Another part of the wood

7

The afternoon was warm and dry. Dotty was practically silent the whole way to the village, striding along between the hedgerows with her shoulders hunched and the shopping bag in her hand. She told Balfour she’d be all right when she got her ciggies.
The village, to her surprise, turned out to be a fair-sized market town with a Tesco stores and a Midland Bank. She purchased at once a packet of Woodbines and said she must have a cup of tea and a sausage roll. They sat in a cream-tiled café and she lit her cigarette and closed her eyes. He was embarrassed by the sight of a tear rolling out from under her closed lids. ‘You’ve no idea,’ she told him, ‘how hungry I get. Honest to God, I get that hungry I could scream.’ She ate and smoked at the same time and colour came into her cheeks.
‘It’s funny,’ she explained, ‘me being hungry all the time, because I don’t really enjoy food and I never put on weight. I wouldn’t know one sausage roll from another. Joseph says my hunger means something else … But then everything means something else, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Why do you stutter now?’ she asked him suddenly. ‘You didn’t at first, when we got here … I didn’t notice, anyway.’
He felt awkward and looked down at the table. ‘It comes and goes,’ he mumbled.
‘I didn’t mean …’ She was afraid she had offended him.
‘I did have a very bad stutter when I was a child,’ he confessed. ‘B-but Mr and Mrs MacFarley cured me, m-more or less. It gets bad w-when – ’ he broke off, not really knowing when it got bad.
She made a list of shopping they could do separately to save time.
‘Are we in a h-hurry?’ asked Balfour, gulping his tea and looking at the clock on the wall. It was a quarter to four.
‘No, there’s no hurry, I suppose … It’s just that there’s nothing for Roland’s supper and we need candles before it gets dark.’
‘There’s gallons of paraffin in the store shed,’ Balfour observed, but she brushed that aside.
‘I don’t like taking other people’s things,’ she cried, hunched over her empty plate, licking her fingers and stubbing them against the dish, bringing orange flakes of pastry to her mouth. ‘It’s so awful sponging on people all the time.’
He felt ill at ease, self-conscious at being seen with her in her denim outfit. The waitress behind the glossy tea urn was staring relentlessly.
‘We’ll get started then,’ he said, jerking his head at the woman at the counter and feeling in his pocket for money.
She wouldn’t let him pay for her. ‘Honest to God, I can’t let you pay for my sausage roll,’ she told him, grimacing as she dug down into the back pocket of her trousers.
His face burning, he walked along the street. Down a side turning were stalls with vegetables and fruit. There was cheap jewellery and cheap glass, and further along a rail of secondhand clothing. He stopped on the corner and she caught hold of his arm with her spiky fingers and asked, ‘Are you angry with me, love? You are, I know you are.’ She wrung her hands in anguish and passersby turned curiously to look at them.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, walking down the side street with the shopping list crumpled in his hand.
In silence she regarded the trays of plastic brooches and metal rings. He hung his head beside her. ‘You’re just like Joseph,’ she accused him. ‘I irritate you, don’t I?’
‘Please,’ he begged, out of his depth and able neither to proceed nor stand still.
It was then that she saw the clothes. ‘Look,’ she cried, running towards the stall, pushing aside the coats and dresses, the curtains of hair enveloping her face and her arms flying out as she separated the hanging garments. ‘Aren’t they smashing? Look at this … and this …’ Her face when she turned to Balfour was bright with happiness.
‘It might suit you,’ he said, looking at the man’s anorak she was clutching in her fingers.
‘It’s not for me … a present for Joseph … What do you think?’
He thought Joseph would hate it. He thought Joseph would tell her so. He said, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ and felt inadequate. It was then she saw the flowered coat. It was seven and six and she had to have it. She counted guiltily the money that Joseph had given her for the shopping, and Balfour on an impulse took out a ten-shilling note and gave it to the stallholder. ‘I did see it first,’ he said, hoping she wouldn’t make a scene.
