Give Us This Day (68 page)

  The man to whom he spoke, one Dyson, a carpenter who had bent and fitted her hood poles, was to remember this remark. Especially when his daughter brought him his illustrated paper towards the end of his lie-in the following Sunday morning.

  His route was a double compromise.

  By the shortest distance, and probing for low gradients and good, metalled roads, he could have knocked miles off his journey and as much as three hours off his time schedule, but he had to reckon on the near certainty of traffic congestion in the complex manufacturing centres stretching eastwards and southwards from Bradford through Halifax to Huddersfield and Oldham. He knew this ground well. Only by night, or on a Sunday, was it free of heavy haulage, up here mostly horsedrawn, and there was no certainty of an easy passage of any of the West Riding towns in mid-week. On the other hand, a more northerly and circuitous route up the valley of the Aire, bearing west by Haworth, then south via Hebden Bridge and Rochdale, presented serious hazards at the time of year. Most of the road ran over high, windswept upland, with the virtual certainty of ice on some gradients. There was, however, a third alternative, the compromise within a compromise, a more tortuous approach over the lower landmass enclosing the Aire gap, heading northwest for Keighley and beyond it to Cross Hill, where the road branched north to Skipton and southwest for Colne and the eastern frontier of the cotton belt. Thus, of the three alternatives, two offered virtual freedom from traffic and of these two the Keighley-Colne route promised the easier climb, although adding more than thirty miles to the journey.

  It was this approach he finally chose, stowing two extra drums of fuel in the trailer, for he had no experience on which to base his probable petrol consumption. His own guess was that it would be nearly double that of the heaviest Swann-Maxie on the roads, particularly over the spine of England, but he was in no particular hurry and a series of long climbs and the twenty-mile drop into Lancashire might provide him with the answers to some of the many questions both George and Scottie Quirt would be sure to put at the inquest. And a searching inquest, with two other prototypes in the making, was vital, with a prospect of saving weeks of trial and error when fed back to the Leeds mechanics. It might also be generally useful to Scottie's men in the Macclesfield yard, for every six months or so modifications were adapted to the standard vehicle and not all of them came (by fair means or foul) from the brochures and workshops of competitors. Perhaps half were derived from personal experience within the network, sedulously circulated to the regions in the columns of
The Migrant.

  The morning was bright, clear, and cold, with the thermometer hovering a couple of degrees over freezing point in the city, so that his hoped-for early start was delayed. There had been a sharp frost in the night, and he decided to wait for the morning sun to get to work on the ice patches. The wind, coming from the west, was very fresh, altogether an exhilarating morning to begin an odyssey, and he set out about ten-thirty, heading west-southwest through Shipley and Bingley, well north of the Bradford suburbs, and found the road surprisingly open.

  He was right about the Fawcett attracting attention. Errand boys whistled with surprise as he rumbled past, and he saw one jot down the name of the vehicle in a notebook. He thought, smiling, That'll fox him for sure. Nobody but Uncle Georg
e and me, and the Leeds mechanics, have ever heard of the name applied to a motor.

  He made very good time, averaging around twenty miles an hour, and before starting the climb to Cross Hill and the Skipton junction he pulled in at a tavern and ordered a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, occupying himself while the coffee was brewing by stamping about the yard and swinging his arms to restore circulation to his fingertips. The leather coat and gauntlets were a boon, but it was still cold up on that high box. Only his feet were warmed by the engine, and the coffee was so good that, after a reassuring glance at his watch, he ordered a second cup.

  The sky had clouded over as he gained height and the wind freshened, veering to the northeast. There were still patches of ice here and there, but he travelled most of this section in second gear, driving with excessive caution. The trailer was inclined to snake a little when he built up speed and his mind was occupied, as he went along, with ways of how this problem could be tackled satisfactorily. Probably by adjustments to the coupling, he thought, as the crossroads came into view a mile beyond the village of Steeton.

  From here on it was almost all downslope, a stretch of about eight miles into Colne and the prospect of flatter ground from then on, together with the near certainty of heavy traffic, slow-moving in these narrow, Lancashire streets, after he reached Nelson and Burnley and turned south for Rochdale.

