Key to the Door (23 page)

The final draw-back, then a masterly satisfying swing of the stone-bellied straw corpse into the air and over the welcoming water. Labour was the best thing—and if Brian ever felt distrust for that sympathetic organization it was only because all big names seemed like devil's threats to hold his soul in thrall—and he wasn't sure enough of his soul yet to trust it with such things.

It was late enough for a traffic lull along the nearby big road; a rough silence reigned between the corridor of its lights, and among the distant railway yards. The Guy, leaving their lunging arms, spent a glorious moment of freedom suspended in black harmless air, then, a straw-emasculated monster, it descended while Bert and Brian held their breath with anticipated delight.

It hit the water with a justified explosion, a reverberating thump creating havocs of sound in the canyon of the deep lock, while Bert and Brian embraced with roars of delight—and then set to pushing the now empty pram back along the towpath, their newly bought flash-lamps making spaces of clear light before them.

On rainy days clothes steamed in the classroom, emitting invisible yet olfactory vapours from waterlogged shoes and soaked jackets. Hot pipes were a December godsend, to be sat on before lessons began, stayed close to during them so that the hand could stretch slyly out and touch their luxurious warmth. At home, when he and Arthur and Fred ran in crying from the bitter cold of hot-aches, Seaton would pull them to the hearth one by one and press his fire-warmed hands over them: “Have a bit o' fire. There's plenty more where that came from”—making Brian's bones ache from the pressure of strong maulers.

In winter he saw the Nook as a snowbound igloo set in the desolation of stark countryside, Merton and the rest plodding in or out for wood and beer and groceries. If there was no snow, then the fields were dull and wet under a grey sky, and there was no comfort in crossing fields and mud like a fugitive walking beyond the world of sound. Silence and rain surrounded it—not even a horse or lightning. Streets were better.

To subscribe penny by penny at the corner shop for some toy to Selection Box of chocolates ravaged his deep-seated natural inclinations. But it had to be done if Christmas was to mean anything at all, it being better to spend two shillings straight off than twenty-four pennies bit by bit. A concentration of resources left a more solid memory of having been rich for a day instead of stingily solvent for many.

“Who'll join the Christmas Club?”

“I wouldn't join two pieces o' string,” Seaton said, “except to 'ang myself, 'appen.” But he laughed as he said it.

Trimmings and Christmas trees and toys were in every shop window, aquariums of light and colour, impossible to buy but good to look at. Seaton was still on the dole, with money harder to come by than it had ever been, though food and presents usually landed from somewhere at Christmas. Vera's mother sent a Christmas pudding, boiled in the outhouse copper of the Nook six weeks before; Ernest sent a parcel of discarded toys from last year; a sister sent clothes and gave Seaton a few shillings when he walked to Carlton for them.

A Christmas tree came into the house. Seaton trimmed the hagged rim of a two-pound tomato tin, filled it with soil, laminated it with blue crêpe paper. It stood, like a god with multiple green arms, on the dresser. Out came the box of decorations, saved like gold from previous years in beds of tissue paper. A delicate yellow pear was held aloft: “Where shall I put this one?”

Arthur stood at tiptoe on a chair to point out a branch halfway up the stem, shaking the sideboard in his eagerness. Margaret bawled at him not to knock owt over. “Just there,” he said firmly.

Vera put down her cup of tea. “Come off that chair, then, our Arthur; you'll fall.”

“And where'll I put
this
one?” Seaton asked, holding up a coloured model of Santa Claus. Brian had seen enough Christmases to lead the chorus of: “Right on top! He's the chief! Up top, our dad.”

“Ah,” Seaton responded, high on the chair, “you'll be 'earing 'im on Christmas Eve if you listen 'ard enough. You'll 'ear 'is reindeers trotting across the chimney-pots, wain't they, Vera?”

“Santa Claus i'n't real,” Margaret scoffed.

“That's what yo' think,” Brian countered.

“He i'n't,” Arthur said, and his baited breath settled it.

“Our dad hides our toys in the pantry, don't yer, dad?” Fred said.

He looked at Vera. “Ain't he a sharp little bogger? You can't tell these kids owt, can yer?”

