Patrick Parker's Progress Read online

  Which made the woman tut and blink and return to her knitting.

  Audrey, who had no idea what patented meant but was feeling quite confident with the brassiere in place, smiled.

  Patrick, apparently addressing some distant, passionate vision, continued, 'Because he was not after the money. He was after the glory ... And in the end he got both.'

  'Smashing,' said Audrey, taking a deep breath and holding it. But it was pointless - Patrick had his head out of the window.

  At Maidenhead she and the grey-haired woman learned that this bridge with its long, low arches was considered one of the wonders of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's world. To Audrey it looked very ordinary.

  Patrick was frowning. His face, deep in concentration, was as handsome as James Stewart's in The Glenn Miller Story. More, really

  'Audrey?'

  'Yes?' She blinked herself back to reality.

  'I was saying - he managed to get the whole of that first run of track, up to here, rushed through in time for the Queen's Coronation. They told him it couldn't be done and he said it could - and so they did. He got it done earlier, in fact. It was sensational.' Then he fixed his eyes upon Audrey, causing her to go bright red, and said, ‘I expect to you now it looks very ordinary?'

  'Gracious no,' she said.

  He stopped and peered at her as if she were one of Mr Murdoch's hopefuls. Audrey had a definite urge to stick out her tongue but managed to smile. Patrick might be beautiful and tall and all that but he couldn't half go on about things.

  'This,' he said, 'was one of Isambard's greatest achievements.' Again he paced about the carriage tapping his finger on his chin as if he were a schoolteacher. 'How to span a river one hundred yards wide without making a hump in his beautiful bridge.'

  'Why?' dared Audrey.

  'Because he had to make headroom for the masts of sailing barges - which would soon be made obsolete by the railway anyway but he had to accommodate them for the moment...'

  'Why without a hump?'

  Patrick sighed. 'He did not want a hump because it would spoil the beautiful simplicity of his design ...'

  'Why not make the hump part of the design?' asked the woman with the knitting.

  Phew! thought Audrey, who was glad she hadn't asked that.

  By the time they came to the Royal Albert Bridge, Audrey's head was buzzing with facts, all of which she had to deal with alone now, as the woman with the knitting (rather thankfully, Audrey thought) left the carriage at Exeter. She was determined not to make any mistake with this one and pronounced the bridge 'a wonder' and 'just as lacy as the Ironbridge.'

  ‘I don't think so,' he said pitying. 'Bridges like these are known as lattice-girders.' And that, he hoped, was that.

  As far as Audrey was concerned it bloody well was.

  When Audrey, accidentally on purpose (as seen in a Marilyn Monroe film) fell against him in the carriage and he pushed her away quite roughly for the very important reason that they were just about to follow a curve which meant he could look back and take more pictures of the bridge and the setting, she finally gave in to her feelings and had a good long sulk. He did not notice. So she told him. 'I am sulking,' she said, arms crossed despite their hiding her chest, 'because when we went over that bump just then, I fell, and you couldn't be bothered.'

  Patrick put down his camera and stared at her in absolute puzzlement. 'We cannot have gone over a bump,' he said.

  'Well, I should know because we did and I fell on you.' She more or less believed it now.

  'Nonsense,' said Patrick. "There are no bumps.'

  Audrey turned up her nose and uttered a rather enjoyable 'Hah!'

  "There are no bumps,' said Patrick patiently, 'because this line was always known as Mr Brunel's Billiard Table. It's as smooth as a baby's...'

  'My arse,' said Audrey, really fed up now.

  He was torn at that precise moment. The prospect of Audrey's arse was quite an exciting image arriving so suddenly and unexpectedly - as was, oddly he thought, her pouting, sullen face. But Brunel won. He had notes to take and more photographs as well as absorbing the sense of seeing things with his hero's eyes. Girls and their arses would just have to wait.

