Snow Angels (4 page)

That summer changed everything. It was funny, Gil thought, how you kept on believing that things were going to get better. He had had the feeling all his life that there had been some kind of mix-up and he had been born into the wrong family. His father was little and dark and dumpy and blue-eyed; his mother was little and fair and not quite so dumpy, and so was Edward, whereas he grew tall and dark eyed and it was always known in the family that he looked just like his grandfather Collingwood. This was not a good thing to be.

Gil could remember his grandparents, and with affection, from when he was very small. They lived in a dark narrow street in a terraced house in Amble and his grandfather built boats for the local fishermen. His grandmother had no servants. She had a big oven with a fire and there would be bread set to rise on the hearth. She always wore a pinafore. Her house was clean; the brasses sparkled; she made soup and in her kitchen was a big table at which she seemed always busy.

His grandfather had a workshop and a yard some way from the house on the edge of the village towards the estuary, with Warkworth Castle in the distance. The workshop had a floor thick with wood shavings and the smell was sweet. His grandfather built cobles, without plans or any help, two a year at least. And he had his own coble. Gil could remember pushing it off the
beach into the waves when they went to see to the lobster pots and sometimes his grandfather took him fishing for cod. Edward didn’t go. Was he seasick? Gil liked being there. He remembered the thrill of fishing, of feeling the tug on the line, the excitement and pride in his grandfather’s voice when he caught his first fish and took it home for his grandmother to cook for tea.

They had both been dead for many years, but Gil knew that there had been a quarrel after which the visits to Amble stopped. His father had called his grandfather stupid and unambitious and the worse thing that he could be – a bad businessman. William couldn’t forgive anybody for that. Gil had seen him reading the morning newspaper and shaking his head over somebody’s bankruptcy and saying, ‘I knew all along that he was a bad businessman.’

Being good at things began with school. You were sent away to be frozen, starved and beaten and then you had to be good at lessons. There was nobody to help. If you had a brother that made things worse, because he was obliged to ignore you. No one ever spoke to their brothers.

Gil envied Edward. For a start, he looked like he should and then he was a success at school. He had lots of friends and, though he wasn’t a swot, he was good at things. His reports did not send his father into terrible rages that made Gil shake with fear and then cry with pain because there was always a beating to follow and days of being locked up with nothing but a jug of water and a mattress. He would, he thought, be very good at being in prison if he should ever do anything that wrong.

At first he had determined to try harder, but the lessons were boring and the teachers were miserable at best. As he grew older nobody noticed that he was quite good at geometry and drawing, though he wasn’t allowed to do drawing. Edward was so good at everything else there was no point in trying. Gil could not compete. Luckily his father didn’t notice him much. With each report, the horror subsided after the first few days and his father was too busy at work to think about him. His mother was always
out, shopping or visiting, and when she was in she was dressing to go out. She wore beautiful dresses and smelled lovely; she wore gloves almost all the time to save her hands.

Edward had many friends at school. Gil hated the idea. He had to sleep in a room with twenty other boys. The idea of putting up with them for more than he had to didn’t appeal. They were stupid. They cared about whether they reached the cricket team. Gil had almost got himself onto the cricket team and had to pretend not to be good just in time or he would have had to rely on other people for something very intricate and that was too awful to be considered. The games master, a creepy man who liked watching boys strip off for games but who was intelligent, said to Gil, ‘Be careful, Collingwood, or you might have to do something more energetic than getting out of bed in the mornings.’

Gil promptly became very bad at everything and kept out of the way.

Then, long after he had wanted to leave school, when he was sixteen, there had come a day when he had an argument with another boy. Gil rarely got into fights. He was big so people avoided him, but this time they said he had lost his temper and thrown the other boy out of a second-storey window. At first he denied it because he didn’t remember. All he could remember was that amazing rush of feeling that nothing could stop or hinder. Beyond it somewhere he could hear voices, but far off and faint and nothing to do with him.

The other boy had been lucky. He had escaped with a broken leg. Gil was sent home for good to face his father and to be told that he could go to work in the shipyard labouring since he was obviously no good for anything else.

