Life: An Exploded Diagram (5 page)

H
E WAS ONLY
a couple of months older than her. (She thought it was more than that. She considered herself a girl and him a man.)

He was born in Sheffield, the eldest of four children. He left school at the age of fourteen, in 1932. It was not a good time. Unemployment was rife. Men waited at factory gates on the off chance of a day’s work. With his mates, George went on the cadge: gleaning spilled coal, running betting slips, a bit of petty theft. The pressure was on him, though. His younger siblings were waiting for his clothes and his bed.

A week after his uncelebrated fifteenth birthday, he joined the army. He went from short trousers into full uniform. He signed up for fifteen years.

He was sent for basic training to Catterick, where he showed some aptitude for mechanics — inherited, perhaps, from his father, who had been a lathe operator — and was attached as a trainee fitter to the Royal Engineers.

He had five good years, learning his trade, and how to drink, in postings up and down the country. He once, years later, spoke fondly to Clem of an army-versus-civvy mass punch-up in Yeovil, Somerset, in 1937.

He was genuinely astonished by the war; he hadn’t been paying attention. Hitler had been a sort of joke in the newspapers and newsreels. Then everything got insanely hectic, and he found himself in France, a corporal, meaninglessly bossing people around and being slapped on the back by elderly Frenchmen. On May 30, 1940, he lost control of his bowels on the beach at Dunkirk when German dive-bombers howled down and sand admixed with body parts exploded all around him. He was ashamed, so when he’d blundered into the sea, he struggled out of his soiled pants and trousers before being hauled, bare-arsed and half drowned — he was a poor swimmer — into a gaily painted launch from the Isle of Wight called the
Anne-Marie.

He was rewarded for his gallantry by a week’s home leave.

There was nowhere at home for him to sleep, so he stayed around the corner in Palmerston Street, at his mate Jacko Jackson’s house. Jacko had joined the merchant navy six months earlier, and his bed was spare. The city was blacked out at night; George, awakened by the sirens, stood at the window watching the thin fingers of searchlights groping for German bombers. He would not go to the shelters; he had a great fear of being crowded into confined spaces. (Which meant he was not ideally suited to marriage, as Ruth would later discover.) In the half-light of dawn, the street would fill with women, head scarves knotted on their foreheads, their arms folded beneath their bosoms, clattering garrulously to the factories. On the penultimate night of his leave, he inexplicably got into a fight at a pub called the Hounds in Hand. He was in Jacko’s bed, sopping the blood from his mouth with a thin towel, when Jacko’s sister Muriel came into the room to see if he was all right. To make sure that he was, she got into the bed with him.

“When this is all over,” she said, before it was all over, “I’ll be waiting for you, George.”

Whether she was or not, he never troubled to find out.

By Christmas 1940, he was in North Africa, promoted to sergeant, in charge of a tank support unit and suffering from dysentery. He was to spend a good deal of his war squatting in tented latrines, smoking. The habit of lingering in the lavatory remained with him for the rest of his life, although usually he was in search of solitude rather than relief.

O
N CLEM ACKROYD’S
third birthday, he got his first car and met his father. These two momentous things — especially the car — ensured that the day remained his earliest memory.

He awoke to see his mother looking down at him.

“Happy birthday, Clem,” she said, then lifted him from the bed. Gusty rain prickled the window. Ruth held his little penis while he sleepily peed into the enameled chamber pot.

Down in the kitchen, his grandmother was busy at the stove. Ruth settled him into the tall chair and pushed it up to the table. Then Win brought him his favorite breakfast, a fried egg on a slice of bread and margarine. She cut it up into pieces that he could eat with a spoon.

“If thas hot, blow on it,” she said.

He watched the yellow juice of the yolk slither over the margarine and leach into the bread.

Ruth tested a cup of warmed milk with her little finger.

“Eat that up, Clem, an then we’ll open yer presents.”

Win had knitted him a sleeveless jumper, brown and yellow stripes, with the wool from an unraveled prewar cardigan. His mother helped him into it. Even over his pajama top, it was itchy. He looked like a giant wasp with a human head and arms. Then Ruth put a parcel in front of him, a shoe box wrapped in stiff brown paper. She helped him tear away at it and lift the lid.

