What Was Promised (6 page)

He remembers Onchan Camp. The boarding house room he shared with a procession of other men – Jews, Hungarians, Italians. The beauty of the view from their window across the island. Douglas town in the rain, or the castle in the sun, and always the green or gold of gorse – even, on clear days, a hint of Port Erin, where the women’s camps were, and where – the Italians said so – the Finns swam naked in the sea.

He remembers leaving Dora. They’d been in England six months. Dora, pregnant, nineteen years old, weeping on the platform. The night train to Lancashire. The transit camp, two thousand men, with twenty buckets and no chairs. Then Liverpool, the crossing, the Steam Packet heading into a storm, all of them sick or sleeping, one or the other, taking turns. And when they came into Douglas he woke, and the first thing he saw was the flag of Man, the triskelion, its three legs so like a swastika that for a wild moment he thought he’d been betrayed. He thought he’d been given back into the hands of the enemy.

It was morning, and the sky was white. The soldiers lined them up like soldiers, all along the wet quay, the whole crazy muddle of them – the London waiters, the Oxford professors, the buskers, tramps and vicars, and Ferracci, the opera singer, and the Germans and the Jews, and the man who had a Scotty dog, and the man who had brought a fishing rod – and with sixty others Solly was led up to Onchan, on the cliffs above the town. They kept him until Onchan closed, then sent him on to Mooragh.

Dora, weeping on the platform. That stayed with him a long time: then it was lost to him for years. It was as if he’d worn away a snapshot kept in a wallet. That was harder. To not remember Dora weeping was worse than remembering.

It won’t be long
, he said to her. He didn’t know it was a lie. In the end it was five years. The war for him was nothing but the view from the cliffs of Onchan. It was all echoes and distances. The long draw of ships’ horns, the
ha-ha-
ing of gulls, the echo of a football struck by men wasting their years in play, the rumours of other men killing and killed far away. The dust-pocked newsreels of Hitler, the crowds rising to his gesture like flowers to the light. The disbelieving whispers of things still inconceivable.

And Dora’s war? Well, he’ll never know. He knows what she has told him, which is only what can be fitted into words. He knows they lost the child, a boy, and that they’ll never have another. He knows how desperate her hungers have become for the things she lacks most – not food or clothes, or friends or neighbours, but parents and children; for family, above and below and around her. He knows he wasn’t there when it mattered most, and that, returning to vacancy, he is no longer enough to fill it. The Dora he left weeping isn’t the Dora he came back to. What else can he know?

Solly puts the postcard back. He turns off the wireless.

*

Some said “no” and some said “yes”. Some said they could but go and see, and anything was better than little supper, less breakfast, and wet clothes all the night. Others said: “These parts are none too well known, and are too near the mountains. Travellers seldom come this way now. The old maps are no use: things have changed for the worse and the road is unguarded . . .”

Someone is calling Jem Malcolm’s name. He’s so deep in his book that at first the voice seems miles away, and when his head comes up he blinks like a boy coming awake.

‘Jem,’ he hears, ‘Je-em,’ his name drawn out into a singsong.

It’s Floss, and he smiles, listening: he knows exactly where she is. She’s in the depot yard – which used to be a market square – by the old market arcades, where the council keep concrete and timber and the spindlemakers is. If you stand just there and call just right the square works like a megaphone. Floss found it out with him. It’s wizard.

‘Jem, where
are
you? I know you’re there. Are you there, Jem, are you? Jem!’

Soon some old lady will come out and ask what all the racket is. Floss Lockhart, she’ll say, I see you down there, yelling. We’ll have no more of that today. This is a nice neighbourhood. You go lark about somewhere else.

Doesn’t he want to lark with Floss? Oh, he does, but the book won’t let him go. If he stops reading now something might happen to it. A thief might find his hiding place. A bomb might find Columbia Road, like the one that blew up Japan. The book and everything will burn with the power of the sun, and then he’ll never finish it.

