R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (59 page)

'You mean the Havelock fire, sir?'

'Yes, long before you came here.'

Coxe considered, his head on one side. 'Davidson could add a bit if we gave him an hour or so. Would Grace like that, sir?'

'I'm sure she would, if Davidson felt equal to it. Upper Third's first period is history this afternoon, isn't it? Tell Davidson he needn't come in if he wants the time to work in the shop. Then I'll come up with my daughter after final period bell.'

Coxe scuttled off with his headboard and David went in search of Grace who was, as he suspected, infinitely touched by the gesture.

'Frankie Coxe is a very nice boy,' she said. 'He wants to be a vet when he leaves.'

'I'll wager a term's salary he will be, even if only half they say about him is true.' Then, thoughtfully, 'You don't think, in the circumstances, that it's pushing things a bit far. Marking a dog's grave, I mean, with Mr Alcock dying here only a few days ago?'

'No, I don't. The two things aren't to do with one another, Daddy. Everybody liked old Towser and I never liked the new head.'

'Why do you say that?'

She looked at him steadily, another trick inherited from her mother. 'Because he wasn't nice to you,' she said, simply. 'You never said he wasn't but I know just the same. I'm sorry he died, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend to like him, does it?'

'No, I suppose not,' he said, thinking of Howarth's comment on graveside hypocrisy. 'Very well, pick me up after the final bell outside the Fifth and we'll go up and see what Davidson makes of it.'

They met them at five minutes after four, waiting a hundred yards or so south of the cricket pavilion, and Grace led the way over the bank to the stones marking Towser's grave. The autumn light was already fading inside the wood but beyond the trees the clear sky was flooded with molten brass where the sun slipped down beyond the school buildings. Coxe displayed Davidson's additional handiwork, a single sentence, carved low on the board, “
This dog saved life when Havelock's ct. fire. He barked.”
As an epitaph, David thought, it had a smack of eighteenth-century forthrightness, and that was just the way a stolid boy like Davidson would think of it. 'He barked.' Nothing gaudy or flowery but the whole essence of Towser's spectacular feat in two words.

Coxe acted as a kind of interpreter. 'Davidson's sorry about shortening the word “caught", sir. There wasn't room, you see. Will it do, sir?' Coxe, usually a very untidy boy, had clearly smartened himself for the ceremony. With his eager eyes, his black hair neatly parted and his shiny black mackintosh turned up at the collar, he reminded David of a rook.

'It'll do splendidly,' David said. 'Thank you for taking so much trouble, Davidson,' but Davidson blushed and stared hard at his boots.

Coxe used a trowel on the ground just beyond the line of stones and carefully inserted the board, afterwards producing a tent mallet from his mackintosh pocket to hammer it firm. Then he and Davidson heeled in the loose soil round the base and stood back. Grace said, a little tearfully, 'Thank you, Coxe. Thank you, Davidson. It
was jolly
nice of you to think of it,' and they all moved off in response to the clamour of the tea-bell, Coxe, Davidson and Grace moving ahead in a group.

The thought occurred to him, as he crossed the forecourt and passed under the windows of the head's house, 'Funny a dog should make more impact on all three of them than a man dying of heart failure within shouting distance of
where they slept,' but then, partly on account of the incident, he was able to get Alcock and Alcock's reign into some kind of perspective. 'I'll talk it over with Algy, then put it out of mind,' he promised himself, as he turned down the flagged corridor to supervise tea.

