Part Two

Ten

He stood by his case and cardboard box of demob clothes in the corridor of third class. The livid leftside scar gave him a look of surly violence. From trying to solve the crossword in a folded copy of The Times he glanced at patchwork fields and woods conveyed along half-open windows, scarves of engine smoke waving a welcome, he hoped, from the city he was bound for. A younger soldier stepped over the demob box, and Herbert, back from overseas and no longer feeling young — if ever he had — sensed his envy and respect.

A refugee from the land of the dead seemed his normal status, and going back to a familiar bolt-hole rubbed out any ideas of retrieving that part of himself left behind at school, or taking on the life his parents wanted for him. Maybe he had been altered by his accident, though he hoped that after a year putting himself solidly together in the factory he would know more what he wanted to do. Besides, he had no qualifications for any other work. Mrs Denman had written to say she would be happy to give him full board after his convalescence.

Going home again, he walked from the smoke of the station and inhaled the air of the streets. No other place had given such strong memories. The road was wide, and he crossed against the traffic of lorries and green double-decker buses. His case felt full of stones along the wide avenue of Queen’s Walk. He’d sauntered by the taxi rank at the station as if to become Bert rather than Herbert as quickly as possible. It was a mistake, five minutes took twenty. A train drummed under the railway bridge and, stopping to change the weight to his other arm, and covering the weakness by retying a bootlace, paving stones shimmered as if he was about to faint. No you don’t, not with me. He stared at them till they behaved, picked up his luggage and walked as if it weighed nothing. Low cloud held in sombre hootings from the engine sheds, at which earthy and melancholy sound it seemed as if he’d been away a very short time indeed.

‘I never thought I’d see you again.’ She opened the door to the parlour and told him to sit down. On the shelf were the usual small white jugs, pots with gaudy coats of arms, a photo of her dead husband, and one of Ralph and Mary when they got married. All the old gewgaws, as well as the same furniture, polished and well kept as if it was going to last forever. ‘You look pale. I expect you’ve bin through the mill, though. Soldiers do. Archie sent a postcard telling me what happened. The army must have made a better man of him, anyway.’

Grey in her hair: amazing how long people lived. The light was too dim; he would like a bulb to shine two hundred watts. ‘I’d rather sit in the kitchen.’

‘You’ve changed, the way you talk.’

He laughed. ‘You mean I’ve got posh?’

‘A bit.’

‘You do, after a few years away. I’ll soon get the lingo back.’

Such an intention seemed to her liking. ‘I’m sure you will.’

But he wouldn’t if he didn’t want to, the accent not being so necessary now. ‘Cigarette, Ma?’

‘Thanks, I will.’

He pushed his legs full out from the armchair. ‘How’s Frank?’

‘Same as ever.’

No one changed, not here anyway, and why should they? Nearly three years was nothing to people who never left home. ‘I expect I’ll be seeing him.’

‘He’ll be thrilled to death. The Prodigal’s coming back, I told him last night. That scar meks you look rough, though. But then, you allus was, especially when you went out boozing with Archie. I expect he’s about to be demobbed as well, in’t he?’

Such a prospect eased his gloom. He nodded at the window. ‘You’ve put up new curtains.’

‘You do notice things, then? I took the old ones down to wash ’em, and they nearly melted in the water they was so worn. Frank managed to get me some new ones, no coupons and no questions asked.’ In the kitchen she took a pork pie out of the cupboard. ‘I got this specially for you. I remember how you liked ’em.’

He didn’t ask where she got it. The days of austerity and hard rationing seemed to go on forever. She cut a large wedge, and poured his tea into a cup instead of the usual mug. The meat was rubbery and overspiced, not much improvement on Spam, but being so hungry it tasted delicious — knowing he must stop looking back on the variegated menus of Cyprus.

‘Now that our Ralph’s married you’ll have the room all to yourself.’ Not only spliced, but he had two runabout sprogs and a ducky little bungalow at Bramcote. ‘You’ll be the only lodger, but I don’t mind. I often think I’ve done enough work, and I can manage all right now.’

‘What about that guest house at Skegness? Ralph told me you were very set on that.’

Her smile coated a nuance of regret, as if she had failed somewhere in life. ‘What would I do in a place like that?’ she said in a tone superior to self-indulgence and disappointment. ‘I like it too much here in Nottingham.’

He followed her lovely legs upstairs to his room, thinking what a pity old people in their forties couldn’t buy new faces from the Co-op. Still, Frank kept his hand in with her. ‘He papered it,’ she said, ‘every wall as you can see. And I put new curtains up at the window as well. I bought the bedspread from a pawnshop.’

Garishness was never more homely than these heavily flowered walls and deep orange curtains. ‘Looks wonderful. All I’ll want is a table to read and write at.’

‘There’s one in the shed. A bit of elbow grease, and we’ll soon mek it shine. You and Frank can get it in tomorrow.’

‘I don’t want to put you to any inconvenience.’

‘Inconvenience!’ she scoffed, giving a very leery look.

Too late to recall his stupid remark, he knew it was always best to show no warmth, lest you betray yourself. The personality he was to regain should merely have given a nod, or a look of understanding, or even incomprehension — it didn’t matter. Posh reactions to kindness on anybody’s part would only delay settling back into a sense of reality. You had to come down from the clouds in a place like this.

Glad to be alone, he took off his boots and lay on the lumpy bed, as exhausted by the half-day as if he had sweated a fortnight at the lathe he would soon go back to. Lulled into oblivion by friendly shouts from the backyards, the uncertain acceleration of a motor car in the street, and Mrs Denman banging washed pots back on the rack in the kitchen, he dozed in the luxury of his return.


The MO said a couple of weeks cycling was the surest way to co-ordinate arms and legs. He ran a finger along the frame of a secondhand five-quid grid, chained up outside the shop, painted black so many times he wondered what pitted rust lurked underneath. The shopkeeper wouldn’t look at his cheque, and it took half an hour to go into town for cash. Maybe the bike was nicked, though the man gave a receipt. Trying it out, a green double-decker ran him into the kerb. The brakes were good, and so was the steering.

After getting a job the bike would pay for itself, by saving on bus fares. He pedalled to the toll bridge, and for a penny at the gate rode over the Trent. He looked at every woman in case she was Eileen, thought he had spotted her a time or two but felt dead towards her when it wasn’t. He wanted someone new, in any case, with free and intelligent ideas, not the old cloying courtship which put you on to a bleak and dead-end road.

He’d only biked before around the leave camp on Cyprus, so wobbled a bit through Wilford, frequently stopped to adjust the brakes, pump the tyres, check the steering, tighten one of the cottapins, soothed by so much mechanical fussing. Following the country breezes to Clifton, a long and at times painful slog uphill drew him into a freewheeling stretch to Barton-in-the-Beans and the placid river again. For twopence an elderly Charon, his pipe smoking like a chimney connected to the punt itself and providing the power, ferried him and his bike to a cindered track on the other side leafy with privet and elderberry. Tyres bumping along the riverbank after Attenborough was better practice than cycling on tarmac.

Soon enough knackered he lay on the grass to watch the manoeuvres of uxorious swans, and fishermen coming out of their statuesque pose only to cast their lines. A hundred pounds back pay and demob money would let him drift, before offering his sweat to a factory. He liked the thought, and feeling an unmistakable spit from watery clouds biked to the nearest pub, the taste of local beer locking nostalgia into place with the scenery outside.

Varying the exercise, he put on boots and walked the town. With the map main thoroughfares were avoided as far as possible, as if road blocks had been set up for him alone. Leaving the Park area of big lace manufacturers’ houses whose leafy quiet he enjoyed, he angled through the straight and barren streets of Lenton, working a route by the cycle factory and into the maze of Radford. The new and geometrically laid-out estates didn’t tempt him, so he re-entered the countless streets and became wilfully lost, till finding his position again by the map.

The complex layout of the town was knitted in his mind so that if necessary any pursuer could be lost in it, though who would want to chase him and why was impossible to say. He noted all terraces, the various yards and offshoots of twitchells and double entries, as well as the landmarks of factories, cinemas, churches and, especially, the pubs and their names. People he found in them when stopping for a drink were good to hide among if he was going to be here for the rest of his life. It was as well to know the place.

But why was he still in hiding? After school he had been on the run, or thought it necessary, and now, out of the army, all he wanted was to conceal himself in a life and locality that wasn’t his. Water always flows downhill, his father had contemptuously said when Herbert, on his last leave before going overseas, told him that he might go back to the factory after demob. A young man with your background should have a destiny, was the inference.

Whatever he did was his destiny, but madness seemed to be stalking him these days, because halfway along a street, dreading to meet whatever lurked around the next corner, he quick-turned back to the junction, and launched himself along a corridor of similar houses, moving as rapidly as if a malady was eating his life away and he had to get to a secret refuge before it killed him. Going at the double left everyone behind on the pavement but, he thought, my own self most of all. He timed his rate of walking and found it to be a hundred and thirty-seven paces to the minute, as if chasing an unattainable vision of heaven, retreating from the possible horrors of hell, either of which his blank and steely mind could put a picture to.

Grimed with sweat after uncounted miles, limbs racked and the scar on his face sore, he went into Yates’s and drank a pint to get cool, comforted to find a point for homing on, especially the long bar that had furnished his first roof in Nottingham.

Early evening, the place was quiet and familiar, a few drinkers further along minding their own business, an air of preparation however before crowds came in later. Herbert recalled with embarrassment his time as a school kid ordering half a pint, and the naive effrontery in asking Isaac to join him, a man almost old enough to be his grandfather. The four years stretched back like forty, and the time since India seemed centuries away, but Isaac was a more recent human landmark, and must still be where he had always been.

On the pavement he adjusted his mackintosh and pulled the cap down as rain blew across the flower beds. Workmen on their way from factories were criss-crossing the square to change buses and go home. He climbed the stairs wearily and, no response to his knock, tore a sheet from his notebook to say who had called. He pushed it through the slit but, when he was halfway down the stairs to the outside door, heard bolts drawn and locks undone. ‘Come back up,’ Isaac called. ‘I thought you must be one of them.’

Herbert followed inside. ‘One of who?’

‘The landlord’s men.’ He looked much harassed, hands shaking as he relocked his fortress as if the crown jewels were inside. Thinner than before, and more bald, he buttoned his dark blue overcoat. ‘Am I glad to see you, though.’

He didn’t eat regular meals, had become pasty-faced, waxy almost. ‘Why, what’s wrong?’

‘People come up here and threaten me, hoping I’ll pack up my tranklements and leave. They want to do the place up and let it for a lot more money. So these bloody oafs say they’ll kick me in if I don’t skedaddle. They don’t know me, though. I like this place, and I’m sticking.’

A cold wind rattled the window, and Herbert passed over his packet of cigarettes, fighting down the words that came to him, wanting to say them but knowing he mustn’t, words such as admiration for Isaac’s courage and independence, and in living the way he did, regard for his qualities as a human being, respect for his knowledge and experience, and even awe at his age. It all added up to the nearest he could get to affection for someone other than a woman he was going to bed with, and even then the sum of his feelings might not amount to half so much. ‘What time do they come?’

‘Hmmm — Players. Where did you get these?’

‘They had some in Yates’s.’

Isaac washed cups, fingers chapped, heavy grey veins on the back of his hands. ‘One of ’em was here an hour ago, about half past five. But you don’t need to get mixed up in it. It’s none of your business, sonny boy.’

‘I can think about it, though.’

He opened a cut loaf and buttered the slices. ‘There’s even some sugar in stock. I got my rations yesterday.’ A pigeon warbled on the window ledge facing the narrow street. ‘Sometimes I think I’m going to start eating them, except I don’t see why they should pay for the sins of the world. Now sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing since I last saw you. Your postcards were welcome, but they didn’t say much. How did you get that scar, for instance? Makes you look a bit of a devil.’


Up Wilford Road he turned right into Goodhead Street. You never went to the front door because the parlour was often somebody’s bedroom, or was used only on Sundays. To find the right house from the back meant counting doors along the street from the entry way, and then going behind and ticking them off again.

The rabbit hutch in the yard was empty, and a bike leaned against a bath big enough to wash the baby Hercules in. A girl of about fifteen came to his knock, a pair of curling irons in one hand and a fresh cigarette in the other: Archie’s sister Janet. The homely smell of toast drifted from inside. ‘What do yo’ want?’

‘Is Archie in?’

He noticed the delicate tits pushing out of her thin blouse, wanting to put a hand on them, except she might turn him into Polyphemus with the curling irons. She glared, went back inside, and he heard her say: ‘It’s somebody as wants our Archie, Dad.’

Herbert was amused at the disgruntled voice of doom: ‘Tell ’im ’e’s still in the fucking army.’

She came out again, and managed a smile to meet Herbert’s halfway. ‘’E’s in the army.’

‘When’s he coming out?’

She turned and bawled: ‘When’s ’e coming out, Dad?’

‘How do I know? Nex’ week, I think.’

‘Are you his posh friend, then?’

He put on his most atrocious accent. ‘I don’t know about posh. Just tell ’im Bert called.’

She nodded. ‘Yeh, all right’ — and banged the door to.


With Mrs Denman’s sandwiches in his saddlebag he set off north to explore the county as far as Worksop, wanting to know the region as if he had been born there. He pencilled the routes to be covered on his map, but found the tarmac dull under his tyres for the first few miles, fields dead and woods deader, the cold shoulder given to dismal villages and worse towns. He didn’t wake up to the beauty until well towards Edwinstowe, fighting off questions as to why he was where he was because there was no answer to what you could do nothing about. To murder someone and get hanged was one solution to his uncertainties, suicide another. Both options stank of romantic defeat, but he’d always wondered whether the life of the criminal wasn’t more to his style than any other.

In each town there was a library, church, schools, a cinema and meeting halls, from which he felt himself as definitively barred as from the world of his parents, from any world perhaps except that of the factory and the pub. The long main street of Worksop seemed like the end of the world, busy and exclusive, so he turned from halfway down to avoid coal smoke and diesel fumes and pale faces, and rode south east towards the Dukeries.

The straight rides hid him and became friendly, took him in, a silent biker pedalling through the glades, no longer feeling isolated because, without people, he had become himself again. Standing on the bridge at Hardwick Grange, by the absolute peace of the lake, he watched the effortlessly floating mallards, part of the willows drooping over cloud reflections, as if this had been his birthplace, or maybe a sign that he was being born again. Not even memories of India, returning in colour and clarity since his accident, but only as if he had read about them in travel books, could nudge aside the healing tranquillity.

The scene was hard to leave. He could grow old, hands splayed on the sandstone balustrade, never moving again — until a postman rode by on his bike and stopped his whistling to call out: ‘Hey up, duck! Nice day, in’t it?’ the tyres crunching gently along under his weight.

Herbert waved, and told himself that all thoughts were irrelevant, that it was what you did that mattered, though if harmony of thought and action was the ideal he must lift up his arms and get back to town, and patiently wait for that blessed state to come full force and take him over, after one last look at the sluggish water of the stream.


He worried about Isaac, and called on him again, thinking that if more than one of the landlord’s thugs showed up at the same time he would have a struggle to deal with them. On the way he queued thirty minutes at the coke depot and bought half a hundredweight in a sack borrowed from Mrs Denman’s shed.

‘They haven’t called for some time,’ Isaac said, suggesting that his tormentors were either on holiday or occupied with some other elderly tenant. ‘Which means, I suppose, that I can expect them any day. I’m ready for them, though.’

Herbert held up his sack.

‘What’s this, then?’

‘I owe yer summat.’ More than anyone else, he thought, untwisting the strand of wire from a bundle of sticks and laying them on crumpled paper in the fireplace.

‘You don’t have to speak the local lingo to me,’ Isaac said, holding his hands to flames that waved in the grate.

‘I’m practising the accent for when I get a job next week.’

Isaac took books from the table and slotted them in the shelves, then washed his hands at the sink. ‘I always thought you were a funny chap.’ He pushed his false teeth back to the roof of his mouth. ‘I can’t think what you’ll end up doing with your life.’

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, and if I never do, it’ll be all right by me.’

‘Aren’t you going to stop for some tea?’

‘No, I’m off to the library for an hour. I’ll call in a couple o’ days.’


Archie beat a man and his fancywoman to a table, the Peach Tree was crowded as usual. The army diet had thinned him down to a well-toned six-footer, made him healthier than when he’d gone in. His demob leave had started but he was still in uniform. ‘There was talk of us staying on because of the Russians trying to grab Berlin. They wouldn’t have kept me, though. Not that I hated it any more, but I’d had enough. I spent half my fucking time on jankers this last month. Sometimes I thought I’d ram one up the spout and tek the sergeant-major with me. Even the officers got my number. So no more army for me, unless it’s two years on guard outside the Eight Bells with an allowance of ten pints a day and all found. I start back at the factory next week. I’ve got a nice married woman on the go, so I need to earn some money.’

‘There’s a little job I want yer ter gi’ me a hand with first,’ Bert said.

Archie stopped the jar halfway to his mouth. ‘Anything, my owd, except I draw the line at robbin’ a bank.’

‘No, it ain’t that yet,’ though the adventure of a big snatch and well-managed getaway, all planned to the off-chance of a dropped pin, and no violence unless called for, went through Herbert’s mind as a good scheme for a stood-down infantryman, except it would be like the pictures where everything went wrong. He told him about Isaac’s trouble with the rent man’s bullies. ‘All we have to do is be there when they call, and frighten them off, or kick the shit out of them if they don’t get the message.’

Archie laughed. ‘Yer don’t need me. Just show ’em that scar on yer clock, and they’ll run away screamin’. Only don’t let my new woman see it, or she’ll want me to buy one as well. I was frightened to death when I saw it in Cyprus, but I didn’t say owt. All yer need now is an eye-patch and a wooden leg. Yer look as if somebody’s comin’ through that door to get yer, and ye’re wonderin’ whether to knife ’em or strangle ’em.’

‘These are hard men, from what I’ve heard. It might not be easy.’

‘All the better,’ Archie said. ‘It’s at least a month since I ’ad a set-to. I’ve got itchy knuckles. Is the old man a relation o’ yourn?’

‘A sort of uncle.’

‘That settles it. I’ll get bullshitted up for the fray.’

‘We’ll have another,’ Bert said. ‘Then we’ll do a recce and plan it all out.’

Archie would be posted across the street, and stalk the men two minutes after they’d entered the building. Bert, already in, and waiting at the top of the turning stairs, would have the advantage of height and be hidden from Isaac’s door. He and Archie decided to wear their uniforms, on the assumption that a couple of tall swaddies couldn’t but seem more threatening to a pair of bastards who had no doubt been deserters all through the war.

‘A pincer movement’, Archie said, ‘by the First Battalion Stalks and Wanks. When’s the day?’

‘Next Monday, I hear, after the landlord’s been for his rent. We’ll just go over it again, to mek sure we know our stuff. We won’t disturb the old man, though.’

Archie stood to empty his jar. ‘I’ll be off to see my woman, after that. Her husband’s on nights, and I’ve got to mek hay while the sun shines, though it looks as if it’s going to chuck it down in ten minutes.’

Green double-decker buses circled Slab Square, the biggest market place in the country, or so Archie had informed him, as if he had designed and built it himself, or was glad to tell Herbert something he didn’t know. Cement block borders lined the pavements and flowerbeds which in springtime blossomed with comic book colours. Archie also told him that if you stood between the lions in front of the Council House for an hour a week everybody who lived in the town would sooner or later pass by.

Not that Herbert wanted to see anyone at all, why he was idling there was hard to say, unless wondering whether to go back to his room, or spend an hour in the library before closing time. He lit a cigarette, envious of people who knew without thinking what to do and where to go. A woman togged up with wire glasses and false teeth, flaunting a gaudy headscarf and puffing a cigarette, dragged a grizzling kid with one hand and bent towards a baby reined into a pushcot with the other. A few paces by, she stopped and backtracked till level with Herbert.

