A Possible Life (11 page)

There was a silence.

‘And you, sir. You didn’t …’

‘Marry? No.’

‘Of course, I suppose the war and all that. That must have been exciting.’ Cheeseman licked his lips.

‘You could say that.’

Cheeseman frowned. ‘My father was in a tank regiment. He was wounded in Sicily.’

‘Wasn’t he rather old?’ said Geoffrey, who could not remember Cheeseman’s father in particular.

‘Just scraped in, I think,’ said Cheddar. ‘He was very keen. And quite short. They just dropped him in the gun turret. So he used to say.’

There was another pause and Geoffrey struggled to find anything to say. He didn’t want to embarrass Cheeseman by talking about his own health, or about his war experiences.

Eventually, he had a thought. ‘What work do you do? Do you have a good job?’

Cheeseman grimaced. ‘Not really. I work for a law firm in the City. It’s pretty dull, to be honest. Quite well paid, though.’

They heard a trolley clanking down the corridor towards the ward. It was Cheeseman’s turn to be struck by an idea.

‘Do you have a television here, sir? I mean, can you watch the Test match?’

‘No,’ said Geoffrey. ‘There’s a wireless in the day room, but the others don’t like cricket. They like pop music.’

‘Bad luck, sir. We’re doing quite well. I was listening in the car. What do you think of Colin Cowdrey?’

‘Plays very straight, they say. Very well coached. Wonderful slip fielder, I believe. I’m afraid I’ve never seen him play.’

‘I’ll take you to Lord’s one day when you’re better. There’s a chap in my firm can usually get tickets. It’s about the only consolation for working there! Who was the best bat you ever saw?’

‘Frank Woolley,’ said Geoffrey without hesitation. ‘He was imperious. He once scored a double hundred in each innings. No one else has ever done that.’

‘Left-hander, wasn’t he?’

A nurse came in to take away the empty teacups. The air seemed heavy when she had gone and Geoffrey felt his inspiration had run dry. Cheeseman licked his lips again and cast his eyes round frantically, through the window and out to the garden where two or three patients were walking slowly over the grass.

The silence hung thickly in the corners of the room until at last the lunch bell rang and Cheeseman said, ‘I suppose I’d better be going now, sir. It was very nice to see you. I do hope they’ll let you out of here soon.’

Geoffrey took Cheeseman to the main door of the building and shook his proffered hand.

‘Thank you for coming, Ched. Very decent of you.’

Then he watched him drive off in a blue Ford Zephyr, sounding the horn once as he left the car park but keeping his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

Geoffrey did not go into lunch that day. He sat in the day room and cried. All afternoon, his tears fell on to the linoleum floor, making such a pool that the nurse eventually had to clean it up. ‘Come on, Geoffrey,’ she said, banging the head of a mop against the leg of his chair, ‘pull yourself together.’

A week later there was a parcel for Geoffrey from London. Buried deep in layers of protective packaging was a small portable television with a built-in aerial and a pair of earphones.

Three months later, Geoffrey was out, discharged; and three months after that, he found himself a job in Hampshire. He had persuaded ‘Big’ Little to write a reference for a post he had seen advertised, and Little did so, adding the postscript: ‘If there is anything further at all you would like to know about this candidate, please do not hesitate to ask me.’ He had underlined the words ‘anything further at all’, which was a code headmasters used as a warning signal – usually that the man in question was too fond
of
boys. It also meant that the new employer could offer a reduced salary.

Geoffrey still had £200 of his inheritance left, and used some of it to buy an old car. His new school was near the area where he had been brought up, though not so close as to provoke mawkish thoughts. It was a notch or two below Crampton Abbey and sent most of its pupils on to schools with strong discipline but poor academic records.

He was put into an old cottage on the edge of the estate, overlooking the main road. It was meant to be for a married couple, but there were none that year and it was really too dilapidated for a woman to tolerate, Geoffrey thought. He didn’t mind it, though. There was a kitchen garden behind, away from the road, and more than enough room inside for him and his belongings. He even took some pieces of his parents’ furniture out of storage.

