Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Page 8

  ‘It’s no use swearing,’ she said. ‘You’d better think of something.’

  ‘Don’t you want to have it?’ he said hopefully.

  Her laugh went echoing bitterly along the empty road, leaping over the dark houses. ‘You want your brains testing,’ she retorted.

  ‘I know I do,’ he said. ‘I’ve thought of going to the doctor’s many a time, but I don’t like standing in queues.’

  ‘I suppose you’d like me to have a kid by you?’ she scoffed. ‘It’d make you feel good, I suppose. But no fear. Not me. You can find somebody else if you want kids. I’ve got two already.’

  ‘Another one wain’t mek any difference then,’ he argued. ‘Will it, duck?’ He took her arm, pressing her elbow. A sudden wind blew a dead cigarette packet over her shoe, and she kicked it back into the gutter.

  ‘You’re looney,’ she said. ‘What do you think having a kid means? You’re doped for nine months. Your breasts get big, and suddenly you’re swelling. Then one fine day you’re yelling out and you’ve got a kid. That’s easy enough though. Nowt wrong wi’ that. The thing is, you’ve got ter look after it every minute for fifteen years. You want to try it sometimes!’

  ‘Not me,’ he said gloomily. ‘Anyway, if that’s how you feel.’

  ‘What do you expect?’

  They walked on again, towards the great wall of windows of the General Hospital. ‘I’ll see an aunt of mine,’ he said. ‘She’ll know how to get rid of it. She’s had fourteen of her own, and I’m sure she got rid of as many others.’

  ‘I hope she knows something then, because there’ll be a hell of a row if I don’t get rid of it, I can tell you.’

  He still could not worry with her and take it seriously; and he did not like the way she was carrying on about it. That was a sure way to get nothing done.

  ‘Don’t worry, Brenda, duck, you’ll be as right as rain in a week. I’ll go and see about it on Sunday.’

  But the night was young yet, as they said on the pictures.

  5

  Rain and sunshine, rain and sunshine, with a blue sky now on the following Sunday, and full clouds drifting like an aerial continent of milk-white mountains above the summit of Castle Rock, a crowned brownstone shaggy lion-head slouching its big snout out of the city, poised as if to gobble up uncouth suburbs hemmed in by an elbow of the turgid Trent. Two smart Sunday-afternoon couples on their way to the pictures stepped out of the cold dank air on to a double-decker trolley-bus, which left the road empty of all but Arthur when it turned off by the tight-shut front of the Horse and Groom.

  He walked along Ruddington Road, hands plunged ever deeper into spacious pockets with dejection, wishing he could turn his back on the worry that Brenda had thrown into his face on Friday as easily as he had turned his back on the castle at the last corner, and wishing also that he could separate himself from the headache that had come to him through trying to wash his worry away in the pale ale of the Midlands. Who would have thought it? Brenda on the tub, up the stick, with a bun in the oven, and now he had to pump Aunt Ada and find out how to empty the tub, throw Brenda to the bottom of the stick, and sling that half-cooked bun from the stoked-up oven. At any price, she said. It’s got to be done. It was nature’s way, he argued. Yes, she replied sarcastically, and his bad luck. But he could see no need of all the fuss, and understood once more why in these happy days men joined the army: to escape the smoke that came from other people’s fires. People made too much fuss about useless things, but you have to get caught by it, or at least join in the chorus of their moans and groans, otherwise life would not go on and you would be left in some old doss-house, neglected like an apple-coking by everybody in the world. And that’s how they got you. Last night Brenda cried like a baby and he mopped the tears from her eyes with one hand and caught the runnings of his own cold with the other, so that she thought he was crying too, and went into the house somewhat contented. But as soon as he was out of earshot he started laughing, drunk to himself and all the world, until he crept upstairs in his stockinged-feet, set his Teddy-suit on the number-one hanger, and slept sounder than any log.

  From the hump of the railway bridge he turned around and saw the squat front-end of the castle still sneering at him. I hate that castle, he said to himself, more than I’ve ever hated owt in my life before, and I’d like to plant a thousand tons of bone-dry TNT in the tunnel called Mortimer’s Hole and send it to Kingdom Cum, so’s nob’dy ‘ud ever see it again. He walked on with held-in wrath between the blackened shops and houses of Ruddington Road, through the fresh wind that did his cold no good.

