Читать книгу Birthday - Alan Sillitoe - Страница 8

After the early days of being in love Brian hadn’t seen Jenny for fifteen years, until a letter came from Nottingham to say his father was dying. He’d seen little of the old man in the previous decade, during which the binding of love and detestation had turned into tolerated indifference. Still, his imminent death meant something, as he stood on the platform thinking it strange that he always had to search for the station exit, never an automatic walk up the steps and across the booking hall onto the street, as if the roots of his instinct were cut on the day he left.

From the crowd around the train his name was spoken clearly enough to startle, and for a few moments he wondered what this half familiar face had to do with him. The express would leave in a few minutes. ‘Hello! Don’t you know me?’ As if the likelihood of his not doing so would devastate her, though the distress in her features wasn’t due to his changed appearance. ‘It’s me, Jenny.’

The more he looked the less altered was she from the girl he had known. He supposed he had mumbled the right words: ‘What are you doing here? Why are you getting on the train? Are you here to meet someone? Or are you going to the seaside?’ He must have said something like all those things, his smile covering the love and curiosity he should have felt, her signals indicating a catastrophe he lacked the nobility of soul to comprehend, and in any case the past they shared was far too far away to be of any help. Eyes filmed by heartache, she held back tears, as if trying to say something with a silence to which he could not respond since he had no silence of his own to give, his heart a ball of string that would need a lifetime to disentangle because he had become another person, and so had she.

Without luggage, she looked too unhappy to be travelling for pleasure. He noted the usual kind of blouse, and one coat button done up unevenly as if she had put it on in a state of shock. ‘I’m going to the hospital in Sheffield.’

Train doors clacked like rifle shots, shouts and whistles normal to him but a grief to her who only wanted to be on her way. He tried to remember whether she had relations in Sheffield. ‘What are you going there for?’

‘My husband’s had an accident in the foundry where he works.’ She gave a mad woman’s smile. ‘I’ve got to run, though, or I’ll miss my train.’

‘I’m sorry. Is he badly hurt?’

‘I don’t know. They telephoned the corner shop. But I’m sure he must be.’

‘Perhaps it’s not as bad as you think.’ He held her warm and vibrant hand while wanting only to get away, yet they were drawn close for a kiss, as if it might reduce the bad news. She wasn’t altogether there, but who would be? He hoped she would remember the meeting as he pulled open a door the guard had just closed, to make sure she wasn’t left behind, being already with her husband as the train went into the tunnel of its own smoke.

He had cut so many people out of his life in order to make a different world for himself, couldn’t connect any more to a woman whose husband had been smashed up in a foundry. The death of his father seemed a formality by comparison. He found the exit easily, as if instinct had come back at the sight of her, marvelling at the chance meeting while walking up the steps.

George, paralysed from the waist down, had to be cared for night and day, lifted and carried, taken and fetched, wiped and fed and humoured and honoured, and no doubt loved, Jenny’s subtly harassed expression the most she would allow herself to show. She did everything, and would have done more had it been demanded or possible. She could have fled – others had been known to – left him in a hospital or convalescent home on the coast, but abandoning your husband wasn’t what you did when he’d stood by you until the time of the accident. In any case, you had sworn to care for each other until one or the other died.

He was never surprised when his brothers’ thoughts ran on the same lines as his own, often so close as those between husbands and wives. ‘By the time George had his accident he and Jenny already had seven kids,’ Arthur said, ‘so maybe it was just as well he did, or he might have given her half a dozen more.’

Brian’s laugh took him away from the tragic aspect of Jenny on the station platform. ‘I should be glad I didn’t stay with her then. I might have had the same number pulling at my turn-ups.’

‘She would have dragged a rabbity bastard like you on every night,’ Arthur said, ‘and in your dinner hour as well, if there’d been no canteen where you worked.’

If he’d got her pregnant he would still have escaped, because the dynamo of curiosity had been busy in him from birth. His departure was both as if swimming out of a vat of treacle, and wandering away like a somnambulist, hard to know which because too far back and they hadn’t been logged at the time. Circumstances had carried him, and those situations met with as if to make him pay for his new life had their own compensations. Being novelties, they were an anodyne against what loss was left behind.

