At half-past eight his Uncle George came into the pub. Arthur knew him for a sponger and disliked him but, under the circumstances, called out and treated him to a pint. George filled his pipe, and complained that the weather was bad. He wanted rain.
‘Don’t come it,’ Arthur said raucously. ‘We ’ad about fifteen inches last week. The ground’s still soppin’ wet.’
‘Not any more it ain’t, my lad,’ George told him. ‘The soil sups up rain quicker than yo’ can sup up ten pints o’ Shippoe’s ale.’
‘I don’t suppose a bloke like yo’d be satisfied unless it was chuckin’ it down all the time,’ Arthur said.
‘I wouldn’t grumble at that,’ George said, a tall, red-faced, sharp-featured market-gardener. He was known as The Whistler, a nickname fastened on to him by the family because whenever any member of it saw him on the street he was always whistling loudly, his cheeks sunken in, lips pursed, hands in his pockets, walking quickly to some nondescript made-up tune, his blue eyes vacant and a flat cap perched on top of his greying hair. He could barely read and write, but behind his blue-eyed emptiness lay a shrewdness that gained him a fair living from the small acreage of gardens he cultivated. Arthur passed his gardens once and saw a notice posted on the gate saying: ‘Fresh cut lettices sixpance each’ and a small queue by the hut door. ‘He must be all there,’ his mother said about her brother, pointing to her temples, ‘to make the money he makes.’
‘And if I hear him whistling again,’ Arthur cried, to the delight of his father who didn’t like his wife’s family, ‘I’ll send him a packet of bird-seed for a Christmas Box.’
George had changed the subject. ‘Have yer read the papers lately, Arthur?’ Two-thirds of the pint went in one long agony of his Adam’s apple.
‘I read ‘em every day. Why?’
‘I wondered what you thought about the big race tomorrer.’
Arthur had often given him good tips, much to his chagrin. ‘Last Echo,’ he said. ‘Back that.’
George gasped, and finished his beer. ‘But it’s at twenty-to-one. It can’t win wi’ them odds.’
‘Last Echo,’ Arthur repeated, who silently agreed with him. ‘I know it’s twenty-to-one, but I’m having a couple of quid on it. I may have more. Put a fiver on it, Uncle George, and you’ll never regret it.’
George was cautious. Smoke from his black twist went into Arthur’s eyes. ‘I’ll see what the bookie thinks.’
Such bastards always prosper, Arthur thought. ‘I don’t care what the bookie thinks. I know it’s a dead cert, and I’m putting all my money on it. Of course the bookie’ll tell you to leave it alone, because he knows it’s a dead cert and don’t want to lose his lolly.’
George had to admit the logic of this, but a flicker of distrust stayed in his eyes. Arthur called out for two more pints. No good expecting George to order. You could never shame him into it, the mean bastard. You had to admire him sometimes. George asked why he thought Last Echo such a dead cert.
‘Because Lord Earwig rang me up today from Aintree. “That you, Arthur?” he asked me. “Look, bein’ as we’ve bin pals for such a long time I’m goin’ ter put yer in the way of a bit of cash. I know yer can do wi’ it, sweatin’ yer tripes out all day at that bleedin’ machin.” No, Uncle George, I can’t tell you how Lord Earwig knows about this, because he made me swear never to tell anybody how he gets hold of it. He’d get chucked out o’ the Jockey Club if I did, and I’d never be able to give you hot tips any more. Anyway, all my other tips ‘ave bin good, ain’t they?’
George was appeased, though somewhat credulous about Arthur’s aristocratic connection. ‘All right,’ he said with a wink. ‘I see what you mean.’ The glasses were empty once more and George gazed vacantly at the bar, a faint whistle coming from his lips. When Arthur ordered again, he swigged it down as though he’d been ten days without a drop to drink. ‘What do you think of the war, Arthur?’ he asked.
‘War?’
‘Yes. A bloke told me in the market that he’s read in the paper as a war was goin’ ter start in three months’ time.’
Arthur laughed. ‘Don’t worry about a war, Uncle George. They don’t call-up blokes of your age.’
