by Robert Edric
‘She thinks he’s going to leave and take her with him.’
Daniels laughed. ‘He’d be lost anywhere else.’
‘Where men would stand up to him?’
‘Where he’d be forced to see himself for what he really is. He was angry tonight because the bad weather fouled up a little run he’d got planned.’
‘What was it?’
‘We were supposed to meet a boat out in the Middle Channel. We waited, but nothing came except the wind and the rain.’
‘Will he go, do you think? Will he walk out on them?’
‘I imagine so. One day.’
Their work on the charts finished, Mercer returned these to a drawer. Daniels inspected the room around him. Mercer invited him to stay longer, but he declined.
Before he left, Mercer said, ‘Will you thank Riley again for me.’
‘I was going to see him anyway. He lives for this place more than any of them. He’d have been out there digging all night if we’d left him.’
‘And knowing what you know …’
‘About what a waste of time and effort it would all have been for him? Don’t worry, I won’t say anything. Do you ever read poetry, Mr Mercer?’
The question surprised Mercer. ‘Sometimes. Rarely. A long time ago.’
‘There’s a poem by Hardy which tells of a man who loved the only woman he ever truly loved, the only woman he was ever capable of loving, and who, for the rest of the long life he lived after loving and then losing her, referred to himself as a “dead man walking”.’
‘And you feel the same about yourself?’ Mercer said, immediately regretting the crass remark.
‘I imagine it’s how we all feel on our bad days. Or perhaps it’s only how I hope we all feel.’
They descended to the ground floor.
‘Thanks again,’ Mercer said. ‘For Lynch, I mean.’
‘If I’m honest, I did it more for Riley than for you or myself,’ Daniels said.
He left the tower and walked quickly into the enveloping darkness.
37
The following morning the sky was again pale and cloudless, but despite this, there was a sense that the true summer had finally ended, and that the continuing good days now were the better days of the approaching autumn. Mercer did not envy the men who would come there to labour through the worsening weather ahead, and he could only guess at how much more time might soon be lost to the deteriorating conditions.
He rose early, determined to make a start before the arrival of the others.
It was not yet six when he left the tower, and he walked to where he, Daniels and Riley had worked the night before. Water continued to flow unchecked in the channels and the shallow diggings were already mostly empty. No further rain was forecast.
He dragged one of the wheeled pumps into position, but then wasted almost an hour coaxing it into life. The whole of the engine was caked in thick oil and sand and he cursed aloud the man whose job it had been to maintain it and protect it from the weather. It finally started, sucking up the water in loud gulps and splashing it out over the land above.
He started two more of the machines, and when there was nothing more he could achieve alone, he sat by the road and waited. Smoke rose from several of the houses, and a few other early risers came and went. He watched Elizabeth Lynch’s door, but saw nothing.
When the shallowest of the depressions was emptied of all but a few inches of water, he dragged the pump to another hole and repeated the process there.
At eight, he left the centre of the site and went to await the arrival of the others.
A few minutes later, he heard the first of the lorries, and then watched from a bank as they came. But instead of the usual dozen vehicles, only three now approached. He searched further back for the others, but a light mist lay over the wet ground, rising in the warming day, and he could not follow the course of the road as far as usual.
The men from the three lorries climbed down and stood in a group beneath him.
‘Where are the others?’ he asked one of the drivers.
‘Ask him,’ the driver said, indicating the only foreman to have arrived.
The man came to Mercer waving an envelope. ‘Told me to give you this,’ he said, shrugging, though it was clear to Mercer that they were all already aware of the reason for this reduction in their numbers.
Mercer took the envelope and tore it open. It contained a brief message from the contractor who had hired the men – his own employer – saying that Trinity House had contacted him to state that, with the bulk of the excavation work completed, the number of men now required at the site was consequently reduced, and that the appropriate action should be taken. Those men who had shown most commitment to the work – the phrase made Mercer laugh – were to be kept on and returned to the site; the remainder were to be paid off or sent elsewhere.
Mercer read all this with growing disbelief. He looked around him at the men who had been sent. They were not the best workers. The contractor had simply filled the first three lorries and held the rest back. There was no course of appeal, or even reply. The Trinity House men must have known all along that this was what they would do.
He read the notice to the men gathered around him. They expressed their dismay at the dismissal of their companions, and at the growing realization that their own time there was now short-lived and uncertain, that they, too, might soon be treated in this same peremptory manner.
‘This is as much of a surprise to me as it is to you,’ Mercer said, hoping to forestall any further discussion of what had happened. It was clear by their response that few believed him.
The foreman insisted Mercer was right. He told them to forget those who had gone and to be grateful for the fact that they were still employed. Anyone working there until the completion of the work stood a good chance of being taken on by the construction firms waiting to build the new Station, he said. Mercer considered this unlikely – they would have their own workforce – but he saw how some of them grasped at this and he nodded encouragingly at everything the man said.
