The Broken Chariot (10 page)

The pub was soon back to singing and talking, but more relaxed than before, as if those unmolested by the police were glad they'd been spared – this time. ‘It was Alf Morley.' Dennis knocked back another whisky. ‘Still, it could have been anybody. As they say in this town: every copper's got your number on the underside of his left boot. Old Alf will be back in six months, though, mark my words. It's just that he gets a bit light-fingered now and again. Careless, if you like.'

Herbert now thought there was something to celebrate. ‘I'll have that drink you mentioned, after all.'

When he went to change out of his overalls Jacko pointed sternly at the bottle, indicating its contents down to the halfway mark. His eyes seemed closer in, and the trenchlines across his forehead made him look uglier, if that was possible. ‘Have you been helping yourself to my sherry?'

Bert fastened his waistcoat buttons. ‘I don't do things like that, shag.'

Jacko was convinced by his hard look. ‘Well, somebody has, and no mistake.'

Only one person could have taken a secret drink, unless Jacko, who maybe was still shell-shocked, had sleepwalked it down his gorge. ‘Too much like piss for me,' Bert said.

‘Piss, you say?' Jacko poured halfway up his Navy-issue mug. ‘Let's drink most of it between us before any more goes.' He held it out. ‘I'm sorry I asked if it was you, shipmate, but I had to make sure.'

Unsociable to refuse, it went down like a rat on roller skates. Jacko drank enough to leave a quarter in the bottle. ‘It'll help us to enjoy that stuff she puts on the table. What's it called?'

‘Shepherd's pie.'

‘Yes, I wouldn't like to know what part of the poor fucking shepherd it was ripped out of. She must be Sweeney Todd's widow.' He had the saddest face Herbert had seen, and he had passed a few on the street these last few months. In Jacko's case such an expression could turn mean rather than easy-going, as was proved when he put the catch on the door and with his back to it slowly undid his trouser buttons, keeping the bottle in his other hand. A glaze came over his eyes at such a malicious notion of justice. ‘There's only one way to deal with this situation.'

Herbert assumed that was how rum-poachers were dealt with in the marines, which made him glad he intended going in the army, as he watched Jacko piss the level of the bottle back to halfway before setting it again, none the worse for colour, in its place.

Yet Herbert, being the age he was, had never seen anything so funny. He opened the window and let out such a bellow of laughter over the backyards that a turbaned woman pushing a kid in its cot stared as if he had gone clean off his rocker. The kid began yelling, and she hurried along in case the madman at the window decided to jump overboard and splash her flipflops with his life's blood.

He drew his head in and thought maybe it wasn't funny at all, as Jacko the Beast calmly laid all items of his kit out on the bed as if the CO would pat him on the back when he came marching through.

To warn Mrs Denman of her peril could be to accuse her prematurely, because it may not have been her at all, though if not, who else? He wanted to describe the intriguing problem in a letter, but didn't know who would be interested. His father, certainly not, nor his mother. They'd be disgusted, and who wouldn't? Yet Barney the English master used to say that a sense of humour was the first sign of intelligence, and he should know, because nobody had ever seen him laugh.

Herbert couldn't pen the Sherry Saga to Dominic Jones either, without blowing the gaff on his town of refuge. If he'd still been at school he could have concocted a moral issue out of the case, though Barney might not have liked such an essay, saying he had made the yarn up, and that if he hadn't it was not a fit topic for a composition, though the boys would have laughed over it for a few days.

Feeling it a shame to waste such material he sat in Mrs Denman's parlour on Sunday afternoon while she was in bed with Frank, and wrote a letter to himself, no less a story than when the head and tail had suffered the fate of Procrustes' bed. He called Mrs Denman Mrs Penman, and related how he had seen Jacko, now Mungo, go through his motions with the bottle, as if to make the alcoholic whizzbang stronger, or maybe even to take care of some ailment he'd got. All he had to do now was put the story aside and wait for the real-life ending.

Another way of keeping contact with the hidden part of himself was to call on Isaac, shed some of the person he had become in the factory with each step up the wooden staircase.

