Another part of the wood

5

Roland went to bed that evening without complaining. For one thing Lionel had played with him in the field after supper – the sunset field with everything cool and the darkness growing. The trees flapped like rags. When Lionel pushed him high on the swing the air rushed at his sunburnt face, its chilliness covering his bare arms with goose pimples. He dropped from the swing and ran round and round the hut, screaming with excitement as the fat man chased him, until he flew into a patch of bramble and lacerated his leg. He bent his head and watched the blood beading on the surface of his leg. Lionel held his ankle in one big hand and dabbed at the scratch with his handkerchief, transferring the three pinpoints of blood on to the white square of cloth. Even as Roland looked, his disappointed mouth open, the spots of redness reappeared again. He scrambled free of the man’s hand and ran about the field triumphantly, shouting for Lionel to catch him. ‘Catch me, catch me,’ he cried, falling into the long grass with his flushed face close to the cooling earth and his leg forgotten. The other thing that made going to bed so pleasant was the two-shilling piece Lionel had found in his ear. Lionel had sat him on the table among the dirty dishes and magicked his toothbrush into the biscuit tin on the draining board. ‘Dotty, Dotty,’ he had said, ‘see if Roland’s toothbrush is in the biscuit tin.’ And Dotty had got up from her chair and Lionel had said, ‘Go on, go on, find Roland’s toothbrush,’ and Dotty opened the biscuit tin and indeed his toothbrush was there. ‘Aaaaaahya-ya,’ said his father, yawning, champing his lips together and trapping pieces of his beard. And then Lionel had placed his hands about Roland’s head and touched his ears and neck, till he squirmed on the table top and laughed and nearly upset the plates, and Lionel said, ‘What’s this in Roland’s ear?’ His probing fingers tickled his right ear, and he wriggled still more because everything about Lionel was so warm and friendly – the warm breath coming out of his mouth, the little coloured moustache quivering, and his face smiling, smiling. And there was the two-shilling piece: a silver coin, two shillings in one, an old one with a King’s head on, not the picture of the Queen sitting on her horse. ‘A two-shilling piece in Roland’s ear,’ Lionel had shouted. ‘All for Roland. Finding’s keepings.’ May had given a small laugh as if she thought it was funny, which it was, and Joseph had yawned again and said at the end of it, ‘Come on, boy. Bed for you.’ Off he went, still feeling the prickles of Lionel’s moustache against his ear, the silver money clutched tight in his hand – a lot of money, though of course he knew there wasn’t any more to be found like that, not in his ear, or up his nose or anywhere. It wasn’t really magic. There was an explanation. But he was drowsy and he slipped from his father’s arms like a fish being loosed in the sea. He fell asleep at once.
Lionel was a domestic asset. Without him they would all have sat half stupefied in the nearly dark hut. He washed the supper dishes and refilled the bowl with soapy water and washed out the tea towel, rinsing it carefully and going out into the field to hang it over a bush to dry. He even found a stiff brush and swept crumbs into a small heap at the door. ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ he went, swinging his brush like a golfer, sending a half crust of bread out into the dusk and humming little snatches of songs. Finally he stood in the open doorway and took great gulps of night air. ‘This is the life,’ he cried, expanding his chest, his eyes glowing with happiness. ‘This is the life.’ He needed May to confirm his opinion. ‘Isn’t this the life? Isn’t it, sweetheart?’ he demanded, turning to her.
‘Oh, do sit down,’ she told him, annoyed. She caught Balfour looking at her in the gloom.
Joseph fetched the paraffin lamp from the far end of the hut and lit it. A moth flew in through the open window and dashed itself against the lamp. May shuddered and fluttered her hands in horror. Lionel protected her at once – big protective Lionel. His handkerchief dropped the insect to the table. ‘Don’t be concerned,’ he said. ‘It will not harm you.’ Balfour, startled by the sudden flourish of white calico that had stunned the moth, heard the words and finished the sentence in his head, the verse of the song … ‘It’s only me pursuing something I’m not sure of …’ He knew two popular songs and those not very well. The ‘Don’t be concerned’ one and ‘Talking about my generation’, written it seemed deliberately to parody his own affliction. He didn’t know every word like the lads in the club, but certain lines of each song remained engraved on his mind –
‘Hope I die before I get old …
Talking about my g-generation …
Don’t want to be a big s-sensation,
Why don’t you all f-fade away …’
Dotty was lifting the Monopoly box out from beneath the sofa. ‘Might we?’ she asked Joseph, sure she would be refused.
But Joseph welcomed the idea. He clapped his blistered hands together and said loudly, ‘Come on, let’s play Monopoly. Do you good, George.’
George, furthest from the table, said nothing. He had been thinking about Willie, the coffin shape his body had assumed as they carried him feet first through the doorway of his cottage. He thought about the fire too, the possible cause of it. Apart from Willie, only Dotty smoked; but then she had been in the barn or down at the stream most of the time. Willie must have passed that way earlier in the day; it could only have been him. In all those years he had never been careless. But there was always a first time. George would have liked to know what Joseph was thinking about at this moment as he sat with his hands busy with the bundles of artificial money and his head constantly jerking backwards to flick away the falling lock of hair.
