But Mr Dukelow didn’t say anything. He walked from the kitchen without swaying like my father was swaying.
My father had his hat on. and he didn’t take it off. He took his turnip watch from his waistcoat pocket and examined it. ‘I can’t see without my glasses,’ he said to me. ‘Will you take a gander at it, boy?’
He never wore glasses, but he often made the joke when he’d been down to Neenan’s for a while. I told him it was twenty past six. He put the stumps of two fingers on my head and said I was a great boy. Did I know, he asked me, that in six months’ time I’d be an uncle? He had a way of touching me with his stumps instead of with the fingers that remained with him, just as he had a way of pushing from him a plate from which he’d eaten a meal. ‘Don’t forget to tell the teacher,’ he said. ‘It’s not every day he has an uncle to instruct.’
My mother took a barm brack from a tin and began to butter it for Mr Dukelow before he went. Bridget moved a kettle on to the hot area of the stove. It boiled at once. ‘Will I fry him something?’ she asked my mother.
‘There’s rashers there,’ said my mother, ‘and a bit of black pudding. Do him eggs, Bridget, and a few potato-cakes.’
‘He’s going,’ repeated my father. His face, redder than usually it was, had sweat on the sides of it. ‘He’s going,’ he said again.
I was sitting at the end of the table with a comic spread out in front of me. While I gazed at my father half my vision retained the confused mass of cartoon characters.
‘Well, that’s that,’ said my father.
He stood there swaying, his feet rooted to the kitchen floor, like a statue about to topple in a wind. He was wearing the blue-striped suit that he always wore on the half-day; his hands were hanging by his sides.
‘You should be bloody ashamed of yourself,’ he said suddenly, and I thought he was talking to me. He wasn’t looking at any of us; his eyes were turned upwards, regarding a corner of the ceiling. ‘A chancer like that,’ he said, ‘that gives a young fellow two-bob pieces.’ Instinctively I knew then that he was speaking to my mother, even though she did not acknowledge his remarks.
‘Sent up from Satan,’ he said. ‘Sent up to make wickedness. I’m sorry about that thing, Bridget.’
Bridget shook her head, implying that it didn’t matter, and I knew they were referring to what had happened in the hall last night.
‘Tell Henry Dukelow I’ll see him at the bus.’ He moved to the back door, adding that he was returning to Neenan’s until it was time to say goodbye to Mr Dukelow. ‘He’ll never make a butcher,’ he said, ‘Or any other bloody thing either.’
I closed the comic and watched my mother and Bridget preparing Mr Dukelow’s last meal in our house. They didn’t speak and I was afraid to, now. I still couldn’t understand why this series of events was taking place. I tried to connect one occurrence with another, but I failed. I felt forgotten in the house: I might have been dead at the table for all they considered me: they were assuming I had no mind.
Mr Dukelow came into the silence, carrying the suitcase he had first carried into the kitchen six months ago, bound up with what looked like the same piece of string. He ate in silence, and Bridget and my mother sat at the table, not saying anything either. I pretended to read the comic, but all the time I was thinking that I’d rather have Mr Dukelow for my father. I couldn’t help thinking it and I began to imagine my father sitting on the Bantry bus and Mr Dukelow staying where he was, running the shop better than my father had ever run it, cutting the meat better. I thought of Mr Dukelow in the big bed with my mother, lying asleep beside her. I saw his hands on the white sheets, the thin clever hands instead of hands that made you turn your head away. I saw Mr Dukelow and my mother and myself going out for a walk together on a Sunday afternoon, and Mr Dukelow telling us about Vasco da Gama and Columbus. Mr Dukelow could spend the afternoon in Neenan’s and not sway and lurch when he came back. There was no need for Mr Dukelow to go kissing the maid.
‘I’m sorry I upset him,’ said Mr Dukelow suddenly. ‘He’s a decent man.’
‘It has nothing to do with anything,’ said my mother. ‘He’s in a bad way with drink.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Dukelow.
