Funderland

by Nigel Jarrett

  Later, as I faced Bee and Bertie across the veranda table of their house on the Arles road, it occurred to me that they had packed away these kinds of thoughts for good. Where Bee and Mavis were concerned, lengthy introductions seemed unnecessary. Bertie’s relationship to them was more obscure. As a wanderer moving idly from one point of remembrance to another, I had simply latched on to them because they offered no resistance. I had nothing else to do, save draw close to new worlds. I walked down from Les Baux on the cusp of the little crescent they formed by linking arms. I wondered whether people who had come to terms with worry ever wished it had happened earlier.

  Bee was at the back of the house, pouring lemonade into tall glasses. She caught my eye. ‘Help with these, dearie, would you?’

  The inside was almost bare: a few sticks of furniture appearing to hold down a worn central carpet of vaguely Moorish pattern. Yet this impression of temporary residence was itself tacked into place by framed photographs of airmen in leather combat jackets. Some were posed like cricket teams in front of Spitfires and other aeroplanes, each a monster poking its eager snout skywards; others were of the same man with the same square jaw, broad smile and wavy blonde hair. All the photos were gathered about a mounted shield crowned by a set of wings. It reminded me of a shrine, a collection of portable icons, which I guessed was what it was.

  ‘I should get some sort of bally medal for it,’ Bertie said as he supped his drink. ‘The French might keep their kiddy-winkies on a lead but that doesn’t go for the rest.’ It appeared that an Arab toddler had wandered too close to the cliff edge; he had grabbed her just in time and returned her to her ungrateful guardians. ‘I don’t know why there isn’t a Danger sign up there.’

  Mavis sighed. ‘If you’d only keep your eyes open you’d know that a country like France is all past. Its present is trivial and its future is sinister or ugly or a combination of both.’ Bee concurred. The return of the theme in Bertie’s presence made it seem as if they had rehearsed it especially for his benefit.

  ‘Bertie wants everywhere to be like the old country, only better,’ Bee said. ‘Restrictions all over the place so that we would all have something to complain about.’

  ‘Poor old Bertie,’ Mavis observed. ‘Every gallant act undercut by stupidity.’

  Bertie smiled across as if inviting me to accept that his cheerfulness would remain invincible no matter how smartly it was chafed by a brighter intellect.

  ‘Personally, I think the world has seen worse things than poor knaves made to step into oblivion,’ he said. ‘After all, this country has a record of making a drama out of an execution.’

  ‘You are mistaking the plebs for the patricians and a gruesome pastime for a necessary act,’ Mavis argued. ‘Even in countries with capital punishment the claim to decency is that they don’t actually enjoy it. It’s not a party.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Bee added, ‘we’re talking about consequences, never mind the road-building and the pretensions to stewardship. The goings-on up there are reminders of a certain grotesque mentality.’ Her wizened features proclaimed that this was a statement hard won by herself and her ilk. Mavis, of course, nodded agreement.

  I felt sorry for Bertie and was relieved when Bee asked if I would like to join them for a dip in the pool. Bertie declined to join us. ‘It’s a good job he was grounded,’ said Mavis, cryptically. ‘Sod’s Law would have brought him down in the drink, and no mistake.’

  As I rested on my elbows at the shallow end of the pool, Bee and Mavis paddled towards me on either flank, their bathing caps like tinselled chocolate Easter eggs. For a moment I had the odd sensation that they were being propelled by motors but this turned out to be a microlight plane which must have passed overhead regularly for all the notice the three took of it. Their indifference made me think of some shared physical defect, such as blindness or deafness, or both of these. I wondered if I had imagined it. I looked up and saw that Bertie had lit a cigar and was releasing his first mouthful of smoke. As the plane cast its shadow the smoke obliterated his face. ‘Put me out,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘I’m on fire!’ The women touched the end of the pool together with their long red fingernails.

  ‘Stay the night,’ Bee suggested.

  ‘Yes, do,’ Mavis said. ‘We’ll bring you breakfast.’

  Bertie just sat there, paralysed by some private reverie. He seemed to know his place. I, too, was dreaming – about that final chapter in which I was to be left on my own, a widow.

