Birthday (3 page)

George had been called up in 1940, and taken prisoner at Tobruk in Libya. He'd already lived forever on coming home from Germany in the long belly of a Halifax bomber. A young soldier in his early twenties, he queued to be measured for his demob suit, a thin man after three years' imprisonment, hoping to find a country more to his liking than the one he had left and, if not, at least to get the job of his choice.

He was promised work as a van driver, but couldn't start for a month – a long time at that age – so he walked into a nearby iron foundry and was set on straightaway. The job was more strenuous, and altogether satisfying in putting him among the sort of blokes he had fought with in the army. You had to be alert in such an occupation, but as long as you looked out for yourself and for others, and if others looked out for themselves and for you, life seemed less dangerous than driving a van.

The chain slipped: no time or place to run, a million lights turning brighter and brighter at his scream. Even if you weren't killed the number chalked on the side of the iron was plainer than on any shell fragments around Tobruk. One of his mates who called at the hospital said he could have been as badly injured driving a van, but George knew there was something more final about a fall of iron in the dismal light than there could be from any crump of tin in the street. He had got unblemished from the battlefield, had survived the boat trip across the Mediterranean, not to mention the journey by cattle truck to Germany – and now this.

A new house was provided out of the compensation, and appliances installed to make staying alive the slowest form of torment, though as easy as possible for Jenny. There was nothing more they could want, but wanting for nothing at such a price was no bargain to George. He couldn't believe it. ‘Me! Why me?' he said a million times, to himself but to Jenny as well often enough. ‘I'd have been better off wounded as a soldier. There'd be some pride in that. But in a foundry! That's what I can't understand.'

The more quickly his thoughts returned to the point from which they had set out, without having made him wiser or more content, the darker his anguish became and went on for months before he reconciled himself to the fact that any good reason for being on earth had been taken away. The short change of mental torture turned up no meaning to his fate, and the nightmare was that he would live as a cripple for the rest of his life.

Jenny's skin blistered with tears as she sat by him. She loved him. Everything would be all right. At least he was still alive. But so deep was her misery that she sometimes thought how good it would be if they could be struck dead together.

Walking through a bookshop to get a present of coloured pencils for Eunice's birthday she saw something on the table with Tobruk in the title. During the week it occupied George he wasn't in such despair, so from then on she took everything from the library connected with that place during the war, so that he could relive his days and stop regretting he hadn't died in the foundry.

His experience of artillery and machine guns helped his expertise with a wheelchair and orthopaedic bed. When a telephone was installed he smiled that it was like having his own headquarters in a dugout, able to call up friends and family whenever he liked. She suspected that he never left off secretly wanting to die, but knew it was a comfort for him to go even further back in time before he met her, and live again in the world of Tobruk. Dangerous though it had been, he'd at least had the use of his limbs.

Brian first saw George when he'd been twenty-five years in a wheelchair. His mother persuaded him to call: ‘Sometimes Jenny comes and sits with me. If I'd been in her place I'd have gone mad now, but she always asks after you, so it would be nice if you'd pop in and say hello.'

Sunlight through the gaps of a high-clouded day gave amplitude to the spirit. He slowed along the tree-lined dual carriageway, reading each street sign so as not to overshoot the drive on which Jenny's house stood. He found a dwelling anyone should be happy to live in, the roof as if someone got up to scrub it every morning, windows as clean as if without glass, nothing too old to be unpointed or shabby, immaculate paintwork on doors and window frames, the house behind an area of sloping well cut lawn.

When setting out on his travels he hadn't wanted to live in either the cosy but decrepit houses of Basford Crossing nor a place like this, but he was happy for Jenny that she had such a pristine house. He had thought only of getting away, even if to be a homeless figure stricken by rain and bitten into by the cold, for whom any house would be paradise.

