A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  “Yes. It was a bit sudden.” His mother hesitated, fumbling with a duster she had tucked in the pocket of her pinny. “Henry and I were just looking around the shop, wondering where to start… what to do, really.” Her voice faltered. “It’s, it’s… just a bad time with this war and that… I’m not sure we, I, can run this on my own. And there’s already talk of rationing. Just one thing after another it seems.”

  “Yes. Yes. I can see what you mean.”

  Mavis watched as he cast a glance around the shop, taking in the sweet jars and the display of cigarettes, face out on the shelf. “Not thinking of selling up are you, Mrs Eastman?”

  Even Henry caught the sense of expectation in Mr Watson’s voice.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.” Mavis hesitated a moment. “Not yet, anyway.” She turned towards Henry as if indicating a reason for her reply. “We’ll see how things go. Early days.”

  “Yes. Yes.” Mr Watson turned to the door as if to leave. “But it would be good for you to have this open,” he tapped the Closed sign. “You’ve probably heard that we’ve had to close the cinema. Government orders. Daft, if you ask me.” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I hadn’t heard that, Mr Watson.” Mavis was genuinely surprised. “What will you do now?”

  “Not really sure to be honest. Wait for my call-up papers I suppose, if it comes to that.” He shifted his weight and tapped his left leg. “Mind you, this might put the kibosh on any attempts to get into the army. Touch of polio when I was a kid left this one a little withered.”

  “Oh dear.” Mavis involuntarily looked down at his leg. She had noticed he had walked with a slight limp but had never guessed why.

  “I’ll get by, one way or another. The important thing is to give you something to concentrate on and, as far as this shop is concerned, I’m sure Arthur would have wanted to see it kept open.” He added jovially. “And if you don’t mind me saying, Mrs Eastman, purely thinking of myself, it will save me a heck of a hike to get my pack of cigarettes in the morning!”

  Mavis smiled nervously. “Well, Henry and I were just talking about the shop. I wasn’t sure what to do to be honest but perhaps it will be a good thing to get it open once more. I don’t know.” She felt the pit opening in her stomach once more, the fear of the future.

  “It would be good to see Eastman’s open again.” Mr Watson put his hat back on and opened the door. “Please call me Victor by the way. I’m going to be a regular – war work permitting of course!”

  Victor Watson smiled and closed the door behind him.

  Mavis & Henry

  1940

  Mavis did open the shop the following week but she had the uneasy feeling that she was destined to be seen as one of those dowdy widows of the town. With a lot of the men away on conscription, the ones left were either too old or already married. Mavis grew increasingly bitter about the situation she had been left in. She said nothing when wives of soldiers came into the shop complaining about the absence of their husbands at some far-flung training camp.

  “I bet he’s having a high-old-time up there. He says that it’s too far to come back for the weekend and here’s me stuck with the kids playing havoc and trying to keep an eye on them all the time as well as cope with the rationing.”

  Joyce Creighton, head-scarved and harassed, had launched into a regular catechism of injustices that Mavis had heard a number of times, not only from her but from other women. She had come into the shop for her daily packet of cigarettes – always a pack of Star – and had stood in front of the counter with her purse open, pushing the money around in the hope of finding a thrupenny bit.

  “I don’t know how he thinks we survive down here on what he sends back. Probably drinking it down the local pub with some Northern floozy. I don’t mind telling you, Mrs Eastman, Ronnie had a wandering eye even before he was called up. Let off the leash, heaven knows what he’s up to.”

  Her gaze caught a pile of leaflets that lay on the counter. “Oh yes, we got one of these shoved through our door.” She picked one up and flapped it in the air. “If the Invader Comes,” Joyce snorted derisively. “Well, perhaps it will give that good-for-nothing something to do at last if Jerry should parachute in. Catch him with his pants down, I shouldn’t wonder.” She pushed the money across the counter and snapped her purse shut before thrusting it back into the wicker basket hung over her arm.

  Mavis had heard it all before and knew that it was pointless to argue against or even try to mollify Joyce’s obvious and persistent anger. Protestations that perhaps Ron wasn’t having a particularly easy time at the training camp had met with little sympathy and nearly every day brought forth new accusations of infidelity or laziness. Mavis often wondered if it was the war that had opened up the cracks in these marriages or if these normally hidden private lives had always been incomplete or troubled. Arthur had been a faithful husband – or at least she had no reason to believe he hadn’t. Now she heard so many tales from the wives who came into the shop that she began to wonder if Arthur had been some kind of confessor to the men who spent so much of their time gassing in the front of the shop or in the New Bear.

  The retreat from Dunkirk – although Churchill had called it one the country’s greatest achievements in a radio broadcast – left no-one in doubt that their backs were firmly up against the wall. Whatever the radio reported – and the news was invariably positive – it had been the returning soldiers on home leave that spread the real story about Dunkirk; how it had been a total shambles and most of the officers couldn’t tell one end of a swagger stick from a rifle butt. The general feeling was that the ordinary soldier had been led by donkeys into a trap from which they had been very lucky to escape.

