Albert’s wife sat at the table, a white-skinned, large-boned middle-aged blonde. ‘Hello, Ina,’ he said, ‘this is Frank. He’s the man staying at Nurse Shipley’s.’ The girl by the sink, and the mother, looked again. ‘I brought him up for something to eat.’
A wireless-eye glowed green from the top of a low-lying pot-cupboard, one of its connections faulty. It kept coming on, staying for half a minute, then cracking out softly again in the middle of some B B C parlour game that would have sounded like the apotheosis of boredom had anyone been listening to it. ‘There’s something left,’ she said, ‘if you’ll wait while it warms. It’s rabbit stew as usual.’
‘There wasn’t any post,’ Albert informed her. ‘I would have got through. He’s a bit soft, the postman we’ve got now. In the last big freeze-up the postman made a sledge. Never missed a day — till he died of pneumonia. Still, they say it’ll be in either late tonight, or in the morning. Mandy can go down at six.’
The girl by the sink said: ‘She can’t. She does enough for this house as it is.’
‘We can’t exist without letters,’ her mother said, ‘you know that. We haven’t paid the grocer yet for that wine. Nor have we settled the newsagent.’
‘I didn’t drink the wine,’ Mandy said. ‘You two did. I didn’t read the papers either. You light the fire with them before I get up.’
‘You should get up before midday then,’ her mother said mildly.
‘Tell me what for, and I will.’
‘They’ll have to wait for their money,’ Albert said. ‘They won’t get blood out of a stone. Anyway, I’ll write a few more letters after I’ve eaten. Mandy can hand them in when she goes down.’
‘I’m not going down,’ Mandy said, coming to the table and looking at Frank as if seeing him for the first time. ‘I told you already.’
‘I’ll knock you about one of these days,’ Albert said.
‘Drop dead. Take an overdose.’
‘You rotten little sybarite,’ he called. ‘Get out of my way.’
‘You’re not saying much,’ she said to Frank, ignoring her father.
‘I’m thinking though,’ he answered.
‘I suppose he’s one of your pub mates,’ she sneered. ‘That wireless is driving me potty’ — and went out of the room. Ina laid dishes: ‘Mrs Warlingham came today for that painting you promised, of her house and orchard she said. I told her you were still working on it.’
‘She’ll be lucky if she sees that,’ Albert said.
‘She paid you for it.’
‘Half. I’ll do it when it thaws. Otherwise I might just as well give her a piece of white board.’ He reached for the bread. ‘That’s not a bad idea. As long as I frame it. It’s been done before.’
Frank opened the beer. ‘Got any glasses?’ Ina brought three — one for herself. ‘Are you any good at writing letters?’ Albert asked.
‘Only love letters,’ Frank said. ‘Why?’
‘Well, I’m a great writer of begging letters, a born begging-letter writer. To edge-up my income (such as it is) I turn out a few every week. You’d be surprised at the results. With an old typewriter, a copy of Who’s Who, a few stamps and a bit of imagination, quite a bit trickles in. Where’s that rough draft I knocked off this morning, Ina?’ She passed him a sheet of paper from the shelf: ‘It needs polishing yet.’
‘Listen to this, though, it’ll make your blood run cold. “Dear Sir, As you know from my last communication I have seven children on the point of starvation, and so far you have done nothing to help me alleviate their condition. At least, I myself had the goodness to write to you and describe their plight. I have had many vicissitudes in my life. Once a successful coal merchant, I went bankrupt when rationing stopped, had to leave the semi-demi mock-tudor pebble-dash detached I was buying on a mortgage and come to this rural slum. My car is rotting at the end of the lane, and I haven’t had a smoke for a week. Apart from that, as aforesaid, my seven children are undergoing hardship in spite of the socialist benefits from this left-wing conservative government.” A remark like that usually puts on an extra five pounds. You’ve no idea what pig-rats they are.’
‘One day he’ll come to see you,’ Ina said.
‘No he won’t. They never do. They hate poverty even more than they like money.’
‘But we aren’t desperately poor.’
‘Not much. The longer I live the more I know I’m poor. If he told me to get a job I’d throw a fit.’ He turned to Frank: ‘I’m a full-time painter and a part-time epileptic. But I’m so good at begging letters that I posted one to myself once by mistake. It broke my heart, spoilt my day, and I was putting a ten bob note in an envelope before I realized my mistake. My eldest son’s going into the Church. I can’t think of a better trade for a lad of mine. He’s at university already, thanks to a scholarship he was bright enough to get. He’s glad to be away from home because he doesn’t like my begging letters. I can’t think why: he never gets one. He calls them “charitable appeals”, the craven bloody hypocrite. Goes white as death when I talk about “begging letters” in front of his friends. They don’t get them, either, though I’ve toyed with the idea more than once, and he knows it as well. What can you do when you’re a painter? You can’t go out to work. Work is a killer, occupational disease number one for a bloke like me. If I do a stroke it puts me on national assistance for a year.’ He smoothed at his moustache, giving the same impression of sulkiness that had been on Mandy’s face, indicating dangerous temper in such a grown man.
Frank stood: ‘I’ve got to empty some beer. Where is it?’
‘You’d better use the one upstairs,’ Albert said. ‘You’d sink without trace in the one outside. The door next to my studio. Show him up, Ina.’
‘Don’t bother, I can’t get lost.’
He went through the hall — children still playing — and up the stairs. How could anyone live in a house so bleak? Snow beaded the windows, worried the chimneys with discordant yappings as the lifting wind hit them. It was a larger house than it looked, emphasizing the power of its protection as he reached the first floor.
He opened a door by Albert’s studio, presumably the wrong one. When his eyes focused he saw a bald-headed thin-lipped man, illuminated by a table lamp in a room of drawn blinds, sitting at a transmitter-receiver with earphones on and fingers ac a morse-key. The man, wearing a good suit, was sweating, shivering as if in the first stages of malaria. He turned a panic-stricken look on Frank’s intrusion, then swivelled from the radio with a gun in his hand. ‘Get out!’ he screamed. ‘Get out!’ — an unforgettable picture.
Frank slammed the door, went in the next before giving himself time to parry the surprise of his first incursion. It was a whitewashed room, open to milky daylight of the outside snow. Nearly the whole space was taken by a low table, over which was spread a vast taped-together ordnance survey map. Two youths were leaning across from opposite sides, moving different coloured symbols across the co-ordinates. One, wearing a black leather jacket and a ban-the-bomb badge, looked up and said: ‘I’m Adam. This is my brother, Richard. Do you want a game? We’re practising civil war on England’s green and pleasant land.’