by Sean O'Brien
Like Claes, when business was slow, Shirley got on with her own vast and entirely indiscriminate reading. The last time we had spoken in the shop she was alternating between Georgette Heyer and Sven Hassel. Claes had recommended the latter, she said. I imagined that apart from Shirley, Hassel’s readership was exclusively male. His gruesomely violent accounts of action on the Russian front were popular among the boys at Blake’s, myself included at one point.
These were also, if you follow me, books that men could read without apology, like James Hadley Chase and Harold Robbins. Trawlermen, dockers, mechanics, feedstuff workers, taxi drivers and the rest were in those days often united by a common indulgence in the view of the Second World War from the other side. This was of a piece with the widespread admiration for Rommel, whose prowess some of them had seen at first hand in the Western Desert, but it also bled off into the fetishism of militaria. There were a lot of German helmets hanging half-proudly on the doors of sheds in the back yards of terraces, plus the odd decorative dagger discreetly kept in a drawer. The father of one of Shirley’s friends was said to have a Luger buried in a box on the railway allotments behind Blake’s.
I hadn’t seen Shirley for a little while because I’d been avoiding Vlaminck’s. The last time I’d called at the shop Claes was busy on the phone and indicated that I should look after myself until he’d finished his call. After a while he followed me into the back room where I was picking over a new consignment of rusty Penguins.
‘That was the General himself,’ he said, smiling and nodding as if I must already know.
‘Keitel? Zhukov? You need to narrow it down, Claes.’
‘The schoolboy humour, always, of course,’ he said. ‘I refer to General Allingham.’
‘Does he want his house cleared?’ Claes looked injured at this. ‘Sorry.’
‘I have the honour to be part of the committee arranging his campaign.’
It dawned on me then. ‘You mean in the by-election?’
‘I do. Great days, Maxwell, great days. A time of destiny.’
I was inclined simply to walk out of the shop, but instead I held out the books I had chosen. Claes took a moment to grasp what I meant. Then we went to the till. When the transaction was done, he said, ‘The General is an Old Blakean, of course.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘You should meet him, Maxwell.’
‘I don’t think he’d find me very interesting. We wouldn’t have much in common.’ Apart from Blake’s, I thought. Claes was about to protest, but stopped, running his great tongue along his lower lip, then nodded.
‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘You can always change your mind. A young man should be open to new ideas.’
‘How d’you mean, new?’
Claes shook his head and made his way back to his chair and his reading. I had offended his sense of courtesy. So be it, I thought.
Claes and his chums were not simply egregious. In the stratum of the unskilled, the permanently unemployed and the unemployable, their concerns could find a hearing; a blend of socialism and racism had considerable appeal to some, to whom it must have looked like common sense. And there were others who’d sympathize, from the grey margins of respectability and disappointment and an urge to deny to others the life they seemed to have denied themselves, part of what Adorno called ‘the dream of oppression of all by all’. Anyway, they would have their day. The by-election was approaching, following the death of the incumbent through ill health, and the British Patriot Party would be putting up a candidate, namely our very own General Allingham, lately returned from long exile in rural France to his family estate on the Plain of Axness.
Allingham was not just some wall-eyed estate agent. He was a name, one of ours, our very own Mosley. There was, of course, as ‘everyone’ knew in those days, and as everyone thought would remain true forever, no chance of him winning. But Allingham and his men would do their best to spread their poison. That would be their victory. I read these pages over now in the year when the region has elected a Euro MP from a neo-fascist party, as if that were normal. Forever is, as they say, a long time.
I couldn’t see Shirley fitting into the BPP’s particular underworld of opinion, though. Her politics, I thought, could scarcely be called politics: they seemed to extend no further than the vague sexual goodwill induced by the next joint and the one after. In Shirley’s head it seemed to be always afternoon, the room blue with smoke. As for me, all I knew was what I did not believe in, though I continued to observe its forms, perhaps, despite the evidence up to that point, still thinking or hoping that I might be set on a different path, that of art, which I seem to have viewed as occupying a separate category from sewers and the balance of payments and all the other dailiness of the despised ‘art of the possible’.
