‘You boys hungry? Mrs Holling made me something to eat.’ He hefted the parcel in his hand. It was heavy. ‘I reckon I’m gonna need a little help here.’
Tom and the cowpokes clattered down from the rig. Harrelson unwrapped the parcel. It was a huge ham and chicken pie, eighteen inches in diameter and five or six thick. ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Harrelson mildly. He cut into it. The pie crust was far too thick. Below the evenly browned surface, it was virtually dough. The meat inside was completely raw, and the juices ran pink and bloody from the cut made by the knife. Harrelson finished cutting the slice, but laid it on top of the crust, like something from a funeral.
‘I don’t reckon that pie’ll be too good to eat,’ said one of the cowpokes, observantly. ‘It needs more cooking, I’d say.’
Harrelson took the pie to the edge of the clearing and dropped it. It thumped heavily down. A trail of ants diverted course and began to run up the cut side of the pie and over its surface. Meantime, lunch was lunch and the riggers unwrapped their lunches, sharing with Harrelson. They ate in silence.
Tom watched in silent astonishment.
The rig stood idle.
At midday, with only a little more than a thousand foot of pipe to lift before the core came up, the rig stood idle. Tom couldn’t believe it. He’d never seen a rig idle, not at midday, not unless there was a problem somewhere with the apparatus. And they were taking a core – and a core close to the level of the hypothetical oil sands. It was unbelievable, just unbelievable.
Nobody spoke.
After lunch, it was back to the pipes. The boiler had lost pressure during the break and it took twenty minutes of stoking to get a head of steam back. Then one by one the pipes rose. Big fat flies buzzed on the air. The warmth made Tom sleepy. He counted the pipes up, to know how close they were getting to the core.
Nine hundred and ninety feet. Eight ten. Six hundred. Three ninety.
Harrelson was sitting down with his back against the side of the Ford. He was pretending to watch the core come up, but he’d fallen asleep. His head had tipped sideways and his hat had caught on the door handle. The noise of the rig drowned out other sounds, but from Harrelson’s juddering chest, Tom guessed that the snoring was pretty bad. At least Mrs Holling could look forward to quiet nights.
Two hundred and ten feet now. Just seven lengths of pipe underground.
Tom could do his thirty times table in his head, upside down, blind drunk, in the dark. It sometimes seemed he’d been rigging all his life. He enjoyed the work. In a year or two, he was pretty sure he’d make it to head driller at Texaco. He knew he was good enough, it was just a question of seniority. He’d get a raise too. He’d buy Rebecca something good, something nice.
Thirty feet.
Tom had got to thirty feet of pipe without excitement. It was just unbelievable. He nudged one of the cowpokes.
‘Go give Titch a kick, would you? It’s his damn core. He ought to see it.’
The cowpoke clambered down the steel ladder. Tom smiled to himself and shook his head. He’d spoken to the stupidest of the cowpokes, the one who’d been so swift to identify the problem with the pie. Harrelson would be lucky not to get a boot in the ribs.
The last pipe rose.
Sure enough, Harrelson got a kick, though not a hard one. He woke up blinking and for a few seconds snatched around on the dirt searching for his hat. He found it on the car door.
The core came up.
The coring-barrel is designed so that flaps close as the tube rises, thus protecting the soil sample from contamination by soil from higher levels. The flaps were jammed and Tom gave them a kick. He was still half looking down at Harrelson, who was adjusting his hat and putting on his dignity like it was a suit.
Tom looked down at the core. It was sand, greyish and coarse, compacted by the weight of rock above it to something that you could crumble with a thumb, but only just. It was sand of the sort that Tom had seen a hundred times, on a hundred rigs, in a hundred places.
Except that this time, the sand was blotched with thick black gobbets of something that looked like caked blood.
The blotches weren’t blood, but oil.
114
The factory was derelict, high-ceilinged and spacious. Tall windows blinked out on to the glittering Thames. A scrap of an old notice gummed to the wall proclaimed the building’s former use: ‘Jones & Palmer Bearings Co. Ltd’. Alan glanced at the notice – then stared. He tore the peeling old paper from the wall and stuffed it in his pocket. For twenty minutes or so, he mooched around, gazing at the traffic on the river, feeling disconsolate at his wife’s new occupation, but irritated at himself for minding. When eventually Lottie was done with her architect, he walked over to her, brandishing the paper.
