Crescendo (17 page)

He smiled and began to hum that naive but catchy tune from
Maritana
known as
Scenes that are Brightest
, inventing words of a suitably childish kind to fit the tune.

“Scenes that are brightest,
Grass in wind blowing,
Grass in wind blowing!
Scenes that are brightest!
Grass in wind blowing
On a Pennine hillside.”

It was one of the jokes which he and Fiammetta had shared: when they saw an agreeable landscape together, to burst forth with adaptations of this verse—in English, German or Italian as the fancy took them—the sillier the better, and if the improvised lines proved sometimes a trifle obscene, they laughed all the more heartily. (There was one version, for instance, composed at the top of the Eiffel tower, which would probably have led to their arrest by the authorities had it been sung in French.) Freeman laughed as he remembered it, shook his massive head and began to think of Fiammetta. His whole life unrolled and lay before him for the viewing, like the landscape at his feet.

He had been born down there in the Hudley slums, and had
lived his first ten years in two rooms in Howgate Close, a dark filthy little court now cleared away. His father, Francis Freeman the elder, was an Irish labourer who had come over a few years before to work on the reservoirs then being constructed in the Pennine moors: a broad immensely strong man with black hair growing thickly over his arms and chest and down his low forehead almost into his sparkling, gleeful, slightly squinting black eyes. He was a Catholic, of course, though hardly a practising one, and would sometimes shout cheerful abuse at his wife because she was a black Protestant—indeed she had been brought up in some very strict obscure sect, Plymouth Brethren as far as the young Francis could make out, and still when challenged professed this faith. She had lived in one of the old remote hillside townships near which Freeman's reservoir was being constructed, and had married him secretly in the face of violent family opposition, Francis gathered. Whether his father's name was in fact Freeman, or whether this was his mother's name, taken by his father to avoid the consequences of some violation of the law, Francis was not sure—there was always a vague atmosphere of secrecy hanging over the house, any question about names from the authorities was received with uneasiness, and the police were ill regarded. Once when Francis, then a young child, was out shopping in Hudley with his mother, she suddenly seized his hand and jerked him round a corner into a draughty passage, and they stood there for some minutes pressed against the wall, his mother breathing deeply, her lips pursed, a strange look of mingled anger and amusement on her face. Clearly the Free-mans were concealing themselves from someone, and it was Francis's guess that this someone was one of his mother's relations: a family feud seemed indicated, which probably had its origin in his parents' marriage, That they
were
married, however, was certain, for his father often joked about this, coarsely though not unkindly, with his mother, and she was apt to drawl out a tart response in her sardonic Yorkshire tones:

“Tha needn't go on so. We all know tha were fair capped to find thisen wed.”

His mother was a strange woman, Francis often thought; tall and buxom, white-skinned, green-eyed, infinitely cleaner than anyone else he saw in those early days, with strong features and a great mane of straight red hair. This she usually wore tightly wound round her well-moulded head, and it was supposed to be a great favour to her husband and son, for which they were required to be respectfully grateful, when she let it loose so that it flowed down her shoulders to her waist. Francis was sometimes allowed on Saturday night to brush this river of hair, but his father when he came in, usually slightly drunk, would seize a great handful and wind it round his wrist, and draw his wife's head back and kiss her lips, laughing loudly.

The attachment between his father and his mother was indeed very strong; the little Francis, looking up at them, hands dirty, nose unwiped, realised that fully. Any quarrels they had sprang from his father's jealousy, which was violent, and directed, since his wife gave him no other cause, invariably against her family. The most terrible row which Francis remembered occurred because his mother gave him a cheap little box of paints for his seventh birthday. His father in a fury tore the little metal box apart and threw the six squares of paint all over the room—it seemed from his angry ravings that his wife's, brother had dabbled with paints.

“Ye gave ‘urn up when ye married me and I won't have ye turn back to 'um!” he shouted.

“Have it thi own way. T'lad can do without a gift, I reckon,” said his wife with calm indifference.

