Flight into Camden Read online

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’ He sounded sincere. ‘I won’t be too late tonight. If you want to come, Margaret, you come.’ He waited for me to refuse. He called cheerfully to us all as he went out.

  ‘There goes a real smart spiv,’ my father said.

  ‘Well, I’ve told you,’ my mother called through to him in the living-room. ‘You shouldn’t interfere.’

  ‘I don’t like seeing him act the king an’ all round here.’

  ‘Well don’t say I haven’t told you.’ She was weary with him. She shrugged her shoulders at me. ‘It’s just like him never to learn his lesson.’ She looked at me hopelessly, aware of his distress.

  But we could hear my father still talking loudly. ‘When I think what I’ve sacrificed for him and Alec … for him, any road. And our Margaret.’

  My mother dried her hands. She went through to the room. ‘I’ve told you, Reg. What’s done is done. We’ve made them like that, and it’s not right to keep bringing it up like this. It’s not fair.’

  But behind her words were her own misgivings, and her own unspoken questions. Where has Michael’s knowledge got him as a person; why does he come back to clutter up the home? Why isn’t Margaret married? And why are you always humiliating yourself in front of them? And why – why am I so resigned, so controlled about it when it tears the life from me?

  But her affection prevented her from doing more than goad him on the surface. In her late middle life her resignation was religious, a love-smothering thing. She struggled to look outwards all the time and wanted my father to do the same.

  When she’d finished shouting he said nothing.

  She came into the scullery and we worked in silence. We sensed him, as if his feelings burnt like a furnace in the next room.

  2

  I heard the band for several minutes before it flashed in the sunlight at the top of the hill. Then it was a mass of blue and red as it jerked its way down towards me. The crowd thickened and pressed in towards the road. I saw Howarth.

  I recognized his fair hair first, then his sun-flushed face, and those slouched shoulders of his tweed jacket. His clothes were a kind of uniform that seemed never to vary.

  He moved slowly through the crowd at the side of the road, waiting for the front of the procession, with its famous Labour leader and large brass band, to draw abreast of him. The long column of miners, their huge embroidered banners unfurled between tall, varnished poles, had crept slowly from the assembly point in the cattle market square and, like two similar groups at the other side of town, was converging on the arena at the City Park.

  It was windy, and the stocky miners, in their dark, baggy suits, had great difficulty in keeping the huge sails of their pennants upright. I waited for my father’s contingent and its decorated lorry, but I’d only time to glimpse my father clutching a rope attached to his district banner before Howarth saw me and blinked his eyes in recognition.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said. His eyes were damp and glistening.

  ‘Oh, hello.’ He shrugged, his hands swinging helplessly at his sides. He shook his head in shy despair. ‘It’s nice to see you again.’ He held my hand lightly to shake it. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  I followed his gaze as he turned towards the coloured floats, packed with fat, grinning wives and children, waving and shouting at everything around them. I was aware of them through his eyes: their amusement and their rude gestures, the miners swaying about the road as they clung to the poles and ropes. I wanted to spoil his spectator’s feeling.

  But when my father came opposite, clutching the guy line of his crimson and yellow banner, a pleased smile of indulgence on his face, I couldn’t help catching Howarth’s arm and pointing. ‘There’s my father!’ I shouted.

  He nodded stiffly, impulsively. He began to walk abreast of the procession. ‘I’m half choked with all this.’ He held on to my elbow tightly and guided me through the thickening crowd. He seemed to accept it: that the crowd had united us.

  We could follow the trail of the banners now as they turned into the main park gates and became separated amongst the spring foliage and branches. ‘All these bloody bands and banners,’ he said, laughing at the simplicity of his feelings. ‘Have you ever seen so many crude emblems before?’ He was tense, excited not only by the scene but by his own scepticism of it.

  Inside the park the crowds were so thick, spectators caught up with demonstrators, lorries wandering loose like huge beasts amongst the banners and the flags, that we were carried along helplessly. Ahead, from the direction of the arena, loudspeakers were urging some discipline on the gathering, occasionally interrupted by manic cries as someone encouraged the already assembled crowd to sing.

  The noise grated harshly through the trees like a mechanical insect. ‘A … a … ar … arbide with me … ee …’ Howarth pushed me forward more urgently as we neared the arena. ‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘Just look at them all.’ It was a boyish wonder, as if, somehow, it might all be found trivial.

  Some brass bands had come to a standstill and were depositing their instruments in neat piles under the trees; one band stood in isolation up a deserted footpath, blowing and thumping independently for its own amusement. Others had collapsed on to the grass mound at the side of the path and were drinking beer from bottles which were being unloaded from a lorry. Groups of men were scuttling everywhere with crates of beer. The marquees floated on the black sea of the mass, flapping and swaying in the wind as the banners were slowly lowered around them and disassembled with great shouts, and carefully rolled up. It seemed that the trees swayed and the canvas billowed not with the wind but with the strain of the throbbing agitation below, the flanks of the marquees expanding and contracting like giant animals terrified of their surroundings.

  ‘Whoever’s going to control all this?’ Howarth shouted behind me. He forced me through a gap, and along with a disintegrating band we overflowed on to the grass. I straightened my coat and took off my hat.

