The Lock-Keeper's Son Read online

  Marriage would have offered a solution, but not marriage to Harriet. Oh, most certainly not to Harriet. He would not rule marriage out completely, though, if the right girl came along. On the other hand, why not simply bypass the institution of marriage altogether? The world offered too many pretty girls to have to settle for just one, especially one whose face was particularly uninspiring, as Harriet’s was. He knew from hearsay that there were plenty of girls willing enough to partake of those delectable stolen pleasures for which he yearned, if only such girls were not so damned elusive. He was thus inclined to believe they all inhabited another planet. They never seemed to pass his way at any rate. Even if they did, he would hardly be able to recognise such qualities in them as he was seeking, and why would they look at him twice anyway? He was nothing special, or so he thought. He did not like his own face, he did not like his dark, curly hair, nor his tallness, nor the shape of his nose either. How could he possibly appeal to women? Especially the sort of women that would interest him, who just had to be pretty, with appealing, youthful figures. Otherwise there was no point to it.

  That same spring Sunday afternoon in 1890 was one of those delightful, lengthening days which herald the approach of summer. Soft sunlight caressed distant hills, and already the air, bearing the sweet smell of greenness, had a mollifying summer mildness about it. A warm breeze gently flurried the fresh crop of young leaves that bedecked the trees after their long winter nakedness. A flock of pigeons flapped in unison overhead, wheeling gleefully across the blue sky in celebration of their Sunday release into glorious sunshine.

  The lock-keeper’s cottage was situated alongside the Stourbridge Canal at an area called Buckpool, set between the township of Brierley Hill and the village of Wordsley, yet no great distance from either. The warmth of the spring day cosseted Algie as he stepped out into it. He stopped to appreciate it, closing his eyes, wallowing in the sensual touch of sunlight, a touch too long denied him. For a fleeting moment, he allowed himself the luxury of a sensual thought; that of spooning in the long grass of some secluded meadow with Marigold Bingham. He’d had his eye on her for so much longer than he would care to admit.

  Hannah, Marigold’s mother, saw him and waved amiably.

  ‘Still having your dinners?’ Algie called, disappointed that he’d mistimed his appearance and they hadn’t finished.

  ‘You gotta eat sometime,’ Hannah called back. ‘Even on this job.’

  ‘I’m just on me way to the public.’ He felt it necessary to explain his presence, even though the explanation was an instantly conjured lie, in case Marigold, who could be listening, might rightly presume that he was seeking her and decide to avoid him. ‘I just fancy a pint after me dinner.’

  ‘You’ll very likely see Seth in there.’

  ‘That’s what I was wondering,’ he fibbed.

  ‘He always likes a pint or two afore he has his Sunday dinner.’ She said the word afore as if she considered it strange that Algie should want to drink beer after his dinner. ‘I don’t mind keeping it warm in the stove till he gets back. He likes the beer at the Bottle and Glass, you know. It’s why we moor up here when we’m this way.’

  ‘I might see him inside then.’ Algie smiled openly, hiding the disappointment at his inability to speak to Marigold without making his intentions obvious to her mother, and continued on the route to which he’d unthinkingly committed himself.

  He walked the few yards to the next lock, which lay beneath the road bridge. There, he left the canal, crossed the road to the public house and entered the public bar. Inside, he leaned against the varnished wooden counter and greeted the publican, Thomas Simpson, familiarly. He ordered a tankard of India pale, peering for a sight of Seth Bingham through the haze of tobacco smoke. Seth was sitting on a wooden settle that echoed the shape of the bowed window, in conversation with two other men whom Algie recognised as boatmen also. They acknowledged him, but he thought better of getting drawn into their company, for it was likely to cost him the price of three extra tankards. He decided to give himself fifteen minutes to finish his beer, by which time he imagined Marigold would have finished her dinner. Then he would try again to catch her while her father was still supping and, perhaps, her mother’s back might be turned.

