New and Collected Stories (42 page)

‘He had cancer.'

There was a pub near by: ‘Let's go for a drink,' Bernard said.

‘Won't the foreman mind?'

‘I expect so. Come on. They've had enough sweat out of me. I'm sorry Joe died.'

They sat in the otherwise empty bar. ‘Come up and see us all before you go back,' he said. ‘We'd be glad if you would. I don't know what you live in London for, honest I don't. There's plenty of schools you could teach at in Nottingham. They're crying out for teachers, I'll bet. I suppose it's a bit of a dump, but you can't beat it. At least I don't reckon so.'

‘It's all right,' Dick said, ‘but London's where I belong – if I belong anywhere.' They talked as if it were on the other side of the world, which it was against the background of their common memories – even further.

‘Well, you can't beat the town you were brought up in – dragged up, I mean!' Bernard said. Dick remembered, and talked about it before he could stop himself, of when they were children, and he and Bernard used to go around houses asking for old rags and scrap, which they would then sell for picture-money and food. The houses whose gardens backed on to the recreation ground were somewhat better off than the ones they lived in, and therefore good for pickings. At one a youngish woman gave them bread and jam and cups of tea, which they gladly accepted. They didn't call often, and not many others went around to spoil their pitch. And yet, good as she was, sweet as the tea and jam tasted, they couldn't keep going there. There was some slight feeling of shame about it, probably quite unjustified, yet picked up by both of them all the same. Without even saying anything to each other they stopped calling. Dick wondered what the woman had thought, and whether she had missed them.

Though he remembered this common incident clearly, it soon became obvious that Bernard did not, and that his mind was a blank regarding it, though at first he had looked as if he did vaguely recollect it, and then as if he wanted to but couldn't quite pull it back. ‘Still,' Dick said, laughing it away, ‘you can't go home again, I know that.'

‘You can't?' Bernard asked, full of surprise. ‘Why can't you?'

‘I can't, anyway.'

‘You can do what you like, can't you?'

‘Some people can.'

They drank to it.

‘Bring your wife and kids here to live. Get a house up Sherwood Rise. It's healthy there. They'll love it.'

‘I can't, because I don't want to.'

He laughed. ‘Maybe you are better off down there, at that. I can't trap yo' into owt. I'm sorry about Uncle Joe though; Mam'll be upset when I tell her.'

‘It'll be in the paper today.'

‘She'll see it, then. Let me get you one now.'

‘Next time. I must be off.'

Dick watched him ascend the ladders, up from the pavement to the first storey, then to the second. From the roof he straddled a parapet, turned and looked down, a gargoyle for one moment, then he took off his cap and waved, a wide frantic smile on his far-off face. Dick had time to wave back before he leapt up and was hidden by a chimney-stack.

The past is like a fire – don't put your hand in it. And yet, what is to stop you walking through it upright, all of you, body and soul? It was a weekday, and the pub hadn't filled up. Near to ten o'clock he couldn't bear the thought of going home. His impulse was to flee towards London, but he'd promised to stay on a few days. It was expected of him, and for once in his life he had to obey.

He'd called here often for a drink with Marian, though she'd always insisted on having her shandy outside because she wasn't yet eighteen, as if it would have made much difference. After a summer's night on Bramcote Hills the thirst was killing, and he drank more beer in those days than he could ever stomach now. The good food of London living had peppered his gut with ulcers – or so it felt, without having been to any doctor – and the heartburn was sure to grip him next day if he put back too much.

The last bus was at half past ten, and he thought he might as well walk home. Outside, fastening his coat in the lighted doorway, the insane idea came to call on Marian, to go down to the estate and knock on her door. Why think about it, if you intended doing it? The one advantage of dwelling on the past was to act without thought if you were to get the utmost from it. In that way, of course, it would end up getting the utmost out of you, but that was nothing to be afraid of.