To be well fed and shod, to be out of the rain and have clothes on his back, was all he needed. A one-roomed dwelling in the middle of a wood had figured in his childhood dreams, but by craving the romantic he had achieved far more. A house like Jenny's had seemed an unattainable luxury, but as soon as he had money enough to get one he despised it. The fee for a single script could buy a dozen huts in a wood, as well as the wood and surrounding fields.

Believing that this life was the only one, that there was no God to help you (and he was intellectually incapable of believing He was other than dead and buried) meant that safety and contentment didn't exist, an ever-likely and interesting state in which there was no class, nation, or religion to capture his allegiance or give comfort. If you allowed yourself to conceive of immortality you were no longer free.

An inane Strauss jingle brought her to the door. ‘Brian Seaton!'

The emphasis on his surname hid her pleasure. Well, he couldn't be sure about that, but he enjoyed hearing she would know him anywhere, though it didn't bring back the old shine in her eyes. He should have telephoned first, but wanted to surprise her. In London you never called on anyone without warning, but he had acted as if Jenny was inferior, or out of familiarity, in his usual off-hand way, an attitude which over the years had become a habit. I suppose that's how they live in London, she might tell herself, just dropping in without any notice at all. Even in the old days she often hadn't known he'd be where he said he would be.

‘Your mam phoned, to tell me you were on your way.'

‘And here I am. It's good to see you again.' He made up a script about a man knocking at the wrong door, then starting a conversation with the woman who answered. She asked him in for a cup of tea, which led to a new life for them that neither had thought possible when they had got out of bed that morning, but which made sense when it happened. The change in their existences was so passionate that when they went away together the relationship turned into a disaster.

He had made no such mistake with Jenny, for she had known all about him, gave him that special weighing up which now showed much of the old self in her features. Her shorter hair was a mix of grey and dark, curling around the head instead of a long and vigorous band of black, making the face seem smaller, fragile and more vulnerable. She was pale, almost sallow, lines scored for a woman in her fifties, perhaps more so than on women of similar age he met in London who hadn't been through half as much. She was slim and middling in height from what he used to think of as tallish and more robust, though she could hardly be shapely after having had seven kids. ‘I was passing, and thought I'd call.'

‘I'm glad you have. Come on in.'

Everything you did was wrong, even more so when you thought well and long before doing it, but she seemed happy at him standing before her, the only sign a tremble of hands as he followed her in. ‘An old friend's come to see us.'

George had been forewarned perhaps, so as to hide the importance of what they had been to each other, though he didn't see why she should be diffident about it. George must have known of her life before they met, since she'd had a kid already, but the hint that they had been more than acquaintances made Brian smile. Maybe she thought that the old adolescent intensity might even now flame up between them. At least the lifetime of suffering under George's misfortune hadn't broken her.

They entered the brightly lit living room. ‘Brian's an old friend. He used to know mam and dad.'

Large windows showed a well trimmed garden, an umbrageous laurel tree in the far corner beyond a newly creosoted tool shed. In the room blue and white plaster birds were fixed in attitudes of purposeful flight along the wall opposite the fireplace, on the wing to a place George might well mull on in his despairing hours, glazed eyes following the direction of their long necks. With such wings, and being heavier than air, they would fly neither far nor easily, kept from a real sky by the ceiling.

He looked away as they came into the room, the open book face down, on knees kept together by his all-tech wheelchair. A palish glow on his face suggested that movement was hard labour, as if eternally sitting with the useless lower part of himself sapped his energy, took far more of his attention than in the days when he had walked with his shovel from mould to mould around the foundry thinking of the ale he would put down in the pub after knocking-off time.

The shine of his intensely blue eyes, out of a broad face in which the bones were nevertheless visible, hinted that the accident happened last month instead of twenty-five years ago. His expression was of living by the minute, as if things hadn't changed nor time moved from the moment he had come out of the hospital. Nothing to look forward to, and little enough to think back on the longer his incapacity lasted, kept him separate and aloof, king of each moment on his wheelchair throne, only able to reign since he could no longer hope.

