by Francis King
From the far end of the garden, gusts of blue smoke rolled towards her window. Someone – Christine or her father – must have made a bonfire. Oh, how inconsiderate it was! Surely they must have realised that the direction of the wind would send all that thick smoke billowing over to the house? The last thing that one wanted was that awful autumn smell to spoil such a beautiful spring day. She straightened, went close to the window and peered out. The skin round her short-sighted, watery eyes gathered into miniscule tucks, she tried to discern something through the swirls. Impossible. But then, suddenly, in the break between one swirl and the next, she saw them. Oh, heavens!
She hurried out on to the landing and approached the window there; then she was at the window of the next-door guestroom and finally at that of the lavatory, a small room dominated by a mahogany throne with a flush that resembled an old-fashioned bell-pull.
‘Henry! Henry! Henry!’ Now she was calling to her brother, as she searched for him in his bedroom, his study, the dining room, the sitting room and even the drawing room – her preserve, seldom entered by him – where she held her weekly tea parties. From her brother’s workshop down in the basement her dulled hearing at long last detected the screech of a saw. She hurried down, all but twisting a narrow ankle on the unlit stairs, fumbled for the switch at the bottom but could not find it, and eventually groped her way to the door and knocked. Henry never liked to be surprised down there. It was his private domain. He did not even like Mary, the maid of all work, to bustle in with her Hoover, scrubbing brush, pail and sour-smelling cloths.
‘Yes!’ It was the bark of a guard dog warning off any intruder.
‘Only me!’ She turned the handle of the door and put her head round it.
‘Oh, its you, is it? I’ve told you umpteen times …’ He was in his shirtsleeves, his face even redder than usual because of his exertion. ‘Well, what is it this time? Don’t complain to me yet again about that ropy switch at the top of the stairs. I haven’t forgotten.’
‘No, no! This is something far more important.’ As she hurried over to him, her nose wrinkled fastidiously at the fish-like stink of boiling glue. ‘Christine has some men in the garden. Two of them.’
‘Some men?’
‘I can’t think what they’re doing in our garden on a Sunday morning.’
‘What are you fussing about? I can’t see that it’s any of your business – or my business, for that matter – if Christine decides to entertain two of her chums, female or male.’
‘They’re Germans! German prisoners of war. I recognised at once those uniforms and those awful caps they all wear.’
‘You’re imagining things! Why on earth should Christine have some German prisoners with her? Or any Germans. She hates the whole bloody tribe.’
‘I’m not yet totally blind – or dotty, for that matter. Well, if you don’t mind having German prisoners mucking around in the garden, I suppose that’s none of my business, is it? I’m sorry I disturbed you.’
‘Hang on, hang on!’ He walked round his workbench. ‘ Wait a mo!’ He threw down his fretsaw, wiped his hand on a cloth and slipped on his green Harris tweed jacket with the leather patches at the elbows. Then, mopping at the beads of sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief jerked out of a trouser-pocket, he preceded her out into the hall. In silence the two of them made the slow ascent, he still in the lead. At the top he tried the light switch, a crooked forefinger flicking it back and forth with increasing impatience. ‘ Yes. The bloody thing’s still kaput.’
‘Look! From here you can see them. Perfectly.’ Aunt Eva pulled back the net curtain over one of the three drawing-room windows.
‘My God! You’re right!’
‘Yes, I am sometimes right. But you never believe anything I tell you.’
They stood side by side, peering out through the smoke at the figures of the two men in uniform and the girl in slacks, raking up the brownish-black, impacted leaves once sealed off for weeks by the freeze but now revealed by the sudden thaw, and throwing them on to a bonfire at the far end of the garden.
With a muttered ‘Oh, hell!’ he strode purposefully to the door.
‘Where are you going? What are you going to do?’
He took no notice as, now in the hall, he snatched up first his walking stick and then his tweed cap, which he tugged down low over his forehead.
