The Wanting Seed (22 page)

‘Then what the hell are you complaining about?’ snarled Tristram. The best of both worlds, as always; women always got the best of both worlds.

‘I’m not complaining,’ said Shonny, with frightening meekness. ‘I’m going to put my trust in the real God. He’ll avenge my poor dead children.’ Then he clamped the two half-masks of his hands, dirty hands, over his fresh sobbing. ‘You can keep your other God, your other filthy God.’

‘I don’t believe in either,’ Tristram found himself saying. ‘I’m a liberal.’ Shocked, he said, ‘I don’t really mean that, of course. What I mean is –’

‘Leave me to my misery,’ cried Shonny. ‘Get out and leave me alone.’

Embarrassed, Tristram mumbled, ‘I’m going. I’d better start my return journey. They say there are trains running now. They say the State airlines are functioning again. So,’ he said, ‘she called them Tristram and Derek, did she? That was very clever.’

‘You have two children,’ said Shonny, removing his hands from his blear eyes. ‘I have none. Go on, get to them.’

‘The fact is,’ said Tristram, ‘the fact is that I’ve no money. Not a solitary tanner. If you could lend me, say, five guineas or twenty crowns or something like that –’

‘You’ll get no money from me.’

‘A loan, that’s all. I’ll repay it as soon as I get a job.
It won’t be long, I promise.’

‘Nothing,’ said Shonny, making an ugly mouth like a child. ‘I’ve done enough for you, haven’t I? Haven’t I done enough?’

‘Well,’ said Tristram, puzzled, ‘I don’t know. I suppose you must have, if you say so. I’m grateful, anyway, very grateful. But you can see, surely, that I’ve got to get back to London and it’s too much to ask me, surely, to return as I came, walking and cadging lifts. Look at this left shoe. I want to get there quickly.’ He feebly banged the table with both fists. ‘I want to be with my wife. Can’t you see that?’

‘All my life,’ said Shonny sombrely, ‘I’ve been giving, giving, giving. People have put upon me. People have taken and then laughed behind my back. I’ve given too much in my time. Time and work and money and love. And what have I ever got in return? Oh, God, God.’ He choked.

‘Be reasonable. Just a loan. Two or three crowns, say. I am, after all, your brother-in-law.’

‘You’re nothing to me. You’re just the husband of my wife’s sister, that’s all. And a damned bad lot you’ve turned out to be, God forgive you.’

‘Look here, I don’t like that. You’ve no call to say that sort of thing.’

Shonny folded his arms, as if ordered to by a teacher, and shut his lips tight. Then, ‘Nothing from me,’ he said. ‘Go somewhere else for your money. I’ve never cared for you or for your type of person. You and your Godless liberalism. And cheating, too. Having children on the sly. She should never have married you. I always said that, and Mavis said the same. Go on, get out of my sight.’

‘You’re a mean bastard,’ said Tristram.

‘I am what I am,’ said Shonny, ‘as God is what He is. You’ll get no help from me.’

‘You’re a damned hypocrite,’ said Tristram with something like glee, ‘with your false “Lord have mercy on us” and “Glory be to God in the highest”. High-sounding blasted religious phrases and not a scrap of real religion in you.’

‘Get out,’ said Shonny. ‘Go quietly.’ The bald waiter by the bar was biting his nails anxiously. ‘I don’t want to throw you out.’

‘Anybody would think you owned the damned place,’ said Tristram. ‘I hope you remember this some day. I hope you remember that you refused help when it was desperately needed.’

‘Go on, go. Go and find your twins.’

‘I’m going,’ said Tristram. He got up and plastered his rage with a grin. ‘You’ll have to pay for the alc, anyway,’ he said. ‘That’s one thing you’ll have to pay for.’ He made a vulgar schoolboy’s noise and went out in tearing anger. He stood on the pavement for a moment, hesitant, then, deciding to turn right, he caught, trudging on his way, through the smeared window of the cheap shop, a last glimpse of poor Shonny with his pudding head shaking in his hands.

