Letters From an Unknown Woman (25 page)

‘You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,’ said Tory, once they were alone in the garden, apart from Branson, who lingered nearby.

‘But Dad’s arranged it.’

‘Without asking anyone else, least of all you. I think it would be quite reasonable for you to go to school tomorrow.’

‘It doesn’t actually start till Wednesday.’

‘In that case, you could go to the factory, see if you like it and, if not, go to school on Wednesday, just as normal.’

Tory had her arm around her son’s shoulders now. He was not an embraceable boy, normally, and flinched at any physical contact from his mother, but not this time. He accepted the compromise, but didn’t seem really to think that once he had put himself into the hands of his apprenticeship, he would be able easily to break free.

Later that evening, just after it became dark, Tom and Branson were on the roof of the privy, side by side, observing the stars through Tom’s telescope, bought from a junk shop on Scarborough Road with carefully saved pennies. The privy was the best place for observing the stars and the boys had spent many evenings on its roof, squinting at the night sky. Tom’s ambition was to find a new comet. As he had told little Branson, if you’re the first person to discover a comet, you can have it named after you.

Occasionally someone would come out to use the privy while they were on top, stargazing. If it was their mother, she would insist that they get down and go indoors before she would even enter it, and the same went for the girls, but Donald didn’t care in the slightest, to the extent that they sometimes wondered if he was even aware that they were on the roof while he was inside. The boys were the more embarrassed, and continued their astronomy in silence to the sub-noise of their father urinating or defecating, which he often did explosively, so that the roof of the privy seemed to shake.

Sometimes he would appear in the garden in a more contemplative mood, standing motionless by the back door, smoking his pipe, looking intently at nothing, or as though he was examining the night air. Sometimes he would attempt some exercise by walking up and down the backyard path without his stick, between the house and the yard gate, bending under the washing-line to do so.

He would stand in the yard right below the children, working his neck back and forth so that his head swung slowly about. It was almost as if he was bathing his head in a stream of water, but there was nothing there but cool air. At night Donald’s head reflected any light that was near. The distant light bulb shining in the back room of Mr Sawbridgeworth’s house opposite, would shine on Donald’s head, just as though he’d had an idea. Once, Branson could distinctly pick out the belt of Orion passing across the top of his father’s cranium, or so he thought. The moon was easily visible in Donald’s glossy, hairless skin, and suggested, to Branson at least, that it wasn’t as far away or as big as everyone thought.

On this particular evening Donald came out just as Tom and Branson had found Saturn and could see four of its moons, if not its rings, and stood below them at the privy door. He was silent for a while, as though ignorant of their presence, before suddenly speaking. ‘I know you have some nonsense thoughts about going to university, Tom, and I know you’ve got a good brain, and determination – Mr Briggs is ample proof of that – but the sad, squalid truth of our family is that we have no money because I, as an invalid, am not able to go out and work. I’ve tried my best – you know how hard I’ve tried, what with the brewing and the other deals I’ve put my hand to – but the law has no pity for a crippled man trying to feed his family by whatever means he can. As a result, I am crippled further, crippled right down to my heart, Tom, right down to my heart. I had a good brain too, once, you know. You can ask me anything you like about Charles Dickens, or Aristotle, or Plato, and I can give you an answer. There is no money to put you through university so you can forget about that. Bolan’s is a much better option, a good place to work, with good prospects for a clever young man. Apart from that, well, you’ll be called up to do your national service in a year or so. University was never on the cards …’

Donald’s speech seemed to drift off, as though he was unable to finish it, and after lingering a while, as if in expectation of a reply from Tom, who all the while had not taken his eye from the telescope, he went back indoors.

Even after his father had gone, it was some time before Tom said anything. ‘You wouldn’t think you could see so far from the top of a shithouse, would you?’ he said, still looking through the eyepiece, relishing that last noun, and using it as often as he could in the subsequent sentences. ‘I wonder what the people who live on Titan would think, if they knew they were being watched by people sitting on the roof of a shithouse. Mind you, perhaps they’re watching us from the roofs of their own shithouses.’

