by Melvyn Bragg
‘What’s been about?’
‘You’ve been off with the fairies lately.’ He smiled and stopped and they were face to face.
‘You didn’t answer. Why don’t you?’
‘No need.’
Still he smiled and the smile annoyed her.
‘They say Your Country Needs You.’
‘There’s all sorts of ways,’ said Frank, unruffled. ‘People have got to be fed. Even armies.’
‘But don’t you want to be with all the others?’
It was a sullen, windless day. The earth, which sloped so evenly down to the calm sea, was overlooked by a light grey screen of cloud that would not budge or break to let in the sun. Grace was aware that she was pushing Frank and the feeling was not pleasant. She tried to leaven the moment with a mock playfulness and lightly hit him on the chest.
‘You should be out there,’ she said, ‘shouldn’t you?’
He caught her wrist, and as she raised the other arm, he caught that also. Grace was a strong woman but Frank held her easily without locking his grip, smiling still, but now with a hardness in the smile. She saw that; she saw the shadow go across his face.
‘You wouldn’t be thinking I was a coward, would you?’
By way of a reply, she wrestled against his grip for a few futile moments. ‘What do you think?’ she said, crossly.
‘I’m asking you.’
‘How could you think that?’
‘You still haven’t said.’
‘. . . No. You couldn’t be that . . . You couldn’t be.’
He let her wrists go and she let them fall, as if lifeless.
‘I’ve thought about it,’ he said. ‘All the lads have but . . . there’s plenty to be done here.’
How could she shake him? Even that expression of anger had been so slight. And now it was over.
She nodded and walked on. He followed, at a distance, and it was some little statement of time before she slowed down for him to catch up. But why had he not speeded up to catch her?
Wilson’s fingers were now clawed with arthritis. They behaved like talons: they could clutch and, collectively, grip and lift, but the flexibility of fingers had gone. The arthritis was now creeping into major joints, his knees, his hips, as if a sapling were growing inside him, one that could not be rooted out or cut down.
He was still capable on the farm, though there was a steadily increasing number of jobs he could not do. He had begun to make provision. Some of the fields were let off to his sons. He no longer did the ploughing. He kept on only one hired man. Betty, a granddaughter who had just left school nearby, had been sent along by her mother to help Sarah about the house and, along the way, learn how to keep and to run a farmhouse. Grace would not be on hand for ever.
Mr Walker thought him very much the village patriarch. There was something of the Old Testament about Wilson, not a prophet, still less a king, but one who kept the faith whatever the trials sent to test him. There he sat, in his chair before a fire licking up in flames through all the seasons, the hams above him on the iron hooks nailed on to the oak beams, the glitter of plain, polished furniture about him and, in the late winter afternoon or in the evenings, the paraffin lamp on the table. Though this farm had been in place for little more than two hundred years, there was, the minister thought, something deeply ancient about it, planted as a wood is planted and just as much part of the landscape. And there was Wilson, binder twine still holding up his trousers, stockinged feet scorning slippers, pipe as often empty for comfort as full for pleasure. Wilson, white-haired now, sat as if in judgement on all about him.
But it was the minister’s opinion he wanted. Every time he came he was properly fed but every time, now, he knew that Wilson was itching to question him. When the minister did draw up his chair and they sat across the fire, Wilson began, as usually now, abruptly.
‘More thousands,’ he said. He indicated the newspaper, neatly folded on the fender. This new daily delivery – on the minister’s advice – now brought the world to him in words and pictures in a way he had never before experienced. He was addicted to it: on Sunday when he would take no newspaper, he felt the lack of it. It had transformed his life. There were times when the minister regretted having urged it on him. He had observed the decline in the old man’s mobility and he saw the popular newspaper as company for him in the longer spells he would spend in his chair. It had broken a fast of reading, which (save for a few glances at the Bible and the hymn book) had lasted through most of his life. It brought news the old man constantly found startling and often unbearable.
‘Thousands of young lads cut down, it says, scythed down just like corn – it’s there, the corn standing up high, take a scythe to it and it’s flat, cut down, like the lads. They’re no more.’
The minister braced himself and took a good pull of the strong tea, brought in by Grace.
‘Why does He let that happen?’
If only he could be certain in himself. But for Wilson and others like him, it was certainty they needed from him. His duty was to provide it. He was their rock. ‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways,’ he began.
‘There’s nothing mysterious about them!’ said Wilson. Across the days he had been stoking up his questions for this weekly discussion. ‘Mown down. And those lads that all come from the same town, those “pals” . . .’
The minister recognised the distress. He had to dig in. ‘We cannot know the ways of the Lord until the Final Judgement.’
‘Why can’t He tell us something now? It’s now we want to know it.’
‘He is the Almighty God. Who are we to question Him?’
‘Why do we say our prayers, then?’
‘In our prayers we seek His guidance to make ourselves more worthy of Him.’
‘We ask for things.’ Wilson was not to be placated. ‘We ask for peace and we ask Him to help our neighbours and ourselves – we ask all the time. Why can’t we ask why He is letting this happen?’
