From the bag he produced two shiny canisters, unlabeled two-pound tins.
“One’s Spam; t’other’s corned beef. I can’t rightly say which is which.”
Later, Clem turned fretful.
“Thas all the excitement,” Ruth said untruthfully. “I’ll take him up. Say night-night to yer dad, Clem.”
The boy clung to her and tried to hide his face in her shoulder. George wondered if he should kiss the child’s head; while he hesitated, Ruth turned away toward the stairs.
“Good night, Clem,” he said cheerily. “Sweet dreams.”
Left alone, George made a recce of the home he’d never lived in. Thorn Cottage was smaller and darker than he’d remembered. It was permeated by the heavy, sweetish fumes from the sinister-looking paraffin heater that stood in the hall. The kitchen, like the rest of the downstairs rooms, had electricity, but the cooking was still done on a black cast-iron range built into the brick fireplace. The floor was covered in green linoleum, worn so thin that it seemed no more than a cracked coat of paint over the slate slabs beneath.
The front room — the “best room”— was a grim and crowded museum of Victorian furniture. A framed photograph of a young woman and a soldier stood on a heavy sideboard next to a threadbare stuffed squirrel inside a glass dome.
The parlor had only two armchairs, one on either side of the hearth. On each sat a ball of wool transfixed by knitting needles.
It seemed to George that every mark in the place — every scar on the skirting boards, every nick and chip in the stair treads, every dent in the dull brass doorknobs — was a trace of dead people he had never known and wouldn’t have wanted to. Dim presences to whom he had no connection. Who frightened him. This place was old and poor. It was not the bright new world he had been told he was fighting for. He had come home to the past, a past that wasn’t even his own. He felt, suddenly, panicky and claustrophobic.
He went out into the back garden. The colder air went to his bladder, and he pushed open the outhouse door. It clattered against an obstacle, a galvanized metal bath hung on a hook. A speckled spider had spread her net within it. Relieving himself, he noted that the bog roll was newspaper scissored neatly into rectangles the size of ten-shilling notes and hung on a nail.
He went to the end of the garden and surveyed his new and awful domain. The hedge had grown wild. Things he presumed were edible protruded from weeds. A fork with a broken handle angled into black soil. Two rusted upturned buckets.
He lit a cigarette. The last of the sun slanted onto the roof. The thatch was ragged and greened by moss; below and to the left of the half-ruined chimney, a sheet of corrugated iron had been slid in to slow a leak.
He pulled on the ciggie and straightened himself.
Discipline. Drill.
“Men all present and correct, Sarn’t?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ready to kick the shit out of Jerry, Sarn’t?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Carry on.”
Men in burned-out tanks who’d come apart like overcooked chickens when you tried to pull them out. You threw up and then you dealt with it.
“Burial detail! Over here!”
They’d fought — he’d fought — for sex. To capture the brothels of Benghazi and Tripoli from the Italians, the Germans. Then take the tricks learned there home to wives and girlfriends who were starving for it. Unless the ruddy Yanks had been there first.
Ruth had got heavier; there was no denying it. She’d slumped, somehow. Having the boy, presumably.
Two months ago — no, three now — he’d been in a back-street bar in Cyprus, being served miraculously cold beer by a gracious Egyptian prostitute wearing see-through trousers and a spangled bra.
“You’ll not be getting much of that in Norfolk, lad,” he told himself — correctly, as it turned out.
As the light died, he heard footsteps on the path. His mother-in-law, a shade or two darker than the gathering dark, came around the corner of the lav.
“Ayup, Win,” he said.
She turned, lifting a hand to her chest and stumbling as if a sniper had got her.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s George, Win.”
She peered as he walked toward her.
“George who?”
“George your son-in-law.”
“What’re you doing here?”
He flicked his cigarette away and said, “It’s nice to see you, too, Win.”
The can that Ruth opened was the Spam. She fried slices of it in a bit of lard with an onion and served it with a boiled potato each and tough garden cabbage.
