Life: An Exploded Diagram (6 page)

F
OR A WHILE
George Ackroyd dealt with his mounting fear, the hostility of his mother-in-law, the coyness of his wife, the reticence of his son, the implacable hugeness of the sky, and his awful sense of having been somehow tricked, in the only way he knew how. He sought to impose regimental order and efficiency. He went about bringing manliness to this unmanned household.

In the skewed and decrepit garden shed (built by John Sparling half a century earlier), he found ancient tools and restored them. With the oiled and sharpened shears, he straightened the hedge. With a rusted hammer, he nailed new boards onto the roof of the chicken coop while the birds regarded him with yellow and baleful eyes. Under Ruth’s direction and Clem’s silent gaze, he dug the vegetable beds. He rehung the washing line, jabbing stones into the ground to steady the uprights. He replaced the broken hinge on the kitchen window, using infinite patience and the wrong screwdriver. He gave the inside of the lav a new coat of whitewash.

After a fortnight, this persistent odd-jobbery had brought Win to the verge of distraction.

The following Sunday, she came back from chapel with the news that there was a job going at Ling’s. The announcement didn’t distract George from the
News of the World.

Win pulled free the long pin that fixed her hat to her hair and stood holding it, looking at him.

Ruth was at the sink, peeling potatoes. After half a minute of awful silence that pinkened her neck, she said, “That might suit you, George. Thas your line of work.”

He looked up at last. “Oh, aye? Why, what’s Ling’s? A Chinese tank regiment?”

In fact, J. W. Ling and Son, of Borstead, were — as announced on a wrought-iron sign that spanned the wide entrance to the yard —
SUPPLIERS AND REPAIRERS OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY.
George leaned Ruth’s bike against the wall of a brick building that looked as though it had been, once upon a time, a pair of farm cottages. On one of the doors there was a stamped-metal sign reading
OFFICE.
The room had two desks, one with a typewriter on it. Apparently, a gale had swept through the place, scattering paper. One wall sported no fewer than eight calendars, all of them topped by a picture of a tractor, none of them turned to the month of April. On one of the desks there was a push-button electric bell with a woven two-wire cable that trailed away into the gloom. A handwritten card next to it suggested that he
RING FOR ATTENDENCE.
George pressed it experimentally and heard, from some remote distance, a faltering tinkle. Several minutes later, a short, burly man stuffed into a one-piece overall came in and immediately went out again and started shouting.

“Look, bor, I dunt give a monkey’s. Do what I say. You weld the bugger up an I’ll tell him thas the best we can do. If he want ut by Wensdy, thas up to him.”

He came back into the room and picked up a piece of paper, apparently at random, and scowled at it. Without looking at George, he said, surprisingly formally, “And what can I do for you, sir?”

“I was told you had a job,” George said.

The man grunted a laugh. “Job?” The small word had at least three vowels in it. “Bleddy right, I’re got a job. The job I’re got is gettun them buggers out there to lissun to a bleddy word I say.”

George concentrated hard, trying to discover the meaning of Ling’s words beneath the thick blanket of his accent.

“I meant a job going,” George said. “A position.”

The man put the paper down and turned to him. He had blue eyes inside plump little purses of skin. The bald dome of his head rose out of a thicket of graying and unkempt curls. He surveyed George’s demob suit, his collar and tie.

“Ah. Thas right, I do. Sorry. Yer Win Little’s son-in-law, just come home?”

“Yes.”

“So you’d be George, er?”

“George Ackroyd.”

“Bill Ling. Howja do.”

He held out his right hand, which was black and lacked half of its third finger.

“Yer dunt hevter shake ut if yer dunt want to.”

“No,” George said, gripping the other man’s hand. “There’s nowt wrong with axle grease. I’m partial to the smell of it.”

Ling grunted humorously again. He took a tin of tobacco from his overall and rolled a cigarette. George lit it for him with his American lighter.

“So, then. Win tell me you was in the Engineers. That right?”

“For nine years, after I joined up. Then the REME from forty-two — Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.”

“What was that all about, then?”

