Vic looked along the road towards the East Street traffic lights. Turn left, and, from Barking straight through the metropolis to Brentford in the West, terrace followed terrace for twenty unbroken miles. London was a working-class concentration – of window-cleaners and war cripples, clerks and typists, slaveys who lived in, skivvies who lived out, shopkeepers, journeymen. London was full, in fact, of people just like himself. Why, then, had he been singled out? His head pounded. Having slept, he wasn’t sure now which ought to trouble him more, the girl or the money. The girl in the night-club had reminded him of someone he should have forgotten, and Tony had seen him kissing her. He tried to rationalise: they’d all been in high spirits, he’d drunk too much. My father was not well, but his illness was more than just a hangover. He really was cracking up.
He thought of his own parent and the little place in the country to which he’d so grandly invited Tony. It did exist. Before 1914, Percy Warren, my grandfather, worked in the same yard as Vic, at Creekmouth where they repaired the Thames barges and wooden lighters. Blunt, working craft, the staple of the river trade, they required the attentions of blunt men who knew the limits of their materials and could knock the grimy vessels back into shape.
Perce was the kind who could build a durable cabin, and did – in the countryside miles downriver, while the family watched and picnicked. That was in the one acre of England where you could buy a square inch of land – never mind that it was an Essex farmer’s private racket. When most working men had scant hope of owning much at all, the tiny wooden house was something unique, a triumph, a place for holidays and sunny Georgian Sundays.
Perce had got a roof on, and glazed the windows, and would have begun decorating the inside if the Great War hadn’t broken out. At Loos, he inhaled several chestfuls of gas, British, when it characteristically blew back on them. At home in East Ham he was convalescent. Vic remembered the pair of them, himself and his dad, playing together, despite the cane that lived on top of the bedroom wardrobe. Like mischievous children they avoided the mother’s bitter tongue.
Most particularly he remembered all three of them at weekends, the little party going out on the train to the wooden house, where the mending rifleman pottered about with his hammer and nails. That was his true father, who loved him; and not the tetchy, shell-shocked side of the man. Vic held the good face of his dad like a precious coin kept always mounted one way. It was himself who was the ‘wrong’un’. He couldn’t stay the course. A marriage forced, a heart elsewhere, a perfectly good trade thrown away. Look, now, how he’d spoilt everything again.
He left the window-pane and sat for an hour, and then another, playing ludo with Jack, trying to keep his eyes open and his craziness at bay. The child insisted on the game only to sabotage it. Over Jack’s breakfast leavings, Vic read him the story of the tinder-box; and at the bad end of a bad tale refused to begin again. On the Somme in 1916, Perce got a machine-gun slug that grazed the lung before passing clean through, and he came home for the second time from France. Vic was five.
A chapel bell started in one of the neighbouring streets, a monotonous clang; and Jack played up until he got slapped. His cries threatened to wake Phyllis and the Wilmots downstairs. Vic issued more threats, sick at the trap of having to back them up. During the start of the German May offensive, 1918, Perce was gassed on the skin. The shell landed right next to him on the earth parapet, tore open his uniform and splashed raw mustard compound on to it, while the fumes were sucked the other way along the trench. The contact raised a tented blister down the whole of his side – which healed in a month and spared him once again to return home alive. Vic’s father, Perce, had character.
JACK UPSET HIS DRINK. There was no change of clothes. Vic sponged him off, grateful for the continuing warm weather. At half past nine, able to bear neither his son’s company nor his own, he risked making Phyllis tea. Jack fidgeted round her in the bed, plucking at her nightdress. But she was laughing awake. ‘I did it, Vic, didn’t I.’
The room with its heavy wardrobe and bilious walls lightened suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘You were marvellous.’ He sat down on his side of the mattress.
‘And we had a good night out on it, didn’t we? Draw the curtains, Vic.’
He obeyed, still wary, afraid his guilt would show.
A prospect of hot slates and bright sky washed in as she lifted her hand to her head. ‘Christ, I’ve got a bloody hangover.’
‘Mummy!’
‘Splitting.’ The cut looked sore and crusted, the two laps of skin heaping on either side the neat gash.
Jack pointed: ‘That’s a hangover!’
A frown fleeted across her brow. She touched the place. ‘Oh, that. No, it isn’t. When you drink too much. Like Dad.’ Her eyes were alight. She teased Vic amiably.
Relieved, he went and bustled about, heating the kettle again, finding the scissors and some lint, bringing a pudding basin of hot water from the kitchen. He settled it down beside her. With his one hand he smoothed her hair back, cradling the head on to the pillow. With the other, he hooked the warm lint out in the scissor blades and stroked it gently across the place. Her head felt small and still. There was the warm female smell of her, the damaged female skin. ‘This should help.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘You know, we ought really to get you to hospital. It ought to be stitched.’
She flared. ‘I don’t want someone else touching me. I don’t want to think about it.’ The emotion subsided. ‘Anyway, they’ll reckon you did it, won’t they?’ Her mouth softened and she smiled up at him. ‘Won’t show under my hair. What’s a war if no one gets wounded? More important to get out to the country. Work on the cabin. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you think. You don’t want to be hanging about on my account, do you, Vic?’
‘Well …’
‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘If you’re sure. There.’ He finished with the lint.
‘Now we’ve got a bit more cash.’ Her gaze followed him as he stood to go.
He paused at the door. She was genuinely compliant. Her affection confused him, and suddenly the agreement with Tony presented itself in a new light. Phyllis hadn’t seen the kiss, wouldn’t trouble about it if she had; it was the deal that held power with her. That alone had been the test, the chance to prove himself. What she’d really needed all along was for him to measure up, to show he cared for her. She wanted the gesture – no one would seriously hold him to it.
How grateful he was. Clarice was just infatuation. Some of the sunlight of the day filled his heart and he believed he’d broken through with his wife. There was a chance; the boy was provided for. And Tony, in the only way he knew, had been trying to help.
Soon, Phyllis was behind him on the tandem. In their shorts and shirt tops, they cut a dash in the Barking back streets. Bareheaded, healthy as Germans, they were a sculpture of modern life, threading through to the Longbridge Road with Jack in the miniature side-car they’d bought when he was a baby, holding his miniature fingers up against the breeze. Vic was taking care of his wife and child. Further out they’d be bomb safe – if it came.
Through Hornchurch and on into Upminster they steered the accustomed route. Householders were piling more sandbags, still installing Andersen shelters, digging slit trenches across prized front lawns. Under the Cranham railway bridge scuffed kerb sides gave way to verges where weed bursts frayed. He was excited, almost aroused. When he glanced down he could see her pretty feet in the toe-clips.
Soon enough, real country appeared, bright as a poster. The shorn fields stretched away, dark edged, flawless. Dotted in them here and there the last stooks were browned by the fine weather. Soon, too, solitary old oaks held ground in pastures, with gangs