Another part of the wood (11 page)

The game went on and on. The little metal objects were moved round and round the squares. No one took any notice of Kidney.
He threw the dice and counted his spaces but was never fined.
Time and again he landed on a row of red hotels bought by Joseph, and once he said, ‘Do I owe you any money, Joseph?’ and
Joseph replied, ‘What? Money? No, shouldn’t think so. Your go next, George.’ Kidney withdrew into himself, because he knew
the rules of the game and he knew he was playing alone.

May was out first. She said, ‘Thank God,’ and shortly after Balfour followed, and then Lionel. Lionel put the kettle on and
May sat slumped behind the brass paraffin lamp and yawned and yawned. While waiting for the water to boil, Lionel went outside
into the field. May could hear him out there under the moon, flooding the grass, and she snapped her mouth shut in the middle
of a yawn, and water seeped out of her smudged eyes and the mascara spread across her cheeks. Lionel returned with a fleck
of hair curled rakishly about one ear. He ran the tap at the sink and rinsed his hands noisily. Unable to find the tea towel,
he took out his useful handkerchief and dried his fingers one by one, pushing back the cuticles of his nails. Looking up,
he saw his wife’s besmeared face in the lamplight. He came towards her with his forefinger embedded in a damp sheath of material
and bent over her, wiping at the stained skin beneath her eyes. She made no resistance. Amusement and anger had long since
drained away leaving her detached and apathetic. ‘There, there,’ he crooned tenderly, cradling her chin in his fingers, making
his wife’s dirty little face clean and wholesome once more. He put away his soiled handkerchief and rubbed his hands together
boyishly, a job well done, telling Balfour it was a grand night. ‘A grand night,’ he said, with his brown-suited back to the
table and still-moist hands holding the teapot beneath the cold water tap. ‘A grand night, a lovely moon. You used to get
those sorts of nights in Italy – during the war, you know. There were cypress trees of course, but the same old moon.’ He
cleared his throat, regretting instantly his mention of the forbidden subject. He couldn’t help himself, the best of him had
lived through the war. He simply had no notion of himself before 1939. Though he talked to May about Father and his brothers
and sisters, he couldn’t be sure that his memories
were exact. It was as though he were chronicling the recollections of someone he had known, but never intimately. This person
had played badminton, he was certain, and there were those holidays in Eastbourne. Like a photograph shown to him, there was
Father in a blazer, his trousers rolled above his knees, planted on the shore with the sea showing between his bow legs. He
didn’t deliberately mean to falsify his rememberings of the time before the war. It was just that one had to play fair by
the past. There was a certain code – honour thy father and thy mother and all that. It couldn’t have been easy for Father
supporting a large family on a bank clerk’s pay, though food was cheaper then, and if he’d been strict and tyrannical with
the girls and Mother it was doubtless with the best intentions. It wasn’t for Lionel to judge. He had a great respect for
Father – did have – a grand man in many ways. He must have been. Anyway, Father had long since passed on. Lionel had been
back several times to Brighton to look at the grave. Once only he brought flowers, and each time it occurred to him that it
was a very small grave for such a stern and strong man to spend his time in. The flowers when he next saw them had turned
black. The headstone gave his full name, William Robert Gosling, making no mention of the word ‘father’ at all. In some ways
the omission shocked him almost as much as the decayed blossoms. It was as if Father were denying their kinship, as if Father
was saying they’d never met.

He smiled, standing at the sink, trying to picture himself in the early days of the war. His hand slipped between the buttons
of his shirt to touch the coin hanging there on a chain about his neck. Curious, that incident. He had been in some public
urinal in Yorkshire in 1939, without a penny to his name, not even the price of a cup of tea. He saw the coin glinting through
the water. It had cost him something, mentally, to do what he had to do, reaching down to retrieve it.

