Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy)

by Gardam, Jane

  She hauled him somehow back indoors where Nurse Watkins came and they got him up at last on the bed. The baby—the alert and golden, happy baby—lay watching from his cot, which was a clothes drawer. The doctor came.

  Both parents that night wept.

  * * *

  The next day was the day of the week when Griesepert came to them with the Sacrament. He never missed. He rolled in like a walrus, snorting down his nose. He stretched out his legs towards the fender.

  Today Florrie ignored the Sacrament and sat out in the yard letting them talk. There was whisky, and firelight in the room and the knowing-looking baby wondered whether the grim man on the bed or the fat man over the fire mattered more. The word ‘father’ kept recurring. The baby seemed to listen for it. As to his mother, she was milk and warmth and safe arms but he didn’t pat and stroke her like other babies do. He seldom cried. Occasionally he gave a great crow of laughter. Nurse Watkins with her brass earrings and heavy moustache called him a cold child.

  Out of earshot of others Father Griesepert told Florrie she must sleep with the Cossack again or she would lose him (What do you know? she thought). ‘He needs a woman. It is Russian,’ (And him never gone a step beyond Scarborough! she thought. And not knowing the state of his back). Anton had, occasionally, visitors, Russian-speaking, who came and went like shadows. She and the baby sometimes slept on a mattress out by the back door. She lay often listening to the Cossack shouting at invisible companions somewhere she would never know. In the end she told the priest who thought it came from some terrible prison in his past and he was talking to the dead. ‘We know nothing here, nothing of what goes on in these places. One day we might if we live through this next war.’

  ‘Never another war!’ she said. ‘Not again.’

  She tried to imagine Anton’s country. She knew nothing about it but snow and golden onion-topped churches and jewels and stirring cold music and peasants starving and all so blessedly far away. She did not allow herself to imagine Anton’s life before he came to her. She would never ask. At night sometimes, to stop his swearing in his sleep, in words she could only guess, she’d pull out a drawer from the press where she kept her clothes and tuck down the baby among them and a chair on either end to keep the cat off and then climb on to the high bed with Anton and wrap herself round him. Sometimes he opened his eyes. They were unseeing and cold. There were no endearments. The sex was ferocious, impersonal, fast. There was no sweetness in it. She didn’t conceive again.

  Her silent faith in the little boy never lessened. Her trust and love for him was complete. As he grew up she asked no questions as he arrived home later and later off the school train. When he was eleven she stopped taking him to the station.

  * * *

  For by now Terry was wandering far beyond the chip shop and the band-stand. He was roaming over the sand-dunes down over the miles of white sands towards the estuary and the light-house on the South Gare. On the horizon sometimes celestially, mockingly blue, shining between blue water and blue sky stood the lines of foreign ships waiting for the tide to take them in to Middlesbrough docks. Spasmodically along the sand-dunes the landward sky would blaze with the flaring of the steel-works’ furnaces. They blazed and died and blazed again, hung steady, faded slowly. The boy watched.

  He was not a rapturous child. The crane-gantry of the Blast Furnaces turned delirious blue at dusk but he was not to be a painter. He noted and considered the paint-brush flicker of flame on the top of each chimney leaning this way and then that but he sat on his pale beach noting them and no more.

  He had no idea why he was drawn to the place, the luminous but unfriendly arcs of lacy water running over the sand, the waxy, crunchy black deposits of sea-wrack, slippery and thick, dotted for miles like the droppings of some amphibian, the derelict grey dunes rose up behind him empty except for knives of grey grasses.

  There would usually be a few bait-diggers at the water’s edge, their feet rhythmically washed by the waves. A lost dog might be somewhere rhythmically barking out of sight.

  Sometimes one or two battered home-made sand-yachts skimmed by; only one or two people watching. No children. This was not sand-castle country. No children in this hard place were brought to play by the sea.

  But there was a single recurrent figure on the beaches. It was there mostly in winter as it began to get dark: an insect figure stopping and starting, pulling a little cart, bending, stopping, pacing, sometimes shovelling something up, always alone.

