Another part of the wood

4

At mid-day when Joseph was checking the food stores he was depressed to realize that the supply he had brought to last three or four days was barely going to feed them for today. It was Dotty eating half the bacon at one go. Where had the grapefruit juice gone and the three boxes of cheese segments? Righteously indignant, he thundered her name from the doorway, agitating Willie who was taking his ease at the back of the barn, sitting in the long grass with his cigarette alight and his cap over his eyes.
‘What’s up now?’ Willie asked himself out loud.
Again the girl’s name was called, louder this time.
Grinning because it wasn’t he Mr Joseph was after, Willie relaxed and drew on his Woodbine.
After a while, for she had been down at the stream with Roland when the summons came, Dotty appeared at the door of the hut, a little out of breath from her climb up the slope. She had been dreaming all the time she ran up the path that above in the holiday hut love waited. Love had suddenly seized Joseph by the throat and dragged him to the edge of the forest to call her name. Either that or he had found her lost comb which she hadn’t washed for weeks or the soiled underwear she had stuffed into the wicker basket under the settee.
She said ‘Yes?’ looking at his humourless face as he put down knives and forks on the dinner table.
‘Where’s the cheese and where’s the grapefruit juice?’
‘The grapefruit juice?’
‘The grapefruit juice.’
He was emptying salt from a packet into an egg cup. All the work there would be when they left, she thought – putting butter in glass bowls and Roland’s tomato sauce into a gravy jug. Such a fuss. Relieved that it wasn’t her comb or the state of her bra, she said, ‘If you mean the grapefruit juice we got on the Finchley Road, it’s in the fridge at the flat.’
‘At the flat?’
‘You said it was too big to go in the grocery box, so we didn’t bring it. And the cheese is in the tin on the shelf.’
‘Do you realize we have only enough food for today?’
It didn’t surprise her at all. He’d brought rice and raisins but no potatoes or tins of Heinz beans or anything they could live on.
‘It means,’ said Joseph, bitterly, ‘that I’ll have to shop again tomorrow. I’ve already spent a bomb.’
Dotty sat down at the table.
‘You’re slouching,’ he said. ‘Here, cut up some onions. I’m making a rice thing for lunch.’
‘Roland won’t eat it,’ she said.
Joseph didn’t reply. She chopped gamely at the onions he placed in front of her.
‘Do you think,’ he asked, ‘that I ought to say something to Kidney? About his being in Roland’s bed?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Dotty. ‘What could you say?’
‘I could mention the bed’s not big enough for two. He might say something – give some explanation.’
‘I doubt it,’ Dotty said. ‘Are you worried about sex or something?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Joseph. But he was worried. When he had suggested having Kidney to live with him, the doctor at the clinic Kidney attended had asked him if there were any women living in the house. Joseph hadn’t mentioned Dotty because he hadn’t thought of her as being a permanent fixture.
‘He was probably just cold,’ said Dotty. ‘I’d forget about it. If he was really bonkers – I mean, dangerous – he’d be in a home.’ She stood up and turned the gas lower under the pan of bubbling rice. It still mystified her how Joseph had managed to get permission to take care of Kidney.
‘He has been in a home,’ said Joseph. ‘Several in fact. Leave that rice alone.’
She did as she was told. The rice was almost done and with any luck it might stick to the bottom of the pan. She went and sat on the settee at the end of the hut, feeling with the heels of her feet for the wicker basket, watching Joseph scrape the cut onions and paprikas into the frying pan. When he turned his back to place the vegetables on the stove she leant forward and put her fingers under the lid of the basket, trying to locate her bra. But she couldn’t.
‘Go and call Roland,’ bade Joseph, turning the contents of the pan with a knife. ‘And see if Kidney is at the back of the barn with Tommy.’
‘Willie,’ corrected Dotty, going out into the field.
Joseph shook the pan about briskly, causing mushroom buds to fall among the paprikas and the pale rings of onion. He thought, Degas or Delacroix or someone like that had made a work of art once out of an omelette. What a pity Kidney had given up painting. Not that the results were all that stimulating – dull little fields with puffy clouds – and he himself had to spend such hours clearing the mess up afterwards, the paint splashed on the wall and the smears of water on the table. It was a pity, but some time soon, very soon, he was going to have to turn Kidney over to someone else. It would mean he might have to go into a home again. But somehow, he’d lost interest. He could always visit the youth. ‘Lunch,’ he shouted, putting his head out of the window, seeing Dotty and Kidney on the path. ‘Did you call Roland?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
When he came in, Roland ate the rice without complaint. ‘What’s that tree called?’ he asked his father. ‘The one beside the barn?’
As usual, he received no reply, for Joseph was listening to the sounds made by Willie hovering outside the hut.
‘He’s waiting for his bloody tip,’ Joseph told Dotty, none too quietly, adding loudly for the benefit of the Welshman without, ‘Like a cup of Nescafé?’
Willie didn’t really want the drink. To tell the truth he was beginning to feel a bit peckish and regretful he hadn’t gone home for some breakfast, but he did want to be amongst them – the woman and Mr Joseph and the plump young lad. What the devil was the lad doing along with Mr Joseph? ‘Come up from London too?’ he asked Kidney, removing his cap now he was indoors, wondering where to sit himself.