If May could only know how his experience of the world protected her. The world was a deep deceptive forest, full of promises
and little glades and clearings, and in the dark depths
roamed the wolves, savage, snapping their great teeth, waiting to spring on those who wandered from the path. May was so unaware
of the dark places, so trusting, so unconscious of danger. He had to watch for both of them. In the darkness of the world
she was a little flower, glowing like a star, beautiful as a pair of little eyes. Sweetheart! How her eyes gleamed. She might
now find it boring to be guarded by him, but she was only a child. One day she would tell him that she understood, that she
realized what it was he protected her from. She might fret, she might argue with him, but it was only to impress Joseph. He
had met Joseph’s sort in the war. Different conditions of course, but the basic problem was the same: lack of backbone, deficiency
of guts, absence of moral fibre. Those chaps were always the first to find the local brothel, always the first to get a dose
of the clap. One or two of that sort in a platoon and the general standard went for a burton. A grand platoon, old Whitey
Briggs had told him. ‘First class, my boy. I’m proud of you. But I don’t altogether care for your VD rates.’

May thought that the only way to live was to throw oneself into the depths. He could tell her a few things about that – he’d
done so – but she became irritated. The war, the war, she would cry impatiently, not realizing that the army dealt with destruction
and death and disgust, trained a man to stay upright instead of falling on all fours like an animal among the carnage. And
life was war, in a more subtle form, that lasted for ever, and only discipline and careful entrenchment would see you through
until your own great Armistice Day. He would see May safely through the lines, even if he had to carry her, kicking her little
shoes off on the way.

Such emotion rose up inside his breast that he thought he would break out weeping, and he ran the water into the metal basin
and blinked back the tears of love, love fulfilled – for she did love him, he knew – and he cleared his throat again. He was
suddenly reminded of a poem. He just had to tell them.

He couldn’t find the next line. ‘D’you know it?’ he asked Balfour, who was getting spoons out of a drawer.

‘S-set in a s-silver sea,’ repeated Balfour, discomfited. ‘I d-don’t think I do.’

‘Grand poem, grand.’ He went out again into the blackness to fetch the tea towel from the blackthorn bush, and they heard
him fall heavily and the short splatterings of his good-humoured laughter as he rolled about the alien field. He reappeared,
hopping about the table on one leg, spitting through his military moustache, whimpering that he’d broken his leg. He was so
boisterous, so full of fun. He made them all feel half dead.

‘For God’s sake,’ May pleaded. Hurriedly Lionel composed himself, dabbing at his drooling mouth with his sleeve and wrapping
the tea towel about his hand like a bandage to lift the steaming kettle from the Calor gas cooker. He couldn’t contain himself.
It was so exhilarating out there under the racing clouds and the far-away moon. He had to tell Balfour the other poem he’d
remembered. He had to.

‘Mary in the garden sifting cinders,’ interrupted Joseph, rattling the dice in its little cardboard funnel and emptying them
across the table. ‘Lifted up her skirt – two fours – and farted like a man. The force of the explosion broke fifteen winders,
and the clappers of her arse went bang, bang, bang.’

There it was, thought Lionel, sniggering with the rest of them – the hatred of womankind, the wish to defile. ‘It’s a bit
not on in the company of ladies,’ he said, knowing he would be ridiculed but compelled to speak.

‘You’re priceless,’ his wife told him, giving little whoops of resurrected joy behind the paraffin lamp.

‘It’s not that I’m a prude,’ he said, ‘I could cap that if I cared. Indeed I could.’

‘Go on then,’ May goaded. ‘Go on, St Lionel.’ Not that he was a prude! How fantastic he was. Obscene was the word for him,
with his sick sagas of the temple. ‘Tell one of your very own stories,’ she said daringly, sitting up straight in her chair.
But he failed to take her meaning. He simply didn’t think she could mean the histories he whispered in her ear when they lay
together in bed.

‘I-I know a story,’ Balfour said. ‘A rhyme that is.’

‘Go on,’ encouraged May, though she detested dirty jokes. Balfour began to recite:

‘Why Jew?’ asked George, raising his head and fixing his censorious eyes on Balfour.

‘It’s just a joke,’ apologized Balfour lamely, glad that he had been interrupted. He had forgotten George’s preoccupation
with the Jews and his interest in Israel. It was just another example of how far short he fell of the high degree of sensitivity
attributed to him by Mr and Mrs MacFarley. He supposed he could have said ‘There was an old
Scot
of Belgrade’, but it was too late for that now. Ashamed of his blunder, he helped the gentlemanly Lionel with the tea-making,
putting cups ready on the draining board.

