The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t just own up,’ the manager said.

  The woman who had apprehended Jean, youngish, straw-coloured hair cut short, was silent, standing with her back to the filing cabinet. Her glance kept lifting above Jean’s head. Jean looked round. In the corner on the wall a closed circuit television screen flickered silently. She saw shoppers among the banks of shelves. ‘I’d advise you to change your tune when you get into court,’ the manager was saying. ‘They don’t like to have their time wasted. You can always plead a mental blackout. That’s a steady favourite.’ His voice was edged with sarcasm. Jean felt herself colouring afresh.

  The police constable was young too, though with dark hair and a soft complexion. He glanced at Jean when he came in and looked round as though expecting to see someone else. He was visibly embarrassed as the manager spoke to him and held up the tin of pilchards.

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Isn’t it enough?’

  ‘You’re sure there’s no mistake?’

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ the manager asked.

  The young constable bristled. ‘There’s no need for that, sir. It’s just that I know this lady, and –’

  ‘You know her, you say?’

  ‘Well, not personally.’ He looked at Jean. ‘Your husband taught me at school.’

  The manager pointed to the television screen. ‘Look, I’ve spent enough time with this. Right? See for yourself?’ He pressed switches.

  Jean found herself wondering how long they kept tapes like that, if it would be destroyed when it had served its immediate purpose or kept on file to condemn her forever.

  She got Fred on his own after their evening meal, when Stephen had left the house for some vague rendezvous.

  ‘Fred, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Put the paper down. It’s very important.’

  ‘All right. I’m listening.’

  ‘The police might come.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whatever for? Is Stephen in trouble?’

  ‘No, it’s me.’

  ‘Have you clouted the car?’

  ‘No.’ Jean drew a deep breath. ‘I’m being prosecuted for shoplifting.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘I took something from that new supermarket in Cross Street this morning. They called me back inside and sent for the police.’

  ‘You’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘I’m not Fred.’

  ‘But... What did you take? Did you really take it?’

  ‘A tin of pilchards. I really did take it.’

  He was incredulous. ‘A tin of pilchards! You mean to tell me they called in the police over a tin of pilchards?’

  ‘They said it was company policy always to prosecute.’

  ‘My God!’ He was speechless for some time. Jean poured herself another cup of coffee. ‘You personally know half the Bench,’ Fred said, lifting his hand in a gesture of refusal as she held the coffee pot over his cup. She was surprised at the steadiness of her hand.

  ‘The ones who know me will have to stand down, I expect.’

  ‘Will it really come to that?’

  ‘They said so. They said they had to make an example of anyone they caught.’

  ‘They’ll let you off.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘The Bench, I mean. You’re well known in the town. You’re a person of... of standing.’

  ‘All the worse, I suppose. I should know better. And it’s not as if I were in need.’

  ‘Of a tin of pilchards? Who needs a tin of pilchards? What made you take a tin of pilchards?’

  ‘I saw them on the shelf and remembered that Stephen is fond of them.’

  ‘Pilchards? Stephen likes pilchards? Buy him some, then. Buy a dozen tins and keep them in the cupboard.’ He stopped, then looked straight at her. ‘You’re not ill, are you?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’ She had not thought of that. No, that wasn’t it. She must not let them make her out to be ill.

  ‘You’ll have to deny it. They’ll believe you. They’ll have to believe it’s a mistake.’

  ‘I’ve no defence, Fred. They have a television tape.’

  ‘Christ! This is going to look fine in the Argus. And don’t think the Evening Post won’t pick it up as well.’ He strained his neck out of his shirt, then loosened his tie. He needed a bigger collar size; she had noticed that before. ‘How is it going to affect my position? I’m always having to chastise light-fingered kids. I can see their smirks now. They’ll make a meal of it. They’ll have me for breakfast, dinner and tea.’

  He got up and went to the cupboard where they kept their small stock of drink. He took out the whisky bottle. ‘Do you want one?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ She wondered when she would start crying.

  He poured one for himself, then said, ‘I’m sorry if I seem selfish; thinking about myself. But I’m trying to imagine all the consequences.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Fred. After all, you didn’t do it. I did.’

  ‘Yes, and I still can’t understand. I can’t for the life of me understand what could have possessed you.’

  ‘It was a feeling that came over me. That’s the only way I can explain it.’

  ‘What kind of feeling?’ But she merely shrugged. ‘You’re not some crack-brained neurotic housewife trying to make up her bingo losses, or somebody who steals for kicks. You know better. You’re as honest as the day’s long. You’re sturdy, dependable. People know you, respect you, look up to you.’

  ‘A good woman,’ Jean murmured.

  ‘What?’ Then he caught it. ‘Yes – good.’

  ‘Yes, I’m good,’ she wanted to say to him. ‘I am good. But how can I prove how good I am, unless I do something bad?’

  She wanted to say it, but she didn’t. She did not think he would understand that.

  The Apples of Paradise

  It was a dazzling morning. Though patches of frost still lay white in shadowed corners, the big winds of the past week had gone and it was possible with the warmth of the sun on one’s shoulders to stand without feeling chilled.

