Hardacre's Luck (The Hardacre Family Saga Book 2)

by CL Skelton

  ‘Do you think so?’ she said, and then she sighed. ‘God, Sam, I’ve screwed half the western world.’ She whimpered slightly, ‘What the hell’s happened to my life?’

  He could have told her. Too much work, too much drink, too many people wanting something from her, and too much frightful determination to be herself. He thought fleetingly of Ruth Barton, weeping in the cinema on the day of Janet’s première. She was, after all, more like her idol than she could have dreamed. ‘I love you,’ he said. He did too. He loved her in many different ways, some that startled him. She had become his confidante, the one person in whom he ever confided, as he had once confided only in Terry. She had come into his life at the height of his struggle to overcome Terry’s loss, and she quite literally took Terry’s place. She was like his sister, he thought, which was an odd thing to think of a young woman with whom he was about to make love. But she was. They were always like a passionate brother and sister, intensely alike and tumultuous, from the beginning. And, from the beginning, he was always more in love than she.

  ‘May I keep some clothes on,’ she whispered. ‘I mean, it’s cold.’ Then she said, ‘No, fuck it, I mean I’m scared.’

  ‘We don’t have to do it,’ he said again, ‘I mean that.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ she snapped, then she buried her tense face against his throat and lay beside him in the hay. ‘Oh, please, quickly, before I lose my nerve.’ He gently put her aside, and sat up. He was smiling, though she could not see.

  ‘You’re angry.’

  ‘No. Janet, I want to make love to a willing woman. I don’t want to rape a frightened girl. I love you. Now, let’s go back to the house. I’ll make you some coffee. We’ll talk.’ She relaxed and reached for his hand, and when she drew him down to her, her mouth was open, seeking his, and her body was as soft and giving as the summer hay.

  It was dawn before they returned to the house, and as they walked over the grey, empty lawn she leaned sleepily against him, as calm and peaceful as he’d ever seen her. She left the next day, because she was filming in London, and he expected to go about his work the same as before, with that slight feeling of added confidence that sexual conquest always imparted, and little change. But that wasn’t the way it happened. He found alarmingly and quickly that he wanted, even needed, to see her again. The thought was strong, dominating, and even got in the way of his work. There was plenty of that about, and after a week in Hull he went to London, ostensibly to see Riccardo, but in reality to see Janet.

  He found her different when she was working, concentrated and distracted. She was filming at Pinewood and rising at five-thirty each morning to get to the studios in time for make-up. She did not wish to go out late, and she didn’t want sex either. His pride was slightly hurt, but that was not his real concern. He sensed already that the relationship was one-sided, indeed top-heavy with his passion for her, only sometimes returned. It had never happened to him before; he had won, so to speak, every sexual encounter he had entered, and unwittingly left a trail of broken hearts behind him all his life. The tables had just turned.

  Not that she rejected him. Far from it. She openly, demonstrably, adored him, but again much as one flagrantly shows adoration for a close male relative who is handsome and presentable. She liked to be seen with him, and when there was a first night to attend, or a theatrical party, she wanted him beside her simultaneously to ward off the public she feared and jointly attract the attention she craved. It was a dual role that was not easy to play. Sam, to his credit, played it well. He was not jealous when men fawned over her, but pleased for her. And when she took fright and yearned for the comforts of alcohol, he gave her the comfort of his love instead. And it seemed to suffice. She virtually quit drinking for the whole first year of their affair and, when she did lapse, it was never so violently as before. Janet spent much of that year in London. She did two films at Pinewood and a limited run of a play on the London stage. He liked to think that she took further work in England to be near him, but in his heart he admitted honestly that was not so. The work was good, so she stayed. A good offer from Hollywood, or New York, or Timbuctoo, and she’d be off. He understood that. Work was vital to him as well; and even in his most miserable days of passion for her, he never neglected it.

  Of course, there are just so many hours in the day, and days in the week, and something had to go. So what he did neglect was rest; he slept odd hours, became more erratic in his daily life than ever, and ate whatever he could find when he found the time. It didn’t do him any harm, though he gained a thin, ragged look at times, like an over-active tom cat, that rather suited him. What mattered more was that he neglected family.

