The Broken Chariot Page 10

  ‘Down from three-o-one?’

  Barraclough sat nearby. ‘Watch he don’t cheat.’

  ‘I never do that.’ But he left him alone.

  He won four games out of five, and rather than walk away with a pound in his pocket spent it on beer for those he had defeated. ‘Pints all round. Have one as well,’ he called to Barraclough. ‘No hard feelings.’

  ‘Ah, all right, you bugger.’

  Halfway pleased at having broken through his guard, they wondered where a toffee-nosed hard case like him had learned to throw darts with such accuracy.

  The few bob a day made him abstemious, verging on niggardly after his easy-going factory time. A few pounds saved out of his pay, and from his wages before enlisting, gave enough to lodge at Mrs Denman’s on his first leave, and to take Eileen out as well.

  She loved her soldier Bert, who was more unlike one of the factory blokes than ever now that he had joined up. The loudmouth pose had never seemed natural to him, and now he was quiet and even polite, which led her to think he really loved her.

  Herbert found it easy to get her up to the bedroom while Ralph was out at ‘business’. Disembodied from the everyday world, a feeling almost of sin at all other men being at work, he drew the curtains, took off his clothes and watched her do the same. She had pleaded a day off, but at other times she would rush from the factory in her dinner break to pass half an hour in his arms, no opportunity to eat anything before getting back to the factory. ‘I can live on love,’ she said.

  He marvelled at the pale delicate skin of closed eyelids when she gave herself to him with loyal passion, and afterwards hinted at how their intimate courtship ought to become more formal now that he was a responsible adult in khaki. This turned him back into Bert, though only to himself. Not bleedin’ likely! He sensed in his deepest gut what she wanted. She craved that their togethering would go on forever, for them to be hugger-mugger in bed all night and every night, a situation in which he – her Bert – would get up, as he should in the morning, make his own breakfast, and go out to work, while she languished an extra half-hour because of her swelling belly. She would stand like a proud Daily Mirror mum with other women in the grocer’s queue to buy the weekly rations, then go back home to make the beds, wash up, and cook some slop for their supper. She could tek a running jump at herself – though he had to admit it was impossible not to believe they were profoundly attached, he in love with her, if she liked to put it that way.

  And yet, like a blade of light straying around their most delicious joinings, he recalled his hopeless juvenile yearning for Rachel, saw her oval peach-coloured face and large blue eyes from behind the topiaristically sculptured bush and across the ‘Dig For Victory’ lettuce patch as she strolled so unwillingly with Dominic and her parents. At times he imagined going softly into her, in the depths of some wood on a hot summer’s day, she lying with legs as open as Eileen’s and giving kisses as welcoming. He would shudder into an ejaculation sooner than intended, but felt such a fantasy was worth it, and in any case not much time went by before he could rise again.

  A long-term plan for seeing Rachel came to mind. She had pushed out a lizard tongue of contempt that first time, but almost seemed to like him after he had forced that little runt Dominic to make an introduction. She would be taller now, with shapely legs, and nice breasts (though not as big as Eileen’s) and would hold his arm in the most adoring way as she talked about paintings and the latest books he would by then have read. She would admire his quotations from Ovid, or look adoringly as he modestly related his adventures after coming back wounded – though not disabled – from some jungle or desert skirmish. The idea of never seeing her again made his heart ache miserably, putting him for a few minutes through a whirlpool of emotion he had thought himself too adult to bother with but which was relished for old times’ sake.

  He certainly didn’t intend sinking as far down into the life of a factory chap as to marry Eileen, warm and wonderful though she was in bed. He anchored his expectations, and therefore hers, from one day to the next. Whatever notions she had of their future were no concern of his. He ignored her hints, open and more plangent towards the end of his leave, except for vague agreements as to the kind of life she longed for. Being silent but polite was the best way of getting her into bed without too much awkwardness, and at such times, which she mistook for the possibility of acquiescence towards his responsibilities, her simplicity and trust was guaranteed to give him a good time and, he was sure, to go by her cries and behaviour, satisfy her as well. He teased her about the dreams she related, long and tedious narratives that got nowhere.

