Key to the Door (21 page)

“No, we ain't,” Brenda denied. “They got spilled.”

“She did eat 'em,” Alma accused, “our Ken.”

Brenda turned: “Clatfart! She's had a lot as well: look at her mouth.” Alma wiped away telltale stains that weren't there, but Ken settled the argument: “All right, yo' two's had a lot, so we'll finish 'em off. Come on, Brian. Come on, Harry”—thrusting his hand into the apron. “You big 'ogs!” Brenda shouted. “Gerroff!”

Ken smacked his lips, remembered the promise to take some home, so all began another collection. “They're mowing corn in the field near our house next week,” Brian said, putting a blackberry into his mouth.

Brenda was distant: “Are they?” He was about to eat another, but dropped it into her apron. “You're a greedy 'og,” she said. “You're eating more than you put in my pina.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are, because I'm counting 'em.”

“There's plenty more,” he said, reaching to the bush top. “Is your grandad going to cut the corn?” She looked at him with brown inquisitive eyes.

“No, Farmer Hawkins' men are doing it.”

They walked down a path almost closed in by bushes. “I might come, then,” she conceded.

At the stream's narrowest point Alma was nervous and wouldn't cross. Ken found a large stone and plunged it into the middle with such force that everyone leapt to the bushes for fear of being splashed. “You needn't a thrown it in like that,” Brenda cried. “It's a steppin'-stone for our Alma.” She put her foot on it, swung to another stone, became rigid at seeing the distance left to cross.

“Go on,” Ken called. “You'll be all right.”

A wave of panic masked her face, and with a sudden shrill cry she collapsed into the water, a dozen blackberries bobbing in the disturbance. Ken hauled her out, bedraggled and shivering.

“Oo you won't 'alf cop it, our Ken,” Brenda sang with a dead-set serious face. “Oo you'll cop it. Not 'alf!”

“I didn't push her in,” he shouted, “it's your fault. You knew she was going to fall, so you should have grabbed her.” They walked out of the wood, arguing bitterly, Alma a silent round-faced heroine shivering between them.

Still in bed, Brian heard work going on in the field: horses neighing and the jingle of harness, men shouting to one another, and harvest machines splutter-chugging up and down the lane. He ran to the window in his shirt: it was true, right enough, they'd started; pulled on his trousers and walked downstairs holding shoes and socks. His grandmother laid some breakfast. “The tea's nearly cold, lazybones, but I din't bother to wake you because I knew the noise'd do it sooner or later.” She poured a mug of tea: “Anyway, it's on'y eight o'clock, so you've plenty of time.”

He washed, and bolted through the hedge. Merton was talking to Farmer Hawkins, so he stayed back. Drays and wagons stood in spaces already cut, and Brian felt a lingering fear of the huge juggernaut wheels of the wagons because three years ago near haymaking time he had asked his grandfather: “What do they carry the corn off in?” “Drays and wagons, Nimrod.” “But wagons eat you,” he exclaimed. Merton cried in surprise: “Eat you? Wagons?” “I read about it at school,” Brian said. “Well, if you did, all I can say is they teach you some funny things,” Merton laughed. Brian was disconcerted: “Well, wagons do eat you, because Sent George killed one.” “He must 'ave 'ad a bit o' bother, then, stabbin' the wheels,” Merton said mischievously. “I suppose it was loaded wi' bottles of ale, and that's why he wanted to kill it!” Lydia broke in: “Sent George didn't kill a wagon, Brian. It was a
dragon
he killed.” “Ah!” Merton exclaimed. “I thought there was a catch in it somewhere.”

Even now Brian half expected a snorting scaly monster to come charging at him and felt disappointed on seeing a clumsy inoffensive thing on four wheels unable to move without the help of horses. At dinner-time he went down the lane to fetch Merton a quart of ale and with the change from a shilling bought himself an ice-cream cornet. A wind had risen, and though a hot sun shone, someone expected there'd be rain tomorrow, so they had to finish the field today. Brian sat on the gate and watched the wheat swaying in a charmed dance under the wind that fell on it from the long embankment of the railway. It turned and lifted like a gentle sea of yellow and gold. The field had shrunk since morning, was half the size of yesterday, would soon be a mere wasteground of short stems that stuck into slippers that walked over them. All heads were lifted and lowered, then went in a beautiful movement all at once from side to side as if making the most of a narrowing existence and knowing that by evening it would be flat and finished.

