‘Allotment tomorrow if weather’s right,’ Arthur says. ‘Might get broad beans in. Might lift first parsnips. Best if they’re frosted but we could have some with our Sunday dinner.’
‘And what will I do?’ asks Olive in a caramel splutter.
‘You can rest, Ollie, or go for walk. Doctor said you should make effort. Get out in air.’
‘Maybe I’ll take Potty,’ Olive says. ‘Yes, I will. I’ll wear my cherry hat and I’ll take Potkins for a walk.’
The house is warm when the children get back and they sit at the kitchen table eating their chips with greasy fingers. Petra leans over Bobby’s shoulder and takes one. ‘Mum!’ he complains.
Petra’s face is white. Wolfe holds out his biggest chip to her. She looks tired and fat with the new baby stretching her jumper out of shape.
‘Well?’ she says. ‘Tell me how you got on. Was it good? Did you have fun? Did anyone actually give you anything?’
‘It was all right,’ says Buffy with her mouth full.
Petra takes Wolfe’s chip and smiles at him. ‘Did you get anything Wolfie?’ Wolfe shakes his head. ‘What’s the matter?’ She can always tell. She can see inside him and always tell when he is sad. ‘It was all right, wasn’t it? No one was horrible to you? Oh I knew I shouldn’t have let you go.’
‘It was all right,’ says Bobby. Buffy looks warningly at Wolfe, but he won’t say anything anyway. He tries not to say things to Petra that will worry her more.
‘It was all right, Mum,’ he says. Poor Petra. She was all right when they were at the Longhouse. They were quite happy then, all of them. Wolfe aches with homesickness when he remembers the warm crowdedness of it and he thinks that Petra does too. They were all settled until she had to go and fall in love with Tom and start another baby, and move them all up North to be with him. But Tom hasn’t been around much lately, and Petra has always got red eyes and she is always sniffling.
In the Longhouse there was always someone to talk to when you were worried, but here there is no one.
‘It will be good living in a little house,’ Petra had told them. ‘Just think, our own kitchen, our own decisions – no more meetings! No more rotas!’ But even then, even before they left, Wolfe thought that her voice sounded wavery, as if she wasn’t really sure.
At first it had been fun. Wolfe loves his own room where he can shut the door and no one steals his socks or borrows his books without asking him. But that is the only thing that is better. He misses the huge garden and the chickens and the big black stove where you can dry your gloves and warm your bum. He misses his friends. And when the baby comes, when it is big enough to sleep away from Petra it will sleep with him. So it won’t be just his room any more.
Petra doesn’t look like the other children’s mothers at Wolfe’s new school. She wears the wrong sort of clothes. She looks older than them, and she looks younger. She looks younger because she doesn’t wear lipstick or stuff round her eyes, and she doesn’t wear high heels to make her walk like a mother; and she looks older because she looks so sad. There are grooves ready for tears on her cheeks, and very long grey bits in her trailing hair.
Wolfe misses his friends at the Longhouse. They never made fun of his name. Nobody likes Wolfe at his new school because he talks funny, but that is all right because he doesn’t like them either. They think he’s scruffy and his hair is too long. And they look at his skin in a funny way. And in country dancing nobody will hold his hand because of his eczema. And they make fun of his name.
‘You can finish my chips, I’m full,’ he says to Petra.
‘Lovely,’ says Petra, ‘I’m quite hungry now.’ She squeezes herself onto the edge of his chair.
‘Why did you have to go and call me Wolfe?’ he asks suddenly. Petra looks at him, surprised.
‘Because you’re so ugly,’ Buffy says, pulling a face at him. ‘We got named after singers, Bobby and me, didn’t we Mum? Because we’re stars.’
Petra ignores her. ‘When you were born you were covered in long hairs,’ she explains. Wolfe grimaces. ‘And it was very strange because just before you were born I’d had an amazing dream about a wolf, a very kind and wise wolf that walked about on two legs like a man. I didn’t mean to call you Wolfe, it just sort of happened. I was going to call you that until I thought of something else … and it just stuck. Anyway, I think it’s quite distinguished. It suits you.’
‘It’s a bit embarrassing for him,’ says Buffy.
