It wasn’t exactly a balls-up, thought Stratton, as he straightened, rubbed his back and looked down at the neat rows of little seeds, but it hadn’t been a roaring success, either. He’d gone to his allotment to try and forget his feeling of irritation at his failure to make headway with Wallace. Abie Marks, who had reappeared in the office a few moments after the man had left, had known better than to gloat, but the bastard had been unable to resist a reprise of his mine host routine, and that, compounded by his failure to make any sort of progress with his other cases, had left him in a thoroughly bad mood. He’d decided on the way home that a bit of sun and sowing the last of the spinach might improve matters, but so far it hadn’t helped much.
Picking up his trowel to cover the seeds with earth, he found himself thinking of his father, tending vegetables in the garden of the small, damp farmhouse where he and his brothers had grown up. He’d often wondered what the old man would have made of his life, and the people he dealt with on a daily basis. Working on the allotment, which was the closest he ever came to the countryside nowadays, always seemed to conjure him up – a carthorse of a man whose three sons had inherited his massive build; a man with warm, leathery hands, who wore a cap, black-rimmed with dirt and sweat, and had endless patience.
He’d always considered his life to be an improvement on his father’s with its familiar, instinctive pattern of work, relentless as the seasons – lifting, tugging, toting, trudging through day after day before dropping off to sleep by the fire after supper and waking just long enough to haul himself up the stairs to bed. His surviving brother, Dick, had returned to Devon in 1919, glad to be home, and had eventually taken over the running of the small farm, but
for as long as he could remember Stratton had dreamt of uprooting himself from the grey, gluey mud and finding another sort of life. It wasn’t that he’d been unhappy. There were many things that he’d loved about the place – his family, the farm cats, the smell of hot horses, the warmth of the cows as they came in from the fields to be milked, dusty rectangles of light in the barn, excitement when a pig was killed – but he hadn’t wanted to stay there. He hadn’t grown up wanting to be a policeman. That suggestion, oddly enough, had come from Dick, who’d pointed out that it was an outdoor life with a pension at the end of it. At the time, it had seemed as good as anything. The decision to come to London had been a deliberate one, and, once he’d got over the initial shock of the crowded buildings, the roaring, grinding traffic and the teeming humanity, he’d discovered that he liked it.
Stratton pushed markers into the earth at the ends of the rows, pulled up a couple of onions to take home, then bent down to examine the marrows. The first one looked about ready. He grimaced. Bloody tasteless things, and the kids weren’t around to help eat them – not that they’d ever liked them, either, and now that they weren’t here to be set an example … Stratton shook his head at the direction his thoughts were taking. The cooking was Jenny’s business, and she thought marrows were good for you, kept you regular, or something. It wasn’t his job to interfere.
He harvested the marrow, tucked it under his arm, and headed for home. It was a great pity, he thought, that Pete and Monica hadn’t been able to go and stay with Dick in Devon, but with his sister-in-law being poorly it wouldn’t have been fair to expect her to look after two extra kids. Shame, because until a couple of years ago they’d all gone down there for holidays – loved it, too, helping out on the farm …
Thinking of Monica’s tears when it was time to come home, Stratton recalled how his father had wept unashamedly on their stepmother’s shoulder after they’d had the telegram about his eldest brother Tom, in 1917. He remembered standing in the kitchen doorway, watching as Auntie Nellie wrapped her arms around him and he sank against her, sobbing. That was the only time he’d seen them touch. Stratton’s mother had died when he was six, and Nellie, her spinster sister, had moved in as housekeeper, marrying his father
– to the disapproval of the vicar, who refused a church wedding – a
couple of years later. Now that he was older, Stratton occasionally found himself wondering about the nature of their union. They’d shared a bed, of course, a big, lumpy, sagging thing that rolled like the sea when you sat on it, but compared to himself and Jenny, the relationship had seemed … What? Functional. Workmanlike. But then his father had always been taciturn, using speech only when all other forms of communication – grunts, shrugs, lifts of the chin – had been exhausted. He smiled at the memory, then frowned as a half-glimpsed advert for Coca-Cola in a café window reminded him once more of the afternoon’s conversation with George Wallace.
Finding Lilian seated in the kitchen when he got home didn’t help matters. He deposited the marrow and onions next to her impressively large breasts – the best thing about her, in Stratton’s opinion – which were resting proprietorially on the table, then stumped upstairs to wash for supper, but not before he’d caught a glimpse of a particular expression on both women’s faces. It was a sort of determined serenity which meant that they had discussed the fact that both Reg and himself were, in their different ways, being ‘difficult’ about the children, and that the thing to do was to respond with an impenetrable front of wifely forbearance. This would mean that everything they said would act as a sort of reverse camouflage for everything they weren’t saying; except, of course, that neither, unless pushed beyond an acceptable point (thus making Stratton a swine and a bully and putting him thoroughly in the wrong), would admit it.
He dried his hands with unnecessary violence and decided he might as well go and lie down for ten minutes. Lilian would surely leave soon and Jenny, once alone, might be prevailed upon to drop it. He really didn’t think he could face another argument about the kids, not tonight. He stared out of the bedroom window across the gardens, and saw, in the alleyway that separated their row from the one beyond, the slim figure of a boy, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet like a boxer warming up for a fight. A second glance told him that it was Reg and Lilian’s son, Johnny, ducking and weaving, outsmarting an imaginary opponent in a series of complicated sidesteps, before a volley of sharp jabs to the chin drove his adversary backwards and the boy administered the killer punch. Stratton, who’d done a fair bit of boxing when he was younger, decided that the invisible man must have had a glass
jaw. He watched as Johnny raised his clenched fists in a salute of triumph, and danced out of sight behind an overgrown buddleia, then turned away from the window to take off his shoes and lie down, hands clasped behind his head. After a few minutes listening to the murmurs of conversation from the kitchen and wearily remarshalling his arguments about why Pete and Monica should stay exactly where they were, his eyelids began to droop; a short time later, he turned over and fell asleep.