The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  Inside the hospital they had to wait again, but the house surgeon, when he came, was young and very gentle.

  ‘Are you her husband?’ The man nodded dumbly, cap in hand. ‘And you’re her mother?’

  The woman said, ‘No, her mother an’ father are dead. I’m his mother. They live with me, y’see.’

  The doctor nodded and the man blurted, ‘How is she, Doctor?’

  ‘It was a nasty accident,’ the doctor said carefully. ‘I’m afraid a good deal of her scalp has gone.’

  ‘Will it disfigure her?’ the woman asked, her eyes fixed on the doctor’s face.

  The doctor frowned. ‘I shouldn’t worry about that,’ he said evasively. ‘It’s really amazing what can be done nowadays.’

  The man brought his eyes up from the floor. ‘I... I’d like to see her if…’

  ‘Well, perhaps for a minute, if she’s out of the anaesthetic, but no longer.’ He left them and returned with a young nurse. ‘She’s in Victoria Ward. The nurse will take you up.’

  When the woman made as if to follow her son, the doctor restrained her. ‘Just one now. He won’t be long. You can sit down in the waiting-room.’

  Going up in the lift he began to feel faint. He had always hated hospitals. He realised the foolishness of his dislike; hospitals were places of healing and mercy. But his aversion was to physical suffering in others and here he felt surrounded, overwhelmed by it. The characteristic smell of the building seemed to grow stronger the farther they were carried from the outside world, and his stomach seemed empty of everything except nausea. At the door of the ward he was handed over to the sister, who led him down the triple row of beds to the screened-off corner, where she said, ‘Just a minute,’ and left him exposed to the eyes of the occupants of the ward who, to his furtive glances, seemed every one to have an arm or a leg raised and secured in some agonisingly unnatural position.

  The sister reappeared. She’s awake. Now no noise or excitement. I’ll come back when your time’s up.’

  He tiptoed, ponderous in his heavy boots, behind the screen. She was lying there, her lips pale and bloodless, her face a dead, pasty white against the crisp skull-cap of bandages and the pillow under her head. Her eyes flickered open. ‘Jack.’ He swallowed painfully. ‘Aye, it’s on’y me, Sylvia. It’s only Jack.’ He pulled forward a chair and sat down, fiddling uneasily with his cap for a time before letting it slip to the floor between his knees.

  She watched him, her eyes dull and heavy-lidded. ‘It’s a mess, Jack, in’t it?’ she whispered then.

  He groped for something to say. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘I don’t know really. It was so sudden. I was just reachin’ over for somethin’ an all of a sudden me hair was fast round the spindle an’ it was pullin’ me in…’ She closed her eyes and her body trembled under the sheets. ‘It was awful…’

  ‘It’s about time they had t’Factory Inspector round that place,’ he said in an angry whisper. ‘I’ve heard some tales about ’em.’ He looked at her. ‘Does it pain you much?’

  She moved her head feebly. ‘Not now... It did at first, but they give me somethin’ to stop it a bit.’ The beginnings of a bitter little smile touched her lips. ‘This is one up for you an’ your mother, in’t it? It’s your turn to crow now.

  ‘No,’ he said urgently. ‘No, it’s not like that.’ He stopped, wringing his hands in helplessness. He wanted to say more but he did not know how. There was so much that he should say to make her understand. The fifteen years difference in their ages had never seemed so great. But words had never come easily to him and now he was bogged down again in inarticulateness: lost, with all the wordless misunderstanding of their marriage between him and her. He made a little movement of his arm. If only he could touch her... But the sheets were drawn right up to her throat and his hand with its dirt-ringed nails and the grease ingrained in every line was like a sacrilege hovering above their spotlessness.

  The sister returned silently. ‘You’ll have to go now.’ He sighed in mingled relief and despair.

