Waterland (35 page)

T
HE guillotines are hissing in the Place de la Révolution. They have been hissing now for months and will go on hissing for some months yet. Who can stop them hissing? Who can curb their unappeasable appetite? And who can stop the hunger in the faces of the crowd who watch, wet their lips, jeer and cheer. Yes, this is the fact that every schoolboy knows about the French Revolution. That it was all to do with guillotines. This is what makes even the most bored and insouciant pupil find History just a little bit engrossing. That hiss-hiss of the descending blades. And yes, old gap-toothed crones really did sit and do their knitting beneath the scaffold; and, yes, there were several recorded instances of corpses that wriggled, kicked – rolled their eyes, moved their lips, screamed – after the head was severed from the body.

Shall we watch? Not just once to see what it’s like, but over and over again, for months on end? Shall we watch the crop of heads mounting in the baskets? Or are you beginning to feel sick already? Are you beginning to feel that History is all made nonsense by that sensation in the pit of your stomach, that tingling in your finger-tips and that swimming feeling in your head and knees? It’s called terror, children. The feeling that all is nothing. There is your subject, your lesson for today.

Or would you prefer to turn your back and walk away? Shall we leave the guillotines to go on working by themselves, shall we leave History to its own devices, and
would you prefer, after all, a fairy-tale instead?

Then let me tell you (I hope it won’t remind you of that dreadful hissing in the distance)

38
About the East Wind

I
T HAS its birth in the Arctic Ocean, north of Siberia. It steals round the northerly tip of the Urals, unleashes itself across the North European and Finnish Plains, gathers itself up again in the Baltic, attempts to sever the neck of Denmark and (if it has lost by now any of its scything keenness, it has it honed back again by the waves of the North Sea) assails the east coast of England. And some people say that the Wash, that gaping wound in the backbone of Britain, is not formed by the effects of tides and rivers and geology, but is simply the first bite the East Wind takes out of the defenceless shoreline with its ice-whetted incisors.

The East Wind blew particularly bitingly in January, 1937. And it blew in with it not only the breath of the Arctic and of half a frozen Europe, but also the influenza, called by some, who claimed to know, the Asian or Russian influenza, or, perversely, for such a wintry malady, the Spanish influenza, but called by most, including those, who weren’t so few, who succumbed to it and died, plainly and briefly, the Flu.

It laid low several pupils of the Hockwell Village
School, one of whom, poor little Roger Pearce, never recovered. It afflicted Walter Dangerfield, the General Store-keeper and Mrs Finch, landlady of the Volunteer Inn. Jack Parr caught a dose but his stalwart wife and plentiful hot whisky pulled him through. Two old people in Apton got it and were dead within a week. And another in Wansham; and another in Sudchurch. In Gildsey the General Hospital improvised a special ward; likewise the Kessling Hall Hospital, albeit designated for mental patients. Doctors Fry of Apton and Bright of Newhithe, to name but two of their hard-pressed profession, had a busy time of it, not to mention the labours of the district nurses. And just to show that physicianship does not confer immunity, Doctor Fry, poor overworked soul who should have retired long ago to Bournemouth or Torquay, went down with a severe bout and was left with a permanent chest complaint.

Henry Crick escaped. And Dick Crick never got it (or if he did, never knew it). But your history teacher was put to bed one Friday and didn’t get up till the following Wednesday, during which interval the stories which his mother told him, in her inimitable fashion, to soothe and console him, failed to perform their normal office. For, far from issuing from his mother to confer on him their balm, they seemed instead to be rising up to envelop and overwhelm her, casting round her their menacing miasmas, so that through his hours of fever he strove to cleave a passage through to a mother who was becoming less and less real, more and more besieged by fiction. But he couldn’t, because these same stories had taken hold of parts of his own body and of the infinitely treacherous bedclothes; they were running coded messages along his bloodstream and performing non-stop variations of themselves inside his skull, so that he himself was in danger of becoming – a figment …

