A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  The black-out regulations had come into effect the very day they had buried Arthur and, cocooned behind hastily constructed felt curtains at nightfall, Mavis felt a growing sense of isolation that rarely dispersed with the arrival of dawn. Evacuees had already been piling into the town from London, even before the formal declaration of war. She had seen the endless stream of coaches running down Silver Street heading for the market square, the bewildered young children’s faces looking out at the new world to which they had been sent. She had heard that a number of people had already had children billeted on them but she presumed that, newly bereaved, the organizers of the evacuees had judged her an unsuitable home for frightened children. At another time Mavis might have more than willing to take in a child or two but right now she was grateful that she hadn’t been asked.

  That week after the funeral saw a violent storm break the long hot spell of weather. Mavis and Henry had stood at the bedroom window with the lights off and watched as the lightning arced across the darkening sky and the thunder rolled overhead. Henry had counted the seconds between the lightning and the sound of the thunder, announcing the approach of the epicentre of the storm. They had seen the bone-dry tarmac of the road outside the shop, dusted with the ubiquitous soot that drifted through the town from the rubber factory by the river, become bespattered with the first rain drops ink-blotting the surface. As the storm rolled in from the Mendips the rain intensified, quickly turning the street into a glistening sheet that rolled downhill, tumbling over the drain gratings in such intensity that it soon became too much for the drains and overflowed down towards the river.

  “Four seconds. It’s only four miles away, Mum. Probably almost over Madeleine’s by now.”

  Henry had his face close to the window as he looked southwards over the rooftops towards Trowbridge. The darkened sky suddenly lit up with a flash of lightning, making Mavis jump. In that split second she caught Henry’s reflection in the bedroom window, his mouth an “O” of surprise.

  “One. Two. Three.” A crash of thunder caused Mavis to shrink her neck into her shoulders, the sound physically crushing her downwards. Henry was hopping from one foot to the other, his hands gripping the window ledge.

  “Wow! That was a good one wasn’t it, Mum? It’s almost here! It’s almost here!” His fingers ran along the edge of the sash, plucking at the rope pulls, jolting the window against the fastenings. “Let me open the window. Let me! Let me!”

  Mavis, frightened in equal parts by the ferocity of the storm and Henry’s delirious exuberance at nature’s violence, stood back from the window. “Come on, Henry, let’s draw the curtains now. Come away.”

  Slash strokes of rain flung against the glass by the storm’s squall only seemed to intensify Henry’s attempts to open the window. “Let me open it! Let me!” Henry’s fingers scrabbled at the turn key that locked the two sashes together.

  “No, Henry! Don’t open the window! I don’t like it.” Mavis put a hand on Henry’s shoulder and tried to pull his hand away from the catch. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  If Henry felt her touch or the tug backwards he made no sign that he had heard. Flicking the catch to one side, he gripped the two handles on the bottom sash window and tugged upwards. The window flew up and the flailing curtains billowed backwards into the room, wrapping themselves around Mavis’s head. A new lightning flash lit up the sky and was followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder.

  “It’s here! It’s here!”

  As Mavis struggled with the curtains to stop them being ripped off the hooks on the pole, Henry leant out of the window so far that she was frightened he was going to topple down into the street. His arms were stretched out, palms upwards, like the priest intoning at the altar on a Sunday. He shouted something that Mavis couldn’t hear.

  “Henry! Get back in now! Henry!” She had let go of the curtains which billowed out behind her once again and she got hold of Henry by his trouser waistband. With all the strength she could muster she pulled Henry back into the room and with one final tug managed to bring him away from the window. Letting go of Henry she turned to the window and with a quick slam she brought down the sash. The curtains, emptied of the wind that had lifted them, sank back on their rings. Turning back towards Henry she was shocked to see the look on his face. Henry stared beyond her and out of the window, an ecstatic glow framing his wet face. Coils of soaking hair hung over his temples and drops of water ran down his face and buried themselves in the linen collar of his shirt. He pushed past her and slapped his hands against the glass of the window so hard that Mavis thought he would break it.

