Last Friends

CHAPTER 8

Florrie Benson — that’s to say she was Florrie Benson before she married the man from Odessa in Herringfleet, Teesside, England ten years back in 1927 and became Florrie Venetski or Venski or some such name — Florrie Benson walked every day of the school term with her son to see him on to the school train. The son was ten, the place the cold east coast, the time 7.30 in the morning and the year 1937.

The boy, Terence, did not walk beside her. He never had, from being five. He disappeared ahead of her the minute they were over the front doorstep.

It was not that he was in any way ashamed at being seen with his mother. He never had been. It was just that life was an urgent affair of haste and action and nothing in it should be missed.

He was a big, blond, good-looking, lanky, athletic sort of child, in top-gear from the start, his mother plodding behind him. By the time she had caught up with him on the station platform he had disappeared into the raucous mob of local children, his flash of white blond hair running among them like a light.

Florrie never even turned her head to look for him. Never had. She arranged herself against the low rails by the ticket-office her kind, big hands hanging down over it, her smiling brown eyes gazing at the cluster of girls — always girls — who rushed to her like chickens expecting grain. All she seemed to do was smile. What the girls talked to her about goodness knows, but they never stopped until the train came.

Florrie was not particularly clean, or, rather, her clothes were rusty and gave her skin a dark tint. Sometimes the school-girls, daughters of steel-workers and not very clean either, stroked her arms and hands and offered her sweets which sometimes she accepted.

Florrie didn’t fit in. Her essence seemed to be far away somewhere, way beyond her stocky figure. She suggested another life, a secret civilisation. She looked a solitary. For her ever to have shouted out towards the boy, Terence, to remind him of something would have been almost an insult to both, but an invisible string seemed to pass between them.

Terence — Terry — the spark running in the wheat — never looked at his mother as he ran in the crowd, never waved goodbye when the train came in. When the children had been subsumed into it and it had steamed away on its six-mile journey along the coast Florrie would heave herself off the railings, nod towards the ticket-office (‘Now then, Florrie? ’Ow are yer?’) and make for home. Her daily ritual was as much a part of local life — quite unexplained — as the train itself, its steam and flames, the fireman shovelling in the coal with the face and muscles of Vulcan. She never seemed to watch him but he was not unaware of her. He sweated in the red glow and wiped his face with a rag.

No other mother came to the station. When the children were smaller the other mothers used to shout ‘’ere Florrie. Can you look to him? Or her?’ Very occasionally at the beginning Florrie would find herself near one or other licking a handkerchief and scrubbing at faces, straightening the slippery scrap of a tiny green and yellow rayon tie. Never Terry’s.

Every morning then, for five years, Florrie would heave herself off the railing and back down the road again to No. 9 Muriel Street, so close she could have waved him off at the front door. And from the very start he’d got home again from the station alone. He had crossed over the iron footbridge out of the alley and into some bushes. Everyone, including Florrie, seemed vague about the home train’s time of arrival and as he got older he began to make small differentials to his front door, preferring the back door in the paved grey alley where there were sheds and a cart house and black stains of blood. The blood was ingrained into the dip around the central soak-away where for years the butcher had slaughtered a beast every Thursday morning. The back street stank of salt. Then he ran round home and in at the front.

When he grew to be eight or nine he told them at home that his day at school was longer now and he would be late, then he began to take off regularly down Station Road, past the chip shop and the corn-store to the band-stand on the promenade looking towards the sea. He clambered about on the flaky iron lace-work and the peeling iron pillars that supported its dainty roof. He stayed there maybe half an hour doing somersaults on the railings, or dancing about or just staring at the grey sea. Herringfleet had once had a brass band that played airs from The Merry Widow or Gilbert and Sullivan to people in hats and gloves who sat out on deck chairs on the promenade but Terry knew nothing about that. He didn’t know the meaning of ‘band-stand’. He’d slide away home through the back streets again and come in at the front door as if he’d just got off the train.

Inside the tiny house the scene was unchanging and he scarcely registered it. His father lay on the high bed facing the street door, beside him a commode covered with a clean cloth. An iron kettle hung from a chain over the fire, puffing and clattering its lid and the window over the sink was misted over with steam. Occasionally, on good days, his father might be in a chair, but usually, summer and winter, the long, tense figure lay on its back, coughing and coughing and sometimes swearing in Russian ‘or whatever they speak in Odessa,’ as Nurse Watkins down the street said. She would have left a minute or so before Terry got home from school, and a tray put out on the kitchen table with big, white tea-cups with a gold trefoil on the side and a broad gold rim. There’d be a plate of bread and butter with another plate on top of it. Nurse Watkins came in every day and was paid half-a-crown now and then because the families were in some way connected. She would wash out the Odessan’s long flannels in Lux flakes and put him in clean ones, rub his joints, shake the bit of sheep-skin someone had once brought down from Long Hall on the moors, which still smelled of sheep-dip. It prevented bed-sores.

Nurse Watkins didn’t seem to have had any training anywhere but there was nothing she didn’t know. She was midwife to the town and she laid everyone out at death and told lascivious corpse-stories. She had Gypsy eyes and earrings and had been briefly at school with Florrie but had left at twelve. Over the years she had looked long at the Odessan whilst he had looked only at the ceiling. She stroked back his bright hair on the pillow and shaved him with a cut-throat razor when he would allow it. Florrie did the toe-nails but not well.

‘Train late again then?’ his father said to Terry. ‘Gets later.’ He spoke in Russian.

‘Yes. Late,’ said Terry, in Russian. ‘She’ll be late in, too. Winter coming. Getting dark.’

Terry made tea in the brown pot and let it stand on the hob until it was brewed.

‘Are there no biscuits, Dad,’ and then in English ‘Why’s there never a biscuit, then?’ and his father roared back in Russian about his grammar.

