Birthday (10 page)

The land undulated as far as Misk Hill seven miles away, a few houses here and there. ‘I do like it,' she said, as if to pass the test.

‘So do I. I have done since I first saw it. Would you like to live somewhere out there?'

‘I already do. If you turn your head a bit to the right you can see Aspley. What you mean, though, is would I like to live somewhere out there with you, don't you?'

‘I'm not sure what I meant.' The possibility was bedded in his soul but, for no reason he cared to explain, or even could, he was glad to see the back of such a thought.

Her elbow jabbed playfully at what meat there was below his ribs. ‘You're never sure of anything. But you must have meant something. I usually do when I open my mouth.'

‘I only asked if you liked the view.'

‘Of course I do. I'm not deaf, am I? Nor blind, either.'

‘That's all right, then.'

‘I want to go in the museum,' she said, ‘and look at the stuffed animals' – intimating that she-might find them more alive than he seemed to be.

‘I want to stand here a bit. I can see a long way, and I like that.'

‘You can do it from a lot of other places.'

‘I know,' he said.

‘So why here, then?'

‘Because this is special. And here I am, aren't I?' Her question was a way of trying to find out what was in his mind, as if he knew, or wanted to know. It was a matter of pride not to know, which might be stupid but he didn't care. ‘It's got something to do with the scenery, and having the Hall behind me at the same time.'

‘I came to the museum the year before leaving school,' she said. ‘The teacher brought us for the day. We all had jotters to write down what we saw, but my pencil wouldn't move. All I could do was look at the birds and animals, and what clothes people used to wear in the olden days. I couldn't take my eyes off so many lovely things. The next week at school we were told to write a composition about our time in the museum, using the notes we'd made, and I'd got nothing in my jotter. I didn't know what to do. “Why aren't you writing, Jenny?” the teacher asked me. “I can't, Miss,” I told her. “Write;” she said, “and be quick about it.” So I did. I just wrote and wrote, and when the teacher read it she said it was the best composition in the class. She made me stand up in front and read it out to everybody else. I was trembling like a leaf, but I did it.'

She looked for some response, till he was glad the sun caught her eyes and she had to turn away. Life-changing moments, carelessly passed over, hid what the heart profoundly wanted. Whatever was yet to come which you couldn't know about was more fundamentally what you wanted to happen. ‘We'll go in, if you like, and you can tell me about it.'

She turned to take his arm. ‘I love you. You know that, don't you?'

‘I love you, as well. I always shall.' What an outrageous liar. He always was, and always had been. He could love no one but himself, and knew the truth as he stood looking at how the old trees and fields had been painted by the rooftops of new houses, in one of which they would have been happy, though for how long? She had relinquished him but he had driven her to it. He hadn't argued. Words of reconciliation would have been easy. She had wanted him to put a ring on her finger as proof that he loved her, even though marriage had to wait a few years. He had let go a kind of heaven in exchange for one disaster after another as if that was the only way someone like him could learn, though where such learning had got him he couldn't say.

In the days that mattered he had wanted no tie-ups, no domestic servitude, no obligations, no acquiescing to the call of the times, no giving in to the mindless drive of nature – shameful to fall into line like all his friends. Whatever was expected had to be against your deepest nature, until death did us kill being no state to live in, the black hole too close even then to tolerate, and so the irreversible step was taken, and he ran from the living death of marrying the girl he loved. He opted for liberty, of looking for a refuge from himself and never finding anything he could recognize as a final haven.

The turmoil of fleeing was the only reality, self-defeating, but always exciting, but if you spoil a person's life make sure you know what you do, otherwise your own soul could die. On the other hand he refused to believe he had ruined Jenny's life, any more than he had wrecked his own. You could never be sure of what effect you had had as long as there was a future to look forward to. Jenny was alive and healthy, and since he had been asked to her seventieth birthday party all might yet be well.

At the foot of the hill a mother, father, and three children on their rainbow coloured bikes went between the greenswards like a shoal of tropical fish. Through the brick archway a young woman in the stable was grooming a horse. She swabbed the snot off its nose with a grey rag that looked as if it had done the same service for a posse of others, a tail of ginger hair shifting to and fro down her back. The placid animal royally accepted her care, but she was accustomed to people noting her activity. ‘You look after the horse well.'

She turned, but kept a hand on the animal's mouth, her pale worried face not losing its concern for the horse. ‘I've got to, haven't I?'

He imagined the shape under her clothes. A funny old chap, she must have thought, though personable young women sometimes fell in love with older men, who would surely be daft if they questioned what sinister undercurrents led them to it. It wasn't the women he fell in love with ten times a day who would improve his existence but the one he laid siege to on deciding to make her his girlfriend, which had now and again succeeded. When one is dying in a desert of your own making, and finally gets to water, thirst kills whatever microbes are hidden in it.

His usual quick walk took him by the industrial museum and out to the large area of grass descending from the rear of the Hall. Heading towards the lake, he thought maybe he would call on his first wife when he got back to London, to see if he could persuade her to live with him again. He would surprise her by being suave, humorous, kindly and understanding, a much reformed man in fact, telling so many amusing anecdotes (he would write a list, and rehearse them) about what had happened to him since their divorce, that she would have no opportunity to bring out the big guns of sarcastic disbelief. He would take an armful of flowers, escort her to a good restaurant (with anti-salmonella pills in his pocket) and if he got as far as being invited back to her flat, he would praise her exquisite cooking (it had always been god-awful, when she bothered to cook at all), offer to wash the dishes, and maybe dry them, and even put them away, as well as sweep the kitchen. He would say how much he loved her, that he couldn't live without her (as indeed, how could any man? he would add) and admit that all the troubles of their previous marriage had been due to him (they hadn't, by any means) and would never be repeated.