Fifteen years was a long time, judging by the excitement the hope of meeting her again let loose in him. It was similar to that when they had been ‘going out' with each other for what seemed a decade, but which had not felt much like being in love at the time.

Having started factory work at fourteen, he was a seasoned man by the age of eighteen, and those four years had slowed down to become the longest in his life, possibly because there was an end to them which he hadn't foreseen at the time. In them, he grew up and died. His courtships had seemed eternal, even when they only lasted several months – looking back on them. The time with Marian went on longest of all, and being the last it was also the most important in that micro-cosmic life.

A fine drizzle powdered across the orange sodium lights of the housing estate. The roads were just as wide as he'd remembered them. If so little alters in a man's life, who but the most bigoted can believe in progress? Such a question came, he knew, of having too little faith, and of too complete immersion in a past so far away and severed that it couldn't be anything else but irrelevant fiction. Yet it didn't feel like it, and it did not disturb him that it didn't. The familiar dank smell of coal-smoke hovered even along the wide avenues and crescents, and the closeness of his cigarette tasted the same in his mouth and nostrils as it had all those years ago. Privet hedges shone with water under the street-lamps, and a well-caped railwayman rode by on a bicycle that seemed to have no light until only a yard away. He pulled up by the kerb, and the latch clattered as he went up the path and round to his own back door.

It was a good distance, yet he wished it were longer, both because he was apprehensive at meeting Marian and because it would spin out further the pleasant anticipation of her being at home. She'd been going with his friend Barry when he first met her, a carnal and passionate love similar to the one he at the time was pursuing with someone else. But Barry went into the army, driven from home by a black-haired bossy mother and a house full of sisters, lit off at seventeen into the Engineers just as the war ended. Letters and the occasional leave were no way to keep love's fires stoked between him and Marian, and one night Dick met her by chance and, on seeing her home, fell into honeyed and violent kisses by her gate. She agreed to see him again, and he didn't realize to what extent he had run his mate off until Barry clocked on with the army for twelve years and went straight off to Greece to serve two of them. They even stayed friends over it, yet the blow to Barry had been hard, as he admitted when they met, years later.

He made up his mind to turn at the next corner and go home, to leave the past in its matchwood compartment and not smash over it with the bulldozer of his useless and idiotic obsession. She would be out, or a husband would meet him at the door and tell him he'd got the wrong house. He smiled to remember how, during the war, an American soldier had called one night on the woman next door, as had been his habit for some months. But this time his opening of the door was answered by the husband, who had unexpectedly finished his stint on nights. The American stared unbelievingly at the pudgy and belligerent face. After a few seconds he backed out with the lame remark, ‘Sorry, I thought it was a public house.' The husband had accepted it as a genuine mistake, but there were some snide comments going around the street for a long time on how lucky Mrs So-and-so was to have such a numbskull for a husband. So if Marian's husband was at home, or some man she might be living with, he'd merely say: ‘Is Mrs Smith in?' and make some excuse about getting the number of the house wrong.

Having decided to go home and not be such a fool, he kept on his track towards Marian's as if locked in some deep and serpentine canal, unable to scale its side and get back to sane air. He even went more quickly, without feeling or thought or sense of direction. From the public house he had forgotten the exact streets to follow, but it didn't matter, for he simply walked looking mostly towards the ground, recognizing the shadows of a bus-shelter, the precise spot reached by the spreading rays of a particular street-lamp, the height of a kerb, or twitchel posts at the end of a cul-de-sac.

He found the road and the number, opened the gate, and walked down the path with even more self-assurance than he ever had after courting her for a year. There was a light on in the living room. The fifteen years had not been a complete blank. He'd heard that her mother had died and that she had married a man who had been sent to prison and whom she had refused to see again. Barry also told him that there had been one child, a son. The first five years after they split up must have been agony to her, blow after blow, and it was as if he were going back now to see how she had borne the suffering that followed in his wake. But no, he could never admit to so much power. He stood at the back door, in darkness for some minutes, torn at last by the indecision that should have gripped him on his way there, and splintered by the remorse he might feel after he had left. The noise of a television set came from inside, music and crass speech that made it impossible to tell whether one or a dozen people were at home.