‘Yes, from London too,’ said Mr Joseph. Not a peep out of the lad himself, sitting there at the table with his cheeks like apples and his eyes shining. ‘Sit down, Bill,’ Mr Joseph told him, and there being no chair vacant he had to go to the end of the hut to the settee. He hadn’t been called Bill since he was a boy and he sat very stiffly on the chintz settee with his shirt very full in the front, giving him a breast like a pigeon, and his red hair pressed flat to his head after being under his cap for so many hours. The girl looked as if she hadn’t had a decent meal for God knows how long, spooning the food into her mouth, sitting with rounded shoulders. Mr Joseph had noted her shoulders. He was sitting very straight himself, in the manner of Mr MacFarley.
‘Not at work today then, Bill?’
‘Oh God no, Mr Joseph. I’ve been retired these six years. Seven more like.’
‘Retired? Really.’ Fixing his attention on Willie and off the hungry Dotty, Joseph made an attempt at conversation. ‘Must find a lot of changes, being retired, Bill. Time hang heavy on your hands, does it?’
Dotty, hearing the mimicry of Willie’s accent, scowled.
‘Oh God no, I’m kept pretty busy here, you know. Always something to do, there is. Mr MacFarley’s always got improvements in hand.’ He wasn’t sure that Mr Joseph was listening. At all events he was looking out at the field beyond the open door, leaning well back in his chair.
‘Plenty to do,’ said Willie, wondering when the girl would roll another cigarette and whether he would be offered one.
‘I haven’t seen old George this morning,’ said Joseph.
‘I have,’ Roland said. ‘He came down to the stream when I was playing with my boat. He told me not to fall in the water.’
‘That’s right,’ Willie told him. ‘Can’t have you falling in the water.’
‘He asked if you were up here,’ said Roland. ‘I said you were. I said you were digging a hole.’
‘Oh, aye.’ Mr George, Willie reflected, was no fool. Not the man his father was, but fairly shrewd. He’d be up here soon to ask why he was doing the toilet when it had been done only a day or so earlier. He’d best be getting off home soon.
‘How do you get on with George?’ asked Joseph suddenly, abandoning his food, laying down his fork and pushing the plate away.
‘Well, now.’ Willie dropped his cap to the floor. ‘I can’t say that I divine Mr George. I can’t say that I do.’
‘Very apt,’ Joseph said, seeing in his mind the pigmy Welshman standing before the giant George, holding a divining rod towards the dark and elongated head.
‘You see, it’s like this, Mr Joseph. He was always a trifle odd, but he wasn’t half so odd till he’d been to Israel – ’
‘To Israel?’ said Joseph, startled.
‘When he came back from Israel,’ Willie said, ‘he was a changed being and that’s the truth. Even Mr MacFarley remarked on the change in him. Like as if he was mesmerized.’
‘What’s Israel?’ Roland wanted to know, eating an orange on the floor.
‘Where the Jews live,’ his father told him. ‘Get up and sit at the table. No one said you could eat on the floor.’
The child stayed where he was, juice running from his lips.
‘What’s the red tree by the barn please, Willie?’
‘The juniper tree, you mean – the one with the dark berries?’
‘I didn’t see any berries,’ said Roland.
‘Don’t go eating any berries, my lad. You’ll get belly-ache.’
‘I think I’d better have one of my pills,’ Kidney said, apparently to Willie. ‘I should have one three times a day.’
Joseph said, ‘I’ve decided to cut them out for a time. See what a bit of fresh air and exercise will do.’ He began to put coffee powder into mugs of assorted colours.
‘What’s been wrong with Balfour?’ asked Dotty. ‘George said last night he’d been ill for a long time.’ Dotty had been thinking about Balfour most of the morning.
Willie saw that she had already rolled one cigarette and was in the process of rolling another. In anticipation he said, ‘Something wrong with his blood, I think, Mrs Dotty. I don’t rightly know what. Thank you, I will.’ He took the thin wafer she proffered him. ‘He went away to Italy for a holiday some years back and picked up a germ. Kept him off work for quite a time. You see, it’s like this. He gets sick suddenly – very high temperatures and the shivers, like as if he was turned to ice. All he can do is hide away and sleep it off.’
‘How awkward,’ remarked Joseph. He had little patience with sickness. How the hell, he wondered, had someone like Balfour afforded to go abroad. Not to mention George trotting round Israel. He bent and wiped at Roland’s sticky mouth with the tea towel. If he wasn’t so encumbered with responsibilities he might manage somewhere more exotic himself, though it would probably be the same wherever he went.
‘Is Balfour ill now?’ asked Dotty. But Willie was lighting his cigarette for the third time and pretended not to hear. He was a little tired of being the focal point of attention and he didn’t much care for Balfour, hardly crediting why the MacFarleys had taken up with him in the first place.
‘I think I ought to have a pill,’ said Kidney loudly. ‘I may get a bad headache otherwise.’
‘Nonsense.’ Brusquely Joseph placed a mug of coffee before him. ‘Tell me, Bill, don’t you find there’s a sight too much pill-taking? Too many drugs and soporifics used today … in comparison with when you were a boy? … Don’t you agree? … Don’t expect you saw the doctor much?’
‘No … no …’ Dismissing such pampering, Willie blew on his drink to cool it, looking down at his cigarette with disgust. The bloody thing was out again.
Pushing back his chair, Joseph said briskly, ‘Right. Everybody out. Lionel will be arriving soon. I don’t care what you do but leave me to tidy up.’ Energetically he piled plates and stacked mugs. Willie, unable to ask for his tip, went out feeling cheated.
