Key to the Door (29 page)

“Grandma gi's me a bob on Sat'day.”

“Not bad for a young 'un.” Brian's summer holidays passed in fetching and taking their cans, running to Woodhouse for more tea and sugar, and gathering the money on Friday. The boundaries of fields had been trodden in by lorry ruts and brick stacks, and houses had made a rush forward during the spring as if they'd grown with the leaves. Some by the boulevard were almost finished, their tops still grinning like the pink tents of an army or circus—urged on, it seemed, by the totem-poles of factory chimneys in the smoking city behind. The sputtering sound of concrete mixers blended in the hot summer air with the klaxon-throated cockerels from the Nook, and privet hedges by the gate were dusty from powdered concrete.

The Nook was lighted by electricity, was magically blessed with water-taps so that the bucket-yoke hung as useless as a souvenir on the wash-house wall. The surface of the land was changing, becoming covered like memory, though Brian realized as he walked for the first time along new-laid pavements that the familiar soil underneath would never be difficult to reach. There was even soil under Slab Square in the middle of Nottingham, he realized, but that was harder to believe in.

With the money he earned he bought novels, dictionaries, and maps, browsed through the threepenny boxes in the basement of a second-hand bookshop downtown. His father hammered a shelf together in the bedroom so that they wouldn't litter the kitchen. Books fitted into a separate part of his life, divided from reality by the narrow pen-knife cut of a canyon that he could cross and recross with ease. The book world was easily defendable because he was alone in it and without competitors—though it was occasionally threatened by his father's resentful glare if he had them strewn over the table when supper-time was near and tea called for.

From where they were working on the foundations, past the singing of trowels as bricks were tapped into position by plumb-line and spirit-level, to where whole walls were complete and surrounded by scaffolding, Brian walked with his final can of tea. He watched a man ascend a swaying ladder with a hod of bricks: he was tall, thin, and agile, blessed with a good sense of balance and seemingly without fear. Someone from the top platform shouted out that he be careful, but he responded by a wave of the arm and by tackling the next few steps without holding on, ending his antic by sending a few swear-words like handclaps into the air. Brian wondered where he'd heard the voice, seen the lanky figure before: stood watching him unload his bricks and talk—friendly despite his swearing—with the bricklayers up top. He took off his cap to scratch his head, then came down the ladder swinging the emptied hod round and round like a mace. One man called to another: “Owd Agger's a real glutton for wok. I ain't seen nobody as can goo up ladders like he can, ev yo'?”

“He wants to be careful, though. I 'eard as a bloke on them new houses near Bilborough broke both his legs last week. He'll get a lot o' compo, though.”

Agger went to a stack of steaming bricks, and Brian decided to go close and greet him: “Ey up, Agger.”

“Hey up, kid”—only a glance. He was the same, a combination of the words “jaunty” and “gaunt,” and his lined face had the regular features of a hard exterior life without realizing it too much within. He seemed easier, though, relaxed compared to a year ago on the harder, more uncertain battlefield of the Sann-eye tips. His eyes had lost some of their haunted ironic glare, were as agile and good-humoured in fact as his limbs at the climbing of ladders.

“Don't yer goo on tips any more?” Brian hoped he wouldn't crack him one at thinking he and not Bert had stolen his prize rake on that far-off day.

“Not since I got a job. I di'n't want to stop all my life on t' tips, kid. Anyway, my missis passed on.” He spoke as if to an adult, and Brian wondered what his wife's dying had to do with getting work. He counted twelve bricks being placed on the hod. “So I couldn't mess about much longer. I knock up above fifty bob a week now, you know.” He felt Agger's pride: his father was in work, hadn't been able to get it up to then simply because it wasn't on the market. Why didn't Agger say this? “It's an 'ard life on the tips, kid. This is better graft for us”—was as far as he would go.

“You said it,” Brian agreed, realizing that he had been taken as a full-time worker and feeling pleased about it. Agger smiled: “They've set you on as a mash-lad, 'ave they?” Brian told him the tariff drawn up by his grandmother, and Agger said he'd like a can as well, every morning at ten if he could manage it. “I'll gi' yer a tanner on Friday.” He hoisted the bricks on his shoulder, and was halfway up the ladder before Brian turned to deliver his last can of tea.

