The Price of Love and Other Stories

by Peter Robinson

  They both knew there was a lot more truth in that fear than either cared to explore. “Bye, Dad,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Don’t be a stranger, son. And don’t worry. Your mother’ll get over it. I’ll tell her to ring you in a day or so, shall I?”

  “Please do.”

  His father smiled. “Or send you an e-mail?”

  Banks moved forward impulsively and hugged him. It was quick, and he felt only the slightest pressure of his father’s hand on the back of his shoulder, but it was enough.

  Banks dashed down the stairs and walked down the path to his car, tears prickling his eyes. He felt a weight in the side pocket of his jacket and realized it was Kay’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He had forgotten to give it to her. Now he decided he might as well keep it. Maybe he would even get around to reading it, thirty years after he’d borrowed it.

  When he got to the driver’s side of his car, he cursed out loud. Some bastard had taken a coin or a nail and made a deep scratch along the paintwork all the way from back to front. He thought he saw someone watching out of the upstairs window of the Wyatt house.

  Bugger them. Bugger the lot of them, he thought, and got into his car and drove away.

  Cornelius Jubb

  Most of us around these parts had never seen a colored person until Cornelius Jubb walked into the Nag’s Head one fine April evening in 1943, bold as brass and black as Whitby jet.

  Ernie the landlord asked him if he had a glass. Glasses being in short supply, most of us brought our own and guarded them with our lives. He shook his head. Ernie’s not a bad sort, though, so he dug out a dusty jam jar from under the bar, rinsed it off and filled it with beer. The young man seemed happy enough with the result; he thanked Ernie and paid. After that, he lit a Lucky Strike and just stood there with that gentle, innocent look in his eyes, a look I came to know so well, and one that stayed with him throughout all that was to happen in the following weeks, for all the world as if he might have been waiting for a bus or something, daydreaming about some faraway sweetheart.

  Now, most of us up here in Leeds are decent enough folk, and I like to think we measure a man by who he is and what he does, not by the color of his skin. But there’s always an exception, isn’t there? In our case it was Obediah Clough, who happened to be drinking with his cronies in his usual corner, complaining about the meager cheese ration. Obediah’s too old to go to war again, and I suspect that he also sat out most of the last war at a comfortable hospital in Skegness after sustaining a blighty. Now, Obediah drills the local Home Guard and helps out with ARP, though air raids have been sporadic here since 1941, to say the least.

  Obediah swaggered up to the young colored gentleman with that way he has, chest puffed out, baggy trousers held up with a length of cord, and looked him up and down, an exaggerated expression of curiosity on his blotchy red face. His pals sat in the corner sniggering at his performance. The young man ignored them all and carried on drinking and smoking.

  Finally, not used to being ignored for so long, Obediah thrust his face mere inches away from the other’s, which must have been terrible for the poor fellow because Obediah’s breath smells worse than a pub toilet at closing time. Give him his due, though, the lad didn’t flinch.

  “What have we got here, then?” Obediah said, playing it up for his cronies.

  Whether because he recognized the question as rhetorical, or because he simply didn’t know the answer, the young man made no reply.

  “What’s your name, then, boy?” Obediah asked.

  The man put his glass down, smiled and said, “My name’s Jubb, sir. Private First Class Cornelius Jubb. I’m very pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand, but Obediah ignored it.

  “Jubb?” Obediah’s jaw dropped. “Jubb? But that’s a Yorkshire name.”

  “It’s the name I was given by my parents,” said the man.

  “Tha’s not a Yorkshireman,” Obediah said, eyes narrowing. “Tha’s having me on.”

  “No word of a lie,” said Cornelius Jubb. “But you’re right, sir. I’m not a Yorkshireman. I’m from Louisiana.”

  “So what’re you doing with a Yorkshire name, then?”

  Cornelius shrugged. “Maybe my ancestors came from Yorkshire?”

