Authors: Harry Bingham
‘Good heavens! You really think he might be?’
Alan shook his head. ‘No. Of course not. For months now, Westerfeld has been on at me about this and I still can’t help thinking that I’m in the right. Quite apart from anything else, if Tom were alive he’d have come and found me by now. The war’s been over long enough, after all.’
‘Yes.’ Lottie allowed the conversation to lapse for a moment, before apparently changing the subject. ‘I didn’t tell you, my love. We’re very lucky to have had Polly with us at all.’
‘Well, of course we are … Why? What? What are you saying?’
‘When Polly decided to come out, she managed to get all knotted up in the umbilical cord. It had wrapped itself round her neck. All the effort I was making to get the little minx out into the world was just knotting the cord tighter round her throat.’
‘Good Lord! I had no idea! I …’
Alan had never once been present when his wife had given birth. He’d never asked and never been told about the gory feminine details.
‘That’s perfectly all right. I had a doctor and a midwife who knew exactly what they were doing.’
‘Thank heavens!’
‘Yes. And it made me think. It made me homesick for the time when I was a nurse.’
Alan swallowed. He half-guessed what Lottie was driving at and he wasn’t sure he liked the idea. ‘You can’t want to … I mean, you don’t surely …’
‘No. I do.’
Alan gulped again. ‘In what capacity?’
‘Not babies, if that’s what you mean,’ said Lottie. ‘Part of the reason I liked nursing was that I liked the soldiers I met. I felt for them then. I feel for them now. For instance, that chap you told me about – what was his name? Shorty somebody or other? The one you sorted out with some new legs?’
‘Hardwick. Edward Hardwick. The legs are jolly good, apparently, only they make a kind of whizzing noise as he walks.’ Alan grinned. Edward Hardwick was now one of Alanto’s newest clerks. ‘They call him Clunky now.’
Lottie grinned back, before getting serious again. ‘There are thousands like him. All over London. All across England. Their country neglects them. The poor devils can’t afford to pay for help. Well! We aren’t poor and I hope we’re not neglectful.’
Alan shook his head. ‘No, I hope not.’
‘Daddy’s given me lots of money. Money I hardly need. I should like to set up a hospital in the East End. For ex-servicemen and their families. We’d offer the best possible help, free of charge.’
Alan was quiet a moment.
He loved Lottie and loved his domestic life with her. If she ran around setting up a hospital, their life would change. He was busy already. She’d become equally busy. Their peaceful family life would never be the same.
‘And your job would be … ?’
‘Getting the place established.’
‘And then?’
‘I know the difference between a good nursing staff and a bad one. I know what works. I’d be in charge of the nursing side. If every now and then, I wanted to put on an apron and go onto the wards, then I expect I’d do just that.’
Alan smiled unhappily. ‘I expect you would.’
‘And you’re wrong, you know.’
‘Wrong?’
‘You said the war’s been over long enough. And it hasn’t. You still suffer it in your dreams. There are thousands of Stumpy Hardwicks longing to become Clunky Hardwicks. There are other men who can’t breathe properly. Or who wake up every night screaming. Or who are blind or deaf or still in pain from a wound that’s never properly been attended to. For that matter, the war’s not over for the people of Germany, because we still find it necessary to punish them savagely for a crime they themselves had no say in.’
Alan sighed. Little Polly let out a milky burp with a sigh of happiness and slipped further down onto her mother’s belly. One tiny hand stayed flat between Lottie’s ribs, as though to keep her from moving. Alan reached out and smoothed the hair away from Lottie’s face.
‘I expect you’re right,’ he said, concealing his continuing unhappiness at his wife’s proposal.
She smiled. ‘And Westerfeld is right,’ she said. ‘You do think Tom’s alive. You’ve never let go.’
‘My love, I –’
‘Say it.’
‘You’re as bad as Westerfeld.’
‘I jolly well hope I’m worse. Say it.’
‘Say what?’
‘That Tom’s alive.’
