The Broken Chariot (19 page)

‘I don't want to put you to any inconvenience.'

‘Inconvenience!' she scoffed, giving a very leery look.

Too late to recall his stupid remark, he knew it was always best to show no warmth, lest you betray yourself. The personality he was to regain should merely have given a nod, or a look of understanding, or even incomprehension – it didn't matter. Posh reactions to kindness on anybody's part would only delay settling back into a sense of reality. You had to come down from the clouds in a place like this.

Glad to be alone, he took off his boots and lay on the lumpy bed, as exhausted by the half-day as if he had sweated a fortnight at the lathe he would soon go back to. Lulled into oblivion by friendly shouts from the backyards, the uncertain acceleration of a motor car in the street, and Mrs Denman banging washed pots back on the rack in the kitchen, he dozed in the luxury of his return.

The MO said a couple of weeks cycling was the surest way to co-ordinate arms and legs. He ran a finger along the frame of a secondhand five-quid grid, chained up outside the shop, painted black so many times he wondered what pitted rust lurked underneath. The shopkeeper wouldn't look at his cheque, and it took half an hour to go into town for cash. Maybe the bike was nicked, though the man gave a receipt. Trying it out, a green double-decker ran him into the kerb. The brakes were good, and so was the steering.

After getting a job the bike would pay for itself, by saving on bus fares. He pedalled to the toll bridge, and for a penny at the gate rode over the Trent. He looked at every woman in case she was Eileen, thought he had spotted her a time or two but felt dead towards her when it wasn't. He wanted someone new, in any case, with free and intelligent ideas, not the old cloying courtship which put you on to a bleak and dead-end road.

He'd only biked before around the leave camp on Cyprus, so wobbled a bit through Wilford, frequently stopped to adjust the brakes, pump the tyres, check the steering, tighten one of the cottapins, soothed by so much mechanical fussing. Following the country breezes to Clifton, a long and at times painful slog uphill drew him into a freewheeling stretch to Barton-in-the-Beans and the placid river again. For twopence an elderly Charon, his pipe smoking like a chimney connected to the punt itself and providing the power, ferried him and his bike to a cindered track on the other side leafy with privet and elderberry. Tyres bumping along the riverbank after Attenborough was better practice than cycling on tarmac.

Soon enough knackered he lay on the grass to watch the manoeuvres of uxorious swans, and fishermen coming out of their statuesque pose only to cast their lines. A hundred pounds back pay and demob money would let him drift, before offering his sweat to a factory. He liked the thought, and feeling an unmistakable spit from watery clouds biked to the nearest pub, the taste of local beer locking nostalgia into place with the scenery outside.

Varying the exercise, he put on boots and walked the town. With the map main thoroughfares were avoided as far as possible, as if road blocks had been set up for him alone. Leaving the Park area of big lace manufacturers' houses whose leafy quiet he enjoyed, he angled through the straight and barren streets of Lenton, working a route by the cycle factory and into the maze of Radford. The new and geometrically laid-out estates didn't tempt him, so he re-entered the countless streets and became wilfully lost, till finding his position again by the map.

The complex layout of the town was knitted in his mind so that if necessary any pursuer could be lost in it, though who would want to chase him and why was impossible to say. He noted all terraces, the various yards and offshoots of twitchells and double entries, as well as the landmarks of factories, cinemas, churches and, especially, the pubs and their names. People he found in them when stopping for a drink were good to hide among if he was going to be here for the rest of his life. It was as well to know the place.

But why was he still in hiding? After school he had been on the run, or thought it necessary, and now, out of the army, all he wanted was to conceal himself in a life and locality that wasn't his. Water always flows downhill, his father had contemptuously said when Herbert, on his last leave before going overseas, told him that he might go back to the factory after demob. A young man with your background should have a destiny, was the inference.

Whatever he did was his destiny, but madness seemed to be stalking him these days, because halfway along a street, dreading to meet whatever lurked around the next corner, he quick-turned back to the junction, and launched himself along a corridor of similar houses, moving as rapidly as if a malady was eating his life away and he had to get to a secret refuge before it killed him. Going at the double left everyone behind on the pavement but, he thought, my own self most of all. He timed his rate of walking and found it to be a hundred and thirty-seven paces to the minute, as if chasing an unattainable vision of heaven, retreating from the possible horrors of hell, either of which his blank and steely mind could put a picture to.

