The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  ‘The boiler guy? Who cares? He’s nothing. You leave the business to me and I’ll –’

  ‘Just tell me. When?’

  ‘It’s no big deal. I promised him just now. Just before coming down to pay you and the boys.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘For God’s sake, pal! What is this? You worried the boiler guy is trying to take a topslice off of our profits?’

  ‘Quit stalling.’

  ‘Jesus! He’s asking a coupla hundred, but he’ll take less. We haven’t shook on anything. Hey – get a good night’s rest and we’ll see you tomorrow. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Tom, hollowly.

  The car beeped again and vanished into the night. Behind Tom, the little wooden house stood empty, when it ought to have contained a wonderful wife and a healthy sleeping child. Tom had no reason to go inside. He had no reason to do anything at all.

  104

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well?’ echoed Alan. ‘Do you examine me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Should I take off my jacket?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘You don’t need to listen to my heart or anything?’

  ‘Yes, but not with a stethoscope.’ Alan looked puzzled, and Dr Westerfeld hastened to end the mystery. ‘This is your first encounter with a psychiatrist, I take it?’

  ‘I saw some nerve specialists during the war, but nothing like this, no.’

  ‘And you’re both a little nervous and wondering whether you’re being had?’

  ‘Yes.’ Alan laughed with the first start of relief.

  ‘Yes, well, I wonder that myself at times … I will examine you, or rather I will ask you to examine yourself, your heart. All we do here is talk. You will wonder how on earth talking can bring about any change and I’m not entirely able to answer you. I can only tell you that with some of my patients, our little talks have brought about profound changes. I hope that they will do the same for you.’

  Alan nodded. ‘Even so,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure I even have a problem. In my waking life, I’m as sound as a bell. I work hard, I have a splendid family, I enjoy my life.’

  Westerfeld’s Harley Street room was furnished like a gentleman’s drawing room. He had offered Alan the choice of reclining on a chaise longue or sitting upright in an armchair. Alan had taken the chair without hesitation. Outside the shuttered windows, there was a burr of traffic rolling up Harley Street.

  ‘And?’ said Westerfeld. ‘You are perfectly happy, have a splendid family, but you have come to see a psychiatrist.’

  ‘And …’ Alan sighed. ‘It’s only dreams, but –’

  He was interrupted by Westerfeld vigorously shaking his head. ‘No, no, no. Not “only”. Not “only”. We believe – that is, Dr Freud and his followers believe – that dreams are a clue to our unconscious selves. Selves more powerful than us, more primitive, less civilised, more passionate. I am a doctor of dreams. Please tell me about your dreams, but never describe them as “only” dreams.’

  So Alan took a deep breath and began. He spoke about when they had started. The cholera, followed by the malaria. The hallucinatory nights. The daily deliriums. The dreams that had started then and followed, first of all sporadically and now nightly. All night, every night. As he spoke, something of the intensity of the experience communicated itself in his words. He sat forward, lean fingers grasping the arms of the seat.

  ‘During the day, let me be clear, do you experience anything untoward? Buzzing in your ears, tremors, fear of bright lights or sudden noises?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any nervousness or anxiety that you can’t explain?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sudden excitability? Angry outbursts? Anything like that?’

  For a fraction of a second, Alan hesitated. Then: ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Nothing? You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘Well … nothing that I could exactly complain of. Sometimes I feel a kind of dullness for no reason that I understand. A kind of ache here.’ Alan struck his chest over his heart.

  ‘Dullness – sadness, perhaps?’

  Alan was about to say no, when he felt a jab of emotion similar to what he was trying to describe, only stronger. It was like sadness. ‘Yes, possibly. I’ve certainly never thought of it like that before.’

  ‘Indeed … Please continue. You were telling me about your dreams.’

  Alan spoke more about his dreams. How they had once been simply about war and how they were now about Tom. All night, every night. Westerfeld asked about Alan’s relationship to Tom, and raised his shaggy eyebrows higher and higher as Alan explained.

  ‘In these dreams, does Tom die?’

  ‘I assume so.’

  ‘That isn’t what I asked. I asked whether he dies. Whether you see him die.’

