by Unknown
It wasn’t right. After a little thought Joseph asked George to lie down in the grass at their feet, full length, feet crossed at the ankles, his head propped on his hand. In the background, though obviously not included, stood the little timber cabin, windows glinting in the sunshine. With a click of the shutter the images were recorded: the winsome little woman with her smooth knees pushed together, jovial Lionel, Roland with his chin raised and his eyes following the flight of a bird.
Balfour remembered all the other photographs taken of himself by friends of George, copies of which he had never seen. He scowled as Joseph prepared for another shot. Though feeling exhausted, he was no longer ill. George had put him to sleep in the barn the previous night, had removed his shoes and wrapped him in blankets. Throughout he had shown a degree of tenderness that had only registered when Balfour awoke that morning. He found himself unable to look directly at George. George had spent the night in the second cubicle, with the door wide open, so as to be better able to hear Balfour if he cried out. The problems of night travelling, coupled with the technical difficulties of lighting the paraffin lamp, had obliged Lionel and May also to stay in the barn. Their mattress was filled with straw and May had complained of lying awake the entire night.
When Joseph had finished taking photographs they all said that they never looked good in snapshots. Each of them secretly hoped that this time would be an exception. It gave Dotty an odd feeling to think of them all cramped on that little roll of yellow film, stamped together for ever on the wooden chairs, never to get up again. She went indoors with May to make coffee.
George told Balfour he was to lie quietly in the shade for several hours. Balfour said he would do that. George fetched a pillow from the barn and placed it on the grass within the angle of the hut. ‘Lie down,’ he said, and Balfour rose and lay, pushing his face into the cushion and shutting his eyes.
After a moment George stopped standing over him and walked away down the path.
Balfour turned over and looked up at the summer sky. A wasp droned somewhere above his ear. He got to his knees. The women were still within the hut. He walked a few paces into the bracken near the barn, undoing the buttons of his trousers. A twig snapped. He straddled his feet wider apart. There was a low murmuring in his ears, a dense rise of dust, sunbeams. He flung his arms about his head as if avoiding a blow. A sound like a cat mewing came from between his lips and he spun round, crouching there with his arms held up stiffly on either side of him.
George, walking back along the path, was in time to see him in just this position and Lionel springing upon him, apparently pummelling him about the head with clenched fists. May ran to the doorway of the hut, brought there by the sound of Lionel’s voice. It was she, not Balfour, who screamed. She shrank backwards, the round hole in her mouth plugged by her pink-tipped fingers.
The men laid Balfour down with his neck on the pillow and examined his face and chest. First they had to bring his bent arms from about his ears.
‘My head,’ he said. ‘My head.’ He felt the skin of his scalp contracting, as a thousand winged insects burrowed into his hair.
‘Nothing on your head,’ George said, partitioning the black hair, seeing with revulsion the swellings beginning on the pimpled neck. He removed Balfour’s shirt and bathed the wasp stings with TCP.
‘How awful,’ whispered the women.
‘Poor devil,’ said Lionel hoarsely, feeling his own neck with pity and fear.
Joseph was telling Roland to be careful not to go near the bracken at the far side of the barn. As if it meant something, Dotty took off her flowered coat and stuffed it away in the wicker basket under the sofa. May was terribly distressed. It might so easily have been herself thus violated in the bushes.
The disturbance of the wasps’ nest had filled Kidney with unusual energy. He ran from hut to field, scarcely noticed by the others, his whole being flung into activity, cantering heavily through the grass and going down the sloping path. Wishing finally to stop and not able to halt, he ran into a tree; striking his forehead on the bark, he slid to the ground and sprawled there, seeing nothing, his eyes fluttering as rapidly as his heartbeat. He didn’t know what had happened to Balfour except that he had opened his trousers in the bushes and that Lionel had struck him to his knees. Joseph had done nothing. Joseph hadn’t protested at such violence. A flux of tears came into Kidney’s sparkling eyes. He dashed it away with a fierce shake of his head, shouting with lips spitting: ‘You horrid man! Rude to undo your trousers. Filthy animal. Should be put away. I’ll show you what’s what, dirty stinker!’
