Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (7 page)

Apse—or Parable—was washing his hands at the shallow stone sink, drying carefully between his fingers.

‘How old did you say? Ah yes. I remember the visit of the Cossacks to the Gas Works though, of course, I was unable to attend. A circus is one of the devil’s plays. There is a rumour abroad—tell me, what is your name?—that you are particularly clever. Your intelligence is above these parts. You might bring your intelligence to us. Come in with me as a lawyer. It could be arranged. It is called ‘Doing your articles’—a ridiculous and medieval concept—but a solicitor’s work is the top of the world.’

(‘This man’s a loony!’)

‘And even now,’ said Parable-Apse, ‘Think of Christian commerce. Sea-coal. It is your family business.’

‘You shut up,’ said Terry. ‘Stop looking down on my mother.’

‘Oh never! Never! Known her since she was born. Since her mother put her in long drawers. I loved her.’

‘My Dad loves her and nowt to do wi’ frills. They don’t speak now, me Dad and Mam, but it’s only because of his shame. Shame at being crippled and nobody caring. And being lost.’

‘He talks to you?’

‘Nay—never! We’s beyond talk. We talk his language together less and less. He grabs me wrist as I pass the bed. Like a torturer but it’s himself ’e’s torturing.’

‘Why does he do that?’

‘There’s always money under his fingers. Tight up in the palm. He needs whisky. The Mam don’t know. Nurse Watkins does. She’s foreign, too. He pushes the bottle under his mattress. When it’s empty. I’ve seen it going home in her leather bag with the washing. The money must come from the Holy Father. How do I know? He’s beginning to need more and more.’

He was dizzy with revelation. Revelation even to himself. None of this had emerged as words before. Not even thoughts.

‘A man comes,’ said Terry. ‘Mam don’t know. A foreign man. Talking Russian—or summat like it. When nobody’s in.’ He burst into tears. ‘Maybe I dream it.’

Parable-Apse, having dried his coal-dusted hands on a clean tea-towel, sat down by the sea-coal fire and speared a tea-cake on the end of a brass toasting fork. The medallion on the toasting fork was some sort of jack-ass or demon, or sunburst god. ‘How wonderful the world is,’ said Parable-Apse.

The fire blazed bright and the tea-cake toasted.

‘We must get him vodka,’ said Parable-Apse. ‘It does not taint the breath. Goodbye. It is more than time you went home. Take the tea-cake with you. I will butter it. I shall expect you to relish it.’

On the doorstep Terry heard him bolting the door on the inside. They sounded like the bolts of a strong-room. ‘Loopy,’ he thought. ‘Silly old stick.’

* * *

He didn’t go again to the beach that week. He wandered to the nasty little shops in the new town and the new Palace Cinema. He had a bit of pocket money and went in and asked for vodka at the Lobster Inn. He was thrown out. He wanted a girl to tell this to. It surprised him. The girls at his school sniggered and didn’t wash much. They hung about outside the cinema. One or two had painted their mouths bright red. You could get a tube of it at Woolworths for sixpence. They shouted to him to come join them, but he didn’t stop. He dawdled home.

The headmaster of Terry’s school did not live on the premises or go in daily on the train. He lived several miles inland on the moors. He was a healthy man and often pedalled in to Herringfleet on a bicycle with a basket on the front stuffed full of exercise books corrected the night before, for he was a teacher as well as a headmaster.

He and the bike made for the Herringfleet beaches—he always checked the tide-tables—and, dependent on the condition of the sand—he walked or rode the six miles to school, thinking deeply. He always wore a stiff white riding mac with a broad belt and a brown felt homburg hat. Sometimes he had to walk beside his bike when the sands were soft, sometimes push it hard, but he was always very upright and to his chagrin rather overweight. There were little air-holes of brass let in to the mac under the arms for ventilation. Despite his healthy, exhausting regime he was a putty-faced man who never smiled. It was rumoured that there was a wife somewhere and he had a son at the school who got himself there on the train like most of them and home again by his wits. A clever, little younger boy. Fred. Terry liked him.

On the morning beaches the headmaster (a Mr. Smith) often came upon Peter Parable doing an early sea-coal stint before going to his solicitor’s office. They nodded at each other, Parable’s gaze on the black ripples in the sand left by the tide. Smith would briskly nod and pass by, growing smaller and smaller until he was a dot disappearing up the path that led to his school assembly and the toil of the term. Smith and Parable had been at the school together as boys but hadn’t cared much for each other. They had only their cleverness in common. Now they never talked.