  ‘I see a blaze of fire. I see him sinking down.’

  ‘Do you see him die?’

  Alan pondered. It was a strange question, but perhaps doctors of dreams had a professional obligation to be strange. And as he thought, the answer came to him, crystal clear, like the sudden illumination of a falling Very light.

  ‘No. It’s very odd. He almost dies a hundred times a night, but I never quite see him die … No, that’s not it. He never dies. In my dreams, he’s always dying, never dead. I don’t know why. It makes no sense.’ Alan sat back.

  Westerfeld was nodding vigorously. He was chestnut-haired, with a squirrelish face and shaggy eyebrows that joined in a single bar above his nose. With his great repetitive nods, he looked like a nodding toy of the sort that might be sold in the Hamley’s toy store. ‘Good, good.’

  ‘You can make sense of it, doctor?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Remember, your unconscious is a primitive, childish sort of beast. It has little to do with the logic which says that a man mown down by bullets must necessarily be dead. Your unconscious is trying to tell you that it doesn’t accept Tom’s death. Not now. Probably not for a moment since the night when Tom was lost. Hence your dreams.’

  ‘So we must tell the beast to grow up, to accept reality.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Far from it. The unconscious won’t grow up, but it’ll talk to you, if you let it. Talk to you in dreams, the way it always has.’

  Alan smoothed his hair, and brushed his hand over his upper lip, just as he’d done in the days when he’d worn a moustache. He hadn’t done that for years. It was a gesture from the past, a gesture from the days of war. He had been taken aback by Westerfeld, but was pleased. He couldn’t quite have said why, but a boyish excitement was beginning to beat in his heart.

  He stood up to go.

  ‘Doctor?’ he said. ‘Am I … ? I mean, do you … ? Look, I’ve never thought worse of a man for suffering shell shock. Some of the best men under my command suffered from it, and I had a bad case of nervous exhaustion myself. But if you think –’

  ‘Not shell shock, no.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Listen, Montague, as soon as I see a man your age inside this consulting room, my first thought is shell shock. I all but assume it. In the Great War we sent men into conditions that were unsupportable. In a literal, medical sense: unsupportable. That’s why I asked about the buzzing, the tremors, the fears of loud noises.’

  ‘Well, I’m clean on that front, thank God.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right to.’

  ‘To … ?’

  To thank God. If a man’s mind is shattered by warfare, there’s nothing that I or anyone can do for them. Nothing at all. Sometimes I think the men that died were the lucky ones.’

  105

  Tom had known nervousness before. When he first trod the muddy duckboards leading to the front line. When he first crept into no man’s land under enemy fire. When he planned his escape attempt with his long-dead friend Mitch Norgaard. When he presented himself at Ellis Island, seeking admission to the United States.

  But he’d never known anythi
ng like this. He was appallingly nervous. His mouth was dry. His hands sweated profusely and as often as he wiped them on his flannel trousers they gummed up again with sweat. It was a Sunday afternoon, cool by the standards of southern Texas, and Tom wore a dark suit with a respectable black hat and tie.

  He walked up to the front door of the farmhouse. It was a biggish two-storey affair from the prosperous days of the last century, but the white paint was beginning to peel and where the boards were bare, they were weathered and brittle.

  Tom knocked.

  A maid answered, let him in, showed him into a velvet and lace parlour, and let him stew there on the edge of a feminine little couch, twisting his hat between his hands until the brim was beaten out of shape and the crown was soft. Then footsteps, and the door opened.

  ‘Ah! Mr Calloway!’

  It was the old dame, the farmer’s widow, still in black some twenty years after her husband’s death.

  ‘Mrs Elwick, good afternoon.’ Tom stood up, standing as awkwardly as a lowly cattle hand in the presence of his boss’s wife.

  ‘I expect you have come to persuade Rebecca home with you.’ She said ‘home’ in a nasty way, a way that implied what Tom called home was what most decent people would call a cesspit.

  ‘Yes … No … Not exactly. I wanted to see her.’

  ‘You should have called ahead.’