  “Leave me alone!” The shout came as a thunderbolt to Mavis. She was about to reply but Henry repeated: “Leave me alone! I want this!” He stood, motionless against the rain-strewn window, his face pushed hard up against the glass, the palms of his hands pattering against the window pane. His breath condensed on the cooling glass as flashes of lightning continued to light up the room, silhouetting Henry’s outline. Mavis stood back, unsure what to do. Henry half-turned his head towards her, his voice quieter, more restrained.

  “It’s OK. Leave me alone. I’ll be alright. I just…” he turned back towards the window, his face once more close to the glass, “…need to be here.” He tapped the panes of glass gently with his palms. “Here.” Although he sounded calmer, Mavis remained worried about his intentions.

  “Don’t open the window, Henry. Promise me. I don’t like it. Please.” She heard herself plead with her twelve-year-old son and wondered how it all come to this so, so quickly – just in the space of a few days.

  “I’ll be alright, Mum. Just let me watch. You go downstairs if you don’t like the storm.”

  Reluctantly Mavis retreated to the door. Another flash of lightning lit up the room, making her flinch. She took a look back and saw Henry shake his head from side to side, just as he had done when he was a baby in his pram, frustrated at not being able to get out of his harness. His hands, clutching the edges of the curtains, slowly pulled them together so that they closed around the neck of his head leaving just his body standing in the room.

  Later that week one of the new ARP wardens – Mavis knew him as one of the more officious members on the church committee – banged on her door late one evening saying he could see a light leaking from an upstairs window which turned out to be Henry’s bedroom. She went up to find Henry sat up in bed, reading, and saw the small gap in the curtains that looked over the street. As she tugged them close, reminding Henry to be more careful, she felt an almost overwhelming despair that her own life had been suddenly and fatally eclipsed. Henry, lying in his bed, the hump of his feet already close to the base board, looked suddenly as vulnerable as she felt. Mavis crossed the room and sat on the edge of his bed.

  “What’s that you’re reading?” She tapped the back boards of the orange linen book which bore the tell-tale green shield of the Boots Library on the cover.

  “The latest Agatha Christie.” Henry put his finger in the pages he had been reading and closed the book so he could hold up the title to his mother. “Murder Is Easy. I’ve only just started it this evening but it looks as if it will be pretty good. A woman goes up to London by train from the country and meets this army type coming back from the Far East. She tells him that she knows about a murder in her village and is going to Scotland Yard to speak to the police.” Henry hesitated for a moment, flapping open the book once more. “Although, to be honest, I don’t know why she hasn’t gone to the local police but,” he smiled at his mother, “that would ruin the plot, I suspect, so she’s off to Scotland Yard and guess what?” Henry looked up expectantly at his mother.

  “What?”

  Henry tucked his bookmark into the page and shut the book with a flourish. “She gets murdered!”

  “By the army fellow on the train?”

  “No, not on the train and not by the army fellow.” Henry paused momentarily. “Well, I don’t think it could be him. He only met her by chance and doesn’
t even know her so I can’t see the connection. But…” he tapped the book with the back of his fingers, “…you never know.” He put the volume down on the top of a teetering pile of other books on the floor by his bed-head. “She gets mown down by a car in Whitehall and that’s as far as I’ve got.”

  “You read so much, Henry, I’m surprised it hasn’t turned your head funny.” Mavis smiled at him. “All these detective stories and the like. Not like real life, are they?” As soon as she said the words Mavis realized that Henry would be more than aware that real life was infinitely more complicated than detective stories, and more unpleasant.

  A strained silence fell on the room for a few seconds before Henry spoke. “Will we get bombed?” Henry had slid down into the bed and lay on his side facing the curtained window. “Is that why we have to have the black-out?”

  The question caught her off guard, piercing through the flimsy veil of calm she had fought to keep in place. She put her hand on his head and ruffled his hair.

