Get you and keep you
In my arms ever more
Leave all your lovers
Weeping on the faraway shore…
Terry Fawcett was allowed a perfect eight bars on the clarinet, and then Joe, raising the bell of his trumpet to the sky, went into the solo Fred had heard so often that it was as familiar to him as the common cold, Mrs Beasley’s arthritis, or the road to the surgery. When Joe had exhausted his repertoire of clichés, during which Den Kitson leant on his double bass and softly chatted up a youngish girl, while Terry drank most of a pint, Joe grudgingly waved his trumpet at Den for his solo. Then they all took up the tune.
Out on the briny
With a moon big and shiny
Melting your heart of stone,
I’d love to get you
On a slow… slow boat to China,
All to myself alone.
It was Fred’s moment for the final outburst. He started quietly, being careful not to become too busy to lose the beat, and it was when he was doing a little complex work on the side drum that he saw her. She was moving out of the shadows beside the bar, as she had once stepped into the light in Marmaduke’s garage at the moment he had failed her. That was over too now, even, perhaps, forgiven. She had come a long way to meet him, and he started on a triumphant drum roll to welcome her.
Some time later they were walking through the beech woods together over a spot which no longer showed signs of fire and there were no charred antlers.
‘So that’s it,’ Agnes said. ‘No one got anything from your father.’
‘We got what we are, Henry and I, in our different ways.’
‘Leslie got nothing.’
‘I think he created Leslie more than any of us. Poor old Dad, God help him!’
They were walking side by side, but with a yard separating them, between the grey-green trunks of trees. He thought how old it would be now, the child they had never had. And he thought of his father’s child, of Charlie, whom the old man had loved.
‘That’s a bit sad!’ Agnes gave him a look of mock despair. ‘You think we’re just what our fathers and mothers made us. Haven’t we got any choice?’
‘We had a choice once. You and I, I mean. I made the wrong one.’
‘It’s a bit late to think of that now.’
He walked in silence and then kicked up a small cloud of dead leaves as he had when he was a child. ‘I don’t think it’s late.’
He looked at her trudging beside him, her fists pushed down into her pockets, smiling as though at a joke so awful that no one else could see it, as he had always known her.
‘It’s never really too late,’ he said. ‘To begin.’
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgement is gratefully made by the author and publishers to the following:
Faber & Faber for kind permission to reproduce lines from Look Stranger XXX in W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright 1937, renewed 1965, by W. H. Auden, and for the same extract to Random House, Inc.
The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty and Macmillan London Ltd for kind permission to reproduce an extract from The Gods of the Copybook Headings in The Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, copyright 1919 by Rudyard Kipling, and for the same extract to the National Trust and Doubleday & Co., Inc.
The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and The Society of Authors as their representative for kind permission to reproduce lines from ‘The Listeners’ by Walter de la Mare.
Chappell Music Ltd London for kind permission to reproduce lines from ‘Twilight Time’, lyrics by Buck Ram, music by Morty Nevins and Al Nevins, copyright 1944 by Campbell Porgie, Inc. and by Duchess Music Corporation. Copyright © renewed 1972 and assigned to Devon Music, Inc. N.Y. for U.S.A. Rights in Canada administered by Manitou Music (Canada), a division of M.C.A. Canada Ltd. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Mills Music, Inc. for kind permission to reproduce lines from ‘Ain’t Misbehavin”, copyright 1929 by Mills Music, Inc. and renewed. All rights reserved.
Frank Music Corporation for kind permission to reproduce lines from ‘On a Slow Boat to China’ by Frank Loesser, copyright 1948 by Frank Music Corporation. Renewed 1976. All rights reserved.
Belwin Mills Music Ltd for kind permission to reproduce lines from ‘St James’ Infirmary’ by Joe Primrose.
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