A Man of his Time

by Alan Sillitoe

  Nose and ears were prominent enough to emphasize his acuteness in both senses, and he stared as if daring the camera to take away the dignity which formed his soul (of which he had no fear) rather than do its job and record his merely physical presence, while obviously having some regard for the camera since he was so formally dressed to face it.

  Emily stood to his left, head tilted slightly as if, should she get too close he might, as a reminder that she must know her place, jab her with his elbow – for not allowing him to make the picture all his own. A few paces to the other side was a handsome man of about thirty, the son of Mary Ann’s sister, six feet tall yet overlooked by Burton.

  Burton’s gaze went beyond the range of any camera, as if into a land and a past – a way of life – that no one around could know about. His stand as if to defy both God and Man indicated that if ever it happened that he was the last person on earth, the continuation and endurance of another human race would grow out of all he knew, and flourish from his blacksmith’s strength.

  When Bill motored him to Cambridge he was amused at so many young men prancing around in gowns and mortarboards, though his observation of the architecture told him it was something to remember. High tea at the Blue Boar was acceptable, but he was as usual appalled at the waste of food around him.

  His eye for goodlooking women was undiminished. ‘You only need one for the purpose,’ he said lightly to Bill, one of whose unmarried daughters was so fascinated by him, as he was with her, that she was invited to take his arm when the family went walking. And she did, making pressures which delighted him on the one hand but riled him on the other because there was no chance of doing anything about it. Mary Ann walking behind – not far enough for him – knew that every eye was on him and his admirer, so he could not get up to any hanky-panky.

  ‘Or, indeed,’ he laughed on the train to Nottingham when she complained about him and the young woman, ‘any argybargy, either.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Howard looked one way and then the other along the wide road, as had been drilled into him, saw it free enough of traffic and, wanting to get home for his piano lesson, never knew where the doubledecker bus came from. The front left wheel dragged him a hundred yards before the driver could stop. An ambulance took him to the General Hospital, his leg crushed, and a teacher from the school went to tell Helen.

  Unable to believe, though fearing her heart would burst, she fainted at her worst nightmare. When Oswald came from the nearby canal she was brought around with a measure of whisky, and went with him to see how Howard was.

  His ruined leg was cut away, and three weeks later he lay on the parlour sofa, crutches leaning behind. Everyone in the family was appalled that such an accident had happened to Helen’s unusual and promising child. Burton wondered at so many hearts in the world to break, and called whenever he passed the house, stood by the sofa and said a few words to his grandson who, asked how he was, replied like a Burton after all that he was fine, thank you very much.

  Burton detected a sheen of suffering about the skin, and a frightened vacancy at the eyes which the poor lad could not hide. Helen’s tears were always running, which Howard saw, and though Burton couldn’t deny it was a case for weeping, it was also a time to hide them.

  Brian, told he was to give whatever silver paper he came across to Howard, who collected it for the hospital, tore apart every cigarette packet for the usual film of paper smelling pleasantly of tobacco, so that Howard could be patted on the head when he was wheeled to the hospital and handed in a bigger bundle than anybody else. Brian always hoped to find a cigarette that the smoker had overlooked, and when that was the case he would have a few sick-inducing puffs behind a hedge, though if feeling charitable he would take it to his father in the hope of making him less miserable.

  With enough silver paper for a worthwhile visit he noticed Helen’s suffering face, her vacant, terrified eyes, and dark ringlets now touched with grey falling over thin shoulders as she showed him into the parlour. ‘Howard, here’s a friend come to see you.’

  He lay tremulous and pale, thanked him for the scruffy ball laid on the shelf, and beckoned him close: ‘I’m tired of everybody coming to ask how I am.’ Eyes wide, he stared at the door, a hint Brian took to go.

  On hearing the tinkling of the piano a few days later he assumed that Howard had hopped the few steps to play, as if music might bring him back to normal life. He was now even more the favourite grandchild of Burton and Mary Ann, which Brian hoped would improve his spirit at having only one leg.

  Ivy and Thomas being out on Sunday afternoon, and Burton in bed with Mary Ann, Emily sat looking mindlessly at the fire until, knowing she would soon hear her father treading downstairs in stockinged feet, put the kettle on. She took the tea caddy from the cupboard and threw as many spoons into the pot, Brian noted, as would have lasted a whole day at home.

  He called at the Burtons’ as often as he thought they would put up with him, liked to be in a kitchen smelling of baking bread – roasting meat on Sunday morning – a medley of hunger-inducing odours depending on the day of the week. The window opening on the back garden path was as clean as if it had no glass, and splashes of blood-red geraniums on the ledge seemed to warn everyone passing not to look inside.

  Fascinated by Emily’s quiet though unpredictable ways, he wondered where the mischievous and brilliant light in her eyes came from. Thin lips were always working, as if she had an irreducible grain of hard sago between her teeth, and was talking in silence to an invisible listener. Sometimes she would take a ha’penny from her pinafore pocket, eyes a-glitter on holding it before him. ‘Do you love me, duck?’ and Brian always said yes, for she would then laugh, and drop the coin into his hand.

