by Unknown
‘Hallo, boy,’ he said, not looking up. ‘Kettle’s boiling, Dotty,’ he added, jerking his head in the direction of the cooker.
‘Did you sleep all right?’ she heard him ask Roland. ‘Kidney didn’t disturb you, did he?’
‘He lets off all night.’
‘Roland knows an awful lot about fleas,’ Dotty said, bringing them cups of tea and a saucer for the fussy Joseph. ‘He says he’s been bitten by some.’
‘I have, I have.’ Eagerly the child rolled back his pyjama sleeve and peered at his arm. ‘They were there,’ he cried, disappointed, tearing at the smooth skin with his nails, trying to bring back the swellings.
‘Nonsense,’ Joseph said. ‘I can’t see anything.’ He flipped the cover of the writing pad over the notes he had made and lifted Roland on to his knee.
‘He did have some marks,’ Dotty confirmed, but the two of them were whispering together, not aware of her at all.
She went once more out of the hut. Holding the cup of tea in her hands for warmth, she sat down on the decaying wooden step at the door. What did one do in the country, she wondered? Maybe they should go for long walks or have picnics. They might just as well be back in the flat off the Finchley Road – her making the tea and Kidney fast asleep and Joseph scribbling away at his dreams. It was safer at home. The constricted space forced Joseph to come close to hurt her. Here she could lose him.
She leaned her head against the wet doorpost and yawned.
As soon as he awoke, Balfour left the hut, pausing neither to wash nor cook himself breakfast. The recollections of the night before followed him out into the wood. He was damp with recollection, saturated. He walked limply under the rain-filled trees towards the Big House. He found it difficult to separate what had happened from what he imagined. He longed to confide in someone. George was on the plateau of the house, holding a branch across a three-legged stool, sawing the wood into logs of equal length.
‘C-could I make a cup of tea?’ Balfour asked. ‘I didn’t want to make too much noise in the hut like.’
George said, ‘I thought Joseph could light the stove in Hut 4.’ He looked out across the valley.
‘Good idea,’ said Balfour, sitting down on the slate slabs.
‘The kettle’s boiling, I expect,’ George told him. ‘If you call me when it’s ready I’ll join you.’ He gazed at Balfour a moment before poising the sharp teeth of the saw above the waiting branch.
Balfour made the tea in Mrs MacFarley’s earthenware teapot and waited on the tidy bed for the mixture to brew. He wanted to talk to George and he knew there wasn’t much point. It wasn’t as if he and George could have a good old giggle together. Hardly likely.
‘George,’ he shouted. ‘George – tea up.’
George entered the door, blocking out the light, his shapeless hat dripping water.
‘It was a bit rum last night,’ blurted Balfour. ‘Lionel p-put the bunks together and she was in the lower bunk and he in the other, and I was on top like, and he told her stories half the night.’
George looked as if he understood. He sat down and regarded Balfour gravely for several seconds. ‘Did you sing?’ he asked, his eyes sliding away from the face below him, studying the map above Balfour’s head.
‘No,’ said Balfour.
‘I thought I heard singing last night from the hut … I thought I did … I wanted to come back and join you, but I felt I should wait till I was included …’
‘We weren’t singing,’ protested Balfour. ‘Nobody sang a note. He just told her stories all night – all about someone called Larry O’Rourke.’
‘Is he Irish?’ George enquired. ‘The Irish are very fond of singing.’
‘They weren’t stories really,’ Balfour floundered. ‘I mean I couldn’t hear them properly. They were private like … all about this fella O’Rourke and a t-temple somewhere.’ He closed his mouth at the memory.
‘He was in the East,’ George said. ‘He was in Palestine.’
Bloody hell, thought Balfour, angrily jabbing at his inflamed neck. He wondered whether Lionel was awake now, already muttering his tales into the ear of the little woman. What a way to greet the day, like ‘Lift Up Your Hearts …’ with a kick in it.
