Adam prodded the fire to flame. “The two prisoners were brought together in the hope that they might incriminate each other,” he went on. “Dog Fox had never seen the other man before. He had no idea who he was. Only when one of the interrogators referred to the number written on the banknote did he realize how the man had come to be there. But the frightened, bewildered face with the damaged eye and the electrode burns around his lips was that of a total stranger. The two prisoners were connected only by the outrageous misfortune that an ordinary fifty-franc note had passed through many hands before Dog Fox slipped it into his wallet without even noticing that a telephone number was scribbled on it.”
Adam paused there, struggling to focus on the metaphysical implications of events which had become for him the stuff of nightmares. “Think about it. Because of a trivial coincidence, an innocent man was plucked out of his life, arrested, tortured and finally sent to a concentration camp where he may or may not have survived. And the poor devil was just a proxy for whoever the Gestapo had been after. Someone arrested as a proxy, tortured as a proxy, exterminated as a proxy. End of story.” Adam stared across at Martin. “Of course, it’s just one terrifying tale among many – no worse than what happened to millions of innocent Jews and gypsies. But imagine something like that happening to you. What comfort do you think you’d find then in wind and stones and stars? Do you seriously think they’d help you to write poetry that can out-stare that kind of horror? As far as I can see, no other kind will do any more.”
The two young men sat on before the dwindling fire, each aware of the other struggling. Martin could find no adequate answer, and there was no triumph in Adam’s eyes – only a bleak acceptance of the facts of the case as he saw it.
Eventually Adam sighed and said, “Martin, it’s cold and dark out there. I wish I could believe in the universe as the enchanted place you seem to take it for. All I do know is that terrible things were done while we were children and there’s no way past them into innocence again. If there was a God, he must have died of shame at his creation then.”
Martin sat in silence, aware of the mask gazing down at him, its slotted eye sockets opening onto vacant space, and he saw that what was truly terrifying was the emptiness it masked. Hanging above the dying fire, it was as devoid of devils as of a god. Not only did it give no light, it offered nothing but a bleak refutation which left him speechless.
“And how about this for a final solution?” Adam added wryly. “At the very moment when our species was proving itself capable of murder on an industrial scale, it also devised the perfect instrument of its own total destruction. Death is what we’ve got really good at these days, don’t you think? So isn’t the real question now whether we actually deserve to live at all?” He glanced across at Martin, saw how his friend was assenting at last, but he took no satisfaction in the knowledge. It filled him rather with a huge, wearying sadness, like a loss. “And the mercy seat’s empty,” he said. “We’re on our own. There’s no saviour to ransom us. No guarantee of meaning in a world where things like that happen. All that counts is what we do, whether we know what we’re doing or not. And all the time, for better or worse, it’s entirely up to us to choose.”
6
Lightning
On the point of leaving High Sugden late the next morning, Martin came out of his room and saw Marina on the landing in her dressing gown making her way to the bathroom. They stared at each other uncertainly for a moment, ill at ease, discomfited by their proximity.
He said, “I was just about to go.” When she only nodded, he glanced away. “Anyway, I’m glad to have seen you before I leave.”
“I’m sorry about last night,” she said. “It wasn’t you I was quarrelling with.”
“Forget it,” Martin shrugged. “I hope I’ll get to see you again.”
“I’m sure Adam will invite you back.”
“That would be great, but…”
“And Hal’s obviously taken to you.”
But too much remained unsaid and unresolved inside him. “Do you want to go out some time?” he rushed. “To a film or something?”
“The three of us, you mean?”
“If you like. But I was thinking…”
“We don’t want to upset Adam.”
“No.”
She left him there for a time, feeling the blood in his cheeks, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. He saw it then: Marina was doing the impossible thing she had asked of him – behaving as though that intimate exchange had never happened and was best forgotten. For everybody’s peace of mind, she’d said. But it was her own peace of mind she meant. He’d been a fool to think otherwise.
