by Unknown
They left the gate open for Joseph and George to shut on their return.
‘Nothing to get out anyway,’ remarked Lionel. They carried the bed at breast height, Lionel’s red face smiling through the bars at Balfour walking backwards through the field. ‘Not going too fast am I, old chap?’
‘No, no it’s all right.’
‘Marvellous air, marvellous.’
Balfour agreed.
‘Been here long?’
‘Yes – well, a c-couple of days that is.’
‘I see.’ Lionel thought perhaps he was shy. It was odd how some people found such difficulty in communicating. He himself had always been able to communicate. His army training, he supposed. Good fellow though, he thought, looking at the marked face and the well-developed shoulders. Salt of the earth, that kind. He prided himself on being a good judge of character. Had to be during the war. Make one mistake in a chap’s ability and it could mean a platoon wiped out. The thought bursting out beneath his ginger moustache, he confided: ‘Reminds me of the old days, this. In the war, you know. Carrying supplies up to the line. An army marches on its stomach and all that.’ Short of breath, sweat dripping into his eyes, he shot a blind glance at his companion. ‘Before your time, of course.’
‘I never even got to do my National Service,’ admitted Balfour.
‘Oh, how’s that?’
Without waiting for a reply, Lionel puffed on. ‘Best training a chap could have, best discipline in the world. Quite indescribable. Seen all types from all walks of life, and – make no bones about it – it separates the wheat from the chaff.’
Balfour was unhappy about the night before them. He hoped somebody would explain to Lionel the sleeping arrangements. Even if Lionel did seem to care for barrack-room life, he would hardly approve of his wife dossing down in the same cubicle as another recruit. Balfour hoped he would take it upon himself to separate the wheat from the chaff and allocate another room to himself and his spouse.
‘Ho, there,’ Lionel shouted, face scarlet with exertion. They were almost at the hut. ‘May, sweetheart.’
Behind his back Balfour heard May reply, ‘I’m here, Lionel.’ She was leaning against the door of the hut. Through the window Dotty could be seen filling the kettle with water.
‘Isn’t it marvellous, sweetheart?’ asked Lionel, gazing about him at the greenness and the shade.
Lionel spoke the endearment in a natural way. Balfour recognized that. It wasn’t just a word tacked on to a sentence that was banal. She was his sweetheart. ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’ Lionel would continue to name her when they were alone. But then they weren’t going to be alone. He, Balfour, would lie close to them. ‘Making tea, Dotty,’ he called, unable to go into the hut for the upwards swell of May’s breasts and the perfume that covered her like a cloak.
At that moment Lionel, as if overcome by the quality of the air and the scenery about them, ran away from his sweetheart in the doorway and went hopping towards the trees, his brown shoes dancing under the leaves and a white moon of baldness, not previously seen, rising across the slopes of his ginger head. Sounds came from him like an elephant trumpeting.
‘Goodness,’ May said and went into the hut, perhaps in disgust, leaving only Balfour to see Roland running straight into Lionel’s arms. The child was swung into the air and down again and held against the grandfatherly moustache and kissed and borne with gusto and hilarity back to the hut and up the steps.
‘Look what I’ve found,’ Lionel said archly, holding Roland like a baby.
‘Hallo, Roland,’ said May.
‘I’ve found a Roland, and such a big Roland. My word he’s a big Roland.’ The big Roland was swung upwards again to the ceiling. ‘Too big for tricks now … much too big, aren’t you?’
‘He’ll be sick if you keep doing that,’ May told him.
‘Not big Roland … not our big Roland … Oh, dear no. No fear of that.’ Lionel was loth to put his playmate down. He held him in his arms and glowed with pride and tenderness.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ Roland said. ‘Nobody said you were coming.’