She was disconcerted but grateful, her face turning pink, her eyes lowered. ‘Thank you, thank you very much, Balfour,’ she said formally. The flowered coat was made of some kind of velvet. It rippled and shone. It was orange and blue and green and black, with a mustard-yellow ground, and there were buttons small as beads going from wrist to elbow. Balfour thought it was terrible.
He prayed she wouldn’t wear it now. He visualized her stalking, swathed in velvet, through the busy market town, the bell-bottoms of her denim trousers flaring out beneath the long and violently coloured hem.
They finished the shopping about five. Dotty had bought a piece of best end of neck so large it could only be carried with difficulty. Balfour thought it wouldn’t go in the oven, nor would it keep fresh for long. He bore it stoically along the street with Dotty at his side, the flowered coat slung across her shoulders. He was feeling unwell. His head ached and there was a burning sensation in the pit of his stomach. He refused to admit that it might be another of his attacks coming on. He told himself he was just tired, and perhaps getting a cold. It was six months since his last attack. As he walked, he looked from side to side, as if seeking some safe and dark place in which to hide. He mustn’t imagine things, he mustn’t let it become worse.
‘I think I’ve got a cold coming,’ he said out loud, reassuring himself. Dotty stared at his face and attempted to put her hand against his forehead. She stumbled. The joint of meat slipped from his arms. As he bent to retrieve it, the road broke up under him and he fell on his knees.
‘Are you all right?’ She was squatting on her haunches, staring at him as she had stared at Willie, with disbelief.
‘Fine, fine,’ he said with an effort, standing upright, afraid now, sure he was ill. He sensed, rather than saw, the road stretching ahead, the hedges on either side, recently trimmed, the fields beyond, the far distant hills, all permeated by the clear and golden light of the afternoon. There was no darkness anywhere, no feeling of shade, nowhere he might hide.
‘I’m so happy,’ Dotty shouted, running ahead, the bag of food clutched in her arms, the flowered coat trailing on the road. She wheeled round to face him and the coat flew with her, orange and black. She was like a matador before him, poised on the tips of her feet, hugging the shopping to her breast. She noticed the pallor of his face, the lankness of his hair upon his forehead as if he sweated. She waited till he was almost level and said, ‘Balfour.’ And he had to stop, for she was planted on the road in front of him. She stood so close to him she must surely hear the thudding in his breast. He could smell tobacco on her breath, see a brown shred clinging to her lower lip.
‘Do you want to sit down?’ she said. ‘You look a bit white.’
He shook his head and they walked on.
‘Joseph always says I can’t walk anywhere,’ said Dotty. ‘I can walk … I can walk miles. Not with him of course … not any more. We did go for a walk together once, a hell of a long way, talking all the time … all about children and the future and nice things. When we came to a signpost we just walked right round it – in a circle, still talking – and started back home again.’
Balfour thought everything she said seemed personal and embarrassing. He asked, ‘Don’t you go walking any more?’
‘We don’t do anything much any more,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes we go out in the car round Hyde Park and things … I quite like that … except for Stephen Ward.’
‘For who?’ Balfour was glad now of her chattering. It forced him to keep moving. It postponed the moment when he must lie down at the side of the road.
‘Stephen Ward,’ said Dotty … ‘that poor man. I always think of him when I’m going round Hyde Park. There’s so many posh cars and everyone’s wearing such expensive clothes … I keep thinking he must have driven round the park, all dressed up, with Mandy Rice-Whatsit beside him. All those parties … all those weekends in the country. Joseph says he was a victim, a sort of present-day martyr. They used him. Joseph calls him St Stephen.’
‘D-does he?’ Balfour hadn’t meant to shout.
‘I don’t go that far,’ said Dotty. ‘I mean, I don’t know if he was a victim or not. But he must have thought life was smashing. He felt so in with all that rich crowd and he thought they liked him. When they closed their ranks, he couldn’t believe it. He thought he was one of them. Lord Denning said Profumo and that lot were misguided. He said Ward was evil.’
Balfour made some sound, a grunt. The blood pounded in his ears. He held the joint of meat tightly in his arms to stop himself from trembling. The light was growing stronger all the time. It was filling his eyes, obliterating shapes and distances.