‘Oh, so yer’ve come back, ’ave yer?’ She jutted her face at him, speaking with such venom he almost lost balance. ‘I’m surprised yo’ ’ad the cheek, after all that. I thought I’d seen the last o’ yo’. I don’t know how you could show your face in this town agen, after the trouble yo’ caused.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you mean what do I mean? I suppose you thought you’d changed so much in three years nobody ’ud reckernize yer? Some bleddy ’opes, mate. I’d know yo’ any time, even with that scar down your fancy clock. I expect some ’usband slashed yer. Serves yer right, if he did. He shoulda bleddy killed yer!’

He could only smile, and wonder what villainous sod she had mistaken him for. Maybe she was a bit off her head, or came out every day to pick on someone at random for a bit of fun, and she had fixed on him because he happened to be standing there. Quite an adventure, really. But look affronted, he told himself. Look shocked. Look as if ready to do her in if she doesn’t stop her senseless ranting. Look as mortally insulted as you’re beginning to feel.

Yet her misery was real, and cut through both the Bert and Herbert layers of who he was. The voice behind the diatribe locked into harmony with her raddled but still young face, and he leaned half fainting against the stone lion. ‘Eileen!’

‘Oh, so yer know me, do yer? Yer’ve got my name wrong though, that’s all. I’m not Eileen, but I suppose she was just another of the women you took down. I’m Betty, and yer bleddy well know it. Don’t even remember my name! That’s the bloody limit.’

Thank God for that. She wasn’t Eileen. A middle-aged man and woman stopped to enjoy the entertainment. The child in its pushcot tugged and screamed. ‘I’ve no idea who you are,’ Herbert said.

‘Look at him, then’ — she jabbed a finger at the kid. ‘Go on, look, because he’s yourn. I was pregnant when you went off in the army and left me all on my own.’

Unless Eileen’s middle name was Betty she was barmy, she had a screw loose, was all he could think. He’d used the best frenchies, and three months had gone by between fucking her and getting on the boat, and she hadn’t blabbed a word. If she was Eileen the kid was obviously somebody else’s. Even though it couldn’t be his he considered taking a quid out of his wallet and pushing it into the child’s hand as a gift, but resisted because that would be admitting responsibility. She knew very well it wasn’t his, and shouting was her idea of getting a bit of her own back on the world. It was sometimes hard to remember who he had fucked during those heady days when he was seventeen.

He hurried away, and the extra decibels of abuse weren’t even muffled by a downburst of rain. The stiff upper lip came in useful, yet he regretted not cursing back even louder. Not to have done so was out of character, or was it? It was always best to give jeeringly better than you got. In the face of injustice you carpet-bombed. If not, you betrayed yourself, and might be sniffed out for who you really were, which might not be altogether a bad thing because then you’d know who you were yourself.

The disturbance brought on hunger, and he sat on a high stool in a milk bar looking at his scarred phizog in the wall mirror while eating a cheese cob. Scarface — no use not liking what he saw. He was lumbered with it. It was totally him, scarred outside and blemished within as well, which he had always known. No hardship living with both as long as he grew to forget them. What’s more the face was worth a smile, being accused in no uncertain terms of fathering a bastard. He finished quickly and, back on the road, cut through to the library, hoping to find a seat in the reference section.

He took down a gazetteer with an atlas at the back, but soon got bored thinking of places he would never see. The woman who had assailed him by the lions needed writing about. The incident wouldn’t leave him alone, so he unscrewed his pen, opened his notebook to find pages not damp from the rain. She wasn’t Eileen, but he made her Eileen so as to see her as more human than the drab with the kid. He wrote until the usher came round at kicking-out time, page after page recording what thoughts she must have had behind the wails of distress. He outlined her appearance, where she lived, and had once worked, and by the time he walked back to his digs she was so real in all dimensions that he no longer needed to feel guilty about her.


Two tall soldiers, buck swaddies bulled up smartly, polished and blancoed and in top fettle, met by the closed door of the Eight Bells. ‘Shame it’s too early for a pint o’ jollop,’ Archie said, adjusting his beret.

‘Time for one or two when we get back. The place’ll be jumping by then.’ Bert led the way up Wheeler Gate and by Slab Square, his scar drumming with an ache that had been with him all day, the world on his back seeming a weight too hard to bear even with a grin. Why such a coal-heavy burden he didn’t know, though it was a fact that the grub at his digs was worse than in the army, that the backyards stank like shit when people boiled their sprouts, and that he’d seen too many stone-age faces walking the town.

Archie fell into step. ‘I didn’t get it in last night. You’ll never believe this, but Janice’s husband — or is she called Janet, I get mixed up sometime — forgot his sandwiches, and the starvo-fuckpig came back for ’em. I just had time to skedaddle out of the front door when we heard the latch go click. Bang went my hearthrug pie. If he’d caught me I’d have slung my boots at him — they were still in my hand. It’s left me with a very nasty ache in my fists.’

He positioned himself in a doorway across the street as arranged, while Herbert, back in the mood of a Thurgarton-Strang, and mind emptied but for the prospect of a justified set-to, went quietly up to his place at the top of the stairs. He was concealed, but able to observe Isaac’s door through the dusty wooden slats of the banister. He sat on the top step, head almost touching the skylight, though he would make no sound getting to his feet when the time came. He felt as if hidden by a fold in the ground, two people in one body, the mutual antagonism producing a high tension of electricity, so much enclosed force that he was able to wait patiently, calmly, and without regard to time.

A bird hit the grimy glass and went like a falling aeroplane across the street to make an emergency landing on the opposite ledge. He smiled when the two men began to climb the stairs, their laughter sufficient to cover the sound of his standing up.

The tall thin man in front wore a raglan overcoat, open to show a three-piece suit. A close-eyed expression of anxiety could look menacing to anyone he wanted to frighten. I’ll call him Dandyman, Herbert decided. ‘It’s time we chucked a few of his things out o’ the winder.’

They didn’t care who heard. ‘I’m game. One bash and the door’s in. The gaffer wain’t pay us if we don’t do it this time.’ Herbert dubbed him as Beer-barrel, middle height and stocky, looking feckless but confident at the job in hand. First across the landing, he sent a solid kick at the door. ‘Come out then, Dad. We know you’re in there.’

‘You’ve no right to come here,’ Isaac called through the door. ‘I pay my rent.’

‘No right!’ They laughed at that. ‘We’ll show you what rights are.’

‘I’ve got a butcher’s knife,’ Isaac shouted, in the voice of a much younger man. ‘The first one through that door gets it in the stomach.’

Herbert almost laughed. Isaac was too peaceable even to think of such a weapon, so his bluff would be no good. The others thought so even more.

‘He’s bluffin’,’ Beer-barrel said, loud enough for Isaac to hear behind his door.

‘You just try. I’ll cut you to pieces.’

Bert, recalling his purpose on being there, clattered down the stairs and shouted in his roughest voice to Isaac, heightened by as much as could be mustered of a sergeant-major’s parade-ground bellow: ‘Yer don’t need to do that. I’ll tek care on ’em.’

He stood two steps above, outlined against the skylight. He was tempted to laugh, but that would mean ruination of the scheme, so kept a sharp rein on Dandy the hard man, fixing them. The beret folded into the shoulder strap of his battledress might have told them he was out for business, as should the long scar turning more livid at his face. ‘Get back to where you come from, and leave him alone. He’s my uncle. We aren’t looking for trouble, but if you don’t clear off I’ll put your arses where yer fuckin’ ’eads should be, and yer’ll never know what kicked ’em,’ a threat heard from one man to another at the factory gate.

‘It’s like that then, is it?’ Dandyman turned to Beer-barrel. ‘Come on, Charlie.’ They turned to go, but it was the oldest ruse in the world. Any actor could spot that retreat wasn’t in their faces. Charlie Beer-barrel turned, and came on like a cannonball in a hurry. Bert’s shining boot caught him full smack at the shoulder, while his fist at the face of Dandyman was dodged. Then Bert had something to avoid but didn’t.

Dandyman came forward, and lightning was only just good enough. There were no rules as in boxing at school. This was behind-the-garden-shed stuff. Fighting dirty, filling the gap between Herbert and Bert, he used his soul’s venom to smash father, mother, schoolmasters, shitbag officers and gaffers, even the old clergyman who had given him money.

Dandyman was no fool, and Herbert felt a blow, staggered, then Dandyman was pulled from behind by gleeful Archie and belly thumped, doubled up and breathless, to the landing below.

‘We know who yer are now.’ Bert drove Beer-barrel with a few aimed punches at the chest to join Dandyman. ‘Cum ’ere again, and yer number’s up. We know where you live, and what pubs yer get pissed in.’

‘I ain’t had enough yet.’ Archie stroked one fist with another, but they gave no reason for him to have more, and his face looked even uglier, a self-defeating expression he could do nothing about. All in all it was still only a scrap rather than a real fight. ‘I’d know ’em anywhere, though. Two ragbags from Sneinton.’

Isaac, sensing the fracas was finished, opened his door and came on to the stairs holding a large black-handled two-foot butcher’s knife. ‘I appreciate what you’ve done, but they would have got this if they’d come in and I’d been on my own. Nobody persecutes me and gets away with it.’

Archie laughed. ‘Nar, Dad, yer can put that away. It’s only fists they appreciate. Next time they’ll gerra real pastin’!’

‘Now you know the score,’ Bert told them. ‘So fuck off, and pick on somebody else.’

Beer-barrel had given up, but Dandyman, an eye bruised and his overcoat torn, was about to say something. He caught sight of Archie’s moiling fist and thought better of it. They weren’t in the game for a fight to the finish.

Bert and Archie followed them to Slab Square, then turned downwind for the Eight Bells. ‘Are you all right, then?’

‘One of ’em got me in the ribs,’ Bert said, ‘but all I need is a drop o’ Shippoe’s oil. Then I’ve got summat to tell yer.’

When they were seated by their drinks Archie asked what it was. ‘But let me sink this pint, and then I’ll listen.’

‘I was standing by the lions the other day and this tart I thought was Eileen started yammering at me. At least I think it was Eileen. I couldn’t be sure. She said one of the kids she’d got with her was mine.’

Archie leaned back, laughing. ‘Yer’ll have to get used to things like that. It ’appens all the time. If it was Eileen, though, she must a bin having yer on. Our Janet says it was Pete Scrimthorpe who knocked her up. Then Jack Wiley married her. He’s as happy as a pig in shit, Jack is. Thinks the kid’s ’is. Everybody knows except ’im, the dozy bleeder. I expect somebody’ll tell ’im one of these days, and then he’ll cut ’is throat. Or he’ll ’ang issen in the shed to save shittin’ on the carpet.’ He blew smoke rings towards the bar, unable to hold down his merriment. ‘On the other ’and, the kid could be yourn.’

‘’Ow do yer mek that out?’ he asked, putting on as near a smirk as he could manage. He wondered what went on in Archie’s mind: only what you heard and what you saw gave any clue. No cunning, subterfuge, or power of ratiocination, that’s what he loved about him. But Archie leaned close. ‘Well, you know them frenchies our Raymond lets me have? A couple of his pals at the cleaning factory got their tarts in the family way, so one day a chap blew one of ’em up, and saw pin-holes all over the place. Nearly killed our poor fucking Raymond. Some wicked bastard must have known what was going on, but fancy playing a trick like that. You was in the army by then, but you might ’ave ’ad one o’ the early models. It’s like that old joke, about a scaffolder putting up some big name, letter by letter at the top of a building. Well, ’e slips, don’t ’e? And falls through the big letter O and gets killed. There was a joke and it ended summat like: “He went as he came, through the ’ole in a letter!” So let’s drink to it, Dad!’

Bert laughed, to show that such humour was right up his street. The publican looked up at the noise of two local swaddies of the same tribal family on a night out that promised to be very good for trade.

Eleven

Drills, milling machines and lathes buggered the hands back to what could only be regarded as normal: calloused, scarred, yet each day becoming more flexible for work. In cap, jacket and overalls he jinked his way along cobbled streets, or swerved around corners on his bike, to gaol himself at his appointed spot and be lost in nobody’s aura but his own, except at tea break and dinner hour. Bashing out energetically on piece rate, his earnings climbed in a few weeks to give a Friday pay packet nicely padded with a dozen pound notes and a few bits of change.

Sweat was cheap at the price but he worked with dogged contentment, no truck nowadays with the darts or any other team. He could laughingly tell people to all but piss off without fear any more of giving himself away or being thought stand-offish. He was an old hand again.

In the evening after a wash and his sit-down tea he went upstairs and beamed light on to the mirror. With scrubbed fingernails, a fresh handkerchief and bottle of TCP he cleared whatever blackheads had formed on cheeks and temples from too long standing in an atmosphere of suds and metal dust. The fight against spotted skin was never-ending.

As a pastime it amused him to scribble whatever came to mind about people at the work place, easier when feeling clean. He unscrewed his pen and hovered it over lined paper, never able to decide on the exact moment it started to move, nor why. A few pages took on the shape of a story, till he felt like a spy in wartime France collating reports on resistance and the moral state of the inhabitants, certainly fancied himself at this early stage as an observer, perhaps the smaller part of himself, looking on the world from the outside. It was the ideal viewpoint from which to write, and if he didn’t sit down every night or two with his pen the factory existence would become so intolerable he would have to flee from it.

The effort of staying in a situation he didn’t altogether want (only to avoid one even worse — though he couldn’t imagine what that might be) led him to try thinking clearly in the hope of finding an answer as to why he must ask the question at all. The result was that there were no answers, only thoughts that chased each other around in the same circle. The inner strength of his upbringing sustained him in the way of life he had chosen, so he must resist abandoning the factory for fear of turning into a faceless deadbeat shambling from place to place for the rest of his life. Happy or not, it didn’t matter, as long as he could tolerate the present, live from day to day, become stable and content, and carry on as if working in the factory and living at Mrs Denman’s was half his natural state, the other part putting up with what he had become, looking on it with tolerance and, when necessary, keeping an excess in check.

Existence was easy when such brooding spared him. At dinnertime he would finish his sandwiches and guzzle off his tea in ten minutes and, if the pavement was dry, spread a Daily Mirror to sit on, and lean against the factory wall with the latest Penguin or Everyman classic. Cap low over his eyes, a posture in no way strange for a workman, he opened the book so as to hold it in one hand, and read till the hooter called him in at two to continue the day’s stint.

Wood from packing cases splintered in the factory yard was sometimes thrown aside as scrap, so he tied up a bundle and took it home as kindling for Mrs Denman. Another time he humped a load through town for Isaac, and on his way a man asked where he’d got it, wanting to buy some himself, for the air was icy, and fuel of any sort hard to find.

Isaac wore leather gloves, a trilby hat, and a heavy woollen scarf inside his overcoat. ‘My last lumps o’ coal went yesterday, but it’s not the end of the world, to be without a bit of fire.’

‘Gorra chopper?’ Bert split the wood into smaller pieces on the landing. The room was cubby enough to warm quickly, and with cigarettes on the go as well he asked if there’d been any more bother from the landlord’s men.

‘I ain’t heard a dicky-bird. Seems you and your friend discouraged them. In fact a woman from the Council was here yesterday, and said there’s a chance of me getting a small flat, with central heating. It might not happen for ten years or so because of the housing list. But I appreciate her giving me something to look forward to.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘Doesn’t it? I might even be sorry to leave the old den.’

Bert slung his nub end into the embers, and split more wood for another transitory blaze. ‘I’ve got to scram, or I’ll be late for my tea. Mrs Denman don’t like to be kept waiting with her burnt offerings.’

‘Just a moment, then.’ Isaac turned to the bookshelf. ‘Perhaps you’d like to read these. I’ve been meaning to give you them.’

‘Dickens?’

‘They’ll keep you going for a bit, Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House. Come back if you want any more. I don’t suppose you read such entertaining novels at your posh school.’

‘We had Kipling, and Rider Haggard, and all that stuff. Not that I didn’t think they were wonderful, especially Kipling. Hard to remember some of them, but they kept me going at times. We mostly had the classics rammed down our throats, and I’m glad we did.’

Isaac rummaged further along the shelf. ‘Take this Bible. It’s a Jewish one, without the New Testament, as your sort call it. Stick your nose into it whenever you get the urge. They could write sublimely in King James’s time.’

He needn’t return the favour of the firewood, but always did in some way, so it would be churlish to say more than: ‘Are you sure?’

‘They’re not things I’m short of, as you can see. When I first came here I had a bit of extra cash, so splashed out at the secondhand place down Wheeler Gate.’

Herbert sat again. His supper could wait. Generosity of spirit, one of Isaac’s built-in virtues, was to be marvelled at. A smile and a mordant few words might be the response if he mentioned it, but Herbert still thought it a miracle that he had been rescued by him that first fateful night in Nottingham. The more time passed the less the event receded, came starkly into focus in fact, distilling juvenile horror and despair at the idea of Isaac having been absent from the pub that evening. ‘How did you come to live in a place like this?’

His smile was of the wryest, hiding a more bitter response perhaps. Wrong again, Herbert heard:

‘Like all long stories it can be told in a few words. My wife died, after twenty years of marvellous devotion, on both sides. It was quite sudden, and when she went I wanted to, as well. But I couldn’t commit the ultimate sin of suicide.’

Herbert nodded towards the framed photograph on the bookshelf: a placid yet vulnerable face, dark hair drawn back from pale cheeks. Thin lips fixed in a half-smile suggested she endured life rather than lived it. ‘Is that her?’

Isaac indicated that it was, as if to speak would bring tears. ‘I took to the road. Gave up job, house, family, everything. It was just before the war, and I was on the tramp for two years. I went as far down as any man can, or so I thought. Up in Scotland I was taken into prison for vagrancy, but an elderly chap on the street, who saw me marched off, came to the court and handed in the ten-pound fine, saving me fourteen days in prison. Who he was I’ll never know. He just saw me, and did it. Scottish, Protestant, I suppose, and charitable. Can you beat that? It brought me back to my senses, and I went down to London, to my daughter’s. She wanted me to live with her, and I did for a while, but I couldn’t get on with her husband. When I left she gave me some money, and I ended up in this place. I’ve been here nearly ten years, and don’t think I’ve ever been happier. I like being alone, and I manage with my pension. It’s surprising how little you need living on your own. She sends me a quid or two now and again, for they’re doing quite well. Keeps promising to come up and see me, but I put her off.’

True, it wasn’t so bad. A lot of people put up with worse. You could call Isaac lucky, living absolutely the way he liked. Herbert thought that if he could afford to give up factory work he would be happy to pass his time reading, or cycling, or walking the town, and writing when he felt like it. Such a dream life would need a few hundred pounds a year to bring off in comfort, however, because Isaac’s near poverty wasn’t at all to his liking.

His jacket soaked by driving sleet, he held the books close to his chest to keep them dry. Mrs Denman grumbled at the late hour but laid out a supper of warmed-up Spam fritters and fried potatoes. ‘You don’t look after yourself. See how wet through you are.’

Never speak with food in your mouth. But he was famished, and being Bert he could say so what to manners. ‘It wasn’t raining when I went out.’

She reached up to the mantelpiece. ‘This came for you today.’

His mother’s writing, not the first letter asking him to visit them in Norfolk. He knew he should call, but didn’t care to squander a weekend. What would he have to talk to them about, in any case? Everything they would say to him he already knew, or thought he did, and his temper was too short these days to do much listening.

‘If I got a letter,’ Mrs Denman said, ‘I’d open it straightaway.’

He didn’t want to snap back and offend her. ‘I know who it’s from.’

‘I dare say you do. Your parents, I suppose, like all the others.’

‘They want me to go and see them.’

‘I’m sure they deserve it. Don’t you want to make ’em happy?’

‘I’m not sure I would.’ She was more than right, and her advice softened his feeling of being pestered by their letters, though he hoped she would now keep quiet about it, for if he felt too guilty he might tell her to mind her own business. ‘I will one day.’

As if knowing his thoughts, she altered tack in any case. ‘You look like a drowned rat. I’ll light the geyser so’s you can have a hot bath and get warm.’

Splashing in the carbolic steam he wondered where Isaac went for the same luxury. Always clean and dapper, he must use the public baths. He lifted himself out and got dry, putting on two jerseys to face the room. Supper weighed heavily as he closed the door, and drank the mug of tea from Mrs Denman before cold reached its core.