Something was wrong. Everyone stood around a horse that, still in the wagon-shafts, lay on its side, half-strangled and tilting the cart, which was in danger of falling. “What's up?” Brian asked his grandfather.

“That 'oss's gone mad.”

“What are they going to do with it?”

“Shoot it, if they can't get it up.” The huge grey horse lay neighing and snorting, its unmoving eyes on the men around, sensing itself in an unusual position, yet unable to break through the dim mists covering its brain and gather strength to get up. Foam was like snow on its mouth and no one would go close and try heaving it on its feet. On its forehead was a red sore the size of a florin, a dozen flies buzzing over it. “Does it want some water, grandad?”

“It's 'ad a drink,” Merton answered brusquely.

“But it's sweating”—he pointed to glistening enormous flanks: the body twitched, and grey eyes rolled emptily. Farmer Hawkins, a heavily built man wearing a panama hat, pushed his way through the onlookers, demanding: “Ain't you got the bloody thing up yet?”

Nobody spoke, seemed afraid of him. Merton smoked a pipe some distance off, and Brian stood by his side. Farmer Hawkins cracked a whip over the horse's head, hoping it would leap up and pull the wagon away. No good: it lay as if dead. He tugged at the harness, but was forced back to his whip, which made red streaks down its flanks. It tried to rise at each crash, but its head fell in a dull half-paralyzed heap. The farmer saw it was useless, threw his whip aside and sent the labourers back to their work. “Got a gun handy, Jack?” he called to Merton. Brian edged closer: its body shimmered with sweat and fatigue, eyes showing grey, tail swishing feebly against attacking flies. Then all movement subsided, and he turned at hearing Ken Arlington shout from the hedge. Brenda's wild face roamed over the field and stopped at the prostrate horse. “It's gone mad,” Brian told them. “Grandad's gone to get a gun.”

“They don't 'ev ter shoot it just 'cause it's gone mad,” Brenda said, “do they?”

“Course they do.” Farmer Hawkins cleared them off when Merton came back and they walked to the embankment hoping for trains, Brenda between them. “What's up?” Brian asked at her silence.

“Nowt,” she answered. Remembering the horse's face, he wanted to get far away before it was killed. “Why can't they make horses better when they're badly, like people?” she cried. “Can't they get a doctor to it?”

“Don't be daft,” Ken threw in sharply. “That hoss is too old. It'd be too much bother to try and get it better.” He plucked at blackberries. “Come and eat some o' these, they're ever so juicy.” Brian collected a handful and gave some to Brenda. Still eating, they sat on the railway fence. Brenda's hair blew about: “I hope they don't kill that 'oss,” she lamented.

They heard a train. Brian leapt from his perch and ran up the green slope, lying flat in deep grass near the top, already feeling a vibration from the approaching train. The others crashed on either side. “I hope it's an express,” Ken whispered, his voice low as though the driver might hear him. Brian remembered how Bert near New Bridge laid flat on the tracks while a goods train rumbled over him—a daredevil who dared the others to do it as well, though nobody would take his dare. He bet Brian a pound, but Brian said: “Where will you get the pound if I do?” “Rob a meter,” Bert said, but Brian hadn't done it anyway.

Before the train's thunder grew too loud for them to hear anything else, a series of sharp echoes fled from the cornfield. Brian felt a pain in his chest, as if the bullet had struck there. He tugged a handful of grass by the roots and chewed it, and when the train screamed by, opened his green mouth to cheer, an arm waving above his head. Engine, wheels, and carriages came to within a few yards, ripping the view into tatters of blue sky and field, each in a decimated second dancing between the carriage-gaps. A column of smoke curled like a black long stocking into the sky, its head quickly dispersing at the shock of finding nothing to keep it in shape.

He followed them down the slope and over the fence. “I want to go away on a train like that some day,” he said, slashing at nettles with a stick.

“Where do you want to go then?” Brenda asked as he drew level. He hadn't thought about it. “Anywhere. I don't know.”

