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The Sons of Adam

Page 33

by Harry Bingham


  ‘Ah, jeez!’

  ‘Would you be able to make him give you anything?’ asked Rebecca.

  ‘Well, not strictly speaking, there wasn’t any kind of refund scheme, of course …’ Tom trailed off. His stake in Titch Harrelson’s hopeless well was his only chance of making something of himself. Tom followed developments in the oil industry closely and he was familiar with every detail of Alanto’s success: oil production in Persia expanding all the time; exploration projects in Iraq; marketing networks in Europe and Asia. Tom felt sick at the thought of it. And all he had to boast of was his stupid ten per cent of a barren well. Perhaps the time had come to put his last feeble hope behind him. ‘… Of course, I’m sure I could get some money from the guy.’

  ‘You could?’

  Tom sighed. He had a difficult admission to make. ‘He sold that well so many times over that pretty much everyone this side of the Mississippi owns a piece of it. I’d only have to threaten him with the courthouse and he’d give me something to buy me off. He’d have to.’

  Rebecca listened in silence. It was her money and her life that Tom had wasted, as well as his own. She was entitled to be angry, but all she said was, ‘The money. Does he have it?’

  ‘Titch? Hell, no. Course not. But he can get it. That’s the way he works.’

  ‘How much did you give him?’

  ‘Give him? Nothing. I invested it, of course.’ Tom laughed uncomfortably. His pained feelings on the subject were still close to the surface, and this was his second confession within a minute. ‘In cash and in lieu of wages, I guess the old bastard took around four thousand dollars.’

  ‘Oh, Tom!’

  Tom had always been vague about his earnings, and Rebecca had never quite guessed exactly how much cash had been frittered away over the years. She was shocked, but it no longer mattered now that she had her husband back.

  Tom was sunk in thought. The water on Rebecca’s back had dried off, but her hair still fell back from her forehead in a smooth unbroken sheet just as it had done when she rose from the butt. Tom reached for a quid of tobacco and began to chew on it, a habit he tried to keep confined to the rig but without complete success. His dark-veined mahogany spit began to speckle the ground.

  ‘If you can’t do it, dearest, then you can’t. Whatever happens, I don’t want to start fighting again.’

  ‘No … no.’

  Tom spat again, crushed the tobacco into a pellet between his teeth and laid it aside. He couldn’t get Alan and Alanto out of his thoughts. If Alan had failed in Persia, how much easier things would have been! He took a deep breath. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘If I can’t manage it on my account, then I’ll manage it for Mitchell and you.’

  ‘You’re sure? You could think it over.’

  ‘No. Next week’s not a bad one to take off. The rig’s been listing a tad and we’ve got to quit drilling for a week while the construction crew levels it out again.’

  That was true, but it wasn’t the reason. Tom felt a burst of resolve that shoved away the ghosts. It was better to act now while he was in the grip of his decision than to wait and let it fester. Rebecca suddenly shivered violently in the water. She’d been in too long and the evening had grown cool. She stood up, beautifully naked, and climbed into an old piece of curtain they used as a towel.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘Me too. I love you too.’

  Her deep dark eyes roved over him as they so often had before. ‘You’re a brave man. It’s not an easy thing to do.’

  The wind blew and she shivered again. She felt a sudden chill. They were happy here. Things were good. Was it craziness on her part, sending Tom back to the heart of his addiction? Right or wrong, she was playing with fire.

  108

  Alan sat at the foot of the bed. Lottie sat up against a mountain of pillows. Her white nightgown hung half open. It was 12 March 1930. Their third child, Polly, born four months earlier, had fallen asleep during feeding, her tiny mouth still closed over her mother’s nipple. Lottie softly drew the baby away and closed her gown. She smiled.

  ‘You’re not tired?’ asked Alan.

  ‘It’s three in the morning, my love. Of course I am.’

  Alan caught hold of Lottie’s foot beneath the bedclothes and massaged it. His wife was the only woman he knew – or rather, the only rich woman – who took care of her newborns herself, going to the extraordinary lengths of breastfeeding them, even at night. Even now, on their third baby, Alan wasn’t sure if he admired Lottie for it, or would rather she stopped.