He fell silent. Someone, Roland perhaps, was calling his name. That much he heard.
Roland stuck out a cheerful tongue and went past him, pretending to have somewhere to go. After a few yards he turned and cried mockingly, ‘Daftie Kidney, sitting on the floor.’
‘I’m hot.’
‘No you’re not. You’re daft.’
Offended, Kidney hung his head.
Roland saw a piece of glass near his foot and bent to examine it. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘This place should get condemned. It’s just dangerous all over.’ He settled on his haunches and rocked backwards and forwards. ‘Bet you it’s clean and safe up there,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of the mountain hidden by the trees.
‘Safe where?’ Kidney asked.
‘Up the mountain. Safe as anything, all clean.’
Kidney got slowly to his feet and with bowed head began to walk back up the path.
‘Daftie,’ shouted Roland again.
Kidney took no notice. He had some vague idea in his mind that in the hut there was something he wanted, that was safe. Nobody looked up when he entered the door. He put a chair by the sink and climbed upon it, reaching with his fingers for the pills. Finding the bottle he put it inside his jumper, clutching his jumper as he climbed down again. No one saw him.
Joseph was worried by the continuing presence of the nest among the bracken. He pressed George to do something about it. George said there was nothing he could do until dusk.
‘What’ll you do then?’ Dotty wanted to know.
George said he would pour boiling water down the hole.
‘That’s a bit primitive, isn’t it?’ asked Joseph. He had thought there was some chemical that could be sprayed at once causing immediate annihilation.
George said he could burn out the nest but it was risky. He hovered between the barn and the hut, keeping a protective eye on Balfour. The others, after a period of adjustment, took sheets and lay down in the sunshine, at the extreme end of the field. It was to give Balfour a sense of privacy.
Lionel had driven his car to the corner shop before breakfast for a morning paper. Now he studied it earnestly and remarked that the country was in a damned mess. Nobody appeared to object or to hold different views. Joseph was lying on his back holding a Penguin book close to his eyes, both reading and shielding his face from the rays of the sun.
May found it difficult to concentrate for long in any one position. She never went brown, only a dull shade of brick. When she bent her legs, sweat gathered behind the folds of her knees. She looked sideways at the sunbathing Dotty, dressed in a swimsuit of dark blue. One arm was curved up above her head, one leg lolled outward from her crotch. There was a little fuzz of blonde hairs catching the sunlight, right at the top of her inner thigh. May felt disgust, almost nausea. It was so immodest. Other women were always revolting. She felt sure Lionel was watching the sprawled girl. Angrily she slapped a fly from her arm.
‘Would you like a chair, my sweetheart?’ Lionel said, looking up from his newspaper.
She ignored him. She rose to her feet and walked back into the hut, shutting the door behind her. She opened the suitcase still under the table. In the pocket of her trews she found the Co-op penny on its little chain. She left the hut and tiptoed past Balfour with exaggerated stealth. She went a few paces into the bracken and turning from the group at the end of the field lifted her ar
m, apparently to steady herself.
‘Careful, my sweetheart,’ called Lionel.
Straightening up, facing in the direction of the barn, she saw Roland standing a few paces from her.
‘What did you do that for?’ he asked her.
‘Do what?’ she said, laughing nervously, going to him with her hand stretched out.
‘Roland,’ shouted Joseph. ‘Come away from the nest. I told you.’
Lionel was shaking his head and making sounds of disapproval as he held his paper. ‘This man Wilson really is making one hell of a mess, you know.’
‘Oh, I love Harold,’ cried May, restored, prepared now to be amusing. ‘That little duckwing of hair at the back, that solemn northern face. I think he’s dishy.’
Her husband smiled at her. ‘He’s certainly making a dish out of Rhodesia, my sweetheart.’
‘I’ve got room for another toe here,’ Roland observed, looking at his foot with interest. Joseph had made him remove his sweater and his jeans and he crouched there in the grass clad in his cotton underpants, shoulder blades prominent, ribs showing, a line of hair, silver in the sunlight, tipping the vertebrae of his spine.
