‘ “He’s not your father, he’s not, he’s not!” screams Charlene, over and over, and then runs out, still screaming.
‘And the two blokes look at each other; young Tex is really baffled. And then Jackie Milton takes him gently by the arm, and turns him, so they’re facing, side by side, the big mirror with Coke stickers all over it. And as I get up and look over their shoulders, I can see the two faces looking out at me, broad blond little faces, with beaky noses and big square jaws. There’s no mistaking it; any court of law would believe it.
‘And then Charlene comes raging back again, belting into Jackie Milton for all she’s worth, and as I’m trying to get hold to calm her, I sense the kid slip out of the room.
‘Then just as suddenly he’s back, with his eyes forced as wide as saucers, and his face set white as marble, and I know he’s gone clean out of his mind, and there’s a big six-shooter, one of Tex’s that some fool had given him, a-waving in his hand. And that shuts even Charlene up. It shuts us all up, ’cos we got a nasty feeling it’s loaded and going to go off.
‘ “Give that here, son,” I say, gently, “afore there’s a nasty accident.”
‘ “There’s bin a nasty accident already, Tom,” he says. “But it’s not your fault. Stand back. I don’t mean you no harm.” And he points the gun at Jackie Milton.
‘And I’ll give it to Jackie, he has guts, for all he’s a pacifist. If he’d tried to run or duck or grabbed for the gun, the kid’d have shot him. But he just says, gently, “If you shoot me, son, you’ll shoot yourself just after.” And again, he points at the mirror. And the kid turns and looks in the mirror, and starts to cry.
‘ “If you want,” says Jackie, “I’ll go away, and never bother you again – promise. But if you’re going to shoot me, I think you ought to get to know me first.” Ever so gentle and sad.
‘And the kid turns to him and says, “Where’ve you been? Why’d you leave me?”
‘ “I didn’t know,” says Jackie. “I didn’t know if you were mine or Tex’s. How could I? Then? And who’d have believed me, anyway? Tex was a hero . . . and it was what your mum wanted.”
‘They both turned and looked at Charlene, then. And both their faces looked exactly alike; like the Day of Judgement. And Charlene ran out into the back again.
‘ “What shall I do?” asked the kid. And he put the gun quite natural on the counter, like it was a salt-cellar.
‘ “The car’s outside,” said Jackie Milton.
‘The kid sort of moans, and starts taking off the University of Texas sweat-shirt. Then it tears, he takes it off so violent, like it was red-hot and burning him. And he goes on tearing it, till it’s lying all over the floor in little shreds. Then he stares at his blue jeans, helpless, clutching at them with his fingers.
‘ “Everyone’s wearing jeans,” says Jackie softly. And he takes off the coat of his hairy suit, and drapes it round Little Tex’s shoulders. “C’mon – we can buy what you need in Cambridge.”
‘And out they go, and we ain’t seen hide nor hair of them since.
‘And I went after them, but I took that blasted gun, and threw it in the dyke – good riddance to bad rubbish. Only . . . Tex always carried guns in pairs, and Charlene’s still got the other one.’
It was late, and I was drunk, by the time I got to Section Officer Edmunds’s house. She opened the door in a red-haired fury.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
So I sat down in my usual chair in her lounge, and drank some more, and told her the lot. We sat till midnight; silent towards the end. Then she said, ‘You want to come to bed?’ But she knew that the answer would be no.
‘I can’t go on with it, Peggy,’ I said. ‘We’ve been on Cloud Nine, too. The War’s over, Peggy. It’s been over seventeen long years. Tex is dead, Chalky’s dead. You’re dead, I’m dead. I’m a dead middle-aged antique-dealer.’
‘And I suppose I’m a middle-aged librarian?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not middle-aged. Not yet. You could start again . . .’
She shook her head at me, half sad, half comical, very thoughtful.
‘I don’t think I can come any more,’ I blurted out.
She smiled faintly.
‘What’ll you do?’ I was really sad for her, in a drunken sort of way.
She shrugged. ‘I’ll manage. Did you think you were the only one?’
‘Only what?’
