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

by CL Skelton

  ‘Eh, eh, lad,’ Mick said, looking up idly to the sound of a distant throaty engine, ‘happen yer in for some fun.’ He looked down again, without further comment, to his work, and when Sam glanced up to see what he meant he was startled to see, arriving amidst a crowd of scattering trippers on the Harbour Top, his mother’s bright red MG-TC and, at the wheel, driving with demonic determination, was Janet.

  He was amazed. He had not told her he was coming down from Scotland; indeed would not have told her until he was certain he could actually get to London, which was something entirely in the hands of his salvage crew on the sunken steamer at the moment. When they were ready for the lift he was going to Tiree, and that was that. He had only faintly hoped it would be after the seventh.

  He stood up on the deck of the Dainty Girl as Janet, in denim jeans, an old white shirt of his own and, incongruously, high heels, came running up the Pier. He smiled and waved, but she didn’t smile back.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he called.

  ‘You bastard,’ she shouted back. Several trippers turned to watch. Sam, still smiling, uncertain of his sins, reached up both arms to help her down to the deck, but she deftly avoided them, scrambled down herself, and stood her ground, one hand on a hip, and the other balling a fist around Madelene’s car keys.

  ‘I was going to call you,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just got here. Haven’t I, Mick?’ Mick said nothing, pretending he’d heard nothing. He had signed a non-aggression pact with Janet long ago, and would not participate.

  ‘Jan said you left Tiree yesterday. I’ve been everywhere looking for you.’ Of course, Jan in Hull, and his radio link with the Mary Hardacre. All kinds of information came that way.

  ‘I did,’ Sam said honestly. ‘It takes a day to get here from Tiree. The first bit is in a twelve-foot launch.’ Janet never quite believed him about the remoteness of Scotland.

  ‘Well, how screwing long does it take to get to London?’ she demanded. Sam put down his piece of rusty anonymous metal and the wire brush, and straightened up again to face her. He knew she was spoiling for a fight because she was swearing. But suddenly he didn’t feel much like placating her. He’d thought of nothing for the last two weeks but how he was to get to London in time for her play and was, as often as not on her behalf, driving himself in circles trying to be in two places at once. He didn’t mind, but he didn’t like being shouted at for his efforts, or called a liar.

  ‘I’ll get to London when I get to London,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s fine. If it’s after the seventh you might as well not bother.’

  ‘Then I shan’t,’ he said calmly, and sat down again, picking up his wire brush and Mick’s lump of metal. Mick looked up and handed him something else.

  ‘Take that apart, will you?’ he said. ‘You’ve got two hands.’ Sam nodded and took a small bolt, stubbornly frozen on to its nut. He fiddled with it, and suddenly a small determined little hand grabbed it from him with a yelp of fury and flung it into the harbour. It made a bright splash on the dark water and vanished.

  ‘You dumb bitch,’ Mick howled, suddenly alive with fury. ‘It’ll take me a week to replace that!’

  Sam stood up. He looked at Mick impotently fuming amidst his circle of oily engine parts. And he looked at Janet, glaring at him with little-girl triumph in her eyes. He took a step towards her and she got suddenly scared and backed off, down aft. Then he leapt for her; she dodged, but he caught her up in his arms with startling ease and with one smooth swing flung her in the harbour after the bolt.

  ‘I’ll be,’ Mick marvelled, as she went under. She rose spluttering, and Sam watched in sudden horror. It wasn’t exactly that he never thought that perhaps she couldn’t swim, but more that he’d always rather assumed that, if pressed, she could probably walk on water. She couldn’t. She gasped a little pathetic cry and went down like a stone, trailing small fingers after. Sam was terrified. The water was deep, and it was black. He leapt in instantly, after her, and with two strong strokes was beside her.

  She waited, floundering helplessly before him, until he was within arms’ length, and just as he reached to help her she suddenly rose up out of the water like a vengeful mermaid, shouted, ‘Shithead’, and thrust him under. When he came up, spitting oily water, she was swimming with sure, athletic strokes for the boat. He had forgotten she was an actress.

