Key to the Door

CHAPTER 1

Brian, watched by his mother, stood in the paddling-pool without becoming part of the fray. His vacant blue eyes were caught by the broad elbow of the river, though he couldn’t be entirely captivated by its movement, and he clutched a mouth-organ as knuckle-duster in case the flying bolts of screamed-up kids should on purpose or accidentally jolt him face down into the gritty water.

Thinking he needed fresh air from the bug-eaten back-to-backs of Albion Yard, Vera had put on their coats and led him up Wilford Road, meaning to save threeha’pence by walking in order to buy him an ice-cream cornet on the way. Maybe she’d even get a free ride back on a tram by saying Brian was under five and winking at the conductor. Harold would paste her if he knew, but then, what the eye don’t see the heart don’t grieve, and that was the end of that by the time they’d reached the railway bridge and Brian clamoured to see a train drive underneath. Satisfied only when coughing smoke back at the loco-funnel, they walked as far as a boat on the Trent and cows by the far bank chewing beneath tree umbrellas, then turned into the compound of a grass-lawned paddling-pool already full of other kids and mams. Vera picked up a yesterday’s Post from the bench, to read while Brian with rolled-up leggings stepped cautiously into the water.

The mouth-organ stuck from a pocket, and he played at a recently discovered trick of pressing both hands on his ears, half-blocking the immediate wild yells of spinning kids to hear instead a far-off echo or reflection of it. He completed the illusion by closing his eyes, and the noises of this distant eldorado, though appearing to come from a similar paddling-pool and river, seemed a haven of enjoyment compared to the brickbat yells that assailed him when he took his hands down to test out a hope that they had been magically replaced by those of the more agreeable playground.

“Don’t push your ’ands in your tabs like that,” his mother called, “or you’ll get canker.” But he was still tuned to the crystal set of that muted unattainable land somewhere beyond the river, wondered where it was and whether his mam would ever take him to where children of another world sounded so much happier than anyone could at the pool wherein his excalibur feet were planted now.

Women paddled as well — anything for a laugh — white feet dipping into watered sludge, and Vera remembered wading not in a shallow corporation pool on a sunny day, but in two feet of cold and swirling water from the ancient New Bridge house to the firm ground of Peter’s Street. She and Seaton had wakened from a night of thunderstorms, a deluge of water still splashing and ricochetting in luminous flakes against the windows as they descended in the half-dark of morning to see furniture and belongings floating around the darkened room like ducks that had strayed into a trap. Vera paddled out when the rain stopped, followed by Seaton with an armchair on his head. “We’ll get consumption if we stay here,” he called. She turned on him: “Where do you think we’re going to live then? Under the canal bridge?” “No,” he answered, “we’ll get a house.” He stacked each piece of furniture on dry ground, leaving Vera as guard while he went back a dozen times for more chairs, a sofa, a bed — planted on his hard head and beefy shoulders as he emerged from the isolated lane on which only a pair of cottages stood. Abb Fowler, cloth-capped and jaunty at the door of the other, helped him after his own was done, while Vera was told, by a passer-by, of vacant houses in Albion Yard on the opposite side of town, flea-ridden but dry, that they could be in by tea-time if they looked nippy.

Harold and Abb co-operated in the move, spent sixteen hours pushing a handcart back and forth to move the happy homes, were dead on their feet by eight that night. Harold had been a bloody rotter anyway, and I suppose he allus will be, Vera thought to herself, half an eye on Brian in the pool. I’ll never forget the swine — what he did over my red coat. I said to Abb’s missis after he’d gone to wok: “What does this smell like on my coat, Lilly?” “Why,” she says, “it’s paraffin.” “That’s what ’Arold done,” I told her. “He got mad at summat before he went out this morning, though I don’t know what, and this is what he went and done.” Lilly turned white with rage, somehow making up for Vera’s feeling of apathy, who nevertheless had to hold her heart in check for fear it would burst. “You know what I’d do if it was my coat?” Lilly said. “I’d wait for him coming in that gate, then I’d put a match to it and throw it over him in flames. I would, by bleeding Christ, I would an’ all. No bleeding man ’un do that to me.” “Well, I daren’t. I couldn’t,” Vera said, easier now, as if in some way Lilly’s outburst and suggested punishment had gone into Seaton’s skin while he was at work and let him know what the world thought of such a trick: the bleddy blackclock.

She opened her eyes from the blank-stared reminiscence to hear Brian say: “Mam, let’s go to the other paddling-pool.”

“What other paddling-pool?”

“The other one, over there,” and he pointed across the wide river, south into the country.

“There’s only one, you daft lad, and we’re in it now.” He didn’t believe it, thought she couldn’t be bothered to take him, and wondered whether he’d ever find it if he went off by his blue-eyed well-legginged self. Though Albion Yard was no playground or paddling-pool, he still, on standing in the common yard of a comparatively quiet afternoon, thought he heard — even without putting hands to his ears — the sound of a thousand children joyfully playing by some sunlit story-book river that would need a long bus ride to get to.

But nine lives were his rock-bottom minimum, and out in the rain-puddled wasteland of Albion Yard he scooped trenches with broken bottles and built his walls with sludge-cement, watching the former silt up when they became too deep and the latter topple to earth on reaching too high towards duck-white clouds above often capsizing chimney-pots of the condemned houses. They’d been ordered to leave and several boarded-up dwellings turned their blind eyes on others still lived in. A two-foot piece of wood was fixed into a slot across the open doorway of some, to hold a stick-brandishing two-year-old from prematurely getting at half-bricks and broken bottles, and over which visitors had to step before asking in private to be lent a cup of sugar or a mashing of tea until Thursday. And on that day, when Mr. Mather the next-door neighbour slept on the sofa after the exertion of walking to the dole office, Mrs. Mather would silently lift the pound note from his pocket and stalk to the street-end in her shawl with a white washstand jug in her hand, and make her way to the Frontier, from which post she returned treading delirious footsteps with a devalued pound and a swimming jug, still singing “I want to be happy” as she advanced into a black eye and cut lip from Mather waiting behind the door. She would complain to Vera: “I told him it was all right because we’d leave the rent that week, but he said we wouldn’t have paid it anyway and that we’d still be four and a tanner down. Then I offered to make up for it by wangling some grub on tick from Mr. Coutts’s shop, but he swore I’d still done him out of the money he was going to buy a budgie with. So what can I do, Vera? If you could see your way to lending me a loaf till next week I’d be ever so grateful, I would and all.”

A rusting motor-bike leaned forgotten against the end wall, bought in the roaring twenties and left to rot in the dirty thirties after the means-test men had valued it at more than it was worth to the bloke who owned it; but Brian drove it from one land to another, pulling levers as the engine in his mouth revved up to take in mountains whose steep sides he had seen in picture-books, and run down witches shown him in magazines by his girl-friend, Amy Tyre. On actual legs he went to the street-end that debouched into the rowdy bonfire-night of the quarter-million town, into the flaming shell-filled no-man’s-land of Orchard Street, where crackers barked beneath your legs and the smell of roasting bug-bound mattresses choked you as you flattened yourself against a wall to get farther up the street, running only into another bonfire at the next explosive corner. A warehouse window cracked from the heat, and bales of lace were liberated by fire from their artistic patterns so that fire-engines more fearful than any Little Demon or Australian Gun filled the street with steam and water, driving Brian back to the refuge of his two-roomed house.

The flat world was only real within the radius of his too-choosing sight, missing everything that did not tally with the damp, rarely ignited soil of his brain. He woke up one day to find he had a sister, but this meant nothing until she was able to crawl up to his paper aeroplane and tear it to pieces. He did not know he had a father, only that a man (what was a man?) sat always humped before a firegrate and was liable to throw out a fist like lightning if he went too close; until he came in one day and found his wailing mother bending over a bucket so that blood could drip into it from her forehead. “Your dad,” she shouted. “That’s what your dad’s gone and done with a shoe.” And so amid the weeping and blood-bucket he came to know what a dad was. He was something else also: a blackclock killer. Dad sat on the stone floor with rug pulled back, holding a hammer and staring at the skirting board, bringing the hammer down with a ringing crash whenever a blackclock thought to run the gauntlet of his keen maniacal sight. The floor was already strewn with corpses, but the killing went on for a long time more, until dad put the brown-juiced hammer back in his toolbox, having grown tired of the game, which Brian took up with the same intent perseverance next day while his mother was washing clothes under the yard-end tap.

The living-room ceiling of the house next door collapsed at four o’clock one morning, fell with an earthquake thump into the room below, breaking an arm and cutting a face of those still dead upon the brass-bed raft of sleep. Dole-day came quickly, and Seaton, who didn’t want his family to be buried under a ton of rubble, paid six bob down on an equally decrepit but not yet condemned house on Mount Street, after Abb Fowler had forged the Albion Yard rent book as paid up to date. That evening, when the keys were in his pocket, Seaton called Brian over from his floor-game of dominoes.

“See this, son? Do you know what it is? No? Well, it’s a rent book.” He held it outstretched in his woodbined hand.

“Yes, dad.”

“Well, take it. Got it? Don’t drop it, you silly bogger. Now carry it over to the fire and drop it on. An accident, like.”

Brian threw it from a yard away, saw it devoured. “Ah! There’s a good lad as does what he’s towd,” Seaton said. “Now I’ll give you a cigarette-card.”

“You are a sod,” Vera put in. “You’ll get copped one of these days.”

“Well,” Seaton smiled, made happy by his audacity, “they know where to find me.”

A moonlight-flit had been arranged for the darkest night of the month according to Old Moore. Seaton struck up an everlasting alliance with Abb Fowler, who also had a dole-stricken family and would push one of Seaton’s handcarts if Seaton would do the same whenever he needed to flit. Through a certain handicap, Seaton could not reciprocate regarding the rent book, but Fowler was enough of a jaunty cap-wearing scholar to forge his own.

Two handcarts were loaded, each the platform for a skyscraper of furniture, with clothes-lines for cement. Fowler gave a grunt and a jerk, pushed his cart away from the kerb so that its wheels rolled forward on to the cobblestones and rattled smoothly up the street. Seaton told Vera to start pushing the pram, then got his own cart into motion with a similar grunt and jerk.

Wide awake Brian walked, pulled his mother to the middle of the road, eyes riveted to swaying bedroll and sofa tilted against rooftops and eavings, afraid to leave her side and go too close for fear the heap would move into a capsizing frenzy and fall on him no matter how far the frog leap took him clear.

“You’d think the Jerries was after us,” Abb shouted from up front, to which Seaton called out: “The rent man is, and that’s worse,” turning them from refugees into a jovial convoy marching its belongings to the bonfires. He clung tighter to his mother’s hand in the dark troughs between gas-light heads and eyes, in the valleys of fearful dragons skulking for a meal of cats and moonlight-flitting children. “I’ll gi’ you a game of draughts when we get there, Harold,” came Abb’s next sally. “You’re gonna lose it, then,” Seaton boasted. They crossed the main road to a maze of narrow lanes. “We’ll gi’ Slab Square a miss,” Abb decided.