Grimed with sweat after uncounted miles, limbs racked and the scar on his face sore, he went into Yates's and drank a pint to get cool, comforted to find a point for homing on, especially the long bar that had furnished his first roof in Nottingham.

Early evening, the place was quiet and familiar, a few drinkers further along minding their own business, an air of preparation however before crowds came in later. Herbert recalled with embarrassment his time as a school kid ordering half a pint, and the naive effrontery in asking Isaac to join him, a man almost old enough to be his grandfather. The four years stretched back like forty, and the time since India seemed centuries away, but Isaac was a more recent human landmark, and must still be where he had always been.

On the pavement he adjusted his mackintosh and pulled the cap down as rain blew across the flower beds. Workmen on their way from factories were criss-crossing the square to change buses and go home. He climbed the stairs wearily and, no response to his knock, tore a sheet from his notebook to say who had called. He pushed it through the slit but, when he was halfway down the stairs to the outside door, heard bolts drawn and locks undone. ‘Come back up,' Isaac called. ‘I thought you must be one of
them
.'

Herbert followed inside. ‘One of who?'

‘The landlord's men.' He looked much harassed, hands shaking as he relocked his fortress as if the crown jewels were inside. Thinner than before, and more bald, he buttoned his dark blue overcoat. ‘Am I glad to see you, though.'

He didn't eat regular meals, had become pasty-faced, waxy almost. ‘Why, what's wrong?'

‘People come up here and threaten me, hoping I'll pack up my tranklements and leave. They want to do the place up and let it for a lot more money. So these bloody oafs say they'll kick me in if I don't skedaddle. They don't know me, though. I like this place, and I'm sticking.'

A cold wind rattled the window, and Herbert passed over his packet of cigarettes, fighting down the words that came to him, wanting to say them but knowing he mustn't, words such as admiration for Isaac's courage and independence, and in living the way he did, regard for his qualities as a human being, respect for his knowledge and experience, and even awe at his age. It all added up to the nearest he could get to affection for someone other than a woman he was going to bed with, and even then the sum of his feelings might not amount to half so much. ‘What time do they come?'

‘Hmmm – Players. Where did you get these?'

‘They had some in Yates's.'

Isaac washed cups, fingers chapped, heavy grey veins on the back of his hands. ‘One of 'em was here an hour ago, about half past five. But you don't need to get mixed up in it. It's none of your business, sonny boy.'

‘I can think about it, though.'

He opened a cut loaf and buttered the slices. ‘There's even some sugar in stock. I got my rations yesterday.' A pigeon warbled on the window ledge facing the narrow street. ‘Sometimes I think I'm going to start eating them, except I don't see why they should pay for the sins of the world. Now sit down and tell me what you've been doing since I last saw you. Your postcards were welcome, but they didn't say much. How did you get that scar, for instance? Makes you look a bit of a devil.'

Up Wilford Road he turned right into Goodhead Street. You never went to the front door because the parlour was often somebody's bedroom, or was used only on Sundays. To find the right house from the back meant counting doors along the street from the entry way, and then going behind and ticking them off again.

The rabbit hutch in the yard was empty, and a bike leaned against a bath big enough to wash the baby Hercules in. A girl of about fifteen came to his knock, a pair of curling irons in one hand and a fresh cigarette in the other: Archie's sister Janet. The homely smell of toast drifted from inside. ‘What do yo' want?'

‘Is Archie in?'

He noticed the delicate tits pushing out of her thin blouse, wanting to put a hand on them, except she might turn him into Polyphemus with the curling irons. She glared, went back inside, and he heard her say: ‘It's somebody as wants our Archie, Dad.'

Herbert was amused at the disgruntled voice of doom: ‘Tell 'im 'e's still in the fucking army.'

She came out again, and managed a smile to meet Herbert's halfway. ‘'E's in the army.'

‘When's he coming out?'

