to a lane out of Thurgarton village, the car splashed as if trundling along a stream bed. ‘What a rotten night,’ Eileen said.

‘It would be, today of all days,’ Arthur said, in the gloom of the car. ‘I’m glad the funeral’s over.’

‘We all are.’ Derek swerved slightly, then righted. ‘We’ll be in a snug pub soon. It’s quite close to the river.’

A car coming head on, no time or inclination to dip its beams, nearly drove them into the hedge. ‘We could have been in the river just then,’ Arthur said, everyone glad to hear him laugh. The all-enclosing dark after Bleasby was as if drifting through space. ‘You’d better slow down. We don’t want four more funerals. At least not for twenty years.’

‘I’ll be driving back,’ Eileen said, as Derek slotted into a space at the car park. They ran through the rain into a comfortable lounge warmed by flame from real logs, a score of people at tables and by the bar; an aroma of meat and chips and mellow beer filling the air. ‘Now we can warm our arses,’ Derek said. ‘Though let’s get tanked up first.’

Brian stood by a table laid for supper, and let Eileen choose their seats. Arthur took his pew, as always without using his hands, looking straight before him, and when the pint came, elbow at an angle of ninety degrees, he lifted the rim to his mouth, and took the first long draught with movements, Brian recalled, exactly like those of his grandfather.

The pub was isolated in the Valley of the Trent, strong gusts across sodden meadows spattering rain to fill the dykes and runnels, driving swans into hiding and fish under wavelets on the river. ‘I don’t suppose the water ever comes over the lanes?’ Brian said.

‘If we do get stuck,’ Arthur said, ‘we’ll be all right as long as the beer doesn’t run out.’ Avril had been with them last time, which he remembered, because his hand shook so much on lifting the glass for another go that he had to put it down.

‘It’ll be like that for a while.’ Brian thought it better to mention than not. ‘It’ll take a good year to get over a blow like yours.’ Eileen and Derek said comforting words as well, till diverted by a waitress asking what they wanted to eat.

No one had much to say during the meal. Brian went to the bar and replenished their pints, and Arthur was unable to finish his cutlets. ‘It’s the first time it’s happened to me.’

Eileen put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t let it bother you.’

‘Grandad Merton would have forgiven you,’ Brian said.

‘I expect he’s looking down on us,’ Arthur smiled.

‘If he can he will,’ Derek said.

‘When I used to go to his house on Sunday morning,’ Arthur recalled, ‘grandma would set a place for my dinner. I once left something on my plate. It couldn’t have been much, a bit of potato or some gristle. Grandad looked at it. He had his eye patch on, and the good eye glared as if it would burn right into me. So I swallowed what was left. He’d never let anybody leave a scrap of food on their plates.’

Brian remembered the copy of Mrs Beaton always on the sideboard. ‘He didn’t want you to insult grandma’s cooking.’

‘He needn’t have bothered. Everything she brought to the table was good to eat.’

‘I hope she’s listening,’ Eileen said.

He tampered with what remained of his meal. ‘I never know what to think about that.’

Brian knew that right now he was wondering about Avril. ‘Nobody does.’

‘It’s hard to imagine she isn’t still looking.’ Eileen had picked up Brian’s thoughts, which she knew Arthur wanted to hear.

‘Have one of these.’ Derek pushed his case across, the top section off, five cigars like a magazine of ammunition waiting to be slotted into a rifle. Tears were in Arthur’s eyes as he pulled one out, as if only a bullet for himself would soothe the anguish. Derek peeled off the cellophane, lit it, and put it into his hand. Laughter from the bar, but nothing to be done except stay calm and help their brother to endure. Every tortuous minute of the year to come would, at a quick calculation, need over half a million before the worst of the pain wore off.

His face was fluid of feature, uncertain in its age, and in a feat of control his hand was rigorously coaxed to normal. He looked into the distance as if hoping to get some comfort, not seeing the bar, or tables at which people were eating, or the farmer-like man who stopped on coming from the gents to stroke a big docile dog blocking his way. He turned back to them and gestured an apology for his weakness, as if to say I won’t embarrass you anymore. Let’s just carry on as if you didn’t see anything.

‘It’s still throwing it down.’ Derek glanced at the windows. ‘I think February filldyke’s got here in January. We might have to swim back.’

Arthur smiled, as if to face such mortal peril would be a pleasure. But whatever the weather, they were safe and warm and fed, and between puffs at his cigar he tackled the pint Brian set before him, listened to their chaff, returned some of it, and looked at the pretty waitress when they paid the bill, of forty-seven pounds made up to fifty because she had been so charming.

A waiter brought the receipt. ‘I thought I’d let you know there’s water on the lanes, so look out for it on the way back. A chap just came in and told us.’

They got into their coats. ‘We’ll take care,’ Derek said.

Eileen coasted through the shallow floods, and even on the main road drove carefully under the rain, mindful that Arthur above all had to go on living.

FIFTEEN

Brian said to Jenny: ‘Let’s go to Matlock. The weather’s miserable, but we’ll be all right in the car.’

‘Do you mean it?’ — as if unable to believe he could suggest something so pleasant.

Every decision could be the wrong one, but he’d opened his mouth and it would be cruel to dim the light in her eyes, though in the old days she wouldn’t have been shocked if he did. ‘I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.’

‘I’d love to. I haven’t been since I nearly went on the bike with you.’

‘I was sorry about that,’ he said, as if it was yesterday.

She didn’t want him to be sorry. ‘But I got to Matlock in the end, because you took me a month later on the train.’

He’d hoped she’d remember. ‘Did I?’

‘You know you did.’

‘Now I do.’

‘George always had to go the other way on his travels, to Skegness or Mablethorpe. He loved the sea.’

He hadn’t come to hear about dead George. ‘We’ll get there by one, and have something to eat. You won’t need to cook dinner today.’

She gathered the cups and saucers. ‘Eunice was coming to see me, so I’d better phone and tell her I’m going out.’ Laughter from the kitchen: ‘I’m not letting on where he’s taking me. Don’t worry, he’ll bring me back. You think we’re going to run away together? I should say not. See you tomorrow, then. I’ll tell you all about it.’ Another laugh. ‘Or I might not. I’ll see you then, then.’

He held the umbrella over her to the car, and threw a couple of cardboard boxes into the back so that she could sit down. ‘Which way do we go?’ she wanted to know.

‘We make for Cinderhill, get onto the A610, and head for Ambergate, through Langley Mill and Ripley.’

‘I love them names.’

He turned for the main road, feeling strange having her by his side in a car, the girl he had so intimately known turned into an unfamiliar old woman. What he wanted he couldn’t say, nor knew why he was taking her to Matlock, but there was no turning back, so he decided to enjoy it.

‘I remember struggling up all the hills. It was so hard I didn’t even feel good when it came to freewheeling down.’

Less traffic after the motorway turnoff, rain still splashing the windscreen. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’

‘I don’t smoke, as a rule, though I will today. It’s nice to puff on a fag now and again.’

He passed the packet. ‘Light one for me as well.’

‘George smoked a hundred a day sometimes. But you can understand that, can’t you?’

He certainly could. ‘I usually smoke cigars, though not too many.’ The rain stopped as he drove up the gentle slope into Derbyshire, usually the opposite. ‘Do you ever think of getting behind the wheel again?’

‘Sometimes. I’ve got a licence, but a few years ago I had a near miss coming back from Skegness, and I haven’t been brave enough to drive since.’

‘You’d enjoy it, now there’s less to look after. You won’t have anymore near misses.’

‘I might try next summer, roam around a bit.’ Both at their ease, he was taking this old age pensioner out for the day. They were the same age, but he couldn’t believe it, because there was no retirement for him, nor any pension either, since he had never bothered with stamps, though a private scheme was there to be milked if he stopped earning. ‘What happened to you after we split up?’

