Читать книгу: «No Man’s Land», страница 2

An attendant approached them, asking if they wanted to sit down, and his enquiry broke the spell.

‘I’m sorry, Adam. I hope I didn’t frighten you,’ Daniel said as they began to walk home through the gas-lit streets. ‘I forget how young you are sometimes.’

‘I’m not young. I’m old enough to go to school,’ said Adam.

‘So you are. So you are,’ said Daniel with a smile, as if realizing the fact for the first time. ‘Well, we shall have to see about that, shan’t we?’

School expanded Adam’s horizons. Beyond his street, beyond his tiny terraced house with the small patch of ground at the back where his father dug at the hard sooty soil with a broken spade and tried to raise shrivelled vegetables under his mother’s dripping washing line. Into a new world.

Lilian gave her son a St Christopher medal to wear around his neck because he would be a traveller now, walking to school and back with his slate hung by a string over his shoulder. And she rubbed ointment into his head each morning to stop the lice coming. It smelt of sarsaparilla and Adam hated it, but it was better than being singled out and sent home when Matron ran her steel comb hard through the children’s hair on her tours of inspection.

School was hot with combustion stoves where the children were allowed to warm their flasks of tea in the morning, and noisy with the sound of their coughing as they tried in vain to expel the coke fumes that they breathed down into their chests. All day the windows of the schoolroom were misted over with the humidity and the children drew faces in the fog. Some of them were unflattering pictures of Old Beaky, the first-form teacher, who was too short-sighted to see what they were doing. He had a tassel on his mortar board that reminded Adam of the organ grinder’s monkey. It made Adam laugh, and, not for the first time or the last, his inability to control his mirth got him into trouble. Beaky needed to make an example and he punished Adam by shutting him up in the cellar. It was dark and wet and there was a creature, maybe a rat, rustling somewhere, and Adam was frightened. And when his father found out what had happened, he went with Adam to the school and shouted at Beaky who backed away into a corner of the classroom with his hat and tassel wobbling ridiculously on top of his old bald head.

After that school was better. Beaky taught his class about the Empire on which the sun never set and showed them a map of the world covered with pink. The pink was British and London where they were was the capital, the centre of everything. Sometimes the children sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and threw their pens up into the air at the climax so that the nibs stuck in the ceiling.

Adam had boots too now, replacing the leaking, broken shoes that he had worn through the long winter. Just as in previous years, the building trade had picked up with the coming of warmer weather and his father was back in regular work. His mother coughed less and they had meat to eat on Sundays, and could go to the eel pie shop up on the High Street in the evenings where they wrapped the food in sheets from the penny newspapers which Adam read as he ate: accounts of stabbings and poisonings that made him shiver even as the hot food warmed his insides.

In the summer the travelling fair came to Islington and encamped on Highbury Fields. Adam went there every day, greedy to experience everything it had to offer. He rode swinging boats that went high up into the air, turning his stomach over when they fell, and the joy wheel that spun the riders round and round, whirling up their clothes so he could feast his eyes on the girls’ white drawers and bare pink knees. He ate hot chestnuts and black peas and wiggle waggle, a toffee that blackened his face and lips; and gazed entranced at the strongest man on earth, who was twice the size of the champion his father had boxed in the market square, and at the human beast from the jungle who snarled and roared in his cage just like a wild animal. There were real beasts too – an elephant that stood on its hind legs and a lion on a steel chain that looked sad and dejected, not lion-like at all. At night Adam left his bedroom window open so that he could hear the roaring of the menagerie coming to him across the rooftops.

Beyond the fairground, beyond Islington, London went on forever, the roads and the rails and the tramlines snaking outward like the Gorgon’s hair in the story his mother had told him about Perseus, the hero who had killed the monster by avoiding her eye, taking care only to look at her reflection in the face of his shining silver shield.

At weekends he helped the cabbies at Euston and King’s Cross, loading and unloading bags, and used the pennies he earned to ride the brightly painted trams as they swayed through the city streets – he liked it best in the evenings when the flashes from their overhead cables lit up the darkness like blue lightning.