It might have been all right, but it wasn’t, because the lads who worked at the yard knew he was William’s son. The very first day half a dozen of them got him down onto the ground and gave him a good kicking. Nobody wanted to be seen with him. Day after day there was the kind of work that until then Gil had
not thought existed: carrying and moving heavy things. His nails broke and his hands roughened. The dirt wouldn’t come off them. The other men used indescribable language, most of it obscenities which Gil soon learned to recognise. Some of them drank heavily and spat frequently and eyed him as though they were going to give him a good kicking, too, though they didn’t. The fighting that Gil had done at school he came to be glad of, and that he was big, so when he had fought a couple of them they let him alone.

At first he couldn’t sleep for all the aching muscles. And it was strange to spend the day in the dust and dirt among uneducated men and then come home to the richness of his father’s house, where his mother expected good manners, punctuality and clean hands and the talk was of social events and people.

After six months his father moved him. It became a pattern. He spent time in each part of the works, with the platers, the riveters, the patternmakers, carpenters, plumbers, while, it seemed to Gil, Edward, Toby and their friends had a good time at Oxford. Gil couldn’t think of anything to say when he met people. It seemed to him that he came from another world, and that theirs was somewhere entirely separate and rather silly. They did not know what it was like when you had one wage and half a dozen children, when you couldn’t read or write, when you drank all your pay the first night so that you and your family starved all week. Some men would vow not to do it the next time, but they always did because it was the only escape. Some of them were moderate people; some had been saved by religion, but that didn’t stop hunger and cold and heat and monotony from being their daily enemies, it just meant that they survived in some way. At home, where his mother insisted on there being half a dozen courses at dinner and enough food for three times as many people, Gil found himself staring. Often the men he worked with were the brothers and fathers of the maids at home, so everybody knew that he went back to luxury each night.

When Gil moved into the offices, among the engineers, the designers and the drawing office, everything changed. He found enthusiasm. He had grown to love the noise and clamour of the shipyard, to see the various processes which put the ship together, but he cared even more for the place where the ships were drawn, planned, designed, calculated. It seemed to him then as though this had all been in his mind to begin with and somebody had just drawn back the curtains. It was like having extra sight. He barely needed any of it explaining to him; he understood immediately. He could see the ship built and fitted; he knew how it went together; he knew that it would live and be something very important, that it could give men freedom, riches, adventure and love. It could give them communication. It could wipe for them fear and distrust and ignorance and it could enable them to kill one another. He could smell and taste and feel the ship even when it was only on paper. He knew how mighty and dangerous it would be and that he cared for this as he would never care for anything again in his life.

Mr Philips, who was the head of the drawing office, saw the enthusiasm, told Gil that if he worked hard he might achieve something, began to teach him and to get the other experienced and clever men to teach him all the things that they knew. Gil left home very early and got home very late and quite often he stayed with Mr and Mrs Philips because they lived in Newcastle. They had no children and Gil could see that as much as he was taking from Mr Philips he gave them back, because Mrs Philips made big meals and was always happy to see him. Seven days a week Gil worked. His father didn’t seem to notice. He was so busy initiating Edward into the mysteries of managing a shipyard that he had almost forgotten Gil. Also, Edward had met a girl called Helen Harrison while at Oxford. William, Gil knew, expected his sons to marry for the betterment of the shipyard and the family and Helen had beauty, money and social status. Her fortune would be put to good use.

‘We’ll have to look round for a likely young woman for you in a year or two,’ William said.

That summer, Gil thought a great deal about Abby Reed. The truth was that he was afraid of her. His father said that she was exactly like her mother and that Bella Reed did far too much reading and thinking for a respectable woman. Abby was clever; Gil knew she was. She would talk to Edward for hours. After her mother died she ran her father’s house so competently that Henderson Reed didn’t bother to marry again. She had a disconcerting way of looking at you from frank blue eyes that unnerved Gil. He had even heard her swear. Her father looked sternly at Gil whenever they met, which made Gil think he was doing something wrong even when he wasn’t.

The best days of Gil’s life were those spent near Abby. That night with her had been the best night of his life and he could not forget about it as they grew older. She had cried until she slept, exhausted, but she was warm and soft and smelled like blackberry pie. He had drawn near to the warmth of her and put his arm around her and she had moved closer in her sleep. He had also been there to pick her up when she fell and he pushed Thomas Smith into a pond when he would have kissed her. More than that, Gil couldn’t manage. He couldn’t think of anything to say to her and, as time went on, Abby seemed to become more formidable. Like Edward, she had lots of friends and was always talking and laughing and dancing. Everybody liked her and wanted to be with her. Gil thought there was no room for him near her. He didn’t think she liked him. Why should she? Other people were clever and they were smaller and neat. He was always falling over things. Dancing would have been torture.

