by CL Skelton
Emily paused, pursing her lips, tilting her yet pretty head back, thinking. ‘Tall order, Sam. Now I’ve got to be more charming than a whole nation.’
Sam laughed. ‘That’s about it, my love,’ he said.
Emily shrugged, but went off to the kitchen with determination. Sam, playing the evening by instinct, left all discussion of salvage strictly out of his conversation, during a long pleasant pre-dinner session before the log fire of the public bar, and throughout Emily’s excellent dinner as well. He let the conversation follow its own natural course, unrestrained, touching on every subject from orange-growing in Israel to the forthcoming Festival of Britain, in the summer.
‘You know Maud and Albert are coming, for Janet’s film première,’ Emily said to Sam, who nodded, remembering Harry or someone had mentioned something of the sort.
‘You will come down,’ Emily said.
‘London?’ Sam said, sipping his wine and only half-listening. But Emily looked so hopeful that he said, ‘Of course. Of course I shall,’ without really imagining that anyone would remember. Film stars, even those who were distant Hardacre cousins, seemed too remote from his present world to be real.
‘She is most beautiful,’ said Jan Muller suddenly. Everyone looked curious, until he explained, slightly embarrassed, ‘The young lady, Janet Chandler. I see her films in Israel. She is very beautiful. I was most surprised to learn she is one of you Hardacres,’ and then added quickly, ‘until, of course, I see how lovely Hardacre women are.’ He glanced at Emily, who made a mock scowl, and at the two young Barton daughters, who looked starry-eyed.
‘Perhaps you would like to meet her,’ Emily said to Jan, having quite honestly forgotten the proposed brevity of his visit. Then she remembered and blushed, as if she had revealed some secret plan, and said awkwardly, ‘If you come back some time.’ Sam said nothing. He had not found the right moment and was relying, as in the old days when he courted girls, on that intuition that would tell him the moment had arrived.
After cheese and trifle the children were sent to bed, Emily went away for coffee and Philip was called away unexpectedly to serve behind the bar. Sam knew his moment had arrived. So did Jan Muller. He met the look of questioning in Sam’s eyes so directly that Sam only grinned, having no need to speak.
‘No,’ Jan said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sam replied, toying with his port glass. He kept his voice casual. ‘Still, I can’t pretend I don’t understand. It’s risky. We’re not all gamblers. Just as well perhaps.’
‘It has nothing to do with that,’ Jan said, defensive. ‘I am not afraid of risks. What have I to lose?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sam said honestly.
‘Kibbutzniks have no possessions,’ Jan reminded. ‘A small initial investment which we are entitled to reclaim, should we choose to leave. In my case, I would feel obligated to forfeit even that. The kibbutz funded my journey to find my mother. I would feel I owed them that back.’
Sam made no expression but a nod, but he caught at once, from Jan’s choice of words, the revelation that the man had clearly considered the consequences of staying on.
He smiled as a whimsical thought occurred to him. ‘Rather like the monastery, actually. We have quite the same arrangement.’
Jan returned the smile. ‘Logical,’ he said. ‘A similar enterprise in some ways. But in others,’ he added slowly, ‘entirely different.’
‘So I would imagine,’ said Sam.
‘You see,’ Jan continued, ‘it is not that I would not enjoy working with you. I find it intriguing. But there is another matter,’ he paused. ‘A personal matter.’ Sam looked steadily at his companion and then nodded again.
‘A woman?’ he said.
‘A woman … a girl rather. No matter. She is there.’
‘I see.’ Sam was silent. He had been rather afraid of this possibility. He thought for a while and said, ‘She wouldn’t consider joining you here? I’m sure it could be arranged,’ he went on, going out on a limb provided by Jane’s friend in the Home Office.
‘Never,’ Jan said instantly. ‘Never. She is a Sabra. Native born. Israel is everything to her. Everything.’
‘I see,’ Sam said slowly, because Jan had revealed in that description of his lover something too of himself. ‘But not so to you?’ he asked.
‘I do not understand.’ But he did, and Sam knew he did. Jan paused, uncertain, and said, ‘I have determined to make my life there. With Hannah.’