May sat smiling at the boy and the man, tapping her tinted nails against the surface of the table, not caring whether they had been expected or not. She’d told Lionel he was a fool to write to Joseph. She’d told him, hadn’t she, that it was just one of those invitations thrown out after a few drinks and never intended to be taken seriously. And who the hell wanted to spend a couple of weeks right out in the country miles away from the shops and things? It wasn’t as if they were friends of Joseph’s. She knew him from the old days in Liverpool, and that fat wife of his and Dotty too – but Lionel hadn’t really known them. He was almost a stranger, and God knows they had nothing in common. It was just a silly statement made after a few drinks. She had rebelled at being taken to Kew to look at the bamboo or cactus, or whatever they were, and had demanded they go somewhere for a drink – not the Cumberland or the Mayfair Hotel or anywhere where she felt lost, but a proper pub – and somehow they had ended up in the North Star on the Finchley Road. There they’d bumped into Joseph and Dotty. Lionel had said, in that delighted way he affected, ‘Why, look who’s here,’ and May had had to stop and smile, though she felt more like screaming, and the four of them sat on those stools that she hated because they made you feel so insecure and lopsided, and talked utter inanities. Lionel stood them all drinks, of course, which he couldn’t afford, and just before they were going Joseph said, ‘We must meet again soon,’ and Lionel, the idiot, said, ‘Oh yes, when?’ And so on, until finally Joseph said, ‘Why don’t you both come down to Wales with me? We Northerners ought to stick together.’
Afterwards in the car May had told Lionel what a fool he was, what an exhibition he had made of himself. ‘Couldn’t you see that Joseph was bored stiff with everything you said?’ she told him. ‘Couldn’t you see he was yawning his head off?’ Lionel had just turned to her at the traffic lights with those reproachful eyes and asked if she was feeling tired, if her monthlies were on the way. ‘Sweetheart,’ were his words, ‘you know you’re due for your monthlies. Don’t hurt me.’ He knew more about her monthlies, as he called them, than she did herself. Not that there was any danger of her ‘monthlies’ not being due – not the kinky way Lionel behaved. How she fought him, how she wasted her time trying to goad him and wound him. It just never got through to him – he was encased in armour. It was stupid really, because all the time she was screaming at him she did know fractionally that he was good and sincere and normal – yes, even normal in a way – and that he was light years away from people like Joseph, superior in every way. Yet she couldn’t tell him. She hated him for his rolling belly and the bald patch on his head and the way he would go on about the army, and deep down, way way down, she was frightened of him and of what he thought of her. He didn’t even know her, and she couldn’t explain herself how she had come to marry this stranger with the thinning hair.
When she was a child her mother had told her that she was utterly beautiful, perfectly formed, and that men would love her for her skin alone. Her mother said she would marry a prince of men with a private income, and here she was at the end with a skin still flawless and a husband with a pot belly and a nostalgia for the war. She pretended not to know about the war, but she did know. While Lionel had stripped down his Bren gun and led his men across Italy (she knew the route as well as he now), she had been a child following her father from camp to camp across England. In the married quarters her mother had tucked her up in the army-issue blankets and commented on her lovely skin. But despite her complexion, she had ended up with Lionel. She had met him in a cinema and he had taken her home in his Triumph Herald. She had been impressed by his manners and by his treatment of her. She felt secure with him. It didn’t matter if her mascara dribbled down her cheek or her hair came out of set, because she could tell he adored her – and why shouldn’t he with his terrible stomach and his hair gone thin and that comical moustache all wet
from kissing? So they were married, and the Triumph Herald disappeared, and they had to leave the Bayswater flat, and then the Maida Vale one, and then one after that. He still said he was going to cover her with jewels. ‘You’ll be worth £3000 standing up,’ he’d told her, fondling what he called her ‘chests’ and pressing his moustache against her nose.
He still promised her things. He still went out daily and returned at six o’clock to tell her his shares were looking up – they always looked down the following day. He lectured her on her personal hygiene and put up with all her cruelties and abuse and disloyalty. When he came in at night he took off his good suit and changed into his pyjamas and sat on the sofa while she made a cup of tea. It was the extent of her wifely duties. He changed so as not to crumple his suit. His feet stuck out and his neck was marked at the throat by his collar stud. She only wanted him to touch her when he was dressed as the business executive he pretended to be. She could take the caresses of the man of the Stock Exchange, soon to make his million, but she despised the tubby husband panting on the mohair settee in the expensive flat with the yellow brocade curtains and the plastic tulips on the windowsill. He never made jokes, he never tried to fight back at her. There was no fun and no victory in hitting a man who so pitifully lay down. He made her wear dresses with high necks and complained that she deliberately wore her skirts too short, and he wouldn’t let her see her old friends. He followed her round like a hospital nurse, plumping up cushions behind her head and washing out her nylons and cleaning her shoes. ‘In the army,’ he told her, ‘you got to realize what cleanliness was. It’s just not on to polish only the tops of your shoes. The instep also must be shone.’ He’d done it in the trenches apparently – those Italian trenches – to set an example to his men. He’d made an effort to shave before consuming his tins of bully beef or whatever, because ‘it’s the little things that make a gentleman’. Even his war wound had been ridiculous. A piece of shrapnel from a shell scored through the ample flesh of his bottom. ‘Did it hurt?’ she had asked him idly, thinking of him clutching his behind on the road to Rome.