Yet to think about her at all – that fragrant warmth in the darkness – was to flood his heart with an aching blend of pleasure and pain that must soon become addictive.
Then, “Write something,” she said, as he turned to leave. “Write me a poem. Write one that shows me who you really are.”
“Sure,” he said, without conviction. “I’ll try.”
But it was as though that visit to High Sugden had shocked him through into a foreign land, where he felt like a displaced person with no stable identity. He was no longer sure what he was for. And Marina had chosen this moment to ask for a poem disclosing his true nature. Had she commanded him to sprout wings at his shoulder blades and fly, he would have been as eager to comply, and no more able. Yet some hours later, as he walked down the bleak steps into the basement at Cripplegate Chambers, he was remembering the inciting light of challenge in her eyes.
He found his mother there, crouched before the hearth, sealing the chimney with an open sheet of newspaper to draw the fire she had just lit.
“You’re back then,” she said. “Did you have a nice time?”
The room felt cold. Only a drear light fell from the window’s frosted glass. He watched the shadows move across the pane as people walked by on the pavement outside. “Yes,” he muttered, “it was good. It was different.”
Without turning she said, “Will you fetch me another bucket of coal, love?” Under the black-leaded cowl of the fireplace the newsprint glowed with a ruddy glare, while the chimney roared.
Martin picked up the metal bucket and went back out into the further reaches of the basement, past the bathroom door and the door to what must once have been a wine cellar. It was empty of everything except cobwebs now. At the end of the passage lay the sooty vault where a ton of coal had been tipped in a sloping pile between the flagged floor and the lid of the chute outside. The lumps were too big for the fireplace, so he had to break them up with the old hammer laid ready by the door. The pieces split beneath the blows, exposing new surfaces that glimmered with a sleek and glossy sheen, as though a dim carboniferous light had been shut up in there for millions of years awaiting this chance to break.
He stared at that blackness in fascination before reaching for the shovel. Coal clanked into the bucket, shedding its dust. This was what his father did, day in and day out. The task required neither skill nor intelligence, nothing but brawn, and it was performed at the lowest level of operation, in the grimy dark of the boiler house at Bamforth Brothers’ mill. And here was Martin now, at the turn of the year, in the cellar of Cripplegate Chambers, underneath the prosperous offices of what he had just learnt to think of as the bourgeois world, shovelling coal.
After the airy spaces of High Sugden he felt buried alive.
By New Year’s Eve the night sky was thawing in a cloudy mist of stars. Snow had been pushed back from the streets of Calderbridge into dingy heaps at the kerbstone edge. The pubs along Eastgate were crowded and loud. Shortly after eleven thirty Martin left Frank Jagger and his other mates blowing their fists under a gas lamp and made his way across the town to the house of his Aunt Violet. For as long as he could recall, the whole Crowther family – his father’s four brothers and three sisters, along with their husbands, wives and children – had gathered there, in what had once been the family home, to celebrate the tu
rning of the year. They would stay up carousing far into what they called “Old Year’s Night”, joking, playing cards, sharing memories of past times and singing the music-hall songs they had learnt when they were adolescents and children during the First World War. Jack Crowther had made it plain that he expected his son to be there before midnight, and by the time Martin arrived, the house was crammed with noise.
Auntie Vi’s balding mongrel bitch, Judy, came panting to meet him at the front door. “Here’s our Martin,” called out Uncle Wilf, still buttoning his flies as he came out of the lavatory. “Come on in, lad, get thiself a drink.” A twelve-year-old girl in a gingham frock ran squealing into the hall chased by one of the older boys. From behind them in the front room came a rowdy chorus:
Show me the way to go home,
I’m tired and I want to go to bed.
I had a little drink about an hour ago
And it went right to my head.
