Wrote For Luck

by D. J. Taylor

  There were people who came to East Creake simply to paint its sky, but they did not come in November. After Michaelmas the light turned iron-grey and the breaking dawn smeared up the cloud behind it so that the effect was not one of Turner-esque tints and hues but like a very pale egg-yolk dragged out over a plate. Just at this moment the light was falling slantwise over the double row of attractively priced paperbacks that Caroline had set out in the window-boxes. Nearer at hand, little aggregations of hardback novels – some of them as recently published as six months ago – rose above the white display table bought for a song from the East Creake furniture mart. Ten feet away there was a terrific jangling noise – like some satanic turnkey wrenching open the gates of Hell – and Nick, with the diffidence that he brought to almost every human activity, came shambling into the shop.

  ‘I went down to the Fisherman’s Pantry to try and get some herrings,’ he said, ‘but they seem to close up at two these days.’

  ‘The tea shop’s already shut for the winter.’

  Come Bonfire Night the East Creake emporia began to keep odd hours. Even the librarian of the Sailor’s Reading Room, where old salts in oil-skins dozed over the North Norfolk Mercury, grew capricious. The Book Bag’s decision to stay open for eight hours a day six days a week was regarded as a dangerous innovation.

  ‘Sold anything?’ Nick asked in a tone that suggested it was a matter of startling wonder that any shopkeeper ever sold anything to anyone.

  ‘Mrs Carmody bought that copy of Edward Heath’s Music: A Joy for Life. She thought it might do for the choir book group.’

  Outside the high street was deserted except for an old man – so old that he had probably been present at the unveiling of the Art Deco war memorial – propping his bike up against the flint wall of the Dog and Partridge.

  ‘I knew that would go in the end,’ Nick said sagely. The £2.95 at which Mr Heath’s leavings had been priced would make their fortunes: anyone could see. The twitch in his upper lip as he pronounced these words suggested to Caroline that he had something disagreeable to tell her. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to go to town again tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, bring back some more copies of Music: A Joy for Life,’ she said, not quite humorously. ‘We’ll have a sale.’

  Later they had supper in the tiny back-room behind the shop. As the Fisherman’s Pantry had not come up with any herrings, this was limited to ham and eggs on toast. Outside, rushing winds plucked at the shutters and the flimsy guttering. From time to time the light-bulb danced on its wire.

  ‘Why have you got to go to London?’ she wondered.

  ‘Tom said he wanted to go through that script again. He thought Barbara might have trouble with some of the jokes.’ Nick wrote plays that were broadcast on the radio and very occasionally performed in obscure provincial theatres. ‘Oh, and Mrs Trent-Browne threatened to put her head round the door. Her choice of words, not mine.’

  ‘What does Mrs Trent-Browne want?’

  ‘There’s some kind of village festival planned for the summer. And she said wanted to see how we were getting on.’

  Practically everyone she knew wanted to know how they were getting on, Caroline thought. Her mother wanted to know. Her half-a-dozen best friends wanted to know. If it came to that, Caroline quite wanted to know herself. They were prudent and, or so they thought, unexcitable people, but they had bought the lease of the Book Bag on a whim, wandered down the high street one summer forenoon, seen the TO LET sign in its dusty window and, euphoric in the July sunshine, clinched the decision over a crab salad in the Enniskillen Tea Rooms. Trade, brisk enough around the August Bank Holiday, was not quite what it could have been now the tourists had gone. ‘I don’t quite see the point of a bookshop,’ a woman in a headscarf who had stopped once outside the half-open door had been heard to say, ‘what with the travelling library and everything.’

  ‘If I have time,’ Nick said, who would not have time, ‘I’ll call in at that wholesaler and see about some new stock.’ His mind was far away, in third acts and jokes that actresses could understand.

  ‘You do that,’ Caroline told him.

  The next day she shut up the shop after lunch, traversed a row or two of pebble-dash cottages, slipped by the ice-cream parlour and the amusement arcade, each now shuttered up and moribund, and went for a walk along the beach. There were a few fishermen down at the north end, lines drawn tight against the surge of the ocean, and rain coming in on the wind, and the town’s solitary teenage boy throwing stones against a tin. On the way back she made a detour to the nature reserve and left a handful of leaflets (If books are your bag, then try the Book Bag) in the café. A previous drop had been discovered two days later in a waste-paper bin. Not everyone in East Creake’s resident population approved of blow-ins, a category in which Nick, at least, was shocked to find that he was supposed to reside. ‘I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Fakenham,’ he had protested, ‘and my parents live in Burnham Market. What more do they want?’ When she got back to the high street there was a foxy-looking middle-aged-to-elderly lady in an Inverness cape standing on the pavement outside the Book Bag with one hand clasped to the door-knob. Caroline did not like that hand. It suggested collusion, infiltration, colonising intent.

