The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  The engine room of the house was the semi-basement, full of light in the morning and easy to make cosy when the light moved off the front. Here meals were served, cellars and cubby-holes stored the fuels and utensils necessary for the running of the house, and it was kept warm. Grace’s court, for occasional tea in the week and always on Sundays, was the chilly upstairs front room into which she would stray several times a day to admire its high-ceilinged proportions, to look over the heavy expensive furniture Leonard’s parents had purchased on their twentieth wedding anniversary and to see what was going on outside. The bay window gave her an expansive field of vision and few of the comings and goings of neighbours or traders on market day or the rare strangers escaped her surveillance. She stored information about their movements as if she were compiling dossiers designed, one day, to bring them to judgement.

  It was into this superior room on that first morning, after a little weighing up, that she invited Sam and Ellen and Joe with Leonard for a cup of pre-breakfast tea. The deciding factor was that the kitchen had been laid for breakfast the previous night for Leonard and her two commercial travellers and though she had about half an hour in hand, she feared the family gathering might interfere with the arrangements. Mr Kneale had his breakfast in his rooms: Ellen served that after she had laid the fires and seen to the other guests.

  Sadie came round uninvited. She had heard the arrival on the steps. For Grace, her presence knocked the edge off it because Sadie was just about as common as you could get and had never been officially introduced to the front room. Grace put a brave face on it. She had been unexpectedly moved to see the young couple so intensely pleased to meet again. She had never known Ellen smile so much and the boy was beside himself and whatever she thought of Sam, he looked a fine handsome man now, almost, she had to admit, distinguished.

  For everyone but Grace and the boy, the room was awkward. Grace sat in her usual armchair, so angled that she could survey the Hill and also look directly at the door. The boy, whom she indulged next only to Mr Kneale, squatted on the floor in front of her and leaned back into her heavy skirts. Even at that hour of the morning, her hair was majestic. Thick and grey, it swept loosely but under exact control from the upper half of her face to be gathered in a bun where it was stabbed with a large pin. It framed her still handsome face, giving it an indisputable dignity. It was her feature. Only twice in her life had Ellen seen her hair loose and on neither occasion had it been mentioned.

  Sam felt unsettled. It was not as he had imagined it. He had hoped for Ellen, Joe and himself, just the three of them. It was not much to endure, he told himself. And why did such a small thing bother him so much, when only a couple of months ago, real danger had been met with far less agitation?

  ‘Let’s see if I can find any presents!’

  He had the kitbag and the parcels. They stood in the middle of the carpet, as if they had dropped from the ceiling, moated by respectful space.

  ‘Two for Joe. Number one for your birthdays – sorry I couldn’t be here but I will be for your seventh.’

  Out of the kitbag, unwrapped, came a magnificent ruby leather satchel embossed on the back with six tiny yellow elephants walking in line, trunk curled around tail. He watched the boy reach out and recognised the gesture as Ellen’s. Yet the boy resembled him too, she had said that in her letters, and looking closely he could see that.

  ‘There now,’ said Grace. ‘You can put all your things in that. Nobody else in Wigton will have one of those.’

  ‘Did you see any elephants, Daddy?’

  ‘Hundreds. I rode on one once or twice. They helped us build a bridge. They pick up the logs with their trunks.’ ‘They don’t.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Sam put his kitbag lengthways on the floor, knelt down and with his right arm miming a trunk, he lifted it up. Joe laughed and clapped and made him do it again.

  ‘Now,’ said Sam, ‘your “coming-home” present.’

  The parcel was bulky and well tied with coarse string, but the knots were easy and within moments Joe had destroyed the wrapping to discover a small wooden train, painted black and red, with four carriages and a guard’s van, the doors and windows picked out precisely, wheels perfectly smooth on the carpet. He looked at his father in adoration.

  ‘What d’you say then?’ said Grace, visibly pleased for him.

  ‘Thank you, Daddy.’ The words were dutiful and flat.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sam, storing up that look from his son, hoping that the print of it would not fade.

