Another part of the wood

6

In the morning when Joseph woke it was raining. He went through to the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. He had dressed and walked through the little hut without feelings of any kind. Now, triggered by the sight of the unwashed cups in the sink, he became irritated. Someone had spilled grease on the draining board. There was Monopoly money in a long streak of water under the utility table and a cup half filled with discoloured liquid, possibly coffee, with three drowned and disintegrating cigarette butts. Where was the ashtray he had found for Dotty last night? He had been wasting his time expecting her to use the saucer he had placed at her elbow. It was typical of her whole attitude.
He rubbed his face with his hands as if to erase Dotty’s memory and the disgust she aroused in him, peering into the looking-glass by the window, liking his brown skin. The reflection helped to restore him, but not wholly. There was something somewhere inside him that persisted. Not unhappiness, not pain. He walked away from the deceptive mirror and opened the door to look out at the field lying green under the falling rain. Mist was covering the hills, rolling down sideways towards the Glen, unfolding the mountain inch by inch, uncovering the cotton-wool trees on the lower slopes. Still he remained heavy and unyielding. What was wrong within him?
He stepped out into the field, away from the sleeping Dotty, and walked through the wet grass in his bare feet to the swing he had made for Roland, reaching out for the rope with one hand as if to anchor himself to something, seeking in his mind for a clue. He must list his worries, his problems. But he was too absent-minded. Thoughts slid across his mind and curled to nothingness. Roland … Dotty … his bank manager. I must do … If I write a cheque post-dated … I should tell her to use the ashtray. He saw himself bent over his cheque book, Dotty lying with her face against the pillow, Kidney hanging from the bough of a tree … Dear Sir, With reference to your letter of … His toes threaded with grass, he stamped his feet. George had planted two young trees in the corner of the field. Mountain ash, circled by stakes; to protect the hut from the winds, George said. In time. How many years before the trees grew high enough and thick enough to be effective? Fifty perhaps. George was planting for posterity.
Dotty was sitting at the table with her head in her hands. She had felt that if she rose before Joseph and prepared breakfast he would be pleased. She thought when she woke that possibly he had gone for a walk through the woods, and she was disappointed at seeing him standing outside the hut staring at the mountain. It was no use starting the breakfast, he would only tell her she was doing it inefficiently.
‘My, my,’ said Joseph. ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ He was pushing books aside on the shelves of the little bookcase. A pen and a bottle of aspirins fell to the floor. ‘Where’s the notepaper?’ he asked.
‘Top shelf,’ she said without looking up.
‘I had the most extraordinary dream,’ he told her, coming to the table with the writing pad in his hand.
‘Oh yes.’ She didn’t know why he persisted in being so interested in his dreams. It didn’t seem to help him much to know what they meant. Sometimes she felt it would be more valuable to him if he wrote down what he did in his waking hours.
‘A pen,’ he said. ‘Where’s the pen, Dotty?’
‘You knocked it on the floor.’
‘Did I? You don’t have to sound so critical. I merely asked where it was.’ He began trying to put down his dream on paper. ‘Listen to this, Dot-Dot … I was in bed with my father. It was very dark and he was just lying there … It was at home … In Wales, I mean, and my father said, “I’ve got an attack coming.” I said, “What shall I do ?” and then – ’
He looked up hastily and Dotty said, ‘I’m listening. Go on. I’m just going for my tobacco … Go on … You said, “What shall I do?” ’ She searched for her tobacco on a chair and failed to find it. Straightening up, she saw the field outside, framed by the window, like a picture someone had hung on a wall.
‘What attacks were they?’
But Joseph wouldn’t answer her. He sat at the table and shut her out, keeping his eyes lowered, pushing the little plastic pen about.
She put the kettle on and went out of the hut in her nightgown. The wood spread over her like a great arched umbrella. Underneath the green spokes she was perfectly dry. There was the red tree Roland had talked about. She crossed to the door of the barn and went in. Roland was sitting up in bed, his hands clutching the blankets.
‘Hallo,’ she said, looking for Kidney in the other bed and finding him, curled sideways with his hair spread across the pillow.
‘I’ve been bitten by something,’ Roland said, holding up one thin arm for inspection. ‘Look … it’s fleas or bugs.’
‘Surely not.’ She bent closer and looked at the two red marks on the delicate white forearm. ‘Not fleas, Roland, they can’t be.’
‘Why not?’ He scratched himself hard and looked down with approval at the swollen skin.
‘Well, you only get fleas in dirty places. This isn’t dirty. We’re in the country with all the flowers and things.’ She found her flesh beginning to itch and rubbed at her neck worriedly.
‘It is dirty in the country,’ Roland asserted. Some of the sting had gone out of his arm. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we had fleas at home and Mummy got the Health Man and it’s not dirt that makes fleas.’