  “It was a bleedin’ wonder – pardon my French, Mrs Eastman – we got off that beach in one piece. The organization was duff. A lot of those officers were like peas in a colander, coming the old soldier like, running around not knowing what to do and more interested in keeping the sand out of their smart boots than sorting out the chaos.”

  Christopher Rose, whose father ran the shoe shop by the market square, was home on leave and had dropped in to buy tobacco. Mavis had known him since he was a very young boy and when Christopher joined the Territorials before the war she would see him in the town, proudly striding around in his spotlessly pressed uniform. Now though, he wore his beret carelessly on the side of his head, and there was a look of weariness around his eyes that added more years to his face.

  “We’d been standing in the water for half a day, queuing up and waiting for the next boat to pick up as many as they could take. I can tell you, Mrs Eastman, we was frozen. Frozen.” He tapped his legs with the flat of his hands as if he could still feel the dampness seeping into his bones. “My legs was numb.”

  Christopher flicked open the packet of cigarette papers he had just bought and began to tap some of the tobacco into an unfolded paper.

  “And you’ll never guess what happened? There’s this officer comes off the shore as soon as the next boat arrives and he wades past all of us that’s been waiting for hours, like – and he’s got his shiny boots and swagger stick in his hands above his head. Holding them like they’re the bleedin’ crown jewels – pardon my French. Cool as you like he just ignores us and hauls himself aboard the boat.” Christopher shook his head, breaking off to lick the edges of the cigarette paper with the tip of his tongue before rolling the cigarette into a semblance of a tube. “You know, Mrs Eastman, I thought the last war did for all that old malarkey. Made us all equal. Doesn’t seem to have changed a bleedin’ – pardon my French – thing, though.”

  “Wasn’t it ever thus, Christopher? All we can do is make sure we try and keep safe. You especially.” Mavis gave a quick smile. “No heroics just to prove something.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that Mrs Eastman. I’ll get through this, make no mistake. And make sure things get changed for the better. I think those Russians have got the best idea, don’t you?
Pity they’re not on our side – well not yet, anyway.” He put the cigarette in his mouth and tipped his beret to Mavis. “Got to be off Mrs E, Mum wants me back for tea.”

  After he had left the shop and there were no further customers, Mavis had time to run the dust cloth over the sweet jars. As she flicked the cloth across the line of jars, she pondered the limbo land that everyone had fallen into. The Germans were coming, they weren’t coming. The Americans would definitely join next week and then the next minute they weren’t. The same with the Russians. And all the time there were the rumours and gossip about fifth columnists and spies planning to subvert the country from within. There was a board across the road from the shop that was normally used for notices of local amateur theatricals but now it had a poster which showed a soldier sitting next to a beautiful girl and the words, Tell NOBODY – not even HER. The emphasis on the HER seemed so unfair and each morning, as Mavis drew the blinds up, the poster stared back accusingly, forever regaling her with its message of distrust.

  The black-out was the one thing that everyone moaned about in the shop or when she was out in town. It felt as if the darkness had overwhelmed everyone and everything and that the night only reluctantly gave way to the day, creeping backwards into dark corners and alleyways, never really giving up to the sun’s rays. Some rooms that were infrequently used in houses had permanent black-out curtains fixed at the windows so as to save time putting them up and taking them down each day. The internal life of these houses became more and more concentrated in kitchens while lounges and dining rooms were left permanently darkened.

  There had been more accidents on the roads since the ban on lights at night and back in February one of the local farmers had been knocked down and killed when returning home slightly the worse for wear from a pub. It was said that he had been following the white line down the centre of the road when an army lorry came round the corner and mowed him down. His widow had been inconsolable at the funeral and the visible pain of her loss revived echoes of Mavis’s own. There had been other violent deaths – mostly army sons – suffered by other families in the town and each one set off in Mavis a sympathetic tremor.

  She found that her sleep patterns were changing and often she would wake at two in the morning, her mind spinning with thoughts and fears. At first she had just lain in bed listening to the distant chime of the church clock sounding the quarters and hours, but later when she woke she would creep quietly downstairs so as not to wake Henry and make her way into the shop. Sitting behind the counter in Arthur’s old chair, wrapped in a blanket taken off her bed, she would raise the blind of one window so that she could look out on the darkened and silent world. The black slab of the buildings opposite was impenetrable but gradually her eyes became more accustomed to the subtle variations in the darkness, especially on nights when there was a full moon and no cloud cover. The velvet of the starry sky, viewed by craning her neck towards the window, and the smoothness of the grey of the road lit by the moonlight always gave her a sense of possible escape; that it wasn’t going to be like this forever. But across the road, indistinct in the gloom, permanently accusing her was that poster, dog-eared and flapping in the breeze, carrying its constant message of mistrust. She never pointed out the poster to Henry and he never asked, but Henry’s bedroom being immediately above the shop she thought it very unlikely that he had failed to notice it.