  Hare had slipped into a rear pew of the chapel just before the coffin entered and now he took a place on the asphalt path, a little way from the cluster of invited guests who would be returning to the house for refreshment.

  Chapel and graveyard stood high on a hill. Wholesale demolition of old property had opened up a fresh view of the town and a wide green sweep of cropped grass bordering a new road had left the once closed-in Victorian building in a rather striking isolation. This had been a town of non-conformist churches in Hare’s youth. Now the few left struggled on with amalgamated congregations, their one-time differences in Methodist doctrine submerged in their need to survive.

  Hare felt one or two glances of half-recognition as the parson intoned, but Fell himself had his back to him and the two women whom Hare took to be Tom’s daughters, standing arm in arm with their men, had been too young when he left the town to know now who he was.

  Waiting, Hare assumed his demeanour to be one of sombre composure, but his stomach felt empty and faintly nauseous and he was not sure how he would react to Fell’s quite proper and expected display of grief. Hare didn’t think he could cope with Tom’s tears, and Tom had never been afraid to cry when given cause.

  Hare was perturbed by a sudden thickening in his throat. And they were finished. He must control himself. He stepped forward as Fell turned and walked towards him.

  ‘Tom...’

  Fell stopped and peered into his face. ‘Gerald? You came, Gerald.�
�

  Fell took Hare’s gloved hand between both of his and they examined each other. The changes in the look of a friend one sees regularly are almost as imperceptible as those observed in one’s own looking-glass, but these two had been apart and nearly thirty years masked for each the youthful face he’d known and kept as the only possible memory.

  ‘You’re looking very well, Gerald.’

  And Tom, Hare thought, seemed uncharacteristically stoic in his self-possession.

  Fell’s daughters hovered for a moment, then proceeded slowly to the gate and the waiting car.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ Hare said. ‘I truly am.’

  Fell shook his head and looked at the ground. ‘A bad do, Gerald. A bad do. We could have had another ten or fifteen year. But,’ he glanced into Hare’s face now with a regretful little smile, ‘it wasn’t meant to be.’

  Hare was the taller of the two. His weight had increased no more than a few pounds since his twenties and, apart from a small round pot-belly, hardly noticeable under his well-cut clothes, he was as lean and trim as then. His smooth dark hair showed a powdering of grey, with two white wings above his ears. Fell had always been the stocky one and now he was comfortably round, though, still, Hare had noticed, light on his small feet. A few strands of once fair-to-gingerish hair were combed across the totally bald crown of his round head.

  ‘But come back home, Gerald, where we can talk in the warm. Have you got a car?’

  ‘Yes, it’s just down the road. But I can’t, Tom.’

  ‘You’re not going back straight away?’

  ‘No, but there’s something else I must see to.’

  Hare had not planned this refusal. It was just that now, watching the people leave the graveyard, he felt a sudden violent wish not to have to talk to anybody else and, as a focus of reminiscence, become a welcome diversion in the uneasy aftermath of the funeral.

  ‘Will you be at home tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  ‘What if I came round then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fell said, ‘come round when we can be quiet and on our own.’ They settled on a time. ‘You know where it is, of course?’ Fell said with a flicker of humour.

  ‘I think I can still find it,’ Hare replied.

  Hare could hardly remember a time when he didn’t know Fell; certainly, he could not recall how they had met. It must have been at Sunday school. Both Hare’s family and Fell’s had been Methodist and rigidly insistent on the boys’ attendance at chapel three times every Sunday. Fell’s father was an ironmonger; Hare’s had owned, in partnership, a furniture shop. Much of the furniture Hare’s father had sold was made on the premises by three craftsmen. It had a name for quality. Their steel-framed three-piece suites were said to last a lifetime, and in those inter-war years long before the coming of discount warehouses of the type Hare himself had ended up owning, when their main rivals were the cheap-jack city shops who attracted a different kind of customer anyway, their reputation spread miles beyond the boundaries of the little town.

  Approaching their teens, both Hare and Fell were enrolled as fee-paying pupils at a grammar school; not the local one to which they could have won free places through County Minor Scholarships, but an older foundation in the nearby city with a better academic record. Fell was a year

  younger than Hare and in a lower form; but they continued together at chapel where at one period, in their early teens, they pumped the organ together for morning and evening services. It was felt to be a job for two lads as the pipes were not as sound as they might have been and keeping them filled with air called for considerable exertion. The one time Hare did it alone found him at the end of the service exhausted, his skin bathed in sweat and his heart pounding. It was unfortunate that Fell’s absence had coincided with that of the regular organist and the appearance of a deputy notorious for the pace at which he dragged out hymns, as well as his seizing a chance of practice by launching on an extended voluntary as the congregation filed out. But Hare liked the duty because it allowed him and Fell, tucked away behind their screen, seclusion from the people in the body of the chapel during the services, with whose content he was becoming bored and disillusioned.

