by Melvyn Bragg
As the time for supper approached and her brothers rushed to clean up and be off on their motorbikes down to the nearby coastal resort where Saturday night was big, Rachel had to fight herself not to catch his eye. The constantly twilit room was more than usually oppressive, the fire, burning peat and logs got for nothing, too hot, the whole enterprise taking too much effort even before it began. How much calmer to sit in and listen to the radio or go around to Linda’s house where they could play records and dance together in Linda’s bedroom. Her father seemed to take such a long time at the table, one cup of tea after another, dark-faced in the dark room, powerfully barrelled body, thick leather belt which he had often taken to the boys, collarless shirt, open waistcoat concealing braces, smelly stockinged feet, boots at the door to be cleaned for him for the morning. He drank his tea in the old way from the saucer and dipped digestive biscuits in it, as if he were down to gums.
Rachel was made even more anxious by the nervousness of her slender, fair mother, who was in on it. There was an excitement in her gestures, the swift smiling knowing looks, which, Rachel was sure, would put him on the scent. More than once she had to get out of the room to lower the tension and whenever she came back she expected the man to fix her and say, ‘Now what’s all this?’
He looked at her carefully before she left. There was a moment. This time she stared him out. The green school raincoat. Flat shoes. No make-up. Assurances that ‘a few’ of them were going which was true although she dared not catch the glittering glances of her mother.
She was free. The bike seemed a thing infected by her escape to freedom, rushing her away, spinning wheels colluded, the greetings of the others like cheers. They pedalled through the still-light lanes close-ranked as a flock of chittering starlings, migrating through the dim countryside for an evening’s pleasure.
Unusually, Rachel did not park her bike down Meeting House Lane next to the Salvation Army but turned into Church Street and found the little yard where an old unmarried aunt of her mother’s lived - Aunt Claire. It was there that Rachel put on her make-up, changed into the high heels she had borrowed from her mother and smuggled into her saddle-bag. She put aside the school raincoat. The old lady smiled. ‘You’re on the gad, eh?’ she said, her sweet country face innocently complicit, gleeful. ‘Well, good luck to you. I hope he deserves you.’ Rachel blushed.
There was still a feeling of blush about her as she made her way a mite unsteadily down the crooked street and across to the mouth of Meeting House Lane where Joe stood looking up and down the road. The first thing she thought was that she was glad he was not wearing his specs. Mostly he did not outdoors but she had feared that for the pictures … But not. And even better he was not wearing the school blazer. A charcoal grey suit, white shirt, tie, like a man out. His hair was as she liked it and so was his obvious uncertainty, which flipped to startled when he saw her.
She had turned into a woman. Was that it? She had changed utterly and yet she was the same. The same framing black hair, jet eyes questioning him -do I look all right? Why are you staring here on the street? - blue dress dipped, as Joe would describe it, at the front so that the rise of breasts could clearly be noted, a whipped-in waist, a gentle fall of soft textured pleats. He wanted to touch her. It was very difficult not to, but King Street was alive and both of them were certain that they were under intense observation.
You look beautiful, he wanted to say, but was an age from saying it. It makes me very embarrassed to see you looking at me like that, Rachel wanted to say, but please don’t stop. How could I have waited so long, Joe would have said, in another world, maybe in a film: wasting a whole summer. There is something about him, Rachel thought, that suit sets him off well, I like his mouth.
The split seconds embraced not only formulated thoughts but a draught of sensual impressions, past comparisons, building of future possibilities, fears of recognition from others, delight of recognition in each other, a sudden nucleus of unspoken affinities which only months would unravel. Yet even such split seconds had to come to an end and descend into conversation. Joe had not a clue what to say-despite repeated rehearsals in front of the mirror as he had vainly attempted to Presley his hair - and so he nodded. The best you could manage, she would say, later, much later, was a nod!
‘Did you get seats on the back row?’ she asked.
The hot seats, the bold seats, the seats for young lovers.
‘No.’ Already defeated. Booked too late. Not even next to the back row.