‘No it’s not,’ says Petra.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ Buffy arches her eyebrows at Wolfe.
‘Sort of,’ he agrees. ‘I do like it, Mum, honest. It’s just that the kids here tease me about it.’
‘Oh dear.’ Petra presses her lips together until they go white at the edges, and the dark wriggly lines that Wolfe hates appear on her forehead.
‘But it doesn’t matter,’ he insists. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Well,’ Petra sighs and gets up and collects together the greasy chip papers. She screws them into a big ball. ‘I’m afraid if they want to tease you they’ll find something. If it’s not your name it’s your teeth or your ears, or something.’
‘Or my skin,’ Wolfe whispers.
‘Where’s Tom?’ asks Bobby suddenly.
‘Out,’ Petra says in her quick voice, the voice that means No more questions. But from the way Bobby and Buffy exchange glances it is clear that they have planned this. Planned to find out what’s happening.
‘Out where?’ Buffy dares. ‘He’s always out.’
‘I haven’t even seen him for days,’ adds Bobby.
‘You haven’t split up, have you?’
Petra throws the paper in the bin and the lid snaps down sharply. ‘Of course not,’ she says, but she does not turn round to look at them. Wolfe can see from the way her back is scrunched up that they might have done. That Petra is not sure. ‘I want all that black plastic and all those pumpkin seeds cleared up from the front-room carpet before you go to bed,’ she says, and she sounds as if she might be going to cry again and Wolfe is cross with Bobby and Buffy. And cross with Tom.
He sits on his hands to stop himself scratching, pressing them with his legs against the hard chair-edge until they hurt, because the pain is more bearable than the itching. His skin has been worse since they’ve been here. It is always worse when he’s unhappy. The backs of his knees and his hands are worst. First the blisters come, terribly itchy like little tight seed-pearls, and he has to watch himself all the time to stop scratching, but even if he manages all day he will scratch at night and wake up to find himself bleeding where his nails have raked his skin. Bobby and Buffy won’t have his sheets on their beds because of the blood-stains all over them. Poor Petra has tried everything. First he couldn’t have milk or eggs, then everything had to be washed in special stuff, and he’s had so many different creams to rub on and none of them very much good … He tries to hide it from Petra mostly because it makes her so unhappy. It makes her worry. And so he tries not to make a fuss. But it is like a terrible burning, a terrible, teasing, itching burn. And it is ugly. It makes him ugly. No wonder nobody likes him here, with his ugly skin and his stupid name.
Olive is dozing on the floor now. She always dozes in the evenings, and Arthur chances switching the television back on with the volume turned right down. There is a comedy on about some people who are divorced and their stepchildren. He chuckles obediently along with the studio audience, and is sorry when it’s finished. Evenings are long now that the clocks have gone back. He gets restless in the evenings, always restless with nothing much to do.
At the allotment it will be quiet now, silent, except for the rushing over stones of the dark river below. The earth will be soft and moist on this mild night, fine clean earth, earth that Arthur has created over fifty years. The turnips and the parsnips are huddled in the ground, their pale shoulders just showing above the blanket of the earth. Tomorrow he’ll ease some of them up, the fat and tapering bodies, cloaked in h
is earth. And it’s all there, waiting for him. In two days’ time the moon will be full and that means it is the time to sow seeds. He might get in a first sowing of broad beans, even peas perhaps for an early crop. He rubs his hands together pleasurably. That’s the beauty of working on the allotment – there’s always something to do, something to draw you through the seasons, through the years.
Olive snorts and jerks. Her teeth have slipped. He helps her sit up. ‘All right, me duck?’ he asks.
‘It’s these blessed caramels,’ she replies, sleepily.
‘Let’s get you upstairs then.’
Arthur helps her to her feet and then to the bottom of the stairs. ‘You get yourself up and ready and I’ll bring up your cocoa in a bit,’ Arthur says. He watches her climbing the stairs, slowly, pausing on each step for a moment with both feet, and panting with the effort. The seat of her skirt is stretched out of shape by her huge backside. A memory flickers just for a moment, the image of her young bottom bobbing up the stairs. Oh she used to run about starkers, and he loved to see her – big, soft breasts and all the rest of her muscular, tight and rippling, buttocks round as stones. Now she blots out the light with her hugeness.
