‘I know. I reckon it up every year.’ He spoke close because of the noise. ‘Lean against me, if you like.’
His lumbago might come back, but it wouldn’t kill him, and whatever did could hardly matter. With more than three score and ten under his belt, and Mary Ann the same beneath her pinafore, he could put a finger to his nose, and hope that those dropping the bombs would be killed, the sooner the better.
Mary Ann’s grip at the cleanly piercing whistle was tighter than he’d ever known. She called out, but he kept his hand relaxed, because if she sensed his worry her terrified heart might give.
The whistle went on, as if to last forever, and though only for a few seconds he thought if this is it, so be it, a throb of rage because they were causing Mary Ann such distress. To calm himself he imagined it wasn’t so much the German bombers as Beelzebub about to blind him in the other eye. She couldn’t stop shaking against him. The whistle ended, as everything had to, and a shudder of explosions almost threw them off the bench.
He knocked his cap against the wall to get the dust off. ‘I thought it was Thomas on his way in, with a whistle like that.’
He thanked God when she laughed and said: ‘Thomas’s whistle was never like that.’ But she couldn’t stop trembling, and went on without opening her eyes: ‘God will pay the Germans out.’ For the first time in his life he held back the grunt she expected.
Burton admitted, on his way to the Gregory Hotel, that he liked to keep a watch over his children, whether they were married or not. Ivy said it was because he wanted to interfere in their lives, but it wasn’t. He was only interested in knowing what they were up to. When Thomas had been married two years he saw him in town arm-in-arm with a woman, out on her dinner break from a factory, he supposed, noting her overalls and the cigarette at her mouth.
Thomas said: ‘Hello, Dad!’ not saying who she was. Burton didn’t want to know, but thought it brazen to be going behind Grace’s back so soon.
When he saw him talking to the same woman in a pub it was obvious what was going on. Grace complained at him having to do Home Guard duty every night, but Burton told Mary Ann he knew very well whose home it was he was guarding, while her husband was in Egypt or some such place. It was hard to understand why his sons had married women too good for them, while three daughters had landed themselves with numbskulls or bullies. Thomas had married an unusual woman, and found her hard to live with, but what wife had ever been easy?
Walking to the bar he noticed a tall army chap with a swagger-stick under his arm, flat cap, moustache, and a row of medal ribbons, who said to him: ‘Do you remember me?’
The Welsh accent brought a picture of Owen the Bible reader who had penned Mary Ann’s postcards at Pontllanfraith, and he got rid of it by a rub at the eye. He knew very well who the man was. ‘I didn’t hear your name.’
‘Dyslin – David Ernest. Captain in the Home Guard for the duration.’
Burton nodded, then finished his drink. ‘Pleased to meet you again.’
‘Thought I’d take another look.’
‘Now you have,’ not wanting to be too abrupt with a man who was, after all, his son. Sensing his wish to shake hands, he kept one firmly by his side, and the other on his empty jar. ‘What are you doing here this time?’
‘I ask that question myself now and then. But I got tired of South Wales – as I believe you did once – and tried my luck in London.’
Another journeyman: it must run in the blood. ‘How did you get on there?’
‘Not too badly. But my wife left me.’
He was astonished that a woman could do such a thing to a Burton. ‘How did that happen?’
‘And then the children grew up.’
‘They all do.’ Burton looked at his impressive son, a sight that, though he was in khaki, brought a pleasure he saw no reason not to enjoy.
Dyslin smiled. ‘Just before the war I thought I’d try things in Nottingham, since I had some connection with it, you might say. And it’s as good a place as any, perhaps better. I get on fine with the people.’
‘You’re doing well?’
‘I’m in a partnership. The war’s hit us, but we’re holding on all right.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘I got a couple of chaps sent down a year or two ago who’d been robbing all over the place. There’s a great deal more crime here than before the war.’
At least one of his sons had made a way in the world, so he accepted a pint, wondering what life would have been like to have had the chap growing up at Old Engine Cottages, the mood momentarily blighted on reflecting that with such a background he might not have done so well for himself – except that Mary Ann could have encouraged him enough to get to where he was now. Perhaps I would have been less harsh to him than the others.
