Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [19]
(This became their unvarying nightly ritual: she would go upstairs and get into bed while he smoked a last cigarette. In almost forty years of marriage, he would never see her completely naked. And, in time, he grew glad of it.)
In the morning, Clem stood in his cot, gazing with baffled horror at the dark stranger in his mother’s bed.
FOR A WHILE George Ackroyd dealt with his mounting fear, the hostility of his mother-in-law, the coyness of his wife, the reticence of his son, the implacable hugeness of the sky, and his awful sense of having been somehow tricked, in the only way he knew how. He sought to impose regimental order and efficiency. He went about bringing manliness to this unmanned household.
In the skewed and decrepit garden shed (built by John Sparling half a century earlier), he found ancient tools and restored them. With the oiled and sharpened shears, he straightened the hedge. With a rusted hammer, he nailed new boards onto the roof of the chicken coop while the birds regarded him with yellow and baleful eyes. Under Ruth’s direction and Clem’s silent gaze, he dug the vegetable beds. He rehung the washing line, jabbing stones into the ground to steady the uprights. He replaced the broken hinge on the kitchen window, using infinite patience and the wrong screwdriver. He gave the inside of the lav a new coat of whitewash.
After a fortnight, this persistent odd-jobbery had brought Win to the verge of distraction.
The following Sunday, she came back from chapel with the news that there was a job going at Ling’s. The announcement didn’t distract George from the News of the World.
Win pulled free the long pin that fixed her hat to her hair and stood holding it, looking at him.
Ruth was at the sink, peeling potatoes. After half a minute of awful silence that pinkened her neck, she said, “That might suit you, George. Thas your line of work.”
He looked up at last. “Oh, aye? Why, what’s Ling’s? A Chinese tank regiment?”
In fact, J. W. Ling and Son, of Borstead, were — as announced on a wrought-iron sign that spanned the wide entrance to the yard — SUPPLIERS AND REPAIRERS OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY. George leaned Ruth’s bike against the wall of a brick building that looked as though it had been, once upon a time, a pair of farm cottages. On one of the doors there was a stamped-metal sign reading OFFICE. The room had two desks, one with a typewriter on it. Apparently, a gale had swept through the place, scattering paper. One wall sported no fewer than eight calendars, all of them topped by a picture of a tractor, none of them turned to the month of April. On one of the desks there was a push-button electric bell with a woven two-wire cable that trailed away into the gloom. A handwritten card next to it suggested that he RING FOR ATTENDENCE. George pressed it experimentally and heard, from some remote distance, a faltering tinkle. Several minutes later, a short, burly man stuffed into a one-piece overall came in and immediately went out again and started shouting.
“Look, bor, I dunt give a monkey’s. Do what I say. You weld the bugger up an I’ll tell him thas the best we can do. If he want ut by Wensdy, thas up to him.”
He came back into the room and picked up a piece of paper, apparently at random, and scowled at it. Without looking at George, he said, surprisingly formally, “And what can I do for you, sir?”
“I was told you had a job,” George said.
The man grunted a laugh. “Job?” The small word had at least three vowels in it. “Bleddy right, I’re got a job. The job I’re got is gettun them buggers out there to lissun to a bleddy word I say.”
George concentrated