by Neil Hegarty
And something else too: if the Lord made floods – and He did, because there had been a reading about it, in church – then he must have wanted things to be in the floods: wood, and cats and dogs, and even dead girls, even if Harry’s mum wouldn’t agree. And something else, that glinted in his memory: the brightest shine of yellow, a golden yellow like the sun, from the stained glass above the altar, above the vicar talking about the flood.
But there was no flood today.
Just the Isle of Dogs, and the early sun, and the river now all of a sudden not brown but yellow. That was really why he remembered the stained glass, was it? Yellow like twinkling gold. A few boats in the river, but no ships; the ships going, and the grey wharves emptier, now; and Dad had to leave the house earlier, and go further, and still no work, Mum said, when they get to where they’re going, maybe; and coming back hang-dog.
Harry’s dad had a different kind of job, an office job: Harry’s family was lucky, so everyone said.
Two stoves.
‘Nothing today?’ – so his mum would say.
‘The building sites tomorrow,’ his dad would say. ‘Good money there,’ he would say. Said yesterday. In the past, in the summer, they would be off to Kent, hopping: but the hops brought in too little money now, when there was no money to be had elsewhere. Someone else would have to do the hops, from now on. So even less green, now, and no more sheep to hear bleating in the fields, the green pastures, before the sun rose. They’d sounded like little babies, tiny little things out there in the darkness, calling for their mums. ‘I hear a baby, Mum,’ he said, one time in Kent, ‘is there a baby out there?’ A baby was lost, somewhere in the fields. ‘Hush, Johnny,’ his mum said. ‘It’s a sheep, it only sounds like a baby, it isn’t lost at all,’ and he would listen and shiver a little under his blanket; but he would always go back to sleep.
All that was over, now.
The building sites: and his mum nodded.
‘My dad’s a river man,’ John liked to say. ‘And my grandad before him.’
‘His heart’s breaking,’ his mum said. She meant his dad. She never said it when his dad was in the house. They needed the money.
The river, though, it was always here. He sat on the warm foreshore with Harry, digging into the shingle with a long white branch. And the sky was there, it was everywhere, it was bigger than everything else.
Harry went home first, to help with the blacking of their two stoves.
Later, John walked back slowly, alone. What had they done, all morning? Nothing very much: they skimmed stones into the water, and they fished branches from the Quaggy. Netting on the foreshore, and bottles with the glass worn smooth, and scraped into a misty silver; and rusted cans. And oily tidewrack with bubbles that you could burst with a pop. This, and that. Flotsam and jetsam, his dad said it was all called, once, and, well, you could do worse with a morning.
When Harry left, John fished out the paper, the charcoal, and drew what he saw. Black slashes on brown paper. But nobody would see. It was a secret.
‘No dogs today?’ Gran asked at dinnertime.
‘No dogs,’ he told her. ‘But the river was nice,’ and she nodded.
4
‘That was when it started,’ he told Stella years later, in the close darkness of Mildred’s. The place was as black as Satan’s waistcoat: so his mother would have put it, and he liked it that way. Smoke from a thousand cigarettes, hanging like a river fog. Sometimes he liked a place out of which the colour and light had been leached. It set his mind at rest.
‘What?’ Stella said. This was early on, before she accustomed herself to the ways in which his thoughts and speech moved: jumping here and there, like a hare in the grass. It took some getting used to, she said mildly.
‘The river, the sky, the whole – ensemble.’
‘Ensemble,’ Stella murmured, and the plush banquette bounced and quivered a little as she snuggled into him. She was no twig, she was a composite of beautiful layers, she was an ensemble herself, she was delighted with herself and her shape. A little gleam from somewhere, from God knows where, caught and refracted on bevels – for Mildred was fond of her mirrors, if not of light to shine on them, and a whole series of them hung on the walls of this smoky room – and this splinter of light caught in her eye too, and gleamed out. ‘Tell me about the ensemble,’ Stella said. ‘What was it like?’
