Chapter 15
‘You’re doing a lot of sighing,’ said Jane with some amusement, turning over to face Grace.
‘Was I? I’m so sorry.’ Grace closed the book, calling it a night. She’d tried to read the same page five times now and on each occasion her mind had wandered off.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Yes, fine,’ Grace answered, none too convincingly.
‘Well… I had a slight row with Frank and I feel a bit bad about it.’ He had never not ended their day with a kiss or a kind loving word.
Even during the thick of everything when she’d spat at him like a cobra, he had held her and told her he was there for her and he’d get her through.
Jane didn’t say anything. Clifford had once told her that saying nothing was the best way to eke out all the information one needed from another. There was something about silence that people found so uncomfortable they felt obliged to fill it.
‘I’m aware that I’m… blaming him for this…
debacle.’ Said aloud, Grace realised this admission sounded ludicrous and petty.
‘He wanted to make this Christmas nice, special and it’s been ruined.
He hurt his leg and couldn’t drive us and then the cottage firm told us they’d double-booked and offered us an alternative that didn’t look a fraction as nice and I should have insisted that we didn’t go because look at us now. ’
‘On one of the world’s most luxurious trains free of charge, yes, I see your point,’ said Jane with a trill of laughter. Then, ‘Forgive me for being facetious.’
Yes, she was indeed being ‘facetious’, thought Grace with a nip of annoyance.
There was nothing ‘glass-half-full’ about the situation they were in.
The silly old lady had no idea of what she’d been through and why she might not want to count her blessings.
She felt that ever-present spitting cobra open one eye, as if priming to uncoil inside her again.
‘I lost my son five years ago, my only child,’ Grace blurted out.
‘It feels sometimes as if the whole universe is constantly against me, doing everything it can to wreck any chance I have at ever being happy again, so I’m not being rude, Jane, but maybe that will explain why I don’t share your optimism.
Unless you’ve lost a child you can’t imagine the storm in my head, it’s worse than what’s out there and unlike what’s out there it won’t abate, it just keeps on without any chance of respite.
’ Grace flicked the reading light off above her head.
A few moments passed before Jane said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ the buoyancy in her tone much reduced.
Grace was cross at herself now, bringing Jane down.
And she was cross at Jane for driving her to give part of herself away to shut her up.
‘Forgive me. I shouldn’t have said… Look…
It’s been a very long day. I hope tomorrow brings some good news and…
better weather. We can but hope. At least, like you say, we’re in comfort and safe from the elements. Goodnight, Jane.’
‘Goodnight, Grace.’
Jane lay in the dark processing their conversation, processing Grace.
Processing all those ‘my’s’ and not ‘our’s’.
She knew exactly what Clifford would have said to them, how he would have raised his steel eyebrows.
How she missed him. How she wished he was in the ether somewhere and not just residing in her head as a figment of her imagination.
Vincent walked into the cabin shower-fresh, flip-flopping in his white train slippers that he’d found in one of the dressing-room cupboards.
There were four pairs and one of them just happened to be his size.
‘I think I’m enjoying this a bit more than I should be.
’ He sat down on the bed as if he were Goldilocks discovering the baby bear’s perfect bunk.
‘What would you have been doing if you weren’t here then, Vince?’ Frank figured Vincent wouldn’t have been doing that much if being marooned in the middle of nowhere with a group of people he didn’t know was such a delight.
‘Well, I should have been having a couple of days off, catching up with paperwork and counting my profits.’ Vincent grinned.
‘Busy time for taxis, Christmas. Not that I do much of the actual driving myself these days. But one of my lads… his kid is poorly so that’s why, last minute, I ended up with Elizabeth’s job. ’
‘So how does it work then, running a taxi firm if you live in the back of beyond?’
‘Well, I eventually learned the art of delegation, as my ex-missus nagged me about. I put a manager in my place in the city office, good girl she is, young, keen, loyal. She deals with all the black cabs. See, I buy ’em and rent ’em out.
I co-ordinate my little fleet of prestige taxi vehicles from the countryside HQ, namely Chuckle Farm, Little Lane, Cary’s Pond.
Very macho. I keep thinking I should change the name, man it up a bit.
McClaren Farm, Lambo Manor. What do you think? ’
‘You’re talking to a bloke who lives in Salty Mussel cottage, son. I don’t think I’m the right person to ask.’
Vincent hooted.
‘You don’t live in your Salty Cockle pub then?’
‘It’s an annex, with its own front door, so it’s joined on but separate if you know what I mean, so we can shut off from work occasionally. It’s important you do that sometimes. I’ve learned that over the years.’
‘You been in the pub trade all your life then?’
