The Eye in the Door (11 page)

It seemed strange to Prior to be reading his friends’ private letters, though these had all – with the exception of Alf’s letter and its inconvenient mention of dogs – been read aloud at the Old Bailey. Even Hettie’s little nursery rhyme had boomed around No. 1 Court, as the Attorney-General argued it implied her involvement in the conspiracy. No, there was no privacy left in these letters; he was not violating anything that mattered. And yet, as the train thundered into a tunnel and the carriage filled with the acrid smell of smoke, Prior turned to face his doubled reflection in the window and thought he didn’t like himself very much. It was the last letter he minded: the gentleness of Mac’s love for Hettie exposed, first in open court and now again to him.

They’d found that letter in the pocket of Hettie’s skirt when they went to the school to arrest her.

Harry Prior was getting ready to go out. A clean shirt had been put to air on the clothes-horse in front of the fire, darkening and chilling the room. Billy Prior and his mother sat at the table, she with her apron on, he in shirt and braces, unable either to continue their interrupted conversation or to talk to Harry. He bent over the sink, lathering his face, blathering and spluttering, sticking his index fingers into his ears and waggling them. Then, after rinsing the soap off, he placed one forefinger over each nostril in turn and slung great gobs of green snot into the sink.

Prior, his elbow touching his mother’s side, felt her quiver fastidiously. He laced his fingers round the hot cup of tea and raised it to his lips, dipping his short nose delicately as he drank. How many times as a child had he watched this tense, unnecessary scene, sharing his mother’s disgust as he would have shared her fear of lightning. Now, as a man, in this over-familiar room – the tiles worn down by his footsteps, the table polished by his elbows – he thought he could see the conflict more even-handedly than he had seen it then. It takes a great deal of aggression to quiver fastidiously for twenty-eight years.

He thought, now, he could recognize his mother’s
contribution to the shared tragedy. He saw how the wincing sensitivity of her response was actually feeding this brutal performance. He recalled her gentle, genteel, whining, reproachful voice going on and on, long after his father’s stumbling footsteps had jerked him into wakefulness; how he had sat on the stairs and strained to hear, until his muscles ached with the tension, waiting for her to say the one thing
he
would not be able to bear. And then the scuffle of running steps, a stifled cry, and he would be half way downstairs, listening to see if it was just a single slap, the back of his father’s hand sending his mother staggering against the wall, or whether it was one of the bad times. She never had the sense to
shut up
.

But then, he thought, his face shielded by the rim of his cup, one might equally say she had never been coward enough to refrain from speaking her mind for fear of the consequences. It would be very easy, under the pretext of ‘even-handedness’, to slip too far the other way and blame the violence in the home not on his brutality, but on her failure to manage it.

As a child, Prior remembered beating his clenched fist against the palm of the other hand, over and over again, saying, with every smack of flesh on flesh, PIG PIG PIG PIG. Obviously, his present attempt to understand his parents’ marriage was more mature, more adult, more perceptive, more sensitive, more insightful, more almost anything you cared to mention, than PIG PIG PIG PIG, but it didn’t content him, because it was also a lie: a way of claiming to be ‘above the battle’. And he was not above it: he was its product.
He
and
she
– elemental forces, almost devoid of personal characteristics – clawed each other in every cell of his body, and would do so until he died. ‘They fight and fight and never rest on the Marches of my breast,’ he thought, and I’m fucking fed up with it.

His father had got his jacket and cap on now, and stood ready to go out, looking at them with a hard, dry, stretched-elastic smile, the two of them together, as they had always been, waiting for him to go. ‘I’ll see you, then,’ he said.

There was no question, as in the majority of households there would have been, of father and son going for a drink together.

‘When will you be back?’ his mother asked, as she had always done.

‘Elevenish. Don’t wait up.’

She always waited up. Oh, she would have said there was the fire to damp down, tomorrow’s bait to be got ready, the table to be laid, the kettle to be filled, but all these tasks could have been done earlier. Prior, once more lowering his eyes to the cup, tried not to ask himself how many violent scenes might have been avoided if his mother had simply taken his father at his word and gone to bed. Hundreds? Or none? The man who spoke so softly and considerately now might well have dragged her out of bed to wait on him, when he staggered in from the pub with ten or eleven pints on board.