  ‘I like to dream,’ she said. ‘Dreams mean summat, that’s why I tell ’em yer. Last night I dreamed you and me was looking at a house to live in.’

  She wanted him to say how nice. ‘Lovely, duck. I dreamed I was walking over a frozen lake, and the ice gave way. It was ’orrible.’

  ‘Yo’ would, wouldn’t yer?’ But he couldn’t deflect her. She was, what was the word? – irrepressible. ‘I read horoscopes every day in the paper.’

  ‘And you believe in ’em?’

  ‘Course I do. They often come true. It might sound daft, but I like to.’

  He didn’t care what she dreamed, or what she read, only wanting her to be happy in the way he wanted to be happy. She mostly was, or seemed to be, seeing that if not she might drive him away. He envied her, living on the edge of her nerves – and her experience. When she couldn’t help but be moody his annoyance was marked by an even deeper silence, which brought her to earth more quickly than any argument. She then tried to be more cheerful, assuming he was discontented at being a soldier, and at having to leave her when his furlough came to an end – just as any young man would be.

  Archie called, his battledress bearing the shoulder flashes of the REMEs. Near the end of his leave and halfway bored, Herbert was glad to see him, and sat him down in Mrs Denman’s parlour. ‘Have a fag.’

  ‘I will but I’ve got this terrible thirst.’ He was slimmer, and there weren’t so many blackheads on his skin. In spite of his grousings about going into the forces he was as smart a soldier as drab khaki would allow. ‘The sooner we whistle up a drink the better.’

  ‘How you getting on in the army?’

  ‘Army? I’m back at school, learning how to mend fuses and roll telephone wire all over the shop at Catterick. I took a test to go on the course, and somebody said I must be intelligent when I passed. Me! Well, it ain’t too bad, a bit of a skive, though it might be useful later. There was nowt doing in camp this weekend, so I flitted for thirty-six hours. As long as the redcaps don’t stop me on the street and ask for my pass.’

  Herbert hoped he was wrong in assuming that Archie had gone AWOL. ‘You’re going back, though, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I bleedin’ well am. King George wouldn’t like it if I didn’t.’

  They went to Yates’s Wine Lodge and found a table in the gallery. Archie fished for his paybook and unfolded a paper. ‘I’ve got a leave pass, because I slipped one o’ the bone idle orderly room penpushers half a crown for it. But it needs somebody’s signature, otherwise it ain’t valid.’ He passed it across. ‘Just sign it for me, Bert. I’d do it myself, except the red caps ’ud spot the writing of a numbskull like me straight away. Any road, you’re a lance-jack. You know how to do it.’

  Herbert drained his jar to gain time. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll get stopped. It’d be a million to one chance. Another pint?’

  ‘Yeh. But it’ll look better if it’s signed. Just put RSM somebody or other. I’d never nark if it got twigged.’

  Herbert came back with the drinks, set them down, and took out his pen to scribble his father’s name on the form, demoting him to the rank of captain. ‘How’s Sheila, these days?’

  ‘Sheila? Going back a bit, aren’t yer? I’ve got somebody else now.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘She wanted to get engaged. Went all mam and dad on me. S
o I towd her to piss off.’

  Herbert laughed. So that was how you did it.

  ‘She said she’d wait till I got out of the army, but I towd her I worn’t interested. What’s the point gerrin’ married?’

  ‘None at all,’ Herbert agreed. ‘Let’s ’ave another.’

  ‘Any time. But drop me a line now and again.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll do that.’

  The names of wild flowers came back to him from school, but there weren’t so many around Nottingham, being shy in chill July. He told Eileen what some of them were, when she asked because she didn’t know what else to say as she warmed her failing spirit by pressing against his shoulder. They walked down a lane and into a field, on the last day of his leave.

  ‘It ain’t the end of the world, duck.’

  Nothing he could say would help because for her it was, or she thought it was, which must be the same. She had hardly noticed flowers before except poppies, which wanted to reach out to her from an age when she had caught sight of them with such delight on a school outing ten years ago, and had run from the bus to pick one by the head, blood red and fragile till blown into the grass where she let it be. ‘I could kill myself, I feel so rotten.’

