A Start in Life (46 page)

Brooding on the misery of William's mother, I'd become tender enough to write to my own and let her know where I was and that I was well. A letter was pushed through the door with a Nottingham postmark and she said, to my surprise, how much she'd worried about me, and how much she missed me, and how much she loved me – love being a word I don't think I'd heard her mention before. She told me the news of my grandmother's death a month ago, which may have upset her because now, apart from me, she was alone in the world, though I thought she must be far from lonely if I knew my mother, who'd never been the person to let boyfriends grow under her feet, and I supposed she was still the same, not being too much above forty. My grandmother, she said, had left me a locked box, and nobody knew what was in it, but she thought it might contain family photos that hadn't been seen for years. So I ought to go up and collect them some time, though if I was busy they'd be kept safe for me until I wasn't, whenever that might be.

I wandered around town all day, reading the letter every time I stopped for a coffee or snack. I was touched by the fact that my mother missed me, and intrigued at the thought of what was in my grandmother's box, so the next day I got on a train at St Pancras and steamed north for Nottingham.

Part Six

I lounged among a heap of newspapers and magazines in a first-class compartment, but soon got bored with them and went to the dining-car for lunch. I'd left it late, and the only remaining place was opposite two other people. I'd felt like being alone with my thoughts, didn't even want to be asked to pass the salt or ashtray. The man's hand was on the table, and the girl by his side touched it, then rested hers on it. I was looking at the window, fascinated by beads of rain breaking and multiplying on their way down the glass as the train rushed along. Then I heard my name spoken, and, being forced to look, I saw that the loving and handsome couple in front of me were none other than Gilbert Blaskin, and my old friend June. I couldn't speak, and a wide smile came on to Gilbert's already wide mouth: ‘Having a rest from the big city?'

I smiled back, but it nearly broke my face: ‘Where are you two going?' I hadn't seen June since our encounter in the taxi, for which I wasn't exactly well disposed towards her. ‘June and I came down to London together in my car,' I explained to him. ‘And now you two are travelling north together. My head's beginning to spin.'

‘It's a small world,' said Gilbert. ‘We all know that. But she's going back north with me now, aren't you, darling?'

‘I gave up my job at the club,' she told me. ‘Gilbert and I have known each other for months, and we've decided to stay together. You know, the old “man-and-wife” kick.' They'd already had brandy, and we were served with scalding soup.

He toasted her: ‘Maybe we'll even get married. We don't talk about it, though it's in the air we breathe. I'm divorced now, thank God.'

I couldn't stand their brimming happiness. ‘What happened to Pearl Harby?'

He winced, but I waited for an answer. ‘She left me.'

‘You mean you threw her out.'

‘She left me, old son.'

When the next course came I asked June how Moggerhanger was these days, and she didn't take it so well: ‘You're as rotten as your car. Why don't you drop to bits?'

‘I'd like to, but I can't.'

‘Not yet, you mean.' Then she smiled, too happy for many hard feelings: ‘He came to the club and asked for Kenny Dukes. Moggerhanger said something about Kenny trying to get off with his daughter Polly, who's a lecherous little bitch, I might say. But he told him not to phone her again. Kenny went all flustered and tried to deny it, and when a few more words flew Claud punched him, and had him thrown out of the club.' I laughed, because that must have been the result of my casual phone call, but I didn't tell her, merely tut-tutted at Moggerhanger's vile temper and irrational suspicions. Her opinion of Polly seemed no more than a bit of feminine pique. And one good turn deserves another, I thought, remembering how Kenny Dukes had done me down in a similar way when I lost my chauffeuring job.

The meal ended amicably because we all got drunk. On the way back to the compartments Gilbert fell down, and I trampled on his hat. This made him truculent, but I told him to pack it in and not get so ratty over an accident. ‘I'll scratch your eyes out,' June said to me, ‘if you try anything.' She picked up the hat and put it on Gilbert's cock-head. ‘Come on, love.'

