1

I took my lunch into the stockyard overlooking the river, and sat on the concrete embankment. A barge shuffled low through the dark brown water, throwing up a foam like dead beer. Its wash roared on the pebbles below. The bargee fastened the long handle of the rudder to a loop of rope, and slung a bucket into the wake. He let it drag in the current, then hauled it up, and tipped it along the narrow walk by the hold. He went back to the rudder and tensed it as the barge began to swing.

It was a habit I’d picked up with the New Year, having my dinner in the stockyard. Usually a few others from the shops and the labs came out and sat amongst the steel and pig iron, or played soccer in a space cleared near the yard office. Those of the older ones who hadn’t been with the firm long ate their snap and just watched the brown glide of the river sewer as if it was the only familiar thing in sight. But today it was cold and blustery, the spume was being blown into the air off the top of the sluice opposite, and the smell of the works hung low. As far as I could see I was the only one out.

I was surprised to see Weaver threading his way through the rows of metal joists. He was on top of me before he’d time to recognize me.

‘Hello … Arthur!’ he said, automatically.

It was the first time I’d seen him since Christmas Eve. I was relieved to hear him still call me Arthur.

‘Do you come out here often to eat?’ he said, surprised into conversation.

‘Only recently. When it’s fine.’

‘The works’ canteen not good enough for you?’ His blue eyes glinted as he dared himself to smile.

‘I’m economizing,’ I told him pointedly. ‘You never know what’s around the corner.’

His smile, only half there, vanished. He dusted the concrete decisively with a cupped hand, eased his trousers at the knee, and motioned me to sit down with him. It was something like his old concern.

‘I’d been meaning to have a chat with you, Arthur,’ he said, and looked down to see if his suit touched my overalls. ‘After that rather terrible display … by Slomer. At Christmas. I suppose we’ve all felt a little estranged. He’s not really a person to entertain socially. But putting that aside—I’m willing to forget the wretched business, if that’s any consolation to you.’

‘I’d be glad to forget it.’

He smiled again, seriously. ‘I’ll take it then we’ve patched up any ill feeling there was between us?’

He waited steadily for me to confirm it, then brought his hand round the front of his suit. We shook as vigorously as we could sitting down.

‘How’re your teeth?’ he asked. ‘Riley showed me the bill we had for them. Quite expensive. I hope they fit all right.’

I smiled for him, and he examined them critically.

‘They certainly look all right.’

‘People say I look younger,’ I told him.

‘Do they, Arthur?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Well … I’ve never thought you looked really old. So any rejuvenating effect is perhaps beyond me. I will say they’re not recognizable—as false, I mean.’

He made a circle in the metal dust with his toe cap. Then pulled a line right through it. ‘There was another thing.’ he said. ‘Going back to that not very happy occasion. Perhaps you didn’t hear, but the police are trying to find who it was lifted some jewellery from my wife’s bedroom that night. Nearly four hundred pounds’ worth.’

‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘I mentioned it in case they ask you—purely as routine—so you won’t feel annoyed. You’ve heard nothing about it?’

‘Not a thing. … What part of the night was it taken?’

‘I’m not sure—we didn’t actually discover anything missing until the following morning, Christmas morning, when Mrs Weaver was about to go to church.’

‘I’m sorry about it,’ I told him unconvincingly.

I realized my attitude to Weaver was rapidly becoming like the way I now thought of Johnson: a withered limb of my ambition. I began to despise Weaver for being so simple, for having his money, his jewellery, his house used by other people. His enemies, in his eyes, were just those people who wouldn’t let him be kind to them. ‘I want to help everybody’ was his motto. It immediately made everybody suspicious: he seemed too good to be true.

‘What annoys me most’, he was saying, ‘isn’t the stuff itself going, but the fact that somebody who came to the party must have taken it. You remember what Slomer said about my lack of faith and all that—just how much faith are you supposed to have? They can’t be content with taking half the slates off your roof, and breaking things up generally, but they take property away as well. I ask you, Arthur, how are you supposed to treat these people? If you treat them like dogs, the way they treat you, someone of the calibre of Slomer complains you’re not human, and if you treat them like people they run all over you.’

‘It was me who took your slates off,’ I said. ‘I’d be glad to pay for the damage. I reckon I ought to have told you earlier.’

‘I’m glad you’ve told me, Arthur, because I knew about that myself. The police had the idea the thief forced entry that way, though why they should think anyone needed to force entry that night, God knows. It was old George who explained what had happened—you got fastened in the room, he said.’

I listened carefully while he explained how he was going to overlook the damn fool thing, and how we ought to forget the entire business from beginning to end. He didn’t sound well. When I insisted on paying for the tiles he didn’t argue. He mentioned the fact that George Wade came back at two in the morning to look for his dog.

‘And did he find it?’ I asked him.

‘No. Johnson discovered it the next morning when he came to clear up the garden … it was like a battlefield. If that dog had died it’d have been the last straw for me. As it was the thing was on its last legs when Johnson found it. You know how attached it is to old George. Still … it did look funny when Maurice let it go like that. Trust Maurice. He’s all action. That boy has never had a thought in his head.’

Another coal barge passed us low in the water, on its way to the power station. The chug of its engine was now the only sound on the river. It pushed the water aside as if it was only a rubber sheet, rippling in thick heavy folds, then collapsing. There were two white gulls swaying over the brown foam.

‘You hadn’t met Slomer before?’ he said casually, suggestive.

‘No.’

He seemed—you know. …’ He fingered his chin, much like a masculine woman might. ‘Very familiar with you, in the way he spoke. I wondered if you hadn’t met him some other time.’

He was looking across the river at the different coloured wool bales, yellow, red, blue, stacked and overflowing from their big wooden trolleys. ‘What do you think of Slomer, Arthur?’ He smiled, but his serious expression didn’t change.

‘He sounded pretty clever … I wasn’t sure.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘I don’t suppose he wants you to like him. Maybe he’s been hurt into being like that.’

‘If he has, then he certainly tries to entertain himself with it.’ He rubbed his upper lip with that well-kept forefinger of his. ‘I found it odd’, he said, ‘the way he took to you.’

‘I thought he was taking it out of me. I felt like some big rubber dummy stuck up there for him to poke.’

‘Did you, Arthur,’ he said, relieved, almost smiling.

‘But you don’t believe that,’ I said.

‘Let me put it this way, Arthur. There’ve been times when, I’ll admit, I’ve tried to put a spoke in your wheel—often for your own good, as I saw it, like last November. You might think I had a personal grudge for doing that … well, it’s very possible something of that sort swayed my judgement. But each time I suggested putting McEwan in your place I was voted down. I was, if you like, persuaded to change my attitude. And you were having a bad patch then. More often than not that persuasion came from Slomer. Not from him personally, you’ll understand. But all the same from him, from people we all know represent his views on the committee. Now, in my position, what would you be tempted to think?’

‘I see what you mean,’ I said, and watched the slight shaking of his hands. ‘But I still think I’ve played myself into the team all along.’

‘Ah, I’m not saying you haven’t.’ He held his right hand up, his fingers splayed out like cards. ‘Not saying you haven’t, at all. I’m not blaming you, Arthur. Don’t get me wrong. I was merely pointing out to you the writing on the wall.’

I immediately thought of Ed Philips, and the writing on his wall. I couldn’t remember exactly what it was.

‘What you mean’, I said, ‘is that you thought you had some ownership over me, as far as that committee was concerned, and you don’t like it being taken away.’

He didn’t answer. He hadn’t perhaps expected it as plain as this, and it pushed him back on his heels.

‘Are you trying to tell me you’ve carried me or something?’

‘You know you’ve been carried,’ he said bitterly. ‘I liked you, Arthur, once. It was my back and nobody else’s. Right from the beginning.’

‘And you think I’m taking myself away.’ I was angry with him, angry that he should allow me to talk to him like this, that he should take all this trouble to expose himself, offer to make up as friends, and, now that he thought Slomer was taking me over, remind me of how much I owed him, and how keen he’d been to give it. Like all effeminate men, he over-emphasized everything. Both Weaver and Slomer seemed worn-out schemes to me: Weaver, maybe through his good nature, was being taken over by other people; Slomer was struggling to keep his religion, his organization, intact. They both seemed due to fall off the branch, and the committee would then take over.

‘I don’t think you appreciate how much help you’ve been given, Arthur,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the crux of the matter.’

‘I felt I deserved it, and you don’t think I do. I reckon that’s the crux of the matter if anything is. Am I a good footballer or not?’

‘I’m not saying any more,’ he told me like a big girl. ‘Just don’t try to push yourself too far—that’s all I’ve got to say.’

He went away before I could think of anything else. He’d got a short mincing stride. A small backside.

I stayed and talked to the stockyard clerk about his pigeons until the buzzer went.

The change wasn’t only in Weaver. Mrs Hammond suddenly heeled over. We were out driving one Sunday afternoon when suddenly she came out with, ‘Had you thought of buying a TV?’

When I looked surprised she said, ‘You’ve nothing against them, have you?’

‘I was shaken at you asking,’ I told her.

‘I thought you’d say that.’ She smiled to herself. ‘But if we can afford it, why shouldn’t we?’

‘You seem to forget—you’re sitting in ten TV sets and dressed in another two.’

‘You’re getting rough. I suppose you mean the car and my fur coat. But I didn’t want it to sound I was greedy or something.’