She was shocked. ‘Did you have fleas at home?’
‘Fleas can be in houses for ever and ever. A flea’s egg can live for a hundred years and then you make everywhere nice and warm and the flea comes out, hundreds of years old but all new. It’s thirty shillings a room for bugs and ten shillings for fleas, and it’s free for mice and rats.’
‘Is it?’ she said, interested and repelled.
‘When the Health Man came, Mummy and I had to go to the park for a walk and he threw bombs in all the rooms. The smoke stuff killed all the fleas by the time we came home for tea.’
‘That’s good,’ said Dotty. Kidney rolled over on to his back and thrust his feet hard down the bed. He made a sound between a snore and a cough.
‘Good morning, Kidney,’ Dotty said, but he went on sleeping.
‘The man couldn’t kill all the fleas,’ said the obsessed Roland. ‘Mummy didn’t have enough ten shillings for the bathroom or the hall. I expect they’ll come back. When we had tea he read the Bible to us.’ He knelt in the bed and pressed his nose to the window. ‘Is it cold?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Dotty said, only a little chill in her white nightgown hemmed with mud.
‘I don’t suppose my Dad will take me up the mountain.’ The little boy didn’t look at her for a denial. He kept his eyes fixed on the square of grey sky and rubbed at his bitten arm.
‘Did you sleep well?’ Dotty wanted to know, feeling the bed with her hand to assess its comfort.
‘All right.’ Roland fell backwards on to her lap and twisted his arms about her neck. He liked being with Dotty. The time before when he had been to stay with Joseph there had been a pretty girl with a long plait down her back. He’d liked being with her too. He didn’t know there would be a girl in the woods with Daddy. When Daddy came in the car to fetch him at Mummy’s there had only been Kidney. Daddy had found Dotty just round the corner without any suitcase or even a coat. Dotty’s hair was nice. It looked like the beige curtains hung in his room at home.
‘Carry me, carry me,’ he demanded, burying his face in the familiar curtains. ‘Ooooh,’ he squealed, as they left the trees and the rain fell on to his neck. Dotty held him tightly in her arms for the benefit of Joseph and her own image, but Joseph was bent over the table still wrestling with his dream.
‘Hallo, boy,’ he said, not looking up. ‘Kettle’s boiling, Dotty,’ he added, jerking his head in the direction of the cooker.
‘Did you sleep all right?’ she heard him ask Roland. ‘Kidney didn’t disturb you, did he?’
‘He lets off all night.’
‘Roland knows an awful lot about fleas,’ Dotty said, bringing them cups of tea and a saucer for the fussy Joseph. ‘He says he’s been bitten by some.’
‘I have, I have.’ Eagerly the child rolled back his pyjama sleeve and peered at his arm. ‘They were there,’ he cried, disappointed, tearing at the smooth skin with his nails, trying to bring back the swellings.
‘Nonsense,’ Joseph said. ‘I can’t see anything.’ He flipped the cover of the writing pad over the notes he had made and lifted Roland on to his knee.
‘He did have some marks,’ Dotty confirmed, but the two of them were whispering together, not aware of her at all.
She went once more out of the hut. Holding the cup of tea in her hands for warmth, she sat down on the decaying wooden step at the door. What did one do in the country, she wondered? Maybe they should go for long walks or have picnics. They might just as well be back in the flat off the Finchley Road – her making the tea and Kidney fast asleep and Joseph scribbling away at his dreams. It was safer at home. The constricted space forced Joseph to come close to hurt her. Here she could lose him.
She leaned her head against the wet doorpost and yawned.
As soon as he awoke, Balfour left the hut, pausing neither to wash nor cook himself breakfast. The recollections of the night before followed him out into the wood. He was damp with recollection, saturated. He walked limply under the rain-filled trees towards the Big House. He found it difficult to separate what had happened from what he imagined. He longed to confide in someone. George was on the plateau of the house, holding a branch across a three-legged stool, sawing the wood into logs of equal length.
‘C-could I make a cup of tea?’ Balfour asked. ‘I didn’t want to make too much noise in the hut like.’
George said, ‘I thought Joseph could light the stove in Hut 4.’ He looked out across the valley.
‘Good idea,’ said Balfour, sitting down on the slate slabs.
‘The kettle’s boiling, I expect,’ George told him. ‘If you call me when it’s ready I’ll join you.’ He gazed at Balfour a moment before poising the sharp teeth of the saw above the waiting branch.
Balfour made the tea in Mrs MacFarley’s earthenware teapot and waited on the tidy bed for the mixture to brew. He wanted to talk to George and he knew there wasn’t much point. It wasn’t as if he and George could have a good old giggle together. Hardly likely.
‘George,’ he shouted. ‘George – tea up.’
George entered the door, blocking out the light, his shapeless hat dripping water.
