Playing for the Ashes (31 page)

“Start?” I set down my packages. “What’ve you got in mind, anyway?”

“I’ve left the hammer on that beam just above the window. See it?”

“Hammer?”

“We should manage to get a fair amount done. You shift the wood and keep me supplied with boards and nails.”

I stared at him. He was pouring out the animals’ food, but I could swear he was smiling.

I said, “You bloody damn—”

“Thirty quid. I’ll expect quality for that. Are you up to quality?”

“I’ll show you quality, I will.”

Which is how it began with Chris and me, working on the barge. All that first night I expected him to make a move. I expected him to make a move in the nights and days that followed. He never did. And when I decided to make the move myself, to get him steaming so that I could laugh and say, “Aren’t you just like all the others after all,” before I let him have me, he put his hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, saying, “That’s not what this is about, Livie. You and I. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to hurt you. But that’s just not it.”

Sometimes now late at night I think, He knew. He could feel it in the air, he could hear it in the way I breathed. Somehow he knew and he decided from the first to keep his distance from me because it was safer that way, because he’d never have to care, because he didn’t want to love me, was afraid to love me, felt I was too much, thought I was too challenging….

I hold on to those thoughts when he’s out at night. When he’s out with her. He was afraid, I thought. That’s why nothing ever happened between us. You love and you lose. He didn’t want that.

But that’s giving myself more importance to Chris than I’ve ever had, and in my honest moments I know that. I also know that the greatest incongruity in my life is that I lived in defiance of my mother’s dreams for me, determined to meet the world on my terms and not on hers, and I ended up in love with a man to whom she would have given me in the
fir
st place. Because he stands for something, does Chris Faraday. And that’s just the sort of bloke Mother would have most approved of, since at one time, before all this became such a muddle of names, faces, desires, and emotions, Mother stood for something as well.

That’s where she began with Kenneth Fleming.

She never forgot about him once he left school to do his duty by Jean Cooper. As I’ve said, she arranged to get him employment in Dad’s print factory, working one of the presses. And when he organised a factory team to play cricket with other factory teams in Stepney, she encouraged Dad to encourage “the lads,” as she called them, to have a measure of fun together. “It will make them a more cohesive group, Gordon,” she told him when he informed us that young K. Fleming—Dad always referred to his employees by initial only—had approached him with the idea. “A cohesive group does, after all, work more effectively, doesn’t it?”

Dad ruminated, jaws and mind working at once as we ate our roast chicken and our new potatoes. He said, “It can’t necessarily be a bad thing. Unless, of course, someone gets hurt. In which case, he’ll be off work, won’t he? And wanting his sick pay. There’s that to consider.”

But Mother persuaded him to her way of thinking. “True, but exercise is healthy, Gordon. As is the fresh air. And the camaraderie among the men.” Once the team was organised, she never went to a match to watch Kenneth play. Still, I imagine she thought she’d done something to give the boy some pleasure in the life of drudgery that she no doubt saw him leading in a marriage to Jean Cooper. They’d had their second child on the heels of the first, and it looked initially as if life’s promise for them was going to be a baby a year and middle age descending before their thirtieth birthdays. So Mother did what she could and tried to forget the bright future that Kenneth Fleming’s past had once presaged.

Then Dad died. Then things began.

At first, Mother left the handling of the printworks to a manager she’d hired. This wasn’t much different from the way Dad had run the operation. He’d never been one for mixing it up with the ink-and-press lads, which is what he had learned to call them from his own father before the Second World War, so he ran the business from the antiseptic silence of his third-
flo
or office and left the day-to-day management of print runs, machinery, and the distribution of overtime to a foreman who’d come up through the ranks.

Four years after Dad died, Mother retired from teaching. She still had a score of good works that she could have used to fill her diary each week, but she decided to cast about for something more challenging to engage her time and her interest. She was lonely, I think, and surprised to find herself so. The classroom and its attendant preparation and paperwork had given her a daily direction in life, and without it she was finally forced to consider the void. She and Dad had never been companions of the soul, but at least he’d
been
there, a presence in the house. Now he wasn’t and she had nothing pressing that would allow her to ignore the solitude that confronted her without her teaching and without him. She and I were as estranged as we could possibly be—both intent upon never forgiving the other for sins committed and injuries in
fli
cted. There was certainly no promise of grandchildren to dandle. There was only so much housework to be done. There were only so many meetings to attend. She needed more.

The printworks was the logical solution, and Mother took over its running with an ease that startled everyone. But unlike Dad, she believed in what she called a hands-on-withthe-lads approach. So she learned the business as an apprentice would have done, and in doing so she not only garnered the respect of the men who worked the floor, she also reestablished her tie to Kenneth Fleming.

I’ve enjoyed imagining what their first encounter must have been like, those nine years after he fell from grace. I’ve pictured it surrounded by the noise of the presses, the smell of ink and oil, and the sight of documents or pages of one sort or another fl ying along the line to be packed. I’ve seen Mother working her way from one machine to the next beneath those dim and dirty windows, at her elbow the foreman with a clipboard in his hand. He’s shouting to be heard and she’s nodding and asking pertinent questions. They stop by one of the presses. A man looks up, greasy overalls, a streak of oil in his hair, thick black crescents beneath his nails, a spanner in his hand. He says something like, “Goddamn machine’s gone down again. We got to modernise or close this place,” before he notices Mother. Pause for dramatic music. They are face to face. Mentor and pupil. All those years later. She says, “Ken.” He doesn’t know what to say, but he twists his wedding band round his
fil
thy finger and somehow that says it all and more: It’s been hell, I’m sorry, You were right, Forgive me, Take me back, Help me, Make a difference in my life.