‘You’re much too thin,’ said his father. ‘You don’t eat enough.’
‘I do, I do,’ he protested.
‘He’s not too thin,’ May said, thinking he was, dreadfully so, but in some way forestalling a remark, should it be made, on the size and weight of her own body. Protectively she bent over her knees, covering her breasts and small pot stomach. ‘Does Mummy give you cod liver oil?’ she asked, watching the discomfited little boy who was now plucking at the skin adhering to the cage of his ribs.
‘No,’ he muttered. ‘That’s for babies.’ He began to struggle into his striped sweater, thrusting his stick-like arms into the air, emerging with hair tousled.
‘Now, boy,’ his father shouted, putting his book face downwards in the grass. ‘Don’t you take offence.’
‘I don’t,’ Roland replied thickly, struggling with a sense of injustice and the awkward zip of his trousers. Self-pity making his head loll pathetically, he walked across the grass towards the trees.
Joseph reached out a hand and seized him by the ankle as he passed. He wouldn’t let go. ‘Little softie boy,’ he shouted. ‘Didums get all cross then? Didums feel a fool?’
Tears flowed down the boy’s cheeks. He was both angry and relieved. He beat at Joseph’s shoulders with his fists, as hard as he knew how.
They had most of the meat for lunch, the big joint that Balfour had carried from the village. There were potatoes and slices of beetroot. The women ate more than the men, tearing at the fatty chops with sweaty faces and fingers covered in grease.
Afterwards May wanted to go for a drive somewhere into the hills, but Lionel was evasive. Determined to recover his Co-op penny, he had the intention of combing every step of ground he had trodden the previous day. Throughout the meal his hand continually sought the opening of his shirt. Contrite, in that he knew May would have liked to have been taken for a run in the car, but determined not to do so, he dried the plates that Joseph had expertly washed. He took care to keep his head turned from her, lest her expression should cause him to change his plans. Actually May was quite contented. She didn’t mind in the least.
There were voices outside the hut. Lionel hovered at the door, thinking it was Balfour, recovered and anxious for food, and saw George talking to an elderly man in a cloth cap. They were nodding and looking in the direction of the bracken.
Joseph said, ‘God, it’s that Bill, hale and hearty again.’
‘Is it Willie?’ Delighted, Dotty pranced into the field, holding out her hand, taking the little Welshman by surprise, asking him if he was better, saying it was a treat to see him. Willie removed his cap and nodded at her, bashful.
‘He’s super. He’s a marvellous little bloke,’ said Dotty, running back into the hut to confide her opinion to May.
‘Is he?’ May said, wondering who the man was. When George came into the hut followed by Willie, she still kept her expectant eyes on the doorway, waiting for another visitor.
‘This is my friend May, Willie,’ Dotty said, pointing at the girl on the settee with sudden pride.
‘Pleased to meet you, miss,’ he said, taken aback by all the areas of uncovered female flesh.
‘Isn’t he super,’ hissed Dotty, though what it was that so impressed her she couldn’t qualify.
May looked at the shrivelled little man. As a child she had spent some time billeted in North Wales and had been early acquainted with pastoral Welshmen who called the cattle home and loved to fondle little girls. She was bored and revolted by him and by Dotty.
‘Mr George told me about the nest. Bad, that is,’ said Willie.
‘It was horrible,’ cried Dotty.
Roland came in and spoke to his father. ‘Can I go for a walk?’
‘Burn the nest out, will you?’ asked Joseph.
‘Most like,’ Willie responded, hanging his head and not wishing to sound too authoritative with Mr George there.
‘Can I go for a walk with Kidney then?’ demanded Roland.
‘Nasty business. Lucky it wasn’t the boy,’ said Willie.
‘You’re right,’ agreed Joseph. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Roland ran out of the hut.