  Cornelius had a twinkle in his eye, and I could tell that he was joking, but it was a dangerous thing to do with Obediah Clough. He didn’t take well at all to being the butt of anyone’s joke, especially after a few drinks. He glanced toward his friends and gestured for them to approach. “Look what we’ve got here lads, a black Yorkshireman. He must’ve come straight from his shift down t’pit, don’t you think?”

  They laughed nervously and came over.

  “And what’s that tha’s got on thy wrist?” Obediah said, reaching toward some sort of bracelet on the GI’s right wrist. He obviously tried to keep it out of sight, hidden under his sleeve, but it had slipped out. “What is tha, lad?” Obediah went on. “A bloody Nancy-boy? I’ve got a young lady might appreciate a present like that.” The young man snatched his arm away before Obediah could grab the bracelet.

  “That’s mine, sir,” he said, “and I’d thank you to keep your hands off it.”

  “Oh, would you, now? Doesn’t tha know there’s a price for coming and drinking our beer in here with the likes of us?” Obediah went on. “And the price is that there bracelet of thine. Give us it here, boy.”

  Cornelius moved a few inches along the bar. “No, sir,” he said, adopting a defensive stance.

  I could tell that things had gone far enough and that Obediah was about to get physical. With a sigh, I got to my feet and walked over to them, putting my hand gently on Obediah’s shoulder. He didn’t appreciate it, but I’m even bigger than he is, and the last time we tangled he came out with a broken rib and a bloody nose. “That’s enough, Obediah,” I said gently. “Let the lad enjoy his drink in peace.”

  Obediah glared at me, but he knew when he was beaten. “What’s he think he’s doing, Frank, walking into our pub, bold as you like?” he muttered, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “It’s a free country, Obediah,” I said. “Or at least Mr. Hitler hadn’t won the war last time I checked.”

  This drew a gentle titter from some of the drinkers, Obediah’s cronies included. You could feel the tension ebb a notch. As I said, we’re a tolerant lot on the whole. Muttering, Obediah went back to his corner and his pals went with him. I stayed at the bar with the newcomer.

  “Sorry about that, lad,” I said. “He’s harmless, really.”

  The GI looked at me with those big brown eyes of his and nodded solemnly.

  Now that I was closer, I could see that the object Obediah had referred to was some sort of gold chain with tiny trinkets suspended from it, a very unusual thing for a man to be wearing. “What exactly is that?” I asked, pointing. “Just out of curiosity.”

  He brought his arm up so I could see the chain. “It’s called a charm bracelet,” he said. “My lucky charm bracelet. I usually try to keep it out of sight.”

  Everything on the chain was a perfect miniature of its original: a silver locket, a gold cross, a grimacing monkey, a kneeling angel, a golden key, a tiny pair of ballet slippers, a tower, a snake, a tiger and a train engine. The craftsmanship was exquisite.

  “Where did you get it?” I asked.

  “Fishing,” Cornelius said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Fishing. Caught it fishing in the Mississippi, down by the levee, when I was boy. I decided then and there it would be my lucky charm.”

  “It’s a beautiful piece of work,” I said. I held out my hand. “Frank Bascombe. Frank to my friends.”

  He looked at my outstretched hand with suspicion for a moment, then slowly he smiled and reached out his own, the palm as pink as coral, and shook firmly. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bascombe,” he said. “I’m Cornelius Jubb.”

  I smiled. “Yes, I heard.”

  He glanced over at Obediah and his
cronies, who had lost interest now and become absorbed in a game of dominoes. “And I don’t know where the name came from,” he added.

  I guessed that perhaps some Yorkshire plantation owner had given it to one of Cornelius’s ancestors, or perhaps it was a contraction of a French name such as Joubliet, but it didn’t matter. Jubb he was, in a place where Jubbs belonged. “You don’t sound southern,” I said, having heard the sort of slow drawl usually associated with Louisiana on the radio once or twice.

  “Grew up there,” Cornelius said. “Then I went to college in Massachusetts. Boston.”