‘Hello, darling!’ she said, with a kiss. ‘Sorry to be so long. My architect is a sweet man, but he can be a dreadful ninny. Not that I care. Our hospital is going to be simply wonderful.’
‘Look,’ said Alan, after greeting her. ‘Jones & Palmer Bearings. That’s what this factory used to make.’
‘Bearings? Little steel balls? I can’t say I –’
‘During the war,’ said Alan. ‘They used to fill certain types of shell with little steel balls. The idea was that the balls would cut the enemy barbed wire. They didn’t, of course, but there were plenty of places where the ground was fairly solid with the things.’
‘I’m still not sure I …’
‘Well, it rather closes the circle, doesn’t it? From shell blasts to shell victims. I should think the building’s jolly glad to be turned into a hospital.’
Lottie nodded. ‘I hope so.’ She was dressed in a long brown coat and strong brown walking shoes, suitable for the dilapidated floor. Only her absurd little grey feathered hat dented her business-like appearance. Her face looked suddenly grave. ‘You don’t mind, do you? All this, I mean?’ Her hand swept around the soon-to-be-converted shell.
‘No, my love. I’m pleased to see you so enthused.’
‘Oh!’ Lottie sounded disappointed. ‘So you do mind?’
‘I didn’t say that. I said –’
‘You nincompoop, I know what you said. Any old fishwife could have heard what you said. It’s my job to know what you mean.’
‘Well, I do mind, I suppose. But only a bit.’
‘Hmm! I suppose that means quite a lot, really. But I’ll bring you round.’
‘If anybody could, you will.’
‘You said you had news? Was it … ?’
Alan opened his wallet and held out a pink telegram slip. The sender was Aude Hartwell in Berlin. The text of the message read: ‘FOUND HIM EXCLAMATION STOP THOMAS CREELEY HETTERSCHEIDT PRISON CAMP ADMITTANCE SEPT SIXTEEN STOP FULL DETAILS SOONEST BY MAIL STOP’.
It took Lottie a second or two to read and understand the message, then her face lit up in delight. Her smile broadened out, the tip of her nose bent down, the little white scar over her eyebrow tightened as it was pulled back. Alan knew his wife’s face so well. He didn’t want her to be this busy practical-minded woman. He wanted her to remain simply his wife and the mother of his children. He wanted to take her home now, to lie in each other’s arms and kiss, as they had done in Hampshire during the war, as they had done every day since Alan’s proposal of marriage.
Alan shook himself from his trance. Lottie was speaking, asking him questions, eager to know what he was doing next.
‘I’ve spoken with Hartwell by phone,’ said Alan. ‘It appears Tom was taken prisoner that day on the Somme. The German prison records indicated that Tom was wounded in the leg, but he obviously recovered reasonably well, since he was well enough to make an escape attempt the following year.’
‘Oh! How like him!’
Lottie half-laughed and Alan did the same. ‘Yes. That was Tom all right. But, you see, the odd thing is this. When the Allies took over the camp, Tom wasn’t there. There was no record of him dying. The camp records continued to have him on their register, but he was gone. Not there. Vanished
.’
‘Oh my darling! It’s just like your dreams all over again.’
‘Isn’t it? He just sort of disappears into the gloom.’
‘So what will you do? Golly! I don’t suppose you’ve thought … ?’
And Alan laughed again. He was only able to be so self-possessed with Lottie now because he’d already experienced his own storms of emotion upon reading the telegram and speaking with Hartwell. He’d been amazed – delighted – shocked – disappointed – upset – ecstatic – almost everything, in fact. But no matter how great had been the shock, his brain had been working pretty much perfectly.
‘So what will you do?’ asked Lottie again.
‘What will I do? Nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘Nothing? But –’
Alan reached out and and gently squashed Lottie’s nose with his forefinger.
‘Don’t be a clot,’ he said. ‘It’s not what I will do that counts. It’s what I’ve already done.’
