by Derek Beaven
‘Vic!’ She laughed.
He was expansive. ‘We were late in the game. By the time my old man had the five pounds to put down there were loads of others who’d already tried and failed. No water, no electricity, despite all the promises. No sewerage – nor ever likely to be. They’d come out on a dream, hadn’t they?’ He gestured around them; the fag end glowed. ‘Onions, chickens and a pig. Freedom from bosses and religion. Freedom from the riff-raff one step below them – the unemployed stevedores and their starving kids. Pirates. Freedom from all those East End family ties and obligations: the bloody blood feuds. Pity no one told them about the local foxes. They’d never even heard of fowl pest,’ he lowered his voice, ‘ … nor all the mysterious fadings that pass amongst swine.’
She laughed again. He was relaxed, more himself than she’d ever known him.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I want to know all about our house.’
She held on to his arm as they strode along. He told her how the vision of the settlement had been all but abandoned during the Depression. How in the heat the ground had contracted and skewed the shacks off level, so that they split apart, their asbestos linings exposed, the corrugated iron falling off the roofs. How in winter the roads became portages of sucking clay because the tarmac had never been laid.
Trapped, freezing in their freehold sheds, the emigrant cockneys had recourse neither to pub nor piano, and the natives had been less than friendly. Sometimes, miles from a doctor, without adequate provision for even the bare necessities of life, they’d seen their children sicken and die as readily as if they were still in Stepney or Whitechapel. And of the grown-ups, he supposed, none but the hardiest had endured the romance.
But now hut after rickety hut, cabin after tumbledown cabin had been reclaimed by escapees from the Blitz. In the gusts the patched-again and doubly makeshift habitations heaved and strained at their moorings, and the smoke from a score of odd, revisited smokestacks was raked sideways. Partially obscured windows spiked with candle points; lanterns and hurricane lamps glimmered before blackout.
WHEN THEY REACHED open country, Clarice and Vic followed a path along the line of the hills. The wind was scything through a copse on their left. Puddles in their way shivered, and loose branches whipped past their faces. The grass beside them rippled. At their feet resilient brown stalks pierced the rotting, lifting carpet of leaves.
Clarice squeezed the hand that held hers and wondered that it had once built barges and touched the body of her cousin. She pictured him at work in the boat sheds. She’d never seen them – beside a mud-banked tide she’d never known. It was his restless and imprisoned intelligence that from the first had attracted her. There were times when he’d try to speak to her of such matters as the Schwarzschild geometry. He said it was the folding inwards of nature. Towards the singularity, he said. She would laugh and let him talk on. The idea was impossible, he said, according to Einstein; yet there were certain equations … She would laugh again, finding the whole business impenetrable.
A sudden chill flurry caught her off guard and he steadied her. Their service boots slid now in the slime of a track to the village between high bending trees. When the cloud raced lower and darker and the rain began again in earnest they took shelter in the church. It was a sad little edifice, she thought, compared to the church at Holbrook, murky and smelling of mould, though neatly kept, with some vases of daffodils placed in nooks along the nave beside the pew ends. They were touches of bright yellow in the still, submarine translucency. The pelting of rain on the masonry outside sounded like the crashing of far-off waves.
She walked to the communion rail, taking in the mood, and then turned. Vic was looking at a monument let into the wall, an alabaster woman kneeling at the side of a tomb. Below it was a marble plaque. ‘Look, see here,’ he said. ‘Here’s a local family. Sons killed in the wars going right back. Local gentry. It’s a family business, the manufacture of soldiers.’ There was an irony in his tone. ‘Like my commanding officer.’
‘Like Daddy’s side, you mean. Believe me, he’s hardly typical. Nor am I.’
‘All right then,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’ll just have to look forward to meeting him, shall I? I’ll impress him with my prospects.’
She watched him moving amiably about and her heart went out to him. The burden had been laid on her: to bring forth this love against the odds. Her father, Vic, and the redemption of her own body – she needed all these to deliver it. To deliver Jack, even. She was suddenly vehement. ‘Say your promises, Vic. Say them again, in here. And I’ll say mine.’
‘What promises?’
‘You know. Back in the cabin, in bed. I promise to love you, Vic. Say you’ll always love me again, and that you won’t get killed.’
‘We can’t.’ He looked up towards the altar under the stained glass. A small ivory figure was stretched on a simple wooden cross.
‘Why not?’
‘Because … well, isn’t it obvious?’
But she felt in control. ‘Come on, darling. Let’s do it, shall we? She took him up to the altar rail and told him how she loved him. In the defiant little ceremony they remade their improvised vows. ‘Look,’ she said to the crucifix. ‘Do you see? We’re lovers. We are.’
Just as they were finishing they heard the lifted door latch clack behind them, from the porch off the body of the nave. They both turned. A large, raincoated woman appeared, holding a bunch of daffodils in each hand.
She was hatted and indistinct in the half-light under the sombre vault, mysteriously enlivened by the two splashes of yellow. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I usually come in about this time to do the flowers. If it’s not convenient …’
‘No, of course. Carry on,’ Clarice said. ‘We were just passing.’
