‘I did knock,’ Billy hears her say. ‘But…’
‘That’s all right,’ his father says. ‘What can I do for you?’
Billy doesn’t hear the next bit but his mother, now standing behind him, does and trots down the stairs. They escort Alice Westerway into the front room, leaving Meryl and Spencer in the hall to wonder what’s up.
It turns out that Alice Westerway has chest pains. Billy’s father told her not to worry, it was probably indigestion, a spot of acid in the tummy. But her visit has had a calming affect. Afterwards, he sees his mother, his father, his sister and Spencer sitting around the dining-room table, talking. They look like four people in a restaurant, waiting to be served. From his bedroom widow, he can see Alice Westerway’s house in darkness. He tries to stare through the gloom. And within seconds, the lights come on, almost as if he had willed it. Spencer and Meryl walk arm in arm to the car. As it moves off, the back wheels spin on the gravel, sending a hail of stones into the shrubbery.
The next morning, a Saturday, Billy’s mother asks him if he would like Alice Westerway to teach him to play the piano. His father is smoking his pipe in the corner, his face turned towards them to catch the reply.
‘But we haven’t got a piano,’ Billy says.
‘We’ll buy one,’ his father explains. ‘That’s not a problem.’
It’s always like this: his mother asking the questions, trying to draw things out of him, while his father stands aside, blocking his exits.
‘OK,’ Billy says, and as he does so his father slides a record out of its sleeve, taking care to hold it only in the middle, and places it two-handed on the turntable. His father sits and watches him as the LP – piano music – is playing. He won’t say anything. Billy sometimes imagines Spencer and his father having a battle with their gramophones, firing jazz and classical music at each other, except that neither would give in, both would retreat and play their music to themselves.
Billy spends Sunday morning thinking about his mother’s offer. But the weather is so good that it slips his mind as he plays in the garden. Meryl and Spencer are spending the weekend at Spencer’s parents’ home in Plymouth. Mr and Mrs Lockwood came for a meal one day, at the other house. Mr Lockwood wore a cap, which he rolled up and stuffed in his jacket pocket. Arms outstretched, Billy is dive-bombing Nazis on the ridge where the garden begins its descent. As he banks to the right, he spies his mother at the front upstairs window. She is looking for her paints. ‘Be careful,’ she shouts, above his father’s music.
After lunch, Dr Roddy Mahon clicks shut his black box of tricks and walks down the lane towards Alice Westerway’s house. It’s built of grey stone and slate tiles, and the terracotta chimney stack wears a coronet of splashed seagull shit. It seems to Billy that the house is carved from rock that has always been there, whereas their own house, their new house, perched higher at the end of the lane and with its brown pebble-dash, bow windows and thick ornamental tiled roof, is out of place. Alice Westerway’s house invites the wind and the rain and the sea’s quiet murmur, while their own sends it away to pester some other place, Mr and Mrs Lockwood’s perhaps. Spencer told Billy that as a boy he would climb into the loft of his house and walk fifty yards in opposite directions above the bedroom ceilings of the neighbours, all twenty-five of them, including a Mr Bamford, who lived on his own and later put his head in the oven. Billy’s father has already been into the loft of their new house with a torch. ‘Come on up and have a look, Billy,’ he shouted through the black trap door in a voice like God’s.
It is his mother who breaks the news brought back by his father.
‘I’m sorry, Billy,’ she says, bending on one knee and adjusting his shirt collar even though it needs no attention. ‘Mrs Westerway doesn’t give lessons, only to older pupils.’
He’s noticed how grown-ups say one thing and then say the opposite straight after.
‘How old?’ he asks.
His father listens to what his mother has to say but has begun cutting old burnt tobacco from inside the bowl of his pipe. It drops into his free hand like apple peel. If he didn’t have to do it he would be able to answer Billy’s questions himself. But for some reason he is angry. He refers to their neighbour as ‘that Westerway woman’.
‘Much older,’ his mother explains. ‘Much older and much cleverer. She is also very busy.’
