Birthday: A Novel (The Seaton Novels) Read online

Arthur cut into his thoughts. ‘Do we go through Eastwood?’

  ‘No. A bypass skirts it along the line of the old railway.’ Every mile brought back Jenny’s clear and all-knowing face. ‘You shoot up to Ripley, and down into Ambergate. It used to be a real slog on the old push-bike. I didn’t even have a three-speed, if I remember.’ He clocked seventy along the bypass. ‘There’s a D. H. Lawrence museum in Eastwood. I’ll take you some day.’

  ‘I tried to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ Arthur said, ‘but I couldn’t get into it. I liked the one you sent the other week, though.’

  ‘Which was that?’ He’d recommended so many: The Woman in White, The Autobiography of a Super Tramp, The Worst Journey in the World, Goodbye to All That, among many others.

  ‘Clayhanger, and it was marvellous. He knew what he was doing, Arnold Bennett did. But I bought Lady Chatterley’s Lover at a car boot sale for twenty pee, and it didn’t interest me, so I gave it to a bloke at work.’

  Books brought them closer, if that was possible, but Arthur would have read whether or not they had been brothers. ‘He’s a great writer, though.’

  ‘Well, I liked Sons and Lovers, but not that one.’ Into Derbyshire, the narrowing road went through Langley Mill, Aldercar and Codnor. ‘In the old days these places were full of life.’ He wondered how people occupied themselves now that the mines were closed, mills forsaken, and factories boarded up. ‘The pavements used to be crowded, but the area’s dead to what it was. They didn’t get paid much, but at least they had work.’

  Arthur went on to say how, motoring around the coalfields during the great Scargill strike, he had sided with the colliers every bit of the way, yet knew they couldn’t win, because not only had the strike started in the summer, when fuel stocks were huge, but the Nottinghamshire men hadn’t been balloted, as if their views didn’t matter and they could be ordered about like the poor bloody infantry. Maybe Scargill knew they wouldn’t vote for the strike but hoped to shame them in when the action began. The Notts miners had their own ideas, and worked on full pelt, so it was only a matter of time before the strike collapsed, though Scargill said that if the Yorkshire men lost everybody would lose. They did. Ten years later even the Notts miners, who thought it could never happen to them, had been paid off.

  Brian noted the placid Derwent coiling its way to Derby, and fields bordered by greystone walls, land uprising to either side. Rage against the fate by which people lived dissolved in such scenery, even the diminishing years of life not worth thinking about. He could remember as far back as if he had lived forever, but an existence far easier than Arthur’s long stint in heavy industry.

  He parked by the chalet style railway station at Matlock Bath and bought tickets for the aerial ropeway. Neither had taken it before, but Arthur agreed they should give it a try: ‘As long as the ropes weren’t made on a Monday.’

  The valley seemed more gorge like from above, the main road winding along by the Derwent, choice houses among clumps of green uphill to the right. ‘If I win the lottery I’ll buy one, then you can stay in it to write your scripts.’

  The cableway stopped halfway, over the highest, point of the crossing, Brian noting with binoculars the hotel he had stayed at with a girlfriend, while his wife went off on one of her affairs. They had laughed at the system, which he called ‘mutual indemnity’, but back in London she made a fuss as if her tryst hadn’t gone as well as expected. She created a morally indefensible screen to stop him seeing his girlfriend again, perhaps out of revenge, or in the belief that control was sweeter than loyalty or love. Such miserable quarrels didn’t go on too long before, discovering that she hadn’t stopped his affair, they separated and were divorced.

  Such a memorable experience taught him never to get married to, or have an affair with, someone who had been psychoanalysed or taken LSD, and she had done both. Her soul hadn’t been her own, so how could she lovingly share her life? From then on, dealing with other women had been like swimming through calm water after dogpaddling in the Sargasso Sea.

  His divorce had just been made final when he saw Jenny getting on the train to visit her damaged husband in Sheffield. There had been enough of the young woman in her features for him to pull her close and say: ‘Forget your husband. They’ll take care of him in hospital. Come away with me to a new life, just as you are. Leave your kids as well. Don’t even go home. Let’s save ourselves by doing what we should have done all those years ago. We have a right to happiness before it’s too late, so don’t get on this train. We’ll take the next one south.’