  The visits to The Rose at Kilham, to cheer Emily Barton, the time spent with the Barton children, now rapidly growing up, the weekends at home at Hardacres with his mother and Harry; all those went by the board. Occasionally he’d have pangs of conscience and make flying visits home, but they were unsatisfactory. His mother was resentful, and he found it hard to settle, hard to even sit still. The only time, indeed, Madelene maintained that he really spent more than a fleeting hour or two with them, was when he’d had a real row with Janet. Then he came home, cloistered himself in Harry’s library, and was hell to be with anyway.

  The rows were many and they were stormy. Their causes were myriad and mostly irrelevant. They rowed because their natures demanded it. Some people said they rowed because they loved to row. Whatever the truth of that, the world generally knew about it. Theirs was a flamboyant and exaggerated romance, screen-style and bigger than life. Janet’s career demanded it, and probably profited from it, and besides she, in her faintly schizophrenic relationship with her audience, positively thrived on it. Sam, who was, and had always been, an essentially very private person, found himself living a very public love affair. But it wasn’t only Janet’s fault, nor her craving for publicity, nor even the omnipresent Bernie’s shrewd manipulations, that won them spotlights. The real reason was the intensity of their multi-faceted devotion, an intensity that made them oblivious to their surroundings, much as it made Sam oblivious to family duty. They were known to have full-fledged battles in restaurants, famous or otherwise, and equally passionate reconciliations. They each walked out on the other from cocktail parties and theatre lobbies and, once, from an extremely elegant titled dinner-party, where Janet said ‘shit’ once too often and Sam threw the soufflé at her. They finally both left that one together, and were not asked back.

  They’d laughed all the way back to the Dean Street flat and made happy love, thereafter.

  ‘They’re just a pair of show-offs,’ Madelene sniffed, upon being told, and even Aunt Jane was mildly appalled. But it wasn’t true. The fault was deeper, the simple nature of their love for each other. It had always a tension, an incestuous heat about it that had ironically enough nothing to do with the fact that they were actually first cousins. It was in their natures, not in their close blood, that they were too close, and they squabbled and fought like two who had been raised together, and each lost years of hard-earned maturity simply by coming into the presence of the other.

  The obvious question was, of course, how long could it last? It lasted through the winter of 1955 and into the spring of 1956 and right through that summer as well. It wasn’t, of course, without hiatus. There were three weeks off in November, when Janet was filming in Cannes. And there were two months in the spring of 1956, when she went briefly to Hollywood. Sam was glad of that. It enabled him to get through the anniversary of Terry’s death in the company of his family, where he belonged. Otherwise, they’d maybe not have seen him. And there were, also, unplanned breaks in the partnership, periods of days and even weeks when they became suddenly combatants, gathering an army of supporters on either side. Janet would run to Riccardo for comfort, though not too often, because Riccardo seemed to spend a lot of his time comforting Emily Barton on extended trips to London these days, to the family’s bemused chagrin. More often, Janet retreated to the
quiet, serious presence of Sam’s friend and partner in business, Jan Muller.

  From the very beginning, on the occasion of the fight with Mike Brannigan in Claridges that had ended her party, Janet had an unusual admiration for Jan. She seemed to sense something in him both remote and deep, a circle of mature peace for which a part of her chaotic nature secretly yearned. Even Sam noticed she was a different person whenever he was present. She didn’t swear. She didn’t drink. When she got excited, Jan would put his big broad hand over hers, and just smile his slow smile, and she would relax. It was something not even Sam could manage with her, but he did not resent it. Not yet. Janet had a way of winning loyalty from anyone, and Sam was more than once presented with petitions, earnestly voiced, from Riccardo, and more often Jan, on her behalf. Filtered through the screen of their loyalties, Janet’s case drew much sympathy, and Sam appeared always the sinner. As for himself, he sought no followers, although Jane Macgregor remained his staunch ally as she always would. When Janet ran to her comforters, Sam went to sea. It was as good a solution as any.

  In the meantime, they went their way, exactly as they had always done. He had with her probably the best times of his life, and undoubtedly the worst.

