Another part of the wood (5 page)

‘Who is fatty?’ articulated Joseph, smiling. ‘No idea, old chap.’

The rocking chair thudded forward as George vacated it. ‘I think he’d better go to bed … I think my father would like him to
go to bed.’

‘Are you receiving telepathic information or something? Is that it?’ Joseph wagged his finger at George, not sure if his voice
was sufficiently jocular. He didn’t want to upset George. Changing the subject he asked, as if interested, which he wasn’t,
‘Is his name really Balfour, George? I mean, is it Balfour something, or something Balfour?’

Hearing his name, the tool-fitter swung his head from side to side.

‘The declaration of the Jewish state,’ said George at the doorway, propping it open with his back, watching the sway of his
scarf ends in the night air.

‘He’s off again,’ moaned Balfour.

‘His name is Edgar Balfour,’ said George. ‘I think he ought to go to bed. He’s been ill for a long time.’

‘Ill?’ Dotty regarded the flushed Balfour. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Just ill.’

Balfour tried to concentrate. Joseph was saying something, something about the people due to arrive tomorrow. He must attend.
There might, who knows, be a message.

‘She’s a blonde,’ said Joseph, ‘and he’s in some sort of business. He used to be in the army. Had his buttock shot off in
Italy.’

George said without reproach, listening to an owl hoot somewhere behind the long barn, ‘You didn’t say there was a woman coming.’

‘Didn’t I? Oh well, they’re married, George. It’s not too bad.’

Dear God, thought Balfour, practically sobered with shock. Not two men but a man and wife – a woman with yellow hair and a
man with a mutilated arse, in his hut, sleeping in the same room as himself. He removed his hands from his face and gazed
at Joseph hopelessly.

‘Bed.’ Joseph yawned, gripping the edges of his chair to lever his body upright. ‘Tomorrow, Mr Whatsit, we really must have
a long talk about your social work, old chap.’

I must try to be cheerful and off-hand, thought Dotty, her fingers still clasping her empty glass. Either that or I must pretend
to be asleep.

Order and growth, thought George, staring out into the dark field, thinking of his remembrance trees, his thousand memorials,
each one named in memory of a Jew who had never reached the Promised Land.

They moved in several directions to bed. Kidney was dispatched to the barn, taken to the door by lamplight and thrust inside.
‘Don’t wake Roland,’ hissed Joseph fiercely, shutting him away for the night.

‘Good night – good night,’ they told each other, close now that they were about to separate.

George lit a candle for Dotty and Joseph because he needed the lamp to guide the unsteady Balfour down the slope and across
the stream to Hut 2. ‘You can have carpets you can afford at Cyril Lord,’ sang the stumbling Balfour in the darkness.

Willie came across the fields from Calfin shortly after seven o’clock the following morning. He took his time, not on account
of his years but because there was no need to hurry and because, since his retirement from the mines, he had begun to suffer
increasingly from shortness of breath. While the wife still slept he had struggled into his clothes and gone down the narrow
stairs into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. He hadn’t bothered to eat. He found he had three Woodbines left from
the night before, and the visitors over at Nant MacFarley might possibly tip him for cleaning out the toilet. He would buy
some bacon at the corner shop for breakfast on his way back from the Glen. He let himself out quietly, treading gently down
the path so as not to disturb the wife. She would probably want to know why he was going and where and what for, and he didn’t
want to discuss it. He had married late, after the death of his mother, and mostly he confused the two women in his mind.

At the crossroads his footsteps faltered as if, by rights, by habit, his boots should go left towards the pit. He spat frequently
into the grass as he went, walking with legs well-bent at the knee, eyes darting from side to side under the colourless brim
of his cap, seeing little pictures – a brown bottle, unbroken, upright in a patch of thistle, a line of sheep two meadows
distant, pouring like grey milk through a gap in the hedge, the mountain humped behind a scroll of mist. His lips moved as
he climbed, telling himself it was a good morning, over and over like a prayer, letting his body go with the flow of the hill
so as to conserve his energy.

The cows in the top field were still lying down across the daisies. He didn’t see the daisies, but he saw the cows out of
the corner of one pale blue eye: seven cows in a lump under an elm tree.

