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’sevening, 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.
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 Derek 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.
When Jenny and Brian stopped going out together, somebody else put a bun in her oven, and her father wasn’t big enough, or fat enough, or maybe even fit enough, or not caring enough, or perhaps she kept it from him until it was too late (he wouldn’t put it past her) but that was no excuse for not chasing the bastard up and kicking the guts out of him. More likely Jenny hadn’t let on as to who the man was, luckily for him, because her father was, after all, a dab hand with pick and shovel at the coal seam.
Brian would never have got her preggers, and that was a fact, because he cared about such things, and hadn’t fancied living out his time in a Nottingham council house. He got away because he had the brains to do it, and the guts to live for years in a London bedsitter before earning any money. I sometimes wonder though whether he wouldn’t have been happier staying where he had been brought up.
Basford Crossing as he had known it was a far-off country, and he sometimes found it hard to decide whether he’d actually lived there, or had dreamed it in his working time at the machine, as if lost in the early mist of a summer’s day that lasted till night time, clearing only at moments to let him see the old buildings and crossing gates.
Reality behind the eyes showed scenery almost too good to be true, yet the ruins of the place were now like those