Leave it, he told himself.
Leave it
.

After his father had gone, Prior and his mother went on sitting at the table while they finished drinking their tea. She never mentioned France or Craiglockhart. She seemed to want to ignore everything that had happened to him since he left home. This was both an irritation and a relief. He asked after boys he’d known at school. This one was dead, that one wounded, Eddie Wilson had deserted. He remembered Eddie, didn’t he? There were deserters in the paper every week, she said. The policeman who found Eddie Wilson hiding in his
mother’s coal-hole had been awarded a prize of five shillings.

‘There was a letter in the paper the other week,’ she said. ‘From Father Mackenzie. You remember him, don’t you?’

She found last week’s paper and handed it to him. He read the letter, first silently and then aloud, in a wickedly accurate imitation of Father Mackenzie’s liturgical flutings. ‘“There may be some among you, who, by reason of your wilful and culpable neglect of the Laws of Physical development, are not fit to serve your country, but –” Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ He thew the paper down.
‘Some among them
carry their wilful and culpable neglect to the point of getting rickets. If he’s physically well developed it’s because his mother could afford to shove good food in his gob four times a day.’ And goodness wasn’t he well developed, Prior thought, remembering Father Mackenzie in his socks.

‘He just thinks a lot of people are shirking, Billy. You’ve got to admit he’s got a point.’

‘Do you know the height requirement for the Bantam regiments?
Five feet
. And do you know how many men from round here
fail that
?’

‘Billy, sometimes you sound exactly like your father.’

He picked up the paper and pretended to read.

‘There’s a lot of talk about a strike at the munition works. Your father’s all for it. Well,
he
would be, wouldn’t he?’

‘What’s it about?’

‘I don’t know.’ She groped for an unfamiliar word. ‘Dilution?’

‘Sounds right.’

‘Well, you can imagine your dad. “Bits of lasses earning more than I do.” “You mark my words,” he says, “after the war they’ll bring in unskilled labour.
The missus’ll be going to work, and the man’ll be sat at home minding the bairn. It’s the end of craftsmanship. This war’s the Trojan horse, only they’re all too so-and-soing daft to see it.”’

Typical, Prior thought. However determined his father might be to raise the status of the working class as a whole, he was still more determined to maintain distinctions within it.

‘Oh, and he doesn’t like false teeth. That’s another thing,’ his mother went on. ‘Mrs Thorpe’s got them, you know. “Mutton dressed up as lamb,” he says. The way he goes on about her teeth you’d think she’d bit him. And then there’s Mrs Riley’s dustbin.
Lobster
tins, would you believe. “They were glad of a bit of bread and scrape before the war.”’

‘He’s got a funny idea of socialism.’

She shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. Things like women’s rights, he was never in favour of that.’

‘No.’

‘I remember him going on at Beattie Roper about that.’

A pause. ‘I went to see Beattie.’

She looked stunned. ‘In prison?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve no call to go getting yourself mixed up in that.’

Faced with this sudden blaze of anger, he said, ‘I have to. It’s my job.’

‘Oh.’ She nodded, only half believing him.

‘How’s Hettie?’

His mother froze. ‘I wouldn’t know. I never see her.’

There had been a time, when he was seventeen, when he and Hettie Roper had been ‘walking out’, and, for once, the ‘quaint expression’ had been painfully accurate. ‘Walking’ was exactly what they did. And talking too,
of course: passionate, heated talk, about socialism and women’s rights, spiritualism, Edward Carpenter’s ideas on male comradeship, whether there could be such a thing as free love. He remembered one day on the beach at Formby, sitting in the dunes as the sky darkened, and the sun hung low over the sea. All day he had been wanting to touch her, and had not dared do it. The sun lingered, tense and swollen, then spilled itself on to the water. ‘Come on,’ he said, picking up his jacket. ‘We’d better be getting back.’

That night, as on so many other nights, his mother had been waiting up for him. A book was open on her knee, but she hadn’t bothered to light the gas. And then the questions started. He realized then that she hated Hettie Roper. He didn’t know why.

‘Does she still run the shop?’ he asked.

‘No point. Nobody’d buy anything off her if she did.’

‘Does she work?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘So how does she live?’