‘It ain’t that. I was on’y thinking about rationing coming in again. There’s a terrible shortage of food in a war.’
This bright, culminating star of the conversation made Arthur splutter into his beer with mirth. The only thing George thought of was money. He was clever right enough. During the war he’d wangled his way out of the army and worked in a gun factory, making luminous black-out buttons, gas-mask boxes, and ration-book covers in his spare time as a firewatcher, and near the war’s end had saved enough to buy his gardens. Apart from vegetables, he did good business in poultry and eggs.
‘I wouldn’t be so happy about a war if I was yo’,’ Arthur said. ‘If they drop an atom bomb a hundred miles away from Nottingham even, it’ll make all the soil dead so that you wain’t be able to grow a thing. It kills all chickens as well. They call it radiation, or summat. I heard a talk about it on the wireless the other night.’
George, sceptical in most things, had a wild fear of scientific fact. ‘You don’t mean it?’ he exclaimed, turning pale and putting his beer back on the table. ‘It’s the first time I’ve heard owt about a thing like that.’
‘That’s because yer don’t meet people who know such things,’ Arthur said. ‘All you do in your spare time is stand at the bookie’s counter.’
‘Nay, lad, I ain’t got so much spare time as it matters. I wok hard for my bit o’ money.’
‘I suppose yer think I play poker all day? Anyway, I’m tellin’ yer that these atom bombs poison the earth so’s nowt can grow. This bit I’d read in the paper as well, by a doctor who’d bin six months testin’ lettuces from the places that have been atom-bombed.’
The glasses were empty, and George stood up, sober in spite of his cadged and gobbled pints. After a long pause he remembered Arthur’s sting about the bookie’s counter. ‘But I know what hard wok is, I can tell you.’ He buttoned his jacket, adjusted his cap, and adopted a jaunty air that became him. ‘I’m off to the Dog and Stag,’ he said, and walked to the door whistling so loudly that he did not hear Arthur’s reply to his abrupt good night.
He drank another pint in solitude, deciding to go home, have some supper, and perhaps watch the television. An early night would do no harm for once. He shouted ‘Good night’ to the barman.
The White Horse stood on a corner, and he went out by the main door, watched a trolley-bus descend from the station and stop at the opposite corner. ‘Shall I run, and take it to town?’ he asked himself. ‘No,’ he answered, without thinking. He heard the conductor’s bell and, like a lighted greenhouse growing people, the bus trundled away up the hill. He turned into the darkness of Eddison Road, walked a few yards, heard a movement of heavy feet behind him.
‘That’s ‘im, right enough. Sink your boots into ‘im, Bill.’
What’s going on? he wondered. Boots into who?
‘We’ve got the bastard now.’
‘It’s about time an’ all.’
Two shadowy figures came level and took his arm. Into me, he thought, struggling to break free, wheeling his fists like windmill sails until he stood clear.
‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘or you’ll get hurt.’
His back was to the wall, fists raised, blood behind his eyes distilled to defiance and a hard-gutted core of self preservation. The war was on at last, and there was no escape from weighted fists and heavy boots, except by his own outnumbered sinews.
They lost no time. In their eagerness one came forward before the other, and Arthur smashed him with all his strength so that he ran back into the roadway holding his face. He felt the heaviness of his own breathing, and then stopped feeling anything in time to meet the second onrush with a kick of his shoe. There was no weight to it so he stepped aside and caught the man’s head with his fist. Somehow the wall was no longer b
ehind him and he did not realize it, because what he thought was the wall itself sent a shock of pain to the centre of his spine. He was caught around the neck and held fast, but made a miraculous escape from this before the other swaddie could come in. The way was open to run, but for some reason that he could never bring himself to understand, he did not run.
