‘Where d’you think?’ He had unfolded his collar and was dragging a tie round his neck now. ‘Where d’you think? I said she hadn’t to go out, didn’t I? I said what I’d do if she did, didn’t I? Well, I’m going up there to see the fun and games and add me quota to them. That’s where I’m going…MRS STEVENS!’
‘No, you’re not. Oh, no you’re not. By God, you’re not!’ She was standing in front of him. They seemed to have forgotten the presence of John Palmer.
‘You try an’ stop me. Just try and stop me. Try and stop me hammering her. If I don’t do it the day I’ll do it the morrow. She’s been askin’ for something big for a long time and by God she’s going to get it. I’ll let her see if she can shame me. Runnin’ round naked. By God, I will! I’ll let her see; you wait. You wait, just wait.’
‘She wouldn’t do that, not Brid. Have some sense you silly, dim bugger.’
‘Silly, dim bugger, am I? Silly dim bugger.’ His face had turned a pasty grey and his upper set of false teeth moved in unison as he ground his lower teeth against them. ‘Aye, I’ll have some sense. After all these years, I’ll have some sense. You’ll see what sense I’ll have.’
He was nodding in emphasis at her when John Palmer spoke in a voice different from that which either of them had heard before: there was no laughter in it, no jocular tone, no placating, no quiet reasoning, but a definite quality of authority: it stated his right to have a say in what was to happen to Brid. He said, ‘You won’t touch her. You won’t lay a hand on her.’
‘I won’t, eh?’ Tom Stevens had turned and was eyeing his lifelong pal, and he repeated again, ‘I won’t, eh?’ and John said, ‘You won’t, Tom. You won’t now or at any time. We’ll have this out later, but at this minute I’m going to—’ He was stopped by a knock on the back door and at the same time it was pushed open and his son entered, his whole attitude trigger-sprung for trouble. But he didn’t give his son time to open his mouth; instead, he demanded in a voice of strange authority, ‘You got your bike out back?’
Sandy nodded sharply before saying, ‘What’s this I hear—?’
‘Never you mind what you’ve heard. Get the bike going and come on. Take me to Stockwell Hill.’
Sandy remained rigid. There was nothing more he wanted than to go to Stockwell Hill and see Brid caught red-handed at something or other. Yet he felt he’d be too late for that now, and his sharp wits told him that if he went to the hill and that bloke was there and he spilled the beans there might be trouble. But his dad was acting different, not easygoin’ and laughin’ any more. When he was pushed through the door he wrenched his shoulder from his father’s grasp and snapped, ‘Give over! Who you pushin’ about?’
‘I’ll let you know that an’ all later. Meantime, get that bike goin’, and quick.’
As he growled this order at his son, Tom Stevens’ voice came yelling after him, ‘We’ll see who’s goin’ to deal with this. Who the hell d’you think you are? Don’t forget I’ve still got me rights. Don’t try to take them an’ all off me or you’ll be in for something, mind. Worms turn, you know, worms turn. You mind your own damn business; this is my business and I’ll see to it, and her. You’ll bloody well see I will, at that.’
When he heard the sound of the motorbike starting up he was dragging his coat on, and he turned to Alice where she was standing near the window, her hand across her mouth, and he shouted at her, ‘Nice thing this, isn’t it, eh? Nice thing. One thing after the other over the years I’ve been stripped of, through you and him. Well, this is the showdown, Alice, me girl, this is the showdown. As he said, we’ll talk later, and by God we will an’ all. But he’s not playing God Almighty in this business; I’ve brought her up and to all intents and purposes she’s mine…mine!’ He was now standing close behind Alice, and he dug his forefinger between her ribs so forcibly that her head jerked. But she didn’t move, nor did she speak. ‘I’ve brought her up, haven’t I? To all intents and purposes I’m her father. Aren’t I her father? Go on, tell me I’m her father.’ He waited, and when she made no answer he went on, ‘Well then, I’ll act like her father.’
