Birthday (2 page)

‘Most families managed better than that,' Brian said, knowing that not a few of his mates, including Billy Jones, had been packed off to Borstal and then to prison. It was easier to get sent down, because the police looked into every small crime, if they got to know about it.

‘I'll keep an eye on you at the party,' Arthur told him, after a silence. ‘You were lucky Jenny's daughter invited the whole Seaton mob and not just you.'

Maybe he wouldn't recognize her after all this time. She would certainly look different, and so would he. Mutually knowing each other on the street would be impossible. At sixteen she'd been robust and full of hope, lived only for the passing day, earned her living and had nothing to fear from anybody. If she imagined the future it was only to picture the man who would fall in love with her generosity and treat her as she deserved. SCUM would have his bollocks for thinking so, but in those days it was true, and in any case Jenny would have laughed at such notions.

On days when they walked out, a freshly ironed blouse covered her bosom, and an open brown cardigan (which she had knitted) draped over that, the brown skirt not so low that he couldn't see her legs. Hair cut in a fringe across her pale forehead fell long and dark over her shoulders.

As a self-absorbed sixteen-year-old youth he had stood on a winter's evening by the arched redbricked gateway of a clothing factory with Pete Welbeck who was waiting for his sweetheart Lottie. She came out arm in arm with Jenny, among scores of other women who worked eight hours a day among the noise and dust of sewing machines, long rows in a vast room, three floors of women running up pieces of khaki serge to make uniforms, hair hidden from speeding belts by turbans which outlined their features like bathing caps, some worn to show the colour of hair underneath. The only males to be teased and flirted with were lads below the age of eighteen who shifted enormous bundles, or acted as rudimentary toolsetters, tutored by one or two chargehands over military age.

The vitality in Jenny's gait, even after a day's work, illuminated her good nature beneath which, nevertheless, a calculated stoicism blandly assessed whoever she looked at. Pete told him next morning that she had been curious about him as well, wanting to know his age, where he worked, and what street he lived in.

They had no photographs from those days, not even separate ones to exchange. Camcorders were ten a penny now, but few people had cameras during the war or for a long time afterwards. Yet the memory was so much richer for dragging scenes back through the haze, whereas clear photographs would do nothing for the reality he and Jenny had known.

Walking the streets, they were said to be courting, but he had never thought the responsibility applied to him, a feckless workman of seventeen (by the time they had split) and nowhere near as staid as Jenny expected. She was too proud, or lackadaisical, or too imbued with a paralysing infusion of both, to broach the fact, only wanting him to speak the homely promise and sooner rather than later.

He knew well enough what she wanted but, in his juvenile slyness, let her wait, caring only that their weekends of love would go on for as long as forever might be. You didn't think about getting older, or making up your mind on anything as deadly as wedlock, which locked you up and no mistake, having only to recall the past miseries of his parents to know that such a state was not for him.

The parting was sudden, though he had known for some time that she wouldn't for much longer endure his wilful indecisiveness. He lacked direction in the world as it was, lived in a dream he couldn't let her share, because even not knowing exactly what it was, he wanted it for himself alone. On the other hand his sensibility, not entirely blunted by selfishness, knew all too well what was in her mind.

Meeting one evening on the street as arranged, she told him she was fed up and didn't want to see him anymore, but was going for a walk with a couple of girls a few yards away laughing, as if they had put her up to it, he thought. The three of them would sit in the pictures and see what lads they could pick up. He was surprised at a firmness she had given no sign of before, knowing from her tone it was no use arguing, that such determination to pack him in was a kindness that saved him pleading for her not to do so.

In any case he didn't want to, and his self-esteem suffered no bruising because he went out with another girl too soon afterwards to wonder whether Jenny had chucked him or he had chucked her. There were all the boys for the asking and all the girls for the taking, always had been and always would be plenty more pebbles on the beach, so you had to make hay while the sun still shone.

The same pure breeze from the Derbyshire hills came through the car window on its way to the middle of Nottingham. In winter it was cold enough to work through the thickest jacket, but the benediction of sweet air at the moment brought back all youth's hopes and expectations.