Half-way up she stops. ‘Arthur!’ she calls, and looks down at him. ‘Arthur, you never got me any tea tonight.’
‘I did, Ollie. We had toasted cheese. We had a nice bit of toasted cheese and an Eccles cake.’
‘Oh … oh did we?’ Olive continues her climb. Arthur watches her bulky back for a moment more, shaking his head, and then he goes out to give Kropotkin a last turn around the block. It will be half an hour before she’s ready for her cocoa.
Two
Olive hollows the mattress in a great snoring scoop and Arthur has to strain not to be engulfed. A grey wash illuminates the room and all its contents. He lies for a moment looking at the scraps of their lives pinned upon the walls and arranged on the mantelpiece of the old cast-iron fireplace, and on the window-sill. There are pamphlets, and newspaper cuttings, reports of an anti-Fascist rally that they had helped to organise. That was what brought them together, the common enemy. They had marched before the danger was widely realised, they had marched full of determination, and in the curling clippings they march still. In one of the photographs, the young Olive, faded now but still vital, waves her arm angrily. Her hair is flying out and her mouth is open in a shout. She had such red lips then, such black black hair. Beside her there is her mother’s splashy painting of Mount Etna erupting. And there are fiddly things – presents, china bits of this and that, artificial flowers, things she never really cared about, things he’s been the one to dust over the years.
Mount Etna glows now as the light catches the glass and Arthur clambers up out of Olive’s warmth and out of bed. He sleeps in old yellowish long johns and a long-sleeved vest and, shivering, he piles his other clothes on top. He wears his favourite trousers since he’s off to the allotment – dark brown corduroy, furrowed like the earth. He puts his hand into the pocket and feels the godstone there. It is a white glassy pebble, smooth and faintly warm to the touch. The stone has been his for well-nigh fifty years. He remembers the first time he held it in his palm, warm and precious as an egg, comforting, fitting the hollow of his hand as if it had been moulded there. ‘That’s a precious stone,’ his mate, Bill, had said. ‘Not money-precious, nothing so common as that.’ Bill is dead now, long, long dead. But the stone is warm in Arthur’s hand. ‘That must be passed on,’ Bill had said, ‘and I think you’re the one to have it. To keep it safe, until you’re done with it.’ They had been standing together on the dense fertile earth with the first tips of green all around them, and the sky a flapping sheet, and the wind had blown tears into Bill’s eyes before he turned away. With the stone, Bill passed on to Arthur the beginnings of his great knowledge. He taught him to test the temperature of the soil with his skin, to judge the character of the seasons, to watch the phases of the moon and to work within her rhythms. Arthur has treasured the godstone ever since that day and, whether it has any influence or not, everything Arthur plants grows as if charmed. Arthur has green fingers, he has the secrets Bill taught him, and the wisdom of half a century of working with the soil, and even without the godstone his plants would be bound to flourish – but the godstone is Arthur’s talisman and now he holds it in his hand for just a moment as he watches the rising, falling form of Olive beneath the bedclothes. He finishes dressing, scoops Chairman Mao from the bed, carries him downstairs and puts him outside. Kropotkin yaps excitedly from the outhouse and Arthur lets him out, old grizzled dog, wagging and smiling and panting with joy.
‘Good dog, good old lad,’ Arthur rubs the curls of his neck and the animal groans with pleasure. Chairman Mao, shivering, slinks under a bush where he does his business and arrives back at the door, blue and mottled already although it is not an especially cold morning.
Arthur breathes deeply. ‘It’s a grand day,’ he declares. ‘I’ll get off early and make the best of it.’ The sky is pearly pale, innocent, but Arthur is aware that the ripple of cloud in the west might well mean rain.
He takes a cup of tea upstairs to Olive. ‘Morning me duck,’ he says. He shakes her shoulder until her snoring shudders and stops and she opens her eyes a fraction. They are bright slits like the eyes of a little girl peeping through a mask. ‘All right now?’ he asks, and helps her up, props her with her back against the pillows. She frowns at him. She’s never been any good in the mornings, not till she’s had her cup of tea and time to separate herself from the unfathomable depths of her sleep. She goes so much deeper than Arthur, who hovers and flickers all night on the line between asleep and awake. He envies Olive her ability to plummet straight through.