  He pulled in to the side of the road at the summit and fed ten gallons of fuel into the tank, using his tin funnel with a filter, but he was impeded somewhat by the ever freshening wind that whipped the hood of cabin and trailer causing them to exclaim like sails and spraying a fine rain of fuel over his gauntlets and the engine cowling. He rolled the cask back and up the plank slide to the trailer tailboard, thinking that it might have been wiser to bring along an apprentice to do the chores, but not seriously, for this was an experience he did not care to share with anyone, not even with Uncle George or Scottie Quirt, whose brains had contributed far more than his to the creation of the monster. There were parts of it, however, that were indubitably his, so that the name was not really undeserved. He looked westward down the long, straight stretch of road he was to travel and thought: Longest route notwithstanding, I've made rattling good time. At this rat
e I'll be in Salford by late afternoon, and Cousin Rudi and I can celebrate with a pint and a dish of Lancashire hotpot!

  Then he was off again, tackling the decline at about twenty-two miles an hour, but changing down when he saw the long squiggle of ice crossing the road diagonally from south to north where a streamlet had frozen during the night. He had not expected ice this side of the Pennines. Almost always the eastern side was the colder, but it must be the wind blowing in from the North Atlantic.

  He felt the skid and heard the distant toot of the horn at the same instant. A hunting horn it was, from somewhere on the fell away to the left, and a second later, as he was steering into the skid on the shoulder of the hill, he saw the hunt streaming diagonally across his front. It was a straggle of about twenty riders less than a hundred yards behind the pack and clearly in full cry, for they were pounding over the frosted turf at a cracking rate, the huntsman out ahead, horn to his lips.

  The spectacle did not distract him. He was too good an engineer for that, but he wasted a split second gauging their probable line and trying to judge where, precisely, they would cross the road bounded by low stone walls, no obstacle to experienced horsemen and certainly none to the scrambling pack that went at it in a bunch and were all over the road in a matter of seconds.

  He had to brake harder then and out of the corner of his eye he saw the leading horsemen pulling on their reins and one or two of them cavorting parallel with him as the horses, baulking more at the Fawcett than the wall, swung left on a downslope. It was then that he went into the real skid, a long, skittering slide left, right, and left again, and he had a moment to be afraid; not for himself but for the Fawcett, for it flashed across his mind that this would be a ridiculous way to conclude his odyssey, broadside on against a loose stone wall on the eastern slopes of the Pennines.

  The landscape lost coherence for him then, at the moment of the first impact. He was hunched over the steering column, wrestling with the heavy vehicle as with a Mastodon, and it was not answering to any of the directions transmitted through his hands and feet. It was like an elephant that had run wild, lashing out with its immense hindquarters and grinding everything in its path. The hunt foamed up on the far side of the wall and about a dozen laggards among the pack were still spewed over the highway, running it seemed in all directions, as though to escape the thundering passage of the vehicle, now almost broadside on with its trailer ricocheting from the base of the wall but always, impelled by its own weight and anchored apex, returning for more punishment.

  Then, as though the whole world was turning topsy-turvey, he lost all sense of direction as the cabin heeled over, was checked by the pull of the trailer, halfrecovered its upright position, and finally somersaulted twice, ending up on its nearside wedged between the two walls and piled in the form of a barricade across the full width of the road.

  He had a sense of being picked up by the heels and shaken, a vanquished rat in the jaws of a terrier, and experienced a single spasm of fear as he saw, all about him, a soft orange glow and smelled the reek of blazing fuel. His last conscious thought was of that unstowed reserve drum in the trailer, surely the main contributory factor to this holocaust, and his lips framed the word, "Fool…
fool
!" as he remembered that he was the man who had placed it there, without so much as a brace or a piece of rope to hold it in position against a contingency like this.

Five

Stella

G
eorge heard the full truth by telephone from Rudi, who had received it from the police at Colne who, in turn, had got it from the infirmary surgeon examining the charred bundle they brought in for him to certify as dead.