Branson was made a bit uncomfortable by the word Tom had used, because his older brother never usually swore or used dirty words of any kind. ‘What do they make at that factory?’ he said eventually.

Then he noticed that his brother, having put the telescope down, was sobbing into his knees. Branson’s discomfort increased. He had no idea why he should be crying but reached out to pat Tom’s shaking shoulders, in a vague apprehension that that was what one did with sobbing people.

The contact seemed instantly to gather Tom’s wits and he stopped crying. Instead he said, as if to himself, but really for Branson’s hearing, ‘Well, if they could see me now, those ninnies on Titan, they’d be having a proper laugh. I expect they’re laughing this minute, to see me have my life taken from me on the roof of a shithouse. They’d be laughing so much they’d probably fall off of their own shithouses. Goodbye, Titans, go back to your shitty little shithouses.’ The tears had returned by the time that final phrase was added, so that it was said stutteringly through gritted teeth, from the back of the throat, in a surprisingly manly tone. Tom let the telescope drop from his hands, and it rolled quickly across the slate and dropped again, onto the cobbles below. The lens popped out and spun like a coin.

*

The next morning at half past seven, a small green van parped its horn outside the house, and Tom, wearing his ordinary clothes and with a round of cheese sandwiches wrapped in newspaper tucked under his arm, left the house, watched anxiously by his mother from the front door. There was something about the boldness and lack of hesitation with which he had walked down the path to greet his new life that suggested to Tory that perhaps he would enjoy life as a working man after all.

*

When Tom came home that evening, he seemed a different person. His hands were shaking. His face was blank. He ignored anyone’s questions and, with a sort of rigid shrug, went straight to his room. Tory went after him but he had wedged the door shut. She could hear him sobbing within, though he was clearly struggling to keep silent. She imagined he had wrapped his face in a pillow, it sounded so muffled.

‘He’s probably been given the initiation,’ Donald said.

‘What initiation?’

Donald mimed sharpening a cutthroat razor on a strop, then gestured towards his crotch. Tory had to sit down, feeling faint.

She would have stood firm in her insistence that Tom should stay on at school, had not Tom himself seemed, despite his apparent shock at his situation, loyal to his father’s wishes and continued working at Bolan’s. He obediently went the next day when the little green van called for him. It amazed Tory that he should be so stoically set upon winning his father’s approval when his father’s motives were so very shabby.

When Tom’s headmaster called, a week or so later, to ascertain whether the rumours he’d heard were true, that one of his most outstanding pupils had left the school for good, Tom could not be made to come down from his room and face his former mentor. To her own dismay, Tory found herself siding with Donald in the discussion that followed, simply in order to present a united front and to give an impression of a settled, stable household.

Mr Wythenshaw was a slightly vague, kindly man with round, steel-rimmed glasses and a wispy moustache. He extolled at some length the exceptional abilities of young Thomas Pace, and how they had had very high hopes for him at Blackdown’s, and that they should try not to think of the short-term gain they might make by sending Thomas out to work at the expense of the long-term benefits for his future if he stayed on at school.

‘I must ask you to reconsider, Mr and Mrs Pace. We are very disappointed that young Thomas will not be completing his studies with us. He is one of the most able pupils we have ever had at the school …’

‘Ableness doesn’t make any difference. We can’t afford to send him to university. If he’s so clever he’ll soon climb the ladder at Bolan’s and be managing director,’ said Donald. Donald then asked the headmaster what he had done in the war (he had been a captain in the First World War, he said, commanding soldiers on various perilous missions throughout the conflict), at which Donald grumbled, wishing he hadn’t sent his medals back.

‘I can’t understand it, Donald,’ said Tory, after the headmaster had gone. ‘You were so keen on learning when I first met you, always reading a book, and you knew so many things – yet you don’t seem to value education.’

