The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  “He doesn’t give tuppence, you know he doesn’t. If he did, he would have come soon as he could; he could have posted the blooming card if he’d really wanted you to get it. If he cared, we’d know him already. We’d have known him for years.”

  She blinks, shakes her head. But she’s coming round to him, he sees it. He pushes his point home.

  “He just needs somewhere to be, that’s why he’s here. One night, you’ll let him stay, and he’ll be here for ever. Or till it suits him to move on.”

  She goes white. He actually sees the pink fade from her cheeks.

  “How dare you.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Go to your room.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Right.”

  She grabs him by the arm and yanks, clatters him up the stairs. He stumbles, his feet barely touching the treads; his shin bangs against a wooden edge. She pulls him to his room and opens the door, then pushes him in. He stumbles to a halt. It’s angry crying, not sad.

  “Don’t let him stay, Ma,” Billy says. “Please. Don’t.”

  She slams the door.

  Amelia puts on her hat and goes out of the front door and walks to Cheeseman’s through the evening dark. Her breath plumes in front of her. Her feet clip on the paving slabs and the cold air cools her cheeks. Her palm stings. It will freeze tonight, she thinks: when she gets into bed later, the sheets will have that faint slick of dampness about them, which never seems to go away no matter how she washes and dries and airs the bedding.

  The words worm through her head: He’s got nowhere else to go. She can see him, in her mind’s eye, standing in the lamplight, with his suitcase and his broken boots.

  One night, you’ll let him stay. His suitcase tucked in beside the card table. His hat dropped on top of the picture book. Without a thought, without a word of apology.

  When she goes into the shop, with its warm familiar smell of ham and tea and brown paper, Mr. Cheeseman is at the door, just twisting the cardboard sign round to Closed. But when he sees her there he lets go of the sign and stands back and opens the door to let her in. He smiles, his face dimpling and folding, and rubs his hands together, and greets her and asks after her health and what he can do for her, and she replies without even knowing what she’s saying, and comes into the shop, and watches as he moves back behind his counter and stands there, smiling at her expectantly, and she should ask him for the wages, for cheese and bread and maybe a pie, but instead she’s marooned in the middle of the polished floor, not quite knowing what to do with herself.

  He’s a liar, though. Bet he is.

  Billy couldn’t know what it would mean, not the adult bedroom things that it would mean, that one night she would let him stay. But really, might she have done that, if it would have meant she didn’t have to face the years ahead alone? What exactly is she capable of?

  Mr. Cheeseman is speaking.

  “Sorry?”

  “That boy of yours,” he says, and shakes his head in admiration. “Legs on him like pistons, that boy has.”

  She nods. Her head is full of twisting tangled threads, of postcards drifting across a bright blue sea, of a row of steady, solid suitors parading past for her to choose from; of Sully lying between her cold sheets, his pale freckled arms reaching out for her.

  longing to see you, and the child

  Her palm still stings. She hit Billy. She feels a jolt of shame: she never hits him; she never has to. Billy bounds through her days, bringing a cloud of cool outdoors; his skin is barley sugar and fog and soap.

  “You must be very proud of him,” Mr. Cheeseman says.

  “I am,” she says. “I’m very proud.”

  “He’ll go far, that lad, you mark my words.”

  She smiles carefully at him. Edwin Cheeseman, who had been in love with her all those years ago. She wonders if he still is, a little bit. “Thank you.”

  “A great consolation to you, he must be.”

  He nods complacently, rubs his fat hands together again. Maybe he thinks she regrets it, choosing William over him. Maybe he thinks, given a second chance, she’d do differently. But it is only William, always William. That’s what she should remember. It’s the words he sent that matter, not the man who brings them.

  She has been such a fool.

  “So,” he says. “What can I get for you?”

  She glances round at the shelves, the jars and tins and packets. She realises that there is nothing here that she wants at all.

  Back home, she drops the packet of tea onto the hall stand while she sheds her coat and hat. She had to get something, couldn’t ask for Billy’s wages of course, and an ounce of tea was all she could bring herself to ask for on tick. She will settle up as soon as Billy’s paid. She sweeps her hands down her skirts, takes a big breath, and opens the door into the kitchen.

