by A. L. Barker
He saw Joe rubbing out a yawn. I pay you for this too, he thought, I pay you for listening when I talk to myself.
There were a thousand men in that camp at first. They died off, good men died, and men who were good enough—all of them better than Brind. Any man with a grain of pity was better than Brind, and weaker.
Joe scuffed idly at the floor with his heel and Rumbold said on a gust of rage, “You can’t blame him for wanting to stay alive.”
“I’m not blaming anyone for anything.”
“Don’t let those glasses fool you. He isn’t myopic.”
Joe peeled himself from the bench. “You mean him with the car?”
“Some jassy Italian thing. Perhaps he built it himself.”
“He built it?”
“He could have. And here’s something you might as well learn—you can like a man for what he isn’t. Brind isn’t Shop Street or Recovery Road. Or this—” Rumbold ducked a thumb at the congealing rubble of the workshop. “You don’t have to be soulmates to do business.”
“What sort of business?”
“I’m thinking of making him my partner.”
Joe threw down the file he was playing with and Rumbold winced. He hadn’t liked the sound of it either. For one thing he’d already decided; for another, it wasn’t he who would be making Brind his partner, it would be Brind who, by putting up the money, would keep the business off the rocks. And if the statement was true as a statement, it was all the more alarming as a fact.
“I’ve made enough losses for one life—a place like this on the neck of nowhere needs new blood to keep it going. With the money he puts up we’ll be able to make improvements. You think we don’t need improvements?”
Joe shrugged. With the point of the file he was digging out the cracks in the workbench.
Rumbold’s hands started dancing from the wrists. “It’s my business, isn’t it? Brind’s my risk. You and me have been pretty free in the past, but you’re the greaser, remember. You’d better watch your tongue when he’s about.”
That wide, fond smile of Joe’s always bothered Rumbold. Either he had to read a lot into it or nothing at all. If he had been in any doubt he would have fired Joe long ago.
They both heard the Dodge coming, a big rancorous old engine as full of ill-will as a rogue elephant. It was Pyefield’s boast that he did his running repairs with string and a penknife. “But only once-tied string,” he would say, laying the stem of his pipe along his nose.
He drove into the yard to the sound of battling iron. When he climbed down from the cab the folds of his clothes opened like bellows and let out puffs of cement dust.
“Rose of Antrim, two-thirty, Moor Park, and Plummet’s running at Wembley tonight. It isn’t easy to keep abreast of current events, Joe.” He went round, kicking experimentally at the tyres of his truck. “You wouldn’t think there were so many four-footed flyers, so many drinkers of the wind with their names in the stud-book. I’m in a hurry, let me see Bart.”
“He’s there.” Joe pointed to the workshop.
“Busy, eh? Nothing like the motor trade for making money. Why, when I think, if I’d had kind thoughtful parents to apprentice me to a garage I’d have my own premises by now.” Pyefield made as if the yard was acres wide and the workshed a three-storey block. “Pumps full of gold juice and customers’ cars to ride. There’s Barty, the square man to his friends.”
“You don’t have to be a friend to get a square price from me.”
Pyefield gave his high chittering laugh. “If you were to put so much as one new washer on my Dodge you know what I’d do?”
“You’d better do it then, that truck needs new bearings.”
“I’m a practical man. I’d drive it into my backyard and let the chickens roost. Because I know and you know and the boy ought to be told that a new part in an old unit is the beginning of the end.” Pyefield tapped the dottle from his pipe and sorted out the unburned shreds in his palm. “When a car’s new, all the components are new, they start work together, take the wear and tear together, they get old and slack together—in two years, five, maybe ten. Then the car looks shabby, it rattles, it won’t go so fast. But all the parts are the same vintage and none of them asks more than the others can give. Then you fit a new sprocket or a tiddly new nut and what happens?”
Joe was listening, Rumbold was staring across the street at Evie’s. Pyefield nudged him with the stem of his pipe. “What happens? Why, the new cog works nineteen to the dozen and all the rest work a dozen to nineteen. Like man and woman. They marry, they mate and the finish wears off them both. Never did any good to run after a bit of new paint.”
