Another part of the wood (6 page)

When Dotty got up she found Joseph in the kitchen making breakfast. Roland was at the table, eating fried bread and bacon.
Thankfully she saw the old man drinking tea. Joseph was always better in the morning if there was someone else around, someone
he wasn’t on intimate terms with. It meant he wouldn’t start telling her she was a lazy bitch, which she suspected she was.

‘This is Dotty,’ Joseph said, coming forward to pat her shoulder.

‘Good morning,’ said Willie, not looking at her long face nor her long hair. ‘Come up from London, have you?’ he asked, stamping
his feet and wheezing.

‘Yes, from London,’ Dotty told him. She sat down beside Roland at the table, looking at his half-consumed fried bread and
bacon longingly. She was always hungry and she always felt guilty at
being hungry – not at home with her parents, or in a café, but anywhere where Joseph was. He made her feel greedy or something.
She asked him for a cup of tea, keeping her face turned away from him, because there hadn’t been a mirror in the cubicle and
she didn’t know whether her make-up was grimy from the night before. Her hair, she knew, was untidy, but she wasn’t sure where
her comb might be and even if she had known Joseph would be irritable if she did her hair in the kitchen and more irritable
if she left the room just as she had entered. He could run in and out like a restless sheepdog and trim his beard over the
bacon and eggs, but then he was male and therefore not disgusting. She asked Roland if he had slept well.

‘Yes,’ the child answered flatly, crunching fried bread in his mouth.

‘He’s been running about the fields in his pyjamas since dawn,’ said Joseph. He added meaningfully: ‘Couldn’t get in at the
door, so he banged on the window.’

‘It wasn’t dawn, it was day, and I didn’t run around. Actually, I went on the swing,’ said Roland.

‘My God,’ cried Joseph, face animated above the spitting fat. ‘It was the swing – that was it.’

‘Oh aye,’ Willie said. ‘I saw you took down Mrs MacFarley’s washing line.’

‘I dreamt about Kidney playing with a rope – not here, back at the flat,’ said Joseph. ‘He was sitting on the floor, the studio
floor, coiling this rope round and round his waist. He had a funny expression, Dotty, really very strange.’ Needing her interest,
for the toilet-cleansing Welshman couldn’t possibly understand the special significance of such a dream, Joseph gave his full
attention to the famished Dotty. ‘There was a record on the gramophone – I can’t remember what record – and there was someone
else there …’ Joseph frowned, wrinkling his forehead, holding the pan of bacon away from the stove.

‘Nathan,’ said Dotty. She resented his everlasting nights of symbolic imagery. She herself dreamed mostly that she was being
betrayed or tortured or conned by Joseph. She could never remember the whole of her dreams, and if she was asked she made
something up. Still when Joseph spoke so directly to her, treating her as if she were real to him, she was forced to respond.
Apart from that, she loved him and she didn’t want to hurt him.

‘Of course, Nathan.’ Delighted, Joseph smiled at her. Nathan was the cat.

‘I dreamed the baby next door was in my bed,’ Roland said.

‘The baby next door was in your bed,’ repeated Joseph fondly, still thinking of the rope about the thick waist of Kidney.

‘But when I woke up it was only Kidney,’ said Roland.

‘Only Kidney,’ said Joseph. ‘Only Kidney! In your bed? Surely not?’

The child didn’t reply, absorbed in thoughts of the baby next door. Sometimes when the baby’s parents went out – to a party
or something – they left it with his mother and it slept in a cot in his room. In the morning Roland would wake and see it
standing in a long nightie at the end of the cot, peering through the bars at him. It had a pinkish face with no eyebrows
and no teeth either and just a few shreds of hair, the colour of marmalade, on its plump head. If he went towards the cot
the baby lifted up its arms and tried to pull itself up out of the bed. His mother had warned him never to lift the baby out
on his own, but he often did, until one morning the baby slipped backwards into the cot and fell with its head against the
bars. His mother came running then and lifted the baby up, and after a while she let Roland cuddle it. He was sad and excited
at having hurt it, and he put his face down into the fold of its neck, where it smelt like an apple, and he cried too.

‘Roland, I’m talking to you. Was Kidney in your bed?’

‘Yes, he was.’

‘What the hell did he get into Roland’s bed for?’ asked Joseph helplessly, looking at Dotty with raised eyebrows.

