Road To The Coast

by John Harris

  ‘By God, it’d better be.’

  Ash stared down at his expensively cut suit, already smudged with dust, and at the thin shirt he wore which wasn’t going to keep out much cold. His mind was as blank as a London fog when he searched it for a good excuse he might offer as a reason to resist her. Blast the woman, he thought. Blast all women! They always managed to throw a spanner in the works, somehow, just when you weren’t expecting it, just when you’d got the soft lights and sweet music all laid on.

  ‘What about her?’ he asked, indicating Teresa.

  ‘We can sleep close together,’ Teresa said helpfully. ‘That should keep us warm.’

  Ash couldn’t resist a grin at Grace over the boot of the car. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, pretending to give way. ‘Perhaps that puts a different complexion on things.’

  ‘And perhaps it doesn’t,’ she pointed out coldly. ‘I don’t go in for funny business.’

  His grin died. ‘God, what a prospect!’ he said. ‘I thought my camping-out days had finished when I handed in my little jack-knife.’

  ‘It’ll be a good opportunity for you to remember it,’ she said calmly, refusing to be put out by his sarcasm. ‘I’ll bet you were a good boy scout. I’ll bet there wasn’t an egg safe on a nest, for miles around.’

  ‘This is a hell of a place to play at Tarzan,’ he said bitterly. ‘Cold as the grave and not a drop of booze within sight.’

  ‘I can manage without the booze,’ she said. ‘How about it?’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ he said reluctantly, giving way at last. ‘Have it your own damn way.’

  ‘Gosh!’ The child’s relief and delight were obvious immediately and she hugged them both quickly.

  Aware of Grace smiling triumphantly, he looked from one to the other of them, his head moving like a baited animal’s.

  ‘Let’s hire a tent,’ he said furiously. ‘Let’s do the thing properly.’ He pause and scowled at them. ‘God,’ he concluded in a sudden flash of bitterness. ‘It’s enough to poison the atmosphere of Eden!’

  The words were torn out of him in his disappointment. All day he had looked forward to a comfortable hotel with a good meal inside him and the chance to get a few drinks into Grace. He suspected she was the sort who liked a few drinks and that underneath that guarded manner of hers was a full-blooded woman who might even have enjoyed a man’s advances towards her.

  He threw down the knife he’d been using and lit a cigarette, the blood still running down his hand.

  ‘All we want is a brass band,’ he said, ‘and a few roundabouts and hot chestnut stalls to make it a real jamboree.’

  He looked up as he saw Grace standing beside him. She was holding a small roll of bandage and a pair of nail scissors she had taken from her bag.

  ‘That’s a nasty cut,’ she said mildly without meeting his eyes. ‘Better let me wrap it up.’

  His eyes lifted to her face and she smiled slightly, in a way that was at once kindly and maternal yet full of a woman’s understanding of man.

  For a moment, he was on the point of telling her to go to hell and stamping away in a fury, then he took out a handkerchief and wiped the blood away and meekly held out his hand towards her.

  Five

  The fire made an orange glow in the night, spreading out and round the old car, tinting with gold the underside of the willows. A few lazy sparks drifted upwards, indistinguishable from the fire-flies, and between the cane brakes the glint of water picked up the gold and reflected it to the stars that were jammed round the Southern Cross like lanterns in the indigo sky. Somewhere behind them on the invisible wind, there was a hint of the river’s whisper; and the road, the long straight road they had traversed during the day, stretched away into the vast empty darkness, dim and touched with the moving shadows cast by the flames.

  Ash sat on a log, poking at the embers with a stick, the light playing on his face as he watched Grace combing her hair, enjoying the curves of her figure and the lift of her breasts as she worked. In his nostrils was the sharp sweet scent of green wood burning, and the night smell of the earth and the river. He dusted his hands, knocking off the flakes of dry bark they’d picked up as he’d broken the sticks for the fire, and glanced towards the rear seat of the car where the child moved restlessly in her sleep at the sound, fidgeting at the unaccustomed discomfort.

  ‘Didn’t take her long to drop off,’ he said.

