Another part of the wood

8

Dotty put chairs outside the hut and clapped her hands. ‘A photie. Everyone must have their photie taken.’
It was such a perfect morning, she thought, straight out of some woodland scene in a pantomime – a backcloth of shimmering trees, azure blue sky, birds singing. May, encased in white shorts, jaunty as a principal boy, came running from the barn.
‘Oh, I hate photographs. I always come out looking ghastly.’ Still, she sat herself on the centre chair, rocking alarmingly on the bumpy ground.
It was important to Dotty that there should be some record she could keep of this last time spent with Joseph.
Joseph assembled them on the chairs, Lionel next to his sweetheart, Dotty to the right, clad in her flowered coat, Roland on her knee. Behind, in a row, with arms folded, stood Balfour, Kidney and George.
It wasn’t right. After a little thought Joseph asked George to lie down in the grass at their feet, full length, feet crossed at the ankles, his head propped on his hand. In the background, though obviously not included, stood the little timber cabin, windows glinting in the sunshine. With a click of the shutter the images were recorded: the winsome little woman with her smooth knees pushed together, jovial Lionel, Roland with his chin raised and his eyes following the flight of a bird.
Balfour remembered all the other photographs taken of himself by friends of George, copies of which he had never seen. He scowled as Joseph prepared for another shot. Though feeling exhausted, he was no longer ill. George had put him to sleep in the barn the previous night, had removed his shoes and wrapped him in blankets. Throughout he had shown a degree of tenderness that had only registered when Balfour awoke that morning. He found himself unable to look directly at George. George had spent the night in the second cubicle, with the door wide open, so as to be better able to hear Balfour if he cried out. The problems of night travelling, coupled with the technical difficulties of lighting the paraffin lamp, had obliged Lionel and May also to stay in the barn. Their mattress was filled with straw and May had complained of lying awake the entire night.
When Joseph had finished taking photographs they all said that they never looked good in snapshots. Each of them secretly hoped that this time would be an exception. It gave Dotty an odd feeling to think of them all cramped on that little roll of yellow film, stamped together for ever on the wooden chairs, never to get up again. She went indoors with May to make coffee.
George told Balfour he was to lie quietly in the shade for several hours. Balfour said he would do that. George fetched a pillow from the barn and placed it on the grass within the angle of the hut. ‘Lie down,’ he said, and Balfour rose and lay, pushing his face into the cushion and shutting his eyes.
After a moment George stopped standing over him and walked away down the path.
Balfour turned over and looked up at the summer sky. A wasp droned somewhere above his ear. He got to his knees. The women were still within the hut. He walked a few paces into the bracken near the barn, undoing the buttons of his trousers. A twig snapped. He straddled his feet wider apart. There was a low murmuring in his ears, a dense rise of dust, sunbeams. He flung his arms about his head as if avoiding a blow. A sound like a cat mewing came from between his lips and he spun round, crouching there with his arms held up stiffly on either side of him.
George, walking back along the path, was in time to see him in just this position and Lionel springing upon him, apparently pummelling him about the head with clenched fists. May ran to the doorway of the hut, brought there by the sound of Lionel’s voice. It was she, not Balfour, who screamed. She shrank backwards, the round hole in her mouth plugged by her pink-tipped fingers.
The men laid Balfour down with his neck on the pillow and examined his face and chest. First they had to bring his bent arms from about his ears.
‘My head,’ he said. ‘My head.’ He felt the skin of his scalp contracting, as a thousand winged insects burrowed into his hair.
‘Nothing on your head,’ George said, partitioning the black hair, seeing with revulsion the swellings beginning on the pimpled neck. He removed Balfour’s shirt and bathed the wasp stings with TCP.
‘How awful,’ whispered the women.
‘Poor devil,’ said Lionel hoarsely, feeling his own neck with pity and fear.
Joseph was telling Roland to be careful not to go near the bracken at the far side of the barn. As if it meant something, Dotty took off her flowered coat and stuffed it away in the wicker basket under the sofa. May was terribly distressed. It might so easily have been herself thus violated in the bushes.
The disturbance of the wasps’ nest had filled Kidney with unusual energy. He ran from hut to field, scarcely noticed by the others, his whole being flung into activity, cantering heavily through the grass and going down the sloping path. Wishing finally to stop and not able to halt, he ran into a tree; striking his forehead on the bark, he slid to the ground and sprawled there, seeing nothing, his eyes fluttering as rapidly as his heartbeat. He didn’t know what had happened to Balfour except that he had opened his trousers in the bushes and that Lionel had struck him to his knees. Joseph had done nothing. Joseph hadn’t protested at such violence. A flux of tears came into Kidney’s sparkling eyes. He dashed it away with a fierce shake of his head, shouting with lips spitting: ‘You horrid man! Rude to undo your trousers. Filthy animal. Should be put away. I’ll show you what’s what, dirty stinker!’
He fell silent. Someone, Roland perhaps, was calling his name. That much he heard.
Roland stuck out a cheerful tongue and went past him, pretending to have somewhere to go. After a few yards he turned and cried mockingly, ‘Daftie Kidney, sitting on the floor.’
‘I’m hot.’
‘No you’re not. You’re daft.’
Offended, Kidney hung his head.