Flakes spinning down the panes in slow Catherine wheels seemed to have eyes that looked at him, so he drew the blanket-like curtains, and lit a cigarette to warm the end of his nose, or staunch the mucus trying to fall from it. He’d had more colds than he could count since leaving Cyprus. Questions as to what he was doing here only came at such times of reflection, and even though unanswerable he supposed they were necessary for what he wanted to do.

Bert’s life had to be written about, and that was a fact, but it could only be done when he said bollocks to questions and side-stepped into being Herbert, the query ritually answered on setting himself at the table to begin an inky scrawl across the page. Herbert and Bert were two ends of a magnet, each competing for the iron filings of other people’s misadventures. One end of the horseshoe had to be Bert, but the other was labelled Herbert so as to make the style clear, and in the hard body of the metal they became one, and words meshed craftily to make sense of the story.

He was closed into a baffle of Third Programme music — anything classical would do — from his fifty-bob secondhand wireless. Archie connected the transformer and fixed an aerial out of the top bedroom window, on a pole that pointed like a finger at the sky as if hoping to draw nothing but the best from God. Music was both an inspiration and a screen, sounds to be enjoyed but for his mind to fight against, the balance opening a space for whatever came.

‘You write because you didn’t want to perish,’ he put into his notebook. ‘Dreams and fantasies hold back spiritual disintegration.’ Pegging dreams into the logic of reality was as much a part of him as it must be with others. Everyone working in a factory was afflicted by dead limbs at the end of the day, and the only way to know the extent of this was by working there yourself; impossible to write about it except by turning into one of those people and doing it.

He was split in two, like that great sphere dividing one half from the other in the old nightmare of infancy. Somewhere spinning and dispensing terror, the trail it left provided a light and showed which words to write and what yarn to spin. After a few pages the impulse burned itself out, and all he could do was go down to the warm kitchen and smoke his last cigarette of the day, bent into a calamitous state of exhaustion.

Mrs Denman, her bed-time curlers in, sat by the fading coal to sip her night-owl coffee, as she called it. ‘I don’t know what you do in your room all these hours.’

What did she think, in her secret heart? Wank himself to a cinder? ‘I read.’

‘You must be freezing. Why don’t you do it down here, or in the parlour with an electric heater?’

He wanted to be in his own four walls, with the door shut, private, often not aware of the cold. She was used to his silence at her questions, thinking him a funny lad, but then, weren’t they all at that age, come to that? ‘I’ll mek yer a nice mug o’ cocoa, so at least you’ll go warm to bed.’

You had to say something to show thanks at such concern, whether you believe it or not. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Ma!’

‘Ah, well, somebody’s got to look after you, since you can’t seem to do it yourself, working all day in that factory. Not that I don’t know why not. But it’s allus bin like that, and allus will be, I suppose.’

He wasn’t unhappy, languishing under her platitudes like the helpless booby he knew he was not. It was the role of the common workman to accept it as his due.

‘You should go out more,’ she said. ‘Find a nice young woman.’

The response to such concern should be to reach out and squeeze her hand, with the jocular remark: ‘Nar, I’ve got yo’, ain’t I, me duck?’ — but he could only say: ‘I’ll have to see about that.’

‘You ought to go and visit your parents, at least. It’s a shame to lose touch. You might need ’em one day. It’d do you good to be away for a weekend, anyway.’

‘’Appen it would,’ he said.


Feet up on the range after the day’s sweat, just as he’d thought his metamorphosis to a workman was as complete as it could be, he reached for Mrs Denman’s Evening Post and saw that a public lecture was to be given at the Mechanics Institute by the author W. J. Hawksworth, winner of last year’s Windrush Prize. A little gingering of the intellect might improve his perceptions in general, though he was doubtful that such testing would occur. In Cyprus he had taken Hawksworth’s Glebe Farm from the camp library, telling about a woman who had to run farm and family on her own because her husband had gone off to the war. A third the way through he left it on his bed to go for a shower, and came back to find it nicked, which led him to believe it may have been better than he’d thought, but a few days later the book was back on his bed, and pencilling on the inside cover said: ‘Bloody trash.’ Herbert had to agree with this criticism, and didn’t go on to finish it. Still, even a mediocre novelist might be amusing to listen to.

Midweek or not, the occasion called for a more than thorough wash and shave at the bathroom sink. He put on his best shirt, cursing the recalcitrant collar studs and cuff-links, which wouldn’t go through the holes made too stiff by starch. Buttoning the mackintosh over his best suit he walked up the street and leapt on a trackless into town.

He spotted a chair near the back of the packed hall, on the edge of a row. A youngish woman beside him had dark ringletty hair and a thin face, all that he could see of her before the curtain opened on W. J. Hawksworth sitting at a table on stage. A man to his left talked a few minutes about how good Hawksworth’s novels were. So many people loved them because they could see themselves mirrored in the characters he wrote so well about. Not the fucking people I know, Bert said to himself.

Hawksworth twiddled a watch chain across his waistcoat, touched up his grey crinkly hair. The human pen was nervous at least and, glad to hear the last of his introducer, he got up as if it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

Herbert noticed that one of his legs was twitching, out of nervousness, or exhaustion, or from too much booze, though perhaps it was to put rhythm into his cadenced and well-rehearsed sentences. Hawksworth went on for nearly an hour about how he had become a novelist, told them how he wrote (he held up his fountain pen), what his first story had been about (himself), explained that he was careful to type all manuscripts neatly (double-spaced with twenty-five lines to a page), and expatiated on how he had sent the first stories out to various magazines (with stamped self-addressed envelopes for their possible return). He then sat down to wait.

The stories came back but, playing ducks and drakes with them (his phrase) he skimmed them out once more on their travels. One was accepted and published. Encouraged by this (and the sum of five pounds) he wrote a novel, and he described the process of doing that as well, detailing the work stage by stage, almost thought by thought until, like a car being bodged to life at a garage by a totally incompetent mechanic listening to ‘Music While You Work’ on full blast, he knew it was fit to face the world. Or he hoped so. The book was turned down half a dozen times, but eventually someone had the good sense to see what a talented work it was for a young man of twenty-five, and a lifetime of producing novels began. He went on to talk about the great modern novelists such as Waugh, Forster, Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, implying that it wasn’t necessary to add before such an intelligent and discriminating audience that he was one of them. He’s an old ham, Herbert thought. He must have given this talk dozens of times already. The woman by his side was writing notes, and between gales of splintered clapping at the end Herbert asked if she was reporting the lecture for a newspaper.

Her laugh was the kind of merry expressive tune he couldn’t remember when he’d heard last. Perhaps she was flattered, but had to say no. ‘I want to remember some of the wonderful things he came out with. I love all his books.’

He was careful to assume the sort of accent a local worthy and not a factory worker would use. ‘My favourite is Glebe Farm. I couldn’t put it down.’

‘Well, it’s good but have you read Bird of Paradise?’

‘No.’

‘Or Life on the Heaviside Layer?’

He made space for her through the crowd on the institute steps. ‘I’ve been trying to get that one for months, but it’s never on the shelves.’

‘What about Never Say Never?’ she asked. ‘Have you read that?’ She knew them all. ‘He’s written a lot. There’s Fires of Love, The Far Side of Heaven, The Lady from Leatherhead.’

‘I’ll get them as soon as I can.’

‘You must. He’s so good. Better than J. B. Priestley.’

They walked slowly, crossing the road at the lights. She must have read all twenty. Or was it forty? He agreed that W. J. Hawksworth was a great writer, and would she like to go into a coffee bar where they could talk about him some more? Maybe she was married, but he thought her too special to worry about that. Anyway, he couldn’t see a ring.

Her yes encouraged him to think that he interested her. The dragon hiss of jets steamed from behind the counter, and to see her shapely little nose twitching at the reek of bacon cobs told him it was an unusual place for her, which was even more promising. The cream silk scarf at the opening of her white blouse made it hard to gauge the size of her breasts, or even their shape. He also noted her soft suede gloves and leather handbag, as well as her fashionable New Look coat, and stylish shoes. Who, he wondered, did she think she had taken up with?

After his working day, and the effort of absorbing all that might be useful from Hawksworth’s chatter, he was happy to let her continue with glistening eyes about novels he would never read while there was still so much good stuff to catch up on. At a convenient break he stretched his hand across the table. ‘I’m Herbert Gedling, by the way.’

She unravelled thin fingers from the coffee mug to brush a ringlet off her cheek. ‘I’m Cecilia Colston. But how did you get that scar?’ — as if it was something to pity him for. ‘I’m dying to know.’

‘Cyprus, in the army.’

‘Were you wounded?’

‘A piece of shrapnel got me from a bomb. I looked up too soon.’

She said what a pity, and asked in the same breath where he worked. He told her. ‘In the offices?’

‘If you like.’ Let her sort it out. She was puzzled, for he could have sworn she caught a whiff of disinfectant suds. You were never free of it, even after a bath. ‘And where do you work?’

‘At Clapton’s, the solicitors.’

‘In the office?’ Giving no time for an answer he said: ‘I’ve done some writing of my own. Just bits of things. Stories, a few of them, or near enough.’

‘So that’s why you came tonight?’

He nodded.

‘You want to be a writer?’

‘I don’t know. I just scribble a bit. A sort of hobby, you might say.’

‘You’re too modest.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ not caring what the penpusher thought. The tightrope of his deception swayed, till he resumed full control. ‘Descriptions of people,’ he said when she asked what about. ‘What they do with their lives.’

‘Can I read some?’

‘More coffee? Sometime, maybe.’

She indicated no, brown eyes looking as if to find out more about him than even he could possibly tell. He met her gaze unblinking, knowing that since it wasn’t done, not in her terms, to get her under the table and fuck her there and then, as Bert might try, or at least Archie would, he’d have to stare her haughtily down as Herbert, and take the risk of her getting up to walk out. It was evidently the right way to behave, and when she looked down he knew he would have her sooner or later if — as Bert would say — he played his cards right. ‘I’ll find some pages to show you.’ He remembered Hawksworth’s advice. ‘They’re not typed yet. I don’t have a typewriter.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to buy one, won’t you?’ — as if they grew on trees, all waiting to be plucked as she was plucking down Herbert’s heart, nuances he detected with no bother. He’d never thought of becoming a real writer but if by pretending to be one he could get more quickly into her New Look knickers he would take on such a role any day.

Twelve

The train puffed and banged its way along the track out of Norwich. He seemed to have been travelling all day, but it was only a few minutes after noon. Mrs Denman had packed him off with enough food to get him to the South Pole and back. ‘All that way? You’ll be hungry. I would be. As soon as the train’s over Trent Bridge I have to eat a sandwich.’

Why his parents had cut themselves off in this remote corner of Norfolk he couldn’t think. Nottingham was a metropolis, and he felt vulnerable as the line descended the valley of the Yare. More like the yawn. He closed the map.

Still, he felt something pleasing in the landscape, as if he’d been here before. Perhaps in another life he had. His mother’s lot came from this way, likewise old Uncle Richard at Malvern who gave him the pound notes that paid for his escape from school.

As the train turned northerly he felt human again, more relaxed than in Nottingham. Being on the move was what did it, but he didn’t trust such a feeling of wellbeing. He liked it, but something was wrong. The man opposite looked at him too closely. Herbert thought that if he had a knife he would aim the point at his throat. Such a lunatic picture forced his gaze out of the window.

Woods and fields were soothing, though why should he struggle to stay calm? Small motor boats lined the river, and he imagined living on one. Any small cabin would do, equipped with books, some food, and lots of fags. In the evening he would find a snug pub and drink himself into a haze before weaving back to the boat for what sleep he could get.

He didn’t know why he was on the train, felt unstable, free-floating in a way he didn’t like. The man opposite — stout, rubicund, tie bowing out of a Fair Isle sweater, wearing a hacking jacket, gleaming brown brogues, and with half a whistle on his stupid lips, which might any minute turn menacing — seemed too interested in Herbert’s state of mind, which Bert thought was none of his fucking business. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

The man smiled, for want of anything else appropriate in such a situation. ‘Looking at you?’

‘Yes, me.’

He had what Herbert supposed was an East Anglican accent. ‘I wasn’t.’

‘You were.’

‘I was looking out of the window, since you want to know.’ He was being friendly, which made his former attitude insulting. ‘Not much to see, though, is there? It gets even less picturesque soon, depending on your point of view.’

Herbert heard himself, saw his own face from the opposite seat (though not as accurately as in a mirror, and even that couldn’t be an exact image) was unable to hold back: ‘You were staring at me.’ He was afraid, couldn’t stop his useless twaddle, felt sweat on his forehead. The words cartwheeled out, words nevertheless precious because he had to stand by them, back them up loyally though he couldn’t think what with.

‘I really wasn’t.’ It was the man’s turn to be afraid, locked in a compartment with no way out except on to the line and break a leg. ‘I never stare at people.’

‘You were staring at me.’ Stop it, stop this, he told himself. What’s happening to you? He heard the voice from a distance, looked at the man, but couldn’t stop the voice even when trying to nail his mind into place with thoughts of Cecilia. He’d see her again soon: easy to get Colston’s number from the book.

‘I know you were looking at me.’ That’s enough, then. But it wasn’t. Cecilia faded. He couldn’t get her coat off nor her blouse. ‘I’m a stranger in the land.’ Why did he say that? But it prevented him saying any more for the moment.

The man hoped to head off another barmy accusation: ‘That church over there is Westwick.’

‘I dare say it is.’

‘Are you going to Cromer?’

Perhaps there was a lunatic asylum there, and he was coming back from leave. His mother had died and they’d let him go to the funeral. ‘What’s that to you?’

‘None at all, I know.’

Herbert was calm, the storm gone. What was that all about? Why had he terrorized the poor bloke? He was afraid, wouldn’t let it happen again. ‘I’m going to Worstead.’

‘Next stop, then.’ The man smiled, his best news of the day. ‘You’ll be there in a few minutes.’

A series of white humpbacked clouds formed an escort to the road. Herbert hurried towards the village, needing a drink to drown the Devil within. Something had got into him today, and he prayed the pub would be open. The lane followed the railway line a few hundred yards before turning east. At not quite two o’clock he saw the pub near the church.

He carried his beer to a table by the window, away from the clutter of people at the bar. They were expecting him for lunch, but he couldn’t care less. Didn’t they realize how many changes of train he’d made to get there? He was more tired than if he had been at work, the scar sore, and thought that everyone stared at his Cain’s mark. In Nottingham he would have punched them in the face, but then, they didn’t stare at you in Nottingham. Or they did it when you couldn’t possibly notice. They knew the consequences. He went to the bar, and asked the way to the Old Hall.

Another mile. The autumnal grass smelled sweet. A pigeon on a gate post rattled away as if aware of his murderous thoughts. Beyond the last house of the village, forking left between the fields, the east wind drove at his face. An isolated cloud was flying by, tatterdemalion white against surrounding blue, heading for companionship towards a more solid bank in the west.

Blue vetch half hidden in the hedge. No other person in sight, his freedom was threatening, too much like isolation, no compensation for the effort of going forward. He thought of his room at Mrs Denman’s, and peace when sitting at his table to read or write, wondering why he had put himself beyond its range. The factory, even more protective, was pushed out of mind to avoid sprinting back for the train on hearing its whistle.

The words ‘Old Hall’ on the five-barred gate at the end of the gravelled drive had once been white but were now half-covered with mildew. Getting too old to keep the place in order. He lifted the latch and jammed the gate back against the bayleaf bush, leaving it wide open for a quick escape. A few sheep ran from the fence on either side, and in the garden area before the house his father poked a hoe into a flowerbed. He must have heard my footsteps. Or maybe the man at the pub had phoned to say I was on my way. Or the man on the train had called from the crackers hospital in Cromer.

‘Herbert!’

‘Hello, Father.’ He put out a hand, but Hugh pulled him forward. ‘I’m glad to see you, my boy, very glad.’ He was strong, and bony, and reeked of the tobacco he began loading into his curved pipe. ‘We did hope you’d get here for lunch. Couldn’t wait, though, or it would have gone cold. It was a leg of best lamb — mint sauce and all the trimmings. Your mother had Mrs Sewell cook it. Still, there’s plenty left. We even put out a bottle of wine, though there’s beer if you want it.’

Hugh changed from boots to shoes in the conservatory. ‘I wanted to visit you in Nottingham but your mother said you wouldn’t like that, though she needed to see you more than I did. She seems to know you better.’

Herbert felt horror at the notion of such a visit: ‘This is my landlady, Mrs Denman. She mothers me a bit too much, I’m afraid. And this is Frank, her fancyman. Yes, it is a small room, but it’s all I need to sleep in, and when I come back from the factory, or totter up to bed half-drunk on a Saturday night. I’m sorry, Mother, but for that you’ll have to go downstairs and across the yard.’ ‘It wouldn’t have been a good idea.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘I only have one room, and it’s hardly the place to entertain anyone, believe me.’

‘That’s nonsense, and you know it. I wouldn’t have cared if you were living in a cave. You should have seen some of the mud holes I had to live in for weeks at a time in Burma. If my mother had been able to call on me I’d have welcomed her with open arms! You’re a grown responsible man from a good family, and you know perfectly well how to go on.’

The row had started earlier than expected, his father wanting to bluster him into the ground. Herbert felt awe, even a shameless fear, stepping back to knock against a column of telescoped plant pots. He straightened them. Bert gave Herbert a nudge, stiffened him not to be afraid of the old bastard, told him he could even be conciliatory. He envied Archie having a father who didn’t know when he was coming out of the army. ‘I’ll get a flat soon, then it’ll be marvellous for both of you to come and see me.’

‘That’ll be a move in the right direction.’

Herbert looked at him, getting towards seventy, frailer perhaps than he thought himself to be. It wouldn’t do to feel pity, though a tinge went through him, and straight out again. Better if they were to go into the house where his mother might soften their talk, but Hugh stood upright among the potted plants and puffed away as if to gas them both with his smoke. ‘We don’t see you from one year’s end to another, and I know your mother suffers from it. She doesn’t say so, but when she suffers so do I, which is totally unnecessary.’

A knife for cutting string lay on the slatted table, and Herbert turned his eyes away, disturbed at such a murderous thought. His father only missed him because his mother did. If she wanted to call on him alone in Nottingham it would be all right, though the thought of them walking up Mrs Denman’s staircase was intolerable. He re-harnessed his self-control. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Well, never mind. Let’s go in. You didn’t come here to cross swords with me.’

He should have expected they would be more concerned about him in their retirement, been old enough to realize their cloying wishes for his wellbeing, but if guilt was all they could make him feel they could get stuffed, especially when Maud showed him to a large room on the first floor looking across the paddock and orchard, a vague hint of metallic sea in the distance.

He took in the commodious luxury, the perfect appointments of a double bed, a wardrobe, two tables, an armchair, a large sink with steel taps, and heavy pelmetted drapes to close off the world, as well as a bathroom for himself alone next door. ‘It’s yours, whenever you come to see us, though we’d like you to live in it all the time, no questions asked. Me and your father have talked about it. We’d make you an allowance. And if you want to cut yourself off I can get an electrician to put in a kettle. You’d be quite cosy in here. I know you would be.’

It was the ideal refuge, perfect and long wanted. ‘Thank you, Mother.’ He could sit in peace and write, totally cared for while heaping up the pages of a novel. ‘Scribbled much today, you dark horse?’ one of them would enquire, not knowing that the other had said the same an hour ago. He would be an infant again, till they arranged for men in white coats to come one morning and cart him off. You only went home again when you died, not at twenty-five. So the room wasn’t for him. Nor could it ever be, with his parents so close. Would Isaac have called him a fool to refuse? No doubt about it, but a fool was always the master of two imperfect worlds, saw neither clearly but survived the perils of both. ‘I’ll be going back tomorrow.’

She sat on the bed. ‘Oh, Herbert, so soon?’