Dotty was walking ahead. ‘I bet you Joseph hates my coat,’ she called. ‘I bet you he says something nasty.’ She turned to look at Balfour, her face forlorn, her features blurred.
The hedgerows reeled backwards. He said indistinctly, ‘Ditch, quick … quick.’
‘What luv? What luv?’
He could feel her arm about his shoulders. She was too heavy for him. She was pushing him to the ground. ‘Please,’ he begged, his cheek on the surface of the shifting road. ‘Please – ’
During the afternoon, Lionel went for a brisk walk across the fields, returning via his Mini to take a few sips from the whisky bottle secreted in the boot. Though he wouldn’t call himself a teetotaller, he wasn’t a drinking man – or hadn’t been until his marriage to May. He found increasingly that a small drink gave him the uplift he needed to face her at the end of his day. There was a lot she expected of him – and why not, loving him as she did? He had wanted her to accompany him on the walk, but she had refused, preferring to lie down on the chintz sofa, with only the thumb-sucking and silent Kidney for company. Roland had gone to the stream. Lionel would have liked to show one of them, wife or child, wild flowers, tell them what they were called. There was a certain poetry in the long Latin names. He sat in his hired car, holding the whisky bottle between his knees, the interior darkened by the haystack that towered above the metal roof of the car.
He remembered a childhood holiday taken at harvest time, when he had been allowed to help the men to stook the corn, holding the sheaves upright against his perspiring face while they bound the bundles with thin silver wire – four bundles to a stook. The corn smelt of dried clean paper, scratching the skin of his face, filling his ears with dust. Round and round the bleached white field went the harvester in ever-decreasing circles, the reverse of the stone dropped in the pond, till all that was left was a patch of yellow corn waving slowly in the bald field. The men took sticks, waiting for the rabbits to break cover. He had run with them, leaping over the ground, raising his arm with the peeled white stick held against the sky. The rabbits ran out, lumpy, slower than he thought possible, disorganized and cowardly, so that he closed his eyes lest he should see what he did, beating at the clumsy scattering things. The killed rabbits smelt of nothing, there was no blood. Their eyes soon filmed over and stared straight up at the sky. When hung, they were like sacks of money, all the weight in the belly, swinging and stupid. He hadn’t forgotten, even now, that first struggle. It had made more impression on him, that first slaughtering, than the other butcherings he had seen, the human killings enacted in the war. The deaths he had witnessed weren’t terrible, only the woundings achieved a degree of brutality. Such killings as he had known had been fragmented, comical – a man blown to bits by a shell, a reconnoitring party of six disintegrated by a mine. No blood, no after-life in death, nothing to show they had been there; in the ragged trees perhaps or strewn about the hedges. The wounded, of which he had been one, had smelt of smoke and excrement, lying swollen or shrunken with eyes screwed up and mouths slack. Spittle at one end and urine at the other. Messy business in the warm and fruitful landscape of Italy.
He put his bottle back into the car boot and climbed over the fence, going slowly across the field back to the hut, threading his way between the grazing cows, looking at their thin legs and their enormous udders.
May was in the barn, alone, changed into a dress of brown linen. It wasn’t his favourite dress, it was too short above her knees. She wouldn’t speak to him. She bent down to straighten her stockings and he saw the tops of her thighs. He cleared his throat and lay down on the far bed, his arms crossed beneath his head.
‘What are you following me about for?’ she said bad-temperedly, flouncing backwards and forwards in front of the mirror.
‘But my darling, I’m not. I’m merely resting on this bed.’
‘You shouldn’t have told your filthy yarns all night,’ she snapped. He didn’t reply, and she tugged savagely at her limp hair with a pink brush. ‘That Balfour heard what you said. Dotty told me. He was absolutely disgusted.’
Still he kept silent. It infuriated her. She wanted to smash things, to set fire to his clothes. Her hair was dreadful, dreadful. She couldn’t be seen like this. She rushed at him with face contorted, the pink brush raised to strike him. He caught her wrist just a fraction before the absurd blow came, with his purple cheeks inflamed and his little eyes shining. How close they were, how her moods drew them together. She kicked her plump legs up and down in the air and screamed several times, wrenching at the cravat about his throat, clawing at his chest with her long nails. ‘Little spitfire,’ he cried, pinning her down, trying to get his arm across the round pads of her knees. She went quiet all at once, her head turned to one side, hair spilled out across the blankets. Roland was shouting somewhere in the field.