  If the rows were shattering, the reconciliations were sweet, and they were batted from one to the other as if in some unholy tennis match. She got out of his car once, in the middle of Sussex, and walked six miles over open fields rather than ride home with him. He got out of her bed in a London hotel at three one morning and she didn’t hear from him again for three weeks, and then from Oslo. But in the end he, or she, would soften. He would arrive at her door directly off a salvage tug, with two dozen red roses over his greasy arm. She flew once to New York on business, after an argument with Sam, and turned right round at Idlewild, to the amazement of Bernie, the press, and a waiting film producer, and flew straight back. Then, and still without sleep, she borrowed Jan Muller’s car and drove all the way to Bridlington where, at four-thirty in the morning, she roused Mick Raddley and got him to let her in to the warehouse below Sam’s flat. She camped cross-legged outside his door until he awoke and let her in.

  When things went wrong, wherever she was, Sam was the only person she wanted to see and that, of course, was the source of half the trouble. She never, in all the time they were together, fully accepted the seriousness of his intentions regarding work. Nor could she comprehend his need to take physical part in the dirty and dangerous work it was.

  ‘Jan doesn’t,’ she declared tearfully, after a resentful reunion following a five-day trip on the Mary Hardacre through the Irish Sea.

  ‘Because I do,’ he said. ‘One of us must.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about running a business.’

  ‘Neither do you. Jan does. He knows how to manage people. What kind of a company director spends half his time covered in engine oil and bilge water?’

  ‘This kind,’ Sam said angrily, because he was by now (it was the mid-summer of 1956), getting tired of hearing Jan’s name in her dulcet tones. But he didn’t argue. She was half-right. He did what he did because he liked it; and he was not about to change. She, of course, was exactly the same. Sooner or later her needs, that is, those of her working career, and those of his must reach an inevitable impasse. And in the late August of that year, they did. Janet had taken a part in another play. It was, for her, an unusual play and an unusual choice of role. She, who had been previously cast always as ingénue and romantic lead, was to play a woman several years older than herself, for a start. Bernie was having a nervous fit about it; all his careful groundwork to protect her ever-youthful image seemed about to be thrown aside. But Janet was determined. In the May of that year, Look Back in Anger had burst upon the scene, and suddenly the London stage was a new and exciting place to be. The play Janet had chosen, a new work, All Downhill Now, did not deal with the angry young, but the bewildered old. She was to play a woman of the British upper-class, whose loving nursing of her war-crippled husband had quite suddenly reached a point of no return. Resentment, sexual disgust, drink and social decline were the themes; not themes typical of the previous oeuvre of Janet Chandler.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Sam had asked stupidly.

  ‘Of course I’m sure, dumbie,’ she snapped.

  ‘But what about the accent?’ he asked, tentatively.

  ‘Actually, my dear, the accent is a trivial matter,’ she said coolly, making his own essentially public-school tones sound just slightly northern and gauche by contrast. He gave up. So did Bernie. Later they both conceded she was right.

  Sam attended a full rehearsal and was impressed. He sat alone in the darkened auditorium, having come in out of a rainy London summer afternoon, and almost instantly was swept into a convincing reality. He saw Janet middle-aged, even old. He saw her play her fatal dance around the whisky bottle on stage, and play it so effectively that it frightened him. He felt he watched her predict her own future destruction. He also saw her become British before his eyes, and the effect of that was so powerful that he was utterly amazed when, on going back to her dressing-room after the curtain, he was met with her big broad smile, both youthful again and sober, and her ‘Whaddya say now, wise-ass?’ in the bright tones of California.

  ‘I think you’re marvellous,’ he said with conviction. She was. She was so marvellous that it took him all the drive back to Hull to shake off the frightening false image she had created on the stage. He knew the play was good, and would be important. He knew it would reach out for critical acclaim, something none of her previous work, films or stage, had attempted. She was at a crossroads in her career, a compelling, important time. The pressure would be on, and she would need him. The wraith of the drunken woman on the stage haunted his mind and he thrust it worriedly aside. No matter, he would be there.

  Only, he wouldn’t.