After this, he regards Alice Westerway, despite her frailty, as someone who has spurned him. He feels sorry for his father, who has had to bring the bad news and hand it to his mother. The other news he brings is that Alice Westerway is taking Milk of Magnesia and has become one of his father’s butterflies. Billy hopes she does not start knocking at their door every whipstitch as Mrs Berryman did at their other house. Mrs Berryman needed the doctor once a fortnight but there was nothing wrong with her, unlike his Uncle Trevor, who had everything wrong with him but refused to see one and died. Sometimes, these things make his head buzz.
Now that Spencer is not there to see it – he is probably with Meryl, placing his hand gently on her stomach, because babies at this stage are just tadpoles – the sun begins its dazzling fall into the sea. It will soon be time for dinner. Mr and Mrs Lockwood will have had their dinner six hours earlier and washed up the tea things, and will be listening to hymns on the radio, Mrs Lockwood singing along quietly so as not to disturb her husband. Billy’s mother has found her watercolours in one of the packing-cases and is in the top window, painting the sunset and the gold glitter it has cast on the water. Downstairs, his father’s face is screwed up with the pain of listening to more music. From Alice Westerway’s open French windows comes the piano sounds he will never be taught.
And he wonders how long the Devil has been down there behind him, stirring up trouble in the green waters as the ocean moans its disapproval.
A Point of Dishonour
I knew Islington but I wouldn’t say I knew London. My daughter had once lived there, a London ‘villager’ in that use of the term I always found amusing. Michael Kramer lived in Alwynne Square. It looked almost deserted, except for the odd taxi. City noises were beyond it, in the background. The doors were painted glossy black and the redundant brass door-knockers shone. I’d made an appointment and I was on time. I rang the doorbell.
I could hear no ringing tone inside but a woman answered anyway, opening the door just enough for her to poke her head around it and for me to see that she was wearing some kind of kaftan. Her hair was long, grey and unkempt. She said nothing but raised her eyebrows, obviously inviting me to state my business. Almost immediately, she opened the door wider in response to something said by a man coming down the stairs behind her. He took over as she vanished into the wings. It was Kramer. I remembered him from the photo on the book’s dust jacket. He invited me in. There was a copy of the book on the telephone table, and I wondered if he’d placed it there deliberately.
Kramer’s book, A Point of Dishonour, was about my great-grandfather, Jack Cowperthwaite, or rather, my great-grand-father was one of a number of people featured in it. They had all been court-martialled and shot in the Great War; in most cases for deserting the battlefield. The book’s subtitle was, Men Who Fell Too Early. It was difficult to tell what Kramer felt about my great-grandfather and his compatriots-in-arms. In one sense he seemed intent on vindicating the military, faced with few if any options when confronted by soldiers who refused to engage in combat; in another, he thought history was not best served by consigning to oblivion those men who may have been psychologically scarred by the bloody scenes they’d witnessed. My great-grandfather Jack, for example, had walked away from the noise and anger of battle in 1918 at Havrincourt, a successful Allied engagement in which three divisions of Sir Julian Byng’s Third Army captured the French village against numerically superior forces. In the book, Kramer notes, ‘By this late stage in the war the fighting will of the Germans was in decline.’ I knew the sections referring to Jack almost by heart. I couldn’t believe that most of these ‘cow
ards’ had done anything other than given a good account of themselves from the time they’d enlisted to the moment of their lapse. Just being there and going through it must have been a sort of heroism.
I’d been recollecting all this, rehearsing it, before I arrived. Kramer led me up two flights of stairs. I’d exchanged pleasantries with him down below and had noticed the grey-haired woman fussing about and muttering to herself in the kitchen. Before entering his apartment and presumably because we were out of earshot, he explained that the woman was formerly his wife and that they had agreed after their divorce to live separate lives under the same roof. I don’t know why he should have told me that. I couldn’t help thinking that the ex-wife had been unfairly landed with the job of answering the door.