“I'd be frightened to go a long way,” she confided. “And trains might crash.”

“Well,” he said, a note of anger in his voice, “
I
wouldn't be frightened.”

CHAPTER 11

Seaton was a secretive man, and his dark complexion may have been more than skin deep because of his inability either to read or write. This bred in him—when surrounded as he imagined himself to be by a fair world of literacy—a defensive wish to create his own peculiar brand of pencilled autobiography. He acquired notebooks and filled them with dates and columns of figures, copied monthly calendars on to sheets of cut-out cardboard, on which he starred each dole and signing-on day. In the books he kept accounts of what wages he came by on his short-lived expeditions into the world of employment. A spacious old toffee-tin held bills, lapsed insurance policies, pink forms of one sort or another, fading official letters he had some time received, birth certificates, and two photographs of his dead mother. All these items, as well as each added-up column of wages, were signed by his name in broad rugged handwriting, the only thing that, apart from figures (at which he was remarkably clever and quick), he knew how to write.

This private office, which gave him a sense of still being part of the world when it no longer needed his labour (yet of being master to a tiny and exclusive life of his own), was kept under lock and key with a tool chest he had made himself. Brian watched him saw the remaining hard gut out of half-rotten planks, plane and bevel, sandpaper and mortise-tenon the lid and sides. Within, on hooks or in equal compartments, lay screwdrivers and hammers, gimlets and bradawls, saws and chisels, hinges and brackets and bolts, and bits of shoe-leather (for he was a miser and threw nothing away except cigarette ends), all of them begged or borrowed or stolen, found perhaps but seldom bought. Brian was sometimes around when it was opened, and out came a smell of upholstery and bicycle inner-tubes, tobacco and sweat and leather, and the beginnings of ruts from straightened nails.

Seaton delighted in using his tools, worked with an animal absorption within self-found carefully defined limits of intelligent usefulness. His creative world was the result of necessity finding its own level in a man who might otherwise have made his family suffer too much, and infect them completely with his own melancholia, spite, and despair.

Brian saw him unlock the cupboard on certain evenings, spread papers and notebooks over the table, watched him set out a clear life in dates and figures and signatures with no explanatory prose, in the only way he knew how to record it. These were the times of his greatest contentment, and an aura of calm descended over the house.

Brian copied him, bought a penny notebook, and in awkward, uneven writing put down the names of schools he had been to and the dates at which he had left them, the streets he had lived on for as far back as he could remember. He saw other boys standing at street corners with pencil and paper collecting car numbers, but his own game was part of walking up Denman Street on Sunday morning to buy a sixpenny roast from a cheap butcher's (pushing up to the counter and always hoping the roast would be bigger than last week's), stopping on his way back near a corner plastered from top to bottom with cinema billboards: big letters in yellow and black, red and purple and gold, forming titles of adventure and destiny, and names from the brightest of heavens such as Robert Donat and Jack Hulbert, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. Shopping-bag by the wall, he took out his book and self-consciously gathered on to paper the shining words of poetry around him, imagining the thoughts of passers-by: What's he doin', writing in a book like that?—for he would stay a long time laboriously copying and turning pages, while his mother waited at home to get the meat in the oven.

The game came to an end one evening when he opened his grandmother's
Evening Post
and discovered two long columns on the inside page already filled with words he had so arduously hunted for and copied down. In one way it was like finding a goldmine, corn in Egypt that dazzled his eyes as he strove to take in such a fabulous concentration of titles. Though they lacked the colour and layout that went right into him at the hoardings, his game was finished.

At the beginning of September, time threw in its reserves of frost and fog to break down the year's resistance, and he wore a coat, began in the chill and darkness of evening to anticipate Goose Fair and Bonfire Night and Christmas parties at school. Rain came, cold and persistent, drainpipes and gutters working overtime to wash away the dead from a battlefield of leaves and matchsticks. Houses grew farther apart in the misty odours of each earlier dusk, became more compatible for Knock-a-door and Spirit-tap and Dustbinlidder in the form of Brian, Ted Newton, and Jim Skelton, moving like wraiths from lit-up lamp to lamp in laughing agony at the distraught tormented who opened his or her door after mysterious noises, to see—their eyes still blind from an electric-lit room—nothing.