Dyslin took a gentlemanly sip of his whisky. ‘A son of yours is in my company, my half-brother of course, though I shan’t let him know. Chance throws up some rare coincidences.’
Burton had to agree.
‘As soon as his name came out at roll call I could tell the instant I looked at him. He has the makings of a good soldier, you might like to know. He learns quickly, and does what he’s told.’
Burton drank half his pint. ‘He’s had a lot of practice.’
‘I imagine he has.’ He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar for a while. ‘But I’d been wanting to have another meeting with you. Who knows when it will be possible again, in this war?’
‘How long do you think it’ll go on?’
‘Another three or four years. But the Russians are in with us now, so I expect they’ll win a lot of it.’
‘I don’t think anybody ever won a war.’
‘I always told myself the same, but we’ve got to fight this one.’
‘So I believe.’ The Germans had tried to kill him and Mary Ann. He took money from his pocket. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’
Dyslin couldn’t refuse the generosity of an old age pensioner, who was also his father, for whom he felt more affection than he thought became any man, as he placed his glass forward. ‘That’s very kind.’
Burton looked askance at Dyslin’s facetious remark. ‘No it isn’t.’ He may be my son, but he has to keep his place, in spite of the ribbons on his chest. ‘It’s my wish. I’m glad we met again.’
THIRTY
Mary Ann booked seats on the train so that she and Burton could stay a week in Kent with Rebecca, who lived so far away that Mary Ann hadn’t seen as much of her children as she would have liked. ‘We don’t know how much longer we’re going to live, and I want to see more of them before I die, even though they’re all grown up.’
She worried about the trip, her glasses on while looking at timetables, and trying to make sense of the London Underground diagram the travel agent had given her, of how to get from St Pancras to Charing Cross. Burton said not to let the matter upset her, but he would say that, wouldn’t he? He expected her to do the figuring merely because he had given the three pounds for the tickets out of money he’d put by. Up at five, he woke Mary Ann at six.
‘You might have left me a bit longer,’ she said.
‘I’m getting hungry. I’ve got the fire going.’
At half-past eight they stood in their best clothes by the silent Gregory Hotel, and took a trolleybus to Old Market Square, changing there for the LMS station. He wasn’t bored, with so much to see from the train, shading his eye when the sun worked through cloud. Near Bedford, Mary Ann looked in the St Neots direction, as if for a glimpse of her relations. When the train puffed up to the platform of St Pancras station Burton was first out to handle the cases.
‘We must get on the blue line to cross London,’ she said, ‘but there’s no hurry. After we change at Leicester Square there’s only one more stop. Our train for Lydd doesn’t leave until a quarter-past three.’
The Underground train seemed to pull up every few seconds, his head so full of the wonder. ‘If there’s time I could do with a drink. And I expe
ct you’ll be wanting your pint of shandy.’
At Charing Cross she put their cases into the left luggage and, with two hours to spare before the Lydd train, she led him into Trafalgar Square, where they ate their sandwiches. ‘This is what I’ve always wanted to see. That must be Lord Nelson up there.’
Twenty years ago an old sailor-looking villain had stomped on his wooden leg up the path at Old Engine Cottages, and sold her a piece of wood for half a crown, saying it was part of the ship Lord Nelson died on. She was proud to have it, until learning that the Victory was in Portsmouth and had never been broken up.
Rebecca and Fred met them at Lydd station, made all the fuss possible during their stay. Rebecca told Mary Ann when they were alone that Fred had used her all their married life as a rag to wipe the sweat of his forehead with. ‘I wish I’d never set eyes on him, but then, what man would have been good enough for me to set eyes on? Bringing up six kids has been my penance, and there was no getting out of it.’