“You don’t mean anything, do you?”
“Only for you to give my bearings a rub with the file.”
Rumbold turned his back. “Jobbing’s your line of country.”
“Oh, I know the tricks. But I’ve a cracked chimney to go to and here’s the pair of you, a good man and his boy, with the spanners and wrenches laid out like a surgeon’s trolly.”
“What makes you think my time’s worth less than yours?”
“You’re introspective, Barty, that’s your big fault. And check that steering, it’s pretty free. I wouldn’t want it to be so free when I’ve got a load of slag.”
“First time you ever objected to anything being free.”
“The best things in life are what God gives us,” said Pyefield. “Sun, dreams, and a roll in the hay.”
Rumbold rubbed out his cigarette on the side of the truck. “Step into the workshop a minute.”
Pyefield looked wary. “Some other time. I’ve a cracked chimney in The Welshies.”
“There may be a job for you here. Joe, get that truck clear of the pumps.”
Rumbold turned into the workshop and Pyefield followed as far as the doorway. “My, my, look at that floor, you could keep ducks on it.”
Joe heard a bolt being drawn and the yawn of hinges. Rumbold had opened the door on to the patch of waste ground behind the workshop. They kept the breakdown van there, in the summer it was driven over fleshy weeds which soaped the tyres dark green.
“It’s poor stuff,” Pyefield was saying. “You could harden it off with a few coats of sodium silicate.”
Joe climbed into the truck. When he started up, the vibration knocked every tooth in his head. It was like being on a cake-walk. He sat listening to the terrible old engine with his hand on the gear lever, letting the judder run up his arm. Familiar pleasure weighed warm in his stomach. He gripped the wheel, engaged, and let in the clutch. The Dodge shrugged, stalled, and pitched Joe over the wheel.
He was glad Pyefield hadn’t seen, and next time he eased in the clutch as if it were spun glass. The truck ground forward and Joe began turning the wheel to heel it round the pump bay. The Dodge kept straight on, from where he sat in the cab he found himself looking down into Rumbold’s office.
Sweating, he braked hard and hauled on the wheel. The truck answered, but grudgingly. Its old fenders struck sparks off the wall of the bay as it turned and lumbered towards the road. Joe had its measure now, he pulled up before the wheels touched the gutter and let it stand panting and shuddering while he hung out of the cab to judge his course.
When he revved, the exhaust jetted out a bitter black smoke which folded down over the lighted globes of the pumps. Head and shoulders out of the cab, one hand locked on the wheel, Joe nursed the truck steadily back until it was over the inspection pit. When he shut off the engine the silence was like wool on his eardrums.
“Nice work, Joe.”
It gave him a superstitious shock to see Brind standing there as if he had knitted up out of the air. He was solid enough, he had a patina, a presence which Joe did not recognise as the gloss of good living, but it was foreign to Shop Street and his pleasure emptied away.
Brind rapped on the side of the Dodge. “What’s this? The Corporation muck wagon?”
Joe was looking to where Brind’s car stood at the kerb. It d
rew the top off his mind like the skin off boiled milk. “It’s Pyefield’s.”
“Pyefield?”
“The builder. He’s back there now.” Joe looked down into the sparkling glasses. “He brought his truck for repair.”
Someone went into Evie’s, the clatter of cups came briefly through the open door.
“Would you like a cup of tea, Joe?”
“I can’t leave the pumps.”
Brind reached up, and gently, smilingly patted the window frame of the Dodge. “Send Rumbold across when he’s free then. Or better still, put him on the pumps and come yourself.”
What’s better still? thought Joe, watching him cross the road. He felt himself sitting up there in the cabin of the Dodge with Pyefield’s bodges all round him, cracks plugged with rags, splits twissed up with wire, ten-inch nails pushed into empty screw sockets.
