The Broken Chariot (28 page)

‘Fuck off!' Bert said. ‘If you did you'd only tek her away from me. I'm keeping her to myself.'

‘No, not me, Bert. I'd never tek my mate's girl. I don't need to do that.'

He returned the thump on the back. ‘I know you don't. I was only jokin'. Look, yer float's bobbin up and down.'

Three weeks after their first session of love Cecilia told him, with much regret, that her parents would be back next day. Herbert wasn't worried. They had fucked as much in that time as if they had been married for six months, and a rest before he melted away would be no bad thing. They smoked the usual cigarette over a mug of coffee in the kitchen after their couple of hours upstairs. ‘We'll go on seeing each other, though?'

‘Whenever we can. You make me know who I am,' she said, ‘and I love you for it.'

His high opinion of her changed from that moment, to something of what it had been before their bonus of a honeymoon, because he couldn't think much of a woman who didn't know who she was every minute of the day and night, and who put the responsibility of defining herself on to someone like him. She had a year or two's advantage in age, so such a statement made her seem almost childish. On the other hand he knew that his juvenile denigration had to be set against the intensity and delight of a passion never to be obtained from such as Eileen, a sort who knew herself to the core and would spit in anybody's face if they tried to tell her who she was. She also never wanted to try any position except the hydraulic up and down.

Maybe Cecilia was flattering him, and knew very well who she was, and if so that was even less tenable. She was secretly smiling because he was younger and, rarely being capable of deciding which of these states she was in, hinted that even he did not know who he was. She wasn't to know that the only time he did was while sitting in his room to write, and he saw no reason to tell her.

Nor was that entirely the case, for in his dark thoughts he knew to the marrow and back again who he was, certainly in a more complicated way than anything she could mean. He was two people instead of one, and knew them both intimately, even if only because they were so widely separated and he could see them from every angle. You couldn't be more deeply aware of yourself than that.

The advantage of such thoughts was that before knowing what part of the town he strode through he was almost home, having hardly noticed his part in the real world at all.

The word love came up all too often in their encounters, especially after they had been together in his room, which she liked even less than the district roundabout. She sat on the bed fixing her suspenders. ‘Where do you think all this is going to lead?'

His mood hardened. Not another discussion about that. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, are we just going to go on like this forever?'

He opened the curtains and looked out over the dismal backs, not a good sight for his morale. ‘What would you like us to do?'

‘If
you
don't know, how can I?'

She was proposing to him, but wouldn't come right out with it. He put on his jacket, fastened the top button. ‘I like things as they are.'

‘Oh, like, like, like,' she cried out. ‘I don't care what you like. That's not what I mean.'

He passed the ever clean handkerchief from his lapel pocket, in case tears were close. ‘I love you so much I want it to go on like this forever.'

‘Well, I don't know.' She sniffed into his linen. ‘I don't, I really don't.' And threw the handkerchief on the bed. ‘You can see me home now.'

Her kisses were just as passionate at the gate, and he was more than in the mood to match them. Quarrels were meaningless when they were finished. Let things go on forever, until for some reason they stopped. Marriage to her or anyone would be a loss of freedom, and as serious as suicide.

They said they loved each other, genuine sentiments on either side, though at times he thought guiltily that they couldn't altogether be so on his, otherwise he would indeed have known there was somewhere to go from where they were now. To latch himself on to her style of life would mean climbing the ladder to where he came from, which was unthinkable. Maybe their love in bed was only so satisfying because they disagreed on almost every issue, the one pleasure that stopped them running a mile from each other.

Having written down his thoughts on the matter, and put the papers into a folder for possible use in the future, he yawned and got into bed.

Fifteen

Herbert was happy to see steam coiling from the chimney of Wilford pit, and hear the jangle of laden coal trucks in the shunting yards. ‘Work, you bastards, work!' he made Bert shout. ‘Flat out, day and night! Work! Keep at it!' – then pulled him to rein but not before he had pictured a cartwheel, and a maniacal laugh with a thumb at his nose.

