England's Lane (7 page)

Check on Janey before I open. Bring her a bit of toast with her tea. Sometimes she'll eat it, most times she won't. Later, she'll go and sit in front of the telly. Whatever's on. Shipping forecast. Flowerpot Men. Football pool results. I say to her: we've got two channels, Janey. Remember? You don't like what's on, you can change the channel. See what's on the other side. Might be something better. I taught you how to do that, didn't I? Change the channel. Hear me? Do you hear what I'm saying to you, Janey? Janey …? Janey, love …? Yeh well. Like talking to a bloody wall.

Said she was coming round in her dinner hour, Sally. I wonder if I ought to say something? Say to her, look Sally—it's very kind of you and everything, coming round to help me out and all, and don't think I'm not grateful, but … well, I don't like to be a burden, specially in your dinner hour, and I could just as easily … no. No. Wouldn't wash. Couldn't do it. Couldn't put it across right. I'd only end up hurting her feelings. Just thinking it out now, I can see her little piggy eyes going all dull, that tiny mouth that still she manages to cram all those eclairs into—truly a cakehole, if ever there was one—I can see it turning down into a schoolgirly pout as her head drops forward and all of those chins start to tremble. No. It's just something I've got to live with. Something else I've just got to live with. Only every two to three weeks, after all. One day, though,
she'll get stuck. She will. She'll be in that window bulldozing everything around her, and she'll get wedged. Jammed. Have to get the glazier round to take the whole pane out—even the Fire Brigade—or else she'll just die there. Jammed and starving. Surrounded by imitation chocolate. Christ Alive—she could become deranged. Poor little Sally. Well—not little, of course. But still just the one more helpless victim in a legend, isn't she really?

“All right are you, Janey my love …? Got you a bit of toast with your tea, look. Eat it up while it's still nice and hot, eh? Help you sit up, can I …? Janey? You awake? You are awake, aren't you? You're just not opening your eyes. I know when you're asleep. Well look … I'll just leave it here on the bedside table, all right? Just leave it here for you. And you can get to it in your own good time. It's not a very nice morning. Was raining quite heavily. Just spitting, now. Just a little bit of drizzle.”

Yes, well—that was about par for the course. She really ought to see someone. Clear to anybody. Some sort of psycho person, don't know much about it. Not going to happen, though, is it? Not the sort of thing we do. So she'll just go on sitting there forever, I suppose. Or as long as she can bear it. Or me. Because there's my needs too, if anybody cares. Which, of course, nobody does. Who would? Janey? I hardly think so. And there isn't anybody else, is there? Sometimes, I can hardly care myself. Forget I've got them, needs. Sometimes can forget their very nature. Other times though, I can hardly think of anything else. Burns me right up. Oh well. Stick to burning my tobacco, ay? Yeh—much the best way. Have a pipe down in the shop now, I think. Unlock the door, put the Wall's sign and the litter bin outside on the pavement, get the lights on and smoke my pipe on the tatty old stool in the corner. Serve Mrs. Goodrich with her quarter of caramel whirls same as every morning at nine o'clock on the dot, and then get back to hiding
away from the day. Much too early to steam in on to dreading tomorrow, so just duck away from this round. Hope most of the shells go over my head. But bloody hell: the silence. The silence she gives me, it's terrible, it really is terrible. Don't know how much more of it I can take, if I'm frank with you. If it wasn't for Anthony … Mind you, when she does say something, it can be even worse. Like last time. Was it Friday? Might easily have been Friday. Don't think she's uttered so much as a syllable since. But last Friday, I take her a bit of toast with her tea as usual, and her eyes are wide open and just staring, like they do. And before I could open my mouth, she puts up her hand and she says to me “Why don't you kill me …?” Voice all hissy. Eyes open wider than ever. And this time, at the back of them, the light of something else. I just looked at her. Just looked. Couldn't think of anything to say. Not a damn thing. So I muttered something about leaving the toast on the bedside table, look … and then I got myself out of there. Dear God, though. She goes a week of silence, and then she comes out with that little lot: “Why don't you kill me …?” Dear God, though. What's a man to think? Hey? Why don't I
kill
her …? Christ Alive.

