Another Part of the Wood Read online

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Why do you stutter now?’ she asked him suddenly. ‘You didn’t at first, when we got here … I didn’t notice, anyway.’

  He felt awkward and looked down at the table. ‘It comes and goes,’ he mumbled.

  ‘I didn’t mean …’ She was afraid she had offended him.

  ‘I did have a very bad stutter when I was a child,’ he confessed. ‘B-but Mr and Mrs MacFarley cured me, m-more or less. It gets bad w-when – ’ he broke off, not really knowing when it got bad.

  She made a list of shopping they could do separately to save time.

  ‘Are we in a h-hurry?’ asked Balfour, gulping his tea and looking at the clock on the wall. It was a quarter to four.

  ‘No, there’s no hurry, I suppose … It’s just that there’s nothing for Roland’s supper and we need candles before it gets dark.’

  ‘There’s gallons of paraffin in the store shed,’ Balfour observed, but she brushed that aside.

  ‘I don’t like taking other people’s things,’ she cried, hunched over her empty plate, licking her fingers and stubbing them against the dish, bringing orange flakes of pastry to her mouth. ‘It’s so awful sponging on people all the time.’

  He felt ill at ease, self-conscious at being seen with her in her denim outfit. The waitress behind the glossy tea urn was staring relentlessly.

  ‘We’ll get started then,’ he said, jerking his head at the woman at the counter and feeling in his pocket for money.

  She wouldn’t let him pay for her. ‘Honest to God, I can’t let you pay for my sausage roll,’ she told him, grimacing as she dug down into the back pocket of her trousers.

  His face burning, he walked along the street. Down a side turning were stalls with vegetables and fruit. There was cheap jewellery and cheap glass, and further along a rail of secondhand clothing. He stopped on the corner and she caught hold of his arm with her spiky fingers and asked, ‘Are you angry with me, love? You are, I know you are.’ She wrung her hands in anguish and passersby turned curiously to look at them.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, walking down the side street with the shopping list crumpled in his hand.

  In silence she regarded the trays of plastic brooches and metal rings. He hung his head beside her. ‘You’re just like Joseph,’ she accused him. ‘I irritate you, don’t I?’

  ‘Please,’ he begged, out of his depth and able neither to proceed nor stand still.

  It was then that she saw the clothes. ‘Look,’ she cried, running towards the stall, pushing aside the coats and dresses, the curtains of hair enveloping her face and her arms flying out as she separated the hanging garments. ‘Aren’t they smashing? Look at this … and this …’ Her face when she turned to Balfour was bright with happiness.

  ‘It might suit you,’ he said, looking at the man’s anorak she was clutching in her fingers.

  ‘It’s not for me … a present for Joseph … What do you think?’

  He thought Joseph would hate it. He thought Joseph would tell her so. He said, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ and felt inadequate. It was then she saw the flowered coat. It was seven and six and she had to have it. She counted guiltily the money that Joseph had given her for the shopping, and Balfour on an impulse took out a ten-shilling note and gave it to the stallholder. ‘I did see it first,’ he said, hoping she wouldn’t make a scene.

  She was disconcerted but grateful, her face turning pink, her eyes lowered. ‘Thank you, thank you very much, Balfour,’ she said formally. The flowered coat was made of some kind of velvet. It rippled and shone. It was orange and blue and green and black, with a mustard-yellow ground, and there were buttons small as beads going from wrist to elbow. Balfour thought it was terrible.

  He prayed she wouldn’t wear it now. He visualized her stalking, swathed in velvet, through the busy market town, the bell-bottoms of her denim trousers flaring out beneath the long and violently coloured hem.

  They finished the shopping about five. Dotty had bought a piece of best end of neck so large it could only be carried with difficulty. Balfour thought it wouldn’t go in the oven, nor would it keep fresh for long. He bore it stoically along the street with Dotty at his side, the flowered coat slung across her shoulders. He was feeling unwell. His head ached and there was a burning sensation in the pit of his stomach. He refused to admit that it might be another of his attacks coming on. He told himself he was just tired, and perhaps getting a cold. It was six months since his last attack. As he walked, he looked from side to side, as if seeking some safe and dark place in which to hide. He mustn’t imagine things, he mustn’t let it become worse.

  ‘I think I’ve got a cold coming,’ he said out loud, reassuring himself. Dotty stared at his face and attempted to put her hand against his forehead. She stumbled. The joint of meat slipped from his arms. As he bent to retrieve it, the road broke up under him and he fell on his knees.

  ‘Are you all right?’ She was squatting on her haunches, staring at him as she had stared at Willie, with disbelief.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ he said with an effort, standing upright, afraid now, sure he was ill. He sensed, rather than saw, the road stretching ahead, the hedges on either side, recently trimmed, the fields beyond, the far distant hills, all permeated by the clear and golden light of the afternoon. There was no darkness anywhere, no feeling of shade, nowhere he might hide.

  ‘I’m so happy,’ Dotty shouted, running ahead, the bag of food clutched in her arms, the flowered coat trailing on the road. She wheeled round to face him and the coat flew with her, orange and black. She was like a matador before him, poised on the tips of her feet, hugging the shopping to her breast. She noticed the pallor of his face, the lankness of his hair upon his forehead as if he sweated. She waited till he was almost level and said, ‘Balfour.’ And he had to stop, for she was planted on the road in front of him. She stood so close to him she must surely hear the thudding in his breast. He could smell tobacco on her breath, see a brown shred clinging to her lower lip.

  ‘Do you want to sit down?’ she said. ‘You look a bit white.’