Lionel, laughing in anticipation – it was years since he had played Monopoly – fetched chairs from the dim corners of the hut and grouped them about the table. He had tried to talk to Kidney at supper and failed. He realized that the boy wasn’t altogether there. In an attempt to show that he felt that no blame should be attached to him, he constantly smiled and winked at the unresponsive lad. He sat himself on the wooden bench and patted the space beside him.
‘Ever played before?’ he asked, expecting no reply, ready to cover up the silence with a cough or a laugh or a squeeze at the waist of the drowsing May.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Kidney said, and sat heavily down on the wooden bench, his curved thighs trapped under the edge of the solid table, his voice deep with comprehension.
May, apathetic with country air and boredom, remained where she was, seated opposite the perspiring Balfour. She remembered now that Dotty never went anywhere without her game of Monopoly. In the old days in Liverpool they had played it often. Sometimes it went on for hours and hours. Absolutely endless. Enjoyment depended entirely on who was playing. There was no hope tonight, she thought, looking with amusement at the players about the board, the uncomfortable Balfour and the snooty Joseph, not to mention potty Kidney – or whatever his name was. What on earth was he doing here? She must ask Dotty. Not that it really mattered. She could ask herself the same question and receive an equally unsatisfying reply.
Joseph was offering the two women a choice of symbols.
‘Do you want the boat, the train, the shoe, the car, the hat, the dog, or the iron?’ he asked them, touching the little metal objects with his finger. He himself always had the train.
‘Oh dear!’ May exclaimed, wanting a nice hot bath.
‘Come on, make up your mind.’ Impatiently Joseph pushed the iron towards her with the tips of his burnt fingers.
‘I hate ironing.’ Childishly May turned down the corners of her mouth, and Lionel said soothingly, ‘So you do, my sweetheart … Poor little sweetheart.’
Balfour chose the car, but after a moment Joseph took it away from him and gave him the dog. Kidney, it seemed, usually had the car. Reassured, Kidney held it upright on the palm of his hand and smiled down upon it. ‘Once,’ he told Lionel, ‘I won. That’s a fact, isn’t it, Joseph?’
It was a true claim. Once, in the early days, to give him confidence, they had let him win. Joseph had never asked for rent when the youth landed on his property, and Dotty had kept telling him that the bank owed him money.
While Joseph laid out the property cards according to value and colour, Lionel reminisced aloud about his Monopoly days.
‘In Brighton, long before the war,’ he told them, ‘when the family was at home. It all comes back to me now.’ Its coming suffused his face with a glow of pleasure. ‘We used to play on the billiard table, on a sheet of course – myself and Father and Alice and George and Hetty … after supper on a Sunday, all the family round the table.’
‘On the billiard table?’ May winked at Dotty and ran the little iron up and down the pale board. ‘Must have been a big house, Lionel.’
‘Quite big,’ he said modestly. ‘Quite big, my sweetheart. Remember? I showed it you once.’
He had driven her to Brighton one afternoon in the summer, and they had spent a perfectly vile afternoon listening to the band. Not a soul under ninety anywhere around. ‘I might,’ she told him tartly, ‘be prepared to do this sort of thing in the twilight of our life, but not now.’ He had taken her down the road past the house the family had lived in. It might have been the house. It might not. He actually had tears in his eyes as he drove, though it could have been the lingering effect of the military airs the band had played so loudly. He said there was a big garden at the back. You couldn’t see it from the road. Take his word for it, it was as big as a field. Mother had been very fond of gardening; and they had played badminton in the summer. He talked about it at length. The white shuttlecock was like a little feathered bird plopping over the net on the warm summer evenings. Mother brought them long glasses of lemonade. Father kept the score. Ridiculous.
‘Highest scorer starts,’ said Joseph, giving a last tidy touch to his row of cards and throwing the dice.
It did draw them together – the counting of the money, the excitement of landing on Community Chest. Dotty won ten pounds in a beauty contest and they smiled at her and clapped their hands. Even May clapped. ‘Quite right, quite right,’ Lionel cried, throwing the dice so hard it flew from the table and going in search of it on all fours, his mutilated posterior raised high, laughter dribbling from his mouth. On the return journey he tickled Joseph’s leg and was kicked. Both men were convulsed with laughter.
Balfour dared to speak directly to May. She landed on Mayfair and made no move to buy it.
Joseph said she was a fool. ‘It’s the most valuable property on the board.’
‘Is it really?’ she asked, fluttering her eyelashes, feeling she was being delightfully vague. ‘Well, can I buy it now?’
‘No, it’s my turn.’
‘Hard luck,’ Balfour said softly, smiling at her. She shrugged her shoulders at him and giggled.
‘I wasn’t thinking,’ she told him alone.
Joseph managed to acquire Bond Street, Regent Street and Oxford Street. He stopped the game while he bought houses, one on each street. ‘Now,’ he told them. ‘Now, watch out, children.’
Dotty bought The Strand, and Lionel protested that it wasn’t fair – that he had Trafalgar Square. ‘It’s not on,’ he shouted. ‘It’s just not on.’ She pretended to be spiteful and told him several times she wasn’t going to let him get his hands on The Strand, not if he offered her ￡500 for it.
‘Willie cleaned out the lavatory, did he?’ asked George suddenly. He had bought nothing and hardly seemed to grasp the point of the game.
‘Yes, I believe he did.’
‘It wasn’t necessary.’ George was looking stern. He held the dice in his hand and stared at the board.
‘Come on, man. Throw the bloody dice. You’re holding up the game.’