‘Dist wan’ a biscuit then, Dad?’

‘Do you want,’ said his father.

‘Or there’s bread.’

Sometimes his father lifted up a hand, which meant yes.

Then Florrie would be back with them, telling Terry in broad Teesside patois where to find biscuits (in her bag to stop Nurse Watkins). She would refill the kettle and swing it back over the fire for the next brew. All three knew how tired she was.

* * *

All that day she had been unrecognisable, black as a Negro, a man’s thick tweed cap pulled over her hair, back to front. A man’s thick coat, made thicker by years of grime, had been tied with rope round her middle. All day she’d been perched up high on a bench across the coal-cart that she kept in the alley alongside the shed of the scrawny little horse and the coal store. The butcher’s men often gave her a hand, if they were there.

Three days a week she clopped round the town on the cart through all the back streets, shouting ‘COAL’ in a resounding voice. The lungs of a diva. ‘Coal today,’ she shouted and from the better houses of the iron-masters’ in Kirkleatham Street the maids ran out in white cap and apron, twittering like starlings. ‘Three bags now Florrie,’ ‘Four bags,’ and watched her heave herself down off the dray, turn her back, claw down one sack after another with black gloves stiff as wood. She balanced them along into coal-houses or holes in stable yards showering out coals and coal-dust. She took the money and dropped it inside a flat leather pouch on the rope belt around her stomach. She adored her work.

‘Cuppa tea, Florrie?’

‘No time, no time.’

A long slow sexy laugh, then back on the dray. Street after street. The horse knew where to stop. Trade was steady. Her call was tuneful, rather like the rag-and-bone man but richer. Almost a song. Fifty years on, Sir Terence Veneering QC, sitting in the Colonial Club, happened to mention to someone in the Sultanate that he had been born in Herringfleet, was told that there had been a northern woman, larger than life, who had delivered coals. Or so it was said. In the poverty-stricken North-East — in the middle of the Thirties.

Once home Florrie drove the dray round to the back. She took the horse to the shed and fed it, rubbed it down and if there was no-one about to help her she dragged the dray into the cart-house. There was a communal bath-house for Muriel Street and she paid a penny to have it to herself on coal days. She poured hot water from the brick tub all over herself with a tin can. She washed her hair and feet and hands and then her body with a block of transparent green Fairy Soap. Then she dried herself on a brown towel, rough as heather.

* * *

Above the crooked, unpainted doors of the cart-house hung a hand-painted, wooden sign in green and gold saying Vanetski Coal Merchant and the exotic flourish to it was the register, the signature, the stamp of proof of Florrie’s past happiness.

The sign-painter was the foreign acrobat and dancer who had arrived in the town over ten years ago with a circus troupe who put up a Big Top on the waste ground by the gasworks for ‘One Week Only’. The tent had sprung up overnight like a gigantic mushroom, with none of the glitter and coat-tails of Bertram Mills but an old, threadbare thing, grey and rather frightening, an image from the plains of Ilium. And how it stank!

‘They’re called Cossacks,’ said the cognoscenti of Herringfleet. ‘They can dance and kick right down to their ankles with their bottoms on the floor. They shout out and yell and make bazooka music, like the Old Testament Jericho Russian.’

‘What they doing ’ere?’

‘It’s since they murdered the Tsar. They want the world to see them. It’s a sort of mix of animal and angel. Russia’s not a rational country.’

He doesn’t go in much for angels — the man selling tickets. Long, miserable face. They killed the Tsar years ago!

But young Florrie Benson saw an angel that night. She had taken money from her mother’s purse to buy a ticket for the show and was at once translated. She heard a new music, a new fierce rapture. She watched the superhuman contortions of the exciting male bodies. Her skin prickled all over at their wild cries. In a way she recognised them.

There was one dancer she couldn’t take her eyes off. Her friend next to her was sniggering into a handkerchief (‘For men it’s right daft’) and the next day she stole more money and went to the Cossacks alone. She went every night that week and the final night she was up beside him on the platform when he fell from a rope. She was ordering a doctor, roaring out in her lion’s voice. People seemed to think she must be his woman. She never left his side.

* * *

The rest of the Cossacks melted away and they and their tent were gone by morning in their shabby truck. Florrie, the English schoolgirl, stayed with him at the hospital and wouldn’t be shifted. Doctors examined him and said his back was probably not broken but time would tell. Someone said, ‘He’s a foreigner. Speaks nowt but heathen stuff! He’ll have to be reported.’

Yet nobody seemed to know where. Or seemed interested. The local clergyman who was on the Town Council went to see him, and then the Roman Catholic priest who tried Latin and the Cossack’s lips moved. Each thought the other had reported him to the authorities, without quite knowing what these were.

‘They’ll no doubt be in touch any day from Russia to get him back.’ They waited.

‘There was a couple of Russians died of food-poisoning last year off a ship anchored in Newcastle. Meat pies. The Russians was in touch right away for body-parts. Suspected sabotage.’

But nobody seemed to want the body-parts of the Cossack who lay in the cottage-hospital with his eyes shut. He talked to himself in his own language and spat out all the hospital food. And only the school-girl beside him.

‘Back’s gone,’ they told her. ‘Snapped through. He’ll never walk again.’

The following week he was found standing straight at the window, six-foot-four and looking eastward toward the dawn and the Transporter Bridge at Middlesbrough, an engineering triumph. It seemed to interest him. When the nurses screamed at him he screamed back at them and began to throw the beds about and they couldn’t get near to him with a needle. Someone called the police and somebody else ran round to find Florence.