Another question was that if he’d asked Jenny to marry him she might have laughed in his face, because no person can avoid what the future has in store, though you may not know it (he’d certainly had no suspicion) giving the illusion that freedom of choice is possible for everyone. Having a baby already by another man, she had no option but to marry George, whether she loved him or not. George didn’t know how much of a bargain he’d got until her devotion became vital for his existence, though in the years and decades of his catastrophic misfortune he was to wish he had never set eyes on her, thinking it would have been better if the falling block of iron had killed him outright. He certainly never imagined in those early days that under Jenny’s care he would live more than thirty years.

George had been called up in 1940, and taken prisoner at Tobruk in Libya. He’d already lived forever on coming home from Germany in the long belly of a Halifax bomber. A young soldier in his early twenties, he queued to be measured for his demob suit, a thin man after three years’ imprisonment, hoping to find a country more to his liking than the one he had left and, if not, at least to get the job of his choice.

He was promised work as a van driver, but couldn’t start for a month – a long time at that age – so he walked into a nearby iron foundry and was set on straightaway. The job was more strenuous, and altogether satisfying in putting him among the sort of blokes he had fought with in the army. You had to be alert in such an occupation, but as long as you looked out for yourself and for others, and if others looked out for themselves and for you, life seemed less dangerous than driving a van.

The chain slipped: no time or place to run, a million lights turning brighter and brighter at his scream. Even if you weren’t killed the number chalked on the side of the iron was plainer than on any shell fragments around Tobruk. One of his mates who called at the hospital said he could have been as badly injured driving a van, but George knew there was something more final about a fall of iron in the dismal light than there could be from any crump of tin in the street. He had got unblemished from the battlefield, had survived the boat trip across the Mediterranean, not to mention the journey by cattle truck to Germany – and now this.

A new house was provided out of the compensation, and appliances installed to make staying alive the slowest form of torment, though as easy as possible for Jenny. There was nothing more they could want, but wanting for nothing at such a price was no bargain to George. He couldn’t believe it. ‘Me! Why me?’he said a million times,to himself but to Jenny as well often enough. ‘I’d have been better off wounded as a soldier. There’d be some pride in that. But in a foundry! That’s what I can’t understand.’

The more quickly his thoughts returned to the point from which they had set out, without having made him wiser or more content, the darker his anguish became and went on for months before he reconciled himself to the fact that any good reason for being on earth had been taken away. The short change of mental torture turned up no meaning to his fate, and the nightmare was that he would live as a cripple for the rest of his life.

Jenny’s skin blistered with tears as she sat by him. She loved him. Everything would be all right. At least he was still alive. But so deep was her misery that she sometimes thought how good it would be if they could be struck dead together.

Walking through a bookshop to get a present of coloured pencils for Eunice’s birthday she saw something on the table with Tobruk in the title. During the week it occupied George he wasn’t in such despair, so from then on she took everything from the library connected with that place during the war, so that he could relive his days and stop regretting he hadn’t died in the foundry.

His experience of artillery and machine guns helped his expertise with a wheelchair and orthopaedic bed. When a telephone was installed he smiled that it was like having his own headquarters in a dugout, able to call up friends and family whenever he liked. She suspected that he never left off secretly wanting to die, but knew it was a comfort for him to go even further back in time before he met her, and live again in the world of Tobruk. Dangerous though it had been, he’d at least had the use of his limbs.

Brian first saw George when he’d been twenty-five years in a wheelchair. His mother persuaded him to call: ‘Sometimes Jenny comes and sits with me. If I’d been in her place I’d have gone mad now, but she always asks after you, so it would be nice if you’d pop in and say hello.’

Sunlight through the gaps of a high-clouded day gave amplitude to the spirit. He slowed along the tree-lined dual carriageway, reading each street sign so as not to overshoot the drive on which Jenny’s house stood. He found a dwelling anyone should be happy to live in, the roof as if someone got up to scrub it every morning, windows as clean as if without glass, nothing too old to be unpointed or shabby, immaculate paintwork on doors and window frames, the house behind an area of sloping well cut lawn.