“Yer can't,” Vera said, pulling Arthur's shoes and socks off. “Not like when we was kids. Believed owt, we did. When I was ten, only a little gel, our Oliver towd me to go up Canning Circus to gerrim some orange peel. When I asked him what he wanted it for, he said he'd bat my tab if I didn't goo. He said he wanted it because he'd got an 'eadache, though. So I went. Silly bogger
I
was. It was miles away, and I was terrified coming back in the dark, under them bridges. I thought an owd man was going to run me. And when I got back wi' me pina full of orange peel our Oliver just laughed. All on 'em did. I said: ‘Yer rotten bogger'—and chucked it in 'is face. Then me dad gen me a penny, and said it served 'im right. He was a bogger, though, our Oliver was. But he was good as well, though, a proper card. Everybody liked 'im. My dad cried like a baby when he got killed in the war.”

Brian had heard it before, yet always found it hard to believe in grandad Merton crying. He pictured someone bringing a telegram to the Nook:
YOUR SON KILLED FOR HIS KING AND COUNTRY
it would have said. Kicked to death by a drunken mule; Oliver's pals had given it rum to drink before he led it across a moor—being a blacksmith like his dad and on his way to shoe it. Maybe they did it for a joke on him because he was having 'em on like he had his mam on. But everybody says he was a good bloke, though, so Brian was sorry Oliver'd got killed because that was one uncle less. A sprig of mistletoe was tied under the light. “Come on, Vera, let's 'ave the first kiss of Christmas,” Seaton said.

“Stop it, 'Arold”—struggling, aware of four kids looking on. “Don't be so bleddy daft.” But she was kissed.

The weekend before Christmas, Brian went to the Nook, stayed overnight, and the next day felt sick as he was about to start back. He stood by the door with a stick in his hand, ready to walk out and home under the black sky that looked like sending fists of rain at the hedges before he got far. He couldn't move, and Lydia turned from her making-up at the mirror. “Look at 'im,” she said to her mother, “he's badly, the poor little bogger. Come on to the fire, Brian. He's as white as a sheet.” He leaned his stick in the corner and walked back. She undressed him and walked him up the stairs in his shirt, the smell of her newly applied powder and rouge bringing the sickness into his mouth so that she just got him to the pot in time. “How is he then?” Mary asked when she came down.

Lydia took two lemons and filled a jug with warm water. “He was as sick as a dog. I'm teking him some o' this up.”

“He'd better stay 'ere over Christmas, if you ask me. Shall we get a doctor?”

“No. It's only a bilious bout.”

Brian curled into a ball, half-slept in a colourful incomprehensible world under the blankets. His tightly closed eyelids held in flickering lights of orange and red, and while he wanted to open his eyes in the hope of driving them away—they attacked him like bluebottles that stung—he did not want to lose the sense of repose that closed eyes gave. He fought this problem for a while, until he was forced to push his head above blankets and look at the flowered wallpaper beyond the bed because open eyes steadied the equilibrium of his stomach and saved him from being sick at that moment. The dance of the flowers slowed down; the swaying ceased and eventually he eased his eyelids together and fell back into less dangerous rest.

On Christmas morning there was a train set on his bed, and its silver lines were held like a horseshoe as Merton's heavy tread sounded on the stairs.

“Hello, Nimrod, is that bilious bout about gone?”

“I feel all right now.” He was in the middle of the wide bed, looking beyond brass posts at wiry tree arms outside that the teeth of winter had picked clean. Merton pulled the window open. “I think we'll get yer up later.”

The railway line circled an uneven terrain of blanket. “Gran'ma said I couldn't yet.” A wind blew sunlight into the room, the damp breeze sharp as smelling-salts after the sick odours of three days' breath. “Ay, 'appen she did, but yer'll never get better stayin' in bed. Yer want a bit o' fresh air round yer now.” He closed the window, stood at the end of the bed. “What yer got there, you young bogger? I suppose Santa Claus brought it for yer?”

“No, yo' did, and gran'ma and the others. You all put to and brought it me from Nottingham.”

Merton laughed. “There's a little sharpshit for yer. Don't believe in Santa Claus any more. I don't know. But yer believe in Sent George and the Wagon, though, don't yer?”

