The Sons of Adam (48 page)

For the first time ever, the thought occurred to him that he could forget about making his fortune. He could forget his tangled feelings about Alan’s success. He could forget about everything except making his wife and children happy and comfortable. And what the hell? They were both still young. He wanted another baby. A girl for preference, but either would be great. For the first time in his life, the old, old dreams of oil were falling silent, the old betrayals no longer important. It was time for something else to take their place.

He touched his face with his hand where a falling lifting-block had grazed it. Rebecca reached her hand out and touched him in just the same spot. Her hand was as soft as a cloud of butterflies.

‘I’m pleased you came,’ she said.

And so was he.

The Rolls-Royce Phantom was a beautiful silver-green affair, polished to a lovely shine, the leatherwork gleaming and smelling of beeswax. It was a damn stupid car to take into the East End of London.

‘Just park it here, would you, Ferguson?’ said Alan. ‘And if you can keep the nippers from wrecking it, then I’d be grateful – and impressed, I might add.’ He gave his driver a pocketful of coppers, in the hope that Ferguson would be able to bribe acceptable behaviour from the crowd of urchins who were already gathering round the car. ‘I’ll try to be quick.’

The street was made up of two rows of working men’s houses, jammed up against each other, thick with the smell of coal-smoke and privvies. None of the houses had a number on the door, and Alan asked one of the urchins to direct him. The boy took a longing glance at the car, turned his back on it long enough to jab a dirty fingernail in the direction of a door, said, ‘That’s me Auntie Min,’ and went back to adoring the Rolls.

The door, which wasn’t shut, was pulled fully open before Alan could knock. A poorly dressed woman of about fifty bobbed and curtsied on the step, while in the back a man was yelling, ‘Get out of here, you little bleeders! And take that bleeding Stumpy, while you’re at it. We’ve got a bloody gentleman, an’ all.’ The woman finished her bobbing and the man finished his yelling. The house fell into a silence of expectation.

‘Good morning. Mrs Hardwick?’

‘Mrs Hardwick as was,’ said the lady, quickly. ‘Mr Hardwick laid down his life for his country, sir, an’ it’s Mrs Jephson now, sir, begging your pardon.’

‘May I come in, Mrs Jephson? There was something I wanted to ask.’

Alan was taken into the tiny front room, where a small child was trying to sweep away the last of the breakfast things before being ejected by a toe of Mr Jephson’s boot. The room was astonishingly dirty. The walls had once been papered, but much of the paper had peeled off with the damp, and the gaps had been plugged by cut-out pictures from magazines: the Tiller Girls, the Prince of Wales, Josephine Baker, Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow. Someone had even taken some ordinary sheets of notepaper and cut them into intricate doily shapes and pinned them out along the filthy shelves.

‘Sorry, sir. Sorry, sir,’ they both kept saying.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘I should apologise for arriving so unexpectedly. Please don’t let me put you out.’

The man and the woman arranged themselves. He pulled on a black-stained jacket indicating his trade as a coalman. He stamped heavily on a gigantic cockroach (‘Pardon, sir!’) and sat down. The woman tucked in her skirt where it was stained or patched, leaving a thin strip of threadbare material stretched tightly across her legs.

‘I was trying to trace a fellow by the name of Hardwick, Edward Hardwick. The War Office gave me this address.’

‘Why yes, sir,’ said the woman, ‘that’s Stu – That’s Shorty you want, sir. Shorty’s what we always called him, sir, before the war.’

‘Is he here now?’

‘Why, yes, sir, only …’

The two looked at each other.

‘He was caught quite bad in the war, sir. He ain’t too pretty to look at, though the boy’s just as good if you could only look inside.’

‘I’m sure he is, Mrs Jephson,’ said Alan gently. ‘There were a great many good lads caught badly. I was there myself.’

The couple looked at each other awkwardly, then Mr Jephson rose. ‘I’ll fetch him out. I believe he may be out for a breath of air,’ he added, in what seemed like a ludicrous imitation of Alan’s manners.