It was that summer, at the end of his first year, that his life shifted and changed for good. It was after a country wedding where he knew almost no one; and in return few people noticed a tall, grey-haired man with a slightly startled expression and flecks of dandruff on the shoulders of his suit. He was fifty-five years old, though looked older, in his late sixties perhaps, and nothing in his manner – mild enough, but dry – would have made other guests linger or introduce themselves.

The bride was blinking, wearing too much make-up, not quite able to believe what she had done, but buoyed by the approval of her parents and old-timers like Geoffrey Talbot. The groom, Nigel or Michael, bespectacled, sweating in his hired suit, was feeling lucky to have even for a day won some approval from his father-in-law. At the same time he was dreading the speech that would be his to make in the marquee on the cropped lawn among the bought-in bedding plants, after which his accountancy exams and married life in Clapham would seem a sweet relief.

No one seemed to know what Geoffrey was doing there, but a young man was polite enough to speak to him and discovered he was a cousin of the bride’s father … Some childhood holidays … Long ago, Great Yarmouth … He was surprised to have been invited, but, yes, what a lovely day. He’d noticed earlier in church how some old chap was listening to the Test match commentary via an earpiece attached to a radio in the pocket of his morning coat. He chuckled at the thought of John Arlott describing the action at Headingley. Better that, said the young man, than listening to the women in the row in front as they whispered about the bridesmaids and their tangerine taffeta dresses.

During the first speech, made by a long-standing friend of the bride’s family (commonly known as the Old Bore’s speech) Geoffrey Talbot stood a little apart. He smiled at the attempted witticisms, nodded at the marital advice and raised his glass at the appropriate moment – but all like a man who had studied a book on wedding behaviour. Apart from his brief exchange with the polite young man, he spoke to no one.

Yet that evening, listening to the wireless in his kitchen, with the window open on to the vegetable garden at the back, in his shirtsleeves with stiff collar and tie abandoned, Geoffrey Talbot was not unhappy. He had found a German station to which he listened frequently in an attempt to make up for the missed lectures and unread books of his youth. He still sometimes dreamed he was resitting his Finals, with better results.

His salary was enough to live on, and he had invested what remained of his inheritance in wine, so that he had a cellar full of half-bottles of burgundy. He had also had the pleasure of seeing Cowdrey, May and Barrington at the crease. After the wedding he opened some wine to go with the lamb chop and fresh vegetables that it was easily within his power to organise. This is not bad, he thought, as he ate at the table on the small paved area at
the
back of his cottage, where he barely noticed the sound of traffic from the main road at the front.

Then, suddenly, at about ten o’clock, when he was clearing up in readiness for bed, a feeling of enormous fatigue came over him – so great that he could walk no further but had to lie down on the sofa in the main room. The strength seemed to drain through his calves and his hands and his back. The millions of instances of lifting, heaving, scraping and hauling he had made in his more than fifty years alive seemed all at once to exact their toll. The efforts of crawling as a baby, of running as a child; of driving, cutting, hooking on the cricket pitch; the pounding of military drill; the reaching, digging, straining and the dragging logs to the furnace, the back-strain of tipping the chute – to say nothing of the hours of running, running through the forests or the everyday lift of boxes or suitcases or books – seemed to have left him with no further power in his body as it was.

Let someone else live my life for me, Geoffrey thought, with the skin of his cheek against the rough material of the sofa cover. I have loved my life, I have been violently loyal to myself, but now I have lived it long enough.

His dandruffy jacket over the back of the chair, his battered black shoes on the rug next to him, Geoffrey inhaled the exhausted, dried-rose smell of the old upholstery and closed his eyes.

He awoke some hours later in the befuddled dark, groped his way upstairs, stripped and climbed into his bed, pulling up the eiderdown over him as the first chill of early morning came into the cottage.

The next day he felt changed. The ropy veins on the backs of his hands were the same; the ache in his arthritic hip was where it always was and the world came to him through the network of nerves he had relied on since infancy. Yet he sensed a
difference
– not a medical or morbid change, more the touch of an unsought grace.

No one at school seemed to notice anything, but Geoffrey, quite happy at the blackboard or on the slow walk to the cricket pitch, with the afternoon sun slanting through the elms and the boys chattering as they ran past him, knew that some subtle rearrangement of particles had taken place within him; he felt with joy and resignation that he was not the same man.