  By the time they reached journey's end Audrey had already decided to abandon Patrick as a potential romance. There was not a hint that he found her attractive and simple pragmatism told her to waste no more energy. It was something of a relief. They spent their overnight stop in a youth hostel and had fish and chips for supper sitting on the sands at dusk. Patrick seemed nervous and a bit twitchy and she was fed up with the whole thing. When he sat very near to her and brushed some sand from her knee, she was so overcome with emotion and wishing, that she immediately got up and went to paddle at the water's edge. She would always love him, she said to the sky and the waves, but it was too difficult. She would never be clever like he was and he would never be gentle and amorous like her. 'A Man Has To Do What A Man Has To Do,' she murmured to the wavelets. It was a quote from a recent cowboy flick and as she spoke it she nodded sagely, feeling old beyond her years.

  Patrick was dashed. He had built up to the moment on the sand with the fish and chips. It was the obvious place, the obvious moment, with nothing of Brunel to distract him. He would kiss her. And now there she was with her toes in the water not even noticing him. He got up and called that he was going back to the hostel, that they were getting the early train back, hoping as he said so that she would come running to him. But she only followed at a distance, along the waterline, across the sand, onto the prom, trailing further and further behind.

  Standing in the corridor that separated the boys' from the girls' dormitories, Patrick did not know what to do. Audrey, also standing there, did. 'Goodnight,' she said, and slipped through the doorway to her room without glancing backwards. She was looking forward to shedding a few private tears into her pillow as all her heroines did, the moonlight picking out the traces on her cheeks . . . Patrick was left standing there wishing she would come out again. Rationally, he decided that she had to come out again to clean her teeth. And when she did ... So he waited. And he waited. But she never appeared. Largely because, forgoing the tears, she immediately fell asleep.

  In the morning they cycled to the station in single file and for the journey back to London Audrey bought a comic. Into which she buried her pink-tipped nose as she read it, cover to cover, with her pink-edged eyes. Patrick asked if she had caught a cold at which she simply sighed. The brassiere was tucked right at the bottom of her rucksack. To be saved for somebody else.

  The next day at the station, as the train for Coventry pulled in, Audrey, caring nothing for decorum any more - why should she? -dared to throw her arms around Patrick's neck and give him the film star kiss she longed to try out. He would have returned it - only her father was watching him with a smile that was less kindly and more like the smile people wore when they watched a playful pair of puppies. Dignity was all. Patrick stepped back from the embrace and said stiffly that he had enjoyed himself, that he hoped they could do it again, and that perhaps Audrey would like to come somewhere with him next Easter? Get stuffed if I will, thought Audrey.

  Patrick climbed aboard, opened the window, waved, called out, 'See you at Easter, then. We might go up and see Brunel's road bridge up at Balmoral. Maybe we'll meet the Queen ... I can tell her to save one for me.' He laughed and waved again as the train pulled away. He was disappointed to see that Audrey had already turned her back and was walking out of the station. Arse swaying like billy-o, he thought, with regret.

  Shortly after this Audrey found herself a real boyfriend and the cakes she used to send to Patrick through the post, and the phone calls, ceased. Which pleased Florence. If not her son. Of course it took him a little while to notice but when he did Patrick was alarmed and rang Audrey, only to be told by Dolly that she was out with William, and surely he knew about that? Patrick put the phone down, said 'Oh, sod the lot of them,' to the empty hallway and ignoring his mother's shoc
ked protestations, went out for a very long cycle ride. Brunel's bridge and Audrey's shorts, the curve of Saltash and the curve of her pink, pink lips, sand on a knee and the perfection of a river's span batted their images around in his mind. The more he pedalled, the crosser he became, and he hardly knew why. When he went home to bed that night he absolutely refused, to the walls, to the ceiling, to the universe, to think of her in that way ever again. It took too much energy. It made him feel weak. What Brunel called 'dilution'.

