Peacetime

by Robert Edric

  Bail motioned into the dark space behind him. ‘Over the forge. There’s a window looks down into the workshop. Anybody comes, he hides himself away up there and watches. Not hides, exactly. He just doesn’t like surprises. Can’t say that I blame him.’

  Mercer wondered if this was intended as a veiled warning.

  ‘Will he see me, do you think?’

  ‘I imagine so. He told me he was out at the workings with Mathias. Mathias comes here every other day or so, brings food and whatever.’

  ‘As do you, I imagine,’ Mercer said.

  ‘Oh, well, you know – fellow man and all that.’ He paused. ‘I wish I hadn’t seen it, I truly do, but I did and there’s nothing I can do about that.’ He shook his head and breathed deeply. ‘I daresay you saw a few things yourself.’

  Mercer peered through the darkness of the vast structure to where Bail had said the window was. He felt reassured by the man’s presence.

  ‘Anyhow …’ Bail said, sensing that Mercer’s attention had been diverted. ‘Work to do. Go on through, shout for him. He’ll hear you. There’s a staircase, but watch your footing, it’s as ready to collapse as the rest of the place.’

  Mercer entered the building and saw that there was almost as much water on the floor inside as there was out. Wooden pallets had been laid as walkways. More dismantled vehicles and pieces of machinery lay scattered around. Workbenches lay spread with parts and tools. Here and there lay something freshly exposed and shining silver, but the overall impression was one of grime- and oil-encrusted waste. Coils of rope and chain hung from a girder which spanned the roof.

  He made his way through the gloom to the rear of the structure, calling for Jacob as he went.

  He came to the stairs and saw the cold forge in an annexe beneath these. Broken fire-bricks and mounds of ash and spent coke littered the confined space. Bundles of iron rods lay stacked against the wall.

  He called again.

  At the top of the stairs a door opened and a light shone out on to the metal platform which ran the length of the high wall. He saw Jacob looking down at him.

  ‘May I come up?’ he shouted.

  ‘Of course.’ Jacob turned and went back inside, leaving the door open behind him.

  Mercer climbed the stairs, feeling them sway beneath him where their fixings had worn loose.

  The door led into a room in which a stove had been installed. This heated the room, and the glow of the burning coals provided some further illumination in the dark space. It was not a cold day, but the fire still burned, and looked as though it had been burning for some time. There was a table, crowded with food, crockery and glassware, several chairs, and a worn and much-patched leather sofa facing the room’s only external window, which afforded a dull view over the back of the yard and the open land beyond. On a workbench alongside this lay the pieces of Jacob’s glassware Bail had mentioned.

  Jacob stood at the centre of all this, beckoned Mercer inside and then motioned for him to close the door.

  ‘Bail told me to come up,’ Mercer said, feeling the need to explain. He felt like an intruder in the small, crowded space.

  Jacob occupied himself briefly by shovelling more coal into the small stove. The room was poorly ventilated, and as makeshift, it occurred to Mercer, as his own accommodation in the tower.

  ‘As you might imagine, I don’t get many visitors,’ Jacob said.

  ‘More than I receive,’ Mercer said.

  ‘And soon the court and all his creditors will declare Bail as bankrupt and as beyond salvation as he already knows himself to be, and all this will be sold from under him, and we will both be once again homeless.’

  ‘Do you think so? Does he think that?’

  ‘Look around you. One man. What chance has he got to make a success of the place? You’ve seen what there is to see; you can easily imagine it.’

  Mercer nodded. ‘Is it happening already?’ he said. ‘Bankruptcy, the courts?’

  ‘He refuses to talk about it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take up his offer and move into the house with him?’

  Jacob laughed at this. ‘What, so that we might spend endless evenings comparing our misery and hopelessness. I think not. I think those two things are best contained and held close.’

  ‘You might be some comfort to each other regardless,’ Mercer said. He knew it was the wrong word.

  ‘“Comfort” is not what either of us seeks. Besides, even if it were, I doubt we would seek it here and from each other. Apart from which, I have everything I need here.’ He spread his arms.

  A world of men alone, thought Mercer.

  ‘May I offer you tea?’ Jacob said. ‘Or, if you prefer—’ He took a bottle of clear liquid from a cabinet beside the sofa. Holding this out to Mercer, he started to cough, and put the bottle down so that he might press both his hands to his chest. The exertion shook him, and he half-sat, half-fell onto the sofa.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Mercer said.

  Jacob signalled that there was nothing.

  Eventually, the coughing subsided and he sat with his head down, panting. He took out a cloth and wiped his mouth and then his whole face with this. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, making no attempt to conceal the lie. He looked surreptitiously at the cloth before returning it to his pocket. He reached for the bottle beside him and settled it into his lap. He sat shivering for a moment and held his palms to the stove.

  Mercer came closer to him and drew up a chair. He examined one of the glass bowls on the bench beside Jacob. It was of the palest blue, with a darker rim and flecked with other colours. ‘One of yours?’ he said, but the question did not require an answer. It was clear to him that the pieces were the work of an artist, that there was considerably more than expertise or craftsmanship involved. ‘Bail told me about the forge,’ he said.

