Against the Tide

by John Hanley

  Fred pushed the barrel away. ‘Be careful with that. Why don’t you get up on the cabin and keep watch whilst Saul takes us back.’

  Alan patted the stock. ‘Locked, loaded, and at your command, sir.’

  ‘Do you think they will be waiting for us?’ Rachel asked.

  Fred replied, ‘Unlikely, if they are short of fuel, they’ll need to get back to St Helier. I suggest we go straight to St Catherine’s and Saul moors there overnight just in case they are waiting in the harbour.’

  I tapped his shoulder. ‘That makes sense. What do you think, Saul?’

  ‘Fine by me so long as we can get a lift home. Is there a phone box nearby?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well you don’t have a phone at home, you can’t get us all on the back of your bike – not that I’d risk my neck anyway – so I’ll have to phone for a taxi.’

  ‘What about the bus?’ suggested Rachel.

  ‘Bus? Jack, tell her what happened the last time I used public transport.’

  ‘It’s not that he’s a snob, Rachel, but having to share a bus with those who can’t afford taxis brings him out in a rash. I’m not sure there’s a bus anyway at this time of day. Not that it matters. I’ll take Alan home and come back with our car. It’ll be a squeeze but I’ll take all of you back.’ That would give me a chance to drop the others off and be alone with Rachel. I enjoyed that comforting thought all the way to the breakwater.

  Saul moored us to a buoy as there wasn’t enough water to reach the slipway. We’d have to take turns in the dinghy.

  ‘What about the crabs? You’re not planning to leave them on my boat, are you?’

  ‘I’ll take a couple home to Mum and Dad,’ suggested Alan. ‘They love spiders.’

  Alan thinking about others? I was too dumbfounded to speak.

  ‘I’ll take the lobster and one of the spiders,’ offered Fred. ‘I can teach Malita some new culinary skills.’

  ‘What about you, Rachel? You want one for your parents?’ Alan’s thoughtfulness was in danger of getting him strangled.

  ‘No thanks. My father,’ she shot me a look, ‘hasn’t got any teeth, won’t wear false ones and I can’t see him using his gums on those shells.’

  We must have all shared the same image because we started to giggle. Even Miko found it funny.

  ‘I take one of these spiny monsters. Give to chef. He cook for us,’ Miko said.

  Somehow, after an afternoon spent risking our lives, shooting at our pursuers, nearly drowning then arranging a way to deprive the Nazis of their diamonds, arguing about crabs made it seem all worthwhile.

  Alan and I rode off on Bessy while the others waited. I dropped him, the crabs and his “fishing rod” in the yard. He could present the gifts while I borrowed our car, picked up the others and drove them back to St Helier. I didn’t want to risk my father’s ire so decided not to ask permission.

  I returned just as a red and white S.C.S Bedford bus pulled away from the top of the slip. Saul, Fred and Malita were waving from the back window. My heart leapt. At last. I could take Rachel home and finally get to talk with her in private.

  ‘Hey, Jerk. Over here. You have room for crabs?’

  Miko stood on the slipway holding two of the spider crabs aloft.

  Of Rachel there was no sign.

  Double buggeration.

  37

  Friday

  Another day, another ticking off. It was hardly worth the bother of attending college anymore. There were no classes for me and I really wasn’t in the mood for digging Mrs Buezval’s garden, however needy she might appear. Four cups of tea and two wheelbarrow loads of weeds later, I revised my view and promised to return to help defend her from the rampaging foliage.

  Bessy took me into town on an impromptu raid on my post office savings account. After the past few days, hoarding money seemed to have less meaning. I resolved to do something useful with it instead. Flowers for Rachel would be an appropriately romantic gesture but she might plant them in my ear. A length of rope coiled into a noose for Caroline was a tempting idea.

  I stopped outside Donaldson’s music shop again – this time I seemed to be alone. Bjoerling stared back at me from behind the glass.

  Uncle Fred was by turns amazed, grateful and then embarrassed that I should make such a gesture. I shut him up by slipping the record out of its sleeve and letting Puccini answer his reservations. Cup of tea number five was followed quickly by three slices of Battenberg cake.

