Blasted Things Read online

  8

  SHE HURRIED AWAY, threading through a warren of narrow lanes till she found herself on the riverbank. There, she stood inhaling the dank air, reeling in the bright openness. Mud flats, threaded with the silvery creep of the tide, reminded her of the stretch marks on her belly. Old posts sculpted thick with weed stood in the shallows like a gathering of stubby monks; the arched ribs of an ancient wreck provided a perch for a heron, which, as she approached, lumbered into the air and flapped away.

  Any minute Dennis might catch her up. On an impulse, she cut up from the riverside, through a deserted boatyard, and along the muddy lanes, head down, not sure where she was going, needing only to be gone. Eventually she emerged on the main road that led to Seckford and continued to walk briskly past modest cottages with handkerchief gardens, larger houses enclosed by willows and poplars bending in the breeze. A white terrier on a rope bared its teeth as she passed but didn’t bother to shift itself. Seagulls swooped over the road, finding something to shriek and squabble over. The breeze was cool with gusts of river smell and something sweetish she couldn’t identify.

  Filled with feverish energy, she strode and strode; her legs seemed something mechanical that did not know how to stop, and yet they became shaky with this unaccustomed exercise. It was the first time she’d been out alone, unshielded, since . . . she could not remember, and though she was warmly dressed, green velvet hat heavy and secure on her head, the bobbing tip of feather like an insect appearing at the edge of her vision now and then, still she felt naked, shivery, exposed. And quite abruptly the need to move left her, and with it the ability. She looked around for somewhere to sit and rest but there was nowhere. What was she doing? She should have waited, Dennis had been right, should have waited, needed now to sit, nowhere to sit. Out of herself now, like he said. Out.

  She stumbled on, turned a corner where the lane went downhill; it was easier to let momentum propel her than to resist. It took her round a bend, the river smell gone now and replaced by the reek of flowering currant, and the sweet smell again, stronger, man-made; she knew it but couldn’t quite identify it. She considered sitting on the front wall of a cottage, but no, there was the low stone parapet of a bridge and she sat there instead, listening to the flow of the stream beneath her, gazing at the slope back uphill, defeated by the thought of the slight ascent.

  Breathe, she used to tell patients, those whose lungs weren’t gas-burned, those who still had ribs and lungs intact, breathe deeply in and out. It calms one, it really does. Remember the look of a cage of ribs, bluish shine under the meniscus, the jerky spasms of gasped-in air. No, don’t. Inhale. She took the outside in, and pushed it out again; so intimate, breathing is, taking in the same air that has been in other lungs, through trees and water, rabbits, herons, across lovers’ bed sheets, across the fields of war. With her eyes closed, she felt the hoops of her nostrils expand, her lungs bloom foamy pink, in and out, in their elastic cage. When she opened her eyes again the world was in brighter colours. It was all right then, she was quite all right. But she must turn back uphill – Dennis would make such a devil of a fuss – and find her way back.

  She must have stepped out into the road. She didn’t even hear the motorbike as it veered round the bend approaching the bridge. The driver saw her, swerved and hit the wall, his machine flipping onto its side, skidding along the road. The crash sent starlings shrieking from a tree, a wheel turned in the air, flashing chrome. The engine stopped, the starlings vanished, and it was quiet again but for the buzz of a fly.

  The rider’s goggles had come off and lay broken on the road. His head was turned to the side: a long bony face, nose hooked, specs, eyes closed. A flash of electricity shocked her legs from beneath her. Powell.

  No! It was too much, and she fainted. From far off came a shout, running feet . . . Smelling salts seared her nostrils. Powell? Now she was in a stranger’s house and it smelled of hops, of brewing. Of course, she was near the maltings – that was the smell. She focused on the mantelpiece. At one end stood a china soldier with a gun against one shoulder, at the other a weeping china girl waved a handkerchief. A clock pecked laboriously at the seconds. Powell?

  Mrs Court, the lady of the house, bade Clem sip sugary tea and take a morsel of burned rock cake. She was dressed in weary, well-worn black, her face dour and downy. She’d been bereaved, husband or son or sons or everyone; Clem could smell it on her, read it in the downward grooves of her face.

