There was plenty of sky at Scratby. High on the Yorkshire moors, exposed, cold, flat, and high, the prison was a disused airbase, near enough to another, well-used RAF base: as the men worked in the grounds, they could see aircraft, fighter jets, screaming across the heavens in formations, singly, looping, swooping, cutting, and slicing, a free display of free movement. Len worked in the open air; he had asked to work in the forestry department. One of the prison’s main industries was forestry: the men grew, from seed, trees for the Department of the Environment and Scots pine for the wood and timber of the future. So much of prison labor is dull, repetitive, wasteful, and most of the men hated the forestry too; they hated digging, bedding out, messing around with little seedlings in little Japanese egg boxes. Len did not much like it either, but it was better than taking apart old radios and washing machines, or cutting up strips of plastic weatherstripping, or watching the washing machines in the laundry. And Len was aware that forestry was a major industry of the future: he had followed with interest accounts of paper shortages and wood shortages, of difficulties over imports from Sweden and Norway, of new schemes for recycling shredded newspaper into animal protein for poultry. Trees were a growth industry, and that obscurely pleased him. Perhaps he would expand into forestry, when he got out? But perhaps not. The growth was so slow, the returns so slow. Buildings were better.
But something in him was touched by the tiny trees, shivering under the cold wind on the hard earth. Odd that so many of them survived, for conditions were far from ideal, and they could attempt only the hardiest species, although they had expensive modern greenhouses, sheltered nursery gardens with high walls. He liked the trees to take. It saddened him to see those that died, those that withered in their infancy, turning yellow, then brown, then drying into thin twigs. Oh yes, he tried to take an interest in trees.
The work was tiring, but nevertheless he lay awake. His system could not adjust to bed at ten; without a drink. In the days of extreme strain before the collapse, in the months between the warrant and the trial, Len had hit the bottle, and had suffered for weeks after his conviction from withdrawal symptoms. A kindly prison officer and a sanctimonious, tedious, and obsequious fellow prisoner had tried to persuade Len to attend the monthly meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, but he had refused, for he had no intention either of admitting that he was an alcoholic or of seeking a cure if he was one. He would stick it out, and the day he got out he would have a bottle or two to celebrate. He had been discussing the subject that evening, with the copper, over Twenty-one: the copper told him the sad story of Alfred Collins, who had lost all his remission because one night he had said to himself, fuck it all, and had walked out of the prison (quite an easy thing to do) and walked the three miles down to the village, and into the pub, and drunk himself into a paralytic stupor, before he was picked up. “Poor sod,” said Len with feeling. “Poor sod.”
“Yeah, I can imagine how it came over him, though, can’t you?” said the copper, dealing Len an eight and a seven.
“I guess I can stick it out,” said Len, although a faint sweat was breaking out on his forehead and in his armpits at the very thought. He told the copper about Anthony Keating, who had had a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, and who had been told to lay off sex, drink, and smoking. “It doesn’t leave much,” said Len. He felt sorry for Anthony: almost, in a sense, responsible. His gamble had so nearly paid off. There was a Gamblers Anonymous group in the prison too: Len sometimes wondered if that wouldn’t be more relevant to him and his problems than the Alcoholics. Gambling was a much more serious vice than drinking, and one he would never be able to kick.
After the story of Anthony’s enforced abstinence, Len and the copper moved on to talk about food, a favorite theme in prisons. Both agreed that the prison bread, baked on the premises, was fine, but that nothing else would bear inspection—apart, perhaps, from the doughnuts, also prison-baked. The copper worked in the bakery and had learned much about bread. He even toyed from time to time with the thought of earning a decent living by taking up baking seriously. But he knew he wouldn’t: he was too ambitious.
