Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels) Page 11

  Bored, he decided to let it free on the next sally, but the sight of the cat leaping to freedom was too much, and before it could scatter its four legs among holes and furrows, he had set it firmly down again on his knees.

  He made a low fence around it with his arms, a tempting barrier that was hardly noticed; it stayed where it was, belly stiffened with rage, eyes staring, tail waving back and forth like the electrical-contact mast of a dodgem-car. Instead of bounding forward, it swung away to the side, under his hand, to the nearest bush. Brian threw himself down, held nothing but its tail end. The cat howled a slow threat, urged its strong body away from what millstone had caught it, from the vice closing tighter and tighter the more it heaved. Brian looked at the straining back, at fur-marks of black and grey and mustard yellow mixed in, at the ears trying to twitch, at the head bent forward like a bull’s.

  The long tail relaxed. A mass of sharp needles ran along the soft fleshy inside of his arm, leaving pale white indentations the size of small fishbones magically turning red.

  But he didn’t let go. He picked up the cat with both hands so that he was helpless, cuffed it twice about the head, and threw it to the middle of the garden. With a scuffle of orientation it hit the soil, skidded towards the hedge, and was free.

  He dabbed at his bleeding arm with a black handkerchief, walking slowly to the house. His grandmother turned from the fire: “What have you gone and done now, you silly lad?”

  “I fell into a bush,” he told her.

  She busied herself in a drawer for clean linen to bind it. “I don’t know, getting scratched like that. I’ll bet you was after bird nests. You’ll get sent on board ship if a policeman catches you at it, you will and all.”

  Lydia promised him a trip to the Empire. She was a stout, good-looking thirty-five and still unmarried, and was making sure, so Brian had heard his mother say, of a good time before settling down. The man courting her, though, was grey-haired and thin-faced, and sent Brian running errands to a dozen different places every time he came to the Nook for an afternoon. He had consumption, Lydia said. (“She’ll never get it, and that’s a fact,” Vera remarked, when discussing the case with Seaton.) “What’s consumption?” Brian asked, when Lydia was getting ready.

  “Mek sure an’ wash yer tabs out. It’s a disease,” she informed him, taking the flannel and rubbing his ears violently, which he resented and struggled to evade. “When yer badly an’ wain’t get better.”

  “Do they tek everybody away then when they’ve got consumption?”

  “Ay,” she said, “they do. If you don’t make haste, we’ll be late and then Tom’ll be mad.”

  It was raining, and the muddy lane was darkened by wet hedges like rows of steaming camels on either bank. Lydia clutched his hand as they walked with heads bent: it was his first time to the Empire, and everyone spoke of it as a marvel, something more grandiose than the Great War, as legendary and surprising as the wooden horse of Troy. Well scrubbed, and dressed in a new coat, he was aware of being taken to somewhere posh and rare. “What’s going to be on?”

  She pulled him along: “Singing and dancing, and people who mek you laugh.”

  “Cowboys and Indians?”

  “No, not tonight.”

  “Aren’t there any lions and tigers and snakes?”

  “Them’s in a circus,” she said. “Besides, you don’t want to see such nasty things. They bite you.”

  He had been so certain of seeing unique and astonishing scenes that he hadn’t bothered before this to question it; and now his wide-open ever-deepening stage had shrunk to a few lights shining on a woman singing at one end and a man trying to make people laugh at the other. He bit his lip in anger: had he been forced to get washed for that?

  When they got off the bus in Nottingham the rain had lifted and the world changed. Slab Square rose up and greeted him on the forehead when he tripped, leaving a mound soon forgotten in the well-lit confusion. The dull sky seemed to be held at bay by barking newspaper sellers who thrust folded Posts at Lydia as they went across the square. Though he was big enough for his age, she dragged him through crowds like a dog on a lead, mixing him with traffic while his eyes were elsewhere: in dazzling windows, on the highlighted cabs of advancing buses, on faces crowding their reflected images in the wet pools before his feet. A sonorous booming of the great council-house clock ruled over the tinselled darkness for eight long beats, drowning voices and motor-horns, leaving only a smouldering smell of petrol until the world opened again after the collapse of the final gong. “Come on,” she tugged, “what are you counting them for? It’s eight o’clock and if we don’t ’urry we’ll keep Tom waiting.”

