She chuckles and shakes her head. They were happy, and they were in love. They were not approved of but nobody could say that they were not happy.
She puts Arthur’s book down and picks up Under the Greenwood Tree. There is her name in the front: ‘Olive Owens, September 1943’, in her own handwriting. The book was a birthday gift from Arthur. He had sent it to her from Norfolk. She remembers unwrapping the brown-paper parcel, and opening the book to begin reading immediately and finding that Arthur had underlined the first paragraph.
To dwellers in the wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the notes of such trees as they shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.
Olive reads slowly, frowning, her lips moving with the effort. It meant something once. In the war Arthur had sent it to her because it meant something to him. Arthur had had to go away during the war because he refused to fight. Brave man. And how she had loved him and respected him. He worked on a farm in Norfolk and he grew passionate about the land. He met others with the same passion for cultivation and for comradeship. For years they had been mostly apart. She flicks through the pages and a dead flat thing, a brownish thing, flutters out.
It is a petal, the petal of a pressed flower. A rose petal? She supposes it came from Arthur, but that memory has gone.
In the years before the war he was full of fire. Mein Kampf had been published and people were reading it and Arthur said the world was threatened with another war. Olive had strained not to believe him, and they had quarrelled, but oh how terribly right he had turned out to be. He may not have had much of an education but he had a nose for the way things were. In his union he was respected, all his life, looked up to and respected. The lead-up to the war was all meetings and rallies and conferences. They had made an anti-war exhibition and sent it all over England. They’d tried to anticipate what the outcome of a second world war would be. But they were wrong. Even Arthur was wrong. The truth was so much worse than they had imagined – they who were accused of scare-mongering.
In those years before the war they’d hardly seen each other. Been together, yes, but hardly had time to notice, caught up in the terrible heady excitement and fear.
And then there was the war, and their separation, and then the time after the war when Arthur lost his fire. Oh he had still dreamt and how she had loved him with his earthy fingers and his dreams.
Between Olive’s fingers the rose petal dissolves into flakes. She did love Arthur but … if it had only been Arthur that she loved.
If only she had been satisfied. Her memory travels towards darkness now, towards a place where she does not willingly go. She frowns at the pages of the books until the jumping words settle down, and she forces herself to try and make sense of them and of the doings of the Mellstock parish choir among the creaking trees.
Arthur goes out to search for Olive’s hat. He takes Kropotkin, who is none the worse for his experience, and together they search in the gutter and under the cars, but they have no luck. It is a grim afternoon now, a proper November afternoon: the paving stones and the slate roofs glint wetly in the light of the watery circle that could be the sun or could be the moon. Drips hang from every twig, every sad privet hedge, and Arthur thinks longingly of his allotment. He fingers the godstone in his pocket.
Olive is getting to be a proper worry nowadays. It is so hard to leave her. It is cruel to leave her for too long, for she loses her bearings. Olive. Desirable Olive. Bright Olive who always knew her mind; who refused to marry him on principle; who campaigned against the war and bravely spent the wartime nights fire-watching or driving ambulances through the blazing streets. His Olive who can’t cope now with taking a dog for a short walk. Arthur sniffs. The coldness brings a drop to the end of his nose, but it is sadness that makes his eyes swim. The godstone is warm in his clutch. It will last for ever, stone, unlike flesh, unlike mind, and somehow that is a comfort. Arthur is too in tune with the rising and the dying-away of the seasons, the endless cycle of ends and beginnings, to be in awe of death. But he does love Olive. And it pains him to see her decline.
The hat is nowhere to be seen; some kid must have made off with it. Potkins has had enough. He’s decided it’s time for his tea and Arthur lets himself be pulled back up the hill. Life is full of sadness and madness, he thinks, and the loss of a cherry hat can break an old woman’s heart.
Five
Rodney has turned up for his tea. Selflessly, Nell serves him her piece of smoked haddock on toast with a poached egg, and makes do with an egg herself.
