The Round Tower Page 4

‘Mr Ratcliffe! He couldn’t do that, Mam. He’d have to have a reason. If he sacked him for nothing he’d have the whole shop out, the whole place out. You remember last year when they came out because of John Petrick. They were out three weeks but they got him reinstated in the end. They couldn’t do anything to Angus.’

  ‘There’s ways and means, lass. An’ I bet you what you like he’d have put the whole blame for yesterday’s business on him if they weren’t frightened of losin’ me.’

  ‘Well, I can understand them not wanting to lose you, Mam, because they won’t get anybody like you in a hurry.’ Rosie patted her mother’s hand, and Emily said firmly, but without bumptiousness, ‘I know that, an’ they know that, and the missis knows if it wasn’t for Angus I’d have left there two or three years back.’ Her voice suddenly dropped and she said, ‘I’m tired, Rosie.’ Then she put in quickly, ‘I’m not bad, I’m just tired. Tired, lass, tired of working for other folks. I want to stay in me own house and get it shipshape an’ have the meals ready for you both when you come in…Aw, I know you won’t be here much longer, you’ll be gettin’ married. And Angus an’ all, he’ll find somebody to his likin’ afore long, if he doesn’t take May, and then likely I’ll be wishin’ I had a job. But I can always get a job. Aw, that doesn’t worry me, but in the meantime I want a space, not just a week off, or even a fortnight—she’s promised me a fortnight—I want a month, two, three, a year.’

  ‘Oh, Mam!’ Rosie dropped sideways and laid her head against her mother’s shoulder and her voice had a broken sound as she said again, ‘Aw, Mam.’

  ‘There, there, don’t upset yourself. And mind,’ she pushed her daughter’s head away from her, ‘now don’t you bloody well go downstairs and tell him. Now mind you.’

  ‘I’m not daft, Mam. But I can tell you this. He could get a job anywhere. There’s dozens of places he could start the morrow, on Monday at any rate.’ She gave a little laugh now.

  ‘Yes, I know that, but not with the prospects there are at Affleck’s. Mr Brett recommended him to chargehand and he can recommend him further. I want to see him be something, lass, not just a workman like his dad and my dad and their dads afore them. I want to see our Angus rise, and he can, given half a chance. You know it was only because of the set-up in this house that he left school when he did to help look after your dad, an’ him being bad so long. You see,’ she swung her legs over the edge of the bed until she was sitting side by side with Rosie, and she started to pull the knuckle of each finger in turn as she went on, ‘you need education to rise, not so much brains. Ratcliffe hasn’t any more brains than a louse to my mind but he had education. An’ look where it got him. A grammar-school education and a few kicks in the backside and he’s at the top of the tree now. Aye, you need education and our Angus hasn’t it, not the kind he needs to push him on, so he’s got to get there in some other way.’

  ‘But where do you expect him to get, Mam? He’s in charge of his shop; he’ll not get much higher than that in Affleck’s.’

  Emily turned her face towards her daughter and the words came under her breath, but they were weighty as she said, ‘He could get himself into the drawin’ office where the draughtsmen are. That’s why he’s been goin’ to evening classes on the quiet. He doesn’t know that I know he’s been goin’. Did you know owt about it?’

  ‘No, Mam. Evening classes! Our Angus?’

  ‘Aye, our Angus.’

  ‘He’s twenty-four!’

  ‘Twenty-four or not, he’s goin’. But mind you’—she poked her finger into Rosie’s chest—’don’t you let on, for God’s sake, else he’ll stop. You know what his temper’s like. If he wants us to know he’ll tell us in his own good time. Now go on downstairs afore he comes up an’ tell him I’m all right.’

  When Rosie entered the kitchen again Angus asked, ‘How is she?’ and Rosie replied, ‘She’s all right. She’s goin’ to have a nap.’

