Playing for the Ashes

  “You aren’t going to put him down, are you, Max? I can look after him. Just give me what I need. I’ll see to it.”

  Max looked up. “Take the dogs out, Chris.”

  I picked their leads from the nails on the wall. “Come on,” I said to Chris.

  He would go no farther than the towpath. We watched the dogs wander its length towards the bridge. They sniffed along the wall, stopped frequently to christen it. They rambled to the water and barked at the ducks. Jam shook off, ears flapping wildly, like he was wet. Toast did the same, lost his balance, came down hard on his shoulder, popped up again. Chris whistled. They turned, began to lope in our direction.

  Max joined us. Chris said, “Well?”

  “I’ll give it forty-eight hours.” Max snapped his bag closed. “I’ve left you pills. Feed him boiled rice and minced lamb. Half a cup. We’ll see what happens.”

  “Thanks,” Chris said. “I’m going to call him Beans.”

  “I’d call him damn lucky.”

  Max fondled Toast’s head as the dogs returned to us. He gave a gentle tug to Jam’s ears. “This one’s ready for a home,” he said to Chris. “There’s a family in Holland Park.”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “You can’t keep them all.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  Max glanced at his watch. “Quite,” he said. He fished in his pocket. The two dogs yelped and danced back a few steps. He smiled and tossed them each a biscuit. “Get some sleep,” he said to Chris. “Well done.” He nodded to me a second time and headed in the direction of the bridge.

  Chris took his Lilo into the animals’ space. He spent the morning sleeping next to Beans. I kept Toast and Jam with me in the workroom where, while they tussled over a squeaky toy, I tried to organise the boxes, the tools, and the timber. I periodically took messages from the phone. These were all cryptic, like: “Tell Chris it’s yes on Vale of March kennels,” “Waiting on Laundry Farm,” “Fifty doves at Lancashire P-A-L,” “Nothing on Boots yet. Still waiting for word from Sonia.” By the time Chris rose at a quarter past twelve, I’d come to understand what I’d been too thick to see before.

  I was assisted by the BBC radio news, which reported what the Animal Rescue Movement had carried out in Whitechapel on the previous night. When Chris came into the workroom, someone was being interviewed, saying, “…have callously destroyed fifteen years’ medical research through their blind stupidity,” in an outraged voice.

  Chris stopped in the doorway, a cup of tea in his hand. I examined him. “You pinch animals,” I said.

  “That’s what I do.”

  “Toast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jam?”

  “Right.”

  “The hooded rats?”

  “And cats and birds and mice. The occasional pony. And monkeys. Lots of monkeys.”

  “But…but that’s against the law.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “So why’re you…” It was inconceivable. Chris Faraday, most compliant of citizens. Who was he, anyway? “What’re they doing to them? To the animals? What?”

  “Whatever they want. Electric shock, blinding, fracturing skulls, ulcerating stomachs, severing spinal cords, setting them afire. Whatever they want. They’re only animals. They can’t feel pain. Despite having a central nervous system like the rest of us. Despite having pain receptors and neural connections between those receptors and the nervous system. Despite…” He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “Sorry. I’m preaching. It was a long night. I’ve got to see to Beans.”

  “Is he going to live?”

  “If I have anything to do with it.”

  He stayed with Beans all day and all night. Max came back the next morning. They had a terse conference. I heard Max say, “Listen to me, Christopher. You can’t—” and Chris interrupt with, “No. I will.”

  In the end, Chris won because he was willing to compromise: Jam went happily off to the home Max had found for him in Holland Park; we kept Beans. And when the barge was completed, it became a halfway house for other animals snatched in the darkness, the hub from which Chris expertly wielded his clandestine power.

  Power. When we saw the pictures of what happened at the river last Tuesday afternoon, Chris said it was time that I told the truth. He said, “You can stop all this, Livie. You have the power.” And how odd it was to hear those words because that’s just exactly what I always wanted.

