The Blind Light Read online

  They serve a decent pint at the Crown; some men will even cross town to sample its beer. It was not ever thus. I am old enough to remember when the inn was exclusively known as Taff’s Gaff, and the subject of a boycott by older townsmen.

  The rumours are – and rumours are currency here; a commodity as abundant as iron ore once was – that the landlord won the pub in a frenzied game of three-card brag. This would have been between the wars, when the Welsh and the Cornish were depleting in number, but suspicion and not a little hostility remained towards them. So, Taff’s Gaff. Frequented by the Welsh, the sons of the Welsh, and those who did not see the need to walk a mile for good beer.

  Few now know it as Taff’s Gaff; most do not know that the landlord is a true Welshman – his accent is soft, and he wears his heritage lightly. Above-stairs, according to his daughter, he speaks his own guttural, impenetrable language; but in the bar he is a welcoming sight: a tall, big-boned, huge-hearted kind of man, one whose company is sought and who has that barman talent for sympathetic listening: nodding his head with factory communists; shaking his head with Tory farmers; sighing with the old over the state of the young; laughing with the young over the stupidity of the old.

  In recent times, after Taff’s wife – a barmaid of the old-fashioned sort, a provider of love and pet and darling, a sultry wink, a charged chuckle – was taken by God, their daughter has minded the pub, her brother set to take it from her on his return from National Service. She does not resemble her mother or her father, though she somehow combines elements of them both; as though, like the pub they ran, their progeny is a fifty–fifty enterprise.

  Her eyes are her father’s: catlike and wide, blue as the brook in summer. Her hair is jet, a shining lustrous black she wears up on her head, scaffolded in a modern version of her mother’s coiffure. Her carriage is upright, almost masculine; her mouth is wide, red-lipsticked, always. There is a touch of the Snow Whites about her; she is what one might describe as striking rather than beautiful; though with a sad cast to her eye that speaks of her mother’s death and her father’s retreat above-stairs.

  Over time, we have developed a relationship of sorts. At the opening of the inn at eleven, she serves me my black and tan, and at some point after I have finished my pages, we discuss books. Readers in London and the South may feel this an unlikely turn of events, but the reading of books is more common here than one might think: the library in the town is always busy, and not just for those escaping inclement weather.

  One morning, I noticed her reading Agatha Christie. The next day she was on James Hadley Chase. The following morning another Agatha Christie. When next I saw her, she began another James Hadley Chase and I could take it no more – to have such voracity, and to spend it in the arms of such lumber, such dead wood! – and so I hurried home, drink untouched, and returned with a copy of Northanger Abbey.

  ‘Try this,’ I said, perhaps a trifle pompously, though I hope I presented myself more as a concerned bystander. ‘One should read good books or none at all.’

  Her face went from shock, to perplexity, then settled on amusement. It has settled there ever since, even now after we have discussed some fifty books, and her literary appreciation has deepened. Towns such as ours are full of such surprises: our community is more than just farmers farming, miners mining, or barmaids tending bar.

  Nicholas Oldman, The Regional Forecast (Castell & Castell, 1961)

  7

  Each house displays a different kind of devastation; in each there is something unique: a baby’s dummy, a dog’s leash, the innards of a transistor radio. Over these last months, the more time he has spent here, the more Drum has noticed the attention to detail, the little touches that convince. The house he’s crossed the road for has a splintered bookcase, spines of the odd volume surviving, bits of leather he has touched, scraps that have crumbled in his hands.

  *

  Once a week at the Shropshire base a package would arrive at their billet, a selection of books from the Carter family library, or a delivery from a local bookseller. All the men Drum knew were readers. Those that could read, at least. At the plant, at home, they read their Marx, their Engels, their pamphlets and manifestos, translated speeches, articles from brothers in Algeria, in Kiev. At the factory, Clifton kept a well-stocked library of left-wing publications, paid for by union dues, and ran a reading group on lunch breaks. No one Drum knew owned books though; books were things only ever on loan.

