by Sadie Jones
‘Don’t!’
He loved her laughing and did it again.
‘Stop it!’
She tried to hit out at him, and he put his hands up to protect himself from her. She had a look about her, like a fighter, and he had to grab her wrists in his hand and hold them together, and even then she tried to kick him. They were both laughing and it was either fight her or take a fall, so he took a fall, and lay on his back looking up at her. She stood triumphantly over him.
‘Yah-boo!’ she said and he laughed.
She stood over him for a moment, with the sunlight behind her head. He sat up and Kit kicked the ground about a bit and neither one said anything. She saw an interesting stick on the ground and picked it up, and sat against a big tree to play with it, drawing lines in the sandy ground. The tree was big enough for them both and he went next to her, and lit a cigarette, and leaned back, shutting his eyes to smoke.
It was nice to be with her. It was much better than being alone.
‘Dora Cargill walloped you.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘She’s mad.’
‘So I hear.’
‘What’s prison like?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Were they mean to you?’
‘I kept my head down.’
‘Is it like school?’
‘Except you learn things.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I can make wooden tables. And I can attach wheels to them.’
‘Gosh. I should think life as a trolley-maker would be very pleasing.’
‘Restful, you mean?’
‘Somewhat. Ow!’
She had a splinter.
‘Show me.’
She held out her hand. He bent over her, looking.
‘Actually it hurts quite a lot. Don’t squeeze it!’
‘How am I going to get it out?’
She took her finger back and sucked it and it was childish, and not childish, and unsettling.
‘I’ve got a knife,’ he said.
‘You have not.’
‘Yes, I have. I’ll do it. Show me again.’
‘No!’
‘I thought you were so tough.’
‘I can be.’
‘Here, let me.’
He pretended to reach into his pocket.
‘No! … You haven’t?’
‘No. I haven’t.’
He sat back against the tree and she went back to her finger, trying to grip the splinter, concentrated. A drop of water reached the end of her hair and splashed onto the dry ground. Her dress was damp and sticking to her. He looked at her bent head, and cheek and shoulder. If she had been a drawing, she would be drawn with few lines, and strong ones.
‘Why did you cut your hair?’
‘I saw a lovely film with a girl with short hair, and I thought it would be glamorous.’
‘Not a boy with very short hair?’
‘No, a girl – shut up.’
‘It’s nice.’
‘Daddy was furious. I did it myself, and it looked absolutely shocking and I had to go into the barber in Turville to sort it out. They want me to grow it, but I’m not going to.’
‘Don’t.’
It was soft hair, and dark, and the fine shortness was beautiful against her neck. Not beautiful like women were beautiful, he thought, just like something very beautiful, something else.
‘Why did you burn the church down?’
It was a silly question, and his look said it was.
‘Honestly, why?’
‘I don’t know. It happened. I just had to see it.’
‘It was a sight.’
‘It was.’
‘You should have seen all the fuss.’
‘You should have seen the judge.’
‘They had meetings.’
‘They nearly hanged me.’
She laughed. There was a silence.
‘They buried my mother there, and she never even liked the place. That wasn’t why. I don’t know why.’
Kit nodded.
‘How is it?’ he said, looking at her finger, still held out, and she showed him. He went near to her to look and Kit felt his nearness go through her.
‘KIT!’
They both jumped. Tamsin was by the river.
‘I’ve been calling for hours! You know we’re going for a drive! We’ve all been waiting.’
‘Sorry.’
Kit scrambled up and she had dirt and bits sticking to her dress and her feet. Tamsin was still in her church dress and she was immaculate and cross.
‘Hello, Lewis,’ she said, and met his eye, and was charming, and Kit looked at Lewis and his reaction to Tamsin, and saw that he had forgotten her.
‘Hello, yourself,’ he said.
‘Well, come on then, if you’re in such a hurry,’ said Kit, and went to Tamsin and grabbed her hand and pulled her away. Tamsin threw Lewis a look over her shoulder as she went.
‘Bye, Lewis, I’m going to bring you lunch at your very important office next week.’
‘Thanks,’ he said and watched them go.
The woods were quiet when the girls had gone. He felt much better, but he waited as long as he could before he went home and it was dusk when he came into the garden.
Alice was standing on the grass.
She had seen him come out of the trees from the house and had come out to meet him.
Lewis stopped some way from her and couldn’t get to the house without passing her.
‘Where’s my father?’
‘He’s inside. Where have you been?’
She wasn’t a stepmother asking him, she was a woman asking him, and he didn’t answer her. His father’s house was behind her with the sky reflected in the windows that were opaque and staring. He wouldn’t look at her. She was trying to make him, but he wouldn’t.
‘Lewis? You’re just going to pretend? Are you? You’re just going to keep pretending?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lewis?’
‘WHAT?’
‘What do you think I want from you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t. Leave me alone.’
‘You act as if—’
‘Stop it!’
