A Man of his Time

TWENTY

Mr Walker, superintendent of the local Sunday Schools, walked down the street, and she thought he might need to speak to her. ‘Children, I want you to go in now, because it looks as if we’re going to have some snow, so find your places quietly, and I’ll be in in a minute. Emily, you’re the eldest, so help to settle everybody down.’

Her brown hair, parted in the middle, was pulled back to show more pale forehead. Darkly dressed, a woollen coat covered a thinness Lydia complained about, as if losing weight was a crime. But it gave a look of endurance, and tiredness from working at the lace, fingers so much faster than her aunt’s that they earned enough to keep their small family going.

With Baby Oliver nearly a year old and already weaned, she helped again at the Mission Hall. She had thought of applying for work at Chilwell Depot filling shells, with thousands of other women. ‘You get twenty-five shillings a week, so I’d be a millionaire on that!’

‘Chilwell’s a terrible place,’ Lydia said. ‘You should see the women coming home at night. Most have such yellow faces from the gunpowder they look like canaries. I heard that one of them died of it.’ The argument that decided her not to go was that she would see so little of Oliver, whereas by staying at home she could be with him all the time. ‘You don’t want him to grow up looking only at a crabby old witch like me, do you?’

Clouds turning the weather raw were grey in their fluidly mapped outlines, like cauliflowers fit only for pig food. Burton came to mind at times for no reason she could think of, and she was glad to hear Mr Walker say: ‘We’ll step inside the doorway, to be out of this wind.’

Seventy if a day, he wore no overcoat, and a small Bible bulged from a pocket of his Norfolk jacket. He wiped a dewdrop with a large white handkerchief. ‘You’ve heard, I suppose, Miss Waterall, that Will Jones had been killed in action? And then that foolish young boy Sidney Camb was also killed.’

‘I saw his mother yesterday,’ she said, ‘and she told me that one of Sidney’s elder brothers has enlisted as well, and that if he got killed she would throw herself off Castle Rock. I tried to comfort her, but you can hardly expect to.’

‘I’m sure you did your best. But Will Jones was a good teacher, and we’re losing so many we can’t be particular as to who we take on anymore. Didn’t that girl Emily Burton lose her brother?’

She wanted to go inside, and quell the noise before beginning her lesson. ‘He was a shoeing smith with the Hussars.’

He seemed to be saying a silent prayer, and perhaps he was, as many must these days, when the world had become so changed from two years ago. The war influenced everything, people only daring to live from day to day, and praying when they could for it to end.

‘We fully realized what we were doing in taking you back instead of casting you out,’ he said, ‘and you’ve been such a good influence on the children of this area. It’s rare for attendance to be so high, and in such capable hands.’

Well, she knew all that, and wondered what he was coming to, because his seriousness was never without a point.

‘The thing in my mind, Miss Waterall,’ he said, ‘and it’s been there for some time, is that we might eventually find you a post in some school, teaching full time. Everything is very unorthodox these days, as you know. You’re not the only young woman who has been left in the lurch because of this dreadful war. I wonder whether there’ll be any young men alive when it’s finished. My wife and I pray every night for the safety of our soldiers, but God seems to move in more mysterious ways than we could ever have imagined. Of course, you’d have to go to Newark for your teaching practice, though I’m sure we could arrange a small stipend. But would you be able to manage, with your present responsibilities?’

She put up a hand to soften the beating of her heart, its rhythm hard to keep in bounds, at sensing a possible turning in her life. Working at heaps of lace with Lydia, and looking after Oliver, she set aside an hour each day to read books from the Free Library. ‘I’d like to go. I’d manage somehow.’

‘I’ll put your name before the committee, and do all the persuading I can.’ He took her warm hand, as if to bring life into his own freezing fingers, then drew a hand away to reset his glasses. ‘I’ve already mentioned what an outstanding teacher you’d make.’

A warmth spread at her face as she followed two late children inside. He closed the door and stood at the back, pleased at how all became quiet when Alma went before them.

‘This afternoon I’m going to tell you a story about the infant Moses, who was hidden among the bulrushes of the River Nile. The Pharaoh who ruled over Egypt gave orders that all Hebrew baby boys were to be killed, because he was frightened of their power and skill when they were grown up. I’ll go on to read about how the Chosen People escaped from such wickedness, and safely crossed the Red Sea, while Pharaoh’s soldiers pursuing them were drowned in the mighty waters.’ She opened her Bible at the well-known place. ‘And then we’ll say a prayer and sing a hymn. And I shall want each of you to come out and read a few verses aloud.’

Audible grumbling at such a task, beyond the capability of some, made her smile and, looking over their heads, she saw that Mr Walker had gone, satisfied that she could finish the session, unable to know her anxiety while being watched, or how much she loved the children for being so attentive.

Coat drawn tight over a woollen shawl, she hurried to get home, the first snowflakes floating across her eyes. Men’s laughter from a pub on the main road tempted her to go in for a warming drink, but Mr Walker’s assumption that she would one day become a teacher gave more than enough heat to resist. Aware of every penny, she wouldn’t go into such a place anyway. Such pothouse noises reminded her of Burton, whom she fought to forget, trying not to blame him for all that had happened to her, and more fatally to Oliver. Many other Hussars had died on service overseas since then, and no doubt still more would be lost. It was impossible to pick up a newspaper without seeing numerous photos of the dead.

She hurried home to be with Oliver. He would soon be walking but, as she told Lydia, he would never be a soldier. Lydia replied that he would only become one over her dead body, adding that she however would be dead before he was old enough to think about it.

They talked in the kitchen when at work. Time went faster and the labour was lighter with two to get it done. Oliver, a lively soul when he wasn’t sleeping, looked on as if to make sure their fingers didn’t slacken. They laid him well swaddled on bundles of lace, no more comfortable place for an angel to be.

Alma often trembled for him as he lay before her, as if the world he had come into was hostile to all human life. What would become of him if she and Lydia left him one day with a neighbour when they had to go out together and they were struck dead by lightning or fatally run over by a motor omnibus whose brakes had failed? A terrible life he would have, starved and abused in an orphanage, and growing up in utter misery.

The haunting picture didn’t let her forget that children were in any case susceptible to measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, tonsillitis, the croup, and scores of other furtive sicknesses which if too virulent could bring on death. He was strong, healthy and big for his age, the only reason to be glad that a man like Burton was his father. Whatever she thought now, he had been conceived in love, and was more likely to survive because of it.

She hadn’t seen Burton since the funeral, and hoped never to do so again. She supposed he would walk straight by her, as she would pass him without a word of recognition. To make sense out of her life you had to assume that both had got what they wanted, and as for Oliver growing up without a father, maybe it was better that way, because those who did have fathers invariably ended with more bad habits than if they only had a mother. When Lydia said she ought one day to think of getting married so as to give the child a father, Alma replied that she would never marry for such a reason. There’ll be no men left to marry by the end of the war, anyway.’

‘But you might not relish being an old maid when I’m dead and gone,’ Lydia said.

She stepped into the small warm house, renewed by seeing Oliver clutching the bars of his crib and laughing at the face Lydia was making to amuse him. She took a plate from the oven, and cut two slices of bread. ‘Come and eat this by the fire, and warm yourself up. The Baby Mikado will scream his little honeyguts out if you touch him. You’ll turn him into an icicle.’

She was hungry for the potatoes and black pudding. ‘It’s all I could get,’ Lydia said. ‘The shops will be out of business soon. I heard they’d be selling horsemeat next, and I couldn’t stomach that.’

‘If we’re starving we’ll have to,’ Alma said.

‘I expect we would. A couple of years ago I couldn’t afford bananas, and now we can there’s none in the shops. I’d like to see Oliver’s face when I can show him one. I mashed some potato with a drop of milk just before you came in and he gobbled the lot from a spoon.’

‘You love to spoil him.’

‘If we don’t, who will? Maybe spoiled children grow up to be better people.’

She held Oliver, in paradise when so close, till he went to sleep. ‘Mr Walker said he might get me taken on as a pupil-teacher in a few months.’

Lydia took up the scuttle, and filled it with coal from under the stairs. ‘Is that what you want?’

The tone said so. ‘More than anything. I’ve wanted to change my life ever since I was born.’

‘Well, I’ve always supposed that. I never thought you’d live in a place like this forever.’

‘It’s not that. I can still be a teacher and live here. Unless you get fed up and chuck me out.’

‘Oh, I shan’t do that.’ Oliver’s blue eyes opened from milk-white dreams. ‘I’ve got used to you, and to this little bundle as well.’

Ivy had started work at the tobacco factory, and Rebecca at Hollins’s Mill in New Radford. Burton got them out of bed at five every morning in time to go down the lane at six with packets of sandwiches Mary Ann had made the evening before, holding hands because they were nervous at going under the long bridge in the dark. It was no use Burton telling them there was nothing to fear, and that the more frightened they were the worse it would get, because he secretly believed they enjoyed it that way.

As soon as she was thirteen Sabina would sign herself on at the same place as Rebecca, so that with eight shillings a week from each the house might seem more prosperous. As for daft Emily, she would never bring a farthing into the house. She’d been sent to school but, like Thomas, could neither read nor write. Perhaps being the last born had made her backward, Mary Ann as well by that time worn out.

With one girl married and two at work she had more to do in the house, not a bad thing if it diverted her mind from Oliver, though she knew that nothing ever would. The postcard-sized photograph taken after he had enlisted hung in the kitchen hugely enlarged and framed, so he was always looking down, willing them not to forget. He watched whatever was being done, a presence Mary Ann felt even when her back was turned. Burton noted his old familiar expression of not much caring to know what was going on, lips slightly pursed as if to begin whistling a tune, something he would occasionally do in life, a piercing melody to make more space around him in the crowded house. Burton sometimes thought he knew more about him than when he had been alive, but supposed that was because he was more on his mind now that he was dead.

He said to Mary Ann more than once: ‘That khaki uniform makes him look like a tramp,’ wanting to remember the well-dressed young man in suit and tie, boots well polished on Saturday night, walking down the lane. ‘It’s a shame we never thought of getting a proper photograph, before he put those khaki rags on; but who of us imagined he would end like that?’

Killed by a mad horse. It should have been roasted alive over a slow fire. Shooting was too good. I’d have made the animal know what it had done. I’ve handled worse horses. I was often alarmed when Oliver got on one and trotted down the lane from the forge, but I said nothing. Perhaps I should have dragged him off and banged his head, but he would only have hated me more. He thought he knew everything, like you do when you’re young, while I would never trust any horse because all of them nurse a wild streak, more than anybody might realize. Getting on their backs was never for me, and shouldn’t have been for him, either.

Mary Ann wrote to Oxford for the death certificate, hoping to learn more about how Oliver had died. She thought of him all the time, couldn’t lay a meal without wondering whether or not he would be pleased should he come alive into the house. She wanted to know how he had spent every moment of his last day, and so did Burton, but the death certificate only said: ‘Fracture at the base of the skull and lacerations of the brain following injuries received while following his calling.’

Which Burton thought wasn’t saying much. There was more to it than that, and I’d like to get to the bottom of it. A horse can go mad and kill a man, but couldn’t have done so to Oliver while he was shoeing one. The leg would have been between Oliver’s thighs, him facing backwards from the horse’s head, and if a horse tries to kick when the leg’s up like that it falls over with such a bang it won’t get back on its feet in a hurry, and would never try such a stunt again. It couldn’t have happened while Oliver was following his calling.

It wasn’t so much a matter of forgetting, nobody could do that, but of living with what you couldn’t help but remember. Work was the only solace, and he went at it full tilt, as he had to in any case to pay Mary Ann enough for the household, a weekly sum to Thomas and Oswald, and have a few shillings left for himself. Old Nick and Tubal-Cain had shoed a hundred horses a day, or so he had heard tell, and if I did as many, he thought, I’d be a lot better off than I am now.

Mary Ann said the years went slowly after Oliver’s death. You could count the minutes. Even when you were working they crawled around the clock. Yet according to the newspapers so much was happening in the world beyond, though Burton was scornful at their obvious lies when Mary Ann read to him. Battles called great victories never ended anything. Fighting and slaughter went on, Burton said, and we were always winning (whoever ‘we’ were) but things got worse and worse for the soldiers, who you had to feel sorry for, as well as for everyone else, most of all for those losing sons, husbands, brothers and fathers who had gone like fools when they shouldn’t have let wild horses drag them away. If they were killed the family got a telegram and a photo in the paper, and as for the blind and the crippled, what would they do for a living when the war was over?

Lottie worked the white handle and pumped two quarts of ale through a funnel into Mary Ann’s bottles, scooping away froth with the same piece of wood she had used for years. ‘A pound of cheese, as well as four boxes of matches and a packet of Robins.’

The new slot machines by the beer-off wall fascinated Mary Ann, flashing emblems of various fruits, yellows and reds and greens, purples and blues, the incandescent colours of her youth long since discarded but regretted all the same, the favourite stockings, gloves, blouses and dresses resting in a separate drawer of the bedroom, rarely used but always a reminder of happier days. Burton smiled when she mused over them.

A penny from her change seemed to go into the small zinc slot by its own will. She pulled the handle with vigour, as if the harder she did the more chance of getting the kitty. ‘We haven’t had them long,’ Lottie said. ‘Mr Warrener makes them in a workshop at the end of his garden.’

Oliver would put in the odd coppers from his wages if he was here, and come home to share a five-shilling win with his brothers and sisters, and even treat his father to a pint, so all she needed was to have three items of the same fruit come around the drums and stop in parallel. They didn’t.

She ought to stop, but fate beckoned, and after a few pennies had gone she put half a crown from her purse on the counter and told Lottie to give more change, hoping not only to win back the first few pence but have the large amount visible through the glass window fall into her pinafore as well.

The coloured drums spun, her mindless heart praying that Oliver would come back safe, until she knew he couldn’t. The hungry mouth was made of steel, a wicked little ravenous slot demanding what pennies she had. It took them all. Oliver was spinning a top in the yard, and she knew he was thinking: ‘That top is me. Don’t let it fall. Let the colours keep spinning, though if it does fall, well, I can set it going again.’ Oh, the poor little boy won’t do that anymore.

‘Don’t cry, duck,’ Lottie said.

Having dug so deep into the housekeeping she must go on playing to get it back, wished she hadn’t started, didn’t know why she had, Burton would surely knock all her teeth out this time, and she would have no one to blame but herself, it would be her fault, and yet it wouldn’t, something stronger controlled her arms, other eyes looking on, apart from hers, and laughing with malice when she lost, but the effort of using her arms to pull and pull and pull and hear the clink of machinery moving and see the gaudy colours spinning made her feel better.

Another woman who came into the shop was astonished at so much being lost, though she willed a cascade of coins to fall like an avalanche into Mary Ann’s lap. ‘Can’t you stop her?’

‘I’ve tried, but she takes no notice.’

Mary Ann gave her a florin for more change. One penny eaten, another slotted in. The machine was big, it demanded more. It wasn’t so much the money she wanted — though she had to hope for it — but to open the prison of the machine and give freedom to all coins inside, as if that would put life back into her.

‘She’s losing all she’s got,’ the woman said.

‘I don’t know what to do. She hasn’t been the same since her lad was killed.’

‘It’s terrible,’ another customer said, ‘this war. But I’ll see if I can meet Burton. He passes about this time on his way from work. If he can’t stop her, nobody can.’

Mary Ann requested more coppers, with such a glint that Lottie had to spread them along the counter and, arms folded over her chest, watch her pick them up quickly in case they grew legs and ran back to the till. Two more women came in, as if they had heard what was going on and wanted to watch the play.

No one else in the shop could hear the talking in her heart. ‘I bore him and brought him up, the best lad that ever was. Dear God, bring him back to me. I want him in the house again.’

With the last of twelve pennies clattering into the steel pocket she knew herself close to getting the kitty. Three lemons showed, though diagonal to each other instead of in a winning row.

‘Stop now, duck. You’ve spent enough.’

Lottie hoped no one would blame her should Mary Ann lose every last farthing. ‘Somebody’s gone to tell Burton. He’s her husband.’

‘Burton?’ exclaimed one of the women. ‘Oh bleddy hell! She’ll get two black eyes for this,’ and went off with her groceries as if not caring to see it.

‘I don’t know why you went.’ As if Oliver was beside her, she worked through the last pile of coins. ‘I’ll never know,’ and then, feeling a presence behind, knew who it must be. A hand gathered in the few coins. He gripped her by the shoulder. ‘This is a fine way to carry on.’

She turned but, finding one last penny in her pocket, slotted it in before he could take it away, a desperate pulling of the handle, the same result as ever. ‘I’ve always wanted to play on one of these.’

‘Couldn’t you have stopped her?’ he said to Lottie.

‘Not without chopping her hands off.’

‘You could have rapped her over the knuckles.’ He gave Mary Ann the sackcloth shopping bag with its bottles of beer and groceries. ‘Come on, let’s get you home.’

‘It’s no use blawting,’ he said on their way up the lane. ‘What’s done is done, but I wish you hadn’t done it. I’ve got a pound or two put by, and that should see us through till next week.’

Her heart beat faster on knowing she had thrown a whole week’s living money away, and it was difficult to imagine that what she had so far heard from Burton, who walked ahead, would be the last of it.

He opened the gate for her to go into the yard, and she held her head high on passing, the tinkle of bottles playing a tune, as if she had gone through fire and nothing could harm her now. Even the scuffles and grunts of the pigs seemed to welcome her home.

Burton, telling the others about it round the table, turned the matter into a joke: ‘I don’t know what Oliver would have said if he got to know — if he was still alive. But if he’s where you think he is it’ll give him something to laugh about.’

TWENTY-ONE

A message from the farm manager at Wollaton Hall asked Burton if he would come and ring a couple of young bulls, and he had sent Thomas back to say he would. He slid out of bed at five o’clock without disturbing Mary Ann, who needed all the rest she could get, being more than ordinarily tired since Oliver’s death, as if she lived the life he would have gone on living, as well as her own.

He called Ivy from the girls’ bedroom, to come downstairs and make his breakfast sandwich. She asked where he was going, so he told her, and why. ‘It’s a cruel trade,’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for the poor young bulls.’

‘So it is,’ his tone was sharp, ‘but bulls have to be ringed so that they can be easily led, and don’t do any damage to men. They’ll pay me ten shillings for doing each one. Another thing is, if I want your opinion I’ll ask for it, so shut your rattle, and get on with what you’re doing.’

He didn’t see her glare of loathing but knew it was there. Not with all the tools in the forge would he be able to cut a way through the wall of her dislike, supposing he cared to, which in some way he did. She had hated him well before he had given her cause to, though all he’d ever done was to make her show sufficient respect to himself and her mother.

Thomas and Oswald were to open the forge, and handle what trade might turn up. No matter how many horses the army took there were still enough to keep them busy. Carts and drays always needed animals to haul them.

At six he went out of the house, a picture in mind of Ivy putting two fingers to her nose at his departure. High clouds suggested a fine day, birds coming noisily to life, new flowers sprouting in the hedges as he descended the lane to Woodhouse. The driver of the baker’s van called out a greeting while feeding a crust to his horse, then walked across the pavement with fresh loaves for the shop. Burton disapproved of those who bought bread instead of making it themselves, as Mary Ann still did.

People walked up the road to work, but he turned for the canal, crossing by a lock gate to the towpath. A bargee lighting his morning pipe had a greeting returned, and smells of bacon from the hatchway where his wife was clearing up after breakfast made Burton momentarily hungry. As a magpie out for no good lifted grudgingly from the path to let him by he realized it was 2nd May and that he was fifty today. He wouldn’t mention the fact at home, and didn’t expect them to do so either, though Mary Ann would remind him, and have them take a tot of whisky together.

A few fishermen were throwing lines from the bank, though what they hoped to catch he couldn’t imagine. A few sticklebacks for the cat, if they were lucky, but they looked as if they were retired, so it was a fair excuse to be idle. What was a birthday, anyway? You were a year older, but that was nobody else’s business. Some people were given presents, and what was the good of that if you were one step nearer to getting old? Presents would only mean something if at every birthday you got younger.

He slithered down the bank and walked his rapid pace through the sawmill, no place without memories of Oliver which was, he supposed, why Mary Ann left the house as little as possible. He had taken her for a walk to the Rodney a fortnight ago, which she might have enjoyed if an unthinking fool hadn’t blurted out what a shame about Oliver being killed. Not that it was his fault. A year of mourning was the least you needed, so it was said, though for Mary Ann, and himself as well, it would last a lifetime.

Coal wagons passed on the main road, huge grey Clydesdales hauling the loads. He smiled at a couple of ragged lads following in the hope of picking up dropped cobbles. At the park gates he called his surname to the man in the lodge, and went in the direction of the stables, crossing the large stretch of grass as if steering by compass, the breeze pleasant after yesterday’s mowing of the lawns.

The great mansion on the hill — worth a glance — was built in olden times from the profits of coal. Nothing wrong with that. If he had owned the land he would have enjoyed it as well, except he’d heard that the man who’d had the Hall built had died bankrupt and miserable in London. Served him right, you could say, because extravagance never forgave.

He should have gone the back way so that no one would see him from the terrace, but if they did, and didn’t like the sight of him, they could ring the bulls themselves, and see how far they got. Lord Middleton owned the cottage he lived in, but Burton knew he could always find another place. Mary Ann had wondered whether they ought to move, the house having so many memories of Oliver; but if they did she would have to leave them behind, so she decided to stay. In any case Oliver’s framed photograph on the wall couldn’t be moved, because when in the same room alone Mary Ann talked to him, Oliver liking to hear bits of gossip about the family, so it was clear he would always want to stay in the house he was brought up in.

Walking across the open ground he hoped he’d get a glimpse of some of the maids, even of Lady Middleton, not to mention her daughters, if she had any, he wasn’t particular. A bit of young flesh would be pleasing, and there were plenty of bushes by the lake.

He’d first come with his father and George at fourteen, to ring five such awkward bulls as kept them busy from dawn until dusk. At midday a maid brought a tray of mugs and a pitcher up to the brim with beer. Her arms could barely hold it, another young wench following with chunks of bread and cheese. A wet April day, they sat on bales of hay in the stable, Father smoking his pipe while he and George eyed the girls tripping oh so daintily back and forth on their duties. The three of them were so exhausted by evening that the old man, in one of his happy moods, treated them to a pint of good ale at the public house. He had drunk most of the pitcher at midday while, it seemed to George and Ernest, they had done all the work.

He veered to the right of the Hall fair and square on its hill, and under the arch into the stable yard. He told a man besoming dung and straw from between the cobblestones to find Mr Parker and say he was wanted.

‘Who shall I say wants him?’

‘Burton. He’ll know.’ The smell of cows was healthy, or so he’d heard. A man was brushing a horse in one of the stalls, the broad arse of a placid animal visible over the half-door. If that one went mad a bar of iron at the back of a leg would drop it in no time, and it wouldn’t get up again, which would be its lookout. Oliver should never have been killed like that.

Parker, a portly bull-tup in gaiters, moleskin waistcoat and bowler hat, strutted as if he and not Lord Middleton was gaffer of the Hall, though you couldn’t fault him for that. His eyes were bloodshot, from putting back too much of his lordship’s brandy, he supposed.

‘Morning, Burton.’

Burton nodded.

‘I’ll show you where they are. They’re a right lot of trouble. His lordship wonders whether you’ll be able to do anything with them, because none of us can.’

Burton wasted little breath in his response. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ He walked to another wing of the stables and looked over the gate, his victims standing at the back where the light was dim. One sensed his presence, and turned. Burton sent a stare back, at the well-muscled young bull, the deep purple of its orbs steadily gazing as if gauging the prowess of the man. The prouder the soul the poorer the beast, because it was going to be subdued, and he trained his eyes on it, to get the measure of the contest, any satisfaction from the coming struggle more appreciated at this stage than later, when pure force blotted out all thought.

The two bulls were young and calm, as if the world belonged to them, stocky, well-fed, and powerful, fresh enough to be confident that no one could bring them to docility. But you’ll be eating out of peoples’ hands next week, such an appraisal the most important part of Burton’s task, the weighing-up, the beginning of confidence for him and defeat for them, a long look in the hope of making them realize that there could only be one end to the contest.

They didn’t know what was coming, yet the second animal turned, stamped, nudged the first out of the way, and took a step forward. The look wasn’t aimed at Burton, who then knew, from the arrangement of its muscled rear and legs, that this was the one he would have most trouble with, because it had already tested itself against the other and won. To tackle it after the first one, which had succumbed to the steel of its gaze, had been beaten, would take some of its heart away. It would sense its impending fall from the alarms of defeat, so Burton would warm himself up with the first, and be in more fettle to crush the disheartened second.

They were similar in everything, except for their eyes, until those of the second, on suddenly taking the decision to weigh him up, became less expressionless, perhaps noting some extra detail of Burton and the surroundings outside. Its way of looking at things was more inquisitive than that of the other, not by too much, but added strength might make it more formidable.

He stood to one side, out of their sight, took the breakfast of a bacon sandwich from his pocket, and ate it in a few large bites, not much in bulk, but you didn’t want to clutter the stomach with such a job on hand. Parker came back. ‘What do you think?’

‘There’s no hurry.’ He pointed over the gate. ‘I’ll begin with the one nearest the wall. In a few minutes you can sling a rope and haul him out.’

A couple of stable boys, and an aproned man who looked like a gardener, stood along the facing wall. There would be an audience. There usually was, always somebody to gawp. If he ringed bulls on stage at the Empire he would make a fortune, except that if one got loose in such a place all the toffs and idlers would have to run for their lives. His smile, barely recognized as such by those waiting for the show to begin, showed him to be in no hurry. Impatience, otherwise fear, had killed many a man, and he wasn’t going to be one of them. The sandwich gone, he smoked a cigarette, then hung his jacket on a hook inside an empty stable. ‘I’m ready when you are.’

Parker called two men with ropes. Another couple carried a smoking brazier, and a selection of thin sharp pokers.

‘Not that one, you fool.’ The thick rope had spiralled the wrong bull. He waited by the door. ‘Get it right this time.’ He supposed the increase of onlookers along the wall would applaud if he flexed his muscles like a boxer. The day was bright and dry, so no chance of slipping on his backside and getting ripped up out of carelessness. That’s something they wouldn’t see, however much they might like it as part of the show. He kept his sight on the door, and indicated that Parker move the audience to a safer place.

The bull walked out, as if on its own sweet way to the greenest of pastures. Taking time, it seemed invincible, nothing in the world to do it harm. At Burton’s approach the bull went towards the arch, as he knew it had to because there was no other option. Two men pulled it to a halt by the length of rope. A head of fresh dandelion grew from the wall nearest Burton, which he calmly took out with his fingers, removing the blemish on an otherwise clean surface. Hooves clattered on the cobbles, and he waited till the bull turned.

To approach such a beast head-on was asking for trouble and so, repeating to himself the eternal rule that he must take his time, he walked towards it obliquely, and stared into eyes that unusual happenings had robbed of opaqueness. They were flat ovals, losing colour as well, their intensity not certain anymore, nor their idea as to what was happening. You had to watch them even more carefully. The bull moved away, then came straight at him. His fingertips touched a horn as it clobbered by. It wouldn’t be easy, because none ever were.

Ropes held it against the wall, though the position wasn’t too secure. ‘Let it go again,’ he said quietly, not wanting to give much time for it to make up its mind. A shake of the rope, and Burton moved to where he sensed it would go, pleased to hear the second bull banging itself around the stable as if riled at missing the excitement. ‘Another jerk of the rope.’

They complied, and the animal ran to Burton, as if he wasn’t there, or as if he were a stone post. He struck the back of the neck with the full force of his hand, and during the time in which it couldn’t know whether it was coming or going, grasped both horns and fought it to a stop.

They watched in silence. Holding the horns took all his strength. The young bull resisted. Nothing like this had happened to it before, a fresh experience, totally unsettling, but it had to struggle, and Burton knew that if he didn’t win at this stage the bull would begin to fight. Then there’d be hell to pay, or worse.

I’ve got your measure, or he hoped he had. Droplets of sweat fell onto his shirt. The eyes of the bull, visible from side-on, spun in all directions. He forced one way, then the other, subtle but strong alterations of will, all the pressure he had. He was wrestling for Oliver, whose face came to him, not from the photograph on the wall but from full reality as he had known him in life, the man who had been done to death by a mindless animal, and now his father, he who was not mindless, was pressing down, down, down, down, trying to save him as he would have had he been in that field or on that lane near Hungerford. Down, down, down with all his force. He hadn’t been there, and couldn’t help him now, but he would beat this one, and its mate as well, if it broke his back and took half his life — or all of it — he didn’t care because he wouldn’t need to.

Minutes of stalemate seemed to go by, seconds really, though he wasn’t counting, couldn’t afford to, then in a split second which left all time behind, he aimed a boot at one of its legs, a painful blow, a bolt coming from nowhere, and threw it down.

Fore and aft legs were tied with leather thongs, but he stayed alert, noting the ripple of muscles and volcanic snorting as it fought to rise. The brazier was brought side-on. ‘Not too close, or you’ll scorch my backside.’ While a youth worked the bellows an iron stool was put under the animal’s head.

Burton looked from full height, not caring much for what must now be done. He never did, but he had to do it. Serves you right for being born a bull, though Ivy was right, it was a cruel trade. She had no doubt got the phrase from Mary Ann, but animals were made to serve man, and if anybody doesn’t think so let them go without meat. Ivy’s got too much to say for herself. It’s what bulls get done to them — and he stared into the animal’s half-defeated eyes — but it’ll soon be over, and when you try to look back on it you’ll have a job to remember. Such words must have been in his father’s mind as well, or probably not. They were a lot harder in those days, though everybody thinks that, the older they get, so maybe they were only as hard as I am now.