A little too quickly, embarrassed, they made their way down the nave and towards the door, smiling to the woman, and to one another, as they went by her. Clarice had her hand on the iron latch ready to leave when the soft voice called after them. ‘You’ve heard the news, I suppose?’
‘News?’ Clarice said. ‘What news?’
‘The Yanks are in. Apparently, the Japs have bombed a big naval base in the Pacific.’
‘Oh, I see. But that’s marvellous. And terrible.’
Her heart was racing as they headed back along the road they’d come down. ‘We should have asked her,’ she said. ‘Going straight out like that, as if we already knew what she meant. But isn’t it wonderful; I can’t believe it.’ She was so excited.
‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘It’s wonderful news. If it’s true.’
‘Oh, you!’ she said in exasperation.
The rain had all but left off again. On the way back he was unusually silent, as though he hadn’t grasped the coincidence, as though the woman had never appeared and he resented her attempt to have their love declare itself. It was almost that he’d prefer to keep his life in boxes and hedge his bets.
He said at length, ‘I’ve been thinking about Jack. Wondering what he looks like, now, actually. Whether I’m losing touch with … with his memory. It’s been two years. D’you realise? Two years and no trace. I can’t stop worrying about him.’
‘I see.’ She was immediately jealous, and there seemed nothing she could do about the spiteful mood that came over her. ‘I suppose it would be too much to hope,’ she sneered, ‘that you might be thinking about me – about us. After what just happened. After what we’ve just done. And the Yanks. You know as well as I do we only ever have a few days together, don’t we? I thought it might have meant something to you. Clearly, it didn’t, and I was wrong.’
‘Darling. What’s the matter? I do care about us.’ He tried to put his arm around her. ‘Of course I do.’
She shook it off. The wind drove between them, as, under the tearing clouds, the sun streaked a pale line along the horizon. ‘Of course you must worry about Jack,’ she said, coldly. ‘But coming just like that, after the church, and the news. It was the tone you used
. All of a sudden I’m taken for granted.’
Seriously, she was amazed at herself, to be speaking like this, so close a moment ago, but now virtually hating him. She did hate him, the more he tried to touch her and make amends. She wanted to hit him, push him away. Her elbow caught him with force.
By the time they got back to the cabin, it was quite dark.
‘You go in,’ she said.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I just want some space to myself, cooped up here in this rat trap. I just need time and space to myself. Can’t you understand that? Life isn’t all lovey-dovey, you know. I have my own life, my own work. Where I come from, people – aircrew – get killed.’
‘But where are you going? Are you coming back?’
‘Don’t worry. I’m not my cousin. I’ll go on as far as the shop, get a newspaper. And some of your fags – if they’re open. You can surely manage without sex for half an hour, can’t you? Or am I wrong?’
It was only on the way back in the pitch dark with the rain starting to pour down again that she began to think of what had happened. Jack and Tony Rice were chained, one to the other. When she thought of the boy, the man’s crime lay there always, waiting to have its name cried out; but she couldn’t speak for the shame, and so it rose up anyway and fooled her, tricked her mind. It had made her attack Vic.
She had to tell him. No matter what agony it would cost her, she must get the thing out in the open before it could do any more damage. Pausing at the door, she collected herself. Then walked in. ‘Vic, dearest, I’m so sorry. Will you forgive me? I simply don’t know what came over me. Well, I do, but …’
He was listening to the crystal set, an earpiece pressed against the side of his head. But when at last he took notice of her, his voice sounded only cold and angry in return. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘The Yanks are in. The Japs have bombed their fleet in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor.’ And then she couldn’t say it. He scared her. He just wanted to punish her for her irrationality.
Their evening was excessively formal, the meal an abomination of tinned meat and stale bread because neither would suggest a preference. Even late in the bed their rancour remained, and each huddled under the coats and blankets avoiding meticulously the touch of the other. She thought of the burning American men, the sacrificed, drowning boys, about whose death she’d been so jubilant.
In the morning he gave in and they made up. But the moment to tell him about Jack was past and she could say nothing.
JACK WAS RUNNING out of the school gates. The school sat at the crossroads of the town, right at the centre. It looked like a church, though small and made from dull red bricks. Whenever he was inside the school, there was a sick feeling in his stomach that made him yawn, and stare, and feel afraid. He couldn’t get his breath. Today was a Friday, and on Friday it was Arthur Figgis who collected him at the gate for the journey up to London in the car. He’d be sick on the way.
His mother had brought him to the school. His father owned the car. His mother had lost her baby. His father worked in London, but wasn’t away in the Army, or the Navy, or the RAF, like the other children’s fathers. Jack was lucky, his mother said, because they had a nice house and a nice car. In the school the teachers spoke of God, and he didn’t know the words of the prayers and hymns. Jack was running away down the street and past the cinema, away from the iron railings.
He was running and the town had a pall over it, yellowish, like jaundice, because he could never get his breath, and the days in the classroom were full of something that was too hard to bear. The workings out in his money sums, the scratchings of his pen on the grainy paper that soaked up the ink, the wooden half desk he sat at next to the fat girl with the runny nose, were incomprehensibly foreign. They were all cast over by the same yellowish light whose colour was sickness.
