by Emlyn Rees
‘Just because what?’
A car horn sounded then and they both looked across the car park to see Christopher Asbury, a kid who’d been in the same year as Tony at grammar school, a rich boy whose father loved him and trusted him enough let him drive his car at the weekend.
Sitting in the passenger seat, alongside another boy, was Anne, a girl Tony had seen Rachel hanging around with before. Leaning out of the back window was Rachel’s erstwhile accomplice, Pearl Glaister.
‘Rachel Vale, get in here now!’ Pearl shouted over.
Rachel slid off the wall and smoothed down her dress.
‘Just because what?’ Tony asked her again.
Her eyes flashed with sudden fire. ‘Just because when I saw you standing next to Margo Mitchell, all I wanted to do was to wipe that smug smile off your face . . .’
‘Well, you certainly did that.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. And, finally, he saw the anger leave her and got a glimpse of that smile he’d so wanted to see. ‘I certainly did, didn’t I?’
Then she was gone, running over to the car, leaving him there on the wall in the cold.
Tony Glover cycled up the tortuously steep road which criss-crossed up Summerglade Hill, and then on another two miles past the turn-off which led across the moor, until finally, he reached the small village of Brookford.
He turned off the main road at the black-and-yellow AA telephone box which marked the beginning of his street. Brookford Cottages was a row of eight terraced houses, all of which were owned by the local council. In 1936, Tony had been born in number 8, the red-painted house which stood last in the row.
The old Vauxhall which belonged to Tony’s stepfather was parked outside. He’d been teaching Tony how to drive in it these last few months. Tony had been looking at maps only the night before, planning out places to drive Margo to on a date. Not that there was much chance of that happening any more.
Tony ducked through the gap in the tall, whitewashed picket fence to the right of the property. His mother did the laundry for several of the guest houses down in the town and the garden was a billowing crop of bedsheets and pillowcases. The smell of washing powder clogged the air.
‘Oh Christ,’ Don exclaimed, looking up from an old radio he’d been tinkering with on the back doorstep, noticing the state of Tony’s face.
Tony’s stepfather was a big, slow-moving man, with a complexion like nettle rash. He looked like a drinker, but wasn’t. An electrician by trade, he worked over at the Watersbind Hydroelectric Power Station. Tony liked him, trusted him, and had done ever since the moment five years ago when he’d told Tony he wanted to marry his mum and take good care of her.
Don raised a scarred forefinger to his lips. Putting down the glass valve he’d been cleaning, he stood and rearranged his cardigan and shirt where it had risen up over his fuzzy belly.
The four-year-old twins, Tony’s half-brothers, who’d been playing marbles in the corner of the yard, now jumped up in unison. Physically, they were the opposite of their father, fast like Tony, but with an added refinement, lending them a birdlike quality, which had always reminded Tony of his mum. Both had jet-black hair and straight fringes which his mother trimmed with cloth shears along the line of a pudding bowl every Saturday after their weekly bath.
‘What’ve you done?’ Mikey called out. He was dressed in scuffed brown lace-up shoes, a blue V-neck jumper and a pair of hand-me-down grey flannel trousers. He ran over to get a closer look.
His identically dressed identical twin, Adam, chased after. The boys stood side by side and examined Tony’s face in silent awe, through dark intelligent eyes.
‘You’ve been hit,’ Adam announced. ‘He’s been hit. Look, Dad. Look, Mikey.’ Tears welled up in his eyes. ‘Someone’s hit our Tony.’
‘Who?’ Mikey demanded. He looked around the garden as if the perpetrator might still be at large. ‘Who did it? Where’s he now? Why’d he do it?’
Tony wanted to make them proud, the way his own elder brother Keith never had. What he didn’t want was for them to see him like this. ‘I’m fine,’ he tried to reassure them.
‘You sure as hell won’t be if your mother sees you like that,’ Don said. He softly tapped the twins on the shoulders. ‘Back to your marbles now, lads, and leave me and Tony to talk.’