The box was half full of little metal soldiers. Ancient wars had peeled the uniforms from some of them. Others had been disarmed; they made threatening gestures with tiny empty hands that had once held swords or muskets. Hidden within this ragtag army was a pink sugar mouse with a string tail. Clem held it uncomprehendingly, so Ruth moistened its nose with her lips and put it to his mouth.

From the lane, Willy Page tooted, and Win put on her long black coat, sighing.

A little later, there was a
Coo-ee
from outside and Chrissie Slender and Tommy came in, damp, and sang “Happy Birthday to You.”

Then Chrissie said, “Go you on, then, Tommy. Give Clem his present.”

It was a painted tin monkey attached to a string between two sticks joined by a spring. When Tommy squeezed the sticks together and released them, the monkey spun head over heels.

It dawned on Clem that today was different from other days. His bafflement took on a happier coloring. He sucked the mouse and watched Tommy work the monkey. The grown-ups stood by the stove, drinking tea, talking. He picked up words:
George, ration book, bacon, teeth.

Then his mum lifted him out of his chair.

“Right, then, young man,” she said. “Les go an see whas in the parlor.”

The parlor door was closed, which was a thing Clem hadn’t known before.

When they were facing it, Ruth said, “Close yer eyes. Tight. Are they closed?”

Clem nodded. He heard the door open. An anxious thrill ran through him and lodged in his bladder. A small dampness warmed his pajama bottoms. He felt his mother’s hand take his and lead him in.

“Open yer eyes,” she said.

He didn’t know what it was, of course. He’d never seen such a thing before. It looked very big. It took up most of the space between the two armchairs on either side of the fireplace. It worried him, because it had not been there at bedtime the night before. It was beautiful, though: green, and very shiny. And because this strange morning had taught him this, he knew that it was his.

He looked up at his mother’s face.

“Thas a car, Clem,” she said. “D’yer like it?”

By the middle of the day, Clem had started to work out that pushing the pedals with his feet — like walking, but sitting down — made the heavy thing move. Ruth guided him back and forth the short distance between the kitchen door and the front door, leaning over him to work the steering wheel, which he couldn’t get the hang of.

In the early afternoon, the rain died off and a pallid light filled the garden. Ruth carried the car outside and set it down on the concrete. Clem climbed into it, bundled up in his winter coat. She steered him around the corner of the lav and onto the brick path that led down to the gate. His knees went up and down in a way that didn’t belong to him. He turned the steering wheel randomly.

On the third trip to the gate, he became aware that his mother’s hand was no longer on his back. The car stopped, and he looked up at her. She had her hands to her face, which had changed color. She was looking at something beyond him. There was a man standing on the other side of the gate. Clem’s eyes climbed up him, from the wet-edged brown shoes to the legs and jacket of the gray suit to the suntanned face that was divided in half by a black mustache. The man wore a gray hat and carried over his shoulder a huge long bag with white lettering on it. Between the stranger and Ruth a silence stretched above Clem’s head, like a sheet hung on the washing line.

The man put his bag on the ground and took off his hat. His hair was as black as the gloss on a beetle.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but you’d be Clem, right? Is that your name?”

“Yes,” Clem whispered. The man’s voice was not like other men’s voices.

“Aye, I thought so. That’s a right handsome car you’ve got there. Would it be a birthday present, by any chance?”

Clem wasn’t sure that he could get out of the car by himself. He looked to his mother for help and saw that she was crying. It frightened him. Then she walked past him as if he weren’t there. And she was saying, “Bloody hell, George. Bloody hell.”

She pulled the gate open and let the man put his arms around her. Let him bury his fingers in her hair.

“G
OD, GEORGE,
I nearly died,” Ruth said, setting the kettle on the stove. “The fifteenth, you said. Next week.”

“I wangled an early. The demob officer was a bloke I’d been in Africa with. I thought it would be nice if I got here today.”

“Is that where you’re come from? Africa?”

He laughed. “No. Aldershot. Mind you, it took about as long. The ruddy trains. The buggers treat you like dirt.”

“Do they? Clem, let go of my leg; there’s a good boy.”

“He don’t know who I am,” George said. “He’s scared of me.”

“He’ll be all right. That’ll take a bit of gettun used to.”

“Palestine,” George said.

“Palestine?”