‘I must be at work on Monday morning.’ He hardened himself against her wanting to make him cry tears of chagrin for the way the trap was closing. If he stayed an extra twenty-four hours he might hang on forever, and the thought made him so blindingly angry that he had to fight off his berserker mood. Easy. Huge efforts were no efforts at all, but the minor annoyances were dangerous.

‘But why do you work in a factory, Herbert? I don’t understand it.’

He preferred to pity her rather than shout, which made him say, the first time loud and clear to anyone but himself: ‘I’m thinking of writing a novel about it.’

‘Ah! I see.’ The knowing smile told him he’d said exactly what would satisfy her. A report of it might even mollify his father, which made him regret having spoken, since he didn’t know whether he would ever be able to make the claim good. Lying to make someone happy was a crude ploy, and he wished it unsaid. If he didn’t want it to be a lie he would have to write the bloody book, which would give them some control over his future. He wouldn’t put up with that. Only if they were dead could he follow his path with a quiet mind, but they seemed so full of life he was sure they would live forever.

‘And after you’ve written it?’

He laughed, glad now that the idea had shot up from more or less nowhere, while knowing there could be no such place. ‘No use thinking about that. It takes years to write a book. A good one, anyway. Another thing’, he went on, ’is that I’m working in a factory because I feel easy being among machines. It’s my métier, it seems.’

‘I’ve always loved machines as well,’ she said, ‘right from when my father bought his first motor car. I still tinker when I can. If the lawnmower goes bang it’s always me who mends it. I suppose that’s where you get your fascination from, which is very gratifying. I understand perfectly well but, all the same …’

They were so close in spirit that she knew when to stop talking, and he realized how pleasant it was to be with someone who sensed your thoughts as much as you were aware of theirs. ‘Let’s go down and have tea.’ She sprang from the bed like a girl of twenty. ‘Your father likes it exactly at four, and so do I. Mustn’t disappoint him.’

‘I have to wash off the grime of travel first.’ He loved her now, with no vicious afterthoughts, and gave her a few minutes to go down and repeat what he had said to his father so that there would be less pain and mystery as to why he had immersed himself in a factory, though he hoped they would not make his stay comfortable enough for him to regret leaving.

There were so many flowers surrounding the Old Hall that, looking down from the window, their various scents and colours — bees working among roses, honeysuckle, lupins and bougainvillaea, and many whose names he didn’t know — gave the impression of being in a vast undertaker’s parlour.

He wanted the visit to be over, though couldn’t decently depart for another twenty-four hours. Every minute was torment, and ought not to be, he knew, if only he could learn to accept being there. It was hard not to look every few minutes at his watch. This itching to get clear, to flee along the lanes and back to the train, was against his deeper grain, an unnecessary burden, and especially irritating since the St Vitus yen existed only on the surface, a weak mesh of impulses dominating the stronger part of him which was capable of enjoying the stay and being made much of. If they hadn’t been his parents the problem wouldn’t exist, and anger at the inability to overcome his aversion made it even more difficult to do so.

Having recognized his disorder he went downstairs feeling more calm, yet was embarrassed at the homely and affectionate way they were so absolutely at ease with one another, at seeing how his father adored his mother, and she him, as if they had met only weeks ago. After tea in the lounge Maud said: ‘I do wish you wouldn’t puff all the time at that pipe, my dear.’

Hugh reached over to smooth her wrist, and gave a great laugh. ‘When I give up smoking, my love, call in the doctor, though there won’t be much he can do for me then.’

‘And Herbert’s smoking, too.’

‘So I notice.’ Hugh winked at his son. ‘I have a couple of cigars for us to demolish after dinner, the last of my Burma cheroots. I came back with boxes and boxes. Then again, though, there are those Havanas you found for me last Christmas.’

‘Oh, so I did.’ She smiled.

Herbert, remembering, took a piece of orange cleaning cloth from his jacket pocket and unwrapped a highly polished brass lighter. ‘I meant to give you this, Father, a present I cobbled together at my machine in the factory.’

Hugh rolled it over in his big hand and then, flame first time. His features gave off a mischievous flicker at Herbert’s siding with him against Maud. ‘You made it all on your own?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Beautiful. A bespoke lighter. I shall treasure it.’ He pressed it twice more to get a flame, before slipping it into his waistcoat pocket, then stood from the deep armchair without using his hands as support. ‘Excuse us, Maud, I shan’t keep him from you for long.’

‘And where do you intend dragging me to?’ Herbert smiled, also standing.

Hugh did a ‘With my head chopped off, underneath my arm’ walk to the door. ‘Come up to my study, and you’ll see how I spend a lot of my time.’

Glad to avoid a stultifying melt into nothingness, Herbert followed, his father’s back as upright as ever, though his tread up the stairs was slow enough. He had been through trench warfare in France, and fought in the jungles of Burma, leading his battalion and later shuffling the wreck of his brigade against the Japanese to great effect. He envied him for having done so much, wanted to take all his experiences into himself.

The table was covered with overlapping maps, some neatly folded in stacks, others opened from rolls and pinned down by piles of army notebooks. Wads of yellowing papers, ragged at the edges and stained with mud (and maybe even blood) were not yet arranged in any order. ‘Don’t tell me,’ Herbert said. ‘You’re writing your memoirs.’

Hugh leaned against the enormous glass-fronted bookcase. ‘It was your mother’s idea. Well, I always knew I would, one day, but I let her think she set me on to it. If I don’t do them for publication I can give all this to the Imperial War Museum. Or to you eventually, if you’re interested.’

He realized he was. ‘I’d be glad to have them.’ Yet would he? They’d probably get mildewed in Mrs Denman’s shed, until forgotten, or the ragman carted them away — a prospect that gave real pain, however.

Hugh unfolded a map and bent over, lowering his magnifying glass to the close brown contours, then shifting its circle to the yellow of cultivated areas. Herbert smoothed over the exquisite colours with his fingers. ‘What a lovely map.’

‘Of course it damned well is,’ Hugh snapped. ‘Don’t you know that the British soldier always died on the best of maps? But look at it closely, though, and you’ll see what abominable country we had to scramble about in.’

‘I don’t see any roads,’ Herbert said.

Hugh ringed a ford and a hamlet with a soft black pencil, stood up straight. ‘Roads!’ He let out an expressive guffaw. ‘There was never any such thing. It was a hundred degrees up from awful. Mud tracks for donkeys, if you were lucky.’ His mouth came close to Herbert’s ear, who had the presence not to move away. ‘When you get married,’ Hugh whispered, ‘as I’m sure you will one day, always keep your wife happy. Let her think everything that’s good about you is because of her. In my case it happens to be true, but even if it weren’t that’s what I would do. Another thing is, though I don’t know whether I need tell you, is that you never, never, never ever say any of the bad things that come into your mind, either about her or about anything, but especially about her. Only the good things, and even those you must think about carefully in case they can be taken wrongly. A wife is the most precious thing a man can have, and if you live by that, or make the attempt at any rate, your wife will think the same of you.’

‘I’ll try to remember,’ Herbert smiled.

‘There are so many difficulties in life that marital discord ought not to be one of them.’

He stood away, and looked again at the map, gazing with affection and appreciation, as if all his speculations about human nature had their origins in his ability to relate the contours of a map to the shape of the land itself. ‘There are less paved roads in that kind of terrain than the other, except those perfectly paved ones that you make yourself and spend your whole life maintaining.’

Such longspeaking indicated to Herbert how difficult being married to his mother might have been. Some of the times in his father’s life must have been absolute boils and blisters. A photograph of Hugh and his staff showed them standing by a twin-engined transport plane, a row of palm trees behind. Hugh, taller than the rest, was grinning as if he owned the aircraft as well.

‘I’ll remember all you say.’

Hugh put an arm on his shoulder. ‘I’m sure you will. You’ve always been a sensible chap, and we won’t bother you in your life. Everyone has to make his own way, and we’re sure you’ll do well in the end.’

It was a strange world, where only utter agreement made everyone happy, and all was in terms of ‘we’. Whatever the old man said could make no difference. He walked downstairs and into the garden, scent from rose bushes taking him to the grounds of his first school, the perfume of gratuitous cruelty rushing back, though too much in the past to be more than a reminder of days which led to him being where he was and even possibly how he was.

A track led across the paddock to an orchard where a branch had been split off by the weight of large reddish apples, some pecked by the birds or bored into by wasps, but most ready for picking. The one he ate was a blend of tart and sweet, and he tossed the core up towards heavy clouds sending down the first drops, soon steady enough to enrich the smell of bent-over grass between the trees. The whole place wanted going over with a lawnmower.

Not visible from the ground floor of the house, he let the water flatten his hair and run down his face, saturate his jacket, get through to the skin, an icy clamminess connecting him to an area of the sky from which a real self looked down on the marionette specimen he felt himself to be. Such rain made tears invisible, unnoticed. He shivered with exhilaration — regarding the elements as nothing compared to the volcanic compound of misery and defiance inside the armour which no downpour could penetrate. The experience was perversely enjoyable, a dose of self-induced reality, and however long he stood in the rain he would stay no other than who he was, no matter how many spirits attached themselves to him.

‘Herbert!’ Maud’s cry splintered him back, and he saw her in oilskins and wellingtons, basket over arm and parting the brambles. ‘I need some apples for a pie. You must take some back with you, unless you catch pneumonia and have to go to bed for a month. I say, you’re soaked.’

‘Am I?’ He took the basket. ‘Let me do it.’ When it was filled she gripped his elbow and guided him to shelter in the house. What a peculiar idea, he thought, imagining someone like me getting pneumonia, recalling summer days in the factory when he had walked out into the breeze soaked in sweat.

A bath freshened, and cleansed away his uncertainties, till he felt as if he’d lived in the house all his life, hadn’t left it for a day. The Rayburn dried his clothes, and upstairs he took off his father’s heavy checked dressing gown before putting on a clean shirt for dinner.

When he walked into the lounge, Hugh came from behind his Daily Mail to offer him a sherry. The tall old man stood stiffly with the decanter and poured a tumbler three-quarters full, Herbert deciding that the best way to get through the evening was to soak in as much as was given him to drink. ‘It’s good,’ he said, after a slug of the golden liquid. ‘Dry.’

‘Can’t stand the sweet stuff.’ Hugh poked at the logs, though the room was warm. ‘Your mother tells me you’re writing a book.’

Another swig lightened the seriousness of the issue. ‘Well, you can say it’s in the planning stage.’

‘Not an easy thing to do.’

‘I’m going to do something that hasn’t been done before: which is write about people who work in factories. Do it properly, though, from the inside.’ The words rolled out, oiled by drink. ‘I know them so well by now, there’s nothing else I really can write about.’

Hugh refilled both glasses. ‘Are they worth it, do you think?’

‘Everybody is.’

‘I expect you’re the best judge of that.’

Maud looked at them as they linked arms and walked in for dinner. ‘How much sherry have you two had?’

‘A couple of little ones, but we’ll go easy on the wine.’

They did, though all three went back to the lounge afterwards and drank several Martell brandies, so that by ten Herbert could decently say he was tired, and would they excuse him if he went to bed?

The silence of the dark was unnerving. If he put on the light the ceiling would revolve. An owl struck the night with its note, and he felt apprehensive, as if the room had no walls. He put on the light and read a few poems from Other Men’s Rowers, but one that was anti-Semitic reminded him of Isaac, and he put the book away.

He would wait for the dawn, though it was only eleven o’clock. The floor was cold to his feet and, wearing the all-embracing dressing gown of his father’s, he opened the door so as to make no squeak at the hinges. Sliding a finger along the wainscot to keep a straight course, he navigated towards a splinter of light, at the other end of the corridor. No one could accuse him of sneaking about, because he was going downstairs to stand in the fresh cold air and get some of his drunkenness blown away.

He was not a prisoner, in any case, and put an ear to the door through which light showed. ‘Nor me,’ his mother said, ’but I’m sure he won’t turn out to be a bad egg.’

Poor things had no one else to talk about. His father’s study was just as he had seen it in the afternoon. In the attic he found a fort and fire engine broken and dusty, toys from his childhood. Finding his way in darkness to the kitchen, he hated the night. Night was inhuman, antipathetic, no good for him. After five minutes of fresh air he made back for bed, his only refuge. Night was a black cloth covering all romance, and he slept as if utterly worn out. When he woke up bits of dream were stamped on by the boots of daylight.

The morning was dry and blustery, and at breakfast Hugh said they would go out with the Purdys. ‘See if we can bag a rabbit or two down by the river.’

Energized, ready for anything, Herbert chose a pair of wellingtons from the hall by the kitchen and, with a bandolier of cartridges hanging from his shoulder, and the gun pointing down, followed his father to the lane. Like two soldiers on patrol, Herbert thought.

High stinging nettles bent over the track, a thick hawthorn hedge and a ditch on the other side. The carmine blue and gold of an overflying painted lady stopped Hugh for a moment in his stalking, and Herbert all but ran into him.

By a pink blaze of rosebay his father signalled for stealth, which put both at the crouch and immobile. He straightened, gun at the same time coming to his shoulder. Herbert went down with equal slowness on one knee to take aim, and the question came as to whether he should put a stop to his father now, in the back, at ten yards range. He pressed off the safety catch, stroking the cold trigger.

Two mature and confident rabbits came from under a laden bramble, furry snouts at the twitch, facing each other as if for a round of boxing before loosing themselves for breakfast in the rich pastures. A large white butterfly made a hypotenuse up from his sights, and he lined his gun on the left-hand rabbit, assuming his father would take the other.

For no reason he could think of Archie’s face printed itself on his mind, enough of a glimpse to make him wonder if such a powerful almost sexual urge to blow a hole in his own father should for a moment be morally contemplated. He decided that Archie was too primitive and too civilized even to think of such a murder, and in any case so was he.

The rabbit spun over, and he hit the other before it could run. A third report from a higher elevation brought a wounded pigeon flopping on to the Pliocene soil. He was astounded that his father had not all along intended to fire at either of the rabbits but had left both to him, confident of being understood.

The shots alerted wildlife for miles around, so that in spite of another hour’s tramping and a few wasted shots, they downed nothing more. ‘Two rabbits and a pigeon ain’t bad,’ Hugh said. ‘That was a good bit of shooting, by the way.’

‘So was yours.’

They stood under a half-shed chestnut, Hugh wielding his pipe for a well-earned smoke. ‘I have so much faith in this little lighting-up machine you made at your factory that I didn’t even carry matches this morning.’

He said ‘Your factory’ as if Herbert owned it, which for some reason pleased him. Light brought out autumn’s colours, a blade of sun catching a clump of Scotch pines. Herbert liked the sound of birds embellishing the day. His father leaned, holding a flame over the bowl. ‘Do you remember that cheque for twenty-five pounds I sent you? It was years ago.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Why didn’t you cash it?’

Why ever not? He’d long forgotten it. ‘I was waiting for a rainy day, which hasn’t come yet.’

‘Well, in my youth I’d have made the bloody rain pour down so that I could have had a whale of a time on it. So cash it. Stop waiting for emergencies.’

‘I promise I will.’

They climbed the stile from the lane in silence, then Hugh laughed as he opened the gate to home. ‘Ah! I can smell something good for lunch.’


Maud drove him to Norwich in their Vauxhall Velox Saloon so as to shorten his journey home. ‘I wish you would make your home with us, though. Or in London, at least. Your father could get you a job in insurance, or shipping. You must have enough material for your book by now.’

The prospect of being alone in the train lured like a gleam of paradise. ‘Not quite.’

She overtook a farm wagon on a bend. Another such manoeuvre, he smiled, and all our troubles will be over. ‘I’ll need a year or two yet.’

After a mile of ointment-quiet she came in with: ‘I can’t think why you torment yourself so. It’s not like either of us.’

Luckily the engine drowned his sigh. ‘It’s how I am.’

‘I know. But I worry about you.’

He touched her hand at the wheel, a natural almost loving gesture that felt strange to him, though there was nothing behind it but the action, which made him free of her as well. ‘You don’t need to, believe me.’

‘All right, I won’t. But write now and again.’

‘I promise.’

‘And come whenever you like.’

He wouldn’t, unless some reason hard to imagine impelled him. ‘I shall.’

He had an impulse to sling the bag of apples out of the train window, but decided they’d make a present for Mrs Denman. She liked fruit. At the station there was time to send a postcard to Isaac, as proof that he had done his duty.

Thirteen

Mrs Denman thought the excursion had done him little good, wondered whether he had been to Norfolk at all, but had gone instead to London and fallen into bad company. As for the apples, he could have bought them at a stall, though in the end she had to believe him, since he was too proud a person to tell a lie. ‘Was your parents well?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do they do?’

‘They’re retired.’

‘They must have a nice garden.’

‘Not bad.’

‘I expect they were glad to see you.’

‘I think they were.’

‘I’m glad you went, though.’

He raised his eyebrows, and smiled. ‘Yes, so am I.’

She didn’t think the trip had made him happy, which disappointed, almost irritated her. He seemed to have a ghost before his eyes every minute of the day, one that he saw all night as well in his dreams, to judge by his expression when he came down for breakfast.

There was something swinish, he knew, in disappointing her, but what could he say? It was harder to come back than it had been to go. Pedalling his bike to work was a relief, part of an ongoing donkey circuit keeping him on course to where he would eventually get. If I unlock myself from such a totally absorbing existence, he thought, the language of his schooldays coming back, as if there was no other way of saying it, I’m lost, so here I am and here I shall stay. Life’s too short to worry about anything other than work and shelter.

A blindoe drink-out with Archie was necessary before he could relax within the palisade of safety, and write a letter thanking his parents for their kindness. Pepper’s chip shop on Alfreton Road was crowded with people just out of the boozers, clamouring for mushy peas and cobs, fish and pickled onions and mugs of well-sweetened tea. Archie elbowed his way to the counter, Herbert in a moment by his side: ‘I’ll have the usual.’

‘Fish, chips, cobs and teas twice,’ Archie bawled.

‘Tek yer sweat, then. There’s others before yo’.’

While waiting Herbert said: ‘I need to get myself a typewriter.’

‘What do you want one o’ them for?’

He would pay for it out of his father’s old cheque. ‘Just to play around on. I want to learn how to tek one to bits and put it together again. Whereabouts would I go to get a good ’un?’

Archie’s brain seemed to be working at the back of his eyes like the spinning fruitwheels of a one-armed bandit. ‘Here’s the grub. Let’s get stuck in. Don’t go to one o’ them secondhand places. You’ll only get done. I’ll bring one to your room as soon as I can. It might tek a month or two.’

They moved to a corner, away from the crush. ‘That’s all right. I’m in no hurry.’


Herbert leaned his workaday sit-up-and-beg against the parapet of Trent Bridge and looked towards the War Memorial, along the sweep of the embankment steps where people were getting into boats for an hour’s pull at the oars. His promise of a mystery trip had called for some attention to the map, until a breeze ruffled inconveniently and he folded it back into his jacket pocket. ‘Not too far, though,’ Cecilia had said. ‘It’s at least a year since I was on a bicycle.’

High cauliflower clouds operated in the west so it looked like a day of dry grass. The quickest way out of town took them along nondescript Wilford Lane and over Fairham Brook. True country began when he navigated into Clifton Grove only if they ignored the new housing estate through trees to their left. He felt something magical and Grecian in the long avenue of beeches, oaks and elms, though he couldn’t let Bert make such a comparison to Cecilia. Shouldering his bike over a dead tree, he went back for hers when she couldn’t lift it and avoid nettles at the same time.

She looked fresh and athletic in her white blouse and jersey tied to hang over her shoulders. A grey skirt and laced shoes set her up for a day in the country, which put her almost on a par with Ralph’s bint when they had set out for the Lake District years ago; but in spite of her provincial confidence there seemed something lost about Cecilia. She was like Mariana out of Tennyson, waiting for who could tell what? Otherwise why would he have latched himself on to her if she hadn’t been waiting all her life for him?

He laid her bike against the tree and reached for her arm, and took her over by the waist. Such courtly treatment was rewarded by a slight pressure to his hand. Beyond the village he steered by her side, playing the cavalier who guarded her from a brush by traffic, hoping the gesture wasn’t beyond notice. The difficulty made him wonder why they used such a plebeian mode of transport — as the swinging of a car passed too close to his elbows. Watch where you’re fucking going, he wanted to shout.