  In London Audrey put her arm through her boyfriend's and stepped out for a stroll. William, the new beau, might not be Great and Grand. Nor (she sighed to remember Patrick's fair face) as beautiful - but he knew how to kiss, he wanted to kiss, he never stepped back from her when she kissed him and she was practising very hard. Getting, she was sure, very Doris Day and good with it. She could turn William's face scarlet with just the touch of her tongue. Trouble was that sometimes - quite often in fact - it was Patrick whose lips she imagined pressed to hers. Bugger, bloody, bugger it.

  'Now Aud's got a boyfriend,' he said to his mother. It means she won't be interested in coming away with me any more.'

  'You'll probably get a lot more done without her,' said Florence, who was in great danger of clapping her hands and bursting into song. 'And anyway, I wouldn't worry about all that...' She handed him the local newspaper, folded back at a particular page. The headline read: money at last pours in to rebuild Coventry, new team appointed.

  'See,' she said. 'And it won't be long before you are old enough to be part of all that.'

  'There are no bridges in Coventry, Mother.' He spoke irritably.

  'Exactly,' said Florence. 'So it's time there was.'

  She sounded, he thought, just as daft as Audrey. But he could not be bothered to point out that an Heroic Bridge needs an Heroic Setting. Or at the very least a sodding river. Coventry had neither. Florence smiled with satisfaction. Just the two of them again, even if George was sitting in his chair by the range and as usual slurping his tea.

  'Bike held out all right?' his father asked for want of something to say.

  Patrick nodded.

  'You ought to give it bit of a clean and a once-over now,' he said. 'I'll give you a hand if you like.'

  But Patrick did not appear to hear this. He never had cleaned it and had no intention of doing so now. His mother noticed he was restless. She considered her options. The matter was left.

  When Florence stopped the elegant Mrs Ruby Boxer on Quinton Road and told her that Little Audrey had a boyfriend in London nowadays, the elegant Mrs Ruby Boxer was more than a little surprised. Such personal conversation was not a feature of Florence's relationship with the people who lived around and about her, especially not the publican's wife. Usually if you got a nod and a 'good morning' from Florence Parker as she hurried towards the shops, or back from the library, you were lucky. Of course, over the last year her Peggy had spotted Patrick, along with half the girls in Coventry from the sound of it - he seemed to be a very desirable young man - though Mrs Ruby Boxer liked them with a little more muscle to them. Her Peggy had said that she wouldn't mind but that when she enquired of Patrick's health, Mrs Parker told her very firmly that he was very well and courting Audrey down in London. Well - not any more.

  'Really?' said Mrs Boxer, adjusting her dainty little homemade hat - or at least, drawing attention to it. 'And how does your Patrick feel about that?'

  'To tell the truth,' said Florence in a low, confiding way, ‘I think Little Audrey was far too self-centred for him. What he wants is to have a nice local girl he can go for walks with, or to the pictures sometimes. You know the sort of thing. Local.'

  Mrs Boxer nodded the bit of navy buckram.

  'He's got to concentrate on his studies if he's going to end up a famous -' Florence hesitated - she was never sure what the right word for her son's ambition was - she settled for 'Architect' since 'Builder' sounded too much like Eddying and Sons who had mended their skylight.

  'He still wants to do the same thing then?' said the elegant Ruby.

  'Oh, yes,' said Florence. 'Never wavered.' She waited a fractional moment and then asked with hitherto unknown interest. 'And your Peggy? How's she?'

  'Starting in Orchard's next spring. In the Modes. If she does well she's hoping to be a buyer.'

  'Nice girl,' said Florence. 'I'll tell Patrick. He'll want to know. He always asks after her. Nice hat too, Ruby,' she added.

  May God forgive you, she thought, as she hurried away. Leaving the elegant Mrs Ruby Boxer standing on the pavement with her mouth wide open.

