A Disturbing Influence (19 page)

Later, they discovered that someone had indeed stolen the Cartersfield club’s bag, containing all their gear, from the tin shack which served as their pavilion. There was considerable indignation.

‘This absolutely proves that it’s local people,’ said Brigadier Hobson. ‘And I may as well warn everyone now I am not going to allow this sort of thing to continue. I shall take certain steps that will make it very hot indeed for anyone associated with this vandalism.’

The headmaster agreed that he was perfectly in his rights. He promised to speak to the whole school about it.

*

The next Saturday evening, at the Lord George Brunswick Memorial Hall, Ruth said: ‘There don’t seem to be many boys here tonight, do there?’

‘No,’ said Betty. ‘Where’s Allen?’

‘I dunno. Haven’t seemed to see much of him lately.’

‘Been seeing the vicar’s nephew, eh? You’re a one, Ruth, and that’s the truth.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Well
I
do,’ said Betty, and giggled.

‘If I were you,’ said Ruth, ‘I’d not spend my time minding other people’s business for them. I’d keep my eye on Bill Ponsonby.’

‘Oh, I can trust Bill all right,’ said Betty, comfortably, twisting her ring. ‘More than I can say for
some
of the boys around
Cartersfield
.’

‘Where are they all, anyway?’

‘Giving the Brigadier the willies, I dare say. Having themselves a good time down at the gravel-pits.’

‘Oh, that nonsense,’ said Ruth. ‘Does anyone know who did it yet?’

‘Not that I know of. Kids from school, I expect.’

Ruth swung one foot in time to the tune. Chuck Carpenter oozed his way through ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Sweetheart’ and she hummed along with him.

‘Well,’ said Betty, ‘here’s
my
boy, anyway, which is more than I can say for yours.’

‘I don’t have a boy,’ said Ruth.

‘“I don’t have a boy”,’ mimicked Betty. ‘It’s about time you got one then, Ruth, that’s all
I
can say.’

Bill Ponsonby came up to her, and they started to dance. Fat lot they’ve got to be proud of, thought Ruth, just because he bought her a ring. Yet she knew she was jealous, simply and not spitefully jealous, just wishing she had one, too. Those two did look so
smug,
though. And where
was
Allen, she’d like to know. Of course he hadn’t said he’d be here, but then she assumed, naturally, that he would be. They came every week. They didn’t have to arrange it. They both knew the other would be there. Only he wasn’t.

She went over to the door and looked out into the night. The moon was full now, and the air sweet with the many flowers that basked by day in the unflagging sun. Ruth wondered where Allen was. There weren’t many boys there, not as many as usual. No one wanted to stay inside on a night like this, probably. It was very warm. A lovely evening to be out with a boy.

S
OMEONE
got out of the car and opened the gate. The black Wolseley moved quietly forward, while the man shut the gate behind it and followed to the old Nissen hut by which it had stopped. The gravel-pit lake stared a perfect image to the sky, not even a rustle of wind to stir the trees, and no sound beyond the quiet scufflings of the six young men around the car as they opened the trunk and took out several things. The black hulk of the
abandoned
gravel-sifter lifted sharp angles against the sky. The moon was so bright that the stars seemed dim. Tufts of reeds showed in the shallow parts of the lake, thin sinister fingers from the water. It was a much bigger lake than Hobson’s, and had several islands, one big one with trees, other smaller ones, scarcely more than sandbanks, giving off a white lustrous light under the moon.

The six men began to undress quietly, putting their clothes in the trunk of the car, six whitenesses moving before the black mass of the hut. They stripped until they were naked, except for one, who put on a bathing costume.

‘You won’t need that,’ said David Mander.

The man looked up surprised, his black midriff clearly
distinguishable
among the whiteness of the others.

‘You’ll get cold sitting around in it. Take it off.’

He was about to protest, but thought better of it, removed the costume, delicately turning his back on the five naked ones, then stood up.

‘I got most of the stuff over there this morning,’ said David. ‘Who’s got some cigarettes?’

There were two or three murmurs.

‘Can you carry them in your teeth to keep them dry? O.K.?’

They nodded, shivering a little. It was warm but the moonlight made them feel cold.

‘Quiet now while we’re swimming. Don’t splash about, just take it easy till we get there. Come on.’

They came out of the shadow of the Nissen hut, suddenly dazzlingly white under the direct moon, stepping gingerly over the gravel to the edge of the lake, six obviously young men, with bodies made artificially smooth and hard by the light. They waded quietly in up to their waists, following David, each carrying something, then pushed out towards the largest island. David
swamgently
, seeming to use little energy, turning over on his back from time to time to make sure they were all there, a cigarette packet held firm and dry in his teeth. The surface of the lake was troubled as if a small breeze had got up, and the moon probed through the surface at their flashing white arms and legs.

They reached the island one by one, grounding a few yards out, then standing up and wading to the shore. The last one to arrive was the one who had wanted to wear a bathing suit. As he joined the others he said: ‘I’m not much of a swimmer, I’m afraid.’ The six of them dripped moonlight on the small shingle beach.

‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ said Dick Thomson. He was tall and strong, the son of the farmer at Mendleton, and he stretched himself luxuriously as he spoke, then shook himself like a dog and said: ‘Let’s have a drink and get warm, David.’

A narrow path led from the beach. It had the air of recent
improvisation
, and could not be seen from the edge of the lake. After about fifty yards David stopped in a small clearing. Someone had obviously taken care to remove all brambles and undergrowth, for they were piled up at one side of the clearing.

David produced some towels and rugs from behind a
tree-stump
,
and gave them each orders about what to do with the things they had carried over. These were mostly bottles. The moon filtered through the branches of the trees, young ashes, with a few willows and hazels. A moorhen scuttled abruptly across the clearing, making them all start.

When they were dry, and the rugs were spread, they lay or sat down, drinking from a bottle of whisky in turn.

‘That’s better,’ said Dick Thomson. ‘Eh, Allen? Still want your bathing costume?’

The others laughed and began to talk in low voices, though soon they made no effort to be quiet. They felt beyond the reach of law and order, of Brigadier Hobson, of Cartersfield.

‘A man needs a drink occasionally,’ said David, opening another bottle.

‘God, you must be rich,’ said Allen Bradshaw. He wasn’t used to whisky.

‘Yes,’ said David. A ghostly amusement flickered across his thin face, the hollows of his eyes accentuated by the filtered moonlight. ‘It has its compensations when one’s in exile.’

‘Exile?’ said Jack Tarrant, Betty’s brother. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I was sent to Cartersfield to recuperate from a long and serious illness,’ said David, gravely watching the faces round him. ‘To me it is a sort of sanatorium, and if you’d ever been in any sanatorium you’d know how boring life can be.’

‘Cartersfield’s a dull hole, all right,’ said Dennis Palmer. He laughed rather loudly. ‘God, I’d give anything to get out.’

‘I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit of the world,’ said Allen.

‘You’ve been in the Army,’ said Jack, ‘you’ve seen the world. Don’t you read the advertisements? Join the Army and see the world.’

‘Fat lot of it I saw,’ said Allen. ‘Never even got as far as Wales. Spent all my time repairing tanks.’

‘This is good stuff,’ said Dick Thomson, irrelevantly. ‘It gives
you a real thick head in the morning, though, Allen. You’d better watch it.’

‘I feel fine. I can look after myself.’

‘It’s a man’s drink,’ said David. ‘A man’s drink in a woman’s country.’ He tilted the bottle and drank.

‘What’ve you got against women?’ said Allen.

‘Nothing,’ said David. ‘Nothing at all. They have a purpose and they gloriously fulfil it.’

They all laughed, Jack Tarrant loudest of all. His voice had a musical lilt to it, and as he laughed he seemed to be practising scales.

‘There’s no need to tell the whole neighbourhood about it,’ said Dennis.

The quiet one, who seemed to be called only Jim, and said he came from Chancelford, smiled and said: ‘Pass the bottle.’ He raised his eyebrow at David in some private question. David shook his head, unnoticed by the others.

David began to talk quietly about abroad, about the desert in Libya and the great plains of Texas, about aridity and the sun as an enemy, till they could almost feel the parching dust-choked spaces, the inimical deadly eye above, and nothing but stunted shrubs and cacti to mar the sweep of multi-coloured sand, muddling Libya and Texas with the films they had seen of the American West and the biblical epics they vaguely associated with Arabia, the muddle becoming more confused with the high thin air of South American mountains, Venezuela scarcely more than a fabulous name to them, with Borneo and the tropical forest like an untamed animal for ever at the door, David talking with a fierce longing that disguised the actual softness of his voice, a longing not for a particular place, but for the exotic, the elemental. He seemed to find some private pleasure in contemplating the absolute humiliation of man before empty spaces and the dank seething vegetable tropics and the sheer airless cliffs of the Andes, as though only in the extreme condition could he find satisfaction, as though he needed the constant battle with the elements, with forces he knew he could never conquer but
which must conquer him, as though he needed them to live. And in telling of these things the excitement of their challenge entered each youth, sprawled out beneath the filtered English moon, and they yearned with him for that elemental struggle which couldn’t be won, but against which he could strip and fight with the intense dedication to survival of a gladiator in some Roman arena, where life depended on himself alone, on his own dexterous evasion of mortality, till it finally failed him, he never surrendering, refusing to be beaten even at the end with the knife at his throat, never crying out for mercy, for charity, for love, taking death as inevitable and hating it even as he embraced it, but never yielding it an inch, never its prisoner, never taken alive, not ceasing to fight till every nerve and cell was cut down and quartered.

They passed the bottle round as he talked, their eyes reflecting the strange images he gave them, thrust on them with his fierce longing, listening as he described the blank useless desert and the blank useless mountains as forces with wills stronger than men’s, as intractably beautiful adversaries, as passionate devouring lovers, fighting with him through jungle and across scrub and sand and up screes, sharing his blind but absolute determination not to give in, not to surrender, to fight while falling over thousand-foot cliffs, while inextricably lost and tangled in the clinging shoots of the jungle, while thirst-crazed in the desert, refusing ever to take a compass or a water-bottle or an ice-axe, setting out alone and
unarmed
against the elements.