  He had no news from Hélène. We argued half-heartedly about my involvement but we both knew that I could hardly place adverts in the Morning News and Evening Post to advise whoever was following me that I was, henceforth, disassociating myself from all further activity. After my double dose of action the previous day, my appetite for further confrontation had diminished anyway.

  Finally, we agreed that, if I was stopped or threatened again, I should tell my father and report it to the police. It was Fred’s suggestion and he made it, knowing that my father’s wrath would certainly fall on him like a tidal wave.

  Yesterday, I could have killed a man, blown his head apart, yet I still felt unmoved. My side still ached in time with my heart, but there was little I could do to relieve either pain.

  We listened to both sides of the record twice and, after my eighth cup of tea of the day, I left feeling somewhat deadened by the whole experience.

  I should find Saul and arrange to return Jacob’s Star but I was still angry with him for dragging them onto the bus and leaving me with Miko instead of Rachel. I needed to see her, wanted to slap Caroline, but went home with Bessy instead. I wasn’t even surprised when she threw a spark plug fit and seized up after struggling up St Saviour’s Hill. Rather like Saul, she had too much oil on her head. I cleaned her up and puttered back home.

  Alan was in the yard pacing up and down as if he’d just fallen into a bed of nettles and couldn’t ease the itch. From his first few words, it was clear that I wasn’t the dock leaf he needed to rub it better either.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? What’s going on? Shouldn’t we be doing something?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I don’t know, you’re the spy – you tell me. Shouldn’t we be following someone, reporting on their movements?’

  ‘It’s over, Alan. There’s nothing more to do.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Of course there is. Never mind what Fred says. There are crazy men out there with guns and coshes and –’

  ‘Shut up and calm down. We have to stay out of it. I was bloody crazy yesterday. I should never have involved you and Saul and… God, I wish you hadn’t brought your rifle.’

  ‘That’s right – blame me. Smellie jumped into your hands and fired itself, I suppose?’ He poked me in the chest but I didn’t react. He pressed his face into mine and hissed, ‘Just tell me where we would have been without the rifle – bloody fish bait, that’s what.’

  I stood nose to nose with him. I couldn’t blink away his anger but I waited, hands by my side, until it cooled.

  He stepped back and grunted, ‘Did Surcouf find you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s upset. It seems someone emptied one of his pots and left some sausages inside. He says a crab choked to death on them.’

  Typical Alan. He’d gone from outraged anger to facetious charm in the twinkling of an eye.

  We were still laughing when a post office messenger arrived in a cloud of muddy spray and two-stroke smoke. Straddling his bike, he let the raucous engine tick over and thrust an envelope into my hand.

  ‘You Jack Renouf?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any reply?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Reply? You need to read it and tell me if you want to reply.’

  I’d gone nearly nineteen years without receiving a telegram and now I’d had two in a matter of days. I stared at the brown envelope, bemused.

  He blipped his throttle impatiently.

  Alan grabbed the teleg
ram and ripped it open. ‘Wake up, Jack. Mister Pony Express here is in a hurry. Go on, read the bloody thing and you,’ he tapped the messenger on the head, ‘wait, if you want a tip.’

  I unfolded the paper. “DINNER SEVEN PM TONIGHT PALACE HOTEL STOP BLACK TIE STOP BE THERE STOP LOVE C ENDS.”

  Alan read it over my shoulder then turned to the messenger. ‘No reply.’ He grinned impishly. ‘And here’s your tip. Don’t be rude to your customers. Now bugger off.’ He turned back to me. ‘Still got you by the short and curlies then? You going?’

  The flimsy paper shook in my hand. I might be able to hold a rifle steady even when facing another gun but she could still reach out and shake me to the core. This time, I really thought I’d escaped. It was only an illusion. My eyes were burning as I walked past Alan.

  ‘No, you can’t borrow the car and that’s an end of it.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘You borrowed it yesterday evening without permission and don’t think a couple of crabs is fair payment.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No, and that’s final! Why can’t he understand me, Mary?’

