by Melvyn Bragg
They passed under the copper beech and over the bridge up to the new estate where Joe had once lived for a while. At the house the girls parted: pre-arranged. Alan trailed after his. Joe was eager and they found a dark wall.
She let him kiss her right away. It was somewhere between a peck and a first embrace although the embrace did not really count as she kept her arms by her sides. Joe did not know how to proceed to torrid and the awful truth was that he liked her no more than she seemed to like him. But the idea of escorting back home and being escorted back home and being seen had a great deal going for it. With a leap of dangerous enthusiasm, he planted his right hand on her left breast. What were you supposed to do with a breast? The pictures never showed you. Just keep your hand there? That was very nice but surely there was more. Squeeze? Rub around? Sort of pump it? What was it Alistair had said? ‘Feel ‘em and forget ‘em.’ He squeezed, quite hard. She yelped, and a hitherto limp hand rocketed up to rip his grip loose. They went back to just kissing, but the excitement had gone out of it.
As they walked up the hill into the old town, Alan blamed Joe for getting him into what could prove to be a mess. There was some truth in this - Joe had needed to persuade Alan, even pressurise him - but that caused Joe to resent his friend’s accusation all the more. He was not too unhappy when Alan sulked off home alone.
It was the tilting time of a Saturday night. The pubs were as frill as they would get but the roaring for drink before the 10 p.m. closing time had not yet begun to gather volume. The nine o’clock news was being used as the prompt to send people and hot water bottles to bed. The cinema was packed for the second house. The first percolation of the crowd was beginning to seep into the Market Hall for the dance. Joe was too young to go but he let himself wander up High Street to breathe it in from the brightly bulbed doorway.
Lizzie was there and the way she looked sent an uncomfortable jolt through the boy. Her hair was stacked in a reckless tangle, the dress followed the boyish body so closely that it revealed a slender but voluptuous contour, a cigarette dangled from painted fingernails, uneasy lipstick, unsteady shoes, to Joe more glamorous than Rita Hayworth, whom she imitated. But there was no comparison, he thought, as she spotted him and beckoned him to the bright mouth of the cave which led to grown-up life and feverishly anticipated pleasures. Rita Hayworth was just in the pictures. Lizzie was real. He went across the road as helplessly and despite all odds as hopefully as any convert in Kelvin Hall on that night going to God via Billy Graham.
Lizzie’s friends were late. She wanted company.
‘How’s Joe?’
‘How’s Lizzie?’
This emergent woman, daring, shimmering, sexually electrifying, but still perhaps, because he had known her when she ran with the gangs long ago in Water Street, just within reach: all he had to do was find the key. What had Alistair said?
‘Fag?’ She held out a packet.
He shook his head. She looked down the street, peering through the yellow blobs of the street lights, searching for her friends.
‘I’ve just been to the pictures.’ Joe’s real message was: ‘Can I take you to the pictures?’
‘We went last night,’ she said. ‘What dancers!’
We? Who was his competition?
‘Great dancers,’ he agreed. Meaning: I like dancing and although I’m not quite as tall as you, even smaller now you have those shoes on, I'm good enough to dance with you; I could give you a good dance. One would be enough to show you.
‘Come on in, then,’ She smiled and nodded to the bare-walled, green-painted brick passage leading to the doors beyond which the band was playing a quickstep. I’ve seen you dance. I’ll give you the first one, Joe,’
It was as if the boy turned into a pillar of salt. What he longed for was before him, but he could make no move. He would have to run back home for the money. He would have to change. He would have to explain this to his mother. He would have to lie to the doorman and say he was sixteen. He would have to ignore the necessary preparation for the most important communion of all the next morning. He would have to be somebody else.
‘Next time,’ she said, kindly, and her smile which promised the world seemed tailored for him alone. She knew: but he was just a boy. It was, though, a tribute and her smile regretted that life could not be different or multiple. He truly loved Lizzie: the scar would never quite go nor the nag of what might have been, but in the end he had been too afraid; being too young was an excuse.