George threw.
‘It’s a chemical toilet of course?’ Lionel wanted to know, lowering his voice.
‘Did you give him any money?’ asked George.
‘Didn’t have time,’ Joseph said. ‘Smelt the fire and that was that.’
Kindly, Dotty told Lionel that it was a chemical toilet.
‘Well, don’t give him any money next time you see him. My father sees to that.’ George put his elbows on the table and cupped his head in his hands, letting his eyes close behind the railings of his fingers.
Lionel said, ‘I’ll take care of the toilet paper. I’m used to that sort of thing.’
The corners of his wife’s mouth trembled. She put the back of her hand against her lips, observed by the spying Balfour.
‘It’s a question of careful planning … Taking that every man functions normally and performs once a day for seven days, that’s four sheets per person, times …’ Lionel counted the group around the table, stabbing the air with one large finger … ‘times six – no seven, mustn’t forget myself.’ He shook with merriment, licked at his moustache, controlled himself and continued … ‘Twenty-eight sheets per day, times seven …’
‘Only four sheets per man?’ said Joseph mildly.
‘Oh shut up, Lionel, shut up and don’t be so disgusting.’ May couldn’t bear it. How dare he talk about her going to the lavatory once a day for seven days in that revolting way. It was both presumptuous and nauseating. ‘You’re revolting,’ she cried, clenching her fists and banging them down so hard on the table that one of Joseph’s little green houses fell over.
‘Steady on. Mind the bloody board.’
‘Forgive me, sweetheart.’ Lionel attempted to pat her knee under the brim of the table. ‘You had to know that sort of thing in the war, sweetheart – ’
‘The war, the war,’ she mimicked, and two lines appeared on either side of her stretched wide mouth and she turned her profile to Balfour, poking her head forward angrily on its quite short neck, pecking at the still spluttering Lionel, telling him he was a fool, an utter fool. ‘You’re grotesque, Lionel … You’re utterly grotesque …’
Lionel flung up his arms, pretending fear, cowering back on his wooden bench, hunched against the stolid Kidney. ‘Kamerad,’ he said … ‘Kamerad.’
‘Going on about your disgusting toilet drill and your dreary war … Who the hell cares about what you did in the army … Who do you think you are? D’you know,’ she added, turning her attention to Joseph, ‘d’you know what he told me on my wedding night?’ Her head tossed indignantly, and the shadow of her hair trembled across the Monopoly board. ‘He actually told me how to dismantle a Bren gun.’
‘Very useful,’ Joseph said, not bothering to look at her.
She giggled. Joseph always made her laugh, even if he was so affected.
Lionel mistakenly guffawed his relief. Instantly he aroused fresh resentment.
‘You find it funny, do you?’ said May. ‘You think that funny, you big fat bore?’
‘Flattery will get you nowhere, May,’ ventured Joseph.
Lionel turned his beaming face from his wife to Joseph and back again. His voice sounded full of tears as he tried to extricate himself. ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart, it’s not …’
‘Stop calling me sweetheart. Stop it.’ She could have wrenched the nose from his face in her anger. Indeed her hand, with the diamond ring encircling the pad of her fourth finger, flew upwards from her lap towards him.
‘Sweetheart,’ he cried, leaning away from her.
‘Joseph has brought six toilet rolls with him,’ Kidney said slowly. ‘It ought to be enough.’ His morello lips stayed open as he tried to remember how many sheets of paper he had used. He quite liked Lionel with his wish to be helpful about the lavatory. They all ought to be responsible for something.
Two spots of colour burned on either cheek of the weakened May. Her eyes under the thick lashes, shone. Her mascara had smudged, giving her face a bruised appearance. They were all fools. They made her sick. She looked sideways at her husband and inconsistently found him less foolish than the others.
Lionel fingered his moustache, as if to reassure himself that it grew on him and wasn’t pasted to his lip. How she abused him. How he loved her.
‘On no account,’ George said, ‘must you give Willie any money, Joseph. You mustn’t tip him. You do understand that, don’t you?’ He hoped Joseph did understand, did realize the power money had to corrupt.
Joseph thought he heard crying outside the hut. He went to the door, opened it and listened. A sound like the sea rolled over the dark field towards him. He held up his hand behind him for silence, tilting his head.
‘It’s the wind,’ Dotty said.
He trod carefully across the grass to the side of the barn, leaning his face against the wooden planks at the point just under the window. The wood was still warm from the day’s sun, and he raised his eyes above the black shapes of the trees and saw a small moon, the colour of a lemon, dragged by clouds across the sky. Moons, he thought, were so that men like himself would know they lived on earth. He fluttered his arms in the wind, imitating the branches all about him, and wheeled across the grass, smiling, entering the narrow doorway sideways with one arm stretched high, almost to the ceiling, casting a long shadow over the group at the table, so that May shrieked in alarm.
The game went on and on. The little metal objects were moved round and round the squares. No one took any notice of Kidney. He threw the dice and counted his spaces but was never fined. Time and again he landed on a row of red hotels bought by Joseph, and once he said, ‘Do I owe you any money, Joseph?’ and Joseph replied, ‘What? Money? No, shouldn’t think so. Your go next, George.’ Kidney withdrew into himself, because he knew the rules of the game and he knew he was playing alone.
