A Possible Life (15 page)

‘Of course I did.’

Nancy was watching through the half-open door.

‘You’re a funny old thing,’ said Alice. ‘Go on then, I’ll see you in the morning.’

Nancy started off sleeping in the front room but in the middle of the night she came through to my room and got in with me. She held on to me tightly and her face was just an inch from mine. ‘I’m not letting you go, Billy,’ she said. ‘Even if she is my sister. Even if she got you first. You’re mine now. I’ve made you the man you are.’

She wrapped herself tight round me and made me do things to her. She could be wild like that. I knew what she said was true. I was nothing till that night she first came to my bed when I’d been drinking and she stood there undressed. And since that day I’d never looked back. For more than ten years Nancy Smith had shared not just my bed but all my thoughts and all my hopes. She was right when she said she had made me the man I was. I couldn’t go back to what I’d been before.

The days went along and I got to know Alice again. In some ways she was just the same old Alice, and this made me feel terrible.
But
half my grown life had passed without her and in that time I’d changed. I’d grown like a plant towards the sun, and the sun was Nancy.

Perhaps that was the problem with Alice, that she hadn’t changed at all. It was almost like she’d been asleep for fifteen years. Sometimes I felt like a murderer, like a traitor who’d betrayed her trust. Sometimes I felt like she was still a child and I had to treat her like one. Other times I felt angry that she didn’t seem to understand – she didn’t even try to understand. Surely no one could just imagine that everything stays the same for ever?

Alice kept asking if she could come back to my bed and one day I thought I’d just better tell her. It was a Saturday and I took her off to Victoria Park. It was a hard thing to do, but if my father was right then I was the man to do a hard thing.

We sat down on a bench under a tree and I said, ‘Alice, we’ve known each other almost all our lives. We seen some rough things in that Union house. And in Crow Street it wasn’t easy. That night Liza was born.’

‘I know, Billy. You were lovely. I remember when you held my hand.’

‘I won’t let you down, Alice. While I can work and breathe I’ll take care of you. You took me in that Sunday to the women’s room and for that alone I’ll never let you down.’

‘My ma give you a kiss, didn’t she?’

I swallowed. ‘I’m happy that you’re well again. They say you’ll live a normal life. But you were away a long time. And I’m not the man you left behind.’

‘I can see.’

‘Me and Nancy had a child. A boy. He’s called Dick. He’s nine years old and he’s coming home soon to live with us. I want you to meet him.’

Alice didn’t say nothing. She sat there on the bench looking
straight
ahead of her over the grass towards the trees. There were tears running down her face on to her collar, just silent tears running down. She looked so far away I wondered if she’d gone away again into her illness.

She held my hand for more than an hour while the people came and went, the mothers and the couples arm in arm and the children running after hoops and balls. Still the silent tears were running down her face.

It was starting to grow dark and the park-keeper sounded a bell. Alice turned her face towards me and squeezed my hand.

‘Can we go home now, Billybones?’ she said.

‘Yes, come on then.’

We stood up and started walking. ‘Can I take your arm some days?’ she said. ‘When there’s no one else?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, you can.’

In the next few years we had a lot of deaths. First it was Ma Smith and then old Stevens downstairs. We did up Stevens’s room so it looked as good as new and Alice moved in there. She took in some work for pin money, sewing and that, but she had her meals with us and cooked a fair bit too.

Then one summer my pa was taken ill. He took to his bed one day and said he was never getting up again. I did get a doctor to come and see him but he said there was nothing he could do, the cancer was all over him. This doctor told me where I could find some medicines that would help the pain and make him sleep.

I sat by his bed and I thought about him when he was a young man and he had his business and twelve men working for him. He’d had a bit of a twinkle about him then. He thought things would work out all right for him after all.

Now I saw his unshaved face and his sunken eyes. He was a man on his last legs.

‘Did I ever tell you, Billy,’ he says, ‘about the ones we lost? Your ma and me? There was another little girl besides Meg. We lost her when she was four or five. And there was a stillborn, a boy, between Meg and you.’

‘P’raps if that boy had lived I’d never have been born,’ I said.