  ‘Your husband’s on his way,’ she told Clem. ‘You’ll soon be right as rain. Wretched motorbikes. What’s wrong with a pony and trap, I say?’

  Clem remembered, dimly, saying who she was, where Dennis might be found.

  ‘You’re the colour of a tapioca pudding. Another sniff?’ The woman held out the little bottle.

  ‘I’m quite all right now, thank you.’

  ‘You said another name too. Pole? Powers?’

  Clem stared at the china girl, the stiff flag of her handkerchief.

  When Dennis arrived Mrs Court looked at him with a kind of awe, and Clem herself, as his wife, with an increased respect. And he did look like someone, a solid citizen, uncommonly virile and handsome with his glossy eyes and natty moustache, his charming manner – and above all the life still in him. He was someone. It did make her proud, when others so clearly admired him, that he was hers. And she should be, would be, nicer to him. After all, he had been right in this case, and she had been wrong.

  ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘The idiot rider’s in the cottage hospital,’ said Dennis.

  ‘I stepped out,’ Clem said. ‘My fault entirely.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Court.

  ‘Nonsense,’ echoed Dennis. ‘He’d been drinking and going like the clappers no doubt. Wants stringing up.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault.’

  ‘Thank heavens you weren’t hit, poor child.’

  ‘I must go and see him, apologise.’

  ‘Tosh!’

  They extricated themselves from Mrs Court and drove back to Harriet’s. Dennis insisted that Clem lie down and drink yet another cup of sweet tea before they drive home. Obediently she lay on Harriet’s bed listening to the children down below – the bossy lisping of the girls, Edgar’s excited shrieks. Martins nested in the eaves. She watched the parent birds flying in, beaks a-dangle with grubs, and out again in a speedy fluster, and she could just make out the squeaking of their chicks.

  At first she averted her eyes from the nightstand where stood a framed photograph of Harri’s Stanley in his uniform. In tiny increments she turned her head, and then seized the image to study it, with a sort of greed. Stanley’s face, about the size of the tip of her index finger, his mouth, looked stern but perhaps on the verge of smiling. Beneath the brim of his cap, one eyebrow was higher than the other, and his ears stuck out comically. He looked exactly what he was: a decent, ordinary man got up in ridiculous fancy dress.

  Of course the man on the motorbike wasn’t Powell, she knew that. Powell was dead. She’d seen him dead, the stovepipe in his back. Curling her knees to her chest, she moaned as grief blasted through her again – grief for Powell, for his child, and for her brother, the pains competing. Ralph’s face had almost vanished from her mind. She could list his features: thick fair hair, straight brown lashes, hyacinth eyes slightly downturned at their outer corners – but she couldn’t really see him any more.

  Dennis creaked upstairs to fetch her. ‘Rested, darling? Shall we set off? We’ll soon have you back in your own bed.’

  Clem sat up. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she said. ‘It’s the poor rider I worry about. I shall visit him.’

  ‘Absolute rot! Straight home for you, my girl.’

  ‘It seems only polite.’

  ‘Polite!’ Dennis hooted.

  ‘And decent,’ Clem added.

  Clem sat at Harri’s dressing table to tidy her hair and replace her hat. She loathed the stupid thing. No one young wor
e such great feathery things any more. In the glass she caught an odd look of helplessness on Dennis’s face, and paused, hatpin pinched between her fingers, feeling a surge of fondness.

  ‘Decent like you, darling,’ she added.

  Harri came up the stairs and, puffing a little, poked her head into the room. ‘Ominous silence!’ she said. ‘Mildred wants to know if she should give Eddie his tea.’

  ‘We’re about to leave,’ Dennis said.

  ‘He could have his tea, then we could fetch him after my visit,’ Clem said.

  ‘She’s got a bee in her bonnet about visiting the blithering idiot who nearly ran her down!’

  ‘Why not?’ Harri said. ‘Poor chap.’

  ‘Poor chap!’

  ‘I stepped out in front of him,’ Clem said. It was the first time she’d felt any real spirit since when? It was a peculiar feeling, frizzling skeins of chemical in her blood. ‘He might have been killed. I might at least pay him the courtesy . . .’

  ‘Of course you must,’ said Harri.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Dennis.