  ‘I have constructed a crude kiln there,’ Jacob said, his voice dry. ‘A primitive and unpredictable thing, largely uncontrollable, but I succeed sufficiently to go on making the effort.’

  ‘You ought to show these to someone. A dealer, perhaps. They’re beautiful.’

  But it was clear by Jacob’s evasive behaviour, his fumbling again for the bottle, his searching around him, that he was not prepared to talk about the glass.

  ‘I mean it,’ Mercer insisted.

  ‘I believe you,’ Jacob said abruptly. ‘And you must believe me when I tell you that I have my own reasons for not wishing to do anything other than to make the pieces and to sell what few I am able to sell to pay for my keep here.’

  None of which will last, Mercer thought.

  ‘Besides which, for every ten pieces I attempt to make, nine are destroyed in the process.’ He indicated a bucket beneath the bench that was filled to the brim with pieces of the broken, coloured glass.

  ‘You break them yourself?’

  ‘There must be some degree of judgement involved, some control. It might just as easily be dismissed as “artistic temperament”, I suppose, but, believe me, nothing could be further from the truth. Just accept that I have my reasons. I have made perhaps forty or fifty pieces since I came here, and that is enough. If I were back in Utrecht right now, I would probably be inspecting sheets of glass waiting to be cut into panes for factory windows. Believe me, this is preferable, far more preferable.’

  ‘Just as Mathias prefers to stand up to his knees in mud and rubble than perfecting the shapes and colours of his roses.’

  Jacob smiled at this. ‘Hardly,’ he said. He handed Mercer the bottle.

  Later, Mercer said, ‘Bail told me that he’d seen—’ only to be immediately interrupted by Jacob, who said:

  ‘He told me, too. It is no true connection between us, no true understanding. It is something in which he, of course, wishes to believe, and perhaps I indulge him in this belief, but it is nothing that truly connects us, I will not allow it to. Do you understand me?’ He looked hard at Mercer, waiting for his only answer.

  ‘I think so,’ Merce
r said. ‘But I still don’t understand why you won’t allow him to do what he believes he should do and—’

  ‘For what reason? Guilt? Because it gratifies some uncertain notion of atonement or redemption he may hold?’

  ‘What harm would it do?’

  But Jacob refused to answer him. He covered his face briefly with his hand and shook his head. ‘He’s a good man,’ he said eventually. ‘I know that. And perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps the fault is mine – perhaps I expect too much of people, too much understanding. How am I to explain anything to him – to you, to anyone – when I cannot yet convince myself of the validity or need for that explanation?’

  But it was not what he was truly saying, and Mercer understood this. He understood, too, how accomplished the man had become at drawing the sudden tensions out of the room and of diverting their course, of turning a single straight path into a dozen meandering tracks.

  Mercer stayed in that overheated room above the cold forge for a further hour. He drank four more small glasses of the spirit, and when he finally rose to leave, he felt himself momentarily unsteady on his feet.

  Jacob laughed at this. ‘I personally’, he said, ‘will not be making the effort to rise.’ He poured himself another glass. As Mercer opened the door, Jacob said, ‘I do appreciate you coming here. I wish I had more to offer you.’

  ‘I’ll come again,’ Mercer said.

  ‘Mathias will come later. I’ll tell him you were here.’ Mercer left the room and waited on the high metal platform until his eyes became accustomed to the darkness beneath him.

  14

  ‘Five days,’ Mary said to him as he sat on the grass bank beside her.

  ‘Five days what?’

  ‘Until he’s coming home.’

  The news surprised him. He had seen her on each of the previous few days and there had been no mention then of her father’s return.

  ‘She got a telegram this morning. She didn’t open it for an hour, just left it sitting there, like somebody had died. I opened it in the end. It just said that he’d already been released and that he’d be here on such and such a date. Five days.’

  ‘And is everything ready for him?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He had almost asked her if her mother was looking forward to her husband’s home-coming.

  ‘I mean is she prepared. The house.’

  She looked at him puzzled. ‘What about the house? You make it sound as though there was anything she could do about it. He’s coming home and that’s it.’

  ‘Was the telegram from him?’

  ‘From someone in the Army. He wouldn’t write.’

  ‘Something to look forward to,’ he said.

  She turned away from him and looked along the beach to where the other children played in the distance.

  She had sought him out the previous day and offered to do some housework for him in the tower. He had accepted her offer and then paid her for the work. She told him not to tell anyone of their arrangement. ‘Is that what it is?’ he had asked her, amused by the intrigue she had so easily created around the occasion. She had accused him of making fun of her, and had then left him before he could deny this. It was why he had come to her upon seeing her sitting alone on the bank.

  ‘Will she go to meet him somewhere?’ The nearest branch-line station was twelve miles away.

  ‘I doubt it. He’ll come here. She said they’ll probably bring him.’

  ‘I doubt that very much,’ he told her. ‘Not if he’s already been released.’ The man would have been given travel passes.

  ‘I told her they’d probably let him out early because he’d been – I don’t know what the word is—’

  ‘A model prisoner? Well-behaved?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And what did she think?’

  ‘She just laughed. “Him?” she said. “Him?”’