Until, on the Monday morning, he awoke to find his mother perfectly real and palpable, not to say smiling and
relieved, sitting on the bed and about to suggest a little light sustenance; while outside the window, beyond the frost-rimmed glass (for with his fever that malign east wind seems to have dropped too), across a room whose outer coldness presents a happy contrast to now cosy and trustworthy blankets, the morning sun is shining on a flat and stable world that is also lucidly real and clear. There is the distant tower of Ely; and there is the distant chug – throaty in the frosty air – of the eight twenty-five to Lynn. And he finds it hard to believe that such plainly immaterial things as stories should ever have proved so predatory and besetting …

But. But. Now it’s his mother’s turn to take to her bed. The flu has flown from him to her. And that wind, after a week or so’s glassy lull, has revived again with redoubled force. It’s booming in the chimneys; it’s rattling the window panes; it sharpens the icicles on the eaves; it shears off the surface of the Leem and deposits it on the concrete tow-path where it turns to a hard and perilous film; it sends bone-chilling darts through every crack and cranny of the cottage. Yet amidst all this, amidst this onslaught of cold, his mother sweats and tosses, just as he once did. And now, in all fairness, it should be his turn to sit beside her, comfort and soothe. But it won’t do any good. Because there was prophecy in little Tom’s fever-dreams. Because, though no one knows it yet, his mother won’t get up out of that bed again. Because, in a word, she’s dying.

Though no one knows it yet. The fever runs its course. But when it departs it doesn’t leave a restored, a recognizable mother, washed up on the safe shores of recovery and not minding if she does have some milky porridge with a large dollop of treacle. It leaves a changed, sunken woman, not at all like the woman of before. Moreover, the wind which announced your history teacher’s recovery by ceasing and letting the sun shine on spangled winter tranquillity, doesn’t cease for her. It continues to scream and howl. It’s a terrible wind.

And it was because that wind didn’t stop, though it did
for him, because that wind didn’t stop though the fever did, that your history teacher, without being told and mere child of nine though he was, knew.

Perhaps the wind wouldn’t stop till she—

And it was plain that Dad knew too. Because of that brightness in his face. For in those days of Mother’s gradual decline an imperturbable good cheer wrapped his features, a benign smile moulded his lips, a gleam lodged in his eye. As if, by his adopting consistently and resolutely enough this posture of optimism, reality might be persuaded to follow suit; as if by never showing that he recognized the truth, the truth might turn out not to be the truth after all.

But who knows what he did with this rigid mask all those hours that he sat, unseen by us, watching and waiting, behind the closed bedroom door? For whether or not it would have done any good for little Tom to sit too by his mother – telling her or not telling her curative stories – it is Dad who monopolizes this vigilant function. All through the day he watches, while down below, Dick, aged nearly fourteen but like his brother excused on compassionate grounds from school, chips ice from the lock-gates with fingers that do not seem to feel the cold; superintends, with stolid efficiency, the passage upstream of rime-coated lighters, but only shrugs uncommunicatively before the enquiries of the chilled-to-the-marrow lightermen who have heard that Mrs Crick is proper poorly, leaving it to his otherwise unassisting brother (swathed in two coats, scarf, mittens and his father’s outsize balaclava helmet, and trying not to snivel) to offer the gallant lies: ‘She’s not so bad, Mr Bailey, thank you. We think she’s getting better …’

All through the night he watches; while in our room Dick snores and I lie awake listening for sounds across the passageway and praying (yes, praying: Please God, please, let this not be happening … Please God, if you don’t let her die, I’ll … I’ll …), and the wind comes and goes,
howls and whimpers, but doesn’t stop, and the cottage, creaking and groaning, seems more and more like a ship far out at sea that has lost its rudder.

It’s only occasionally and guardedly, as if smitten with some peculiar form of jealousy, that he lets us enter the sick-room. He ushers us in, sometimes with a finger to his lips, as if into the presence of something rare and priceless, as if to behold the crown jewels. He smiles fixedly. He smiles exactly the sort of oafish smile a father smiles when a new little baby’s just been born. And that’s just what Mother looks like – like a little helpless baby tucked up under the sheets. A little baby with an old woman’s voice.

What’s become of my beautiful grown-up Mummy? We sit, one on either side of the bed, Dick on the left, I on the right; Dad, in his chair, drawn up at the foot, one of his hands clutching Mother’s blanket-wrapped ankle. She croaks, after a long pause in which it seems she will never quite find enough breath to speak, ‘Well this … is a fine … state of things … isn’t it?’ With an air of almost-levity. But her eyes say something different. They say: Look, children, your mother’s dying. In a little while she won’t be here any more. It’s a unique, a momentous event. Unique and momentous, not to say unexpected, for your mother too. It only happens once, it won’t be repeated for you. Note it, observe it.