As out of a fog the truth came in pieces to me, and some of the pieces as yet were missing. In six months Mr Dukelow had become a better butcher than my father and my father was jealous of that. Jealousy had caused him to see Mr Dukelow as a monster; jealousy had spread from him in different directions until it wrapped my mother and myself, and tortured my father’s pride until he felt he must get his own back and prove himself in some way.
‘I’ll say goodbye,’ said Mr Dukelow, and I hated my father then for his silly pettiness. I wanted Mr Dukelow to go to my mother and kiss her as my father had kissed Bridget. I wanted him to kiss Bridget too, in a way more elegant than the way of my father.
But none of that happened, nor did I ask why, in the face of everything, my father was being described as a decent man. Mr Dukelow left the kitchen, having shaken hands with the three of us. I sat down again at the table while my mother and Bridget prepared the tea. They did not say anything, but I thought to myself that I could see in Bridget’s flushed face a reflection of what was passing in her mind: that Mr Dukelow was a nicer man than the porter at the Munster and Leinster Bank. My mother’s face was expressionless, but I thought to myself that I knew what expression would be there if my mother cared to permit its presence.
Again I pretended I was reading the comic, but all the time I was thinking about what had silently occurred in our house and how for no sensible reason at all my father’s rumbustiousness had spoilt everything. No one but my father could not love Mr Dukelow: no one in the wide world, I thought, except that red-faced man with stumps on his hands, who fell over chairs when he’d been down in Neenan’s, who swayed and couldn’t read the time. I thought about the ugliness of my father’s jealous nature and the gentleness it had taken exception to. ‘Sent up from Satan,’ his stumbling voice had ridiculously announced. ‘Sent up to make wickedness.’ How could it be, I wondered, that I was the child of one instead of the other?
‘Well, mister-me-buck,’ said my father, returning to the kitchen after a time. When I looked at him I began to cry and my mother took me up to bed, saying I was tired.
O Fat White Woman
Relaxing in the garden of her husband’s boarding-school, Mrs Digby-Hunter could not help thinking that it was good to be alive. On the short grass of the lawn, tucked out of sight beneath her deck-chair, was a small box of Terry’s All Gold chocolates, and on her lap, open at page eight, lay a paper-backed novel by her second-favourite writer of historical fiction. In the garden there was the pleasant sound of insects, and occasionally the buzzing of bees. No sound came from the house: the boys, beneath the alert tutelage of her husband and Mr Beade, were obediently labouring, the maids, Dympna and Barbara, were, Mrs Digby-Hunter hoped, washing themselves.
Not for the moment in the mood for reading, she surveyed the large, tidy garden that was her husband’s pride, even though he never had a moment to work in it. Against high stone walls forsythia grew, and honeysuckle and little pear trees, and beneath them in rich, herbaceous borders the garden flowers of summer blossomed now in colourful variety. Four beech trees shaded patches of the lawn, and roses grew, and geraniums, in round beds symmetrically arranged. On either side of an archway in the wall ahead of Mrs Digby-Hunter were two yew trees and beyond the archway, in a wilder part, she could see the blooms of late rhododendrons. She could see as well, near one of the yew trees, the bent figure of Sergeant Wall, an ex-policeman employed on a part-time basis by her husband. He was weeding, his movements slow in the heat of that June afternoon, a stained white hat on his hairless head. It was pleasant to sit in the shade of a beech tree watching someone else working, having worked oneself all morning in a steamy kitchen. Although she always considered herself an easy-going woman, she had been very angry that morning because one of the girls had
quite clearly omitted to make use of the deodorant she was at such pains to supply them with. She had accused each in turn and had got nowhere whatsoever, which didn’t entirely surprise her. Dympna was just fifteen and Barbara only a month or two older; hardly the age at which to expect responsibility and truthfulness. Yet it was her duty to train them, as it was her husband’s duty to train the boys. ‘You’ll strip wash, both of you,’ she’d commanded snappishly in the end, ‘immediately you’ve done the lunch dishes. From top to toe, please, every inch of you.’ They had both, naturally, turned sulky.