‘Wigton’s crap.’
Lizzie’s two friends had arrived, behind him, two girls from the same estate as Lizzie, both dressed to the nines. Arms linked. They ignored him. The one who spoke had flat peroxide-blonde hair, famous in Wigton, ‘got out of a bottle’.
‘Crap.’ The commonplace condemnation was echoed with a vengeful spitting emphasis by her friend.
‘I went up street this afternoon,’ said the peroxide. ‘No knickers on. What happened?’ She took a fag from Lizzie. ‘Not a sniff.’
‘Wigton’s crap.’
‘So long, Joe.’
‘So long.’
‘Next time.’
He watched them all the way to the door, stayed for a moment to let the possibilities play out a few more chords of fantasy and then turned to go.
He was bumped into the gutter, deliberately, by one of three men walking abreast, filling the pavement. They did not break step, for which the boy was very grateful. It could have been much worse. They were bad men. His father had long ago barred them for life from the Blackamoor and more than once they had threatened him on the streets. Now, intent on drink, tanking up for the dance, urgently focused on the next pub, one of the minority from which they were not barred, they merely, but with menace, ignored him.
Joe sought the comfort of chips. Josie was on, which meant that when he asked for scrams she put a heap of the shards of batter on the vinegar-soaked chips and the boy went into the glimmering night streets with a feast, which he ate at his leisure.
Safe now, he could bring out a secret he would not confess to anyone. He was fascinated by the bad men. By their badness. Badness was the biggest dare. Maybe bad men were the bravest. Not just the fighting, others did that, nor just the thieving, breaking into the St. Dunstan’s Blind box in the pub which had justified the ban for life, nor their language, their regular appearances in court, spells in Durham gaol - it was something other which provoked the boy’s fascination. They were a law unto themselves. Mr. Kneale had said that, shaking his head, but Joe stole the phrase and prized it. A law unto themselves. He leaned against the railings of the Fountain, clocking the town as the men did: Lizzie, the bad men, the darkening streets, the chips sliding down his throat, time enough to get in the right mood for eight o’clock communion in the morning, the pang at missing the dance comfortingly transformed into resisting temptation.
The noise in the pub below was heavy but he read through it. When it became too threatening he turned up the music. Time was called. He decided not to go down and help his father count the takings. He had stolen a march on his swotting and was well into another reading of one of his O-level set books, The Cloister and the Hearth. He put it aside. He needed all his energy to concentrate on the Resurrection.
Outside his window the customers went into the night. Joe knelt by his bed and read the account of the Passion in the Gospel according to St. Matthew. He was calm: there was no room for fear. Even Lizzie, he believed, could be forced to the outer edges of his mind. A law unto themselves? He stared at the bible to drive out everything else.
Sam was disappointed that Joe had not come down. He would have welcomed his company. He was still out of sorts. Ellen, it seemed to him, had done her best to avoid him since her late and flustered return with I’ll look after her William.
All that Ellen wanted was to be alone. The hours in the crowded pub, greetings, orders, chatter, prices, news, drink, noise, noise, had been a torment. The noise was louder than ever before, she was sure. The Milburns
more threatening. The singing rowdier. The whole place without that coat of cosiness which made it tolerable. Just another raucous drinking den on a Saturday spree. She wanted to go upstairs and sit in the dark in the unused parlour but how could that be explained away? She wanted even more to get out and walk, beat the boundaries of the old town, recall the words of Marjorie, revise them, commit them to eternal memory. But instead she opened the bottles which foamed a little at the neck, gently poured the drink into an inclined glass, made the many little journeys to and from the till, expressed delight, surprise, and regret, made promises which she would keep, kept her sense of the flow of the place, its cohering mood as closing time approached, suffered others as best she could.
