Three Brothers (2 page)

Sally had been impressed when he told her that he was a
writer. He was young, and looked very smart in a grey suit, grey overcoat and grey trilby.

“I like grey,” he told her. “I can disappear.”

“Now that’s interesting.”

“I promise you, I will
always
say interesting things to you. I can’t help myself.”

“But what will
I
say?”

“You just have to smile.”

When he first took her out she ordered a pink gin and smoked Woodbines. This delighted him. They went dancing at the Rainbow Room in Holborn to the music of Harry Chapman and his orchestra. After three months, much to her parents’ disapproval, she moved into Philip’s small room.

“Living in sin is not right,” her mother said. “It will come to no good. Mark my words.” She was always enjoining her daughter to mark her words. “And what are you going to live on? Spam and baked beans?”

In fact there was a fish-and-chip shop in Dean Street. And the pastries were free. She brought back the stale ones at the end of the day.

After a violent argument with the staff of the Horn of Plenty, Philip Hanway lost his job.

“Where are you going?” the landlord asked him.

“I’m going
outside
. For good.” He wanted to slam the door but it swung limply to and fro.

“Well,” he said to Sally when he returned home, “at least I can concentrate on my writing.” She surmised that he would be happy to survive on her small income.

When she first realised that she was pregnant, she panicked. She enquired about abortionists, of whom there were several in Soho, but the stories of injury and even fatality dissuaded her. “Sometimes,” a friend told her, “they stick a knitting needle up your you-know-what.”

“Ouch.”

“Have you ever seen a dead baby? Looks like a mole.”

So Harry was saved.

She informed her parents of the pregnancy before she told Philip. She wanted to present him with a family ultimatum. And so, five weeks later, Sally and Philip were married in the registry office on St. Martin’s Lane. Philip then exerted himself to find work, and applied for the job of nightwatchman. The two of them formally requested a council house, as a newly married couple, and to their relief they succeeded. So they moved to Camden, where Harry was born four months later.

The three brothers had been sitting in silence around the kitchen table. Sam was fiddling with two elastic bands he had tied together. “I’m going to have a drink of fizz,” Harry said. “Anyone else want some?”

“Where is she?” Daniel asked him.

“I think,” he replied, “she’s been delayed.” An old alarm clock was ticking by the sink. “Dad will know what to do.”

Philip Hanway did not seem particularly surprised by his wife’s disappearance. “She has gone away for a while,” he told his sons. That was all he said. He offered no other explanation. In fact he never afterwards spoke of her. He continued his work as a nightwatchman, and the boys saw little of him. They grew accustomed to looking after themselves. Philip provided them with pocket money that they pooled. After a few months they forgot that their life had ever been different.

In the days immediately following her disappearance, however, Sam was very quiet. On going to school in those mornings the boys encountered a thick smog, and under its cover Sam wept softly without the others knowing. They explained nothing to their school companions or to their teachers. On
the matter of their mother, they were wholly silent. Something—something vast, something overwhelming—had happened. But they could not speak of it. The neighbours, curiously, did not seem to notice Sally’s absence. The three brothers were left to themselves.

A year after the disappearance Harry progressed, as he had expected, to the secondary modern school on the other side of the borough. He had sat the 11-plus examination, but he had not excelled in any of the papers. He changed from one school uniform to another, and caught a bus in the morning. Then, a year later, Daniel passed the same examination with much higher marks.

Daniel seemed to have a natural propensity for study, and a love of reading. Often, when Harry and Sam would busy themselves with sports or games on the common, he would stay behind with a book. In this he could be said to take after his father. But Philip knew very little of his son’s secluded life. Daniel visited the public library on the boundary of the estate, and brought home each week a selection of adventure novels and popular histories. He took out on an extended loan each volume of
Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia
, and vowed to memorise the contents.

His work was rewarded when it was announced, after passing the 11-plus, that he had won a place at Camden Grammar School. If his mother had been there, she would have danced with him around the kitchen; she would have lifted him up, and pressed her nose against his. Philip simply shook his hand, and gave him half-a-crown. Harry joked with him about a school for swots. Sam never mentioned the subject.