His back was again to the wall. They rushed him together. He piled all his strength on one and repelled him, lunging with his shoe in an attempt to lessen the charge of the second. He hit the first, then the second, then the first again reeled back, but they were still fresh, and Arthur felt a crack explode down his face that seemed to break all the bones in it, pain bursting across his eyes and throwing showers of orange sparks over him. In the same second he threw out his fists and freed himself, but a blow caught him in the back, followed by another that grazed his chin. He drove his fists back hard against one or another of them. They were undifferentiated and without identity, which put a sense of exultation into Arthur’s attacks. But four fists against two began to tell, though it still did not occur to him to run. A hundred people were drinking beer or whisky in the White Horse, but the world had shrunk for him to a struggle being decided in the space of a few square yards, and his world was the colour and hue of sombre purple.
In the time between one defending blow and the next, he felt as though he were in a dream. He still held them away from him, heard their curses and advice, monosyllables and grunts that leapt about his face as he threw them back each time.
Judging by the colour of one man’s curses, the jolting ache at the joint of his arm, and the sting across his knuckles, he gave the biggest and best smash-hit of the night. Then he thought they were leaving. They were not leaving. He felt a blow on his chest, then another, and he stabbed his elbow into a stomach and hit out with his free hand. He was being pulled away from the wall. A blow at the side of his mouth spun him around, and the floor lifted to hit his shoulder. He kicked out, freed himself, drove his knuckles into someone’s eyes, stood up again. They dragged him down and he wrestled, lifting his head from the tangle of limbs. He pressed his fingers into a throat while his head was pulled back and back. He heard a hooter from the main road, and before its strident sound ended, a blow knocked all sense from him.
Knives and arrows went into all parts of his body. They want to kill me, he thought dimly, and tried to stand up, only to be kicked down again. He lay curled up. His thick clothes cushioned the hard core of their boots. Thinking that someone was coming along the road, they went away.
Rage helped him to get up. He held dizzily on to the wall, noticed that cement was missing from certain cracks, and picked more of it away with his fingers until he was able to stand by himself. He felt his face, tried to move forward, thinking of revenge and unwilling to tell himself whether or not he had deserved to lose his fight. His greatest wish was to hurry back to the White Horse for a double whisky before closing time. He tapped his coat: the wallet was still there. Pain leapt into his head. The world he saw stayed purple and sombre, bricks and paving stones shining lividly in the darkness, filled with rage and pain when he tried to touch them. His fingertips had a will to live. Walking slowly he came to the back-gate of the White Horse. He looked at his watch, but it was smashed, hands bending outwards from half-past nine. Seven quid gone down the drain, he said to himself, making for the lavatories. Under the dim lightbulb he turned on the tap and bathed his face in cold water, soaking a handkerchief to wipe the grime away. Two side teeth were loose. Rinsing blood from his handkerchief, he reached into his pocket for a comb. It was broken so he threw it down and sprinkled water on his hair, smoothing it back with his fingers. Pain would not let him think, flaring over his face when he bent down to rub dust from his shoes.
Pushing open the saloon-bar door he walked quickly to the counter with his overcoat collar well pulled up, and asked for a double whisky. The lights were too bright, like giant magnets inflating his head to several times its size, burning his eyes into a squint so that he was hardly able to see. The whisky went into him like a sheet of flame, and he was about to ask for another, wondering how it was that no one could see the blood that seemed to be running down his face, when someone tapped his elbow. He turned and saw Doreen.
‘Hey up, duck,’ he said with a smile.
‘My God,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter with you, Arthur? You do look a mess.’
‘Where did you spring from?’ he asked, ignoring her question.
‘I’ve been to me sister’s and brother-in-law’s and we came here for a drink. They’re sitting over there, look.’ He didn’t follow the finger she held out, so she turned back: ‘But what’s happened to you? What’s wrong with your face? How …’
Her words trailed off and, with a grin, he slipped down in a dead faint, feeling the world pressing its enormous booted foot on to his head, forcing him away from the lights, down into the dark comfort of grime, spit, and sawdust on the floor.
PART TWO
Sunday Morning
13
He lay in an apathetic state and, sitting up to move his pillow, stared without recognition at the pink wall of the bedroom. Then he fell back, to sleep his troubles away. On waking up he ate voraciously the meals his mother set on the bed-side chair, becoming surly when she asked what was the matter and why he lay there for days on end like a dead dog.