  Mum hovered the teapot over my tenth cup of the day. I felt quite light headed. ‘Probably because you haven’t told him why, Aubin.’

  ‘I don’t have to explain myself to him… or anyone. “No” is “No”. Isn’t that sufficient?’

  Gulliver must have felt the same way when all the little people were tying him down. His word was law – why was I questioning it?

  ‘Aubin, he’s almost a man now and, as you always tell me, men need things explaining to them – don’t they?’

  He grunted but continued to sip his tea.

  ‘What he means to say, love, is that we’re going out tonight. Don’t look so surprised. It does happen occasionally. We’re picking the Cabots up and your father is driving so you see, it’s quite simple. No need to make a fuss about it, Aubin.’

  She turned her back on him and winked at me. ‘Of course we could use the lorry or hitch a trailer to the tractor.’ He didn’t rise to the bait. She rattled the cups in the sink. ‘Anyway, where are you going, love?’

  ‘Your bloody brother’s I bet,’ Father said.

  ‘What if I am? What’s the problem you’ve got with Uncle Fred? Why can’t I see him when I want? Why don’t you want him coming here? It’s bloody crazy.’ I’d gone too far and we all knew it.

  In the silence which followed my outburst, we could hear the distant crack as Alan scratched his itch on wooden targets.

  My father, heavy with disappointment, got up and moved to the door. He grabbed his cap. ‘Tell him if you must – it won’t change anything. He won’t be welcome in this house until…’ he left the rest unsaid and stalked outside.

  Mum dried her hands and sat down, collecting her thoughts carefully before she spoke. ‘I love my brother but… he can be so difficult. I think he’s changed but your father doesn’t.’ She looked at her hands, realised they were empty, got up and lifted a can of Brasso out of a cupboard.

  ‘What did he do to upset Father so badly? Was it during the war?’

  She shook her head as she fished a rag and a duster from the drawer.

  ‘Religion?’

  She picked one of the copper pots off its hook above the range. ‘Come on, Jack. What drives your father?’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘After Grandpa died and your father inherited the farm, we had very little – not enough to expand, barely enough to survive, especially as we had his mother and mine to look after as well. The banks weren’t interested so he borrowed from a Jewish moneylender.’

  She plonked the pot, which looked perfectly clean, onto the table. ‘Lord knows he wasn’t the only one. The interest rate was crippling but it was either that or sell the farm but we couldn’t do that, not after Grandpa had nearly broken his back keeping it going during the war. Before the flu took him, he made your father promise. Anyway, we worked every waking moment and started to earn enough to pay back a little bit of the capital. You were only a baby and Alan was on the way.’

  She opened the Brasso tin and released the acrid smell into the room. ‘Fred came back from his adventures – you know about the Communist business. He was broke, couldn’t find work because of his views. He came to me and I persuaded Aubin to help.’

  She dabbed the tin onto the rag. ‘It nearly finished us. Your father was devastated. He’d put everything into the farm and your uncle, who now hated everyone who owned their own business, wanted money.’

  The tin wobbled as she slapped it down. ‘We couldn’t believe his hypocrisy but I couldn’t turn him away, especially after what he’d done for us.’

  Something crossed her face. Alarm? I had the feeling she hadn’t meant to say that.

  She inspected the pot, turning it as she spoke. ‘He’d tried everywhere else. Aubin went back to the moneylender. The deal this time was five times the normal interest rate. Take it or leave it.’

  ‘Is that why he didn’t like me playing Shylock?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. He doesn’t like Shakespeare, hates the chairs in the Great Hall – they remind him too much – he loathed school you know, couldn’t see any point in it once he’d learned what he needed.’

  The pot was upside down now as she dabbed polish on a blemish I couldn’t see. ‘No, your father’s not a racist. He’s not too fond of your friend Saul though – finds him a bit smarmy.’

  ‘What about Malita? Why won’t he meet her?’

  ‘Did your uncle say that?’ She stopped smearing polish.