‘He used to love this,’ Rodney says, tucking in. ‘Remember, Mum? They used to have it for Saturday tea, all round the fire. Rodney and Mum and Dad. Trays on their knees. Only time they were ever allowed to eat in front room.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t sit at the table with your coat on,’ sniffs Nell. ‘Anyone would think was a transport café to look at you.’
‘Sorry.’ Rodney stands up and takes off his donkey jacket. Nell whisks it away and hangs it in the cellar head. There is a blast of cold musty air from the cellar before Nell closes the door. ‘It’s none too warm in here,’ Rodney remarks.
‘It’s quite sufficiently warm, Rodney. You have to expect a bit of a chill this time of year.’
‘He had a bit of luck at dogs, last night.’
Nell sniffs. Rodney has a globule of egg-yolk on his chin. Remembering gentlemanly Jim, knowing her own background, it is hard to credit that this lout is really their child. Lout. She suffers the word, for if he is a lout, if he is worse, then perhaps it is her own fault. Rodney isn’t like most boys … men. He needs more supervision, a mother’s supervision.
She rinses her hands under the tap and then sits back down opposite him. ‘Rodney,’ she says. ‘You asked me yesterday if you could move back home …’
‘Yes …’ Rodney looks at her eagerly, his eyes sharp points behind his thick lenses.
‘Well I’ve reconsidered. You can move back if you wish. But …’ she holds up her hand to stall his response, ‘there are conditions.’
‘He’ll do anything. Anything.’
‘I want your hair cut. I want you smartened up. I want to see you in a job. No more time-wasting, betting, drinking your money away.’
‘Anything.’
Nell controls the twitching of her lips. It is good to please, to have the power to please someone so. And perhaps it will work out for the best. Once she’s in control, she might make something of him yet. She pours them each a cup of tea, and arranges the iced fancies on a paper doily.
‘Can he see his room?’ Rodney asks. He sinks his teeth into a yellow fondant diamond and crumbs rain down his front. Nell’s fingers fidget towards the sink, towards the J Cloth, but she is a model of restraint this evening.
‘In a bit,’ she says. ‘I’ll just get the pots out of the way first.’ She moves to the sink and turns on the hot tap.
‘He’ll just go up and look.’ Rodney stands up. ‘No need for you to come.’ But Nell dries her hands hastily. She doesn’t want him up there alone. Not yet. That room is her treasure, her pleasure. He hasn’t been in it for years, decades. He hasn’t slept at home since before the trouble and the room is still a boy’s room, her boy’s room, nothing to do with this man. She follows him up the stairs to the small, cold back bedroom. It is a clean room, a museum of Rodney’s childhood. The exhibits are arranged on the shelves with care, and not a speck of dust among them. There are cars and boats and trains. There are aeroplanes constructed from balsa kits, suspended from the ceiling. There is a Meccano crane, its hook dangling emptily. There are books: Biggles and Jennings and Boy’s Own annuals, fairy tales and poetry.
Reclining on the pillow of Rodney’s bed, a narrow bed with a blue candle
wick bedspread, is Mr Wog, Rodney’s golliwog, his face as black and beaming as ever. Rodney, wonderingly, picks things up, puts them down all awry. ‘You’ve kept his things. All his things. His Model T Ford, all his Dinkies.’
‘It’s all here. All as it was when you left. You were only seventeen, and I hoped, we hoped, your dad and I, we just hoped you’d be back. “He’ll see sense,” he used to say. “Our Rodney’s no fool. He knows where he’s best off.” He so wanted you to take your chances, go to university. Could never believe that you’d throw it all away. “If I’d had his chances,” he used to say of an evening when it was all quiet. “Such a bright lad. If only I’d had his chances, what wouldn’t I have done? But he’ll be back. He knows which side his bread’s buttered.” But he was wrong, wasn’t he? Nearly broke his heart, you did, our Rodney.’