Her husband eyed her suspiciously, but roared with decreasing force and finally flung himself muttering out of the room. The moment he was gone his wife collected the scattered paints and pressed them back into their little sockets with her broad thumb. As she did this, she smiled—to herself, not at her son.

“Best not use them except when I'm here, Frankey,” she said.

She was not at all discomposed, it was clear, by the preceding scene, and was quite prepared to endure more such scenes in the future. But Francis did not feel that his own happiness counted for much in the matter. He was a little perplexed and disappointed, but he played with the paints whenever he felt the wish to do so—he was not a child easily downcast.

The work on the reservoir had finished before Francis was born—or perhaps his father had left it at marriage; at any rate his father was now a labourer on the roads, sometimes wielding a pick with a fierce energy which Francis greatly admired, sometimes hardly raising a hand but entertaining his fellow labourers so well with story and song, keeping them in such good humour, that foremen turned a blind eye on his idleness. What foremen would not overlook, however, was a late arrival on the site. Unfortunately, for some months when Francis was about ten years old his father was employed on widening a hill road out of Hudley, at the foot of which stood an inn, the Ring o' Bells. In those days inns opened early in the morning, and some of the roadmakers caught the habit of dropping in to the Ring o' Bells for a drink of coffee laced with rum, on their way to work at six o'clock. It fell to Francis's lot to follow his father discreetly to the Ring and try to get him out after his first cup, before it was too late. His father was apt to resent this surveillance.

“Ah, get away with yez!” he roared, swiping Francis aside with his mighty arm. “Don't come bullocking here where ye're not wanted!”

Francis did not mind the physical blow—blows were customary in Howgate Close and the boys there were skilful in sidestepping them. He found himself harder hit by the suggestion that he came where he was not wanted. It seemed to touch into active pain some latent discomfort in his mind. Without quite knowing why he was very glad, indeed when
that section of road was finished and his father went to work in another direction.

Later, in his teens, when he understood the facts of procreation, he understood too that his earlier instinct had been sound. Only a mad physical passion for each other could have been strong enough to drag his mother from her respectability and his father from his footloose rovings into the bond of such unsuitable matrimony; they wanted only each other, children who came as a result of their intercourse were unwanted intruders. (Luckily they had but two more after Francis, who—perhaps also luckily—died of smallpox in infancy.) So though they were kind to Francis in an offhand manner and as Howgate Close understood the word, their son never really mattered greatly to either of them. Francis had too robust, too independent, a nature to brood over this lack of parental interest; it was only natural, he thought, he did not resent it, he just accepted it as a minor nuisance which it was no use grumbling about, like a crooked nose or a sore finger. (Still, it was a sore.) But it probably shaped his life. For one thing, it made it easy for him to leave home early when the chance offered.

In the winter and whenever the weather was bad his father was, in the manner of the times, “laid off” from road work, unemployed; then he took any work which offered itself. His great muscular strength stood him in good stead here. By this time his son's strength was also quite considerable; Francis was in his teens, strong, stocky and solid, his brief and sketchy schooling over, and father and son worked side by side. One day some chance or other—a scene-shifter was ill, Francis seemed to remember—led to their employment at the recently built theatre nearby, the Empire, where the millhands who crowded the slums on this side of Hudley roared their approval of the melodramas of the day. Some of the scenery they were hired to shift was still being painted when they arrived, and somehow—like so many crucial moments in life, this one was
obscure, Francis could not recall it clearly though he tried—Francis found himself helping to paint it.

His foot was now on the ladder, and he climbed. At the end of the week the Empire offered him a regular job as scene-shifter, painter and general bottle-washer (the 1897 equivalent of dogsbody) for a few shillings a week. He took it. When he announced this to his parents, as he expected his father raged. The elder Francis had all the native fluency of the Irish, with a command of profane invective all his own. His son listened appreciatively until, exhausted, the older man subsided into less decorated English.