  The girl in the bed opened her eyes again as he stood up and replaced the chair. He made a last desperate attempt. ‘I’ll come again, as soon as they’ll let me,’ he said. ‘An’ look, don’t worry yerself about it, lass. It’ll be all right. It won’t make no difference. No difference at all.’

  ‘Look after Peter,’ she said, and tried to smile. ‘So long, Jack.’

  There was horror in the sunlight outside, and in the normality of the traffic passing along the main road at the bottom of the hill, and in the people going about their business, not knowing or caring that she lay helpless in that great building with half her scalp torn away. A young girl rode by on a bicycle, her long hair blowing out behind her. A picture came to him then of his wife’s beautiful red-gold hair entwined in the oil-blue steel of the spindle and he closed his eyes and clutched at the wall as his senses swooned and the world spun about him.

  His mother took his arm. ‘Come on, Jack. You’ll be all right now you’re out in t’fresh air.’

  She said little going down the hill, but on the bus she started to talk again. ‘She won’t be the same again, Jack. You could tell the doctor didn’t like to say. But I knew... This’ll cure her vanity. She’ll not be wantin’ to do much gallivantin’ again…’

  He only half-heard her, his attention held by a view across rooftops where a factory chimney poured out smoke, thick and dark against the sky, like a woman’s hair...

  ‘Now’ll be your chance to put your foot down,’ his mother was saying. ‘You should ha’ done it long since. Now’ll be your chance to show her who’s boss –’

  He put his hands to his face beside her. ‘No,’ he broke in. ‘No, now’s me chance to show her…’

  ‘Show her what?’ his mother said. ‘Show her what, Jack?’

  He dropped his hands and clenched his big-knuckled fists on his knees’. ‘Nowt,’ he said, and the ferocity and anguish in that one word made her gape. ‘Nowt… you wouldn’t understand.’

  The Actor

  He was a big man, without surplus flesh, and with an impassivity of face that hid extreme shyness, and which, allied with his striking build, made him look more than anything else, as he walked homewards in the early evening in fawn mackintosh and trilby hat, like a plain-clothes policeman going quietly and efficiently about his business, with trouble for someone it the end of it.

  All his adult life people had been saying to him, ‘You should have been a policeman, Mr Royston,’ or, more familiarly, ‘You’ve missed your way, Albert. You’re cut out for a copper, lad.’ But he would smile in his quiet, patient way, as though no one had ever said it before, and almost always gave exactly the same reply: ‘Nay, I’m all right. I like my bed at nights.’

  In reality he was a shop assistant and could be found, in white smock, on five and a half days of the week behind the counter of the Moorend branch grocery store of Cressley Industrial Co-operative Society, where he was assistant manager. He hid been assistant manager for five years and seemed fated to occupy that position for many more years to come before the promotion earmarked for him would become fact. For the manager was a man of settled disposition also, and still comparatively young and fit.

  But Albert did not apparently worry. He did not apparently worry about anything; but this again was the deception of his appearance. Quiet he might be, and stolid and settled in his ways; but no one but he had known the agony of shyness that was his wedding day; and no one but he had known the pure terror of the premature birth of his only child, when the baby he had longed for with so much secret yearning was dead and had almost cost the life of the one person without whom his own life would hardly have seemed possible – Alice, his wife.

  So it was the measure of his misleading appearance and his ability to hide his feelings that no one ever guessed the truth, that n
o one was ever led from the belief that he was a taciturn man of unshakeable placidity. ‘You want to take a leaf out of Albert’s book,’ they would say. ‘Take a lesson from him. Never worries, Albert doesn’t.’

  Thus Albert, at the age of thirty-seven, on the eve of his small adventure.