When setting out on his travels he hadn’t wanted to live in either the cosy but decrepit houses of Basford Crossing nor a place like this, but he was happy for Jenny that she had such a pristine house. He had thought only of getting away, even if to be a homeless figure stricken by rain and bitten into by the cold, for whom any house would be paradise.

To be well fed and shod, to be out of the rain and have clothes on his back, was all he needed. A one-roomed dwelling in the middle of a wood had figured in his childhood dreams, but by craving the romantic he had achieved far more. A house like Jenny’s had seemed an unattainable luxury, but as soon as he had money enough to get one he despised it. The fee for a single script could buy a dozen huts in a wood, as well as the wood and surrounding fields.

Believing that this life was the only one, that there was no God to help you (and he was intellectually incapable of believing He was other than dead and buried) meant that safety and contentment didn’t exist, an ever-likely and interesting state in which there was no class, nation, or religion to capture his allegiance or give comfort. If you allowed yourself to conceive of immortality you were no longer free.

An inane Strauss jingle brought her to the door. ‘Brian Seaton!’

The emphasis on his surname hid her pleasure. Well, he couldn’t be sure about that, but he enjoyed hearing she would know him anywhere, though it didn’t bring back the old shine in her eyes. He should have telephoned first, but wanted to surprise her. In London you never called on anyone without warning, but he had acted as if Jenny was inferior, or out of familiarity, in his usual off-hand way, an attitude which over the years had become a habit. I suppose that’s how they live in London, she might tell herself, just dropping in without any notice at all. Even in the old days she often hadn’t known he’d be where he said he would be.

‘Your mam phoned, to tell me you were on your way.’

‘And here I am. It’s good to see you again.’ He made up a script about a man knocking at the wrong door, then starting a conversation with the woman who answered. She asked him in for a cup of tea, which led to a new life for them that neither had thought possible when they had got out of bed that morning, but which made sense when it happened. The change in their existences was so passionate that when they went away together the relationship turned into a disaster.

He had made no such mistake with Jenny, for she had known all about him, gave him that special weighing up which now showed much of the old self in her features. Her shorter hair was a mix of grey and dark, curling around the head instead of a long and vigorous band of black, making the face seem smaller, fragile and more vulnerable. She was pale, almost sallow, lines scored for a woman in her fifties, perhaps more so than on women of similar age he met in London who hadn’t been through half as much. She was slim and middling in height from what he used to think of as tallish and more robust, though she could hardly be shapely after having had seven kids. ‘I was passing, and thought I’d call.’

‘I’m glad you have. Come on in.’

Everything you did was wrong, even more so when you thought well and long before doing it, but she seemed happy at him standing before her, the only sign a tremble of hands as he followed her in. ‘An old friend’s come to see us.’

George had been forewarned perhaps, so as to hide the importance of what they had been to each other, though he didn’t see why she should be diffident about it. George must have known of her life before they met, since she’d had a kid already, but the hint that they had been more than acquaintances made Brian smile. Maybe she thought that the old adolescent intensity might even now flame up between them. At least the lifetime of suffering under George’s misfortune hadn’t broken her.

They entered the brightly lit living room. ‘Brian’s an old friend. He used to know mam and dad.’

Large windows showed a well trimmed garden, an umbrageous laurel tree in the far corner beyond a newly creosoted tool shed. In the room blue and white plaster birds were fixed in attitudes of purposeful flight along the wall opposite the fireplace, on the wing to a place George might well mull on in his despairing hours, glazed eyes following the direction of their long necks. With such wings, and being heavier than air, they would fly neither far nor easily, kept from a real sky by the ceiling.

He looked away as they came into the room,the open book face down, on knees kept together by his all-tech wheelchair. A palish glow on his face suggested that movement was hard labour, as if eternally sitting with the useless lower part of himself sapped his energy, took far more of his attention than in the days when he had walked with his shovel from mould to mould around the foundry thinking of the ale he would put down in the pub after knocking-off time.