He passed through the area to reach his favourite strolling ground by the sluggish but insidious Trent, under towers of humming transmission lines, where surveyors were checking levels and mapping the alluvium to make roads and lay out factories.

The city spread its buildings for people to enjoy, better dwelling places than those on the crummy acres of the Meadows where Archie lived. The new estate across the river caused arguments when Cecilia said what a shame it was there'd soon be no countryside left. Her complaint reminded Herbert of tedious belly-aching books by D. H. Lawrence and others, who wanted people to live in cottages without bathrooms but with the Greenwood Tree at hand to dance around at the weekend; while at night they would read those same writers' books by oil and candlelight. He erased the picture, and walked more quickly, glad when he was beyond all sight of the city.

A notebook on his knee, he sat by the weir at Beeston, green water sliding over the lip as smooth as paint. In the warm sun, when the breeze slackened, smoke from his cigarette kept off the midges. Instead of stories and sketches he thought he would use his experience of the last seven years and write a novel. People on the street and at work, and his digs, led intense and unique lives. They did everywhere, but few seemed to realize that they did here as well. Everyone he knew thought themselves the centre of the world, as far as they were concerned. Burdened in the morning with fatigue, headaches and unresolved dreams on their way to the factory, they were quick to be offended if anything unexpected was put in the way of routine, not wanting to work but knowing they must to earn a living. Only when fully awake in the middle of the day, and aware that all they had to do was endure until evening, could they afford to be cheerful. They slogged home at half past five, as if having stood so long at a machine had solidified legs and feet into lead. Yet when a sluice of water had gone over chest and face, and they'd eaten a tea of the cheapest food, the daze cleared from before their eyes, and what seemed like the length of another day opened for them to do what they liked in. Eight hours of sweat had been traded for eight hours of freedom, and everyone was different in the use they put it to. Likewise with Bert, who Herbert at times knew better than himself. The permutations of stories from such existences were endless, and even incidents out of his imagination could be described in sufficient detail to seem credible. He mulled until clouds darkened over the eddying water, giving reason to hurry home and make a beginning.

The typed sheets lay on his table under a folded shirt, a secure enough hiding place, he had thought, until Mrs Denman said one day at supper: ‘I didn't realize you were writing a book, Bert.'

He cut a sausage in two, dipped one half in a pool of sauce. ‘What meks yer think that?'

She let the newspaper fall. ‘I can't see as Archie will like what you say about him, true or not.'

‘It ain't Archie,' he said gruffly, reaching for the bread. ‘And if it was he wouldn't mind.'

‘I only found it because I wanted to wash your shirt' – not caring, he assumed, to be accused of snooping. ‘As for that woman you write such things about, well! I suppose she's that nice dark one you tek to your room.'

‘No.' He didn't see why she should feel like a criminal or, worse, a sneak. ‘It's completely made up.'

‘So you say. But there's me in it, as well. I've got black hair, though, not ginger.'

‘It's all right, Ma.' He could only laugh, and touch her arm. ‘I'll alter it before it's finished. You won't know yourself when I've done with you.'

‘That's a fine thing to say!' Which remark he couldn't decide how to take. Perhaps she was amused at the description, and wanted him to leave it be, for she smiled: ‘I allus thought there was more to you than met the eye.'

Within three months he had written the novel again, sucking so much ink into the rubber sack of his fountain pen that he wondered if for the rest of his life he would use sufficient of the blue-black liquid to drown himself. Changing people so that they couldn't be recognized, yet not distort the sense of their reality, or their appearance to the world, seemed hardly possible. The best he could hope was that – if by a far off chance anyone in the district read it – few but scattered qualities of various people they knew would be detectable. He wanted to make the book readable and convincing mainly for himself and for whoever didn't know how industrial workers lived.