She needed time to think, as he weaved through Langley Mill and went towards Ripley. ‘It’s going a long way back. Too far, maybe. We were different people then, weren’t we?’

He shouldn’t have asked. She might think he’d only brought her for that reason, and was taking advantage. ‘True, yet we’re still the same people. It’s just that such a lot’s happened to us.’

‘We don’t look the same,’ she laughed. ‘Anyway, about a year later, I had an affair, as they call it now, and I got pregnant. The man didn’t want to know. He told me to get rid of it, and when I said I couldn’t do such a thing he ran away. He was married, though I didn’t know at the time. Gordon was his name.’

‘It would be.’ Yet he didn’t want to denigrate someone she must have loved.

‘He was a draughtsman. He got a job near Bristol, and took his family because he didn’t want his wife to find out.’

‘You didn’t think of chasing her up and telling her?’

‘There wasn’t any point. He wouldn’t have come back. I had the baby. You’ve met her. It’s Eunice, and she’s fifty now.’

‘She wrote to me about the surprise party.’

‘A couple of years later I met George, and when he said he loved me, and I told him about Eunice, he said it didn’t matter. He would take her in, and she would be all right with him. And she was. He looked on her like one of his own, and when I had six more she just blended in. So you can see how I had to care for him after the accident. Not that I thought I wouldn’t, though I did sometimes wonder how long it was going to go on, mostly for his sake, especially near the end. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’

You would indeed. He thought about the tolerance and mutual affection between himself and the women he had been with, where it had always been a gamble as to who would flee first. Such signs as had been in the offing were mistaken for those of undying love which, as he well knew, never ran smooth.

‘I feel a lot better now,’ she said, ‘even if the weather isn’t very good. It’s nice to come out, a real change from being stuck in the house.’ She touched his arm as he overtook a gravel lorry on a few yards of dual carriageway. ‘I never thought you would be driving me around in a car.’

‘Nor did I.’ He followed the white arrows, and got in front of the enormous lorry just before the road became a single lane, the perfect end if they were killed at the same moment, both so maimed they’d be shovelled into plastic bags rather than coffins, at least not divided in their deaths.

She pointed. ‘You can see blue sky and a bit of sun over there.’

‘I got God on the blower this morning and asked Him to make the weather good for us.’

‘Did you know by then that you were going to take me out?’

‘I thought about it, and hoped you wouldn’t tell me to get lost.’

‘Well, I didn’t, did I?’

He never knew whether he was more alive while thinking, or while talking, but now he was glad to be talking as he threaded four traffic islands to get around Ripley, where he had once abandoned her.

‘I know that after you left me,’ she said, ‘you married Pauline Bates, and when you came out of the air force you left her and your little boy, and went off to France.’

He began the winding descent to Ambergate, knowing it hadn’t been like that. Pauline had told him to go, and he went. She had been seeing someone else while he was abroad, but to explain would sound like dodging whatever responsibility had been his.

‘I met her one day while I was shopping, and she told me about it. Things don’t often work, do they?’

‘No use going into whose fault it was.’ They went under the train bridge and on to Ambergate junction, the Hurt Arms Hotel facing the road like a sentinel, as it had done for more than a century. A furniture centre and a Little Chef on the opposite corner were recent additions. There was more traffic on the trunk route to Matlock, a road in the old days empty except for the odd army lorry.

‘I didn’t hear any more of you,’ she said, ‘till we met at the station when I was going to visit George in Sheffield. And when I called on your mother she told me you were working for television.’

The grey stonewalls of Derbyshire gave a homely air, woods beyond Whatstandwell sleeving the road. He was reluctant to ask, in case she thought him wanting to tear her heart out and hold it up to the light: ‘When we split up all those years ago, how long was it before you forgot me?’

‘I had other things to think about. We were just kids, weren’t we?’

He was glad the question hadn’t disturbed her, as a similar one wouldn’t have bothered him. ‘Yes, but you were the first woman I had, and I did think about you now and again,’ which was no lie, otherwise why was he driving her to Matlock?

‘I’ve had lots of time to think,’ she said, ‘about how it might have worked for us but didn’t.’

Traffic lights held them on red before the turning into Cromford. ‘We’ll have lunch at a pub here. They serve a good meal.’ He parked by the kerb, and held her arm across a road in heavy use by gravel lorries.

‘Is it a long way?’ She took his hand as in the old days. ‘I can’t walk far.’

‘It’s just up this narrow street.’

‘My legs feel like columns of lead. Maybe I should have them chopped off, then I wouldn’t have to drag them everywhere. Even if I’d wanted to run away from George I wouldn’t have got very far on legs like these.’

‘You got a long way from me, though, didn’t you?’ Banter had always been used, either to find out what each other truly wanted, or what they actually meant to say. Sometimes it was used to irritate, at other times to amuse. More often than not if served its purpose, though not sufficiently to keep them together so many years ago.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but you didn’t chase me very far. When I said I wouldn’t want to see you again you didn’t even argue. I don’t think I knew my mind. I did want to see you again. I cried myself to sleep that night.’

‘I’ve never been one to do the right thing at the right time, either then or since.’ Hardly an apology, but he hoped she picked up his enduring regret.

‘Nor me, if it comes to that.’ He held the door of the low eighteenth-century Boat Inn and followed her into the long ceilinged room with its beams and plain tables, an untended juke box facing the bar, and a few books arranged on the window sills. She took in everything with hardly a glance, he noticed. ‘I suppose if we had done what you call the right thing we’d never have met up again like this, with you taking me out,’ she said. ‘I feel a real old fogey sometimes, but at others I don’t feel a day over eighteen, especially — and I’ve got to say it — now that George has gone.’ They laid their coats along a spare seat. ‘It’s nice and warm in here.’

Former girlfriends had found it quaint and picturesque. The place never changed. ‘I’ll go for the drinks, while you look at the menu.’

‘What are you having?’

‘A tomato juice: I’m driving.’

‘Get me a gin and tonic, then. It’s like being on holiday.’

A rugged farmer of the region standing at the bar remarked in a friendly voice that the weather wasn’t much to write home about. ‘But you and your wife will be all right in here.’

Brian wanted to say she wasn’t his wife and never would have been. ‘Yes, it’s a snug place, right enough.’

He took the drinks back. ‘Your tomato juice looks cold,’ she said. ‘You haven’t even got Worcester in it.’

‘That bloke at the bar thought you were my daughter.’

‘A likely story.’

‘Well, what are you going to have to eat?’

‘Roast beef and all the trimmings.’

‘Me too.’ The young woman who took their orders had pale and pleasing features, a slender figure, and though not for him he recalled, while following her progress back to the bar, that a virgin was put into King David’s bed to hold him back from dying.

‘Do you know her?’

‘I’ve seen her before. Knock that back, and I’ll get you another.’

‘Are you plying me with alcohol?’

‘I wouldn’t get far with a couple of those.’

‘I don’t want to do anything foolish.’

Maybe she had when she first got pregnant. ‘I can’t see that happening.’

‘Nor me,’ she laughed. ‘Whatever I did that was daft in my life didn’t need drink to make me do it. Perhaps if I had been drunk I wouldn’t have been so stupid.’

‘That goes for us all.’

‘You never know why you do anything, but when you’ve done it you’re stuck. I often wish I could turn the clock back.’

‘After I left you,’ he said, ‘I got married to Pauline because she was pregnant. A shotgun wedding, though no one needed to point the barrel at me.’

‘The one who got me pregnant ran away.’

‘It might have been worse if he’d stayed behind.’

‘I loved him enough for it not to matter. But you did the right thing by Pauline.’

‘And look where it got me. Maybe I should have bolted as well. It wouldn’t have been any worse for either of us.’

