The Summer Isles (34 page)

“But I knew I had to do something more with this new life John Arthur had given me. Do you understand that, Griff? Living in England then was a nightmare and all I had was this man’s name. So I jumped on a cattle truck, took the train down to London. I’d never been there before, but thousands of men like me had found their way here because there was nowhere else to go. Many of them ended up starving. It was cold that winter and there was the flu epidemic. Each morning under the bridges and in the shop fronts, they’d be a few bodies extra that didn’t wake up. And the men in suits and the women in hats who’d never done anything but complain about the rationing just wrinkled their noses and stepped over them. I was lucky. I’d boxed in the army as Francis and there were always people prepared to pay to watch men hit each other. Queers like you, Griff, used to gasp and hold their hands over their faces as if they couldn’t bear to watch. And the fat cats and the Jews. Women wearing stoles who’d sit near the ring and then complain if they got flecks of blood on them. And the bright young things. And the colonels who were back from the War without a scratch, jingling with medals and a big pension. And the stupid socialists who wanted to rescue us all and turn us into smock-coated peasants. This country was in a sick mess in the twenties, Griff. It was a ghost country, it had lost itself.

“But I still remembered I was John Arthur. And I began to meet people who understood that there was nothing left in all the lies that had once kept this country afloat, people who knew that we would have to fight again if anything was ever going to change. The War was still going on, Griff. We soldiers had brought it back with us, just the way you civvies had feared. We still carried it in us—boom, boom, the sound of those guns—and the battle lines were drawn across the country for anyone who cared to notice. And the thing was, I found that if I spoke up and said what I thought, people would listen. If I shouted, they would become silent. If I raised my hand and pointed, they would go the way that I sent them. You saw what it was like—Griff, that night fifteen years ago. You saw how easy it is to
be
John Arthur. He was always waiting there. Always. This figure. Even now, he’s leading me on…”

John Arthur shakes his head. The big display is reaching its climax, and the stars have been extinguished by vast man-made clouds that drift amid green and red forests of splintered light. Even here, what must be two miles off, there’s a sweet-sour reek of gunpowder as the flares blossom overhead. He puts his trilby hat on, straightens it, checks that his coat collar is still up and offers me his hand again. “Come on, Griff, I’ll buy you that drink. It’s not far…”

I let him help me up, and as he does so, an elderly woman in a hairnet and a house coat glances back across the road from the watching crowd. Her hand goes up to her mouth for a moment, childlike in wonder. Could it really be
Him
over there? But no, no… It couldn’t be, could it? Relieved, she looks towards the crackling sky again.

John Arthur and I shuffle beside the docks and turn down a different side road where a dog is barking inside a house, terrified by the blaze and racket. He breathes easily beside me, helping me along as I wonder what I should say, what horrors I could tell him that he doesn’t already know, what questions should I ask. But it’s like all those letters that I never wrote to him, and the words I used to feel fading from my lips as I awoke. It’s like sitting out with the Cumbernalds in the green darkness of Penrhos Park and saying yes, yes, I once knew John Arthur. It’s like all the promises of love that, even in that brief, glorious time when Francis and I were alone in our turf-roofed cottage by the shore, were never given. It’s like my unwritten book. It’s like my whole life.

The sky is on fire now. The individual crackles and pocks and explosions have become one vast single roar. The houses look flash-lit, pushed back into skeletons of their real selves. I stumble as the tablets fade from my blood and renewed pain shoots through me. Our two linked shadows leap, burned and frozen ahead into the pavement, and it seems that we’re at the lip of a vast wave that will soon break through everything, dissolving, destroying. Then, with one last final bellow, the display ends and we move on through the East End, the ordinary East End of London in this night of the 21st of October 1940 beneath a bruised sky, in shocked, blotchy darkness.

A public house juts at the triangular meeting of the two streets facing towards the Mudchute and the Isle of Dogs. It’s a storey higher than the terraces that join it, but of the same grim make and age. The faded paint on the brickwork reads F
ULLERS
A
LES
. The sign hanging below is unilluminated, painted in darker colours. If I didn’t know this place already, I probably wouldn’t be able to make out the words C
OTTAGE
S
PRING
.

