The Summer Isles (32 page)

“In a few minutes I’m going to have to get back in there and talk to that screeching hag—what’s her name?”

“Gracie Fields.”

“I’ll have to sit smiling for half an hour whilst she wishes me good health from all the nation and presents me with a china plaque all the way from Burslem. And after that… After that…” His brow furrows, as if the prospect of the evening requires great intensity of thought. “After that, I’d like for us to talk, have a drink. We could go somewhere, Griff. Just you and I. I could shake off all of this for a while…”

With that, he turns and walks back towards the house. His manner is forgetful as the deepening night air parts to receive him. There are many stars kindled overhead now; the night will be crisp and clear. Shadows that I hadn’t noticed before separate from the trees and the ancient walls and move towards him. A cigarette flares as they cluster and quick, deferential voices murmur. One of the shadows moves towards me. Others seem to blur behind him. I almost want to run.

He’s dressed in a KSG uniform, is the shadow that approaches me, although I can’t properly make out his face. He could be anyone, anything. We’re all just ciphers here. My head sways dizzily as I’m led back across the soft turf of these Downing Street gardens towards the house.

“It seems, Mr. Brook,” his voice says as the lamps are put out and the warm windows beckon, “that you’re set to be with the PM for the evening…”

I murmur and nod.

I don’t believe anything.

J
OHN ARTHUR IS SILENT
as he drives swiftly along Horse Guards Parade and then on through clear barricaded side streets, past police road blocks and the edges of the crowds that are gathering along the Embankment for the vast fireworks display to come. No one turns to stare. The speeding, blank-windowed official car is commonplace in Modernist Britain.

“You enjoyed the show?”

“The show?” I look over at him.

He shakes his head, the lights forming and re-forming his face. “I mean all of it. These last few days…”

“I was hardly paying much attention.”

“Of course.” He pushes the car faster. “You were here to kill me…”

Drunk and jolly Tommies squat aside the lions as we pass Trafalgar Square, shouting down to their mates who are pissing or splashing merrily in the fountains. Everywhere, flags are being waved, people are leaning dangerously out from windows, couples are kissing deeply in shop doorways, lads are climbing lampposts. There will be deaths tonight. There will be conceptions.

“Look…” What do I call him? John? Francis? Sir? Mr. Arthur? None of his names belong. “I can’t plead with you. I’ve been through too much already. And I don’t mean,” I gesture vaguely at the car’s window, “just this…”

On through Covent Garden and across the Strand, then past the Inns Of Court. Fleet Street, with the front pages written and typeset—the news on this Trafalgar Day already made—is quiet, but we’re drawn to a halt by a knot of traffic around Saint Paul’s where there are flags and litter, twisted railings, and a man is vomiting onto the pavement. A taxi draws up beside us as we queue to get into Cheapside. Two women in evening clothes are talking animatedly in the back.

“Tell me this, though, Griff,” he says, his fingers clenching and unclenching on the wheel’s stitched leather. “Whatever made you think the world would change if there was no John Arthur?”

“Who would replace you?”

He inches the car forward. The back of a bus thrums ahead of us. I S
HAN’T
B
E
L
ONG—
M
OTHER’S
U
SING
S
UNLIGHT
. “You tell me.”

“Jim Toller’s too young—nobody trusts him. People like Smith and Mosley are second-rate politicians. They’d be second-rate under any leader. I suppose there was Harrison, but then he was conveniently executed for treason. We’ve all been laughing at William Arkwright for years…”

“You shouldn’t underestimate Bill Arkwright. I’ve kept him close to me because he’s the one person I can least trust. You’re wrong about it all, in fact, Griff. The military, the bloody establishment. They all want rid of me. They were happy enough when they thought that they could just buy a few more cars and whores and polish some extra medals. Without John Arthur, though…” He shakes his head. He sounds tired. His voice is toneless—the famous light Yorkshire accent is almost gone. “The point is that there
has
to be a John Arthur. There would be no point, no purpose, in destroying him. He’s something that’s been given to me—you understand that? I
want
you to understand, Griff. There’s a space called John Arthur into which this world has pushed me. I have been given destiny, Griff. Really, there was no choice…”

“You could cast it aside.”