‘Aren’t you ever going to come and play with me and my boat?’ said Roland.
‘Later, boy, later. Go on, move.’ Joseph pushed both the child and Dotty towards the door. Kidney stood up.
‘Just a moment, Kidney,’ said Joseph. ‘Something I want to ask you.’
Kidney sat down again.
‘I did tell you last night not to disturb Roland,’ began Joseph. ‘I did say to be quiet.’
Kidney stared at him.
‘I did say that, didn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ said Kidney.
‘Well?’
‘I didn’t disturb him, Joseph.’
‘You got into his bed.’
‘Yes, Joseph.’
‘Well?’
‘I didn’t disturb him, Joseph.’
‘But why did you get into his bed?’ Joseph took away the plates and dumped them in the sink.
The boy looked at him as if to speak. Instead he turned his eyes towards the doorway and studied the field.
Trying to reach him another way Joseph seated himself at the table. ‘Why do you think you ought to have a pill?’
‘I usually have a pill after lunch. I always have one.’ Mouth trembling, Kidney repeated, ‘After lunch I have one.’
‘Well, I don’t know if it does much good really, but if you feel you ought to – ’ Capitulating, Joseph decided to let Kidney have his pill.
‘They said I must.’
‘Who’re they?’
‘My mother’s doctor says I must have one after lunch.’
‘All right, all right.’ Joseph scratched his head not knowing what else to say.
‘They said in hospital I should take a pill after lunch,’ volunteered Kidney. ‘In hospital my mother tried to see me, but she didn’t see me. The Government wouldn’t let her. Then she came later and I went home. They told me to take my pills three times a day.’
‘Don’t worry. You’ll get your pill.’ Joseph went to the wicker basket beneath the settee and pulled it clear. He found the glass bottle. He took out an oblong capsule and replaced the bottle in the wicker basket. ‘Here you are,’ he said, coming back to the table with the pill.
Kidney swallowed the capsule without water. He seemed anxious to tell Joseph about the hospital. ‘It was a big hospital,’ he said. ‘There was a man there …’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Joseph.
‘He gave me my pills … He was there when I woke up.’
‘In the morning, you mean?’
‘He called me sonny.’
‘That was friendly.’
‘I said I wanted to go home.’ Kidney played with a fork left in the centre of the table. ‘It was night and the man told me to be quiet.’
‘They have rules,’ said Joseph.
‘The man said: “Be quiet. Do you want a hot thing up you, sonny?” ’
Joseph sat still. He felt distressed. Clearing his throat, he had every intention of saying something meaningful, but he merely said, ‘You go down to the stream and see Roland. I’ll be down when I’ve washed the dishes.’
It was the disgruntled Willie who saw the smoke. There was a line, black and waving, widening as he watched, rising into the blue sky.
‘Great God,’ he shouted, running like hell, passing the hut and the curious Joseph standing in the doorway. ‘The bloody wood’s on fire.’ He jumped like a wrestler on all fours into the bracken on the slope. ‘It’s them damn women of yours,’ he told the man at the door, voice shrill, pulling out handfuls of grass and nettles in a frantic attempt to locate the water pipe buried in the ground.
‘A fire,’ Joseph said calmly, a tea towel draped over his arm. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Dropping their bloody fags all over my woods.’ Willie was too far gone to notice the use of the possessive. He was sitting in the undergrowth now with the pipe between his short legs. ‘Come on up, you bastard,’ he moaned, wrenching the tap further to the right, spit dribbling down his stubbled chin, his mind shifting from one thought to another, each idea more overlaid than the last, till all he had in his brain was a pattern of leaves, miraculously veined, each one ablaze behind his eyes.
‘No good mucking about with water,’ observed Joseph. ‘I divine Mr George will be in control.’ He went at a trot along the path, away from the struggling Willie, and disappeared down the slope.
A little above the stream, the scent of the fire reached him. He forsook the path and plunged down into the ravine, leaping and sliding, adopting a sideways position with arms wildly waving to balance himself. Boots crushing the black ivy that ran like main arteries across the curve of the hillside, he lost his tea towel to a low bush and slithering now on the bare rocks of the lower slopes missed his footing entirely. Guillotining a foxglove with the upwards kick of his boot, he rolled clear to the bottom of the incline, coming to a halt finally with his head against the wet clay at the edge of the river, his boots in the thin trickle of water, his fists full of pebbles.
On the opposite bank, a hundred yards up the hillside, Balfour and George were beating the undergrowth with sycamore branches.
Further along the stream, at the bridge, Roland and Kidney heard the stampeding firefighters come down on either side, but saw no one. Roland was busy with his boat, and the reclining Kidney was laid flat on the wooden planks of the bridge, his head stuck out over the edge and his hands folded under his chin, watching the water go over the river bed and the red boat getting nowhere.
Dotty, who had been in the barn when the raised voices had disturbed her, found Willie sitting in the grass.
‘What’s up, Willie?’ she asked, looking down at him, puzzled. His eyes, full of surprise, were fixed on the apex of a bush.
She moved into the bracken and squatted down on her haunches the better to observe him, staring at the freckles thick across the bridge of his lumpy nose. She thought maybe he was drunk. He sat so stiffly, clutching that iron thing sticking up out of the ground. He didn’t smell of drink, only of grass and smoke and he looked more baffled than stupefied.