The thin poker, handed to him from the coals, was examined to make sure the colour was right, a shade down from white. He noted two black-uniformed maids among the gawpers, white ribbons flowing from their caps, and while in no way distracted from his work — dangerous if you were daft enough to let that happen — he appreciated their comeliness. They looked at him as if, should he take the liberty of asking (he would certainly do that) they might agree to go out walking.

They fled as he forced the burning rod through the bull’s nose, but he hoped one would be back before long with his platter of whatever the kitchen could provide, thinking he’d be lucky to get a piece of bread and cheese at this place.

The shriek of the animal, as if cast into the fires of hell, alerted the second bull to what might be in store. Hammering at the half-gate with its hooves, no one knew or cared whether it was desperate to come out and help its brother, or wanted to make a run for it to avoid the same fate.

The smell of smoke and flesh made him hungry for his dinner. When the wound had healed in a few weeks a ring would be threaded through, so that it could be led docilely anywhere. He stepped aside, and looked at his watch. ‘Let the other go in ten minutes.’ A ringmaster at the game, his word was not to be disputed. ‘When it comes out, it can run about a bit.’

The first animal was let up, two legs released, but hauled with difficulty, fighting against the dread of its torment going on, into a separate stable. It was no work of Burton’s to help. He was only here to ring bulls. ‘Make sure the top and bottom gates are locked.’

Try as they might, they couldn’t get the other out. Half an hour went by before they could, which seemed a good sign to Burton. Resistance and indecision now would make it easier to quell. Half a dozen pulled and sweated at the ropes, Burton wary as they forced it into daylight like a deadweight. It came back to life, yet didn’t run around and waste energy, used its animal intelligence more knowingly than the first. Burton worked long before he considered it to be under his control, yet thought it an easier job than the other, when he had it on the ground.

He felt as if he had already done a day’s work, but took the trouble to keep any sign from his face. Not that tiredness could be allowed to bother him, because he still had to be at the forge for the rest of the day, even if only to make sure those two dozy idiots were getting on with what they’d been told to do. Meanwhile, where was that hot-bottomed maid with something to eat?

He was given the pound note by Parker. ‘His lordship sent you this. He was looking from the window with his opera glasses, and said you’d done a very good job.’

‘And what did her ladyship say?’

‘She wasn’t there.’

‘Too tender-hearted, I expect.’

‘She’s in the greenhouse, cutting the day’s flowers.’

‘Best place for her.’ Payment was a slip of green paper instead of the solid sovereign of a few years back, the government having called in the gold. Paper was much inferior, because it didn’t jingle like good metal in the pocket, and could turn to pulp if soaked by the rain.

The bulls were bellowing as if the end of the world might be coming up, wanting to batter the doors off their hinges and leap out for vengeance, not knowing that their troubles were over. The maid was back in the stable yard, Burton glad his jacket was on and already buttoned. Taking the glass of whisky, he drank it straight down, wondering what abundance of hair was hiding under her cap. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Millie.’ Her blue eyes sparkled as she looked up at him. ‘But her ladyship calls me Jane.’

‘That’s a cheek.’

She looked over her shoulder. ‘Aren’t them bulls making a noise?’

He smiled. ‘So would you, if you’d just had a hot iron through your jaw.’

‘It’s wicked.’

‘Lots of things are.’

She shuddered. ‘Anyway, I don’t mind working at this place. I get eighteen quid a year. And it’s a situation. I get well looked after.’

‘I’ll bet you do. But if I was you I’d take a job in the gun factory, and earn two pounds a week.’

‘Well, I won’t. I’m better off here. It’s all found, and I don’t have to worry about anything. As long as I do what I’m told.’

‘Don’t you want people to call you by your proper name?’

‘Why should I care? I know I’m me, don’t I?’

‘I’d care,’ he said. ‘At the gun factory they’d call you what you were christened, and if you worked there I could meet you in the Market Square now and again. I’d take you to the Trip to Jerusalem, or the Royal Children, or the Eight Bells, or the Rose of England or’ — he was enjoying himself after such exertion — ‘to the Peach Tree. I’m sure you’ve heard of all those places.’

‘So that’s your game? I might have known. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘When is your day off?’ He stroked his moustache. ‘I only ask because you’re a very beautiful young woman. I mean it.’ Try to say something nobody’s had the gall to say to her before. ‘I fell in love as soon as I saw you looking at me while I was working. “I hope she’s the one who brings me my snap,” I said to myself. “I’ll go home and hang myself if it’s somebody else, because I don’t think I’ll be able to live without another sight of her.” Come into town on Saturday night, and we’ll have a tripe supper at Pepper’s, and go to the Empire afterwards.’

She listened with flushed cheeks, mouth slightly open (a good sign) a hand at her bosom as if to hold every word captive, or maybe to prevent her heart flying away. ‘You know I can’t.’

‘You can do anything, if you want to.’

Freckles on cheeks and forehead looked like sparks of hell that had bedded there and only half gone out. ‘Now you’re tormenting me.’

‘That’s the last thing I’d do to a girl like you. I’ll walk you around the corner, to say goodbye. Then you can go into the Hall and get on with your skivvying.’ Taking her hand, he was surprised that the fingers curled so warmly into his.

Parker, having made sure the stable doors were locked, said to the man next to him: ‘Just look at that, Burton going off with one of the maids. I hope nobody cops her. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘What do you expect from a blacksmith who rings bulls? They’re a law unto themselves.’

‘Yes, but it’s a bit much. What if his lordship sees them?’

‘I expect he’d laugh his head off.’

Burton had thought of bringing Thomas, to show him the technique of the job, in case he was ever called on to do it, but was glad he hadn’t, drawing Millie into a coign of the wall for a kiss, her bosom firm behind the rustle of her clothes.

‘It’s not when you look at me brazen,’ she said, ‘but it’s you looking at me so sly that gives me a frizz.’

Sly be damned, he’d never imagined such a bonus on setting out that morning. If he had hoped for it, and wasted much thought in imagining it, as sure as hell it wouldn’t have turned up so nicely. Only a Nottingham girl appreciated a man who ringed bulls, though when his smile was buried in her warm neck he wondered whether his birthday had anything to do with it. ‘I do love you, you know.’ Since Oliver’s death there were times when Mary Ann couldn’t bear to be touched in such a way, and he was never one to bother a woman who didn’t want him.

‘And I love you,’ she said. ‘You’re so strong. The way you did those bulls gave me a frizz as well. But do be quick.’

Leaning on the wall presented a good view of the greensward falling away behind the Hall, so he would see anyone who came into the open, not wanting to get such a pleasant and obliging girl into trouble. As for whoever saw him and made objection, they could take his presence or leave it, and ring their own bulls, knowing they wouldn’t get anyone else from the area to do it so well or so cheaply. He opened his trousers, and lifted her skirts deftly, then drew her onto him as if she was a toy come to life, and worked them together till she cried out and all that was in him poured into her.

A jerk of the head at her crucial moment threw her cap off, a mass of fair ringlets falling about her cheeks, the sun shining through as, barely finished with her pleasure, she coiled it rapidly back into place and fixed the cap on. She straightened her skirts. ‘Oh, that was good. What a dirty devil you are! I loved it.’

‘If you meet me again you can have some more.’

‘I don’t think I’ll be able to. The trouble is, they watch us like hawks.’

‘They didn’t that time.’ He stroked her face. ‘Never mind though, my pretty love. It’s my birthday today, and you couldn’t have given me a better present.’

‘Many happy returns, then.’ She blushed, as he had often noticed them do, after being seen to rather than before, when he was too busy to realize and they were so eager to get it.

During the discreet buttoning-up he watched her go into a small side entrance, at which he turned back for the stables, to eat the food she had brought him.

TWENTY-TWO

A workman touched his cap to Lydia and stood so that she could take the seat and put three-year-old Oliver on her knees. She kept the shopping bag with its flask of tea, bottle of Dandelion and Burdock, and sandwiches safe from the rattling sway of the tram. As good as stifled by sour breath and tobacco smoke, Oliver looked with wide-open eyes at men and women going on afternoon shift at the gun factory, Lydia thinking that if he was happy so was she.

The tram almost emptied at the factory stop, and went on to its terminus by the river. ‘We’re going over a big bridge, and since you’ve been a good lad I’ll let you look at the water. It’s deep and wide, and flows as fast as a motor car.’

She walked at his dawdling gait, gave a ha’penny for her toll, the keeper seeing a child who could go free. A cart went by, and at hoofbeats Oliver stared at the horse, till she urged him further onto the bridge, a grip at his vibrant body as he was lifted to watch a boat rowed by two soldiers slide from under the arch. He looked into the sky with steady and knowing interest: ‘Crowds.’

‘Not “crowds”,’ she said. ‘Say “clouds”.’

‘Clouds.’

She took him down. ‘Now walk.’

‘Where’s Mam?’

‘She’ll come later. She won’t be long. Look at the big river again. It’s the biggest in the world, and flows right down to the sea, where I expect you’ll go one day.’ She traipsed him through Wilford village. Alma was being talked to by a board of inspectors about her teaching post, which Oliver wouldn’t understand, so she turned his attention back to the grey velvet sweep of the Trent.

Through a gate, and over Fairham Brook by a footbridge, was a space of dry land between the two watercourses. Cattle dotted meadows on the far side. ‘You can play on the grass,’ she said. ‘Only don’t go near the water.’

‘Isn’t water good?’

‘If you drink it, but not if you drown in it. You must learn to swim first.’ She called him close for half a cup of Dandelion and Burdock, which he couldn’t finish so she drank the satisfying fizz herself.

A stalk of grass between his lips, he imitated a man on the tram with a cigarette, talked indecipherable words in the rhythm of counting lace bundles before wheeling them back to the factory. She laughed. ‘You are a funny lad. I’d like to know who your father is, though don’t suppose I ever shall. But he can’t have been all that bad.’

The more words the more he would feel cared for. No baby talk allowed. He was intelligent, but words would make him more so, Alma said. Words were what mattered, they agreed. Speech was paramount. What was in the mind must come to your lips. People might look at you gone-out in talking plainly to a child, but let them.

She and Alma went at it like a couple of sparrows in spring, chattering on every topic as they worked. Oliver put in his contribution, asked questions that were always answered, which only increased his curiosity. She wondered whether his father had talked all the time at that age.

‘Come away from the water. It likes to suck little boys under and eat them for its dinner. You can only go close when you’re grown up.’

She had no patience with people who didn’t talk, or couldn’t talk, or who wouldn’t. You never knew what they would do next, so they weren’t to be trusted. The less they talked the more miserable they looked, and the more threatening they could be. Often they only talked when they wanted something, and if that something they wanted was yours they would have it off you before you knew what was happening. If you had a bit more than them they broke the Commandment. And if they didn’t covet they complained, which was worse.

Oliver looked at her, smiled as if knowing he owned not only her but the whole world and the air everyone breathed. ‘Don’t get your leggings dirty.’

He measured his paces one-two-three, footstepped them back again, and flattened himself on the earth to see how much his body covered. He ran to a hillock, and when he got to the top jumped up and down as if to make it lower.

‘Have this slice of cake, my pretty little duck. You must be hungry after so much travelling around.’ She offered a corner as if to a prize budgerigar, but he took the slice and went back to chuff-chuffing around the slope like a train. When he fell with a bump she waited for the howling indicated by his face, but the features straightened before reaching her. He drank too much for his throat. ‘My nose is fizzy.’

‘I might not know who your father is, but you’re the spitten image of your mother.’ Children took in everything, even at his age, so she must stop saying such things in case he later asked questions his mother wouldn’t want to answer.

The gate clicked, and she saw Alma coming along the path.

‘Coo-ee, Oliver!’ She picked him up, though he was beginning to weigh a ton. Lydia knew from the glow in her eyes that she had passed her test.

‘I said everything right, would you believe it? I got a teaching post. Mr Walker congratulated me on the impression I made.’ She wheeled Oliver around in a half-dance until out of breath. ‘Oh, I’m so glad.’

‘If you are, then I am. But you must have some tea and a sandwich.’

Having run from the house too nervous to eat, saying there wasn’t time, she had been half an hour early for the appointment. She steadied herself to sit, as if all strength had been used up in a life that might now be passing. ‘The only thing is I must work in Newark for a year, and I won’t like being separated from my little bundle of shame!’

Lydia frowned. ‘Newark’s only twenty miles away, and Oliver will be as right as rain with me. Won’t you, Little Nollie? He’ll soon be a big Nollie, then I can set him on at the lace. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ She held him so that Alma could eat, then he ran back to his hillock.

‘It’s going to be a struggle.’

‘When wasn’t it?’

‘But I shall miss him.’

‘I know you will, but take it in your stride, and when you look back on it it won’t have seemed too long. You’ll see him every weekend, and he’ll be safe with me, won’t you,’ she called, ‘while your mother knocks some knowledge into all those ragamuffins?’

Sensing a cloud over the otherwise clear landscape, a tear ran down his cheek, which he caught on his tongue, and smiled at the taste of salt. Alma fastened the top on the flask. ‘I could turn it down.’

‘And disappoint Mr Walker? I wouldn’t let you. Not now you’ve come this far.’

‘I thought about it on my way here.’

Lydia stretched. ‘My old bones get worse and worse. When you see what most women have to put up with we should consider ourselves lucky. We’d better go, though. It gets cold at dusk.’

They must work at the lace until midnight, to make up for the day’s absence, and Alma thought, holding the gate for them to pass through, that compared to such drudgery her time in Newark couldn’t come too soon.

‘What’s all this about?’ Burton had to ask, at Edith in her mother’s arms. He might have guessed, but didn’t want to. Her bitter and desperate keening filled the kitchen, while two-year-old Douglas boxed the dog on the rug, an innocent with no notion of the disaster.

‘It’s Tommy,’ Mary Ann said. ‘She got the telegram, and came straight here to tell me.’

‘The bloody bastards!’ Edith didn’t need to explain who they were. Nobody could at such a time. ‘They’ve gone and killed him.’ She picked up Douglas who, at the bang of her heart and the hard grip, began to howl.

Burton had noted more houses with blinds drawn on his way from work, meaning that someone in the family had been killed in action. Mary Ann read in the newspaper that the government disliked the custom of drawing blinds. It wasn’t good for the national spirit. People saw how many there were. They talked, and grumbled. They might no longer believe in what the country was supposed to be fighting for. Drawn blinds indicated a plague of misery, and he wondered that people put up with it. Thousands of young men were now called up whether they wanted to go or not, and there soon wouldn’t be enough wood to make crutches for the cripples to go around begging their bread. Wars kept the rich rich, and nobody but the poor ever paid for them.

He took off his cap, and smoothed the peak before hanging it up. He had even told Edith that he liked Tommy, which made her a little fonder of him, though not by much. He had respected him because he was a smartly dressed hardworking warehouseman at the bike factory, nothing wrong with him as the man for Edith, so he felt pity and anger at his death. She put Douglas close to the dog, and went into the parlour, banging the door behind her.

‘I’ll go and keep her company,’ Mary Ann said.

Burton knew how terrible it was for his daughter, who’d expected to pass a lifetime with the man she loved, and now he was dead, a gunner blown to pieces, as like as not, and for no reason he could fathom, no home burial for him, to see his face and say goodbye. ‘Leave her.’ He sat at the table. ‘The poor girl needs to be by herself a bit.’

Everyone hungry, they wanted food. Mary Ann, hair grey yet eyes as blue and bright as ever, couldn’t face another’s suffering. Her heart broke every day at the slightest upset, such tender feelings did she have. ‘Sit down and eat with me,’ he said.

She couldn’t recall when he had last allowed that, perhaps at Matlock when there had been someone else to serve. Did he intend her to think of that happy time? ‘Leave Edith alone,’ he said. ‘Take her dinner in later. She’ll eat it then, I know. She’s one of us. She’s got to go on living, to take care of her lad.’

He lifted Douglas to his knee, the blank pale face wary, and at his squirming Burton put him down to go on tormenting the dog. ‘Edith will mend,’ he said. ‘It’ll take a while, but she will. She’s young, and she’ll get married again.’

He laid a choice slice of meat on Mary Ann’s plate, took up the boat of mint sauce, spooned out potatoes, forked a boiled onion and some cauliflower. ‘It’s all from the garden,’ she remarked.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I grow it for you,’ glad at her beginning to eat. A tender nugget sent down on his fork to Douglas was clutched as if by right, but while making burbling noises at his good fortune the dog swallowed the meat, and would have dozed by the fire to digest it had not Burton shifted it away with his boot.

Only women can comfort women, were better at it than he could be. Mary Ann finished her food and went into the parlour, while he sat making a box of spills out of an old newspaper — all they were fit for — a mindless job, but Edith’s fate didn’t give him the peace to enjoy it. He would willingly put her grief on his shoulders, but grief wasn’t transferable from the one who was stricken. To tolerate its pangs and let no one know his torment was the least he could do for his tall and one-time rebellious daughter, now bowed down in the certainty that she would never see Tommy Jackson again.

Mary Ann came back, and he asked how she was.

‘She’s crying her heart out,’ as was she. ‘The poor girl’s broken by it. But she’s eating her dinner.’

‘I knew she would.’ A blacksmith’s daughter would get over it. His heart was breaking with hers, but a broken heart would always mend, if you lived long enough in hope. And if you didn’t live long enough you took your broken heart to the grave and had it mended there. He well knew there was no other way.

Sabina had never been so late. He didn’t like her being out after ten o’clock. She wasn’t old enough to look after herself, if any young woman ever had been. Soldiers crowded the pubs before going to France, got drunk and hardly knew what they were doing when they came onto the street. Or perhaps they did. It didn’t bear thinking about. Women made guns and shells in the factories for men to kill each other, earning more money than men ever had. They could even afford to get drunk, a cheerful lot, except those who’d had people close to them killed, and they were either glad of alcohol, or so mixed up with the others you didn’t notice them.

Thinking of Alma, he wondered whether the child was boy or girl, what she was doing and where she lived. He wanted to see her but wouldn’t enquire at the Sunday School in case Mary Ann heard of it, not caring to jeopardize himself in her eyes anymore. Alma must have left the district, otherwise he would have seen her, though if he did she would ignore him, and who could blame her?

Mary Ann seemed reconciled to the war going on forever. Victories reported in the newspapers were all of them disasters. He’d heard a drunken soldier on leave from the trenches say they were no more than bloodbaths, and to no purpose.

There were fewer at table these days, with Oliver dead and Edith gone, and now Rebecca had married a miner who lived in Yorkshire, a man who didn’t have to go in the army because the government needed the coal. On the other hand he was a loudmouth who spent every night in the boozer getting kay-lied, as if being well paid entitled him to it.

The gate rattled, the dog barked from its kennel, and Sabina came in, looking too pretty for her own good.

‘Where have you been till this time of night?’

‘I went down town, with two other girls.’ She trembled, yet happy that time had been forgotten.

‘Did you see the town hall clock?’

‘It was foggy.’

He had seen stars glistening, on his way across the yard. ‘Don’t chelp me.’

She was defiant for the first time, not knowing or caring where it came from. ‘I’m fifteen, and I’m earning my own living,’ she said through her tears, ‘so I’ve got a right to stay out a bit later.’

His smack across the head couldn’t be avoided. ‘Don’t come in so late again. Now get to bed.’

‘You aren’t going to hit me anymore.’

Another flat-hander was once too often. She worked fifty hours a week, so he had no right to knock her about just for being in town with a couple of workmates. They’d had a tripe supper, and walked around the market square. She had kissed one of the youths, but what harm was there in that?

Much of the night she was trying to get the blankets from Emily who, in the sort of sleep a zeppelin couldn’t disturb, worked her hands like a machine to drag them back. Finally snug among her sisters, she knew she had to go. She folded a few clothes into a bag and went from the house before Burton got up.

The terror of the dark assailed her at the railway bridge, and tears, rage, exhaustion and hunger drove her from one wall to another, arms held out so as not to scrape herself against the cold stones, but she got through, and walked confidently up the lane.

‘You shouldn’t have hit her,’ Mary Ann said, ‘no matter what she’d done.’

‘She said she’d been with two girls, but how was I to know if it was true?’ He had never put it beyond his high-spirited daughters to tell lies, knowing where such a trait had come from. ‘It wasn’t that so much’ — he pulled on his boots and sat down for breakfast — ‘but she had to cheek me back.’

‘I expect she was frightened.’

‘So she should have been. She’s got too much lip. I don’t want her getting into trouble. I know what girls are like.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

The bait wasn’t taken. ‘I’ve seen them walking around with soldiers. Some were painted up to the eyebrows. They couldn’t have been older than fourteen.’

‘Our girls are sensible enough not to get into trouble.’

The expected grunt of disbelief was not long in coming, as if he doubted that any young woman had ever been able to take care of herself in that way. He drank the strong tea she poured. ‘The only girl I knew who never got into trouble was you.’

‘And look where it got me,’ the smile suggesting that in spite of everything, and whatever his faults, she would never stop loving him.

He sent a half-smile in return. ‘That was because Mrs Lewin kept such a tight rein on you.’

‘What a fine thing to say. You don’t give me credit for anything.’

He put on his jacket and took up his lunch tin. ‘I give you credit for everything, just as you deserve.’ He looked pleased with himself for saying so. ‘I can’t think of anybody else I’d need to give it to.’

‘It’s nice to hear it from your lips now and again. But I’m worried to death about Sabina.’

He turned from the open door. ‘You think I’m not? But worry won’t help.’

‘She’s silly enough to sleep under a hedge.’

‘The weather’s still warm.’

‘But it’s cold at night. I can’t think where she’ll go.’

‘She’ll be back before long. The silly little devil will soon realize home’s the best place. I’ll call at the mill on my way to work, and ask what she thinks she’s up to.’

‘Don’t hit her when you see her.’

He would lose an hour’s work, the mill a fair detour from his route to the forge. ‘I shan’t, though she deserves it, a girl of her age running off without telling anyone.’

He hurried, not pleased at getting so much trouble from his feckless daughter, crossed to the Board School at Radford Bridge, where he had sent his children, then on by the station. Beyond the Jolly Higglers he noted that the pork butcher’s window didn’t display its customary abundance of food.

The tall brick façade of the mill, with its square tower, was on war work like every place, hundreds of women and girls turning out uniforms when the machines, he thought, would be better used putting proper clothes on people’s backs.

Beyond the gate, at a wide doorway half-blocked by enormous square baskets on wheels, a man who wanted to know Burton’s business was ignored. He went two at a time up the stone steps, avoiding a man coming down with a bale of khaki cloth, and found Luke the foreman looking through order sheets in his cubby hole of an office.

‘I think I know why you’re here.’ Luke, acquainted with Burton from when he had come to see about Rebecca and Edith starting work, was a deformed man in his fifties, lame since birth, and with the firm all his life. Burton looked at the neat and tidy girls tending their machines in the long lit-up room, preferring those who were handsome to the merely pretty ones. ‘Where is she?’

‘Look for yourself,’ Luke said. ‘She came in first thing this morning and collected what money was owed. Then she left with a girl called Leah Allsop. They went off arm-in-arm, laughing at what they’d done.’

At least she wasn’t on her own, though that needn’t bode well, either. ‘Where to?’

‘I’ve no way of knowing. It was none of my business.’

‘It was your business. They were young girls. You should have asked them.’ He gave a last look at the rows of women, nodded to Luke, and went out onto the road. Mary Ann would have to be satisfied with that, and so would he. He had done all he could. Looking north, east, south and west, he had no idea of telling which way the daft girl had gone.

TWENTY-THREE

The Clydesdale shivered, nervousness in its eyes, warning Burton to be careful. Shoes had to be put on, and he wouldn’t let Thomas or Oswald do it. The July day was no help, an empty milky sky with a sun that had burned for weeks. Nor was a bump in the air, telling that something like a bomb had gone off in the direction of Beeston, an ominous rumble and shake of the earth that sent the horse rearing.

Letting the foot go he jumped to one side and snatched at the reins. Hooves struck the ground with such a scrape he thought the horse might fall. Then it would take some getting back on its feet, and serve it right. Strength was needed to stop it going on hind legs, and he held firm as it kicked from behind. If it didn’t stop he knew the exact spot in the ribcase where a solid punch would knock it to the ground. Even the strongest had their weaknesses, and a horse was no exception. ‘You’re all right now, so don’t give me any more trouble. It was an explosion by the sound of it, but Old Nick’s not coming for you yet, nor for me, either. Just hold still while I get these shoes on.’

‘It was a big one,’ Oswald said from the door. ‘I felt the ground move. You did a good job with the horse though.’

He was glad neither of his sons had tried to help. ‘Yes, but next time don’t even stand at the door. Another face might upset it more, especially a long one like yours!’

On the way home they waited to cross Derby Road. Carts and wagons, and sometimes a motor lorry, carried wounded and bleeding victims into the city, many to die before reaching the hospital. A man told Burton that the shell-filling factory at Chilwell had gone up, hundreds killed and injured. A slaughterhouse. It didn’t bear thinking about. As bad as in France.

Groans and screams came from the wagons, and Thomas went pale at blood painting its way onto the road. Nor was Oswald willing to look, Burton thinking them too much like their mother, which would do them no good. Smoke from the explosion floating up the hill scraped his throat. ‘It’s all part of this damned war,’ he said.

Thomas stopped his whistling. ‘None of our family works there, anyway.’

Burton wondered where Sabina was, and hoped none of his acquaintances or their family had been at Chilwell that day, glad when a gap in the traffic allowed them to cross. ‘You work where you can, when you want bread for your children,’ he said.

Thomas, ever hungry, bought a sausage pasty from a shop in Woodhouse, but after a bite slung it to a mongrel nosing along the gutter. ‘It tastes as if they filled it with shit.’

‘I expect they did.’ Oswald saw him throw it down. ‘But that’s what you get, buying something like that from a shop.’

‘Can’t you wait for your dinner?’ Burton said. ‘It’ll be on the table, unless it starts to thunder and Mary Ann’s hiding under the stairs.’ Rain spat at the end of the railway tunnel, as if the exploding tons of TNT had drawn in clouds to make a storm.

Bread, slices of bacon, and a dish of kidney beans were laid before them. ‘I thought I heard thunder not long since,’ Mary Ann said.

Thomas told her about the disaster.

‘All those poor souls dead or maimed,’ she said.

Burton also regretted their injuries. Unable to say so, he resented not being thought capable of such feeling. You couldn’t object to that, either, because it was worse for them than for him if they didn’t understand. ‘Eat your dinners,’ though it was hardly necessary to tell them.

Mary Ann sat with them for the main dish, at Burton’s request. ‘It’s Sabina I worry about,’ she said. ‘I can’t get her out of my mind. We haven’t heard a word in months.’

He cut into the scrag-end of mutton she’d been able to get from the butcher’s. A penny stamp cost nothing, and he was angry that Sabina hadn’t written. What had he made her go to school for if she couldn’t write a letter now and again? It was to annoy him, he knew, but she should realize it was Mary Ann who would suffer. ‘She’ll be back one day, but I won’t have her in the house, after the way she’s behaved.’

Mary Ann got up from the table, thinking it no privilege to sit with him if that was how he saw the matter. ‘I’d never turn one of my own children away from the door.’

She was too soft-hearted, but she was his wife, and he had to take note of what she said now and again. He knew she knew that he did, and she knew also that he knew that he did. You couldn’t be closer to someone than that, except when in bed at night or on Sunday afternoon, and even then it wasn’t the same as knowing each other’s mind. That was how they lived, no gainsaying it, though it didn’t hurt to remind yourself that you must be careful what you said to questions you didn’t want to answer. Life was difficult without having to give yourself away in talk, though keeping your trap shut wasn’t hard, because he’d been used to it since birth. The youngest of ten, he’d had to let others do the talking before he dared open his mouth, and even then he might get a blow for his trouble, so after a while he had taken care not to. But whatever Mary Ann said about Sabina, he would never have her back in the house.

Frost was white on the ground, and on the bare twigs of the hedges, the garden derelict except for a few forlorn sprouts among the milky furrows. Sunday afternoon, he gazed over the fence onto the lane. Emily was in the parlour staring at the cat, Mary Ann was dozing by the fire, and Ivy had gone walking with Ernie Guyler, her latest boyfriend, while Oswald and Thomas were in Nottingham chasing the girls.

Everybody swore that times were changing, though if it was true he would do all he could to slow them down as the best way of caring for his family. They were changing because of a war he would have nothing to do with. Let people do their worst if they were mad enough. King and Country was a curse too many were afflicted with because they were too soft to know who they were unless they had such a thing to believe in.

Blistered ice covered the puddles, the lane empty, hedges so bare you could see across the fields as far as the bridge. Even a train along the embankment seemed slower because of the cold. He shivered in his jacket, a bitter start to the year. Changing times would make no difference to him. Old men were happy for their sons to go for soldiers, while women in factories made uniforms and guns to put into their hands. They would fight till the last man was dead, or so exhausted as to be useless. It didn’t bear thinking about.

The government’s taken my pigs, but even if they hadn’t there’d be little enough to put in their bellies. Food’s rationed, and Mary Ann queued for an hour to get a pound of sugar, but just as she reached the door the shopkeeper said there was no more left, and slammed the door in her face. I wish I had been there. They’re even selling horsemeat, but I’d rather eat vegetables and bread than the flesh of beasts I’ve worked with all my life. He had ringed another bull last month, and Lord Middleton had sent him back with a leg of beef, which fed them for a while. Middleton might have thought it useful to keep him strong in case more such work was needed, but it was good of him all the same.

Someone came from under the bridge and walked slowly up the lane, avoiding ice and puddles, no coat on by the look of it, only a frock to keep out the cold, a jersey to the waist that didn’t match. He supposed her a girl from Woodhouse taking the short cut to Aspley. Parents sent their children unprovided into any weather. You saw them every day, battered shoes keeping out neither rain nor snow. Wages from the factories were spent in pubs, with no thought for their children. Those who’d had barely a living wage before the war had been attentive to their families, but a lot now lived as if tomorrow never came, and if that was the change they had in mind he couldn’t think it was for the better.

