Another Part of the Wood Read online

The war talk went on for a long time.

  May wouldn’t speak to Lionel. She was obviously huffy. She shielded her face with one hand and played with her spoon in the unappetizing mess of her shredded wheat. She felt exhausted and hideous, with all her make-up on wrong. The mirror was too small, and when she had done her eyebrows Joseph had made some remark about her warpaint and they had all watched her. She was sure she had swollen in the night; she felt blown out like some balloon. It was water retention or something horrible like that. She couldn’t think how Dotty could walk around in that cotton sack in this weather. Lionel had told her to put on another sweater if she wasn’t warm enough, but she was damned if she was going to add to her already large proportions. The hairdresser in the King’s Road had sworn her set would last a week – four or five days at the least – and already it was out. It was dreadful. Those army blankets had given her some kind of skin allergy too, she was convinced of it. She could feel the little broken veins in her cheeks and there was a rough patch on her neck. Lionel of course looked much the same as usual, the same as he ever did. He’d pushed his head into that tin bowl of cold water and come up all red and spluttering. The way he scrubbed his face with the towel it was a wonder he didn’t wear his skin through to the bone. He’d changed into a checked shirt with a silly green cravat at the throat, with that coin of his hidden behind it and his elderly heart going boom-boom-boom on the other side. She was grateful it wasn’t summery enough for his appalling shorts, the khaki ones that came below his knees. It was such a small hut with all these people in it. There wasn’t room to breathe and it was so dark with the door shut, as if they were in a ship’s cabin with the spray splashing up against the porthole. There was more space further in, towards that chintz sofa – which was an odd piece of furniture to find in this place – but it was warmer nearer the cooker. There was something large and grey standing near the wall, shaped like an unexploded bomb with a metal knob on it. She hoped it wouldn’t blow up. Lionel was going on about Churchill being a great man, talking about him as if he’d met him, saying he spoke to him at Malta once. He always pretended that. He never had met him.

  ‘Great man, a great man of history. I had the honour once of meeting him …’

  Balfour said, ‘I watched the funeral on telly. It was sad.’

  ‘Who are we talking about?’ asked Joseph, looking round with a puzzled expression.

  ‘Lionel met Winston Churchill, and Balfour saw him on telly,’ Dotty said, miserable without her tobacco. She knew Joseph had heard Lionel, he was just being awkward.

  ‘He had a remarkable ability,’ Lionel was saying, ‘to get close to the ordinary man.’

  May said, ‘I couldn’t bear that awful siren suit he wore. What did he have to wear that dreadful thing for?’

  ‘Ah, my sweetheart, how little you understand. The man, Churchill, the historical figure, was behind his siren suit. In his case, clothes could hardly matter.’

  Clothes do matter, thought May, licking away the grains of sugar folded in the corners of her mouth. If she had the money she would buy a coat the same colour as the shredded wheat, with Italian seams at the waist. With it she’d wear a boy’s shirt with buttoned-down collar and cream stockings and toffee patent shoes, and beige nail varnish and lip salve, and just a touch of white shadow above her eyes, on the corner of the lids. It was typical of Lionel not to know that clothes mattered. He’d gone on long enough deploring the loss of the Empire or something, and he couldn’t see just how British-mad everyone was now, what with clothes and pop songs and the King’s Road on a Saturday morning. Everyone she knew was dreadfully patriotic, and especially if you came from Liverpool. She had told Lionel they ought to buy a Union Jack to hang over their bed. Lionel had just laughed and called her a funny little thing. He didn’t believe her when she told him that all the best people, even the Armstrong-Joneses possibly, pinned Union Jacks up all over the place. It was the thing. You could get boxes of matches with the flag on, and tea towels and handkerchiefs and coffee mugs, a shirt if you went to Carnaby Street – anything if you wanted it. And it really had something to do with being glad you were English – as though you knew everything was going decadent and awful, and now was the time you could dress up in style and shout you were British-made.

  Lionel was now talking about treaties and organizations. ‘South American powers,’ he said seriously, ‘Asiatic powers, European powers, known collectively as the Great Powers.’

  ‘I only know Tyrone Power,’ said May.