Win said, “You’re cut that Spam thick, Ruth. That wunt see us out the week at that rate.”
At ten o’clock, Ruth pretended she needed him in the kitchen.
She said, “I’m gorn up to bed, George. Give us five minutes.”
He went outside and smoked another cigarette. When he went back indoors, the cottage was intensely dark and utterly silent. He groped upstairs, clutching the wounded banister. In their bedroom, the light came from an oil lamp the shape of a faded yellow tulip. Clem was asleep in a cot within reach of Ruth’s arm. She wore a flannelette nightdress buttoned almost to her throat. Her glowing hair aroused him. When he began to unbutton his trousers, she turned the lamp out.
(This became their unvarying nightly ritual: she would go upstairs and get into bed while he smoked a last cigarette. In almost forty years of marriage, he would never see her completely naked. And, in time, he grew glad of it.)
In the morning, Clem stood in his cot, gazing with baffled horror at the dark stranger in his mother’s bed.
FOR A WHILE George Ackroyd dealt with his mounting fear, the hostility of his mother-in-law, the coyness of his wife, the reticence of his son, the implacable hugeness of the sky, and his awful sense of having been somehow tricked, in the only way he knew how. He sought to impose regimental order and efficiency. He went about bringing manliness to this unmanned household.
In the skewed and decrepit garden shed (built by John Sparling half a century earlier), he found ancient tools and restored them. With the oiled and sharpened shears, he straightened the hedge. With a rusted hammer, he nailed new boards onto the roof of the chicken coop while the birds regarded him with yellow and baleful eyes. Under Ruth’s direction and Clem’s silent gaze, he dug the vegetable beds. He rehung the washing line, jabbing stones into the ground to steady the uprights. He replaced the broken hinge on the kitchen window, using infinite patience and the wrong screwdriver. He gave the inside of the lav a new coat of whitewash.
After a fortnight, this persistent odd-jobbery had brought Win to the verge of distraction.
The following Sunday, she came back from chapel with the news that there was a job going at Ling’s. The announcement didn’t distract George from the News of the World.
Win pulled free the long pin that fixed her hat to her hair and stood holding it, looking at him.
Ruth was at the sink, peeling potatoes. After half a minute of awful silence that pinkened her neck, she said, “That might suit you, George. Thas your line of work.”
He looked up at last. “Oh, aye? Why, what’s Ling’s? A Chinese tank regiment?”
In fact, J. W. Ling and Son, of Borstead, were — as announced on a wrought-iron sign that spanned the wide entrance to the yard — SUPPLIERS AND REPAIRERS OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY. George leaned Ruth’s bike against the wall of a brick building that looked as though it had been, once upon a time, a pair of farm cottages. On one of the doors there was a stamped-metal sign reading OFFICE. The room had two desks, one with a typewriter on it. Apparently, a gale had swept through the place, scattering paper. One wall sported no fewer than eight calendars, all of them topped by a picture of a tractor, none of them turned to the month of April. On one of the desks there was a push-button electric bell with a woven two-wire cable that trailed away into the gloom. A handwritten card next to it suggested that he RING FOR ATTE
NDENCE. George pressed it experimentally and heard, from some remote distance, a faltering tinkle. Several minutes later, a short, burly man stuffed into a one-piece overall came in and immediately went out again and started shouting.
“Look, bor, I dunt give a monkey’s. Do what I say. You weld the bugger up an I’ll tell him thas the best we can do. If he want ut by Wensdy, thas up to him.”
He came back into the room and picked up a piece of paper, apparently at random, and scowled at it. Without looking at George, he said, surprisingly formally, “And what can I do for you, sir?”
“I was told you had a job,” George said.
The man grunted a laugh. “Job?” The small word had at least three vowels in it. “Bleddy right, I’re got a job. The job I’re got is gettun them buggers out there to lissun to a bleddy word I say.”
George concentrated hard, trying to discover the meaning of Ling’s words beneath the thick blanket of his accent.