George said, ‘You could help me carry the logs over to the hut later if you have a moment.’ He stood up, shifting his head a little from side to side, looking down at Balfour and away again. He went out of the hut and on to the rain-drenched plateau. He wasn’t at ease about Balfour – the drinking of the first evening, the rhyme about the Jew in a cave of last night. Like the sudden outbreak of fire in the scrub, nothing was entirely accidental nor entirely planned. Chaos could escalate to such a point that what preceded it achieved a degree of order. He didn’t wish the chaotic Balfour to become less ordered. No man could foresee with accuracy the type of feeling generated by another. Evil lay beyond the Glen – the emotion of evil – waiting to devour the trees and the valley, waiting to burst into flame. Soon he would be able to discuss such problems with Joseph. They wouldn’t of course allude to evil by its name, they would talk about faulty materials and bad planning and cheap design. He didn’t delude himself that Joseph would be of much help to him. He had too many things adhering to his life that hindered – marriage and women friends and a responsible job. He must wait a few days until the peace of the Glen had smoothed out the creased Joseph.
Balfour made a clumsy job of securing the wood into a bundle that could be carried. He was hampered by the fact that he wished to get away across the stream before Lionel and May awakened and sought him out. The thought of facing them with only the detached George for protection filled him with anxiety.
‘That’s no use,’ George told him. Methodically, he placed the logs in correct lengths on the plateau, slipping a leather belt underneath the roll and drawing the thong tight.
Balfour looked in the direction of Hut 2 and imagined he saw the curtains move across the window. Loaded correctly, he was set on the down path to the stream. George turned about from time to time to comment on the vista before the Big House. ‘We should lop a few more trees,’ he said. ‘From certain angles the plateau is quite obscured.’
Balfour could smell the bacon frying even as they climbed the slope above the bridge. Roland was being pushed on the swing by Dotty, still in her nightdress. She looked, he thought, a funny girl, standing there in the damp grass with her large feet sticking out from beneath the bedraggled hem of her gown. The child and the girl looked at George in his odd hat and Balfour with his pile of logs, but they didn’t speak. Balfour thought they were all a bit daft, all of them – no one saying a word of greeting, not even a bit of a smile. Gloomily he went to the door of the hut and waited for George to open it for him.
‘What’s all this about?’ Joseph asked of George authoritatively, pointing at the wood with a long knife in his hand, ignoring the beast of burden beneath it. He hadn’t really noticed the stove alongside the settee. He kicked at its brick base with his shoe and wanted to know if it worked. He wanted to know if it smoked much, if they could use it for cooking. He sounded angry and suspicious, as if George were trying to sell him something. Balfour let the logs fall on to the settee and went to wash his hands at the sink. The bacon was spitting in the pan. On the floor by the Calor gas container was the tartan holdall of groceries that Balfour had carried for Lionel.
Dotty came in and looked anxiously at the frying pan on the cooker. ‘That’s not our food, Joseph,’ she said.
‘Quite right, Dotty.’ He brought out a bag of sugar and placed it on the table. ‘Call Roland, will you.’
Roland had bacon and some slices of bread dipped in fat. Joseph asked Dotty if she wanted bacon too, but she suspected it was Lionel and May’s and refused, saying she wasn’t hungry. It was untrue. She was huge and vicious with hunger, but she sat there with a mug of tea in her hand and refrained from eating even a piece of bread. ‘Don’t you think,’ she said finally, ‘that you ought to give Kidney somethin
g to eat?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Joseph told her. ‘He’s far too fat.’ He studied the palm of his hand, holding it up to the light as if gazing at a rare stamp.
I shall never kiss you again, she thought spitefully, and then sorrowfully, I shall never kiss you again. When the week was up she would go to her parents’ home and write him a letter asking him to send all her things to her. That wasn’t really a good idea – she might never see her books or clothes again, he was so bad about that sort of thing.
As if reading her thoughts, as if the possibility of her leaving him made him generous, he said, ‘Go on, Dot-Dot, have some of Lionel’s bacon.’
‘Joseph’s had another of his dreams,’ she told George. ‘He writes them all down.’
‘I never dream,’ said George.
