Cycling into the endless streets of Sneinton made him happy, a spirit retained even when he passed the house by which he’d fought with the husband of that bag Edna, picked up in the Langham last autumn. What a night! His black eye lasted a fortnight, and he only hoped the other bloke’s had taken as long to disappear. When Bert came home three months later his side of the story was spilled: Rachel had taken him to bed and he’d had the time of his life, including breakfast on a tray in the morning. Bert had all the luck, though he couldn’t but laugh as he skidded into the street on which was Edgeworth’s Engineering Ltd.
It was a small firm, one long building of sixty workers, and two side offices at the street-end, where a typist drew up the Friday wages. The glass-pannelled door took him into a cul-de-sac of waist- and breast-high machines, lit by blue fluorescent gleams from overhead. Belts under the ceiling ran races with each other, pinjoints clicking against motor-driven wheels. Ted Edgeworth, the owner, worked like one of the men, tall and miserable with long grey hair, dressed in a boiler suit only different from the rest in that it was changed every day instead of once a week. His wife came in often to see him, drove down in a flash car from their bungalow by fresh-aired Thurgarton. Not to help, but to stand by his side while he fiddled with some blueprint or component on his bench at the end of the shop. Their backs were to the workers, but it was safely assumed that she nagged him black and blue over some long-corroding domestic detail because, though no words were heard above the drone and roar, the back of his beanpole neck stayed bright red whilever she was there. Maybe it’s because she caught him with some fancy woman or other a few years back and wain’t let him forget it, though that’s not likely because Ted is a bit pansyish if anything, the way he puts his hand on your shoulder when explaining a new job. Maybe it is something like that: you never know, what with having such a cat-faced scrag-end of mutton for a wife, and two sons in the army who didn’t want to take over the business.
When Mrs. Edgeworth stayed away, there was Burton the government inspector from Birmingham to give him hell, as like as not. Poor old Ted. Burton was a real Hitler who played on the fact that Ted was a timid old bastard, even though he was a boss, one who couldn’t answer back too much because he was salting thousands away out of the fat government contract whose work Burton came every now and again to inspect. He was bigger than Ted, well-built and pan-mouthed, and let himself go into rages about inferior work that Ted was trying to palm off on a government that had had all the money in the world to spend since 1939. Two thousand nuts went one week to a Birmingham gun factory and all of them had been drilled and threaded so much off centre that the guns would have killed our own blokes instead of the Jerries. Burton made a special trip up in his car and saw boxes of them still being blithely turned off on a row of lathes. He pushed by poor flummoxed Ted, stood at the boxes with his battleship jaw fixed on his gauges, and then carried one back to Ted’s bench. Even over the noise of machinery you could hear him shouting, and he ended up by knocking — maybe an accident, but nobody ever knew — the whole box of them over the floor. After he’d stalked out and driven off, Ted started screaming at his tool-setters and viewers, but not near enough to get his own back.
Ructions, everywhere you went, though Brian hoped it would get quieter at home after this morning’s bust-up. The house was too small and so was the factory: often Brian would load his saddlebag with sandwiches, a bottle of milk, and a map and take off into the country, pedalling north through the open fields and scrub-lands of Sherwood Forest. The smell of tree bark in spring reminded him of his far-off days at the Nook, and of his not-so-distant ramblings over the Cherry Orchard with Pauline. Ructions with her it had been as well, though things had got better lately. Some months after their parting he’d been walking along the open pavement by the Council House lions one Sunday evening with Albert Lomax, and had spotted Pauline talking to a couple of other girls on the steps. Everyone was out in their Slab Square best, perambulating to either get or give the eye; perhaps in an odd moment stopping to hear a few words of admonition from Sally’s Army, or soak up a bit of sound advice from some Communist speaker, or argue with a Bible-backed old god in a trilby hat — who was so thin you’d think somebody had nicked his ration book.
Pauline waved at Brian’s smile as if she were glad to see him. He’d never noticed before how pale she was. You’d think she’d got jaundice by the look of her. He went up the steps, followed by Albert. “Hey up, duck. How yer gooin’ on?”
“All right.”
“You want to come out of the wind or you’ll get a cold.” Though it was so long since their quarrel, he still felt affection for her. Her friends stood to one side, made sharp responses to the calls of passing youths. He also felt jealous at the world of time that had fallowed between them, some land of other-occurring days lost and never to be known. Why does it make so much difference? They should have been closer, and he considered it her fault they weren’t. “I feel marvellous,” she said. “I ain’t ’ad a cold for weeks. Where you off?”
“A walk. Where yo’?”
“A walk.” Picking up lads, he thought, like her pals now talking to some — feeling rotten against himself for these unspoken words, because Pauline seemed to have less ebullience and stature than when he had last been with her. “Do you still go to the Capitol on Sat’day nights?”
“No.” She was absorbed by people moving around the square, as if wanting to be among them and away from this meeting that she had, by a characteristic lapse towards good nature, let herself in for. “I didn’t think you did,” he admitted, now hoping to get her going with him again, “because I often go there to see if I can spot you.” She didn’t, as he wished, take him up on this, and they stood awkwardly. It was a fact that he’d haunted the cinema the last few weekends to see if she would get off a 7 or 22 and walk slowly towards the queue he stood in — though knowing that such meetings never happened when expected or encouraged, came only when all thought of them was deep in hiding, like now. Her friends had dismissed the youths, and even Albert was impatient for a walk up Trent. “How’s your dad?” Brian asked, offering a cigarette, which was refused.
“He’s dead.”
The beginning of an ironic laugh came, a disbelieving start to a sentence that would have been catastrophic if he hadn’t pulled himself up in time: “You.…”