The Family Arsenal Read online

  ‘Pick it up,’ said Hood softly.

  ‘I’m going to nail you.’

  He came at Hood, lunging with his arms out, landing a glancing punch on his upper arm. But Hood batted him away, and Weech falling back kicked at him; he was tall and nearly toppled himself with the kick.

  ‘Pick it up!’

  Hood, breathless, had sobbed the command. He took Weech by the shoulders, and pulled him forward and down as he raised his knee quickly, cracking it into Weech’s face. Weech started to fall, but Hood kept him up, punching him erect with the force of his fists, catching the underside of Weech’s jaw and lifting his head. Then he let Weech drop. He fell backwards, against a car and slipped down, leaning into each contour as flexibly as a descending snake. Weech’s trouser cuffs were hitched to his knees and his sleeves to his elbows; his head was knocked over to one side, his ear against his shoulder. Hood knew he had broken the man’s neck, for when he pulled him away from the car Weech’s head flopped backwards from the ledge of his shoulder and hung there staring blindly behind him, tugging his abnormally long throat. The failing light gave the horrible translucence of a membrane to his white throat.

  Kicking at it with his heel, Hood opened the small side window of the car and unlocked the door. It was a Volkswagen, and though he had no trouble jumping the wires and starting it he could not get Weech into the back seat. He pushed on the man’s legs, but the small space would not contain him. So Weech rode in front, propped by the seat and nodding each time Hood touched the brake. He drove fast up Bell Green and then along the bus route towards Brockley Rise.

  They were such simple skills, like steadying a rifle to hit a target: following the bully and setting him up, faking a left to land a right, hot-wiring a car, and finding a place to dispose of the body – that wooded mound he saw was called One Tree Hill. It was all easy, and if there was blame it was in taking advantage of the simplicity of it. He had not known it would end like this, on a dimly lit path above Peckham. He had thought he would feel triumphant, but he was only angry and his fingers stank of error. It was furiously petty; the man was worth nothing; no one knew. But he was not sorry. The memory of a thing not done was worse than any deed. He had never wanted to go back, and now he had proved he couldn’t.

  He dragged the body into the park and off the path and sank it in grass. Laughter carried down the slope from a thicket of bushes and low hiding trees: lovers. Beneath him London lay on a plain, the humps and spires showing in dim aqueous light, yellow distances like a burnt-out sea drenched and smouldering under a black sky.

  4

  Volta Road, Catford, was in his eyes a corridor of cracked Edwardian aunts in old lace, shoulder to shoulder, shawled with tiles and beaked with sloping roofs; the upper gables like odd bonnets with peaks jutting over the oblongs of window lenses and the dim eyes blinded by criss-crossings of mullioned veils. With the long breasts of their bay-fronts forward and their knees against bruised, clawed steps, they knelt in perpetual genuflection, their flat grey faces set at one another across the road, as if – gathering dust – they were dying in their prayers. They were tall enough to keep Volta Road in shadow for most of the day. In among those four-storey houses one’s primness stood out in the senility, paler than all the rest, with a low hedge and clematis beside the door and a garden gnome fishing in a dry bird-bath, Number Twelve, Gawber’s.

  He walked towards it tonight in a mood of distress, hurrying home to be calmed. Once, this road had the preserved well-tended look of the nearby roads of lesser houses, small-shouldered bungalows with freshly painted trim, owned by families for their cosy size and kept in repair. But the houses on Volta – with servants’ bells in every room and names like The Sycamores – had fallen into the hands of speculators and building firms and enterprising landlords – who partitioned them with thin walls, sealing off serving-hatches and doors, building kitchens in back bedrooms, installing toilets in broom cupboards, bolting a sink or a cooker on a landing so that the stacked dishes were in full view of the street. Many of the houses were hives or insects’ nests, every bed-sitting room a tiny home in which people were battened down like weevils, murmuring to other families through the chipboard walls. The density was obvious from the panels of buzzer bells on the front doors or the clusters of unwashed milk bottles on the top steps.

