New and Collected Stories (28 page)

And not long afterwards I was fourteen, went to work and started courting, so what was the use of fires after that?

The Magic Box

I

Fred made his way towards the arboretum bench.

Though it was well gone eleven he hadn't yet clocked in, and wouldn't, either. There were some things a man would be glad to work for, but that morning his head was full of thoughts that would have got him hung – if anything could have been gained by swinging.

He sat down, drew two porkpies from their cellophane wrappers and exposed them to daylight. Half closing his eyes (as if his palate were up there and not in his mouth) he bit into the first pie: the meat wasn't bad, but the pastry was chronic. When the crumpled bag settled in the prison of the half-filled litter basket he chewed through a prolonged stare towards the ornamental pond and park wall, hearing the breathtaking gear-change of traffic chewing its way up the hill outside.

Morning was the worst time. He hated going to bed, and he hated getting up even more, but since these two actions were necessary for life and work he preferred getting up – by himself. God alone knew why Nan had risen with him this morning, but she had, and that, as much as anything else, had been the cause of the row that had burst over them – from her. In six years of marriage he'd learned that to argue at breakfast always led to a blow-up. It was better to argue in the evening (if you had any choice) because sooner or later you went to bed.

Though in many ways pleasant, half a day off work wasn't the sort of thing he could keep from Nan, since she saw his wage-packet on Friday night. Not that she nosed into everything, but her skill at housekeeping demanded that each bob and tanner be accounted for. He would be laughed at by his workmates if they knew, though many of them lived by the same arrangement, and that was a fact. In any case how could they find out? Nan wouldn't drive by in a speaker van and let them know, for she often claimed: ‘My place is to go shopping and clean the house, not to wait for you outside that stinking factory. When we go to the pictures on Friday you can get me a place in the queue, and I'll meet you there.'

He only hoped that one day Nan would see him as the good man from the many bad, a bloke who didn't deserve to be bossed and tormented so much. But she hated the factory, as if to punish him not only for having married her but also for stipulating soon after that she should stop going out to work. He'd only insisted on it because he loved her, thinking she wanted him to press her on this and prove even greater love than he was capable of. Not many would have loved a woman enough to see it that way. But since the gilt had worn off she became bitter about having left work at all, hinting that staying on would have made her a forewoman by now. In fact she had only offered to give in to his manly insistence because she wanted him to see that she loved him more than was considered normal, and he had been blind and selfish enough to take her up on it.

‘Well' – now wanting some peace in the house – ‘why don't you go and ask them to set you on again if that's the way you feel? I'm not a bleddy mind reader.'

This took the row to a higher pitch, as he'd known it would, but he hadn't the sense to sit down and say nothing, or walk out of the house whistling. ‘How can I?' she called. ‘I'd have to start again on a machine. I'd never get back to the old position I had when I was loony enough to take note o' you and pack my good job in.'

He didn't know how it had begun that morning. He didn't suppose she did, either. He would like to think of her as still brooding on it, but not likely. No sooner had the door closed than she'd smashed the cup he'd drunk from, though he'd bet his last dollar she was out shopping now, and laughing with other women as if there'd been no quarrel at all.

It was fine enough weather to make everyone forget their troubles. Autumn sun warmed the green banks of the park, ants and insects proliferating among juicy-looking blades of grass. Small birds fed at a piece of his cast-off porkpie beyond the diamond wirespaces of the litter basket, like a dozen thumbnail sketches that had come to life. Two pigeons joined the feast, enormous in comparison to the thrushes, but there was no bullying. Both pigeons and thrushes seemed unaware of any difference in size, and the fact that both wanted to get at the same piece of pie was, after all, a similarity.