The furnishings of a three-piece suite on the thick piled carpets gave a temporary aspect to the room, as if George hoped to be moving out in the next week or two. Maybe Jenny had created it that way out of a restless nature now that she too was imprisoned.

The floral pattern of wallpaper was broken by pictures and framed photographs of children on a climbing frame, a youth straddling a motorbike, two young wide-smiling girls in Goose Fair hats. He was never alone with so many children and grandchildren, a living theatre to vicariously take part in. He sometimes stared at the photographs as if he hardly knew the people in them, though he did right enough, because who else was there for such as him to acknowledge?

His blue shirt was open at the neck, grey hairs below the throat, pudgy white veined hands resting on a tartan blanket covering his withered knees. Order had been arranged around him by Jenny, as much for her benefit as his, because without the routine of a twenty-four hour job such a life would have been insupportable. She had to make sure he was fed, get him into and out of bed, wash him and dress him and see to his toilet requirements, knowing it would go on into old age, never a thought of giving in, of saying it was too much, that it was breaking her back and would one day burst her heart. Maybe she wanted to shout: ‘For God's sake take him to a nursing home, this is killing me, I can no longer cope,' but she'd never say it because George was king, and she the country he ruled over, a pact which enabled her to go on living.

He took Brian's hand between cool fingers as if the rite was foreign but he wanted to pass the test nevertheless. ‘She's told me about you a time or two.'

He wondered what she had said, though anything would be of interest to George, for whom the past, no matter how far off, was only yesterday. The face-down paperback on the arm of his chair was about the siege of Tobruk. ‘Are you reading that?'

His smile indicated eternal worry, self-pity the desert of his affliction, sandstorms depriving him of visibility on long passages through and back and through again. When able to rest from the irritation he was amazed that the small distance had taken such gruelling effort, which showed on the part of his mouth to which the smile was hinged. ‘I was there, once upon a time.'

‘It looks interesting.'

‘I find it so.'

‘Thanks, duck!' Brian used the old lingo for Jenny when she came with tea and a plate of biscuits, the cup rattling against its saucer like a garbled telegraph message. ‘You were in the army, then?' he said to George.

‘Yeh, when I was young. And after the war ended I never thought I'd look back and say how wonderful life had been in a German prison camp, though maybe it would have been the same even if I wasn't in this contraption.'

Jenny's smile showed relief at George talking with such liveliness. In trying to read more from her expression, Brian got as far into nowhere as he always had. Her back was straighter than when she had met him at the door, a stance showing more alertness, though why it should be necessary he couldn't tell, unless on kneeling by the chair to rework the blanket over his legs, or wipe the tea his shaking hands had spilled, she was fearful of his fist, powered by an inboiling irritation from a mind demented by uselessness, snaking out at her face. He wouldn't do it before a guest, but was easy to imagine in the quiet and seemingly endless afternoons when they were alone. He sensed something and wished he hadn't, wanted to go, sorry he had come, such scenes of domestic knockabout familiar from childhood when the old man battered his mother and the rest of the family out of despair at being unemployed, or at not being able to read or write.

‘The only break I get these days,' George went on, ‘is a fortnight every year at Ingoldmells. Still, it gets me away from this place.'

‘My brother Arthur and his wife go fishing near Skegness,' Brian said. ‘I stay with them overnight when they hire a caravan.'

‘He fishes in the sea?'

Brian laughed, for no reason except that it was about time somebody did. ‘No, it's a mile inland, at a big pond in the middle of a field. But it's good sport.' He had bought Arthur
The Compleat Angler
and he had read it more than once. ‘The caravan's parked by the water, so they stagger out in their dressing gowns for an hour's fishing before breakfast. They chuck everything back, naturally.' He didn't want to dwell too long on such a pastime with a man who wasn't able to take part in it, though maybe he could if someone pushed him to the water's edge. ‘If Jenny gave you a rod and some bait you could try your luck. You'd probably catch buckets.'