  After weeks Terry decided it was a man and it was pushing not a cart but a baby’s pram. For months he watched without much interest but then he began to look out for the man and wonder who it was.

  * * *

  One cold afternoon he did his usual rat-run of railway bridge to the back of Muriel Street—he now passed through the room with the bed in it—and found his father’s fist stuck out of the blanket towards him grasping a ten shilling note. The wireless crackled on about Czechoslovakia and his father’s lips were trying to say something. Terry pocketed the note and said in Russian, ‘D’you want tea?’

  ‘Whisky,’ said his father.

  ‘It’s for the Holy Father. How are you?’

  ‘I’m well.’

  ‘You have a good Russian accent. Are you happy?’

  Terry had never been asked this, and did not know.

  ‘I’m going down the beach now, Pa.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  The wireless blared out and then faded. They had been first in Muriel Street for a wireless. It stood with a flask of blue spirit beside it. Where had the money come from?

  ‘I’m glad I know Russian,’ Terry said.

  ‘How old are you son?’

  ‘Going on twelve.’

  Tears trickled out over the Cossack’s bony face running diagonally from the eyes to the hollows of the neck and Terry knew that, watching, there was something he should be feeling but didn’t know what. He took the money and went to the shop. Let them get on with their lives. He was getting his own.

  * * *

  He sat down in the dunes facing the sea and soon began to be aware that he was being watched from somewhere behind his left shoulder. Before him the white sands were empty. The sea was creeping forward. He watched the trivial, collapsing waves. The steel-works’ candle-chimneys were not yet putting on their evening performance against tonight’s anaemic sunset.

  There was a cough above him on the high dune.

  Turning round, Terry saw the insect-man in an old suit and a bowler hat. The pram hung in front of him, two wheels deep in fine sand that flowed in spreading avalanches down the slope.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said the man. ‘Parable-Apse.’

  Terry stared.

  ‘And Apse,’ he said. ‘Parable, Apse and Apse; Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.’

  Terry stared on.

  ‘My name is Peter Parable, senior partner, and you I believe to be Florrie Benson’s boy? I was briefly at school with your mother. I am being obliged to ask for your help.’

  Terry’s Russian eyes watched on.

  ‘I am a man of principle,’ said the creature. ‘I am not in the least interested in children. I am not of a perverted disposition. I am able to survive without entanglements and I ask only your immediate assistance in conducting the pram down to the harder level below this dune. Today I have attempted a different route home. It has not been a success.’

  The pram was up to its axles in sand.

  ‘When I lean with all my might,’ said the tiny man, ‘you may assist by tugging at the back wheels, those nearest you. And then if you could sharply—sharply—spring to the side I think the vehicle might achieve the beach in an upright position and of its own volition.’

  Terry sat a minute considering this new language and then plodded up the dune. He kicked the rear of the
pram facing him with a nonchalance close to insolence. Close to hatred. Bloody man.

  He soon stopped kicking. He tried to heave the pram upwards in his arms. He said, ‘It’s not going to shift. Is’t full o’ lead? What you got in’t?’

  ‘Black gold,’ said Parable-Apse. ‘Black diamonds. Tiny black—and white—pearls. Now then—again!’

  After at least seven heaves Terry yelled and fell to the ground, rolled sideways and watched the pram lumbering and slithering down the slope to tip over on its side upon the beach. A heap of gravelly dirt spilled over the silken sand. Using a shovel as a walking stick Mr. Parable (or Apse) toddled after it, legs far apart, and Terry sat up.

  ‘We have, I fear, a weakened axle,’ said the insect-man.

  ‘You’ll have to leave it ’ere,’ said Terry.

  ‘Oh, it hasn’t come to that. Perhaps we should empty it completely, scatter the load with simple sand and, later, return.’

  Terry regarded the heap of dirt.

  ‘And if, boy, you would carry the broken wheel and we were to push the rest of it home, then you could take tea with me.’

  Terry thought, Here we go and said, ‘Is’t far?’