  “What are you doing here all by yourself?” I asked. “Most American soldiers seem to hang around with their mates, in groups.”

  Cornelius shrugged. “I don’t know, really. That’s not for me. I just don’t seem to fit in. They’re all…y’know…fighting, cussing, drinking and chasing girls.”

  “You don’t want to chase girls?”

  I could have sworn he blushed. “I was brought up to be a decent man, sir,” he said. “I’ll know when the right girl comes along.” He gestured to the charm bracelet again and smiled. “And this is for her,” he added.

  I could have laughed at the naïveté of his statement, but I didn’t. Instead, I offered to buy him another drink. He accepted and offered me a Lucky. That was the beginning of what I like to think of as an unlikely friendship, but I have found that war makes the unlikeliest of things possible.

  You might be wondering by now why I wasn’t at war with the rest of our fine lads. Shirker? Conchie? Not me. I saw enough carnage and breathed in enough gas at Ypres to last me a lifetime, thank you very much, but the fact of the matter is that, like Obediah, I’m too old to be a soldier again. After the first war, I drifted into the police force and finally rose to the rank of detective inspector before leaving to become a teacher. Now all the young men have gone off to fight, of course, they need us old codgers to carry the burden at home, so they called me back as a special constable. Just as I was getting ready to spend my twilight days reading all those books I never read when I was younger—Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Hardy, Trollope. Ah, well, such is life, and it’s not a bad job, as jobs go. At least I thought so until events conspired to prove me wrong.

  Cornelius, as it turned out, was one of about three hundred colored persons—or Negroes, as the Yanks called them—in an engineering regiment transferred up from the West Country. During our conversations, mostly in the Nag’s Head, but often later at my little terraced back-to-back over carefully measured tots of whiskey, no longer readily available, I learned about hot and humid Louisiana summers; the streets, sounds and smells of New Orleans; and the nefarious ways of the color bar and segregation. I had already heard of problems between white and colored GIs in other parts of the country. Apparently, the American military command wanted to institute the same sort of color bar they had at home, but we British didn’t want that. I had also heard rumors that in some towns and villages a sort of unwritten code had grown up, fostered by whispering campaigns, as regards which pubs were to be frequented by Negroes and which by whites.

  I also learned very quickly that Cornelius was a shy and rather lonely young man, but that he was no less interesting or intelligent for that, once you got him talking. His father was a Baptist minister who had wanted his son to go to college and become a schoolteacher, where he might have some positive influence on young men of the future. Though Cornelius had instead followed a natural interest in and flair for the more practical and mechanical aspects of science, he was remarkably well traveled and well read, even if there were great gaps in his education. He had little geography, for example, and knew nothing beyond the rudiments of American history, yet he spoke French fluently—though not with any accent I’d heard before—and he was well versed in English literature. The latter was because of his mother, he told me. Sadly deceased now, she had read children’s stories to him from a very early age and guided him toward the classics when she thought he was old enough.

  Cornelius was homesick, of course, a stranger in a strange land, and he missed his daddy and the streets of his hometown. We both had a weakness for modern music, it turned out, and we often managed to find Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman broadcasts on the wireless, even Louis Armstrong if we were lucky, whenever the reception was clear enough. I like to think the music helped him feel a little closer to home.

  All in all, I’d say that Cornelius and I became friends as that spring gave way to summer. Sometimes we discussed currents events—the “bouncing bombs” raid on the Eder and Möhne dams in May, for example, which he tried to explain to me in layman’s terms—without much success, I might add. We even went to the pictures to see Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator with a couple of broad-minded Land Girls I knew. That raised more than a few eyebrows, though everything was aboveboard. As far as I could tell, Cornelius stayed true to his word about waiting for the right girl to come along. How he knew that he would be so sure when it happened, I don’t know. But people say I’m married to my job, which is why my wife left me for a traveling salesman, so how would I know about such things?

