What better time to start than then and there? Decide. Remove all obstacles. Proceed. Victor took his memo pad and wrote a note in pencil on it. For Anna. She could deal with Rook. A less generous man would call the police, and let them sort it out. But, no, let Anna do the job. That’s what he paid her for.
Victor was glad — relieved — to have this task with which to fill his ninth decade and so engrossed by every touch and mark upon the artist’s page that he neither saw nor felt the plastic foliage pressing on his back.
Part Two. MILK AND HONEY
1
THERE’S BEEN no other birthday chairs in Victor’s life, other than the one that Rook had prepared for him when he was old, other than the one he’d sat upon yet failed to see. Victor was a townie almost through and through. He was not as soily or as leafy as he claimed. He’d fled the countryside when he was three weeks old, when this brusque, gymnastic century was also in its infancy. His dad had died. An epidemic of the sweats had seen him off before his son was born. His home village could barely cope with the sudden glut of widows, dotagers, and orphans, all shaken from their tree before their time, all seeking charity at once. A widower could work and earn his keep. But who would go without to feed and clothe the harness-maker’s wife, or her new baby, when it came? Her husband’s skills had died with him. He had left no land or crops for her to sell. The workshop cottage and its yard was only theirs by rent. The landlord’s agent let her stay until the child was born, and then — what choice had he? — he asked for payment for the weeks she’d missed. The money that she’d made from selling unworked leather, harness tools, her husband’s horse, was not enough to clear the months of debt, and live. The mother and her wrinkled kid were as cold and poor as worms.
At least Victor’s tiny gut was full. His mother’s breasts were independent of all the hardship in their lives. But she was weak from loss of blood and milk and lack of food. The best she had for meals was half a block of pigeon’s cheese and two jumps at the larder door.
What of the free food of the countryside? The mushrooms and the nuts? The stubble grain left over by the thresher and the harvesters? The berries and the birds? The honey and the fish? Life’s not like that, except in children’s books. The free food of the countryside is high and maggoty before it’s ripe; or else it’s faster than the human hand and can’t be caught. What’s free and good is taken by the bully dogs and birds. What’s left is sustenance for flies and mice.
So Victor’s mother had no choice but to pack a canvas bag — a bag her husband stitched for her before they wed — and set off with her baby to the town. She had a distant, younger sister there, a maid to some rich man. Her address was poste restante at the Postal Hall. Victor’s mother asked the landlord’s agent to write a note. It said, ‘Sister, my husband’s dead, and less than twenty-three years old. I have a child. His name is Victor. So we must come to you as you are all we have, and will be with you soon for love and help. Today is Monday and the 26th of June. God keep you well. Signed lovingly, your only Em.’ She begged a postage stamp and left the letter with the village clerk. There was a mail train every other day. The letter would soon be in the town. Her sister would prepare to take the widow and the orphan in, for sure, and find them food and work.
Em made a sling for Victor and strapped him to her chest with her shawl. She tied the canvas bag across her back. She threw some grains of maize — for Thanks and Fare-thee-well — on the doorstep of her house. She lit a candle. She ought to carry light from their old home into their new, wherever that might be. Light is luck. You take it with you when you move. She lifted it and put it down again. Once. Twice. The flame drew back. It ducked and shrank. The light would have to stay. She was not fool enough to think she’d keep the flame alive out in the wind and night.
‘We’ll leave it here for him,’ she told her son. ‘Your father always loved the mummery of candle flames.’ But Victor cried when he lost the sight of that low flame. It was his first and only toy. He wanted it. Em knelt and snubbed it then, with fingers moistened by her tongue. She let him grip the candle end, a nipple and a finger made of wax. It kept him quiet as they set off on their journey to the town, through valleys made patchy-blue that time of year by fields of manac beans. The sky and countryside were fabric from one cloth, and that the colour of the Caribbean Sea.
The baby Victor was content with little more than suck and blow. He was happy just to hold the candle end, to sleep or feed, made biddable by the rhythm of his mother’s steps, kept warm and coddled by the sling and by her breasts. A child of three weeks old is built to bend and bounce and sleep throughout. And just as well, because his mother’s hike to town took seven days and passed through storms and woods and fords which would frighten and dismay children of a greater age. Em feared wolves and chills and broken legs, but Victor filled his empty head with heartbeats from his mother’s chest. She washed his soiled and heavy swaddle cloths in streams and let the wet clothes dry and stiffen, draped across her back. By the time they reached the outposts of the civic world, the cemeteries, the rubbish dumps, the gypsy camps, the homes of bankers, the abattoirs, the outer boulevards of town, Victor had regained his birthweight. His mother, on the other hand, was paler, thinner, colder than a cavern eel.
They left the fields behind. They reached metalled roads, and rows of houses with lawns and carriage drives. They came through high woods and found a measured townscape spreading out in greys and reds and browns, with a shimmering mirage of smoke which made it seem as if the hills beyond were chimney products of the city mills and that the sky was spread with liquid slate. This was a different city from the one we know. Less egoistic, more malign.
Em carried Victor down the causeway of trees and grass which split the city’s outer boulevard in two, and conducted trams and countryside into the town. These were the days when foot and hoof and wheel were battling for the government of towns, and wheels — because the rich had motor cars — were winning every skirmish on the streets. For peace and quiet the walkers shared the causeway with the trams.
She asked an old man for the Postal Hall. ‘It’s far, you’ll have to take a tram,’ he said, pointing to the tallest part of town. He showed her where the tram would stop and waited while she joined the queue. But, once he’d turned away to dodge a path between the vans and carriages which thronged the road, she set off once again by foot along the tramway into the city’s heart. She feared the other passengers. She feared the clanking trams with their winding, outside stairs, and their wind-blown upper platforms which shook and muttered like the devil’s haycart. She trembled in the street. Yet surely these were women just like her, beneath their feathers and their ribbons, beneath their hobble skirts. What had she expected? That city people got about on hands and knees, as country wisdom claimed? She looked her urban sisters in the face, but could not find an eye to match her own. They seemed like modest girls — or sinful ones — who could not lift their eyes, who did not have the energy to smile. Em walked and smiled and sought a welcome from everyone she passed. How could she know how strange she seemed, how disconcerting was her upturned face and mouth? She kissed her Victor on the head. She nuzzle-whispered in his ear the chorus of the nursery rhyme: ‘Townies, frownies, fancy gownies; noses up is; mouthies down is.’