‘Good!’ She smiled. It would have seemed too fast, too soon.
Joe did not understand her obvious relief but there was no time for that as they were tugged in by the flow which indicated that the doors had opened for the second house.
First they sat straight in their seats, three rows from the back, attentive to the bits and pieces that came on before the main film, staring intently ahead as if afraid to miss a frame. In the interval Joe bought two ice-cream tubs. Rachel did not like to refuse although she wanted to shove it under the seat. Conversation through the wooden spoons over the damp little tubs was not easy but Joe found a useful vein in the caricaturing of teachers. When On the Waterfront began they snuggled closer, as if that was what they ought to do, and behind them there was a ripple of snuggling up and the beginnings of such gropings and suppressed groanings as would be tolerated in a small cinema peopled exclusively with locals, part of whose entertainment was to watch and report on the real-life love stories in the back rows. Joe’s eventual looping of an arm around Rachel’s shoulders was a small masterpiece of nonchalance, he thought, only partly spoiled by his hand bumping into the knee of the large lady directly behind Rachel. Her cough was a test. Both of them giggled. Rachel eased closer.
Joe did keep a check on the screen but his time was now devoted to answering the question which would not go away: what to do next? He fished the hand down in the direction of a breast but a mere shrug ruled out that route. He looked at her, hoping that she would look as intently at him but she was eyes front, unyielding. He turned a little sideways so that his other hand could touch her waist, her arm, anything so long as more parts of her could be in contact with more parts of him. This was not satisfactory at all: she seemed frozen to him, alive only to the screen.
Finally she did turn and by this time a turbulent Joe thought he had earned a kiss.
'Isn’t he sexy?’ she said.
Joe looked at Marlon Brando as for the first time. He was affronted. What was sexy about him? Old jacket. Mumbling. Squashed face. Not a trace of a smile. And in the fighting bits they always used doubles. Girls weren’t supposed to find men sexy, were they? It was girls who were sexy. But her use of the word excited him. When he turned back to Rachel, once more she seemed enraptured by the massive stumbling creature on the screen. Joe studied Brando.
He eased off. To be beaten by somebody in a film! But as soon as he eased off, Rachel’s body softened to him and she seemed to melt a little, prepared to be part of him. He made no further move.
And then he flew. Welded to her by the lightest of touches, he saw them take off together. That he had so nearly not secured her! That was now the urgent goal, securing what had become in that short time, and however hard to articulate, someone absolutely necessary to his life.
In bed, later, wide awake in the silence of the countryside, Rachel knew that it would go on. His mixture of urgency, anxiety and undisguised affection - could she risk anything stronger? - had flung itself at her with an unsettling, a flattering, force. In the tingling silence of her bedroom, with the memories of that shyly looped arm, the sexiness of Marlon Brando, the full long kiss pressed against her which Joe had claimed after fetching his bike and riding home along the unlit by-roads with her, the wiping off the lipstick at the door, even though her father was long asleep, that good suit of his, good mouth, she felt that she had made the right choice.
She knew her father would somehow have sensed it all and anyway there would be the gossip over the nex
t day or two.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sometimes Ellen thought she scarcely knew him. Even now when as usual he was reading, cigarette dangling, cup of tea long cold, customers long gone, town a tomb, and she as usual had pulled up the low stool to the embering fire, her Woman’s Illustrated to hand, drowsily grazing on the spent coals, even now, even there she could think she scarcely knew him.
There had been the strict innocence of knowing him as a girl, then the knowing as a woman, the strange mix of longing and memory and inevitable numbness of knowing when he was at war and in danger of no return and perhaps that had strained it for good, or maybe time was responsible. William had talked about time and pain finally snuffing out any flicker from the original fire until only a memory was left. The rest was habit, William said, shored up by will.