As the men dispersed, he took the foreman to one side and told him what needed to be done. He pointed to where the pumps were already working. Where he had anticipated almost a hundred men, he now had fewer than thirty. He had prepared plans for them to follow, but he saw how far beyond the reach of such a depleted workforce this work now was. He would return to the tower and make new preparations. Meanwhile, he announced, they could all continue clearing the sites on which he had already started. He showed the foreman which channels to tackle first.
The man returned to the others and started telling them what to do. Mercer left them, hearing their complaints as he passed through them.
In the tower, he took out a blueprint and began making new marks on it.
He finished revising these plans and went back out. He would relay the changes he had made only to the foreman and avoid all direct contact with the others until their own unfocused anger had settled.
It was after he had given the man his instructions, and as he was returning to the tower along the airfield perimeter, that he saw Mary and Elizabeth Lynch standing at a distance from him and looking out over the same expanse of rapidly disappearing concrete. Heavy tractors had already started ploughing the underlying soil, darkening it, and immediately and dramatically changing the appearance of the place.
He turned away from where they stood, but as he did so, Mary called to him. She waved to him and started running over the uneven ground towards him. Elizabeth Lynch followed slowly behind, keeping her distance from her daughter.
‘If it’s about last night, I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said.
Mary stood on the lip of a dry and shallow drain, catching her breath.
‘You could have said or done something then,’ he added, knowing how unfair the remark was. The woman was still some distance away, still coming slowly towards them.
‘He’s gone into town,’ Mary said, her
head down, breathing heavily.
‘So?’
‘You can imagine what happened after you and Daniels had gone. She reckons she pays for just about everything you say to him.’
‘Only because she’s the only one he’s brave enough to take it out on.’
She said something he didn’t hear.
‘What?’
‘I said “And me”.’ She raised her face to reveal where her lip had been cut, and where a scab of dried blood still stuck to it.
He looked hard at this for several seconds before meeting her eyes. ‘I wish I could say I never imagined it would happen,’ he said.
‘I know. You’ll think I’m still making excuses for him, but it was mostly an accident. He was drunk and angry after what happened outside. He went to open a drawer, but it wouldn’t come. He pulled harder at it and it broke and came out and caught me on my mouth. It looks worse than it is.’ She tested her lip with the tip of her tongue.
‘Or perhaps it’s every bit as bad as it looks and you are still making excuses for him.’
Elizabeth Lynch had come much closer by then and she stood several feet behind her daughter.
‘She’s already told me it was an accident,’ Mercer called to her, hoping his true understanding of the situation was clear to her.
‘It was,’ Elizabeth Lynch said quietly, her own abjection complete. She, too, bore the marks of the man’s anger. As one small bruise faded, so another appeared. ‘She told you he’s gone into town?’
‘Yes.’
‘She tell you what for?’
He looked to Mary, and she looked directly back at him, but without speaking.
‘Tell him,’ Elizabeth Lynch said.
‘Someone told him that they were finally kicking Bail out, that the bank had sold his yard. He said that seeing as how there wasn’t any work here for him – you’d seen to that – then he’d go and have a look there. Stands to reason, he said. It’s a big place, and if they’re clearing it of all the junk, they’re going to need a lot of men.’
At first, Mercer did not believe her, guessing that Lynch had only said this knowing how he, Mercer, would react. Whatever else Lynch was doing, he had not gone in search of work.
‘What time did he go?’
‘Before we were up.’
He had seen no one, and he had been out since six. Lynch would not have set off so early.
‘He was lying to you,’ Mercer said.
Mary shrugged. ‘He knows it’s where Jacob lives,’ she said.
‘Someone else who won’t fight back.’
She did not respond to this.
‘Nothing we could do to stop him,’ Elizabeth Lynch said. She stood with her hands balled tightly together.
Mercer looked at the pair of them, the woman and the girl, and he saw what a shift had taken place in the balance between them. When her husband went – as he undoubtedly soon would – then Elizabeth Lynch would stumble, stand again and continue to move slowly forward, just as she had done during his absence. But when her daughter finally went – and that, too, Mercer now considered inevitable – then she would reach out to grab her and hold her and try to pull her back, but the girl would be deftly beyond her reach and the woman would finally lose her balance and fall, unable afterwards ever to rise and stand fully upright again. She, too, it seemed to Mercer, watching her closely over the short distance which separated them, fully understood all that was now going to happen to her. She would be left with her small son, and that would be all. She would be homeless, her past and her future would be gone, and all that would remain would be the boy.
‘What did he say last night?’ Mercer said to Mary.
‘Nothing. He was too busy, remember?’ She tilted her cut mouth at him.
‘Do you blame me for that?’
She shook her head.
He knew that nothing would be achieved by following the man to Bail’s Yard. He knew that this was what Lynch wanted. If Bail was finally being evicted, then there would be enough confrontation and confusion in the place for Lynch’s presence there to be of no consequence. He knew Bail would take care of Jacob, or that Jacob would be sufficiently forewarned of what was about to happen to avoid Lynch completely.
On the airfield, a siren sounded. The noise startled Elizabeth Lynch, and she turned to look.