  Aside from Mannering, who was never without a cowboy novel, and Norm, who had a thing for spy thrillers, Drum didn’t know any men who read fiction. Fiction was childish, fiction was feminine. It was apolitical. Seeing Carter that first night in the billet take out a novel – even if it was written by a Russian – made him nervous. Pansy, perhaps. Didn’t know him. Not really. And now in a shared billet. He took out the copy of Marx his grandpa had bought him as a farewell gift, the only book he’d never needed to return, and started again at the beginning.

  ‘So you’re a communist, are you?’ Carter said, quickly over to Drum’s cot, taking the book from him, pinching it between fingers like it was stinking out the billet.

  ‘A union man,’ Drum said, taking it back. ‘There’s a difference.’

  ‘Sounds like the same thing to me,’ Carter said. ‘It’s all Bolshiness in the end, isn’t it? Funny, I’ve come to expect Reds under the bed, but not in the cot beside me.’

  They were drinking brown ale, the base quiet and the gramophone on low.

  ‘Do you ever take anything seriously?’ Drum said. ‘All you ever do is make light.’

  Carter stood up and poured the dregs of the ale into his glass.

  ‘This world is too serious to take it any other way,’ he said.

  He spun the antique globe on the small dresser. Spun it and with a finger stopped it somewhere in Africa. He shrugged and spun again.

  ‘There’s really no point in being serious, my commie friend,’ he said. ‘Everything is set. Nothing changes. Not really. Things only change when people like my father say so. They set the conditions for change, and they decide how far it’ll go. We can sit here and argue about commies and Tories and the rights of man, but we’re all just shitting in the wind. Your mates out on the strike at Ford’s? Good luck to ’em. Good luck to ’em all. But they’ll only get what’s already been decided. And they’ll go back on the lines and be grateful for it. A little battle won, but the war lost before they’ve even entered the fray.’

  It sounded rehearsed, this argument, honed perhaps at university, designed to prick the bubble of his political friends, designed to draw a line under discussions that had begun to bore him.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Drummond said. ‘Things are changing. Look at us sitting here. A posh bastard talking politics with a skate like me. You think that’s an accident? This is the first time in history there’s ever been peacetime conscription in this country. First time ever, and it was Labour who brought that in. You know why? It’s a quiet revolution. Throwing everyone together to see what happens. Giving men trades, showing them the world, opening their minds. National Service is just the start. The old orders, your father included, they’re coming down.’

  He was pointing, pointing the way Clifton had pointed when he’d said much the same thing in the pub after Drum’s last shift at Ford’s.

  ‘Do you honestly believe that?’ Carter said. ‘Or are you just parroting one of your shop stewards? I hope it’s the latter. If not, you’re deluded. I hope you’re better at riveting doors than you are at understanding the class system.’

  ‘When the revolution comes,’ Drum said. ‘You’ll be first against the wall, you know that?’

  Carter laughed.

  ‘We own the walls,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget we own the walls. The pavements and streets too.’

  ‘For now, yes,’ Drum said. ‘Not for long, mind.’

  Carter set his head to one side, weighing up an idea, something to consider. He finished his beer and went to get
another, but thought better, instead going to the small pile of books on his nightstand. He threw over a leather-bound copy of Great Expectations.

  ‘I’ll swap you,’ he said. ‘A Dickens for your Marx.’

  Drum shook his head.

  ‘Don’t be soft,’ he said. ‘I can’t read that.’

  ‘You can read complex political philosophy, but not Dickens?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Drum said. ‘There’s just no point in it. You learn nothing. It’s just words.’

  ‘You learn nothing? How would you know if you don’t read it?’

  ‘It’s bourgeois,’ he said. A word he usually mispronounced, a word that sounded stupid as soon as he said it.

  ‘It’s Dickens,’ Carter said. ‘Nothing bourgeois about it.’

  He said it differently, as though a French word in a French accent.

