England's Lane (11 page)

Yeh—and then she were heaving out the mats, beating the filth out of them on the washing line, there. Boiling up water. Dragging buckets up the stairs. Scrubbing the floor. Me, I left school—help her out, like. Weren't too keen on the lessons, yeh it's true—I weren't no scholar. Yeh but I couldn't just watch it, could I? Ay? My old mum. Slogging her bleeding guts out. So I get a job in a shoe mender's. Never paid much—least though she never have to take in washing no more. My dad, he buggered off by then. Spent all the money what the ironmonger's took, left us all of the debts. Then my mum's brother, he kick the bucket and leave her a few quid. That's when I get the shop up and running again. Worked it all hours. Fifteen, I were. My mum, she says to me—Jim, you're a good lad, you are. I says to her—What you talking about? Yeh. Good lad, that's what she said I were. Only one whatever did. Yeh. And next thing you know, well … I just turn round and she gone. Come up from the shop one night, and it all dark and ever so quiet. I thought—funny. Come into the room. Parlor, we called it. Don't no more. And there she were, all keeled over. Half in the old tin bath what she been filling out of kettles. Burned her arm something terrible. Red and white it were. And all down the side of her face.
Didn't matter. On account of she dead. Doctor said it were her heart. Just must've burst, I reckon. Yeh well.

After that, my brothers and my sisters, they was all fostered off. Adopted, one or two of them—formal, like. So then it were just me. I put my back into the shop. All I had. Started making a few bob. Then the war come along and, well—got to do your bit, ain't you? I didn't mind. I were one of the first to volunteer. Never saw no action, though. I got this Achilles problem, is what they says to me—don't know the ins and outs of it. But sometimes, my feet, they'll just buckle from under me, and I goes all useless. Bugger if I got a cup of tea in my hands. Anyway, the army—they bung me in a desk job down Minehead. Least I kept safe. And then I goes and meets Mill. That were a day. Won't never forget that day in a hurry, tell you that. Lovely-looking gel, she were. Still is, my eye. Ever so posh. That were a worry. But she never seemed to mind all of that—that I were common and don't know nothing. We had a laugh, Mill and me. Never were bothered. She never minded. She do now. Now she do. You can smell it. Wherever I am, there's the stink of it. I only asked her to marry me because that's what the lads were doing in them days. And Mill, she were the only gel what I knowed. You could've blown me down with a wossname when she turn round and go yeh to me. Blimey, I thought.

Reckon … I reckon I'll get myself upstairs. Turn off all the doings. Mill, she'll be in the box room tonight, if I know her. Like what she were last night. Don't know why. Couldn't tell you. Don't like to ask.

Milly heard the creak—saw the passing of Jim cutting the bar of white beneath the door, and then it winked back. She heard then the snap of the light switch, and it was gone again. All is quiet and darkness. So now and at last I can relax, and turn out the bedside
lamp. Now that I know he's not going to come in here and start making an unholy fuss like he did last night. You could smell the Bass from the doorway. But this time, clearly, he's accepted it. Well good. Because it's getting harder and harder, you know—it really is so terribly difficult for me. Lying next to him in that so very narrow bed of ours. I have suggested we throw it out—get a nice pair of twins. Why, he says. Wholly predictably. What's wrong with it, he says. Good bed, this is. Served us Trojan. Got years of life in it, this bed has. Yes. Well, I couldn't tell him—could I really? Of course another man might have known. Might maybe have understood. But he doesn't understand. Jim, he knows nothing. About anything, really. And I suppose I ought to be grateful for his seemingly utter blindness where I am concerned. I mean to say—he did go on a bit about all that nonsense I was talking about the windowsill and the United Dairies … but of course he was taking it nowhere because he never really has anywhere to go with a thing. I'm not even sure that there is a window, never mind a sill. It just floated into my head—and I'm rather pleased it did, because I had to say something, didn't I? I couldn't very easily say Yes well I'll tell you where I've been Jim, since you come to ask me. I have in fact just been visiting Mister Jonathan Barton, family butcher, who was at the time covered in blood. Fresh blood: warm. All over that beautiful suit of his. And the reason I had been calling upon Mister Jonathan Barton, family butcher, is because I was consumed with a no doubt girlish and extremely idiotic panic and the burning redhot poker of jealousy, but I can assure you they felt no less real to me for their lack of foundation. You could indeed say that I was in anguish. And all because that awful Mrs. Goodrich had invoked the name of a silly little girl called Doreen. And of course there had been a perfectly rational explanation, as—had I stopped to think for just for a moment—I knew there must. Deep down. I just had
to hear it from his own so very sweet lips, that's all. Because the thought of it otherwise … well I simply could not bear it, I do know that. This is the position in which I find myself, considerably to my surprise, and I am somewhat stranded, I admit it. Though still that desert, that place of abandonment from what used to be the comfort of my everyday life, has become the very place I long to be. So thrilling is my exile, that were it not for Paul, I should happily live there forever, on my secret island. Yes—it's not a desert, it's a paradisical island. I row there, back and forth.

