Читать книгу The Black Diamond - Francis Brett Young - Страница 5

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In the middle of a summer night Abner’s father came blundering into his son’s bedroom. ‘Come along, get a shift on you!’ he said. ‘Go and holler to Mrs Moseley, and then run on to the doctor’s.’

In his hand he carried a candle which lit up his surly face and threw the folds on either side of the grimy wrinkles into relief. His eyes were bleared and angry, for he had been sleeping like a log and resented any disturbance at night.

‘It bain’t no good my going for her,’ said Abner sleepily. ‘She’s got a bad leg.’

‘Bad leg be bosted!’ shouted John Fellows. ‘She’ll have to come if I send for her. Tak’ your hook now!’

While Abner dressed, his father was prowling from room to room letting the tallow from the candle drip down the front of his trousers, and shouting at the boy to hurry up from time to time. In a few minutes Abner was ready and had crossed the patch of waste ground that lay between the terrace and the Stourton Road. This highway was more desolate than he had ever seen it before. In some of the upper windows subdued gas-jets were burning, but most of them took on the gray light of a moon that could not be seen. He was halfway into Halesby before he really woke. Then, in the cool night air, he forgot his grudge against his father for waking him. Even the foul dust of the Stourton Road smelt sweet. He had never felt fitter nor more awake in his life.

As he reached Mrs Moseley’s door Tiger began to bark. He heard the voice of Mrs Moseley trying to soothe the beast. Then he picked up some pebbles and threw them against the window panes, and a moment later the old woman looked out, Tiger scrambling into the window beside her.

‘Our father wants you,’ he called. ‘And I’ve got to go for the doctor.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said Mrs Moseley, ‘I knew it would happen like this. I wouldn’t disappoint your father for anything . . . that I wouldn’t!’

‘Don’t you take no notice of it!’ Abner urged. ‘Don’t you come! I’ll tell ’em the doctor won’t let you.’

She shook her head solemnly and disappeared from the window.

Abner, exhilarated with the night air, ran on to the doctor’s house. This gentleman appeared to resent his call. Abner was told to wait below so that he might carry the bag. He stood there in a garden heavy with the perfume of stocks. In the meadows along the Stour a corncrake was calling. He wondered what kind of bird it was, and whether it was easy to kill. He didn’t mind how long the doctor kept him waiting.

On the way back to Hackett’s Cottages Dr Moorhouse spoke very little. He asked Abner the kind of questions he usually put to young people, and grunted in reply, as if he hadn’t heard what Abner said.

‘Are you John Fellows’s son?’ he asked. And then: ‘How old are you?’

When Abner said that he was going in seventeen, he grunted. It scarcely seemed possible that more than sixteen years had passed since, in the same small house of Hackett’s Cottages, he had ushered this tall youth into the world. It filled him with a kind of discontent to realise that for all these years he had been moving in the same groove, in a vicious circle that had brought him back once more to this identical point. Only it hadn’t been so hard to turn out at night sixteen years ago. A dog’s life! People didn’t realise it. There was Ingleby, the chemist, a sensible man in most things, fool enough to make his only son a doctor!

When they reached Hackett’s Cottages they found the door of number eleven open and a light shining in it. John Fellows came out to meet them and insisted on shaking hands with the doctor. It was obvious that he had been sampling the bottle of brandy that is always in evidence on these occasions.

‘She’s all right,’ he said. ‘She’s all right, doctor. A tough wench she is! Tougher than the other one.’

He turned on Abner. ‘Get the fire lit. Sharp, now! Else I’ll drap thee one. Fill the big kettle. Plenty of hot water. That’s it, isn’t it, doctor? I know . . . don’t I, doctor? . . . I know.’

Somebody came limping downstairs. It was Mrs Moseley.

‘What . . .?’ shouted the doctor. ‘What’s the meaning of this? What do you mean by it, woman? Didn’t I tell you to stay in bed till I let you out? Of all the damned pig-headed foolishness . . ‘

Mrs Moseley smiled her tired, patient smile; but the doctor knew she was in pain. He couldn’t help admiring her.

‘You’ll forgive me all right, doctor,’ she said. ‘Now, what could I do with the poor young thing lying here like that . . . and after all I’d promised Mr Fellows here? Don’t you remember the last time?’

‘No, I’m hanged if I’ll forgive you,’ he smiled. ‘You’re an obstinate old fool. Now run along upstairs. If you lose your leg it’s not my fault.’