‘But if I know perfectly well that he isn’t, why –’ He would have continued objecting but he could see from Lottie’s face that there wouldn’t be much point. So he said it. ‘Tom’s alive.’ He felt like a fool for saying so.
‘Not like that. Properly. As though you mean it.’
‘Tom’s alive.’
‘Again.’
‘Tom’s alive. He’s alive. Tom’s living, not dead. Tom, my brother, my –’
But he couldn’t go on. Like a ten-thousand-barrel gusher, his emotions blasted to the surface, smashing obstructions to smithereens. Alan Montague, Managing Director of Alanto Oil, holder of the Military Cross, father of three, sat on the edge of his wife’s bed and wept like a baby.
Lottie waited until the storm of weeping had passed, before saying gently, ‘Tell me, my love, no matter how unreasonable it sounds: what is it you want?’
‘I want to find him,’ said Alan.
‘Of course you do. So do it.’
Harrelson was behind the shack, kicking around in the long grass.
‘That’s no way to search for oil, Titch. You gotta drill for it.’
‘Hey, bud! Welcome home! You sure took off sudden.’
Tom shrugged. Harrelson kicked around until he swung his foot into a tangle of devil-grass, when he began hopping around and swearing as he extracted the barbed little seed heads from his leg. ‘Jeez, goddamn the … Listen, didn’t we have a fishing tool here sometime?’
‘Shed over there. Behind the lumber,’ said Tom, pointing.
‘Shit, you might have told me. Been kicking around here half an hour.’
Harrelson went to the shed and came out with a rusted-up fishing tool, the sort you had to use to fish a broken pipe from a well.
‘Drilling’s going well then?’ said Tom smiling. With a decent rig like the one he worked on at Texaco, he didn’t experience boiler breakdowns, hole cave-ins, pipe twist-offs, drill ruptures. At Texaco, he’d never even seen a fishing tool.
‘The fuck it is.’ Harrelson spat. ‘Since you blew out of here, the whole damn thing’s been one lousy break after another.’ Tom noted Harrelson’s anger with interest. Perhaps he’d been wrong about Harrelson. He was a hustler and a crook, of course. There was no doubt about that. But perhaps there was a little piece of him that also cared about finding oil. Tom liked that.
‘I want my money back, Titch.’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘Ain’t no damn money coming anybody’s way. Not mine, pal, and definitely not yours.’
Harrelson was a biggish man, but soft and paunchy. Tom was not as heavy, but his muscles were trained as hard as whipcord on the rigs. Tom put his hand against Harrelson’s chest and pushed him without roughness but with plenty of force up against the corner post of the little shed.
‘Titch, you stole my money, like you stole everybody else’s. Some of it you put in the well. Most of it you put in your pocket. I want the part that wound up in your pocket.’
‘Jesus Christ, Tom, Jesus Christ.’ Harrelson put his hands to Tom’s arm, pushing it back, and Tom, after resisting a moment, dropped his grip. ‘You used to be a believer, pal. You was one of the guys I could rely on.’
‘You find me the money or I’ll go to the law. They’re poor folk around here, the ones you take from. You took from me long enough. And maybe it’s time you stopped taking anything at all.’
‘Hell … Jesus … You sure got religion since you hoofed it outa here.’ Harrelson rubbed his chest, as though Tom had hurt it, which he certainly hadn’t. ‘Never knowed you to be a crabapple annie before.’
‘The money, Titch, the money.’
‘How much d’you want?’
‘What you stole.’
‘I got expenses, pal. Costs you wouldn’t know about.’
‘French frills for Mrs Holling?’
‘Hey. I do what I can.’
‘Get me the money, Titch.’
‘Yeah, yeah, OK. I got the message.’
‘And no forgetting it.’
‘OK.’
Tom nodded and stepped away so that he was no longer in Harrelson’s face. The tension dropped. And the moment that had privately terrified Tom had turned out to be easy. Now that he was here, he saw how stupid the whole thing was. He had no urge to stick with Harrelson, no temptation to gamble one last time … He was proud of himself, eager to get back to his beloved wife and son.