  Joe slung the satchel around his neck and then concentrated on puff-puff-puffing the train around the room.

  ‘It’s very well made,’ said Leonard, offering Sam a cigarette.

  ‘Have one of mine.’ Sam handed him a tightly packed drum of Players No. 1.

  ‘Well, I don’t mind if I do.’

  ‘Take the lot.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Leonard, longingly. He had always liked Sam. Apart from everything else, both of them enjoyed a flutter on the horses and Sam had never given him away to Grace. He took the drum.

  ‘Now then. Grace’s present.’ Her shoulders stiffened. ‘What about this?’

  It was a double-stranded ivory necklace with a cameo of Queen Victoria as a centrepiece. He held it out. She took it, after a pause, almost as a tribute from a defeated foe.

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’

  ‘Try it on, Aunty Grace,’ said Ellen. ‘It’ll suit you.’

  It did. Grace’s style was big and the white ivory sat imperially above her serious bosom. She fingered it as if considering whether she might buy it.

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Sam,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Makes you look like a duchess!’ Sadie had restrained herself and even waited to be offered a cigarette instead of just cadging one, but now she had to speak out. ‘Dead posh!’

  ‘Ivory?’ said Grace, probingly, her thumb and forefinger lightly caressing the cameo.

  ‘Straight from the tusk. And hand-made, every bit.’

  Grace nodded, carefully disturbing not a hair.

  ‘I’ll keep it for best,’ she said and took it off and scrutinised it carefully.

  He had bought several sandalwood boxes and he handed one out to Sadie. She held up her hands.

  ‘You can’t give me a present, Sam!’ ‘Go on, Sadie.’

  ‘I didn’t come here for a present.’

  She would be lucky, Sam knew, to get one present a year. ‘Smell it, Sadie.’

  The small woman, light brown hair in curlers topped by a turban of scarf, face pinched but eyes twinkling like an imp, one stocking already at half-mast, pom-pom-less slippers shuffled paper-thin, took the exotic wood, pressed it to her sharp nose and filled her lungs.

  ‘Now then,’ she said, as she let out the air, ‘that beats perfume hollow!’

  Again she sucked in the scent before passing it round. All of them smelled approvingly.

  Sam wanted to give Ellen her present in private. It was rather a strange present anyway. He had imagined the two of them, alone, perhaps even in bed, and the present flowing around and about them, weaving them together.

  But everyone – save Joe, chugging into the hall – was expecting it.

  ‘There we are,’ he said, clumsily.

  Ellen took off the brown sugar paper and was puzzled at first by the compressed layers of material. She looked enquiringly at Sam. He held her gaze longingly: she blushed, scooped up the material and pressed it into her face, pretending to smell it. Their exchange had not gone unnoticed by Sadie and Grace and both women felt like intruders. Joe chugged the train back into the room.

  ‘They’re what they call “saris”,’ Sam spoke shyly.

  ‘What are they for?’

  He looked at Ellen helplessly.

  ‘Indian women wrap them around themselves for dresses.’ He saw their plumed and gracious bearing in the highly coloured saris, their bodies undulating, and he remembered the times of his own longing for the
body of his wife.

  ‘How do you know they wrap them round?’ said Ellen.

  ‘Guesswork!’

  Thank God, he thought, he had kept away from all that.

  Ellen nodded and that nod was a rebetrothal, a second wedding band, the full stop to an inevitable suspicion – and quite suddenly she tugged at the tightly folded saris and flung them like streamers over the room, their colours gorgeous, high yellows, Prussian blues, green, orange, violent, burnt-oak reds, a swirl of colours like her dreams, the room exotic and alive with happiness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The warm morning sunlight seeped through the cheap curtains and Ellen carefully propped her head up on her elbow to look at him closely.

  He had changed. Not just the tan and the few flecks of grey hair in the red, nor the body, much stronger now, lean with muscle. It was the whole expression. She needed time to worry it out.

  In the cobbled yard below, footsteps clacked on the stone and Ellen imagined glances thrown up towards the bedroom still curtained in mid-morning. She felt uncomfortable being so public.