(And I did, very carefully. And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …)

Dick sits, unmoving, by the bed; his lashes flicker. But I turn round to look at Dad. Whose face beams back; whose eyes twinkle: Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she wonderful? Isn’t she a beautiful baby?

(When is the mask going to drop? Not yet. Not yet.)

We troop out. We troop in again. Between our rationed visits Dad remains at his station, nursing this woman who once, years ago, nursed him; emerging only to descend to
the kitchen, to concoct soups and hot drinks and refill hot water bottles; or to carry downstairs other kinds of vessels – Mother’s poor last feeble passings – whose contents he empties down the lavatory.

I think: Can this go on for ever? This being-on-the-edgeness. This trance of Dad’s. This wind. This hearing Mother say, A fine state of things, when it isn’t.

I pray to God: Please God, don’t let it go on like this for ever. Please God, if it’s got to happen, make Mummy be no more. Let it be over, let it be done with …

Now how could I be praying this when only a while ago I was praying …?

But it doesn’t go on for ever. The fact that it’s not going to go on for ever is announced, in the first place, by Doctor Bright who on one of his medicinal visits doesn’t, as is his wont, thrust his stethoscope back into his bag, utter a few grave if calm instructions and depart at once with the air of a man in justified haste (Don’t you know I’ve got other patients to see? Don’t you know there’s a flu epidemic?). He is slow to leave. He accepts Dad’s offer of a cup of tea in the kitchen. I officiate with the kettle. He engages Dad, or attempts to do so, in conversation. Not doctor’s talk, mind you, but a groping effort at casual chit-chat.

For example, after first stirring his tea much more than is necessary, then cocking an eye, out of the kitchen window, towards the hen-coop:

‘Do they keep laying then, even in this weather?’

Dad: ‘Yes, they lays. Not much. But they lays.’

(One of my jobs during Dad’s nursing duties: to fling daily handfuls of feed into the coop, and to remove with cold fingers from under the bellies of resigned and apparently frost-proof hens, the odd warm egg. Warm. Incredibly warm …)

But there’s something about the very by-the-wayness of this talk; there’s something about the slope of Doctor Bright’s shoulders and the fact that his stethoscope,
apparently forgotten, is still dangling round his neck, as if he might use it at any moment, instead of that overworked spoon, for his tea; there’s something about the way Dad starts without knowing it to rub his knee, so that Doctor Bright gratefully latches on once more to a professional topic; there’s something about the way they concern themselves with such curious intentness with this knee (an old wound, always worse in cold weather) while, up above, Mother … There’s something about all this which doesn’t deceive even nine-year-old Tom (‘And we’re fighting fit again, are we, young soldier?’ – as Doctor Bright at last packs away his stethoscope); which fills him with far from by-the-way feelings.

Dad walks with Doctor Bright to his car, via the back path round the edge of the vegetable patch to avoid those treacherous glaciers on the tow-path. I watch him return, from the kitchen window. His mask has gone. His face doesn’t have any expression at all. He pauses on the path, unaware that he’s being observed, apparently heedless of the bitter cold. His shoulders start to shake. His head is turned. He’s not shivering. It’s not the effect of the icy wind. Little abrupt spasms are seizing him by the neck.

I start back from the window. I run up the stairs and open the door where Mother is. Her eyes move. Open. Her eyes look at me. But the strange thing is that she says, ‘Dick?’

And it’s announced, in the second place, by Dad’s entering our room late that night and shaking Dick into wakefulness. It takes a long time to haul Dick from his oblivious slumbers, and while the rousing goes on I pretend I’m asleep too. But I half open one eye and in the beam of light from the open door I read the time on our bedroom wall-clock – an elaborate affair with a wooden face shaped like a plump perching owl (perpetually chased by a ravenous yet lifeless pike three feet farther along the wall). The
hour hand is straight between the owl’s eyes. It’s ten minutes past midnight, on the morning of the twenty-fifth of January, 1937.