The case was full of money.
There was a flicker at the edge of my vision. I jerked my head round and saw a light in one of the upstairs windows. I slammed the boot lid down.
At once the light was gone, so quickly it would have been easy to believe it hadn’t been there at all.
The little square lobby was dark, so lightless I had to feel my way along the wall until I came to the stairs. I went up softly, opened the door on the right, closed it behind me and stood listening. The skylight had no curtains and in the moonlight I could scarcely see the dim island of the bed. I made out the shape of one sleeper and then I thought there might be two and wondered if in the dark I had turned myself round and taken the wrong door. I held my breath and heard a sound so soft it might have been the sighing of my own blood in my ears. I crept quiet as an assassin to the side of the bed.
Mrs Morton was lying on her side. I bent close, and for a horrible second it seemed she had no face. Her face was buried in her hands; that was how she slept. She had shrugged off the blankets and her nightdress had come up to her waist. With a sigh she turned on to her back, and my nostrils caught the smell of sweat from her sickness mixed with the heavy warmth of her body’s scent. Step by step, I retreated from the bed.
Trembling, I felt my way down the stairs again, expecting to hear a voice calling that only a thief would creep upstairs in the middle of the night.
When I finally got to sleep, I dreamed that I slipped my hand under the open lid, pushed it between the bundles and felt the money go all the way to the bottom of the case.
Between one moment and the next the windows were pallid with early-morning light. I lay awake, and it came into my head that I wasn’t sure I had relocked the boot. I had to check, and saw myself crossing the farmyard towards the car. The image was so vivid, I thought I had done it, and started up suddenly as if wakening again out of sleep.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a while and then pulled on my trousers. The fire was out and the room with its thick stone walls was cold. I tiptoed over to look at the shelf of books beside the chair. In the dim light, it was hard to make out the titles. White and Morrison’s Geometry, a blue binding, we’d used it at school; riffling through it, pages of propositions, each ending in ‘QED’; dull reading it seemed. A thin volume in a dark wine red binding: Adonis, by Sir James Fraser. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
I reached for the next book and remembered everything and knew the money was no dream.
As it had in the middle of the night, the front door opened at a touch. In this remote place, there was no need for locks. Who would murder us in our beds? I was smiling at my fears when I stepped out into the yard.
As I did, the man came into view, straightening up as if he might have been bent over the boot of the car.
‘You’re like me,’ he said. He spoke softly, but it was so quiet each word was distinct. ‘You have trouble sleeping.’
I was holding the keys and put my hand in my pocket to hide them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He watched me as I crossed towards him. A bird whistled a few notes and fell quiet. It wasn’t proper daylight yet. The dark was thinning, as if getting ready for the sun. Going to him was like walking into the shadow of a wall. I couldn’t make out the detail of his face until I was close.
‘No, I sleep all right.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I’m not used to the country – being so quiet.’
‘I don’t sleep much,’ he said. ‘But there are consolations.’
When he started to walk, I went with him. Without saying anything, he made it seem as if he expected it. He led the way along the side of the barn on the path Mrs Morton and I had taken the day before. ‘I’ve seen the world get started every day of my life,’ he said. He seemed a different man from the one who had been so silent and withdrawn the day before. The keys bit into my hand as I clenched my fist on them. As we went under the trees a wind coming out of nowhere stirred the branches above us. It was like a signal and with every step we took after that it seemed to get lighter, until by the time we stood by the pool it was morning.
He picked up a handful of small stones and started to throw them one at a time into the water. Ripples from the splashes wove a net across the surface.
‘I missed your name yesterday,’ he said.
I told him Harry, and was about to add Glass when he nodded and said, ‘Harry Morton, right. My name’s August.’
I thought it was a joke but fortunately didn’t smile for he went on perfectly seriously, ‘Like the month.’
I followed the flight of another stone.
‘Up there,’ he said. ‘See?’
The bird was a speck hovering at the end of his finger.
‘A sparrowhawk. Watch now.’
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the hawk folded its wings and dropped. It came down on the opposite bank in a cloud of feathers, the bird it had struck in its swoop held in its claws. The hawk stood on its prey, looking around. The victim was bigger than the hawk that held it down, a fat brown bird with a white collar, fluttering its wings as the predator dug in its claws. With an effort, the hawk got a better grip and rose again into the air. As it did, the pigeon or whatever it was tore itself loose. I watched the two of them beat off in different directions. One to live another day, the other giving up on a kill and curving away in the opposite direction.
After calling it to my attention, he seemed to pay no heed to the drama playing out in front of us.
Another stone went into the water and he asked, ‘What age are you?’
‘Nineteen.’ Nearly. Three weeks would take me to my birthday.
‘And you’ve left school?’
‘Yes!’
‘As soon as you could. Hated every minute.’
I didn’t much care for the way he said that.
‘I liked French.’
‘What’s the French for hunchback?’
‘No idea.’
‘Bossu.’ He shook his head. ‘Just as well you gave up. You’d never get Higher French if you don’t know the word for hunchback.’