‘A lovely name,’ said Sam. He said nothing more, watching the man war within himself.
‘You do not see. She is so young, so vulnerable,’ he shrugged, raising his hands in wordless apology. ‘She loves me,’ he said, again revealing more of himself than he imagined. Then Sam did something that would prick his conscience for weeks, indeed months to come. He did something that from the very start he had sworn he would not do. Later, alone in his bed with a weight suspiciously like guilt on his mind, he could not honestly recall why he had done it; only that it had fitted into the conversation too well to be avoided, and he had grasped it as a young man grasps the fatal line of flattery he knows will turn a woman’s head.
He said, ‘So does your mother.’
Jan was silent. He fingered an unused spoon on the linen tablecloth, reached for his port glass, found it empty, refused Sam’s offer of the decanter. He shook his head, saying at the same time, ‘Of course. Of course.’
Feeling already a regretful need to make amends, Sam said awkwardly, ‘But of course she has many friends. I know she’s very happy in Strathconon. Very happy. Jane always says …’
‘I am lying to myself, am I not?’ Jan said, his pale confident eyes suddenly made younger, more vulnerable, by doubt. ‘I keep saying that too, but I am wrong.’
‘Not at all,’ Sam said, aware of his impotence to undo the effect of the thing he had said, and frustrated by it. ‘Look, Jane knows Heidi better than anyone and she was the one who advised you to go.’
‘Jane knows her better? And how can that be so? How can anyone know her better than I? I am her son.’ He shook his head again, so that his heavy blond hair fell over his forehead, and angrily pushed it away. He rose suddenly and said to Sam, ‘Will you possibly excuse me? I am suddenly very tired. This travelling always … could you speak for me to our kind hostess …?’
‘Of course,’ Sam said, guiltily solicitous. He got up and stood watching Jan walking with bowed head towards the stairs. For the rest of the evening, Sam, relieved of the tension of business and moreover, eager to forget some of what had passed, relaxed into the family party, assuring Emily that Jan’s early departure was no reflection on her entertainment, and showing everyone by his own overt cheerfulness that the evening had not been the disaster that Jan’s defection might indicate. He knew, in fact, that it had not. He suspected already that he had been successful and was filled with a hollow deadness, part aftermath of concentration, part guilt. He drank too much and stayed up too late, alone with a well-lubricated Philip, discussing the relative merits of a variety of local ales. In the morning he awoke with a hangover, a rare occurrence, and descended blearily to the dining-room to find Jan Muller already awaiting him.
Whatever his troubles of the previous night, Jan was in a buoyant and cheerful mood. He grinned at Sam’s obvious suffering and said loudly, ‘Come, such a splendid breakfast your aunt prepares. Join me. What will you have, porridge, or boiled eggs?’
‘Coffee,’ Sam croaked, waving the rest away.
Jan grinned again. ‘So, Mr Hardacre, there is evidence of a hard night. What a pity. I had thought we would start our work this morning. Nothing like some good sea air for a hangover.’ He made with one hand the motion of rippling waves.
Sam closed his eyes. ‘You serious?’ he asked.
‘But of course,’ Jan said. ‘Would I mock my new employer?’
From the start, Jan Muller was an employee in name only. Sam Hardacre regarded him, with his expertise and experience both in salvage and in the ways of the
world, as more than an equal. He regarded him as a partner and had already decided that, were Hardacre Salvage to progress beyond this first job and become a company of genuine substance, he would make the financial arrangements in accordance with partnership. He told himself it was sound business practice, a practical thank you to a valuable man and a good way of holding on to the same. It was, however, more likely a kind of apology, partly to Jan for winning him by devious means, but more to a lonely young girl far away; a girl called Hannah, whom he would never meet.
Chapter Eleven
That summer, the summer of 1951, was one that Sam Hardacre would remember as uniquely pleasant, an unBritish season of balmy days and sunshine. Whether his recollection was accurate, or the result of his memory falsely re-creating an appropriate climate for the springtime of his new enterprise he could not honestly say. Surely the climate in the rest of the country was less bountiful.