“Tanks, mostly. Half-tracks, Bren gun carriers, armored cars. That sort of thing.”

Ling picked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. “We dunt get a lotta them come in.”

“No,” George said. “I don’t suppose you do.”

“Tractors, reapers, balers, harrers. Go all over the place sortun out threshun machines, things like that. Lot on ut is donkey’s years old. Patch up an bodge. That dunt sound like what yer used to.”

“No. But a machine is a machine. An engine is an engine.”

Ling lifted his eyebrows and nodded as though this were a novel piece of wisdom.

“So yer reckon you might pick ut up, do yer?”

“I should think so.”

Ling looked around the office as though help or advice might materialize from its shadows.

Eventually he said, “Well, I do need a man what know his arse from a gasket. Things hev got busy, this past year. I tell yer what, George. Why dunt we try ut for a month? See if the work suit yer? How do that seem?”

“Sounds fair enough to me. When d’you want me to start?”

“Lessay Mundy.” Ling grinned, displaying a random collection of teeth. “There ent no hurry. I daresay you an Ruth hev still got a bit of catchun up to do, arter all this time.”

George would work for Bill Ling for twelve years. The other men never grew to like him. They never addressed him by his first name; they called him Sarge, and behind his back, they imitated his brisk and upright manner of walking. When there were breaks from work, they would isolate him by retreating inside the slow, thick moat of their impenetrable dialect.

George remounted Ruth’s bike and pedaled the three-quarters of a mile to Borstead. The trees and hedges along his route were misted with the green of early spring. The town was silent. He passed a pub called the Feathers, turned back, and wheeled the bike into an alleyway that led to the rear entrance. There were only three people in the bar: two elderly men, who sat silently in front of their pints, and an elderly woman perched on a bar stool, reading a newspaper aloud to her glass of stout. George took the stool farthest from her and, after several minutes had gone by, took a two-shilling piece from his pocket and tapped the counter with it. A woman with lips painted close to her nose emerged from a curtained doorway and reluctantly drew him a pint of bitter.

Later she drew him another. Drinking it, George felt the absence of joy pierce him like a bayonet.

He did not want to go home —
home?
— so he rode the bike in the opposite direction. He passed through the dripping gloom under the railway bridge and, on a whim, turned right onto a narrow road he had no memory of. He found himself alongside an extensive playing field, in the middle of which was a pavilion, a gray stone and white-gabled house, like something pictured in a fairy tale. The field was divided into a number of football pitches, and upon three of them, boys in shorts and motley shirts were charging after a ball, massing and hallooing like huntsmen. Beyond them, the railway embankment, its flank darkly patched by brambles.

George rode slowly along the low beech hedge, watching the games, and above his head the moody clouds split open. Sun, in beams as clearly defined as searchlights, straked the sky. As if in celebration, something sounded a long fluting whistle. A clanking two-carriage train, gusting smoke, ambled into view. A goalkeeper turned and waved to it and, with his back to the play, conceded a goal. George laughed. He took his hands from the handlebars and applauded.

The playing field ended in a line of poplars like huge upended besoms. Here, the lane forked. George turned left and was astonished to find himself in a newer, braver world. He pedaled slowly past a long row of new, cement-rendered, and white-painted semidetached houses. They looked solid, modern, confident. Fresh. Each one had a slate-roofed porch over the front door. Each one had a small lawn, separated from its neighbor by a ruler-straight privet hedge, still only knee-high, and separated from the road by a tarmacked pavement. At the end of the row, the road turned smartly right. At the corner house, a woman was cleaning her windows, standing on a kitchen chair. Her buttocks swung with the work, and her calves were muscular. George rang the bell on his handlebar, and she turned and waved to him as if she knew him. Or wanted to. He rode right and left and right and left again through a grid of new suburban roads that were named after poets: Chaucer, Donne, Browning, Arnold. The names meant nothing to George. He rode, admiring it all, to its limits, attracted by the chug of a cement mixer and the growl of machinery. Beyond Marvell Road, an acre of raw and muddy earth had been dug into trenches into which men were slumping barrowloads of concrete.