‘Please don’t be so – You’re so …’
She was starting to cry and he couldn’t stop himself looking, and when he did he wanted to comfort her and it was unbearable. He went past her and felt as if she was reaching her hands out to grasp him as he passed – but she wasn’t, she didn’t move – and he didn’t look back, but went inside to his room and didn’t feel safe there, or calm, but walked up and down and tried not to want to do the bad things he needed to, to release himself and to sleep.
It was early morning when Gilbert knocked and came into his room. Lewis was putting on his shirt and thinking it was very bad that his hands were shaking so early in the day when he hadn’t got a hangover.
‘I’ll be off in a minute. I’m leaving you the car.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’ll see you at the end of the week.’
‘Yes.’
Gilbert didn’t leave, but stood in Lewis’s room, waiting. He was holding a book in his hands and he turned it over as he spoke.
‘What you did yesterday, at lunch, losing control of yourself like that, it worries me. It was frightening. Can you see that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Lewis … Sometimes when things seem overwhelming, we have to remember that we have a choice. I wanted you to have this.’
He put the book on the bed between them and bent down to open it at a marked page, fumbling.
‘This sort of thing probably seems old-fashioned to you. But it’s always meant a lot to me. We can find solace. If we look for it.’
It was the poem ‘If’. Lewis couldn’t speak to him. He stared at the page.
‘Lewis, this can’t go on. What’s going to become of you?’
‘Dad … I’m sorry.’
A
fter a silence Gilbert said, ‘Sorry isn’t good enough, is it?’
‘No, sir.’
The water washed the last of the soap away and Lewis rinsed off his face, and the razor, as his father left the house. He didn’t close the razor. He looked at it, he looked at the blade and its straightness, and very carefully he traced a line down his forearm, hardly touching the skin, feeling the whisper of it, gentle on him. He was holding the razor so hard his hand was shaking, but the blade was very light against his skin, barely touching. Then he put the razor down.
Chapter Five
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating …
Alice was in the bathroom and Lewis was on his bed and they were alone in the house. It was Tuesday morning. He could hear the water splashing. She could have been washing herself, between her legs, where he had been. The bathroom door opened and he held his breath as she went to her room, and didn’t start to breathe again until the door closed behind her. There was so much of his mind taken up with the not thinking of things that the rest of it was having some trouble thinking at all. They hadn’t had breakfast together, or supper the night before. He thought if he could just get through this day, and then the next … He picked up the book again, ‘If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew …’
He got up. Phillips would be happy to see him arrive early; there were definite advantages to sleeplessness. As he came down the stairs he saw a brown envelope on the mat. There were no other letters. He kept his eye on it as he went down; knowing what it was and feeling nothing.
He picked up the envelope: ‘Ministry of Labour and National Service’. He put it in his pocket and waited until he had stopped outside the quarry office to open it.
It was a brown notice, with his name in crooked type that fell off the dotted line, ‘Lewis Robert Aldridge’. Then, below, ‘In accordance with the National Service Act, 1948–1950, you are called up for service in the regular army and you are required to present yourself on Monday the 26th August 1957 between 9 am and 4 pm to the Officer Commanding of the Royal West Kent Regiment, The Barracks, Maidstone, Kent. A travelling warrant for your journey is enclosed.’ With the notice was a card, with ‘Description of Man’ at the top, which made him smile. It said: Date of Birth: 29th December 1937; Height: 6 ft and 1 ¾ ins; Colour of Eyes: Grey; Colour of Hair: Brown.’ Well, he thought, it’s definitely me.
He had known he would get his enlistment notice. They’d given him his medical in prison; now that he had been locked up for two years, he was apparently not the unstable delinquent the army had felt him to be when he went in. He hadn’t thought the notice would come so soon. He put the envelope in his pocket and went into the office.
He and Phillips were a happy team now. It looked as if shrinking your brain down to a tenth of its capacity and pretending you were a small and unsophisticated machine paid off in the world of filing. Lewis wasn’t sure what appalling acts Phillips had thought he would commit, but it seemed that he could delight him simply by being there every morning and getting on with it and going home again at the end of the day. Phillips had checked on him and given him strange glances for the first few days, but now he seemed more genuinely fond of him than anyone else Lewis could think of. Lewis took his approval and shored it up against his crimes. When Phillips dumped the dusty boxes of files on his desk, pointless files – from the 1940s, some of them – he gave him friendly looks that said ‘Here we go again’ and ‘Good lad’, and Lewis was reminded of the Kafkaesque nature of his work and of Dicky’s words, ‘I’m paying you almost nothing to do a worthless job …’ Well, he was going off to the army soon to do another worthless job for almost nothing, and didn’t give a damn either way. The sound of a horn distracted him from ‘Unpaid invoices, 1950’ and he looked up. Tamsin pressed the horn again and waved and beckoned him out.
‘I said I’d feed you, didn’t I?’
Lewis leaned against the wall of the building and watched her. She had spread a cloth on the bonnet and was unloading things from a basket onto it, bread and cheese and bottles of lemonade.