She stayed to the nearside of the lane, a sly little cat, walking slowly as if not wanting to be seen. Wondering who she was made him forget the cold. When she stopped by the leaning fence he could see only the top of her head.

‘Dad, I’m badly. I think I’ve got tonsillitis. Can I come home?’

His limbs momentarily shook, though not from the cold. I won’t have her in the house. I’ll talk to her, then she can go back to where she came from. ‘Stand across the lane, where I can see you.’

Sabina came close, bare arms folded, bluish features raddled with unhappiness. Snatched to the very middle, her shoes weren’t fit for the feet of a tramp, though a slip of blue ribbon hung limp from her hair. The day wasn’t even good for a dog to be out in.

She was flushed with illness, but through it all looked at him unafraid, eyes similar to his own, wanting to rush away from his brutal unfeeling look, should have thrown herself at a train or died of cold under a hedge. He would never take her in. If only he had been in the garden and Mary Ann at the door.

He read her easily because she was his own flesh. Neither she nor the others know me — observed her a few moments longer. ‘Come into the house, and get yourself something to eat. You look as though you could do with it.’

She followed by the silent pigsty and into the large kitchen smelling of cinnamon and baked bread, thyme and curry, cleanliness and comfort, and the strong tea Emily had made, a medley of odours that must have been there even before she was born.

He closed the door and told her to sit by the fire. ‘Not too close, or you’ll get chilblains,’ stood away from the table for a better look. He spat at the bars, its familiar sizzle part of the welcome she hadn’t dared expect. ‘Where did you go?’

‘To Skegness. I worked in a hotel, but they treated me worse than a slave. I stuck it as long as I could, then ran away.’ Tears smeared her cheeks, pride scorched at having pleaded to be taken in, but weeping with relief at not being turned away as she had dreaded. ‘I was going to get a job filling shells at Chilwell, and go into lodgings, but Leah didn’t want to.’

‘She had some sense.’ He spat at the bars again, always embarrassed by tears. ‘You aren’t having a baby, are you?’

‘Oh, nothing like that.’

‘Mary Ann will be in soon, to give you a meal.’

Emily took her cold hands and brought them back to warmth. ‘It’s lovely to see you, duck. You’ll be all right now you’ve come home.’

‘We’ll have to get you some proper clothes.’ He came back from the pantry with two buckets and the yoke. More water was necessary if Sabina was to have the bath she needed. And he might as well do something as stand idle, carry in tomorrow’s coal, chop up a log or two of wood, make sure the house was comfortable now that a bird had flown back to the nest. ‘Your mother will put you in the bath later, and scrub some of that muck off you.’

When the door closed on him Emily poured her a cup of tea, lifted a fresh loaf from the panchion, took the sharpest knife, and drew it through the bread towards her chest, a thick slice falling onto the table. She spread it copiously with margarine, spooned almost half a pot of homemade damson jam onto it, and looked with such pleasure at Sabina eating that she might have been her only daughter instead of a sister.

The war had to end sometime, and now it had. As with everything all you had to do was wait, but it had been like watching the hour hand of the clock go round, never seeming to move. The Armistice was signed, and you could buy meat, butter and sugar again, but the feeling was as if you had climbed out of a darkened room through a window onto a street hardly recognized.

The postman had delivered a small packet containing a large bronze medallion. The name OLIVER BURTON was engraved above a lion’s head watched over by Britannia with a wreath in her hand. The accompanying paper, from Buckingham Palace said: ‘I join with my grateful people in sending you this memorial of a brave life given for others in the Great War’ — signed in facsimile by the King.

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ a rare occasion when Burton didn’t curb his language before Mary Ann, ‘the King can kiss my arse, and should have kept his trinket.’ He wanted to throw it into the heat, but Mary Ann set it like a holy medal on the parlour shelf, giving it pride and sorrow of place among horse brasses and other ornaments. Burton would rather it had been nearer the fire, and used as a target to spit at.

Boots firmly on the pedals of Oswald’s tall pushbike, he pumped his well-balanced upright way towards Woodhouse, speed as easily come by as fire in the forge on pressing the bellows as a child. The ratio of energy to distance made it much better than walking.

Every car, lorry and motorbike seemed to have come back from France. Enough buses had taken the place of horsedrawn brakes and charabancs to have an effect on the farrier’s trade. Only a fool wouldn’t see the way things were going.

Oswald had bought the bike for six pounds on the instalment plan, and paid most of it off, so Burton wondered about getting one himself, and was trying it out. The Co-op van went by, on its way to take the weekly order up the lane to Mary Ann, and by the time he reached the bridge it passed him on the way back.

A single morning glory in all its freshness guarded the wall of the house, a five-petal hand against the bricks. He leaned the bike by the old deal table under the tree and took off his clips, saw a clutch of dockweed sprouting, his ever-active fingers putting the leaves together, and yanking them clear by the single root, annoyed that neither of his sons had remedied the excrescence. He hurled the leaves in a bunch over the fence of the pigsty, smiling at two young porkers rousting themselves as if it was birthday time.

As always on greeting Mary Ann he took off his cap. Now in his fifties, his white head was almost shaved after yesterday’s visit to the barber’s. Emily on the floor violently stirred Yorkshire pudding batter around a large yellow bowl, the only thing she was good at. He bent down, and said in a lugubrious tone close to her ear: ‘Not so much elbow grease, or it’ll all go to froth.’

In her fright the spoon went handle-first into the yellowish mess. ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ he said.

‘You made me do it, our dad.’

Mary Ann took the spoon out and gave her a clean one. ‘Don’t tease her.’

He set his lunch tin on the dresser. ‘That’s all she’s good for.’

‘No it isn’t. She’s a good help to me.’ When his jacket was on the back of the door and he sat at the table Mary Ann laid out his bottle and glass, with a piece of bacon and bread. She frowned at him shaking such a quantity of salt over his plate from a large pewter pot. ‘You look tired.’

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘But trade’s getting bad.’

She ignored that for the moment. ‘I’ve made a blackberry and rhubarb pie.’ Thomas put his lunch tin on the table before washing his hands. ‘Take that thing off,’ Burton said.

‘It isn’t harming anybody.’

‘It’s too close to my arm.’

He put it on the sideboard.

Mary Ann pushed a couple of sticks between the bars, giving the fire new life. ‘Why is it bad?’

He wiped beer froth from his small white moustache. ‘There’s so many motors that nobody needs horseshoes. Or they soon won’t want enough to keep three of us in work. They even make them by machine at a shilling each. I won’t compete with that.’

She knew him well enough to think for him, to feel whatever disturbance tormented him, guess the anguish that wouldn’t come from his lips. It was conduct never to be judged. ‘What shall you do, then?’

Thomas drank from a large cup of tea, and Burton nodded in his direction. ‘He’ll have to get a job elsewhere, for a start.’

He had longed for the day when he would no longer be under his father’s gaze. ‘It won’t bother me.’

‘I don’t suppose it will.’ None of his sons had valued the good trade he had given them. Blacksmiths who took on different work were given the best of jobs.

‘I’ll go to the Raleigh,’ Thomas said. ‘They’re turning out all the bikes they can. Motorbikes as well.’

Those, too, had robbed him of trade. Oswald joined them at table. ‘Where have you been?’ Burton asked, though he knew well enough. ‘You shouldn’t keep your mother waiting.’

‘I was talking to Helen.’

Burton had seen them walking by the canal, Oswald introducing him to a dark-haired girl with a face too troubled by what she saw of the world, and by much that was uncertain in herself. He hoped Oswald would be able to take care of her, not sure whether he’d be lucky with her in the long run. ‘She’s a Roman Catholic,’ Oswald said, which none of the family saw as an issue between such a handsome man and so goodlooking a girl.

‘You’ll have to get a job, as well,’ Burton told him, ‘when we close up.’

‘I’ve been expecting it. I heard they’ll want a man to look after the canal locks between here and Trowell. There’s a house to go with it, so I might apply. As a blacksmith I’ve got a good chance, and if I get it I’ll ask Helen to marry me.’

Thomas pushed his cup aside to be refilled. ‘Do you think she’ll say yes?’

He smiled. ‘I have high hopes.’

His smile reminded Mary Ann of Oliver’s. ‘She’s a lovely girl.’

Burton emitted a rare grunt of approval: someone whose children would carry on his name. He stooped to unlace his boots. ‘I’ll close the place early next year, and see what I can get for it. Morgan said the other day they need blacksmiths at Wollaton pit for shoeing ponies and other work, and the pay he mentioned seemed about right. Then there’s extra jobs I can do at the farms between here and Ilkeston, so we’ll be all right for money. I’ll keep what tools I need.’ It was a step down, to be a journeyman again, yet the thought gave some pleasure because it would be like his younger days.

Ivy, home from the cigarette factory, came out of the scullery with a tray of washed crockery. ‘I shall be going to put flowers on Oliver’s grave tomorrow morning.’ They were laid there every week, and would be while the forlorn portrait looked down from the wall.

‘Take the clippers,’ Burton said, ‘and cut the grass. It needed doing last time I was there. I want to see it neat and tidy.’

They sat, seven when Sabina came in and took off her coat, a different girl, Burton thought, to the wounded sparrow pleading to be let into the house a couple of years ago. She was late, but he made no remark, knowing that she too would no doubt be getting married soon.

‘Why don’t you come with me and Emily tomorrow?’ Ivy said to her father.

He cut into his meat. ‘I only go on my own. You should know that by now.’

TWENTY-FOUR

He answered the knock, and a tall man in his thirties, spare, upright, unflinching eyes — something of the soldier about him — announced: ‘My name is Albert Beardmore, late South Nottinghamshire Hussars. I was with your son Oliver when he had the accident.’

Burton stepped aside: ‘Mary Ann!’ — and invited the ex-soldier to sit at the parlour table. ‘Your Oliver wasn’t killed “while following his calling”, as was written in the newspapers,’ Beardmore said.

Burton put a hand on Mary Ann’s shoulder, hoping she would stop crying and listen. ‘I never believed it.’

‘We got the horse off a train at Hungerford, and it was as wild a devil as I ever saw. We called for a drink at a pub, and Jenny the barmaid, as was found, put whisky in the horse’s water. She did it without thinking, but the horse was already mad. The man who brought it from Marlborough said as much, so Jenny just got a ticking-off. I know all about it from her side. When I went back after the Armistice we got married, because we’d been writing to each other all during the war. We still talk about what a fine lad Oliver was. He was going to teach me to read and write, but another pal did it afterwards. I’m sure Jenny would have married Oliver like a shot though, if he hadn’t been killed. But we’ve got three kids now, and live near Oxford. I’m in charge of some stables. This is the first time I’ve found the opportunity to look you up. I knew you’d want to know what really happened. The regiment lost sixty men killed altogether, as well as a lot wounded. I count myself lucky to have come through without a scratch.’

Burton refilled his glass. ‘And all this was known about his death at the time?’

‘They didn’t want to tell you the truth, I can’t think why. But I got into trouble as well. We shouldn’t have stopped at the pub, but you know what soldiers are. Not that I think it would have made much difference with a horse like that, though I’ll regret to my dying day what happened.’

Burton wore his navy-blue suit, a button-sized chrysanthemum in his lapel, the tip of a white handkerchief pointing from the opposite top pocket, a polished watch chain across his waistcoat, and a large flat cap in his hand. People at the cemetery were in twos and threes, but he stood alone, looked at the rectangular tombstone, a marble scroll at the head. The two prongs of an embossed horseshoe pointed down, and though unable to read, he knew the words well enough:

‘IN MEMORY OF OLIVER THE BELOVED SON OF MARY ANN AND ERNEST BURTON WHO WAS ACCIDENTALLY KILLED WHILE DOING HIS DUTY NOVEMBER 15TH 1914. LATE FARRIER SOUTH NOTTINGHAMSHIRE HUSSARS.’

He stood by the grave, and at times Oliver was so fleshly vivid that he reached out to touch, and say a few words — before the agonizing truth came that his son was dead.

He threw the wilting flowers against the church wall, and carried the water-filled vase back to put the daffodils in, and stood upright, no words to his sorrow, as still as a dummy inadvertently left there, to stay until rotted into the soil by rain and be even closer to whoever was so intensely mourned.

Unwilling to go directly home, he replaced his cap and walked to the White Hart, to stand by the bar he had chatted over to Mary Ann thirty years ago. Emma Lewin, whom he had so much fancied, and who had been so good to them, was long since gone, and the landlord who gaffered in her place had ex-sergeant-major written all over his face, upright behind the pumps, potbellied and moustached, hair parted down his skull. A couple of chaps were listening to the story of his life, Burton getting little more than the end: ‘I was in the Ordnance Corps, all through the war, and swore every day that when I got out I would have a pub of my own.’

He should run it, instead of jawing, Burton not stopping to discover how he had found the money to set himself up. Energy to wear down after his pint, he walked over the Leen and the canal, leaving houses behind, up and over the railway bridge. Far left across the meadows was the line he had travelled on to get the gloves for Mary Ann, and again for the coveted claddach ring in his attempt to mollify her after doing what no man ever should. Packed trees on the heights of Clifton were painted darkly under a clouded sky too high to threaten rain, though a shower would be welcome for a richer sniff of the grass.

Sense told him that you couldn’t be on your own for long, but after being so close to Oliver it seemed an intrusion to hear a woman shouting: ‘Come down, you little monkey, or you’ll get your suit dirty.’ She held a bunch of flowers, and turned to the two younger women. ‘He’ll never listen,’ but laughing at her unnecessary concern.

Alma’s dark and slender companion stylishly smoked a cigarette: ‘I don’t see why you go to that cemetery every month.’

Burton looked across the nondescript fields, lighting a cigarette before facing an encounter impossible to avoid, recalling their stay at Matlock as if it had been last weekend. Her face was more full — plainer — not as it had come back to him since last seeing her.

‘I knew him,’ she retorted. ‘You don’t have to worry. He’s been dead a long time.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ the smarmy woman said.

‘I shall go whenever I want to,’ Alma said, ‘whatever your dislikes, dear Rachel.’

Rachel let the spent cigarette fall from its holder. ‘I shan’t say any more.’

Lydia hoped not, but was used to quarrels boiling up out of nothing, couldn’t understand why they shared a house when much of the time they seemed to like each other so little. In the beginning Alma had asked her to live with them, but Lydia knew that such a scheme would end in pain and turmoil, wanted in any case to stay where she was, small and dingy though her own place sometimes felt, bothering nobody and not being upset by them. The Old Age Pension was hardly enough, but she earned a few shillings dressmaking, and by looking after peoples’ children. ‘Oliver! Don’t fall into that ditch.’

‘I can see tadpoles.’ He kneed himself up a low tree in his neat short-trousered suit, and waved from the top: ‘I like it here. I’m the King of the Castle!’

Burton stood by the gate, and she noted his unmistakable stance, the same long jaw and firmly-angled chin, and though he looked at least the decade older he was still placed as if he owned the earth and was the only man on it. She couldn’t think why she had given herself to him — so long ago — except there was always Oliver to remind her. I fell in love, and the villain took advantage of me, unless in a fit of juvenile madness I was the one who did that.

His look demanded recognition, everything they had done burning in his possessive stare, irony and some humour on his lips as a hand went to the rim of his cap, and glanced the smartly clipped moustache on coming down.

The last time she was reminded of him was on seeing a man in the Duke of Portland’s retinue at an agricultural show that Rachel had wanted to attend, who wore a large flat cap in exactly the same way. She smiled, and went forward.

He was glad the two other women walked in different ways across the field. ‘I hardly expected to see you around here,’ he said.

‘I call at Oliver’s grave now and again, though I don’t often come this way, unless to let my son run about.’

He wondered how much better she would have felt if the grave had been his. ‘It’s a wonder we didn’t meet before, or that you saw some of my family there.’

‘I came across Edith once.’

‘Who’s the lad up the tree?’

Whatever he’d done he’d given her something to make life worthwhile, and the worst of the struggle was behind her. ‘Can’t you tell?’ she smiled.

A twitch at the left cheek told her he could. ‘Why didn’t you let me know?’

‘Didn’t Edith say I was pregnant?’

‘She might have done.’

‘I didn’t want to let you know, with any of your family around. You wouldn’t have wanted that. In any case I thought it best not to bother you.’

Pleased more than not at such consideration, he nodded towards Oliver. ‘So he’s mine?’

‘He can’t be anyone else’s.’

Rachel came back, stood aside with lips sourly closed, thinking it curious that Alma could have any connection to a man who looked like an old soldier from the war before the one before. Lydia had waited a long time, till this casual meeting with such a tall impressive man showed the last piece of her puzzle coming into place. You could see from the face, and the shape of his head, that he was Oliver’s father.

‘Fetch him over,’ Burton said.

‘Oliver, come here,’ she called in her schoolteacher’s voice as if he was miles away. ‘Come here at once.’

He ran. ‘What do you want?’

Burton noted the blue eyes and a fair curl over his forehead, while the shape of the nose, and the lips as if about to start, whistling, reminded him of Oliver, though the lad was his right enough. He put a hand towards him: ‘Shake this.’

‘Why should I?’

Burton laughed. He must be mine. ‘Do as I say.’

The tone gave no option, and Burton took the warm hand for a moment, then turned to Alma. ‘You aren’t married?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘and I never shall be. I’ve been a teacher for five years. And this is my friend, Rachel.’

A jaunty, intriguing woman, she wore a dark costume with a scrap of lace at the throat, picked a fleck of tobacco from small white teeth with a painted nail. He sensed the sort of woman who would never do for him, and there weren’t many he could say that about. Her reluctant hand came forward, so he offended her by a mere touch.

‘We share a house in Carlton,’ Alma said.

‘That’s why I didn’t see you.’

‘And this is my Aunt Lydia,’ to whom he gave the full hand, realizing that she was the one who had covered for her in Matlock, and afterwards cared for her. ‘We’re going on holiday to France next month,’ Alma told him.

‘I expect you’d rather go to Skegness,’ he said to Oliver.

‘I’ve not been there yet, so I don’t know what it’s like, do I?’ He had given up trying to understand the meaning behind all that was being said. ‘But I’ve been to Rachel’s cottage at Staithes.’

‘Rachel and I will be going on our own,’ Alma said, ‘and he’s to stay with Lydia.’

‘We’ll go into Belgium, to see my brother Charles’s grave,’ Rachel said. ‘He was killed.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

Oliver grasped his hand. ‘Who are you, Mister Man?’

The boy sensed more about Burton than his name, but what a bust-up it would cause if I told him, Alma thought.

‘Everybody calls me Burton, so you can as well.’

‘He seems to know you,’ she said, not altogether liking the idea, though supposed that blood would always tell.

‘A year ago I could have shown him the forge.’

‘I don’t think he’ll ever be a blacksmith.’

‘The trade’s finished,’ Burton said, seeing Rachel’s eyebrows go up. ‘There was none better. Both my sons have found good jobs because of it. I’ll take the little chap off your hands, while you go to the grave.’

More an order than a request, though Rachel’s lips curled in disapproval. He’s mine, Alma thought, not yours, anyway, let him be with a man for once. ‘Would you like to walk with Burton for half an hour?’

Oliver gripped his long legs. ‘Oh yes! That’s thirty whole minutes. Can it be thirty minutes and fifteen seconds?’

‘Bring him back to Lydia’s house on Park Street.’ She told the number. ‘We’ll be having tea there.’

‘I know where it is,’ Burton said.

Rachel watched them striding the lane hand-in-hand. ‘Why did you let him go off with that chap?’

She wanted to manage everything and everyone, and Alma wasn’t sure how much longer she’d care to put up with it. ‘I did it because I did.’

Burton bent his knees, to touch Oliver’s head. ‘The Trent’s not far away.’

‘Oh, not that same old dreary river.’ He looked at the shapes and veins of leaves, and threw them down. ‘I’d rather go to the Amazon.’

‘And where might that be?’

‘It’s a mighty river in Brazil, with fish that eat your fingers to the bone. Not like the piddling Trent, full of minnows. Lydia often takes me there because she thinks I like it.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Of course not. But I tell her I do.’

‘You’re a real little sharpshit.’

‘Rachel doesn’t like swearing.’

‘I’ll bet she doesn’t. Shall you tell her?’ — rather hoping he would.

‘I don’t think so. She’d get on at me. My mother doesn’t like it, either, but we sometimes swear at school, in the playground.’

‘Do you learn a lot there?’

‘I suppose so. But I’m good at reading and writing, and geography.’

The river was shot with cooling light, cloud lower above the ripples. He stopped by the dredger, and held out an arm, saying, ‘Pull this finger.’

‘What for?’

‘It’s giving me gyp. You’ll make it better.’

Amused yet distrustful — Burton had seen the expression on the other Oliver. The blood had done some funny twists and turns. The boy got a grip on the long bony finger. ‘You mean like this?’

He dampened a smile. ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’

Oliver pulled, angled against the ground, face reddening at the effort. ‘I’m doing my best.’

Burton let out a long splintering fart. George had tried the same game with him as an infant, to the amusement of all the others, while he could still be treated as a pet, and before he grew old enough to work.

‘Oh, you farted!’

He took the boy’s hand. ‘You’ll be a rum lad when you grow up.’ Spits of rain fell onto Oliver’s hair, so Burton used it as a reason to end the outing. ‘We’ll go back now, or your mother will miss spoiling you.’

‘She doesn’t spoil me. But she’ll miss me, I bet. She always worries about me.’

‘That’s no good.’

‘That’s what I say. And then Rachel gets on to me.’

He hurried the pace, to see if Oliver would keep up. ‘It sounds like you have two mothers, and that’s no good, either.’

His face twisted with dislike at the idea, a more delicate boy than he looked, which was even less good. ‘You’re a fine young lad,’ he said sternly, ‘but you must never let anything like that bother you. In fact you should never let anything bother you at all.’

‘I shan’t. But I’m tired, Burton.’

‘You’ve walked a long way.’ Back among the streets he arched his back down from full height. ‘Climb up me as if I’m a lamppost.’ He had played it with Oliver and the others in their early years, recollection more than effort giving an ache at the heart. ‘You can get on my shoulders, and you’ll see as far as Brazil from there.’

He set him squarely on, and crossed the main road towards Park Street, where he knew of a pub called the Black’s Head, good for a pint after he’d handed him back, knowing he would never see him again.

TWENTY-FIVE

Ivy pulled her coat collar up and fastened the scarf against a cold rain-laden wind, the smell of the air clean and good. Too dark to go along the canal and through the sawmill, it was even so lonely enough on the main road after leaving the building sites and the last glow of the nightwatchman’s fire. She carried a tin of food to give Burton at Wollaton pit two miles away, because he had sent word with a collier on his way home that he would be working till midnight, and Mary Ann was not to wait up.

Tall and strong like all the Burton daughters, she still didn’t fancy being alone in the dark, so carried the usual bag of pepper to sling in the face of anyone who might jump on her from a hedge, knowing that Mary Ann’s arcane method of defence was more to reduce anxiety than have much effect.

A pony and trap went by, a light back and front, the crack of a whip in the dull air, creating such a clatter on its way towards Nottingham you’d think the devil himself had come out of hell for a drive to frighten people. She had been to the coalmine in daytime, but when it was dark Sabina or Emily would come with her, laughter certain to keep them safe. Tonight they had been allowed to go to the Ilkeston Road Picture Palace.

Mary Ann told her someone had called that evening to see Burton, a tall impressive man, well-dressed and quietly polite. ‘Let your father know about it,’ she said, and Ivy repeated the message aloud every few minutes so as not to forget, and to gain courage while walking. Startled by an owl’s hoot from the marshes around Martin’s Pond, she hurried by the park walls dimly seen across the road. Perhaps the man who had called for Burton was a lost relative come back from Australia, and the family would one day come into a fortune, and he might fall in love and want to marry her, which couldn’t be, because Ernie Guyler was her sweetheart, and they would never chuck each other.

The lit-up Admiral Rodney was noisy with boozers, horses and carts and motor cars lined up outside. She felt safer, with only another half-mile to go. She and Ernie Guyler had walked in Shepherd’s Wood last Sunday, and even though he had consumption, or maybe because of it, and knowing he might not have long to live, he was able to make her happy. And she could play her part as well in that way. People at work said you might get left on the shelf at twenty-five if you didn’t look sharp, but she didn’t worry about that, as long as she had a good time.

Yellow and orange lights at the pit were close, and the man on the gate told her she’d find Burton in the engineering shop. ‘You can give the snap straight to him, duck.’

She made her way between sheds and buildings, so much machinery it was surprising anyone could hear what was being said. Coal, fire and sulphur gave a smell of the inferno and, behind Burton in the wide doorway, were enough jangling noises to go with it. He glared at her, as if not wanting to be seen in a place he didn’t own, but he was only wondering whether she had brought bad news from home. ‘What do you want?’

She put the tin forward. ‘Mam sent you some supper.’

He wore a large leather apron, tools in hand, features even thinner in the half-light. In a sour mood, because nobody liked working till midnight, he also thought she had been put to unnecessary trouble in having to walk so far, when he could have managed without eating till the end of his work. He took the tin as if grudgingly. ‘You needn’t have bothered.’

She walked the whole way back with his unappreciative words so rankling that she felt no fear, thinking she ought to have opened the paper bag and thrown the pepper in his face at getting not even a thank you and having given up her evening for the errand. Only when putting her hand to the gate latch at home did she recall the message Mary Ann had insisted that she recite, about the strange man who had come to the house. Ivy regretted her lapse because maybe Burton would have told her who he was. Then she was glad at having forgotten, laughing at the thought that it served the old devil right.

Mary Ann waited up for him nevertheless. ‘He was a very smart young man.’ They were undressing by the curtain-drawn four-poster bed. ‘He wouldn’t say what he wanted, and I didn’t like to seem nosy and ask, but you could tell by his voice he came from Wales.’

‘Did he say he’d call again?’

‘He mentioned tomorrow evening. I had a funny turn, because he looked a bit like your brother Edward when he was young.’ He had resembled Burton more, having black hair instead of fair, but she wouldn’t say so. ‘Haven’t you any idea who it might be?’

‘It’s a mystery to me.’ One of his longest yawns ever signalled the end of the matter. ‘I expect it’ll be solved.’ He got into bed and was soon on his way into sleep, taking speculation to be shared with no one.

A cup of Camp coffee in hand, he sat by the fire after his meal, while Mary Ann went to answer a firm knock at the door. ‘It’s that gentleman who came for you yesterday.’

‘Tell him I’ll be out directly.’ He stood before the Sandeman mirror to straighten his shirt collar, draw a hand through bristly hair, and put on a jacket and cap, to appear as neat as anyone could just back from work.

Mary Ann was right regarding the man’s likeness to the family, for he was tall and thin-faced, hair not quite as dark as she had said, more mousy, eyes grey and lips under a similar small moustache as if about to smile. He wore a pepper-and-salt suit, with a tie and well-ironed white collar, a good quality mackintosh over his arm, brogues highly polished. The feather of his smile was momentarily curbed when Burton, weighing him up in a second, asked: ‘What is it you want?’

‘Strangely enough,’ he glanced towards the lane as if someone might appear to stop him talking just as he had found the person he’d been looking for. ‘I’m in Nottingham for a few days, so thought it would be interesting to talk to you. My name’s David Ernest Dyslin. I was born near Pontllanfraith. I believe you know where that place is?’

A satisfactory speed of mind was necessary when faced with surprise or embarrassment but, all the same, he should have known what was coming. He grasped the man’s arm. ‘Walk to the end of the yard with me,’ glad none of the family were near to crowd in and listen. To delay matters, whatever they might turn out to be — though he had a good idea — he asked: ‘What line of trade might you be in?’

Dyslin smiled at such a question, the same faint curl of the lip as came onto Burton’s when amused at giving information from an unassailable vantage point. ‘I’m a solicitor, here on some will and property business for a client in Cardiff. I’ll be going back tomorrow, so I’m more than happy to find you.’

‘People don’t make such a point of it for nothing.’ He accepted the offered cigar from his leather case, as yet too astonished to think of him as his son, but refused a match and struck one of his own, holding the flame a few moments over the end of the cigar, then pressing the fire out with two fingers, and rubbing the burnt part of the match to a point. Making sure it was sharp enough, he stuck it in the end that would go into his mouth, firstly so that it could be held more securely between the teeth, and secondly that the juice would go into the wood instead of his mouth, and thirdly that the end of the cigar wouldn’t get soggy. Smoke flew out over the lane. ‘Now you’ve found me.’

‘Do you recall anything about the name Dyslin?’

Burton puffed on the cigar — a good one — and looked into his eyes. ‘I knew a woman in Wales who had it.’

‘I’m her only child.’

Every day, no matter how far back, was only yesterday as far as he was concerned but, judging by the age of the man before him, he could acknowledge that thirty-six years had passed all too quickly. ‘How is she?’

Dyslin, fascinated by Burton’s procedure in lighting the cigar, thought he might follow it himself sometime. ‘She died, two years ago.’ He tapped ash on top of the fence while waiting for a phrase of regret — which didn’t come. ‘Before she died …’

Burton wondered if there’d be any blawting, which would be disgraceful in a grown man. It was two years ago, after all.

‘She told me how I came into the world.’

‘We met on a train.’ Burton wished for such an adventure today, but knew it was unlikely to come more than once in a lifetime. ‘She told me her husband had just died. He was an engineer at some pit in Staffordshire.’

‘Your memory is good.’

‘It’s hard not to remember things like that.’ When did you forget anything, especially when silly damned people reminded you so unexpectedly? ‘You must have had a job finding me.’

‘Not at all. She told me your name and your calling, and where you came from. I’m used to tracing people.’

There were many Burtons in Nottingham, but it could hardly be denied he’d found the right one. ‘How did you become a solicitor?’ Being told to mind his own business might provide sufficient reason for walking away, but Dyslin had the sense and politeness to tell him.