Brian felt himself lifted by the waist and set on top of a barrow, wedged between an armchair and a mattress. Stuck in the crow’s-nest of the moonlight flit, he saw blue peep-holes of stars when he dared open his eyes. He clung hard at the extra peril as a corner was turned, a public house exploding like a tiger, lights and noise around the door scratching at his closed eyelids. The rocking was gentle as they went up hill.

“You flitting, mate?” a voice called from the pavement.

“Ar.”

“Where from?”

“Albion Yard”—in a lower tone.

“What number? I could do wi’ a place myself.”

“Yer welcome to it,” Seaton told him. “It’s condemned, though. Ain’t woth a light.”

Brian’s mouth was jammed with a piece of bread passed up by Vera, and he woke with it still uneaten when he was shaken down by his father and told that here was his brand new house. He finished his night’s sleep in a corner on two coats.

Next morning the world was new: it had even rained to cover up the tracks of the old. A neighbour’s girl liked taking Brian out because it made her feel important. She called every day, cajoled him from a game on the pavement with Billy French by a handful of blackened dolly mixtures and a promise to take him somewhere he’d never been before. “I’ll let you come to our ’ouse after for some bread and tea.”

“What’s ’ospital?” he asked her one day. His mother said to dad that morning that Mrs. Mather had been carted off to the General after falling into a midnight gutter. It was a knock-out collapse, and the only thing retained — discovered by nurses on a pre-entry wash — was the white handle of a jug gripped in one hand like it was a silver purse.

Mavis didn’t know, but: “I’ll take you and show you one of these days.”

He grunted: “Tell me now what it is.”

“No,” she was adamant, “but I’ll tek yer soon. So come on, or we’ll be too late to see one.” A pair of streets joined hands at an acute angle and the arrowhead was a boarded-up sandtip. Heavy supports to timber ran between ground and house-side to stop the wonky edifice sprawling flat on its exposed wound. Running beneath the timber, Mavis sang about London Bridge falling down, while Brian with a glum face built sand castles and bored tunnels with clenched fists. Damp sand stayed easily in place and shape, but tunnels collapsed when buildings grew above. He worked a long time, cupping hands for towers, holding them rigid and face to face for walls, but the crash was inevitable, a rift through the outworks and a crater opening from underneath when the sand, drier below, was sucked downwards as though through one of his grandma’s egg-timers. No tunnel could bear such weight. Around the tip’s edge he found laths of wood, and reinforced the tunnel so that his castle stayed up: until Mavis’s foot sank through it because he wouldn’t come to another place. At which he kicked her on the leg and made it bleed.

Her dad was a hawker and they lived in two rooms of a cellar. From drinking tea at her table Brian had only to look up at the grating to see the wheelspokes of her father’s barrow stationed by the kerb. She fed him toasted bread and apple while her mother read the paper in a rocking-chair. A pustule of white light flared and went out. Grey flakes of mantle fell from the gas-bracket on the wall and Brian ran with Mavis through the rain to buy a new one. “Mam said it cost tuppence,” she said when they came out of the shop, “but it on’y cost threeha’pence. I’ll not tell her, and buy a ha’porth o’ tuffeys. And I’ll gi’ you one if you don’t say owt about it.”

On a hot dry day they came to a factory whose coal cellar was close to the pavement. Bending down, he saw a row of oven doors, from which flames bellowed when they were pulled open with long-handled rakes. Gusts of heat forced him back, and a shovel-armed man told him to scram. Brian stood by a hillock of black cobbles, watched the shovel singing them into the coal-hole. Mavis came close, led him forward to see the fires again. He was hypnotized by the round holes of flame.

“That’s ’ospital,” she said into his ear, and the three dreadful syllables reached his brain, bringing back to him the drunken image of old shrill Mrs. Mather, who, so mam had told dad, had been shovelled in there like coal after they had taken the white jug handle from her clenched hand. Mavis pulled him quickly away.

The moonlight barrows moved once more, a pair of collapsible lifeboats swaying down Mount Street towards Chapel Bar, Abb Fowler in front and Vera pushing the pram behind. When a copper stopped Abb to ask where he thought he was going with all that stuff, he said he was changing houses at night because he didn’t want to lose a day’s work. Shuttlecocked Seaton and battledored Vera were gamed from one house to another, because Mount Street also was about to fall before the mangonels of a demolishing council. Need for a bus-station gave slum-dwellers the benefit of new housing estates, though Seaton was having none of this, clung to the town centre because its burrow was familiar and therefore comfortable, and because no long walk was involved to reach the labour exchange on Thursday to draw his dole. Sometimes he was able to get a job, and there would be bacon and tomatoes for dinner (Yorkshire pudding and meat on Sunday) but though he woodbound his muscles to show willing at the hardest labour, the work never lasted and he was back on the eternal life-saving dole, running up bills at food shops that he would never be able to pay, and playing Abb Fowler at draughts, swilling mugs of reboiled tea in move and counter-move until neither had a penny left to put in the gas for light.

In every staging-post of a house they found bugs, tiny oxblood buttons that hid within the interstices of bedticks, or secreted themselves below the saddles of their toes. Cockroaches also fought: black advance-guards of the demolition squads came out in silent, scuttling platoons over the kitchen floor after dark, often encountering lethal powders sprinkled by Vera, and those that succumbed would be swept up by Seaton before he mashed tea in the morning; or they would run into Seaton’s equally fatal hammerblows and be washed up by his wife when she lifted the rug on the unequal battlefield next day.

The demolition of one condemned block took a novel turn: the Albion Yard area, deserted and cordoned off, was to be the target of bombs from buzzing two-winged aeroplanes, the sideshow of a military tattoo whose full glory lay on the city’s outskirts. The bombing was to be on a Sunday afternoon, and Seaton hoisted Brian on to his stocky shoulders so that he felt one with the trams that swayed like pleasure-ships before the council house, ferrying crowds to the bombing; he rocked on his father’s shoulders, gripping the neck of a dad he hated when he did or said something to make his mam cry. But the grim and miserable emotion was kept to the ground as dad swung him up high, an action that split his hate in two upon such kindness. The first intimation of a good deed to him by dad only brought back his mam’s agonized cries as the blood streamed from her face, but his turning head beheld his mother at this moment happy and saying he would be taken to see the bombing if he was a good lad, passing his father a packet of fags from the mantelpiece for a smoke in case they had to wait long before the aircraft played Punch and Judy with the enclave of slums in which they used to live.

Seaton’s body swung as he walked and Brian was often in danger of falling overboard, pitching head first from his lifeboat-dad into the boiling sea of other heads around. Peril came at the quick switch into an unexpected short-cut, and his flailing arms, finding nothing closer, grabbed the black tufts of dad’s short, strong hair. When dad cried out he’d get a pasting if he didn’t stop that bleddy lark, Brian’s instinct was to go forward and bind himself on to dad’s bull neck, a tightened grip that brought forth a half-throttled exclamation from dad below saying that he could bloody-well walk if that was going to be his game; at which a shirt-sleeved tentacle reached up and tried to lift him outwards; but Brian reacted to the danger of his imminent slingdown by clinging tighter in every way so that the well-muscled arm dragged at him in vain. “Come on, my lad, let’s have you down.” And again: “Are you goin’ ter get down or aren’t you?”

“I’ll fall”—his arms bare and the neck slippy with sweat.

“No, you won’t.”

“I will, dad, honest.” They were near the lassoed bomb-target, bustled to the kerb by those who wanted to get near the rope, maybe feel the actual blast and pick up a fallen brick for a souvenir. Mounted policemen pushed back those who infiltrated the brick-strewn neutral ground, and Brian, forgetting to struggle, saw white foam around a horse’s mouth. He asked dad if it were soap.

“Yes,” Seaton told him. Brian bent his head and enquired of the nearest ear: “What do they give it soap for?”

“So’s it’ll bite anybody who tries to get past the coppers.”

“Why does anybody want to get past the coppers?” he whispered.

“Because they want to see the bombs closer.”

“But they’ll get blown up.”

“’Appen they want to. Now come down for a bit, my owd duck, because my showders is aching.”

“Not yet, our dad. Let me stay up some more.”

“No, come down now, then you can go up again when the bombs start dropping.”

“But I want to see the horses bite somebody first.”

“They won’t bite anybody today,” Seaton said. So down he came, jammed among the shoes and trousers of a surging jungle, evading a tiger boot or a lion fist, a random matchstick or hot fagend. Three biplanes dipped their wings from the Trent direction. Brian climbed up to his dad’s shoulders to spot from his fickle control-tower, his hand an unnecessary eyeshade because the sun was behind a snow-mountain cloud silhouetting the yellow planes.

They swung back, flying low in silence, like gliders, because of noise from the mass of people. “They aren’t going very fast, dad,” he complained. “They’re slower than motorcars.”

“That’s because they’re high up, kid,” someone told him.

“They’ll come lower soon,” dad said.

“Will they crash?” Brian asked. “I’ve never seen an aeroplane crash.”

“You will one day,” somebody laughed.

Each plane purred loudly along the rooftops, like a cat at first, then growling like a dog when you try to take its bone away, finally as if a roadmender’s drill were going straight to the heart, so that he felt pinned to the ground. Two black specks, then two more, slid from the rounded belly of each. The gloved wheels beneath seemed to have been put down especially to catch them, but the dots fell through and disappeared into the group of ruined houses.

“Now for it,” somebody announced, and an enormous cracking sound, a million twig-power went six times into the sky — followed by the muffled noise of collapsing walls somewhere in the broken and derelict maze.

A policeman’s horse reared up, tried to climb an invisible stairway leading from the explosions, then saw sense and merely stood nodding its head and foaming. A bleak scream came from some woman at the back of the crowd and Brian saw her led away by men in black and white uniforms. “Is she frightened, dad?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m not, are you?”

“No.” But Seaton lifted him down, dragged him roughly out of the crush.

“Is that the end, dad?”

“Stop asking bleddy questions, will yer?” Brian caught his mood, and the bomb that had lodged itself inside his chest suddenly burst, scattering more blind havoc in him than the actual grenades sent from the flight of planes. “Stop cryin’, will yer?” Seaton tugged at him angrily. “Come on, if you stop cryin’ I’ll buy you an ice-cream cornet.”

“I don’t want one,” he roared, thereby creating a big puzzle, its depth measurable only by Seaton’s inability to solve it. “Then what do you want?”

And without giving the question any thought, he answered: “Nowt”—and went on crying till he stopped.

On a wet afternoon two tall men wearing raincoats and nicky hats knocked at the front door. Vera led them into the room where Seaton sat. Brian, sprawled on the floor playing with a box of dominoes, noticed that she was almost in tears, something that never failed to touch off the sea-controlling springs at the back of his own heart. She stood with folded arms, and the two men stayed by the door. “They’ve come for you, Harold,” she said. He turned his head and looked up from the fireplace.

“We don’t want any trouble,” one of the men said, seeing desperation in his ashy face.

