Birthday Read online

  ‘It looks interesting.’

  ‘I find it so.’

  ‘Thanks, duck!’ Brian used the old lingo for Jenny when she came with tea and a plate of biscuits, the cup rattling against its saucer like a garbled telegraph message. ‘You were in the army, then?’ he said to George.

  ‘Yeh, when I was young. And after the war ended I never thought I’d look back and say how wonderful life had been in a German prison camp, though maybe it would have been the same even if I wasn’t in this contraption.’

  Jenny’s smile showed relief at George talking with such liveliness. In trying to read more from her expression, Brian got as far into nowhere as he always had. Her back was straighter than when she had met him at the door, a stance showing more alertness, though why it should be necessary he couldn’t tell, unless on kneeling by the chair to rework the blanket over his legs, or wipe the tea his shaking hands had spilled, she was fearful of his fist, powered by an inboiling irritation from a mind demented by uselessness, snaking out at her face. He wouldn’t do it before a guest, but was easy to imagine in the quiet and seemingly endless afternoons when they were alone. He sensed something and wished he hadn’t, wanted to go, sorry he had come, such scenes of domestic knockabout familiar from childhood when the old man battered his mother and the rest of the family out of despair at being unemployed, or at not being able to read or write.

  ‘The only break I get these days,’ George went on, ‘is a fortnight every year at Ingoldmells. Still, it gets me away from this place.’

  ‘My brother Arthur and his wife go fishing near Skegness,’ Brian said. ‘I stay with them overnight when they hire a caravan.’

  ‘He fishes in the sea?’

  Brian laughed, for no reason except that it was about time somebody did. ‘No, it’s a mile inland, at a big pond in the middle of a field. But it’s good sport.’ He had bought Arthur The Compleat Angler and he had read it more than once. ‘The caravan’s parked by the water, so they stagger out in their dressing gowns for an hour’s fishing before breakfast. They chuck everything back, naturally.’ He didn’t want to dwell too long on such a pastime with a man who wasn’t able to take part in it, though maybe he could if someone pushed him to the water’s edge. ‘If Jenny gave you a rod and some bait you could try your luck. You’d probably catch buckets.’

  George laughed, for the first time. ‘Not on your life. She might push me in.’

  ‘Don’t talk so daft,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Well, I’m not serious, am I? When I was a kid’ – he smiled, as if he might still be one, and have life to live over again – ‘I went after tiddlers, scooped ’em up in a jam jar with a bit of string around the neck. It wasn’t easy, but I always got some. We lived in Basford Crossing, and the Leen was our favourite stream. There were eight of us kids in the family, and when we went out as a tribe nobody could harm us. We often stayed by the water all day, rain or shine. Mam would wrap us up sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and fill bottles of cold tea left over from breakfast. There was always something interesting to look at, as long as the stream kept running, and it always did. Never stopped, did it? Well, it couldn’t, could it?’ The idea of the stream ceasing to flow seemed to alarm him. ‘It could no more stop than the Trent could stop. Or any river, come to that, though the Leen’s only a piddling little brook.’ He smiled again. ‘It was cold, though, if you fell in, and I did a time or two. It’s a wonder one of us didn’t drown, but kids had charmed lives in those days.’

  Old times meant more to him than anybody else, but they were important to everybody the older or more physically difficult life became. With Arthur and Derek he often made fun of them, because if you didn’t the reality of so-called halcyon days didn’t bear thinking about, and there was too much happening in the present to have their weight as well on your back. Even so, it would be cruel to scoff at such times in front of George, who dropped a host of sugars into his tea: ‘Jenny tells me you’ve done very well for yourself in London.’

  ‘You could say I’ve made a living.’ George’s tone implied that he must have done so out of trickery and skiving. ‘But I like to come up and see my brothers, who are always glad to see me. In any case, I’m still fond of the old place.’

  ‘Why did you leave it, then?’

