3
Willie came across the fields from Calfin shortly after seven o’clock the following morning. He took his time, not on account of his years but because there was no need to hurry and because, since his retirement from the mines, he had begun to suffer increasingly from shortness of breath. While the wife still slept he had struggled into his clothes and gone down the narrow stairs into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. He hadn’t bothered to eat. He found he had three Woodbines left from the night before, and the visitors over at Nant MacFarley might possibly tip him for cleaning out the toilet. He would buy some bacon at the corner shop for breakfast on his way back from the Glen. He let himself out quietly, treading gently down the path so as not to disturb the wife. She would probably want to know why he was going and where and what for, and he didn’t want to discuss it. He had married late, after the death of his mother, and mostly he confused the two women in his mind.
At the crossroads his footsteps faltered as if, by rights, by habit, his boots should go left towards the pit. He spat frequently into the grass as he went, walking with legs well-bent at the knee, eyes darting from side to side under the colourless brim of his cap, seeing little pictures – a brown bottle, unbroken, upright in a patch of thistle, a line of sheep two meadows distant, pouring like grey milk through a gap in the hedge, the mountain humped behind a scroll of mist. His lips moved as he climbed, telling himself it was a good morning, over and over like a prayer, letting his body go with the flow of the hill so as to conserve his energy.
The cows in the top field were still lying down across the daisies. He didn’t see the daisies, but he saw the cows out of the corner of one pale blue eye: seven cows in a lump under an elm tree.
He rested a moment astride the stile above the Big House. Removing one of the three saved Woodbines out of his jacket pocket, he rolled it between his fingers to coax it back into plumpness.
He liked to keep an eye on the Glen when the MacFarleys were away. He didn’t consider Master George man enough to be responsible, not being a married man, and there were so many jobs likely to be overlooked. In his working days he had come to lend a hand on a Sunday after chapel, and every day on his paid week’s absence from the mines, even when he was off sick, if he could manage to get away without the wife nagging him too much and going on about him being dishonest to the company. Since his retirement he came and went as he chose. Some people had their clubs or their bingo or their dart matches: he had his Glen.
Spitting shreds of tobacco from his flat lips he shambled down the slope, skirting the Big House and George’s bedroom, not wanting to be greeted until he had introduced himself to the visitors in Hut 4, going down into the valley with lips still moving and chest still heaving.
George, though not the first to wake, was the first to leave his bed some few minutes after Willie had passed the wall of his room. He dressed and folded his sleeping bag neatly before going through to the kitchen of the Big House. There he washed his hands and face. He was happy because Joseph was in the Glen and there would be things to talk about. George had had a solitary childhood, albeit in a boarding school, and a solitary manhood, though he wasn’t conscious of any deprivation. He liked order and he liked company of a sort, Joseph’s sort. Joseph on occasion had discussed Art with him in a way that he found suitable and in conformity with his own sense of order. If he had known that Joseph was to all men all things and to his own self nothing, it wouldn’t have spoiled his pleasure or diminished his admiration.
*
Balfour had woken shivering an hour or so earlier, minus his boots but otherwise fully clothed, with parched mouth and gelatine eyelids. He burrowed into his sleeping bag, handsewn by George, thought once about the one-arsed brigadier due to arrive that day, and drifted again into sleep.
Joseph and Dotty were lying side by side in the single bed in Hut 4. Their two faces were cold under the beamed roof. On the chest of drawers Joseph had stood his after-shave lotion, a bottle of green scented water with a spray given to him by his ex-wife at Christmas. It looked like a floral arrangement with a single bud, propped against the brown wall of the cabin.
Outside the hut trod Willie, spitting his phlegm into the undergrowth, noting that the washing line had gone from its place slung between the blackthorn thicket and the elder bush. He scratched his neck under the band of his cap and saw the rope hanging from the high elm at the boundary of the field. However did it get up there, he asked himself out loud, looking up into the sky? Puzzled, he shook his head and went down the path.
