Patrick Parker's Progress Read online

  MAVIS CHEEK

  Patrick Parker's Progress

  Faber and faber

  First published in 2004 by Faber and Faber Limited 3 Queen Square London wcin 3au This paperback edition published in 2005 by Faber and Faber Limited Printed in England by Mackays of Chatham, plc

  All rights reserved © Mavis Cheek, 2004

  The right of Mavis Cheek to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similiar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0-571-21448-7

  2468 10 97531

  Sixteen years on - for Bella again, with love.

  '... so from this bridge, a geologist of the centuries will succeed in recreating our contemporary world.'

  Mayakovsku

  Begin, small boy, to know your mother with a smile (Ten lunar months have brought your mother long discomfort) Begin, small boy: him who for this parent has not smiled No god invites to table, nor goddess to bed. Virgil, Eclogue IV

  According to Isambard, Ellen (Hulme) appears to have been a lively young lady ... who indulged in the 'shocking habit of... quizzing...' him.

  Angus Buchanan, Brunel

  ... He evidently considered himself sufficiently well supplied against disaster to ask Mary Horsley to marry him ... without talents, she constituted no threat to his ego ...

  Adrian Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Knight Errant

  ... I wish you were my obedient servant. I should begin with a little flogging.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel's reply to John Scott Russell, naval architect and shipbuilder, September 1855

  The reputation of Isambard Kingdom Brunel is unassailable. Observer, 10 March 2002

  The Clifton Suspension Bridge (Egyptian in style) is my first love, my darling ...

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel

  Postcard of Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar sent by Patrick Parker to Florence Parker and dated 11 April 1954.

  Now here's a beauty, Mother! Aud liked it. But she called it 'lacy looking'. I ask you! Px

  Postcard of Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar sent by Patrick Parker to Audrey Wapshott, 12 November 1961.

  Here's one for your album Aud! I wish I could show it to you. What do you think of it? Yours, Patrick.

  ONE

  PATRICK

  Patrick is Born

  It was Han engineers who advanced the suspension bridge into the form we recognise today ... More than a third of the Empire's economic output was made up of luxury goods to be transported west. As a result, canals were developed and fibre towropes refined to consistent qualities and strengths. These cables could, in turn, be used in suspension bridges: lightweight, economic, and without the large foundation forces associated with the arched alternatives ... Matthew Wells, 30 Bridges

  November 1940. Coventry burns. The hospital in which Florence and George Parker's baby might have been born is no more than melted rubble. The house to which Florence and George Parker would have returned with their baby sits in the row of smoking artisans' dwellings, like a blackened tooth stump. The railway station where George Parker (excused service duties, flat feet) collects tickets is twisted like a handful of grotesque barley-sugars. If you wish to travel north after the night of the fourteenth of November, you must travel from Tile Hill. If you want to travel south you must go from Brandon Street.

  Miraculously on the night of the fourteenth of November the Parkers have no need of this information for they have already done their travelling. On that dreadful, scorching night, the fourteenth of November 1940, the Parkers - miraculously - are not there. At the exact moment that the devastation of Coventry takes place, Florence, after nearly twelve hours of labour - is brought to bed of a fine baby boy in her friend Dolly's house in south-west London. He is a little early, it is true. But he is nevertheless perfect, perfect.

  Florence Parker and Dorothy Wapshott were in service together before their marriages and are close as sisters. Closer, some might say, though Dorothy, at thirty-five, is seven years younger than her friend. The visit to London was a little pre-Christmas treat for

  Florence, who is somewhat dazed to find herself expecting at all, given her age, and not a little embarrassed, but it is wartime and strange things are happening everywhere. Now she is even more dazed to find herself far from home with a new and perfect, perfect baby in her arms.

  Long, long after this day they will talk in awed tones about the strangeness of fate. Why should Florence choose that day to visit and not another? Why did the baby choose that afternoon to arrive early? If he had come the day before, then ... They speak of this in whispers and they shudder down the years. One more quirk of fate bringeth forth a miracle. Florence feels that God has not let her down, despite her shame in front of Him for her obvious dip into carnal sin. The baby is destined, quite clearly, for greatness.

  George, father of the baby, though left behind in Coventry has also escaped the inferno. He is surprised, and pleased, to be summoned. It is not customary for his wife to want him for anything much. But summoned he is by Florence's shrieking to Dolly and Dolly haring off up the road clutching her pinny about her to the undertaker's on Brokesley Street (the nearest telephone) and ringing the station. George is therefore halfway between Coventry and King's Cross when the sirens wail and the terror starts and he knows nothing of it. He has swapped his ticket duties with Arthur Crow, his friend. Something about which Molly Crow might have had something to say now that her husband lies a crisp corpse on the bumpy, bubbling asphalt of Station Road. Only Molly, too, is dead. Five orphans, five more orphans, to add to the toll of that night. But the baby born of Florence Parker is quite, quite safe and has both parents alive and sound in wind and limb.