  For all his faults, I would love to have seen Tim jewelled by water like Bee and Mavis were, as though mortality stumbled forever in his wake. When his biopsy results came through and we were both asked to report to the health centre together, the well-meant ineptitude of the summons made us chuckle. Laughter then was a major event. We had braced ourselves for the worst, and the unofficial tidings made us feel as sorry for Mrs Hopkins, the centre’s receptionist, as we did for each other. I remember the drive there: rigid with foreboding, I thought about Mrs Hopkins and her continual arrival at grim knowledge through form-filling, card-indexing and the faint marks of bureaucracy. She waved us through in silence. I also remember Tim’s profile, slowly declining away from me towards the surgery window. Six months, a year if we were lucky. It turned out to be eight months of warfare against an implacable enemy, and it was a lingering death.

  I think Bee was the first to begin talking of Cherry Hill, the Second World War airfield in East Sussex. As she described the place – an expanse with hangars like giant woodlice and Spitfire pilots relaxing, waiting, in the sun on battered settees – it merged into a picture from every film I’d ever seen about the Battle of Britain. But it could have been Mavis or even Bertie who told me, though almost everything Bertie said was either contradicted or ridiculed, and this made him an early faller in the race to impart wisdom and recollection. We drank a lot. All I retain is a vague picture of a deserted, moonlit airfield near Lewes. Then again, the scene might have been up in the old town, where I dreamt we’d walked to. There was laughter from other parts of the house after I turned in, a sort of mischievous laughter. I thought of how tamely Bee and Mavis struggled to construct separate personalities for themselves. They were all confident talk. I cannot remember whether the two had each loved the airman – dead in battle, of course, leaning at full tilt on a Messerschmitt, teeth bared – or whether I had supplied this information fancifully to myself. Bertie was, or could have been, the pilot’s brother; it made sense, the image of a pleasant-enough duffer in a hero’s sloughed skin, saved from the ignominy of a belly-flopper in the Channel to live on, blazered and benign, among determined women of indeterminate rank. He was in league with them, the laughter told me, he was their disciple. I can see him now, standing on the topmost rampart, keeping watch as Bee and Mavis pick their way towards me with their arms stretched before them and their palms upturned. Over the rattling stones they come on that final walk to the spot beyond which the dead flash in their courses like shooting stars. Did I dream, too, that this was my punishment for not knowing that to die young is to be deprived of a life which the survivor must seek to redeem?

  I packed up early next morning before breakfast and left a note. Through a chink in the door to one of the bedrooms I could make out the cathedral effigies of Bee and Mavis. In another room, Bertie was sleeping unclothed.

  My destination was Clermont-Ferrand, but first I had to make for Thiers, then travel a little farther south to the campsite at Escoutoux. Butterflies were thick among the asphodels. It had been the same when Tim and I had spent the night there and I discovered him sunbathing the next morning with three Swallowtails drinking at the stream of sweat running down the middle of his chest. I’d taken a photo of it, but had forgotten to bring it with me on that final outward journey of remembering. I positioned my forgetfulness alongside the relentless remembrance of Bee and Mavis and wondered if I was at all like them. At all like Tim, for that matter. From my window seat on the fast train home, the countryside rushed by, but
I will always remember it as drifting slowly, into the past.

  Coker’s Mule

  My Uncle Ben always exaggerated, which meant he was often lord of a vacant annexe, but I believed him when he told me that the Italian prisoners-of-war had been trusted to work in the fields near Coker’s Wood. It seemed inconceivable that their regime of inspired lassitude could have been overridden by a patriotic urge to escape.

  I recall being taken to the compound ten years after the war, when I was thirteen. The huts were still standing, but the high fence had been removed and the silver birches planted by the prisoners as saplings inside it were already forming an expanded arbour. They softened the memory of confinement and in a strange way were a comment on it, as though salvation could emerge from oppression in almost the same image.

