Peacetime (32 page)

‘It's perhaps because he wasn't involved that he feels the need to keep bringing the thing up now,' Mercer suggested.

‘While the rest of us are just sick of it all and want to move on.' He paused. ‘Except we returned to this backwater and moving on was no longer a serious option.' He held out his glass for Mercer to fill it. ‘No, I doubt he hits the girl much. Him and her were always tight.'

‘So everyone says. But I wonder what that means with a man like him.'

‘It means he thinks first of himself, and of others only insofar as they might be of some use to him.'

‘She thinks he's going to leave and take her with him.'

Daniels laughed. ‘He'd be lost anywhere else.'

‘Where men would stand up to him?'

‘Where he'd be forced to see himself for what he really is. He was angry tonight because the bad weather fouled up a little run he'd got planned.'

‘What was it?'

‘We were supposed to meet a boat out in the Middle
Channel. We waited, but nothing came except the wind and the rain.'

‘Will he go, do you think? Will he walk out on them?'

‘I imagine so. One day.'

Their work on the charts finished, Mercer returned these to a drawer. Daniels inspected the room around him. Mercer invited him to stay longer, but he declined.

Before he left, Mercer said, ‘Will you thank Riley again for me.'

‘I was going to see him anyway. He lives for this place more than any of them. He'd have been out there digging all night if we'd left him.'

‘And knowing what you know …'

‘About what a waste of time and effort it would all have been for him? Don't worry, I won't say anything. Do you ever read poetry, Mr Mercer?'

The question surprised Mercer. ‘Sometimes. Rarely. A long time ago.'

‘There's a poem by Hardy which tells of a man who loved the only woman he ever truly loved, the only woman he was ever capable of loving, and who, for the rest of the long life he lived after loving and then losing her, referred to himself as a “dead man walking”.'

‘And you feel the same about yourself?' Mercer said, immediately regretting the crass remark.

‘I imagine it's how we all feel on our bad days. Or perhaps it's only how I
hope
we all feel.'

They descended to the ground floor.

‘Thanks again,' Mercer said. ‘For Lynch, I mean.'

‘If I'm honest, I did it more for Riley than for you or myself,' Daniels said.

He left the tower and walked quickly into the enveloping darkness.

The following morning the sky was again pale and cloudless, but despite this, there was a sense that the true summer had finally ended, and that the continuing good days now were the better days of the approaching autumn. Mercer did not envy the men who would come there to labour through the worsening weather ahead, and he could only guess at how much more time might soon be lost to the deteriorating conditions.

He rose early, determined to make a start before the arrival of the others.

It was not yet six when he left the tower, and he walked to where he, Daniels and Riley had worked the night before. Water continued to flow unchecked in the channels and the shallow diggings were already mostly empty. No further rain was forecast.

He dragged one of the wheeled pumps into position, but then wasted almost an hour coaxing it into life. The whole of the engine was caked in thick oil and sand and he cursed aloud the man whose job it had
been to maintain it and protect it from the weather. It finally started, sucking up the water in loud gulps and splashing it out over the land above.

He started two more of the machines, and when there was nothing more he could achieve alone, he sat by the road and waited. Smoke rose from several of the houses, and a few other early risers came and went. He watched Elizabeth Lynch's door, but saw nothing.

When the shallowest of the depressions was emptied of all but a few inches of water, he dragged the pump to another hole and repeated the process there.

At eight, he left the centre of the site and went to await the arrival of the others.

A few minutes later, he heard the first of the lorries, and then watched from a bank as they came. But instead of the usual dozen vehicles, only three now approached. He searched further back for the others, but a light mist lay over the wet ground, rising in the warming day, and he could not follow the course of the road as far as usual.

The men from the three lorries climbed down and stood in a group beneath him.

‘Where are the others?' he asked one of the drivers.

‘Ask him,' the driver said, indicating the only foreman to have arrived.

The man came to Mercer waving an envelope. ‘Told me to give you this,' he said, shrugging, though it was clear to Mercer that they were all already aware of the reason for this reduction in their numbers.

Mercer took the envelope and tore it open. It contained a brief message from the contractor who had hired the men – his own employer – saying that Trinity House had contacted him to state that, with the bulk of the excavation work completed, the number of
men now required at the site was consequently reduced, and that the appropriate action should be taken. Those men who had shown most commitment to the work – the phrase made Mercer laugh – were to be kept on and returned to the site; the remainder were to be paid off or sent elsewhere.

Mercer read all this with growing disbelief. He looked around him at the men who had been sent. They were not the best workers. The contractor had simply filled the first three lorries and held the rest back. There was no course of appeal, or even reply. The Trinity House men must have known all along that this was what they would do.

He read the notice to the men gathered around him. They expressed their dismay at the dismissal of their companions, and at the growing realization that their own time there was now short-lived and uncertain, that they, too, might soon be treated in this same peremptory manner.

‘This is as much of a surprise to me as it is to you,' Mercer said, hoping to forestall any further discussion of what had happened. It was clear by their response that few believed him.

The foreman insisted Mercer was right. He told them to forget those who had gone and to be grateful for the fact that they were still employed. Anyone working there until the completion of the work stood a good chance of being taken on by the construction firms waiting to build the new Station, he said. Mercer considered this unlikely – they would have their own workforce – but he saw how some of them grasped at this and he nodded encouragingly at everything the man said.

As the men dispersed, he took the foreman to one side and told him what needed to be done. He pointed
to where the pumps were already working. Where he had anticipated almost a hundred men, he now had fewer than thirty. He had prepared plans for them to follow, but he saw how far beyond the reach of such a depleted workforce this work now was. He would return to the tower and make new preparations. Meanwhile, he announced, they could all continue clearing the sites on which he had already started. He showed the foreman which channels to tackle first.