She was taken out of school and to the hospital in a police car, no explanations; and when she was let into his isolation ward she looked every bit woman and shouted, ‘You. You come ’ome wi’ me. Away!’ ‘Away’ is a word up there that can mean anything but is chiefly a command.

She left her address at the hospital and commanded an ambulance. The ward sister was drinking tea with her feet up so Florrie got him from the ambulance herself, half on her back. She had a bed made ready. The aged parents, never bright, shook their heads and drowsed on. ‘Eh, Florence! Eh, Florrie Benson — whatever next?’

The dancer stayed. He lay, staring above him now. Nobody came. Florrie went to the public library in Middlesbrough to find out about Cossacks. She came back and stood looking at his curious eyes. She imagined they were seeing great plains of snow spread out before him. Multitudinous mountains. The endless Steppe. She got out some library books and tried to show him the photographs but they didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

She gave up school. She was sixteen, anyway. Her old parents went whimpering about the house, faded and both were dead within the year.

Florence was pregnant, and even so, nobody was interested in the Cossack. Neighbours came round but she was daunting. If she had been a boy it would all have been different. Serious enquiries. But, even pregnant, nothing was done for Florence.

After a time the man began to walk again, just to the window or the door on the street. Or into the ghastly back alley.

One day Florrie came home from buying fish to find him gone.

It was for her the empty tomb. The terror and the disbelief were a revelation. She ran every-where to look for him, and, in the end, it was she — out of half the parish — who found him, on the sand-dunes staring out over what was still being called the German Ocean. The North Sea.

She brought him limping and swearing home and, at last, being well-acquainted now with the Christian Cross that lay in the warm golden hair on his chest, she went to the Catholic priest, leaving Nurse Watkins in charge for two shillings and four pence. There were very few half-crowns left now.

The priest lived in a shuttered little brick house beside his ugly church beside the breakwater. Nobody went there except the Irish navvies in the steel-works. ‘Russian?’ asked Father Griesepert. ‘Communist you say?’

‘No. He’s definitely Catholic.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He doesn’t believe in taking precautions.’

Father Griesepert said that he would call. He said that, actually, he had already been thinking about it.

‘Name?’ Father Griesepert shouted.

Nobody had actually asked the Cossack’s name. The Catholic priest bullied the sick man in a loud voice. He tried a bit of German (on account of his own strange name which was one of the reasons for his isolation here).

‘Address? Home address?’

The man looked scornful.

‘Name of circus?’

Silence. Then ‘Piccadilly’ and a great laugh.

Suddenly, in good English, the Cossack said, ‘My name is Anton’ (‘Anton,’ whispered Florence, listening to it).

‘Very unlikely he’s a Cossack. I’d guess he comes from Odessa,’ said the priest. He rubbed his hands over his face as if he were washing it. ‘This woman,’ he said in loud English to the man, ‘Is with child.’

Anton understood.

‘You must be married before the birth.’

Anton looked at Florence as if he had never seen her before.

Florence went to get the priest his whisky.

They all said prayers together then, and Griesepert named the wedding date. ‘We must, of course, inform the authorities.’ He was met by two pairs of staring eyes.

‘You are a Catholic, Florrie Benson.’ She seemed uncertain. ‘Your parents were lapsed. But I remember baptising you as a child. That child has now to have her own child and it must be brought up as a Catholic. It must go to a Catholic school. You must bring it to the church. And your marriage must be preceded by a purification.’

‘A purification, Father?’

‘Have you no concept of your faith?’

‘You never gave me any.’

She stretched out her rough hand in a gesture which was — for her — hesitant, towards the Cossack’s hand and together they both glared at the priest. Then, between them in assorted words, from God knows where, they made a stab at the Catechism, Anton’s face rigid with contempt.

Florrie’s face was alight with joy. The baby in the womb stirred.

* * *

Anton tried. When Florrie was in the ninth month and couldn’t walk far he began to limp about the town looking for work.

There was almost no money left by now from the wills of Florrie’s parents and so he became a caretaker at a private school at the end of the town. When they found that he spoke several languages he began to teach classes there. His English improved so quickly that it almost seemed that it had always been there, beneath the other languages. He began to meet educated people in the good houses across the Park towards Linthorpe. The new great families, the iron-masters. Some of them German Jews. In these houses he behaved with a grave, alien formality: but with a seductive gleam in his eye. It seemed that he was a gentleman. It was confusing.

Soon he was being invited to dinner — always, of course, without Florrie — by the headmaster of a local private school and his artistic wife while, in Muriel Street, Florence suckled the child over the kitchen range. She sang to it, made clothes for it, wished her mother were alive to see it. Wished she had been kinder to her mother.

Her husband, seated at the headmaster Harold Fondle’s great mahogany dining table with its lace mats and good crystal, spoke in improving English and fluent French of Plato and Descartes. His English was without accent, he looked distinguished and he appreciated the wine. When anybody broached the question of his past life or his future, or his allegiances he would raise his glass and say, ‘To England’.

He grew strong again, and after the child was weaned decided to go into business as a coal merchant. He carved and then painted the gold and green sign in the slaughter-house alley. The butcher thought little of it (‘You don’t start a business by mekkin a painting of it’). When Anton’s back gave out for the second time, Florrie found him twisted, lying in the alley under a sack of coal, the thin horse munching into its nose-bag.

She hauled him somehow back indoors where Nurse Watkins came and they got him up at last on the bed. The baby — the alert and golden, happy baby — lay watching from his cot, which was a clothes drawer. The doctor came.

Both parents that night wept.

* * *

The next day was the day of the week when Griesepert came to them with the Sacrament. He never missed. He rolled in like a walrus, snorting down his nose. He stretched out his legs towards the fender.

