Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (6 page)

‘You are a Catholic, Florrie Benson.’ She seemed uncertain. ‘Your parents were lapsed. But I remember baptising you as a child. That child has now to have her own child and it must be brought up as a Catholic. It must go to a Catholic school. You must bring it to the church. And your marriage must be preceded by a purification.’

‘A
purification
, Father?’

‘Have you no concept of your faith?’

‘You never gave me any.’

She stretched out her rough hand in a gesture which was—for her—hesitant, towards the Cossack’s hand and together they both glared at the priest. Then, between them in assorted words, from God knows where, they made a stab at the Catechism, Anton’s face rigid with contempt.

Florrie’s face was alight with joy. The baby in the womb stirred.

* * *

Anton tried. When Florrie was in the ninth month and couldn’t walk far he began to limp about the town looking for work.

There was almost no money left by now from the wills of Florrie’s parents and so he became a caretaker at a private school at the end of the town. When they found that he spoke several languages he began to teach classes there. His English improved so quickly that it almost seemed that it had always been there, beneath the other languages. He began to meet educated people in the good houses across the Park towards Linthorpe. The new great families, the iron-masters. Some of them German Jews. In these houses he behaved with a grave, alien formality: but with a seductive gleam in his eye. It seemed that he was a gentleman. It was confusing.

Soon he was being invited to dinner—always, of course, without Florrie—by the headmaster of a local private school and his artistic wife while, in Muriel Street, Florence suckled the child over the kitchen range. She sang to it, made clothes for it, wished her mother were alive to see it. Wished she had been kinder to her mother.

Her husband, seated at the headmaster Harold Fondle’s great mahogany dining table with its lace mats and good crystal, spoke in improving English and fluent French of Plato and Descartes. His English was without accent, he looked distinguished and he appreciated the wine. When anybody broached the question of his past life or his future, or his allegiances he would raise his glass and say, ‘To England’.

He grew strong again, and after the child was weaned decided to go into business as a coal merchant. He carved and then painted the gold and green sign in the slaughter-house alley. The butcher thought little of it (‘You don’t start a business by mekkin a painting of it’). When Anton’s back gave out for the second time, Florrie found him twisted, lying in the alley under a sack of coal, the thin horse munching into its nose-bag.

She hauled him somehow back indoors where Nurse Watkins came and they got him up at last on the bed. The baby—the alert and golden, happy baby—lay watching from his cot, which was a clothes drawer. The doctor came.

Both parents that night wept.

* * *

The next day was the day of the week when Griesepert came to them with the Sacrament. He never missed. He rolled in like a walrus, snorting down his nose. He stretched out his legs towards the fender.

Today Florrie ignored the Sacrament and sat out in the yard letting them talk. There was whisky, and firelight in the room and the knowing-looking baby wondered whether the grim man on the bed or the fat man over the fire mattered more. The word ‘father’ kept recurring. The baby seemed to listen for it. As to his mother, she was milk and warmth and safe arms but he didn’t pat and stroke her like other babies do. He seldom cried. Occasionally he gave a great crow of laughter. Nurse Watkins with her brass earrings and heavy moustache called him a cold child.

Out of earshot of others Father Griesepert told Florrie she must sleep with the Cossack again or she would lose him (What do you know? she thought). ‘He needs a woman. It is Russian,’ (And him never gone a step beyond Scarborough! she thought. And not knowing the state of his back). Anton had, occasionally, visitors, Russian-speaking, who came and went like shadows. She and the baby sometimes slept on a mattress out by the back door. She lay often listening to the Cossack shouting at invisible companions somewhere she would never know. In the end she told the priest who thought it came from some terrible prison in his past and he was talking to the dead. ‘We know
nothing
here, nothing of what goes on in these places. One day we might if we live through this next war.’

‘Never another war!’ she said. ‘Not again.’