John Arthur lifts the latch and holds the door for me, and the room inside is smaller than the place I remember stumbling into after my violent tryst on that scrap of wasteground exactly fifteen years ago. But I recognise the shape of the counter that John Arthur had leapt onto, and the pattern of the mirror, now cracked, that lies behind it. I recognise the frosted windows engraved F
INE
B
EER
A
ND
A
LES
; there, even, is the fat pillar in the corner that I hid behind. This is still the Cottage Spring. It’s simply my memory that’s been twisted.

There’s a moment of bizarre normality as John Arthur takes off his hat, lowers his coat collar, walks up to the bar, rests his elbow, and turns to ask me what I’d like to drink. The barman is polishing a glass, two cloth-capped men are playing darts in a smoggy corner, a drunk is lounging asleep on a bench, whilst three underage lads sit nursing their pints, and an old man stares at his evening glass of stout. They’re some of the few who couldn’t be bothered to see tonight’s fireworks, or even watch them at home on telly, and it’s amusing to observe their reactions as they realise who’s just come in. There’s puzzlement, doubt—like that old woman by the docks in her house coat—followed by that standard British reluctance to acknowledge the unusual: and the desire to hold back, not to make a fuss.

“I’ll buy everyone their next round,” John Arthur says, looking around at them and speaking with that soft Yorkshire accent as the air drops into awe-struck silence: the very image of himself. “There aren’t
that
many of you here. I think I can afford it… What’ll it be?”

Suddenly, they’re all clustered around him, breathless and eager like children at a fete when Father Christmas finally arrives. Believing, not believing, wanting to get close, yet still too amazed to touch. And needing, needing. John Arthur signs beer mats with a stubby pencil used to keep the score at cribbage, he laughs and shares a joke. He’s really John Arthur now, and these are his people. Even the ones who’d never ever have voted for him can’t help but want to share the dream when it’s this close. The old man downs the rest of his stout, spilling most of it down his shirt, and quavers that he’d like another. The lads ask for halves of ginger beer, which John Arthur laughingly changes to the pints of Fullers’ that they were on before. The drunk remains asleep on the bench in the corner; what a joke the world will have on
him
in the morning…

Outside, word of who’s here must have got out; there are children’s and women’s voices, and the shadows of raised hands and heads shift across the long frosted windows. Pleading fingers squeal over the panes. And I’m just standing here, tired and in pain. Drained of hope. Drained of anger. I shuffle closer to that pillar at the end of the bar, in need once more of its reassuring anonymity. If I could get behind it, it’s not far to the door, and even on a night such as this there must be buses and taxis that would take me back to central London; I could escape. John Arthur’s forgotten about me anyway.
These
are his people.
This
is where he belongs. I’m just a name from the past that he couldn’t remember well enough to get right when he made his first speech to the Parliament that he later dissolved. A phone begins to ring at the back of the pub, seemingly unanswered. Somewhere, a car engine is racing.

Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps there had to be a John Arthur, and I was wasting my time imagining that I could ever change anything. Perhaps if that bullet had bit closer and Francis Eveleigh really had bled out his life at the Somme, some other solider would have risen to stand feared and adored in this East End pub, and a fool like me might be too confused and afraid to love or hate him.

The voices of the men who stand around John Arthur are easier now. Their postures have grown more relaxed. Yes, they realise, he really is just as everyone says he is; an ordinary bloke you could share a drink with. This will be a story they’ll tell to their grandchildren in the long days ahead when the squares of striped lawn turn ever greener and the roads entwine and the suburbs marry in playgrounds and clean neat streets where everything ugly and unwanted has been destroyed.

John Arthur looks over from the men clustered around him as the roar of an approaching car fills the street. He seems to notice me now almost as he did all those years ago when I stood amid those angry men. It’s as if nothing has ever changed. But this time, somehow, his smile is more genuine, and as he walks over with his arms a little apart, saying, “Griff, what
am
I doing, I haven’t even got you that drink…?” I can’t help but smile back.