‘It was a bit rum last night,’ blurted Balfour. ‘Lionel p-put the bunks together and she was in the lower bunk and he in the other, and I was on top like, and he told her stories half the night.’
George looked as if he understood. He sat down and regarded Balfour gravely for several seconds. ‘Did you sing?’ he asked, his eyes sliding away from the face below him, studying the map above Balfour’s head.
‘No,’ said Balfour.
‘I thought I heard singing last night from the hut … I thought I did … I wanted to come back and join you, but I felt I should wait till I was included …’
‘We weren’t singing,’ protested Balfour. ‘Nobody sang a note. He just told her stories all night – all about someone called Larry O’Rourke.’
‘Is he Irish?’ George enquired. ‘The Irish are very fond of singing.’
‘They weren’t stories really,’ Balfour floundered. ‘I mean I couldn’t hear them properly. They were private like … all about this fella O’Rourke and a t-temple somewhere.’ He closed his mouth at the memory.
‘He was in the East,’ George said. ‘He was in Palestine.’
Bloody hell, thought Balfour, angrily jabbing at his inflamed neck. He wondered whether Lionel was awake now, already muttering his tales into the ear of the little woman. What a way to greet the day, like ‘Lift Up Your Hearts …’ with a kick in it.
George said, ‘You could help me carry the logs over to the hut later if you have a moment.’ He stood up, shifting his head a little from side to side, looking down at Balfour and away again. He went out of the hut and on to the rain-drenched plateau. He wasn’t at ease about Balfour – the drinking of the first evening, the rhyme about the Jew in a cave of last night. Like the sudden outbreak of fire in the scrub, nothing was entirely accidental nor entirely planned. Chaos could escalate to such a point that what preceded it achieved a degree of order. He didn’t wish the chaotic Balfour to become less ordered. No man could foresee with accuracy the type of feeling generated by another. Evil lay beyond the Glen – the emotion of evil – waiting to devour the trees and the valley, waiting to burst into flame. Soon he would be able to discuss such problems with Joseph. They wouldn’t of course allude to evil by its name, they would talk about faulty materials and bad planning and cheap design. He didn’t delude himself that Joseph would be of much help to him. He had too many things adhering to his life that hindered – marriage and women friends and a responsible job. He must wait a few days until the peace of the Glen had smoothed out the creased Joseph.
Balfour made a clumsy job of securing the wood into a bundle that could be carried. He was hampered by the fact that he wished to get away across the stream before Lionel and May awakened and sought him out. The thought of facing them with only the detached George for protection filled him with anxiety.
‘That’s no use,’ George told him. Methodically, he placed the logs in correct lengths on the plateau, slipping a leather belt underneath the roll and drawing the thong tight.
Balfour looked in the direction of Hut 2 and imagined he saw the curtains move across the window. Loaded correctly, he was set on the down path to the stream. George turned about from time to time to comment on the vista before the Big House. ‘We should lop a few more trees,’ he said. ‘From certain angles the plateau is quite obscured.’
Balfour could smell the bacon frying even as they climbed the slope above the bridge. Roland was being pushed on the swing by Dotty, still in her nightdress. She looked, he thought, a funny girl, standing there in the damp grass with her large feet sticking out from beneath the bedraggled hem of her gown. The child and the girl looked at George in his odd hat and Balfour with his pile of logs, but they didn’t speak. Balfour thought they were all a bit daft, all of them – no one saying a word of greeting, not even a bit of a smile. Gloomily he went to the door of the hut and waited for George to open it for him.
‘What’s all this about?’ Joseph asked of George authoritatively, pointing at the wood with a long knife in his hand, ignoring the beast of burden beneath it. He hadn’t really noticed the stove alongside the settee. He kicked at its brick base with his shoe and wanted to know if it worked. He wanted to know if it smoked much, if they could use it for cooking. He sounded angry and suspicious, as if George were trying to sell him something. Balfour let the logs fall on to the settee and went to wash his hands at the sink. The bacon was spitting in the pan. On the floor by the Calor gas container was the tartan holdall of groceries that Balfour had carried for Lionel.
Dotty came in and looked anxiously at the frying pan on the cooker. ‘That’s not our food, Joseph,’ she said.
‘Quite right, Dotty.’ He brought out a bag of sugar and placed it on the table. ‘Call Roland, will you.’
Roland had bacon and some slices of bread dipped in fat. Joseph asked Dotty if she wanted bacon too, but she suspected it was Lionel and May’s and refused, saying she wasn’t hungry. It was untrue. She was huge and vicious with hunger, but she sat there with a mug of tea in her hand and refrained from eating even a piece of bread. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said finally, ‘that you ought to give Kidney something to eat?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Joseph told her. ‘He’s far too fat.’ He studied the palm of his hand, holding it up to the light as if gazing at a rare stamp.