He carried a loaf and two pounds of potatoes, a tin of condensed milk and a few apples from a corner shop, as well as a twenty-packet of Senior Service which Isaac liked. A bag of sugar for five bob came from one of the viewers whose father worked at the refining factory near Colwick.

‘Your accent's changed,' Isaac said, though not disapprovingly.

Herbert found it comforting to use rough speech, while knowing he could go from the hot tap of the local argot to the cold faucet of his school any day of the week. ‘It 'ad to, in the factory.'

‘As long as
you
don't. At least not radically.'

He forked up his chips, knife held too close to the blade. ‘I can't do that.'

Isaac put on an ironic smile. ‘Your table manners have altered, as well.'

‘You do as others do.'

‘I know all about that. But keep yourself intact, all the same. Your own soul, I'm talking about.'

‘I can't do owt else, can I?'

Isaac put tea on the table, and they lit cigarettes. ‘You've taken to that factory like a duck to water, Herbert Thurgarton-Strang. Or should I say Bert Gedling to a quart of Shipstone's ale? It shows you've got character. I expect your parents have, too.'

‘Don't mention them.'

‘Still like that, is it?'

He felt no need to be on his guard with Isaac. ‘Nar. I want the credit for myself.'

‘Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but you've got to think of people's feelings, and write them a letter now and again.'

He'd sent one since arriving in Nottingham, telling them he was working in Stoke on Trent. Archie had dropped it in a box when he'd gone there to see a girl. ‘Anyway,' Isaac said, ‘thanks for the sugar. Mine went days ago, with my sweet tooth.'

Herbert, drained for words due to the intensity of his life, or that's how he put it to himself, sometimes liked sitting in idleness and silence, and though he did not much care who he really was – whether Bert or Herbert – it brought a sense of peace that was vitally needed if he was to carry on any life at all.

Isaac took down one of his strangely scripted volumes and read with head going faintly back and forth as if wanting to sing the rhythms, while Herbert in his chair faded around the edges of sleep, visions fastening on to him brought about by Isaac's mutterings. Maybe Isaac was saying a form of prayer, not the sort they were drummed into mouthing at school, but one which put him into a trance, and brought dreams for Herbert of being back in India and walking behind an elephant, huge plates of grey excrement flopping from between its rear legs, his mother and father laughing from their chairs on the veranda of the bungalow. Where did that come from? The same place as the meteorite nightmare above the jagged skyline of mountains, split in half by a scimitar of lightning. Back at school he was running along a lane in vest and shorts, coming into the gate after a cross-country run. The runner, who was somebody he didn't know, turned out to be an old man, drooling and dying as he fell into the bracken. You needed a dirk to pin such fuzzy pictures down, because when he tried to re-run them on waking they slipped away like mercury.

‘You're looking a bit serious for a chap of seventeen.' Isaac broke into his exhaustion. ‘Let me send you back to your digs with a drop of whisky. I've got a secret bottle, for times like this.' He took wet glasses from the sink. ‘I think you must have had a hard week.'

‘I suppose they all are in the factory. But I'm used to it by now.' Nothing easier. An hour or two could go by at his machine and he marvelled that work got done with no variation in the measurements. Had it been sleep? Cleft in two, part of him dreamed, part of him worked. He lived as different a life in those lost periods as he had just now in Isaac's room, and would never know what was pumped into him because it was impossible to understand. Not that he cared to, for you didn't poke your nose where it had no use being, and where nothing of interest could be explained even if you took the trouble to wonder.

Isaac held up his glass. ‘
L'chaim
!'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Long life, to you. It's Hebrew.'

The promise of longevity seemed superfluous to someone who assumed he was going to live forever, or as close as dammit. Nevertheless, Herbert said ‘
L'chaim
, then,' and took a fiery swig.

He thought the sherry in the bottle had gone down by half an inch, but couldn't be sure, despite the glitter of certainty in Jacko's eyes as he packed his kit for departure. ‘I wouldn't say she liked it, but I wish I could have seen her face. Made her look prettier, maybe.'

