§tandby - The Light

The lights went at twenty to seven, the same as the night before and the night before that, and Margaret had the candles up before the picture had finished dying on the television, three of them in the white saucers she kept by the clock now, so that the room went from the gray flicker of the set to the dark to the soft yellow of the flames in the space of a held breath. The street went with it. Stanley watched it from the front-room window, the Hartleys' gone, the Dixons' gone, the lamp at the corner stuttering once and dropping out, the whole row of it going down toward the bottom end where the houses stopped and there was only the dark and, past the dark, the pale place where the sky didn't carry on as a sky should. House by house, like something tipped out of a jug.

"Come away from the glass," Margaret said. "You'll have the Hartleys thinking we've nowt better to do than count their candles."

He came away. She had the tea kept warm under a plate on the camping stove, the little blue Calor ring they'd bought in November when it started, and she lit it and set the kettle on, and the room smelled of paraffin and gravy and the wax, and it was, Stanley thought, not a bad way to sit of an evening, the two of them in the one pool of light with the cold pressing on the windows and the rest of the house gone dark and unimportant. There was a kind of holiday in it that nobody would say out loud. The works was on three days. He had Thursday and Friday to himself and his hands didn't know what to do with them. Margaret had got out the cards.

"Twenty to seven," he said.

"What about it."

"Same as last night. Twenty to. And Tuesday. And Monday it was twenty to as near as makes no difference." He had it in his head, the times, he couldn't help having it. "You'd think a thing that big breaking down would break down ragged. A bit here, a bit there. Not on the dot."

"It's the rota, Stanley. They do it by streets. It's in the paper."

"I know it's the rota." He did know. He'd read the rota, the district letters and the hours, the gray columns of it. "Only ours doesn't move. They're meant to shift it round, so it's fair, so it's not the same houses dark every night. Ours has been twenty to seven a fortnight. To the minute." He heard himself and stopped. Margaret had her cards squared in her hand and she was looking at him over them, not unkind, with the small braced waiting on her face that she got now when he started.

"You and your minutes," she said. "Cut for deal."

He cut. He wasn't trying to make anything of it; he didn't want it to be anything. A man wanted, after a day of nothing at the works and the cold and the price of a bag of coal, to sit in the one warm yellow room with his wife and play three-handed solo short a hand. As a boy he'd been the one who saw the join in the wallpaper where the paper-hanger had set the pattern a half-inch out, the one who stood up in the picture-house and said the reel had a bit in it the same as a bit before. He was fifty-one now and sitting in candlelight saying twenty to seven to a woman who only wanted to play cards.

It hadn't done him any good at the works, either. The Tuesday just gone, the last day they'd run before the three days came in, he'd stood at his bench and said to young Naylor that the dinner hooter went off at the very same second every day, you could set your heart by it, and that a hooter ran off a clock and a clock drifted, all clocks drifted, there wasn't a works clock in England kept true to the second across a fortnight, his own father had been a fitter before him, forty years at the same works in Bilston, and had told him so as a lad. Naylor had laughed, not nasty, and said give over, Stan. But Pickersgill the foreman was stood near enough to hear, and Pickersgill hadn't laughed. He'd taken the stub of pencil from behind his ear and written something small on the sheet clipped to his board, no more than he'd put down for a man clocking in late, and said nowt, and that was worse than if he'd said summat.

He let it go. They played. The candles burned down a finger's width. On the transistor, low, a man read the news, the talks broken off again, the miners and the Coal Board and the Prime Minister, and then the same man read the rota for the morning in the same flat patient voice, the district letters, the hours, and gave the small dry cough he always gave before he handed over to the weather. Stanley's hand stopped on a card.

"He coughs," he said.

"Who coughs."

"The wireless man. Just before the weather. He's coughed there every night. Same little cough, same spot." He had the card halfway laid and he didn't lay it. "A man doesn't cough in the same place every night, Margaret. Not the same cough."

"They record them," Margaret said. "The forecasts. Days ahead, my sister says, her Ron worked at the studios. They do them in a batch." She took the card out of his hand and laid it for him and took her trick. "Now will you leave the poor man's chest alone and mind your play."

It was a good answer. It was the sort of answer that should have closed it, and with anyone else it would have, and Stanley sat there in the candlelight and felt it not close. Because he had thought of that, the recording, and it didn't account for the cough itself, the same catch of breath in the same half-second, night on night, a thing a man's own body couldn't do twice if he tried. And it didn't account for the cut coming at twenty to seven to the minute on a rota that was meant to move. And it didn't account for old Sykes at the corner shop, who'd buried his wife the year Stanley was wed and had been an old man then, and was the same old man now, the same age exactly, the same yellow-white in the same moustache, when Stanley's own hair had gone and Margaret had her glasses and the boy they'd had was a man in Coventry with a girl of his own. Things wore. Things were meant to wear. That was the one rule under all the other rules, that a thing went on from the thing before it and got older doing it, and the street he was sitting in the dark in the middle of had a great deal in it that did not seem to be obeying that rule, and he was the only one who would say so, and saying so made Margaret's face do the small braced thing, and he loved her, and he wanted the face to stop doing the small braced thing, and so mostly now he didn't say.

