The visit was as predictably on its way as a train or plane journey that had begun. My uncle had looked to it with apprehension. I who had made the journey often in the past months and knew it would go this way could not have said to him, “It’ll be all right. Nothing will happen. It’ll be the same as everything. We’ll get through it.”
Now that it was taking place it amounted to the nothing that was the rest of our life when it too was taking place. It would become part of our life again in the memory. In both the apprehension and the memory it was doomed to live far more vividly than in the taking place. Nature had ordered things well in that we hardly lived our lives at all. Our last conscious moment was the moment when our passing nonexistence and our final one would marry. It seemed felicitous that our going out of life should be as similarly arranged as our coming in. And I was ashamed of the violence of the reflections my own emotional idleness during the visit had brought on: the dead of heart can afford to be violent.
“You were great to come up,” my aunt was saying to my uncle now that the visit was ending.
“It was great to see you,” he shook hands. “I’ll be able to tell them all that you’ll be home in no time.”
“And you? Won’t you be in soon?” she asked me anxiously.
“I’ll be in the day after tomorrow.”
“God bless you both,” I heard her say.
He was diminished and silent as he came out, the raincoat over his arm, and as soon as we got a little way down the tarmacadam from the hospital he put his huge fists to his face and turned away. When I saw the body convulse with sobbing I moved across the road out of way of the traffic and started to move a white lawnblock about on the grass with my shoe as I waited.
She used to abuse him for trailing sawdust into the house on his boots. I could see him sitting at the head of the table, close to the black-leaded Stanley, hungry, while she carried over a plate of fried eggs and bacon and sausage.
“Look at the dirty sawdust all over the floor. You’d think you were still in a field,” I could hear her complain as she put down the plate. “Some people put sawdust down to clean floors,” he’d say half-heartedly, his mouth already full. “O they do, do they, on clean floors! And it’d be fresh sawdust, not soaked in dirt and oil and carried in on boots.” He’d be happy to let the last word go with her in the peaceful sounds of his knife and fork on the plate. These chidings, and his acceptance of them, were but tokens of the total security they felt with one another. Nothing threatened. Everything was known. Within its protective ivy frightening affection must have grown. He must be about two or three years older than she, I was remembering, when I saw him straighten and turn, wiping his hand across his eyes. They’d lived together twenty years before she married. And five years after she had married he was still living with herself and Cyril.
“Would you have a handkerchief on you there?” he asked.
I gave him a white handkerchief. I saw how discoloured the back of his hands were with scars. He moistened the handkerchief as he wiped his face and eyes.
“Is it all right now?” he asked, dabbing at his eyes.
“There’s just a streak there to the side,” I showed him and he wiped it clear. “You’re fine now.”
His tiredness was gone. He looked completely refreshed, even happy.
“Is there anything you’d like to do?” I asked.
“The train goes at six?” He wanted to hear it again.
“That gives you almost three hours. Is there anything you’d like to do before then?”
“What about you? You may have to go about your own business now.”
“I have the day off. Don’t worry about me.”
“I brought these few addresses with me,” he drew a crumpled piece of paper from his breast pocket. “They’re saw factors. There’s a few parts I could do with and there’s no use asking them for anything over the phone,” the voice was suddenly so swollen with the charming self-importance of a child that all I could do was smile.
“We have plenty of time,” I said. “We have so much time that we’re as well to go round the corner and wait for a bus. A bus will take us in at this time almost as quick as any taxi.”
There are many who grow so swollen with the importance of their function that they can hardly stoop to do it, but there was no such danger with my uncle. In him all was one.
The factor’s office was a flat-roofed prefab, out beside the gasworks, islanded by disused arteries and locks of the canal which once joined it with the mouth of the river. We crossed it by a footbridge, water pouring through leaks in the great wooden gates. The smell of rotting waterweed mixed with the pervasive sulphur everywhere. Inside, the office was lit by a naked bulb screwed to the ceiling. A rodent-like little man looked up from behind the high plywood counter.
“We’re lookin’ for spares,” my uncle boomed.
“We only supply the trade here, sir.”
“We are the trade,” my uncle pulled some billheads from his pocket. “Mr McKenzie knows us well.” Mr McKenzie was the chairman of the company and was certaintly as unaware of my uncle’s existence as he was of his small red-haired clerk behind the counter who was now turning the billheads over in his hands. Suddenly he opened a door to his right and called, “Hi, Jimmy,” and when Jimmy appeared he looked as if he might be a brother of the small man behind the counter. He handed him the billheads and said, “These gentlemen are looking for spares.” When they opened the counter leaf we followed Jimmy into a large warehouse. It was lit by the same naked bulb that lit the office. The floor was soft and earthen but all along the walls the parts were neatly arranged on shelves. The saws and larger parts were stacked in the centre of the floor. It was what I imagined a wine cellar might be or a place where mushrooms might be grown. For a while, with affection as well as some amusement, I watched my uncle flower in the dankness of the warehouse, examining parts, displaying his knowledge, even going so far as to lecture the patient Jimmy; and when I lost interest I hung about in the boredom of childhood until my uncle was through. When he was, Jimmy carried the parts out to the office. He and the clerk made up the bill from a price list in a plastic folder, parcelled the parts, and my uncle paid from an enormous wad of notes he pulled from his trouser pocket. The evening sun seemed as harsh and blinding when we came out as it had been when we’d left the pub to go to see my aunt in the hospital.
“It’s a great ease for me to have those,” he said when I took the parcel to carry. “You can imagine the writing and telephoning you’d have. And do you think you’d have a chance of getting anything? You’d be as well idle. It was there under their noses and they couldn’t see it unless you took them by the hand. You’d often wonder if there’s anybody in this country that knows anything. Is there long before the train goes?” “An hour,” I checked on the watch. “Is there anything you’d like to do before then?” it was his turn to ask now. He was positively expansive.
“We might as well get close to the station first. We can have a drink or a cup of tea, whichever you’d prefer.”
“We might as well have a drink for ourselves. It’s not every day of our lives that we have an outing.”
We had the drink in the corner bar at the traffic lights across from the station. We had more than forty minutes left. He insisted on buying large whiskeys. He grimaced as the first gulp went down but put the glass firmly on the table.
“Does this city business bring you in much money?” he asked with all the confidence he’d won at the factor’s warehouse.
“It brings in enough,” I answered but when I saw his disappointment named in or around what I earned.