New and Collected Stories (80 page)

He had been brought up to believe that his spirit was of little value, though he'd never accepted the fact. Even so your beliefs were continually waylaid and overwhelmed, but year by year they had become strong again, till such strength was the only thing of importance. As soon as this was realized your spirit got stronger until nothing could break it at last. It had survived the attacks of church and school, and then worst of all the God-almighty State in the shape of Mussolini standing on a shield and held aloft by his gang, the man and the Party you were expected to die for as you had once stood in church and been told to adore somebody who was supposed to have died for you – when nobody had a right to die for you except yourself, and what fool would want to do that? He had had enough for the rest of his life, and smiled at the truth that he would never be able to do anything about such assaults while he continued to blame nobody but himself. Being taken a prisoner of war was the final indignity, but it was also the point from which he had begun to hope.

The fat in the vat was smooth and smoky. The end of your finger would skate if it didn't get scorched. With three people in front she stared at the dark ice starting to split and bubble, and sending up shrouds of lovely mouth-smelling steam when the man poured a wire basket of raw chips in. His scrawny wife who wore glasses and a turban was pulling a handle on spuds that had been peeled white and then fell as neat chips into an enamel bowl.

‘Two pennorth o' chips and a couple o' fish, please,' Edie said. She didn't know why she had left Mario outside in the dark, but it wasn't raining so she didn't worry. To be seen with a lad or a man would have made her feel daft, and being with an Italian was as bad as going out with a Yank, she felt, in that people said all sorts of rotten things, and if they didn't say so you could tell what they were thinking, though at work they might have had a bit of a laugh over it. One of the older women could pull a megrim if you as much as mentioned having a good time before peace was declared, in which case somebody was bound to call out: ‘Well, Mrs Smith, it's a bleddy free country, ain't it?'

She hoped he'd be gone, but was glad he wasn't.

‘Long time.' He hadn't expected to see her again.

She opened the bundle. ‘I had to wait till they was done.'

‘Done?'

‘Cooked.' It was black but the stars were out, and the smell of vinegar and chips drew her face back to the batter-steam and fish clinging to her fingers. ‘You'd better get some, or they'll be gone.'

He picked into the paper, and ate more as if to please her than feed any hunger. ‘Good.' His approval seemed like a question. ‘Thank you.'

Her smile could not be seen in the dark. ‘Lovely, aren't they? They don't fry every night, so we was lucky.'

‘You are a good girl.' He spoke solemnly, then laughed at her and at himself. The wall held him up. He leaned as if nobody lived inside the house.

He
is
funny, she told herself, though I don't suppose he'll murder me. ‘Let's walk for a bit.'

He held her arm in such a way that it seemed to her as if he was blind or badly, and wanted to be led somewhere. ‘I was in …' he began.

‘In where?' she asked, after a while.

Their feet clattered the pavement. A soldier passed. Another man in the dark nearly bumped into them and stood for a moment as if to say something. He smelt drunk. If it was daylight he might have spoken but if so she'd tell him to get dive-bombed, or to mind his own effing business – whichever was more convenient to his style of life – as they said at work, with more laughs than she could muster at the moment. Mario snorted, as if thinking something similar. ‘You're in Nottingham now,' she whispered.

‘Nottingham, I know.' His normal voice made the name sound like the end of the world, and maybe it was, in the blackout, in the Meadows. ‘I was in Addis Ababa. You know where that is?'

‘I'm not daft. It's Abyssinia, ain't it?'

He laughed, and pressed her arm. She was glad at getting it right, saw a wild land full of black people and high mountains. Or was it jungle? As they turned into Arkwright Street the crumpled chip paper slipped from her other hand. There was always a smell of soot when it got dark, and a stink of paraffin from factories. A late trolley bus with lights hardly visible was like a tall thin house rumbling along the cobbles. The Methodist Hall was silent, all doors barred against tramps and ghosts.

‘It in't a church,' she said. ‘It's a British Restaurant. I sometimes eat my dinner there, because it only costs a shilling.'