She turned and bawled: ‘When's 'e coming out, Dad?'

‘How do I know? Nex' week, I think.'

‘Are you his posh friend, then?'

He put on his most atrocious accent. ‘I don't know about posh. Just tell 'im Bert called.'

She nodded. ‘Yeh, all right' – and banged the door to.

With Mrs Denman's sandwiches in his saddlebag he set off north to explore the county as far as Worksop, wanting to know the region as if he had been born there. He pencilled the routes to be covered on his map, but found the tarmac dull under his tyres for the first few miles, fields dead and woods deader, the cold shoulder given to dismal villages and worse towns. He didn't wake up to the beauty until well towards Edwinstowe, fighting off questions as to why he was where he was because there was no answer to what you could do nothing about. To murder someone and get hanged was one solution to his uncertainties, suicide another. Both options stank of romantic defeat, but he'd always wondered whether the life of the criminal wasn't more to his style than any other.

In each town there was a library, church, schools, a cinema and meeting halls, from which he felt himself as definitively barred as from the world of his parents, from any world perhaps except that of the factory and the pub. The long main street of Worksop seemed like the end of the world, busy and exclusive, so he turned from halfway down to avoid coal smoke and diesel fumes and pale faces, and rode south east towards the Dukeries.

The straight rides hid him and became friendly, took him in, a silent biker pedalling through the glades, no longer feeling isolated because, without people, he had become himself again. Standing on the bridge at Hardwick Grange, by the absolute peace of the lake, he watched the effortlessly floating mallards, part of the willows drooping over cloud reflections, as if this had been his birthplace, or maybe a sign that he was being born again. Not even memories of India, returning in colour and clarity since his accident, but only as if he had read about them in travel books, could nudge aside the healing tranquillity.

The scene was hard to leave. He could grow old, hands splayed on the sandstone balustrade, never moving again – until a postman rode by on his bike and stopped his whistling to call out: ‘Hey up, duck! Nice day, in't it?' the tyres crunching gently along under his weight.

Herbert waved, and told himself that all thoughts were irrelevant, that it was what you did that mattered, though if harmony of thought and action was the ideal he must lift up his arms and get back to town, and patiently wait for that blessed state to come full force and take him over, after one last look at the sluggish water of the stream.

He worried about Isaac, and called on him again, thinking that if more than one of the landlord's thugs showed up at the same time he would have a struggle to deal with them. On the way he queued thirty minutes at the coke depot and bought half a hundredweight in a sack borrowed from Mrs Denman's shed.

‘They haven't called for some time,' Isaac said, suggesting that his tormentors were either on holiday or occupied with some other elderly tenant. ‘Which means, I suppose, that I can expect them any day. I'm ready for them, though.'

Herbert held up his sack.

‘What's this, then?'

‘I owe yer summat.' More than anyone else, he thought, untwisting the strand of wire from a bundle of sticks and laying them on crumpled paper in the fireplace.

‘You don't have to speak the local lingo to me,' Isaac said, holding his hands to flames that waved in the grate.

‘I'm practising the accent for when I get a job next week.'

Isaac took books from the table and slotted them in the shelves, then washed his hands at the sink. ‘I always thought you were a funny chap.' He pushed his false teeth back to the roof of his mouth. ‘I can't think what you'll end up doing with your life.'

‘I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, and if I never do, it'll be all right by me.'

‘Aren't you going to stop for some tea?'

‘No, I'm off to the library for an hour. I'll call in a couple o' days.'

Archie beat a man and his fancywoman to a table, the Peach Tree was crowded as usual. The army diet had thinned him down to a well-toned six-footer, made him healthier than when he'd gone in. His demob leave had started but he was still in uniform. ‘There was talk of us staying on because of the Russians trying to grab Berlin. They wouldn't have kept me, though. Not that I hated it any more, but I'd had enough. I spent half my fucking time on jankers this last month. Sometimes I thought I'd ram one up the spout and tek the sergeant-major with me. Even the officers got my number. So no more army for me, unless it's two years on guard outside the Eight Bells with an allowance of ten pints a day and all found. I start back at the factory next week. I've got a nice married woman on the go, so I need to earn some money.'