Key to the Door (14 page)

A few minutes' stroking of smooth fur raised the rattles of its purring again; then his knees moved a fraction, and the purring stopped abruptly. He knew when an escape was coming because the cat's back legs stiffened, whereat his arms grew ready to snap out and bring it back.

It took longer to soothe it this time, but Sunday afternoon was endless. His hands played slowly, rhythmically along the length of its soft flanks, backwards and forwards, from the top of its leonine head to the base of its tail, up and down, from the side of its mouth to behind its neck and above the hardly felt ridge of its comfortable backbone, until it purred as loud as if its throat were clogged with marbles.

He prodded it from behind. The indications of its pleasure ceased, but returned after a few seconds in which it sensed that the prod had been nothing more than an accident of nature which had gone away quickly and would probably not return. It did. Annoyed, it leapt from Brian's knees, but his hand shot out and set it firmly and with some roughness where it had been.

The tail, upright with righteous wrath, waved before his eyes. He took the end and held it still, feeling the force of it trying to free itself and continue its angry swaying. Letting it go, it swung completely to one side. When the back legs stiffened, his hands hovered above the cat's neck, and as it sprang, a hard grip descended.

It realized eventually that there was no real need to escape, that if it stayed still on the warm knees no harm would come. But the controlling demon of Brian—felt dimly by the cat between escapes—grew tired of waiting for a next attempt, and prodded with such force that it was almost clear before being snatched by hovering hands. Each time it thought to abandon its prison there was an unmistakable warning, but the interval between the jerk in its back legs and the sight of its body in mid-air grew shorter, until the warning jerk became so faint that Brian's heart almost stopped in an effort to stay aware of it.

Bored, he decided to let it free on the next sally, but the sight of the cat leaping to freedom was too much, and before it could scatter its four legs among holes and furrows, he had set it firmly down again on his knees.

He made a low fence around it with his arms, a tempting barrier that was hardly noticed; it stayed where it was, belly stiffened with rage, eyes staring, tail waving back and forth like the electrical-contact mast of a dodgem-car. Instead of bounding forward, it swung away to the side, under his hand, to the nearest bush. Brian threw himself down, held nothing but its tail end. The cat howled a slow threat, urged its strong body away from what millstone had caught it, from the vice closing tighter and tighter the more it heaved. Brian looked at the straining back, at fur-marks of black and grey and mustard yellow mixed in, at the ears trying to twitch, at the head bent forward like a bull's.

The long tail relaxed. A mass of sharp needles ran along the soft fleshy inside of his arm, leaving pale white indentations the size of small fishbones magically turning red.

But he didn't let go. He picked up the cat with both hands so that he was helpless, cuffed it twice about the head, and threw it to the middle of the garden. With a scuffle of orientation it hit the soil, skidded towards the hedge, and was free.

He dabbed at his bleeding arm with a black handkerchief, walking slowly to the house. His grandmother turned from the fire: “What have you gone and done now, you silly lad?”

“I fell into a bush,” he told her.

She busied herself in a drawer for clean linen to bind it. “I don't know, getting scratched like that. I'll bet you was after bird nests. You'll get sent on board ship if a policeman catches you at it, you will and all.”

Lydia promised him a trip to the Empire. She was a stout, good-looking thirty-five and still unmarried, and was making sure, so Brian had heard his mother say, of a good time before settling down. The man courting her, though, was grey-haired and thin-faced, and sent Brian running errands to a dozen different places every time he came to the Nook for an afternoon. He had consumption, Lydia said. (“
She'll
never get it, and that's a fact,” Vera remarked, when discussing the case with Seaton.) “What's consumption?” Brian asked, when Lydia was getting ready.

“Mek sure an' wash yer tabs out. It's a disease,” she informed him, taking the flannel and rubbing his ears violently, which he resented and struggled to evade. “When yer badly an' wain't get better.”

“Do they tek everybody away then when they've got consumption?”

“Ay,” she said, “they do. If you don't make haste, we'll be late and then Tom'll be mad.”