  In that, I suppose, I am more like my mother than I care to be. While I was learning to attend to the animals, sitting in on my first meetings of the Movement, and establishing myself in a form of employment that could be useful to our ends—I was the lowest grade of technician at the London Zoo’s animal hospital—Mother was setting in motion her plans for Kenneth Fleming. Once she knew he had a secret dream of playing cricket for England, she had access to the fissure she was looking for in his marriage to Jean Cooper. It would have been incomprehensible to Mother that Kenneth and Jean might have been not only compatible but also happy with each other and with the life they’d managed to make for themselves and their children. Jean was, after all, Kenneth’s intellectual inferior. She did, after all, trap him into a marriage to which he, after all, had submitted himself in the name of duty-and-responsibility but certainly not in the name of love. In Mother’s eyes, he was yoked to a plough that had long ago become mired in the mud. Cricket would be the means by which he was freed.

  She moved neither hastily nor mindlessly. Kenneth was still a member of the factory’s cricket team, so she began by attending their matches. At first the men were put off by her appearance, deck chair in hand and sun hat on her head, at the edge of their playing field in Mile End Park. She was “Ma’am” to the lads from the pit, and both they and their families gave her a wide berth.

  Mother wasn’t put off by this. She was used to it. She knew that she was an imposing figure in her summer sheaths with their matching shoes and handbags. She also knew that a great deal more than Hyde Park, Green Park, and the City of London separated her life and experience from those of her employees. But she was confident of winning them over eventually. At each match, she mingled somewhat longer with the players’ wives. She spoke to their children. She made herself at once one of them and one step removed: shouting, “Oh, well played! Well played!” from the sidelines next to the tea urn and the biscuits which she always took with her, commenting at the tea interval, after the match, or later at work upon an especially good inning. The players and their families grew to accept and even to anticipate her presence. Eventually, she established regular team meetings, and she encouraged strategising, scouting other teams, and seeking advice.

  She even made inroads on Jean Cooper’s misgivings over her presence at the matches. She knew that a key to Kenneth’s future lay in garnering Jean’s trust, and she set about proving herself worthy of it. She professed herself interested in the schooling of the two older children. She immersed herself in conversations about the health and development of the youngest one, a three-year-old called Stan who was slow to talk and who toddled unsteadily when he should have moved solidly on his feet. “Olivia was just like Stan at that age,” Mother confided. “But by the time she was five, I couldn’t hold her in one place and I would have needed a muzzle to keep her from talking.” Mother laughed gently at her long-ago anxieties. “How we worry over them, don’t we?” A nice touch, that we.

  So that unfortunate day at Billingsgate Market years before might never have occurred between Jean and Mother. In the place of invective slipped discussions over the cost of child care, over Jimmy’s remarkable resemblance to his dad, over Sharon’s maternal instincts and how she began demonstrating them the very day Jean brought little Stan home from hospital. Mother stayed away from any topic that might have caused Jean to feel her inferiority. If they were to be co-conspirators in Kenneth’s personal renaissance, they had to be equals. Jean would eventually have to agree to the previously unthinkable, and
Mother was wise enough to know that her agreement could only be won if Jean thought in part that the idea was her own.

  I’ve wondered if Mother laid her plans systematically or if she allowed her scheme to follow an organic pattern. I’ve also wondered if she decided how she wanted things to be the moment she saw Kenneth Fleming in the pit. What’s so remarkable and so audacious about her machinations is that they seem—even now, to me, who knows the truth—unquestionably natural, a sequence of events that cannot be explored from any direction with the hope of finding a Machiavelli at their root.

  Where did it first come from, the idea that the factory cricket team needed a captain? From logic, of course. From a gentle and perplexed question dropped here or there: Tell me now, England’s team have a captain, haven’t they? The county sides have captains, haven’t they? In fact the cricket first eleven at every school in the country must have a captain. Perhaps the lads from Whitelaw Printworks should have a captain as well.