  ‘She was tired,’ Grace lowered her arms for a moment and smiled at him.

  He tossed another piece of wood on to the fire and lit a cigarette. He had accepted the decision to stay where they were for the night now, had accepted the presence of Grace and the child, too, and for a moment he even felt curiously content. He held out the cigarette packet, then while he was offering a light, they heard the sound of gunfire in the distance, three of four dull thuds that brought Grace slowly to her feet, listening.

  ‘Where is it?’ she whispered, as though she were afraid of being overheard.

  He lifted his head, not troubling to rise. Casually he tossed another stick into the flames before he spoke.

  ‘Down by the river,’ he said. ‘They told me in Flores there might be a bit of a flap along the banks before long.’ He drew on his cigarette thoughtfully for a moment, before he went on. ‘Wonder if we ought to bash straight across country.’

  ‘Would that be difficult?’

  ‘It’d mean crossing two rivers. And they’re bound to guard the crossings. We’d probably be sticking our necks out. This way, if we pick up the ship at Santa Rosa, it’ll take us straight down into the estuary and across to Montevideo without even going ashore. Once you’re aboard, nobody’ll come near you.’

  He spoke with confidence, a traditional English confidence which she thought had long since disappeared with flag-wagging and imperialism. But to Ash’s way of thinking, nobody ever searched a British ship. They never had. He had reached manhood in the days just before the war when “One Englishman equals two Germans, three Frenchmen, four Wops and any amount of niggers” had still been a by-word in his home. Even with the diminution of the Empire and beginning of doubt in the jingoism of Edwardian England, he still instinctively believed that things British were sacred.

  Grace sat down again slowly. ‘Are you sure they’ll take us aboard?’ she asked. ‘From what I’ve seen around here, anything could happen.’

  ‘Sure I’m sure.’ Ash replied without thinking, then he paused, startled for a moment at the unexpected question, and began to wonder. It had never crossed his mind that the captain of the Ballaculish might not want him aboard. He had never in his life before stopped to wonder whether he might be an embarrassment to anyone. He glanced at Grace, feeling disturbing qualms in the pit of his stomach for a second, then he hastened to reassure himself with that transcendent certainty in himself that never failed to come to his aid that all was well. After all, he told himself, he was British. The Ballaculish was British. The captain was British. It was an understood thing that when the bottles were flying, the British stuck together. One for all and all for one and that stuff. Dammit, only a bit of bum-suck spite could get in their way. Besides – and this was the most important factor of all in his eyes when everything was weighed up – he’d greased the appropriate palms in Santa Fé, and a well-greased palm was always a stone bonker when it came to getting things done. Every man had his price. It was one of the first things you learned about life.

  ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘Sure I’m sure.’

  He looked across at Grace. She still didn’t appear to place too much reliance on his confidence but she accepted his opinion at least and, in doing so, seemed to forget her worries, certain that he knew what he was talking about and what he was doing. She stretched luxuriously and yawned.

  ‘God, I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I’ll look like the Wrath of God tomorrow.’ She smiled impulsively. ‘All the same,’ she concluded, ‘I feel a damn sight safer here than in a town.’

  ‘You’re safe all right with me,’ he s
aid.

  She looked at him curiously. ‘You’re a fast operator, aren’t you?’ she observed. There was no malice, no fear, in her words, if anything just a wary sort of respect.

  He grinned with his fox’s eyes, knowing that all the old subterfuges, all the old dodges that usually brought results, would never work with her. ‘I get around,’ he said.

  ‘Are you married?’ She tossed the question at him unexpectedly.

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Women marry you for what you are and then try to mould you into something else. When you’re so mouldy nobody else would look at you, they finally decide they never liked the look of you anyway and run off with the milkman.’

  ‘Not all women.’

  ‘All the women I’ve been around with.’

  ‘I bet they were a fine lot.’

  ‘None of ’em ever complained much that I remember,’ he said blandly, and she had a feeling that he’d always been a little contemptuous and condescending towards the women who’d been unlucky enough to share his life. For a moment she even managed to feel a twinge of sympathy for them. She looked at him for a long time before she spoke again.