‘You did right, because if you’d got me pregnant we would have stayed together. And what would have happened then?’

‘Who can tell?’

‘You can imagine, though. You can dream. I wouldn’t have married George, would I? You and me might still be married.’

As far into sincerity as he’d ever strayed, he was nevertheless glad to see the large platters set before them. ‘It’s possible.’

She unwrapped the cutlery from its paper napkin. ‘I like to think so.’

‘And so do I.’

‘Rain always makes me hungry, and I love Yorkshire pudding.’ She took a bit of this and a scoop of that, but such a laden platter dulled his appetite. He established a bridgehead, and reduced the greens, the peas and carrots, the roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, and occasional reinforcement of the meat as if on a military campaign.

‘I like eating something I don’t have to cook.’ She gazed along the opposite line of tables. ‘I dreamed a lot during all those years caring for George.’

‘What about?’

‘One thing and another.’

‘That’s not saying much.’

‘It’s harder to remember day dreams than night dreams. They helped me to keep going, and while I was dreaming I just wasn’t there. I was somewhere else. I would dream that George wasn’t George, that he had two legs and was somebody else, and could walk wherever he liked. After we bumped into each other on the station platform I dreamed that George wasn’t George, and that the somebody he was was you. The best thing that ever happened to me was that I met you before getting on that train.’

‘I can see how hard things were.’

‘You can’t. Nobody can, though I could never say so. I can now it’s all over, but I couldn’t at the time. You can never complain. People don’t want to hear, and you can’t blame them, because neither do I.’

He would never see such a smile again, brought on by understanding her more than he ever had or that anyone ever could, a smile meant for him alone, which came as lightning burrowing into his flesh for evermore.

He leaned across to wipe the tears on her cheeks with the fresh handkerchief always in his lapel pocket. She deserved a place in the Official History of the World, an impossible paragraph to write since too many would be competing for space.

Her distress burned into him, to put out the tears before they could flow from his eyes, a connection he had no option but to allow, even if he was destroyed as he deserved. Her generous and friendly smile was shaped by long endurance, was offered to what in him was able to receive it, telling him that he couldn’t have stayed long with a person of such quality, would have been no more use to her than George, an emotional rather than an actual cripple, who would have released her sooner because at least he had legs. ‘You did more than was expected.’

‘Your mother was nice to me when I went to see her. She laid out a good tea while I talked my heart out. I didn’t call often, because I couldn’t always get somebody to sit with George, but it was good to get rid of what was on my mind. It was the pressure of having to care for him every minute of the day and night, so I had to talk about it, though maybe I didn’t think there was all that much pressure at the time.’

‘What sort of dessert would you like?’ He picked up the menu card. ‘There’s hot apple pie and custard. Then we can have a cup of coffee.’

‘I don’t think I could eat a pudding. Well, maybe I will,’ as if it was a novelty to have a decision made for her. ‘I can’t let you eat on your own.’

When the waitress brought his coffee, and one with milk for her, she said: ‘I don’t know how you can drink it black, and with no sugar.’

‘The dessert sweetened it.’

‘Is it to keep thin?’

‘I don’t need to.’

‘I can see that. But I’ve got a sweet tooth.’

‘You don’t get fat, either,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s because of our early years in the factories. When we’ve done we’ll have a look around Matlock Bath.’

‘It might bring back memories,’ she said lightly. ‘We came on the train. And you said you didn’t remember!’

‘I do now. I took you rowing on the river.’

‘You nearly got us caught in the weir.’

‘I wanted to give you some excitement. I also remember when I came on the bike, and you were so tired I left you in Ripley. I’ve never liked that place since.’

‘You can’t blame Ripley. I wasn’t well. I was having my period.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘You might have guessed. Anyway, I didn’t want to spoil it for you. On the way home I had an icecream in Eastwood. I went to bed with a hot-water bottle in the afternoon because my back ached.’

He wondered why they’d waited so long to talk openly. They used to chat like two monkeys, yet conveyed nothing important. He held up her coat, as he always did. An odour of rain on the cloth reminded him of former days. ‘That was cheap,’ she said, as he paid the bill.

To spend more at the best hotel might have been as exotic an experience to her as the Boat Inn was for his girlfriend from London, though her remark only meant what it said, no troubling reverberations. He saw how relaxed life would have been with her, instead of the eternal confrontations with other women. After a few years, however, she might have turned just as vitriolic, out of self-preservation — though decades of George’s bad temper hadn’t crushed her.

He parked by the parade of cafés, and shops selling the eternal fishing tackle, and souvenirs for trippers, technicolored gewgaws for the mantelshelf, or the scrapheap soon enough.

‘Byron thought this place was as beautiful as anywhere in Switzerland,’ he said, seeing her gaze at the wooded cliffs.

‘I’ve never been there, so I wouldn’t know. I suppose you have, though?’

‘A couple of times. Ruskin said the valley was ruined by too many trippers.’

‘People have got to have somewhere to go. And there aren’t many here at the moment.’

‘Things are dosed up until spring, so I can’t take you on the river.’

‘It’s too cold for that,’ she said. ‘You can do it another time.’

He couldn’t think when that would be, there being little more to know about her, or that he could know about her, wondering what the connection was between them, as if they’d lived too long, and should stop being curious about what they had done in the misty days of long ago. They had been through too much to need the disturbance, yet he couldn’t avoid an inexplicable fondness for his first love, and for himself as he might have been, as if bringing her on the jaunt had turned him back into a feckless youth.

A coat pocket warmed her hand, his damp from closing the car door as they left the main road and walked a cobbled track towards the Heights of Abraham. ‘You get a wonderful view from there,’ the gradient no trouble for him, taking her arm as if to help her. ‘And there’s a café at the top.’

‘I can’t make it.’ She stopped. ‘Well, I could by tomorrow morning.’ Mist moved between the houses, plumes of coal smoke bending from the chimneys. ‘It’s starting to rain, and I’ve left my umbrella in the car. You go up, and I’ll wait by the road.’

All of life’s anguish had taught him that she was too old a friend to be abandoned a second time and in the rain. ‘There’s a comfortable place in the town where we can have a pot of tea.’

‘I do feel good,’ she said, when he had ordered from the waitress. ‘And being with you makes it even better.’

‘Do you ever think of the future?’

‘Why should I?’ She poured his tea.

‘I don’t know if you don’t know. I thought everybody did from time to time.’

‘I go on living, so what do I want to think about the future for?’

‘Don’t you dream of doing something now that you’re free?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by free. But I’ll never get married again, that’s for sure.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘I didn’t think you was asking me,’ she laughed. ‘You mean like going on a world cruise? I wouldn’t want to even if I could afford it. I’ve got enough to live on, and there’s my family to think about.’

‘I met a few at the party. And Ronald and Sylvia were at Avril’s funeral.’

‘Yes, Ronald didn’t like the way you looked at Sylvia.’

‘I thought she was interesting.’

‘I’m only joking. He said what a nice chap you were, and how different he would have been if we’d had him. But my family keeps me up to the mark, so what more do I want?’

Hard to imagine. The comfort and security of helping the species along had never been part of his purpose, plenty of others to take care of that, and any good people the world couldn’t do without would soon be replaced.

She drank her tea halfway down the cup. ‘Yes, I’ve been lucky with my family.’

‘You weren’t with George.’

‘No, but it balances out. I used to wonder if it did, but I see now that it does.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve never talked to anyone like this before.’

‘You used to call on my mother.’

‘It wasn’t the same.’

‘It’s because I’m asking you.’

‘I wouldn’t answer if I didn’t want to.’