115
Big fat flies buzzed on the air. The cowpoke riggers looked down at the core like they’d looked down at the pie. The silence seemed to go on for ever. Down on the ground, Harrelson was standing like a man frozen.
‘Is that oil?’ asked one of the riggers.
And then Tom did the single cleverest thing of his entire life. It was the sort of thing you’d think of days afterwards but never actually think of doing on the spot. Except that Tom did. Straight away. Without giving away anything in his face or the way he spoke. Without even pausing, he just came out with it.
‘Screw it!’ he yelled, kicking the core hard in apparent frustration. ‘Screw this goddamn stinking stupid flea-bitten lousy pisshole of a well.’
‘There a problem?’ The stupidest cowpoke spoke mildly.
‘Goddamn lubricant’s leaked. Gotta do it again. Stupid goddamn son-of-a-bitch.’ He kicked the core barrel again.
‘We gotta take another core?’
‘Yeah.’
The cowpokes looked at the tired apparatus. ‘We gonna start right now?’ They would honestly have been willing to empty the core barrel, re-arm it for another trip down the well, and start hauling pipes all over again until the fall of night.
‘No. Screw it. Tomorrow. If I spend another hour on this rig I’m going to puke.’
One of the cowpokes bent down. He dug his thumb into the sand, exposing oil deep down inside. ‘You sure this ain’t oil?’
‘I’m damn sure it is oil,’ said Tom. ‘Premium grade Texan oil. It’s been all the way through a Gulf Oil refinery and come out the other side in a shiny red can marked “For Lubricant Use Only”.’
‘It spilled, huh?’
‘No, it just got homesick for underground. Go on, beat it. Scram. I’ll close down.’
The cowpokes melted away. One of them went over to the huge pie still standing like a millstone on the ground. He nudged it with his toe and looked at it sadly, before heading home like the others.
Harrelson came over to Tom.
‘Lubricant spilled, huh?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Bad?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Harrelson sighed deeply and sat down in the shade of the rig. He wiped his face with a white handkerchief.
‘Shame that.’
‘Yeah.’
‘’Cept that a core barrel don’t use no lubricant.’
‘Nope.’
‘Nothing ’cept mud.’
‘Nope.’
Tom brought the core down for Harrelson to see. Both men hefted it in their hands. They probed it with their fingernails. They smelled it. They crumbled it between their palms. What was there to say? It was oil.
When the car turned up, Rebecca was working in the little cottage garden behind the house, while Mitchell was scooping water from the butt, in an effort to teach worms to drink. The car – a battered old Tin Lizzie, filthy with dust – shot up to the front of the house and stopped with an angry bark from the engine. Whoever had been driving it, raced up the garden path and in through the front door.
‘Mitch, you wait here a moment –’
‘I’m going to make them swim!’ said Mitch with delight as a new idea struck him.
‘No darling, worms don’t like swimming. What about making Mommy some nice mud castles?’
She supervised Mitch long enough to make sure that the worms would escape their swimming lessons, then hurried inside.
It was Tom.
Tom crazy, Tom possessed.
He was snatching everything that had any saleable value at all. He had clothes, crockery, a blue vase that Mrs Elwick had given them, a clock all rolled up in their bedroom quilt. When Rebecca found him, he was hesitating over her thirty-dollar wedding ring on the windowsill, where she’d left it while she was out gardening. Pipsqueak, who had tried to welcome him home with her usual explosion of licks, barks and tail-wags, was cowering frightened in a corner of the room.
‘Tom, what the –’
He stood up, leaving the wedding ring where it was. ‘Your necklace, hon,’ he interrupted. ‘I’ve got to have cash now, as much as I can as fast as I can.’
‘Tom! We need our money for the house!’
‘Screw the house. Have a mansion.’
Rebecca saw one of their bank books lying on the side. She knew instantly that Tom had already drained their account of its last dollar and cent.
‘You can’t do this,’ she said. ‘The money’s half mine. I earned it.’
‘I’ll pay it back.’