Olive fumbles for her teeth and Arthur passes them to her. She puts them in and clamps her jaws until they sit comfortably. They are sticky still, and sweet with the caramel that is jammed in their crevices.
‘Morning,’ she croaks, and takes the cup of tea.
‘I thought, Ollie, if it’s all right with you, I’d get straight off. Looks like rain. I’ll be back soon after dinner.’ Olive grunts. ‘There’s ham in the fridge for your dinner, you can do yourself a sandwich then I’ll do you chips for your tea. Chips and egg, eh?’ Olive sips her tea. ‘I’ll put your clothes out for you here, and I’ll fetch your hat down. Potkins is looking forward to his walk.’
‘If you say so. Where’s Mao?’
‘He’s downstairs, Ollie. He’s been out so he’ll be all right till I get back.’ Arthur arranges Olive’s clothes on the end of the bed. ‘All right, then? Need the lav before I go?’ Olive shakes her head. He kisses her, and creaks off downstairs. Olive listens to him whistling. Already his mind is on the allotment, messing with the soil. He doesn’t get up there so much now, but still he loves it. Loves it more than anything. More than anything except Olive. She finishes her tea and slides luxuriously back down into the bed. Mao materialises on the pillow beside her just as she hears the door bang downstairs. With a pitiful little cry, a new-baby cry, he snuggles his cold smooth body down inside her nightdress, and curls himself up, vibrating with pleasure, against the warmth of her breasts.
‘Hello Mum.’ Rodney comes in through the back door looking taller and more disreputable than ever. ‘How are you?’ He hugs her so that her face is squashed against the roughness of his donkey jacket.
‘Oh Rodney!’ Nell pulls away from him, pleased and cross, rearranging her hair with her fingers. ‘I expect you’re after a cup of tea? Well that’s all you’ll get this morning. I’m all upside-down. Won’t get to shops till after dinner if I stop now.’ She fills the kettle.
Rodney sits down at the table, starts flicking through the Mail.
‘Well take your coat off, our Rodney, if you’re staying for a bit,’ Nell says. Rodney is her pleasure and her shame. He is her own, her only flesh and blood and he isn’t a bad son. Since he’s been free he’s been coming to see her three or four times a week. He’s a good boy like that, not ne
glectful. And now that Jim has passed on she gets lonely. He is a dutiful boy. But he is not a boy. Perhaps it would be all right if he was, but he is nearing fifty and his hair is grey and thinning on top, and he has no job and never even seems to look. He lives in a hostel, a place for people like him who have been inside. Nell visited once, but only once. She found it a sordid, peeling place. She hardly liked to breathe the stale old-smoky air while she was there, let alone touch anything or sit on the greasy chair that was offered in the reception room. No, far better she stay away and Rodney visit her here where at least it is clean. Fancy Nell having a criminal for a son! She can never get used to the idea. But then that is all behind him now, touch wood. She presses her fingers fervently against the Formica front of the cutlery drawer. It is shameful to have a son with badness in him, and Nell has no illusions about him, no secret hope that none of it was true. She knows he was bad and simply hopes that he has learnt his lesson, that he is bad no more. And anyway, Rodney is God’s will, she thinks, puzzled and resigned, putting his cup of tea down in front of him.
‘You didn’t call round last night?’ she asks. ‘Only I wouldn’t have answered.’
‘Oh, what were you up to?’
‘Nothing. I locked the door against … against Hallowe’en. You get all sorts round these days, knocking, begging, so I locked the door. Better safe than sorry I say, only it did occur to me that you might have called.’
‘No. He stayed put last night. Skint. Watched a film on the box, about an ice skater.’
Nell wipes her hands on her apron and sits down opposite him. It annoys her the way he does that, always an alibi on the tip of his tongue, slick as you like.
‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me, our Rodney. A grown man.’
Rodney slurps his tea. ‘Anything want doing now he’s here?’
‘You can take the bins round the front, save the binmen coming down the passage in their filthy boots. What are you doing later?’
‘He’s going up the post office to cash his giro and then he’s off to town. He’ll read the papers in the library. He’ll have a pint for his dinner.’
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