Chapter 16
It was after five when we arrived home. The MG had died on us in Nottinghamshire. Rust from a disintegrating fuel tank had clogged up the feed line, and we'd had to call out the AA. Now, I felt sick with a headache and after hugging the kids, and listening to their mad banter for ten minutes, I'd had enough and went upstairs to lie down.
They'd taken over my room. The few toys they'd brought with them were scattered across the floor and the place was littered with drawings and colourings, the mad untidy energy of their presence. I could have wept. Throughout the long journey home, they had been my one thought, the only thing drawing me back to an image of home that was otherwise disintegrating fast. But now, in my fatigue, I resented their intrusion into my sanctuary and at the same time I hated myself for that selfish resentment.
My father came in with a mug of tea, stepping carefully over the toys and clearing a space on the bed so he could sit down. He smiled, something he rarely did, and I had the impression he'd enjoyed being with them. "They take over a bit, don't they," he said.
"Thanks for looking after them. I hope they weren't too much trouble."
"I'm their grandad," he said.
There was a hint of a rebuke there and it was well founded. Annie and I had always seemed to fall in with whatever her parents were up to - lunches on Sunday, such-a-body's wedding, such-a-body's Christening and ooh, you must come or it will look bad. So one way or another I'd never seemed to spend much time in Middleton,… except now of course.
"Anyway," he said, "They were okay. Pair of little bastards when they're tired though."
"Aren't they just."
"Well, you were the same at that age. Did Ellie say anything while you were away?"
"Yes. She said quite a lot in fact."
"I thought she might. So now you know, eh?"
"Now I know. She's very special Dad - I mean to go through all that and still be such a good person - I mean not end up hating the world."
"She needs love, Tom. But more than that she needs someone to love."
I think it was the first time I recall my father ever uttering the word 'love' and it took me by surprise. He loved me, I knew that, and he'd loved my mother too but he'd never told us so. It was something we'd been led to assume if only because he'd never said anything to the contrary.
"She's doing fine, now," I told him. "You both are."
"You'll see she's all right, though, won't you? I mean if anything should happen to me."
"Eh? Don't go morbid on me, Dad. It's not like you."
"I'm not being morbid. Just realistic." The sensitive tone began to harden. "Listen. I'm an old fart, right? And things happen. So, you'll see she's okay? You'll keep an eye on her? This is not an idle question."
His almost angry persistence sobered me at once: "Of course I will."
"Fine then," he said, and before I'd grown used to the fact that it was a serious matter, perhaps the most serious matter we'd ever shared, he'd changed the subject. "Did you find this Rachel woman then?"
"Not exactly. She'd moved on. Have you heard of Bexley's Bottles?"
"Southport. They shut down about five years ago,.. Alfred Jenks used to work there. You remember Alfred? Lives down Hinkley street."
"They shut down? But I thought Alf worked at some moulding company. They owned the Stanley Mill on Cross Lane."
"That's right. Bexley's took them over."
"Don't tell me," I said. "There's a supermarket there now."
"D.I.Y. store."
That was the end of it, then. I almost felt relieved. She really could have been anywhere now. The fantasy would remain for ever intact.
He rose to go. "Oh, before I forget," he said. "Some bird rang while you were away. I told her you'd call her back when you got home. I said you were away on business."
"Some bird?"
"Carol. She sounded all right. Kept me talking for ages. Lovely, she was. I reckon you could be in there."
"I'm still married dad."
"Not any more you're not. You should get out a bit. Give her a ring. Get laid. Move on!"
"Sometimes," I said. "I wonder which one of us is the more mature."
I felt better after a cup of tea and a rest and I was able eventually to return to the lounge and to join in the antics of my children. I found them on the sofa, Eleanor sandwiched between them, reading them a story that she embellished with silly voices and mad expressions.
Gemmie and Stevie were spellbound. I sat opposite and watched them for a while, eventually to become as spellbound as they but it upset me, knowing she could have no children of her own. It was true, she had not turned out bad, as she might so easily have done, but it terrified me, how fragile she must have been on the inside!
I thought about what my father had said, about seeing she was all right, and wondered what he’d meant by it. I wondered also for the first time how long he might have. I supposed he could expect, another ten or fifteen years. Eleanor would be forty five by then, perhaps fifty. I had no idea if she would be all right alone, or if she would retreat inside herself. It was unthinkable that this fragile beauty might one day shrivel into nothing, into the saddest of dementias. She caught me looking and gave me a daft smile while wobbling her eyes. I smiled back, and promised her silently that it would not be allowed happen.
Afterwards, I settled the children and watched until they fell asleep, then I gathered their drawings together and set them on the table. They were bright, frantic drawings, rather like their lives, I thought, though Gemmie's were becoming more controlled, more considered, the colours as they should be, rather than as she might actually have preferred them. I looked up and caught Rachel's eye as she gazed out at me from the photograph and suddenly it all came together, sending me crashing into the past, into the pain, and the hope, and all that useless longing and I knew I had no choice: if it was at all possible, I had to see her again.