  ‘You must take care of yourself too,’ he said.

  ‘That’s precisely what I am doing.’

  ‘We could have someone just for the nights, if you wanted.’

  ‘Yes. If I wanted, I could.’

  Alan shook his head and smiled. He’d be as likely to strike oil in Piccadilly as he was to change his wife’s mind. He didn’t know why he bothered.

  ‘You weren’t sleeping either,’ she commented.

  ‘I was sleeping lightly and heard you wake. That’s all.’

  ‘Are you still dreaming?’

  He glanced at her sharply. It was the first time for some while she’d mentioned his nightly dreams.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or rather no. Yes and no.’

  ‘How clear. I’m so pleased I asked.’

  Alan laughed. ‘It’s odd. I was trying to explain it to Westerfeld earlier. The dreams themselves haven’t changed in the slightest. I dream every night. Always about Tom. Always about the war. Always about Tom sinking down in a storm of fire.’

  ‘Oh, darling!’

  Lottie’s voice was full of concern, but Alan shook his head. ‘But you see the odd thing is this. The dreams have changed. I used to wake up in nightmare. Now I don’t. It’s not exactly that my feelings have changed, it’s more that they’ve completely disappeared. I feel as though I’m watching a news-reel whose basic truthfulness I don’t actually believe for a minute.’

  Lottie stroked her baby’s tiny head. Little Polly was beginning to snore, puffing milky bubbles from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘What does Westerfeld say?’ she said, keeping her voice low and gentle for Polly’s sake.

  ‘He says my unconscious can’t accept that Tom has died. He wants me to … to contemplate the possibility that Tom is still alive.’

  ‘Good heavens! You really think he might be?’

  Alan shook his head. ‘No. Of course not. For months now, Westerfeld has been on at me about this and I still can’t help thinking that I’m in the right. Quite apart from anything else, if Tom were alive he’d have come and found me by now. The war’s been over long enough, after all.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lottie allowed the conversation to lapse for a moment, before apparently changing the subject. ‘I didn’t tell you, my love. We’re very lucky to have had Polly with us at all.’

  ‘Well, of course we are … Why? What? What are you saying?’

  ‘When Polly decided to come out, she managed to get all knotted up in the umbilical cord. It had wrapped itself round her neck. All the effort I was making to get the little minx out into the world was just knotting the cord tighter round her throat.’

  ‘Good Lord! I had no idea! I …’

  Alan had never once been present when his wife had given birth. He’d never asked and never been told about the gory feminine details.

  ‘That’s perfectly all right. I had a doctor and a midwife who knew exactly what they were doing.’

  ‘Thank heavens!’

  ‘Yes. And it made me think. It made me homesick for the time when I was a nurse.’

  Alan swallowed. He half-guessed what Lottie was driving at and he wasn’t sure he liked the idea. ‘You can’t want to … I mean, you don’t surely …’

  ‘No. I do.’

  Alan gulped again. ‘In what capacity?’

  ‘Not babies, if that’s what you mean,’ said Lottie. ‘Part of the reason I liked nursing was that I liked the sol
diers I met. I felt for them then. I feel for them now. For instance, that chap you told me about – what was his name? Shorty somebody or other? The one you sorted out with some new legs?’

  ‘Hardwick. Edward Hardwick. The legs are jolly good, apparently, only they make a kind of whizzing noise as he walks.’ Alan grinned. Edward Hardwick was now one of Alanto’s newest clerks. ‘They call him Clunky now.’

  Lottie grinned back, before getting serious again. ‘There are thousands like him. All over London. All across England. Their country neglects them. The poor devils can’t afford to pay for help. Well! We aren’t poor and I hope we’re not neglectful.’

  Alan shook his head. ‘No, I hope not.’

  ‘Daddy’s given me lots of money. Money I hardly need. I should like to set up a hospital in the East End. For ex-servicemen and their families. We’d offer the best possible help, free of charge.’

