Vital Signs
Page 12
Anna began jumping up and down on the spot chanting, Going to the seaside. Going to the seaside.
“This carpet’s got a couple of years in it,” said Mr. Arkle. “In my trade,” he said, “carpets and mirrors. Can’t get enough of ‘em.”
George!
Can you hear me?
The carpet from the room what we’re in now!
Right, Mr. Arkle.
There was a tremendous crash and then the continuous clatter of angle iron sliding down the stairs.
“That’ll be Frederick,” said Mr. Arkle.
George!
The runner from the top landing!
Right, Mr. Arkle!
In the second-floor bathroom he stuck a pink label on the bathroom cabinet and then levered the brackets out of the wall with the bar of a screwdriver. Showers of plaster fell into the washbasin.
“‘Ere, quick! Take this off me before I drops it.”
Peter took the cabinet and Mr. Arkle called to Frederick, who was trudging up the stairs to the top floor.
“Take this down to the van, Frederick.” Turning to Peter, he said, “Strong as an ox, that boy. Aren’t you, Frederick?”
“I ain’t weak,” said Frederick as he started downstairs.
“Strong as an ox,” said Mr. Arkle. He brought his face closer to Peter, whose eyes began to water in sympathy.
“Strong as an ox and about as clever,” he said. “And about as clever.”
He started to laugh but the laughter turned into a bronchial wheeze and then into a retching cough. His face grew purple and congested. Veins stood in his face. He clung to Peter’s shoulder. Tears ran down from beneath the thick lenses. A final, open-mouthed, retching cough snatched him double. Bent over the bath, he started to make hawking noises. They got louder and louder until, with a final roar, he pushed himself upright and spat into the washbasin. Peter stared at the gob of yellow phlegm.
“Pick the bones out of that!” gasped Mr. Arkle.
He sat down on the edge of the bath and mopped his eyes with a grey handkerchief. A thread of saliva hung from his unshaven chin.
“Oh, Gawd!” he said. “That were a good one. Strong as an ox and about as clever, I said. Oh, dear Gawd! My sense of humour’ll be the death of me yet. Going on like that. Be the death of me. Can’t resist a joke, I can’t.”
He took his glasses off again and rubbed them up and down his jacket. He sniffed and sighed and wiped his nose on the edge of his hand.
They went into the bedroom next door. Peter helped Mr. Arkle take the door off the wardrobe.
“Too old fashioned, see,” said Mr. Arkle. “But old Henry’ll use the mirror for something.”
Anna danced in, singing, We’re going on hol-i-day. We’re going on hol-i-day, and Peter caught her up into the air and said, “What’s mummy doing?”
“Downstairs packing and we’re going to have spades and buckets and I can take my waterwings.”
“And we’re going to go fishing, too,” said Peter. “Do you think you’ll like that?”
“Will you take me fishing?”
“Of course I’m going to take you.”
Something heavy was being dragged across the floor in the room above and plaster was flaking off the ceiling.
George!
Can you hear me?
Yes, Mr. Arkle.
The carpets from the rooms with crosses on the doors.
And George?
Don’t scratch up that little wardrobe.
As the house emptied, the noises sounded louder. The air swam with dust from the carpets the boys were dragging down the stairs. Wrinkled pennants of wallpaper marked the passage of bedsteads.
Mr. Arkle pushed open the door of the ground-floor sitting room and looked inside.
“Aha!” he said. “Now this is a different class of piece altogether.”
He stuck pink labels on the bureau and the two armchairs. He lowered himself onto his hands and knees and felt along under the table.
“Lovely, that is. Come on. Get down here. Feel along under there.”
“What?” said Peter.
“What can you feel?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” repeated Mr. Arkle. He took hold of Peter’s arm and, pushing his face close, said, “Exacly!”
Peter stared into the swimmy, moist magnification of Mr. Arkle’s eyes.
“Exacly!”
They stared at each other.
“None of your glue. None of your nails. None of your screws.”
Peter nodded.
“Joints and pegs.”
“A bit of real craftmanship, that is. And do they care? They buy plyboard with plastic glued on it. The young ones now.”
He hauled himself up, breathing heavily, and slapped a label on the tabletop.
“It’s no use,” he said. “There just isn’t the honesty for it these days.”
Peter nodded slowly.
“Plyboard!”
Mr. Arkle slapped the tabletop even harder.
“This here’s manogony. Something you can call a wood. And none of your veneers neither.”
“It’s very nice,” said Peter.
“You remember,” said Mr. Arkle, prodding Peter in the chest, “you just keep it in mind. Your soft woods comes and goes but your manogony goes on for ever.”
Peter!
Hello!
I’ll put your suit and these books. . . .
I’ll come down there.
A chest of drawers walked past the doorway. Anna was walking backwards alongside it.
Jeanne was in the kitchen buckling a strap around the trunk.
“I’ve put your suit and some other clothes and books in here and you can get them from Bill when you come back.”
“Fine,” said Peter. “He’s awful when he gets going, isn’t he?”
“Bill? He’s been lecturing you, has he?”