Every day in the factory, as each finished artefact fell from his lathe, he wondered what vocation he might otherwise have followed in his life. He could have been a soldier, certainly, perhaps an actor, even a confidence man, not to mention a mechanic that half of himself had become, but he was turning most of all into a thief of broken dreams, or a cat burglar of other people's lives. Switching off, he tidied up so as to leave the lathe and its surroundings clean for the next morning's start. The lathe had been the only thing in his life he could go back to, but now he had something else, his spirit floating like a compass needle in alcohol as he reached for his jacket, haversack of sandwich paper and empty flask, and collected his new Raleigh from the cycle shed. He rode away from the factory like a somnambulist, and when he got home washed himself at the kitchen sink and sat down to a silent supper. Afterwards he went upstairs and closed the door to his room. Eight hours of pandering to the mechanical part of himself called for a refuge in which he could fit his daydreams together like the scattered pieces of a Meccano set. Phrase by phrase, he was assembling a version of himself, but not turning into a Bert or a Herbert, rather someone a little of both but unique to neither. Such a way of finding out who he was gradually revealed that no one ever discovered who they were, at least not to the depth and unity he had formerly hoped was possible. The cold emotion felt while writing told him that he was reconstituting himself, whoever he was, by using the people among whom he lived. From Phaeton driving a disintegrating chariot across the sky he was putting the pieces back and fixing them together while the vehicle was still in motion.

A dark cloud, shaped like the top half of South America, drifted across scintillating Ursa Major. While saying a passionate goodnight to Cecilia at the gate of her house he noticed a man smoking a cigar come on to the pavement, and look up and down the road as if wondering what rent he would charge if he owned the houses on it, or as if to make sure that no roughnecks from Radford or the Meadows were swarming up in the darkness with knives between their teeth to take his posh villa to pieces: her father.

Cecilia broke free, and forestalled him. ‘Hello, Dad.'

‘Thought I saw you. Is this your young man?'

Herbert objected to the description, it being a long time since he had thought of himself as young, and in any case he didn't care to be lumped with any group of the population by such a slob. But for Cecilia's sake he held out his hand, moodily shaken by a short, compact, bald-headed man who all but ignored him by saying sharply to Cecilia: ‘You'd better get in. It's late.'

Herbert appreciated the kiss on his cheek, but was annoyed at such obedience from a woman of her age. ‘Good night, then.'

The large front door thumped to. ‘You seem to be courting my daughter.'

Bert opened his packet of Senior Service, and took time to light one. ‘You could say as much.'

‘I hope you're not stringing her along.'

What kind of world was he living in? ‘If you believe that you'll believe anything.'

He scuffed the end of his cigar into the pavement. ‘Have you got any long-term plans?'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘I'm not surprised you don't know. Future intentions – you know very well what I'm getting at. I'd be interested to hear your views.'

‘So would I. When I have some you'll be the first to know, after Cecilia, I expect.'

‘That's straight enough. She deserves well.'

‘I couldn't agree more.'

‘Make sure she gets it, then.'

Herbert's supercilious smile was wasted in the dark. If I loved her I'd be polite, because of his age, which is supposed to give him wisdom and knowledge, but who can say he's wiser or more knowing than I am? He thinks all the advantages on his side give him the right to test my seriousness with Cecilia, but I stopped taking tests when I left the army. He clenched his fists at having been forced into reflection, ready to knock the self-important little tyke down if he said much more. ‘Are you threatening me?'

‘You told her you worked in an office.' Coming closer, Herbert gave him top marks for guts. ‘But I happen to know you work in a factory.'

‘She's aware of that.'

‘I don't think she is.'

‘She should be by now. In any case,' the full public school accent took him over, ‘it's none of your business. So if you'll excuse me, I must be going. I have to get up in the morning and do a day's work.'

‘If you think I don't work, you're wrong.' Herbert sensed the man relenting towards him, maybe because of the accent, which made him angrier. The pathetic swine wanted a good pasting, but there was no point squandering time. ‘I'm not implying anything, old boy. I'm just trying to tell you, in no uncertain terms, to get off my back.' It was satisfying to see him walk away so quickly.