  It had been almost four years since she had seen the man. She had been only eleven at his arrest, her young brother little more than a baby. He wondered how much she knew, and how much she now expected of him. There was something guarded about everything she said to Mercer concerning the man: as though she wanted to share her excitement with him, but at the same time was conscious of her own uncertainty in the matter; conscious, too, of not wanting to appear disloyal or dismissive of the man to whom she had been such an ally before his arrest.

  ‘I suppose everybody else knows about his return,’ he said.

  ‘Most of them were there when the telegram came. Mrs Armstrong crossed herself and stood as though she was praying all the time the man was looking for it in his bag.’

  ‘Perhaps she thought it was for her.’

  ‘I doubt it. She’s had hers. The man asked me where my mother lived. He made her sound like somebody else completely.’

  ‘It’s how telegrams work,’ he said. ‘You’re meant to be on your guard before you open them.’

  ‘Mrs Armstrong went and told everyone what had happened and they all gathered outside while she read it.’

  A bed of cotton-grass grew along the base of the bank, looking like a line of snow where it stretched towards the houses. A flock of birds sat motionless on the water beneath them.

  ‘I went into town,’ he said, not having mentioned this to her previously.

  ‘To see the Jew. I know.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that,’ he said.

  She looked at him, half-closing her eyes against the light. ‘I know that, too,’ she said.

  ‘His name’s Jacob.’

  She repeated it ten times over.

  ‘I know it’s what everybody else here calls him, but I thought you were different,’ he said.

  She saw through this subterfuge immediately. ‘How am I different?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘If I’m different, tell me how I’m different.’

  ‘You have more sense,’ he said. ‘More compassion.’ She considered this for a moment. ‘I doubt it,’ she said.

  ‘More ambition, then.’

  ‘And what does that have to do with not calling a Jew a Jew?’

  He refused to tolerate this any longer. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, and prepared to rise.

  She put out her hand and held him back. ‘Jacob,’ she said. ‘And you’re wrong about everybody else here calling him a Jew. My mother never does.’

  And, presumably, she’s already told you not to call him that.

  She bowed her head for a moment.

  He sat back down beside her.

  ‘It’s mostly because I don’t have anyone else to talk to. Nobody my own age.’

  The oldest of the other girls was at least four years her junior.

  ‘I know that,’ he said.

  ‘She pretends to do it,’ she said, meaning her mother. ‘But she doesn’t know how to, not really. And besides …’

  ‘It’s not what you want from your own mother.’

  She shook her head. She leaned forward to watch the other children. They were further away than earlier, their voices barely audible.

  ‘What do you remember most about him?’ he asked her.

  She lay back against the slope, folding her arms across her stomach.

  ‘He used to take me out with him. Fishing. Into town. He used to take me to places I wasn’t supposed to go.’

  ‘And your mother disapproved.’

  ‘It sometimes seemed like she disapproved of everything he did. She once told me that his own mother had warned her against marrying him. She said he used people and that he’d use me just the same.’

  ‘She loved him, I suppose.’

  ‘Something. I was born six months after they were married.’

  ‘And you think that’s why she married him?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘It wouldn’t account for his behaviour afterwards.’

  ‘He always used to complain about feeling trapped. Every time they argued, he’d say it.’


  ‘Trapped by her?’

  ‘I used to think he meant trapped by this place. Who wouldn’t feel trapped?’

  ‘But now you think he meant because she was pregnant?’

  She nodded.

  Nothing he said would relieve her of the uncertain blame she still felt.

  ‘She said that half of everything was her fault, anyway. She used to defend him, especially when she was with the other women. She used to say they didn’t know him like she knew him.’

  ‘There must have been something,’ he said, wanting to reassure her.

  She propped herself up on her elbow. ‘You don’t have to,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t have to what?’

  ‘Side with him on my account.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I don’t know the man. All I know is that you, at least, still have a great deal of affection for him and that his return means a lot to you.’

  She acknowledged this in silence.

  ‘Do you think he’ll leave?’ he asked her. ‘Come back here, let the Authorities think he’s settled, and then go?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s what she thinks will happen. What is there here for him any more? Farm work? Not even much of that now that the farmers can pick and choose who they take on. He once told her he was going back to the Midlands to work in a car factory. He said he’d be the one to pick and choose if he lived there.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll want you all to go with him,’ Mercer suggested, but with little true conviction.

  ‘She wouldn’t leave,’ she said. ‘Not now.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘You think he’d take me with him?’

  Her disbelief, he knew, was intended to prompt him into saying more. ‘Why not? You could enrol at a college or a—’

  ‘College? Me?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s not what people like me do.’ She still wanted to be convinced.

  ‘I’m talking about there, not here,’ he said. ‘The Midlands, anywhere.’

  She fell silent, considering all he had just suggested. She had left the local school two months earlier, and it surprised him to realize how little thought she had given to her future, caught in this limbo of her father’s absence and the anticipation of his return. He wished he could persuade her not to expect so much of the man or his home-coming. And then he became concerned that he himself might now become the source of further false hope and impossible expectation, and that she might repeat all he had suggested to her mother.