by Fiona Shaw
‘You bastard,’ she said slowly, quietly. ‘You bastard with no bones. You’re not there, in that lake. You didn’t die and you didn’t come back. You never even came back to tell us.’
Her voice was hard and low.
‘You left him and his body, and you left us.’
‘Mummy?’
She started. It was Will’s voice, sleepy and uncertain. ‘Mummy?’
And when she turned, there he was on the threshold, more asleep than awake, a little, sleepy boy she would go to and reassure and tuck back in to his bed.
‘What are you doing?’ she said gently, and she felt her rage drop and relief touch her forehead like a calm hand. She picked him up. He was warm and soft-skinned. ‘Did you have a dream?’
He nodded.
‘Is Daddy here?’
She stroked his hair.
‘You’ll see him in the morning,’ she said, kissing his cheek. ‘Sweet dreams.’
In the kitchen Meg broke eggs and whipped them. She boiled potatoes and cabbage. She opened a tin of ham. The night sky was full of stars, same as every night. When she was a child somebody had told her that each star was the soul of someone who had died; she didn’t understand then why that was meant to be comforting, and she didn’t understand now. Insects crashed against the kitchen window, trying for the light.
The omelette was yellow like the sun. She cut it in two, a smaller half and a larger, and took the food into the dining room. George was back and waiting. She smiled.
‘It’s a proper dinner tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Yusuf bought a piece of beef.’
George nodded. He studied his food, then lifted his knife and fork.
She watched him eat. He was methodical with this, as with all things, and he ate steadily, keeping his eyes on the plate. She had learned it was better not to distract him during this, and she waited until he had nearly finished.
‘George,’ she said.
He looked at her plate. Her food was untouched.
‘Not hungry?’
She shook her head.
‘Mind if I …?’ he said, pointing.
She shook her head again and pushed her plate towards him.
‘Not coming down with something?’ he said, his mouth full with cabbage and ham and egg.
‘No,’ she said, and she thought her voice was steady, but something made him pause and look up.
She shut her eyes and watched the flecks and fragments that gathered behind her sight in all their shades of darkness.
‘What’s the matter?’
George’s voice was solid; she could hear his concern, and she could hear the flick of anxiety behind it.
‘What’s happened?’ he said.
‘There was another letter from my mother. I waited till you came back to open it.’
He read the letter in the same way that he ate his dinner, then folded it up and pushed it back across the shiny table.
‘I’ve known, really,’ Meg said. ‘For years. Else he’d have come to find us.’
‘Your brother, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
George stood up.
‘You’d better eat something,’ he said, and he left the room.
She looked across to the windows, to the view across the hills, but the night had come down fully and all she could see in the black glass was the table and the chair backs and herself.
George returned with a plate of buttered bread and honey. He pulled his chair beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.
‘At least it’s settled,’ he said.
She noticed that the bread was cut straight and the butter spread evenly and that the honey made a smooth patina of yellow in the middle. He never cooked, never made his own breakfast even. She took a bite and the sweetness made her gulp.
‘You’ll have a place to go to now,’ he said. ‘To remember him, that is.’
She thought: I’ve never forgotten him, not even for a moment. Only now he’ll only be there, and I’ll never hope to find him anywhere else.
They sat together in the darkened room and she finished the bread and honey.
‘You should sit on the veranda and smoke your pipe,’ she said. ‘Please. I’d like you to do that. And I’ll water the garden.’
She carried a watering can in one hand and a lantern in the other. Bushes and plants loomed in and out of the dark. The rains would be here soon, but she would water her garden tonight.
She’d leave Africa, she knew now. When Will went away to school, she’d return to England. She didn’t want to live with so much water between them. Or perhaps she’d leave before then and make her own home, not a borrowed one, and her own garden.
At the pond she stopped and listened. The air was full of foreign sounds and the wind was whipping up. Her eyes swam. Clouds had covered the sky and the night had grown darker. She set the lantern down by the pond so that it threw a shadow of light over the water, and she wrapped her arms around herself.
‘Will,’ she cried, but softly because this Will, this brother of hers, he was lost and gone, and it was no good searching for him any longer.
She heard the rain even before she felt it – a rush of sound, a sigh – then it was falling, quietly, surely. She knelt down and the rich, warm smells of the wet earth, from which all things came and to which all returned, rose around her.
FIRE
The light came across the bed so bright, it was like a blow to the head. He woke with a start and lay there dazed. Then smiled. It was going to be the best day.
There was no hurry to be up. The dawn had barely broken, the birds still busy with their shouting, but he was awake. He watched the baubles of light run across the ceiling, then turned and watched Benjamin. He would sleep for hours yet, or till he was woken.
Stretching the night from his arms, Will swung out of the bedclothes and pulled a sweater over his pyjamas. On the landing he stopped and listened. The house was quiet. His father gone to work already, thank God; his brother and sister still sleeping. He took the stairs to the half landing in one and locked the bathroom door behind him. The first piss of the day. Aiming for the deepest point in the bowl, he let go and listened. He liked it that the sound of his piss had got deeper with his voice. He’d stood here like this since he was small enough that his mother had put out a box for him to stand on. This bathroom that he knew so well: the creak of the seat when he pushed it up, and the brown linoleum, and the line of shells on the windowsill. Better than standing on cold tiles in the middle of a row of bleary boys and pissing into a trough with no time and no privacy to enjoy it.
