A Start in Life (7 page)

When I arrived home my mother was at the table, still wearing her coat. There was a look of desolation on her face I'd never seen before.

‘What's the matter?' I asked, sitting opposite without even bothering to take my mac off. She didn't answer, so I just looked, and tried to guess. The anguished premonition of my stroll through the Ropewalk with Claudine came back to me, and I held her hand.

She drew it away: ‘My father's dead.'

As soon as I knew what it was my heart and stomach became normal again. My sense of wanting to die on the spot vanished absolutely and did not come back. ‘Grandad?' She said nothing. ‘What happened?'

‘Had a heart attack at half past five. The police came and told me when I got home from work.'

‘Where is he?'

‘Grandma's. At Beeston. She's breaking her heart. I nearly fainted when I saw him.' She didn't say anything for a few minutes. ‘They'll be taking him to Callender's funeral parlour tomorrow.'

I got up and put the kettle on: ‘If you're going there in the morning I'll go with you,' I said, slashing three big spoons of tea into the pot.

‘All right. You might be a help to us.'

‘When are they burying him?'

‘On Thursday.'

I felt fine, wonderful, and saw Grandad stretched out in the parlour next morning before they carted him away. He was sixty-five (or had been) and I considered he'd had a good life to reach such an age. From being a big man he now seemed like a doll, as if I could lift him up and sit him on my knee, speak for him like a ventriloquist. But his sternness was having none of it. He lay like an age-old soldier in a horizontal tailor-made sentrybox, but ready to get up at the split-fart of an Army bugle, or the smell of the rag they used to wipe up spilt beer on the bar with. His eyes were closed, so that he couldn't see where he was going, and though it looked as if some dreams might still be tail-ending behind his life, I knew he was surely as dead as I would ever see anyone and that God's heaven was not for the likes of him or me. We were both of us cut out for finer stuff than God's own heaven. I held his cold hand, hoping that I too would get the royal privilege of stepping into the be-all and end-all as soon as my heart stopped and the lights went out. I tweaked his ice-cold nose, kissed him on the stone forehead, and went out, to have Grandma throw her soft arms around me and wet my silk shirt through to the skin. She sobbed that I was just like him, and that no doubt I'd be as good as he ever was when I grew up. My mother was also weeping, but I thought: what the hell he lived to be old, and that should be enough for any man unless eaten up with the greatest greed of the world. They thought I had no heart and almost drove me away, till Grandma in all her soft wisdom said I was too young to let it tear me up, and that taking it like I did was the only way to show my grief.

And who knew that she wasn't right? Because in this frame of mind I did various useful errands connected with Grandad's sudden drop-out. There were payments to make and collect, various people to tell, as well as odd messages to carry to those who might come to the funeral, food to order for the party afterwards.

I went to the office with a black band around my arm to make me feel important, and Mr Weekley was sorry at my loss, impressed by such looks of grief that I could use when necessary, and told me I could stay off for a day after the funeral. I also got immediate sympathy from Claudine on telling her by phone at midday, and it blossomed to a full-blown envelopment of her body when I went to her house in the evening and found that her parents were out. It was marvellous, the grief people thought you felt, and how they were ready to shed your own tears for you, and the soft oily gratitude they gave you for giving them the opportunity of it.

Grandma wanted her dead husband to have a fair funeral, and Mother and I did our best to see that her wish was satisfied. There were three car-loads of friends and family, and I sat among them with my black suit on, seeing the occasional person by the roadside take off his hat as we went by. Standing in the rain by the open grave, and staring the box into the bottom of it, I had the mad desire, which I was hardly able to resist, to jump down and drag my mother and grandmother with me so that all three of us got buried at the same time.

I walked back to the gate and the waiting cars, and didn't care whether the world ended or not. This had nothing to do with my grandfather having died. It was almost as if I'd started something by suddenly beginning to live, but wasn't interested any more in going on to finish it.

