What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  ‘No need to worry,’ Alan says. ‘A spot of business on the side, it shows initiative. More than a spot . . . well, that’s where problems start. What’s his name, now? There’s a Wolf in it.’

  ‘Wolfowitz,’ Michael says, unwilling.

  ‘I never took to him myself. I tried to do business with him. But too much trade on the side, that was his trouble, too. Too independent-minded . . .’

  Alan’s gaze drifts away, out towards the advancing night: he looks disappointed with it. Michael keeps his mouth shut. There’s enough rope here to hang himself, if he doesn’t guard his tongue.

  ‘He was always good at his work, it’s true. And he must be getting on by now?’ Alan asks at last.

  With gratitude Michael takes his cue. ‘He’s not young. He’s come round to doing what he’s told. All he wants now is a living.’

  ‘And I like you, Michael, so I’ll tell you what. I’ll do you both a favour. We’ll keep him on, above board. You’ll have to keep him straight with us, and you’ll have to sort it out with Cyril. I don’t suppose he’ll be best pleased, but tell him it’s all squared with me.’

  ‘You won’t regret it,’ Michael says, but Alan gestures, waving off the whole problematic business.

  ‘I’ve some work for you, too, by the way, if you’re not too independent-minded yourself.’

  Michael licks his lips. He doesn’t answer straight off, though it’s an effort not to. He composes himself. This is what I’m here for, he thinks, and this is what I’ve waited for. This is what I’ve earned; a chance with the likes of Alan Swan.

  ‘It’s driving,’ Alan says. ‘Just a bit of driving.’

  ‘Norman can drive,’ Michael says, curtly crestfallen, and Alan grins again.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Michael, we all have to start somewhere. You’ll be with Norman this time out, but I want you in the driving seat. This time tomorrow, if you’re not too busy.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Isle of Dogs. Millwall.’

  ‘In this?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Alan says, ‘no, this won’t do. There’s a van at Limehouse. Norman can show you. He’ll come for you tomorrow.’

  They turn into Mile End, going east, shadowing the Roman Road. Alan is watching Michael. The old man looks hungry himself.

  ‘And when we get to Millwall,’ Michael says, ‘what do we do there?’

  ‘You drive,’ Alan says, softly. ‘That’s all you do, you drive. Norman will take care of the rest. You’re not afraid, are you, Michael?’

  It is a moment, just a moment, before Michael shakes his head.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ Alan says. ‘Cyril gets afraid. That’s the trouble with men like Cyril, they’re too fearful to make a mark. A small beer drinker, that’s Cyril, a small beer kind of man, always has been, always will. But you’re not like that. You asked for Scotch, bold as brass. That’s what you meant to show me, wasn’t it, Michael? That first night in the club? You’ve ambition, you’ve pride, that’s what you had to say for yourself. You want to leave your mark on the world. I didn’t have you wrong, did I?’

  ‘No,’ Michael says. ‘I’m your man.’

  Alan pats him on the knee.

  ‘Good boy. Norman,’ he calls forward, ‘it’s time we were getting back. We don’t want to keep Michael from his business.’

  He works on after they’ve gone. There is still business to be done, and he thinks only of that until the crowds thin out to nothing. He glances at the library clock, then, and sees that the hours have flown: he’s stayed longer than he intended.

  He has taken down the tarp, is boxing up the strops and blades, when he looks up in the lamplight and sees Mary, standing there.

  ‘I thought I’d see you home,’ she says. ‘It’s a cold night to walk alone.’

  ‘I was feeling it,’ Michael admits, and she comes up and kisses him. Her own lips are chilled. Her cheeks are red. She’s beautiful as the day he first saw her, laughing at him amongst her friends, ten years and a lifetime ago, in Ladywood, in Birmingham.

  *

  ‘Mrs Malcolm? Bernadette Malcolm?’ the Sister calls, her smile thinning when Bernadette raises a hand, though it’s no great loss, a smile like that; there wasn’t much sunshine in it to begin with.