  It was not grim, exactly, his expression, but it did have a severity which had not been there before. It seemed set, whereas she was sure she remembered a softer face, much more fluid, changing almost from one minute to the next; that was one of the best things about him, the energy, always on to the next thing. But now it was set and his lips seemed thinner, clamped together in a way she had not seen before. Of course he was asleep and exhausted and you could only tell the real man by looking at his eyes and catching the smile – and the eyes still smiled and the smile still felled her – but as an involuntary spasm, a deep shudder, went through him for the third time since they had come to bed, Ellen was a little apprehensive about this man who was different in ways she did not want to recognise from the man who had marched away those years ago.

  Sam had told her, in diffident, fractured sentences, that she looked ‘just the same’, ‘even better than he remembered’, and from such cliches, she had known the full strength of his feelings. He had, in truth, been almost winded by her beauty when she had undressed. That slender body, candle white and quick, had slipped into the hastily made bed, grateful that the first encounter for so long had been without embarrassment, with a clear reminder of the passion between them. Her face, he swore, had got younger, the hair even blacker, more luxuriant, the oval shape more defined, the deep brown eyes more teasing, the rather full lips softer.

  Ellen coughed, barely audibly, and was relieved to see that Sam did not stir. They could not inhabit the room for too long, even on such a day. But there was still time to look and listen to his slow breathing and watch the mid-morning light dappling patterns through the curtains on to the bare white walls. He had been back for four hours and still it was not real.

  Sadie had engineered Joe out of the way, up street, with many promises and heavy bargaining on his side – his right to take the elephant satchel and the train (the carriages made too much bulk). She had also volunteered to give word to Mrs Alfreds that Ellen would not be turning up for cleaning that morning. Sadie did not like Mrs Alfreds, who looked right through her when they met in the street, and she looked forward to delivering the inconveniencing message. Then she would take Joe on to school, the last day of the term.

  Ellen did not see why she should miss her work at Eves’ chemist shop that afternoon and though Sam would have preferred her not to go, he was not quick enough to propose an alternative. Once he himself was out of the house in the summer temperature of that early spring, he realised that they could have gone for a walk together -through the Show Fields, along the banks of the River Wiza, around Cuddy Lonnings or the Syke, any one of the trails along which they and so many others had pursued a long, thrifty and constrained courtship.

  At the end of Market Hill, Sam turned left, west, and faced up the length of King Street which, with High Street, formed the axis of the town. Nothing, it seemed at first, nothing at all had changed. He strolled as slowly as he could, the leisurely progress and his rather smart light grey double-breasted demob suit giving him the air of a stranger, a visitor keen to absorb the atmosphere.

  The place pushed at him wave after wave of his old life, his lives, all but stopping him in his tracks, the names themselves almost suffocating him with memories. On the right side Plasket’s Lane where John Willy Stewart kept his ponies and sometimes let boys have a free ride. Tickle’s Lane teeming with cottages where as a boy a friend had shown him, proudly, a floor carpeted in cockroaches. Station Road, New Street, Meeting House Lane: the weight and detail of the past seemed to press physically on his neck, bearing him down as the town had always threatened to do after the birth of Joe: most possibilities tested, life just begun. Soon the first of the pubs, the Blue Bell big as a railway station, then the narrow, sly Vaults, the Vic, the dominating King’s Arms. Nineteen pubs and pothouses in the town. In Burma he had totted them up more than once. And those small-paned windows in the same old shops, one or two with awnings out against the unseasonal sun; and faces, faces all of which, it seemed, he recognised. When the first one or two stopped to say hello or waved ‘Hiya Sam’, then everyone appeared to notice him, ‘How do, Sam?’, and it was like pushing up an Everest of the past, grand, dislocating, stirring and somehow new, bewildering, this place of peace.

  He went for refuge into the bar of the Vic at the end of Water Street, no more than a hundred yards from his starting point, grateful for its stale emptiness.

  There was a young boy behind the bar.

  ‘Is your dad in?’

