The Blind Light Read online

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

  ‘You’re right, it’ll be good to get away,’ she said. ‘I’ll do us some sandwiches. We can eat while Annie sleeps. Be nice to see Carter and Daphne again. It’ll be fun.’

  It would not be fun. It would be a backward glance, a respooling. The two boys drinking whisky, telling their imagined war stories; Gwen making slow going of any common ground with Daphne. Would that Carter had married Patty. The fun that would have been. Patty married now, a kid now, moved up to Scotland with a man called Peter. Peter and Patty, their child called Paul. So far away, Gwen wrote her in a letter, you might as well be on Mars.

  She’d first met Daphne at her own wedding; the second time at Daphne’s more opulent celebrations. They have exchanged little more than a hundred words with each other, most of which in the course of one stolen moment in a rose garden at the back of Daphne’s parents’ house, the two of them sharing a cigarette, faces flushed from champagne, momentarily separated from their partners at the Carters’ wedding.

  ‘So,’ Daphne said, ‘it’s done then.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gwen said. ‘Ring’s on now, no taking it off.’

  Daphne sat on a cast-iron bench, flicked ash into the flower bed.

  ‘You’re happy?’ Daphne said. ‘You think you made the right decision?’

  ‘Ask me in twenty years.’

  Daphne motioned to her to sit down next to her. She smelled of sweat and the roses, expensive cigarettes, champagne halitosis.

  ‘You could ask me now, and I’d probably say I’ve not done the right thing,’ Daphne said. ‘But it is the right thing, isn’t it?’

  What to say to that. How to respond. To say, you could do better. Not to know if that were the case.

  ‘You two make a good couple,’ Daphne said. ‘Hale and hearty, the two of you. You stand well together. That’s what my mother said is the most important thing. The way you stand together is the way you’ll stay together.’

  At that she’d laughed, high and fluted the laugh, and then Drum and Carter were back, whiskies in hand, wondering where they’d got to. Gwen stood and positioned herself next to Drum, wondered how they looked side by side; how they looked to the assembled wedding guests. Hale and hearty. Staying together.

  Thinking of that as she agreed, as she cleared the plates, as she checked on Annie once more, thinking of that as they went to bed. Sex that night. Their usual night for it, Wednesday. He tried to touch her breasts, but she moved his hands away. Sex with a certain abandon, without pressure. No thoughts of baby, coming or present. She told him to do what she liked him to do and he did it without giving up early. Afterwards, he let her smoke in the bed. He didn’t even complain when she asked him to fetch an ashtray.

  She looks at the clock. She smokes. In her handbag there is the letter from her father, read so much its paper has begun to shine. That, perhaps, more the reason. A part of the reason. Count to ten, tell the truth. Most of the reason. Honesty the best policy. Without the letter from her father, there would have been no longing for field and pasture, no yearn for frosted hikes and deep country air, no yen for dung and starry skies. For Drum, yes. For him, yes. But not without the letter. The letter more than the strike. The letter more than his deep silences and stuttering lips.

  *

  Slim amongst Tuesday’s second-post bills, the envelope and her father’s careless scrawl surprising. Letter sent because she had not called; letter sent because she could not face the short, cold walk to phone box; letter sent as last resort; resentment, she imagined, in the price and lick of a stamp.

  With a butter knife, she opened the envelope. Inside, a sheet of paper crowded with crooked, tight-spaced words. For him a long letter, two whole sides, the sum of which the usual complaints: you never call; send photographs of Annie; you must visit soon. Then, at its end: Nicholas Oldman has passed.

  In the warm of the small kitchen, Old Nick dead. Taken sudden, his heart just giving out. Found dead in his study, pen in hand, slumped over desk and papers. Died the Monday and buried the Saturday. Too much of a fuss for Da: Old Nick would not have wanted all that. The funeral a town carnival: streets lined with silent, hatless men; silent, weeping women. The cortege led by horse and carriage, hooves louder than engines, the town’s most famous son, its own poet, boxed and scattered with wildflower and moor-heather. A long, rambling route taken from undertaker’s to church; men and women spilling into the churchyard, clotting around the open door. And then laid to rest.

