Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  He was in. There was no precedent for it. Not in that house. There was no need for it. Benefits would have been hard to quantify. Yet, when the relationship had achieved a certain weight, you met the parents. It was not an announcement but it was a recognition: that this was not a childish matter.

  ‘It seems daft him hanging about outside the gate all the time in the cold and dark just waiting,’ her mother said. ‘Why doesn’t he come in?’

  He came in on a night early in the New Year, after a Christmas holiday of walks and dances and three parties in the houses of friends which had defined for both of them the glamour of their new social life as a couple. Four months, Joe would say to himself, still going together and not sick of each other yet. So he came in on the last day of the holidays and Mrs. Wardlow told him to sit down, though not at the table. She had just made some tea, Rachel was upstairs getting ready, they were going down to the Donaldsons’ to play cards.

  The brothers were clipped but civil, absorbed in pulling off their boots, splashing their faces with water, hauling up chairs to the table, arming themselves with knives and forks for the rapid demolition of the third big meal of the day. Insofar as it is possible to be genially ignored, Joe was genially ignored, which gave him time to settle. He liked the gleam of the old wood, the beams in the ceiling, the bulky highly polished furniture, corner cupboard, sideboard, the smell of fresh food, the routine of it all, the family being together, words to each other, he guessed, varying little from one night to another, Mrs. Wardlow feeding them. He liked the brothers. Their hunger satisfied, they cocked back their chairs which seemed an essential prerequisite to taking out a cigarette, offered him one, refused, he did not really smoke and it seemed too intimate a thing, too presumptuous, as he waited, they all waited, for Isaac.

  Isaac had been warned that this might happen. He had seen the boy’s bike propped against the wall as he conducted his last tour of the barns and sheds in the dark evening. He carried a storm lantern and liked the private light it gave. It was the time and the weather that suited him most. All the animals early accounted for. Provisioned well for winter. Clear but not frosty. A feeling of snug, of territory bounded and claimed, a time to recharge. Fewer things could go wrong. He counted his stock like Silas Marner counting his golden coins.

  He padded straight to the table in his stockinged feet and a hush came on the kitchen. He ate carefully. Compared with his wolfing sons, he ate delicately. Such talk as there was was murmured between the three men at the table, farm talk, detailed talk, checking the accounts of the day. Joe enjoyed listening in. He liked the whole mood of the place, the everybody being there solidity of it, the sense of being enclosed and self-sufficient, fortressed.

  ‘So,’ Isaac said, turning directly to him. ‘Sam Richardson’s lad.’

  Joe smiled. It was almost funny how closely Rachel resembled her father.

  ‘What does Sam think about you not working?’ He poured the tea into his saucer.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to mind,’ Joe sought to excuse his uselessness. ‘I help a bit around the pub.’

  ‘Sam was a clever lad at school.’ Joe felt complimented.

  ‘So what’ll come out of this school business?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He didn’t. But he needed to be obliging. ‘I could go on to be a teacher.’

  ‘Hear that, Mother? We have a teacher in the house!’

  ‘I clean job anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Not a lot of money in it,’ Isaac said.

  ‘Money doesn’t matter,’ Joe began but got no further.

  ‘Money doesn’t matter! Hear that, Mother? Hear that, boys? Money doesn’t matter!’

  Isaac leaned back in his chair and laughed. He laughed a big deep belly laugh, a laugh he may not have enjoyed for years, a laugh so sincere that it was infectious and first the brothers, then his wife, then Joe himself joined in and Rachel, who entered at that moment, was immobilised in astonishment.

  ‘Well!’ Isaac’s great laughter gradually ebbed away. ‘That beats the band. That beats the band!’

  ‘What was all that about?’ They were walking to Donaldson’s farm. Joe explained.

  ‘I can see why that would set him off,’ she said, and smiled, more to herself than to him. ‘Well, you got off to a good start. A sight better than I thought, to tell you the truth. He must like you. He doesn’t like many people.’

  ‘You’ve got your feet under the table now,’ said Alan, when he told him. There was pity in his voice. ‘She’ll want to meet your lot next.’