The shine of his intensely blue eyes, out of a broad face in which the bones were nevertheless visible, hinted that the accident happened last month instead of twenty-five years ago. His expression was of living by the minute, as if things hadn’t changed nor time moved from the moment he had come out of the hospital. Nothing to look forward to, and little enough to think back on the longer his incapacity lasted, kept him separate and aloof, king of each moment on his wheelchair throne, only able to reign since he could no longer hope.

The furnishings of a three-piece suite on the thick piled carpets gave a temporary aspect to the room, as if George hoped to be moving out in the next week or two. Maybe Jenny had created it that way out of a restless nature now that she too was imprisoned.

The floral pattern of wallpaper was broken by pictures and framed photographs of children on a climbing frame, a youth straddling a motorbike, two young wide-smiling girls in Goose Fair hats. He was never alone with so many children and grandchildren, a living theatre to vicariously take part in. He sometimes stared at the photographs as if he hardly knew the people in them, though he did right enough, because who else was there for such as him to acknowledge?

His blue shirt was open at the neck, grey hairs below the throat, pudgy white veined hands resting on a tartan blanket covering his withered knees. Order had been arranged around him by Jenny, as much for her benefit as his, because without the routine of a twenty-four hour job such a life would have been insupportable. She had to make sure he was fed, get him into and out of bed, wash him and dress him and see to his toilet requirements, knowing it would go on into old age, never a thought of giving in, of saying it was too much, that it was breaking her back and would one day burst her heart. Maybe she wanted to shout: ‘For God’s sake take him to a nursing home, this is killing me, I can no longer cope,’ but she’d never say it because George was king, and she the country he ruled over, a pact which enabled her to go on living.

He took Brian’s hand between cool fingers as if the rite was foreign but he wanted to pass the test nevertheless. ‘She’s told me about you a time or two.’

He wondered what she had said, though anything would be of interest to George, for whom the past, no matter how far off, was only yesterday. The face-down paperback on the arm of his chair was about the siege of Tobruk. ‘Are you reading that?’

His smile indicated eternal worry, self-pity the desert of his affliction, sandstorms depriving him of visibility on long passages through and back and through again. When able to rest from the irritation he was amazed that the small distance had taken such gruelling effort, which showed on the part of his mouth to which the smile was hinged. ‘I was there, once upon a time.’

‘It looks interesting.’

‘I find it so.’

‘Thanks, duck!’ Brian used the old lingo for Jenny when she came with tea and a plate of biscuits, the cup rattling against its saucer like a garbled telegraph message. ‘You were in the army, then?’ he said to George.

‘Yeh, when I was young. And after the war ended I never thought I’d look back and say how wonderful life had been in a German prison camp, though maybe it would have been the same even if I wasn’t in this contraption.’

Jenny’s smile showed relief at George talking with such liveliness. In trying to read more from her expression, Brian got as far into nowhere as he always had. Her back was straighter than when she had met him at the door, a stance showing more alertness, though why it should be necessary he couldn’t tell, unless on kneeling by the chair to rework the blanket over his legs, or wipe the tea his shaking hands had spilled, she was fearful of his fist, powered by an inboiling irritation from a mind demented by uselessness, snaking out at her face. He wouldn’t do it before a guest, but was easy to imagine in the quiet and seemingly endless afternoons when they were alone. He sensed something and wished he hadn’t, wanted to go, sorry he had come, such scenes of domestic knockabout familiar from childhood when the old man battered his mother and the rest of the family out of despair at being unemployed, or at not being able to read or write.

‘The only break I get these days,’ George went on, ‘is a fortnight every year at Ingoldmells. Still, it gets me away from this place.’

‘My brother Arthur and his wife go fishing near Skegness,’ Brian said. ‘I stay with them overnight when they hire a caravan.’

‘He fishes in the sea?’