He looked at them for some time. “You’ll have to keep me,” he remarked at last, forcing a smile.

“We know all about that.”

Seaton hadn’t moved from his chair. “And my family as well you’ll have to keep.”

“That’s nothing to do with us,” he was told.

Vera unfolded her arms, ran a finger along one of her eyes. “Shall I get you your coat, duck?”

“Aye, you might as well,” he answered, standing up. “I’m going on holiday, and I suppose I’ll see a lot of my pals there as well.” This witticism amused him, and he laughed, his face relaxed. The two men said nothing. “Got a car?” Seaton asked them.

“No,” one said, “it’s not far; we’ll walk you down.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it matters if the neighbours guess what’s going on. It might ’ave been them if they did but know it. If I’d ’ad a job to wok at I wouldn’t a done this. But when yer kids ain’t got no grub, what else can you do?” He’d run up too many food bills at too many shops. It’s a big country, he thought. There’s grub in the shops for everybody, so why ain’t there wok? I don’t know, it beats me, it does.

Vera came back with his coat. “Will you want your mac as well?”

“No,” he said, “keep it. You’ll have to pawn it when you get short.” Brian felt himself lifted from the dominoes and kissed; then quickly put down. “Don’t let the kids get at my tools, Vera, will you?”

“No,” she said, “they’ll be all right.”

A watch was looked at, and Seaton realized aloud that he’d better go. “I’ll see you in a couple o’ months then. It’s nowt to worry about, duck. I’ll be all right, and you’ll be all right. They’ve got to keep you all, so they’ll be the losers in the end.”

“Come on, young man,” the eldest said. “We haven’t got all day. We’re busy.”

“I expect you are,” Seaton said.

Brian was too involved in his collapsing line of dominoes to wonder what was going on, and his mother must have been crying for some time before he joined in, without knowing why. Not that she knew why she was crying, because, as Seaton had truthfully said, none of them would starve while he was in Lincoln; and it would be as much of a holiday for her as it would be for him, and this thought lifted her from despair as she set the table and put on the kettle to boil and sat wondering however she’d come to marry a bloody fool who got himself sent to jail — and was a rotter to her in the bargain. She could hardly believe it had happened like it had, and that she was in such a fine bleddy mess; and it was impossible not to spend the next hour brooding on it, going back over the last few years and picking them to pieces as if they were the components of a complex lock that, once opened, might solve something.

CHAPTER 2

Merton had scratched his head. He drew back at the sound of some far-flung twig or half-hearted gate rattling from outside, hoping to hear the door-latch lift and Vera make her way across the kitchen to say she was sorry for being late.

Which is too much to expect, he thought, from any man’s daughter since the war. Leaves made a noise like the erratic beginning of a rainstorm: October: if she comes in wet she’ll get my fist, he promised himself, turning back to the fire, and no mistake; I can’t have her getting her death o’ cold and then not being fit for wok; she manages to get enough time off as it is. But he knew it wouldn’t rain because he hadn’t yet noticed the pause between the end of leaves falling and the commencing tread of mute cats running lightfoot through them; so he swung a watch from his waistcoat pocket in pursuance of another reason to be angry, and saw with satisfying indignation that it was eleven o’clock. What a bloody time to be coming home, and me having to get up at five in the morning because they’re bringing a dozen ponies up from the Deep Main. They’ll be hell to pay getting ’em out of the skips — and all of ’em to be shod before they’re turned loose by the tip-field. Allus the same when you want an early night.

He spat forcefully at the fire-bars and his spit didn’t sizzle with the alacrity to which he was accusomed, thereby reinforcing his often-said conviction that nothing in life could be relied on. By God she’ll get the stick when she comes in for keeping me up like this. Yellow flames from a darkening unstable fire-bed blazed full-tilt upwards, and with the self-made poker he pushed a lump of prime pit coal into the last effort of the inferno. God bugger it, there was no doubt about using the stick, and he turned, while thrusting back his watch, to make sure it still leaned by the pantry door. It was bad luck for Vera — the last of Merton’s brood young enough to be disciplined in this way — because she shared his anger with the dogs now barking in the yard, was the wall to his violent and frequent upstarts of passion, which usually — though not always — coincided with signs of defiance in what animals or humans happened to be under his control; and whereas the dogs would lick his hand a few hours after one of his uncouth godlike flings of rage, Vera took days before she could force herself into the kitchen for a meal. Such domineering reached beyond the borderline of family, for Merton was recognized as the mainstaying blacksmith of the pit he worked at, where, no matter how obstinate or too-happy the horses and ponies became, they were soon broken into docility by his strong will; hence shoes hammered on to tranquil hoofs by Merton only loosened when nails could no longer support the thinning metal. A lit pipe signalled a good job done, and no chafing butty or gaffer begrudged him the loud smack their horses got on the arse as an indication that it should be taken clip-clop back to its shafts outside the shed door; they’d better not, either, because that was the on’y way to deal with ’em; a clout for the hoss so’s the rest on ’em would do as they was towd.

Vera’s footsteps came quickly up the path, crunching lightly on cinders as she crossed the yard. By God, he told himself, straightening up against the chair-back to make sure he was hearing right, if she brings trouble to this house by her running around with lads, she’ll be out of that front gate and on the road for good and all with every tat she’s got. The leaves had stopped racing, and both dogs whined in a duet as she passed the kennel: about time, he muttered, but I’ll teach her to stay out so long at the tuppenny hop, when she should a bin in at half-past nine. I’ll put a bloody stop to this — his mental peroration cut off by the rattling door-latch.

She had been to the Empire, was still happy at remembering the antic-clowns and unclean jokes and the pink ribald heads shaking with laughter as seen from a front seat of the fourpenny gods. Her new scarf had slid from the rail, and after the last curtain had dropped and closed (she was half-sick from the heat and cigar smoke that rose through the show from pit to sweating ceiling), she had wheeled down the slippery steps with Beatty and Ben and Jack and invaded the deserted dress-circle to get it back. A tripe-and-onion supper revived all four, piled them, after custard pies to follow, on to the last tram that rattled its way towards Radford. Beatty and Jack were jettisoned into the darkness of Salisbury Street, and Vera began to wonder whatever in the world her father would say at her getting home so late. She already pictured herself trying to borrow the fare to Skegness so as to find a living-in job at some boarding-house, chucked out of the Nook with a heavy heart and a light bag holding her belongings, with Merton’s words that she could bloody-well stay out for good stinging one ear, while the fact that she wouldn’t be able to get a job now at Skeggy because the season had long since finished made an ironic tune in the other. Well, perhaps he would already have gone to bed and locked the door on her. She hoped so, for then enough sleep could be had in the wash-house curled up on sacks next to a still warm copper, and by tomorrow he may have forgotten how mad he’d been. Ructions, she thought, that’s what I’m sure it’ll be; even though I’ve been working seven years I can’t do a thing right as far as the old man’s concerned. One bleddy row after another just because I come home late; and I don’t suppose it’ll alter a deal either until I’m married; and then I wain’t be able to go out alone at night at all, with some big husband bullying at me for his supper.

She ignored the silent Ben beside her and ruminated on her previous runnings-away from home, and twice she came back because she’d lost her living-in job at the end of a season and couldn’t earn enough at shop or factory to pay for her board. There wouldn’t be a third time, her father had promised, which she knew to be true: “And you wouldn’t be sitting at this table now,” he’d bellowed, “if your soft-hearted mother hadn’t let you in last night when you called up to the bedroom winder and asked if she’d have you back. Next time it’ll be ME you’ll have to ask, and I’ll say NO.”

Still, it might not be so late, she thought, Ben having set out for Wollaton — morosely because she’d refused to descend to the canal bank with him. Turning down the lane towards Engine Town, she was terrified at the twig-shadows, and leaves rustling like the thin pages of a hundred well-hidden Bibles caught in the wind, and stepped softly into the pitch-blackness wondering: Shall I be murdered? Is there a man behind that tree? as she did on every dark night coming back to the Nook. I’ll run by it anyway, and walk when I come to the lit-up houses, because if anybody stops me there I can knock at a door for help. In the split-running of terror she laughed, remembering the man dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, and imitating the leg-work of a dancer on reaching the long railway tunnel, hardly knowing she was under it until a goods train came out of the fields like a cannonade of coronation guns and made her run with all speed to the other side with coat open and mud splashing her ankles, afraid the train might weigh too heavily on its sleepers and crash through underneath, or that some unknown evil would stifle her in the complete silence of its noise.

With no breath left, she walked along the sunken lane, elderberry and privet hedges shaking softly above, black night split only by a melancholy old man’s whistle from the distant train.

She patted the dogs before the kitchen door, as if thankful for the happiness they must feel for her safe return. The latch gave easily into a safe refuge, and the suspended oil-lamp in the corner dazzled as she took off her coat. She saw her father sitting by the fire, legs stretched out towards the hearth, his long lean body stiffening. “Wheer yer bin?”

He’s mad, right enough. So what shall I say? His “wheer yer bin?” turned the first spoke of the same old wheel, with every question and answer fore-ordained towards some violent erratic blow. “Out,” she replied, pouring a cup of tea at the table.

“If yer don’t answer me you’ll get a stick across yer back.”

She was unable to meet the glare of such grey eyes. His clipped white hair, lined and tanned face, and white moustache above thin lips, made up a visage from which all her misery emanated. “I’ve been to the Empire,” she admitted.

He was unappeased: “What sort o’ time do you call this, then? It’s past eleven.”

“I had to walk from Nottingham.” The tea was cold, so she wasted no sugar and pushed the cup aside; an effort of kindness by her mother come to nothing. “I dare say you did,” he shouted, “but you could a got ’ome earlier.”

From experience she knew that arguments in this house were too short; afterwards they were seen as illogical explosions from which reason had been excluded by their inborn force. It was impossible to say: All right, I should have been in earlier, so please don’t hit me now; and just as out of the question to defy him by force, for he was the unassailable father of more than fifty years, whom she couldn’t dream of defeating. Only a craving for his extinction seemed possible and good enough, a hooked thunderbolt to lift him out of the house but leave her unharmed. The impossible was not on her side and she knew it, sensed rightly that it never would be. So she cried out in rage, which only made things worse, as she had known it would before the row began: “I couldn’t leave the show until it was finished, could I?” implying that he lacked sense to think so.

“You should a come out earlier, you cheeky young madam.”

“I did,” she conceded, beyond hope. “But I had some supper wi’ Jenny and Beatty.” She fell into a chair, choking on tears of hatred and bitterness. Who knows? Merton’s temper often wavered with his own children, hid contrition and a peculiar gruff kindness that sometimes turned to their advantage at the last moment. But the reins of compassion were rarely in his hands, had to be hoped for by those who had broken his rules. He might have been softened up to this point by Vera, been satisfied merely to wave the stick from the corner where he now stood; but the verifiable boundary of this was passing — too well disguised for her to see it, too faint for her to take advantage of it in such confused distress. She saw what was coming and hurried towards it, her wish to escape thrust out of the way by an uncontrolled defiance that could bring nothing but defeat. “Leave me alone, you rotten bogger. You aren’t going to hit me like you hit your dogs!” She didn’t move. He would hit her the same as he’d hit anything else. The weight of his hammer at the forge was heavy, and burning metal was moulded without trouble; he drank beer by the pint tankard on Friday night, but always woke from his stupor with an urge for more obedience, more work, more beer at the weekend, and to tame the defiance that sprang as much from him as anything else. All his blows seemed made for life and self-preservation, which afterwards he sometimes felt, mistaking his resentment of it for a pang of conscience.

