‘Just a moment, then.’ Isaac turned to the bookshelf. ‘Perhaps you’d like to read these. I’ve been meaning to give you them.’
‘Dickens?’
‘They’ll keep you going for a bit, Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House. Come back if you want any more. I don’t suppose you read such entertaining novels at your posh school.’
‘We had Kipling, and Rider Haggard, and all that stuff. Not that I didn’t think they were wonderful, especially Kipling. Hard to remember some of them, but they kept me going at times. We mostly had the classics rammed down our throats, and I’m glad we did.’
Isaac rummaged further along the shelf. ‘Take this Bible. It’s a Jewish one, without the New Testament, as your sort call it. Stick your nose into it whenever you get the urge. They could write sublimely in King James’s time.’
He needn’t return the favour of the firewood, but always did in some way, so it would be churlish to say more than: ‘Are you sure?’
‘They’re not things I’m short of, as you can see. When I first came here I had a bit of extra cash, so splashed out at the secondhand place down Wheeler Gate.’
Herbert sat again. His supper could wait. Generosity of spirit, one of Isaac’s built-in virtues, was to be marvelled at. A smile and a mordant few words might be the response if he mentioned it, but Herbert still thought it a miracle that he had been rescued by him that first fateful night in Nottingham. The more time passed the less the event receded, came starkly into focus in fact, distilling juvenile horror and despair at the idea of Isaac having been absent from the pub that evening. ‘How did you come to live in a place like this?’
His smile was of the wryest, hiding a more bitter response perhaps. Wrong again, Herbert heard:
‘Like all long stories it can be told in a few words. My wife died, after twenty years of marvellous devotion, on both sides. It was quite sudden, and when she went I wanted to, as well. But I couldn’t commit the ultimate sin of suicide.’
Herbert nodded towards the framed photograph on the bookshelf: a placid yet vulnerable face, dark hair drawn back from pale cheeks. Thin lips fixed in a half-smile suggested she endured life rather than lived it. ‘Is that her?’
Isaac indicated that it was, as if to speak would bring tears. ‘I took to the road. Gave up job, house, family, everything. It was just before the war, and I was on the tramp for two years. I went as far down as any man can, or so I thought. Up in Scotland I was taken into prison for vagrancy, but an elderly chap on the street, who saw me marched off, came to the court and handed in the ten-pound fine, saving me fourteen days in prison. Who he was I’ll never know. He just saw me, and did it. Scottish, Protestant, I suppose, and charitable. Can you beat that? It brought me back to my senses, and I went down to London, to my daughter’s. She wanted me to live with her, and I did for a while, but I couldn’t get on with her husband. When I left she gave me some money, and I ended up in this place. I’ve been here nearly ten years, and don’t think I’ve ever been happier. I like being alone, and I manage with my pension. It’s surprising how little you need living on your own. She sends me a quid or two now and again, for they’re doing quite well. Keeps promising to come up and see me, but I put her off.’
True, it wasn’t so bad. A lot of people put up with worse. You could call Isaac lucky, living absolutely the way he liked. Herbert thought that if he could afford to give up factory work he would be happy to pass his time reading, or cycling, or walking the town, and writing when he felt like it. Such a dream life would need a few hundred pounds a year to bring off in comfort, however, because Isaac’s near poverty wasn’t at all to his liking.
His jacket soaked by driving sleet, he held the books close to his chest to keep them dry. Mrs Denman grumbled at the late hour but laid out a supper of warmed-up Spam fritters and fried potatoes. ‘You don’t look after yourself. See how wet through you are.’
Never speak with food in your mouth. But he was famished, and being Bert he could say so what to manners. ‘It wasn’t raining when I went out.’
She reached up to the mantelpiece. ‘This came for you today.’
His mother’s writing, not the first letter asking him to visit them in Norfolk. He knew he should call, but didn’t care to squander a weekend. What would he have to talk to them about, in any case? Everything they would say to him he already knew, or thought he did, and his temper was too short these days to do much listening.
‘If I got a letter,’ Mrs Denman said, ‘I’d open it straightaway.’
He didn’t want to snap back and offend her. ‘I know who it’s from.’
‘I dare say you do. Your parents, I suppose, like all the others.’
‘They want me to go and see them.’
‘I’m sure they deserve it. Don’t you want to make ’em happy?’
‘I’m not sure I would.’ She was more than right, and her advice softened his feeling of being pestered by their letters, though he hoped she would now keep quiet about it, for if he felt too guilty he might tell her to mind her own business. ‘I will one day.’
As if knowing his thoughts, she altered tack in any case. ‘You look like a drowned rat. I’ll light the geyser so’s you can have a hot bath and get warm.’
Splashing in the carbolic steam he wondered where Isaac went for the same luxury. Always clean and dapper, he must use the public baths. He lifted himself out and got dry, putting on two jerseys to face the room. Supper weighed heavily as he closed the door, and drank the mug of tea from Mrs Denman before cold reached its core.
Flakes spinning down the panes in slow Catherine wheels seemed to have eyes that looked at him, so he drew the blanket-like curtains, and lit a cigarette to warm the end of his nose, or staunch the mucus trying to fall from it. He’d had more colds than he could count since leaving Cyprus. Questions as to what he was doing here only came at such times of reflection, and even though unanswerable he supposed they were necessary for what he wanted to do.
Bert’s life had to be written about, and that was a fact, but it could only be done when he said bollocks to questions and side-stepped into being Herbert, the query ritually answered on setting himself at the table to begin an inky scrawl across the page. Herbert and Bert were two ends of a magnet, each competing for the iron filings of other people’s misadventures. One end of the horseshoe had to be Bert, but the other was labelled Herbert so as to make the style clear, and in the hard body of the metal they became one, and words meshed craftily to make sense of the story.
He was closed into a baffle of Third Programme music — anything classical would do — from his fifty-bob secondhand wireless. Archie connected the transformer and fixed an aerial out of the top bedroom window, on a pole that pointed like a finger at the sky as if hoping to draw nothing but the best from God. Music was both an inspiration and a screen, sounds to be enjoyed but for his mind to fight against, the balance opening a space for whatever came.
‘You write because you didn’t want to perish,’ he put into his notebook. ‘Dreams and fantasies hold back spiritual disintegration.’ Pegging dreams into the logic of reality was as much a part of him as it must be with others. Everyone working in a factory was afflicted by dead limbs at the end of the day, and the only way to know the extent of this was by working there yourself; impossible to write about it except by turning into one of those people and doing it.
He was split in two, like that great sphere dividing one half from the other in the old nightmare of infancy. Somewhere spinning and dispensing terror, the trail it left provided a light and showed which words to write and what yarn to spin. After a few pages the impulse burned itself out, and all he could do was go down to the warm kitchen and smoke his last cigarette of the day, bent into a calamitous state of exhaustion.