At the Halifax Building Society they turned right by a row of ugly, square, brick-built shops roughly assembled into a poor man’s shopping centre. A long street of red-brick semi-detached villas fell steeply away towards a Leeds skyline that shimmered against a blue sky in a hazy distance of spring heat and pollution. An area of waste ground grew unkempt, yellow-sprinkled with dandelions. On the other side of the road stood the Bramley Community Centre, with its freshly blue-painted facade and a narrow strip of parking behind a broken stone wall.
Their driver pulled the minibus into the parking area and slapped his steering wheel with satisfaction. ‘There we are. Bang on time, gentlemen. The coach should arrive any minute now. Then after lunch you can join them for the rest of the journey.’
‘Where’s the coach coming from?’ Jack asked innocently. Although what he really wanted to know was where it was going.
The driver obliged on both counts. ‘Didn’t they tell you? The north-east. Newcastle. You’re the last lot to get picked up before they hit the M1 for London.’
Jack and Dave exchanged looks, and Maurie nodded gravely. Ricky shut his eyes and kept his sigh to an almost inaudible puff of air.
The driver helped them down on to the tarmac. ‘You don’t have much luggage with you for a three-day trip.’ He paused and frowned. ‘In fact, you don’t seem to have any at all.’
Jack said, ‘My son was heading down to London this week. So he took our stuff on ahead. Saved us carrying it.’
‘Very wise. In here, gents.’ And the driver led them into the hall of the community centre.
It was arranged with rows of tables covered with paper cloths and set with plates, cutlery and china teacups. A row of windows along the front of the building laid sunlight across them in broken, zigzag slabs.
Ricky leaned in to whisper in his grandfather’s ear. ‘I’ve never heard anyone lie so easily.’
Jack searched his face as if looking for a sign, any sign, that his grandson was learning anything from his experience. He said, ‘It’s called survival, son. You’ll find out about that if you ever join the rest of us in the real world.’
‘This is the OAP lunch club,’ said the driver, ‘run by Bramley Elderly Action. The only square meal some of these folk get, and often the only company they have from one week to the next. There are a few regulars here today, but mostly it’ll be folk from your tour. Why don’t you sit beside Mr Maltby? He’s an interesting old fella. Ninety plus, I think.’
Mr Maltby sat at a table near the back. There were others, sitting together in groups of two or three, but Mr Maltby was on his own, and had chosen a place in the full glare of sunlight from the window. He seemed burned out by it, like an over-exposed photograph, so that he appeared almost spectral.
His dark suit was shabby and shiny. It must once have fitted, but he had clearly shrunk, and it was now several sizes too big for him. His shirt was buttoned to the neck, but hung loose around it. He wore no tie, and his hands were folded together on the table in front of him. Gnarled, arthritic hands with huge knuckles and deformed fingers. His fingernails were too long and the skin on the backs of his hands was bruised and stained with the brown spots of age.
He had a strong face, airbrushed by the light from the window so that his skin seemed quite smooth and almost shiny. His ears and nose were enormous, as if the rest of his face had contracted around them, and only a few wisps of silvered hair clung stubbornly to his scalp. A drop of clear mucus hanging from the end of his nose glistened in the sunlight.
‘Here, young man,’ the driver pulled out a chair next to Mr Maltby. ‘You can have the honour of sitting next to him.’
Ricky looked as if the last thing in the world he wanted to do was sit beside Mr Maltby, and he drew his chair into the table with a bad grace, immediately pulling a face and putting a hand to his nose. Mr Maltby, it seemed, was disseminating the perfume of old age. Jack glared at his grandson and very deliberately took the seat on the other side. Dave and Maurie sat opposite.
Jack reached over to shake the old man’s hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Maltby. I’m Jack, and these are my friends Dave and Maurie.’ He nodded towards Ricky. ‘And my grandson, Rick.’
‘Ricky,’ Ricky corrected him.
Jack was surprised by the strength of Mr Maltby’s handshake. ‘Knew a Ricky once,’ the old man said. ‘Private Richard Tyson, he were. But everyone knew him as Ricky. Worked in the hat department at Harrods in London before the war. Absolutely bloody useless, ’n all.’ His green eyes shone with mischief, his voice strong and lucid in spite of his years.
‘You were in the war, then?’ Jack said.
‘Aye, I were that. Last two years of it, anyroad. They wouldn’t let me go and fight the bloody Hun till I were eighteen.’
‘What did ye dae? Were you front line?’ Dave eyed him with curiosity. None of his generation had fought in any war.
The old man chuckled. ‘No, we were beyond the front line. The no-man’s-land between them and us. Wi’ a radio and a pair of bloody binoculars. It were our job to radio back the position of the enemy so our boys could drop their shells in the right place. Safest spot to be, really. In the middle. Nobody dropped their bombs there. But it were bloody noisy, I can tell you.’ A distant memory flickered across his face in a fleeting smile. ‘Ricky, the hat boy, he couldn’t deal wi’ it. Shat himself the first time we took him out, then started screaming when the shells was flying over our heads. Me and Tommy had to sit on him to shut him up.’ His laugh crinkled his eyes, then faded into some sad recollection that never found voice.
They knew the coach had arrived when the pensioners’ party from Newcastle flooded noisily into the hall, gaggles of women and groups of men finding their seats at separate tables as if there were some unspoken ban on integration of the sexes. Almost immediately, volunteers started serving up the soup, a thick vegetable concoction of lentils and barley.
Jack supped his, and dipped in some bread. Then he said mischievously, ‘Our Ricky here’s a bit of a soldier, Mr Maltby.’
The old man looked at Ricky, surprised, and cast an appraising eye over him. ‘Really? You don’t look very fit, son.’
Ricky blushed.
‘That’s because he’s an armchair soldier, Mr Maltby. TV screens and remote controllers. It’s all a game to him.’
Mr Maltby shook his head gravely. ‘War’s no game, son. It’s a bloody tragedy. Just be grateful you’ve never had to do it for real, and I pray you never will.’
Ricky glared at his grandfather in wordless fury, and they finished their soup in silence.
The main course was roast beef in gravy with Yorkshire pudding and mashed potato. As he ate, old Mr Maltby wiped away a dribble of gravy from his chin with the back of his hand. Miraculously, the drop of mucus still clung to the end of his nose.
Then out of the blue he said, ‘Poor bastard.’
‘Who?’ Maurie said.
‘Ricky.’
Jack frowned. ‘My Ricky?’
‘No, Harrods Ricky.’
And when it seemed as though he wasn’t going to elucidate, Jack said, ‘What happened to him?’
Mr Maltby sat with his fork raised halfway to his mouth, roast beef dripping gravy back on to his plate, and he appeared to drift off in space and time to a place only he could see and hear. Then he lowered his fork back to his plate.