  Tom already had the tickets, had got them half an hour ago, he said, and been for a drink to the Peach Tree rather than stand in the rain. Brian thought of him as old, dressed in a white muffler and good topcoat, hair well-combed with brilliantine, tall and delicate and never saying boo to a goose—a phrase he’d heard his grandfather use about him. Merton found him easy to tolerate, even had a certain respect for his gentleness. He’d been a bit of a lad though once, Lydia said with some pride—though in lieu of this, consumption had given him dignity. Tom had worked twenty years in the tobacco factory, and it was assumed that dust had caused his consumption so that the union made sure he had the wherewithal to maintain himself. Though in one way he appeared as strong as any other man, in another he seemed hardly to exist, walking on the world’s rim as if ready to shake hands and say goodbye to it at a week’s notice. He was in the rare position of a man regarded as dying on his feet, yet was looked upon by others with as much respect as if he had in some way proved himself a scholar, though as far as Brian knew he never read anything but newspapers.

  Time went quickly. Brian kept his eyes on the stalls clock, hardly laughed at what the funny men said, though he was amused when they fell about the stage. He liked the man with the seal best because it barked and flapped its feet when everybody clapped. The only thing he didn’t like while fixed in his plush seat was the cigar smoke, and he felt sick until lost at what was happening on the stage. But the swirl of glaring colours clouted his brain and stupefied his ears with the music’s tuneful and furious beating. His eyes stared when women danced across the stage in something that looked like a bathing costume, and pushed out even harder when someone came from the wings in what looked like nothing at all.

  At the interval Tom and Lydia smoked cigarettes, something Lydia never dared do in the house. She opened the packet and folded back the silver-paper with deliberate pleasure, handing the cigarette-card to Brian. When the ice-cream woman came down the gangway she said, feeling for her purse: “Get three tupp’ny cups, Brian, there’s a good lad.”

  Tom pushed a shilling into his hand, and he struggled against solid-tree-trunk legs along the row, elbowed his way up the blocked gangway. Many people stood talking, and he waited in an ice-cream queue for the freezing cardboard cups and wooden spoons, novelties he had never seen in such pristine condition, had seen only crushed and mud-marked underfoot. He was reading the words on each when the lights dimmed for the second half.

  Curtains opened, and a flourish of oriental music was driven out from the orchestra as if at the crack of a whip. Brian guided himself down the gangway, looking along each darkening row for Lydia and Tom, and keeping an eye turned on the stage so as to miss nothing. A black-faced lady in flowing robes appeared from the proscenium, greeted by arabesques of eastern music. Brian stared at her elaborate robes and turbanned headdress, at the silks and satins covering her figure with such neatness, was even more entranced at her sudden strange wailing. “Hey,” he called, a few yards from his seat, “Aunt Lydia, is she the Abyssinian queen?”

  “She must be,” came some answer.

  “That’s a good ’un.”

  “She does look like it, and all.”

  “I never thought of it myself.” Remarks flitted among the laughter, and Lydia pulled him into his seat, convulsed herself. Brian peeled
the top from his ice-cream, eyes still on the stage, half believing himself to be in Abyssinia except when he turned to see the red-framed figures change as the curtains swung to for a new act.

  The bus made him feel sick on the way back so Lydia and Tom got out to walk. “The trams never used to mek people badly,” she remarked. “But these new trolley-buses is terrible.” They didn’t mind the walk: it was fresh and without rain, and Brian saw a million stars when he looked up, like luminous breadcrumbs on some mighty tablecloth. Lydia and Tom stopped at a pub, left him outside while they had a couple at the saloon bar, and they came out after half an hour, Lydia bending with beer-smelling breath to give him a packet of crisps. They turned down the dark road, passed the fire of a nightwatchman’s hut where new drains were being laid.

  “Uncle Tom,” he asked, “is Abyssinia a long way away?”

  “Yes,” he told him, laughing, “ever such a long way.”