  Howarth looked at the hat smilingly. He said something, but it was lost in the crowd. When I bent towards him he said, ‘I wonder what makes you wear a hat?’ He had no thought for his familiarity.

  We began to climb the grass slope overlooking the arena. But by now we were aware of one another.

  He was panting in a stifled, flushed way, hiding his fatigue. ‘It’s just about dry enough here,’ he said. We’d climbed almost to the top and found a space. He knelt on one knee and felt the grass with his palm. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, and looked up at me, full of a sudden curiosity. A man just below us was playing softly on a trumpet.

  The three columns had coiled and interlocked in the arena. The tails of the procession, interrupted every hundred yards or so by still more brass bands and coloured floats, were dragging themselves through the gates and disgorging their members in every direction. The hillside below us began to fill up as the arena, now black and scarcely moving, was packed to its short terrace boundaries.

  On a stage like a boxing ring several ant figures were struggling from the arms of the crowd, brushing down their coats, and dropping on to the wooden chairs and benches. Someone had handed up a bottle of ale, and the Labour leader was ostentatiously applying it to his lips, whether it was full or not, and getting a cheer for his matey gesture. He made one or two comments into the microphone which raised a burst of laughter and a fractured applause from those round the platform; then he sat down. He vigorously dusted the turn-ups of his trousers.

  ‘I seem to be always finding you with a crowd,’ I said. Howarth leaned back on his elbow, and screwed his eyes up in the sun. But he was not relaxed: his whole body was tense and alive. ‘But it’s not often you can see a thing like this,’ I told him without thinking, hating to express my feelings to him. He was impatient, wanting to find his own reaction and convince himself about it.

  ‘All these people,’ he said. He watched them with a certain helplessness, as if they had a great deal to do with him. He turned to look
at me. ‘I’ve seen you about town,’ he said.

  ‘Why didn’t you say hello?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ve seen you once or twice. But you were striding along so fast I thought it best not to interfere.’

  ‘Interfere?’ The loudspeakers were beginning to crackle with the first speech and he turned to stare down at the arena. ‘There’re so many of them,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t like people coming near you?’

  He waited, then said, ‘I like them to keep their distance, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Then you’re like me,’ I told him, almost vehemently.

  ‘Am I?’ He smiled to himself. He was stroking the short grass with the palm of his hand. ‘Yet I don’t mean physically. You don’t like to be touched. Aren’t I right? I noticed down there when I got hold of your arm. You went rigid.’

  We both looked at the crowd below. It was quiet, like a dying fire. The voice over the loudspeakers was sharp and strong but from this distance unintelligible.

  ‘It’s the emotional kind of touching I draw away from,’ he said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘People who drop a little bit of feeling here, a little bit there. Who can never commit themselves.’

  ‘There aren’t many of those.’

  ‘Aren’t there? Then I must meet them all.’

  ‘You never told me your name when I met you,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t I?’ He looked genuinely surprised.

  ‘Was it because you didn’t think it was worth while?’

  ‘No, of course not. I don’t know why I didn’t. Why didn’t you ask?’

  ‘I thought you might have had some reason. Some people are like that.’ I wanted to laugh at him, but he ignored it. ‘My brother told me in any case. But he didn’t tell me your Christian name.’

  ‘It’s Gordon. I don’t like it – I used to be called “Oh Gord!” at school.’

  ‘Was that because you were stuck-up?’

  ‘No.’ He watched me smiling at him. ‘Perhaps they thought I was an idealist. Pretentious, therefore.’

  ‘I don’t like calling people by their real names if they mean something to me. It makes them sound as if they could easily be somebody else. Do you know what I mean? Somebody strange, that you don’t know.’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘What did your brother have to say about me?’ he asked a moment later.

  ‘I don’t think he likes art, or artists.’

  ‘I can understand that. But I’m no artist.’

  ‘He probably counts you as one.’

  ‘Well.’ He sighed. ‘That is a mistake. And I quite liked your brother. He’s made a good impression at the university, you know. What does your father think about it all?’

  ‘Him and Michael – they just haven’t learned how to get in touch with one another yet. Not since Michael and I went to the grammar school.’

  ‘You went to a grammar school?’

  ‘Edward the Fourth. Then a secretarial college in the evenings.’

  ‘I can see your brother making short work of your father: he’s a kind of intellectual gangster.’

  ‘That sounds terrible. It’s not like that at all.’

  ‘It’s a habit of his class. Your brother always shows he’s working class. He has a habit of taking advantage of the disinterested nature of his work to make personal claims for it – and other things. It’s a workman’s habit.’

  ‘You sound as though you don’t like him one bit.’

  ‘Oh, but I do. I like him a lot. But don’t tell him that.’ He laughed, elated. He pulled himself up into a sitting position.

  ‘I think you’re very strange,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes.’ But he didn’t smile.

  ‘You sound shut in. Your opinions and things … as if they’re your opinions only.’

  ‘How else should I have them?’

  ‘You could have shared opinions, like other people’s.’

  ‘Do you really mean that?’ He looked at me closely, leaning over his knees, his face turned sideways to me.