Martin walked into the bitter-caramel smell of stout and cigarette smoke that wafted through crepe-paper trimmings. He was greeted by faces he hadn’t seen for many months. One part of the family had bussed across the frozen moors from Lancashire to be there, others had walked or ridden motorbikes and sidecars from outlying areas of Calderbridge. The younger children were already packed off upstairs – so many of them that they would have to sleep six to a bed, warm as puppies, boys and girls together, three at the top and three at the bottom. Martin and his cousins had done the same when they were small, and it had been no secret that, soon after they’d been tucked in, they would throw back the blankets and creep out, barefoot in pyjamas, to sit on the landing, listening to the din round the piano downstairs.
“You will always hear me singing this song,” they were singing now, “show me the way to go home.”
Smiling in her high-backed chair, Aunt Violet, grey-haired, in her late fifties and lame since she was a girl, blew him a tipsy kiss. With a sherry in her hand, she swayed her narrow shoulders from side to side as she began to sing ‘Roll out the Barrel’. At once the others joined in, Martin’s mother clapping her hands and crossing to hug him with a warm kiss when they reached the rousing final lines:
Now’s the time to roll the barrel
Now the gang’s all here!
A moment later his cousin Kathy, who had been his childhood sweetheart, was offering him a choice of beer or whiskey, a bottle in either hand, while she asked with a teasing smile whether he’d been out after the lasses that night.
“Nay, they’ve been after me.”
“Oh aye, now you’ve got a place at Cambridge University I bet they just can’t keep their hands off you!”
“I’ve said nowt to ’em about it,” he grinned at her, “but then a good-looking lad like me doesn’t need any other advantages!”
“Oh, I can see you’re going to be as full of yourself as a Cheshire cat from now on!” Kathy said and turned to Martin’s mother, who was approaching across the room. “Auntie Bella, come and help me bring this brain-box here back down to earth.”
“Now then, Kathy,” Bella Crowther said, “you’re not to poke fun at our Martin. He were first in our family to stay on at school after he were fifteen, and now he’s off to college and we’re dead proud of ’im, aren’t we, Jack?”
“Just so long has he doesn’t let it go to his bloody ’ead,” Jack Crowther answered. “Does anybody know what time it is?”
Martin glanced at his watch. “Just coming up to five-to.”
“Come on then, get your glasses filled up everybody.”
“Who’s letting it in then?” asked Uncle Wilf. “Must be my turn this year?”
“Our Martin’s tallest and darkest now,” Jack Crowther declared. “He’ll do it.”
“I’ve only just come in,” his son protested.
“Then you can just get back out again.” Jack laughed, and turned to the piano, demanding, “Where’s that New Year stuff got to?”
But his wife had already gathered up the ritual objects and was offering them to Martin. “Here you are, love,” she said, putting the crust of bread, the cob of coal and the silver florin in his hands, “bring us all some luck.”
Reluctantly Martin followed his father out into the hall. He could smell a mix of beer and spirits on his breath as the man frowned up at him, saying, “You took your time. I thought we were going to have to let that bugger Wilf do it!”
“I said I’d be here, didn’t I?”
“Aye, well… Make sure you get them words right when yon door gets opened for thee. We don’t want you letting no bad luck in!”
Martin glanced away. “I’ve heard ’em often enough.”
Even at that moment, when the year was turning and the world changing with it, and both father and son might have yearned to reach out to each other from their separate worlds, there was this baffled shock of hostility between them. But then Auntie Vi came into the hall, where in a couple of minutes she would open the front door of her house at the midnight knock. With a stick in one hand and a welcoming glass in the other, she was already singing in her thin contralto warble:
O the lamps were burning brightly
’Twas the night that would banish all sin,
For the bells were ringing the old year out
And the New Year in.
And the moment had passed before Jack Crowther could find a way to say what was plain in his gaze: that he knew his son stood on other thresholds now, and this might well be the last New Year that the two of them would welcome in together. Instead he put a stubby-fingered hand on his son’s shoulder and said, “All right, let’s have you out there.”