Brian laughed, for no reason except that it was about time somebody did. ‘No, it’s a mile inland, at a big pond in the middle of a field. But it’s good sport.’ He had bought Arthur The Compleat Angler and he had read it more than once. ‘The caravan’s parked by the water, so they stagger out in their dressing gowns for an hour’s fishing before breakfast. They chuck everything back, naturally.’ He didn’t want to dwell too long on such a pastime with a man who wasn’t able to take part in it, though maybe he could if someone pushed him to the water’s edge. ‘If Jenny gave you a rod and some bait you could try your luck. You’d probably catch buckets.’

George laughed, for the first time. ‘Not on your life. She might push me in.’

‘Don’t talk so daft,’ Jenny said.

‘Well, I’m not serious, am I? When I was a kid’ – he smiled, as if he might still be one, and have life to live over again – ‘I went after tiddlers, scooped ’em up in a jam jar with a bit of string around the neck. It wasn’t easy, but I always got some. We lived in Basford Crossing, and the Leen was our favourite stream. There were eight of us kids in the family, and when we went out as a tribe nobody could harm us. We often stayed by the water all day, rain or shine. Mam would wrap us up sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and fill bottles of cold tea left over from breakfast. There was always something interesting to look at, as long as the stream kept running, and it always did. Never stopped, did it? Well, it couldn’t, could it?’ The idea of the stream ceasing to flow seemed to alarm him. ‘It could no more stop than the Trent could stop. Or any river, come to that, though the Leen’s only a piddling little brook.’ He smiled again. ‘It was cold, though, if you fell in, and I did a time or two. It’s a wonder one of us didn’t drown, but kids had charmed lives in those days.’

Old times meant more to him than anybody else, but they were important to everybody the older or more physically difficult life became. With Arthur and Derek he often made fun of them, because if you didn’t the reality of so-called halcyon days didn’t bear thinking about, and there was too much happening in the present to have their weight as well on your back. Even so, it would be cruel to scoff at such times in front of George, who dropped a host of sugars into his tea: ‘Jenny tells me you’ve done very well for yourself in London.’

‘You could say I’ve made a living.’ George’s tone implied that he must have done so out of trickery and skiving. ‘But I like to come up and see my brothers, who are always glad to see me. In any case, I’m still fond of the old place.’

‘Why did you leave it, then?’

‘I lived here till I was eighteen, then thought I’d take off.’ Enough of the apologetic tone for having made use of his legs. ‘We called at the White Horse for a pint or two last night.’

‘Sometimes we get in the car,’ Jenny said, ‘and go for a drink, don’t we, duck?’

‘Aye, and a right bleddy ta-tar it is, lifting me in and out of this thing.’ He looked at Brian, ignoring Jenny. ‘I ain’t been in the White Horse for years. Not that I could put much back if I did. Apart from having to watch my weight, I’ve got too many pills inside to swill ale down as well. Still, I can let myself go a bit when I’m in Ingoldmells. When I’m away from home, if you see what I mean. I don’t have Jenny fussing over me every second of the day and night. It’s the only time we get a rest from each other, and I’m sure she deserves it. I know I do.’

She kissed him on the forehead. ‘It makes a change. You like to have young nurses pushing you up and down the seafront, don’t you? And all that sea air! You do look a lot better when you get back.’

‘Jenny takes me, and then she fetches me. Anyway,’ George said to him, ‘you manage to get around a bit?’

Brian set his empty cup on the table. ‘When I can. I drove through Yugoslavia to Greece last year, and put the car on a ship to Israel. It was a treat, steaming through the islands.’

‘Did you look in on Libya? Or Crete, where we changed ships as prisoners of bloody war.’

‘It wasn’t on our way. We stopped an hour or two at Cyprus, but there wasn’t time to get off.’

‘I’d like to go back and see Tobruk.’ He gazed at the window. ‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t. You can’t go back, can you? Not if you don’t want to you can’t. Or you can’t if you’re knackered like this. It would be funny if I did, though. Still, wanting to satisfies me. As long as you can dream you can tell yourself you’re still alive.’