Or he would sit on the open upper deck of the new motor buses feeling the wind and the rain on his face as he looked down at the people in the streets – people everywhere, poor and rich, idle and hurrying, no end to them. He wondered where he fitted in amongst them all, what his place might be in this mad rushing world that stopped for no one.

He was getting older. He gambled with his school friends for cigarette cards on the canal towpath. If the policeman caught them, he passed his hat round for a bribe, the price of turning a blind eye, but often they just threw it in the water and then dived in themselves, surfacing on the other side, laughing. Always laughter surging up through Adam like life, making it possible to forget for a moment about his troubles: his mother’s sickness, his father’s anger, the endless need for money.

Everything changed when Halley’s Comet came. That’s how Adam remembered it afterwards. He was transfixed by its brightness – the flash of dazzling light drawn across the still night sky. He knew it was only gas and dust and rock held together by gravity, but he couldn’t shake off the sense of foreboding that everyone seemed to feel as the comet approached its zenith. And when the King died it seemed as if the doomsayers might be right.

Adam went to Westminster with his parents to watch the funeral procession. Daniel had been going to stay at home but relented at the last moment. ‘I’m coming to watch, not to mourn,’ he said defiantly, refusing to put on his newly purchased best suit which Lilian had laid out for him, hoping for a change of mind. ‘He was king of his class, king of the one per cent who own half the wealth of this country and want to keep it that way,’ he added as he pulled on his working clothes and straightened his cloth cap.

‘Daniel, please don’t speak ill of the dead,’ said his long-suffering wife. She’d heard it all before – every statistic, every argument. Repeating them didn’t change anything.

‘He embodied them,’ Daniel went on, ignoring her. ‘I’ll say that much for him. Gorging his way through four huge meals a day while the rest of us were left to starve; filling his fat stomach with disgusting rich food. I’m surprised the old devil lived as long as he did.’

Something inside Lilian snapped. ‘Don’t come if you don’t want to. You’re not doing me any favours. In fact, to tell you the truth, I’d prefer it if you didn’t,’ she told her husband. She was soft-spoken by nature and her harsh tone startled him, making him look up. ‘You talk to me like I’m not here, like I don’t exist except as an audience for your politics. But I do exist. I’m flesh and blood and tears and pain and—’ She broke off, unable to go on as she strangled the cry in her throat, but the tears on her cheeks bore witness to the depth of her distress.

Out on the half-landing, Adam, uncomfortable in his tight Sunday suit, stood watching his parents’ argument through the open door of their bedroom, the bed between them covered with a cheap eiderdown, the dust motes in the air illuminated by the morning sun coming in through the open window, a cheap wooden cross the only ornament on the mildew-stained wall. The moment burnt into his memory like an X-ray photograph.

Daniel was white-faced, standing up straight as if he had been struck, searching for words. He wanted to go to his wife, beg her forgiveness, but he couldn’t, forced back by the intensity of her emotion.

‘I’m sorry, Lil,’ he said, stumbling over his words. ‘You’re right. I get carried away sometimes.’ He reached out his hand across the bed, but she ignored it, wiping her tears away instead with the back of her arm.

‘It’s for Adam’s sake I want to go,’ she said. ‘It’s history when the King of England dies and our son needs to see it. What you do is your own affair.’

Daniel nodded, accepting the reproof. He picked up his best suit and began to change his clothes.

In the streets everyone was in black. The women seemed like giant crows behind heavy crape veils. Everywhere was closed up, silent, except for the muffled tolling of the church bells and the monotonous tread of the mourners walking from all directions towards Westminster.