‘Willie,’ she said, almost afraid, and put her hand on his two clasped ones, stroking the speckled skin upwards to the wrist, fingering his pulse though she didn’t know what it might signify, and wishing he would look at her. She tried to remove his hands from around the pipe, and as she struggled he suddenly released his grip and collapsed on his back into the bushes. His cap fell off and he lay there staring up at the sky in that surprised way.
‘Willie,’ she said again, not very loudly, and stood up and didn’t know what to do for the best. Then she ran away down the slope towards the stream, shouting, ‘George, George,’ feeling excited and fearful and important all at the same time.
George told Joseph he’d better bring the Jaguar round to the field road in case Willie needed moving urgently.
Perhaps it’s a stroke,’ Balfour suggested. ‘It c-could be that by the sound of it.’
‘Perhaps,’ George said. ‘Possibly it’s hunger. He’s been about since dawn. Still, you’d better go and bring the car round.’ Authoritatively he strode up the path towards the stricken Willie with Balfour in pursuit.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Roland, as his father and Dotty crossed the bridge.
‘Just to the car, boy.’
‘May I come?’ Already the child was scrambling out of the water, boat forgotten.
‘No,’ Joseph said, not turning round, going very fast up the slope to the Big House. His hands were quite sore – not burnt, possibly blistered from all that sycamore-wielding. His head ached and his eyes hurt. It accelerated him the more. He swung his arms in a fury and leapt up the path.
‘Do you think Willie’s dead?’ Dotty cried, sure he wasn’t, but feeling sick as she tried to keep pace with Joseph. It wasn’t like Joseph to rush in an emergency. More like, he was running away from her.
‘Almost certainly,’ he shouted, grinning to himself, holding his smarting hands a fraction before him.
Stubbornly Dotty ran behind him, both of them pursued by a black spiral of gnats.
As they drove up the hill in the Jaguar, a green Mini turned the corner. The narrowness of the lane forced Joseph to slow down. ‘Can’t stop, old man. Somebody’s died on us,’ he called and drove on at speed.
‘Was that Lionel?’ shouted Dotty.
Joseph heard the upward inflection of her provincial voice and found it objectionable. Dotty twisted in her seat in time to see the green Mini halted and lost in the hedge-rimmed lane. At the crossroads Joseph turned right and drove half a mile to the corner shop. She was left sitting in the hot car staring at a border of pinks in the small garden.
Joseph came out of the shop with several bars of chocolate and a tube of cold cream.
‘What’s wrong with your face?’ Dotty asked, looking at the colour of it, glowing red and smudged with black.
He didn’t reply, sitting at the wheel smearing grease into the smarting palms of his hands.
‘What have you been doing? You’re all dirty.’
He reversed the car up the lane, looking over his shoulder as he did so. The breeze blew something from his hair.
‘You’ve got bits of leaves in your hair,’ she said, puzzled.
‘I’ve been having it off with old George in the bushes,’ he shouted, lips drawn back to show his teeth, and she thought she saw the small endings of his beard shrivelled up in the bright light, as if singed by the sun.
The green Mini was at the crossroads. There was Lionel’s elbow in a white sleeve sticking out from the window like a flag of truce. As the Jaguar sped past, Joseph pointed his arm to the sky, spreading his blackened hand against the cool breeze. He didn’t turn his head.
Dotty swivelled round and waved at the Mini. ‘Not long, not long,’ she cried, kneeling in the passenger seat, her hair blowing about her face.
The Jaguar turned into an opening at the side of the lane and stopped in front of a five-barred gate. Lionel turned too, manoeuvring the Mini carefully, and switched off the engine. He let the little silver ignition key dangle between his fingers, sitting there with pleasure and good humour on his flushed face, waiting for Joseph to greet him, his darling wife May safe beside him.
‘Glad you made it,’ said Joseph, coming to the car. About to shake the hand held out to him, he drew back. ‘Sorry, bit of a fire down in the Glen … Hands a bit sore.’ He wiped his cold-creamed hands on the side of his trousers and looked at May. ‘Ah, the lovely May. How are you, darling?’
May giggled and stepped out of the Mini in her new pink trews and her gingham shirt, a white silk handkerchief tied casually about her neck. She turned her powdered cheek for Joseph’s gallant kiss, moving past Dotty with a jangling of the charm bracelet on her rounded arm and stood at the barred gate looking about her at the view.
Lionel said the Mersey Tunnel hadn’t been too crowded. Better than expected, in fact. Dotty hadn’t met him before. She thought he was nice, because he shook her hand and said he was glad to meet her. He seemed an unlikely partner for the restless May.
May said how pretty the scenery was. ‘So unspoilt and countrified.’ She giggled, because she wasn’t a fool, and the remarks faded into the summer air as they followed each other over the gate. She very nearly fell on her knees on the far side.
Lionel opened his mouth in alarm. ‘Take it easy, my darling,’ he cried, attempting to take his wife’s arm, but she stepped away from him.
Over the brow of the hill came Balfour and George, carrying an iron bedstead with the body of Willie laid on a striped mattress splotched with damp.
When the two groups met, the bearers halted and lowered the cot to the grass, and Dotty said ‘How is he?’ looking down at the sunken mouth and the stubbled chin – all that was visible of Willie, for his eyes and nose were covered by his cap.
‘I think he’s all right … just a bit dazed. Been overdoing it.’ George sat down on the mattress and laid his white fingers on the Welshman’s knees. ‘Home soon, Willie, home soon.’ He hung his head, still touching Willie, and appeared not to see the new arrivals.