That summer Parable began to watch Smith’s straight back diminishing away from him. He noted the little eyelet holes of the mac and the plumpness and the rather desperate marching rhythm. Even if he was on the bike Mr. Smith always looked tired. Better hurry up, thought Parable. Smith, who knew that he was being watched, also knew that at some point he was going to be asked for something.

One beautiful, still morning Parable shouted out, ‘Smith!’

Smith stopped the bike and placed both feet on the sand but didn’t turn his head. ‘What is it, man? Hurry up. I’ll be late.’

‘There’s something you have to do. At once.’

‘Indeed?’ (What does Parable do at once or even slowly? Plays on the beach.)

‘You have a boy at school who in my professional opinion—and Opinions are my stock-in-trade as a lawyer—is remarkable. They’re going to put him in The Works when he leaves you next year and you have to stop it. He must go to the university. He already verges on the phenomenal. I’ve begun to play chess with him. We debate. He has an interesting foreign father. Rather broken up.’

‘You mean Florrie Benson’s boy?’

‘And—?’

‘They need his wages. Sooner the better. It’s a bad business there. She can’t go on.’

‘She’ll try. We both know her.’

‘How could they afford a school until he’s university age?’

‘There are scholarships. We each got one.’

‘We had better parents.’

‘I won’t have that,’ shouted Parable after him across the sand, ‘You have a boy yourself who’s clever. I bet he’ll be spared The Works.’

An hour later at the end of School Assembly and prayers Smith paused for a long minute before clanging the hand-bell that sent the rabble of Teesside to their class-rooms and announced that he wanted Terry Benson in his study.

‘Terry Njinsky? Venetski? Benson? A letter for you to take home.’

Terry, in some dream-scape, was kicked awake by his neighbours and looked about him. (‘What you done, Terry?’ ‘Only tried getting vodka for me Dad.’ ‘What—nickin’?’ ‘Nah—cash.’) A new respect for the already-respected Terry ran down the line.

Smith surveyed the crowd of spotty children, all thin. Grey faces. Poor. All underfed. Terry whatsname—Benson’s white-gold hair and healthy face shone amongst them (It’s said she gets them tripe). We’ll get that hair cut, Smith thought. Start at the top. I’ll write to the father.

‘Take a letter down now, Miss Thompson,’ he said back in his office.

‘I’m not sure Florrie Benson can read,’ said the secretary. ‘Me Mam said she was useless at school. And the father’s a cripple and only talks Russian. He’s a retired Russian spy.’

* * *

The letter was typed, nevertheless, that day and sat waiting for Terry to collect and take home. At the end of the afternoon the headmaster, Smith, came in and pointed at it and said, ‘Letter, Miss Thompson?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘He never came. I’ll tek it. I know where he lives, down Herringfleet. On my way home.’

‘No,’ said Smith, ‘I’ll drop it in. I can take the bike that way. Say nothing to the boy. He’s probably been trying all day to forget it. I’ll bike along the sand.’

‘You tired, Sir?’

‘Certainly not,’ he said, pulling on the ventilated mackintosh that made him paler still. ‘Certainly not! Box on.’

By tea-time, Florrie cooking brains and hearts on a skillet, the letter was lying across the room on the door-mat. The Odessan was having a better day and was in a chair. His back was to the door, but he sensed the letter. He said, ‘We have a letter. I heard a bicycle and a man cough. Pick it up, will you, Florrie?’

‘No,’ said Florrie adding dripping, peeling potatoes.

‘Then I’ll wait for Terry to do it. Where is he?’

‘It may not be for you,’ she said. ‘The last one was to me. And what came o’
that
?’

* * *

Years before there had come a letter on the mat that she remembered now like excrement brought in on a shoe. It was a letter in a thick cream envelope written in an operatic hand in purple ink.

In those days the situation at No. 9 Muriel Street was still an interesting mystery in Herringfleet. Most people kept themselves at a distance. People crammed together in mean streets are not always in and out of each other’s houses.

The letter had been sent without a stamp and delivered ‘By Hand’. It said so in the top, left-hand corner. The letter-paper inside was the colour of pale baked-custard and thick as cloth.

