A Book at Bedtime

by Barrie Shore

  Jack trudges on without a look or a word. If he had stopped and looked back, he might have seen that the Great Man’s magnificent eyebrows seem to tremble a little, might have caught the trace of a tear glistening in the corner of his all-seeing eye. But he doesn’t. He grasps the handle of the great door, heaves it open and blunders out into the night. Hopeless, faithless, Godless, damned.

  ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot.’ And a cemetery garden lovelier still. A place that invites the most casual of passers-by on their hurrying way to somewhere else to sit for a while in a sequestered spot, to listen to remembering breezes that sigh in the trees and ruffle the grass. A place where long-ago voices whisper condolence to the saddest of hearts: ‘Don’t regret, we are happy here.’

  But not in the cold of a December night. Not when the sky is heavy with gathering rain and lowering clouds blanket the moon. Not when the vixen howls and the nightjar screams, when the screech owl blinks and the shrew trembles in its ravenous claw; when the rabbit shrieks at the moment of death; when ghosts tread in unsleeping eternity. Not when the cold grip of terror clutches the heart.

  Dim pools of light from the north and west porches of the church soon trickle away in the murky dark so that the Bethlehem star, that seems to hang in space over the tower, is Jack’s only beacon as he fumbles through the graveyard, bumping into headstones, clutching the ribbed trunks of ancient yews, hearing the noises of the night, fearing them, the wet grass squeaking under his feet, the soft scufflings and scurryings of small animals disturbed by his passing.

  The mist has thickened into a low fog through which tombstones loom and recede like ghostly soldiers guarding the bulk of St Michael’s Church. The newest recruits stand to attention, stalwart and strong; but the old hands tip out of line, as though they are tired from their long watch, while the oldest of all have fallen face forward to the ground, overcome with fatigue.

  Three graves disfigure the gloom with a darker darkness. Three headstones set close in a row as if, after a lifetime divided, death has united the tenants below.

  William John Carter

  21st July, 1888 – 23rd August, 1924

  Sarah Elizabeth Carter

  13th March, 1890 – 20th January, 1960

  Robert Emmanuel Pride

  5th October, 1873 – 17th May, 1941

  But these are not the graves that Jack struggles to find. There’s a fourth, set in the south-west corner in the shelter of a wall to protect it from the bitter chill of winter winds, from which the babe might smell the summer sweet grass of the meadow beyond, listen to newborn lambs calling their dams in spring and to cattle lowing to their calves, so that his soul might sing with the blackbird and leap with the lark. A tiny grave that he comes on it at last, not by a remembered path – it is months, years, since he ventured it last – but fumblingly, blindly, out of desperate need. Surely this child in his innocence will not sit in judgement? Surely his son will lighten his darkness?

  He stumbles to his knees by the side of the grave and gropes for the stone, stone that’s as cold as the tiny bones that lie beneath, traces the inscription with trembling fingers, each letter engraved on his heart.

  William John Carter

  born & died

  1st April, 1961

  O jocus horribilis

  O my son, my son…

  ‘D’you know something? You’re beginning to piss me off.’

  A high-pitched voice in the whispering wind. The voice of a child.

  ‘Will? Is that you?’

  ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘Oh, my son, my son.’

  The child sighs, an irritable, hissing sound between his teeth. ‘How many times do you have to be told? I’m not your son.’

  What makes him admit it in the end? Is it that, confronted by innocence, he is reminded of his own and cannot corrupt it? Is it his mother come back to haunt him again: ‘He who deceives with his lips shall be damned forever?’ Or Eva’s voice from long decades ago: ‘I hate people who lie?’ Or is simply that it doesn’t matter any more?

  ‘I know.’ A still, small voice in the dark.

  ‘Hell’s bells and buckets of blood! He’s got it at last.’