The copper described to Anthony the best meal he had ever had. It had been eaten in the company of his wife, his brother, his sister-in-law, and a mate and his wife. They were celebrating his brother’s promotion. He had taken them all out, to a newly opened roadhouse restaurant outside Manchester: his brother knew the manager, and they had put on a good show for them. First of all, drinks at the bar. He had a whisky and dry ginger. Then, at the table (with real roses on it, not plastic ones, and a real tablecloth), pâté for starters, though the girls had all had prawn cocktails, and Jim had the soup. After the pâté, a steak, the like of which you never saw in your life—it just melted in the mouth, said the copper lyrically. Accompanied by? Mushrooms, French fries, French beans, and garden peas. All perfect. Just so. For dessert, chocolate gâteau, with cream and cherries in it, and some kind of liqueur flavoring. Then the girls had knocked off, but he and Jim and Dave had had a slice of Stilton each, and a couple of brandies. Lizzie (that’s my wife) drove home, we were all past it. That was a meal to remember, all right. Lizzie was wearing her blue dress.
Lovely shoulders, my Lizzie has. She’s not a bad cook herself, either. But you can’t buy steak like that in the shops. The restaurants get it all. You’ve got to be like that with the butcher, to get a piece of steak like that.
Len had seen Lizzie on visiting day. She was a big woman, a blonde, who treated the whole shaming occasion in high style, marching into the dismal canteen as though she were the Queen of Sheba, and talking in a loud Lancashire voice, not to be put down, not to be silenced. He had not seen her shoulders, for they were concealed by a large fluffy coat, but he could imagine that her husband’s praise of them was justified.
Len had not been able to reciprocate with the best meal he had ever had: he’d had so many good meals in his time. The Christmas dinners of childhood had been hard to beat, but he’d tried to beat them, with business lunches and business dinners at the Carlton Towers, the Mirabelle, Stone’s Chop House, Simpson’s in the Strand. He thought of Simpson’s. The beef off the trolley was quite something. Red slices, off a great slab. Red gravy, red blood. And the silver fifty-pence piece that Len (an astute observer) had learned to lay on the edge of the silver trolley, for the man who carved. The niceties of wealth, the finer points of ostentation.
Their supper that night had been tinned soup, hamburger, mash and swede, and rhubarb and custard. The thin green-pink strands of rhubarb had floated like weed, like scum, acidic, sinister, in the watery juice, nudging uneasily, like a jellyfish against a rock, against the great solid dob of custard. Custard, the poor man’s cream. Len, like many of his generation, did not taste fresh cream until he was a man: for a year or more he had surreptitiously preferred condensed milk, before weaning himself onto the real thing. Now he was back on condensed milk again: the prisoner’s treat. The men would buy it from the store, with their £1 of earnings a week, some of them preferring it, in their craving for sweetness, to tobacco.
In bed, looking at the moon, Len decided that the best meal of all had been that meal he’d had with Maureen in the Palmer House hotel in Chicago. He hadn’t wanted to describe it to Jim, but now he recalled it, in loving detail. It was her first visit to the States, his first to Chicago, to visit an architect who specialized in multistory car parks: they arrived late, a delayed flight, and went straight from the airport to the hotel, finding themselves, at two o’clock in the morning, almost alone in the huge Edwardian foyer, with its trees and its chandeliers, its enormous carpet, its myriad lost armchairs. They checked in, were shown up to their room, in a lift with brass doors twice as high as doors could ever need to be; their room had a carpet so thick that one’s shoes sank into it, a thick green carpet like deep grass, and a bed large enough for four, and a color television set, which was demonstrated for them at once, before they were left alone together, to stare at one another, to hug on
e another, to laugh in astonishment.
“What a place!” said Maureen, sitting on the edge of the bed, tugging off her high-heeled boots, flinging off her coat. “This really is quite something!”
And she prowled around in her stockings, opening doors, turning on taps, swishing the heavy curtains, opening them on a stunning but rather frightening view of a brightly lit, faraway street, too far below to watch with ease. Len fiddled with the television, and found a late-night movie: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It seemed singularly appropriate. Enraptured, they sat on the edge of the bed and watched for five minutes, then, at the sight of the people on the screen eating, decided they were hungry. So Len, keen to impress Maureen, who was so delightfully impressionable, reached for the telephone, with more calm than he felt, and ordered two de luxe turkey sandwiches, and a bottle of whisky, and some fruit.