‘Oh, but you do,’ cried Joseph. ‘All the time. You just don’t remember them. The mind,’ he explained, ‘is less inhibited when we sleep. We can be our true selves then – give vent to all kinds of repressed desires, act out our fantasies, behave without the restraints imposed by society.’
‘Some people,’ Dotty said, ‘are like that when they’re awake.’ She got up and went in search of her tobacco.
Balfour was fidgeting on his chair, fearing any moment the arrival of Lionel and May. He chatted with Roland about his red boat, telling him it was a lovely boat, standing up and taking it to the window to admire it.
‘Oh God,’ Dotty moaned distractedly. She went through the aperture into the cubicle and Balfour followed, squeezing past her in the constricted space, stepping into the second room with the truckle bed.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Lionel,’ he mouthed, pointing ridiculously with one frantic finger at the wall. ‘Out there.’ He fumbled with the bolt of the back door and held it closed with his hand.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, coming close, her eyes shining with curiosity.
‘Sssh,’ he warned.
Outside Lionel shouted cheerfully, ‘Ahoy there.’ There was the sound of footsteps at the door. The wooden wall of the cubicle vibrated as he entered.
‘What is it?’ whispered Dotty.
Anguished, Balfour shook his head and stepped into the field, standing there in the rain, his head tilted to catch the sound of Lionel’s voice.
‘What is it?’ Dotty persisted, stepping outside the hut and hanging on to his arm.
‘I just don’t want to see Lionel.’
‘Why not? What happened?’ She shook him. ‘Go on, tell me.’ She pushed her washed-out face close to his.
‘He told stories all night.’ He swung his head round, hearing Lionel move inside the hut, and suddenly felt foolish.
Dotty was looking at him, less eagerly, but still with that curious degree of elation on her features.
‘What do you mean, he told her stories? What kind of stories?’
‘Well, funny ones – ones I shouldn’t think he wanted me to hear. But I did hear like. Blinking rum stories,’ he added bleakly, detesting the way he spoke, wondering why at work he was considered a bit of a talker, in spite of his stammer, not understanding why he should find it difficult to express himself to this lot – Joseph and Dotty and the rest of them.
‘Rum?’ said Dotty. ‘Do you mean dirty?’
That was tricky, thought Balfour. He didn’t know if they were dirty – not in artistic circles, that is – though somehow Lionel didn’t seem in the least like Joseph or George. More like himself – and he’d thought they were dirty all right. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, feeling hungry and not at all sure. He couldn’t think why he was making such a fuss.
‘Poor Balfour,’ she said and reached up and touched his cheek with the back of her hand. ‘Poor Balfour. Don’t you worry, boyo.’ She sounded genuinely concerned, amused and yet anxious for him. ‘They’re all a bit rum, aren’t they?’ She was the conspirator again.
‘A bit,’ he admitted.
‘They are, aren’t they? I mean, they really are, don’t you think? I mean, look at Joseph, going all moody and never being polite to anyone, and Lionel going on about the army, and May saying she hates him. They’re all barmy.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking at his feet, not wanting to commit himself.
‘Well, you don’t feel comfortable, do you? I mean, it’s obvious. You didn’t stutter at all when we first came. Not that I noticed. I bet you’re like you were the other night when you’d had a few drinks – I mean, like that all the time normally.’
‘I’ve always had a s-stutter,’ Balfour said, wanting to be off through the trees. He knew it wasn’t the others that were odd, but himself who was at fault. He couldn’t get his bearings. If he’d heard some bloke at the factory telling a smutty yarn he’d have laughed like hell. The dirtier the better. He wouldn’t be like he was now – sort of morally indignant and feeling like he was shocked. Old Lionel probably had his reasons for getting his kicks out of telling her stories. The little woman was a man-eater. He couldn’t make a judgement on Joseph yet. Old George he knew about – he’d got used to not being able to talk to him. There was something wrong within himself, something he could sense but not explain.
