by Roy Lewis
‘I’d love a cup of coffee,’ she said, and made one for herself.
She was thirty and, in her own words, had known ‘more than a few fellers’.
‘So tell me what’s on, then,’ Ruby said and sipped enthusiastically at her coffee.
‘What do you mean?’ Sara asked. She was sitting down now, grudgingly drinking the coffee Andrew had made for her, and with an equal reluctance accepting Ruby’s thick-skinned presence in her van. Atmosphere was something Ruby never noticed, Andrew guessed: she could come into the middle of a quarrel, or enter the van when a young married couple had decided it was bedtime, and she could sit and talk, impervious as rubber, round, soft, persistent, and completely and utterly self-centred. She chuckled now, and Andrew liked her for her chuckle, her common giggle, her uncomplicated personality.
‘Forsyth,’ she said.
‘What about him?’ Sara asked, giving nothing away.
‘Oh, come on,’ Ruby insisted. ‘You know as well as I do old Jack Forsyth don’t come around here unless there’s trouble brewing. As far as this site is concerned he’s an absentee landlord. You got to remember, I been here on this site four years now, before you — and for that matter before Chuck Lindop — got here. And in that time I seen Jack Forsyth here maybe four times. First time was when the council raised hell over the mains, second time was when the gipsies heading for Stowford Fair tried to camp here on the site and he came over with the coppers from Netherfield. The others I don’t recall too well but they was trouble times, so this must be one too.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sara said coldly.
She found Ruby difficult to handle, Andrew guessed. Sara had changed over this last year. When he met her first she had been a little shy, but her personality was warm, and she had an enthusiasm for personal relationships of a close kind that made her very lovable. She was a dependent person, one who wanted to be looked after, and he supposed it was in this way that he had failed her. He knew as well as anyone that he was not to be depended upon; he was a weak reed; he needed support as much as she did for he lacked the necessary steel to deal with people and situations when they turned ugly. Ruby Sanders wasn’t like that. She had a streak of coarseness that enabled her to face the harsher aspects of life, a capacity to overcome vicissitudes that he envied and Sara could not understand. Ruby was difficult to keep out of your caravan; her own warmth spilled over into cunning and Sara could never tell where the one started and the other ended. It could be friendliness or calculation; openhandedness or manipulation; but whatever it was, it was confusing, and Sara could not handle her. She liked people to be straight and uncomplicated. Men should be male and strong and reliable. Women should be pliant — as she wanted to be pliant, and was not. But Ruby fitted no pattern. She was a woman who had found her own way of life in a male world; she had been used often enough, but she did her own share of using, too.
‘Well, it’s something to do with Chuck Lindop, that’s obvious,’ Ruby said.
‘Why do you suggest that?’ Sara asked.
‘Like I said, love, it’s obvious. Look here, Jack Forsyth isn’t the kind of chap who socializes. If he’s come here on to the site, on to his investment, it’s because something’s up. I been watching him. He arrived about three, didn’t he? He parked outside Chuck’s van there, went in for a chat with the Sharkeys on Site Nine. By three-thirty he was over with the Wilsons. Four o’clock he was with you. And stayed best part of an hour. Count up the way I do and the chances are he got what he was after here specially since he’s now up the field sitting outside Chuck’s van, waiting for Chuck to come back from wherever he is. But I’ll bet you a pound to a penny Chuck don’t come back while old Forsyth is here. Got antennae, Chuck has; antennae that tell him there’s trouble waiting. And he don’t turn up unless it’s the kind of trouble he wants.’ She scratched her cheek wonderingly. ‘Thing is, what did Forsyth want from you two nice young people?’
Andrew glanced uncertainly towards Sara, who glared at him to maintain silence.
‘I think Mr Forsyth is of the opinion that the site manager doesn’t spend enough time on the site,’ she said.
Ruby grinned. ‘That’s true enough, for sure. There’ve been times when he rarely left, of course.’ Something happened to her china blue eyes, a dark hint of regret and pain, but it was gone in a moment and replaced by a calculated malice. ‘And not so long ago either, once I’d moved down the field — or been moved, I should say.’ Her grin came again, broadened into a chuckle as some private joke touched her. ‘Fact is, that man’s got so many irons in the fire he don’t have time to stay on the site.’