She wasn’t telling anything he couldn’t already know, but he needed to find out what had kept her going with George, what were her thoughts after tucking him into his special bed at night and she was on her own in the dark, what had been in her mind when, with his cripple’s petulance, he had struck her as quick as a cobra across the face on her leaning down with a weary tenderness to see to him. He wanted to get to those sacred springs and learn more about her noble qualities because she had been his first love. By himself he could only put together clues, never sure how close he was to understanding.

By knowing his brothers as well as he knew himself, by listening to their families and friends, by all he heard from people in the pubs, by using the packed experience of his childhood and youth — because wherever he had lived and however much he had changed — he still belonged with them and could therefore understand Jenny without the need to rake her soul over the coals of past suffering. First love had put him in sympathy with everything to do with her, because they had been through a courtship that was still accessible to both.

If Pauline or Jane had been crushed in a motor accident would he have spent his life looking after them? Such sacrifice would hardly have been expected. After the shock habit took over and you lived from day to day, crushed with pity, life changing until accustomed to the routine of living without hope.

In a restaurant he always placed the woman so that she could see on to the street, then he would watch her features as she observed whoever went by. He smiled on knowing she was about to say:

‘A penny for your thoughts.’

‘I haven’t got any.’

She looked towards the window, as if a friend might look in and see her with her first love. ‘That’s what you always said.’

‘Was it? All right, I’ll tell you.’

‘You said that, as well, after I said “That’s what you always say.” I can’t believe it.’

‘I told you people don’t change. But I was thinking about you. Who else, on such a day?’

‘You’ve got to tell me, then.’

‘I was wondering how much I really knew you.’

‘And how much do you think you do?’

He had nothing to lose by lying, but how much of a lie it would turn out to be he would never know. ‘More than anyone else. And you know me more than anybody else you know.’

‘I think you’re daft. I don’t think there’s all that much to know about me.’ She stopped her amusement from turning into a laugh. ‘Somebody with more thought in their head wouldn’t have done what I did. In any case I’m not hard to know, so you wouldn’t be claiming much.’

‘I make my living by putting words into people’s mouths.’

‘You’re lucky, being able to do that. And clever, I suppose. Not everybody can. If we’d been married you’d have got fed up with me in no time.’

‘Not if you’d had half a dozen kids.’ He would have made sure she didn’t, though it would have been cruel leaving her with no family.

She was enjoying the game. ‘If you could know all about me that easily, you would. You’d have packed me in and gone off on your own, or with somebody else.’

‘I told you you knew everything about me.’

‘Well, I’m not that dense.’

‘I never thought you were.’

‘George often did, but I suppose he had a right to.’

‘Nobody with a head on their shoulders would say such a thing.’

‘He wouldn’t wear anything when we were in bed together, and then he grumbled when I got pregnant. But I suppose every man would.’

‘It sounds unreasonable.’

‘I couldn’t tell him that.’

‘Why not?’

‘He might have clocked me. He did now and again, though there wasn’t too much of it. I wouldn’t have put up with that. We got along all right, and I liked him most of the time. He was a cheerful sort, before his accident.’ She looked as if at last interested in someone walking along the pavement. ‘You don’t say much about yourself. Your life’s been a mix-up, according to what your mother said.’

He could just see them, having a head to head natter. ‘I’ll get us another pot of tea, and some cake.’

‘I had that big dinner, but the kids tell me I never get fat because I burn it all up inside.’

‘The same with me. I eat like a horse, and never put weight on.’ He signalled the waitress. ‘We’ll have a proper tea, with scones and honey.’

‘I’ll have jam with mine. Honey’s too sweet.’

‘You want to know about me?’ The spread was laid before them. ‘So do I. I always have. I only know what happened, and never what any of it meant. I don’t think I have the sort of answers you want. Things happened too fast for me to learn much. Yet I knew very well what was going on but was too idle and self-centred to be able to learn, or to control myself. Bismarck said it was better to learn from other people’s mistakes, but I never could.’

‘It sounds sensible. Not that I think anybody else ever could, either.’ She leaned forward to touch his hand, a motherly gesture he could have done without. ‘You got on all right, though, by the look of it.’

He certainly had. As Arthur reminded him, he had clothes on his back, all the food he wanted, a roof over his head, a car to drive around in, and he could spend without thinking too much about it. Some of his life had been difficult, but to tell her would be meaningless. ‘There’s not much I can say. You know me well enough as it is.’

‘I don’t think I do, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking like two separate people. I don’t know anything about your life. I can’t imagine it, even if you tell me. We’re strangers, though that’s what makes it nice being with you, because you don’t want to put one over on me. And if I’d really known you early on you might not have left me. I’d have been able to stop you.’

‘Why didn’t you? You knew me well enough. We split up. I married Pauline, which was a disaster. Later on, I had a few affairs, and then met an interesting and pleasant woman, as I thought, who came from Lichfield, though when I met her in London you wouldn’t have known. We were married for twelve years, till I read a bundle of my wife’s letters, and realized there was more than a chance my daughter wasn’t my own. When I tackled her about it she said her womb was her own to do what she liked with. So I left her. I’d brought the girl up as well. She was eleven when I lit off, but I kept sending her money to go through university.’

‘It was good to do that for her. Our Eunice wasn’t George’s, but he treated her like one of his own. I have to say that for him.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have let my first marriage go. We’d both had affairs, so neither of us could complain, though we fought like cat and dog about them. It livened our existences, and kept us together longer than it should. But to bring a kid into the family that she knew couldn’t be mine didn’t endear me to her. After that I had a few years on my own, and had what girlfriends I wanted.’

‘I expect they grow on trees in London.’

He smiled. ‘Trees for men to hang themselves on. I got married again, and the couple of kids we had were surely mine. That lasted until two years ago, when she went off to become an art historian.’

‘You wouldn’t get married again, would you?’

‘No. I’ve done enough damage already.’

‘I like being on my own,’ she said. ‘Life’s good now, I don’t mind admitting. Eunice said the other day: “You’ve earned your peace, mam.” “Perhaps I have,” I told her, “but if I looked at it that way it wouldn’t be worth having gone through so much trouble.”’

He went to the toilet, and paid at the desk before returning to the table. ‘I’d like to dock at Arthur’s before it gets dark.’

‘I’m ready, though there’ll be plenty of daylight left.’

The way back was always shorter, traffic lights open at the Cromford turn-off, and no wait at the Whatstandwell bridge. He drove on dipped beams through the rain to Ambergate. ‘The River Amber joins the Derwent here, so I suppose that’s how the place gets its name.’

‘You learned a lot,’ she said.

‘Facts are easy. You get them out of any book. But knowing something useful is quite different.’

‘Can you make jam?’

‘I’d burn it.’

‘Can you knit?’

‘Only knots.’

‘Can you cook?’

‘Enough to stop myself starving.’

‘I know a few things you don’t know, then.’

They laughed. ‘You certainly do,’ he said. He drove over the Erewash and along the dual carriageway back into Nottinghamshire, an area so familiar from childhood and youth it seemed he’d never been away. He certainly had no other place to come back to, yet knew that if he stayed more than three days a panic to travel overwhelmed him, to move and keep on going, especially in winter when dusk dimmed the countryside as if all life on the planet was draining away. He only belonged when in the kitchen with Arthur, or at Derek’s and Eileen’s, lights on and curtains drawn, bottles on the table and the smell of dinner cooking, talk crackling like squibs on Bonfire Night.

An enormous greyblack cloud reared in front. ‘I’d like another fag, duck,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to have one in the car.’

‘It’s not fashionable to smoke.’ He passed the usual two, and she lit one for him.

‘I never was fashionable, was I?’

‘Nor me,’ he said.

‘Not many people are. Not round here they aren’t. They just do what they want to do.’