Yes of course I would love to take Paul with me, if only I could. But impossible. Such a prospect would require all things to be equal, and when ever are they that? He does get on so very well with Amanda, though, my Paul. Which is just lovely—and so very in keeping, somehow. He only just has been telling me so, as I was putting him to bed. He's such a funny little boy—he hates it, absolutely hates it, if ever I mention her (he blushes so prettily it makes me want to hug him), and yet out of the blue he will suddenly start jabbering away about her thirteen to the dozen, and so very animatedly. She is such a lovely creature, and of course so very beautifully brought up. So beautifully spoken. I suppose there will have been some sort of contribution there from … from the mother, but I really wouldn't know. We rarely encounter. Fiona, I believe she is called. Paul says that Amanda never speaks of her.

“Well what does she talk about then?” I asked him. “Lie down and let me tuck you in.”

“Nothing, really.”

“Well she must talk about something, Paul. What do you have to say to her, then? You're together an awful lot. Aren't you? Hm? Must talk about
something
 …”

Paul was screwing up his nose and narrowing his eyes into a parody of concentration.

“Don't know. Just things.”

Milly smiled and nodded. Smoothed away the hair from his forehead.

“Does she … ever mention her father, at all?”

“Her father? Not really. She says he's pretty generous.”

“Mm. He is. I expect so, anyway. He does seem quite well-todo. Is that all she says?”

“Think so.”

Actually, it now occurred to Paul, I don't think she has ever said that—about her father being generous. She's said that his mustache is quite prickly, but she likes it. I must have looked a bit sick or something when she said that but only because I was thinking of Uncle Jim's disgusting mustache. I wouldn't ever get close to that. To know if it prickled. It would just smell. That's all. I said all this to Anthony, once. We'd just come back from school and we were in the sweetshop and Anthony's father had just finished selling cigarettes to Mr. Bona from the delicatessen and he had given us both a liquorice pipe with all those little red dots on the end that I always save up till last and then he said he was just going to boil up the kettle and wouldn't be two ticks. And then I said to Anthony—who was sitting on his father's stool now behind the counter because he always gets tired if he stands too long: he says the metal of those things he has to wear starts pinching him; it must be horrible.

Anthony's dad came back in then with a cup of tea, and we went up to Anthony's room. It's quite nice in there actually because he's got posters for R. White's Cream Soda, Smarties and Rowntree's Fruit Gums on the wall. He said he rescued them from big fat Sally from Lindy's before she managed to tear them all to pieces. He calls her Hippo now.

“Is your dad okay?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“Crumbs. Why is it, Anthony, whenever I ask you anything you ask me what I mean? I mean—your dad. Is he okay?”

“Think so. Sort of okay. He's just Dad. Don't know what you mean.”

“It's just that … I don't know. He looks a bit—sad, that's all.”

“Mm. I suppose he might be, a bit. There's me to look after. The shop. Mum, of course …”

“I've never seen your mum.”

“Oh I have.”

“You are a complete and utter twerp, Anthony! Do you know that? Of course you have! She's your mum, isn't she?”

“Yes. I know. But I don't see her often. She doesn't like people, really. Seeing people.”