But there was now a change in the Hanway family. Daniel had to strive with his contemporaries. He had to compete. He was given homework every night, and would sit at the kitchen
table while Harry and Sam were free to roam. He became more deliberate and circumspect; he saw his life as a series of hurdles over which he was obliged to jump.

Then Harry started playing football for his school team. He enjoyed the exhilaration of the dribble with the ball, the clever pass, and the sudden shot at the goal. He enjoyed the exercise of his own body—the exercise of his power in the world. He called out to his teammates, he shouted at the linesmen, he whooped with triumph at every goal his team scored. It was a world of expressive noise. The physical sensation of movement delighted him. He revelled in the wind and rain and sunlight as he ran across the pitch.

In this, he was different from his brothers. Gradually the intimacy between them began to fade. Sam was left to himself. He spent many hours making elaborate contraptions out of wood and cardboard. Even though he did not know the word melancholy, he began to experience it. He would turn, head over heels, on his narrow bed in order to make himself dizzy and disoriented. He did not prosper at school. As a matter of course he was sent to the same secondary modern school as his older brother. He made no friends there, and Harry seemed to avoid him.

The path is clear

H
ARRY
H
ANWAY
left school at the age of sixteen, and was already eager to join the world. He was active, determined, and energetic. At school he had won popularity for his cheerfulness and bravado. He had become captain of the football team. He had retaliated against one notorious school bully by knocking him to the floor. He had his own recognisable phrases, which were instantly imitated. “How the heck are you?” was his standard greeting. He also said, in mock irritation, “What the heck?” So he became known as Harry Heck.

“I don’t want to go to college,” he told his father as his leaving day approached. “I want to get a job.”

“Say that again.”

“I want to get a job.”

“Just so you’re certain.” He looked away for a moment. “There’s nothing worse than a dead-end job.”

It was a Sunday afternoon. Philip Hanway was about to leave for the City. He now worked seven nights a week in order to support his family. “I’ll come back with money, Dad.”

“It’s not about the money. It’s about you.”

“But what do you think, Dad, of the newspapers? That’s a good life, isn’t it?” Harry loved newspapers. He enjoyed
the appearance, and even the texture, of them. He liked their smell. He relished the size of the headlines and the neat rows of type. He was excited by the thought of thousands of copies despatched from the printing plant into waiting vans. In the evenings, after school, he flattened the
Daily Sketch
on the kitchen table and slowly turned its pages. Sometimes he read out paragraphs aloud, just like the news broadcasters on the wireless.

“Newspaper boy?” Daniel was writing in an exercise book, but now looked up at him.

“Dry up.”

“I was only asking.”

“Sod off.”

“There’s no need for a fight,” Philip said. “We have to think about this seriously.”

“I have thought about it seriously.”

So Harry arrived at the offices of the local newspaper, the
Camden Bugle
, and asked if they needed a messenger boy.

He was astonished to discover that the offices of the
Bugle
comprised two small rooms, one marked “Editorial” and the other marked “Advertising,” above a row of shops along the high street. Its premises were on the second floor above a barber, and the candy-striped pole could be seen from the desks of “Editorial.” The floor was covered with scuffed linoleum, and the interior needed repainting.

The
Bugle
, quite by chance, did need a messenger boy, the previous occupant of that post having just handed in his notice in order to become a gentleman’s outfitter in Bond Street. The editor, George Bradwell, prided himself on making his decisions in an instant. And he reckoned Harry to be a lively young man. “Do you run or do you walk fast?” he asked him. He had a gruff voice that seemed to come from his chest rather than his throat.

“I run, sir, when I see the path clear.”