She sat upright and pointed bitterly at her stocking. ‘Look what you’ve done.’ She bent forward to trace with her finger the ladder that sprang from ankle to thigh.
He couldn’t apologize enough. It had been clumsy of him, though there was provocation. She was such a little spitfire. ‘Anyway,’ he cried, puffing out his cheeks, the colour receding now, placing a rueful hand on his face. ‘Look what you’ve done to me.’ He fell back in mock despair with his legs bent at the knee, fondling his scratched face, good-humoured, fortified by the secret nip of whisky.
‘Oh shut up, you.’ Contemptuous of him, but no longer spirited, she stood up and removed the linen dress, unwearable now by reason of the torn stocking. She peeled the stocking free, exposing pudgy feet, granules of dirt between her piggy toes.
Dotty had dragged the incoherent Balfour behind a hedge. There was no ditch to be found. She had lugged him under the armpits through a gate and propped him against the inner hedge, leaving the shopping bag on the road. He kept asking for a ditch as if they were in danger of being machine-gunned.
She was disturbed at how detached she was in the face of such apparent sickness. She couldn’t really bring herself to believe that he was as ill as he seemed. She handled him quite roughly and sat down beside him to smoke a cigarette. He leaned forward over his knees and moaned at intervals, making sounds as if he was going to vomit. She did suggest she might go for help, either to the corner shop two miles on, or further to the hut and Joseph. Balfour shook his head. Dotty lay back puffing smoke into the fading light.
Balfour was cold. He bent his legs at the knee and tried to curl over on to his side, tried to get his head down into his arms, but nothing obeyed him. Dotty tucked the flowered coat about his legs and sat up. It was almost dark, the field blurring into sky, the light gone from grey to ash, no stars. If a car came she might run out and shout for help. If a car came it would flatten the shopping lying in the road. She climbed the gate, sitting perched there like some bird, staring at a rind of daylight stretched across the horizon.
Balfour was leaning on one elbow clutching the coat about his throat. He spoke in a thin exhausted way. ‘I’m so cold, Dotty.’
‘Are you better, luv?’ She was relieved that he had spoken to her. ‘Shall I go for Joseph now? Shall I go for help?’ She tried to perceive the expression on his face.
‘I must get warm,’ mumbled Balfour.
‘Yes, luv, of course. We’ll get warm, right now. You leave it to me.’ She knelt beside him, wrapping the extravagant coat tight against him, pinioning his arms, putting her own arms about his head so that his face was crushed against the denim jacket, the metal buttons like cubes of ice on his cheeks. She herself wasn’t comfortable. The spongy grass was soaking into the cloth of her trousers.
‘Put the coat over my h-head,’ Balfour whined, struggling to free himself, slumping away from her into the grass.
‘What coat? Do you want my jacket? Is that what you want?’
‘The Joseph coat,’ he whined. ‘The dreamer’s coat.’
She placed it about him like a shawl, tying the arms behind his back to hold it in position, manoeuvring herself so that she was supported by the hedge, stretching him out on the ground with her jacket under his buttocks and his swathed head resting in her lap. ‘Is that any better?’ she asked hopefully, not knowing what more she could do.
Balfour seemed to be asleep, his face half covered by the coat, his hands clasped together as if he prayed. After a time he said, ‘I’m sorry about this. I didn’t have time to warn you. It just come on like. No idea when it’s going to happen.’
‘Oh don’t you worry. I don’t mind. Honestly. It’s quite nice here. I’m quite cheerful really. I’m just thinking about things.’
She didn’t really understand what it was that ailed him. He couldn’t really explain it himself. The doctors didn’t know for sure. Some kind of virus picked up on holiday abroad, some bug in his bloodstream. There was no treatment, no real possibility that he would ever completely recover.