  And if there was any doubt in Jack’s mind that this is his child (he insists on it still, my child, my son) here is the proof, in that consciously antiquated, schoolgirl expletive that Eva used to use when she was in comedy mode, feigning surprise, signalling danger: ‘Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, if it isn’t Mrs Baines.’

  Ah, but no danger here, not in the peace of the churchyard, not when the wind has dropped and the yews are still, when the owl has paused in its call and the insistent scutterings of night have ceased. Not when Will himself has chosen to answer Jack’s prayer, to bring him the reassurance he craves. To come to his father.

  He peers down at the child, but all he can see is a small silhouette hunched up on the grave with his knees drawn up to his chin and a pale face, featureless in the dark. So close to him though, so close he can almost feel his warmth, hear the soft wisp of his breath. And a slow peace steals over him as if, like Christian at the Cross of Salvation, he is relieved of a great burden of years and is glad and lightsome in his heart.

  ‘And in any case,’ he says, smiling through the dark, ‘what difference does it make? I’d have loved you as my own, whoever your father was.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. How could you love another man’s child?’

  ‘For your mother’s sake.’

  ‘You have to be joking.’ The child laughs, a chuckling sound in the back of his throat that’s particular to the very young when they’re wholly entertained. ‘And what if I’d grown to look like my father? My properly one?’

  Oh, yes, what if. How often the thought had tortured him before the baby was born, how often he had pushed it away, persuaded himself that the boy would be Eva in miniature: her eyes, her nose, her glorious smile; and that maybe, just maybe, by means of love, by willing it so, there would be a little bit of Jack in him too. And the question he doesn’t want to ask, for fear of the answer, comes blundering from a mouth that seems not to belong to him but to somebody else he doesn’t much like, a prurient stranger greedy for vicarious gratification. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Who was who?’

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. She wouldn’t tell me either.’

  ‘But you must know. You were there.’

  ‘Yeah, that was quite rubbish. I kept my eyes shut, kind of pretended it wasn’t me at all, like it was happening to somebody else, know what I mean?’

  Heavens, how like Margaret he sounds: ‘If you know what I’m saying, Mr C, if you follow my meaning and get my drift.’

  ‘And it wasn’t like they did much talking and stuff. He just grunted a bit and then he pissed off.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ How much he had hoped, or pretended he did, that Eva had found… what precisely? What had he wished her from that inconceivable encounter? Except that she had conceived, and not miraculously so but by somebody’s seed that wasn’t his. Whose then? Who had he imagined, during those long, obsessive nights when he lay beside her listening to her gentle breathing, smelling her happiness, hating the alien growth in her womb. Someone he knew? From Castlebridge? A man he served in the shop, who gloated and winked behind his cuckolded back? Someone he not only knew but liked? An old friend of the family? What family, what friends? Or someone from back in the days of Temperance Terrace… Miss Madden, for example, whom Eva was fond of… no Maiden, not Madden, Miss Maiden that was her name, the one with the peculiar brother that nobody saw, the one that Eva was kind to. Kind? Oh. Oh, just a minute… exactly how kind was Eva to Miss Maiden’s peculiar brother? If you follow my meaning, Mr C, if you get my drift. And who was it that used to say that? Mar
garet, yes, but somebody else, someone connected with Margaret. Her husband, perhaps, the one who pushed off? Ridiculous thought, he’d be too young, not even born. Her father then? Who was the son or grandson or some other relation of somebody else beginning with M… I love my love with an M because she’s of magnificent size, and I hate her with an M because… ‘Mind you take care of that wife of yours…’ Mrs Moxon! That’s who it was. Old Moxie with her malevolent tongue. So you’ve done your duty at last, young man, and not before time. Did she have a peculiar brother or husband, and was Eva kind to him too? And Ned Styles. What about him?

  The child is fidgeting, jiggling his knees. ‘I don’t know what you’re on, but whatever it is you’re driving me nuts. I mean, what does it matter? It’s not as if she was in it for the laughs, she just wanted me. Any old sod would have done as long as he had a functioning willy. That’s a joke, by the way. Will, willy. Get it?’