Chapter 17
I have never been a people person. I have drifted though my life touching the lives of others as little as possible, which is perhaps the one reason my past has dissolved so easily into impenetrable shadow.
I could not remember the last time I'd seen Alfred Jenks, though I recall as a boy how I'd taken an injured pigeon for him to look at. I'd found it lying in the road, half mauled to death by a cat. Alf had always been a pigeon man, and he'd received me kindly. I remember him saying he'd do his best, but I guess he probably throttled the thing out of mercy as soon as my back was turned.
He had not weathered life as gracefully as my father. Not for him the designer shirts, nor the contemporary grooming. Alf, though of a similar age, dressed and looked a good twenty years older. His was the old age of cliché, the old age of expectation.
He greeted me at the door with a brightness in his eyes and the smell of whisky on his breath. "Ah, Tommy, lad. Come in. You'll have a drink with an old fella?"
"Sure, Alf. Whatever you're having."
We settled by his antiquated ceramic fireplace, a fire half way up the chimney, roaring and spitting sparks. His house was much the same as it must have been when he'd first moved in, back in the sixties. There was no video, no hi-fi, no computer. In fact, looking around the most modern things I could see were an early colour television and a transistor radio.
Not that long ago, you could have gone into any house in this part of town and found more or less the same, but Alf was a dying breed with his old clothes and his pigeons and his Lancashire dialect. Somewhere in the past twenty years the world had undergone a profound change and I was only just beginning to notice.
"Still at Derby's then?" he asked.
It was, I thought, an increasingly dated opening gambit: Where do you work? What do you do? As if that alone could define you.
"That's right. Not for much longer, though."
He shook his head in sympathy. "Heard they were shutting it. Well, there can't have been much left anyway."
"True. How long since they finished you then?
Bexley's wasn't it?"
Alf shrugged. "It was still Turner's as far as I was concerned, but it's true Bexley's took us over towards the end. It's five years now since they shut it down. I just about managed to see it through to my retirement - but that's rare these days. Most of us end up on the scrapper long before then."
"It was a Norwich firm wasn't it? Bexley's? I heard they transferred some people up here."
Alf leaned back and probed his memory. "That's right. I worked with one of them in the tool-room. Barney. We used to call him Barney Balls-up. Bloody useless, he was."
"I think an old school-friend of mine moved up with that lot. Rachel. That was her name."
Alf considered this for a while. "There were some girls who came up. Bexley's specialised in bottles you see? It was high volume work, not what we were used to at Turner's really. Bexleys transferred some purpose built machinery from their place in Norwich - and the people to operate them. But it was mindless work,… "
"God knows where she is now, then," I said. "What's happening Alf? Everywhere you look they're pulling down factories and sticking up supermarkets."
It was the same old song, one my father must have sung when they were shutting the pits. Alf joined in with a plaintive sigh. "It's no great mystery, Tommy. At the end of the day making things is about, well, making things. And that means, when all the talking's done, someone has to roll up their sleeves, cut metal and put things together. For that you need a pair of these." He lifted up his hands to show me. They were gnarled, stained yellow with nicotine, and the tip of his left forefinger was missing. "The price of a pair of hands. That's what it's always been about.
"This watch I'm wearing was made in Taiwan. Then it was shipped here and sold to me for less than someone in this country could do it, and that's why we don't make watches any more. That's why we'll never make a watch again until the price of a pair of hands over here is a lot cheaper than it is over there.
"Anyway - most of us reckoned Bexley's only wanted us so they could sell us off. They opened a new place at Skem. within a year and moved their bottle line over there."
"Skelmersdale? Did you say they opened a plant at Skelmersdale?"
"That's right. Rented a wriggley tin shed - very modern looking mind. Bexley's were always a class act."
I settled back, feeling the warm glow from the whiskey spreading through my insides. There was still a chance then,… . just a chance.
"You'll have another ?" he asked, nodding towards my half empty glass.
I looked at him, looked into his eyes and knew that if I lived to be a hundred, I would never see the world as clearly as he. "Aye go on, Alf. Why not?"
I didn't go into Derby's the following morning. I rang Stavros and told him what had happened with the kids and he told me just to take the day off and see to them. You could do that with a big firm. They were more human somehow, and allowed time for such things as the welfare of their staff.
I dropped Gemmie at school and then sat in the car outside the gates, thinking hard. Skelmersdale was only a quarter of an hour's drive, but it was an odd place, one of the original new-towns. It was spread out over several square miles of landscaped greenery, and not the easiest of places for a stranger to navigate. I needed an address and a telephone number but I'd come prepared with my laptop and my Info-disk. Within a few minutes I'd found what I wanted.
I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline when the details appeared on the screen. I even got a map - with a little 'x' to mark the spot. It was childish, the hope that she would still be there, pushing buttons on her bottle making machine after all this time, but then much of what I'd felt and hoped and dreamed about all my life concerning Rachel was also childish, and it was that same childish hope that kept me on course as I drove over there.
It's possible to pass through Skelmersdale without ever knowing you've been, so well hidden are its inhabitants behind their grass banks and their dense screens of foliage. I knew Bexley's was in the industrial sector, so I navigated my course carefully along stretches of featureless and deserted dual carriageway, finally pulling up on the car park, in front of their reception area.