I'd asked Claudine to come to the funeral, but she said she ‘didn't like to' because she wasn't yet ready to meet my mother. The truth was that she didn't want to be connected to someone who had died, and nobody could blame her for this, because there had been moments when I hadn't been too easy about it either. Yet I wanted her to come, because it was the first opportunity in our courting that I'd been able to offer on my side something to balance the weight of her family that she had given to me from hers. It would in some way have equalized the intimacy of life between us, but she was too embarrassed to come, and I thought: so what? Why should she? Maybe she won't even go to her own grandparents' funeral, when the time comes. If I had a father of my own, I thought, instead of being the undoubted bastard that I am, I wouldn't have bothered to take so much part in it as I had.

I got really drunk that night, so that I didn't even have the stiffening left to get myself to Claudine's place as I'd promised. When I saw her the next day I said I'd been too blacked out with fond memories of my dear grandad to leave the house. I'd hugged my bed, I told her ‘in a paroxysm of grief'. She really understood that, and forgave me, giving me such comfort on the settee that I said I hoped I'd be able to do the same for her some day, if ever she needed it, though I hoped she wouldn't.

It took a long time to push house deals through, and I assumed that Wainfleet was having a surveyor go over the Clegg mansion before he made his offer. Nevertheless, I was beginning to wonder why I hadn't heard from either of them, and I knew that no news had come in at the office. Nothing would go wrong as far as I could see, and I stayed optimistic because before going out to work that morning (I hadn't yet steeled myself to calling it ‘business' as they did in West Bridgford) I read my horoscope in Mam's paper which said: ‘A day to remember. Financially good. Romantically sound. Don't rush it. Promotion in the air. Heady progress. Good for you.'

I went blithely to work and, as was only to be expected when I got there bright and punctual, Mr Weekley called out for me: ‘Shut the door,' he said.

He didn't look good, and I wondered whether it wasn't his turn now to go down with some half-imaginary flu. He opened a folder in front of him: ‘Cullen, you've been up to some monkey business, and it's the most clumsy piece of work I've ever come across in this line. If it had been a bit more subtle and underhand I might have been tempted to keep you on. As it is, you disgrace me. A bloody baby could have done better. Let me put you in the picture. Your Mr Wainfleet did offer Clegg a higher price for his house – four thousand three hundred instead of four thousand that Clegg originally wanted. I'm putting you wise so that you'll never make the same mistake again, behind the back of the person you might work for at your next job. Well, so far so good, but in comes the first chap who set out the asking price, and offers four thousand four hundred. Then Clegg plays him off in a dutch auction, and Wainfleet, red in the face, ups it to four thousand five hundred. Do you see what you started? You bloody jackanapes!'

I was boiling too: ‘That's all right by you,' I cried, ‘as far as commission's concerned, isn't it?'

‘Oh, yes. But let me tell you the last of it. Then comes the bright young chap
again
, and jacks it up to four thousand six hundred. There it stops, and yesterday while you were away getting those ordnance-survey plans, enter Wainfleet absolutely frothing at the mouth, and accusing me of using innocent young you as a pawn to start a dutch auction, and positively screaming that he was going to make a complaint to the Society. Well, of course, I can take care of that. In any case that vile vendor Clegg wasn't entirely innocent when he saw which way the wind was blowing. But you've got to go, young Cullen. You can take your briefcase and umbrella, and remember next time to think before trying to push something so intricate. Oh, yes, I know, you nearly brought it off, but don't forget: there's always some swine a bit greedier than you are.'

‘I didn't expect anything from Clegg,' I said. ‘I was only trying to do the firm a favour so that you'd think highly of me and I could get on a bit. Anyway, they were both bidding for the house on the open market. What's wrong with that? It was nothing to do with me.'

‘Don't lie, Michael. You make it hard for me, mate. I've got the particulars of the house here that you typed for Wainfleet, with your fancy price on it. Oh, all right, there's more to you than the others working here, but I can't keep you on. However, I'll give you a fair reference so that you might get a job somewhere else. But wherever it is, try not to pull such monkey business again. It'll get you a bad name.'