  The screed of a madman, because he wouldn’t have been sincere, never had been, didn’t know what the word meant (he did, but it couldn’t get a look in) he was all impulse, fell in love with every woman going by in the street, burning with madness, a fire that never went out.

  Jenny would have been appalled and enraged. She would have told him not to be a bastard, to stop tormenting her at such a time, to be his age, and maybe pushed him on to the rails as he deserved, if an express had been speeding out of the tunnel. On the other hand she might have laughed, in spite of her tragic errand, as when he used to amuse her with impossible propositions in bygone days. It could have been just what she needed, to judge by her anguished face. And what if she had said yes, take me, let’s go, it’s the only thing left for me to do, would he have ditched her in London? The question nagged him for years, though he knew she would have got on to the train for Sheffield thinking that at least once in her life she’d shown good judgement in not tying herself to someone like him.

  The Georgian façade of the hotel he’d taken his girlfriend to overlooked the main road, and he recognized the window of their room. Her name was Penelope, neither the first nor the last of that name, amazing how many had been christened it, as if scores of those coming back from distant battlefronts at the end of the war had picked up a copy of The Odyssey at Victoria Station, and hoped their wives had been unknitting the khaki jersey they had been making for them for the last five years, so that the lodgers wouldn’t get at her bloomers.

  At the Heights of Abraham station they stayed in the little bug-like cabin and waited for the ride back. ‘I suppose every bloke of our age remembers the days when he biked to Matlock with his sweetheart,’ Arthur said. ‘I did it first with Helen Dukes, who lived a few doors down from us. She was as hot as a cat, and pretty. It was sunny and warm, and we finished our bottles of Tizer at Eastwood, and couldn’t find a place to sell us a drop of anything till we got to Matlock and had a drink of tea. We scrambled up that hill over there and bedded down in some bushes. I didn’t think I’d get it off her, but I did. It was my first time, and I was fifteen. It was marvellous. She was dying for it, and so was I. I don’t know why, but she called fucking “nursing”. “Will you nurse me?” she asked, when I’d got her knickers off. “I fucking well will,” I said. She was dark and lovely, but I never knew why she called it nursing, unless it was a secret code word between her mam and dad, and she’d heard ’em at it one day.’

  The incline was steeper going back, Arthur gripping the railbar as if the little truck might race for the ground, but it levelled out and floated gently over the valley of their dreams, grey clouds bleeding a steady drizzle which obscured the houses like curtains at a theatre. Meteorological phenomena of the valley turned the day magical: to get out of traffic needed only a short climb into the well moistened air of nostalgia.

  The ruins of Riber Castle on its hill were still in sunlight, cloud moving across gaps in the masonry: ‘Like Frankenstein’s residence,’ Arthur said. ‘After being burned down in the Carpathians.’

  ‘There’s a café in Matlock Town where we can have some coffee.’

  Showing Arthur so many different places reminded him of the Penelope he should have married but couldn’t because, knowing what was good for her, she refused the jump. ‘Have you seen anything of cousin Dave lately?’

  Arthur had a slab of chocolate cake with his coffee. ‘Didn’t I tell you? He snuffed
it, from cancer of the throat. He was seventy-three, but the same old Dave to the end. I phoned him a week before he died. He couldn’t say much, and it was painful to laugh, but he liked hearing me talk about the thieving him and Donnie did when they deserted from the army in the war. He was always as hard as nails, Dave was, and I didn’t much like him, but because he was dying I asked whether it had been him who gave our Margaret’s husband that big pasting all those years ago. Do you remember? Albert could hardly crawl back in the house because somebody had punched the crap out of him. I was in the army, or I’d have done it myself. Dave had always had a soft spot for Margaret, but she was his cousin so he couldn’t try anything, and when mother told him that Albert was knocking her about, Dave waited for him to come out of the pub one night with his usual skinful. Albert probably looked forward to taking it out on Margaret when he got home, but Dave put both boots in. He told me when I asked about it. “Who else did you think did it?” he wheezed. “With every kick I told him to leave Margaret alone, and when he shouted he’d get the police if I didn’t stop, I started all over again.” Then a week later Gladys phoned to tell me Dave had died. The older you get the more people around you kick the bucket. God used to have a musket to try picking you off with, so at least you had a chance, and when you were young it didn’t matter, but now the old bastard’s got his hands on a machine gun.’ He pushed his plate aside. ‘I’ve heard there’s an Industrial Museum near here. I wouldn’t mind having a look.’