  There was little enough room for manoeuvre in the schedulings of a London stage play; theatre managements, ticket sales, advertising, cast commitments, all hemmed a production in to its precise allotted time. All Downhill Now would open on 7 September 1956, and there was precisely nothing Sam Hardacre could do about it, other than be there.

  But on the other hand, though he couldn’t tether time, he wasn’t likely to be able to tether tide either. Nor would he outmanoeuvre the sea. On 13 August, a MacBrayne’s steamer, travelling unloaded from the Minch to the Firth of Clyde for repairs, ran into trouble in a gale, lost power, and was driven ashore on the seaward coast of Tiree. Her crew was taken off by lifeboat and the steamer, holed on rocks, went quickly down, to lie in shallow water, her top hamper battered by waves. Before she fully settled on the floor of the sea, Jan Muller, on Sam’s orders, had a bid in for the salvage contract, and by late afternoon the next day, Sam was on his way to Tiree.

  Time was of the essence. They had to patch her and they had to raise her before the determined Atlantic took her apart before their eyes. There was a brief fortunate hiatus in the weather when, for a short spell, the West Highlands took on its almost magical rare air of summer. They worked in still air, in temperatures approaching eighty-five degrees, in burning sun, throughout the endlessly long daylight of the far north. The normally ferocious Hebridean sea was still as glass, broken only here and there by curious, watching grey seals. They patched her with wood and concrete, and prepared to raise her with a combination of compressed air, pontoons, and the helpful nudge of the tide. By now it was the first week in September and the weather was yet holding. Sam, who had spent weeks of his childhood in the North of Scotland, knew for certain it could not possibly last. September and gales went hand in hand up there.

  On 4 September, with the work nearly completed, Sam left his crew in charge of Pete Haines and flew back to Glasgow from Mull, and then on to Manchester. From there he travelled back to Bridlington, to meet with Mick Raddley, whose job it had become to keep the rest of the activities of Hardacre Salvage alive while he was away. Age and a finally re
bellious wife had more or less pegged Mick down in Yorkshire, somewhat to his resentment. Sam found him down at the Harbour, working on the old Dainty Girl which, like himself, was semi-retired these days, replaced by her larger sisters, the Hull-based Mary Hardacre and the new Jane Hardacre which Sam had bought in the spring.

  ‘Aye, there?’ Mick greeted him, as he always greeted him, as if Sam had been away an hour and not two weeks. ‘Fancy doing some honest work for a change?’ Mick was sitting on an overturned fish crate on the sun-baked deck, surrounded by black, oily bits of the Dainty Girl’s disassembled engine.

  ‘Having trouble?’ Sam said, jumping down on to the deck.

  ‘Nay, do this sort uv thing fer fun,’ said Mick. ‘’Ere, clean that.’ He flung a piece of rust-encrusted metal and a stiff wire brush at Sam. Sam took them obediently, partly because his mind was on Janet and the play and how the hell he was going to get to London in three days’ time and immediately back to Tiree, and partly because he still did what Mick told him to do.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked curiously, not recognizing the metal.

  ‘Damned if I know,’ Mick said. ‘Found ’er in the bilge. Can’t tell what it is until it’s clean, can I? Happen it’s important.’

  ‘Happen it’s rubbish,’ Sam said sourly, scrubbing the rusty lump.

  He looked idly around the Harbour. It was busy, with holiday excursion boats taking trippers out for spins to Flamborough Head and private yachts crewed by the crisply elegant young of the Royal Yorkshire Yacht Club. Crowds of frumpily dressed working-class women from the West Riding, with clusters of sunburnt children, crowded about the stalls selling shell trinkets and sticks of rock. The late afternoon sun, still warm in the same steady weather that had blessed them in the north-west, mellowed all with gentle summer kindness. As he sat working on the deck of the Dainty Girl, people passing greeted him, as they greeted Mick, familiarly; people of every class, fishermen, yachtsmen, arcade folk, trippers even, who knew him, or his family, from somewhere. It gave him great pleasure, a feeling of belonging that was, he realized, the essence of the word ‘home’. London seemed far away.