2

The Saturday before the election he begged a loan of Molyneux's car and ran over to Bilhampton. It did not seem to matter now whether or not he involved himself in politics but Christine, drawn and exhausted after six weeks' nonstop campaigning, would not hear of him speaking at either of the two meetings he attended. 'Your field is wide open again,' she said, 'and what sort of selfish bitch would I be to stand in your way a second time?' When he told her he was not disposed to play the field again, and that it was extremely unlikely, after the row preceding Alcock's death, that the Governors would short-list him for the job, she said this was no time at all for a professional man of any kind to enlist with so-called Bolshies. 'It's like rolling a boulder up Snowden,' she said. 'There's a kind of hysteria running loose, as if the country was waging some kind of patriotic war. The National Government is seen as a lifeboat, and whoever won't jump aboard and give thanks to God is off their rocker. One would have thought, with nearly three million on the dole, and wage cuts all round, the tide would be running for us, not them! Not on your life. You should hear the gibes I've had thrown at me, and from people living on pittances! 'You're the bastards who have landed us in the mess!' someone shouted at me on Thursday, as if the British Labour Party had engineered the Wall Street crash, back in '29. It's absolutely incredible what people will believe if it's told them often enough. There are chaps about here wearing blue rosettes and taking home thirty-five shillings a week to a tied cottage they can be evicted from at any moment. Talk about a working-class Tory being too green to burn, that's an understatement. You can dry green wood but how the hell do you light a fire with solid ivory?'

He sympathised with her but could have wished she was equipped to take things more philosophically. People were scared, he said, scared stiff of losing even that thirty-five shillings a week, and probably saw a national government as the only solution. Moreover, who could blame them, with men of MacDonald's stature, and Snowden's famed integrity, leaving the ranks? 'Don't mention those names to me,' she snapped, 'and as for that word “national", for heaven's sake,
get it straight, Davy. It
isn't
national, it's
Tory!
How long will it be before they drop the pretence and that charlatan with it? What happened to Lloyd George when he did a deal with the Tories in 1916?'

'Lloyd George probably wishes he could back-pedal right now. So will Ramsay when things have gone off the boil.'

'Do you think we'd have him back after this? The one thing that cheers me up is the prospect of him losing his seat and having to ask the Tories to find him another. Look, I can't waste any more time, Davy. I have to go over my speech for this afternoon.'

It was a very different Christine Forster, he reflected, from the girl who had lain in his arms beside Windermere two short months ago. She was strong, and very dedicated, but she would need all her strength and dedication to maintain the pace for long. The afternoon meeting was thinly attended, and depressing apart from the interruption of a few hecklers, but there was serious trouble at the evening rally, with constant interruptions, a spate of abuse, and, at one time, the prospect of a general scrimmage. No warm-up speaker could make himself heard and Christine was greeted by the slow handclap and backrow jeers of 'Find yourself a man and get yourself a couple of kids!' 'Chuck it, love, and come and give us a cuddle!' and a few mild obscenities. It was all he could do to stop himself getting up and fighting his way over to one lout who bawled, 'Yer ol' man run orf, didn't he, ducks? And buggered if I blame him!' a sally that was greeted by a gale of laughter and another scuffle in the aisle.

She was in tears when he called for her in the committee room behind the stage. The sheer weight and ruthlessness of the opposition was beginning to tell, not only upon her but on her few steadfast supporters. All her committee men looked sullen and despairing, so that David said, for their benefit as much as hers; 'You've made your gesture. That's all that really matters. People will remember it when things drift from bad to worse. With a majority of over twelve thousand, and a three-cornered contest under these conditions, you can't expect to get a fair hearing. My advice is to cut out meetings and concentrate on door-to-door canvassing in the factories and working-class districts. Hold an open-air meeting beside every dole queue in the division. Then move on, speaking in every street where there's a concentration of unemployed. They won't vote Tory.'

She said very little during the walk home but at the gate, where he was prepared to leave her, she said, 'Come upstairs. I'd made up my mind not to ask you in. For my sake, as well as yours, for you must have heard what that
swine shouted about me being a married woman, living apart from her husband. They only need a whiff of scandal to put paid to me here, but to hell with all of them!'

He followed her up a staircase lit by a 25-watt bulb to a front-room bedsitter in the ugly, Londonbrick villa she occupied, near the station. It was a cheerless, anonymous room, with bagged-out furniture, bilious-green tiles in a grate fitted with a small gas-fire, and dun-coloured curtains screening the bed. She did her own cooking here on a primus stove, she told him, and the smell of paraffin did battle with the reek of lino polish and bacon fat.

He said, 'Do you have to live in a place like this, Chris? You said something about making use of Rowley's allowance.'

'I do make use of it. It goes into the funds. We've hardly any money to fight the election.'