‘P’raps.’ He heaved up a big sigh. ‘I sometimes think I wasn’t a good father to you, Billy. When I had to send you to the Union. But you was the only one who’d survive it. And otherwise we was going to starve.’

‘I understand.’

Then my father said, ‘Being a father … When you’re a lad you think your pa knows it all. He’s like a god to you. But he doesn’t. You just make it up as you go along.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘And then you know you got it wrong. But it’s too late.’

‘You didn’t mean no harm,’ I said.

I looked down at his bed and into his eyes, which had all red rings round them. He was finished. Once he thought he could win, but life had beaten him, like it beats everyone.

We carried on living in Crow Street till my younger girl May got married too, then I took all the money I could from the business I had with Worthington and I paid down a deposit on a cottage in Clapham which had belonged to a railwayman. I took a loan from a mutual society and me and Nancy and our boy Dick moved in.

Arthur went off to Australia where he hoped to meet his mother, my mother, though I don’t know if he ever did because he couldn’t write. For a time Alice was the landlady in Crow Street, but her health wasn’t so good really and Nancy said she should come and live with us in Clapham. I was very pleased with this and I was glad it was Nancy who suggested it. So now it’s the four of us. And this is where we are.

Alice has a room on the back of the house that looks out towards the railway. She sits by the window there quite a bit of the day, and sometimes she goes down into the little square of garden at the back. She’s got quite a knack with flowers and she’s planted some tomatoes under the window, where they get the sun.

Nancy’s taken my name, she’s Mrs Webb now, and Alice has gone back to being Smith. No one in this part of London knows any different. Nancy’s very good to Alice, she’s careful not to crow. She’s generous with what we’ve got and what we’ve made together.

Once I came home early and I saw them playing cards in the front room. It was like all the years fell away and they was in the mothers’ room in the Union house on a Sunday, waiting for the bell to go. It was like nothing in between had ever happened. They didn’t hear me come in and I stood in the doorway looking at them. Alice’s eyes were fixed on Nancy’s face while she dealt the cards. She looked quite calm, but puzzled.

I don’t think you ever understand your life – not till it’s finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.

Dick’s a bright lad and he did well at the Board school. Now he’s got a job as a clerk in the City. He goes off early in the morning in a collar and tie. He’s a good, clean-living boy and he wants to make an impression.

And when I die all the memories of my own life will go to the grave with me, God willing, and Dick will never have to look back at them. And his children will never even know what my life was like. They’ll know nothing of grinding stones and lying down to sleep in what felt like a coffin and being hungry and ashamed all day and night and being beaten by a teacher who
couldn’t
write himself and being sure you kept your mind so empty that you had no thoughts at all. And that’s what I’ve done for them, that’s my gift to them and to all their children ever after, so don’t talk to me about being hard.

PART III – EVERYTHING CAN BE EXPLAINED

2029

ELENA DURANTI WAS
a wild girl who spent most of her time alone in the woods near her parents’ farm. Her mother said she was ‘shy’, but the truth was that she found other children irritating. She knew what they were trying to say even as they began to labour slowly towards it; and when they got there it hardly seemed worth the trouble. She wasn’t proud of this impatience and felt uneasy about being friendless, but she had only to spend a lunch hour hearing Bella make conversation with Jacopo to know that she was better off on her own.

Elena’s father, Roberto, was a boatbuilder and the only human being she was never bored by. Perhaps this was because he said so little as he stood at the bench in his workroom, planing yellow curls from the planks of wood or bending over them with his set square and spirit level. He had long, shaggy hair that hung over his eyes and a beard that even in his thirties was threaded with grey. Elena would stand in the sawdust, her skinny legs bare beneath a cotton dress, hoping that Roberto would occasionally remember she was there. She watched how he measured and sawed, how he made the joints firm with screws and glue, and tried to remember it all for when she would build her own private hideaway.