Reluctantly, the boys walked away, and slumped back down next to the gnarled old pear tree. They whispered to one another, then Adam set about gathering the steel ball bearings and twinkling glass marbles into a pile, while Mikey drew a line in the dust with his finger from where they would shoot.
‘What are you smiling at?’ Don asked Tony in surprise.
‘Nothing,’ Tony answered, ‘just that me and Keith used to play marbles there, too, when we were kids.’ His smile faded and he turned to face Don. Don didn’t want to hear about Keith. No one did.
‘We’d best get you cleaned up,’ Don said.
They weaved through the pillowcases and sheets to the wooden shed at the back of the yard which housed the outdoor toilet. Don turned on the tap which rose up like a metal sapling out of the ground beside it.
‘Here,’ he said, taking the worn bar of carbolic antiseptic soap from the tin box nailed to the outside of the shed and handing it to Tony.
Tony ran his hands beneath the tap and lathered up the soap between his hands.
‘Who did it?’ asked Don.
‘Cunningham.’ The tap water thundered on to the mud.
‘Bernie Cunningham?’ Don hissed in disbelief. ‘Jesus, Tony. What did you want to go messing with him for?’
‘I didn’t. It wasn’t my fau –’
The sound of tuneless whistling cut him off. Don switched off the tap immediately and both men stared at each other uneasily. Through the billowing sheets, they watched Tony’s mother walk towards them, dragging an empty wicker laundry basket behind her. She was wearing an old brown dress, patchy with perspiration. She was forty-seven, four years younger than Don, and wore her neat black hair tied up beneath a red-and-white-checked cotton scarf.
Reaching up to pluck the pegs from the line and drop another load of dried sheets into the basket, she suddenly spotted her husband and son standing there in silent conspiracy beside the tap.
She was on them in seconds.
‘You promised me!’ she shouted at Tony. ‘You promised me you wouldn’t. Not ever again.’ She glared in disgust at the dried blood on his face.
Don repositioned himself between them. ‘Now just hold on a minute, Sissy,’ he cautioned Tony’s mother. ‘We don’t know what happened yet. He says it wasn’t his –’
‘I can see what’s bloody happened,’ she shouted, barging Don aside and shoving her face up close to Tony’s. ‘He’s been bloody fighting again, that’s what. Go on!’ She eyeballed Tony. ‘Deny it!’
Adam and Mikey began to keen.
‘Listen to them. See what you’re doing to us,’ hissed Tony’s mother.
‘I’m sor –’ Tony attempted to apologise.
Violently, she shook her head. ‘No! That’s no good!’
He reached out to touch her shoulder. He wanted to comfort her, hated to see her like this, hated even more that it was him who’d made her feel this way. ‘Please . . .’ he implored.
She recoiled from him, like he’d stuck a needle into her flesh. It was hatred, not misery, which he saw in her eyes. Then she turned to Don. ‘You know what I said the last time,’ she snapped.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ Don said. ‘Six months’ time and he’ll be off with the army.’
‘I don’t care. I won’t go through this again.’ She spat the words out, like she’d been chewing them over for months. ‘Not again. Not like I did with –’
She shut her mouth and looked away, but what she hadn’t said, Tony had heard. Not like I did with Keith. That’s what she’d wanted to tell him.
Tony’s spine turned to ice. He pushed past her and ran towards the house.
‘Go on then!�
� his mother screamed after him. ‘Get out! Get out and don’t come back!’
He didn’t – wouldn’t – look back. She was wrong, wrong about him having started the fight, wrong about him having broken his promise to her about not fighting. But most of all, she was wrong about him being anything like Keith. Keith? She didn’t even know who Keith was any more.
Inside the house, Tony ran past the musty-smelling larder, through the steam-fogged kitchen and on up the rickety stairs.
His room was the one next to his mother’s. He shared it with the twins. The faces of Roy Rogers and Dan Dare stared out at him from the posters on the walls. Tony tripped over a punctured leather football, before kicking it hard to one side, smashing a badly painted model of the Golden Hind which lay in the corner next to the bin.