May had never seen anyone quite so tall as George. She stood with one hand, the one with the bracelet about her wrist, gripping the bars of the bed, and smiled into the field. Lionel adopted a tragic expression, bending his head low as if in church, though he wasn’t sure why there was an old man lying on a bed in a field, and not sure who the tall fellow was or the other shorter one with the spotty complexion. He had understood from Joseph’s letter that there would be just Dotty and themselves out in the woods. Of course, Joseph, being arty, was often vague. May had wanted to go abroad, or to a hotel on the coast at least, but he simply couldn’t raise the money and he thought it safer to take her somewhere secluded, rather than expose her to the twin temptations of casual acquaintanceships and drink. It was something he often told her. ‘Any casual acquaintance could have you in drink. You simply have no sense of responsibility.’
‘Is he ill, poor old fellow?’ Lionel asked, standing stockily in his good suit with the rather wide trousers and his white stiff collar tight about his neck.
‘I believe so,’ said Joseph, not interested, wanting to sit down somewhere. He told Dotty, ‘I think I ought to go and see about Roland.’
‘Ah, Roland.’ Lionel jangled pennies in his pocket, remembering the vanishing tricks with money that he had shown Roland a year earlier. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing Roland.’ He meant it. ‘Coming along all right, is he?’
‘You’ve got to drive Willie home in the car,’ George said.
‘Of course, of course,’ Joseph agreed, genuinely ashamed of being so forgetful. He took Balfour’s place at the foot of the bed, and he and George carried the stretcher towards the gate. Lionel marched ahead in his shiny brown shoes, anxious to be helpful.
Balfour was astonished by May. She was the living reality of the mound of old dreams dreamt in puberty of fair women coming to lie down beside him. He was fearful to speak lest he should utter obscenities.
Seeing his glance, May, with eyes lavender blue, smiled in his direction, at which he blushed and turned to follow George.
‘Isn’t he ghastly,’ said May, playing with her charm bracelet and looking at Dotty.
‘Ghastly?’ said Dotty. ‘Balfour’s not ghastly at all. He’s rather interesting. He’s very funny when you get to know him. He got tight last night.’
‘I mean Lionel, my Lionel. He makes me sick,’ said May.
Willie, warm in his womb-world under the covering of his cap, breathed in odours of silk linings and something else, something that was vegetable. He thought he was on his way to the annual hot-pot dinner given by the mine owners for their employees, at the Herbert Arms. He could smell potatoes and gravy, and he was aware of an intense hunger. He could hear the voice of the boss come up from Liverpool in his grand expensive car, the car with the green hood, asking how he was. He struggled to touch the brim of his cap, and his wife was telling him he’d made a fool of himself as usual, or was it his mother? ‘Drunk you are, Willie,’ she said, but how was a man to resist free drink, dressed in his Sunday suit, brown with a white stripe in it, and the boss making a little speech, standing there on the stone-flagged floor in a pair of plus fours the colour of tobacco, handing them all a cigar and telling them the directors were very pleased with the work done. They dug barytes out of the ground and somewhere along the line it got put into gallons of paint – God knows what it did, though no doubt it made someone a heap of old money. He didn’t doubt that. You didn’t give close on forty men a hot-pot dinner and as much beer as they could drink, not to mention the cigars and that damn big car with the headlamps shining, unless there was money in it somewhere. The boss only ever went into the mine once and that was to take his little daughter down, and she put on a white helmet on her head with a candle at the front and all her hair falling down about her shoulders. The little girl used to come to hot-pot do’s as well, and each year she got a little taller and her hair a little shorter. He could still hear the rattling of the stall chains as the cows shifted about in the shed in the pub yard. He could almost hear the sound of the men pissing against the wall and see the rivulets of urine running out across the yard. ‘Disgusting,’ the other folk in the pub called it, but who gave a damn after all that drink, and they wouldn’t let them upstairs to use the lav. Couldn’t blame them for that. Anyway, the stairs in the pub were waxed like glass, weren’t they? There’d have been nothing but broken legs and damaged skulls. There were quite a few breakages as it was. Mugs and the like and one or two plates falling on to the stone floor and old Davis shouting out to be careful of that case of stuffed birds in the corner – a damn big glass case full of birds, like none you ever saw in your life. Coloured like beetles they were, scarlet and blue and bottle-green, all perched on a bit of tree. ‘Mind them birds,’ Davis would shout. ‘Just you be careful of them birds.’ Course he had a thing about birds – not live ones at all, but stuffed birds and painted birds on plates. Old Davis had a job to get them out of the pub. Some of them would go right through to the back into the old kitchen and climb up the steps to the loft to sleep the drink off, sleeping up there in the straw with the dog – nice little bitch, that dog – with the sides of bacon hanging up on the beams to remind you flesh was mortal. They were grand times. The men worked hard enough, God only knows, and they did have lonely lives. There seemed one long leap of loneliness from the time they were lads to the nights of the hot-pot suppers. Most of them had been boys in the same school, such as it was – with church twice on Sunday, fishing down at the river, a bit of football in the winter, a couple of outings to Shrewsbury – and then it was all over, and they all went away from each other into houses in the village and took wives and got lads of their own. Then it was as if they’d never been boys at all. Responsible they all were, men they all were, till hot-pot supper night. Everything was different those nights, somehow. There was the church in the daytime you hardly even noticed, grown big as a cathedral with a graveyard like a battlefield, and the ivy climbing up the side of Albert Price’s house and Albert at the window with his shotgun telling them all to go to the devil. All the lads stumbling through the churchyard, shouting out to each other like boys, linking arms in the lane and laughing dirty-like seeing the light go on in Mrs Parry’s window, knowing old Freddie White was creeping in, like as not, with his boots in his hand. Everyone knowing each other, a funny kind of knowing – though it was a daft way to think, because didn’t they still know each other, though some were dead? He was so damn hungry.
