The man leered, came close, and threw his newly-lighted cigarette to the ground. He ignored Arthur, who stood looking and listening with lips set tight. ‘It was you that was at fault, and you bloody-well know it,’ he went on, at receiving such a feeble retort from Fred, fists clenched by his raincoat pockets. ‘You walked across the road with your eyes shut. I suppose you were practising to get a job as sleepwalkers on the Empire. I saw you and hooted till I was blue in the face. You must be deaf as well as blind.’
‘You know your hand didn’t get anywhere near that hooter,’ Fred said quietly. ‘In fact I’ll bet you haven’t got a hooter on a car like that. It’s so small you can’t get one in after your fat gut has been squeezed in there.’
He came closer and lifted his fist. ‘If you don’t have less o’ your cheek,’ he threatened. Fred glared back, hoping to avoid what he knew by now to be inevitable.
Arthur stepped in, pushed himself between them, gripped the astonished man by his raincoat lapels, and lifted him up. ‘If yo’ don’t shurrup, and button yer gret gob,’ he roared like a bull, his face livid with fury, his eyes swimming with blood, ‘I’ll SMASH yer ter smithereens.’
The man’s mouth opened, said nothing, then shut slowly as he hung several inches above the ground. His eyes rolled emptily, his face a ghastly white as he angrily yet fearfully wondered how he came to be in such an awkward situation. When Arthur released him he staggered back towards the wall, pale, tired, hopelessly drunk.
A diabolical suggestion sprang inspired from Fred’s agile brain: ‘Let’s tip his car over. It’s no bigger than a baby’s pram.’ Arthur laughed, and agreed, regarding it as perfect justice, punishment both for the actual metal that had struck him, and for the cranky driver leaning against the wall.
They bent their backs against the car, one at the front wheel, one at the back, straining and groaning, making a magnificent joke of it, pushing with their shoulders, majestically heaving at the weight as if it were a giant Wolseley, lifting at convenient places with their hands, fighting against door and running-board, wheel and mudguard.
It lifted slowly. It became lighter.
‘Keep on,’ Arthur encouraged.
The last effort, and:
‘It’s going,’ Fred said with a radiant smile.
‘Another shove,’ Arthur called. ‘I can feel it.’
They heard nothing more. Though locked in a revengeful act they felt a sublime team-spirit of effort filling their hearts with a radiant light of unique power and value, of achievement and hope for greater and better things. The weight was enormous at first, then became lighter and lighter, until the car was held gently, like a butterfly, on a thread, a perfect point of balance that made them want to laugh and cry-out and roar like ecstatic warriors, and they would have done so had it not meant the ruin of their project.
It swung away, and in a fraction of a second landed with a grinding crash on its side, settling tranquilly on to the paving. It looked more attractive in that position, quiet and dignified, four wheels poking decoratively from its chassis, like a mule that, after a hard day’s graft, settles down in its stable to rest.
The man slept deeply near the wall.
Arthur did not notice the pain as they walked away. He felt more buoyant and mirthful and stocked with good spirits than for many months, hoping that the next few days would pass quickly, wanting Jack to return to his beloved night-shift, and Brenda to be free for his forays into her dimly-lit parlour after work. The maze of streets sleeping between tobacco factory and bicycle factory drew them into the enormous spread of its suburban bosom and embraced them in sympathetic darkness. Beyond the empires of new red-bricked houses lay fields and woods that rolled on to the Erewash valley and the hills of Derbyshire, and as they entered the house they were talking about the pleasure of cycling to Matlock on the first fine Sunday in spring.
8
Mrs Bull’s malicious gossip travelled like electricity through a circuit, from one power-point to another, and the surprising thing was that a fuse was so rarely blown. One midday at the summer’s beginning, when a low, quiet-looking sky was full of intimidation as before rain, she stood by the pillar to watch the factory turn out. Suddenly there was a soft pluck-like report from an air-gun, and she jumped a mile. Her fat arms sprang unfolded from her apron. With a hand to her face, she squealed out:
‘Christ All-bleedin’-mighty! Somebody got me that one!’
She wailed in like fashion for some minutes, like a stuckpig, said old Mrs Mackley who looked up at her bruised face, glad that Mrs Bull had been shot but not daring to do anything but sympathize. ‘Now I wonder what rotten sod’s gone and done that?’
