OK. It was worth it. Sight of me made him ladle on the old pals act so much, you got an invite to his party. Now you’ll be able to take a real close-up look at Mrs Georgie, won’t you?’
‘Hey, no,’ said Joe in alarm. ‘I’m going to no party …’
‘You don’t, I’ll go and I’ll say you sent me,’ she retorted. Then she began to laugh.
‘What?’ said Joe.
‘Willie on Sunday it is!’ she gurgled. ‘Sixsmith, one way or another, you may yet be the death of me!’
Saturday night came and Joe found he was greeted at the Uke with much less hostility from Gallie’s parents than he’d expected.
As he helped the girl carry a round of drinks from the bar, she whispered in his ear, ‘By the way, I told Mum you were gay. You know how they worry.’
‘You what?’ said Joe, but she just laughed and then they were back at the table. So much for innocence. Now he’d have to find a way of disabusing the Hackers. Not because he felt demeaned or anything. Nothing wrong with being gay. If you were, that is. But if you weren’t, and the Hackers found out he wasn’t, they might start thinking he’d told their daughter he was to lull her into a false sense of security before he pounced. Or was he being paranoid?
Whatever, here and now wasn’t the time, not till they’d got to know him a bit better. But he was dismayed to find himself checking his speech and gestures for anything camp!
A native Lutonian, George Hacker was easy to get on with once he discovered in Joe a shared interest in the ups and downs of the town’s football club. Galina, his wife, eyed Joe much more warily at first. She was a broader, less angular version of her daughter and still retained the strong Manchester accent of her youth. She hit Joe with a volley of probing questions which he answered with an openness as natural as her curiosity till Gallie said, ‘What’s up, Mum? Think Joe’s an illegal immigrant or something.’
‘Don’t be daft!’ said her mother flushing. ‘I just like to know about folk. I’m sure Mr Sixsmith is just as interested in knowing about us.’
‘Course I am,’ said Joe, seizing this heaven-sent opportunity. ‘You from the Ukraine yourself then, Mrs Hacker?’
‘Not me,’ she laughed. ‘Manchester born and bred. My dad settled there after the war, isn’t that right, Father?’
Taras Kovalko took enough time to give the impression this was a question needing serious consideration before he nodded his head. It was a fine head with a strong-featured, deep-lined face beneath a crown of unruly white hair. His daughter had inherited his shrewd watchful eyes, but while her gaze had the unselfish wariness of a mother concerned for her daughter, the old man’s had more of the suspicious cornered animal in it …
Steady, boy, thought Joe, uneasy at this sudden flight of imagination. You’ll be writing poetry next.
‘Must’ve been hard, settling down in a new country like that, Mr Kovalko,’ he said.
‘You say so? How did you find it?’
The overlay of Lancashire on his native accent gave a rather comic effect, but it would have taken a braver as well as a ruder man than Joe to show amusement.
‘I was born here in Luton,’ explained Joe. He’d already told the daughter this and the old man had been listening keenly. So was his reply an attempt at diversion?
He said, ‘You ever go back home? To the Ukraine, I mean? Vinnitsa, isn’t it?’
The mention of the city brought the eyes into direct contact with his for a moment, then they dropped to the half empty spirit glass before him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There is nothing for me there. No family, no friends. My life is here now. Has been here for nearly fifty years. I am an Englishman now. Like you.’
He tossed back the rest of his drink and put the glass on the table with an emphatic bang.
‘English he might be but he still likes the old firewater, isn’t that right, Taras?’ laughed George Hacker. He picked up the glass and headed for the bar.
Joe said, ‘You still come here though, to the Uke.’
Kovalko shrugged.
‘Old parents need a place to go so they are not always under their children’s feet. This is as good as any other place.’
‘Must bring back memories, all the same,’ said Joe. ‘Just hearing the old language for instance.’
Kovalko said, ‘Look around, Mr Sixsmith. How many here speak the old language, do you think?’
‘How many’s it take to have a conversation?’ said Joe. ‘In any case, aren’t there more people coming now from the old country, especially since it got its independence back?’
‘Independence? From what? They lose one yoke, they will rush to put on another,’ said Kovalko cynically. ‘Pray to God they can do it without finding an excuse to fight each other.’
‘I didn’t know there was any chance of that in the Ukraine,’ said Joe.
‘We are talking about human beings. Violence is always a possibility. All that the good society can do is minimize opportunity, either to perform it or provoke it. But absolute control is impossible. There must be streets and pubs even in Luton that you will not visit alone after dark, Mr Sixsmith.’
‘Because I’m black, you mean?’ said Joe. ‘Yeah, well, maybe …’
I’m being diverted again, he thought.
He said, ‘I don’t say I wouldn’t run for cover if the Nazis ever took over here. But doesn’t history show that in the end they always get beaten because there’s more inside most people that wants to live in peace with other people than wants to fight them? Shoot, you must know this better than anybody. Must have been times when the Nazis took over your country and started shipping off the Jews to the extermination camps and folk like yourself to the forced labour camps that you felt this was it, the end, nowhere else for the human race to go. But we won, and you’re here, and you’ve got your family, so the best is always possible as well as the worst. Nothing for you to feel guilty about.’
‘Guilty? What do you mean, guilty?’ demanded Kovalko, the hand on the table clenching into a fist.
‘Hey, it’s all right. All I meant was, people can get to feel guilty ’cos they made it through bad times while a lot of other folk didn’t. But it’s OK. What you’ve got here, you got for all those others too. They didn’t make it, sure, but the Nazis didn’t make it either. You’re here. The guys who ran the death camps aren’t. They’re long gone.’
This was pushing it, but there might not be another chance to push so hard and test a reaction. There was none, unless absolute stillness, almost to the point of catalepsy, counted. Then George came back with the drink which he put down in front of his father-in-law with a cheery, ‘There