Mrs Digby-Hunter, wearing that day a blue cotton dress with a pattern of pinkish lupins on it, was fifty-one. She had married her husband twenty-nine years ago, at a time when he’d been at the beginning of a career in the army. Her father, well-to-do and stern, had given her away and she’d been quite happy about his gesture, for love had then possessed her fully. Determined at all costs to make a success of her marriage and to come up to scratch as a wife, she had pursued a policy of agreeableness: she smiled instead of making a fuss, in her easy-going way she accepted what there was to accept, placing her faith in her husband as she believed a good wife should. In her own opinion she was not a clever person, but at least she could offer loyalty and devotion, instead of nagging and arguing. In a bedroom of a Welsh hotel she had disguised, on her wedding night, her puzzled disappointment when her husband had abruptly left her side, having lain there for only a matter of minutes.
Thus a pattern began in their marriage and as a result of it Mrs Digby-Hunter had never borne children although she had, gradually and at an increasing rate, put on weight. At first she had minded about this and had attempted to diet. She had deprived herself of what she most enjoyed until it occurred to her that caring in this way was making her bad-tempered and miserable: it didn’t suit her, all the worrying about calories and extra ounces. She weighed now, although she didn’t know it, thirteen stone.
Her husband was leaner, a tall man with strong fingers and smooth black hair, and eyes that stared at other people’s eyes as if to imply shrewdness. He had a gaunt face and on it a well-kept though not extensive moustache. Shortly after their marriage he had abandoned his career in the army because, he said, he could see no future in it. Mrs Digby-Hunter was surprised but assumed that what was apparent to her husband was not apparent to her. She smiled and did not argue.
After the army her husband became involved with a firm that manufactured a new type of all-purpose, metal step-ladder. He explained to her the mechanism of this article, but it was complicated and she failed to understand: she smiled and nodded, murmuring that the ladder was indeed an ingenious one. Her husband, briskly businesslike in a herring-bone suit, became a director of the step-ladder company on the day before the company ran into financial difficulties and was obliged to cease all production.
‘Your father could help,’ he murmured, having imparted to her the unfortunate news, but her father, when invited to save the step-ladder firm, closed his eyes in boredom.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rather miserably, feeling she had failed to come up to scratch as a wife. He said it didn’t matter, and a few days later he told her he’d become a vending-machine operator. He would have an area, he said, in which he would daily visit schools and swimming-pools, launderettes, factories, offices, wherever the company’s vending-machines were sited. He would examine the machines to see that they were in good trim and would fill them full of powdered coffee and powdered milk and a form of tea, and minerals and biscuits and chocolate. She thought the work odd for an ex-army officer, but she did not say so. Instead, she listened while he told her that there was an expanding market for vending-machines, and that in the end they would make a considerable amount of money. His voice went on, quoting percentages and conversion rates. She was knitting him a blue pullover at the time. He held his arms up while she fitted it about his chest; she nodded while he spoke.
Then her father died and left her a sum of money.
‘We could buy a country house,’ her husband said, ‘and open it up as a smart little hotel.’ She agreed that that would be nice. She felt that perhaps neither of them was qualified to run an hotel, but it didn’t seem worth making a fuss about that, especially since her husband had, without qualifications, joined a step-ladder firm and then, equally unskilled, had gone into the vending-machine business. In fact, their abilities as hoteliers were never put to the test because all of a sudden her husband had a better idea. Idling one evening in a saloon bar, he dropped into conversation with a man who was in a state of depression because his son appeared to be a dunce.
‘If I was starting again,’ said the man, ‘I’d go into the cramming business. My God, you could coin it.’ The man talked on, speaking of parents like himself who couldn’t hold their heads up because their children’s poor performances in the Common Entrance examination deprived them of an association with one of the great public schools of England. The next day Mrs Digby-Hunter’s husband scrutinized bound volumes of the Common Entrance examination papers.
‘A small boarding-school,’ he later said to her, ‘for temporarily backward boys; we might do quite nicely.’ Mrs Digby-Hunter, who did not immediately take to the notion of being surrounded day and night by temporarily backward boys, said that the idea sounded an interesting one. ‘There’s a place for sale in Gloucestershire,’ her husband said.