He smoked a cigarette. A young man walked by with a back-combed suicide-blonde in a black mac, who looked as if she hadn't had a square meal for a month, and she was saying angrily: ‘I'll bleddy-well nail him when I see him, I bleddy-well will, an' all' – with such threat and vengeance that Fred felt sorry for whoever this was meant for. The world thrives on it, he thought, but I don't, and in any case life's not always like that. Bad luck and good luck: it's like a swing on a kids' playground, always one thing or the other. We've had more than our share of the bad though, by bloody Christ we have, too much to think about, and the last bit of good luck was almost more trouble than it was worth. He thought back on it, how a year ago, at the start of the football season, a cheque had come one morning for two hundred and fifty quid, and a few hours later his mug (and Nan's) was grinning all over the front of the newspaper. She enjoyed it so much that it certainly didn't occur to him to remind her of all the times she had threatened to burn the daft football coupons on which he had wasted so much time and money. No, they got in a dozen quarts of beer and a platter of black puddings, and handed manna around to anyone with the grace or avarice to drop in. The man from the
Post
had asked: ‘What are you going to do with the money?' Fred was surprised at so much bother when all he felt was disappointment at not hitting the treble chance and raking in a hundred thousand. Two hundred and fifty nicker seemed so little that before Nan could spin some tale of intent to the reporter Fred butted in: ‘Oh, I expect we'll just split it and use it as pocket-money.' Which was duly noted in heavy type for the day's editions
(POOLS WIN: POCKET-MONEY FOR NOTTINGHAM COUPLE)
so prominently displayed that though Nan had the spirit left to tell Fred he should have kept his trap shut she hadn't the nerve to make him do anything else with the money but what he'd said he would for fear of being known to defy the bold public print of a newspaper that, as far as Nan knew, everyone had read.

To spend a hundred quid in one fell bout of shopping demanded bravery, and Fred was the sort in which, if bravery existed, it was anything but spontaneous. Still, he had seen things worth buying which, so far, was more than could be said for Nan. Walking around town Fred had come across an all-wave ex-army wireless receiver staring him out from behind plate glass, the exact communications set he'd worked during his war stint with the signals in Egypt. It stayed in the same window for months, being, he surmised, too expensive for anyone to step in and say: ‘I want it.' So he took his time in sparking up courage to walk by that array of valves and morse tappers, to make a purchase by pointing between heart beats towards the window.

Many afternoons he'd stood at the window fixed by the magic black box of the communications receiver, and at so many long and regular absences Nan began to wonder whether he had set himself up with a piece of fancy work met in the factory – and she said as much when he once came home looking piqued and sheepish. He still hadn't been able to walk in and buy the radio, and so felt poor enough in spirit to go straight over and kiss her: ‘Hello, my angel, how are we today?'

She turned her face away. Half a dozen books were stacked on the sideboard after a visit to the library. ‘What's the idea? What do you want?'

‘I don't want anything.'

‘You'd better not, either, until you tell me where you go and what you get up to every Saturday afternoon.'

So that was what he'd seen boiling up, something so far from his mind that he could only say: ‘I've bin down town looking around the shops.'

She pulled the curtains across and set the table, while Fred dug himself in the fireside chair, watching her as she worked. Her face had altered, become sterner in the last year or two, as if it had done enough battle with the world since Ivor had been drowned. But at thirty she was still good-looking, pretty almost, with her small even features and smooth skin. Her face was round and pleasantly fleshed, her eyes cool and outgiving when she was not anguished or perturbed. He smiled as she reached into the crockery cupboard: the best might be yet to come. How can she think I'd ever look at another woman? We've been through a lot together, the worst of it being the terrible way that Ivor went. If there's anything worse than her blaming me for him having fallen into that canal while reaching for a batch of tadpoles, it's her blaming herself, which I know she does even though it was three years ago and an accident. To think we paid that batchy girl half a crown every time she took him out, and she let this happen. My first thought on hearing he'd been killed like that was: ‘The daft little bogger. Wait till I get my hands on him. I'll give him what for.' I couldn't believe it then, but I can now, just about.

