The Likes of Us (27 page)

‘The sun's moving round,' she said, taking her gaze off him. ‘We ought to be up on the roof.'

‘The roof?' he said stupidly.

‘Yes. We can lie in the sun longer up there. That's what it's meant for.'

She sprang up and held out her hand. ‘Come on.'

Parker allowed himself to be led across the lawn and into the house. The way to the roof lay up thickly carpeted stairs and along a corridor with closed white-painted doors. At the end of the corridor Parker followed the woman up another short flight of steps to a door which opened out into the sunlight.

At once he felt acutely exposed standing there on top of the house. He looked at the woman, who was at the rail surmounting the low parapet, gazing out at the river. She beckoned him and he went and stood beside her.

‘Look,' she said, ‘it's coming in.'

The view was better than any he had had before. From here he could see part of the bay and the low grey line of the sea, thrusting its foaming fringe before it deep into the river channels, and as he watched he felt the woman's fingers entwine themselves in his. There was a surprising strength in their grip, but it seemed to Parker that she was hardly conscious of him, all her concentration focused on the sweep of the tide. He wondered what was in her mind as she looked out there minute after minute, and all at once it came to him that she was afraid of the sea and he trembled slightly, feeling the heat and tension of her body against his forearm.

At last she released his hand and turned away to sink down on a large airbed which lay inflated on the flat roof. She lay with her face hidden from him. It was as though she had forgotten him.

Parker got down beside her in a silence that grew into minutes. He said at length, ‘Are you asleep?'

‘No... There's a bottle of suntan lotion somewhere about. Will you rub some into my back?'

Parker found the lotion and poured some into his hands. He held them poised over her back, unable to touch her until she said, ‘Can't you find it?'

‘Yes, I've got it.'

‘Go on, then,' she said. ‘Don't be shy.'

Parker flushed. He knelt beside her and laid his hands on her back. He began to work the lotion into her skin, the movement of flesh and muscle under his hands transmitting itself to him in slow mounting waves of excited feeling. When his fingers touched the string holding the upper half of her costume she said, ‘Unfasten it.'

He pulled at the bow and parted the two halves of cord.

‘You have smooth strong hands,' the woman said, ‘I could fall asleep with you doing that.'

She stretched her limbs indolently, then relaxed again under the pressure of his touch. Again, a feeling of being exposed came over Parker.

‘Can't anybody see us up here?'

‘Nobody,' the woman said. ‘We're as private as if we were inside four walls. Sometimes I sunbathe in the nude up here, but Miles doesn't like it. He's very prudish, really. When he sees me like that it reminds him of when I was on the stage. He was on a night out with some business acquaintances and he came back three more times in the same week. He wanted me to leave the stage straight away, but I wouldn't throw up everything for him. I told you I was a long time making up my mind. He followed me to other places. He told me I'd the most exciting body he'd ever seen. But he forgot about his heart and that he wasn't a boy any longer.'

‘You can't stay young for ever,' Parker said.

‘You don't know anything about it, do you?' she said. ‘You live your own life in your own little world, among people you've known for years…'

‘I know what it's like to be lonely,' Parker said.

‘What is it like?'

‘I reckon it's something you've got to get used to.'

‘You never get used to it,' the woman said. ‘The most you can do is find moments when it goes away.'

Parker was looking at her right hand which rested, fingers slightly open, on the blue airbed, and noticing for the first time that the little finger was curiously malformed. The sight of that twisted finger on the small and otherwise well-shaped hand aroused in him a feeling he had never known before. He did not know how to deal with this strange compassionate feeling except by putting his hand on her back again and moving it over her skin as though lightly applying more oil. But there was a difference in its touch, and under its new tender urgency the woman shuddered, then turned over without speaking in a quick movement that exposed to him for a moment the naked front of her body before she reached out to pull him down into the bruising ferocity of her kiss. The nails of one hand dug into his shoulder and the light fluttering gasp of her breath was on his face as she drew away to speak to him.

‘Now,' she said, ‘Be very quick.'

He was nothing. He knew it through the flare of his response. Something the sea would use and discard. He thought it in the fleeting second before she took him, unresisting, plunging down with her into the vortex of her frenzy.

 

In the morning, his bag packed, Parker went back to look at the house. He had no words for the woman: no more than yesterday when he had left her as she slept in the sun. But something drew him back there. A car stood in the driveway, a large black saloon with dusty bodywork. He looked at it as he passed and went on without stopping.

The train was not busy and he found an empty compartment and settled himself by the window. As they swung out on the viaduct, the village falling away behind, Parker looked down the shoreline for the last glimpse of the white house through the trees. But there was nothing to see: nothing but the estuary, empty now, the smooth sandbanks drying in the sun, the river and its minor channels winding placidly out into the bay; free for a time of the deep dark treachery of the tide...