  Parking by the white domed pavilion, Brian saw half a dozen hikers heading across the road on their way into the hills, all rucksacked up and looking like figures on Ordnance Survey map covers of the thirties. He felt a yen to follow, witness landscape with seventeen-year-old eyes, except that in those days he had seen only so much height and so much green, one line folding into the other, little beyond tarmac in front of the handlebars, too controlled by adolescent thoughts to see much else.

  Arthur walked among the displays of two thousand years of mining, quietly studying the giant water pressure engine made out of wood and iron during the industrial revolution, while Brian, though familiar with machinery from his time in factories, knew little about it. He did a ten minute recce, then stood by the information counter to buy postcards he wouldn’t look at till sending one to Arthur in a year or two as a reminder of today.

  Whitening clouds skimming from the west turned flimsy, larger areas of blue left behind. ‘We’ll go to Cromford for lunch. It’s a nice place.’

  Arthur buttoned his overcoat against the wind. ‘You know your way around here better than I do.’

  ‘I used to shoot up from London for a day or two whenever I was bored.’

  ‘Yeh, I’ll bet you did.’

  ‘I was a dirty young man then, and now I’m a dirty old man.’ He swung right into Cromford. ‘I think I love this area more than any other.’

  He was glad to hear it, as Brian led him into the beamed lounge of the Boat Inn, and sat him at a table, while he went to the bar to get their pints and order two lunches of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, boiled and roast potatoes, cabbage, carrots and peas.

  The enormous platters came and Arthur unwrapped his irons from the paper napkin. ‘You wouldn’t get anything like this in London, not at this price anyway. Nor in Nottingham, either, as far as I know. It’s real fucker’s grub.’

  Brian relished his use of the old lingo, recalling how he put on his cap to go out with his brothers and sup pints in familiar pubs, and no one thinking him a foreigner who didn’t belong.

  ‘You can eat better here than down south,’ Arthur said. ‘So why don’t you come and live this way?’

  Sell his flat? Find a lace-manufacturer’s bolt hole in the Park? See the Castle glowering when he went for his morning paper? Wander moribund more than alive around the middle of town? It was a great city, with concerts to go to and plays worth seeing at the theatre, radio and television stations. The magnet of the East Midlands had a self confidence no one could fault, a cosmopolitan go-ahead conurbation whose unique pulse animated young and old alike, the capital of his heart with a long history.

  The garden of Derbyshire was close to its back door, and out of the front it wasn’t far to the paddling pool of the North Sea at Skegness. What more could anybody want? Wherever he was, he felt the dynamo power of his life always pulling, and right from the fifties had considered ending his days where they started. ‘I’m settled in London. Maybe I live there to have the pleasure of spending a few days here now and again.’

  ‘You’ve got your room. And you’re always welcome.’

  Only the clatter of knives and forks disturbed the silence. ‘We’ll take a drive up the Via Gellia,’ Brian said, when the hot roll and custard came.

  ‘We seem to be on a mystery trip.’

  ‘It’s a two mile run to Grangemill. A bloke called Gell from Wirksworth laid it out in the last century and gave it a Latin name, but it only means Gell Road. Vyella gets its trade name from it, because a mill up there used to make the stuff. Are you going to want coffee?’

  ‘Better not, or I’ll be looking for a piss-house every five minutes.’

  ‘Same here. Fit, then?’

  A weaving tunnel of green, steep banks with nothing but trees to see, limestone sides turning the road into a ravine. He sensed Arthur thinking there wasn’t much to it, so they were soon up and down and driving back through Cromford. The day had to end with something better so he said: ‘We’ll have a look at Crich Memorial.’