‘My uncle, the Methodist minister who took in my mother, was a good man, and I did so well at school he paid the two-hundred-pound premium for me to be an articled clerk for five years. After I qualified I enlisted and went to the war, like everyone else, and didn’t get into practice till I came out.’ In spite of the silence Burton knew he had more to say. ‘I got the notion of coming to see you as soon as the opportunity arose. I know my mother wanted it.’

They observed each other with an intensity that couldn’t deny their connection, stance exactly alike, even something in the shape of their hands and the casual smoking of cigars. Dyslin was talkative, but Burton supposed he would be in such a situation. He could hardly have inherited the tongue-wag from his mother, who’d never said much. ‘She didn’t want to marry again?’

‘She told me that the only person she ever loved was you.’

‘I did think a lot of her, and it’s good of you to let me know.’

‘She said it, not me.’ He showed less of a smile. ‘But it’s been on my mind the last year or so to talk to you. I’d assumed my father to be the mining engineer, and you can imagine my surprise, for a while anyway, when she told me just before her death that it could only have been you, a journeyman blacksmith.’

Burton gave a short dry laugh. ‘Strange things happen in the world.’

‘Anyway, you might like to know I’m getting on well in life.’ His smile turned from one of amusement to irony: ‘Though there were times during the war in France when I wished no one had ever met my mother.’

‘I don’t suppose you were the only one.’

‘At least I stayed alive, and came out a captain in the South Wales Borderers. Now I have three children, all on their way to being grown up.’

So I’m a grandfather again, which makes seven, the last time I counted. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

He held something wrapped in tissue paper. ‘My mother wanted me to give you this. She said you wiped her tears with it at the worst time of her life.’

Burton looked at the folded handkerchief. ‘So I did.’

‘I have a lot to thank you for.’

He put the handkerchief in his pocket, something precious to remind him of Minnie. The regret that he hadn’t persisted in trying to marry her was caught by the tail as it sped through his mind. ‘She was a very fine woman. Knowing her was one of the best times of my life.’

They stood in silence, till Dyslin said, ‘I understand you not inviting me into your house, while your wife is there.’

‘What happened between me and your mother was long before I got married.’

‘I imagine so. The war altered many attitudes, otherwise my mother might not have told me about you.’

‘Come and see me whenever you like.’

Dyslin’s cigar went sparking into the lane. ‘I might not have another chance. If you want to reach me, here’s my address. My uncle was a father to me nearly all my life, but I don’t mind thinking a little of you in that way, though I shan’t bother you.’

He’s just as obliging as his mother. Burton thought himself, lucky that it ran in the family. The white piece of calling card fitted into his waistcoat pocket, well hidden for going into the house. The handshake was so firm that Dyslin hoped no bones would need resetting before going back to the office, though whether the pressure made up for his putative father’s off-handedness was still hard to decide.

Burton watched him striding down the lane, glad that at least one of his sons had made something of himself. He stood a few minutes, unable to move. Oliver had died, but he had gained another that had been growing up in Wales all the time Oliver was alive. The shock usually came long enough after the event to poleaxe him — for a moment or two. Life was long with so many happenings that you didn’t know about and therefore couldn’t control. He felt weirdly blinded as if, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, he didn’t belong in the world of smithery but in a more expansive, a richer and better style to which he was entitled yet had never been able to enter because he was doomed to be who he was.

A shake of the head, he knew it wouldn’t do, and with the shadiness of dusk coming on went into the house to receive the expected questions from Mary Ann.

‘Who was he?’

‘The son of a friend I knew in Wales. He came to tell me his father died recently, and thought I’d like to know. They’ve done well for themselves. The chap was a solicitor up here on business. He didn’t go much out of his way.’

‘He looked a lot like you.’

‘Some must. I can’t help that.’

‘Ivy thought so as well.’

‘She would.’

There was no way of getting anything out of him if he didn’t want to explain. ‘We can’t both be wrong. You don’t tell anybody what they want to know.’

Why should I? It always pays to keep your trap shut. ‘Is there any whisky left in that bottle?’

‘It’s only half-gone.’

‘Make a pot of tea then, and we’ll put a splash in.’

Pouring some into a glass, he complained it was tasteless. ‘Oswald and Thomas have been guzzling from the bottle, and levelled it up with water.’

Such remarks weren’t as serious as might be assumed, she knew, or his words didn’t come out the way he wanted because he had held them back too long. Maybe he only spoke so as to hear the sound of his own voice, and when he did the children answered back and made him angry.

But she was sure Oliver would never have drunk his father’s whisky on the sly, and the little I take, she thought, can’t make much difference. God help anyone if he caught them. Luckily it’s his nature to suspect everybody, then he can’t settle onto who in particular it was.

Thomas and Oswald might well have glued their lips to it, Burton thought, and I wouldn’t put it past Ivy to sip a drop, or even Emily, whose eyes glistened unnaturally from time to time when she acted a bit dafter than usual. Maybe the whole family was at it, queued up to take their turn for a good swig when he wasn’t there, and if so they’d all end up a bit sillier than they already were, or with their livers eaten away, which would serve them right.

‘I suppose that’s what you used to do with your father’s whisky when he wasn’t looking,’ Mary Ann said. ‘But if you think it’s the others you’d better lock it up.’

‘I’ll be damned if I’ll do such a thing in my own house. If you can’t rely on your children to keep their hands off what doesn’t belong to them who can you rely on?’

He didn’t wonder at her laugh, but she had her notions, and he had his. She was welcome to hers, and could say what she liked, but he would keep his to himself. In most ways he lived in the time of when they had fallen in love, she thought, and would never change, which didn’t make her unhappy. Holding more or less the same views was good for both, no matter how old they were beginning to look. All the same, she realized somewhat more than him how times were changing.

He wanted to tell her about David Ernest Dyslin, being pleased more than not at the meeting, but nipped his tongue as she poured the tea, and he put a good measure of whisky in both cups. ‘We might as well drink it before the others sup it away.’

If he wouldn’t tell her who the man Dyslin was she wouldn’t admit it was she who liked a tot from his bottle now and again. ‘That’s a devilish thing to say about your own children. They’d never dream of stealing your whisky. It’s just that the older you get the stronger it has to be.’

He touched her hand. ‘I’ve got them weighed up.’

‘It takes one to know one.’ She liked talking, as a drop of the fiery stuff took effect. ‘That young man was your son, wasn’t he? It had something to do with when you were in Wales.’

He gave a grunt, then smiled. ‘It happened long before we put the banns up.’

‘That’s nice to know.’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘You ought to have brought him into the house.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’

‘He’ll go away thinking we’re a pack of heathens, keeping him outside like that.’

‘He had no business around here.’

‘If he comes again I shall invite him in,’ though he was unlikely to return with the welcome he’d had.

‘He had to see what I looked like.’

‘I hope he wasn’t disappointed.’

‘He can please himself. Have some more whisky. It won’t harm you. It’s mostly water, only next time you have a nip when I’m not here don’t put too much in.’

It pained Mary Ann that the children had always hated and feared their father. With Ivy it was more hate than fear, whereas the others feared more than they hated. Edith both hated and feared, but regarded him with contempt as well, and defied him as much as she could get away with, which was why she had been the first to escape by marrying Tommy Jackson. There had always been more of Burton in her than Burton could put up with, and she had more waywardness than he was able to tolerate.

Pushing Douglas in his cot by Woodhouse on her way to see Mary Ann and her sisters, she stopped at the railway bridge because the way through was deep in mud, no dry place on either side to save her sinking in.

She’d been trained by Mary Ann to be a good cook and housekeeper, so after Jackson’s death she had found work living in at a large house near Radcliffe. Douglas was looked after by Tommy’s parents, and she only saw him for a couple of hours on Sunday, which was pain enough for her full heart.

She wondered how to avoid getting cold and wet to the ankles. The family was expecting her, and would worry if she didn’t appear.

The tall bullish young man who came out of the beer-off wore a Norfolk jacket under his army greatcoat, and a white scarf hanging to his waist. ‘What’s wrong then, duck? Can’t you get through?’

‘It’s not that.’ She drew herself upright. ‘It’s just that I’m waiting for a nice big boat with a velvet seat to take me. One usually comes if I stand here long enough.’

‘That’s me, then,’ he laughed. ‘I’m not the Titanic, but I’ll get you through all right.’ Before she could think of anything really sarcastic he picked up the cot with Douglas in it and carried it into the tunnel. ‘I’ll come back for you in a bit.’

He splashed his way along, and lodged the cot safely in a dry part of the track. ‘Just wait there, you little crumb,’ he said to the child. ‘And don’t cry, or I’ll stop your windpipe. Your mam’ll be here soon.’ Douglas opened his eyes and looked over the barrier with stolid curiosity, then smiled as if his father had come back undead from the war.

Well-built and strong, he cradled Edith in his arms, and before she could say what the hell do you think you’re up to? he went splashing through the mud. ‘This is like milk chocolate. It’s nothing, a paddling pool. I was a gunner in the Royal Artillery at Wipers. Now that was what you could call mud. There was lakes of it. I was a sergeant, and they promoted me because everybody else was either dead, drowned in the mud, or in hospital.’

She could well believe it. His brutal authority had a certain attraction, but only for as long as he would use it to protect a woman from the world, and not turn it against her — a young man to be wary of.

‘I hate mud more than death. I’d run from anything that looks like it. But this ain’t mud as I’ve known it. It’s more like cocoa, and fit to drink while I’m carrying somebody as nice and warm as you.’ He set her down, and the gap between his otherwise white and even teeth gave him a mischievous and untrustworthy look. ‘Don’t I deserve a kiss now?’

‘You deserve a couple, I suppose, but you aren’t going to get one. Thanks, all the same.’

‘I can wait,’ he said. ‘I’m going up the lane to the Cherry Orchard, so at least I can walk a little way with you. You can’t deny me that. Here, I’ll push your cot.’ She let him. ‘My name’s Doddoe. That’s what everybody calls me. Surname, Atkin. You can have my army number if you like. I’ll never forget that. But I didn’t hear what your name was. Must have been the guns that did my ears in.’

She wondered how to get rid of him. ‘It’s Edith. And this is Douglas.’

‘Are you going very far, Edith? I’m going after rabbits in Robin’s Wood.’ He stopped the cot and stood closer than she liked, opened his coat to show nets spilling out. A ferret’s sharp little eyes from another pocket frightened her. Such a big girl, he thought, as if it might run up her legs and bite her quim. If it did I’d skin the little devil alive. ‘It’s only Percy.’ He laughed, and showed her a cosh. ‘It don’t even earn its keep, though it’s a hungry little bleeder.’ He resumed his pushing. ‘I’ll knock it on the napper one of these days and throw it to the cat. Or I’ll sell him and buy myself a pint.’

His talk sickened her, glad to stop by the gate. ‘I’m going in here, so you can let me have the cot now.’

He was startled. ‘That’s Burton’s place.’

‘I know it is. He’s my father.’

He put a hand to his cap, pushed it further back over his tight fair curls. ‘Bleddy hell! I don’t want anything to do with him. He’s a hard bogger. I once asked him for a job, and thought the swine was going to kill me.’

‘Don’t you talk about my father like that.’

‘Well, that’s how he is. But he’s got an eye for the women, I do know that much.’

‘You can piss off.’ She pushed him from the cot handle, and he seemed willing enough to walk up the lane alone, muttering about Burton, she was sure, words she had at one time used herself but didn’t care to hear from a poaching braggart like Doddoe Atkin. Burton was her father, after all.

She watched the one-man poaching machine turn into the Cherry Orchard, thinking she would never marry someone like that, helpful though he had been, repeating the words with more determination on leaving the cot in the shed across the yard so that it wouldn’t get wet in the rain.

She pulled Douglas into the house. Burton sat in his Windsor chair by the fire. ’emily, clear out of the way so that your married sister can sit down.’

Emily sat on the rug to play with Douglas, her talk confirming for Burton that she was just the right age for him. ‘I thought I wouldn’t get here,’ Edith said. ‘I’ve never seen such deep mud under the bridge. But a chap called Doddoe Atkin carried the cot, with Douglas inside, all through it. He was very considerate.’

She had heard many grunts from Burton but was long to recall the one he gave now. ‘He’s a bad sort, the worst of the lot. I know about him and his ways. The rest of his family’s rotten, as well. He was in the pub the other night with some of his pals, and I think he must have got thrown out of the army for swearing.’

Edith thought nobody could be as bad as Burton said. To him everybody was bad, so whoever he said was bad could never be bad to her. ‘He helped me a lot just now.’

Pleasant, comely, and fair to all men as she was, you couldn’t tell her anything. People went to hell in their own way, and little could be done to stop them, but he didn’t want her to fall under the pall of Doddoe Atkin, since she had already suffered enough. Because Burton had brought the girls up strictly Mary Ann also hoped they’d never marry men who would treat them worse than they thought Burton had.

Emily was spoiling Douglas with a jam pasty, and not doing much good to her own face either, while Edith sat with a cup of tea and a slice of caraway seed cake, talking about the place she worked at. ‘The doctor’s wife is so mean it’s a wonder I’m not skin and bone. At teatime on Saturday she puts a big cake on the table, after the bread and butter, and her five kids sit too frightened to ask for some. Well, I stand there feeling sorry for the poor little things, because I know that when she locks it back in the cupboard I’m going to help myself. I know where she keeps the key, so I don’t starve. I shouldn’t stay there if I did. She must think a ghost gets in to gobble it down.’

‘That’s not honest,’ Mary Ann commented. ‘But you should tell her to feed you properly.’

At the bridge on her way back, when Edith thought there’d be no option but to push the cot through and spoil her shoes, a voice from the bushes said: ‘Don’t worry, duck. I’m still here. I came back early to help you.’

He was hard to make out in the half-dark. ‘Doddoe?’

‘You weren’t waiting for somebody else, was you? I wondered if your husband might come to meet you. That’s why I hid myself.’

‘I haven’t got one.’

‘Some rotten swine left you in the lurch, did he?’

‘He was killed in the war. He was in the Gunners, as well.’

‘A terrible lot of ’em caught it.’ He took hold of the cot. ‘I nearly went west more than once. I had a charmed life, though. Just a few scratches, and not many could say that who was in it from start to finish. Wait here, duck. I’ll get the lad through first.’ He bent down and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Won’t I, Douglas? What a lovely lad you’ve got, Edith. You’ll have to get him out of the cot and make him walk a bit more. Then he can come poaching with me.’

‘He bleddy won’t.’

‘Go on! He’ll love it.’ He came back to say she would have to ride piggy-back. ‘It’s easier that way, because I’m tired, and you’ll be more comfortable.’

‘I think you’re trying it on.’

‘I am, duck. I’ve got to confess.’ Even the darkness couldn’t hide the dazzle of his smile, the faint gap between his teeth accentuating what charm he had. Her warm arms went around his neck, and she recalled Burton’s harsh words, which he would have used against any man she mentioned, only wanting to spoil her life. Doddoe had even remembered Douglas’s name. ‘Where do you work?’

‘I’m a bricklayer, and I’m earning good money. They’re building a lot of houses fit for heroes.’

‘Why do you go poaching?’

‘For a bit of sport.’

‘It’s not very honest.’

The word shocked him. ‘Honest? Well, it might not be, but everybody does it around here.’

‘My father doesn’t.’

‘Burton wouldn’t, would he?’ Setting her down, he offered a Park Drive, but she didn’t smoke. He lit one for himself. ‘Even Shakespeare’s mother got done for poaching.’

‘Who’s Shakespeare?’ She recalled Oliver mentioning the name, so she was testing him.

‘How the hell do I know? I heard somebody say it in the Jolly Higglers the other night. He might have been a teacher from across the road, showing off. “Shakespeare’s mother was caught poaching,” he said in his posh voice. I heard it as clear as a bell.’

‘A likely story.’

‘Anyway, duck, I’ve got three rabbits in my pocket, so I’m going to give you one. It’ll make a nice stew for you and young Douglas. Won’t it, you lardy titch?’

She wanted to say no, but thought what a blessing it would be for the Jacksons, who had little money and could do with some help. Now and again she gave them a pat of butter, some scrag-ends of meat and a few bones, or a cigar for old Jackson which she hoped wouldn’t be missed from the doctor’s leather case.

The smell of rain on the rabbit’s fur almost made her stomach heave, its body as limp as that of a dead cat. The lane joined the main road. ‘You can leave me now. I’ll be all right from now on.’

‘Do I get a kiss, or don’t I?’

‘No you don’t, you fawce bogger.’

He laughed. ‘Well, I’ve enjoyed talking to you. I’ll see you at the bridge next week, in case the tunnel’s still muddy. You never know. I might even be there if it’s as dry as snuff.’

Burton at dinnertime berated Thomas for having stayed out late the previous night. ‘Two o’clock in the morning’s not good enough.’

‘I’m over twenty-one, so I should have the key to the door.’ He dared to answer back, as if surprised at his father’s unworldliness. Earning his own wages from the factory led him to believe he could do as he liked.

Burton lifted his fist for a solid smack at his son’s head, to let him know his place, as everyone must who was still in the house, but for once he wasn’t quick enough. Thomas, eyes wide open at what he took as an unjustified telling-off, was caught out by an eruption of cock-o’-the-walk confidence born from being hard done by for so long, and at the idea that a man of his age, who worked hard, should not be able to come and go as he pleased as long as he paid his board and no one but himself was harmed by it. He got one in first, and a good one, such a blow at Burton’s chest that at the unexpected ferocity he almost fell to the floor.

Thomas was more terrified at what he had done than his father was surprised that such a thing could happen. On his feet in a second, and even more enraged at Ivy so openly amused at what she saw as his downfall, Burton picked up the woodsman’s axe and went for his son as if intending to kill him.

Thomas fled, and Mary Ann — she would, wouldn’t she? — wondered where he had gone, but Burton said that someone like Thomas would always find a bed, probably with a woman, until her husband came back, or she got fed up with him, which in either case couldn’t be for long. ‘So stop worrying.’

Thomas’s re-entry into the house was negotiated by Mary Ann, and in agreeing to it Burton may have wanted Thomas back so that, Ivy said to Oswald, he could take a stern revenge. Unashamed at his reverse, knowing that hard lessons were often the best, Burton was confident that in any future set-to he would get his blow in first. At the same time he was amused at having a son courageous enough to tackle him, but if he stopped chafing at his lateness it may have been in the hope that one night he wouldn’t come back at all.

Oliver would never have behaved in such a way, and as for Oswald, he’s married and taking care of Helen who is so weak and delicate you’d think she didn’t have long for this world, though newly-born Howard would no doubt help to keep her in it. Oswald hadn’t stayed on as a blacksmith, won’t work at the colliery as I have to, though nobody can blame him because it’s harder graft than walking along the canal tapping the lock gates now and again to make sure they’re not leaking. Times might be changing, as Mary Ann always claims, but there are fewer and fewer men to do the hardest work.

When Edith decided to marry Doddoe, Burton said: ‘Don’t do it,’ but she did, because when did they ever not do what you told them not to? You said don’t, and they always did. Even if you’d said do it, hoping they would do the opposite to spite you, they’d have done it anyway, since they had no sense and couldn’t avoid throwing themselves at men with no trade, no dignity, and no brains.

If his girls blamed him for the rough beds they had to lie on after getting married they were wrong, because only the wicked and the weak held their parents responsible for what happened to them. Even if the parents had done what their children complained about, whoever blamed them would become parents themselves one day, and do even worse to their children, or at least no better.

He spat in the fire. As for your own kids, it was best never to open your mouth, then you wouldn’t get answers you didn’t like, or they wouldn’t do something to regret. But he was sorry for Edith, helpless under the reign of a brute and a bully such as Doddoe Atkin had always been, boozing what wages he got and never a thought for her or their children. Rebecca’s coalminer in Yorkshire at least provided for his family, though that man Seaton, whom Sabina married last month, was a numbskull as well, an upholsterer only fit to work for his father.

He pushed the dog from the fire. He wanted his girls to marry men like himself, but there was only one of him, and there were too many of the other sort walking around. In choosing men different to himself the girls found that times hadn’t altered as much as they had hoped. He remembered scorning his father for saying: ‘Men are lightweights these days,’ yet the old man had been right, because men who now worked as little as they could get away with didn’t treat their families well.

‘It’s always been like that,’ Mary Ann said, thinking he went on too long about it. ‘At the White Hart I noticed how many used to spend money they should have given to their wives and children. It was sickening. If times don’t change, as you say, it’s only because they’ve always been the same.’

She went up to bed, so tired that earlier nights were needed. He poked the bars, the top layer of coal falling lower in the grate, then put a bundle of sticks in the oven to be tinder-dry for Mary Ann starting a fire in the morning.

Soft and idle Thomas, who wasn’t yet in, was only interested in going after women. Well-built and over six feet tall, with short thick wavy hair, he had farseeing blue eyes which even so, Burton was convinced, showed nothing but what was immediately in front, and he came in most nights with lipstick on his collar (which Mary Ann had to wash off) whistling some senseless tune like a love-sick canary.

Pushed out of the door, the dog sloped off to its kennel across the yard. He came back and drew the rug away from the fire, because dead ash might throw a spark and send the house up in flames while they slept in their beds. You couldn’t be too careful. He turned the lamp out, and felt his way upstairs.

TWENTY-SIX

A large red handkerchief covered his left eye, keeping the blood all but invisible. Pain drummed as if the hammers of six smiths beat against the anvil of his head, the rest of his face whitening as he rode his bicycle against the cold east wind. The way seemed endless, and he was tempted to call at Oswald’s house at the top of Radford Bridge Road, for whisky to dull the agony, but he didn’t want Helen to make a fuss at the sight of his wound. She was always so fluttery and nervous, unless too busy burbling over baby Howard, so he pedalled on through Woodhouse, unable to care who looked at him.

Mary Ann cried out when he stood at the mirror to untie the handkerchief. ‘Ernest!’ — a rare word for the living part of the house.

He noted it, but excused her, since he felt half-dead from pain and mortification.

‘What have you done to yourself?’

He sat by the fire, deadened flesh and bones coming slowly to life. ‘A piece of steel flew in my eye. Some fool of a striker got the angle wrong, and hit a bit too hard.’ He lowered the handkerchief, to show torn flesh, the eye a circle of blue, dull yellow and red, as if the hammer and not a mere spark had flown at his face.

‘Oh, God, you’ve been blinded.’

‘Only in one eye.’ He looked around, as if to see all that was visible from the other. ‘It’s lucky I was born with two. I shan’t be eating tonight, but how much whisky’s left? I’d like a pull or two, unless the others have gluttoned it.’

She fetched the bottle from the parlour. ‘I’ll heat some water, and bathe the wound.’

‘If you think it’ll do some good.’

‘It looks terrible.’

‘I don’t want to be seen by anybody in this state. Hand me the whisky before you get started. It’s giving me gyp.’

He didn’t complain about the strength, or look for the mark he had mentally put there, but held the bottle to his mouth, which he had never done before. After her gentle dabbing with a swab of clean linen he went upstairs and got into his nightshirt, lay in the dark, sparks bombarding his head as if trying to break through skin and tissue to his brain.

He set off at five o’clock to do his day’s stint at the pit. Mary Ann asked him not to, but he knew what he was doing: you only stopped when you stopped for good. He felt justified when within a week the swelling around the eye began to diminish, though he saw nothing from it, and didn’t need telling that he never would again. He asked Mary Ann to make two eyepatches. ‘I don’t care to have anybody looking at the mess.’

‘What do you need two for?’

‘I’ll tell you, only don’t ask again. I want a brown one for everyday, and to go to work in — a piece of strong cloth will do. Then I want the smartest one you can make, from black velvet, for when I get dressed up and go out.’

The pain was so intense at times that he was unable to be among the family. He took the bottle of whisky into the parlour, drew the curtains, and sat in silence. Mary Ann told the others not to disturb him, or make any noise. On going to see how he was, the only person allowed to, he’d be sitting upright in a chair, glass and bottle before him on the table, the world not so sealed off that he didn’t hear everything said in the living room.

The throbbing would have given even more gyp had he but let it. Pain burned a cavern in his head, a space which, by an effort, he imagined as four compartments. As if by some trick he prevented his senses from entering more than one, where he would corral the pain and endure it until, like a miracle, it went away sufficiently for him to go back among the family, whom he would astonish or dismay with his knowledge of all they had said in his absence.

Ivy said, though not in front of Mary Ann, that God had got back at Burton twice in his life: once when He had taken his son, and again when He had put out his eye. What she couldn’t know was that Burton saw just as well with the other, and that with only one eye his hearing became twice as sharp, for he overheard her saying it to Thomas, who told her to keep her thoughts to herself. Burton couldn’t forgive such a depth of malice, which neither he nor anyone else in the family could reach. Had Emily made the statement she would not be responsible, though she wasn’t hard-hearted enough to come up with anything like that. Ivy should have known better because, for all her bitter dislike, she had to go on living with him in the same house.

Nor was he unaware that she sometimes referred to him as ‘Old Nelson-one-eye’. He heard her, from the bedroom window, say it to Edith while walking in the garden, a remark he found so disrespectful to level at someone who was not only her father but a man who suffered so much that he was unable to go down and give her the smack across the mouth she deserved, or even ever to say anything, for to accept that one of his own flesh and kin could be so uncaring was more than pride would take. Whoever could be so slighting about another’s misfortune would one day suffer for it, and though he might not be alive as a witness, that didn’t lessen his satisfaction at the prospect. He couldn’t kick her out of the house as was deserved because she was, after all, part of the family, who probably thought that, hating him as she did, she had to stay at home for Mary Ann’s sake, while he often assumed that she didn’t clear out because she wanted to go on tormenting him.

The unease Ivy always felt in his presence was so thick, Burton said to Mary Ann, that you’d need a knife to cut into it. He wondered why no one ever asked her to marry him. She was well liked at work — so it seemed — knew plenty of men, and went out often enough, yet no one would take her on. He didn’t have to think far for the reason. Her tongue was more bitter than a bumboy’s arse, and he couldn’t imagine what had made her that way. He may have brought the girls up too strictly, but Ivy had been treated no worse than the others.

Mary Ann said he ought to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t, and went on suffering. In any industrial trouble he walked out with the others, which as a journeyman he wasn’t obliged to do, so was respected at the pit. The union representative said he could get compensation from the colliery owners of a hundred and twenty-five pounds, but the eye would have to be removed by surgery first, and apart from not wanting any part of his flesh interfered with Burton suspected he would be left with an uglier hole than before.

‘In any case, it was my fault,’ he said to Mary Ann. ‘I knew that striker was no good, but they were in a hurry for the piece. It was within my rights to say I didn’t want him, but I didn’t. For once in my life I was careless. I kicked him so hard afterwards I’ll bet he didn’t sit down for a week. One eye in my head or not, I got him right where I should have done. And since it was my fault there’s one thing I do know: you have to pay for your mistakes.’

‘All the same,’ she said, ‘you ought to put in a claim.’

‘I don’t beg for anything.’

‘It isn’t begging.’

‘I don’t ask, either.’

And that was that. He had never been to a hospital, and wouldn’t go now. ‘You always come out worse than before you went in,’ he said and, being the man he was, his words were final.

Ivy was so in love with Ernie Guyler that Burton thought the time of getting shut of her couldn’t be far off. He took more than usual care not to find fault with him when he called. He was distant, but polite and, though not asking him into the house, shook his hand gently, Guyler being so thin he seemed in danger of being blown away by the softest breeze, especially if it had perfume on it.

He halfway liked Guyler because he was tall and well-dressed: a brown suit with sharply creased trousers, a tie carefully knotted and fixed in place with a pin, a fashionable Fair Isle pullover, a raglan overcoat, brilliantly shining shoes, and a handkerchief in his lapel pocket ironed and folded into shape by a loving mother. His dark hair was brilliantined neatly back, the only fault being that he wore neither hat nor cap, but his gaunt though well-featured face was always pleasant, a half-smile due to sensing perhaps his more than usual impermanence in the world.

Ivy saw Burton’s leniency towards her courtship as a hope that she would marry as soon as possible, but it wasn’t so easy to get rid of her — and she knew this to be in Burton’s mind. Having fallen in love with a man who had consumption from working two decades in the tobacco factory, he was sure to die soon after they were married, in which case she would certainly come home again.

Another thing was that if she married Ernie before he died she would lose her place at the factory, because no married woman was allowed to work there. Then if — or more likely when — Ernie died soon after the marriage, she would be a widow and out of a job as well, or at least not get such a good one again.

Burton indeed saw these pennies moving behind the reasonably clear glass of her mind, as he rested from chopping logs by the fence and watched them go hand-in-hand towards the Cherry Orchard on Sunday afternoon to get what they could while it was possible, for it was plain that Guyler would be dead before any wedding could take place, since the salty cough he eternally carried seemed to be shredding his lungs. Ivy certainly knew how to choose them.

They reached the huge elm whose inside had been burned out by lightning, in which two or more people could shelter from the rain. Ernie drew her close. ‘Your father never says much.’

‘He didn’t to any of us at home, either.’

‘I often wonder whether people like him have got something to hide.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s as plain as a pikestaff, to me anyway.’

He wiped his mouth after a bout of coughing that rattled every bone in his body. ‘Why don’t you like him? He’s your father, after all.’

‘Because he’s always been a swine to me, and to the others as well. He interferes in everything, and though he never uses bad language he can be so sarcastic that you want God to strike him dead. Still,’ and he saw her smile in the dim light, ‘God got back at him twice in his life — so far — when he took his firstborn son, and then when he knocked out his eye.’

He pressed her hand, though couldn’t say whether he altogether liked her, but did when she leaned closer and offered her lips for a kiss.

She thought Ernie a bit slow on the uptake when talking about other people. ‘Don’t let’s worry about that old so-and-so. We’ve got better things to do.’

He could only agree. They left their hiding-place, whose smell of burnt ash irritated his chest, and set out for Robin’s Wood, hoping it wouldn’t rain again before they did what they longed to do.