  Somewhere a baby is crying; and there is something wrong with the sound, an incredulous distress that hiccoughs for breath now and then, but persists, on and on, echoing down to the waiting room along barely lit corridors, through wards of peeling wartime paint and governmental linoleum; there is apprehension in that voice, a lonely terror of existence, that puts Bernadette’s nerves on edge, so that one hand grips Clarence’s quite fiercely as she smiles up at the nurse approaching them: a proper smile, that lights her eyes, despite the nerves and the pain that comes and goes; Bernadette shows them all how it’s done.

  ‘Can we go in, Sister?’ she asks, but the nurse shakes her head.

  ‘Not today, dear, unless it’s urgent. We’re very busy, Bernadette; we see so many these days, with the National Health, but Dr Rogers did tell me he’s space for you on Sunday. Noon. It’s kind of him to offer, not all of them hold with Sunday hours, but babies don’t keep the Sabbath, do they? At least the sun has come out, see? We should count our blessings, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘Air,’ Bernadette mutters, when the Sister is out of earshot, and Clarence bends down to hear. ‘I said get me up, I want air.’

  ‘You wanting to lose your seat for it?’ Clarence whispers back, and it’s true that it’s standing room only around them, the only mercy for Clarence being the cavernous ceiling, where tobacco smoke collects out of reach in stained corners.

  ‘I’ll come Sunday,’ Bernadette says. ‘I want to be out of this blessed place.’

  Out they get. They do a turn round the grounds, where pigeons pick over the lawns, or huddle in the coppiced planes with their grim amputations and witch-broom branches.

  London churns around them. It’s as ugly as it’s ever been this winter, its jams and crowds, its ruins and clearances – the first sign of rebuilding – all grey as newsreels in the long, revealing light of a sun already falling.

  ‘Lord!’ Bernadette exclaims, and Clarence clutches her arm more tightly at the sound of the name taken in vain.

  ‘What is it? What?’

  ‘No,’ she says at his mistake (he is looking her up and down in alarm). ‘I just miss it. Home.’

  ‘Here is home,’ he shrugs. ‘We come this far together, what else can it be?’

  ‘I know that,’ Bernadette says, ‘oh, I know that really,’ and she takes his hand and squeezes it, to let him know she’s alright.

  As they come back round to the front gate she stops and looks up into his eyes. He’s still a handsome man, her faithful giant. He’s a fool to have come down to the hospital with her when he should be working – he’ll be out late because of it – but Dora was poorly, so here he is, all done up in his Sunday suit, gawky as a boy in his best, the look on his face so worried and that face still strong despite it; still strong enough that she can draw succour from it.

  She gazes beyond him. There is a narrow view of the river there, and before it, of one almost beautiful thing: the Monument, with the sun twinkling off its fiery golden summit.

  ‘Let’s walk there!’ Bernadette says, but Clarence tuts.

  ‘You get that far, I’ll be carrying you back.’

  ‘Don’t you kiss your teeth at me. You think I can’t do it?’

  ‘Alright, woman,’ Clarence says, ‘don’t say I didn’t tell you so.’

  Carefully they make their way down. When Bernadette was young she had a picture that she loved, of London couples by the Monument, but it’s no picture when they get there. Where did the beauty go? Bernadette cranes her neck. The square in which the pillar stands is full of dustbins crammed in doorways and laundry on balconies, and a lone drunkard coiled under papers.

  She winces as they turn to go. ‘It kicking?’ Clarence asks, and she nods.

/>   ‘Digging her heels in. Don’t want to go nowhere. Not out here,’ she says, wistfully, glancing round one more time: she wishes she weren’t here herself. The wind cuts cold in the square’s shadow.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ she says. ‘I can last till Sunday.’

  ‘You so sure it’s a girl,’ Clarence says, as they turn for home.

  ‘You better hope I’m not dreaming,’ Bernadette says, ‘because I’m telling you, I’m set on Sybil.’

  He laughs at that, ho! ho!, and Bernadette laughs with him, but her heart’s not in it. The name makes her think of Mama, and Mama leads her on to home again.

  It is still Home, on a day like this more than most, when the wind cuts cold and the child struggles inside her, as if it knows it is coming to a new beginning and fears it. It is an idyll, Jamaica, like the best days of childhood: always out of reach behind her, whatever other places she and her man make for themselves, whatever they tell themselves, however far they have come, or go.