  The huge clock that adorned one wall had a tick that sounded more like a clunk, even above the buzz of conversation, and Algie watched its hands slowly traverse its discoloured face. He drank his beer, trying to appear casual and unhurried, as if he was really enjoying it. He dropped the occasional greeting to various men who approached the bar for their refills, and took a casual, benign interest in a game of bagatelle other men were playing.

  Eventually, he stepped outside once more into the unseasonably warm sunshine of the late April afternoon. At the bridge he hesitated and, for a brief second, watched the sun-flecked sparkle of the water as it lapped softly against the walls of the canal, plucking up the courage to approach Marigold again. He looked for the Sultan – the name given to Seth Bingham’s horse boat – and saw Marigold conscientiously wiping down the vivid paintwork of its cabin with a cloth. It was now or never, he thought as he rushed onto the towpath and approached.

  ‘Busy?’ he asked, beaming when he reached her.

  She looked up, momentarily startled, evidently not expecting to see him, and smiled when she realised it was Algie Stokes again. ‘It has to be done regular, this cleaning,’ she replied pleasantly.

  Up close – and this was as close as he’d ever been to Marigold – she was even more lovely. Her skin was as smooth and translucent as finest bone china. Her eyes seemed bluer, clearer, and wider; her dark eyelashes so unbelievably long. Her lips were upturned at the corners into a deliciously friendly smile, and he longed to kiss her. The very thought set his heart pounding.

  ‘Your two boats always look sparkling,’ he remarked with complete sincerity. ‘I’ve noticed that many a time.’

  Marigold smiled proudly. ‘It’s ’cause me mom’s so fussy. She don’t want us to be mistook for one o’ them rodneys what keep their boats all scruffy. And I agree with her.’

  ‘Oh, I agree with her, as well. Where’s the sense in keeping your boat all scruffy when you have to live in it?’

  ‘And while we’m moored up, what better time to clean the outside?’ she said with all the practicality of a seasoned boatwoman. ‘We’m carrying coal this trip and the dust gets everywhere.’ She rolled her eyes, so appealingly. ‘You can taste it in your mouth and feel it in your tubes. It gets in your pores and in your clothes. It’s the devil’s own game trying to keep anything clean when you’m a-carrying coal.’

  ‘I can only begin to imagine,’ he replied earnestly, truly sympathetic to the problem. ‘I know what it’s like in our coal cellar. It must be ten times worse on a narrowboat. So you’re bound for Kidderminster, you reckon?’

  ‘Tomorrow. We’ll be on our way at first light.’

  ‘What time d’you expect to get there?’

  Marigold shrugged. ‘It’s about dinner time as a rule. Then it depends if we can get offloaded quick. Some o’ them carpet factories am a bit half-soaked when it comes to offloading the boats, ’specially if you catch ’em at dinner time. Me dad likes to wind round and get back. He gets paid by the load, see? Me, I don’t mind if we get stuck there till night time. We do as a rule.’

  ‘Got much more cleaning to do?’

  ‘Only a bit. We’ve all got our jobs, but I’ve nearly finished mine for today.’

  ‘Fancy a walk then?’ Algie enquired boldly, seizing the moment.

  ‘A walk?’

  He nodded. ‘I could take you a walk over the fields or up the lanes, if you like. You must be sick o’ looking at the cut all the time.’

  She instantly flushed. ‘I’ll have to ask me mom.’

  ‘Ask her then.’ Algie’s heart skipped a beat. Marigold had agreed in principle. This was significant progress. All that stood in the way now was perhaps her mother.

  Marigold smiled w
ith blushing pleasure, and nipped inside the cabin.

  Algie could no more help flirting with a pretty girl than some people can help stammering, but he had not the least intention of breaking anybody’s heart. For a start, he did not take himself seriously enough, he was not good-looking enough to succeed. The desire to elicit a smile from a pretty face was strong within him, however.

  Hannah Bingham nipped out, holding a limp dishcloth. ‘You want to take our Marigold a walk?’ she asked, not unpleasantly.