Brian was six when Sabina his mother first took him to Old Engine Cottages. The country footpath led through a land of wonders after the streets smelling of horse turds and melting gas tar. She held him on the parapet of the railway bridge to see a train go by, and watch the twirling spokes of the colliery head-stocks that circled so merrily he felt sick and had to be pulled down.

She stopped at the gate to rub lipstick away. ‘Your grandad wouldn’t want to see me wearing this. Another thing is he likes to see little boys with a clean face, so be sure to have a good wash whenever you come on your own.’

The house was an oasis of calm and plenty compared to his dole-stricken home, because Burton worked at the pit, and Thomas and Ivy paid their board. At the weekend Ernie Guyler opened a twenty packet of Player’s and gave him the cigarette card, as well as a ha’penny from the shilling packet if it came out of a machine.

Mary Ann saw a shadow of Oliver in Brian, for his curiosity about books, and the cast of his lips on breaking into a question, or his smile on asking for something to eat.

He sometimes stayed overnight in the same bed as his Uncle Thomas, which was no hardship because he shared one with two sisters and a brother at home. Sent upstairs at nine o’clock, he was still awake when Thomas came in at midnight whistling a tune from pub or dance hall, and having been with some woman or other (he was a great man for the ladies, Ivy said) and Brian would get a whiff of his scent, and hear the clash of silver and coppers emptying into a dish on the dressing table. Thomas smoothed the ironed handkerchief for further use, folded his trousers carefully on a clothes hanger behind the door, and Brian would feel the bed sag as his tall and handsome uncle fell in to sleep.

After a breakfast of sausage, bacon and fried potatoes, Thomas wheeled his bike from the wash house, checked every moving part, and inflated the tyres to as hard as concrete. He rode every Sunday along the canal bank as far as Trowell selling fishing tickets for the navigation company at twopence apiece to anglers, keeping a farthing to himself for each one. The day’s takings on a warm weekend added a useful few shillings to his spending money. ‘You can come with me, if you’re a good lad.’ Brian didn’t think he had ever been anything else, as Thomas set him on the crossbar. ‘But keep your legs away from the pedals.’

Ivy had told Brian that Thomas could neither read nor write, but he noticed that no mistakes were ever made in dealing with the clutch of blue tickets, or how much was to be deducted for each one sold. At the counting of pennies and threepenny bits back at the house Brian hoped there would be a coin for himself but, as Ivy also said — who did give him a penny now and again — Thomas was so mean (except perhaps with the women he kept on a string) that he wouldn’t give you the skin off his nose.

Brian was always glad at not having stuck his feet in the spokes and brought them crashing onto the towpath, which possibility worried him every second, since it was difficult to keep his legs in the right position. When he got cramp he was shamed into asking his uncle to stop. He was also fearful on seeing from his high point the cliff-like brick sides of the deep locks, and wondered how he would climb out if his whistling and carefree uncle’s feet slipped on the pedals and they both went in. But the bicycle and its burdens were like feathers under Thomas, a strong man in his thirties, charging along to claim money from the next fisherman, who glowered over the water as if to become invisible and not have to part with his tuppence.

In the garden Brian picked potatoes from their furrows and, collecting the tops, pulled them in the laden barrow to a corner where his grandfather lit a fire and left them to smoulder, a vegetable smell Brian took with him into sleep. Rotten potatoes were dumped into a compost heap within squared-off planks next to the field, a mulch taking the place of horse manure which was no longer common due to fewer horses on the road, Burton telling him that in any case thousands hadn’t come back from the war.

When Brian scraped up shit and feathers, to leave the pigeon coop as clean as a living room, Burton, tall and straight, a finger in his waistcoat pocket, observed an eight-year-old who took care to do things well and was willing to work, probably to please him but also because he was happy to do it. He liked to see a child so absorbed, Brian not knowing that he had found a way to his grandfather’s heart.

Whenever Burton thought to give him the reward of a penny he sorted the coin for size and feel before pulling it from his pocket, and held it under his nose. ‘Take this, Nimrod!’ Feigning a happy surprise, Brian thanked him, and ran down the lane to buy sweets.

Burton disliked Edith’s children, those satanic offspring of Doddoe’s, because they had turned into predators like their father. On once letting three into the yard he saw how they took pleasure in tormenting the pigs, and ran about the garden not caring where they trampled. From then on if he saw them coming up the lane he waved a stick to keep them off, and watched till they had gone to do their mischief in Robin’s Wood.

Brian would sometimes go to Old Engine Cottages along the main road, passing Oswald’s square redbricked cottage a few steps down from the pavement. He heard his cousin Howard practising the piano, random but pleasing notes tinkling in the air, sounds unconnected to any tune he knew but following him by Woodhouse and under the railway bridge, only leaving him when he got to the Burtons’ door.

Howard was a strange grandson for Burton, and whenever off to the pub, or into Nottingham, and sometimes on his way from work, he called at the house to see Oswald, still the same dignified and handsome man, whereas Helen, with more uncertainties in her features than he had seen on any woman, seemed to live on an island whose landscape no one could know about but herself, and he marvelled that Oswald was able to look after her as well as he did.

Her sensitive nature had passed to Howard, and Burton was puzzled that such a delicate boy could be connected to a robust family such as his. He had shown a love for music at school, so Helen insisted they buy a piano on hire purchase, and arrange piano lessons. It had almost cost her life to give birth, and because there could be no other children he was more cherished than most. Burton hoped that as the first grandchild to bear his name he might one day do as well if not better in the world than his chance offspring in Wales.

Brian once noted the peculiar glint in Howard’s eyes on passing him by the gate, so had no wish to become friendly, too proud to talk to him, because too sensible to be rebuffed. Howard would never be able to skim across the narrow lock gates and explore the intricate wooded paths around Brown’s Sawmills, or climb trees, or jump ditches, or explore the deeper parts of Robin’s Wood, or go with the Doddoe kids to scrump orchards and break into allotment gardens. All such activities were too rough and perilous for Howard to share, much as he might have wanted to, and probably did, for who wouldn’t? He could only watch from the parlour window as they went down the lane in a gang, Brian scruffy and uncared-for, waving a stick and seeming without the bother of having to play the piano or do such a thing as homework after school. There had to be times when Howard longed to come out and ask what he was up to, but he never did, and his enigmatic yet forlorn face at the window made Brian feel perversely glad at not offering to let him take part in whatever exciting mischief he was heading for.

He didn’t want Howard to come, because suppose one day he avoided his mother’s vigilance and did, and joined an expedition to the woods, and in emulation of others he climbed a tree, and was so full of rapture at his achievement that on starting to come down, always the most dangerous stage (and how he would boast of it afterwards at home, to the horror of Helen, and perhaps the pride of his father) he missed his footing and crashed onto the turf twenty feet or more below? If he broke an arm or a leg, or bruised his angelic face, it would be put down as Brian’s fault, and the trouble he’d get into didn’t bear thinking about.

Neither could he imagine Howard working in the garden with Burton and getting his shoes muddy, or passing hours at the well dropping the bucket in the water and winding it up with handle and chain to see how many he could get onto the parapet before his arms felt they were dropping off. In the garden Howard might fall and cut his knee on a stone and get blood poisoning — Brian’s heart nearly stopped at the prospect — or at the well he might lean too far over, looking at his face in the coin of water far below, and fall.

Howard only went to the Burtons’ with his father, Helen not otherwise letting him out of sight for fear something should happen, despite Oswald’s disapproval. To send him alone down the lane and under the bridge was also unthinkable, because he might get into the company of rough kids running up and down the dead-ends of Woodhouse. School was only a few hundred yards along the main Wollaton road, so that was all right, but she was anxious when he left in the morning, and kissed him with relief when he came back.

Burton saw it as a pity that he wasn’t allowed to run free, but Oswald seemed too frightened of Helen to tackle her on the matter, or he wanted a quiet life. Instead of insisting that she let him loose he treated her objections as if she might hang herself, or run away if he spoke too plainly. Burton wasn’t to know that Oswald didn’t like Howard to be so sheltered from the world either, and argued with Helen, though in as mild a way as possible, trying not to contradict her too directly, since she was so easily upset.

When she took Howard to mass at St Barnabas Cathedral he always came back saying how he had liked the service, and had enjoyed talking to the priest. As far as Burton was concerned Helen’s religion was her own affair, though Mary Ann was glad to have such an unusual woman in the family, being not irreligious herself, thinking that growing up in such a pious atmosphere went well with Howard’s appearance.

No one was to know that in the playground, or toing and froing the short distance from school, Howard, at eight years of age, entertained and enthralled his friends with stories containing the most scandalous information, which his listeners lapped up like nobody’s business, as one of his friends later related to Brian, who told nobody else in the family. He stood there, with his bright little face, coming out with things they’d hardly imagined.

He culled such details from his parents’ quarrels, because, though Oswald had always loved Helen, he was, after all, a son of Burton, and was known to go after other women. Helen was a devout Catholic, and forgiving of a sinner, but was distressed to hear of his behaviour, nothing being secret for long in such a district.

Tears and anguish would bring Oswald to a state of repentance, compelling him to confess infidelities in detail so that she could forgive him more thoroughly. They imagined young Howard in the kind of deep slumber that angels were thought to enjoy, but his ear was warming the wall or bedroom door, and whatever half-strangled phrase came through was used next day in a narrative for the delectation of his schoolmates.

When Mary Ann’s relations came to stay in the summer Howard was shown off as a unique being, while Brian was told to stay at home for a few days because of the full house.

Bill Goss, Mary Ann’s cousin, drove his wife and ageing Aunt Bee from St Neots in a Rolls-Royce. Erect at the wheel in cap and leather gloves, he took care not to scrape the car while tackling the bridge and narrow lane. The stately vehicle going by Woodhouse set tongues flapping at the thought that Burton — amused at such a daft notion — might be connected to a millionaire who would one day die and see him right.

Thomas bedded down in the wash house, his room given, suitably aired, to Bill and his wife, while Aunt Bee slept on a sofa in the parlour. Tea and dinner services came out of glass-fronted cupboards for them to feed and drink from, Ivy and Emily washing every piece in hot water before they were used, since Mary Ann insisted on nothing but the best for her Huntingdonshire family.

When Burton in the parlour passed the soda syphon to Bill he didn’t take whisky from the cupboard but opened a bottle of Johnny Walker that could not have been interfered with. ‘So business is good?’

‘When was it not?’ Bill said. ‘You work hard, and have a bit of luck now and again.’ Old Charles had started as a saddler, then taken to repairing bicycles, he reminded Burton. ‘At your wedding the old man asked you to come and work for him at St Neots.’

‘I saw no reason to,’ Burton responded. ‘And I still don’t.’

Burton was set in his ways, and always would be, too attached to his district even as a young man to start somewhere else. ‘You’d have been a bit more prosperous.’

Burton grunted. ‘I might, but money isn’t everything.’

From bicycles the Goss’s had moved to dealing in motor cars, and bought a small filling station, earning enough for Bill to own his Rolls-Royce. ‘You’re quite right. The only time I relax is when I come up here to see you and Mary Ann.’

‘You’re welcome. Any time you like.’ Burton meant it, as Mary Ann would want him to. ‘In the morning we’ll go and see Oswald and Helen, and perhaps Howard will give us a tune on the piano.’

‘If he does we’ll take him for a spin around Nottingham. Show him the Trent.’

He poured more drink for them both. ‘When we come back here I’ll show you the garden. I’ve put a lot of good things in this year, so you’ll have plenty to take home.’

Curtains open, pots of geraniums nodding on the window ledge, summer light mellow outside, eight sat at table for the feast of welcome. Thomas and Ivy had wanted to go out, for a bit of courting it was supposed, but Burton said they must be in for the first dinner out of respect and politeness, for what Mary Ann, both girls, Aunt Bee and Bill’s wife had been working hard in the kitchen to prepare.

On the train to St Neots’ Burton recalled his carefree journey to South Wales, when he hadn’t been encumbered with baskets of vegetables, and a cloth sack of loaves and cakes Mary Ann had baked the day before, gallantry insisting that he carry them on changing at Grantham.

Bill waited at Peterborough, and drove them to the Great Northern Hotel for dinner, the best in that part of the country, he said, Burton replying that it needed to be, at six shillings a head.

Accommodation was more spacious in the Goss house, nobody being put out for Burton and Mary Ann, who noted how much easier he was on such a holiday. The Goss’s were glad to see him, though amused on going out to see how he made what they regarded as the antediluvian request to Mary Ann that she walk a few paces behind.

He agreed one afternoon to have his photograph taken, but only out of politeness, for it was a disturbance to his privacy. He was seventy, and looked it, after a lifetime of work. Though high summer in the garden, he wore a dark suit and the usual highly polished boots for the occasion. His waistcoat was fastened left over right, a vertical line of six buttons on either side, thumbs stuck into the two lower pockets joined by the watch chain, the long fingers of his gnarled hands half-bent inwards from bony wrists. The tip of a handkerchief showing from the lapel pocket of the jacket was close to the buttonhole of a small white chrysanthemum. His ‘dicky’ collar was old-fashioned even for those days, but the bow tie was perfectly arranged.

He stood erect, confident yet unwilling to look too relaxed, the face overshadowed by his large flat cap, though sufficient features showed the sort of man he was, and had been all his life. The chin was firm and well-shaped, a small white moustache carefully clipped, lips infinitesimally apart as if to emit withering sarcasm should anyone dispute his right to any detail of the pose.

Nose and ears were prominent enough to emphasize his acuteness in both senses, and he stared as if daring the camera to take away the dignity which formed his soul (of which he had no fear) rather than do its job and record his merely physical presence, while obviously having some regard for the camera since he was so formally dressed to face it.

Emily stood to his left, head tilted slightly as if, should she get too close he might, as a reminder that she must know her place, jab her with his elbow — for not allowing him to make the picture all his own. A few paces to the other side was a handsome man of about thirty, the son of Mary Ann’s sister, six feet tall yet overlooked by Burton.

Burton’s gaze went beyond the range of any camera, as if into a land and a past — a way of life — that no one around could know about. His stand as if to defy both God and Man indicated that if ever it happened that he was the last person on earth, the continuation and endurance of another human race would grow out of all he knew, and flourish from his blacksmith’s strength.

When Bill motored him to Cambridge he was amused at so many young men prancing around in gowns and mortarboards, though his observation of the architecture told him it was something to remember. High tea at the Blue Boar was acceptable, but he was as usual appalled at the waste of food around him.

His eye for goodlooking women was undiminished. ‘You only need one for the purpose,’ he said lightly to Bill, one of whose unmarried daughters was so fascinated by him, as he was with her, that she was invited to take his arm when the family went walking. And she did, making pressures which delighted him on the one hand but riled him on the other because there was no chance of doing anything about it. Mary Ann walking behind — not far enough for him — knew that every eye was on him and his admirer, so he could not get up to any hanky-panky.

‘Or, indeed,’ he laughed on the train to Nottingham when she complained about him and the young woman, ‘any argybargy, either.’

TWENTY-SEVEN

Howard looked one way and then the other along the wide road, as had been drilled into him, saw it free enough of traffic and, wanting to get home for his piano lesson, never knew where the doubledecker bus came from. The front left wheel dragged him a hundred yards before the driver could stop. An ambulance took him to the General Hospital, his leg crushed, and a teacher from the school went to tell Helen.

Unable to believe, though fearing her heart would burst, she fainted at her worst nightmare. When Oswald came from the nearby canal she was brought around with a measure of whisky, and went with him to see how Howard was.

His ruined leg was cut away, and three weeks later he lay on the parlour sofa, crutches leaning behind. Everyone in the family was appalled that such an accident had happened to Helen’s unusual and promising child. Burton wondered at so many hearts in the world to break, and called whenever he passed the house, stood by the sofa and said a few words to his grandson who, asked how he was, replied like a Burton after all that he was fine, thank you very much.

Burton detected a sheen of suffering about the skin, and a frightened vacancy at the eyes which the poor lad could not hide. Helen’s tears were always running, which Howard saw, and though Burton couldn’t deny it was a case for weeping, it was also a time to hide them.

Brian, told he was to give whatever silver paper he came across to Howard, who collected it for the hospital, tore apart every cigarette packet for the usual film of paper smelling pleasantly of tobacco, so that Howard could be patted on the head when he was wheeled to the hospital and handed in a bigger bundle than anybody else. Brian always hoped to find a cigarette that the smoker had overlooked, and when that was the case he would have a few sick-inducing puffs behind a hedge, though if feeling charitable he would take it to his father in the hope of making him less miserable.

With enough silver paper for a worthwhile visit he noticed Helen’s suffering face, her vacant, terrified eyes, and dark ringlets now touched with grey falling over thin shoulders as she showed him into the parlour. ‘Howard, here’s a friend come to see you.’

He lay tremulous and pale, thanked him for the scruffy ball laid on the shelf, and beckoned him close: ‘I’m tired of everybody coming to ask how I am.’ Eyes wide, he stared at the door, a hint Brian took to go.

On hearing the tinkling of the piano a few days later he assumed that Howard had hopped the few steps to play, as if music might bring him back to normal life. He was now even more the favourite grandchild of Burton and Mary Ann, which Brian hoped would improve his spirit at having only one leg.

Ivy and Thomas being out on Sunday afternoon, and Burton in bed with Mary Ann, Emily sat looking mindlessly at the fire until, knowing she would soon hear her father treading downstairs in stockinged feet, put the kettle on. She took the tea caddy from the cupboard and threw as many spoons into the pot, Brian noted, as would have lasted a whole day at home.

He called at the Burtons’ as often as he thought they would put up with him, liked to be in a kitchen smelling of baking bread — roasting meat on Sunday morning — a medley of hunger-inducing odours depending on the day of the week. The window opening on the back garden path was as clean as if it had no glass, and splashes of blood-red geraniums on the ledge seemed to warn everyone passing not to look inside.

Fascinated by Emily’s quiet though unpredictable ways, he wondered where the mischievous and brilliant light in her eyes came from. Thin lips were always working, as if she had an irreducible grain of hard sago between her teeth, and was talking in silence to an invisible listener. Sometimes she would take a ha’penny from her pinafore pocket, eyes a-glitter on holding it before him. ‘Do you love me, duck?’ and Brian always said yes, for she would then laugh, and drop the coin into his hand.

The first scalding sip of Emily’s black tea tasted so strong to Burton that the inside of his head seemed to empty in alarm. He liked a fair brew, but she put too much tea in the pot, though he didn’t chide her in case she became upset, for it was the one thing she was proud of being able to do.

She gazed at him drinking, impossible to say whether her eyes glowed with beady satisfaction at having him imbibe her heart-coating liquid, or whether she was waiting to be patted on the head at producing an effect that threatened to send him clawing up the wall and travelling halfway across the ceiling. Burton wanted to boot the knowing pest out of the house, but Mary Ann would hear of no such thing, which Emily well realized.

At thirty years of age she had never been able to keep a job, being too uncertain in her behaviour. She had a temper, and little patience in unfamiliar situations. When set to work by a local shopkeeper, a charitable Methodist preacher, all went well for a few days, until she decided she was being ‘put upon’. They were asking her to do too much. They were mixing her up deliberately. They were laughing behind her back. They accused her of making mistakes when she hadn’t, because she had only been doing what she had been told to do, and they were telling her, now that she was doing it, that they had told her to do something different. It wasn’t right. They wanted to see her cry. Then they could laugh at her.

She began to drop things, change items around on the shelves, or put them in places where they shouldn’t be, whether she had been told to or not. It wasn’t right for them to mix her up. She was doing her best so didn’t deserve it. She’d heard right the first time. She knew what they had said. She remembered everything. She wasn’t daft. She’d only been doing what they had told her to do. She wasn’t having it. She’d show them, she would and all, she’d show them if it was the last thing she did.

The assistants in the serving part of the shop wondered why it was so quiet in the store room, till she had been there long enough for the shopkeeper to go and see what she was doing. His brain was properly knocked about at witnessing such chaos never before experienced, though in one sense the rearrangement was imaginative, the aspect colourful, and the ingenuity unbelievable.

‘Have you lost your tongue?’ He hoped to find out why she had done what she had certainly done, but all he got was an imitation glower of Burton in a bad mood — which Burton would have been in because of something she had said or done to him — followed by a demented grin, until sensing in the half-lit attic of her mind that she might not have done right after all. Instinct triumphed, and she reached for her coat.

His move to evict her took more strength in his arms than had ever been called on for shifting boxes of groceries, but he got her through the door and onto the busy street, confirming for Emily that he’d spitefully had such intentions boiling in him from the beginning, and she little cared that it would take days for her reassortment of goods in the shop to be unravelled. She wasn’t known in the family as ‘Batchy Em’ for nothing.

After talking to the manager of the Flying Horse hotel in the middle of town, Mary Ann got her taken on as a chambermaid, work which pleased Emily, at first, for if there was one thing she could do, and didn’t dislike doing, it was making beds, which she’d been taught from an early age.

As far as the family understood, because accounts varied on both sides, some double-dyed wicked commercially travelling villain had tried to get her into bed and rape her. She wasn’t the biggest of the Burton girls, but her upbringing had been as hard as the rest, so the man was shocked at her ferocity. She gave him a drubbing he would never forget, and had to be pulled away by four other chambermaids drawn to the room by his screams.

Emily was no beauty, but she was young and personable enough in the half-dark, and to someone probably drunk, who couldn’t know the significance of the grim expression she put on even when not being interfered with. She must have seemed just another of those willing Nottingham girls the man had heard about, especially if he had just come up from Leicester.

He denied trying to molest her, swore she had attacked first on being asked to smooth one of his pillows. The manager knew he would never get the truth, so gave Emily five pounds, with the advice not to come back. From then on Mary Ann thought it best to keep her at home.

When gangrene attacked the remains of Howard’s mutilated stump he was taken in an ambulance to the hospital, unconscious from morphine. Oswald stood by the door to watch him go, gritting on his anguish at the possibility of his son not seeing home again.

Helen stayed by Howard’s bed for as long as was allowed, then went to church and lit candles for his recovery. On the way home she bought a bottle from each beer-off passed, and threw the empties into any convenient hedge, ashamed of drinking but desperate for oblivion. Oswald went to the hospital whenever work made it possible, but she wouldn’t come home on the bus with him because one of those things had started it. ‘Is my angel going to be all right?’ she asked again and again on the way home. ‘He’s suffering like the Lord Jesus. Is God going to spare him? Please tell me he is.’

Oswald promised Howard’s life, though aware that God was unable or unwilling to spare anybody. He walked with her so that she wouldn’t drink, and stayed with her at home because if he didn’t she would go to the Crown Hotel and get drunk. His son’s pain and Helen’s racking agony held his own in control.

Howard died, and the light went from Helen’s life. Oswald had lost his only son, and Burton didn’t wonder that the shades went down on Oswald’s life as well. Helen could have no more children, and the blow was as close to mortal as any could be.

Careful not to slip on the mildewed steps, Brian went down from the lane and knocked on the door of his uncle’s house. Sabina, with many of Mary Ann’s good traits in thinking of others’ misfortunes, had asked him to call, in the hope that the sight of a young face might give them encouragement to carry on living.

Oswald’s handsome features reminded Brian of a Viking pictured in a book at school. And what better job could an uncle have than that of lockkeeper on a nearby canal? As for Aunt Helen, if he knew nothing else he saw her as beautiful, and interestingly unlike any of the Burton women, with dark and curly hair around her tenderly enquiring face when she talked to him. Her hair now grey, this strange and distant woman was the last person in the world who should have had to suffer such grief.

Oswald led him into the curtain-drawn living room, Helen unable to let in sunlight though Howard had been dead six months. ‘Mam sends her regards,’ he said to the tall raddled figure in the half-dark. ‘To Aunt Helen as well.’

Oswald seemed hardly to know who he was, and pointed to his leftovers from breakfast, a couple of long bacon rinds with the fat still on, a few scraps of egg-white around the plate. ‘Do you want to finish that up? I’ll cut you some bread, if you like.’

He was hungry, hadn’t yet had his own breakfast, and Helen might have offered something better, but she was in bed and not to be disturbed. Through the half-ajar parlour door was Howard’s still-open piano, uneven ranks of crotchets and minims on the sheet of music crowding across the page like black ants on the march, to remind Howard in the grave, or maybe even in heaven, how his fingers had at one time turned them into sounds. The sorrowful gloom of mourning was too much and, having given the message, he wanted to resume his walk. ‘No thanks. I’m not hungry.’

Helen hurried to church for solace every morning, and drank her way home when there was a shilling to spare. Her vice was no more a secret to Oswald than his going with other women had been to her. He was to recall how, after the first years of marriage, unable to be all the time under her pervading fits and miseries and imagined misfortunes long before Howard’s accident, as well as the seeming impossibility of their ever achieving some kind of compatibility, he succumbed to the congenital Burton need to know more than one woman. But after Howard’s death, loving Helen as he did and always had, he devoted himself to keeping her alive.

He nevertheless wondered about the person he might have married had he not been so in thrall to her, chosen a less complicated and demanding woman closer to what he thought of as his easygoing self. But he had fallen in love with Helen Drury who was more beautiful than any seen in his roamings as a young man, and it had been the same for her when he talked to her at the tram stop after she had come out of church. The sparks of attraction were more fiery and sure between those whose temperaments were so unmatched. They should have stayed entranced, and happy in the mutual quest of getting to know each other for the rest of their lives, but Howard’s death drove Helen almost mad. Oswald endured with the stoicism Burton showed at the death of Oliver, in that having Helen to pity made it more feasible for him to carry on. Where, in that case, would he have been without her, and if he gave in to the same agony of grief, which he felt just as much, who would look after her? Each became a crutch to hold a single body upright.

He sometimes thought that only the secret drinking kept her going, yet tried to get her to dress in the colourful way she once had, even to take more interest in church affairs, but neither colour, sobriety or piety meant anything. When it seemed she might perish from lack of nourishment he cooked her a meal — the first time for any male Burton — but she stared as if the food was poison, and went back into her world of grief, with its visions of angelic Howard, leaving Oswald racked with guilt at not being able to hide his exasperation.

She prayed continually for Howard’s soul in the cathedral, comforted by the priest telling her that the boy wasn’t in any place but heaven, where he would one day greet her and say how happy he was that she had lived so long after him, but had come to join him at last.

Brian was embarrassed at her trembling hands and at the smell of stout on her breath when she greeted him in the street: ‘Tell me, Brian, where is Howard now?’

‘He’s in heaven, Aunt Helen.’

‘So he is. You’re a good boy.’ With the light in her eyes renewed she leaned over a little less on her way towards home.

Everyone in the family agreed — at least those who no longer lived in the same house — that Burton became more amiable as he went further into his sixties and seventies, though he was no less scornful of anyone regarded as a fool. When Brian sat reading on the rug Burton looked down on someone he thought privileged, in spite of his poor clothes, so absorbed by a world he couldn’t get into. At least one child did not have to put up with what he’d had to at that age. Perhaps times had changed, and though he would never say whether or not it was for the better, he told Mary Ann that Brian was a lucky boy in being able to read and write.

Having fallen into Howard’s place, Brian was all eyes and ears at the Burtons’, taking everything in without giving any sign of doing so. His enjoyment was intense because the distractions were varied and the comforts assured, impressions staying more than he could know. Quiet under the living room lamp of a winter’s evening he seemed engrossed only in his book, and whether or not they thought he had any gift of understanding didn’t concern him, in the flesh of his own fortress, his mind belonging to himself alone, not to be disturbed by any outside influence.

Burton did not see such stolidity as slowness or inanition, while Brian didn’t regard his grandfather as harsh or threatening. He only felt that when Burton watched him he seemed to know more about him than he knew of himself, though little was said between them, as if it did not need to be. He felt wanted because of Burton’s obvious interest, while Mary Ann liked to see him take books from the glass-fronted bookcase in the parlour because it reminded her of Oliver. ‘I don’t know what he’ll do when he grows up,’ she said.

Burton grunted. ‘I expect it’ll be interesting, whatever it is.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

Ernie Guyler coughed himself to death, and Ivy wore black for the funeral. ‘I’ll have his grave to visit now, as well as Oliver’s.’

Emily followed her out of the house. She loved a funeral. People cried as if they were bursting, but after the misery in church and wailing at the graveside there’d be food and drink, just like a party. She wanted to be there so that she could have a good cry with the rest of them. She loved a good cry, whoever it was had died. And at the feasting afterwards there might be an argument to watch. Somebody was bound to say something somebody didn’t like, and give him a smack in the chops. Even two women might have a go, and while they did she would help herself to more of the drink, and get tipsy, which made her feel as she would like to feel all the time when she was sober. Having a guzzle of Burton’s whisky now and again wasn’t the same — well, it wasn’t enough anyway — because she was sure he put water in it, while keeping his own special bottle locked up where nobody could get at it.

Ivy was her sister, so she couldn’t let her go to Ernie Guyler’s funeral on her own. In any case she wanted to see what his family was like, because she had never met them. Maybe there’d be a man there who would want to take her out. He might ask her to the pictures or the theatre, and if he tried to do anything to her afterwards she could biff him so hard he’d run away.

Ivy knew her sister’s thoughts and didn’t much like them, but was glad of her company because she felt there was nothing else to do on the way there except throw herself off a railway bridge when an express train was on its way. She said so as they walked down the lane, but Emily said what would become of Mary Ann if you did anything like that?

‘Well, I don’t mean it, do I?’ Burton would be glad, so that was one reason not to do it. She would be dead, so that was another. ‘It’s only what I feel like. Ernie was the man I loved, and now he’s gone. I know I’d been expecting it, and so had he, poor soul, but when it comes it’s still like the end of the world. My heart used to bump when I saw him walking up to the house to call for me.’ She began to weep again. ‘I shall never get over it.’

Emily took her arm. ‘Don’t cry, duck, or I shall as well, and my frock will get wet.’

The death of a sweetheart was worse than the death of yourself. No more shilling teas in the Mikado, or walking hand-in-hand to the wood. No more worrying whether your period would start, though he’d always taken good care.