Cleverdick that she was, Mrs Bull looked around after cursing, to discover who had taken a pot-shot at her. Deep-set beady eyes traversed the yard’s length from street to factory, were then swivelled back from the factory wall to where she was standing, ranging along upstairs and downstairs windows, no point of architecture or human movement escaping her. It was rumoured that the government had her name down for a reconnaissance unit in the next war.
‘I’ve twigged it,’ she said, jerking her chin at Mrs Mackley: her eyes fixed dead at the last but one window from where she stood; it was slightly ajar. Bernard Griffin lived there with his divorced mother. He had an air-rifle. The biting pain in her face caused her to assume that he still had the air-rifle. Her memorized case-book came into action: sent to Borstal when a kid for breaking open gas meters and ripping lead from church roofs; deserted three times from the army; got a girl into trouble and did three months in gaol when he didn’t pay for the baby; apart from all this he hates everybody’s guts. She had a dossier on everyone in the yard.
With Witness Mackley she walked to the Griffins’ back door, and thumped so hard on it that the neighbour opposite swore she would have broken the panel had she given just a single thump more. No one was at home. At least, no one came to the door.
Holding her bruised face she walked back to the yard-end. Half the workers had already passed, in a mad rush for cafes and fish-and-chip shops, and this loss of entertainment, together with the pain of the pellet-wound, promised her husband a miserable dinner-hour.
There were times when Fred was forced to admit that Arthur was not a very nice bloke. In fact sometimes, he swore to himself, he can be a real bastard. If anybody gets on the wrong side of him he can do what seem very dirty tricks indeed — if you didn’t know that his motive was revenge. Mrs Bull had been continually gossiping about Arthur carrying on with married women, and both Fred and Arthur considered this an unforgivable sin because she happened to be right. Arthur felt she was ruining his reputation apart from risking his neck, resenting her stares as he walked up and down the yard, and her half-muttered words of disgust that branded him a dirty old man. How Mrs Bull had discovered so much about him he had no way of knowing, and did not care to find out. She was not above a little rum stuff herself, but he was not interested in this and it never entered his mind to hold it against her. So though he was incapable of fighting fire with fire, he hit upon the idea one morning when he was off work with an upset stomach of fighting fire with a lead pellet. Despite Mrs Bull’s extraordinary powers of observation she did not hear him close the bedroom window after the shot simply because he did not need to close it: he had fired from a hole in the pane: his mother had been meaning to put a cardboard patch in it for several days but had not yet done so. Fred was in the same room when he fired, sitting at the table filling in his sickness benefit form. Arthur slid another pellet into the gun and let-fly at what remained of the plaster poodle on the mantelpiece, a handsome dumb-friend that, since Arthur had acquired the air-rifle from Bernard Griffin for ten shillings, had lost its head and breast in a storm of shell and shot, expert marksmanship that left only a shapeless stump of black and white plaster resting on four untouched paws.
By afternoon the news had spread by chimneygram: Mrs Bull had been shot. Not with a real gun though, but with an air-rifle,
the story-teller would add when the person laughed, or was sad, according to how friendly they were with the victim. Mrs Bull’s face had never looked so fierce and determined as she gesticulated: ‘The wicked bogger. He didn’t need to pick on me, a woman who’s never done a ha-porth of harm to a living soul.’
She waylaid Bernard Griffin coming home from his window-cleaning job, and on tackling him about having shot her with his air-gun he was even more incensed than if he had actually done it. ‘How could I have shot you?’ he stormed. ‘For one thing I’ve been at work all morning. You can ask my boss if you don’t believe me. And for another thing I sold my pellet gun last week to a pal o’ mine at Mansfield.’
Arthur, in his shirt sleeves, leaned on the gate and looked at them with sympathy and interest, shaking his head sadly at some of the more violent pronouncements of Mrs Bull. Fred listened from the bedroom window, knowing that Mrs Bull, while going full-tilt at one person, could quite easily, for no obvious reason, swing around to an onlooker and accuse them of whatever crime needed vengeance. And whoever it was might be the guilty one. Which was why Fred thought that Arthur shouldn’t stand too close.