May was out first. She said, ‘Thank God,’ and shortly after Balfour followed, and then Lionel. Lionel put the kettle on and May sat slumped behind the brass paraffin lamp and yawned and yawned. While waiting for the water to boil, Lionel went outside into the field. May could hear him out there under the moon, flooding the grass, and she snapped her mouth shut in the middle of a yawn, and water seeped out of her smudged eyes and the mascara spread across her cheeks. Lionel returned with a fleck of hair curled rakishly about one ear. He ran the tap at the sink and rinsed his hands noisily. Unable to find the tea towel, he took out his useful handkerchief and dried his fingers one by one, pushing back the cuticles of his nails. Looking up, he saw his wife’s besmeared face in the lamplight. He came towards her with his forefinger embedded in a damp sheath of material and bent over her, wiping at the stained skin beneath her eyes. She made no resistance. Amusement and anger had long since drained away leaving her detached and apathetic. ‘There, there,’ he crooned tenderly, cradling her chin in his fingers, making his wife’s dirty little face clean and wholesome once more. He put away his soiled handkerchief and rubbed his hands together boyishly, a job well done, telling Balfour it was a grand night. ‘A grand night,’ he said, with his brown-suited back to the table and still-moist hands holding the teapot beneath the cold water tap. ‘A grand night, a lovely moon. You used to get those sorts of nights in Italy – during the war, you know. There were cypress trees of course, but the same old moon.’ He cleared his throat, regretting instantly his mention of the forbidden subject. He couldn’t help himself, the best of him had lived through the war. He simply had no notion of himself before 1939. Though he talked to May about Father and his brothers and sisters, he couldn’t be sure that his memories were exact. It was as though he were chronicling the recollections of someone he had known, but never intimately. This person had played badminton, he was certain, and there were those holidays in Eastbourne. Like a photograph shown to him, there was Father in a blazer, his trousers rolled above his knees, planted on the shore with the sea showing between his bow legs. He didn’t deliberately mean to falsify his rememberings of the time before the war. It was just that one had to play fair by the past. There was a certain code – honour thy father and thy mother and all that. It couldn’t have been easy for Father supporting a large family on a bank clerk’s pay, though food was cheaper then, and if he’d been strict and tyrannical with the girls and Mother it was doubtless with the best intentions. It wasn’t for Lionel to judge. He had a great respect for Father – did have – a grand man in many ways. He must have been. Anyway, Father had long since passed on. Lionel had been back several times to Brighton to look at the grave. Once only he brought flowers, and each time it occurred to him that it was a very small grave for such a stern and strong man to spend his time in. The flowers when he next saw them had turned black. The headstone gave his full name, William Robert Gosling, making no mention of the word ‘father’ at all. In some ways the omission shocked him almost as much as the decayed blossoms. It was as if Father were denying their kinship, as if Father was saying they’d never met.
He smiled, standing at the sink, trying to picture himself in the early days of the war. His hand slipped between the buttons of his shirt to touch the coin hanging there on a chain about his neck. Curious, that incident. He had been in some public urinal in Yorkshire in 1939, without a penny to his name, not even the price of a cup of tea. He saw the coin glinting through the water. It had cost him something, mentally, to do what he had to do, reaching down to retrieve it.
If May could only know how his experience of the world protected her. The world was a deep deceptive forest, full of promises and little glades and clearings, and in the dark depths roamed the wolves, savage, snapping their great teeth, waiting to spring on those who wandered from the path. May was so unaware of the dark places, so trusting, so unconscious of danger. He had to watch for both of them. In the darkness of the world she was a little flower, glowing like a star, beautiful as a pair of little eyes. Sweetheart! How her eyes gleamed. She might now find it boring to be guarded by him, but she was only a child. One day she would tell him that she understood, that she realized what it was he protected her from. She might fret, she might argue with him, but it was only to impress Joseph. He had met Joseph’s sort in the war. Different conditions of course, but the basic problem was the same: lack of backbone, deficiency of guts, absence of moral fibre. Those chaps were always the first to find the local brothel, always the first to get a dose of the clap. One or two of that sort in a platoon and the general standard went for a burton. A grand platoon, old Whitey Briggs had told him. ‘First class, my boy. I’m proud of you. But I don’t altogether care for your VD rates.’
May thought that the only way to live was to throw oneself into the depths. He could tell her a few things about that – he’d done so – but she became irritated. The war, the war, she would cry impatiently, not realizing that the army dealt with destruction and death and disgust, trained a man to stay upright instead of falling on all fours like an animal among the carnage. And life was war, in a more subtle form, that lasted for ever, and only discipline and careful entrenchment would see you through until your own great Armistice Day. He would see May safely through the lines, even if he had to carry her, kicking her little shoes off on the way.
Such emotion rose up inside his breast that he thought he would break out weeping, and he ran the water into the metal basin and blinked back the tears of love, love fulfilled – for she did love him, he knew – and he cleared his throat again. He was suddenly reminded of a poem. He just had to tell them.
‘The moon like a ghostly galleon,
Set in a silver sea …’
He couldn’t find the next line. ‘D’you know it?’ he asked Balfour, who was getting spoons out of a drawer.
‘S-set in a s-silver sea,’ repeated Balfour, discomfited. ‘I d-don’t think I do.’