Burton regretted having come, counting every hour to going home. He was nagged to get back, though couldn’t say why, said nothing about it, never would have, went to the pub with Fred, who was a happy but thoughtless man, solid in body and contemptuous of everyone, without having the presence to back up his opinions, Burton knowing that Fred, in maligning someone, only showed his own littleness. Most of all, he talked too much.
But Burton enjoyed being with Rebecca’s grown sons and daughters, who were fascinated by him. One grandson walked him to the Pilot Inn at Dungeness, and eighty-year-old Burton walked so quickly he at one point left him behind.
Whatever was calling him home he wouldn’t like when he discovered what it was. He only knew he wasn’t where he wanted to be, as if neglecting an issue of crucial importance. The sooner he went back the better, a feeling so firm he was tempted to talk about it with Mary Ann. The only sign of his uncertainty to her was that he ate so little it was a wonder he could go on living, but when she mentioned it he said he had never been a big eater anyway.
Standing with his grandson by a field at harvest time he watched the machine reducing the area of wheat. He was sorry at not having a shotgun to get one of the rabbits running for safety, but on one coming close enough he snatched it up, and killed it by a cut at the neck. At the same instant a youth slung a piece of slate which caught Burton’s hand, and made a gash that fetched blood.
Kids were only doing what they had always done, so he laid no blame, but strode down the lane to where his daughter Rebecca would bind the wound, blood dripping through his fingers, the dead rabbit swinging from the other hand.
Burton, the large flat cap under his arm, stood so as to give full advantage to his height, looked at the rectangular grave and marble scroll at its head. Under the embossed horseshoe were words he knew backwards and forwards, upside-down and right side up, the only writing he could recognize, every letter blazoned into his head.
He laid down the swatch of red roses and threw the bunch of daffodils laid there by Ivy and Emily onto a heap of decaying blooms by the church wall. He carried the vase of tap water to the grave and set his flowers in it, prime roses from a shop, not trash out of Thomas’s allotment.
He wiped his large veined hands with a red and white spotted handkerchief. Wounds never healed. Knots didn’t unravel. You couldn’t expect them to, had no say in the matter. You were grieved unto death and maybe afterwards, though his doubts on that were such as not to worry. Life had been long, and at least he had lived it.
The sepulchral grunt was as if his heart could hold no more. The older he got the worse Oliver’s death tormented him. He wondered how much longer he’d need to shoulder its weight. Your head seems as full as a bucket but, turn it upside-down, nothing comes out, glued in by memories you could well do without. Life was long enough to enjoy, but too short for torment. He turned abruptly and went onto the street, walking in so straight a line that an onlooker assumed he was following the marks of the paving stones.
Back from his usual pint, he said to Mary Ann that he was going up to bed. Sparks of pain moved across his chest, hot as toast yet as blunt as all get out, toing and froing in a slowed-down insistent way, hardly worth bothering about, but suddenly they clubbed together and gave a gyp he’d never known. She asked again what ailed him, but he wasn’t the man for answers.
Ivy and Emily sat by the diminishing fire. It was even harder to get coal and coke than it had been during the war. Emily queued patiently at depots all around the town, and sometimes brought half a hundredweight back on her shoulders. ‘It’s time you two were in bed.’ He went upstairs before knowing whether or not they obeyed.
There was nothing to do with such pain except get some kip and hope it would go. If it didn’t, it was him who would, to some place he had never known, and there was damn-all to be done about it. He put his boots in their usual place by the door, to know where they’d be if needed again, and draped his suit on a hanger beside the brown one in the wardrobe. He unclipped his suspenders and sat on the bed to draw off his socks, dropped them in the hamper for Mary Ann to wash.
The pain seemed to settle, and he hoped he wasn’t pampering himself, though it would get back into action if he didn’t lie down. Shedding his long underwear, nakedness minus feet and face showed in the wardrobe mirror. The woollen nightshirt shook to his feet, and the last thing done before getting into bed was to take off his black velvet eyepatch, make sure it was smooth, and put it on the small table so that he would know where to find it. The wounded eye was less painful for some reason, though dazzled with colours never seen before.