  ‘If you’ve got no objection, Mrs Bingham,’ he answered with an apologetic but appealing smile. ‘She says she’s finished her jobs.’

  ‘I got no objection, young Algie, as long as she’s back well afore sundown.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll be back well before then, Mrs Bingham, I promise.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to give her a minute to spruce herself up if she’s going a walk.’ She turned and spoke to her daughter in the cabin. ‘Our Marigold, change into another frock if you’m going a walk with young Algie.’ She turned back to Algie and smiled. ‘Why don’t you come back in ten minutes when she’s ready, eh?’

  Algie grinned with delight. ‘All right, I will, Mrs Bingham.’

  He could hardly believe his luck. Marigold had agreed to accompany him on a walk, and her mother had sanctioned it. The prospect of getting the girl alone had, till that moment, seemed an improbable dream, but a dream he’d diligently clung to. He sauntered back to the lock-keeper’s cottage, thrilled. Maybe he had a way with women after all. Maybe he did possess some fascination or irresistible power over girls, despite his doubts. For so long he’d thought it unlikely. There was a suspicion meandering through his head – he knew not from where it came – that, in any case, a handsome face was not the be-all and end-all for women, but he just didn’t have the experience to know if it was true. For the time being, it was enough that some young women blushed when he spoke or smiled at them; and he made a point of smiling at all those girls who were pretty, whatever their station in life, rich or poor. If they thought he was ugly or uninteresting they could always turn their heads and ignore him. Yet they seldom did. Only the very stuck-up ones, and stuck-up girls he could not be doing with anyway.

  He returned home to wait. Over the fireplace in the parlour was a mirror. He stood in front of it and looked at himself, but was not impressed. He straightened his necktie and tried unsuccessfully to smooth his unruly curls with the flat of his hand.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ his mother said, suddenly appearing from the brewhouse outside. ‘Fetch some coal up from the cellar for me, our Algernon. There’s scarcely any left in the scuttle.’

  ‘Can’t our Kate do it?’ he complained. ‘I’ll get all mucked up and I’m going out in less than ten minutes.’

  ‘Our Kate’s busy changing beds ready for washing day tomorrow,’ Kate herself chimed in, opening the stairs door as she descended with a bundle of sheets and pillowcases in her arms. ‘You wouldn’t be very pleased if your bed was black as the devil from the coal in the cellar, would you? Anyroad, where are you off to of a Sunday afternoon?’

  ‘Mind your own business.’

  ‘I’ll mind me business if you’ll fetch the coal up.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Algie muttered reluctantly, knowing it to be futile attempting refusal to these two women, ranged against him with a singular will. He opened the door to the coal cellar and disappeared with the scuttle.

  His task completed, he went to the brewhouse and washed his hands. Behind him, his mother complained that he had left damp coal dust on the scullery floor, which he’d brought up from the cellar on the soles of his boots.

  ‘Our Kate should have gone down,’ he called back. ‘She’s got smaller feet than me. She wouldn’t have made so much mess.’ Then, before he could be asked to perform any more disagreeable chores, he dashed outside and returned to the Bingham’s butty, waiting for Marigold to appear.

  From where the Stokes’s cottage stood, the canal descended by a series of locks and basins towards Wordsley. You could see, beyond the massive cone of the Red House Glassworks, green valleys swooping between wooded hills and leafy glades. Towered and spired churches clad in the ivy of centuries dotted the landscape, as well as cosy homesteads, farmhouses and stately old manor houses. Nibbled pastures, where sheep and cattle grazed, receded into the hazy green distance. It was a sight that cheered Algie’s heart.

