by Unknown
‘I see.’ His expression was still hurt.
‘Well, I’m not bloody well sleeping in that tiny bunk with you and I’m not going to sleep up there on my own with all those animals and things flying around.’
He was touched. How childish she was, not wanting to be alone in the dark. The way she had said ‘up there’ as if the top bunk were several miles away and swarming with insects. Several of the chaps in his group in the army had been afraid of the dark. He could see her point.
‘All right, my darling,’ he conceded. ‘You just get undressed and get into the bunk and I’ll call Balfour.’
‘I’m not undressing,’ she said. ‘It’s too cold and you left the suitcases in the other hut.’
He had. It had been foolish of him not to remember. He stood up and took the bowl of water back into the kitchen. Perhaps it was just as well he had been so careless. She could have been warmer and in one of her moods and determined to annoy him. She might have chosen to flaunt herself before Balfour. There had been occasions in the past, one or two, parties and things, when he felt she deliberately sat down with too much leg showing. Nothing very bad, she was too innocent for that, but she did lay herself open to abuse. She just hadn’t the experience to know how dangerous her behaviour could be. He constantly had to be on guard to protect her. And himself. She would never know the torment it was for him to see other men looking at her with lust. It filled him with anguish, it unmanned him, he screamed inside himself. He had told her once what he would do if he caught any man messing about with her. He would kill.
‘Would you really?’ she had asked, her innocent eyes round with fear. ‘Would you really kill him, Lionel?’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘And me, Lionel, what about me?’ How frightened her eyes had been.
‘I would use karate on you, my sweetheart.’
‘Karate?’ Her pink mouth opened. Her hands flew upwards.
‘A quick blow with the edge of my hand at the pit of your stomach – just there on either side – one-two, and your womanhood would fall to the ground.’ How childishly amused she had been, how she had laughed, showing the curved row of white teeth and the pale pink of her moist gums. Everything he said caused her to laugh, she was so innocent.
Tenderly he led her to the curtained bed and removed the coat from about her shoulders, taking his jacket with equal tenderness to the rocking chair, moulding it above the curved back. The bedraggled sleeves brushed the floor.
When he returned to the bed May was under the blankets with her face turned towards the kitchen. He stroked her yellow hair, black in the lamplight, and went to call Balfour.
They dragged the second bunk beside the first and they washed in the dark kitchen, the two men, with the little woman who was so afraid of the dark lying there breathing softly behind their backs. Balfour just knew she wasn’t asleep. She was spread out there with her blue eyes wide open, laughing silently at their absurd preparations for the night. What a noise Lionel made swilling water round his mouth. He had left his toothbrush in the other hut, he said. May was sleeping in her clothes because her nightdress was in the suitcase. He hoped Balfour wasn’t too inconvenienced by the sleeping arrangements. He came closer in the darkness and whispered sincerely, ‘My hands are tied, old boy,’ and for a second Balfour took him literally, and stood there helplessly, feeling the captive man’s breath on his cheek. Hastily he said he understood and felt for the cold water tap with his invisible fingers. Was Lionel stripping himself naked? Would he move, huge flanks scarred with bullets, into the lantern light? Balfour stayed in the corner of the kitchen, endlessly turning his hands in water so cold that it burnt him.
‘Will you see to the lamp, old boy?’ Lionel asked finally. Half way down him a pair of little shorts caught a shaft of light.
Balfour waited till he felt Lionel must have come to rest. He threw the water noisily down the sink and cleared his throat. He hung his pullover and his trousers on the nail above the back door and stood in his bootless feet trying to smell himself, wondering if he should remove his socks or not. He decided not. He crept, partly naked, and defenceless with cold, into the main room, dragging a chair to the centre of the hut, stepping on it with body curled away from the recumbent May, turning down the wick of the lamp, and fading with it into blackness. He padded to the bunks and placed his foot on the lower bed. He thought maybe Lionel would give his merry laugh, but there was absolute silence in the arctic night.