‘You mean, like the flu?’ she said. ‘Only much worse. Something you catch?’
‘It’s not catching,’ he reassured her. ‘At least not from me. I caught it all right, but it’s sort of dormant in me. It won’t pass to you.’
‘I didn’t mean …’ she said and stopped. She was thinking how Joseph had influenced her, how through him she found sickness distasteful, or thought she did. I do love Joseph, she thought. It was terrible the way he wouldn’t let her love him any more. Even after a lifetime of domestic trivia she would still love him, though she wasn’t going to be allowed that. It was like the virus stirring in Balfour. She would never completely recover. She would always mourn for what she had lost. What a miserable thing she was, everything suspended by worry and introspection, no laughing or singing or dancing, no trees or flowers. The world was all lovely on the outside, white and green and red, and black as death within. How could she be this way unless it was some disease that gripped her?
She was bending low over Balfour, free of the masculine jacket, wearing a top of some soft woollen material, no bra beneath; he could feel the bounce of her breast against his temple. Dim and dreamy, with a temperature of 103, Balfour craned upwards and kissed her on the lips. He was kissed in return.
‘Nice boy,’ said Dotty, a little embarrassed and stroking his face with more assurance now that they had been so close. ‘Isn’t kissing nice? It is nice, isn’t it? Are you well enough to go home? It must be awfully late.’
There was one steady stream of wind coming across the black field, blowing hard and steadily right into her face.
He sat up slowly and struggled to his feet, scraping his head against the hedge as he rose. Staggering, he set off down the road.
*
There was no air in the hut. The wood had burnt quickly and with great heat. Already the pile cut by George that morning had been reduced to ashes. There were only a few logs left on the sofa occupied by May. She quite enjoyed being alone with three men – four, if she bothered to include the peculiar Kidney. It made her feel something of a queen. It was odd Dotty wasn’t back yet from the shopping expedition. It was getting on for midnight. Perhaps they had gone to the pictures. Lionel had irritated her earlier by wanting to set off with a lantern to look for them. It was obvious Joseph wasn’t worried, only furious she hadn’t returned with the food.
George was talking to Lionel about architecture. He said, ‘Today the modern architect is a constructor as well as a designer. He can’t, however, expect to combine all the engineer’s functions as he did before the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary construction is too complex.’
‘Quite so,’ Lionel said respectfully, fumbling inside the neck of his shirt for the comfort of the penny. The chain had gone. He sat there with his face politely inclined in George’s direction waiting for the words to end, for the man’s mouth to close.
Gone, but where? It had been about his neck that morning when he changed his shirt. The water he had liberally splashed against his face had run from the edges of the coin down to his belly. He had shivered with the sensation.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to George. ‘I’ve mislaid something, old boy.’ He stood upright, slapping his hands against his stomach, wriggling his knees violently in his creased flannels.
‘Been bitten?’ Joseph wanted to know, drawing lines on a sheet of paper at the table. He was trying to make a graph of his subconscious. His toil of the afternoon had been of little use in regard to solving the problems of his dream. George had talked to him at length about the use of shoddy materials in housing projects. He had enquired about Joseph’s own property and about his ex-wife’s flat in Liverpool. He said that some of the property in the cathedral quarter of the city was in a bad state of repair. He said that housing conditions were directly related to delinquency and neurosis. The dream had been pushed from Joseph’s mind, to be replaced by guilty thoughts of Roland growing up in the dilapidated city, far away from the green fields and the clean air. Lionel had played with Roland in the field before the boy had been put to bed. May had helped him clean his teeth and combed his hair, telling him he had very smart pyjamas. Roland had looked at her listlessly, without enthusiasm. Joseph had meant to play with Roland himself, but he had been too whacked after the day’s exertions to do more than cuddle the boy on his knee.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ May was looking at Lionel standing there with his arms slack at his sides, his mouth open beneath his auburn moustache.
‘I’ve lost something.’
‘What?’ she said.
‘My coin.’ He shook his head, crestfallen. ‘I had it this morning. I distinctly remember I had it this morning.’
‘Oh, that.’ She settled herself more comfortably.