Back at work, Florence on the next machine commiserated. Ernie Guyler had lived in the same street. A good man, she said, one of the best. He laughed a lot, even in his illness, but you can’t go on being faithful to a memory all your life. You’ve got to go on living.

‘Any damned fool knows that.’ Ivy denied that she could forget him. ‘He won’t be out of my mind till the day I die.’

‘He will. I know there was no better chap,’ Florence went on, ‘but he’s got to fade.’ Ivy realized how good it was to have such a friend at work, and that life would be unimaginable if there was no factory for her to go to every morning.

Those employed by Player’s received a tin of fifty cigarettes every month, and because Ivy smoked only a few she handed the rest to her brothers. Burton thought that he could do with one or two as well, but Ivy considered he had been so harsh to her all her life that he didn’t even deserve the skin off her nose, and when she once reminded him of this Burton said: ‘Then why don’t you leave, if you don’t like it here?’

She had thought of it more times than he could know, but if she did leave where would she go? How could she set herself up on her own with what she earned at Player’s? She would have to find a house — and a mean little one it would be — and buy furniture to put in it.

Burton noted that she was never short of money to go on trips with friends from work, so knew she wouldn’t leave home where living was cheap. Besides, who but Mary Ann would have such good meals on the table the moment she came in the door? He had her weighed up right enough. She was more than well off, and would stay ‘on the shelf’ like a packet of Mazawattee tea, even if only to spite him.

If she gave Burton some cheek now and again it was, Ivy told herself, because nobody deserved it more. Years could go by when they hardly spoke to each other, and though she knew her hatred of him troubled the tender heart of Mary Ann, it was his fault because he ought to have known it would be bad for her mother if he gave her anything to hate him for.

Words from her lips couldn’t say anything good of him, no more than words from his would say anything good about her. They found nothing to say to each other, lived within different worlds in the same house. Ivy’s silent anger became more bitter on Burton not even realizing he was the cause of it, and he never would because he was too set in the ways of long ago. She had her life and wasn’t going to be made miserable by a bully like him. He only wanted to see her having the same hard time as Rebecca and Edith and Sabina. If there was such a place as hell for a woman it was where she was tormented by a tyrannical husband who wouldn’t support either her or the children properly. She would never get into a situation like that merely to amuse Burton.

Her one chance of happiness was gone because Ernie Guyler — poor soul — had died. She couldn’t marry anyone else, so stayed at home in spite of Burton, and if ever she did leave it would only be when she was good and ready.

Miss Middleton, a schoolmistress, was shown around the factory by one of the subordinate directors. A party of girls could see how cigarettes were manufactured, and perhaps they would want to work there one day. Ivy was in charge of a dozen women packing the boxes, and when asked how many were completed every day Miss Middleton, looking intently for her answer, smiled before walking on. ‘You can tell what sort she is,’ Florence said to one of the girls, but Ivy didn’t care what sort she was, only knowing that she had been smiled at in a way she never had before, by this self-confident schoolteacher woman.

Jane Middleton waited for her to come out of work, and took her to a restaurant in town. A case of mutual curiosity, Ivy turned girlish at the notion that a schoolmistress could find her interesting. During the meal Jane told her of a bus holiday through Germany the year before. ‘We were all women, so a very pleasant time was had by all. Frankly, I don’t like men. They’re hopeless. All the best were killed in the war.’ Ivy agreed, thinking of Oliver, but also because she had never had much luck with men either, unless you could count Ernie Guyler, who had died a year ago.

Jane, also in her middle thirties, a tall red-haired woman, had views which Ivy thought at times a little too close to Burton’s, yet agreed with them because they didn’t sound the same coming from someone to whom she was in thrall. They met every weekend, and went to Jane’s flat in Mapperley. The following year she took Ivy on holiday to Normandy. Burton watched them walking arm-in-arm down the lane, and knew with chagrin that Ivy was as far from getting married as ever.

Ivy went on her own to see Rebecca and her husband who lived near Lydd in Kent. She was put up on a settee in the parlour of their cottage, and spent most of the time with her sister maligning Burton. She came back and told Brian how marvellous Kent was, promising to take him one day. ‘We’ll go through London, and look at Buckingham Palace, and then see the pretty countryside where hops grow in fields on long poles.’

She was too busy with Miss Middleton, and would never take him, but the secret dream belonged to him alone, though one dream which became real was staying all weekend at the Burtons’, helping his grandfather in the garden, and running across the Cherry Orchard to make a bow and arrow in Robin’s Wood. When it got cold and dark a warm house was waiting, with something to eat inside. Mary Ann baked cakes, and gave him the large yellow bowl to scrape clean of the batter with a wooden spoon, leaving a few currants to find.

Burton came in from the garden for breakfast, and Mary Ann put a slice of fat bacon and a fried egg on his plate, the orange yolk neatly centred in a zone of white. Brian had collected eggs from the coop but never seen one cooked. Burton, thinking him hungry, trimmed off the broad white border with his clasp knife, and halved the bread. ‘Eat this.’

‘Isn’t it yours, Grandad?’

Spraying vinegar over the yolk, he sensed a possible hurt to Brian’s pride at being given it so off-handedly. ‘I don’t like the white. I never did, Nimrod. Eat it for me.’

Hungry or not, he did as he was told, watching Burton tackle the heart of the egg, and thinking that one day he would get as many yolks as he could eat.

A prince at the Burton house, he could be alone yet feel himself one of them. In the darkened kitchen, rain thrashing against the window, Mary Ann told him you never turn a beggar away from the door. If you didn’t have a penny to give there was always a cup of tea. This was the goodness of the Irish coming out in her, his mother Sabina said when he mentioned it. Nor should you ever be unkind to animals, Mary Ann went on, seeing him tormenting the cat unduly. She instilled into him that he must always care, and never — ever — tell lies.

Burton told him little, but he took in by example and from what others said about his grandfather. He learned to believe in himself, to doubt everything, to work, to stand up straight, never to have hands in his pockets, not to care what anyone said about him, to look on the world with a cold eye, to speak only when spoken to, and when words were fully formed and well-rehearsed, above all to distrust praise or flattery, and stand indifferent in face of denigration. He seemed not to take in any of this, but it went in all the same, the difficulty of merging both sets of precepts apparent only later.

Thomas expressed himself mainly by the melodious whistling of tunes he heard in pubs and dance halls, or from somebody else’s wireless, which instrument Burton wouldn’t allow in the house, regarding it as an intrusion of unwanted sound, a box of lies that might one day have the cheek to answer him back. Brian wondered how in that case a gramophone had found its way into the parlour. He had heard it played once, when his grandmother put on a Negro spiritual.

Standing on the table in its immovable wooden casing, a large horn expanding above like the mouth of a giant lily, and a steel handle almost as big as that for winding up a motor car, perhaps it was tolerated because at least it couldn’t talk, and needed work to set it going.

Thomas could whistle as loud as he cared to in the noisy workshop of the Raleigh, where machinery swamped all human sound. In that place he was little bothered at not having an audience, and produced a concert mainly to entertain himself. Ivy wondered whether he whistled music in his courting, on pushing his handsome and neatly dressed presence onto some tractable woman. He always had one or two going mad about him, she said, but God help any who was daft enough to marry him, because he was as mean as a kidney bean. On the other hand he was more than willing to spend money on women in the hope of getting what he wanted.

As if unaware of where he was, Thomas set up a piercing whistle in the living room before sitting at table for his dinner. A glance from Burton’s single and therefore more menacing eye broke through to Thomas’s deepest core and immediately squashed his sibilant display. ‘I’m surprised you’ve so much money in your pocket these days,’ Burton said. ‘You haven’t won the pools and not told us, have you?’

Thomas filled in the Littlewoods coupons every week in the hope of winning a fortune, and then what women he would have! He knew all the teams but couldn’t read, so Ivy had to point out the relevant names. ‘I don’t know why I help him,’ she said, ‘because if he wins he’ll never give me anything.’

‘Why is that?’ Thomas asked his father.

Burton ran a long thin knife up and down the steel for carving the meat. ‘You must swallow at least half a ton of bird seed every week to keep that noise up, and even I know the stuff doesn’t come cheap.’

Brian considered the remark a fair example of that withering sarcasm Ivy complained about, yet thought his grandfather right in putting a stop to such whistling because, however pleasant the tune, it killed stone-dead what was going on in the mind.

Thomas ignored the setback to his performance — it was impossible to damage his self-esteem — and during the meal asked Burton if he would like to have his prize horseshoes taken to the Raleigh and dipped in chrome, which would help in their preservation and give them a more handsome appearance.

Burton was wary. They looked good as they were. He had made them that way. The iron would last forever, as far as he knew. But he thought about it and, sipping his usual coffee after the pudding, took Thomas away from his football coupons and said that he could dip one of the shoes and see how it turned out.

‘If you like it,’ Thomas said, ‘I’ll do the others, two at a time though, otherwise I’d get the sack if I was caught dipping them all at once.’

Burton stood. ‘It sounds a bit like cheating to me.’

‘Oh no, we’re allowed to do the odd thing now and again.’

Brian stayed for Christmas, and money was collected to buy him a trainset. He sat in front of the fire and lifted piece after piece from its box, wondering what it had cost as he slotted the lines together, and laid engine and trucks on the circuit.

Burton looked from his great height. ‘You’ll be so busy I don’t suppose I’ll have you working in the garden today.’

‘There’s nothing to do there, Grandad. Look at all that frost at the window. It’s the middle of winter.’

‘You’re winding the engine up wrong.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Give it me.’

‘You’ll break it.’

‘Not like you, if you don’t do it right.’ He turned the key gently clockwise — Ivy and Emily hoping for something to snap — and passed the toy back.

Thomas at the mirror had half a dozen goes at getting his tie straight, inflated features holding in the aria of a whistle he wouldn’t dare let rip before reaching the lane.

‘All you’ve got to do now,’ Burton said, ‘is take the brake off. I don’t suppose you’ll have your nose in a book today, either.’

Thomas brought back the first horseshoe from the Raleigh, chromed to a fine shade of silver. Burton saw how good it looked in a beam of January sun. ‘It is beautiful,’ Mary Ann said.

She was right. ‘Do the others,’ which was more praise from Burton than Thomas could remember.

Burton handed it to Brian, who took the perfectly shaped horseshoe made by the hands of his grandfather at the forge, turned it around, examined it from all angles, felt the solid weight, held the coolness to his cheek, and counted the nail holes. ‘Why are there seven, Grandad?’

‘How many days are there in a week?’

‘Seven.’

‘That’s why. Four shoes on a horse’s feet, and how many holes does that make?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘That’s for a month, a moon of days.’

He passed it back. ‘That’s clever.’

‘There’s a lot of things you don’t know, Nimrod. Some horseshoes have eight holes, but a horse goes better on seven.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Seven hold just as well as eight, and they don’t weigh as much. It’s easier on the feet, and it won’t go lame so quick.’ He put the shoe in its case on the wall, took down another, and held it before Brian’s eyes. ‘You see this one?’

He felt the prongs with both hands. It was wide, heavy and flat. ‘What’s special about it?’

‘It’s for a carthorse. I made it in Wales.’

‘Wales is a long way off.’

‘I know it is.’ He took it back. ‘It’s where I worked as a young man.’

‘Why did you go there?’

‘It was the only place I could get work.’

The rows of chromed horseshoes hung impressively in their place, and Brian wondered whether all or any would ever be fitted to a horse. ‘No,’ Burton told him. ‘They’re prize ones, and have to stay there. Now pick up that newspaper. I want to hear about Spain, where another damned lot is fighting a war for no good reason as I can see.’

On Saturday night Mary Ann stood in her slip to wash at a large bowl of water on the living room table, then dressed in a navy-blue skirt and white blouse. Brian stood at the fence to watch the handsome and stately couple walk down the lane, Mary Ann a few paces behind. When they were out of sight he went into his aunts’ bedroom, attracted by unfamiliar smells of feminine indulgence, of powders and creams and unguents, of bedclothes giving off odours of lavender and clean wind that had swept over the sheets when on the line by the garden of fecund soil and growing vegetables. Such smells came straight out of heaven, if there was such a place, though he hoped there was, yet condemned all his life not to believe it.

TWENTY-NINE

Surveyors spread triangulation, marked out roads and gardens. Enormous black sewage pipes you could crawl through were lowered into trenches straight as a die. The foundations of identical houses covered the green acres walked on so many times. Walls and windows were installed, roofs put on. Nottingham was spreading west.

Mary Ann filled the workmen’s billy-cans with tea at sixpence a time, Brian fetching the empties and taking them back full. Sometimes he forgot who the cans belonged to as he walked among heaps of gravel and stacks of tiles, smells in the air of resin and fresh sawdust.

He jinked between trucks and concrete mixers, changed the hot cans several times to stop burns, men hurrying up scaffolding with hods of bricks or slates, till someone claimed one of the mashcans, recognition swift to a man with a parched throat. Mary Ann did good business because her tea was sweet and strong, and Brian was glad of a few pennies at the end of the day.

Old Engine Cottages made space for new dwellings. Burton didn’t want to quit, because the house had mellowed during a century and, in good condition still, could have lasted well into the next. Electricity had been in for a year, and running water laid on, but Farmer Taylor got a good price, and orders came that they had to go.

Burton was over seventy, as was Mary Ann, who was not sorry to move to a street in Woodhouse, though Burton regretted bulldozers smashing down a place they had lived in so long.

‘They should have moved forty years ago,’ Sabina said, ‘then I wouldn’t have had to walk under that dark and muddy bridge when I was a girl.’ Ivy thought Burton would like living in Woodhouse because it was near the beer-off and closer to the pub, but Mary Ann said sharply that he had never been averse to walking a mile or two to get to those places. ‘And he’s never drunk much.’

Burton disliked so many people crowding close. In the back yard you heard the noise of neighbours shouting and clattering about. Women screamed at kids, and kept the wireless on. Trains shunted along the railway night and day.

A year later, after the war had started, they moved to Radford Boulevard, further into the city. The nearest pub was the Gregory Hotel a hundred yards away, though Burton had little to spend from the old age pension. It helped that Thomas and Ivy paid their board, and Emily made up the rations to five. Burton being a sparse eater unlike — he remarked — that glutton Thomas, meant that sufficient was usually on the table, though not as much as in the days of autumn pig-killing when legs of pork, flitches of salted bacon, and strings of sausages swung in the pantry.

Burton and Mary Ann lived in a comfortable though at times spartan way. If Emily or Ivy or Thomas said or did something annoying, Burton might now hold back his response for fear of upsetting Mary Ann. Ivy was encouraged by Jane Middleton to buy a wireless on hire purchase, so Burton enjoyed music now and again, and listened to the nine o’clock news, but it was sparingly used, and never too loud.

Mary Ann had the Evening Post delivered, and sometimes stood on the front step looking for the paperboy. Brian’s brother Arthur put it into her hands for a fortnight, when standing in for a pal on holiday. In cold weather Burton took it in to Mary Ann by the fire, so that she could read aloud what might inform him about the war. They also learned in this way of the prison sentences on Edith’s sons, who had deserted from the army and taken to robbing shops and offices. He pitied Edith for having had such lawless children by Doddoe Atkin, though Tommy Jackson’s son Douglas was also in jail. ‘Idleness is the greatest cause of misery in the world,’ he said.

Standing on the front step, chin up, staring right and left at people and traffic, he saw Brian walking along the boulevard, a girl holding his arm. He beckoned. ‘How are you getting on, Nimrod?’

The name embarrassed him, having been at work for two years, and no longer a kid. But he had to lead Pauline forward for his grandfather’s inspection.

Burton noted her brown hair, fringed at the front and long behind, took in a good figure through the open coat, and with knowing eyes reached for her hand. He smiled. ‘How are you, then?’

Brian expected her to curtsey, so smarmily did she speak. ‘I’m very well, thank you.’

She could have sworn Burton winked. He was well aware that Brian, from his expression, and from hers also, was getting all that a young man wanted. ‘Is he a good lad to you?’

‘He’s got to be, hasn’t he?’ Brian noted that she seemed about to bite off her tongue at having to add: ‘Well, he’s all right, most of the time.’

‘Tell him to bring you to the Gregory Hotel one evening so that I can buy you a drink. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, my girl?’

‘I’d love it.’

You bloody would, Brian said to himself.

Burton took her hand again, as if he couldn’t feel it often enough, wanting her to know she could come for a stroll and take a chance with him any time she liked. ‘But don’t let me stop you going where you want to go.’

‘Your grandad’s nice,’ she said, on their way to the cinema. ‘And handsome.’

‘I suppose he is. I can see him running me off if I’m not careful. He’s a dirty old man.’

‘I’ll bet he was a dirty young one, as well,’ she said. ‘He must have been a smasher. He’s got such warm hands.’

‘Aren’t mine warm?’

‘Not like his are.’

He pulled her along. ‘Come on, or we won’t get there before the picture starts.’

‘Of course we shall,’ she said in a tone that riled him. He was aware that if he turned Burton would still be looking at her.

Tall, white-haired, and seventy-five, a black velvet patch over his dead eye giving a raffish and predatory look, Burton seemed charged with energy as he walked towards the Gregory Hotel. Still unable to sit in the house for long, he walked a mile to the Crown, and to call on Oswald and Helen. Or he strode uphill through Canning Circus and down into the city.

When he took Mary Ann out she noticed his eye wandering towards any personable woman in the pub or on the street, unnoticed by whoever he was observing, though she also could pick out a well-dressed woman, knowing that Burton would never fail to do likewise till the day he died.

He could be taken, by his marching stride, for an old soldier, by those who didn’t know him, a comparison he would have scorned. In the coldest weather he carried a coat over his right arm for smartness rather than utility. Many old men younger than himself ought to stand straight and put another inch or two on their height to give more dignity. As for a walking stick, it was only all right to carry one if you didn’t need to. They should at least close their mouths and hide the rotten teeth. Looking so dead on their feet would make the young dread what they might one day come to, instead of showing a person to respect. If a lifetime’s work had broken them they should try not to appear so gormless. It cost nothing to be smart.

No one was more surprised than Burton when Thomas said he had fallen in love with the woman of his life. ‘It’s about time,’ he said to Mary Ann.

Thomas must have realized that at forty it was now or never, and decided it had to be now. He sang Drink To Me Only in a fine tenor voice at the church hall reception, his wife Grace looking on as if she had found the perfect husband.

Poor woman, Burton thought, listening to a song whose message of sincerity his son would never live up to. Grace was a tall thin woman far too good for him, which Thomas was never to realize, not having cared about anyone from the day he was born. Grace expected much, after the courting of such an insincere cavalier. Thomas had pursued her because she seemed unattainable, and now that he had her she would need a lot of looking after. She should have had more sense than to deliver herself into his hands, Burton said to Mary Ann. ‘He could charm himself into the bedroom of the Queen of Sheba.’

‘Which was much like you and me when I put myself into your hands,’ Mary Ann responded.

He didn’t indicate whether or not this had occurred to him, and went on to say that Oswald had made a better job of married life than Thomas ever would, because Oswald was closer to being a son of his as any man could get. Thus Burton, who had never bothered about knowing himself — who needed to, if you were yourself? — speculated about Thomas, who had lived in the same house for so long, and yet was right.

Thomas rented a house across the boulevard, as if he couldn’t bear to be far from a father he feared so much, though Mary Ann hoped to have a grandchild close now that Brian was working in a factory and too busy going after the girls to come and see them.

Thomas walked into the house at least once a day, till Burton wondered whether he thought he still lived there, and that Grace was his kept woman across the road. He looked smarter in his Home Guard uniform than most spare-time soldiers, no doubt in order to get off more easily with the women, whether married or not. ‘I suppose you fancy yourself in that khaki suit?’

Thomas’s smile showed white and perfect teeth as he reached for the tea Mary Ann poured from her best pewter pot. ‘I like being in the Home Guard. It’s interesting, and fills my spare time. I’m doing something for my country.’ The tea went like a scalding sword into his throat, as if someone might take it away if he didn’t hide it quickly enough. ‘Anyway, when I’m in uniform I’m not wearing out my own clothes.’

He ignored Burton’s contemptuous grunt at such a notion of economy. ‘You earn enough to buy your own.’

Thomas could only smile, even now wary of ‘answering back’. ‘Our company CO likes us to look smart when we’re on parade. His name’s Captain Dyslin, a man of about fifty, though he doesn’t look anywhere near it. He was in the South Wales Borderers in the last war.’

From the cul-de-sac of his thoughts Burton recalled a name already heard, and wanted more information but couldn’t ask directly. ‘That’s a rare name for a Nottingham man.’

‘He’s Welsh.’ Thomas pushed his cup forward for his mother to fill again. She did. ‘A tall smart man, wears a little moustache. He saw me in a pub the other day and treated me to a pint.’

Burton by the fire folded sheets of newspaper into spills for lighting cigarettes, wondering how Dyslin, if it was him, came to be in Nottingham, and why he’d had the effrontery to hobnob with his half-brother. Perhaps it’s somebody else, because there must be more than one Dyslin in the world.

Thomas adjusted a cap Burton thought only fit to carry a pennyworth of chips in. ‘I must be going. Captain Dyslin shouts at us if we’re late on parade. He likes to keep us in line. He can be a real tyrant. Shoulders back, stomach in, chest out! But I sometimes think he’s laughing inside when he goes on a bit too long like that.’

The sirens howled their warning message but Burton did not vary his walk, and ignored a warden shouting from the factory gate that he should get into an air-raid shelter. He considered himself too old to die young, though not too old to go on living.

He wouldn’t have bothered to hide at any time in his life. If you were to die there was nothing to be done, though better of course to stay alive, the bonus of a year or two extra not to be turned down. There had been times when he hadn’t cared to go on living, while knowing there was no cure for life this side of the grave, and that the grave was no cure at all. His snort on turning towards home was meant for all those in the world who had allowed the war to come about.

Anti-aircraft guns unloaded their crackerbarrels at German bombers, shrapnel falling like hard peas on roofs and along empty streets, sounds regarded as merely another manifestation of Old Nick trying to reap him in. A blackout curtain was drawn over the district, except for stars between moving cloud, but he used the kerb and lamp-posts as markers, instinct and local knowledge showing the way to his doorstep.

Mary Ann stood waiting, shaking with fear, had visions of him being killed or injured. ‘I’d have sent Thomas to look for you, but he’s gone on Home Guard duty.’

He gave a dry laugh on following her inside. ‘You don’t think a fool like him would have found me?’

‘You might have got lost. You can’t see a hand before you in this blackout,’ she said in the kitchen. ‘I told you not to leave the house.’

A warm hand touched her cheek. ‘Don’t make a fuss. You know I’ll be all right.’

‘But the sirens go nearly every night, and give me a pain in the stomach.’ The finned shoulders of a bomb crumped into earth not far away. ‘It’s worse than the last war with the zeppelins,’ she said, a gap in the clatter of gunfire. ‘I never thought we’d have to put up with this again in our lives.’

He took off his jacket. ‘Neither did I.’

‘Don’t you think we’d be better off in the cellar?’

‘You can go down if you like. Where are the others?’

’emily’s in bed.’

‘Leave her there. She sleeps like a stone.’

‘And Ivy’s staying at Miss Middleton’s.’

‘She should be safe enough there. They only bomb poor areas like this. Put the kettle on, and take a hot water bottle when you go down. A blanket as well, or you’ll start shivering.’

‘Won’t you come with me?’

If a bomb hit the house it wouldn’t matter whether they were in the cellar or not, and if they got buried together what more could they want? ‘I’ll look in later.’

Every gun-sound came like a clap of the direst thunderbolt, then a barrage from the naval guns behind Robin’s Wood opened up, dozens of shells one after the other, then many all at once, an unbearable noise for a poor soul like Mary Ann, who trembled at every rattle of distant thunder, which he didn’t expect she would mind now, though as far as he knew she was in the safest place of the house.

The cellar was swept and cleaned, and a few of Mary Ann’s selfmade rugs spread on the floor. He had whitewashed the walls to make it much like another room, and hammered up a wooden bench for whoever wanted to sit down, glad he’d kept sufficient tools from his work at the pit to do that and other jobs about the house. The trouble was that at night the cellar could be as cold as an igloo, and staying there long brought pains around the lower part of his back. Mary Ann called it lumbago, and he let her rub the aches with lotion now and again.

When Jane Middleton, asked into the house one evening by Mary Ann, heard the mention of lumbago, she looked up through her fancy rimless glasses and, ignoring a signal from Ivy, piped up: ‘Lumbago is a painful complaint in the muscles of the lower part of the back, or so I understand, and has something to do with rheumatism.’

As if he didn’t know, but there was nothing he could say in reply, even supposing he cared to, which he didn’t, only thinking Miss Hoity-Toity should have been left out on the pavement to wait for Ivy. There was no woman he wouldn’t be polite to, and try to get something out of (even now, if they’d have him) but if Jane Middleton had any liking for a person such as Ivy she wasn’t the sort he wanted to know.

He supposed his lumbago to have started on the first night of air-raid warnings, when Mary Ann asked him in a way he couldn’t refuse to come with her to the cellar because she was afraid to be on her own. Sitting erect in the same position for an hour, the best way he knew of keeping the mind empty so that time would go more quickly, a stabbing cut across the small of his lumbar parts, and from then on it came back if he sat too long. Nothing had ever been wrong with his body, and though such a complaint wouldn’t kill him, Mary Ann said he should go to the doctor, a suggestion — all it dared be — receiving such a sceptical grunt it wasn’t mentioned again.

A couple of bombs from the direction of Old Engine Cottages shook the house. Had he been in the cellar with Mary Ann they wouldn’t have heard themselves speak. Pot dogs rattled on the shelf as if wanting to leap off and hide under the table. Oliver’s photograph looked down, seeming to wonder about noises he had briefly heard in his days as a soldier.

He put on his jacket and walked through the scullery, out the back door. At the end of the small garden was the lavatory, and even though it was the flushing sort he put the usual two-gallon tin of creosote by the pan. He never pulled the chain after a piss because it was a waste of water. The toilet roll on the wall was only for Mary Ann — though he was sure Ivy used it — while he and Emily used newspaper cut into squares. Though it meant black arses it was good enough for them.

Vibrations underfoot and an orange glow over the yards meant more bombs. The noise of guns itched his ears, and he sniffed smoke. A terrified moggie leapt over the wall into the next garden, hoping for safety. Shrapnel pinked, one piece missing his boots by inches. The sky was lighter towards town, as if the whole lot was going up. Aeroplanes flew low again and again, engines droning unevenly between the gunfire.

He thought of Edith and her family in the Meadows, where a lot of the bombs must be falling, hoping they’d be neither killed nor maimed. Rebecca had moved to Kent, and there’d been a danger last year that the Germans might land, though she would have given them what-for if they had. Luckily they were frightened of a drop of water.

In many years he hadn’t thought about Alma, or the child she’d had the cheek to call Oliver. He went to the grave every week but without seeing her, nor anywhere on the street either, and he wondered whether she was curious about him. Perhaps she lived in a different part of town, but if she wanted to find him she knew where to look, and if she didn’t then she didn’t want to find him. He only hoped she was safe.

The windows rattled. Another bomb, and close this time. He went inside at more peppering of shrapnel, careful not to let the bulb glow, though it seemed the Germans had all the light they wanted. He put a half-filled kettle on the few embers, thrifty as ever with the gas. When it boiled he spooned tea into the pot and filled it. Mary Ann would like a cup, and he could do with one as well. Such flame and smoke outside parched the gorge. He opened the parlour cabinet to get the best cups, supposing that if the house were to go up they might as well drink in style.

Sugar was short, but a full spoon went in for Mary Ann’s sweet tooth. He had stopped using it when rationing began, able to take it or leave it, not mattering to him, and so all the more for the others. Even Ivy didn’t refuse his share. He opened the cellar door with his boot, and went carefully down the darkened narrow steps carrying the first tea he had mashed in his life.

He thought Mary Ann was asleep, leaning against the wall, hands by her side, till realizing nobody could be with such noise, except Emily upstairs who must have imagined in her weird dreams that it was Bonfire Night.

Her lips were slightly open, as if expecting something to be put between them, though he couldn’t think what that might be. The pale forehead was luminous with a fear tightly locked in. She waited for the bombing to stop and the war to be over, like everybody else, he supposed, yet feared that every second would be her last. Poor woman! In the dim light were the features of the girl he had married, enough beauty still there for him to touch her lips with his.

She opened her eyes. ‘You kissed me, Ernest!’ — something only done in bed.

Better to grow old like Darby and Joan than Punch and Judy. In such light she hadn’t seen the smile. ‘With this lot going on you never know when it’s time to say goodbye. Here, I made a pot of tea.’

She sipped, and with the other hand reached for his. An explosion made the house shudder as if it would crumble, smashing them and all their tranklements to smithereens, but she was less frightened now.

His tea went down scalding hot as he sat by her, head bent from the low ceiling of the cellar. She felt his warm face: ‘Oliver would have been fifty if he’d lived.’

‘I know. I reckon it up every year.’ He spoke close because of the noise. ‘Lean against me, if you like.’

His lumbago might come back, but it wouldn’t kill him, and whatever did could hardly matter. With more than three score and ten under his belt, and Mary Ann the same beneath her pinafore, he could put a finger to his nose, and hope that those dropping the bombs would be killed, the sooner the better.

Mary Ann’s grip at the cleanly piercing whistle was tighter than he’d ever known. She called out, but he kept his hand relaxed, because if she sensed his worry her terrified heart might give.

The whistle went on, as if to last forever, and though only for a few seconds he thought if this is it, so be it, a throb of rage because they were causing Mary Ann such distress. To calm himself he imagined it wasn’t so much the German bombers as Beelzebub about to blind him in the other eye. She couldn’t stop shaking against him. The whistle ended, as everything had to, and a shudder of explosions almost threw them off the bench.