Eleven

T
RISTRAM
walked hungry and wondering what to do,
rage still quaking inside, through the sunny Easter Preston streets. Should he stand in the gutter and beg, sing with his hand out? He was dirty and ragged enough for a beggar, he knew, gaunt, bearded, his hair a crinkly tangle. Someone out of ancient history or myth had been that not too unhappy teacher of Social Studies of less than a year ago, groomed, neat, eloquent, home to eat synthelac pudding prepared by a personable wife, the shiny black news spinning sedately on its wall-spindle. Things had not been too bad, really: just enough food, stability, a sufficiency of money, stereoscopic television on the bedroom ceiling. He choked back a dry sob.

Not far from a bus-terminal – red single-deckers filling up with passengers for Bamber Bridge and Chorley – Tristram’s nostrils dilated at a briskly wind-borne smell of stew. It was a coarse charity kind of aroma – greasy metal and meat-fat mitigated by herbs – but he slavered lavishly, sucking the saliva back in as he followed his nose. In a side-street the smell blew out richly at him, heartening as low comedy, and he saw both men and women queueing outside a double-fronted shop whose windows had been rendered opaque with whitewash whorls like amateur reproductions of Brancusi’s portrait of James Joyce. A metal plaque above the door said, white on scarlet,
WD North-West District Communal Feeding Centre
. God bless the army. Tristram joined the line of vagrants like himself – dusty-haired, clothes creased with sleep, fish-eyed with disappointment. One jockey of a wretched man kept doubling up as though punched in the guts, complaining monotonously of the belly-warch. A very thin woman with filthy grey hair stood upright in pathetic dignity, above these people,
above begging except absent-mindedly. A quite young man sucked with desperate force at his mouth without teeth. Tristram was suddenly nudged by a jocular male bag of rags, smelling powerfully of old dog. ‘What fettle?’ he asked of Tristram. And then he said, nodding towards the greasy stew-aroma, ‘Oo’s getten chip-pan on.’ Nobody else smiled. A young shapeless woman with hair like teased wool said to a bowed and sunken Oriental, ‘Ad to ditch kid on’t way, like. Couldn’t carry im no more.’ Wretched wanderers.

A ginger man in uniform, capless, arms akimbo but bent painfully forward the better to show his three chevrons of rank, now stood in the doorway and said, surveying the queue compassionately, ‘The scum of the earth, the dregs of humanity,’ and then, ‘Right. In you come. No pushing and shoving. Plenty for everybody if you can call it a body. In, then.’ The queue pushed and shoved. Inside, on the left, three men in dirty cooks’ white stood with ladles over steaming drums of stew. On the right a private soldier, his tunic far too large, clattered out dull-gleaming pannikins and spoons. The hungrier members of the queue barked at each other, drooling as their doles were ladled out, clapping dirty paws over their portions, protective lids, as they staggered with them over to the rows of tables. Tristram had eaten the day before, but the morning’s anger had made him ravenous. The room, whitewashed, coarsely functional, was full of the noise of sucking, the splash and tremulous clatter of spoons. Tristram, maddened by the odorous steam, supped up his stew in seconds. Hunger was now greater than before. The man next to him was licking his empty bowl. Somebody, eating too
greedily, had been sick on the floor. ‘Waste,’ said somebody else, ‘sheer bloody waste.’ There seemed to be no second helpings. Nor was it possible to sneak out and re-join the queue: the akimbo sergeant was watchful at the door. It did not, as a matter of fact, seem possible to get out at all.

A door diagonally opposite to the entrance now opened and a uniformed man in early middle age marched in. He was capped, polished, brushed, pressed, holstered, and carried the three stars of a captain. His steel-rimmed army-issue spectacles gleamed benevolently. Behind him stood a stocky two-striped man, clipboard under his arm. Tristram, with wonder and hope, saw that the captain carried, in addition to his stars, a grey bag that chinked discreetly as he walked. Money? God bless the army. God very much bless the army. The captain stalked around the tables, surveying, weighing, and the corporal toddled after. At Tristram’s table, ‘You,’ said the captain – his accent was cultured – to an old champing man with wild hair, ‘could use, perhaps, a tosheroon or so.’ He dug into the bag and, half-contemptuously, tossed a bright coin on to the table. The old man made the ancient gesture of touching his forelock. ‘You,’ said the captain to a young hungry man who was, ironically, very fat, ‘could probably make use of a loan. Government money, no interest charged, repayable within six months. Shall we say two guineas?’ The corporal presented his clipboard, saying, ‘Sign here.’ The young man, with shame, confessed that he could not write. ‘A cross, then,’ comforted the corporal, ‘then out through that door.’ He nudged towards it, the door he and the officer had entered by. ‘Ah,’ said the captain
to Tristram, ‘tell me all about yourself.’ His face was remarkably unlined, as though the army possessed some secret face-iron; he smelled curiously spicy. Tristram told him. ‘A schoolmaster, eh? Well, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. How much shall we say? Four guineas? Perhaps you can be persuaded to settle for three.’ He rustled the notes out of the bag. The corporal pushed his clipboard forward and seemed ready to stick an inkpencil in Tristram’s eye. ‘Sign here,’ he said. Tristram signed, shaky, the notes clutched in the same hand. ‘Now out through that door,’ nudged the corporal.