  The lads cast about for a choice and selected their foreman. Who better to set the field than the same chap who oversaw their workdays? But then again, perhaps that wasn’t such a good idea after all. The skills that went into managing the pit at Whitelaw Printworks weren’t exactly suited to the cricket pitch, were they? And even if they were, a certain distinction should be made between time spent on the job and time spent in pleasure, and how could that distinction be made if the foreman at work became the foreman at play? Wouldn’t it be a fine idea for the foreman just to be one of the lads on the team rather than the team leader? Wouldn’t it go further to advance employee bonhomie if the foreman were the lads’ equal in this endeavour?

  Yes, yes. The lads saw it that way and the foreman saw it no differently. They cast about for a second choice, someone who knew the game, who’d played it in school, someone who inspired performance on the pitch, either as batsman or as bowler. They had a decent two bowlers: Shelby the compositor and Franklin, who kept the machinery up and running. And they had a stellar batsman: Fleming, who worked one of the presses part time and worked management as well. Well, what about Fleming? Would he do? If they chose him, neither Shelby nor Franklin would have occasion to think the team considered the other a better bowler. Why not give Fleming a go?

  So Kenneth became team captain. There was no money involved and just about the same amount of prestige. But that didn’t matter, because the entire point was to whet his appetite for the game, to make him start longing more intensely for the what-could-have-beens, and to inveigle him away from the dismal what-weres.

  To no one’s surprise, least of all Mother’s, Kenneth made a great success of his position as captain. He set the field with wisdom and precision, switching players from one position to another until he had them where they performed the best. He saw the game as a science rather than as an opportunity for popularity among the lads. His own performance was always the same. With a bat in his hand, Kenneth Fleming was magic.

  He never played cricket for its potential for public adulation. He played cricket because he loved the game. And that love showed, from the deliberation with which he took guard at the crease to the grin that cracked across his face a second after he hit the ball. So he was first to agree with enthusiasm when an old gent called Hal Rashadam, who’d come to three or four matches, offered his services as the team’s coach. For a lark, Rashadam said. Love the game, I do. Used to play it myself when I was able. Always want to see it played c’rrec’ly.

  A coach for a factory cricket team? Who’d ever heard of such a thing? Where had he come from, anyway? The lads had seen him on the edge of the playing field, leaning back on his heels, pulling on his chin, nodding, talking to himself now and again. They’d thought he was one of the neighbourhood loonies and dismissed him as such among themselves. So when Rashadam approached after a particularly sticky match against a tyre company from Haggerston and offered his thoughts about how they played, the lads’ inclination was to tell him to be about his business.

  It was Mother who said, “Wait a moment, gentlemen. There’s something…What is it you’re talking about, sir?” And she no doubt said it so ingenuously that not one of them guessed how long it had taken her to persuade Hal Rashadam into giving the lads from Whitelaw Printworks—and particularly one lad among them—a serious look. Because make no mistake, Mother was behind Rashadam’s presence, as anyone with a brain would have known once he introduced himself and Kenneth Fleming said, “Rashadam. Rashadam?” He struck his forehead and laughed. “Crikey,” to his teammates, “you loobies. Don’t you know who this is?”

  Harold Rashadam. Are you familiar with the name? You wouldn’t be if you don’t follow the game with the sort of passion Kenneth Fleming had. Rashadam was taken out of cricket some thirty years ago by a bad shoulder that refused to heal properly. But when he played a brief two years for Derbyshire and for England, he’d made his mark as an outstanding all-rounder.

  People believe what they want to believe, and it seemed that the Whitelaw Printworks lads wanted to believe that Hal Rashadam happened upon their team on a visit to whoever on earth he might have known in the environs of Mile End Park. Just strolling by, he told them, and they lapped up the information like cats after cream. They also wanted to believe that he was, as he said, offering his services as a coach gratis, out of love for the game and nothing more. Retired, he said, Got time on my hands, love to have something to take my mind off these old bones, don’t you know. Beyond that, they wanted to trust in the fact that Rashadam was interested in the group, not in an individual, and that the group would benefit from his presence in some obscure way only marginally related to cricket in the first place.

