by Gil North
Dust shrouded a small, littered room. A buffing-wheel droned, whirring softly. Cluff leaned on a ramshackle counter, decorated with half-a-dozen rusty tins of shoe polish and a box of laces that might well have been there since the place was built.
The wheel stopped. The cobbler in the space behind the counter swivelled on his stool, feet scraping on discarded scraps of leather, putting a boot down on his bench. Crippled, he limped across to Cluff. One shoulder rose higher than the other and he had the makings of a hump on his back. His eyes, through steel-rimmed glasses bound with twine, were shrewd.
“I thought you’d be in, Caleb.”
“You knew more than I did.”
“You don’t miss much.”
“In Gunnarshaw!”
“What’s it say in the poem—‘time to stand and stare’?”
“I’m not seeing a lot today.”
“It’ll come when you’ve mulled it over.”
“It’s taking its time.”
The cobbler rooted in the junk under the counter. He came up with an enamel bowl and held it under a tap near his bench, rinsing it. He hobbled back with it, full, and put it on the floor, calling to Clive. Clive went through a space in the counter, bridged by a hinged flap. The dog put his muzzle into the bowl and lapped noisily.
The cobbler lifted the flap, inviting Cluff into his sanctum.
Cluff perched on an up-ended box. The cobbler returned to his stool. His foot worked a treadle and he held the edge of a sole to his wheel. Clive lay down by Cluff. Cluff hunched forward, slackly, letting his mind go blank.
The cobbler held the boot up at eye-level, turning it in his hands, examining it. He said, “I work late.”
Minutes passed before Cluff replied, “You have to with the prices you charge.”
“It won’t last.”
“When’s this place coming down?”
“Soon.”
“I knew you’d lost at the Inquiry.”
“I’d no chance. Not me against the council.”
“It’ll improve his property when your shop’s cleared away.”
“He knows that. He’s not on the council for nothing.”
“You’ve been here a long time.”
“I’m not supposed to know what’s good for me.”
“None of us are these days.”
“Which way did you come?” the cobbler asked.
“Through Greensleeve’s yard.”
“I’m surprised he let you.”
“He wasn’t in. He didn’t know.”
“He’ll find out.”
“Let him.”
“He’s a nasty sort to get across with.”
“I can look after myself.”
“There’s too many like him running things.”
“In my father’s day they had to be gentry. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry with the cheek can stick his oar in now.”
“You could retire yourself, Caleb.”
“It stops me from thinking. What would I do?”
“There’s Cluff’s Head.”
“John’s settled. I’m too old to start farming on my own.”
The cobbler set his wheel going again. He worked quietly for a while, finishing the second boot of the pair he was occupied with.
“I’ve seen her with him in his car,” the cobbler said.
“Maybe.”
“Late on.”
“Coming away from the shop?”
“Aye.”
“She helped him with his books.”
“He’s got a front door.”
“It won’t wash.”
“What makes them tick?” the cobbler demanded.
“He’s too much to risk letting it go. His public life’s meat and drink to him.”
“He rides rough-shod. They get to think they’re above the rules.”
“I’m paid to be a policeman.”
“You know his wife.”
“I haven’t seen her lately.”
“Nobody has.”
“Well?”
“She was never much to look at,” the cobbler said. “He married her for her money.”
“It’s not the first time that’s happened.”
“He’s in his fifties.”
“I’m not much younger.”
“You know what I mean then.”
At the door Cluff turned, one foot in the hollow of a worn stone step. He said, “It’s not enough, Tom. You can’t make bricks without straw.”
“You can have a good try.”
“It wouldn’t get me anywhere.”
“They’re saying in the town it was young Carter.”
Cluff’s fingers crumpled the letter in his pocket: “Already?”
The cobbler said, “You don’t believe that, Caleb?”
“I shall, if I have to believe it.”
Chapter V
Clive trotted at his heels.
He kept away from the centre of the town and away from the police-station. Turning a corner, he ran into a uniformed constable. The constable said, “Sergeant, Barker’s looking for you. I saw him a while back.”
Cluff grunted at the constable and walked on. The constable pushed his helmet sideways on his head and scratched his scalp. But he knew Cluff. He shrugged his shoulders and grinned to himself.
The Sergeant wandered the back streets of Gunnarshaw with no sense of urgency, killing time. He passed the railway station near the outskirts of the town. A high fence of sleepers, placed on end one against another, separated the road along which he was walking with Clive from shunting yards and railway tracks. The afternoon had turned greyer than the morning, and cold. The beginnings of rain spattered him and the wind blew the rain away.
He kept to the pavement on the side of the road opposite to the fence. Gates in garden walls dropped behind him in orderly succession, the gardens they protected scarcely worth the name, mere strips of withered grass, bordered by meagre empty flowerbeds. Soot and ash blackened both grass and soil. The stonework of the terraces fronted by the gardens was grimy, their windows dingy. No one went in or out of the garden gates. The houses themselves betrayed no signs of occupancy.