  ‘So that’s settled. Mildred and I shall feed Eddie.’ Harri went thumping downstairs.

  Shrugging, Dennis turned to Clem. ‘Well, we’ll have to be bally quick then. I don’t want to be driving after dark. You’ll have to go in on your own – I’ve no wish to see him. And don’t go blurting out that it was your fault, for pity’s sake.’

  Clem hesitated at the hospital threshold. Who might she meet at the bedside? Wife perhaps? Might she have to converse with strangers? Perhaps Dennis was right, perhaps there was no need. After all, how killingly awkward to approach a perfect stranger in such circumstances. What on earth could one say? She glanced back and caught the set of Dennis’s jaw. He was leaning against the car smoking a cigarette; how gratified he’d be if she returned to the car and told him he was right.

  No, it was the decent thing to do, and besides, she had to see that face again, to see whether the fellow did indeed resemble Powell.

  Matron warned her that visiting time was almost over, looked at her askance when she said she didn’t know the name of the chap she was visiting. Clem found him – alone, thank heavens – at the end of the ward beside a window, through which the pinkish sky cast him in an odd light: bony cheekbones, blade of nose, gold glint of wire-rimmed specs. Coming closer, she observed with a start that the upper left quarter of his face was prosthetic; a painted eye and brow, and a cheekbone that fitted snugly to the side of his long, handsome nose. The glass in the spectacles that held the prosthesis to his face was broken; that side had been on the ground, concealed from her. His hands lay on top of the green blanket, thin and elegant, the fingers long, the nails tapered.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said.

  He turned his eyes towards her, showing no sign of recognition.

  ‘It was myself you swerved to avoid,’ she prompted.

  For a moment his expression did not change, then, ‘Hah,’ he said, focusing his real eye on her with more interest. ‘Yes, I see it now.’ His voice was common, local. A tradesman of some sort, or perhaps in the clerical line. ‘That hat,’ he added, with something of a smirk.

  The iris of his good eye was a curious pale grey, almost silver; the edges were darker, as if tarnished like a coin, and the artist had made a brave attempt to paint the other eye to match. The eyebrow had been finely painted, with the most miniature of brushes, the most delicate of strokes, but it was a shade too yellow. The blank eye gazed beyond her.

  Sucking in a breath, Clem said, ‘I wanted to call and . . . well . . .’ The words dried up in her mouth and she felt foolish, but also weakened by a feeling both strong and strange for there really was a strong, almost uncanny, resemblance.

  He began to haul himself up, and it came naturally to her to move forward, plump the pillow, settle him comfortably back.

  ‘Concussion,’ he said. ‘I’ll be out tomorrow. I’ve had worse.’ He tapped a fingernail on his tin cheekbone.

  She smiled weakly.

  ‘But my Norton – motorcycle – wrecked,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t apologise enough,’ Clem said. ‘So careless of me to step out like that.’

  ‘I won’t contradict you there.’ Had his voice refined itself? He seemed harder to place now. Tearing her eyes from his face, she noticed the ridges of his collarbones under lilac pyjamas and a scar on the side of his neck – thick raised tissue, healed but angry, the same side as his mask. That must still hurt, she guessed, nerves tangled in the clumsily healed and thickened epidermis.

  ‘Please feel free to stare,’ he said.

  Heat rose in her face. ‘I do apologise. I’m not, I . . . Heavens above, I haven’t even introduced myself!’ She held out her hand. ‘Clementine Everett, Mrs, that is I’m married.’

  He lowered his head in a single nod, the corners of his mouth quirking with amusement. Like Powell’s mouth, though wider, the lips narrower. Languidly he held out a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Married Clementine Everett,’ he said. ‘Oh, by the way, are you, by any chance, married?’

  The nerve of him! But to her own amazement she found herself laughing. A bell drilled out the end of visiting time.

  ‘Well, I . . . might I offer to pay for repairs to your motorcycle?’ she said, taking his hand. ‘It seems the least I can do.’

  He hesitated; his natural instinct was to refuse the offer, she could tell.

  ‘In fact I insist,’ she said. ‘I shall chain myself to your bed if you refuse!’

  His real eyebrow rose. ‘Well, now, that sounds rather tempting!’ His sudden wide full smile spread to the eye on the intact side of his face, the white pinked by capillaries, the pupil inking larger in the silver.