  ‘All right. All right. She’s not all right. An’ I know why she won’t leave up there, she thinks it’ll affect me. I know, and she’s a bloody old fool. He can do nothing to me and he knows it. You know something?’ He turned round and looked at Rosie across the table. ‘That man Ratcliffe has hated my guts since I was a nipper.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I think I know; in a sort of way I know.’ He went and looked out of the window and down the narrow backyard. Then he said musingly, ‘It was him that stopped me playing with Van. I remember the day. It was just after Dad died. Me Aunt Mary had you, an’ me mam told me to go up there after school and she’d slip me a bite to eat. She was workin’ late because they were havin’ a dinner or somethin’—they gave dinners when they couldn’t meet their grocery bills. Anyway, this day I was keeping out of the way round the back when Van comes on me. She was about five at the time. Well, there happened to be a garden barrer on the back path, you know one of those wooden ones, an’ I put her in it and started to wheel her up and down. An’ she laughed so much I thought she would burst. It must have been her laughin’ that brought his lordship round, and he bellowed so loudly that he startled me and I nearly upset the barrer and her an’ all. After he had ordered her in he stood looking at me with a look on his face that he sometimes has now, as if he considers me so much slime that should be washed down the drain. Yet even on that day he didn’t go for Mam and tear her off a strip. But I never got the chance to play with Van again. Anyway, I’ve worked out this theory about Ratcliffe’s attitude to me. It’s just this. He can show his dislike for me and nothin’ comes of it, but if he did it to Mam she would leave, and knowing this he not only hates me guts but hers an’ all.’

  ‘Go on. You’re just imagining things. They think the world of her.’

  ‘Think the world of her! Why? They think the world of her because she’s necessary to them. They won’t get a woman like Mam the day. Who they goin’ to get to work from eight till five for five quid a week, turning her hand to anything from cooking to waiting on the “At Home” dos and their blasted dinners? Think the world of her! If she died the morrow they wouldn’t come to her funeral.’

  ‘Oh, you’re too bitter against them, our Angus.’

  ‘Not me, I’ve just got them taped, him most of all. He’d like to kick her backside out of the door. You see she doesn’t kowtow to him, she answers him straight, without the bloodies of course.’

  They both laughed softly now, and Rosie said, ‘Eeh! I wonder what they’d think if they heard her going on sometimes?’

  ‘Do them good. God! Wouldn’t I like to hear her let rip at them!’ He boxed the air and Rosie said, ‘Well, that reminds me. When you’re gettin’ it out of your system why aren’t you at the match the day? Is your back still hurting?’

  ‘I’ve left.’ He was still punching the air, dancing round the table now, boxer-fashion, on his toes.

  ‘You’ve left?’ Her exclamation was high.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Are you barmy altogether? You broke your neck to get in, and it was an honour.’

  He stopped abruptly and repeated, ‘An honour? From who?’

  ‘Well.’ Rosie tossed her head. ‘With Callow, the solicitor, playin’, and that young Brownlow in the accountant’s office.’

  ‘To hell! Who’s Callow, the solicitor, and Brownlow? Don’t forget Ted Robson’s the star player, and he’s a bricklayer. And Andy Thompson, what does he do? He carts ballast. If they had to depend on the white collar bods they wouldn’t have a team at all. Honour!’

  ‘Well it was,’ Rosie persisted. ‘It isn’t everybody who is asked to join the rugby team in this town. You must be barmy leaving it.’

  ‘Well, I have left.’

  ‘Does me mam know?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Two weeks ago, if you want to know.’

  ‘When you hurt your back?’

  ‘Yes, when I hurt me back; when somebody hurt me back, jumping on it with both feet. For the last year I’ve
been asking meself what it’s all about. Why get half-killed every week? I’ve had me ribs nearly kicked in, me shins torn. There was one time last year I nearly had me neck broke. And so I asked meself, why I was doing it? And then when you’re playin’ away, the drink. Swimming in it. I don’t mind a drink, you know I like a drink, but, oh God, the stupid things they get up to, the way they carry on! I used to an’ all, I did me share, but I happened to be solid and sober one night when I went along to The Bull late. They had been at it a couple of hours, and aw, it turned me stomach over. They had put a nappy on Bill Webster. That’s all he had on, a nappy, an’ there he was sittin’ in the middle of the floor sucking his thumb and slobberin’, and Alec Turner was playin’ the mother. I tell you, Rosie, I nearly spewed.’

  ‘Well, it’s only a bit of fun.’

  ‘Well, it’s not my kind of fun.’ He nodded his head at her.