It was still early when they reached Hyde Park and they were able to work their way to the front of the crowd by the time the draped gun carriage with the King’s coffin came into view, followed immediately by a small dog, the King’s fox terrier, Caesar, led by a kilted Highland soldier. But that was the last homely touch. The new king, George, rode behind his father’s coffin at the front of a group of men dressed in wildly extravagant uniforms. The bright May sun reflected on their shining white-plumed helmets, half blinding Adam as they came abreast of where he was standing. And then for no apparent reason the cortège stopped – only for a moment or two but it was enough for the horseman closest to Adam to look down and catch the boy’s eye. Immediately Adam recognized him. The huge absurd upturned moustache was unmistakable – it was the German Kaiser. It was only a few seconds at most, but Adam had time to sense the man’s extraordinary rigidity – his frozen left arm, his chin thrust forward, his unblinking blue eyes; his concentration and self-absorption. He seemed mad somehow, capable of anything. And then, while Adam’s impression was still forming, he was gone – a memory of scarlet and silver and gold. And the marching soldiers and sailors followed – thousands and thousands of them following their dead king down the road that led to Paddington Station, while the drums beat and the bagpipes wailed.

It was as if the old order had passed away into the mist, and now everything was changing. It was an age of wonders: a Frenchman had flown a monoplane across the Channel; there was newsreel of it at the Picture Palace where Adam also went to watch the official motion picture of the King’s funeral, peering up at the grey-specked screen, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of himself in the crowd, a participant in history.

The world seemed to be turning faster, rushing towards some invisible climax. Motor cars were everywhere, blowing their horns, whipping up clouds of dust from the poorly surfaced roads, running down people who left the safety of the pavements. And above the noise the newspaper boys cried out their violent headlines about a country torn apart by strife: suffragettes breaking windows in Whitehall; the need for more dreadnoughts; riots and mayhem.

And strikes – that word was on everyone’s lips. Everywhere men were demanding better pay; better hours; better conditions. It was the time Daniel Raine had been waiting for: the dawn of a new age of social justice when workers would be fairly rewarded for their toil. He was the secretary of the local branch of the building workers’ union, which met in a small private room at the Cricketers, the pub on the corner of his street. Membership was up and meetings went on late into the night, taking all his attention. But Adam’s mother was unwell again and sometimes she sent Adam with messages to ask her husband to come home. Like other women on the street, she hated the pub, although in her case it was not for the usual reasons. Daniel had never been a drinker, wasting what little money they had on alcohol. Politics and the union were his addiction and the pub was where he was able to indulge his passion. Fired up with righteous zeal amid the dazzle of the gas lamps, he could forget about the rent arrears and the grocer’s unpaid bill. But Lilian couldn’t. She knew they couldn’t afford a strike – not with the colder weather coming. The winter before had been bad enough; and everyone said that this one would be worse. But her husband wouldn’t listen whenever she tried to talk to him about her worries: it was as if she didn’t exist.

She felt as if there were taut strings inside her body that were being tightened like piano wire until they were almost at breaking point. When she tried to exert herself she coughed and coughed, and had to grope her way up the rickety stairs to her bedroom where she lay completely still, listening to the sounds of the street below coming up to her through the open window like the noise of the sea, receding away from her on an ebb tide.

In the end it was a safety issue that lit the fuse. Daniel and his crew had been refurbishing a department store on the north side of Oxford Street. It was a large job needing to be done quickly so that the shop could reopen in time for the Christmas season, and the contractor had been cutting corners by using high ladders instead of scaffolding for painting the high ceilings. Some were so high that the painters had to work, balanced at ninety degrees almost on the top rung, and it wasn’t long before a man fell, suffering appalling injuries when he hit the ground. The union demanded proper scaffolding be installed and refused to carry on working until it had been put in place, and the employers responded by bringing in new labour. They saw the strike as an opportunity: times were hard and the strike-breakers were prepared to work for lower wages.

Daniel was tireless, toiling day and night to organize the picket lines that the blacklegs had to cross to go to work, but the strikers’ shouts and curses didn’t deter them. And as the refurbishment continued apace, the strikers’ anger grew. Police were called in to keep the peace and stood in a solid blue line between the two sides, their truncheons at the ready. The rain ran down their capes into pools on the ground, but they stood motionless, ignoring the strikers’ fury, indifferent to their frustration.

‘How long will this go on?’ Lilian asked her husband, confronting him in the hallway on one of his rare visits home.

I don’t know,’ he said. ‘As long as it takes. Until the owners see reason.’

‘And what if they don’t? What do we live on?’