Hauling himself aloft, Balfour squirmed into his blankets and pushed his head under the clothes for warmth. He could hear his own breathing and his own heart beating and the sound made by the straw mattress he lay on, as he moved. Nothing stayed in his head. He tried to visualize the horizontal May, with her malicious eyes covered by the flannel sheets and her busty breasts bunched high in her gingham blouse. But he was almost asleep. Hours seemed to have passed. He poked his congested face above the bedding and settled his head more comfortably.
‘Sweetheart,’ whispered Lionel. ‘Are you awake … are you?’
He felt with his large hand for her shoulder and she hissed angrily, ‘Go away, Lionel, be quiet.’
‘I just want to know if you’re quite comfortable, my darling.’
She wouldn’t answer. She jerked her head backwards and forwards on the pillow and compressed her lips in the darkness. She daren’t turn away from him. It was too black facing in that direction – and besides, that man up there might think she was moving into Lionel’s arms. She didn’t want him to think she was lying close to anyone, not anyone as awful as Lionel.
‘Let me tell you a story, my darling … only a short one … Just you lie still and I’ll tell you a story.’ He was putting his thick fingers under her neck, feeling for the little hollow under her ear, treading the skin as if she were a heavy object he needed to lever upright.
‘Go away,’ she whispered as loudly as she dared, lifting her head fractionally, so that he hooked his arm about her neck on the instant and she could feel the ginger moustache brushing her cheek.
‘Lie quite still, little sweetheart, little Lalla Rookh …’
She lay pinned beneath his weight, his body half in her bunk and half in his own, his bald head bobbing up and down above her.
‘Sssh,’ she said weakly, ‘sssh.’
Balfour heard the whispers. One moment he was poised on the very brink of sleep and the next he was wide awake, his eyes cold under the timbered roof, his chest constricted.
‘Sweetheart,’ breathed Lionel. ‘Listen to me, sweetheart. This is the story of Lalla Rookh, goddess of the temple. In the eleventh year of the reign of Aurungzebe, Abdalla, King of the Lesser Bucharian, set out on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Prophet, and passing into India through the valley of Kashmir rested at Delhi on the way, where he was entertained most lavishly. It was not long before he heard of the beauty of the renowned Lalla Rookh, Priestess of the Temple of Love. She was, he was told, more lovely than Leila, Shirine or Dewilde, or any of the heroines of the songs of Persia and Hindustan. She was small and rounded with breasts as white as snow and nipples as red as the thorns of the rose …’
May didn’t hear the words at all. She was thinking about her mother and father and how long it was since she had last been to see them. She ought to have visited them, she ought to have sent them some money. They were her family. Her mother wouldn’t like her to lie in some rotten hut with this strange old man telling her stories in the night. Her mother called her May, or My Daughter, not Sweetheart or Lalla Rookh. Her mother knew who she was …
‘ … When he came at last to the temple and saw Lalla Rookh for the first time he was utterly ravished. She stood on the steps of the golden altar, dressed in a robe of transparent gauze, with the tips of her toenails dyed blood-red and a gold rod in her hands …’
Balfour, alone in the upper air, was huge and bloated with excitement. Legs, arms, stomach, mind ballooned out into the darkness, leaving only his head pinned to the pillow like some specimen butte
rfly.
‘ … Abdalla bowed low to the beautiful Lalla Rookh and seated himself on a low stool to observe her performance. First the handmaidens, each one with a cornelian of Yemen about her neck, still in their robes of deepest mourning, knelt before Lalla Rookh and licked the soles of her feet. She stood with eyes demurely lowered …’
May was thinking about the age of her mother. Not an old woman, she wouldn’t die for years yet. Even if she never visited her, it was comforting to know she was alive. It made one old if one’s mother died, it was the beginning of the end. Or the end of her beginning … Wasn’t it futile the way one forgot what mothers did? All that loving and kissing and rocking and changing. All those mothers smelling of woollies and bread. Either you were with someone or you weren’t, it didn’t really matter. Lionel thought he loved her and thought she loved him. It didn’t matter. Either the person wasn’t right or the time wasn’t, or love came out as something else … Take Lalla Rookh – she didn’t really care for Abdalla or he for her. It was just they were all so perfumed in those days and sexy, and it was all right to behave like that in church in those days.
