‘I’m sorry I made you lose time from your work,’ she said, ‘but he was your father. And now you know.’
‘It’s taken long enough for you to tell me. Up to a few years ago I was burning to know, then found I couldn’t care less. Lydia once hinted who it was, but I didn’t believe her, thinking it was just another of her stories to amuse me.’
‘You played with him once as a child.’
‘And I just thought he was some man you’d picked up.’
She was crying. ‘He ruined my life, but he made it as well. I never loved any man as much as him.’
He put an arm over her shoulders: better for her to cry, and talk, though how could the stern headmistress of a girls’ school allow what happened so many years ago to upset her? ‘You let him take me for a walk, I couldn’t think why at the time, but the memory kept popping up when I was on those Atlantic convoys, and on the worse ones to Murmansk.’ He recalled telling Burton he wanted to see the Amazon, but the Tuloma and the Hudson had been enough. ‘I should have known he was my father, because everything about that meeting stayed so vivid.’
‘I often wondered whether the past is worth having been lived,’ she said, ‘but at least I’ve got you, and your children.’
The last pair to leave the churchyard, he held her arm. By the time they reached the pavement she’d stopped crying. The gate was still open. ‘Go back and close it.’
He looked as if thinking her slightly mad. She had brought him up to obedience, though it was a bit much expecting a trained engineer and ex-naval officer to jump to his mother’s command. He shut the gate nevertheless.
Mary Ann took a nightdress from her private drawer, folded between sheets of tissue paper and smelling of lavender, every pleat sharply ironed. ‘I shall want to be put in this when I die,’ she said to Sabina, ‘so be sure not to use anything else.’
She had told Sabina to ask Brian to bring some rice back for her from Malaya, so she might not have expected to die as soon as she did. ‘They grow it out there, and I know he’ll bring it if you let him know it’s for me.’ She hadn’t been able to get any for more than five years, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t in the shops now that the war was over, beginning to realize that she and Burton had unwittingly voted for a government that kept people short so that they would know their place. Having imagined such days were over, she wondered now if they ever would be.
She died in her sleep a year after Burton, before Brian could bring the rice. Burton was buried in the same plot as Oliver but Mary Ann wanted to be cremated, which Ivy told Sabina was because she’d had as much of Burton as she could stand during her lifetime, and didn’t care to lie in the same grave with him after death.
Sabina replied that Mary Ann asked to be cremated because the grave was full, and she was generous enough to let Burton stay with Oliver. In any case she was frightened of being buried alive in the box.
‘Your grandma was timorous,’ she said to Brian when he came home, ‘but she would stand up to right a wrong whenever she could. She loved Burton from the moment she set eyes on him till the day she died, whatever Ivy might say. And he loved her the same. He thought the world of her. When I went to wake her up on the morning she died I didn’t know she was dead, but I saw it as soon as I looked at her lovely peaceful face. She lay on her back, the bedclothes up to her neck as smooth as if she hadn’t moved an inch all night. One arm was under the clothes, but the other was outside, her fingers tight together and holding something. I had a job to get the hand open, but when I did I found a two-shilling piece with Queen Victoria’s head on it. I’ll never know why it was there. Perhaps she thought she’d have to pay her way into heaven when she died, though they’d have welcomed a good soul like her for nothing. It was an old two-bob piece, but the shopkeeper took it, and I don’t expect she minded me spending it on groceries.’
THIRTY-TWO
When sirens sounded and the bombers roamed, Helen walked from the house with joyful expectation. To stop her would mean using strength that would hurt, so Oswald let her go. She would come back unharmed, was happy among gunflashes and the shudder of bombs, hoping God would turn sufficiently benevolent to take her to Howard.
After the war, when Oswald’s job on the canal came to an end, he had to give up the house as well. Helen didn’t want to leave, because Howard had lived there, but Oswald believed a move would be good for her. She would no longer have to walk along the road and pass the place where their son had been struck down.