  *

  Michael is driving to the end of the world.

  Some nights, in the war, when Mary and the girls were still halfway safe up north, Michael and Wolfowitz would come down to the Isle of Dogs. It was the old man’s idea, and Michael still owes him for that. There were rich pickings to be had in the wake of the bombings, rich enough to make London worthwhile, though it was nervy work, with the Germans always drawn to the Island – the river’s great meander the plainest of landmarks – and the fires smouldering and bringing down roofs, and the dockers and firemen on the lookout for looters, though Wolfowitz always insisted they weren’t that. Salvage, that was all they took. Salvage from the wreck of London.

  It was a broken place then, the Island, and it’s still broken now, as Michael drives through the dusk; so marred that it’s surely past mending. The wharf cranes loom immobile over the docks, gaunt as guns, and south of them, where the Thames closes round the neck of land, the darkening streets of Millwall are barely lit, barely wanted, with God only knows who marooned in the timber-propped terraces, and the roads all mud and country ruts, with grass and reeds growing up around the woodpiles, and here and there a sign of erstwhile wealth, a custom house or shipwright’s office, fallen into disrepair since the heyday of the docklands; and what new buildings have gone up ramshackle, gone-tomorrow things, and the smell of mud always on the air, and no sound but the sound of gulls.

  Norman looks this way and that and says nothing. Michael likes a quiet man, but he doesn’t like the man beside him. Twice, since Limehouse, he’s spoken up himself to break the uneasiness of their silence. Makes Shoreditch look handsome, he said, as they came down into Millwall, to which Alan’s man said nothing, and later, when Norman pointed them east, towards the old Mudchute batteries, Michael asked in so many words what they wanted with the place; but Norman only swung his head, looking at Michael unblinkingly with his anxious eyes.

  Nerves, Michael thinks. It’s nerves that make a man talk too much, as he has. Only Norman is nervous, too – sweating with it, despite the cold – and he says not a word.

  There’s something broken in him. Michael can feel it; can smell it, almost, coming off him with the reek of his sweat. There’s something in Norman that echoes the world around them. Michael wants nothing to do with it, that thing (the war is past; he has escaped it, even if Norman has not), but here he is sitting beside it, driving it to its destination. It’s too late now.

  ‘We’re here,’ Norman says just then. ‘Stop here,’ he says, and points Michael to a stretch of buildings, a warehouse with an office outhouse, the office old glazed brick but the warehouse new-built or rebuilt, thrown up out of makeshift timber, with no lights on and a hoarding up front:

  McEACHAN BROS.

  METALWORKERS

  METAL BROKERS

  is all it says.

  Norman gets out of the van. He walks towards the office, tries the door, stands back. He rolls a cigarette and lights it, peers up at the pockmarked building and around. When the cigarette is spent he hawks, comes back to the van and leans by Michael’s window.

  ‘Lend us that,’ he says, and gestures towards the horse-head stick, close at hand, stood in the footwell of the seat.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Door’s locked.’

  Michael regards his stick, then Norman. ‘You won’t be jemmying it with this.’

  Norman smiles. He reaches across Michael and takes the stick out through the window. He does it quickly – Michael is too off-guard even to speak, even as the ferrule clacks cold against his cheek in passing – but once he has what he wants, Norman waits. There is a pause in which Michael might act – Norman allows him time – and only when it is clear that Michael will do nothing does Norman’s smile fade, as if Michael’s submission disturbs his momentary happiness. He nods and turns and goes back to the office.

  Michael doesn’t watch. He sits looking at his hands. He checks his cheek. The bone aches, but the skin is unbroken. He hears the sound of breaking glass, the first report loud, the rest muffled, and when he looks that way again, one of the office windows is staved in, and Norman is gone.

  There are stones, he thinks. He could have found a stone or timber. But it was the stick he wanted, to test me, or to bruise me.

  No one comes at the sound of the glass (who would come, in this desolate place?), and Michael’s thoughts begin to wander. He thinks of the stick. It is his father’s work, made for him when he was sixteen, when the stroke took him. It’s good work, that horse-head. His father fashioned gold and bronze, now and then, but he was always most at home with silver.