He pulled the chain and set the seat down again. Other boys in other families left it up – he’d noticed when he stayed at their houses – but his mother was insistent on this, as she was about few other things where he was concerned, and he obeyed her. On his way downstairs Will mapped out the day, his sleeping friend tucked into a corner of his mind like a gift.
In the kitchen the wireless talked about the weather. Will put the kettle on the stove to boil. He ducked through the back door and found his mother in the greenhouse. She was in her dressing gown, the sleeves rolled up out of the way, tending her plants. He noticed the fine hair at the nape of her neck, lit up by the sun, and wondered fleetingly whether his father ever stroked it.
Without turning from what she was doing, Meg beckoned to him.
‘They don’t like our soil,’ she said, pointing to some green shoots in a pot. ‘But sometimes I can fool them for a while and convince them that they do.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he said, and she looked up surprised, then smiled at her tall son and pulled his head down to kiss him on the forehead.
He made the tea carefully, using her favourite teapot and the blue china with flowers round the edge that she liked best.
‘You’re up very early. Benjamin still asleep?’ she said.
He nodded.
‘Sensible boy,’ she said. ‘And you didn’t wake the little ones.’
&n
bsp; ‘I was a mouse,’ he said. ‘Everything’s still quiet.’
He sat down in the old wicker chair and watched his mother. She worked on with her plants and every so often she would stop and sip her tea, carefully so as not to make a noise, and place the cup down gently, making only the softest clink on the saucer.
It was nearly perfect, sitting here like this and Benjamin asleep upstairs, and the day still so early it was all ahead of them.
‘I’m taking Benjamin to Shining Sands today,’ he said.
‘You’ve checked the tides? You’ve listened to the forecast?’ Meg said.
‘It’s going to be beautiful. We’ll try for some mackerel on the way, cook them on driftwood.’
‘Bring some home, if you catch enough,’ Meg said.
He could feel an erection rising with the thought of the day and he pulled his knees up onto the seat, circling them with his arms, but still he was glad his mother had her back to him.
‘He’s never done that kind of thing before,’ he said.
‘Poor city boy,’ she said and he grinned because she knew that Benjamin was anything but poor, and because she spoke of him with such affection.
‘You’ll take out the Wayfarer?’
He nodded.
‘Better today than tomorrow for the trip,’ Meg said, ‘what with the dance.’
Will’s stomach flipped. Somewhere in the house a clock struck the hour.
‘The dance?’ he said.
‘The Lavery girl. I told you about it when you came home. It’s her eighteenth tomorrow; a big bash. They’re delighted Benjamin can come too; they’re a bit short on boys.’
‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘I haven’t told Benjamin.’
‘I’m sure he won’t mind. He’s a well brought up boy. He’ll charm them all.’
‘He doesn’t charm Father,’ Will said. ‘And I don’t even know Barbara Lavery. I used to play with her when I was eight years old.’ His erection faltered. ‘I don’t want to go, and I don’t want to take Benjamin. He won’t know anybody.’
Surely she wouldn’t make him. He didn’t have anything to say to girls and he hated dances. Hated all the guff and pretence.
Meg tamped another seedling safe in its pot and eased the next free from the gather of roots.
‘You’re going, William, with or without Benjamin,’ she said.
He went into the garden. His feet still had their night softness and the path grit was needle-sharp. Jaw clenched, he reached the lawn. His father’s lawn, a stretch of sheer green, where not a daisy, not a spindle of moss, not a single lucky clover leaf could find a place.
‘It’s because of Africa,’ his mother had told him. ‘You can’t imagine, you were small. He used to dream of green.’
‘Petit bourgeois,’ Will thought, but he kept it to himself.
This early morning the grass was silver with dew and his feet left trails. So soft, so cool it was underfoot that a thread of sensation ran through him, and he ran round the house and stood beneath his open window.
‘Ben,’ he called up. Benjamin should see him running here, should join him even. But even as he called, he hoped his friend still slept because his anger with his mother had slipped away into the grass. Tomorrow was tomorrow – he would find a way with the dance – and today they were sailing to Shining Sands, just him and Benjamin, and it would be glorious. He ran back round the house; he would sit in the wicker chair while the day came in, and tell his mother his ambitions. She always loved to hear him talk like that if they were alone.
A clock struck the quarter hour, ringing out its thwarted quarter phrase. He didn’t even know that he’d heard it but it checked him and he heard his father’s voice in his head: ‘I don’t want to hear what you might want to do. I want to hear what you will do, and when and how.’
