He didn’t want to sleep in his old room, told Frank he would be staying with somebody in town. He put up at the George Hotel behind the Council House, then walked across Slab Square to call on Isaac. The front door was locked and bolted, windows boarded up. He went into a shop lower down the street to buy cigarettes, and asked about it.
‘It’s being redeveloped, duck, as far as I know.’
‘An old man lived there. Do you happen to know anything about him?’
‘Couldn’t say. I expect they rehoused him. They don’t chuck anybody on the streets, not now they don’t.’
Which was a comforting thought. Yates’s was crowded, and he positioned himself by the door in case Isaac shuffled in. It wasn’t his night, and Herbert was irritated by the noise, so after his second pint he walked up the street to have dinner at the hotel.
The morning weather poured a deluge into the gloom, and he regretted having no workman’s cap for his head. He took the two bags of groceries bought for Isaac to Mrs Denman’s.
‘You needn’t have done this,’ Frank said.
‘Just a contribution to the household. How is she?’
Frank’s face was wet with tears, a phenomenon in that Herbert hadn’t noticed them begin. They were suddenly there. ‘She’s fighting, is all I can say. You know, Bert, I know I shouldn’t say this, but it’ll be a blessing when it’s over.’
Herbert thought so, too. A faint untidiness made the house seem dead already. ‘I shan’t disturb her, then.’
‘No, that’s right. Come back this afternoon. She might be a bit better by then. Forget what I said just now. The only thing that’s left of me is hope.’ He sat in the armchair, almost fell into it, as if his legs had lost the strength to hold him up. ‘It’s funny, though. I told her to see a doctor last year, but she said it was only a cold that wouldn’t go. Maybe every complaint that’s going to carry you off starts with thinking you’ve got a cold. I shouldn’t have believed her.’
‘There wasn’t much you could do,’ Bert said.
After the funeral he avoided the main route out of the city by paying the fourpenny toll over Wilford Bridge to Clifton, practising the indirect approach for getting back to London. To his right were the dark trees of the Grove he had walked along with Cecilia, and he smiled at no longer regretting his lost love.
In the few days between death and burial he had called at various council offices, and put on his haughty Thurgarton-Strang voice to get Isaac’s address out of a snotty-faced penpusher. The old folks’ ground-floor flat was spacious and newly furnished, a living room flanked by kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. ‘There’s so little else I want’, Isaac smiled, ‘that I’m beginning to think my time’s almost up. I’ve even got good neighbours.’
‘You deserved this years ago.’
‘No, I’m happy enough.’
Only the scattered books made it halfway familiar, and Herbert took a few off the settee so that he could sit down and unload his misery on to someone who had suffered more, and knew how to listen.
Working his way across country to intercept Watling Street, he thought maybe he should have stayed on a couple of days to console Frank. But Frank was strangely calm, icy almost, fully in control. The agony was over for Beryl so it was finished for him too, and he would grieve in his own way, for as long as it took, Herbert supposed, to get back to being only himself, when he’d maybe meet someone and marry again. His era of tears had ended, and Herbert was glad. In the past he’d been scornful of whoever shed them, cruel even — let the dead bury the dead — but the black dog of experience was firmly latched on to his shoulders, and the illumination of being a writer was always before his eyes — or mostly so — though in spite of his new tolerance he was inclined to scoff at such thoughts, unless impelled to pick up his pen and get them into a notebook.
By the aerials of Rugby and Daventry he was on the Roman road, and well on his way to London, beamed towards Deborah. She pulled him south, tarmac rolling under his car, distance lessened at every signpost. Wanting her nakedness to cling to, he cut his speed in case he never got there, despair vanishing now that Mrs Denman was dead and out of pain.
Twenty-Two
Awake, yet not awake, alert in the needle-grey dark but unable to open his eyes, the misty palisades closed in. Beryl haunted him through the deepest oceans of memory, till she had tracked him back to her lair. He must get out of bed on Monday morning, and reach for clean overalls, cram in his kitchen breakfast and, after as sociable a good morning as could be dredged up, bike his way through cold murk to the factory.
Such terror had its consolations when the limits of despair and indignation pulled away, and he felt the purest happiness to know that the factory had no more call on him, and that Deborah was in the kitchen pressing orange juice and brewing coffee.
To disperse the final wisps of nightmare he gloated, no less, on how the new year had brought more money from Humphries, and a thousand pounds advance for film rights which promised another fee on writing the script. There was much to be said for riches that fell so easily into your hands. ‘It’s as if I’ve inherited a coal mine.’
Deborah set the tray down, passed the Sunday papers, and put an arm around him. ‘Darling, they nationalized them years ago. In any case, whatever you get, you’ve earned.’
He supposed he had, if it counted as back pay at so much a year. Such money didn’t tempt him to waste time on the pleasures of London, a night or two each week at Deborah’s taking care of that. Otherwise he stayed in his room to finish The Wrong Side of the Tracks, not as easy as writing Royal Ordnance, which had been put together as if time had no importance. On the other hand he couldn’t afford to let The Wrong Side of the Tracks take nearly as long, not drawing a regular wage from the factory for his support. Since most of it had been done, or at least thought about before coming to London, he forced the pace through revision after revision till it was finished.
Time had to be found for interviews in certain newspapers: SENT OUT TO WORK AT FOURTEEN TO GET DAD SOME BEER MONEY. He hated their disgusting headlines, but couldn’t deny that he was responsible. Keeping up the image of Bert Gedling was becoming more tedious and difficult, only manageable by exaggerating the role, which made the headlines worse. The deception was getting bad for his self-esteem, and he was terrified at being so much up to his neck in Gedling that he would never be able to come out of him, and have to stay fixed for life in the skin of a monster so mindlessly created.
The only way to go on was to separate himself into three compartments, one containing the all-seeing Herbert Thurgarton-Strang, another the calloused and resentful Bert Gedling, and the third a distillation of someone able to handle both in television interviews. Perhaps Deborah sensed his struggle when she gave a few hints on how to manage. He had worked out certain rules for himself, but nodded appreciatively, as Bert would, when her advice confirmed them. ‘Don’t you know’, she said, ‘that you never say a straight yes or no to any of their questions?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Now you do. That way they have less chance of making you say things you might regret. And it gives you time to think about what to say next. Also, never say anything that might lead them to think you’re naive.’