Rodney reaches up and swings one of the aeroplanes. ‘His dad put these up for him, with his little tacks and his ladder. And he used to watch them at night. He used to dream of flying.’
‘And then when we heard of you next – given you up for dead we had. Ten years! Whatever had we done to deserve that? When we heard of you next it was only because you were in trouble. Only because you needed help. And such trouble! We couldn’t understand it. Your dad he just couldn’t comprehend. Grey he went, when we got the call. Weren’t we good parents to you Rodney? Weren’t we?’ Nell’s voice has risen to a wail and there are spots of pink in her cheeks. Rodney’s face too is red. ‘Filthy,’ she shrieks and Rodney flinches. ‘Filthy, filthy, filthy. I’ve tried Rodney since that day to make things clean, to keep things clean. How any child of Jim’s, any child of mine could be so filthy …’ her voice trails away. Rodney shrugs. He sits down on the bed and picks up Mr Wog.
‘And don’t sit on that bedspread!’ Nell snaps, but Rodney stays put. ‘Look around this room,’ continues Nell. ‘Just you use your eyes and look. Look at the toys and the books. Look at the wallpaper. Cowboys on the wallpaper. And Indians! What more could a lad want, eh? What more could we have done? Ungrateful wretch, that’s what you are. And I’m just thankful your dad – God rest his soul – is good and dead to spare him the sight of you now.’
Rodney has moved to the top of the bed. He curls his knees to his chest and hugs Mr Wog tightly to him.
‘Look at you!’ Nell jeers. ‘A grown man! And didn’t I tell you not to sit on that bedspread? I’ve kept it nice without your help all these years … Oh and you broke your father’s heart. Oh yes you did. And mine too while you were at it. When I think of the times I was up in the night to you, what with your croup and your mumps and your nightmares. Did you ever, ever once, hear a word of complaint? Did you? And there was Daphne parading her perfect Miles in front of us. Just to show us. Just to show us. Why couldn’t you have been more like Miles, eh? eh? Weren’t we good enough parents for you? Eh? eh?’
‘Fuck off,’ says Rodney quietly and Nell flinches. He might as well throw a bucket of manure at the walls as use that language in here.
‘Don’t you use that word to me, Rodney! Not in my home.’
‘Oh piss off.’ Rodney’s voice rises. ‘Fuck off you cold old, fucking old bitch!’ Spit flies from his mouth as he shouts.
Nell takes a deep breath. Fear and anger fuse in her breast and something like violence flows along her arms and she has to hold them stiff against her sides to stop herself grabbing something and hurling it at him. She is afraid not only of him but of the rage inside her own body, her own controlled body. She calms her breathing using a technique she learnt from breakfast television. Breathe in for ten, out for ten, and so on, until the heartbeat slows, until she regains control. The room is quiet but for her own breathing and a sniffling noise from Rodney.
‘I will ask you to leave now,’ says Nell.
‘Oh no.’ Rodney’s voice sounds peculiar, a sort of high-pitched, childish whine. He is curled tight around Mr Wog, and his face seems not angry now, but scared. ‘He’s not leaving now because if he does you’ll never have him back. He knows that. He knows you. You’re angry with him because he swore, because he’s sitting on the precious bedspread. Once you locked him under the stairs for that.’
‘I did no such thing!’
‘All night. He cried all night.’
‘What nonsense!’
‘And if he goes now, you’ll never have him back.’
‘This is my house, and I’m asking you to leave. Son or no son.’
Rodney begins to cry. Nell thinks that he is mad, mad to make up such lies about her. For she did her best, and a boy has to be punished, there has to be discipline. To make such a fuss! He takes off his glasses and scrubs at his eyes with his fists. His eyes are mean and red-rimmed. All the lashes, the lovely long lashes – wasted on a boy they used to say, the women who admired him in his pram – have fallen out. His face crumples horribly into greasy folds as he cries. There is something disgusting about the tears of a grown-up man. A kind of discharge, a diseased overflowing, unwholesome. She never saw his father cry, not once in more than fifty years of marriage. Not Jim.