PART II – THE SECOND SISTER

1859

MY FATHER MADE
us all sit round the table. ‘Children,’ he says, ‘one of you is going to have to go into the Union house. They’ve offered me that – to take one of you off my hands.’

We all looked at each other. John was the oldest so he’d be all right, he could work. Meg was the only girl and she was the apple of Pa’s eye. Tom was the baby, he was only two. I reckoned it was between me and Arthur, the third and fourth ones. It was a long evening. I didn’t know whether to speak up for myself or not. Me and Arthur kept staring at each other.

We were living in two rooms on the first floor of a house in Mason Street. Once we had all four rooms but then we had to let off the bottom two for the rent. Ma and Meg and the baby Tom slept in one room. Me and Arthur shared a bed in the other one. I don’t remember about Pa and John, where they slept. They were out a lot.

In the morning, Ma said, ‘I’m sorry, Billy, it’s you.’ I knew it would be. The place was called St Joseph-in-the-West, but most people called it the Bastille. I was seven years old and small for my age because we never had enough to eat. I said goodbye to Tom, but he didn’t know what was happening. Meg was crying and making a big to-do. John had gone out with Pa to look for work. Arthur shook me by the hand but he couldn’t look at me.

My mother put on a bonnet and walked me quickly down Mason Street because she didn’t want people to ask where we was going.
It
was half an hour to walk there. I’d seen the place once before when we were on our way to see Aunt Annie in Hoxton. It was a big grey building with an iron railing in front of it. Ma pulled the bell and you could hear it ringing inside but half a mile away. We waited and my mother was shivering. After a long time we could hear footsteps inside and then the sound of bolts being drawn. The door opened and a big man in a black hat was standing there.

‘My name is Mrs Webb,’ said Ma.

The man nodded. ‘Leave the child.’

He pulled me inside. I called after her but the man pulled the door closed. I never saw her again.

I was in an arched hallway with a brick floor. I turned back to look at the door and felt the man’s hand on my shoulder. I wondered if my mother was still outside. The man pushed me forwards and we went into a wide corridor with no windows.

We came to a sort of lobby and I was told to sit on a bench outside an office. There was more light here and I could see we were at the junction of two long corridors. I wondered if I’d ever see the outside world again. A man in workhouse grey clothes came and took me down till we came to a wash house with no windows but two gas jets. Here they made me take all my clothes off and put me in some water in a kind of square trough and a man scrubbed me with a brush. Then they cut my hair off and shaved my head. They gave me clothes made from some stiff material that smelled bad and some boots with nails in them that didn’t fit proper. One was bigger than the other. There were blue socks.

They took me to another room and told me to wait outside. When I got in there I was face to face with the Master. I thought he’d be a swell like the people I’d seen when I’d gone with my father to St James’s Park one time. But he was a rough type with whiskers and small eyes. There was a hot coal fire raging in the
grate
and he mopped his forehead with a red rag. He said something about believing in God, but Hard Work came first. There was framed pictures with words in them on the wall but I couldn’t read.

I was shown a bed in a room that was like a barn with wooden rafters. You laid down in a sort of hole in the floor in a row like you was being buried except there was nothing on top of you, just a blanket. There was a straw mattress to lie on. Above you was the beams and on the walls there was more writing but it wasn’t in frames, it was printed in big letters. In my room it was all boys, from littl’uns not much more than Tom’s age up to John’s age which was fifteen. There was a trough at one end you could use as a privy but I didn’t want the others to see me. They wanted me to sing a song or say a rhyme or something because that was what new boys did.

The Master came in and he had a cane so no one moved. His wife, the Matron, she came in too and she had a stick. Mostly the man in charge was a pauper in the workhouse uniform called McInnes and he was given a bit more food to keep order. It was dark when the bell rang in the morning and we all had to get up quick and put our boots on and go to the hall where there was prayers. Then you went to these benches and sat down at a long table for breakfast. And you’d see the girls then, they come in from their corridor, but they were down the other side of the room and you couldn’t talk to them. Breakfast was something in a bowl, they called it ‘skilly’, it was a liquid with oats in it. You just wanted it, you wanted it bad, but there were no spoons or forks. You drank it, then used your hands.