He tried to sit up and someone pushed his head down again and he could swear he was lying on the leather seats of the boss’s car.
*
Balfour waited to help Lionel carry his luggage to the huts. He sat on the bed vacated by the delirious Willie and watched Lionel doing things with a dustpan and brush to the interior of the car. Now and then the tidy man would bob his head over the top of the car, his face one big apologetic smile. ‘Won’t be a tick, old man – just want to get the car spruced up.’ May had dropped sweet papers everywhere, and ash from her du Maurier cigarettes, and there was a frosting of face powder on the felt floor-covering beneath the passenger seat.
‘The little woman loves her sweeties,’ Lionel told Balfour, emerging at last with the dustpan in one hand and brush in the other. About to scatter the contents of the pan into the hedge, he stopped abruptly and said, ‘Wrong thing to do, don’t you think? Honour the country code and all that.’ Contritely he put the pan and brush away in the boot of the car and took out a black leather suitcase and a holdall in tartan cloth. ‘Food,’ he told Balfour, putting the holdall down on the bed. ‘Eggs and stuff.’
They left the gate open for Joseph and George to shut on their return.
‘Nothing to get out anyway,’ remarked Lionel. They carried the bed at breast height, Lionel’s red face smiling through the bars at Balfour walking backwards through the field. ‘Not going too fast am I, old chap?’
‘No, no it’s all right.’
‘Marvellous air, marvellous.’
Balfour agreed.
‘Been here long?’
‘Yes – well, a c-couple of days that is.’
‘I see.’ Lionel thought perhaps he was shy. It was odd how some people found such difficulty in communicating. He himself had always been able to communicate. His army training, he supposed. Good fellow though, he thought, looking at the marked face and the well-developed shoulders. Salt of the earth, that kind. He prided himself on being a good judge of character. Had to be during the war. Make one mistake in a chap’s ability and it could mean a platoon wiped out. The thought bursting out beneath his ginger moustache, he confided: ‘Reminds me of the old days, this. In the war, you know. Carrying supplies up to the line. An army marches on its stomach and all that.’ Short of breath, sweat dripping into his eyes, he shot a blind glance at his companion. ‘Before your time, of course.’
‘I never even got to do my National Service,’ admitted Balfour.
‘Oh, how’s that?’
Without waiting for a reply, Lionel puffed on. ‘Best training a chap could have, best discipline in the world. Quite indescribable. Seen all types from all walks of life, and – make no bones about it – it separates the wheat from the chaff.’
Balfour was unhappy about the night before them. He hoped somebody would explain to Lionel the sleeping arrangements. Even if Lionel did seem to care for barrack-room life, he would hardly approve of his wife dossing down in the same cubicle as another recruit. Balfour hoped he would take it upon himself to separate the wheat from the chaff and allocate another room to himself and his spouse.
‘Ho, there,’ Lionel shouted, face scarlet with exertion. They were almost at the hut. ‘May, sweetheart.’
Behind his back Balfour heard May reply, ‘I’m here, Lionel.’ She was leaning against the door of the hut. Through the window Dotty could be seen filling the kettle with water.
‘Isn’t it marvellous, sweetheart?’ asked Lionel, gazing about him at the greenness and the shade.
Lionel spoke the endearment in a natural way. Balfour recognized that. It wasn’t just a word tacked on to a sentence that was banal. She was his sweetheart. ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’ Lionel would continue to name her when they were alone. But then they weren’t going to be alone. He, Balfour, would lie close to them. ‘Making tea, Dotty,’ he called, unable to go into the hut for the upwards swell of May’s breasts and the perfume that covered her like a cloak.
At that moment Lionel, as if overcome by the quality of the air and the scenery about them, ran away from his sweetheart in the doorway and went hopping towards the trees, his brown shoes dancing under the leaves and a white moon of baldness, not previously seen, rising across the slopes of his ginger head. Sounds came from him like an elephant trumpeting.
‘Goodness,’ May said and went into the hut, perhaps in disgust, leaving only Balfour to see Roland running straight into Lionel’s arms. The child was swung into the air and down again and held against the grandfatherly moustache and kissed and borne with gusto and hilarity back to the hut and up the steps.
‘Look what I’ve found,’ Lionel said archly, holding Roland like a baby.
‘Hallo, Roland,’ said May.
‘I’ve found a Roland, and such a big Roland. My word he’s a big Roland.’ The big Roland was swung upwards again to the ceiling. ‘Too big for tricks now … much too big, aren’t you?’
‘He’ll be sick if you keep doing that,’ May told him.
‘Not big Roland … not our big Roland … Oh, dear no. No fear of that.’ Lionel was loth to put his playmate down. He held him in his arms and glowed with pride and tenderness.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ Roland said. ‘Nobody said you were coming.’