‘She's a good sort.' Herbert defended her. ‘And I'll bet she used to be very good-looking. I like Ma.'

Jacko stared at him, unbelieving. Such an uncertain end to the Sherry Saga was hardly worth either story or letter, but Herbert noted Mrs Denman's glare from the window as Jacko, who left the bottle behind, marched smartly away with his bag and case to the station.

Having much on her mind Mrs Denman hurried to scour the room before Ralph got back, and maybe to work off her indignation at such a vile trick, though perhaps after a sip she assumed the doctored sherry had gone sour of its own chemical will, thinking no evil of Jacko at all. Herbert saw the emptied bottle in the dustbin and, however it was, tore his tale into shreds for fear Mrs Denman would read the papers with disgust on finding them under a shirt in his room.

Ralph pushed his bike up the steps, through the house and into the shed, limping as if he had worn his arse out on the saddle. He'd probably stood up in the train all the way from Ambleside. Herbert watched him fix the padlocks on his bike with a grin he hadn't seen before. He couldn't make it out, but thought he'd know before long. At the welcome home tea they were shown Ralph's map and the routes he had pedalled with Mary, a maze of pencillings and arrows and circles. Mrs Denman fussed about what a long way it was, and I'll bet you was tired, and it's a wonder you didn't get lost, and I'm sure you both slept like logs at night.

Herbert's suspicion that Ralph was keeping something back was confirmed when they were in their beds and before the light was put out. ‘She let me have it.'

‘What, yo'? I don't believe yer.'

‘Oh yes, she did. Coming down from Helvellyn. And again near Keswick. And then near Ambleside, and then in the bushes near Langdale youth hostel – after supper.'

Herbert imagined penpusher Ralph putting a map on the wall and sticking pins in every place he'd had his oats, till it looked like the Lake District was doing to close down with a smallpox epidemic. ‘And you're still going to marry 'er?'

‘More than ever. I told you, we're in love.'

She's probably in the club by now. ‘I'm dead jealous.'

He pulled off the light. ‘Knew you would be. Good night.'

There were times when Herbert thought he had landed in as compact a prison as the one at school. He was lucky, but discontented, knowing that his present state would have been less of a prison if he'd been able to write to someone and tell them about it.

The walls were made of everything well worth describing, which heightened his perceptions and rattled his nerves. He wanted to write something about it, anything. Curiosity was spoon-fed without asking, during every hour but those passed in the dead land of sleep, where too much was minced into his dreams to sort out.

He also knew that his aching to write to someone was an impulse to betray himself and make a glorious failure out of his enterprise. The scale of the fall was tempting, but a sense of self-preservation veered him from the course of Lucifer hurtling through space, or Phaeton glorying in a smash up of universal proportions.

The police raid on the pub worried him more than it had at the time. A partial blackout had been useful on getting to Nottingham, but the war was now over and the streets lit – though not as bright as pre-war, Mrs Denman said, what with rationing and call-up still going on.

The end of the war against Japan in August made him feel still more visible. He couldn't otherwise explain his anxiety, as if a curtain was slowly lifting between him and the world he had abandoned. To be clawed back into the life of school was such a prospect that he would sooner sling himself into a vat of acid. Here was where he belonged, because he had made the place his own and was familiar with everyone. There were times when he couldn't understand how it had been so easy. Maybe he had been to a good school after all, because what other could have trained him to fit in so well? If they caught him he would break out again, just like the chaps in
Caged Birds
, who had escaped time after time, and hide himself even more where they would never think to look.

All the same, in spite of his fears, he would not walk the street except openly and with the expected workman swagger. He would go into a pub if he felt like it and have it with Eileen whenever they went out together. To lessen the chances of being found and forced back to school he decided to volunteer for the army a month or two before he was eighteen so that there'd be less questions asked than enrolling under conscription. After all, he told himself with a pride not altogether trusted, he was Thurgarton-Strang, and the longer he was free the less likely was anybody to find him.

Six