  Sully is sitting at the table. He looks up expectantly, smiles. Shows his long yellow teeth.

  “Everything all right?” he asks.

  “Fine, yes, thank you.”

  She sets the tea packet down on the table, goes over to the range and opens the burner, grabs the old singed pan-holder to shove the kettle onto the flame.

  “Difficult age, that,” Sully says.

  She flushes, not just from the heat. Was he listening? What did he hear?

  “He’s a good boy.” She folds the pan-holder, then folds it again, then unfolds it.

  “A credit to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It can’t have been easy.”

  He means, bringing him up all by herself, without a man around. He is working his way up to something, she senses, towards some kind of statement or question or confession. She looks down at her hands, the snags and cracks from washing, cooking, cleaning. And her clerical work has left her fingers faintly crooked, flattened at the tips, from the hours spent every day hitting the heavy stenograph keys.

  “There’s his grandpa,” she says.

  “The old man. Yes.” Sully flicks out the newspaper and folds it, then lays it down on the table, and smiles again, as though settling in for a good long chinwag, but Amelia just can’t bear to look at him now—his strange bony face, his ragged ear, sitting where William could so easily have been. She turns away to the range, and ducks down to open the firebox. She pokes at the coals unnecessarily.

  “And there’s plenty of boys growing up without their fathers,” she says.

  “But what a shame, though, don’t you think?”

  “Billy’s father’s dead,” she says briskly.

  The kettle begins to hiss. She closes the fire door, straightens up.

  “Still, it’s not easy on you,” he says lightly. “Shall I have a word?”

  He shifts his chair away from the table to get up.

  “No.”

  The word comes out too quick, too sharp. It shocks her, how afraid she is. She turns away to the cupboard, to fetch the teapot.

  “What did you do, Mr. Sully?” she says, her back to him. “After the Goliath sank?”

  “Please, do call me George.”

  “George. What did you do?”

  “Like I said, the Cornwallis picked me up—”

  “No,” she says, “I mean, after the war?”

  She stands, hand on the open cupboard door, looking up at her scant array of crockery. She hears him creak forward in his seat, leaning his elbows on the table. A pause. The kettle’s hiss narrows to a whistle. She thinks, he will have known that this would come eventually. He will have prepared for it. Once the shock has passed, Why now? is, after all, the obvious question, if you think to question anything at all.

  “I stayed in the navy, until the year nineteen. Then I went into the merchant fleet.”

  “And you were at sea, all that time.”

  “Africa, the East Indies, all over really.”

  And you never passed a postbox, not once, in all those years, she wants to ask. Not once in ten whole years?

  She reaches do
wn the brown teapot. She is such a fool.

  “This is your first time back in England then,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says. “No. I mean, a few days’ shore leave, of course, yes. Sometimes Liverpool or Bristol. But no time for anything, not really. Hardly been in London at all.”

  She sets the teapot down on its trivet, on the table in front of him.

  “So you’ve left the merchant fleet now, have you?”

  The kettle’s whistle builds into a scream behind her. She looks at the angular face, the white-rimmed stub of his ragged ear. She sees the calculation in his eyes. And she knows, with perfect clarity, that she has to get rid of him.

  He nods. A pause.

  “I tried to write,” he says. “But—”

  “There wasn’t really time,” she says.

  “No.”

  “And it’s not easy, to write that kind of letter.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though you had years and years and years.”

  The kettle rattles, shrills.

  “Tea,” she says brightly, and turns to lift the kettle from the heat. He tucks his chair back in under the table. Sets the newspaper to one side. And when she brings over the heavy teapot, he smiles up at her—a quick, narrow little smile.

  Billy sits on his bed and listens. He can’t hear the words, but he can tell that the patterns of their conversation have changed. A series of dodging runs from him, like a striker dribbling a football up a pitch; and slight, brief comments from her, landing like a dropped cloth; soft, dampening things down. He listens till they come out into the hall. A lot earlier than before: his grandpa isn’t even back yet. And they don’t linger. She says a brief goodnight, and the One-Eared Man returns the farewell more fully, but indistinctly. And then he leaves.