She tried to imagine Anton’s country. She knew nothing about it but snow and golden onion-topped churches and jewels and stirring cold music and peasants starving and all so blessedly far away. She did not allow herself to imagine Anton’s life before he came to her. She would never ask. At night sometimes, to stop his swearing in his sleep, in words she could only guess, she’d pull out a drawer from the press where she kept her clothes and tuck down the baby among them and a chair on either end to keep the cat off and then climb on to the high bed with Anton and wrap herself round him. Sometimes he opened his eyes. They were unseeing and cold. There were no endearments. The sex was ferocious, impersonal, fast. There was no sweetness in it. She didn’t conceive again.

Her silent faith in the little boy never lessened. Her trust and love for him was complete. As he grew up she asked no questions as he arrived home later and later off the school train. When he was eleven she stopped taking him to the station.

* * *

For by now Terry was wandering far beyond the chip shop and the band-stand. He was roaming over the sand-dunes down over the miles of white sands towards the estuary and the light-house on the South Gare. On the horizon sometimes celestially, mockingly blue, shining between blue water and blue sky stood the lines of foreign ships waiting for the tide to take them in to Middlesbrough docks. Spasmodically along the sand-dunes the landward sky would blaze with the flaring of the steel-works’ furnaces. They blazed and died and blazed again, hung steady, faded slowly. The boy watched.

He was not a rapturous child. The crane-gantry of the Blast Furnaces turned delirious blue at dusk but he was not to be a painter. He noted and considered the paint-brush flicker of flame on the top of each chimney leaning this way and then that but he sat on his pale beach noting them and no more.

He had no idea why he was drawn to the place, the luminous but unfriendly arcs of lacy water running over the sand, the waxy, crunchy black deposits of sea-wrack, slippery and thick, dotted for miles like the droppings of some amphibian, the derelict grey dunes rose up behind him empty except for knives of grey grasses.

There would usually be a few bait-diggers at the water’s edge, their feet rhythmically washed by the waves. A lost dog might be somewhere rhythmically barking out of sight.

Sometimes one or two battered home-made sand-yachts skimmed by; only one or two people watching. No children. This was not sand-castle country. No children in this hard place were brought to play by the sea.

But there was a single recurrent figure on the beaches. It was there mostly in winter as it began to get dark: an insect figure stopping and starting, pulling a little cart, bending, stopping, pacing, sometimes shovelling something up, always alone.

After weeks Terry decided it was a man and it was pushing not a cart but a baby’s pram. For months he watched without much interest but then he began to look out for the man and wonder who it was.

* * *

One cold afternoon he did his usual rat-run of railway bridge to the back of Muriel Street—he now passed through the room with the bed in it—and found his father’s fist stuck out of the blanket towards him grasping a ten shilling note. The wireless crackled on about Czechoslovakia and his father’s lips were trying to say something. Terry pocketed the note and said in Russian, ‘D’you want tea?’

‘Whisky,’ said his father.

‘It’s for the Holy Father. How are you?’

‘I’m well.’

‘You have a good Russian accent. Are you happy?’

Terry had never been asked this, and did not know.

‘I’m going down the beach now, Pa.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know.’

The wireless blared out and then faded. They had been first in Muriel Street for a wireless. It stood with a flask of blue spirit beside it. Where had the money come from?

‘I’m glad I know Russian,’ Terry said.

‘How old are you son?’

‘Going on twelve.’

Tears trickled out over the Cossack’s bony face running diagonally from the eyes to the hollows of the neck and Terry knew that, watching, there was something he should be feeling but didn’t know what. He took the money and went to the shop. Let them get on with their lives. He was getting his own.

* * *

He sat down in the dunes facing the sea and soon began to be aware that he was being watched from somewhere behind his left shoulder. Before him the white sands were empty. The sea was creeping forward. He watched the trivial, collapsing waves. The steel-works’ candle-chimneys were not yet putting on their evening performance against tonight’s anaemic sunset.

There was a cough above him on the high dune.

Turning round, Terry saw the insect-man in an old suit and a bowler hat. The pram hung in front of him, two wheels deep in fine sand that flowed in spreading avalanches down the slope.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the man. ‘Parable-Apse.’

Terry stared.

‘And Apse,’ he said. ‘Parable, Apse and Apse; Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.’

Terry stared on.