“I meant a job going,” George said. “A position.”
The man put the paper down and turned to him. He had blue eyes inside plump little purses of skin. The bald dome of his head rose out of a thicket of graying and unkempt curls. He surveyed George’s demob suit, his collar and tie.
“Ah. Thas right, I do. Sorry. Yer Win Little’s son-in-law, just come home?”
“Yes.”
“So you’d be George, er?”
“George Ackroyd.”
“Bill Ling. Howja do.”
He held out his right hand, which was black and lacked half of its third finger.
“Yer dunt hevter shake ut if yer dunt want to.”
“No,” George said, gripping the other man’s hand. “There’s nowt wrong with axle grease. I’m partial to the smell of it.”
Ling grunted humorously again. He took a tin of tobacco from his overall and rolled a cigarette. George lit it for him with his American lighter.
“So, then. Win tell me you was in the Engineers. That right?”
“For nine years, after I joined up. Then the REME from forty-two — Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.”
“What was that all about, then?”
“Tanks, mostly. Half-tracks, Bren gun carriers, armored cars. That sort of thing.”
Ling picked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. “We dunt get a lotta them come in.”
“No,” George said. “I don’t suppose you do.”
“Tractors, reapers, balers, harrers. Go all over the place sortun out threshun machines, things like that. Lot on ut is donkey’s years old. Patch up an bodge. That dunt sound like what yer used to.”
“No. But a machine is a machine. An engine is an engine.”
Ling lifted his eyebrows and nodded as though this were a novel piece of wisdom.
“So yer reckon you might pick ut up, do yer?”
“I should think so.”
Ling looked around the office as though help or advice might materialize from its shadows.
Eventually he said, “Well, I do need a man what know his arse from a gasket. Things hev got busy, this past year. I tell yer what, George. Why dunt we try ut for a month? See if the work suit yer? How do that seem?”
“Sounds fair enough to me. When d’you want me to start?”
“Lessay Mundy.” Ling grinned, displaying a random collection of teeth. “There ent no hurry. I daresay you an Ruth hev still got a bit of catchun up to do, arter all this time.”
George would work for Bill Ling for twelve years. The other men never grew to like him. They never addressed him by his first name; they called him Sarge, and behind his back, they imitated his brisk and upright manner of walking. When there were breaks from work, they would isolate him by retreating inside the slow, thick moat of their impenetrable dialect.
George remounted Ruth’s bike and pedaled the three-quarters of a mile to Borstead. The trees and hedges along his route were misted with the green of early spring. The town was silent. He passed a pub called the Feathers, turned back, and wheeled the bike into an alleyway that led to the rear entrance. There were only three people in the bar: two elderly men, who sat silently in front of their pints, and an elderly woman perched on a bar stool, reading a newspaper aloud to her glass of stout. George took the stool farthest from her and, after several minutes had gone by, took a two-shilling piece from his pocket and tapped the counter with it. A woman with lips painted close to her nose emerged from a curtained doorway and reluctantly drew him a pint of bitter.
Later she drew him another. Drinking it, George felt the absence of joy pierce him like a bayonet.
He did not want to go home — home? — so he rode the bike in the opposite direction. He passed through the dripping gloom under the railway bridge and, on a whim, turned right onto a narrow road he had no memory of. He found himself alongside an extensive playing field, in the middle of which was a pavilion, a gray stone and white-gabled house, like something pictured in a fairy tale. The field was divided into a number of football pitches, and upon three of them, boys in shorts and motley shirts were charging after a ball, massing and hallooing like huntsmen. Beyond them, the railway embankment, its flank darkly patched by brambles.
George rode slowly along the low beech hedge, watching the games, and above his head the moody clouds split open. Sun, in beams as clearly defined as searchlights, straked the sky. As if in celebration, something sounded a long fluting whistle. A clanking two-carriage train, gusting smoke, ambled into view. A goalkeeper turned and waved to it and, with his back to the play, conceded a goal. George laughed. He took his hands from the handlebars and applauded.