Of course, that’s probably not at all the way it happened. But happen it did. And it wasn’t long before more notice was taken of Kenneth Fleming’s talents and intelligence in seven months than had been taken in all the years he’d laboured in what the ink-and-press lads always referred to as the pit.

The first thing Mother wanted to know was what Kenneth meant by modernising the place. The second thing she wanted to know was how she could set him back on the track of making something special of his life.

The first reply he made directed her towards the world of word processing, computers, and laser printing. The second reply suggested that she keep her distance. No doubt Jean had something to do with the latter. She can’t have been delirious with joy to know that Mrs. Whitelaw had made an unexpected reappearance at the borders of her life.

But Mother wasn’t one to give up easily. She began by elevating Kenneth out of the pit and into part-time management, just to give him a taste of the what-might-be’s. When he was successful—as he couldn’t help be, considering his cleverness and that damnable affability Dad and I had heard about over the dinner table for months on end when he was a teenager—she began to make furrows in the long uncultivated field of his dreams. And over this lunch or that tea, after a discussion on the best way to handle a salary dispute or an employee grievance, she discovered that the dreams were still there, unchanged after nine years, three children, and day after day in the noise and the grime of the pit.

I can’t think Kenneth readily revealed to Mother the fact that he still cherished the hope of watching that cherry-red ball soar beyond the boundary, of hearing the crowd’s roar of approval as another six runs appeared on the scoreboard at Lord’s next to the name

K. Fleming. There he was, twenty-six years old, father of three, tied to a wife, the best hope of an education behind him, and all of it the fault of an evening when he’d assured Jean Cooper that nothing could happen the
fir
st time she had sex without taking her pills. He wouldn’t have said, “I dream of playing for England, Mrs. Whitelaw. I dream of walking the length of the Long Room with the eyes of the MCC upon me and the bat in my hand. I dream of descending those steps from the Pavilion, of striding onto the wicket beneath a bright June sky, of seeing the wash of colours speckling the crowd, of facing the bowler, taking position, feeling the electrical surge of contact the length of my arm as my bat strikes the ball.” He wouldn’t have said that, Kenneth Fleming. He would have smiled, said, “Dreams are for little chaps, aren’t they, Mrs. Whitelaw. My Jimmy has dreams. And Stan shall have them as well in a year or two when he’s grown a little.” But as for himself, he’d have waved dreams off. They weren’t for the likes of himself, he’d say. At least not any longer.

But she would have worn him down over time, my mother. She’d have begun with “But surely there’s something more you hope for, Ken, something beyond this printworks.” He’d have said, “This place has been good to me, good for my family. I’m fine as I am.” To which she would have confessed, perhaps, a dream of her own gone unfulfilled. Perhaps they’d have had a late evening chat over coffee when she said, “You know, this is silly…confessing it to one of my former pupils after all, confessing it to a man, to a younger man even…” and then she would have revealed a little something no one knew about her, a little something which she, perhaps, concocted on the spur of the moment just to encourage Kenneth to open his heart to her as he’d done as a boy.

Who knows how she managed it exactly. She’s never given me all the facts. All I know is that, while it took her nearly a year to gain his confidence, gain it she did.

The marriage wasn’t bad, he probably told her one evening when the factory was silent as the grave beneath them and they were working late. It hadn’t even gone sour as one might have expected it to do, considering how it had come about. It was just…No, it wasn’t fair to Jean. It felt like betrayal to talk about the girl behind her back. She did her best, did Jean. She loved him, loved the kids. She was a good mother. She was a good wife.

“But something is missing,” Mother would have replied. “Is that the case, Ken?”

Perhaps he picked up a paperweight, unconsciously curving his fingers round it like a cricket ball. Perhaps he said, “I suppose I hoped for more,” with a wry smile after which he added, “But I got what I purchased, didn’t I?”

“Hoped for what?” Mother would have wanted to know.

He would have looked embarrassed. “It’s nothing. It’s foolishness and that’s all.” He would have packed up his belongings, ready to leave for the night. And in the end by the door where the shadows partially obscured his face, he would have said, “Cricket. That’s what it is. Some idiot I am but I can’t let go what it might have been like to play.”

To push the issue further, Mother would have said, “But you do play, Ken.”

“Not the way I might have,” he’d have replied. “Not the way I wanted. We both know that, don’t we?”

And those few phrases, the longing behind them, and most of all the use of that magical
we
gave my mother the opening she needed. To change his life, to change the lives of his wife and children, to change her own life, and to bring disaster upon us all.

CHAPTER
8

I
t was mid-afternoon when Lynley dropped Sergeant Havers at New Scotland Yard. They stood on the pavement near the Yard’s revolving sign, speaking in low voices as if Mrs. Whitelaw could hear them from where she sat inside the Bentley.

Mrs. Whitelaw had told them she didn’t know her daughter’s current whereabouts. But a phone call to the Yard and two hours’ wait had taken care of the problem. While they managed a late lunch at the Plough and Whistle in Greater Springburn, Detective Constable Winston Nkata checked the PNC in London. He also riffled through
fil
es, called in debts, spoke to mates at eight different divisions, and talked to several PCs at their collators’ offices, encouraging them to dip into their reference files for a mention of Olivia Whitelaw’s name. He reported back to Lynley via the car phone just as the Bentley was crawling across Westminster Bridge. One Olivia Whitelaw, Nkata said, was living in Little Venice, on a barge in Browning’s Pool. “The lady in question did some lamppost-leaning round Earl’s Court a few years back. But she was too quick to get stung, according to DI Favorworth. Great name, that, isn’t it? Sounds like a tart himself. Anyway, if someone from vice showed up in the street, she knew it the minute her eyes locked on to him. Vice liked to ruffle her feathers a bit by having her down to the station for a chat whenever they could, but that was as far as they ever got with her.”