by David Lodge
– I should leave yourself plenty of time to get to Victoria. You know what those thirty-sixes are like.
– I thought we’d leave about ten.
– Before, if I were you. Better early than late.
His cigarette was loosely packed and a few shreds of tobacco trailed from the end. When he applied a match, the paper flared up in a brief flame and glowing fragments of ash fell on to his knees. He brushed them off vigorously.
– You might bring us back a few packets of fags if you have room.
– Sure, Dad.
– Sure, Dad, his father mimicked him. He’s talking like a Yank already, Dorothy. Have a real twang by the time he gets home, I bet.
– I don’t know, his mother said. It hasn’t happened to Kath. I thought how nicely she spoke when she was home last.
– A bit too posh, if you ask me, said his father. I think she puts it on to impress the Yanks. He winked at Timothy and changed the subject:
– Had a letter from Stubbins and Gillow, this morning, son.
– The architects?
– They’re still keen to have you, if you want to start in September. Five pounds a week to start with, plus luncheon vouchers. Not bad for a sixteen-year-old. Of course, once you’re qualified it jumps up to . . . quite a lot.
– I think Timothy should stay on at school and try for University, said his mother.
– Let the boy make up his own mind, Dorothy. It’s not as if he’s giving up his education, anyway. He’ll be taking examinations all the time, going to night school and so on. What shall I tell them, son?
– I dunno, Dad, I still haven’t decided. I want to see what my results are like first.
– Yes, wait till you get your results, said his mother. There’s no hurry. Stubbins and Gillow can wait.
– All right, we’ll leave it till you come home, said his father. He picked up his newspaper and went upstairs.
– Don’t sit in there all morning, his mother called up the stairs. It’s gone eight already.
– All right, all right, he muttered from the landing. They heard the door of the lavatory shut.
– Don’t forget to thank your father when you say goodbye, said his mother. It costs money, you know.
When his father came downstairs again he was fully dressed for work. His mother handed him his sandwiches, which he put in his attaché case.
– Thanks dear. Well, Tim, have a good journey, and let us have a card to say you’ve arrived safely.
– I will, Dad. And thanks for the fares and everything.
– That’s all right, son. Give our love to Kath. Tell her to come over and see us soon.
– I will.
– Goodbye, then, son.
They shook hands solemnly. It was a strange sensation. Timothy couldn’t remember shaking hands with his father before. The last time they had been separated for any length of time was in the war, when he had been young enough to kiss his father goodbye. The handshake was like casting off a rope that had held him for a long time in safe anchorage. But he was relieved when his father left the house. The strain of maintaining a mask of imperturbable confidence about the journey before him was increasing, and the fewer observers there were, the better. Now he had only his mother to cope with.
– I’ll make some sandwiches for the train, she said.
– Make a good few will you, Mum? Then I can save some for tea-time.
– They won’t be very nice by then, she said doubtfully. You should be able to get something hot on the boat. Or on the train the other side.
The idea of his ordering himself a meal on a foreign train was so preposterous that he didn’t offer a comment.
Timothy was ready long before his mother. He was washed and dressed, his bag was packed, and his documents checked. There was nothing else to do, but it was too early to leave. He prowled restlessly round the house, and tried unsuccessfully to read the paper. The headline story was about Burgess and Maclean: B & M – WHERE ARE THEY? But there was nothing new in the report, and he couldn’t concentrate on the words anyway. He scanned the cricket scores, and threw down the paper. He went out into the back garden.
It was a bright day. The sun shone on the grey slate roofs of the houses beyond the garden fence, and dappled the coalshed with the shadows of the rose bushes. A sorbo-rubber ball still hung from the clothes-line by a grimy, weather-stained string, though it was a year or two since he had last played with it. He went back into the house and took his cricket bat from the cupboard under the stairs. Its bottom was splintered and worn down by years of street cricket, the rubber covering the handle was perished and sticky. He went back into the garden and began to practise his strokes: off drives and on drives, leg glances and forward defensive pushes with a dead bat. From time to time he indulged in a hook, which invariably snagged the string in the rose bushes, and brought a shower of petals fluttering to the ground.