  We’ll go back to the river, then, and you can jump in, if I don’t throw you in first. I’ll light a cigarette, and stand under the trees to watch you sink. Why can’t you live from day to day like me and just enjoy the good fucks we have now and again?

  A carpet of morning glory covered a hedge with white trumpets, some open and others closed, so maybe there’s a chance of no rain, he thought, if that’s what it means. The edge of the field was their horizon, but they stopped under a great elm. ‘Don’t think like that,’ he said. ‘You’ll have me crying in a bit, and soldiers aren’t supposed to.’

  ‘But I love you,’ she told him, ’and soldiers go away, and get killed.’ A lime-green and black dotted ladybird settled on her lip. She brushed it away. ‘Or summat else ’appens, and they don’t come back.’

  Here’s one that won’t, if you go on like this, and if I have any say in the matter. ‘Of course, soldiers come back. I will, you can bet, and you know why I will?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  He unbuttoned his battledress and lay it on the grass for this princess of the workbench. Walter Raleigh had nothing on him. ‘Because I love you, that’s why. You mean more to me than anybody else in the world.’ Pushing out all the pretence of Bert Gedling, he gave in to a feeling of luxury, and spoke as the words came out of his heart. ‘I’ve never been as close to anyone as I am to you, and I never will be. I know that. You’re the best person in the world, not one better anywhere.’ He couldn’t stop himself, didn’t see why he should, because every word was true. ‘I loved you the first minute I saw you in the factory, and I love you now a hundred times more than I did then, if that’s possible.’

  No effect. It was a more solid sign she wanted, a tawdry pawnshop engagement ring sliding on to her finger. Even if he had one he wouldn’t know which one to put it on, thought of walking away, the tragic swain rejected though all his poetry had been spoken. His feet wouldn’t move, and he didn’t want them to. ‘I love you. I can’t say any more than that.’

  So many tears that the shoulder of his shirt was wet. The tap runneth over. Her eyes were illuminated with misery and determination. ‘If you love me. Is that all?’

  ‘I’ll be back, you know that.’

  She sat down, her legs shaking, the skirt lifted to show shapely white ankles. ‘I took the day off work specially to be with you.’

  The ultimate sacrifice. He passed a clean handkerchief. The ring could wait. Words would be enough. No one was going to control his fate – if he could help it. ‘I’m glad you did. I appreciate it.’

  A fist struck at his leg, hurting her more than him, he was sure. ‘Don’t talk like that. Appreciate! Appreciate! You don’t mean it, I know you don’t, using words like that. Who are you, anyway? You don’t talk like anybody else. There’s summat fishy about you.’

  Not me, duck. You’re Pisces, and I’m Taurus. He wondered if she hadn’t cooked all this up as a way of getting shut of him, a cunning route through the jungle of her self-preservation. The thought chilled him, for a moment. To tell somebody to push off for good all you had to do was disagree on a basic issue, such as liking a different film star, or another sort of food, or saying you didn’t care for a certain place, or even a particular colour in a dress. That way you also gave whoever it was a reason to get rid of you. With primitive people of inferior intelligence you had to agree with everything, otherwise the union wasn’t viable.

  If he sank himself into the foreordained scheme of marital captivity he would give her a few kids and abandon her in five years, really ruining her life. The very picture made him want to say yes, let’s get engaged and then married and we’ll find a room, a flat, a house with a garden, and after the army I’ll pack it in at the factory and get a cleaner job elsewhere and in a few years I’ll love you even more and you’ll change so completely by being with me that people will think we came out of the same drawer. Then I’ll light off, beat it with spectacular suddenness, utterly unexpected, and it’ll be a lot worse if we’ve had kids because you’ll never hear from me again and you’ll be scrubbing floors to feed them.

  Perhaps she picked up the best of the reflections, for when he sat down all hope left her and she held him in a burning embrace, and they made the best love ever, he decided, at the crying out when she came.

  Looking up, he saw the large melancholy head of a cow with big purple eyes fixed on them from over the hedge. Definitely not, he said to himself, unpeeling the frenchie before turning to help her, though minutes passed before he could stop her crying.