A girlfriend once said that smoking defined the social class you belonged to. If you smoked, she said, you were working class. He replied that if such was the case he would join a cigar club, except that he never joined anything, being of no class at all, which shut her up. He made the affair so difficult that she broke off the relationship, a more kindly system which let her think she had abandoned him.

He had done the same with Jenny early on, proving that you never change, only perfect the most advantageous techniques to live by.

He parked by the house. ‘I’ll see you inside.’ The rain had stopped, daylight still, even a glisten of sun from behind a cloud. A small grey bird flew like a fighter plane by the chimney. He noted its marks and colours, then realized that Avril wouldn’t be able to tell him what it was.

He followed her into the living room, noticing that the plaster birds had been taken away, the wall blank. ‘I’ve had a wonderful day,’ she said, ‘but I always feel good when I get back home.’

He saw again the face of an old woman in her well lit room. ‘It was a real pleasure being in Matlock with you.’

‘Will you stay for a cup of tea?’

‘No, thanks a lot. I want to see that Arthur’s getting on all right.’

‘I was ever so sorry about that. He must be having a rotten time. You’d better go, then, or he’ll be worried about you. Don’t forget to give him my love.’ She took his hand, out of regret for happiness lost, or for one she’d never had but felt some sign of today. ‘Come and see me any time you like.’

‘I will. I call on Arthur more often now that Avril’s dead.’

‘I’m sure he appreciates it. You’re a good brother, anyway.’

‘I can’t be anything else.’ Which he supposed couldn’t be entirely true.

‘I’ll phone Eunice and let her know I’m back.’

‘We don’t want her to think I’ve hauled you off to Gretna Green!’

‘She’d love to hear that, I expect.’

Hard to say whether he went to her or she to him, but they stood in the middle of the room for a kiss which had all the passion of their early meetings. The only excuse he could find for not getting her to the floor and fucking her was that the scorched infant he suddenly turned into wouldn’t allow him to get a hard on, and when one came he saw panic on her face in case he tried. It was equally hard to know who broke away first, their pressing lips no more, after all, than a sign of days long gone.

SIXTEEN

Near the end of May he was on his way to see Arthur for the fifth time since the funeral. On the phone every few days, Brian never had much to say but Arthur always made sure there was something, even if only to prove he was coming out of the slough and back into daylight. And if he wasn’t he would never admit it.

‘She still seems to be in the house. I think of something, and get up to tell her, then I find she’s not there. The thing is, we did everything together. I saw Oliver the other day and he offered to bring some apples in the autumn, but I told him not to bother. I’ll never be able to cut up apples again. There’s a few jars in the deep-freeze, but I’ll eat them when I can. It’d be a shame to let them rot.’

He steered into the inner lane so as not to miss the A606 turn-off. When he was pole-axed by the flu Arthur advised him to get some antibiotics. ‘You’re not as young as you used to be. I always have a jab before the winter, and then I don’t get the flu. So make sure the doctor gives you one next year, or I’ll thump you!’

He had written letters, sent him books and magazines. ‘Reading a lot takes my mind off things,’ Arthur said, ‘so it’s good you keep feeding me interesting stuff.’

‘If I enjoy it I know you will.’

‘I finished A Scrap of Time, and now I’m about a third through Dreadnought. That’ll keep me going a few weeks. The trouble is it’s hard to sleep. In the day things aren’t so bad, but when it gets dark and I draw the curtains, that’s when it hits me.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

‘Not much to be done.’

‘We can only hope things’ll get better.’

‘They’re OK already. I took all the curtains down yesterday, and during the night I put ’em in the washing machine. It don’t cost so much electricity if you do it then. This morning I hung ’em out in the garden, and they got dry just before it rained. Now I’m hanging ’em back at the windows. Last night when I was making supper I spilled frozen peas all over the floor. I thought fuck it,’ he laughed, ‘I can’t be bothered to pick ’em up one by one on my hands and knees, so I just hoovered them up. It worked a treat. The vacuum cleaner had mushy peas for supper!’

‘Do you eat a hot meal every day?’

‘You bet I do. I can look after myself.’

Traffic was slack when he turned off the Great Arterial, a restful drive between woods and fields to the large car park by Rutland Water. He slotted in a pound coin and put his ticket under the windscreen for a half-hour’s relaxation before going on to Nottingham, then descended the curving macadam track to a toilet complex. The sombre bark of a chainsaw from the trees stabbed at the silence, a rural noise never heard by Virgil.

At one o’clock it was time for a chorizo sandwich, and to broach the flask of black coffee cooling by the brake handle so that it wouldn’t scald his lips. Through the trees that looked as if they had been scraped and sanded a tug-boat cruised to some anchorage he couldn’t see, the opposite shore green except for a field of yellow rape whose freshness was gone, richer pastures squaring it in. Fat crows by the shore enjoyed their morsels as much as he relished his sandwiches.

On previous visits he had taken Arthur to Matlock, where he had never been with Avril, so he couldn’t be reminded of her. They ate an ample platter of good Derbyshire lamb at the Boat Inn, such a meal that Arthur didn’t need to cook for them in the evening. After a cold supper he slotted in a video about the Jews of Paris at Drancy concentration camp. ‘Why didn’t they get every single fucking German after the war who’d been responsible and make them pay for what they’d done?’ Arthur said. ‘I wouldn’t have rested if I’d survived. I’d have got them one by one, given them the pasting of their lives, then shot them in both feet and left them bleeding to death. Hanging would have been too good.’

Next day they called on Jenny, and Arthur remarked on how much better she looked than at the funeral, especially her legs, which were not so swollen because she had, as they were told, seen the doctor and been given pills.

A son, daughter and two young children were there, but Jenny sitting as if even now subdued by having looked after George for so many years. ‘But then, she’s always been a quiet person,’ Arthur said, ‘and difficult to know.’

The steamboat wandered like a lost soul, as if not knowing where to berth. Black at the base, superstructure white, nobody was on the top deck due to a chill wind. They sat in the saloon, bored but comfortable, till the captain made up his mind and edged his vessel towards the jetty close to the car park.

A woman stood between the trees looking at the water. He named her Edith Weston, after the nearby village. Tallish and slim, she wore dark slacks, a windcheater, a white blouse, and had short hair. He noted well cared for teeth and a fresh complexion when she walked to a small maroon car parked in the next row. Seeming pleased with herself after gazing at the water (though the wind had been sharp, and she had no more time to spare) she sat in the car and looked at a magazine through rimless gold-sided glasses, sipping from a can and nibbling a bar of chocolate. He imagined shapely legs when she took off her slacks and showed the whitest cotton knickers.

On looking again she was no longer there, had finished her snack and driven away, though on what errand, whether to husband or lover or business, he couldn’t say, Edith Weston gone forever and leaving a pain at his heart she would never know about.

Stories came out of imaginary confrontations, mental wanderings into realms more pleasant than the one he was in when alone. Encounters turned violent when he sensed assaults on his dignity: ‘What did you say? Who the fuck do you think you are?’ — in his earlier life no need to curb the forked lightning of his fists.

Interior pictorial activity reinforced his cool Merton aspect. Verbal slambacks, laced with rehearsed slanders that no so-called civilized opponent could equal (once he was forced into speech) defended psychic territory valid to himself, the significance of an event not obvious until even twenty years had gone by, when he would realize too late the damage that had been done.

He drove to the main road, and in Oakham got into the wrong lane for Melton Mowbray. Someone behind flashed him on his way, as he himself had often done, and halfway up the hill he realized that it must have been Edith Weston, but because she had turned in another direction he couldn’t pursue her to give thanks, and chat to her, cajole her phone number, find a way to see her again, arrange a clandestine weekend in some remote hotel in East Anglia.