But she could not stay for the final drinks and round-up chat in the kitchen when the last customer had gone and the initial mopping up had been done. Wished goodnight to them all, said she had a headache after the journey in the car, ‘She’s not used to cars,’ said Alfrieda, whose waitress wage more than covered the petrol on her own car, ‘Cars can make you feel sick,’ said Jack Ack, still fresh after three hours on the accordion. Tom Armstrong just nodded. She wished she could have stayed to have a word with Tom, who had brought a chair leg wrapped in brown paper to ‘see him back home’, he said, now that his brothers and the Milburns had fallen out again. She liked Tom and knew he was looking for a bit of support but there was nothing she could do about the force which drew her upstairs and to solitude.
Sam saw them out and stood on the steps, the final cigarette, still a little warmth in the evening, the town seemingly peaceful before him. He considered a stroll up to Howrigg Bank where Mr. Hawesley lived - but Ellen would hear the door shut and ask where he had been and he would be ashamed to tell her.
William stayed up later than usual, listening to Gilbert and Sullivan, playing the records softly to spare the neighbours, yet again unpicking the hours he had spent so privately confined with Ellen, feeling for the first time in his life a pleasure of longing, obsessive, which disturbed but also impressed him - that he was a man of such strong feeling. That it was wholly unrequited and certainly hopeless in some measure made it more romantic. Though was it entirely hopeless? A rogue whisper would not be completely stilled. It made him a new man. But what to do with it? She was totally loyal to Sam and the loyalty was part of her desirability - he put it high on his list. He would go to the Congregational Church, but in the evening. He had difficulties with the Resurrection. She would be asleep now, he imagined, calm, untroubled, at one with the tranquil and decent little town.
The three men had given Lizzie rum and detached her from her friends. They strolled up towards the estate on which all of them lived but took the less familiar route. There was a house along the way, standing on its own, empty for months. They had more rum. They dared her to break in with them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘And the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures. And ascended into Heaven. And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father. By whom all things are made. For us men and for our salvation.’
Joe chanted the words, subdued by his broken voice but no less passionate. Nothing mattered but this. He could see it all clearly. Christ coming out of the sepulchre, become divine, no longer a man, coming back from beyond death to gather in His flock. Joe, on his knees waiting for communion, driving out with all his might all thoughts, even sights, jealously watching Alfred and Malcolm, servers at the altar, above the altar the Pre-Raphaelite Christ shepherding the little children, the whole congregation now His children, people shuffling to the altar as he had seen them do for years, years of devotion, centuries the vicar said, but most of all his mother, earlier spotted, miraculously there about to take communion - but all of this had to be ignored as he prepared to drink the blood and eat the body which would raise him from the dead and make him, too, divine. Why did the words of Alistair, the tangled hair of Lizzie, the fear of the shuddering colt, still breach his concentration on such a morning in such a place? He was not worthy.
I am not worthy, Holy Lord, so much as to gather up the crumbs from under thy table …’He had to be! ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord.’ What was his soul if he could not be undistracted? He had confessed his sins. The vicar had absolved him: he had absolved the whole congregation. Struck dead now he would go up to Heaven as fast as the good thief on the cross. But already he was thinking about swear words and seeing Lizzie lying across the horse, his belly pinching hunger after fasting that morning. He stood in line to go to the altar rails, his hands tight in fists of effort but it was no good. He was no good. He could not be wholly given over to Christ, not even when God had changed his mother’s mind, which was surely a sign. The waxy rather plastic communion wafer stuck on his tongue and he coughed too loudly as he forced it down. He did not like the taste of wine.
But after the service the choir, fully robed, spilled gaily out of the vestry into the churchyard where Mr. Kneale took photographs, first of the whole choir, then groups - tenors, basses, sopranos, trebles -and finally, disrobed, of clutches of them, chattering and smiling on the benches, the women and girls newly bonneted, some of the boys in new suits, Joe wearing his new grey flannels and a blazer and, like all the other boys and men, a white shirt, tie, polished black shoes, hair flattened into short back and sides. The burden of the communion lifted by the gigglings before the lens.