Milly could tell by the neat, still steaming, curlicue of dung—those stray bits of straw stirred up by the wind in the alleyway to the side of the United Dairies—that she'd fetched up just too late for her selection of treats to be eagerly crunched by the milkman's horse. She folded the sugar lumps back into her hanky, along with the chopped-up chunks of a withered pippin. She missed seeing the horse's big brown eyes grow larger with greed as she approached him. Not though, naturally, from love or affection—she wasn't a fool. Nor even recognition, not of herself; but even for one's bounty to engender just any sort of a desire in a single living soul … well that could be something too. Champion, his name is. Champion the Wonder Horse—so silly to call him that: he's sweet, but it's not as if he were a steeplechaser or anything. But they got it from an American program on the television, Paul was telling me—a sort of a cowboy show, I can only imagine, but I really wouldn't know a thing about it. Don't really seem to get much time for the television these days, although I don't really know quite why that should be: other people seem to. I used to love it when Paul, of an afternoon, would cuddle up beside me on the sofa, happily waiting for
Watch With Mother
. Were we sitting comfortably? Yes we truly were.
I'd have a nice cup of tea and a digestive, and Paul would be sucking on a chocolate finger until it threatened to play mayhem with his clean white shirt. Much too old for all that sort of thing now, of course, my little Paul—but sometimes if he's home from school on a Friday promptly, we'll still watch that cartoon show he so much adores. The sailorman. Popeye, that's it, that's the fellow. And his skinny girlfriend, Olive—she does makes me laugh. In the early days, Paul—he begged me to buy him lots of tins of spinach from the United Dairies, which I was more than happy to do because to get him to eat up any vegetable at all apart from peas and potatoes is little less than a miracle from heaven, quite frankly. And it seems so funny now, but golly—I wasn't best pleased at the time, I can assure you of that: well he refused to have anything to do with them, didn't he? Those three large tins I'd got for him—and Smedley's, so it wasn't as if they were cheap or anything. And why? Because he couldn't squeeze them open with the pressure of his hand. In the cartoon, he was wailing—just like a silly baby—Popeye does that and the spinach whooshes right up into the air and he catches it all in his mouth. Yes I know Paul, I said to him—but that's a cartoon, isn't it? It's not real life, is it Paul? It's just a cartoon.

So that was me eating all the spinach for it seemed like years. I really didn't care for it. I tried it on Jim, but he just eyed the wet green mound of it on his plate as if it were about to reach up and throttle him. “What's this muck?” he wanted to know. Anything not familiar—anything that isn't a pie or a roast or a fry-up—all of it's just “muck,” in his eyes. Once I bought some real Italian spaghetti from Bona, and my golly was that expensive. It was terribly long, in a bright-blue paper wrapper and a diamond-shaped label I couldn't make head or tail of. I've kept it in my drawer, the label, as a sort of souvenir. I only got the stuff because I'd seen this recipe in
Woman's Own
, and all it needed was tomatoes and a bit of mince. Make a
nice change from cottage pie, I thought. Well you just should have heard the furor: “We fought the b-word Eyeties all through the War! Those b-word Eyeties—they're all b-word fascists!” he was ranting away. Yes well, I said—not you personally, Jim. You were in Munitions in Minehead, if you remember: not too many Italians to fight in Minehead, I shouldn't have thought. Wrong thing to say, of course, but I was really very peeved with him, if you want to know the truth. I'd been to quite a lot of trouble over that supper—set the table nicely with the floral cloth and the proper cruets and even a cupful of marigolds from some pots I had in the backyard, at the time. Refused even to so much as try it. When I urged him, he threatened to throw his plate against the wall. If Paul hadn't been at table (and he ate it all up like a good little boy) then I'd have dared him to do it, I was, ooh—that angry with the man. And he would have, you know—yes and then who do you think would have been up till all hours clearing away all of the mess? Exactly. Anyway, I thought it was actually very tasty—a lot of cutting up involved, of course: you wonder why they make it quite so long. The recipe said to put cheese on the top, but that would have made it more like a rarebit sort of affair, to my mind. And anyway, all I had in the house were some portions of Dairylea. I get it for Paul—he likes it on his toast.

