‘Holst.’
‘Somebody got me Mars and Jupiter for my birthday once. I played them so loud that a bloke next door threatened to duff me if I didn’t keep it quieter. I told him to try it, but he backed down and said he’d get the police. I lost interest in it though because Jupiter was what we used to sing at school and I didn’t like it at all. Mars made me laugh, and I used to act the zombie to it for my kids. But it’s a rotten piece because it reminded me of the Germans smashing everything at war. So one day I snapped the record and threw it out.’
She put sausages and tomatoes on his plate: ‘A pity they’re only the sawdust type, but that’s the worst of working in these outback villages.’
‘I don’t think I know anyone,’ he remarked, ‘who likes the work they do. There’s always something wrong with it.’ He was a quick, orderly eater, as if the food on his plate were a fortified area to be reduced by knife, fork, and mopping-up bread. His manner of speaking annoyed her, of connecting her spoken thoughts too outlandishly to some hook in his own mind. He was a passer-by she’d given shelter to, a footloose working-man from whom, at moments, she wanted the same tone of deference that she’d grown to expect from the grateful Lincolnshire villagers roundabout. ‘People who work at jobs they don’t like are too stupid, unintelligent, and cowardly to break the rut they’re in and get work that they would like.’
‘If everybody changed the job they didn’t like I’d be at the pit face and you’d be roadsweeping.’ She’d set the meal as if the idea of eating had no appeal for her, but now she ate as if hungry at the sight of someone else loading it back before her. ‘Everyone does the job they’re fit for. The natural order of things works pretty well. Eat some bread and cheese.’
‘Thanks. We’ll talk about that when there’s a natural order of things. Most of my mates wanted an easier job, less hours, more pay, naturally. But it wasn’t really work they hated, don’t think that. They didn’t all want to be doctors or clerks, either. Maybe they just didn’t like working in oil and noise, and then going home at night to a plate of sawdust sausages and cardboard beans, and two hours at the flickerbox with advertisements telling them that those sausages and beans burning their guts are the best food in the country. I don’t suppose they knew what they wanted in most cases — except maybe not to be treated like cretins.’
She went out, returned with a pot of coffee and a jug of hot milk: ‘Anything but work, that’s what you mean. Strike, go slow, or work to rule, seems the order of the day. Why is it, I wonder?’
He cut bread and cheese. ‘Now you’re being unjust. It was to vary the treadmill. But as well as that there was a collective wish to change the way things are run, so that they’ll have the power of running things. If that happened it wouldn’t be a treadmill any more. They wouldn’t strike. They’d be too busy. And too interested in running it.’
‘That’s being idealistic.’
‘I know it is, but not too much.’
‘I think you’re speaking for yourself,’ she said. ‘You’re more knowing and intelligent than the rest. Not only that, but you speak of it in the past tense, I noticed.’
‘I haven’t thought much about the factory since leaving it, that’s true, because I suppose there’s so much else to think about, soak in. But maybe what I soak in is still connected to the factory that I don’t think about. It still separates me from the world in any case, the fact that I’ve been in one. Whether it’s on my mind or not. How many of the others have you met besides me, come to think of it?’
Her face relaxed, and she laughed.
‘I thought so.’
‘What would you say if I went on strike, a nurse?’
‘I’d condemn you. You’ve no right to go on strike. You sell your knowledge and art, a workman sells his labour. That’s the big difference. Oh, don’t think I haven’t thought about it. If I had a vocation I wouldn’t have the right to strike, either. But you must concede it to the others. I didn’t know I was so hungry — and talkative. Travelling makes me eat more, though I feel thinner than when I was at work. I don’t eat as much as some people. I once knew a man who ate so much he had a blackout. Then he died. I think it was his liver. Some people never know when to stop.’
‘That’s a story you made up,’ she said, pouring his coffee.
‘I know. They’re all true enough. I think them up when I’m walking.’ They sat by the fire. She suspected he was trying to charm her, but was disturbed more by her suspicion than by the fact that it might be justified. He obviously didn’t think about what he said, she decided. ‘This is a comfortable house,’ he remarked, ‘I’m enjoying tonight.’
‘So am I,’ she admitted, ‘in a strange way.’
‘That countryside was getting me down. It’s too green. The road’s hard and the sky’s too grey. I favour a warm room and the supper I’ve just had.’ To spoil it, his feet ached for the walking they’d do tomorrow. He couldn’t thumb any more lifts, as if the man’s accusation of begging free transport had broken one part of his spirit, only to have strengthened another that had just become visible to him. ‘It’s hard to imagine you not getting lonely though, on these nights.’
She was glad of his curiosity. It comforted her, since it was too rare these days. Yet it was also too brusque and offhand, not only that he might not be sincere in it, but that he might be forgetting that they had only just met, and that such curiosity was premature. Still, she had asked him in — for a cup of tea — and in spite of its short time ago she felt no shyness in talking, mainly because she was only talking out of herself, on the understanding that he would be gone in the morning. In any case, he seemed amiable, almost interesting, though somewhat more remote than a person often is when you stop them in the street to ask a direction.
Relaxed and comfortable by the fire, another part of him was out on the wide spaces of the road, blinded by sky and distance. ‘I haven’t always lived alone,’ she said. ‘I was married twelve years, until I split up a while ago, to a typical middle-class Englishman, an advertising copywriter — someone who sat in an office all day in Holborn thinking up slogans that would sell soap powders or a correspondence course in bricklaying.’
Her phrases gave way to a ticking clock, a noise which made the silence deeper than itself. ‘You chose him,’ Frank said.
‘I made a mistake.’
‘So did he. So did I. It’s a marvel to me how many people make mistakes.’
‘You have a sense of humour. But I was tired of the useless life I was leading. It got so that I didn’t need him and he didn’t need me. He was a sort of father to Kevin, but even that didn’t weigh when I decided to leave. Being a housewife in London with a charwoman and an au pair wasn’t enough. I was a trained nurse, and was needed in a village like this, by ordinary people who want some sort of looking after. I think everybody should do useful work. I hate idleness or pretence.’
‘So do I.’
‘Tell me about your work. I’ve never met anyone who worked in a factory, not to talk to.’
‘In what way? I’m what they used to call a mechanic, but I was beginning to see further than the end of my nose. I was also what the gaffers called “a bit of a troublemaker”, but for years they were baffled by me because I was also a good worker. I could set anybody’s tools and take their machine apart as well as the chargehand, and I had many hints that if I stopped being such a keen member of the union, life would be easier for me as far as getting on went. But I saw too much injustice to accept that. I knew which side of the fence I stood on, and still do. I made many others see it as well. They had a favourite trick at our firm of starting on the coloured blokes when they wanted to reduce work rates, but I got the whole shop out once over this, a stoppage they didn’t forget because they had to give in over it. People think factory life is a bed of roses, but it needn’t be as bad as the gaffers make it. I loved the work — though I didn’t realize how much till now. But I can’t go back to it, not for a good while.’