‘Grand poem, grand.’ He went out again into the blackness to fetch the tea towel from the blackthorn bush, and they heard him fall heavily and the short splatterings of his good-humoured laughter as he rolled about the alien field. He reappeared, hopping about the table on one leg, spitting through his military moustache, whimpering that he’d broken his leg. He was so boisterous, so full of fun. He made them all feel half dead.
‘For God’s sake,’ May pleaded. Hurriedly Lionel composed himself, dabbing at his drooling mouth with his sleeve and wrapping the tea towel about his hand like a bandage to lift the steaming kettle from the Calor gas cooker. He couldn’t contain himself. It was so exhilarating out there under the racing clouds and the far-away moon. He had to tell Balfour the other poem he’d remembered. He had to.
‘I must go down to the sea again
To the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall, a tall ship,
And a star to – ’
‘Mary in the garden sifting cinders,’ interrupted Joseph, rattling the dice in its little cardboard funnel and emptying them across the table. ‘Lifted up her skirt – two fours – and farted like a man. The force of the explosion broke fifteen winders, and the clappers of her arse went bang, bang, bang.’
There it was, thought Lionel, sniggering with the rest of them – the hatred of womankind, the wish to defile. ‘It’s a bit not on in the company of ladies,’ he said, knowing he would be ridiculed but compelled to speak.
‘You’re priceless,’ his wife told him, giving little whoops of resurrected joy behind the paraffin lamp.
‘It’s not that I’m a prude,’ he said, ‘I could cap that if I cared. Indeed I could.’
‘Go on then,’ May goaded. ‘Go on, St Lionel.’ Not that he was a prude! How fantastic he was. Obscene was the word for him, with his sick sagas of the temple. ‘Tell one of your very own stories,’ she said daringly, sitting up straight in her chair. But he failed to take her meaning. He simply didn’t think she could mean the histories he whispered in her ear when they lay together in bed.
‘I-I know a story,’ Balfour said. ‘A rhyme that is.’
‘Go on,’ encouraged May, though she detested dirty jokes. Balfour began to recite:
‘There was an old Jew of Belgrade
Who kept a dead whore in a cave.
He said I admit
I’m a b-bit of a – ’
‘Why Jew?’ asked George, raising his head and fixing his censorious eyes on Balfour.
‘It’s just a joke,’ apologized Balfour lamely, glad that he had been interrupted. He had forgotten George’s preoccupation with the Jews and his interest in Israel. It was just another example of how far short he fell of the high degree of sensitivity attributed to him by Mr and Mrs MacFarley. He supposed he could have said ‘There was an old Scot of Belgrade’, but it was too late for that now. Ashamed of his blunder, he helped the gentlemanly Lionel with the tea-making, putting cups ready on the draining board.
‘Go on, George,’ shouted Joseph. ‘Pull your finger out … You’re in gaol, man. You can’t come out yet.’ Spooning sugar into his mug, he kept a watchful eye on the unwilling player.
Stubbornly, Kidney played alone, counting his moves and collecting his money from the bank at Joseph’s elbow. Beyond the amber circle of the lamplight Balfour and Lionel dissolved into the darkness. Lionel could hardly bear to look at his sweetheart, so beautiful had she become, so luminous in the wooden hut amid the trees. Emotionally he stared at her dewy mouth, slack with tiredness. When she had drunk her tea she stretched herself and told Lionel she wanted to go to bed.
‘Sweetheart, of course,’ he cried, leaping into the lamplight, his little moustache trembling.
George said he would show them to their hut.
‘But you’re not out,’ protested Joseph.
‘I don’t want to play any more,’ George said, standing up and looking away from the board.
‘Well, don’t take the lamp.’ Joseph put his hand about its base in annoyance. ‘The wind would only blow it out.’
‘Perhaps,’ George said. He opened the door and looked out into the blowing night.
Joseph reluctantly left the table to wave the departing players from the hut, holding the lamp in the doorway and smiling fiercely in the yellow light. Balfour, walking sideways to gesture to the friendly Dotty, was blinded by a sudden gust of wind that blew the hair into his eyes. When he looked again, the door had closed and clouds flew above the roof of the hut.
May hung on to her husband’s jacket, shivering with cold. ‘It’s freezing,’ she said, hating the whirling trees and the unseen path. Lionel removed his coat and covered her shoulders. His white shirt glowed in the field … ‘There, there, sweetheart … There, there.’
‘It’s like winter,’ she wailed, lowering her bleached head and pushing it against his shrapnel-ploughed buttocks, her two arms wrapped about his waist, the man’s jacket trailing about her uncertain feet.
‘It’s quite light, sweetheart,’ he told her, seriously endangered by the way she clung to him and worried about his good coat being trampled underfoot. Like a milkmaid with her cheek pressed to the warm flank of a particularly restless cow, she slithered down the path under the wild trees. Small stones stubbed her exposed toes in their absurd sandals. She screamed thinly at regular intervals. Balfour, following behind the joined and lurching couple, couldn’t become accustomed to the sound. On each occasion he started and trembled as if a screech owl had flown in his face.
At the hut George said he would fetch the storm lantern from his bedroom for them. Lionel began to thank him profusely. ‘Most kind of you, old man … Much appreciated … The little woman doesn’t – ’
‘He’s not there,’ May said, lowering herself on to the wooden bench dimly outlined outside the hut. ‘He’s gone.’ She looked with surprise at the thin trunks of trees glittering in the night. ‘Is that the sea?’ she asked Balfour, her head down, listening to the sound of waves breaking all about them, seeing her toes lying like pebbles in the grass.