May sat smiling at the boy and the man, tapping her tinted nails against the surface of the table, not caring whether they had been expected or not. She’d told Lionel he was a fool to write to Joseph. She’d told him, hadn’t she, that it was just one of those invitations thrown out after a few drinks and never intended to be taken seriously. And who the hell wanted to spend a couple of weeks right out in the country miles away from the shops and things? It wasn’t as if they were friends of Joseph’s. She knew him from the old days in Liverpool, and that fat wife of his and Dotty too – but Lionel hadn’t really known them. He was almost a stranger, and God knows they had nothing in common. It was just a silly statement made after a few drinks. She had rebelled at being taken to Kew to look at the bamboo or cactus, or whatever they were, and had demanded they go somewhere for a drink – not the Cumberland or the Mayfair Hotel or anywhere where she felt lost, but a proper pub – and somehow they had ended up in the North Star on the Finchley Road. There they’d bumped into Joseph and Dotty. Lionel had said, in that delighted way he affected, ‘Why, look who’s here,’ and May had had to stop and smile, though she felt more like screaming, and the four of them sat on those stools that she hated because they made you feel so insecure and lopsided, and talked utter inanities. Lionel stood them all drinks, of course, which he couldn’t afford, and just before they were going Joseph said, ‘We must meet again soon,’ and Lionel, the idiot, said, ‘Oh yes, when?’ And so on, until finally Joseph said, ‘Why don’t you both come down to Wales with me? We Northerners ought to stick together.’
Afterwards in the car May had told Lionel what a fool he was, what an exhibition he had made of himself. ‘Couldn’t you see that Joseph was bored stiff with everything you said?’ she told him. ‘Couldn’t you see he was yawning his head off?’ Lionel had just turned to her at the traffic lights with those reproachful eyes and asked if she was feeling tired, if her monthlies were on the way. ‘Sweetheart,’ were his words, ‘you know you’re due for your monthlies. Don’t hurt me.’ He knew more about her monthlies, as he called them, than she did herself. Not that there was any danger of her ‘monthlies’ not being due – not the kinky way Lionel behaved. How she fought him, how she wasted her time trying to goad him and wound him. It just never got through to him – he was encased in armour. It was stupid really, because all the time she was screaming at him she did know fractionally that he was good and sincere and normal – yes, even normal in a way – and that he was light years away from people like Joseph, superior in every way. Yet she couldn’t tell him. She hated him for his rolling belly and the bald patch on his head and the way he would go on about the army, and deep down, way way down, she was frightened of him and of what he thought of her. He didn’t even know her, and she couldn’t explain herself how she had come to marry this stranger with the thinning hair.
When she was a child her mother had told her that she was utterly beautiful, perfectly formed, and that men would love her for her skin alone. Her mother said she would marry a prince of men with a private income, and here she was at the end with a skin still flawless and a husband with a pot belly and a nostalgia for the war. She pretended not to know about the war, but she did know. While Lionel had stripped down his Bren gun and led his men across Italy (she knew the route as well as he now), she had been a child following her father from camp to camp across England. In the married quarters her mother had tucked her up in the army-issue blankets and commented on her lovely skin. But despite her complexion, she had ended up with Lionel. She had met him in a cinema and he had taken her home in his Triumph Herald. She had been impressed by his manners and by his treatment of her. She felt secure with him. It didn’t matter if her mascara dribbled down her cheek or her hair came out of set, because she could tell he adored her – and why shouldn’t he with his terrible stomach and his hair gone thin and that comical moustache all wet from kissing? So they were married, and the Triumph Herald disappeared, and they had to leave the Bayswater flat, and then the Maida Vale one, and then one after that. He still said he was going to cover her with jewels. ‘You’ll be worth ￡3000 standing up,’ he’d told her, fondling what he called her ‘chests’ and pressing his moustache against her nose.
He still promised her things. He still went out daily and returned at six o’clock to tell her his shares were looking up – they always looked down the following day. He lectured her on her personal hygiene and put up with all her cruelties and abuse and disloyalty. When he came in at night he took off his good suit and changed into his pyjamas and sat on the sofa while she made a cup of tea. It was the extent of her wifely duties. He changed so as not to crumple his suit. His feet stuck out and his neck was marked at the throat by his collar stud. She only wanted him to touch her when he was dressed as the business executive he pretended to be. She could take the caresses of the man of the Stock Exchange, soon to make his million, but she despised the tubby husband panting on the mohair settee in the expensive flat with the yellow brocade curtains and the plastic tulips on the windowsill. He never made jokes, he never tried to fight back at her. There was no fun and no victory in hitting a man who so pitifully lay down. He made her wear dresses with high necks and complained that she deliberately wore her skirts too short, and he wouldn’t let her see her old friends. He followed her round like a hospital nurse, plumping up cushions behind her head and washing out her nylons and cleaning her shoes. ‘In the army,’ he told her, ‘you got to realize what cleanliness was. It’s just not on to polish only the tops of your shoes. The instep also must be shone.’ He’d done it in the trenches apparently – those Italian trenches – to set an example to his men. He’d made an effort to shave before consuming his tins of bully beef or whatever, because ‘it’s the little things that make a gentleman’. Even his war wound had been ridiculous. A piece of shrapnel from a shell scored through the ample flesh of his bottom. ‘Did it hurt?’ she had asked him idly, thinking of him clutching his behind on the road to Rome.
