Jane Gardam - Last Friends

But young Florrie Benson saw an angel that night. She had taken money from her mother’s purse to buy a ticket for the show and was at once translated. She heard a new music, a new fierce rapture. She watched the superhuman contortions of the exciting male bodies. Her skin prickled all over at their wild cries. In a way she recognised them.

There was one dancer she couldn’t take her eyes off. Her friend next to her was sniggering into a handkerchief (‘For men it’s right daft’) and the next day she stole more money and went to the Cossacks alone. She went every night that week and the final night she was up beside him on the platform when he fell from a rope. She was ordering a doctor, roaring out in her lion’s voice. People seemed to think she must be his woman. She never left his side.

* * *

The rest of the Cossacks melted away and they and their tent were gone by morning in their shabby truck. Florrie, the English schoolgirl, stayed with him at the hospital and wouldn’t be shifted. Doctors examined him and said his back was probably not broken but time would tell. Someone said, ‘He’s a foreigner. Speaks nowt but heathen stuff! He’ll have to be reported.’

Yet nobody seemed to know where. Or seemed interested. The local clergyman who was on the Town Council went to see him, and then the Roman Catholic priest who tried Latin and the Cossack’s lips moved. Each thought the other had reported him to the authorities, without quite knowing what these were.

‘They’ll no doubt be in touch any day from Russia to get him back.’ They waited.

‘There was a couple of Russians died of food-poisoning last year off a ship anchored in Newcastle. Meat pies. The Russians was in touch right away for body-parts. Suspected sabotage.’

But nobody seemed to want the body-parts of the Cossack who lay in the cottage-hospital with his eyes shut. He talked to himself in his own language and spat out all the hospital food. And only the school-girl beside him.

‘Back’s gone,’ they told her. ‘Snapped through. He’ll never walk again.’

The following week he was found standing straight at the window, six-foot-four and looking eastward toward the dawn and the Transporter Bridge at Middlesbrough, an engineering triumph. It seemed to interest him. When the nurses screamed at him he screamed back at them and began to throw the beds about and they couldn’t get near to him with a needle. Someone called the police and somebody else ran round to find Florence.

She was taken out of school and to the hospital in a police car, no explanations; and when she was let into his isolation ward she looked every bit woman and shouted, ‘You. You come ’ome wi’ me. Away !’ ‘ Away ’ is a word up there that can mean anything but is chiefly a command.

She left her address at the hospital and commanded an ambulance. The ward sister was drinking tea with her feet up so Florrie got him from the ambulance herself, half on her back. She had a bed made ready. The aged parents, never bright, shook their heads and drowsed on. ‘Eh, Florence! Eh, Florrie Benson — whatever next?’

The dancer stayed. He lay, staring above him now. Nobody came. Florrie went to the public library in Middlesbrough to find out about Cossacks. She came back and stood looking at his curious eyes. She imagined they were seeing great plains of snow spread out before him. Multitudinous mountains. The endless Steppe. She got out some library books and tried to show him the photographs but they didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

She gave up school. She was sixteen, anyway. Her old parents went whimpering about the house, faded and both were dead within the year.

Florence was pregnant, and even so, nobody was interested in the Cossack. Neighbours came round but she was daunting. If she had been a boy it would all have been different. Serious enquiries. But, even pregnant, nothing was done for Florence.

After a time the man began to walk again, just to the window or the door on the street. Or into the ghastly back alley.

One day Florrie came home from buying fish to find him gone.

It was for her the empty tomb. The terror and the disbelief were a revelation. She ran every-where to look for him, and, in the end, it was she — out of half the parish — who found him, on the sand-dunes staring out over what was still being called the German Ocean. The North Sea.

She brought him limping and swearing home and, at last, being well-acquainted now with the Christian Cross that lay in the warm golden hair on his chest, she went to the Catholic priest, leaving Nurse Watkins in charge for two shillings and four pence. There were very few half-crowns left now.

The priest lived in a shuttered little brick house beside his ugly church beside the breakwater. Nobody went there except the Irish navvies in the steel-works. ‘Russian?’ asked Father Griesepert. ‘Communist you say?’

‘No. He’s definitely Catholic.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He doesn’t believe in taking precautions.’

Father Griesepert said that he would call. He said that, actually, he had already been thinking about it.

‘Name?’ Father Griesepert shouted.

Nobody had actually asked the Cossack’s name. The Catholic priest bullied the sick man in a loud voice. He tried a bit of German (on account of his own strange name which was one of the reasons for his isolation here).

‘Address? Home address?’

The man looked scornful.

‘Name of circus?’

Silence. Then ‘Piccadilly’ and a great laugh.

Suddenly, in good English, the Cossack said, ‘My name is Anton’ (‘Anton,’ whispered Florence, listening to it).

‘Very unlikely he’s a Cossack. I’d guess he comes from Odessa,’ said the priest. He rubbed his hands over his face as if he were washing it. ‘This woman,’ he said in loud English to the man, ‘Is with child.’

Anton understood.

‘You must be married before the birth.’

Anton looked at Florence as if he had never seen her before.

Florence went to get the priest his whisky.

They all said prayers together then, and Griesepert named the wedding date. ‘We must, of course, inform the authorities.’ He was met by two pairs of staring eyes.

‘You are a Catholic, Florrie Benson.’ She seemed uncertain. ‘Your parents were lapsed. But I remember baptising you as a child. That child has now to have her own child and it must be brought up as a Catholic. It must go to a Catholic school. You must bring it to the church. And your marriage must be preceded by a purification.’

‘A purification , Father?’

‘Have you no concept of your faith?’

‘You never gave me any.’

She stretched out her rough hand in a gesture which was — for her — hesitant, towards the Cossack’s hand and together they both glared at the priest. Then, between them in assorted words, from God knows where, they made a stab at the Catechism, Anton’s face rigid with contempt.

Florrie’s face was alight with joy. The baby in the womb stirred.

* * *

Anton tried. When Florrie was in the ninth month and couldn’t walk far he began to limp about the town looking for work.

There was almost no money left by now from the wills of Florrie’s parents and so he became a caretaker at a private school at the end of the town. When they found that he spoke several languages he began to teach classes there. His English improved so quickly that it almost seemed that it had always been there, beneath the other languages. He began to meet educated people in the good houses across the Park towards Linthorpe. The new great families, the iron-masters. Some of them German Jews. In these houses he behaved with a grave, alien formality: but with a seductive gleam in his eye. It seemed that he was a gentleman. It was confusing.