  “No, of course not! Why would the Germans want to bomb Bradford on Avon, eh? There’s nothing or no-one here worth bombing.” She looked at Henry and wondered if he believed her. “It’s just that everywhere in the country has to be blacked out so that any bombers can’t see where we live when – if – they should fly this way.”

  “Is that why they’ve taken away the station signs then?” Henry said, turning on his back to look straight at his mother. “I saw some workmen unscrewing the name boards and taking them away on the back of a lorry yesterday. And I noticed the sign by the bridge – you know the one that says Trowbridge, Westbury, Bath – that’s gone as well. Why have they done that?”

  Mavis hadn’t been out of the house since the funeral, having given Henry the shopping list for the essentials. This news gave her a jolt. Hidden behind dark windows in a nameless town with all signs gone, Mavis suddenly felt physically sick. Picking at the small tufts of raised wool on Henry’s blanket, she hesitated for a few seconds before lifting her head and forcing a smile at her son.

  “I’m sure it’s just a precaution, dear. Something that was always planned if we should be at war,” she hesitated before adding, “again.” She felt the reflux in her stomach push upwards. “Now, don’t you worry none. I’ve got to clear up downstairs. You can read a bit more if you want but make sure the curtain stays closed tight.”

  Henry turned back on his side. “No, I’ve read enough for tonight. You can turn the light out.”

  She bent over and kissed the top of his head and pressed the button on the side lamp. The room was plunged into darkness and Mavis had to grope her way to the door where a thin strip of light from the landing showed by the floor.

  “Mum?” Henry’s voice came from the darkness behind her.

  “Yes, dear?” She had her hand on the doorknob and opened it to let in a wedge of light that lit up a section of the room.

  “I miss Dad.”

  Mavis’s heart folded. “So do I, love. So do I.”

  She went through the door and, as she closed it slowly behind her, she could see the wedge of light tighten and diminish, eclipsing Henry’s face, leaving it in the darkness of the curtained room.

  The remains of the evening meal were still sitting on the table but Mavis didn’t have the energy to clear anything away. Sitting at her usual place, she pushed a handkerchief to her mouth and closed her eyes tightly against the impulse to vomit. Gradually the nausea subsided and she took a sip from the glass of water. She sat there for almost another hour, absent-mindedly circling the salt and pepper pots around each other, trying to imagine what life was going to be like without Arthur – and especially now, with the country at war. She had been a young child the last time but could still vividly remember the day her mother had received that telegram telling her that her eldest son and Mavis’s adored brother, Ronald, had been lost in action, believed killed. They never found his body, forever lost in the mud at the Somme, and her parents seemed to give up the will to live. Her mother had died in 1919, struck down by flu, and her father, now hopelessly overburdened with four other children, gave the care of Mavis, the youngest, to his childless sister. He was to die in 1926 and she had lost touch with her remaining brother and two sisters. Marriage to Arthur had seemed a godsend, a chance to build a new life, but now everything was undone like a thread of a jumper suddenly snagged on an unseen nail, unravelling all of life’s carefully knitted work.

  On the surface very little changed in the town in the first weeks of the war, apart from the occasional sound of the air raid siren which, at first, had everyone running around but as no-one knew what to do they simply decided to carry on with business as normal. There was a bustle that served both to pull Mavis into the town’s life and paradoxically increased her sense of loneliness. Nearly all the people she knew socially were couples and the few single women were either spinsters or had lost their husbands in the last war. Previously she had been content to let Arthur run the shop single-handedly and took little active part in the practical running of the business. Now she looked at the account books, order sheets, wholesaler names and the huge variety of sweets, cigarettes and tobacco that lined the shelves and wondered how she would ever come to grips with the intricacies of the business. The gap left by Arthur’s death was beginning to feel immense and more than she could cope with. For that first week in September she kept the doors of the shop locked.