“Yes but at teatime, and things. When she puts you to bed, and everything …”

“No. Dad does all that. He says she's not well. Says she's quite ill. Don't know what's wrong with her. She's been like that for ages.”

And I thought—gosh, that must be really awful. Like not having a mum at all. I mean—I don't, of course. I don't have a mum, not really. But Auntie Milly, she's even better. She's the best mum in the whole wide world. I'd hate it if she didn't tuck me into bed every evening. I wish she wouldn't make me say my prayers, though—but I do it really quickly. I don't like to ask God to bless Uncle Jim because I don't really think he deserves it. And when it's over she kisses my head and I smell all her Lilian Valley and she tells me that she loves me and that tomorrow is a lovely day.

“Nighty-night then, Paul. I love you. And tomorrow—tomorrow is a lovely day.”

“I love you too, Auntie Milly. Night-night.”

Yes—I love him so. Every night I say it to the little mite, and every night—every single night without exception—I walk over to the
door and I have to switch off the light before I turn around to smile and then just flutter across to him my two-fingered wave, or otherwise surely he would catch the glinting of those tiny stinging pinpoints of tears in my eyes. The rush of just loving him, the sourness and twist in my stomach whenever I just must leave him, even for a single night … and when I wake in the morning, always exactly two minutes before the alarm is set to go off, my only thought is: Paul. Yes. But at night … at night, though … at night, in the still and dark, it is another I think of.

The moment when I first encountered him was on the morning of the reopening. The old butcher, Mr. Blake, his nerves had eventually got the better of him: never really was the same since the end of the war. And now this Mr. Barton had taken over the shop. It did look very spruce. There was bunting outside, and the rather odd cashier woman he has in there, mousy little thing, was handing out thimblefuls of Harveys Bristol Cream. Rather too early in the day, though—not that anyway I am a lover of sherry—so I marched up to the counter and I said to this very tall and handsome man there “Good morning. Welcome to England's Lane. I hope you will be very happy and prosperous. I should like three pork chops and a pound of lard please, if it isn't too much trouble.” And his eyes, they creased into that smile of his that I have come to know so very well, and he said to me “Quite the reverse, I do assure you, madam. It is both my honor and my privilege to be able to serve you.” Well. And the beautiful deep rich tone of his voice, the quite perfect accent … His large and capable hands as he wrapped the chops in a sheet of greaseproof. I think I blushed. I know! So terribly shame-making. But I do think I must have. And looking back … looking back, you know—whether or not I admitted it to myself at the time (and I didn't, of course I didn't—I strove so hard to put it out of my mind for weeks and weeks, and then simply months) … I
was, at that moment, completely smitten. A thing that never before had happened to me in my entire life on earth, and nor did I ever expect it. Here was the stuff of novelettes and serials on the wireless—hardly applicable to everyday life. Hardly applicable to mine, anyway. And yet … here it was within me.

There was, over time … what I suppose you might term banter. No more than that. And of a mild, quite casual and perfectly friendly nature, it ought to be understood: Jonathan was ever the gentleman. And then one day—the shop was empty, even the funny little cashier was absent from the box that he keeps her in—one day he said to me, across the counter:

“Mrs. Stammer. Please do forgive me, if you can find it within your good heart, should I in any manner whatever come to cause you even the very slightest offense … but I am moved to be bold.”

Well I ask you! How on earth is a lady expected to respond to a speech such as that!

“Why Mr. Barton. I cannot imagine what you mean to say to me …”

Which, due to my abiding love for Jane Austen, is the sort of thing that always I had rather longed to utter.

“Oh but surely, Milly … may I call you that? Would you permit me? It is simply that I feel that already I know you so very well …”

“I'm sure that cannot be, Mr. Barton …”

“Jonathan. Please. I entreat you. I should regard it as a rare and signal honor should you feel able to bring yourself to call me Jonathan.”

“Well … Jonathan. Of course I shouldn't mind. Why on earth would I? And I should be delighted for you to call me Milly. Heavens—everyone else in the Lane does. Apart from such as Mrs. Goodrich, of course. The Lord alone knows what it is that she might call me!”