* * *
‘So she took them and went away quite happy. Well, on Monday – not on the Friday, she must have been washing them and there were some holes in them too and she would have been darning them – well, on Monday the really comic thing happened. I’m sorry, would you care for some more tea? I’d forgotten. No? Willie, move your chair a little farther from the fire.
‘Well, one of her sons . . . what’s his name, Willie?’
‘Harold.’
‘Well, Harold wore them to school. There he was. You can imagine him, so proud of his new stockings with the yellow diamonds, strutting up to the school gate. Was that how it was, Willie?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he goes into the classroom. You can imagine him stretching out his legs so the teacher can see his “new” stockings. He’s really very pleased with them.’
‘And?’
‘Yes . . . All goes well till the interval when what do you think happened?’
‘I can’t . . . wait. Somebody spilt water on them?’
‘No! You’ll never guess. Who would see the stockings but our friend here?’
‘No!’
‘Yes! Willie! And do you know he really tore into Harold. He began shouting out: “These are my stockings,” and he started pummelling Harold for dear life. I admit it was bad – Willie, you must never do that again, do you hear me? – but you must see it was comical, these two gladiators. And you know what happened. He took off poor Harold’s shoes and then the stockings. Imagine it! And he put them on over his own. Wasn’t it uproarious?’
* * *
‘He had no right to them. They were my stockings. You shouldn’t have given them to him.’
‘I gave them to his mother, Willie, not to him.’
‘I suppose she won’t come back now?’
‘Well, that’s the funny part of it. I intended to send her a message to say I was sorry and the . . . ’
‘She won’t get my stockings again.’
‘Well, of course, I didn’t want to send the stockings back again. You see that?’
‘Yes.’
‘It wouldn’t do. They would be fighting each other all the time. No, it wouldn’t do.’
‘No.’
‘So I was going to send her this message. But then yesterday, Thursday, you see, she came again. She always comes on Thursday.’
‘Her husband goes into town that day.’
‘Is that the reason? I was going to say something but she talked to me and looked at me as if nothing had happened. Really, it was quite astonishing, quite astonishing. So I took my cue from her. I went and brought out some old clothes the same as usual. You see she never takes more than one thing at a time and there always seems to be something. Willie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go outside a moment, will you? You need some fresh air. Hurry up. Leave these books and mind and be back here in fifteen minutes. And don’t slam the door. Well, she was examining the old clothes you see. She’s down on her knees looking them over.’
‘Well . . . ?’
‘You’d never guess. She chose . . . What do you think she chose?’
‘Really, I . . . ’
* * *
‘No, don’t guess . . . she chose . . . a vest! A vest! You see the point, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘A vest! It was really . . . And then just as usual she went away. It was extraordinary, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, quite extraordinary. Well, I’m afraid I must be going.’
‘Now? But surely . . . Oh, you must stay. Surely a little while longer. John won’t be home for ages yet.’
‘No truly, I couldn’t.’
‘Well, if you must you must. But it was rich wasn’t it? Really.’
The Scream
The older boys used to play cards in her house (it wasn’t really much of a house, just two rooms, a kitchen and bedroom) and have song sessions there with an accordion. She was very old even when I first remember her, with skin unlike other people’s skin, so unlike that it didn’t seem to be skin at all. It wasn’t red or pink or white, it was like something ancient and unmentionable gone curdled and sour, like very very old cream petrified and hideous. She would sit on a stool by the fire wearing a black shawl and a black dress. She had been widowed many years before and lived on the Old Age Pension. I can still remember some of the boys who used to be there. One was Cob. He was a wonderful footballer who was drowned in the war. I was half asleep in bed when he came to say goodbye on what turned out to be his last leave. I could hear him talking through a haze of sleep but I was too tired to raise the lids of my eyes and say goodbye to him. His destroyer was torpedoed shortly afterwards. Then there was Gammy. There was something wrong with one of his legs – no one exactly knew what. He was a first-rate card player. He’s still alive, married now. There was also Peddie who was a fine rollicking singer, virile and boisterous. He married about ten years ago and has seven or eight children. And there were many others.