‘ … and now the lovely Lalla Rookh was standing before the great Abdalla, naked to his eyes. “Eyes of mine, why do you droop? Golden dreams, are you coming back again …” ’
That was a lovely thing to say, she thought. He always said that at some point in the story. Even if it was the version about Lalla Rookh and the donkey in Port Said. ‘Eyes of mine, why do you droop?’
Later on, when Abdalla had ravished her and gone away, there was the other bit, the poetry bit Lionel liked reciting:
‘But see – he starts – what heard he then?
That dreadful shout across the glen:
“They come – the Moslems come,” he cries,
His proud soul mounting to his eyes …’
‘ … slowly the lovely Lalla Rookh thrust her abdomen at the mouth of the mighty Abdalla, her mound of Venus against his throat, the perfume of her sex assailing his nostrils …’
Outside the wind howled like voices singing a sea song. The unlit paraffin lamp quivered imperceptibly above the wooden floor.
‘ … naked came I out of the womb of my mother, said Abdalla the King, casting his garment from him and seizing the wanton Lalla Rookh …’
It shouldn’t happen to a d-dog, thought Balfour, grinding his teeth lest he moaned.
6
In the morning when Joseph woke it was raining. He went through to the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. He had dressed and walked through the little hut without feelings of any kind. Now, triggered by the sight of the unwashed cups in the sink, he became irritated. Someone had spilled grease on the draining board. There was Monopoly money in a long streak of water under the utility table and a cup half filled with discoloured liquid, possibly coffee, with three drowned and disintegrating cigarette butts. Where was the ashtray he had found for Dotty last night? He had been wasting his time expecting her to use the saucer he had placed at her elbow. It was typical of her whole attitude.
He rubbed his face with his hands as if to erase Dotty’s memory and the disgust she aroused in him, peering into the looking-glass by the window, liking his brown skin. The reflection helped to restore him, but not wholly. There was something somewhere inside him that persisted. Not unhappiness, not pain. He walked away from the deceptive mirror and opened the door to look out at the field lying green under the falling rain. Mist was covering the hills, rolling down sideways towards the Glen, unfolding the mountain inch by inch, uncovering the cotton-wool trees on the lower slopes. Still he remained heavy and unyielding. What was wrong within him?
He stepped out into the field, away from the sleeping Dotty, and walked through the wet grass in his bare feet to the swing he had made for Roland, reaching out for the rope with one hand as if to anchor himself to something, seeking in his mind for a clue. He must list his worries, his problems. But he was too absent-minded. Thoughts slid across his mind and curled to nothingness. Roland … Dotty … his bank manager. I must do … If I write a cheque post-dated … I should tell her to use the ashtray. He saw himself bent over his cheque book, Dotty lying with her face against the pillow, Kidney hanging from the bough of a tree … Dear Sir, With reference to your letter of … His toes threaded with grass, he stamped his feet. George had planted two young trees in the corner of the field. Mountain ash, circled by stakes; to protect the hut from the winds, George said. In time. How many years before the trees grew high enough and thick enough to be effective? Fifty perhaps. George was planting for posterity.
Dotty was sitting at the table with her head in her hands. She had felt that if she rose before Joseph and prepared breakfast he would be pleased. She thought when she woke that possibly he had gone for a walk through the woods, and she was disappointed at seeing him standing outside the hut staring at the mountain. It was no use starting the breakfast, he would only tell her she was doing it inefficiently.
‘My, my,’ said Joseph. ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ He was pushing books aside on the shelves of the little bookcase. A pen and a bottle of aspirins fell to the floor. ‘Where’s the notepaper?’ he asked.
‘Top shelf,’ she said without looking up.
‘I had the most extraordinary dream,’ he told her, coming to the table with the writing pad in his hand.
‘Oh yes.’ She didn’t know why he persisted in being so interested in his dreams. It didn’t seem to help him much to know what they meant. Sometimes she felt it would be more valuable to him if he wrote down what he did in his waking hours.
‘A pen,’ he said. ‘Where’s the pen, Dotty?’
