Daddy listened to what Martha told him. He made no movement nor signal of recognition.
‘Well, that were when he were a lad. He spent most of his time away at boarding school, of course, being from family he’s from. But in summer months, during long holidays, he’d be back round here trying to pick fights with lads. He never had much time for us girls, mind. Not to chat to, anyway. I suppose most teenage boys are like that but him even more so. Sometimes he’d have friends from school come to stay. Never one or two, always a whole gang of them together, when his father was down in London or away elsewhere. They’d have manor to themselves. They were interested in girls then, when they were all together. And some of them were very charming, of course. Real posh boys, well-dressed, immaculately groomed, taught how to speak politely up at that school. And I knew of girls – common, ordinary girls from round here – that went up to manor with them. For a chat and some dinner, like. Well I heard rumours of what had gone on and after a while I stopped listening. Wandt the type of thing I liked to hear about. But I caught enough to know kind of boys they were. And boys like that don’t grow into decent men. Boys who get girls drunk and share them around like a cut of meat.’
‘Safer that way for some boys,’ said Ewart. ‘They can look searchingly into each others’ eyes rather than into terrified faces of girls they’re holding.’
Ewart placed his tea on the floor by his chair. Martha picked it up and placed a thin cork coaster beneath it.
‘So he’s been making more mischief, has he?’ said Ewart.
‘That’s right,’ said Peter. ‘John here would like to take man down.’
Ewart looked my Daddy up and down, from the bottom of his polished work boots to the top of his furrowed forehead.
‘Woundt we all,’ he replied. ‘But he’s not like you or I. He’s a different class. He could be taken down by one of his own and he probably has been. Or that’s his fear. Ever wondered why he bothers with all of us? Ever wondered why he doendt just take his money and muck about amongst his own sort? Well I have. It’s because he can’t. He’s afraid. So he interferes with our lives.’
They talked for hours about the Price business. Martha told stories that she had gathered from many years of listening. Stories from across the West Riding and beyond. Stories of evictions, disappearances, suspected corruption in the county council. They spoke of how it was to be resolved. Ewart talked about direct action. He spoke of the way things had been when people who lived together in the same communities also worked together, drank together, voted together and went on strike together.
I stopped listening after a while and I know that Cathy did as well. There was a dog-chewed tennis ball beneath the table and Cathy and I amused ourselves by softly kicking it to one another. The trick was to kick it with enough accuracy that it would hit Cathy’s feet but lightly enough that it would not bounce away. Then Cathy could retrieve it and roll it into the correct position with the soft sole of her foot and kick it back. Only once did I miss and the ball darted across the room and settled by the radiator beneath the window. Cathy got it back subtly though. The conversation had become so serious that only Daddy noticed the error and he shot his daughter a sly wink.
Revenge. They were speaking of revenge. Revenge against Mr Price and against everything that was invested in him. Lost money that really stood for lost time and lost children that really stood for a kind of immortality, just like Granny Morley had always said.
And then there was Ewart Royce, who had tossed and turned against the slow rot of the decades and against the new order that took him further and further from any kind of future for which he had hoped and imagined and prayed and fought.
When we lived by the coast, Granny Morley had taken us to an old war memorial. It was the sort fashioned in the style of an Anglo-Saxon stone cross with men’s names carved onto each of its four sides in order of military rank. Each time we saw the memorial she told us that millions of men had died dancing in the old style. I had not understood. I had puzzled over her meaning for years and only occasionally came to attach her words to some new and small piece of knowledge about human nature and the history of the world. Something about the thrall of performance and the retarded values of nations. Something about men who play out the same scenes again and again and who try to remedy all blunders and remove all errors in plot and description. Men who wrestle backwards through the acts.
I half listened to the plans that were being made now in this lounge between my father and these new friends. I could not help but feel that they too were dancing in the old style and appealing to a kind of morality that had not truly existed since those tall stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only in dreams, fables and sagas. Only then in the morality of verse.
Chapter Eleven
Spring came in earnest with clouds of pollen and dancing swifts. The little birds, back here to nest after a flight of a million miles, were buffeted by the wind, which blew hot then cold and clipped unripened catkins off the ash. The swifts were too light to charge at the gusts like gulls or crows, and through them I saw wind as sea. Thick, pillowy waves that rolled at earthen, wooded shores and threw tiny creatures at jutting rocks. The swifts surfed and dived and cut through the invisible mass, which to them must have roared and wailed as loudly as any ocean on earth, only to catch the air again on the updraft and rise to the crest. They were experts. They knew how it was done. And they brought the true Spring. Not the Spring that sent timid green shoots through compacted frost-bitten soil but the Spring that came with a rush of colour, a blanket of light, unfurling insects and absent, missed, prodigal birds on this prevailing sou’westerly.