The photographs in the churchyard cheered him up so much that he would have skipped down the streets had he been younger. The town itself seemed reborn: strong, sure, clean, purified. His mother had not waited for him but the full significance of her attendance at communion elated him. He was unable to imagine that she might have come for reasons other than his evangelising. She said nothing when he got back to the pub, hell bent on catching up to meet opening time, noon on Sunday. Joe changed into his old clothes and went down the cellar. His father seemed less open than usual: Joe could tell he regretted missing communion. Sadie had shut herself in the singing room which, she announced, needed a real seeing to. She had not been to communion either and Joe knew that for Roman Catholics this could be fatal to your chances. She was not singing. ‘It’s the best I could manage.’
Less than half an hour to opening time, the three of them discordant in the kitchen. There were half a dozen thin slices of cold ham, bread and butter, pickled onions, tea and a bowl full of the excessively hardboiled dyed eggs, called pasce eggs, which Ellen had put on before she went to church, letting them solidify. Now the eggs were as tradition demanded, the white meat rubbery, the pale shells shot with many colours, streaked, gaudy, two bucketsful in the scullery, ready to be sold in the evening for sixpence each and to be fought with - bashed or dumped against each other until an unbroken champion emerged who would receive half the takings.
‘Mr. Kneale said if we wanted a family photo he could do it this afternoon,’ Joe reported. ‘But Alfred’s coming for tea.’
‘Ah.’ Sam gave Joe a look he could not read. ‘Clear all decks. We are to be hidden away.’
Sam crunched the egg onto his plate, podded off the shell, leaned forward and took two slices of ham with his fingers, ate deliberately grossly.
‘We used to go down to Pasee Egg Hill - where you sledge -when I was a little girl,’ Ellen began.
‘You’ve told me,’ Joe said. ‘You always tell me. To roll the eggs down the hill.’
‘We could break into one of your chocolate eggs for pudding.’
‘He’ll be keeping them,’ Sam said, mouth full. There were two resplendent chocolate eggs, luridly wrapped, on public display on the window sill alongside humble pasce eggs brought as gifts. ‘They’ll be for this Alfred.’
Ellen stopped eating and poured the tea.
The clock struck louder than usual, Joe thought.
‘We really are being unfair to Colin,’ Ellen said, intent on the pouring.
‘It’s good ham.’ Sam held up a wadded forkful and stuffed it all into his mouth. He added a pickled onion.
‘I’ll dump with you.’ Joe held out a heavily guarded egg to his mother. Too casually, she tapped it, hoping to let Joe win. His was the egg that cracked.
‘You can’t beat your mother’s luck,’ said Sam. He burped.
‘Sam!’
Joe looked from one to the other, at sea. He could tell they were angry.
‘Grandad does great eggs.’ The boy pointed to three eggs dyed a wash of yellow and then painted, miniature scenes of lakes and mountains.
‘I’ll tell you something about your grandad.’
Ellen nibbled at the food, knowing she must eat something, wanting to be out of this vortex of other people, jobs to be done, customers to prepare for, the world to obey; wanting to go over yet again, and again, what she had heard beside her father’s grave.
‘This was when he worked in the pits at Siddick.’
‘The mines that went under the sea,’ said Joe, as he always did, always thrilled with fright at that image, men hacking black rock under the deep waters of the sea. It was the most important thing he knew about his grandfather: the first World War, in which the old man had served throughout, was hardly mentioned.
‘He came up from his shift this day and then he set off, the seven miles to where one of his sisters lived. He had heard that her husband was knocking her about. He got there, called him out and gave him a terrible hammering.’ He could see that the word got home to the boy and excited him.? real hammering. Lay one finger on her again, he said, and next time I won’t answer for it.’ Sam took a deep mouthful of tea. ‘Then he walked back home.’
Joe glowed. He had been included, he was grateful. Yet his father’s anger made him afraid. It always would.
‘What did you want to tell him that for?’ Ellen asked, although both of them knew he had told it to her.
Sam looked at her almost cockily. He reached for the Capstan.