‘Naw. My dad was a landlord and so I spent my formative years in a pub but I was a boxer when I was younger. And no, you wouldn’t have heard of me.
I was what they call a journeyman: reliable but not outstanding, though I had my moments.
I was never good enough to be one of the big names and that was fine, because I earned more money being the fill-in, putting on the show.
And, when my day was done, I went into the pub game and bought a gym to train young boxers up.
Johnny Kendall’s one of my lads. And Paul Khan, he’s just signed up with Frank Warren. ’ He grinned proudly.
‘I have heard of them. I follow the boxing. Heavyweight, Khan, inne? Kendall – cruiser?’
‘Yeah, that’s right. I miss it. I miss working with young people.
I miss… making a difference. I’ve got some ideas for the pub floating around that I’d like to do.
Some of the kids who used to come in through my doors didn’t know what discipline was, couldn’t follow a rule if it was tied to their fronts.
But somehow, by putting a pair of gloves on and discovering a craft and getting hit in the face, they learn how to respect others – and themselves, how to focus.
They learn perseverance and self-control, and find a purpose.
Kendall was in with a gang and he’d be in prison for sure by now.
And once you’re in there, the system swallows you up. ’
‘You give your gym up, Frank?’
‘Yeah. Life got too busy, you know how it is.’ He didn’t elaborate.
Vincent nodded. ‘The girl who’s my manager, the young one, she was an ex-prisoner.
Made some stupid mistakes as a teenager.
I took a punt on her when they asked me if I’d be willing to employ her to make the tea and sort out emails.
Best investment I ever made – in that person.
She’s a blinder. If I ever sell up, her job security will be part of the buying package.
Got to take a chance on people sometimes.
I have in the past and it’s not paid off but when it does…
it means the world, making a difference like you say. ’
Frank nodded. It was nice to meet someone with the same mindset. It made him think that the ideas he had he shouldn’t shelve, as Grace had wanted him to.
‘How many cabs you got then?’
‘Ten,’ said Vincent.
‘Ten!’ Frank whistled. ‘That’s some serious coin.’ He wouldn’t have put Vincent at more than mid-thirties. And he knew how much one of those cabs cost.
‘I passed the knowledge just before my twentieth birthday. My mum, my dad and my nan all helped me buy my own cab. And I saved and I grafted and I borrowed a bit and bought another and rented it out. Then another. Nan left me some money and I ploughed it into my business and just kept building.’
‘They still around, your family?’
‘Naw,’ said Vincent. ‘Dad went not long after my nan, lost my mum six years ago and my missus left me four months after. I find that keeping busy stops me being lonely.’
Frank didn’t say that he kept busy for the same reason, but it hadn’t stopped it for him.
‘We weren’t right for each other really, more friends than anything else and we’d met and split up all in the space of two years.
We didn’t take anything from each other, just walked away nice and amicable.
But, she did give me that invaluable piece of advice about learning to delegate and she was right because I was running myself into the ground.
’ Vincent smiled. ‘She didn’t want kids when she was with me.
It was one of the many things that weren’t right.
But she’s got three now. I’d have loved to have kids. ’
‘You’ve still got loads of time, Vince. What are you – thirty-five?’
‘Thirty-six in Feb. Getting old, Frankie boy. The tadpoles are starting to thin out.’
‘Give over. Look at all them ancient rock stars still giving it large.’
He’d have a child again tomorrow if Grace had been able, despite what they’d been through. Yes, the joy their boy had brought them had been worth it. He knew though that Grace didn’t think the same.
‘Life, eh?’ Vincent huffed. ‘We lose people but the world keeps turning and we have to keep on keeping on however much we try and resist it.’
Frank nodded but he wasn’t quite sure that was entirely true. His wife’s world had stopped turning five years ago and for all his efforts to get it shifting again, the brake remained stubbornly on.
Grace was long asleep but Jane was uncharacteristically still awake, thinking about too much.
It was just when she found herself edging into the hinterland of sleep that she heard it again, in the distance and it jolted her back to full consciousness, that ring-ring, pause, ring-ring.
A deep, serious knell: a signal. A distress call from someone stuck in the snow, perchance?
Who just happens to be carrying a huge bell? Clifford’s gentle ribbing in her head.
She closed her eyes and attempted to slip out of this world and into one of her imagination, her usual method of finding sleep when it evaded her.
One of the trips she and Clifford had planned to make but didn’t get round to, so she took them both there in her head.
Tonight they were queueing up behind fellow passengers to disembark their cruise ship in Casablanca.
The heat of the sun hit them like a wall of fire when they walked out onto the gangway.
The rattle of the bouncy metal in her mind disguised the sound of the soft footsteps moving cautiously outside the train cabin, pausing at the door, before moving on.