  It was at about the time Hare was privately rejecting its teachings that the chapel played host to a two-week evangelical mission of students from a Methodist college who were being trained for the ministry. The mission culminated in ‘conversions’, when the erring, the strayed and the sore-at-heart were enjoined to come forward to the communion rail, there to kneel and be born again in Christ: to be ‘saved’.

  Hare sat through it with a mounting discomfort of spirit. It wasn’t merely the small-minded rigidity that characterised many of the chapel’s regulars which more and more alienated him. There were to him too many flaws in the gospel preached from the pulpit week after week: too many anomalies that his intellect could not accept and which his faith was not strong enough to overlook. He realised that, more than simply rejecting the teaching of his church, he was beginning to doubt the existence of God in any form he found acceptable. He had never discussed this with Fell or anyone else and when, to his mild surprise, Fell got up and went forward to kneel with the others at the rail, Hare decided to keep his own counsel until such time as he could reach a clear decision. That, he felt, would be when his reluctance to displease his parents was outweighed by distaste for his lip-service. In any case, war threatened. Chamberlain had averted one crisis, but Hitler was making more and more demands. A war would change a lot of things.

  Fell started courting a cheerful fresh-faced girl from among those who had pledged themselves to the Lord during the mission. Hare decided that Fell’s conversion had been less for its own sake than a way of making himself more acceptable, of showing himself to be serious, to Emily Schofield. In later years Hare could blame his inability to reconcile Laura Sherwood’s chapel-going with his own hardening doubt for his failure to make sure of her when she seemed to welcome his attentions. Laura was neatly shod. Her hair was tucked under a little blue hat. The collar of a white blouse encircled her slim throat. The soft stuff of the blouse formed a V between the lapels of her plainly tailored costume-coat. The coat hinted at a gentle fullness of breast that stirred Hare to a tenderness which lodged under his heart in a weight of longing.

  When he first saw her he did not know who she was; knew nothing about her except that she had emerged, bible in hand, from the nearest of the town’s other Methodist chapels. A few days later she came into the shop while he was waiting on counter. She had a couple of chairs which needed recovering: would he show her some material and give her a price? Hare said he would call himself. She gave him her name and her address: The Cottage, Millbank Lane. He told her that he had seen her coming out of her chapel and she said she had chosen it because it seemed most like the one she had attended before they moved to the town. No, she had not been here long; less than a year. Her father had retired early from his business because of ill-health. He was a widower and she kept house for him.

  There was about her a haunting womanliness, a gentleness and a natural grace which made the other girls he knew look either cheap or gawky and his thoughts seem shameful. He felt she would have been profoundly shocked to know of some of the things which flitted through his mind. He knew little of these matters and during the walks they began to take together in the long summer evenings of those months just before the war he avoided physical contact and any familiarity of speech. He did not know what she expected of him and was terrified of offending her. When war was declared, knowing that he would eventually be conscripted, Hare volunteered for the RAF and flying duties. ‘I shall pray for you,’ Laura told him.

  He was sent for training to Canada and came back as a navigator to a squadron of Coastal Command on operational duty in the Middle East. It was when he had completed his overseas tour and was given a home posting that he met Cynthia. She w
as all that Laura was not: direct, pleasure-loving, passionate in her seizing of the moment. ‘Life’s short,’ she reminded him as she took him into her bed. ‘There’s a war on.’ It was his late initiation and he was grateful to her. She stripped him of his inhibitions and thoughts of her sustained him during the long patrols over the Atlantic. Periods of hazardous

  duty were punctuated by evenings of drinking and heightened gaiety and snatched opportunities of making love. Cynthia helped her father to run his hotel and sometimes she could entertain Hare in her room without fear of scandal.

  He counted himself fortunate that he wasn’t an infantryman slogging through the desert, or a member of the crew of one of those ships they watched over, heaving below on the ocean with no sight of home or a woman for weeks or months at a time. What Cynthia gave Hare became as necessary to him as a drug. For by this time he was losing his nerve. He thought his luck was bound to run out and he expected every patrol to be his last. The knowledge that he was at much less risk than Bomber Command crews operating over Europe was little consolation. Fear had seized him and wouldn’t let go. They married by special licence. When he awoke sweating in the night as his aircraft plunged towards the grey swell of sea, Cynthia was there to be clung to.

  Hare brought his wife home to an empty house. His father had died of a heart attack while Hare was overseas and his mother decided to go and live near Hare’s sister, who had already married and moved away before the war. The speed with which the rift between himself and Cynthia opened surprised Hare. Peacetime marriage to a shopkeeper was different from a wartime one to an officer of RAF Coastal Command. She found it dull. It bored her. There was no sign of her conceiving and starting a family and she soon grew restless. Her manner took on a bitter edge, as though she felt she had been deceived. She had the house refurnished and still disliked it. She persuaded Hare to acquire a plot of land and start to build a new house. He also bought a flat at Scarborough, where she spent more and more time. She became friendly with a set there who hung around a hotel bar at weekends and drank cocktails. Hare found them brittle, living on their nerves, and left Cynthia to it.