“He died about six weeks ago,” she said, his doubt unnoticed. Disbelief withered, was overpowered at what he saw was the residue of grief in her pallid face and the damaged spirit of her slightly glowing eyes. He remembered the exact physical centre of the blow, as if someone had struck him by the left eye, dazed his senses, so that he took her arm — which seemed to her a gentle pressure of sorrow. But he shouted angrily: “Why didn’t you let me know?”
She drew back. “I couldn’t very well telephone you, could I, loony?”
“You knew where I lived, didn’t you?”
“Well,” she shouted back — and Albert stood amazed at this unexpected blaze-up of a quarrel — “you knew where I lived as well, didn’t you?” Which floored him with its logic and quieted him down: “I’m sorry about your dad, duck. I liked him a lot, you know that.”
“I know you did,” she said, half-jeering still, enraged at him for starting a row where so many people might hear and notice. “But don’t mek me cry, though, will yer?”
“All right, then: I was just trying to say how sorry I am.” They stood in the path of a raking wind, and he wondered why she and her pals chose such a perch to flirt with lads. She turned from him, in some deep way insulted, though he couldn’t see how. “You could have called for me,” she said. “You didn’t think I was going to run after you, did you?” He’d never thought that at all, he argued, knowing that to knock at her house and ask if Pauline was in would have been too simple; he preferred to hang around the pictures in the hope of seeing her on the off-chance; and in any case, much of his time had been taken up boozing and gelling with Albert, just as it looked as though hers had been occupied ladding with her pals. There were ten sides to every story, when you came to think about it, but he didn’t want to tell her this — and perhaps upset her even further. The fact that Mullinder had died caused an emptiness even of air inside him, leaving nothing for his lungs to draw on. “Come up to the club next week,” he said, expecting her to swing round and tell him to clear off. “You’ll have a good time,” he added. “Albert brings his girl as well.”
She turned and smiled: “If you like. As long as it i’n’t on a Wednesday, because I wash my hair that night.”
“Thursday’s the night,” he told her, believing again in happiness. “You look perished, duck: let’s go off and get a cup o’ tea somewhere.” She ditched her pals and went with him, and had gone to the club every week since. The old times came back, though different. He thought about them as he set the miller spinning, invincible steel teeth biting soft as butter into aluminium castings, gouging out grooves with such exactitude that even Burton wouldn’t be able to complain. Sud-drenched splinters spat over the jigs and tray, cleared away every so often with a specially provided handbrush. Pauline had taken to the club like a duck to water, and though they still had violent rows, they usually made up before the good-night kiss. Nowadays there was less of the rough stuff, both of them not so eager to tread on the fine gauze of self-control and descend into thumped-up quarrels. Brian was gentler and more protective, learned to see that her previous tom-lad bouts were only indulged in so as to be like one of the rest. Even so, she sometimes became angry at his continual solicitude, but would have hated him to lose his temper over such resentment and go back to his old retaliatory ways. Their lovemaking was a natural prolongation of calm and seemingly endless walks together, showing that a new stage of tenderness had been reached.
Grandfather Merton saw them arm-in-arm one evening, copped Brian at it, as he told Vera later, talking to his girl like any love-struck youth as they walked along in the spring dusk. Merton was over seventy, had a lean sardonic face that at one time had reminded Brian of a cross between a strengthened Dox Quixote and the head of George V on the back of coins; but Merton was cleanshaven, a blacksmith mixture of both, an upright man in the prime of his old age who still knocked back his seven or eight pints of Shippoe’s every day, much to the disgust of Lydia — who thought it time he packed it in a bit, though not daring, even now, to tell him so. Afraid once upon a time of the stick he beat his dogs with, she was, at forty-five, still wary of him lifting the stick he sometimes allowed to accompany him on his walks. Lydia was unmarried, lived at home, and, as she told Vera and Ada many a time: “The old man’s still a bogger, leads poor mother such a dance as well that I can’t help thinking it’ll be a good job when he’s out the road.” But Merton had always been gaffer, and would stay that way. “I’ll drink what I bloody-well like,” he said when Mary told him about it. “As long as you’ve got enough snap on the table, don’t try and tell me what I can and can’t do.” And knowing how much he liked his ale — and his own way — she didn’t mention it again. In any case he was never so drunk that he didn’t know what he was doing. During a period when Harold Seaton was amiably disposed towards his in-laws, he called there at midday one Sunday and went out with Merton for a drink.
They took a bus to the Admiral Rodney in Wollaton Village, walked back a mile to the Crown under blue sky and fresh-smelling wind, then to the Midland, the White Horse, the Jolly Hig’lers — the distance between each pub shrinking as they got into Radford — ending at the Gregory with Harold groggy on his feet, fuddled with beer fumes and fagsmoke, wrestling with the earth-pull at the calves of his legs, while Merton stood up tall, sliding a pint into himself now and again between casual called-out remarks to some pal or other. Considering, Seaton thought, what a hard old sod he’d been to his family, it was surprising he was so well liked by all and sundry. Still, Merton worn’t a bad owd stick at times, and you couldn’t deny as he’d wokked ’ard either. Seaton took him in small doses, enjoyed bumping into him but made sure it didn’t happen too often. Even now, over forty himself, he felt too much like a son when with him, and because his own father had been dead twenty years he resented Merton’s natural sense of domination.
Seaton liked his beer as much as anybody, which gave him something in common with his father-in-law. A five-pound wage-packet made him well-off, and on weekend nights he would go out with Vera and let his voice rip on the old songs that he liked, his brown eyes, broad sallow face, and black receding hair set against his favourite corner in the Marquis of Lorne. For the first time since getting married he was able to buy a suit — utility and illfitting — but one in which he felt compact and proud, boss of himself when away from work. He had money to buy wood and paint and nails, spare parts for his bicycle and wireless set, but these materials for brightening home and life were hard to find because of the war. He made do and did what he could, though he considered he got little thanks for it from his wife and five kids. What was the use? A bloke couldn’t even have a row with his missis without his son getting up and threatening to bash him. Still, he’ll know different some day. He felt grieved that he seemed to get little love from anyone after all he’d done for them this last twenty years: serving two months in jail to pay for the grub he’d got on strap, which had been no picnic either; not to mention his odd-job versatility and force-put cunning in dodging the means-test man.
I reckon Brian thinks a lot o’ me, though, even after our bit of an argument the other day, because last year he bought me a new set of teeth for nine quid when I’d lost my others being sick down the lavatory after a booze-up. It must a took him a long time to save all that out of his wages, so I don’t think we hate each other even if we do have our ups and downs. By God, you can’t have everything, you can’t. We’re lucky to have some work and grub and not get blown to bits, I do know that much. With his labouring spade he spent all day at the bicycle factory loading mountains of brass dust and splinters from the auto shop on to lorries for the scrap trucks over the road. Just turned forty, he was stocky and of iron strength and knew he would have flattened Brian in ten seconds if it had come to a smash that morning, though, unlike Merton, he found it easier to knock his wife about than his children: the idea of fighting with solid hard-working Brian seemed an impossible disaster; while Merton on the other hand had knocked his lads about, but never Mary.