The school, begun as a small one, remained so because, as her husband explained, any school of this nature must be small. The turnover in boys was rapid, and it soon became part of the educational policy of Milton Grange to accept not more than twenty boys at any one time, the wisdom of which was reflected in results that parents and headmasters agreed were remarkable: the sons who had idled at the back of their preparatory school classrooms passed into the great public schools of England, and their parents paid the high fees of Milton Grange most gratefully.
At Milton Grange, part ivy-clad, turreted and baronial, Mrs Digby-Hunter was happy. She did not understand the ins and outs of the Common Entrance examination, for her province was the kitchen and the dormitories, but certainly life at Milton Grange as the headmaster’s wife was much more like it than occupying half the ground floor of a semi-detached villa in Croydon, as the wife of a vending-machine operator.
‘Christ, what a time we’re having with that boy for Harrow,’ her husband would say, and she would make a sighing noise to match the annoyance he felt, and smile to cheer him up. It was extraordinary what he had achieved with the dullards he took on, and she now and again wondered if one day he might even receive a small recognition, an OBE maybe. As for her, Milton Grange was recognition enough: an apt reward, she felt, for her marital agreeableness, for not being a nuisance, and coming up to scratch as a wife.
Just occasionally Mrs Digby-Hunter wondered what life would have been like if she’d married someone else. She wondered what it would have been like to have had children of her own and to have engaged in the activity that caused, eventually, children to be born. She imagined, once a year or so, as she lay alone in her room in the darkness, what it would be like to share a double bed night after night. She imagined a faceless man, a pale naked body beside hers, hands caressing her flesh. She imagined, occasionally, being married to a clergyman she’d known as a girl, a man who had once embraced her with intense passion, suddenly, after a dance in a church hall. She had experienced the pressure of his body against hers and she could recall still the smell of his clothes and the dampness of his mouth.
But Milton Grange was where she belonged now: she had chosen a man and married him and had ended up, for better or worse, in a turreted house in Gloucestershire. There was give and take in marriage, as always she had known, and where she was concerned there was everything to be thankful for. Once a year, on the last Saturday in July, the gardens of the school were given over to a Conservative fete, and more regularly she and her husband drove to other country houses, for dinner or cocktails. A local Boy Scout group once asked h
er to present trophies on a sports day because she was her husband’s wife and he was well regarded. She had enjoyed the occasion and had bought new clothes specially for it.
In winter she put down bulbs, and in spring she watched the birds collecting twigs and straw for nests. She loved the gardens and often repeated to the maids in the kitchen that one was ‘nearer God’s Heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth’. It was a beautiful sentiment, she said, and very true.
On that June afternoon, while Mrs Digby-Hunter dropped into a doze beneath the beech trees and Sergeant Wall removed the weeds from a herbaceous border, the bearded Mr Beade walked between two rows of desks in a bare attic room. Six boys bent over the desks, writing speedily. In the room next door six other boys wrote also. They would not be idling, Mr Beade knew, any more than the boys in the room across the corridor would be idling.
‘Amavero, amaveris, amaverit,’ he said softly, his haired lips close to the ear of a boy called Timpson. ‘Amaverimus, Timpson, amaverint,’ atnaverint.’ A thumb and forefinger of Mr Beade’s seized and turned the flesh on the back of Timpson’s left hand. ‘Amaveritis,’ he said again, ‘amaverint’ While the flesh was twisted this way and that and while Timpson moaned in the quiet manner that Mr Beade preferred, Dympna and Barbara surveyed the sleeping form of Mrs Digby-Hunter in the garden. They had not washed themselves. They stood in the bedroom they shared, gazing through an open, diamond-paned window, smoking two Embassy tipped cigarettes. ‘White fat slug,’ said Barbara. ‘Look at her.’
They looked a moment longer. Sergeant Wall in the far distance pushed himself from his knees on to his feet. ‘He’s coming in for his tea,’ said Barbara. She held cigarette smoke in her mouth and then released it in short puffs. ‘She can’t think,’ said Dympna, ‘She’s incapable of mental activity.’ ‘She’s a dead white slug,’ said Barbara.
The Collected Stories Page 43