‘The dead Jerry’s Reichsmark?’ Joseph asked. ‘You’ve lost it? What a bore.’
Joseph wasn’t all that attractive, May thought, seeing him above the arm of the sofa, seated at the table with his head bent. Nose too flat and mouth too big. A plum mouth, not attractive in a man. Dotty was a fool, suffering agonies over a man like that. She was just too inexperienced to know that there were hundreds of men to choose from – better than Joseph with his snub nose and his high voice, always going on about education and the meaning of dreams. She let herself remember all the men who had found her attractive. Some of them. It was strange how the good and solid ones evoked no response in her, no feeling of being a woman. All those dreary kindly men, ending with Lionel, wanting to give her security and a nice home – while the other kind, the unstable ruthless ones, who treated her like a whore, slapping her bottom and flinging her on to the bed at the first opportunity, exerted such power over her.
‘Lionel,’ she said, ‘do you remember that day you came home and I was out and I said I’d been to see Christine? Well, I hadn’t.’
He looked at her distracted, hardly hearing, trying to think where the coin might be.
‘I didn’t go to Christine’s. I got picked up by a man and went home with him.’ Defiantly she swung her foot up and down in the air.
The barn, thought Lionel, that’s where it must be. He remembered the tussle with his sweetheart in the barn. He didn’t suppose Joseph would like him to go in there now. ‘Joseph, old chap,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could possibly come into the barn with me?’ He appealed to Joseph, standing there at the table, his face yellow in the lamplight.
‘Dear me,’ said Joseph, looking up from his paper. ‘Do you fancy me, darling?’
May giggled.
‘I’ve got a feeling I left my coin in the barn earlier this afternoon.’ I’m almost certain. May and I were in there having a little chat this afternoon.’
‘Look where you like. It’s not my barn,’ said Joseph.
‘I was thinking about Roland … being in beddy-byes.’
‘Don’t you wake him up for God’s sake.’
‘I’ll be terribly quiet.’ Gratefully Lionel turned towards the door and opened it and came back again. ‘I’ll have to take the lamp,’ he said apologetically.
May bounced on the little sofa and waved her hands about. ‘Oh, sit down. Leave it till the morning. What a fuss about nothing.’
Joseph was looking at Kidney. ‘Hold on a tick,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time Kidney went to bed.’ He stared at the youth, whose eyes were closed. ‘Kidney, do you hear?’
The boy opened his eyes at once.
‘Bed for you. Come on.’
Kidney rose obediently at the command and blundered towards the table. ‘My pill,’ he said. ‘Please, my night pill.’
Joseph handed him one, putting the bottle back on the shelf above the door, standing over him while Kidney wiped his face with a flannel and cleaned his teeth. Kidney took a long time, brushing assiduously, gargling and spitting. At last he went out into the night with Lionel, leaving the others in darkness.
‘Don’t forget to pee,’ Joseph shouted, slamming the hut door and finding his way back to the table.
May gave a little squeal in the darkness. She didn’t mind being alone with Joseph, but George gave her the creeps. ‘Isn’t Lionel awful,’ she said, clutching her bare toes, bending right over to touch the floor. ‘Doesn’t he make you sick?’
‘Now now, Mrs – ’ Joseph faltered. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Gosling. Mrs Gosling. Isn’t it a funny name?’ She laughed, bringing her head up, feeling with her hand the heat of her face. ‘Sounds like a duckling.’
‘It’s Jewish,’ George said.
May thought she saw the whites of his eyes, luminous in the blacked-out hut. ‘Do you think so? Jewish … A bit, you mean … I’ve often thought that.’ She tried to sound polite and chatty. ‘His nose, you know … His grandmother was called Rebecca. I do know that. And that’s Jewish, isn’t it? It’s in the Bible.’
George said, ‘He’s a Michling.’
‘A what?’ she tittered.
‘The Nazis had a definition for quarter-Jews,’ said George. ‘Originally they were exempt from the gas chambers.’
He had a thing about the Jews, that was obvious. May supposed you had to get obsessed by something, if you were like him. He’d probably have a heart attack if someone kissed him.
