didn’t hang about after school had finished. Because next door there was the boys’ school. And maybe some girls knew boys from the boys’ school – if they had brothers or something – but this girl, I said to her one day, “Let’s walk home together.” And she said to me, “No, let’s hang around here and see if we can bump into boys because they’re out in ten minutes.” We didn’t get let out together, the boys’ school and girls’ school. And she jumps on to the wall, sits there, grins, waiting for me to jump up too. Because she just wanted to meet boys. That’s the sort of girl she was.’
‘Dear oh dear,’ the driver said. She had hoped for a little more concern: the older men might have had daughters of their own. The levity of the sarcastic apprentice had spread to them.
‘So you didn’t stay friends with her, then?’ The chief remover pushed back his cap and scratched his bald head.
‘No,’ Sandra said. Sod them, she thought. ‘Five months later, she had to leave the school because she’d met a boy and gone further. In a way I don’t need to specify—’ the adult phrase rang well in her ears ‘—and she had to leave the school because she was having a baby. Can you imagine?’
‘No,’ the driver said. He almost sang it, humouring her, and now it was over, the whole invented rigmarole seemed unlikely even to Sandra. ‘Probably best for you to leave a school where things like that go on.’
‘That’s right,’ the chief remover said, very soberly, looking directly ahead.
‘That’s right,’ the boy said. He plucked at his chin as if in thought. But he was trembling with laughter; the big blue van at their backs rumbled and trembled with suppressed laughter.
The blue pantechnicon, ahead of Bernie, Alice and Francis, formed a hurtling, unrooted landmark.
‘I don’t know which way he’s heading,’ Bernie said. ‘Expect he knows a route.’
Alice opened her handbag, brown leather against the brighter shine of the Simca’s plastic seats. She popped out an extra-strong mint for Bernie and put it to his mouth, like a trainer with a sugar-lump for a horse – he took it – then one for herself. They were on Park Lane. The van was a hundred yards ahead – no, that was a different blue van. Theirs was ahead of it.
‘We don’t need to follow them all the way,’ Bernie said, crunching his mint cheerfully. ‘We could be quicker going down side-streets. They’ll be sticking to the A-roads through London.’
‘I’d be happier, really,’ Alice said. That was all. Everything she had, everything she had acquired and kept in her life, had gone into that van – the nest of tables they’d saved up for, their first furniture after they had married, the settee and matching chairs that had replaced the green chair and springy tartan two-seater Bernie’s aunts had lent them…
‘That’s all right, love,’ Bernie said. ‘If you want to keep them in view, we’ll keep them in view.’
…the mock-mahogany dining table and chairs, green-velvet seated, from Waring & Gillow, brass-footed with lions’ claws, the double divan bed only a year old – their third since she had first come home with Bernie, him carrying her over the threshold and not stopping there but carrying her upstairs, puffing and panting until he was through the door of their bedroom and dropping her on to his surprise, a new-bought bed, and her not knowing she was pregnant already – and the carpets…
‘I know it’s silly,’ Alice said, ‘but I won’t feel easy about it unless we follow them.’
‘Well, we’ve lost them now,’ Bernie said. ‘We’ll catch up.’
It was true. London had spawned vans ahead of them, blue and black and green, rumbling and bouncing to the street horizon; the Orchard’s van was there somewhere, but lost. They ground to a halt in the dense traffic.
‘It can’t be helped,’ Alice said bravely. The carpets, all chosen doubtfully, all fitting their space. (She had no faith in the Sheffield estate agent’s measurements. The woman bred Labradors, which she’d mentioned more than once when she ought to have been paying attention.) The unit for the sitting room, a new bold speculation, white Formica with smoked brown glass doors, the Reader’s Digest books, the china ladies, the perpetual flowers under glass; the mahogany-veneer sideboard, a wedding present, once grand and solitary in the sitting room before furniture started to be possible for them; curtains, yellow for the kitchen, purple Paisley in the sitting room, red in their bedroom, the rainbow pattern Sandra had chosen…
‘Look on the bright side,’ Bernie said. ‘If they do get lost, or if they steal it and run away to South America, Orchard’s can buy us a whole new houseful of furniture. Insurance.’
‘They aren’t going to lose it, are they?’ A voice came from the back seat. It was Francis; even at nine, his knees were pressing hard into his mother. Goodness knew how tall he’d grow.
‘No, love,’ Alice said. Her own worry disappeared in her love for her son. He worried about these things, as she did. Once, on an aeroplane, she had found her own nervousness about flying vanished as she did her duty and comforted him. ‘They won’t lose it, and if they did steal it, they wouldn’t get far on the proceeds. Do you think they’d get much for Sandra? She’s up there with them, keeping an eye on things.’
‘I wouldn’t give you two hundred quid for Sandra,’ Bernie said, concentrating on the road. ‘Maybe if she’d had a wash first. What do you reckon, son?’
‘I don’t know where you go to buy and sell people,’ Francis said. ‘There aren’t people shops, are there?’
She hadn’t told Francis they were going to move to Sheffield until it was certain. She wasn’t sure, herself, how it had happened. Bernie had worked for the Electricity Board for years, the only member of his fast-talking family not to make money in irregular, unpredictable ways. They were at the outer edges of respectability, in most cases only having their churchgoing to take the edge off their quickness. Alice had first met Bernie at church, him and his family in their Sunday best. If it had been a deft illusion, it hadn’t been a long-lasting one; you couldn’t be surprised with Bernie – he was as open to view as an Ordnance Survey map. His family were proud of him and his proper job, his steadily rising salary, at head office, and Bernie paid back their pride by not renouncing his own quick ways, his broad mother’s broad manners.
But in the last couple of years, the job, London, had worn away at him. The series of strikes – every power-cut had driven him to a personal sense of grievance. ‘Don’t say that,’ Alice had said, the first time the house had gone dark, the television fading slowest, giving out a couple more seconds of ghostly blue light before the four of them were in pitch darkness, Bernie swearing.
‘Don’t say what?’ Bernie said, almost shouting.
‘You know what you said,’ Alice said.
‘I can’t think of a better word for them,’ Bernie said, getting up and groping for the fucking candles.
Though the power-cuts, random and savage, affected and infuriated every adult in the country – not the children, who across the nation took to it with delight, like camping, and in later years were to ask their parents when the power-cuts would start again, as if it were a traditional, seasonal thing – they affected Bernie worst. In part, it was the way neighbours, like the Griffithses, or the regular commuters on Bernie’s train would inquire pointedly when Bernie and his colleagues were going to get a grip on the situation.