‘The union will help.’

‘A few shillings,’ she said contemptuously. ‘That won’t pay the rent.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said wearily. He was dog-tired – all he wanted to do was sleep. ‘We’ll have to do our best, make sacrifices. We have justice on our side – it’s a cause worth fighting for.’

‘Worth starving for, worth dying for,’ she shot back, mimicking her husband’s phrase, echoing it back to him, invested with all the despair she felt inside.

‘It won’t come to that, Lil,’ he said, moving past her to go up the stairs. ‘I promise you it won’t.’

Another week passed and she’d had enough. There was nothing to eat in the house and no money to pay the tradesmen who came knocking at the door. Next it would be the bailiffs. Daniel talked about justice but there was no justice in leaving her alone and abandoning his family. For Adam’s sake he had to come home, give up the cause once and for all and start over; she would make him if she had to. Wrapping herself in her thin overcoat, she set out to find her husband.

It was getting towards evening and the strike-breakers were beginning to come out, keeping their heads down, hurrying between the lines of police to where the special buses laid on by the employers were waiting to take them away. Another week’s work done and Sunday, a day of rest, to look forward to, at home or in the snug at the public house with beer in their bellies and a warm fire in the hearth.

For the strikers it was too much. Enraged by their own impotence, hating the scabs who had stolen their jobs, imagining the pay jingling in the pockets of their enemies’ overalls, they held up their banners and pressed forward against the phalanx of police, trying to find a way through the human barrier. And when it stayed firm, they began to throw stones. It was what the police had been waiting for. At a whistled command from behind, their front rank charged forward, laying about them indiscriminately with their truncheons and trampling the strikers, who fell down under their blows.

Daniel was hit on the side of the head and lost consciousness. When he came to, he was lying on his back in the gutter; he opened his eyes and then closed them immediately as the darkening sky came hurtling down towards him. His head ached and his shoulder hurt, and he swallowed back hard on the vomit that had risen up into his throat, mixing with the blood in his mouth. Slowly, very slowly, he pushed himself up on to his knees, looking back down the road to where his workmates were fighting a losing battle with the police. Everything was blurred and confused: a melee of movement; a cacophony of noise – cries and shouts and something else, a beating, and someone running towards him, calling out his name. Someone he recognized – Lilian, his wife Lilian, with her beautiful blonde hair flying out behind her as it had when she was a girl and they had first met faraway by the sea – in another time, another century.

She was shouting: ‘No, no, no,’ running towards him and shouting: ‘No,’ and something else was running too – behind him where he could not see. The beating was the beating of hooves on the asphalt. In despair he held out his hands towards his wife – whether to stop her or to receive her he didn’t know. His back contracted, shrinking up, anticipating its own destruction. But miraculously the horse passed over him, leaving him unscathed and able in the next instant to watch his wife being crushed to death only a few feet in front of where he knelt.

Afterwards he crawled forward, indifferent to the madness all around him, and covered her body with his, even though he knew that he had failed her and that it was too late to redeem his fault.

Chapter Two

Daniel broke the news to his son in a flat, matter-of-fact way. He told him that he was responsible and that none of it would have happened if he’d been a better husband and a better father. And when Adam rushed away up the stairs he didn’t follow him but just went out the back door and stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets under the empty washing line, gazing up at the stars with dry, unblinking eyes.

Adam buried his face in his pillow, turning, winding the sheet around his body. And from outside he could hear a cry, human but inhuman, coming up from down below. Falling and rising on unconscious breath, it was the cry of a broken spirit, someone alive who could not bear to be alive. He heard it again five years later in the trenches in France on the night after battle and recognized it for what it was.

He slept, stupefied by exhaustion, and woke up in the early light and for a moment didn’t know. And when he did, he pulled on his clothes quickly. He had to keep moving. Across the landing, his father was asleep, lying face down on the bed in all his clothes. His shoes hung over the edge and Adam thought of untying them, but he couldn’t. It was his mother’s bedroom too and he couldn’t bear to go in there. In fact he couldn’t bear to be in the house. Downstairs her sewing machine and her needlework, her spectacles and her apron, all spoke of her continuity, but her coat missing from the stand by the door told a different story. She was gone; she wasn’t coming back. And each time he remembered, it was like the twist of a sharpened knife in a raw, open wound.