George dismounted and lit a cigarette. Before he was halfway through it, a car — a black Morris — drew up. Its driver clambered out. He was wearing a suit and had a clipboard in his hand. He balanced the clipboard on the roof of the car and leaned back inside and produced a pair of Wellington boots. With his backside perched on the bonnet of the car, he bent to unlace his shoes.

“Excuse me,” George said.

The man looked up, frowning.

George, smiling nicely, said, “What’s all this, then?”

“Pardon me?”

“I mean, what’s all this going to be? More houses?”

“Er, no. This is the new Millfields Primary School.”

“Ah,” George said.

The man pulled off his left shoe and, surprisingly, sniffed its interior.

“This will be where your children go to school, Mr., er?”

“Ackroyd.”

“Yes. We estimate, on a ten-year projection, a minimum of one hundred and ten children on the estate. You chaps back from the war have already been busy, if you know what I mean. Quite right, too.”

George stood on his cigarette.

“Estate?”

The man looked at him quizzically.

“So these are council houses,” George said.

“Yes, of course. Sorry, I assumed you lived here. You’re not a tenant, then?”

George cycled back into Borstead — the playing fields were silent now — and leaned Ruth’s bike against one of the two trees in front of the town hall. He waited almost an hour before he was ushered into the presence of the housing officer, who was, according to the gold-effect lettering on the little black nameplate on his desk, Mr. G. Roake. He stood up to shake hands when George entered. Even from across the desk, his breath was rank. He had thin colorless hair greased over the top of his head, and he did not convincingly occupy his clothes. His eyes, magnified by his spectacles, took up a disproportionate amount of his face. His hand, in George’s clasp, was bony.

“Take a seat, Mr. . . .”

“Ackroyd. George Ackroyd.”

Roake wrote George’s name on a piece of paper, not checking how it was spelled.

“How can I help you, Mr. Ackroyd?”

Roake’s accent was not Norfolk. George could not identify it.

‘Those new council houses. Up off the Aylsham road.”

“Millfields?”

“Yes. I want to put my name down for one.”

Roake gazed for a moment. “Yes. Well. We can do that for you. Have you applied for council housing before? Here or elsewhere?”

“No.”

“I see.” Roake shifted a knee and opened a drawer. “There’s a form to fill in, of course. Always a form.” He put sheets of stapled paper on the desk but left his hand resting on them. “There’s a waiting list, as you’ll appreciate.”

“Is there?”

“Oh, yes.”

The way he said it started something cooking inside George.

“How long’s this waiting list?”

“Well, that’s hard to say. It’s not so much the length of the list. More a question of when a house becomes vacant and which families on the list have priority. According to the number of children, and so forth. The quality of their present accommodation. Amenities. That sort of thing. There’s an assessment process.”

George clasped his hands together and stared at the linoleum between his feet.

After a moment or two, he said, “D’you mind if I smoke?”

“I’d rather you didn’t, actually.”

George nodded, slowly, and without lifting his head said, “I’ve been in the British army for fifteen years. I came out a month ago. I survived Dunkirk. With seven other blokes and only a Thompson submachine gun and a rifle between us, I marched two thousand Italian prisoners out of Benghazi. I had dysentery and had to stop the whole ruddy column every time I needed a shit. I was at El Alamein, and a German 88 hit the unit next to us and the blood came down on us like rain. In forty-six, when the heroic ruddy conscripts came home to parades and free beer and women, I was sent to Palestine. I was sitting with my mates in a bar a hundred yards from the King David Hotel when the bloody Irgun blew it up. We spent forty-eight hours digging stinking bodies out of the rubble. The flies were unbelievable. I’ve come home to a . . . a
hovel
I share with the wife and our three-year-old son and her evil mother. It’s got no running water, no light, and stinks of paraffin; the roof leaks, and we pay rent to a ruddy farmer who lives in a manor house and owns half the flamin’ county. It’s like I’ve fought a war and ended up living in the Middle Ages or summat. What does the
G
stand for?”