A Little Bit on the Side (24 page)

For a couple of years the bears had simply been carefully wrapped and stored away, but as the rooms were furnished, so they came into their own again until the overall impression created by the house while undoubtedly masculine, was coloured with what Celia described as a delicious, sexual ambiguity.

Jimmy’s comment was more direct.

‘For Christ’s sake don’t let the story get noised abroad Jack. A taxman with a Teddy Bear collection! You’ll lose all credibility.’

Both thought, but did not say, that for those who knew the background, the place looked a little bit like a shrine.

‘He’s not taken up with anyone else,’ said Celia. ‘Do you think he still has hopes?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine love. Do you think she’d be likely to come given the chance?’

‘Same answer I’m afraid.’

Far from regretting his departure from the hill as Jack had expected, Jimmy and Celia had been quite delighted with his move to Barlow. They still met regularly, and the occasional overnight accommodation that Jack provided meant that Jimmy could now indulge himself in the liquid and solid delights of The Parish Pump without stinting. And to Jack’s surprise he was also displaying a newly awakened interest in ecclesiastical architecture. Although utterly dismissive of Jack’s enthusiastic introduction to the masonic skills exhibited in the stone tower of All Saint’s, Jimmy had now become ecstatic to the point of boredom on the constructional wonders of St Botolph’s wooden spire.

‘Just under one hundred and fifty feet Jack. Almost the highest, and possibly the oldest, timber-framed spire in the country. I got talking to Bill Thomas the churchwarden soon after we first stayed with you. Found we’d got a common link in our wartime service. Shared the same convoys once or twice, and possibly even the same ship, although we never met up. He couldn’t do enough for me then. Got to have a look at the spire from the inside. Got almost halfway up in fact. I tell you Jack, it’s a bloody marvel.’

‘Oh do tell me more Jim,’ said Jack, but his sarcasm was lost on Jimmy, who took a deep draught of his second pint, cool from The Pump’s dark cellars, and continued.

‘Well it’s late thirteenth century, lead-covered on oak timbers throughout, and all sitting snug on top of the tower masonry, not tied to it mind you, just sitting there, and it’s straight as a die. You could drop a plumb-line from top to bottom, and it would be dead centre.’

Jack suspected that he was now being paid in his own coin for the number of times he had teased Jimmy with literary references, but he was vaguely interested in the subject and quite happy to indulge his enthusiasm.

‘And that’s unusual is it Jim?’

‘Oh come on Jack. Think about it a bit. That stuffs been sitting up there some seven hundred years. Don’t you think you might have sagged a bit in that time? And it’s not just the years. This chap really knew his stuff. He’d got his hands on good seasoned timber to start with. He’d cross-braced it properly, and he’d set it on footing timbers clear of the wet. Too many of them got the construction right, but started off with green, unseasoned timber: others mixed their wood or were careless with the footings. Starting like that they didn’t give the spires a chance: they either twisted, or rotted and dropped at the base. But not this chap.’

‘And is this paragon anonymous, like most of his kind in those days, or do we know anything about him?’

‘Yes, Bill made the same point, but he said that unusually we do know just a little. He said that much of the funding for the church came from the Barlow Merchants’ Guild, and apparently a few guild records survive for the time which show payments to a Ricardus Willeson, Master Carpenter at two shillings a week. When I laughed at that Bill said that two bob a week was in fact something above the going rate for the time: only about threepence a day it seems. So our man must have had quite a reputation.’

‘Two bob a week,’ said Jack. ‘Dear God and he probably kept a wife and family on that, and enjoyed a pint like us. Well here’s to Dick Wilson, Master Carpenter, wherever his dust lies buried.’

The morning after what had proved to be a heavier than usual evening session in The Pump, Jack closed the door behind him leaving Jimmy and Celia to breakfast at leisure and then let themselves out. He’d be seeing them again at the weekend when he went back to the Croft to stay for a night or two. He’d said nothing to them, but they probably remembered as well as he did that it was three years to the day since Kate had departed. That trauma apart, however, he reckoned that things had gone pretty well: Krugerrands, promotion, the posting he wanted and even a commendatory letter from his boss at head office. Somebody up there liked him he decided.