  ‘My dear, so there you are. How nice to be able to shut up shop whenever you feel like it,’ Mrs Trent-Browne said in her usual blizzard of phantom italics.

  ‘Yes it is, isn’t it?’ Caroline conceded. In the life of East Creake, Mrs Trent-Browne was a mysterious figure, known to enjoy exercising the considerable power she possessed in a capricious manner. She was rumoured to own half the high street, and at her instigation a Women’s Institute lecture on ‘The Exotic East’ had been replaced by a demonstration of flower-arranging techniques.

  ‘I’ve been very remiss in not coming to see you,’ said Mrs Trent-Browne, following Caroline briskly into the shop. ‘Especially now that I hear you’re doing so splendidly.’

  There was no getting rid of Mrs Trent-Browne. She poked around in the bargain bin and bought a P.D. James for 75p, admired the display of cookery books while suggesting that they could be moved slightly to the left, and clucked her tongue over a biography of the Dalai Lama, all the while discussing her plans for next summer’s festival. This was to be on an extensive scale, do wonders for trade, involve the covering of the high street in a deluge of tricoloured bunting and the commandeering of the village hall for a display of horse brasses. By the time she left Caroline had agreed to host an evening in the shop at which one of Mrs Trent-Browne’s friends would read from a volume of self-published poems entitled Wood Sorrel.

  In her absence the shop seemed diminished, turned in on itself, barren and inert. The bargain bin, in particular, appeared to be such a desperate coign of literary vantage that Caroline decided to re-utilise the space for Psychology and Self-help. There were no further customers. Nick came back late, by taxi from Sheringham station, which suggested that the script meeting had gone well, and she told him about Mrs Trent-Browne and the festival.

  ‘I heard something about that,’ he said. He had bought himself a new scarf, which sat uncomfortably on his thin shoulders like a Lutheran priest’s ruff. ‘Apparently they’re looking for premises for an office.’

  ‘How did you get on?’ she enquired. As the Fisherman’s Pantry was still keeping odd hours they were eating gnocchi bought at ruinous expense from the up-market delicatessen three doors down.

  ‘Not so bad at all,’ Nick said. He could be complacent at times. ‘I’ll probably have to go back next week and stay a night or two.’

  A storm blew up in the small hours and took half-a-dozen slates off the roof. Without explanation, Nick’s night or two turned into a week and a half. Over the next few days Caroline heard a great deal about the festival. There was an article about it in the weekly paper, a picture of Mrs Trent-Browne statuesque upon the village green and many a rumour about the site of the festival office. There was also a le
tter from Mr Warburton, the solicitor who had arranged the purchase of the Book Bag’s lease.

  ‘I thought you said he was such a nice old man,’ Caroline complained, once she had negotiated the complex series of upward revisions on which the renewal of the lease seemed to depend.

  Nick’s ear for local gossip was better tuned. ‘I think I heard somewhere that he’s Mrs Trent-Browne’s brother-in-law.’

  In retrospect Caroline could never quite tell when she became aware that the place where Mrs Trent-Browne burned to establish her festival office was the Book Bag. No one informed her directly: it must have happened by osmosis. Meanwhile it came as a shock to discover that she was at the heart of a guerrilla war which she could not remember having started. One lunch-time she came back to the shop to find that someone had plundered handfuls of the attractively priced paperbacks from their ledge and flung them all over the pavement. But if Mrs Trent-Browne had her partisans, then, as a practised opponent of local planning applications, she also had her detractors. Two days later there came a handwritten but necessarily anonymous note that read: tell the old bitch to go to hell.

  November was wearing on. The nature reserve closed up for the winter, and the stone curlews and the oyster-catchers in the reed beds browsed on unregarded. Elderly gentlemen in flat tweed caps could be seen walking to the village hall to play whist. Matters came to a head one Thursday afternoon, when the light had begun to fade and a series of flashes and detonations over the eastern sky made it look as if an alien invasion was in train, and Mrs Trent-Browne descended once more upon the shop. It had been a bad day, bringing a bill from the wholesaler and a letter – an actual letter, such was the gravity of the news it contained – from Nick.