  By then Rudi was in Colne himself, having rushed there by motor-cycle and arriving, chilled to the bone, about dusk, when a team of corporation men were still trying, without much success, to clear the road six miles to the east. Rudi telephoned before notifying Scottie Quirt and the Macclesfield depot. Shocked half out of his mind, he still realised it was his responsibility as The Polygon viceroy, and commissioner of the new trailer, to pass the information to Headquarters and ask for instructions.

  He could sense his father's numbed horror over the two-hundred-mile gap between them, and when George remained silent for something approaching half a minute, he said, urgently: "You did get it, sir? You… you heard everything?"

  George replied, in a voice that seemed to come from the other side of the world, "Yes, Rudi, I heard. It's awful… frightful…" but then, rallying a little, "You're at Colne? Then go out to the scene of the accident. Talk to the police, to anyone who was early on the scene. To the master of that damned hunt, if you can find him. Get all the information you can. Every scrap, you understand?"

  "Yes, sir. I'll stay on overnight."

  "Arrange to stay indefinitely, and I'll join you for the inquest. I'll get someone to stand in for you at the depot. Meantime, I've got to tell his mother and father."

  "Can't someone else do it? The police? Grandfather, perhaps?"

  "No, son, it'll have to be me, for I was the one who took him from that farm. Stay on the job, there's a good lad. And thank you for letting me know so quickly. Don't bother with Scottie, I'll see he's notified from H.Q."

  "Right, Father. Goodbye."

"Goodbye, son. Leave word where you're staying with the Colne police."

  He rehooked the receiver and sat motionless, forcing himself to assemble the factors fed him by Rudi into some kind of sequence. A head-on collision with a hunt in full cry on a Pennine slope. A pile-up, with that immense weight bearing down on the buckled cabin and the man inside it. The first puff of flames, a soft explosion, then an inferno, far too fierce to permit hope of rescue, even if the nearest horsemen could have got to him in time. He remembered the last time he had seen Martin, only a few days ago, and told himself how splendidly the boy was coming along and what an asset he would be to the network in the years ahead. Now he was not a person at all, just a blackened corpse lying in a corporation mortuary two hundred miles to the north, awaiting a string of coroners, solicitors, witnesses, and jurymen to pronounce upon the circumstances of his death. And after that, he supposed, a coffin would trail south, containing all that remained of Martin Fawcett, one-time farmhand, lately someone of infinite promise and charm.

  He drew a jotting pad towards him and wrote a few instructions for the head clerk, calling a vanboy and telling him to deliver the note to the counting house at once. The network viceroys at least would have to know in advance; they would never forgive him if they learned it from the newspapers. And thinking of newspapers, he rang for Jeffs, his editor, who came close to breaking down when he heard the news and said, in answer to George's query: "Fleet Street will get on to something of that kind very quickly. Local correspondents will wire in stories by tonight, but there won't be any, most likely, in a place the size of Colne. Probably staff men will go over from Manchester, certainly one on behalf of the Northcliffe press. He'll feature this as his front page tomorrow."

  "As soon as that?"

  "Almost surely, George." He looked at him steadily. "It means Stella and Denzil will have to know tonight, doesn't it? Would you like Debbie and me to drive over with you?"

  "No, this is something I've got to cope with alone. Thank you all the same, Milt. Go on home and arrange for Debbie to go down to Tryst and tell the old folks in the morning. There's no need for them to know yet. The London papers don't get there until around eleven o'clock. Tell Debbie I'll be there by then."

  He dragged himself up and across the yard from his ground-floor office block near the weighbridge to the spot where his Daimler was parked. The mechanic in charge was polishing the windshield. George said, gruffly, "Leave that, Rigby. Is there enough petrol in the tank to take me down to Tryst?"

  "It's half full, sir. I checked a minute since."

  He got in and waited for the man to swing the starting handle. Then, tuning the engine, he drove slowly through the main gates and headed south into the thick of the Old Kent Road traffic. The Daimler's oil lamps battled with a low swirl of river mist as he nosed his way carefully into the southbound stream.