She half remembered it from a newsreel. Her and Chrissie in the dark of the Regal, fag smoke wreathing in the beam of the projector. A huge hotel with its side blown off by a bomb. Jewish terrorists. How could there be Jewish terrorists? They were all skeletons. The main feature had been
The Best Years of Our Lives.

George lit a cigarette with a brass lighter that flipped open to the flame.

Dear God, Ruth thought, who was he? He was different, somehow. Like he could get angry any minute, or something. She would have to sleep with him tonight. With her mother listening. She couldn’t do it. She wasn’t ready. The thought of it made her feel faint.

“Jerusalem,” he said. “Bloody mad hellhole.”

To her, Jerusalem was a song. A sort of hymn.

He could not persuade his son to sit on his lap. Ruth poured weak tea. The cup trembled in her hand, chinking against the saucer.

“So, love, where’d you get the car?”

She blushed, not knowing why. “I’ll tell yer later.” She lowered her voice. “That ent exactly new. Painted up.”

“Nowt wrong with that,” George said. He looked at his son. “Now then, young man. I’ve got a present for you, too. Would you like to see it?”

Clem looked up at Ruth for guidance.

“Another present, Clem! Thas nice, ent it?”

George pulled the kit bag to his chair and untied the complex knot. He rummaged theatrically inside it.

“Is that it? No. Is that it? No, that’s not it neither. Ah, here we go.”

He produced an oddly shaped package wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. He held it toward his son, who still lurked behind his mother’s skirt. Ruth picked her child up and carried him to the table and sat him down on her lap.

“Whatever can this be, Clem, that Dad’re brought yer? Shall we undo it?”

The newspaper had photographs of foreign-looking men on it, and the writing was black wiggles and dots that looked a bit like music. Ruth imagined, madly, that her husband must be able to read it.

George’s present for his son was an exquisitely carved wooden camel.

“It opens,” George said. “See?”

The camel’s hump was brass-hinged. George reached across the table and lifted it, revealing a hollow slightly larger than an eggcup.

“See? You can keep your sweets in there. Or money.”

Sweets, Ruth thought. Clem dunt know what they are.

George fished in his trouser pocket. He brought out a silver sixpence and dropped it into the hump.

“There you go, lad,” he said. “That’s got you started. It’ll all add up.”

“What is ut, Mum?” Clem asked.

“I’ve got something for you, as well, Ruth,” George said, reaching into the bag again and producing a small soft package.

“What is it?” she asked stupidly. She was like a child, too.

“Well, why don’t you open it and find out?”

It was a silk shawl, diaphanously white, embroidered along its edges with green and silver threadwork. At each of its four corners was a tiny seashell. It was perhaps the most useless thing you could give to a red-haired woman who lived in Norfolk and was saving her clothing coupons for a new winter coat.

“I spent a whole afternoon haggling for that with a nig-nog in Cairo. I wore him down in the end, though.”

“Thas beau’iful, George.”

She held it against her face and wept. It smelled whorishly of foreign parts.

“Now what are you crying about, lass?”

“Nothun. Sorry. I’m sorry, George. Just I wunt expectun you. You give me a shock.”

She’d planned things for his return. A sign on the gate saying,
WELCOME HOME GEORGE.
A strip wash at the sink, then a touch of makeup and her better set of underwear. Clem in his Sunday clothes. A bottle of beer or two. She’d been more or less promised a half shoulder of pork. And he’d mucked it all up.

She wiped her face on her sleeve.

“It’s just we hent got nothun in for tea. Our rations all run out yesterdy, and we can’t get nothun till tomorrer. All we’re got is two eggs and the last of the bread. What mother’ll say when she get home I can’t imagine.”

“Don’t worry yourself. Look here.”

From the bag he produced two shiny canisters, unlabeled two-pound tins.

“One’s Spam; t’other’s corned beef. I can’t rightly say which is which.”

Later, Clem turned fretful.

“Thas all the excitement,” Ruth said untruthfully. “I’ll take him up. Say night-night to yer dad, Clem.”

The boy clung to her and tried to hide his face in her shoulder. George wondered if he should kiss the child’s head; while he hesitated, Ruth turned away toward the stairs.

“Good night, Clem,” he said cheerily. “Sweet dreams.”