  Mick displayed partisan interest only in that he offered Janet his hand to climb back up on deck, whereas he allowed Sam to find his own way up. Then he went back to his engine parts while Janet scrambled on to the Pier, with Sam in pursuit, both dripping wet and equally furious. He caught her after a dozen yards, with one big hand around her wrist.

  Her shriek alerted any of the now large watching crowd of assorted trippers, yachtsmen and harbour regulars who might have thought the show was over that it still had some time to run. Mick looked up. Janet swung her free hand and hit Sam across the face. Sam hit her right back. Those two didn’t fool around when they fought.

  He wrestled her, with great difficulty to a nearby bench. He was obviously stronger, but concentrated outrage gave her powers of her own. She twisted round and sank her teeth into his arm and drew blood, which just made him that much more determined. Some serious-minded citizen stepped to intervene, thinking it had gone too far, but Mick stood up on the Dainty Girl and shouted, ‘Leave be, you big twit. Yon’s a private fight,’ to which the waiting audience responded with a small hand of applause.

  ‘Eeh, give it to her proper, Sam,’ someone shouted, but Janet had her defenders among the tougher of the women who shouted advice, most of it obscene. Janet didn’t need much; she was the dirtiest fighter in creation, and could have taught them all a lesson. Still, he got her across his dripping thighs and pinned her kicking legs long enough to get in three resounding smacks across the stretched wet denim on her bottom before she struggled free. It was no pretty play-spanking either; he meant to hurt, and he did. Only when she got free of him did some faint remorse strike him, both towards Janet, and towards Mick, his family, and indeed the rather respectable company of which he was a director, for making so public a spectacle of himself. The remorse was short-lived. He saw Janet heading for her borrowed car, and he wasn’t letting her off that easily.

  He sprinted after and caught her climbing behind the wheel. He picked her up under her wet armpits and lifted her bodily out, carried her right around the car and plonked her down in the passenger seat. Then he fought her for the keys, gaining another bitten wrist for his efforts, and, winning them, leapt into the driver’s seat, and drove skidding away, with Janet yet screaming abuse and pummelling his head and shoulders, as he did so.

  A ripple of applause followed them down the street.

  Mick went back to work on the Dainty Girl and Sam and Janet’s audience drifted away. He heard, in the distance, a small childish voice requesting, ‘But what was the man doing to the lady, Mummy?’ until the Mummy in question stuffed a sweetie into the curious mouth, for silence. The harbour was still and peaceful, as evening came on. Mick worked until the carnival lights down along the promenades came on, and then he packed up his tools and went home. As he passed the street in which Sam lived, he looked up at the old warehouse. The lights of Sam’s flat glowed gently through drawn curtains, and the little MG was parked docilely below. Mick shrugged and walked on.

  She left in the early dawn. She had to get back to London. Sam stood in the chill, crisp air of the deserted street, watching her drive away to a serenade of morning gulls. The air smelt heavily of salt. The warmth of her still surrounded his body. When he returned to the flat he lay down again on the rumpled bed which smelled of her perfume, remembering. In the middle of the night she had agreed to marry him. He let the thought play across his mind but did not dwell on it, instinctively aware already, perhaps, that it was counterfeit. In the middle of the night, in his bed, she’d agree to anything.

  He slept again for a while, and then got up, with the morning still early, made coffee
and sat down at his desk with a heap of awaiting mail. He was consciously waiting for the telephone to ring, with word from Jan that the lift was ready to begin. He prayed the message would not come; at the same time he prayed it would. The weather could not last for ever. The needs of work, and the needs of love had never been more in opposition.

  When Mick Raddley came back down to the Harbour at nine in the morning to finish his work on the engine of the Dainty Girl, he saw that the MG had gone, and assumed one, or both of the couple had gone with it. Disgruntled, he went into the warehouse and climbed the stairs to Sam’s flat. Sam was getting harder than ever even to find, much less do business with, which for Mick was a nuisance and for other people, like Jan Muller or Pete Haines, was a potential business disaster. Some day soon it was going to matter, and either Sam was going to have to grow up or Hardacre Salvage was going to fall apart. Mick, clamping up the stairs, wondered idly which was going to happen first.

