A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  Outside of Gregory’s there was a large box of miscellaneous books, maps and pamphlets all priced at 3d each. It was stuff that either had not sold inside the shop or was just too odd to be easily classified. The afternoon sun, now lowering into the west, still shone the length of Green Street and pressed warmly against Henry’s back as he kneeled on the pavement next to the box. It didn’t look too promising. Two well-rubbed prayer books and various catechisms sat on top of a large pile of sheet music. Pulling out the sheet music and putting them to one side, Henry began to flick through a number of pamphlets that had been buried underneath. There were a number of yellow paper political tracts published during the war years which didn’t interest him at all. Then he came to a thin book with a plain red jacket. It was the author’s name on the flimsy and frayed dustjacket that first caught his eye. H.G. Wells. The title was odd: Mind at the End of Its Tether. Henry had read The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds, but had never heard of this before. Opening the book at the title page he saw that it had only been published the year before. Browsing the slim pages of text, Henry was suddenly struck by one sentence that seemed to leap out at him from the thinly printed pages: the end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded – a frightful queerness has come into life. He turned it over in his hand, looked at the title, assumed it was a philosophical work and put it back in the box. But as he went to replace the sheet music on top, he hesitated. Something about those words: a frightful queerness has come into life seemed, in some, as yet indefinable way, to ring true for him as well. He pulled out the book and looked at the cover once more. Putting the sheet music back in the box, Henry tucked the book under one arm and entered the shop to pay his 3d.

  He got back to Bradford on Avon just after 5 pm and walked over the bridge and up Silver Street. As he passed by the market he could see the cinema manager putting out the A-board announcing that evening’s film times. A sense of unease began to grow as he neared home. The shop closed at five o’clock and he had to let himself in with a key, the bell on the door tinging as he entered. His mother put her head round the door that led to the back rooms.

  “Hello, dear. Had a good time? Buy anything?” She gave him a warm smile.

  “Not a lot this time. A detective novel and a little book by H.G. Wells.” Henry waved the two paper bags that he held in his hand. “It was lovely in Bath today. Not too many visitors crowding the streets.” Henry gestured towards the shop counter behind him. “Did we take much today?”

  “Quite a good day, really.” Mavis brightened. “A fair amount of loose tobacco and those lemon sherbets we bought in last week have almost sold out. Oh, and remind me to reorder the cigarette papers on Monday. We’re getting quite low.” She ducked back into the living area and called back as she went up the stairs: “I’ve got to get ready. George is coming round at 6.30 and I’m still in my smelly shop clothes.” Her voice trailed away as she reached the first floor and entered her bedroom at the back of the building.

  Henry went through to the hallway and took off his outdoor shoes. The day had been warm enough not to wear a coat but the evenings had begun to get a chill that gave a hint of the coming autumn. Putting his feet into the large felt slippers that sat beside the hall stand, Henry shuffled back into the shop and lifted the counter flap. He noted the jar of lemon sherbets was all but empty – just enough left for one more quarter. Checking through the other sweet and tobacco jars he made a mental note of what needed to be reordered on Monday morning. He tidied the jars so that all the labels faced outwards and neatly uniform, sitting with their edges aligned with the front of the shelf. He found that his mother could be a little untidy left to herself in the shop. Straightening the boxes of blackjacks, Nipits, Mighty Imps and sweet cigarettes on the counter, Henry brushed off the faint dusting of sugar that still lay on the open space beside the till. He took a look in the two Rizla boxes. With the greens almost all gone and the reds running low, a reorder should have been put in yesterday. Henry wished his mother did a more regular check and perhaps then they could keep the shop better stocked, but it hadn’t been easy to keep the enthusiasm going with rationing still in force.

  Henry opened the till and took out the money tray. His mother would say that it wasn’t really worth the effort but he preferred to have the money out of the shop overnight. Just in case, he would say, just in case. Going through to the back parlour, Henry could hear his mother upstairs singing along to a Beryl Davis tune he remembered from about the time his father died, Don’t Worry ’Bout Me. She had sung it to Henry in those first years of the war, tucking him up at night, always changing the words to Don’t Worry’ Bout Us. Now her clear soprano voice sang out in perfect tune with the radio.

  Henry tucked the money drawer onto a shelf under the occasional table on which the radio stood. Picking up his paper bags he pulled out the two books he had bought that day. He put the detective novel to one side and opened up the H.G. Wells booklet. Henry remembered going to the cinema before the war to see Things to Come with his father. He marvelled at Wells’ ability to predict the future and after reading The Time Machine he had often daydreamed of climbing into a time machine to travel a few years’ ahead in time. Five or six years would be good, he thought, just to see if life would change for the better. Just a few notches on the control lever… through the time gate… onwards. Henry was still staring in a trance at the first page of the book when his mother came down the stairs and into the living room.

  “Well, how do I look?”

  She twirled on her heel to let the light grey dress blossom out from her knees. There was a girlish quality to her that Henry hadn’t seen before. She wore a knitted blue cardigan over her shoulders and it lay open, unbuttoned. Clip-on pearl button earrings were just visible below her hair and round her neck she wore a light string of pearls she had bought from Woolworths before the war.