There comes a sharp sound of banging, and the thought passes, too quickly to be fully-formed, that the fireworks have resumed, or that some of the lads outside are tossing firecrackers. Then, one by one, the frosted windows of the Cottage Spring begin to fall in. They burst into shining veils, and splinters of wood fly out and the room explodes in a reflecting spray of shattered bottles and collapsing mirrors. The tide sweeps left to right towards me, tearing the world apart. The men gathered at the bar spin around, are jerked, thrown back, lifted. The glass is like a great watery tide, rolling and rising, incredibly immense. John Arthur pirouettes as the last window explodes. His hands spin out and the shining air flowers silver and red around him, then the rain of glass sweeps on and the pillar I’m beside splatters and streams. Then everything stops and there’s sudden, terrible silence, filling slowly with a weeping haze of dust, the reek of spilled beer and whisky, the musical tinkling of the last splinters of glass.

After that, as I look down at this shattered place and these broken dolls lying on the crimsoned linoleum, there comes a sudden crash as the last of the big mirrors falls, and faint, at the very edge of everything, too frail as yet to be really believed, are the sounds of crying, fumbling, moaning, weeping. Then the roar, once again, of that car. Gears smash as it turns, and I wait for more bullets as the agitated air swirls, but instead something large and metallic flies through the gaping windows. A thick, round-cornered box with a single wire protruding, it hits an upended table with a crack and skids hissing through the wet sparkling wreckage to settle beside Francis’s body.

The car pulls away with a screech of tyres before everything breaks into darkness.

E
VERY MORNING NOW, I
awake not knowing who or where I am; filled with a vague sense of horror and helplessness. I do not even know if I am human, or have any real identity of my own. This, I decide, is how a ghost must feel—what it must be like to haunt or be haunted. But a ghost wouldn’t have these twisted limbs. A ghost wouldn’t taste soil in its mouth. A ghost wouldn’t have this pain.

For a moment then, I am under the rubble again and Francis is beside me. His hand is in mine, and flutters like an insect in the moment that he dies. My life seems to float out in both directions from that point. It’s like unwrapping a complex present; tearing away at silvery ribbons of the future and the past, although I know that it’s all just some trick—a party game—and that I will be left clutching nothing but tangled paper, empty air.

I ungum my eyes and look out at the world, accepting the strange fact of my continued existence. But it remains a slow process even though this beamed ceiling is familiar to me; fraught with a sense of aftermath, a feeling that another dreadful discovery still lurks amid the gaudy wrapping of my life. I am Brook, yes, I am Geoffrey Brook. I am a lecturer, a teacher—in fact, a true Professor of History now. And Oxford, yes, Oxford. I live in these college rooms, just as I have done for many years. Once, as a preference, I used to love men. Now I seem to love no one, although I sense from the warmth of this bed and the play of firelight over this ceiling that I am encased in cottony layers of help, goodwill, money. By twists and turns that my mind cannot yet fully encompass, I have been close to death. I’m still close to it now. It hangs there with the scent of applewood smoke and old stone and Mansion House floor polish and cut flowers; it whispers to me in the thinning darkness. That, I suppose, is the final sour message within this package that I have been unwrapping.

I feel for my glass, my tablets, which lie a long way beyond the Chinese pheasants cavorting on my eiderdown. That journey accomplished, much water spilt and a few white pellets of bliss lost beneath the counterpane, I lie and wait for something else to happen. I sense that it is early, still dark outside my window, although a strange light seems to wash up from the quad and there is a chill to the air beyond the crackling heat of my fire. A clock ticks somewhere, and a beam creaks in sympathetic rhythm. Somewhere across the rooftops and towers, a bell, distant yet clear, begins to chime the hours. The sound is sharp, bright as freshly cast metal as I try to count each stroke before time gets lost in the bubbling maze of my breath and my heartbeat, the welling memories, the ebb and flow of pain. When silence and equilibrium return, I shuffle inch by inch across the constricting pull of the sheets until my feet slide off the edge of the bed and the top of my body, in compensation, is forced to rise. I am old, I think. I am old. Perhaps that is the last shock I have been waiting for.