  Coker’s Wood rose in a westerly direction, and beyond it was the farm itself. It was to this place on warm summer mornings and snow-draped winter ones that Uncle Ben and his fellow guards would escort their charges for agricultural duties, to which Bruno and the others brought a gritty Tuscan efficiency. They mucked out stables and repaired fences; they helped break in horses and dipped sheep. So sure was old man Coker of their character that he allowed them to help with the killing of chickens and geese at Christmas, with knives made thin and lethal by much use. (It was Coker, a cynical, sloping figure, who likened Uncle Ben’s responsibilities to the cosseting of lambs and suggested that Bruno and his friends knew they were on to a good thing.)

  When recounting all this, Uncle Ben would fix me with a steady gaze. At eight every morning, on rising, he would clamp a pipe between his teeth, light it with a fuss of sucking and biting, and not remove it permanently until late in the day. His eyes watered, irrigating the furrows of his skin, so that he appeared to be in a state of perpetual lament. He had remained a bachelor and had survived without a reputation for womanising – unusual in that frisky region down from the hills – but at thirteen I found it hard to reconcile the ruddy cherubic status this conferred on him among the virtuous with his watery, mesmerising scowl. At that age I felt he was wondering whether or not I had yet plundered the only secret that really mattered and one to which he claimed sole dominion. But Uncle Ben’s dominions tended to be shaky.

  He rose from his chair one Saturday morning, as I was struggling with one of his boiled sweets, and pulled a folder from a drawer.

  ‘See this?’ he mumbled. ‘Bruno did it.’

  It was a sheet of paper on which horses in various positions had been sketched with a pencil. In a corner was written, ‘To Sergeant Beniamino from Bruno Siepi!’ A talent for art ran in one side of my family and there were pictures on the wall at home. One of Bruno’s drawings showed a colt rolling in the grass, its flattened belly like a sack of corn and its vicious legs kicking out, celebrating release. Uncle Ben was fond of reminding me that I had not inherited any artistic skill, and my attempts to copy Bruno’s efforts made him laugh.

  A few years later, Sunday tea at Uncle Ben’s house in the village became a tired ritual. I was off to university and was already overbearing. My parents had long ceased to accompany me. Though always dutiful, I’d rapidly grown tall and boorish. One day, while we had our heads under the bonnet of his Ford Anglia, Uncle Ben told me of a plan to clear the compound and build a row of council houses.

  ‘A good thing,’ I said provocatively. ‘It just offers an excuse for old warriors like you to play the storyteller.’

  ‘Rubbish!’

  I knew he couldn’t defend himself. It was the wrong time. The Festival of Britain had come and gone. A monstrous gear was grinding throughout the land. I was to study philosophy while my father’s generation was firing more and more rivets into more and more washing machines.

  ‘You know what they say: step out of a river and step back in again and it’s a different river, totally different.’

  Tobacco ash dropped on to his arm. I wondered why he had never married. I saw the pipe as a talisman protecting him against the advances of women. I imagined two people arriving at sex so late that they had to make do with its embers without having experienced its wildfire. I had come to believe that those who expected little deserved less.

  ‘In any case,’ I said. ‘You didn’t really like those Eyeties.’

  ‘Bastards!’

  ‘Except Bruno.’

  ‘Bruno was all right.’

  He had a habit, like my father, of only answering certain questions and making the others sound rhetorical through silence. His lack of response indicated that he’d obviously thought about this himself.

  ‘Let’s try again and then I’ll show you something,’ he said.

  I flopped into the driver’s seat, held the choke out and turned the ignition. After two spasms and a lot of whining the engine started. Uncle Ben appeared from behind the bonnet, re-lighting his pipe. Without looking at me but positioning himself so that I could see him, he made signs for me to push the choke in gently. He wouldn’t tell me what had gone wrong: it might have taken too much away from the triumph of common sense over intellect, then as now a dirty word. He once expressed doubts about a philosopher’s ability to raise a stranded car from a ditch, given a fixed number of seemingly unrelated tools. I must have responded with some superior-sounding remark about what kind of philosopher.