  ‘Where are you heading for?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Same as you. The coast. Get across to Montevideo. Fast as I can.’

  ‘Why are you so anxious to avoid BA?’

  ‘No reason at all really,’ he said lightly, not looking at her.

  ‘Come off it,’ she said with an earthy awareness of things that left him naked. ‘Don’t try to pull my leg. What have you been up to?’

  He looked up and, finding himself fixed by those magnificent black eyes, he gave her another grin, that was at once defiant and faintly ashamed.

  ‘Persona non grata,’ he said.

  ‘What’s all that about?’

  ‘I’m unwelcome.’

  ‘You been upsetting the government? It doesn’t seem too hard.’

  He laughed. ‘I wish it were the government. I’d feel safer. They won’t be with us much longer.’

  She said nothing for a moment and began to comb her hair again in short swift strokes, then she looked up at him again, frankly, as though she’d decided she ought to know him better.

  ‘What are you doing in this barmy country anyway?’ she asked. ‘Are you working here?’

  He laughed shortly. ‘I’d need a damn good job,’ he said, ‘to live the way I like to live. It’s always a drawback to have the inclination towards luxury and none of the wherewithal to provide it. Work’s for mugs.’

  ‘Ever thought of trying it?’

  ‘Not me. You have to have concentration and eye-on-the-ball for work. Got to take the gall and the wormwood and the old bitter pill. I always did regard commerce as a bit much.’ He stopped, realizing she was saying nothing but was watching him steadily, and he smiled at her. ‘Sometimes I sell things,’ he said, picking up a stick and tossing it on to the fire.

  ‘What, for instance?’

  ‘Anything. Pigtails to Chinamen. Coals to Newcastle. Born with the gift of the gab. That’s me. Muy elocuente. You want it, we’ve got it. I worked with a Yank called Duffy. We had our headquarters in Cordoba till this lot started. It was full of stuff. DDT for fleas, flies, bugs and beetles. Radio-active underwear for virility. They go big licks on virility in South America. Plutonium tablets for when you’re run down. Tricks and parlour games.’

  He pulled the briefcase towards him and, taking out a set of plastic teeth, stuck them in his mouth so that his features were transformed to an idiotic ugliness.

  ‘Nobby, aren’t they?’ he asked.

  He was curiously pleased when she laughed out loud and heartily, in sheer enjoyment at his tomfoolery, leaning against him in helpless abandonment, so that he felt at last he was getting through to her.

  ‘Blots of ink for the boss’ desk,’ he went on gaily, taking advantage of the sudden friendliness. ‘Letters that give you an electric shock. Mugs with frogs in the bottom. Visiting cards from the cat. Stink bombs. Itching powder. Raspberries for under Aunt Fanny’s cushion that blow elephantine farts when she sits down. I’ve got ’em all.’

  She wiped her eyes and sat up. ‘Wouldn’t have thought there was much of a living in those things, all the same,’ she said shrewdly, the laughter vanished. ‘Bit of a mug’s game for a man like you, isn’t it?’

  ‘In a way,’ he admitted. ‘My old man always fancied I’d take over where he left off. Brass buttons for soldiers’ pants: That’s what he made. The sort that always fell off when you bent down. His family had been doing it for generations in the same crummy street in Birmingham. It knocked a hole in the market when the War Office decided in nineteen-forty-two that an army couldn’t fight while it was using both hands to hold its pants up and switched to plastic jobs. He thought I’d pull it round after the war but I couldn’t see myself as a military outfitter. And besides, by then the family coffers has a hollow booming sound and it’d have required more mental stamina than I possessed to fill ’em up again. I’m not as clever as I look.’

  She looked at the plastic teeth in his hand.

  ‘I used to love those things when I was a kid,’ she said, a look of nostalgia on her face, and he saw her immediately as a bright-eyed child on the concrete pavements with whirling dark hair, her face full of mischief. Only women full of mischief grew up to look like she did, for as she had laughed, he had seen her again as she really was when she hadn’t her guard up, full-blooded, ripe-figured, enjoying the good things of life, food, drink, men, pleasure.