Only Kidney had made use of the shed in the bushes. In the night Dotty had woken fretfully and fumbled awkwardly under the truckle bed for the chamber pot placed there by Mrs MacFarley. As if triggered to wake at just such a moment, Joseph had risen invisibly in the blacker-than-black night and said ‘Out, out’ and folded like a wing to the mattress again. Obediently Dotty had gone and squatted under the dark sky, pissing reproachfully into the damp grass. Moth-pale in her voluminous nightgown, she had crouched with splayed knees, thinking that no doubt Roland and daft Kidney would be permitted the solace of a chamber pot, but not she, being female. Waddling experimentally forward, she had felt like some duck threading its way through platters of water lilies in a pond. She stood, trying to list all the animal names of the stars that swam about day and night above the earth: the winged horse, the dolphin, the eagle, the horned goat, the scorpion, the serpent, the bull, the little bear. Little bear gone away, she had told herself fancifully, climbing back into bed beside the superior Joseph, thinking of the dreams he must be dreaming.
Willie first of all took off his coat and hung it on the inner door of the lavatory. Then, bending low, as if to perform a Russian dance movement, he embraced the pan with his two short arms and lifted it from the cement hole in the base of the shed. He carried it up the slope past Hut 4 to a place behind the long barn. Grunting, he put his burden down on the wet patch of ground and rested a moment with hands to his side before going to fetch his spade from beneath the uprights of Hut 4. He began to dig a deep hole.
Roland opened his eyes in the middle of a dream about the baby who belonged to the people next door. He saw the baby’s face on the pillow beside him, larger than it should be and crowned with hair, but with the same crumpled mouth and the same skin, shiny as the white candle his mother had in the brass holder in the living-room. He blinked his eyes, and then saw that it was only Kidney’s face after all lying there above the sheet. He sat up in bed and looked about him at the barn. It was a bit like a ship, he thought, with all those wooden walls and the planks joined together by nails big as sixpences. There was a clothing rack hanging just beneath the arch of the roof, tethered to the wall of the hut by a rope wound in a figure of eight about an iron hook. He trod along the side of the blanketed bed, careful not to step on the baby-faced Kidney, and climbed over the black-painted bars to the floor. He took his trousers and his jumper in his arms and kicking his sandals before him opened the barn door and stepped down into the grass.
The place had changed completely from what he remembered. For one thing, there was a smell of something, and there were trees everywhere – no longer grey, but all sorts of colours. Among the bushes near the barn there were pieces of flowers, blue and white, and just by the front step of the hut in which his father was sleeping a marigold grew in the grass, a wasp flying about its head. Bravely he approached the hut door from the opposite side, leaning across the wooden step, fumbling with the knob, keeping his eyes fixed on the spiralling wasp. Dismayed, he dropped his clothes and retreated further away from the marigold, never letting the insect out of his sight. He could hear someone digging behind the barn, but he didn’t care to go that far, without his sandals. Spinning round and round in the field, he shouted ‘Daddy, Daddy’. In the middle of his pirouette he saw the swing his father had made in the elm tree and righting himself he ran to the loop hanging above the grass.
Facing away from the barn and hut, he sat on the horizontal bar, which was wide enough for him alone, and pushed with his muddy feet at the bumpy ground, rocking forward into the field. After a time he rose above the level of the tangled hedgerow and saw the mountain in the distance. Mouth open, he slid backwards through the leafy field and wriggling his body from side to side slowed the swing. At a point nearest the ground he jumped clear and rolled down the wet slope. Forgetting the wasp, forgetting his fear of snakes and worms, he ran round the back of the hut and squatting on his haunches banged with his hand on the small window behind which he knew his father lay. ‘The mountain,’ he shouted, pushing his nose to the pane of glass, seeing Dotty with her face turned towards him and her eyes closed but no sign of Joseph. Fist clenched, he continued to beat at the window, heart pounding with the vision of the mountain he had seen.