  One August night, just after the Allies had won the battle for Sicily, the local GIs all got a late pass in honor of General Patton’s role in the victory. After an evening in the Nag’s Head drinking watery beer, Cornelius and I stayed up late, and after he left I was trying to get to sleep, my head spinning a little from a drop too much celebratory whiskey, when there came a loud knocking at my door. It was a knocking I wish I had never answered.

  Brimley Park was a thick wedge of green separating the terraces of back-to-backs on the east side and the more genteel semidetached houses on the west. There was nothing else in the place but a few wooden benches and some swings and a slide for the kiddies. Chestnut trees stood on all three sides shielding the heart of the park from view. There used to be metal railings, but the Ministry of Works appropriated them for the war effort a couple of years ago, so now you could make your way in between the trees almost anywhere.

  Harry Joseph, who had been dispatched by the beat constable to fetch me, babbled most of the way there and led me through the trees to a patch of grass where PC Nash and a couple of other local men stood guard. Of course, under normal circumstances, this sort of thing would hardly be the province of a special constable, but I had one or two successes in criminal investigations under my belt, and the local force was short staffed.

  It was a sultry night and the whiskey only made me sweat more than usual. I hoped the others couldn’t smell it on me. It was late enough to be pitch-dark, despite double summer time, and, of course, the blackout was in force. As we approached, though, I did notice about eighteen inches of light showing through an upper window in one of the semis. They’d better be quick and get their curtains down, I thought, or Obediah Clough and his ARP men would be knocking at their door. The fines for blackout violations were quite steep.

  Harry had babbled enough on the way to make me aware that we were approaching a crime scene, though I never did manage to find out exactly what had happened until I got there. PC Nash had his torch out, the light filtered by the regulation double thickness of white tissue paper, and in its diffused milky glow I could see the vague outline of a figure on the grass: a young woman with a Veronica Lake hairstyle. I crouched closer, careful not to touch anything, and saw that it was young Evelyn Fowler. She was lying so still that at first I thought she was dead, but then I noticed her head move slightly toward me and heard her make a little sound, like a sigh or a sob.

  “Have you called an ambulance?” I asked PC Nash.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “They said they’ll be here straightaway.”

  “Good man.”

  I borrowed Nash’s torch and turned back to Evelyn, whispering some words of comfort about the doctor being on his way. If she heard me, she didn’t acknowledge it. Evelyn wasn’t a bad sort, as I remembered. Around here, the girls were divided into those who don’t and those who do. Evely
n was one who did, but only the morally rigid and the holier-than-thou crowd held that against her. It was wartime. Nobody knew which way things were going to go, how we would all end up, so many lived life for the moment. Evelyn was one of them. I remembered her laugh, which I had heard once or twice in the Nag’s Head, surprisingly soft and musical. Her eyes might have been spoiled for me by that cynical, challenging look that said, “Go on, convince me, persuade me,” but underneath it all, she was scared and uncertain, like the rest of us.

  There was no mistaking what had happened. Evelyn’s dirndl skirt had been lifted up to her waist and her drawers pulled down around her ankles, legs spread apart at the knees. She was still wearing nylons, no doubt a gift from one of our American brothers, who seemed to have unlimited supplies. Her lace-trimmed blouse was torn at the front and stained with what looked like blood. From what I could see of her face, she had taken quite a beating. I could smell gin on her breath. I looked at her fingernails and thought I saw blood on one of them. It looked as if she had tried to fight off her attacker. I would have to make sure the doctor preserved any skin he might find under her nails. There was always the possibility that it could be matched to her attacker’s.

  I averted my gaze and sighed, wondering what sad story Evelyn would have to tell us when, or if, she regained consciousness. Men had been fighting a deadly campaign in Sicily, and even now, as we stood around Evelyn in Brimley Park, they were still fighting the Germans and the Japanese all over the world, yet someone, some man, had taken it into his mind to attack a defenseless young woman and steal from her that which, for whatever reason, she wouldn’t give him in the first place. And Evelyn was supposed to be one of those girls who did. It didn’t make sense.