  Back in camp a letter was waiting from Brigadier Thurgarton-Strang, in reply to one Herbert had written on joining up. His parents were on their way home by troopship and would get to Southampton in a month. As soon as Herbert could wangle a forty-eight hour pass they would like to see him and talk things over and please find the cheque inside for twenty-five pounds – a month’s wages at the factory, and about three months as a soldier. He smiled, looking at it back and front before slotting it into his wallet for use in an emergency, though thinking he might not cash it at all.

  Strangers were demanding his reappearance in a stage play he had walked out of years ago. What did they want to see him for? Who were they, in any case? Who was he, come to that? He felt a mix-up of curiosity and resentment, at the idea of meeting people who had abandoned him for seven years. He wouldn’t even know what they looked like, nor they him, as if arranging a rendezvous by a lion in Trafalgar Square with someone you’d never seen, so that you might stand a few yards apart fruitlessly waiting for hours. Lord Nelson high above would recognize him before they did. Still, they were his parents, or claimed to be, so he had to respond to their curt summons, acknowledging that at least the cheque had been generous.

  But should he go? Hard to say. In Nottingham he could have talked the matter over with Isaac, though in the end the decision would be his and nobody else’s. It wasn’t worthy of a grown-up to be uncertain when a brigadier wants to see you. There was nothing to do but, as with headmaster or foreman, do it with neither thought nor malice.

  London was familiar, and he walked as if the streets belonged to him. You could still tell the place had been bombed, odd corners roped off, brambles proliferating behind wire fencing. Gower Street was shabby, but he supposed it always had been. Smells of petrol, coal smoke and plaster dust enriched the air. At eighteen he felt superior to everyone, a soldier with creases as sharp as his reactions in dealing with traffic when crossing the road, disdaining green lights and Belisha beacons. Boots were blackened to the utmost shine, gaiters blancoed, and a belt buckle that winked at whatever young secretary, darting from a door on the way to get her sandwich for lunch, might glance back at him.

  The Underground train rattled along to Notting Hill Gate. He stood without s
trap-hanging, well enough balanced and controlled to stay upright at the stops and starts. Most of the people looked worn out, so closed in on themselves he wondered if they weren’t, in the words of Mrs Denman, sickening for something.

  He found the place easily on his map, a small but three-storied cottage kind of house in a street south of the main road. Within the railings two wooden tubs stood by the door, each holding an evergreen. Herbert adjusted his cap – though there was no need – to conceal his hesitation, not willing to put a hand on the knocker. He saw himself walk smartly away, a jolt to the heart at such a move, for he would never afterwards make contact. But they’d know where to find him, so escape was impossible. It would be easier and more sensible to meet them.

  He detected regret in the man who opened the door, at not having a skivvy to do the job. Times had changed. There were no servants now, at least not in this country, unless you were a millionaire or in the Labour Government, his father’s expression seemed to say. Herbert was led into a parlour whose bay window fronted the street. ‘Maybe we’ll have someone to look after us when we get back to the old place in Norfolk.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘I’ll be out next year. And then we’ll see. Meanwhile this doll’s house costs ten pounds a week. Sit down, my boy, and let’s have a look at you. I hope you don’t mind sandwiches for lunch?’

  Herbert’s head was level with that of this erect oldish bloke of nearly sixty who claimed to be his father, bald but for a few grey strands, a returning trace of rubicund in his face after the sea voyage. He removed his beret and stared into his father’s grey eyes. ‘Not at all, sir.’

  Hugh smiled. Mufti or not, you could tell he was a soldier, straight and slender, head seemed more inclined to the ceiling than to anybody else’s level. He held Herbert’s right hand with both of his, instead of returning the handshake that was offered. ‘Do you know, my boy, we were never worried when you bolted.’ He spoke as if the escape was yesterday, though maybe it was to him. ‘We were surprised at first, a little annoyed, I won’t say we weren’t, but that was about all. I always dreamed of doing it from my school, but never had the initiative to carry it out. It was good of you to let us know so soon, though. The first thing I did was write to your school and tell ’em they weren’t to go after you. Don’t suppose they liked it, but they must have known better than to argue.’