Abner was left alone in the kitchen with his father. While the boy raked out the ashes from the grate and lit the fire John Fellows took the brandy from the cupboard and had another swig, putting the neck of the bottle in his mouth. He said ‘Ah!’ and smacked his lips. Then he went out into the strip of garden at the back and walked violently up and down. It was almost light when he returned. He was sweating and quarrelsome. Abner had a bad time of it. Now that his poor mother was suffering like this John Fellows hoped he’d be sorry for the way he’d used her. If anything went wrong—he implied gloomily that something probably would—Abner would be to blame for it. To give his fuddled brain the chance for indignation that it wanted there entered the dog Tiger, fawning, ingratiating. He had escaped from Mrs Moseley’s house and followed the scent of her or of Abner. He jumped up at Abner, yelping with joy.

For a second John Fellow’s stared at him stupidly. Then he burst out with: ‘And here’s that bloody dog again! Your mother’s told you she can’t a-bear it, but she’s no sooner upstairs . . .’ He slipped the belt from his waist and lashed at the wretched Tiger’s quarters. The dog squealed piteously. For a moment Abner saw red. He didn’t see his father any longer, only a stubby man, shorter than himself, staring at him with bloodshot eyes, and sweat trickling down two grimy wrinkles. He would have knocked his father down if Mrs Moseley hadn’t suddenly appeared at the foot of the stairs asking what the noise was about. The sound of her voice steadied both of them as they stood staring hatred at one another, and Abner’s anger passed as quickly as it had come. Mrs Moseley, standing between them, brought with her a pungent odour of some antiseptic. The smell impressed Abner with the moment’s seriousness. He was suddenly sorry for Alice. He even wished that he had been more patient with her. Then the whole sky was shaken with the vibrations of the great bull at Mawne Colliery. Five-thirty. He slipped into his pit clothes, left his father staring, and hurried from the house.

When he came back from his turn at night the sense of stress that he had quite forgotten in the work of the day returned. On the doorstep of Number Eleven he felt intensely nervous. Something was going to happen, perhaps something had happened already. The house was quiet. In the kitchen a fire was burning that made for cheerfulness in spite of the heat. All this was attributable to Mrs Moseley, who now appeared with an encouraging smile. She told him that Alice’s baby had been born at ten o’clock. ‘And when I got her clean and comfortable and washed the baby, I thought, “Well, now, while I’m on my legs I may as well have a bit of a tidy round.” A lovely boy!’ she said. ‘Oh, what a beautiful babby—just like his father!’

Abner didn’t want to hear about the baby. He stuck to his obstinate determination not to countenance the affair at all, and Mrs Moseley laughed at him for behaving like a baby himself. He asked her what had happened to his father.

‘I haven’t seen him, not since you went to work. But men’s best out of the way at these times.’

Abner guessed that, once having started to drink, his father had probably been drinking all day and might well by this time be lying drunk in some hedge at the back of the Royal Oak. Mrs Moseley rebuked him.

‘You’re hard on your father, Abner,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad time for a man when he feels he can’t do nothing. You don’t love and honour your father the way you ought.’

All through the fortnight of Alice’s lying-in Mrs Moseley did her best to keep the peace of the house and to reconcile Abner to the new state of things. She made him feel almost as much at home as he had been in the old days, limping downstairs in the evening to talk to him. Alice was very jealous when she heard them talking below. On most evenings they sat alone in the kitchen together, but sometimes they went out into the strip of garden at the back of the house to a wooden bench screened by a straggling hedge of scarlet runners. They sat there, often in silence, till the sky darkened, reflecting above the western horizon all the furnaces of Mawne; and no one disturbed them, for John Fellows, having once yielded to the bottle, had continued his celebrations of the event. After all, such things didn’t happen very often.

One evening Mrs Moseley brought down the baby for Abner to see. ‘Look at him, Abner,’ she said, ‘bain’t he a pretty dear? bain’t he a little lovee?’

Whatever the baby may have been he certainly wasn’t pretty; but there was something in his helplessness that appealed to Abner’s generosity. In spite of his prejudices he couldn’t see himself being vindictive toward this comical creature. He touched the baby’s downy, wrinkled face with his hand. The creature made a sucking noise, seeking Abner’s fingers with his lips, and at the same moment Tiger, with a snarl, took Abner’s calf between his teeth, and, with the gentlest pressure, threatened to bite him.

‘There you are,’ said Mrs Moseley. ‘Look at jealousy! You and Tiger are a pair, and that’s the truth!’

