Letters From an Unknown Woman (24 page)

‘We’re all orphans in the house, but we don’t know it. Apart from you, Branson. I think you’re the real son of our fake mother. That makes you the only non-orphan in the family, and a very lucky boy.’

‘Do you think our father isn’t our father as well?’

‘Well, he’s certainly not
your
father, and I very much doubt if he’s ours. For a start, if he was our father, he would have noticed that his so-called wife was an actor, wouldn’t he?’

Tom said this in a triumphant tone, though Branson didn’t seem convinced.

*

The construction of Mr Briggs took more than two years, a project that soon overspilled the little outhouse, and began to fill most of the backyard, which was continually strewn with the workshop debris, tools and raw materials of Tom’s ingenious invention. The robot became a celebrated local sight. His slightly comical demeanour (Tom had constructed a face with two small light bulbs for eyes and a harmonica for a mouth) and his rather bulky size, which meant he had to be handled with care when he was being moved from one spot to another, made him a spectacular curiosity. During the long, hot summer holiday of his completion, Tom had friends from school round almost every day to help with Mr Briggs. The scattered yard would be full of dishevelled, inky grammar-school boys, sitting on their haunches, labouring with hacksaws at squares of zinc plate, or filing away to smooth a jagged edge of something. The seriousness and solemnity with which they performed their work – rarely joking, rarely even speaking, unless to discuss a technical matter, seemed only to accentuate the comicality of Mr Briggs himself. He stood erect and as stolid as the statue he was, gazing with his unblinking eyes at whatever was set before him, grinning (was it a grin or a grimace?), while at his feet boys seemed curled in acts of earnest devotion.

‘I can’t get over how lifelike that thing looks,’ said Tory one day to her mother, as they both happened to glance out of the back window.

‘
Lifelike
is not a word I’d use,’ said Mrs Head.

‘No, I don’t mean it looks alive, exactly, but it looks like it’s got its own mind. It’s funny but I’ve got so used to seeing its face staring at me from the bottom of the yard that I forget what an extraordinary thing Tom has done.’

‘
Mr Briggs
,’ said Mrs Head, as though correcting her daughter’s
faux pas
. ‘I don’t like to look at him myself. He looks a bit sarcastic.’

‘Don’t be silly, mother. How can a robot look sarcastic?’

‘Well, I just hope he doesn’t ever get as far as making it speak. If Mr Briggs ever spoke, I’m sure he’d be most high-falutin’ and hoity-toity. He’d look down on us because we’re just human beings.’

Donald expressed similar misgivings about Mr Briggs. ‘It’s a pile of junk with a face on it,’ he said, ‘and I don’t like the way it looks at me.’

*

The day came when Tom wanted to unveil the completed Mr Briggs officially. It was the last Sunday of the summer holiday and he had invited all his friends over. The backyard had been cleared of its debris and Mr Briggs draped with a sheet. The family were gathered near the house – Tory and Mrs Head, Donald, Albertina and Paulette, who complained all the while: ‘We’ve seen his stupid face staring at us all summer, why do we have to come out and look at him again?’

‘That’s no way to talk about your brother,’ Tory joked. (Oh, they had become awkward, obtuse and contrary girls. Tory was getting quite fed up with them.) ‘Tom has worked very hard at Mr Briggs. He deserves some respect. And what have you done all summer, I’d like to know, apart from hang about in the streets like a couple of urchins?’

‘Come on,’ Donald called to the boys at the other end of the yard, as they fiddled with the figure behind the sheet, and he leant heavily on his stick to make a display of his discomfort. ‘We havenae got all day.’

Donald and Tom, it seemed to Tory, had become a little closer in recent months. She had seen the way Donald would chat to the boy on his way to and from the privy, and he had dropped heavy hints that he had prepared a reward for all the work Tom had put in to Mr Briggs. No one could imagine what such a reward might consist of because Donald remained as penniless as the day he had returned from the war, having refused to look for work in the two years since. Tom and Branson were aware that this was a cause of friction in the household because they could hear the frequent arguments between their father and mother on the subject.

‘So you think I should be a bus conductor eh? With my leg? Or what about a milkman, then? That’s a laugh …’

He seemed to think that all their problems would be solved once his claim for a veteran’s pension and compensation payments had been made, but these had been very slow in coming, and most of the family doubted that they were ever likely to materialize.

