A Summer in the Twenties Read online

  ‘How are things, Mrs. Barnes?’

  ‘Well as can be expected, Mr. Hankey.’

  She spoke as though the strike were a painful but not fatal ailment afflicting a near relative.

  ‘It’s a bad business,’ he said.

  ‘That it is. Baxter’s they’re rationing the bread.’

  ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘Language, if you please, Mr. Hankey.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Of course . . . but why should they need to ration anything? I can understand people not having the money to buy food during a strike, but the idea of the food not being there for them to buy—it’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Nineteen eleven it was the same, Mr. Hankey.’

  ‘Yes, but that was a rail strike, wasn’t it? And in any case isn’t it only coal the railways aren’t carrying? Besides, I thought the flour mills and the bakeries were here, in Hull, and there must be plenty of lorries and so on to get the bread to the shops.’

  ‘It’s not for me to understand,’ said Mrs. Barnes rather stiffly, as though refusing to question the providence of her own severe version of the Deity. ‘Now they’re saying there’s a train of food up at Selby, waiting to be given away for free as soon as the strike’s done with.’

  ‘Who’s saying?’

  ‘It’s all over.’

  ‘I’ll try and find out. You think the owners have put it up there as a kind of bait?’

  ‘The owners! You don’t want to go believing all you hear about them. Mr. Barnes, he’ll tell you it’s the owners own the bakeries, and that’s why there’s no bread in the shops—but then, he’ll tell you anything. You might think he’d gone to Russia, like our Kate did.’

  ‘Did she? She never told me.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Do you think it made much difference to her? I can’t imagine anything or anybody persuading her to be anything other than what she is.’

  ‘You’ve the right of it there, Mr. Hankey. Haven’t you heard speak of our Kate’s Prize-giving Day?’

  ‘No. In fact she talks very little about what she’s seen and done.’

  ‘Head full of foreign nonsense. There’s five decent men, to my knowing, have asked Kate, and she’s said No to the lot of them—and one of them a clerk in the Insurance, so it’s no use her thinking she’s too good for the likes of them.’

  She muttered the history of Kate’s unlucky suitors as if it were something mildly shaming to the whole family, but at the end she gave Tom a quick glance, to see how he had taken the news.

  ‘What happened at the Prize-giving?’ he said.

  ‘That. You don’t want to know about that.’

  ‘Please, Mrs. Barnes.’

  She frowned at him, thin lipped. It was clear that she was eager to tell the story, but needed a formula to demonstrate her own disapproval of something in it as yet unexplained.

  ‘It’s a warning,’ she said at last. ‘When you come to raise bairns of your own, Mr. Hankey, you remember what it did to Kate, Mr. Barnes putting his ideas into her head. Well, you know there’s a Marfleet Boys’ High and a Marfleet Girls’ High? They’re separate, but they have their Prize-giving Day together, and at the end of it all one of the bairns is put up to say thank you to the governors. Naturally it’s mostly one of the boys, but seeing Kate had won every prize they were giving, and the Scripture, and was going off to London on a scholarship, they chose her. Mr. Barnes bought me a new hat, too. There all the governors were, up along the platform in their frock coats, Mr. Smythe and Sir Jack Wansdale and the Reverend Tarrant and Alderman Franks and the rest of them. Mr. Barnes and me we were right close facing them, all among the paying parents because of Kate’s Mam and Dad being passed away. Every time Kate’s name was called out I sat there all scammy with pride in my new hat and watched her climb up to the platform and give her bob to the Mayor and take her book and her certificate. My, I thought, how dainty she’s conducting herself. If only I’d known! Not that she hasn’t always had good manners—you have to say that for her. And at the end, the Mayor took her along the line of the Governors to shake hands with them all, and then he brought her to the front of the platform and told us what an example she was to the rest of them and sat down to listen to her saying thank you. Oh, Mr. Hankey, if only I’d known!’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Why, she stood there, so pink and white and innocent—she should of been a cow-girl, my poor brother-in-law used to say—and I was wishing I’d had another go at that hair of hers to make it respectable, not that . . .’

  She stopped and shook her head, apparently lost in the remembered impossibilities of Kate’s coiffure.

  ‘Do go on, Mrs. Barnes.’

  ‘She didn’t do it to shame me. She swore to me after she didn’t. No, it was Satan put her up to it, him and Mr. Barnes. Never mind the Scripture Prize. She takes a deep breath, throws back her head as if she was going to sing, and yells at us. Not at us, you understand, sitting down there among the paying parents. No, at the back of the hall, where they’d put the parents to stand whose bairns got their schooling free like our Kate did. “Comrades!” she yells . . . My, Mr. Hankey, all round me I felt the whole hall go cold, where a minute before we’d been perspiring in our places. It was July, did I tell you? Kate paid no notice. She stood there and preached at us, like a minister preaching our sins, capitalism and oppression and the time coming for the workers to rise and inherit the earth. She hadn’t been to Russia then, had she? Why, the war was hardly over.’

  ‘How did the Governors take all this?’