He struck her fiercely across the shoulders: “Let that teach you, you cheeky young bitch.”

“I wish you was dead,” she moaned. “I wish everybody was dead.” The dogs outside whined at the noise, a pitying tune to her fit of dereliction. Silence between the last frantic rustling of leaves and the first onset of rain went unnoticed, and raindrops swept the yard like a square-mile sweeping brush.

I’ll run away, was her first thought, as Merton threw down the stick and went up in his stockinged feet to bed. But how can I? I’ve got no money. But I must do summat because I can’t stand this. I’m nearly twenty-three and wain’t put up with the old man’s bullyin’ any more. If I can’t run away I might as well chuck myself in the cut or under a train as go on puttin’ up with a dog’s life like this, because it’ll go on and on, I know for a fact, if I stay here. I’ll never be able to go out to the Empire and come in late after it. I’ve stood on the canal bank before, trying to chuck myself in the deep locks, but I never could do it; and I’ve waited for a train on the embankment to come fast out of Radford Station but I’ve allus been frightened at the noise as it gets closer, and before it comes near me I run away, down the bank and back through the field because I was frightened to death. But then, I don’t see why I should kill myself just for the old man, because I’m sure it wouldn’t bother him a deal if I did. No, why should I? though it would be nice one day if I did get killed by a bus or tram so’s he’d happen be sorry and think of all the times he’s been a rotten bogger to me.

Looking around the too familiar room — a whitewashed cottage kitchen with a Sandeman sherry mirror by the door, a large homemade rug by the hearth, chairs and table under the window — she saw his case of horseshoes on the wall, brass and chromium-plated prizes that kept the girls polishing and cleaning all Saturday morning as if they were silver and gold. Supported behind glass on especially wrought nails, these horseshoes had been accumulated by Merton from apprenticeship to his becoming one of the finest craftsmen in the county. She took down a big shoe and held it, feeling its weight and knowing it would slip easily from her fingers if a fair grip wasn’t kept on the bend. Two prongs pointed upwards and the grooved, smoothly polished side — meant to tread the soil on more workaday productions — was held facing her. A ray of red paint had been spilled into the groove from pronged tip around bulging curve to pronged tip — red because blood from the horse’s foot wouldn’t be noticed when the nails went in, she had always thought. On the left side were four holes and on the right side three. Beginning from left to right she muttered: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday; and then looked at the three remaining holes on the right, completing the week: Friday Saturday Sunday. The first four were to be said quickly because you wanted them to go as fast as possible, thus bringing you sooner on to the last three, which you spoke more slowly because they were enjoyable days — looking at the seven holes through blood-red paint and holding the prongs upwards so that no luck would run out.

She remembered Merton singing rhymes when they were children, holding each child on his knees in turn and chanting the words to them, again and again, as rain poured down and thunder boomed. When they were afraid of black Sunday evenings in summer, the sing-song chant had gone in and stayed, seven nails for a nursery rhyme rough-edged into them who were disturbed at being so close and not knowing with what amount of ease to take his momentary kindness and good nature, so that the jingled forgeries had stayed there for good.

She saw herself taking a basket from the pantry, opening the door so that Merton would not hear, and returning up the steps to fill it with all thirty horseshoes. Then the outer door would open and into the choking rain she’d go, hatless and without a coat, between the pigeon coop and the house-side, her skirt soaking on long nettles and grass, shoes sogged and distorted on stones until she turned into the open and went towards the well. How would she find it? As easily as if it were a birth wart in the centre of her hand. And then I’ll throw the horseshoes one by one into it, hear each splash as it hits bottom and sinks, and laugh to think the old man will never see them again.

The impossible dream faded; her hand covered her ear and cheek, was hidden by long hair; leaning on her elbow, she went on looking at the case of horseshoes until she grew too sleepy to stay awake.

She was just back from Engine Town with a box of buttons to sew on her blouse, dodging mud-puddles under the railway bridge and negotiating ice-ruts in the lane so as not to wet her shoes in the piled snow. Looking out of the bedroom window, her desire to solve any problem was killed by the hard winter. Perhaps the year would break through. A long thick layer of cloud spearheading towards the Pennines was ghost-green on top and turning pink below, indicating a half-beaten-to-death sun lurking somewhere, licking its wounds after an agonizing Armageddon of autumn. Lines of snow lay in the furrows of the next field, and in the garden it gathered in uprooted cabbage hollows like deserted pools of unpalatable milk. Winter’s juggernaut crushed everything except people, who still went to work, quarrelled, played football, got married, and died.

She walked up the lane on Sunday afternoon when her father was sleeping off his dinner and beer, noticing black withered beads of elderberries clinging still to twigs contorted by icy cold. Three greyhounds flashed through a hedge into a hollow of Cherry Orchard, back legs skidding on frost-flowers when they tried to ascend and breach level ground. Off they went under the heavy lead of afternoon sky, across treeless humps and dips, each growl heard low from the distance they were suddenly at, the only sound from them as if caught in cupped hands and placed just outside her ears. And also Seaton’s ears: he put two fingers into his mouth and knifed the dead man of silence, so that the three greyhounds came racing back, front legs and back legs machine-gunning the turf.

“Hello, duck,” he said, seeing her for the first time.

She asked a question: “Are them whippets yourn?”

“They aren’t whippets,” he told her, putting her right, “they’re greyhounds and they belong to my feyther.” He untangled the chain-leash. “I bring ’em out every Sunday for a run.”

“They go fast.” They approached in line ahead, and she moved out of their way. “You’ll be all right, duck,” he said in a kind voice. “I’ll tie ’em up soon an’ tek ’em back ’ome. This sort o’ dog likes a good run, you know,” he explained, by way of breaking the silence when she showed no sign of speaking.

A further whistle sent the dogs across the mile-long roughs. “They ain’t had enough yet,” young dark-haired Seaton with the leash said. She gazed vacantly towards the three dogs, watching their mad mechanical legs careering almost out of sight, then bend head to tail by the wood and bear round again towards them. Framed by green hollows and a dark pack of jellied trees, they broke formation often, one to manœuvre its long whippet head towards another, each in turn failing on the same trick, and devouring only the too vulnerable gap of much coveted dank air between the end of its muzzle and the flank of the one attacked. The best defence was to get slightly ahead, swing the head outwards and outflank the outflanker, showing a fierce growl and shine of teeth, make the other afraid to resist effectively by increasing the fierceness, which would then be outdone by the other dog, and to surmount it still again until a final pure competitive speed would remain. They turned their elongated, gracefully swinging bodies about in the frolic, drum-tight pelts stretched over distinguishable ribs and bones, sometimes rolling in the grass so that the pursuer, unable to pull up for its victory, thundered by to return only when the fallen dog was back on its four legs belting away in another direction.

Wheep, wheep! A signal from Seaton, whom she had forgotten, wheeled them in his direction, and they came leaping three abreast up and down the dips and hollows, parted by a bush, then a disused well, until for no reason they swung away from Seaton’s repeated whistle and stamped against Vera before she could break the stony paralysis into which the sight of their seemingly unnatural advance had fixed her. Neither had Seaton time to act: she was on the crisp frost-bitten grass before he could swing the leash into a circle and intimidate his animals to a halt.

“Well,” she said, as he fastened his dogs first, “don’t bother to pick me up, will yer?” Now he ran to do so, but it was too late. He pulled at the dogs and fastened the master-lead to a bush stump, laughing as she stood up. “I’m sorry, duck,” he said. “I didn’t know they’d bowl you over like that. You must be as light as a feather. What do they feed you on down yonder?” He pointed a tobacco-branded finger to the chimneys of the Nook. “Pigtaters?”

She pulled her coat to and wiped wet hands on the pockets. “Don’t be so nosy, sharpshit. I get fed all I want.” A scornful look was thrown at his dogs: “Them whippets o’ yourn don’t get too much snap, though, by the look on ’em.”

“Nay,” he said in a quiet tone, not willing to show even slight resentment to a stranger, “they get fed plenty of stuff. Hoss meat and boiled taters. It looks so good I could eat it myself sometimes.”

He don’t seem English to me, she thought, with them brown eyes and that black mop, though it’s combed well and he’s a smart-looking chap all right. He looks like an Italian, with his skin and all, though his talk is Radford enough, I will say that for him. “My old man’s got two dogs,” she said. “Mongrels, but they’re good house-dogs. He uses ’em for fetching the birds when he goes shootin’ as well. And they allus know when a stranger’s coming up the yard, even before they see ’em, because of the feet. They never make a murmur at any of the family.”

“They must be well trained,” he conceded. “Let’s walk down the lane a bit, duck, It’s cowd standin’ ’ere.”

The dogs pulled hard, and she noticed his strong arms tugging them back. When she agreed to walk they jerked forward and nearly sprawled him into an icy rut. “Gerrr-er BACK,” he shouted.

“The old man trained our dogs right enough,” she said, hands in pockets, noticing Seaton’s leather gloves. “The poor boggers think themselves lucky if a day passes wi’out ’im taking a stick to ’em.”

“It’s like that, is it?” he said self-righteously. “I don’t like cruelty to animals. I mean, you can gi’ ’em a kick now and again if you lose your temper and don’t think what you’re doing, or if they get in your way, but it ain’t right to tek a stick to ’em.” He braced himself against the pull of the dogs and lit a crumpled cigarette from his raincoat pocket. On second thought: “Shall you have one, duck?”

“If you’ve got another. I’d better be careful when I go past our gate in case the old man sees me.”

He took a new packet from his coat and lit one for her. “Why? Has your old man tamed you as well as his dogs?”

“Don’t be daft. He just don’t like me to smoke, that’s all.”

“I see nowt wrong wi’ a woman smokin’ a fag now and again,” he said, generous and liberal at the same time. He’s a short-arse, she thought, but nice: only an inch bigger than me. “What sort o’ wok do you do?”

“I wok for me feyther, ’polsterin’.”

Her cigarette went low as they passed the gate, though the old man would sleep for a while yet. “What’s ’polsterin’?”

“Repairin’ sofys and chairs. The old man teks wok in from pubs and ’ouses. We’ve got a shop in Radford. I don’t do much tackin’ or cuttin’, though. Mostly I fetch the stuff on a handcart and tek it back. I go for the leather and cloth as well from time to time. It’s good wok, but you’ve got to be as strong as a hoss, climbing up three nights o’ stairs wi’ a sofy on your back and getting nowt but threepence for your trouble when you get there.”