‘I’m badly,’ he answered.
‘Well let me get you a doctor.’
‘I’m not that badly.’
He didn’t much care whether he lived or died. The wheels of change that were grinding their impressive tracks through his mind did not yet show themselves off in him to advantage. He stared at the pink-washed bedroom wall above the fireplace, plagued by crowding and inexpressible thought, thinking that he was going mad. He heard the rattle of plates and cups from downstairs, the dull thumping of factory turbines at the end of the terrace, people walking the street, children playing under lamp-posts, wireless sets piercing the air from neighbouring houses, an aeroplane flying low overhead like an asthmatic man playing a comb-and-paper — but they had no meaning and he only vaguely noticed the combined pandemonium rolling over the black cloud of his melancholy. He told himself that he would be able to go back to work soon, to the pub again in the evening, to the pictures; would be able to take a bus to town and walk around Woolworth’s to see what was on the counters for Christmas — but nothing could drag him out of the half-sleep in which he lay buried for three days.
They seemed like a hundred years, wheeling their brilliant Goose Fairs and Bonfire Nights and Christmases around him like branding irons in a torture chamber. When he stopped looking at the wall he lay back to sleep, and awoke after violent yet unrememberable dreams to see the grinning frantic face of the cheap mantelpiece clock telling him that only two minutes had gone by. He knew it was no use fighting against the cold weight of his nameless malady, or asking how it came about. He did not ask, believing it to be related to his defeat by the swaddies, a fact that did not call for much speculation. He did not ask whether he was in such a knocked-about state because he had lost the rights of love over two women, or because the two swaddies represented the raw edge of fang-and-claw on which all laws were based, law and order against which he had been fighting all his life in such a thoughtless and unorganized way that he could not but lose. Such questions came later. The plain fact was that the two swaddies had got him at last — as he had known they would and had bested him on the common battleground of the jungle.
He ate, but did not smoke, did not fight the tumultuous lake and whirlpool in his mind. He never thought to do so, but waited unknowingly for the full flood to diminish and cast him unharmed on to dry banks, cured of brain-colic and free to carry life on where he had left it. Every bone in his body seemed to have its separate and private pain, and he knew that his despair had acted as an anaesthetic when he came out of it and felt the actual sharp pains that forced him to stay in bed for another week.
On
Saturday morning he had not replied to his father’s gruff call that he should get up for breakfast. He heard the voice each time, distinct and peremptory, rolling up the stairs and through the closed door, but he stared at the wall wondering how many times his father would call before giving him up as a bad job.
Fred came in later and asked if he was all right.
‘Why?’ Arthur demanded, as best he could.
‘I just wondered,’ Fred said. ‘I thought you might want a doctor if you’re feeling badly. You don’t look good.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Did the swaddies get you?’
‘Yes. Leave me alone. I’m not getting up for wok on Monday. I’m all right. Shut the door when you go.’
‘Who was that girl as brought you ‘ome las’ night?’ his brother wanted to know.
‘What girl? Leave me be.’
‘Do you want a doctor?’
‘No. Bogger off.’
Fred left, and closed the door. Arthur fell back into a half-sleep. What girl? It must have been Doreen that gave me the brandy when I conked out in the White Hoss, and walked me back later, propping me up along Eddison Road, one step at a time. He remembered trying to talk to her, and wondered what he had told her when she asked him how he came to be looking so black-and-blue. He didn’t doubt it was something that sounded true, for even when you were dozy-daft it was easy to make up lies and excuses, he thought.
When he could think more clearly he asked himself a question and, because he couldn’t answer it, he was angered. It was this: How had the swaddies known he would be drinking at the White Horse that night? Neither of them had looked in at the door, and it was impossible to see through the windows because the curtains were well drawn. They had known he would be there and had waited outside, so who had told them? Had anybody told them? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was a coincidence that they had been standing outside when he turned the corner on to Eddison Road. But he didn’t think so. They had lounged around in the darkness, waiting for him to come out.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Page 19