Between My Father and the King (11 page)

Presently it was discovered that a few scones and sandwiches were being handed round, and there was shuffling and pushing; and finally the patients saw a few pastries coming towards them, and set up a cheer, and were told to be quiet or they would be taken back to the ward, and not allowed such a privilege another time; privileges could be abused too easily. And still the crowd stayed, staring stupidly and expectantly at the hard drab asphalt court, as
if they expected it to behave in an entertaining or even miraculous way, and not just lie there aloofly and obscenely sweating tar and grains of sunlight. There was a notice up to say that only sandshoes could be worn on the court.

Only four people wore sandshoes; they had come to play the first game. They displayed their white shoes, walking freely up and down on the court, with the crowd watching them with envy and admiration and feeling out in the cold, and having no share; so that soon everybody but the four young men in tennis shoes and clothes gradually walked away, as if in disdain, but really in disillusion, until all were gone but a few stragglers. The official party came from the clubrooms. The superintendent looked about him at the almost deserted lawn and the empty seats, and the patients walking up the path back to the hospital, and an expression of uneasiness crossed his face. It was all over, and he had spent some time preparing his speech. And what a litter the crowd had made — you would have thought there would be more consciousness of social obligations. Toffee papers, chewing-gum wraps, sandwich crusts. Why did people have to be eating all the time? He brushed the crumbs from his best suit and shrugged his shoulders. If only he had rallied for a while, with his wife using the other racquet; they would have seen his forehand drive then. What nonsense, what a waste of time over a tennis court. All the human race wanted was spectacle, spectacle all the time.

There was a sparrow on the edge of the court struggling with a piece of sandwich. Another bird joined in, and they began a tug of war. The superintendent felt angry to see them there, and he waved and clapped his hands. Then he raised his voice, speaking to the first assistant about the state of the country roads and the alarming number of potholes. The official party left the tennis court, the wives totting up calories and regretting their cream cakes, the husbands reflecting that the whole thing was nothing but a lot of tomfoolery; and all of them feeling dissatisfied. With all
the speeches and food, and everybody staring at the tennis court, you would have expected something to happen, they thought, but nothing had happened, it was the same old story.

The tennis players, and one man sitting on a seat by the hedge, and a few anonymous small boys were the only people left when it started to rain. It rained big drops, pelting down hard like a punishment. For one minute, two minutes, it teemed as if from nowhere. It had not been forecast, there had been nothing in the paper or over the radio about sudden rain. But scarcely had it started than it stopped, and the sun shone again, and the steam rose in soft grey smoke as if the court were breathing; and the two young men (the other two had gone when it rained) set upon the three big dappled puddles to remove them with brooms.

‘It can't be level,' one said, ‘if it makes puddles like this.'

He felt proud and learned to be criticising the new court.

‘Poor workmanship,' the other answered, ‘everything these days is poor workmanship.'

They talked like old old men, but they were young, tanned brown as gravy, and dressed in whitewashed tennis clothes, and wearing the right kind of shoes, white gymshoes, gliding them like white-laced fish across the court.

They rasped their stiff-haired brooms back and forth, distributing a flurry of water drops and light and fragments of reflected cloud that were seized by the sun, as truants or prodigals, and sucked back into the sky.

Once more the court lay ready for play. There were three people left now — the two players and the man who sat by the hedge. He was a patient who worked as rouseabout for the farm manager and his wife. His name was Roly, and his pants were tied with string, and his heavy farm boots were caked at the heel with cow manure. They were hobnailed boots.

He watched the men playing tennis. He had been watching all the time from the very first when the superintendent gave his
speech and walked on the court and bounced the tennis ball, and everybody had clapped and waited for something to happen; and the whole procedure had seemed something wonderful and dazzling, and people had stared at the tennis court as if it were alive and belonged to them, and would make them rich, and tell them what they wanted to know, and talk to them and be kind to them. And yet it was just this grey slab. And everybody had clapped for it and waited and waited for something to happen; but they had got angry and changed their minds and gone home, and only the two men in white stayed, leaping and dancing.