‘We'll be a bit early,' Arthur said, ‘but I expect they'll let us in at The Crossbow. Jenny's daughter's booked the upstairs room from eight o'clock.' A mile away to the right the M1 crossed the old bucolic courting grounds of Trowel Moor, slicing a wood and a few fields out of existence to make room for a service station. ‘Something else gone forever.'

So will we be soon enough, but Brian didn't say so because Avril had cancer, and in any case they were going to a celebration. Jenny's daughter had written to him in London that she and the other grown-ups were arranging a surprise birthday party, and would he come up for it? ‘She talks about you now and again, so I know she would love you to be there.'

You can't say no to a request which might give some meaning to your life. Why otherwise had he said yes? His existence couldn't have been more different from Jenny's, and that of the man she went on to meet. At nineteen she'd got pregnant, and the baby was now the woman of fifty who had organized the surprise party for her mother. After having the daughter Jenny got married and bore six more kids from a man who was to wish many times he had never been born.

‘She used to come up to the house now and again, and have a cup of tea with mam,' Arthur called out. ‘I suppose she had to talk about her troubles, or she would have gone off her head. She used to reminisce about when she'd gone out with you, which cheered her up a bit. Mam liked her a lot.' He aimed for a black cat, knowing it would get out of the way, which it did, just, so that they all laughed. ‘You brought Jenny home for tea once, do you remember? But mam knew her parents already, because everybody knew everybody in those days.'

Brian nodded. ‘Jenny's old man was a cheerful bloke, though I expect he knew what I was getting up to with his daughter. Luckily, he was fond of his ale, and went out with his wife to the pub every Friday and Saturday night.'

‘You had it made,' Arthur laughed. ‘And you fucked her blind on the sofa.'

‘Well, who wouldn't?'

‘Men!' Avril gave her usual dry laugh. ‘That's all you can talk about.'

‘It was the same,' Arthur retorted, ‘when Sarah called on you a couple of years ago. You thought I'd gone out, but I was in the living room with my ear stuck to the wall. I looked in the mirror, and my face had gone like a beetroot.'

‘I'd have known if you had been there,' she said. ‘Even when I'm in bed and you go out into the garden I can tell you're not in the house.'

‘Anyway,' he said to Brian, ‘I'd have fucked Jenny blind as well. You should have stayed with her.'

‘I ought to have done a lot of things, but they'd have been just as wrong as what I did do.' His many mistakes in life had only been useful for counting over and over when he couldn't get to sleep.

‘She'd have had a better life,' Arthur said, ‘though I don't suppose somebody like you would have stayed with her for long.' He nodded towards the mass of clean slate roofs going down the hill. ‘Do you remember all them blocks of flats they built there twenty years ago? They had to demolish 'em after ten years because the partition walls turned into wet cardboard when it rained. A fortune was lost over that, which must have gone into somebody's pocket. Nobody got sent down for it, and I expect a lot of people are still living in Spain on the proceeds. I'd have stood 'em against a wall and shot the lot. Some made even more money when they built new houses in their place.'

‘It provided work,' Avril reasonably suggested, ‘and saved a lot of dole money.'

A pool of sunlight flowed into the car, and Arthur put the visor down. ‘In them days there was always work. It was just a shame Jenny's husband took a job at that iron foundry. The best luck he ever had was when he married Jenny, even though she already had another bloke's kid.'

‘A lot of men wouldn't have taken it on,' Avril said.

Arthur flicked the visor back when cloud hit the sun. ‘Yeh, but she made up for it a million times.'

TWO

After the early days of being in love Brian hadn't seen Jenny for fifteen years, until a letter came from Nottingham to say his father was dying. He'd seen little of the old man in the previous decade, during which the binding of love and detestation had turned into tolerated indifference. Still, his imminent death meant something, as he stood on the platform thinking it strange that he always had to search for the station exit, never an automatic walk up the steps and across the booking hall onto the street, as if the roots of his instinct were cut on the day he left.

