The Watchers on the Shore (7 page)

'Not here in Longford. But London's only forty minutes away.

I sometimes go up to the Festival Hall. I spent a week of my
holidays up there last spring. Had a proper orgy of it. Heard
Klemperer do the whole cycle of Beethoven symphonies. Bloody
marvellous.'

'I'm not too keen on him in all of them. I prefer Beecham in the
Pastoral, for instance.'

Conroy nods. 'Yeh, maybe old Otto is a bit straight-faced in that one.'He starts to grin. 'Y'know, they did that and the Fifth in the same concert and the minute they struck up the Fifth I started thinking about old Rawly and his big culture thing.'

I smile at this, remembering Rawlinson, one of the draughtsmen
at Whittaker's, with his fancy tie-clip and a pocketful of fountain
pens. The sort of bloke, as Conroy once said about him, who'd go to a concert once a year and talk about it at the top of his voice on
the bus next morning. But by the time he said this Conroy was
giving me another side of himself that I'd never thought existed
under the loud-mouthed, big-headed front he put up at the time.
Now it seems to me he's mellowed a lot. He's got responsibility and
he's loving it.

'I wonder what happened to him, Conroy says.'Do you know?'

'No idea. I haven't laid eyes on him since I left.'

'What about the rest of them? Do you keep in touch?'

'Afraid not. I'd no idea Jimmy was down here, for instance. The only place you might run across 'em is in some pub, and I don't go
drinking much nowadays.'

Conroy's looking at me. 'No concerts, no booze ... You've
settled for marriage in a big way ...'

'Well, you can't carry on as if you're single.'

'What does Ingrid think about the possibility of you coming
down here?'

I hesitate, pushing my empty soup dish away. 'Well, tell you the
truth, Albert, she's not all that keen at the moment. But she'll
come round if she has to.'

'They don't all,'Conroy says. 'Women have deeper roots than men, y'know. Some of 'em can't bear to move out of their own backyard.'

'Well, they've bloody well got to go where the living is, haven't they? And that's all there is to it.'

This comes out with a bit of force and I see Conroy's eyes narrow ever so slightly. I'm sorry then that I've let him see so
much. Not that he takes me up on it, but it's something for him to remember in future.

'You'll have to see how you fancy it yourself, first,'he says. 'Come on, let's go help ourselves.'

I follow him across to the long bar, one end of which is set out
with the cold buffet: plates of ham and tongue, a big pork pie, and
dishes of lettuce, tomatoes, slices of hard-boiled egg in mayon
naise, red cabbage, sliced onion, and so on.

Looking round as we eat, I can't see anything that straight away tells me I'm two hundred miles from home. Lots of pubs in the North have been slicked up in this fashion, with imitation beams, stone fireplaces, and timber that's nailed to the plaster and doesn't support a thing. And then I think
to myself - what did I expect? That people two hundred miles south of Cressley would have two heads or four eyes and talk a lingo I couldn't understand?

But still, the strangeness of being here does hit me as Conroy and
I sit and tuck, in without talking. Some people seem to settle down
as soon as they leave school and spend the rest of their lives growing
old. With other people things are always changing, or they're
making them change. I'm kind of in between. I've got a strong feel
ing I'm going to take this job, though I know next to nothing about
it yet. And it's not so much the job itself, but more as though it's a
dividing line in my life. A crossroads, if you like. A few weeks ago I'd no more idea than flying that I'd be going back into engineering.
I hadn't heard of Longford; as far as I knew Conroy was on the
other side of the world; the shop was my future. Then Mr Van
Huyten dies and everything's changed overnight., Just like it
changed when Ingrid told me she was pregnant. Only then the world closed in on me and now it could be opening out a bit.

After lunch we go out to the red Morris 1100 that Conroy
picked me up at the station in (not his own car but the firm's, which
is better for him because it's paid for by them, serviced at their
expense, and most of the petrol is chargeable to expenses) and he
drives me through the town. It doesn't seem like much of a place to
me. I like a place to be either country or mucky industrial and this
seems to be somewhere in between. Still, I suppose I saw the worst
of it when I arrived, like you always do from a train. The main street is long and wide and straight with a lot of the new anonymous-looking supermarket and department store buildings you get in every town since the war. I notice a Woolworth's and a Marks and Spencer's and a cinema plastered with Bingo notices
and, down a crossroads as we come up to a red light, a theatre. It's a
dingy-looking shack with an iron fire-escape on the side wall, and
I have time to register that they're doing
An Inspector Calls,
by
J. B. Priestley, before Conroy moves forward on the amber and
begins talking to me about the firm and the chap I'm going to see,
whose name is Franklyn.

'He's a bit of a ball of fire,'Conroy says. 'An engineer, not an accountant. Been all over the place and done all kinds of things. He's the nearest thing I've ever met to those tough engineers in American pictures. -You know - building a dam across a canyon one year and a road through a jungle the next.'

'He sounds a bit scaring,'I say.

'I'm exaggerating a bit,'Conroy says, 'He doesn't walk about with a six-gun strapped round him, but... well, he's a bloke who's obviously taken his talent wherever it was needed and he's just the opposite of the family retainer types we had at Whittaker's.'