He laughed, but for all that he didn’t look forward happily to Mrs Moseley’s departure. He felt that the baby would only serve to make Alice more intolerably important. When, on the thirteenth night, a dead-white, incredibly diminished Alice came down to sit for a couple of hours on the sofa, he decided to ask Mrs Moseley to take him into her house as a lodger. ‘The money will come in handy,’ he urged. ‘I could sleep in the washhouse with old Tiger.’

But she wouldn’t think of it. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t like to put your father out, not if it was ever so! John’s been a good friend to me. I don’t know how I could have lived all these years without him.’

‘He’s got a sight more out of yo’ than ever yo’ got out of him!’ Abner grumbled.

But again she said ‘No’—partly, it is true, because she felt that Alice might make it the occasion for a quarrel, and partly because, much as she loved Abner she knew that her strength would not allow her to look after him properly. On many days of late she hadn’t really been fit to do her own housework, and so she fought shy, for Abner’s sake as much as her own, of the arrangement that he suggested. The money, alas! was very tempting.

Abner, who didn’t generally notice things particularly and had always taken people like Mrs Moseley for granted, had not appreciated the changes that were slowly overtaking her. He didn’t see the slight contraction of her brows that had lately become a fixed expression of the pain that wouldn’t let her be. Neither he nor Alice nor John Fellows were aware of Mrs Moseley’s suffering; but the doctor, on his daily visits, saw how gamely she was fighting, and said nothing; for he knew that to abstain from obvious advice was the highest tribute that he could pay to her fortitude. He knew that there was trouble ahead, but he still joked with Mrs Moseley, and she, in answer, returned him a smile that struck him as particularly sweet in this plain old woman, making excuse for the reproach that remained unspoken. In the end, Abner, piqued at her refusal, quarrelled with her.

‘Any one ‘d think I was likely to be a nuisance,’ he said.

Mrs Moseley shook her head. She nearly told him all her reasons against his plan, but when she came to speak of them her lips trembled. She knew that she couldn’t keep up much longer. On the fifteenth day she left Hackett’s Cottages. Alice, who paid her the agreed ten shillings from a leather purse that she kept wrapped up in a handkerchief under her pillow, thought it rather shabby of her not to offer to stay longer. ‘You’d think it ‘d be the least she could do after all your kindness,’ she said to her husband. John Fellows, not to be buttered with flattery, merely grunted.

It took Mrs Moseley more than an hour to walk the mile home. The doctor passing in his trap, saw her resting on a doorstep in the Stourton Road. He pretended not to recognise her, but scribbled a note on his list that she was to be visited in the afternoon. Toward evening he stumped up the crooked stairs and stood at the bottom of her bed looking at her with a curious smile on his lips. She knew it was no good making excuses.

‘Let’s have a look at it,’ he said. And then: ‘Well, my dear, this means six weeks in bed. You know that, don’t you? Ten shillings’ worth, eh?’

Mrs Moseley, conscious of the fact that it was worth a good deal more than ten shillings, said nothing. If he only realised what a blessed relief it was to her to be off her feet again!

When Alice ‘came downstairs’ again, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Abner had never known her so studiously charming. From the first it was as if she smiled: ‘For goodness’ sake let us forget what has happened and make a new start!’ and he couldn’t very well refuse to meet her. At the same time he found it difficult to conceal his suspicions that she was getting at him in some covert, female way. The situation would have been easier to handle if Alice hadn’t been a trifle pale and interesting. She didn’t pick up very quickly, and now, of course, in addition to the ordinary housework she had to look after the baby, who was already suffering from its mother’s dietetic indiscretions. Like many thin young women Alice could never conquer her inclination for sweets and for vinegar, and as a consequence the child was noisy and irritable. Her housework went to the wall, and in despair she turned to Abner to help her out. Nothing could have been sweeter than her temper, and though he didn’t believe in it he couldn’t help being sorry for her, and did what she asked him. As a matter of fact, he was already a little interested in the baby. The smallness of its limbs and the timid uncertainty of its movements fascinated him. He regarded it with a certain benignant curiosity, much as he might have looked at a nestling taken from a hedge in April.

Of course Alice was feeding her child at the breast. If Abner came into the kitchen in the middle of this performance she would turn round quickly and take the baby upstairs or out into the washhouse, blushing. Abner wondered why she did this. Other women weren’t so sensitive. Sometimes he would pass a couple of them standing at their garden gates gossiping and feeding their babies at the same time. He had never taken any notice of them. Nobody else took any notice of them. There was something in Alice’s blushes that embarrassed him unreasonably. Afterward he asked himself why this should be; but when next he saw Alice hiding her white breast he blushed himself.