Dear Mrs. Vet(scrawl)y, it had said, ‘I would be so delighted if you would bring your little boy to a fireworks party—with supper, of course—on November 5th for Guy Fawkes’ Celebrations at The Towers. A number of local children will be coming and we hope to give them a lasting and happy experience. Five o’ Clock
P.M.
until 8
P.M.
Warm coats and mittens. Sincerely yours. Veronica Fondle.’

‘She has asked me to a party,’ Florrie said. ‘Me and Terry.’ Anton watched her blush and smile and thought how young she was. How beautiful. ‘With Terence,’ she said. ‘Our Terence. For Guy Fawkes.’ She gazed at the letter. ‘It’s to be a supper—unless she means we take our supper?—and at
night
!’

‘What,’ he asked, ‘is Guy Forks?’

‘We burn a model of him every year. For hundreds of years. Because he once tried to burn down the Parliament in London.’

The Odessan considered this.

‘But we can’t go. I haven’t any clothes.’

He said, ‘It just says a warm coat and mittens. You have your better coat and we can get mittens.’

‘I think that means only the children. The mothers will be in furs.’

‘Here, in Herringfleet?’ said Anton and at once wrote the acceptance in fine copperplate on a card they found in an old prayer book. Nurse Watkins brought an envelope and took it round to the local private school, The Towers, where Veronica Fondle was the headmaster’s wife.

On the party day Terence, then not yet four, was scrubbed, polished and groomed but then became recalcitrant and unenthusiastic. He lay on his face on the floor and drummed his feet. When his mother walked in from the bath-house where she had been dressing, he roared and hid under his father’s bed, for this was a woman unknown. The lace on her hat (Nurse Watkins’ cousin’s) stood up around her head with black velvet ribbons enmeshed. Her cloth coat Nurse Watkins had enriched with a nest of red fox tail bundles round her throat. Beneath the chin, the vixen’s face clasped the tails in its yellow teeth. Poppies swayed about round the black straw hat brim. Her shoes were Nurse Watkins’ mother’s brogues worn on honeymoon in Whitby before the First World War, and real leather.

‘You’re meant to wear the veil tight against the face, like Greta Garbo, and tied round the back with the black ribbon, Florrie,’ said Nurse Watkins, shushing Terry on her knee.

‘I’ll never get it off.’

‘You’re not meant to get it off.’

‘Then how do I drink tea?’

Even Nurse Watkins didn’t know this.

The veil was left to float around the poppies. Anton said suddenly, ‘How beautiful you are,’ and Florrie disappeared out the back.

She came back saying that Nurse Watkins was to go instead of her and Terry kicked out at the table leg while Anton picked up the book on Kant he’d been reading which Florrie had ordered for him from the Public Library. All he said was, ‘Go!’

So outside over the railway bridge from Muriel Street the gas lights inside their glass lanterns were beginning to show blue as mother and son set off hand in hand.

There was no driveway up to The Towers just three wide, shallow steps, a big oak door with circles of wrought-iron leaves and a polished brass plate alongside saying The Towers, Headmaster, HAROLD FONDLE M.A. OXON. A chain hung down. Florrie picked up Terry and held him tight. Terry was in the full school uniform of Nurse Watkins’ nephew who went to a paying Kindergarten. He had had his first hair-cut. As Florrie stood miserably beside the chain the child shouted, ‘Me, me!’ and she let him drag it down. Far inside the house came a tinny clinking.

Florrie knew that something was now about to go wrong. Terry on her shoulder—rather heavy—seemed to be transfixed with terror by both the sound of the bell and the poppies in the hat. She set him down and clutched his hand. When the door opened she thought she might faint. The colours and heat within, the noise and laughter, the smell of rich food and spiced fruit and sweet drinks, the rasping whiff of gunpowder, the snap of crackers, the squealing of children running madly, waving sparkling, spitting lighted things into each other’s faces. The girls were all in heavy jerseys and gaiters with button boots, the boys in corduroy and mufflers. Several wore the tartan kilt. Across the entrance hall, propped against a carved fireplace, leaned a huge stuffed man with a grinning mask for a face and straw tufts coming out of his ears. He was waiting to be burned.

The maid who had answered the door however was only Bessy Bell, the Gypsy girl who’d known Florrie since school. ‘Eh, Florrie!’ she said. ‘’Ere. I’ll tek Terry in.’

‘I’ll tek ’im in meself, Bessie.’

‘No, it’s just to be ’im,’ said Bessie, ‘She said.’