‘I’m a Catholic myself,’ she said. ‘A lapsed one … but still a Catholic.’ She felt quite intelligent, talking like this to two invisible men. ‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,’ she gabbled, proving her point. ‘Christe, audi nos.’ The words had a strange effect on her. She curled up on the sofa and closed her eyes, feeling she was a child again, fearful of the probability that Christ did hear her. What if He had heard what Lionel said last night? Lionel’s worry, not hers. ‘I’d love a double-barrelled name,’ she said aloud, opening her eyes again and looking in the direction of Joseph.
He didn’t reply. She could hear him breathing, soft and hurried as if he were running.
‘I’ve got Lionel’s blasted penny in my pocket,’ she said, glad to confess.
‘You’re a bit of a bitch,’ Joseph said.
Lionel entered with the lamp.
‘It was on the floor,’ he lied. ‘Just near the door. Fancy that. Sorry to be a bore about it, but it means a devil of a lot to me, and I just couldn’t rest until I had it again.’
‘Quite,’ said Joseph, humouring him. ‘Mrs Gosling’s quite a little linguist,’ he said, drawing his pencil aimlessly across the square of writing paper, waiting for May to squeal, to pat her hair into shape.
‘Fides quid tibi praestat?’ she murmured modestly, on cue.
Lionel wasn’t really paying attention. She would have to give him back his precious token. Later. ‘Lionel, you’re not listening. I was speaking Latin.’
‘You were?’
‘I was.’ Nasty brutish man tickling his moustache not hearing a word she said.
‘What’s it mean?’ asked Joseph. He looked expectantly at her, and she fidgeted on the sofa, smiling, wondering if she knew.
‘It’s the baptismal thing … what the priest says when you’re a baby.’
‘A baby,’ cried Lionel. ‘Ah, a baby!’
That had moved him, thought May. He was imagining her in a long white dress with a shawl over her bald head. He was impossible. ‘The priest says “What dost thou look for from the Church of God?” and the reply is “Faith”, and then he says “What doth Faith assure thee of?” and someone says “Life eternal”.’
‘Dear God,’ Joseph said. ‘Life eternal, what a drag.’
‘It’s true,’ May said defensively.
Joseph was quite patient, quite polite. ‘I don’t doubt some believe it to be true, nor do I doubt they’ll be bitterly disappointed. All this love thing is an appalling delusion.’
Lionel wagged a finger at him, speaking with assurance. ‘Now, now, love does exist, old boy. It really does.’ He mightn’t know about architecture, but love – well, he did know about that. ‘You may not have been as lucky as myself, but when it hits you … ah well …’ He shook his head, baffled, as if still dazed by the blow.
‘I have been hit by it,’ said Joseph. ‘Many times as a matter of fact.’
‘Ah yes, but really. I mean, really.’
‘What do you mean, “really, really”? How real can you get? All I know is it passes off. Right off. Sooner or later.’ Joseph made a gesture of departure with his hand, slicing the air dogmatically, looking from Lionel to May and back again as if to say their time would come.
Lionel would have none of it. ‘I’m a business man myself,’ he asserted modestly, ‘and I know what I’m talking about. When it hits you, you know. It’s no use giving your feelings where they’re not appreciated. It pays no dividends. Give them where you will receive an appreciable rate of interest.’ He endeavoured to adjust his expression. Try as he might, his mouth widened in a smile. He felt the kind of self-satisfaction and benevolence befitting a man who knew who he was and to whom he belonged.
‘Do you believe in love, George?’ May asked maliciously, propping herself on her elbow, gazing at the giant on his chair.
‘Tolstoy,’ observed George, paying no attention to her, ‘said that life is all right while you are intoxicated.’ He thrust the palms of his hands together, looking at Joseph enquiringly, as if setting a riddle.
‘Yes … well?’
‘When you sober up it’s impossible not to see it’s a fraud.’
‘Here’s another one,’ said Joseph. ‘Nothing lasts, absolutely nothing. Neither fear, nor love for one woman.’
‘Plato?’ suggested Lionel, half fearful.