‘Presumably Mr Forsyth pays him an adequate wage to look after it.’
‘Presumably,’ Ruby mimicked, not unkindly. ‘Yes, he does in fact, pays him a reasonable screw, but Chuck never did see this site managership as a job for life. Ambitious, he is. I could tell you things . . .’
She lapsed into a sudden silence. Andrew watched her as she placed both hands around her coffee cup and stared at the coffee. She was a moody person; her general devil-may-care gaiety made her attractive to men, good company, easy to get on with, but there were occasions when life suddenly got through to her again and she was touched by dark thoughts, realizations of pain when the self-induced drug of extroversion wore off and she felt exposed and raw and vulnerable. It was happening briefly now, and he was aware of the coarseness of her skin, the enlarged pores at the base of her rather large nose, the liberal makeup around her mouth and eyes.
Maybe that was how Sara always saw her. Andrew looked at his wife and observed how Sara had lost the critical downturn to her mouth as she noticed Ruby’s sudden vulnerability. She stood up, awkwardly, manoeuvring away from the table with difficulty, one hand on her spreading belly.
‘Another coffee, Ruby?’
‘Hell, no, haven’t finished this one. And you sit down, can’t have you trundling around with that little one kicking inside you. How long is it now, by the way?’
Sara shrugged. ‘Five weeks, they say. I feel like a mountain. Makes me short-tempered.’ It was the nearest she could get to an apology for her shortness and Ruby knew it. She waved a deprecating hand.
‘Ain’t we all short-tempered? Anyway, talk of that Chuck Lindop always makes me a bit mad, you know. I mean, when he moved me from where I was down closer to the lavatories I was so hopping I could have stuck a breadknife into him. Almost did, as a matter of fact, you know that?’ The grin was back. ‘You know what the bastard did? Chucked me a loaf. What can you do with a guy like that? You wave a knife at him and he makes you laugh! I mean, if it had been a proper loaf — but sliced bread!’
A light thump told them that Patch had returned with a leap into the van. Sara glowered but Ruby seemed not to notice. She put out her hand and Patch swaggered forward, confident in being loved. He licked her fingers.
‘Didn’t like you, did he, Patch? Put the boot up your backside a few times. Said dogs fouled up the camp site, and you do too, don’t you? I usually get him to go up against Lindop’s van, you know that? When it’s dark. Well, you got to take every chance you can get to manage your own back. But you stay away from him, Patch, you hear me? Stay well away.’
Patch dropped his rump, stretched out and muzzled his paws. Sara said, ‘He won’t be able to come in here, Ruby, not when the baby comes.’
‘He likes kids!’
‘It’ll be unhygienic!’
‘Not that we’ll be here long, anyway,’ Sara announced.
Ruby looked from her to Andrew in surprise.
‘You leaving after the baby comes? Is that why Forsyth was around here then? You didn’t tell me you were going!’
Andrew shook his head. ‘It’s not something we’ve really discussed ourselves yet. Of course, we don’t want to stay here longer than we have to — I mean, a caravan site is no place to bring up a baby, even if it is fairly close to the quarry for me. But we’ve not decided anything yet.’
> ‘We’ll be moving,’ Sara said firmly.
‘If we can afford it,’ Andrew said.
‘We’ve got to afford it, even if it means moving back to Oxford. If you’d only kept that bloody job of yours instead of getting made redundant things would have been better. We could have had some prospect to look forward to. Now, in that bloody quarry . . .
‘Oh, oh,’ Ruby said. ‘Marital fall-out. Thank God I never walked to the altar. There was a chap once, but we discovered I wasn’t pregnant after all so he scarpered pretty quick after that. .. So you’ll be selling the van, then?’
If we can prove it’s ours, Andrew thought, but said nothing as he caught the warning glint in Sara’s eye. ‘We’ll be selling,’ she said firmly.