  Joseph laughed.

  ‘Silly child,’ said Lionel indulgently, a little annoyed at her interruption but charmed by her gaucherie and the fact that she had at last spoken. It made him feel freer. It allowed him to speak more personally about the war, his war. He started a long rambling account of his experiences in Malta leading up to his meeting with the Great Man. ‘When the show first got under way,’ he began. ‘After Mr Shickelgrueber had shown his hand …’

  May saw that Dotty was gazing at Lionel, not fluttering her eyelashes at him – she wasn’t feminine enough for that – but eyeing him all right. She’s so drab, thought May; she’s no idea how to exploit her sex. All those ghastly boys’ dungarees and sneakers on her feet – size nine, by the look of them. She hadn’t been born till the war was over. Fancy that – not even a war baby. Where was that place, she wondered, with the injured soldiers everywhere? They had lived there for a year during the war, after her father had been sent overseas. Southport, was it? The place with the fairy lights in the trees. The soldiers were all dressed in bright bright blue, some on crutches and some without an arm, and a terrible man with a burnt face, candle-pink, and a strip of waxy flesh for a nose. It looked comical really – not the burnt man, poor devil, but all of them, hobbling and limping down the street, under those trees with the lights not on because of the war, just the black bulbs stuck up there like fruit spotted with bird droppings. Some of the wounded soldiers pushed each other in wheelchairs. She’d never liked soldiers, never – they reminded her of Father. They always looked so awful when they put on civilian clothes and couldn’t hide behind the uniform any more.

  She had an uncle, though, who had been in some regiment that made him wear a kilt, and he came on leave once and played the piano, with his legs all bare and the tight little pleats flaring out all round the piano stool, sitting there playing ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’.

  Lionel was looking at Dotty with wonder and shaking his head from side to side. ‘Incredible,’ he said, ‘I keep forgetting – not even born.’

  ‘She’s too young. Aren’t you, Dot-Dot?’ Joseph said, patting Dotty’s hand.

  May smiled too, regarding her husband fixedly, positively daring him to dwell on the youthfulness of Dotty. She didn’t pretend to be younger than she was. She wasn’t as old as her birth certificate said. She couldn’t be. It was a cruel mistake.

  ‘I had a cousin who was killed in Germany,’ Dotty volunteered. ‘He was shot down over Dresden.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Lionel said. His grief seemed genuine.

  ‘I never knew him,’ Dotty explained. ‘I’ve seen photographs, but I never knew him.’

  Lionel pushed the dead relation out of his mind. ‘Clever lot, those Germans. Good soldiers, especially under Rommel. They’re a nation of soldiers – it’s the Prussian influence. They have an instinct for it, just as we had an instinct for colonization. The warring instinct of the German nation.’ He paused. His fingers fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. ‘I have here,’ he said, clutching something inside his shirt, ‘a symbol that may illustrate what I mean. I don’t often show it to anyone. I regard it as sacred.’

  ‘What is it?’ Dotty was sure he was talking about the coin, the Blakeley Moor token piece. She couldn’t look at May.

  ‘A coin,’ said Lionel, ‘an old coin. I took it from around the neck of a German officer in Italy. There was a small nick at the edge and beneath the coin a round hole in his breast.’ He allowed them a glimpse
of the metal chain, but that was all.

  ‘A dead German, I hope,’ Joseph said, not greatly caring, looking at the still-munching Kidney, who had eaten half a loaf of bread. He wondered whether he should give him a pill now.

  ‘Very dead. He was little more than a boy. Same age as myself actually. But make no bones about it, he was dead.’

  How awful, thought May, in part believing the story, seeing the lifeless German and a callous Lionel, little more than a boy, snatching the chain from about his neck. He was so persuasive. Sometimes she wondered if Lionel had ever got further than the Isle of Man. He had told her once that his father, the buried William Gosling, cashier of the bank, had given him the coin, and on another occasion that he’d found it on the windowsill of a farmhouse in France – when he was occupying some place or other, when he was winning the war. The last story he’d told her even after she knew it was the Blakeley Moor token for one penny only.