‘Tom! Don’t do this. It’s not –’
‘No, no, no. It’s not like before. This is not what it seems. We’re this far from oil, this far.’ Tom held his finger and thumb two inches apart. With his other hand he groped in his pocket and pulled out some compacted sand, which he threw onto the bare table. The sand mostly looked like sand. There were some dark oily blotches in it, which could have come from anywhere.
A person’s world can change utterly in a matter of seconds. Rebecca’s world changed now. She knew there was no point in fighting her husband’s addictive drive. She saw her dream of a new home vanish. She saw that Tom would never be able to escape the trap he’d built for himself. Her world turned to ash.
‘If you go now, we’re finished. You know that.’
He stopped and took her by the shoulders.
‘We’re only a few yards from striking oil. Feet, even. Doesn’t that make a difference to you?’
‘You always were only a few yards away. Only a few more yards.’
Tom snorted out through his nose. ‘Not like now. See that?’ He pulled away from her and poked the sand on their kitchen table. ‘Smell it.’
‘Don’t go, Tomek.’
‘I’ve got to. Right away.’ He looked again at her necklace, wanting to ask her for it again and only barely restraining himself. Rebecca could see his fingers itching to take her wedding ring. ‘I’ll be back,’ he added.
‘Don’t count on it.’
He pretended he hadn’t heard her. ‘I’ll write you from Overton. Soon as I can.’
‘I’ve let you back three times, Tomek. I swore I never would again.’
By this time, Mitchell had come in from the garden. His first impulse had been to run to Daddy, but something in the atmosphere scared him and he hung back, pressing himself into Rebecca’s skirts, holding Pipsqueak into his little chest. Tom picked up the quilt by its four corners so it formed a grab-bag of all their household possessions.
‘Bye, Mitch. See you soon. Be a good boy for your mommy.’
‘Don’t go, Tomek.’
‘I’ll write.’
Tom looked around the shabby little cottage one last time. There was nothing left to take. The room was almost empty, except for the wedding ring on the windowsill and the oil sand on the table. He tousled Mitch’s hair and kissed him. He would have kissed Rebecca but she shrank from his touch. Ten seconds later, the Ford’s engine clattered into a roar and tore off.
Awa
y from Rebecca, out of her life.
116
Coppers are coppers are coppers are coppers.
Probably, if it were possible to go back to ancient Rome, or further back still to the first dawning of civilisation in Assyria and Sumeria, you’d find that their policemen looked exactly the same. Big-footed, heavy-shouldered, plain-faced, bent-nosed, put-upon, dogged.
Alan’s first act on receiving the news from Hartwell had been to identify and then retain the leading firm of private detectives in London. The three men standing in front of Alan now didn’t just look the part, they were the part. Between them, they had sixty-eight years with Scotland Yard. Sixty-eight years of hunting men and finding them.
The senior detective, Alfie Proctor, cleared his throat.
‘On the fifteenth of April nineteen thirty, you supplied us with a list of some eighty-three persons believed to have been held in the Hetterscheidt –’ he pronounced it Hetter-shit, with only the smallest glimmer of embarrassment – ‘Hetter-shit prison camp in Germany during the last war at the time when your friend, Lieutenant Thomas-known-as-Tom Creeley, was also believed to be present.’
Proctor paused briefly, to let Alan acknowledge the facts. He did so with a nod and Proctor continued.
‘As of today’s date, the twenty-seventh of August, we have now been in touch with sixty-one of the eighty-three persons. Of the twenty-two individuals we have not been able to find, six have died, four have emigrated to America (in three cases) or Australia, in the fourth case. We have so far been unsuccessful in determining the whereabouts of the remaining dozen, but will – if so instructed by yourself – continue to make enquiries.’
Alan nodded. ‘Please do.’
‘Of the sixty-one men we have been able to find, five were not available for questioning or were found not to be of sound mind, and were accordingly removed from our list of possible informants.’
Alan nodded again, more briskly. Why the hell couldn’t the man just get on with it? Alan sighed. The man was a policeman, that was why. And because he was a policeman, he’d been able to find as many men as he had. Proctor turned a page in his notebook, as though he himself had no idea what the outcome of the investigation had been.
The Sons of Adam Page 35