This time, his laugh becomes more bitter. “I
have
to carry on. Why do you think I made that speech this evening? Why do you think this country has to fight? They’re afraid, Griff. All of them are afraid…”

Outside, as we move on, the traffic has cleared. We are turning away from the bustling swirl of the river. Looking back, I glimpse the great dome Saint Paul’s over the rooftops. As celebratory searchlights begin to wheel around it, extinguishing the stars, barring the sky, it seems to glow and rise as if held aloft by clouds. Then the light flares and the vision is gone, and the roads grow narrower, uglier. Soon, we are in Whitechapel; since the days of the Ripper, since my own sad wanderings and the fights and burnings and intimidations of the twenties, and despite all the new overspill developments at Beacontree, little about the East End has ever changed.

“At least you’re still honest with me, Griff,” he says, looking over for longer than feels comfortable as the big car rushes along these cramped little streets. “So few people are…” He makes a turn and the tyres squeal and slide across the wet cobbles, then rumble to the kerb of a dead end beside a scrap of wasteground. The engine stops. He jerks on the handbrake.

“Can you manage to walk a while, Griff…?”

Clinging to my dignity, not waiting for him to come and help me, I climb slowly out. It’s cold and dark here. The ground is sticky with litter and the air has a faintly seasidey smell of coal smoke and river silt. Even where the houses begin, the dim street lamps are widely-spaced. John Arthur opens the car’s rear door and takes a hat from the back seat—an ordinary-looking trilby—then a dark overcoat, which he pulls on, raising the collar. “There,” he says, holding out his arms, pantomiming a turn in the middle of this empty road. “Who would recognise me?”

My walk is slow and laboured as we head towards the houses. John Arthur helps me by snaking his arm around my back and hooking it across my shoulders to support some of my weight, and gives me a little lift as we step over a pothole and up onto the loose beginnings of a pavement. In odd, flashing moments, he feels almost like Francis—although I thought I’d forgotten what Francis ever felt like. His breathing and the way he walks is almost the same, and his skin, beneath it all, beneath everything, still smells faintly of burnt lemon.

Something grey that is too low and quick to be a cat darts into an alley that on warmer days would be filled with washing, but there’s no one about and the only lights that show from the windows of these terraces are television grey. The morning’s drum and fife bands have long gone. The teas have been cleared, the tatters of ribbon and bunting hang limp, the paper union jacks that the children made at school lie torn in the puddles.

Soon, we’re drawing close to the sidings, the tracks and the cliff-face brick warehouses of the docks. It’s quiet here tonight, but in my head dropped iron clangs, steam rises, sacks of produce from all the Empire slump and pile as the giant cranes turn and nod in God-like approval. And there’s that sound again, that dull rumble gathering at the back of my teeth and in the void that waits to fill my skull when my brain finally evaporates. It’s in the boom of guns, the rumble of tank tracks, the drone of aircraft engines, the crash and sigh of masonry, the scream of children, the churning of great machines, the grey roar of an angry sea…

“For all those years,” I say as John Arthur helps me along the brick-cobbled street and the sky over London suddenly fractures into light. “I thought you were dead. It destroyed your parents—did you know that? Putting up a headstone years later isn’t enough…”

“Don’t try to tell
me
what happened, Griff—as if you know more than I do about my life.”

I blink stupidly as the fireworks roar and the shadows colour and change, suddenly close to tears.

“I loved you once…”

His face is close to mine. His arm squeezes my waist as he helps me along. “I know that too.”

We’re drawing close to humanity again. Locals who’ve wandered out from their homes to gather where there’s a view beyond the piers where the Thames glitters and the sky fizzes, churns, explodes. Mothers in slippers with scarves wrapped over their curlers are holding up their youngest for as long as their arms will last. The men have fags behind their ears and the stubble of a day off work peppering their chins. Their collars are off and many are in vests, flabby arms showing tattoos: M
UM.
I
RIS.
W
EST
H
AM
. They
ohh
and
ahh
as the sky crackles and the colours shine in gutters and ignite the myriad panes of warehouse windows. No one notices John Arthur as he and I slip between them. He’s just a slight middle-aged man helping his invalid father.

