The Whites of Gold

by Sam Lock

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as Mark, for instance.’

  ‘Oh, him.’

  ‘What do you mean by that “oh, him”?’

  ‘Well, you aren’t seeing him, are you? You aren’t going to have him round here?’

  ‘Of course I am. I like him. It’s inevitable that I shall have him here eventually. And how can you speak like that, Thelma, in such a derisory way, about someone you’ve never met?’

  ‘Now, Eddie – don’t start using those fancy words of yours to me. Just the Queen’s plain English, please, so we can all understand … If he had been here, this Mark, and if the two of you had been up to something, you wouldn’t have answered the door – would you? – and I’d have just left. And you know darned well that I would have.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I threw at her.

  ‘Oh, Eddie!’ she exclaimed with a deep, throaty laugh, looking at me, all aglow with a kind of powerful, motherly light that lit up her skin and that caused the rather beautiful set of beads she was wearing to acquire new depths of purple and gold.

  ‘Now, darling,’ she said, as she brought the coffee tray into the room and placed it on a table close to the sofa, ‘you must tell me all about him. You do have sugar – don’t you, pet? You shouldn’t, you know, and I shouldn’t either. It puts the pounds on. But indulgences are good for you at times. So what’s he like?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ I said. ‘I don’t ask you about your love-life, so please don’t ask me about mine.’

  ‘Oh, I think you do, Eddie. Or perhaps you don’t need to, darling, since I’m always spouting on about myself so much.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, still not feeling comfortable with her.

  ‘Well, what about him, then – this Mark? What’s he like? What does he do?’

  ‘He works.’

  ‘Well – that’s something, isn’t it? You been to bed with him yet?’

  ‘Look, Thelma, I’m not getting into that kind of talk. You know too much. And you can’t keep things to yourself. One word to you about something personal and the whole of London gets to know of it.’

  Thelma didn’t answer this. Instead, she stretched towards the coffee pot and began pouring out the coffee. Then she suddenly stopped and looked directly across at me, and said, in a totally different voice, ‘Are you all right, pet?’

  ‘All right?’ I answered. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you’re so touchy today. Is something wrong? Are you in trouble, perhaps? Is something bugging you?’

  Thelma has this uncanny sense of timing, and can use it, as she did then, to undermine any defences I might form. For the truth was that I had been thieving that afternoon, and for once had almost been caught – and, moreover, by a store detective. And with this being such an unusual thing to have happened, I was feeling deeply unsettled.

  ‘I’m just not myself, Thelma,’ was all I offered as explanation. ‘I don’t know why. It’s not to do with Mark, though – he’s nice, really decent. It’s just that – well, sometimes I feel shaky, insecure. It’s just me, I guess.’

  Thelma allowed her gaze to linger on me a while longer before she accepted what I had said. ‘Well, as long as it’s nothing serious, pet – that’s the main thing. But you will speak to me about it if you want to – won’t you?’

  ‘Thanks, Thelma,’ I answered. ‘If I want to, yes, I will.’ Then I began to sip my mug of coffee and she began to sip hers, turning towards her shopping bags as she did so; and in a while, as part of a ritual we observed, I knew she would be showing me the various purchases she had made, and asking for my approval.

  The night I left home – I am now going back in time again – is often in my mind; so often, in fact, that I sometimes wonder if there are others who have experienced such a thing: the almost compulsive recollection of one particular memory. It is as if I have to relive it and to go on reliving it, perhaps for all my life.

  The pattern is always the same, down to the smallest detail. I see myself hoisting my suitcase out of my wardrobe with great care, in order to avoid making a noise; then putting on the coat I had decided to wear and slowly buttoning it up; then creeping my way stealthily down to the first-floor landing of the house – where, because its door had been left ajar, and because its curtains had not been drawn, I could see the moonlit spaces of the sitting room, with its chairs and sofas all placed in their different positions, and their small wine tables set beside them. Then, through the windows of the room, I could see the ghostly image of the town’s small square, with the eerie town hall clock – lit, as it always was at night, by a pale-green, yellowish light – telling me that it was now gone half-past one; and seeming to assure me that everyone must now be fast asleep, and that the only encounter I was likely to have would be with the odd stray dog or cat. There were no sounds, except for the faint snoring that came from my father’s bedroom and the steady, familiar tick of the big grandfather clock that stood below me in the hallway.