As he climbed out of the truck he wouldn’t have noticed if Shop Street had folded into smoke. The car was there and he went to it, eating it up with his eyes, thinking that now it would often be here, out of Brind’s partnership would come this good thing.
Someone whistled fiercely at sight of the car and Joe, with his hand on the bonnet, prickled up as if it had been a girl on his arm. Now he could see where the chromium had speckled ready to rust, the rashes of old and new dirts and a long fresh scratch that had cut down to the metal. He touched it gently with a slow piling anger.
It wasn’t aimed at Brind, or anyone. It seemed to have been with him a long time and the car had only sparked it off. Nor was it because of any one thing, but a lot that ought never to have mattered a damn, Perhaps it wasn’t even anger, he could recognise wants and fears and dreams in it, crazy, mighty kids’ dreams. Whatever it was, it was anchored here, it was all tied up in the car. And then suddenly he felt the car was there for a reason that had nothing to do with Brind’s being there, but a great deal to do with himself—as if it were another part of Brind, could carry on and do things after Brind’s fashion.
Repelled, he dropped his hand, his fumbling rage sank to a little coiled-up dread. That too he recognised, through having wakened up with it once or twice in his life, knowing before he could remember, that there was something bad about the day.
“Joe!”
Rumbold came out of the workshop. He had seen Brind’s car and as Joe went back across the bay he turned his head this way and that as if he were trying to swat a fly.
“Where is he? Where’s Brind?”
Behind him Pyefield was saying, “Or I could level it and put a dressing of cinders, like the turnround at the Bricklayers’ Arms. The kids use it for a skid-track and everyone’s happy except Sid Bellamy. ‘Where’s the harm, Sid?’ I said. ‘Innocent fun and high spirits, an’t they no use to you without they’re bought over the bar?’”
“He’s over at Evie’s,” said Joe.
“Evie’s! What did you send him there for?”
“He went.”
“A word of advice, Barty—”
Rumbold flung round on Pyefield, put his hand in the flat of the old man’s back and started walking him away. “I’ll do what I can to the truck, look in at noon tomorrow.”
Pyefield stood still to shred off the loose tobacco from his pipe. He tamped it down, wiping the rim with his thumb while Rumbold’s hand hovered at his back.
“A word of advice, Barty. Never stint on the groundwork. It’s too close to Mother Nature. She’ll soak it and split it and shove it up like a bloody piecrust. You want a good solid slab with a gut down the middle.”
“I’ll think about it.” Rumbold’s hand moved up to his collar, made as if to take him by the scruff. Pyefield began a slow routine hunt through his pockets for matches.
“That’s a fly-looking thing—”
“Tomorrow,” said Rumbold, “at noon,” and walked away leaving Pyefield pointing the stem of his pipe at Brind’s car.
He almost ran across to Evie’s. It was bound to start, he was thinking, something was bound to, but need it have been right away, before he had time to turn his back? Not that he could claim that it would make any difference to him.
They were standing at the end of the counter. Evie was hidden by the urn, but Brind had taken off his hat. That thin timber-coloured hair of his, that small hammer-shaped skull—didn’t any of them see it was a bird’s head? Not a dove’s, either. It was one of those things he’d seen tearing strips off a dead dog, thought Rumbold.
“He’s been telling my fortune,” said Evie, and he saw that Brind was holding her hand.
*
When Joe went home to Aberglaslyn Terrace the girl was there. Her name was Esther Munn and she was fifteen years old.
“This is your cousin. She’s come to live with us.”
He looked, and looked away.
“Where are your manners?” said Alec. “Go and shake hands.”
“They’re oily.”
“Your tongue isn’t.”
“Leave them be,” said Jessie. “They’ll get acquainted.”
It was several days before he looked at the girl again. She embarrassed him bitterly. He tried to avoid catching sight of her, he thought if he didn’t look she might turn out not to be there.
She was very quiet. He only heard her say, ‘Yes, please’, and ‘No, thank you’. She slept in an attic at the other end of the house from his own. One night when he came home she had already gone to bed. He flung himself into a chair, it was a relief to look about freely.
