She pushed open the carriage door and left me with a final image of her delighted grin, her waving hand: an image which was to fade slowly into blankness over the eight long years which passed before my next, and final, glimpse of Alice Hastings.
2
… necessary brilliance … necessary bravado …
Almost. Very close, now. Very close.
My spirits continued to rise as the journey progressed. The books I’d brought with me lay unopened on the table, and I abandoned myself instead to dreamy contemplation of the scenery. As we left Derby, the redbricked factories and warehouses backing on to the railway line gave way to rich green countryside: Friesians grazed on hilly pasturelands dotted only with handsome sandstone farmhouses or the occasional village, a few rows of grey slate terraces nestled warmly in a valley. Later, immense heaps of coal began to appear beside the track as Chesterfield announced the beginning of mining country, its skyline dominated at first by cranes and pit shafts and then, incongruously, a crooked church spire which jerked me into nostalgia, taking me back fifteen years or more to the opening credits of a silly comedy series about clergymen which I had enjoyed on television as a teenager. I was sunk deep in the memory of this as we passed through tunnels and long rocky cuttings. The line was planted so thickly with trees that Sheffield itself took me completely by surprise, my first sight of it being a row of terraced houses silhouetted against a sky of Mediterranean blue, and perched on the edge of a ridge, impossibly high: on a clifftop, almost. All at once a spectacular townscape lay before me: the steelworks and factory chimneys beside the railway line were shrunk to insignificance beside the sheerness of the hillsides on which the city had been boldly raised, with phalanxes of tower blocks climbing steeply to their summit. Nothing had prepared me for such sudden, austere beauty.
‘Austere beauty’: why did I use that phrase, though? Was it really the city I was describing, or was it the face of Alice which imposed itself on the sombre dignity of these buildings and made them glamorous to my moonstruck eyes? Certainly it was Alice I was thinking of when Joan loomed out of the waiting crowd at the station, her welcoming smile and eager, waving arms striking despondency into my heart in an instant. She had put on weight, and she was not wearing make-up, and she looked very plain and ungainly. (These were not praiseworthy observations, I know: but I might as well be honest about them.) She gave me a bruising hug and a wet kiss on the cheek, and then led me to the car park.
‘Let’s not go home right away,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you a bit of the city first.’
I’m a Midlander by birth and a Southerner by adoption. Never having lived in the North of England, I’ve always regarded it from a distance, with a mixture of fear and fascination. It seemed extraordinary, for instance, that I could have been on a train for less than two and a half hours, and disembarked to find myself in a city which felt so palpably and bracingly different from London. I’m not sure whether this difference lay in the architecture, or in the faces of the people surrounding me, or the clothes which they wore, or even in the knowledge that only a few miles away stretched vast and lovely tracts of moorland: but perhaps it went deeper than any of these things, and derived from something fundamental in the very spirit of the place. Joan told me Sheffield’s nickname—‘the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’—and sang the praises of David Blunkett who at this time led the city’s Labour Council. Coming from London, where opposition to Mrs Thatcher was virulent but fatally dispersed and fragmented, I was immediately filled with envy at the thought of a community which could so closely unite itself around a common cause.
‘It’s nothing like that in the South,’ I said. ‘Half the socialists I know have defected to the SDP.’
Joan laughed. ‘They were routed in the local elections here last month. Even the Liberals only picked up a few seats.’ A few minutes later we were driving past the cathedral, and she said: ‘I went to a memorial service in there recently, for the people who died on HMS Sheffield.’
‘They were all from around here, were they?’
‘No, not at all. But the local sea cadets were affiliated to the ship, and the crew were always coming to visit children’s centres and things like that. We were all devastated when it went down. The “Shiny Sheff”, people used to call it. The service was packed: they were turning hundreds away at the door. There was a queue stretching down to York Street.’
‘I suppose there must be a lot of anger about the war.’
‘Not everybody’s angry,’ said Joan. ‘Not everybody even opposes it. But that wasn’t the point. I don’t know how to describe it, really, but … it was as if we’d all lost relatives on that ship.’ She smiled at me. ‘This is a very warm city, you see. You can’t help but love it, for that very reason.’
Already I felt like a stranger in a foreign land.
Joan lived in a small, dark-bricked terraced house not far from the university. There were three bedrooms, two of which she rented out to students in order to help with her mortgage payments. This came as a surprise to me: I’d been expecting that she and I would be alone together for the length of my stay, but it turned out that she was proposing to sleep downstairs while I took over her bedroom. Of course I couldn’t allow that to happen, so I found myself facing the prospect of five nights spent on a settee in the living room, to be rudely awoken every morning by the arrival of Joan and her lodgers as they passed through into the kitchen to get their breakfasts.
Both of these lodgers, in fact, were from the polytechnic rather than the university. There was Graham, who was on some sort of film-making course, and a very shy and uncommunicative art student called Phoebe. It soon became obvious that they would not be easy to avoid: Joan presided over a regimented household, and there was a large notice pinned up in the kitchen which set out, in three different coloured inks, the rotas for shopping, washing up and cooking the evening meal. It seemed that I was to be the guest of something closely approximating to a family unit — and, to make matters worse, that there had been much advance discussion of my visit. I had the sense that Joan had been giving me a huge build-up, that by singing the praises of this exotic envoy from literary London she had been trying to stir the others into a state of enthusiasm which they seemed oddly reluctant to share.
These things started to become clear as the four of us sat down to supper together on that first Tuesday evening. It was Joan’s turn to cook. We had stuffed avocado with puréed carrot and brown rice, followed by rhubarb crumble. The dining room was small and could almost have been cosy if a little more effort had been made in that direction: instead we ate in the glare of a naked bulb, and beneath the reproachful scrutiny of a number of posters — all of them Graham’s, I was to discover — advertising political causes and foreign-language films (of which Godard’s Tout Va Bien was the only one I recognized). For a while I was more or less excluded from the conversation, which centred on topics of shared interest such as Joan’s latest cases and the impending end-of-year assessments at the college. I had to content myself, if that’s the word, with munching away at Joan’s wholesome food and refilling the wineglasses.
‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ said Joan finally. ‘A lot of this won’t mean anything to you. I was thinking perhaps you’d like to come with me on some of my calls tomorrow, and get a sense of what I do. It might be useful to you one day: give you something to write about.’