It was raining, and the muddy lane was darkened by wet hedges like rows of steaming camels on either bank. Lydia clutched his hand as they walked with heads bent: it was his first time to the Empire, and everyone spoke of it as a marvel, something more grandiose than the Great War, as legendary and surprising as the wooden horse of Troy. Well scrubbed, and dressed in a new coat, he was aware of being taken to somewhere posh and rare. “What's going to be on?”

She pulled him along: “Singing and dancing, and people who mek you laugh.”

“Cowboys and Indians?”

“No, not tonight.”

“Aren't there any lions and tigers and snakes?”

“Them's in a circus,” she said. “Besides, you don't want to see such nasty things. They bite you.”

He had been so certain of seeing unique and astonishing scenes that he hadn't bothered before this to question it; and now his wide-open ever-deepening stage had shrunk to a few lights shining on a woman singing at one end and a man trying to make people laugh at the other. He bit his lip in anger: had he been forced to get washed for that?

When they got off the bus in Nottingham the rain had lifted and the world changed. Slab Square rose up and greeted him on the forehead when he tripped, leaving a mound soon forgotten in the well-lit confusion. The dull sky seemed to be held at bay by barking newspaper sellers who thrust folded
Posts
at Lydia as they went across the square. Though he was big enough for his age, she dragged him through crowds like a dog on a lead, mixing him with traffic while his eyes were elsewhere: in dazzling windows, on the highlighted cabs of advancing buses, on faces crowding their reflected images in the wet pools before his feet. A sonorous booming of the great council-house clock ruled over the tinselled darkness for eight long beats, drowning voices and motor-horns, leaving only a smouldering smell of petrol until the world opened again after the collapse of the final gong. “Come on,” she tugged, “what are you counting them for? It's eight o'clock and if we don't 'urry we'll keep Tom waiting.”

Tom already had the tickets, had got them half an hour ago, he said, and been for a drink to the Peach Tree rather than stand in the rain. Brian thought of him as old, dressed in a white muffler and good topcoat, hair well-combed with brilliantine, tall and delicate and never saying boo to a goose—a phrase he'd heard his grandfather use about him. Merton found him easy to tolerate, even had a certain respect for his gentleness. He'd been a bit of a lad though once, Lydia said with some pride—though in lieu of this, consumption had given him dignity. Tom had worked twenty years in the tobacco factory, and it was assumed that dust had caused his consumption so that the union made sure he had the wherewithal to maintain himself. Though in one way he appeared as strong as any other man, in another he seemed hardly to exist, walking on the world's rim as if ready to shake hands and say goodbye to it at a week's notice. He was in the rare position of a man regarded as dying on his feet, yet was looked upon by others with as much respect as if he had in some way proved himself a scholar, though as far as Brian knew he never read anything but newspapers.

Time went quickly. Brian kept his eyes on the stalls clock, hardly laughed at what the funny men said, though he was amused when they fell about the stage. He liked the man with the seal best because it barked and flapped its feet when everybody clapped. The only thing he didn't like while fixed in his plush seat was the cigar smoke, and he felt sick until lost at what was happening on the stage. But the swirl of glaring colours clouted his brain and stupefied his ears with the music's tuneful and furious beating. His eyes stared when women danced across the stage in something that looked like a bathing costume, and pushed out even harder when someone came from the wings in what looked like nothing at all.

At the interval Tom and Lydia smoked cigarettes, something Lydia never dared do in the house. She opened the packet and folded back the silver-paper with deliberate pleasure, handing the cigarette-card to Brian. When the ice-cream woman came down the gangway she said, feeling for her purse: “Get three tupp'ny cups, Brian, there's a good lad.”

Tom pushed a shilling into his hand, and he struggled against solid-tree-trunk legs along the row, elbowed his way up the blocked gangway. Many people stood talking, and he waited in an ice-cream queue for the freezing cardboard cups and wooden spoons, novelties he had never seen in such pristine condition, had seen only crushed and mud-marked underfoot. He was reading the words on each when the lights dimmed for the second half.