  ‘I should have done. I was worried, maybe …’

  ‘You were worried she wouldn’t wish to see you, and little wonder.’

  Mrs Elwick nodded, birdlike, took a little look round the room as though to check whether Tom had soiled the carpet or stolen the porcelain. ‘Wait here, please.’

  She went.

  Half an hour passed. There was an ormolu gilt clock on the mantelpiece, and Tom counted the ticks as a way of holding on to his small amount of self-possession. Then more steps. Tom stood up. His head swam. The door opened. It was Rebecca.

  She was wearing a black dress with starched white cuffs and collar. The dress gave her a severe look, accentuated by a pair of gold-rimmed glasses that she took off as she entered.

  ‘Becca!’

  ‘Tom! You shouldn’t have come.’ Rebecca’s voice wasn’t unkind, but it was grave and measured, like a mind made up. ‘I had asked you not to.’ She remained standing.

  ‘I know, hon, I …’ Tom’s voice trailed away. His wife was still standing. She had left him to wait for half an hour. Defeat already nagged at him. ‘I can leave.’

  ‘No, you’re here now.’ Rebecca sat down, but not close to him, not in any way that invited contact. ‘I apologise for keeping you. I was with a client.’

  ‘A client?’

  The word sounded strange, given their surroundings. The only clients that Tom had ever known Rebecca to have had weren’t exactly the sort that Mrs Elwick would make welcome. For that matter, Rebecca’s outfit, which made her look like some kind of Puritan Wall Streeter, wasn’t exactly the kind of thing to pull in the punters.

  She smiled. ‘Not like that. I used to help my father out with his bookkeeping. My father and some of his friends. I studied a little to learn how these things work in America, then advertised for clients.’ She shrugged, as though her resourcefulness were commonplace. ‘It was surprising to me how many of the ranches and other businesses round here have their finances in a total mess. It’s been a pleasure to help them.’

  Tom gaped, remembering the book of accounts he’d found in Rebecca’s empty apartment eight long years before. But he’d never known that she knew bookkeeping well enough to make a living at it. ‘How come I never knew that? You never said.’

  ‘You never asked,’ she replied, with some sharpness. ‘You think because you want to hide your own past, you can’t ask me anything about mine. I don’t want to speak to you about things you don’t want to hear.’

  There was a short, difficult silence.

  ‘Sorry.’

  The silence continued a moment or two.

  Then: ‘Perhaps you’re right, Tomek. Perhaps it would be better if you left.’

  Tom’s hat should have bitten the bullet and surrendered then and there. The battering it took in the next half-minute was indescribable. Tom twisted and wrung it between his fingers. It had arrived at the house a brand-new hat. It would leave it a cheaply millinered corpse.

  ‘Hear me out, hon. This time, I promise … hell, Becca, I don’t suppose you think too much of my promises.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘So no promises.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I just wanted to tell you about where I am, what I’m doing.’

  Rebecca nodded. If Tom had been calm enough to notice, he’d have seen emotion flooding her eyes. He’d have seen that, although her voice was steady, she was breathing fast and deeply.

  Tom handed her a white card. ‘This is my new address. If you want to get hold of me, I’ll be here. It’s a bit of a dive, but as soon as I can save for something better, I’ll let you know.’

  Rebecca took the card and her eyes registered surprise. The address was no more than ten miles away: a settlement thrown up around a Texaco drilling site.

  ‘You’re living here?’

  Tom nodded.

  Rebecca looked back at the card. There was a second question in her eyes and Tom knew what it was.

  ‘I’ve taken a job with Texaco,’ he said. ‘Starting Monday. I ain’t gonna … I mean, I’m not going to work for any hooey and hokum promoters any more. This job with Texaco, I’m starting as an ordinary rigger, but I’ve got more experience than some of their drillmen. I’ll get ahead pretty quickly.’

  ‘Honestly? You’re working as a rigger? For Texaco?’

  ‘They’re OK. They’re not stuck up like Standard or Shell. It’s an OK outfit.’

