The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (21 page)

She wondered how old the dog was; the walk didn’t seem to tire him. They met another dog, a scruffy little object with a man way behind. Frederick went over and the other dog sniffed at him. They smelled one another and danced a little and then Frederick came back.

‘Are you hungry?’ Joe said when they got to the bridge.

‘Haven’t you eaten?’ Lucy ventured.

‘I turned down a sandwich hours ago. Why don’t we go into the town and have fish and chips?’

She thought it was the best idea anybody had ever had. They walked up the steps when they came to Framwellgate Bridge and then up North Road, where she could smell the salt and vinegar. They got the fish and chips wrapped up in newspaper and went back to the river. They found a bench and sat down and opened the parcels. It was heavenly. Joe had bought Frederick his own chips.

‘We can’t let him sit there while we eat,’ he said as Lucy protested, ‘and besides I don’t think the poor chap
has ever seen a chip. His whole life has revolved around sandwiches.’

She got the giggles at this. Frederick demolished his portion (plus scraps) with surprise and delight. Then he sat, waiting to be given more, so they could not help giving him fish, which Joe said was very good for him. He even got a few extra chips, which Joe said he begrudged.

On the way back Frederick seemed to have shed five years. He rushed up and down the towpath, and when they returned to the tower house he dashed inside. He stopped suddenly. The three cats were sitting in the kitchen. Joe had brought fish back for them and he put Frederick into the other room while they ate. When they were full the cats sat down by the dying fire.

Lucy wasn’t sure about letting Frederick in, but Joe said they would try it. Frederick saw the cats sitting by the fire and very carefully went across and sat down behind them, thereby cutting off the draught. Lucy thought they might get up and stalk out, but they didn’t.

As they woke up Frederick began to lick their heads. Lucy had never seen such a thing. She thought they would object, but Frederick was licking the back of their heads, the part they couldn’t reach. He moved on to each cat in turn and they closed their eyes and let him continue. In the end the fur on their heads stood up, so slick with Frederick’s spit, but they merely shook their heads to get rid of the excess, lay down between his paws and went back to sleep.

Lucy went up to the luxury of her own room and stood there for a long time in the darkness, being thankful for it and wondering how far she had pushed Joe into this. Then
she climbed between sheets which smelled of lavender, and stretched out, something she’d not been able to do since she left home, her university bed having been so short and the sofa with Tilda so uncomfortable. She listened to the river and fell asleep, full of fish and chips and hope for the future. And then she opened her eyes and thought of Tilda and how she had said nothing that day, not even when she’d come home and seen all the new furniture. She tried to put the girl from her mind.

*

Edgar said on the Monday morning that he would like to have a word with her. Lucy followed him into his office. He closed the door, something he rarely did, and he didn’t ask her to sit down.

‘I don’t think I quite understood when you were talking about the Misses Slaters moving and Mrs Formby not,’ he said. ‘Have I got this right?’

‘Yes, Mrs Formby and her family have moved into the Misses Slaters’ house, which they rent from Mr Manson. They needed somewhere to go and I went and asked the landlord twice if he would do something, but I couldn’t get him to change his mind. Then Mr Hardy offered the two old ladies a home and he has lots of room, you know. It seemed a good solution so that was what we did over the weekend.’

Edgar paused as though he wanted to say something but wasn’t sure whether he was right.

‘And you?’

‘What?’

‘Well, are you staying with Mrs Formby and her family? Is there enough space, sufficient beds? I think I ought to put
up your wages. You can’t go on living there, and you could find a room somewhere if I helped.’

Lucy’s face began to burn. She told herself that there was no reason why it should, but she couldn’t help it. She looked all around the room before finally turning back to him.

Edgar went on, ‘I feel as though I should have offered sooner, but I have had so much on my mind lately, though that’s no excuse. It isn’t correct for you to live with the Formbys without the two Misses Slaters.’

‘I’m not,’ she said, ‘I’ve gone with the Misses Slaters. We have the whole of the third storey at Mr Hardy’s house.’