The air of the council estate was healthier, the aspect more open, but Oswald dreamed of living alone on an island in the middle of a lake, a one-roomed house with bed, table, chair and fireplace, a few trees outside to give shade and fuel. A rowing boat would get him to shore for basic provisions, though a plot of garden (and maybe a chicken coop) would supply much of what was necessary. He wanted solitude and peace, but had to make do with the vision, so as to endure the maelstrom of Helen’s moods and needs.
At the new house she wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of bed without help. She complained of her blighted life, which Oswald considered a good thing because it saved him doing the same, though he wished she had nothing to complain of at all, or could stop herself doing so, then he wouldn’t have to think about not doing so, though in that case there’d be nothing to talk about. I’d live in silence, and feel too much like my father, he thought. So he cleaned the house and cooked the meals, carried her up and carried her down, and saw to everything she wanted.
He sometimes thought his heart would burst, a dim explosion in his chest, a jolt, a push from within taking him beneficially down into blackness. He dreaded it because who would then take care of Helen? He thought what a relief it would be to walk away from her eternal lamentations at the hardness of life.
On better days Howard like a true angel receded from her thoughts and let daylight in. After a while this God-given anaesthetic wore away, to be replaced by the pain of realizing that life had no meaning, that she had nothing to live for and, because it was a sin to die, must endure until God (as she put it) took her.
Oswald laid out a bedroom on the ground floor, which opened onto the garden. Every fine day he cradled her to the lawn whose borders he had cultivated into a fresh and colourful display. From his allotment he brought choice blooms, though without expecting much appreciation when she held out a hand for them. Even before taking his boots off in the kitchen he put lettuces in season and small colourful radishes on the table, and then on her plate when he had washed them, all good things gathered so that she would eat. He cared for her as if paying back every woman who throughout the ages had done so for all the Burton men.
He met Edith in town one morning walking along the Ropewalk. He had been to Boots with a prescription for Helen. ‘You look like death warmed-up,’ she said.
He chose not to worry about the pain that had run across his chest a few weeks ago like a ferret in search of food, since it hadn’t come back. Edith put up her umbrella against the rain, and told him she had a house of her own at Beeston now, which her son Gilbert had bought for her who, she said, was doing very well in America. ‘But how is Helen getting on?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘She’s got to forget her troubles. It’s you who worries me, though, you’re too thin. You ought to see a doctor.’
‘Who would take care of Helen if he found something wrong? You can’t have two people badly in the same house.’
‘That’s a daft way to look at it. If anything happens to you she won’t have anyone to take care of her at all, and then where would she be?’
At such concern he said: ‘It’s a long time since I gave you a kiss,’ and brought her close, not caring what passersby might think. Were her cheeks wet from the rain? Or was she tearful because of him?
She laughed after his kiss. ‘The last person who did that to me was a Chinese man last night. There’s a caravan in my garden that I let him live in, and I’ve come downtown to buy some pots and pans so??
?s he can have something decent to cook with. He’s a lovely little chap with dark hair. He wears a suit all the time, and makes me a delicious Chinese meal every now and again. We have a little cuddle afterwards. I used to think all men were rotten, but he’s not.’
‘You always were a devil,’ he laughed with her. Once young and flighty, she was now more beautiful than handsome, few wrinkles on her face, and a firm stout figure even after bearing nine children. ‘I’m lucky to have such a sister,’ he said.
The day was warm, but Helen called for a blanket over her knees while resting in the garden. She lay in a half-sleep, head to one side. When her missal slipped onto the grass Oswald took it to the kitchen. If she lived a hundred years he would look after her in the same way, then happily die in the belief that he had done all he could. A shadow drifted across the doorway, a cool evening breeze bringing the freshness of mown grass and flowers.
She wanted to go in. ‘But you must let me walk by myself, Oswald,’ she said for the first time. ‘I do have two feet, you know.’