“I think you’re wonderful,” said Maureen, with deep sincerity. “I hope they hurry up. I want to take my clothes off.”
So did Len. But it would never have occurred to either of these children of the North of England to take their clothes off before the arrival of their dinner.
It arrived, in ten minutes, on a clinking silver trolley wheeled by a black man in a picturesque uniform. Len, who had been impressed on previous visits more by the evidently unoppressed blacks of America than by the oppressed, wondered briefly why so large and imposing a man allowed himself to be dressed up in so ludicrous a manner, and nervously offered him a few dollar bills, which were, somewhat to his relief, accepted with the merest formal gesture toward gratitude.
The turkey sandwiches were many-layered and filled with mayonnaise; they were garnished with gherkins and olives and onions and pieces of tomato. The fruit was arranged in a basket, the kind of basket one sees in the movies, the kind that was now flitting before their greedy eyes on the TV on the Queen Mary of the 1930s. And there was ice in buckets, and soda in siphons, and an array of glasses, and a bottle of Dewar’s. He poured Maureen a generous tumbler, splashed in some soda. She pulled off her red jersey, revealing her black lace brassiere, her cream shoulders, her lovely thick neck. She drank, he watched the liquid travel down. She unfastened her skirt, took a huge bite of turkey sandwich, and, mayonnaise oozing, giggling, wriggled her bottom till the skirt dropped off. Her pants were floral, Marks and Sparks: she had once confided in him that she had had this pair since she was fourteen, but as they were as good as new, why throw them away? She was wearing black knee socks. “When I was little,” she said, taking another huge bite, “I used to hate mayonnaise.”
She took her pants off. “I’m getting into bed,” she said. “Shove the trolley over, there’s a love.”
And there she sat, in her socks and bra, eating and drinking and watching the television. “I think this is paradise,” she said.
And so did he.
While Len Wincobank was lying in his prison bed thinking about Maureen in a king-sized bed in Chicago, Maureen was trying to write her weekly letter to Len. It was heavy going; you can’t say much in a letter, and Maureen had never been much of a one for personal correspondence. Business letters she was good at, but there wasn’t any more business, and if she tried to give him the latest on the fates of subsidiary companies and old enemies in property, they’d only cut it out. And she couldn’t think of any sexy or encouraging jokes. She didn’t want to tell him about her new job, because it would annoy him to think she was going on living when he wasn’t. And she couldn’t tell him about what was uppermost in her mind, which was the fate of Auntie Evie.
I had supper at Marlene’s yesterday, she wrote. Those kids don’t half make a row, and the walls in that flat are like paper. The plaster is full of cracks.
She stared at the typewriter. That would please Len: he disapproved of the architect who had designed the block that her sister-in-law Marlene lived in. She didn’t like the flat much herself: it was poky and the lift was always broken, and it was no fun walking up six flights of stairs with shopping carts and strollers and two kids under three. No wonder Marlene was foul-tempered and kept clobbering them all the time. Yes, Len would be pleased to hear about Marlene’s flat. The lift is always broken too, she added, then came to a full stop.
The truth was that Auntie Evie was weighing on her mind, and thinking about her made her feel irritable with the absent Len, which wasn’t fair, but there it was. Maureen knew quite well that it was hardly Len’s fault that Evie’s slum was to be redeveloped, and that Evie had been given notice and was furious, but she couldn’t help imagining how unsympathetic Len would be, if she were rash enough to force the story on him. For Len too was grossly inconsistent. Much as he disapproved of some individual council developments, and much as he despised many city architects (particularly those of Porcaster), in principle he was always in favor of rebuilding, and nothing annoyed him more than stories about pathetic old ladies fighting lone battles to preserve their cherished crumbling homes. He was all for more ruthless powers of eviction. Conservationists and litigious obstructionists annoyed him equally, and poor old ladies touched not a chord in his black heart. Auntie Evie’s case would get no sympathy from Len. He had forced his reluctant mum out of her decaying terrace cottage into a nice suburban semi, where she had moped briefly behind lace curtains, despised by her suburban neighbors, and then died: of loneliness, Maureen was sure. “Balls,” Len would snarl, when Maureen raised this possibility. “She never had a friend in the world anyway, nobody was ever allowed to cross our threshold, when I was a kid.”