  Over the hill in the opposite direction lay, incongruously, a black industrial wilderness of slag heaps, mines, glassworks, and forges. Foundries and ironworks belched forth acrid brown smoke from great chimney stacks, and red flames from open hearth furnaces, even on this warm spring Sunday. Humble little red-brick houses shared this desolate eastward outlook, sparsely dotted with clumps of coarse grass, railways, viaducts and bridges as well as the interlinking canals with their locks, basins and wharfs. This was the astonishing landscape of the Black Country, that broad tract of man-made bleakness that lay roughly between the opposing boundaries of Wolverhampton to the west and Birmingham to the east. Yet it held as much diversity as you could reasonably assimilate in a month of Sundays if you cared to look. Prosperity lived symbiotically with hardship, as did culture with ignorance, good taste with bad, virtue with wantonness, respectability with indelicacy, and hard work with idleness. Significantly, the Black Country, for all its limited size, generated a disproportionate amount of the enormous wealth that enabled Britain to wield such undeniable power in the world.

  Marigold popped her head round the cabin door.

  ‘Oh, you’re back then.’

  ‘Yes, I’m back. Are you ready yet?’

  She nodded and stepped out onto the gunwale, then onto the towpath. ‘I just wanted to change me frock, wash me face and tidy me hair up a bit. Me mom don’t like me venturing away from the cut in me working frock. She says it’s common to do that.’

  He smiled his response, looking her up and down. The frock was plainly cut in muslin and well-washed, the floral pattern almost faded from enthusiastic and frequent laundering, but she looked divine, and there was no shame in cleanliness. It fitted her perfectly, enhancing her slender figure. Her dark hair had been hurriedly brushed and re-pinned, and it was tidier now.

  ‘You look ever so nice,’ he said sincerely.

  ‘Thank you. So do you in your Sunday best suit. Where you taking me?’

  ‘There’s a path over the fields to Kingswinford. I bet you’ve never been there?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not if there ain’t a cut what goes there. Is it far?’

  ‘A mile, a mile and a half, maybe – nothing really. But it’s a fine afternoon for a stroll.’

  ‘What is there at Kingswinford? Anything special?’

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing special. It’s just a nice walk over fields.’

  He led her back to the bridge he’d just come from and onto the lane that led first to Wordsley.

  ‘I’m thinking of getting meself a bike,’ he announced, in a manner calculated to impress.

  ‘A bike? Blimey.’ Marigold sounded duly impressed. ‘I wish I could have a bike. I could ride to the locks ahead of our narrowboats and open ’em ready. It wouldn’t half save us some time.’

  ‘Suggest it to your dad. Mebbe he’ll buy one.’

  ‘I doubt whether he could afford one. How much do they cost?’

  ‘About twelve pounds with pneumatic tyres. Pneumatic tyres are best. You don’t want solid tyres.’

  ‘Twelve pounds?’ Marigold queried with disbelief. ‘That’s a fortune. Me dad would never spend that much, even if he’d got it to spend.’

  ‘I’ve been saving up for ages.’

  ‘Where would you moor it?’

  ‘In our shed.’

  ‘What d’you do for a living, Algie, if you can afford to buy a bike?’

  ‘I make brass bedsteads at Sampson’s up at Queen’s Cross in Dudley. A bike will be handy for getting to work and back.’

  ‘Don’t you fancy being a lock-keepe
r, like your dad?’

  ‘Me? Nah. It don’t pay enough wages. You get your coal for free, granted, and a house to live in as part of the job, but I wouldn’t be a lock-keeper. Me dad gets called out all hours. I wouldn’t want that. I like peace and quiet. How about you, anyway? D’you intend to spend the rest of your life on the narrowboats?’

  ‘Depends,’ she said with a shrug.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether I marry a boatman – a number one, f’rinstance.’

  ‘A number one? You mean a chap who owns his own boats?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Got your eye on anybody?’ he asked, dreading her answer, but grinning all the same.

  She shrugged again. ‘Dunno. Nobody on the boats at any rate.’ She gave him a sideways glance to assess his reaction.

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘I ain’t telling you.’

  So there was some chap in her life. Damn and blast. It was naïve of him to think otherwise, a girl like Marigold.

  ‘Go on, you can tell me.’

  ‘There is a chap I like,’ she admitted. ‘He ain’t a boatman. He works at one of the carpet factories in Kiddy. He’s one that generally helps offload us.’