No Man’s Land. Simon Tolkien

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СКАЧАТЬ beside the fireplace and told his son to pack his bag. He already had his own ready, sitting beside the front door on top of the final unopened letter from the landlord giving him notice to quit.

      ‘Where are we going, Dad?’ asked Adam.

      ‘Somewhere you’ll be safe until I come back for you.’

      ‘Where, Dad?’ Adam repeated his question, even though he thought he knew the answer. They had no close friends or relations in London and so there was only one place where his father could leave him behind.

      Daniel bit his lip, unable to look his son in the eye.

      ‘It’s the workhouse, isn’t it? That’s where you’re taking me. You’re going to abandon me, just like you abandoned my mother.’ Adam’s voice rose, fear and rage finally overcoming the deference he always showed towards his father.

      ‘I didn’t abandon your mother,’ Daniel said.

      ‘Yes, you did. You admitted it at the inquest. I heard you – you said that if you’d stayed at home Mother would still be alive. But instead you had to have your stupid strike. The strike was what you cared about, not me or Mother.’

      Tears were streaming down Adam’s face but he didn’t notice them. His words slashed at his father like the lashes of a whip and Daniel involuntarily stepped back, angered by his son’s unexpected attack. The blood rushed to his head and he was about to assert his authority and put the boy in his place, but then at the last instant he bit back on his words. Some sixth sense made him realize the importance of the moment – it was a crossroads in their relationship that could either drive them further apart or perhaps bring them back together.

      ‘You’re right,’ said Daniel, forcing himself to speak slowly; choosing his words carefully. ‘I put my politics before my family and I was wrong. And I have paid a terrible price—’

      ‘We have,’ Adam interrupted, throwing the words in his father’s face. Because words were not enough; he needed to feel that his father truly understood the crime he had committed. Without that there could be no forgiveness.

      ‘Yes, we have. And I promise you I won’t make the same mistake again, Adam. You are more important to me than any idea. I will never abandon you. Try to believe me …’ Daniel held out his hand to his son.

      And the pent-up passion in Adam suddenly broke like a rush of water flooding through the falling walls of a broken dam. His grief for his mother, his fear for the future, his love for his father, came together in a wave of emotion that took him forward and into his father’s arms.

      ‘Get your things,’ said Daniel, releasing his son after a moment. ‘Leaving is only going to get harder the longer we stay here.’

      But it wasn’t the house that was hard to leave; it was the street. Instinctively Adam knew that he wouldn’t be coming back, at least not for a long time, not until he’d become an older, different person revisiting childhood memories when they were no more than dust in the wind.

      And as he followed his father down the road on that bright winter morning it all came back to him. The sepia lens through which he’d seen the world since his mother’s death dropped away and he saw the barefoot children running behind the water cart soaking their legs and feet in the spray as it rattled over the cobblestones; saw them dancing round the horse trough where he’d spent a hundred Sundays; saw them stop and wave goodbye as he reached the Cricketers on the corner and paused to look back one last time.

      The golden rays of the rising sun glared back at Adam and his father from off the thick engraved glass in the pub’s window panes, and from somewhere inside they could hear an invisible woman singing a popular song to the accompaniment of the pub’s penny-in-the slot piano:

      ‘If I should plant a tiny seed of love

      In the garden of your heart,

      Would it grow to be a great big love some day?

      Or would it die and fade away?’

      She sang well, holding the melody, and Adam stopped to listen, but his father took his arm and pulled him forward.

      ‘We need to go,’ Daniel said, and Adam sensed the tautness in his father, saw the muscles working in his face. He seemed for a moment like a drowning man trying desperately to stay afloat.

      It was a long walk through Highbury and up into Holloway where they went by the women’s prison: a dreadful building with blackened Gothic spires and high castellated walls surmounted by barbed wire. And the workhouse when they reached it was just as forbidding, although in a different way: long and grey and flat with rows of clean, closed windows running in a line under the stacks of smokeless chimneys, and above them a brick clock tower with a bell that mournfully tolled the hour just as they arrived outside the door.

      The place terrified Adam – he remembered what his father had said about the workhouse in times gone by: it was the place where the poor were sent to die when they were no use to the rich any more; it was the house at the end of the world.

      ‘Please, Dad, don’t leave me here. Take me with you,’ he implored his father.

      ‘I can’t,’ said Daniel. ‘I don’t have the money to support us both. Not until I’ve got work. And you’ll be safe here.’

      ‘I don’t want to be safe; I want to be with you.’

      ‘You will be. I promise. But for now you’ve got to stay here and trust me. Can you do that, Adam?’ Daniel asked. He leant down, putting his hands on his son’s shoulders, trying to look him in the eye. But Adam kept his gaze on the floor: he hated his father just as much as he loved him at that moment. Finally, reluctantly, he nodded his head.

      ‘Good lad,’ said Daniel, straightening up. ‘I knew I could count on you.’ He reached out his hand and pulled the bell cord.

      ‘Listen, Adam, I’ve got to go now,’ said Daniel quickly. ‘The Guardians, the people who run this place, might cause problems if they see me here, but if you’re on your own they’ve got to look after you; so – goodbye. I’ll be back, I promise.’ He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and suddenly pulled him close in a tight embrace. And then, picking up his bag, he walked quickly away.

      And for Adam there was no time to think. A wooden grating in the door was shot back and a pair of dark eyes looked out at him for a moment from above a thick moustache.

      ‘New?’ asked the voice of the otherwise invisible man.

      Adam nodded, and there was a sound of bolts being drawn back and a key being turned in the lock. Adam wanted to run away. He felt that once inside, behind this thick iron door, he would never get out again. He hesitated, looking wildly up and down the street, and gave up. He had nowhere to go, no money in his pockets, and he had given his word that he would stay. If he left now his father might never find him when he came back. If he came back.

      The porter was dressed in a blue serge suit with gold braids on the sleeves and collar. He looked pleased with himself; pleased with his uniform and with his elaborate military moustache curled up into tiny black spikes at the corners of his mouth. He towered over Adam, looking him up and down as if he was conducting a preliminary assessment, which perhaps he was.

      ‘All right then,’ he said eventually. ‘Follow me.’ And he set off at a brisk pace down СКАЧАТЬ