‘It’s just the t-trees,’ he told her, and she looked up and saw the forest moving and a grey smear of light shifting across the tops of the trees like a ridge of mountains. ‘You went on about a moon,’ she accused the white-shirted Lionel. ‘Where is it now?’
‘It’s gone down behind the hill, sweetheart.’ He laughed jovially and spread his cold fingers across her neck, digging his thumb into the hollow behind her ear.
May was so cold sitting out here in this damn countryside, feeling her bones bitten into by the coldness. Ice was forming on her eyeballs. She would die of the cold. ‘I want to go home,’ she said with difficulty, clamping her jaws together to stop her teeth from breaking against each other. And louder, more firmly, anger giving her warmth, ‘I can’t stand the bloody place, Lionel, I can’t.’
‘Hush, hush, sweetheart,’ he said, rubbing at her back with his knuckles. ‘You’ll soon be in beddy-byes.’
George came back along the path with his storm lantern held at shoulder height, his shadow running like a river behind him. The silver birches at the side of the path lost their slenderness. Splotches of brown smeared the fattened trunks. The grass lay flat like hay gone rotten in the rain.
It was only a little warmer inside the hut. George hung the lantern from an iron hook in the ceiling and the wooden walls rolled outwards and back as the lamp twisted above their heads.
‘I’ll go now,’ he said, standing in the doorway, his long face white and his eyes never quite looking at them. Despite his height and the terrible size of his boots he appeared insubstantial. He opened the door and the wind blew at the lantern and shadows disintegrated the quiet pool of his face. He went out of the door, without saying good night. May listened for his footsteps, but she couldn’t hear anything.
Maybe, thought May, he had simply flown, like some terrible bird to his nest higher up the hillside.
Lionel was fussing about the bedding.
‘How many blankets, old man?’ he asked Balfour, looking about the room for another doorway. ‘Bedroom through there, eh?’ he said, nodding his head in the direction of the kitchen, his hands caressing the army-issue blankets of the upper bunk.
‘No, there’s no b-bedroom. That’s the kitchen, L-Lionel.’
‘The kitchen.’ He looked up incredulously at the discomfited Balfour and then at the double-tiered bunks on either side. ‘I say,’ he began, smiling broadly, and stopped, not wishing to appear suggestive. It was, he thought, a bit of a lark. A bit not on, of course, but still quite a lark. He hoped his sweetheart would see the funny side. She was sitting hunched and shivering with cold, on the rocker by the black stove.
‘Sweetheart,’ he called. ‘We’re all together.’
‘I know,’ May said, massaging the ends of her toes and noting the cuffs of mud on the sleeves of Lionel’s best jacket.
Relieved, Lionel decided it would be more sensible to move one bunk unit to the other end of the hut, near to the kitchen opening – more privacy for the little woman. He began to drag the iron frame across the wooden floor. Balfour helped him. It was the second time that day that they had carried a bed together.
‘What are you doing?’ May asked. She was damned if she was going to let Lionel sleep on one of those narrow beds with her.
‘Just making a little more space,’ he panted, his large nose resting on the side of the upper bunk, his ginger moustache sunk in the bedding. He positioned the bedstead sideways across the room, shutting out the kitchen doorway, and draped a blanket from the top bunk to the floor. It would mean less warmth, but it did curtain them off quite successfully. He stepped back to admire his arrangements and smiled at Balfour with satisfaction.
‘Very good, old boy … pretty good, don’t you think?’
‘Very good,’ agreed Balfour, wondering if the little woman would perversely insist on sleeping above, so that it would be the orderly Lionel who would be modestly hidden away behind his curtain, leaving May with her breasts exposed in the moonlight. Shaken, he went to the red curtains and drew them together, though it was black as pitch outside. Better to be sure, he thought, though the moon was not needed to make May visible to him. Imagination alone would fill the occupied hut with light.
He said, ‘I’ll just take a walk round till you’re s-settled, till Mrs – ’ he stumbled, not knowing what to call her – ‘till you’re settled.’
‘All right, old boy.’ Lionel appreciated his thoughtfulness. ‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ he said. ‘Shall I give you a call, old boy?’
But Balfour had already fled into the damp wood.
May knew she must look awful, absolutely awful. Probably blue with the cold and her hair all over the place and her make-up rubbed clean off her face. She would have liked to beautify herself quickly before Balfour returned, but she didn’t want to give Lionel the comfort of thinking she was back to normal again. She could hear him on the other side of the bunks, behind that ridiculous blanket, running water in the kitchen. Dear God, did he really expect she would rinse herself in a bucket of ice?
He called, ‘You can wash now, sweetheart. It’s all ready for you.’
‘I don’t want to wash, Lionel.’
There was a moment’s silence. Only a moment. The resourceful Lionel appeared with a bowl in his hands, manoeuvring himself around the bedstead, slopping water as he came.
‘Now, now, little love. Your sweetheart will help you.’
Gently, yet not wasting time, for he was considerate of the walking Balfour, Lionel slipped her sandals free and splashed her feet with water.
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘how warm you are – how we love each other.’ He pulled her head down and further disarranged her hair, which reminded her anew of Balfour. If he slept over by the window he would see her face when he awoke. He would surely see her. She couldn’t bear anyone to see her when she first awoke. He mustn’t sleep by the window. She must make Lionel move the other bunk closer to their own. That way Balfour would be so near he would never dare to look at her, not without branding himself as a Peeping Tom. He would just have to bound out of bed in the morning embarrassed, leaving her in peace to renew her crumpled face.