  Mr Gawber had been born in Number Twelve and he had grown up in it, moving into the front bedroom with Norah when, ten years after his father, his mother died. He had attended the boys’ school, St Dunstan’s, at the top of the road and the Anglican church at the bottom. Now the church was Baptist and mostly black; it had gone simple: he stayed away. He had seen the street’s residents grow old and die or retire to the country, and after the war the houses had moved into a phase of decline that was, even now, unchecked. The occupants were numerous, they were every human colour, and the street was made nearly impassable by their parked cars. The street had been lined with elms; the trees had risen, almost to the height of the house-tops, and the boughs had met over the street. Then they were cut down. The killing had taken a week, and hearing the drone of the saws Mr Gawber felt they were cutting his arms off. The stick-like saplings planted in their place had gone quickly, after one season of promising leaves – that autumn children had snapped their tender branches and used them for swords and spears. The window-boxes were empty, the hedges torn out, the gardens paved for cars and motor-bikes. In three front gardens old wheel-less cars rotted with their doors ajar. It was not a bad road – there were many worse – but it would never improve. Eventually it would be bought wholesale by the council and boarded up and rained on, then pulled down and tall blocks of flats built on it. That was the pattern. Out here there was nothing worth preserving, not even sentiment, for that had passed away with the older residents who had gone when the trees had.

  The native families were dispersed, and Mr Gawber thought: I am a relic from that other age. Latterly, he had studied the new families. They were limpers and Negroes and Irishmen who wore bicycle clips; dog-faced boys in mangy fur coats and surly mothers with red babies and children with broken teeth and very old men who inched down the sidewalk tapping canes. All of them escapees who had arrived and would never go. There was a tall Chinese and his wife in Number Eight and an Indian with a blue Landrover next door – he washed the huge thing on Sunday mornings with his radio going. Mr Gawber had fit them into houses, matching their colours with names on the bell panels. He did not know them well; they did not seem to know each other, and oddest of all, none of the darker people wore socks. Tropical folk with tropical names: Wangoosa, Aroma, Palmerston, Churchill, Pang. Estate agents and men with unreliable eyes and dandruff on their shoulders had tried, first with leaflets pushed through the letter-slot and finally by bumptious visits, to gain possession of Mr Gawber’s house. They sat on Mr Gawber’s sofa with their knees apart and spoke ominously of encroaching blacks, using their own unlucky hostages as an oblique threat; they told Mr Gawber there was a nice class of owner-occupier and more fresh air in Orpington and often they alluded to the length of Volta Road that had already fallen to them, as if to show that it was only a matter of time before they would have it entirely. But Mr Gawber held on. Orpington? He was a Londoner. And he would not surrender his father’s house.

  In winter it was tolerable; it had a bleakness Mr Gawber liked. The cold rain composed it, blew the newspapers into corners, restored the black shine to the street and kept the limpers indoors. Rain tidied it and gave London back some of her glamour, even some of her youth: the city was designed for grim weather, not crowds. It was best in drizzle or gleaming darkly under a thin layer of ice. Then Mr Gawber felt an affection for it and saw the pelted dripping lamps on the platform at New Cross as magical jelly moulds mounted on Arabian posts, or he lingered on Catford Hill to watch the heaving rain-reddened buses.

  But winter was distant tonight. Mr Gawber walked down the sidewalk feeling spied-upon. In the warm weather that started the poisons in bricks and woke
the smell of decay the life in those houses spilled into Volta Road – babies were wheeled out for approval; youths met and tinkered with motor-bikes and taunted girls; arguments turned into fights, shameless courtships into loud weddings. There, on the steps of Palmerston’s he had seen one on a Saturday afternoon, a wedding party enlivened by music from steel dustbins, the guests’ lavender buttocks on windowsills, all the people using the occasion to raise their voices. They hollered and laughed and late at night the party broke up, leaving pools of vomit all the way to the corner. This evening they were out, Wangoosa mending his bicycle, Churchill dandling his baby, the Indian tuning his Landrover, each one claiming his portion of the road. He wished these families away.