He would prepare their evening meal in his pyjamas and arrange it daintily on a tray. Then they watched the telly, and he sat her on his knee and began to whisper those things into her ear, never realizing how incongruous was the change from Gentleman Jim in the trenches to Dirty Dick on the rented settee, as he mouthed those dreadful words into her brain as if he were demented. She didn’t altogether dislike it. There was a certain thrill to be experienced. It did make her feel she wasn’t entirely living out her life in a wicker basket under a barrage balloon floating high above the rest of the world. If only he would call her May instead of Sweetheart, if only he would give her a name. ‘What will I be worth lying down?’ she would ask him brutally, as he foraged in the whorl of her ear, and he would moan, ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart, how I love you. How you love me.’
*
‘Sweetheart,’ said Lionel, placing the child on the floor, ‘I’ve brought your cigarettes.’ He handed her the packet with a tender smile. Dotty put cups on the table and Balfour stared out of the doorway. Presently he said, ‘Roland, there’s your dad,’ and the child ran out into the sunlight and across the field.
‘Who,’ asked May, ‘is that huge lad wearing the football scarf?’
‘It’s George,’ Dotty said, making the tea. ‘George MacFarley, who owns these woods – him and his parents.’
‘It’s probably glandular,’ May remarked, beginning to open her cigarette packet and watching Lionel’s hand go to the pocket of his suit for his lighter. Deliberately she put the packet down again.
‘It’s nothing glandular,’ said Balfour. ‘H-his father and his uncle are very tall men. Broad too. They both look like gods. When he grows a bit, he’ll be l-like them.’
May laughed and Balfour bent down to scratch at his ankle. He hadn’t actually looked at her face yet. He daren’t. She was pink and white like a carnation, and heavy with scent.
The two women began a conversation that was incomprehensible to him.
‘That tall one who gave us a lift – ’ said Dotty.
‘The one you liked – ’
‘The one you liked – ’
May chose to deny this emphatically. ‘I hated him. I told him so. He wore bicycle clips.’
‘He never. Not the tall one.’
‘In the Hope Hall. You said he was nice and I said he was awful.’
George and Joseph entered the hut and Dotty poured out more tea. She was relieved to see Joseph making an effort to be polite to Lionel, shaking him by the hand and introducing him to George.
May took out a cigarette and said, ‘Might I have a light, Lionel,’ and he replied, ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’ and was ashamed of himself for having to be asked. He hadn’t noticed that she wanted a light – he had been too busy being introduced to the tall fellow. He had thought she needed a light several minutes earlier before that odd conversation about the Hope Hall. Sounded like something to do with the Salvation Army. It wasn’t like May to accept lifts from strangers. Anyway, she seemed to have hated him, whoever he was. She’d said twice she’d hated him. He hoped it was a long time ago.
George and Lionel, surprisingly, had a lot to say to each other. George wanted to know if he had been to Palestine. Lionel had. He was there in 1946. Had he been to Cyprus? There too. George sat stiffly in his rocking chair, his hands still black from the fire, folded in his lap. His slanted eyes, shining and mournful, shifted from the army man with the little brown moustache to the green field beyond the hut, and back again.
Losing himself down a maze of streets with exotic names, some mispronounced, Lionel named comrades and regiments, gave his impressions and his opinions, his head inclined solemnly.
After a while Joseph took Roland by the hand and left the hut. May and Dotty went into the barn and May combed out her hair in front of the mildewed mirror. ‘What on earth is there to do round here?’ she asked peevishly.
‘It’s not too bad, love. The thing is, the air knocks you out and you sleep a lot.’ Dotty remembered where May was to spend her nights. She said, ‘You know Balfour, the one with the pimples, the one that can’t look you in the eye – well, you and Lionel are sharing a hut with him.’
‘A hut? Really.’ May didn’t care. She asked spitefully, ‘Still not married to Joseph?’
‘You know damn well I’m not,’ said Dotty.
May said, trying to be nice, ‘Anyway, you’re better off than I am with my Lionel. He’s a fool.’