Roland saw a piece of glass near his foot and bent to examine it. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘This place should get condemned. It’s just dangerous all over.’ He settled on his haunches and rocked backwards and forwards. ‘Bet you it’s clean and safe up there,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the mountain hidden by the trees.
‘Safe where?’ Kidney asked.
‘Up the mountain. Safe as anything, all clean.’
Kidney got slowly to his feet and with bowed head began to walk back up the path.
‘Daftie,’ shouted Roland again.
Kidney took no notice. He had some vague idea in his mind that in the hut there was something he wanted, that was safe. Nobody looked up when he entered the door. He put a chair by the sink and climbed upon it, reaching with his fingers for the pills. Finding the bottle he put it inside his jumper, clutching his jumper as he climbed down again. No one saw him.
Joseph was worried by the continuing presence of the nest among the bracken. He pressed George to do something about it. George said there was nothing he could do until dusk.
‘What’ll you do then?’ Dotty wanted to know.
George said he would pour boiling water down the hole.
‘That’s a bit primitive, isn’t it?’ asked Joseph. He had thought there was some chemical that could be sprayed at once causing immediate annihilation.
George said he could burn out the nest but it was risky. He hovered between the barn and the hut, keeping a protective eye on Balfour. The others, after a period of adjustment, took sheets and lay down in the sunshine, at the extreme end of the field. It was to give Balfour a sense of privacy.
Lionel had driven his car to the corner shop before breakfast for a morning paper. Now he studied it earnestly and remarked that the country was in a damned mess. Nobody appeared to object or to hold different views. Joseph was lying on his back holding a Penguin book close to his eyes, both reading and shielding his face from the rays of the sun.
May found it difficult to concentrate for long in any one position. She never went brown, only a dull shade of brick. When she bent her legs, sweat gathered behind the folds of her knees. She looked sideways at the sunbathing Dotty, dressed in a swimsuit of dark blue. One arm was curved up above her head, one leg lolled outward from her crotch. There was a little fuzz of blonde hairs catching the sunlight, right at the top of her inner thigh. May felt disgust, almost nausea. It was so immodest. Other women were always revolting. She felt sure Lionel was watching the sprawled girl. Angrily she slapped a fly from her arm.
‘Would you like a chair, my sweetheart?’ Lionel said, looking up from his newspaper.
She ignored him. She rose to her feet and walked back into the hut, shutting the door behind her. She opened the suitcase still under the table. In the pocket of her trews she found the Co-op penny on its little chain. She left the hut and tiptoed past Balfour with exaggerated stealth. She went a few paces into the bracken and turning from the group at the end of the field lifted her arm, apparently to steady herself.
‘Careful, my sweetheart,’ called Lionel.
Straightening up, facing in the direction of the barn, she saw Roland standing a few paces from her.
‘What did you do that for?’ he asked her.
‘Do what?’ she said, laughing nervously, going to him with her hand stretched out.
‘Roland,’ shouted Joseph. ‘Come away from the nest. I told you.’
Lionel was shaking his head and making sounds of disapproval as he held his paper. ‘This man Wilson really is making one hell of a mess, you know.’
‘Oh, I love Harold,’ cried May, restored, prepared now to be amusing. ‘That little duckwing of hair at the back, that solemn northern face. I think he’s dishy.’
Her husband smiled at her. ‘He’s certainly making a dish out of Rhodesia, my sweetheart.’
‘I’ve got room for another toe here,’ Roland observed, looking at his foot with interest. Joseph had made him remove his sweater and his jeans and he crouched there in the grass clad in his cotton underpants, shoulder blades prominent, ribs showing, a line of hair, silver in the sunlight, tipping the vertebrae of his spine.
‘You’re much too thin,’ said his father. ‘You don’t eat enough.’
‘I do, I do,’ he protested.
‘He’s not too thin,’ May said, thinking he was, dreadfully so, but in some way forestalling a remark, should it be made, on the size and weight of her own body. Protectively she bent over her knees, covering her breasts and small pot stomach. ‘Does Mummy give you cod liver oil?’ she asked, watching the discomfited little boy who was now plucking at the skin adhering to the cage of his ribs.
‘No,’ he muttered. ‘That’s for babies.’ He began to struggle into his striped sweater, thrusting his stick-like arms into the air, emerging with hair tousled.
‘Now, boy,’ his father shouted, putting his book face downwards in the grass. ‘Don’t you take offence.’
‘I don’t,’ Roland replied thickly, struggling with a sense of injustice and the awkward zip of his trousers. Self-pity making his head loll pathetically, he walked across the grass towards the trees.
Joseph reached out a hand and seized him by the ankle as he passed. He wouldn’t let go. ‘Little softie boy,’ he shouted. ‘Didums get all cross then? Didums feel a fool?’
Tears flowed down the boy’s cheeks. He was both angry and relieved. He beat at Joseph’s shoulders with his fists, as hard as he knew how.
They had most of the meat for lunch, the big joint that Balfour had carried from the village. There were potatoes and slices of beetroot. The women ate more than the men, tearing at the fatty chops with sweaty faces and fingers covered in grease.
Afterwards May wanted to go for a drive somewhere into the hills, but Lionel was evasive. Determined to recover his Co-op penny, he had the intention of combing every step of ground he had trodden the previous day. Throughout the meal his hand continually sought the opening of his shirt. Contrite, in that he knew May would have liked to have been taken for a run in the car, but determined not to do so, he dried the plates that Joseph had expertly washed. He took care to keep his head turned from her, lest her expression should cause him to change his plans. Actually May was quite contented. She didn’t mind in the least.