  Alerted, Peggy Boxer began to observe Patrick as he cycled to and from school. She watched him going in and out of the Library and into Stonor's Bookshop where she wisely left him alone. Only when he went to sit in the Cathedral grounds, gazing up and around at the shell of the new building with its scaffolding, and the old walls and the spire (which he stared at as hungrily as if he could eat it) and the sky beyond, his book discarded on the bench beside him, his sketch book open on his knee, did she reckon it was safe to approach.

  High above her the workmen whistled as she stepped towards her prey. Nose well up, she ignored them. Patrick seemed not to notice her, though what he could find quite so interesting in the scaffolding escaped her when she was, she knew, looking particularly nice. She had progressed from bunny ears and bobbles to a nipped-in waist and full skirts (of her own creation) and she wore shoes that made her much taller and which she tied with a fancy little bow around her ankles. She sat down daintily on the bench next to him and said, 'Hallo.' He dragged his gaze down from the spire and scaffolding and the clear, blue sky and looked at her. Puzzled. She reminded him that they had been at junior school together. He pretended to remember her then, but she knew he did not.

  Peggy Boxer was undaunted. His mind was on much higher things. Different. Artistic, so her mother said. With a good future ahead. After another respectful silence, she began to tell him that she thought this place was very interesting. All that history it had - and the bombing. He agreed. He told her that he was born on the night it was destroyed and that it was a miracle he survived, which impressed her. He saw that she was impressed and decided not to explain that he was actually down in London at the time. He told her that he came to sit here quite a lot, something which she knew but with her own economical approach to the giving-out of information, decided not to say. He liked, he said, to watch the new walls rise, get inside the spirit of the thing.

  'Mmm,' she said. Peggy was game and quite as able as Audrey to appear as if she understood. Then he added, much more understandably as far as Peggy Boxer was concerned, that the Cathedral site was somewhere to go, something to do. That there wasn't much for the likes of them in Coventry. She agreed.

  They sat on in silence for a few minutes more and then she said, quite pointedly, that they had just opened a coffee bar down Trinity Street. Patrick nodded, looking up again to where a scaffolder hammered more fittings into place. The noise rang out sharp and metallic, making them both wince.

  'He's brave,' said Peggy in a sweetly breathy voice. ‘I couldn't do that.'

  'I could’ said Patrick. 'But I wouldn't want to.' They watched the man flitting around the poles, agile as a bird or a bat.

  'It's taking ever such a long time,' said Peggy, her peevishness echoing her parents and the whole town. 'You'd have thought they'd have finished it by now.'

  Patrick turned on her. 'Of course they haven't finished it yet.' He said. 'Because it's the work of a committee. Not one man.'

  'Oh’ said Peggy. 'Really?'

  'If we had a Brunel working on that Cathedral,' Patrick said, 'it would be finished by now.'

  'Of course it would’ she said, imagining a Brunel to be some gigantic machine sending the walls rising rapidly into the sky like a scene from a science fiction film. Which reminded her . . . And she thought, nothing ventured. So she remarked that there was a good show on at the Picture House, a musical.

  He nodd
ed, but he was gazing upwards again. 'It's the only thing in this goddam town I'd care to build and I'm too young’ he said, with something of the picture house himself. 'Everything else is peanuts.'

  'Yes’ said Peggy.

  Then he turned to her and blinked. 'So’ he said. 'What are you up to now?'

  'I'm leaving school this summer and I want to be something artistic. A window dresser or a dress designer or a photographer -something like that. Nothing common, anyway. I'm starting off at Orchard's . ..' She gave him a smile, waited, and then said casually, 'Are you still seeing Audrey?'

  He ignored this but said, 'I'd have given them flying buttresses like they never knew they could have.'

  ‘I bet’ she said. And wondered whether to approach the subject of the cinema again. Too late. He stood up.

  'London's the place’ he said.

  'What?' she asked.

  'London. The place.'

  'Oh yes’ she said.

  'I'm going there next year.'

  'Oh’ she said.