I shall never kiss you again, she thought spitefully, and then sorrowfully, I shall never kiss you again. When the week was up she would go to her parents’ home and write him a letter asking him to send all her things to her. That wasn’t really a good idea – she might never see her books or clothes again, he was so bad about that sort of thing.
As if reading her thoughts, as if the possibility of her leaving him made him generous, he said, ‘Go on, Dot-Dot, have some of Lionel’s bacon.’
‘Joseph’s had another of his dreams,’ she told George. ‘He writes them all down.’
‘I never dream,’ said George.
‘Oh, but you do,’ cried Joseph. ‘All the time. You just don’t remember them. The mind,’ he explained, ‘is less inhibited when we sleep. We can be our true selves then – give vent to all kinds of repressed desires, act out our fantasies, behave without the restraints imposed by society.’
‘Some people,’ Dotty said, ‘are like that when they’re awake.’ She got up and went in search of her tobacco.
Balfour was fidgeting on his chair, fearing any moment the arrival of Lionel and May. He chatted with Roland about his red boat, telling him it was a lovely boat, standing up and taking it to the window to admire it.
‘Oh God,’ Dotty moaned distractedly. She went through the aperture into the cubicle and Balfour followed, squeezing past her in the constricted space, stepping into the second room with the truckle bed.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Lionel,’ he mouthed, pointing ridiculously with one frantic finger at the wall. ‘Out there.’ He fumbled with the bolt of the back door and held it closed with his hand.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, coming close, her eyes shining with curiosity.
‘Sssh,’ he warned.
Outside Lionel shouted cheerfully, ‘Ahoy there.’ There was the sound of footsteps at the door. The wooden wall of the cubicle vibrated as he entered.
‘What is it?’ whispered Dotty.
Anguished, Balfour shook his head and stepped into the field, standing there in the rain, his head tilted to catch the sound of Lionel’s voice.
‘What is it?’ Dotty persisted, stepping outside the hut and hanging on to his arm.
‘I just don’t want to see Lionel.’
‘Why not? What happened?’ She shook him. ‘Go on, tell me.’ She pushed her washed-out face close to his.
‘He told stories all night.’ He swung his head round, hearing Lionel move inside the hut, and suddenly felt foolish.
Dotty was looking at him, less eagerly, but still with that curious degree of elation on her features.
‘What do you mean, he told her stories? What kind of stories?’
‘Well, funny ones – ones I shouldn’t think he wanted me to hear. But I did hear like. Blinking rum stories,’ he added bleakly, detesting the way he spoke, wondering why at work he was considered a bit of a talker, in spite of his stammer, not understanding why he should find it difficult to express himself to this lot – Joseph and Dotty and the rest of them.
‘Rum?’ said Dotty. ‘Do you mean dirty?’
That was tricky, thought Balfour. He didn’t know if they were dirty – not in artistic circles, that is – though somehow Lionel didn’t seem in the least like Joseph or George. More like himself – and he’d thought they were dirty all right. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, feeling hungry and not at all sure. He couldn’t think why he was making such a fuss.
‘Poor Balfour,’ she said and reached up and touched his cheek with the back of her hand. ‘Poor Balfour. Don’t you worry, boyo.’ She sounded genuinely concerned, amused and yet anxious for him. ‘They’re all a bit rum, aren’t they?’ She was the conspirator again.
‘A bit,’ he admitted.
‘They are, aren’t they? I mean, they really are, don’t you think? I mean, look at Joseph, going all moody and never being polite to anyone, and Lionel going on about the army, and May saying she hates him. They’re all barmy.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking at his feet, not wanting to commit himself.
‘Well, you don’t feel comfortable, do you? I mean, it’s obvious. You didn’t stutter at all when we first came. Not that I noticed. I bet you’re like you were the other night when you’d had a few drinks – I mean, like that all the time normally.’
‘I’ve always had a s-stutter,’ Balfour said, wanting to be off through the trees. He knew it wasn’t the others that were odd, but himself who was at fault. He couldn’t get his bearings. If he’d heard some bloke at the factory telling a smutty yarn he’d have laughed like hell. The dirtier the better. He wouldn’t be like he was now – sort of morally indignant and feeling like he was shocked. Old Lionel probably had his reasons for getting his kicks out of telling her stories. The little woman was a man-eater. He couldn’t make a judgement on Joseph yet. Old George he knew about – he’d got used to not being able to talk to him. There was something wrong within himself, something he could sense but not explain.