There were voices outside the hut. Lionel hovered at the door, thinking it was Balfour, recovered and anxious for food, and saw George talking to an elderly man in a cloth cap. They were nodding and looking in the direction of the bracken.
Joseph said, ‘God, it’s that Bill, hale and hearty again.’
‘Is it Willie?’ Delighted, Dotty pranced into the field, holding out her hand, taking the little Welshman by surprise, asking him if he was better, saying it was a treat to see him. Willie removed his cap and nodded at her, bashful.
‘He’s super. He’s a marvellous little bloke,’ said Dotty, running back into the hut to confide her opinion to May.
‘Is he?’ May said, wondering who the man was. When George came into the hut followed by Willie, she still kept her expectant eyes on the doorway, waiting for another visitor.
‘This is my friend May, Willie,’ Dotty said, pointing at the girl on the settee with sudden pride.
‘Pleased to meet you, miss,’ he said, taken aback by all the areas of uncovered female flesh.
‘Isn’t he super,’ hissed Dotty, though what it was that so impressed her she couldn’t qualify.
May looked at the shrivelled little man. As a child she had spent some time billeted in North Wales and had been early acquainted with pastoral Welshmen who called the cattle home and loved to fondle little girls. She was bored and revolted by him and by Dotty.
‘Mr George told me about the nest. Bad, that is,’ said Willie.
‘It was horrible,’ cried Dotty.
Roland came in and spoke to his father. ‘Can I go for a walk?’
‘Burn the nest out, will you?’ asked Joseph.
‘Most like,’ Willie responded, hanging his head and not wishing to sound too authoritative with Mr George there.
‘Can I go for a walk with Kidney then?’ demanded Roland.
‘Nasty business. Lucky it wasn’t the boy,’ said Willie.
‘You’re right,’ agreed Joseph. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Roland ran out of the hut.
There were blackberries in the hedge – blue-black, juicy. Kidney reached down the high ones for Roland. He ate none himself. Roland dug the stalks out with his nails and stained the pads of his fingers mauve. He rather preferred the red and tight fruits, tart on his tongue; some of the black and ripe ones he let fall on to the road and trod beneath his feet. He could hear the telegraph wires humming, high and quivering above his head. He laid his ear to the warm wood of the telegraph poles and thought he heard the sea. Kidney walked with his eyes looking down at the smooth road, his hands in his pockets. When he plucked the blackberries his eyes lifted no higher than the hedge. They came to the crossroads, one road going right to the market town and the other to the White Horse public house, with the sign hanging motionless in the sunlight and the smithy opposite. The blacksmith was shoeing a cart horse. The horse puffed and the man puffed too, his leather apron touching the ground. A fire glowed in an iron stove. Roland could think only of Scripture lessons at school and Pentecostal fire; try as he could he failed to remember the exact meaning of the word. The man went on filing at the raised hoof. Once he cut at it with a short knife and carved away a whole segment of skin. It fell to the stone floor and lay like a slice of coconut. Now and then, fussily, he bent lower, straddling his legs wide, and blew dust from the hoof. Before the shoe was fitted Roland moved away. He couldn’t watch the final bearing down, the smell of the horse’s foot burning. He wanted to watch, he wanted to stay, but he couldn’t.
To the left of the smithy was a church, square-towered. The graveyard was at the back, not seen from the road. There was a signpost saying To the Mountain, as if it was an attraction. The sun burnt on, drugging everything with warmth. Roland would have liked to buy some lemonade at the corner shop but he had no money.
In time the change in the countryside was noticeable. The prolific elms became fewer, the hedges thinned, the lane climbed steeply. At last there were no more houses or cottages. Then the road stopped too. They came to a gate, stone walls at either side. Beyond the gate was moorland, rolling into the distance, purple under a growth of heather. It was vaster, wilder, than Roland had expected – a bleak plateau of flowing earth as far as the eye could see, and the mountain ahead and to the left, one hundred miles away. There was a desert of moorland to cross and a deep valley to descend, not steep but endlessly sloping down to a plantation of firs shaped like an arrow head. Its tip pointed at the black slab of a reservoir and the lower slopes of the mountain. Roland was quite checked by the distance they would have to go. He was at the end of the world; come from any direction start from any place, it would be the same.
The sheep trotted in packs as if they were afraid. When Kidney swung his arms they leapt haughtily, like miniature camels, black muzzles held high. A strange unified cry came from them; they stretched their throats and landed trembling, with ears laid back.
‘It’s a long way,’ said Roland, looking over the edge of the world into the valley that separated him from the mountain.
‘Head back, shoulders braced,’ bade Kidney, beginning to march across the plateau.
‘Have you walked often?’ Roland asked, but already Kidney was some way ahead and didn’t reply.
Something about the expanse of earth made Roland hungry. He wanted chocolate, biscuits, anything. He shouted to Kidney that he wanted some food badly.
‘There’s none,’ Kidney called, swinging his arms from the shoulder. He waited till Roland should reach him. ‘We had a very substantial lunch,’ he said sternly, a deep crease between his sleek eyebrows.