The fur coat I’d bought her at Christmas, cost price from a dealer who was a fan of mine, though he wasn’t that close. It’d taken me some time and effort to convince him that knowing me was more important than his profit from one coat. Mrs Hammond’s reaction to it on Christmas morning was first surprise and natural greed, then a strict, martyred refusal, and a final reluctant acceptance. There was no doubt she was proud of it, and treated it like a living thing.

Now she suddenly said, ‘I’m a kept woman, Arthur. You can’t expect me to act otherwise.’

‘Oh Christ,’ I told her. ‘But I know what you mean.’

‘Well, then, you shouldn’t be surprised at me being straight about it.’

‘I reckon not. … But I can’t see how it helps.’

‘You mean how it can help you. What you don’t see is that if you deal with dirt you mu’n expect to look dirty. People have got eyes, you know.’

I couldn’t think why she should say all this, and the shortest way of stopping it I found was to hit her. I cracked her hard across the face, and I wanted to apologize when I saw the mark.

We drove along in the kind of silence that comes after an event like that. The kids were stiff, erect, then Ian began to cry, then Lynda.

‘Do you feel like dirt?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’

We reached the summit of a hill and coasted down through a leafless wood. I noticed how there’d been a light fall of snow during the night, and how the frost had kept it in place till now. A faint sun was breaking it up into patches: the brown earth and dark grass showed through.

‘I don’t feel dirty,’ I told her. ‘I wonder what the difference is.’

‘The difference is,’ she said after a while, ‘I’m still used to being honest. It’s one thing somehow I haven’t been able to throw off.’

‘I said I didn’t feel dirty. You’re talking about seeing—about what other people think from what they see.’

‘I’d like to feel clean, that’s all,’ she said, and added with a queer reluctance, ‘I don’t want to get at you, Arthur. You’ve got your own feelings. But I’d just like to be decent.’

‘You think I should feel like you? Is that what you mean?’

‘You don’t need me to tell you how it looks. A car … me in a fur coat. Living in the same house as you. You see what I mean now? It’s only natural I should feel about it like this.’

‘I don’t bother about what people feel,’ I told her. ‘You don’t have to take any notice at all, so why bother?’

‘You don’t mean that. You bother about what your fans feel, about what people tell you, when they tell you how good you are. Look what you’re like when you’ve had a bad match. You break things. You tear about the house like a madman. And just because you dropped a ball or something at the wrong moment. You’re always looking at your body in the mirror. Look how you shadow-box in front of that mirror—watching yourself. Don’t tell me …’ She was breathless, hurt; the red mark on her temple and cheek had flushed a deeper, vicious colour that made her face look pale. ‘You’re not fair to me, Arthur. You just say whatever comes into your head—to make me feel I should be grateful. …’ Tears hung in her eyes, but she held them back. Her eyes glistened.

‘These people who watch—I don’t care about them. I don’t, honestly. So you’re wrong. They’re pigs and I don’t reckon with them at all. They can go stuff themselves. …’

‘That’s you all over. You just bluster about. Anybody who gets in your way—you just knock them down. Anybody who’s stopped being useful—you just throw over on one side. You just use people. You use me. You don’t treat me like … I should be. You don’t know what you’re like with people. Look how you treat that Johnson now. At one time you couldn’t leave him alone.’

‘That’s good of you to say that. It was you who spoilt anything Johnson and me had between us.’

‘Spoilt it! I didn’t spoil it. You can’t put the blame of things like that on to me. I’d nothing to do with it. I only said I didn’t like you bringing him home. I didn’t like the man. It was nothing to do with me how you and him found each other.’

‘Well, whatever you say now, you set him against me.’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said quietly, letting the water at last run from her eyes. She pulled Ian over on to her knee. ‘You’ll be blaming me next because you’re not playing football well.’

We ran out of the wood and accelerated alongside a reservoir. The water had a thin coating of ice, and on a hill the other side a swarm of kids were trying to sledge in the melting snow.

‘Why do you carry on like this?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve tried to treat you all along as if I cared. You don’t seem to appreciate a bloody thing of what I’ve done.’

‘I don’t have to tell you why. I’m a mother.’

‘If you’re going to think this way how can you expect Lyn and Ian to think any different when they’re older? Don’t you mind what they think about us?’

‘Of course I mind,’ she said tonelessly. ‘But I reckon you’ll leave me soon.’

I felt that, in spite of herself, she was always trying to hurt me. Her face seemed to tell me she didn’t want to do it, but something prompted her inside, and out these jibes came, almost every day, almost every time we spoke to each other. And here was I, showing all the time how I was growing to rely on her, and she went on doing it. It was as if one side of her wanted me to rely on her, and the other was terrified of the responsibility. She was frightened of committing herself, and so she just went on pushing me off, hurting herself as much as me, and building up a fire and pain between us that neither of us knew how to handle.

The car shook, and something rattled and dropped off as we shot over a hump-backed bridge at the head of the reservoir. The car went on running so I didn’t stop. We slowed down to cruise through the village. As we rose up the opposite flank of the valley the kids came into sight again with their sledges. Lynda and Ian stopped crying to watch them. We skirted the foot of their hill. It was an old slag heap; behind it stood the crumbled structure of a disused colliery.

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ I said. ‘Me leaving.’

‘There’s always a first time.’

I remember what Weaver had said the night he drove me home after signing on. ‘It’s amazing how these dead people keep popping up.’ Eric, whoever he was, whoever he had been, stood not between us, but behind her. ‘Don’t you see what you’re saying?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re making everything between us cheap—no value. When it could be just the opposite if you’d only let it.’

‘I’m not saying it hasn’t a value,’ she said, thinking clumsily, with difficulty. ‘Everything’s got a value. But you can always tell a cheap thing. You can always tell when a thing’s got cheap value.’

‘I never thought any of it was like that.’

We didn’t say anything for a while.

Then I told her, ‘You sound as if you want to shove me on to some other woman.’

She laughed.’ I don’t have to do that, do I? From what I hear you’re never short of girls—you and your Maurice.’

‘You think I go bedding other women?’

‘Think. I don’t think … You don’t believe I’m that simple?’

‘If you think you know that why do you stick with me still?’

‘You’ve never heard me complain.’

‘You don’t mind me knocking off other women?’

‘I might mind.’ Her eyes had dried. The mark of my hand still flushed her cheek, and had been joined by two dribbles from her eyes. ‘I’m not one to complain.’

‘Because you’ve got nothing to complain about. I’ve kept clean of other women.’

She gave her funny sort of laugh. Short, and breathless.

‘Your Maurice: he wouldn’t have the same view, I bet.’

‘“Your Maurice”—why is it always “your Maurice”, “your Johnson”, with you? My mother’s the same: “your Mrs Hammond. …”’

‘I can just hear her saying that. I can just imagine it. I bet your mother was like me when she was younger.’

‘I’m not arguing over that. You’re so blind wrong about everything that there’s not much point me saying anything.’

‘Well don’t—I don’t want to argue about it. Don’t say anything else.’

I lowered the window and let cold air stream into the car.

‘If I stopped the car,’ I asked her, ‘you took your fur coat off, and we all got out and walked back, would you feel any cleaner?’

‘No. I’d only feel stupid. How could that alter anything? It’s just like you: big, swash actions. I’ve told you, Arthur. In spite of what you say, it’s impressions that count more with you than anything else. Make a big impression, and you think everybody will swallow it.’

‘But you don’t like the idea. You don’t like the idea of walking back all those miles.’

‘’Course I don’t. The kids’d freeze to death, even if we didn’t.’

‘I could wrap them in a blanket. It’s getting warmer.’

‘And carry them? Being a martyr doesn’t alter anything. I’ve told you. That’s what I mean when I say you’ll go soon and leave me. You’ll find it’s the only way you can feel clean.’

‘I don’t feel dirty!’

‘You’re all right for another week, then. I don’t want to argue about it. The time’ll come soon enough for me.’

She calmed down a bit because she started pointing out things we passed to the kids, and we didn’t talk till we came over the ridge at Caulsby Castle and in sight of town.

‘You don’t seem to understand the reason I’ve done all these things for you,’ I told her, and suddenly felt like Weaver making a big-girl complaint.

‘’Course I do. You do it because it makes you feel good, it makes you feel big—you know how you like to feel big.’

‘And that’s the reason?’

‘I don’t know. … But you must think: look at me, keeping a widow and two brats thrown in. Aren’t I a hero? I must be good if I do that. They depend on me. And I don’t have to do it.’

‘That’s how I feel about you?’

‘I know how you feel. I’ve lived with a man before.’

‘You’ll be glad then when I buy you a TV.’

‘I won’t grumble. People expect us to live big.’ She saw my look and said, ‘I’ve got past being very glad about anything—and more than that—I’m past pitying myself because of it. But I will say this—you’ve helped me. You’ve probably helped me as much as the kids. If you hadn’t come along I reckon I’d have gone around in a shroud for more than a long time.’

‘ I thought you were beginning to feel happy.’

‘Happy! I could say something there, but I won’t.’

‘Go ahead. I don’t mind. I’d like to hear all of it.’

‘You’ll hear it soon enough. It’s like a disease you can’t do anything about. As it is, this’s brought it all closer.’

‘I’ll get the TV then … You’ll be able to sell it when I go.’

‘Yes,’ she said, seriously, as if there was a lot I didn’t know, and even more she couldn’t tell me.