He felt like Gulliver in here. This wasn’t his room any more. He’d outgrown this place. He was surplus to requirement, the last reminder of a dead marriage. His mum, Don, the twins . . . they had their life to get on with and he needed to get out and begin his.
His mother was wrong about him, but right about one thing: the sooner he left, the better it would be, for all of them.
Footsteps drum-rolled up the stairs. His mother slammed her bedroom door and the thin wall shook. Still, he couldn’t quite let go. Still, an impulse told him to go through and talk to her and stroke her hair and make it all better. Like he’d always done when he’d been a kid.
But it wasn’t his dad she was hiding from in there any more. His dad had died of a fever on New Year’s Day 1939, after having passed out drunk in the gutter the freezing night before. And nor was it Tony’s brother she was turning the key on now, because Keith had been eight years in prison already now.
No, now it was Tony she’d gone in there to escape. And the only way to prove to her that he wasn’t like his brother or his dad was to do what they’d never done, and that was to leave her in peace.
He pulled out his kitbag from under his bed, chucked in his important stuff: the copy of The Count of Monte Cristo he was halfway through reading, his pot of Brylcreem, his comb, cut-neck razor, shaving soap and mirror. He shoved his clothes in on top.
He looked up to see Don standing in the doorway.
‘She’ll calm down,’ he told Tony. ‘Give her a few hours and she’ll . . .’ But his words ran out, because they both knew it wasn’t true. Tony’s mother was a woman who stood by her ultimatums. She’d succeeded in cutting Keith out of her life, and now she was washing her hands of Tony, too.
‘Where will you go?’ Don asked.
‘Grandad’s.’
‘But it’s –’
‘It’ll be OK.’
‘Do you need to borrow any money?’
‘No, thanks. The twins . . .’ Tony said, hauling his bag up on his shoulder.
‘I told them to stay in the garden.’
‘Will you say goodbye to them for me? I’m going to leave by the front door.’
‘But they’ll –’
But Tony was firm. ‘Mum won’t want me to see them any more, so I won’t. Not until I’ve proved her wrong. She won’t believe what I tell her, so I’m going to show her, Don. I’ll prove to her who I am. And who I’m not.’
The two men stared at each other.
‘Good luck,’ Don said, holding out his hand.
Tony shook it and then left.
Tony sat shivering on a broken rocking chair in the corner of his grandad’s shed, wrapped in two sweaters, his coat and a heavy blanket. His head still ached from the fight. Above him, rain strafed the corrugated-iron roof and the wind shrieked like ghosts.
His grandad had always called this building a shed, but it was much more substantial than that. A mile east of Brookford, it was on a slither of otherwise useless dirt on Farmer Dooley’s land, which Farmer Dooley had given to Tony’s grandad in return for having saved his life by pulling him out from under a tractor before Tony had been born. Tony’s grandad had used it for rearing chickens and rabbits for the pot, and in the latter years of his life, hiding from his wife’s nagging.
The old storm lamp hanging from a hook in the ceiling flickered erratically in the draught. Down to the last of its oil, it hissed at the damp, mouldy air and threatened to sputter out at any second.
Tony refused to let the situation depress him, though. A galaxy of dust shimmered in the lamplight. Life remained packed with possibilities. He knew that leaving had still been the right thing to do. This was a crossroads, not a dead end.
Of course, he’d need to insulate the shed properly, if it was going to be his home. Which he’d already decided it was. Because there was no point in wasting his pay from the café on renting a room down in town. Not when summer and all its fine weather would soon be here. There was running water and a potting sink outside. Once he got himself a gas stove and a mattress to sleep on, he’d be fine.
He wouldn’t be here for ever, anyway. Six months. That was all. Don was right. In six months’ time, he’d be facing a medical board which would duly pass him fit to do his national service. Then it would be off to Aldershot for him to do his basic army training. And after that, out there in the wide world, anything was possible, wasn’t it? All he had to do was survive until then.
The lamp died and Tony shivered. Before he could stop himself, he found himself thinking of home. He pictured himself in the living room, watching the orange and green flames flicker on the coal fire, listening to the radio, while Don smoked his pipe and his mother’s voice drifted downstairs from where she was putting the twins to bed.