Mary Ann stood in her nightdress. He hadn’t heard her come in, unusual for a man who always noticed everything. She laid the fallen blankets over him, the bedroom icily cold. His face was the colour of chalk. ‘You’re not well, Ernest,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
He couldn’t stare the pain into quiescence, lay with knees bent in a bed that had never been long enough. Maybe he would get one to fit, where he was going. He turned to her. ‘Bricks in my chest are banging together. Don’t ask any more.’
It was an illness that couldn’t be palliated by Epsom salts mixed with hot tea in a large white saucer; or cured by friar’s balsam, or held at bay by that mysterious concoction for horses given him by a gypsy in Wales, gurgled into his gullet from an upended position, fitness and colour coming into his face as the sombre liquid diminished in the bottle.
His back was to Mary Ann, who lay by his side. Drawing his knees up eased him. ‘Are Emily and Ivy in bed?’ Whatever I’ve got seems more than a cold, unless it’s a bad case of the flu, though if it is I can’t think where I caught it. Walking among people who are hawking and spitting, it jumps into your throat, then goes everywhere else in your body. I’ve never seen a doctor in my life, but might if this hasn’t gone by morning. Drunken youths shouted along the boulevard. ‘They are,’ Mary Ann told him.
He wondered about his children. Edith had at last rid herself of Doddoe – after he’d been in prison a few times for poaching. He recalled how some years ago Doddoe had pawned Edith’s sheets and finest underclothes to get money for beer. On his way to the pub he met Sabina’s husband Harold, and the pair drank away every penny, while their children were hungry at home. Edith now lived with a man who looked after her as she deserved, though her jailbird lads called him blind and tormented him almost to madness.
Sabina lived down the road, and Rebecca was all right in Kent. Oswald did his best for Helen at home, and Thomas across the road was more likely chasing some woman instead of being in bed with Grace. You couldn’t berate a man too much for that. In any case nobody ever altered.
He thought of his children but didn’t want them close, for who would be gawped at when the devil was getting his claws into you? He took my favourite son, and now it’s my time to go, when I was hoping for another ten years before the lights went out. ‘You tossed and turned all night,’ Mary Ann said. ‘Drink this cup of tea, and then I’ll get your breakfast.’
She covered him, put a hand to his fevered head. The pain had thinned him since yesterday. ‘Thomas has gone for the doctor. He’ll be here directly.’
‘I don’t want breakfast. A doctor won’t do any good, either.’ No use talking, I don’t care to frighten her, though by her look and the tears on her cheeks she thinks I’m about to go. His voice was weak. ‘None of your blawting. Not for me.’
The doctor was a short heavy man not long out of the navy. ‘What’s all this, Mr Burton?’
Less answer was necessary than there ever had been to any question, and he felt like swearing at being addressed in so familiar a manner. As with the wounded on the burning deck, he was shot full of diamorphine to make the pain more distant.
‘I’ll call later,’ the doctor said to Mary Ann downstairs, ‘and give him more of the same. The poor chap needs it.’
THIRTY-ONE
Burton was dying. Ivy knew that if he didn’t now he never would though no one lives forever, and who would want him to? Certainly none of his family, so she believed. Immortality is not given to anyone born of the flesh, as she had heard long ago in Sunday School, and whoever came into the world other than that way, and told us all about it, would be shouted down as a barefaced liar.
Burton would go to hell when he went, because where else was there for a man like him? She had heard that everybody who did go to that place, no matter how old, were made into their prime of thirty-three. Those who went to heaven, on the other hand, stayed the same age as when they had died, because innocence was much cherished in that place.
She found it unpleasant to think of Burton back in his prime. He had been tall and domineering all his life, though a roisterer when young, and a womanizer since. When we did anything he didn’t like or thought was wrong, and he was forced to speak to us about it, the fact of having to open his mouth at all, as if he had no energy to spare after a day’s work at the forge, made him so angry he nearly always ended by hitting us. Above all, we must never answer back, because the response would be certain and devastating. He’d had more power over his family than a Persian satrap over a province.
A Man of his Time Page 37