  There is rare black humour when George finally returns to Coventry after a twenty-four-hour visit to London. He slipped and slid and did very little sleeping on the unyielding Rexine-covered settee provided for him by Dorothy overnight and he is not up to much excitement as a result - but he gets some anyway. For as he turns the corner of Lamb Street, Lilly Willis of the little General Stores passes out when she sees him. One minute George is walking along and smiling at her, the next she is stretched out cold and white on the cobbles. When she is brought round she says, faintly, that she thought he was dead, the ticket booth having caught it. To which, with unaccustomed humour, George replies that he certainly came close to thinking death was preferable once or twice in the night because of that dratted settee - but though weak, he points out, he is alive . . . 'Very much so,' he says, which makes Lilly regain her colour, and add a little more to it. Blushing becomes Lilly though she does it seldom. She has an old head on her young shoulders.

  To Lilly's questions about mother and baby, George is positive. Both are doing well, he says, and Florence seems to be in her element. Lilly sniffs. Not like George's wife to be in her element over anything, she thinks. But Florence, to Lilly's grim amusement, has apparently forgiven the carnal act that brought about the child, taken to motherhood like a duck to water, and the baby has taken to its mother like a - like a - duckling. Lilly asks who the baby favours and George says, somewhat mournfully Lilly thinks, that the baby -apparently - takes after Florence's side of the family. Entirely. The baby is Florence to the spit was what Dolly said. Women always stick together, was what George th
ought, and he could only nod, look at his child, and agree. All the same, he thought he saw something of himself in there. The long, sensitive fingers, if nothing else. George may collect tickets for a living but he is good with his hands, too. Creative.

  'It's a miracle -' Lilly shudders - 'that Flo was off out of it.' What she really thinks is that the real miracle is how George was off out of it.

  According to George, the miracle of being off out of it is what Florence does nothing but repeat to the baby in her arms. That he is a little miracle. That he will go far. That he was destined. That he is her little angel risen from the ashes. That he will really be someone - do something - one day. He'll probably end up making cars like the rest of them, thinks Lilly, but she wouldn't say so. It has not been her happiness to have children and she is aware that she can sometimes sound sour. The old head on young shoulders is quite a wise one.

  'Oh,' says Lilly, 'It's a he, then?' And George agrees that it is.

  'And what colour hair has he got?'

  But George shakes his head. He hasn't actually held the baby, or got very close, buried as the infant remained in his wife's pillows and bedjacket and bosom and armpits.

  'There doesn't seem to be a lot of it,' he says cautiously. 'Yet.'

  'And a name?'

  'We have called him Patrick,' he says. 'Not Pat and not Paddy - but Patrick.'

  'That's nice’ says Lilly.

  'Can't stand the name myself’ says George. 'I wanted William.'

  'He'd be called Willy then and you wouldn't like that’ says Lilly who likes to look on the bright side and cheer people up.

  'Nothing wrong with Willy is there?' asks George, gone sly all of a sudden.

  Lilly simpers. The colour has returned even more strongly to her cheeks. She may be an old head on a young body but she still knows how to colour up fetchingly like a girl. She turns back towards her shop. George follows. They go in and Lilly snags the lock and turns the card at the window to 'Closed'. George runs his hands through his hair as prelude to pushing open the door that divides the shop from Lilly's living quarters. 'Go on then,' she says. And he does.

  Now that Lilly has recovered from her faint, George and she go up the stairs to Lilly's bedroom, as they have been doing every Wednesday half-day closing for several years. Ever since, in fact, George and Florence were wed. After the wedding night Florence said that once was quite enough for her. And she turned a blind eye. Around the same time, Lilly's new young husband Alfred Willis lost his bits in a weaving accident, and she had already got the taste for it was how she put it to George. It is a suitable arrangement all round. If the community knows, the community says nothing and does not condemn. It is a friendly part of Coventry. Or it was. The General Stores, Willis's, round the corner from Chapel Street, has been saved, along with a couple of houses either side - while, all around, the rest of the street stands smouldering and blistered. George refers to this as he follows Lilly up the now oddly sloping stairs.

  'It's a miracle,' he says, looking lugubriously at her ascending bottom.

  'Swings and roundabouts,' says Lilly the pragmatist.

  George puts his hand out to pat the bottom, thinks better of it and removes it. He is still not quite sure how to approach touching a woman in broad daylight and with her clothes on. Somehow the body takes over once the lights are out, the curtains are drawn and the sheets are pulled over their heads.

  Lilly is brisk and friendly and sweet-smelling of Parma violets during the experience. She keeps herself, as George says to himself, nice. Not too fancy but nicely turned out. She paints her nails, even her toenails, and she unashamedly wears lipstick. He likes that sort of thing though he feels slightly bashful about it. And she is cheerful afterwards. When it is over she smiles and sings as she dresses and smiles at him as if they have shared a good joke and her voice is softer, sweeter somehow. The change in her voice reflects how his body feels. Kind and gentle and good.