Today Florrie ignored the Sacrament and sat out in the yard letting them talk. There was whisky, and firelight in the room and the knowing-looking baby wondered whether the grim man on the bed or the fat man over the fire mattered more. The word ‘father’ kept recurring. The baby seemed to listen for it. As to his mother, she was milk and warmth and safe arms but he didn’t pat and stroke her like other babies do. He seldom cried. Occasionally he gave a great crow of laughter. Nurse Watkins with her brass earrings and heavy moustache called him a cold child.

Out of earshot of others Father Griesepert told Florrie she must sleep with the Cossack again or she would lose him (What do you know? she thought). ‘He needs a woman. It is Russian,’ (And him never gone a step beyond Scarborough! she thought. And not knowing the state of his back). Anton had, occasionally, visitors, Russian-speaking, who came and went like shadows. She and the baby sometimes slept on a mattress out by the back door. She lay often listening to the Cossack shouting at invisible companions somewhere she would never know. In the end she told the priest who thought it came from some terrible prison in his past and he was talking to the dead. ‘We know nothing here, nothing of what goes on in these places. One day we might if we live through this next war.’

‘Never another war!’ she said. ‘Not again.’

She tried to imagine Anton’s country. She knew nothing about it but snow and golden onion-topped churches and jewels and stirring cold music and peasants starving and all so blessedly far away. She did not allow herself to imagine Anton’s life before he came to her. She would never ask. At night sometimes, to stop his swearing in his sleep, in words she could only guess, she’d pull out a drawer from the press where she kept her clothes and tuck down the baby among them and a chair on either end to keep the cat off and then climb on to the high bed with Anton and wrap herself round him. Sometimes he opened his eyes. They were unseeing and cold. There were no endearments. The sex was ferocious, impersonal, fast. There was no sweetness in it. She didn’t conceive again.

Her silent faith in the little boy never lessened. Her trust and love for him was complete. As he grew up she asked no questions as he arrived home later and later off the school train. When he was eleven she stopped taking him to the station.

* * *

For by now Terry was wandering far beyond the chip shop and the band-stand. He was roaming over the sand-dunes down over the miles of white sands towards the estuary and the light-house on the South Gare. On the horizon sometimes celestially, mockingly blue, shining between blue water and blue sky stood the lines of foreign ships waiting for the tide to take them in to Middlesbrough docks. Spasmodically along the sand-dunes the landward sky would blaze with the flaring of the steel-works’ furnaces. They blazed and died and blazed again, hung steady, faded slowly. The boy watched.

He was not a rapturous child. The crane-gantry of the Blast Furnaces turned delirious blue at dusk but he was not to be a painter. He noted and considered the paint-brush flicker of flame on the top of each chimney leaning this way and then that but he sat on his pale beach noting them and no more.

He had no idea why he was drawn to the place, the luminous but unfriendly arcs of lacy water running over the sand, the waxy, crunchy black deposits of sea-wrack, slippery and thick, dotted for miles like the droppings of some amphibian, the derelict grey dunes rose up behind him empty except for knives of grey grasses.

There would usually be a few bait-diggers at the water’s edge, their feet rhythmically washed by the waves. A lost dog might be somewhere rhythmically barking out of sight.

Sometimes one or two battered home-made sand-yachts skimmed by; only one or two people watching. No children. This was not sand-castle country. No children in this hard place were brought to play by the sea.

But there was a single recurrent figure on the beaches. It was there mostly in winter as it began to get dark: an insect figure stopping and starting, pulling a little cart, bending, stopping, pacing, sometimes shovelling something up, always alone.

After weeks Terry decided it was a man and it was pushing not a cart but a baby’s pram. For months he watched without much interest but then he began to look out for the man and wonder who it was.

* * *

One cold afternoon he did his usual rat-run of railway bridge to the back of Muriel Street — he now passed through the room with the bed in it — and found his father’s fist stuck out of the blanket towards him grasping a ten shilling note. The wireless crackled on about Czechoslovakia and his father’s lips were trying to say something. Terry pocketed the note and said in Russian, ‘D’you want tea?’

‘Whisky,’ said his father.

‘It’s for the Holy Father. How are you?’

‘I’m well.’

‘You have a good Russian accent. Are you happy?’

Terry had never been asked this, and did not know.

‘I’m going down the beach now, Pa.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know.’

The wireless blared out and then faded. They had been first in Muriel Street for a wireless. It stood with a flask of blue spirit beside it. Where had the money come from?

‘I’m glad I know Russian,’ Terry said.

‘How old are you son?’

‘Going on twelve.’

Tears trickled out over the Cossack’s bony face running diagonally from the eyes to the hollows of the neck and Terry knew that, watching, there was something he should be feeling but didn’t know what. He took the money and went to the shop. Let them get on with their lives. He was getting his own.

* * *

He sat down in the dunes facing the sea and soon began to be aware that he was being watched from somewhere behind his left shoulder. Before him the white sands were empty. The sea was creeping forward. He watched the trivial, collapsing waves. The steel-works’ candle-chimneys were not yet putting on their evening performance against tonight’s anaemic sunset.

There was a cough above him on the high dune.

Turning round, Terry saw the insect-man in an old suit and a bowler hat. The pram hung in front of him, two wheels deep in fine sand that flowed in spreading avalanches down the slope.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the man. ‘Parable-Apse.’

Terry stared.

‘And Apse,’ he said. ‘Parable, Apse and Apse; Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.’

Terry stared on.

‘My name is Peter Parable, senior partner, and you I believe to be Florrie Benson’s boy? I was briefly at school with your mother. I am being obliged to ask for your help.’

Terry’s Russian eyes watched on.

‘I am a man of principle,’ said the creature. ‘I am not in the least interested in children. I am not of a perverted disposition. I am able to survive without entanglements and I ask only your immediate assistance in conducting the pram down to the harder level below this dune. Today I have attempted a different route home. It has not been a success.’