  He had one meagre slice of luck. Bumping down the length of unsurfaced track from river to farmyard, he saw the wink of a lantern in the byre on his right and pulled up, opening and closing the door softly and treading over frozen ruts to the byre. Denzil was inside, anxiously watching one of his Guernseys. The shed reeked of warm, country smells, touched with a whiff of disinfectant. His brother-in-law looked up as he entered, his broad, red face expressing surprise as he said, "George? You here, this time o' night? Stella never said…"

  "Where is she, Denzil?"

  "In the kitchen. I've only come out to look before locking up." He nodded at the cow beyond the rail. "She's through it but we had a worrysome hour or two. Vet was here twice since she started, around noon. Twin heifers. Alwus look for trouble with a pair. Still, she'll do now, I think. Take a look at 'em," and George peered beyond the lantern ray to see the mild-eyed Guernsey munching at her rack, one calf at her udders, another curled at her feet in the straw. He said, with a rush, "Listen, Denzil, I'd sooner break it to you here… alone. Martin was… was killed today, up in the Pennines…"

  "Killed? Marty!" His head came up so sharply that George heard the cricking sound of his neck. "How?"

  "He was driving one of the new vans from Leeds and skidded on an icy road trying to avoid a hunt. He was dead before they got him out. Rudi telephoned from a place called Colne."

  He watched the farmer ride out the shock. His weather-beaten face first drained itself of colour, and then a heavy flush returned to his pendulous cheeks as he raised a hand and rasped the palm across a day's stubble.

  "My boy? Dead, you say?"

  George nodded and stood waiting. The only sounds that broke the stillness of the byre was the lisping suck of the calf and the champ of its mother at the rack. Presently Denzil said, "When did it happen, George?" George said he wasn't sure, but it was probably early afternoon. The van Martin was driving was brand new, one that he assembled himself and partially designed on his own drawing-board. He added, "He was keen, Denzil. The keenest lad we ever had in the machine shops. It's a frightful thing to have happened, the first man we ever lost on a motor run. I don't know much about the circumstances except that there was a fire…"

  "A fire? On the road you mean?"

  "The vehicle caught fire, but Martin was almost certainly dead when the flames reached him, or so Rudi says."

  Denzil was staring at him aghast, and he knew why. Within yards of where they were standing, Denzil's own father had died in a fire, trying to save his cattle when the farm was gutted. That was before he married Stella, something like thirty years ago. Stella had told him how, on that occasion, Denzil had carried his father's body to an outhouse down the approach lane, and afterwards she had watched over him all night while he slept on sacks in a shed behind the piggeries.

  "We'd best go in now and tell his mother, Denzil."

  "Nay, I coulden do that."

  "You don't have to, I will…"

  "
No!
" The farmer shot out his huge hand and caught George by the wrist. "Let me think on it a minute… Burned up, you say?... I can't tell her that. She's alwus been afraid o' fire, ever since we lost Dewponds that time. Every time she smells smoke she makes me go out an' do the rounds. No, I dassn't tell her that, not yet any road."

  George could hear his breath wheezing, but soon, rather sooner than he expected, his brother-in-law recovered some sort of grip upon himself. He said, finally, "You wait on. Wait in the yard. I'll go in and break it, best I can. It'll be better comin' from me, seein' she was always dead against them boys goin' up there in the first place. Wait on 'til I come."

  He plodded slowly out of the byre, closing the door and moving across the beam thrown by the Daimler's lights towards the kitchen. He went in and George saw his shadow move against the muslin curtains of the big, low-beamed room.

  It was a room, he recalled, that his sister had helped Denzil to rebuild when she was a girl of about twenty, slowly emerging from the shock of that disastrous first marriage to a vicious wastrel over the Sussex border. He understood then why she had opposed the exodus of her boys from this farm and this plodding way of life. Everything that was real and important to her was right here, in this flowering corner of Kent, and everything beyond it, even Tryst, where she had been born, was alien and charged with menace. She had renounced home and family the night of that fire, identifying herself body and soul with that lumping great chap, Fawcett. Why and how nobody had ever discovered. Not even his mother, who had done all she could to encourage the unlikely match.