‘OK, Titch.’
‘Sheez.’
Tom pulled some tobacco from his pocket and offered some to Harrelson, who took it gratefully. They both chewed in silence for a moment.
‘Listen, bud, no shit, I’ll get you some money.’
Tom nodded.
‘But I got a bunch of no-hopers working the well for me now. We’re on Number Three. Two was a bust. And Three – shit, you know how we decided where to site this one? We was moving the rig when the sill collapsed and the rig just dropped down in the dirt. We couldn’t move it no more. The timber yard wouldn’t stand us ten bucks for a new sill, so there we were. Nellie Holling Number Three.’
Tom laughed. That didn’t happen on fields managed by Texaco.
‘While you’re here, bud, do me a favour and lift that end of pipe out. The one which got busted yesterday. The cowpokes I got now could fish a hundred years and not fetch it up.’
‘No problem.’
‘And take a core. The idea was we would take a core. We’re at three thousand two hundred feet, pretty near.’
‘I need to be back with my folks in seven days’ time. You’re going to get me the money in six days. Between now and then, I’ll do what I can.’
‘We should be down on the Woodbine now. Oil sands.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘Hell, if we don’t hit nothing, then I’m out of the game. Nobody can say I didn’t try.’
There was something hopeless in Harrelson’s look, something dejected. It wasn’t Tom’s demand for money, it was the failure to find oil. For almost the first time in their mutual acquaintance, Harrelson moved up in Tom’s esteem.
The military records bureau was on the fourth floor. It was tiny, just big enough for a thin metal desk and a pair of thin metal chairs, marked ‘
WAR OFFICE
’, as though someone might want to steal them. A lieutenant colonel stood smoking in the window, his back turned.
Alan knocked at the open door.
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for –’
The officer turned. The first thing Alan noticed was that the man had only one arm, the left empty sleeve pinned loosely to the tunic. The second thing Alan noticed was the face: a face he knew well, almost the first face he’d seen on the front line in France. A dark moustache, a lop-sided smile, the muscular slope of the shoulders.
‘My God, Fletcher!’
‘Montague!’
Alan felt shock, then surprise, then delight. Similar emotions crossed the other man’s face. Fletcher bounded across the room, throwing the cigarette away from him as he did so. ‘Bloody nice to see you again. Very damn bloody nice surprise.’
The two men shook hands with real warmth. Fletcher looked older than before – older and without the same dangerous muscularity that he’d once enjoyed. But his face was still young and his grip still powerful.
‘Must be a bit of a bloody shock to see my ugly mug, what? Probably thought you’d escaped the sight of it?’
‘Not at all.’ Alan smiled. His right hand rose to a loose civilian salute. ‘It’s the very best sort of surprise.’ He almost literally had to bite his tongue to keep himself from adding the once-obligatory ‘sir’. ‘You’re well, I take it? You look …’
‘I look like a bloody cripple, Montague. You probably think you ought to fling tuppence in my hat or buy a box of matches off me. But at least I’m not dead, eh? That’s the main thing. You look all right. Limbs all present and correct.’
‘Yes. They patched me up.’
‘Talking of patching, it’s not your wife, is it, who’s … ?’
‘That’s right. The hospital for the war wounded in the East End. She’s just bought the premises. Now it’s all down to the builders to get the place fitted out. There’s a colossal need for such places, you know.’
‘Yes. I do know. As a matter of fact …’ Fletcher’s face reddened a little with embarrassment, ‘I heard about the project. Sent along a little donation – very little, of course – nothing compared to what – anyhow – thought it best – probably shouldn’t have said – bloody fool.’
‘Not at all. You’re very kind.’
‘Yes, quite, quite.’ Fletcher grunted away his embarrassment and abruptly changed the subject. ‘How’s that other fellow? Friend of yours. Creeley. Worst dressed subaltern in the King’s Army. Is he … or was he … ?’ Fletcher petered out, trying to remember if Creeley had fallen in the general slaughter.