When they married he had said to her, one thing I guarantee: no woman of mine will be poor. He had hoped to be a good husband, to be provident, faithful. He was exceptionally provident and mostly faithful. By the time Grace was born he was working for Wolsey every hour. The cousins would look at him warily when he came in: where have you been? As if it must be somewhere nefarious. They were waiting to see another self: the wolf that lives in man, his father Walter bristling through his skin.
By the time he returned from Antwerp, Walter was a man of consequence in the district. Formerly he had enlarged his land-holdings by kicking over his neighbours’ boundary-markers, but now he had acres by lawful purchase, and he had invested in his brewery, even tempting a Lowlander over to teach him to improve his beer, for the art was well-mastered there. His brother-in-law Morgan had said, ‘Thomas, you should go to Putney and see your dad now. You should see the belly on him. You should see the hat he’s got, now he’s a churchwarden.’
‘If you recommend it,’ he’d said, ‘I’ll go and have a look.’
The day came. Before he caught sight of Walter, the neighbours caught sight of him. Word spread. Some gawper said, ‘It’s bloody little Put-an-edge-on-it. Where’s he been, do you think?’
He did not feel a need to answer.
‘Show his face here!’ a woman said. ‘He must think we have short memories!’
He had nothing to say.
‘We thought you were dead,’ a fellow exclaimed.
He did not correct him.
Then he looked up and Walter was rolling towards him. He wasn’t wearing the hat but he was wearing the belly. It didn’t soften him. He might be sober and shaven, but he still looked as if he would knock you down as soon as blink.
The smithy was still there, not that Walter did the work these days; when he held out his hand it was pink and clean and you would have to look close to see the burn marks.
He, Thomas, prowled around the premises. Tools in their racks; a leather apron on a peg, with the stench of the tannery still about it. Or perhaps he imagines that: sweat, salt, shit, all the savours of his early life. Walter said, ‘Taking inventory, are you? I’m not dead yet, boy.’
He made no answer.
‘You moving back?’ Walter asked.
‘No.’
‘We not good enough for you?’
‘No.’
People are always prompting you, you notice, to forgive and forget. They are always urging you, do as your father did, boy: be what your father was. Young men claim they want change, they want freedom, but the truth is, freedom just confuses them and change makes them quake. Set them on the open road with a purse and a fair wind, and before they’ve gone a mile they are crying for a master: they must be indentured, they must be in bond, they must have someone to obey.
He would like to be the exception. He has travelled a mile and more. But perhaps he isn’t that different from the mass of men. As a boy, before he ran away, all he wanted was to be his father – Walter, but tidier. He had thought, one day the old man will keel over and get buried: then I, Thomas, will be master of the brewery and runner of the sheep, and I’ll hand the smithy work to boys I’ll train, only because of lack of hours in the week. There’s something about a smithy (it’s the warmth) that draws in all the idlers of the district on a winter’s day, and they stand around gossiping, till the light drains from the sky, and the colours of burning, cherry red to pale straw, are replaced by a sky of slate, by the moon heeled underfoot by late drinkers heading home. The day gone, and what’s to show for it? Rose-headed nails or brads, hooks, skewers, stakes, bolts, holdfasts, bars.
In Florence, and then in Antwerp, Walter patrolled his dreams: he would wake up belly churning, awash with rage. But still, he came home to Putney. When Walter died the neighbourhood mourned his loss: the new, reformed Walter. He believed in Purgatory in those days, and though he paid a priest to pray for Walter’s soul, he hoped Purgatory had a good strong lock on the door. He sees no need for Walter’s grandchildren to put him in their prayers.
Anne is a child who grizzles and wails, a trouble to the wet nurse: greedy, Liz says. She always wants something but nobody knows what it is. All of us are born into sin, our souls already besmirched: Anne illustrates it, the picture of infant turpitude. She creates spillages and knocks objects flying. She sits on the stairs outside the room where he is working, till he brings her in and she sits under the table with the dog, twisting Bella’s fur into spirals, humming to herself; till he says, ‘For God’s sake, daughter, can’t you read a book?’
‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘When I’m six.’
‘How old are you now?’ (He loses track.)
‘I don’t know.’
