CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Dean felt internally injured on being told not to take part in the search, saw it as a positive slur on his good character. He brooded on what a shame it was that no one trusted such an easygoing person as himself.
He couldn’t understand what Handley’s motives were, and was shocked that after so many weeks the community still didn’t have confidence in him. If Handley had shown that he could trust him Dean would not have considered stealing anything. Since arriving in the community, and imagining he was thought to be as reliable as any other member, he hadn’t laid hands on a thing that wasn’t his own.
It didn’t pay to get humpy, because it stopped you smiling and staying on good terms with the whole wide world around you. But when people didn’t trust him there was no telling what he would do.
During his threading-and-bobbing days in the factory he’d been on the best of terms with the women workers, and they liked him because he’d always got a smile and sometimes a fag for them. On slack days he’d go down to the basement where George the mechanic had his workroom of tools and gauges, and talk with him and drink his tea for as long as he thought he wouldn’t be missed upstairs. He called him ‘Engineer’ which made George smile because he’d been a stoker in the navy till he was sunk in the Atlantic and got oil on the chest.
The square room whose benches were lit by long bars of strip lighting seemed separate from the rest of the factory, warm and cosy with pipes running along three of the walls, turning and coiling in and out, elbows and junctions and Ubends carrying their water and power and steam, various dials and clock faces showing pressures and current which George glanced at now and again to see that all was faultlessly running. He was a medium-sized man with a pale face and short hair still black for his age, and a pipe set in his teeth. Even the foul twist he smoked was a comfort to Dean as he took the bacon sandwich that was offered and slowly munched it.
The factory wasn’t too unpleasant, seeing as how you had to earn a living, but the foreman didn’t trust him, and so trouble was always simmering. Dean was generally hardworking enough never to let it come to a head, while in his wisdom the foreman realised that if he chucked Dean out he might easily get somebody worse, and then have to put up with him because he’d be afraid of getting somebody worse still.
Dean gave in his notice one Friday night and left a week later. Everybody was sorry to see him go, even the foreman, but when a William Posters had to move nothing could stand in his way, because it was his blood that spoke. Admitted, he hadn’t yet come far from Nottingham, but it looked like he’d be pushing on soon, away from this community, because the first clear sign that he wasn’t trusted had just been given.
He walked upstairs to see what progress there was, thinking he wouldn’t like to be in the boots of whoever nicked those notebooks, because a family like this would rend him or her in pieces, even if it turned out to be one of their nearest and dearest — which it surely must.
The only person he liked was Enid, the woman and mother and wife who was so beautiful he was always wanting to tell her he loved her in the hope that she’d let him kiss her. But he was afraid to say too much, or make too many moves, in case he offended her and she too turned against him. You never could tell with such a mob.
Through an open door on the first floor he saw Myra pushing a bed back to the wall. He went one flight up and into the room where Enid was, which belonged to Maricarmen who was arguing downstairs with Cuthbert.
Enid heard him, and closed the cupboard she was looking in.
‘Any luck?’
Her face had a worried expression. ‘I expect they aren’t in the house or anywhere near it.’
‘You shouldn’t let it bother you.’
‘It’s bound to, isn’t it? Especially the gun.’
‘Well, not so much, then.’ He looked at her across the bed, thinking that her face had got slightly thinner since first meeting.
‘A thing like this could be the end of our community experiment,’ she said, sitting down.
‘Be a shame if it is.’
She smiled at his unexpected concern. She was touched, and liked him for it. ‘I’m always sorry when something breaks up. When my brother-in-law went away and the house caught fire, it was terrible. It turned us into refugees, and I still don’t know why it did.’
She felt at the end of her tether, and didn’t know what to do. It seemed as if she could only wait for a catastrophe to change her life so completely that whatever happened would be for the better. Things couldn’t go on as they were, and that was a fact. She was stuck in the blackest of cul-de-sacs with Albert, worse than it had ever been — and it had been bad at times. Yet the diversion of the notebooks, and the necessity of looking for the gun, had in a strange way lightened her mood. It was this slight sense of relief that made her smile at Dean, and suddenly enjoy seeing him there.
He was a child, really, or only a youth (if she were honest with herself) but the protectiveness she had felt on first seeing him in Hitchin market had turned into something that she could not define.
He was the age of her own children, and she remembered needing to hold them lovingly when they were like him, but not being able to because they wouldn’t want it and because it would do them no good. But though it had been impossible with them, it certainly wasn’t out of the question with Dean who, after all, was not her own son and so needn’t be afraid of it.
‘I hope it don’t happen,’ he said, breaking the silence. ‘It’s a nice community. I could gather moss in this place, but I don’t want to stay much more, or else I’ll never leave. I wouldn’t a bin here so long if it hadn’t a bin for you.’
He went around the bed and sat by her.
‘Don’t go too soon, then,’ she said.
The bed creaked when he put an arm over her shoulder, ice melting in his stomach for fear she’d shrug it away. He didn’t know whether to be glad or afraid, but felt no doubt as to what he wanted. ‘You ought to come with me. We can travel away together.’
‘You’re mad,’ she told him, but smiling happily.
He laughed softly, as if they were getting into each other’s secrets at last. ‘I know. But it’s great, being mad like that!’
She kissed him lightly on the cheek, and he looked at her, holding himself back. He never had difficulty in believing his luck, but he always saw an end to it. So he looked at her face and kept it in view till she lowered her eyes modestly (that’s how it seemed to him, and he was right) and turned her head away. These gestures made her more beautiful to him, vivid features enhanced and increased by all he knew of her: her good ripe age (though she wasn’t too old), and her seven children (whom he hoped she wouldn’t bring with her), and even her husband (whom he prayed would walk out one day soon and conveniently never come back), and her life and long experience of being a mother (which he wanted turned entirely on to him).
His grey eyes had a powerful animal stare, and she could barely meet them, yet knew it was her own heat that put such intensity into his stare. He was more of a man than she thought, and she wondered how she had got into this situation of him tightly clasping her on the bed. But the heat became greater when she saw him also as even more of a child than he was, and when he eased her down she knew that she was pulling him towards her with just as much passion. His confidence was that of a child, which made his manhood so irresistible that, as it came down, she felt something of what rape must be like.
Dawley had been through the attics and storage rooms with a flashlight and found nothing. He sat in John’s old armchair before the altar of radio equipment.
It was a restful place, and he remembered his first encounter with John, on a bleak snow-deep Lincolnshire day after meeting Handley in the village pub and being invited back to the house. Handley was bone-poor in those times, and having enough money to live on nowadays hadn’t altered him, because it had come so late in life.