‘Will you go to Jacob?’ Mary said to him.
‘Why should I?’
‘To make sure he’s safe.’
‘Safe from what? Safe from the beating your father thinks he deserves simply because he’s a Jew?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘That’s exactly what he wants me to do – run after him. Besides, he was probably lying about Bail’s Yard. The bank won’t be foreclosing on him so soon.’
‘Bail’s known it was coming for the past year,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows about it. It was only ever Bail who closed his eyes to it all. Most people in the town can’t wait to get rid of the eyesore. If the beet factory comes, there should be lots of new jobs.’
‘Even one for you, perhaps?’ he said, knowing even as he said it that it was the cruellest thing he could have said to her.
‘I told her to go and ask,’ Elizabeth Lynch shouted.
Mary looked hard at Mercer and then turned and walked away from him.
He called for her to wait. He stepped across the drain and went to where she stood with her back to him.
‘There’s no point me going after him,’ he said, his voice lower.
‘I know – you said.’
‘Even you can’t truly believe he’ll do anything to Jacob.’
‘He said the Jew-boy was probably putting ideas into Bail’s head, telling him that he could keep the new owners out, stuff about his rights.’
‘And as far as everyone else is concerned, the sooner Bail goes, the better?’
‘He said that all Bail needed now was someone to help him on his way.’
‘I have to get back,’ Elizabeth Lynch called to them. ‘Peter.’ She wanted her daughter to go with her, but Mary gave no indication of complying. The woman waited several minutes and then turned and walked away alone.
‘She wanted you to go with her,’ Mercer said.
‘I know. You don’t even believe he’s gone, do you?’
‘Not much I can do about it either way.’
She looked over the site. ‘Where are the rest of them?’
‘Finished. Gone for good.’
They now stood closer to the airfield perimeter, and over her shoulder he saw the distant figures gathering in groups to eat and rest. Individuals wandered away from the others and stood alone.
She studied him for a moment. ‘He picked up Jacob’s glass bowl and threatened to smash it,’ she said. ‘But she told him that if he did then he’d never see her or his children again. He laughed at her and pretended to throw the bowl into the fire. She told him she was serious.’
‘And was she?’
She nodded. ‘All the time it was in his hand she never took her eyes off it. He told her it was worthless rubbish. He told her that if she wanted to keep it, then he didn’t want it anywhere he could see it. He told her the little bubbles in it were probably full of the Jew’s breath.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Just kept it held above his head. He’ll wait until you expect him to do one thing, and then do the opposite just to spite you. She said his name.’
‘Jacob’s?’
‘Jacob Haas. She just said it.’
He turned to look in the direction the woman had gone, but she was no longer in sight.
‘She said he was an artist and that the bowl was probably the most valuable thing in the house. He laughed at her and said that if that’s what she thought, then she ought to take better care of it. He jerked his arm as though he was going to throw it to her, but she didn’t move an inch. She just stood there and went on looking at the bowl.’
‘What happened?’
‘Finally, he j
ust put it back down where it had always been.’
‘Beside the photograph.’
‘Yes. I expected her to pick it up and take it away or something, but she didn’t. She just left it where it was and went on doing whatever it was she’d been doing before he picked it up. He’s smashed a thousand things in the past.’
‘She knows what Jacob’s work means to him,’ he said.
‘She said he’d seen things the rest of us couldn’t even begin to imagine. She said she couldn’t even imagine what one million men and women looked like. She said they killed children, even babies.’
‘Everyone,’ Mercer said.
She looked all around them. ‘Will it happen again?’
He wanted to deny this. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But not here. Somewhere else.’
‘It’s men, isn’t it,’ she said.
She came to him and slid her arm through his and they walked to the dunes, where they stood together and looked out over the sea. A distant freighter left its smoky course in the sky and the terns still rose and fell in the calm shallows.
‘Will you tell him?’ she said. ‘Jacob.’
‘About what happened, what your mother said about him?’
She nodded.
‘I doubt it. It might be too much for him to bear, to know that she understands him so well.’
‘It still doesn’t make any sense,’ she said, and he felt her hand tighten around his arm.
38
Later, he saw Mathias and told him what had happened. He expected him to express some concern about Jacob, but he did not, dismissing Lynch’s threats as merely that. He told Mercer that Bail would take care of Jacob, or, failing that, that Jacob would have to look out for himself. Just as Mary’s remark had surprised him earlier, so the harshness of this dismissal surprised him now, and he did not pursue the matter other than to ask Mathias when he had last seen Jacob. It was clear to him that Mathias remained preoccupied with his own rejected appeal and the possibility of his imminent repatriation.
Mathias had come to him from the airfield. There were now even fewer restraints placed upon him, he said, and he and the others were allowed – within reason and the demands of their work – to come and go between the airfield and the town as they chose. They were expected to report for work each day, and were still counted upon their arrival, but that was all. He repeated the words ‘within reason’ as though they were at once both unintelligible and hilarious.