In spite of our differences we sat in the same compartment, much to the disgust of an elderly parson, who told Gilbert to stop using such foul un-Christian talk in front of a lady. ‘Don't worry, your reverence,' June said with a downbeat leer, ‘I'm not a lady, and he's not a Christian. If he is I'm going to stop living with him,' at which he got up and walked out.

‘I'll have to take you everywhere,' Gilbert said to her. ‘I like space, and you'll clear every place I go into. We're made for each other.'

I asked him if he was writing another book.

‘Not if I can help it,' June said. ‘We're too busy living, aren't we, Gilbert my sweet?'

‘Almost,' he said, standing up to do physical jerks on the luggage rack. ‘I'm doing a monumental non-fiction work at the moment called
The History of Carnage
. My publisher thinks there's a market for it in these years of peace.' He was out of breath, so sat down between us. ‘I should get good material living with dear June. The reason I've been so unsuccessful and unhappy with women so far in my life is because I've never found one that will stand up and fight with me. June is a real match. In a restaurant last night she threw an avocado pear, and it splattered beautifully, oil and all.'

‘He kicked me under the table.'

‘I wanted to see what you'd do.' Gilbert smiled: ‘Whenever I did it in the past I just got a look of regret from the injured party.'

‘Next time,' she said, ‘I'll throw the table as well.'

‘Wonderful,' he said, ‘and I'll break your bloody neck.' I marvelled at the way he seemed to have altered. I could only assume that Pearl had been driven into the looney-bin. I got off at Nottingham Midland and left the happy couple to their love and kisses.

I'd sent a telegram to my mother the day before and, as I hoped, she had got the afternoon off work so as to be in when I arrived. I took a taxi from the station, craning my neck to get a view of Castle Rock as I went by, caught in the swamp of memory, and loving every minute of it, so that I could get out of it blithely any second. Nobody can feed me the crap that you can't go back, that you can't go home again, because I never believed I was going anywhere, anyway. You do what the hell you like, and don't need to believe in any such thing that ties you down and stops you moving. To go back or to go forward is better than standing still, that's all I know, though the only final moving you do is in the skinbag of yourself.

She was cleaning out my room. ‘I'll only stay tonight,' I said, ‘because I've got to be back at work tomorrow.'

I stood in the scullery as she lit the gas.

‘What work?'

‘Travelling' – adding the usual explanations.

She had her curlers in and wore a turban to cover them up: ‘You've landed a good job.'

‘It pays well.'

‘Do you like it, though?'

‘It's easy.'

She laughed, and we plonked in the armchairs opposite each other: ‘You always were on the lookout for a cushy billet.'

I offered her a cigarette: ‘How's your work then?'

‘The same old drag. But it keeps me alive and kicking. Do you want something to eat?'

‘I'm not hungry.' She made the tea, poured it, put in sugar and milk, stirred it up, and pushed it towards me. ‘I'm sorry I couldn't be at Grandma's funeral,' I said. ‘But I didn't know about it.'

‘We tried to find you. I even went to the police, but there was nothing they could do.'

This made my stomach jump: ‘I'll keep in touch from now on.'

‘It's best if you do, in case something happens to me. Not that I'm likely to be a drain on you, because I'm getting married soon. Albert and I have fixed it for about three months from now.'

‘Albert?'

‘You'll meet him tonight, if you come out down town.'

My grandmother's box was upstairs, and I was given an envelope with the key in it. It wasn't full. There were the rent books she'd kept right through her life, all the lapsed insurance policies, birth certificates, a family Bible which, when I opened it, had the births and deaths of several generations of the family written in the fly-leaves, not only by her but by others before her. There were character references from people she had worked for from the age of twelve – packs of that useless detritus that old-fashioned half-literate people liked to hoard. I tore up a few of the rent books and stacked them in the fireplace, piled them on and got a good blaze going with my lighter, for the room was damp and cold. Some fifty-year-old newspapers came out, and these I put to one side to read later, curious as to why she had saved them. Then a pack of ancient photos, a few of them daguerrotypes, members of the family who had steamed over from Ireland.

