Birthday: A Novel (The Seaton Novels) Read online

  Her smaller and more perfect apple was soon finished. ‘I expect he’d do it if he had to.’

  ‘If somebody tried to make him he’d get out of it. Can you see him sitting all nice and quiet like me as he worked? He’s far too canny to get sergeant-majored into this.’

  She reached for another. ‘You mean you don’t like to do it? I can read you like a book.’

  ‘And what page are you on now, sharpshit?’

  ‘I can see you aren’t doing very well.’

  ‘That’s because you pick all the little ’uns, and leave the monsters to me.’ He sliced the completed apple into the bowl. ‘I love doing this, you know I do.’

  ‘Tell me another.’

  ‘Have I ever complained?’

  ‘No, but I can tell by the look on your face that you don’t exactly enjoy it.’

  ‘Do you expect me to look as if I’ve just opened the newspaper to page three? I’m concentrating. I love cutting up apples. The first thing I said when I learned to talk was to ask mam if she’d got any apples that wanted cutting up. When she said no I cried so loud people in Derby thought there was another riot in Nottingham. I used to go scrumping, and no orchard was safe. Every day I’d come back with my jumper full of apples so’s I could sit at the table cutting ’em up. Mam had to drag me away when she wanted to put newspaper and jam jars on the table so that we could have some tea with our bread and lard.’

  He kissed her on the mouth. ‘I was dreaming about ’em all last night, and thought I was in paradise. Apples was falling from a tree. You was there as well, and gave me one to eat. You looked at me in a very funny way, but before I could take one I woke up.’ His aspect turned to dark brooding. ‘On the other hand, when I get my claws on Oliver, who out of the goodness of his heart – so don’t tell me – gave us these two bags of scabby drops I’ll tell him where to shove ’em.’

  ‘A man at his age can’t climb the trees to pick them fresh,’ she said. ‘Nor can he send his wife up. You know she’s got arthritis.’

  ‘That’s what he says. She’s so fat it takes all his strength to get her upstairs at night. Anyway, when I see him I’ll take this knife’ – he spun it a half circle before spearing the next apple – ‘cut his heart out, and throw it on the compost heap he’s always bragging about.’

  ‘It’s very generous of him.’ She expertly sliced half an apple into the bowl, each piece exactly the same size. ‘Every year he gives us these Bramleys. The delicious stewed apple lasts us all winter, and I’ve never known anyone gobble it like you, especially when I put it in a tart with a nice thin crust. So get on with it. You’ve only done two, and I’m on my fifth. You’re too busy talking.’

  ‘I can cut apples up and talk at the same time.’

  ‘I know you can, but you aren’t.’

  He sliced another half into the bowl. ‘Oliver doesn’t only give us apples. He brings you a bunch of chrysanthemums as well.’

  ‘Yes, beautiful big white ones.’

  ‘I think he fancies you.’

  She laughed. ‘A man who’s had six kids?’

  ‘They’re grown up. He’s got plenty of time on his hands.’

  ‘He spends every spare minute in his garden. Even his wife says she doesn’t see anything of him.’

  ‘Yeh, he potters there every day, even in December when it looks like something left over from the First World War. He’s on his hands and knees by the apple trees praying for a good harvest so’s he can give more to us. He hates apples himself, he told me. He gives ’em out to everybody else, to make their lives a misery when they have to cut ’em up like this. He knows what he’s doing. It don’t bear thinking about. One day the whole district’s going to rise up against him. You’ll know who they are as they go by the window because they’ll all have cut fingers, and be swivel-eyed from staring at too much apple skin.’

  ‘He’s generous, that’s all I know. I thought he was supposed to be your friend?’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘He helped you when you had that allotment. Hey,’ she cried, ‘that was a whole apple you threw in the compost bucket.’

  He picked it out: it was rotten all the way through. ‘He had to. We had the plot in common. Still, you’re right, he’s a good sort. I’ve never known anybody so good hearted. We used to have some right old times at that allotment on long summer nights.’