Roland had been told to go looking for larch twigs for the fire they were going to have in that stove thing by the sofa. May said it was too cold to live, so they were going to light a fire later on to keep her alive. He knew they weren’t going up the mountain today on account of the wet, though it wasn’t raining any more – even the trees had stopped dripping. The grass was untidy. Over the hedge there was a field full of mauve thistle tops that stuck in his feet, painful as anything, and he’d seen a cow yesterday with long white legs galloping like a horse through all those prickles, with its tail held straight out in the air and Joseph said a horsefly was probably bothering it. Most of the leaves on the trees by the barn had been eaten by something – lots of little holes bitten in the leaves, showing spots of sky, as if someone had spattered the trees with white paint, all tatty-looking. Moths or something. The ferns by the bushes hadn’t been bitten – they smelt too strong – nor the nettles. There wasn’t a dock leaf in sight. His teacher at school had told him that wherever God put a stinging nettle he put a dock leaf next to it. Children, she had said, run to the lowly dock leaf and rub its juice over the sting of the stinging nettle. It wasn’t the truth and he would tell her. There were thousands of nettles and not a single dock leaf. He had looked.
He wanted to go up the mountain because it looked safe out there: nothing dangerous on it, no wire netting like under the barn step, through which the wasps went, buzzing pale green and angry. He supposed it wasn’t much use telling Joseph it had stopped raining. Joseph didn’t want to take him up the mountain. They were all talking in there about that war, and bombs dropping on things, and about Germany. It sounded dangerous in there too. Besides, Joseph was going vista-clearing with George, and he had seemed so pleased about it – jumping up and swinging his arms as if he were holding an axe, and Lionel laughing at him – that it wouldn’t be kind to mention the mountain again. Lionel said ‘vista’ came from the Italian, and George said they weren’t going to chop any trees down, only lop off a few branches. ‘Vista’ sounded sad, like saying goodbye. They said he could go for the milk tonight, on his own, to the farm. That was to make up for not going vista-clearing or up the mountain or with Dotty and Balfour to the village to spend his two-shilling piece. He couldn’t go to the village with them because they were walking and they said it was too far for him to walk. There wasn’t any food left to eat, only Ribena and red peppers.
He didn’t have to get those twigs for the fire. No one really expected him to go for them – it was just to make him feel big and busy while they finished their chat about the war. It was only when he was with Joseph that he wanted to be big. When he was with Joseph it was always ‘Lift that, you’re a big boy now’, or ‘Climb that tree, Roland … Higher … you’re big enough’, as if it showed he wasn’t big enough at all. Not like Kidney. If he could grow as big as Kidney, Joseph and he might do exercises in the morning on the tree and climb the mountain, and do vista-clearing all the time.
Dotty had said she’d bring him back a notebook from the village for him to write in. He would write a story like Joseph. It would be a dream story. Joseph had asked him if he had ever had a dream. He was starting to tell him, only Lionel and May came in and Dotty said she was sorry Joseph had eaten all their bacon and used their sugar.
He heard the door of the barn creak and he looked round the side of the hut and saw Kidney.
‘What are you looking at, please?’ asked Roland joining him.
‘I’m looking,’ said Kidney, screwing his face up till his eyes almost disappeared.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘A silver birch,’ Kidney said.
Roland stared too. He could see Kidney’s shoes all scruffy with dried mud, and a rock lying beneath the bushes, and he could see the tree. The birch was wet, its bark gleaming after the rain, and there were four ants joined like a thread of cotton clinging to its trunk. Ants in the grass were hardworking and stupid. They only itched. Those ants on the tree were lazy and clever. They would sting like pins going in. He moved quite close, fascinated and afraid.
‘Those?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What are they doing?’
Kidney said he didn’t know. He swung his head sorrowfully and told Roland he was going for his breakfast. ‘I’m hungry and I want my pills.’
‘The ones in the bottle?’
‘I need my breakfast.’
‘You shouldn’t eat those pills in the bottle. You should swing on trees.’ Kidney was walking away and Roland shouted, ‘There’s no food left and they’re all talking about that war.’ He watched the hungry Kidney push open the door and disappear with lowered head.
The war talk went on for a long time.
