Grimed with sweat after uncounted miles, limbs racked and the scar on his face sore, he went into Yates’s and drank a pint to get cool, comforted to find a point for homing on, especially the long bar that had furnished his first roof in Nottingham.
Early evening, the place was quiet and familiar, a few drinkers further along minding their own business, an air of preparation however before crowds came in later. Herbert recalled with embarrassment his time as a school kid ordering half a pint, and the naive effrontery in asking Isaac to join him, a man almost old enough to be his grandfather. The four years stretched back like forty, and the time since India seemed centuries away, but Isaac was a more recent human landmark, and must still be where he had always been.
On the pavement he adjusted his mackintosh and pulled the cap down as rain blew across the flower beds. Workmen on their way from factories were criss-crossing the square to change buses and go home. He climbed the stairs wearily and, no response to his knock, tore a sheet from his notebook to say who had called. He pushed it through the slit but, when he was halfway down the stairs to the outside door, heard bolts drawn and locks undone. ‘Come back up,’ Isaac called. ‘I thought you must be one of them.’
Herbert followed inside. ‘One of who?’
‘The landlord’s men.’ He looked much harassed, hands shaking as he relocked his fortress as if the crown jewels were inside. Thinner than before, and more bald, he buttoned his dark blue overcoat. ‘Am I glad to see you, though.’
He didn’t eat regular meals, had become pasty-faced, waxy almost. ‘Why, what’s wrong?’
‘People come up here and threaten me, hoping I’ll pack up my tranklements and leave. They want to do the place up and let it for a lot more money. So these bloody oafs say they’ll kick me in if I don’t skedaddle. They don’t know me, though. I like this place, and I’m sticking.’
A cold wind rattled the window, and Herbert passed over his packet of cigarettes, fighting down the words that came to him, wanting to say them but knowing he mustn’t, words such as admiration for Isaac’s courage and independence, and in living the way he did, regard for his qualities as a human being, respect for his knowledge and experience, and even awe at his age. It all added up to the nearest he could get to affection for someone other than a woman he was going to bed with, and even then the sum of his feelings might not amount to half so much. ‘What time do they come?’
‘Hmmm — Players. Where did you get these?’
‘They had some in Yates’s.’
Isaac washed cups, fingers chapped, heavy grey veins on the back of his hands. ‘One of ’em was here an hour ago, about half past five. But you don’t need to get mixed up in it. It’s none of your business, sonny boy.’
‘I can think about it, though.’
He opened a cut loaf and buttered the slices. ‘There’s even some sugar in stock. I got my rations yesterday.’ A pigeon warbled on the window ledge facing the narrow street. ‘Sometimes I think I’m going to start eating them, except I don’t see why they should pay for the sins of the world. Now sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing since I last saw you. Your postcards were welcome, but they didn’t say much. How did you get that scar, for instance? Makes you look a bit of a devil.’
Up Wilford Road he turned right into Goodhead Street. You never went to the front door because the parlour was often somebody’s bedroom, or was used only on Sundays. To find the right house from the back meant counting doors along the street from the entry way, and then going behind and ticking them off again.
The rabbit hutch in the yard was empty, and a bike leaned against a bath big enough to wash the baby Hercules in. A girl of about fifteen came to his knock, a pair of curling irons in one hand and a fresh cigarette in the other: Archie’s sister Janet. The homely smell of toast drifted from inside. ‘What do yo’ want?’
‘Is Archie in?’
He noticed the delicate tits pushing out of her thin blouse, wanting to put a hand on them, except she might turn him into Polyphemus with the curling irons. She glared, went back inside, and he heard her say: ‘It’s somebody as wants our Archie, Dad.’
Herbert was amused at the disgruntled voice of doom: ‘Tell ’im ’e’s still in the fucking army.’
She came out again, and managed a smile to meet Herbert’s halfway. ‘’E’s in the army.’
‘When’s he coming out?’
She turned and bawled: ‘When’s ’e coming out, Dad?’
‘How do I know? Nex’ week, I think.’
‘Are you his posh friend, then?’
He put on his most atrocious accent. ‘I don’t know about posh. Just tell ’im Bert called.’
She nodded. ‘Yeh, all right’ — and banged the door to.
With Mrs Denman’s sandwiches in his saddlebag he set off north to explore the county as far as Worksop, wanting to know the region as if he had been born there. He pencilled the routes to be covered on his map, but found the tarmac dull under his tyres for the first few miles, fields dead and woods deader, the cold shoulder given to dismal villages and worse towns. He didn’t wake up to the beauty until well towards Edwinstowe, fighting off questions as to why he was where he was because there was no answer to what you could do nothing about. To murder someone and get hanged was one solution to his uncertainties, suicide another. Both options stank of romantic defeat, but he’d always wondered whether the life of the criminal wasn’t more to his style than any other.
In each town there was a library, church, schools, a cinema and meeting halls, from which he felt himself as definitively barred as from the world of his parents, from any world perhaps except that of the factory and the pub. The long main street of Worksop seemed like the end of the world, busy and exclusive, so he turned from halfway down to avoid coal smoke and diesel fumes and pale faces, and rode south east towards the Dukeries.
The straight rides hid him and became friendly, took him in, a silent biker pedalling through the glades, no longer feeling isolated because, without people, he had become himself again. Standing on the bridge at Hardwick Grange, by the absolute peace of the lake, he watched the effortlessly floating mallards, part of the willows drooping over cloud reflections, as if this had been his birthplace, or maybe a sign that he was being born again. Not even memories of India, returning in colour and clarity since his accident, but only as if he had read about them in travel books, could nudge aside the healing tranquillity.
The scene was hard to leave. He could grow old, hands splayed on the sandstone balustrade, never moving again — until a postman rode by on his bike and stopped his whistling to call out: ‘Hey up, duck! Nice day, in’t it?’ the tyres crunching gently along under his weight.
Herbert waved, and told himself that all thoughts were irrelevant, that it was what you did that mattered, though if harmony of thought and action was the ideal he must lift up his arms and get back to town, and patiently wait for that blessed state to come full force and take him over, after one last look at the sluggish water of the stream.
He worried about Isaac, and called on him again, thinking that if more than one of the landlord’s thugs showed up at the same time he would have a struggle to deal with them. On the way he queued thirty minutes at the coke depot and bought half a hundredweight in a sack borrowed from Mrs Denman’s shed.