‘There’s no need of that.’ She lay with arms by her side, dark eyes glowing from grey curls. ‘You don’t weigh more than a feather pillow.’ His blacksmith’s strength would serve for as long as needed, regarding it like Burton as his to command. He carried her with his usual ease to the door.
‘This is like the day we were married,’ not having reminded him of that before, either. He would get her inside, see that she was comfortable, then make the supper, an omelette for her, and a slice of fat bacon (with potatoes) for him. They would then sit together and watch television, before she went to sleep.
The malign fate which had called his son had kept a blow in store for him, though not one he would suffer from, except for the second or two of pain which struck across his heart like the cut of a sword. When a neighbour came at Helen’s screams it was obvious to anybody except a fool, she said, that he would never get up again.
Helen was cared for in a Catholic nursing home till she was well over eighty. Grief can prolong as well as shorten life, only mysterious and inherited qualities having any say in how long it will be.
The nuns looked after her as if she were their mother, always making sure the framed photograph of Howard stood at the right angle on her bedside table for when she opened her eyes in the morning. One night she went to sleep, and had no further need to look.
Burton had always said that Thomas’s marriage to Grace wouldn’t last, only wondering whether he would live to see it. He didn’t. Grace fell ill from a fatal cocktail of pleurisy, bronchitis and pneumonia. Ivy and Emily took turns nursing her, Thomas rarely at her bedside. He made the excuse of too much overtime, but Ivy said that Grace died because she couldn’t take any more of his doing it on her with every woman he set eyes on.
Thomas grieved a little longer than usual, having behaved so badly, then went on with his philandering, having no more to waste thought and energy on alibis which hadn’t always been successful.
He didn’t find it so easy to get the women he wanted. Times changed. Young women went off with completely unsuitable men (as if they hadn’t always) – men, Thomas thought, who were scruffs and runts, or ugly and without any rules of that chivalrous behaviour he had schemed to follow. He was still handsome, tall and well-built, with thick but grey hair, looking fully ahead when out walking, though as Burton had often said, he lacked the ability to see much on either side. Yet he could tell a woman that he loved her (and be believed as often as not) though only so as to get her into bed, and for as long as he himself thought it to be true, which it often wasn’t for long, since he hadn’t always been convinced in the first place, which drove him to looking for someone else.
When he was sixty-five he met Alice, in her fifties. She had a vinegary tongue, but he settled for her until someone better came along. He made the mistake of moving into her council house at Aspley, such a comfortable place he felt less and less inclined to seek out better prospects. Besides, he no longer had the energy and, being retired, preferred to sit by the fire watching television in winter, and digging around the garden in summer. It wasn’t the sort of clover he’d been used to, but the better looking women than Alice, spoken to in pubs or at bus stops, either turned their backs or told him in ripe old Nottingham parlance to fuck off or they’d get their boyfriends to kick him in.
Alice soon lost all liking for this tall man who stood a bit too often before the hearth warming his arse, and in a wavering tenor voice sang a popular ballad from the old days, thinking he was entertaining her in prime television style, like a modern Richard Tauber. Sometimes he would set up a concert of whistling till the sound drove her mad, and she asked the big daft canary to put a sock in it, always much to his surprise at a performance supremely entertaining to himself.
A solo performance started one day, and before she could complain his well-built body rumbled onto the carpet by the living room mirror, such a crash of limbs that in her alarm she knew he couldn’t be acting or trying to frighten her.
He gurgled. A foot jerked. She dialled nine-nine-nine and, this being Nottingham, an ambulance came within minutes and took him to the City Hospital, the driver cheerfully telling her (in case she hadn’t noticed) that Thomas had had a stroke, and there was no saying when or if he would be home again.
Brian and Derek called at the hospital to see their uncle, tracked him to a small ward whose windows faced well-shaven lawns. Even in a wheelchair they could tell he was a big man. He and half a dozen others were looked after by a black nurse, who told Brian how much liked Thomas was. He couldn’t articulate, but when he wanted something he sang it to a popular tune till they understood, which made him a very entertaining patient.