His daily journey, diametrically across town from northwest to southeast, allowed him a variety of routes, all very pleasant walking, soured only by the final destination: his office. Leaving the river behind him he turned first into Withy Lane, an area which for many years was characterised as one of the least desirable in town. Despite later changes some taint of that earlier reputation lingered on, and was one of the reasons why the prices there and at nearby Riverside had remained so attractive for a few years.

Originally two rows of artisans’ cottages interspersed with simple workshops and a couple of coach-houses, the area had slid steadily down the social scale to reach its nadir in the closing years of the war, when the activities in two or three of the houses brought accusations that the area was little more than a red light district servicing the Americans, who had arrived at the end of 1943 to set up camp on Barlow Common.

‘There were two or three houses in particular,’ said Elsie. ‘I could point them out to you now, and the madams that were running them. Board and lodgings they called them — well that’s a nice way of putting it. And they did very nicely out of it too, and now to see them about town you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

Owned by the old Barlow gentry too, but they didn’t turn down the rent did they? Nor it wasn’t just the Yanks who they obliged I can tell you. I could name a few names if I’d a mind.

Mind you times were hard then, and there were a few young widows with families to bring up that I wouldn’t blame for taking a pound or two from the Yanks. They always had more than enough to spare.’

Elsie was Jack’s cleaner, Barlow born and bred, and highly recommended to him by Mrs Arscott for her honesty and discretion. But having heard Elsie in full spate on the red light district and other local gems after a strong gin and tonic had loosened her tongue at Christmas at the end of his first year in Barlow, Jack always took particular pains to ensure that any sensitive papers were well secured when Elsie made her weekly visit. He was not, however, above priming her from time to time to learn a little more of the local gossip.

With the coming of the housing boom Withy Lane gradually began to lose its unsavoury reputation. The old Barlow families, those who had their own houses on Priory Hill or the High Street, while content to screw what rent they could from the run-down properties, were not slow to recognise their potential as prices began to rise, and over ten years or so the cramped little artisans’ houses, workshops and coach-houses were transformed and gentrified into compact, but ‘deceptively spacious’, cottages or mews houses.

Former knocking-shops were occupied by respectable widows, coach-houses by middle-aged divorcees, and the remaining two-up, two-down slums where Barlow’s workers had once raised their families, were now bijou residences occupied by middle or upper-middle class singles. Artisans, coachmen and children may have been conspicuous by their absence, but with those who now formed the residents of Withy Lane Jack, by virtue of his regular passage up and down the lane, was soon on friendly terms. His relationship with Angela, however, a divorcee a couple of years younger than himself, had matured rapidly into a more particular and intimate affair.

Although Jack’s sexual fires were more inclined to slumber than rage, he had missed his occasional comforts since Kate left, and would not have been averse to fanning the flames a little with Angela. A petite, vivacious and attractive brunette, she must have been in her late thirties, and Jack, now well into his forties, neither expected nor desired anyone younger. With Kate’s comments still fresh in his mind he had no wish to be entangled with anyone too demanding.

Their recent histories meant that the relationship was exploratory on both sides: walks, coffees, a meal together at The Pump, and a trip to the theatre at Wolverton. Following the theatre Jack asked Angela to dinner at Riverside. Her thank-you kiss when she left was markedly more than friendly.

Angela returned his hospitality a couple of weeks later. She lived upstairs in one of the converted coachhouses, and as Jack passed through to her living room overlooking the walls of the castle, the door to her bedroom stood half-open. The curtains were already drawn although it was only early evening, and from one corner a table lamp threw a soft light over the bed and the negligee casually spread across its foot. It all looked very inviting.

The meal and wine were enjoyed over inconsequential chat, holidays, books, the theatre, that sort of thing; all of which Jack was certain concealed a more inviting sub-text. And with the meal over he helped to clear the table, for which he received a kiss presented with a much closer body contact than the occasion strictly required. Then they had coffee and a liqueur, and as darkness fell over the walls of the castle sat together listening to vintage Sinatra:
Maybe You’ll Be There, Where Is the One,
and
I’m a Fool to Want You.
Familiar ballads of loneliness and longing, as the record sleeve said.