There came another dig between her ribs, and on this Alice Stevens turned and dashed to the table. She grabbed a knife by the handle, and gripping it in her fist and pointing the blade towards him, she growled, ‘Get out! Get out while you’re able or by God I’ll ram this in you. You sod! I will, mind…I will.’
Slowly he backed a few steps from her. He was checked and evidently a little frightened, but he laughed and said, ‘You would like to, wouldn’t you? Go on then, why don’t you do it?’ For a moment longer he watched the knife trembling in her fist, then he turned on his heel and went out.
When the door closed on him she dropped the knife onto the table, then put her hands to her head for a while before running upstairs and pulling some shoes from the bottom of the cupboard and a coat from the wardrobe. She was pushing her arms into the coat as she ran down the stairs again. Once out of the house, she slowed her running to a quick walk down the road towards Furness’ Garage. She couldn’t wait for a bus, there wasn’t time, and anyway they ran oddly on a Sunday. She would have to get a taxi out to Stockwell Hill before he got there.
‘If he wasn’t one of them, there wasn’t much sense in it, was there? You shouldn’t take it out on Peter for what Paul has done.’
The teacher knew that if he had been in Joe’s place he would have done the same thing, but he couldn’t get over the habit of moralising.
Joe was sitting on the ground again and he was panting, but he said in angry tones, ‘He was one of them; I know him. He’s always trailing after them. They likely sent him back to see what was going on. Or if I’d skedaddled or not. Or perhaps to see if you had gone’—he jerked his head at the teacher—‘so they could come back and try on some of their games.’
‘No; no, I don’t think he came for that. In fact, I think I heard him call out Sandy Palmer’s name.’
‘Yes, he called out all right, but that could be a blind. You don’t know that lot.’
The teacher gave a twisted smile and said with a touch of authority in his voice, ‘I know them. I knew them before you were born.’
Joe’s head drooped, and he swung it slowly from side to side, biting on his lip as he did so, and when he stopped he asked quietly, ‘Do you think he’ll bring them back?’
‘There’s no knowing what he’ll do, but I shouldn’t worry. If they come back there’s always the police to deal with them. You would have let them deal with the matter in the first place if you had taken my advice. But there, come on; are we going in the water or not?’
Joe looked from the man to the woman and then to Brid and back to the man again. The man, he thought, seemed to be running things and he didn’t know now whether he liked it or not. He could recognise in him the teacher, ordering, organising, setting a kind of life pattern. He supposed the man had done this so often that he couldn’t get out of it. If he hadn’t felt so worked up and worried, and his body hadn’t felt so painful and his head so muzzy, he thought that he might have answered, ‘If you want to go in, go in. Leave us be, will you?’ yet at the same time he felt that he owed this man and woman something, and it made him rise to his feet.
The woman now laughed and said, ‘The pins held, anyway.’ Then, in the manner of a young girl, which did not suit either her figure or her age, she ran with a leaping movement towards the bank top, and the man, after dividing a smile between Joe and Brid, followed her, but more slowly.
Joe now looked at Brid. Her face was even whiter than it had been, if that were possible. It was so white he was forced to say, ‘Don’t worry, they won’t try anything on. As the man says, if they do we’ll get the pollis. Come on.’ He half extended his hand towards her.
She didn’t take it, or move, but she said, ‘I’m frightened, Joe. Charlie Talbot’s spiteful; he could bring them back, as you said.’
He moved closer to her and was about to deny the assumption, which he fel
t in his own mind was really inevitable, when his glance was caught by the discoloured mark on her neck. It was a disjointed mark, stopping and starting over a patch of about six inches, dark blue in the middle and red at the ends. The red spread down to the strap of her bathing costume. He brought his eyes up towards her face and he said quietly, ‘That’s fresh.’
‘It’s nothing.’ She hitched the strap carelessly over the mark as if to demonstrate that it caused her no pain.
‘Who did it?’
‘I…I…’ She jerked her head rapidly and brought out, ‘I fell against the bedpost.’
‘That’s not good enough. Who did that?’ He lifted his finger and pointed to her neck.