‘At home,’ said Roland, torturing himself, ‘we have Mr Mahmood’s breasts – ’
‘Indeed.’
‘ – of chicken. They’re pre-packed and frozen.’ Roland gazed at the distant mountain and would have preferred to turn back.
They walked some way across the moor without much purpose, until by chance they found a path, worn through the heather, leading down to the valley.
Roland thought the men who had lived here hundreds of years ago had made the threadbare patch. Kidney said it would be sheep. He was much better in the open air; he replied to most questions when asked. There was a book in the pocket of the sports jacket. Roland could see it above the check flap of his coat.
‘What’s the book?’ he asked, walking behind Kidney, taking care not to tread on his heels, as his father had taught him.
‘Joseph gave it to me.’ said Kidney.
‘Let me see it.’
Kidney reached out the book and handed it backwards. Roland spelt out laboriously, ‘John Donne, His Poems.’ He turned the pages.
‘What’s that writing say? I can’t read it.’
‘Joseph wrote it.’
‘What did he write?’
‘To my friend Kidney, for whom everything may be possible.’
‘What may be possible?’ asked Roland.
Kidney didn’t answer.
‘What’s it mean?’
After a moment Kidney paused and reclaimed his book, fingering the open page like a blind man reading braille. ‘It means,’ he said, ‘that he’s my friend.’
‘What are the poems about?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t read them.’ Kidney put the book back in his pocket and continued the descent into the valley.
Roland looked back the way they had come and already the plateau was shrunk by distance. He could see its surface lit by sunlight, a concave rim of brightness merging into the sky. Below him, quite near, the plantation of firs lay ruptured by shadow.
They had no need to go near the trees. The path wound in a semicircle to the furthermost side of the valley, so that the reservoir in its neat cement sink and the arrow of firs lay to their right and the mountain loomed directly above them. Roland could make out the tower quite specifically now. He was disappointed to see that it was almost a ruin, three walls standing and the fourth gone half way. Pieces of stone jutted like broken teeth out of the ruined mouth of the tower.
It wasn’t a difficult climb, hardly a mountain at all now that they were there. The path wound upwards, leading gently to the top. There were even sheep quite near the summit.
‘Where are we?’ cried Roland, turning round to look out across the valley and the distant fields. ‘Where’s our hut?’
Frowning, Kidney poised his hands on his plump hips and regarded the view. He could see water a long way off and factory chimneys sticking like upturned glasses from the rim of the sea.
‘There’s the Estuary of the Dee,’ shouted Roland. ‘All that bright piece in the sun is the Wirral and Cheshire.’
The tower was quite roomy inside, enough to sit down in. There was a mound of refuse in one corner and some beer bottles. ‘What’s it for anyway?’ said Roland, feeling cheated, kicking the bottles with his foot.
‘It’s not for anything,’ said Kidney, sitting down on a pile of yellow stone, shifting his feet about to balance himself. ‘It’s a tower for people to see.’
Roland remembered a film he had been to with his grandmother. It had been about a king with a humped back who had drowned his friend in a malmsey butt. ‘They put the princes in a tower,’ he said, ‘but it had beds and things. My dad wouldn’t think much of this.’ He sat on his haunches and rolled a brown bottle backwards and forwards in the dust.
‘King Lear had a beard,’ said Kidney.
‘Who’s Lear?’
‘Lear was a king by Shakespeare,’ said Kidney.
‘How old?’ asked Roland.
‘– who had some children he wanted to live with. They didn’t want him.’
‘Why not?’ asked Roland.
‘He went out for a walk and his beard went white. His good girl came for him and took him home.’
‘Is that all?’ said Roland. He watched Kidney take a bottle of pills out of his pocket.
‘Yes,’ said Kidney.
‘Joseph said you weren’t to have those,’ shouted Roland. ‘You’ve got to do more exercise.’ He reached out his hand and snatched the bottle away from Kidney. He ran to the entrance of the tower, ready to flee down the mountain. He looked back at Kidney, crouched on his seat of stones, dark in the shadows of the interior. ‘It’s windy up here,’ he called, the breeze whipping his hair back from his forehead. ‘Why is it windy, Kidney?’
‘We’re up a mountain.’
‘There’s towers in the Bible too,’ said Roland, leaning his head back and looking up at the square structure. ‘There’s Babel and Pisa, the leaning one, and there must have been one at Jericho that fell down when the trumpet blew.’ He came back into the tower and sat down on the floor, resting his shoulders against the wall. ‘Mountains too … Mount Sinai and the Mount of Olives and the one Moses went up … things like that. Do you know any mountains in the Bible?’ He didn’t think Kidney would know any. It had been a rotten story about Lear and his beard.
‘Abraham in the Bible took his only son up a mountain,’ Kidney said.
‘Oh, I know that one.’ Roland looked at Kidney who had stood up and turned away from him. ‘He only used a ram – only a ram in the end.’
Water was running in a rivulet between Kidney’s legs. The stone dust thickened the stream and made it run sluggishly.
‘My dad would never sacrifice me,’ shouted Roland. ‘He doesn’t believe in God.’