So Len would not be interested in Maureen’s feelings about Auntie Evie’s house, which were quite strong, for Maureen had spent much of her childhood there, and she too did not want to see it go. She could see why it would have to go: it was in very poor condition, the middle of a sloping hillside terrace, hit by bomb damage and subsidence. The roof sloped, the windows would not shut by four or five inches, every door was out of true, the steps were crumbling, and the floor of the front room was buckled as though by an earthquake. But Evie paid only a pound a week for it, and she had lived there all her married life, and she had made it very nice, as everyone agreed. Evie was much the most respectable member of Maureen’s feckless family, but had had a tough life: as, again, everyone agreed. Her husband had died of cancer when she was only thirty, leaving her with three kids and one on the way. She had worked all her life, charring, washing up in the Korner Kafe, cleaning at the Children’s Home, and she had brought the children up a treat, a credit to her—two of them were printers, earning good money, one a draftsman, and the fourth worked as a nurse at the Children’s Home. And she had kept her house a treat, too, with little bits and bobs from here and there, from jumble sales, castoffs from employers. Maureen knew every corner, every item: the tea caddy with the wooden lid, the willow pattern plate on the wall, the china dog on the mantelpiece, the old Singer sewing machine, the lacquered button box, the old armchair from Dr. David’s, the firescreen with the brass rail. It was no good saying you could move all that to a council flat: you couldn’t, there’d never be room, and anyway, it would never look right.
Auntie Evie had spent thirty years making herself one of the most respectable women in the neighborhood. Wherever she went—to the butcher, to the launderette, to the fish shop, to the Indian emporium—she received her due, the courtesy due to years of toil. And how had she done it? Through cleaning and washing dishes. It was a triumph, a careful slow laborious victory, over circumstance. Maureen would not have liked Auntie Evie’s life at all, and would have found its rewards meager, being a child of affluence and expectation, a postwar baby, but she could see it for what it was, and she shared her aunt’s helpless indignation. To have so much undone, by a council decision: all those patient years, all the rewards of old age—honor, love, civility, streets of friends. But what else could happen? The house was falling down. “I hoped it would last me out,” said Evie, “but it seems it won’t.” Maureen had tried to cheer her, with stories of nice new flats with views and central
heating, but her cheer had rung hollow.
I don’t know, thought Maureen. It’s funny, I wouldn’t want to live on that shabby little terrace for anything in the world, I wouldn’t go back to that part for anything, to be honest, it stinks, around there; every time I go back, I think what a filthy hole it’s turning into, garbage and muck everywhere and the shops seem to get dirtier and dirtier and cheaper and cheaper. But then, when I think of Auntie Evie, it’s as though I was thinking about a different place. Seeing it through her eyes.
She tried to look at it through Len’s eyes. A run-down, seedy, neglected area, an eyesore, a disgrace. A monument to lousy housing policy, bad planning, council ineptitude.
She wrote to Len: You will be glad to hear that the council has at last decided to do something about Whitethorn Road and Ambleside Road, Auntie Evie got a note from the council last week. Naturally she is not very pleased at the moment, but . . .
Maureen stopped. But what? She could not think of anything else to say about Auntie Evie.
There was nothing else to say about Auntie Evie.
Maureen scrubbed out her remarks about Auntie Evie, and began a sentence about her new hairdo, trying hard not to think about all the old ladies whom she and Len had dislodged, by fair means or foul, to make way for wonderful new shopping centers and office blocks. Len had been fond of a phrase that had always puzzled her: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” he used to say. But that was nonsense. She tried to work it out. Of course an omelette is broken eggs. That was the point about an omelette. There’s nothing accidental about breaking eggs for omelettes. Whereas nobody could pretend that an office block was angry evicted old ladies. Could they? One didn’t have to crunch them up and pound them in a cement mixer, did one?
The Ice Age Page 10