The rolling wolds of Rutland and Leicestershire were familiar from cycling trips on Sundays, his body still sluggish after sessions with Jenny on Saturday night, and his spirit renewing before Monday morning’s start in the factory. He turned onto the Fosse Way so as to outflank Nottingham from the east, make the familiar indirect approach to Arthur’s.

Ever since he’d had a car, whether married or not, whether he had a girlfriend or was living by himself on Vinegar Hill, he kept material in the boot with the notion of driving away at half a day’s notice, and living on the road for as long as life and money lasted — a motorized tramp, no less.

He would drive to Rumania or Russia, or perhaps not to Rumania and Russia till he had done with Spain and Portugal, taking in Italy and Sicily before Rumania and Bulgaria, then into the Ukraine and Russia, to see if he could drive to Siberia and Turkestan, with enough fluid cash in his account, and his little leather satchel or credit cards. The more inches on the map, the greater the chance of getting away from himself. His passport was always up to date, though he occasionally panicked that it might not be, and pulled into the next layby or petrol station to fumble through his wallet.

The inventory of equipment and supplies was such that Lepporello would have run out of foolscap, and on boring stretches of mainroad or motorway he ticked each item, knowing that in one box was a highway atlas of Europe, with Blue Guides for civilized places and Lonely Planets for the rough. Treating the car as his desert island, there was a King James’ Bible, the single volume Shakespeare, a dictionary, Herbert Read’s poetry and prose anthology for soldiers in World War Two called The Knapsack, and the stubby little SAS Survival Guide.

He’d make sure there was a radio with short wave and plenty of spare batteries, in case he felt a pang to know whether the world was still going, or even to hear the current equivalent of the Goon Show, should he be so lucky, which would be little different to the news.

A supply of Partagas cigars would create a satisfying cloud of solo bonhomie in the evening, or send mosquitoes away coughing fit to die if they strayed too close. (Mustn’t forget half a dozen boxes of matches.) The serpentine tubes of a water purifying kit, which he didn’t know how to use but hoped would serve him well when he stopped at dusk by a scum surfaced pond to make safe liquid for a brew up was also carried.

Once a year he put up the Marechal bivouac tent and crawled in with a flashlight to be certain the moths hadn’t got their incisors into its canvas, a tent he had used years ago on taking his children camping in the New Forest. A safari bed that fitted inside would also go in the car.

A pocket barometer would warn of foul weather, and combine as an altimeter to tell the height of Dracula’s castle while exploring the Carpathian Alps, though scientific observations wouldn’t distract him long enough for a vampire bat to lock on to his throat because he’d wear a woollen scarf and a string of fresh garlic around his neck.

A compass was necessary in case he had to abandon the car and make his way over desolate moors, or go through a ride-less fairy tale forest, and beam onto the nearest small town where a snug hostelry smelling of delicious roast meat (a nubile young serving girl to welcome him in the doorway) would glow from all windows in the main square.

Should he cross a desert other than the one in himself a thermometer would measure the heat of his heart before it burst. A pair of binoculars would pick out distant figures homing towards him with malign intent, or would scan the heavenly meadows of a Shangri-La he’d always hoped to make real from his dreams.

With an electronic calculator and pamphlet of mathematical formulae he would reckon how far he had travelled after going round and round in the same circle, during hours of loneliness when he would wonder why the hell he was where he was. Or he could actuarially predict the time remaining which he had to live, or tell how much money was left for his self-indulgent wanderings, and even how many miles and kilometres back to Calais. Otherwise the calculator could pass the hours (having finished the Bible three times and Shakespeare twice) while stranded by flood or snowfall in some outlandish candle-lit flea-bitten caravanserai of the Balkans.

A camping stove slotted neatly into its metal container would fry bacon-egg-sausage in the peace that may or may not pass the hallmark of understanding in the tent at evening, followed by coffee and powdered milk under a storm lamp to read by when on his last nightstop before the Coast of Bohemia. Or he could use the signalling attachment should he be stricken by a strangulating hernia, a massive cardiac arrest, snake bite or broken limb.

For sustenance in emergencies, if all shops were shut or empty, and there was no room at the inn when he wanted a bath, he stored (apart from soap) half a dozen tins of sardines and anchovies, cans of baked beans and corned beef, steam puddings and a tin of pineapple chunks, some marmalade, packets of soup, a jar of Mrs Ellswood’s gherkins — and a Leatherman tool to get everything open. Every so often he took the supplies into his flat to check the sell-by dates, to replace any that had elapsed or were about to.

Eating-irons and a tin plate were wrapped in a tea towel, with a metal mug, a small kettle, a teapot, and a mess-tin kit picked up from Laurence Corner. Rolled blankets, sheets and a sleeping bag, a spare sweater, oilskin trousers, Wellingtons (green) and a long cape, would keep him warm and dry in the worst of weather.

Tangled jump leads would help to rescue anyone whose car battery was spent, preferably a young woman with the magic of Edith Weston (maybe the very woman herself) stranded by the roadside, and his expertise would be so appreciated that she would accept his offer of dinner at the next town, and they would spend the night having delicious sex in bed.

On the other hand the jump leads might be useful in the frosts of Transylvania, or the damps of the Danube Delta, should his own car be as uncooperative in coming to life as a dead dog, and he shivering for an hour before a motorist stopped and transferred enough power to get him back on the road.

A toolkit, already stowed, included an axe sharpened by Arthur, in case he ran out of camping gas and needed to chop wood for a fire on which to cook his supper and keep the wolves away if stranded in a forest. An entrenching tool would dig the wheels out of sand or snow, or be used for self-defence against violent peasants when he slaughtered a gaggle of poultry driving through a village or, slithering along a road of grey mud, hit and killed a grey donkey.

Cartons of cigarettes from the duty free were to hand out as gifts in repayment for minor favours when money would be insulting or the local currency worthless. A brace of full whisky bottles lodged in a box would raise the spirits, toast a meeting, repay hospitality, or get him quietly sozzled over supper before zipping up the entrance to his tent and saying goodnight to the world and himself, the entrenching tool at his feet in case animal or human marauder thought to disturb him.

Or maybe his car would be the only one in the main square of some Moldavian backwater and, within locked doors of the car, he would make his way through both bottles in good old English being-abroad style, then stagger out blind drunk for a bit of mayhem among the local riff-raff or gilded youth, a seventy-year-old in the lock-up putting the town into The Guinness Book of Records.

Fitting into two or three cardboard boxes, such supplies took up little space in the ample back of his estate, the list endlessly checked, a hand-held tape recorder-notebook on the spare seat should anything need to be added.

He could set out for the mainland and support himself on the road for as many months as he cared to take, with the assurance that if the world ended while on his travels there was enough material on board to begin civilization all over again. With such foresight, why hadn’t he so far done it? One day he surely would, become one of the landboat people in a vehicle that might crash but not sink.

SEVENTEEN

Beyond Saxondale Crossing Brian turned left for Lowdham, over the River Trent yet again, a glance at wide and placid water, dull grey today, always a sign of getting home whichever of the four bridges he went over.

He walked through drizzle to the front door and shouted in his roughest voice: ‘I’ve come to collect the rent!’

‘Mam isn’t in,’ Arthur bawled, ‘so fuck off, and see if you can do better next door.’ He was no longer the pitprop he’d been as a young man, but still straightbacked and alert, more middle-aged than elderly, an aspect helped by short hair and a clean shave.

They embraced in the hallway. ‘You look so well I thought I’d come to the wrong house.’

‘Well, it’s no use crying, is it? It’s funny, though, I still imagine her voice in the next room, that she’s dozing over her sewing machine, or I’m waiting for her to come back from the supermarket.’

‘It’s not half a year yet, don’t forget.’