He judged the contours, and chose the road to Gotham rather than Barton because the hill was less steep. Even so, she found it hard to keep to the saddle of her new Raleigh. ‘Gotham is where those funny yokels tried to rake the moon out of a pond,’ he said.

‘People still do,’ she smiled. ‘They’re always fishing for something they can never get.’

Was that a hint against what she must know he was after? If rain threw it down — which didn’t seem likely — and they sheltered in a barn he might get at her buttons in the hugger-mugger. Or he might not, would have to be subtle and slow, but it would be a pity not to try because she might be dying to get the old mutton dagger inside her. With such a woman you never could tell.

Stopping by a gate, he took the top from a lemonade bottle, and passed it for her to drink, deciding to put on a bit of the old Herbert. ‘People fishing for something that turns out to be impossible can at least get the thrill of realizing how stupid they are. There’s always something to be had in fishing for the unattainable.’

‘You should be an actor, the way your accent changes when you try to say something interesting.’

‘Ah, I could have been a lot of things.’

‘I think there’s more to you than meets the eye.’

‘I can only hope so.’ His father’s advice, to make the woman imagine that all the good in you came from her, seemed apt at the moment. ‘I listen to the BBC, and get influenced, because I think you would like me to.’ Back to Bert, he spat out a mouthful of the vile and oversweet lemonade, and screwed the top back on as if to strangle the bottle. ‘I’m for the road. Are yer fit?’

She found him stiff, and awkward, though not detecting any definite fault only added to her confusion as to the real quality of his character, especially as she hadn’t actually known whether she wanted to come out on such a jaunt and be exposed to its full force. Cycling was more difficult than she had thought when, holding hands on the table in the café, he had so eloquently told her how pleasantly liberating a bike ride would be to the body and spirit. At such times he spoke like someone whose mind was halfway into another world, one she would be more comfortable in yet could hardly understand. He had a persuasive way of stating all arguments clearly, setting one against the other, but finally coming down on the one he wanted to win, and in such a way as to make you imagine you’d outlined it yourself.

He reached across and touched her hand, pointing to Leake Hills a mile away. ‘Just look at those splendid woods over there.’

‘I’m glad I came,’ she said. ‘It’s wonderful to be in the countryside.’

‘If I could ride close enough, and be in no danger of knocking you off the bike, I’d get a fan and keep the gnats off you.’

‘They’re not too bad.’ He could be gentlemanly and polite to an extent she never found in any of her previous boyfriends, who hadn’t shown a fraction of such finesse. But when he came out with: ‘After we get to Leake I think I’ll sink a pint or two in the pub. It’s thirsty work, this bikin’. As for yo’, duck, yer can ’ave a glass o’ shandy,’ she wondered where such habits and manners came from, and why it was, after saying something gallant, he immediately suggested an action which showed he was ashamed of having tried to be nice. Such switches of personality — or whatever it was — added to her mixed feelings, an anxiety latent at the best of times. She felt close to tears. He was unknowable, unreachable, unfathomable, and there must be something in him as hard as nails. Either that, or he was incredibly stupid, perhaps even cruel.

On the other hand maybe his frequent lapses into the demotic merely indicated his snobbery in wanting to make fun of the common people, but if that was the case how was it he did it so well? He had obviously picked it up from the pubs, and on the street, and being a good mimic knew how to make it sound genuine.

That, he thought, was what she would like to think, and he could only hope for her sake that she did. He came back with crisps and shandy from the bar, and a pint for himself, relishing the trip with this young woman who vacillated between the suave and the highly strung. Twelve miles out of the city added up to hardly enough time to be with her and get all he wanted, though if they did much more cycling she would no longer find it pleasant, he gathered, because her legs ached, and her behind was getting sore.

She seemed to be in the ladies for an hour, though it could have only been a few minutes. All the same, her absence went on long enough for him to think that if he couldn’t seduce her on this outing he wouldn’t bother to meet her again. He’d pack her in, to quote Archie. In fact the chances of getting so far looked in no way promising, and he wondered what would happen to her if he wasn’t there when she came out of the ladies, if he mounted his bike and rode alone to Loughborough, to see what he could pick up there.

The longer he sat thinking about such a good idea the greater was the chance of her seeing only the back of him as he vanished through the door. Dwelling enjoyably on such a picture delayed him until she came smiling into the bar. His standing up to watch over her sitting down was seen as another example of perfect manners, but then he had to spoil it by saying that since he was on his feet he might as well go to the bar and get his glass refilled.

Outside, noting that her tyres had not been firm since Clifton, he pumped them up, but even ruined that considerate service by adding: ‘You feel the bumps, and that’s what’s making your arse sore.’ He talked about continuing the ride as far as Nanpanton in Charwood Forest. ‘Maybe jolly old toothless Nancy Panton will have a cup o’ tea and a charcoal sandwich ready for us!’

Such a total run of forty miles would be impossible for her, though nothing to him, and to persist in the idea would be cruelty, so like the reliable consort he was called on to be, he confessed to a little tiredness, and said maybe they ought to wend their way back, providing of course that she didn’t mind. ‘I love you,’ he said, ‘in any case, and wouldn’t like either of us to get too exhausted.’

She put a hand on his, eyes lovely with relief. ‘Yes, we can turn round. I don’t mind.’

‘Whatever you like, sweetheart.’

She had hoped for a pleasant meadow by the roadside on which to eat lunch but, a little ahead in Gotham and without saying anything, he forked left on to another track. Ascending the hill she felt the bumps as painfully as ever, so manoeuvred her bike on foot, until he took both machines and pushed them easily along.

She could imagine being married to him, for he thought of kind things to do almost before they came into her own mind. On the other hand he could be disturbingly unpredictable, at times like someone on the verge of mental illness. Or perhaps she was exaggerating, having often been wrong in differentiating the rough parts from the smooth, which led her to question the workings of her own reason, something she didn’t like at all, since it came too easily even in matters of no importance. No one had ever made her doubt herself more than Herbert, so that it was difficult to get the right advice from her instinct in dealing with him.

The slope steepened, awkward off the track to hold the bikes and guide them upright between tussocks or grass. She followed, willing him to stop, heard him call back after a rabbit skipped panic-struck towards the woods. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

To be fair — and she liked to be fair — she could never find the final damaging evidence that he was no good for her. Something always surfaced to make him likeable, so she assumed it would be all right to go on meeting him.

He stopped, and let her catch up. ‘You wanted to get as far away from the city blight as possible, so I did my best.’

He remembered everything, which was good, but only to use it against her, which wasn’t. His enthusiasm led her uncomplainingly to the line of woods, where he found a smooth place and spread his cycling cape like Raleigh his cloak so that she could sit in comfort.

‘We’re about three hundred feet up. See how many villages you can count.’

‘As if it matters,’ she said. ‘Stop treating me like an infant.’

He walked along the edge of the wood to find a way inside, where their snogging could take place more privately. He found it easy to get in, but knew it would be impossible to coax her under the barbed wire. ‘If I’d known about the fence I’d have brought some wire-cutters. I don’t like being kept out of places.’

The picture of him, like an ant gone wild, destroying with glee the fence which a farmer had spent so much to erect, disturbed her. It would be wrong. ‘You’d be breaking the law.’

On his own he would have cut a wide enough gap for a tank to get through. ‘You don’t believe I’m daft enough to do it?’

‘I don’t know. Do you know the difference between right and wrong? I sometimes wonder.’

So did he, feel the guise of Herbert getting away from him, slipping — sloping almost — over the horizon, and too far off ever to be brought back, a dim unreal person set apart, a pair of muddy heels vanishing in the distance. He found it frightening, fragmenting, but the fright coming and going like one of his other selves. It wasn’t always easy to feel convinced that he was who he was supposed to be at the moment. Often it was hard to tell even when he thought he most certainly knew. He came back to Herbert sufficiently to say: ‘I absolutely am aware of the difference between right and wrong. But anyone who does wrong not realizing that he does so is a fool.’

She thought better of continuing the sort of argument he would never let her win, and to divert him mentioned a burglary they’d had at the office a few nights ago.

‘Did they get much?’

‘Oh, some stamps. But they took two typewriters, and an adding machine.’

He looked into the sky, thinking he might have to call Bert back. ‘Nothing’s safe, I suppose. Life’s an ongoing guerrilla war between the rich and the poor.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’re not rich, and I’ll bet they’re not poor. So it’s wrong, whatever you say.’

Nor did he feel it was time for an argument. ‘I suppose you’re right, if I think about it.’

They ate sandwiches, corned beef for him, and lettuce and cheese for her. He drew her down on to the cape and kissed her, as gently as he hoped would be preferred, lips roaming to her forehead and eyes. She liked it, and put her arms around him in a relaxed way. They lay as if half-asleep and, it seemed to him as well as to her, perfectly harmonized with the smell of warm herbage and the rustling from trees behind.

‘I love you.’ He omitted the word ‘duck’, his love only true as far as the scorching desire of his groin. ‘I’ll never forget today,’ he murmured, warm breath caressing her ear. ‘Our lie-down together on the Gotham Hills will stay in my memory forever.’

‘I love you as well, but my arm’s going dead.’ He moved, an opportunity to readjust so that his hand could reach her ankle. He stroked the lisle covering between kisses and, crabwise, finger by finger, but in the slowest motion, inched as far as her calf, then let the hand rest awhile. She seemed unaware of his purpose, or at least she said nothing. Perhaps she liked the perspirational closeness, and enjoyed what he was doing, as long as he did it with gentleness and consideration. He assumed she wanted him to go on, so resumed the sly and tactical creep, her skirt ascending with his hand.

He toyed in the silky cavern at the back of the knee, and felt her passion increase, though perhaps it was only in his own mind. Motionless together on the hillside, like an outcrop of two bizarre rocks, he felt himself close to victory as the sweet and lingering kisses were returned.

His eyes were fully open before the final advance when, looking beyond her shoulder, he saw an animal fifty yards away, which he at first thought was a large dog, and wondered how the hell it came to be there. A reddish pelt glowed in the reflected sun, its long nose sniffing the breeze for prey. Clean and sturdy, as if fresh out of creation, an elect ruler of all it saw, the still pose seemed fixed forever: a fox.

For Cecilia to see it would be a unique treat, except that by pointing the scene out he would have to shift his besieging hand, which had gained its position after so much pertinacity. Telling her would make their hillside idyll even more memorable, an unforgettable prelude to the fucking she was going to get, and her gratitude would be everlasting, but he became Bert and Herbert both, and gloried in the fox whose resplendent orange brightness against dull green joined the two parts of him together. They had never been so close, and he took a lesson in the fox’s stillness to say nothing.

The encroaching hand under her skirt had a mind of its own, even so. Nor was the increasing pressure between his legs any help towards a decision. Under cover of a series of softened kisses his hand went higher, till a stiffened finger touched the rim of her knickers, and felt for a glorious second the texture of hair.

She moved. ‘Do you want all of Nottinghamshire to see what’s going on?’

He wouldn’t have cared if Leicestershire and Derbyshire were getting a look in as well. Nobody was visible, as far as he could see, and if some modern chiker had invested in a pair of binoculars to further his foul ends good luck to him — though if he caught anybody doing such a thing he’d pound them to blood and gristle.

At her movement the fox melted back into the woods, and she would never be aware of what, by his unity with the animal, he had allowed her to miss. He looked at his watch. ‘We’d better go, if we want to be back by dusk.’

She stood, and held him close, and he knew that the wrench away from loving had been as hard for her as for him. ‘We’ll do it soon, darling. I want it too, but it really wouldn’t be good to start anything here.’

Pride made him say it didn’t matter, and kiss her tenderly, telling himself that soon had better mean what it implied or he wouldn’t bother wasting much more time on her. Love ought to have some substance, and the wetter the better. His pocket hadn’t been lightened by the weight of a single french letter. Luckily he didn’t have cold rice pudding down his leg, though the tumescence was plain for her to see.


While reading The Times, clandestinely acquired with the Daily Mirror on his way through town that morning, he was disturbed by Mrs Denman calling that Archie was on his way upstairs. Bert put the newspaper under his pillow, and swung round to undo a packet of cigarettes.

Archie smiled forlornly, and put a weighty package on the bed. ‘I got this for yer.’ He wore his weekend suit, with collar and tie, though such a smart rig did not take attention from his black eye and scuffed face.

‘What ’appened to yo’?’ Bert said.

He sat on the spare chair, head down as if to hide the worst patches. ‘Got my comeuppance, din’t I?’

‘It bleddy looks like it. What ’appened?’

‘The other evening it was. Cherie and me was all set for a bit of delicious hearthrug pie when her ’usband comes back to the house with some of his pals. One at the front, but two at the back. I ran straight into the two at the back, the cunning bastards. Then all three set on to me. Some fucker must have shopped us.’

Bert grinned, the only response being: ‘Shall we go out and get the fuckpigs? Give ’em a real pastin’?’ Such an offer of assistance was all that could be made, after the hastily considered and rejected alternative of taking the mickey out of Archie for his misadventure. The problem was that after taking the mickey out of someone like Archie there wouldn’t be much left to take. Should Archie feel the consequences of such an emptying, which he probably would, being more sensitively acute than many, he might go into a berserker’s fit and take the house to pieces. Mrs Denmah wouldn’t like that. Nor, thought Herbert, would I.

Yet there was always more to Archie than anyone would suppose. ‘You never know, Bert,’ he said. ‘Maybe one day I’ll get a scar as bad as yourn, then I’ll ’ave all the women I like — maybe even a posh whore will fall for me. Anyway, I’ll get ’em sooner or later.’ He stood to unwrap the parcel. ‘Let ’em stew a bit. It’s the luck o’ the game, anyway.’

‘Where did you get this?’ A neat little portable typewriter lay snug in its shining black case. Herbert put it on the table and clipped it open, all keys and tappets shining, a black and red ribbon already installed. He hoped it wasn’t one of those taken from Cecilia’s office, though it was too late to worry about that. In any case, they didn’t use portables in offices.

‘Search me! It was just about to fall off the back of a lorry, I expect, and somebody — don’t ask me who — caught it in time and stopped it smashing to pieces.’ Archie stroked his battered face. ‘Ain’t she a beauty? I still can’t see why you want one, though.’

‘It’s summat to keep me out of mischief. I don’t fancy gerrin beat up like yo’.’ He slotted in a sheet of paper, and ping-ponged his name. Then he did Archie’s, both exquisitely printed. ‘How much do you want for it?’

‘They said twenty-five. Is that all right?’

‘I shan’t argue.’ He smiled: good to think of his father coughing up for such a potent tool. ‘Can it wait till the weekend? I’ve got a cheque to cash.’

‘I suppose so. But no longer, or I’ll have to volunteer for Korea. Them lads want their money quick.’

‘I shan’t let you down. It’s worth a fortnight’s wages to me.’ He craved to see some of his handwriting in print, but could not dismiss Archie so soon after he had brought the machine. As consolation he clacked out both names again, and thought how distinguished they looked. He turned to Archie. ‘You’ll have to stop going with married women.’

‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I love married women. They know so much. And they’re grateful when you mek ’em cum, especially if they’re married to a numskull, as most of ’em are. Can’t think why. Anyway, let’s go down the road for a pint, and seal the deal. Bruises like these make you thirsty.

Fourteen

The wall of the restaurant was mostly glass, making two of everything and everyone, which suited him fine: a double ration of his own face each belonging to the other. One sort was all Thurgarton-Strang, roman-nosed and verging to swarthy, and a cicatrice whose up and down soreness acted like a barometer for his spirit. Then there was the brighter and more accepting version of Bert Gedling, out for fun rather than mischief, and not giving a toss for anyone in the world, not even for himself should he need to fight his way out of a perilous fix.

How the place with such mirrors had got through the Blitz he would never know, but a surreptitious side-on view of all the Cecilias, whose eyes were preoccupied in other directions to avoid his scar — because it wasn’t a pretty sight tonight, or even at the best of times — showed how tragic her aspect could occasionally be. Maybe he and she were made for each other, though he rather thought not. Her laughter always seemed as much a punctuation device as cursing did with those in the factory, because there was nothing humorous about their glum meal. She seemed sad, and distant in thought. ‘Say something,’ he told her.

An obliterating glare dissolved, as it should from a carefully brought up young woman. She smiled: ‘I liked your short stories.’

His thank you came with a sneer, hard to say why.

‘They’re typed very well,’ she said. ‘Not a mistake anywhere.’

He objected to her thinking he’d make a good clerk, or penpusher, but let it pass. ‘I got a book out of the library on how to touch-type.’

She drank her coffee as if it were brewed from superior acorn dust and, forgetting her determination to make him break silence first: ‘They’re very vivid. But why do you write about people who swear all the time, and do terrible things to one another? I mean, they’re always getting drunk, and being sick all over the place.’

He pulled himself back from laughing. ‘That’s the way they are. It’s no good playing it down.’

‘I think you play it up, though.’

‘I appreciate the criticism.’ He didn’t. She could at least say she was entertained, or amused, or had learned something about people she didn’t know. Or she could just say his stories were wonderful, and shut up. ‘I’ll have to check what you say, and then maybe I’ll do better by making things a bit more subtle.’

‘There must be other subjects to write about.’ She was encouraged by his attitude. ‘People just don’t drink and fight all the time.’

She didn’t mention the fucking, of which there was quite a bit, though it must have been in her mind. It was certainly in his, but he wouldn’t bring the matter up in case it delayed him getting such a nice middle-class woman into bed.

‘What’s more,’ she went on. She didn’t, presumably, know when to stop. ‘You are not like that.’

‘Thank you very much.’

His table manners and behaviour tonight were impeccable, even to someone who had always found such fault with the clerks who had taken her out that they soon gave her up for a girl who would provide unstinted love and approval. None had come close to the perfection of Herbert at his best. ‘You aren’t, though, are you, darling?’

Certainly not, but the Bert in him regretted not wearing overalls and having a spanner to brandish. ‘I couldn’t write about such frightful people if I was. Nor would I care to.’ He mimicked a public school accent with sufficient accuracy to stop her suspecting he had at one time used it. Nor did he want her to think he was mocking her accent, of the local but clearly enunciated sort. He was far enough into alien territory to feel irritated and uncomfortable, and to realize he should be on his guard. It was hard enough fitting into one sort of life, and here he was jinking among three.

His obvious hedging and dodging put a flush into her delicately boned face. ‘You should read more books by Walter Hawksworth. He’s good. You’d learn a lot from him.’ He wondered if she had ever been to bed with Hawksworth, the way she went on. Hawksworth was a good writer, she said. He wrote about those whom any sensible person would want to be like. Even if people in his books happened to do something bad they did such actions later on that they ended up good. Hawksworth didn’t write about those common people who lived all around us, and who didn’t care about the difference between right and wrong. The people all around us, well, you knew how they lived already, in any case, so you didn’t need to read about them.

She was so delightful it would be easy for him to relinquish the role of Bert Gedling, or enough to give that impression. His defences fell flat when he was only vaguely aware of the rough side of himself and could be mostly a Thurgarton-Strang, a part in the play of his life which seemed to charm her, though he couldn’t really care whether it did or not. He could, after all, be who he liked whenever he liked and behave in any way he cared to, having had a good education and come from the sort of family that she would never know about. He had just spent a good part of his week’s wages paying for their dinner and she hadn’t even had the grace to thank him. She wasn’t always aware of the change in his accent, and whatever was in her mind he could only hope it would snare her into doing all he wanted her to do, though as soon as this looked like coming about — and his villainous faculties, he smiled, would tell him precisely when — he would revert positively to Bert Gedling in the hope that her ant-like restless desire would let him do what he liked no matter who he felt himself to be.

‘I’m going slowly through the Everyman Library.’ One of the books Isaac had given him had a full list at the back. ‘I’m on Joseph Conrad at the moment. Lord Jim was terrific. Jim is a ship’s officer who jumps overboard when he thinks the boat’s going down, and leaves all his dago passengers to drown.’