The new relation was very curious. If it hadn’t been for Abner’s profound distrust of her they might even have become intimate. It was no good for Alice to pretend that she wasn’t lonely. In spite of all her pride in being a married woman and the mother of a family’s beginning, she couldn’t conceal the fact that since the baby’s birth her husband took very little notice of her. It was as if he had said: ‘Now that I’ve done my duty by the nation and given you something to play with you can just attend to my comforts without bothering me.’ He had lately transferred his custom from the Greyhound to the Lyttleton Arms. A shorter walk at closing time. So far he had never maltreated Alice, but she knew very well that she couldn’t now play him the tricks that had pleased him in their courting days.

So, from being with her husband like a little girl in school, with Abner she behaved like a schoolgirl released, chattering, eager and friendly. It puzzled him, for he had never had a sister and didn’t understand the creature in the least. Her flatteries and sudden kindnesses surprised him every bit as much as her spurts of temper. In each case she seemed equally childish, particularly on days when she had been too busy to do her hair and wore it in a honey-coloured pigtail at the back. Then, there was another Alice who could assert with something very near to dignity the fact that she was mistress of the house; and another, blushing Alice, before whom he too had blushed.

On the whole, however, her most obvious feature was her kindness. In the evening, when Abner came home dirty from the pit, he would find the soap-suds waiting for him and tea laid ready on the kitchen table. Alice, as likely as not, would be bathing the baby, who already showed a native sturdiness in spite of his mother’s indiscretions. While Abner ate his tea she would talk to the baby in a low, cooing voice, which she was evidently convinced would fetch him. From time to time in the middle of these whispers, she would look up sideways to where Abner sat munching bread and butter with the sunlight in his hair. Abner, who knew that he was good-looking, and was now a little conscious of his manly superiority, took no notice of her.

And yet, in the end, he couldn’t help being dragged into the atmosphere of intimacy which her small attentions created. Grudgingly he was forced to admit that she had changed for the better. He was now old enough to be flattered too. They became almost good friends, and only Abner’s native cautiousness prevented a complete reconciliation. Alice knew this. She knew the shy spirit with which she had to deal, but was happy to feel that she had accomplished so much already. Somewhere in the back of her mind she suspected that a time might come in which she would rely on Abner’s strength to protect her and her baby. Some day she might need his help. It was of John Fellows, her husband, that she was afraid.

This new relation, Abner thought, was all very well. Still, just because they had patched up their old quarrel, they needn’t necessarily be always together. He wasn’t going to abandon his friend, Joe Hodgetts, and Tiger for the sake of feminine small talk. Nor did he mean to forsake Mrs Moseley, at whose house the dog still slept. Those early autumn evenings were great times for Tiger. Abner knew of a dozen fields in which he could be certain of putting up a hare.

It annoyed Alice to see him so eager to get away just when she wanted him most. She knew that he went in to see Mrs Moseley. She told herself that she had always hated the old woman, even before she had been forced on her by her husband. One evening when Abner was hurrying away after tea she called him back.

‘Where are you going, Abner?’

‘Down town.’

‘You’m going to Mrs Moseley’s.’

‘And why shouldn’t I go to Mrs Moseley’s? You can’t stop me!’

‘Stay with us to-night, Abner,’ she coaxed.

Abner only laughed at her. Then she flew into a passion, standing up white and trembling at the side of the table.

‘How can you go to Mrs Moseley’s?’ she cried. ‘Who’s Mrs Moseley, I should like to know? You’re all cracked on your Mrs Moseley, you and your father! That fat old woman in her nasty smelly house! And you didn’t ought to leave me when I want you. You didn’t ought to! I’m your mother . . ‘

‘Oh, you’m my mother, are you?’ Abner burst into a laugh. ‘That’s bloody funny, that is!’

‘Oh, you and your swearing . . .’ she cried.

He didn’t wait to hear any more. When he was gone she fell down on her knees beside the table and sobbed with her head in her hands: a frail, pathetic figure with her hair in curling rags. Her sobs woke the baby, whose cradle had been carefully placed in a draught between the open door and the fireplace.

‘Oh, you now!’ she cried, rocking the cradle roughly. She might easily have upset it. Then, suddenly repenting, she picked up her son tenderly, and hugging him to her breast, buried her sobs in his downy face.