Remembrance Day

‘Do I happen to know this fly gent?’

Letting a little more of the liquid run down his throat, Tebbutt decided to tell his boss everything. Yarker listened intently, sucking a long grass from the hedge behind him.

‘Pity you was carrying that credit card,’ he commented, when Tebbutt finished. ‘They’re a trick of the banks to get you in their power. If you’ve got money, carry it round in fivers. If you haven’t got money, go round with empty pockets. You’re a townee, that’s your problem.’

‘I love the way you blunt countrymen see everything in black and white. What if you’ve got too much money?’

‘Get married.’

‘Or buy a pig?’

‘I’d like to see this bugger Linwood’s eye in black and white. He got you over a barrel proper, didn’t he? Tell you what, go and confront him tomorrer, that’s Saturday, demand your rightful money back, and tell him if he don’t hand it over by Monday we’ll beat him up. That’s straightforward, isn’t it? He should understand that.’

He stretched himself out on the dry ground, hands clasped at the back of his head, satisfied with his own plan.

Tebbutt tried to explain his latest thoughts. ‘I’m afraid the poor sod may not have the three hundred to give back. That’s what I’m afraid of. Having worked with him, I know his problems. If I press him, it may only get him in trouble with his father. I was wondering if it wasn’t better to go and have a word with his bank manager. I know he banks—’

‘What? I must have been falling into a light doze here. I thought for a moment as you uttered the dreadful words “bank manager”. No, you’ve got to have it out with the bugger straight. No other party involved.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘’Corse I am, boy, and don’t you never doubt it. Now, time’s up. I ent paying you to lie about drinking Coke. See if you can make an impression on this here soil, and I’ll give some thought to your problem.’

‘Thank you, Uncle Greg.’ He sat where he was for a moment, listening to the second-rate music issuing from Pauline’s radio before returning to his work.

On Saturday mornings in season, Ruby worked and Ray did not. He drove her into Fakenham to the cake shop, keeping the car to a crawl, to the annoyance of other drivers, so that they could talk over anew the problem of the debt. He had hoped for a cheque from Linwood in the morning’s post. It had not arrived.

‘You’ll have to go over to Hartisham and confront him,’ Ruby said. ‘It’s our money. We’ve got every right to get it back. But keep that goon Yarker out of this. You don’t want to be had up for GBH.’ She laughed.

‘Supposing he’s even now preparing to drive over to us and return the money. He did say he’d pay it back by the weekend. Then he’d be offended if I showed up there this morning. It would look as if we didn’t trust him.’

‘We don’t trust him.’

Agnes had been let in on their problem over breakfast since they could not keep it to themselves. Agnes had her own indignant opinion.

‘What you should do, Ray, is get on to your bank and cancel the payment. Don’t let it go through. Three hundred pounds is three hundred pounds, I mean to say. It was a year’s wages when I was a young girl.’

He frowned. ‘Forget about Victorian times. This is now.’

Agnes said no more, withdrawing hurt from the discussion.

It’s no fun stuck in this chair. He ought to understand that. Your bottom goes numb after a bit. Of course I hark back to the old days. I was properly alive then. It’s very rude of him. I reckon it was because of his way of behaving that Jenny ran off and joined the CND. She couldn’t stand her father any more.

Still, all families have their differences, I suppose. I was lucky. Good husband, nice couple of girls, Ruby and Joyce. Well, Joyce was nice till she married that builder. All through the war, I was terrified Bill was going to be killed, him being at sea, but he came through safely. Never torpedoed.

First thing I ever remember was the war. I’d be, let’s see, about seven. That was the Great War … And I was asleep when there was this terrific bang. I remember sitting up in bed. We were living down in Southampton then, of course. I got up and went through to Mum’s room and the far wall was missing. There was the sky and our garden where the wall used to be, and the early morning sun shining in. Mum and Dad were sitting up in bed looking surprised. And what I thought was … sounds silly now … ‘How beautiful!’ I was clutching my golliwog.

So we went to live with Auntie Flo down the road from us. Poor old Auntie Flo, I liked her. She was fun. It would be 1917. Yes, that’s it, because she had lost Uncle Herbert the year before, fighting in France, so there was plenty of room in her house. I was as proud as punch, telling the kids at school as we’d been bombed out.

Years later, perhaps that was after I married Bill, Mum heard me telling someone we’d been bombed out when I was a kid, and she corrected me, saying it was a gas main blew up and not a German bomb at all. But I always somehow connected it with the Germans. The entire wall, gone like that, and the sun shining in, lighting up the room …

Bill and I had a lot of fun … Purser on a P & O liner, so he was away a lot of the time, and I pretty well brought up Ruby and Joyce on my own. But when he came home, well, we always had parties and presents. The thirties … Looking back, I reckon they were the best time of my life. Somehow, after the war, the second one, Bill wasn’t quite the same. He used to be very depressed at times … I suppose we were getting older by then …

Ruby was always our pet. We ought to have made more of Joyce, but she was more difficult. I suppose she’s paying us back now by never having me to stay with her and her husband in their posh house in Norwich … Still, things could be worse. It’s quite nice here, and Ray really isn’t such a bad chap. At least Ruby likes him, and that’s half the battle …

Although Ray had dismissed Agnes’s remark over breakfast, he took her advice and went to his bank.