  ‘Do we think he should have abandoned her?’ Miss Castle asked of Upper Sixth Arts’ small corps of Latinists. ‘Not left her “an abandoned woman” as Richardson translated it.’ The error still amused the schoolteacher and there was almost affection in her teasing. ‘But deserted her after promising to marry her.’

  The radiators were on full and creaked with effort. The northeast February wind cut through the neglected frames of the old windows. Double Latin at the end of Monday afternoon was never a pleasure. They were in the last lap before the Mock exams.

  There was, as usual, a tactical silence after Miss Castle’s declaration. You never knew with Miss Castle, or Two Ton Castle as she was hurtfully known, even though she was nicknamed after the equally plump but much loved ukelele player Two Ton Tessie O’Shea. ‘Aeneas has been saved by Queen Dido, on his way from Troy to Italy. She has fallen passionately in love with him,’ here the vigilantly sensitive schoolteacher stared down her small crew to quell any titter at her, especially her use of ‘passionately in love’: but they knew better. ‘And then the gods tell him he must resume his destiny and leave her. As we know, she kills herself, falling on a sword. Should he have left her? Brenda?’

  Brenda had prepared this one.

  ‘I think there are two points,’ she said, alert as a hare, shining as a full moon. ‘Firstly, it was his destiny and that’s what he’d been saved for after the burning of Troy. Virgil says it in the poem.’ Filling Miss Castle’s ears with music and streaming her back to the comparably small Latin Sixth of her own youth and the young Oxford man who had led her through the poetry of Virgil, Brenda quoted, in Latin and not a stress out of order. Brenda was capable of pulling off the school’s first distinction in Latin for years.

  ‘And secondly?’ she prompted.

  ‘Secondly,’ Brenda mirrored her teacher’s proud smile, ‘Mercury comes from Jupiter to tell him that he must leave, which (a) terrifies Aeneas and (b) gives him no choice because he has to obey the gods. To illustrate how fearful he is -’

  But Brenda would never complete the sentence because Arthur said, ‘They’re not real gods,’ with such force that she was halted and all the intensity of Miss Castle’s scowl could not prevent Arthur pursuing the point. ‘It’s a mistake to call them gods,’ he said. ‘There should be another word. The Greeks and Romans just made them up to suit themselves. They’ve no idea how to be a real God. They just muck about.’

  As he spoke and continued what had become a predictable diatribe, Miss Casde had to decide whether or not to take him on. He was a lost cause. She had never budged him, not once, not an inch. But how could she defend the principal comfort of her intellectual life, the glamour of her scholarship, those liberated, licentious, arbitrary, untamed pagan metamorphosing gods, whom this nonconformist clod from the hills simply dismissed.

  ‘We have had this discussion before,’ she said.

  ‘We have,’ said Arthur. ‘It needs discussing.’

  Could she sacrifice the rest of the lesson? There were the Mock exams to prepare. ‘Does anyone disagree with Brenda?’ said Miss Castle and Arthur knew he had won.

  ‘I think he shouldn’t have left her like that,’ Joe said. ‘Especially when she’s gone mad. He shouldn’t have left her like that.’

  ‘I’m impressed, Richardson.’ The dart not loosed at Arthur had to find some target. ‘I thought you’d be the last to comprehend Dido’s emotional distress.’ Joe’s face tightened - then,
as happened very rarely, Miss Castle softened, for a few moments, to the boy she almost compulsively enjoyed tormenting. ‘I agree,’ she said. ‘I think Aeneas should have defied his fate.’ Miss Castle shared a deep fellow feeling with Dido. ‘She loved him, she was prepared to give up everything for him, she made a public spectacle of herself, lost her reputation, shamed herself for him,’ Miss Castle’s delivery became increasingly urgent: the children were spellbound, not and possibly never knowing why. ‘And then he just left her. He just walked away.’

  She stopped. Out of the silence, Arthur said,

  ‘Sailed.’

  Miss Castle looked at Arthur as if he were insane.

  ‘Sailed?’

  ‘He sailed away,’ Arthur corrected her. ‘You said walked.’