  “How far?”

  “Thousands o’ miles.”

  “I’d like to go there.”

  “You will some day.”

  “I want to go soon.”

  “Them black people’ll eat you if you do,” Lydia said.

  “No, they wain’t. I’ll ’ave a gun like they ’ave on’t pictures. Anyway, Paul Robeson’s Abyssinian and ’e don’t eat people.”

  “That’s a good ’un!” Tom said.

  Houses were left behind and they walked through the long tunnel of the railway bridge, where Lydia was always afraid with or without Tom’s company. “Come on,” she snapped to him, “don’t tread in them puddles o’ water, you’ll get your socks all wet.”

  “I’d like to go to Abyssinia,” he said. “I want to goo a long way.”

  “I wish you’d stop talking about Abyssinia,” she complained. “You’re getting on my nerves.”

  They walked for a time in silence. “I’m going to draw a map when I get home, Aunt Lyddy.”

  “You don’t know how to draw maps,” she said, easier in her mind now that they were near the Nook.

  “I do; it’s easy.”

  “That’s the first thing I knew.”

  “We do ’em at school,” he persisted. “I like making maps up.”

  Tom said he wouldn’t go in with her, and they drew together by the hedge in what looked like a more desperate combat than that which was supposed to have taken place between St. George and the Dragon. After a few minutes Tom went into the blackness of the lane, and Lydia opened the gate so that she and Brian could go into the lighted house.

  CHAPTER 7

  Ada, by marrying Doddoe, had unwittingly outlawed her children from the Nook. Doddoe was a “bad lot,” Merton swore, a foul-mouthed drunken bully beyond the railings of reason or help or pity. His son-in-law would have laughed and agreed arrogantly with the truth of these random verdicts if Merton had said them to his face—which he hadn’t bothered to do, though Merton’s fiery stick-brandishing ostracism was nevertheless known.

  Doddoe had an inside demon whose existence he was unable to acknowledge, a figure pictured by a friendly yet untrustworthy grin on Doddoe’s actual face, that pulled the strings of his recklessness in the most haphazard seesaw fashion. Harold Seaton didn’t like him, having frequently been put out when associated with Doddoe’s misadventures, and nothing made Seaton more black-dog depressive than to be put out by something. There was the time when the pair of them collected all the spare underwear their wives possessed and pawned it for the pleasure of a pint and a seat at the pictures. In retaliation Ada had laid hands on Doddoe’s Sunday boots and pawned them, for four shillings, which she shared with Vera because neither had any food to put on the table. But these were minor tribulations of Ada’s misery. Doddoe once blacked her eye before going to work, and returned after a prodigious stint of overtime in the evening to see not a limb of kid nor stick of furniture left in the house, whence it was his turn to roar all night like a stabbed bull in his misery. A month later they were back together again, and there seemed no denying on the night of the reunion that both kids and grown-ups liked it better that way.

  Few people were fond of Doddoe, that tall sandy-haired muscular ex-bombardier sergeant of artillery who played a tempestuous forty-year centre-forward for whatever team could be persuaded to take him on. Navvy, collier, poacher by turn, he swung from job to job, content that his wages should leave him a bob for booze, allow him to sit taciturn in the pub and drink a few pints that came as his due either by treat or credit after his meagre shilling was exhausted. Doddoe placed himself too often at the mercy of bum-baliffs, coppers, publicans, gamekeepers, and bookies, mostly to the damage of himself and always to the detriment of Ada and their underfed children. Yet butties and chargehands were glad to call on him when work was going, because Doddoe, once set on, had a knack of harnessing his energies into careful prodigies of labour that outshone all other workers and often encouraged them. He toiled within a slow-moving pantomimic world of his own, behind a barred mind that had to be told the time before he would bring himself to cease work in the evening. For him, overtime was like free money: unfortunately it came too rarely, and when it did his children clamoured in such a mighty voice that he could not but give them a good share of what he had earned.