Joseph woke from a dream. He sat up and saw his son outside the window. ‘Hallo, boy,’ he mouthed, leaping from the bed clad only in a string vest. He was furious with himself for letting Roland see Dotty and him in the same bed. He picked up his clothes hastily and ran to unlock the front door, stubbing his toe as he did so. He kissed the boy with a great show of cheerfulness, making a lot of incidental noises, hissing with feigned hurt and holding his foot in the air, saying ‘Ooooh’ with pursed lips, spitting with laughter as Roland jumped in his arms.
Roland had never, to Joseph’s knowledge, caught him in bed with a woman. Joseph didn’t believe anyway that a child of eight – or was it seven? – equated bed with sex. Still, he was upset as he wrestled with the child. Hastily he dressed, hopping in the grass with Roland clinging to his ankle. Somebody coughed beyond the hut. Taking Roland by the hand, Joseph went to investigate.
Behind the barn he saw the old fellow who worked for the MacFarleys – the odd-job man, Bertie or Tommy or someone.
Touching his cap, Willie said, ‘And how are you, Mr Joseph?’
‘Fine, fine. Musn’t complain. Digging, I see.’
‘Just emptying the toilet for you, Mr Joseph. Start clean, as it were. Mr MacFarley likes me to keep an eye on things.’
‘We’ve not actually gone into production yet,’ said Joseph. He wondered how much the old chap would expect to be tipped. ‘Go and get your clothes on, Roland,’ he ordered.
‘Got your hands full,’ said Willie, leaning on his spade, taking in Mr Joseph’s trousers and jacket. Best London style, he thought: bit of a dandy – and a woman back there in the hut very possibly, if he ran true to previous years.
Sensing criticism, Joseph said, ‘He’s no trouble, we get on very well.’ Nodding to Willie, he went into the hut, and after a moment Willie followed him.
When Dotty got up she found Joseph in the kitchen making breakfast. Roland was at the table, eating fried bread and bacon. Thankfully she saw the old man drinking tea. Joseph was always better in the morning if there was someone else around, someone he wasn’t on intimate terms with. It meant he wouldn’t start telling her she was a lazy bitch, which she suspected she was.
‘This is Dotty,’ Joseph said, coming forward to pat her shoulder.
‘Good morning,’ said Willie, not looking at her long face nor her long hair. ‘Come up from London, have you?’ he asked, stamping his feet and wheezing.
‘Yes, from London,’ Dotty told him. She sat down beside Roland at the table, looking at his half-consumed fried bread and bacon longingly. She was always hungry and she always felt guilty at being hungry – not at home with her parents, or in a café, but anywhere where Joseph was. He made her feel greedy or something. She asked him for a cup of tea, keeping her face turned away from him, because there hadn’t been a mirror in the cubicle and she didn’t know whether her make-up was grimy from the night before. Her hair, she knew, was untidy, but she wasn’t sure where her comb might be and even if she had known Joseph would be irritable if she did her hair in the kitchen and more irritable if she left the room just as she had entered. He could run in and out like a restless sheepdog and trim his beard over the bacon and eggs, but then he was male and therefore not disgusting. She asked Roland if he had slept well.
‘Yes,’ the child answered flatly, crunching fried bread in his mouth.
‘He’s been running about the fields in his pyjamas since dawn,’ said Joseph. He added meaningfully: ‘Couldn’t get in at the door, so he banged on the window.’
‘It wasn’t dawn, it was day, and I didn’t run around. Actually, I went on the swing,’ said Roland.
‘My God,’ cried Joseph, face animated above the spitting fat. ‘It was the swing – that was it.’
‘Oh aye,’ Willie said. ‘I saw you took down Mrs MacFarley’s washing line.’
‘I dreamt about Kidney playing with a rope – not here, back at the flat,’ said Joseph. ‘He was sitting on the floor, the studio floor, coiling this rope round and round his waist. He had a funny expression, Dotty, really very strange.’ Needing her interest, for the toilet-cleansing Welshman couldn’t possibly understand the special significance of such a dream, Joseph gave his full attention to the famished Dotty. ‘There was a record on the gramophone – I can’t remember what record – and there was someone else there …’ Joseph frowned, wrinkling his forehead, holding the pan of bacon away from the stove.