‘I learnt all I needed to know without having to go to university. They’re a waste of time, Tory, when you’ve got public libraries full of books. Why would anyone need to go to university just to listen to a professor reading out from books that you could just as easily read for yourself ? Einstein never went to university. Think of that, my dear. And now you can do my head.’

Tory didn’t have an answer so settled into what had become one of the new routines of the house: applying ointment to Donald’s scarred scalp.

It was the end, it seemed, of Tom’s interest in scientific matters, even though he was now working in an engineering and chemical establishment. Now that he was part of the industrial world, it seemed robbed of all interest for him. When every day the knock came, he would obediently answer the door and walk out to the little green van. Then, at the end of the week, he would put his pay on the kitchen table (as instructed by his father), and he would be allowed to keep a few shillings for himself, while the rest was divided between Donald and Tory.

Mrs Head, now increasingly frail and spindly, could still muster enough energy to harangue her son-in-law. Usually when this happened Donald hobbled back to the sitting room and locked the door, but this time she banged on it incessantly for two hours, shouting through the panelling: ‘You’re using that boy to do the work you should be doing. I don’t know why you don’t go down to the factory and work yourself – you’ve got perfectly good arms, why don’t you use them? That boy could have been anything if he’d stayed on at school. You say there was no money to pay for him but if we were inventive enough we could have found a way. You’re treating this family like your own little kingdom …’

And so on. It made no difference. The problem was that, now that he was a worker in one of the biggest factories in the area, Tom seemed to have lost any desire to return to school. He no longer showed any interest in Branson, and if Branson asked him any scientific questions, which he was always keen on doing, Tom would reply with words like ‘What are you asking me for? Save it for your teacher …’ He had begun to comb his hair straight back from the forehead, losing the scientific side parting that he had worn since early childhood. He also grew a small ginger moustache, very similar to his father’s.

Tom became noticeably older. It was as though he had been put through some sort of time accelerator. A year ago he had been a schoolboy getting used to long trousers, with yo-yos in his pockets and beetle collections in his bedroom. Now he read the
Daily Sketch
in the evening, and would drink a bottle of ale, poured carefully, at an angle, into a glass. He would talk about politics just like one of the grown-ups. Since his mother and grandmother rarely read newspapers they began to regard him as a sage authority on such matters – the futility of the Berlin Airlift (the city should be handed over to the Russians), the devaluation of the pound, the situation in Korea. He even criticized Mrs Head for not joining the dock workers’ protest meeting in Trafalgar Square – when her own father had been a stevedore in the Surrey Docks. Father-
in-law
, corrected Mrs Head, as if that distinction absolved her from any responsibility towards the plight of the current dock workers. ‘I don’t know why you don’t go and live in Moscow,’ she said one day, pronouncing that city’s name as though it was a type of bovine farm animal.

Branson, still stranded in ground-level childhood, watched this transformation with curiosity and awe. He still shared a bedroom with Tom, the smallest of the three small bedrooms, at the back of the house, overlooking the mossy concrete of the yard, but there was little conversation between them because Branson was usually asleep by the time Tom came to bed and hadn’t woken up by the time he’d left for work. Sometimes he’d be woken by unusual sounds. Once, Branson woke to hear the sound of distant water falling, and it took him a long time to realize that Tom was being sick into a shoe. He didn’t do anything to clear it up, and the sulphurous zest of vomit stayed in the air all night.

Another time Branson woke up with a start to find the room illuminated and Tom sitting at the end of Branson’s bed in his striped pyjamas. Branson didn’t say anything, but rubbed his eyes, looking at Tom, waiting for him to explain himself.

‘I’ve just discovered something rather strange,’ he said, without looking at Branson.

‘Have you?’

‘Yes.’

There was a long silence during which Branson gradually realized he was expected to speak.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘Oh, well. I was down the public library the other day – one of my favourite places. And I happened to be looking through the archive of the
Echo
– they’ve got them all there, you know, all the way back to 1869.’