When he stopped, he reached for the bottle and drank, as though he had indeed been wandering in some desert, watched by them in silence. The moon splattered through the branches on the six young bodies, motionless and dreaming.

‘I’d like to go to those places,’ said Allen softly, his mind far from his strange nakedness on an island near his native town. He drank, hardly tasting the liquor.

They all stirred, like sleepers disturbed by a distant noise, not loud enough to wake them.

‘God, I’d like to get out there,’ he said, still absorbed in himself and the images in his head, unaware almost of the others. ‘That must be a wonderful place you were talking about, David.’ He was still too entranced to separate the places, thinking of them as one, as David had described them in his fierce longing, giving them all a single condition of being.

There was silence. Then Dennis said: ‘I’m cold. Let’s light a fire.’

‘Won’t it be seen?’ said Jack Tarrant.

‘Not if we keep it small,’ said David.

They gathered wood and brushwood for kindling from the pile at the side of the clearing. As David lit the fire, he said: ‘Now don’t get too close to it or you’ll feel cold when it dies down. Keep away from it.’

They did what they were told. The sight of flames was enough to warm them as the desert sun faded from their minds. The fire burned briskly for a few minutes, then settled to a quiet demolition of the logs, a steady smouldering, a red eye in the darkness. When it was quiet their eyes grew used to the moonlight again. David opened yet another bottle, and they drank. Allen and Jack were becoming rather drunk. Jim raised an eyebrow and this time David nodded almost absently, not making any further move.

Jim said something to Jack, who giggled. Dennis and Dick Thomson looked at each other uncomfortably. Allen noticed nothing, lost in whisky and the bright images of foreign lands. After a minute or two Jim and Jack slipped quietly away into the
undergrowth
, melting quickly into the blackness of the island. Again Allen noticed nothing.

After a while he was conscious of someone’s arm round his shoulder, and he sat up. The arm was David’s. ‘Where did those two go?’ he said, bewildered.

‘I don’t know,’ said David. ‘Shall we go and look?’

‘All right,’ said Allen. His feet were unsteady, he found, and he felt rather sick, but David helped him up and supported him, the
arm now round his waist. They went in the opposite direction from Jim and Jack.

Left with the bottle, Dick Thomson said: ‘I don’t know. It’s all right, I suppose, if you like it, but it’s not …’ He left the sentence to the bland moon, filtering still through the branches.

‘It’s not a very painful way of getting a night’s drinking, is it?’ said Dennis. He lay back on the rug.

‘No. All the same——’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Dennis. ‘Relax and enjoy yourself.’ He followed his own advice, the bottle passing steadily between them. Then he said: ‘That Jim’s an odd bird, isn’t he?’

‘He’s the one started it, if you ask me. David’s a good bloke.’

‘Doesn’t stop him doing it, though.’

The bottle passed.

‘God! This is a fine way to spend an evening!’ said Dick Thomson, in a thoroughly satisfied voice.

‘Did he make you do that the first time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Me too.’

‘Were you the first?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Dennis. ‘There was just the three of us the first time. Then you came, and we swam that old hut out to the island. I thought I’d die laughing. Christ, we were all pissed as newts.’

‘I’ll say. I don’t hardly remember what happened.’

‘Well,’ said Dennis, ‘you don’t remember much the first time.’

They were silent for a while, then Dennis said: ‘Give the fire a poke, Dick.’

He went over to the fire and pushed at a log with his toe,
sending
a bright stream of sparks into the air.

‘What do you reckon we’ll do tonight, Dennis?’

‘Smash something. We’ll have to get a bit more pissed first. Give us the bottle.’

‘Come and get it.’

‘Come on, hand it over.’

‘I want to smash something,’ said Dick Thomson.

‘I’ll smash you,’ said the other, suddenly angry. He leaned over to grab the bottle, but Dick foiled him, snatching it away out of reach. They began to grapple, playfully at first, then earnestly,
fighting
for the pleasure of fighting. The bottle was knocked over, spilling whisky into the dry ground. The moonlight spattered on their twisting bodies.

David watched them from the shadow of the edge of the clearing. There was no expression on his face at all, no mockery or indolence, just a smooth white blankness with the sharp jut of his nose and the invisibly dark eyes watching the two men wrestling back and forth. Allen leaned against him in a bewildered drunken dream, supported by David’s arm, his eyes recording only an astonished innocence, as though it had been left there to dry like a photographic negative.

*

A mile away Brigadier Hobson dozed over his twelve-bore. He shook himself awake, and thought, Evangeline will have a fit. He looked at his watch. Just about midnight.

I’ll give it another half-hour, he thought.

His back ached. He sneezed.

*

‘It’s a man’s world,’ said David, ‘if you make it that way.’