  ‘What should I have said, then?’

  ‘I think you’re trying to suggest you find me lonely.’ I hadn’t thought of it, but I said, ‘I think you are.’

  He turned his head at an exceptionally loud burst of applause; the movement was thoughtless, impulsive like an animal’s. ‘That sort of thing is bound to spoil them,’ he said.

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  His eyes lit up with amusement, and he said nothing, looking slowly at me.

  ‘Do your moods usually change so quickly?’ I said.

  There was something strange about him, as if he might be afraid that he was laughing at me, or at himself. ‘It’s a middle-age affliction,’ he said.

  ‘What sort of people do you go about with? Are they from the university?’

  ‘Not as a rule.’ He was undecided how much he would tell me. ‘I’ll introduce you to one or two if you’re so interested,’ he said.

  ‘Do you like teaching art?’

  ‘I teach Industrial Design. But then, if I really told you what that meant you’d have no respect left for me at all.’

  ‘Why don’t you like art?’

  ‘I do. But I don’t like all these questions. In any case, I shall have to be going.’

  ‘Why?’ I tried not to be offended by his clumsiness. I could only smile and shake my head. ‘As soon as we start talking one of us has to go.’

  He looked at his wrist watch. ‘I shall have to go,’ he said. ‘I was on my way somewhere when I met you.’

  ‘And now I’ve frightened you off.’

  ‘I’m being damned rude, I know,’ he said, offended. He waited for me to accept his half-apologetic stare.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I told him.

  He stood up, and looked down at me, pale now, but uncertain. Beyond him the crowd were cheering at the end of the first speech. ‘I’ll see you, then,’ he said.

  For a while I sat and watched the arena. He set off down the hill, then turned to wave quickly, and was soon swallowed up in the crowd. Something had suddenly drained all his interest. It seemed as though he’d been driven away.

  It was hopeless even to think of finding my father. Now I didn’t want him to know that I’d seen him. I turned away and climbed over the brow of the hill to the opposite exit from the park. A tremendous burst of applause echoed through the trees. Some birds were flung up, cawing, into the air.

  ‘I thought this was a bit much,’ Michael said. ‘I found it in my rack at the department.’ He’d interrupted his evening’s conversation with my mother to look suddenly at me. The university had found him a small flat in town, and he visited home now once a week. He put his hand into the inside pocket of his suit and brought out a white envelope. In spite of his resentment it was still clean and smooth.

  ‘Why, who’s it from?’ my mother said, watching me open it and pull out a slip of bright yellow paper. The handwriting was large, black and mechanical.

  ‘It’s from that character she met at Christmas,’ he said. My mother couldn’t remember. She frowned with curiosity. ‘That dance I took her to.’

  Her interest turned to me as I looked up from reading the letter. She followed my eyes anxiously.

  ‘I was silly to bring it,’ Michael said.

  ‘Why did you, then?’

  ‘I should have given it back to him.’

  ‘He wants to meet me. Is that so very bad?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said.

  But my mother interrupted him. ‘I’d like to know,’ she said quietly. ‘Is there anything the matter with our Margaret seeing this man?’

  ‘I don’t mind who she sees,’ he said. ‘I resent acting as a post-box and messenger, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s a lecturer,’ she suggested heavily, paining herself with such open curiosity.

  ‘He
teaches in the Art College and he comes over to our common room occasionally. Though he’s no right there at all. He’s made a habit of it, and he’s got one or two friends there.’

  ‘And you don’t want to help Margaret, then?’ she said. Her calmness irritated Michael. ‘She’s got few enough friends as it is.’

  ‘All right then – I don’t like the man. But that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Is he a clean man, Margaret?’ she asked, stressing the adjective which she used to inquire about all my men friends. But she added quickly, ‘I mean – is he decent?’

  ‘I hardly know him. But he’s as decent as anyone else I know.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. In his middle thirties, I suppose.’ I tried to control my impatience with her, but she was affected by Michael’s attitude, and also by the letter’s unusual delivery.

  ‘It seems, you know, very personal, sending a message to you like that,’ she suggested.

  ‘I don’t think it’s very good either,’ I told her.

  ‘And he’s not ever been married,’ she stated clumsily.

  ‘You don’t have to be like this, Mother. He’s not married and I hardly know him.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’ Michael said. He looked at me slowly.

  ‘Yes.’ I stared demandingly at him.

  ‘All right,’ he said, raising his hands in apology.

  I couldn’t identify his tone. When he went, my mother, as always, saw him to the front door, and stood waving into the darkness until the sound of his footsteps had faded. When she came back in she sat knitting and didn’t talk.

  I saw him some time before he saw me. He was going into a phone booth the other side of the island in Albert Square. I crossed over and sat on one of the seats beneath the two royal statues. The little crescent-shaped garden between the statues was full of tulips, colourless in the early street lights, arranged symmetrically around a dry fountain.

  Howarth had propped his head on his hand, his body leaning across the narrow width of the box, and he was speaking slowly and patiently into the phone, as if tediously explaining something. He listened for long stretches, then gave several brief replies, nodding vigorously, in assurance. He put the phone down and rubbed his face, and came out.