The heady wave of socialist ideals and nationalizing fervour that had swept over Britain in the immediate postwar years had now broken, and swirled about the feet of the stumbling Labour government in a muddled eddy. The pinch of rationing seemed as tight as ever and the monumental task of rebuilding both the physical structure and the industrial fabric of the nation seemed a terribly long way from finished. With the physical evidence of the recent war still painfully visible, British troops were again at war already, in Korea. In the words of Noel Hardacre, upon being requested to join in family and national celebrations of the Festival of Britain in London, conveniently coinciding with Janet Chandler’s film première, ‘Seems t’ me there’s bloody eff-all to celebrate.’
But as always when an economy is more or less in rubble, somebody is using the pieces to lay foundations. This time Sam Hardacre was determined to be one of those somebodies and the odds, for a man who just a year ago had been a penniless religious Brother, were looking surprisingly good. He was still pretty much penniless; he’d used all his profit from the Louisa Jane to purchase more equipment; odds and ends of military surplus, useful junk; but primarily another workboat, an open personnel carrier that had done service on D-Day. What he really needed was a small tug, but that would have to wait. In the meantime, he put what he had to good use.
For Sam, the Festival of Britain, and the much ballyhooed première of A Lady in Love stood out as two moments of calm in that hectic, sunny summer, whereas to Emily Barton, on the other hand, they were the most exciting and vivid times of the entire year. Perhaps their different attitudes could be ascribed to the fact that Sam spent what felt like every other moment of that summer on one or another wet, salty deck of a ship, floating half-sunken, or thoroughly aground, while Emily spent the equivalent period of time in the kitchen of The Rose at Kilham.
‘I wish I’d been born a man,’ she said enviously one afternoon when Sam, passing through Kilham with a load of salvaged slates in his new army surplus lorry, had dropped in unexpectedly at The Rose.
‘I never knew you wanted to be a salvage engineer,’ Sam sympathized. ‘But I’m sure I could find you a place …’
‘You know what I mean,’ she said, giving him a friendly shove as she set tea before him in the pub’s kitchen. ‘Men get to do what they want. They get to choose. All women get to choose is who they marry. Then hope he’ll do what they want, and not just …’ she shrugged, looking about the busy scrubbed workroom that was her kitchen. Sam looked around as well, and the industrious cleanliness, the cared-for hardworking look of it drew his sympathy where her complaints alone might not have done. He had to say that for Emily; she knew how to work.
He said, ‘What did you want to do, Aunt Emily? I mean, that you never got to do?’ She looked surprised, then thoughtful and then suddenly forthright.
‘Do you want to know really?’ He nodded and she smiled slightly. ‘I wanted to sing. I wanted to be a singer.’
‘Can you sing, Emily?’ he asked curiously, having never heard her do so.
She shrugged again. ‘A bit. I could once, anyhow. I mean if I’d had training. Who knows? Oh I’d have probably failed like Maud did at her sculpture, but I’d like to have tried. Of course, Mother wouldn’t hear of it. I mean, one daughter in the “arts” was enough for her in those days.’
‘I thought it was more up to great-grandfather what you did. You lived with him then, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes, of course. And he would have indulged me, but that was it. It would just have been indulgence, like he used to indulge Jane before she married. I didn’t need that, Sam. I needed someone who’d take me seriously. Someone who’d back me, believe in me … Then of course I married Philip and everyone was happy.’
‘Except Emily,’ said Sam. Sometimes he forgot he was no longer in the monastery and his words no longer veiled by the cloth.
She looked shocked, and then smiled wryly. ‘All right Sam. I asked for that. I know. I married him, and it’s all my own fault.’
‘I never said that,’ said Sam. He had parted with her there, in the silent kitchen, with a kiss and a promise to meet up in London at the family gathering. It was a promise which in the past he had made lightly, little intending to keep. Now Emily’s large dark defeated eyes demanded sincerity.