  ‘What I mean is—’

  ‘I know what you mean!’

  They looked at each other for a moment, and now she squirmed under his scrutiny, in which there seemed a kind of challenge. A stranger, he had teased her and made her laugh! Beside his eye was a spray of lines, deeper, she guessed, than his years deserved, painted much more faintly on the other side. She longed to ask him about himself, about his war, but seeing the nurse approach she took a pencil and notebook from her bag. ‘My address,’ she said, jotting it down. ‘I shall leave the matter in your hands.’

  ‘Come on now,’ the nurse said. ‘No shilly-shallying, if you please.’

  Clem pressed the piece of paper into the man’s hand. ‘You haven’t introduced yourself,’ she added.

  ‘Fortune,’ he said, ‘Vincent. Sergeant, as was.’

  Ah, she thought, an NCO, and down on his luck. ‘Well, goodbye, Mr . . . Sergeant . . . Fortune. May you recover swiftly.’

  She walked down the corridor and through the hospital door to where the air was shrill with birdsong, sharp in the greenish spring dusk.

  Dennis was leaning against the car door. ‘Duty done?’ he said, grinding out his cigarette end with his foot. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ Clem said, touching his hand before she climbed into her seat and waited for him to crank the engine.

  9

  LEANING ON THE bar watching Doll, Vince finds himself grinning – that involuntary stretch of lip and hoick of cheek a rare sensation. It stretches the tight scar, the skin sliding itchily behind the tin. Doll bends over, checking a barrel; she’s got hips on her under that skirt, sturdy, bovine, though she’d kill him if he said as much. His cheek yearns for her lap, for her stroking hands, for her fantastically common reek of beer and ham and Parma Violets. No stays for her, not today. She’s like a big old flower blooming her heart out, a big old cow flower; now he actually laughs and drains his glass, bangs it down on the bar.

  ‘Same again?’ she says, face pink from exertion, hair springing free of its pins. Not a natural blonde he knows, and you can see the roots and her dark brows but he likes that about her; natural is overrated in his opinion. She’s his age or older, pushing forty and with a kid; he doesn’t mind kiddies. Her old man Dick copped
it at the Marne right at the start of war, poor sod.

  Doll fills his tankard, and another pint of Adnams slips down a treat. Her capable hands on the pumps, on his pump too! ‘Marry me’ is in his reckless mind to say, but someone else is calling her – a stranger in a trilby. Vince watches her flirt, those bosoms swelling out from under the blossoms on her blouse, buttons straining. Huge nipples she has; great pink saucers. She’d always be flirting, and who knows how many men she’s had after closing time, in the bar, a quick, hot, wet one, beery and bleared with smoke, a happy, dazed, lucky bastard staggering out into the cold. In need of a husband to keep her on the straight and narrow. Not too straight or too narrow though; you wouldn’t want to squash the life out of her, only to rein it in, save her from herself – and reap the benefit.

  Now she hands bread and cheese and one of her famous pickled onions that make your eyes run to a travelling salesman – sharp moustache, lust in his eyes as they stray to her chest. He’ll eat his ploughman’s, swallow his half of light and be off, weaselling his way into some housewife’s bed with a demonstration of his wares. Encyclopedias? Brooms? Those were the days.

  And in any case, Vince isn’t budging. He’s been in her bed more than once, her sanctuary, and that makes him different, not just a fly-by-night. The second time when they were only just finished, the boy came through, rubbing his eyes – ‘Mum, I dreamt a robber was here’ – and Doll was up and out of that bed, soothing and petting and gone an hour or so.

  ‘You still here?’ she’d said when she returned, sounding quite taken aback.

  ‘Kept the bed warm for you.’

  ‘Kind of you, I’m sure, but you’d best be wending your way.’

  ‘Come on, Doll, can’t I stay?’

  But she’d only folded her arms and waited for him to leave, to climb up that ladder to his room in the loft.

  Nearly closing. Then there’s an hour before Kenny gets back from school and in the meantime . . . Sun gleams through the stained-glass tops of the windows onto the optics and the brass bar fittings. The beer is pure gold. He lights a cheroot, sups his ale – home from home, this is.