  ‘My dear,’ Mrs Trent-Browne began. She was unusually flustered, no doubt fearful that the aliens had her in their sights, were about to carry her off into the clouds above Brancaster Staithe. ‘I’ve come to make you an offer.’

  Caroline stared at her stonily. Nick, the ever diffident, apparently wanted time to ‘think things over’. Having blown into her life, he seemed all too ready to blow out again.

  ‘An offer,’ Mrs Trent-Browne went on, as if repetition and emphasis would somehow seal the business. ‘Let me have your lease for my HQ and you can move into the Bodega absolutely rent-free. Mr Warburton can fix everything up in a jiffy.’

  The Bodega was a failed art gallery on the high street’s outermost margin that smelled of rotting fish. For some reason it was Nick’s scarf that rose in her mind, a scarf that now suggested abandonment, urban sophistication, greener grass. ‘No I won’t,’ she yelled at Mrs Trent-Browne. ‘You’re a nasty, interfering old woman, and I wouldn’t let you have the lease if you were the last person alive.’ ‘My dear,’ Mrs Trent-Browne plaintively, but it was too late, far too late. The nearest thing to hand was the biography of the Dalai Lama, and she absolutely picked it up and threw it at Mrs Trent-Browne’s anguished and departing head. Afterwards she strode in triumph along the stony beach, past the slumbering fishermen and their lines, and the endless worm-casts, on and on into the beckoning blue-grey horizon, where there was no Mrs Trent-Browne, no Nick, no mocking metropolitan neck-wear, only herself, her books and silence.

  —2013

  Brownsville Junction

  His uncle, old Spencer Van Hart, had come back from Vietnam with a Master Sergeant’s stripes and two fingers missing from his left hand, and though the army gratuities didn’t pay so well in those days he walked away with a pension and a two thousand dollar disability benefit. For a time he wondered about investing in a plantation or buying some real estate out near Lafayette, but it turned out that tobacco growing was in slump and Spencer didn’t like the look of the Nashville lawyers who ran the real estate business, so he put the money into the café at Brownsville Junction. The previous owner had only been gone six months, but Spencer fixed on doing the thing properly. He put ads in the Cook County Sentinel, fitted in chromium-plated soda dispensers along the rickety bar, and because he was a Louisiana boy who had gone through most of South East Asia with a stars and bars insignia in his forage cap there was a neon sign that read ‘The Rebel Den’.

  Even at the grand opening, when they had a couple of country bands playing on the open forecourt and Spencer’s buddies from the National Guard sat on the porch drinking root beer, the omens didn’t look good. Brownsville Junction lay on the western side of Choctaw Ridge at the point where the pine forest ended and the railway lines came snaking in from Nashville and the Gulf: a dusty main street and a strew of log cabins that led on to the trainsheds and the abandoned freight yards. For a while the old timers who remembered Spencer’s father came out at the weekends to stand in the asphalt car park trading reminiscences, but then in the mid-Seventies they cut back the railway service and Spencer found himself serving to a handful of local farmers and the odd hobo who’d fetched up in Choctaw forest. But he stuck it out. ‘Taking a dip in Van Hart’s trashcan,’ Barrett the journalist used to say when the talk turned to some conspicuously underfunded local amenity. Towards the end he turned into one of those ramrod-straight middle-aged men who live off their pride and no-one would dare offer a hand to, so it wasn’t until he was off in hospital at Johnson City and there was a FOR SALE sign up over the door of The Rebel Den that people started saying that it was a shame and what did Spencer’s folks reckon they were doing anyway?

  There was no close family. Spencer’s parents were both dead and his brother had left home years back, but a couple of nephews showed up at the funeral. They were fruit farmers away in Kentucky, people said, and neither of them had set eyes on Spencer since the day he left for the training camp at Fort Sumner. There was a third nephew called Ron who worked as a film stunt man out West and whose name sometimes appeared in the credits of Al Pacino films, but he hadn’t been seen in Cook County for twenty years and it was left to the fruit farmers to smoke dollar cigars on the church porch and talk to Spencer’s lawyer about legacy duty and probate.