  ‘Humour me,’ Carter said. ‘We have all the time in the world to kill, haven’t we? Why not give it a go? And you never know, you might convince me about old Marx. Maybe you’ll turn me red.’

  He laughed and clicked his fingers, insistent like Drum was an elderly waiter. Drum handed him the Marx and took up the Dickens, determined to find fault on every page. Failing, mostly.

  Over the next week, Drum was perplexed by Dickens’s old-fashioned spellings, the words he did not recognize. But he kept reading, for himself and for Carter. In Joe Gargery he saw something of his grandpa, in Magwitch so many men from Ford’s. He saw Carter in everyone, even Miss Havisham. He saw Carter in all the books he read from then on, in Flaubert, in Trollope, in Daniel Defoe. Carter ghosting about in all the characters, in the things they said, the decisions they made.

  *

  Drum looks into the next windowless shell. On the wind, he can hear something. Perhaps a gate banging; perhaps some masonry crumbling. A clink or clank of some kind. He closes his eyes and listens. He opens his eyes and scans the room, the way one might an exhibit. By what was once a kitchen table he sees something blackly welded to the floor. A child’s doll perhaps. Set there, no doubt to break him. He has not noticed it before.

  8

  The barroom clock chimes half eleven, and Nick has not even put his lips to his black and tan. They only open early for him; it’s rare anyone comes in before midday. And he sits and does not drink. Just works the pages, lets the black and tan drift. After the toll she hears her father upstairs shuffling from sitting room to kitchen. The tea will be cool in the pot, but he’d rather drink that than make his own. Mae’n well yn oer.

  *

  At their mother’s wake, her brother John, back from Service, played father for the mourners, their da unable to show himself. Back-claps and thanks-for-comings and have another drink, won’t yous? Garrulous, almost; a fine mimicking. John worked the barroom and Gwen served the drinks until there was no one left, and she and John were in the bar alone, glasses teetering on every surface, silted with beer, sticky with gin. That the start of her working behind the bar; the start of her father’s gradual retreat upstairs.

  ‘You spend so long in darkness, you become a nocturne,’ her father said after John had gone back to Service. This when her father still addressed her in English, when he still came down for the evening shift. Not long after the funeral, no more than a couple of weeks. It had been a packed bar, a rush at eight, a swell at last orders. Wesley from the pit had played his banjo; her father had not sung, though punters had begged him to give them an air. He now sat at the bar, gin in hand, talking as though he had the attention of an audience.

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d take to it. It takes a sort. And look at you now! A nocturne, just like your mother.’

  His frame was already losing heft; his face already creased as slag. He raised his glass to her, the way he had to cricket captains and baritones, to policemen and fiancés, a slight stammer, a shake to the gin.

  ‘You should take more water with it,’ she said, nodding to his glass. ‘You’re making as much sense as Old Nick.’

  His laughter and then a miner’s cough, though he’d never been deeper than to change a barrel.

  ‘Your mother used to say there was no light here, just different shades of dark. You see that now, don’t you?’

  When helping on a shift, he sometimes draped an arm over her, the way he had with her mother. He sometimes called her darling the way he’d called her mother darling; called her sweetheart the way he’d called her mother sweetheart.

  ‘She would have been proud,’ he said. ‘Minding the place the way you do.’

  Gwen took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket in her apron, struck a match and closed her eyes on his disapproval.

  ‘And when John’s back?’ she said. ‘What then? Won’t be needing me with him and Barbara around.’

  Gwen sat down at Old Nick’s table, cloth marks ghosting the blistered wood, the fire dying in the grate.

  ‘Always need good barmaids. No point in a pub otherwise. He’ll do you right, you’ll see. I’ll make sure of that.’

  He finished the gin, placed a kiss on her forehead and said goodnight. The public bar no longer public, its lamps no longer lit. A nocturne, aye.