He rested a moment astride the stile above the Big House. Removing one of the three saved Woodbines out of his jacket pocket,
he rolled it between his fingers to coax it back into plumpness.

He liked to keep an eye on the Glen when the MacFarleys were away. He didn’t consider Master George man enough to be responsible,
not being a married man, and there were so many jobs likely to be overlooked. In his working days he had come to lend a hand
on a Sunday after chapel, and every day on his paid week’s absence from the mines, even when he was off sick, if he could
manage to get away without the wife nagging him too much and going on about him being dishonest to the company. Since his
retirement he came and went as he chose. Some people had their clubs or their bingo or their dart matches: he had his Glen.

Spitting shreds of tobacco from his flat lips he shambled down the slope, skirting the Big House and George’s bedroom, not
wanting to be greeted until he had introduced himself to the visitors in Hut 4, going down into the valley with lips still
moving and chest still heaving.

George, though not the first to wake, was the first to leave his bed some few minutes after Willie had passed the wall of
his room. He dressed and folded his sleeping bag neatly before going through to the kitchen of the Big House. There he washed
his hands and face. He was happy because Joseph was in the Glen and there would be things to talk about. George had had a
solitary childhood, albeit in a boarding school, and a solitary manhood, though he wasn’t conscious of any deprivation. He
liked order and he liked company of a sort, Joseph’s sort. Joseph on occasion had discussed Art with him in a way that he
found suitable and in conformity with his own sense of order. If he had known that Joseph was to all men all things and to
his own self nothing, it wouldn’t have spoiled his pleasure or diminished his admiration.

Balfour had woken shivering an hour or so earlier, minus his boots but otherwise fully clothed, with parched mouth and gelatine
eyelids. He burrowed into his sleeping bag, handsewn by George, thought once about the one-arsed brigadier due to arrive that
day, and drifted again into sleep.

Joseph and Dotty were lying side by side in the single bed in Hut 4. Their two faces were cold under the beamed roof. On the
chest of drawers Joseph had stood his after-shave lotion, a bottle of green scented water with a spray given to him by his
ex-wife at Christmas. It looked like a floral arrangement with a single bud, propped against the brown wall of the cabin.

Outside the hut trod Willie, spitting his phlegm into the undergrowth, noting that the washing line had gone from its place
slung between the blackthorn thicket and the elder bush. He scratched his neck under the band of his cap and saw the rope
hanging from the high elm at the boundary of the field. However did it get up there, he asked himself out loud, looking up
into the sky? Puzzled, he shook his head and went down the path.

Only Kidney had made use of the shed in the bushes. In the night Dotty had woken fretfully and fumbled awkwardly under the
truckle bed for the chamber pot placed there by Mrs MacFarley. As if triggered to wake at just such a moment, Joseph had risen
invisibly in the blacker-than-black night and said ‘Out, out’ and folded like a wing to the mattress again. Obediently Dotty
had gone and squatted under the dark sky, pissing reproachfully into the damp grass. Moth-pale in her voluminous nightgown,
she had crouched with splayed knees, thinking that no doubt Roland and daft Kidney would be permitted the solace of a chamber
pot, but not she, being female. Waddling experimentally forward, she had felt like some duck threading its way through platters
of water lilies in a pond. She stood, trying to list all the animal names of the stars that swam about day and night above
the earth: the winged horse, the dolphin, the eagle, the horned goat, the
scorpion, the serpent, the bull, the little bear. Little bear gone away, she had told herself fancifully, climbing back into
bed beside the superior Joseph, thinking of the dreams he must be dreaming.

Willie first of all took off his coat and hung it on the inner door of the lavatory. Then, bending low, as if to perform a
Russian dance movement, he embraced the pan with his two short arms and lifted it from the cement hole in the base of the
shed. He carried it up the slope past Hut 4 to a place behind the long barn. Grunting, he put his burden down on the wet patch
of ground and rested a moment with hands to his side before going to fetch his spade from beneath the uprights of Hut 4. He
began to dig a deep hole.