Somewhere on the second floor there was a thunderous crash and the sound of rending wood.
“Jesus Christ!” said Peter.
Jeanne began to laugh.
They heard Mr. Arkle shout, George? and a faint voice calling It’s all right, Mr. Arkle. Fred went through the banisters.
“The banisters!” said Peter.
Never mind Frederick. Just don’t scratch no furniture.
His slow footsteps came down the basement stairs and he stood in the doorway rubbing his back.
“We don’t get no younger, do we?”
“There’s a double bed and a nice dressing table in my room across there,” said Jeanne.
He took out his gummed labels.
Mummy!
Hello!
George says we can ride in the van. Can we?
Yes.
Mummy?
George can spit all the way across a room.
I don’t want to hear about it.
“The hot-water heater,” said Mr. Arkle, coming back into the kitchen. “Did you get it from the Gas Board or private?”
“A shop, I think,” said Jeanne.
Frederick!
He peered at the name plate and checked the back for a serial number.
“Frederick. Use a spanner on that gas pipe and then have the heater off the wall. Then you can go back upstairs and help George.”
“Right, Mr. Arkle.”
“Frederick.”
“Ah?”
“We usually turns the gas off before we undoes the pipe.”
“Oh, ah,” said Frederick.
“Oh!” said Peter. “What about the Hoover?”
“Right,” said Mr. Arkle.
“Well?” said Jeanne. “What do you think?”
“What would you call fair?” said Mr. Arkle.
“A hundred and fifty?” said Jeanne.
He pursed his lips and whistled in.
“You’ve got to consider my overheads,” he said.
“A hundred and twenty?”
“I’ll tell you what. Seeing as how it’s you, Mrs. C., we’ll call it a hundred.”
“Done,” said Jeanne. “And you’re getting a bargain.”
“We all has to live, Mrs. C.”
He reached into his pocket and brought out a pair of pliers, a pencil stub, a ball of string, a radio valve, screws, nails, a piece of fancy moulding, two spanners, and a cigarette end. Groping down into the lining, he brought out the fattest roll of money that Peter had ever seen. He slipped off the rubber band, and, wetting his finger and thumb, began to count. When he had counted out a hundred pounds, the wad looked no smaller.
George and Frederick came clattering down the stairs followed by Anna. They went into Jeanne’s room and dismantled the bed.
“And there’s a trunk and box in here to go,” called Mr. Arkle, “and then we can get moving.”
Peter took Jeanne’s suitcase and his rucksack down to the van. He quickly dumped them inside. The van seemed just over half full. He glanced casually at the neighbouring houses but no one seemed to be taking any notice. The sides of the van were plain and there was no name on the front.
George and Frederick came down the path at a staggering run with the trunk between them. Jeanne, Anna, and Mr. Arkle followed.
“Finished?” said Peter.
“Ah,” said Mr. Arkle, but then he turned and walked back up the path and onto the front lawn. He bent and peered at the small grey statue of a girl fighting down her skirts with one hand and holding onto her hat with the other.
“It’s only an ornamental birdbath thing,” said Jeanne. He poked at it with a screwdriver.
“Frederick! Come and put this in the van.”
“What on earth do you want that for?” said Jeanne.
“Don’t you think we’d better go!” said Peter.
“Solid lead, Mrs. C. Solid lead.”
Anna and the two boys got into the back of the van. Mr. Arkle pulled himself up and struggled in behind the wheel. Jeanne sat in the other seat. Peter sat sideways, head bent, on the engine casing.
“All aboard, then?” said Mr. Arkle.
“Oh!” said Jeanne. “I’ve forgotten something. Won’t be a minute.”
She climbed down and hurried back into the empty house. Peter saw Mrs. Williams next door looking out of her sitting-room window. The floor of the cab was littered with peanut shells. A golliwog dangled from the mirror. The minutes lengthened.
“What’s she doing!” said Peter.
“Strong as an ox,” said Mr. Arkle suddenly, “and about as clever.”
A spasm of wheezy laughter took him and he accidentally sounded the horn. Peter hit his head on the roof.
“Oh, Gawd!” sighed Mr. Arkle. “That really were a good one.”
A man further up the road washing his car seemed to be watching them. Peter listened to Mr. Arkle’s breathing.
Then he heard the front door slam and, leaning forward, saw her running down the path. She waved to Mrs. Williams. Mr. Arkle started the engine. She climbed up into the cab and dumped a bundled towel into Peter’s lap. The bundle slid down his knee and shilling pieces began to slide and pour out onto the floor.
“Well, bless my soul!” said Mr. Arkle, slapping the steering wheel.
“Yes,” said Jeanne. “I nearly forgot to do the meters.”
* * *
Peter and anna strolled along the path through the dappled wood and out into the full sunshine of the clearing. In the centre of the clearing stood an old concrete pillbox and the remains of a prefabricated hut. Trees had been cleared through the wood to command a view over the estuary for the guns.
The top of the pillbox was grown over with grass and weeds and the angled stairwell was full of dead leaves. Speckled wood butterflies danced over the leaf mould.