  ‘You know what, our Angus?’ She pursed her lips and grinned. ‘I think you’re goin’ through a bad time. It can’t be adolescence, so it must be an early change. I should warn May.’

  The old tea cosy flew through the air again and she ran into the scullery laughing, and he was laughing as he went into the front room, which was his room.

  The front room was twelve feet by nine. In it was a single divan bed, a new acquisition, an old chest of drawers, a hanging wardrobe, a small table in the corner near the window, and a gas fire in front of an open grate. The floor was covered with blue-and-white check linoleum and there were blue cotton curtains at the windows. The room was tidy and, if not bright, it was clean. No matter what condition the rest of the house got into, Emily saw to this room.

  Early change. He grinned to himself and jerked his head, then pulled a straight-backed chair up to the table on which were a number of books and some drawing paper, but he didn’t start to work. He rested his elbow on the table and supported his chin on his hand, and he gazed through the narrow aperture of the curtains, across the street to the high, faceless wall of the railway sheds. An early change. Well, he might not be going through an early change but there was something wrong with him. He didn’t know what, except, as he put it, he was at sixes and sevens with himself. He knew this much though. If it wasn’t for his mam he would pack up the morrow and clear out, he would that. Ratcliffe, Afflecks, the lot would go to hell…What about May? Oh, May an’ all for that matter.

  THE LARCHES

  As they went out of the door it began to rain and Rosie said, ‘Oh lord! me hair’ll be flat. Why the devil can’t we have a car, our Angus? Nearly everybody else in the street’s got one ’cept us.’

  ‘Aye; and look at them.’ He thumbed a derelict looking specimen they were passing. ‘I’ll get a car when I can afford one, not one from the scrap.’

  ‘You’ll get no car at all,’ said Emily, ‘if you want to stay alive. Remember Sammy Cullen afore Christmas. I bet where he is the night he wishes he had never seen a car.’

  ‘His was an old wreck, Mam,’ said Rosie. ‘You can get a nearly new one for a couple of hundred from Hallows.’

  ‘Listen her!’ exclaimed Angus. ‘A couple of hundred! Why don’t you get Stan to fork out and buy you a car?’

  ‘He will an’ all. That’s what he’s goin’ to do if he wins the talent spot next week, goin’ to put it down on one.’

  Angus gave a ha-ha of a laugh; then nudging his mother, he said, ‘Why don’t we go in for the talent spot, Mam, eh? You could do your bit poetry, you know.

  “Between the dark and the daylight,

  When the night is beginning to lower,

  Comes a pause in the day’s occupations

  That is known as the children’s hour.

  I hear in the chamber above me

  The patter of little feet…”’

  He was pushed into the gutter. ‘You’ll hear the crack of me hand across your lug, me lad, if you don’t stop takin’ the mickey. I’ll tell you one thing, they learnt you poetry in my day. Aye, at a council school at that.’

  ‘Eeh! The Children’s Hour.’ Rosie shook her head. ‘It used to petrify me, that, Mam, when you used to say it to me.

  “I have you fast in my fortress

  And will not let you depart

  But put you down in the dungeon

  In the round tower of my heart.”

  ‘You used to say it to me to send me to sleep but it always sent me into nightmares; I was always cryin’ to get out of dungeons.’

  They were laughing hilariously as they boarded the bus. They were still laughing and talking, and all at once, when they alighted in the main street, and they were a few yards from the club entrance and passing a tobacconist’s, when Angus said, ‘You go on in, I’m goin’ to get some baccy.’

  ‘Baccy? You?’ Rosie had hold of his arm.

  ‘Aye, baccy, me. I’ve decided to smoke a pipe. Better for your lungs, they tell you.’

  Their laughter vied with the noise of the traffic, and as they parted he tried to control his face before entering the shop.

  Carsons was a big shop, the best in the town. A number of people were inside, and he did not notice the young girl until she moved a step to allow a man to pass her, and then he said, ‘Why, hello, Van.’ He had almost said Miss Van. It was just a habit, the Miss. Sometimes he added it to her name and sometimes he didn’t.

  ‘Oh, hello, Angus.’ Her face, which had been solemn in repose, brightened.

  He bent his head down to her. ‘You takin’ to smokin’?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled widely at him. ‘It’s Father’s birthday on Monday.’