Kidney was gazing at a sunspot on the stone wall above his head, flickering before his eyes. He felt dazed by the play of light on the crumbling wall. A fly, alighting, clung to a crumb of stonework and crawled into a niche, folding its wings. Kidney turned round, still with his trousers unbuttoned and said pettishly, ‘Give me my pills. You have no right.’ He tried to tuck himself away, but his hands were ineffectual, inaccurate; he waggled the flaccid member at the staring boy.
‘That’s rude,’ said Roland, looking in another direction and returning fascinated to Kidney and the front of his trousers.
‘I want my pills.’
‘It’s very big. It’s bigger than Joseph’s.’
‘Give me the bottle.’
‘I ought to keep the pills. Joseph wouldn’t like you to have a pill. You’re much too fat.’
Kidney rebuttoned his trousers and stood with arms dangling in the shadow cast by the wall. The fly left its cranny and spun upwards into the light. Kidney raised his hands high, palms cupped together, as if he sought to imprison the fly, the spot of sunlight, something.
‘Is it the pills that make you so big?’ said Roland. ‘Is it the pills?’
Kidney wouldn’t reply.
‘What’s your other name?’ asked the child. ‘What’s your real name?’
‘A boy like you,’ said Kidney, ‘oughtn’t to be like you are.’
Roland fidgeted in the doorway, not knowing what way he was. He put his face to the wind and blinked his eyes with embarrassment. Still, he wouldn’t give up the bottle of pills.
Going down the mountain, he tore from the bracken a piece of heather for Joseph. It was dried up, like the lavender his mother kept in the linen drawer. He held the bottle in one hand and the odourless heather in the other, following Kidney down into the valley.
‘What’s the pills called?’ he asked Kidney.
Sullenly Kidney told him they were Phenobarbitone. ‘They sedate me,’ he told Roland, turning his face to the boy higher up the path. The child didn’t know what he meant. He held the bottle tightly in one clenched hand.
‘Pheno barbitone,’ sang Roland. ‘Pheeeno barbeeee tone.’
It was from the Italian, like vista, and only half sad, the other half funny. He sang the strange words over and over, shaking his head from side to side, the breeze carrying the name away … ‘Pheno, pheeeeeno, pheno-bar-be-tone.’
Half way down the mountain he unscrewed the bottle cap and with difficulty swallowed one of the oblong capsules. He could feel it lying against his throat, cold, obstructive. He sucked in his cheeks and collected saliva under his tongue, using it to wash down the pill.
At the far side of the valley, before the ascent to the plateau, he took two more. He took a fourth when he turned to look back at the mountain blackening now and the tower a smudge against the whitening sky. He swallowed ten capsules in all, the last before they went through the gate. Ten, he reckoned, would be enough to put a lot of weight on him and make him tall and strong. Perhaps not all at once, but in a matter of days. He was only a little worried by what he had done. His mother had repeatedly warned him about aspirin and the tablets she took when she couldn’t sleep. They were a different kind of pill, he thought, pills to make you better when you were ill, not like Kidney’s pills, which were just to make him grow.
He was glad Joseph had stayed at home. The mountain had been a bit of a let-down. Only an old ruined tower, no battlements, no peep-holes, nothing, just a lot of old beer bottles. Joseph would have yawned.
Balfour woke at teatime and was sick in the grass.
He raised his white face and saw the sunbathers at the end of the field. Joseph and Dotty and May. He went inside the hut to swill out his mouth and Dotty ran over the grass after him.
She looked at him with interest and wanted to know how he felt.
‘Fine,’ he told her. He spat into the sink and did feel better. His face was a mess. The stings and constellations of pimples were merged. His eyes were large with fatigue. ‘Where’s George?’ he asked her.
‘Painting the house. Ma and Pa MacFarley’s windowsills. Gone off with Willie.’
‘I’ve been sick in the grass. Threw up, like. I wouldn’t w-want him to see.’
She offered to clean it up. ‘Honestly, I don’t mind,’ she said, looking about for a bucket. She still felt a doctor should have been called. It frightened her, someone being sick and stung about the head by wasps. Finding a pail under the sink she went out purposefully, ignoring Balfour’s protests, thinking of the nuptial flight of the queen of the hive and the fertilizing male plummeting to the earth. Serve him bloody well right, she told herself giggling, looking about for Balfour’s vomit in the grass.
When she returned she had to tell him about the bees, the little she knew, while she made him some tea. ‘At the very end, at the very end, the toughest bee, the one that flies high enough to mate the queen – why, he leaves most of himself inside her and drops dying to the ground.’
‘Is that so,’ said Balfour, depressed by the cruelty of it.
Gaily she poured him out a cup of tea. She wouldn’t call the others in – why should she? ‘It’s silly, isn’t it?’ she said, handing him the sugar. ‘What a way to go.’ She laughed quite loudly and he laughed with her. She felt at ease with him, elated. She kept smiling. He felt there was a definite relationship being established between them, something special. It was a shock when she told him she was leaving early in the morning.
‘Leaving … where?’
‘I’m going to London … or home.’ She stared self-consciously at the cups and saucers. ‘I’m not sure where I shall go. Obviously I can’t stay here.’
‘No, of course not,’ he agreed, not finding it at all obvious, disappointed that she wouldn’t be staying longer, that they weren’t going to know each other better. It annoyed him that he should feel distressed, before there was anything to feel distressed about.
‘I just can’t hang about here … now.’ She leaned back in her chair, playing with the limp strands of her hair. ‘I mean, I can’t hang about now.’