The roof of the hut gaped open in places where the asbestos sheets had been smashed. What was left was moss-grown. Patches of moss were growing on the concrete floor, slowly covering over the shards of glass from the shattered windows.
Round the hut someone had planted lilac bushes which now grew wild, half masking the open doorway and pushing in at the window frames. The bushes were choked by convolvulus and honeysuckle.
Butterflies hung and battened on the tiny red and yellow flowers and basked on the sun-warmed concrete of the doorstep. Painted ladies, drab meadow browns, red admirals, and brimstone yellows, their wings winking shut and opening down into the full spread of their colours.
“What’s that one?” whispered Anna.
“A red admiral,” said Peter.
“I like the ones with eyes on them best,” she said.
Anna squatted down to watch the caterpillar flowing over the bark. Its body was bright red and black, furry. As she reached out her fingers, Peter said, “Don’t touch it. The bristles come out and make your hand swell up.”
“Shall I squash it?” said Anna.
“Why? You should never do things like that.”
“What’s its name?”
“I don’t know its real name,” said Peter. “We always used to call them woolly bears.”
“I want to touch it.”
“I’ll find you some you can take home, if you like,” said Peter. “You can keep them in a box.”
He looked about him for a ragwort plant and then said to Anna, “See that plant over there? The one with all the yellow flowers? See if there’s any there.”
She ran over and shouted, “Peter! Hundreds!”
The stem and leaves crawled with the yellow-and-black-banded caterpillars of the cinnabar moth, and Anna chose the fattest to put into his matchbox.
A breeze blew across the headland, swaying the harebells in the short turf. The river and the estuary lay like a model below them. Shadows raced over the slope.
“Where’s our house?” said Anna.
“See those black houses right down there near the sea? That’s Wildhaven where we came in the boat this morning. And Pennyford’s about three miles further up the coast. You can’t see it from here.”
“What do you think Mummy’s doing?”
“Making you something nice for tea.”
Peter gazed out over the estuary. The far shore was lost in the shimmer of the heat haze. At the mouth of the estuary he could see the orange beach and the white surf line of the sea beyond; the black cottages of Wildhaven where the boatman had ferried them across the tide race. As the yachts heeled under the breeze, the white sails flashed in the sunlight.
Anna was laying out her shells on the grass, arranging them in order of size. She had been carrying them inside her blouse. Tiny yellow periwinkles, cockleshells, whelk shells with spiral horns, pairs of razor shells, mermaids’ purses.
Peter lay back and closed his eyes. The sun swam red and yellow inside the blackness, lighter and darker, lighter and darker as the clouds passed. In his ears the heavy wash of the sea sounded; the scrunch of their feet on the shingle; a line of black rocks jumbling out to sea, the furthest rock splashed with birdlime where a brooding cormorant sat hunched over the surge and sway.
Beating out heavily over the pine trees, over the sedge, lumbering out into the sky over the estuary, the toiling black shape of an owl, mobbed by screaming starlings and thrushes.
“Peter! Peter! Look at me!”
He started up, blind for a second in the sudden light, and looked down the slope. Fifty yards or so below him, Anna was dancing about on a low, oval mound waving a bunch of flowers.
“Get down off that!”
&
nbsp; “Why?”
“Come up here!”
She ran down the mound and came panting up the hill towards him. He sat up and watched her. She flopped down and said, “Why should I get down? It isn’t high.”
“Because somebody’s buried inside it and it isn’t nice to jump about on someone’s grave.”
“Whose grave is it?”
“I don’t know who. One of the people who made that big dike we saw this morning. Thousands of years ago. It was so long ago that there weren’t any towns or cities and there weren’t even houses.”
“What did they do here?”
“This was their fortress and they used to hunt here and catch fish in the river and the sea.”
“Why weren’t they buried in a churchyard?”
“Because there weren’t any churches then and they liked to bury the people in high places where they could look out over where they used to live.”
“Was I bad?” said Anna.
“No, sweetheart. Of course you weren’t. Those little hills they’re buried in are called long barrows and they sit inside them with all their favourite things with them. If you remember all that, you’ll be able to tell Mummy about it when you get home, won’t you?”
“Look!” shouted Peter. “Look, Anna!”
She looked along the direction of his arm.
“What?”
“See the yellow field, just over there. The stubble field? Look at the middle of it and then up into the sky. See?”
“What is it?”
“A hawk,” said Peter. “You don’t see them very often now. They’re called kestrels. Windhovers.”
The kestrel shifted its quarter and hovered lower over the field.
“If a mouse just twitches its whiskers they can see it,” said Peter.
The hawk banked and hovered again.
“I’m tired, Peter.”
“Just a minute. Watch. I think it’s going to stoop.”
The hawk climbed, slipped down the sky towards the middle of the field again, and hung motionless. Suddenly, as if a string had been cut, it plunged black down the air and dropped out of their sight behind the hedge.
“Can I have an ice-cream on the way home?”
“What?”
“Can I have an ice-cream cone on the way home?”
He looked down at her, her blouse stained and lumpy with seashells and her hair straggling out of the elastic band, and smiled.