‘What an awful thing to do.’

‘It makes a marvellous novel though. And he pays for it in the end. You’d like it.’

‘He should have stayed on the ship and looked after them, or gone down with it.’

Maybe he shouldn’t have been on the ship at all, just as Phaeton ought not to have driven his father’s sun chariot across the sky. Look what trouble that caused. Most come to grief when they overreach themselves, though if you don’t overreach yourself you’ll never know what you can do. And if you come a cropper it doesn’t much matter as long as you’re still alive. And if you aren’t still alive your worries are over.

‘Then there would have been no moral in the story.’ He reached for her hand: ‘Conrad does rather put old Hawksworth in the shade, though. I think you ought to tackle a bit of grown-up stuff now and again. Maybe you should start with Evelyn Waugh. He’s very good.’

She smiled. ‘I do find you difficult to understand.’

Nor do I always understand you, and I don’t care to, but what does it matter anyway? You only need to understand about someone when you’re writing about them, and if it’s someone you’ve never met that’s even better, because then you can make it up, which comes out just as good if not more truthfully than if you had really bumped into them. ‘It takes a long time to understand a person.’

‘You don’t tell me anything about yourself.’

Her twinge of complaint was difficult to forgive, since not only did he know so little of himself but her pathetic attempt to find out more than he even knew made it seem as if she was starting to nag.

‘Let’s go for a walk, my love.’ He manoeuvred her through a crowd at the door waiting for a table. ‘I’ve told you my life-story already.’

‘Yes, but it was a very skimpy one.’

Let her settle for that, and wonder about the inconsistencies, in her old-maidish droning. He held her by the waist as they walked towards Slab Square, her arm over his shoulder being a slight advance up the ladder of affection. The human warmth was good for him. He needed to have a body close to his own, and none could serve better than hers. However he thought of her, he wanted to hear that she liked his writing, but the sparse comments so far could perhaps be put down to the bottle of wine which had tasted like sock-juice, for which he couldn’t altogether blame her. The next hope was for her body, but all he’d had up to now were a few kisses verging on the passionate from him and the hard given from her while saying good night at the gate of where she lived in Mapperley Park. ‘Very skimpy,’ she repeated.

‘I’ll write a novel about it one day, so’s you can have a good read. I can’t explain things to you in speech.’ He let Herbert take over again. ‘I find it extraordinarily difficult to say what’s on my mind, probably because I’m so fond of you. The ardent desire I feel for you puts me off. On the other hand, you haven’t told me much about your life.’

‘I did, but you weren’t very interested.’

‘I didn’t want to be nosy.’

‘Are you only saying that because you don’t want me to go on about you, and your past? I know you aren’t who you say you are, but I don’t care. I like it that way, in fact. I knew who my other boyfriends were, only too well, and they bored me to tears. I don’t care where you came from.’

‘Well, I respect that opinion.’ And he did. ‘But I still don’t know much about you,’ which he realized was more of a lie than not.

‘I think you do. Anyway, not much happened in my life. I went to Mundella Girls till I was sixteen. Then I went to work. My father could have kept me at home, but he told me to get a job, so that I’d know what it was like to earn a living. Not that I minded. What would I have done, staying at home?’

He wondered how many men she’d really had. She was at least thirty, but he thought there couldn’t have been many. When he asked she said it was no business of his, and he had to agree that it wasn’t, because she didn’t want to know how many women he’d been with. In more ways than one she seemed older than himself.

They walked up gloomy Mansfield Road, all shops shut, and few people about, though with fists clenched he marked each shadow until it had gone by. They turned off by the cemetery. ‘I’m on my own in the house for a couple of weeks,’ she said into his ear. ‘Mum and Dad have gone on holiday to France in the car.’

His heart went bump in the night. ‘Really? Where to?’

‘They’re staying a night in Paris, then going down to Nice.’

‘That’s really good news. Thanks for telling me.’

She looked at him as if he were a fool — as he’d supposed she would. ‘Why not? I only hope their travel allowance lasts out, and they don’t come back too early.’

‘Your father must have stuffed his back pocket with five-pound notes, you can bet.’

She pulled her arm away. ‘He’d never do anything like that.’

Oh, wouldn’t he? She had no right to be so naive at her age. He really was a fool. She only meant you never said that kind of thing.

The large house had its own space, lilac bushes and trees heavy from rain, a damp soil smell reminding him of muddy and murderous rugby matches on the playing fields at school. ‘I’d like to see inside. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a big house like that.’

She squeezed his arm, at being able to grant his wish. The kitchen covered the same acreage as Mrs Denman’s ground floor, but the decoration reminded him of his clergyman uncle’s place near Malvern, all pine wood and marble top. ‘What sort of work does your father do?’

‘Work? He goes to business. He has property. Shops in town. Things like that.’

He watched her make a pot of tea, so prissy and precise with the doses of leaf it was bound to be as weak as gnat’s piss, but at least she did it with her coat off, a white blouse over slender bosom from neck to wrists, all done up, with beads as well, which made her look, as Archie would have said, like lamb and lettuce. ‘What’s upstairs?’

Her smile of amusement was real, though time would tell whether it was because she had already arranged everything. ‘Just bedrooms. Why?’

‘Can I see?’

‘If you promise to behave’ — a positive laugh this time.

‘Of course I promise.’

On the landing at the top he said: ‘I suppose you have a woman in to clean all these carpets?’

‘Oh, I vacuum them sometimes, on Saturday afternoon.’

He put both hands forward over her breasts, finding some shape after all. Encouraged by a trembling hand at her shoulder he kissed the ringlets from her neck and licked the warm skin, a hard-on pressing into her skirt. ‘I’d love to be intimate with you,’ he whispered, on an all or nothing course.

He expected to be pushed away, but she turned, and he tasted the cachou breath around her mouth. ‘Can you cope?’

If he answered yes she would take him off for a rake who had a dozen women on the go. But if he said no she might write him off as inexperienced, such virtue not doing him any good at all. Remembering the triple-packet of frenchies in his left waistcoat pocket he had to say that he could.

He knew he would have to take special care with her delicate body, in any case, otherwise she might break up under his bit of rough stuff. Another thing was that a pregnancy would be fatal, the baby so big it would end up having her. He felt as if he had never before been in such a situation, that his time with Eileen was puppy love from another age, almost from another country, which with fiery Alice in Cyprus it had been, though their love had been full-blown, and he hoped Cecilia would come up to it; but going into the furnace of a new affair cut off the others as if such phases of his past life were like the carriages of a train, each abandoned to rot in a siding when done with.

He stood by an armchair as she took off her clothes, needing minutes to come down from three-o-one with so many pearl buttons to her blouse. Her brown eyes glowed, and a faintly modest smile made her look like the whore of Babylon, apt for the moment, but something she could never otherwise be as she unclipped her pretty white brassiere and gave her tits a stroke before attending to her stockings and skirt. Had she put on her best underwear knowing how the evening would end, or did a woman like that always wear such clean and flimsy stuff?

The light was clinical, which must be what she wants, he thought, the full-length mirrors of the white wood wardrobe doors seeming to multiply the dazzle. She neither wanted to hide the slight wrinkling of her mouth nor diminish the intensity of his scar. Her figure was thin but not inelegant, and he lustfully noted her charming breasts with their delicate carmine nipples. Seeing her whole nakedness appear, though she was no Aphrodite parting the waves and coming into land, he noted how shapely her legs were now that he could see them all the way up, and robust as well, as if made for a fuller figure than she had, and which some day she might grow into. Dark ringlets turned her into a houri, out of an illustration in some fairy-tale book he had once seen.

‘I always knew you were beautiful.’ He smoothed a palm down the neat bush of pubic hair. ‘But you’re far more so with no clothes on.’

She blushed almost to her shoulders. ‘Thank you. I like looking at myself in the mirror, as I’m doing now.’

‘Do you do it often?’

‘Why not?’ She drew back the covers of the bed, and their first tentative slow-motion movements hardened him more. He had taken the precaution of being already sheathed and, by midnight, three well-blobbed specimens lay discarded around the bed.

‘Weren’t you good?’ She seemed an entirely different person to him now. ‘Don’t you think it was worth waiting for?’ Her smile was brief, faintly teasing, which he liked because it drew them even closer together. ‘I think it was, certainly,’ she went on, wanting him to agree, while he could only wonder that she saw an altered man in him as well. ‘You’d better flush those things away, though, and be careful not to spill anything.’

She was nothing if not practical, influenced no doubt by reality, which he couldn’t care less about at such a time. He bombed them into the toilet bowl, each making a satisfying splash, as if retaining their individuality to the end, then pulled the chain, but even after a ton of water one of them surfaced like a poor benighted jellyfish that didn’t want to go into that bourne from which no traveller returned. He waited for the cistern to build up, and tried again, but the same forlorn homunculus spluttered up and eased its bulbous tail out for another circuit. The head of number two peaked from under the porcelain lip to see how his brother — or sister maybe — got on. Two more attempts, but number three still wanted to survive. Herbert didn’t fancy plunging a hand in to drag the recalcitrant bleeders out and throw them from the window for fear Cecilia’s parents would think a funny bush had grown in their garden during their time away.

She knocked on the door. ‘Are you all right, darling?’

‘Yeh, fine, coming.’ Another massive flush sent the final unwilling spunk bag to its doom — or he hoped so. Maybe it would surface in the morning for a final pathetic look at the sunlight coming through the mock stained-glass window, and only then do the decent thing and drown itself. At least he wouldn’t be there to hear her comments if the bloody thing didn’t succeed.

On the way home he told himself he was in love, said it over and over on the long depressing stretch through town, not even complaining at the thought of having to be in his overalls by seven. Words, however, were not rivets to fasten his emotions into place. He loved her compliance, and the pleasure of going round the world on her body again and again on her parents’ great bed. If he saw no more of her he would surely miss such delectable copulation. It was not, on the other hand, the profound and life-long love he ought to have felt, for it didn’t have that rootish tug of the heart, the all-enveloping sinking into the depths as between him and Eileen in the old days, which memory surfaced after his flesh to flesh fucking with Cecilia as if it had been only yesterday — though when seemingly flying home he felt no reason for complaint.


On Sunday morning he saw Archie and his pansy brother Raymond out by the shallows of the Trent near Clifton, both in their waders and hoping for a bite from fish that had just about had time to congratulate themselves at escaping the peril of the weir. Raymond went off to moon by himself, and Archie complained to Bert that the pair of them hadn’t been out for a booze-up lately.

‘It’s all right for you,’ Bert told him. ‘You can see your women in the week because they’re married, but me, I’m courtin’, and I can only meet my tart on Fridays and Saturdays.’ After a genuine no-nonsense berserker laugh, he added that his backbone was turning slowly, almost without him knowing — though he would most fully by the end — into a string of shiny Wollaton Park conkers.

Archie sat on the bank to watch his float. ‘Who is she, then?’

About to blurt out the truth, honour forced Herbert into an account of how he met a young woman called Joanna on his way back from guzzling a jar or two in the Admiral Rodney at Wollaton. He described how he sat next to her on the top deck of the bus, rain peppering at the windows all the lumbering way uphill and down into town. ‘I didn’t know how it was. We just got talking.’

Archie soaked in the account, enjoying the story whether true or not — though Herbert realized he took it for gospel, because why shouldn’t he? What you said to people they believed, as he would have taken in a similar story from Archie. ‘You clicked good and proper.’

‘Yeh, we talked the hind leg off a donkey. Then we got off the bus in Slab Square, and went for a drink in the Old Salutation. Lovely, she was. Dark hair, and a nice slim figure. She towd me she worked in an office and had a room of her own at West Bridgford, in a house owned by a Polish bloke.’

Archie clapped him on the back, saying what a ram he was. ‘I’d like to meet her sometime.’

‘Fuck off!’ Bert said. ‘If you did you’d only tek her away from me. I’m keeping her to myself.’

‘No, not me, Bert. I’d never tek my mate’s girl. I don’t need to do that.’

He returned the thump on the back. ‘I know you don’t. I was only jokin’. Look, yer float’s bobbin up and down.’

Three weeks after their first session of love Cecilia told him, with much regret, that her parents would be back next day. Herbert wasn’t worried. They had fucked as much in that time as if they had been married for six months, and a rest before he melted away would be no bad thing. They smoked the usual cigarette over a mug of coffee in the kitchen after their couple of hours upstairs. ‘We’ll go on seeing each other, though?’

‘Whenever we can. You make me know who I am,’ she said, ‘and I love you for it.’

His high opinion of her changed from that moment, to something of what it had been before their bonus of a honeymoon, because he couldn’t think much of a woman who didn’t know who she was every minute of the day and night, and who put the responsibility of defining herself on to someone like him. She had a year or two’s advantage in age, so such a statement made her seem almost childish. On the other hand he knew that his juvenile denigration had to be set against the intensity and delight of a passion never to be obtained from such as Eileen, a sort who knew herself to the core and would spit in anybody’s face if they tried to tell her who she was. She also never wanted to try any position except the hydraulic up and down.

Maybe Cecilia was flattering him, and knew very well who she was, and if so that was even less tenable. She was secretly smiling because he was younger and, rarely being capable of deciding which of these states she was in, hinted that even he did not know who he was. She wasn’t to know that the only time he did was while sitting in his room to write, and he saw no reason to tell her.

Nor was that entirely the case, for in his dark thoughts he knew to the marrow and back again who he was, certainly in a more complicated way than anything she could mean. He was two people instead of one, and knew them both intimately, even if only because they were so widely separated and he could see them from every angle. You couldn’t be more deeply aware of yourself than that.

The advantage of such thoughts was that before knowing what part of the town he strode through he was almost home, having hardly noticed his part in the real world at all.


The word love came up all too often in their encounters, especially after they had been together in his room, which she liked even less than the district roundabout. She sat on the bed fixing her suspenders. ‘Where do you think all this is going to lead?’

His mood hardened. Not another discussion about that. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, are we just going to go on like this forever?’

He opened the curtains and looked out over the dismal backs, not a good sight for his morale. ‘What would you like us to do?’

‘If you don’t know, how can I?’

She was proposing to him, but wouldn’t come right out with it. He put on his jacket, fastened the top button. ‘I like things as they are.’

‘Oh, like, like, like,’ she cried out. ‘I don’t care what you like. That’s not what I mean.’

He passed the ever clean handkerchief from his lapel pocket, in case tears were close. ‘I love you so much I want it to go on like this forever.’

‘Well, I don’t know.’ She sniffed into his linen. ‘I don’t, I really don’t.’ And threw the handkerchief on the bed. ‘You can see me home now.’

Her kisses were just as passionate at the gate, and he was more than in the mood to match them. Quarrels were meaningless when they were finished. Let things go on forever, until for some reason they stopped. Marriage to her or anyone would be a loss of freedom, and as serious as suicide.

They said they loved each other, genuine sentiments on either side, though at times he thought guiltily that they couldn’t altogether be so on his, otherwise he would indeed have known there was somewhere to go from where they were now. To latch himself on to her style of life would mean climbing the ladder to where he came from, which was unthinkable. Maybe their love in bed was only so satisfying because they disagreed on almost every issue, the one pleasure that stopped them running a mile from each other.

Having written down his thoughts on the matter, and put the papers into a folder for possible use in the future, he yawned and got into bed.

Fifteen

Herbert was happy to see steam coiling from the chimney of Wilford pit, and hear the jangle of laden coal trucks in the shunting yards. ‘Work, you bastards, work!’ he made Bert shout. ‘Flat out, day and night! Work! Keep at it!’ — then pulled him to rein but not before he had pictured a cartwheel, and a maniacal laugh with a thumb at his nose.

He passed through the area to reach his favourite strolling ground by the sluggish but insidious Trent, under towers of humming transmission lines, where surveyors were checking levels and mapping the alluvium to make roads and lay out factories.

The city spread its buildings for people to enjoy, better dwelling places than those on the crummy acres of the Meadows where Archie lived. The new estate across the river caused arguments when Cecilia said what a shame it was there’d soon be no countryside left. Her complaint reminded Herbert of tedious belly-aching books by D. H. Lawrence and others, who wanted people to live in cottages without bathrooms but with the Greenwood Tree at hand to dance around at the weekend; while at night they would read those same writers’ books by oil and candlelight. He erased the picture, and walked more quickly, glad when he was beyond all sight of the city.

A notebook on his knee, he sat by the weir at Beeston, green water sliding over the lip as smooth as paint. In the warm sun, when the breeze slackened, smoke from his cigarette kept off the midges. Instead of stories and sketches he thought he would use his experience of the last seven years and write a novel. People on the street and at work, and his digs, led intense and unique lives. They did everywhere, but few seemed to realize that they did here as well. Everyone he knew thought themselves the centre of the world, as far as they were concerned. Burdened in the morning with fatigue, headaches and unresolved dreams on their way to the factory, they were quick to be offended if anything unexpected was put in the way of routine, not wanting to work but knowing they must to earn a living. Only when fully awake in the middle of the day, and aware that all they had to do was endure until evening, could they afford to be cheerful. They slogged home at half past five, as if having stood so long at a machine had solidified legs and feet into lead. Yet when a sluice of water had gone over chest and face, and they’d eaten a tea of the cheapest food, the daze cleared from before their eyes, and what seemed like the length of another day opened for them to do what they liked in. Eight hours of sweat had been traded for eight hours of freedom, and everyone was different in the use they put it to. Likewise with Bert, who Herbert at times knew better than himself. The permutations of stories from such existences were endless, and even incidents out of his imagination could be described in sufficient detail to seem credible. He mulled until clouds darkened over the eddying water, giving reason to hurry home and make a beginning.

The typed sheets lay on his table under a folded shirt, a secure enough hiding place, he had thought, until Mrs Denman said one day at supper: ‘I didn’t realize you were writing a book, Bert.’

He cut a sausage in two, dipped one half in a pool of sauce. ‘What meks yer think that?’

She let the newspaper fall. ‘I can’t see as Archie will like what you say about him, true or not.’

‘It ain’t Archie,’ he said gruffly, reaching for the bread. ‘And if it was he wouldn’t mind.’

‘I only found it because I wanted to wash your shirt’ — not caring, he assumed, to be accused of snooping. ‘As for that woman you write such things about, well! I suppose she’s that nice dark one you tek to your room.’

‘No.’ He didn’t see why she should feel like a criminal or, worse, a sneak. ‘It’s completely made up.’

‘So you say. But there’s me in it, as well. I’ve got black hair, though, not ginger.’

‘It’s all right, Ma.’ He could only laugh, and touch her arm. ‘I’ll alter it before it’s finished. You won’t know yourself when I’ve done with you.’

‘That’s a fine thing to say!’ Which remark he couldn’t decide how to take. Perhaps she was amused at the description, and wanted him to leave it be, for she smiled: ‘I allus thought there was more to you than met the eye.’

Within three months he had written the novel again, sucking so much ink into the rubber sack of his fountain pen that he wondered if for the rest of his life he would use sufficient of the blue-black liquid to drown himself. Changing people so that they couldn’t be recognized, yet not distort the sense of their reality, or their appearance to the world, seemed hardly possible. The best he could hope was that — if by a far off chance anyone in the district read it — few but scattered qualities of various people they knew would be detectable. He wanted to make the book readable and convincing mainly for himself and for whoever didn’t know how industrial workers lived.

Every day in the factory, as each finished artefact fell from his lathe, he wondered what vocation he might otherwise have followed in his life. He could have been a soldier, certainly, perhaps an actor, even a confidence man, not to mention a mechanic that half of himself had become, but he was turning most of all into a thief of broken dreams, or a cat burglar of other people’s lives. Switching off, he tidied up so as to leave the lathe and its surroundings clean for the next morning’s start. The lathe had been the only thing in his life he could go back to, but now he had something else, his spirit floating like a compass needle in alcohol as he reached for his jacket, haversack of sandwich paper and empty flask, and collected his new Raleigh from the cycle shed. He rode away from the factory like a somnambulist, and when he got home washed himself at the kitchen sink and sat down to a silent supper. Afterwards he went upstairs and closed the door to his room. Eight hours of pandering to the mechanical part of himself called for a refuge in which he could fit his daydreams together like the scattered pieces of a Meccano set. Phrase by phrase, he was assembling a version of himself, but not turning into a Bert or a Herbert, rather someone a little of both but unique to neither. Such a way of finding out who he was gradually revealed that no one ever discovered who they were, at least not to the depth and unity he had formerly hoped was possible. The cold emotion felt while writing told him that he was reconstituting himself, whoever he was, by using the people among whom he lived. From Phaeton driving a disintegrating chariot across the sky he was putting the pieces back and fixing them together while the vehicle was still in motion.