He went out into the street. But now he saw it with new eyes: it was a tawdry show, a mockery of life. Cabbage stalks and refuse in the gutter; horse manure; a dead cat. And the uncertain sympathy on people’s faces made him remember when all he wanted to do was forget. He walked on quickly but aimlessly – anywhere to get away, and found himself outside the church his mother used to take him to. He gazed up at the high tapering spire pointing like a compass needle towards heaven and wondered if it was a meaningless gesture. Was there anyone up there? If there was, the God in the clouds wasn’t a loving God as his mother had said. Adam knew better now: God was more cruel and vengeful than even Father Paul could imagine. Adam shook his fist at God and turned away.

He was hungry; famished. He wanted to die but he was desperate to eat. He had two pennies in his pocket and bought some fish and chips and ate them standing up, gulping down the food like an animal. Afterwards he felt sick, but he also felt as if he’d made a choice – to stay alive.

A day passed and then another and he went with his father to the inquest. He sat at the back, forgotten at the end of a long grey bench, while a police sergeant described in a monotonous voice what had happened to Adam’s mother ‘on the fateful day’, as he called it, cradling his helmet in his hands as he talked, as though it was a baby. The sergeant said he wasn’t the horseman who had crushed the deceased, but that he’d had an excellent view of all that had occurred: the woman had run forward, giving the rider no chance to take evasive action. And then Adam’s father spoke too, saying over and over again that it was his fault; that he was the one responsible: ‘If I’d been at home like Lilian wanted, then she’d be alive now and this would never have happened.’ But the coroner couldn’t punish him; he didn’t even want to. It was an accidental death, a tragedy, and he extended his sympathy to the family as he released the body to them for burial.

Daniel was a broken man but on one issue he was adamant: he wouldn’t allow his wife’s crushed and mutilated body to come home. There would be no wake, no laying out, no chance for Adam to see what had really happened to his mother. He rejected his neighbours’ sympathy and their offers of help, and invited no one to the funeral, so that there was just Daniel and Adam and Father Paul’s curate at the graveside as the undertakers’ men dropped the small plain pine coffin down into the pit that the parish sexton had excavated out of the hard ground. Father Paul had made it quite clear that he considered himself far too grand for what was little better than a pauper’s funeral.

Most of the other families on the street belonged to funeral clubs, contributing a penny or two a week to guarantee a proper send-off when their time came. And, left to her own devices, Lilian would have liked to have done the same, but Daniel had refused to allow it. He hated the idea that the only thing the poor saved for was their deaths, as if that was all they had to look forward to. He had wanted better for his family and now the cost of even the cheapest funeral that the undertaker had been able to offer had left him almost destitute.

Every day he walked the streets looking for work and came home in the evening empty-handed. The building trade was always slow in winter and his work with the union had marked him out as a troublemaker. He knew he was getting nowhere but being out was better than being at home, trapped inside with his memories, and he needed time to think, to come to terms with his grief.

He met Adam in the evenings, sharing inadequate meals beside the cold hearth. The silence between them had become tangible, almost developing into an estrangement. Daniel knew he was failing his son when the boy needed him most, but he also knew that he had nothing to give. Not yet, not until he had worked out what to do.

Each day he went further, walking to forget his hunger, wearing out his boots as he tramped past miles and miles of windswept brick terraces until he reached unnamed places where tarred fences studded with nails and ‘No Trespass’ boards stopped him going on into wastelands strewn with broken glass, tin cans and ash. And there, on the borders of nowhere, he finally made a decision and turned for home.

Early the next day he took the last of his money from behind the loose brick beside the fireplace and told his son to pack his bag. He already had his own ready, sitting beside the front door on top of the final unopened letter from the landlord giving him notice to quit.

‘Where are we going, Dad?’ asked Adam.

‘Somewhere you’ll be safe until I come back for you.’