I don’t know why they all met in that house – and being much younger than they I never questioned them about it, had I even consciously thought of it then. Nor did my friend Clocky. To us they were simply The Older Boys: great football players, accordion players, singers, card players. We always thought of Her – Minnie – as of some old crazy witch wrecked over the fading fire while all round her surged speech, music and smoke. We were only allowed to stay till ten but even by ten things were getting rough, for example they often used to have girls there. It gave me an extraordinary sensation once to see my own brother with his arm round a giggling redhead who appeared to me disgusting and stupid. She seemed to leer at me as I watched. There was almost a fight once over solo: Cob accused Peddie of reneging on diamonds:
‘You —— well did. The hand before last you trumped my diamond.’
‘I —— well didn’t.’
‘You —— well did.’
‘I’m —— telling you I didn’t.’
‘Look here you ——.’
‘Aw shut your —— mouth. Look up the cards and find out.’
‘I won’t —— look up the —— cards.’
‘You’re getting too —— big for your —— boots.’
Then voices would join in: ‘Give it up, boys, go on give it up,’ but the two would continue:
‘I don’t need to look up the —— cards. You trumped that —— diamond and you —— well know it.’ All this time Minnie would be sitting on her stool, mechanically knitting some trailing shapeless object for some unnamed recipient. She would knit jerseys for some of the boys. They were always clumsy and ill-fitting. I think the habit of going to her house must have begun either in her husband’s lifetime or because it was the only place where the boys could do practically as they liked. When some of the more considerate ones said about 11 o’clock that it was time to go she would look at the small white-faced clock with the trembling hands and say:
‘You aren’t thinking of going away yet are you?’
And sometimes she would make tea for them even at that hour and bring out from the heavy dresser hard round biscuits. She herself would dip them in the tea to soften them for her toothless jaws. Sometimes if she was in a particularly good mood she would take a seat at the table and they would make fun of her.
‘Minnie’s best friends are trumps tonight.’
And there would be similar jokes about night clubs, spades, last trumps and so on. I think that on the whole they liked her. Her husband had been a sailor. She had been older than him by about seven years. People said she had trapped him into marrying her. She was the only daughter of a sour-faced half-mad woman who had tried to keep her for herself. This half-mad mother of hers used to have fits, particularly at the full moon, when she would crawl under the bed and jump out, in the middle of the night, with horrifying screams. Minnie herself never told anyone this but I heard it from others. She had no children. It was no secret that her husband used to go with other women and that h
e didn’t care whether she knew it or not. However he had been a pleasant enough man and people said they didn’t blame him for she was a bit queer.
Some nights even before ten I would see the boys and girls wrestling on the hard bench in the kitchen and she would look at them with her fixed smile. More often however she would pretend not to see them.
They would even insult her:
‘Where did you get these biscuits from, Minnie? No wonder you haven’t any teeth left.’
or someone would say:
‘To hell with it. I’m fed up coming here. Why don’t we go somewhere else for a change?’
or:
‘Is that your picture on the wall, Minnie? You looked better then, almost human.’
‘When do you read the Bible, Minnie? I bet you don’t read it at all.’ There was a huge black Bible on the shelf above her bed. We didn’t know whether it was put there for show or not.
No matter what they did she wouldn’t put them out. They would sometimes bring bottles in and drink. Sometimes they would offer her a drink but she would never touch it. Perhaps it reminded her of her husband. One night two of them came in masked and nearly frightened her to death. But she would always say ‘Boys will be boys’ and smile her sickly smile. She must have spent hours tidying up the house after they had left. Of course I think of all this as I look back on it now. Then I simply saw her as an unlikeable old woman who would have been better out of the house when we were in it.