‘Joe—’ she was looking into his face, ‘I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve got to talk to somebody. It’s about me father. We’ll talk after…Look, let’s go and have that swim now. They’ll only come back for us. They’re trying to be kind. They’re nice. Let’s go.’
‘All right, all right. Have it your own way.’ His body, for the moment, seemed to reclaim its old strength. The fact that she was evidently frightened, that someone had hit her and that she wanted to talk about her father made him in some odd way feel old, and responsible; her need of him was like a salve on the humiliations of this past hour. He said, ‘All right, but we won’t stay in long, ’cos me mother’s expecting us home to tea.’
‘Me as well?’
‘Of course…I’ve told her about you.’
Her lids drooped slowly, then she raised them quickly and her eyes held his with a searching look for a second. Then she turned from him and walked towards the edge of the clearing.
When they reached the bank top, the man and woman were already in the water; and when Brid waved a hand, the woman shouted, ‘Hurry along! It feels grand.’
Joe helped Brid down the bank, and then they picked their way over the sand-strewn rocks to the edge of the tide.
The water felt wonderfully cool as it flowed round Joe’s legs, and when it was above his knees he turned to Brid and actually smiled, saying, ‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’
She nodded back at him, but did not answer his smile.
‘How far can you swim?’ he asked her.
‘Not very far. The width of the baths…back and forth. I’ve never tried the length yet.’
‘You can always swim further in the sea; it’s the salt that keeps you up.’
He went under and when his head broke the surface again he stood up and squeezed the water from his hair. It was as the man had said, he felt better already. His body had stopped aching and the burn, after smarting unbearably for a moment, had ceased to pain him. It was as if the salt water had cauterised it; it felt healed.
Brid stood still in the water. She felt reluctant to go further and let it cover her. She looked towards the man and woman and a section of her mind wrenched itself from the fears that were filling it and paused to deal with them. She watched them diving up and down like porpoises. They were laughing and making a lot of noise, as young people did. It was odd, she thought, them going on like that; it wasn’t right somehow, for they were old. Well, they were over forty. And it was odd an’ all how they had tacked themselves on to them. Yet she realised that if the man hadn’t come when he did Sandy Palmer and the others would surely have come back right away. She shivered as if from the coolness of the water. Charlie Talbot would be home now. Would he tell Sandy Palmer? And would Sandy Palmer go and tell her father? No, she didn’t think he would, somehow, because if there was any explaining to do there would be trouble for him all right. She looked at Joe now. He was swimming with jerky breaststrokes. Joe was nice. He was more than nice. She wanted to think about Joe but her mind would not stay on him; it was back on Sandy Palmer again. Once she had started thinking of Sandy Palmer she couldn’t stop. Joe, her mother and father and Uncle John were, for the moment, blotted out. What more would he have done if she hadn’t come up the cliff at that minute? Eeh, God! She would never be able to get rid of the picture of Joe’s stretched body. Sandy Palmer was rotten, filthy. If he came near her ever again she would scream, even if it was out in the street. She had a picture of herself clawing his face. She could see the flesh coming off in strips. Shocked at the ferocity of her thinking, her body responded and she plunged away into the water until it was almost up to her shoulders. Joe came swimming towards her, and as he straightened up and stood in front of her she noticed that his oxters weren’t even covered with the water, yet their heads were on a level. They were practically of the same height. He had rather a large head, had Joe. It was a beautiful head. He had beautiful eyes too, and she liked his voice. She found she wanted to cry and her lips trembled.
‘Come on. Come on.’ His voice was very low and coaxing. ‘Look, there’s nothing to be frightened about any more. I tell you there isn’t. They won’t dare show up again.’
She shook her head and lowered her eyes to the miniature waves that were dancing between them.
‘Is it something else that’s worrying you?’ She jerked her chin to the side, almost onto her shoulder and she was looking towards the man and woman again. Side by side, they were swimming towards them, and with a deep note of irritation in her voice, she said, ‘I wish they would go. I wish they would leave us alone.’
He had his back to the couple and he said, ‘Aye yes, so do I. But look, we’ll soon be on our way home. Come on, have a swim for a little. It’ll make you feel good. It has me. You’ve no idea. I wouldn’t have believed it.’
