by Derek Beaven
Vic was slumped next to Frankie in the back. The window had been wound right down. Unlit gas lamps hung where the wind came from, then swept past. Forbidden headlights made the iron beaks of warehouse hoppers poke from speeding, eyeless cages. The night was a tall sack ripped by a car’s roar, and the air driving to meet his face tasted of coal.
Still his evening replayed itself. He mustn’t close his eyes. ‘It’s your money, Vic. Yours, mate. All you have to do is pick it up.’
He’d been wary. ‘Me? Don’t expect to see that kind of item in a month of Sundays.’
‘More ways to skin a cat, aren’t there? Come on, pick it up. Think what a difference a twenty would make. And twenty more like it.’
The tyres screeched in a left-hand corner. Frankie was forced against him. Vic’s shoulder hit the right door and he was pinned under her. The car swung again. Her eyes screwed tight, she raised an arm and clung on to his neck. Then her other hand slipped across into his. He clasped at it. She made words in his ear he couldn’t catch.
He’d danced with her. To the muted trumpet and the whining sax, she’d answered his arm’s inclination and the nudge of his hip. When they’d sat down again Phyllis and Tony were drinking through straws from each other’s glasses. Blatant and provocative, the twenty-pound note was still on the table.
Now beside them careered the black brick ends of streets, the outlines of sheds, the ironwork of a bascule bridge. A pub sign hung above the scream of another high-speed turn. Beyond Frankie’s perfumed hair Vic saw the city momentarily framed, a hard silhouette that touched low cloud. He’d made a deal. The food was taken care of, the rent, and shoes for little Jack. He and Phyllis could tide themselves over, pull themselves up … but there was a condition attached, some codicil that he still couldn’t recollect.
‘Well, Vic? What am I worth to you, Vic? What would you do for me?’
Tony thrashed the engine through the gears. Tall cranes angled darker strokes on dark. A ship’s hull, huge, loomed almost within touching distance.
Vic had come back from the gents, his legs loose, his brilliantined hair flopping over his eyes in strands. Through them he’d stared at the persistent banknote. There were glasses and ashtrays around it. He’d been taken up with the detail, the King’s head, the faint lettering, the fine lines that looped and scrolled.
His own head reeled with the thought of it, and with the weight of the girl thrown now this way, now that by the lurching car. Frankie’s fingers held on. She was managing to stroke the side of his face. So like the girl he’d fallen in love with, he could almost imagine … The sequence was scrambled. He’d stretched out his hand over the note, poised to give it back, or reluctant to touch it. ‘Did you drop this? Tony?’ The note was a test. It was Frankie’s eye he’d caught, and not Phyllis’s. ‘I know what you mean, Tony, but you can count me out of all that.’
The engine raced hard, accelerating. ‘It’s yours, mate. Yours for the taking.’
The straight run was a relief, a lampless high street. Frank’s eyes remained closed. Her breath was warm and damp and she was naked in his mind. No, she was slipping out of her purple evening dress and the flesh-coloured underwear. Or his hand was against the suspender hitch, where the silk of the stocking met the silkier skin of her thigh, still bearing the bruise of Tony’s fingers.
Vic saw Phyllis’s head loll on to the back edge of her seat. Now a long bend bumped it against the pillar and she must have felt the hurt. Her fur stole rucked up over the leather as she shifted down, curling herself out of view. Frankie moaned and hardened herself against him. He tried to speak. Literally behind his wife’s back, his drunken imagination was unbuttoning a prostitute to the jazz, there on the dance floor. Or here in the car, and all the time wishing for Clarice Pike. There was a fox fur caught up on Phyllis’s seat back, with its little cub mouth and eyes and sharp suggestive teeth. What would he do for her? ‘For you, Phyllis, anything. You know that. You know that, don’t you, darling. I love you … beyond measure.’ They’d all laughed.
Vic pulled himself away. Tony braked hard, swore, and then jumped a red light. The girl’s face lifted for a second, her eyes suddenly open in surprise, her lips slightly parted. On an impulse, Vic met the mouth and held the kiss. They broke off just as Tony shouted back to them, ‘Enjoying yourselves, you two? Just goes to show. You can never tell with snobs, can you?’ The voice had a hint of triumph. ‘What do you think, Phylly?’ There was no reply from Phyllis. ‘Must be asleep. Tell the missus later, shall I, Vic?’