However as the years went by fewer and fewer people went to visit her. The reason for this was that her health was rapidly failing. I used to watch her bending over a sheaf of corn and remain motionless in the act like a moon in water. Latterly she began to take more and more to her bed. I don’t know exactly what was wrong with her, possibly some form of rheumatism. She seemed to grow smaller and smaller and blacker and blacker. My mother and I used to visit her sometimes, my mother tall and slim, Minnie small and black. She would often go to bed in the middle of the day and call us feebly to her bedroom where she sat humped among tumbled blankets and an old overcoat with bright buttons. I assumed it belonged to her husband. She would sometimes stroke it absently while talking to us.
At this time Minnie began to pretend that she could tell fortunes. She would put my hand between her dry palms, fondle it as if extracting all its warmth from it, and eventually turn it face upwards.
‘A fine boy you have here,’ she would say to my mother, looking at me with her scattered eyes.
‘A fine boy’ she would repeat to herself.
‘Yes they are all fine boys,’ she would add, stroking the old overcoat. Then she would look at my hand. I don’t think she even saw the lines but she would invent.
‘A clever boy. He will grow up to be a credit to you. He will earn a lot of money. He will be a model son . . . a model son.’
One day, after such endangering flattery, my mother snatched me out of the house as if to protect me from some evil influence.
So, fewer and fewer people visited her or if they did it was only to give her spasmodic help, as if she was something to which they had an obligation. None of the older boys went there in the evening: there was no accordion, no jokes, no swearing, no love-making. The house was dead.
Clocky and I, however, used to go to her house though not often. Clocky was smaller than me with smooth black hair and a tanned polished face. His eyes were cunning and alert. During the summer months we would raise a tent and build a fire inside till the smoke forced us out into the hot air. A favourite sport of his was to throw stones at horses as they stood statuesquely in the brittle sunlight, till he drove them into a disjointed panicky motion. Between us there was a curious unspoken antagonism. Nevertheless he was the only boy of my own age: he was inventive and fearless. For instance he was not afraid of ghosts nor did he believe in fairies or goblins. He liked to feel things in his hands, usually stones. He would steal and lie his way out of situations without the slightest compunction. For example we would all steal turnips, carrots from the small gardens but if caught would usually confess under strenuous examination. Often it was even heroic to confess. Clocky would never confess. I once saw him swearing on the Bible that he hadn’t stolen some jam though I knew perfectly well he had. However I would never dream of telling on him.
One August day, tired of tent-living, of running, of playing, we were walking drearily along the road not knowing what we would do next when one of us (I can’t remember who) took a notion to visit Minnie. Together we walked in the roaring heat up to her house. We knew she would be in bed exhausted, breathing like an old yellow fish that had been thrown twitching on humped rocks. The door was open and we crept in. We hadn’t spoken to each other. We quietly entered the kitchen which was large and cool like an inverted pail. The long wooden bench ran along one side of it. The floor was hollowed and pitted. There was a dresser on the side farthest from the door. We opened its door and helped ourselves to blackcurrant jam which lay at the bottom of the paper lidded jar. On the paper was a picture of a footballer and studying it abstractedly we heard the voice going on and on:
‘I can’t help it. I can’t stand you. Go out to your women, then. Do you think I don’t know? They all come to hint it to me. Hit me: yes go on hit me. You can’t hurt me. I’ll see you dead yet. Don’t think I’ll die so that you can marry your women.’
There was a silence, then the voice began again, this time with a fiercer, more reckless, intonation:
‘I hate you. Why are you keeping me here when I could have been married? You’re afraid. That’s what it is. You’re afraid of getting old and dying. I don’t care whether you die or not.’ (Here her voice rose to a scream.) ‘I don’t. I don’t. I want to get married. Weren’t you married? You think that I won’t leave you. But I will, I will, I will. You’re mad. Everybody says you’re mad. You should never have married. You can’t look after your own children properly. Why did you marry then? I hope you die.’