He always felt apologetic in the bank. Even the modest Fakenham branch oppressed him with its pretence that money was easy to acquire, easy to spend. He looked at the posters on the wall, offering him huge loans so that he could buy a new car or house, or take a holiday in Bermuda; immune to such seductions, Ray nevertheless felt that he was the only man banking here who could not afford to take advantage of such offers.

It had to be said, however, that none of the other customers looked particularly rich, though some wore suits and ties. I’m glad that someone’s keeping up the country’s standards, he told himself and, slightly amused, went up to one of the girls behind the counter. She explained to him in some detail why it was impossible for the manager to interfere with any credit card transaction, which did not go through the bank but through a central accounting system in Northampton.

Was she sympathetic or condescending? he asked himself, returning to the comfortable anonymity of the streets. The little bitch had probably just come off a training course in Purley or somewhere.

He drove slowly out of town and along the road to Hartisham but stopped before reaching East Barsham. Other traffic roared by as he pulled up in the gateway to a field.

By the side of the road a phone-booth stood knee-deep in cowparsley and alexanders. From it he could ring Mike. It would save him the embarrassment of a personal encounter. He sat for a while, thinking over what he would say. As he walked back to the booth, he could hear Mike’s voice clearly in his head. Oh, hello, Ray. I’m sorry you had to ring me. Jean and I were just going to pop over to see you and Ruby – you know Jean has always had a bit of a crush on you. Yes, I’ve got the money, of course. I had a slight problem or I’d have been in touch sooner. We’ll be over in about an hour, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for getting me out of a hole. You know what an awkward cuss Joe Stanton is – trusts no one.

The Linwood number was ringing. It was Jean who answered.

Immediately she spoke, the sound of her voice, the intonations she used, conjured up her face, her figure, and the way she stood. Ray saw in inner vision her dark old kitchen with the portrait of her father-in-law above the grate, and Jean with her dark hair about her cheeks. He also heard the change in her voice when he announced himself.

‘Oh, Jean, hello. How are you? Could I speak to Mike?’

‘Mike’s still over at Pippet Hall. What exactly do you want?’

‘Well, it’s something really between the two of us.’

Her tone was unyielding. ‘It’s about the money, is it?’

‘Jean, it’s about the three hundred quid I lent Mike at the beginning of the week, and I didn’t want to bother you—’

‘I’ve got quite enough problems here, Ray, thanks very much, without being pestered for money just now.’

‘Look, Jean, it’s not a case of—’

In the same undisturbed voice, she cut in, saying, ‘Michael will repay you that money next week, OK? Does that satisfy you, because right now we’re involved with the suicide at Pippet Hall. Goodbye.’

Suicide? Tebbutt said to himself, as he replaced the receiver. What was the cheeky woman on about? Inventing excuses not to pay, rather as he had invented excuses not to stay with Noel Linwood; but at least he’d been drunk on that occasion. What a misery! She was lying – well, forced to lie, of course, because the Linwoods were dirt poor and still keeping up a middle-class façade. Bloody suicide, indeed: ‘bankruptcy’ was the word she was looking for.

Ray took a walk in the field to try and calm down. The sheep moved grudgingly out of his way, as if, he thought, they too had borrowed money from him.

He could write a book about being poor, except that it would be so awful that no one would read it. The poor would not read it. They could not afford to read, they had an increasing contempt for reading, being slaves to the video machine; in any case, they knew all about the miserable subject. The rich would not read it. Why? Because being rich they did not want to know. And why should they?

Every day, almost every hour, brought a humiliation unknown to solvency. He did not want to have that conversation with Jean. Moreover, looked at coolly, the situation was such that she probably did not want to have that conversation with him. She liked him, and maybe more than that, though not a word on the subject had ever passed between them. She too was in bad financial straits, poor dear.

He did not want to be walking about this field, trudging through sheep shit. He did not want to be wearing these clothes – in particular, not these boots and these trousers. He did not want to be wearing his patched underclothes. He would not want to eat whatever it was he was going to have to eat for lunch (nor did he want to call it ‘dinner’, as did most of the people with whom he associated). He did not want his poor wife to work in a cake shop, a sign of genteel poverty if ever there was one.

This evening, he would most probably go out and get pissed at the Bluebell. He did not particularly want to do that, but there was little else to do in North Norfolk on a Saturday night if you had not got two pence to rub together.