  Jack got it all right. Any old sod would have done. A one-night stand. With an anonymous stranger she’d met somewhere or other, in London perhaps, during one of her visits to Dodie. Someone a bit raffish who went to all-night parties and had too much to drink, like the sailor who kissed her in Piccadilly at the end of the war. And wasn’t it much better so? Than for him to suspect every man he encountered in Castlebridge, however unlikely – milkman, postman, the swivel-eyed lad from the butcher’s shop. Ned Styles. And with what grim satisfaction (but what pain for her sake) he learns now that there was no pleasure in the coupling, no abandonment to joy, not even dignity in it. Only a grubby moment in which a thoughtless seed was sown.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘What d’you mean, sorry? Sorry for what?’

  ‘I’m sorry that…’ What can he say to this child of adultery who must surely need to know he was born out of love. ‘I’m sorry I’m not your father.’

  That childish chuckle again in the back of the throat, but cynical now, older than his years. ‘You’re not sorry at all, you’re just full of shit. And anyway, it isn’t me you should apologise to, it’s Mum. She must have been out of her mind marrying you.’

  Out of her mind? Oh, no, not then, not on that golden afternoon, holding a buttercup under his chin. ‘Marry me, Jack.’ ‘I’ll have you know,’ he says, making a valiant attempt to retrieve the tattered remains of his self-respect, to establish a note of parental authority, ‘it was she did the asking.’ ‘Marry me, Jack.’ ‘You can think whatever you like, but your mother loved me.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘And I loved her.’

  ‘Then why aren’t you my father?’

  Jack’s delight at meeting Will is beginning to wear decidedly thin. What right has this child, this changeling, that he never wanted but learned to accommodate, what right upon earth has he to sit in judgement, as if his short life and premature death give him the moral high ground? ‘I had my reasons.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Because if you must know,’ (you pompous little tyke), ‘I loved her too much.’

  ‘That’s pathetic. If you’d properly loved her, you’d have given her me, that’s what marriage is for.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Marriage is a declaration of love, selfless love. We haven’t a word for it but the Greeks called it agape.’

  ‘Well, bully for them.’

  The resentment grows, beginning to turn to active dislike. He has no idea how to answer the child and yet he feels compelled to go on. ‘Matrimony,’ he says, clinging to the ancient rock of the prayer book, ‘is ordained for the mutual society, help and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity…’

  ‘Oh, here we go, better or worser, richer and poorer, sickness and health, yah-de-yah.’

  ‘Stop it…’

  ‘And you’ve missed a bit out. What about procreation? Children brought up in fear of the Lord?’

  ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ This isn’t anger. It’s beyond anger, transcending it, like nothing he’s ever felt before. ‘You know nothing! I worshipped your mother. She was the air I breathed, her skin was my skin, her touch my touch, my heart beat with hers, I knew her happiness, I felt her pain as if it were mine, she was inside me and I in her. She was my heart, my soul, the whole of my being. I didn’t want to possess her, I wanted to be her, I was her. To have…’ He balks at the words… taken her, entered her…

  ‘Shagged her, you mean.’

  ‘God Almighty! You think I should have shagged your mother? Mounted her as if she were a bitch on heat?’

  ‘Okay, okay, keep your nuts on, it’s only a word. He shagged, she shagged, they shagged… you didn’t.’

  ‘You little bastard! Don’t you understand? It would have been a violation, a rape. Not just of her, of myself.’

  ‘Oh, I get it. Like Onan.’

  ‘Who?’ He’s completely wrong-footed. The child should be humbled, begging his pardon, and he isn’t, he’s still asking questions, calling the shots.

  ‘Judah’s son in the Bible. His brother was dead, so Judah told him to take his brother’s wife and give her some kids, but Onan thought it was wrong so he scattered his seed on the ground instead.’

