Grey in her hair: amazing how long people lived. The light was too dim; he would like a bulb to shine two hundred watts. ‘I’d rather sit in the kitchen.’
‘You’ve changed, the way you talk.’
He laughed. ‘You mean I’ve got posh?’
‘A bit.’
‘You do, after a few years away. I’ll soon get the lingo back.’
Such an intention seemed to her liking. ‘I’m sure you will.’
But he wouldn’t if he didn’t want to, the accent not being so necessary now. ‘Cigarette, Ma?’
‘Thanks, I will.’
He pushed his legs full out from the armchair. ‘How’s Frank?’
‘Same as ever.’
No one changed, not here anyway, and why should they? Nearly three years was nothing to people who never left home. ‘I expect I’ll be seeing him.’
‘He’ll be thrilled to death. The Prodigal’s coming back, I told him last night. That scar meks you look rough, though. But then, you allus was, especially when you went out boozing with Archie. I expect he’s about to be demobbed as well, in’t he?’
Such a prospect eased his gloom. He nodded at the window. ‘You’ve put up new curtains.’
‘You do notice things, then? I took the old ones down to wash ’em, and they nearly melted in the water they was so worn. Frank managed to get me some new ones, no coupons and no questions asked.’ In the kitchen she took a pork pie out of the cupboard. ‘I got this specially for you. I remember how you liked ’em.’
He didn’t ask where she got it. The days of austerity and hard rationing seemed to go on forever. She cut a large wedge, and poured his tea into a cup instead of the usual mug. The meat was rubbery and overspiced, not much improvement on Spam, but being so hungry it tasted delicious — knowing he must stop looking back on the variegated menus of Cyprus.
‘Now that our Ralph’s married you’ll have the room all to yourself.’ Not only spliced, but he had two runabout sprogs and a ducky little bungalow at Bramcote. ‘You’ll be the only lodger, but I don’t mind. I often think I’ve done enough work, and I can manage all right now.’
‘What about that guest house at Skegness? Ralph told me you were very set on that.’
Her smile coated a nuance of regret, as if she had failed somewhere in life. ‘What would I do in a place like that?’ she said in a tone superior to self-indulgence and disappointment. ‘I like it too much here in Nottingham.’
He followed her lovely legs upstairs to his room, thinking what a pity old people in their forties couldn’t buy new faces from the Co-op. Still, Frank kept his hand in with her. ‘He papered it,’ she said, ‘every wall as you can see. And I put new curtains up at the window as well. I bought the bedspread from a pawnshop.’
Garishness was never more homely than these heavily flowered walls and deep orange curtains. ‘Looks wonderful. All I’ll want is a table to read and write at.’
‘There’s one in the shed. A bit of elbow grease, and we’ll soon mek it shine. You and Frank can get it in tomorrow.’
‘I don’t want to put you to any inconvenience.’
‘Inconvenience!’ she scoffed, giving a very leery look.
Too late to recall his stupid remark, he knew it was always best to show no warmth, lest you betray yourself. The personality he was to regain should merely have given a nod, or a look of understanding, or even incomprehension — it didn’t matter. Posh reactions to kindness on anybody’s part would only delay settling back into a sense of reality. You had to come down from the clouds in a place like this.
Glad to be alone, he took off his boots and lay on the lumpy bed, as exhausted by the half-day as if he had sweated a fortnight at the lathe he would soon go back to. Lulled into oblivion by friendly shouts from the backyards, the uncertain acceleration of a motor car in the street, and Mrs Denman banging washed pots back on the rack in the kitchen, he dozed in the luxury of his return.
The MO said a couple of weeks cycling was the surest way to co-ordinate arms and legs. He ran a finger along the frame of a secondhand five-quid grid, chained up outside the shop, painted black so many times he wondered what pitted rust lurked underneath. The shopkeeper wouldn’t look at his cheque, and it took half an hour to go into town for cash. Maybe the bike was nicked, though the man gave a receipt. Trying it out, a green double-decker ran him into the kerb. The brakes were good, and so was the steering.
After getting a job the bike would pay for itself, by saving on bus fares. He pedalled to the toll bridge, and for a penny at the gate rode over the Trent. He looked at every woman in case she was Eileen, thought he had spotted her a time or two but felt dead towards her when it wasn’t. He wanted someone new, in any case, with free and intelligent ideas, not the old cloying courtship which put you on to a bleak and dead-end road.
He’d only biked before around the leave camp on Cyprus, so wobbled a bit through Wilford, frequently stopped to adjust the brakes, pump the tyres, check the steering, tighten one of the cottapins, soothed by so much mechanical fussing. Following the country breezes to Clifton, a long and at times painful slog uphill drew him into a freewheeling stretch to Barton-in-the-Beans and the placid river again. For twopence an elderly Charon, his pipe smoking like a chimney connected to the punt itself and providing the power, ferried him and his bike to a cindered track on the other side leafy with privet and elderberry. Tyres bumping along the riverbank after Attenborough was better practice than cycling on tarmac.
Soon enough knackered he lay on the grass to watch the manoeuvres of uxorious swans, and fishermen coming out of their statuesque pose only to cast their lines. A hundred pounds back pay and demob money would let him drift, before offering his sweat to a factory. He liked the thought, and feeling an unmistakable spit from watery clouds biked to the nearest pub, the taste of local beer locking nostalgia into place with the scenery outside.
Varying the exercise, he put on boots and walked the town. With the map main thoroughfares were avoided as far as possible, as if road blocks had been set up for him alone. Leaving the Park area of big lace manufacturers’ houses whose leafy quiet he enjoyed, he angled through the straight and barren streets of Lenton, working a route by the cycle factory and into the maze of Radford. The new and geometrically laid-out estates didn’t tempt him, so he re-entered the countless streets and became wilfully lost, till finding his position again by the map.
The complex layout of the town was knitted in his mind so that if necessary any pursuer could be lost in it, though who would want to chase him and why was impossible to say. He noted all terraces, the various yards and offshoots of twitchells and double entries, as well as the landmarks of factories, cinemas, churches and, especially, the pubs and their names. People he found in them when stopping for a drink were good to hide among if he was going to be here for the rest of his life. It was as well to know the place.
But why was he still in hiding? After school he had been on the run, or thought it necessary, and now, out of the army, all he wanted was to conceal himself in a life and locality that wasn’t his. Water always flows downhill, his father had contemptuously said when Herbert, on his last leave before going overseas, told him that he might go back to the factory after demob. A young man with your background should have a destiny, was the inference.
Whatever he did was his destiny, but madness seemed to be stalking him these days, because halfway along a street, dreading to meet whatever lurked around the next corner, he quick-turned back to the junction, and launched himself along a corridor of similar houses, moving as rapidly as if a malady was eating his life away and he had to get to a secret refuge before it killed him. Going at the double left everyone behind on the pavement but, he thought, my own self most of all. He timed his rate of walking and found it to be a hundred and thirty-seven paces to the minute, as if chasing an unattainable vision of heaven, retreating from the possible horrors of hell, either of which his blank and steely mind could put a picture to.