  Alan was quiet a moment.

  He loved Lottie and loved his domestic life with her. If she ran around setting up a hospital, their life would change. He was busy already. She’d become equally busy. Their peaceful family life would never be the same.

  ‘And your job would be … ?’

  ‘Getting the place established.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I know the difference between a good nursing staff and a bad one. I know what works. I’d be in charge of the nursing side. If every now and then, I wanted to put on an apron and go onto the wards, then I expect I’d do just that.’

  Alan smiled unhappily. ‘I expect you would.’

  ‘And you’re wrong, you know.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘You said the war’s been over long enough. And it hasn’t. You still suffer it in your dreams. There are thousands of Stumpy Hardwicks longing to become Clunky Hardwicks. There are other men who can’t breathe properly. Or who wake up every night screaming. Or who are blind or deaf or still in pain from a wound that’s never properly been attended to. For that matter, the war’s not over for the people of Germany, because we still find it necessary to punish them savagely for a crime they themselves had no say in.’

  Alan sighed. Little Polly let out a milky burp with a sigh of happiness and slipped further down onto her mother’s belly. One tiny hand stayed flat between Lottie’s ribs, as though to keep her from moving. Alan reached out and smoothed the hair away from Lottie’s face.

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ he said, concealing his continuing unhappiness at his wife’s proposal.

  She smiled. ‘And Westerfeld is right,’ she said. ‘You do think Tom’s alive. You’ve never let go.’

  ‘My love, I –’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘You’re as bad as Westerfeld.’

  ‘I jolly well hope I’m worse. Say it.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘That Tom’s alive.’

  ‘But if I know perfectly well that he isn’t, why –’ He would have continued objecting but he could see from Lottie’s face that there wouldn’t be much point. So he said it. ‘Tom’s alive.’ He felt like a fool for saying so.

  ‘Not like that. Properly. As though you mean it.’

  ‘Tom’s alive.’

  ‘Again.’

  ‘Tom’s alive. He’s alive. Tom’s living, not dead. Tom, my brother, my –’

  But he couldn’t go on. Like a ten-thousand-barrel gusher, his emotions blasted to the surface, smashing obstructions to smithereens. Alan Montague, Managing Director of Alanto Oil, holder of the Military Cross, father of three, sat on the edge of his wife’s bed and wept like a baby.

  Lottie waited until the storm of weeping had passed, before saying gently, ‘Tell me, my love, no matter how unreasonable it sounds: what is it you want?’

  ‘I want to find him,’ said Alan.

  ‘Of course you do. So do it.’

  109

  Harrelson was behind the shack, kicking around in the long grass.

  ‘That’s no way to search for oil, Titch. You gotta drill for it.’

  ‘Hey, bud! Welcome home! You sure took off sudden.’

  Tom shrugged. Harrelson kicked around until he swung his foot into a tangle of devil-grass, when he began hopping around and swearing as he extracted the barbed little seed heads from his leg. ‘Jeez, goddamn the … Listen, didn’t we have a fishing tool here sometime?’

  ‘Shed over there. Behind the lumber,’ said Tom, pointing.

  ‘Shit, you might have told me. Been kicking around here half an hour.’

  Harrelson went to the shed and came out with a rusted-up fishing tool, the sort you had to use to fish a broken pipe from a well.

  ‘Drilling’s going well then?’ said Tom smiling. With a decent rig like the one he worked on at Texaco, he didn’t experience boiler breakdowns, hole cave-ins, pipe twist-offs, drill ruptures. At Texaco, he’d never even seen a fishing tool.

  ‘The fuck it is.’ Harrelson spat. ‘Since you blew out of here, the whole damn thing’s been one lousy break after another.’ Tom noted Harrelson’s anger with interest. Perhaps he’d been wrong about Harrelson. He was a hustler and a crook, of course. There was no doubt about that. But perhaps there was a little piece of him that also cared about finding oil. Tom liked that.

  ‘I want my money back, Titch.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘Ain’t no damn money coming anybody’s way. Not mine, pal, and definitely not yours.’