  Rebecca nodded, silently amazed. Three things amazed her. First, Tom had moved close to her and Mitch, rather than trying to persuade them back to him. Second, he had demoted himself. He was a highly capable lead driller and to take a rigger’s wage was almost an insult – and Tom had never been the slowest person to resent an insult. And third, Texaco. Whatever Tom said about it, they both knew that it was a major oil company. He’d get a wage, decent working conditions, and nothing else. No ‘lease action’, no ‘percentage of wellhead crude’. No promises, no lies, no worthless slips of paper – in short, no dreams.

  ‘I missed you,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to live without you both again. I’ll make it work this time. It’s been … every time till now it’s been my fault, no matter what I said in the past. It’d break my heart if you didn’t want to see me.’

  Rebecca came and sat next to him on the couch, taking the hat gently out of his hands and laying its battered remains on a mahogany sidetable. She took his hand.

  ‘What’s all this about, Tom?’

  ‘It’s about you. You and Mitch. I couldn’t bear to have him grow up ashamed of his daddy.’

  ‘We’ve always been around, Mitch and I. What’s brought this on?’

  Tom sighed. ‘Age, maybe. Age and wisdom.’ He smiled and they both laughed. ‘OK, not wisdom, but maybe a little break from idiocy. I felt ashamed. I realised I was better than … than all of that.’

  She laughed again, kindly. She was always kind.

  The truth was this. The final straw had been that last night with Harrelson. The boiler man needed money. It most probably wasn’t a down-payment on a new boiler. Most likely it was a debt unpaid from the last one. Harrelson could have paid him off then and there. He had a fat calfskin wallet that still had notes in it after he’d paid Tom and the riggers. But Harrelson didn’t need to do that. He could play Tom so easily that he rolled up that afternoon absolutely confident of taking a hundred and fifty bucks off him, having already promised away the first thirty. Tom was just a way of paying Harrelson’s lousy debts.

  Tom had known Harrelson for a crook, but this was something worse. Harrelson had no intention of finding oil. He honestly didn’t care. He’d sel
l ‘shares’ in his well and live off the proceeds. When the well was dry, he’d disappear, leaving Mrs Holling in the lurch, amidst a forest of unpaid debts and unkept promises.

  Tom’s disillusionment was complete. He’d sat down on the wooden step of his veranda, listening to insects grating in the trees. By accident, he put his hand on something behind him: Mitch’s toy train gleaming softly in the dark. He brushed the dust off it and rolled the wheels on his palm. As he did it, Pipsqueak nuzzled up close as if trying to build a family from just the two of them. Tom felt a sudden rush of homesickness. Mitch, Rebecca and him. It hadn’t been such a great family, but, by God, it had been one.

  For the first time ever, the thought occurred to him that he could forget about making his fortune. He could forget his tangled feelings about Alan’s success. He could forget about everything except making his wife and children happy and comfortable. And what the hell? They were both still young. He wanted another baby. A girl for preference, but either would be great. For the first time in his life, the old, old dreams of oil were falling silent, the old betrayals no longer important. It was time for something else to take their place.

  He touched his face with his hand where a falling lifting-block had grazed it. Rebecca reached her hand out and touched him in just the same spot. Her hand was as soft as a cloud of butterflies.

  ‘I’m pleased you came,’ she said.

  And so was he.

  106

  The Rolls-Royce Phantom was a beautiful silver-green affair, polished to a lovely shine, the leatherwork gleaming and smelling of beeswax. It was a damn stupid car to take into the East End of London.

  ‘Just park it here, would you, Ferguson?’ said Alan. ‘And if you can keep the nippers from wrecking it, then I’d be grateful – and impressed, I might add.’ He gave his driver a pocketful of coppers, in the hope that Ferguson would be able to bribe acceptable behaviour from the crowd of urchins who were already gathering round the car. ‘I’ll try to be quick.’

  The street was made up of two rows of working men’s houses, jammed up against each other, thick with the smell of coal-smoke and privvies. None of the houses had a number on the door, and Alan asked one of the urchins to direct him. The boy took a longing glance at the car, turned his back on it long enough to jab a dirty fingernail in the direction of a door, said, ‘That’s me Auntie Min,’ and went back to adoring the Rolls.