  Mr Gawber destroyed it with his eyes. He policed the ruins and found the idlers guilty of causing a nuisance and a breach of the peace, of unlawful assembly, uttering menaces, outraging the public modesty and tax evasion. He blew a shrill whistle and had them carried off, then levelled the road, reducing the houses to a field of broken bricks and lumber; and he let the grass reassert itself and cover the rubble with its green hair. It would serve them right. The summer’s disorder, those hot lazy mobs, made him wish for a cleansing holocaust – some visible crisis, black frost combined with an economic crash. It was certainly coming: a slump, a smothering heaviness, a power cut and a blinding storm stopping lifts between floors and silting up the Thames, and but for the tolling of funeral bells there would be silence. Hardship was a great sorter. He rather enjoyed the thought of deprivation, candlelight, shortages, paying with official vouchers and coupons, and cold baths with home-made soap. He included himself in the challenge. It would be a fair test for everyone, like the war, that last dose of salts. Let it all come down! The foolish would go to the wall, but those who endured, and jolly good luck to them, would be the better for it. It would not be easy for him at his age – even harder for poor Norah – but he’d survive the collapse. It was a matter of patience, belt-tightening and book-keeping. In that sense he knew he was the older sort of Englishman: he valued decency above all things, and hardship, testing instinct, only made decency a greater prize.

  Once, he had been calm, but this summer – was it those Irish bombs? – the city and its faces overwhelmed him with thoughts of ruin. He was not angry but apprehensive. His imagination exaggerated his simple feeling, and he never wished for the worst without an accompanying sense of shame and a frown of guilt he knew passers-by could read on his face.

  The pain was not only his. Often he came home to Norah and knew from her eyes she had been blubbing.

  He fitted his latchkey and peered at the red and green stained-glass window on the door for the shadow of Norah. Then he entered and met the familiar smell of dry carpets and dead relations. Home was that odour of furnishings and family, and an obscurer unfragrant one in the air of your own skin.

  ‘Rafie?’

  His mother had called him that. The name had stuck, though Norah only used it when she feared something was wrong, to get near to his worry.

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘You weren’t worried, Noddy?’

  ‘You’ve had a phone-call,’ said Norah, insisting on her alarm. ‘That Araba Nightwing. I didn’t know what to tell her. Rafie, I had no idea where you were!’

  ‘Shambles. Fell asleep on the train, pitched up in Lower Sydenham. Groping around the back end of the borough.’ He laughed, using his age to excuse his mistake: I’m getting feeble, don’t mind me. Nothing about the crossed-line; nothing about the men sparring dangerously in the public house; nothing about his destructive mood. ‘What did Miss Nightwing want?’

  ‘She was upset. I couldn’t understand a word she said. Poor girl.’

  ‘Not poor, Noddy. Her income last year ran to five figures. She’s going to be Peter Pan.’

  ‘She sounded distraught.’

  ‘She’s an excellent actress.’

  ‘She’ll make a lovely Peter Pan.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ He mistrusted actors off-stage: the most convincing were the most suspect. He could not deny their skill, but there was something about their swift ability to persuade that was itself unpersuasive. They did not have a voice of their own and when they attempted one it sounded vulgar and insincere. Their vanity was titanic, their capacity for bluff bottomless. Norah’s respect for them amounted almost to veneration; he was suspicious in the same degree. He had had them as clients his whole life and still did not know them, which was why.

  Norah said, ‘I’ll get your tea.’

  The rest was ritual. He sheathed his umbrella in the tall blue jar, fastened his coat on a hook, laid his briefcase and bowler hat on the table by the stairs and washed his hands. That was London done with. Then he sat in his unlaced shoes and for minutes there was only the tick of the wooden clock in the hall and the sound of the tea going down his throat, and Norah’s finishing first and saying, ‘I needed that.’

  The room was dominated by a painting, blue stripes, an orange sun, a conflagration of red in one corner. He had accepted it in lieu of a small fee, but now the artist was famous and the painting was very valuable. Visitors remarked on it – because of its size and its fiery colour – and Mr Gawber told its story. He was glad to have the story; he had never found the painting much good. And next to the bookshelf, photographs of actors he’d represented, one now in the House of Lords, another the wife of a shipping tycoon, a suicide, a murder victim, several outright failures, a singer who made her name during the war and who in peacetime sank into obscurity: all smiling into their signatures. A fan of theatre programmes twenty years old lay on a small table as casually as if they had been used the previous night – Norah’s doing, and it was she who had framed the programme of the Royal Command Performance.