She pestered her parents for a bicycle. Her mother, Fulvia, worked as a cleaner at a school in the nearby city of Mantua, and one day Elena pointed out to her a showroom that made her sick with longing. The black tyres had a new rubber smell and the
colours
on the metal frames – purple, lime and gold – were entrancing. She spent a long time looking at the straps and buckles on the saddlebags. Above all, it was the handlebars she craved; she pictured herself with her backside stuck high in the air, crouching with her face over the front wheel and her hands on the racing grips; she would raise one arm to swipe a bottle from a drinks station and ease her aching back. But the machine that arrived as a present from her parents on her ninth birthday in June 2029 had neither fluorescent paint nor fragrant tyres; it was the cast-off of a neighbour’s son who had outgrown it. It had no saddlebag or lights; and worse, it was – and there was no denying it – a boy’s bike.

Determined not to let her parents see her disappointment, Elena rode off as fast as the machine would let her. Within a week she had stripped it down and oiled it up; she fixed the gear-change and with some savings bought an elementary tool kit. She longed for a puncture. Ignoring Fulvia’s cries of alarm, she went out on to the main highways, then lanes and farm paths and eventually off-road into the woods and hills. One day, deep in a glade she was fairly sure no human being had ever visited, she found a clearing that she thought ideal for a hideout. With timber offcuts from Roberto’s workshop and some old tools he’d passed on to her, she set to work. For a roof she used a piece of corrugated iron she’d seen abandoned by a path, and for guttering some scraps from a skip at a building site. What she was most proud of was the drain: a three-metre run that voided into a natural ditch.

Inside, she put up shelves; and on these she put a few action figures, dolls and other toys she thought robust enough for the outdoor life. The place of honour was taken by a French eighteenth-century plaster Madonna that her father had picked up in a junk shop on a visit to a client in France. It had been badly knocked about over the years, but Elena repainted it a virginal blue. Through the centuries the
figure
had retained a one-eyed, minatory stare that was both comic and alarming.

The Madonna was left on the shelf, but the others became actors in long-running stories concerned with natural disasters. There was never a question of mothering them, or putting them to bed or seeing them marry one another; the American doll with the yellow hair had no time to spare for the fashion catwalk when she was needed to mastermind an airlift from a flooded infant school. Elena had a number of plastic soldiers she deployed in battle formations, trying to give the Indian braves a fair chance against the Soviet artillery, but the killings and explosions bored her and she preferred to integrate the military into the lives of the town.

Here their stories became more personal. Where she had been happy to tell her parents at the dinner table about fire and avalanche, she was reluctant to reveal too much of her suspicions about the closeness between the head firefighter and his deputy.

‘She has no friends,’ said Fulvia to Roberto. ‘It’s not natural.’

‘She’s happy, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, but living all day in that make-believe …’

‘The teachers told me she’s doing well,’ said Roberto. ‘She reads a lot up there in her little hut. She studies animals. She knows about the planets. And solar navigation.’

Fulvia was not convinced. ‘Maybe she studies too much. I see her bedroom light on till all hours. And she’s so thin.’

Roberto laughed. ‘Listen, if you’re worried, take her to see the doctor.’

Fulvia smiled and shook her head. ‘She’s just your little pet, isn’t she? For you she can do no wrong.’

‘She is what she is. We’ll never change her.’

The local doctors’ surgery had been reduced by lack of funds
to
little more than emergency services, but eventually Fulvia was able to secure an appointment for her daughter. The afternoon was airless and hot; they sat in a dusty waiting room for almost two hours until at last the name ‘Duranti’ was called over the system.

The doctor was a bearded man in shirtsleeves. He looked exhausted. There were blooms of sweat in the armpits of his shirt and heavy bags beneath his eyes. He made Elena strip to her underwear, then bent her arms back and forth. She touched her toes. He shone a light in her eyes.

‘Does she have periods yet?’

‘Not yet.’

Elena was taken away and put in a tube that rumbled. A nurse took her back to the doctor’s room with a batch of blurred photographs. She felt humiliated at having to walk along the stone corridor in her vest and pants. The doctor told her to sit down while he took her blood pressure. Then he rubbed the inside of her elbow with alcohol and slid a needle into her vein; as he leant over her she could smell the cigarette smoke on his clothes. He put a small test tube of her blood into an envelope in his out-tray as he sat back in his desk chair and riffled through the scans.