  Henry, for his part, would look at the poster and wonder if he should trust Madeleine but couldn’t think of anything he might have said to her that would help the enemy, or indeed how she would get that information to Austria. The disruption of his father’s death and the onset of war had driven an unspoken wedge between him and Madeleine. He had progressed to senior school while she remained in the junior and the arrival of the refugees had filled the schools and town to overflowing. The intimate, relatively closed, world of Bradford on Avon was invaded not only by the child refugees but at weekends and holidays by parents coming to visit their offspring. The close ties that Henry had with Madeleine became stretched and weakened as the months went by. Their days were not now shared just with each other but with scores of others. It was only natural, given Henry’s prominence – he was now close to ten stone even though not yet thirteen – that he retreated more into himself, uncomfortable with strangers and wary of the cocky and confident London lads who roamed the streets in little gangs of twos and threes. There had been organized fights between local boys and the incomers and although no-one had been seriously hurt there had been some rumblings of discontent from the local parents and questions about when these “ruffians” would be returning home. Henry avoided the problem by retreating to his books although there were a few places at school and in the town where he found his toes “accidentally” trodden on or an elbow nudged into him by a passing refugee.

  He often heard his mother descend the stairs to the shop and the sound of the blind being raised below. At first he wondered what she might be looking out for and he would go to his own window on the top floor and part the heavy curtains. From his vantage point he could see over the roof of the building opposite towards the distant Mendips where the hills shaped themselves dark against the night sky. He would stay awake and watch until he heard the window blind close downstairs and then he would return to his bed, listening out for the footsteps on the stair.

  It was on such a night that they both saw the barn owl fly the length of Silver Street, its ghostly wings unmoving in the moonlight that streamed across its back and guided its path down the empty street. Henry, peering out between the curtains upstairs, had been the first to spot the bird swooping over the roof of the house a few doors up on the opposite side and descend to about ten feet above the ground, flying in a lazy glide between the houses. Instinctively, Henry pushed aside his curtains to get a better view and perhaps it was this sharp movement off to the bird’s right that made it swivel its head towards the shop front as it passed. At the same moment, immediately underneath Henry’s bedroom, Mavis peered from the shop window and only caught sight of the owl’s face as it turned towards the shop. It let out a piercing shriek before turning its head to the front and disappearing from the sight of both Henry and Mavis. The effect on the two of them couldn’t have been more different: for Mavis it induced an inexplicable terror, for Henry a moment of insightful wonder. Neither was to know of the other’s vision, nor did Henry ever tell his mother that he often heard her going downstairs to the shop at night or the sound of her crying that filtered like a rising fog through the floorboards.

  Mavis & Victor

  1940

  It was in the first week of September 1940 that Victor Watson invited Mavis to the cinema. The closure of the theatres had been short-lived, the government realizing that people needed some kind of enjoyment. Afterwards she imagined that perhaps he had waited an exact year after Arthur’s death to make his approach – through some kind of twisted gentlemanly etiquette. He had dropped into the shop just after she had opened at 8.30 am and after pocketing his packet of cigarettes had nonchalantly asked Mavis, “When did you last go to the flicks?”

  Somewhat taken aback by the question, Mavis had flustered a little, shuffling and squaring up the sweet bags on the counter by the till. “Oooh, I can’t remember now. Some time ago – before the war. Not really Arthur’s thing. I remember I took Henry to see The Adventures of Robin Hood a couple of years ago but I seem to remember another film that just Arthur and I saw about the same time. Now what was it called?” Mavis stared out the window as if for inspiration. “It was a mystery story and had something to do with a train and someone writing their initials on the window or something. Oh, I’m hopeless at remembering things these days.” She laughed.

  “My guess is that’d be The Lady Vanishes. Came out in 1938. Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.” Victor added, “It was the Krauts that dunnit.” He laughed, adding, “Don’t they always!”

  Mavis laughed. “Yes, that was the one. Quite clever, if a little far-fetched, I
thought.”

  “Do you remember those two characters in it, the English fellows who were keen to get back to England to see a cricket match only to find it had been washed out?” Victor opened his newly purchased packet and pulled out a cigarette, wagging it between his fingers. “I only cottoned on to this because I watched it so many times during that week – one of the drawbacks of being a cinema manager, I reckon – but it was supposed to be early spring on that train journey, avalanches and all that, and there’s these English wallahs wittering on about getting back for a test match which would only be held during the summer.” He struck a match and lit the end of the cigarette, simultaneously blowing out the match and placing it back in the box. “Spoils it a bit, it do.”

  “Well, that’s your job, I suppose.” Mavis indicated the sweet trays in front of her under the glass top of the cabinet. “It’s like these. I get heartily sick of all this stuff. Sometimes the smell of marshmallows makes me feel queasy. We just have to get on with it, eh?” She looked at Victor who seemed to be thinking of something else.

  “Yes,” he said absent-mindedly. There was a brief pause before he added, “Look, there’s a pretty good film on this week at my cinema. Rebecca it’s called. Murder, mystery, ghost story. It’s got Joan Fontaine and that Olivier fellow in it. Best one we’ve had in the house for a long time and drawing in the crowds. You should come down.”

  Mavis had instinctively learnt to refuse the few invitations out to tea and sympathy in the last year but now she hesitated. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure…” her answered tailed away.