A dark cloud, shaped like the top half of South America, drifted across scintillating Ursa Major. While saying a passionate goodnight to Cecilia at the gate of her house he noticed a man smoking a cigar come on to the pavement, and look up and down the road as if wondering what rent he would charge if he owned the houses on it, or as if to make sure that no roughnecks from Radford or the Meadows were swarming up in the darkness with knives between their teeth to take his posh villa to pieces: her father.

Cecilia broke free, and forestalled him. ‘Hello, Dad.’

‘Thought I saw you. Is this your young man?’

Herbert objected to the description, it being a long time since he had thought of himself as young, and in any case he didn’t care to be lumped with any group of the population by such a slob. But for Cecilia’s sake he held out his hand, moodily shaken by a short, compact, bald-headed man who all but ignored him by saying sharply to Cecilia: ‘You’d better get in. It’s late.’

Herbert appreciated the kiss on his cheek, but was annoyed at such obedience from a woman of her age. ‘Good night, then.’

The large front door thumped to. ‘You seem to be courting my daughter.’

Bert opened his packet of Senior Service, and took time to light one. ‘You could say as much.’

‘I hope you’re not stringing her along.’

What kind of world was he living in? ‘If you believe that you’ll believe anything.’

He scuffed the end of his cigar into the pavement. ‘Have you got any long-term plans?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I’m not surprised you don’t know. Future intentions — you know very well what I’m getting at. I’d be interested to hear your views.’

‘So would I. When I have some you’ll be the first to know, after Cecilia, I expect.’

‘That’s straight enough. She deserves well.’

‘I couldn’t agree more.’

‘Make sure she gets it, then.’

Herbert’s supercilious smile was wasted in the dark. If I loved her I’d be polite, because of his age, which is supposed to give him wisdom and knowledge, but who can say he’s wiser or more knowing than I am? He thinks all the advantages on his side give him the right to test my seriousness with Cecilia, but I stopped taking tests when I left the army. He clenched his fists at having been forced into reflection, ready to knock the self-important little tyke down if he said much more. ‘Are you threatening me?’

‘You told her you worked in an office.’ Coming closer, Herbert gave him top marks for guts. ‘But I happen to know you work in a factory.’

‘She’s aware of that.’

‘I don’t think she is.’

‘She should be by now. In any case,’ the full public school accent took him over, ‘it’s none of your business. So if you’ll excuse me, I must be going. I have to get up in the morning and do a day’s work.’

‘If you think I don’t work, you’re wrong.’ Herbert sensed the man relenting towards him, maybe because of the accent, which made him angrier. The pathetic swine wanted a good pasting, but there was no point squandering time. ‘I’m not implying anything, old boy. I’m just trying to tell you, in no uncertain terms, to get off my back.’ It was satisfying to see him walk away so quickly.


It had to be done somewhere, so why not in his room? He led the way step by step, between wallpaper that must have been there since before the Boer War. Likewise the shabby carpet. Cecilia wore the usual mock-thoroughbred expression at muted bruto noises from the backyards, and turned up her shapely nose at the sparse economy of the furnished room, heavy with odours from train and cigarette smoke, and diesel fumes from the buses, not much improved when he closed the window and curtains. A good half of him sympathized with her, which didn’t please him, so he said: ‘If I bump into your old man again I’ll black both his eyes, and break one of his arms.’

She laughed as he closed the door. ‘Oh, darling, you made him hopping mad. I promised faithfully not to see you any more. Don’t be angry, though. He was only trying to look after me. He still thinks I’m a young girl. There are times when I don’t like it, but I know he’ll never grow up and treat me as a woman, and I’m twenty-nine.’

‘Doesn’t it bother you?’

She sat on the bed. ‘I’m used to it. I can always pacify him, and get what I want.’ Does that mean, Herbert wondered, that she thinks she can do the same with me? He undid his belt. ‘Take your clothes off.’

‘You know, I don’t much like doing it here.’

He drew her forward for a kiss, and managed it delicately. ‘It’s just as sweet as anywhere else. I feel such love for you. Come on, sweetheart.’

The encounter reminded her of one they had seen in a French film of before the war, so she loosened her skirt, and lay on the bed. He manoeuvred a warm shoulder out of her blouse, much appreciating that she accepted his squalid digs as an adventurous place for a fuck. His kisses sent her into such rapture that soon it didn’t matter that they weren’t on the brightly lit bed at home. He couldn’t be sure to what extent she had climaxed, because a train whistle sounded at the same time.

‘You keep promising to let me see your typewriter,’ she said, arranging her clothes. ‘But you never do.’

We’ve just made love a couple of feet above it, he wanted to say, having wrapped it in a piece of blanket and shoved it under the bed. Not that he was convinced the machine had been stolen from her office. ‘One of the letters went phut, and it’s away for repair.’

‘Oh, what firm do you use?’

What indeed? ‘I take it to a bloke up the road. He knows all about them. Used to work at Barlock’s.’

‘I really must see it, one day. I can’t wait to read your novel, either, when it’s finished.’

‘Nor can I.’

‘Well, you know what I mean.’ She didn’t want to stay long after making love, as if everyone in the street had their ears fixed against the wall. The French film effect had worn off. The room was cold, its window rattling at every breeze. She wanted to be walked back to where steam pipes were hot to the fingers.

She came out of the love-making mood before he did, though he was happy enough to shift, even to walk in silence through the same old dismal town, rain blowing against their faces.

‘Let’s say goodnight at the end of the road in case my father’s waiting. No use antagonizing him unnecessarily.’ Another reason was the ever present violence in Herbert which, though it had some attraction, made her afraid for herself as well as for her father. It was too easy to imagine them getting into a fight. She would like Herbert to have more control, and not be so self-indulgent. He was often touchy for little reason. Her other young men had put on a show of respect for her father, but Herbert relished no such laws, and her father had ranted only that day that he wouldn’t trust him as far as he could throw him.


They met less often, she making excuses for staying at home, which he didn’t question, using the time to work on his novel, whose progress she no longer asked about, indicating that she had lost interest, which at times suited him well, while at others it increased his sense of isolation.

He persuaded her to go to the pub on Wilford Road, thinking she might like to see a scene from one of his chapters. He led her along dark streets to get there, which route, apart from tiring her, put her into a gloomy state, especially when the devil was in him to rile her more than usual. The saloon bar was disappointingly empty. ‘You haven’t been in a dive like this before, I suppose?’

She smiled, knowing his game. ‘Is it just another of your planned adventures? It’s called slumming, isn’t it? If so, I can do without it. Pubs like this aren’t places a well brought-up woman would normally go into.’

‘A good upbringing should allow one to go anywhere.’

She sipped her brandy as if the rogue factory worker before her would belt her one if she didn’t appreciate it, or he would look askance if she drank it too quickly. Like everything about him it was hard to tell. ‘You ought to get a room in a better district.’

He only annoyed her to make her more lively, unless it was an underhand way of increasing the liveliness in himself, which thought brought on momentary shame at such meanness, though in revenge at her making him feel it he said: ‘You’ve told me that a hundred times already.’

Her face flushed with excitement, as if every quarrel took them further into the unknown. ‘I’m telling you again.’

‘There are two reasons why I don’t,’ he said calmly. ‘One is that it’s cheap where I am, and the other is that it’s close to work. Another thing is I like the woman who runs the place.’

She retied the pretty coloured scarf around her neck. ‘But you’re a writer, aren’t you? And you work in an office, don’t you? You could surely get a nice flat.’

He swallowed half his pint, wondering whether to belch. He didn’t, though if this was taking place in a story he certainly would have. ‘I’ve slaved on the shop floor since I was fourteen, except for a few years in the army.’

‘Oh stop that stupid talk. You know very well what my father told me. I suspected as much before, anyway. But why did you try to deceive me?’ She was close to tears. ‘That’s what’s so unforgivable.’

If things had gone that far between two people it was time to end the affair. He grinned, as widely as he was able to stretch his lips without the help of his fingers. ‘I didn’t deceive you, duck.’

‘You revelled in it. And in any case I’ve always known you weren’t what you said you were.’

He respected her, and maybe loved her too much even now to let rip the full power of his assumed personality. ‘You just try to guess everything, without coming out honestly and asking to talk it over. You don’t know anything about me.’

‘But if you loved me you’d have been open with me.’ She was ready to let the tears fall. ‘Why weren’t you?’

She guessed he had been searching for a reason to stop seeing her, and realized that she wanted to stop seeing him as well. Her legs supported her in standing up, though it was hard to stop the shake at her ankles. ‘You’re sly and deceitful, and mean. You’re afraid of the world and everybody in it. You don’t know anything about human beings because you’re not human yourself.’

The words came out hard, like a machine gun firing dumdum bullets which ought to have chewed his guts to mush, and would have if they’d meant as much to him as they obviously did to her. Real life again, he smiled. She had come alive at last, at the very point when he was intent on ditching her. To tolerate such yammering he drummed up more Archie than there was even Bert Gedling in himself, and no attempt at control could stop him. ‘You’re a sour old maid, a bleedin’ snob, as well, and all because o’ the work I do.’

Further words were stopped by her brandy splashing his jacket and shirt. ‘Don’t expect to see me again.’

The drops that hit his scar stung like acid, and if she hadn’t gone quickly he would have smacked her between the eyes. He had often wondered how it would end, and now he knew.

‘I think you asked for that,’ a man called from the bar, seeing his shock and rage impossible to hide.

Bert, realizing the procedure in such a situation, said that he supposed he did.

‘That’s a lovely scar you’ve got, though,’ the man said, stricken with admiration and envy. ‘Did she do it?’

‘Good Lord, no,’ Herbert smiled.

‘She gave you what-for, though, didn’t she?’

Herbert admitted that she had indeed, but said it wouldn’t be the last time such a bust-up would happen to him. He hoped not, anyway, otherwise what was the point of being on earth?

‘You’ve got a point there,’ the man said, and went on, cheerfully enough: ‘I’ve had six wives, if you want to know.’

Herbert didn’t particularly. ‘Six?’

‘Well, women, you might say. Three of ’em I left, and the other three left me. Not bad, eh? I can’t wait to find another, but I’m having a bit of a break at the moment.’

‘I’d say you deserved it.’ Herbert strolled across for another pint. The occasion of his rupture with Cecilia called for a swagger. He seated himself beside the Lothario, though he hardly seemed that, with his fat slack body and worn features, pasty skin and grey but alert eyes.

His navy-blue three-piece suit was of good quality, his collar and tie impeccable, as was the trilby at a confident enough angle. Even the stool he sat on seemed to feel the privilege as he swivelled to face Herbert: ‘No use crying over spilt beer, that’s what I always say.’

Herbert denied he was made that way, though knew he had lost her right enough, deciding never to get rid of anyone so unfeelingly again. In other words, have even more self-control over his mouth than heretofore, and watch his behaviour every second. That way he’d get what he wanted and stay sane as well — and you couldn’t have it better than that. As for happiness, if you thought about having much of that you would really end up to your neck in shit.

‘You know how to keep a woman happy?’

The man seemed to be intercepting his thoughts, but Herbert appreciated being amused by this funny little chap who claimed to be so irresistible to women. ‘Give ’em a good fucking every night?’ Bert said.

He laughed. ‘Yo’ young ’uns! Nothing so crude as that. I’ve worked it out like this: every time you feel happy, give her a good hiding; every time you feel rotten and down in the dumps, make her feel as if she’s the queen of the earth. Can’t lose, because that way neither of you can take each other for granted, or get fed up.’

‘How come that three of your women left you, then?’ He called for another pint and sat on a stool to listen.

‘I’d better start from the beginning.’ The man sipped at whisky that the publican had put down without him even having to ask, suggesting that he was trying to drown his sorrows in drink now that his peculiar system had fallen apart at the seams.

The longer the rigmarole went on the more dismal it became, a catalogue of tricks and woes spun out in monotone, with a lack of art that Herbert found depressing, boredom only offset by pint after pint until both of them were blindoe and incoherent. It was a story no one either sane or drunk could make head or tail of, and the only happiness of the evening was when he reeled into the street at kicking-out time, finding the way back to his room as if radar had drawn him to it.

Sitting alone he realized the truth that Cecilia had walked out on him, and who could blame her? With another woman it might only have been a step to a more realistic relationship (albeit of unbearable cosiness) though with her it was final because he had so blatantly let it happen, had even been gentleman enough to engineer it in his own particular way.

Consoling himself, before getting out of his clothes and falling into a dreamless sleep, he thought of Aeneas leaving Dido at Carthage, and couldn’t imagine that Aeneas had felt very good about it either as he sailed away over the cerulean briny. Like Aeneas too he felt beckoned on to higher things, while not caring to ask himself what they might be.

Sixteen

He lit the Rippingill heater, and the bubble of paraffin going down into the reservoir under the wick was a comforting sound on cold nights. Though heavier curtains made a womb to sit in, both glass and cloth seemed merely conductors to let the freezing fog inside. He wore two pullovers as well as a jacket and a pair of mittens, less willing to shiver than in former days, when he had undressed and jumped naked into bed. Now on icy nights he undid belt and all buttons, braces and bootlaces, and had his pyjama top to hand as soon as shirt and vest came off, and the bottoms pulled on the moment he was out of his boots. Socks were left till the bedclothes were drawn back and he could get in to generate warmth. Every winter seemed closer to the one before, each useful for writing his novel over and over again in an effort to transmute people so that not only would they find it difficult to spot themselves, but would also get some feeling as to their relationship with earth and heaven.

Mrs Denman’s had been his refuge longer than any other place, and he occasionally felt, as at the climax of one of those penny-dreadful comic books sometimes read at school, that the walls of his room were closing in, and would crush him to death. The hero-victim inevitably found a way out, but Herbert saw no exit except by keeping a wary eye on the walls’ position — and endurance. The dulling sunflowers of the wallpaper urged him to write for them as his first audience, as if they monitored every sentence even before it came into his mind; and when he was out of the room they would put on flesh and blood, to check with big brown Cyclopean eyes what he had written.

He needed some other brain to imbibe what he had done, even if only to tell him he wasn’t on a slow boat to madness, or that the accumulating pages in the cardboard box under his bed weren’t merely the evidence of his splintered mind. Perhaps it didn’t much matter, for he had no fear of madness as long as he felt the anguish of uncertainty about what he was doing, but he needed to know whether the writing would engross others to the extent that he was mesmerized on reading it himself.

Cecilia had long since gone — been dumped, he now knew — which could be a pity, because she would have commented in some way, even though the collected works of Hawksworth clouded her paltry mind. He couldn’t show his secret writing to Archie, and that was a fact. If Mrs Denman took a look now and again she didn’t say, though even she must have lost interest because he could never find any disturbance to prove otherwise. The only person he could think of was Isaac; he put the typescript into a carrier bag, and walked with both burdens into town.

Isaac was thinner and more frail. Every few months showed a difference, eyes shining through the papery skin of his face as from a lantern, false teeth too big for his diminishing features. But the same gimlet light came into his eyes. ‘You haven’t called lately. I thought you were chasing the girls.’

‘I wasn’t sure I’d find you. I thought you might be in your council flat by now.’

‘That’s cold — as they say round here. Maybe I never will be. Old folks like me come last on the list. Still, times are a lot easier now that rationing’s a blight of the past. Not only that, but my daughter sends money every month, to bolster my pension.’

‘Maybe her conscience has started to bother her.’

‘I don’t mind what it is,’ Isaac said. ‘If you begin questioning people’s motives when they do good deeds there’d soon be no virtue left in the world.’

Herbert thought he might work such a statement into his novel — and laid the bag of typescript on the table. ‘There’s this to take your mind off things. Have a read, when you can find the time.’

‘I wondered when you were going to let me see what you’d been up to.’ Isaac washed his hands at the sink, then spread the papers to separate the first chapter. Over seventy, he moved slowly as he sat down to read. Herbert stood by the window, a rank smell rising from the narrow street. Even the pigeons in the opposite guttering looked drab and fed up as they nudged each other aside for a better view of the chimney pots. Noises of approval and understanding from Isaac caused him to sweat with embarrassment, and regret that he had given his underground work to the mercy of a man who hadn’t been young for fifty years.

Not knowing how long it would be before Isaac grew tired of the story, and came back to life saying what absolute rubbish, or maybe even how marvellous, or merely how interesting (since he wouldn’t know what else to say), Herbert pulled a book from the shelf called Guide for the Perplexed. The title seemed right for him, and his eyes fixed on:

If there were two Gods, they would necessarily have one element in common by virtue of which they were Gods, and another element by which they were distinguished from each other and existed as two Gods; the distinguishing element would either be in both different from the property common to both — in that case both of them would consist of different elements, and neither of them would be the First Cause, or have absolutely independent existence; but their existence would depend on certain causes, or the distinguishing element would only in one of them be different from the element common to both: then that being could not have absolute independence.

He went back and forth over the complex netting of words, played at interchanging God for Man — and even man — so that he understood that you could use the word God in any way you liked, because the concept had after all been invented by human beings, who must have known themselves as such, while hammering the idea out on stone, or scratching it on animal skin.

God was just as much split in two as Herbert most of the time felt. In the contest between nihilism and a code of morals he was most comfortable with the former, since it allowed him to enjoy doing more or less what he liked, or as much as he could get away with. While he had to control his actions his thoughts could go free, and the gulf between thought and action was a power house that fuelled his double life, and was vital to his writing.

Spanning both states, he acknowledged the need for morality or fair play in the world (he wasn’t a Thurgarton-Strang for nothing) while knowing he was a savage compared to Isaac. For Herbert to lead a good life would fetter his intuition and, even more, his imagination. Not only that, but a virtuous stance on everything might make his views more rigid and therefore less interesting. The fact that Isaac, being the epitome of rectitude as far as he could tell, lacked no human qualities, convinced Herbert of his unique spirit.

Isaac’s voice startled him. ‘Looks like you’ve stumbled on Maimonides. I never could get through all of it.’

‘It’s interesting.’

‘Do you want it?’

‘No.’ He slid the book back. ‘I’ve read enough. How about my effort, though?’

‘Well, it’s not a bad read. You ought to think about getting it to a publisher.’

‘It doesn’t need redoing?’

‘Not as far as I can tell, though there’s no reason why you shouldn’t think so. It reads as good as any novel I’ve taken out of the library lately. Go over it once more, then send it to London. With a bit of luck you may shake ’em rigid!’


A pale evening sun made the walls of the newspaper offices glow red, the muted noise of machinery sounding from inside. He was glad to get out of the airless library, after copying publishers’ addresses into his notebook. His aim was to go through Slab Square and back to his digs, but by the Peach Tree he bumped into Archie, eyes seeming closer together than usual, indicating anger for some reason or another. ‘Yer look pale,’ Bert said. ‘Did another ’usband put the shits up yer?’

His laugh was that of an unhappy man as he gripped Herbert’s arm and drew him towards the pub door. ‘Not likely. Come in for a drink, and I’ll tell yer.’

Hunger for his tea was made up for by the comforting smell of ale. ‘What’s it all about, then?’

‘You know this fucking trouble wi’ Egypt?’ Archie said, when two cold pints were on the table.

Hard not to. A real killpig. They’d grabbed the Suez canal, and Israel had kicked their arses all the way across the desert. It was in every newspaper, but he wondered what world affairs had to do with Archie.

‘Well, I might get called up.’ His face was crimson at such injustice, as if only he had been singled out. ‘They’ve put me on standby.’ He showed the envelope. ‘But I’m not going this time.’