“That’s good. That’s what you must do.” He had an emphatic manner of speaking, reminding Harry of the fairground barkers who came to Camden once a year. George Bradwell was not used to being interrupted or contradicted. He explained that Harry was supposed to take the “copy” from the office to the printer, and then bring the “proof” back to the
Bugle
. Copy of what? Proof of what? It was very mysterious. Bradwell then showed Harry some pages of typing, with various scrawls and symbols in the margins. “These,” he said, “have been marked up.” Harry nodded, as if he understood perfectly what he was being told. The air was heavy with the stale odour of tobacco. “Cadogan Street.” Pinned to the wall was a large map of the borough. Bradwell pointed with tobacco-stained finger to the street in question. “On the right is Lubin the printer. Just tell him you’re from the
Bugle
. This is Tony, by the way.”

Tony was a middle-aged man of florid complexion, with the indefinable air of having been disappointed in life. He boasted a thin pencil-like moustache, and a clump of hair perched precariously on his head. “You can’t miss Lubin,” he said. “He is the Jew boy.” Harry knew at once that Tony wore a wig, and he suspected that the moustache was dyed. Tony looked like a man perpetually in disguise.

Tony, in turn, took an instinctive dislike to the new recruit; any young person threatened him.

Harry soon became accustomed to his duties. He was so exhilarated by his new job that he mastered its details easily enough. He dashed from the
Bugle
to the printers. He ran between “Editorial” and “Advertising,” picking up the copy from both departments. In “Editorial” Tony was news. George was interviews and reviews. An elderly man, Aldous, was sports. Aldous hardly ever spoke, and seemed to Harry to exist in a state of self-pitying gloom. Stress and tension were always in the air. Bradwell would answer the telephone and
announce himself as “editor in chief.” Tony would then give a sarcastic smile. Bradwell would often snatch his hat and coat, and stride purposefully out of the office. Sometimes he would not come back for an hour or more. Then he returned with an air of mystery, and with the odour of alcohol.

In the background there was always the stutter of a typewriter, as Tony or Aldous put together a paragraph. Aldous described the triumphs, or the miseries, of the Camden Rovers. He praised the exploits of a Camden schoolgirl who had won a North London javelin competition. He denounced the closing of the bar of the Camden Cricketers’ Association. He typed down all this with the same air of gloom. Tony celebrated a lucky win on the football pools by a Camden pensioner. He described the closure of a cottage hospital in East Camden. He reported the theft of a jukebox from a Camden public house. He sat over his typewriter like a bird of prey.

On the whole, Harry preferred “Advertising.” It was run by a small woman with a strong Scots accent. To Harry, Maureen seemed marvellously exotic. She wore a skein of artificial pearls over her hair and, according to Tony, dressed like something out of a shop window. He referred to her as Queen of Scots or Bloody Maureen. She supervised the work of two young men who were, again according to Tony, “slaves at her feet.” Maureen had overheard the remark; she had arched her eyebrows and sniffed. She considered Tony to be, as she put it, “a drastic little creature.” “Excuse me,” she said, “but I think he’s a very common type of person. And that wig looks like a dead cat.” Harry could not disagree.

Harry enjoyed his time in Lubin’s printworks. He savoured the pervasive smell of ink, and the steady metallic beat of the electrotyping machines. He saw the curved plates of metal type being inserted into the presses, and watched as the paper flowed between them. It was a cheerful and good-humoured
place, filled with shouts and the noise of the machinery. This was the newspaper world that Harry had envisaged—a strident, exciting, declamatory world.

Harry was walking back from the printer one evening, after delivering the last of that day’s copy, when he noticed a man in a dark raincoat walking ahead of him. He was in his thirties, or so it seemed, but he was much smaller and slighter than Harry. He was carrying a shopping bag in each hand, containing something bulky or heavy. He had difficulty in maintaining an even pace, but he looked calmly from side to side. On a whim, or instinct, Harry decided to follow him. The man crossed the road, and then began walking down a street of semi-detached dark red-brick houses. The area was gloomy enough in the day, but on a winter evening it was a place in mourning. It was one of those parts of London that sunlight never seems to enter, an almost subterranean world of domestic privacy and seclusion. Net curtains were hanging at every window, and the gates of the small front gardens were all closed.