It was not so bleak or so clear cut with her although William’s arguments always beguiled Ellen, who was not used to analysis and reflection of this kind. She would declare, stoutly to herself, that she still loved Sam and could show it and did and always would. But she could look at him as on this night and see the man, the outward form, the familiar slouch over the book, the cigarette, and feel that what had really been him had gone, replaced by efforts and memories on both their parts. The length of the absence in war and her unrelenting current of fear had taken part of his life away from her. He could as it were vanish from her in such a strange way. She knew him and she did not know him, and what she did not know could sometimes seem everything.
‘We called in the Traveller’s Rest,’ she said. ‘You were right about it being a lovely place.’ Sam smiled.
‘Did the Queen have a half with you?’
‘She told us she was already spoken for.’
‘And?’ He put down the book.
‘It’s …’ She struggled: praise did not come easily but the Traveller’s Rest was a very fine pub, a cut above all the pubs she knew in Wigton, a pub with a rose garden, a ladies’ bar, ample amenities. ‘I can see what you saw in it,’ she said.
‘We did what we did.’
‘I can see what you could have done with it.’
‘There would’ve been no point.’ The words were philosophical but the regret could not be disguised, the anger was not frilly gone, and he picked up the book.
‘I was willing,’ Ellen said, and he nodded without looking up.
But Joe was not. When the brewery had offered Sam what the director called One of the jewels in our crown’, a pub in the rich steel town of Workington down on the West Cumbrian coast, Joe had instantly announced that he would stay the week in Wigton at his Auntie Grace’s and only come through at weekends. Nothing would shift him. And Sam had seen the eyes, seen the uncontrollable force of the fear of leaving the town, the school, the Known, and sensed a little of the boy’s deeper unconfessed terror.
‘I wouldn’t know anybody,’ the boy had said.
‘What’s the point of having him if we never see him?’ That had been Sam’s sole and stoic statement. ‘We’ll stay where we are till he’s through.’
‘We saw her three times,’ Ellen volunteered and this time Sam checked the place in his book and put it down for the night. He had laid on a coach for those interested in seeing the Queen on her visit to open the new Nuclear Power Station on the West Coast.
‘You were like a pack of kids when you set off,’ he said.
‘Gerald knows the back roads.’
‘She must have thought you were on her tail. Three times! The Wigton Mob.’
‘She’s lovely.’
‘Did she give that wave?’ Sam did a fair impersonation of the royal half-salute.
‘She’s lovely.’
‘For King and Country,’ Sam murmured. ‘That was what we were told.’
‘William wants to get up a bus to go to Carlisle to hear Mr. Gaitskell speak on Suez.’
‘He told me.’ Sam lit a last cigarette. ‘I said I’d lay it on.’ That had taken some of the sting out of it. ‘Do you two talk about politics when you’re in that car?’
Ellen’s throat dried. They did. Or rather she listened. William saw her as a clean slate on which he could write the story of his mind and on their trips she had been drawn in by his talk. Sam read books, as many she would guess as William Hawesley, but Sam did not talk to her about them. To Joe, yes, when they caught each other. But Sam’s books were closed to her, they were somewhere in which he lost himself.
‘He reads a lot,’ she said. The wrong thing.
‘He’s an educated man,’ Sam responded, doggedly fair. Tm surprised he still wants to help us out here.’
‘But he really likes it here!’ Ellen’s face shone, Sam noticed. ‘It’s the people and the gossip of it, he says. He feels he’s in the middle of real life. He wouldn’t be without it now, he says.’
‘So you talk about politics? You must. You going to hear a speech can’t be an accident.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘No reason.’ Sam smiled. Except that I feel left out.
‘Do you think what we’re doing in Suez is right?’
Ellen’s earnest question made her seem strange to him. It was as if she had been asked to say it on behalf of someone else. As if it were not her. But it was. The question was rather diffidently asked but put sincerely. Perhaps it came too from the new hinterland she had been forced to find for herself in the war, one which William now gave her the energy to explore further. As strange to Ellen herself as to Sam.
‘I can see why Nasser got confused,’ he said, ‘the Americans promising a loan and then backing off. But everybody has to be on the same side when you send in our own lads.’