  ‘No. Not directly but I got the impression –’

  ‘It might be the other way round, Jack. She might not want to meet him. Have you thought of that?’

  I hadn’t but, as my father refused to talk about his brother-in-law, I had only ever heard one side. From Mum’s tone, clearly she saw another.

  ‘This loan you gave him, it was a long time before Malita, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes, before he went back to England.’

  ‘So he needed it as no employers would give him a job because he was a Communist?’

  ‘I just don’t understand how things get so dirty’ She rubbed vigorously with the rag. ‘It wasn’t quite that simple. We didn’t know at the time but he used most of the money to help set up a branch of the General Workers’ Union.’

  ‘That was rather cheeky, wasn’t it? Taking money from an employer to help the workers?’ The ammonia was tickling my nose. I fought back a sneeze.

  The once clean and shining pot was now discoloured with an opaque sheen. ‘It was worse than that. He set up a new section for agricultural workers and tried to get them out on strike until employers, like us, paid them more money for their labour.’

  ‘Could you afford to?’ I couldn’t watch this much longer. Either I had to start polishing with her or take the pot away.

  ‘Not really. You know we do most of the work ourselves but need help during the potato season. If we paid more, we couldn’t be sure of making enough to plough back in for the next year’s crop. What with maintenance, replacements, running costs, it doesn’t take much to tip us over into loss. There are only a handful of large farms that can cope with poor seasons.’

  I moved closer, grabbed the duster and tried to polish the side of the pot. ‘Surely Uncle Fred understood that. What’s the point in driving you under? That wouldn’t help anyone.’

  She pulled the duster from my hand. ‘Of course he understood. He knows how farms work, what a fine line it is, but he was driven by these socialist beliefs. The redistribution of wealth, I think he calls it.’

  ‘Did they strike?’

  ‘For a few days but their union decided not to support them and refused strike pay. They were quickly back to work and your uncle was forced to resign from the union he had borrowed from us to set up.’ She held the rim in one hand and swept the duster over the surface with the other. ‘Your father thought it was no more than he deserved.’

 
‘Hasn’t Uncle Fred paid you back?’

  ‘Oh, he tried. After Spain, he came back with quite a bit of money. Wanted to give us double what we’d lent him. He didn’t seem to understand that we’d paid nearly three times the amount we’d borrowed in interest alone. At one stage we had to pawn nearly everything. I’m sure my mother, bless her soul, noticed but she didn’t say anything. Granny Renouf, poor thing, had stopped noticing anything by that time.’

  ‘But we’re not poor now, are we?’

  ‘No, we’ve worked very hard and been fortunate with the crops but your father has never forgiven him for the pain he caused. He’s very stubborn, as you know. He asked Fred where he’d got the money. He wouldn’t tell him so Aubin refused to accept it. He seemed to get some pleasure in cutting off his nose to spite his face.’ Her polishing hand speeded up.

  ‘So he still hates him because he used you. And because he’s a Communist as well.’

  ‘He doesn’t hate him, that wouldn’t be very Christian, but he’s been a big embarrassment to your father.’

  She spun the pot then looked at me over its rim. ‘He’s also upset that you seem to be closer to Fred than to him.’

  The reflection in the polished surface stared back at me accusingly.

  ‘It’s alright, love, I understand. I think he does really. He’ll come round.’

  The way she’d told it made sense but I still felt there was something missing. Dare I ask? ‘Thanks for telling me, Mum, and there was I thinking it was just about a woman.’

  She looked shocked; a deep red colour seeped from her neck into her face. I’d embarrassed her. Big mouth, both feet – again.

  ‘Jack Renouf, whatever do you mean?’

  ‘Sorry, I must be confusing him with me. I meant… I heard that Phillips, Father, and Uncle had a fight over a woman. I just wondered –’

  ‘Wondered what?’

  ‘Whether that woman was you?’

  She pushed the pot away as her flush faded.

  I daren’t speak.

  Suddenly she got up and left the kitchen. I heard her moving about upstairs in her bedroom. The pot glared at me.

  Eventually she returned clutching a worn leather album. She sat next to me and placed it between us.