  Amateur drama was a popular pastime in Cressley and varied in standard from rather embarrassing to really quite good. Generally considered to be among the best of the local groups was the C.I.C.S. Players – the drama group of Cressley Industrial Co-operative Society. They restricted their activities to perhaps three productions a year and worked hard to achieve a professional finish. It was about the time of the casting for the Christmas production, perhaps the most important of the year, since at this time each group was shown in direct comparison with all the other bodies who joined together in the week-long Christmas Festival of Amateur Drama in the Co-operative Hall, that the rather fierce looking lady from General Office who was said to be the backbone and mainstay of the C.I.C.S. Players, happened to visit the shop. Seeing Albert on her way out as he towered over a diminutive woman customer, she stopped abruptly and, waiting only till he was free, crossed over to him and said, ‘Tell me, have you ever acted?’

  As it was the oddest thing anyone had ever asked him, Albert simply stared at the woman while a colleague said, ‘He’s always acting, Albert is. Make a cat laugh, the antics he gets up to.’

  ‘Take no notice of him,’ Albert said. ‘He’s kiddin’.’

  ‘What I mean,’ the lady said, ‘is, have you had any experience of dramatics?’

  ‘Dramatics?’ Albert said.

  ‘Taking part in plays.’

  Albert gave a short laugh and shook his head.

  ‘There’s a chap coming from M.G.M. to see him next week,’ the facetious colleague said. ‘Cressley’s answer to Alan Ladd.’

  Ignoring the irrepressible one, the lady continued her interrogation of Albert with: ‘Has anyone ever told you you look like a policeman?’

  ‘I believe it has been mentioned,’ said Albert, wondering if the woman had nothing better to do than stand here asking him daft questions all morning.

  She now looked Albert over in silence for some moments until, unable to bear her scrutiny for another second, he bent down and pretended to look for something under the counter. He had his head down there when she spoke again and he thought for a moment he had misheard her.

  ‘Eh?’ he said, straightening up.

  ‘I said, would you be interested in a part in our new production? You know, the C.I.C.S. Players. We’re doing R. Belton Wilkins’s The Son of the House for the Christmas Festival and there’s a part in it for a police constable. We’ve no one in the group who fits the role nearly so well as you.

  ‘But I can’t act,’ Albert said. ‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’

  ‘It’s only a small part – about a page. You’d soon learn it. And you’d find it great fun to be part of a group effort. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of the stage, you know.’

  ‘Aye, happen it’s all right if you’re that way inclined,’ Albert said, and was relieved to see a customer at the lady’s elbow.

  ‘Well, I won’t keep you from your work,’ she said; ‘but think it over. We’d love to have you, and you’d never regret it. We start rehearsals next week. I’ll pop in and see you again later. Think it over.’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ Albert said. ‘I’ll think it over.’ Meaning that he would dismiss it from his mind for the nonsense it was as soon as she was gone. Acting! Him!

  But he did not dismiss it from his mind. A part of his mind was occupied with it all morning as he attended to his customers; and at lunch-time, when the door had been locked, he went over to one of the young lady assistants from the opposite counter.

  ‘You’re mixed up with this acting thing, aren’t you?’

  ‘The Players?’ the girl said. ‘Oh yes. It’s grand fun. We’re doing R. Belton Wilkins’s latest West End success for our next production.’

  ‘Aye,’ Albert said, ‘I’ve been hearin’ so. I’ve had yon’ woman on to me this morning.’

  ‘You mean Mrs Bostock. I saw her talking to you. A real tartar, she is. Terrifically keen and efficient. I don’t know what we’d do without her.’

  ‘She’s been doin’ a bit o’ recruitin’ this morning,’ Albert said. ‘Been on to me to take a part in this new play. Don’t know what she’s thinkin’ about.’ All morning a new feeling had been growing in him and now he realised that he was pleased and flattered by Mrs Bostock’s approach, nonsense though it undoubtedly was. ‘I always thought you wanted these la-di-da chaps for play-actin’,’ he said; ‘not ord’nary chaps like me.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the girl said, unbuttoning her overall. ‘What part does she want you for?’

  ‘The policeman.’

  ‘Well, there you are. Perfect type-casting. You look the part exactly.’