  ‘He’s just gone up street.’

  The first drink in Wigton. He had planned it would be with Ian. He shook off the thought, physically, like a dog shaking off water. He had to stop all that …

  ‘Pint of bitter.’

  The boy pulled it deftly enough. ‘One and two, please.’

  Sam had the exact change. The boy put it in the open wooden till and left.

  He let the bitter settle before he drank.

  It was a small bar, men only, just an old oak bench against the window, most stood against the bar itself. A door in the corner led to the billiard room. Sam enjoyed listening to the chinking of the ivory balls and the preoccupied murmurings of the players but had no wish to go in and be drawn into the game.

  He wet his lips, paused and then downed a third of it and held the glass up, just a touch. A toast. Home. He stood square at the bar, facing the shelves, and took out a cigarette. His feet had still not touched the bottom.

  He had a few minutes alone.

  Henry Allen poked his head around the door and was just about to retreat when he spotted Sam. His hand went out like a piston, the smile genuine but well worn. Sam had been a steady customer.

  ‘You look well, Sam. Nice tan.’

  ‘I can think of easier ways to get it.’

  ‘Look at today. You could top it up. Have one with me.’

  ‘I’ve just got one in.’

  The boy came into the bar.

  ‘Just a tonic for me, Billy.’ To Sam, ‘Still bothered with my stomach, Sam. Never got past the medical. And fill up that glass of Sam’s.’ He slapped a half crown on to the polished walnut bar.

  ‘Welcome back.’ He sipped at the tonic, pulling a face.

  Sam made a second toast and, to head off any talk about himself, he said, ‘How are they running, then, Henry?’

  ‘No faster, Sam.’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘Never complain, Sam, lads in Wigton I’ve never been too skint for a bet. They’re very reliable that way.’

  Henry was the most prosperous bookmaker in the town and this was part of his midday run, picking up bets, illegally, in the pubs.

  ‘Was it terrible over there?’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘So we heard. Mind you, it was terrible all over. Tales of woe wherever you turn. Your lot’ll be about the last back. The bunting’s long gone, I’m afraid, Sam. Everybody wants to get back to normal.�
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  ‘Include me in.’ Sam offered Henry a cigarette. ‘What was it like here?’

  ‘In the war?’ Henry drew in the cigarette greedily, his pale sallow face seeming to need the warmth. ‘Heaving, Sam! We had the soldiers, and the RAF, they came from far and near, Fridays and Saturdays the streets were littered.’ He looked about suspiciously, out of habit. ‘You know what they called the King’s Arms?’ Sam shook his head. ‘The cock-loft,’ he said, softly, and repeated it with a dirty chuckle, much more loudly, tilting his hat back, debonair in his Prince of Wales check suit. ‘The cock-loft! And, Sam: it was!’

  Sam’s smile was a little uneasy.

  ‘And I’ll tell you, Sam,’ said Henry, inspired by a new listener and excited by the gossip of the bawdy life he would never dare lead, ‘there are women in this town with little kiddies whose fathers have nothing to do with Wigton and have moved on to faraway places! Say nothing.’ He tossed back his tonic. ‘You know -well, you won’t of course – what the new Father down at St Cuthbert’s said? “Well,” he said, “I have travelled the world, I have penetrated the darkest parts of Africa, but I have never come across as wicked a little hole as Wigton”!’ Henry’s grin was wide, proud and delighted. He slapped the bar top with his palm. ‘As wicked a little hole as Wigton,’ he repeated. ‘And he had penetrated darkest Africa. How’s that for a testimonial! Billy!’ The boy had gone out again, but returned instantly. ‘Did Dad leave a little package for Mr Allen?’

  The boy came back with a thin wad of notepaper and a clinking envelope which, after a doubtful look at Sam, he handed over.

  Sam and Leonard had managed to exchange a few words at the house after breakfast and he had his bet ready. ‘Lovely Cottage,’ he said, pulling out, he did not know why, twice as much as he had intended to bet on the next day’s Grand National. Henry pocketed the money with furtive swiftness.