‘Right.’ I looked for a smile; there wasn’t the faintest trace.
‘Schools matter,’ he said. ‘In Norway the Nazis took all the history books out of the schools. They wanted to have their own books instead. The teachers refused. It shows the power of ideas. Those teachers knew that ideas matter more than guns.’ I more or less knew where I was with that. It had the sound of a sermon; the church service to end the school year; Bible Class, that kind of shite. But then he surprised me. ‘We think in this country we won the war,’ he said, ‘that all our guns and armies defeated them. But there’s no telling whose ideas will shape the world that’s coming.’
‘We won,’ I said. ‘We won all right.’ I didn’t have the courage to say to him he was talking rubbish. ‘I saw the pictures of Berlin. In the newsreels, at the Roxy in Glasgow. Berlin was flattened. We flattened it.’
‘Ruined cities . . .’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve had plenty of them before, from Troy to Warsaw.’
All I could think of to say was ‘I never saw pictures of them.’
The last ripples from the stones were settling against the sides of the pond.
‘This is a favourite place for us,’ he said. ‘When the weather’s good, we often walk down here after supper. For swimming, sometimes. But it’s deeper than you think, so you have to be careful.’
‘Safe enough when there are two of you.’ I suppressed a cartoon image of them ploughing solemnly back and forward.
‘Like you and your mother. Lucky for her you were there.’
Realising he thought Mrs Morton had been rescued by me, I hesitated. But then, when I didn’t say anything, he smiled and I wondered if he knew perfectly well what had happened. It was as if he’d set a trap and I’d fallen into it.
‘My wife won’t swim,’ he said, ‘because she can’t be sure of being private. Not that anyone ever comes.’
For a moment, r
aw-boned and unsmiling they were naked in the cartoon.
‘What happened to the teachers?’ I asked.
‘In Norway?’
‘I just wondered.’
‘They were shot.’
Of course. What else had I expected?
‘If you want to carry on with your walk,’ I said. I yawned, giving an impersonation of a man who wanted to get back to his bed. ‘I’ll maybe go back and try for another hour’s sleep.’
The fake yawn set off the real thing. Great gaping teachings for breath stretched my jaws.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Young man like you, once you’re up you should stay up. I’ll walk back with you.’
He picked up a stone, small and white like the ones he’d thrown into the pool, bent to wash it, and then rubbed it dry between his palms. He held it out to me, white and pebble-sized. ‘Souvenir.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Keep it for luck. You could have died here.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
When the woman said my mother was still unwell, my first reaction was disbelief.
‘Go up and see her,’ she said.
It was a tiny room. Apart from the narrow bed, there was space only for an old wardrobe and a chest of drawers, a chair piled with the clothes she’d been wearing and the big suitcase on the floor with its lid propped open against the wall. Seeing me look at it, she said, ‘Take what you need. We’re going to have to be here one more night.’
‘What’s wrong?’ I couldn’t manage anything better by way of sympathy.
‘I can see two of you.’ She frowned and narrowed her eyes as if trying to focus.
‘We could go back to Inverness. Find somewhere better than this, somewhere you’d be comfortable.’
‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t travel.’
‘This is a miserable place to be ill.’ The skylight was grimy with dirt on the inside and shaded on the outside with long, caked streaks of dried birdshit. The blue paint on the walls had faded to the colour of an old man’s eyes. You could tell it had been put on over paper because a long ragged strip had come loose and hung down in the corner by the door. Incongruously, the clock that sat on the chest of drawers was made of marble with a statuette on top of a woman in a toga with naked breasts. ‘It feels as if it’s never been heated. Don’t you feel the cold?’
She was sitting half up and her nightdress left her shoulders bare.
‘I’m burning up,’ she said. She rubbed her hand across her mouth. ‘Could you get me something to drink?’
When I came back with the glass of water, she was lying with her arms by her sides breathing through her mouth. I could see her nipples under the nylon, and the curves of her breasts. She opened her eyes and held out a hand for the glass. When she sipped from it, water ran down her chin.
I didn’t know what to do. ‘Maybe if you ate, you’d feel better,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to bring you something?’ Eating was my solution to feeling unwell. I knew nothing about illness.
‘I’ll lie down. Feel better if I sleep.’
When I went down, the man, August, had eaten and left already. The woman had put a bowl of porridge on the table. There was a jug of milk and I poured some into the porridge and added a lot of salt to make it palatable. At home we ate corn flakes. Even when my mother was with us, she’d never fancied porridge. I wondered if she made it now for her lawyer husband in Aberdeen. I sat spooning up porridge and staring into the bowl.
The woman spoke twice before I came to and realised she was asking me how my mother was.
‘She lay down again. Maybe she’ll feel better once she’s had a sleep. If she does, we should go back to Inverness.’ And I added diplomatically, ‘We could find a doctor there, if she still feels ill.’
‘My husband says you’ve not to think of moving her till she feels better. And not to worry about money, he says. We won’t charge for putting you up, not when there’s illness.’
I didn’t feel grateful. I felt trapped.