  ‘Who told you that? Has my mother been getting at you?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t speak to me, she doesn’t like me. Not that I’m bothered, I’m not mad about her either. She smells.’

  Poor Mother. Smelling of piety, pedantry, fanaticism, fear.

  ‘Your dad’s okay, though. He tells me stories.’

  ‘You’ve seen my father?’

  ‘Yeah, all the time. We look out for each other.’

  Oh, lucky child.

  ‘So is that what you did?’

  ‘Is what what I did?’

  ‘Scattered your seed on the ground.’

  ‘Something like that.’ How grateful he is for the covering dark.

  ‘What a waste.’

  But was it? Does he really regret not being the father of this – yes, let him say it – this odious little boy? So smug, so sure of himself, and still so young. What would he have become if he’d ever grown up? A man of ideas and dreams, an artist, a writer? Not in the least. This is a child without imagination, he’d be middle-aged now, run to fat, losing his hair, a salesman, estate agent or, God help him, a shopkeeper. A man he’d be ashamed to call his son.

  ‘Why don’t you just say it? You were shit scared.’

  Was he? Was that all it was? No high and mighty ideals? Only fear? Of what precisely? The act itself? Hell and damnation?

  ‘Or was it him all along?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him over there.’

  The mist has lifted and the sky has a hint of lightness in it, as if the moon is pressing against the clouds, and through it a figure approaches, dipping and weaving among the graves.

  ‘Dear God…’ Jack flinches away. ‘Hasn’t he done enough? Can’t he leave me in peace?’

  ‘Don’t worry, he couldn’t care less about you, he’s looking for his friend.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘I don’t know, some writer or somebody, Oswald or something? There he is, look…’

  A portly figure is leaning against a monumental tomb under the spread of an angel’s wings sharply etched against the lightening sky. The man is a mere shadow of his former self, but only one man has that singular, languid stance, that particular pronouncement of self that can survive public humiliation, hard labour, ultimate despair. Oscar Wilde. Who sees Bob and greets him with a slow, theatrical spread of his arms; the two lumbering towards each other in slow motion; meeting, embracing, walking away into the night entwined like tragic lovers reunited in the last reel of a romantic film. And wait, who is this? Two figures, one bewigged, the other bedizened with baubles and beads: Brande and Barber galumphing in the
ir wake like bridesmaids at the wedding.

  ‘Poor old buggers, how stupid they look.’

  Jack has forgotten the child for a moment, is surprised to hear the thin little voice again, sorry to be reminded how unforgiving he is. ‘No,’ he says, ‘not stupid. Bob’s happy at last, and I’m glad of it.’ He’s overcome by a profound sense of release and yet… and yet a strange feeling of loss as well that he can’t quite account for.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re not my father. I mean, let’s face it, you’re pretty screwed up one way and another.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am. But I’m no different from anyone else: I try my best to do right and I fail. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I called you a bastard.’

  ‘Why? That’s what I am.’

  A tawny owl hoots from the thick of the yew, answered by a distant mate. Thin voices from the church echo faintly in their wake, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, till the wind gathers and howls, drowning them away. And somebody else is singing, a man’s voice, gruff and familiar, slightly off-key, and a horse whinnies. Nell! Old Nell, clopping out of the shadows. All is well, his father is here.

  ‘Dadda…’

  His father stops as if to answer his call, but it’s the child he wants, not Jack. Who watches helplessly as the boy scrambles up and runs away, whooping with joy; watches hopelessly as his father scoops him up, tucks him between his legs and rides away into the black of the night.

  ‘Wait… wait for me…’

  But the wind howls and nobody’s there.

  Except…

  ‘Jack… Jack…’

  A figure is shimmering through the dark, circled in light.

  ‘No, no…’

  He scrabbles to get up, scratching his hands, tearing his knees. She moves closer, stands over him, her browless eyes piercing his soul, tongues of flame licking her cheek.

  ‘Jack, my son…’