Ruby shook her head. ‘Won’t be easy, you know. Chuck, he’s got a bloody good racket going, you know that? For starters, he sells the van on commission from Jack Forsyth. So he gets a rake-off for every van he sells. Every site gets filled, he gets a percentage on that. But when you want to sell yourself, he gets the right to veto the sale — you can’t just sell to anyone on this site. He has to approve it. And that means you pay a fee for the approval — or you don’t get it.’
‘We can sell off the site,’ Sara said indignantly.
‘Sure, but you have to pay him a fee before you can get the bloody van off!’
‘He can’t stop us moving it!’
‘Watch him do it! How you going to get a lorry on to the site to pull your van off if he refuses a lorry driver permission to come on to the site? You want to read the small print in your site contract, love. I tell you Chuck Lindop, and through him Jack Forsyth I suppose, has got us by the short and curlies every time.’
‘Is this right, Andrew?’ Sara asked. Her face had plumped out since the beginning of her pregnancy and she looked fine and healthy, but she had developed a tendency towards reddening at the slightest provocation. She was getting flushed now.
‘Well, I suppose so, I don’t really know. I haven’t read our contract for some time, but it may be there in the small print. I understand there are certain controls over van sales on the site; the idea is to make sure that undesirable persons don’t move on without permission. I mean, a sale could be made to a family that was . . . unsuitable, or something.’
Ruby was laughing at him openly, her red lips wide, her gums exposed above her white teeth. ‘Unsuitable’ she gurgled happily. ‘That’s a laugh. The only way someone could be unsuitable to Chuck Lindop would be if he had no money. But you take my word for it, lovers, you won’t find it easy to sell off this site. And make your profit, that is.’
Sara leaned forward suspiciously. ‘How do you mean, make your profit?’
‘Oh, come on, kid. You know in the main these residential vans hold their price. You pay six hundred pounds for one, couple of years you should be still able to get about five hundred pounds or more for it, because the newer models would have gone up maybe two hundred quid. But that’s the come-on that you’re given by an operator like Chuck Lindop. The realities are different.’
‘Tell me,’ Sara said grimly.
‘Simple enough,’ Ruby said, obviously enjoying the opportunity to air her knowledge of the world to these young unsophisticates. ‘You decide to sell your van, right? You tell Chuck, because after all it’s in your site agreement that he has first offer, so the van can stay on the site for letting purposes. I mean, it is all but bedded in, isn’t it, with running water and everything? Okay. So you go to him, you tell him, he gives you that great, warm, wide smile of his and he says of course he’ll make you an offer. What about three hundred pounds for the van you paid twice that much for?’
Ruby settled back in her chair; Patch raised his head briefly, calculated Ruby wasn’t about to leave and settled down again.
‘I’d tell him what he could do with his three hundred pounds,’ Sara said.
‘So you’d tell him. Who wouldn’t? Pete Orton did. But he sold out to Chuck eventually. And at a lower price, too.’
‘But why?’
‘Because it was costing him not to!’ Ruby shook her head. ‘Peter had retired, took the van for a year, decided he didn’t really like the air after all and wanted to return to Oxford. Chuck made him a poor offer for his van and Pete told him what he could do with his money. Like you’re going to, hey? Well, come winter that van was still here, Pete was still paying rent for it, travelling up from Oxford weekends to show people over it, and what happened? Nobody prepared to buy. Why not? Because every time Pete found a buyer Chuck queered the whole thing. Either he wouldn’t allow a truck on the site, or he didn’t approve of the buyers, or he wasn’t prepared to allow them in unless they paid him a commission — it was hell for the old man. So he took the easy way in the end. He gave in. Sold to Chuck. Following week the van was moved off the site and that was that. But you tell me things will be different with you? Maybe. But let me see it.’ She gestured towards Sara’s hands lightly resting on her stomach. ‘With Pete Orton it was retirement and shortage of cash. With you . . . will you hold out for long with a baby around?’
‘Chuck Lindop may be inclined to be more helpful towards us,’ Sara said.