‘Probably couldn’t see in the dark,’ she said reasonably.

‘But he shouldn’t have.’

‘Why not?’ asked Roland, leaving the table and going to the
door of the hut. He peered over at the marigold and was relieved to see that the wasp had gone.

‘Well, he shouldn’t have.’ At a loss, his father put back his frying pan on the gas and continued his cooking.

‘I didn’t mind.’ Roland came back to the table and leaned against Dotty. ‘Did you mind Daddy being in your bed?’

‘No,’ Dotty said, stirring her tea and wanting her comb.

Willie spent most of the morning hanging about the barn and Hut 4, anxious not to miss anything and with plenty to think about.
He filled the lavatory pan with an equal amount of chemical and water and replaced it on its base in the shed among the bushes.
Nobody appeared to take advantage of his gesture. He refilled the crater he had made, burying Kidney’s waste matter, and burned
some rubbish left by Balfour several weeks ago.

The girl in the nightgown wandered about the field for some time before getting dressed, looking at the flowers in the hedgerows
and lighting a lot of cigarettes she rolled herself. She dropped matches and stub ends all over the place. She went and sat
on the swing too, gliding over the grass with her nightgown billowing out behind her and her two thin yellow feet pointing
at the sky. Mr George, Willie thought, would be grim-faced about all those fag-ends littering the place. He was a tidy sort
like his father, though not half the man his father was. In the middle of the morning Mr Joseph went into the barn. There
was a lot of shouting, and after a while a boy came out into the sunshine with a mop of hair and a face pretty as a girl,
prettier than most. Mr Joseph said it was too late for breakfast now, nearly lunchtime in fact. He told the lad he was too
fat anyway, which was about the size of it – a big soft lump of a lad, just standing there shuffling his feet and blushing
and saying he was sorry. After a bit more talk, too low-pitched for Willie to catch, the lad began taking off his shirt and
his vest and there was a pair of breasts good enough for a woman, if you didn’t like them too big. White little swellings
turning pinkish, for all the world like the buds on the Norway maple down
in the Glen, and not a sign of hair on the padded chest nor beneath the armpits. This last fact Willie established when Joseph
had hoisted the youth on to the branch of the tree, letting him dangle by his arms above the slope. He was supposed to raise
his legs, but he just hung there with his face filling with blood.

At mid-day when Joseph was checking the food stores he was depressed to realize that the supply he had brought to last three
or four days was barely going to feed them for today. It was Dotty eating half the bacon at one go. Where had the grapefruit
juice gone and the three boxes of cheese segments? Righteously indignant, he thundered her name from the doorway, agitating
Willie who was taking his ease at the back of the barn, sitting in the long grass with his cigarette alight and his cap over
his eyes.

‘What’s up now?’ Willie asked himself out loud.

Again the girl’s name was called, louder this time.

Grinning because it wasn’t he Mr Joseph was after, Willie relaxed and drew on his Woodbine.

After a while, for she had been down at the stream with Roland when the summons came, Dotty appeared at the door of the hut,
a little out of breath from her climb up the slope. She had been dreaming all the time she ran up the path that above in the
holiday hut love waited. Love had suddenly seized Joseph by the throat and dragged him to the edge of the forest to call her
name. Either that or he had found her lost comb which she hadn’t washed for weeks or the soiled underwear she had stuffed
into the wicker basket under the settee.

She said ‘Yes?’ looking at his humourless face as he put down knives and forks on the dinner table.

‘Where’s the cheese and where’s the grapefruit juice?’

‘The grapefruit juice?’

‘The grapefruit juice.’

He was emptying salt from a packet into an egg cup. All the work there would be when they left, she thought – putting butter
in glass bowls and Roland’s tomato sauce into a gravy jug. Such a
fuss. Relieved that it wasn’t her comb or the state of her bra, she said, ‘If you mean the grapefruit juice we got on the
Finchley Road, it’s in the fridge at the flat.’

‘At the flat?’

‘You said it was too big to go in the grocery box, so we didn’t bring it. And the cheese is in the tin on the shelf.’

‘Do you realize we have only enough food for today?’

It didn’t surprise her at all. He’d brought rice and raisins but no potatoes or tins of Heinz beans or anything they could
live on.

‘It means,’ said Joseph, bitterly, ‘that I’ll have to shop again tomorrow. I’ve already spent a bomb.’