‘Anyway,’ Bernard Griffin went on, ‘how do you know it was somebody in this yard as done it? It could easy have come from up the street. An air-gun carries a long way, yer know.’
She decided he wasn’t to blame, and looked away, her eyes more shifty, her mind seeming to roam up and down the street searching for another suspect. Not that you can blame her, Arthur thought, with that black mark on the side of her face, as though somebody slung a bottle of ink at her.
They went to a cheap matinee at the pictures, a cinema filled with old-age pensioners, truant children, shop assistants on half-day, shift-workers, and those off sick like themselves. An old man smoked foul twist behind; three rows further back a baby began bawling at the rowdy climax of a cowboy picture. Coming straight out of it, the sound of six-guns still blazing, thud of avenging hooves breaking through bleak sunshine and a thriving wind, he bumped into Brenda. Loaded with shopping baskets she looked fresh and innocent, red-cheeked and relaxed, saying with a Saturday-night sharpness that he should look where he was going. It was the first time for a week. ‘Have a fag, duck,’ he said, but she didn’t like to smoke on the street.
‘I’m fine,’ she answered.
‘How’s Jack these days?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t seen him for a long time.’
‘He’s looking better.’
He lit a cigarette. ‘And Em’ler?’
‘All right,’ she laughed. ‘Still thinks everybody’s barmy.’
‘The bleeder wants certifyin’, if you ask me’ — imagining her to be the cause of all his troubles.
‘She’s harmless. She was as good as gold to me that night.’ It was the first time she had mentioned ‘that night’, and it pleased him, meaning that they could close their eyes over it and get to know each other once more.
‘I tried to give her a quid for helping us, but she wouldn’t take it. She nearly scratched my eyes out. I like Em’ler, you know that. She’s one of the best sort. Only at times she makes me mad. I think she’s a bit of a gossip, because some woman in our yard knows about me going out with a married woman and she’s making my life a misery.’
She laughed out loud. ‘Well, if you let a thing like that bother you, you want certifying, not Em’ler.’
‘It’s not that. I don’t mind who knows about us. Only this woman goes out of her way to make trouble.’ He told her of how he had shot Mrs Bull, to which she replied that it was a barmy thing to have done and might have blinded her.
‘She asked for it,’ he said. ‘You see, it’ll do her a lot of good. She’ll think twice about gossipin’ at the yard-end again.’
‘Well, let me know what happens. If you go to gaol, send a note, and I’ll bring you a pie to Lincoln with a couple of files in it.’
‘Thanks,’ he said ironically. ‘I knew you’d stand by me. How’s Winnie and Bill these days?’
‘Bill’s gone back. I don’t think he enjoyed his leave. He spent most nights chasing a bloke who went after Winnie. Somebody’s been doing their best to break up his marriage. Winnie swore blind he was wrong about it all, and glad when he went back.’
Jack’s a deep ‘un, Arthur thought. He hadn’t even told Brenda about Bill’s ideas. Why not? It was funny when you thought about it. Jack knew about me and Winnie, and yet he didn’t tell Brenda, not even as a man might tell his wife, to pass the time while the kettle boiled, or between one fag and the next. Neither had Winnie said anything to Brenda about him going to bed with her that night. Perhaps Jack didn’t want to put ideas into her head. The jungle was softer than he thought. ‘Can I come and see you tonight, duck?’
‘Make it tomorrow, about nine, when the kids are in bed. But don’t let’s get into any more fixes, eh?’
‘I’ll watch that. You can stop worryin’ from now on.’
A strong wind blew down the road, and a bicycle propped by its pedal against the kerb crashed on to the pavement, and a man ran out of the barber’s shop to pick it up. Brenda said she had to hurry home to make Jack something to eat. ‘He goes on at half-past seven.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow night, then.’
Fred had waited at the next corner reading a newspaper.
‘Any news?’ Arthur asked.
‘Not much. A kid was drowned in Wollaton Cut. A man got three months hard for shoplifting. There was a road-smash at Radcliffe. A collier got killed in the pit, and there’s going to be a Three Power meeting.’
‘Is that all?’