  ‘Sat there with faces like tombstones, all in a line. Only I saw the Reverend Tarrant smiling at his fingernails, that way of his. Then Mr. Claythorpe, he was Headmaster, came hustling from behind the Governors and snatched her by the elbow to stop her. They were shouting at the back for her to go on. I had to pull Mr. Barnes down, stop him shouting as well—I was wrong to say he’d put her up to it, Mr. Hankey. It was Satan did that, only Mr. Barnes was to blame in the first place, giving her the ideas for Satan to work with, and the Lord knows what He will say to Mr. Barnes at the day of judgment.’

  ‘What happened next? Did the Headmaster manage to shut her up?’

  ‘He did not, Mr. Hankey. She turned to him, quite calm, and whispered a word or two. Nobody’s ever got it out of her what she said, though there’s been plenty have asked. His face turned white as a china plate and he went stumbling back to his chair and sat there behind the Governors with his head between his hands and all the Governors looking the other way. Kate, she said her say out as if nothing had happened, and went back to her place like she was supposed to. Alderman Franks he stood up and smoothed it all over, talking about her fresh and vigorous approach, and how even scholarship children still have a lot to learn in the great school of life.’

  ‘And that was all?’

  ‘I sent my new hat to the jumble, to show Mr. Barnes what I thought of him and his notions. Mr. Claythorpe, he went and drowned himself in the Holderness Drain.’

  ‘Good . . . I mean Great Scott! How did Kate . . .’

  ‘Off to London by then, hunting for lodgings and such. Somebody, it wasn’t Mr. Barnes or me, must of written and told her. She won’t speak of that, nor of the Prize-giving. I tell you, Mr. Hankey, it’s a sin, is Knowing Best. It is the Sin of Pride.’

  She nodded vehemently, as if saying Amen to her own opinion and at the same time bringing the subject to a close. Tom was used by now to her apparently unlikely talent for long, coherent and often dramatic accounts of past events, but mostly these had been of things which she had not witnessed, and never in any case closely concerned with herself or her family. Now she rose from her stool, peered into the kettle, adjusted the position of a simmering pot and sat down again, but was clearly still restless for something more to expunge the memory of the recalled disaster.

  ‘I never should of told you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m very glad to know. I won’t tell anybody else.’

  ‘It’s the cons
equences they never think on, with their heads right up in the clouds.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She seemed not to have heard him, but sat nodding ever more gently, as though the wavelets of Kate’s long-ago splash were now at last reaching her shoreline. Tom, merely interested and amused by the account of Kate’s outburst, had been ambushed by the sudden introduction of the schoolmaster’s tragedy. He had argued with Kate many times about the effects of action, the difference between results and consequences, endeavouring to communicate some of his own feeling about the unmappable web of lives which hung trembling along its strands, sensitive to apparently remote events, and into which she proposed to plunge the clumsy fist of revolution. But as Kate said, too great a tenderness for the web made deliberate action of any kind impossible. And yet, eventually, one had to act.

  ‘Mrs. Barnes, do you know a man who calls himself Ricardo?’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him.’

  ‘You won’t do that, ever.’

  ‘You know about him, then?’

  ‘Why he can’t go calling himself by his own name . . .’

  ‘It’s the fashion. None of these Russians—Lenin, Trotsky and so on—were christened by those names. I think I may have seen Ricardo. Tall, very thin, shaggy black hair, a friend of Mr. Barnes.

  ‘That’s not him. That’s Walter Dyke.’

  ‘Is he a docker?’

  ‘Ah, no, he’s a seaman. On the timber ships, last I heard.’

  ‘That would be in and out of the Baltic?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘How do you know he’s not Ricardo?’

  She pouted and frowned, as if trying to imply that Ricardo could not be Mr. Dyke or anyone remotely like him. Tom wondered how much she really knew. Dyke—Dick—Richard—Ricardo. That evening on Marfleet Strand Kate had had to argue with Dyke about Tom staying for the meeting. Hadn’t the name been on Inspector Whitehorn’s list, too? And the Baltic trade came very close to Russia . . . At any rate, it would be unfair to go on questioning Mrs. Barnes; if she knew the answer, her loyalties must be as divided as his own, and by now he was even further from certainty as to where those lay. Only the search for Ricardo still seemed to make clear sense, as something that could actually be achieved. The question of whom to betray could wait until he knew what there was to be betrayed. The enlistment of Doyle as a spy could almost be justified in this light; Doyle could serve his apprenticeship, perhaps, as Tom’s spy. And yet . . . Although the purpose of his visit this evening was that circumstances had suddenly seemed to give him a chance to talk to Doyle alone, he was far from sure still what he would say, was reluctant even to think about it.

  As much for his own relief as Mrs. Barnes’s he made her earlier mention of rationing an excuse to tell her about the episode with Dora and the butcher’s boy at Diggleton. She thoroughly enjoyed it, appreciating all the nuances, and responded with a wartime scandal about a Hull butcher who had scanted his ordinary customers so that he could be lavish towards a few citizens who were influential in some club to which he was hoping for election. Mr. Barnes came in as she was reaching the denouement and waited grinning by the door so that she could finish before the necessary relocation of chairs took place.