Merton didn't like the idea of leaving the Nook, and said as much to Tom, who came for his fortnight's rent. Mary laid the open book on the table, four half-crowns and sixpence down the dividing line of the middle. “I thought they were going to leave it a year or two,” he said, “what wi' tekin' so much trouble putting in water and electricity.”

Tom scooped up the money and wrote it in: “It's the land they want, you see. As far as the railway and over to the woods.”

“Aye,” Merton grunted, “they're bleddy gluttons for it.” He stood near the window, a tall thin figure wearing black trousers from an old suit, a brown cardigan, and well-polished laced-up boots. He'd finished his momentous fifty-odd years of work as a blacksmith, and now gave his strength to the garden, to chopping wood and seeing to his pigs and poultry—taking it soft, as he termed it. There was no work for Brian to do; Merton shouldered it himself as if, despite his fifty years' hard labour, he hadn't yet worked the violence out of himself, as if he had been put on the earth to attack life rather than live it, to subdue it with hammer and pickaxe, tunnelling his way through until he dropped within sight of the ligher daylight of death. He had a long way to go yet: stood erect, white hair cropped short, his blue eyes steadily taking in the view, an ironic fierce gaze set upon the tatterdemalion camp of wood and bricks and cement bags nearby. He turned back to the cups of tea Mary had poured: “Not that I 'adn't bin expectin' it.”

“It ain't that black,” Tom said, not sitting down to drink. “They've got another house for yer: in the Woodhouse, on Vane Street.”

“That's summat to be thankful for,” Mary said.

“Besides, it's only two doors up from the beer-off.” Tom had a gnome face topped by a nicky hat, the sort of face that seemed to have dried-up river beds running down it to meet at his pointed chin, a worried expression that tried to do nothing but please because the vanity behind it wanted everyone to think him a good bloke and not insult him. He buttoned his mac. “Thanks for the tea, Mrs. Merton. You've got a month or two to think about moving.”

Merton thought about it: and since he had been expecting the upheaval, he wasn't so disturbed as he led everyone to believe. It would be a change to live among shops and pubs and be nearer to bus stops for the city. Lydia thought so as well: that there'd be no walking down the muddy lane and under the lonely bridge on dark nights. Mary said the house was like being in the middle of a graveyard all through winter, and now they'd have neighbours and company for a change. Merton was galled most of all at the smaller garden. “I've seen 'em down there,” he said, “and they aren't big enough to tek a piss in.”

The new house was in the middle of a long row inhabited mainly by miners working at Wollaton Pit. Merton sold up and moved in, George and Lydia glad because, apart from being comfortingly nearer the town, there was less work for him to set them to. Brian walked there along the main road and down by the canal side, went for the first time one afternoon and found no one in but his grandmother, who dozed by the fire. He sat on the sofa waiting for her to wake up. The kitchen was arranged exactly as at the Nook, with the same mixed pervading aroma of tea and spices, kindling wood and tobacco, baked bread and stew. Brass candlesticks towered on the shelf, with two black and white statue dogs that reminded him of Gyp about to leap for birds before Merton had killed him, and white pot ornaments were placed between seaside souvenirs of Cromer and Skegness, Cleethorpes and Lowestoft. A magnifying glass hung from a nail, waiting for Merton to come back from his walk and look closely at the photographs in tonight's
Evening Post:
Brian always hoped to borrow it, to set fire to a piece of paper in the garden by holding it under the sun. On the other side of the room was a glass-faced cupboard of tea-services, and rows of Merton's prize horseshoes. His grandmother sneezed and woke up. “Hello, Brian, I di'n't 'ear you come in.”

“Well, I knocked first, grandma.”

She looked at the clock: “I'd better get some tea ready for when the others come. I'll get the sack if I don't.” She went into the scullery to put the kettle on the gas. Brian wondered where his grandfather was, pushed the cat away from the fire with his foot: “Shall I get some coal up from the cellar, grandma?”

“Yes, you
can
do that. Fill me two buckets, there's a good lad. It'll save your grandad doing it later.” He clattered down the steps whistling. Sunlight came through the grating, showing many small pieces of coal at the foot of the neatly stacked heap. But he pulled down an unwieldy lump and smashed the half-hundredweight of it to pieces with the hammer. Then he filled the buckets and trundled them back up. “Wash your 'ands and I'll gi' you a piece o' jam pasty,” his grandma said.