And isn't it funny? I'm looking now into the window of the United Dairies, and what's the very first thing that catches my eye? A pyramid of tins of Smedley's spinach …! Yes well you can keep them, thank you very much. But I do love this window—I sometimes think I could stand on the pavement and gaze at it for hours. And maybe in the past I have done—well, not for hours, obviously … but more than once somebody like that busybody Mrs. Goodrich or the lady from Amy's the hairdresser—not Gwendoline, not the one who does me, but the other one—they've touched my arm and they've said to
me something along the lines of Are you quite all right, my dear …? And I've come right back to earth and laughed at myself for ever having drifted away. Oh yes quite all right, thank you, I eagerly assured them. But that Mrs. Goodrich, she obviously thinks I'm touched. It's just that I love to look at the displays, that's all—why I don't really care for these supermarkets, as they call them; even the new food hall they've got in John Barnes—I've never been in. Before I go into any of the shops in the Lane, though, I always pause to look at the windows. In the Dairies, it's mostly these tapering piles of packets and tins—they look so very impressive, I always think, when they're all massed together like that. Ranked like soldiers. The red of the Heinz Tomato Soups always makes for a cheery sight—reminds you of winters by the fire: I always add the top of the milk—gold top though, it's got to be that. Stir it in—makes all the difference, I can tell you. And those great big boxes of Force, with Sunny Jim looking always so very posh and happy. Worlds away from my Jim, isn't he …? My Jim, he never could be said to be sunny—perpetually overcast, rather more, with the threat of anything from showers to an out-and-out tornado. I don't think they can be real though, those enormous packets—there'd be more than enough cereal in there to feed a family of six for a year. The manufacturers must just make them for show, I suppose. Well if that's the case, their money isn't wasted. If it wasn't quite so nippy today, I'd linger longer—savor all these brand new Huntley & Palmers big square tins and the handsome jars of Marmite. But there's always the devil of a wind just on this corner, so I think I'll go in there now and get what I came for.

I always smile at the sign on the door: “Yes! We are open for the sale of Lyons' Cakes.” When they shut the shop in the evening—and even when it's half-day closing on Thursdays—I've seen Edie, the manageress (and she's always the last to leave) … I've seen her turn
it around: she never forgets, she always turns it around before she locks up the shop. And then it says “Sorry! We are closed—even for the sale of Lyons' Cakes.” I wonder if there's anyone else who even so much as notices? I hope so—because I think all these windows, they're really a bit of an art that we all just take for granted. And oh my goodness, the number of times I've said to Jim—God's sake, man: you've just got to do something about the state of your window. Well you can imagine his reaction: “Window? My window? State of my window? What's b-word wrong with the state of my window? Looks all right to me. Nothing wrong with my b-word window.” On and on. Yes well—like so many men, he just doesn't see. I mean … even the glass itself, that hasn't been cleaned in a decade, and every day he hangs up the same old things outside—and that tin bath, I'm telling you: it must be a museum piece, by now. All dented and gray—not silvery and shiny like galvanized is when it's new. When it's not a museum piece. It's not even as if anyone's ever going to buy a tin bath in the first place. We may not all be living in Buckingham Palace, but I think we've at least progressed from that. And everything else out there is coated in grime, from the traffic and the flies. The idea of a window display, I say to the man, is to entice people into the shop—to tempt them to buy something they may not have thought of. People look at your window, they'd run a mile. He says I don't know what I'm talking about: they come in, they buy their flypapers, their nuts and bolts, their paraffin, their brooms and their four ounces of tacks—and the b-word butcher buys his buckets. No doilies and pretty pink bows in the window are going to make the slightest bit of b-word difference. And I don't know—he might even be right. I still used to argue, though—and then I stopped. I used to do a lot of things where Jim is concerned. Yes I did. But now I've stopped.

It is true though that Mr. Barton, Jonathan, he does seem to buy an awful lot of buckets. And in his line, you don't really care to
inquire, do you? I did think of asking him one time, but I didn't like to in the end. Now
his
window—oh my goodness! That really is a work of art, and no mistaking it. All these neat little white porcelain trays divided up by what I think is supposed to resemble parsley, though I must say the green is very vivid. The sirloin steaks, all fanned out so very handsomely, their creamy fat and marbling part of nature's wonder, to my mind. The carcasses of pig, the neatly trussed-up chickens (for those who can afford them) with those sweet little chef's hats perched on the ends of the drumsticks—and that parade of pinkish lamb chops, curling like commas. Mr. Barton, Jonathan himself—oh, he's just such a gentleman. So very beautifully spoken and courteous, and always just perfectly turned out. Immaculately groomed, his hair and mustache always just so. Sounds so silly now, but I used to be quite … well, not frightened of him, exactly, no—but never really wholly at ease in his presence. Awed, I think I was, maybe just a little. He is rather commanding. He does tend to dominate any given space—and particularly so when he's behind the counter of his own very brightly lit and nearly glittering shop. Which always smells so … I don't know … clean, really. Is the nearest I can get to it. But it's true that I still hear people talk of him as being really rather intimidating, but you just have to see beyond all that: that's only his manner—he's actually very kind. I find it all, all of it, quite a comfort. Big strong hands. Well you need that, I suppose. If you do what he does.