‘Are you going out to them? Do you think that’s wise?’
Without answering, he pulled open the front door and walked out.
‘Don’t do anything rash! Be careful!’ One could never, she thought, be certain how creatures like that might react to a challenge. She stood at the open door, half screening herself behind it.
‘Christine!’
Christine turned, rake in hand. ‘Yes?’
‘Just one moment please. Perhaps you could kindly explain to me. Just who the hell are these men? Forgive me for asking but their presence here does seem to be just a little odd. And unwelcome, he added, turning his head to glare at the intruders. Waving his stick, he advanced on them. ‘Gentlemen, I want you to go. At once!’ They stared at him, one holding a rake and the other a broom. ‘Vamoose!’ He pointed with the stick at the gate.
The Germans backed away. They gazed at each other, glanced nervously at this irate old man and his beautiful daughter, and once again gazed at each other. In sudden, simultaneous panic they dropped rake and broom and rushed to the gate.
‘Don’t go!’ Christine commanded. Then she repeated, ‘Don’t go!’ as one of them fiddled with the latch with nervously clumsy fingers. The gate at last open, they dashed through it, all but colliding with each other, and then began to run helter-skelter down the narrow, grass-choked lane that would eventually bring them to the thunderous main road.
Christine hurried to the gate. ‘Hey!’ she shouted. ‘Hey! Come back!’ Probably they could not hear her. If they did, they paid no attention, still running on and on without a backward glance.
She turned. ‘Why did you have to do that? What was it to do with you? I asked them in for a cup of coffee – when I saw them strolling aimlessly in the high street with nothing to do but window-shop. They offered to sweep up the leaves for me. In fact, insisted. They wanted to make a return for the coffee and cake. Why not? What’s wrong in that?’
‘What’s wrong in that? I’ll tell you, my dear. I do not – repeat, do not – want German prisoners wandering around my garden, much less entering my house. You didn’t even have the courtesy to ask if I minded. That’s the least you could have done. Bloody cheek!’
Christine hesitated. Then she began to walk, with slow purposefulness, towards him. In a quiet but implacable voice, she said: ‘ What an awful man you are! Do you ever realise that? I don’t mind that you humiliated me. I’m used to that. But to shout at those men as – as if they were nothing better than straying cattle – that, that was unforgivable. And I’ll never forgive it. Never.’ Suddenly, to her own amazement as much as to his, she raised her arm and slapped him across the face.
He stared at her, rubbing his cheek with one hand.
Aunt Eva, who had all the time been watching and listening from her redoubt behind the front door, now hurried over. ‘Christine dear, what are you doing? You should be ashamed. What’s come over you? Surely you both can discuss this matter in a civilised way? I must admit that I don’t myself feel that having those two men here was, well, quite the right thing but all the same –’
‘The right thing! What do you both imagine to be the right thing?’ Christine felt an explosive rage detonate within her. But her voice remained calm. ‘For years – ever since mother died – you two have led your sheltered, useless lives, without one generous impulse, one thought of anyone but yourselves. For years now I’ve watched you and had to put up with you. It’s all hate, hate, hate …’
‘Christine – please!’ Her father’s tone was surprisingly restrained. ‘You really mustn’t speak to me and your aunt in that wild, insulting fashion. I think I ca
n truthfully say that we’ve always tried to do our best by you. And by the world at large. Difficult though that sometimes has been. But I must now make something absolutely clear.’ His voice hardened into ice. ‘ I forbid, absolutely forbid, you to invite any more of these prisoners into this house or even the garden. House and garden are both mine, let me remind you. Do you understand?’
‘While I live here, I’ll ask whom I please.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. The privilege of living here brings with it certain obligations and conditions. Like most privileges.’
‘Then I shan’t live here any longer. That’s simple enough. I’m afraid that, at the age of twenty-five, I must have the freedom to live the life I want.’
‘I don’t care what age you are. You’re behaving like a child.’