Vic recognised the occluded shop fronts of Beckton Road, Canning Town. Once more, the car accelerated fiercely. Soon there was nothing but the long stretch over the East Ham levels, the stink coming off the marshes of rot and salt and the oily wash. They were going too fast into the night and Tony had caught him red-handed – hadn’t he? ‘You should’ve gone left,’ he said.
‘Scenic route,’ Tony called. ‘Any objections?’
He’d taken the money. He remembered picking it up. The kiss, was it good or bad? Clarice would always be the other side of the world. Suddenly desperate, light-headed, Vic played up to his wife’s manfriend. ‘You know. We’ve got this little place in the country, Phyllis and I. We go there at weekends. We’d love to see you. Why don’t you all come down?’ He shared the laugh.
At Ripple Road he was looking into the child’s room. If Phyllis’s sister had called in she’d left no trace of herself. But Jack was fast asleep, as though in the child’s mind there’d been no alteration, nothing of the bounce of the music and the foxy, foxtrotting on the dance floor. Frankie’s kiss still stung Vic’s lips. He’d made a deal.
In the chamber-pot the mess of his vomit reeked. The couple who ran the shop below had the only bathroom, half-way down the stairs. The chain cranked in the iron cistern. He cleaned up and rinsed his mouth. Back in bed there was Phyllis’s body, its familiar and unfamiliar smells.
At last, the deal held its focus and he realised what he’d agreed to. It was to do a job with Tony Rice. If he loved Phyllis. His heart thumped in his chest.
‘And no backing out.’ Tony had sealed it, laughing.
‘Yes, Vic. No backing out.’ She’d hold him to it. His head ached, cracking up. In the darkness, the bright, jazz-hard lines around his wife horrified him.
AWAKE TO THE SHRILLING of birds, Jack carried his box of toys into the front room of the flat. Through half-drawn drapes the sun made a glinting, near-horizontal bar, and the child sat in the gleam of it, where the dirty brown rug stuck a plaster over the join in the floor. All along the length of the join, except for the rug, the striated, mustard-coloured lino had chipped away to show the string and glue inside it. The join was the edge of England, and when the tin bomber came Jack’s mother would be all right because of the soap packet. That stood for the wooden house, lifted by low hills, which his parents always reached when they rode on the tandem. If he sat, so, on the rug, he believed he could save her.
Jack didn’t like Ripple Road. There was a dog’s muzzle in the coal scuttle. It was a brass creature whose gaze had cracked the leather in the two chairs. Pugs and griffons lurked behind the hat-stand; sometimes he ran at them with his wooden sword. The war was a dog in a gas mask with eyes like dinner plates. Any moment it would burst in, carrying the tin bomber on its back. Jack’s mother said Ripple Road was in Barking, and from that the three-year-old imagined a perpetual canine gape ready to swallow his family.
Vic Warren stepped around my brother, or half-brother, to draw the curtains. Through dirty uneven glass, taped crosswise, the sunrise hurt his eyes. Below him, on the opposite pavement, a shirtsleeved newsagent was putting out a sign for a Sunday paper: LONDON – 200,000 CASUALTIES STILL EXPECTED.
One or two cars were parked by the post office, and a solitary Home and Colonial van stood further along. Two old men were stopped on the Vicarage Road corner to exchange greetings, and by the sandbagged shop front of Wallace’s, the chemist, a black labrador sniffed and cocked its le
g. The long, dry September had left all surfaces the colours of dust, and even the moist morning air was stained with tar haze.
Vic looked along the road towards the East Street traffic lights. Turn left, and, from Barking straight through the metropolis to Brentford in the West, terrace followed terrace for twenty unbroken miles. London was a working-class concentration – of window-cleaners and war cripples, clerks and typists, slaveys who lived in, skivvies who lived out, shopkeepers, journeymen. London was full, in fact, of people just like himself. Why, then, had he been singled out? His head pounded. Having slept, he wasn’t sure now which ought to trouble him more, the girl or the money. The girl in the night-club had reminded him of someone he should have forgotten, and Tony had seen him kissing her. He tried to rationalise: they’d all been in high spirits, he’d drunk too much. My father was not well, but his illness was more than just a hangover. He really was cracking up.