I couldn't be sure of a wink under his glasses, but wanted to thump his putty cheeks and grey moustache so as to stop the trembling in both my legs – except that I didn't want to end up in a cell at the Guildhall at that particular moment.

I took my fortnight's pay and insurance money, and said goodbye with regret to Miss Bolsover. ‘It's a shame you got into trouble,' she said, ‘but don't worry.'

I smiled. ‘Glad to get away, really. I've been thinking of moving on to London' – another useless lie, for she was bound to see me around town sooner or later and wonder why I hadn't had the guts to go. She was a proud, grey-haired woman, well into her thirties, who I often fancied knuckling into because there seemed no hope of it.

There was only one person I wanted to see at that moment, and it was still early enough in the day to go out and find him. In fact a few hours in the country would do me good after the mental strain of getting the sack. I'd wheedled from Miss Bolsover the information that the bright young man had sent in his deposit cheque on Clegg's house for four hundred and sixty pounds, so I'd be due for at least a hundred pounds when the contract was signed, though I wondered now whether Clegg the egg would keep to it.

The fields and woods weren't half so pleasant, for a sharp wind was shaking itself out from Lincolnshire, and even a thick tweed overcoat didn't stop it finding my ribs. Walking through it from the bus stop, the full shock of getting my cards hit me, and I wondered whether in this life I was only destined to work in a factory where I could get into nothing more troublesome than walking out now and again with whatever was produced there bulging from my pockets. My natural move should have been to retreat, to get back and let my heart curl up in safety where no blow-through mistakes could get at it. But natural moves were already alien to me, and I was set on some course even more natural than my natural desires because I didn't think one bit about what I was going to do.

Clegg asked me into a room just inside the door, where he had a sort of office or study. He hadn't shaved for a few days and the stubble, like his hair, was grey. I sat down, when he asked me to, in an armchair. On the wall behind was a framed railway map of England. I was left alone while Arthur Clegg went hospitably into the kitchen to make some tea. I don't know what he thought I'd come for, because he asked nothing and said nothing, imagining perhaps in the quirky darkness of his mind that I just happened to be passing and had called in. But his grey shallow eyes showed him to be far more alive to the world than I was, and while he was busy with his teapot and old cups he'd left a record on his pick-up, playing part of what I knew to be Handel's
Messiah
. I supposed he spun this sort of music all day to stop himself going sideways up the wall till he got the hell out of his gloomy house. I wondered why I had come, now that I was here, and the voice was telling me that the trumpet shall sound, while I didn't know how to get to the point because I knew he knew he didn't have to give me a blue penny for the favour I'd done him.

He asked how I was getting on, and I saw that the only thing I could do was be dead honest and tell him I'd just been booted out of my job on his behalf. He smiled at this: ‘That's the way of the world. What did you expect?'

I wasn't ready to let things go as easily, and said I was glad to hear he'd got four thousand six hundred for his house: ‘That was due only to me, and you shouldn't forget it.'

‘Oh, I won't, my lad,' he said, putting half a biscuit between his false teeth. ‘Not in a hurry, anyway.'

‘It'll take me a good while to get another job,' I said, ‘and I'll need a bit to tide me over. A hundred and fifty would see me right.'

‘You've upped your price?' he grinned.

I was beginning to dislike the way he too obviously played with me, and wished I'd brought a blunt instrument to threaten him with – though I knew that as a wicked thought, because it went out of my mind very quickly, especially when he said: ‘There's many a slip between the first offer being made and the final payment falling into my bank. He can still back out, as you know. He's sending a surveyor over tomorrow, and if his report's no good, I expect the deal will be off, or he'll want a lower price. But if it all goes through as planned, I'll give you a hundred. That's what you said, wasn't it?'

‘It's not much of a share.'

He poured more tea, looked me straight in the eye: ‘It's all you're going to get. It's more than you deserve, twenty per cent, in any case, but I'll stick to our agreement. A pity you lost your job over it, though. What's a bright young lad like you going to do now?'