What was it like? John remembered the sky reaching up, a vast vertical that dwarfed and diminished London, and the river, and the creek, and the empty wharves. Blue, in his mind’s eye: a quivering blue in the gathering heat of a summer morning in London – and the river golden in the light.
‘It was everything I wanted,’ he told her in the darkness. ‘If I could capture the light,’ he said, ‘I knew I would be happy.’ Stella was silent: she understood; surely she would always understand. He drank. ‘That was my mind made up.’
It was made up, over many days, mornings, evenings. Later, he would cruise the galleries: London in fog, London as Venice, Nocturnes: and then on and on, deeper into the adventure. He was not the only one: far from it. They were all on the same quest, maybe, to capture the light. But hardly any of them would make it. He would make it.
‘And I will,’ he told Stella, and felt her nod beside him. The banquette shivered. ‘I bloody well will, too.’
‘Black as Satan’s waistcoat,’ Stella repeated. He must have said it aloud, had he? ‘That was one of your mum’s sayings, wasn’t it?’
‘It was. Her own mum was from the North. My gran. She made the best of it, but I think she was lost, you know, adrift, on the flood. London, Deptford, the whole bloody place, and all she wanted was to go home.’
‘Which was impossible,’ Stella said.
‘Which was bloody impossible. So she had to make the best of it.’ His gran hadn’t been much of a talker, nor his own mum: but both of them had something about them. A way with language. Some intangible thing they had passed on, he felt: a way of looking at the world that made him feel rich.
Along with a freight of grief and rootlessness, a dreadful heart-stopping homesickness that never could be eased. He knew all this now – though God Almighty, it had taken him long enough.
And Stella. What a great woman to have in his life, the ballast when all the other ballast was gone.
Although, Stella thought she had him, that she could see into his heart. But she was wrong, there. He set a limit on such things.
‘So you started off with black,’ Stella said, and her voice was musing in the darkness, ‘and you worked towards the light. Is that it?’
He nodded, although perhaps she wouldn’t see this in Mildred’s darkness. ‘That’s about it.’
They’d slipped out of the house onto darkness on Regina Road. John had shaved for the first time that morning: a straight razor, his dad watching, guiding, laughing a little, not unkindly. ‘You can puff your cheek out a bit, that helps,’ he’d said, and ‘now, a nice tight stretch on your neck, go easy, you don’t want to cut your throat,’ and ‘slow around your lips,’ and ‘your nose,’ and ‘your ears, that’s the boy, good lad,’ proud as anything, John could tell, and then they’d stepped in and he’d showed himself off, and his mum had looked and nodded, a shining of tears in her eyes, and his dad had clapped an arm around his shoulders. Two men in the house, now.
And now black night, and John had strapped lengths of rough hessian sack onto his boots – for the treads were worn to nothing, and he needed something for purchase, Mum said, on the snow – and his dad had his big boots that would take him anywhere and then home again. And now they walked, gingerly enough, past the house where Harry had lived, with the door knocker shaped like a dolphin, the house that was empty now, and turned right onto the High Street and through the wiggle of dark roads and lanes to the Thames.
Father and son. His dad hadn’t wanted to miss this. ‘You don’t mind if I tag along, son, do you?’ – and John had shaken his head. No, he didn’t mind.
; This was something to share with Stella: his dad, his mum, the house, the ice. The light in the sky, in the city, welling up and shining blue on the ice: this was something he was able to share.
No moon, but the snow and the ice. No light from the dark tangle of lanes and alleys behind him – but the light would be no trouble. He knew that London itself would lend him the light.
‘Stay close to the shore, the two of you,’ said his mum, and she went to the window as she spoke, and looked across the road to the black, lightless house opposite, the black lightless houses to its left and right. They had withdrawn even the street lamps, now, and the blackness must have hurt her eyes as she stood there, for she soon enough let the net and the curtains fall, and retreated to the fire. ‘You know what the ice is like.’ She herself kept far away from the ice: too many stories from Gran of dead boys and dead young men, plunging through the ice on this lake and that lake, peat-brown, in Northumberland long ago. Gran was gone, but the stories lingered. But John was stretched now, he was growing out of his clothes month by month, he was past telling what to do – and the paper said, besides, that the river was safe.