‘Go on, George,’ shouted Joseph. ‘Pull your finger out … You’re in gaol, man. You can’t come out yet.’ Spooning sugar into
his mug, he kept a watchful eye on the unwilling player.

Stubbornly, Kidney played alone, counting his moves and collecting his money from the bank at Joseph’s elbow. Beyond the amber
circle of the lamplight Balfour and Lionel dissolved into the darkness. Lionel could hardly bear to look at his sweetheart,
so beautiful had she become, so luminous in the wooden hut amid the trees. Emotionally he stared at her dewy mouth, slack
with tiredness. When she had drunk her tea she stretched herself and told Lionel she wanted to go to bed.

‘Sweetheart, of course,’ he cried, leaping into the lamplight, his little moustache trembling.

George said he would show them to their hut.

‘But you’re not out,’ protested Joseph.

‘I don’t want to play any more,’ George said, standing up and looking away from the board.

‘Well, don’t take the lamp.’ Joseph put his hand about its base in annoyance. ‘The wind would only blow it out.’

‘Perhaps,’ George said. He opened the door and looked out into the blowing night.

Joseph reluctantly left the table to wave the departing players from the hut, holding the lamp in the doorway and smiling
fiercely in the yellow light. Balfour, walking sideways to gesture to the friendly Dotty, was blinded by a sudden gust of
wind that blew the hair into his eyes. When he looked again, the door had closed and clouds flew above the roof of the hut.

May hung on to her husband’s jacket, shivering with cold. ‘It’s freezing,’ she said, hating the whirling trees and the unseen
path. Lionel removed his coat and covered her shoulders. His white shirt glowed in the field … ‘There, there, sweetheart … There,
there.’

‘It’s like winter,’ she wailed, lowering her bleached head and pushing it against his shrapnel-ploughed buttocks, her two
arms wrapped about his waist, the man’s jacket trailing about her uncertain feet.

‘It’s quite light, sweetheart,’ he told her, seriously endangered by the way she clung to him and worried about his good coat
being trampled underfoot. Like a milkmaid with her cheek pressed to the warm flank of a particularly restless cow, she slithered
down the path under the wild trees. Small stones stubbed her exposed toes in their absurd sandals. She screamed thinly at
regular intervals. Balfour, following behind the joined and lurching couple,
couldn’t become accustomed to the sound. On each occasion he started and trembled as if a screech owl had flown in his face.

At the hut George said he would fetch the storm lantern from his bedroom for them. Lionel began to thank him profusely. ‘Most
kind of you, old man … Much appreciated … The little woman doesn’t – ’

‘He’s not there,’ May said, lowering herself on to the wooden bench dimly outlined outside the hut. ‘He’s gone.’ She looked
with surprise at the thin trunks of trees glittering in the night. ‘Is that the sea?’ she asked Balfour, her head down, listening
to the sound of waves breaking all about them, seeing her toes lying like pebbles in the grass.

‘It’s just the t-trees,’ he told her, and she looked up and saw the forest moving and a grey smear of light shifting across
the tops of the trees like a ridge of mountains. ‘You went on about a moon,’ she accused the white-shirted Lionel. ‘Where
is it now?’

‘It’s gone down behind the hill, sweetheart.’ He laughed jovially and spread his cold fingers across her neck, digging his
thumb into the hollow behind her ear.

May was so cold sitting out here in this damn countryside, feeling her bones bitten into by the coldness. Ice was forming
on her eyeballs. She would die of the cold. ‘I want to go home,’ she said with difficulty, clamping her jaws together to stop
her teeth from breaking against each other. And louder, more firmly, anger giving her warmth, ‘I can’t stand the bloody place,
Lionel, I can’t.’

‘Hush, hush, sweetheart,’ he said, rubbing at her back with his knuckles. ‘You’ll soon be in beddy-byes.’

George came back along the path with his storm lantern held at shoulder height, his shadow running like a river behind him.
The silver birches at the side of the path lost their slenderness. Splotches of brown smeared the fattened trunks. The grass
lay flat like hay gone rotten in the rain.