by David Storey
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you in the park in a few minutes.’
‘Aw mam!’ Lynda bawled, looking at her with an adult disappointment.
‘Well, I thought you’d been shouting all morning to go out,’ she said.
Some of her reluctance to accept the car was because she associated it with Weaver, and all of a sudden she hated Weaver, perhaps finding it convenient to blame him personally for Eric’s death. She didn’t know how he’d got it for me, but she’d heard he’d been teaching me to drive. I’d taken good care he didn’t come further than the end of the street.
‘You know what we mean, mam—go in Uncle Arthur’s car,’ Lynda said.
‘That’s not for me to say. It’s not your motor-car, young miss.’
‘I’ll take you’, I told Lyn, ‘so long as your mother comes.’
The kid jumped up and down, assuming that now there was no barrier.
‘I don’t know whether I can,’ Mrs Hammond said. ‘I’ve all this to clear up.’ She looked round at the room—a junk shop. There was a pool of soap flakes and water where Ian had been cleaning his car, and a pile of empty tins and cornflake packets Lyn used for a shop. ‘What would you say’, she asked the kid, ‘if there was no dinner for you? There’s all that to get ready yet.’
‘I wouldn’t care,’ Lyn said.
‘And we can’t go without your mam,’ I warned her. The kid tugged at her mother’s skirt uncertainly.
‘Just for a few minutes then,’ she said, and took off her apron. ‘Round the houses.’
‘Aren’t you going to put your grey dress on?’ I asked her.
‘What, for two minutes?’ She looked at me dumbly.
‘It’s Sunday. Lyn and me, we’ve got our Sunday clothes on. Haven’t we, Lyn?’
She wasn’t in a mood to argue. She probably knew what I wanted, and she went upstairs without a word.
I waited in the kitchen for her while Lyn and Ian hung around outside blowing the horn, kicking the tyres, rubbing the windows. She spent some time getting ready, and when she came down she was right on edge. She’d been crying. She’d been crying a lot recently: a lot more than usual. She brought the kids back in and polished their faces with a flannel till they both started wailing. I put on my sports coat and went out into the street. She locked the front door carefully and held the key in her hand.
It was a sunny winter morning. There were a few spectators at the front doors. Mrs Hammond kept her eyes down, not wanting to look concerned. She was worried. She knew what they were thinking, and was frightened of them because of it. As I held the door I told her, ‘They’ll think you’re quite a lady now.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But do you mind if I sit in the back? I don’t want it to seem. …’ She saw my look and added, ‘Lynda and Ian’ll want to be in front.’
‘We’ll all be in front. There’s plenty of room. The car’s usually carried those big fat frogs from the County Hall, so it won’t complain at us.’ She got straight in.
I drove slowly down the street to give the neighbours the benefit of the carnival. I talked to Mrs Hammond in a way conspicuous enough to show how independent I was, that I didn’t really need to notice people any more.
I turned left along City Road and headed away from town, stepping up the speed. She was nervous. She held Ian tightly between her knees, and had her arm round Lynda. She watched the huge bonnet of the car as if it was some giant reptile nosing its way through the landscape.
‘How far are we going?’ she asked, when the last houses had shot past and we were skimming between high banks of sooted hedges.
‘I thought we might make a day of it.’ I couldn’t use Lyn to argue this, so I said, ‘You’ve locked the house. We’ll take a run in the country. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘We can’t very well get out now.’
‘If you’re going to be like that I’ll turn back.’
She didn’t answer. ‘Even if it’s only for the kids’ sake it’ll be worth it. Don’t you reckon?’
I could wait a long time for the answer. I turned north and headed over the ridge into the next valley. We by-passed the big towns, spending half an hour weaving through the suburbs. The kids got restless seeing so many damned houses. I took the road over the next moors and we came out at the top of a huge limestone ridge which gave a view over ten or fifteen miles of wooded countryside. We all woke up a bit and I parked the car on a grass plot. We got out, eased our legs, and sent Lyn and Ian behind the bushes. There was another party already parked; they waved at us pretty cheerfully and Mrs Hammond smiled and waved back, shyly. ‘I’ve been here once before,’ she said. ‘We came on the bus. Just before we got married.’