Arthur turned to six-year-old Philip who sat at the table in the clean kitchen. ‘He’s Mary and Jonah’s lad. Aren’t you, young boggerlugs?’ He lifted him off the chair, held him to the light. ‘Look at him! A bleddy great cannonball with curly hair on top!’

‘Put me down, grandad. And don’t swear. I’m not a boggerlugs.’

‘They dumped him on me, to go shopping, but they should be back soon.’

Brian, unseen, closed a pound coin into each hand, and held both towards Philip, back at the table with his book. ‘There’s a pound in one of these hands, and if you guess which one it’s in, you can keep it.’

Philip stood, a finger moving over one and then the other as if his future depended on the choice.

‘Don’t take all day,’ Arthur said, ‘or he’ll put it back and spend it in the pub tonight.’

Philip touched a knuckle, then smiled at his luck, and cried out with pleasure when Brian opened the other hand as well. He put the two pounds in his pocket. ‘Now you can finish telling me that story, grandad.’

Arthur pulled him onto his knee. ‘But where were we?’

‘That monster-man was going up the dark staircase.’

‘So he was. He was following this little woolly haired six-year-old nipper called Sabbut Handley up the mildewed slippery steps, and daft young Sabbut didn’t know Boris the Frankenstein was only a few steps behind as he went higher up the tower. He didn’t hear him, though if you ask me, the little bogger had no sense poking his button nose where he shouldn’t have done. Boris put a foot down every time Sabbut did, so the poor lad didn’t hear that somebody was right behind.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t, would he, grandad?’

‘No, he wouldn’t, but then he soon wished he had heard him, because when he got to the top of the tower lightning was flashing all over the mountains, and thunder was booming like big guns in a war, and he felt bits of icy rain coming at his daft little face.’

He lowered his voice to an ominous growl, Philip’s face turning paler with, Brian thought, simulated fright. ‘A hand went around his neck, and young Sabbut didn’t know whose it was. He was just about to say “Hey, what the bleddy hell do you think you’re up to?” when he heard a scream from Boris, because Boris hadn’t heard somebody coming up behind him, and putting a foot down everytime he did.

‘The man behind Boris was little Sabbut’s father, who’d come out looking for him. His father was a champion heavyweight boxer, and he gave Boris a terrible pasting, the biggest fight you ever saw, blood all over the place. He went hurtling over the wall, and hit the boulders a hundred feet below. It looked like he’d broken every bone in his body, because he just lay there moaning, though I don’t suppose we’ve heard the last of him.

‘Mr Handley lifted careless little Sabbut on to his shoulders, and took him back to the cottage they lived in, where they had cream buns for tea, sitting by a blazing fire. Sabbut’s mam was ever so glad to see them safe and sound. And that’s the end.’

‘Oh, grandad, that was smashing. Tell me another story. I want another.’

Arthur kissed the top of his head. ‘I’ll think one up for next time. I’ve got to mash the tea now, or Brian’ll die of thirst.’

Philip’s lips went down, then he smiled. ‘When mam and dad come I’ll go back home and play with the computer.’

‘Are you on e-mail yet?’ Brian asked.

‘No, but dad says he’s going to fix it all up for my birthday. I’ll only believe it when I see it, though.’

‘He always keeps his promises, don’t he?’ Arthur said. ‘Dads always do.’

‘Well, I’ve still got to see it, haven’t I?’

Arthur swung him. ‘You’re the sharpest little sharpshit, and I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.’

‘Chop me up for firewood!’ he screamed.

He set him on a chair and turned to Brian. ‘He’ll be all right, won’t he?’

‘I’m glad to see he’s reading.’

‘He always is. Can’t keep him away from it.’ The bell sounded, and Arthur let in Jonah and Mary, both in too much of a hurry to wait for the offered tea. ‘We won’t be able to get Philip in the car,’ Jonah said. ‘It’s jammed with shopping. You’ll have to stay with Arthur.’

‘Oh yes! He can tuck me up like last time, and tell me another story.’

‘Then again,’ Jonah winked, ‘we might tie him on the luggage rack, if you can find a bit of old rope.’

Mary took Philip’s hand. ‘Let’s get you home. We bought some cupcakes for tea, so’s we won’t have to stop at a cob shop.’ He went out on his father’s shoulders, the exodus leaving Brian and Arthur to a few minutes of silence at the table till Brian asked how things went at the local elections.

‘Labour lost this seat, I suppose because only twenty-nine percent bothered to vote.’

‘Why was that?’

‘I didn’t, for a start. I’m sure it’s this bombing of Yugoslavia. I just can’t believe it. They should have spent all the billions dropping TVs and washing machines, then the people would have stopped killing each other to get at them. Or they could drop a million mobile phones so’s people could start talking. That Blair’s a real prat. Bombing hospitals and orphanages — it’s cruel. And all they can do at home is cut benefits for the disabled. A lot of people round here say they won’t vote Labour again.’

‘In London we get the Euro elections soon,’ Brian said, ‘but I won’t vote, for the same reason.’

‘I never will again, not for anybody,’ Arthur said. ‘I can’t stand Blair and Cook and Robertson yammering about NATO winning the war when they’ve never heard the whistle of a bomb. The fuckpigs started it in my name, and spout about how right they are, but I just want to live in peace and have a good time like everybody else, as far as fucking miseries like that will let me. All the rest is propaganda.’

A bottle of supermarket Bordeaux stood by the usual lavish supper when Brian came down from an hour’s sleep. ‘I phoned Derek and Eileen,’ Arthur said, ‘and they’re picking us up in an hour to go to The Five Ways for a drink. Meanwhile, eat some of this. You must be clambed after driving up from London.’ He loaded both plates. ‘I heard a few rumbles of thunder while you were upstairs, but it might blow over.’

As if to deny it, a clatter sounded from close by. ‘I didn’t hear a thing. I go right down, and wake up as if there’s a clock inside me.’

‘I wish I could. The doctor offered me some tablets, but I didn’t bother. It’s better than a few months ago, but I don’t sleep in the afternoon in case it stops me getting under at night. I sometimes read till one o’clock.’ The window was covered by a flash, and the rooftops seemed to explode. ‘At least there’s nothing lethal at the end of it, like on those Serbs and refugees.’

Brian took a swig of wine, rain as if driving against the house from all directions, ripples of light cutting out the battleship grey sky, followed by shattering blows of thunder. Arthur went upstairs to make sure every window was shut.

‘It’s going like the First Day of the Somme,’ Brian said.

Sulphur tanged the air, and a flash and immediate blast put the lights out. ‘That’s done it.’ Arthur walked through the gloom and took out a packet of candles from the cabinet to put into holders, but a minute later the lights came on. ‘On the Somme every flash could have had your number on it. At least we’ve got a million to one chance. Let God do His worst, is what I say. Come on, we’re nearly at the end of the bottle. We’ll split what’s left.’

Slaps and hugs over, they got into the car, and Derek drove them to The Five Ways. The storm had grumbled its way north but the streets were still empty, so that in ten minutes they were in their favourite music-free drinking place close to the City Hospital — where many in the family had died, though if any recalled sad times (and Brian knew they did) none mentioned them.

The appetizing smell of freshly drawn ale greeted them at the entrance to the lounge, Derek doing a quick march to a table for four. ‘They must have kept it for us,’ Arthur said.

Young men and women, maybe nurses who worked at the hospital and lived close, talked and drank at tables not packed against one another. The publican, a slim man in his fifties, dressed in a suit and wearing glasses, thin hair combed back, came to offer his hand to Brian, which he shook as if they were old friends, though he hadn’t been in for weeks, while the barmaid pumped up pints of Mansfield and fixed the shandy for Eileen.

Built in the early thirties, some of the rooms were under a preservation order so couldn’t be altered, the walls of the room covered with drawings of past customers, done by local artists. Such faces were dead and gone, but alive in their small frames and looking (if they could) at what was now poignantly missed.