  ‘He should have taken her with him,’ Joe said, somehow understanding that somebody had to say something. ‘She would have brought her navy and army with her as well. But he never even offered.’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Castle, abruptly awake. ‘He never even offered.’ A breath. A difficult case to argue, Richardson, but if the question comes up you might get good marks for trying, although,’ and she was back on open ground, ‘you will also have to make the points made so well by Brenda, especially, as she pointed out, as Virgil gives us so much evidence. Examiners like quotations.’

  ‘Mind you,’ said Joe, and hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She says some terrible things to him.’

  ‘Perhaps he deserved them.’ Even a smile now, the tone altogether lighter. ‘A broken heart, Richardson, you should know about that from those awful songs you sing. It can do terrible things to a woman. Men will never understand that.’

  Joe nodded because he thought he ought to. Miss Castle left him alone for a week or two. A fag, a cup of tea, work done with half an hour to go before the eleven-thirty opening time, Sam drifting up street, Joe away playing rugby, Ellen willing just to sit and talk in the kitchen: for Sadie this was bliss. She would not, she said, have swapped places with the Queen of Sheba.

  She stirred both her tea and the conversation very gently: there was something she wanted to winkle out of Ellen. In the winter morning dark grey, the kitchen, which backed onto a small yard and a high wall, would have been gloomy without the fire. It drew the gaze of both of them.

  ‘Penny for them.’

  ‘I was thinking about Joe.’

  ‘I miss Joe, pottering about.’

  ‘So do I.’ Ellen spoke softly as if this were an immoderate confession. Yet she continued. ‘He’ll be gone soon. Just like that.’

  ‘How come?’ From Sadie’s nose came perfect double tracks of smoke.

  ‘Mr. Kneale told Sam he thought he just might be university material. He’ll have to leave Wigton for that.’

  ‘Not for long, Ellen. Not Joe. Not Wigton.’ Ellen turned to Sadie and smiled. ‘There is life beyond Wigton, you know, Sadie.’

  ‘Not Joe.’

  ‘He’ll have to get out if he wants to get on.’ Sam had said that. Ellen would murmur the sentence to herself.

  ‘What does he want to get on for? It’s been good enough for you and Sam.’

  ‘Things change.’

  Sadie did not persist, sensing that her disapproval of Joe’s hypothetical abandonment of the town would upset Ellen who had drifted into a world of her own in which once again she tried to begin the process of focusing on what life would be like without Joe, Joe whom she had protected throughout the war, even in the first years taking him to her bed, Joe whom she had steered unobtrusively but relentlessly, cutting down any tendency to excess, watching over him, Joe who was in and out of her daily life like her thoughts, always there, within reach, available. How would it be with him gone? She shook off the mood: maybe it would never happen and anyway, cross the bridge, as William always said, when you get to it.

  ‘There’s talk,’ said Sadie, trying, hopelessly, to be cunning, ‘that William’s got you thinking of standing for the council.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Tom-toms,’ Sadie said and bared her small tobacco-stained teeth. ‘Them old tom-toms.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You’d be bonkers.’ Sadie looked at the wall-clock, the one with the rearing horse cresting it, and took another Woodbine. ‘They only get moaned at, councillors. Women’s worse.’

  Ellen had already made up her mind against doing it, but William’s suggestion was so well argued and so flattering that she wanted to give it an airing - especially with such a confidante.

  ‘It’s a chance to do something useful,’ she said, toning down William’s head-turning speech on public service and the public good, the dependence of the health of the community on the willingness of its stronger members to help the weaker and how this was essential to the continuing march and eventual triumph of socialism. That was too much for Ellen. But it was an appealing idea, of being someone who could be useful to people in Wigton - as she had been when teaching the girls who danced at the Carnival, especially when William told her that her experience of dealing with a range of people in the pub and the knowledge it gave her of the workings of the town meant that she had an ideal grounding. Which came out as, ‘William says being in the pub’s quite helpful.’

  ‘They’ll never be off your back.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘We know who.’ Sadie’s tone was severe. ‘We all know who, Ellen.’

  ‘It would be doing something, though, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You work hard enough as it is. You’ll do more good behind the bar. Anyway, it turns their heads, being councillors. Look at that Mrs. Browne with a E on it. Tells one off on Greenacres for having too high a polish on her floor, she says, tells another off for having too much furniture, poor old Jane for making wedding cakes and selling them on council premises, not allowed. Who’s she?’