The man returned to the others and started telling them what to do. Mercer left them, hearing their complaints as he passed through them.

In the tower, he took out a blueprint and began making new marks on it.

He finished revising these plans and went back out. He would relay the changes he had made only to the foreman and avoid all direct contact with the others until their own unfocused anger had settled.

It was after he had given the man his instructions, and as he was returning to the tower along the airfield perimeter, that he saw Mary and Elizabeth Lynch standing at a distance from him and looking out over the same expanse of rapidly disappearing concrete. Heavy tractors had already started ploughing the underlying soil, darkening it, and immediately and dramatically changing the appearance of the place.

He turned away from where they stood, but as he did so, Mary called to him. She waved to him and started running over the uneven ground towards him. Elizabeth Lynch followed slowly behind, keeping her distance from her daughter.

‘If it's about last night, I don't want to talk about it,' he said.

Mary stood on the lip of a dry and shallow drain, catching her breath.

‘You could have said or done something then,' he added, knowing how unfair the remark was. The woman was still some distance away, still coming slowly towards them.

‘He's gone into town,' Mary said, her head down, breathing heavily.

‘So?'

‘You can imagine what happened after you and Daniels had gone. She reckons she pays for just about everything you say to him.'

‘Only because she's the only one he's brave enough to take it out on.'

She said something he didn't hear.

‘What?'

‘I said “And me”.' She raised her face to reveal where her lip had been cut, and where a scab of dried blood still stuck to it.

He looked hard at this for several seconds before meeting her eyes. ‘I wish I could say I never imagined it would happen,' he said.

‘I know. You'll think I'm still making excuses for him, but it was mostly an accident. He was drunk and angry after what happened outside. He went to open a drawer, but it wouldn't come. He pulled harder at it and it broke and came out and caught me on my mouth. It looks worse than it is.' She tested her lip with the tip of her tongue.

‘Or perhaps it's every bit as bad as it looks and you
are
still making excuses for him.'

Elizabeth Lynch had come much closer by then and she stood several feet behind her daughter.

‘She's already told me it was an accident,' Mercer called to her, hoping his true understanding of the situation was clear to her.

‘It was,' Elizabeth Lynch said quietly, her own
abjection complete. She, too, bore the marks of the man's anger. As one small bruise faded, so another appeared. ‘She told you he's gone into town?'

‘Yes.'

‘She tell you what for?'

He looked to Mary, and she looked directly back at him, but without speaking.

‘Tell him,' Elizabeth Lynch said.

‘Someone told him that they were finally kicking Bail out, that the bank had sold his yard. He said that seeing as how there wasn't any work here for him –
you'd
seen to that – then he'd go and have a look there. Stands to reason, he said. It's a big place, and if they're clearing it of all the junk, they're going to need a lot of men.'

At first, Mercer did not believe her, guessing that Lynch had only said this knowing how he, Mercer, would react. Whatever else Lynch was doing, he had not gone in search of work.

‘What time did he go?'

‘Before we were up.'

He had seen no one, and he had been out since six. Lynch would not have set off so early.

‘He was lying to you,' Mercer said.

Mary shrugged. ‘He knows it's where Jacob lives,' she said.

‘Someone else who won't fight back.'

She did not respond to this.

‘Nothing we could do to stop him,' Elizabeth Lynch said. She stood with her hands balled tightly together.

Mercer looked at the pair of them, the woman and the girl, and he saw what a shift had taken place in the balance between them. When her husband went – as he undoubtedly soon would – then Elizabeth Lynch would stumble, stand again and continue to move
slowly forward, just as she had done during his absence. But when her daughter finally went – and that, too, Mercer now considered inevitable – then she would reach out to grab her and hold her and try to pull her back, but the girl would be deftly beyond her reach and the woman would finally lose her balance and fall, unable afterwards ever to rise and stand fully upright again. She, too, it seemed to Mercer, watching her closely over the short distance which separated them, fully understood all that was now going to happen to her. She would be left with her small son, and that would be all. She would be homeless, her past and her future would be gone, and all that would remain would be the boy.

‘What did he say last night?' Mercer said to Mary.

‘Nothing. He was too busy, remember?' She tilted her cut mouth at him.

‘Do you blame
me
for that?'

She shook her head.

He knew that nothing would be achieved by following the man to Bail's Yard. He knew that this was what Lynch wanted. If Bail was finally being evicted, then there would be enough confrontation and confusion in the place for Lynch's presence there to be of no consequence. He knew Bail would take care of Jacob, or that Jacob would be sufficiently forewarned of what was about to happen to avoid Lynch completely.

On the airfield, a siren sounded. The noise startled Elizabeth Lynch, and she turned to look.

‘Will you go to Jacob?' Mary said to him.

‘Why should I?'

‘To make sure he's safe.'

‘Safe from what? Safe from the beating your father thinks he deserves simply because he's a Jew?'

‘You know what I mean.'

‘That's exactly what he wants me to do – run after him. Besides, he was probably lying about Bail's Yard. The bank won't be foreclosing on him so soon.'

‘Bail's known it was coming for the past year,' she said. ‘Everybody knows about it. It was only ever Bail who closed his eyes to it all. Most people in the town can't wait to get rid of the eyesore. If the beet factory comes, there should be lots of new jobs.'

‘Even one for you, perhaps?' he said, knowing even as he said it that it was the cruellest thing he could have said to her.

‘I told her to go and ask,' Elizabeth Lynch shouted.

Mary looked hard at Mercer and then turned and walked away from him.

He called for her to wait. He stepped across the drain and went to where she stood with her back to him.