He saw even less of her when he began to work seriously, but he thought of what his father had said and bided his time, thinking that when he was twenty-one William might consider him old enough to marry. That summer, his mother boasted at the dinner table that she thought she had found a brilliant match
for poor little Abby. Abby was always poor and little to his mother, even though Abby was the most confident young woman Gil had ever met. His heart plummeted. Robert Surtees. Who on earth could compete with somebody twenty-five who was his own master, fabulously wealthy, from the top drawer of society, who owned houses and ran his own life, and had known exactly what to say probably since he had been in the cradle? She would undoubtedly make a good wife for a man like him. She was pretty enough to flatter expensive clothes and jewellery, wise enough to run a rich man’s household. Her father would be delighted at such a match, Gil knew. He looked in the nearest mirror and saw a half-educated, overgrown boy with no graces. He stumbled away from his mother’s table and left the house.

It was a perfect summer’s evening, the one before Edward and Helen’s betrothal party, and it was a relief to get out of the way. His mother had been fussing for days about the food, the flowers, the airing of beds and the making up of rooms. It was her only talent, he thought, organising parties. Perhaps he took after his mother, being no good at things. Then he remembered the look in Mr Philips’ eyes over some of the work he had recently done. His drawings and calculations were ‘beautiful’ Mr Philips had said, ‘just beautiful’. Gil had remembered this over and over again. It was the first time in his life that anybody had praised him. Gil wished he could live in the office. He listened hard to every piece of advice he was given from the educated, experienced men who ran his father’s shipyard. If he could have gone in any earlier and stayed any later, he would have.

‘You’ve got talent, laddie, real talent,’ Mr McGregor in the engineering department had said. Mr McGregor wasn’t supposed to call him ‘laddie’ or anything else that was familiar, Gil being the boss’s son, but Mr McGregor didn’t notice and Gil didn’t care. It was almost a term of endearment. Mr McGregor and Mr Philips kept him close to them and gave him important, detailed work to do and Gil felt like a sponge, taking everything in. It was not like school, where he didn’t understand. Everything he was
told now became clear and he soaked up the teaching and the information even more as they began to praise him. Gil wanted to hear it. Every day he wanted to hear that he was good and for the two men to smile and shake their heads in admiration. The looks and words of approval would never cease to be a novelty. He had managed to please somebody and that had never happened before. Gil felt like a highwire act at the circus: among the height and the fear but out there in the middle, doing wonderfully clever things. He had an audience who urged him on to do more and more daring, adventurous and creative things and the results were heady and wonderful. Gil would have done anything to bring to their faces that special glow of satisfaction.

Neither of them said anything to his father, but soon some of the best work was coming from Gil. He heard reported that his father was pleased at the new ideas and the accuracy and skill. Gil would spend hours adding deft touches, making sure that things would work and fit. Mr Philips opened the world of numbers to Gil as ten years of schooling had not and he could see it, he could see the patterns. They were like frost on the windows and rings on the inside of trees. He had felt like jumping up and down. There was order in the universe; there was symmetry that you could alter and change. You had power there; everything had a place and a purpose. Levels and seasons and time and music were all to do with numbers. There came a clarity to Gil’s mind that nothing could shift. It was like a flowering, an excitement, a sense of being where none had been before. Gil loved Mr Philips’ office as he had loved nowhere in his short life. There he was not clumsy and stupid and self-conscious. Mr Philips would shut the door and when the door was shut nobody dared enter. Very often he went out and shut the door after him, leaving Gil alone and it was bliss; the day went by much too quickly. He was always disappointed when it ended and he had to go home. The office was dusty because nobody was allowed to move anything. Gil knew it was a measure of Mr Philips’ growing regard for him
that he let him stay there away from other people and other eyes and anything that might break his concentration, but Gil felt as if he could have worked in the middle of Grainger Street in Newcastle and it wouldn’t have made any difference. That office, filled with rolled-up papers that had been designs for ships God knew how many years back, was a sanctuary, an escape into another, better world. In some ways, Gil knew he would never come out of it. He was at home here; nothing could hurt him. It was clean and assured. Best of all, were his ideas. He soon came to realise that there was no limit to these. Once you had let that extra eye open which was creativity, it could not be closed. If you nurtured it and gave it space and acknowledged it, the work came to you and it was wonderful.