‘I suppose it looks even better in summer. We’ll come and see.’ She was still smiling. We pottered around for a while amongst the rocks and birches; I chased the kids until they were bored and wanted to be moving.
We followed the road into the valley and drove alongside the river, passing through a couple of bare empty woods and a village. Turning a bend we came on Markham Abbey standing in meadows by the river. Mrs Hammond made a sound of surprise. Lyn almost bounded through the windscreen at the ‘fairy castle’. I headed the car up a narrow lane and we stopped at the foot of the ruins, just beside a flock of sheep. They moved round the car as if it was just another part of the ruins, shoving their black faces under the wheels to get at the grass.
‘You’d never think anything like this existed,’ Mrs Hammond said. We stood by the car and looked up at the shell of the building, its great window empty to the sky. Ian stayed near us, afraid, but we could hear Lynda’s shouts echoing inside.
We strolled round after her. She kept nipping back to tell us some discovery she’d made. We only caught her up at the side of the river where she was watching the water for a fish to splash again. The river’d been widened there centuries ago and a dam put across. All that was left was a line of stepping stones round which the water, like a smooth sheet of flecked marble, crumbled. Lynda jumped on to the first stone, swayed, and said, ‘They’ve got fish in this water. Shall we go across, Mam?’
Her mother shook her head. ‘It’s too dangerous, Lyn. And it’d take too long in any case.’
I picked Lynda up.
Her mother knew what I was going to do. She didn’t say anything. She started to make a move, then stopped, and stood frozen to the spot. She watched us on to the first, then the second stone, and turned away. She looked towards the ruins, stiff, small, and erect.
The river was high, running smooth and fast with its winter rain; the bottom couldn’t be seen because of the water’s sheen. The foam gurgled and splashed over the stones but slipped like glass over the unseen submerged ones. Lynda was frightened. She stared around her disbelievingly, as if the water was new, something she’d never seen or reckoned with before. She was heavy, and striding from stone to stone it seemed that any minute she might panic and pitch us both into the river. We got half-way before I found some of the stones were insecure, and when I tried to turn round none of them were broad enough to take my splayed feet. I’d given up hope of keeping my feet dry. I splashed about in the water as I fought for each stone and having reached it, stopped to regain my balance. The last stones had been pushed together to fish from, and once we were on this tiny pier I told Lynda to wave back.
‘Ma … am!’ she called in a loud bleat.
‘Do you want to look round, Lyn?’ I said. ‘Or go straight back?’
She didn’t know. She looked at me, then at the water. The bank this side was low and soggy, and my feet were beginning to sink. I thought about trying to find a bridge, but downstream the river disappeared into a wood, which seemed an unlikely place to accommodate one, and upstream it tumbled down by the side of a rocky escarpment, fringed and surrounded by heath and moor. Lynda went behind a bush or two. She found a bird’s nest, and
we both looked at it nervously, more intently than we might ordinarily have done. I held her up so she could push her hand into the middle of the bush and feel in the cup of the nest. She brought out a small wet feather.
‘Do you want to go back now, Lyn?’ I said.
She shook her head slowly, and stared at the bushes in the hope of finding some other diversion. She was pale. After a while she went and stood on the low bank and stared across at her mother, fifty or more yards away. I could see the car, sticking up out of the flock of sheep, and the red blobs of paint on the sheep’s backs. I tried to imagine how I’d feel if I was responsible for Lynda’s drowning, then forgot the idea as I picked her up again. ‘Here we go,’ I said, so cheerfully that she laughed.
