Birthday. Alan Sillitoe

and she the country he ruled over, a pact which enabled her to go on living.

      He took Brian’s hand between cool fingers as if the rite was foreign but he wanted to pass the test nevertheless. ‘She’s told me about you a time or two.’

      He wondered what she had said, though anything would be of interest to George, for whom the past, no matter how far off, was only yesterday. The face-down paperback on the arm of his chair was about the siege of Tobruk. ‘Are you reading that?’

      His smile indicated eternal worry, self-pity the desert of his affliction, sandstorms depriving him of visibility on long passages through and back and through again. When able to rest from the irritation he was amazed that the small distance had taken such gruelling effort, which showed on the part of his mouth to which the smile was hinged. ‘I was there, once upon a time.’

      ‘It looks interesting.’

      ‘I find it so.’

      ‘Thanks, duck!’ Brian used the old lingo for Jenny when she came with tea and a plate of biscuits, the cup rattling against its saucer like a garbled telegraph message. ‘You were in the army, then?’ he said to George.

      ‘Yeh, when I was young. And after the war ended I never thought I’d look back and say how wonderful life had been in a German prison camp, though maybe it would have been the same even if I wasn’t in this contraption.’

      Jenny’s smile showed relief at George talking with such liveliness. In trying to read more from her expression, Brian got as far into nowhere as he always had. Her back was straighter than when she had met him at the door, a stance showing more alertness, though why it should be necessary he couldn’t tell, unless on kneeling by the chair to rework the blanket over his legs, or wipe the tea his shaking hands had spilled, she was fearful of his fist, powered by an inboiling irritation from a mind demented by uselessness, snaking out at her face. He wouldn’t do it before a guest, but was easy to imagine in the quiet and seemingly endless afternoons when they were alone. He sensed something and wished he hadn’t, wanted to go, sorry he had come, such scenes of domestic knockabout familiar from childhood when the old man battered his mother and the rest of the family out of despair at being unemployed, or at not being able to read or write.

      ‘The only break I get these days,’ George went on, ‘is a fortnight every year at Ingoldmells. Still, it gets me away from this place.’

      ‘My brother Arthur and his wife go fishing near Skegness,’ Brian said. ‘I stay with them overnight when they hire a caravan.’

      ‘He fishes in the sea?’

      Brian laughed, for no reason except that it was about time somebody did. ‘No, it’s a mile inland, at a big pond in the middle of a field. But it’s good sport.’ He had bought Arthur The Compleat Angler and he had read it more than once. ‘The caravan’s parked by the water, so they stagger out in their dressing gowns for an hour’s fishing before breakfast. They chuck everything back, naturally.’ He didn’t want to dwell too long on such a pastime with a man who wasn’t able to take part in it, though maybe he could if someone pushed him to the water’s edge. ‘If Jenny gave you a rod and some bait you could try your luck. You’d probably catch buckets.’

      George laughed, for the first time. ‘Not on your life. She might push me in.’

      ‘Don’t talk so daft,’ Jenny said.

      ‘Well, I’m not serious, am I? When I was a kid’ – he smiled, as if he might still be one, and have life to live over again – ‘I went after tiddlers, scooped ’em up in a jam jar with a bit of string around the neck. It wasn’t easy, but I always got some. We lived in Basford Crossing, and the Leen was our favourite stream. There were eight of us kids in the family, and when we went out as a tribe nobody could harm us. We often stayed by the water all day, rain or shine. Mam would wrap us up sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and fill bottles of cold tea left over from breakfast. There was always something interesting to look at, as long as the stream kept running, and it always did. Never stopped, did it? Well, it couldn’t, could it?’ The idea of the stream ceasing to flow seemed to alarm him. ‘It could no more stop than the Trent could stop. Or any river, come to that, though the Leen’s only a piddling little brook.’ He smiled again. ‘It was cold, though, if you fell in, and I did a time or two. It’s a wonder one of us didn’t drown, but kids had charmed lives in those days.’

      Old times meant more to him than anybody else, but they were important to everybody the older or more physically difficult life became. With Arthur and Derek he often made fun of them, because if you didn’t the reality of so-called halcyon days didn’t bear thinking about, and there was too much happening in the present to have their weight as well on your back. Even so, it would be cruel to scoff at such times in front of George, who dropped a host of sugars into his tea: ‘Jenny tells me you’ve done very well for yourself in London.’

      ‘You could say I’ve made a living.’ George’s tone implied that he must have done so out of trickery and skiving. ‘But I like to come up and see my brothers, who are always glad to see me. In any case, I’m still fond of the old place.’

      ‘Why did you leave it, then?’

      ‘I lived here till I was eighteen, then thought I’d take off.’ Enough of the apologetic tone for having made use of his legs. ‘We called at the White Horse for a pint or two last night.’

      ‘Sometimes we get in the car,’ Jenny said, ‘and go for a drink, don’t we, duck?’

      ‘Aye, and a right bleddy ta-tar it is, lifting me in and out of this thing.’ He looked at Brian, ignoring Jenny. ‘I ain’t been in the White Horse for years. Not that I could put much back if I did. Apart from having to watch my weight, I’ve got too many pills inside to swill ale down as well. Still, I can let myself go a bit when I’m in Ingoldmells. When I’m away from home, if you see what I mean. I don’t have Jenny fussing over me every second of the day and night. It’s the only time we get a rest from each other, and I’m sure she deserves it. I know I do.’

      She kissed him on the forehead. ‘It makes a change. You like to have young nurses pushing you up and down the seafront, don’t you? And all that sea air! You do look a lot better when you get back.’

      ‘Jenny takes me, and then she fetches me. Anyway,’ George said to him, ‘you manage to get around a bit?’

      Brian set his empty cup on the table. ‘When I can. I drove through Yugoslavia to Greece last year, and put the car on a ship to Israel. It was a treat, steaming through the islands.’

      ‘Did you look in on Libya? Or Crete, where we changed ships as prisoners of bloody war.’

      ‘It wasn’t on our way. We stopped an hour or two at Cyprus, but there wasn’t time to get off.’

      ‘I’d like to go back and see Tobruk.’ He gazed at the window. ‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t. You can’t go back, can you? Not if you don’t want to you can’t. Or you can’t if you’re knackered like this. It would be funny if I did, though. Still, wanting to satisfies me. As long as you can dream you can tell yourself you’re still alive.’

      He was sorry for George, because who wouldn’t be? But you couldn’t tell him so to his face. George was well aware of what everybody felt when they looked at him, knew they had to feel sorry, nothing else they could do. George would feel the same for somebody like himself if he was all fit and full of beans, or even if he was all fit and full of sludge. He’d much rather be the one who was feeling sorry, and if it happened that he was such a person he wouldn’t say he felt sorry for fear of being told to fuck off, though he’d still be over the moon at feeling it.

      So the projection bounced back at Brian, to inform him that there was no need to feel sorry for George, or feel bad because you weren’t a cripple as well. George was done for, and comments of sympathy would be no help. He too had a roof over his head, all the food he could get into himself, any clothes he thought of wearing and, under the circumstances, the finest care in the world. He was all right for as long as Jenny stayed