  ‘Yes, the state you were in when you got home.’

  He held up his knife. ‘I’ve done three. It must make a difference to if you was on your own.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be doing it on my own, would I?’

  ‘You would if I wasn’t good enough to give you a hand.’

  ‘I don’t know how you could have had so much that night you got back. You came in and dropped the onions all over the floor.’

  ‘That was an accident. I tripped over the carpet.’

  ‘You should have seen yourself, trying to pick everything up. All I could do was laugh.’

  ‘I wasn’t drunk. I never get drunk, you know that. It was just that Oliver had brought these six packs of lager out of his car, and we sat on the seat talking. We started at seven, and it didn’t get dark till ten. He was telling me what a tartar his mother had been to him and his five brothers. All of them worked down the pit, and when they came in with their wage packets they had to put them on the table unopened. She sat there in a chair like Queen Elizabeth, and slit each one open with a pearl-handled paperknife. She gave each of the lads five bob back for spending money.’

  ‘That wasn’t much.’

  ‘That’s what Oliver said. But none of them dared say anything. She kept the rest of the money, for housekeeping. Even when they were grown up men of twenty-one they still had to hand in their wage packets every payday. “Why didn’t you just tell her to piss off?” I said to Oliver. “You don’t know what she was like,” he said. “We were terrified of her. We daren’t say a word. We’d been brought up to it from babies, so none of us knew any different. She fed us all right, or just about. She had to if she wanted us to go on working hard and bringing in our money. When we wanted to piss in the toilet she told us we had to sit down to do it, not like in other places where you could stand up, in case we splashed her precious bit of pink carpet. She was dead hot on that. When I was twenty-two I met a nice girl and wanted to bring her home to tea, and when I told my mother, you can’t guess what she said.” I told him I didn’t suppose anybody could: “What did the old cow say?” “Well,” he said, “she told me I could bring her home to tea if I liked, but I’d have to pay the expense of it out of my own money.”

  ‘I was shocked to the backbone: “And did you?” “What could I do?” “And what did your mother think of her?” “Oh, she was polite,” Oliver said, “I will say that, but that’s about all. Six months later I got married.” “What,” I said, “to your mother?” “No, the girl, you daft prat.” “And did your mother get into bed with you and your girl when you went on your honeymoon?” “Don’t be so fucking soft.” “Well, I’ve got to wonder,” I said. “But what did your mother do with all the money you and your brothers earned at the pit?” I was dying to know. “Oh,” he said, “she and me dad used to go travelling. They went all over the place. One time they went to the Bahamas, another year they went to Australia, to see one of her brothers, who’d got as far away from her as he could, but she still found him. Over the years they went everywhere. I don’t think she liked it much, because she used to complain at the scruffy hotels and rotten food. But that didn’t stop her. I don’t know why she did it, except maybe she was punishing herself for what she was doing to us.”

  ‘You can imagine how easy it was to get through so many cans of beer while he told me all that,’ Arthur said. ‘And he wasn’t bitter about it, only a bit puzzled as to why him and his brothers had put up with it for so long.’

  ‘Is that a true story? But cut up another apple while you tell me.’

  He reached for the smallest. ‘It was jus
t as he told it.’

  ‘And what happened to her in the end?’

  ‘She died, only last year. The old man pegged out ten years before. I suppose he couldn’t take anymore. She was ninety-seven, and the lads were frightened of her right to the end. They were all married, but had to visit her every week so’s she could tell them what work to do about the house. Only a month before she died she told them to paint her kitchen, and they set to and did it. It never occurred to them to argue. She was bright and bossy to the end. Oliver’s older than me, and I could see his hands shaking while he lifted can after can to his lips. That’s why I drank so much: I had to keep up. He said he’d never talked to anybody about it, and that I was a real pal for listening. It all goes to show how you can have a rotten mother like that, and the kids still turn out to be good sorts.’

  ‘I thought your mother was a very nice woman,’ Avril said in her silkiest voice.