‘Take the plunge!’ It was the man shouting. He, too, was standing upright now and addressing Brid. ‘If you don’t go right under you’ll catch cold. You shouldn’t stand about even on a day like this, you should go under. Come on, we’ll race you to the rocks. What d’you say? All of us. Let’s see you do your stuff.’ His voice was loud and jovial and seemed much larger than himself. His wife stood abreast of him. Her short hair and face were running with water. At this moment it resembled a boy’s face, a boy’s head. She too addressed herself to Brid. ‘Come on,’ she said; ‘breaststroke. Can you do the breaststroke?’
For answer, Brid, moving to the side of Joe and not waiting for any signal, dropped passively into the water and began to swim. The three of them watched her for a moment.
Her movements were slow and her style was good. Then Joe was following her. Then the man and woman, and now they were all swimming towards the rocks that looked like a half circle of schoolboys’ caps bobbing on the horizon.
Joe turned his head to look at Brid. She was swimming steadily, slowly. She had said she could do only the width of the baths, but from the sureness of her strokes he guessed she had been modest or had compared herself with some of the top-notch swimmers. She was a better swimmer than himself, that was sure, or the man and woman.
‘We’ll sit on the rocks.’ It was the man calling.
When they reached the peaked black caps they hung on, one after the other. There had been no effort made to race by any of them. The man, last in grabbing at the slippery surface, shouted as if they were all miles away: ‘It’s going down fast. It’ll show the flat ones shortly. We’ll be able to lie here and sunbathe.’
Joe became irritated again. He wished the man would shut up. He always seemed to be talking. As he clung on to the rock he felt himself being forcibly swayed this way and that by the pressure of the water dragging through the rocks. When the pressure pushed him up he could see right out to the far horizon, or where he guessed it to be, for now the whole surface of the sea was a shimmering sheet of light which hurt his eyes. He looked along at Brid. She was about three yards away from him, and she too was moving up and down, and she too was looking towards the horizon. He was thinking how nice it would have been, in spite of all that had passed, if they had been here alone together. And yet he knew he should be grateful to this couple. God knows what might have happened to him if the man hadn’t come along. His thoughts at this point took on the same pattern as had Brid’s. They would likely have com
e back and started on him again and made Brid watch. Oh, he knew Sandy Palmer was capable of anything. Anything. He had heard a lot about badness, real badness. He had only to listen to the men in the pit talking during the break time. If any of the old soldiers got together it was always about the war and the things the Germans did. And the things that some of the Russians did to the Germans. But—and he had thought of this before—they never talked about what the English did to the Germans.
No, they never talked about that. They talked as if they, the English, were a race without human frailties, without such reactions as bitterness, hate, and wickedness. He knew that they liked to think of themselves in that light. Decent blokes, too. He had said as much to his father once, and his father had said, ‘Put a gun into any man’s hand and he’s no longer a human being. You’ve just got to see what they do to animals. Nice fellas who say they love birds and get all sentimental when they see them flying against a dawn sky. Then bang—bang! Down they come. But that’s nothing to wartime, ’cos then they’ve a licence for killing men, and the more poor buggers on the other side they blow to hell the more applause and medals they get. In peacetime you would be locked up and hung for the things you get praise for in a war. You’re a bad bugger if you kill a man without a licence. War is a funny thing, and you can take it from me, Joe, that when Johnny Hertherington and Fred Cooper start thinking back an’ talkin’, they are likely shutting their eyes to the things they did themselves. I was in the war and I know…I know. Even after the peace was signed, the things that happened…my God, the things that happened! It’s circumstances and chance that bring out the rottenness in a man.’
Could you blame circumstances and chance for the things that were in Sandy Palmer? His dad had been wise, but could he have found an explanation for Sandy Palmer? He doubted it. Without war, without chance or circumstance, Sandy Palmer would be bad, really bad, vile. He’d make his chance. He’d make the circumstances. His mother would have said the devil was in Sandy Palmer, and my God, she could be right.
The Bonny Dawn Page 11