16

I had boots to wear in cold weather. I had a fringe again. My hair fell across my eyes. I liked tossing my head in order to see what I was doing.

June did not go home one Friday night, and on a very cold Saturday I set out with her to go to a football match in Bridlington. The art college team was playing some Bridling­ton team, and she had to be there for a reason to do with her extensive and complicated flirtations. She explained it to me, but I did not understand.

That Saturday was one of those days when I was looking my best.

The diesel travelled fast and swayed. June talked.

The land became less flat. There was farmland. We passed through Cottingham station at speed. Soon we could see the towers of Beverley Minster.

The train stopped at Beverley. Beverley was ‘One of the best country towns in England’. There was shouting outside in the cold and quiet in the warm carriage. There were many chestnut trees in Beverley. In springtime they were glorious.

As we approached wayside stations the driver sounded two notes on the train’s Klaxon. Village platforms made for sum­mer afternoons were left behind in the January cold.

‘You look very thoughtful,’ said June.

‘I’m always thoughtful on trains,’ I said.

In a field there were long, low sheds of wood that had been made dark umber with creosote.

June pointed. ‘They keep battery hens in them,’ she said. ‘I think it’s cruel.’

Nature was being remade. There was nothing that could not be compelled to do what it was necessary for it to do. Even God had undergone such modifications that hardly anybody knew him anymore.

I laughed.

‘What are you laughing at?’ June asked.

‘Something I was thinking.’

‘You are strange,’ she said.

Bridlington appeared as the backs of semi-detached houses over the fields. It was supposed to be a jolly seaside place where jolly Northern folk had jolly Northern good times. According to an article I had read in one of the serious Sunday newspapers, miners raced whippets on the beach. I had often been on Bridling­ton beach, but I had never seen whippets being raced.

The Yorkshire one read about was not the same as the Yorkshire one lived in.

I wondered if I should have called myself Cathy.

The wind met us on the platform. This was no place for a romantic novel. The east wind would shock lovers to decency and blow poor ghosts away forever. We hunched ourselves against the blast.

‘Do you think it might be too cold for football?’ June asked.

‘No,’ I laughed, ‘men play football in any weather. They have to.’

‘Why?’

‘They can’t think of anything better to do.’

‘I wouldn’t like to be kicked on the leg on a day like this,’ she said.

After enquiring the way of several people who seemed to be stupefied by the cold we arrived on an open space of playing fields with a gasworks nearby that was making a smell. There was no football going on. There was nobody there. June said that it was too early, that the kick-off was not till half-past two. I said that I had no intention of staying on the Russian steppes until half-past two.

We found a groundsman in a hut. He wore a high-crowned trilby and had curved yellow teeth.

As though he were talking to two fools he told us that the Hull art college football team was not coming to the playing fields that afternoon and that there were no other playing fields in Bridlington. June argued. He told her slowly and clearly that he knew what teams would be playing football there that afternoon and what teams would not be playing football there that afternoon and that the Hull art college team was in the latter group. June admitted that she must have been mis­informed.

When we were coming away from the hut she told me that footballers were mostly unreliable and recalled an occasion when the college team had been defeated by twenty goals to nothing.

I said that, if I did not get food and warmth very quickly, I would die of exposure.

We had to go to the seafront before we found a café that was open.

The sea looked too cold and dark to sustain life of any kind, but, out on the harbour wall, what looked like a bundle of old clothes was fishing with a rod and line. It was impossible to imagine how he withstood the cold, even dressed as he was in the attire of two or three men.

Snowflakes came flying in from the sea.

We ate egg and chips behind tall windows that looked out onto the seafront. We were the only customers. Outside was the sea and the curve of the bay under flurries of snow.

‘If this isn’t a lesson to me!’ said June.

‘A lesson about what?’

‘A lesson,’ she said. ‘Never run after men, Wendy.’

‘I won’t,’ I said.

‘Fancy coming here! It’s like the end of the world.’

I agreed with her.

We contemplated the bleakness through the windows.

I began to think that it was rather beautiful.

June said that there was a train back to Hull at half-past three.

The electric clock on the wall showed a few minutes after half-past one.

We decided to go to a pub.

When we left the café the snow was whirling. The wind had dropped and it felt slightly warmer.

We arrived at a pub that looked from the outside as though it might be full of jovial fishermen. It proved to be full of basket chairs. But the holiday makers had gone. It seemed a Marie Celeste of a pub. June had to tap on the bar with a half-crown to make an attractive, thirty-nine year old barmaid appear and say what a terrible day it was.

June bought a pineapple juice and then I bought a pineapple juice.

The barmaid said that there was a fire in the ‘snug’.

The snug was a small room at the end of a passage.

There was a man.

June shouted, ‘Frank Cracknell!’

He was in his late twenties, fair and strong. There was a lazy-lion ease about him. He sat in a Windsor chair, com­fortable, his short grey overcoat open to let the heat from the fire get to him. A cigarette hung from his thick hand. His pint of beer was set on a small table by his side.

The way he looked at June suggested that he regretted being discovered and disturbed. Then he looked at me to see who I was. I remembered that June had said that he was a thoroughly bad man. He was formidable. I took my eyes from his.