  *

  She looks at her watch, not trusting clocks now, but time seeming right, just after 11.30. In an hour Jessie will come to relieve her. A special favour. How many times she’s asked Jessie to do this; how many times Gwen has paid her out of the till and not told Da. Too many. Jessie glad of the money; glad also to be party to some solid, if unspectacular, scandal. Glad for that the most, Gwen suspects. Still, Jessie has kept her confidence thus far. Gwen has not suffered any knowing looks at least.

  Jessie is to relieve her, then Gwen will meet Drum at the town square, under the clock. Her idea. Drum suggested meeting at the pub, but Gwen wanted to have a moment in the light with him, to stand in the grey sunshine and kiss him and steel themselves for what they were about to do. She imagines the clock striking the hour, him kissing her, and then walking under cold blue skies to her father’s sanctuary.

  She hears Drum ask the question, ask for her hand, and hears Da tell him to speak in Welsh. Gwen is prepared for this and has coached Drum phonetically as to what to say. She hears Da say in English, no daughter of mine. I will not allow it. I forbid it. She sees Drum’s calm and honest eyes looking into her father’s. She hears Drum tell her father that he loves her. That he wants to keep her safe, provide for her. Wants to make her happy. She sees Da smile. This is how it will go. She knows this. She is sure.

  And yet the whole thing feels transactional. Though there are promises and entreaties instead of dowries, it’s still a horse-trade. What do you offer for my daughter? Da will not stop her, but he is sure to kick and mewl. He will tell her that he will die without her. He will say that she can go when he goes. She will tell him that it’s time to leave. That others will look after him. John and his wife. She will tell him it is time for her to leave. She will tell him that it’s time for him to let her go.

  Old Nick turns a page. He looks up and smiles at Gwen. He drains half of his beer in one draught. He knows already. She can tell. He has something about him, of important information ready for discussion. He disappears back to his work, he is lost to it, gone deep inside his papers. She would like to escape there, too. Better there. Safer between the sheets.

  9

  The high street extends for almost a mile and he walks it like he’s window shopping. Inside the once-grocer’s are twisted wire baskets, rusted cans, a cash register; inside the once-chemist’s the shelves are no more than kindling. He imagines lives bustling through here, populates it with people from home. The soft face of the butcher, Mr Dutton (Mutton to everyone; everyone a comedian), Trisha from the bakery with the painted-on eyebrows, Harold the fishmonger, pout like a bloater. He sees his great-aunt Vi stopping to gossip; men from Ford’s coming out of the bookies. All the stories of their lives, all of them taken in a single flash.

  *

  There were always stories at the Shropshire base
, stories written, but more often told. There were new conscripts every two weeks, a new audience every fortnight, all of them hungry for tales of real soldiering, real action, and Carter happy to provide them. In the bar of the NAAFI, a crowd would gather, and he would recount his war stories, the missions he and Drum had undertaken, the dangers they had survived before falling on their feet in the Catering Corps.

  Carter did most of the talking, but Drum contributed colour and detail to their fictive exploits. There was a multitude of them, embroidered over months, honed and tightly composed. They had seen a bewildering array of action. They had performed at every theatre of war. Carter had an appendectomy scar that became a gut shot from a sniper, a stab from a cutlass, shrapnel from a mine. No one questioned it. No one disbelieved him. The books helped Drum to lie. They made his stories clearer, they had more suspense. The younger men hung on his words too.

  In almost every story, Carter was saved by Drum at the last moment; Drum always arriving in the nick of time with an impossible intervention. At the end, the men would look at Drum differently. Respect accorded, deference even.

  As a coda, Carter would gather the men in a close huddle.

  ‘Be lucky, all of you,’ Carter would say. ‘And if you can’t be lucky, make sure someone has your back.’

  Drum wondered sometimes if that was it, whether Carter considered him as a kind of lucky charm, found like a four-leaf clover. They never did go fishing on their Leave; Carter never mentioned it again. Leave was tricky. The worst time. The journey long to home, but quicker for Carter. Carter talked of Daphne, how much she and Drum might get along, but there was never an invitation to meet her.

  Carter showed him photographs of Daphne. A thin, willowy woman, expensively dressed, laughing into the camera.