He thought about the woman often in the months that followed, and the memory of her brought a vague half-longing that sank him in moods of dreamy discontent. It was in one of these periods that he became engaged to the small plump slow-moving girl with the deep, tolerant laugh who had answered his advertisement for help; and since there was no reason to wait, he married her quickly and took her to live in the little house behind the shop. She was a good wife to him, and as the warmth and solid contentment of his new life enfolded him, the woman became increasingly dreamlike and remote until there came a time when he did not think of her any more.

Love and Music

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Popping into the lounge bar of The Wheatsheaf just before lunch that Saturday morning, I was surprised to see Sam Skelmanthorpe sitting behind the bottom half of a pint and lighting up the room with the full glory of his scarlet tunic.

‘Chalk that up to me, George,' he called to the landlord as I ordered my own half-pint of bitter; and once served, I went over, glass in hand, to join him.

‘Contest today?' I asked him after a brief exchange of greetings.

‘Wedding,' Sam said. ‘Just got back.'

‘Somebody important?'

‘Important to us,' he said. He took a pull at his glass. ‘Have you never seen a full brass band at a wedding?'

I said no, I hadn't. ‘A lovely sight,' Sam said. ‘And when they play it brings tears to your eyes. Better than any organ. Lovely.'

If there's a man who likes to tell the tale it's Sam Skelmanthorpe; but you have to work him round to it gently. And a little while later, when he was comfortably settled behind a fresh pint, with his pipe drawing well, he began to tell me all about it.

 

I don't suppose you know Dave Fothergill and Tommy Oldroyd, do you? Sam said. Well, they're two lads in the band. Young chaps; real pals. They've known one another right from the time their mothers took 'em to the clinic together as bairns; and before that, even, because their families lived on'y three doors apart down Royd's Lane and there wasn't much more than twenty-four hours between them being born. You might say they were thrown together right from the start, and that's the way they carried on. They went to school together – and when you're young, y'know, you can change your pals as easy as changing your shirt.

But not Dave and Tommy. They stuck like glue.

We allus used to say it'd take a woman to come between 'em, and that's how it happened. Even then we were a bit surprised.

They took an interest in the band very early on, and soon they were nattering their dads to get 'em an instrument apiece. So their dads brought 'em to see the committee. We have one or two instruments that we lend out to learners and we said we'd fix 'em up, seeing as how they were so keen. We allus try to encourage young lads, y'know. Brass banding isn't what it used to be when I was a lad. What with all this television and radio, all this entertainment laid on, there isn't the interest in learning an instrument, some road.

Anyway, they both had to have the same instrument, o' course, and they picked the cornet as being to their liking. And old Jess Hodgkins, our conductor, offered to give 'em a few lessons just to put 'em into the way o' things.

Now they soon showed a bit o' capability and Jess used to talk about 'em at practices. ‘I've two right good lads yonder,' he used to say, ‘and do ye know, I'm blessed if I can tell which is t'best between 'em!' They kept on getting better, and when they could hold their end up a bit, we took 'em into the band. By the time they were sixteen or seventeen they were sharing the solo parts between 'em and we knew that we'd two o' the best young cornet players in Yorkshire. An we began to get a bit windy, I can tell you, because by the time young lads start working these days they're pining for the bright lights and pastures new, as they say. And we were a bit scared that one o' the big bands, like Fairey or t'Dyke might be hearing of 'em and snapping 'em up. Not that we'd have stood in their way, mind you; but they were two such grand players that they all but made our band, and we couldn't bear the thought o' losing 'em.

But as it turned out, they seemed well settled. When they left school they took to farming with old Withers, as keeps that place on Low Road, and this seemed to suit 'em nicely. They played engagements round about with any band that was short o' men, and they even had offers to go and play with jazz bands in Cressley and suchlike places. But they weren't having any o' that. No jungle music for them, they said. They were stopping where they could play some real stuff.

Well, all this was fine for us. But we all knew that one thing was sure to take 'em away and split 'em up, and this was their National Service. But you know, they went up together, they served together, and they came back together. And when we asked 'em how they'd managed it, they just grinned in that quiet way they both have and said it'd take more than the Army to split
them
up.

Well, I reckon you've guessed, it did. It took a lass. And a town lass at that.

Seeing as they wouldn't be away all that long, Withers had decided not to hire another man. He set a landgirl on. And no sooner had Dave and Tommy got back to work than the trouble started. Give credit where it's due – it was Short Fred, our librarian, who first spotted what was going on; and he used to come up to the band-room and tell us how both Dave and Tommy were making sheep's eyes at this lass; and how she was making up first to one then the other.

What I should tell you here is that neither of 'em to our knowledge had ever shown any interest in lasses afore; but this Cynthia was a sly bit. She made out she was a music lover, and that she'd heard 'em play. Find a man's weak spot, they say, don't they? Well, she found both Dave and Tommy's there. She had 'em danglin' straight away. Not satisfied with one, she had to set one off against the other by telling each of 'em, when the other wasn't there, that he was the finest player she'd ever heard.