“Don’t your old man pay you wages?”

“Ay,” he said, “but it ain’t a sight.”

They reached the bridge. “I’ll go no further,” she said. “The old man’ll be mad if I don’t get back in time for tea.” Which was as good an excuse as any to leave him at this point. Beyond the other side of the long bridge she saw the houses of Radford Wood-house: colliers’ houses, poachers’ dens, shops, and beer-offs.

He had expected her to walk to the main road. “You don’t want to be so terrified of your old man,” he said. “He don’t bite that bad, does he?”

“It’s not that. I’m hungry, so I think I’ll get back. I didn’t bother wi’ any dinner.”

“Come on wi’ me, then, and I’ll buy you some tea.”

“Another time I might. But not now.”

He jerked the leash so violently that he nearly throttled the dogs. They ambled back, subdued, to Vera, and she patted their heads. “I’ll pass again next week,” he said. “Shall you wait for me?”

He’s so quiet, except for them eyes. Half a pint o’ mild and a couple of hot whiskies. “If you like. I can be leaning on our gate.”

“All right then, duck. I’ll be seeing you.”

Black hair, and teeth going to bad: he couldn’t ’a bin a day over twenty-four. He walked off, with a slight swinging gait, which might, as far as she could tell, have been the way he always walked; or it might have been caused by the predatory forward pull of his three strong dogs.

She kept telling herself that she didn’t want to be married, that, even though it meant getting away from the threat of the old man’s fist and stick, she didn’t want to let herself in for something that as far as she knew might turn out to be worse. What did she know of Seaton? He was quiet, kind, and often charming in a simple sort of way; but he’d been barmy enough to ask her to marry him at the end of their second meeting, and she’d been just as barmy in saying all right. And now the three-month wait he’d agreed to was over and she sat by the window in her underwear, looking out at the garden and fields because she couldn’t stand the sight of her wedding-dress spread out on the bed behind. In half an hour she would be off to Lenton Church, in a horse-drawn cab on which Seaton had seen fit to splash part of his wages earned at an outside labouring job — saved up for what he hadn’t dared hope for when he’d “popped the question.” Vera remembered his disappointment, a black look when she mentioned the three-month wait. So how do I know what being married to him’ll be like? she wondered, nagged by the uneasy memory of their second meeting in the Cherry Orchard, a scrag-end of a field whose scrub-covered up-and-down surface matched well her feelings at that time.

To get away from home for always was a good thing, that nobody could gainsay, though Merton had hinted after seeing Seaton for the first time that he didn’t think he was much of a bargain for his gel, and that she’d realize (by God she would) what a good home she’d had when she’d lived with him a while in Nottingham. But this had only made her more anxious to escape, had cut her apprehension at the roots and made her look forward to starting a new life in a Nottingham house or flat, despite the needling of premonitions that soon came back.

There was no time left to deliberate. She closed her arms over her soft, well-shaped breasts and began to weep, the sound of it bursting upon her ears and cordoning her off from the noise of fussing in the kitchen below. She did not want to be married, was prepared to stay more months or years in peril of the old man rather than take a chance of living with someone she did not know, throw herself at a stranger after three months’ acquaintance.

People were going and coming from the house, many of them unknown to the dogs, who hadn’t stopped barking and dragging their chains since early morning, despite Merton’s going out twice to them with the stick. She stood in the middle of the room, dressed now, unable to go downstairs, knowing that this was expected of her, yet unwilling to reconcile it with the fact that she had made up her mind not to get married. The stairfoot door opened: “Vera!” came her mother’s voice. “Are you ready? Don’t be too long, or we’s’ll keep Harold waiting at the church and that’d never do.” There was an intentional pause, giving her time to call out:

“I’m not coming.”

Another pause, from shock. Her mother ran up, and came into the bedroom with a worried end-of-the-world frown on her face. She leaned on the wash-stand to get her breath. “What do you mean?” was all she could ask for the moment.

“I’m not getting married, mam. I don’t want him. I want to stay single.” She was afraid of saying this, and afraid above all of the silence downstairs, as if the whole house had stopped breathing to listen to her argument, even the dogs quiet at last.

“I don’t know what you mean,” her mother said. She had wanted no trouble, hadn’t expected any after the tight-fitting locks of plans and arrangements had turned on her daughter’s life. Now she trembled and was upset because there looked like being a row.

Vera’s face set hard, though she knew her determination to be only a thing of the minute, a fluctuating protest to try and save herself. “I mean what I say. I don’t want to go to church.”

“But everything’s ready.”

“Well, let it be.”

“But don’t you love him?”

“No,” Vera said. “I never did either.”

Her mother felt a pain above the eyes. Merton also had thought she shouldn’t marry Seaton, but even he would agree it was too late to turn back now. Vera maintained a deadly silence in which time passed quickly, and her mother couldn’t stand such obstinacy. “Don’t you even like him then?” Vera began to say yes. “Well, come on down and get married. They’re waiting for you. Come on.”

“Oh, I can’t, mam,” she cried. “I don’t want to.”

Her mother’s voice was harder now: “For Jesus Christ’s sake, come on. Everything’s ready. If you let Harold down he’ll kill you.” She went to the stairdoor: “Ada, come up here a minute, will you?”

Ada had travelled from Chesterfield especially for the wedding of her sister, and if it were called off, her disappointment would be almost as great as Seaton’s. She was nearly thirty and already on her second husband, the first having stopped a bullet in Flanders. Brawling bombardier Doddoe had been fresh out of that fiasco when she met him. Ada was in her weeds at the time — she made a big laughable issue of her story now to Vera — going back into servant work to feed herself and the only child of her first quick set-to, taking a slow train to Chesterfield up through the black pimplescapes of the industrial Pennines. She was blonde and fair-skinned, handsome and attractive with a tantalizing expression of cheek and sadness, so that Doddoe, who got into the opposite seat of the empty carriage at Codnor Park, was soon in conversation with her. At Chesterfield he carried her box to the tram stop, and when she was on the platform fifty yards away he bawled out through the bell and grinding wheels: “Will you marry me, duck?” After a week of courting she said yes, and now she had another child and, to judge by her stomach, a third one was due in a month or two.

“How do you think most people get married?” she said to Vera. “You don’t want to bother that much about it. Just laugh and say yes and then the bad times you might ’ave now and again wain’t seem so bad. Come on, duck.”

Vera was confused, pinned on to the flat spirit-level of indecision. Her mother pleaded and took her hand. Shall I go, or shan’t I? she asked herself. It was like throwing a penny and seeing on which side it landed. Maybe Ada was right, and it didn’t matter either way, because if it isn’t Harold Seaton it’ll be somebody else. She rubbed a handkerchief over her eyes, followed her mother and sister down the dark stairs, comforting noises from the kitchen once more filling up the desolate, companionless void of protest. She knew she wouldn’t even be late at the church as the cab trotted under the long tunnel and emerged into the Radford Woodhouse sun.

CHAPTER 3

Ascending stone steps to the railway bridge, a fine spring rain began to fall, hiding towers, wheels, and sheds of the colliery below as Vera fastened her coat and hurried towards the first streets of the city. When Seaton left for the tannery that morning she had been unable to face the empty day and had gone to visit her mother at the Nook, short-cutting it there and back across the fields.

The novelty of decorating two unfurnished rooms had long since worn off, though it had been enjoyable while it lasted, had shown that Seaton, who had seemed too much of a numbskull to talk about anything (even his work had been described and forgotten in five minutes), had proved his worth of papering the walls and ceiling, painting doors and skirting boards, pinning down cheap lino from Sneinton Market. He set them both to making rugs from a pile of clippings and a couple of boiled-clean sackbags, using a sharpened piece of stick to thrust each sliver of coloured rag beneath and then pull it up above the rag-bag base. Plate-shelves and pot-shelves were plugged and bracketed on to the kitchen walls, covered with fancy paper and adorned with oddments unearthed from piles of penny junk. Even the tips yielded certain usable objects, such as screws and hinges, firebricks, and strips of wood that made a clumsy but effective clothes-horse.

Vera was next to useless in these slow constructions, sat on a chair and watched, looked through a newspaper or hummed a tune, mashed Seaton’s tea, and marvelled at what the black-clocked numbskull was doing with his clever slow-moving fingers. When his hammer tried to take a bite out of his thumb he swore with such awful care and deliberation for five minutes that Vera went into the other room until his vocabulary gave under the passing of time. She looked across the road at the large windows of the lace factory, seeing the cheeky bedevilled girls working at looms and threading bobbins, slaving under the forewoman’s eye when they weren’t winking at the men-mechanics or cat-calling to each other above the noise of their machines. That was me, Vera thought, not so long ago, and now I’m married to Harold Seaton, though at times I can’t believe it except when we’re in bed together at night and he gets up to his dirty tricks, and often he don’t even wait until then. Yet strangely, it seemed to her, there was a compensation in that she was on a higher plane of respect at the Nook. She had never seen more sense in her mother or more kindness and deference in her father, and it often occurred to her that had this been the case all her life she would never have got married, at least not so soon. But that’s how it is, she said to herself. “You’ve made your bed, so lie on it,” her mother said when she first mentioned in a not complaining voice that Harold’s temper wasn’t all he had led her to believe it would be when they walked together over the Cherry Orchard. Her eyes were drawn out and back to the bobbinating girls, across the road that widened the more she thought how wide it was. I was earning a quid a week then, and now Harold’s bringing thirty-eight bob home, so it’s no wonder we can hardly manage.

They did for a while, because Seaton was never a boozer, though the tuppences doled out for fags made holes enough in what his wages came to. But he picked up a decrepit pair of shoes for next to nothing in the market and cobbled them into good enough condition for work. He sometimes spent an evening at his father’s shop, pushed a loaded barrow to some pub or house and planted a half-crown in Vera’s palm when he came home. Nevertheless, she thought, hurrying through the Hartley Road traffic, he’s a sod to me when he loses his temper like he does. I wonder if he found the note I left telling him what to have for his tea? A red sky at evening settled over the fields behind as she walked into the house and climbed the stairs.

Seaton sat in his cap and coat, smoking a cigarette by the empty fireplace. One hand shaded his eyes as if sun still shone into the room, and he held himself from looking up at her, which told her he must be angry about something. “Where’ve you been?”

“Mam’s,” she told him, hanging up her coat behind the door. “I got fed up, so I went this morning. I’ve just got back.” He said nothing, and Vera, feeling his hateful silence, asked: “What time did you come home?” He wouldn’t answer. “What’s the matter, then?”

“Nowt.”

She looked round the room. Clean. Tidy. Little to complain about there. The table had been set for the bare event of a meal since morning, and the note she’d left for him was still on the shelf, fastened down by the clock. “What time did you come home?”

“Five,” he muttered.

She remained standing, intrigued by the reason for his unbending anger, yet also afraid of it. “Why didn’t you cook summat for your tea?”

“What tea?”

“It’s all ready. In the cupboard. Bacon and potatoes. You only needed to fry ’em.”