He knocked his cap against the wall to get the dust off. ‘I thought it was Thomas on his way in, with a whistle like that.’

He thanked God when she laughed and said: ‘Thomas’s whistle was never like that.’ But she couldn’t stop trembling, and went on without opening her eyes: ‘God will pay the Germans out.’ For the first time in his life he held back the grunt she expected.

Burton admitted, on his way to the Gregory Hotel, that he liked to keep a watch over his children, whether they were married or not. Ivy said it was because he wanted to interfere in their lives, but it wasn’t. He was only interested in knowing what they were up to. When Thomas had been married two years he saw him in town arm-in-arm with a woman, out on her dinner break from a factory, he supposed, noting her overalls and the cigarette at her mouth.

Thomas said: ‘Hello, Dad!’ not saying who she was. Burton didn’t want to know, but thought it brazen to be going behind Grace’s back so soon.

When he saw him talking to the same woman in a pub it was obvious what was going on. Grace complained at him having to do Home Guard duty every night, but Burton told Mary Ann he knew very well whose home it was he was guarding, while her husband was in Egypt or some such place. It was hard to understand why his sons had married women too good for them, while three daughters had landed themselves with numbskulls or bullies. Thomas had married an unusual woman, and found her hard to live with, but what wife had ever been easy?

Walking to the bar he noticed a tall army chap with a swagger-stick under his arm, flat cap, moustache, and a row of medal ribbons, who said to him: ‘Do you remember me?’

The Welsh accent brought a picture of Owen the Bible reader who had penned Mary Ann’s postcards at Pontllanfraith, and he got rid of it by a rub at the eye. He knew very well who the man was. ‘I didn’t hear your name.’

‘Dyslin — David Ernest. Captain in the Home Guard for the duration.’

Burton nodded, then finished his drink. ‘Pleased to meet you again.’

‘Thought I’d take another look.’

‘Now you have,’ not wanting to be too abrupt with a man who was, after all, his son. Sensing his wish to shake hands, he kept one firmly by his side, and the other on his empty jar. ‘What are you doing here this time?’

‘I ask that question myself now and then. But I got tired of South Wales — as I believe you did once — and tried my luck in London.’

Another journeyman: it must run in the blood. ‘How did you get on there?’

‘Not too badly. But my wife left me.’

He was astonished that a woman could do such a thing to a Burton. ‘How did that happen?’

‘And then the children grew up.’

‘They all do.’ Burton looked at his impressive son, a sight that, though he was in khaki, brought a pleasure he saw no reason not to enjoy.

Dyslin smiled. ‘Just before the war I thought I’d try things in Nottingham, since I had some connection with it, you might say. And it’s as good a place as any, perhaps better. I get on fine with the people.’

‘You’re doing well?’

‘I’m in a partnership. The war’s hit us, but we’re holding on all right.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘I got a couple of chaps sent down a year or two ago who’d been robbing all over the place. There’s a great deal more crime here than before the war.’

At least one of his sons had made a way in the world, so he accepted a pint, wondering what life would have been like to have had the chap growing up at Old Engine Cottages, the mood momentarily blighted on reflecting that with such a background he might not have done so well for himself — except that Mary Ann could have encouraged him enough to get to where he was now. Perhaps I would have been less harsh to him than the others.

Dyslin took a gentlemanly sip of his whisky. ‘A son of yours is in my company, my half-brother of course, though I shan’t let him know. Chance throws up some rare coincidences.’

Burton had to agree.

‘As soon as his name came out at roll call I could tell the instant I looked at him. He has the makings of a good soldier, you might like to know. He learns quickly, and does what he’s told.’

Burton drank half his pint. ‘He’s had a lot of practice.’

‘I imagine he has.’ He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar for a while. ‘But I’d been wanting to have another meeting with you. Who knows when it will be possible again, in this war?’

‘How long do you think it’ll go on?’

‘Another three or four years. But the Russians are in with us now, so I expect they’ll win a lot of it.’

‘I don’t think anybody ever won a war.’

‘I always told myself the same, but we’ve got to fight this one.’

‘So I believe.’ The Germans had tried to kill him and Mary Ann. He took money from his pocket. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

Dyslin couldn’t refuse the generosity of an old age pensioner, who was also his father, for whom he felt more affection than he thought became any man, as he placed his glass forward. ‘That’s very kind.’

Burton looked askance at Dyslin’s facetious remark. ‘No it isn’t.’ He may be my son, but he has to keep his place, in spite of the ribbons on his chest. ‘It’s my wish. I’m glad we met again.’

THIRTY

Mary Ann booked seats on the train so that she and Burton could stay a week in Kent with Rebecca, who lived so far away that Mary Ann hadn’t seen as much of her children as she would have liked. ‘We don’t know how much longer we’re going to live, and I want to see more of them before I die, even though they’re all grown up.’

She worried about the trip, her glasses on while looking at timetables, and trying to make sense of the London Underground diagram the travel agent had given her, of how to get from St Pancras to Charing Cross. Burton said not to let the matter upset her, but he would say that, wouldn’t he? He expected her to do the figuring merely because he had given the three pounds for the tickets out of money he’d put by. Up at five, he woke Mary Ann at six.

‘You might have left me a bit longer,’ she said.

‘I’m getting hungry. I’ve got the fire going.’

At half-past eight they stood in their best clothes by the silent Gregory Hotel, and took a trolleybus to Old Market Square, changing there for the LMS station. He wasn’t bored, with so much to see from the train, shading his eye when the sun worked through cloud. Near Bedford, Mary Ann looked in the St Neots direction, as if for a glimpse of her relations. When the train puffed up to the platform of St Pancras station Burton was first out to handle the cases.

‘We must get on the blue line to cross London,’ she said, ‘but there’s no hurry. After we change at Leicester Square there’s only one more stop. Our train for Lydd doesn’t leave until a quarter-past three.’

The Underground train seemed to pull up every few seconds, his head so full of the wonder. ‘If there’s time I could do with a drink. And I expect you’ll be wanting your pint of shandy.’

At Charing Cross she put their cases into the left luggage and, with two hours to spare before the Lydd train, she led him into Trafalgar Square, where they ate their sandwiches. ‘This is what I’ve always wanted to see. That must be Lord Nelson up there.’

Twenty years ago an old sailor-looking villain had stomped on his wooden leg up the path at Old Engine Cottages, and sold her a piece of wood for half a crown, saying it was part of the ship Lord Nelson died on. She was proud to have it, until learning that the Victory was in Portsmouth and had never been broken up.

Rebecca and Fred met them at Lydd station, made all the fuss possible during their stay. Rebecca told Mary Ann when they were alone that Fred had used her all their married life as a rag to wipe the sweat of his forehead with. ‘I wish I’d never set eyes on him, but then, what man would have been good enough for me to set eyes on? Bringing up six kids has been my penance, and there was no getting out of it.’

Burton regretted having come, counting every hour to going home. He was nagged to get back, though couldn’t say why, said nothing about it, never would have, went to the pub with Fred, who was a happy but thoughtless man, solid in body and contemptuous of everyone, without having the presence to back up his opinions, Burton knowing that Fred, in maligning someone, only showed his own littleness. Most of all, he talked too much.

But Burton enjoyed being with Rebecca’s grown sons and daughters, who were fascinated by him. One grandson walked him to the Pilot Inn at Dungeness, and eighty-year-old Burton walked so quickly he at one point left him behind.

Whatever was calling him home he wouldn’t like when he discovered what it was. He only knew he wasn’t where he wanted to be, as if neglecting an issue of crucial importance. The sooner he went back the better, a feeling so firm he was tempted to talk about it with Mary Ann. The only sign of his uncertainty to her was that he ate so little it was a wonder he could go on living, but when she mentioned it he said he had never been a big eater anyway.

Standing with his grandson by a field at harvest time he watched the machine reducing the area of wheat. He was sorry at not having a shotgun to get one of the rabbits running for safety, but on one coming close enough he snatched it up, and killed it by a cut at the neck. At the same instant a youth slung a piece of slate which caught Burton’s hand, and made a gash that fetched blood.

Kids were only doing what they had always done, so he laid no blame, but strode down the lane to where his daughter Rebecca would bind the wound, blood dripping through his fingers, the dead rabbit swinging from the other hand.

Burton, the large flat cap under his arm, stood so as to give full advantage to his height, looked at the rectangular grave and marble scroll at its head. Under the embossed horseshoe were words he knew backwards and forwards, upside-down and right side up, the only writing he could recognize, every letter blazoned into his head.

He laid down the swatch of red roses and threw the bunch of daffodils laid there by Ivy and Emily onto a heap of decaying blooms by the church wall. He carried the vase of tap water to the grave and set his flowers in it, prime roses from a shop, not trash out of Thomas’s allotment.

He wiped his large veined hands with a red and white spotted handkerchief. Wounds never healed. Knots didn’t unravel. You couldn’t expect them to, had no say in the matter. You were grieved unto death and maybe afterwards, though his doubts on that were such as not to worry. Life had been long, and at least he had lived it.

The sepulchral grunt was as if his heart could hold no more. The older he got the worse Oliver’s death tormented him. He wondered how much longer he’d need to shoulder its weight. Your head seems as full as a bucket but, turn it upside-down, nothing comes out, glued in by memories you could well do without. Life was long enough to enjoy, but too short for torment. He turned abruptly and went onto the street, walking in so straight a line that an onlooker assumed he was following the marks of the paving stones.

Back from his usual pint, he said to Mary Ann that he was going up to bed. Sparks of pain moved across his chest, hot as toast yet as blunt as all get out, toing and froing in a slowed-down insistent way, hardly worth bothering about, but suddenly they clubbed together and gave a gyp he’d never known. She asked again what ailed him, but he wasn’t the man for answers.

Ivy and Emily sat by the diminishing fire. It was even harder to get coal and coke than it had been during the war. Emily queued patiently at depots all around the town, and sometimes brought half a hundredweight back on her shoulders. ‘It’s time you two were in bed.’ He went upstairs before knowing whether or not they obeyed.

There was nothing to do with such pain except get some kip and hope it would go. If it didn’t, it was him who would, to some place he had never known, and there was damn-all to be done about it. He put his boots in their usual place by the door, to know where they’d be if needed again, and draped his suit on a hanger beside the brown one in the wardrobe. He unclipped his suspenders and sat on the bed to draw off his socks, dropped them in the hamper for Mary Ann to wash.

The pain seemed to settle, and he hoped he wasn’t pampering himself, though it would get back into action if he didn’t lie down. Shedding his long underwear, nakedness minus feet and face showed in the wardrobe mirror. The woollen nightshirt shook to his feet, and the last thing done before getting into bed was to take off his black velvet eyepatch, make sure it was smooth, and put it on the small table so that he would know where to find it. The wounded eye was less painful for some reason, though dazzled with colours never seen before.

Mary Ann stood in her nightdress. He hadn’t heard her come in, unusual for a man who always noticed everything. She laid the fallen blankets over him, the bedroom icily cold. His face was the colour of chalk. ‘You’re not well, Ernest,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

He couldn’t stare the pain into quiescence, lay with knees bent in a bed that had never been long enough. Maybe he would get one to fit, where he was going. He turned to her. ‘Bricks in my chest are banging together. Don’t ask any more.’

It was an illness that couldn’t be palliated by Epsom salts mixed with hot tea in a large white saucer; or cured by friar’s balsam, or held at bay by that mysterious concoction for horses given him by a gypsy in Wales, gurgled into his gullet from an upended position, fitness and colour coming into his face as the sombre liquid diminished in the bottle.

His back was to Mary Ann, who lay by his side. Drawing his knees up eased him. ‘Are Emily and Ivy in bed?’ Whatever I’ve got seems more than a cold, unless it’s a bad case of the flu, though if it is I can’t think where I caught it. Walking among people who are hawking and spitting, it jumps into your throat, then goes everywhere else in your body. I’ve never seen a doctor in my life, but might if this hasn’t gone by morning. Drunken youths shouted along the boulevard. ‘They are,’ Mary Ann told him.

He wondered about his children. Edith had at last rid herself of Doddoe — after he’d been in prison a few times for poaching. He recalled how some years ago Doddoe had pawned Edith’s sheets and finest underclothes to get money for beer. On his way to the pub he met Sabina’s husband Harold, and the pair drank away every penny, while their children were hungry at home. Edith now lived with a man who looked after her as she deserved, though her jailbird lads called him blind and tormented him almost to madness.

Sabina lived down the road, and Rebecca was all right in Kent. Oswald did his best for Helen at home, and Thomas across the road was more likely chasing some woman instead of being in bed with Grace. You couldn’t berate a man too much for that. In any case nobody ever altered.

He thought of his children but didn’t want them close, for who would be gawped at when the devil was getting his claws into you? He took my favourite son, and now it’s my time to go, when I was hoping for another ten years before the lights went out. ‘You tossed and turned all night,’ Mary Ann said. ‘Drink this cup of tea, and then I’ll get your breakfast.’

She covered him, put a hand to his fevered head. The pain had thinned him since yesterday. ‘Thomas has gone for the doctor. He’ll be here directly.’

‘I don’t want breakfast. A doctor won’t do any good, either.’ No use talking, I don’t care to frighten her, though by her look and the tears on her cheeks she thinks I’m about to go. His voice was weak. ‘None of your blawting. Not for me.’

The doctor was a short heavy man not long out of the navy. ‘What’s all this, Mr Burton?’

Less answer was necessary than there ever had been to any question, and he felt like swearing at being addressed in so familiar a manner. As with the wounded on the burning deck, he was shot full of diamorphine to make the pain more distant.

‘I’ll call later,’ the doctor said to Mary Ann downstairs, ‘and give him more of the same. The poor chap needs it.’

THIRTY-ONE

Burton was dying. Ivy knew that if he didn’t now he never would though no one lives forever, and who would want him to? Certainly none of his family, so she believed. Immortality is not given to anyone born of the flesh, as she had heard long ago in Sunday School, and whoever came into the world other than that way, and told us all about it, would be shouted down as a barefaced liar.

Burton would go to hell when he went, because where else was there for a man like him? She had heard that everybody who did go to that place, no matter how old, were made into their prime of thirty-three. Those who went to heaven, on the other hand, stayed the same age as when they had died, because innocence was much cherished in that place.

She found it unpleasant to think of Burton back in his prime. He had been tall and domineering all his life, though a roisterer when young, and a womanizer since. When we did anything he didn’t like or thought was wrong, and he was forced to speak to us about it, the fact of having to open his mouth at all, as if he had no energy to spare after a day’s work at the forge, made him so angry he nearly always ended by hitting us. Above all, we must never answer back, because the response would be certain and devastating. He’d had more power over his family than a Persian satrap over a province.

Sometimes they sensed the moment coming, and slipped away before he could strike, thinking that when back within range he would have forgotten his anger. Hope stayed during their escape, but he never did forget what they had done or said before running away, so they always got whatever battering the lapse of time had convinced him even more they deserved. He’d never crushed them, though, oh no, but they did grow more bitter as they got older. Or at least she had.

She pictured Burton arriving at the gates of hell, where he was made into his prime of thirty-three. He would be at Old Nick’s throat in no time. There’d be some argument or other, such as when Burton, a lifetime blacksmith, wanted to get closer to the fire, while others did what was expected by running from the flames. At the first sign of authority from Old Nick, who as the gaffer demanded fear and respect from everybody, Burton would send a wicked knucklebone crack at his chin, because at thirty-three Burton had been a smith of long standing, with five of his eight kids already born, and took no chelp from anybody. Old Nick, having more than his work cut out to hold Burton in check, would get the pasting of his life. All hell would break loose, you might say. The defence of Burton’s behaviour could only be that he had only been himself, at a time when to be anybody else would have brought him and his family to destitution.

On hearing the din, and being told what it was about, God Almighty would send word for the culprit to come up and explain himself. Out of curiosity Burton would go, to see if there really was a God, and if so what He looked like, because hadn’t he all his life heard from his chastised children, and even from Mary Ann, that God would one day pay him out for his wicked temper? All that could be said in his favour was that at least he had heard of God.

‘Nobody in hell has ever made such a fuss.’ God would shake a finger, though not too harshly, reluctant to upset anyone unnecessarily. ‘So tell me what it was about.’

‘He asked for it,’ Burton would reply, if his mood was mischievous, which it rarely had been, certainly not at thirty-three. Though aware of being talked to by no less than God Himself, he wasn’t the sort of man to answer a question from anyone.

‘What do you mean by that?’ God would ask more sternly, committing the ultimate sin, as far as Burton was concerned, of answering back, and before any of the angels realized what was happening God would be knocked from his golden throne and crawling around the floor looking for his glasses, as well as for the scythe that only a blacksmith like Burton could have made.

Burton would go back to where he knew he belonged, to live in as much peace as could be expected after the life he had led.

Ivy made a pot of tea for Mary Ann, who had only left Burton’s side because, unable to fight off sleep, she had come down to doze in her rocking chair by the fire. Burton was beyond needing a cup, but Ivy wouldn’t take him one, unless he asked her politely, which he was incapable of doing.

Standing on the doorstep a week ago she had seen him coming back from the pub with one of the last pints he would drink settled inside him. Under the sodium lights of the boulevard he held himself straight-backed, fully erect, striding along in his best suit, as if knowing that everyone would step aside for him. Halfway to the house he touched his cap to a young woman going by.

Ivy had been too close to know why women had always found him so attractive, but they had. She remembered standing in the jug-and-bottle to get some Guinness for Mary Ann, and when the door into the saloon bar opened for a few moments there was Burton talking to a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. She was all dolled up, smiling and nodding and looking ready to eat him, and happy that he laughed and touched her arm, as if he would like to eat her. God alone knew what he was telling her. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen him trying to get off, unable to imagine why a young girl could be so taken by such an old man.

The last to know about a man were his own children, and all of them were between forty and fifty now. They had never acknowledged how hard he worked to keep them fed, shod and housed, but on the other hand his lifelong struggle had stopped him getting close to them, and had not allowed them to get close to him. Perhaps the only way of keeping himself going was to fight against any kind of bother.

Providing for a wife and eight children hadn’t been easy on the money a blacksmith earned, and she admitted that he had never complained, or blamed anyone for whatever unpleasantness he’d had to face, even though such endurance had cut him off from getting love or consolation from his children. He had never wanted to know himself, thinking, if he had thought at all: ‘I’m me, therefore I am.’ It had always given her satisfaction to recall that God had got back at him twice in his life.

Those who had lived under his reign might dispute that they were the last people to know him. They could say it was easy to know all there was to know, because the expressive fist and vitriolic mask had been only too plain to understand, and that if they didn’t know what was behind it, on running away with aching ribs or a sore back, then who could?

At the groan from upstairs she told herself that whatever pain he was in served him right. It was as well for God to pay him out as much as possible before he died, because who in fact could be certain there was a hell for him to go to afterwards?

The only thing was that he was about to kick the bucket, for which she had waited till the age of forty-five, more years than she’d ever wanted, but when you were born into a situation from which you couldn’t escape there was nothing to do but put up with it. None of them had been asked to come into a family lorded over by Burton.

Every day since birth she’d vowed she couldn’t bear another day under his cold unblinking eye. Maybe her mother had thought the same from the time of their marriage, but it was hard to believe, at her lying so peacefully in the chair.

The arrow of another cry came down the stairs and into the kitchen, bedding its tip into Mary Ann’s heart. At the sound of her feet ascending the narrow wooden stairs Ivy thought that those who suffer most are more punctilious in their obligations to those who put them through it. No one had borne the brunt of him more than Mary Ann, whose loving care for the rest of the family had been the only balm for her endurance. All her married life she had fortified herself by recalling the love that had surrounded her like a halo in those early days.

She had never heard Mary Ann speak a word of complaint against him, as if leaving that to the five daughters and three sons, herself in particular, who always had and always would say what she thought about him, though she’d never done so to his face because, as old as he was, his hand would have been unavoidable.

The framed oleograph above the parlour mantelshelf, a wedding present from Burton’s brother George (who had been no angel either) showed a curly-headed debonair youth with a kerchief around his neck, by his sweetheart in a flowered frock. From the couplet beneath it wasn’t clear which of the pair was speaking, but Ivy assumed the sentimental thought was shared by both, though it was the young man who offered the bunch of flowers. Mary Ann must often have looked at the picture, and wondered about her life with Burton.

Its mysterious quality had appealed to Ivy even before she could read the words, a scene between two people promising a life of happiness and mutual understanding, and kindness towards any children they would have. She had gazed at it as a little girl, and the bitterness of her intense disillusionment was enough to spoil her life.

Still, the picture had been a strength to Mary Ann, because there was no doubt that in spite of his sins Burton was about to die knowing he had never been loved so much by any other woman. He had loved her, as well, and perhaps he had turned against his children thinking they had formed a barrier between himself and Mary Ann.

Ivy realized that for all Burton’s dislike of her, and knowing her hatred of him, he had never threatened to pitch her into the street. He might have thought it often enough — she was sure he had — but he hadn’t said it, because having females in the house who daren’t answer back was something he couldn’t live without. Anyway, the family was the family, and because he had had to put up with the hardships, so must they.

The gate latch clicked, and Oswald came in, tall and ruddy-faced, with the thick hair of Mary Ann’s Irish ancestors. He looked worn and raddled, as if caring for Helen rather than his work had tired him out. ‘Thomas isn’t home yet, but I expect he’ll call later,’ he said. ‘How is Burton?’

‘Mother heard him moan, and went up to see what she could do. I don’t think he’s got long.’

‘Everyone has to die sometime.’ He recalled how Burton had comforted him after the death of Howard. ‘But I do feel a bit upset about it.’

‘I suppose you would.’

‘Well, he’s not dead, is he? He could suddenly recover enough to walk downstairs and be more or less his old self for another five years.’

Ivy’s face reddened with horror at the idea. ‘No, no he couldn’t. He’s too far gone.’

He smiled. ‘It’s been known,’ but didn’t want to argue with such a sister. ‘Has the doctor been?’

‘He was in this morning, and just told us to keep him as comfortable as we could. I’m to go and fetch him, if anything happens.’

‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘Mary Ann will need you here.’ He looked out of the window as if to see Burton’s soul already lifting across the plot of yard, illuminating the darkness before fading into rest. ‘You always think your father’s going to last forever, and it comes as a shock to know he won’t.’

She disliked his melancholy, so often noticed in Burton. ‘Well, he can’t.’ Arms folded across her bosom, she wanted to say he had lasted too long as it was, but Oswald wouldn’t like it, so she didn’t. If his sons thought differently it was because they had been quicker at standing up to him and getting out of his way. They found it easier to forgive than women, who’d had more to put up with. ‘I don’t care what you think. I just wouldn’t want somebody like that to last forever.’

‘He didn’t know any better than to treat us like he did.’ Oswald took a spill Burton had made a few days ago, touched a light from the fire for his cigarette. ‘I know he was hard, but not all the time with me.’ Burton had become easier to get on with in the last few years, and was dying just as he was ready to enjoy life. Maybe the longer two people live together the more they get to be like each other, and being married to Mary Ann for sixty years it was natural that her tolerance should pass onto him — as he’d said to Sabina only last week.

Emily came in, without saying hello, a half-filled basket on her arm. The war had been over more than a year, but times were no easier. You’d be daft to expect it, Ivy thought. Food was still rationed, and all the buildings were shabby and needed a coat of paint.

Emily put the weekly rations in the cupboard. The put-upon aspect of her features that had been there since birth made everyone look on her as a bit touched. It helped to recognize herself in the mirror, which was better than not seeing anything unusual at all.

‘I had to queue half an hour. A lot of people jumped in the line just as they saw me coming. Then some pushed in front of me. I wanted to kill ’em, but they pushed and pushed. When I couldn’t put up with it any longer I told them to fuck off or I’d blind them.’

‘Don’t swear.’ Ivy remembered her doing so in front of Jane Middleton, who’d been shocked. Tears came at the memory of poor Jane, who’d died of a heart attack two years ago.

Emily gave a wickedly triumphant smile. ‘Well, I got my place back, didn’t I? And I brought all the groceries home, didn’t I? So don’t fucking well tell me what to say.’ She poured tea, and made a face on tasting it. ‘You let it get cold,’ glancing at Ivy, who she thought capable of putting ice in it specially for her.

Ivy, knowing better than to argue, was glad to see Sabina and Edith, followed by Thomas. All six crowded the living room, both men still in their working clothes. Sabina kept her coat well-wrapped, looked fearful, as if incapable of tears after her baleful life with Harold. ‘How’s Dad?’

‘The old so-and-so’s about to go.’ Ivy when in Kent heard Rebecca say she wouldn’t bother to come and see Burton when he was ill and looked like kicking the bucket, so everybody was here who should be.

Edith set out cups for the tea Emily was making. ‘I know he was a bit of a bogger to me, but I’m sorry he’s going.’

Sabina was too miserable to speak. He had been a devil to her as well, though she couldn’t forget how he had taken her back into the house after she had run away from home.

Burton shouted, like a much younger man, ordering his sons to start work at the forge: ‘Nobody can do a job as well as yourself.’ Then he was in the doorway of the house handing out jobs to all and sundry like a sergeant-major. Oliver was walking across the Cherry Orchard towards Robin’s Wood, about to vanish in the mist of a warm spring morning. He called for him to come back.

Ivy shook with rage. ‘It should be Mary Ann he wants.’

‘He loved Oliver more than anybody else except her.’ Oswald dried tears with a large white handkerchief, wondering whether Burton had wept when his father had died. Probably not, because he hadn’t been born of a mother like Mary Ann. He stood with Thomas by the bed, the first time they had been in the room while their father was there.

Come to see me go, Burton thought. Mary Ann hadn’t slept by his side the night before, which meant that Old Nick was about to have him. Narrow stairs curved upwards, dark and dusty in his waking dream, but he was beyond the effort of climbing.

‘What are you doing here?’ Oliver stepped from the frame in the parlour, to see him off, or welcome him, his smile no more than a subtle alteration of the lips, as if to start softly whistling, make perfect music to cut himself off from the surrounding tribulations. Burton hoped for love and forgiveness, but Oliver turned like a plaster dummy and walked away.

He shouted, but his son wouldn’t listen, had only been happy when by himself as a youth. Burton called again, looked hard and long. ‘He’s not far off, Mam,’ Oswald said, though it took some believing, till he heard Mary Ann crying, poor soul. Impelled by his last strength, Burton sat rigidly upright, the flannel nightshirt buttoned to his neck, a look of inflamed wonder when the velvet patch fell from his skull-like head and revealed the ugly terracotta hole of his dead eye.

He was still for a moment — as if to give traffic on the road outside the chance to stop at his going — until a spark the size he had never imagined spread through his heart and lungs, causing gouts of pink froth to erupt from his open mouth. Blood flowed down his chin, and he saw with a blacksmith’s clarity Old Nick coming towards him on a horse. There was shock on his face, and then the eye stopped looking because it could see no more. Never afraid of the dark, he went into it wondering what was there.

Feeling more alone than he ever had, Oswald stepped onto a trolley bus going into town, and paid for an announcement in the Evening Post saying that Ernest Burton, blacksmith, was dead. The world would be a different place from now on, and they who had been borne from him would feel themselves different people. He wanted to sit in the Peach Tree over a pint and think about the family’s loss but, fearful that something might happen to Helen if he delayed, took the same numbered bus towards home.

One or two men who had worked with Burton at the pit came to Lenton churchyard to see him buried. Many people had heard of his death, but Mary Ann wondered what the dumpy and spectacled woman by the wall, and the tall young man by her side, were doing there.

Old Morgan, thin and upright, was the height of formality in his wing collar and bowler hat, and silver-handled stick pressed firmly to the ground. He stood next to Tom who was dressed equally high and out of fashion, both upright but close together, as if to support whoever might fall, and looking beyond the grave into space they would be entering soon, to find Burton. When the priest had finished his words Tom turned to Morgan: ‘There’s a dewdrop at the end of your nose, old pal,’ and passed the ironed handkerchief from his top pocket.

Morgan snatched it, dabbed, then handed it back. ‘Mind your own bloody business. There’s one on yours as well.’

Dyslin came to the graveside, and said to Mary Ann: ‘My family knew Mr Burton as a young blacksmith in Wales.’

The mention of Burton’s youth brought back the days when he had courted her, so she felt momentarily young in her grief. He was the same smart chap who had called at Old Engine Cottages fifteen years ago. ‘You mean your mother knew him?’

‘Yes. I saw from the paper that he’d died. It’s a sad day for me as well.’

He looked like Burton’s son, clipped moustache, hard unblinking eyes, a strong line of jaw, tall and spare. Perhaps Burton had fathered more than one child before meeting her.

His laugh made an uncommon noise in the churchyard when she told him. ‘In my profession I hear even more outlandish stories. But I must go now. If you ever need anything, you have only to let me know.’ He gave her a newer version of the card she had found among the things of Burton he had thought worth keeping.

Oswald saw him walk away under his large umbrella. ‘Who was that?’

‘He was my captain in the Home Guard,’ Thomas put in. ‘Wasn’t it nice of him to come? I didn’t think he thought so much of me. I suppose he found out about it from the Post.’

‘He was Burton’s son,’ Mary Ann said. ‘Your half-brother, from before Burton married me.’ She walked away from their astonishment. A man can scatter children everywhere, she thought when out of the rain and in the car to go home, but if a woman brings one into the house that isn’t her husband’s, and he finds out, she gets murdered.

Alma, a pale spinster of fifty, hair grey under her rain hat, peered at the ceremony through small gold-rimmed spectacles. The heavy gaberdine mackintosh wasn’t quite warm enough to stop her emotional shivers. Thirty-one-year-old Oliver was by her side, both standing well apart from the Burtons. She hardly knew why she was there, except that she had wanted him to see his father buried, but he seemed bored, even irritated.

‘I’m sorry I made you lose time from your work,’ she said, ‘but he was your father. And now you know.’