  About five minutes passed. The sweat on his forehead and under his arms struck cold and he shivered, making the effort of his life to resist the temptation to leap into the motor, reverse madly up the lane to the river road, and drive off into the night. Presently Denzil came out and called, not to him but to someone working in a milking shed on the far side of the yard. Robert, Denzil's eldest son, emerged, shouting irritably, "What's to do now? I'm milking. Charley's gone and I said I'd finish!" But his father called again, sharply this time, and Robert stumped across the cobbles to join him and they stood talking for a moment in the doorway before Robert went in and Denzil came across to the byre. He said, "Woulden it be better if you left it? If you just drove off, and come back in the morning?"

  "No, it wouldn't, Denzil. The papers might be full of it in the morning, and even if you keep them from her, busybodies from the village are sure to come posting up here falling over themselves to tell her the gory details. No, no, I don't want that, and neither do you if you think about it."

  "Ah, come on in, then, but don't say more'n you have to, for she's taken it bad. She's taken it real bad, George."

  She was in her customary place at the head of the long oak table, as though about to preside over supper. She sat bolt upright and her plump round face was perfectly blank, almost as though she was asleep with her eyes open. She gave no sign when he moved around and took a seat close to her, furthest from the fire. He took her hand, coarsened by years of farm work, and held it tightly. It had always been difficult to equate her with the elegant sister he remembered in the days when they were all growing up together at Tryst and she was reckoned the belle of the county and the best horsewoman for miles around. The Stella of those days had died before she was twenty, and this heavy, practical, unsmiling woman had taken her place. He said, brokenly, "I'm sorry, Stella… sorry," but could say no more, lowering his head so that he was only half aware of her sudden, incredibly swift movement up and away from the table. He only realised that the hand he had been clasping had been whipped away, as from the fangs of a snake. He heard Denzil and Robert cry out together and a combined rush of boots on the slate floor. There was a sudden flash and a shattering report, blinding and deafening him and then, as his chin came up, he saw Stella struggling with her husband and son, the latter with one hand on the gun forcing the barrel towards the floor. Then, very suddenly, she went limp, her knees buckling as she pitched forward and would have fallen had not both men grabbed her, Robert throwing the twelve-bore to the floor. The kitchen was half full of smoke and the reek of gunpowder made him cough and splutter. Robert said, breathlessly, "Leave her, Dad. I'll see to her. I'll carry her up. Fetch Dolly fer Chrissake! For Chrissake run an' fetch Dolly!" George subsided on the bench, the noise of the shot still singing in his ears, and through a haze of smoke he saw Robert lift his mother as though she was a slip of a girl and move ponderously towards the stairs. He was unable to help him. There was no power in his legs. The big kitchen clock ticked on, and a Welsh collie that had scampered for cover when the shot was fired emerged cautiously from beneath the table and arranged himself carefully beside him, slowly wagging his bush of a tail.

  Dolly, Robert's brawny wife, hurried in and went straight upstairs. Then Denzil returned, wordlessly picking up the gun and breaking it open. "T'other barrel weren't loaded," he said. "That must be young Dick. On'y Dick's vool enough to leave a loaded gun about the place."

  "Did she mean to kill me? Or was it to scare me out of the house?"

  "God knows. She had the gun on you any road, and if Bob hadn't been mighty quick…" He ran his hand over his stubble again, making a sound like a hand-saw. "It's all on account of what the boys did, I reckon, leaving here to work on those motors of yours. She's never been the same. She never got used to it and alwus blamed you for it. She told me just now you killed him, same as you shot him, but she didn't mean it, not really."

  "How do you feel about it, Denzil?"

  "Not the way she does. It was what they wanted, or young Marty wanted any road. We had letters from him saying so, and his brother woulden come back to a farm, not now."

  "That's how it was, Denzil. I'd like you to believe that. I'd like you to try and make Stella understand that. Martin was a born engineer and was first-class at his job, right from the start. He wouldn't have been happy doing anything else. Do you think you could convince her of that?"