‘Now just listen to me. Listen! I’m going to tell you something. Once you’ve heard it, I don’t care what you think, I don’t care what you say. When you humiliated me in front of those Germans, you didn’t realise something. Something important. Now I’m going to tell you.’
‘Well, tell me!’
‘In six or seven months I’m going to have a child.’
‘What?’
She nodded. ‘And it’s by a German prisoner.’
‘Christine!’ Aunt Eva hurried forward. ‘Stop these silly jokes! That isn’t true, is it? You’re telling us that just to upset us? Aren’t you?’
‘I’m afraid not. I had to tell you some time. Now you know.’
‘And have you married the creature?’
‘No, Father. Not yet. Perhaps never.’
‘Are you talking of one of those two wretches?’
‘Of course not! I told you – I met that couple for the first time this afternoon in the high street.’
‘You’re shameless.’ There was a quavering note of wonder in his voice. ‘ I can hardly believe you’re the daughter I thought I knew.’
‘You never knew me. You never bothered to get to know me.’
He hesitated, staring at her with red-rimmed, prominent eyes. Then he said huskily: ‘I think you’d better go. I can’t take all this. And your aunt can’t take it. Perhaps we’re too old. Too set in our ways. But there it is.’ He turned away.
‘Fine. I’ll go just as soon as I can make arrangements for somewhere to go to. Excuse me, please.’ She put her hand on his shoulders and pushed him gently but inexorably away from her.
Christine stooped and dragged her suitcase out from under the bed. Having placed it on the bed, she clicked open the hasps and stood motionless, hands resting on their cold metal. She felt exhilarated, she felt ashamed. She had won a victory but she wished that the means of doing so had not been so brutal. Suddenly exhausted, she threw herself on to the bed beside the suitcase and stared up at the ceiling.
When she was a child she would often be woken in the middle of the night by incoherent yelps and screams. In violent gusts, the sounds whirled up from the room in which her mother and father slept below her own. She would try to make out words but rarely could do so. Most often, if she could make out a word, it was ‘No!’, either screamed by itself or constantly reiterated on a note of rising panic. Later, she had decided that it represented the rejection of some experience too devastating to be relived in sleep, much less in life itself. Repeatedly she had crept out on to the landing and even ventured down to the lower floor, to ask her mother ‘What’s the matter, Mummy?’
The reply was always along the same lines: Nothing. There was nothing the matter. Her father had just had one of his nightmares.
With her desperate eyes and hollow cheeks, her mother would then order: ‘Back to bed. It’s nothing important. Go on!’
‘I’m frightened.’
‘Don’t be silly. There’s nothing to be frightened about. You heard what I told you – back to bed!’
On these occasions she never saw her father. She would imagine him sprawled or stretched rigid on the canopied double bed that her parents always shared, recovering from whatever it was that had caused that terrible uproar in the middle of the night.
When she was older, she asked her mother, ‘What does he dream about?’
‘Oh, the war.’ The tone was strangely casual, almost bored.
‘The war?’
‘He went through things – awful things. He can’t speak about them. It would be better if he could. But the poor old buffalo can’t.’
At the memory of those final words, Christine jumped to her feet. She felt an overwhelming contrition, followed by a no less overwhelming pity. She went to the door, hesitated and then opened it. She hurried, faster and faster, down the stairs.
When she knocked at her father’s study, there was no answer. But somehow she knew that he was in there, perhaps silently cursing her, perhaps labouring in his mind to devise some way of reasserting his domination over her. She knocked again. Then she turned the handle of the door and walked in.
He lay on a chaise longue under the window. He had kicked off his shoes, which lay far apart from each other. There was a glass of what she knew must be whisky, his habitual drink, on the floor beside him. He scowled across, saying nothing, almost as though he were trying to remember who she was.
‘Father … I’m sorry about all that.’
He made no reaction, continuing to scowl at her with the same puzzled intensity. Did she imagine it or was his left cheek still red from the slap?