‘Nathan,’ said Dotty. She resented his everlasting nights of symbolic imagery. She herself dreamed mostly that she was being betrayed or tortured or conned by Joseph. She could never remember the whole of her dreams, and if she was asked she made something up. Still when Joseph spoke so directly to her, treating her as if she were real to him, she was forced to respond. Apart from that, she loved him and she didn’t want to hurt him.
‘Of course, Nathan.’ Delighted, Joseph smiled at her. Nathan was the cat.
‘I dreamed the baby next door was in my bed,’ Roland said.
‘The baby next door was in your bed,’ repeated Joseph fondly, still thinking of the rope about the thick waist of Kidney.
‘But when I woke up it was only Kidney,’ said Roland.
‘Only Kidney,’ said Joseph. ‘Only Kidney! In your bed? Surely not?’
The child didn’t reply, absorbed in thoughts of the baby next door. Sometimes when the baby’s parents went out – to a party or something – they left it with his mother and it slept in a cot in his room. In the morning Roland would wake and see it standing in a long nightie at the end of the cot, peering through the bars at him. It had a pinkish face with no eyebrows and no teeth either and just a few shreds of hair, the colour of marmalade, on its plump head. If he went towards the cot the baby lifted up its arms and tried to pull itself up out of the bed. His mother had warned him never to lift the baby out on his own, but he often did, until one morning the baby slipped backwards into the cot and fell with its head against the bars. His mother came running then and lifted the baby up, and after a while she let Roland cuddle it. He was sad and excited at having hurt it, and he put his face down into the fold of its neck, where it smelt like an apple, and he cried too.
‘Roland, I’m talking to you. Was Kidney in your bed?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘What the hell did he get into Roland’s bed for?’ asked Joseph helplessly, looking at Dotty with raised eyebrows.
‘Probably couldn’t see in the dark,’ she said reasonably.
‘But he shouldn’t have.’
‘Why not?’ asked Roland, leaving the table and going to the door of the hut. He peered over at the marigold and was relieved to see that the wasp had gone.
‘Well, he shouldn’t have.’ At a loss, his father put back his frying pan on the gas and continued his cooking.
‘I didn’t mind.’ Roland came back to the table and leaned against Dotty. ‘Did you mind Daddy being in your bed?’
‘No,’ Dotty said, stirring her tea and wanting her comb.
Willie spent most of the morning hanging about the barn and Hut 4, anxious not to miss anything and with plenty to think about. He filled the lavatory pan with an equal amount of chemical and water and replaced it on its base in the shed among the bushes. Nobody appeared to take advantage of his gesture. He refilled the crater he had made, burying Kidney’s waste matter, and burned some rubbish left by Balfour several weeks ago.
The girl in the nightgown wandered about the field for some time before getting dressed, looking at the flowers in the hedgerows and lighting a lot of cigarettes she rolled herself. She dropped matches and stub ends all over the place. She went and sat on the swing too, gliding over the grass with her nightgown billowing out behind her and her two thin yellow feet pointing at the sky. Mr George, Willie thought, would be grim-faced about all those fag-ends littering the place. He was a tidy sort like his father, though not half the man his father was. In the middle of the morning Mr Joseph went into the barn. There was a lot of shouting, and after a while a boy came out into the sunshine with a mop of hair and a face pretty as a girl, prettier than most. Mr Joseph said it was too late for breakfast now, nearly lunchtime in fact. He told the lad he was too fat anyway, which was about the size of it – a big soft lump of a lad, just standing there shuffling his feet and blushing and saying he was sorry. After a bit more talk, too low-pitched for Willie to catch, the lad began taking off his shirt and his vest and there was a pair of breasts good enough for a woman, if you didn’t like them too big. White little swellings turning pinkish, for all the world like the buds on the Norway maple down in the Glen, and not a sign of hair on the padded chest nor beneath the armpits. This last fact Willie established when Joseph had hoisted the youth on to the branch of the tree, letting him dangle by his arms above the slope. He was supposed to raise his legs, but he just hung there with his face filling with blood.