Which would be absolutely the wrong way to go about it, supposing he cared to try, which he didn't. She knew him too well to trust him, and if he did win her again the same fiasco would soon enough come around, and for such a smash up to happen twice would wreck her peace forever. So he wouldn't do it, malice and injustice no part of him, fantasies only grain for the mill of his trade, having long since learned where imagination ended and actual life began.

Such speculation took him to where a chill wind rippled the water, two swans sliding towards the bushes, more as if thinking to find cover than have a quick fuck. Ruts being filled by yesterday's rain, he gave way to a passing woman, and took in what he could without seeming to stare, hoping his manoeuvre to leave her the drier part of the path was plain.

Her head was angled towards the ground, but not so much that he couldn't see a sign of tightness around the mouth, perhaps due to anxiety as much as age, for she couldn't have been much more than forty. She might have stepped from an Edwardian album, being handsome though not classically beautiful, mysterious because interesting and independent, coat blown by a renewing breeze to show a high necked pale brown blouse with a broad tie of narrow darker brown bands hanging between the folds of her small bosom, giving the neat aspect of a north American with dark Colette styled hair.

In the photoflash of a moment, he would have said something was missing in a life which ought to have been exciting but wasn't, though formerly an event he couldn't guess at had provided sufficient memories for her to be alone, while beginning to wonder on her solitary walk around the lake if it might be good to mix with anyone interesting again, her lips showing a subtle mark of enquiry and discontent.

Any intriguing woman passed on the street sent a wave of desire through him, always had, as if he'd only to see their face during an orgasm and discover the greatest love of his life. But the lady by the lake could have no part of him. Her passing merely enlivened the morning, for which he was grateful, and sorry he couldn't tell her so. Such faces filled his mind with possibilities, yet one of the first women met that way had been Jenny, on coming out of the factory arm in arm with a friend, smiling as if she could only be at ease with other women.

Perhaps all his clandestine scrutinies were an attempt to retrieve her image from the time they were in love, before she got pregnant by a man who wanted neither her nor the child, and before her marriage to George who later required almost more than anyone had to give.

Looking along the shore from the sluice gate at the top end of the water recalled scenery from
The Woman in White
, but the Hall beyond was a monument of civilization resplendent against slowly shifting clouds. You live in order to create memories, an incident from the past swamping in, whether pleasant or not, and you relish the free show with all its resonances, because when you're dead there'll be no more. If he had turned into smithereens on the motorway back to London every memory would have been fighting for space in the final second, before the exhibition hall of his mind was blacked out forever, the psychic pile up of all time, a reflection that only increased his feeling for life.

SIX

Arthur, driving as carefully as all get-out over Basford Crossing, thought that Brian had never come up for a gasp of real air since leaving home, because working for television cut him off from ordinary life. He spends his time scribbling, sticks to his work but admits it's an easy life, having enough in his loaf to earn money by writing scripts, which I never thought anybody in our family would do. Derek (who's probably at the pub already) slid out of hard sweat as well, only me to carry the can, except I jacked work in when the firm went bust and I was supposed to be too old to go on. Grandad shoed ponies down the pit till he was seventy, but I was glad to let others have a turn.

A lot of factories were closing at the time, the government glad to see them go, everybody chucked on the scrapheap and more like slaves than when they'd got places to work in. Now there's a Labour government but they're no better than the Tories because they don't care about ordinary people either.

What I can't understand though is why I've got such a bone idle bastard like Harold for a son. If I say anything about him wearing a ponytail and an earring, when he calls to cadge some money, he looks as if there's a bomb ticking inside him ready to explode, though I'd give him more than a run for his money if he made a move.

Now and again he spins a yarn that he's got a job, and likes it because it's such interesting work, says he's friendly with everybody and wants to stick it for the rest of his life, it's just what he's always wanted, and what a shame he didn't find it years ago. He sits there like a useless wanker, telling me how he works so hard the firm can't do without him, that he's so well in with the gaffer he's on the way to marrying his daughter and being made a foreman, and when he is he'll take out a mortgage on a bungalow and they'll have a few kids, and go for their holidays to Skegness or the New Forest.

A pack of fucking lies because I know he's only taking the piss, which makes me want to punch him in the chops and tell him to wrap it up or he'll get another, but for some reason I can't, want to see how far he'll go, and then it's as I expect because a week later the job, if he had one, is no longer a novelty, or he gets a black look from the foreman and tells him to stuff the job where a monkey shoves its nuts. Then he comes to us and asks to borrow twenty quid, like he did last month.

‘I'm stony broke. I ain't even got the price of a pint.'

‘You should have thought of that before you chucked your job.'

‘I didn't chuck it. I was kicked out.'

‘Everybody gets kicked out if they tell the foreman to fuck off.'

‘How did you know I said that?'

How? It was just what he'd wanted to say a hundred times a day when he'd worked in the factory, but hadn't because he'd got to earn a living, and needed his fourteen pounds for ale and women at the weekend. ‘It's what everybody wants to say who's at work, and you were daft enough to say it.'

‘He asked for it.'

‘They all do. But you don't say it.'

‘The fuckface was picking on me. He had it in for me right from the start, but I stuck it as long as I could. Anyway, it's too late now. All I want is twenty quid for a packet o' fags and a pint. It's Saturday night, and I'm flat broke.'

‘Where do you think I've got twenty quid? Well, I did print a batch this morning, but I'm waiting for the ink to dry, though I don't think you'll be able to pass 'em over the counter because like a prat I put the Queen's head on upside down.'

‘Very funny.' The smile didn't do much for his face, as he stretched his legs to their fullest extent. ‘What a fucking country. It must be the deadest place in the world. I wish I'd got a lot more than twenty quid, and if I had do you know what I'd do with it?'