Beyond, a little away from the crowd where the river can no longer be seen, some tea chests lie heaped beside a wall where a few loose posters, grainy and grey, cling like bats. L
ONDON,
C
APITAL
O
F
E
MPIRE.
O
RIENT
L
INE.
V
ISIT
J
AMAICA
. I slump down even though the air is sour here with the stink of dog excrement that pervades all such places and the wood is wet. John Arthur sits beside me. In shadow, he risks taking off his hat, and gestures towards the crowd. “They all seem so happy,” he says. “A few drinks, a bed, food, some flesh to hold, some bloody fireworks…”

“They worship you.”

“Do they? You tell me, Griff. You’re the historian. Why would anyone follow John Arthur?”

“Because you offer them certainty.” I cradle my arm, one half of me wanting to draw closer to him, the other wishing I was far, far away. “Because you tell them whom to hate and love.”

“Is that all they want from him?” He looks at me challengingly then, does this ex-lover of mine who once used to gasp as he emptied himself into me—does this John Arthur. Something chill and terrible runs down my spine. A shock that’s almost the opposite of recognition. Now, powerless as I am, I’m sure that I was right to try to kill him.

“You don’t understand what it was like,” he says. “You weren’t in the War.”

“I thought I’d lost a friend.”

“We all lost friends—do you think
I
didn’t? But it’s not enough, is it? After what we went through. I thought it might be enough when I first visited Dublin after the victory. And then again when word came through from Rhodesia.” He shakes his head as sulphurous plumes of red smoke drift over London. “You don’t know what the War was like, Griff. No one did who wasn’t there…”

He’s leaning forward now, eyes fixed on nowhere as the flashes of light catch and die over the planes of his face, the silver of his hair, his elbows resting on his knees as he grips the rim of his hat, turning it over.

“It was all so easy when I enlisted,” he says. “There were men chatting with each other on the train as that took us down to this big park north of Birmingham. Suddenly we were all the same—bosses and labourers…

“We came just exactly as we were, Griff. Dressed in the clothes we’d arrived in at the station. We thought we’d all be given uniforms…” He chuckles. The fireworks spit and crack. “We were expecting those bloody uniforms for weeks. There were men dressed in their Sunday best doing bayonet practice with broom handles, or the overalls they’d worn at the factory. We slept in tents from the Crimea. But we were proud of what we were, Griff. We didn’t care what the rest of the world thought because we knew we were right…” He shakes his head.

“I was a rifleman, Griff. Third best shot in the training battalion when the Lee Enfields finally arrived. I even found that I wasn’t bad at boxing. Entered the competitions they organised to keep us busy, and was runner up without even trying. Perhaps that was the trick.

“We went to France in December as part of Kitchener’s First Army. The regular soldiers thought we were a joke, called us the greys because our khaki was the wrong shade. It itched like hell when it got wet—the stuff was made for horse blankets—and you could see us coming a mile off. South Staffordshires. C Company. 89th Battalion. I remember hearing the first sound of the big guns. Boom, boom. Even when it’s far off, Griff, it’s a bigger, deeper noise than you’d ever imagine. I didn’t know if it was theirs or ours, but the sound was somehow reassuring. I was a soldier at last—I was
there
…

“Don’t believe any of the bloody rubbish about King and Regiment and Country. We didn’t care who we were fighting. It could have been the French or the Hun or the Belgians—we hated them all. We hated them almost as much as we hated the cavalry waiting behind the lines and the staff officers and the pay corps. You fight, Griff, for the bloke who’s standing next to you. You put up with all the mud and the lice and the officers and the regimental bullshit for their sake. If you’re lucky, perhaps there’s someone back at home as well. But there was never anyone like that for me. I’m sorry, Griff—there simply wasn’t, and I ended up being grateful for that because I saw what happened to the others. The letters from your girl going on about some new bloke that got shorter and shorter and then stopped coming at all. How could we possibly tell any of you what it was like after that, Griff—you civilians? How could you ever know?”