Then Martin was out in the night, stamping his feet against the cold. In one of the houses he could see the monochrome flicker of a television screen. When he looked up, the stars shivered over Gledhill Beacon. He tried to see them for what they were in Hal and Adam’s uncompromising view of things – titanic accidents of stone and gas explainable by physics and chemistry and mathematical calculations, otherwise random and meaningless. The night smelt of alcohol and old snow.
He ran the words of the family’s ritual greeting through his mind. Here’s a piece of bread for the staff of life, a piece of coal for the warmth of life, and a piece of silver for the wealth of life. And here’s a kiss for the love of life.
He was the stranger at the door. It was his role to usher in the New Year that was bearing down out of the dark on all of them, and who knew what promises or menace it carried on its wings?
Well, he had ventured beyond the mills and pubs and churches of this grimy town, beyond the humdrum activity of spinners, carders and slubbing dyers, of fat solicitors and sarcastic teachers. He had glimpsed intellectual horizons that reached across the Pennine summits, round the curving earth, out into the brown river mouths and steaming green rainforests of West Africa and beyond. History was on the move. The whole world was changing. And he too could change. For even though Hal had seemed to admit him to the order of manhood, those days at High Sugden had shown Martin how little he had so far grasped of life and its possibilities. It was a time for resolutions now. As the midnight strike of the Town Hall clock was answered by a peal of bells across the freezing air, he vowed that this year he would seize life with both hands.
Invited out to High Sugden again, he went in renewed pursuit of Marina. She proved friendly enough but elusive in the little he saw of her. Adam, however, seemed glad to welcome him back. Both he and Hal were eager to share news of Emmanuel’s return to Africa, where he was now under arrest. Left restless by his own distance from events, Hal turned the visit into an informal seminar, and under his Socratic tutelage Martin was encouraged to observe both local affairs and international diplomacy with critical attention, to analyse motivations, to reason things out, and at every significant turn to demand to know, “Who gains from this?” Meanwhile he began to understand the kind of courage it took to act with radical purpose in the world – as, by early February, Emmanuel was daring to act from
his cell in Makombe Castle; as the crowds of students, trade unionists and market women dared to riot for his release on the streets of Port Rokesby; as Hal’s ambitious plans for a free Equatoria dared to offer a template by which things might be made new.
As also, more perversely, Marina’s rebellious spirit had begun to break out from under the weight of her father’s ideological authority. Quite early in the year Martin was dismayed to learn from Adam that she was infatuated with Graham Holroyd once more. Most weekends they went out together, driving across the county in his scarlet sports car, drinking too much at extravagant parties with a boisterous crowd who all seemed to be the sons and daughters of mill owners, property developers and consultant surgeons.
For a time Adam affected to despise the sister he adored. Hal was out of all patience with her, while Grace could only worry over her daughter’s hectic veering between explosions of bad temper and a blithe disregard for anything that might interfere with her pleasure. Compromised by loyalty to Holroyd’s circle of friends, Marina declared that she now shared their disdain for the increasingly vocal campaign against nuclear weapons, of which Hal was a prominent spokesman. As Easter approached, her resistance to joining her family on the march to Aldermaston became intractable.
As it happened, Grace fell briefly ill around that time, so only Adam and Martin travelled by coach to London, where Hal was already closeted with the other leaders. On their elated return four days later, Marina became aware that she had denied herself an important experience. She listened in glum silence as Martin and Adam reported on how a crowd consisting of no more than a few hundred good-humoured protesters had set out through the streets of the capital, only to grow in strength day by day, until the gathering outside the Nuclear Research Establishment at Aldermaston broke on the nation’s consciousness as the most powerful demonstration of popular dissent since the Jarrow march. Filled with admiration, Martin described how Hal’s bluff, charismatic manner had drawn many people into vigorous debate along the route as he articulated ways in which the aims of the march were related to the wider political and economic problems of the planet.
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