EIGHT
As far as I could tell, Shirley had never held a grudge about our lapsed romance. It was my fault it ended. By the end of the summer before I went up to Cambridge I’d been bored. I slept with one of her friends, who then saved me the trouble of telling Shirley myself. Shirley didn’t seem surprised. While I was away at university she wrote me the occasional letter about what she was reading and listening to, hardly referring to our relationship. Whenever we ran into each other on my occasional visits home, she seemed happy to flirt in her slow-motion way, sometimes as if we were the vaguest of acquaintances, at others as if passion must soon overtake us. I retained a guilty fondness for her, and I was afraid of what might be in store for her, which I thought might be nothing much. Her position at Vlaminck’s suggested that I was right. But it was not my business to save anyone, having failed to save myself, was it?
Men, so far as I knew, partly from Smallbone’s observations, seemed to come and go in Shirley’s life without commitment or on their part or resentment on hers. They were a mixture – layabouts from the local university, a trawlerman, at one point a failed priest-turned-librarian. She remained attractive in a half-aware way, always beautifully dressed and made up, as if the call might at any moment come to be somewhere else. Of course she would never really strike out on her own account, though I gathered she had moved out of her mother’s to an address I hadn’t bothered to discover. When I visited the shop she was happy to advise me on my purchases. At that time I was collecting all and any editions of Greene, Ambler and Geoffrey Household, as well as occasional rarer items, all of which she had read and remembered. She absorbed books as she smoked dope – in large quantities, content to go on doing so, rarely expressing any opinion beyond yes or no.
Now, from her position at the bar, she raised in my direction a glass of Babycham that had been poured the moment she arrived. The two men looked incuriously over at me for a moment. Claes raised his hat formally as if I were a stranger. I had never seen Shirley mixing socially with her employer. The combination seemed faintly monstrous. She smiled at me, then turned back as Claes resumed his monologue.
‘Drinking alone?’ asked Smallbone as he climbed breathlessly on to the stool next to mine. He smoked too much.
‘If I’m left in peace to get on with it and have a read at the paper.’
‘I’ll have a brown mix,’ he said. I caught Stan’s attention. Smallbone lit a Regal and looked about him critically. He was getting fat, working in his mother’s stamp shop, ‘pro tem’, as he put it, since completing his own history degree at the local university just as les evenements erupted in local form on the campus with the occupation of the Senate House in protest at the university’s investments in South Africa. He made me feel like a monster of ambition. Smallbone’s father had been a Labour councillor, in the teeth of his wife’s Daily Express-minded antagonism. Perhaps seeing the advantages of a quiet life, Bone himself affected the Telegraph (which he claimed had the best racing coverage) but admired Anthony Crosland. At least, unlike me, he had politics of a sort. He seemed to have given up reading, though, in favour of following the horses and going to the dog track in the far-off east end of the city, as well as committin
g himself to an exhaustive and indiscriminate pursuit of the opposite sex. The day would come soon enough, he had explained, when he could not get his hole, so until then what was the point of wasting time on things of the mind?
‘Oh aye. They’re in, then,’ he said, nodding towards the group in the snug.
‘I can’t work out what Shirley’s doing with that lot,’ I said. ‘Socially, I mean.’
‘Perhaps that’s where she gets her dope. Or maybe she’s become one of them.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t care about that sort of thing. Not as far as I know. She just thinks people should be nice to each other.’
Bone adopted an Ed Murrow voice. ‘Democracy is under threat tonight, not from Hitler’s bombs but an equally deadly source. For the Munich beer-hall read Greenland Street. The fascists, for which read the British Patriotic Party, are putting up a candidate in the by-election, using the democratic process in order to threaten democracy itself. Good night and good luck.’
‘They’ll lose their deposit,’ I said.