She began to moan as we got nearer the middle and she heard me panting hard, breathing in gasps as I balanced from stone to stone. I stopped to rest. The water drowned every other noise. Mrs Hammond waved and shouted soundlessly, her small figure almost standing in the water itself. Lynda watched carefully where I put my feet on the next stone, then seeing them slide on the green, mossy weed, she lifted her head and stared at the tiny figure on the other bank. I felt her trembling between my hands as she clung there patiently, her fingers digging in my arms, waiting for me to make several attempts to get my feet on to a loose, green boulder. ‘There Lyn! Did you see that fish?’ I said. But she couldn’t hear what I was saying.
The closer we got to the bank the tenser she became.
‘Ma … am! Mam!’ She waved stiffly.
Her mother shouted, ‘Give over waving—you’ll have Mr Machin in the water.’ Her voice sounded peculiar, uninterested.
When I stepped on to the last stone Lynda struggled to get down. I dropped her on to the close cropped grass and she flung herself on her mother. ‘We did it!’ she said. ‘Did you see us?’ Her fear had completely disappeared with relief. Her mother folded herself round her, and didn’t look my way. ‘We soon got back, didn’t we?’ Lynda said, muffled.
My feet were sodden. When I put on a pair of football boots I had in the back of the car Mrs Hammond gave a shy laugh.
‘You’re not driving in them?’ she said.
‘I’ve nothing else. Gonna lend me yours?’
She blushed, and watched me lace them up. She had been flushed altogether since the moment Lynda had jumped down from me to her, as if the excitement had brought the blood up in her, and made it surge in parts she’d thought or felt dead. Her face was relaxed with broken strain, and tanned red as if it’d been exposed to the weather for a long time.
‘We’ll see what difference they make when the car sets off,’ I said.
‘Is it safe?’ She looked serious. ‘Can you steer as well with them on?’
When I laughed she smiled back nervously.
‘I thought you’d have noticed I don’t steer with my feet.’
‘I meant those things you press.’
We looked at each other coyly, realizing we were both playing. Then she glanced down at the sheep, and stamped her foot at them.
We felt the security of the car more than ever. With the heater on, the smoothness of the running added to the cosiness. ‘It makes a big difference having a car,’ I said, and she pulled a face of restrained, dubious agreement.
‘Did a king live there?’ Lynda asked, flushed like her mother, and looking at the ruins as we climbed out of the valley.
‘I should think so, dear,’ Mrs Hammond said. She probably didn’t know it had been a monastery. Lynda watched till the last stone summit had disappeared amongst the bare trees.
‘Where’re we going now?’ Mrs Hammond said. We had a long run downhill and were travelling fast. I put my foot to the floor and the car rocked and swayed, and the air screamed past a hole somewhere.
‘It’s a place I’ve heard of. We’ll go there and get some dinner. It’s not far.’
We drove in silence, but as we passed the next village, its grey stone houses like sombre banks to a stream, she asked, ‘Does that mean we’ll have to eat with other people?’
‘Depends if anybody else is there. It shouldn’t be crowded this time of the year. Do you mind eating with other people or something?’
‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said uneasily. ‘I just wondered if we were dressed right.’
‘I reckon so long as we’ve got sommat on they won’t chuck us out.’
Howton Hall’s an old country house converted into a hotel and an eating place for the sort of client who can afford to drive out there for an evening, or a week-end. It’s an equal distance from three large industrial towns, and approachable from two more. This distance used to act as a kind of social sieve. But with the bigger hand-out of cars and other crap propaganda since the war it’s stepped down a peg or two. A couple of Rugby League clubs have their annual dinners there, and at the week-ends you find schoolteachers and an occasional clerk who’s sweated on his bike all the way from town. Because of this increase of trade and general lowering of standard the place’s been cut into two. On one side, overlooking a deep wooded valley and a lake, is the residential sector and the restaurant, and on the other is a car park, a bicycle rack, and a café.
I took them to the restaurant. It was after one o’clock and not very crowded. I tried to get Mrs Hammond to go in the cocktail bar, but one look at the plush interior and the Riding cloth merchants, and she wouldn’t budge past the door. The restaurant was the same: people who couldn’t be bothered with cooking a Sunday dinner. They lounged around eating and drinking and making too much noise. But they were more dispersed and it wasn’t quite so overbearing.