  ‘Not at all.’ The man was busy covering up the mound of black gold, scratching the last of the dirt from the pram. He snapped off the damaged wheel, handed it to the boy and fell flat on his face.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Terry, hauling him up. ‘’ere. Gis ’ere. Give over. Tek’t wheel. Where we goin’?’

  They paraded over the sandy path behind the dunes, across the golf-links, somehow got themselves over a wooden stile watched by a lonely yellow house with empty windows. They followed a track that put them out into a street of squat one-storey houses Terry had not seen before, the long, low street of the old fishing village built before the industries came, before the ironstone chimney and the foreign workers and the chemicals and the flames. The sandstone dwellings had midget doors and windows like houses for elves. Mr. Parable-Apse, Commissioner for Oaths, let them both in to one of these houses, leaving the pram outside, and inside they walked down a long, low tunnel of a rabbit-warren-like passage-way into a kitchen scrubbed clean. Some of Mr. Parable-Apse’s under-clothing hung airing from a contraption of ropes and wooden bars overhead. He lit a hazy, beautiful gas-light on a bracket, crossed to the coal fire, flourished a poker and flung a shovelful of glittering, hard dirt, like jet, into the flames. The coal fire in the grate blazed up, hot and brilliant.

  ‘What is’t?’ asked Terry.

  ‘Sea-coal. Washed, of course. I wash it in a bath in my yard several times a week. Out of office hours of course, and never on the Lord’s Day. In my back yard I have a pump with clear, unbounded water that cleanses like the mercy of God. The sea-coal’s what washes off the ships, you know. In the estuary. Sea-coal is a bonus. Clean and beautiful, sweet-smelling, effective and free. Your mother should market it.’

  ‘She has enough to do,’ said Terry.

  ‘So I hear. But you haven’t yet, my boy. I expect you are meant to leave school shortly and slave at The Works? Oh, my dear boy! Sweeping a road ’til the end of your life.’

  ‘They need the money.’

  ‘You could begin now, working casually for me. While you are waiting. I make money. I have never had any difficulty there. We could expand across this world. Apse and Benson. In the name of the Lord, of course.’

  Apse, Benson and God, thought Terry. He said, ‘But I’ll have to go full time to The Works. For the money.’

  Apse—or Parable—was washing his hands at the shallow stone sink, drying carefully between his fingers.

  ‘How old did you say? Ah yes. I remember the visit of the Cossacks to the Gas Works though, of course, I was unable to attend. A circus is one of the devil’s plays. There is a rumour abroad—tell me, what is your name?—that you are particularly clever. Your intelligence is above these parts. You might bring your intelligence to us. Come in with me as a lawyer. It could be arranged. It is called ‘Doing your articles’—a ridiculous and medieval concept—but a solicitor’s work is the top of the world.’

  (‘This man’s a loony!’)

  ‘And even now,’ said Parable-Apse, ‘Think of Christian commerce. Sea-coal. It is your family business.’

  ‘You shut up,’ said Terry. ‘Stop looking down on my mother.’

  ‘Oh never! Never! Known her since she was born. Since her mother put her in long drawers. I loved her.’

  ‘My Dad loves her and nowt to do wi’ frills. They don’t speak now, me Dad and Mam, but it’s only because of his shame. Shame at being crippled and nobody caring. And being lost.’

  ‘He talks to you?’

  ‘Nay—never! We’s beyond talk. We talk his language together less and less. He grabs me wrist as I pass the bed. Like a torturer but it’s himself ’e’s torturing.’

  ‘Why does he do that?’

  ‘There’s always money under his fingers. Tight up in the palm. He needs whisky. The Mam don’t know. Nurse Watkins does. She’s foreign, too. He pushes the bottle under his mattress. When it’s empty. I’ve seen it going home in her leather bag with the washing. The money must come from the Holy Father. How do I know? He’s beginning to need more and more.’

  He was dizzy with revelation. Revelation even to himself. None of this had emerged as words before. Not even thoughts.