May wouldn’t speak to Lionel. She was obviously huffy. She shielded her face with one hand and played with her spoon in the unappetizing mess of her shredded wheat. She felt exhausted and hideous, with all her make-up on wrong. The mirror was too small, and when she had done her eyebrows Joseph had made some remark about her warpaint and they had all watched her. She was sure she had swollen in the night; she felt blown out like some balloon. It was water retention or something horrible like that. She couldn’t think how Dotty could walk around in that cotton sack in this weather. Lionel had told her to put on another sweater if she wasn’t warm enough, but she was damned if she was going to add to her already large proportions. The hairdresser in the King’s Road had sworn her set would last a week – four or five days at the least – and already it was out. It was dreadful. Those army blankets had given her some kind of skin allergy too, she was convinced of it. She could feel the little broken veins in her cheeks and there was a rough patch on her neck. Lionel of course looked much the same as usual, the same as he ever did. He’d pushed his head into that tin bowl of cold water and come up all red and spluttering. The way he scrubbed his face with the towel it was a wonder he didn’t wear his skin through to the bone. He’d changed into a checked shirt with a silly green cravat at the throat, with that coin of his hidden behind it and his elderly heart going boom-boom-boom on the other side. She was grateful it wasn’t summery enough for his appalling shorts, the khaki ones that came below his knees. It was such a small hut with all these people in it. There wasn’t room to breathe and it was so dark with the door shut, as if they were in a ship’s cabin with the spray splashing up against the porthole. There was more space further in, towards that chintz sofa – which was an odd piece of furniture to find in this place – but it was warmer nearer the cooker. There was something large and grey standing near the wall, shaped like an unexploded bomb with a metal knob on it. She hoped it wouldn’t blow up. Lionel was going on about Churchill being a great man, talking about him as if he’d met him, saying he spoke to him at Malta once. He always pretended that. He never had met him.
‘Great man, a great man of history. I had the honour once of meeting him …’
Balfour said, ‘I watched the funeral on telly. It was sad.’
‘Who are we talking about?’ asked Joseph, looking round with a puzzled expression.
‘Lionel met Winston Churchill, and Balfour saw him on telly,’ Dotty said, miserable without her tobacco. She knew Joseph had heard Lionel, he was just being awkward.
‘He had a remarkable ability,’ Lionel was saying, ‘to get close to the ordinary man.’
May said, ‘I couldn’t bear that awful siren suit he wore. What did he have to wear that dreadful thing for?’
‘Ah, my sweetheart, how little you understand. The man, Churchill, the historical figure, was behind his siren suit. In his case, clothes could hardly matter.’
Clothes do matter, thought May, licking away the grains of sugar folded in the corners of her mouth. If she had the money she would buy a coat the same colour as the shredded wheat, with Italian seams at the waist. With it she’d wear a boy’s shirt with buttoned-down collar and cream stockings and toffee patent shoes, and beige nail varnish and lip salve, and just a touch of white shadow above her eyes, on the corner of the lids. It was typical of Lionel not to know that clothes mattered. He’d gone on long enough deploring the loss of the Empire or something, and he couldn’t see just how British-mad everyone was now, what with clothes and pop songs and the King’s Road on a Saturday morning. Everyone she knew was dreadfully patriotic, and especially if you came from Liverpool. She had told Lionel they ought to buy a Union Jack to hang over their bed. Lionel had just laughed and called her a funny little thing. He didn’t believe her when she told him that all the best people, even the Armstrong-Joneses possibly, pinned Union Jacks up all over the place. It was the thing. You could get boxes of matches with the flag on, and tea towels and handkerchiefs and coffee mugs, a shirt if you went to Carnaby Street – anything if you wanted it. And it really had something to do with being glad you were English – as though you knew everything was going decadent and awful, and now was the time you could dress up in style and shout you were British-made.
Lionel was now talking about treaties and organizations. ‘South American powers,’ he said seriously, ‘Asiatic powers, European powers, known collectively as the Great Powers.’
‘I only know Tyrone Power,’ said May.
Joseph laughed.
‘Silly child,’ said Lionel indulgently, a little annoyed at her interruption but charmed by her gaucherie and the fact that she had at last spoken. It made him feel freer. It allowed him to speak more personally about the war, his war. He started a long rambling account of his experiences in Malta leading up to his meeting with the Great Man. ‘When the show first got under way,’ he began. ‘After Mr Shickelgrueber had shown his hand …’
May saw that Dotty was gazing at Lionel, not fluttering her eyelashes at him – she wasn’t feminine enough for that – but eyeing him all right. She’s so drab, thought May; she’s no idea how to exploit her sex. All those ghastly boys’ dungarees and sneakers on her feet – size nine, by the look of them. She hadn’t been born till the war was over. Fancy that – not even a war baby. Where was that place, she wondered, with the injured soldiers everywhere? They had lived there for a year during the war, after her father had been sent overseas. Southport, was it? The place with the fairy lights in the trees. The soldiers were all dressed in bright bright blue, some on crutches and some without an arm, and a terrible man with a burnt face, candle-pink, and a strip of waxy flesh for a nose. It looked comical really – not the burnt man, poor devil, but all of them, hobbling and limping down the street, under those trees with the lights not on because of the war, just the black bulbs stuck up there like fruit spotted with bird droppings. Some of the wounded soldiers pushed each other in wheelchairs. She’d never liked soldiers, never – they reminded her of Father. They always looked so awful when they put on civilian clothes and couldn’t hide behind the uniform any more.
She had an uncle, though, who had been in some regiment that made him wear a kilt, and he came on leave once and played the piano, with his legs all bare and the tight little pleats flaring out all round the piano stool, sitting there playing ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’.