  His ma’s footsteps come up the stairs. His bedroom door opens and she stands there, in the dim light from the streetlamp outside his window. She draws the curtains.

  “D’you want some cocoa?” she asks.

  Billy gets to his feet and wraps his arms around her waist and she squeezes him close.

  The next time they see the One-Eared Man is on Sunday and he is heading down the far side of the street towards their house, carrying his suitcase, his collar up and his hat pulled low. So he hasn’t given up yet, Billy thinks—but then it is a savagely cold day, he’d be tempted to try his luck again just to get out of this wind. Billy digs his chin down into his muffler, links his arm in through his mother’s arm. He tries to drag her along past the One-Eared Man before they notice each other. But he feels her flinch: she’s seen him. And then the One-Eared Man raises his free hand and crosses the road to them.

  “It’s arctic, isn’t it?” he says.

  Billy’s ma murmurs something in agreement. The One-Eared Man says something more about the weather, but nobody is really listening, not even himself. He hasn’t got any gloves on, Billy notices. His knuckles, standing proud as he grips the suitcase, are white against the livid pink skin. For a moment no-one speaks, and Billy tugs discreetly at his ma’s arm, thinking he should just get her to scarper before someone says something, and the other says something else, and before you know it the two of them will have slipped back into being all warm and cosy together.

  “I shouldn’t keep you standing in this cold,” Billy’s ma says, eventually.

  Billy looks up at her. Her face is pale and tight.

  “Oh,” the One-Eared Man says. “Are you off out?”

  He glances up the street, the grey sky low overhead, the wind blustering. Of course they are, Billy thinks; that’s why they were walking down the street. He feels ever so slightly sorry for him. But mostly he feels pleased.

  His ma says, “We’d best be getting on.”

  The One-Eared Man stands there. Billy looks down at his ratty trouser cuffs, his broken boots. He does try really hard not to smile.

  “I’ll call by later then,” the One-Eared Man says.

  Billy’s mother takes in a sharp little breath. “I’m afraid we won’t—”

  Her arm squeezes tighter against Billy’s arm. He squeezes back.

  “That won’t be convenient,” she says.

  Her voice sounds odd. She tucks Billy in closer to her, and he lets himself be held tight against her side, his cheek on the thin roughness of her coat.

  “Right-o then,” the One-Eared Man says.

  Billy looks up from where he stands, leaning into his mother’s protecting flank. The One-Eared Man is looking up the street, nodding slightly, as if working out what to do next. Then he shifts his case from one hand to the other, and looks down at Billy.

  “I see how it is,” he says.

  He knows. He knows that Billy made this happen. That Billy cracked open the happy, cosy little cocoon that the One-Eared Man had spun around Billy’s ma. That it is Billy’s fault that he is out in the cold again.

  Billy shivers.

  “Good afternoon, then,” his mother says. She pulls away, drawing Billy with her.

  But the One-Eared Man just holds Billy’s gaze. “Be seeing you, son.”

  Billy blinks up at him. He hopes not. But if it happens, Billy thinks, he’ll be ready for him.

  Then the One-Eared Man turns, swinging his suitcase out in an arc, and walks away, his coat flapping in the bitter wind. Billy’s ma looks down at him, and he gives her a smile. She smiles slightly back, but her face looks kind of puffy and swollen. Billy gets the sudden feeling that he has been luckier here than he realised: that this is a skin-of-the-teeth escape.

  In the park, the trees are bare and it is cold. He and his ma march along the paths, huddling against each other, her arm around his shoulder, holding him close to share their warmth. He feels giddy with success and with the blustering wind—he wants to run and shout and clamber up the skeletal, clattering trees. But instead he walks with her, soberly: he is all she has. He will be her man now. He will always be her man.

  And the One-Eared Man: he can’t worry about that. He’s gone. Over time, he’ll disappear from their thoughts completely, Billy tells himself, like a bloodstain left in the scullery sink to soak.