  “Not too fancy, am I?”

  “No. You look just fine, Mum. Be warm enough, will you? Can get a bit chilly these nights.” Henry noticed that her legs were bare.

  “We’ll only be nipping from the pictures to the fish and chip shop afterwards so I’m not going to be outside in the cold for very long. Now, George said he’d drop in a portion of fish for you when he comes to collect me.” There was knock on the shop door. “That’ll be him now, I guess.” Mavis turned towards the shop.

  “Mum?” Henry blurted out. “Do you mind if he doesn’t come in? Not tonight?”

  “It looks a bit rude, son.” Mavis hesitated, her hand on the door jamb. “But I’m sure he’ll understand.” She gave Henry a quick smile and was gone into the shop.

  Henry heard the drawing back of the bolts and the ting of the bell as his mother opened the shop door. He padded quietly towards the living-room door and listened for scraps of conversation echoing down the corridor. He moved back quickly to the table when he heard his mother coming from the shop. She came through the door with a small bundle of newspaper which she put on a plate from the sideboard.

  “Rock and thrupenny worth, Henry. Your favourite.”

  Henry felt his mother had spoken a little louder so that the soldier would hear from the shop. He put his hand on the newspaper. Warm.

  “Thanks.”

  Mavis picked up her handbag from the chair and checked her hair in the mirror over the fireplace. With a light touch she patted and shaped the light brown curls just above her cardigan collar. Looking in the mirror at Henry’s reflection over her shoulder, she said:

  “The pictures finish about 10 pm and I should be back by 11 at the latest. Don’t need to wait up for me, love. Don’t bolt the front door otherwise I’ll be locked out!” She turned and gave him a quick smile before going back to the shop.

  “Bye!”

  Henry listened for the sound of the bell of the shop door as it closed behind them. Waiting until he was sure his mother had removed her key from the lock, he walked down the passageway and into the shop. Going behind the counter and up to th
e edge of the window he could see the retreating backs of his mother and the soldier – he now in civvies – as they walked down the street towards the town centre. His mother had her head turned towards the soldier. Henry could see that she was laughing at something the soldier had said. Soon they were beyond the bend in the street and were lost from view.

  He returned to the living room and looked at the folded newspaper parcel. The smell of the warm fish and chips had begun to seep into the air and made him feel hungry. Unrolling the layers of paper, Henry slid the fish with its distinctive bone down the middle onto the plate next to the chips. Flattening out the newspaper the fish had come in, he placed it on the table under the plate so that he could read it while eating. He switched on the radio and waited while the valves warmed up before retuning the dial. His mother preferred the Light Programme but Henry had recently discovered the BBC Third. Rolling the dial between his fingers, the radio sputtered with fragments of noise and static from exotic locations. Hilversum, Stavanger and Luxembourg passed by on the dial before he finally tuned it into the Third. A voice was just finishing off an introduction to the evening’s concert:

  “…and Isolde. Performed this evening at our Maida Vale studios with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Adrian Boult.”

  Henry scanned the newspaper page as he picked at the fish with his fingers. His eye caught details of a new film that would be coming round the circuits soon – Dancing With Crime – and he began to read the review. He had only finished the first line when the opening bars of the music from the radio made him stop reading and look up. His understanding of classical music was still limited but there was something about the sound, this particular sound, which was different from the music his mother played at the piano. She had been amazed at how he had been able to pick up the notation on the music sheets as he watched over her shoulder. He hadn’t needed to be told twice about how key signatures worked and sharps, flats and cadences. The music that was coming out of the radio now, though, was different. It had a strange, unsettling quality to it. The newspaper and the food forgotten, Henry sat with his large hands resting beside the plate, listening intently. The opening chords increased in intensity until a sudden wave of sound filled the room, billowing from wall to wall. On and on it built, rising to a massive crescendo that never seemed to resolve into a perfect cadence. By the time the music had finished the rest of the food remained untouched on the plate and was now cold. Henry’s trembling hands tipped the fish and chips into the newspaper, folded it up and dropped it into the waste bin ready for the compost tomorrow. The house felt intensely claustrophobic and he needed to get out into the fresh air.

  Locking the shop door behind him, Henry headed down towards the river. Passing Market Street he walked along the path by the river’s edge and crossed the fields towards the Great Tithe Barn that sat next to the canal. Slipping through the narrow gap in the hedge he came out on to the canal towpath. The canal had become little more than a weedy ditch after years of non-use and the gates on the town lock had disappeared during the war, hauled away, he guessed, by someone to be used for firewood. The towpath, although now quite overgrown in parts, was kept open by the few walkers who often used it to get to the next town by the shortest route.