‘Where, Dad?’ Adam repeated his question, even though he thought he knew the answer. They had no close friends or relations in London and so there was only one place where his father could leave him behind.

Daniel bit his lip, unable to look his son in the eye.

‘It’s the workhouse, isn’t it? That’s where you’re taking me. You’re going to abandon me, just like you abandoned my mother.’ Adam’s voice rose, fear and rage finally overcoming the deference he always showed towards his father.

‘I didn’t abandon your mother,’ Daniel said.

‘Yes, you did. You admitted it at the inquest. I heard you – you said that if you’d stayed at home Mother would still be alive. But instead you had to have your stupid strike. The strike was what you cared about, not me or Mother.’

Tears were streaming down Adam’s face but he didn’t notice them. His words slashed at his father like the lashes of a whip and Daniel involuntarily stepped back, angered by his son’s unexpected attack. The blood rushed to his head and he was about to assert his authority and put the boy in his place, but then at the last instant he bit back on his words. Some sixth sense made him realize the importance of the moment – it was a crossroads in their relationship that could either drive them further apart or perhaps bring them back together.

‘You’re right,’ said Daniel, forcing himself to speak slowly; choosing his words carefully. ‘I put my politics before my family and I was wrong. And I have paid a terrible price—’

‘We have,’ Adam interrupted, throwing the words in his father’s face. Because words were not enough; he needed to feel that his father truly understood the crime he had committed. Without that there could be no forgiveness.

‘Yes, we have. And I promise you I won’t make the same mistake again, Adam. You are more important to me than any idea. I will never abandon you. Try to believe me …’ Daniel held out his hand to his son.

And the pent-up passion in Adam suddenly broke like a rush of water flooding through the falling walls of a broken dam. His grief for his mother, his fear for the future, his love for his father, came together in a wave of emotion that took him forward and into his father’s arms.

‘Get your things,’ said Daniel, releasing his son after a moment. ‘Leaving is only going to get harder the longer we stay here.’

But it wasn’t the house that was hard to leave; it was the street. Instinctively Adam knew that he wouldn’t be coming back, at least not for a long time, not until he’d become an older, different person revisiting childhood memories when they were no more than dust in the wind.

And as he followed his father down the road on that bright winter morning it all came back to him. The sepia lens through which he’d seen the world since his mother’s death dropped away and he saw the barefoot children running behind the water cart soaking their legs and feet in the spray as it rattled over the cobblestones; saw them dancing round the horse trough where he’d spent a hundred Sundays; saw them stop and wave goodbye as he reached the Cricketers on the corner and paused to look back one last time.

The golden rays of the rising sun glared back at Adam and his father from off the thick engraved glass in the pub’s window panes, and from somewhere inside they could hear an invisible woman singing a popular song to the accompaniment of the pub’s penny-in-the slot piano:

‘If I should plant a tiny seed of love

In the garden of your heart,

Would it grow to be a great big love some day?

Or would it die and fade away?’

She sang well, holding the melody, and Adam stopped to listen, but his father took his arm and pulled him forward.

‘We need to go,’ Daniel said, and Adam sensed the tautness in his father, saw the muscles working in his face. He seemed for a moment like a drowning man trying desperately to stay afloat.

It was a long walk through Highbury and up into Holloway where they went by the women’s prison: a dreadful building with blackened Gothic spires and high castellated walls surmounted by barbed wire. And the workhouse when they reached it was just as forbidding, although in a different way: long and grey and flat with rows of clean, closed windows running in a line under the stacks of smokeless chimneys, and above them a brick clock tower with a bell that mournfully tolled the hour just as they arrived outside the door.

The place terrified Adam – he remembered what his father had said about the workhouse in times gone by: it was the place where the poor were sent to die when they were no use to the rich any more; it was the house at the end of the world.

‘Please, Dad, don’t leave me here. Take me with you,’ he implored his father.

‘I can’t,’ said Daniel. ‘I don’t have the money to support us both. Not until I’ve got work. And you’ll be safe here.’

‘I don’t want to be safe; I want to be with you.’