He was sorry for George, because who wouldn’t be? But you couldn’t tell him so to his face. George was well aware of what everybody felt when they looked at him, knew they had to feel sorry, nothing else they could do. George would feel the same for somebody like himself if he was all fit and full of beans, or even if he was all fit and full of sludge. He’d much rather be the one who was feeling sorry, and if it happened that he was such a person he wouldn’t say he felt sorry for fear of being told to fuck off, though he’d still be over the moon at feeling it.

So the projection bounced back at Brian, to inform him that there was no need to feel sorry for George, or feel bad because you weren’t a cripple as well. George was done for, and comments of sympathy would be no help. He too had a roof over his head, all the food he could get into himself, any clothes he thought of wearing and, under the circumstances, the finest care in the world. He was all right for as long as Jenny stayed by his side, so it was her you should feel sorry for, and how could he not, heart bleeding drop by drop into his liver at her fate, and though it was proof that he could still feel pity for somebody he much preferred dealing with the emotional turmoil that came from himself, always useful for channelling into his work.

She stroked her husband’s pale hand. ‘Maybe one day we’ll win a lottery, then we’ll hire a private plane and go to Tobruk.’

‘Don’t be daft.’ He pushed the hand away, smiling at Brian as if to apologize, though not to Jenny, for his abruptness.

She didn’t have much of a life, shackled to his side and waiting for any little request that might pop into his circumscribed brain, but she was glad at hearing Brian tell of his drive through the Balkans, the description of a squalid night-stop in Macedonia exaggerated into as much of a narrative as would interest George and amuse Jenny. Set apart from the world, no such talk could lift them out of their imprisonment. By now he had taken in all he could, and had to leave, Jenny offering to show him out because she wanted to see what sort of a car someone drove who wrote scripts for television.

He had never been a flash lad for posh motors, he told them, not caring to impress anybody when he was on the road. A dependable estate served for whatever he wanted in the way of transport, no need of a blood-red underslung tin lizzie with the power of a Spitfire flashing up and down the motorway at a hundred and twenty till he was nicked for the third time and lost his ticket.

They smiled at his admission that the car wasn’t changed every three years, though his accountant said it should be for self-employed income tax. Maybe she was disappointed that he didn’t live up to his image, though why should she care? ‘It’s nothing to show off about, but come and look. Nice meeting you,’ he said to George, once being enough. ‘I’ll call again sometime, if that’s all right.’

‘You’re always welcome.’ He told Jenny to put on her mac, the first to notice a drop at the window.

She stood outside with Brian. ‘I didn’t really want to look at your car.’

‘I know.’

‘Sometimes he dozes off in the afternoon and wakes up with tears on his cheeks, but what can I do? He used to scream because the iron was falling on him in his dreams, but he doesn’t do that anymore, which is a blessing.’

He took her in his arms and kissed her. Because he wanted to? Because she expected it? To give her a treat in her miserable life? Whatever, he pressed her to him, his and her tears meeting after so much time. ‘I’m sorry, love.’

‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘It’s my bed, and I’ve got used to lying on it.’

He let her go, whether or not she hoped he might hold on to her forever and release her from the life she had been pitched into. He saw the light glow again in those melting brown eyes that he recalled after making love so many times in the old days, knew her as she was then, the momentary resurrection of the past suddenly blown away like so much smoke, the poignancy that you couldn’t go back setting him as close to a broken heart as he would ever get.

Pain pulled them away, a fire that burned all memories. ‘Call again,’ she breathed into his ear. ‘Anytime you like. I’ll always be here.’

George’s room faced onto the garden, but he would wonder, all the same, why his departure was taking so long. The neighbours would also be looking through their curtains, but he couldn’t care less about that, and neither could Jenny. ‘I will.’

If you could dispute the number of angels able to dance on the tip of a pin he wondered how much emotion could be packed into a split second as he drove back through Basford Crossing. A message from a new chapel not noticed before said: ‘Turn your cares into prayers.’ Only a quick reader wouldn’t smash into the crossing gates, cursing a prayer that had done no good at all. The exhortation couldn’t concern him, though did suggest that there might be life in the old district yet.