  They all went: Da, John, Barbara and their boy Jack. A beautiful service. Afterwards, in the pub, an informal wake that lasted the night and nudged the early hours. The take good that week. Best for years. A few days later, a headstone carved and erected. Below date of birth and death, the stonemason’s letters: ‘I thank God for this town and its people’.

  Annie was asleep, so Gwen cried. Gwen’s tears caused Anneka distress, the same as sharp words or the fights and thumps from next door. A sensitive soul, Great-Aunt Vi’s one-time diagnosis, at which Gwen had laughed. Take my nipples, know what sensitive means. Gwen cried, a heave of weeping, an unexpected sensation in the sternum, gagging on breath, some words said, the usual kind, the oh-nos and the oh-my-Gods and the low, simple nos.

  He’d stayed in touch since her leaving. His idea, and his letters. Three in three years; a poem composed on the occasion of her wedding day. Simple, gilded words she’d kept in her vanity case and not shown to anyone, not even Drum. For no one else, those words. His florid copperplate, beautiful on watermarked paper, just for her. No one pours a black and tan like you/It is a different drink in different hands/a half-light memory bid adieu.

  There had been a reading, six months before, at some hall or somewhere, right in the heart of the city; an invitation extended she’d declined without discussion with Drum. To go, indecent. Unsure why. Why that word. But indecent, yes. Had she mentioned it, Drum would have insisted she attend. Insisted he accompany her. Of this she was sure. He would have got Vi to stay with Annie and they would have made a night of it: taken the Underground, the racketing carriages fast through the suburbs, then into the deepening dark; a drink in some small, gas-lit boozer beforehand and then to the hall, their clothes plain amongst the formal wear. The applause for Old Nick at the mahogany lectern, accent thicker the further south he came, and as he read, that face of Drum’s: the factory face, projected attention but lost somewhere else, halfway to sleep.

  ‘Sorry,’ Gwen wrote, ‘but we have plans. Perhaps next time give me more notice.’

  Of late, she’d not much thought of him; not Nicholas Oldman, not the pub, not the town, not the coast, not the fields, not even her brother or father. The odd dream to take her back, but no homesick wobbles in the day, no itchy feet for gorse, for kicking sand against waves, no family hankering. Her calls home are a courtesy and chore; her father asking when she’s planning on coming back, telling her he won’t last the week without his daughter. Each entreaty met with soon, and soon being enough. Barbara was taking good enough care of him, so he said when they spoke, and the pub was busier than ever. John born to be a barman, born a landlord: this another constant. When she heard this, she’d say she was glad it’d worked out so well for everyone. So well for everyone but Nick. Everyone but him.

  In the kitchen sink she washed her face and looked at the clock. An hour and the girl would wake; an hour and it would start all over again. Outside the rain had eased. She looked into the hallway, tiptoed past Annie and lightly took the stairs. In her vanity case, she found Nick’s letters, a touch of pipe-smoke still to the pages, carried them downstairs and slipped them into her handbag.

  Five doors down, she knocked at Vi’s place. Vi opened the door, big Vi with her big yellow hair and small yellow teeth.

  ‘Would you mind taking her?’ Gwen said, pushing the pram inside. ‘Just for an hour or so?’

  Vi’s face: practised sympathy, brought out often for cancer, death, lost babies, divorces and affairs. Multipurpose, warmly m
eant and knowingly useless.

  ‘Everything all right, love?’ she said.

  ‘Fine. I just need to call my da. A mate of his died.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, love,’ she said. ‘Annie’ll be fine here. You go call your dad.’

  Rain hit the black petals of the umbrella. She closed the door and set off with quick steps, the distance punctuated with things she’d forgotten to do, things that Annie would need when she woke.

  On entering the Oak Bar of the Eastbrook, the men looked at her, maybe twenty of them. They sized her up, then turned away. Behind the pumps, the barmaid, fierce with make-up, poured a pint for a man in overalls.

  ‘Black and tan, ta,’ Gwen said.

  The barmaid looked calculatingly at the taps.

  ‘A pint is fine,’ Gwen said.