Carrying his bag between them to the bus stop, each holding a handle, they took up the whole width of the pavement. Halfway along the street the paving stones were newer, where the bomb had dropped. The houses had been rebuilt, in exactly the same style. Except for the unweathered look of the brickwork and roof tiles you would never have guessed that there had been a gaping hole there for nearly ten years. A young woman with a scarf round her head opened the bedroom window of Jill’s house (as it used to be) to shake out a mop, and a little girl’s face peered down at them through the next window pane: new people, whom they didn’t know.
They waited nearly fifteen minutes for a number 36 bus. Conversation was desultory, and contributed mainly by his mother.
– Did I pack your green shirt? she wondered. Did you remember to put in your toothbrush? It’s going to be hot. I should have given you more apples, they’re thirstquenching. I wish I’d bought something for you to take Kath, but what can you give her, she’s got everything, and better quality. These buses! Aren’t you too hot in those trousers? You should have packed them and worn your best ones, they’re lighter. Don’t slouch, Timothy.
He gave curt answers to these remarks, if he bothered to answer at all. He stood with his hands in his pockets, taking in the familiar scene, the little row of shops opposite the bus stop, where he had bought his comics and expended his sweet ration for so many years, the hardware store that smelled of carbolic and paraffin, the watch repairers that had been closed and empty as long as he could remember, its big clock outside stopped permanently at twenty minutes past two, the time the bomb had fallen just along the street. The houses that adjoined this row of shops were small terraced cottages with front doors that opened straight into the front rooms, and a bare yard of space between the windows and the pavement. Their own house, though not much bigger, was more modern and semidetached, with a pebble-dash façade and some decorative woodwork which his father, like their neighbours, kept brightly painted in two colours, green and cream. These terraced cottages, whose roofs he looked at from his bedroom window, were mostly grey stone and brick, encrusted with soot, streaky with rain as though tear-stained. They had a tired, over-worked look, like the stout, scarved women who went in and out of them with their babies and shopping baskets.
The whole journey to Victoria was like that. From the window of the bus the familiar streets took on a strange visual clarity and resonance of association. He felt that he was seeing them for the first time as they really were, that he was responding with all his senses to the special character of South-East London, its soiled, worn textures of brick and stone, its low, irregular skyline, its odours of breweries and gas and vegetables and tanneries. He noticed how old and neglected it all was: if you raised your eyes above the modern shop-fronts, you saw that they had been pasted on to buildings crumbling into decay, with cracked, grimy windows and broken-backed roofs and chipped chimney pots. The predominant colours were black, brown and a dirty cream. Guinness tints. Those were the tints to use if you were to try and paint it – and he was suddenly filled with the urge to try.
He felt strangely stirred; and it seemed more than ever foolish to be going abroad – for that was the point of going away, wasn’t it, to see your home with a fresh eye when you returned? But the bus rolled on inexorably to Victoria. Now it was skirting the Oval. From the top of the bus he could see over the wall, but play hadn’t started yet. Groundsmen were taking the covers off the wicket, and the scoreboard showed the overnight score: Surrey 247 all out, and Northants 21 for 1. The bus left the Oval behind, swept under the railway arches at Vauxhall and turned on to Vauxhall Bridge. A pleasure boat passed beneath them ferrying people from the Festival of Britain on the South Bank to the Festival Gardens at Battersea. Vauxhall was not the most impressive place at which to cross the Thames – the buildings here, except for the Tate Gallery, were undistinguished. But the river glinted prettily in the sunlight, and downstream you could see Lambeth Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, and beyond them the great expanse of London with the dome of St. Paul’s shimmering in the haze. London. They said it wasn’t the biggest city in the world any more, that Tokyo had a bigger population. But it was still the greatest, and he often thought how lucky he was to have been born there. It was just chance. He might have been born in one of the towns and villages you saw from the train on the way to Worthing, dim little places that seemed to have no reason for existing. Or he might have not been born in England at all. He might have been a French boy, or a German . . . What would that have been like? To grow up in that benighted country, knowing that everybody in other countries hated and despised you, because of Hitler, because of the concentration camps, because of the war which your country had started and lost.