‘You knocked it on the floor.’
‘Did I? You don’t have to sound so critical. I merely asked where it was.’ He began trying to put down his dream on paper. ‘Listen to this, Dot-Dot … I was in bed with my father. It was very dark and he was just lying there … It was at home … In Wales, I mean, and my father said, “I’ve got an attack coming.” I said, “What shall I do ?” and then – ’
He looked up hastily and Dotty said, ‘I’m listening. Go on. I’m just going for my tobacco … Go on … You said, “What shall I do?” ’ She searched for her tobacco on a chair and failed to find it. Straightening up, she saw the field outside, framed by the window, like a picture someone had hung on a wall.
‘What attacks were they?’
But Joseph wouldn’t answer her. He sat at the table and shut her out, keeping his eyes lowered, pushing the little plastic pen about.
She put the kettle on and went out of the hut in her nightgown. The wood spread over her like a great arched umbrella. Underneath the green spokes she was perfectly dry. There was the red tree Roland had talked about. She crossed to the door of the barn and went in. Roland was sitting up in bed, his hands clutching the blankets.
‘Hallo,’ she said, looking for Kidney in the other bed and finding him, curled sideways with his hair spread across the pillow.
‘I’ve been bitten by something,’ Roland said, holding up one thin arm for inspection. ‘Look … it’s fleas or bugs.’
‘Surely not.’ She bent closer and looked at the two red marks on the delicate white forearm. ‘Not fleas, Roland, they can’t be.’
‘Why not?’ He scratched himself hard and looked down with approval at the swollen skin.
‘Well, you only get fleas in dirty places. This isn’t dirty. We’re in the country with all the flowers and things.’ She found her flesh beginning to itch and rubbed at her neck worriedly.
‘It is dirty in the country,’ Roland asserted. Some of the sting had gone out of his arm. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we had fleas at home and Mummy got the Health Man and it’s not dirt that makes fleas.’
She was shocked. ‘Did you have fleas at home?’
‘Fleas can be in houses for ever and ever. A flea’s egg can live for a hundred years and then you make everywhere nice and warm and the flea comes out, hundreds of years old but all new. It’s
thirty shillings a room for bugs and ten shillings for fleas, and it’s free for mice and rats.’
‘Is it?’ she said, interested and repelled.
‘When the Health Man came, Mummy and I had to go to the park for a walk and he threw bombs in all the rooms. The smoke stuff killed all the fleas by the time we came home for tea.’
‘That’s good,’ said Dotty. Kidney rolled over on to his back and thrust his feet hard down the bed. He made a sound between a snore and a cough.
‘Good morning, Kidney,’ Dotty said, but he went on sleeping.
‘The man couldn’t kill all the fleas,’ said the obsessed Roland. ‘Mummy didn’t have enough ten shillings for the bathroom or the hall. I expect they’ll come back. When we had tea he read the Bible to us.’ He knelt in the bed and pressed his nose to the window. ‘Is it cold?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Dotty said, only a little chill in her white nightgown hemmed with mud.
‘I don’t suppose my Dad will take me up the mountain.’ The little boy didn’t look at her for a denial. He kept his eyes fixed on the square of grey sky and rubbed at his bitten arm.
‘Did you sleep well?’ Dotty wanted to know, feeling the bed with her hand to assess its comfort.
‘All right.’ Roland fell backwards on to her lap and twisted his arms about her neck. He liked being with Dotty. The time before when he had been to stay with Joseph there had been a pretty girl with a long plait down her back. He’d liked being with her too. He didn’t know there would be a girl in the woods with Daddy. When Daddy came in the car to fetch him at Mummy’s there had only been Kidney. Daddy had found Dotty just round the corner without any suitcase or even a coat. Dotty’s hair was nice. It looked like the beige curtains hung in his room at home.
‘Carry me, carry me,’ he demanded, burying his face in the familiar curtains. ‘Ooooh,’ he squealed, as they left the trees and the rain fell on to his neck. Dotty held him tightly in her arms for the benefit of Joseph and her own image, but Joseph was bent over the table still wrestling with his dream.