There was a bit of thumping out back. Mrs Jephson tried to rearrange her skirt again, but there was a limit to how little black material was needed to cover a pair of quite ample thighs. Another huge black cockroach waddled across the floor and they both stared at it as though mesmerised. Then a door slammed, Jephson puffed, and he came in with the one-time Private Edward ‘Shorty’ Hardwick held lop-sided in his arms.

Shorty Hardwick had no legs, hence his new name, Stumpy. He looked dishevelled. His shoulder and hair were white with cobwebs and a disintegrating lime mortar. His face was dirty with the dirt common to all children of the East End. He smelled vaguely of excrement. For a second or so, Alan gaped rudely before realising what had happened. In the haste to clear the downstairs room for its grand visitor, the Jephson kids had hauled Stumpy out of his normal seat and leant him up against the wall in the only place they could think of putting him: the privvy.

‘Shorty Hardwick, is it?’ said Alan, extending his hand. ‘My name’s Alan Montague, Captain Montague as was.’

‘Sir. Yes, sir.’ Stumpy brought his hand up to his forehead in something like a salute.

‘No, no, never mind that. We’re all in civvies now.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Look, I’m trying to track something down and I have reason to believe you may be able to help.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It was in France. August nineteen sixteen. The night of your infinitely courageous assault on the gun posts –’

‘Machine guns, sir. Two of them, there were.’

‘Exactly. Two of them. You were under the command of a Mr Creeley, I believe. Is that right?’

‘Yes, sir. A proper gentleman he was. Picked me an’ Bobby Stimson because he didn’t want to kill anyone as had a missus.’

‘Quite, quite. Now what I want to know is this. You were there when Mr Creeley was hit, I take it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Please can you tell me, as exactly as possible, what you remember of that moment. I’m particularly concerned to know whether Mr Creeley was killed outright or whether he might just have been severely wounded.’

‘Oh no, sir. He copped it all right. It’s a wonder that any of us survived. They hit us pretty hard. I lost both my legs,’ he added, in case Alan hadn’t yet noticed.

Alan winced at Stumpy’s matter-of-fact tone, but pursued his line of questioning. Dr Westerfeld had been right. His dreams had been burning to tell him that Tom hadn’t died. His dreams were almost certainly wrong, but, with Westerfeld’s encouragement, he realised he would never have an easy night until he’d got to the truth of the situation. And so he’d gone back to the curt official dispatches of the time. He’d found the names of the two privates that had gone with Tom. He’d used War Office pension records to find (to his surprise) that one of the two had lived, although horribly wounded, and had used the same records to trace Hardwick’s address.

‘Please. If you could tell me exactly what happened?’

Stumpy was no storyteller, but, with patience, Alan got to the bottom of it. The three men had crept close to the first gun post. They had no real chance of taking it, unless by some fluke the Germans panicked at the first Mills bomb and fled. But before anything could happen, they were seen. A hail of German fire broke out from appallingly close quarters. ‘Stimson, sir, he disappeared in front of my eyes. Like in a sausage machine he was. Must have had maybe ten thousand bullets inside him, I wouldn’t be surprised.’ Shorty – as he then was – had also been hit and had crashed to the ground. He’d lain there horribly wounded, resigned to that staple of Great War deaths: the slow bleeding away in a shell-hole, within sight and sound of British lines. ‘I thought I was a goner. Tried to remember all them things the padre said about going on living after you’d snuffed it, but I can’t say as how it made a lot of sense. I fainted. Don’t remember anything else, till I found myself in Field Hospital, screaming bloody blue murder, sir, pardon my French, only they were short of morphine, sir, and the buggers hurt me bad, getting my legs trimmed off all neat and even, like.’

Rescued by some RAMC corporal who’d earned an DCM and a sergeant’s stripes for his deed, Stumpy had made a slow but complete recovery. But the strange thing was that, when it came to Tom, his account almost precisely followed Alan’s dream. ‘There was heavy fire, sir, horrible heavy. I saw him sinking. I know he must have been hit. Not like Stimson, sir. Stimson pretty much came apart as I was looking. But hit pretty bad. Must have died, sir. Nobody could of survived it.’

And that was that.

A hail of fire – Tom sinking – probably dead – then nothing. It was just as in the dream. Nothing was resolved. Alan felt a crease of tension running across his stomach as he took in what he’d been told. He stroked his non-existent moustache to conceal his agitation – that old wartime gesture once again.

