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 recordin
g 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.