  He thinks of the stroke. Why recall that now? But there it is: the smell of oranges. The smell and taste of oranges, cloying at first, then overpowering. When he came to he was lying on his bedroom floor. Hours had passed – the light had gone – and Graeme was there with him, murmuring comforts, lifting him.

  He was still half a boy. A warning from God, the doctor called it, and what earthly use were such words? And why in God’s name think of it now?

  And then the war. Graeme and Christy cheered off with the rest of them. Michael left behind, like the crippled boy in the story who couldn’t keep up with the piper. He hated the war for that, well before the news came back of Christy, missing at Dunkirk, and then his death, and then Graeme gone the same way; gone and dead, not dead and gone.

  The war made plain to all and sundry his redundancy. It made him pitiful. How bitter he grew then. And the bitter arguments. His father, telling him to leave the house and never to come in it again, on the day of Graeme’s memorial.

  Powerlessness. What else links those times and this, but that? Norman may be broken in mind or spirit, but his body is whole. He could break Michael as easily as he might break the horse-head stick (More easily than that, a small voice whispers in his skull. The stick is sound???). It is powerlessness that Michael recalls, here, so far from anywhere.

  He hears a sound then, a queer cry, and when he looks he sees a light has gone on in an upstairs window. How long it has been there he doesn’t know, and it goes out soon enough. When Norman appears again – stooping out the door – he has a carpet-bag in one hand and the stick in the other. He props the stick by Michael as he gets in beside him, and in the dark it looks to Michael as if the horse’s head is wet.

  ‘Drive on,’ Norman says, and Michael starts the engine.

  *

  ‘You woke me up,’ Floss says. ‘What are you doing?’

  He is bent over the sink, shirtsleeves up past his elbows. His teeth are gritted. He is scrubbing at the stick in his hands, its head under water.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ he says, and Floss sighs and does. She dreams of silver horses, racing through orchards full of green and blue and apples.

  *

  Wednesday, dark and early, the last flakes of a night of snow still twirling down as soft as smuts.

  Mary hangs clothes, pegs in her mouth, steam-ghosts rising between her hands. Bits of conversation drift acros
s the balconies.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘A stick of wood. I haven’t a bit of fire in the house.’

  ‘It’s a hundred pound you’ll be wanting next. Look, the sun’s coming up.’

  ‘Oh, I know, but it’s this cold, it’s gone right into me.’

  ‘Go on, then. Door’s on the latch.’

  ‘Ta, love. I owe you one.’

  ‘And wipe your feet! Not half, she don’t. More like all the trees in Essex.’

  How hard London is, Mary thinks. All these years after the war, and all it seems to get is harder.

  Still, maybe nowhere else is better. Maybe the war was really the end, and none of us knows it yet. No one sees that everywhere is going on the same way, the whole world getting harder and harder, until it just cracks apart and takes us all with it.

  Don’t think rot.

  At least she has Michael and her girls. And at least they still have their own place, cracks and all, and look – new clothes on the line. It’s like Michael says, when it comes to it: they need to look out for themselves. They’re alright, and that’s what matters.

  She hears a sound down in the square. She glances down into its well, and there is Annie, walking away through the snow.

  From up high the old woman looks childlike. The view foreshortens her, and her suitcase is too big for her, so that she limps, weighed down like an evacuee.

  The square is still in deep shadow. It is all shades of grey; the snow, the depot yard, the car and van, and Annie Platt, hobbling too quickly for comfort towards the far arch: holding her hat and peering to see the street beyond; looking for the brokers who have not yet arrived for her on such a cold morning.

  ‘It’s been five days,’ Mary murmurs, but then she remembers that it hasn’t: only four. Annie is getting out to Pontefract with a day to spare.

  As Annie reaches the arch, Mary almost calls her name, wanting her to wait, needing to go down and . . . what? Urge her back? Take her in? Well, at least to say goodbye, to wish her well up north. Mary is poised to shout; but she holds back. All she does is raise an unseen hand, and then Annie is gone.