  I can see it all so clearly, so vividly; and not only see it but re-experience it as well. All the emotions that are attached to it are ever active in me, it seems; creating shudders in me, even now, as I see myself descending the second run of stairs that led directly into the hall; then opening the main door of the house that gave on to the square, before stepping across its threshold into the street.

  I find it hard to believe that I was then just sixteen years of age – and moreover (for my parents travelled very little) had never been much more than fifty miles from home; either to Exeter or to Taunton, or at the most perhaps to Plymouth. London and what its reality might be was something quite intangible. It was just a name, a kind of legend, that had now become a goal. Yet I can recall how confident I felt that I would get to it eventually, having estimated that I could easily walk the two miles or so to where the main road led to Taunton. From there, I felt sure I could hitch a lift from someone; that perhaps some car-driver or some lorry-driver would help me on my way. It was only the time factor that worried me: whether I could get to Taunton quickly enough. For once there, in a town of that size, I would find places in which to hide; and even get work perhaps of a kind; and with it some cash that I could then add to what I had with me in my suitcase.

  I can still see my father’s eyes as he sat facing me over breakfast. Grey-green in colour, with a curious overlay of gold, they seemed at times almost reptilian, and they gave no notion of what his thoughts might be, or his feelings. He never smiled – or never at me; and certainly not at my mother. He did laugh occasionally, in a rather dark, almost abstract manner, but only when with men, never in the company of women. Not even when with Amy, who had clever means of humouring him when he was in one of his difficult moods, and who was able to relieve the tensions there always were in the house when the spankings first began. Eventually, as I grew older, the spankings became such serious beatings that at such moments my mother would always closet herself in her room, and Amy would quake with anger in the kitchen, knowing she dare not interfere, since my father always made it clear to her, as he also did to me, that the punishment he was meting out was just: that stealing was a crime, that it was a law being broken. ‘Do not take things that do not belong to you,’ he would repeat over and over again, as he removed the broad leather belt he wore around his waist. ‘Do not steal them,’ he would say, as he raised his arm to strike. And full of anger though she might be (and I am sure my mother was as well), Amy believed that, severe though the beatings were, and perhaps a form of cruelty as well, my stealing was more than shameful and that what my father did was necessary.

  I said I would need to be generous towards my father and not depict him as an ogre; but I cannot do that yet: I can only see how difficult it is going to be. For even now, I cannot bring myself to imagine what his reactions must have been the morning after I left home, when he, or Amy, or my mother, discovered the note I had left for him in my bedroom, saying that I was sure of what I was doing: that I didn’t hate them – m
eaning my parents – or anything like that; but that I just felt that I didn’t fit, had been a disappointment to them both and needed to get away. I was quite capable of looking after myself, I said, and would write to them in a week or so to assure them I was all right – which, in fact, I never did; although I did send a note to my aunt, saying that none of them was to worry.

  I would be in touch, I had written, once I had a permanent address, which, in fact, by chance I soon had. For on the road that night I had been given a lift by someone – a stocky, middle-aged van-driver; who had said to me, after he had listened to my story and to my reasons for leaving home, that although he thought what I really ought to do was turn back, if I felt sure of what I was doing he would help.

  ‘In what way?’ I had asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, once I was seated beside him in his van, ‘you’ll need somewhere to stay – won’t you? – once you get to London; so here’s my address … You can stay with me – south of the river, in Battersea … Near the Dogs’ Home,’ he added with a quick laugh; which was, as I soon learned, a more than appropriate place for him to live. For I had noticed that his van smelled strongly of dogs – that it reeked of them, in fact – and I couldn’t help asking him what he did.