Dotty sat down at the table.

‘You’re slouching,’ he said. ‘Here, cut up some onions. I’m making a rice thing for lunch.’

‘Roland won’t eat it,’ she said.

Joseph didn’t reply. She chopped gamely at the onions he placed in front of her.

‘Do you think,’ he asked, ‘that I ought to say something to Kidney? About his being in Roland’s bed?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Dotty. ‘What
could
you say?’

‘I could mention the bed’s not big enough for two. He might say something – give some explanation.’

‘I doubt it,’ Dotty said. ‘Are you worried about sex or something?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Joseph. But he was worried. When he had suggested having Kidney to live with him, the doctor
at the clinic Kidney attended had asked him if there were any women living in the house. Joseph hadn’t mentioned Dotty because
he hadn’t thought of her as being a permanent fixture.

‘He was probably just cold,’ said Dotty. ‘I’d forget about it. If he was really bonkers – I mean, dangerous – he’d be in a
home.’ She stood up and turned the gas lower under the pan of bubbling rice. It still mystified her how Joseph had managed
to get permission to take care of Kidney.

‘He has been in a home,’ said Joseph. ‘Several in fact. Leave that rice alone.’

She did as she was told. The rice was almost done and with any luck it might stick to the bottom of the pan. She went and
sat on the settee at the end of the hut, feeling with the heels of her feet for the wicker basket, watching Joseph scrape
the cut onions and paprikas into the frying pan. When he turned his back to place the vegetables on the stove she leant forward
and put her fingers under the lid of the basket, trying to locate her bra. But she couldn’t.

‘Go and call Roland,’ bade Joseph, turning the contents of the pan with a knife. ‘And see if Kidney is at the back of the
barn with Tommy.’

‘Willie,’ corrected Dotty, going out into the field.

Joseph shook the pan about briskly, causing mushroom buds to fall among the paprikas and the pale rings of onion. He thought,
Degas or Delacroix or someone like that had made a work of art once out of an omelette. What a pity Kidney had given up painting.
Not that the results were all that stimulating – dull little fields with puffy clouds – and he himself had to spend such hours
clearing the mess up afterwards, the paint splashed on the wall and the smears of water on the table. It was a pity, but some
time soon, very soon, he was going to have to turn Kidney over to someone else. It would mean he might have to go into a home
again. But somehow, he’d lost interest. He could always visit the youth. ‘Lunch,’ he shouted, putting his head out of the
window, seeing Dotty and Kidney on the path. ‘Did you call Roland?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

When he came in, Roland ate the rice without complaint. ‘What’s that tree called?’ he asked his father. ‘The one beside the
barn?’

As usual, he received no reply, for Joseph was listening to the sounds made by Willie hovering outside the hut.

‘He’s waiting for his bloody tip,’ Joseph told Dotty, none too quietly, adding loudly for the benefit of the Welshman without,
‘Like a cup of Nescafé?’

Willie didn’t really want the drink. To tell the truth he was beginning to feel a bit peckish and regretful he hadn’t gone
home
for some breakfast, but he did want to be amongst them – the woman and Mr Joseph and the plump young lad. What the devil was
the lad doing along with Mr Joseph? ‘Come up from London too?’ he asked Kidney, removing his cap now he was indoors, wondering
where to sit himself.

‘Yes, from London too,’ said Mr Joseph. Not a peep out of the lad himself, sitting there at the table with his cheeks like
apples and his eyes shining. ‘Sit down, Bill,’ Mr Joseph told him, and there being no chair vacant he had to go to the end
of the hut to the settee. He hadn’t been called Bill since he was a boy and he sat very stiffly on the chintz settee with
his shirt very full in the front, giving him a breast like a pigeon, and his red hair pressed flat to his head after being
under his cap for so many hours. The girl looked as if she hadn’t had a decent meal for God knows how long, spooning the food
into her mouth, sitting with rounded shoulders. Mr Joseph had noted her shoulders. He was sitting very straight himself, in
the manner of Mr MacFarley.

‘Not at work today then, Bill?’

‘Oh God no, Mr Joseph. I’ve been retired these six years. Seven more like.’

‘Retired? Really.’ Fixing his attention on Willie and off the hungry Dotty, Joseph made an attempt at conversation. ‘Must
find a lot of changes, being retired, Bill. Time hang heavy on your hands, does it?’