Around March all this coincided with a slight change in her habits. She let herself go a bit. I came home one night from work and found her sitting at the tea table smoking. She laughed at my surprise, and held the cig out for me to have a drag. ‘That’s one thing I don’t like,’ I said, ‘women smoking.’

‘What’s the matter with women smoking?’ she said, puffing inexpertly and laughing as the smoke drained from her mouth.

‘It looks obscene.’

‘Oh, obscene. I see. We’re getting very classy … and you’re a right one to talk about that.’

‘Maybe I am.’

‘Anyway, big boy, I’m only smoking in private. I need the relaxation.’

A week later she was in the backs smoking, and I could see one or two people had noticed. The next day, a Saturday morning, I met her up town when I was with Maurice. She was pulling Lynda and Ian along, and was laden down with a basket and a canvas bag, a cigarette cocked in the corner of her mouth. ‘You look bloody awful,’ I told her. ‘If you feel a slut you shouldn’t show it.’

She stared a minute, and didn’t look at Maurice. Her look, deep under her eyebrows, seemed to say I’d betrayed her. She bent down and collected the brats, and shuffled off down the street.

‘So that’s your Mrs Hammond,’ Maurice said.

‘Is it the first time you’ve seen her?’

‘Yes,’ he said, nearly sighing, and nodding his head at me. ‘What d’you say that to her for, Art?’

‘I don’t like seeing her smoke.’

‘What’s the matter with you, kid? You’ve never been like that before. I can’t think of a bag you know who doesn’t.’

‘That’s what I mean. She’s the only one who doesn’t. I want her to keep that way.’

‘She’s not a dog you’ve trained or bought,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t say things like that to her. You talk as if you owned the woman.’

‘For the moment I do. And she doesn’t like it.’

His small, cheeky teeth came out in a smile. He thought I was being funny. We went into the Booth.

Beyond the confectionery counters the British Legion doorman saw us coming and got ready to hold open the smoke-room door. ‘Mr Middleton said he wanted to see you, Mr Braithewaite, Mr Machin,’ he said.

‘What’s up?’ Maurice said. ‘Does he want a new car?’

The doorman half smiled, and looked at me apologetically over Maurice’s head.

There were the usual celebrities inside—the Area Manager and the Area Accountant of the Coal Board, the pre- and post-war Conservative nominated candidates, the woodwork master from the grammar school, the Town Clerk. Each had his bunch of confederates and informers. Down the far end of the room were a few old forgotten football heroes, big and fat, a suspect amateur boxer, a selective bunch of fans, all would-be advisers. And the Mayor: Ralph Middleton.

Weaver’s group had taken over the tables near the huge coal fire, and he beckoned to Maurice as soon as we came in. Maurice went over; then I saw the Mayor moving to the only empty table and waving me to join him. He must have reserved it. ‘Did the doorman tell you?’ he said.

‘About you wanting to see Maurice and me?’

‘I see he did.’

A waiter came up and Middleton ordered a coffee. ‘Is he going to be long?’ he asked me.

‘I couldn’t say. He knows you want to see him.’

‘Well, I hope he weren’t keep us waiting. What I’ve got to say is of some importance. Even to somebody as important as Maurice Braithewaite.’ He was cold and angry, and he kept his eyes on me as if either he didn’t want to look across at Maurice or I had something that belonged to him.

I looked round at the oak-panelled walls and timbered ceiling and tried to avoid Middleton’s peculiar expression. The fire glowed, through the smoke-stained air, on the coats-of-arms and the pieces of armour decorating the room. The low tone of the conversation, the selectiveness of the people allowed in, the absence of women, made this my favourite meeting place of the week. Only this week it’d been spoilt by Mrs Hammond and now by Middleton, who suddenly changed his look to show he thought I was responsible for Maurice not coming.

‘Go an’ tell him I want him, Machin,’ he said eventually. ‘Tell him it’s now, not tomorrer.’

I went across and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr Weaver, but Middleton’s bursting his britches over Maurice not being there to talk to him. He wants us for something important. Right now, he says.’

‘Oh?’ Weaver looked round the room, ducking and bobbing his head, till he saw the Mayor, who at that moment was signing for his coffee on expenses. ‘What’s the trouble, Morry?’

‘I don’t know,’ Maurice said, and I immediately knew he did. ‘How long do you think I ought to keep him waiting?’

Before Weaver could tell him anything, I said, ‘It’s up to you, Maurice. I’m going to sit with him. I can’t get a seat anywhere else,’ and I went back.

‘Is he coming?’ Middleton said over the steam from his coffee.

‘He’ll be over in a minute. What’s it you want to see us about?’

‘You’ll know soon enough,’ he said, and his cup rattled in the saucer as he lifted it up.

Maurice came across like an innocent breeze, and brought his own coffee. He stirred it while Middleton examined our two faces side by side.

‘We’ve been told we’d make a good picture together,’ Maurice told him. He seemed offended by something. I was sure he knew what Middleton wanted.

Middleton answered with a resigned gesture, and said, ‘A’m not finding this funny, Braithewaite. Do you mind turning off your schoolboy antics while you’re with me.’

‘What is it you want?’ Maurice said. ‘Not to throw this afternoon’s game for a fiver?’

‘I want to know’, he said, looking quickly at us both, ‘which of you it is who’s responsible for Judith, my secretary, being pregnant.’

‘Christ,’ Maurice said, stopping a laugh, ‘is that all? I thought at first you’d won the pools.’

‘It’s not news to you,’ he said.

‘No—I should think everybody in the room knows. … As a matter of fact Weaver was just mentioning the secret when I came across.’

‘I didn’t know about it,’ I said, and tried to think of when I’d last seen Judith and what she’d looked like.

‘There’s innocence for you.’ Maurice shovelled his hand at me. ‘That lets us two kippers out.’

‘I don’t see how it does,’ Middleton said quietly. ‘From all her many friends I still think you two know who I want.’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Maurice said. ‘I reckon she’s likely to know best. Mother always knows, you know.’

‘At the moment I find that something I don’t want to do. I’d much prefer it if you told me.’

‘I don’t know her as well as you’re trying to make out,’ I told him. ‘And if it is true, I don’t think she’d want you to interfere.’

Middleton looked pained, and he flushed. ‘You mayn’t understand this, Machin. But the fact is I have a responsibility to that girl. I’m responsible in one way or another for a lot of the people she meets, a lot of the places she goes to. And if that word responsibility means nowt to you, then I’m sorry. I came here this morning with the intention of finding out. And you two are the most likely people.’

‘Oh, I understand your position,’ Maurice said. ‘I mean I can see you thinking people might say it’s you.’

Middleton didn’t answer for a moment Then he said, ‘It does you no good, that sort of talk. You might think I’m a bit of an ass talking like this, and asking you questions. But Judith’s a good girl. I don’t want to stick a knife into her—or into the man responsible. I only want to see the situation handled properly from the beginning. Do you see my meaning?’ He looked at us both intently.

‘I’ve known Judith since she was a baby,’ he went on. ‘I’ve known her parents for as long as I care to remember. They’re all people I respect. I think I’m in something of a position to help them now. … It’s not for nothing I’ve come to you two first. You both are, to put it simply, number one suspects. I don’t go around with my eyes shut, you know. A’ve seen,’ he added confidentially, ‘and A’ve asked.’ He propped his forefinger against the side of his nose.

I waited for Maurice to say something, perhaps a vague inquiry about what Middleton intended to do. But he only went on looking at the Mayor with a vacant, ready-smile of a stare.

‘How deep are you in this, Middleton?’ I said, weakly, wondering if Maurice didn’t mind who took the blame. ‘Is it a piece of Council politics, or what?’

‘If you’re reckoning I want to hush it up, then the answer’s “yes”. I don’t want these Primstone-Mecca Saturday maniacs going tearing round with it like a piece of dirt. But if you think I want to use it as a piece of scandal myself, directed against those football ’eroes who strut about town as if they owned it, then you’re wrong. It’s for everybody and everything concerned that I want to see it taken care of properly, and quietly. Does that show you where I stand, Machin?’

‘Yes. … All you need now is the bloke.’

‘Aye. That’s all I need.’ He looked at both of us.

Maurice opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. Then he said, ‘Honestly, Middleton, I don’t know where you get all this load from.’

Middleton stood up and fingered his Homburg. ‘There doesn’t seem much need for me to go on asking,’ he said. He was still flushed, his eyes anxious and strained. ‘I’ll say good morning. And good luck for this afternoon.’

He walked out slowly, tipping his hat unconsciously to the uniformed doorman.

Weaver, who’d been watching what was going on over his neighbour’s shoulder, got up and came across with all the reluctance and impatience that was supposed to characterize our present relationship.

‘What is it, Morry?’ he said. ‘You don’t want to get yourself worked up—or Arthur—before a match. You should leave these arguments for Saturday night, or Sunday.’

He knew what Middleton had been about, and must have thought he’d only to talk a lot to rid us all of worry. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to take that man so seriously. He can talk the hind leg off a donkey. If every signalman on the railways is like Middleton it’s no bloody wonder the trains are always late. …’

‘He seems to think’, I said, ‘that either Maurice or me is a daddy.’

He stared at me sullenly, his blue eyes narrowed. ‘This Judith story that’s going about? … But I don’t think that’s so serious—for Middleton to cause a commotion about.’ He put his arm round Maurice’s shoulder, but Maurice, looking both dejected and angry, shook it off. ‘Temper, temper,’ Weaver said, hurt by this bit of public defiance. He glanced round to see how many were noticing the episode. ‘There’s no need to act like this, Morry. Christ’s sake, pull yourself together.’