The pram was up to its axles in sand.

‘When I lean with all my might,’ said the tiny man, ‘you may assist by tugging at the back wheels, those nearest you. And then if you could sharply—sharply—spring to the side I think the vehicle might achieve the beach in an upright position and of its own volition.’

Terry sat a minute considering this new language and then plodded up the dune. He kicked the rear of the pram facing him with a nonchalance close to insolence. Close to hatred. Bloody man.

He soon stopped kicking. He tried to heave the pram upwards in his arms. He said, ‘It’s not going to shift. Is’t full o’ lead? What you got in’t?’

‘Black gold,’ said Parable-Apse. ‘Black diamonds. Tiny black — and white — pearls. Now then — again!’

After at least seven heaves Terry yelled and fell to the ground, rolled sideways and watched the pram lumbering and slithering down the slope to tip over on its side upon the beach. A heap of gravelly dirt spilled over the silken sand. Using a shovel as a walking stick Mr. Parable (or Apse) toddled after it, legs far apart, and Terry sat up.

‘We have, I fear, a weakened axle,’ said the insect-man.

‘You’ll have to leave it ’ere,’ said Terry.

‘Oh, it hasn’t come to that. Perhaps we should empty it completely, scatter the load with simple sand and, later, return.’

Terry regarded the heap of dirt.

‘And if, boy, you would carry the broken wheel and we were to push the rest of it home, then you could take tea with me.’

Terry thought, Here we go and said, ‘Is’t far?’

‘Not at all.’ The man was busy covering up the mound of black gold, scratching the last of the dirt from the pram. He snapped off the damaged wheel, handed it to the boy and fell flat on his face.

‘Oh, God,’ said Terry, hauling him up. ‘’ere. Gis ’ere. Give over. Tek’t wheel. Where we goin’?’

They paraded over the sandy path behind the dunes, across the golf-links, somehow got themselves over a wooden stile watched by a lonely yellow house with empty windows. They followed a track that put them out into a street of squat one-storey houses Terry had not seen before, the long, low street of the old fishing village built before the industries came, before the ironstone chimney and the foreign workers and the chemicals and the flames. The sandstone dwellings had midget doors and windows like houses for elves. Mr. Parable-Apse, Commissioner for Oaths, let them both in to one of these houses, leaving the pram outside, and inside they walked down a long, low tunnel of a rabbit-warren-like passage-way into a kitchen scrubbed clean. Some of Mr. Parable-Apse’s under-clothing hung airing from a contraption of ropes and wooden bars overhead. He lit a hazy, beautiful gas-light on a bracket, crossed to the coal fire, flourished a poker and flung a shovelful of glittering, hard dirt, like jet, into the flames. The coal fire in the grate blazed up, hot and brilliant.

‘What is’t?’ asked Terry.

‘Sea-coal. Washed, of course. I wash it in a bath in my yard several times a week. Out of office hours of course, and never on the Lord’s Day. In my back yard I have a pump with clear, unbounded water that cleanses like the mercy of God. The sea-coal’s what washes off the ships, you know. In the estuary. Sea-coal is a bonus. Clean and beautiful, sweet-smelling, effective and free. Your mother should market it.’

‘She has enough to do,’ said Terry.

‘So I hear. But you haven’t yet, my boy. I expect you are meant to leave school shortly and slave at The Works? Oh, my dear boy! Sweeping a road ’til the end of your life.’

‘They need the money.’

‘You could begin now, working casually for me. While you are waiting. I make money. I have never had any difficulty there. We could expand across this world. Apse and Benson. In the name of the Lord, of course.’

Apse, Benson and God, thought Terry. He said, ‘But I’ll have to go full time to The Works. For the money.’

Apse — or Parable — was washing his hands at the shallow stone sink, drying carefully between his fingers.

‘How old did you say? Ah yes. I remember the visit of the Cossacks to the Gas Works though, of course, I was unable to attend. A circus is one of the devil’s plays. There is a rumour abroad — tell me, what is your name? — that you are particularly clever. Your intelligence is above these parts. You might bring your intelligence to us. Come in with me as a lawyer. It could be arranged. It is called ‘Doing your articles’—a ridiculous and medieval concept — but a solicitor’s work is the top of the world.’

(‘This man’s a loony!’)

‘And even now,’ said Parable-Apse, ‘Think of Christian commerce. Sea-coal. It is your family business.’

‘You shut up,’ said Terry. ‘Stop looking down on my mother.’

‘Oh never! Never! Known her since she was born. Since her mother put her in long drawers. I loved her.’

‘My Dad loves her and nowt to do wi’ frills. They don’t speak now, me Dad and Mam, but it’s only because of his shame. Shame at being crippled and nobody caring. And being lost.’

‘He talks to you?’

‘Nay — never! We’s beyond talk. We talk his language together less and less. He grabs me wrist as I pass the bed. Like a torturer but it’s himself ’e’s torturing.’

‘Why does he do that?’

‘There’s always money under his fingers. Tight up in the palm. He needs whisky. The Mam don’t know. Nurse Watkins does. She’s foreign, too. He pushes the bottle under his mattress. When it’s empty. I’ve seen it going home in her leather bag with the washing. The money must come from the Holy Father. How do I know? He’s beginning to need more and more.’

He was dizzy with revelation. Revelation even to himself. None of this had emerged as words before. Not even thoughts.

‘A man comes,’ said Terry. ‘Mam don’t know. A foreign man. Talking Russian — or summat like it. When nobody’s in.’ He burst into tears. ‘Maybe I dream it.’

Parable-Apse, having dried his coal-dusted hands on a clean tea-towel, sat down by the sea-coal fire and speared a tea-cake on the end of a brass toasting fork. The medallion on the toasting fork was some sort of jack-ass or demon, or sunburst god. ‘How wonderful the world is,’ said Parable-Apse.