‘You won’t be too busy?’ she said. ‘I’d understand …’
‘Of course I won’t,’ he lied. ‘What could be more important?’ A million things, he knew, as Jan and Mick and everybody would point out to him, upon his return. But this was family, and family mattered to Sam, even now. In the end, when he went to London, he took Jan along as well, managing to create a meeting with a London scrap-merchant interested in the brass and copper fittings of an old wartime wreck he had his eye on, as justification. He had not forgotten Jan’s enchantment with his theatrical cousin, and felt an introduction was the least he could do for a friend. It was, he later admitted in a moment of private remorse, the most unmitigatedly stupid thing he ever did in his life, but that realization was mercifully in the future. For now, his only interest in London, Janet Chandler and the Festival of Britain included, was to do an acceptable amount of duty to the family and get back North and back to work. Like so many of the pivotal points of life, that summer weekend in London, for Sam, passed somewhat unnoticed.
Once in London the Hardacre family, for all the outward pretence of a cosy reunion, in reality set up three separate camps. Sam and Jan Muller stayed, courtesy of Hardacre Salvage, in two rather sad rooms in a guest house in Earls Court and Sam worried about whether he could really afford that. Harry and Hetty motored down from Hardacres, with Vanessa and Rodney’s daughter Mary being allowed to attend as a special treat. Vanessa herself announced that she couldn’t possibly leave Yorkshire until something called Fancy-free had foaled, but swore she would ‘pop down’, Rodney in tow, at the first opportunity after the big event. Harry was just as pleased; Vanessa at Hardacres was trying; Vanessa in London, striding about overturning tables and braying, was unbearable. Harry set up his camp in Brown’s, where he had traditionally always stayed, and worried now whether he could any longer afford that.
Helen Brannigan stayed at the Savoy and didn’t worry about anything.
‘Britain is finished,’ she announced with flat cool satisfaction, standing at the window of her river-facing suite, gazing across to the South Bank and the lights of the Festival proclaiming back at her that Britain was on the threshold of a new beginning.
‘Mother,’ Maud said in her soft patient way, ‘how can you say that? Why, everyone’s trying so hard, working so hard. Already things have come a long, long way since the war’s end, I’m sure.’
‘Rather easy for you to say,’ Emily cut in sharply, her voice surprisingly like her mother’s in tone, ‘watching it all from the safe distance of sunny California.’
Maud was unperturbed. She plucked gently at a piece of lint on her husband Albert’s worn dinner-jacket collar and said, ‘Well, never mind. That’s all done with. We’re back to stay.’
‘Idiots,’ said Helen, with contempt
.
‘Mother,’ Maud pleaded. ‘We’ve been through that.’ Her husband Albert, placing a gentle hand on her knee as they sat side by side, dwarfed by the luxury of a huge velvet settee, interrupted in her defence.
‘Now, Mother, there’s no use laying into Maud over that. It’s all because of me. All my fault. You know that.’ He spoke very softly, with a faint twinkle in the dark eyes that used to enchant his audience with their quick, over-the-shoulder glance as he led his band.
Albert was impossible to rile, but he was not above a little gentle needling, and his use of the word ‘Mother’ in addressing his mother-in-law was a well-tried technique. It worked, as always. Helen froze, casting him a bitter stare, and turned back to the window, pouring her venomous look on the new Royal Festival Hall, across the Thames. Helen was one of those ladies who liked to be reminded that her daughters looked to be merely sisters of so youthful a mother. She did not like to be addressed maternally by an ageing bandleader, a romantic idol of the thirties. Granted, Albert Chandler was a good few years older than his wife; that was one of Helen’s original objections to the marriage, an objection not loudly voiced, however, since Janet Chandler’s birth had preceded her parents’ marriage by several months. No fault of hers, of course, and very little of her parents’ actually, but the result was that a marriage that would have been strictly forbidden between that well-known bandleader and Joe Hardacre’s daughter went ahead with everyone’s hurried blessing.
Blessings or no, it had proved a happy union, probably the happiest Hardacre marriage since poor Harry’s brief idyll, so many years before, with Judith Winstanley. Maud, looking about her family with their many frictions and quiet dissatisfactions, thought perhaps there was truth in the old adage that good fortune in money could never be linked with good fortune in love. She smiled secretly. Well, if that were the case, she’d accept their own reduced circumstances without a second thought. They were small enough price to pay for her years with Albert Chandler.