‘I dare say,’ said Bone. ‘But they’re vicious bastards. And they’ve got Allingham standing, after all. Someone people are likely to have heard of. Another Old Blakean, of course. Not that Blake’s advertise it.’
‘No, but his books are all in the library. He sends them. Vegetarianism, indecisive battles, the Jewish plot. The last sort don’t get put on display, of course. How serious are this BPP lot, really, compared with Allingham? It sounds like playacting.’
‘Depends how you define it. They are play-acting, but they seem to mean it anyway. That business last year with the petrol bomb thrown through the window at the hostel where the Nigerian medics stay – you were still away at the time – Claes’s little band were meant to have done it.’
‘This is according to your mother, I take it?’
‘One thing my mother has got is sources. That’s probably why she walks that way. Anyway, she probably agrees with Claes and his lot. She thinks the Nigerian medics are taking our boys’ jobs. She’s not very sophisticated in her analysis.’
‘I suppose not. And the police did nothing.’
‘Not enough evidence, apparently – not that they’d care about a gang of coons.’ I stared at him. ‘I mean, that’s how the police would look at it. You know what they’re like. But it got in the paper, with a photograph of Claes and his goon squad, composed of Lurch and a few others in camouflage gear, stood round this old half-track they’ve got parked in a yard somewhere, preparing to go on manoeuvres on the Plain of Axness. They said they were unjustly blamed because they’re English patriots. Which Claes isn’t, of course. And where the hell did Lurch spring from?’
‘East of the river, obviously. Your stamping ground.’
‘Piss off,’ said Bone amiably. ‘I go there for anthropological reasons.’
The city was divided by a muddy trench, the Ouse. Dwellers in the east were known to be inbred lunatics. According to Smallbone, however, the web-footed women were strangely susceptible to his indefinable charms.
‘How many of this lot are there?’ I asked. ‘I mean, running about in old lorries . . .’
‘Who knows? Depends on the state of the moon, I should think.’
‘But Shirley? I mean, she’s—’
‘A woman? No flies on you, are there? She is indeed. I’d give her one. It must be my turn one day.’
‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said. ‘You be nice about Shirley.’
‘Of course she’s a nice girl. All the better,’ said Smallbone, rubbing his hands together. ‘All the better for the Bone.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Now then, fair’s fair. You had your go.’
But Smallbone would have to wait. Rackham had just entered the snug. Over his shoulder hung a camera case. He said nothing but looked at Shirley in his bloodlessly amused way. She finished her drink and left, taking his arm. Claes carried on talking.
‘Now I’ve seen everything.’ Smallbone groaned. ‘That corpse Rackham. Is she fucking blind?’ Rackham was, in fact, rather handsome in his saturnine way.
‘De gustibus, I suppose. Rackham’s not actually a paid up one of them, is he?’ I asked, more nonchalantly than I felt. Rackham? But Shirley used to go out with me.
Smallbone shrugged. ‘Well, hardly. Not with the teaching, surely.’ In one of those unstated ways in which Blake’s was so effective, it was understood that staff did not undertake public political activity or make their allegiances known, though for the most part, Blake’s being Blake’s, these were self-evident. Rackham had not precisely breached this protocol, any more than he had committed any overt offence in the library. He had simply come in to meet a girl at the pub. He was too old for her, I thought, by a couple of decades. But he didn’t act or somehow look that way. Once again he was hard to place. Perhaps ‘act’ was the word: the cinema was full of leading men far older than their love interests.
‘He must be a wrong ’un, though, Bone. Look at the company he keeps.’
‘Yes, Maxwell, but look who’s talking, eh? Perhaps Rackham’s a fellow traveller, a dabbler, someone who gives them intellectual weight. Claes would like that. Rackham’s a poet, you tell me. Or else they want to have a go on his boat so they can claim to have a navy.’ Rackham was a keen sailor, active in the sailing club at Blake’s. His impressive motor yacht Lorelei was moored in the creek.