Lionel was looking at Dotty with wonder and shaking his head from side to side. ‘Incredible,’ he said, ‘I keep forgetting – not even born.’
‘She’s too young. Aren’t you, Dot-Dot?’ Joseph said, patting Dotty’s hand.
May smiled too, regarding her husband fixedly, positively daring him to dwell on the youthfulness of Dotty. She didn’t pretend to be younger than she was. She wasn’t as old as her birth certificate said. She couldn’t be. It was a cruel mistake.
‘I had a cousin who was killed in Germany,’ Dotty volunteered. ‘He was shot down over Dresden.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Lionel said. His grief seemed genuine.
‘I never knew him,’ Dotty explained. ‘I’ve seen photographs, but I never knew him.’
Lionel pushed the dead relation out of his mind. ‘Clever lot, those Germans. Good soldiers, especially under Rommel. They’re a nation of soldiers – it’s the Prussian influence. They have an instinct for it, just as we had an instinct for colonization. The warring instinct of the German nation.’ He paused. His fingers fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. ‘I have here,’ he said, clutching something inside his shirt, ‘a symbol that may illustrate what I mean. I don’t often show it to anyone. I regard it as sacred.’
‘What is it?’ Dotty was sure he was talking about the coin, the Blakeley Moor token piece. She couldn’t look at May.
‘A coin,’ said Lionel, ‘an old coin. I took it from around the neck of a German officer in Italy. There was a small nick at the edge and beneath the coin a round hole in his breast.’ He allowed them a glimpse of the metal chain, but that was all.
‘A dead German, I hope,’ Joseph said, not greatly caring, looking at the still-munching Kidney, who had eaten half a loaf of bread. He wondered whether he should give him a pill now.
‘Very dead. He was little more than a boy. Same age as myself actually. But make no bones about it, he was dead.’
How awful, thought May, in part believing the story, seeing the lifeless German and a callous Lionel, little more than a boy, snatching the chain from about his neck. He was so persuasive. Sometimes she wondered if Lionel had ever got further than the Isle of Man. He had told her once that his father, the buried William Gosling, cashier of the bank, had given him the coin, and on another occasion that he’d found it on the windowsill of a farmhouse in France – when he was occupying some place or other, when he was winning the war. The last story he’d told her even after she knew it was the Blakeley Moor token for one penny only.
Joseph fetched the bottle of pills from under the settee. He kept the container hidden in his palm, not able to make up his mind about the problem of Kidney – medicine versus exercise. He was going to go vista-clearing with George and he wasn’t going to have time to see that the youth did press-ups or ran round and round the field. Those half-dozen slices of white starch Kidney had just consumed weren’t exactly the best way to start a day. He fretted that he couldn’t concentrate on Kidney, couldn’t be singleminded enough to be of real help. He fretted that he was again postponing taking Roland up the mountain, though the child seemed to have forgotten the whole idea.
Lionel was still carrying on about the battlefield and the gunfire. His voice was breaking with recollection.
Joseph, putting the bottle of pills high up on the shelf above the sink, said roughly, ‘Come on, George, let’s get cracking.’
The tall man rose slowly and Balfour quickly joined him. George lowered his head at the doorway, to step down into the grass.
When the three men had gone, May said she had left a lipstick in the front pocket of the car and wanted it. She told Lionel to go at once, waving her hand at him imperiously, and he did as he was told, leaving the two women alone with Kidney. May didn’t mind him being there. He didn’t count. She jumped to her feet and peered into the mirror, giving a small scream of disgust. ‘Ugh.’
‘Do you want some hot water?’ Dotty put the kettle on and lit the Calor gas.
‘I hate him, I hate him … It’s all his fault.’ May fell on her knees and dragged the suitcase from under the table, pulling out several dresses and some sweaters.
‘That’s super.’ Dotty picked up a skirt, held it against her waist. It looked like an apron on her.
‘Well, I can’t wear it … Look at the creases in it.’ May snatched it away and bundled it into her case. She sat back on her heels and buried her head in her hands.
‘Oh come on, love. It’s not as bad as that.’
Kidney was looking earnestly at the writing pad abandoned by Joseph among the dishes. He turned its pages and began to draw something.
When the water was hot Dotty poured it into the bowl for May and found the soap. The woman was so helpless in many ways, she felt compelled to do things for her. May washed her hands and placed her damp fingertips against her face as if the water might do her an injury. ‘It’s all stinging,’ she complained. ‘It’s those bloody army blankets.’
‘What happened last night with Balfour and you?’
‘Me and Balfour?’
‘He seemed a bit upset. He said Lionel told a dirty story.’
‘My God.’ May hid her ravaged face behind the towel and turned to the mirror. ‘Did he hear?’ she asked. ‘What did he say?’
‘He just said Lionel told you a story.’