One of the nicest things about Dave and Tommy up to this time was that there'd never been a breath of jealousy between 'em; but after a bit of Cynthia's tactics they started giving one another funny looks. In the end they gave up coming to practices, and word got about that they weren't speaking.

Well, this was a bit of a caper. I mean, it was the last thing anybody expected. And here we were with a full programme of summer concerts and our two best men behaving like bairns. We couldn't reckon it up at all. We studied it all roads, and we spent a lot o' time talking about it when we should have been practising. We sent Jack Thomas, our secretary, down to see 'em, and he came away with a flea in his ear. So there was nothing else we could do. I mean, folk have been getting into that kind of trouble ever since the Garden of Eden and the best thing to do is leave 'em to come round on their own. But that didn't alter the fact that we shouldn't sound so good without 'em, and we brooded about it.

Then one Thursday night both Dave and Tommy rolled into the band-room and sat down in their places. They didn't say much to nobody and not a word to one another. And when the practice was over they packed their instruments and walked off without stopping for a dust-slaker in the Fox and Ferret like they'd allus done before. We couldn't reckon this up, either. It left us with summat else to speculate about.

The same thing happened Sunday morning. In they walked, said nowt to nobody, did their playing, and walked out again. But after, Fred gave us a bit of news. Cynthia was leaving the farm. We were sure this had some bearing on it, and before long, what with odd bits of talk and gossip, we'd pieced it together, and the idea was this. They were both fed up with one another interfering with their courting, and still this Cynthia wouldn't plump for either of 'em. Well, it was being a music lover, like, that had first attracted her to 'em, so she said, and they both knew they'd be doing a bit o' showing off at our first concert, so they'd fixed up for her to come and hear them and make up her mind between them after.

In the week or two left before the concert they practised like mad, and folks used to hear music coming from down Royd's Lane at all hours of day and night. It got so bad towards the end that the bobby had to have a walk down and tell 'em that all this midnight triple-tonguing constituted a public nuisance, and they'd better tone it down – or else!

I remember that the Sunday after Whit was a lovely day. We hadn't another like it all summer. We hired a bus as usual to take us and the tackle down to the park, and when we got there the place was packed to the tree-tops with folk in their Sunday best. A record gate we had that day, as a matter of fact.

The afternoon concert went off grand, and we had a very nice boiled-ham tea, I remember, before setting about the evening programme. This was when Dave and Tommy were going to do their stuff. You know, I've been in brass banding for nigh on forty year and I've heard some stock o' cornet players in me time; but I've never enjoyed owt so much as hearing them two lads play that night. They played like angels: they were like somebody possessed. One of the pieces we did was
Alpine Echoes
, and we had Dave on the platform and Tommy up a tree in the park, echoing him. Wonderful! And the clapping! I didn't know park audiences had it in 'em. But you know, I shouldn't have liked to pick between the two lads.

Well, when we'd played
The Queen
the lads hopped it and the rest of us went across the road to The Weavers for a sneck-lifter before going home. We'd be in there about three-quarters of an hour, I should think. And when we got back to the bus who should be there but Dave and Tommy; Tommy sitting inside on his own and Dave prowling about outside, reckoning to look how the bus was put together. We all climbed in, reckoning that we thought nowt of it, though we could see from their faces that all wasn't well. And in the end we couldn't hold it any longer and we gave Short Fred the nudge, seeing as how he knew
'
em best, and he asked 'em what was wrong.

Well, Dave looks down at his feet, then sneaks a glance at Tommy, who's begun to colour up a bit. Then he says, ‘She's gone.' Just like that. ‘She's gone.'

‘Gone?' we says. ‘How d'you mean, gone?'

‘I mean what I say,' Dave says, a bit short like. ‘She's gone with another chap.'

And then Tommy finds his voice, and he was all choked up he was so mad. ‘Aye,' he says, ‘I know him an' all. He's a blitherin' accordion player from Bradford.'

Well, we just gaped at 'em for a minute, and then somebody started to laugh, and in a second we were all at it, fit to bust. And all of us rolling about helpless seemed to bring the lads round; because in a minute Dave gives a sheepish grin and looks at Tommy, and Tommy grins back. And before we're home they're sitting together and chatting away as though they'd never heard of a lass called Cynthia.

‘And that's how it's been ever since,' Sam said. ‘They just got married this morning. Both of 'em. Double wedding.'

‘To two girls, of course,' I said.

‘Oh aye,' said Sam. ‘But twins. Lasses from down in Cressley. Alike as two peas, they are. Nobody but Dave and Tommy seems to be able to tell 'em apart.'

He lifted his glass and drank. I looked up in time to catch a broad wink directed at me over the rim.

‘Course, now we're all wondering what's going to happen next.