  He looked her up and down, then whispered, ‘I didn’t recognise you without your school rig; you know, it’s the first time I’ve seen you out of school uniform in years.’ He jerked his head. ‘You look different.’

  She stretched her face slightly up to his and whispered back, ‘And you know something, Angus? I feel different.’

  They both chuckled, then moved a step forward as another customer left the counter. They were silent for a moment, he staring ahead towards the cigarette-laden shelves; then turning to her again, he whispered under his breath, ‘Don’t often see you down this way,’ and she answered as softly, ‘I don’t often get down this way; I’ve been let out.’ And they exchanged an understanding smile.

  When her turn came to be served she asked for a box of cigars and paid over thirty shillings for them. As she turned from the counter he said, ‘Be seeing you, Van.’ And she nodded at him and answered, ‘Yes. Be seeing you, Angus.’

  A minute or so later, when he left the shop, she was standing in the shelter of the doorway and she turned to him and said, ‘What a night! I’m going to wait here until the bus comes across the road and then make a dive for it.’

  He peered at her in the dim light, saying, ‘This is one time when I wish I had a car. We were just talking about a car when we left the house, me mother and Rosie. They said I should have a car.’

  ‘Are they here?’ She nodded towards the street.

  ‘They’re in the club; we’re goin’ to make a night of it.’ The corner of his mouth moved characteristically upwards.

  She looked into his face, hers unsmiling now, and she said, ‘You do enjoy yourselves, don’t you? I mean Emily and Rosie and you, you do enjoy yourselves.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, not more than anybody else. Life’s very dull at times.’ In his mind he was talking to a very young girl, a girl who had everything, yet whom he was sorry for in a way, whom he had always been sorry for in a way. He said now, ‘It’s about time you splashed out at dances, isn’t it? Country balls an’ that?’

  ‘The school dance is as far as I’ve got so far, Angus; but I’ll likely start in the autumn.’

  ‘Well, that’s something to look forward to.’ He paused and stretched his thick neck upwards out of his collar before saying, ‘By the way, Van, there’s something I’d like you to get clear.’ He now rubbed the side of his forefinger across his chi
n. ‘It’s about yesterday’s business. You know I wouldn’t have let that happen if I could have helped it, but the lads—’

  Her gloved fingers lightly flicked his sleeve. ‘Look, Angus, forget it. All that fuss. They ask for what they get, I know that.’

  ‘Yes, but nevertheless, the fellows should mind their tongues…I didn’t know you came along that way.’

  ‘I don’t as a rule, but I was going to my friend’s house and apparently she uses it as a short cut,’ her lips pressed together for a moment, ‘because she likes to egg them on.’

  He stood looking down at her. She was wise in a way was Van. He’d always felt that. Different from the rest, inside as well as in appearance. She was turning into a lovely looking lass, and she would get lovelier. With startling suddenness there came into his chest, just below the ribs, a strange feeling, and for a moment he felt he had been cut off from life; he felt empty, sort of lost. The feeling so enveloped him that he didn’t notice a car drawing up to the kerb. When a man got out and came into the shop doorway, Vanessa said, ‘Oh, hello, Brett,’ and the man answered on a surprised note, ‘Why, Vanessa!’ Then he looked at Angus and added, ‘Hello there, Angus.’ He didn’t show any surprise that Angus Cotton, one of the floor men, should be standing in a doorway talking to the manager’s daughter. But, on the other hand, Angus showed a great deal of embarrassment.

  ‘Hello, Mr Brett,’ he said; then added quickly, ‘Van…Miss Van here got caught in the rain. She’s waitin’ for a bus.’

  ‘Waiting for a bus? Well, it’s a good job I came along. I won’t be a minute, Vanessa. Go on in the car; Irene’s there.’

  ‘Oh thanks. That’s fine. Goodbye, Angus.’ She smiled at him.

  ‘Goodbye, Van.’ They were alone again for a moment. ‘Be seeing you.’

  ‘Yes; be seeing you, Angus.’

  As she got into the back of the car she said, ‘Hello, Irene,’ and Irene Brett turned round in her seat and said, ‘Hello, Vanessa. A beastly night, isn’t it?’ Then after a slight pause she added, ‘Wasn’t that Emily’s son you were talking to?’