I compared the dates on the back with the notes in the Bible, and one photo was particularly interesting because it was of the first Cullen to come from County Mayo at the time of the Famine. He'd brought six sons and a wife with him, and the photo showed a man who looked very much like photos I'd seen of myself. It gave me a shock. Polly Moggerhanger had taken one of me in Geneva, and the same stiff self-conscious pose was there. The man of eighteen-forty wore a fine suit, with a waistcoat that had a watch-chain looping across it. He was just above middle height, about thirty years old, and wore a derby hat (or was it a billy-cock?). But he had my thin lips and straight nose, the same arching of the back as the head looked superciliously into the air as if expecting trouble from that quarter. It gave me a pang to realize he'd been dead eighty years, and that maybe in another hundred years someone like me would be looking at a photo of me and saying the same thing to himself. Time has no meaning, I thought, when it comes to photos hoarded by an old woman. I tried to picture his life in the England of those days, but I couldn't. He'd worked with his sons on the railways in Cambridgeshire, and I supposed they'd earned good money with it. He certainly looked well dressed in this photo.

I put it in my wallet, continued digging in the trunk. There was a bonnet, a few embroidered handkerchiefs, a hymn and prayer book, a man's yellow necktie or cravat, and a gold watch that didn't go when I wound it up. Lower down and beneath everything was a small leather bag with something inside that weighed heavily. I opened the string, and gold coins fell out. There were fifty altogether, and I'd never seen golden sovereigns before, that must be worth four or five quid each. The sight and weight of so much gold made my mouth water, and for several minutes I ran them through my fingers like a miser. I was so long up there my mother must have thought I'd laid down and died, so I put all the things back except the gold and humped my way to the living-room.

She looked up from her novel. ‘Get anything?'

I clinked the bag down: ‘Photos, rent books, and this.'

‘What the hell is it?'

‘Fifty gold sovereigns.'

She stood up: ‘Do you want any more tea?'

‘If it's fresh. There's half for you, and half for me. It's over a hundred pounds each.'

‘It was left to you,' she called from the scullery.

‘I insist on going halves.'

This obviously pleased her: ‘All right. Albert and me might go to Paris for a few days with it. I've always wanted to go there.'

‘That's a good way of spending it,' I said, pleased that she hadn't wanted to fritter it away on sensible things like clothes or the house.

I met Albert that night, and we hit it off together, which was just as well because my mother wanted me to ‘give her away' when the time came, and we both knew I wouldn't give her away to just anybody. She looked so young dressed up that if I'd met her in London and she'd not been my mother I could imagine wanting to get off with her. As for Albert, he was about fifty, and had been a factory worker most of his life. But from being a boy he'd been in the Communist Party and had educated himself, so we had a lot to talk about. Before the war he'd actually been sent to Russia by his trade union, and in those days, being so young, he'd thought it was great. Even now, he wasn't one of those who'd opted out. He knew all about what had been going on, but still kept his faith in a better world and all that. I didn't see eye to eye with him on some of this, but there'd always been a tradition of religious tolerance in our family, so there was no reason why I shouldn't respect him for it. We drank steadily, as if we'd never stop talking, and I could see how pleased my mother was that we took to each other. I certainly wouldn't mind him going to Paris on part of the Cullen gold. My grandmother must have got her hands on so much during the Great War when she was working at the gun factory. I'm glad to know that somebody made something out of it apart from the millionaires. She must have gone out of her way to get gold so that it wouldn't lose its value, and I was glad that at least one member of the Cullen family had shown a bit of wisdom for once.

I left my twenty-five sovereigns locked in the box, and went back to London, an ideal journey in that I neither met nor spoke to anyone. Sunshine came warmly into the musty compartment as I left Nottingham, but two hours later the train passed St Albans and entered the drizzle. My mother had packed sandwiches so I didn't need to go to the restaurant coach. As for drink, I never got thirsty. I don't know why but I could go a whole day without liquid of any kind, not even feeling uncomfortable for lack of it.