‘The only lost RAF flyer, who couldn’t find his way home to East Cardingham? My God, if you think I’m going to be lonely you’re very much mistaken. I’ve got Tosher Norris, and Sid Stevens out of ‘B’ Flight; and Taffy Thomas, Chalky’s old flight-engineer, is due to fly in tomorrow night. And Easby and Tullah, and Sproston and Gatesby and Micky Morris . . .’
‘You’re having me on . . .’
She pulled a desk-diary out of a drawer, with her old neat precision. I opened it. All the names were there; mine among them.
‘You’re not a woman; you’re an old-comrades reunion.’ I was too drunk to get up, thank God, but that didn’t stop me being spiteful.
But she was beyond my spite. She smiled again, still half happy, half sad. ‘Just call me the old home base. The flak wasn’t all over Happy Valley. Some of them have never stopped fighting the war. Tosher Norris’s wife walked out on him; Sid Stevens has got cancer.’
‘And they all found the Adjutant’s ashtray.’ I was still bitter.
‘It wasn’t even the Adge’s ashtray. I bought it in an antique-shop in Stalham. But it seems to make them happy, just the same.’
‘Why?’ I shouted. ‘Why?’
‘Chalky got the chop,’ she said. ‘It never mattered after Chalky got the chop. You remember . . . you were all waiting to see whose girl I would become, once I got over Chalky. Well, I never got over Chalky. So when they came flying back, all shot up with civvy flak, it seemed the least I could do.’ She smiled a last time. ‘You’re tuckered up, Geoff – your eyebrow’s twitching. Go to sleep.’ With expert fingers, she loosened my tie and took my shoes off, and lifted my legs up on to the couch. Tossed a rug over me, gave me a beautiful salute in the doorway, and was gone into her bedroom, with the door locked, snap!
By the time I wakened in the morning, with one beauty of a hangover, she was gone. There was just a note saying:
Please never come back.
I never went back; but I still send her flowers for her birthday.
The Woolworth Spectacles
Before the War, you could buy spectacles at Woolworth’s. Dealers gathered in lost spectacles, uncollected spectacles, dead men’s spectacles, and they appeared in a black, spidery jumble on Woolworth’s counter. There were stranger ways of making a living in the Depression . . .
You merely walked up to the counter, tried them on pair by pair, and if a pair suited, you pulled out your sixpence.
Mostly, pensioners bought them, having more troubled eyesight and less money than anybody else. Certainly my cousin Maude Cleveland had no reason, one warm June afternoon in 1938, to be patronizing that counter. Her father, as the town’s leading solicitor, would have disapproved tremendously. He would have sent her to the optician immediately. Perhaps that’s why she was standing there fiddling, turning her large, blue, beautiful and myopic eyes to the door at intervals, in case anyone she knew came in and saw her.
She was only slightly short-sighted, but blurring small print, the need to hunch closer and closer, provoked her inordinately. Besides, if she went on squinting, it would make lines on her face in the end. She had been tremendously fit all her twenty-nine years; never been to the doctor since her mother died.
And once her father paid for spectacles, he would insist she wore them. All the time. In company. And men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses . . .
So she dabbled among the black, long-legged mass with her fine tapered fingers, holding her leather-bound New Testament in her left hand, open at the Book of Revelation, peering at it through each successive pair, in between pee
ring at the door . . .
It was the feel of the strange spectacles that attracted her. The lively spring of metal, instead of the funereal smoothness of horn-rims. She disentangled them with difficulty: they seemed reluctant to come; then she realized they were on a chain, for hanging round the neck. This immediately disposed her in their favour. Lady Frome had such a pair, and fiddled and poked with them elegantly at meetings of the Parochial Church Council. And though Lady Frome was nearly fifty, her sprigged frocks and large hats were the quiet epitome of London elegance.
Maude examined the strange spectacles. Close to, her beautiful eyes had that near-microscopic accuracy that is the gift of short sight. The spectacles were very old-fashioned; half-moon lenses, with the palest green tint, and even a few tiny bubbles caught inside the glass. She could almost have sworn the frames were gold; and the chain, with its tiny links.