She took a step forward, then another. ‘I’m sorry about all that,’ she repeated.
At last he spoke: ‘ Why do you think that’s of any interest to me? Please go. Please leave the house as soon as you can. I’ll go on paying your allowance but otherwise … Please go.’
‘If that’s what you wish.’
‘Yes, that’s what I wish.’ He lowered his hand and picked up the glass of whisky. He put it to his lips and sipped at it, his eyes still fixed contemptuously on her face.
As she was about to leave the room, he called out: ‘Oh, by the way, old girl – don’t forget to give your keys to your aunt before you go. We don’t want to have you smuggling any Tom, Dick or Harry into our old sweet home.’
That was the last time that Christine saw her father.
Five days later this holder of a DSO and an MC with bar had once again been asked to speak at a British Legion dinner. The note that went out with the invitations described the occasion as one in which a hero of World War One would introduce a hero of Word War Two.
A practised and fluent orator, he had just told an ancient but well-received joke about two tommies arguing in the trenches as bombs rained down on them, when he had faltered, with a sudden look of bewilderment. ‘Now where was I?’ He looked down at his notes and then out over the heads of the audience. ‘I’m sorry … Lost my place … My eyes …’ With a groan, he tottered and fell forward across the table, knocking over the glass filled with his usual whisky.
A few minutes later, as a retired army doctor was clumsily attempting to loosen his old-fashioned wing-collar, he died.
Chapter Twenty
Mrs Dunne had just returned from Wales the previous afternoon, with regret certainly that her all too brief holiday was over but also with an eagerness to settle once more to her book on Virgil. It was only in strenuous exercise of her body or her mind that she was ever truly happy. She had put off beginning that sixth and most important chapter on the Georgics (‘Good Husbandry’ should be its title, she had all but decided) until the holiday was over, partly because she had been a full-time companion to her husband, as she rarely was, and partly from the perverse desire for self-torment that impels lovers to defer from hour to hour the telephone conversation, letter or visit that will bring them together.
She had woken with exhilaration, her husband still snoring beside her, thinking: ‘Today I start.’ Already she had shaped the opening sentence, and at intervals, as she had her bath and dressed, she repeated it over and over to herself, testing it out, like a sip of vintage claret on her tongue
at one of the Somerville wine tastings. She smoked one of her Gitanes, glanced through the Manchester Guardian, and then drew herself up at her desk, touched in turn the pens of various thicknesses, the inkwell, the blotter and the heap of high-quality foolscap, like a general reviewing his forces before a battle, and began to write.
Only a few minutes seemed to have passed – although in fact it was almost an hour – when there was a knock at the door. Oh, lord, she had completely forgotten that Holliday girl’s telephone call the previous afternoon, asking for an urgent appointment. One did not expect to be badgered by pupils during the vacation, when one was seldom in College and in any case had better things to get on with.
‘I met a boy on the doorstep and he let me in.’
‘That must have been my grandson. He’s staying with us while his parents are in Cyprus. That’s where his mother comes from.’ Mrs Dunne was brisk, almost impatient. ‘ Now what can I do for you?’
On her walk over, Christine had felt calm; but now, with those fierce eyes fixed on her with what seemed to be disdain, she wondered if she would ever be able to come out with what she must say.
‘Well?’
Christine blinked and jerked her head sideways, as though to avoid the blow of the monosyllable.
‘What is it, Christine?’ Mrs Dunne softened. ‘Come on!’
‘Well, what I wanted to tell you – had to tell you – is that – I don’t think I can come back next term. It’s impossible. I’ll have to leave.’
‘What are you saying? Has something happened? I don’t get it.’
‘It’s a question of money.’ Christine had already planned her story. ‘My father died only a short time ago. Suddenly. It seems that his finances are in a terrible mess. He made all sorts of risky investments. Now my aunt and I – well, we must cut down on all our expenses.’