Roland had been told to go looking for larch twigs for the fire they were going to have in that stove thing by the sofa. May said it was too cold to live, so they were going to light a fire later on to keep her alive. He knew they weren’t going up the mountain today on account of the wet, though it wasn’t raining any more – even the trees had stopped dripping. The grass was untidy. Over the hedge there was a field full of mauve thistle tops that stuck in his feet, painful as anything, and he’d seen a cow yesterday with long white legs galloping like a horse through all those prickles, with its tail held straight out in the air and Joseph said a horsefly was probably bothering it. Most of the leaves on the trees by the barn had been eaten by something – lots of little holes bitten in the leaves, showing spots of sky, as if someone had spattered the trees with white paint, all tatty-looking. Moths or something. The ferns by the bushes hadn’t been bitten – they smelt too strong – nor the nettles. There wasn’t a dock leaf in sight. His teacher at school had told him that wherever God put a stinging nettle he put a dock leaf next to it. Children, she had said, run to the lowly dock leaf and rub its juice over the sting of the stinging nettle. It wasn’t the truth and he would tell her. There were thousands of nettles and not a single dock leaf. He had looked.
He wanted to go up the mountain because it looked safe out there: nothing dangerous on it, no wire netting like under the barn step, through which the wasps went, buzzing pale green and angry. He supposed it wasn’t much use telling Joseph it had stopped raining. Joseph didn’t want to take him up the mountain. They were all talking in there about that war, and bombs dropping on things, and about Germany. It sounded dangerous in there too. Besides, Joseph was going vista-clearing with George, and he had seemed so pleased about it – jumping up and swinging his arms as if he were holding an axe, and Lionel laughing at him – that it wouldn’t be kind to mention the mountain again. Lionel said ‘vista’ came from the Italian, and George said they weren’t going to chop any trees down, only lop off a few branches. ‘Vista’ sounded sad, like saying goodbye. They said he could go for the milk tonight, on his own, to the farm. That was to make up for not going vista-clearing or up the mountain or with Dotty and Balfour to the village to spend his two-shilling piece. He couldn’t go to the village with them because they were walking and they said it was too far for him to walk. There wasn’t any food left to eat, only Ribena and red peppers.
He didn’t have to get those twigs for the fire. No one really expected him to go for them – it was just to make him feel big and busy while they finished their chat about the war. It was only when he was with Joseph that he wanted to be big. When he was with Joseph it was always ‘Lift that, you’re a big boy now’, or ‘Climb that tree, Roland … Higher … you’re big enough’, as if it showed he wasn’t big enough
at all. Not like Kidney. If he could grow as big as Kidney, Joseph and he might do exercises in the morning on the tree and climb the mountain, and do vista-clearing all the time.
Dotty had said she’d bring him back a notebook from the village for him to write in. He would write a story like Joseph. It would be a dream story. Joseph had asked him if he had ever had a dream. He was starting to tell him, only Lionel and May came in and Dotty said she was sorry Joseph had eaten all their bacon and used their sugar.
He heard the door of the barn creak and he looked round the side of the hut and saw Kidney.
‘What are you looking at, please?’ asked Roland joining him.
‘I’m looking,’ said Kidney, screwing his face up till his eyes almost disappeared.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘A silver birch,’ Kidney said.
Roland stared too. He could see Kidney’s shoes all scruffy with dried mud, and a rock lying beneath the bushes, and he could see the tree. The birch was wet, its bark gleaming after the rain, and there were four ants joined like a thread of cotton clinging to its trunk. Ants in the grass were hardworking and stupid. They only itched. Those ants on the tree were lazy and clever. They would sting like pins going in. He moved quite close, fascinated and afraid.
‘Those?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘What are they doing?’
Kidney said he didn’t know. He swung his head sorrowfully and told Roland he was going for his breakfast. ‘I’m hungry and I want my pills.’
‘The ones in the bottle?’
‘I need my breakfast.’
‘You shouldn’t eat those pills in the bottle. You should swing on trees.’ Kidney was walking away and Roland shouted, ‘There’s no food left and they’re all talking about that war.’ He watched the hungry Kidney push open the door and disappear with lowered head.