For one moment, he thought, she might mean because of him kissing her in the field. He half believed it, but he knew it wasn’t that.
‘I mean, it’s obvious he doesn’t want me. It is … isn’t it?’ She looked at him for a denial. They were both tentative, both disappointed, though she was the more cheerful.
‘I suppose so,’ he said.
‘I don’t know why I’ve stuck it so long,’ she admitted. ‘Honest, I don’t know why. I don’t really want to go, but I must.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘I’ll give you my address, my home address, and I’ll write to you and we’ll keep in touch.’
‘Yes, we could do that all right,’ said Balfour, without hope.
‘You won’t mention to anyone that I’m going to do a flit, will you?’ Dotty turned to him earnestly. ‘You won’t, will you?’
‘N-not a word. I’ll carry your suitcase if you like.’
‘Would you? Would you really?’ She hadn’t really thought she would go. Still, if Balfour expected her to leave and wanted to carry her suitcase she supposed she would have to go.
‘I hope we meet again,’ he said dejectedly.
‘Oh, we’ll meet,’ she said carelessly enough. ‘If not on earth, then somewhere else.’
When George came back with Willie he spoke sternly to Balfour. ‘You ought to be resting,’ he said. Balfour, anxious not to appear ungrateful for care given, lay down obediently on the sofa.
Willie smacked his lips and made sympathetic noises. ‘And you not too well,’ he said, his eyes moist with satisfaction. ‘I hear you took bad last evening, had one of those attacks. Very sorry to hear it … that and the wasps.’
Joseph came indoors, skin glowing. He showed his burnt chest to Dotty. ‘Look at that, Dot-Dot. How’s that, eh?’
‘Smashing,’ she agreed, turning her head away from his fiery breast and the two nipples embedded like black pips. ‘Why hasn’t Roland come back?’ she said.
He buttoned his shirt neatly and shook his head. ‘Don’t ask me. He’s down at the stream, isn’t he?’
‘Is he?’ She wouldn’t tell him. She put more water in the kettle and averted her eyes from his sunburnt skin.
He went slowly out into the field, glancing at Lionel, who was still reading his newspaper.
‘Roland,’ he called, ‘Roland.’
‘He’s gone for a walk with that Kidney,’ May told him.
‘A walk – are you sure?’
‘He asked you if he could go. Several times in fact.’
Joseph studied the trees and sniffed the air. ‘Extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Well, they can’t have gone far.’
‘They’ve been gone hours,’ May said cruelly. She followed him into the hut and sat down at the table, watching Dotty put out more cups.
‘Balfour’s better,’ Dotty said, nodding in the direction of the sofa.
‘Is he? What’s been wrong with him?’ asked Joseph, standing at the window looking out at the field and the sprawled and lonely Lionel.
Balfour kept his eyes closed.
‘Don’t you think it’s a little foolish letting Roland go off with Kidney?’ May said.
‘Foolish? What’s that supposed to mean exactly?’ Joseph faced her, knowing exactly what she meant, angry, fearful that he might be put in the wrong.
‘Well, Kidney’s not exactly a suitable companion for a little boy. He’s very odd.’
‘Odd?’
‘Yes, odd.’ May turned to Dotty for support. ‘Do you think Kidney’s fit to look after Roland?’
Dotty looked at Joseph and was forced unwillingly to defend him. ‘I don’t think there’s much harm in him … He’s a bit simple, but he’s all right.’
‘Kidney isn’t simple,’ Joseph said sternly. ‘I’ve told you that often enough.’ He was sorry at once that he had spoken so loudly. She had meant to be loyal. He added more gently, ‘He’s not simple at all. He’s just mentally blocked. He’s perfectly intelligent and normal, but he can’t communicate.’
‘That’s not what you said before,’ said Dotty.
‘Perfectly normal!’ May lifted her eyebrows and eyed him incredulously. ‘He’s almost an imbecile. There’s nothing normal about him.’ She was growing irritated, malicious. Savagely she dug her nails into the table top. She couldn’t bear Joseph and his supercilious ways, and Dotty rattling the cups, and the ridiculous wooden hut set in the middle of nowhere. ‘I think it’s terrible,’ she cried. ‘A little boy like Roland, sleeping in the same room as that big fat man and going off for walks with him for hours … Anything could happen. He looks as if he’s abnormal.’
Joseph thought she was absurd. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he told her sharply. ‘I’ll just walk over to the road and look for them.’ He glanced at Dotty, but she wouldn’t look at him. She blamed him too.
‘I’ll just s-stretch my legs a bit,’ said Balfour, rising from the sofa and coming to the door. ‘I’ll just come over the field for a walk.’
They passed Lionel in the grass, the newspaper lying flat, his head propped on his arm. He was snoring.
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Balfour. ‘They won’t have gone far.’
‘I’m not in the least bit worried,’ Joseph told him. ‘That woman’s a cow.’ He shook his head with disgust. ‘It doesn’t do to coddle them too much, you know. They’ve got to have a feeling of independence. Strike out on their own, dear boy.’
Balfour agreed, keeping pace with difficulty, thinking of Roland being independent, striking out with his mentally disturbed companion. ‘We’ve got quite a few lads l-like Kidney at the club,’ he said. ‘Same types, same difficulties, only a bit more predictable.’ He looked quickly at Joseph but failed to read his expression.
