Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [21]
George rode slowly along the low beech hedge, watching the games, and above his head the moody clouds split open. Sun, in beams as clearly defined as searchlights, straked the sky. As if in celebration, something sounded a long fluting whistle. A clanking two-carriage train, gusting smoke, ambled into view. A goalkeeper turned and waved to it and, with his back to the play, conceded a goal. George laughed. He took his hands from the handlebars and applauded.
The playing field ended in a line of poplars like huge upended besoms. Here, the lane forked. George turned left and was astonished to find himself in a newer, braver world. He pedaled slowly past a long row of new, cement-rendered, and white-painted semidetached houses. They looked solid, modern, confident. Fresh. Each one had a slate-roofed porch over the front door. Each one had a small lawn, separated from its neighbor by a ruler-straight privet hedge, still only knee-high, and separated from the road by a tarmacked pavement. At the end of the row, the road turned smartly right. At the corner house, a woman was cleaning her windows, standing on a kitchen chair. Her buttocks swung with the work, and her calves were muscular. George rang the bell on his handlebar, and she turned and waved to him as if she knew him. Or wanted to. He rode right and left and right and left again through a grid of new suburban roads that were named after poets: Chaucer, Donne, Browning, Arnold. The names meant nothing to George. He rode, admiring it all, to its limits, attracted by the chug of a cement mixer and the growl of machinery. Beyond Marvell Road, an acre of raw and muddy earth had been dug into trenches into which men were slumping barrowloads of concrete.
George dismounted and lit a cigarette. Before he was halfway through it, a car — a black Morris — drew up. Its driver clambered out. He was wearing a suit and had a clipboard in his hand. He balanced the clipboard on the roof of the car and leaned back inside and produced a pair of Wellington boots. With his backside perched on the bonnet of the car, he bent to unlace his shoes.
“Excuse me,” George said.
The man looked up, frowning.
George, smiling nicely, said, “What’s all this, then?”
“Pardon me?”
“I mean, what’s all this going to be? More houses?”
“Er, no. This is the new Millfields Primary School.”
“Ah,” George said.
The man pulled off his left shoe and, surprisingly, sniffed its interior.
“This will be where your children go to school, Mr., er?”
“Ackroyd.”
“Yes. We estimate, on a ten-year projection, a minimum of one hundred and ten children on the estate. You chaps back from the war have already been busy, if you know what I mean. Quite right, too.”
George stood on his cigarette.
“Estate?”
The man looked at him quizzically.
“So these are council houses,” George said.
“Yes, of course. Sorry, I assumed you lived here. You’re not a tenant, then?”
George cycled back into Borstead — the playing fields were silent now — and leaned Ruth’s bike against one of the two trees in front of the town hall. He waited almost an hour before he was ushered into the presence of the housing officer, who was, according to the gold-effect lettering on the little black nameplate on his desk, Mr. G. Roake. He stood up to shake hands when George entered. Even from across the desk, his breath was rank. He had thin colorless hair greased over the top of his head, and he did not convincingly occupy his clothes. His eyes, magnified by his spectacles, took up a disproportionate amount of his face. His hand, in George’s clasp, was bony.
“Take a seat, Mr. . . .”
“Ackroyd. George Ackroyd.”
Roake wrote George’s name on a piece of paper, not checking how it was spelled.
“How can I help you, Mr. Ackroyd?”
Roake’s accent was not Norfolk. George could not identify it.
‘Those new council houses. Up off the Aylsham road.”
“Millfields?”
“Yes. I want to put my name down for one.”
Roake gazed for a moment. “Yes. Well. We can do that for you. Have