  It was the Friday afternoon when she had finally gone into the shop to look through the drawers for a pair of scissors. The blinds were down on the windows and the light from the September sun filtered into a soft yellow glow within the shop. Mavis was rummaging through the drawers, pulling out ends of string, pipe cleaners, boxes of matches as well as hand-written notes that Arthur had made and which she now had difficulty deciphering.

  “When are you going to open up again, Mum?” Henry’s voice at the door gave Mavis a start.

  “Oh Lord, Henry, I didn’t know you were here. Fair made me jump!” Mavis, bent over, continued digging around in a drawer, ignoring Henry’s question.

  “Why don’t we open tomorrow, Saturday? I can help. Like you said; we can do this together.”

  Mavis stood up. She had been trying to pull the pieces of her life back together, put some order into everyday events, but the constant talk of war and what might happen only served to cut her off from the orderliness that had been normality just two short weeks before.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure I can face people yet. It’s a bit soon…” her voice tailed off.

  “Madeleine’ll help.” Henry blurted. “We know all the sweets. Look – there’s the Flying Saucers and here’s the Liquorice Chews and over there are the Gumballs.” Henry paced up and down the front of the counter, pointing to the boxes and glass jars on the shelves and counter, reciting the litany of sweets that his father had kept well stocked. There was a gap where the tray of marshmallows had slotted into the glass cabinet under the counter. He hesitated for a second, running a finger over the glass counter and then turned to his mother to add: “And you can do the ciggies and other stuff.”

  “But you’ll be at school Henry. And Madeleine.” Mavis sat back on the high stool. “And anyway I don’t know anything about cigarettes and these kinds of things.” She picked up a box of Rizla papers, waving it in the air before dumping it back on the counter. “Your dad never talked to me about the shop.” She had been tempted to add “or about anything really” but bit it back. “We always had the money to pay the bills and I just left him to it.”

  A difficult silence hung between them and Henry was just about to say something when they both heard footsteps approach the doorway. Even though the door was shuttered someone tried the handle, making the Closed sign rattle against the glass.

  A voice called out: “Mrs Eastman, are you in?”

  Mavis looked towards the door and then to Henry. She whispered, “Who’s that, do you think?”

  Henry shrugged. “Don’t know. Shall I open the
blind?”

  Mavis hesitated. She didn’t really want to meet anyone yet but maybe it was something important, something to do with Arthur or the war or… she couldn’t think straight.

  “No. You hang on there, Henry. I’ll go.”

  The door rattled again. Mavis came around from behind the counter and instinctively wiped her hands on her pinny, just as she used to do whenever she came down the corridor from the kitchen towards the shop. She reached down to the tassel on the edge of the blind and gave it a little tug. The blind rolled up automatically. On the other side of the glass door stood a man. Mavis recognized him immediately but Henry was still trying to place him as his mother unbolted the door and turned the key.

  “Hello, Mr Watson, what can I do for you? I’m sorry the shop’s not open for business right now.”

  “That’s alright, Mrs Eastman, I didn’t want to buy anything. I just knocked to see how things were going. Hope you don’t mind.” He hesitated, hovering on the threshold of the doorway.

  “Oh, come in, come in, do. I’m sorry Mr Watson, how rude of me.” Mavis stood back to let the man come through the door.

  Henry watched as he took off his hat as if he was entering a church, running the brim through nicotine-stained fingers.

  “I don’t want to hold you up, Mrs Eastman, but I just wanted to pass on my condolences, personal like. Difficult at funerals to say the right thing. Arthur and me, well, we used to be drinking buddies over at the New Bear and, well,” he hesitated fractionally, searching for the right word, “his sudden going, like, was a bit of a shock to us all.”

  Henry picked up the man’s light Somerset accent and then recognized where he had seen him before. Mr Watson, the manager of the cinema in the town. He stood in the foyer at the end of the Saturday morning pictures, keeping an eye on all the children as they shoved and pushed through to the exit. Henry remembered the day Danny Truscott had been given a cuffing for stepping on Mr Watson’s foot as he barged through to the doors.