  Harrelson was a biggish man, but soft and paunchy. Tom was not as heavy, but his muscles were trained as hard as whipcord on the rigs. Tom put his hand against Harrelson’s chest and pushed him without roughness but with plenty of force up against the corner post of the little shed.

  ‘Titch, you stole my money, like you stole everybody else’s. Some of it you put in the well. Most of it you put in your pocket. I want the part that wound up in your pocket.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Tom, Jesus Christ.’ Harrelson put his hands to Tom’s arm, pushing it back, and Tom, after resisting a moment, dropped his grip. ‘You used to be a believer, pal. You was one of the guys I could rely on.’

  ‘You find me the money or I’ll go to the law. They’re poor folk around here, the ones you take from. You took from me long enough. And maybe it’s time you stopped taking anything at all.’

  ‘Hell … Jesus … You sure got religion since you hoofed it outa here.’ Harrelson rubbed his chest, as though Tom had hurt it, which he certainly hadn’t. ‘Never knowed you to be a crabapple annie before.’

  ‘The money, Titch, the money.’

  ‘How much d’you want?’

  ‘What you stole.’

  ‘I got expenses, pal. Costs you wouldn’t know about.’

  ‘French frills for Mrs Holling?’

  ‘Hey. I do what I can.’

  ‘Get me the money, Titch.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, OK. I got the message.’

  ‘And no forgetting it.’

  ‘OK.’

  Tom nodded and stepped away so that he was no longer in Harrelson’s face. The tension dropped. And the moment that had privately terrified Tom had turned out to be easy. Now that he was here, he saw how stupid the whole thing was. He had no urge to stick with Harrelson, no temptation to gamble one last time … He was proud of himself, eager to get back to his beloved wife and son.

  ‘OK, Titch.’

  ‘Sheez.’

  Tom pulled some tobacco from his pocket and offered some to Harrelson, who took it gratefully. They both chewed in silence for a moment.

  ‘Listen, bud, no shit, I’ll get you some money.’

  Tom nodded.

  ‘But I got a bunch of no-hopers working the well for me now. We’re on Number Three. Two was a bust. And Three – shit, you know how we decided where to site this one? We was moving the rig when the sill collapsed and the rig just dropped down in the dirt. We couldn’t move it no more. The timber yard wouldn’t stand us ten bucks for a new sill, so there we were. Nellie Holling Number Three.’


  Tom laughed. That didn’t happen on fields managed by Texaco.

  ‘While you’re here, bud, do me a favour and lift that end of pipe out. The one which got busted yesterday. The cowpokes I got now could fish a hundred years and not fetch it up.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘And take a core. The idea was we would take a core. We’re at three thousand two hundred feet, pretty near.’

  ‘I need to be back with my folks in seven days’ time. You’re going to get me the money in six days. Between now and then, I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘We should be down on the Woodbine now. Oil sands.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Hell, if we don’t hit nothing, then I’m out of the game. Nobody can say I didn’t try.’

  There was something hopeless in Harrelson’s look, something dejected. It wasn’t Tom’s demand for money, it was the failure to find oil. For almost the first time in their mutual acquaintance, Harrelson moved up in Tom’s esteem.

  110

  The military records bureau was on the fourth floor. It was tiny, just big enough for a thin metal desk and a pair of thin metal chairs, marked ‘WAR OFFICE’, as though someone might want to steal them. A lieutenant colonel stood smoking in the window, his back turned.

  Alan knocked at the open door.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for –’

  The officer turned. The first thing Alan noticed was that the man had only one arm, the left empty sleeve pinned loosely to the tunic. The second thing Alan noticed was the face: a face he knew well, almost the first face he’d seen on the front line in France. A dark moustache, a lop-sided smile, the muscular slope of the shoulders.

  ‘My God, Fletcher!’

  ‘Montague!’

  Alan felt shock, then surprise, then delight. Similar emotions crossed the other man’s face. Fletcher bounded across the room, throwing the cigarette away from him as he did so. ‘Bloody nice to see you again. Very damn bloody nice surprise.’

 

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