Her hand went to her purse swiftly. The shop could not know what it was selling . . . they were antiques . . . Mr Hazlitt who ran the little shop in Church Walk would be interested. She waved frantically for the assistant who was gossiping, arms akimbo, further down the counter.
‘I’ll take this pair!’ She thrust the sixpence with force into the assistant’s hand.
‘Them’s not ours, madam. We don’t sell that sort.’ The slow country voice quickened with contempt. ‘Old-fashioned rubbish!’
‘But they were here on the counter!’
‘One of the old ladies must ha’ left them, when she bought a new pair. Give ’em here, madam, an’ I’ll throw ’em in the bin.’ The girl’s plump hand rearranged the remaining spectacles protectively, as if they were sheep who’d had a wolf among them.
‘But I want them!’ Maude’s voice rose to an indignant squeak.
‘But they’re not for sale, madam. Not ours. Lost property. I s’pose they should go along to the police-station, by rights.’
‘Then I shall take them,’ announced Maude triumphantly. ‘After all, we don’t want them ending up in the dustbin, do we?’
The girl hesitated, knowing she was lying. But Miss Cleveland was Miss Cleveland. And a complaint to the manager could cost her her job . . .
‘Very well, madam. Shall I wrap them?’
‘No thank you.’ Maude clutched the spectacles even tighter, knowing she was being ridiculous. ‘Are you sure I can’t pay you? I wouldn’t want you getting into trouble.’
‘No, madam,’ said the girl, tight-lipped with stubbornness.
Outside, Maude stood appalled. She had behaved in a most un-Christian manner. Lying, avarice, theft, uncharity to someone less well-off than herself. Sins that must go down in the back of her diary, towards her next confession at St Michael’s. More sins in five minutes than she’d been guilty of in the last month . . . she felt almost shockingly excited about it. Was getting excited about sinning a sin in itself?
In the heat, the High Street seemed deserted. Maude felt a foolish urge to try the spectacles on. She moved well clear of Woolworth’s doorway so that the assistant couldn’t observe her, slipped the chain over her long smooth neck, felt her throat nervously and popped them on.
They were pince-nez; clamped surprisingly firmly on to the bridge of her elegant nose. Not painfully, like tweezers, but as if they knew where they belonged, and meant to stay.
What was more, they worked. Maude saw the world with a quite amazing clarity she’d forgotten existed. The black, half-shaven whiskers of that man coming towards her; the dirt-filled broken wrinkles descending cruelly from nose to mouth; the few greasy black strands fighting a losing battle across his balding pate. Worse, the way his beady black eyes roamed hungrily across her breasts and throat . . . It made her blush all over. Insufferable. She was a lady, but he was regarding her as if she was the lowest type of woman. A common working man . . . would she ever feel safe again?
She whipped the spectacles off, and relaxed back into her familiar peaceful blur. She was very good at reading that blur. That broad pink fuzz-patch approaching, accompanied by a smaller grey fuzz-patch, was undoubtedly what the county magazine referred to often as the genial Mrs Forbes-Formby and her charming daughter Patricia . . .
There was no time to remove the spectacles from round her neck; Mrs Forbes-Formby would certainly notice such a furtive gesture. Instead she tucked the spectacles down inside her discreet neckline. They lay flat, snugly, across the top of her breasts; a little chilly, but not unpleasant on such a hot day.
But some effect seemed to have lingered from wearing them. Certainly she had never seen Mrs Forbes-Formby so clearly in her life. How heavy she had grown in the haunch; how thick her ankles were, and how domineeringly she stood. Maude had always thought her a handsome woman, but now her nose, far from seeming noble, seemed merely too big and fleshy, and little beads of perspiration stood out unbecomingly all over it. The mouth, which had always seemed so decisive, drooped disagreeably.
Patricia looked worse; like a sweating sheep. Had her shoulders always drooped so much? Did she always keep her eyes down, so, when she was with her mother? She was two years younger than Maude, and she looked positively middle-aged. Gosh, thought Maude, you can’t give up at twenty-seven! Do I look like that? She was seized with a sudden desire to peer into mirrors; to walk past reflecting shop-windows. The conversation did not prosper. Mrs Forbes-Formby looked positively affronted when Maude cut short her account of the cake-judging at the Melton W I gala . . .