Brian laughed, stood the train lines up like a child's drawing of the Big Wheel at Goose Fair. He let it fall. “No, I don't.”

Merton took the lines: “Let's see'f we can't get this contraption going.” He set them on the floor and turned the engine key until it came against the stop. Brian leaned over the edge of the bed: Merton lined the carriages behind the engine, stopped whistling when the caravan set off. “There,” he said, “nowt to it.” After a dozen times round he set an empty cup on the track, and they stared down on the whirring colourful train going by the counterpane that hung to the floor, then circling to Merton, then towards the washstand legs, finally turning with a clack into the cup, knocking it aside and going round and wearing itself to a standstill.

“Put a shoe on now, gran'dad.”

“Why, you destructive little bogger,” he said, feeling under the bed for one. It jerked the train sideways, sent it trundling at an angle: Brian heard a hollow thump as its snout smacked at the skirting board. “That did it,” Merton said, satisfied at Brian's laughter. “Now yer know how to break it, I'll leave yer. Though I expect yer'd a found out soon enough on yer own.”

He went down for Christmas dinner, and later found himself alone in the kitchen, the others either out or in bed. He was sitting on the rug, dressed, torn between a book on shipwrecks and the mountainous red shapes licking above the firebars. The book didn't hold, except that it was new, another present. He tried a page: everyone stood on the deck and sang “God Save the King,” while the boat descended into a sea of sharks. Why didn't they shoot the sharks, make boats, drink ale perhaps? It was nothing to sing about. When he was totally interested in a song, book, a picture, his face went dead, his pale snubbed features carved in wood, life only coming into his face when he didn't understand something and was trying to. Like now, with the men singing “God Save the King” and sharks waiting to snap them up.

A grey and mustard cat purred in a hump by his knees. Merton would have booted it out of the way for being too near the fire. Brian prodded it, but went back to his book to read the end of the story over again. The cat's paws flattened along the rug, its green full-empty eyes staring. Men were struggling in the sea: no more singing. The women were far away in rowing boats, wailing at the terrible grey sea that melted like mountains and then shot up again. The cat looked at him and he offered it a piece of mincepie from his plate. The next story was about a steamship with funnels—with ten times the number of people on board. The cat came eagerly forward to take the pie: put its claws on his bare knee, sniffed the pastry, and put out its pink tongue. Everybody said the ship couldn't sink. Well, let's see how it does. The cat went back to its half-sleep, unable to understand why Brian was eating with such enjoyment something it found uneatable, suspecting that what Brian ate changed from meat to dull flour by the time the cat got to it. An iceberg ripped the bottom out. There was a complete silence both in and outside the cottage. Even the dogs slept, gorged for once on scraps and bones.

Brian returned to school and snow, which fell so deep that gangs made barricades across the pavements and fought like revolutionaries in
Les Misérables
. White cannonballs spun through the air, soft and harmless as they collided with coat or neck, carrying cold instead of fire. After an hour contestants would melt away to nurse hot-aches, tired and jangled after charge and countercharge. The enemies of winter were snow and 'flu, and Brian was a reluctant casualty of the latter. He was in bed for a week, fed on rice-pudding, toast and margarine, and hot drinks of Oxo. Elbows on the window-ledge, fingers pressing against his cheekbones, he watched it snowing, protected from the outside world of cold and wet by the glass pane that nevertheless smelled of the wintry desolation when his nose went to within an inch of it. A jersey over his shirt, socks on for warmth, he singled out a particular snowflake, determined to keep it in view among the hundreds around, slowly bringing his eyes lower, as if it were a white butterfly pinned within his control by hypnosis and taken as a special privilege out of its secret den in the sky for safe conduct to earth and a better life.

Flat, triangular, an ordinary shape (yet different because it was the one he'd fixed on)—changing to oblong—others had decided to come with it, not wanting to be left back there alone. They were all pals, except that there were too many of them and they got in each other's way. So he lost it, but looked on down into snow just the same, where it would by now have fallen. It was near evening. Snow along the street had been trammelled into ruts by passing traffic, but the pavement was still thick and inviolate, a long smooth bed of untroubled snow. Until a man-shadow rounded the corner, and went off towards home, hooked out of sight by another corner, only footsteps left behind, plain and deep.