‘She used to come up to the house now and again, and have a cup of tea with mam,’ Arthur called out. ‘I suppose she had to talk about her troubles, or she would have gone off her head. She used to reminisce about when she’d gone out with you, which cheered her up a bit. Mam liked her a lot.’ He aimed for a black cat, knowing it would get out of the way, which it did, just, so that they all laughed. ‘You brought Jenny home for tea once, do you remember? But mam knew her parents already, because everybody knew everybody in those days.’
Brian nodded. ‘Jenny’s old man was a cheerful bloke, though I expect he knew what I was getting up to with his daughter. Luckily, he was fond of his ale, and went out with his wife to the pub every Friday and Saturday night.’
‘You had it made,’ Arthur laughed. ‘And you fucked her blind on the sofa.’
‘Well, who wouldn’t?’
‘Men!’ Avril gave her usual dry laugh. ‘That’s all you can talk about.’
‘It was the same,’ Arthur retorted, ‘when Sarah called on you a couple of years ago. You thought I’d gone out, but I was in the living room with my ear stuck to the wall. I looked in the mirror, and my face had gone like a beetroot.’
‘I’d have known if you had been there,’ she said. ‘Even when I’m in bed and you go out into the garden I can tell you’re not in the house.’
‘Anyway,’ he said to Brian, ‘I’d have fucked Jenny blind as well. You should have stayed with her.’
‘I ought to have done a lot of things, but they’d have been just as wrong as what I did do.’ His many mistakes in life had only been useful for counting over and over when he couldn’t get to sleep.
‘She’d have had a better life,’ Arthur said, ‘though I don’t suppose somebody like you would have stayed with her for long.’ He nodded towards the mass of clean slate roofs going down the hill. ‘Do you remember all them blocks of flats they built there twenty years ago? They had to demolish ’em after ten years because the partition walls turned into wet cardboard when it rained. A fortune was lost over that, which must have gone into somebody’s pocket. Nobody got sent down for it, and I expect a lot of people are still living in Spain on the proceeds. I’d have stood ’em against a wall and shot the lot. Some made even more money when they built new houses in their place.’
‘It provided work,’ Avril reasonably suggested, ‘and saved a lot of dole money.’
A pool of sunlight flowed into the car, and Arthur put the visor down. ‘In them days there was always work. It was just a shame Jenny’s husband took a job at that iron foundry. The best luck he ever had was when he married Jenny, even though she already had another bloke’s kid.’
‘A lot of men wouldn’t have taken it on,’ Avril said.
Arthur flicked the visor back when cloud hit the sun. ‘Yeh, but she made up for it a million times.’
TWO
After the early days of being in love Brian hadn’t seen Jenny for fifteen years, until a letter came from Nottingham to say his father was dying. He’d seen little of the old man in the previous decade, during which the binding of love and detestation had turned into tolerated indifference. Still, his imminent death meant something, as he stood on the platform thinking it strange that he always had to search for the station exit, never an automatic walk up the steps and across the booking hall onto the street, as if the roots of his instinct were cut on the day he left.
From the crowd around the train his name was spoken clearly enough to startle, and for a few moments he wondered what this half familiar face had to do with him. The express would leave in a few minutes. ‘Hello! Don’t you know me?’ As if the likelihood of his not doing so would devastate her, though the distress in her features wasn’t due to his changed appearance. ‘It’s me, Jenny.’
The more he looked the less altered was she from the girl he had known. He supposed he had mumbled the right words: ‘What are you doing here? Why are you getting on the train? Are you here to meet someone? Or are you going to the seaside?’ He must have said something like all those things, his smile covering the love and curiosity he should have felt, her signals indicating a catastrophe he lacked the nobility of soul to comprehend, and in any case the past they shared was far too far away to be of any help. Eyes filmed by heartache, she held back tears, as if trying to say something with a silence to which he could not respond since he had no silence of his own to give, his heart a ball of string that would need a lifetime to disentangle because he had become another person, and so had she.
Without luggage, she looked too unhappy to be travelling for pleasure. He noted the usual kind of blouse, and one coat button done up unevenly as if she had put it on in a state of shock. ‘I’m going to the hospital in Sheffield.’
Train doors clacked like rifle shots, shouts and whistles normal to him but a grief to her who only wanted to be on her way. He tried to remember whether she had relations in Sheffield. ‘What are you going there for?’
‘My husband’s had an accident in the foundry where he works.’ She gave a mad woman’s smile. ‘I’ve got to run, though, or I’ll miss my train.’
‘I’m sorry. Is he badly hurt?’
‘I don’t know. They telephoned the corner shop. But I’m sure he must be.’
‘Perhaps it’s not as bad as you think.’ He held her warm and vibrant hand while wanting only to get away, yet they were drawn close for a kiss, as if it might reduce the bad news. She wasn’t altogether there, but who would be? He hoped she would remember the meeting as he pulled open a door the guard had just closed, to make sure she wasn’t left behind, being already with her husband as the train went into the tunnel of its own smoke.
He had cut so many people out of his life in order to make a different world for himself, couldn’t connect any more to a woman whose husband had been smashed up in a foundry. The death of his father seemed a formality by comparison. He found the exit easily, as if instinct had come back at the sight of her, marvelling at the chance meeting while walking up the steps.
George, paralysed from the waist down, had to be cared for night and day, lifted and carried, taken and fetched, wiped and fed and humoured and honoured, and no doubt loved, Jenny’s subtly harassed expression the most she would allow herself to show. She did everything, and would have done more had it been demanded or possible. She could have fled — others had been known to — left him in a hospital or convalescent home on the coast, but abandoning your husband wasn’t what you did when he’d stood by you until the time of the accident. In any case, you had sworn to care for each other until one or the other died.
He was never surprised when his brothers’ thoughts ran on the same lines as his own, often so close as those between husbands and wives. ‘By the time George had his accident he and Jenny already had seven kids,’ Arthur said, ‘so maybe it was just as well he did, or he might have given her half a dozen more.’
Brian’s laugh took him away from the tragic aspect of Jenny on the station platform. ‘I should be glad I didn’t stay with her then. I might have had the same number pulling at my turn-ups.’
‘She would have dragged a rabbity bastard like you on every night,’ Arthur said, ‘and in your dinner hour as well, if there’d been no canteen where you worked.’