The apartment was not the kind of bohemian redoubt I might have expected. There was a laptop computer on a table near the back window, and pictures on the wall: some modern, some traditional in gilt frames. Files and books in tidy rows seemed to reflect an orderly mind. A notepad lay open next to the laptop with a fountain pen resting snugly in its hinge. In one corner was a sort of kitchenette. The room was suffused with bright morning light. Kramer invited me to sit in a leather settee, which seemed to engulf me. I felt too much at home too early on.
Standing before me in front of an unused fireplace, Kramer began talking about A Point Of Dishonour before I’d had a chance to tell him the reason for my visit. I’d explained in a letter and then in a phone call that I had important information about my great-grandfather and that as I was in London for another reason on that particular day (not true), he might be interested in seeing me.
‘You’ll have gathered that I don’t go into much autobiographical detail about the unfortunates in the book,’ he said, obviously not aware or not worrying that the word ‘unfortunates’ to my mind further diminished them as individuals.
‘I read a review in the Sunday papers, though it didn’t mention my great-grandfather or his particular story,’ I said. ‘So I bought the book, only half-expecting him to be mentioned.’
Leaning forward and smiling, he said: ‘It’s very expensive!’
Had he summed me up as someone who could ill-afford to part with twenty-five pounds or was he inviting me to deplore the audacity of publishers in charging so much? I couldn’t tell. His surroundings obviously suggested that he was more than well-off. He asked me if I would like coffee. I said yes and he went into the kitchenette to brew up.
‘So what did you think?’ he shouted, clinking cups and saucers.
‘You discovered something I never knew,’ I said, raising my voice and half-turning towards him to maintain a sort of formality.
‘Really? Milk and sugar?’
He returned with the coffee and some biscuits and sat beside me on the settee, leaning towards me with one arm resting lazily across the back of it.
‘The incident at Havrincourt. I never knew the details but you don’t actually say… you don’t express a view about what Jack and the others did.’
‘You mean a moral view?’
He looked serious, as though wishing me to tell him precisely why I was there. I didn’t want to go into the ethics of war, but I blurted out something: ‘Despite what you say about the mental state of Jack and the others, I wondered if you nonetheless believed in honour and disapproved of cowardice.’
He smiled again and raised his eyebrows. I felt stupid. How could anyone approve of cowardice. I wanted to say ‘abhorred’, but I hadn’t thought of the word quickly enough.
‘Men,’ he said. ‘Such uncomplicated beings!’
It sounded like the old defence mechanism: an invitation to accept, and by implication pity, the male for his lack of deviousness.
It was then that I became aware of a distant commotion in the house: raised voices, which I took to be a heated phone call, then doors slamming and the clatter of pots and pans. Kramer talked over them without explanation, though he must have seen that I was alarmed. Even when the front door shut with such a bang that the apartment’s front window rattled, he merely fell silent for a few seconds, sighed heavily, and carried on.
The coffee drained, I felt he wanted me to press ahead. Jack and his story had taken up a whole page in the book. He didn’t ask what my information was and I needed a context to introduce it. I told him a bit about myself, my interests.
‘I’m keen on family history,’ I said, trying not to lead up to the dramatic act I wished to avoid. ‘It’s a bit boring really. Jack was an only child of parents with siblings who had died in infancy. Tracing the family on his side has been difficult. I’ve begun researching more fruitful branches of the family tree. However, I’ve retained an interest in Jack for obvious reasons.’
I told him more about my family on both sides. I’m sure he did find this boring. Like all family-historians, I supplied too much detail. He continued to smile at me as a parent does when indulging a child in its elaborate fantasies. At one stage, affecting to make himself more comfortable, he discreetly slid towards me, crossing his legs.
I reminded Kramer that Jack was 28 when he was executed. ‘At that age, I had begun moving up the career ladder at Kendal, Milne and Faulkner’s, the Manchester department store.’
‘I know it,’ he said quickly. Something told me that he didn’t. He said he’d gone to Leeds Grammar School and then Oxford University to study history, but I knew that from the book’s dust jacket. He added: ‘And now?’
‘Head buyer.’