‘At the end of school today, when I was in the library, I think he meant to insult one of the sixth form, a Jewish boy, Feldberg,’ I said.
‘He’s the bright one, yeah? Samuel Feldberg’s lad.’
I described what had happened. It seemed to grow vaguer in the telling, though my disquiet hadn’t gone away.
‘Did the boy complain?’ Bone asked, putting on his overcoat.
‘No, he didn’t.’ I stood. Bone turned away, eager for the off, but I hesitated and he turned back. ‘It was something and nothing. But I was there. I saw it. I told Feldberg off for being insolent in return.’
‘Well, then.’
‘Well, then, what?’
‘Well, then, actually I dunno, Maxwell. Is it important? You said it was something and nothing. And the staff always have to back each other up. You know that. Let it go.’
‘It wasn’t quite nothing.’
‘And now you seem to be feeling guilty. Not much use, though, is it?’
‘I think I told Feldberg off because I didn’t do anything about Rackham.’
‘That’s too subtle for me. But there’s not much you can do now, is there?’
‘Perhaps I could talk to Feldberg.’
‘And say what? You’ll just look like a pillock. Let it go, man. He’s probably forgotten by now. Save it for another day. I’m just going for a quick recce of the bint situation.’
Smallbone, I suspected, would be intending to buy some contraceptives. The local chemist would probably have informed his mother if he’d tried it there. Given the implacable, grasping disposition of the rusted machine in the Gents he might be a little while. And if there were any women he knew in the bar, it would further extend the delay while he rehearsed a few introductory moves.
I ordered another half. The street door opened and Maggie Rowan came in.
NINE
Did we know each other in here?
Stan appeared as if through a trapdoor.
‘For the lady, sir?’ he said. Was the ghost of a sniff, a smirk? I turned to Maggie.
‘I’ll get this,’ I said.
‘Oh, well then, a gin and tonic, please, Stan,’ Maggie said, as if all this were an accident.
‘Large gin, Mrs Rowan?’
She nodded. ‘And I’ll have twenty Kensitas.’ She put the money for the cigarettes on the counter. ‘Getting ready for Christmas, Stan?’
‘Have to ask the wife about that.’
‘I haven’t done a thing. I’m panicking. As usual. Dare say we’ll survive.’ She raised her glass. Stan nodded politely, handed over the change and wen
t back into the bar. ‘He doesn’t like me.’
‘He probably doesn’t like unaccompanied women coming into the pub. He’s of the old school.’
‘Not our school, he’s not.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘Why, what does he think I am? A tart off the street?’
I gathered she’d had one or two before coming out. She looked OK, vividly auburn and beautiful in a slightly old-fashioned way, a little like Kay Kendall in Genevieve. Her lipstick seemed too bright for the setting.
‘I imagine he thinks you’re the Headmaster’s wife.’
‘And does that mean I can’t go out if I want to?’
I shrugged and lit her cigarette.
‘Your brother was in just now.’ I nodded across at the snug, where Claes and Lurch remained, now looking expressionlessly over. They had put down their drinks and seemed as though waiting. ‘He came in to collect a girl. Has he got a date?’
‘Do I look like his keeper?’ she asked, unsmiling.
With slight surprise I realized that she never talked about Rackham. Not that there was any particular reason why she should. They seemed very different, and he was some years older.
‘Those two seemed to know him.’
‘I imagine he knows lots of people, just as you do,’ she said. Now Claes rose to leave. Lurch held the glass-panelled door for him, and for a second there were two of Claes in view. He doffed his broad hat to Maggie, who did not appear to notice.
‘Do you ever go on the Lorelei?’ I asked.
‘What? The boat? It’s not his. I let him use it sometimes with the sailing club. I use it myself now and again.’
‘I didn’t know you were a sailor.’
‘Well, there you are. Are you trying to annoy me, Stephen? Why are you talking about boats?’
‘I’m just curious.’
She sighed and breathed out smoke. She was irresistible when being unreasonable, which was much of the time.