of his catastrophic misfortune he was to wish he had never set eyes on her, thinking it would have been better if the falling block of iron had killed him outright. He certainly never imagined in those early days that under Jenny’s care he would live more than thirty years.
George had been called up in 1940, and taken prisoner at Tobruk in Libya. He’d already lived forever on coming home from Germany in the long belly of a Halifax bomber. A young soldier in his early twenties, he queued to be measured for his demob suit, a thin man after three years’ imprisonment, hoping to find a country more to his liking than the one he had left and, if not, at least to get the job of his choice.
He was promised work as a van driver, but couldn’t start for a month – a long time at that age – so he walked into a nearby iron foundry and was set on straightaway. The job was more strenuous, and altogether satisfying in putting him among the sort of blokes he had fought with in the army. You had to be alert in such an occupation, but as long as you looked out for yourself and for others, and if others looked out for themselves and for you, life seemed less dangerous than driving a van.
The chain slipped: no time or place to run, a million lights turning brighter and brighter at his scream. Even if you weren’t killed the number chalked on the side of the iron was plainer than on any shell fragments around Tobruk. One of his mates who called at the hospital said he could have been as badly injured driving a van, but George knew there was something more final about a fall of iron in the dismal light than there could be from any crump of tin in the street. He had got unblemished from the battlefield, had survived the boat trip across the Mediterranean, not to mention the journey by cattle truck to Germany – and now this.
A new house was provided out of the compensation, and appliances installed to make staying alive the slowest form of torment, though as easy as possible for Jenny. There was nothing more they could want, but wanting for nothing at such a price was no bargain to George. He couldn’t believe it. ‘Me! Why me?’he said a million times,to himself but to Jenny as well often enough. ‘I’d have been better off wounded as a soldier. There’d be some pride in that. But in a foundry! That’s what I can’t understand.’
The more quickly his thoughts returned to the point from which they had set out, without having made him wiser or more content, the darker his anguish became and went on for months before he reconciled himself to the fact that any good reason for being on earth had been taken away. The short change of mental torture turned up no meaning to his fate, and the nightmare was that he would live as a cripple for the rest of his life.
Jenny’s skin blistered with tears as she sat by him. She loved him. Everything would be all right. At least he was still alive. But so deep was her misery that she sometimes thought how good it would be if they could be struck dead together.
Walking through a bookshop to get a present of coloured pencils for Eunice’s birthday she saw something on the table with Tobruk in the title. During the week it occupied George he wasn’t in such despair, so from then on she took everything from the library connected with that place during the war, so that he could relive his days and stop regretting he hadn’t died in the foundry.
His experience of artillery and machine guns helped his expertise with a wheelchair and orthopaedic bed. When a telephone was installed he smiled that it was like having his own headquarters in a dugout, able to call up friends and family whenever he liked. She suspected that he never left off secretly wanting to die, but knew it was a comfort for him to go even further back in time before he met her, and live again in the world of Tobruk. Dangerous though it had been, he’d at least had the use of his limbs.
Brian first saw George when he’d been twenty-five years in a wheelchair. His mother persuaded him to call: ‘Sometimes Jenny comes and sits with me. If I’d been in her place I’d have gone mad now, but she always asks after you, so it would be nice if you’d pop in and say hello.’
Sunlight through the gaps of a high-clouded day gave amplitude to the spirit. He slowed along the tree-lined dual carriageway, reading each street sign so as not to overshoot the drive on which Jenny’s house stood. He found a dwelling anyone should be happy to live in, the roof as if someone got up to scrub it every morning, windows as clean as if without glass, nothing too old to be unpointed or shabby, immaculate paintwork on doors and window frames, the house behind an area of sloping well cut lawn.
When setting out on his travels he hadn’t wanted to live in either the cosy but decrepit houses of Basford Crossing nor a place like this, but he was happy for Jenny that she had such a pristine house. He had thought only of getting away, even if to be a homeless figure stricken by rain and bitten into by the cold, for whom any house would be paradise.
To be well fed and shod, to be out of the rain and have clothes on his back, was all he needed. A one-roomed dwelling in the middle of a wood had figured in his childhood dreams, but by craving the romantic he had achieved far more. A house like Jenny’s had seemed an unattainable luxury, but as soon as he had money enough to get one he despised it. The fee for a single script could buy a dozen huts in a wood, as well as the wood and surrounding fields.
Believing that this life was the only one, that there was no God to help you (and he was intellectually incapable of believing He was other than dead and buried) meant that safety and contentment didn’t exist, an ever-likely and interesting state in which there was no class, nation, or religion to capture his allegiance or give comfort. If you allowed yourself to conceive of immortality you were no longer free.
An inane Strauss jingle brought her to the door. ‘Brian Seaton!’
The emphasis on his surname hid her pleasure. Well, he couldn’t be sure about that, but he enjoyed hearing she would know him anywhere, though it didn’t bring back the old shine in her eyes. He should have telephoned first, but wanted to surprise her. In London you never called on anyone without warning, but he had acted as if Jenny was inferior, or out of familiarity, in his usual off-hand way, an attitude which over the years had become a habit. I suppose that’s how they live in London, she might tell herself, just dropping in without any notice at all. Even in the old days she often hadn’t known he’d be where he said he would be.
‘Your mam phoned, to tell me you were on your way.’
‘And here I am. It’s good to see you again.’ He made up a script about a man knocking at the wrong door, then starting a conversation with the woman who answered. She asked him in for a cup of tea, which led to a new life for them that neither had thought possible when they had got out of bed that morning, but which made sense when it happened. The change in their existences was so passionate that when they went away together the relationship turned into a disaster.
He had made no such mistake with Jenny, for she had known all about him, gave him that special weighing up which now showed much of the old self in her features. Her shorter hair was a mix of grey and dark, curling around the head instead of a long and vigorous band of black, making the face seem smaller, fragile and more vulnerable. She was pale, almost sallow, lines scored for a woman in her fifties, perhaps more so than on women of similar age he met in London who hadn’t been through half as much. She was slim and middling in height from what he used to think of as tallish and more robust, though she could hardly be shapely after having had seven kids. ‘I was passing, and thought I’d call.’
‘I’m glad you have. Come on in.’
Everything you did was wrong, even more so when you thought well and long before doing it, but she seemed happy at him standing before her, the only sign a tremble of hands as he followed her in. ‘An old friend’s come to see us.’
George had been forewarned perhaps, so as to hide the importance of what they had been to each other, though he didn’t see why she should be diffident about it.