His specs are slipping. He’ll have the National Health 524 Contours soon: these are just market hand-me-downs. He’s tried the 524 Contours. They hurt, but that was because they weren’t properly prescribed. His mum said they looked intelligent. She’s going to queue for them all hours.

Jem pushes the hand-me-downs back up. He wrinkles his nose to keep them there. His gaze drifts to the pages.

They asked him where he was making for, and he answered: “You are come to the very edge of the Wild, as some of you may know. Hidden somewhere ahead of us is the fair valley of Rivendell where Elrond lives in the Last Homely House. I sent a message by my friends, and we are expected.”

Jem bows like a monk over scripture. His knees are capped with fine white dust; but he likes the smell up here, which is of ancient wood and stone, and soap suds and all clean things.

This is his best hiding place. Once upon a time there was a laundry below him, but it was forsaken long ago. No one comes up this way any more – only sometimes, on days off, Dad and Mr Lazarus. But they don’t know the hiding place. All they notice is their game.

Mr Lazarus has prescribed specs, but they’re not the 524 Contours.

‘
Jem
,’ Floss says one more time, but she’s losing steam, she’ll give up soon and look for someone else to play with.

He gnaws his lip and reads faster. He’d really like to go with Floss, but he has to get to Rivendell. It’s dim in the hiding place, though, the sun gets tired creeping in the gaps where the slates have gone, and outside it’s so bright and warm . . . and if he goes with Floss he can make up his own stories. He could make up one like this. Not with a sissy hobbit – Floss won’t like that – Jem doesn’t like the hobbit either – but with dark trees and waterfalls, and the great heavy faces of trolls.

Jem likes telling Floss stories. He makes them up ahead of time. She likes the frightening ones best, so he’s got good at frightening. Stories like the German airman. Floss was all for that. No one listens to Jem like Floss. He loves the look she gets when she believes in him.

Floss will believe most anything.

Sometimes she worries him. Jem worries about lots of things, but not all worries are the same. The worrying he does for Uncle Neville gets into him like a London winter, a bone-deep cold that makes him shiver; but the worry he has about the bombs is a heat so fierce it’s hard to breathe, and those he has for himself are mostly furtive things, little noiseless creatures that infest all his imaginings, his thoughts and stories and dreams.

With Floss it’s like a tide. The worry for her comes and goes. Sometimes it swells up so high that fear is what it really is . . . she frightens him, then, like her father, Mr Lockhart, whose face is pulled down on one side, as if the wind changed on a game, and who looks at Jem so hard but never says a word to him. And then the worry for Floss will ebb away again. They’ll be having a lark and Jem will wonder what he ever worried for.

Sometimes he doesn’t understand her. She’ll do something that makes no sense, and after Jem will ask her why, and Floss will say,
Oh Jem, you don’t understand
. But he knows he doesn’t understand – that’s why he asks her
why
. But Floss says he doesn’t understand, as if that
is
the answer. And then they just go round in circles.

She’s pretty. Jem thinks so. Most of the time it doesn’t matter and then sometimes nothing else does. People will give her things just because she looks that way. Once a lady in Bacon Street bought her an ice – and one for Jem (
She thinks you’re pretty too,
Floss said) – and once a man in a Homburg offered her a ticket to the Electric Theatre. But Floss said,
What about my friend
? And the man shook his head at Jem, and Floss said,
I don’t want to, then. And I think you’re rude. And I don’t talk to strangers
.

But Floss,
Jem said, after,
you did.

Other times she just gets wild. Then their games go bad. It always comes up out of nothing. It doesn’t give Jem time to think. It’s only later that he stops and knows he’s gone astray.

One time they made a girl give them her hat and money. It was only farthings. Floss told her that Jem was Dick Turpin, the famous boxer and highwayman. It was her money or her life. Floss wore the hat halfway home, then threw it in an alley. She said it had nits. Another time, in Kingsland Waste, she stole a rubberstamp. She nicked it from Mr Instance, the rubberstamp engraver with the wart. She hid it in her mouth. After they got away she spat it into Jem’s hand and her tongue was blue. The stamp said
Henry Wiltshire, Esq., Farrier, 9b Lavender Walk
–
but backwards, like a secret message in a secret agent story.