Roland opened his eyes in the middle of a dream about the baby who belonged to the people next door. He saw the baby’s face
on the pillow beside him, larger than it should be and crowned with hair, but with the same crumpled mouth and the same skin,
shiny as the white candle his mother had in the brass holder in the living-room. He blinked his eyes, and then saw that it
was only Kidney’s face after all lying there above the sheet. He sat up in bed and looked about him at the barn. It was a
bit like a ship, he thought, with all those wooden walls and the planks joined together by nails big as sixpences. There was
a clothing rack hanging just beneath the arch of the roof, tethered to the wall of the hut by a rope wound in a figure of
eight about an iron hook. He trod along the side of the blanketed bed, careful not to step on the baby-faced Kidney, and climbed
over the black-painted bars to the floor. He took his trousers and his jumper in his arms and kicking his sandals before him
opened the barn door and stepped down into the grass.

The place had changed completely from what he remembered. For one thing, there was a smell of something, and there were trees
everywhere – no longer grey, but all sorts of colours. Among the bushes near the barn there were pieces of flowers, blue and
white, and just by the front step of the hut in which his father was sleeping a marigold grew in the grass, a wasp flying
about its head.
Bravely he approached the hut door from the opposite side, leaning across the wooden step, fumbling with the knob, keeping
his eyes fixed on the spiralling wasp. Dismayed, he dropped his clothes and retreated further away from the marigold, never
letting the insect out of his sight. He could hear someone digging behind the barn, but he didn’t care to go that far, without
his sandals. Spinning round and round in the field, he shouted ‘Daddy, Daddy’. In the middle of his pirouette he saw the swing
his father had made in the elm tree and righting himself he ran to the loop hanging above the grass.

Facing away from the barn and hut, he sat on the horizontal bar, which was wide enough for him alone, and pushed with his
muddy feet at the bumpy ground, rocking forward into the field. After a time he rose above the level of the tangled hedgerow
and saw the mountain in the distance. Mouth open, he slid backwards through the leafy field and wriggling his body from side
to side slowed the swing. At a point nearest the ground he jumped clear and rolled down the wet slope. Forgetting the wasp,
forgetting his fear of snakes and worms, he ran round the back of the hut and squatting on his haunches banged with his hand
on the small window behind which he knew his father lay. ‘The mountain,’ he shouted, pushing his nose to the pane of glass,
seeing Dotty with her face turned towards him and her eyes closed but no sign of Joseph. Fist clenched, he continued to beat
at the window, heart pounding with the vision of the mountain he had seen.

Joseph woke from a dream. He sat up and saw his son outside the window. ‘Hallo, boy,’ he mouthed, leaping from the bed clad
only in a string vest. He was furious with himself for letting Roland see Dotty and him in the same bed. He picked up his
clothes hastily and ran to unlock the front door, stubbing his toe as he did so. He kissed the boy with a great show of cheerfulness,
making a lot of incidental noises, hissing with feigned hurt and holding his foot in the air, saying ‘Ooooh’ with pursed lips,
spitting with laughter as Roland jumped in his arms.

Roland had never, to Joseph’s knowledge, caught him in bed
with a woman. Joseph didn’t believe anyway that a child of eight – or was it seven? – equated bed with sex. Still, he was
upset as he wrestled with the child. Hastily he dressed, hopping in the grass with Roland clinging to his ankle. Somebody
coughed beyond the hut. Taking Roland by the hand, Joseph went to investigate.

Behind the barn he saw the old fellow who worked for the MacFarleys – the odd-job man, Bertie or Tommy or someone.

Touching his cap, Willie said, ‘And how are you, Mr Joseph?’

‘Fine, fine. Musn’t complain. Digging, I see.’

‘Just emptying the toilet for you, Mr Joseph. Start clean, as it were. Mr MacFarley likes me to keep an eye on things.’

‘We’ve not actually gone into production yet,’ said Joseph. He wondered how much the old chap would expect to be tipped. ‘Go
and get your clothes on, Roland,’ he ordered.

‘Got your hands full,’ said Willie, leaning on his spade, taking in Mr Joseph’s trousers and jacket. Best London style, he
thought: bit of a dandy – and a woman back there in the hut very possibly, if he ran true to previous years.

Sensing criticism, Joseph said, ‘He’s no trouble, we get on very well.’ Nodding to Willie, he went into the hut, and after
a moment Willie followed him.