“Is it a painter ye'll be making of my son like ye're mealy-mouthed brother!”

He banged his fist on the table—an old round wooden one, uncertain in balance and long since bereft of varnish, Francis could see it now—till it shook beneath his blows, and thrust his flushed face menacingly into his wife's.

“The pay's good,” said she in a considering tone.

This apparent defence of her son was in reality no such thing, as Francis well knew; it was spoken in order to exacerbate her husband's jealousy, which she enjoyed. It seemed time to end the scene.

“It's what I want to do and I shall do it,” said Francis.

He spoke without malice or animus, but solid as a rock.

His parents looked at him with astonishment, even a little fear.

“Ah, ye're a bold boyo, no doubt of it,” jeered his father.

“Lad knows his own mind, seemingly,” said his mother in her sardonic drawl.

“I do,” said Francis.

For the first time in his life he received a look from his father which held real interest.

“So ye mean to follow ye're fancy, do yez, my boy?”

“I'm your son,” said Francis.

His father laughed and flung away, and on Sunday evening,
when the load of scenery and furnishings arrived by rail for the touring company which was to open next day, Francis entered the employ of the Empire.

Presently one of the better-class touring companies carried him off with them on a round of provincial bookings. His mother seemed a little taken aback when he announced his imminent departure. Her tone in talking of it was reproachful and almost tender; she washed her son's bits of underclothes without being asked to do so, and actually kissed him goodbye when the time came for him to leave. She also pressed into his hand a tiepin—a cheap poor thing enough, purchased no doubt at the pawnbroker's down the street, but even so it was a miracle how she had found the money for it—and said wistfully, looking up at him:

“Tha's grown a gradely lad nowadays, Frankey.”

Francis, who felt his entrails move within him, said nothing, kissed her quietly and left the house. Outside the door a stone slab flanked by rusty iron railings, and five uneven stone stairs, led down over the windows of the “house” below to the broken muddy pavement of the close. Francis had reached the bottom of these stairs when his name was called. He turned. His father stood in the doorway, his great arms stretched up to jamb and lintel.

“Do ye mean to come back home after this tour, now?” said he.

“No,” said Francis.

His father hesitated, then stepped on to the stone slab and held out his hand. Francis likewise hesitated. But this huge rough hand, scarred by labour, covered up to the top joints of the fingers in black hair, somehow could not be refused; Francis would not retrace his steps, but he stretched up his arm and father and son shook hands across the railings.

The Sunday morning train crawled out of Hudley station, crawled into the tunnel and after an interminable interval of sulphuric darkness, crawled out again. It had now left Hudley
and entered the neighbouring township. Francis sprang to his feet, let down the window of the compartment, threw the tiepin as hard as he could at the adjacent hillside and jerked up the window again almost before his companions had begun to protest against the intrusion of smoke and smell. He sat down and folded his arms, well content; he hoped he was now free for ever from his parents, free from the humiliation of living with those who did not want him.

He was right; he never saw his parents again. Ten years later a letter from a Howgate Close neighbour, a scrawl on cheap paper, ill-written and ill-spelled, told him that his mother was dead. For a few days he felt sore and moody and he indulged in one or two of those explosions of temper, which were already becoming known in his profession. But he was in Milan at the time and there was nothing he could do except send a hypocritical letter and a money order.

“The old man won't last long without her,” he thought.

Sure enough a few months later a letter in the same hand told him that his father had gone. There was enough, it seemed, from some of the money Francis had sent before, which the neighbours had prudently laid aside, guessing how things might go, to bury him decently. This had been done, and the neighbour would keep for his trouble the few shillings which the sale of the Freeman furniture had produced, if Francis agreed. Francis sent another money order. He drank rather more heavily than usual for a night or two and his temper was rough. But then suddenly he cheered up and came back to his usual robust and lively spirits; “all that”—by which he meant, not the Hudley slums but the biological jealousies—was safely over at last, he thought, and he was glad of it.