The fire blazed bright and the tea-cake toasted.

‘We must get him vodka,’ said Parable-Apse. ‘It does not taint the breath. Goodbye. It is more than time you went home. Take the tea-cake with you. I will butter it. I shall expect you to relish it.’

On the doorstep Terry heard him bolting the door on the inside. They sounded like the bolts of a strong-room. ‘Loopy,’ he thought. ‘Silly old stick.’

* * *

He didn’t go again to the beach that week. He wandered to the nasty little shops in the new town and the new Palace Cinema. He had a bit of pocket money and went in and asked for vodka at the Lobster Inn. He was thrown out. He wanted a girl to tell this to. It surprised him. The girls at his school sniggered and didn’t wash much. They hung about outside the cinema. One or two had painted their mouths bright red. You could get a tube of it at Woolworths for sixpence. They shouted to him to come join them, but he didn’t stop. He dawdled home.

CHAPTER 9

The headmaster of Terry’s school did not live on the premises or go in daily on the train. He lived several miles inland on the moors. He was a healthy man and often pedalled in to Herringfleet on a bicycle with a basket on the front stuffed full of exercise books corrected the night before, for he was a teacher as well as a headmaster.

He and the bike made for the Herringfleet beaches — he always checked the tide-tables — and, dependent on the condition of the sand — he walked or rode the six miles to school, thinking deeply. He always wore a stiff white riding mac with a broad belt and a brown felt homburg hat. Sometimes he had to walk beside his bike when the sands were soft, sometimes push it hard, but he was always very upright and to his chagrin rather overweight. There were little air-holes of brass let in to the mac under the arms for ventilation. Despite his healthy, exhausting regime he was a putty-faced man who never smiled. It was rumoured that there was a wife somewhere and he had a son at the school who got himself there on the train like most of them and home again by his wits. A clever, little younger boy. Fred. Terry liked him.

On the morning beaches the headmaster (a Mr. Smith) often came upon Peter Parable doing an early sea-coal stint before going to his solicitor’s office. They nodded at each other, Parable’s gaze on the black ripples in the sand left by the tide. Smith would briskly nod and pass by, growing smaller and smaller until he was a dot disappearing up the path that led to his school assembly and the toil of the term. Smith and Parable had been at the school together as boys but hadn’t cared much for each other. They had only their cleverness in common. Now they never talked.

That summer Parable began to watch Smith’s straight back diminishing away from him. He noted the little eyelet holes of the mac and the plumpness and the rather desperate marching rhythm. Even if he was on the bike Mr. Smith always looked tired. Better hurry up, thought Parable. Smith, who knew that he was being watched, also knew that at some point he was going to be asked for something.

One beautiful, still morning Parable shouted out, ‘Smith!’

Smith stopped the bike and placed both feet on the sand but didn’t turn his head. ‘What is it, man? Hurry up. I’ll be late.’

‘There’s something you have to do. At once.’

‘Indeed?’ (What does Parable do at once or even slowly? Plays on the beach.)

‘You have a boy at school who in my professional opinion — and Opinions are my stock-in-trade as a lawyer — is remarkable. They’re going to put him in The Works when he leaves you next year and you have to stop it. He must go to the university. He already verges on the phenomenal. I’ve begun to play chess with him. We debate. He has an interesting foreign father. Rather broken up.’

‘You mean Florrie Benson’s boy?’

‘And—?’

‘They need his wages. Sooner the better. It’s a bad business there. She can’t go on.’

‘She’ll try. We both know her.’

‘How could they afford a school until he’s university age?’

‘There are scholarships. We each got one.’

‘We had better parents.’

‘I won’t have that,’ shouted Parable after him across the sand, ‘You have a boy yourself who’s clever. I bet he’ll be spared The Works.’

An hour later at the end of School Assembly and prayers Smith paused for a long minute before clanging the hand-bell that sent the rabble of Teesside to their class-rooms and announced that he wanted Terry Benson in his study.

‘Terry Njinsky? Venetski? Benson? A letter for you to take home.’

Terry, in some dream-scape, was kicked awake by his neighbours and looked about him. (‘What you done, Terry?’ ‘Only tried getting vodka for me Dad.’ ‘What — nickin’?’ ‘Nah — cash.’) A new respect for the already-respected Terry ran down the line.

Smith surveyed the crowd of spotty children, all thin. Grey faces. Poor. All underfed. Terry whatsname — Benson’s white-gold hair and healthy face shone amongst them (It’s said she gets them tripe). We’ll get that hair cut, Smith thought. Start at the top. I’ll write to the father.

‘Take a letter down now, Miss Thompson,’ he said back in his office.

‘I’m not sure Florrie Benson can read,’ said the secretary. ‘Me Mam said she was useless at school. And the father’s a cripple and only talks Russian. He’s a retired Russian spy.’

* * *

The letter was typed, nevertheless, that day and sat waiting for Terry to collect and take home. At the end of the afternoon the headmaster, Smith, came in and pointed at it and said, ‘Letter, Miss Thompson?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘He never came. I’ll tek it. I know where he lives, down Herringfleet. On my way home.’

‘No,’ said Smith, ‘I’ll drop it in. I can take the bike that way. Say nothing to the boy. He’s probably been trying all day to forget it. I’ll bike along the sand.’

‘You tired, Sir?’

‘Certainly not,’ he said, pulling on the ventilated mackintosh that made him paler still. ‘Certainly not! Box on.’

By tea-time, Florrie cooking brains and hearts on a skillet, the letter was lying across the room on the door-mat. The Odessan was having a better day and was in a chair. His back was to the door, but he sensed the letter. He said, ‘We have a letter. I heard a bicycle and a man cough. Pick it up, will you, Florrie?’