‘Love,' they called out. ‘Love fifteen.'

Roly listened and smiled. He shuffled his boots on the ground, rubbing his ankles together.

‘Forty love. Game.'

Roly's head turned from side to side as he followed the shots. Sometimes he thought he would go back up to the farm and sluice out the cow yard and feed the new chickens, or watch them, as he had been told to. Yes, Mrs Skeat, the farm manager's wife, had told him to be sure to stay and keep watch over the chickens,
or else
. She was going out, she said, after the tennis affair was over, down to the village shopping, and Roly was not to go wandering about, but to
keep watch
. But Roly's head moved from side to side, and he clapped his hands at the beautiful players in the beautiful white shoes, and he forgot about the farm and keeping watch over the chickens.

But now the players were crossing to the pavilion for a rest, and suddenly there was Mrs Skeat carrying her shopping basket, and coming through the gate to the court, making a shortcut to the farm. And Roly remembered the chickens and keeping watch, and she saw him at the same time that he remembered. She hurried up to him, calling in a harsh voice,

‘Roly. What are you doing here? Didn't I tell you?'

Oh, it was terrible, the new chickens worth pounds and
pounds, and no one watching them. ‘Roly, didn't I tell you? What about the chickens?'

She raised her voice. ‘What about the chickens?'

Roly didn't answer her. There were no people in sight, and they had all waited for something to happen, and now it was happening. He felt proud but afraid.

Mrs Skeat advanced.

‘You great big lout. You great big lout,' she repeated, ‘come on home this instant. You wait till Mr Skeat hears of this, and then you know what will happen.'

Roly knew. It was called a privilege to work for the farm manager, and it was, and if you didn't work for the farm manager you just sat about all day, or carted coal and rubbish, or tipped disinfectant down drains while someone guarded you.

‘Come home this instant.'

Mrs Skeat was amazed that Roly had dared to leave the new chickens. He had seemed like a mechanical toy that you wound up the way you wanted it to go, and it went, it went all the time.

Roly moved his tongue round and round in his mouth. He was sorry he hadn't done what he had been told to do. They were good people to him, and gave him cream at dinnertime, outside in the shed. He smiled at Mrs Skeat, but his eyes showed fear. He got up from his seat and walked towards her.

Ah, the mechanical toy had moved! Relieved, Mrs Skeat stepped onto the tennis court, her high-heeled shoes going
tick-tack-tuck
,
tick-tack-tuck
. Roly followed her, his heavy boots clattering harshly on the surface.

Mrs Skeat turned round, letting out a small scream. ‘How dare you, how dare you cross the court in those boots. Don't you see the notice? No one, no one is allowed on here in anything but soft shoes. You'll ruin it, you oaf.'

She looked lovingly at the drab, prison-grey surface. She had bought five tickets in the raffle, even bought one for Roly, but
neither of them had won anything, not a thing, and all for this tennis court, and she didn't even play tennis, but still, she had a share in it and had to protect it, there had to be someone to protect it.

‘Get off at once,' she flung. ‘Get off at once.'

She clittered on over the court.
Tack
, her shoes said.
Tack, attack
. Soon she disappeared behind the hedge, knowing that Roly would follow her. Her anger with him had died down. He was a poor soul, but the rain should have not been so sudden and rained all over her best dress.

Roly stood a moment looking at the court. He saw the players getting ready to come out for a new game, and he knew he would have to walk across the court: even if he took his boots off, he would have to walk across it. So he stooped down and removed his boots, the left one, the right one, and tied the laces together, and hung the boots around his neck in the way he had seen it done. Then he approached the court and stepped on it. His bare feet were narrow and sunless and his big toes curled back like the prow of a canoe. The surface was hot and pricked his feet, but he walked across, smiling, smiling to himself and thinking, Why did they all go away? Why did they suppose that nothing would happen? But there seemed to be no one to look at him. He left the court and disappeared behind the hedge.