  ‘I lived here till I was eighteen, then thought I’d take off.’ Enough of the apologetic tone for having made use of his legs. ‘We called at the White Horse for a pint or two last night.’

  ‘Sometimes we get in the car,’ Jenny said, ‘and go for a drink, don’t we, duck?’

  ‘Aye, and a right bleddy ta-tar it is, lifting me in and out of this thing.’ He looked at Brian, ignoring Jenny. ‘I ain’t been in the White Horse for years. Not that I could put much back if I did. Apart from having to watch my weight, I’ve got too many pills inside to swill ale down as well. Still, I can let myself go a bit when I’m in Ingoldmells. When I’m away from home, if you see what I mean. I don’t have Jenny fussing over me every second of the day and night. It’s the only time we get a rest from each other, and I’m sure she deserves it. I know I do.’

  She kissed him on the forehead. ‘It makes a change. You like to have young nurses pushing you up and down the seafront, don’t you? And all that sea air! You do look a lot better when you get back.’

  ‘Jenny takes me, and then she fetches me. Anyway,’ George said to him, ‘you manage to get around a bit?’

  Brian set his empty cup on the table. ‘When I can. I drove through Yugoslavia to Greece last year, and put the car on a ship to Israel. It was a treat, steaming through the islands.’

  ‘Did you look in on Libya? Or Crete, where we changed ships as prisoners of bloody war.’

  ‘It wasn’t on our way. We stopped an hour or two at Cyprus, but there wasn’t time to get off.’

  ‘I’d like to go back and see Tobruk.’ He gazed at the window. ‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t. You can’t go back, can you? Not if you don’t want to you can’t. Or you can’t if you’re knackered like this. It would be funny if I did, though. Still, wanting to satisfies me. As long as you can dream you can tell yourself you’re still alive.’

  He was sorry for George, because who wouldn’t be? But you couldn’t tell him so to his face. George was well aware of what everybody felt when they looked at him, knew they had to feel sorry, nothing else they could do. George would feel the same for somebody like himself if he was all fit and full of beans, or even if he was all fit and full of sludge. He’d much rather be the one who was feeling sorry, and if it happened that he was such a person he wouldn’t say he felt sorry for fear of being told to fuck off, though he’d still be over the moon at feeling it.

  So the projection bounced back at Brian, to inform him that there was no need to feel sorry for George, or feel bad because you weren’t a cripple as well. George was done for, and comments of sympathy would be no help. He too had a roof over his head, all the food he could get into himself, any clothes he thought of wearing and, under the circumstances, the finest care in the world. He was all right for as long as Jenny stayed by his side, so it was her you should feel sorry for, and how could he not, heart bleeding drop by drop into his liver at her fate, and though it was proof that he could still feel pity for somebody he much preferred dealing with the emotional turmoil that came from himself, always useful for channelling into his work.

  She stroked her husband’s pale hand. ‘Maybe one day we’ll win a lottery, then we’ll hire a private plane and go to Tobruk.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ He pushed the hand away, smiling at Brian as if to apologize, though not to Jenny, for his abruptness.

  She didn’t have much of a life, shackled to his side and waiting for any little request that might pop into his circumscribed brain, but she was glad at hearing Brian tell of his drive through the Balkans, the description of a squalid night-stop in Macedonia exaggerated into as much of a narrative as would interest George and amuse Jenny. Set apart from the world, no such talk could lift them
out of their imprisonment. By now he had taken in all he could, and had to leave, Jenny offering to show him out because she wanted to see what sort of a car someone drove who wrote scripts for television.

  He had never been a flash lad for posh motors, he told them, not caring to impress anybody when he was on the road. A dependable estate served for whatever he wanted in the way of transport, no need of a blood-red underslung tin lizzie with the power of a Spitfire flashing up and down the motorway at a hundred and twenty till he was nicked for the third time and lost his ticket.

  They smiled at his admission that the car wasn’t changed every three years, though his accountant said it should be for self-employed income tax. Maybe she was disappointed that he didn’t live up to his image, though why should she care? ‘It’s nothing to show off about, but come and look. Nice meeting you,’ he said to George, once being enough. ‘I’ll call again sometime, if that’s all right.’