‘No,’ said Florrie adding dripping, peeling potatoes.

‘Then I’ll wait for Terry to do it. Where is he?’

‘It may not be for you,’ she said. ‘The last one was to me. And what came o’that?’

* * *

Years before there had come a letter on the mat that she remembered now like excrement brought in on a shoe. It was a letter in a thick cream envelope written in an operatic hand in purple ink.

In those days the situation at No. 9 Muriel Street was still an interesting mystery in Herringfleet. Most people kept themselves at a distance. People crammed together in mean streets are not always in and out of each other’s houses.

The letter had been sent without a stamp and delivered ‘By Hand’. It said so in the top, left-hand corner. The letter-paper inside was the colour of pale baked-custard and thick as cloth.

Dear Mrs. Vet(scrawl)y, it had said, ‘I would be so delighted if you would bring your little boy to a fireworks party — with supper, of course — on November 5th for Guy Fawkes’ Celebrations at The Towers. A number of local children will be coming and we hope to give them a lasting and happy experience. Five o’ Clock P.M. until 8 P.M. Warm coats and mittens. Sincerely yours. Veronica Fondle.’

‘She has asked me to a party,’ Florrie said. ‘Me and Terry.’ Anton watched her blush and smile and thought how young she was. How beautiful. ‘With Terence,’ she said. ‘Our Terence. For Guy Fawkes.’ She gazed at the letter. ‘It’s to be a supper — unless she means we take our supper? — and at night!’

‘What,’ he asked, ‘is Guy Forks?’

‘We burn a model of him every year. For hundreds of years. Because he once tried to burn down the Parliament in London.’

The Odessan considered this.

‘But we can’t go. I haven’t any clothes.’

He said, ‘It just says a warm coat and mittens. You have your better coat and we can get mittens.’

‘I think that means only the children. The mothers will be in furs.’

‘Here, in Herringfleet?’ said Anton and at once wrote the acceptance in fine copperplate on a card they found in an old prayer book. Nurse Watkins brought an envelope and took it round to the local private school, The Towers, where Veronica Fondle was the headmaster’s wife.

On the party day Terence, then not yet four, was scrubbed, polished and groomed but then became recalcitrant and unenthusiastic. He lay on his face on the floor and drummed his feet. When his mother walked in from the bath-house where she had been dressing, he roared and hid under his father’s bed, for this was a woman unknown. The lace on her hat (Nurse Watkins’ cousin’s) stood up around her head with black velvet ribbons enmeshed. Her cloth coat Nurse Watkins had enriched with a nest of red fox tail bundles round her throat. Beneath the chin, the vixen’s face clasped the tails in its yellow teeth. Poppies swayed about round the black straw hat brim. Her shoes were Nurse Watkins’ mother’s brogues worn on honeymoon in Whitby before the First World War, and real leather.

‘You’re meant to wear the veil tight against the face, like Greta Garbo, and tied round the back with the black ribbon, Florrie,’ said Nurse Watkins, shushing Terry on her knee.

‘I’ll never get it off.’

‘You’re not meant to get it off.’

‘Then how do I drink tea?’

Even Nurse Watkins didn’t know this.

The veil was left to float around the poppies. Anton said suddenly, ‘How beautiful you are,’ and Florrie disappeared out the back.

She came back saying that Nurse Watkins was to go instead of her and Terry kicked out at the table leg while Anton picked up the book on Kant he’d been reading which Florrie had ordered for him from the Public Library. All he said was, ‘Go!’

So outside over the railway bridge from Muriel Street the gas lights inside their glass lanterns were beginning to show blue as mother and son set off hand in hand.

There was no driveway up to The Towers just three wide, shallow steps, a big oak door with circles of wrought-iron leaves and a polished brass plate alongside saying The Towers, Headmaster, HAROLD FONDLE M.A. OXON. A chain hung down. Florrie picked up Terry and held him tight. Terry was in the full school uniform of Nurse Watkins’ nephew who went to a paying Kindergarten. He had had his first hair-cut. As Florrie stood miserably beside the chain the child shouted, ‘Me, me!’ and she let him drag it down. Far inside the house came a tinny clinking.

Florrie knew that something was now about to go wrong. Terry on her shoulder — rather heavy — seemed to be transfixed with terror by both the sound of the bell and the poppies in the hat. She set him down and clutched his hand. When the door opened she thought she might faint. The colours and heat within, the noise and laughter, the smell of rich food and spiced fruit and sweet drinks, the rasping whiff of gunpowder, the snap of crackers, the squealing of children running madly, waving sparkling, spitting lighted things into each other’s faces. The girls were all in heavy jerseys and gaiters with button boots, the boys in corduroy and mufflers. Several wore the tartan kilt. Across the entrance hall, propped against a carved fireplace, leaned a huge stuffed man with a grinning mask for a face and straw tufts coming out of his ears. He was waiting to be burned.

The maid who had answered the door however was only Bessy Bell, the Gypsy girl who’d known Florrie since school. ‘Eh, Florrie!’ she said. ‘’Ere. I’ll tek Terry in.’

‘I’ll tek ’im in meself, Bessie.’

‘No, it’s just to be ’im,’ said Bessie, ‘She said.’

‘Marvellous,’ cried a large woman, wearing a musquash coat, square shouldered, bearing down on them in the porch. ‘You found your way then Mrs. Van — Van Erskine? Splendid. We are short of boys.’

Behind the woman a door stood open upon a glittering dining room, a gleam of white cloth and shiny glasses. Silver cake-stands. Three-tiered, laden plates.

Then Florrie was out again on the steps alone.