‘I’ll leave you to pull yourself together,’ says Nell. She is at a loss. The thing to do when people cry is to comfort them, hold them, pat them, dry their tears. When Rodney was a baby she could always make it right, make it all better, just by holding him tight, just by murmuring into his silky hair. But she cannot bring herself to touch this greasy oaf, crumpling and damping the beautiful blue candlewick. She feels the first tendrils of a headache creeping round from the back of her neck towards her forehead. When they join she will be done in, and bed will be the only place.
In Olive’s head there is a song. The words of the song go on and on, round and round like a merry-go-round. She can almost feel them spin. The room is full of words tonight. They spill from the tidy know-it-all lips of the television newscaster until the room is awash with them. It is the reading that’s done it, the trying to read. Something has been dislodged in her brain but it is just words, just a welter of unsorted words. There is no sense in it, no meaning. It is chaos. And the newscaster keeps on churning them out, words and words and words about murder and Poland and money and freedom but the edges are not clear. It is not plain where one thing ends and another begins and it is no good trying to make sense of it, there is too much of it, too many words and what with the raggle-taggle words of the song spinning, it is too much to bear.
‘Artie!’ cries Olive, and he, who has been watching her face as she struggles, gets up immediately.
‘I’ll switch it off.’
His chair creaks as he settles back down. It is quieter, though the ghosts of the words hang in the air, fading only gradually. And the words still rattle inside.
Olive squeezes her eyes shut, squeezes them so hard that the darkness sparkles. She can feel Arthur looking at her, hear him sigh. All the bloody years he’s been there. All the bloody years. And where in the world have they gone? It’s like a game, a playground game, suddenly you’re out, you’ve had your turn and you’re out, or the bell goes. All those years since she first clapped eyes on him, all those years that have just gone, like a mistake, like a present snatched away from under her nose. But then it was a life as valid as any other, she must suppose. She worked, he worked, and not just for themselves, they were political, they thought about the state of the world – but the state it’s in now is beyond her, and the news is like fragments, puzzle pieces all messed up and no picture to go by and anyhow, who knows if there are any pieces missing? She snorts, impatient with the fancy of it, everything like something else now in her mind, nothing just itself.
She concentrates. She concentrates on remembering Arthur, for that she can remember, every detail as if through a microscope. Arthur with the sun always in his eyes, although of course there could not always have been sun, but still, there he is with the sun in his eyes, blinking and grinning and pushing a lock of his black hair back from his face. And his pullover was green and it had a darn, a bad darn, worse than the hole wou
ld have been. And he hadn’t had any schooling to speak of and Nell looked down, no doubt, and Jim – though who knows what went on in that one’s head – and Arthur always pushed that lock of hair back as he spoke and he might not have had time for school as a lad but he read books, oh yes, and his brain was like fly-paper the way things stuck, every bloody word he read stuck, and he had ideas, he made patterns from the things he read, and he had ideas and he dazzled Olive with his ideas and he dazzled others too, and she used to love to watch him at meetings, she loved to watch other people watching him, watching the light in his eyes, and his brown hand pushing that lock of hair back from his face.
She opens her eyes and there is Arthur on the big chair in the cluttered room. Little shrivelled Arthur. They were the same size once, almost. Funny how she has swelled and he has shrunk about his bones. The first time they met he was handing out leaflets in front of the town hall, leaflets with red borders and swastikas on them, The Threat of Fascism, or Fascism the Threat, or something like, and afterwards he’d taken her to tea and she’d watched the way his fingers – fingers with earth under the nails, oh he was particular about the house she found later, but always there was earth under his nails – and she watched the way his fingers held the teacup and she’d wanted them on her, all over her, and inside her, and that was that.
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