Black liquid streamed down the sides of the white sink, and his hands smelt pleasantly of carbolic. The table was laid, and a half-pasty and a cup of tea waited for him. “Pull up a chair and get that down you,” Mary said. The
Evening Post
had just clattered through the letter-box, and she went to get it. He interrupted her reading. “I'm going up to the Nook tomorrow to see what's 'appened. Then I'll go over the Cherry Orchard to see Ken and Alma Arlington.”

The paper rustled to her knees: “You'll find it altered. The Nook's down already, and I did hear that the Arlingtons was going to have to leave as well.”

He slept at home that night, and woke up the next morning with Fred on one side and Arthur on the other. Pushing Arthur's knee from his back, he remembered he was to explore the Cherry Orchard, and an hour later he set off down the street, turning over the Lean towards New Bridge. From its summit he saw that, apart from the immediate fields below, the countryside had gone. Nothing was the same, and beyond the broad new boulevard were houses, in which direction there seemed no set point worth searching for any more. He could go on walking on and on and not meet anyone he knew, could lose himself in the mountains of Derbyshire and reach the Atlantic at Wales without being able to stop a friendly face and say: “Hello, how are you” and “Which is the way back to Nottingham?”

He leapt streams and climbed over stiles in the pocket still left. Flowers hid among hollows and hedgerows, or stood in the wind of hillocks. His hair blew about, and most of the sky was blue. A horse nibbled at clover, and Brian thought it was the same horse that had nibbled there during the last four years he had passed through the field on his way to the Nook.

Across the boulevard he entered streets of new houses, and at the corner where he should turn and see the Nook, neither smoke nor roof was visible. The hedge had been trampled down, and the gate torn from its hinges, and instead of ochred walls he looked through into space towards the dark shade of the yet untouched wood. Nettles and thorns caught his ankles, and only the foundations of the house remained, and he stood in them, walking from section to section, kitchen to parlour, and down into the pantry—filled with bricks, filth, and glass fragments that had once been part of windows showing him marvellous fields and gardens. It hadn't taken them long to flatten it, he thought, and imagined it being done, beginning with roof and chimney-pots cascading into the yard, then the slow ripping down of walls, and lorries carting everything away.

The garden was a jungle, and he walked through it to the well. The fairytale headstock was no longer there, and he dropped stones down the depths still left: the noise of stone sailing down to stone hypnotized him as he lay over the parapet of rubble, a great pace sounding between the stone leaving his hand and striking the depths below.

The Cherry Orchard was untouched, still in the country. Noises of machinery fell away, giving place to the whistling of birds, and bushes bending in the wind. The silence made him afraid. In the distance he could see the two cottages of the Lakers and Arlingtons, but as he got near there was no sound of water being drawn from the squeaking pump.

Their gate was also smashed. The cottage doors were boarded up and chimney-pots hung slantwise, as if youths had taken shots at them with bricks. He stood still, unable to speak his thoughts that were too deep to be fished up by the bent pin of sentiment. But the disappearance of his friends disturbed him, and trying to put his thoughts into speech was like an iceberg that grows hands in the middle of the ocean attempting to lift itself out of the water. The wood at the end of the garden sent out bird sounds: but no twigs cracked unexpectedly under other children's feet.

He went into the wood. Where had the Arlingtons and Lakers gone? He knew the land of Nottingham and a few miles beyond, but all was unexplored after that, and his consciousness of it slid over the rim of the world like the sailors in olden days who had no maps. But there were farms, he supposed, other towns and woods and fields, mountains and oceans that went on for ever and ever, until you came back to where you were standing now.

Clear water ran along the stream, and he leapt over. Where had they gone to live, though? He had been to Skegness on a train when he was three, and vaguely remembered the rhythm of the wheels, a green blur of fields as he fell into sleep on his mother's knee. Then the grey boiling sea burst on to the sand. He brushed fingers over yellow ripples of bittersweet, unknowingly trampled the curved vetch. They've gone to another farm, I expect. I wish I could go somewhere, a long way off, to jungles and mountains, and islands. I'll draw a map when I get home. He ripped leaves from an elderberry bush and rubbed the stain over his hands.