The Broken Chariot

  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 g
et 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.

  Part Three

  Seventeen

  The publisher’s letter said they would appreciate him calling, at a mutually convenient time and date, when they might, after some discussion, be prepared to make an offer on his book. During days of fever the words shot and spiralled around his brain like fiery arrows, always reforming at a distance his arms couldn’t reach nor his eyes decipher. When his mind cooled back to equilibrium he thought that whoever had dictated such stilted language must have been to a similar school to his own. But then, maybe they all had in that particular trade.

  Knowing the letter by heart, he sent every bit from the window while passing St Albans, and opened the Evening Post to gloat over Cecilia’s marriage to her middle-aged company director. Director? As they said about one who strutted around the factory, he couldn’t direct a trolley from one end of the firm to the other without getting lost, unless it was loaded with bags of somebody else’s money and he was going in ever-diminishing circles in the hope of reaching an exit.

  If you looked at the photograph one way the man was handsome and self-assured, while squinting at it with one eye closed he seemed furtive and lecherous, and well on the way to being sent down for embezzlement. At the risk of thinking himself mean and despicable Herbert finally considered the man to be a type eminently suitable for Cecilia who, in her virginal wedding dress, would no doubt become a fitting partner for him.

  A woman opposite, who he was starting to see as the spitting image of Eileen’s apparent reappearance by the town hall lions after
he came back from the army, disturbed the recollection of his perfect afternoon with Cecilia on the hillside near Gotham, which had culminated in his sublime eye-contact with the fox. He saw again the clean orange flame of its pelt framed in green, snout to the wind and turned towards prey. Yet its instinct had been defective in not spotting the entwined bodies of two lovers. Even a fox made mistakes.

  ‘What time does this train get to London, duck?’

  ‘How do I know?’ Bert snarled.

  ‘Sorry, I was on’y askin’.’

  So as to look more like Bert Gedling than Herbert Thurgarton-Strang he stood before a glass at St Pancras to set his cap at an angle, though not too much in case he appeared a caricature rather than dignified. The white silk scarf around his neck was barely visible when his jacket was fastened. A tall thin man of twenty-nine, he sniffed the worldliness of the air outside, mackintosh open and showing his smartest suit, a clean haversack settled on his shoulder. Fingers poking from the arm in its sling were available for adjusting his tie or dealing with trouser buttons. He took care not to look like one of the walking wounded back from a hard campaign of whippet breeding in the North.

  The eternal pigeons circling Nelson’s head spiralled down in clouds to scavenge crumbs and corn. One settled on the thatched napper of a five-year-old boy with sparkling blue eyes who held a piece of bread in a still hand hoping a bird would come off its perch and eat. Bert smiled when one did. On his way through the same square from school, so long ago, identical pigeons had brought him luck, reinforced him with their powers of intuition and self-preservation, and sent him on a circuit which had brought him back. He waved to the kid’s young mother, and set off towards Covent Garden.

  A streak of white shit struck the peak of his cap, from a Heinkel pigeon-bomber following along the street. He looked up at the plump-chested bird on the window sill turning its head this way and that, as if looking for another pigeon to blame it on. He slotted the map into his haversack and pressed the bell with the same force as starting a machine at work. Some Mrs Mop had not long scrubbed the step, but he scuffed his fag and leaned on the white button again. Maybe they were on holiday, though the date had been unmistakable. Or the letter had been posted from Mars and had been a hoax, in which case he would jump on the next train back. A busty woman in her twenties pulled the door open. ‘What do you want?’