  The barmaid poured the pale and then the stout. A good job. It would have pleased Nick well enough. Gwen carried the drink to a table by the window and took the letters from her handbag. She read them twice; the poem three times. Dabbed at her eyes when she was sure no one was looking.

  She wanted to tell Nick he’d been wrong about Drum. She wanted to tell him she was happy. She wanted to tell Nick, as she had been unable to do in life, that without him there would be no Drum, there would be no Annie, no reading books of an evening, no rigour of thought.

  ‘Ah, that’s all on you,’ she heard him say, ‘don’t go blaming me for all that.’

  But she did blame him, her Old Nick. The man who had let her say no; the man who the following day congratulated her when she told him there had been a delay to Drum’s demob, a message waiting for her on her return to the pub. Drum en route now to be with her. No look of disappointment on his face. She wanted to thank him for that.

  Goodbye, Nick, you old skate. Goodbye, Nick, dead now and heavenward, reunited with your wife and walking an endless moor, God in every gorse and grouse. She raised her glass to him. On her lips, a line from the poem: You do not just go, you disappear.

  In the held glass, a man’s face appeared: a cloud in the black and tan. It broke and the man was standing in front of her, shadows cast from his flat cap and ferret-lean body.

  ‘Listen, love,’ the man said. ‘I’ve been all over the world and let me tell you this. I’ve seen it all. But I’ve never, never seen a woman drink a pint before. Never. Not once in all my days.’

  She looked at the drink, then up at the man, once-kind eyes in a battered, pugilistic face. She smiled and hoped it would repel, that he would not take it as licence to sit. A moment of terror, there. How long before she could escape? How long before he said she was being unfriendly or impolite?

  No power this side of the bar. No dominion. Just a woman alone with an unprecedented pint, its two-tone hue coquettish perhaps; maybe a code for something. He stood looking at her. She had no words, no quick lip to scold him. No longer a nocturne. Aye, not her father’s nocturne, at least.

  The man smiled. Perfect teeth. Denture perfect. She felt his eyes on her chest. On her arms and on her face. He shook his head. He walked back to his table and his companion.

  ‘You believe that?’ he said to the man at his table. ‘You ever seen the like?’

  The line between pale and stout strayed as she held the glass. She set it down on a beer mat and the Watney’s logo darkened. She packed up the letters and held the bag against her chest. She wanted to drink the black and tan, but could not; not even for Nick. She got up and left the bar, deliberately and slowly, out into the rain-lashed streets. Not a look at the men, not a glance behind.

  *

  She has packed the letters, the ones from Nick and the one from her father. She will smoke the cigarette and will gather Annie up and she will be cheerful on the journey. She will sleep and then she will be refreshed, and then she will be good. She will be pleasant no matter what. For Drum, yes. For herself, too.

  3

  In the warming car, waiting for the front door to open, he looks down the street. It is empty of people, the rain harrowing the pavements. For the fifth time in as many minutes he gives thanks to shop steward Francis; a fine union man, a man of rare conviction, sacked for convening what Ford’s considered an illegal meeting. In solidarity, the factory was all out on strike; in solidarity, the plant was at a standstill. All thanks to one man and his meeting. Front-page news for a time. Thank you, Brother Francis. Thank you, St Francis of Dagenham. Without you, brother, my family surely dead.

  *

  The front page of the Daily Mirror was dominated by the strike for almost a week. On the bus to the picket, Drum would read about their own lives while others talked of the stewards preparing for war, of the militants puffed up and proud, of tactics, of revolution. Hard not to think of Carter in the billet, telling him, we own the streets, the walls too. Wanting to believe the union men and knowing Carter was probably laughing about it over his breakfast. When asked, Drum said the right things. He turned up for all pickets, was counted when there were votes. But Carter was there, in the back of the canteen, in the barrack-room noise, in the smoke-sweat and stewed tea, in the mob of men and women from Paint, Trim and Assembly laughing at their seriousness.

  On the third, maybe fourth day of strike action, Ford’s was still the main story in the Mirror, but tensions in Cuba made a small sidebar on the bottom right. Drum read all he could, though the information was scant, perhaps a storm in a teacup. The next day, the stories had reached parity, the day after, the strike at Ford’s was shunted to the side, the stand-off between Kennedy and Khrushchev the main headline. Then no mention of Ford’s at all. Just Cuba dominating the front page. That on the Wednesday.

