Then she whispered something, and the words confused him. One light bulb hung from the ceiling, and the yellow altered her skin. The bulb filled the wall with her outline.
She put on her girdle, and then a slip; only then did she shoo him away for looking. He listened outside her door. Her stockings brushed, one against the other, her dress faintly slithered. The knock on the boards was her heels as she turned herself about in front of the mirror, and when the handle rattled he stepped back against the banisters. She came out tense; he could feel the fierceness in her body. She spoke to his father in the kitchen, demanding his attention, until there was another flare-up and suddenly she was leaving again.
Down in the shop the dusty display of weighing scales was lit only from the stairs. The faces of the machines were like shadowy fish eyes. In the dark his mother kept her hand on the catch and the door was half open. Jack was cold for a long time even though he was four, now. When they all came back up, the kitchen was full of steam and the potatoes had boiled dry. His father laughed as he always did, and made a joke; but at last there was the sound of a motor bike outside in the street, and Jack remembered the words she’d used: Tony Rice was taking his father up Waltham to do the job.
Tony wore a belted mac with the collar raised. He carried his goggles in his hand as he came up the stairs. Behind him there was another man, fat and red-faced, who was unslinging the large satchel he had over his shoulder. Jack knew his name; it was Arthur Figgis.
‘Don’t mind if I bring Figgsy, do you?’
Arthur Figgis winked. Jack hated him. He tried to hide. His mother held him.
‘All right, Tony.’
‘Like a bad penny.’ Tony laughed. ‘All right, sonny? You’re up late. What’s the score? Couldn’t wait?’ He laughed at his rhyme. His smooth cheek hurt Jack in a way his father’s rough one didn’t. ‘You coming with us, Jacky boy? Eh? Coming to screw a bit of swag with your old man and his old mate?’
‘Tony. Keep it shut in front of the boy.’
‘What’s the matter, Phylly?’
But his father spoke. ‘Tony! I wasn’t expecting … It’s been so long. I thought …’
‘Thought I’d forgotten, did you, Rabbit?’
‘No, I … Well, yes, as a matter of fact. It can wait, can’t it? I’d no idea. Tonight of all nights. Of all the bad times.’
‘No time like the present. Eh, Figgsy?’
His father said, ‘Tony, I …’
‘Yes?’
Arthur Figgis said, ‘Deary me.’ He took his hand out of his coat. It had three heavy rings on it. Jack saw his father’s face was pale. His eyes had opened wide. He’d become smaller. Tony Rice always made his father look as though he were someone else, as though Jack too should call him Vic, or Warren, or Rabbit. Tony Rice had a glitter about him, like a decoration, with his wit and sharp voice.
‘Figgsy’s walking home, Vic. You’re coming with me.’
Jack’s father was a grown man wearing his apron at the stove and holding a fish-slice. His wife’s face had the faintest of smiles.
‘Are you coming, or what? Eh, Rabbit. I’m talking to you.’
‘Yes, Tony. I’m coming.’
‘Attaboy.’
Jack saw Vic Warren put a hand in his trouser pocket and give some coins to his mother. He saw him get his raincoat from the stand and go meekly out of the house behind the other two men. When Jack ran into the front room, past the decorated tree, his shoes clumped upon the floorboards. He watched the men from the window. Vic Warren on the back of the bike was hugging Tony Rice. It was the same person doubled. The motor bike roared, and the streak appeared from the headlight, a white finger pointing the way between the lightless gas lamps on either side of Ripple Road. Vic Warren had the large bag strung over his shoulder. Gone to fetch a rabbit skin. To wrap the baby bunting in.
The bike swung and roared until he lost all sense of where they were, or how long they’d been going. In every corner the back wheel threatened to go away from under him, and all Vic could think of was that his fingers would be frostbitten and useless when he hit the ground. Then, though the road was unlit, he recognised the fringes of Epping Forest. Old crookbeams rose up on either side of them. Their bare branch tops hooked and clawed at the streaked cloud. He clung to Tony Rice’s greatcoated body, sheltered his eyes from the iced and blinding wind behind the nape of Tony Rice’s neck. The band of the goggles made a blank strip in Tony Rice’s neat, clipped hair. The bike roared on.
They cornered sharply, leaning over together, and there were houses again, sedate black shapes, in the rushing air. Tony pointed a gauntletted hand at one of them, in a spacious row set back. It was large, detached; the bike’s exhaust note rattled at its moon-glazed windows. They passed some villas, timbered and countrified. Then round in a side road, they came to a halt. Tony killed the engine. They turned the bike and left it ready, kick-start cocked.
Vic’s guts churned. The side road ended in deeper darkness topped over by the shapes of trees. Tony led him into a path through the murk. Rime had formed on the iron kissing gate; it glistened. They scouted along, the two of them half crouched, feeling the leaf mould and fallen twigs through the soles of their shoes, picking their way by the flash of a torch beam. A branch creaked overhead in the trifling wind. Tony sniggered.
The way was overgrown. So long since the Coal Hole, one part of Vic had counted on Tony forgetting the deal. But another had prepared for this moment all along, dreading it, knowing with certainty that it would come to pass. It had lain between him and his wife. She’d sung at the club while he’d remained uninvited. Cash had appeared; he had no work. Though the cabin was finished he had little energy, for the child would wake in the night, twice, three times, and he would get up to calm him, or sit up with him. He and Phyllis camped out in the wastes of marriage – when she was at home. Nothing else would shift. There was only the continued ritual of her threats.
In the freezing glitter the forest hinted at its past. Twisted, silhouetted limbs took on a desperate, sardonic nature. The two men came to a fence. Five feet high, the larch strake tops wobbled underfoot. Vic landed in a vegetable patch. Among sturdy brassica stalks he stood ashamed. The tilth crunched minutely as his shoes broke the forming crust, and there rose a smell of cabbage rot. He caught the sweaty whiff of his own coat, heard his own heart. His stomach cramped him. He looked ahead and saw the black bulk of Tony ten paces further on, his breath steaming.
Vic was amazed at himself. His life was a fairy-tale. Only the bombs, when they came, would make sense of it. Who’d stolen him and brought him here – the apprentice boy, hoicked out of his grammar-school place at fourteen because of his dad’s lungs? That boy had once ridden off each morning wearing his too-manly flat cap, his jacket, waistcoat and clipped-up long trousers – as his dad had gone before him along the marsh track. Who’d picked him out – pedalling over the Roding at the Abbey Works, and then down the River Lane to the wharf to earn the family living?
As a young man he’d made cross-London voyages night after night on buses and tubes in hope of some engineering degree. He’d attended cheap concert halls, libraries, public lectures. Who had crippled his almost superhuman effort to lift himself out of the dockside backstreets?
His marriage had put a stop to it. Between lust and marriage there’d been Clarice. But he’d done the decent thing. And then Jack had been born. So why couldn’t Vic Warren be left alone to make his way, bring up his family? He reminded himself that it was because of the child he was here. It was Jack who was at stake. Phyllis couldn’t help herself. Nor was it the threats of violence from Tony, or Figgsy. Not really. It was what would happen to Jack, his son, if he didn’t go along with her.
My father wasn’t deluded. Phyllis had grown up the plaything of criminals. Now, unless Vic acted, the same