‘He tells me stories every night … I don’t listen any more … they’re always the same.’
‘What are they about?’
‘Lalla Rookh and some temple.’
Dotty giggled.
‘When he first told me them – ’ May was spilling the contents of her handbag on to the draining board, fumbling for her foundation cream, unscrewing the gold top on the black tube – ‘it was a bit of a shock, I can tell you, but I’ve got used to it now.’ She wasn’t going to tell Dotty that Lionel never made love to her, never actually had intercourse. Dotty would probably tell everybody. She said, ‘If he can’t make love to me, he tells me stories.’ She caught sight of Kidney’s face in the mirror, his blue eyes fixed on her. ‘Is he listening?’ she asked, turning round to look at him.
‘Shouldn’t think so.’ Dotty was reminded of the farewell letter she was going to write Joseph, telling him everything in her mind, everything. ‘Joseph won’t touch me,’ she said, searching on the shelves in the inner room for her writing paper. ‘He says I revolt him.’
‘Really?’ May tried to express sympathy and incredulity, but she was too absorbed in her make-up, barely listening to the girl.
‘I’m going to write him a long letter,’ Dotty said, sitting down on the settee.
‘Oh yes.’ May’s mouth stretched wide as she applied colour to her lips. There were freckles, gold-coloured, on the bridge of her tilted nose.
Dotty wrote:
‘Joseph: I don’t suppose you will take much notice of this, because I have done this so often, written I mean, threatening to go away and in the end not going …’
It was true. She wrote him so many letters but she never went.
‘But this time I do mean it. It’s all to do with me being so awful and people like this girl you’ve got at the college not being awful. I mean, if I wasn’t awful you wouldn’t need to go to someone else so quickly. Anyway, I don’t see much point in me hanging around just irritating you with my ciggies and my nose, because your wife did that – always around, I mean – and it didn’t get her very far, did it?’
May said, ‘Why doesn’t Joseph play with Roland? He’s a sweet little boy. Just look at him.’
Dotty looked up and asked what he was doing.
‘He’s on the swing, just swinging up and down. He’s bored.’
‘Oh, he’s all right. He adores Joseph.’
She wrote:
‘I know it’s none of my business and less so now, but you have to be careful of Roland, you have to give him more time. It’s all right with me or Kidney or women, but it’s different for Roland. You have to see that. Once when I was little …’
She stopped. She had told Joseph that anecdote before, several times in fact. She reread the words written and wished she had some cigarettes. Or something to drink. Without tobacco she couldn’t possibly tell Joseph what she thought of him. She couldn’t tell him she hoped he would rot and end up without friends, only a host of women to whom he paid out conscience money. Neither could she describe in detail her own ugliness or unworthiness – the concentration wasn’t there, she just wanted a cigarette. She sat looking at May, who was puffing up her hair with one hand, standing at the sink with her cosmetics in a row on the narrow windowsill.
‘My God,’ May said, ‘here comes the galloping major.’
Lionel entered the hut, carrying Roland on his back. He said he hadn’t been able to spot her lipstick, not in the compartment, nor on the back seat, or in the boot, or anywhere.
‘Hallow, luv,’ Dotty said, and Roland came to the sofa and fell on to it beside her, leaning his head against her shoulder. ‘Are you a bit bored? Don’t you know what to do with yourself?’
‘I’m all right. What are you writing?’
‘A sort of letter.’
‘I’m just going to spend a penny,’ Lionel told them, frankly, running out of the hut with his cravat slightly dishevelled.
May said ‘Christ!’ and came to Roland, her hand rummaging in the depths of her handbag. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Would you like to play with this?’ It was her lighter.
‘No thanks.’ He got up and stood at the table, pushing the dishes about to disturb the placid Kidney, watching him drawing his flowers.
‘Would you like to write to Mummy and I’ll post it?’ Dotty asked, tearing free a page of her writing paper in expectation.
‘No.’ The little boy attempted to smile. Dotty had to go to him then, falling on her knees beside him, pushing his face into her neck, feeling his lips quivering against her throat. ‘What’s wrong, little boy? What’s wrong, little love?’
He couldn’t speak. He wanted his mother.
‘You want Daddy, don’t you? Poor little love.’ Her voice was angry all at once. She stood up and sat at the table, lifting him with her, placing him on her lap. She looked down fiercely into his desolate face and wiped a tear away with the tip of her finger.
May stood uncertainly with the lighter in her hand. Dotty was so emotional with the child, she was as bad as Lionel. The boy had been perfectly all right, bored perhaps but not miserable. Dotty didn’t seem to realize that Roland was like his mother. The mother had terribly wistful eyes, really terribly mournful and bereft, and she was as strong as a man and fat as hell.
After a moment Lionel returned and sat down at the table. He and Roland began a game of noughts and crosses.