‘It’s that frog Middleton,’ Maurice said. ‘Shoving his bloody big nose in. I ought to have flattened him.’

Weaver glanced at me to pull Maurice out of his petty mood.

‘You want to be careful how you treat Middleton,’ he advised him. ‘You know what happened to him three years ago?’

‘What’s that?’ Maurice said, looking up and hoping for something particularly damning.

‘He separated from his wife. A couple of months later she died.’

Maurice waited, then said, ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘Well, you can imagine what people said. No doubt he’s been on the lookout ever since for some opportunity to exonerate himself—to show he’s not as cold a man as he’s made out. I must say I was surprised the way he behaved at my party.’

‘Aye, and that’s what he may’n be surprised at too,’ Maurice said. ‘It wasn’t only that M.P. that was round her that night. There was him himself.’

‘Aw now, Maurice …’ Weaver began in a whisper, because Maurice’s voice was beginning to carry. ‘Now look …’ But when he saw Maurice’s face, its tight and bitter look, he stopped. For a moment he looked at me helplessly, then a sudden light came into his eyes. He said, ‘The only thing to do, Maurice, is for me to see Middleton. And Judith herself.’

He might even have been jealous of Middleton organizing a crusade, but now that he saw the chance of getting one of his own together all his loose feelings left him. He even looked at me as though a hard word had never crossed between us. It was a wide open opportunity for him to be kind, to be generous, and he put his arm round Maurice’s shoulder more firmly this time. ‘You just leave this to me, Morry,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of it. He seemed to be in no doubt that Maurice was responsible.

I fixed up with a dealer in the Booth for the TV to be delivered Monday at cost price. I paid him ten per cent deposit. He seemed glad to do me the service. I signed his kiddy’s autograph book. Then we went to the Northern Hotel Grill for a steak lunch.

Maurice had a good game that afternoon. One of his best. I had one worse than bad, and I was met in the changing room by a smiling Weaver. He stood in the clouds of steam, between two piles of mud and jerseys, and said, ‘I don’t know what you’ve got to be worried about, Arthur.’ He’d gone back to the easy attitude of our first meeting. He was all smiles. ‘Stop worrying. You played terribly today. Thank goodness I for one know the reason why.’ He gave me a confidential wink and went over to talk to Maurice.

Judith was at the Mecca that night. She looked a bit strained under the eyes, but she was putting on a show, and no one would have noticed if they hadn’t all known she was pregnant. A particular eye was kept on those who danced with her—always a bit apart so’s not to touch bellies—and the barman was even careful not to chat too long. She was towing quite a bomb around with her. It took me an hour to get her alone. We shuffled in a tight circle in the middle of the floor. I found myself careful not to press too close.

‘You look worried tonight, Tarzan,’ she said, perhaps hoping I’d softened. ‘I hear you didn’t have a good game this afternoon.’

‘No.’

‘Maurice played well.’

‘It’s more difficult for him not to. But I’m not worried over that.’

‘What is it, Tarzan? Still looking for your ideal lady?’

I thought she nearly said landlady. I told her, ‘I saw Weaver up at the ground after the match. I’ve never seen him looking so happy.’

‘What of it?’

‘When I see him happy these days it makes me feel uneasy. … I wondered what he’d been saying to you this afternoon.’

‘Who?’ She was astonished. We stopped dancing. ‘I haven’t seen him since Christmas. You know, the party, Tarzan. You and Mag.’

‘Do you often tell lies, Judith?’

‘Now what?’ She tried to look impatient, and we started moving round the floor once more.

‘Everybody here knows you’re pregnant by Maurice. What’re you trying to act about? Tell me. What did Weaver say this afternoon?’

She slipped from my loose hold, made for the door, and disappeared into the powder-room. Quite a few people stopped to watch her go, then looked back at me. I followed her slowly and waited outside the men’s cloakroom, opposite the exit.

Maurice slipped through the crowd on the floor. His bright pink, half-loaded face was angry. ‘What’ve you started?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you? Weaver said it was all settled. Now leave her alone.’

‘I want to know how it’s settled. Don’t you?’

‘No. If he’s arranged things to lie, then let them lie. He knows how to handle these people. You’re stupid, Art. You might unfasten all he’s done. Christ, you don’t want to lake about with her when she’s in that condition.’

‘I don’t like things going on behind my back. You’ve less to lose than me. I don’t want any labels on me, joke or no joke. If Mrs Hammond heard …’

He waited for me to go on with this domestic incident. He watched me in bleary half-astonishment.

‘If you’d only pull Judith out with you,’ I told him. ‘And stop all this talking. You’ve made a mistake … why can’t you come out with it? You stink, Maurice.’

He waited again, to see if there was any more. Then he said, ‘I’d kill you for that, Art, if I hadn’t reckoned on you as my mate!’ His face was shining and bloated with alcoholic rage. He caught hold of the lapels of my jacket in his hard little fists and tried to pull me towards him.

I gripped his wrists. ‘And I’d have done the same for you, Maurice,’ I told him. He listened intently as I said it, as if he heard a lot of other voices at the same time. Judith came out of the powder-room with a friend.

We both watched her pass. I thought for a moment Maurice was going after her. He swayed on his toes. Then he rocked back on his heels and flung his fists down from my coat. I lurched back against the wall. ‘I’m going to talk to her,’ I said. ‘Are you coming?’

He stepped aside to see if I would. He didn’t follow me. When I got outside I looked back. He’d disappeared from the entrance.

I caught Judith in Market Street, off City Centre. It was raining hard. ‘I’ll take you home in the car,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got it parked at the Mecca.’

‘She doesn’t want to talk to you,’ said her friend, a clerk from the Education Offices.

‘Shove off,’ I told her. ‘This’s private.’

‘No. She’s staying,’ Judith said.

‘I said go away, little girl. If you want to see what happens go and stand at the corner.’

‘She’s staying, Tarzan. I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘If I can’t talk to you,’ I told her, ‘I might as well go up to your house.’

Her friend brightened up with privileged interest. The bus came and Judith hadn’t moved.

‘Are we getting on, Judy?’ her friend said, rain streaming down her face.

‘You’re a cad, saying that,’ Judith told me.

‘Are you coming back to the Mecca, then we can get in the car and talk.’

‘No. I’m not going anywhere with you.’

‘We can’t argue in the street. I’m getting wet. Make your mind up quick. It’s either you or your mother.’

I started back across the Bull Ring. After a few minutes I heard her running after me. She’d left her friend at the bus stop. ‘Tarzan! Don’t run off like that. …’

I stepped into a shop doorway and she came in with me. ‘I wanted to know what Weaver said to you,’ I said.

‘Why should it concern you? It doesn’t, you know.’ Her face was hard, unlike her, and flecked with rain. She was panting after her little run.

‘Middleton doesn’t seem to think so. He came to see me as well as Maurice today. You know he’s having a quiet crusade about it?’

‘Yes. I know. But I can’t see him getting anywhere.’

‘What did Weaver say?’

She rubbed her finger against the steamed-up window of the shop; I could just see the vague pyramid outline of piled up tins and packets. ‘He said he’d talk to Maurice.’ A filter of mist came out with her words. ‘He said he’d talk to Maurice for me. Are you satisfied, nosey?’

‘And is that all he said?’

‘What concern is it of yours, Tarzan? I don’t see how anybody should want to drag you in.’ She looked back at the empty street, glistening with rain, and her friend waiting at the corner.

‘I just don’t want people to think it might have been me. At the moment, what with Maurice not coming clean, and all this stupid talking and running about, anything might happen. I don’t find this a joke like most people, you know.’

‘You’re exaggerating,’ she said, surprised at my concern and moodiness.

‘Well, did Weaver make any arrangement with you … or anything like that?’

‘You seem to have a grudge against Weaver, as though he’s doing something subversive, behind your back all the time. I honestly don’t think you’re as important as that, Arthur. And Weaver isn’t like that. He couldn’t be malicious if he tried. … And if you must know everything he said, then, he offered me money if he couldn’t talk Maurice round. That’s all he’s doing. And he’s not buying me off, if that’s what you’re thinking. You know Maurice on his own’ll let things drag. He won’t bother to work out what’s best for himself, or anybody else. He wants a good time. … If we have to get married then I’d rather he did it off his own bat, not because he was dragged into it or because he just dropped into it. Weaver can help him there. If he fails to impress Maurice then he said the baby would never be a financial burden to me—or anybody. God above, I can’t think of a finer thing a man could do. … And look how you’re behaving!’

‘You’ve got your things you’re frightened of losing, Judith. And I’ve got mine.’

‘You’ve no need to be bothered, Tarzan. I can tell you that. So let’s all stop this chasing about.’

‘And so you said you’d keep quiet about everything till Weaver’s had a chance to talk to Maurice?’

She nodded. We both watched a lighted bus fill the street, leaving two furrows on the wet tarmac. Someone walked past the shop doorway. Judith’s friend came and stood in a doorway opposite, and peered across at us.

‘Let’s hope he gets round to it quick,’ I said, and stepped out into the rain.

‘Knowing Maurice, Tarzan, what exactly would you do in my place?’

There was real appeal in her voice. She pushed past me and ran across the road. She was crying. The two girls met, said a few words, and Judith set off by herself to the Bull Ring. Her friend stepped under a dark shop canopy and watched her go. I pulled up my jacket collar and walked back to the car.