  ‘Tess, I’m surprised at thee, telling Mr. Hankey that. It’s a parable of capitalism in action, if ever there was one.’

  ‘Exactly the same goes on in your precious Russia,’ snapped Mrs. Barnes, putting his mug precisely on the ring it had made in the chequered oil-cloth during a hundred similar meals and arguments. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr. Hankey?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Tom. ‘I suppose they’d say that it’s an imperfection they hadn’t yet managed to get out of the system.’

  ‘And never will,’ said Mrs. Barnes. ‘They’ve only got to read their Bibles. Man is born to sin.’

  ‘And woman is born to be sinned against,’ said Mr. Barnes. ‘You won’t find our Kate here tonight, Mr. Hankey.’

  Out of the corner of his eye Tom saw a minute movement of skin on Mrs. Barnes’s forehead, nothing that could be called a frown, but quite enough of a warning in the unspoken language in which she and her husband communicated. Mrs. Barnes had very definite ideas about tact, as about everything else. Though there might well be what she would have called an understanding between Kate and Tom, it was improper to draw attention to it until they chose to announce the fact.

  ‘I wasn’t actually looking for her,’ said Tom. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Ernie.’

  ‘None of the lads’ll be going down the gym tonight,’ said Mr. Barnes.

  ‘Yes, I know. I came in on the spur of the moment because I got the chance of a lift into Hull. I shan’t be able to come on Thursday. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve been asked to a party for York races, and it sounds rather fun, but . . .’

  ‘Acourse you must go,’ said Mr. Barnes. ‘Why, you can put a couple of bob on Bold Archer for the Gimcrack. Put it on for Mrs. Barnes here.’

  ‘You dare,’ said Mrs. Barnes, visibly shivering with the wickedness of the suggestion. ‘If I’d known you were a gambling man, Mr. Hankey . . .’

  ‘I’m not. I’ll bet the odd few bob because I’m expected to, but it’s the people I want to go for, not the horses.’

  Again he caught one of those typical flashes of understanding between the Barneses. He did not feel that he had said or done anything to encourage Mrs. Barnes in her belief that his interest in the gym was really only camouflage for his interest in Kate, but it had been difficult to discourage the notion, seeing how much time he and Kate spent together when he was in Hull.

  ‘The only thing that bothers me is Doyle,’ he said hurriedly. ‘We’ve got to keep his momentum up. I wondered if I might take him off for a few rounds after his tea . . .’

  ‘He’ll be at his evening class,’ said Mr. Barnes. ‘Ambitious young fellow, Ernie. Book-keeping.’

  ‘Would there be time after that?’

  ‘You’ll be getting late, Mr. Hankey. I doubt Minnie’ll have your room ready.’

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t have to catch a train. I’m being picked up outside the Alhambra at ten o’clock. Really, I only came on the off chance, because the lift was going.’

  (Almost true. Judy had insisted on his coming, because the girl she had arranged to go to the cinema with had cried off, and she didn’t dare let Mrs. Tarrant know that she was prepared to go on her own. It was not Tom’s sort of film, some stifling weepie she had missed in London, and once clear of Brantingham she was happy to drop the pretence rather than inflict the nonsense on him.)

  ‘Time enough, then, if Ernie’s willing,’ said Mr. Barnes. ‘Give us our meat, Tess, and I’ll nip round and have a word with him before he’s off to his class.’

  In the late evening calm the side-streets had an almost rustic feeling about them, a sense of day-time lives settling to rest and nocturnal creatures not yet stirring. Passing the corner shop Tom said ‘Mrs. Barnes tells me they’ve started rationing the bread.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘That can’t be necessary.’

  ‘Acourse not. Why, go into any of the shops in Hull West, you won’t find empty shelves, will you?’

  ‘I’ll look next time I’m that way.’

  ‘Come a time like this there’s always shortages, because of money being short. Mrs. Baxter won’t go buying bread she can’t sell, will she? She’ll cut her order down.’

  ‘Mrs. Barnes tells me a rumour that there’s a train-load of food waiting up at Selby for free distribution as soon as the strike’s over.’

  ‘Women!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why, that’s stores for when they bring the army in.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. But it came from a chap that’s ways of knowing.’

  ‘Still, I don’t think it can be true. I was talking to my father about the strike a couple of days ago. Anything to do with the army in Yorksh
ire, he hears about it. I’m sure he’d have told me if there were plans to bring them in.’

  ‘I tell you, he’s ways of knowing.’

  ‘How can you be sure? The trouble about people who live by theory—I take it this chap’s a communist—is that they’re always expecting their theories to come true. If Marxist theory suggests that the government will eventually support the owners by force, then the army must be coming, so the food at Selby—if it’s really there—must be for them.’

  ‘He’s been right before,’ said Mr. Barnes obstinately ‘And I can prove it to you, Mr. Hankey. He knew there’d be trouble on Marfleet Strand. Why, he knew there’d be a man looking for me that week . . .’