The evening, like the record, had been beautifully orchestrated, and Jack was in no doubt that Angela was only waiting for him to take the initiative, but the longer they sat, the more inhibited he became. He was increasingly haunted both by the memory of Kate’s missionary position jibe, and by the dawning awareness that the familiarity he had always felt when with Angela was occasioned by her resemblance to his much loved and long deceased maiden aunt Betty, as she had been in her younger days: a resemblance that once he was aware of it seemed to strengthen each time he looked at Angela.

A second record went on to the player, some romantic ballads sung by Roberto Murolo: mementos of one of Angela’s Italian holidays. In any other circumstances the songs and the voice would have been impossibly seductive, but before the record came to an end Jack realised that his situation was quite impossible. He sat there utterly incapable of action, paralysed by a vision of himself as the missionary lying naked between Angela’s welcoming legs and pulling back from a kiss to see his dear, dead aunt Betty’s face gazing back at him flushed with passion and wanting more. He’d feel like a bloody necrophiliac.

It was no good, he had to get away, and the sooner the better: before he let poor Angela commit herself any further. Mumbling a few pathetic thanks for a wonderful evening, he made his excuses, and leaving with a kiss which even he recognised as semi-detached, he stumbled from Angela’s door into the lane.

‘Arsehole. Arsehole. You stupid, fucking arsehole.’

Flushed with shame and embarrassment, he kept up the same refrain all the way back to Riverside, where he drank himself to sleep with whisky.

The memory of that sexual misadventure was still fresh enough in Jack’s mind for him to look studiously ahead as he made his way up Withy Lane before turning into the abandoned churchyard of St Botolph. Glancing up at Dick Wilson’s spire he smiled at the memory of his friend’s new-found enthusiasm.

After the castle, St Botolph’s was the oldest establishment in town. Older by almost a century than All Saints’, it had at one time been the principal church of the town, but as the centre of gravity and wealth had shifted from the castle end of town towards Priory Hill and the streets around The Parish Pump, St Botolph’s had entered into a slow, but irreversible decline, and it now looked as though it would not be long before it joined those other redundant churches that were to be found here and there throughout the county.

For those like Jack, however, whose taste was for the time-worn, unimproved and contemplative it had much to offer. Its graveyard, extending over more than an acre, had not, unlike All Saints’, suffered a latterday equivalent of the Highland Clearances, but offered its own monumental commentary on the ravages of time and the slow movement of earth. Table tombs sagged and drooped; coffin tombs pitched and yawed, and everywhere headstones, inclining to or recoiling from their neighbours, hinted at the attachments or antipathies over three centuries of those bearing the names to be read on them, Gowring, Oseland, Boweswell and Adams: names that were still to be found every Thursday in the births, deaths and news columns of the local journal.

Nodding a morning greeting to them all as he passed, Jack moved on into the lanes of the old town, and out into Church Street to pass The Parish Pump and All Saints’ church before dropping down into the Shambles, an area of small industrial enterprises where, in the thirties, the authorities had taken it into their head to build the local tax office on the site of the town’s demolished abattoir.

It was a decision seized upon by the leader writer of the local rag, a man of little invention and less wit, as an excuse to take firm hold of the conceit of lambs being led to the slaughter, and systematically wring every drop of humour out of it. A framed and yellowing copy of this atrocity had been gracing a wall of Jack’s office when he arrived: having been placed there in the thirties, he was told, by one of his predecessors. His first executive action had been to consign it to the rubbish bin. His second had been to ensure that an early coffee was on his desk to cheer him just as soon as he arrived each morning. This he now sat sipping as he reflected, not for the first time, on the changes recent years had brought.

Kate’s departure from his life had, if anything, served only to strengthen Jack’s determination to move to Barlow, as his long-held suspicion that he might after all be a town, if not a city dweller at heart was rapidly reinforced when he found himself in solitary ‘enjoyment’ of the house and its nine acres. Even if a sale hadn’t been inevitable as part of a settlement with Kate, he was tired of responsibility for the land, had had his fill of the rural good life, and was sure that after another year or so there would be little to hold him in Barton.