Now he was in full flight and the air panted hard up through the pavement and into his lungs. It was broad daylight. He ran past the shop where they sold gob-stoppers, and if he could run far enough and fast enough, his legs free and flying, almost, beneath him, he could get away from the school. When he stopped he was on the kerb of a side road, and then on again in front of a van coming fast with its horn blasting. He stopped when he was across. The air ripped in and out of his mouth.
‘Where do you think you’re off to, sonny?’ A tall man in a long brown overcoat bent his trilby down. Jack dodged round him, and forced his way on. Level with the cinema on the other side of the main road his legs once more refused and he took stock of his situation. After the shop with the airguns and golf clubs he didn’t know the route. They usually drove out by other ways, his mother and father in the big car. A sign by the municipal gardens said St Mary’s Lane and he imagined he shouldn’t be on it. Large full-headed poppies stood and swayed amidst the weeds.
The railway bridge ahead made a rectangle like a camera’s eye, and it was as though he’d come this way before, in some other time. Walking now, because his chest was heaving his ribs, he had an intimation that if he could pass beyond that bridge a scene would unfold where his blood and body would be made good. For a second he believed there’d been another man, not his father at home at all, but some other face, some other smell, some other name than Tony Rice.
Then he managed to run on, his blazer flapping, the waistband of his worsted shorts chafing him on the slack of his braces. The cut-ended tie flew its wasp stripes into his face and streamed over his shoulder. At last there was a stitch in his guts and the distance to the bridge was too great, and the cop shop was just over the road. A couple of old women were waiting for a bus. As he stopped, panting, they stared at him. If he gave them a clue, the police would be after him in no time.
They’ll tie you up with wire
Behind a Black Maria
So ring your bell
And pedal like hell
On your bicycle made for two.
The playground song played over and over in his head.
When the cops took him home his mother was furious. She had the cane in her hand. ‘What your father’s going to say, I don’t know. Why did you? Answer me. Didn’t you realise the trouble you’d cause? Having that flatfoot turn up at the door. What people will think? Eh? And they’ll imagine I don’t look after you.’ She caught him and swiped the backs of his legs three times, four, between the sock tops and the trouser ends. At each cut he screamed out and his eyes burned with tears. Then she took him upstairs and put him in his bedroom, turning the key.
‘IT IS A marriage, Daddy, because we love each other. You don’t understand. It’s a marriage under these emergency circumstances, more than any damn parson’s words can make it. And since when have you come over so bloody … sacramental?’
‘Clarice! Do you have to swear. It’s …’
‘It’s what? Unladylike? Is that so surprising now, Daddy, when I spend most of my time with boys who’re going up over Germany every night? And if they swear and drink and horse about it’s because the odds are tomorrow or the next day they won’t be back for breakfast.’
‘Darling. Let’s take this matter one step at a time.’ Her father sat in the surgery he’d reopened in the wing of Pook’s Hill. He was silvery, and oddly impressive behind his mahogany desk. With the fingers of his right hand he squeezed and released the stethoscope tube that snaked across his blotter. The mannerism put Clarice in a frenzy of irritation.
He continued, however, in that remorselessly precise way he had sometimes of speaking to her. ‘You tell me he’s Phyllis’s husband. But if she is married to the other one, the one we met, then your fellow’s the impostor. You say you found him in a prison.’ The pedantic tone built up. ‘Some of them are very plausible, and, I’ve heard, even attractive to women in some way I don’t pretend to understand. If, on the other hand, he’s who he says he is, then he’s married already. Point one.’
She bit her lip. High above the next-door fields, a lark sang; the sound streamed in through the open window. �
�But Phyllis didn’t want him,’ she said. ‘She was horrid to him, Daddy, she and that man. For God’s sake, they were here. I told you something was wrong. They got him locked up.’
‘So he says.’
‘It was the boy who told me – Jack. Well, he told Dolly Hayman.’
Her father remained impassive. ‘And this – Vic – has been doing time for breaking and entering.’
‘So what? He was tricked into it. He’s paid his debts. He’s served his time.’ The lark’s song poured into the room.
‘And now he’s in the army you want my blessing.’
‘I want you to meet him. He’s nice, Daddy. He’s a good man. You’d like him, I know you would.’
She felt she was protesting too much. She’d last been together with Vic in April when he’d got leave after a training exercise on the Isle of Wight. An electrician at her airfield had salvaged her a radio, and, excited, she’d lugged the heavy thing down to Laindon on the train. They’d danced, she and Vic, there in the cabin to American music, jitterbugging around the crates and trestles, careering into the tandem, bumping against the bag full of his notebooks.
But it hadn’t all gone so swimmingly. She had to remind herself of that. They’d also rowed, badly, and at one point they’d even been on the brink of parting. And tomorrow he was coming up from Southampton; they were meeting in London. She was caught between longing and dread. For, after Pearl Harbor, that day at the church, she’d been acutely conscious of a barrier between them. Sex and her temper caused it. It seemed they had to fight before they could be intimate; and it had to go to extremes, Vic icy and withdrawn, herself raging, scornful, threatening to leave. But she couldn’t help it. The rape would rule her.