‘But don’t you think,’ Ellen tried to remember William’s words, stumbled in her mind, used her own, ‘it’s a bad thing to do?’
‘It depends what you mean by bad.’ Sam spoke the sentence for the quotation it was, but Ellen had not listened to Dr. Joad on the Brains Trust. It was Joe who joined him now that it had moved onto television on a Sunday afternoon, sat together in the empty pub kitchen, silently intent on the giants of conversation - Dr. Bronowski, Julian Huxley, Isaiah Berlin, Alan Bullock, Professor A.J. Ayer - who spoke to them and so fluently of what most mattered. They would know what was meant by bad.
‘Bad’s …’ Ellen did not like debate on ideas. She had no faith in herself. William made it easy by somehow putting the answer inside his question. ‘You know what bad is.’
‘Sometimes you don’t know,’ Sam said. ‘There’s some think the Atom Bomb was bad. We were glad of it. More would’ve been killed without it. Maybe it’ll stop big wars in the future. Then it’ll be seen as good.’
‘The United Nations,’ Ellen said, determined, ‘they should decide on wars - otherwise nothing will ever change.’
‘I wouldn’t disagree. But sometimes life can’t wait for the United Nations.’
‘Why don’t you come and listen to Mr. Gaitskell?’
‘One of us has to look after the pub.’
‘I’m not out much.’
‘I’m not saying that. You go. Take Joe.’
‘I seem to see less and less of him these days.’
‘He does lock himself away,’ Sam nodded. ‘He’s going his own road now.’
There was a pause of shared sadness, a few minutes which almost formally marked a passing, a change, the end of a time, the boy beginning to leave them, their son on the solitary way to becoming the man he wanted to be, having to loosen bonds, even to shake them off. Both had registered that in small signs, oblique remarks, changed glances, outbursts, sudden oppositions, and in that pause they did know each other. Out of this unexpected wholeness, Ellen said,
‘It’s good of you to let Colin travel on the dog men’s bus.’
‘He would have found it hard to get to the trails without.’
‘But it’s still good.’
Sam wanted none of this subject but there was in Ellen’s voice a yearning to which he had to respond. She longed to be p
roud of something in Colin.
‘He’s got himself a good dog,’ he said and it was true. Colin had sold off his budgerigars and bought two well-bred young hound dogs, one of which was now emerging as a champion. He needed what was known as the ‘dog men’s bus’, laid on by Sam every day of the hound trailing season, making the Blackamoor the dog men’s pub in the town. Ellen had made the request for him. Sam made a final effort.
‘It’s smartened him up,’ he said. ‘It’s made something of him.’ He stood up. ‘Sometimes all that’s needed is a bit of success.’ He yawned, widely. ‘Bed,’ he announced. ‘I know. You’ll have a last cup.’
‘No,’ Ellen decided, out of nowhere. ‘You’re not always right. I’m coming to bed now.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It rained. It pelted down. It sluiced. The river by the station flooded onto the road and for three days the school buses could not come in from Rachel’s area. There were floods elsewhere in parts of the sodden town, streams in the gutters, waterfall spouts from overcharged or broken drainpipes, low-lying land pooled in shallow lakelets as they had been on and off for months now. On the farms on the Solway Plain the harvest was delayed yet again. Men went round the unprotected fields with sacks over their shoulders, boots squelching ankle deep in mire, the smell of damp indoors as thick as the rain haze outside. Like an unpitying invasion the clouds came in from the Atlantic, over Ireland, over the sea, squadron after heavy-laden squadron, dropping their tons of cargo on the water-brimmed land below and Isaac Wardlow was a man to be avoided. The flattened saturated corn in his fields looked on him as a failure.
Cut off from school Rachel helped her mother dry things out in front of the kitchen fire, pulley overloaded, clothes horse sending up steam as if it had nostrils, her brothers unwilling, unmanly to change out of soaked clothes at midday, her father like the wrath of God, her mother said, just you watch out for him, like the wrath of God.