  ‘You’re always welcome.’ He told Jenny to put on her mac, the first to notice a drop at the window.

  She stood outside with Brian. ‘I didn’t really want to look at your car.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Sometimes he dozes off in the afternoon and wakes up with tears on his cheeks, but what can I do? He used to scream because the iron was falling on him in his dreams, but he doesn’t do that anymore, which is a blessing.’

  He took her in his arms and kissed her. Because he wanted to? Because she expected it? To give her a treat in her miserable life? Whatever, he pressed her to him, his and her tears meeting after so much time. ‘I’m sorry, love.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘It’s my bed, and I’ve got used to lying on it.’

  He let her go, whether or not she hoped he might hold on to her forever and release her from the life she had been pitched into. He saw the light glow again in those melting brown eyes that he recalled after making love so many times in the old days, knew her as she was then, the momentary resurrection of the past suddenly blown away like so much smoke, the poignancy that you couldn’t go back setting him as close to a broken heart as he would ever get.

  Pain pulled them away, a fire that burned all memories. ‘Call again,’ she breathed into his ear. ‘Anytime you like. I’ll always be here.’

  George’s room faced onto the garden, but he would wonder, all the same, why his departure was taking so long. The neighbours would also be looking through their curtains, but he couldn’t care less about that, and neither could Jenny. ‘I will.’

  If you could dispute the number of angels able to dance on the tip of a pin he wondered how much emotion could be packed into a split second as he drove back through Basford Crossing. A message from a new chapel not noticed before said: ‘Turn your cares into prayers.’ Only a quick reader wouldn’t smash into the crossing gates, cursing a prayer that had done no good at all. The exhortation couldn’t concern him, though did suggest that there might be life in the old district yet.

  The new estate on which his mother lived was such a tangle of ways and drives and crescents and closes and cul-de-sacs and gardens and walks and rises that all but a madman would get lost, no distinguishing features to indicate one turning from another. Only a pull-in and unremitting attention to the town plan ever got him to her ground-floor flat. Ask someone who lived there how to find a certain address and nine times out of ten you’d get a blank stare and the statement that they didn’t know, though the regret was plain at not being able to tell you. The planners had created a nightmarish labyrinth rather than a civilized layout of houses; the street plan of Radford in his younger days had been simple by comparison.

  ‘I’m glad you went to see her.’ A Senior Service smouldered in one hand, and a mug of strong tea steamed in the other. ‘She told me she’d love to see you, and it makes a change for the poor woman, with that bleddy miserable husband she’s got to look after. A right bleddy burden he is. If I was her I’d pack him off into a home. He can be a nasty bogger, as well. She came here once with a black eye, and I said: “You want to bogger off, duck. Don’t put up with it. He don’t appreciate anything you’ve done for him.” But she said: “I just couldn’t do a thing like that. I daren’t even let myself think about it.”’

  ‘It would be hard to leave a bloke in that condition,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it would. I don’t expect I’d do it, either. When I think of what I had to put up with from Harold all those years, it makes me marvel. Every morning I used to think of packing him in. It’s twenty-five years since he died, and I haven’t been unhappy a single day since. Before that I was never in peace for a minute.’

  The old man had led her such a dance that she let no tears fall at his funeral, though put a hand to her face as if some were there while going through a group of neighbours to the hearse. She cut bread and laid out smoked ham and fresh tomatoes for his tea, fuel for his drive to London. He recalled sitting on her knees and reading when he was six, the air warm at the end of a summer’s evening, and she still a young woman (he realized now) resting on the doorstep before going inside to make Harold’s supper. He put together one sentence after another, a miracle to them both, from a book about people going fancy free over the countryside in a gypsy caravan – and how she must have wished she was with them!