‘I trust,’ said the minister, severely, ‘that this sort of talk is confined to us and does not extend to the family.’
‘No!’
‘I am sorry but . . .’ Mr Walker rallied ‘. . . I admit that these are difficult times for those of us who believe. We must accept that He is at times inscrutable. We may not know His full purpose.’
‘How,’ said Wilson, returning to what the minister recognised was a well-rehearsed line of questioning, ‘how can He be All Powerful and All Good if He lets this happen? I know He is All Powerful and All Good – don’t get me wrong – but I want you to tell me how it works.’
That was the heart of the matter. The old man, who had leaned forward, his talon hands gripped tight around the chair’s arms, now sat back, tapped the pre-charged pipe and took a spill to the fire to light it.
‘We are being punished,’ said the minister. ‘We are being punished and we are being tested.’
‘What did those lads out there ever do to deserve to be punished?’
‘Perhaps it was not them, but us, all of us for what we have failed to do. All the firstborn of Egypt were innocent but we know now there was a reason for that terrible massacre. He has given us life and He has given us free will but if we betray that trust then there have to be sacrifices.’
The minister’s throat was dry with strain.
Wilson seemed lost behind the smoke. He said nothing. It was up to the minister.
‘He wants us all to be saved. He wants us all to cleanse our souls. But we have to learn to obey Him. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. The vengeance of the Lord falls on the guilty and the innocent alike . . .’
‘That’s what I can’t grasp,’ said Wilson, quietly. ‘When you talked about the Germans at the beginning, I had some idea what you were saying – that we were the same under the skin and it was bad, it was brother against brother, you said. I could grasp that. But this . . . those lads . . .’
The old man was so pure in his seeking. The minister no less true
to himself. Nevertheless he felt his throat contract as he tried one more time.
‘There is what we know and there is what we believe,’ he said. ‘They are different. We, you and I and the congregation, believe that there is an Almighty and forgiving God who wants to welcome all good souls to eternal life. It is not given to us to understand everything. There are things we will never know. Maybe some day, even if only on the Last Day, we will understand. But while we don’t understand, we must believe. If we cease to believe we have nothing. Without belief we are worthless, just creatures like other creatures. We deny what is most precious in us. We deny the soul. And there are those who hold that view. But we, in our chapel, we hold on to the faith and the faith tells us to endure, to seek, to hope and then salvation may be delivered to us.’
Wilson said little more. He had enough to brood on. He saw that to meet the desperation there had to be a hard creed. He had to accept that at times God was not good.
After the funeral, Grace managed to claim a half-hour of her father’s time. They went into the park and found a free bench.
Martha’s illness had been long and painful. The doctor spoke of ‘consumption’ and later he spoke of a ‘growth’. Cancer was not yet an available explanation.
‘The pity was,’ James said, ‘she was too full of anger. She was mad with herself because she was badly, which must have made it worse. She didn’t know what she was saying half the time at the end.’
He took out a cigarette. She noticed how ingrained his finger pads were with fine coal dust and nicotine. He had never carried much fat but he had grown thinner as he had aged and yet still the blue eyes, which matched her own, were lit with a flame of life that always touched her heart.
‘We never got on,’ Grace said. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘One of those things,’ he said. ‘She might have thought you were too like Ruth. She was always asking about Ruth.’ He looked away. ‘It’s strange the influence a dead woman can have. Sometimes it was as if Ruth was there in the room with Martha and me! At times.’
Grace asked him about the arrangements. He would move out of the house, he said, and go and live with Grace’s older brother, his wife and family. The younger two girls would go one each to their two older sisters by Martha’s first marriage. It was all tidied up, Grace thought, and no place for her. She had come prepared to stay and look after her father for a few months at least. She accepted his plans and knew that to challenge them would be to upset him. She could mourn later.
‘And my Grace,’ he said to her, ‘how is she, now, Grace?’
‘She’s well. She’s very lucky.’
‘Frank seems a fine lad.’
‘He is.’
‘And life on that farm must be sweet: hard at times but sweet. I would have given a lot to have a small farm, you know. Just one or two acres would have done. I could have worked extra for other farmers roundabout but I’d have had my own house and place and maybe a horse, maybe a pony for you children, and a vegetable garden, hens, geese, a goose for Christmas. I would have been the happiest man on God’s earth, you know, with that.’ He stubbed out the cigarette and smiled at her, a smile that provoked a smile. ‘I like to think it could have been the saving of your mother,’ he said. ‘Just a few acres . . . But it was not to be.’
As Grace huddled into herself for warmth in the train that took her back to Wigton, she was still moved by his confession. He had never said that to her before. Perhaps he had never said it to anyone – wouldn’t that be a privilege! But he had not got what he wanted and now it was too late.