The pavement shone black ahead of him. The road at his side gleamed black with a film of moisture. The grey of the whole world beyond the road and the pavement took on a deeper hue, adjusting itself to the norm.
At intervals a car, or more infrequently a bus, drove between the terraces and the railway lines. Engines whistled mournfully. The buffers of goods-wagons crashed against each other, kissing violently.
Streets sliced the terraces every few hundred yards, running away from the road, jammed between road and railway on the one hand and the high embankment of a canal on the other.
The Sergeant turned into Charles Street and, halfway along, into Rupert Street, a backwater in a region of backwaters, running parallel to the railway and the terraces by the railway. The back windows in Rupert Street looked at the back windows of the terraces in the distance, divided from them by the long line of yards behind the houses in Charles Street and those of the street next adjoining. The windows of the living-rooms in the middle of Rupert Street had a view, over their own yards, of washing strung on sagging ropes, the permanent greyness of babies’ nappies, of children’s rompers, and of coalsheds and outdoor lavatories. The houses at either end of the street faced, no less depressingly, the blank gables of the rows going down to the main road.
Cluff ambled in Rupert Street, between the houses on its one side and the many-windowed wall of a high mill on the other. At the other end of the street a jumble of unpainted hen-huts and rusty, wire fences enclosing vegetable gardens spiked with the rotting remains of Brussels sprouts filled an area of open ground, long since denuded of grass. A mangy goat, staked to a tangled rope, looked owner
less and starving.
He leaned against the mill wall, opposite number twelve. The wall vibrated slightly, trembling at the power of the machines racing inside. The grey winter afternoon shaded quickly to the early winter night, daylight dispelled more rapidly by the storeyed building towering at Cluff’s back. Pilot-lights in the three lamp-posts on the pavement in front of the houses, one at either end of the street and one halfway along it, sparkled into visibility. Tiny clicks heralded the release of gas to the mantles and the lamps bloomed, wan.
He retraced his steps, into Charles Street, still alone except for the dog, down Charles Street almost to its junction with the road, the front rooms hemming him in as coldly dark and silent as those across from which he had been standing for so long. Unseen, he stopped again in the shadows, glancing now and then over his shoulder towards the mill, aware that it was getting late, afraid of being swamped, before his purpose was accomplished, by the evening flood of the mill’s operatives.
He watched the road, where the white pole of a bus-stop reared by the fence of railway sleepers. Cars and lorries drove by, headlights blazing, tyres swishing on the damp macadam. A grey mist began to collect, eddying.
A dark-red, double-decked bus drew up by the stop, ejecting a slim trickle of passengers, the last of them lagging, keeping to himself, a youth, nondescript, unremarkable. He crossed to Charles Street, the sort of youth to be expected in this part of Gunnarshaw, ignorant of the town’s real tradition of sheep and farming, recent, the upshot of the mills that had trespassed into the valley with the Industrial Revolution, finding in the climate of the valley and the ample water of the valley the conditions suited to them. Thin and stunted, his boyhood impetus to the exploration of the country about the town long spent, the youth came gangling and loose-limbed, stoop-shouldered, hollow-chested, in a ready-made suit too small for him. A flat cap accentuated the sharpness of his features.
Cluff motioned Clive to stillness. He shrank farther back, hugging the wall of a house. The youth walked like a man in a dream, his eyes cast down, paying no attention to his surroundings. Cluff put out a hand. He let it fall heavily on the youth’s shoulder. The youth gasped. His knees gave way and he stumbled. Cluff held him, feeling his bones sharp under his cheap clothes.
“Jack,” Cluff said. “Jack Carter.”
He saw the youth’s face, in the yellow gas-light. The face crumpled, losing shape, white before, whiter now. The youth’s bloodless lips worked soundlessly. He shook in Cluff’s grip.
“It’s all right,” Cluff murmured, and kept his hand where it was, cloth bunching in his fingers.
Carter’s eyes roved. His head oscillated this way and that on his scrawny neck with its prominent, mobile Adam’s apple, jerking like a ball on an elastic string. He shrank from Cluff, an animal at bay, searching uselessly for a way of escape, the pack at its throat. He said, “Don’t take me home, Mr. Cluff.”
“I’ve been waiting to see you, Jack,” Cluff answered him. “Better here than where you work.”
He shepherded Carter down Charles Street, his hold transferred to the youth’s arm, and along Rupert Street. In Rupert Street Carter hesitated. He moaned and Cluff had to force him on. He steered Carter into the lee of the mill and round its far end. A siren shrieked in the dark, without warning, making Carter start violently, quivering. Behind them weavers poured from the mill into Charles Street. Cluff said, “Just in time. You wouldn’t want them to see you with me.”
A narrow path, no wider than one man at a time could pass, crawled between the gable end of the mill and the broken wire fencing the derelict hen-pens and vegetable gardens. The mill cut them off from the illumination of the lamps in Rupert Street. Points of light glimmered distantly, far away on the other side of the waste ground, which lay black and threatening, an ocean of dark. Somewhere a dog barked and Clive snarled in answer. Clinker scraped and splintered on the path. A jet of steam hissed, white, from the bent arm of an outlet pipe over the engine-house of the mill.