‘Lionel, I’m sorry, but I don’t intend sleeping in that bottom bunk with you.’ She leaned backwards in the rocking chair and pushed him with her bare foot so that he sat back on his heels.
‘Steady on,’ he protested, knowing she was about to be difficult and feeling there wasn’t time to cope with it. Couldn’t let that poor fellow run about the woods all night. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked, defeated.
‘You sleep on that bed,’ she said, pointing to the bunks at the window.
‘That bed?’ he repeated, flushing red.
‘Not over there. You bring those beds over here and put it beside my bunk.’
‘Beside your bunk.’ He looked at the window and back again in despair, thinking of Balfour. Didn’t she realize what she was suggesting? Didn’t she realize the temptation she was throwing in Balfour’s path? But of course she didn’t. She was so innocent. But it was a bit not on – more than a bit not on. Balfour was bound to get the wrong idea. He said, ‘I don’t see what you’re driving at.’ It was one of his expressions. It meant she had offended him.
‘I’m not driving at anything. I sleep on the bottom bunk of that bed, and you sleep on the bottom bunk of the other one, and Batman, or whatever his name is, can sleep above you.’
‘I see.’ His expression was still hurt.
‘Well, I’m not bloody well sleeping in that tiny bunk with you and I’m not going to sleep up there on my own with all those animals and things flying around.’
He was touched. How childish she was, not wanting to be alone in the dark. The way she had said ‘up there’ as if the top bunk were several miles away and swarming with insects. Several of the chaps in his group in the army had been afraid of the dark. He could see her point.
‘All right, my darling,’ he conceded. ‘You just get undressed and get into the bunk and I’ll call Balfour.’
‘I’m not undressing,’ she said. ‘It’s too cold and you left the suitcases in the other hut.’
He had. It had been foolish of him not to remember. He stood up and took the bowl of water back into the kitchen. Perhaps it was just as well he had been so careless. She could have been warmer and in one of her moods and determined to annoy him. She might have chosen to flaunt herself before Balfour. There had been occasions in the past, one or two, parties and things, when he felt she deliberately sat down with too much leg showing. Nothing very bad, she was too innocent for that, but she did lay herself open to abuse. She just hadn’t the experience to know how dangerous her behaviour could be. He constantly had to be on guard to protect her. And himself. She would never know the torment it was for him to see other men looking at her with lust. It filled him with anguish, it unmanned him, he screamed inside himself. He had told her once what he would do if he caught any man messing about with her. He would kill.
‘Would you really?’ she had asked, her innocent eyes round with fear. ‘Would you really kill him, Lionel?’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘And me, Lionel, what about me?’ How frightened her eyes had been.
‘I would use karate on you, my sweetheart.’
‘Karate?’ Her pink mouth opened. Her hands flew upwards.
‘A quick blow with the edge of my hand at the pit of your stomach – just there on either side – one-two, and your womanhood would fall to the ground.’ How childishly amused she had been, how she had laughed, showing the curved row of white teeth and the pale pink of her moist gums. Everything he said caused her to laugh, she was so innocent.
Tenderly he led her to the curtained bed and removed the coat from about her shoulders, taking his jacket with equal tenderness to the rocking chair, moulding it above the curved back. The bedraggled sleeves brushed the floor.
When he returned to the bed May was under the blankets with her face turned towards the kitchen. He stroked her yellow hair, black in the lamplight, and went to call Balfour.
They dragged the second bunk beside the first and they washed in the dark kitchen, the two men, with the little woman who was so afraid of the dark lying there breathing softly behind their backs. Balfour just knew she wasn’t asleep. She was spread out there with her blue eyes wide open, laughing silently at their absurd preparations for the night. What a noise Lionel made swilling water round his mouth. He had left his toothbrush in the other hut, he said. May was sleeping in her clothes because her nightdress was in the suitcase. He hoped Balfour wasn’t too inconvenienced by the sleeping arrangements. He came closer in the darkness and whispered sincerely, ‘My hands are tied, old boy,’ and for a second Balfour took him literally, and stood there helplessly, feeling the captive man’s breath on his cheek. Hastily he said he understood and felt for the cold water tap with his invisible fingers. Was Lionel stripping himself naked? Would he move, huge flanks scarred with bullets, into the lantern light? Balfour stayed in the corner of the kitchen, endlessly turning his hands in water so cold that it burnt him.
‘Will you see to the lamp, old boy?’ Lionel asked finally. Half way down him a pair of little shorts caught a shaft of light.
Balfour waited till he felt Lionel must have come to rest. He threw the water noisily down the sink and cleared his throat. He hung his pullover and his trousers on the nail above the back door and stood in his bootless feet trying to smell himself, wondering if he should remove his socks or not. He decided not. He crept, partly naked, and defenceless with cold, into the main room, dragging a chair to the centre of the hut, stepping on it with body curled away from the recumbent May, turning down the wick of the lamp, and fading with it into blackness. He padded to the bunks and placed his foot on the lower bed. He thought maybe Lionel would give his merry laugh, but there was absolute silence in the arctic night.