  ‘Oh, did you?’ The knife, due to clumsiness, or from having changed to smaller apples, nicked the ball of his thumb, the skin turning a deep red.

  ‘You’re bleeding.’

  ‘Am I? Where?’

  ‘Look at it!’ She crossed the kitchen for a sheet of paper towel. ‘Put this around while I get a plaster.’

  He did as he was told. ‘Don’t worry, it’s only blood. Pass me a basin, and I’ll save it for breakfast. I can carry on like this.’

  ‘Wait till it dries.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘what were you saying about my mother?’

  ‘I said even though Vera was a good woman you didn’t turn out too bad.’ After her second husband died and she was on her own again, happy in her ground-floor flat whose rent was paid by the council, they took her once a week to the supermarket, and made sure she wanted for nothing. Derek and Eileen also kept a watch over her, and though Brian couldn’t get up often from London he had a telephone installed and took care of the bills. In her old age cataracts were removed from both eyes at the hospital and she was able to see again, so that when she died at eighty-five she had a fag in one hand and a mug of tea in the other, while watching television.

  ‘Come on,’ Avril said, ‘take that bit of paper towel away and I’ll put this plaster on. The blood will come through if you don’t.’

  ‘No, don’t bother. It’s dry now.’

  ‘Oh, you shirker. Look at all those apples still to be done.’

  ‘There ain’t so many. It won’t take long, after I’ve made a cup of tea.’

  ‘So that’s how you mean to get out of it?’

  ‘You want one as well, don’t you?’

  ‘All right, but I want more help with all these. There’s still the other bag, don’t forget.’

  ‘Wait till I get my hands on Oliver.’

  ‘It’s not his fault. And I don’t think you can blame his mother, either. The poor woman must have had a hell of a time bringing up six coalminers. No wonder she was so strict.’

  ‘Yeh, she had to go to Australia to unwind.’ He dashed three spoons of tea in the pot and set cups on the table. ‘I haven’t told you I’m investing in a chainsaw, have I?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘There’s a model you can charge up from the mains and take outside without having to plug in a lead.’

  She spilled some tea over the apple leavings. ‘Oh what a wicked thought! Just because you’re too idle to cut up a few apples.’

  ‘I love you being so quick on the uptake. But the nights are pulling in, so I’ll sneak out in my camouflage suit, my face black with boot polish, while Oliver and his missus are upstairs sleeping off their cider. With the chainsaw slung over my back like an anti-tank weapon, I’ll get over the wall, and zig-zag across his garden – like we did in the army. Then I’ll switch on the chainsaw and shout: “Timber!” every time an apple tree goes down.’

  ‘I’ll bet you would, you rotter.’

  ‘I’ve got to. Even if he lives to be ninety he’ll still come wheeling his bags of Bramleys from door to door in a pram, just to make people’s lives miserable. Anyway, have another cup of tea. You lost half of that one laughing. Oliver and me had some good times together. I just hope his trees get blight and stop breeding.’

  ‘I will have more tea,’ she said. ‘But when you’ve poured it you can help me cut up the rest of these apples. With two bags done we’ll have enough for the winter.’

  He tapped her wrist. ‘You missed a bad bit on that one.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Some peel fell on it.’ She flicked it away. Rain came at the window like the rattle of unstrung beads. ‘I thought that was going to happen.’

  He scooped heaps of chippings into a plastic bucket, then cut the rot from the biggest apple remaining. ‘I saw that forecast as well, but I shopped around till I got a better one. I started on Radio Four, and on Radio One the prospects still didn’t seem good so I switched channels around the telly till I found one which said it was going to be fine all day. Searching for a good forecast gives me something to do when I’m not cutting up apples.’

  ‘You can always work in the garden if you’re bored.’

  ‘Not when it’s pissing down. It’s a sea of mud out there. No wonder Brian lives in London. It rains less, and it ain’t as cold.’

  ‘If everybody lived in the south nobody would be up here, would they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to live there, though I don’t mind having a look at it now and again. I expect you miss it more than I do.’