‘Thank you. You’ve been most helpful.’

‘Oh yes, sir, not to worry. Pleased to be of help, sir.’

In the horrible little room, Alan caught sight of a photo: it was a young Shorty, in private’s uniform, a long pale underfed city-faced boy, almost certainly underage.

‘Listen, Hardwick. I do a spot of work now and again for the Infantryman’s Artificial Limb Board. We’re always on the lookout for deserving cases. Have you ever been measured up for a pair of legs? They’re not as good as the real thing, but a lot better than nothing at all.’

‘Oh, no, sir.’

Stumpy’s face was white and the silence in the room became almost holy as the family waited in awe.

‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to send you to a fellow who’s the very last word in artificial legs. What d’you say?’

‘Oh, sir!’

‘I’ll make an appointment for you and send a car to fetch you there. Will that be convenient?’

‘Oh, sir!’

‘Good man.’ Alan nodded. Once Stumpy Hardwick was Shorty Hardwick once again, Alan would find a job for him somewhere in Alanto Oil. He wondered about making a gift in cash, but decided that the right moment would be later, not now.

He stood up to go. He shook hands with Mr and Mrs Jephson, who were both rooted to the spot and dumb. If he had been the risen Christ, he could hardly have made a greater impression.

Ferguson had kept the car safe from malicious hands by driving round and round the block with a different carload of kids each time. The queue for an encore now stretched out of sight down the street. Alan drove back in silence.

To his surprise, he wasn’t mostly thinking of Tom. That would come later. At night, by day, with Lottie, with Dr Westerfeld, he’d turn over every possible angle connected with Tom, until his head and heart ached with the effort. But now his head was full of something else altogether: an anger that took his breath away and left reason bleeding in the gutter.

His mind filled with the names and faces of the men he’d known in France. Tom: dead. Fletcher: crippled. So many others dead or lost or maimed or blinded, it sometimes seemed a wonder there were men enough to people England. He saw Lottie’s bloody apron as though it was yesterday. He saw Stumpy Hardwick’s childish face light up at the thought of a pair of hollow steel legs. He heard that ‘Oh sir, oh sir,’ until the big car nosed out of the City into the West End, where the din of traffic swallowed thought.

Up in New York, the stockmarket descended with a crash that was heard across the world. Across America, the economic ripples began to shatter and split the glass-bubble economy of the late 1920s. But in one small cottage in Texas, work remained steady, income remained adequate, life became good.

Early on in spring 1930, Tom was working for Texaco, managing to hold down the same job for nine months on the trot – the first time he’d managed that since serving as a British officer. What was more, not once during those nine months did he let himself slip. He didn’t womanise. He didn’t brawl. His drinking was moderate. And best of all, he didn’t hand over so much as ten dollars to any snake-oil salesman promising untold riches from any ‘sure-fire wildcat’ (as if that weren’t a contradiction in terms). After six months of exemplary behaviour, Rebecca, still working as an accountant, trusted him enough to let him back.

Of course, nobody, still less Tom, reforms overnight.

He was helped by the fact that the drilling site was old and well-developed. The tarts and bars and whorehouses that are part and parcel of any oil-boom town had moved on elsewhere. The girls that remained looked drained and listless. And this was Texaco he worked for, one of the big guys. Its rigs sat on a block of nearly three thousand acres. Anywhere Tom moved, he was on Texaco land. The promoters who tried to chisel out a living by parting small-time investors from their cash couldn’t work without leases. The promoters were up in Oklahoma. They were there chasing shadows in California. They were out there scratching amongst the pines and corn fields of East Texas. The one place they didn’t hang out were the prime oilfields of the Gulf Coast.

But Tom, definitely and certainly, was making progress. He was still working as a rigger – a senior one now – but he genuinely didn’t mind the loss of position. He looked forward to the end of drilling every day and hurried off to the Elwick farmstead to catch Mitchell (now six years old) before he went to sleep. He played with his boy and taught him baseball, having hurriedly learned the game himself first. He helped him with his alphabet and his numbers. He stayed around as Rebecca bathed the child and put him to bed.