  Uncle Ben illustrated the fact that if children enjoy a stable relationship with their parents they will discover more interesting forms of vitality only in ever-increasing circles away from the core of their happiness. Once I had returned the love of my mother and father, nothing else about them seemed worth noting. At the time I did not feel that this was callous. Through them I came to appreciate the idea of an almost unsullied goodness and how few lived up to it, hard though they tried. Perhaps this was why tragedy always struck at families and why aunts and uncles and the eccentric legions of relatives beyond them were always good for a laugh, notwithstanding that each one was the centre of something or other.

  Although I knew the countryside around Uncle Ben’s place, I had no idea where he was taking me. In any case, the journey was punctuated by leaps and hops as the car started playing up again. Uncle Ben was slapping the steering wheel and looking straight ahead, determined to avoid ignominy. After another minute of being rocked about, the ride became smoother and Uncle Ben’s pipe rose slowly in the corner of his mouth as part of the mechanism of grinning.

  Soon, I realised we were heading for Coker’s Farm, because the fork in the road we’d taken near the reservoir led unsuspecting walkers and motorists to a stony track which itself merged into Coker’s deeply-rutted lane. Coker and his brawny sons encouraged weeds to clog the footpath sign at the gate. They could have taken it down with impunity but this would have denied them the satisfaction of mischief. Many of Uncle Ben’s contemporaries, including the Cokers, needed props for their self-assertion.

  Uncle Ben wasn’t particularly friendly with the Cokers. No-one was. I remembered as a snotty-nosed mudlark being discovered bird-nesting in Coker’s Wood by old man Coker – then, I suppose, about sixty – who parted the branches of a hazel bush and stood in cruciform silhouette saying nothing while his dogs ran rings around me. I used to see him strolling aimlessly across his land in the gloaming, his path signalled by the flaring ember of a cigarette. But now he was old and sick and reduced to lifeless supervision of his three sons, two of whom had acquired his sourness. They would have been toddlers when Bruno and company visited the farm, just like me, open to everything but blind to its significance. In the constant motion of their industry, with their father occupying rather than holding its centre on a rickety stool, they were a walking vindication of their custom against our ambition. Uncle Ben said of old man Coker that he’d put the ‘cant’ in ‘cantankerous’.

  The Cokers knew why Uncle Ben had come and nodded when he pointed to the paddock beside the farmhouse. It held an old mare, which pulled the Cokers’ cart about the lanes, and a doleful mule. There had once been another horse, the mule’s more
majestic parent; and a donkey, its awkward, submissive mother.

  Uncle Ben rested a foot on the gate and tapped his pipe.

  ‘One Christmas,’ he said, ‘that mule’s father was choking on its umbilical cord. Bruno knew he was on the way. They wanted to call the vet but Bruno said he could do it. And he did – with some rope and a lot of Italian know-how. Then he went, just like that.’

  ‘The horse?’

  ‘No, Bruno, yer daft bugger! With the others, on a lorry. The war was over, you see.’

  I felt that these were disclosures not being made lightly. How many had seen Bruno’s drawings or even knew they existed? Uncle Ben had a small collection of books, limited yet suited to the purpose of confirming the rumbling of other worlds.

  ‘The horse, too,’ he said. ‘But not before it had had its way with Coker’s donkey. There’s the result. Sterile issue.’ He indicated the mule with his wet pipe-stem.

  During my second year at college, Uncle Ben wrote to say that old man Coker had died and that the boys were selling up to go in for a bigger place. There was to be an auction of machinery and stock. He hoped to buy the mule, as one of the boys had ‘given me the nod’.

  I suppose I got home once a term. Neither my parents nor Uncle Ben had a phone then. Letters were vehicles of quiet dissemination in which one received postal orders and inklings of things going awry. ‘Your uncle has ripped up his beautiful garden and is sowing grass seed,’ my mother wrote. ‘Whatever for we can’t imagine. He’s never been forthcoming.’ This last sentence was meant to suggest a new, immediate concern but it might as well have summarised a lifetime’s futile attempts at union. Surrounded by married relatives with children, Uncle Ben’s bachelorhood seemed like a redoubt, a social position felt to be wanting. These things must also have had their unfathomable reaches.