  He kicked open the entry-gate that led to Ada’s back door. Perhaps the twenty kids — or however many it was she’d got — will be in and I won’t be able to get a word in edgeways, but then again maybe the house’ll be empty and I can have a nice quiet talk. All the same I’d better not blab my mouth and tell her why I want the advice. The whole family ‘ud know in five minutes. News gets around so quick you’d think they’d got tom-toms on every roof.

  He saw through the open door that the lavatory-bowl was cracked. The coal-house was ruined because they’d once kept chickens there and had smashed part of the wall down to put wire netting in its place, and the asphalt paving had been dug-up to make a V-for-Victory garden during the war. Window curtains were torn at one corner but otherwise clean, though the back door at the top of the three steps had been left slightly ajar day and night for years because the landlord wouldn’t repair the uneven floor tiles. Even though they pay the rent, Arthur thought. Landlords today are so lucky they don’t know they’re born. The on’y way they got our rent before the war was through County Court.

  ‘Anybody in?’ he shouted from the scullery. ‘Bring out your dead, Aunt Ada.’

  ‘Come in, Arthur,’ she called out. Waves of heat, rising from an enormous coal-fire built-up in the grate, met him as he entered. ‘I can see Dave still works at pit,’ he said, racing to unbutton his overcoat before he stifled to death. ‘Where’s the Tribe?’

  ‘Gone to’t pictures.’ The table was laden with the debris of Sunday dinner, and she sat by it, Arthur’s entry taking her gaze from the burning heart of the coal-fire, that acted like a crystal ball in which she saw a past whose incidents however black could never be anything but fascinating now that they had buried themselves behind her. She was a woman of fifty-odd dressed in a grey frock, with a face attractively made-up a face that Arthur remembered being plump but now narrowing and showing her features more as they had been, when she was a young girl, but with a mask of age imposed.

  ‘How are yer, my owd bird? Why don’t yer mam come and see me any more? Has owd Blackclock bin on to her again?’ She reached into the hearth for the kettle and settled it skilfully on the blazing coals.

  He laid his overcoat on the sofa. ‘No, Dad’s all right these days. He don’t get on to her now. Not since me and Fred’s grown-up.’

  ‘Sit down then, duck,’ she said. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea in ten minutes. I’m glad you’ve come though. Sunday afternoon’s the only time I get a bit of peace, and I like somebody to talk to. I like the house to be empty now and again. It’s a treat the way you look after your clo’es, Arthur. Every young man should, that’s what I say. But you know, it’s like living in a different house, when the kids aren’t fighting and running over everywhere. Eddie’s gone up Clifton with Pam and Mike, and they won’t be back till six, thank God. They lead me such a dance all week that I’m allus glad to get shut on ‘em at weekend. Last night we went to’t Flying Fox and I had so many gin and Its I thought I’d never get home. Our Betty clicked wi’ a bloke, and he bought the whole gang of us drinks all night. He must a got through a good five quid, the bloody fool. He had a car though, so I suppose he could afford it, and he thought he was on a good thing with our Betty, but you should a seen his face drop when she came home wi’ us instead of going off with him! He was going to start some trouble, but our Dave — he was wi’ us as well — got up and said he’d
smash him if he didn’t clear off. The poor bloke went deathly white and drove off in his car. “What a bleddy fool I was,” our Betty said when he’d gone, “I should a got ‘im to drive us all home!”’