He too had gone into the army, and when her letters grew less frequent he was almost glad at the sense of freedom he felt. But her thoughts and feelings were not of the sort she could put easily in writing and transmit that way, as he found when they met on his first leave. Passion, because it was incommunicable, was her form of love. It was fully flowered and would go on forever with regard to him, incapable of development yet utterly complete. He expected letters, subtlety, variation, words, words, words, and couldn't stand the emptiness of such fulfilment. She could foresee no greater happiness than that they get married, and would have demanded little more than the most basic necessities of life. If he had been a man he would have accepted this, because he also loved her; and if he were a man now he would not have come back looking for her, unable to say what he wanted, whether it was love or chaos he hoped to resurrect.

It was no use standing in the dark with such thoughts, so he knocked at the door. She opened it, set up the two steps in an oblong of pale orange light. ‘What do you want?' she said, seeing only a stranger and at this time of night. The protective voice of a boy called from inside:

‘Who is it, Mam?'

Regret, indecision, dread had gone, for he had acted, had the deepest instincts of his heart carried out for him, which really meant that he had been acted upon. He smiled, telling her who it was.

She repeated his name, and looked closer, eyes narrowing almost to a squint, ‘You! Fancy you!'

‘Well,' he said, ‘I was passing and thought I'd see if you still lived here.'

She asked him in, and they stood in the small kitchen. He saw it was painted white instead of cream, had an electric stove in place of the old gas one, but with the same sink now patched and stained.

Who is it, Mam?'

‘I'm surprised you still knew where I lived.'

‘I don't suppose I could ever forget it. In any case it's not that long ago.'

‘No? It is, though.'

‘It doesn't feel like it to me.'

But, to look at her, it was. And she was thinking the same. She seemed taller, was more full-bodied, no longer the pale, slim, wildlife girl of eighteen. The set lines running from her mouth, which he remembered as being formed by that curious smile of wanting to know something more definite and significant about what had caused her to smile in the first place, had hardened and deepened because her curiosity hadn't been responded to, and because the questions could never be formed clearly enough in her to ask them. The smile had moved to the grey eyes, and was more forthright in its limitations, less expressive but no longer painful.

‘Come in,' she said. ‘I'll make you a cup of tea, if you'd like one.'

‘All right. I will for a minute.' Once inside he forgot his absence and hesitancy and took off his coat. Her twelve-year-old son lay as far back as he could get in an armchair, watching television from too close by, a livid perpetual lightning flicker to Dick, who wasn't facing it. His mother made him turn it down. ‘This is Peter,' she said. ‘Peter, this is an old friend of your Mam's.'

Peter said nothing, an intelligent face blighted by sudden resentment at another man in the house. He looked harder into the telly in case his mother should ask him to turn it right off. Marian's hands shook as she poured the tea, put in sugar and milk. ‘I can't get over it,' she said, ‘you coming to see me. Of all people! Do you know anybody else around here?'

‘Nobody. Only you.'

She was happy at the thought that he had come especially to see her. ‘You haven't altered much in all these years.'

‘Neither have you.'

Her ironic grin was the same: ‘Not much I haven't! You can't lie to me any more. You did once though, didn't you, duck?'

He might have done, and the fact that he'd forgotten was made to seem unforgivable by the slight shock still on her face at his sudden reappearance. Still, she managed to laugh about the thought of him having lied to her once, though he knew better than to take such laughs at their face value. ‘Did you come up by car?' she asked. ‘What sort is it?'

‘I don't have a car.'

‘I thought you would have. Then you could have taken me and Peter for a ride in it some time. Couldn't he, Peter?'