He seemed to belong to her, even more so when he released her arm and held her hand. At the Midland Station he stopped. ‘Not possible to go to centre of city. Not allowed for us.'

She was glad. In Slab Square people would look at them, and talk, and maybe call out. They turned back. She was also angry, because he no longer belonged to her when he couldn't go where he liked. There were different laws for him, so they weren't alone even while walking together in the dark. ‘It's daft that we can't go downtown,' she said. ‘It's not right.'

He held her hand again, as if to say that he was not blaming her, a warm mauler closing over her fingers. ‘Not public houses, either, but cinema we can go.'

Nobody would take any notice if they went and sat on the back row, but it cost more than at the front. Youths would shout out, and there'd be a fight perhaps. ‘We can go to the Plaza. That's a nice one.'

He pulled her close into a doorway. He smelt of hair and cloth, and stubbed-out fags – and scent. ‘Tomorrow?'

‘Don't kiss me, then.'

She couldn't fathom the scent. It wasn't even hair cream. His hair was dry. He didn't, and as they walked along wide Queen's Drive towards Wilford Bridge she shared a bar of chocolate and the bag of caramels from her toffee ration. You had to pay a ha'penny if you wanted to cross the Trent there, so they called it Ha'penny Bridge. To her it always seemed the only real way to get out of Nottingham, to leave home and vanish for ever into a land and life which could never be as bad as the one she'd felt trapped in since birth. But she had only been taken over to play as a child – or she'd gone across for a walk by herself and come back in half an hour because there didn't seem anywhere to go.

They passed the police station, and three years ago she had stood outside reading lists of dead after the air raid, long white sheets of paper covered in typewritten names. Spots of rain had fallen on them, and people queued to see if anybody was on that they didn't already know about.

Houses were heaps of slates, laths and bricks. If anybody was dead a Union Jack was sometimes put over. Johnny Towle's name was on the list. She'd only seen him the Sunday before, when they went to Lenton for a walk. He said he loved her, and sometimes she dreamed about him. A man stopped her when she walked by one smashed house and said: ‘Would you believe it? My mother was killed in that house, and I put a flag over it. It ain't there any more. Somebody's stolen it.' He was wild. He was crying, and she told him before hurrying away: ‘They'd nick owt, wouldn't they?'

She wanted Mario to talk because she didn't know what else to say after telling everything that had been in her mind, but he wouldn't. He didn't understand when she said: ‘A penny for your thoughts!' Everybody must have something in their heads, but he only wanted to walk, and to listen to her, asking her now and again to explain a word he didn't know.

Before reaching the bridge she said: ‘Let's turn round.' The thought of water frightened her, and she had no intention of crossing to the other side. Their footsteps echoed, and she was glad when she heard others.

‘After Abyssinia' – his voice startled her – ‘go to South Africa. A long way. Then to England. Soon, Italy, when war is finished. I go to work. War is no good.'

‘What will you do?'

‘I do business.' He rubbed his fingers so hard that she heard chafing skin before actually looking towards it. ‘
Affari
!' he said, and she could tell it made him cheerful to say it, the first Italian word she had learned.

‘
Affari
!' she echoed him. ‘Business!' – so that she also laughed. ‘I like that word –
affari
.' She would remember it because it sounded
real.
It was good to do business. Two years ago pennies were short for putting in gas and electric meters, so she and Amy did business by standing on street corners selling five pennies for a sixpenny bit. Some people told them to bogger off, but others were glad to buy. Then a copper sent them away, and she daren't do it again, though Amy did it with somebody else. She used to collect milk money at school so could always get the pennies. Mario laughed when she told him about it.

‘
Affari
?' she said.

‘Yes,
affari
!'

She knew nothing about him, but liked him because even English wasn't his language, and he had been all over the world. Unlike the lads at work, he was interesting. She took out another cigarette and, embarrassed for him at having to accept it said, hoping he wouldn't be offended: ‘Ain't you got any?'

‘No. We are paid sixpence a day. Italian collaborators' work. Pay tomorrow, so we go to the cinema, both, eh?'