  They pass the pond, where a few ducks sit looking cold and miserable. They sit down in a shelter, huddling into a corner of the bench. Her arm round his shoulder, the smell of soap and powder off her skin, and the faint trace of cooking and the candleworks off her clothes.

  Billy feels, at this moment, quite content.

  Knox Road, Battersea

  April 18, 1935

  BILLY SITS UP. The water heaves away, crashes into the sides and end of the bath. He reaches for the shaving bowl.

  As he stirs the soap into bubbles with his brush, his privates move in the tepid water; his cock is half-hard from thinking of her, but he ignores it: the feeling will fade away if unattended to, and right now he can’t afford to waste anything. He lifts his left knee and presses his foot against the cold metal. His toes fan out like a fin.

  From ankle to mid-thigh he brushes curves and spirals, sucking on his back teeth as he paints, reaching round to the hanging ham of his calf muscle, and up into the underside of his knee. Where the water meets it, his skin is puffed and pink; above the water line, it’s hard with goosepimples. He reaches out over the chilly enamel edge of the bath, dripping soapy water, and sets his soap bowl down on the rush seat of a kitchen chair. He lifts his razor.

  He loves the feel of it, its weight in his hand. Closed, the cutting edge is kept safe inside the bone handle. Tease it open and the handle fits snug in the crook of his palm, the blade gripped neatly between his thumb and forefinger. There’s a perfect unity of form and function here, the kind of beauty you get with a good bike. He angles the steel against his skin and scrapes away a drift of foam and hair.

  He has to keep his attention on the ritual, the routine. He can’t think too much ahead, can’t let himself. If he lets himself stop to consider possibilities, rather than do what needs to be done, he’ll get lost in speculation, and not be properl
y prepared. But things are good, he thinks. Things are definitely good.

  He can hear his ma moving around next door, in the kitchen, putting his silk sweater out to air. He hears the creak as she sits down. Then there’s the sound of a bottle being unstoppered, and the rustling as she unfolds the newspaper across her lap. She’ll be rubbing down his shoes for him, the soft chamois almost as flexible as glove leather. She’ll do a good job of it, he knows; she always does.

  He inches the blade up over the ribbed skin of his knee. There’s a big shiny scar there, and smaller ones, hard dots and pits, down the side of his leg. He’d misjudged a sprint trying to take a jump on Seaton last year. Gone flying off the cycle track onto the centre, lost traction on the cinders, and come down hard. Even in the fall he’d heard the crowd’s massed intake of breath. And that transformed everything. He didn’t care about the pain, the damage done. The crowd had gasped for him.

  God, but the ache in his shoulders and neck as he’d cycled home on his own roadster: he could barely look up to see where he was going. The impact shunted everything sideways: upper arm, collar bone, spine. Tore at ligaments. Took the skin off his knee. He stank of liniment, and was black and blue and yellow all down the inside of his right leg where it’d whacked against the frame. But he didn’t care. It didn’t matter. What mattered were those breaths suddenly caught. For him.

  He’d been in the game for four years then, building bikes for Butler’s during the week, racing them at weekends and bank holidays, and that alone was enough to leave him dazed with gratitude and a sense of his good fortune. Perhaps the pay wasn’t that wonderful, but then it hadn’t really felt like work to him, so he didn’t mind. But after he took a jump on Seaton, even though he failed, even though he wrecked himself for the rest of the season in the attempt, things changed. He already knew Mr. Butler to nod to and say good morning, but that was the first time that, when Mr. Butler had come through the workshop, he had stopped at Billy’s bench to have a word. And when Billy had stammered out his idea about the new cranks, about how they could take out one of the bearings and lose a little weight and a little friction too, Mr. Butler, Mr. Claud Butler himself, had patted Billy on the shoulder and said that was smart thinking: a little thing like that could make all the difference in the world. Could be the difference between winning and losing. And when Mr. Butler had gone on, and Billy had blinked up, flushed and proud, he’d caught Alfie’s eye, and Alfie had grinned at him and raised his eyebrows. Good for you, he’d said.