A shrug. ‘She’s still got the allotment.’

‘I thought I’d pop round and see her.’

Silence.

Reminding himself he was no longer seventeen, Prior stood up and put his cup on the draining-board. ‘I won’t be long.’

Before the war, women used to sit on their steps in the warm evenings until after dark, postponing the moment when the raging bedbug must be faced, and taking pleasure in the only social contact they could enjoy without fear of condemnation. A woman seen chatting to her neighbours during the day quickly felt the weight of public disapproval. ‘Eeh, look at that Mrs Thorpe. Eleven kids. You’d think she could find herself summat
to do, wouldn’t you?’ Now, looking up and down the street, Prior saw deserted doorsteps. Women were out and about, but walking purposefully, as if they had somewhere to go.

He supposed it was Mrs Thorpe’s name that came particularly to mind because she’d been one of the worst offenders, with her lard-white breasts the size of footballs, and Georgie or Alfie or Bobby worrying away at them, breaking off now and then for a drag on a tab end. Or perhaps, subconsciously, he’d already identified her, for there she was, coming towards him, divested of the clogs and shawl he’d always seen her in and wearing not merely a coat and hat but flesh-coloured stockings
and shoes
. It was scarcely possible the attractive woman with her should be Mrs Riley, but he didn’t know who else it could be.

They greeted him with cries of delight, hugging, kissing, standing back, flashing their incredible smiles. There was a saying round here: for every child born a tooth lost, and certainly, before the war, Mrs Thorpe and Mrs Riley had advertised their fecundity every time they opened their mouths. Now, in place of gaps and blackened stumps was this even, flashing whiteness. ‘What white teeth you have, Grandma,’ he said.

‘All the better to eat you with,’ said Mrs Riley. ‘And who are
you
calling Grandma?’

Mrs Thorpe asked, ‘How long have you got, love?’ And then, before he had time to answer, ‘Eeh, aren’t we awful, always asking that?’

‘Two days.’

‘Well, make the most of it. Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do, mind.’

He smiled. ‘How much scope does that give me?’

‘Fair bit, these days,’ said Mrs Riley.

He remembered, suddenly, that he’d sucked the breasts
of both these women. His mother had been very ill for two months after his birth, and he’d been fed on tins of condensed milk from the corner shop, the same milk adults used in their tea. Babies in these streets were regularly fed on it. Babies fed on it regularly died. Then Mrs Thorpe and Mrs Riley had appeared, at that time, he supposed, lively young girls each with her own first baby at her breast. They had taken it in turns to feed him and, in so doing, had probably saved his life. He had known this a long time, but somehow, when Mrs Thorpe and Mrs Riley had been shapeless bundles in shawls, it had not
registered
. Now, though not easily discomforted, he felt himself start to blush.

‘Look at that,’ said Mrs Riley. ‘He’s courting, I can always tell.’

‘Are
you courting?’ Mrs Thorpe asked.

‘Yes. Her name’s Sarah. Sarah Lumb.’

‘Good strong name that,’ said Mrs Riley.

‘She’s a good strong lass.’

‘Mebbe has need to be,’ said Mrs Riley, looking him up and down, speculatively. ‘Do y’ fancy a drink?’

‘No, I’d like to, but I’ve got to see somebody.’

‘Well, if you change your mind we’ll be in the Rose and Crown.’

And off they went, cackling delightedly, two married women going out for a drink together. Unheard of. And in his father’s pub too. No wonder the old bugger thought Armageddon had arrived.

Prior walked on, noticing everywhere the signs of a new prosperity. Meat might be scarce, bread might be grey, but the area was booming for all that. Part of him was pleased, delighted even. ‘Bits of lasses earning more than I do’?
Good
. Lobster tins in Mrs Riley’s dustbin?
Good
. He would have given anything to have been simply, unequivocally, unambiguously pleased. But he
passed too many houses with black-edged cards in the window, and to every name on the cards he could put a face. It seemed to him the streets were full of ghosts, grey, famished, unappeasable ghosts, jostling on the pavements, waiting outside homes that had prospered in their absence. He imagined a fire blazing up, a window shaking its frame, a door gliding open, and then somebody saying, ‘Wind’s getting up. Do you feel the draught?’ and shutting the door fast.