  Doing an effortless ninety after the Leicester turn-off, a car ahead had for some reason stopped on the inside lane, no hazards flashing, or brake lights redly blazoning. There was barely time to notice in the dusk, and who but a murderer or a mindless suicide would stall at such a place and give no warning? By the splittest of seconds he swung the wheel and missed the car’s bumper by inches, realizing that in all his years of driving he had never been so close to annihilation. Instinct had saved him, no other way to explain it.

  He pushed in a tape of the Messiah. If he had survived as a basket case there would have been no one like Jenny to look after him, because what generous actions had he performed to be paid back for? Scorning to admit that the nearest of misses had scared him, he slowed to seventy and thought of Jenny getting the shit out of George twice a day and emptying it, the eighth baby she was never to get off her hands. His pitiful existence was her dead-end from which there was neither escape nor relief, no matter how often he was shunted off to Ingoldmells. Her placid and uncomplaining aspect didn’t mean she wasn’t suffering. He knew she was. She had to be, and giving no sign made him as angry as if she was betraying their former love.

  The music wiped out her face, kept the mind blank to stay fixed on the road and not get killed. The turmoil of his two marriages and the bother of three children as recalcitrant as himself had taught him at least to be calm. They were grown up, and no longer needed his money (they’d had plenty, willingly given) and rarely telephoned because they didn’t approve of his feckless ways. He only knew that no longer being married stopped him inflicting misery on those who had the misfortune to get too close.

  To complain about his own life would be self-indulgence compared to Jenny’s fate, but she at least had a solid reason for existence, and in any case all lives were at some time pitiable, otherwise there would be nothing for scriptwriters to do except a day’s real work.

  He hated the dazzle of driving at night, the lack of horizon and uncertain borders, so with half the run gone he forked into a service station. The coffee was like whitewash and the wedge of sweet cake hard to swallow. He lit a cigar, and readied himself for the road again, reflecting as he headlighted towards the exit going south that he had come a long way from Basford Crossing, which couldn’t be anything but good.

  THREE

  Passing Basford Crossing was as if you were going to be hanged, because your whole life went by during the time it took to bump over the cobbles and between the railway gates. Like bumps in your life they passed up the spine and into the brain, and Arthur, mulling on how much had changed in his time, couldn’t decide whether it was due to circumstance, or because he was the way he was. He’d often talked about it with Avril, with Der
ek and Brian and Eileen but, ever suspicious, knew there had to be more to it than a shuffling of cards by blind fate.

  As regards housing, the giant ball and chain mechanisms of the council had gone through one area after another, smashing up dwellings that had been lived in for generations, when bathrooms could have been installed above the scullery and made them comfortable for another fifty years. People had been miserable in them only for lack of money when they were out of work, but bulldozing whole districts and throwing up high-rise hencoops was ordained by those who made enough money from the business never to have to live in them.

  Jenny and her family had a pre-war council house at Broxtowe, and Arthur remembered going there with Brian because her father had given him the unexpected bonus of sixpence, the equivalent of a pound coin in those days. Jenny’s two sisters had the same long dark hair, and even the mother looked like them, though she must have been older. No wonder the father was self-satisfied and full of energy, being surrounded by women.

  Arthur even at thirteen could tell Brian was getting plenty of crumpet, and Jenny’s parents didn’t put a spoke in the wheel as long as she wasn’t knocked up. If he had knocked her up he would have married her, and that would have been that, which was fair enough, if you were daft enough to do it.

  Cousin Bert got a girl in the family way. He’d had dozens of girls so should have known better, but the girl’s fat brute of a father collared him on his way out of work and threatened to squash him like an orange if he didn’t do the right thing. Arthur, who knew he would get out of a similar situation if he didn’t love the woman, told Bert to do a runner, but Bert over his pint in the Peach Tree said that if it wasn’t Maureen it would be somebody else, a surrender to circumstance so bizarre that Arthur could only suggest that they drink up and go for another in the Royal Children. Thus Bert got married, and lived much like everyone else, happily and unhappily ever after.