he let out a shout. Turland scooped up the ball and had taken George’s bike by the handlebars before George had even worked out that he would cop it too if he stayed.
‘Come on!’ Turland said and George got on the bike and pushed off, standing on the pedals with Turland perched on the seat with his legs dangling and the ball held tight against his stomach. Behind them, the others clambered down, dropped to the ground and then took off running after them.
‘Go to the Twa Dogs!’ Haycock called out as he swerved between two metal bollards and along a footpath, leaving the bike to take the road.
‘Left! Go left!’ Turland said as they made it to the wrought-iron gates at the edge of the park. George glanced back and saw the park keeper standing with one hand above his eyes peering after them, dazzled by the low sun. He cut left and then followed Haycock, who had re-emerged further along the road, down a series of side roads and back alleys between the terraced houses. When they reached the pub, Turland showed him where to stow the bike behind the privy at the rear and pressed him to come in for a drink. George, carried along on a wave of bonhomie that was new to him, readily agreed. Triumphant after their escape, jostling each other, faces flushed, they all crowded inside.
Turland ordered beers and they squeezed around a table, Rooke pouncing on spare stools and drawing them over. The place was full of men in their working clothes, some sitting at tables, some standing or leaning on the bar and a group playing shove-ha’penny at a board in the corner. The only female was a young woman with a figure that was beyond buxom, who was squeezing between tables to collect up the glasses. She paused beside a swarthy, heavily built man in shirtsleeves and braces who sat alone at a corner table reading a newspaper. George heard him ask for whisky and push some coins over to her without bothering to look up from his paper. She went straight to the bar and returned with a whisky glass, before carrying on stacking spent glasses. A fug of cigarette and pipe smoke hung in the air; the smell of Capstans mixing with the fruity smell of the briar. The whitewashed walls of the room had been turned a glossy brownish-yellow by the smoke. The only decoration in the place was a handful of paper Union Jack flags in a stoneware jar on the bar and a couple of pen-and-ink caricatures in frames, their faded mounts scattered with thrips, trapped behind the glass.
Behind the bar, a balding man with a sour face was pulling pints. He nodded to a younger man who came in briefly to change a barrel and then rolled the empty one out, cursing as it stuck in the doorway and kicking it through.
‘As I said, Ernest Turland, junior reporter.’ Turland offered him a hand wet with slopped beer. ‘And this is Tom Haycock, from the gas works, and Percy Rooke …’
‘… of no fixed employment,’ Rooke cut in.
‘Currently delivery boy and general factotum at the Cumberland News but with an eye to advancement,’ Turland said, punching Rooke lightly on the arm.
George introduced himself as George Farrell and, when pressed about why he had been sitting alone and mournful in a strange town, gave a vague answer about having had a disappointment and quickly asked how they came to be friends.
‘Turland and I were in the scouts together,’ Haycock said, ‘and Rooke lives at Turland’s lodgings.’
‘Under the dragon’s eye,’ Rooke said. ‘She even counts the toast at breakfast.’
‘That’s because she knows you pocket some for your lunch,’ Turland said.
Rooke grinned and shrugged. He took a pack of dog-eared cards from his pocket and shuffled them adeptly, flipping through two piles with his thumbs, cutting and splicing them together and then spreading them out on the table like a fan flicked open and clicked shut again. They decided on pontoon and as they played George took the opportunity to observe his new companions.
Haycock and Turland looked around his own age, eighteen or nineteen, Haycock maybe a little older as he was stocky, wider in the chest and well muscled; he moved with the confidence of a man who works with his hands and knows the strength of his arm. He had fair, crinkly hair that reminded George of the wire wool he used to clean the spokes on his bicycle wheels. Turland, who studied his cards with great seriousness, was a good-looking young man with more delicate features, dark-haired and with brown eyes and an olive complexion that seemed darker than merely the tan of summer. George wondered if there was continental blood in his family.
Rooke, despite his predatory name, reminded George somehow of a mouse: he was so quick in his movements and he was small, surely no more than sixteen, if that, really still just a boy. His hair was slicked to the side, flat to his head, which didn’t flatter him as his ears stuck out rather. His eyebrows seemed always to be raised, giving him a look not so much of surprise as constant alert anxiety, as though he was ready to take off at any minute should something untoward occur.
Rooke had suggested that they play for matches and he soon had a pile of them in front of him, whereas George, who hadn’t been giving the game his full attention, had only three and Haycock, who broke off every now and then to watch the girl collecting the glasses, had not fared much better.
‘It’s Farrell’s round then,’ Rooke said, poking George’s pathetic cache of matches.
‘That’s not hospitable,’ Turland said. ‘He’s a visitor.’
‘It’s all right,’ George said quickly. ‘I got paid today.’ He took out his pay packet from his jacket pocket, slit it open with his thumb and began to pull out a note from inside. There was a lull in the conversation at the table beside them and Haycock leant over and quickly put his calloused hand over George’s, crumpling both notes and envelope back into his fist.
‘Are you daft, man? This isn’t the place to show your money about.’
George, feeling confused, stuffed the money back into his lower pocket and automatically, without thinking, patted his breast pocket where the painting still lay between the covers of his sketchbook. With a sickening jolt, he remembered the humiliation and disappointment of the afternoon and placed his hand flat upon the table as if to keep it in view and prevent it from betraying his feelings.
Haycock stood up, saying, ‘My shout. Same again all round.’ He made his way between the tight-packed tables to the press of men at the bar.
Turland scooped all of the matches back into the centre of the table. ‘You took some off Haycock again,’ he said to Rooke sadly.
Rooke grinned. ‘He’s so easy; he can’t keep his eyes off a bit of skirt.’
‘You’re incorrigible,’ Turland said with good humour.
‘What’s that mean? That another of your newspaper words?’
‘A hopeless case.’
Rooke just laughed.
When Haycock returned with the drinks, George put out of his head the Methodist teachings on the evils of drink that his parents and a lifetime of chapel meetings had dinned into him. He was surprised how easily he did it. He had never taken a drink before, and his only experience of public houses was waiting outside while tracts for the Temperance League were distributed by his mother and a group of chapel ladies. He was anxious not to let his naivety show: even Rooke seemed at home in the bar. How could he have thought that Violet might see him as a man when he lived the life of a boy? He drank fast, as if the golden liquid that he poured down his throat could fill up the empty space inside him where his hopes had once been. They played on and drank more: Rooke was sent up to the bar, grumbling, then Turland went again, refusing to let George take his turn as he was ‘a visitor’ and ‘had got him out of a jam, courtesy of the bike’.
As they played, the conversation among the men around them ebbed and flowed but returned always to the war: the horses being commandeered – what would the brewery do for the dray-carts? The barracks at the castle were filling up with new recruits; since Mons, men were flocking to the country’s aid … they said the Germans were doing unspeakable things; they said someone had heard engines over Cockermouth, Zeppelins spying out the land …
As