In the beam of Cluff’s torch a low wall held back the base of the embankment. A gap showed in the wall, its stones pulled down by children, making a way where there was no way. The mill wall ended, its extension up the bank a high railing shutting off the heaps of a coal dump. A long scar in the grass stretched up by the railing to the towpath.
Stones slid and rattled as Carter climbed over them. Carter and Cluff, bent double on the greasy, trodden earth, pulled themselves along, clinging to the bars of the railing. Carter breathed heavily. Cluff kept close to him.
The weeds on the canal bank stirred. Something plopped into the black water, raising a dull splash. Clive, his fur on end, stood forelegs apart on the edge of the bank, nose twitching, head down.
“It’s as good a place as any,” Cluff said. “We’ll not be seen here. Not at this time of day.”
Carter drooped.
“You know what they’re saying,” Cluff added.
“That,” Carter replied. “And you.”
“I know your father. And your mother.”
“They warned me not to have anything to do with her.”
“You’re old enough to stand on your own feet.”
Bare branches of trees across the canal rubbed against each other in the wind. The wind ruffled the water. The water lapped gently at the land.
“I wanted to marry her,” Carter burst out.
“Why not? You’ve known her all your life. You were children together. You’ve grown up with each other.”
The noises of Gunnarshaw floated to them on the wind, muted and unreal. They were closer in their isolation to the dead than to the living.
“I can’t believe it,” Carter said suddenly. “I can’t! I don’t know how I’ve lived through today.”
Long minutes dragged endlessly. Cluff’s shoulders hunched. He had his hands deep in his pockets, his stick hanging by its handle on one wrist. He loomed big and black and shapeless, a rock, solid, resistant.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Cluff murmured at last.
“It ended a long time ago.”
The minutes lengthened again.
“Jack,” Cluff said. After a while he stated, tonelessly, “You were with her last night.”
Carter wasn’t listening. He wasn’t on the canal bank, with the wind blowing chill about him, the houses of Gunnarshaw down there at his back, the house he lived in, the house she lived in. He said, not to Cluff but to himself, “She won’t have anything to do with me.” He used the present tense not the past, enduring as he had endured, himself alive and she still alive, continuing his torment. He couldn’t believe either that the child he had played with had grown into the girl she had become. He couldn’t believe it and he had to believe it.
“I’ll have to know,” Cluff said.
The youth turned, wondering where he was and who was with him, coming back slowly to a realization of Cluff, of the inevitability of Cluff, the impossibility of ever being free from Cluff.
“Get it over with,” the youth pleaded. “I can’t stand any more of it.”
“I’ll believe you, Jack.”
“What’s the use?”
“Tell me!”
“I was with her. Is there anything you don’t know?”
“Everything, Jack,” Cluff said. “Everything.”
The Sergeant stepped closer to the edge of the bank, blocking Carter from the water. Carter’s eyes stared through the Sergeant at the canal, large, unblinking. Carter stayed very still. A sob broke from him. Cluff smelt the air damp and scented with pollution. Weeds choked the canal. Its banks crumbled. Gases stirred in the ooze on its bottom, bursting in tiny bubbles on its surface. The canal was filled with corruption.
Cluff extended his arms, as a barrier or in a gesture of embrace. He felt rather than saw Carter’s hands go to his face, trying to shut out the scenes his eyes looked on. He heard the
groan Carter uttered. Carter whirled. He jumped for the embankment, slithering, keeping his balance by a miracle, not caring whether he lost it or what hurt his body took. Carter’s arms flailed, useless wings lacking pinions for flight. He hurtled into the wall at the foot of the embankment, dislodging stones, the stones crashing and rolling. Cinders on the path crackled under his running feet.
Cluff allowed his own arms to fall to his sides. He let Carter go. He stayed where he was, his heart aching, the night growing quieter for the earthquake of Carter’s departure. Clive looked from Cluff to the spot where Carter had vanished and back at the Sergeant, confused, uncertain of what should happen next.
Nothing happened. Cluff continued to stand where Carter had left him. His body shivered with cold. He did not notice the cold. He tried to recall his own youth and it would not come back to him, but he was sorry for youth because youth had to bear so much.
The towpath unrolled, a black ribbon side by side with the ribbon of the water only slightly less black. Cluff followed the ribbon, carrying as burden a sense of defeat. He got past the mill, to the gap that was the end of Charles Street. He listened for the tread of feet in the dark, for the opening of a door and its closing, for voices raised. Clive danced on the path, the dog’s every movement urging the man to go on.
He slid awkwardly down the embankment, foothold difficult. The toes of his shoes felt for cracks between the stones of the wall. He walked past the big doors of the mill, blank and lowering, along the upper part of Charles Street to where Rupert Street joined it.
He stopped in Rupert Street, on the pavement outside the door of number twelve. These houses had no bells. He lifted a hand to the knocker, jerking the knocker up and down. Drawn blinds blacked out the window by the door and the two windows on the top storey above his head.