‘This is my friend, Wendy,’ June said, introducing me to him. ‘Wendy, this is Frank.’

I smiled and nodded. I thought that he ought to have stood up when we came in.

We sat round the fire. June sat next to Frank and I sat opposite him.

I looked into the fire or looked at June. He was a man. I felt pretty and I felt dressed up. I could sense that he was a clever man. He might see that I was a boy. I tried to go blank.

He was saying something to June.

‘Frank!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re in one of your black moods! I can always tell.’ And then to me, ‘Frank’s horrific when he’s in one of his black moods. He says the filthiest things!’

He was smiling as though he thought that June was a joke.

I tried to smile.

I got the thought that he might be able to see up my skirt, which forced me to edge round in my chair so that my knees were towards the fire. I managed a position that was safe but painful. I was too frightened of him to do anything as overt as moving my chair round.

June was bubbling at the unexpected meeting. She evidently thought that Frank was a wonderful animal.

‘What are you doing in Bridlington?’ she asked him.

‘I’m here for the winter sports.’

‘He won’t talk sense to me,’ she told me. ‘He despises women. He says absolutely appalling things about women sometimes.’

He was looking at my legs.

I tried to tuck them away under the chair, but my screwed-up position made it impossible for me to do anything with them.

‘Are you working nights now?’ she asked him.

‘I have been. I’ll be back on days soon.’

‘Frank always works at jobs he hates,’ June told me. ‘He’s a lost soul. Aren’t you, Frank?’

‘Yes, child. I’m an unloved blacksmith, alone and in need of comfort.’

I glanced into his eyes. He was looking straight at me. There was laughter in his eyes.

I looked into the fire.

He stood up. ‘I’ll have to go and get a refill. What do you want?’

June said that she would have another pineapple juice. I said that I would like another pineapple juice.

When he came back June told him that I lived in the next room to her.

He was watching me. His eyes were confident. He knew that I was frightened of him. By not speaking to me he was playing a game with me.

I wanted to make a show of not being frightened of him. I spoke to him. ‘Have you ever shod a horse?’

He answered me smiling, ‘No I haven’t. I’m not really a blacksmith. I’m just a factory hand.’

‘Do you think you could shoe a horse?’ I asked to keep talking.

‘I could try.’

‘What if the horse kicked you?’

‘I’d kick it back.’

‘Poor horse.’

He laughed.

‘Frank wouldn’t kick a horse,’ said June. ‘He’s a soft old thing really. Aren’t you, Frank?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘June likes to think that all men are soft old things,’ he said to me. ‘She’s looking for a weak-willed, feeble-minded man with a lot of money.’

‘No, I’m not!’

‘What sort of man do you want?’ I asked her. I wanted to help with teasing her.

‘Not someone who’s weak-willed and feeble-minded. I want someone who’s kind and good-natured but smart and sophisti­cated. And I’d like him to have enough money, because security is important. And I want him to be a gentleman of sorts, not a rough-neck. And I wouldn’t want him to take me for granted.’

‘That means that she wouldn’t always be willing to provide entertainment for her keep,’ laughed Frank.

‘You’re horrible, Frank!’ she shouted. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to marry you!’

He grinned at her.

She grinned back. ‘You’re a foul beast, Frank. I wouldn’t be able to take you anywhere. What would I do if I married you? You’re just a common blacksmith.’

‘I think he’s an uncommon blacksmith,’ I said, and looked down at my coat and examined one of the buttons intently. It was grey leather woven into a button. I wondered how they were made. I felt him looking at me.

At three o’clock the pub closed and he left us. He said that he had to see someone, and when he got outside he walked off with his hands set deep in his pockets. The way in which he could be interested in me but still go about his business, leaving me behind, seemed very manly to me.

The snow was beginning to lay.

On the train June pleased me by talking about him. She said that she liked him but that he was moody. ‘He’s like Paul Gauguin,’ she said. She said that one day someone might give him a good hiding to teach him proper manners, but she regretted that such an event was unlikely because he was so big and strong. ‘He’s terrifically strong,’ she said. ‘He can crush an apple in his hand and he can lift a chair up by the bottom of one leg. I think that tricks like that are rather cheap, don’t you?’

I said that I didn’t know.

‘Brute force isn’t anything,’ she pronounced. ‘It’s intelli­gence that counts.’

‘He seemed quite intelligent to me,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she agreed, ‘that’s what’s so infuriating about him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because people should be either strong or intelligent.’

‘But not both?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s not fair.’

‘Why did he get the sack from teaching?’ I asked her.

‘I suppose because he fell out with everybody,’ she said. ‘He sometimes pretends to hate women, but he hates men much more. I think he’d like to kill all the men in the world and have all the women to himself. He wasn’t suited to being a teacher at all.’

I was glad that he knew where I lived.

But I told myself that, if I ever saw him again, I would have to be determined not to do anything to encourage him. I told myself that I had behaved foolishly in the pub.

He was not happy, I thought. I thought that behind his front he was a bitter and sarcastic man.