He got up and went to the window again.

"Stanley."

The street was all candle-glow now behind the curtains, square after square of it down the row, warm and orange and the same, and none of it reached the bottom of the street. Past the Dixons', past where the last lamp stood dead, there was the dark, and in the dark the pale place, low along where the fields ought to start, a gray that wasn't morning and wasn't the town's glow thrown up on cloud because there was no glow tonight, the whole town was down. It just stood there, the gray, level, the height of a man's eye, where the sky stopped going up and started being a wall, and he had looked at it all his life and not looked at it, and tonight with everything else dark it was the only thing to see.

He put his coat on.

"Where are you going? It's gone seven, it's perishing, what'll—" She stood up with the cards still fanned. "Stanley. Come and sit down."

"I'll only be on the step."

He stood on the front step in the cold with the door shut behind him to keep her heat in, and he looked down the row at the gray, and he counted, under his breath, slow. He didn't know what he meant to time. He only knew the want of it, the old boy's want, to put a number on the wrongness so it would hold still and be a fact. The cold came through his slippers. Up and down the row the candlelit squares held steady, and behind more than one of them, he knew, without seeing it plain, a face had come to the gap in the curtain. A man stood out on his step in the dark in a power cut with his head turned the wrong way, away from his own warm house, toward the bottom of the street where there was nothing a man should want to look at, and the street watched him do it the same as it watched who put their bins out wrong and whose coal merchant came twice in a week. He knew they were watching, and he stood there anyway, fifty-one and shivering and counting, because it was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, and not one other soul on the street would stand in the cold and say so.

"Forty," he said, to no one, to the gray. "Forty seconds and the lamp's still dead. It's not the bulb, Maggie. A bulb's not the same forty seconds every—"

The door opened behind him and her hand came onto his arm, warm out of the warm house, and her voice when it came was low and quick and not like her cards voice at all.

"Come in," she said. "Stanley. Come inside now. Please. People are looking."

And he let her bring him in, because of the please, because of her hand warm from the Calor ring on his cold arm, because of the tea and the wax and the cards still fanned on the cloth where she'd set them down to come and get him, the whole small warm room of his life with the cold shut out of it. The door shut. And that was the last ordinary night, though he didn't know to count that one.

They came on the Thursday, in the morning, when the power was on and the kettle worked and Margaret had the wireless going in the kitchen. Two of them, in good dark coats, hats in their hands at the door, polite as the men who came about the insurance. They knew his name. They said there were a few questions, just routine, nothing to trouble himself over, it wouldn't take long and he'd be back before he knew it, and one of them said it had come up that he'd not been sleeping, that he'd been keeping odd hours, standing out in the cold, and that a man under strain in times like these, with the works gone to three days, it was understood, it was very common, and there were people whose job it was to help with that sort of thing. Margaret stood in the hall with the tea towel still in her hand and her face had gone smooth and bright and certain, the face for the rent man, the face for the doctor, and she said of course, of course, you go with the gentlemen, Stanley, and get it sorted, and she'd have his dinner kept. She did not look at the bottom of the street. She had learned, somewhere he hadn't watched her learn it, not to.

He went because you went. Because you didn't make a show on your own front path with the Hartleys' curtain twitching. He went down the path between the two coats and there was a car at the kerb, dark, clean, no writing on it, and a cold came up off it that wasn't the morning's cold, and when he ducked his head to get in he had, for half a second, a taste in his mouth like a coin held under the tongue, and the word for the thing he was getting into would not come to him, the ordinary word, car, it sat just out of reach behind the cold and the taste, and then it came back, car, of course, a car, and he got in.

Under his hand the seat had gone scratchy, a moquette, blue and brown in a pattern, worn shiny on the arm, and there was a smell of damp wool and old smoke, and a bulb in the roof that flickered and steadied and flickered, and a window beside him with the gray standing level outside it where the platform ought to have been. A train, then. He had got on a train. He couldn't think of the platform, or the getting-on, or where the two men had gone, but a man knew a railway carriage when he sat in one, and he sat in it, with his hands on his knees, and waited for someone to come and tell him where they were taking him and why, and how long, and when he'd be back for his dinner. Someone would come. There was always someone whose job it was. He was sure of it. He sat very straight and kept the question ready in his mouth, and outside the window the gray did not move, and then, with no lurch, with nothing, it began to.

§§ : https://www.abctales.com/collection/period-pieces