  One Friday when Doddoe was ably labouring at a semi-detached row near Wollaton, Bert was told by Ada to take him a parcel of shirt, suit, and bowler hat. The message was clear, though Brian was also forced to memorize it: Doddoe was to change on the job, after finishing work, and come into town without stopping at any pub, to meet her for the first house at the Empire. “Mam thinks I’m daft and can’t remember owt,” Bert grumbled, carrying the enormous parcel, arms holding it in front so that Brian had to lead him by the hand to stop him burying both face and parcel in some thorn hedge. “I’ll tell people I’m blind and maybe somebody’ll gi’ me a penny,” Bert said. “Hey, missis,” he bawled to a woman, “I’m blind,” but she walked on without looking, so he passed the load to Brian.

  Wet trees overarched the road, and they kept well in so that cars and buses wouldn’t splash their legs with mud and water. Fields stretched away on one side, and high moss-covered park walls on the other. Brian suggested he’d carried the parcel far enough, complained it made his arms ache, so Bert walked bent double with it on his back for a hundred yards. Brian found it harder work to help him stop it falling than to carry it himself, so he shouldered it for good. The too-long pressure on his arms made him relax unwittingly, and Doddoe’s bowler rolled into a hedgerow.

  “Christ,” he exclaimed, “we’ll cop it now. Doddoe wain’t be able to put it on.” But, undismayed, Bert lifted it from the mud with a piece of stick, scrubbed it clean with sleeve and spit, and carefully refolded the parcel.

  Doddoe was up a ladder with a hod of bricks, and they hung around till knocking-off time, kicking their feet in fresh-pared shavings and inhaling the ominipresent tar-smell that came from them. “If we wait a bit, Doddoe might give us a penny out of ’is wage-packet,” Bert said. “Besides, we’ve got to tek ’is wokkin’ clo’es back ’ome.”

  Doddoe slung his jacket on a heap of ochred bricks, bent to swill his face at a tap. “Got them bleeding clo’es?” he called, wiping himself on a piece of old rag.

  Bert handed them over. “Mam says you’ve got to go straight there.”

  “I bleddy-well know that. She’s towd me fifty times already,” he said, and went behind a lorry to change.

  “And not go in no pubs,” Bert added, ready to duck and run. But Doddoe was singing “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-wow”; jacket, cap, and shirt thrown on to an empty cement bag, boots and socks and trousers following, until he stood in clean shirt and bowler hat, about to don his handsome well-pressed blue-black trousers. “How’s yer mother?” he called out, laying bricks on the cement bag to stop it taking off in the wind. “Is she still grumblin’ at me?”

  “She was getting ready when I left,” Bert told him.

  “What was she wearin’?” Doddoe as
ked.

  Bert came nearer. “A red coat and ’at, I think.”

  “She would,” was the deprecating comment. “You’d think she’d got nowt else to wear. Whose lookin’ after t’ young ’uns?”

  Bert ticked the kid-register off in his mind. “Beryl.”

  Doddoe grunted. One leg was over one foot, and his shirtflap waved in a sudden breeze, showing a bare arse. “It’s bound to bleeding-well rain,” he swore. Brian noticed someone in the lorry-cab, and the roar of an engine sent heavily rubbered wheels spinning in ruts of sand and shavings.

  “Bleedin’ ’ell!” Doddoe shouted, his screen moving away. It churned up a circular cement-making bed and turned by a brick stack, from where the driver could see what he’d uncovered. “What the bleedin’ ’ell der yer think yer doin’?” Doddoe bawled.

  The engine roared loud, then decreased in sound for the Irish accent: “You should ’ave changed in one of the houses, then you wouldn’t be showin’ us everything you’ve got.”

  Doddoe belched obscenities so quickly that the man hadn’t time to drown them with his motor. He then shuffled into the rest of his trousers, pulling his shirtflap violently in as if blaming it for all the trouble. “You leary bleeder,” he threw at the driver, massaging his sandy scalp before a pocket mirror. It was dusk before he gave Bert the parcel of old clothes, and tuppence between them for their trouble. “Now get off ’ome, you little boggers. Keep out o’ them allotment gardens and gas-meters or you’ll get a clink across the ear’ole wi’ my fist.”

  They went off into the dusk. “Yer know what I’m goin’ ter do when I grow up?”