  He knocked on the door, and was happily surprised to be summoned in not by Janet but by Sam himself, sounding rather efficient at that. He pushed open the door and looked around. He could always tell when Janet had spent the night. Not, as the films would have it, by little touches of femininity, jugs of flowers or what-not, but by the fact that the place was suddenly a mess. Janet, whose own person was always immaculately groomed, yet trailed a small hurricane of chaos behind her wherever she went.

  ‘Good morning,’ Sam said. He was sitting at his desk, with a neat stack of papers at one side, and an equally neat heap of sealed envelopes at the other. He wore his reading glasses down on the end of his nose, and they looked incongruous and attractive on him, as such scholarly attributes do on a weatherbeaten face. He had the look of a man who hadn’t slept much and was all the better for it.

  ‘You’re bloody cheery,’ Mick groused.

  ‘Just as well. You’re obviously not. Go and make some coffee, I’ll be done in a minute.’

  Mick lumbered off to the kitchen, and shouted through in a moment, ‘Like a bluidy pigsty in here. When are you going to teach that woman how to wash up?’

  ‘Never,’ Sam called back at once. ‘She’s too beautiful to wash up.’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ Mick muttered, ploughing his way through discarded wine glasses, and Janet’s borrowed shirt which hung drying over the sink. ‘Like to hear you say that in ten years’ time.’ Sam was silent. Mick made coffee and brought it through and leaned against the edge of the desk. ‘Tell me something,’ he said.

  ‘Aye,’ Sam said, not listening, reading a letter instead.

  ‘You gettin’ serious?’ Sam looked up, startled and suddenly cagey.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You and Janet. About each other.’ Mick was not an easy person to be cagey with. Sam looked down at the letter, pretending to read it.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, almost to himself. There was no answer. He looked up. Mick was drinking coffee and looking at him. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

  ‘Nowt.’

  Sam shrugged. He tried to read the letter again, but now his mind wasn’t on it and he looked up again, irritated, and said, ‘All right, Mick, say what’s on your mind.’ But Mick seemed now determined not to speak. He left the side of the desk and wandered about the room, looking at each of the seascapes on the walls, as if he had never seen them before. ‘Stop walking around,’ Sam snapped. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  ‘Yon’s a pretty one,’ Mick commented, pointing ingenuously to a painting of a full-rigged schooner, off Flamborough. Then he said abruptly, ‘Happen you should think again.’

  ‘About Janet?’ Sam said. He deliberately kept his voice light and said, as a dismissal, ‘I think I can sort out my own personal life, Mick.’

  Mick turned to face him, his lined old face suddenly very wise. ‘It’ll not work, lad,’ he said. He raised his one hand, fingers outstretched, a surprisingly strong gesture, silencing argument. ‘Just a moment, afore you lose the rag. Just listen. You’re like a match and dry tinder; look at t’ pair uv ye, yesterday. You’re fire and fire. It won’t do. Lass needs someone steady, and if ye’ll pardon me, so do you. Ye’ll give each other nowt but misery, and in a dozen years ye’ll burn each other out.’ He lowered the hand, having said his say, and shrugged awkwardly, his voice more gentle, ‘Find another, lad,’ he said. ‘Be better for ye both.’

  Sam said nothing, staring down at the papers on his desk. After a long while he said, still without raising his eyes, ‘And what in hell would you know?’ He looked up suddenly, and Mick saw how very angry he was, and how he was struggling to control the anger, ‘What gives you, what possibly gives you the right to judge me? To judge Janet?’

  ‘Nowt,’ Mick said, ‘but forty years’ experience uv marriage.’

  Sam looked at him coldly and said, ‘Really, Mick, this is something quite different.’

  Mick smiled slightly, and shrugged again, ‘Oh aye?’ he said mildly. Then he leaned forward, put his hand down on the desk and, in a low voice, said, ‘Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re a different class uv folk, the two uv ye. I know that. An’ I don’t need remindin’,’ he added sharply. ‘But I’ll tell ye summat. There’s nowt much atween the classes when it comes tot’ ways uv a lad an’ a lass. We’re much uv a sameness, from the big house, or the fisherman’s cottage.’

  He straightened his back and looked Sam coolly in the eyes and Sam said, ashamed and a little sullen, having been caught out in a subtle snobbery he hadn’t thought himself to possess, ‘I didn’t mean that, Mick.’