His hand fell, and he looked up at last: “How the bloody hell was I to know that? Are you tryin’ to clamb me?” he shouted. “Where’ve you bin all day?”

She was unable to counter such blind unreason with swift arguments of her own because it blamed her too much for something she couldn’t quite prove was undeserved. “I’ve been to my mother’s. I’ve already towd you.”

“Well, you should be at ’ome cooking my tea. If I work all day, I want to come ’ome to some snap at night.”

“I didn’t know you’d be in as early as this,” she countered, thinking he was angry because she’d been to the Nook. He wasn’t fond of her parents, often referring to them as “that bloody lot.”

“I’m not a prisoner, am I?” she exclaimed righteously.

“And I can’t work if I’ve got no grub,” he contended.

“It was all ready for you.”

“How was I to know that then?” he went on.

“Because I left a note,” she protested, “to tell you what to have.”

His voice became calmer. “What note?” She took it from the shelf and handed it to him. “Here it is, plain as black and white.”

He looked at it meaninglessly while Vera lit the stove and set the table. Seaton screwed the note into a pellet and threw it into the fireplace, stood to take off his cap and coat.

“Didn’t you see it, then?” she said, in a pleasant voice.

“Yes, I did see it.”

“Then why didn’t you cook the dinner?”

He looked to where he had thrown the note: “I’m not much of a scholar, duck.”

“Neither am I,” she said, not quite understanding. “Only I felt like going to the Nook for a change. You didn’t mind that, did you?”

He burst into a vivid flower of swearing: “No, but I like to fucking-well come home to a bleeding meal.”

He merely glared at her request that he use less dirty talk, seating himself again by the fireless grate. She detested him for making her miserable, though she felt guilty at not having cooked his meal. “I left everything for you,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I left a note to tell you as well.”

But he’d had enough of quarrelling: “You bloody fool,” he said calmly, almost laughing, yet a little ashamed that she hadn’t quite understood, “don’t you know I’m not much of a scholar?”

It seemed at times she was still a girl of sixteen, single, back at the Nook helping Farmer Taylor with haymaking in the summer; and an hour later, involved with shopping or cleaning the rooms, she was married so firmly that she had never been anything else, had been so for a century, with the Nook (whose years she now looked on as wide with gaiety and freedom) a dream-house lingering in the sunlit outskirts of her mind. At times she wished she’d never set eyes on Seaton, often hoped he’d step out of the house one fine morning and never come back, that someone would rush to her from the skinyard to say he’d been run over or crushed by some fatal weight of bales.

Many quarrels centred on cigarettes. He came home from work one day:

“Any fags?”

She’d been dreading this question. “I ain’t got one. Have you?”

Young, stocky, and dark, he took off his coat, showing rolled-up sleeves and heavily muscled arms. “What do you think I’m asking yo’ for, then?”

“Can’t you go without ’em for one day?” she reasoned. “You get paid tomorrow.”

He couldn’t, swore and spat into the fire. The coal flames killed his spit, almost threw it back, they killed it with such speed. She faced him with eyes averted, arms folded over her breasts, unable to look when he was like this. “Can’t you get any?” he asked after a long silence.

“How?” she cried. “Shall I cadge some on the street? Pinch some?”

Such absolute logic could in no way stop the quarrel, made it worse in fact. “What about the corner shop?”

“We owe them ten bob already.”

He cursed under his breath. She saw the shape of the well-formed words. “You dirty beast. Why don’t you stop swearing?”

It was finished in a second, as she had guessed it would be. He stood up, took his steaming dinner from the table, and threw it against the burning soot of the fire-back. “That’s what your effing dinner’s worth.”

But the next day, all smiles and amiability, with a wage-packet in his pocket and a Woodbine fresh between his lips, nothing could shake his happiness. “Hello, Vera, my love,” he said as he came in, hoping she’d forgotten the previous evening. She knew he was sorry now, that he was trying to forget it and hoping hard that she’d already done so. He laughed as he sat down to his food. “Well, my duck, come on, talk to me.”

She turned her head, almost weeping again, his exuberance bringing it back more than taking her mind from it. She had made the meal he had thrown away. The food she had collected and scraped for he had fed to the devil.

“Now then, duck, now then!” he entreated, leaning across to touch her face. She pushed his hand off: it’s always the guilty who try to forget, she thought. But he looked into her eyes, and somehow it seemed foolish and unimportant to remember it, until she almost smiled at his clumsy attempts to reconcile her to his good humour, only wanting a few more endearing words and laughs to be won over. But:

“Take your hands off me.”

“Now then, Vera! Don’t get like that!” It wasn’t possible to rile him tonight. He drew back to begin his meal. “It’s pay-day,” he told her, in the same tone of endearment.

“What if it is?”

He laughed: “You want some money, don’t you?”

“You want your meals next week as well, don’t you?” Her quick retort did as much as his gallantry to break down the memory of the burnt dinner.

“I do,” he admitted, pouring a cup of tea. “Will you have one, duck?” The lure of peace was too attractive, and she relented. “All right. Pour me one in here”—pushing her cup across.

“Have summat to eat, as well.”

“No, I had summat before you came in. I eat bits and bobs all day and don’t feel like eating at dinner-time.” He pushed the empty plate aside and took out a cigarette, striking a match across the fender: “I drew thirty-two bob this week.”

“Is that all?” she said, in an alarmed voice.

“I was on short time Monday and Tuesday, you know.”

“Oh.”

“Never mind,” he soothed, “we’ll get on all right.” The Nook returned to her in a sudden blaze of reality, and she thought that if there were no food or money remaining in the two rooms she occupied with Seaton, then she had only to pack her few things and go back to the Nook, take up life as she had left it before the last outburst from her father. The Nook stood behind her as a refuge, still regarded more as home than her rooms in the city that had been given life only by Seaton’s ingenuity and a few bare promises in church, and therefore belonged more to him than to her. But the fatal phrase that she had made her bed and must lie on it sank the solid island of the Nook, left her feeling alone and hopeless in an empty sea, unable to commit herself entirely into the safekeeping of Seaton’s capabilities. No one had ever been out of work at the Nook. Her father and brothers had been blacksmiths either at the pit or in private forges where there had always been labour enough, and besides their small but regular wages there were pigs and chickens and a large garden, tangible amounts of food to be seen from any of the bedroom windows, besides a ton or two of pit coal standing in the yard because the coal-house was packed to its gills already. And the house itself, one of Lord Middleton’s cottages, cost practically nothing to rent. But Seaton, she told herself, was a duffer and a numbskull — sometimes reminding him of it to his face — pitted inside a city at a mere labouring job when thousands of such men were being sent home day after day because there was nothing for them to do, often to be laid off altogether.

They owed rent, and Seaton decided it was time to leave. He found a house on a lonely lane near the city’s edge, closer to the Nook by half a mile, and costing less than the two rooms. Vera was fearful of moving, wanted to stay fixed in the rut they had made for themselves, hating to change the tenuous routine and walls that were familiar and therefore comfortable. To sally out and live on a new lane or street meant exposure to different faces, traffic, trees, and turnings to reach the town centre. Yet she knew Harold was right and that they must go.

The flit was planned for a Saturday night, when Raglin the rent collector (who had a room off the entrance hall) would be boozing in his favourite pub at Canning Circus. Seaton looked on the prospect of a “moonlight” with elation: days beforehand he was taking down shelves and dismantling the furniture, was ready to rent a handcart from a nearby woodyard half an hour before they were due to move, time enough to carry everything downstairs on his broad, long-accustomed shoulders and rope it firmly on.

Vera was nervous. “You’re sure it’ll be all right?”

“Course,” he replied, scornful of her anxiety. “Raglin’ll be off to his pub soon, and then we’ll get going.”

“I mean about the house.” He wrapped two pictures in brown paper, a wedding present from one of Vera’s brothers. “I told you before: everything’s ready. The house is clean from top to bottom and I’ve got the rent book and keys. All we’ve got to do is get the stuff there.”

A common peril — having other things to fight beside themselves — made them amiable. They were too busy to quarrel, warmed by the risk of a secret move. Yet Vera tormented herself by wondering how long this happiness would last. “I hope we do better in the new place than we’ve done here.”

“We haven’t done too bad, you know,” Seaton said, making a packet of knives and forks with tea-towel and white tape. He worked with a single-minded intensity, an undeflectable purpose in which action became an emotion and therefore was contentment for him. “Think of it, duck, a house to oursens!”

“It’ll be a lot better,” she admitted. “There’s too much noise here. And besides, the house is cheaper.”

Blankets and sheets were drawn into brown paper, became a parcel bulging between a squeezing network of thin string. “Put your finger on here,” he said, twisting the first loop of the final knot and pulling it tight. She did so, exerting a gentle pressure where the string crossed. He looped the cord again in the half-dark room. “Take it off now,” he said, and snapped the fixity tight as soon as she did so. “There!” he exclaimed. “That’s done.” He sat on one of the chairs to rest. “We can get going in a bit”—and lit a cigarette to wait.

Vera opened the window and rested her elbows on the cool ledge. It was autumn and the red-bricked factory wall glowed with light, turning a salmon-pink from the dying sun that could no longer be seen, making her think of the sun as she remembered it going down behind Wollaton Church, whose spire split the glowing clouds suspended above Baloon House hill. And she thought of suppers at the Nook and the small bedroom shared with Ada and Lyddy, and being half-asleep in the half-light in spite of stories being told in the same or in the next bed and the grunt of ever restless pigs in the sty outside. Now the factory bricks were dull and a few dead-eyed stars came out above the roof. She heard the oven-door clang at the Nook and smelled new-baked bread.

A voice was talking and she turned back to the dark room, in time to remember that she had somehow been landed in the middle of a moonlight flit.

Back from work, he glanced at her distrustfully, saying with unlimited concern: “You ain’t bin working too hard, have yer?”

Steak-potatoes-cabbage came from oven to table. “I’ve got to work, you know.”

He patted her on the stomach: “I don’t want owt to ’appen to my little gel.”

“How do you know it’ll be a gel?” she joked, sitting by the fire.

“It’s sure to be,” he said, eating. “If I want it to be a gel, it will be.”

“I want a boy. He can look after me then when he grows up.” Against you, she added under her breath.

“Whatever it is,” he grinned, “it’s bound to be a baby.”

He made her sit down while he mashed the tea. She couldn’t help saying: “I wonder how long this will last?”

“What?”—boiling water went into the pot.

“You being so nice.”

“Forever, my sweetheart. You know I’m a good lad to you,” he claimed, pressing the cosy down.

“I don’t think so,” she said, almost as uneasy as if he were in one of his rages. But it was impossible to provoke him. He laughed off her taunts, fussed over her and squeezed her hand, got her to tell him what was in the newspaper while he cleared the table and washed the pots. Coming back from the scullery, he seated himself opposite, took out a pair of old trousers to mend. “You’re a real jack-of-all-trades,” she said.