'Well, I can do with a change from them. The first horrible
thought I had when Mr Van Huyten died was I might end up back
there. Locked in again for life.'

Conroy shoots me a sidelong look.'Yeh, I know just what you mean. It's so bloody dead easy to get yourself in a cage. You hardly know it's happening till it's too late. But it's funny how things happen. You didn't know what a favour you were doing me that day in the office at Whittaker's when you made that crack. What was it now?'

'Summat about a pig, wasn't it?'

'Yeh, that's right.'Conroy's grinning now and I've got a sudden sharp memory picture of him standing there in the drawing office at Whittaker's, his face red with fury in the second before he comes for me and we go down scrapping among the plan-presses.

'If we hadn't had that little punch-up,'he says now, 'Althorpe wouldn't have talked to us the way he did and got my dander up
enough to look for another job.'He touches the brake and does a quick change down as a middle-aged woman tries to end it all by stepping out in front of the car. We get a
glimpse of her staring eyes and open mouth as she realizes how near she was to being clouted and Conroy says amiably, 'Blind bitch,'and picks up speed again.

'Still,'he says in a minute,'I suppose something else would have happened to get me out eventually.'

'What happened after you left?'I ask him. 'I never got the right tale about it all. I thought you'd gone to Australia.'

'I nearly did. I'd practically got my bag packed. Then I saw this firm advertising and applied on a whim. There again, y'see, when I left Whittaker's the first job I tried was with a firm in Bradford. It was okay for a while, but they were nearly as bad as Whittaker's. Old retainers in nearly all the top jobs, too many other people in line before you for promotion. Accountants and clerks round your neck, knackering things up all the time, we do it this way because we've done it like this for the last fifty years. All the old stuff. You know. I'd got to a pitch where the only way out of it as far as I could see was to bugger off somewhere where everything was new. Though I didn't really want to leave England for ever.'He throws me a grin. 'I like the beer too much.'

The old Conroy, I'm thinking: full of bad language, a liking for beer and skittles all mixed up with one for books and music, and
all sorts of sensitive spots occasionally showing through. I say the
old Conroy, but actually the first Conroy I knew was a loud
mouthed, thick-headed, ignorant lout who shook me no end when
he let me see his hidden depths. He doesn't seem to keep them as
hidden now; but maybe that's because he's a few years older and
in a happier position, and partly because I know him better and he
doesn't have to put on an act with me. Though he still has his secrets. That marriage of his, for instance; mentioned just once
when he was drunk and then tucked away again out of sight...

We're up to a big traffic island with a sign showing roads off to Colchester, Chelmsford and Southend, and this seems to mark the end of the town proper. Beyond it, on the road Conroy takes, are semi-detached and detached houses, modern and posh-looking, behind well-established lawns and trees. Conroy swings the car left up a side road with open fields beyond it and in a couple of minutes
we're going through a gate in a wire fence on to a stretch of flat ground, and there are the factory bays in front of us with the thump of a cropping machine coming from one of them and carrying to us on the cold air. Conroy parks in front of a long single-storey prefabricated office building next to a blue Zephyr estate car and we get out.

'Here we are, then.' He walks towards a door with me following. 'There's nothing fancy about this set-up yet,'he says over his shoulder, 'so don't expect fitted carpets and uniformed commissionaires.'

There's no commissionaire at all as far as I can see, and nothing on the floors except brown lino. There's perhaps half a dozen people to be seen and one or two heads lift on the other side of the glass as we go along the corridor. Sizing up the new man? No, more likely the vague interest anybody feels in a strange face. A funny thing, that, the way human beings swim about in the same tank, lots of them never seeing one another, others crossing tracks, and some bumping in real contact. For instance, if I go away from here today for good there's nobody who's seen me will remember me. If I come to a job, though, I'll become part of their lives; even altering some of them a little bit. All of which deep thinking flashes through my powerful mind as we go into the biggest office at the end of the building.

Jimmy Slade grins at me from behind one of the four drafting machines and I wink and grin back as Conroy has a word with a smoky blonde piece in a dark green wool frock who's sitting at a
desk by one of the doors leading out of the main office. She stops
typing to answer Conroy.

'Yes, he's by himself. I should look in. He's expecting you.'

What is it about birds in wool? They seem to give off an extra body warmth that their perfume
floats on.

'Oh, by the way,'Conroy says, 'this is Vic Brown ... Cynthia Holness.'

We say hello and her eyes come up to my face for a second's
acknowledgement, then away again.

'You have a natter with Jimmy for a minute, Vic,' Conroy says. He taps on the door behind Cynthia and goes through, closing it behind him.

Jimmy grins again and swivels half round on his stool as I walk
over to him. We shake hands.

'Nice to have something decorative about the place,'I say.

'Who, Cynthia? Yes. But her sights are set high, old cock,
and draughtsmen - married or single - don't come into the
picture.'

'What did
I
say?'

He laughs. 'Anyway, how's the old married man?'

'Fair to middling.'

'And Ingrid?'

'The same. I hear you're doing a spot of courting these days.'