I got home from work on Monday to find the TV already in place. The three of them were watching a children’s programme in the front room.

‘You were quick in getting it,’ Mrs Hammond said, standing up smartly. ‘I didn’t know you’d even ordered one.’

‘I said I’d get you one.’

‘You’re a man of your word,’ she said deliberately. ‘… I thought we’d have it in the front room. If it was in the kitchen I’d never stop looking at it. Thank you very much, Arthur.’ She kissed me lightly on the cheek and called to the kids, ‘Say thank you to Arthur for it.’

‘Thank you, Arthur,’ Lynda said with a small questioning look at her mother, and turned back to the set.

‘Tank Artar,’ Ian said. He was beginning to get bored already and rolled about on the floor.

‘That’s my bloody hero.’ I picked him up, and for the first time forgot he was Eric’s son. I rubbed my nose on his and he laughed. When I put him down he fell on his head, rolled over, and burbled.

‘Be careful with him,’ Mrs Hammond said.

‘He’s all right. We want him to grow into a good forward, don’t we?’

She gazed at me critically. Then she nodded and said, ‘Yes, if you like.’

I went into the kitchen, she came after me and made my tea.

‘We’re doing quite well,’ I said. ‘You’ll be able to open a shop when I go.’

‘If you’ve only bought it to boast about you might as well take it back.’ She was smiling, and in a good mood.

‘I’ve a good mind to take you upstairs afore I go training,’ I said.

‘Oh have you. … And what makes you so sure I might go?’ She laid some plates down and began to margarine the bread.

‘I was thinking of the way you kissed me.’

‘It shows it can mean something, then. I was trying to show you I was grateful.’

‘And can you show me again?’

She put down the knife and smiled cheekily. ‘I don’t know whether it’s worth two of what I gave you.’

‘But I say it is. And I should know. I bought it.’

I got up and went round the table. She waited for me coming, her head bowed, her eyes on the plate with the knife. I bent down and put my arms round her, my hands over her small breasts. ‘Oh, now Arthur,’ she whispered.

‘Can’t I kiss you just once?’

I put my cheek alongside hers, and felt her jaw move as she spoke. ‘I don’t suppose I could stop you if you tried hard.’

‘But won’t you give me one without fighting?’

‘I don’t think I should … what if Lynda came in?’

‘I bet she’d think I was making up to you.’

I stroked her breast through her dress. She took my hand away and turned her head, her mouth open to say something. I pressed my lips against her mouth, and caught it open, and smoothed my tongue inside. I wanted to tell her how I felt. I ran my hands round her belly and waist and back. Then held her head, like a ball, pressed to mine.

‘Aren’t you going to say it?’ I said, when I pulled back.

She looked weakened and lost, like a kid. ‘Say what?’ She only whispered when she tried to speak.

‘Say you’ve got some feeling for me … that you can feel something.’

‘Arthur … I can’t. Not yet’ She was hot and miserable. She pulled back, and turned to the table again. ‘I can’t let myself go like that. I’m not sure of you.’

‘But you know me.’ I tried to touch her, but she stiffened, and my hands fell off her. ‘You know how I’ve been to you.’

‘I can’t let my feelings go. Not again. Not to have them cut off like Eric … and everything gone, in one person, and dead. I want to be sure. You’ve to give me some time.’

‘But we’ve had all this time. Surely …’

‘I don’t know you mightn’t rush away—I don’t know what I feel.’

‘But Christ, be reasonable. I’d have gone now if I was going to. All that encouragement you’ve given me.’

‘I don’t know. You might just want to hear me say it—and see me feel something. Then you might feel that’s all you wanted, and go away. How do I know?’

She looked pale and worn. Her good mood had gone quickly, like all her moods, and she was unsure again. Just when for once I’d got close to her, almost too close for her to let go. She picked up the knife, and that hardness came into her face. She’d almost given in, and she regretted it.

‘You’re always fighting against me,’ I said. ‘And you know I can’t be that bad. When’re you going to give us a bit of peace?’

She didn’t answer. She went on stroking the fat on to the bread: the grease and the crumbly dough were dirt.

‘There mightn’t be any of us left by the time you’ve made up your mind,’ I said.

‘Don’t I go upstairs with you?’

‘But that’s not the same. I don’t feel you mean it. You make me feel I’m buying it off you. I’m just buying. And I’m not.’

‘Well, that’s me. That’s how I am. There’s nothing else left for me to do.’ She was the angry little woman again. She banged the knife handle on the table. ‘I wish you wouldn’t work me up like this. I’ve nothing to give you, Arthur.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

She stood up and rearranged the table absent-mindedly. ‘There you start again,’ she said. ‘Telling me how I should feel. What I should be like. If you’d only let me alone a bit. But you won’t. You’re so big. You’re so stupid. Arthur. You don’t give me a chance.’

I sat with them a while and watched the set. When I went out early to training I already felt it had been the last chance, and I’d never see her happy. I couldn’t understand what she wanted from me. She’d never been so close before to saying what she felt, and I thought it was only too plain how I felt, how I wanted to help her out. What else did she want? It’d been her last chance. And it’d been mine. I felt like a big ape given something precious to hold, but only squashing it in my big, clumsy, useless hands. I couldn’t even apologize.

I dropped off the bus, and decided I wouldn’t go to training. I got off half-way up the hill to Primstone, just when the lights were pricking the valley, making it bleed with its slow night glow. Quite a few people recognized me. They nudged and pointed. They were always doing that. I didn’t like Middleton talking about footballers strutting about town as if they owned it. It was the way they were treated that made them like that. The way people looked at me, spoke to me, handled my affairs generally whenever I wanted to buy a suit, a stick of chewing-gum, a gallon of petrol. They made me feel I owned the place. Course I strutted about. They expected it. I couldn’t help it. I walked in front of these people now, and I felt a hero. They wanted me to be a hero—and I wanted to be a hero. Why didn’t she see that? It wasn’t me who was always telling her how she should be, how I wanted her to look, it was she who was always on at me. Not so much by words. But in her real woman’s way. Keeping her feelings in. Keeping her stinking feelings back so that I felt it was me who was to blame and nobody else. I was always reproaching myself for her, always feeling in the wrong. Never her. She was the bloody martyr with two kids, let loose in the world with nobody to protect them.

So I come along. And she starts to play me about. Was that how it’d been? All along I’d thought of myself as the gallant frog, going out Saturday afternoons to be knocked about, thumped, cut, and treated generally like a piece of mobile refuse, just so I could have that extra load of cash, and help her out. I even used to think of her when I was playing, as if I was playing for her, as if it was all worth it if only to make her happy—with a car, a fur coat, and now a TV.

But I was wrong. She wasn’t like that. I knew she wasn’t like that because I knew that wasn’t the reason I played football, that wasn’t the reason I fought for ninety minutes every Saturday as if the world was coming to an end. I knew it wasn’t that—because even as I’d been thinking I’d gone on walking up the hill towards the stadium turrets, taking notice of how people noticed me, hooted car horns, and said, ‘Good night, Art’, even when I’d never seen them before. I was a hero. And I was crazy because she seemed the only person in the world who wouldn’t admit it.

She knew that. She really did know that. Perhaps she even thought it was the one thing that held me to her. Because, whatever she said, she needed me. She couldn’t manage without me. And she wouldn’t admit it. She had her pride. Greater perhaps, because of Eric, than anybody else’s pride. She wasn’t going to show her need. She had the one hold over me because she knew; needed her to make me feel whole and wanted. I could see her fear now. If she gave me her love, just for a minute, an hour, I might never look at her again.

I couldn’t make her feel that wasn’t true. I was the big ape again, known and feared for its strength, frightened of showing a bit of soft feeling in case it might be weakness. I might like all these nods and waves and nervous twitches that my passage along the road created, but they were always some distance away. People wouldn’t act like that if they were close. I wanted a bit more than a wave. I wanted to have something there for good: I wasn’t going to be a footballer for ever. But I was an ape. Big, awe-inspiring, something interesting to see perform. No feelings. It’d always helped to have no feelings. So I had no feelings. I was paid not to have feelings. It paid me to have none. People looked at me as if I was an ape. Walking up the road like this they looked at me exactly as they’d look at an ape walking about without a cage. They liked to see me walking about like this, as if the fact I tried to act and behave like them added just the right touch the next time they saw me perform. ‘I saw Arthur Machin last week,’ they’d say, ‘walking along West Street.’ It was just what they needed when they next saw me run on to the field, just the thing to make them stare in awe, and wonder if after all I might be like them. I might be human.

I felt I’d done a night’s training already by the time I reached Primstone. The floodlights had been turned on and the stadium bowl was filled with a blue-green glare. A few players ran round the perimeter of the pitch, talking and laughing in the night, filling the empty stands and terraces with their single voices. The people who’d come to watch training were gathered round the tunnel so they could see their particular favourites run out, and maybe catch a word or two of what they were saying, and get a nod or wave in answer to their shouts.

It was cold. I put two jerseys under my track suit and did a couple of laps before Dai came out and started us on exercises in the middle of the pitch. The place was big and bare. We looked like midgets. We bent and strained, twisted and rolled, shadow-boxed in two rows, sprinted up and down the pitch again and again, slowing and spurting according to Dai’s whistle. We practised the set moves three times each, then played the ‘A’ team at touch-and-pass. All this time Maurice hadn’t spoken to me. And nobody had mentioned Judith.