* * *
House-roofs were flushed orange by the setting sun, and a green luminous light crossed the house-walls of the opposite terrace; a sudden silence was brought on by the heightened colours of dusk, reflecting the red-ochred bricks of lavatory walls as Mr Bull knocked at the Seatons’ back door. When Fred saw his punched and harassed face he knew he had been bullied into the visit by his wife, and felt sorry for him standing on the doorstep in his factory overalls and not knowing what to say. Some women won’t let their husbands live, he thought. Some won’t let anybody live. While Mr Bull was making up his mind how to begin, and Arthur was doing a one-act mime at him through the kitchen window, Fred wondered how Mrs Bull had come to the conclusion that it was Arthur who shot her.
‘Ar’ve ‘eerd yer’ve bin shootin’ at my missis,’ Bull said, sliding his foot nervously around the doorstep, causing Fred to wonder how it was that a shifty-eyed man always married a shifty-eyed woman. The muscles twitched on Bull’s face: he wanted to be fierce, but was afraid to raise his voice above the quiet level of speech, only asking Fred to say with some conviction that no one in the house had shot his wife, then he would be satisfied and go back home. So Fred told him bluntly: ‘I ain’t shot your missis. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’d better go and ask somewhere else.’ He made to shut the door in Bull’s face, but Bull was not prepared to leave. If he went back empty handed to his wife there would be an unpleasant scene. ‘Listen,’ Bull said, as if to strike some sort of bargain, ‘my missis got shot at dinnertime wi’ an air-gun and she reckons you’ve got one in your house.’ He spoke in a whining voice whose tone grated against Fred’s nerves. You can stand only so much from a bloke like this, he thought, who always knows he’s wrong before he starts. ‘Well, it ain’t true,’ he said. ‘There ain’t no gun in this house.’
‘What do you think this is?’ Arthur shouted from within. ‘The ‘eadquarters o’ the Royal Corps o’ Snipers?’
Bull’s eyes opened wide, then half closed, and an expression of anger spread over his face. He began shouting about how they were a bloody pack of heathens, that they weren’t civilized, that they all needed a good thumping, and that he’d give it to them if they stepped outside, one at a time.
Arthur left his chair by the fire. He stood over Bull like a lamp-post: ‘Yo’ll be the one to get a thumpin’ if yer don’t shut yer gret gob.’ They faced each
other, Bull looking as though he thought he had said his last word; then he turned and walked back up the yard, fumbling with the gate-latch to let himself out. ‘The poor bleeder’s got to face his missis now,’ Arthur said. ‘Some blokes are born unlucky.’
Suddenly they saw her coming down the yard, walking with a swinging motion as if she had just come off a ship. The bruise was still visible on her cheek, though the swelling had decreased since dinnertime. ‘It makes her look prettier, I’m sure it does,’ Arthur remarked.
‘She’s up to no good,’ Fred told him. ‘When she walks like that it means trouble.’ Arthur said he was going upstairs for his gun, and before Fred could ask him not to be bloody-well daft, the stairfoot door slammed and he was clobbering up to his bedroom like a pit-pony. Fred sat by the fire, waiting for the storm to break.
Mrs Bull was at the door, rat-tat-tatting like a machine-gun. Fred went on smoking, and the knocks sounded again. ‘They’re in,’ he heard Bull say. ‘I know they’re in.’
He went to the door and opened it slowly, asking them to come in, saying how sorry he was he hadn’t seen them for such a long time, implying that they should call more often. Mrs Bull entered the kitchen cautiously, as if fearing an ambush, and once inside her eyes darted everywhere, as though she were a bum-bailiff checking up the furniture for a quick sale. Fred considered it lucky that his father wasn’t at home, for she would have been put out in no time. If there was anything the old man couldn’t stand it was a gossiper, and Arthur was said to take after him in this respect.
‘I’m sorry I can’t ask you to have a cup o’ tea,’ he said, ‘but it’s stone-cold now.’ She stood by the door with folded arms, as if to know whether the house was clean before coming right in, or as if trying to see into the cupboards and find out how much food they contained. But Fred was passing judgment on her too: she was the sort that let her rent lag three months in arrears even though it was only eleven bob a week, and stood at the pawnshop door every Monday morning, even though her husband had a good job.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Page 13
