The Death of William Posters (10 page)

He was back in the street of empty houses, running along it and holding his fist, shoes crunching over smashed slates, kicking against half bricks and rotting woodlumps. The publican's gang weren't far behind, and he expected nothing less than lynching if they caught up. At great speed he ran into the same house, along the hallway and back into the living-room. By the fireplace he trod on the startled rat before it had time to shift, but it had scattered up the soot-banks and into the chimney before the publican's boots squashed all life from it.

Frank, in the backyard, heaved himself to the roofs of a dozen insecure half-gutted lavatories, his egress fixed now into the next street. A brick parapet divided the sloping roof of one set of lavatories from the slates of the next, and Frank stood precariously astride this high ridge – a ridge so rotten that he could bend down now and again to lift up a brick from it, or even a piece of one, to threaten his attackers – since they too had access to bricks and were now industriously prising them loose for a short-range stoning.

He was perched eight or nine feet above, and at his first shot they scattered. Frank had had enough, was ready to make his retreat towards Hartley Road and back to his parked car. But the world swayed, as if he were about to faint, to roll down limp at the feet of the exulting posse.

A brick caught him weakly on the shoulder. He hurled two, clearing the space of backyards. The earth swayed again, his shoes moving slightly on the slates, several bricks cascading from the parapet between his legs. Are any of them bastards pushing at the walls? No, they couldn't, otherwise he would have seen them. He stood under the clear sky, fighting for his balance, a horse on all fours, then straight and uneasy, ready at any second or footweave to use his hands again. He hurled his last brick through a window that still had glass, and at the force of his swinging arms the whole line of lavatories swayed like a slate-blue wave of the mid-ocean sea. His attackers drew back terrified into the house, as if running for their lives from some huge towering scar-faced monster high in the sky behind that Frank could not see.

He heard them falling over each other (trod on that poor bloody rat again) scrambling back through the house to the comparative safety of the street as if the whole district might crumble, only too glad to go laughing in to their snug pub at the poetic justice of that young bogger up to his neck in ruins and bruises.

When the collapse began under his feet, Frank slid pell-mell down the slates and onto hard asphalt of another backyard. The lavatories collapsed as if dynamited, like a bit of war from a silent film of long ago, ending in a mass cave-in of bricks and splintering wood, a rising grey stench of bug-ridden slatedust settling over the lot as he made his way out of it, back towards the car, and hoping the same fate would be soon in store for the pub from which he had been so discourteously thrown.

She came back with a laden tray, set it on a low table somehow missed on his crazy zig-zag across the room. He was drunk no longer, yet she needed to shake him as if he were, back into the immediate environs of love and care at the heart of Lincolnshire: ‘If you want to drink and not suffer you should eat a slice of bread first, with butter half an inch thick. Or drink a glass of water between each glass of whisky – or whatever it is you drink.'

He waved his hand. ‘What's the use getting drunk if you prepare for it in such a scientific way?' Pills and Alka Seltzer were on the tray. ‘Knowing so much would stop me enjoying it.'

‘If knowing stopped you enjoying life, then you wouldn't be much of a person. Come on, love, eat. Drink.'

His eyes were fully open. ‘Would you marry me?'

She looked, all laughter gone. ‘As far as I'm concerned, we are married. Why do you ask?'

‘I suppose we are. You don't need to answer. I'm in love for the first time in my life.' He found it impossible to say why he loved her, had been so busy in his life that she was the first woman he had thought to ask this question about, frightened into it because early on in his stay he would sometimes wake up in the morning and be unable for a few moments to think of her name. Such a thing proved how completely she had altered his life, and you could only be in love with a woman who had done that to you. She had become a midwife indeed, getting him out into some new lit-up world still beyond the touch of his hand and brain to reach.

6

Furrow-lines refused to break as he walked over them. Frost made the earth hard as steel, coated the ridges that bent the arches of his feet. A copse on the opposite hill was bare, sky visible through upright posts. A dead bird seemed a piece of hoar-shaded soil until he was right up to it. There was no wind: winter had brought a biting lacquer of frost that numbed his face and half-closed his eyes. At two in the afternoon the land was silent, all doors locked against it.