  Arthur laughed. ‘I wish I’d ‘ave bin there,’ he said, happy sitting with Aunt Ada and waiting for the kettle to boil on a cold April afternoon — until the big worry started thumping away once more inside his brain. He wanted above all to go to sleep, feeling as if he hadn’t seen a bed for a month. The heat from the big fire beat against his eyes, and the marble clock on the mantelpiece clacked away like a bird in the last five minutes of its life, while Ada poked the fire and reset the kettle. The sideboard along one side of the room sloped down away from the wall because of a subsidence in the tiles, indicating too much space between the living-room floor and the cellar roof, in which Ada’s three sons, on the run from the army during the war, had stowed much of their loot whenever they did a job, a credit and debit bank on which they had worked their living in snatches of freedom from glasshouse and gaol. Above the dresser hung two pictures in oblong frames, bearing an antique ring for the family because their father, now dead, had plundered them from France in the war before the last, a boozing bombardier sergeant of the artillery who had stayed on till nineteen-twenty, thrown out of the army for, so Ada said, using such foul language that even soldiers couldn’t stand it. The pictures he gave Ada were of two beautiful girls standing by a marble balustrade, wearing chiffon stoles over creamy shoulders against a background of soft full-blown roses. Doddoe had been killed three years ago, when his powerful side-carred motor-bike burst like a bullet into a draper’s shop at the bottom of a hill, with grinning and goggled Doddoe gripping the handlebars and knowing, when it was too late, that he should have taken the turn sooner, spouting like buckshot all the bad language he had ever known in the second before crashing. That’s the way to do it, Arthur thought, sitting stupefied by the fire’s heat and the fever from his cold. Doddoe knew what he was up to when he forgot that turning.

  Ada now had another husband, but in taking him on, the tribe from her womb was not increased beyond the fourteen children she had already borne from Doddoe. Nowadays she was both too old or too wise to have any more, rested on her laurels and relished the twilight of retirement in which she found herself. For Doddoe had come upon her like a scourge of God and fired her through a life of dole, boozing, bailiffs, and a horde of children who grew up learning to fend for themselves in such a wild free manner that Borstal had been their education and a congenial jungle their only hope. Ralph, Ada’s present husband, was a mild man who brought her five children of his own — thus the rumour that she had twenty — and who was himself wanting a peaceful life after seeing his first wife die of consumption and his eighteen-year-old daughter settled on the same downward blood-spitting track. But Ada’s sons and daughters had not been bred to peace, and led him a worse life than before, for he discovered that he was jealous of Ada. At fifty she still had the personality of a promiscuous barmaid, a kindness to listen to any man’s tale and sob like a twin-soul into his beer, even to bring him home to bed if she thought it would make him feel better. And Ralph showed resentment at this, bearing an ingrown agony that came so strongly because the same thing had happened to him — only he had called in his shackles of furniture and five children and stayed with her — and he had an uneasy premonition that she might in the future favour other unfortunate men. Ada’s eldest son Dave bought a record of ‘Jealousy’ and every time Ralph mentioned the softness of her heart and the fact that she spoke to too many men when they were at club or pub, the invidious disc began to wheel around the turntable and beat out its howling damnable tango that drove his mild heart to frenzy. One Saturday night, among moans of despair from Ada, he fought with Dave when the tune was played, and Dave quickly knocked him down, though as he fell Ralph clutched both gramophone and record and sent them smashing to bits on the floor. Thereafter Dave and the others merely contented themselves with turning the volume of the wireless full on whenever ‘Jealousy’ was played on Family or Forces Favourites. Ralph was a considerate man who gave Ada — as far as he was able, for her sons were true chips off Doddoe’s block — the sort of quiet life she had never known. Since the end of the war, when the Redcaps ceased their eternal hounding of her sons, life had calmed down. Everyone had work, and regular money had been coming into the house for so long that she no more worried about what would happen when times stopped being good. The greatest excitement of the house these days was when it was rabidly divided by the football results on Saturday night. Even then, it was more or less united by Family Favourites on Sunday morning.

  While Arthur looked into the fire Ada reset the table for tea, then opened the sideboard cupboard and took out a roll of cooked meat, asking him how he was, how he felt these days, as if he had been ill at some time. She questioned everyone in this way when they came to see her or when she met them on the street, so that one might think she had lived among sickness all her life, which she had not. Arthur replied that he was feeling all right, though admitted that he had something on his mind.

  ‘Why,’ she exclaimed, emerging from the scullery with a bottle of sauce and setting it by his place, ‘what would a nice-looking young chap like you have to worry about?’

  He lifted the kettle from its rosy bed of coals and poured scalding water into the teapot: ‘Well, it ain’t that I’m worryin’, Aunt Ada. I never worry, you know that. It’s a mate o’ mine at wok. You see, he’s got a young woman into trouble, and he don’t know what to do. He wanted me to help him, but I don’t know what to do either. So I thought I’d come and see you.’