  ‘A man comes,’ said Terry. ‘Mam don’t know. A foreign man. Talking Russian—or summat like it. When nobody’s in.’ He burst into tears. ‘Maybe I dream it.’

  Parable-Apse, having dried his coal-dusted hands on a clean tea-towel, sat down by the sea-coal fire and speared a tea-cake on the end of a brass toasting fork. The medallion on the toasting fork was some sort of jack-ass or demon, or sunburst god. ‘How wonderful the world is,’ said Parable-Apse.

  The fire blazed bright and the tea-cake toasted.

  ‘We must get him vodka,’ said Parable-Apse. ‘It does not taint the breath. Goodbye. It is more than time you went home. Take the tea-cake with you. I will butter it. I shall expect you to relish it.’

  On the doorstep Terry heard him bolting the door on the inside. They sounded like the bolts of a strong-room. ‘Loopy,’ he thought. ‘Silly old stick.’

  * * *

  He didn’t go again to the beach that week. He wandered to the nasty little shops in the new town and the new Palace Cinema. He had a bit of pocket money and went in and asked for vodka at the Lobster Inn. He was thrown out. He wanted a girl to tell this to. It surprised him. The girls at his school sniggered and didn’t wash much. They hung about outside the cinema. One or two had painted their mouths bright red. You could get a tube of it at Woolworths for sixpence. They shouted to him to come join them, but he didn’t stop. He dawdled home.

  CHAPTER 9

  The headmaster of Terry’s school did not live on the premises or go in daily on the train. He lived several miles inland on the moors. He was a healthy man and often pedalled in to Herringfleet on a bicycle with a basket on the front stuffed full of exercise books corrected the night before, for he was a teacher as well as a headmaster.

  He and the bike made for the Herringfleet beaches—he always checked the tide-tables—and, dependent on the condition of the sand—he walked or rode the six miles to school, thinking deeply. He always wore a stiff white riding mac with a broad belt and a brown felt homburg hat. Sometimes he had to walk beside his bike when the sands were soft, sometimes push it hard, but he was always very upright and to his chagrin rather overweight. There were little air-holes of brass let in to the mac under the arms for ventilation. Despite his healthy, exhausting regime he was a putty-faced man who never smiled. It was rumoured that there was a wife somewhere and he had a son at the school who got himself there on the train like most of them and home again by his wits. A clever, little younger boy. Fred. Terry liked him.

  On the morning beaches
the headmaster (a Mr. Smith) often came upon Peter Parable doing an early sea-coal stint before going to his solicitor’s office. They nodded at each other, Parable’s gaze on the black ripples in the sand left by the tide. Smith would briskly nod and pass by, growing smaller and smaller until he was a dot disappearing up the path that led to his school assembly and the toil of the term. Smith and Parable had been at the school together as boys but hadn’t cared much for each other. They had only their cleverness in common. Now they never talked.

  That summer Parable began to watch Smith’s straight back diminishing away from him. He noted the little eyelet holes of the mac and the plumpness and the rather desperate marching rhythm. Even if he was on the bike Mr. Smith always looked tired. Better hurry up, thought Parable. Smith, who knew that he was being watched, also knew that at some point he was going to be asked for something.

  One beautiful, still morning Parable shouted out, ‘Smith!’

  Smith stopped the bike and placed both feet on the sand but didn’t turn his head. ‘What is it, man? Hurry up. I’ll be late.’

  ‘There’s something you have to do. At once.’

  ‘Indeed?’ (What does Parable do at once or even slowly? Plays on the beach.)

  ‘You have a boy at school who in my professional opinion—and Opinions are my stock-in-trade as a lawyer—is remarkable. They’re going to put him in The Works when he leaves you next year and you have to stop it. He must go to the university. He already verges on the phenomenal. I’ve begun to play chess with him. We debate. He has an interesting foreign father. Rather broken up.’

  ‘You mean Florrie Benson’s boy?’

  ‘And—?’

  ‘They need his wages. Sooner the better. It’s a bad business there. She can’t go on.’

  ‘She’ll try. We both know her.’