It was a small unit, rather as Alf Jenks had described it, an upmarket version of a corrugated iron barn, and brand new by the looks of it. There was an articulated lorry just pulling away from their dispatch bay. Bexley's Bottles Dot Com., read the caption on the container. It all looked smart and bright and dynamic, but I doubt the place employed more than fifty people.
Alf had told me last night, there'd been more than six hundred at Turner's - that had been considered a small firm in the old days. There had been two thousand at Derby's. Now we could barely muster a few hundred. I wondered where everyone had gone - all those people, all those hands!
Through the smoked glass of the reception building I could see a blonde receptionist in a dark jacket taking calls from a fake mahogany desk. But having got there I wasn't sure what to do next. Did I just walk up to her and ask if Rachel Ogilvy worked there. She might even have given up her married name and reverted to her maiden name,… or married again. Panic! What the hell did I think I was doing?
I took a moment to calm myself, then chose the more devious option and called the number on my mobile. I saw the receptionist pick up the telephone.
"Hello, Bexley's Bottles. Anne speaking. Can I help?"
"Ah hello, Anne. Is it possible to speak to Rachel erm,… Standish please?"
"Could I ask who's calling?"
"John. John,… erm,… Jenks."
"One moment please."
There was a pause and I could see her fiddling with her switchboard. She hadn't said: "Who?" or: "Are you sure you've got the right number?" and after a moment, she came back on the line. "Sorry to keep you waiting."
I started to sweat, for suddenly it seemed possible that in just a couple of seconds, Rachel might actually speak to me. I felt the mobile becoming hot, like it was going to melt. My ear felt like it was burning against the plastic, and waves of panic were rising through my chest.
"I'm sorry Mr. Jenks. I'm afraid Rachel's not in the office today. Can I take a message?"
I'd found her!
"Mr Jenks?… ."
"Hello,… erm,… No. That's okay. Any idea when she'll be back?"
"You could try Monday."
"Okay. Monday. Thank you."
Following on from the panic, there came a brief wave of euphoria, then an inexplicable emptiness. I'd found her, but if she'd been there, if she'd picked up the telephone a minute ago, I felt sure I would have hung up. Monday! She'd be back on Monday! But even after everything I'd done, I knew I would not call her, because I hadn't changed. I was the same now as I had always been. I was weak and I was stupid.
Chapter 18
Alan was waiting when I brought Gemmie home from school. My heart sank at the sight of his car filling up the street outside my father's house, but Gemmie's eyes were dancing with delight.
"Grandad's here. Grandad's here," she chanted.
My father, she had always maintained was not Grandad - he was just Jack. We walked in to find Jack and Grandad standing in the front room, hands in pockets, an uneasy silence between them while Eleanor fastened Stevie's coat in readiness for his departure.
For once Alan was relieved to see me. "Ah. Tom. Well. Right."
"Yes. Right." I said.
"I'll get them off your hands, then. No doubt you'll be glad of the break."
"They've been no bother," said my father.
Alan was embarrassed. "No, no,… . I'm sure they haven't. Well, anyway. We'll be getting,… "
"Annie all right?" I asked, inadvertently prolonging his ordeal.
"Oh. Fine. Anyway,… ."
"Tell her,… "
"Hmnn?"
I hesitated, unable to find the words. "Nothing," I said. "Safe journey back."
There had been nothing to say. Annie did not exist any more. And even though I could not easily dispose of what we had shared,… the memories,
the children, the inevitable untidiness of our separation, I sensed she would not haunt me in the way Rachel still did. I would never dry up or become rigid and useless at the mere thought of Annie.
I watched them go, following them out and waving from the end of the street. Then I felt the wrench of it, the tearing and the sense of my own selfishness for having wasted two days on the road, stalking the shadow of another past, instead of being here with my children. Now they were going and I had no idea when I'd feel their arms around my neck again. All for what? For nothing!
Eleanor had followed me out and when I turned away from my departing children, it was to find her watching me, arms folded, reading me.
"They'll be back," she said.
I forced a smile, and brushed past her, unable to look her in the eye. I walked inside to find my father on the telephone. He took my arm as I passed and handed me the receiver.
"Carol," he said and I'm afraid the rest, in spite of my resolve to the contrary, was a foregone conclusion.
"Hi, Carol. Tonight? Great. I'd love to."
Eleanor was beside me now, eyebrows raised when I hung up.
"She's wants me to go round for supper," I explained.
She looked away, something reproachful in the way she held herself. "What about Rachel?"
"Rachel won't keep me warm," I said, a little out of character, but longing for a distraction,… anything to take my mind off Rachel.
Eleanor looked hurt. "That's not like you, Tom."
"Maybe I need to change."
"You said you weren't ready for another woman. You said another woman right now would kill you."
"Well, I'm not planning to marry her."
"But is Carol right for you?"
"Does it matter? I just need to get out a bit more,… get laid, live a little."
The Road From Langholm Avenue Page 12