In fact nobody would have mentioned any of it hadn’t Mellor, when we were all stuffed together in the bath, started off a joke about a pregnant woman. We sat leg to leg, pressed up tight to each other, fighting for a bit of space to duck a head and rinse some hair. The water was its usual grey, with bits of grass floating on the top, but the froth of rinsed soap was slowly hiding the colour underneath. It was the usual smell of body and carbolic, dampened down with steam, broken up by joking bodies. ‘Lady,’ Mellor finished, ‘if I’d known you were in that condition I wouldn’t have asked you.’

The bath overflowed with laughter. Mellor’s usually stiff face broke up into creases. One or two, who’d waited for the end of the joke, got out of the bath, and Dai, who’d stood by the bath side quietly listening with a ready toothy smile, picked up a towel and started rubbing them down.

Tommy Clinton, who spent most of his life worrying hard how to enjoy it, came to the bath side and said, over everybody’s head, ‘Have you heard about Arthur, then?’

They looked at him and me, and decided they hadn’t.

‘What’s that, Tommy lad?’

Clinton laughed in preparation. ‘He’s barn a be a daddy. … Aren’t I right, Art? And the Mayor’s gunna be godfather.’

I pulled a few funny faces, thought about pasting Tommy, and said, ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’ I looked round for Maurice. He was sitting quietly at the end of the bath, smoking, looking at Clinton through his smoke as if he wasn’t sure he’d kill him then or later on outside.

‘Nay, Arthur, What about that time last Christmas? Me and the girl friend. …’ He turned round with a big gesture to everybody, his naked body flushed and trembling with so much laughing. ‘… We was working out, it mu’n’ve been last Christmas at Weaver’s little home from home. Old Art here and Judith were knocking it off in that front bedroom so hard the bloody tiles fell off the roof.’

When the laughing had dropped down again I said, ‘You’re getting the names mixed up aren’t you, Tommy? That was Lionel Manners’ sample you’re talking about.’

He stopped laughing to think a minute. ‘You know, Art, you might be right there. It’s surprising how you get things mixed up. Now you mention it I’ve got a faint reckoning of something like that. Perhaps we can let you off’n it this time. There’s alus Maurice to consider.’

‘Shut your bloody hole, Clinton,’ Maurice said from the far end. So seriously that Clinton almost did.

‘Christ. I was only having a joke, Maurice. As far as I’m concerned it’s anybody’s baby but mine. …’ Clinton risked another joke. ‘Even then, if you don’t wan’ it, Morry,’ he said, ‘I might tek it o’er.’

Maurice threw his cig across the room, jumped up, and with bodies leaping out of his way in surprise he trampled through the bath. There was a huge swell and cascade of water, out of which Maurice lunged over the side at Clinton.

The reserve had been too surprised himself to move. He thought maybe him and Maurice were going to do a joke together. Maurice caught him with a swinging fist. But they were both wet and badly placed, and Maurice, though he hit him again, didn’t hurt him. Dai and some others separated them. They found Clinton had broken the edge of a tooth when he slipped against the concrete bath side.

‘Nay, Maurice lad,’ Frank said, pushing his great belly against him and fastening him to the wall. ‘Just be fair. Clinton’s got a big hole. All right. But lay off.’

Maurice told Frank something nobody could hear. He shrugged his huge shoulders, and turned his body away from Maurice. ‘Leave the lad alone, Maurice,’ he said. ‘He won’t say owt else about it.’

I got out and dried myself, and put my teeth in.

When Mrs Hammond got the news, as I knew she would, she got hold of the bad end of it, and bit hard. People were always telling her stories about me, on an average one a day. She knew more about me than I did myself, because some days she’d be told how I’d been seen in three different places—all ‘bad’ places—at the same time the night before. Though she couldn’t believe any of them she just took a general impression of what I was like outside. I couldn’t blame her doing this, and I couldn’t do anything about the impression being a bad one. I was supposed to be ‘a bit of a lad’ and ‘quite a rake on the quiet side’: nothing I said or did could alter this. People wanted me that way, and they got it. I suppose my father was treated the same way as Mrs Hammond.

When I got home on Thursday night to change before training, she said, ‘I heard about Judith Parkes today.’

‘I didn’t know you knew her,’ I said.

‘I didn’t. But I do now. She works at the Town Hall. Quite a lady, I was told. A very good reputation, and all that.’

‘You’ve heard about the kid she’s having? Taken some time to get this end of town, hasn’t it?’

‘You don’t sound bothered.’

‘Should I be? Where did you hear it?’

‘I heard it in a shop actually—they all seemed surprised you should be the father.’

‘So you’ve heard that one. You’re a bit behind the times. I’ve been dropped now. Maurice is daddy number two. Who told you about it anyway? I suppose by rights I should go knock their faces in.’

‘Does it honestly matter how I heard it?’

‘I suppose you believe everything people tell you about me. Like that time you were told I’d raped a little girl. Remember? The woman said she had certain proof.’

‘When everybody gets the same idea as this one, though—they can’t all be wrong. … They said you were seen arguing with her at the Mecca last Saturday night. That you made quite a scene, and they all watched her walking off the floor with you running after her.’

‘And you really believe all this pub talk?’

‘As I said, when everybody gets the same idea it’s not always wrong.’

‘No. And it’s usually not all right. I thought you’d got past listening to what people told you about me.’

‘I’m not saying I do believe it,’ she said primly. ‘But it’s funny that your name should have been connected. There’s no smoke without fire.’

‘You make me bloody sick,’ I told her. I put on my coat and went out. She shouted something after me, but I didn’t want to hear.

This time I didn’t go training. I went up to Primstone, collected my pay, and tried to avoid seeing Maurice. I caught sight of him coming into the ground, and I waited in the tunnel till he’d gone by. I was blaming him—and no doubt he was blaming me and Saturday night far more. As I walked away, taking some trouble to avoid bumping into players going up to the ground, I wondered if I oughtn’t to go and see Weaver. What I should see him about I didn’t know. I felt all along I’d misjudged him, looked down on him because he wasn’t a strong pig like me, just one of those who watched me perform. Yet he was one of the few people who’d treated me as a person—as an oddity, perhaps, but still, an oddity with feelings. I caught a bus through town to Sandwood, and walked up the lane to his house.

Mrs Weaver answered the door. She was completely surprised, almost stunned. I could tell from her look that she was in by herself. ‘Hello, Machin. What do you want at this time of day?’

I asked her if Weaver was at home, and she shook her head. ‘No, he’s out,’ she said, and in such a way I felt cheap. She seemed to think I knew he was out and had come up purposely. ‘What did you want him for? Anything important?’

‘No. It doesn’t matter.’

I started thinking we could start where we’d left off, that Wednesday a few months ago. The same idea might have been in her mind. It was dark and misty in the garden, and me standing there—it must have seemed I was offering an open invitation. If her face was anything to go by, she found the idea too sudden to be repulsive.

When she said, ‘Do you want to come?’ in an unsure voice, I felt she would, after all, be some consolation. Like Weaver himself, she was free to give something without getting or expecting anything back. Maybe, like Weaver, she was getting tired of that role. The last time she’d treated me like an ape. Grabbing hold of an ape was, for some people, better than just watching it perform. She’d been crude, thinking I was crude, and I’d frightened away. This time she looked at me in surprise. She was tired. I must have looked sick, for she was staring at me as if I might be a person.

‘If I come in I mightn’t behave,’ I said.

‘That’s all right,’ she told me. ‘I think I can take care of myself.’

I followed her inside and she shut the door. We went into the lounge. Its curtains were drawn, and only a reading-lamp was lit. One or two patches on the leaved wallpaper were all that was left of the Christmas Eve party. I sat down in the chair she showed me to, and she sat opposite, beneath the lamp. She had a wool dress on that made her look stouter than before. Her head had the usual mass of tight curls.

‘Shouldn’t you be training tonight?’ she said. ‘Thursday … that’s one of your nights, I believe.’

‘I’ve skipped it tonight.’

‘Why? Aren’t you well?’

‘I didn’t feel like it. I felt like a walk or a talk.’

‘And that’s what you came to see Mr Weaver about?’

‘I suppose so. I don’t know what I came to see him about. I just came to see him.’

‘Are you in any sort of trouble … with the police, or anything?’

‘No, it’s nothing like that.’

‘Well,’ she said, getting up, and closing the book she must have been reading. ‘Let’s see if it’s anything a drink won’t cure.’ She went to the cabinet by the gramophone, and filled up a small glass. She carried it across and stood close while I took it from her hand. She went back to her seat and watched me take a first sip.

‘I presume you like whisky,’ she said. ‘It’s all we have in, I’m afraid. Very bad housekeeping.’

I coughed over it, I wondered whether to take my overcoat off, but I’d got my overalls on underneath. She’d already guessed, or seen, and she didn’t mention it.

‘What’s the cause of your sudden lack of enthusiasm for football?’ she asked, looking at me as at a patient. ‘You’ve not been taking any more tiles off, I hope.’

‘It’s probably trouble at home,’ I said clumsily, but with enough obvious intention that she found my stare a bit too much and looked away. Her fingers found a strand of wool to pull from the arm of the chair. Then she folded her arms under her breasts and looked back.

‘With Mrs Hammond,’ she suggested.

‘Yeh.’