“Aye,” he answered, looking for the thimble, “and master of none. I should a bin a good ’polsterer, but my feyther thought too much of his booze to bother learnin’ me.”

“You’re a sight cleverer than me, I will say.” It was one of two old cottages they lived in — living-room, scullery, and a pair of small bedrooms — set on a lane. Vera missed the sound of factory engines and traffic, found herself immersed again in silent afternoons as she waited for a reasonable time at which the kettle could be set on the fire, or sat with folded hands waiting for the tread of Seaton’s shoes on the ash-laid path.

She liked to see him busy, for then he was less irritable. He turned his hand to make tasks, employing such slow-moving methods that she thought he would never be done, when suddenly there was a neat patch, a pair of refurbished shoes, a new latch on the gate. When a brother lent him tools, he made cabinets, and ornamental shelves into which he fixed diamond-shaped mirrors, sold for five shillings to people met in Radford or at work. But his suit still went to the pawnshop on Monday morning, a hand-to-mouth loaning system on which they lived until Friday night.

Winter snowed its snow, created a masterpiece of arctic mist and rain until a vanguard convoy of warm days turned into Easter, with supplies of sun run surreptitiously through from warmer lands. Normally slim Vera felt her body growing to what seemed enormous size, which often made her half-ashamed in spite of Seaton’s saying with a laugh that she looked no different from other women, and that was the truth. “In fact, you wouldn’t know there was owt inside you at all unless you thought to tek a closer goz,” he argued. Well, she felt too sluggish to worry much.

She walked up the lane one afternoon, passing the sandtip where lorries sometimes came to empty their humped backs. Over the low sandstoned wall lay a stagnant stream, a green and still surface whose tadpoled water beneath seemed to have come from nowhere, a lost tributary of the Lean displaced by the machinations of the pit. She passed primroses and ripening elderberry bushes, and from the railway bridge looked down at the colliery working full tilt. Trucks jangled in the sidings, hooters sounded, and coal rushed into railway trucks from glistening steel chutemouths on the underside of enormous reservoirs that matched the free-wheeling pit shaft in height. Smells of dust and train smoke were in the air, but she enjoyed the sun, and the sight of buttercups growing out of the parapet wall. She told herself that, though Christmas had carried off her twenty-fourth birthday, she was still a girl, felt a girl at any rate, and was somehow distantly frightened that everyone should consider her a woman. And Harold isn’t much more than a lad either, she thought.

It was hot and still, a world without wind. Looking in the direction of the Nook, she wanted to leap down the bridge steps and go there, crossing the far ridge to where safety lay. Her mind slipped into the momentary refuge of this idea, saying to run back would mean no more worry about the baby on its way. Once she had slammed the door (hearing the dogs chase off the few pursuing devils), her pregnancy would disappear and she would be a girl again. She stood a long time by the wall, various scenes arising from a well of forgotten relics. It must have been twenty years ago, on a Saturday night when she had been hours asleep with her sisters, that an arm lifted her up, out of bed and room. She huddled to what carried her, still trying to sleep in spite of movement and the sound of creaking stairs. “Now then, Vera, wake up,” Merton said when the kitchen lamp blazed white upon them. He set her on the table and took a screwed-up fist from her eyes to show her a circle of collier pals, with grinning faces, done up in their weekend best, breathing beer and pip-smoke when they laughed at what Merton had done. “She’s going to dance,” he said, drumming a rhythm on the table. “I towd yer she was pretty, did’t I? Now you’ll see her dance as well. Come on, Vera, my duck, cock yer legs up and do us a dance. Come on, and I’ll gi’ yer a penny.” A man’s voice sang and she stepped around the table edge, feet lifting and falling to the tune, smiling at the long moustaches and laughing voices saying what a pretty little dancer she was.

Seaton entered the house whistling a song, cap in hand and coat half off; a minute later he left the house, his face a yellow white, and hurried in the direction of the nearest houses to get a midwife.

While waiting, he set himself to clean the kitchen and scullery, but because of his nervousness this task lasted half an hour instead of a possible two or three. He sat by the fire smoking, his mind clouded by a numb unhappiness, a helplessness at what was going on upstairs. The groans and cries suggested only disaster, an unspectacular black ending of the world that kept him pinned like a moth to the fireside. His enforced quiescence released only a paltry feeling of rage, not strong enough to dispel the hypnotic grip in which each fresh cry caught him. A flame suddenly burned his fingers, its pain reminding him to strike another match and light up in earnest. He thrust a heavy brass-handled poker between the firebars, and glowing coal fell wastefully through into the tin beneath. “How long will it be,” he wondered aloud, “before it’s all over?”

Eleven struck from some church. “The first one’s worse than waiting to go over the top at Gallipoli,” a workmate had assured him. For the woman it might be, Seaton thought, throwing more coal on, because sometimes they never got over it. No amount of thinking could take him further than that, and his face was ashen with the burden of pity. He wished some pub or picture-house was open, or that some pal would be glad to see him at such an hour, but it was black outside with only the odd bird trying to whistle and maybe a few rats scuttling through long grass in the field.

The coalscuttle was empty: his searching hand rubbed among cobbles and dust on the bottom, so he went outside to the garden shed. He dislodged a ledge of coal in the light of an uprisen half moon, then set to breaking pieces off without spilling too much slack or making much noise. He used both the blunt and blade of the axe, spinning the smooth haft in his palm without once letting it fall, chipping a wedge into the coal grain with the blade, and knocking it apart with the back, until a pan of even lumps had been gathered. A handbrush hung on the wall and he swept the slack up to a corner, then stacked the coal into a more even arrangement as far from the door as possible, happy and content now that his mind was empty, whistling a tune from nowhere that no one had ever written as his stocky waistcoated figure stooped to his made-up work.

By the kitchen door he heard Vera cry. He had forgotten her, and the blinding cry of pain startled him so that he almost dropped the coal. He went in and loaded the fire, but couldn’t stay by it. The clock hands had moved on ten minutes, and that was the only difference in his mood between now and before he had broken the coal. Another cry of pain brought a response of hatred and anger, and he leaned on the gate outside hearing the distant beat of colliery engines and seeing occasional courting couples sauntering along the lane to vanish in darkness by hedges further up, until he felt deathly cold and returned to the fire. He swore in a low voice, cursing no one in particular and nothing he could give words to, unless it was whatever made his lips whistle the unwritten tune in the coal-house, that he didn’t even know he’d been whistling.

The midwife said it was a boy, and he went quickly up the stairs. “Are you all right, duck?”

“Yes,” she told him, her face bleached with exhaustion. He stood a few moments not knowing what to say. She held something in her arms. “Can I see him?” The baby was shown. “It’s small, i’n’t it?” was his opinion. “Though I expect it’ll get bigger. They all do.”

She looked at him looking at the baby. “It will.”

“What shall we call it?”

“I ain’t bothered about that yet,” she said, thinking: I don’t want to go through that lot again.

“Call it Brian,” he ventured.

She closed her eyes. “All right.”

“I’m going to work in the morning,” he told her. “But I’ll go to your mother’s first and tell her to call and see you.” She was asleep; my young gel, he thought, walking down the stairs to make a bed on the sofa, my young gel’s got over it at last and it’s about time.

Rain beat in gusts against the bedroom window, an uneven rhythm singing with the wind, and Vera realized from her blissful half-sleep that Seaton was still in bed, that he had to be at work by half-past seven, that it must be late because the room was light already. Six-month bottle-fed Brian should cry his guts out from the crib for milk any minute, so she sat bolt upright, while Seaton grunted and turned over in his sleep at the disturbance. She glanced at the clock on the dressing-table, nudged him in fear and apprehension.

“What’s a matter?” he yawned.

“Come on, ’Arold. It’s gone eight-thirty.” Dressing quickly, she knew there’d be trouble, always the case when he overlaid like this. He acted as if it were the end of the world because he’d be an hour late at his job. She could never understand it; he seemed not to have much fear of losing it, or to be afraid of his foreman; but he became a maddened bull when jerked straight from sleep into something to worry about, a rush that wouldn’t let him dawdle by the fire over a cup of tea and some bread-and-jam, then wander off briskly yet with a settled mind along the morning lane. With a glance at Brian she went downstairs, leaving Seaton looking sullenly for his trousers.

She poked ashes through the grate and screwed up a newspaper, shivering in the damp cold. Seaton came down: “Get out of my bastard way”—pushing by and sitting in an armchair to pull on his boots. She spread sticks over the paper. “Why don’t you wash your foul mouth out?” she cried, knowing how true it was that their quarrels never began by a stray word and went by slow stages to a climax, but started immediately at the height of a wild destructive battle, persisting with violent intensity to blows, or degenerating to a morose energy-less condition often lasting for days. There seemed no halfway stage between a taunting jungle fray, and a loving happiness. Vera could not switch her moods with Seaton’s speed, and so detested his fussiness between quarrels, treating him at the best with brittle gaiety and reserve. She had tried controlling her retorts in the hope of finding some other man in Seaton who never quarrelled, who was kind all the time, who would love her in spite of them both, only to discover that no such breadth existed in him. For six months after Brian was born he had been near to this, but the novelty of a baby soon wore off.

A bootlace snapped and he snorted with rage, muttering inaudibly. Her heart beat wildly: “Why didn’t you wake up?” she implored.

“Because the bastard alarm clock didn’t go off,” he shouted. “Or you forgot to set the bleeding thing, one of the two.”

Sticks and paper flared in the grate, cracking and sparking. His continual swearing was the carrier of terrible hatred seen in his face; thus she attacked his swearing, as if his hatred — and therefore their troubles — would go could she cure him of that: “For God’s sake, use less filthy talk.”

“You what?” he bellowed. “You what?” She wanted to say something else, but no words were good enough. If only the minute-hand would race around the clock (that he had set on the shelf as an accusation against her) so that he would clear off to work; or if, better still, it would run back to seven o’clock and they were happily drinking tea. She was crying now. “You can get into the factory at half-past nine, can’t you?”

“Shut yer cryin’, yer mardy bleeder.”

“I’m not cryin’ for you.”

“I wouldn’t want you to cry for me,” he shouted, dragging cups and saucers from the cupboard. “I wouldn’t want any bastard to cry for me.” She sat by the window, which was the farthest point she could get from him in the house without actually running away — which she felt powerless to do. “I wish I’d never married you. And I wouldn’t a done if Ada and my mother hadn’t made me come downstairs on the day we got married.”

The kettle boiled and he was not deterred from making the tea. “It’s the worse turn they ever did me then.”

“I wish I’d never married you,” she wept.

“Well, you know what to do,” he roared. “Go back to that dirty mother o’ yourn, and that drunken old man, and that pack of poxetten brothers and sisters.”

She picked up a cup. “Don’t you call them, or you’ll get this at your face. They’re worth fifty of yo’.”

Seaton stood, head and shoulders bent towards her, eyes pierced with madness. “You throw that bastard cup, that’s all. Just you throw that cup.”

No thought, no caution. “I will,” she cried. “I will”—words of affirmation echoing through her memory back to the day she was married.