I wanted to check if the car boot really was unlocked, but when I went out August was working in the yard. He glanced at me and went on piling up logs under the overhang of the nearest shed. After a minute, I made up my mind and went over and stood behind the car. Ignoring him, I found the right key and slid it into the lock. When I turned it there was a click and the boot wouldn’t lift. All night, then, it had been unlocked. I took out the key, pulled at the handle to make sure the boot was locked now, and went back inside.
In the kitchen, the woman poured a glass of water and said I should take it up. ‘She’ll need to drink,’ she said.
I didn’t knock the door in case she was sleeping, but surprised myself by being glad to find her awake. When I showed her the glass, she edged up and made little gasping noises as she sipped the water. I wondered if I should offer to take the coat from the chair and put it back round her shoulders, but realised the little room was warm; the sun had come high enough to flood it with light.
‘The woman says we can stay until you feel better.’
‘When she was helping me into bed – it was just yesterday, wasn’t it? We came here yesterday? She told me her name’s Beate. That’s right, isn’t it? I didn’t dream it?’
I shook my head. I couldn’t remember being told a name.
‘Maybe she was embarrassed. And she spelled it for me.’ She spelled out the letters. ‘A German name, I thought. Or Dutch.’
‘His is as bad,’ I said. ‘August. Like the month, he said. Is that a German name?’
She gave a little shake of the head as if she was too tired to answer. And standing there with my head bent under the low ceiling, because I couldn’t think of anything else I told her of our walk to the pool.
‘The two of them swimming together,’ she said.
‘Just him. She doesn’t want to in case someone sees her.’
I wondered if she had the same image of the two of them swimming naked under the trees.
‘Hansel and Gretel,’ she said.
‘A kids’ story,’ I said, to let her know I’d heard of it.
‘The two of them in that pool.’
‘Deeper than it looked.’ It didn’t seem worth telling her again that he was the one who swam.
She went on, not talking to me, talking to herself, ‘The pool under the trees in Gibbet Wood.’
It was possible the woman Beate had told her the name of the wood, or maybe it was a name out of another kids’ fairy story that had come into her mind because she was unwell. Her cheeks were very red and when she lay back after handing me the glass her forehead was shiny with sweat. Even though I badly needed to, I knew it would be wrong to tell her about the money in the case while she was ill. Until we were away from this place, I had to keep it to myself. When I did tell her, what would she make of it? The strength of wanting to know that was unexpected, but then who else had I to ask?
‘You should try to sleep,’ I said.
I thought at first she hadn’t heard, but after a while she said, ‘Poor things,’ which I suppose made a kind of sense.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
There came to be a kind of routine to the days, for Mrs Morton was ill for almost a week. The largest change in that time wasn’t visible, but happened inside my mind, where from the fourth day I started to think of Mrs Morton by her first name. This came about through a kind of . . . I don’t know what to call it. Jealousy? After two days of being confined to bed, she started to spend the afternoon downstairs in the kitchen, and when August and I came in for the evening meal on the fourth day it was to find the two women using first names. Before the meal was over, August, too, was on those terms with her, but I, who had known her longer and shaken her out of her old life, had to bite my tongue.
It would have been inappropriate to call my ‘mother’ Mrs Morton; and since I could not bring myself to call her ‘Mother’, even to keep up the pretence, I finished by having no way at all of addressing her. For compensation, from then on
I thought of her as Eileen.
One morning when we were alone, I asked her, ‘What do you and Beate find to talk about?’
‘For one thing, South Africa. It turns out they aren’t German or Dutch, they’re South African. She was brought up on a farm out on the veldt.’
That seemed an enormous distance to travel, a world away. ‘How on earth did they get here?’
Eileen shrugged. ‘The war I suppose – it shook up everything like a kaleidoscope for so many people.’
‘Did it do that for you? Was your husband in the army?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Bernard’s factory made things for the war. He was more useful there than in uniform. Maybe things would have been different if he’d gone to war.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m not sure I understand the why of it myself. I think a bit of him regretted not being a hero. I said as much to him once. I didn’t mean any harm by it. No, more than that, I was trying to say in some muddled way that was how I saw him, as someone who could have been a hero. It was almost the first time I saw that special face of his – the one he made just for me, the one that said I was a fool. He used it more and more often and it took me to the end of my tether. Maybe having the baby was about ending that look. But it was no use. She died. There’s no sense in things.’
There was a silence I didn’t know how to fill. She blinked and stretched her jaws as if yawning out of a sleep. ‘How did I get started on that? I’ve been talking too much. That’s what happens when you aren’t well. And Beate’s a good listener.’
And where was I during these days they passed in talking together? Whenever I had the chance, I walked to get away from August’s oppressive presence. The weather was unusually good: blue skies, often striped with white cloud, and the sun shone from early in the morning till dusk. The first two days I took the path through the woods to the pool. It wasn’t a long way, but I didn’t want to be far from the house and so I would stroll, stopping to look at the shapes the water made as it ran round rocks and over shallows.
My Life as a Man Page 12