  ‘Couldn’t you have sold those things much better somewhere else?’ she asked. ‘The States for instance? The Yanks love those things. I knew a lot of Yanks. They were always horsing around. Brought me chocolates that went off bang and cigarettes that fizzed’ – she looked curiously at him – ‘what I mean is, this is a funny place to find a man like you, isn’t it?’

  He raised his eyes and smiled. ‘Why? I needed the dough. My cheques were starting to bounce. Don’t like bouncers. Tricky. I needed a job and I’d had one offered. It looks now as though I might need another.’

  There was a veiled suggestion of wariness about the words, as though he didn’t enjoy admitting his humiliation, and it made her hurry to apologize.

  ‘I’m sorry I was nosey,’ she said. ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Help yourself.’ He paused and stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at the flames. The young-boy impression that his red hair gave him slipped away and he looked his age for a moment.

  He lifted his eyes to hers, an unexpected frankness in his face.

  ‘I had big ideas when I was demobbed after the war,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘I wanted something worthwhile.’

  ‘Everybody did, I suppose.’

  ‘Unfortunately I hadn’t the capital to pull it off.’ He chuckled. ‘I’d spent it all before I got it. Boy, did I spend it and did I enjoy it! And as the Old Man had gone bust by that time, I had to try AMGOT, Egypt, those places. I’d got contacts here and there – tried a bit of everything for a while, some of it stuff I shouldn’t have. Borrowed a bit. Had to touch old friends. You know the lark. Came down to selling insurance before I finished. Door to door. Cradle to the grave. Womb to the tomb. Me! Henry Hackforth Ash. In the end I got a job with an export firm. Chap called Willowgreen who’d been in my company helped. Introduced me to the Old Man’s daughter and we promptly got engaged.’ He grinned that wicked grin of his at the memory. ‘It shook him rotten, because he’d had ideas in that direction himself.’

  Grace felt vaguely frightened of him with that wolfish expression on his face and she tried to change the subject.

  ‘Was it a good job?’ she asked.

  ‘If you like that kind of thing. Only I didn’t. Especially after seven years in the army. It made me sick. There was bloody little Willowgreen who’d not managed to make anything more of himself than company clerk doing the big tycoon act, while I was sort of glorified office boy.’

&nb
sp; There was concern and sympathy in Grace’s eyes. ‘Was it hard?’ she asked. ‘After the war, I mean?’

  ‘A bit,’ he admitted. ‘It was so bloody dull.’

  ‘Why? Did you enjoy the war or something?’

  There was a nostalgic look in his eyes for a moment, then he gave her one of those wide grins of his. ‘Between you and me and the bedpost,’ he said, ‘I never had such a good time before or since. I never felt so free in all my life.’

  He tossed away his cigarette, his eyes distant, as he recalled the exhilaration, and the tremendous excitement; the benders that had taken place in the quiet periods; the fighting and the fornicating; the pleasure he’d felt when he’d discovered he’d done something courageous and been given a gong for it; the startled amazement when he’d discovered in Rome that the girl he was romping in bed with was a duchess – a Wop duchess but nevertheless a real, silver-plated, dyed-in-the-wool duchess, who’d taken his corned beef and chocolate and told him with stars in her eyes that she’d never seen such a noble figure of a man as him, with his size and his strength and his medals. Then he remembered with a sudden sourness of the mind the deadly dullness that had come afterwards when it was all over and he’d thought he was having a hell of a success in the city, with his blue suit and Anthony Eden hat, while all the time he’d felt as though he’d wanted to push his fist through a window or kick somebody up the backside to relieve the boredom.

  ‘Hard work and application,’ he said fiercely, his eyes glowing and yellow. ‘That was Willowgreen’s motto. It drove me round the bend. In the end I went on a hell of a razzle and told him what he could do with his barmy little exports.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was a blazing row.’ He laughed and she knew he’d thoroughly enjoyed that part of it at least.

  ‘I’ll bet that helped,’ she said.

  ‘Not really. The Old Man showed me the door. So did his daughter. The course of true love received a bit of a jolt, as you might say. She married Willowgreen in the end after all – a bloody little company clerk.’