  The first scalding sip of Emily’s black tea tasted so strong to Burton that the inside of his head seemed to empty in alarm. He liked a fair brew, but she put too much tea in the pot, though he didn’t chide her in case she became upset, for it was the one thing she was proud of being able to do.

  She gazed at him drinking, impossible to say whether her eyes glowed with beady satisfaction at having him imbibe her heart-coating liquid, or whether she was waiting to be patted on the head at producing an effect that threatened to send him clawing up the wall and travelling halfway across the ceiling. Burton wanted to boot the knowing pest out of the house, but Mary Ann would hear of no such thing, which Emily well realized.

  At thirty years of age she had never been able to keep a job, being too uncertain in her behaviour. She had a temper, and little patience in unfamiliar situations. When set to work by a local shopkeeper, a charitable Methodist preacher, all went well for a few days, until she decided she was being ‘put upon’. They were asking her to do too much. They were mixing her up deliberately. They were laughing behind her back. They accused her of making mistakes when she hadn’t, because she had only been doing what she had been told to do, and they were telling her, now that she was doing it, that they had told her to do something different. It wasn’t right. They wanted to see her cry. Then they could laugh at her.

  She began to drop things, change items around on the shelves, or put them in places where they shouldn’t be, whether she had been told to or not. It wasn’t right for them to mix her up. She was doing her best so didn’t deserve it. She’d heard right the first time. She knew what they had said. She remembered everything. She wasn’t daft. She’d only been doing what they had told her to do. She wasn’t having it. She’d show them, she would and all, she’d show them if it was the last thing she did.

  The assistants in the serving part of the shop wondered why it was so quiet in the store room, till she had been there long enough for the shopkeeper to go and see what she was doing. His brain was properly knocked about at witnessing such chaos never before experienced, though in one sense the rearrangement was imaginative, the aspect colourful, and the ingenuity unbelievable.

  ‘Have you lost your tongue?’ He hoped to find out why she had done what she
had certainly done, but all he got was an imitation glower of Burton in a bad mood – which Burton would have been in because of something she had said or done to him – followed by a demented grin, until sensing in the half-lit attic of her mind that she might not have done right after all. Instinct triumphed, and she reached for her coat.

  His move to evict her took more strength in his arms than had ever been called on for shifting boxes of groceries, but he got her through the door and onto the busy street, confirming for Emily that he’d spitefully had such intentions boiling in him from the beginning, and she little cared that it would take days for her reassortment of goods in the shop to be unravelled. She wasn’t known in the family as ‘Batchy Em’ for nothing.

  After talking to the manager of the Flying Horse hotel in the middle of town, Mary Ann got her taken on as a chambermaid, work which pleased Emily, at first, for if there was one thing she could do, and didn’t dislike doing, it was making beds, which she’d been taught from an early age.

  As far as the family understood, because accounts varied on both sides, some double-dyed wicked commercially travelling villain had tried to get her into bed and rape her. She wasn’t the biggest of the Burton girls, but her upbringing had been as hard as the rest, so the man was shocked at her ferocity. She gave him a drubbing he would never forget, and had to be pulled away by four other chambermaids drawn to the room by his screams.

  Emily was no beauty, but she was young and personable enough in the half-dark, and to someone probably drunk, who couldn’t know the significance of the grim expression she put on even when not being interfered with. She must have seemed just another of those willing Nottingham girls the man had heard about, especially if he had just come up from Leicester.

  He denied trying to molest her, swore she had attacked first on being asked to smooth one of his pillows. The manager knew he would never get the truth, so gave Emily five pounds, with the advice not to come back. From then on Mary Ann thought it best to keep her at home.

  When gangrene attacked the remains of Howard’s mutilated stump he was taken in an ambulance to the hospital, unconscious from morphine. Oswald stood by the door to watch him go, gritting on his anguish at the possibility of his son not seeing home again.

  Helen stayed by Howard’s bed for as long as was allowed, then went to church and lit candles for his recovery. On the way home she bought a bottle from each beer-off passed, and threw the empties into any convenient hedge, ashamed of drinking but desperate for oblivion. Oswald went to the hospital whenever work made it possible, but she wouldn’t come home on the bus with him because one of those things had started it. ‘Is my angel going to be all right?’ she asked again and again on the way home. ‘He’s suffering like the Lord Jesus. Is God going to spare him? Please tell me he is.’

  Oswald promised Howard’s life, though aware that God was unable or unwilling to spare anybody. He walked with her so that she wouldn’t drink, and stayed with her at home because if he didn’t she would go to the Crown Hotel and get drunk. His son’s pain and Helen’s racking agony held his own in control.

  Howard died, and the light went from Helen’s life. Oswald had lost his only son, and Burton didn’t wonder that the shades went down on Oswald’s life as well. Helen could have no more children, and the blow was as close to mortal as any could be.

  Careful not to slip on the mildewed steps, Brian went down from the lane and knocked on the door of his uncle’s house. Sabina, with many of Mary Ann’s good traits in thinking of others’ misfortunes, had asked him to call, in the hope that the sight of a young face might give them encouragement to carry on living.