‘I think he loves you.’
May shrugged her shoulders, doing things now to her eyelashes, spitting on a little brush to moisten the mascara, blinking rapidly at the mirror. ‘I don’t know what he thinks. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’ Her mouth sagged wider as she worked at the splayed lashes and she leaned forward to see her reflection more closely.
It’s true, Dotty thought, and was frightened. She said, ‘I don’t know either. Honest to God, isn’t it awful?’ Frowning dreadfully, shoulders hunched, she paced up and down behind the titivating May. ‘It’s all so silly … this love business.’
‘I never tell Lionel I love him. I don’t think one should.’ May looked critically at her reflection. ‘Lionel cut all the stuffing out of my bras, you know.’
‘What for?’
‘God knows. He does all sorts of funny things. You wouldn’t believe it. All about how he’ll kill me with a karate blow to my womanhood, and all that stuff about the army. You just wait till he takes you on one side and tells you about his coin.’
‘His what?’ asked Dotty.
‘It’s a coin he keeps on a chain round his neck,’ May said. ‘He pretends it’s very special and private, and he tells everyone about it at the drop of a hat. It’s supposed to be valuable and dreadfully historical, and it’s really a metal token for one penny issued by the Blakeley Moor Co-op in 1827. God knows where he got it. It looks ridiculous when he hasn’t got his shirt on. He’s
never without it, never.’
‘Does he wear it in the bath?’ Dotty saw him fox-coloured beneath the water, the Blakeley Moor coin moving gently across his primitive chest.
‘He keeps saying I’ll be worth £3000 lying down.’
They both started to laugh – Dotty loudly, with her mouth wide open and her two feet set in a circlet of sunshine. May with pink lips compressed and shoulders wriggling.
5
Roland went to bed that evening without complaining. For one thing Lionel had played with him in the field after supper – the sunset field with everything cool and the darkness growing. The trees flapped like rags. When Lionel pushed him high on the swing the air rushed at his sunburnt face, its chilliness covering his bare arms with goose pimples. He dropped from the swing and ran round and round the hut, screaming with excitement as the fat man chased him, until he flew into a patch of bramble and lacerated his leg. He bent his head and watched the blood beading on the surface of his leg. Lionel held his ankle in one big hand and dabbed at the scratch with his handkerchief, transferring the three pinpoints of blood on to the white square of cloth. Even as Roland looked, his disappointed mouth open, the spots of redness reappeared again. He scrambled free of the man’s hand and ran about the field triumphantly, shouting for Lionel to catch him. ‘Catch me, catch me,’ he cried, falling into the long grass with his flushed face close to the cooling earth and his leg forgotten. The other thing that made going to bed so pleasant was the two-shilling piece Lionel had found in his ear. Lionel had sat him on the table among the dirty dishes and magicked his toothbrush into the biscuit tin on the draining board. ‘Dotty, Dotty,’ he had said, ‘see if Roland’s toothbrush is in the biscuit tin.’ And Dotty had got up from her chair and Lionel had said, ‘Go on, go on, find Roland’s toothbrush,’ and Dotty opened the biscuit tin and indeed his toothbrush was there. ‘Aaaaaahya-ya,’ said his father, yawning, champing his lips together and trapping pieces of his beard. And then Lionel had placed his hands about Roland’s head and touched his ears and neck, till he squirmed on the table top and laughed and nearly upset the plates, and Lionel said, ‘What’s this in Roland’s ear?’ His probing fingers tickled his right ear, and he wriggled still more because everything about Lionel was so warm and friendly – the warm breath coming out of his mouth, the little coloured moustache quivering, and his face smiling, smiling. And there was the two-shilling piece: a silver coin, two shillings in one, an old one with a King’s head on, not the picture of the Queen sitting on her horse. ‘A two-shilling piece in Roland’s ear,’ Lionel had shouted. ‘All for Roland. Finding’s keepings.’ May had given a small laugh as if she thought it was funny, which it was, and Joseph had yawned again and said at the end of it, ‘Come on, boy. Bed for you.’ Off he went, still feeling the prickles of Lionel’s moustache against his ear, the silver money clutched tight in his hand – a lot of money, though of course he knew there wasn’t any more to be found like that, not in his ear, or up his nose or anywhere. It wasn’t really magic. There was an explanation. But he was drowsy and he slipped from his father’s arms like a fish being loosed in the sea. He fell asleep at once.