Joseph said abruptly, ‘How so?’
‘Well, you get to know the signs. It’s a kind of pattern. They’ve got the same troubles at home, lack of interest, lack of – ’
‘– security?’ suggested Joseph.
‘That and other things …’
‘What things?’
‘B-bad housing. Three or four to a bed. Bad diet. Bad schools. They usually have mentally defective parents and a long history of – ’
‘Kidney’s parents are perfectly intelligent,’ said Joseph. ‘Particularly about Kidney.’
‘Yes – well, there are differences,’ Balfour conceded. ‘Different environment, like. As a general rule there’s only one parent anyway. The dads have usually b-buggered off somewhere.’
His head was aching once more. The poison was working through his bloodstream. But he would gladly have been stung all over again if it would have erased that last remark. ‘I only meant about the lads at the club. I mean the parents are different … You and Roland, that’s different. I can see that … You understand him.’
‘I love him,’ said Joseph simply, coming to the gate at the end of the field. He climbed it agilely and walked quickly away along the path between hedge and haystack.
Roland, turning the bend of the road, saw his father at the entrance of the farm and began to run towards him with arms held out. Swaggering, Joseph went leisurely to meet his son. The boy ran swiftly, clutching the sprig of heather.
‘Where the devil have you been?’ Joseph shouted. He swung the child up in his arms, shaking him fiercely. ‘Where have you been, beauty boy? Just where have you been?’
Roland was trying to tell him. He was choked with the violence of the embrace and the excitement of his return. ‘We’ve been up the mountain,’ he got out at last, looking up slyly at Joseph’s face, waiting for the surprise to show.
‘Up the mountain!’
‘Me and Kidney, right to the top. We did, didn’t we?’ He twisted in his father’s arms seeking confirmation from Kidney.
‘All that way?’ Joseph was amused and delighted. He turned and called triumphantly to Balfour. ‘Did you hear that, eh, Balfour? Would you believe it, right up the mountain.’
Balfour said ‘Jolly good’, looking at the animated child and the silent Kidney scuffing his boots at the edge of the road.
Roland rode on Joseph’s shoulders across the field, a conqueror’s return. He beat at his father’s head with his fists and felt giddy. The sky was colourless now, without clouds. It was like riding on the back of an elephant, swaying high above the ground, with Balfour and Kidney following, lurching under the low branches of the elm tree, the sky rocking up and down, his heart bumping. He hoped he wasn’t going to be sick.
They were all amazed at him. Roland was gratified by their surprise. Dotty made him fried eggs and tomatoes, but he was no longer hungry. He drank several cupfuls of water, but his throat remained dry. ‘It was lovely up the mountain,’ he said, attempting for Dotty’s sake to eat something. ‘You could see all the way to Liverpool … and the sea shining.’
‘What about the tower?’ Dotty wanted to know. ‘Was it a real tower?’
‘Yes. It was jolly good.’ He looked at his father and said quickly, ‘It was a super tower, really good … One of its walls had gone. Wasn’t that interesting? Kidney told me a story about a king and some children.’
‘Did he now?’ Joseph made sure that May had heard. ‘Kidney told you a story did he?’
‘Eat your supper,’ said Dotty, not wanting the food to be wasted.
‘All about this Lear going off for a walk. It was a good story,’ lied Roland. He dropped his hands into his lap and yawned. ‘I don’t want any more egg, thank you, Dotty.’
‘You mean King Lear?’ said his father.
‘What?’ The child pushed his plate away. The light in the hut had almost gone. His father’s face was in shadow. ‘Kidney showed me his wee-wee,’ he said. ‘It’s awfully big.’ He yawned again, his eyelids heavy.
Lionel laughed and wished instantly he hadn’t. You never knew quite where you were with Joseph, all unconventional and bohemian one moment and prudish as they come the next. Lads often did that sort of thing among themselves. Nothing to be shocked about. Perfectly understandable. Of course Roland was a little young and Kidney a little old, but even so. He looked at his wife and was deceived by the expression on her face. He touched her leg with his knee and kept his mouth solemn.
‘Did he?’ said Joseph, regarding the child a moment longer before rising from the table to light the lamp.
May longed to interrogate Roland but was intimidated by the presence of Joseph. She felt uneasiness at the situation not yet explained and satisfaction that her fears had been justified. She looked at Kidney contemptuously.
Roland’s throat hurt. He found it difficult to talk. ‘My mouth feels funny,’ he complained, letting his jaw go slack.
Joseph told him he was tired. ‘You’ve been a long way, little soldier. It’s time you were in bed.’ Gently he undressed the boy, wiped his fingers with a flannel and dabbed at the smooth, sleepy face. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s my beauty boy.’
Roland was too tired to do his teeth. Joseph insisted. The child began to cry. ‘I don’t want to …’
Joseph disliked the whining protest. He flung down the toothpaste in irritation. ‘Oh don’t bother then. Let them all fall out,’ he shouted.
‘He’s tired,’ said Dotty, wanting to take the weary boy on her knee, but not doing so.
Lionel took Roland to the barn. It was still and silent out in the field. No breeze, the trees motionless, the sky waiting for the moon. ‘Must be careful of the wasps’ nest,’ said Lionel. ‘We mustn’t trip over that, must we?’