* * *

She wondered if she was meant to sit there until it was eight o’ clock. Three hours. It was getting quite dark already. And cold.

She wasn’t going home, though. Oh, no! Nurse Watkins must never know. But there was nobody she knew round here to call in on. Especially dressed like this. There was the refreshment room over the station but the sandwiches were all curled up under glass and anyway she’d no money. And it might be closed. Father Griesepert? His church down by the beach would be locked up. It was a creepy place anyway. In the Presbytery he’d be drowsing now all by himself, alone with his whisky and his thoughts about purity. She’d never gone to him — nor he to her — even when her parents were dying.

The mist was thickening outside the ironwork porch of The Towers and she longed suddenly for her parents. Her father had once been a powerful, forceful, political man. Oh, she wanted a man. A man who stood straight and strong, who’d have brought the child here instead of her and looked round to see if the place was good enough. She folded herself down on the top step and began to disentangle the veil from the vixen’s teeth.

She wondered what Terry was doing.

If he needed the you-know-what, would he ask?

He still had to be helped with buttons. He’d not long finished with the chamber-pot. She often went with him down the privy in the yard especially in the dark. All those other children! Shouting and dancing about with the flaming wires. They were all so much older. Why ever had Terry been invited?

He wouldn’t be crying though. Terry never cried.

But, well, he might just be. He might be crying now. Would they notice him? Would they, any of them have the gump to think he might never before have been out in the dark? Would they look after him around the bonfire? Would he scream when he saw the man burning? Would they care?

That daft Bessie. No help there. Fourpence in the shilling. And she’d seen other people. All their proud horse-faced nannies in that hall. Eyebrows raised. She’d known Anton was wrong about the kids all being in uniform. Maybe in his country. Not here. Except if it was a sailor-suit and where would she get a sailor-suit? He’s not Princess Margaret Rose in London.

They might be being unkind and laughing at him. At this moment he might be screaming with fear. She’d seen his face as they grabbed him and carried him away. They all said he was advanced. Very, very, very clever—. But she’d seen his solemn face—.

He thinks I have left him and he won’t see me again. Fear blazed to inferno and she scrambled from the step through a laurel border and round to the back of the house to its rows of lighted windows and doors and the waiting bonfire. She stepped into a flower-bed and looked into a long room full of children sitting round a banquet.

It was a Christmas card of pink and gold and scattered with glitter. There were cart-wheels of cakes, pyramids of sweets and fruit. Nannies in dark blue dresses stood behind almost every child’s chair talking to each other out of the sides of their mouths but never taking their eyes off their charges. Iron-masters’ children. The other side of the tracks. She couldn’t see Terry.

One Nannie was pressing a rather torpid child into a high chair facing Florence. All the children were being firmly controlled. They’ll not forget the rules, these ones, she thought. There’ll be no fight left in them. She knew that this stuff wasn’t for Terry. Where was he?

She sensed an event. A few children were being restrained from banging spoons on the table-cloth and a tall iced cake was being carried in by a heavy smiling man who gripped a pipe between his teeth. Mr. HAROLD FONDLE, OXON! A maid came and began to cut the cake. Where, where was Terry?

Then she saw him. He was so close to her that she could have stretched to touch him but for the glass in the long window. He had his back to her. With his newly cut hair he looked like a tiny man. In both hands he held a glass of orange juice.

He was drinking from it. He was lifting it up in the air. He was bending backwards. Then he slid off his chair and turned towards the window and she stepped back. And, oh, he was beginning to cry!

And there was blood on his face and there was a jagged arc in the glass and on his hand and he was spitting out blood. He had swallowed glass!

She began to beat her fists against the window as first one person and then another noticed that there was a crisis. Shouting and consternation surged among the nannies. One gave Terry a savage shake and glass shot across the room. Terry stopped crying and grinned and Mrs. Veronica Fondle came swanning up like a barge at sunset.

Through the window Florrie heard her pea-hen cry that the child was probably only used to mugs, All well. All well.

But Florrie was by now at the front door again hanging on the bell chain, dragging it up and down and when Bessie answered she was across the hall and into the dining room to see Terry composedly eating porridge which some plumed assistant was spooning in to him. Mrs. Fondle in her furs stood nearby, en route to the garden where the bonfire was being lit. Smoke and one crackling flame. ‘Oh! Aha! Oh — Mrs. Verminsky!’ (She was laughing) ‘He took a bite from a glass! But please don’t worry. Nannie has counted all the bits and we have most of them. Boys tend to do this more than girls. We give them porridge just in case. Wonderful in the intestines—.’

Florrie seized the child in her arms as his mouth opened for more porridge. He looked at his mother and began to cry again.

‘There are worse things we have to face than glass.’ Mr. Harold Fondle strode by, his arms spiky with rockets, towards the bonfire.

‘Well, he’s coming home with me now,’ said Florrie. ‘I’ve had enough.’

* * *

‘But however did she know?’ Veronica Fondle called across to her husband that night in their avant-garde twin-bedded room. Outside, the bonfire was dowsed and ashy, the straw man a few fragments of rags and dust. ‘She must have been watching through the window. Crept into the garden. Peeping in at us!’

‘Perhaps we should have invited her in to the party,’ said Fondle. ‘He’s very young.’

‘Oh, I think not. There are limits.’

‘I have my reasons you know for keeping an eye on that boy. He could become one of my stars.’

‘So you say. Look, he’s perfectly all right. He’d eaten an enormous tea before that orange juice. He wasn’t worried when his mother came barging in.’

‘Well, his mother was. Very worried.’

They laughed as they turned off their individual bedside lights, like people in a dance routine. Click, then click.

‘Oh, and darling,’ she said in the dark. ‘The hat!’

‘Do you know,’ he said from the other bed, ‘I thought the hat was rather fine.’