  ‘I used to like going up there, though the wind’s always fresh, and it’ll probably blow me away. Turn left at Whatstandwell.’

  Not much likelihood of that with Arthur, who was a solid figure, no longer a six foot pit-prop as in the old days, yet not looking anywhere near his age, either. The workshop built on the back of his house was a mechanic’s paradise, tools and equipment neatly compartmented. Brian had often seen him with shirt sleeves rolled up, fashioning an artefact for home or garden, his stance like that of their grandfather at similar work.

  The lights turned orange, and he was halfway across before the green came up. ‘I’ve never known anybody as quick as you at getting away from the lights,’ Arthur said.

  ‘I don’t lose much time.’

  ‘Be careful, though. Every road’s a battlefield.’

  The tower stood, stark and phallic on its hill as he drove through the open gate and along an unpaved track by the lodge. His girlfriend had found the situation bleak, the giant structure too crude a pepperpot cock perhaps. Eight columns supported a domed roof at the top. ‘In good visibility you can see Nottingham Castle, sixteen miles away.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll go up,’ Arthur said. ‘I’m feeling idle after that dinner.’

  A thousand feet above sea level on the platform, the previous towers served as signal stations, now an impressive memorial to eleven thousand four hundred men of the Sherwood Foresters killed in the Great War, and fifteen hundred in the second.

  ‘And God knows how many were wounded,’ Arthur said, ‘or who died still young a few years later. It makes you wonder what it was all for, though I suppose it was to stop the Germans walking all over us. They’d have killed you and me for sure, when you think what they did in the last war. I remember that book you sent me, with this photograph of a little terrified kid in the Warsaw Ghetto holding his hands up, and the bastard of a German standing behind him with a gun.’

  He had sent the book because the picture reminded him of Arthur in the only snapshot they had of him as a child, with its expression of bewilderment and deprivation. The old man, who took against him from the moment he was born, thought nothing of booting him across the kitchen in order to terrify the rest of them. Margaret, who protested, got a black eye, though he didn’t hit anyone for a while after she swore to run out for the police if he did.

  Arthur grew into a strong youth, with more and better food to eat after the war began, and when he went to work in a factory the old man became reconciled
to his being part of the family. He had no option, because Arthur was taller and stronger. A lot to be said for his good nature was that he never held anything against his father.

  ‘I often think of that kid in Warsaw,’ Arthur said. ‘It haunts me. I don’t suppose he lived to grow up, and as I get older it gets even worse to think about. They did that to millions of others. Why? I’ll never understand.’

  Brian stood at the railings of the quadrangle. ‘The two of us would have been daft enough to enlist in 1914.’

  ‘You’re right, and we might have been killed, though three of dad’s brothers went, and they came out all right.’

  ‘Maybe it was a pity the old man was too young to go.’

  Arthur smiled. ‘Then we wouldn’t have been born. I don’t think I’d have liked that. All these swaddies, though, and from one regiment. It don’t bear thinking about. Still, there were times when I wondered why I came out of the army after I’d done my National Service.’

  ‘You thought of staying in?’

  ‘I was a corporal, don’t forget. You get a stripe straightaway in the military police, and they made me one of them because I was tall, though I never put anybody on a charge. By the end I’d got two stripes, and my pay was nearly eight bob a day.’

  ‘You used to say you hated it.’

  ‘That was because everybody else did, but before I was demobbed the company CO got me standing to attention in front of him and asked if I’d like to sign on. He just barked the question at me as if I was a dog, so I had to say no. But if a sergeant-major had sat me down with a pint and talked to me for a few minutes like a human being I’d probably have said yes. It wouldn’t have been a bad life as an NCO. I’d have got a pension by the time I was in my forties.’

  ‘You might have been killed at Suez.’

  ‘You take the chance. That’s what being a soldier is. Still, I didn’t stay in, and I’m not complaining. It’s just that sometimes I think it might have been better for me.’

  ‘We only see the mistakes we’ve made on looking back, and we only have one life.’