They stood close so as to coax the cigarettes alight. ‘You've got a one-track mind,' she said.

‘You teach me English!'

On Arkwright Street they turned back towards Trent Bridge. She still wondered whether he was having her on. ‘You know it already.'

‘I learn. But speech makes practice. Good for
affari
!'

She laughed. He was funny. ‘If you like. Pictures, then, tomorrow night?'

‘Pictures? Museum?'

She knew it couldn't be hard for him to understand what was said because she'd never been able to talk as if she had swallowed the dictionary. ‘No. Pictures means cinema. Same thing.'

She didn't want to lose him, but felt a bit sick after she had agreed. They said at work she never talked, not deep dark Edie Clipston at her sewing and seaming machine earning fifty bob a week. But she did – when nothing else seemed possible. The lad who humped work to and from the machine tried to kiss her, and she threatened him with the scissors, but she let him last Christmas when somebody held mistletoe over them.

‘It didn't mean anything, though,' she told Mario as they stood on the bridge. He had a watch, and said it was half past nine. He had to be in by ten, so pressed her hands hard, and kissed one quickly.

He walked away and she forgot all about him. She didn't know what he looked like, and wondered if she would recognize his face on meeting him again. But she felt as if the cobbles had fur on them as she walked back to Muskham Street.

Hearing no noise through the door she tried the knob and was able to go in, glad the house was empty. She filled the kettle and lit the gas. The cat rubbed against her ankle.

‘Gerroff, you've had yer supper already.' It followed her around the room, mewing, so she gave it a saucer of bread and milk. Then she put coal on the fire. When they got back from the boozer they might wonder why she'd done so, but she didn't care what they thought.

Her father was tall and thin, and worked on a machine at the gun factory. He took his cap and jacket off and threw them across the sofa. ‘Pour me some tea, duck.'

Her mother came in a few minutes afterwards, pale like Edie but her face thinner and more worn. She took off her brown coat with its fur collar and put it on a hanger behind the stairfoot door. ‘What did you bank the fire up for?'

‘It's cold.'

‘It is when you stand in a queue to buy the coal.'

She sat by the glow to warm her hands. Her legs were mottled already from sitting too close too often. She had never queued for coal, anyway, because a delivery man emptied a hundredweight bag outside the back door every week.

‘Kid's don't understand.' Her father nodded at the teapot. ‘Let's have some, then.'

Joel Clipston had once spent four months in quod for ‘causing grievous bodily harm' to a man who, wilting under opinionated hammerblows of logic during an argument on politics had called Joel's wife a foul name as the only way – so he thought – of stopping his gallop and getting back at him. Joel had kept silent in court, ashamed to say out loud what the man had called Ellen, and so he had no defence against having half killed somebody while waiting for opening time outside a pub one Sunday morning. He said nothing to the magistrate, and got sent down for ‘such a vicious attack'. There are worse places than Lincoln, he said when he came out, though he was more or less cured of ever doing anything to get sent there again. For a while he roamed the streets looking for the man who had called Ellen a prostitute, but then heard he had gone into the army. If he don't get killed I'll wait for him when he comes out, soldier or not.

He lost his job over the court case, but now that the war had started it was easy to get another. He was set to digging trenches on open ground for people to run into from nearby houses when aeroplanes came over from Germany. If he worked twelve hours a day he made more money than he'd ever had in his pocket before. Then he got work as a mechanic, and found he was good at it. There was either no work at all, or there was too much, but never exactly as much as you needed. He preferred to read newspapers, play draughts, sit listening to the wireless with a mug of tea in his hand, or spend a few hours in the boozer, rather than work more time than he thought necessary – war or not.

They sometimes went over the river at Ha'penny Bridge and into the fields beyond Wilford. In spring, Ellen baked lemon curd tarts and made sandwiches, and Joel filled two quart bottles with tea for a picnic by Fairham Brook. The air seemed fresher beyond Wilford village, where the smell of water lingered from the river which rounded it on three sides.