From the crowd around the train his name was spoken clearly enough to startle, and for a few moments he wondered what this half familiar face had to do with him. The express would leave in a few minutes. ‘Hello! Don't you know me?' As if the likelihood of his not doing so would devastate her, though the distress in her features wasn't due to his changed appearance. ‘It's me, Jenny.'

The more he looked the less altered was she from the girl he had known. He supposed he had mumbled the right words: ‘What are you doing here? Why are you getting on the train? Are you here to meet someone? Or are you going to the seaside?' He must have said something like all those things, his smile covering the love and curiosity he should have felt, her signals indicating a catastrophe he lacked the nobility of soul to comprehend, and in any case the past they shared was far too far away to be of any help. Eyes filmed by heartache, she held back tears, as if trying to say something with a silence to which he could not respond since he had no silence of his own to give, his heart a ball of string that would need a lifetime to disentangle because he had become another person, and so had she.

Without luggage, she looked too unhappy to be travelling for pleasure. He noted the usual kind of blouse, and one coat button done up unevenly as if she had put it on in a state of shock. ‘I'm going to the hospital in Sheffield.'

Train doors clacked like rifle shots, shouts and whistles normal to him but a grief to her who only wanted to be on her way. He tried to remember whether she had relations in Sheffield. ‘What are you going there for?'

‘My husband's had an accident in the foundry where he works.' She gave a mad woman's smile. ‘I've got to run, though, or I'll miss my train.'

‘I'm sorry. Is he badly hurt?'

‘I don't know. They telephoned the corner shop. But I'm sure he must be.'

‘Perhaps it's not as bad as you think.' He held her warm and vibrant hand while wanting only to get away, yet they were drawn close for a kiss, as if it might reduce the bad news. She wasn't altogether there, but who would be? He hoped she would remember the meeting as he pulled open a door the guard had just closed, to make sure she wasn't left behind, being already with her husband as the train went into the tunnel of its own smoke.

He had cut so many people out of his life in order to make a different world for himself, couldn't connect any more to a woman whose husband had been smashed up in a foundry. The death of his father seemed a formality by comparison. He found the exit easily, as if instinct had come back at the sight of her, marvelling at the chance meeting while walking up the steps.

George, paralysed from the waist down, had to be cared for night and day, lifted and carried, taken and fetched, wiped and fed and humoured and honoured, and no doubt loved, Jenny's subtly harassed expression the most she would allow herself to show. She did everything, and would have done more had it been demanded or possible. She could have fled – others had been known to – left him in a hospital or convalescent home on the coast, but abandoning your husband wasn't what you did when he'd stood by you until the time of the accident. In any case, you had sworn to care for each other until one or the other died.

He was never surprised when his brothers' thoughts ran on the same lines as his own, often so close as those between husbands and wives. ‘By the time George had his accident he and Jenny already had seven kids,' Arthur said, ‘so maybe it was just as well he did, or he might have given her half a dozen more.'

Brian's laugh took him away from the tragic aspect of Jenny on the station platform. ‘I should be glad I didn't stay with her then. I might have had the same number pulling at my turn-ups.'

‘She would have dragged a rabbity bastard like you on every night,' Arthur said, ‘and in your dinner hour as well, if there'd been no canteen where you worked.'

If he'd got her pregnant he would still have escaped, because the dynamo of curiosity had been busy in him from birth. His departure was both as if swimming out of a vat of treacle, and wandering away like a somnambulist, hard to know which because too far back and they hadn't been logged at the time. Circumstances had carried him, and those situations met with as if to make him pay for his new life had their own compensations. Being novelties, they were an anodyne against what loss was left behind.

Another question was that if he'd asked Jenny to marry him she might have laughed in his face, because no person can avoid what the future has in store, though you may not know it (he'd certainly had no suspicion) giving the illusion that freedom of choice is possible for everyone. Having a baby already by another man, she had no option but to marry George, whether she loved him or not. George didn't know how much of a bargain he'd got until her devotion became vital for his existence, though in the years and decades of his catastrophic misfortune he was to wish he had never set eyes on her, thinking it would have been better if the falling block of iron had killed him outright. He certainly never imagined in those early days that under Jenny's care he would live more than thirty years.