Ruby gave her a calculating look. ‘He’s always more helpful towards women — if there’s no man around. But then it’s just that the payment’s different. But like I said, things may be different with you. I’m just giving you kids a warning. Don’t expect generosity from our site manager — it’s a condition too close to miraculous to be expected . . . Who’s up there with Forsyth?’
Sara twisted slightly in her seat so that she could look out past the curtains to the top of the site. Andrew stooped also to peer out. The flint track curved slightly along the sixty yards to Chuck Lindop’s van, which also served as a site office. Flanking the track, some thirty feet away on each side, were the unoccupied vans, and parked near the top one was Jack Forsyth’s Rover. Beside it was a burly man with matted, curly hair and a leather jacket and jeans.
‘It’s Mr Samson,’ Sara said.
‘He’s talking with Forsyth?’ Ruby rose, peered out of the window. She had lost some of her confidence; her eyes were brighter and she seemed a little breathless. In another person it could have been nervousness, but in Ruby it could have had different roots and causes. She leaned over Sara to peer out; Sara smiled at her. There was an edge of malice in her voice when she said, ‘Pity you’re so far down the site, Ruby, isn’t it?’
For just a second anger scored Ruby’s face. She looked down at Sara as though about to make a sharp retort but she glanced swiftly at Andrew and bit it back. Her mouth relaxed. She managed a grin. ‘A walk down the site never does any man harm, Sara. But I’d better get along.’
Sara wouldn’t let it go. In the old days, before they were married, and when they were newly married, she would never have let rancour touch her eyes or her words.
‘Yes, you’d better hurry, Ruby. I gather he likes to have his slippers warmed for him.’
She was tangling with the wrong person.
Ruby produced her falsest smile. ‘There are some women who keep nothing warm for their men,’ she said, and called to Patch to follow her. With an apologetic look towards Andrew, Patch followed.
* * *
‘That was uncalled for.’
‘You started it, Sara.’
‘Why is it you never stick up for me, but always take the other person’s point of view?’
It was an argument that was now almost exhausted. In the forty minutes that had passed since Ruby Sanders had left their van Andrew and Sara had gone over the same bickering ground. When Sara accused Andrew of taking sides with Ruby against his wife he disagreed. Sara accused Andrew of liking Ruby and he agreed — he did. She was open, honest — relatively honest, anyway — and uncomplicated. She was also a whore, Sara announced. Andrew stepped back from that one.
But there were signs of Sara’s winding down. She felt tired. The baby had been active today, Forsyth’s visit had unsettl
ed her, and she was feeling generally out of sorts and dissatisfied with herself. Andrew understood how she felt; she was too aware of her condition, too concerned about her appearance. Where some women held their pregnancy proudly Sara did not. They had not intended making a baby. Now, the baby was coming. Sara resented it. Andrew kept away from that one too.
But, inevitably, after supper when Sara was rested, the arguments started again. What had Forsyth been hinting at? Was the sale of the van to Andrew and Sara legal? Had Andrew ever received a bill of sale from Chuck Lindop? It went on and on, the words grinding at him, and he tried to read in the gaslight as the summer evening closed in. His head began to ache. He heard cars leaving the site and Sara moved on to a new tack.
Here she was, twenty-two years old, and already she was house-bound. No, not even house-bound. Van-bound! Everyone was going out tonight, heading for Stowford and the fair. What had she seen of it? Nothing! There had been a time when they used to go out nights, but not now. And there was Ruby going off again. She supposed she’d have a good time and she was nearly ten years older than Andrew Keene’s wife! It was all so unfair.
‘Be sensible Sara,’ Andrew said irritably. ‘You can’t go out to Stowford on the bus the way you’re feeling.’
‘We could go if you had a car.’
‘Well, I haven’t got a car!’
‘You’d have a car if you had a better job!’
Andrew grimaced angrily. ‘We’d have a car if you drew that money out of the building society too, but that’s not the point. The money stays there because we’ll need it, when the baby’s growing, and when we can afford a mortgage to buy a house. But in the meanwhile, there’s no car, we live in a van, I’ve got a job at the quarry and it’s the best I can do for the moment.’