  I was working down near Choctaw that week on a photography project for the State Forestry Board, so I didn’t get to see Spencer’s funeral, but Barrett stopped over one night on his way from a track-club meet at La Grange to fill me in. ‘You didn’t miss anything my man. Two Kentucky strawsuckers in K-Mart sneakers and pantsuits, looking like they couldn’t wait to collect. Reverend Daniels hadn’t hardly finished his oration before they were off to get the will read. You never saw anything like it.’

  I said it seemed like a lot of trouble to take over a rundown café that nobody wanted to buy. Barrett smiled that lazy, ornate smile that made him look like a Southern gentleman in an ante-bellum TV drama. ‘You got it my man. Leastways, those two bullet-heads walked out of the attorney’s office with a couple of unpaid electricity bills and Spencer’s collection of army cap badges. Last thing I heard, they were still arguing about who was paying for the train fare.’

  As it happened, Spencer’s nephews turned up two or three times in the next month or so. They ate prawn platter lunches with the real estate salesmen at Brackus’s bar and diner or had themselves driven out to the Junction where they stood inspecting the plywood shutters that had been put up after old Spencer got taken to hospital. ‘Kind of desperate,’ people said. They put ads three weeks running in the Cook County Sentinel real estate page offering the café at the same price Spencer had paid for it in 1972, but there weren’t any takers. Summer stretched on into September. The brothers went back to the farm twenty miles outside of Lexington, the grass curled up under The Rebel Den’s boarded-up windows and Joe Brackus cracked his old joke about the Kentucky dirt farmer who tried to reach his dog to write but then stopped when he found out the dog was smarter than he was.

  It was a wet fall that year. The rain blew in early from the Gulf and covered the back roads with a four-inch coating of mud, and the river burst its banks over by Degville Gap. Working down in the pine woods, taking shots of the felled timber or following the environmental department guy around
to snap pollution damage, I got used to sheltering behind the big trees waiting for the wind to drop, or staring out over the canvas roof of the foresters’ pick-up at the angry sky. Then on a particularly bad day, when it had rained for four hours clear and ruined two waterproof Nikon cameras, Barrett turned up in a borrowed convertible, wearing the three-button Fox Brothers suit the paper made him put on when he had to interview a state congressman or an assistant secretary from the DA’s office. There was no-one around – the forestry board manager was vacationing in Florida and the two girl assistants had taken the day off – so I figured on showing Barrett round the site, but he wasn’t interested.

  ‘Forget it my man. I seen enough trees to last me a lifetime.’ He looked shrewd for a moment. ‘Lee-Ann around here any place?’

  Lee-Ann was the younger of the two girl assistants, a forestry graduate from Tennessee State University and way out of Barrett’s league.

  ‘Gone to visit her daddy over in Marin County. You want to leave a message?’

  Barrett shrugged. ‘Can wait. Hey, guess who turned up in town the other day?’

  I suggested the ex-county Treasurer, who’d gone down under an embezzlement charge six months back, but Barrett smirked and pressed the tips of his fingers together in that way he had. ‘His parole don’t come up for a fortnight. No, Ron Van Hart showed up.’

  ‘Spencer’s nephew?’

  Barrett flicked me an impenetrable look in which awe and derision grimly contended. ‘He’s a big star my man. Maybe you don’t get to see his name at the top of the credits, but he’s up there with Pacino and Hackman. You ever see that inferno scene in Escape from Alcatraz, the one where the guy leaps out of the burning building on a pulley rope? Well, take it from me, it sure as hell wasn’t Clint Eastwood.’

  It was a characteristic of Barrett’s that he never explained how he came by his information. I watched as the convertible jerked away towards the low line of trees, their tips blown back and wavering in the wind. After this Ron Van Hart turned up a lot, a burly conspicuous figure in the gathering October gloom. He stood at the bar of Brackus’s blowing froth off his moustaches and buying drinks for grey-haired fifty-year-olds who claimed they remembered him from way back. Barrett wrote him up for the Sentinel, a lavish photo spread that featured Ron shaking hands with Richard Dreyfuss and doubling as Luke Skywalker on the set of Star Wars, and gradually people woke up to the fact that they had a celebrity in their midst. There was a two-year waiting list at the Stonewall, the gentleman’s club where the tobacco planters gathered on Saturday nights to play stud poker and drink juleps, but he had dinner there on his second evening and people started saying that Ron Van Hart was all right, not like some of your Hollywood actors that wouldn’t give the time of day to the folks they were brought up with. Meanwhile the FOR SALE board stayed up over the shutters of The Rebel Den.