  ‘Oh, I think ye did,’ Mick said, unperturbed. ‘Now I’ve had my say, and I’ll not say further,’ he added, stepping back.

  Sam was angry again, with the petty anger that comes when someone comes bearing us a truth we’re busy trying to fly from. He said, ‘If you’ll pardon me, Mick, I have some work to do.’

  Mick smiled faintly, stepping towards the door. ‘Aye, aye. One uv t’ best things about bein’ t’ boss.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Sam asked, testily.

  ‘Ye can always chuck folk out, rather than listen to ’em.’ He grinned, retreating.

  Sam wasn’t amused. He looked at Mick over the tops of his glasses. ‘Damn it to hell, Mick, I’m your employer. Just once in a while I’d like some respect from you.’

  ‘And ye’ll get it. Ye’ll get it.’

  ‘I’m waiting,’ Sam snapped.

  ‘When you earn it,’ said Mick. He stepped jauntily to the door, gave a little wave and walked out, leaving it ajar. Sam rose angrily to close it but, before he reached the door, the telephone rang. It was Jan Muller.

  ‘Four o’clock tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘Pete says everything will be ready, by the tide. There’s a gale forecast for the end of the week.’

  ‘I see,’ Sam said, and Jan, waiting a moment returned, ‘So? Are you going?’

  ‘Of course.’ There was really never any question about it. He was no longer an amateur, playing at the professional’s game. He had used his years of apprenticeship, to Mick, to Pete, and to Jan himself, well. He probably knew as much as any of them, though he might lack their practical experience to some degree. What he had gained in the last two years, though, was confidence. He no longer turned to any of them to make his decisions for him. And in the end there was no one but himself in charge. He left the flat in half an hour, for Manchester, on the first leg of the long complex journey to Tiree. There was not even time to telephone Janet, and say goodbye.

  Janet opened in All Downhill Now three days later to a crowded house empty of the one person she wanted most to be there. The play received a mixed response. Half the audience loved it and cheered it. The other half sat on their hands and a small noisy percentage walked out. It was controversial, if nothing else, and the critical response was equally mixed. But the one thing everyone agreed on was Janet Chandler’s powerful performance, and so she underwent the peculiarly divisive experience of triumphing personally while the production collapsed around her. Withi
n a fortnight it closed. The fanfares were still ringing in her ears and she was out of work. Still, it could not be doubted that, on the London stage, Janet Chandler had made her mark. She would never again be the image of blonde froth she had so long projected; that was over. What remained to be seen was whether she could climb up to the new image that needs must replace it. Bernie panicked and begged her to bolt to California and grab the first Hollywood film vehicle that was passing. Janet was uncertain. The one person who could bolster her confidence, make her judgements seem right, reassure her ever of her own deeply-doubted talents, was six-hundred miles away towing a patched, barely floating steamer through a gale, to the Firth of Clyde. It was precisely the scenario Sam had always dreaded, and its corollary he dreaded even more; that finding him absent, she would turn again to drink.

  She did not. She did something far wiser, something that showed that she too was capable of shouldering her own responsibilities a little, if not completely. She turned to Jan. When Sam learned of that, that Jan had attended her first night in his place, that Jan had seen her through that chaotic first week of the play, taken her to supper every night, seen that she ate and did not drink, he felt nothing but relief and gratitude. Later, when he was to learn how personally destructive, for himself, that week would prove, even then the gratitude did not entirely wane.

  None of this was learned by the ugly voice of rumour, none of it was hidden from him. Janet was as honest as he was, and she told him everything herself. Had she seen what he had seen, she would have told him that as well. But Janet did not see it for months, whereas Sam knew almost at once that, between them, it was ending.

  Chapter Twenty

  When Harry came back from his midday walk through the beech wood gone luminous with October sunlight, he saw to his surprise that the library fire had been lit. He saw it, that is, from the soft whitish plume of fresh smoke from one of the myriad buff chimney-pots surmounting the high roof of Hardacres. Only one as familiar with every inch of the building as Harry was could have told which of those many chimneys belonged to his library, among the scores of rooms.