There were blackberries in the hedge – blue-black, juicy. Kidney reached down the high ones for Roland. He ate none himself. Roland dug the stalks out with his nails and stained the pads of his fingers mauve. He rather preferred the red and tight fruits, tart on his tongue; some of the black and ripe ones he let fall on to the road and trod beneath his feet. He could hear the telegraph wires humming, high and quivering above his head. He laid his ear to the warm wood of the telegraph poles and thought he heard the sea. Kidney walked with his eyes looking down at the smooth road, his hands in his pockets. When he plucked the blackberries his eyes lifted no higher than the hedge. They came to the crossroads, one road going right to the market town and the other to the White Horse public house, with the sign hanging motionless in the sunlight and the smithy opposite. The blacksmith was shoeing a cart horse. The horse puffed and the man puffed too, his leather apron touching the ground. A fire glowed in an iron stove. Roland could think only of Scripture lessons at school and Pentecostal fire; try as he could he failed to remember the exact meaning of the word. The man went on filing at the raised hoof. Once he cut at it with a short knife and carved away a whole segment of skin. It fell to the stone floor and lay like a slice of coconut. Now and then, fussily, he bent lower, straddling his legs wide, and blew dust from the hoof. Before the shoe was fitted Roland moved away. He couldn’t watch the final bearing down, the smell of the horse’s foot burning. He wanted to watch, he wanted to stay, but he couldn’t.
To the left of the smithy was a church, square-towered. The graveyard was at the back, not seen from the road. There was a signpost saying To the Mountain, as if it was an attraction. The sun burnt on, drugging everything with warmth. Roland would have liked to buy some lemonade at the corner shop but he had no money.
In time the change in the countryside was noticeable. The prolific elms became fewer, the hedges thinned, the lane climbed steeply. At last there were no more houses or cottages. Then the road stopped too. They came to a gate, stone walls at either side. Beyond the gate was moorland, rolling into the distance, purple under a growth of heather. It was vaster, wilder, than Roland had expected – a bleak plateau of flowing earth as far as the eye could see, and the mountain ahead and to the left, one hundred miles away. There was a desert of moorland to cross and a deep valley to descend, not steep but endlessly sloping down to a plantation of firs shaped like an arrow head. Its tip pointed at the black slab of a reservoir and the lower slopes of the mountain. Roland was quite checked by the distance they would have to go. He was at the end of the world; come from any direction start from any place, it would be the same.
The sheep trotted
in packs as if they were afraid. When Kidney swung his arms they leapt haughtily, like miniature camels, black muzzles held high. A strange unified cry came from them; they stretched their throats and landed trembling, with ears laid back.
‘It’s a long way,’ said Roland, looking over the edge of the world into the valley that separated him from the mountain.
‘Head back, shoulders braced,’ bade Kidney, beginning to march across the plateau.
‘Have you walked often?’ Roland asked, but already Kidney was some way ahead and didn’t reply.
Something about the expanse of earth made Roland hungry. He wanted chocolate, biscuits, anything. He shouted to Kidney that he wanted some food badly.
‘There’s none,’ Kidney called, swinging his arms from the shoulder. He waited till Roland should reach him. ‘We had a very substantial lunch,’ he said sternly, a deep crease between his sleek eyebrows.
‘At home,’ said Roland, torturing himself, ‘we have Mr Mahmood’s breasts – ’
‘Indeed.’
‘ – of chicken. They’re pre-packed and frozen.’ Roland gazed at the distant mountain and would have preferred to turn back.
They walked some way across the moor without much purpose, until by chance they found a path, worn through the heather, leading down to the valley.
Roland thought the men who had lived here hundreds of years ago had made the threadbare patch. Kidney said it would be sheep. He was much better in the open air; he replied to most questions when asked. There was a book in the pocket of the sports jacket. Roland could see it above the check flap of his coat.
‘What’s the book?’ he asked, walking behind Kidney, taking care not to tread on his heels, as his father had taught him.
‘Joseph gave it to me.’ said Kidney.
‘Let me see it.’
Kidney reached out the book and handed it backwards. Roland spelt out laboriously, ‘John Donne, His Poems.’ He turned the pages.
‘What’s that writing say? I can’t read it.’
‘Joseph wrote it.’
‘What did he write?’