Tom, for his part, was very nervous. He had not thought, when he arranged this day, how he would feel if it all went wrong – if Mr Briggs’s engine failed to start, or if he fell over or ran amok. He glanced at the gathered family as they stood by the poorly pointed brickwork of the house, his father’s grooved face and bald head, so glaringly bald.

Only the night before he’d said to Branson, ‘It’s such a pity our dad’s mental.’

Branson nodded slowly in carefully considered agreement, before saying, ‘What do you mean?’ He only had a vague memory of the time their father was in the asylum. It was never talked about in the house, and it seemed a very long time ago now. But for the fact that their father wore the scars of his madness on his head, they might all have forgotten about it.

Donald’s head had become an object of horrified fascination for everyone in the house. The loss of hair seemed to transform him completely, far more than one would have thought. The whole shape of him seemed different. He did not, in fact, have a very good-shaped skull. It lacked a convincing roundness, especially at the back, which seemed to rise a little, like a pterodactyl’s. Even without the application of ointment it would have been a shiny thing, but with it his skin became not just shiny but glossy, almost to the point of transparency. Branson looked at it sometimes and thought, If I touched it I bet my finger would go right through. To him, Donald became his head in a way that was uniquely his. Branson could only think, when his father came into the kitchen, Here comes my father’s head; Father’s head is eating its dinner; Father’s head is talking to Mother … And sometimes, Father’s head has come out into the yard, and is looking at me.

And that was what he was thinking now, except that, as ever, Donald was not quite looking at him. Donald had never looked at him, as far as Branson could recall, or ever spoken to him. Only now was he beginning to feel that this was odd behaviour for a father towards his son.

Tom tugged at the starting cable of the old petrol engine that sat rather awkwardly in Mr Briggs’s chest. On the fourth pull it caught, and gave its familiar, urgent throb. The sheet was drawn back by Tom and Branson, and Mr Briggs was revealed for the first time in his full, completed glory. There was a gasp of genuine delight from the observers because, although they had seen Mr Briggs many times before, in his various drafts of construction, Tom had managed a very special feat as a finishing touch to his robot. By hooking the engine up to a bicycle dynamo he had made the light bulbs that served for Mr Briggs’s eyes actually light up, and the bright stare that greeted the spectators as the sheet fell really did make it seem that he had gone some way towards creating a true automaton. Even more so as it began to move.

Tom had long before given up on the idea of a walking robot, and Mr Briggs was carried on a set of wheels. Instinctively the family, although nearly thirty feet away, took a step back as the robot trundled forward. The old lawnmower engine sounded unexpectedly powerful in the walled space of the yard and gave the impression that Mr Briggs could, at any minute, break into a terrifying sprint. Instead his progress was agonizingly slow and, thanks to the unevenness of the cobbled yard, lurchingly unstable. Again, this seemed to give him a human quality because he rolled from side to side as he progressed, like a drunken sailor (as Mrs Head quietly remarked). Perhaps most unnerving of all, however, was the way Tom had rigged the arms to the wheels so that they swung as the robot advanced. With a little too much free movement in the elbows and wrists, they were a little ungainly, gesticulating in a rather undisciplined way, as though the robot was frantically directing traffic or (Tory quailed at the thought) trying to put out a fire in its clothing.

The idea had occurred to Tory before that Tom had constructed a mocking simulacrum of his father in Mr Briggs. Donald, on the other hand, had been struck by a quite different and unexpected resemblance. He wondered if his son had intended to mock the figure of Winston Churchill. It wasn’t only something about the squatness of Mr Briggs’s body, the flatly rounded head, the pearshaped torso, he was convinced that the fingers of the flailing hands (consisting, as far as he could tell, of ten neatly soldered teaspoons), occasionally offered a V for Victory sign to the observers by the house. Donald was particularly sensitive to ignorant remarks about Mr Churchill and could still not quite believe that the nation had ditched him so readily in favour of someone who looked like a headmaster of a third-rate elementary school, and who seemed hell-bent on bankrupting the country.