‘Klaw Redneval,’ Jem whispers. It would be a good name for a troll.

‘I’m going, then!’ Floss yells. ‘I’ll go to Long Debris without you!’

He listens to her leave. He chews his lip and turns a page. At first he still thinks of her – wishes he could be with her – but soon Jem is gone, too. He is in other times and worlds. Nothing – not Floss or Uncle Neville or the worry of the bombs – can ever reach him there.

There were many paths that led up into those mountains, and many passes over them. But most of the paths were cheats and deceptions and lead nowhere or to bad ends; and most of the passes were infested by evil things and dreadful dangers.

*

Michael is receiving goods. Noakes’s man unloads the pots and together they haul them inside.

He doesn’t talk much, this man. On Saturdays he brings potted plants. On Sundays he comes back with cut flowers and blooms, and once a month – more, when trade’s brisk – the shaving goods Michael shifts six days a week in the Roman Road. Nine loads a month, and hardly a word. Sometimes they share cigarettes, but even that’s more smoke than talk. The man could speak Latin at home for all Michael knows or cares.

Michael approves of him.

One of these days he won’t need Noakes, his dour man or his neat-handed boys. He’ll buy as he wishes and earn for himself. He’s a fellow of his own already – not that Noakes will hear of that – and if one man will obey, why not others? For now he’ll do as the masterman asks, but it grates on him to serve, and to serve a man like Cyril Noakes – thick wits, small mind, no more thought than where the next meal’s coming from –

Michael’s patience is wearing thin, and under the thinning patience lies the raw flesh of his pride. Still, all things in good time. He’ll move on in the world. He’ll be his own master one day. It can’t come soon enough.

He goes back out to the truck, brings in the last rose columbine – the pot tucked under one arm, his weight on the horse-head stick – then rests. He’s short of room. The lock-up is already crowded with greenery and hard goods – straight and safety razors, leather strops and honing stones – and he’ll need a cool spot for the blooms. The pots will sell or they won’t, but it’s the flowers that draw the crowds, the blooms which are the dazzlers.

He stretches – his shoulders crack; the pots are awkward work for him – and sees his younger one. She’s watering the lavenders, half hidden in the greenery. She whispers as she waters, and smiles as she whispers.

What is it she’s whispering? Who does she think she’s whispering to? It’s time Mary put a stop to that. The child has a head on her shoulders but too many fancies in it. What age is she now? Too old for make-believe. As she waters each lavender she hunkers down, nuzzling into the green, like a cat into a hand.

When Michael was Iris’s age he dined with silver at his father’s table.

He thinks, again, of Miss Milne’s knife. It’s not much to be dwelling on. It was only a little thing. Still, he liked the work. The scales good pearl throughout, well cut. No piqué, no carvings of grapes or hunting hounds, no excess: only the silver cartouche with the owner’s name engraved on it. All skill and little showmanship, the one proud flourish hidden along the flat of the blade: a wild cornucopia of vines and passion flowers. Michael found that forgivable. Pride’s no sin when work’s well done.

The marks were hard to read, but he has a knack for them; even his father would give him that. On Miss Milne’s knife they were worn thin – the blade being pure soft silver, the better to resist the tarnish – but the insignia was Aaron Hadfield’s, and the work maybe Hadfield’s own: a name worth something in itself, and the piece more than a century old, made in Sheffield, the City of Steel.

It reminded him of Birmingham, that knife. The Lockhart workshop in the Jewellers’ Quarter. The voices of his father and Graeme and Christy, before the war, his brothers’ banter and their father’s songs rising and falling as they worked together. The life which he was meant to have and which he has been cut off from.

He would have kept it, if he could – the knife – but it came through Noakes’s boys, not Michael’s private man. Word might have got back. It’s nice work, not that Noakes will know it. Noakes will let it go for a song. Noakes wouldn’t know nice work if you walked up and sheathed it in his throat.