She wanted to have a life, some time of her life, outside the invisible walls of the village, the farm, the daily tread, Frank. The clickety-click, clickety-click of the wheels on the track urged her on to a new future and yet she was aimed for the past. She went into the corridor to be alone and walked to the end of the carriage, swaying, rather off balance, and in the space between the carriages, she flung open the window and let in the gusts of cold wind from the sea. Clickety-click, got-to-get-out, clickety-click, got-to-get-out. Got to get out.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When Mary was up for it, he would take her into one of the two sitting rooms. Spacious, well proportioned, fitting the ambition of the place, they were walled with armchairs leaving the centre free for the passage of wheelchairs and nurses carrying trays. The midday meal and the late-afternoon meal were served in the adjoining dining room. The television was on all the time, the consensus being among the patients that it was better on than off. The volume was moderated, too much so for some for whom deafness was part of the accumulating ailments of age.
Mary had her friends and liked to be settled in a corner with them. On the good early days, there had been something of a conversation, which John observed with the pride of a father watching his child do well. Some of the women were alert, wholly compos mentis and happy to patch over the gaps in Mary’s contributions. John was grateful for that. Apart from helping his mother, it shielded him from the responsibility of talking to her in public. He found that very difficult. He was not so vain as to think they were being observed and overheard – although they could scarcely avoid it – but he found that, outside the privacy of her room, he had nothing to say save, ‘How are you?’ ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ and then direct her and himself to the television.
When there were only a few in the room, most of them unmoving, exhausted by this trial of survival, it could be awkward. Mary would sometimes scan the room and say loudly, ‘Everybody’s asleep! Just look at them.’
‘No, they’re not.’ John could never manage more than a whisper and he also hoped, faint hope, that it would bring down the volume of his mother’s proclamation by example. ‘They’re watching television.’
‘They’re asleep! And where are the men? Why are there no men?’
‘There’s one or two in the other sitting room. We could go there. They’re in the other room.’
‘I don’t believe you. There’s nothing but old women. It’s terrible. There’s nobody you can talk to!’
Mary was talking loudly to about six mostly recumbent women. It occurred to John that they were quite tactfully ignoring her.
‘Oh dear.’ In that phrase she almost realised what she was saying, but then she was back in the rant: ‘I can’t be doing with this. I’m going home.’
‘Would you like some tea?’ he whispered. ‘I could get you some tea.’
‘Home!’
‘I’ll see if there’s any tea.’ He stood up.
‘Where are you going? You’ve just come. You never come to see us.’
He had made a misjudgement. She would be better off in her room. Mercifully he had not unloaded her from the wheelchair.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Back to your room.’
In the corridor, she said, ‘Look at this! Isn’t it marvellous? Marvellous! Look how long it is.’
The corridor, an impressive stretch, rarely failed to please her.
‘Who lives here?’
‘You do.’
‘Do I?’
He took her to the end where her bedroom was located and then turned the wheelchair around and went back again and then around to feeder corridors, into dead ends that demanded a U-turn, trying, in a mood of desperate jollity, to make an event of this homeward spin. He walked fast. She liked that. He took corners pretending it was perilous. That, too, she liked. She waved at the nurses and John felt he was making too much of it, but as long as she was enjoying herself he stuck at it until he felt a sudden blanketing of depression and he steered her back into her room.
‘Where’s this?’
‘This is where you live. Look at the photographs on the wall, and there’s your dressing-gown and the fluffy toys your grandchildren bring you.’
‘Have I got grandchildren?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aren’t I lucky? I am. I am very, very lucky.’ She looked out of the window. ‘Look at that tree,’
she said.
John sat in the chair and tried to swim out of his dark immersion. Was he helping? Earlier in the afternoon he had started to talk about Grace but stopped when her confusion began to upset her. He had been rushing it. He went outside for a cigarette and took out the letter he had received a couple of days before. It was from Mr Tate, the psychiatrist.
‘Mary scored markedly better than last time on numbers,’ he read. ‘She was better on association as well. When I asked her who she was and where she came from she was very good. She talked a little about Wigton. She knew she was in Silloth. She remembered more of the ten objects than she had done over the last eighteen months. We are not talking about substantial but we are talking about “marked”.’
What might have changed her? Were the drugs working better? Or was it the photographs, or talking to her about the Pea and Pie Supper and Kettler and the Two Wigton Mashers and dancing the Valeta?
She was becoming another person, he saw that with sorrow. She was for ever reduced to a fragment of what she had been or assuming a character he had never known her to have. That public rudeness to the other women in the room, for instance. It was totally untrue to the real character of Mary, whose politeness and sympathy for others had been set in concrete. That vulgar loudness! Where had that come from in someone who had such a sweet and rather soft voice? She would have been shocked at the vulgarity of the person she had been during those imperious moments in the sitting room. And the complaints. This was a woman whose answer to ‘How are you?’ was, time without number, ‘No complaints! No complaints at all.’
Perhaps he was expecting too much. He smoked a final cigarette and went back in. She was watching Singin’ in the Rain. He reminded her that the vicar would soon be round to see her. It was one of his days.
‘Oh. He won’t, will he?’
She looked – self-mockingly – crestfallen. But, more importantly for John, she was like her old self. He waited.
‘He’s a nice man,’ she said, ‘I like him. But . . .’