  He would like to ask Lilly what she thinks about it all - the act, the afterwards - but he never does. He wouldn't know how to begin the sentence and he is afraid she will laugh. He can hear her saying in response 'Oh George, what do you mean?' if he should say, 'Now then, Lilly - don't you feel this is unsatisfactory?' But he knows what she would say. 'What can we do?' And he would not have an answer.

  Once he just went on lying there and said, half dreaming, 'Be good to go away somewhere together, Lil. How about Paris? We could go up the Eiffel Tower. I'd like to see it. I'd make you a model of it afterwards. Paris is the place for lovers.' The word lovers is heavy in the room. Lilly just stood there in front of him, hands on her hips, shockingly naked and carelessly amused, and smiling crookedly, all lipstick gone.

  'Now then, George,' she said. 'Don't get all sentimental.' Then she touched his face in a different way from usual - and somewhere inside of him he felt as if a plug had been pulled out - everything was running away to nothing. He said, moving into the murky waters of taboo - 'If I had stuck with you we'd be together like this all the time.' For a moment she had looked down at him with the sweetest look on her face. And then - snap! The look was gone. 'Come on now,' she said, back to her usual self, 'gee-up. You've got a baby on the way... And there's a war on.' She pulled him up, aware that he did not look too happy about it. Probably, she thought, as she dressed, he was worried about the baby's future in this death-filled world. She tried not to think the other thought which hurt, surprisingly: that he and Florence made that baby, together. Unless bloody Florence was going for the Immaculate Conception. Which Lilly Willis would not put past the woman.

  But it was not that then, and it is not that now. George already has an inkling that this son of his will never be his at all really. Already he feels the exclusion. Another possibility has let him down. His life all round has not been what he once thought it would be. In short, George is a disappointed man and a once-a-week pleasuring has not fulfilled him at all. Always, as soon as he has left the shop, George wonders why he bothers. Lilly is so cheerful, he is sure that she forgets him as soon as the door swings shut. He tries to be like that too. But by Monday he is running his hands through his hair and back to waiting for the following Wednesday session with a pleasurable need. If he hadn't got flat feet he might have seen something of the world, expanded his horizons, even if it did end up putting a bullet into his chest. As it is, his horizons are narrow and getting narrower. A model of the Eiffel Tower is about as far as he will get, he knows. He makes models like some men have dreams. He hopes his son will do better. He certainly hopes his son will do better in the matter of marriage and happiness and all that. He couldn't do much worse.

  The little diversion from George's sensible sexual arrangement with Lilly, and from which baby Patrick occurred, happened the previous Easter when Florence ate a considerable number of liqueur chocolates. She was keeping them, two boxes, winnings from the church tombola, to give away as gifts herself, being teetotal, but since the Germans were very likely due to land at any moment, it seemed an act of Patriotic Duty to swallow the lot. Fortunately she could remember nothing of the ensuing conjugal act, except the room going round and George above her looking very surprised.

  Now, down in South London, tucked up in Dolly's bed with a pink bedjacket around her shoulders, her once harsh mouth bears the soft curve of contentment. 'I never knew I wanted you until you came,' she whispers to the bald, pink head. And she kisses its pulsing tip. Like many a mother before and since, the act of maternal union took her quite by surprise, rendered her weak, and made her ready to rip the world apart with her jaws should any element in it try to hurt the babe at her breast. It surprised her all over again that such perfection should be borne out of such an ugly act, such a painful sequel. No wonder, she thought, that it was considered original sin.

  After a few weeks, Florence reluctantly made the train journey back to ravaged Coventry, with George at her side. 'Ah, the proud father,' said a hearty lady in the carriage, after cooing over Florence's bundle. Florence
looked up as if she were about to say something sharp and all George, who had come to accompany his wife and son, managed was a sheepish smile. He knew it embarrassed his wife. If he felt any atavistic stirrings of masculine pride, he kept them to himself. If you were a woman and you sat with a man in a railway carriage, and you held that man's baby, then it meant you had been doing unmentionable things with him. It was all George could do to stop himself leaning across the carriage and saying to the hearty lady 'It's all right you know, we only did it twice - ever.'

  The council found them the three-roomed ground floor of a house to the south of the town - with a small scullery, shared bathroom above, but its own privy out the back. Florence, though she moaned about it, realised that they were lucky compared with some. Her previous neighbours, a childless couple, were now living in one room and a kitchen and the WC was down two flights of stairs. She stroked little Patrick's head as he nuzzled at her breast - another blessing, another miracle - if it hadn't been for him who knew what kind of a tip they'd be rehoused in. He was, in every sense, his mother's salvation. In the midst of ruin and chaos, he will bring light, she thinks. She also thinks he will bring glory for her. Before her marriage Florence looked after her three brothers and her father - Mother having departed when she was in service in London and little Flo recalled to take her place. George had seemed like a miracle then. A man with a future, she thought, in the railways, a safe job throughout the Depression - only he never got further than collecting tickets and making his models and looking miserable about it.