The voice continued as we ate the jam. Then Clocky going down on his hands and knees crawled up to the room where the old woman was speaking and crying. I followed him. We could see blankets hanging untidily over the foot of the bed. Wasps buzzed in the window panes, but this room too was frighteningly cool.
We crawled under the blankets like Red Indians. But the old woman seemed to hear the rustling, for she suddenly shouted:
‘Who’s there?’
We said nothing. My body grew cold.
‘Who’s there?’ she screamed, like a child. We heard her scrambling about as we lay there and thought she was about to leave her bed. But no we heard a whisper of leaves. She must have opened her huge black Bible. There was a petrified silence. The wasps were like aeroplanes. Then she began to speak again:
‘I didn’t mean it. Why don’t you let me be? I didn’t mean it. It was all my fault.’ Her voice expired: ‘All my fault.’ Her voice drooled.
I could hear our hearts beating.
Suddenly Clocky catapulted outwards from below the bed. In the centre of the scream I followed him head bent for the door. The scream uptore roots. Back in the tent I heard it, till in my mind it died away into an exhausted whimper. When it stopped I went out of the tent. Clocky shouted after me, but I turned away. He stood in the tent like a witch doctor shouting after me while thin wisps of smoke curled about him. But I didn’t turn back nor did I stop running till I reached home.
The Angel of Mons
1
. . . and I don’t know if it was in the papers over there, dad, though you see some of their reporters now and again hopping about, trying to keep their shoes from getting muddy: it was in the early morning it happened, you could look across the mud for a little way and see everything flattened and all mixed-up together. Do you know what I saw? It was a helmet half-buried in the mud and a bird standing on it, jumping about, with its head a little to one side, just like in the garden at home: this little bird, I watched it for a long time and it stayed there without flying away. You don’t
see birds around here often, they’ve been scared off: but this one was quite happy, just as if it was at home, I remember it very clearly. And the sun seemed to come up, very bright, and this bird was basking in the sun, shaking its wings now and again, as if there was dew on them: I don’t understand where it came from at all: and all the time the sun was coming up, bright and hot. At least that’s how I think it was.
I was watching that bird and thinking how it was hopping about there without a care in the world, and I was wondering about your last letter and how mad you were about me deciding to become a lay preacher – just because Mum died, you said – throwing away my training, you said – and you know how it is in the army, I’m trying to describe it, you get feelings things are going to happen or they’re not going to happen as if all of you are together, even though you’re alone, like when you listen to the Last Post and you hear all these voices and all these people speaking. Well it was just like that. Some people said we were going over the top and it was only three in the morning but I don’t remember it like that at all. What I remember is that bird hopping about on the helmet and the sun coming up very very hot and I was thinking about that telegram I got about Mum’s death – and anyway you know perfectly well that I’d decided to become a lay preacher even before she died. It was nothing to do with you really, dad, and I know it must have been awful for you all these years, with her in bed and me working for my apprenticeship. It was just that I couldn’t bear it any more, what was any apprenticeship worth anyway? And you say that the worst thing of all is me wanting to leave home, but I can’t help that either, dad, I’ve got to get away just for a while. So there it is, there’s not really any point talking about it, I can’t help being what I am and you being what you are. And I do wish, dad, you would stop talking about money, I’m not interested in money. You know I send you most of my money home and anyway since I came here I’ve decided to become a lay preacher more than ever. You say it’s all nonsense, you’re entitled to your own opinion, dad, and that’s a fact, but I wish you didn’t talk like that. I don’t mind you going to the pub, as I said mother being an invalid must have been a great strain on you all these years, but you shouldn’t be bitter. What do you have to thank God for you say, well, you can go out now and take your dog for a walk, that’s one thing, and you can sit down and read a book can’t you. It’s no good being bitter and anyway I’ve made up my mind and I won’t change it no matter what happens. But I must get back to what I was saying.
The Red Door Page 56