  Joseph fetched the bottle of pills from under the settee. He kept the container hidden in his palm, not able to make up his mind about the problem of Kidney – medicine versus exercise. He was going to go vista-clearing with George and he wasn’t going to have time to see that the youth did press-ups or ran round and round the field. Those half-dozen slices of white starch Kidney had just consumed weren’t exactly the best way to start a day. He fretted that he couldn’t concentrate on Kidney, couldn’t be singleminded enough to be of real help. He fretted that he was again postponing taking Roland up the mountain, though the child seemed to have forgotten the whole idea.

  Lionel was still carrying on about the battlefield and the gunfire. His voice was breaking with recollection.

  Joseph, putting the bottle of pills high up on the shelf above the sink, said roughly, ‘Come on, George, let’s get cracking.’

  The tall man rose slowly and Balfour quickly joined him. George lowered his head at the doorway, to step down into the grass.

  When the three men had gone, May said she had left a lipstick in the front pocket of the car and wanted it. She told Lionel to go at once, waving her hand at him imperiously, and he did as he was told, leaving the two women alone with Kidney. May didn’t mind him being there. He didn’t count. She jumped to her feet and peered into the mirror, giving a small scream of disgust. ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Do you want some hot water?’ Dotty put the kettle on and lit the Calor gas.

  ‘I hate him, I hate him … It’s all his fault.’ May fell on her knees and dragged the suitcase from under the table, pulling out several dresses and some sweaters.

  ‘That’s super.’ Dotty picked up a skirt, held it against her waist. It looked like an apron on her.

  ‘Well, I can’t wear it … Look at the creases in it.’ May snatched it away and bundled it into her case. She sat back on her heels and buried her head in her hands.

  ‘Oh come on, love. It’s not as bad as that.’

  Kidney was looking earnestly at the writing pad abandoned by Joseph among the dishes. He turned its pages and began to draw something.

  When the water was hot Dotty poured it into the bowl for May and found the soap. The woman was so helpless in many ways, she felt compelled to do things for her. May washed her hands and placed her damp fingertips against her face as if the water might do her an injury. ‘It’s all stinging,’ she complained. ‘It’s those bloody army blankets.’

  ‘What happened last night with Balfour and you?’

  ‘Me and Balfour?’

  ‘He seemed a bit upset. He said Lionel told a dirty story.’

  ‘My God.’ May hid her ravaged face behind the towel and turned to the mirror. ‘Did he hear?’ she asked. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He just said Lionel told you a story.’

  ‘He tells me stories every night … I don’t listen any more … they’re always the same.’

  ‘What are they about?’

  ‘Lalla Rookh and some temple.’

  Dotty giggled.

  ‘When he first told me them – ’ May was spilling the contents of her handbag on to the draining board, fumbling for her foundation cream, unscrewing the gold top on the black tube – ‘it was a bit of a shock, I can tell you, but I’ve got used to it now.’ She wasn’t going to tell Dotty that Lionel never made love to her, never actually had intercourse. Dotty would probably tell everybody. She said, ‘If he can’t make love to me, he tells me stories.’ She caught sight of Kidney’s face in the mirror, his blue eyes fixed on her. ‘Is he listening?’ she asked, turning round to look at him.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so.’ Dotty was reminded of the farewell letter she was going to write Joseph, telling him everything in her mind, everything. ‘Joseph won’t touch me,’ she said, searching on the shelves in the inner room for her writing paper. ‘He says I revolt him.’

  ‘Really?’ May tried to express sympathy and incredulity, but she was too absorbed in her make-up, barely listening to the girl.

  ‘I’m going to write him a long letter,’ Dotty said, sitting down on the settee.

  ‘Oh yes.’ May’s mouth stretched wide as she applied colour to her lips. There were freckles, gold-coloured, on the bridge of her tilted nose.

  Dotty wrote:

  ‘Joseph: I don’t suppose you will take much notice of this, because I have done this so often, written I mean, threatening to go away and in the end not going …’

  It was true. She wrote him so many letters but she never went.

  ‘But this time I do mean it. It’s all to do with me being so awful and people like this girl you’ve got at the college not being awful. I mean, if I wasn’t awful you wouldn’t need to go to someone else so quickly. Anyway, I don’t see much point in me hanging around just irritating you with my ciggies and my nose, because your wife did that – always around, I mean – and it didn’t get her very far, did it?’