‘I’ve often wondered about you—and her,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind me talking about it, Arthur. Mr Weaver used to be very concerned about it. You might remember the night you were signed on at Primstone he took you home. He said then how surprised he’d been to learn you were living there, with a widow and two children. He couldn’t understand it. I doubt if he does even now. He appeared to think you were asking for trouble. … Do you mind me talking like this? You’ve only to say. …’

‘No, I don’t mind. I’d like to know what other people think.’

‘Well, it certainly isn’t every young man’s cup of tea. I suppose when you first went there you didn’t have much choice. But I’d have thought later on, when you were more secure, you would have moved to a more congenial domestic atmosphere. From what Mr Weaver said, Mrs Hammond’s marriage wasn’t a very happy one. Her husband was a very sombre, moody man. There was some talk when he was killed that it wasn’t all an accident.’

I finished the whisky. I’d never thought why I’d stayed in Fairfax Street. The news about Hammond relieved me. I seemed to see Mrs Hammond there in the room. Not so much see as feel. ‘Why have you stayed there?’ Mrs Weaver asked.

‘I was just trying to think why. I’ve always felt at home there, if you like. Maybe it was just a habit. I think I felt I had to give a hand … I know I first went there because it was cheap, and I thought I was on to a good thing. Then when I’d been there a bit I saw what a load of trouble they were in, and I felt it was only right I should give them a hand. After that … it went from one thing to another. The two kids aren’t anything I’d look at by choice. At first I thought they were ugly little … kids. I remember, they seemed to be crying and screaming all day. I suppose she was too upset at that time to care. I don’t know. But once I’d started helping they all started looking to me for it. Mrs Hammond always tried to refuse … you know how a woman’s like that. But she needed what I gave her, and the kids weren’t so choosy. I reckon I more or less took over from their dad. That’s what it looks like now. But I’ve always thought—you know, that I was independent.’

‘And now you’ve found you’re not,’ she said.

‘Maybe. It’s just that she won’t admit anything. She thinks I’m doing all this for her because it makes me feel good. She doesn’t think I care about anything. Except playing football, having crowds after me, and that sort of stuff. She taunts me with it. She tries to make fun of me having no feelings. She drives me off my nut at times, till I’ve got to hit or something. Like tonight. She thinks I only want to see her give in, to become really … relying on me, then I’ll go away and find some other mug. That’s what she thinks. And to make it seem it really is like me to be like that she comes out with all these stories people tell her about me. You know the sort of muck. She doesn’t believe them. She just thinks it’s something she can hold over me. It’s the carrot I’m chasing, trying to show her I mean what I say, and every time she says she can’t believe it, that I’ve lost. … I know this is all talk. I hope you don’t mind listening. It’s either this …’

‘No, no, Arthur. I don’t mind one bit. I feel quite overwhelmed. I’m glad you’ve told me. I honestly never thought you felt so much about things.’

‘I suppose that’s my fault. I’m a natural professional. What I don’t get paid to do I don’t bother with. If I was paid enough to feel then I’d probably make a big splash that way.’

‘Well, that sounds more like the old you. That’s the sort of brash thing you usually say. It’s the sort of thing which makes people think of you as … big. But your feelings about Mrs Hammond. They’re a different matter. If you’d only get down a while from that great big height you see yourself on. For one thing I’m sure I can understand some of the reasons why Mrs Hammond is frightened of you. You’ve probably convinced her more than you have yourself what a Big Man you are. To you it may all be show. But to her, I should think seeing the money you earn, the things you buy, your photograph in the City Guardian every other week—all those things must have convinced her that you are big. And she must have asked herself what it is you see in her, and how on earth, once she’s admitted some feeling for you, as a person, she’s going to keep you. Things like that mightn’t occur to you as a man. But I can assure you they do to a woman. She’s in a particularly vulnerable position—a widow with two children. You, a young man with the opportunity to go off with almost any girl in town. She must be terrified of showing any feeling for you. Particularly if she knows she has some, if she’s committed herself.’

Having both shot our loads we lay back in our chairs. It was very quiet in the dark room. The ship’s-wheel clock ticked. But there were no sounds from outside. ‘I used to admire you very much,’ she said. ‘As you know. And in spite of what’s happened I think I must still do. I wouldn’t have felt this concern if I hadn’t. So don’t imagine I’m just getting one back at you, Arthur. … Taking ordinary people like yourself, and putting them into a sudden limelight can have extraordinary results. You must be aware of that now. Do you think it would help any if I saw Mrs Hammond myself? Perhaps I could smooth things out.’

‘I’d thought of that while you were talking. But she’d probably be suspicious. She wouldn’t like it, I know. But thanks for the offer.’

‘I see. …’ she said, reading something else into it. ‘Then you’d better face it yourself. But a little more gently than you seem to be doing. You both have my sympathy. Mr Weaver and I—we seem to be always patching up people’s troubles, including our own. Mr Weaver is up at Judith Parkes’s house tonight, I believe. Trying to solve their difficulties, and Maurice’s. I hope things work out. Phone me up and let me know how you’ve gone on.’

She came to the front door to see me out. She gave me her advice again, and offered to drive me into town when she saw I hadn’t the car. I said I’d walk or catch a bus. She stood in the lighted doorway till I was out of sight down the drive. I heard the door shut in the stillness of the big garden. I realized I hadn’t thanked her.

Mrs Hammond had already gone into a gradual decline, looking to me to force the break. She was puzzled why I didn’t do this, and particularly why I showed no interest in marrying Judith. ‘It’s your chance to become respectable,’ she told me in the slow voice she’d suddenly adopted.

When I got back from Mrs Weaver’s she only stayed up to say this, then went to bed, locking herself in with the kids in the front bedroom. I didn’t go to work Friday. I tried to talk to her without getting angry, but it was no go. The more I talked and the more begging I became, the more convinced she was that I’d something to hide. She wouldn’t listen. In spite of all she’d heard and all she’d said, she had felt all along that I’d been faithful to her. Now she staggered about the house from one room to another, from one job to another, as if she’d been hit with a hammer. It was a physical affliction: her legs wouldn’t straighten as she walked, her head wouldn’t lift. She didn’t even talk to the kids.

When I told her, after phoning up Mrs Weaver, that Maurice had decided to marry Judith, she was even more shocked. The first thing she asked was, ‘Is he doing it for you?’

‘No. It’s his kid she’s having,’ I told her for the fifth time.

She seemed hurt it had cleared up this way: she’d used Judith as the last crutch to prop up her own thick pride. She even said, ‘You’ve been let out of this too easy,’ as if she still felt I was to blame for Maurice and Judith’s behaviour. It was as though she’d been waiting for this Judith affair to come for a long time, and when it had she’d been thankful, in spite of the pain. A part of her wanted it. It meant she could reach a decision. She’d even built up in her own mind the strength to meet the break. And now that it had come, and the cause suddenly taken away, by Maurice, she was left dangling—the ground had disappeared and she couldn’t keep her balance. I hadn’t been bad after all, and she wasn’t in a position to believe it. And I could have killed her for not seeing all the stinking protection I gave her. She seemed determined to carry on as though I was still to blame.

She was watching TV on her own that particular night. The kids had gone to bed, though I could still hear Lynda crying about something upstairs.

She didn’t look up when I came in.

‘You haven’t sold it yet?’ I said.

‘Not just yet,’ she said tonelessly, in a way that could either have meant interest in the screen or just lifelessness.

‘I keep coming home expecting to see the brokers carrying thy fur coat and the TV out of the door.’

‘I’ll let you know when it’s likely to happen.’

‘According to you I won’t be here. … They wouldn’t keep you long. What would you do then? I was wondering only recently why you never pressed for damages from Weaver’s when Eric died.’

I waited for her to look up from the play she was watching, but she sat hunched up without moving. ‘Even some sort of compensation,’ I added. ‘Or did you keep that on one side?’

She turned round, already vicious. ‘I know you’re half drunk, Mr Superman, drowning your sorrows. But just how low can you grovel? Can’t you get any smaller than that?’

‘If you push me to. You generally do.’

‘What have I done to get all this!’ she cried out, her eyes turning up to the ceiling where Lynda was already moaning. She picked up a cigarette tray no one had ever used and lugged it at the set. It missed the screen and fractured the woodwork. The faces went on performing unconcernedly. Just above was a mounted press photo of me scoring a try.

‘I must want you to notice I’m still around,’ I told her.

‘I’ve noticed. Don’t worry, I’ve noticed! I can smell the stench from here when you come in the door.’

‘Can you now? Well that’s the smell of work,’ I told her. ‘Perhaps there’s not enough of it around here.’

‘You’ve never worked in your life. You live like a spiv, you smell like a spiv … and you live with me like one an’ all.’

‘Because I don’t come home grunting, swearing, and sweating like the other pigs round here it doesn’t mean I don’t work—I do! You bitch! You’re always trying to make out I do nothing!’

She got up and came to stand beneath my chin so she could shout what she’d been wanting to shout for weeks. ‘Well you can get out right now and join those other pigs because I don’t want you in my house any more!’

I stepped back to look at her quietly. ‘I’m not going,’ I told her, calming down. ‘I like living here. I’ve paid for a lot of the stuff. I like to see you benefit from all I do for you. I like to see these kids get plumper and fitter and a bit more cheerful on the decent living I give them. …’

‘You’ll get out!’ she screamed, and ran past me up the stairs. She must have thought of doing this often, because when I reached my room she’d already torn up a couple of shirts. She’d pulled the drawer out, and was standing with one foot in it, straining to rip my best nylon shirt between her hands. The rest of my clothes and some of my paperbacks were in the yard. My first impulse was to kill her. To push her out of the window.