Hauling himself aloft, Balfour squirmed into his blankets and pushed his head under the clothes for warmth. He could hear his own breathing and his own heart beating and the sound made by the straw mattress he lay on, as he moved. Nothing stayed in his head. He tried to visualize the horizontal May, with her malicious eyes covered by the flannel sheets and her busty breasts bunched high in her gingham blouse. But he was almost asleep. Hours seemed to have passed. He poked his congested face above the bedding and settled his head more comfortably.
‘Sweetheart,’ whispered Lionel. ‘Are you awake … are you?’
He felt with his large hand for her shoulder and she hissed angrily, ‘Go away, Lionel, be quiet.’
‘I just want to know if you’re quite comfortable, my darling.’
She wouldn’t answer. She jerked her head backwards and forwards on the pillow and compressed her lips in the darkness. She daren’t turn away from him. It was too black facing in that direction – and besides, that man up there might think she was moving into Lionel’s arms. She didn’t want him to think she was lying close to anyone, not anyone as awful as Lionel.
‘Let me tell you a story, my darling … only a short one … Just you lie still and I’ll tell you a story.’ He was putting his thick fingers under her neck, feeling for the little hollow under her ear, treading the skin as if she were a heavy object he needed to lever upright.
‘Go away,’ she whispered as loudly as she dared, lifting her head fractionally, so that he hooked his arm about her neck on the instant and she could feel the ginger moustache brushing her cheek.
‘Lie quite still, little sweetheart, little Lalla Rookh …’
She lay pinned beneath his weight, his body half in her bunk and half in his own, his bald head bobbing up and down above her.
‘Sssh,’ she said weakly, ‘sssh.’
Balfour heard the whispers. One moment he was poised on the very brink of sleep and the next he was wide awake, his eyes cold under the timbered roof, his chest constricted.
‘Sweetheart,’ breathed Lionel. ‘Listen to me, sweetheart. This is the story of Lalla Rookh, goddess of the temple. In the eleventh year of the reign of Aurungzebe, Abdalla, King of the Lesser Bucharian, set out on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Prophet, and passing into India through the valley of Kashmir rested at Delhi on the way, where he was entertained most lavishly. It was not long before he heard of the beauty of the renowned Lalla Rookh, Priestess of the Temple of Love. She was, he was told, more lovely than Leila, Shirine or Dewilde, or any of the heroines of the songs of Persia and Hindustan. She was small and rounded with breasts as white as snow and nipples as red as the thorns of the rose …’
May didn’t hear the words at all. She was thinking about her mother and father and how long it was since she had last been to see them. She ought to have visited them, she ought to have sent them some money. They were her family. Her mother wouldn’t like her to lie in some rotten hut with this strange old man telling her stories in the night. Her mother called her May, or My Daughter, not Sweetheart or Lalla Rookh. Her mother knew who she was …
‘ … When he came at last to the temple and saw Lalla Rookh for the first time he was utterly ravished. She stood on the steps of the golden altar, dressed in a robe of transparent gauze, with the tips of her toenails dyed blood-red and a gold rod in her hands …’
Balfour, alone in the upper air, was huge and bloated with excitement. Legs, arms, stomach, mind ballooned out into the darkness, leaving only his head pinned to the pillow like some specimen butterfly.
‘ … Abdalla bowed low to the beautiful Lalla Rookh and seated himself on a low stool to observe her performance. First the handmaidens, each one with a cornelian of Yemen about her neck, still in their robes of deepest mourning, knelt before Lalla Rookh and licked the soles of her feet. She stood with eyes demurely lowered …’
May was thinking about the age of her mother. Not an old woman, she wouldn’t die for years yet. Even if she never visited her, it was comforting to know she was alive. It made one old if one’s mother died, it was the beginning of the end. Or the end of her beginning … Wasn’t it futile the way one forgot what mothers did? All that loving and kissing and rocking and changing. All those mothers smelling of woollies and bread. Either you were with someone or you weren’t, it didn’t really matter. Lionel thought he loved her and thought she loved him. It didn’t matter. Either the person wasn’t right or the time wasn’t, or love came out as something else … Take Lalla Rookh – she didn’t really care for Abdalla or he for her. It was just they were all so perfumed in those days and sexy, and it was all right to behave like that in church in those days.
‘ … and now the lovely Lalla Rookh was standing before the great Abdalla, naked to his eyes. “Eyes of mine, why do you droop? Golden dreams, are you coming back again …” ’
That was a lovely thing to say, she thought. He always said that at some point in the story. Even if it was the version about Lalla Rookh and the donkey in Port Said. ‘Eyes of mine, why do you droop?’
Later on, when Abdalla had ravished her and gone away, there was the other bit, the poetry bit Lionel liked reciting:
‘But see – he starts – what heard he then?
That dreadful shout across the glen:
“They come – the Moslems come,” he cries,
His proud soul mounting to his eyes …’
‘ … slowly the lovely Lalla Rookh thrust her abdomen at the mouth of the mighty Abdalla, her mound of Venus against his throat, the perfume of her sex assailing his nostrils …’
Outside the wind howled like voices singing a sea song. The unlit paraffin lamp quivered imperceptibly above the wooden floor.
‘ … naked came I out of the womb of my mother, said Abdalla the King, casting his garment from him and seizing the wanton Lalla Rookh …’
It shouldn’t happen to a d-dog, thought Balfour, grinding his teeth lest he moaned.