  Dusk was settling over the surrounding fields and enveloping the canal in a dark tunnel of trees with the occasional open pond of water. A pillbox had been erected by the side of the canal in the early years of the war, supposedly to give a clear field of fire on three sides against any marauding invaders. There had been some desultory manning of the box by the Home Guard but now it sat, the gun slits and door opening boarded up to stop the local children getting inside. Long tendrils of ivy had laid their fingers on the brickwork of the box and Henry reckoned that given another summer the building would be completely covered. By the time Henry had got as far as the Avoncliff aqueduct about two miles down the canal, it was completely dark. He walked onto the aqueduct footpath which carried the canal across the river and looked back towards Bradford. The black-outs during the war had draped every night in intense darkness and a quiet that Henry had come to find strangely comforting. He had often stood by his window with the black-out curtains closed behind him to watch the town sink into a silhouette of roof tops and church spires. Now, street lights shone once more and people stayed out longer in the evening. The night was clear and above his head Henry could make out the stars of the Plough and Orion’s Belt. From the river that flowed underneath there came the constant sound of water tumbling over the weir, unremitting and unvaried. Suddenly a mushroom of steam and a distant whistle drew Henry’s eye to a spot about three miles distant down the valley where the train from Bath was climbing the Limpley Stoke incline. As Avoncliff Halt was just the other side of the bridge he made the decision to take the train back to Bradford. About five minutes later the train rounded the bend and Henry, standing under the single lamp on the one-carriage-length platform, waved his arms towards the oncoming engine. The driver pulled the whistle cord in recognition and applied the brakes. Nodding to the driver as the engine pulled up, he entered the only carriage accessible from the platform and settled back in the seat for the short journey back to the town.

  Walking from the station, he had intended to go straight back to the shop but at the junction with Market Street he could see the warm light spilling out from the foyer of the cinema about a hundred yards up the street. Hesitating momentarily, he turned and made his way towards the cinema. The poster by the entrance announced the day’s showing, Brief Encounter, the film that he had hoped to see with Madeleine. On the poster two figures stood under a lamp on a railway station at night and a train was drawing into the platform. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. Henry looked at the poster and read the names but couldn’t decipher what kind of film it might be. Peering through the glass doors of the cinema he could see the ticket booth now standing empty in the brightly lit small foyer and along the walls that led to the auditorium there were lobby cards that portrayed scenes from the film now showing. Pushing open the door to the foyer he could hear the soundtrack of the film coming from the cinema. Walking past the ticket booth and an office which had Manager written across a square of frosted glass, Henry came to the double doors. The sound was much clearer now. Two people, a man and a woman, were talking. Pulling open one of the doors slightly, he was confronted by a heavy velvet curtain that had been put up at the start of the war and which was pulled across the entrance during performances to stop the outside light bleeding into the auditorium. The voices were speaking intimately of love and dying and forgetting.

  “Henry!”

  It was the cinema manager. He had come out of his office and had seen a familiar figure peering through the cinema doors.

  Henry closed the auditorium door.

  “What you doing, my lad?” His accent still had hints of Somerset. “Show’s almost over. No point creeping in at the end, Henry.” He laughed. “Anyway, not your kind of film. All luvvy-duvvy stuff. We got a good thriller coming next week, Dancing With Crime. More your cup of tea, I’d say.”

  “Sorry, Mr Watson. I wasn’t trying to get in. I…” He thought about explaining about his mother being in the cinema but realized it would sound odd. “I… was just curious to see what this film was about.”

  From inside the cinema came the sound of the long whistle of an express train. This seemed to galvanize Victor into action.

  “Oh, right, there’s the whistle. That’s the point where she almost tops herself, she does. Thinks about throwing herself in front of the train.” Mr Watson raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Folks is funny.”

  Victor Watson stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, his evening jacket dusted with cigarette ash. Henry noticed a stain on the front of his trousers and presumed he had spilt tea down them at some time.

  “Just a couple more minutes to go in the film. Best make yourself scarce, Henry, otherwise you’ll get trampled in the rush as that lot try to get out before the Nati
onal Anthem.” The manager indicated the cinema doors. “They’ll be through there like a pack of sheep chased by dogs.”

  With the manager preparing himself to greet the outgoing public, Henry slipped out through the entrance doors. He didn’t want to be seen by his mother and he made his way quickly back to the shop. By the time he had tidied up the living room and turned off all the lights, except one small table lamp, it was nearly 10.30. Picking up the two books he had bought that day, he went upstairs to his bedroom.

  Henry’s bedroom sat above the shop and a window both out to the front and to the side gave him a good view up and down Silver Street. Drawing the curtains and turning out the light, Henry pulled up a chair by the side window, looking down towards the town. And waited. As the film had finished about twenty minutes ago he expected his mother would be back in the next ten minutes or so. He made a small chink in the curtains, just wide enough for him to watch without being seen. He watched intently, never moving from the chair.

  Eventually, after twenty minutes, he spotted two figures rounding the bend in the road. The woman was walking close to the man with her arm through his. As they got closer he recognized his mother. He felt his scalp prickling. The two figures moved out of sight under the front window and stepped into the bay by the front door to the shop. Henry could hear muffled, indistinct words from under his feet.

  And then silence.

  He was expecting the shop doorbell to ring but there was no sound from underneath. Staring down at the carpet by his feet, Henry experienced an intense nausea that brimmed and churned in his stomach. He rubbed his hair back and forth, his fingernails digging into his scalp, his eyes squeezed shut.