But Tony wasn’t there; he was here, cold, hungry and alone.
He searched for a good thought to lead him into sleep. He tried thinking of Margo, tried imagining lying with her on a warm beach, his fingers toying with a red silk ribbon in her golden hair, his lips pressed up against hers.
But it was a thought which slithered like an eel from his grasp. Margo Mitchell didn’t want to see him any more. That’s what her mother had told him – standing on their doorstep, pointing a broom at him like a bayoneted rifle – when Tony had gone round to Margo’s house after the fight to apologise.
‘She never wants to speak to you again,’ he’d been firmly told.
He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders.
But then he remembered Rachel Vale, pretty, red-haired Rachel Vale.
‘Just because what?’ he’d asked her as they’d sat on the wall of St Jude’s Cemetery.
‘Just because when I saw you standing next to Margo Mitchell, all I wanted to do was to wipe that smug smile off your face . . .’
That smile was back now, only this time it wasn’t smug at all, but puzzled. Because however much Tony Glover had previously thought he knew about women, this one had him confused. Hatred was one reason to cover someone with paint, all right. But wasn’t jealousy another? And yet surely, as she’d looked down at him from the church-hall balcony, jealousy had been the last thing on Rachel Vale’s mind . . .
As, indeed, she was the last thing on Tony Glover’s now, as he sank into a deep and dreamful sleep.
Chapter III
Somerset, Present Day
Rachel Glover threw down the pile of letters and unopened cards and picked up the phone, cursing at the intrusion of yet another call. It was Anton Philippe.
‘I’ve just heard the tragic news,’ he said, his French-accented voice laden with sincerity. ‘I can hardly believe it. Please accept my deepest condolences, Mrs Glover.’
‘Tony liked doing business with you,’ Rachel said, bluntly, taking off her glasses.
‘He was one of my best customers. But more than that, he was an incredible man. A true friend –’
‘I appreciate you calling, Anton.’
‘If there’s anything I can do –’
Why did people say that? Rachel wondered. It was a natural response, probably. A safe offer made with no probable outcome, because there was nothing Anton or anyone could do to bring Tony back. Nothing they could do to
make this ordeal any better.
Of course, if she was being her normal charming self, she would have told Anton it was him alone who had nurtured her and Tony’s love of art over the years and in return had gained her husband’s undying respect and loyalty. She would have peppered the conversation with anecdotes and shared memories of their famous lunches in Paris, until, no doubt, Anton would have been forced to shed a tear. As it was, she was in no mood for flattery.
As Anton continued talking, Rachel looked across the room to the abstract painting above the white marble fireplace in the drawing room. Tony had bought it for this exact spot in Dreycott Manor, their country home in Somerset, when the artist was barely out of college. Now he was on display at Tate Modern and the painting was worth a fortune. It had been there for fifteen years, but now she could move it up to the apartment in London, where she supposed she would now spend most of her time. There was no point in festering in the countryside. Besides, if she stayed here, she’d be beset by visitors wanting to see the abandoned widow. And she didn’t feel like a widow. Not yet.
The fact she’d thought about moving the painting, that she could and probably would move the painting, momentarily filled Rachel with an illicit thrill. This naughty schoolgirl reaction to her husband’s death was baffling, even to herself. It was as if she’d regressed to her most rebellious self, doing things to defy Tony in revenge for him defying her and dying. And yet she’d never seriously defied him before, not in all the years of their marriage. It went against the very foundations of how she’d built the success of their partnership – on compromise and making Tony feel in control. But now she wanted to provoke him, as if by annoying him she could get him to react. She couldn’t seem to connect with the fact that he would never react to anything she did, ever again. It didn’t feel true.
Rachel shivered and sat down heavily on one of the wide window seats. As she pressed the red call-end button on the phone, she looked across at her son Christopher, who was pouring coffee from a china pot on the low ottoman by the fire. Benson, Tony’s springer spaniel, lay dejectedly on the rug behind him.