‘No, Marlon Brando.’
Lionel laughed nevertheless, thwacking the side of his leg to show that his sense of humour really knew no bounds.
‘Where, oh where, is Dotty?’ cried his wife, swinging her legs up and placing the black soles of her feet down again squarely on the rough floor. There was an atmosphere in the hut that made her feel irritable. It was as if they had all been plucked up out of nowhere and set down with the express purpose of being amusing or interesting or something, and they had all been found wanting. It was so embarrassing, not knowing what way to be, Lionel in a tiz about his Co-op penny and Joseph attempting to be profound. She longed for Dotty to return and give them some distraction – ask questions, undo shopping, explain the delay.
George said, ‘I’m anxious about Balfour. I feel he may be ill.’
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Joseph. ‘Dotty can cope.’
‘His behaviour of the last few days has been strange. Unlike … He has been less than himself … or more. A preparation perhaps.’
‘He hasn’t seemed very strange to me,’ said Joseph. ‘What way do you mean?’
‘There are currents,’ George said. ‘Changes … attitudes … certain deviations from normal behaviour … preliminaries … an increasing impediment in speech.’
‘Oh aye,’ said Joseph, giving up.
Lionel said he thought he would go and listen to the stock-market closing reports. ‘You’ve got a radio in the car, old boy, haven’t you?’
Joseph said he had, that the car wasn’t locked, that the knob of the radio was on the floor by the clutch somewhere.
Lionel found himself a candle and a box of matches. When he opened the door of the hut he was too troubled by the loss of his coin to look back at his sweetheart. Like a swimmer, he threw himself from the step of the porch into the field, breast-high in mist, and began to wade to the distant Jaguar.
Though still liable to sudden fits of trembling, Balfour walked without help. The breeze tore free a corner of paper wrapped about the joint of meat. Flap, flap, it went in the night. Slap, slap went his feet on the smooth surface of the road. After a time Dotty could see shapes and grades of darkness – line of hedge, rise of field – even the outline of Balfour’s face as he walked at her side.
She wondered if Joseph was worried at her absence. Angry, most likely. She thought she would put in her farewell letter that Balfour had kissed her behind the hedge, that she felt life was exciting. In truth, the embrace of the delirious Balfour, swift though it had been, had only depressed her, illustrating as it did how unexciting life was without Joseph.
‘I expect they think we’ve been boozing,’ she said. The road dipped gently down to the stone bridge, to the weeping willow, unseen, rising up out of the stream. The noise of the water coming down from the rocks was deafening.
Then they were climbing the hill again. One more turning to go and a short stretch of road before they came to the gate into the field.
‘I’d rather you d-didn’t say I’ve been ill,’ said Balfour.
‘Don’t be daft. What else can we say? It must be nearly midnight.’
‘I don’t c-care for old G-George to know.’
‘Well, I don’t care for old Joseph to think we’ve been doing anything else.’ Dotty was quite cross and assertive, fortified by their intimacy of half an hour ago. Balfour walked stiffly, with the joint of meat held to his chin. He would just make it back to the hut, to the barn. He would have to sleep there for the night.
‘Oh, all right,’ she relented. ‘I’ll say we went to the chippie or something, or that I felt sick. I don’t suppose he’ll be up anyway.’
Behind the gate the hump of the haystack rose above the two cars. Inside the Jaguar burnt a little light, orange against the blue leather of the seats. Lionel, plump as a Buddha, sat holding his candle aloft, listening to a voice on the radio. They waved at him. He made signs and attempted to wind down the window. They climbed over the second gate, heading towards the hut and were swallowed up in the mist.
In the centre of the field Dotty searched for and found Balfour’s hand. Like lovers they stumbled through the damp air.
All alone in the little cabin Lionel sat listening to the market trends. A liturgy of big business, a rosary of abbreviations and percentages, gilt-edged and gold-leafed. Some things were up, some down. Some shaky, some sound.
Awkwardly, with the stub of a pencil he wrote down figures on the back of an envelope. He would wait until the shipping reports, till the announcer said ‘Good night, gentlemen’. One gentleman to another.