  May said, ‘Why doesn’t Joseph play with Roland? He’s a sweet little boy. Just look at him.’

  Dotty looked up and asked what he was doing.

  ‘He’s on the swing, just swinging up and down. He’s bored.’

  ‘Oh, he’s all right. He adores Joseph.’

  She wrote:

  ‘I know it’s none of my business and less so now, but you have to be careful of Roland, you have to give him more time. It’s all right with me or Kidney or women, but it’s different for Roland. You have to see that. Once when I was little …’

  She stopped. She had told Joseph that anecdote before, several times in fact. She reread the words written and wished she had some cigarettes. Or something to drink. Without tobacco she couldn’t possibly tell Joseph what she thought of him. She couldn’t tell him she hoped he would rot and end up without friends, only a host of women to whom he paid out conscience money. Neither could she describe in detail her own ugliness or unworthiness – the concentration wasn’t there, she just wanted a cigarette. She sat looking at May, who was puffing up her hair with one hand, standing at the sink with her cosmetics in a row on the narrow windowsill.

  ‘My God,’ May said, ‘here comes the galloping major.’

  Lionel entered the hut, carrying Roland on his back. He said he hadn’t been able to spot her lipstick, not in the compartment, nor on the back seat, or in the boot, or anywhere.

  ‘Hallow, luv,’ Dotty said, and Roland came to the sofa and fell on to it beside her, leaning his head against her shoulder. ‘Are you a bit bored? Don’t you know what to do with yourself?’

  ‘I’m all right. What are you writing?’

  ‘A sort of letter.’

  ‘I’m just going to spend a penny,’ Lionel told them, frankly, running out of the hut with his cravat slightly dishevelled.

  May said ‘Christ!’ and came to Roland, her hand rummaging in the depths of her handbag. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Would you like to play with this?’ It was her lighter.

  ‘No thanks.’ He got up and stood at the table, pushing the dishes about to disturb the placid Kidney, watching him drawing his flowers.

&nbs
p; ‘Would you like to write to Mummy and I’ll post it?’ Dotty asked, tearing free a page of her writing paper in expectation.

  ‘No.’ The little boy attempted to smile. Dotty had to go to him then, falling on her knees beside him, pushing his face into her neck, feeling his lips quivering against her throat. ‘What’s wrong, little boy? What’s wrong, little love?’

  He couldn’t speak. He wanted his mother.

  ‘You want Daddy, don’t you? Poor little love.’ Her voice was angry all at once. She stood up and sat at the table, lifting him with her, placing him on her lap. She looked down fiercely into his desolate face and wiped a tear away with the tip of her finger.

  May stood uncertainly with the lighter in her hand. Dotty was so emotional with the child, she was as bad as Lionel. The boy had been perfectly all right, bored perhaps but not miserable. Dotty didn’t seem to realize that Roland was like his mother. The mother had terribly wistful eyes, really terribly mournful and bereft, and she was as strong as a man and fat as hell.

  After a moment Lionel returned and sat down at the table. He and Roland began a game of noughts and crosses.

  7

  The afternoon was warm and dry. Dotty was practically silent the whole way to the village, striding along between the hedgerows with her shoulders hunched and the shopping bag in her hand. She told Balfour she’d be all right when she got her ciggies.

  The village, to her surprise, turned out to be a fair-sized market town with a Tesco stores and a Midland Bank. She purchased at once a packet of Woodbines and said she must have a cup of tea and a sausage roll. They sat in a cream-tiled café and she lit her cigarette and closed her eyes. He was embarrassed by the sight of a tear rolling out from under her closed lids. ‘You’ve no idea,’ she told him, ‘how hungry I get. Honest to God, I get that hungry I could scream.’ She ate and smoked at the same time and colour came into her cheeks.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she explained, ‘me being hungry all the time, because I don’t really enjoy food and I never put on weight. I wouldn’t know one sausage roll from another. Joseph says my hunger means something else … But then everything means something else, doesn’t it?’