  Ada tut-tutted as she sat down. ‘That’s bad luck for the poor bogger,’ she commented with a fatalistic expression. ‘What a daft thing to do, to get a girl into trouble. Couldn’t he have bin more careful? He’ll just have to face the music, like our Dave did.’ Arthur remembered: Dave got a woman into trouble who had turned out to be the worst kind of tart, a thin, vicious, rat-faced whore who tried to skin him for every penny he’d got — until he threatened to chuck her over Trent Bridge one dark night, and she settled for a quid a week out of court.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘ain’t there summat as can be done? I mean to say’ — but he didn’t know how to say it; he had never spoken so openly to her before, and wondered why he had expected it to be so easy — ‘well, sometimes people do things to stop it. They get rid of it by taking pills or something, don’t they?’

  She poured tea into a big white cup, and stopped abruptly at his last remark, holding a spoon in the sugar basin, an inquisitive look on her ageing face. He noticed for the first time that she hadn’t got her teeth in. ‘How did you know about things like that?’

  ‘I read it in the Sunday papers’ — he smiled, but felt like a criminal, recalled the up-ended sensation when first walking into an army camp after getting his papers.

  ‘You don’t want to mess about with things like that,’ she cautioned. ‘You never know where it can lead.’

  ‘It’s for my mate,’ he said. ‘He’s in a mess, and I’d do owt to help him. You can’t let your mate down when he’s in trouble. He’s a good bloke, and he’d do owt for me if I was in the same hole.’

  She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Are you sure it ain’t you as is in this mess?’

  He met her investigation with an ingenuous, almost startled face at the injustice of it. Lie until you’re blue in the face, was his motto, and you’ll always be believed, sooner or later. ‘I wish it was me that was in trouble, rather than my mate,’ he said seriously, ‘then I wouldn’t feel so bad about it. But it’s him that’s in trouble, and I’ve got to help him. That’s what pals are for.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what to tell you,’ she said, softening before his display of loyalty. ‘It’s dangerous to mess with such things. I once knew a woman as got sent to prison for a thing like that.’

  She sipped slowly at a cup of tea, and Arthur explained: ‘This g
irl’s about a fortnight past her monthlies. She’s taken pills, but they didn’t work.’

  ‘The only thing she can try, as far as I know,’ Ada told him ‘is, to take a hot bath with hot gin. Tell her to stay there for two hours, as hot as she can bear it, and drink a pint of gin. That should bring it off. If it don’t, then she’ll just have to have the kid, that’s all.’

  The front door opened to a tramping of feet, was pushed to with a heavy slam, and a multitude of boots came kicking through the hall. The Tribe’s advance-guard was struggling out of its coats, breathing hard after having run too quickly from the bus.

  ‘They’re back,’ Ada said laconically.

  Jane, Pam, Mike, and Eddie came into the room crying for their tea. Arthur pushed his empty plate and cup away. Just in time, he thought jubilantly.

  ‘Tek your sweat,’ Ada shouted. ‘The pot’s empty. Wait till the kettle boils.’ Big ginger-haired Jane threw herself on to the sofa, and Arthur noted the bouncing of large sweater-covered breasts as she landed. ‘I suppose yo’ lot of ‘ogs ‘ave swallered all the tea?’ she cried with a flush on her indignant face.

  ‘’Eve less o’ yer cheek,’ Ada said, brandishing her fist, ‘or yer’ll get no tea.’ The fight was on again. Doddoe had left a fiery enough rearguard to keep his ghost still tangible in the house. If they were my kids, Arthur thought, they wouldn’t get away with this.

  Pamela was tackled next for turning the wireless up too loud. She was a fourteen-year-old version of Jane, but with a milder face and smaller breasts, with the same shade of freckles on her arms and the same flaming ginger in her hair. Bert and Dave came in, back from the pictures, and in trying to restore Jane and Pam to order turned the room into a box of catcalls and shouts to mind your own business and demands that you keep your big dirty plates of meat to yourself. Ralph came downstairs in his stockinged-feet, turfed out of his nap by the eruptions below. ‘Why don’t yer mek less bleddy noise?’ he cried from the stairfoot door, boots in one hand and sports page in the other, his face bewildered and filled with frustrated wrath. But nobody took a blind bit of notice of him — as he was quick to point out — so he pushed through to the fire and sat disconsolately by the range to pull on his boots while Ada poured him a cup of tea.