  ‘She was criticised for it,’ Ellen said, ‘by the council itself.’

  ‘She still thought she could say it in the first place! It goes to their heads.’

  ‘I hope they don’t let Greenacres go back,’ said Ellen. ‘When we went there, right at the start, it seemed it was going to be paradise.’ She laughed. ‘I used to stand in the bathroom pulling the lavatory chain just to see the water go whoosh!’

  ‘There’s lavatories blocked up now,’ Sadie said with a touch of it serving the tenants right for agreeing to move out of the centre of Wigton, betraying the old town for these new and fancy estates. ‘There’s windows warped and lino put on wet concrete.’

  ‘I know.’ Ellen was dismayed by this. It was as if she shared the blame for paradise going to seed so quickly.

  ‘That’s why people go on the council,’ she said, ‘to sort it out.’

  ‘They never will,’ said Sadie. She threw the stump in the fire. ‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘Sam should be back.’

  ‘He said he might be a bit late. Ill open up.’

  Sam was less than a hundred yards away, in another kitchen, with Mr. Kneale, checking through the questions for the Sunday Quiz. Leonard had taken Grace to the Cumberland Infirmary for a checkup. They were alone, which was perfect for Sam’s purpose, one which rather embarrassed him because it seemed weak. All it amounted to was that he wanted Mr. Kneale to repeat the sentence he had uttered in such a casual way, so easy and natural about it, as if it were so ordinary, but when he had said that Joe ‘might turn out to be university material’, Sam had been elated: and yet. ‘There’s a long way to go,’ Mr. Kneale had warned, ‘and he’s fallen away before, you remember, two or three years back. If these things happen once, they can happen again. But: there is a distinct possibility.’

  Just why the idea of Joe at university moved Sam so deeply he could not, ever, fully explain. What he had to do now was to damp it down, damp it right down for fear evidence of his eagerness might raise the stakes, tilt towards imbalance, interfere. But, and this was the weakness, he just wanted to hear Mr. Kneale say it again so that he coul
d have it confirmed before burying it. Which was why he had chosen his time with care, knowing of Grace’s appointment. Yet face to face with the ageing schoolteacher, he found he had no strategy at hand to gain his end.

  ‘This block of wood,’ Mr. Kneale said, holding up a block of dark oak about the size of a building brick, ‘is part of a humanly fashioned piece of timber which they found in Wedham Flow when they were digging down. At least seven thousand years old, Sam. At least. Seven thousand years ago there were men like us just a few miles away getting on with their lives, just as intelligent, not with our science but with their own knowledge. They would live where we would starve -there’s no end to the past, Sam.’

  He handed it over. Sam did his best with it and then handed it back.

  ‘For somebody not born around here you take a big interest.’ A man must cultivate his own garden, as the French philosopher said.’

  ‘The lads on the allotments would say the same.’

  ‘Now then, Sam. You know I respect the lads on the allotments too. But you can have both. You need both. Just as in the study of history you need your Great Minds - Toynbee, Spengler, Macaulay - but you need the local detail too and we haven’t had enough of that.’

  ‘We will by the time you finish.’

  ‘If I ever do.’

  ‘It must be coming on by now.’

  ‘It isn’t started, Sam. Not as a book. I’ve got notes. I’ve got outlines. I’ve got chapter headings. I’ve developed a talent for chapter headings.’ He laughed at himself, affectionately. I’ve got a skeleton. I’ve got all those things but as a book Wigton Men at War has yet to get under way. It’s rather depressing.’ He looked keenly at Sam. ‘Now where did that come from? Eh, Sam? I don’t feel gloomy about it, not at all, not usually. Maybe it’s this ancient piece of wood. Will anything I do last as long as this block of wood?’

  Sam laughed. Mr. Kneale queried it in his glance.

  ‘A queer sort of contest,’ Sam said. ‘You against an old block of wood.’

  ‘Words,’ said Mr. Kneale, ‘last to come, first to go.’ He put the wooden block on the kitchen table between them, reverently. Still looking at it, he said,