Alex said, “You want a shave.” He watched Joe feel the young prickles on his jaw. “Esther thinks you’re tough.”
“I don’t care what she thinks.”
“She’s a bit frozen. When she thaws out—” Alec’s eyes glimmered. “Take her to the pictures, why don’t you?”
“What did you bring her here for?”
“You know as well as I do. The woman that adopted her died and she’d nowhere to go.”
“You could have found someone to take her in. We don’t want her.”
Jessie reached out a big bare foot in its heeled-over shoe and nudged his knee. “What are you afraid of?”
“Not her, for sure!”
“She’s all fin and feather, she can’t hurt you.”
Next morning when the girl came downstairs he was shaving. Alec and Jessie were still in bed, he was alone in the kitchen. He stopped with the lather thick on his chin and stared at her. He had to screw himself so hard to do it that he scarcely saw what she looked like.
She didn’t give him much opportunity. One scattering glance at him and she ducked her head and turned away. All he could see were the polished knuckles at the back of her neck. Nothing there, certainly, to upset him. And he wasn’t upset, it was everything else that was slightly out of true.
He held the razor over his jaw. “There’s tea in the pot if you want it.”
She made a sound like the scrape of paper, though whether with her lips or the clasping together of her hands, he couldn’t tell. “They won’t be up yet, being Sunday.”
She waited until he had finished shaving and his back was turned. Then he looked round to find her pouring tea, holding the big brown pot as if her hands were ready to break.
She was like those others who passed the garage on their way to school. They were neither women nor children, they were caught between one stage and the next, with a foot in each and a nature like a raw pudding.
He looked her over while he dried his chin. From being afraid to catch a glimpse he now felt capable of turning her around for inspection.
She wasn’t much to look at. He understood what Jessie meant by fin and feather. The girl was meagre, her bones slight and the flesh on them sparing. She had a modicum of colour in her face and a minimum of hay brown in her hair and as much economy everywhere as if she had been made up last like a pastry doll from scraps.
She sat sipping her tea, keeping her head well down.
“What’s your name?” Of course he knew, but he was going to turn her aro
und for his inspection.
“Esther Munn.”
It really was her own lips making that dry rustle.
“Munn? The same as mine? That’s funny, women usually change their name to their husband’s. Your mother would be a Munn without she was married.” He could not see her face, only the dusty parting in her hair. “You going to live here?” He’d been told that too, but why shouldn’t he have it at first hand?
She nodded.
“That woman you were with—what’s her name? Didn’t she have any friends you could have gone to?”
A shake of the head. Her neck poked lower across the table.
“What I mean is, it’s pretty cramped here. You can see that can’t you?”
Yes, she could see that. Surely she could see, too, that she was butting in, that he hadn’t wanted her? He said, with some idea of softening the blow, though not withdrawing it, “I don’t suppose you want to live on top of people, do you?”
Her shoulders moved—they were narrow and sloping like the neck of a bottle—she was crying.
He felt the blood run up under his skin. “I didn’t mean anything—if you’ve nowhere else to go—” He rubbed his hands up and down his thighs. “It’s all right, of course—for sure—”
What made it worse was the way she sat there, not wiping her eyes, those two knucklebones poking up at the back of her neck. “You don’t have to do that!” He hit the table almost under her nose.
She lifted her head. Her eyes were dry, her face calm. “Shall I make you some breakfast?”
Joe stared. He still had his fist on the table.
“I can cook—”
“Having me on a string, were you?”
“—if there is anything to cook.” She got up and went to the cupboard.
He hoped she hadn’t known that he’d thought she was crying: she certainly hadn’t been. Looking at her now he could see she was too cut and dried ever to squeeze out a tear. He watched her drop the fat bacon into the pan. She moved about tidily with a faint rustle as if she wore paper under her skirt. Now and again as she passed he caught a whiff, at once sweet and stale, that he disliked. She cut bread and fried it with the bacon. When the fat began to hiss in the pan she stood away, gingerly reaching out with a fork.