Roland was too drowsy to be frightened. Besides, the man’s strong arms held him sure and safe. His own body felt strange, heavy. Even the tips of his fingers lying on the curve of Lionel’s wrist were leaden and insensitive. He was carried into the barn and laid down.
‘Good night, old boy,’ said Lionel, tucking the blankets about him firmly. He rested on the side of the bed and brushed the hair away from the boy’s unseen forehead. ‘No tricks tonight, old boy. No pennies in your ear tonight.’ The child spoke so indistinctly that Lionel was forced to lower his head on a level with the bedclothes. ‘What’s that, old boy?’
‘May put your penny down the …’
‘Down where?’
‘ … wasp hole.’
‘May did?’
But the child slept. Lionel strained forward to catch a glimpse of his features, but the darkness was tight and final.
He rose at last and walked outside, closing the door behind him. He stood as near to the bracken as he dared. It was so still out there under the trees that he fancied he could hear the wasps moving, like honey trickling, in their nest beneath the leaves. May had thrown his coin down there, May had done that? He didn’t doubt Roland.
Through a triangle of light shining from the porch a man passed, plodding heavily in the darkness. Lionel listened to the footsteps going over the grass and when the sound finished went back into the hut.
‘Gone down all right?’ asked Joseph, wanting peace, distressed by his angry parting with Roland.
Lionel nodded, not looking at May, going to the sofa to sit beside Balfour.
She knew something was wrong. His face had in some fashion collapsed. Only his moustache seemed permanent.
‘Asleep, is he?’ persisted Joseph, moving restlessly about the hut.
Lionel nodded once more and fiddled with the cravat about his throat.
‘I’ve sent Kidney for the milk. I thought I’d meet him on the way back and have a bit of a talk with him.’ Joseph wasn’t concerned about their opinion of Kidney, only of himself. I’ve spoiled it all, he thought: Dotty’s holiday – poor Dotty, slouched over the table rolling her cigarettes – and Roland’s. He suppressed the desire to go now, at once, to the barn and tell the boy he was sorry about the tooth-brushing.
May sensed he was vulnerable. She couldn’t help taking advantage. ‘You really ought to have a little talk with Roland. You’d get more information out of him. Anything might have happened, you know.’
‘I don’t see it would serve any purpose.’ Joseph tried to be patient.
‘Boys of Kidney’s age are very developed nowadays,’ said May. ‘Normal ones, let alone that one – ’
‘If you’re trying to suggest Kidney assaulted Roland – ’
‘Well, what did he want to show his thing to the child for?’ asked May. She gave a little giggle and Joseph said quickly, ‘All adolescents experiment … If he had harmed Roland, Roland would have told us.’
‘If he was my child …’ began May, tossing her head.
‘Well, he isn’t, is he?’ he retorted.
Balfour was disturbed. He was convinced now that they were all different from him, even the foolish May. They must know more, they appeared to know more. Behind everything, they said, lay something else, another meaning altogether. They had such tolerance. They didn’t think it all that important that Kidney might have exposed himself to Roland. Even May’s comments were made only to get at Joseph – she wasn’t concerned about the child. And Joseph, why was he worried about the effect on Kidney? Taking a broad view, he was right to worry about that; but there was something wrong in it all. There was family, and blood ties, and sticking up for your dad even if you did think he was a right yob of a bastard, and not letting on you had no underpants and telling the rent man your mam was out when all the time she was hiding behind the back door, and when it came down to the centre, the core, all the feuding and protecting was pride in your own flesh and blood – well, maybe not pride, but loyalty: there wasn’t anything else. But somewhere along the line Joseph and Dotty and the rest of them, old George too, had cut themselves free from that sort of thing, gone out on a limb. They didn’t really feel they belonged to anyone any more.
‘One has to be very careful,’ Joseph was telling him – it was Balfour he was looking at – ‘not to suggest too much to a child. One must guard against meddling.’
‘Well, he looked a bit pale to me,’ May cried, unable to keep quiet. ‘Not at all well.’
‘Rubbish. He was just tired. All that way up the mountain. He’s only a child.’
‘He looked more than tired. He didn’t eat any supper.’ She was holding the sprig of heather, rolling it back and forth across the palm of her hand, rubbing the dry buds from the stem.
‘That’s mine,’ Joseph cried, snatching the heather from her and sticking it into the pocket of his shirt. He flounced out of the door. They heard him shout a greeting, and then a farewell, and Willie’s voice replying ‘All the best, all the best’, as if it were Christmas.
Lionel was watching his wife sitting in her chair, separate from him, head lowered to scrutinize her polished nails. Beneath the darkening roots of hair lay her little pale-grey brain, hidden, secretive, beyond his reach or influence. His vicious wife. How often had he met old comrades from the regiment who seemed at first the same comrades, untouched by time. Only later, after some conversation or longer acquaintance, one found they weren’t the same but altered beyond recall. They had taken up smoking or given up drink, learnt to drive or become religious, adopted a new style of speech, an unfamiliar mannerism. The same yet no longer the same. People changed and in changing affected others, were affected in their turn, a continual process of addition and subtraction. Cut the communication lines and contact was broken, no information could come through. If the breach was serious enough, the lapse of time long enough, one could be fired upon by one’s own guns.