Resuming work was harder to slot into than when, scarred and broken, he left the army after Cyprus. Motivation now seemed lacking, and tedium reigned for the first few weeks, an inner voice suggesting it was time such labour came to an end. He was getting too old for it, the bolshie tone went on, had done as much of a stint as any man needed, and certainly enough to write about it for the rest of his life. He was bored more often than he could tolerate, at times bored almost to death, though knowing he must continue until he could move into another existence without destroying himself in the process.
You should never complain, though he was beginning to, in the silence of his mind, considering it lucky no one could know it. Muscles ached, but he struggled on till the morning tea trolley showed at the end of the shed door, steaming as if in imitation of Stephenson’s Rocket. After the scalding liquid had gone down and the sweet bun was scoffed he was lured through the day by the promise of refuge in his room, where he could write in spite of the muted yacker of the television from the kitchen.
He tried to describe how a man felt when at work in the machine shop, or in the sand foundry, or when stuck at the pressure die-casting machines. The aim was to tell it without the distortion of sympathy, but the accounts were even so a world from reality. What did words know? Though if they couldn’t, what might? Every word was a label for something, or an action, and enough permutations barely existed to use them as they had never been used before, while too much trying would make for a heavy and stilted style, debasing the inspired flow of what had to be told. Best to let rip, and tinker later, let blocks of action, varied by badinage and laced with glum but often feverish hopes, make an account fine-tooled by his experience over the years.
The process wasn’t so different from that of taking a piece of angular steel and, with the aid of a blueprint, shaping it at your machine till a pristine object of exact utility lay fashioned and almost finished on your bench, but which still had to fit into an overall pattern with other pieces.
His writing was considered in this way also. Three months absence made him happy to go back to it, but some time passed before his eyes could focus and make the mass of words coherent. He had to be sure that every phrase was where it ought to be. Time was, as they said, no object, but as a wage-earner he longed for the day when he could tell himself the book was finished, and send it away as a parcel. If too frightened by the risk he could put it back in the drawer till driven to take it out for another re-writing. And if a sense of its uselessness overcame him he would go through his notebooks and muse something else into shape.
His scarred hands were cramped, stiff fingers barely able to grasp the pen as he read the opening pages again, of two brothers fishing from the canal bank. Circular clusters of white elderberry flowers concealed them from the lane, and the steamy summer heat over the water kept the coloured stripes of their floats perfectly still.
They biked the countryside through pastoral scenery which he tried to describe with the purity of The Eclogues, a memory of school even more pleasurable when lines came unexpectedly in Latin.
The brothers went back to their labour on Monday morning, and Herbert laid the raw alternative of the factory against the succulent peace of the countryside. He made a theatrical stage out of the shop floor and lifted the narrative into a three-dimensional experience of stench and noise which, he hoped, would keep a reader turning the pages to find out what was going to happen to the people he wrote about.
He told that such toil was a normal and not too disagreeable way of earning a living: all components of the factory’s activity, the hundreds of different jobs, the inner musings and outer mouthings of those who sweated there, all living in and moving through the mansion of his novel, so that by the end something had happened to them, not in the apocalyptic way of earlier versions, but as fitted with the easy-going morality of the times.
Should Archie and his brother Raymond, or their mates, or their sisters and mothers even, ever pick up the book they might speculate as to who the people were, what street they lived in, or what place they worked at, while they would be seen as complex and interesting by those who hardly believed such characters existed.
In ten years Herbert’s soul had been captured as surely as if a net had been thrown over him by a gladiator in the arena, and the long fight to get free from its entanglements had led him to know more about himself than if such a fate had not ensnared him. He posted Royal Ordnance to a publisher and, when it came back with no comment, sent it out again.
He closed the typewriter, feeling neither Bert nor Herbert, and far from a solid mixture of both. A booze-up with Archie might bring one of them into focus and ease his spirit, but Archie was nowhere to be found so he forced himself out of the house and quick-walked into town.
Standing at the bar of the Eight Bells, he saw a woman even Mrs Denman would have looked at sideways and leerily. Fair and dumpy, big tits and beehive hair-do, high heels and brandished fag, a slight gap between her upper teeth that promised mischief, the photo-flashed picture was one Bert Gedling liked. ‘Drink up, duck.’
‘Give me a chance.’
Down it went. So did his. ‘I had to get out of the house tonight or I would have gone barmy.’ At least you could say what you liked for the price of a drink. They sat at a small round table in the corner.
‘Like that, is it?’ she said.
It was, though no longer. ‘I couldn’t write any more. My pen nib went rusty.’
‘Was yer writin’ letters?’
‘I allus am.’
‘I wrote one yesterday, to my sister in America. She got married to a Yank ten years ago. I went to see her last summer.’
‘How did you get on?’
‘I loved it.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘It’s smashin’ over there. They’ve all got fridges and washing machines and cars … how did yer get that scar on yer chops?’
Always a good talking point. Her name was Denise, and she worked at Chambers in Stapleford packing pencils. Like all of them, there was more behind the eyes than you thought at first. ‘Why is it a nice girl like you don’t have a young man?’
‘Where’s your young woman, then?’
‘She packed me in,’ he said. ‘Or we fell out, you could say. It happened last night, so I forget.’
‘My young man was married to me.’ She shaped her lips to indicate he hadn’t been up to much. ‘We’d only been together six months when the police called and took him away for burglary. After he came out we had a bust-up and he left me. I’m lucky we never had any kids. This is the first time I’ve been in a pub in months. I just wanted to get talking to somebody.’
Even if she had been on the batter since leaving school he would have liked her. ‘Well, we’ve both got company tonight.’
She was easier to get on with than Cecilia, and that was good — almost like being seventeen again, except it took time and a few drinks to lighten the deadness in them both.
He knew they were drunk by the time they got back to the house, and felt the old rough Bert topside over Herbert. Standing on the doorstep he put his fist under her nose. ‘If you make any noise getting up the stairs I’ll crack you one.’
With a scar like that he might even try. ‘Bleddy masterful, aren’t you?’ Too merry to care, she squeezed his arm, and he kissed her saying: ‘I love you, and want to get you into bed.’
Her mood changed like the flip of a penny. ‘You ought to show it, then.’
‘I will.’
‘I love you,’ she said, ‘whoever you are.’ Her smile showed a vulnerable, more sensitive face. With love and care she could be beautiful, but he had no wish to do a Pygmalion, especially when she added: ‘At least let me get my hairnet off.’