The new estate on which his mother lived was such a tangle of ways and drives and crescents and closes and cul-de-sacs and gardens and walks and rises that all but a madman would get lost, no distinguishing features to indicate one turning from another. Only a pull-in and unremitting attention to the town plan ever got him to her ground-floor flat. Ask someone who lived there how to find a certain address and nine times out of ten you’d get a blank stare and the statement that they didn’t know, though the regret was plain at not being able to tell you. The planners had created a nightmarish labyrinth rather than a civilized layout of houses; the street plan of Radford in his younger days had been simple by comparison.

‘I’m glad you went to see her.’ A Senior Service smouldered in one hand, and a mug of strong tea steamed in the other. ‘She told me she’d love to see you, and it makes a change for the poor woman, with that bleddy miserable husband she’s got to look after. A right bleddy burden he is. If I was her I’d pack him off into a home. He can be a nasty bogger, as well. She came here once with a black eye, and I said: “You want to bogger off, duck. Don’t put up with it. He don’t appreciate anything you’ve done for him.” But she said: “I just couldn’t do a thing like that. I daren’t even let myself think about it.”’

‘It would be hard to leave a bloke in that condition,’ he said.

‘Yes, I suppose it would. I don’t expect I’d do it, either. When I think of what I had to put up with from Harold all those years, it makes me marvel. Every morning I used to think of packing him in. It’s twenty-five years since he died, and I haven’t been unhappy a single day since. Before that I was never in peace for a minute.’

The old man had led her such a dance that she let no tears fall at his funeral, though put a hand to her face as if some were there while going through a group of neighbours to the hearse. She cut bread and laid out smoked ham and fresh tomatoes for his tea, fuel for his drive to London. He recalled sitting on her knees and reading when he was six, the air warm at the end of a summer’sevening, and she still a young woman (he realized now) resting on the doorstep before going inside to make Harold’s supper. He put together one sentence after another, a miracle to them both, from a book about people going fancy free over the countryside in a gypsy caravan – and how she must have wished she was with them!

Doing an effortless ninety after the Leicester turn-off, a car ahead had for some reason stopped on the inside lane, no hazards flashing, or brake lights redly blazoning. There was barely time to notice in the dusk, and who but a murderer or a mindless suicide would stall at such a place and give no warning? By the splittest of seconds he swung the wheel and missed the car’s bumper by inches, realizing that in all his years of driving he had never been so close to annihilation. Instinct had saved him, no other way to explain it.

He pushed in a tape of the Messiah. If he had survived as a basket case there would have been no one like Jenny to look after him, because what generous actions had he performed to be paid back for? Scorning to admit that the nearest of misses had scared him, he slowed to seventy and thought of Jenny getting the shit out of George twice a day and emptying it, the eighth baby she was never to get off her hands. His pitiful existence was her dead-end from which there was neither escape nor relief, no matter how often he was shunted off to Ingoldmells. Her placid and uncomplaining aspect didn’t mean she wasn’t suffering. He knew she was. She had to be, and giving no sign made him as angry as if she was betraying their former love.

The music wiped out her face, kept the mind blank to stay fixed on the road and not get killed. The turmoil of his two marriages and the bother of three children as recalcitrant as himself had taught him at least to be calm. They were grown up, and no longer needed his money (they’d had plenty, willingly given) and rarely telephoned because they didn’t approve of his feckless ways. He only knew that no longer being married stopped him inflicting misery on those who had the misfortune to get too close.

To complain about his own life would be self-indulgence compared to Jenny’s fate, but she at least had a solid reason for existence, and in any case all lives were at some time pitiable, otherwise there would be nothing for scriptwriters to do except a day’s real work.

He hated the dazzle of driving at night, the lack of horizon and uncertain borders, so with half the run gone he forked into a service station. The coffee was like whitewash and the wedge of sweet cake hard to swallow. He lit a cigar, and readied himself for the road again, reflecting as he headlighted towards the exit going south that he had come a long way from Basford Crossing, which couldn’t be anything but good.