He said ‘Your factory’ as if Herbert owned it, which for some reason pleased him. Light brought out autumn’s colours, a blade of sun catching a clump of Scotch pines. Herbert liked the sound of birds embellishing the day. His father leaned, holding a flame over the bowl. ‘Do you remember that cheque for twenty-five pounds I sent you? It was years ago.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Why didn’t you cash it?’
Why ever not? He’d long forgotten it. ‘I was waiting for a rainy day, which hasn’t come yet.’
‘Well, in my youth I’d have made the bloody rain pour down so that I could have had a whale of a time on it. So cash it. Stop waiting for emergencies.’
‘I promise I will.’
They climbed the stile from the lane in silence, then Hugh laughed as he opened the gate to home. ‘Ah! I can smell something good for lunch.’
Maud drove him to Norwich in their Vauxhall Velox Saloon so as to shorten his journey home. ‘I wish you would make your home with us, though. Or in London, at least. Your father could get you a job in insurance, or shipping. You must have enough material for your book by now.’
The prospect of being alone in the train lured like a gleam of paradise. ‘Not quite.’
She overtook a farm wagon on a bend. Another such manoeuvre, he smiled, and all our troubles will be over. ‘I’ll need a year or two yet.’
After a mile of ointment-quiet she came in with: ‘I can’t think why you torment yourself so. It’s not like either of us.’
Luckily the engine drowned his sigh. ‘It’s how I am.’
‘I know. But I worry about you.’
He touched her hand at the wheel, a natural almost loving gesture that felt strange to him, though there was nothing behind it but the action, which made him free of her as well. ‘You don’t need to, believe me.’
‘All right, I won’t. But write now and again.’
‘I promise.’
‘And come whenever you like.’
He wouldn’t, unless some reason hard to imagine impelled him. ‘I shall.’
He had an impulse to sling the bag of apples out of the train window, but decided they’d make a present for Mrs Denman. She liked fruit. At the station there was time to send a postcard to Isaac, as proof that he had done his duty.
Thirteen
Mrs Denman thought the excursion had done him little good, wondered whether he had been to Norfolk at all, but had gone instead to London and fallen into bad company. As for the apples, he could have bought them at a stall, though in the end she had to believe him, since he was too proud a person to tell a lie. ‘Was your parents well?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do they do?’
‘They’re retired.’
‘They must have a nice garden.’
‘Not bad.’
‘I expect they were glad to see you.’
‘I think they were.’
‘I’m glad you went, though.’
He raised his eyebrows, and smiled. ‘Yes, so am I.’
She didn’t think the trip had made him happy, which disappointed, almost irritated her. He seemed to have a ghost before his eyes every minute of the day, one that he saw all night as well in his dreams, to judge by his expression when he came down for breakfast.
There was something swinish, he knew, in disappointing her, but what could he say? It was harder to come back than it had been to go. Pedalling his bike to work was a relief, part of an ongoing donkey circuit keeping him on course to where he would eventually get. If I unlock myself from such a totally absorbing existence, he thought, the language of his schooldays coming back, as if there was no other way of saying it, I’m lost, so here I am and here I shall stay. Life’s too short to worry about anything other than work and shelter.
A blindoe drink-out with Archie was necessary before he could relax within the palisade of safety, and write a letter thanking his parents for their kindness. Pepper’s chip shop on Alfreton Road was crowded with people just out of the boozers, clamouring for mushy peas and cobs, fish and pickled onions and mugs of well-sweetened tea. Archie elbowed his way to the counter, Herbert in a moment by his side: ‘I’ll have the usual.’
‘Fish, chips, cobs and teas twice,’ Archie bawled.
‘Tek yer sweat, then. There’s others before yo’.’
While waiting Herbert said: ‘I need to get myself a typewriter.’
‘What do you want one o’ them for?’
He would pay for it out of his father’s old cheque. ‘Just to play around on. I want to learn how to tek one to bits and put it together again. Whereabouts would I go to get a good ’un?’
Archie’s brain seemed to be working at the back of his eyes like the spinning fruitwheels of a one-armed bandit. ‘Here’s the grub. Let’s get stuck in. Don’t go to one o’ them secondhand places. You’ll only get done. I’ll bring one to your room as soon as I can. It might tek a month or two.’
They moved to a corner, away from the crush. ‘That’s all right. I’m in no hurry.’
Herbert leaned his workaday sit-up-and-beg against the parapet of Trent Bridge and looked towards the War Memorial, along the sweep of the embankment steps where people were getting into boats for an hour’s pull at the oars. His promise of a mystery trip had called for some attention to the map, until a breeze ruffled inconveniently and he folded it back into his jacket pocket. ‘Not too far, though,’ Cecilia had said. ‘It’s at least a year since I was on a bicycle.’
High cauliflower clouds operated in the west so it looked like a day of dry grass. The quickest way out of town took them along nondescript Wilford Lane and over Fairham Brook. True country began when he navigated into Clifton Grove only if they ignored the new housing estate through trees to their left. He felt something magical and Grecian in the long avenue of beeches, oaks and elms, though he couldn’t let Bert make such a comparison to Cecilia. Shouldering his bike over a dead tree, he went back for hers when she couldn’t lift it and avoid nettles at the same time.
She looked fresh and athletic in her white blouse and jersey tied to hang over her shoulders. A grey skirt and laced shoes set her up for a day in the country, which put her almost on a par with Ralph’s bint when they had set out for the Lake District years ago; but in spite of her provincial confidence there seemed something lost about Cecilia. She was like Mariana out of Tennyson, waiting for who could tell what? Otherwise why would he have latched himself on to her if she hadn’t been waiting all her life for him?
He laid her bike against the tree and reached for her arm, and took her over by the waist. Such courtly treatment was rewarded by a slight pressure to his hand. Beyond the village he steered by her side, playing the cavalier who guarded her from a brush by traffic, hoping the gesture wasn’t beyond notice. The difficulty made him wonder why they used such a plebeian mode of transport — as the swinging of a car passed too close to his elbows. Watch where you’re fucking going, he wanted to shout.
He judged the contours, and chose the road to Gotham rather than Barton because the hill was less steep. Even so, she found it hard to keep to the saddle of her new Raleigh. ‘Gotham is where those funny yokels tried to rake the moon out of a pond,’ he said.
‘People still do,’ she smiled. ‘They’re always fishing for something they can never get.’
Was that a hint against what she must know he was after? If rain threw it down — which didn’t seem likely — and they sheltered in a barn he might get at her buttons in the hugger-mugger. Or he might not, would have to be subtle and slow, but it would be a pity not to try because she might be dying to get the old mutton dagger inside her. With such a woman you never could tell.