'Well,' he said, 'you're a game one to be sure. Keep reminding yourself of that. It might help.'

'It did once,' she said, throwing her off-the-peg coat on the bed, and filling the kettle. 'It doesn't now.'

'Because of a bunch of hecklers?'

'Not just them. I didn't come into this expecting miracles. I knew that at best it would be a long, uphill fight to build a party organisation. No, it was you, I imagine.'

'Me?'

'Being cut off from you in this way, feeling as guilty as hell every time I'm alone with you, because of what happened the last time you stood up for me in public.'

'But Alcock's dead. Algy is deputy head now, and Howarth will probably succeed him. Neither would dream of trying to control what I did in my spare time.'

'You're kidding yourself, Davy.'

'How? I know Algy. He's a democrat and he's been teaching democracy all his life.'

'It's the mood of the country. Nonconformist Socialists are seen as revolutionaries, people who want to drag the whole shooting match down. I know, I'm much closer to this than you, and I
know
. And as if that wasn't enough there's the moral aspect – a man like you, supposed to set an example, tagging along with a married woman.'

'But damn it, you aren't married in the proper sense. You haven't set eyes on
that damned Rowley for nearly three years.'

'It's still a stick to beat you with, a smear that can stop you getting what you're after, what you've set your heart on getting, being Gaffer of that place. It's a very worthwhile objective and a practical one too, for I've seen the way all those boys look at you and address you. You'll make it, but only if I let go of your coat-tails.'

'But can't you see, I don't want to make it at the price of losing you? I'm in love with you. More than ever now I see you bruised and battered and still on your feet. What kind of man would that make me, to turn my back on you now?'

'A sane one, with the right priorities in view. You can do untold good at a place like Bamfylde. Not just for the boys who go there, but for all of us.'

'Good God, are you suggesting we should break up on that account?'

'Yes, I am. And don't imagine it's a pretty gesture on my part. It hurts like hell, even the thought of it.'

'Then don't think of it. Because I won't go along with it. Not now, not ever.'

'What does that mean? We go on meeting and mating in anonymous places? We make love once every six weeks standing up in alleys, or in the back of a car on a moor? No, thank you, Davy. You deserve better than that and so do I. The fact that I was having an affair with that schoolmaster who made the famous Monmouth speech at my adoption meeting wouldn't only ruin you, it would ruin my candidature. We're up a dead end, Davy.'

Something warned him to stop arguing with her now, with her so tired and dispirited, with the echo of that heckler's gibe ringing in her ears. It was wiser to sheer away and wait for the feverish atmosphere to spend itself, to wait patiently, if that was possible, for some kind of break that would offer hope. Away in the back of his mind was the thought that perhaps this baptism of fire would prove too much for her, that she would emerge so ignominiously from the polls that she would swing away from politics, and if she did that they could soon find a way to get married and put both Rowley and politics out of mind. To his way of thinking, there was not much prospect of him being encouraged to take up the fight again. Even Howarth had as good as conceded that, when he and Barnaby had been speculating idly about Alcock's successor. The best he could hope for was another stopgap man, and a chance to persuade the Governors, over a long period of time, that he was something more than a born trouble-maker, who had quarrelled with Alderman Blunt, Carter and
his headmaster in rapid succession. That might take a decade and by then he would be in his mid-forties, and as set in his ways as old Judy Cordwainer.

She made tea and they sipped it in silence. He noticed the colour had gone from her cheeks and the sparkle from her eyes. For the first time he understood why she persisted in regarding her nose as a feature that spoiled her looks. The heat and turmoil of the meeting had made it glow in the light of the Wool-worth's shade. She had lost weight, too, a surprising amount of weight, in a few weeks. He had reason to know that her breasts were round and full but tonight she looked flat chested. Only her elegant legs reminded him of the Chris Forster of Windermere, and earlier.

He said, earnestly, 'Listen, Chris, you've got to ease up a little. What's an election, anyway? There'll be other, luckier elections, with the tide of events on your side. It won't help to tax yourself this way. You look as if you haven't had a square meal since we parted in August.'

A flicker of her independence showed.