Birthday Read Free Page B

husband wasn’t what you did when he’d stood by you until the time of the accident. In any case, you had sworn to care for each other until one or the other died.
    He was never surprised when his brothers’ thoughts ran on the same lines as his own, often so close as those between husbands and wives. ‘By the time George had his accident he and Jenny already had seven kids,’ Arthur said, ‘so maybe it was just as well he did, or he might have given her half a dozen more.’
    Brian’s laugh took him away from the tragic aspect of Jenny on the station platform. ‘I should be glad I didn’t stay with her then. I might have had the same number pulling at my turn-ups.’
    â€˜She would have dragged a rabbity bastard like you on every night,’ Arthur said, ‘and in your dinner hour as well, if there’d been no canteen where you worked.’
    If he’d got her pregnant he would still have escaped, because the dynamo of curiosity had been busy in him from birth. His departure was both as if swimming out of a vat of treacle, and wandering away like a somnambulist, hard to know which because too far back and they hadn’t been logged at the time. Circumstances had carried him, and those situations met with as if to make him pay for his new life had their own compensations. Being novelties, they were an anodyne against what loss was left behind.
    Another question was that if he’d asked Jenny to marry him she might have laughed in his face, because no person can avoid what the future has in store, though you may not know it (he’d certainly had no suspicion) giving the illusion that freedom of choice is possible for everyone. Having a baby already by another man, she had no option but to marry George, whether she loved him or not. George didn’t know how much of a bargain he’d got until her devotion became vital for his existence, though in the years and decades of his catastrophic misfortune he was to wish he had never set eyes on her, thinking it would have been better if the falling block of iron had killed him outright. He certainly never imagined in those early days that under Jenny’s care he would live more than thirty years.
    George had been called up in 1940, and taken prisoner at Tobruk in Libya. He’d already lived forever on coming home from Germany in the long belly of a Halifax bomber. A young soldier in his early twenties, he queued to be measured for his demob suit, a thin man after three years’ imprisonment, hoping to find a country more to his liking than the one he had left and, if not, at least to get the job of his choice.
    He was promised work as a van driver, but couldn’t start for a month – a long time at that age – so he walked into a nearby iron foundry and was set on straightaway. The job was more strenuous, and altogether satisfying in putting him among the sort of blokes he had fought with in the army. You had to be alert in such an occupation, but as long as you looked out for yourself and for others, and if others looked out for themselves and for you, life seemed less dangerous than driving a van.
    The chain slipped: no time or place to run, a million lights turning brighter and brighter at his scream. Even if you weren’t killed the number chalked on the side of the iron was plainer than on any shell fragments around Tobruk. One of his mates who called at the hospital said he could have been as badly injured driving a van, but George knew there was something more final about a fall of iron in the dismal light than there could be from any crump of tin in the street. He had got unblemished from the battlefield, had survived the boat trip across the Mediterranean, not to mention the journey by cattle truck to Germany – and now this.
    A new house was provided out of the compensation, and appliances installed to make staying alive the slowest form of torment, though as easy as possible for