‘There was a lot of protest when the company said it was going to make alterations,’ the publican said, ‘and now they can’t do it, which makes me happy as well as the clientele. It would have been a shame to tart up a nice place like this.’

Arthur was telling a story about Stan the shop steward at a factory he once worked at. ‘He was red hot, old Stan was, always calling meetings. Anything wrong, or supposed to be, and he’d go from one machine to another getting us to drop tools and gather around him for a half-hour talk. He called the gaffers blind, and we cheered him all the way. The management didn’t know what to do about it. They were going off their heads, specially if he got us to drop tools when there was a rush order on, which there nearly always was. They didn’t know what to do. Stan was a real demon, and there was hardly ever a dull day.

‘Well, I suppose the gaffers put their heads together at the board meeting, or they must have had a bottle of whisky on the table that day, because one of the directors had a brainwave. They decided to promote Stan, and the next Monday morning he turns up, not at half past seven, but at half past nine. He was wearing a suit, with a collar and tie. The little white tip of an ironed handkerchief peeked out of his lapel pocket, his thick fair hair went back in waves, and his shoes shone like black glass. He walked across the shop floor with his nose in the air and a clipboard under his arm, not saying a word to any of us. We couldn’t believe it. The cunning bastards had found him a job in the office, and doubled his wages. He got a salary now. In other words, they bought him off, and it paid ’em to do it.

‘But it was no job at all. He’d got nothing to do. They sat him at a desk and gave him a writing pad, a box of paperclips and a set of coloured biros. Maybe they told an office tart to sit on his knee now and again, but all the time they must have been laughing at him behind his back. They’d post something on the sly to a branch in Birmingham, and send him in the company car to fetch it back, saying it was urgent, just to make him think he was useful and might get promoted one day. Or they sent him to a firm as their representative, telling him to collect some obsolete spare parts in the boot.

‘We teased him unmercifully whenever he had to walk through the shop. “Hey up, Stan! How are you?” we’d shout. “Have they put your rate up lately? Where are you going, then, Stan? Are you going to buy the directors’ condoms? When are you coming back to work with us? We ain’t had a meeting for a while. We’re just longing to down tools.”

‘He didn’t know where to put his face. We ragged him so much he got to be the fastest walker in the factory. Not that we could blame him. I suppose most of the others would have fallen for it as well.’

Derek took a long drink. ‘So what happens to a bloke like that?’

‘Wait till I tell you. Every story has an ending. The firm went bankrupt six months later, and Stan was out on his arse. He got no golden handshake, either. Firms were closing down all over the place in Thatcher’s time. I got another job, and so did a lot of the others, but Stan was known as a firebrand, and one of the blokes. I met on the street told me he’d seen him drawing the dole. Stan didn’t know where to put his face. He was counting his money as he walked to where he’d parked his car.

‘He wasn’t on the dole for long, though. I was in town one day and saw him coming down the steps of the council house with a briefcase under his arm, dressed even smarter than when he’d worked in the factory office. I waved to him, and he waved back, but he didn’t stop to talk. I haven’t seen him since. He’ll probably be Lord Mayor one day, as long as he’s not Labour. Come on, sup up. I get thirsty talking so much.’ No second telling, since no jar had far to go, and he stood up to go for their refills.

‘He doesn’t seem too bad now,’ Eileen said.

Derek passed the cigars. ‘He’s getting over it, but there’s still a fair way to go.’

‘You wouldn’t know, though.’ Brian puffed on his cigar. ‘None of us would show what was going on inside.’

‘That’s the best way.’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Eileen said.

Derek smoothed the froth from his moustache. ‘That’s Arthur’s way, and it’s working. They don’t need to send him a social worker for counselling.’

‘Not unless she’s got good tits and nice legs,’ Brian said, creating sufficient laughter for Arthur to think what a merry lot they were as he laid the jars down: ‘I bought four packets of pork scratchings, so get stuck in. I saw ’em behind the bar, and remembered how mam used to love ’em, but I can’t eat ’em in case they break my teeth.’

Brian put one in his mouth, and softened it with a gulp of beer. ‘I haven’t tasted them for donkey’s years.’

‘My dad took ’em down the pit in his lunch box,’ Eileen said. ‘He said they made him work better.’

‘They used to be spread out on a big tray,’ Brian recalled, ‘at La Roche’s the pork butchers on Ilkeston Road. Mam often sent me to get some, and told me not to eat any on the way back, but I could never resist a pick.’

Arthur lifted his jar. ‘Let’s drink to her.’ Glasses were emptied and taken by Derek for another filling.

‘I remember when I went with her in the ambulance, after she had that last heart attack,’ Arthur said, when Derek came back. ‘I was sitting holding her hand because she was frightened. Well, who wouldn’t be? But the ambulance bloke told me to get away from her, and sit on the other side, because it was against regulations. My fucking blood went up. He was a big bloke and thought he could put one over on me, but I told him to shut his trap or I’d punch his head in. I stayed where I was. He could see I was doing her some good, but he wanted to show his authority.

‘After I’d seen mam tucked up in bed I went outside looking for that ambulance man. I was going to give him a right fucking pasting, but luckily for him I couldn’t find him. He’d probably gone on another trip to try barking at somebody who’d cringe and do what he said. I’d been going to smash him in the ambulance, but didn’t want to upset mam. If I had knocked him about a bit they’d have needed an ambulance for him.’

‘The world’s full of ’em,’ Derek said. ‘Somebody’s got to keep ’em in their place, or the scabby Hitlers would be all over us.’

Eileen turned to Brian. ‘How long are you up for this time?’

‘Until Sunday morning. Then I’ll slide back to London.’ He would bypass the Smoke and head for France on the Shuttle, go travelling for as long as he could stand being by himself. Or maybe he’d put it off till Arthur was right again. They’d go together, and what a trip that would be! ‘I’ll see you and Derek before I go. Tomorrow I’m taking Arthur to Matlock. It’s our favourite run.’

‘And on the way back,’ Arthur said, ‘we’ll call and see how Jenny is.’

The waiter came in and laid platters of food on each table, legs of chicken, small sandwiches, meat balls, bits of kebab. ‘What’s all this?’ Derek wanted to know.

‘It’s from a wedding party in the back room,’ the publican said. ‘There was too much food, and all this is the leftovers. They told us to spread it among the clients.’

Hands went out, picking things to eat. ‘It looks good,’ Eileen said. ‘I wish I was hungry, that’s all.’

‘If you don’t eat it it’s going in the bin, and it’ll be a shame if it does.’

‘Who do we have to thank for it?’

‘It was the bridegroom’s idea. Here he is.’

A slim six foot man in his early twenties, with short fair hair, grey eyes, and wearing a T-shirt and jeans, stood smiling at the door, to be thanked and shaken hands with by everyone in the room, congratulated, wished happiness and a long life.

‘It was time for me to get spliced,’ he said, ‘because she’s five months pregnant. So eat the grub up if you can. It was too much for us. If we sent it to Yugoslavia it’d be rancid before it got there. I’ll get back to my wife now though, because she’s a bit tired. It’s time to take her home and tuck her up.’

‘Which is where we ought to go.’ Eileen stood. ‘I’m starting to yawn.’

‘You aren’t five months pregnant, are you, duck?’

She turned to Derek and kissed him. ‘I sometimes wish I could be, but I’ve got to drive you lot home, and it’s lucky I have, otherwise who knows where we’d end up?’

Pot after pot of tea at Arthur’s kept them talking till the middle of the night, and Eileen knew that when they left Arthur would have no trouble falling asleep. If it meant that Brian wouldn’t get his wake-up mug of coffee at eight o’clock he would surely look on it as the best news of the day, as would the rest of them when they heard about it.