‘It’s taken long enough for you to tell me. Up to a few years ago I was burning to know, then found I couldn’t care less. Lydia once hinted who it was, but I didn’t believe her, thinking it was just another of her stories to amuse me.’

‘You played with him once as a child.’

‘And I just thought he was some man you’d picked up.’

She was crying. ‘He ruined my life, but he made it as well. I never loved any man as much as him.’

He put an arm over her shoulders: better for her to cry, and talk, though how could the stern headmistress of a girls’ school allow what happened so many years ago to upset her? ‘You let him take me for a walk, I couldn’t think why at the time, but the memory kept popping up when I was on those Atlantic convoys, and on the worse ones to Murmansk.’ He recalled telling Burton he wanted to see the Amazon, but the Tuloma and the Hudson had been enough. ‘I should have known he was my father, because everything about that meeting stayed so vivid.’

‘I often wondered whether the past is worth having been lived,’ she said, ‘but at least I’ve got you, and your children.’

The last pair to leave the churchyard, he held her arm. By the time they reached the pavement she’d stopped crying. The gate was still open. ‘Go back and close it.’

He looked as if thinking her slightly mad. She had brought him up to obedience, though it was a bit much expecting a trained engineer and ex-naval officer to jump to his mother’s command. He shut the gate nevertheless.

Mary Ann took a nightdress from her private drawer, folded between sheets of tissue paper and smelling of lavender, every pleat sharply ironed. ‘I shall want to be put in this when I die,’ she said to Sabina, ‘so be sure not to use anything else.’

She had told Sabina to ask Brian to bring some rice back for her from Malaya, so she might not have expected to die as soon as she did. ‘They grow it out there, and I know he’ll bring it if you let him know it’s for me.’ She hadn’t been able to get any for more than five years, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t in the shops now that the war was over, beginning to realize that she and Burton had unwittingly voted for a government that kept people short so that they would know their place. Having imagined such days were over, she wondered now if they ever would be.

She died in her sleep a year after Burton, before Brian could bring the rice. Burton was buried in the same plot as Oliver but Mary Ann wanted to be cremated, which Ivy told Sabina was because she’d had as much of Burton as she could stand during her lifetime, and didn’t care to lie in the same grave with him after death.

Sabina replied that Mary Ann asked to be cremated because the grave was full, and she was generous enough to let Burton stay with Oliver. In any case she was frightened of being buried alive in the box.

‘Your grandma was timorous,’ she said to Brian when he came home, ‘but she would stand up to right a wrong whenever she could. She loved Burton from the moment she set eyes on him till the day she died, whatever Ivy might say. And he loved her the same. He thought the world of her. When I went to wake her up on the morning she died I didn’t know she was dead, but I saw it as soon as I looked at her lovely peaceful face. She lay on her back, the bedclothes up to her neck as smooth as if she hadn’t moved an inch all night. One arm was under the clothes, but the other was outside, her fingers tight together and holding something. I had a job to get the hand open, but when I did I found a two-shilling piece with Queen Victoria’s head on it. I’ll never know why it was there. Perhaps she thought she’d have to pay her way into heaven when she died, though they’d have welcomed a good soul like her for nothing. It was an old two-bob piece, but the shopkeeper took it, and I don’t expect she minded me spending it on groceries.’

THIRTY-TWO

When sirens sounded and the bombers roamed, Helen walked from the house with joyful expectation. To stop her would mean using strength that would hurt, so Oswald let her go. She would come back unharmed, was happy among gunflashes and the shudder of bombs, hoping God would turn sufficiently benevolent to take her to Howard.

After the war, when Oswald’s job on the canal came to an end, he had to give up the house as well. Helen didn’t want to leave, because Howard had lived there, but Oswald believed a move would be good for her. She would no longer have to walk along the road and pass the place where their son had been struck down.

The air of the council estate was healthier, the aspect more open, but Oswald dreamed of living alone on an island in the middle of a lake, a one-roomed house with bed, table, chair and fireplace, a few trees outside to give shade and fuel. A rowing boat would get him to shore for basic provisions, though a plot of garden (and maybe a chicken coop) would supply much of what was necessary. He wanted solitude and peace, but had to make do with the vision, so as to endure the maelstrom of Helen’s moods and needs.

At the new house she wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of bed without help. She complained of her blighted life, which Oswald considered a good thing because it saved him doing the same, though he wished she had nothing to complain of at all, or could stop herself doing so, then he wouldn’t have to think about not doing so, though in that case there’d be nothing to talk about. I’d live in silence, and feel too much like my father, he thought. So he cleaned the house and cooked the meals, carried her up and carried her down, and saw to everything she wanted.

He sometimes thought his heart would burst, a dim explosion in his chest, a jolt, a push from within taking him beneficially down into blackness. He dreaded it because who would then take care of Helen? He thought what a relief it would be to walk away from her eternal lamentations at the hardness of life.

On better days Howard like a true angel receded from her thoughts and let daylight in. After a while this God-given anaesthetic wore away, to be replaced by the pain of realizing that life had no meaning, that she had nothing to live for and, because it was a sin to die, must endure until God (as she put it) took her.

Oswald laid out a bedroom on the ground floor, which opened onto the garden. Every fine day he cradled her to the lawn whose borders he had cultivated into a fresh and colourful display. From his allotment he brought choice blooms, though without expecting much appreciation when she held out a hand for them. Even before taking his boots off in the kitchen he put lettuces in season and small colourful radishes on the table, and then on her plate when he had washed them, all good things gathered so that she would eat. He cared for her as if paying back every woman who throughout the ages had done so for all the Burton men.

He met Edith in town one morning walking along the Ropewalk. He had been to Boots with a prescription for Helen. ‘You look like death warmed-up,’ she said.

He chose not to worry about the pain that had run across his chest a few weeks ago like a ferret in search of food, since it hadn’t come back. Edith put up her umbrella against the rain, and told him she had a house of her own at Beeston now, which her son Gilbert had bought for her who, she said, was doing very well in America. ‘But how is Helen getting on?’

‘Not too bad.’

‘She’s got to forget her troubles. It’s you who worries me, though, you’re too thin. You ought to see a doctor.’

‘Who would take care of Helen if he found something wrong? You can’t have two people badly in the same house.’

‘That’s a daft way to look at it. If anything happens to you she won’t have anyone to take care of her at all, and then where would she be?’

At such concern he said: ‘It’s a long time since I gave you a kiss,’ and brought her close, not caring what passersby might think. Were her cheeks wet from the rain? Or was she tearful because of him?

She laughed after his kiss. ‘The last person who did that to me was a Chinese man last night. There’s a caravan in my garden that I let him live in, and I’ve come downtown to buy some pots and pans so’s he can have something decent to cook with. He’s a lovely little chap with dark hair. He wears a suit all the time, and makes me a delicious Chinese meal every now and again. We have a little cuddle afterwards. I used to think all men were rotten, but he’s not.’

‘You always were a devil,’ he laughed with her. Once young and flighty, she was now more beautiful than handsome, few wrinkles on her face, and a firm stout figure even after bearing nine children. ‘I’m lucky to have such a sister,’ he said.

The day was warm, but Helen called for a blanket over her knees while resting in the garden. She lay in a half-sleep, head to one side. When her missal slipped onto the grass Oswald took it to the kitchen. If she lived a hundred years he would look after her in the same way, then happily die in the belief that he had done all he could. A shadow drifted across the doorway, a cool evening breeze bringing the freshness of mown grass and flowers.

She wanted to go in. ‘But you must let me walk by myself, Oswald,’ she said for the first time. ‘I do have two feet, you know.’

‘There’s no need of that.’ She lay with arms by her side, dark eyes glowing from grey curls. ‘You don’t weigh more than a feather pillow.’ His blacksmith’s strength would serve for as long as needed, regarding it like Burton as his to command. He carried her with his usual ease to the door.

‘This is like the day we were married,’ not having reminded him of that before, either. He would get her inside, see that she was comfortable, then make the supper, an omelette for her, and a slice of fat bacon (with potatoes) for him. They would then sit together and watch television, before she went to sleep.

The malign fate which had called his son had kept a blow in store for him, though not one he would suffer from, except for the second or two of pain which struck across his heart like the cut of a sword. When a neighbour came at Helen’s screams it was obvious to anybody except a fool, she said, that he would never get up again.

Helen was cared for in a Catholic nursing home till she was well over eighty. Grief can prolong as well as shorten life, only mysterious and inherited qualities having any say in how long it will be.

The nuns looked after her as if she were their mother, always making sure the framed photograph of Howard stood at the right angle on her bedside table for when she opened her eyes in the morning. One night she went to sleep, and had no further need to look.

Burton had always said that Thomas’s marriage to Grace wouldn’t last, only wondering whether he would live to see it. He didn’t. Grace fell ill from a fatal cocktail of pleurisy, bronchitis and pneumonia. Ivy and Emily took turns nursing her, Thomas rarely at her bedside. He made the excuse of too much overtime, but Ivy said that Grace died because she couldn’t take any more of his doing it on her with every woman he set eyes on.

Thomas grieved a little longer than usual, having behaved so badly, then went on with his philandering, having no more to waste thought and energy on alibis which hadn’t always been successful.

He didn’t find it so easy to get the women he wanted. Times changed. Young women went off with completely unsuitable men (as if they hadn’t always) — men, Thomas thought, who were scruffs and runts, or ugly and without any rules of that chivalrous behaviour he had schemed to follow. He was still handsome, tall and well-built, with thick but grey hair, looking fully ahead when out walking, though as Burton had often said, he lacked the ability to see much on either side. Yet he could tell a woman that he loved her (and be believed as often as not) though only so as to get her into bed, and for as long as he himself thought it to be true, which it often wasn’t for long, since he hadn’t always been convinced in the first place, which drove him to looking for someone else.

When he was sixty-five he met Alice, in her fifties. She had a vinegary tongue, but he settled for her until someone better came along. He made the mistake of moving into her council house at Aspley, such a comfortable place he felt less and less inclined to seek out better prospects. Besides, he no longer had the energy and, being retired, preferred to sit by the fire watching television in winter, and digging around the garden in summer. It wasn’t the sort of clover he’d been used to, but the better looking women than Alice, spoken to in pubs or at bus stops, either turned their backs or told him in ripe old Nottingham parlance to fuck off or they’d get their boyfriends to kick him in.

Alice soon lost all liking for this tall man who stood a bit too often before the hearth warming his arse, and in a wavering tenor voice sang a popular ballad from the old days, thinking he was entertaining her in prime television style, like a modern Richard Tauber. Sometimes he would set up a concert of whistling till the sound drove her mad, and she asked the big daft canary to put a sock in it, always much to his surprise at a performance supremely entertaining to himself.

A solo performance started one day, and before she could complain his well-built body rumbled onto the carpet by the living room mirror, such a crash of limbs that in her alarm she knew he couldn’t be acting or trying to frighten her.

He gurgled. A foot jerked. She dialled nine-nine-nine and, this being Nottingham, an ambulance came within minutes and took him to the City Hospital, the driver cheerfully telling her (in case she hadn’t noticed) that Thomas had had a stroke, and there was no saying when or if he would be home again.

Brian and Derek called at the hospital to see their uncle, tracked him to a small ward whose windows faced well-shaven lawns. Even in a wheelchair they could tell he was a big man. He and half a dozen others were looked after by a black nurse, who told Brian how much liked Thomas was. He couldn’t articulate, but when he wanted something he sang it to a popular tune till they understood, which made him a very entertaining patient.

‘He sang us The White Cliffs of Dover last week,’ she said with a sunrise smile. ‘We didn’t realize there were such good tunes in the olden days.’

Arthur, who came another time, said it was lucky for the nurses that the stroke had put paid to his whistling, otherwise the doctors would have had to cut his windpipe.

Thomas understood all that Brian and Derek said. He took the chocolates, perhaps to woo the nurses with, but didn’t want the carton of cigarettes, which Derek gave to a man whose eyes flashed like Eddystone Lighthouse at the sight. They talked about the days at Old Engine Cottages, and at the mention of Burton he showed as much terror as if his father would stride into the room, bang him around the head, and tell him to stop shirking.

Alice, glad of a rest, didn’t visit him, having had more than enough of someone complaining about his father yet behaving in ways that showed he was too much like him.

Fit at last to be managed at home, Thomas was packed off in an ambulance. The driver’s mate pushed him, clutching a couple of plastic bags of toiletries and a goodwish card from the nurses, along the garden path in a wheelchair. The young woman at the back door put a little more light into Thomas’s eyes. Even though she was followed by two kids he wondered whether she would fall in love with him. The ambulance man told her they were bringing him back, duck, about to tip him onto the path whether she claimed him or not. She looked as if they were carting the third prize of a raffle she had long forgotten buying a ticket for, and would certainly no longer want.

She screamed that she had never seen the hopeful yet bemused Thomas before, told them in no uncertain terms to fuck off and take the old man away or she would tip the fucking wheelchair in the gutter where he’d get run over by a Corporation doubledecker bus and fucking good riddance. Who did they think they were, trying to palm a crippled old-age pensioner off on her, a single mother who was trying to make ends meet in spite of all the fucking council and social services could do to stop her?

‘All right, duck, keep your hair on. We must have got the wrong place. We’ll go back and check up on it.’

Thomas followed the altercation as if television had come alive at last, and the powers that be had decided to put on something good. The truth was that Alice had found another house, and done such a flit as to be forever unfindable. They weren’t married, but she would have gone even if they had been.

Thomas’s second stroke six months later finished him off. At eighty Sabina wasn’t fit to go to the funeral, and her three sons were so scattered as not to be told in time. Where Thomas’s cremated ashes went, nobody knew.

Ivy worked another ten years at the tobacco factory, and retired at sixty-five. She met a pensioner of seventy in the Gregory Hotel, who told her in a sly and dependent way that he had fallen in love with her. He was a cocksure smiler, a trickster, a thin little man with wavy grey hair who wouldn’t let her pay for a drink, not yet. His self-assurance and twinkle of malice captivated her, perhaps because he matched her in the shuttlecock and battledore game of sarcasm which passed for wit. He asked her to marry him, and in saying yes she made a mistake which was to be her last.

Gerald wanted a house to live in instead of a council flat at the foot of a highrise hencoop where he was threatened nightly, and often during the day, with being kicked in by the local black and white thugs who, when not playing Waterloo among themselves, ran the area.

He brought his few tranklements and moved in with Ivy and Emily, but within weeks Ivy knew she should never have had anything to do with him. Burton must have laughed from the comforting heat of hell’s fire on realizing she had more than met her match.

Gerald was spiteful, and a bully. The only good thing for Ivy was that she was too old to complete the disaster by having children. He sat by the fire smoking foul twist in a short black pipe. He would send her for beer from the pub, and she would go so as to avoid the mayhem of a refusal. He wouldn’t give any help in the house, not even to change a lightbulb or mend a fuse, and insisted on being served every meal on Mary Ann’s best china. Sometimes he would drop a cup or plate to show who was boss of the house, and only stopped when Ivy said how much they would get for it if ever they needed to sell it.

He mocked Emily for her ways, but she was not slow to mock him back, so he became more wary of her than Ivy. Emily was angry to see that her sister, though capable of knocking him down, was crippled by feelings of stupidity at having brought him into the house.

She should have known better, she told herself over and over again. Even Burton would not have been so heartless as to laugh at what she had done. He would have been angry at her doing something he would never have sanctioned had he been alive. She wouldn’t have done it then, of course, but if he had been alive he would have kicked Gerald every inch of the way to the workhouse.

She felt like thumping herself, unable to believe she had let such a thing happen at a time of life when only peace and quiet was needed. She had always vowed, and it was bitter to remind herself, never to marry unless to the right man, and now she knew it had been unwise to marry any man at all. How could an upstanding blacksmith’s daughter have attached herself to a type like Gerald? Though a tall strong woman, she couldn’t bring herself to throw him out as he deserved.

As years went by, though wizened and close to eighty, it seemed he would live forever. She prayed that God would strike him dead, but it was she who became ill, from Parkinson’s disease. When she was being taken out on a stretcher to the hospital Gerald’s last words were: ‘I hope you don’t come back.’ Three weeks later only Emily went to her funeral.

Gerald didn’t have things all his own way when living with Emily. Ivy was no longer there with the nervously guiding hand to bring her to order. Emily had feared Burton, yet had also loved him, and the space left was gradually filled with utter loathing for the man Ivy had so frivolously brought into the house. Burton’s spirit helped her not to put up with his tantrums.

When he tormented her she would, accidentally it seemed, bump into him so forcefully as to send him painfully against the furniture, such hard knocks frightening him more than the thugs from the housing block.

‘Say that again.’ She fixed him with tight lips and a steady eye. ‘Go on, say it once more, just say again what you said just now, you fucking pest. Come on, say it. I’m waiting. But if you do I’ll split your fucking head open and make you clean the rug afterwards.’

She would go out until she was calm enough not to come back and murder him. She would walk down the street and have a talk with Sabina, or make herself useful for an hour at the church hall. Men and women who were not much older smiled as she came around with cakes and cups of tea, laying bets as to whether or not her shaking hands would let go of the tray before she reached them — though they never did.

Most days she would come out of the church hall and go over the road to the Gregory Hotel for half a pint of bitter before facing Gerald at home. He thought himself the most put-upon man in the world, and dreaded the click of the door knob as she came in.

She hung up her coat, and fixed him with her implacable blue-grey eyes, blew smoke over his fragile head from a smouldering Woodbine cadged from Sabina and, though he hadn’t spoken, say: ‘I know you. I know your sort. I’ve got you weighed up, I have an’ all, mate, so don’t think I haven’t. Oh yes, I know your game right enough.’ Her face went closer. ‘You think I don’t, don’t you? But I do.’ She gave a little laugh which to him was no laugh at all. ‘I know, what you’re up to. Right from the start I’ve known: “Serve me this, and serve me that, get me some ale, and bring me a packet of baccer while you’re at it.’” She mimicked him perfectly. ‘But I’m not Ivy, you know. Ivy was worth a hundred of a rat like you. Well, I won’t lift a finger for you anymore.’

She went on so long in her maniacal way as he cringed by the fire not even daring to fill his empty pipe, and hoping her wrath wouldn’t explode beyond words. When she cooked a meal she left his part on the gas to turn into mush, or frazzle, and enjoyed seeing him jump up to save it.

Coming out of the church hall one evening she collapsed halfway across the road, and died on the way to hospital. Gerald sat in triumph among his inherited possessions, though Ivy had previously given out Burton’s prize horseshoes to the family.

His enjoyment didn’t last long. The mangonels of social destruction were moving downhill from the city centre, and he was ordered by the council to quit the place. Whole streets were razed, the space covered by highrise firehazards designed for people’s wellbeing by those who would never have to live in them.

His sister in a village near Newark agreed that he could stay with her. He sold every last cup, sheet and artefact of Mary Ann’s belongings and, with a fat wallet and pockets rattling, gave his death-mask smile as four suitcases were carried to a taxi to go with him to the station. The only thing left in the house was his marriage certificate to Ivy, screwed into a ball and thrown on the bedroom floor in a delinquent rage, to be found by Sabina’s son Derek when he went for a last look at his grandparents’ house before it was wiped out.

THIRTY-THREE

A soddened sky, but what else in December? — vegetation ponging like when they were kids, taking Brian back to pulling barrows of rotten potato tops to the compost heap at the Burtons’.

‘You’d expect plenty of parking outside a church,’ Arthur called. ‘There’s nothing legal anywhere,’ but a touch of anarchy and lateral thinking fitted both cars neatly along a double yellow line: ‘If I catch a warden fastening a plastic envelope under the windscreen I’ll give him such a pasting he’ll crawl back sobbing to his mam for a wank.’

They laughed, always did with Arthur though never at him. The juicy mot juste’s got nothing on him, Brian thought. The church was locked and barred, and should you want to get in, a notice on the door said apply to the rectory. Brian had come especially from London, to stay the night at Arthur’s. Warm in his countryman’s three-quarter woollen overcoat with poacher’s pockets, he wore a navy blue suit, a white collarless Jermyn Street silk shirt buttoned to the neck. ‘It’s Sunday morning, and in any case the doors should be open for sanctuary. You might be an asylum-seeker, or the cops could be after you. I suppose they’re afraid of the Nottingham Lambs kicking the altar down.’

‘If it did get kicked down they’d build a mosque in its place,’ Derek said.

Arthur adjusted his Rohan garment from a car-boot sale, spruced up and reconditioned for a few quid to look new. ‘The yobs would burn that down as well. Nothing’s sacred. They’ll turn on the town hall one day. Somebody ripped up a Belisha beacon in town the other day and slung it through a shop window. A naked dummy clutched it to her tits like a big lollipop, everybody pissing themselves going by.’

Derek’s Gortex jacket had seen much service in the Pennines, and kept the rain off as he opened the cemetery gate. ‘It must have been as wet as this in 1946, and at Oliver’s funeral as well. They were buried about the same time of year.’

Brian carried flowers, and champagne in a plastic bag. ‘Don’t drop it,’ Arthur said, ‘or Burton will jump out of his grave and thump you.’

He lifted the bottle. ‘He’ll like the idea of us celebrating the anniversary of his death with Moet et Chandon. Shame he can’t come up for a sup.’ Grass was long and rank around the multitude of graves, grownover pathways knitting into each other, half-covering fallen or slanting stones. Brian paced the back wall of the church, made a right angle, and trod over the long dead to where the grave should be.

‘Too far,’ Arthur called. ‘Go a bit left. Then on from there.’

Brian cursed the uncertainty of his bifocals. Green mould streaked the names. ‘Can’t read a thing.’

‘You’re right next to it, so watch where you put your great clodhoppers. Me and Avril cleaned the grave up a year ago.’

The sacred plot was rectangled by indestructible marble, and under Oliver’s inscription was chiselled: ALSO ERNEST BURTON, FATHER OF THE ABOVE, DIED DEC. 8TH, 1946. AGED 80.

Derek lifted a vase from the next grave, filled it at the tap, and set their flowers by the scroll with its embossed horseshoe. ‘At least we’re remembering him.’

‘He’ll appreciate it,’ Arthur said. ‘If you can’t remember, you’re dead from the neck up.’

‘Fifty years ago to the day.’ Brian laid three plastic cups along the ledge. ‘He lived thirty-two years after the death of his favourite son. It must have been pain all the way.’

‘It don’t bear thinking about.’ Arthur righted a cup tilted in the breeze. ‘We should have brought proper glasses. Burton won’t like plastic.’ A hand to his mouth, he leaned over the beige stalks. ‘We’re drinking to you with champagne, Grandad! If it’s too hot down there, come up and have a swig.’

The cork curved out onto the grass, no sound in the heavy air. Arthur steadied the spout, three beakers filled without spilling. They took off their caps and stood at the head of the grave. ‘Here’s to Burton! If he can’t hear us down there, nobody can.’

Derek waved at a man in a Sikh turban framing the back window of one of the houses. ‘He thinks we’re nicking tombstones to make a garden path.’ A shade of consideration passed over his features on turning back to his brothers. ‘We’ll spare a thought for Oliver. He deserves it just as much.’

They agreed, and drank to him. ‘Here’s to the South Nottinghamshire Hussars as well.’

Brian tipped the rest of the drink out in shares as equal as any could gauge. ‘Burton should feel happy at three of his grandsons drinking to his memory.’ A cloud over the church tower spat rain as he put cups and bottle in the bag. ‘When we celebrate his sixtieth anniversary I expect it’ll still be pissing down.’

Arthur put his cap on, and turned towards the gate. ‘How many of us will be alive in ten years? But if we live that long we’ll bring half a dozen bottles and have a party, and come by taxi.’

‘And bring our Zimmer frames as well,’ Derek said.

A thought lit Arthur’s grey eyes. ‘Mine’ll have a built-in pocket for Viagra.’

They embraced, one-time members of the unkillable poor. Brian shared Arthur’s Peugeot, and Derek got into his sleek Volvo Estate saying: ‘See you at the Five Ways tonight.’

Arthur fingered his jar. ‘Our mother was the last of the Burtons.’

Derek gentled tobacco into his pipe to be sure of a smooth draw. ‘We haven’t gone yet.’

‘We soon might be. I’m sixty-two, and Brian’s sixty-eight. You’re the baby, at fifty-seven.’

‘I saw Burton in a dream a few nights ago.’ Brian came from behind his cloud of Antico Toscano cigar. ‘He was smartly dressed, as usual. “I was something else before I was a blacksmith,” he said. I was going to ask what, but he walked away, keeping the secret to himself. I don’t normally remember dreams.’ Why should I? Dreams were only dreams, could mean anything, or nothing. You’d never get to the botton of them, and they were your own affair anyway. ‘I’ve got one of his prize horseshoes, that Mother passed on to me from Ivy. It was made to fit a lame horse, which is right for me. The other day I cleaned it till I could see my face. Then I saw Burton looking at me.’

‘What did he say?’ Derek asked.

‘I know.’ Arthur put on Burton’s commanding tone. ‘“Shine it up a bit more. It’s not good enough.’”

‘I wonder what he’d think of things if he came back to life?’ Brian said.

Derek turned his glass in a circle. ‘He wouldn’t recognize the place.’

‘He’d know us,’ Arthur said, ‘and we’d know him. He was a family man, and I can’t think of him without seeing Mary Ann as well, so let’s drink to her. As long as we’re alive they will be.’

Brian lifted his glass. ‘You’re only immortal as long as somebody remembers you. Then you fade into the billions already dead. We’ll drink to her, then. She’s in heaven, but I’m sure Burton’s allowed to go and see her now and again.’

Three glasses tapped wood on coming down at the same second. Derek smiled. ‘There’s a lot of him left in us. Arthur’s got all his prejudices, for a start.’

‘Now then, that’s slander,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ll get my lawyer on the blower.’ He drank the rest of his jar, arm at ninety degrees to give himself space, proving the truth of his brother’s remark. Arthur’s height and stance indisputably resembled Burton’s, and apart from his gardening he had worked all his life in heavy industry. He retorted that Brian reminded him of Burton, in the way he wore his cap, and stood with fingers in the pockets of his waistcoat crossed by watch and chain.

‘What a right pair you are,’ Derek said, ‘to believe in such things.’

‘You’re like him as well,’ Arthur said, ‘in not believing anything anybody says. But nobody these days has to work as hard as Burton did. A blacksmith would have ear-muffs, and leather gauntlets to prevent scars on his arms, and a visor to stop sparks blinding him. When we fired Brens and threw grenades in the army we didn’t have anything to protect our ears, but I’ll bet swaddies have them today. I can just imagine them going over the top with ear-muffs to keep out the noise.’

At the gaffer calling ‘Time!’ Derek went for three more pints, knowing the towels wouldn’t go on till such favoured clients stood to leave. When he got back Arthur was saying: ‘If Burton had a permit from hell to take a look at the modern world he’d have to sink a dozen pints to get the cinders out of his throat. But he’d be amazed how easy life is, and how soft people are. If I took him a walk around town he’d be glad in some way but not in others. He wouldn’t think much of the highrise hencoops, and I don’t suppose he’d think much of all the fat guts walking about the streets. As for a beggar tapping him for a quid, he’d push him aside, and anybody trying to mug him would get the worst pasting of his life, while a police car went by and took no notice. Imagine him though, if you can, going into Yates’s Wine Lodge on Saturday night, and after talking to one of the gorgeous young girls, getting her outside behind a wall to give her a bit of you-know-what, and finding a button in her cunt! It wouldn’t stop him, but what a surprise.

‘As for what’s called ale, he’d think it was brewed out of suds at the Raleigh, and he wouldn’t touch the grub in any pub or restaurant because apart from it being like shit he’d find everything overpriced to what it had been in his day, even allowing for inflation. He’d notice the rabbit hutches in place of the cosy little houses in Woodhouse, but the railway bridge is still there, and a bit of the lane leading to where Old Engine Cottages used to be. The pub’s doing good trade at the top of Radford Bridge Road, where Oswald’s wife Helen used to go for her stout after Howard died, though the traffic’s murder if you want to get to it. Neither Lenton nor Radford stations exist anymore, and though Wollaton Hall no longer belongs to Lord Middleton it still looks as good as ever on its hill. Nottingham’s spread as far west as the motorway, and he’d have to look out for cars, buses, vans, lorries and motorbikes speeding all the time like Dinky toys gone mad. He’d soon get used to looking both ways before crossing a one-way street. The supermarkets and legal bookies would surprise him, but there’d be no corner-shops or beer-offs for Mary Ann to gossip in or play the one-armed bandits. Maybe in heaven there’s a special arcade for her to pass an hour in, and they give her endless pennies to keep her happy.

‘Burton on his way to town would wonder where all the pedestrians were, nobody on the pavements to say hello as he went by, till he realized they were all in their motorcars, and if they waved it would only be to laugh at him for using Shanks’s pony, and for being togged up in a suit and wearing a hat, and not in trainers and a bomber jacket. He’d wish himself back in hell rather than among such sloppy dressers, though he’d be glad to see the White Hart looking the same, at least from the outside, with the row of cottages opposite where he set off from for Wales on his twenty-first birthday. He met Mary Ann there, but wouldn’t recognize the inside because the walls have been ripped out to make more piss-up space. If he went in and got jostled too much at the bar he’d think it time to nip back to Old Nick’s taproom, because there’s no sabbath in hell, and he’d have his own special place, the only member of the club not forced to stand in a queue when the ale’s given out. In a place like that the Big Wheel’s always turning, and old tunes he liked are played whenever he feels like hearing them, so it can’t be as hard as the world when he was in it. He’ll be in hell as long as anybody thinks it exists. It’ll be a shame that after we’ve snuffed it there’ll be nobody to remember him, though the more we drink to him the better, because I see the landlord’s getting twitchy to put the towels on, so we’d better look sharp and sup up. When Burton’s decided his leave from hell is over he’ll walk away saying: “It was nice to see you chaps again, but when Old Nick calls time for the three of you you’ll know where to find me. I’ll be waiting.”’