  ‘But they’d know straight away ’at I wasn’t an actor, soon as I opened me mouth.’

  ‘They don’t want to know you’re an actor. They want to think you’re a policeman.’

  ‘But I can’t put it on.’

  ‘Policemen don’t put it on, do they? You’d just have to be yourself and you’d be perfect.’

  ‘And I’ve no head for remembering lines,’ Albert said.

  ‘How do you know if you’ve never tried?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Albert said.

  ‘Look,’ the girl said, ‘I’ll bring my copy of the play back after dinner and you can have a look at the part. As far as I remember, it’s not very long.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother,’ Albert said. ‘I’m not thinkin’ o’ doin’ it.’

  ‘No bother,’ the girl said. ‘You just have a look at it and see.’

  That afternoon, in the intervals between attending to customers, Albert could be seen paying great attention to something slightly below the level of the counter; and when the shop had closed for the day he approached the girl who had lent him the book and said, ‘Will you be wantin’ this tonight? I thought I might take it home an’ have a look at it.’

  ‘It’s getting you, then?’

  ‘Well, I’ve read it about half-way through,’ Albert said, ‘an’ I’ve got interested like. In the story, I mean. I’d like to see how it ends, if you can spare the book.’

  ‘You can borrow it,’ the girl said. ‘You’ll find it very gripping near the end. It ran for over two years in London.’

  ‘You don’t say so,’ Albert said. ‘That’s a long time.’

  ‘Of course, we’re only doing one performance,’ the girl said, ‘so you needn’t get the wind up.’

  ‘What d’you think happened at the shop today?’ Albert asked Alice after tea that evening.

  Alice said she couldn’t imagine.

  ‘We had that Mrs Bostock down from General Office an’ she asked me if I’d like a part in this new play they’re getting up.’

  ‘You?’ Alice said. ‘She asked you?’

  ‘Aye, I knew it,’ Albert said. ‘I knew you’d think it was daft an’ all.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s daft at all,’ Alice said. ‘I’m surprised, but I don’t think it’s daft. What sort of part does she want you to play?’

  ‘Guess,’ Albert said. ‘She took one look at me an’ offered me the part.’

  Alice began to laugh. ‘Why not? Why ever shouldn’t you?’

  ‘Because,’ Albert said, ‘there’s a difference in walkin’ the streets lookin’ like a bobby an’ walkin’ on to a stage an’ reckonin’ to be one. I don’t think I could do it, not with maybe hundreds o’ people watchin’ me.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. They tell me you forget the audience once you start saying your lines.’

  ‘Aye, an’ s
upposin’ you forget your lines? What then?’

  ‘Well, you just have to learn them. And you have rehearsals and what not. I don’t suppose it’s a long part, is it?’

  Albert fingered the book. ‘Only a page. I have it here.’

  ‘Oh, ho!’ Alice said.

  ‘Well, young Lucy Fryer would bring it for me, an’ I started readin’ it and got interested. It’s a real good play, y’know. They ought to do it on the telly. It ran for two years in London.’

  Alice took the book and looked at the title. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of this.’

  ‘It’s all about a young feller and his dad’s ever so rich and dotes on the lad. Thinks the sun shines out of him; an, all the time this lad’s a real nasty piece o’ work. A proper nowter.’

  ‘Where’s the policeman’s part?’

  ‘In the second act. Here, let me show you. This lad an’ his brother are havin’ a row, see, because he’s run some’dy down in his car and not stopped, because he was drunk. An’ right in the middle of this I come in an’–’

  ‘You come in?’ Alice said. ‘I thought you weren’t interested in the part?’

  Albert looked sheepish. ‘I haven’t said I am,’ he said. ‘I sort o’ tried to imagine meself as I was reading it, that’s all.’

  ‘I see,’ Alice said.

  ‘Aye, that’s all... What you lookin’ at me for?’

  ‘I’m just looking,’ Alice said.