Then the two players emerged from the pavilion and resumed their game. They volleyed and shouted. Their whiteness made them seem like tall sticks of chalk, but they made no mark on the court, and their feet moved softly, as on grey blotting paper. And the sun, lower in the sky now, shone out of a clear darkening blue, and there was no more rain that day.

We acted the cliché. We melted with laughter. Not the prickly melt that comes from sitting on a hot stove but the cool relaxing melt, in defiance of chemistry, like dropping deep into a liquid feather bed. We did not know or remember the reason for laughing. There was a film, yes; a dumb sad man with hair like wheat and round eyes like paddling pools; another man with a moustache like a toy hearth-brush; and many other people and things — blondes, irate managers, stepladders, whitewash, all the stuff of farce. And there was a darkened opera house growing cardboard trees and shining wooden moons.

I shall never know why we laughed so much. Perhaps other films had been as funny, but this one seemed to contain for us a total laughter, a storehouse of laughter, like a hive where we children, spindly-legged as bees, would forever bring our foragings of fun to mellow and replenish this almost unbelievably collapsing mirth.

Nor was it the kind of laughter that cheats by turning in the end
to tears, or needing reinforcement with imagery. It was, simply, like being thrown on a swing into the sky, and the swing staying there, as in one of those trick pictures we had seen so often and marvelled at — divers leaping back to the springboard, horses racing back to the starting barrier. It was like stepping off the swing and promenading the sky.

After the film we managed somehow to walk home. The afternoon was ragged with leaves and the dreary, hungry untidiness of a child's half-past four. Faces and streets seemed wet and serious. The hem of sky, undone, hung down dirty and grey.

But the laughter stayed with us, crippling, floating, rolling, aching, dissolving.

‘It must have been a comic picture,' our mother said, not knowing, not knowing, when she saw our faces.

The refractory, or
disturbed
, part of the hospital, known as Park House, was built a safe distance from the bright admission ward whose pastel walls were hung with soothing seascapes and sunset-occupied skies, where two-toned autumnal rugs matched the golden bedspreads, and where floral curtains bunched themselves across wide-opening unbarred windows. The door of the admission ward stood unlocked, in the modern way, and the path led to a lawn, bright green like a lawn in a shop window where a wax man is mowing. In the centre, a marooned willow wept, with no pool. Birds flipped themselves, dry and hot, in the empty birdbath. Circling the lawn was a high red brick wall, dressed in a seemly way with slowly burning ivy. A country retreat? Yes, a country retreat. Gentle patients, exclaiming at the beauty and calm of it all, wandered in and out of the ward, or sat, at meals, in the light airy dining room, with napkins matching the tablecloths
spread in front of them. They said grace. They pursued civilised conversation.

Park House squatted directly opposite the door of the hospital kitchen, like a dirty brick imbecile waiting for food. Its buildings were old, and leaked in the winter, water running down the inside of the plaster walls. The dayroom, blessed with a timely and multiple personality, served as dayroom, dining room and playroom, a huge space lined with long heavy tables like cast-off banquet tables, and long wooden benches, split and seamed with dirt, and shiny from being sat on. And the people who played and dined and spent the day there? They were the violent, the uncontrollably deluded and hallucinated, those who had murdered or would murder, the sadly deformed, the speechless. And up on the wall, sitting primly and securely in its wire cage, the electric clock looked down, saying
tick tock
,
tick tock
, the way clocks are supposed to. It was a strange, unreal sound, like the sound of knitting; it was as if someone had mistaken the Last Judgment for an afternoon tea party or a sewing bee. For what communication could the clock hold with that world, where time, tribal and primitive, told itself not by hours and minutes but by years of the lion and the panther and days of the hurricane; by hours of getting up, using the toilet, eating, going to bed; by days of sausages and saveloys, of bathing, of hair being combed with kerosene to discourage the lice, of head operations, of official inspections. The weeks had no name, nor the months, nor the years. Once, on a privileged walk, there was for me the Time of the Striped Waterfall, but I am not sure if it actually happened, for I was butcher-frocked and hallucinated, with my name on a list called Prefrontal Leucotomy.