  Mother encouraged them. She said, “Let us think about it, if you please, Mr. Rashadam,” to his offer, and she met with the lads and played the role of Lady Caution, saying, “Is he really who he says? And who was this Rashadam when he was somebody?”

  Someone did the research for her, unearthing old newspaper clippings, procuring a copy of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack so that she could see for herself. Mother transmogrified from Lady Caution to Lady Interest, no doubt inwardly thrilled to see how keen Rashadam’s appearance at Mile End Park had made Kenneth Fleming.

  How would she have met Rashadam? You’re wondering that, aren’t you? You’re asking how on earth Miriam Whitelaw, former schoolteacher, could have pulled an ace cricketer out of the hat?

  You must consider the years of her life that she gave to volunteer work and what those years meant in terms of contacts she had, people she knew, organisations that owed her one favour or another. A friend of a friend was all she needed. If she could get someone like Rashadam to visit Mile End Park on a Sunday afternoon, to stroll along the playing field behind the spectators and their deck chairs and their picnic lunches, Kenneth Fleming’s talents would do the rest. She was sure of it.

  Naturally, there was money involved. Rashadam wouldn’t have done any of it out of the goodness of his heart, and Mother wouldn’t have asked that of him. She was a businesswoman. This was part of business. He would have named an hourly sum to visit, to talk with, and to coach. She would have paid.

  And you’re wondering why. I can hear you ask. Why would she go to the trouble? Why make the sacrifice?

  Because it was neither trouble nor sacrifice to Mother. It was simply what she wanted to do. She no longer had a husband. Her relationship with me had been mutually destroyed. She needed Kenneth Fleming. Call him what you want: a focus for her attention and concern, a potential recipient of her affection, a cause that could be fought for and won, a man to replace the one who had died, a child to replace the one she’d expunged from her life. Perhaps she felt she’d failed him when he was her pupil ten years earlier. Perhaps she saw their renewed relationship as an opportunity not to fail him a second time. She’d always believed in his potential. Perhaps she was merely seeking a way to prove herself right. I don’t know exactly what she was thinking, hoping, dreaming, or planning when she began. I believe her
heart was in the right place, though. She wanted the best for Kenneth. But she also wanted to be the one who said what that best would be.

  So Rashadam joined the factory team. It wasn’t long before he singled out Kenneth for special attention. This attention took place at first in Mile End Park, with Rashadam working on Kenneth’s skill with the bat. But within two months, the old cricketer suggested they book a few sessions in the nets at Lord’s.

  More privacy there, after a fashion, he would have informed Kenneth Fleming. We don’t want scouts from any other team having a look at what we’re developing here, do we?

  So to Lord’s they went, on Sunday mornings at first, and you can imagine what it probably felt like to Kenneth Fleming when the door to the indoor cricket school closed behind him and he heard the crack of bats hitting balls and he heard the whoosh of balls being bowled. What he must have felt as he walked along the netted enclosures: nerves making his stomach quiver, anxiety making his palms become damp, excitement obscuring any question he might have asked about why Hal Rashadam was spending so much time and so much energy with a young man whose real future lay not with cricket—Good God, he was already twenty-seven years old!—but on the Isle of Dogs, in a terraced house, with a wife and three children, in Cubitt Town.

  And what of Jean, you ask? Where was she, what was she doing, and how was she reacting to the attention Kenneth was getting from Rashadam? I imagine she didn’t notice at first. Initially the attention was subtle. When Kenneth came home and said, “Hal thinks this” or “Hal says that,” she no doubt nodded and noticed how her husband’s hair was getting lighter with the exposure to the sun, how his skin looked healthier than it had in years, how his movements were more agile than they’d ever been before, how his face radiated an enthusiasm for living that she’d forgotten he once possessed. All this would have translated to desire. And when they were in bed and their bodies were working rhythmically together, the least important question to ponder was where this ardour for cricket was going to lead them, not to mention what potential for unhappiness lay in one man’s simple love for a sport.