He had been frightened of his father when he was small, eager to please, but bewildered as to what was wanted. Now he was contemptuous. The man was so cluttered about by his own rules and measurements that he never had time to live. At work by six every morning, home by six each evening. A measure of sherry and the winding and adjustment of the clocks, glass in hand, by six fifteen. Then the children. Six clocks, and three children. The clocks he gave two and a half minutes each, and the children: they must each account for themselves in ten. That left fifteen minutes for the Telegraph crossword before Meg rang the dinner bell at seven.
‘Calibration and estimation,’ George would say. ‘The successful man makes it his business to know his subject before tackling it,’ he would say. ‘Know thine enemies, young man.’
And Will would nod politely and think: You are my enemy.
A second clock chimed, breaking Will’s dark reverie and he headed for the kitchen. He could smell bacon and he remembered that he was hungry.
Meg stood at the stove.
‘Ready in five minutes,’ she said. ‘Benjamin’s can go into the warming oven.’
‘I’ll have to wake him,’ he said, ‘or he’ll sleep till noon. And we have to catch the tide right.’
She turned round and ruffled his hair. She had to reach up, now he was taller than she was.
‘You’ve inherited the early mornings from your father,’ she said.
Will scowled and shrugged away. He hated comparisons with his father.
‘I’m not like him,’ he said.
‘I was only speaking about the early mornings,’ his mother said mildly.
‘He thinks everyone should be up early. He thinks everyone should work at things all the time and do the same as him. As if he has a monopoly on what is right,’ he said. He had never spoken of his father like this before, not to anyone, not to his mother, but his chest was tight with an anger that had flared on the instant. ‘I think he’s wrong; very wrong. I don’t think everybody should do the same as anybody else,’ he said.
‘You haven’t lived his life, William.’
‘No I haven’t, because I’m not him. But try telling him that.’
‘He’s worked as hard as a man can work. The years in Africa on his own, working himself to the bone, all of us safely in England, so he could make this home for his family …’
‘As he never stops telling us. I know.’
‘And we’ve sent you to an excellent school …’
‘Please, Mother.’
‘So that you can have the education that he didn’t get, that I certainly didn’t get; that teaches you to think for yourself; dare I say it, to be rude, even, as you are being now …’
Will couldn’t stop himself and he slammed his hand down on the table.
‘I’ve heard you and Father arguing about that education. You didn’t want me to go away to school, you don’t want Henry to go in September, and you certainly don’t want Emma to go. But he played that card, I heard him: “If they don’t go to the school I choose, then I’m not paying for them to go anywhere.” That’s not a shared decision, that’s his tyranny. You thought you had to give in, to give us what you didn’t get, a better start in the world and all of that. But it’s all on his terms. This house, this life, us, we all have to do it, all of it, on his terms.’
‘You eavesdropped.’ Meg spoke quietly.
‘Yes, but what he said …’
‘It was a private conversation.’
‘But what he said …’
‘Stop now,’ she said, and he stopped.
Her voice was level, but she was so angry he thought she might hit him. He pictured her battering at his chest, the pair of them like a piece of corny melodrama, one of those black and white pictures from before the war.
‘Sit,’ she said.
He slid round the table and sat slouched down on the bench, his back against the wall, his arms on the scrubbed surface. It was his old place though he had grown so much these last six months that there was barely room.
She took the frying pan off the heat and sat down opposite. She was white-lipped.
‘When you leave home, then you will choose how you live you
r life …’ she said and she paused.
He sat in his pyjamas and sweater facing his mother over the table, so near to her that he could see a money spider scrambling in her hair. She was as angry as he’d ever seen her. She reached and put her hand on his chin like a command, lifting his head so that he met her gaze; and the kitchen, his father, Benjamin asleep, his siblings: all were vaporised and there was only the two of them in the whole universe.
When she spoke again, she did so slowly, as if each word had been chosen with great deliberation.
‘…You will choose how you live your life. And as you are my son, William – as my son – I tell you that you, and you alone, must do the choosing.’
Her words were fierce and opaque. They were older than her anger and fiercer than a wish. They rang through his head and he thought: this is like a play; we are acting something. But it was also real, and he knew he must remember what she’d said.
Then Meg took her hand from his chin and stood up.
‘I don’t ever want to hear you talk about your father like that again. If you have something to say, say it to his face or not at all. You’ll be a man soon and you must start to behave like one.’
Will sat in silence as his mother went on with her cooking. She had told him something he understood clearly and something that he understood not at all. He looked across at the farther wall to the picture of the knots. He knew each by heart: the clove hitch, the bowline, the reef knot. He had eaten every childhood meal at this table and in this place, and he had learned the knots without knowing it. Now, as his eyes ran across them, he could feel the rope in his fingers: the rough intransigence of wet hemp, the clean moves of the knot, the tug to bring it to bear, that sure satisfaction of a knot well made.
‘Your breakfast is ready. And you’d better wake that sleeping beauty friend of yours before too long, else his will be shrivelled and dry and the tide will have gone.’
Will started. His mother’s voice had a mock-jovial edge and he was grateful to her.
‘I’ll eat mine first, then wake him,’ he said, because he wasn’t ready yet to share the room with anybody else. Just for a few more minutes he wanted to keep his mother to himself.