Edgar stared at her. ‘I didn’t think you would do that.’

‘He did ask me.’

‘Yes, but—’

She cut in. ‘It’s perfectly respectable, surely, with the Misses Slaters there.’

‘I’m not sure a lot of people would think so. Joe is a stranger and a southerner – and he’s also quite different.’

‘He can’t help that.’

‘I’m not saying he should, but he comes from a class of people who behave in ways that we don’t.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘His family name is very old and he is titled. I don’t think upper-class people think like we do and he certainly doesn’t. They’ve been so privileged they don’t understand. He lost everything—’

‘That’s not his fault either,’ Lucy said. But she was cross with herself for defending Joe. He didn’t need it.

Edgar said nothing else.

‘He didn’t have to offer his house to anybody,’ Lucy said, wishing she would shut up. ‘He solved the problem. I didn’t know what to do.’

‘This is what I mean about becoming involved. You cannot rescue everybody.’

Lucy looked hard at him.

‘Isn’t that what we try to do – rescue people, help them? I know that’s what my father’s always done.’ It hurt even to speak about him, but also brought her a little closer to what she had lost. She didn’t often admit to herself how much she missed him, how she longed for him, dreamt about him.

‘Yes, but not in a personal way.’

‘It is personal to me. I live with the two old ladies. They are my business and as for Mrs Formby – did you think I was going to let her be on the street—’

‘It wouldn’t have come to that.’

‘It did come to that,’ Lucy argued, angry now. ‘All they have is what Tilda makes and—’ She was about to say that Tilda wouldn’t be able to do that for long, that they would soon have nothing, but she managed to stop herself.

Edgar was silent for several moments while Lucy went back and back over everything she had said. She was already reprimanding herself.

‘We obviously don’t agree on this matter,’ Edgar said levelly. ‘If you are going to allow your personal feelings into your life when you become a solicitor you will not survive. Do you understand what I mean? You will put at risk the very reason for your being there because your emotions will conflict with the law. Then what will you do?’

She was too angry to speak. She understood what he meant and the only defence she could think of was that she was not a solicitor yet, which was hardly the point.

‘Perhaps this is why women should not become solicitors,’ he said. ‘They let their emotions cloud the issue. If you are going to go home and take all these pressures with you, your whole life will become a burden.’

Lucy didn’t reply. She was seething. She went back to her draughty office and began work.

The car which they had decided to try to build became a bigger and bigger project to Joe and Mr Palmer. They went on with repairs as they must to make money, but they spent many hours in the little office at the back of the premises, talking about what they wanted, getting the ideas down on paper and then trying to make them real. Joe had questioned his reasons for doing this. It was a huge commitment and as such would take up a great deal of time and money. If it didn’t succeed he would take the whole thing personally. It would change their lives. He wasn’t sure whether Mr Palmer had taken in what it meant to them, whether he could see that far ahead, but then they thought of the project quite differently.

To Mr Palmer it was fun, it was something new and different to do. Joe knew it did not occur to him that they might be breaking new ground in the motor industry in England. Yet Joe thought more and more about what he was attempting. And it was quite new, the idea that the motor car would become the domain of every man and woman. It would change not only people’s individual lives but how they saw themselves and one another. He was so scared at what he might do that
images came to him in the night of chaos and black roads and lack of privacy and how speed might kill.

In daylight he laughed at himself for such ridiculous fears. The ideas would come to nothing or someone would beat them to it and build a car for the common man, someone else would end up taking responsibility for something which could become more important than trains, a place where man would feel invincible when he was nothing of the kind. It made Joe shudder at night, but during the day all he felt was excitement.

On paper the design was nothing more than a square box with wheels. It was the equivalent of a terraced house, Joe thought, hopefully ordinary, buyable. It was within the reach of those people who’d never thought they would have a form of transport so easy and so reliable and that they might take to the world without thought, without conscience. They would take control as they could never do with a train. Driving was something Joe had thought of as for necessity only, but it would do a great deal more than that if someone came up with the ideas.