He had walked since morning in a great circle, down the valley-path and across the old railway, cutting over the speckled leprous surface of a frozen stream and heading between coverts to Market Stainton. With a cold pint in him he trekked over Dog Hill, took the sloping track through fields that met the houses of High Benniworth. His eyes had sharpened and, as winter gripped, more life was evident. The faintest impress of rabbit feet vanished into a spinney. Magpies argued on a dung heap just inside a farm gate; dogs and cocks called in tune with vertical smoke going out of the chimney – life in spite of all doors closed. By Warren Hilltop, where the sun reflected shadows on the green-white landscape, a spring poured from a hedge bottom. Gulls screamed upwards – often seen no matter how bitter the weather, and always reminding him that the sea was close, only fifteen miles east of his crunching feet, a flaking, slow, raw-heaving sea of frost and desolation. Winter was in the earth like King Arthur's sword, waiting for a hand of resolution to heave it out and set off over land and sea. He smiled at such a flamboyant impossible image, knowing he was fixed in Lincolnshire for a long time with the sort of love he had on his hands.

In drunkenness he had spoken the truth, saying he was in love for the first time. He reminded Pat next morning that he had said this, and neither had she forgotten the night that his words had branded. Understanding of them had matured, and his drunkenness subsided by the time they got to bed. He was surprised that she hadn't resented his coming back in such a state. He'd mistrusted her amusement at it, having expected, when phoning in advance, a retort to stay out until he was sober. Not a bit of it. She took it well. Maybe she was not as rigid as he'd often thought. She even seemed more relaxed, as if flattered at the possibility that for the first time he had revealed part of his real self to her. They drew closer together in spirit. She hadn't even bothered to ask why he'd got drunk. Not that he knew, either, though maybe it had been so that this understanding could be reached between them. Things sometimes worked that way, though he could never imagine her admitting it, and in any case he would never get drunk again.

They talked about Kevin, who was to come up in a week from boarding school, and stay for Christmas. ‘How are you going to explain me?' he asked.

‘I'm not. I'll simply tell him.'

‘Isn't he a bit young?'

‘You don't think I could lie, do you? He's eleven. He's old enough to know.' They drove to Lincoln, Frank at the wheel, taking it slowly on frosty bends. Kevin had caught the express from St Pancras, then the diesel from Nottingham. It drew quietly into the long platform on time, half empty so that Frank thought it a train still to go out before the one waited for came in. He expected all trains to arrive crowded, people packed by the windows ready to disembark. Right from the beginning of childhood, railways had been life lines to him, the double attraction later on of machines travelling. A train rushing under a bridge and through a station was a serious and romantic sight, mystical and full of power over a person's life. He had rarely taken a train, rather bus or car, because to do so would be committing himself in a way he felt hardly ready for.

They walked along the platform. Pat wore a heavy camel coat and fur boots; Frank a thick sweater under his mackintosh, and ordinary shoes. Kevin already had his case down, stood by it till he saw them. Expecting his mother alone, it took some time to recognize her. She embraced him: ‘Hello, darling' – and asked about his trip down.

He was a tall, dark haired boy of eleven, had the same shape and colour eyes as his mother, though lacking their clarity. His features were similar, slightly darker, and his presence seemed more poised and careful regarding the different worlds he moved in, as if much of Pat's one-time and far-off assurance had passed early to him – though the seeds of something like her present conflict and uncertainty loomed in his eyes. ‘I was looking out of the window all the way,' he said, ‘watching things. Then in Nottingham I had a pie and some coffee.' He glanced up.

‘I want you to meet Frank,' she said. ‘He's living with mummy now.'