“Go on,” he hissed, “go on, throw it. Just you throw it, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” He stood by the wall, a loaf in one hand and a knife in the other.

The table was between. “You think I daren’t, don’t you?”—her heart breaking in agony.

It flew for his eyes, all her might and aim behind it, smashing to pieces on the wall. He had not leaned out of its track; and then she felt his hand hitting at her face. Reeling back to the sofa, covering her head, she remembered the breadknife gripped in his fist before she let fly with the cup. The stinging blows somehow hurt through to her cheeks despite the protection of her hands, until she felt no more stings because he must have stopped.

“You’ll have your day to come,” she sobbed, shaking with misery, hands still over her eyes, “when he grows up upstairs.”

His answer was a barrage of curses: no reasonable reply to her long-term threat, but simply a spring reaction to what could be countered in no other way.

“God will pay you out,” was all she could say to it.

“What bastard God?” he shouted with a sneer. “There ain’t no bastard God.” His sacrilege overwhelmed her and she looked blankly out of the window, at tree trunks showing dimly through sheets of rain. You’d think God would strike him dead, saying a thing like that; but happen he was right: there was no God. He was cutting bread and wrapping it in paper for his lunch, then drinking a cup of tea, and all the time she hoped he would put on his coat and leave her in peace.

“’Ave some snap and fags ready for when I get back tonight.”

“You’ll get nowt else from me,” she cried. “I’m going home this morning, and I’m taking Brian with me. You wain’t see me again, so don’t try and come for me.”

He reached for his coat and cap. “We’ll bleeding well see about that.”

“You can’t stop me from leaving,” she called out.

He spun round: “Can’t I?”

“No.”

“We’ll see then,” he bellowed, and with one rush caught hold of the table rim, tipped it, and sent it spinning across the room. Dishes and cups flew towards the fireplace, and a pot of steaming tea sprayed over the rug. He was no one she knew, had never known anyone so wild as this, a stranger here with her, gone mad in a way she hadn’t seen before. Her father had ruled the roost right enough, had wielded big stick and bony fist, but had never havocked and scattered his own goods in so blind a way. There was no man left in his unseeing eyes, and she waited, waited.

“It’s no good, she said when he’d gone out into the rain, it’s no good not knowing what to do, not even crying any more, though the pain was sharper than knives. Can I really go back to my mother’s? She decided she could not. It was as bad there as it is here, so either way it’s a rotten look-out. What reasoning she did sprang from hatred, the hope that Seaton would be struck down by a lorry and killed on his way to work, or mangled to death when he arrived there. If only he’d injured me, came another burst of reason, and I’d had to be taken to hospital, then he’d happen have been frightened to death by the police, and have been good to me for a bit. She was startled by the baby crying. But how can I stop its rotten father from being such a rotter to me? A positive thought told her to visit one of his brothers, tell Ernest, for instance, what had happened, and ask if he couldn’t talk to his batchy brother Harold and ask him to have more sense.

She levered the table back on to its legs and fed the baby. A cup of tea, and a resolution to see Ernest Seaton, made her feel better. It wasn’t raining so heavily when she set out, pushing Brian in the pram.

Turning through street after street, she wondered again why Harold was a numbskull, while his five brothers stood apparently on another level, in the firm grip of good jobs. One was a shoemaker, two were upholsterers, the fourth a lace-designer. Ernest managed a draper’s shop in town. Harold Seaton, a labouring numbskull, earned thirty-eight bob a week, when he was lucky, at a tannery and skinyard. The explanation had been pieced together that Harold, having had the bad luck to be the baby of the family, had been left behind by his up-growing brothers, and half-forgotten by his too-old parents. He had had rickets, from thoughtless neglect rather than lack of money, and the disease had prevented him from going to school, caused him lifelong to walk with the swinging gait that Vera, on first seeing him, had mistaken for the pull of the three whippets. She suspected that the bad end of a bargain had come to her, and from wondering whether Seaton was more to be pitied than blamed, gave in to another fit of weeping as she turned on to the street of semi-detached houses where Ernest lived.

Ernest himself opened the door, and she was glad at finding him in. He’d got a good job right enough, able to go in when he liked: I wouldn’t be here now if Harold had such a job. He greeted her in a friendly way. “Hello, Vera. You are a stranger, aren’t you?” He was twelve years older than Harold, with the same dark eyes and complexion, similar stature going to roundness, afflicted with baldness blamed on his army days in Mesopotamia. They’ve all got strange eyes, though, Vera thought, leaving the pram by the window and following him into the living-room, where a huge fire burned in the grate. He offered her some tea, as if, she divined, being polite to one of his customers. The sound of herself saying no brought all the events of the black morning bursting into her. Ernest was thinking how pretty and lively she was, that Harold, though backward, had known how to go for the women, that in his opinion he’d done better than the rest of them in this respect. He hardly knew what to say to her, though: what could one ask one’s sister-in-law, except how one’s own brother was?

“I don’t know”—her tone was bitter — “and I don’t care.”

He’d thought something like this was in the offing. “What’s the matter then, Vera?” He was alarmed when she began to sob, yet also gratified because he had never known his own wife to shed a tear over anything. “Sit down,” he said; “that’s right.”

She cried into her hands: “It’s your brother. He’s a swine to me.”

Ernest sensed that some sort of blame was being thrown on to him. “Harold? How?” and didn’t like hearing his brother referred to in this way either.

“He hit me,” she accused, “for nothing. He’s a lunatic, that’s what he is.”

Ernest stayed calm, reasoning: “He couldn’t have hit you without a reason.” Since he wouldn’t dare strike his own wife, he thought all that sort of thing had been stopped years ago, had gone out of fashion.

“He tipped the table up as well,” she told him, “and smashed all the pots.”

“Whatever for?”—still unbelieving.

“I don’t know. Because we overlaid. He’s always using filthy talk. They’ll cart him off to Mapperley one day, the hateful way he looks at you. I couldn’t stand his dirty talk, and he hit me because I told him about it. I’m going back to my mother’s. I daren’t stay with him.”

Ernest caressed the top of his bald pate, looked at her sardonically, stood before the fire with his legs apart. He patted her on the shoulder. “Calm down, Vera,” he said kindly. “Beryl will be back soon with the shopping, and we’ll have something to eat.”

But she couldn’t calm down, felt Seaton’s blows once more and saw the table flying across the room, and she felt them again for tomorrow and the next day. “Can’t you talk to him?” she asked, a last desperate remedy that she didn’t think would help.

He was cautious. “I suppose I could, but I don’t know anything about it.”

“I’ve told you already,” she protested.

“I haven’t heard Harold’s side yet, have I? I must be fair.”

“And you won’t hear it,” she cried. “He daren’t tell you, don’t worry.”

“I think he will. There’s two sides to every story. People don’t do things like that for nothing.” He hadn’t meant her to take this in the way she did, but blood was thicker than quicksilver in the Seaton family.

“But he did,” she roared, “because he’s looney like the rest of the family.”

Well, this was the bloody limit. Now he could see how Harold had been provoked. They’re all alike, these women. And on she went: “He’s a numbskull who can’t even read and write, so it’s no wonder he does such rotten things. If he’d been to school he might a been a bit more civilized.”

The two things don’t figure, he told himself. “You must have asked for it,” he said sharply, “that’s all I can say.”

Yes, they’re all alike, she thought. “You’re all the same,” she threw at him.

They must fight like demons, and I’ll bet she does a good half of it. If me and Beryl did a bit as well, our lives would be a bloody sight livelier, but one word back from me and we’d be finished. And this no-good bloody girl complains of Harold, and then comes here to cheek me off as well. “You should go back and look after him,” he exclaimed.

As thick as thieves, that’s what they are. “But won’t you help me? Won’t you talk to him for me?” she pleaded.

“No, I bleddy-well won’t; not until I’ve heard the full story.”

She turned from him: “I’m going. But he isn’t going to swear at me and hit me any more. I’m going to do myself in,” she sobbed. “I can’t stand it, I tell you. I’ll chuck myself under a bus.”

The door slammed, every window in the house tingling against its frame. She pushed the pram down the path and into the empty street, walking quickly along the semi-detached rent-collecting shop-managing pavement. Everybody hates me, and he’s only the other side of the bad penny. I can’t understand why I ever got married. Now, why did I? And I didn’t want to, no, never wanted to do any such thing, though if I’d stayed at home the old man would have gone on pasting me, because they’re all rotters and if it ain’t Harold it’s the old man. Everybody hits me, and why? That’s what I’d like to know, because it’s no use living like this. I can’t keep on with it. I’d be a sight better off dead, I’m sure. I wish I was dead, and I will be soon, quicker than anybody thinks, under a tram at where it’ll be going fast, and then to have no more rowing and misery like I’ve allus had. The boulevard isn’t far off and there’ll be lots of traffic. Around two corners and up a bit of hill. Ernest is rotten like the rest. They hate everybody: and it’s no good going back so’s it’ll happen again in a few more mornings. Why am I still crying? Because they made me? I wouldn’t cry for them, the rotten lot. Thank God it’ll soon be over, because never again. I’m out of breath, but here’s the corner. They are all rotten. I’ll wait here as if I’m going to cross the road. Nobody’ll think to stop me.

As a tram came one way, footsteps ran up the street behind her and stopped when they came close. A hand touched her shoulder.

“Come on, Vera,” Ernest said gently. “I’m sorry about all this. I’ll see Harold and make things right.”

She shook him off. “I’m not frightened, so leave me alone. I’m fed up with everything.”

“Don’t be daft,” he said. “Come on, duck. Harold won’t hit you again.”

A suggestion of Harold’s kindness after a quarrel lurked in the tone of his voice. “No,” she said, watching a tram gather speed at the crossroads.

“Come on back to the house and we’ll have something to eat.” He took her arm firmly. “You’ll be all right. Things are never as bad as they seem.” His considerate inflexion so closely resembled Seaton’s that for a moment she thought he was behind her, too, as if by magic he had come out of the factory to find her and make up for the quarrel.

She turned. He pushed the pram. Brian woke up and she thought he was going to cry. Bending over, she pulled the coverlet up to his neck. He did not cry. She let herself be led by Ernest, feeling bitterly cold, though the air was warm and Seaton had dashed out without a coat. She shivered on her way back to the house, and a drowsiness replaced or accompanied the cold, as if she had been a week without sleep.

When she left Ernest’s, a huge basket of groceries was at the foot of the pram, and the small fortune of a pound note lay in her coat pocket. But she was indifferent to these gifts and all that Ernest had meant they should mean. Yes, he would meet Harold coming out of work. Yes, he would say he should control his temper and not lead her such a dance; yes, he would say this and he would wag his head and nod his chin and tell Harold he should behave himself. Fine, fine, fine. But in the end it wouldn’t mean a bleddy thing. You can say things to a reasonable man that he’d take notice of, but you can’t tell a madman not to be mad any more. And so it would go on, though one day, she said, Brian would grow up, the proof of it being that he was beginning to cry.