She turned. He pushed the pram. Brian woke up and she thought he was going to cry. Bending over, she pulled the coverlet up to his neck. He did not cry. She let herself be led by Ernest, feeling bitterly cold, though the air was warm and Seaton had dashed out without a coat. She shivered on her way back to the house, and a drowsiness replaced or accompanied the cold, as if she had been a week without sleep.
When she left Ernest’s, a huge basket of groceries was at the foot of the pram, and the small fortune of a pound note lay in her coat pocket. But she was indifferent to these gifts and all that Ernest had meant they should mean. Yes, he would meet Harold coming out of work. Yes, he would say he should control his temper and not lead her such a dance; yes, he would say this and he would wag his head and nod his chin and tell Harold he should behave himself. Fine, fine, fine. But in the end it wouldn’t mean a bleddy thing. You can say things to a reasonable man that he’d take notice of, but you can’t tell a madman not to be mad any more. And so it would go on, though one day, she said, Brian would grow up, the proof of it being that he was beginning to cry.
PART TWO
Nimrod
CHAPTER 4
Brian had just height and strength to wrench himself on to the parapet of New Bridge and see the free-wheeling bare spokes of the headstocks riding the empty air like upside-down bicycle wheels. Leaning on his elbows and booting a rhythm on the wall, he saw the semaphore arm of a signal rise upwards, and settled himself in the hot sun to wait for a train.
When he was on an errand to his grandma Merton’s, the couple of grandiose miles out from the last houses of Nottingham became an expedition. Across his route lay streams and lanes and stiles, and to the left stretched a green-banked railway line, rightwards an acre of allotment gardens whose shabby huts and stunted trees were often raided by roving kids from Radford — among them, he knew for a fact, Bert Doddoe and his elder brothers. Brian remembered, in the awesome silence before the advent of a train, how the whole family had descended on his house during the bitter blue snow of last winter. Ada, Doddoe her husband, and their four kids had done a bunk from Chesterfield with their bits of furniture because Doddoe had lost his job for cursing at the overseer down pit; and had spent his wages on booze before going home. Being two months behind in rent, they’d come back to Nottingham without a penny in any pocket, had been given a lift all the way by a lorry driver who had lived next door — otherwise they’d have walked. The lorry drew up outside the house one morning, and there was Ada calling to her sister Vera — crying at the same time she was — asking if they could come in for a warm because they were freezing to death. The look on her face forbade any questioning; to do so would mean going into the animal glare of uncivilized territories, as even Harold Seaton realized when the anger felt at their disturbing arrival had worn off. Ada tried to climb from the lorry-back, but her chapped fingers went aside — like cotton thread that misses the needle-hole when it doesn’t seem possible it can — and she fell towards the pavement while Vera screamed a warning. The rest of the kids watched, except Bert, who ran from under the lorry into his father’s stinging fist, a quick hand that opened in time to catch his wife and stop her fall.
That afternoon Bert and Brian played on the recreation-ground roundabouts while their mothers walked to the convent at Lenton to ask the nuns for bread. They slid face downwards from the high apex of the slide, hoping to work up speed for a dive into soil at the bottom — impossible because the surface wasn’t smooth enough. “You want a candle to rub on it and mek it proper slippy,” Bert had said, and Brian was impressed with the useful know-how of his much-travelled cousin. Their mothers came back with two carrier bags of bread and a tin of cornbeef, making a supper for the ten people who that night slept in three rooms. Next day Ada’s half-dozen moved into a house up Sodom. Lucky Doddoe bluffed a quid out of his old man and got a six-week navvying job from the labour exchange — at which the unwieldy barge of the Doddoe family was once more afloat in its native Nottingham.
A signal passed from the wall to his fingers: train coming. The thunder of its warning grew louder behind, until a black engine burst into the open and shot a choking cloud up from its funnel. He had intended counting the carriages as they clicked one by one into sight, but heavy smoke threw him from the wall.
The fields were divided by a narrow sandy-bottomed brook, and he descended the steps towards it. White clouds climbed shoulder upon shoulder over the houses of Radford, while in front two horses tethered to a tree-stump meditated the clover like statues. He forced a branch back from an elderberry bush until it cracked, stripped it with a quiet, preoccupied ruthlessness, each leaf dropping to the path and taken into an unwilling dance by the wind. His stick was a sword, and he fenced with the shadow of a bush. Thistles were sabred, stinging-nettles laid low, flowers massacred, and he turned up a lonely lane where bordering thorn hedges were tall enough to hide everything from view but the blackening clouds.
A thunder-noise quickened his walk, a distant drumroll that seemed to single him out from everyone else in the world as its first victim. With thunder, fear had come before the word. At its first sound in a darkening house his mother had looked at the window and said: “Thunder,” and between both pronouncements he had run to hide himself. I’m frightened because it makes a noise like guns and bombs, and guns and bombs can kill you, he thought.
He stood in the silent field halfway between home and the Nook, and without thinking he walked on, knowing he would rather go to his grandma’s than run back home, even though the storm might come smashing down any minute, chase him along the lane with each growl louder than the last, blue lightning like cats’ tongues licking the hedgetops. His stick was brandished, as if it could be used as a weapon to wheel and fight the storm should it catch him up.
He leapt a stream with bursting heart, seeing reedgrass between scissor-legs as he went across. Green and blue thunder-clouds rose like jungles over the uncannily lighted red of city buildings behind, and with the next burst of noise flat, heavy drops of rain fell against knees and forehead.
Still clutching his stick, he stood on tiptoe to reach the gate latch, heard the ceaseless grunting of the pigs as he rushed up the yard. A blue sausage-like globule of lightning bounced from a too-close hedgetop and he was impelled by a last effort towards the kitchen door, a box of red geraniums on the window-sill passing him by like a splash of blood. One push, and he was standing inside, breathless, wiping his feet, claimed by the interior warmth. Grandma Merton looked up from her sock-darning. “Hello, Brian, what brings you here?”
Sheets of newspaper protecting the recently scrubbed tiles were used as stepping-stones to the fire: “Mam says she can’t come to see you this weekend because Margaret’s badly again.”
“Don’t stand with your back to the fire, Brian, or you’ll be sick, there’s a good lad.” He moved, waiting for a proper response to his delivered message, hands in pockets and looking out at the last triangle of blue sky. “I don’t know,” she tut-tutted. “What’s up wi’ ’er this time?”
“I think she’s got measles, because she had spots on her face this mornin’.” She took knives and forks from the table drawer and laid them on the cloth for tea. “You must be hungry after coming all that way”—looking out of the window as if to see in one glance the total distance of his journey. She went down the pantry steps and the rattle of the panchion lid filled his mouth with instant desire for the pasty she would bring. Will it be jam or mincemeat? he wondered.