‘Hello,' Kevin said, not, as Frank observed, batting an eyelid. They walked out to the car. Frank fastened his case on the luggage rack. Pat embraced her son again. ‘Don't you think he's handsome?' Frank agreed, but wondered why the boy wasn't shy of so much fuss. He sorted out the various combinations regarding their journey back. Should Pat drive and the boy sit in front with her? Or should he take the wheel, and the two of them sit together in the back? What about her driving, and Frank sitting beside her, with the boy behind? Which would be best for the wellbeing of their time together? They couldn't all sit in the front, and that was a fact – which was the worst of these mini cars. He laughed, to find himself blessed with so much consideration, only to wonder what the hell it mattered. Well, things do matter, he decided, pulling forward the front seat so that Pat and Kevin could get behind. But halfway to the village Kevin had to sit in front because he felt car sick.

For the first days he was taciturn, studious, and went only once to visit Waller's farm. Frank talked to him, spellbound him with facts and possibilities of the various machines he'd worked, discussed motor cars, and natural history which he had taken an interest in through Pat's books and on his walks.

The sensual monotony of their existence was broken. Kevin sat at the table for meals, and when he wasn't telling his mother about school he either ate silently, or looked at a book while slowly dealing with food on his plate. Pat didn't mind him reading at meals, and on this point Frank wondered whether she was spoiling him, or allowing so much freedom simply because it was good for her. Frank had the sense to treat him as another man which, in intellect if not experience, he often seemed to be. ‘I'm glad you're here,' Pat said, after Kevin had gone to bed. ‘Before, I think he used to be lonely, with me out on my calls so much of the time.'

‘He seems a good lad,' he remarked. ‘I can't make much of him, but then, you never can at that age.'

‘I often don't like the idea of him being bandied about from one part of the country to another, yet it's best, as things are, that he's away at school.' Seeing how she treated him at home, he realized that she must have worried about him a great deal when he wasn't there, though she had kept it well concealed during the long autumn weeks.

On his ramblings he had noticed a small plantation of firs in an isolated hump of land beyond Panton Hall – trees that were part of the estate. He set out with a trowel, circled and undermined the roots until the slender trunk sloped into his arms and he could pull it clear. Steering a return course through the backbone of the night, head bent and breathing evenly under the coarse weight of the tree, he felt happy at having made off with a piece of greenery that had sprouted from the earth, land which he considered belonged to him, but was denied by circumstances or sham legislation. He felt nothing like a thief except in the caution of his getaway, and hoped the tree would be missed in the morning – likely, since he'd all but trodden a fence down to get at it. As for being tracked, he'd walked the half mile of a nearby road, and turned across fields from there. Low cloud held back stars and moon, and no one else was out on the broad earth. The frost had broken, loam softening underfoot, a smell of soil and bracken cutting his nostrils as he breached a hedge. It seemed as if the year had doubled on its heels to bring autumn back.

He sat down to smoke in the Lincolnshire blackness, his tree a piece of plunder towards which freedom had led him. The roots of it smelled of sap and stored-up frost, comforting soil and crushed fir-needles, the fruitful odours of a life snapped out of its accustomed earth and rut. He thought of Nancy and the children, not with shame or anguish, simply saw them for a moment in front of his eyes. Memories made him uneasy, helped him over the long stretches of field bearing his tree, but he wanted to be further away from them, felt as if tied by the ankle and barely hovering beyond the darkness of their confines – whereas a thousand miles might make him feel as if the whole complex recollection had been worth abandoning.

They were surprised to see him pulling the tree through the back door. ‘Here's a good-looking conifer for the Christmas pot.'

‘What a robust specimen,' Kevin exclaimed. Pat came in from cleaning the kitchen, and asked with a cold glance: ‘Where did you get it?'

He weighed up her disapproval, and said for Kevin's sake: ‘Panton village. I met a man in a pub last week and told him to put one by for me. I paid ten bob for it. Cost a pound in Lincoln.'

He trimmed it, and Kevin helped him gather soil and fix it in a large earthen pot – which they stood in a corner of the dining-room because Pat hinted strongly that it would spoil the furnished perfection of the lounge.

When Kevin was in bed she demanded: ‘Well, where
did
you get it?'

‘I dug it up. You don't think I'd buy a thing like this when there are so many around?'