He would prepare their evening meal in his pyjamas and arrange it daintily on a tray. Then they watched the telly, and he sat her on his knee and began to whisper those things into her ear, never realizing how incongruous was the change from Gentleman Jim in the trenches to Dirty Dick on the rented settee, as he mouthed those dreadful words into her brain as if he were demented. She didn’t altogether dislike it. There was a certain thrill to be experienced. It did make her feel she wasn’t entirely living out her life in a wicker basket under a barrage balloon floating high above the rest of the world. If only he would call her May instead of Sweetheart, if only he would give her a name. ‘What will I be worth lying down?’ she would ask him brutally, as he foraged in the whorl of her ear, and he would moan, ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart, how I love you. How you love me.’
*
‘Sweetheart,’ said Lionel, placing the child on the floor, ‘I’ve brought your cigarettes.’ He handed her the packet with a tender smile. Dotty put cups on the table and Balfour stared out of the doorway. Presently he said, ‘Roland, there’s your dad,’ and the child ran out into the sunlight and across the field.
‘Who,’ asked May, ‘is that huge lad wearing the football scarf?’
‘It’s George,’ Dotty said, making the tea. ‘George MacFarley, who owns these woods – him and his parents.’
‘It’s probably glandular,’ May remarked, beginning to open her cigarette packet and watching Lionel’s hand go to the pocket of his suit for his lighter. Deliberately she put the packet down again.
‘It’s nothing glandular,’ said Balfour. ‘H-his father and his uncle are very tall men. Broad too. They both look like gods. When he grows a bit, he’ll be l-like them.’
May laughed and Balfour bent down to scratch at his ankle. He hadn’t actually looked at her face yet. He daren’t. She was pink and white like a carnation, and heavy with scent.
The two women began a conversation that was incomprehensible to him.
‘That tall one who gave us a lift – ’ said Dotty.
‘The one you liked – ’
‘The one you liked – ’
May chose to deny this emphatically. ‘I hated him. I told him so. He wore bicycle clips.’
‘He never. Not the tall one.’
‘In the Hope Hall. You said he was nice and I said he was awful.’
George and Joseph entered the hut and Dotty poured out more tea. She was relieved to see Joseph making an effort to be polite to Lionel, shaking him by the hand and introducing him to George.
May took out a cigarette and said, ‘Might I have a light, Lionel,’ and he replied, ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’ and was ashamed of himself for having to be asked. He hadn’t noticed that she wanted a light – he had been too busy being introduced to the tall fellow. He had thought she needed a light several minutes earlier before that odd conversation about the Hope Hall. Sounded like something to do with the Salvation Army. It wasn’t like May to accept lifts from strangers. Anyway, she seemed to have hated him, whoever he was. She’d said twice she’d hated him. He hoped it was a long time ago.
George and Lionel, surprisingly, had a lot to say to each other. George wanted to know if he had been to Palestine. Lionel had. He was there in 1946. Had he been to Cyprus? There too. George sat stiffly in his rocking chair, his hands still black from the fire, folded in his lap. His slanted eyes, shining and mournful, shifted from the army man with the little brown moustache to the green field beyond the hut, and back again.
Losing himself down a maze of streets with exotic names, some mispronounced, Lionel named comrades and regiments, gave his impressions and his opinions, his head inclined solemnly.
After a while Joseph took Roland by the hand and left the hut. May and Dotty went into the barn and May combed out her hair in front of the mildewed mirror. ‘What on earth is there to do round here?’ she asked peevishly.
‘It’s not too bad, love. The thing is, the air knocks you out and you sleep a lot.’ Dotty remembered where May was to spend her nights. She said, ‘You know Balfour, the one with the pimples, the one that can’t look you in the eye – well, you and Lionel are sharing a hut with him.’
‘A hut? Really.’ May didn’t care. She asked spitefully, ‘Still not married to Joseph?’
‘You know damn well I’m not,’ said Dotty.
May said, trying to be nice, ‘Anyway, you’re better off than I am with my Lionel. He’s a fool.’
‘I think he loves you.’
May shrugged her shoulders, doing things now to her eyelashes, spitting on a little brush to moisten the mascara, blinking rapidly at the mirror. ‘I don’t know what he thinks. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’ Her mouth sagged wider as she worked at the splayed lashes and she leaned forward to see her reflection more closely.
It’s true, Dotty thought, and was frightened. She said, ‘I don’t know either. Honest to God, isn’t it awful?’ Frowning dreadfully, shoulders hunched, she paced up and down behind the titivating May. ‘It’s all so silly … this love business.’
‘I never tell Lionel I love him. I don’t think one should.’ May looked critically at her reflection. ‘Lionel cut all the stuffing out of my bras, you know.’
‘What for?’
‘God knows. He does all sorts of funny things. You wouldn’t believe it. All about how he’ll kill me with a karate blow to my womanhood, and all that stuff about the army. You just wait till he takes you on one side and tells you about his coin.’
‘His what?’ asked Dotty.
‘It’s a coin he keeps on a chain round his neck,’ May said. ‘He pretends it’s very special and private, and he tells everyone about it at the drop of a hat. It’s supposed to be valuable and dreadfully historical, and it’s really a metal token for one penny issued by the Blakeley Moor Co-op in 1827. God knows where he got it. It looks ridiculous when he hasn’t got his shirt on. He’s never without it, never.’
‘Does he wear it in the bath?’ Dotty saw him fox-coloured beneath the water, the Blakeley Moor coin moving gently across his primitive chest.
‘He keeps saying I’ll be worth ￡3000 lying down.’
They both started to laugh – Dotty loudly, with her mouth wide open and her two feet set in a circlet of sunshine. May with pink lips compressed and shoulders wriggling.