  On the bus to the picket that morning, no one talked of Cuba. Drum never heard it mentioned once. The strike the only topic, and once that exhausted, the usual conversations of men. Malkin and Brown discussing how much they hated the singer Adam Faith, but would love to slip a length to Dilys Watling, the guest star on Faith’s show. Nott telling Fraser he was on a promise with this bird from the Coronet and Fraser saying in his dreams. Talk of Spurs, West Ham, the Arsenal, Chelsea. Not one of them afraid, not one of them seeing what was to come.

  Drummond went back to his paper and read again about the situation and stand-off, saw again what he saw. He saw the escalation, the intransigence, no one willing to lose face. A bald man and a vain man: this how the world ends, two men unwilling to show fear. Drum saw it all, the radiation gusts skidding the Atlantic, the North Sea; the tactical deployments, the readying of the missiles, the way they erected slowly on their launch pads, the cradle of them in the aircrafts’ bellies, the fingers on buttons; how the buttons looked, not simply functional, but ceremonial.

  And he saw Carter’s bomb shelter. The way it had been described in his letters, the vastness of it. State of the art. Envisioned by his father, but finished by Carter after his father’s death and the house coming into Carter’s possession. How safe they would be. How safe they would all be. When he got to the picket, he sloped off to call Carter from the payphone at work. On the way home he sent him a telegram, called him again from the phone box at the end of the road. He did not receive an answer. It didn’t matter. He was owed. Carter had been clear on that. Whatever he wanted. Whenever it was needed.

  On the production lines, men dream their way through shifts, their hands and eyes keeping time, working to a pre-ordained tempo. Muscles work staccato bursts in din and dust, unmoored from thought; minds off somewhere other: wandering and lost. Only way. Without dreams you rot from the inside. And so dreams. Hours of Cup Final-winning goals; of the seduction of women; of Pools wins and flash motors. Hours of reeling in a monster perch; of a son or daughter winning a place at the grammar; of money enough at the end of the week to spend on beer and a fish supper. Hours of Eden, then home on the bus, to kids and bills and a wife whose dreams you can’t imagine.

  These dreams, yes; but others, too. Darker and more appealing in the rut of work. The arguments you win with ease. The punch you land on y
our no-good son. The bullets you fire as you declare a workers’ takeover of production. All the world’s ills corrected. A private realm in which you’re always right and always land the killer blow.

  These see you through the first years. Ire and spite, joy and luck. Beyond that, though, these finely sculpted worlds feel bloodless. Their perfection riles. They need tension. The two entwine then; the vicious and the victorious. The break-leg challenge in the Cup Final that ends your career; the woman who runs off with your best mate; the burning through of your fortune and no pot to piss in. More complex worlds, wider in scope. Your utopian revolutionary state turns dictatorial and murderous, denouncing you as a reactionary. The kid gets into the grammar and comes home hating your common accent and piggish table manners. You lose your Pools coupon and spend your life rifling bins. These the dreams that take hold; these the dreams with legs.

  Drum has his bomb dream. It begins with the sounding of an alarm at the factory. Only he knows what it really means and is home in miraculous time. There he ushers Gwen and Annie into the basement, the cellar they thought boarded up and desolate, in fact a well-stocked shelter: a radio set, tanks of water, tins of meat and fish and fruit and vegetables, two cot beds already made up with blankets, a locked cabinet housing a shotgun and revolver, boxes of ammunition. Safe there the three of them.

  Except not safe, never safe. The bombs hit too close, blown off course from London. They survive the blast but the radiation gets them. Scavengers find them months later, rob their food, skull Annie and take Gwen. A bullet in Drum’s head, his murderer laughing as he pulls the trigger.

  *

  When Gwen opens their front door, he imagines himself shot and about to die. He watches her struggle with the door. The carrycot is between her legs, skimming the carpet. He jumps from the driver’s seat and takes the cot from her. His daughter is heavy, fat from mother’s milk. Thief and sunlight both. Gwen opens the car’s back door and he slides the cot onto the seat, just enough room with enough of a shove.