Then I told her, ‘Your stuff’ll get just as torn when I fling it out of the front.’

She came dragging after me on the landing. She fell on her knees and put her hands together. ‘Please, please, Arthur. Leave us alone.’

‘I can’t. I love you.’

She spat up at my face. But it only reached my shirt. Her face was screwed up like a dried weed. She dribbled on her grey dress. In the bedroom Lynda was screaming, and then Ian. I tried to imagine how it must sound outside.

Lynda opened the door slowly and looked at her mother sobbing on the floor. I felt shy of the kid. She rushed into her arms. ‘It’s all right, Lyn. I just fell.’ They buried their heads in each other’s shoulders.

I went downstairs and out at the back to pick up my clothes. Across the back people were standing about like cattle, listening and watching, scratching in the ashes, having a good laugh, pretending nothing had happened. When I went in she was already in the kitchen. The TV screamed through from the other room. Washing powder.

‘Are you going now or in the morning?’ she said, and watched me dusting down the clothes and shaking the ashes out of the books. She had quietened. Her hands were still flushed from tearing cloth.

‘I’m not going at all.’

‘What is it you want … to make you go? I’ll give you anything. Ought we’ve got.’ She pressed herself against the table. ‘Do you want to go to bed?’

‘I don’t want anything you’ve got. I’m staying.’

‘I’ll have to fetch the police then,’ she said emptily.

‘They can’t turn me out without a week’s notice.’

‘I’ll go then. I’ll take Lyn an’ Ian. I’d rather we live in a hole in the backs than stay here with you. You poison us all. Listen at them—scared stiff.’ She pulled open the kitchen door so I could hear the kids wailing.

‘That’s your own bloody fault for screaming round like a maniac. You want to get used to the idea—I’m staying. You’ll waste less energy.’

‘I can’t think of any better way of wasting it. You don’t seem to know what you are. What you look like to us.’

‘All I can see is the food you eat. The clothes you wear, the pleasure you get. When I came here you hadn’t a strip of underclothes between you that wasn’t in rags.’

‘Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure! You say pleasure! You standing over us! Like a bloody lord and master. … You made us enjoy anything we ever did. You made us.’

‘You don’t seem to appreciate one bloody thing—not one bloody thing I’ve done for you,’ I shouted, crazed by her stinking lack of gratitude. ‘I’ve treated you better than my own parents even. How can you say a thing like that? You’ve a life better than any other woman on this street.’

‘You must be a lunatic. You must be a lunatic if you think I’ve got any … any, any thing for what you’ve done. You’re raving! You’ve done nothing for us that wasn’t just your fancy. You’ve done just what you’ve liked. You must think you’re God Almighty … stuck up there in your tin motor-car, with your TV and your cheap fur coat. I’ll burn everything! Everything you’ve touched I’ll burn. The minute you leave this house, every stick and every morsel you’ve touched. … You can’t see yourself. You just can’t see. A better life than any other woman on this street! My life is hell! I can’t lift my head without somebody pointing at me and saying I’m your … slut!’

‘Who says that?’

‘Who says that! Just listen to him. Who? …’ She choked with laughing, with pulling up laughter, strangled, from her belly. ‘Is God hurt because somebody calls me a slut? Is God going to go out there in his big motor-car and knock them down … knock them down because they don’t say good morning to his kind of dirt? Well—you hit them! Massacre them! You smash and tear them up until there isn’t two bits of them together! Just you make sure they won’t ever do it again. … They all laugh at you. Now that’s surprising, isn’t it? They all point you out. Did you know that? They think you’re trying to be different. They all point you out. And they point me out. And Lynda. And Ian. We’re not proper people now because of you. Because you show off every Sat’day in front of thousands of them. We’re like cripples that daren’t show ourselves. You’ve put your stenching mark on all of us.’

‘This must sound right good next door.’

‘No better … no better than it’s ever been. They listen every night. Tonight’s no different. … If it’s a week’s notice, then you’ve got it.’

She bent down and screamed into the fireplace—something to the Farrers next door. ‘You’re my witnesses,’ she told them. ‘For when the police come. A week’s notice to get out from tonight.’

‘You must think they’ve minds like yours. There’s no need to go screaming like a lunatic. …’

‘I don’t think they’re like me. I know they’re not. They’re much better. Everybody’s much better than me. Before you came here … you don’t know, but I was respected. Everybody round here, everybody in the street—everybody, they all respected me. They thought well of me—of how I brought up Lynda. … But I’m not going to cover myself up now. I don’t kid myself. Not like you. I know what I am.’

‘You’re feeling like this because you’re frightened. …’

‘You don’t know me!’

She went round the room, glanced out of the window, looked back at the walls. ‘I know you,’ I said. ‘I ought to. I’ve been here long enough.’

‘You don’t know me. Just how do you know me? You don’t look at anybody but yourself. When I was younger. … Before, I felt young. You only make me feel old. I’ve always been old with you. And I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be right. I’ve tried and I’ve tried. I wanted … I only wanted to be left alone. I didn’t want you. I didn’t ask you to come here and push yourself in.’

‘But you’ve taken all I’ve given you. Don’t say you didn’t want somebody. I’ve treated you like a queen. Just look at what I’ve given out here.’

‘How you go on! I don’t see what you’re trying to get out of it.’ It looked as though she’d finished, that she was going out. Then she added, ‘Can’t you get it into your head? We don’t need you.’

‘The trouble with you is it drives you mad to see somebody who won’t crawl about. Isn’t that right? You want me to crawl about like the rest—like Eric crawled. Look at the people round here. The people who won’t say good morning, tickle me fancy, to you. Just look at them. There’s not a bleeding man amongst them. They’re all flat out on their backs and anybody can walk over them. They haven’t the nerve to stand up and walk about like me. And because of that you try and make out that it’s me who stinks. Me!’

‘How you go on. …’

‘Shut your hole a minute and listen to me. These people want you to act like this. They don’t like you because you’re on to a good thing. If we had no cash, no car, and no fur coat you could have a hundred men living here. All they want is to see you in the same miserable dirt as themselves. Can’t you see what you’re doing? I could tell you some things people have said to me that’d make your toe nails drop off. And just because I’m a Rugby League player. Isn’t that right? You know that’s right. Tell me it’s right!’

‘You don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like.’

‘I know what’s it’s like. They hate me, they hate you … they even hate Ian and Lynda. Only you don’t want to see it. For some stupid crazy reason you prefer to think like them.’

She twisted against the table, beating it for silence, shaking her head: everything as if I actually had hold of her and she was trying to break away. ‘You don’t know. You’ve never gone without a thing in your life!’

Somebody, Mr Farrer, was banging on the wall, then he rooted at the back of the chimney. I banged back with a poker. A piece of plaster fell in the hearth. Kids ran screaming in some game over the ashes.

‘The police’ll be here any time,’ I told her. ‘Better get the beer out and the set warmed up.’

‘Nothing’s clean to you,’ she murmured. ‘You filthy everything you touch.’

‘You’re too sentimental. I don’t like these arguments either, but I’m not complaining. These people I’m talking about—they’re my friends, my fans. I don’t mind what they think. If they say anything to me about it I just knock their teeth in. Me—I don’t complain about anything. You—you resent me helping.’

She looked at me thoughtfully, dazed, as at some new revelation. ‘Thank God there’s a part of my life you never touched. There’s something that’s clean,’ she said. ‘That’s one thing which must really hurt you. I can see it, now. You must hate Eric. He’s one thing you can’t touch. He’s what brings me through all this. Him and Lyn and Ian. The one really good thing in all this. …’

‘Come on, come on—get it over with. You might as well put his bloody boots back in the hearth. Let’s all get down and pray for the good soul of Eric—the father of this house.’

‘How he must hurt you,’ she said with all the keenness of at last finding something she thought really did hurt me.

‘If I’ve ever seen a crazy thing, that’s it—a pair of dead man’s boots in the hearth. Christ, they put people into nuthouses for less than that these days. You even polished them. As if he was going to step into them the next minute. I know enough about you to keep you in a rubber room the rest of your life.’

‘What. … What do you know about how good Eric was to me—how he treated us? How would you know what a decent father does for his family? How hard he worked? What do you know about Eric?’

‘I know he can’t have done so bloody much going by what I’ve seen here. I know he shoved a file in his guts. He was such a good father he virtually killed himself on that lathe. It was no accident. …’

She stumbled against the table. ‘You want to kill me!’ she screamed. ‘You treat me as if I didn’t exist. I’m just nothing, to you. You make me think I’m nothing. Anything I do you knock down. You won’t let me live. You make me think I don’t exist.’

She got into a chair and wiped her hair aside with her wrist. She was completely exhausted, panting and sobbing.

‘I want to live with you. I don’t want to squash you.’

‘Everything I do you make as if it wasn’t important. You make me feel that I’m dead.’

‘But I want you!’ I shouted.

‘I’m one thing you can’t have like everything else.’

She seemed a long way off, and disappearing.

‘You don’t want me to go, do you? Say you don’t. Say you don’t want me to go.’

‘I don’t want you to stay here,’ she said slowly, forced, reciting an idea she’d got too used to to let go. She sat still. Her eyes were glazed. If her mouth hadn’t gone on saying it I’d have thought she was dead.