Let her look affronted, thought Maude, passing her first shopfront. She treats her daughter like a child; and Patricia lets her.
Meanwhile, the shop-window showed her shoulders slightly rounded, thought not half as badly as Patricia’s. She pulled them back, as she’d been taught at school.
It made her breasts stick out with disturbing prominence . . . another working-man passed and admired them.
It occurred to Maude that she had reached a crossroads in her life . . .
She went on, her shoulders well back.
The clarity of sight persisted. She noticed many things, few pleasant: broken upstairs windows above the shops’ peeling paintwork, twitching faces. She had always thought Barlborough such a mellow town. There was a black-and-white cat sitting in the butcher’s window, and several white cat-hairs on the meat. She went into Flatt’s the greengrocer’s. Mr Flatt gave her his usual genial greeting; she realized for the first time how shifty his eyes were . . . dipping down constantly to the apples he was weighing for her on his scales. It came to her quite suddenly that he was giving her short measure; something to do with resting his hand on the right side of the scales. She stared at the hand. His babbling increased; he broke out into a sweat and threw several more apples into the pan, bundled them all into a bag and couldn’t get rid of her quick enough.
She had gained several apples, and lost a friend. The thought so disturbed her that she decided to go and see Mr Hazlitt. He always made her feel better, though he had to be used sparingly. For Mr Hazlitt was persona non grata at home, and it would not do for gossip to reach Father. Ever since the night he’d come to Barlborough Archaeological Society and disputed with Father a little too long over the dating of the Barlborough Crosses. On which subject Father was a lifelong expert . . .
She surveyed the front of Mr Hazlitt’s shop with pleasure; the wall-clocks, the big brass Buddha she’d have loved to buy, the ginger cat . . . but the spectacles took over again, and showed her something less pleasant. The top corner of the shop-window showed damp; worse, green lichen was spreading everywhere. Worse still, the beam above was cracking into those little squares that could only mean dry-rot . . . and a widening crack meandered through the brickwork above, right down from the level of the guttering.
She knew with dreadful certainty. She rushed into the shop, breathless.
‘You’ve got dry-rot. Your shop’s going to fall down any minute . . .’
Mr Hazlitt looked up from his ancient book with a smile. He was intriguingly ageless. White hair above a young face, and very bright
blue eyes. Tall and slim, like an undergraduate. His mouth intrigued her; cruel or kind? She could never decide.
But one thing the spectacles showed clearly; his smile was one he would give a precocious child. He didn’t take her seriously, not for a minute. If only Mr Hazlitt would give her the kind of look those working-men . . . she brushed the thought aside, into the back of her diary.
‘All right, Maude. Show me where you mean . . .’ Amused, detached, kind, tolerant.
She showed him.
He suddenly ceased to be any of these things; he went berserk. He picked up the telephone directory and dropped it; trod on the cat; sent a hat-stand crashing to the floor; paced up and down like a caged tiger. She had never had anything like this effect on Mr Hazlitt before. It was she who finally got through to Theodore Brittan the builder, and calmly explained what was required.
By the time Theodore had come, and the window-beam was temporarily but safely shored up, Mr Hazlitt had flopped into his best Sheraton armchair, totally exhausted.
‘I’ll make you some tea,’ said Maude, soothingly and greatly daring. As he did not reply, she went through the curtain into the back of the shop, where she’d never dared tread before. It was scrupulously neat and tidy, with a smell of clock oil, wood-shavings and tobacco smoke. Being so close to his life pleased her inordinately. She was satisfied he was what she would have called a proper man.
When she came out with the tray of tea (and some biscuits she’d found in a tin) he looked up at her in a new way.
‘Maude, what would I have done without you?’
‘Rung up Theodore Brittan yourself,’ she said, with mock sharpness. But she blushed becomingly with pleasure, and thought she saw in his face not just a new respect, but the merest flicker, gone in a second, of the look that had been on the working-men’s faces. Though much more refined, of course . . .
It was then that she noticed the time and remembered it was Wednesday. Wednesday was the day Father came home early; Wednesday was the day Mr and Mrs Dewhurst always came to tea. At four. And already it was half-past.
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