He thought of his own parent and the little place in the country to which he’d so grandly invited Tony. It did exist. Before 1914, Percy Warren, my grandfather, worked in the same yard as Vic, at Creekmouth where they repaired the Thames barges and wooden lighters. Blunt, working craft, the staple of the river trade, they required the attentions of blunt men who knew the limits of their materials and could knock the grimy vessels back into shape.
Perce was the kind who could build a durable cabin, and did – in the countryside miles downriver, while the family watched and picnicked. That was in the one acre of England where you could buy a square inch of land – never mind that it was an Essex farmer’s private racket. When most working men had scant hope of owning much at all, the tiny wooden house was something unique, a triumph, a place for holidays and sunny Georgian Sundays.
Perce had got a roof on, and glazed the windows, and would have begun decorating the inside if the Great War hadn’t broken out. At Loos, he inhaled several chestfuls of gas, British, when it characteristically blew back on them. At home in East Ham he was convalescent. Vic remembered the pair of them, himself and his dad, playing together, despite the cane that lived on top of the bedroom wardrobe. Like mischievous children they avoided the mother’s bitter tongue.
Most particularly he remembered all three of them at weekends, the little party going out on the train to the wooden house, where the mending rifleman pottered about with his hammer and nails. That was his true father, who loved him; and not the tetchy, shell-shocked side of the man. Vic held the good face of his dad like a precious coin kept always mounted one way. It was himself who was the ‘wrong’un’. He couldn’t stay the course. A marriage forced, a heart elsewhere, a perfectly good trade thrown away. Look, now, how he’d spoilt everything again.
He left the window-pane and sat for an hour, and then another, playing ludo with Jack, trying to keep his eyes open and his craziness at bay. The child insisted on the game only to sabotage it. Over Jack’s breakfast leavings, Vic read him the story of the tinder-box; and at the bad end of a bad tale refused to begin again. On the Somme in 1916, Perce got a machine-gun slug that grazed the lung before passing clean through, and he came home for the second time from France. Vic was five.
A chapel bell started in one of the neighbouring streets, a monotonous clang; and Jack played up until he got slapped. His cries threatened to wake Phyllis and the Wilmots downstairs. Vic issued more threats, sick at the trap of having to back them up. During the start of the German May offensive, 1918, Perce was gassed on the skin. The shell landed right next to him on the earth parapet, tore open his uniform and splashed raw mustard compound on to it, while the fumes were sucked the other way along the trench. The contact raised a tented blister down the whole of his side – which healed in a month and spared him once again to return home alive. Vic’s father, Perce, had character.
JACK UPSET HIS DRINK. There was no change of clothes. Vic sponged him off, grateful for the continuing warm weather. At half past nine, able to bear neither his son’s company nor his own, he risked making Phyllis tea. Jack fidgeted round her in the bed, plucking at her nightdress. But she was laughing awake. ‘I did it, Vic, didn’t I.’
The room with its heavy wardrobe and bilious walls lightened suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘You were marvellous.’ He sat down on his side of the mattress.
‘And we had a good night out on it, didn’t we? Draw the curtains, Vic.’
He obeyed, still wary, afraid his guilt would show.
A prospect of hot slates and bright sky washed in as she lifted her hand to her head. ‘Christ, I’ve got a bloody hangover.’
‘Mummy!’
‘Splitting.’ The cut looked sore and crusted, the two laps of skin heaping on either side the neat gash.
Jack pointed: ‘That’s a hangover!’
A frown fleeted across her brow. She touched the place. ‘Oh, that. No, it isn’t. When you drink too much. Like Dad.’ Her eyes were alight. She teased Vic amiably.
Relieved, he went and bustled about, heating the kettle again, finding the scissors and some lint, bringing a pudding basin of hot water from the kitchen. He settled it down beside her. With his one hand he smoothed her hair back, cradling the head on to the pillow. With the other, he hooked the warm lint out in the scissor blades and stroked it gently across the place. Her head felt small and still. There was the warm female smell of her, the damaged female skin. ‘This should help.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘You know, we ought really to get you to hospital. It ought to be stitched.’