‘My name is Peter Parable, senior partner, and you I believe to be Florrie Benson’s boy? I was briefly at school with your mother. I am being obliged to ask for your help.’

Terry’s Russian eyes watched on.

‘I am a man of principle,’ said the creature. ‘I am not in the least interested in children. I am not of a perverted disposition. I am able to survive without entanglements and I ask only your immediate assistance in conducting the pram down to the harder level below this dune. Today I have attempted a different route home. It has not been a success.’

The pram was up to its axles in sand.

‘When I lean with all my might,’ said the tiny man, ‘you may assist by tugging at the back wheels, those nearest you. And then if you could sharply—
sharply
—spring to the side I think the vehicle might achieve the beach in an upright position and of its own volition.’

Terry sat a minute considering this new language and then plodded up the dune. He kicked the rear of the pram facing him with a nonchalance close to insolence. Close to hatred. Bloody man.

He soon stopped kicking. He tried to heave the pram upwards in his arms. He said, ‘It’s not going to shift. Is’t full o’ lead? What you got in’t?’

‘Black gold,’ said Parable-Apse. ‘Black diamonds. Tiny black—and white—pearls. Now then—again!’

After at least seven heaves Terry yelled and fell to the ground, rolled sideways and watched the pram lumbering and slithering down the slope to tip over on its side upon the beach. A heap of gravelly dirt spilled over the silken sand. Using a shovel as a walking stick Mr. Parable (or Apse) toddled after it, legs far apart, and Terry sat up.

‘We have, I fear, a weakened axle,’ said the insect-man.

‘You’ll have to leave it ’ere,’ said Terry.

‘Oh, it hasn’t come to that. Perhaps we should empty it completely, scatter the load with simple sand and, later, return.’

Terry regarded the heap of dirt.

‘And if, boy, you would carry the broken wheel and we were to push the rest of it home, then you could take tea with me.’

Terry thought, Here we go and said, ‘Is’t far?’

‘Not at all.’ The man was busy covering up the mound of black gold, scratching the last of the dirt from the pram. He snapped off the damaged wheel, handed it to the boy and fell flat on his face.

‘Oh, God,’ said Terry, hauling him up. ‘’ere. Gis ’ere. Give over. Tek’t wheel. Where we goin’?’

They paraded over the sandy path behind the dunes, across the golf-links, somehow got themselves over a wooden stile watched by a lonely yellow house with empty windows. They followed a track that put them out into a street of squat one-storey houses Terry had not seen before, the long, low street of the old fishing village built before the industries came, before the ironstone chimney and the foreign workers and the chemicals and the flames. The sandstone dwellings had midget doors and windows like houses for elves. Mr. Parable-Apse, Commissioner for Oaths, let them both in to one of these houses, leaving the pram outside, and inside they walked down a long, low tunnel of a rabbit-warren-like passage-way into a kitchen scrubbed clean. Some of Mr. Parable-Apse’s under-clothing hung airing from a contraption of ropes and wooden bars overhead. He lit a hazy, beautiful gas-light on a bracket, crossed to the coal fire, flourished a poker and flung a shovelful of glittering, hard dirt, like jet, into the flames. The coal fire in the grate blazed up, hot and brilliant.

‘What is’t?’ asked Terry.

‘Sea-coal.
Washed
, of course. I wash it in a bath in my yard several times a week. Out of office hours of course, and never on the Lord’s Day. In my back yard I have a pump with clear, unbounded water that cleanses like the mercy of God. The sea-coal’s what washes off the ships, you know. In the estuary. Sea-coal is a bonus. Clean and beautiful, sweet-smelling, effective and
free
. Your mother should market it.’

‘She has enough to do,’ said Terry.

‘So I hear. But you haven’t yet, my boy. I expect you are meant to leave school shortly and slave at The Works? Oh, my dear boy! Sweeping a road ’til the end of your life.’

‘They need the money.’

‘You could begin now, working casually for me. While you are waiting. I make money. I have never had any difficulty there. We could expand across this world. Apse and Benson. In the name of the Lord, of course.’

Apse, Benson and God, thought Terry. He said, ‘But I’ll have to go full time to The Works. For the money.’