In rhythm with the lowland, the road undulated gently, an edge of the tidal basin. Every so often a car passed. Redeemed, daring the bubble to burst, Vic breathed deeply. There was still no job for him at Everholt’s, but if Phyllis was with him he’d find something else. His old bag of tools was strapped to the side-car. And once everything was set to rights they could uproot and do well at the little house, war or no war. He could maybe find a bit of wallpapering, distempering, odd jobs. He could sell vacuum cleaners, superior gas masks. They could live off the land, and she’d be away from the temptations of London. …
The heat was soon freakish; their tyres slicked a little on the tar. At Horndon, women were covering a rick in a cornfield; he heard the sound of a threshing machine in the distance – that, and a flourish of church bells driven faintly on the wind. The Englishness touched him. Then came a run-down, rather desperate stretch. No one could miss the doorless car at the back of a farm cottage, or the unusable tractor abandoned in a field further on, the harrow still attached. Barns and sheds were patched with rusting corrugated iron, doubling for pig pens, degrading into chicken runs.
They overtook a traction engine. They passed a party of hikers, tousled lads who waved, and would soon be holding rifles, being likeliest for the call-up. All along the way, telegraph wires strung out the distances. In a paddock just before the main road a dispirited cart-horse stood in the heat haze. The notion of it troubled Vic like a presentiment, and he was instantly assailed by the truth of the matter, shocked by the situation he was in. His family, all on the same bike, began the slow climb into Laindon.
HE’D TELL HER NO. He sawed new gabling for the porch, climbed up on his dad’s old pair of steps, and nailed the strips carefully into place. From the roof he could see the river, wide and grey-blue in the distance. Behind him the clutter of cabins, holiday shanties, miniature follies and disused plots stretched over the roll of hills as far as the arterial road and along eastward to the village of Basildon. The locals called the settlement Slum Farm.
But Vic had always loved it. People had made dwellings out of anything, flotsam and thievings, offcuts and salvage. There were clinker-built homes, and boiler-made homes. There were railway carriages and self-assembly kits. Closest to his heart was the converted bus, six plots along the lane, where the Flatman family had lived with their ungovernable brood. Over the open top it had a crazy pitched roof with a stove-pipe sticking out, and barefaced roses groped and wrestled up the conductor’s spiral staircase.
Roses grew everywhere on the encampment. They straggled over cabin porches, trailed under tiny, curtained windows or were clustered upon brick chimney stacks. They made bold and prickly hedges inside the picket stakes. Unpruned, they burst right through the tumble-downs, the failures, scratching at roofing felt and asbestos fibre. Now hip-laden in the Indian summer, they rioted.
Vic climbed down to finish the glazing he’d pinned the previous weekend. He pressed a strip of putty against the pane, shaped it deftly to the joinery with his thumb, and looked over at Phyllis. She was singing a nursery rhyme to Jack, cuddling and kissing him. He caught his breath at the slope of her shoulders, her wrists, the whiteness of her legs. In his imagination he ran his hand all along the flesh from her sandal strap to the cuff of her shorts. She was his wife. He left his work and went to put his arm around her, touching her neck with his lips whenever the boy looked away. In her ear, he whispered, ‘After lunch, eh? Shall we? When he has his nap.’ But Jack was hungry, and Vic stood up to lay out the picnic.
And while they were eating he plucked up his courage, a grown man, and told her that the deal was out of the question. And to his surprise she merely nodded, and frowned, and looked away. Then he imagined it was all right.
Jack licked the jam out of his last sandwich until the red sweetness was the same as his tongue. Always his mother was beautiful when they came to the wooden house. He thought of the slips of complicated words that had just flown between his parents. ‘Twenty quid and my three, Vic. What about that for a night out?’ He held on to the shape of them.
Still tasting his bread, he wandered away from his parents and over towards the little house. By the window where his father had been working he put his hand in the putty tin. ‘The fact is, Phylly, the twenty’s out of the question. You must see that. I’ll have to go and see Tony and give it back.’ The plump, oil-smelling stuff was warm and smooth.
Then his father caught him, picked him up, kissed him too and swung him round. His head high up next to his dad’s, Jack gazed down at her, there, lying in the deck-chair. The putty lump was a feeling squeezed in his hand. She had frowned when they couldn’t keep it. A crease appeared in between her eyes, just to the left of centre, and Jack remembered the cut. On the floor at Tony’s place there had been red blots, as if large wet buttons had come slipping out of his mother’s head and fallen to the floor. And her cream blouse dripping red.
Jack watched her as she lay in the deck-chair, her face clear now, her eyes fallen shut. He struggled to get down, and next thing he was climbing on her, his knee on her stomach, his head down on her soft chest, looking up under the dark wisps of curl.
‘Christ, Vic. I thought you were looking after him.’
But Jack could see it, still there, a small line coming out of her hair and opening the top of her forehead with black and red. He wanted to point to it, put his finger in. Now she had her hand up to touch the wound, the ring on her finger a gleam of yellow, bright as sunshine. She had told him not to tell. He liked the gold, how one point of it shone.
Vic pulled his son off her. He said, cautiously, ‘If I can just stop up that bit where the rain came in over the door. Then we’ll need a couple of new panels for the sides because of that mould. I’ll bike over and order them. Churchill Johnson’s, that place at the station, they’ve got asbestos. Maybe next weekend.’
Phyllis straightened her blouse where it was tucked up. ‘You’re turning Tony down, then.’
‘You can’t seriously expect …’
She, too, seemed to check herself, as though she were fighting her impulses, as though she were really trying. ‘Look, Vic, it’s only me keeping us going, isn’t it? No call for you to be looking down your nose any more at me, or my family. Or my friends. D’you think I like it or what, standing up in that club making a spectacle of myself? Those men, Victor. They do pass comments. If it wasn’t for Tony … You do respect me, don’t you?’
‘I have to give it back, Phyllis. I can’t get involved in all that, no matter how much we need it. …’ He looked away.
‘You say you love me, Vic.’
‘I do love you.’
‘Do you, though? You don’t. You don’t love me at all.’
He sighed and turned back to her. ‘Look, darling. A bloke like me has to stick in the lee of the law. That’s loving, isn’t it? That’s for you.’
‘You don’t want me. If you loved me you’d do what it takes. You think I’ve got no morals, don’t you? How could I have, where I come from? Down by the docks. That’s what you think. Well, love means more than lying down and taking it, Victor. It’s more than, Yes boss, No boss, Thanks for the sack, boss. A man would be on my side but you never are.’
‘I’d had too much to drink, for God’s sake. I want …’
‘I know exactly what you want.’
‘What do I want?’ he responded crossly. ‘You tell me what I want. Tell me.’ Then he sensed the trap he’d fallen into. ‘No … Phyllis.’
But a line had been crossed. ‘You just want to get rid of me, don’t you? You want me dead.’
VIC FELT EACH colour of the world click off as the frame changed. It was always so sudden, and he always walked in. He knew every detail of what had to come next – and on, and on, until the man in him broke. Her eyes were already glazed