Actually, when he thought of the Germans, the ones living in Germany now, he felt no hatred, only a kind of embarrassment. It was far more likely that they hated you. And that was what made him, at the deepest level, apprehensive about the weeks to come. A solitary English boy, he thought, would not be particularly welcome in occupied Germany. They would think he had come to gloat. It wasn’t a place any normal person would choose to go to for a holiday, a country soaked in blood and guilt and ugly memories, a country your own side had been fighting only six years ago. The only consolation was that he was not going to Germany to see the Germans, but to see Kath and her American friends. The idea of Americans was a reassuring one. He remembered watching convoys of American tanks and lorries rumbling through Blyfield in the months before D-Day, and feeling a lift of the spirits at the mere sight of them, their tanned, untired faces, the functional smartness and sophistication of their uniforms and equipment, the glamour of their general style, as irresistible as a Technicolor film, a little larger than life.
– You’re very quiet, Timothy. Is anything the matter?
– No, why should there be?
– You don’t need any medicine, do you?
– No, he said irritably. This was his mother’s usual way of enquiring about the regularity of his bowels.
– I’ll get you some Bile Beans at Victoria. They have a Boots there.
– I don’t need any, Mum. Come on, ours is the next stop.
They had left the bag in the space under the stairs. The conductor helped them off with it.
– Wotcher got in there, a body? he quipped.
Timothy smiled feebly from the pavement. His mother muttered:
– Sauce!
It was already obvious, though the journey had scarcely begun, that the bag had been a mistake. It was too wide to go on the luggage rack of his compartment, and too fat to fit under his seat. Eventually they left it in the corridor, and the other passengers struggled over it as best they could. Timothy put his raincoat and sandwiches on a corner seat and joined his mother on the platform, where a party of schoolgirls in brown blazers trimmed with gold hummed and heaved like a swarm of bees. About half a dozen of them broke away and ran past him tittering and shrieking vacantly. They had discs pinned to the lapels of their blazers. A giggle of schoolgirls, he thought; like a gaggle of geese. He felt a kind of aloof pride in confronting the perils of Continental travel alone, without teachers and an organized party, at the same time that he envied them that protection. His mother wondered where they were going.
– It says Innsbruck on their luggage. Austria.
– Fancy that. What a long way to go.
– I hope they’re not on my train to Mannheim, he grumbled. The noise they’re making.
– Well, they’re excited, I expect. Are you excited?
Timothy shrugged.
– I dunno. Not excited, exactly.
– I’m sure I would have been, at your age. But you never were one to show your feelings.
Thank God for that, he thought, looking miserably at the clock that showed it was ten minutes to eleven. The train was already full, and some passengers were standing in the corridors.
– You were lucky to get a seat, his mother said.
– I’d better get in, in case someone takes it.
She kissed him goodbye, and he took his seat. Through the glass his mother mouthed last-minute instructions and questions, to which he replied with a nod or shake of the head. Tiring of this absurd mime, he stood up and opened the ventilator window.
– I should go, Mum, there’s no point in waiting.
– Oh, no, I must see you off.
– Have they closed the gates yet?
She squinted down the platform.
– I’d need my glasses . . . There’s a mobile canteen down there. Shall I get you something extra to eat?
– No, don’t bother.
– They’ve got some Lyons’ Individual Fruit Pies. I saw them as we came past.
Timothy hesitated. He was rather partial to Lyons’ Individual Fruit Pies.