‘I do think you’re mean not coming for a picnic. I’m sure that little man has more important things to do than spy on you. Check gravel and so forth.’
Seeing Tamsin was more and more like being visited from another planet. She amazed him with her blitheness and her confidence and he envied her. He couldn’t think what her life must be like, or what her interest in him was, and while he appreciated being able to look at her, he felt no connection with her at all. He would have liked to be able to join in. He didn’t know how.
‘What do you do, mostly?’
She looked up, ‘What do you mean?’
‘You and most people. Do you stay at home? What?’
‘I try to have fun.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Lewis – gosh, I don’t know. I see friends. I go up to town. There are parties. Theatre sometimes and all sorts of charity things. You know.’
He didn’t know, did he, he’d been in Brixton prison – he’d barely heard of Elvis, he had no idea what people did or where they went. There were great chunks of him missing. He wondered if she really questioned her life so little that being asked what she did produced genuine surprise, or if it was an affectation, and she actually had it all designed, her place in the blueprint for society. She handed him a sandwich and he sat down against the wall while she arranged herself in the passenger seat of the Austin and sipped her lemonade at him.
He didn’t eat. He looked at the way she sipped, and it was adorable, the way she did it, and he thought she was the sort of girl you were supposed to want. She was the kind of girl people married, were lucky to marry. He didn’t want to be her charity case.
‘Those things you do,’ he said, ‘do you want to do them with me?’
She’d been asked out so many times, she didn’t pause at all.
‘You’re sweet, I don’t know what Daddy would say.’
‘I’ll ask him,’ said Lewis, and it seemed perfectly simple and the sort of thing people did, and she laughed.
‘I dare you!’
He walked over to the Carmichael house, not through the woods, but along the road, to arrive the proper way, and his feet were noisy on the gravel as he went up to the front door. He remembered playing on bikes with the others in the gravel and how they had made tracks through it, loving the skidding, and been told off by Preston and had to rake it all flat. Kit opened the door to him and he didn’t recognise her again, because he’d been remembering them all as children, and the sight of her was odd. She lit up when she saw him and he could feel her joy. He wondered what made her so happy.
‘Hello!’
‘Hey, Kit. Is your father in?’
‘Library,’ she said, and disappeared into the dark hall before he could say anything else. Like a shadow in the shadows, she led the way and knocked on the door.
‘Lewis is here,’ she said, and went, giving him a resentful glance that made him want to chase her and make her laugh.
He went into the library. Dicky was by the desk.
‘Well?’
There was nothing for it. Perhaps he hadn’t locked himself out of the normal world; perhaps Dicky would see that his intention was good. He’d given him a job, hadn’t he? And Lewis had stuck at it.
‘I wanted to ask you, I wanted to know – if I could take Tamsin out one evening.’
Dicky turned to face Lewis, taking a step towards him.
‘You think not burning anything down for a few days qualifies you as some sort of beau for my daughter?’
Lewis was taken aback. He thought about it.
‘Probably not, but I think she’d like to.’
‘You think she’d like to?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you imagine Tamsin’s interest in you is anything other than pity – altruistic pity – then you’re mistaken. She’s kind to people. She’s helped you. Don’t get above yourself.’
There was silence.
‘I expect you’re right,’ said Lewis.
There was another silence.
‘Now would you mind getting out of my house?’
Kit hid around the corner as he came out of the study, but she was too angry just to let him go and she followed him out and caught up with him on the drive. He kept on walking and didn’t look at her, and she went along next to him in a rage.
‘Why did you let him talk to you like that?’
‘You shouldn’t listen at doors.’
‘Why did you?’
‘Because he’s right,’ he said, still not looking. She could see he wanted to be away from her and it was horrible.
‘No, he isn’t! And anyway, you should be pleased. Tamsin’s not nearly so lovely as she thinks she is.’
He stopped and when he looked at her she knew she looked tearful and mean and she didn’t feel pretty or like a girl should look.
‘Put away your claws, Kit, it’s none of your business.’
She stopped and he walked on. He didn’t know he was hurting her, she thought. He didn’t do it on purpose.
Chapter Six
There was no let-up in the weather. There was no let-up in the heat, or the dryness, and the summer was empty, with no flowers left in it and just dust, and the fields being cut, and the dark green of the woods. It was very near the anniversary of Elizabeth’s death.
He was by the river. He was always there. The sky was white and pressing down and the slow, fat raindrop fell on his arm, and the feeling of it falling and the trickle of it were sickening. The water was very dark, and the woman in it was dead already this time, and it wasn’t his mother, it was Alice. She was dead, but she was looking at him, and he still couldn’t move in the hot day, and the heat was the thing that woke him. The closeness of the suffocating heat woke him, and when he did wake he was shivering and his face was wet and he thought it was sweat, but it wasn’t, he’d been crying in his sleep. He never cried normally, just in his sleep, and he could never remember what it felt like afterwards to cry like that. He wasn’t crying now, but he was scared.