He looked impressed. I wanted to say that we were alike, similarly ‘privileged’: at our feet the same world, one not without conflict somewhere but holding out more promise than disappointment. But I thought it might encourage him in his attempts to ingratiate himself with me, his wish to slide further along the settee. He spoke as though Jack had been his relative too. Then we began to talk about what had happened to Jack on the Western Front.
I knew the story by heart. My great-grandfather had been involved in an attack on the northern flank in three successive waves, right to left, and directly west towards the village. The first wave made ground under light machine-gun fire, encouraging the second to follow quickly. But by the time this middle wave had reached halfway along its route, the machine-gunners had been reinforced on both sides (possibly, Kramer believes, by two positions, or ‘nests’, caught unawares by the first charge) and several of the advancing soldiers were felled by a sweep of gunfire along the whole flank. Jack was in the third wave. For some reason the subaltern commanding decided that this final charge should take on the machine-gun post immediately opposite, leaving the soldiers exposed to angled crossfire from the other two. Whatever the option, this wave, like the second, came under heavy fire from all three posts. Jack must have seen a dozen of his colleagues killed before he halted, turned and walked back to his own line. At the court martial, it was said that the cowardice of his withdrawal had been ‘somewhat mitigated’ by his decision to retreat by walking rather than running, the suggestion presumably being that he had increased his chances of dying with his colleagues, despite the ‘quintessential shame’ (Kramer’s phrase) of being shot in the back. However, the court also heard that the Germans had ceased firing when they saw Jack walking away. Kramer says this was probably a lie which no-one was fussed to contest. He makes much of the ‘lie’ on the page dealing with Jack, and it crops up elsewhere in the book. If the lie could be established as such, he says, Jack’s action could be construed as a kind of bravery or, at the very least, a calamitous disregard for his own safety.
After a while, I had told him everything, save one story, the reason for my visit. I was about to reach in my handbag for the cutting from the Westmorland Gazette when the front door slammed shut again. A woman’s voice shouted ‘Michael!’ with an interrogative snarl. Kramer waved his hand in front of him to minimise any concern I might have, rose from the settee and went downstairs, closing the apartment door behind him.
In the muffled exchange below, the woman’s voice was rais
ed and agitated, Kramer’s quiet and pacifying. All went still and he returned to the apartment and the settee, by which time I had retrieved the cutting and was reading it. I think he said ‘Where were we?’ but I may have imagined that. I handed him the cutting; it was thin and browned with age, but its type was still readable after ninety-nine years; it seemed to hold a secret always available, like an imperishable indictment. Above the text was a short ladder of headlines in letters of descending size. At the top it read ‘Penrith Man Rained Blows On Young Wife’, then ‘Child Saw Fracas’, followed by ‘Showed No Remorse’. It told how my great-grandfather, aged twenty, had come home drunk and beaten his wife unconscious in front of their four-year-old daughter. The report was largely given over to the comments of the presiding magistrate, though the bench heard how Jack Cowperthwaite had had a history of violence in his neighbourhood, on one occasion towards a girl he had been courting before his marriage to Mary Jane Cowperthwaite (née Howgill). In his defence, it was stated that my great-grandfather, a labourer on his wife’s parents’ farm, was noted for consuming ‘alcoholic liquor’ in huge quantities, though he had tried to give up drink with the help of the Society of Rechabites in Carlisle. Jack Cowperthwaite spent two years in Lancaster Jail. The undeclared remorse was something noted by a policeman at the scene.
Kramer looked at me, also a Howgill, shrugged his shoulders and handed back the cutting. He obviously hadn’t known about its contents. Not that they were of use to him. He became curt, as if I had deliberately tried to embarrass him, and he twice looked at his watch without saying anything about soon having to attend to something else. There was no other way of introducing Jack’s background story, no soft-bedded context. But in a way, I wanted it to be dramatic. Seeking a way of doing that without having him dismiss the information before sliding further towards me had proved impossible. Perhaps I’m over-sensitive. Perhaps Michael Kramer, in old Westmoreland dialect, was ‘a man o’ harns’, a brainy type, whose interest in what I’d come to say was only academic.
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