‘Have you been looking at the shops thinking how to spend your football money?' she asked in a more amiable voice, passing a cup of tea. They'd married on his demob leave in forty-six, after a mere week of kisses five years before, and four hundred letters in which by an inexhaustible permutation every aspect of common romantic love had been exchanged between them. Distance had made both hearts grow fonder, and out of sight out of mind had been disproved, apart from the long letters, by a frequent transmission of photographic images on which were stamped the thousand proofs of far-off love that kept Fred and Nan alive for each other. It was as if they were married after the first three months apart, as if they had already spent a honeymoon at Matlock and been wrenched from it by the first year, and had been long settled into an unthinking matrimonial rut by the fourth. They wrote of houses and work and children, and by the time they stood outside the church posing for their first photo together Fred anyway felt that the marriage about to begin was a plain print of black and white on positive paper, as opposed to the flimsy and transient negative of the preceding years.

Nan didn't see it like this, found it necessary to distinguish between the correspondence course and her new full status as a housewife, became more competent than Fred at tackling problems after returning from a week at Matlock. To go shopping – pale, young and full of thought – in the raw fog of a December morning and come home to see that the fire had died, brought reality closer than Fred's daily dash to his factory incarceration in which machines warmly hummed and men baited him still on his recent honeymoon. Through the war Nan had stayed in a cold and exacting climate, while Fred had picked dreamily at radio sets in his monastic army life. Fascinated by the Nile Valley, he had ventured with his pals on a trip to the Great Pyramid, and his lean young unsure face looked down from the high back of a camel in a Box Brownie snapshot sent to Nan who, though stuck with the hardships of air-raids and rationing, saw him as adventuring around wild desert with an independence boding good for when they were married.

Not that she'd had much to complain about; in fact during her pregnancy Fred was as good as gold – she told her mother. And when Ivor came along he was even better, so she was now in the position of knowing that something was wrong yet not being able to complain, a state for which she couldn't but blame him, and which led to frenzied unreasonable quarrels which he could only define as ‘temper' and blame on her.

‘You're always curious about how I'm going to spend my share of the football money,' he said, ‘but you haven't got rid of your whack yet. What are you going to do with it?' Answers to this question lacked venom, for money was now the only discussable topic which did not disturb the unstable bed of their emotions. She looked up from the newspaper: ‘I haven't thought about it much, though I daresay I shall one of these days.'

A waterhen went out from the nearest bank, going as smoothly over the water as if drawn by a piece of cotton pulled by an invisible boy on the other side. Its head with button-eye and yellow beak was perfectly proud and still, and the green and blue back-feathers were comparable to colours made by flames appearing on the surface of a fire that had acted dead and out. The sun was good, and he didn't intend going to work until after dinner-hour, even if it meant another big row with Nan. The sound of machinery would cripple all reflection, and its manufacturing teeth pulling him back like a bulldog to earning a living for himself, Nan, and a possible future kid, seemed appalling in this unexpected sunshine – just as did the idea of going home to Nan again after their awful purposeless scrap of the morning.

It was the first time such a thing had happened, and it gnawed at his peace of mind because he'd had no intention of pushing her back so hard against the sofa. His hand had left the hot side of the cup and collided with her before he could do anything about it. It frightened him. If only I'd done it deliberately, known what was in me. The gone-out stare in her face drove him from the house, and he doubted whether he'd get back into it. Then again maybe she'd have forgotten it by evening, which would only go to show how much effect these rows had on her. He wasn't even sure he wanted to get back into the house anyway. Out of it the pain was less, and sitting in the park having eaten two porkpies and a thimble of sunshine sent it right away except for occasional stabs of the memory knife.

He walked through the main gate, towards the radio shop in the middle thoroughfare of the driving city. His football winnings took on value at last, a lump sum of over a hundred pounds to be handed in for a high-class radio set that would put him in touch with the short-wave world, give him something to do and maybe stop him being such a bastard to Nan. If he ordered it now the shop van would deliver it tomorrow. And after the dinner-hour he'd go back to work, otherwise, with it being Friday, he would get no wages.