‘He’s brittle with good living,’ he said. ‘A well-charged magneto who lords it over us with all the authority of unexplainable drive and power — and the fact that his hands are on the cash.’
She clutched her stomach. ‘That’s the third bloody time.’
‘What is?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what woke me in the first place.’ She straightened, and smiled. ‘We’d all like to see the back of him. Give us a fag.’
‘I haven’t got any.’
‘You’re even meaner than he is.’ She took a packet from her padded and flowered dressing gown. ‘If he popped off one day to the South Seas who’d take his place?’
He lit a cigarette. ‘Who knows?’
‘As long as it’s not you. I’d rather die.’
‘I thought you were too generous to think that far ahead.’
She groaned. ‘Either I’ve eaten too much, or my appendix has burst.’
‘Take a pill.’
‘I’ll need at least forty to get a few winks before daylight.’
He couldn’t resist speaking his favourite interior thought, having often noticed that deciding not to say something was merely the first stage to letting it out. ‘I’d be such joy to see the last of father that there’s no point in thinking about what would happen afterwards. You’d never do anything if you considered the consequences.’
‘You certainly don’t think about getting pregnant when you’re humping around on a bed with a man,’ she said.
An owl sang its nightsong over the caravans, such a cool rhythmical warbling that they couldn’t but listen. She bent down, then straightened and turned her pale full face as if to see where the moon had gone. ‘If this keeps on I’ll have a miscarriage.’
‘It’ll get out so easily you won’t know it’s happened,’ he said lightly.
‘I tried to get rid of it when I knew I was preggers. But nothing bloody worked.’
‘Some loathsome member of this community could have given you an address, I expect.’
There was a movement on the higher ground of lawns and fruit trees at the back of the house. Whoever it was had been only a few yards from their conversation, hidden in the thin alleyway dividing the caravans. Cuthbert felt a chill, knowing himself to be a coward, otherwise he wouldn’t make so many plans.
‘I heard you,’ Handley shouted, coming down the steps. ‘Your pair of plotting nightbirds.’
Cuthbert backed away, smiling so that his father might believe his remarks had been merely a joke, crossed by one of defiant friendliness in case Handley hadn’t really heard and was only bluffing — which he often was.
Mandy clutched her belly, and Cuthbert was proud of her quick though dramatic response in trying to divert her father’s wrath. ‘It’s getting out,’ she said, pools of sweat breaking from her face.
Handley stood in his dressing gown, looking from one to the other. ‘Neither of us could sleep,’ Cuthbert informed him.
‘I can’t hold it,’ Mandy said. Between spasms she felt light enough to drift away bodily in the blue air despite her stony weight. It was a sensation of great happiness in which her past returned in one delicious moment, as if every minute of it had been a golden paradise that she’d always wanted to bring back but had never succeeded in till now, when it was totally unexpected and twice as sweet for almost reappearing.
Another spasm struck, and blacked it out. Two faces looked at her, made exaggeratedly clear because of the pain. She lost control of her life so utterly that she was both pleased and frightened by it. Her father’s sharp chisel nose, and his thin lined face bent down, eyes burning through to her in sympathy. He should have been named Oswald, she thought, a laugh even in her pain. Oswald the Chiking Viking. Cuthbert’s own clear eyes also looked, but knew nothing, as if he were still too young at twenty-five to tell himself what he did not want to know because he would be afraid when he found out.
Handley pushed him roughly aside. ‘You bloody fool,’ he said, putting an arm around her. ‘Can’t you see she’s having a miscarriage? Let’s get her into the house.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Dawley could not sleep. He’d drunk too much brandy and got the heartburn. Or maybe the livid globe of the moon was reaching the dark corners of his heart at last, scooping away that mystery of peace in which he might have found rest.
He stood by the caravan window and pulled on his trousers. Sure enough, the moon was there, queen of the thick white night for all to see, high above the chestnut trees of the opposite field. His belt was too tight at the waist, which came from Myra’s rich soups and Russian salads, jellied chicken buried in cream, baked potatoes, medium-done steaks, and heavy breakfasts of the sort he hadn’t eaten when working in the factory three years ago. English country walks didn’t slake flesh off like treks through the valleys and deserts of Algeria. He remembered that lean and mindless state of continual travelling, when staring blankly at a map in the evening was the nearest you got to intellectual refreshment.
Printed matter rained into the community, but in the wilderness there’d been nothing but agonising foodless days, a flycrawl and pencil-scratch across a piece of coloured paper called a map, in memory more real than the actual fabulous land his feet had plodded through. It was a marvellous time.
A wailing bitch-howl flew from the moon’s full face. He wanted to boot the dog out of existence for being as restless as himself. When the scream came again it wasn’t from Eric Bloodaxe but some poor wracked person in the house, and it startled him even more. He’d almost got used to the oppressive tranquillity of the last few weeks. Certainly, if you had two quiet days in the Handley household you began to worry that it would go on forever, though the others acted as if it had never happened in their lives before.
Myra created a kingdom of ease and plenty. She drove to the markets of Hitchin and Bedford, and came back with a car-load of baskets and bottles and boxes and crates, their son Mark strapped high in his chair beside her, watching rabbits run before them on the country lanes. The house prospered in its mildness, set for a warm summer and a comfortable year, which Frank felt the need of in spite of its dullness, because it was only a few months since he had left the perilous sands and hills of Algeria.
Fetching Nancy and the kids from Nottingham hadn’t turned out as he’d expected, but he’d enjoyed the train ride, the usual thrill of going north again. At St Pancras he went by the ticket man to the waiting train — coiling upshoots of grey steam between each carriage.
Passing a stretch of the M1 beyond Hendon the train was overtaking every car on it. Factory walls of Vauxhall and SKF at Luton slid past. A solitary man walked across some tips, seen as William Posters, that indefatigable fugitive from Dawley’s past who was nowadays turning more into a ghost and floating further from him than ever.
Rich fields and soil showed the great wealth of England, Pylons rose and fell in their lines, laced up a couple of woods and a crest of rising ground. More farms, rich land, empty roads now that the motorway had sucked off traffic. Crossing the Trent he thought that in middle age one turned to the past so as to arm oneself against what was left of the future.
He was almost sorry to leave the soothing train. The man of action is drawn deeper into rest than most. On a bus through town to the estate he noticed how the centre was splitting into car parks and one-way streets, dead acres and blocks of flats covering old houses now down and gone forever. It gave him a feeling that, in tune with his own travels and actions, the rest of the world had not lived either in vain or idleness. His favourite birthplace and city had done things for itself, though he didn’t suppose that those who had stayed thought about it in the same comfortable nostalgic way that he did going through on the bus.