The doorway seemed not to be a way out. It led into a long wide kind of hallway, whitewashed and smelling of size, and a number of ragged people were being indignant with a young and unhappy-looking sergeant. ‘It’s no good going on at me about it,’ he said in a Northern voice pitched tight and high. ‘Day after day we get them in here going on at me as if it was my fault, and I have to tell them it’s nowt to do with me. Nothing,’ he translated, looking at Tristram. ‘Nobody made
you,’
he told everybody reasonably, ‘do what you’ve just done now, did they? Some – that is to say, the old ones – got a little present. You got a loan. That’ll be taken out of your pay, so much per week. Now, you needn’t have taken the King’s money if you didn’t want to, and you needn’t have signed. It was all quite voluntary.’ He pronounced this last word to rhyme with ‘hairy’. Tristram’s heart lunged down deep then up again into his throat, as if it were on elastic.

‘What is all this?’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’ To his surprise he saw the dirty-grey lady there, ramrod with
grande dame
hauteur. ‘This creature,’ she said, ‘has the
impertinence to say that we’ve joined the army. I never heard such nonsense.
Me
in the army. A woman of my age and position.’

‘I daresay you’ll do all right,’ said the sergeant. ‘They like them a bit younger as a rule, but you’ll as like as not get a nice job looking after the auxiliaries. Women soldiers,’ he explained courteously to Tristram, as though Tristram were the most ignorant one there, ‘are called auxiliaries, you see.’

‘Is this true?’ asked Tristram, fighting for calm. The sergeant, who seemed a decent young man, nodded gloomily. He said:

‘I always tell people never to sign anything till they’ve read it. That thing that Corporal Newlands has out there says at the top that you’ve volunteered to serve with the colours for twelve months. It’s in pretty small printing, but you could have read it if you’d wanted.’

‘He had his thumb over it,’ said Tristram.

‘I can’t read,’ said the young fat man.

‘Well, then, that’s your funeral, isn’t it?’ said the sergeant. ‘They’ll teach you to read, never fear.’

‘This,’ said the grey lady, ‘is preposterous. This is an utter scandal and a disgrace. I shall go back there at once and give them back their filthy money and tell them precisely what I think of them.’

‘That’s the way,’ said the sergeant admiringly. ‘I can just see you in the orderly room, giving them what for. You’ll do pretty well, you will. You’ll be what they call a real old battle-axe.’

‘Disgraceful.’ And she made, a real old battle-axe, for the door.

‘What’s done can’t be undone,’ said the sergeant philosophically.
‘What’s been signed can’t be unsigned. Fair means or foul, they’ve got you. But twelve months isn’t much, now, is it? They talked me into signing on for seven years. A right twit, I was. A mug,’ he translated for Tristram. ‘Between you and me, though,’ he confided to all, ‘there’s a lot more chance of promotion if you’re a volunteer. Eee, she’s at it,’ he said, cocking an ear. From the dining-hall the raised voice of the grey woman could be clearly heard. ‘Do well, she will.’ Then, ‘They’ll be having what they call Con Scrip Shun before long, so Captain Taylor says. A volunteer will be in a different position altogether from one of those. That stands to reason.’

Tristram began to laugh. There was a chair just inside the doorway and he sat on it the better to laugh. ‘Private Foxe,’ he said and laughed, crying.

‘That’s the way,’ said the sergeant approvingly. ‘That’s the real army spirit. Keep smiling is what I say, it’s better to laugh than do the other thing. Well,’ he said, standing at ease, nodding as other pressed vagrants came in, ‘you’re in the army now. You might as well make the best of it.’ Tristram continued to laugh. ‘Just like he’s doing.’