She flared. ‘I don’t want someone else touching me. I don’t want to think about it.’ The emotion subsided. ‘Anyway, they’ll reckon you did it, won’t they?’ Her mouth softened and she smiled up at him. ‘Won’t show under my hair. What’s a war if no one gets wounded? More important to get out to the country. Work on the cabin. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you think. You don’t want to be hanging about on my account, do you, Vic?’
‘Well …’
‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘If you’re sure. There.’ He finished with the lint.
‘Now we’ve got a bit more cash.’ Her gaze followed him as he stood to go.
He paused at the door. She was genuinely compliant. Her affection confused him, and suddenly the agreement with Tony presented itself in a new light. Phyllis hadn’t seen the kiss, wouldn’t trouble about it if she had; it was the deal that held power with her. That alone had been the test, the chance to prove himself. What she’d really needed all along was for him to measure up, to show he cared for her. She wanted the gesture – no one would seriously hold him to it.
How grateful he was. Clarice was just infatuation. Some of the sunlight of the day filled his heart and he believed he’d broken through with his wife. There was a chance; the boy was provided for. And Tony, in the only way he knew, had been trying to help.
Soon, Phyllis was behind him on the tandem. In their shorts and shirt tops, they cut a dash in the Barking back streets. Bareheaded, healthy as Germans, they were a sculpture of modern life, threading through to the Longbridge Road with Jack in the miniature side-car they’d bought when he was a baby, holding his miniature fingers up against the breeze. Vic was taking care of his wife and child. Further out they’d be bomb safe – if it came.
Through Hornchurch and on into Upminster they steered the accustomed route. Householders were piling more sandbags, still installing Andersen shelters, digging slit trenches across prized front lawns. Under the Cranham railway bridge scuffed kerb sides gave way to verges where weed bursts frayed. He was excited, almost aroused. When he glanced down he could see her pretty feet in the toe-clips.
Soon enough, real country appeared, bright as a poster. The shorn fields stretched away, dark edged, flawless. Dotted in them here and there the last stooks were browned by the fine weather. Soon, too, solitary old oaks held ground in pastures, with gangs of cattle in their shadow. Ashes and quickbeams stood up from thorn brakes. Greenfinches from the hedgerows looped besi
de the bike, their beating bodies almost close enough to grab. Grasshoppers shrilled from copper tufts and dun-coloured butterflies meddled with the late white flowers.
In rhythm with the lowland, the road undulated gently, an edge of the tidal basin. Every so often a car passed. Redeemed, daring the bubble to burst, Vic breathed deeply. There was still no job for him at Everholt’s, but if Phyllis was with him he’d find something else. His old bag of tools was strapped to the side-car. And once everything was set to rights they could uproot and do well at the little house, war or no war. He could maybe find a bit of wallpapering, distempering, odd jobs. He could sell vacuum cleaners, superior gas masks. They could live off the land, and she’d be away from the temptations of London. …
The heat was soon freakish; their tyres slicked a little on the tar. At Horndon, women were covering a rick in a cornfield; he heard the sound of a threshing machine in the distance – that, and a flourish of church bells driven faintly on the wind. The Englishness touched him. Then came a run-down, rather desperate stretch. No one could miss the doorless car at the back of a farm cottage, or the unusable tractor abandoned in a field further on, the harrow still attached. Barns and sheds were patched with rusting corrugated iron, doubling for pig pens, degrading into chicken runs.
They overtook a traction engine. They passed a party of hikers, tousled lads who waved, and would soon be holding rifles, being likeliest for the call-up. All along the way, telegraph wires strung out the distances. In a paddock just before the main road a dispirited cart-horse stood in the heat haze. The notion of it troubled Vic like a presentiment, and he was instantly assailed by the truth of the matter, shocked by the situation he was in. His family, all on the same bike, began the slow climb into Laindon.
HE’D TELL HER NO. He sawed new gabling for the porch, climbed up on his dad’s old pair of steps, and nailed the strips carefully into place. From the roof he could see the river, wide and grey-blue in the distance. Behind him the clutter of cabins, holiday shanties, miniature follies and disused plots stretched over the roll of hills as far as the arterial road and along eastward to the village of Basildon. The locals called the settlement Slum Farm.