Curtains opened, and a flourish of oriental music was driven out from the orchestra as if at the crack of a whip. Brian guided himself down the gangway, looking along each darkening row for Lydia and Tom, and keeping an eye turned on the stage so as to miss nothing. A black-faced lady in flowing robes appeared from the proscenium, greeted by arabesques of eastern music. Brian stared at her elaborate robes and turbanned headdress, at the silks and satins covering her figure with such neatness, was even more entranced at her sudden strange wailing. “Hey,” he called, a few yards from his seat, “Aunt Lydia, is she the Abyssinian queen?”

“She must be,” came some answer.

“That's a good 'un.”

“She does look like it, and all.”

“I never thought of it myself.” Remarks flitted among the laughter, and Lydia pulled him into his seat, convulsed herself. Brian peeled the top from his ice-cream, eyes still on the stage, half believing himself to be in Abyssinia except when he turned to see the red-framed figures change as the curtains swung to for a new act.

The bus made him feel sick on the way back so Lydia and Tom got out to walk. “The trams never used to mek people badly,” she remarked. “But these new trolley-buses is terrible.” They didn't mind the walk: it was fresh and without rain, and Brian saw a million stars when he looked up, like luminous breadcrumbs on some mighty tablecloth. Lydia and Tom stopped at a pub, left him outside while they had a couple at the saloon bar, and they came out after half an hour, Lydia bending with beer-smelling breath to give him a packet of crisps. They turned down the dark road, passed the fire of a nightwatchman's hut where new drains were being laid.

“Uncle Tom,” he asked, “is Abyssinia a long way away?”

“Yes,” he told him, laughing, “ever such a long way.”

“How far?”

“Thousands o' miles.”

“I'd like to go there.”

“You will some day.”

“I want to go soon.”

“Them black people'll eat you if you do,” Lydia said.

“No, they wain't. I'll 'ave a gun like they 'ave on't pictures. Anyway, Paul Robeson's Abyssinian and 'e don't eat people.”

“That's a good 'un!” Tom said.

Houses were left behind and they walked through the long tunnel of the railway bridge, where Lydia was always afraid with or without Tom's company. “Come on,” she snapped to him, “don't tread in them puddles o' water, you'll get your socks all wet.”

“I'd like to go to Abyssinia,” he said. “I want to goo a long way.”

“I wish you'd stop talking about Abyssinia,” she complained. “You're getting on my nerves.”

They walked for a time in silence. “I'm going to draw a map when I get home, Aunt Lyddy.”

“You don't know how to draw maps,” she said, easier in her mind now that they were near the Nook.

“I do; it's easy.”

“That's the first thing I knew.”

“We do 'em at school,” he persisted. “I like making maps up.”

Tom said he wouldn't go in with her, and they drew together by the hedge in what looked like a more desperate combat than that which was supposed to have taken place between St. George and the Dragon. After a few minutes Tom went into the blackness of the lane, and Lydia opened the gate so that she and Brian could go into the lighted house.

CHAPTER 7

Ada, by marrying Doddoe, had unwittingly outlawed her children from the Nook. Doddoe was a “bad lot,” Merton swore, a foul-mouthed drunken bully beyond the railings of reason or help or pity. His son-in-law would have laughed and agreed arrogantly with the truth of these random verdicts if Merton had said them to his face—which he hadn't bothered to do, though Merton's fiery stick-brandishing ostracism was nevertheless known.

Doddoe had an inside demon whose existence he was unable to acknowledge, a figure pictured by a friendly yet untrustworthy grin on Doddoe's actual face, that pulled the strings of his recklessness in the most haphazard seesaw fashion. Harold Seaton didn't like him, having frequently been put out when associated with Doddoe's misadventures, and nothing made Seaton more black-dog depressive than to be put out by something. There was the time when the pair of them collected all the spare underwear their wives possessed and pawned it for the pleasure of a pint and a seat at the pictures. In retaliation Ada had laid hands on Doddoe's Sunday boots and pawned them, for four shillings, which she shared with Vera because neither had any food to put on the table. But these were minor tribulations of Ada's misery. Doddoe once blacked her eye before going to work, and returned after a prodigious stint of overtime in the evening to see not a limb of kid nor stick of furniture left in the house, whence it was his turn to roar all night like a stabbed bull in his misery. A month later they were back together again, and there seemed no denying on the night of the reunion that both kids and grown-ups liked it better that way.