Left alone, George made a recce of the home he’d never lived in. Thorn Cottage was smaller and darker than he’d remembered. It was permeated by the heavy, sweetish fumes from the sinister-looking paraffin heater that stood in the hall. The kitchen, like the rest of the downstairs rooms, had electricity, but the cooking was still done on a black cast-iron range built into the brick fireplace. The floor was covered in green linoleum, worn so thin that it seemed no more than a cracked coat of paint over the slate slabs beneath.

The front room — the “best room”— was a grim and crowded museum of Victorian furniture. A framed photograph of a young woman and a soldier stood on a heavy sideboard next to a threadbare stuffed squirrel inside a glass dome.

The parlor had only two armchairs, one on either side of the hearth. On each sat a ball of wool transfixed by knitting needles.

It seemed to George that every mark in the place — every scar on the skirting boards, every nick and chip in the stair treads, every dent in the dull brass doorknobs — was a trace of dead people he had never known and wouldn’t have wanted to. Dim presences to whom he had no connection. Who frightened him. This place was old and poor. It was not the bright new world he had been told he was fighting for. He had come home to the past, a past that wasn’t even his own. He felt, suddenly, panicky and claustrophobic.

He went out into the back garden. The colder air went to his bladder, and he pushed open the outhouse door. It clattered against an obstacle, a galvanized metal bath hung on a hook. A speckled spider had spread her net within it. Relieving himself, he noted that the bog roll was newspaper scissored neatly into rectangles the size of ten-shilling notes and hung on a nail.

He went to the end of the garden and surveyed his new and awful domain. The hedge had grown wild. Things he presumed were edible protruded from weeds. A fork with a broken handle angled into black soil. Two rusted upturned buckets.

He lit a cigarette. The last of the sun slanted onto the roof. The thatch was ragged and greened by moss; below and to the left of the half-ruined chimney, a sheet of corrugated iron had been slid in to slow a leak.

He pulled on the ciggie and straightened himself.

Discipline. Drill.

“Men all present and correct, Sarn’t?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ready to kick the shit out of Jerry, Sarn’t?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. Carry on.”

Men in burned-out tanks who’d come apart like overcooked chickens when you tried to pull them out. You threw up and then you dealt with it.

“Burial detail! Over here!”

They’d fought — he’d fought — for sex. To capture the brothels of Benghazi and Tripoli from the Italians, the Germans. Then take the tricks learned there home to wives and girlfriends who were starving for it. Unless the ruddy Yanks had been there first.

Ruth had got heavier; there was no denying it. She’d slumped, somehow. Having the boy, presumably.

Two months ago — no, three now — he’d been in a back-street bar in Cyprus, being served miraculously cold beer by a gracious Egyptian prostitute wearing see-through trousers and a spangled bra.

“You’ll not be getting much of that in Norfolk, lad,” he told himself — correctly, as it turned out.

As the light died, he heard footsteps on the path. His mother-in-law, a shade or two darker than the gathering dark, came around the corner of the lav.

“Ayup, Win,” he said.

She turned, lifting a hand to her chest and stumbling as if a sniper had got her.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s George, Win.”

She peered as he walked toward her.

“George who?”

“George your son-in-law.”

“What’re you doing here?”

He flicked his cigarette away and said, “It’s nice to see you, too, Win.”

The can that Ruth opened was the Spam. She fried slices of it in a bit of lard with an onion and served it with a boiled potato each and tough garden cabbage.

Win said, “You’re cut that Spam thick, Ruth. That wunt see us out the week at that rate.”

At ten o’clock, Ruth pretended she needed him in the kitchen.

She said, “I’m gorn up to bed, George. Give us five minutes.”

He went outside and smoked another cigarette. When he went back indoors, the cottage was intensely dark and utterly silent. He groped upstairs, clutching the wounded banister. In their bedroom, the light came from an oil lamp the shape of a faded yellow tulip. Clem was asleep in a cot within reach of Ruth’s arm. She wore a flannelette nightdress buttoned almost to her throat. Her glowing hair aroused him. When he began to unbutton his trousers, she turned the lamp out.

(This became their unvarying nightly ritual: she would go upstairs and get into bed while he smoked a last cigarette. In almost forty years of marriage, he would never see her completely naked. And, in time, he grew glad of it.)

In the morning, Clem stood in his cot, gazing with baffled horror at the dark stranger in his mother’s bed.