  ‘Walk dogs,’ he answered, with another quick laugh. ‘I always have done … I’m not going there now, though,’ he went on (meaning to London), ‘but if you’d like a lift from Taunton with me tomorrow, I’ll give you one.’

  ‘To London!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Yes. That’s where you’re heading for, isn’t it?’

  I told him that it was.

  ‘Then be at the bus station at eleven,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go to my sister’s now. She lives near here. But I can’t take you with me, not at this time of night. She’s such a bossy thing, she’d be packing you off home in no time. But if you’re at the bus station tomorrow at eleven, I’ll pick you up from there.’

  I couldn’t believe my luck. Just a few hours of waiting was all it was going to mean (for it was already after three) – and I felt that I could easily find some way of passing the time until then; and of getting some sleep perhaps as well; although I can recall thinking it rather odd that the man should be going to visit his sister at such an unusual hour.

  ‘I was due there at ten,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts, ‘but my van gave up on me, the other side of Barnstaple. And it took time to get it fixed … She knows, though,’ he said. ‘I’ve rung her; and she told me she’d wait up – which she probably has done, as we’ve not seen each other since Christmas.’

  It wasn’t long before the road signs showed that we were about to arrive in Taunton.

  ‘Now, son, you will be all right, won’t you?’ the van-driver asked me anxiously, as he dropped me on the outskirts of the town. ‘Look, there’s a barn over there,’ he said, pointing towards a farm that lay just a few yards from the road, and beyond which there was a large, iron-roofed shipping.

  ‘It’s a shipping,’ I said, in a rather knowledgeable fashion, having heard the soft lowing noises of cattle.

  ‘Whatever it is, you’ll be safe enough in there … Just go quietly. And make sure no one sees you when you leave. You look respectable enough, but at your age you’d soon get reported to the police … If someone asks you who you are or what you are doing, tell them the truth: that you’ve got to be at the bus station at eleven to meet me … Say I’m a friend,’ he added, ‘because that’s what I am, you know. Just think of me like that.’

  The man’s name was Rufus. He had told me this soon after I had climbed into his van; and I knew instinctively that I liked him. His calling me ‘son’ had also had its effect; for I felt that, unlike my father, who was so impersonal and aloof, he was caring and warm-hearted, and because of that I could trust him. Also, I could see in him, I believed, the free, uncluttered spirit I was hoping to become; for he gave the air of having few ties, few emotional commitments of any kind, and that perhaps animals more than humans were his true friends.

  ‘Good luck, then,’ he said, once I had climbed out of the van carrying my suitcase in one hand. ‘See you tomorrow, at the bus station, at eleven … Ask anyone,’ he added, ‘they’ll tell you where it is. And there’s only one,’ he called out as he drove off, nodding at me with a cheeky kind of smile – as if he knew somehow that I was destined to play a part in his life; and which, for a short while, I was.

  That night – or that morning, rather – I slept the sleep of the dead. A great wave carried me in my dreams to the shelter of a small cove, set between heavy, amber rocks; and there I rested, and slept, and woke and slept again, so that my outer and my inner lives were one. When I finally awoke the sun was already up, and I could hear early morning movements in the farm. First, those of a tractor passing quite close to me before it moved off into the fields; then the barking of some dog and of someone telling it to stop; then the noise of what I believed to be a bus, passing close to the farm along the road where Rufus had dropped me during the night – which too soon faded away, returning things to silence.

  It was a beautiful day. Peeping through a chink in the shipping door I could see that a soft blue haze of mist lay in the valley beyond the farm, through which, from the chimney of a small cottage, smoke rose steadily into the sky.