  ‘You live where you live.’ Her fingers were speedy, each piece neatly cut. ‘I’ve always been happy enough up here.’

  ‘Brian loves it here, but he’s got to be where the work is.’

  ‘Look, we’re getting through them now. See how quickly they go when both of us are at it?’

  Half a dozen left, and he couldn’t wait. ‘I think we’ll deserve a treat when it’s done.’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘I don’t know. Have you got any ideas?’

  ‘Why should I have?’

  He recalled the Medieval Night Out they’d gone to five years ago in Warwickshire. He’d had a beard and weighed a couple of stone more, till Avril put him on a diet and he lost them. A hundred people in two coaches from Nottingham were sat at long tables in a great wainscotted hall, fires erupting at either end, placecards indicating your seat bent double on the halfway mark and looking like miniature soldiers’ bivouacs between the knives and spoons. Written on the side of his was: Thane Arthur Seaton.

  A couple of Great Danes bigger than Shetland Ponies and twice as rugged plodded up and down as if hoping to get jobs as mobile ornaments in the back of ex-colliers’ Rovers, though Arthur assumed they were more for flinging bits of dinner to like Charles Laughton in Henry the Eighth. Pots of mulled wine with cloves were put into your hands as soon as you went in, with chicken legs and venison sticks, and sausages like pricks worn to a frazzle after an orgy, to while away the time till the barons of beef roasting on spits were done, Arthur thinking it a pity they weren’t real barons.

  Scullions ran up and down with earthenware platters laying slabs of burnt offering on everybody’s plate, and serving wenches with their tits about to jump for freedom walked around making sure your flagon of mead never got below the halfway mark. Mine Host had done his best to put wives and husbands as far apart as possible.

  After apples and frumenty for dessert one of the wenches came to see if Arthur wanted anything else, a question which nearly choked him. ‘What’s your name, love?’

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘I had a sister called Sarah, and I thought she was the loveliest girl in the world – till I met you.’

  ‘Oh, you liar.’

  ‘I never say anything I don’t mean.’ After more such talk she was on his knee, and he was gratified to feel the pure heat from her arse scorching through his trousers as she put her face forward for another kiss, such warmth not known since Brenda used to plonk herself in the same place to lighten the mood before going up the wooden hil
l when Jack was on nights.

  Short of dragging this lovely girl (from Sutton Coldfield) under the table and sliding the mutton dagger home – burbles of enjoyment hidden by the jollity above – there was little he could do but see to her breasts now and again, which she didn’t mind, perhaps liking to be on daddy’s knee while he whispered into each delicate oyster ear as she wrote her phone number on the back of his placecard, and slid it unseen into his jacket pocket.

  ‘I thought it would end in an orgy,’ he said on the steps of the coach.

  ‘You look a bit cheated that it didn’t,’ Avril said. ‘I suppose it would have been amusing, except the man at our table was overweight, and he had a beard with bits of grey in it, so I didn’t fancy him. You should have heard the language when the woman across from me told her swain to get lost as well. Then we sat talking, which was a lot more interesting.’

  The apples done, he drew her into his arms for a kiss, but her lips were there first. ‘So this is what you had in mind?’

  ‘It must be the apples. They act on me like Spanish fly.’

  ‘It feels as if you’ve been to the chemist’s and bought a box of those Viagra pills.’

  ‘When I’m ninety I’ll get the doctor to put me on ’em. Apples’ll do till then.’

  ‘You’ve got something to thank Oliver for, after all.’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky, and come to bed.’

  ‘I wondered when you were going to ask me.’

  ‘Well, now I have.’

  NINE

  Eileen pointed: ‘Here they come.’

  A pigeon got lift-off at the screech of Arthur’s horn, and he backed into a free space in case a hurried departure should be necessary. Old habits died hard.

  Brian, glad to flex knees and stretch his aching thighs, opened the door to get Avril safely out and standing. Then he embraced Derek, and kissed Eileen. ‘All right, then?’

  Derek showed the same broad smile as when he was a kid. ‘Have a good run from London?’