He and Mr Palmer spent exciting evenings when the day’s work was done and Mrs Palmer had filled them full of egg and chips. They would go back to the workshop and pore over their ideas. Joe liked it best when it was dark and he could hear the rain pounding the roof. They would sit there, Frederick under the desk, listening to the rain and feeling the heat coming from the old pot-bellied stove. He was happier there than he had been since he’d come back from France and before everything had gone so wrong.

The square box with wheels would be tiny compared with any other car, yet there must be room for luggage. It was so modest that Joe didn’t think any of the car designers would accept it. Modesty was not something the car industry adhered to. Cars were all about speed on tracks, about competition – or they were the rich man’s toy, the devotee’s place. Joe and Mr Palmer imagined the little car outside a front door – so that you could get up in the morning, pack a picnic into a basket and take to the roads, going anywhere you wanted until you came to the sea.

As a concept Joe loved it, but the practicalities worried him. They took up many hours of thought. There was something which nagged at him too, the idea that every time you went forward and created something new, something which people might take to in a big way, you created a monster. Once you put that monster at people’s disposal there was always a downside. But Joe had thankfully not allowed himself to imagine what this might be. So they went on, ignoring the ‘what might happen’. They toiled night after night at the little square shape and what it must enclose. It would be the first car for the working man and his wife and his family, and after that Joe couldn’t think. He determined not to.

First they built the car in wood, just to see where everything fitted. It had to take four people in it and not make them feel squashed. It had to have a boot which would take two big square boxes, Joe had decided, for whatever people chose to put in it. The car must be neat but not too small, it must be square so that it would stand in a street and allow traffic both ways, it must go down a fairly narrow side road
and it must be robust so that it could be taken down an unmade back street and not clatter itself to pieces.

It must be tight so that water did not pour in at the doors or roof or sills. Everything must fit perfectly.

The engine was the most important thing of all.

They tried everything they could to get the parts in the right place and in the right order, but began to despair that they could not make it happen.

Joe wanted it to go in the front. Mr Palmer was prepared to turn the whole thing around and have the engine at the back. Joe’s sense of what was neat and proper refused to allow this, but he had to keep the possibility in mind if it was the only thing they ended up being able to do. Also costs must be kept to a minimum if the car were to be made in quantity, and he thought that was the least expensive way of doing it. The whole point was for the car to be made as cheaply as possible so that it was available to as many people as possible.

Once the wooden chassis was built and things went where they should and Mr Palmer and Joe could even sit in the back seats, though Mr Palmer said he wouldn’t have wanted to go any further than Whitley Bay like that, not with his aches and pains, they moved on. The engine didn’t fit, and it didn’t matter how they moved things around.

He began rearranging the engine in his sleep, having black dreams where he fell into it and drowned in oil. Every time they moved even just a small part the whole thing refused to work and they had to dismantle it again. It was like the world’s biggest jigsaw being thrown up into the air and landing all over the garage.

Joe came to hate the big corrugated shed which was all the garage really was. In fine weather it was stifling. In the winter Joe mistook heavy sleet for bullets at first and threw himself onto the cracked concrete floor. The windows blew in and out with wind and rain and were spattered with dirt. If either one of them felt the call of nature they would have to rush up the back street into Mr Palmer’s backyard and outside lavatory. Luckily it was not far.

In cold weather they found excuses to huddle by the stove in the tiny office. The snow blew in around the big doors at the front.

From the wooden prototype with the engine finally fitting, they moved on to building the car. It brought a whole new set of problems with materials. The real thing, Joe decided, was nothing like the prototype. He wanted to use cheap metal for the body, but it wasn’t sturdy enough; too thick and the car was weighed down. The metal bulged or the doors wouldn’t shut, the roof and the boot poured in water. Every time they solved one difficulty they created another. Mr Palmer would swear at nobody in particular and go home to warm up by his kitchen fire, boring his wife by telling her the same things over and over again, while Joe despaired and would walk Frederick right around the river.