‘I ain’t got mine,’ Bert said, ’and I’m on the reserves as well. Maybe there’s some mistake.’

Archie laughed. ‘You’re later in the alphabet than me. Anyway, I heard on the wireless they’d be wanting some of us back. Not me, though. I don’t have a uniform any more. I was looking for it yesterday, and Mam towd me she’d gen it to the ragman. So I can’t go, can I?’

‘I don’t suppose I’ll mind all that much.’

‘You wouldn’t, you daft bastard. You’re a gentleman-wanker who’s got no fucking sense at all.’

‘Well, don’t despair, Archie, my owd.’

He guzzled, and took out a handkerchief to wipe his mouth. ‘Despair? Not me. Despair’s stupid, and I’m not fucking stupid. All the same, just think of it. It’ll be jump to attention again, and polish yer boots, stand by your beds, and all that bull. They’re either a bunch of fucking Hitlers, or a pack of useless shitbags. It’s all right for you, Bert. You was made for it, though I’ll never know why.’

Herbert, as if Archie was looking over his shoulder, was almost ashamed at the pleasure of being wanted for service again. Even Mrs Denman said: ‘Good news, Bert?’ when he opened the little brown envelope.

He wondered what use he would be. ‘I’ve been called up. It’s that Suez thing.’

A new television set had been pushed under the table until Frank came in after work to do the installation. She stroked it, could hardly wait to see the pictures. ‘What a shame. It ain’t right, is it, that young chaps like you have to go.’

Archie walked to the station to see him off, helping to carry his suitcase and kit bag. Half an hour to go, they sat in the refreshment room of pillars and plantpots, one of the more elegant places in the middle of Nottingham. Tea and Mars bars were set on the table. ‘I think they forgot about me.’

Bert slipped his folded beret under a shoulder strap. ‘They’ll get you, don’t worry.’

‘No, they wain’t. Maybe they don’t want any electricians, only infantry. If they do want me, though, it’ll tek a long time for the redcaps to find me. As for yo’, Bert, you could have swung the lead, and towd ’em yer can’t walk because of the smash-up in Cyprus.’

He could, but wouldn’t. The injuries, such as they were, had never relegated him into the ranks of the unfit. Pain in arms and legs had long since gone, which pleased him, because he thought it the lowest form of life to be useless either as a workman or a soldier. When he mentioned the breakages on getting to the depot the MO merely asked if they still bothered him.

‘No, sir.’

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ the sergeant said outside. ‘You’re for the Canal, like the rest of us.’

Few cared for a soldier’s lot; it was so long since the war. The blokes were more bollocky than before, and who could blame them? It was Archie’s good luck not to be called, but Herbert was exhilarated at being in khaki again, and hoped the war in Egypt wouldn’t pack in before he could add the experience of battle to his life — as he put it in a letter to his parents. His affinity with the ways of soldiering was proof, if it were needed, that he wasn’t as cut off from his old school self and the notions of his father as he had imagined. Heredity never relaxed its power, and within a week he felt he could stay in the army forever.

The men of his platoon were disgruntled rather than grumbling, near mutinous at times, though Herbert assumed that even the married ones would be all too ready to take such resentment out on the Egyptians. Getting the lads to let go on the range with the Bren was a fiasco at first, half of them not on the list till he noticed and made it right.

Rain splashed down as they marched across the airfield for embarkation, visibility almost nil. Basic kit was already on board, and transport planes waited to fly them to a staging post in Cyprus. He wondered would he see that beautiful woman who had worked in the vineyards — or her younger sister by now? Best to hope not, and to avoid her vision even in daydreams, because maybe she had been Lady Death, hiding behind a rock and luring him and Pemberton into the lorry crash. It was easy to cut her out. He was more powerfully himself than in those days. The copy of Our Mutual Friend, bookmarked halfway through, jutted from his trouser pocket, and he only wanted to get on board the plane and carry on reading.

A headlit jeep swung into the dispersal point, and the RSM climbed down with a signal to say it was no go. Lorries would take them back to barracks. Everything was at full stop, just as they were about to go out and clear the mess up forever. A cheer spread along the lines, but the ground missed a beat under Herbert’s boots at being robbed of a chance to blend the disparate sides of himself in the most perfect way. The meat-skewer bayonet would never come out of its scabbard. No use spitting tacks, or even cursing. Despair, as Archie said, was a sign of stupidity. Maybe he had wanted to be killed in a blinding whirl of heroics before lights-out, so that only in death would his two selves be united.


He gobbed into the sud pan, pressed the button, and adjusted the machine to the job in question. Gratitude would have been the order of the day, at being so valued by the firm that his place had been kept open which, at fifteen quid a week, was worth having.

His hands had become soft while he was in the army. Amazing how little time was needed. They blistered from pressure and repetition. The skin grazed too easily and was prone to splinters. Brass was the worst, bits that festered like mad till he got them out. Archie said steel was his curse, and Herbert supposed it depended on the preference of your flesh, or even some temperamental make-up that couldn’t be analysed.

Resuming work was harder to slot into than when, scarred and broken, he left the army after Cyprus. Motivation now seemed lacking, and tedium reigned for the first few weeks, an inner voice suggesting it was time such labour came to an end. He was getting too old for it, the bolshie tone went on, had done as much of a stint as any man needed, and certainly enough to write about it for the rest of his life. He was bored more often than he could tolerate, at times bored almost to death, though knowing he must continue until he could move into another existence without destroying himself in the process.

You should never complain, though he was beginning to, in the silence of his mind, considering it lucky no one could know it. Muscles ached, but he struggled on till the morning tea trolley showed at the end of the shed door, steaming as if in imitation of Stephenson’s Rocket. After the scalding liquid had gone down and the sweet bun was scoffed he was lured through the day by the promise of refuge in his room, where he could write in spite of the muted yacker of the television from the kitchen.

He tried to describe how a man felt when at work in the machine shop, or in the sand foundry, or when stuck at the pressure die-casting machines. The aim was to tell it without the distortion of sympathy, but the accounts were even so a world from reality. What did words know? Though if they couldn’t, what might? Every word was a label for something, or an action, and enough permutations barely existed to use them as they had never been used before, while too much trying would make for a heavy and stilted style, debasing the inspired flow of what had to be told. Best to let rip, and tinker later, let blocks of action, varied by badinage and laced with glum but often feverish hopes, make an account fine-tooled by his experience over the years.

The process wasn’t so different from that of taking a piece of angular steel and, with the aid of a blueprint, shaping it at your machine till a pristine object of exact utility lay fashioned and almost finished on your bench, but which still had to fit into an overall pattern with other pieces.

His writing was considered in this way also. Three months absence made him happy to go back to it, but some time passed before his eyes could focus and make the mass of words coherent. He had to be sure that every phrase was where it ought to be. Time was, as they said, no object, but as a wage-earner he longed for the day when he could tell himself the book was finished, and send it away as a parcel. If too frightened by the risk he could put it back in the drawer till driven to take it out for another re-writing. And if a sense of its uselessness overcame him he would go through his notebooks and muse something else into shape.

His scarred hands were cramped, stiff fingers barely able to grasp the pen as he read the opening pages again, of two brothers fishing from the canal bank. Circular clusters of white elderberry flowers concealed them from the lane, and the steamy summer heat over the water kept the coloured stripes of their floats perfectly still.

They biked the countryside through pastoral scenery which he tried to describe with the purity of The Eclogues, a memory of school even more pleasurable when lines came unexpectedly in Latin.

The brothers went back to their labour on Monday morning, and Herbert laid the raw alternative of the factory against the succulent peace of the countryside. He made a theatrical stage out of the shop floor and lifted the narrative into a three-dimensional experience of stench and noise which, he hoped, would keep a reader turning the pages to find out what was going to happen to the people he wrote about.

He told that such toil was a normal and not too disagreeable way of earning a living: all components of the factory’s activity, the hundreds of different jobs, the inner musings and outer mouthings of those who sweated there, all living in and moving through the mansion of his novel, so that by the end something had happened to them, not in the apocalyptic way of earlier versions, but as fitted with the easy-going morality of the times.

Should Archie and his brother Raymond, or their mates, or their sisters and mothers even, ever pick up the book they might speculate as to who the people were, what street they lived in, or what place they worked at, while they would be seen as complex and interesting by those who hardly believed such characters existed.

In ten years Herbert’s soul had been captured as surely as if a net had been thrown over him by a gladiator in the arena, and the long fight to get free from its entanglements had led him to know more about himself than if such a fate had not ensnared him. He posted Royal Ordnance to a publisher and, when it came back with no comment, sent it out again.


He closed the typewriter, feeling neither Bert nor Herbert, and far from a solid mixture of both. A booze-up with Archie might bring one of them into focus and ease his spirit, but Archie was nowhere to be found so he forced himself out of the house and quick-walked into town.

Standing at the bar of the Eight Bells, he saw a woman even Mrs Denman would have looked at sideways and leerily. Fair and dumpy, big tits and beehive hair-do, high heels and brandished fag, a slight gap between her upper teeth that promised mischief, the photo-flashed picture was one Bert Gedling liked. ‘Drink up, duck.’

‘Give me a chance.’

Down it went. So did his. ‘I had to get out of the house tonight or I would have gone barmy.’ At least you could say what you liked for the price of a drink. They sat at a small round table in the corner.

‘Like that, is it?’ she said.

It was, though no longer. ‘I couldn’t write any more. My pen nib went rusty.’

‘Was yer writin’ letters?’

‘I allus am.’

‘I wrote one yesterday, to my sister in America. She got married to a Yank ten years ago. I went to see her last summer.’

‘How did you get on?’

‘I loved it.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘It’s smashin’ over there. They’ve all got fridges and washing machines and cars … how did yer get that scar on yer chops?’

Always a good talking point. Her name was Denise, and she worked at Chambers in Stapleford packing pencils. Like all of them, there was more behind the eyes than you thought at first. ‘Why is it a nice girl like you don’t have a young man?’

‘Where’s your young woman, then?’

‘She packed me in,’ he said. ‘Or we fell out, you could say. It happened last night, so I forget.’

‘My young man was married to me.’ She shaped her lips to indicate he hadn’t been up to much. ‘We’d only been together six months when the police called and took him away for burglary. After he came out we had a bust-up and he left me. I’m lucky we never had any kids. This is the first time I’ve been in a pub in months. I just wanted to get talking to somebody.’

Even if she had been on the batter since leaving school he would have liked her. ‘Well, we’ve both got company tonight.’

She was easier to get on with than Cecilia, and that was good — almost like being seventeen again, except it took time and a few drinks to lighten the deadness in them both.

He knew they were drunk by the time they got back to the house, and felt the old rough Bert topside over Herbert. Standing on the doorstep he put his fist under her nose. ‘If you make any noise getting up the stairs I’ll crack you one.’

With a scar like that he might even try. ‘Bleddy masterful, aren’t you?’ Too merry to care, she squeezed his arm, and he kissed her saying: ‘I love you, and want to get you into bed.’

Her mood changed like the flip of a penny. ‘You ought to show it, then.’

‘I will.’

‘I love you,’ she said, ‘whoever you are.’ Her smile showed a vulnerable, more sensitive face. With love and care she could be beautiful, but he had no wish to do a Pygmalion, especially when she added: ‘At least let me get my hairnet off.’

He put his key in the door. ‘Shurrup, though, like I towd yer, or there’ll be trouble.’

‘You’re frightened o’ waking yer mam, is that it?’

Rage blasted his nerve-ends into darkness. He wanted to get his hands at her throat because she wasn’t Cecilia. The doghead of himself had got rid of her, for nothing, for no reason, to destroy himself, to drop himself into the mire, then out of it and beyond into something he must have wanted but was too scared to think about. What an idiot he’d been.

‘Oh, don’t you have a nice little room?’ she said, when he pushed her inside.

Nice? He wondered what sort of squalid den she lived in, what rat-hole space she shared with a score of others. Maybe she shared a house with her ageing mother, as decent as they came except for an occasional night out like this. He could ask, but it didn’t matter. She stripped in practised fashion, skirt down, suspenders undone, stockings off, roll-on unpeeled, blouse and bra on the floor — good clean underwear she’d spent money on.

She spread her white and robust figure on the bed, pubic hair sprouting as if to wave him in. Glad the light wasn’t too bright, she was half gone anyway, make-up smeared from kissing on the stairs. Smile at north and south, she beckoned him to get a move on, telling him not to spill his cocoa. He was too drunk to do much, barely able to get hard enough. In a sober corner of his mind, a recurring and suicidal fantasy, he wondered what it would be like to stay with her for the rest of his life. By laughing it away he was able to use her. Even so, he was too quick, and had to play her by hand.

They were soon asleep, and in a dream he was standing by a large tropical bird of red and yellow and royal blue. He was affectionately stroking its warm vibrating plumage, when the Bird of Paradise lost its friendliness and, mindlessly, viciously, pressed its razor-sharp beak deep into his hand and wouldn’t let go. Blood spurted out, so to save his limb and possibly his life he squeezed its neck with the other hand, using all his strength until the feathers were bloody and ligaments began to separate till the bird was dead.


Tall thin Frank bent over the stove to fry their breakfast. Traffic noises beyond the windows were muted by rain. ‘It ain’t right,’ he murmured. ‘It ain’t bleddy right.’

‘What ain’t?’ There was no sign of Mrs Denman, and no place set for him, so he took plates and cutlery from the cupboard.

‘She’s having a lie-in this morning. But you know she’s not well, don’t you?’

He didn’t, but thanked the Lord he had got Denise out into the street with no noise. She’d been too sleepy to care, because it was only half past seven. ‘I at least expected to stay a bit longer,’ she whispered at the door. He pushed a pound note into her hand. ‘Your taxi fare.’ ‘Oh, ta!’ she said, happily enough.

‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’

‘She keeps complaining about her stomach, and won’t let me get her to the doctor. She gets these terrible pains. I phoned Ralph last night and told him about it, but the bogger don’t seem interested. He said she’ll see a doctor when she’s good and ready. I tell yer! His own mother!’ He put tomatoes and bacon on the table. ‘But will she see a doctor? Not her. She’s as stubborn as the bleddy Hemlock Stone.’

Herbert had thought she had looked all right to him. ‘Maybe she’s overworked.’

‘You think so?’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me. She needs a week at the seaside, just sitting around all day or strolling along the front. She’d feel better then, I’m sure.’

Frank ate bread and butter with a shaking hand. ‘I’ll try her. You could be right. It’s the pain, though. She gets pole-axed, and it breaks my heart.’ He began to cry, and Herbert couldn’t wait to get out of the room.


The drill snapped, and a piece gashed his right arm. A short cut through carelessness. There was no such thing. He had done it himself, because the chuck hadn’t been tight enough. Blood marbled into the vat of milky suds, filtered away between coils of shining swarf. Toolsetter Paul, who knew Bert wouldn’t slacken without good reason, came to look. ‘That’s nasty. You’d better go to the first aid and ’ave it seen to.’

He felt close to sleep. The wound began to burn. ‘What did you say?’

‘Your arm. Looks like an ’ospital job. Are you all right?’

The ragged pomegranate split would need stitches — another scar to show. ‘It’s hard to say, at the moment. I have to be off now.’ The accent made Paul think he must be far from his old self, imitating the bloody BBC. He ought to be in the concert party.

Walking through the open gate of the hospital with his arm in a sling, he went at an unaccustomed slow pace down the street towards Slab Square and the bus stop. Cecilia was walking on the other side, by the eighteenth-century houses, in one of which Byron had lived, though she wasn’t talking about that, but saying something to a tall smartish man — good-looking in his clerkly provincial mode — who rounded his shoulders to hear her words. Bert assumed he could pass unnoticed wearing cap and overalls and clomping along in swarf-dull boots, but she saw, and expected him to give no sign. The shape of her lips would take a decade to analyse, but the impression he got was of regret, panic, damaged feelings and, finally, unmistakably, relief that he had caught her signal, and would pass as if they had never been acquainted.

He owed her that much, though the thought of assailing her as Bert, crowing: ‘Don’t yer know me, don’t yer know me, don’t yer know me, then, — duck?’ caused no inner laugh or gloating. Turning her prospects, even happy ones, into entrails of misery, was no part of him.

Putting out his left arm for the bus, he spewed contempt at the idea that his heart was wounded but knew it was true enough. He hadn’t been sufficiently adult or loving to hold her, or sufficiently mature to want to, though it was good that he hadn’t, since if they had married the inevitable parting would have been more destructive. The sense of loss reminded him of childhood, though he no longer blamed anyone for what he might have suffered then.

The bus on Wheeler Gate was slowed by the crowds and traffic at dusk. He scorned the bite of regret over Cecilia, though wondered whether it wasn’t time to flit from this town of romantic agony.

Mrs Denman and Frank were sitting by the range reading the advertisements in the evening paper for boarding houses at Skegness. She got up to ask Herbert what had gone wrong with his arm. It was plain she’d been ill for weeks, to go by the deep blue moons under her eyes. He hadn’t noticed, and now that he knew he must act as if she wasn’t. ‘Just a scratch. Industrial accident, it’s called.’

‘It’s only an excuse to stay off work,’ Frank said.

She reached for a letter from behind the walnut wood clock. ‘This came for you.’

Frank sat in the rocking chair to sip his tea. ‘We’re going to Skegness for a fortnight. And after we come back I’m going to make an honest woman of her.’

‘I should think it’s the other way round.’ Herbert, half fainting in the haze, put the white envelope into his pocket, and took Mrs Denman’s hands, drew her close for a kiss, noticing her carmined face above the pastiness of illness. ‘Congratulations, Ma. I’m glad.’

‘Me and Frank have known each other so long I think we can stand living together.’ She sat in her usual armchair by the fire. ‘I’ll still be here to look after you, Bert.’

‘That’s all right, then.’ He went slowly upstairs, as if the ache of gash and stitches ascended from each foot and ended as needles stabbing at the brain. Such a small room, no more than a cell it seemed, had been a life-long comfort, but he felt intolerably boxed in and wanted to put his coat back on and run as far as he could get into the countryside. Coming to a dense wood he would find the middle, fall asleep in the undergrowth, and hope never to wake up again.

Even the energy to reach the front door was beyond him. Bert couldn’t get up to save his skin, and though Herbert might manage it he would be neither better off nor wiser if he did. He unlatched the buckles of his overalls with one hand, twisted them free and loosened his bootlaces. The wardrobe mirror gave back a perturbed mask, as if he hadn’t looked into it for years. His father’s features showed more clearly. You’re the image of Hugh, his mother would say, as if to drive him round the bend and two-thirds up the diminishing zigzags. He had struggled free by becoming who he was not, and in spite of the battle found himself more than halfway back to being who he really was.

Dark hair, straight nose, forceful chin, and the cul de sac of a scar showed a self-engrossed though raddled aspect. A smile gave the image a facile supercilious charm which would deceive nobody, certainly not him. He was amused that cul de sac backwards produced (more or less) cased luc(k); which sign caused him to hope that the cul de sac he was caught in would turn into an open street, on which his luck would begin to change.

The mirror also reflected how his face might seem to others, because all the people he had ever looked at were in some way embedded there, which made it more of his own face than ever. Such switchings of template took place without his awareness, and turning his head from side to side, as if to discover how and why, was a gesture which further emphasized who he was.

The reflected image was made up of too many faces because the one that indubitably belonged to him had behind it all those people who, in his novel, had been through happiness and sorrow due to his god-like devising, though the basic aspect was as much under his control as the chariot of a Phaeton arriving successfully at the end of the day.

If his face seemed a mass of contradictions at certain moments there was a discipline within which could always bring it back to one he recognized, because whatever he cared to read there showed it could be no other than his own face, whether the roughneck Bert Gedling or the superior Thurgarton-Strang. Only a member of the elect could look in a mirror and realize there were many versions of his face instead of, like any oaf of the common run, thinking it complete and in no way puzzling.

He wrapped himself in the cold bedding and reached for the almost shredded copy of Caged Birds, to indulge in a soothing read, until his eyes would no longer obey his will, and he was so warmly asleep that he failed to hear Mrs Denman calling him down for supper.

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