Cal followed, wondering what on earth he could do for Edna Stilton to fulfil the notion Walter had dreamt up. He’d never been in the Navy-he wasn’t actually in uniform-as in better days Stilton was wont to remind him-his experience of combat was clandestine, grubby compared to the heroics of the Royal Navy. No one would ever boast of what he and Stilton had got up to last night. For himself, he wasn’t sure he’d ever tell anyone.
Edna Stilton was leafing through a photograph album. Stilton eased him gently forward with a hand between the shoulderblades. Then Cal heard the door close softly, looked around and found himself in a room he hadn’t seen last time. A formal room-Victorian in the weight of its furniture and the universal hues of brown and black. The ‘parlour’-that was what Stilton had called it. It had the air of a room scarcely used. Like the ballroom in his grandfather’s house-the dustsheets came off once a year.
‘Mrs Stilton?’
She looked up. Sad and smiling at the same time.
‘Captain Cormack. It’s very good of you…’
‘Calvin, please…’
‘I was just looking at some snaps of my boys.’
Cal peered over. Black gummed corners sticking the snapshots down to a coarse grey paper, heavy as blotter. Two shorn pre-adolescent boys in swimming trunks, facing the camera with four rows of bright teeth. A castle made of sand.
‘That was Southend, 1923. The year they got nits and I had to shave their ‘eads.’
She turned a page, then another and another. Came to rest on the twins in uniform, a cigarette stuck to each lower lip, beer bottle in hand, one of them with his head back, roaring with laughter.
‘That was the year they enlisted. 1934.’
Cal pulled up a footstool and took the crick out of his back. He felt like a child next to Mrs Stilton, her bulk sedate in the depths of an overstuffed armchair.
‘You’re a reg’lar aren’t you, Calvin? Not like Maurice. Maurice is only in for the duration.’
‘Yes. I’ve served eleven years if you count West Point.’
‘What’s that? Is that like Aldershot?”More like Sandhurst, I guess.’
She nodded at this, turned another page. A formal shot. The boys in dress uniform standing to attention.
‘The vicar was round.’
‘Yes, I heard.’
‘Reckons they was ‘eroes. Told me and Kitty they died a hero’s death.’
This was the moment Cal had dreaded. His own feet of clay. He had no idea what to say and less of what to be.
‘But they was reg’lar. “That’s the thing with reg’lars,” he said. “They lay down their lives for their king and their country.” ‘
She stared off into nothing for a few moments. Then she looked straight at Cal.
‘Was that why you joined up?’
And he could see no moral or merit in lying to her.
‘No, Mrs Stilton. I’m no hero. I joined up to escape the ties of family. The obligation to go to the right university after the right school, and to cheat the career my folks had mapped out for me. It was a selfish act on my part. I had no thoughts of heroism. I had hoped to get through it all without ever coming face to face with an enemy. It was always meant to be something temporary. I saw myself doing something else within a few years. I’d no idea what, but I never imagined I’d still be a soldier on the eve of a war. Not everyone’s a hero. Not everyone can be like your boys.’
‘Heroes?’
‘We’re not all cut out for it. Your boys were… special.’
‘An’ you didn’t want to be a hero?’
‘Never entered my mind.’
‘I’m pleased to hear you say that. I’d much sooner remember them the way they were-a pair of scallywags looking out for the next fag and the next likely girl. If I thought they was really heroes I’d never have understood ‘em. They joined up to get off the bloody dole queue. ‘Scuse my French.’
She closed the book flat on her lap.
‘Vicar always was a silly old sod. I remember during the General Strike him saying we’d all go to hell ‘cos we’d broken God’s law and it was God as allotted us our station in life. You hang on to your life, young Calvin. I don’t think I believe in dead heroes. Now-has no one offered you a cup of tea? There’s nothing like a nice cup of tea.’
Her arms were poised to push herself out of the chair when the door opened and, as if on cue, Stilton appeared with the tea tray.
‘There’s nothing like a nice cup of tea,’ he said, and Cal knew he was trapped for the duration of the English Tea Ceremony.
§ 49
Vera cooked as well as her mother. Cal had no idea what it was, but there was plenty of it. A dash of meat somewhere, he thought it might be mutton, but healthy portions of carrot and lentil. All the same it was a spartan meal, in that neither Stilton nor his wife nor the lodgers came down to eat, and the awkward recriminating and self-recriminating gathering around the kitchen table consisted of Cal, Kitty, Vera, Rose, her husband Tom, the roundly pregnant Reenie, and the boy Tel.
Cal aimed for neutrality, as heads bent over plates in what he could only think of as an angry silence.
‘Is Pilot Officer Micklewhite on duty?’ he asked of Reenie.
Reenie and Rose were the tearful ones, always on the verge of grabbing a handkerchief and dashing from the room. Reenie looked up at him, eyes red-rimmed.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Maurice-I meant, I guess Maurice is on call?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He can’t get away, you see. They could scramble any time.’
And in saying this the implication of her own words came home to her. She sniffled and dug around in a pocket for her hanky.
Vera’s voice cut through the sniffles.
‘You’ll have to move back now. You know that, don’t you?’ Cal wondered to whom she was speaking, but Kitty answered all the same.
‘Wot? Wot do you mean?’
‘I mean you, fancy pants. You’ll have to move back. I can’t manage this house on me own. It’s time you recognised that you can’t shirk your responsibilities no more.’
‘Wot? Me? Why me? Why not Rose or Reen?’
‘Why you, ‘cos you’re the eldest, that’s why. Besides, they’re married. They got blokes and kids of their own to look after. I can’t look after me mum as well as Dad and Tel.’
Tel chipped in, ‘You won’t ‘ave to look after me. I don’t need no looking after. I’ll be in the Navy next year.’
Then both the sisters turned on him.
‘Not bloody likely!’
‘Wot?’
‘You’re going nowhere,’ said Kitty, aiming at him with her fork. ‘Hasn’t this family lost enough already? You can just wait till you’re called up, and even then you won’t have to go. Not after this. It’d be cruel to take you as well as Kev and Trev. If you join the Navy now it’ll break your mother’s heart.’
‘That’s not fair!’-the cry of younger siblings everywhere. ‘You’re making me stay at home just so you can go on swanning around up West.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it. I work up West. Bow Street ain’t exactly the Mile End Road, you know. I can’t roll out of bed and be at work ten minutes later! Will you lay off. Will you all just lay off! I am not moving back, and that’s final.’
Vera gathered up plates, an oversized show of bustle, as much noise as she could make. And when she’d dumped everything in the sink, she faced Kitty across the width of the kitchen and uttered the single word, ‘Bitch.’
Kitty pushed back her chair and yanked open the kitchen door. Cal sat nonplussed. He’d never seen anything like this. In his family it simply didn’t happen. His sisters would never call each other a bitch, they’d simply point out that one was being boring-the greatest sin the family knew of, to be boring.
‘Calvin!’ Kitty said from the doorway.
Out in the street it was already dark.
‘Will you take me home?’ she said.