  Norah said, ‘The butcher saved me some nice chops.’

  They ate together in the back dining room, facing each other across a table whose grain he had memorized as a child on winter nights between algebra problems: there were yellow lyres and unstrung harps in the beautiful wood. But tonight he stared, seeing faces in the table, and he replayed the day’s conversations, all those extraordinary voices: Who’s there? Don’t be so bloody silly. There’s a war on! If he didn’t understand, was he dead?

  Norah said, ‘You’ve gone all quiet, Rafie. Is there anything wrong?’

  Everything. The overheated world has split its shell like a cooking egg. Deranged, deranged. The news was written in blood, and smudges of blistered paint said Arsenal Rule! Let it all come down; now he only bought the paper for its puzzle. Norah leaned to enquire, but he said nothing.

  Norah said, ‘We’ll have a good holiday. You’ll see.’

  He hated the word. He didn’t want a holiday’s brief deception of well-being. He had no intention of repeating last year’s disappointment, when he had sat in a shirt and tie, but with his trousers rolled to his knees, behind a canvas windbreak on a crowded Cornish beach. He had seen gluttonous Yorkshiremen turn into lobsters and tug at children with their claws. Sand blew between the pages of his book, which the sun prevented him from reading. The high-spirited parents, to amuse their children, disfigured the beach with deep trenches too far from the tide-mark to be altered by the sea, and so the scars on the sand remained as an appropriate parody of invasion on this littered beach-head. Holidays required skills Mr Gawber did not possess: pounding posts into the sand; humping and unflexing beach-chairs; acting as a waiter – with a clumsy tea-tray – for Norah. He endured it, praying for it to end, wishing the skies to darken and those families to be rained on. It was the sun – the sun maddened the English and turned them into farting Spaniards. The holiday, that rest at Polzeath, had exhausted him, and though Norah still spoke of it with pleasure it had taken two weeks at Rackstraw’s for him to regain his former grip on things.

  Norah said, ‘If we’d had children we’d have our own grandchildren by now. They love the beach.’

  A sadness. It was a son they’d had. He had lived for twelve hours an
d they hadn’t had the heart to name him. Baby Gawber, the death certificate read. Mr Gawber saw him once, and that was thirty years ago, but not a day went by that did not throw up that memory of the infant. He seemed to grow into manhood in his mind, and Mr Gawber always recalled with solemn clarity the chipped paint in the room where he had been told the news. For the second time that day, he remembered his boy.

  Norah said, ‘You’ll want to listen to the wireless.’

  It was late. The Proms concert was half over. He wouldn’t listen. The second half was always modern, thin and incomprehensible, unexpected pluckings and bongs and vagrantly sorrowing note shifts. It was soulless stuff. He preferred the coughing between movements to the music itself.

  Norah said, ‘You’ve left half your meal. I did those runner beans especially for you.’

  They tasted of dust. There was dust in the air, and outside in the street he could hear – even from this back room – the shouts of his neighbours, frighteningly loud, the honk of common speech. It could have been a riot, the voices looters’, the slapping feet fleeing felons’. But no, it was always that in summer, the ordinary tyranny of noise.

  Norah said, ‘They’re at it again.’

  Mr Gawber finished his meal. He ate the beans for Norah’s sake and knew as he did so they would rouse him in the night and make froth in his stomach. He went into the parlour and listened to Norah busy at the kitchen sink. At nine o’clock he heard the television, the yak of typewriters that preceded the news, and the factual voice of the newsreader, Robert Dougall: Ireland, bombs, the Prime Minister warned today, record crowds. Phrases reached him; he did not want to hear more. The newsreader said good night, and he heard Norah’s ‘Good night, Robert!’ She usually replied to salutations on the damned thing.