– Alright, he said, and immediately regretted it. This was just the kind of last-minute rush, unsettling and entirely unnecessary, that he had tried to avoid, and had so far succeeded in avoiding.
He opened the window to its fullest extent. By standing on tiptoe and turning his head sideways, he could just see his mother hurrying down the platform towards the mobile canteen. As she reached it and fumbled in her handbag, a whistle shrilled and doors began to slam along the length of the train. His mother came away from the canteen at a trot, then stopped and retraced her steps. Timothy groaned under his breath: she must have forgotten her change. Now she was running along the platform, holding outstretched the pie in its cardboard box, like a relay-runner’s baton. He withdrew his head from the window, and extended his arm in its place. When she was about ten yards away the train began to move. For a few seconds the gap remained stable, then began to grow wider. His mother staggered to a halt, gasping for breath, clutching her side with her free hand. He waved and smiled, trying to convey that it didn’t matter. But that was the last view he had of his mother: standing on the platform, gasping for breath, disappointment lining her face, still holding outstretched, like a rejected gift, the Lyons’ Individual Fruit Pie.
2
AT FIRST, EVERYTHING went smoothly. He declined the offer of a porter at Dover, and, although the bag bumped awkwardly against his knee and made his arm ache, he managed the long walk along the quay to the ship with only two pauses for a change of hands. He dragged his burden aboard, and up three flights of stairs, until he found an open deck high up at the front of the ship, with plenty of deckchairs marked Gratuit. He collapsed, perspiring, into one of these, until the ship shuddered and began to move.
It turned in the middle of the harbour, giving him a fine view of Dover, its grey slate roofs spread out beneath the battlements of the castle, gleaming dully in the sunshine. Some holidaymakers who had walked out to the end of the harbour mole, where there was a small lighthouse, waved to them as they passed. Then he felt for the first time in his life the slow, deliberate roll of a big ship at sea. It was a strange, unsettling sensation, to feel the solid mass of the deck, which in harbour had seemed as firm as dry land, tilting silently and mysteriously under your feet. It was the very movement of risk
and adventure.
For a while the boat sailed parallel to the coast. A song from his childhood came into his head.
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
He remembered planning to go and see the bluebirds when the war was over. Well, it had taken him a long time to get here, and there weren’t any bluebirds, only scavenging seagulls that swooped and glided round the ship with shrill cries. The cliffs were a rather dirty white, too, but they confronted the blue sea with a kind of peaceful serenity that fitted the song.
The ship changed course and the coast slipped out of his view. He was looking over the bows of the ship, dipping and rising gently as it carved a path through the waves. A brisk wind blew off the sea, flipped his tie over his shoulder and set it fluttering by his ear. The wind, and the bright light bouncing off the waves, made him half-close his eyes, and drew his mouth into a smile. He was enjoying himself.
– Sailing card, sir?
He turned to find a uniformed officer at his side. He handed over his ticket and the man frowned.
– This is the first-class deck, he said coldly. Kindly go to the rear of the ship, which is reserved for second-class passengers.
Mortified, cringing with embarrassment under the glances of the other passengers in the vicinity, Timothy picked up his bag and staggered as quickly as he could along the side of the ship, until he came to a little gate which gave access to the second-class deck. It was crammed with people and baggage. Most of the passengers sat or stood or lay on the deck, eating sandwiches and drinking cups of tea; or, if fortunate enough to be in possession of one of the few deckchairs, lolled in attitudes of abandonment, eyes closed and mouths sagging open, faces turned towards a sun that glowed dully behind the screen of the ship’s smoke. Five nuns sat shoulder to shoulder on a bench, holding on their fluttering veils with both hands, and smiling timidly. There was a buzz of conversation, laughter, children’s cries and babies’ howls. Every now and again a gust of wind blew smoke down from the funnels. Timothy could see nowhere for himself and his bag except at the foot of the nuns, around whom the other passengers had left a respectful space.