  Don’t forget what Rufus said, I recall telling myself. If someone questions you, tell them the truth – that you are on your way to meet a friend who is taking you to London. And armed with that idea, and after I had combed my hair and had brushed myself down and had made myself look respectable, I slipped quickly away, seeing no one and hearing nothing. Then, walking as if I was some student, perhaps, who was setting off for school – or, more probably, for college (since I was tallish for my age) – and feeling proud of myself as well for having done what I had just done in leaving home, I made my way into the town. Freedom, I thought, was something wonderful, and no one could rob me of it now. I was just one night free of my past – of its shade, its shadow and the awful loneliness of my youth – and ahead of me lay only hope, and perhaps too, I dared to think, some kind of happiness.

  III

  If I have found it difficult to write about my father, it will be no easier, I expect, for me to say things about my mother. For what is there that one can say about someone who lived such a guarded life; who seemed to have so removed herself from the present? Yet she casts no great shadow in my mind. Unlike the memory I have of my father, the one I have of my mother bears no great weight, calls no real attention to itself. My main picture of her is of someone tall, slim and rather elegant – for she dressed herself with care; and usually in darkish colours, or sometimes just in black, with the relief of a small pattern, perhaps, that offset the amber beads she wore most days, or the rather splendid set in lapis lazuli that she wore only occasionally, and that had been given to her by a friend. Her shoes, too, were smart – well cut; stored neatly on wooden shoe-racks in the large wardrobe that lined one wall of her bedroom. Not that she was sober or over serious in character, for she laughed quite a lot at times; and when she did, it was a light, silvery tinkle of noise that breathed its way into the air and then was quickly gone.

  Sometimes, when I was doing my homework in the dining room (as opposed to in my bedroom) and my mother happened to be with Amy in the kitchen (discussing household matters, perhaps, or having a chat with her about local things) I would hear this tinkling laugh of hers: hear it rise, break, fall and then be gone. And I would often wonder what the cause of it had been: what Amy might have said to bring it on.

  When I was small – in my infant years, I mean – I must have spent a lot of time alone with my mother, because she had been much less reclusive then, and I know that she took me out for walks most days, usually to a small park that lay on the north side of the town, where she would sit and watch me play. But the odd thing is that I cannot remember it with any clarity. Nor can I remember my mother clearly at all when at table in the dining room, having lunch or supper
(for she was never there at breakfast) with my father and myself. The only moment when I can picture her with precision is when she came into my room to say goodnight. Then she suddenly comes into focus, as she pushes open my bedroom door and crosses towards my bed. Then I can see how soft, how very gentle, were her eyes; how truly kind she was, how thoughtful. She did care for me – I am certain of that, for she used to ask me questions about school; what I had done that day; and sometimes she would even tease me a little as well; and those moments are very precious to me. They didn’t last long, however, for she would soon withdraw, having patted me lightly upon the forehead, and occasionally having pinched my cheek and smiled.

  Why was she like that, I wonder? I cannot put down the extremity of her reserve entirely to my father; for it’s not as if he bullied her or anything like that. It’s not as if they quarrelled – had fights or words. It was just that she seemed to have accepted, and to have done so without question, the strictness of the order he had imposed upon the house: the regular mealtimes; the ten-thirty bedtime for them both – and, until I had reached my teens, the much earlier one for me. The order too of the occasional supper parties that they gave when they would entertain their friends – if one could quite call them friends – and when I could see how proud he always was of her; of her looks; of the general dignity of her carriage; and of the quiet, steady way she had of conversing and of discussing things. In a sense, they created an atmosphere between them of marital harmony and calm; and no one could tell, I am sure, how maimed they both had been by someone or by something when they were young, and how in retreat they really were both from themselves and from each other.

  No, it is the memory of my father that so clings to me – and will not let go of me, even now. His image is still there – fixed, set; grey, grim; almost gruesome at times: a picture that I cannot look into and explore; cannot see beyond the surfaces that ever twist and turn towards me; forcing me to confront its eyes, its nose, its mouth, its slightly protruding ears; and be forever watching them, waiting; hoping for some smile, some sign of joy.