‘He sang us The White Cliffs of Dover last week,’ she said with a sunrise smile. ‘We didn’t realize there were such good tunes in the olden days.’
Arthur, who came another time, said it was lucky for the nurses that the stroke had put paid to his whistling, otherwise the doctors would have had to cut his windpipe.
Thomas understood all that Brian and Derek said. He took the chocolates, perhaps to woo the nurses with, but didn’t want the carton of cigarettes, which Derek gave to a man whose eyes flashed like Eddystone Lighthouse at the sight. They talked about the days at Old Engine Cottages, and at the mention of Burton he showed as much terror as if his father would stride into the room, bang him around the head, and tell him to stop shirking.
Alice, glad of a rest, didn’t visit him, having had more than enough of someone complaining about his father yet behaving in ways that showed he was too much like him.
Fit at last to be managed at home, Thomas was packed off in an ambulance. The driver’s mate pushed him, clutching a couple of plastic bags of toiletries and a goodwish card from the nurses, along the garden path in a wheelchair. The young woman at the back door put a little more light into Thomas’s eyes. Even though she was followed by two kids he wondered whether she would fall in love with him. The ambulance man told her they were bringing him back, duck, about to tip him onto the path whether she claimed him or not. She looked as if they were carting the third prize of a raffle she had long forgotten buying a ticket for, and would certainly no longer want.
She screamed that she had never seen the hopeful yet bemused Thomas before, told them in no uncertain terms to fuck off and take the old man away or she would tip the fucking wheelchair in the gutter where he’d get run over by a Corporation doubledecker bus and fucking good riddance. Who did they think they were, trying to palm a crippled old-age pensioner off on her, a single mother who was trying to make ends meet in spite of all the fucking council and social services could do to stop her?
‘All right, duck, keep your hair on. We must have got the wrong place. We’ll go back and check up on it.’
Thomas followed the altercation as if television had come alive at last, and the powers that be had decided to put on something good. The truth was that Alice had found another house, and done such a flit as to be
forever unfindable. They weren’t married, but she would have gone even if they had been.
Thomas’s second stroke six months later finished him off. At eighty Sabina wasn’t fit to go to the funeral, and her three sons were so scattered as not to be told in time. Where Thomas’s cremated ashes went, nobody knew.
Ivy worked another ten years at the tobacco factory, and retired at sixty-five. She met a pensioner of seventy in the Gregory Hotel, who told her in a sly and dependent way that he had fallen in love with her. He was a cocksure smiler, a trickster, a thin little man with wavy grey hair who wouldn’t let her pay for a drink, not yet. His self-assurance and twinkle of malice captivated her, perhaps because he matched her in the shuttlecock and battledore game of sarcasm which passed for wit. He asked her to marry him, and in saying yes she made a mistake which was to be her last.
Gerald wanted a house to live in instead of a council flat at the foot of a highrise hencoop where he was threatened nightly, and often during the day, with being kicked in by the local black and white thugs who, when not playing Waterloo among themselves, ran the area.
He brought his few tranklements and moved in with Ivy and Emily, but within weeks Ivy knew she should never have had anything to do with him. Burton must have laughed from the comforting heat of hell’s fire on realizing she had more than met her match.
Gerald was spiteful, and a bully. The only good thing for Ivy was that she was too old to complete the disaster by having children. He sat by the fire smoking foul twist in a short black pipe. He would send her for beer from the pub, and she would go so as to avoid the mayhem of a refusal. He wouldn’t give any help in the house, not even to change a lightbulb or mend a fuse, and insisted on being served every meal on Mary Ann’s best china. Sometimes he would drop a cup or plate to show who was boss of the house, and only stopped when Ivy said how much they would get for it if ever they needed to sell it.