The playing field ended in a line of poplars like huge upended besoms. Here, the lane forked. George turned left and was astonished to find himself in a newer, braver world. He pedaled slowly past a long row of new, cement-rendered, and white-painted semidetached houses. They looked solid, modern, confident. Fresh. Each one had a slate-roofed porch over the front door. Each one had a small lawn, separated from its neighbor by a ruler-straight privet hedge, still only knee-high, and separated from the road by a tarmacked pavement. At the end of the row, the road turned smartly right. At the corner house, a woman was cleaning her windows, standing on a kitchen chair. Her buttocks swung with the work, and her calves were muscular. George rang the bell on his handlebar, and she turned and waved to him as if she knew him. Or wanted to. He rode right and left and right and left again through a grid of new suburban roads that were named after poets: Chaucer, Donne, Browning, Arnold. The names meant nothing to George. He rode, admiring it all, to its limits, attracted by the chug of a cement mixer and the growl of machinery. Beyond Marvell Road, an acre of raw and muddy earth had been dug into trenches into which men were slumping barrowloads of concrete.
George dismounted and lit a cigarette. Before he was halfway through it, a car — a black Morris — drew up. Its driver clambered out. He was wearing a suit and had a clipboard in his hand. He balanced the clipboard on the roof of the car and leaned back inside and produced a pair of Wellington boots. With his backside perched on the bonnet of the car, he bent to unlace his shoes.
“Excuse me,” George said.
The man looked up, frowning.
George, smiling nicely, said, “What’s all this, then?”
“Pardon me?”
“I mean, what’s all this going to be? More houses?”
“Er, no. This is the new Millfields Primary School.”
“Ah,” George said.
The man pulled off his left shoe and, surprisingly, sniffed its interior.
“This will be where your children go to school, Mr., er?”
“Ackroyd.”
“Yes. We estimate, on a ten-year projection, a minimum of one hundred and ten children on the estate. You chaps back from the war have already been busy, if you know what I mean. Quite right, too.”
George stood on his cigarette.
“Estate?”
The man looked at him quizzically.
“So the
se are council houses,” George said.
“Yes, of course. Sorry, I assumed you lived here. You’re not a tenant, then?”
George cycled back into Borstead — the playing fields were silent now — and leaned Ruth’s bike against one of the two trees in front of the town hall. He waited almost an hour before he was ushered into the presence of the housing officer, who was, according to the gold-effect lettering on the little black nameplate on his desk, Mr. G. Roake. He stood up to shake hands when George entered. Even from across the desk, his breath was rank. He had thin colorless hair greased over the top of his head, and he did not convincingly occupy his clothes. His eyes, magnified by his spectacles, took up a disproportionate amount of his face. His hand, in George’s clasp, was bony.
“Take a seat, Mr. . . .”
“Ackroyd. George Ackroyd.”
Roake wrote George’s name on a piece of paper, not checking how it was spelled.
“How can I help you, Mr. Ackroyd?”
Roake’s accent was not Norfolk. George could not identify it.
‘Those new council houses. Up off the Aylsham road.”
“Millfields?”
“Yes. I want to put my name down for one.”
Roake gazed for a moment. “Yes. Well. We can do that for you. Have you applied for council housing before? Here or elsewhere?”
“No.”
“I see.” Roake shifted a knee and opened a drawer. “There’s a form to fill in, of course. Always a form.” He put sheets of stapled paper on the desk but left his hand resting on them. “There’s a waiting list, as you’ll appreciate.”
“Is there?”
“Oh, yes.”
The way he said it started something cooking inside George.
“How long’s this waiting list?”
“Well, that’s hard to say. It’s not so much the length of the list. More a question of when a house becomes vacant and which families on the list have priority. According to the number of children, and so forth. The quality of their present accommodation. Amenities. That sort of thing. There’s an assessment process.”
George clasped his hands together and stared at the linoleum between his feet.