As for Alfred, his mum said, talking aloud: that was a case of like son, like father. She wasn’t going to waste her breath trying to stop him.
‘Safe as houses,’ his dad said. And, ‘Stop worrying, woman.’
The ice was piled up against the foreshore. That was the thing: the wind and the currents and the rest of it: they drove the ice and raised it high, and it was no good for skating. It was for clambering over, close to shore; and – in spite of what the paper said – John was none too keen to venture further out; for he had listened to his gran too, and picked up on her horror. And his dad was canny: he understood the river, he understood the water, he even understood the ice – even the ice, although nobody had seen such ice, nobody had seen the Thames like this. So they stood by the mounds of ice, and looked out across the expanse of ice. Out there it was smoother: they watched the skaters – but again, no temptation to join them, to clamber over the masses of ice and into the middle of the river. A deep horror kept John back. And now, the light was different again: plucked from the darkness, just a gleam here and there on the rutted and piled ice; and over it all a fitful blue London glow.
The skaters whisked and turned. A toboggan too, a rough sled – made of a piece of wood and a couple of lengths of metal, but fit enough for purpose – shared around. Young men, and girls; and younger boys: voices called and squealed across the ice, their breath smoked, the ice seemed to him to shift a very little, as though it were a vast raft, and to sigh, and squeak, and settle again. He watched. He was aware of his dad, watching; aware of his smoking breath, of the light. He would not join in; it was better to watch. The voices were joyous, giddy – even the men had lost the run of themselves, out in this strange glimmering once-in-a-lifetime world of ice and blue light and darkness.
‘Would you look at that,’ his dad said.
And suddenly, a change in the voices: from joy to fear in a moment. He was gripped by a sense of horror – but also of exhilaration. His gran would have snuffed the air and understood at once: a skater had slipped through a gap and vanished into the black water. He stood amid the piled ice, his breath white in the air, London sending its eerie blue light into the high sky, listening to the calling voices. To be in on a death: this was not new, but it had never happened in such surroundings, in such an otherworldly setting. Would they die at once? – or would the cold take them quite slowly? From feet to legs, from hands to arms, from thighs slowly up into the abdomen, the ice closing in on the heart and at last on the brain? This would be the way. They would be aware of death closing in on them. They would see the blue-black sky, maybe, last of all as they vanished below the water, and then it would be all black, and then – nothing.
‘False alarm,’ his dad said, and exhaled suddenly.
John blinked, and looked. It was – nothing, false alarm. The voices turned again to laughter. He gazed out across the ice, and saw the rough slab of sled thrown up into the air, crashing on the ice. A metal bar had come loose from the sled; it was fit for nothing.
His heart sank a little, though. The prospect of a thrill of death, now whisked away.
‘So, all part of the ensemble,’ Stella murmured in the darkness. ‘Well, I can understand that.’
They had talked about it, many times. Colour, and the absence of it. It was the kind of conversation that John could never have with the others – the students now looking around at London, and wondering how they might manage. Winklepickers and tight cords and jeans, a de rigueur uniform of black, black, black: at least he could discuss with such people the texture and assets and virtues of the colour black, could he not?
So Stella had said once, laughing, knowing that there was but one answer to her question.
‘Well,’ John said, ‘yes. I mean: yes, it was a—’
‘Thrill,’ Stella said. ‘Death, right there and then.’
‘Yes.’
‘Under the lights,’ Stella murmured. The banquette juddered a little as she sat up, animated now. ‘The way you talk about black, you have them in the palm of your hand. And you work with your blacks and your greys so well. But when you talk to me, it’s like your world is floodlit. Even at night, the world is blue: and in the daytime, it’s all gold and silver and green. So, why not work with colour?’
With colour. Yes: exactly.
‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘You could.’
‘Not yet. I couldn’t do it yet.’
‘You could do it right now.’
Back home, on Regina Road, the light had leaked from the downstairs window; the fish door knocker was dull and filmed. Difficult not to feel chilled as he walked along – even here, on this familiar road that was being stripped around him, lined by houses being picked off one by one – and he jumped in the door.
‘Murder a cup of tea,’ his dad said.
Inside, the place was warm: but she had been crying again, and now she was sunk into her chair by the fire.
‘We’ll be damned if we’re moving anywhere,’ she had said in the summer – but they would be moving, now; something had shifted. The pressing darkness was too much for them.
‘What about the river, then?’ she said now, with an effort. His father’s long legs were stretched out to the flames; his stockinged feet wiggled in the heat. She said, ‘Many people out there?’
There were lots, John told her: lots and lots, a great crowd. ‘But too cold to stay long.’
‘What about the ice?’
‘Thick enough. It was thick enough.’
‘Just thick enough?’ – and now John shook his head, and laughed, and described the hills of ice, a sight to behold. His dad nodded; his stockinged feet wiggled and wiggled. Who knew, he said, when they would ever see such a thing again?
‘But safe, everyone felt safe. The ice must be as thick as anything. You could tell that they all felt safe.’
‘That’s right,’ his dad said.
Safe as houses, John nearly said, but closed his mouth just in time. They felt as safe as houses, out there on the blue-shining ice. Death was far away.
His mum said nothing.
5
The first letters had arrived in the spring of that year. The season was stamped into his memory: there had been floods upriver, and April arrived with a tumble of dead farm animals and dogs on the Deptford foreshore. ‘Tory animals,’ his dad said, ‘come down from Oxfordshire. All we need is a few of their MPs to join them, and we’ll be in clover.’ With the dead animals came blue spring skies, and bluebells in Greenwich Park, when they went walking one sunny Sunday, and then the letters.
These came as no surprise: even before the war, the County Council had been minded to demolish half of Deptford. That had been the plot; the Germans had put it all on hold, but even the Germans couldn’t cancel it for ever. The place was ‘too much,’ said his mother, ‘for all those chaps up ther
e at the council,’ and she waved a hand in an indeterminate direction, ‘sitting in their offices and cooking up schemes to spend money and keep themselves busy.’
The shops on the High Street stayed open until eleven o’clock on Friday nights, and ten o’clock on Saturday and Sunday nights, and until eight every other night of the week; the stalls stayed open even longer; and the pubs – and there were dozens, throngs, masses of pubs – longest of all; and the street was alive day and night. The war years were far away, the place was thriving again. Costermongers and fishmongers, butchers and button shops and beaderies, hosieries and confectioners and brothels, Methodist churches and Congregationalist churches that opened their doors wide and welcomed all comers: they were all to be found on the High Street. And their own church, with its radiant yellow stained glass, that John liked to slip in to look at, now and again.
And now the postman, delivering letters that nobody wanted to see. ‘The Lord give me strength,’ his mum liked to say, and she said it more and more frequently, though the Lord’s ears seemed to be pinned tightly closed just at the moment.
‘Too much,’ Mum said. The floods waned, leaving even more jetsam on the foreshore, and then the summer passed, and with the beginning of autumn came an opportunity to put on her camel coat on Saturday nights and link her husband and swank with the best of them: along Regina Road and onto the High Street to join the crowds. Sunset earlier every Saturday, the lights brighter, the smells and voices sharper in the cooling air. This was the life.
It was too much life for some.
‘Where did you go?’
Mum and Dad had their various haunts – but it was the Prince Regent, this time, for their beers and their sherries.
‘Did you see anyone?’
They saw everyone: where to start? John was growing out of his clothes and into his razor blades, but he was still too young to hang around the Prince Regent. Another year would make the difference: but until then, he had to taste this life through stories, from far away. He liked to hear about the captured moments, the glimpses of lives, and Mum was adept at capturing them for him.