Mrs Head, on the other hand, couldn’t help but be reminded of Major Brandish, her neighbour in Waseminster, and a proper soldier. He had played the cymbals in a marching band, and liked to clash them together whenever he got the chance. He had performed many cymbals recitals in her little cottage (the variety of sounds that could be drawn from such a crude instrument was remarkable); the climactic moments often had the major waving his arms in similar fashion to Mr Briggs. Paulette detected signs of their old schoolteacher in Upper Slaughter, Mr Davis, the jovial old bean who would describe historical episodes with arm-waving vigour – ‘And at the Battle of Prestonpans, when Bonnie Prince Charlie fought King James’s men, it was every man for himself …’

 Only Albertina was able to see the robot as nothing other than the robot, Mr Briggs, and for this reason she was the most scared of him, out of all the family. As he came nearer, his eyes winking and his arms swinging, she searched blindly for her mother’s hand, then held it tight.

‘Are you going to make it stop?’ said Tory, a little quaveringly, as the robot approached to within a few feet of the spectators. Tom, who had walked alongside the robot for the entire journey, like a groom escorting a mechanical bride down the aisle, checking carefully for anything coming loose, reached for the motor and turned it off. The sudden silence that befell the yard was filled instantly with applause. It was begun by Tory, who nudged everyone else to join in, which they did, the girls somewhat reluctantly. Even Donald hung his stick on his forearm and clapped, slowly and loudly. The applause seemed to take Tom entirely by surprise, and he struggled to conceal the joy he was feeling at being so noisily appreciated. He couldn’t prevent the blush that coloured his half-downturned face as he pretended to adjust a vital part of Mr Briggs’s body.

Donald stepped forward. ‘Well, son, I’ve always said you were a clever bugger, and now here’s the proof, a mechanical being. All you need to do now is to teach it to cook, and we can kick your mother out of the house.’ No one laughed at this, apart from Donald.

‘I think Branson needs some thanks as well,’ said Tory, quietly. ‘He helped Tom a lot.’

That Donald should ignore this remark without a pause for breath, that he should ignore Branson so completely, surprised no one. Donald had not acknowledged Branson’s existence in two years. Tory did find it difficult to bear the little boy’s evident disappointment, because after she’d made her remark, she had noticed how he squared himself up, put his little chest out and his shoulders back, as if ready to absorb the impact of praise from his father, then deflated immediately the moment he saw it wouldn’t come. She regretted saying anything.

‘I’ve got a special prize for you, Tom,’ Donald went on, ‘one that I think you will appreciate for the rest of your life.’

Tom was still looking down at something in Mr Briggs’s insides, unable, quite, to bring himself to turn his face fully into the stream of fatherly appreciation.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?’

‘What is it?’ Tom said, without lifting his head.

Oh, such a shy boy, Tory thought, such a modest, abashed and awkward boy.

‘I’ve got you an apprenticeship at Bolan’s,’ Donald said, slapping a hand on Tom’s shoulder, so that he swayed a little. There was silence. The only response from Tom was the slightest frown of puzzlement.

It was Tory, eventually, who spoke. ‘Bolan’s?’

‘Yes, Bolan’s. Starting tomorrow, in fact …’

‘But Tom’s going back to school this week.’

‘School? The boy’s sixteen. He doesn’t want to stay at school when he’s a grown man, do you, boy?’ He shook Tom’s shoulder.

Tom swayed so much he had to hold on to Mr Briggs. ‘I rather thought I was going to stay on,’ he said at last.

‘Yes,’ Tory said. ‘He’s doing very well – all his teachers have said so.’

‘In two years he could be earning twice as much as any of those teachers. Anyway, it’s all arranged. There’ll be a van calling at half past seven tomorrow morning …’

Donald looked again at Mr Briggs before turning back to Tom. ‘Well, what do you say to your old man? I went to a lot of trouble to get this apprenticeship for you. Just lucky one of the foremen there is a former comrade-in-arms, an old soldier. Even so, I had to go down on bended knee – not the right one, obviously. So what have you got to say to me?’

‘Thank you,’ Tom, said. He appeared to be close to tears.

‘That’s the spirit, son,’ and with that Donald stepped back into the house, back into the sitting room, and closed the door.

The crowd in the backyard slowly dispersed. The grammar-school boys, many wearing their uniforms, gave Tom a consoling pat on the back as they went. Such brief, intense valedictions for the friend they might never see again.