  Oswald’s handsome features reminded Brian of a Viking pictured in a book at school. And what better job could an uncle have than that of lockkeeper on a nearby canal? As for Aunt Helen, if he knew nothing else he saw her as beautiful, and interestingly unlike any of the Burton women, with dark and curly hair around her tenderly enquiring face when she talked to him. Her hair now grey, this strange and distant woman was the last person in the world who should have had to suffer such grief.

  Oswald led him into the curtain-drawn living room, Helen unable to let in sunlight though Howard had been dead six months. ‘Mam sends her regards,’ he said to the tall raddled figure in the half-dark. ‘To Aunt Helen as well.’

  Oswald seemed hardly to know who he was, and pointed to his leftovers from breakfast, a couple of long bacon rinds with the fat still on, a few scraps of egg-white around the plate. ‘Do you want to finish that up? I’ll cut you some bread, if you like.’

  He was hungry, hadn’t yet had his own breakfast, and Helen might have offered something better, but she was in bed and not to be disturbed. Through the half-ajar parlour door was Howard’s still-open piano, uneven ranks of crotchets and minims on the sheet of music crowding across the page like black ants on the march, to remind Howard in the grave, or maybe even in heaven, how his fingers had at one time turned them into sounds. The sorrowful gloom of mourning was too much and, having given the message, he wanted to resume his walk. ‘No thanks. I’m not hungry.’

  Helen hurried to church for solace every morning, and drank her way home when there was a shilling to spare. Her vice was no more a secret to Oswald than his going with other women had been to her. He was to recall how, after the first years of marriage, unable to be all the time under her pervading fits and miseries and imagined misfortunes long before Howard’s accident, as well as the seeming impossibility of their ever achieving some kind of compatibility, he succumbed to the congenital Burton need to know more than one woman. But after Howard’s death, loving Helen as he did and always had, he devoted himself to keeping her alive.

  He nevertheless wondered about the person he might have married had he not been so in thrall to her, chosen a less complicated and demanding woman closer to what he thought of as his easygoing self. But he had fallen in love with Helen Drury who was more beautiful than any seen in his roamings as a young man, and it had been the same for her when he talked to her at the tram stop after she had come out of church. The sparks of attraction were more fiery and sure between those whose temperaments were so unmatched. They should have stayed entranced, and happy in the mutual quest of getting to know each other for the rest of their lives, but Howard’s death drove Helen almost mad. Oswald endured with the stoicism Burton showed at the death of Oliver, in that having Helen to pity made it more feasible for him to carry on. Where, in that case, would he have been without her, and if he gave in to the same agony of grief, which he felt just as much, who would look after her? Each became a crutch to hold a single body upright.

  He sometimes thought that only the secret drinking kept her going, yet tried to get her to dress in the colourful way she once had, even to take more interest in church affairs, but neither colour, sobriety or piety meant anything. When it seemed she might perish from lack of nourishment he cooked her a meal – the first time for any male Burton – but she stared as if the food was poison, and went back into her world of grief, with its visions of angelic Howard, leaving Oswald racked with guilt at not being able to hide his exasperation.

  She prayed continually for Howard’s soul in the cathedral, comforted by the priest telling her that the boy wasn’t in any place but heaven, where he would one day greet her and say how happy he was that she had lived so long after him, but had come to join him at last.

  Brian was embarrassed at her trembling hands and at the smell of stout on her breath when she greeted him in the street: ‘Tell me, Brian, where is Howard now?’

  ‘He’s in heaven, Aunt Helen.’

  ‘So he is. You’re a good boy.’ With the light in her eyes renewed she leaned over a little less on her way towards home.

  Everyone in the family agreed – at least those who no longer lived in the same house – that Burton became more amiable as he went further into his sixties and seventies, though he was no less scornful of anyone regarded as a fool. When Brian sat reading on the rug Burton looked
down on someone he thought privileged, in spite of his poor clothes, so absorbed by a world he couldn’t get into. At least one child did not have to put up with what he’d had to at that age. Perhaps times had changed, and though he would never say whether or not it was for the better, he told Mary Ann that Brian was a lucky boy in being able to read and write.

  Having fallen into Howard’s place, Brian was all eyes and ears at the Burtons’, taking everything in without giving any sign of doing so. His enjoyment was intense because the distractions were varied and the comforts assured, impressions staying more than he could know. Quiet under the living room lamp of a winter’s evening he seemed engrossed only in his book, and whether or not they thought he had any gift of understanding didn’t concern him, in the flesh of his own fortress, his mind belonging to himself alone, not to be disturbed by any outside influence.

  Burton did not see such stolidity as slowness or inanition, while Brian didn’t regard his grandfather as harsh or threatening. He only felt that when Burton watched him he seemed to know more about him than he knew of himself, though little was said between them, as if it did not need to be. He felt wanted because of Burton’s obvious interest, while Mary Ann liked to see him take books from the glass-fronted bookcase in the parlour because it reminded her of Oliver. ‘I don’t know what he’ll do when he grows up,’ she said.

  Burton grunted. ‘I expect it’ll be interesting, whatever it is.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ernie Guyler coughed himself to death, and Ivy wore black for the funeral. ‘I’ll have his grave to visit now, as well as Oliver’s.’