Along one side the wall had been knocked out and glass put in its place, which gave the impression as you sat down of the room’s being suspended over the valley: an exclusive sensation for which you had to pay.
She was frightened—more frightened than when I’d carried Lynda over the river. And she was worried that both Lynda and Ian were going to behave like pigs. I tried to give her the feeling that nobody’d mind my keeping my football boots on.
I did all the talking with the waiter, who made no attempt to hide his feeling we’d strayed over to the wrong side of the hotel. He coughed a lot, and pointed out the big prices with the tip of his smart pencil. He underlined one or two prices to emphasize the dearness of everything. I ordered everything that cost the most. He wasn’t sure whether he should be pleased. He wanted to get quickly to the point where we paid for it all. Mrs Hammond was quiet, terrified of him, looking at him as if he was responsible for a peculiar odour.
But it didn’t prevent us, when this marmoset wasn’t there, from enjoying the meal. Mrs Hammond’s eyes widened as she ate the juicy food. It made her feel that the indignity of coming to the place was somehow worth it.
‘Is it one of those places where they have coffee after the sweet?’ she said, as if she knew all such places backwards. She’d just finished stuffing the last potato down Ian’s gullet. When I said ‘Yes’ she nodded significantly.
‘Now you’re here, do you want some?’ I asked her, because I’d been aiming to miss the coffee out. I’d no socks on, and one or two smart frogs had been pointing at my football boots under the table. One of them had already directed the waiter’s attention to them.
‘Well,’ she said, her confidence restored by the fact we hadn’t been flung out, and looking at me to see if it was money that held us back. I ordered two coffees.
When they came Lynda wanted some; in a cup of her own. I got her an orange juice instead, which the waiter made clear was no end of trouble. We sat back and looked at the view for less than five minutes when the kids got restless. Lynda had wandered off on a tour of the tables and was watching a quiet-looking man eating his chicken. I told Mrs Hammond to take Ian and catch her and I’d join them at the car.
The waiter was out to make me wait for the bill. I gave him three minutes. Then I made quickly fo
r the door.
He intercepted me with a prolonged stumble down the long room, swaying and diving between tables as if his rear was on fire. ‘Have you got your bill—sir?’ he panted.
I tried to think of something very smart to say, but all I gave out was, ‘No.’
He grimaced with some sort of politeness and held it out on a plate. It came to around two pound sixteen. I asked him how it had arrived at that. He explained it carefully, feeling justified at last, checking each item we’d eaten, marking it with his fine pencil on the menu, keeping at the back of his mind the pleasure of calling the manager. I asked him if he’d made a mistake in the addition.
He trilled up the penny column and down the shillings, and stabbed quickly at the pounds. The pennies, I suggested, I think you’ve gone wrong there. He added them again, a bit more slowly, having a look at me for each shilling he ticked off. I thought we ought to check the prices with those on the menu. He did that. The figures on the bill were thickened in now like a kid’s drawing with the number of times he’d run over them. His pencil was blunt. He was in a can of a temper. I still wasn’t sure he hadn’t made a mistake. He went over it all again, and he couldn’t read some of the numbers.
I counted the money out carefully, and put a sixpenny tip on top of the pile, ‘Thank you,’ he said, his eyes like charcoal.
They were waiting by the car. Lynda was crying and Ian leant sleepily against the mudguard. He scowled at me as I came up as if I was responsible for all his troubles.
‘What’s the matter with our little girl?’ I asked her.
‘She’s been smacked for running round those tables,’ her mother said. I nodded wisely at Lynda and unlocked the doors. We came away from Howton Hall with a sense of achievement.
I drove a circular way back, through countryside I’d only visited as a boy on a bicycle. It was something of a triumphal tour. Lyn fell asleep. We stopped to lay her on the back seat and Mrs Hammond sat beside her. We got back to Fairfax Street with the sunset.