  He shook his head and they walked on.

  ‘Joseph always says I can’t walk anywhere,’ said Dotty. ‘I can walk … I can walk miles. Not with him of course … not any more. We did go for a walk together once, a hell of a long way, talking all the time … all about children and the future and nice things. When we came to a signpost we just walked right round it – in a circle, still talking – and started back home again.’

  Balfour thought everything she said seemed personal and embarrassing. He asked, ‘Don’t you go walking any more?’

  ‘We don’t do anything much any more,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes we go out in the car round Hyde Park and things … I quite like that … except for Stephen Ward.’

  ‘For who?’ Balfour was glad now of her chattering. It forced him to keep moving. It postponed the moment when he must lie down at the side of the road.

  ‘Stephen Ward,’ said Dotty … ‘that poor man. I always think of him when I’m going round Hyde Park. There’s so many posh cars and everyone’s wearing such expensive clothes … I keep thinking he must have driven round the park, all dressed up, with Mandy Rice-Whatsit beside him. All those parties … all those weekends in the country. Joseph says he was a victim, a sort of present-day martyr. They used him. Joseph calls him St Stephen.’

  ‘D-does he?’ Balfour hadn’t meant to shout.

  ‘I don’t go that far,’ said Dotty. ‘I mean, I don’t know if he was a victim or not. But he must have thought life was smashing. He felt so in with all that rich crowd and he thought they liked him. When they closed their ranks, he couldn’t believe it. He thought he was one of them. Lord Denning said Profumo and that lot were misguided. He said Ward was evil.’

  Balfour made some sound, a grunt. The blood pounded in his ears. He held the joint of meat tightly in his arms to stop himself from trembling. The light was growing stronger all the time. It wa
s filling his eyes, obliterating shapes and distances.

  Dotty was walking ahead. ‘I bet you Joseph hates my coat,’ she called. ‘I bet you he says something nasty.’ She turned to look at Balfour, her face forlorn, her features blurred.

  The hedgerows reeled backwards. He said indistinctly, ‘Ditch, quick … quick.’

  ‘What luv? What luv?’

  He could feel her arm about his shoulders. She was too heavy for him. She was pushing him to the ground. ‘Please,’ he begged, his cheek on the surface of the shifting road. ‘Please – ’

  During the afternoon, Lionel went for a brisk walk across the fields, returning via his Mini to take a few sips from the whisky bottle secreted in the boot. Though he wouldn’t call himself a teetotaller, he wasn’t a drinking man – or hadn’t been until his marriage to May. He found increasingly that a small drink gave him the uplift he needed to face her at the end of his day. There was a lot she expected of him – and why not, loving him as she did? He had wanted her to accompany him on the walk, but she had refused, preferring to lie down on the chintz sofa, with only the thumb-sucking and silent Kidney for company. Roland had gone to the stream. Lionel would have liked to show one of them, wife or child, wild flowers, tell them what they were called. There was a certain poetry in the long Latin names. He sat in his hired car, holding the whisky bottle between his knees, the interior darkened by the haystack that towered above the metal roof of the car.

  He remembered a childhood holiday taken at harvest time, when he had been allowed to help the men to stook the corn, holding the sheaves upright against his perspiring face while they bound the bundles with thin silver wire – four bundles to a stook. The corn smelt of dried clean paper, scratching the skin of his face, filling his ears with dust. Round and round the bleached white field went the harvester in ever-decreasing circles, the reverse of the stone dropped in the pond, till all that was left was a patch of yellow corn waving slowly in the bald field. The men took sticks, waiting for the rabbits to break cover. He had run with them, leaping over the ground, raising his arm with the peeled white stick held against the sky. The rabbits ran out, lumpy, slower than he thought possible, disorganized and cowardly, so that he closed his eyes lest he should see what he did, beating at the clumsy scattering things. The killed rabbits smelt of nothing, there was no blood. Their eyes soon filmed over and stared straight up at the sky. When hung, they were like sacks of money, all the weight in the belly, swinging and stupid. He hadn’t forgotten, even now, that first struggle. It had made more impression on him, that first slaughtering, than the other butcherings he had seen, the human killings enacted in the war. The deaths he had witnessed weren’t terrible, only the woundings achieved a degree of brutality. Such killings as he had known had been fragmented, comical – a man blown to bits by a shell, a reconnoitring party of six disintegrated by a mine. No blood, no after-life in death, nothing to show they had been there; in the ragged trees perhaps or strewn about the hedges. The wounded, of which he had been one, had smelt of smoke and excrement, lying swollen or shrunken with eyes screwed up and mouths slack. Spittle at one end and urine at the other. Messy business in the warm and fruitful landscape of Italy.

  He put his bottle back into the car boot and climbed over the fence, going slowly across the field back to the hut, threading his way between the grazing cows, looking at their thin legs and their enormous udders.

  May was in the barn, alone, changed into a dress of brown linen. It wasn’t his favourite dress, it was too short above her knees. She wouldn’t speak to him. She bent down to straighten her stockings and he saw the tops of her thighs. He cleared his throat and lay down on the far bed, his arms crossed beneath his head.

  ‘What are you following me about for?’ she said bad-temperedly, flouncing backwards and forwards in front of the mirror.

  ‘But my darling, I’m not. I’m merely resting on this bed.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have told your filthy yarns all night,’ she snapped. He didn’t reply, and she tugged savagely at her limp hair with a pink brush. ‘That Balfour heard what you said. Dotty told me. He was absolutely disgusted.’

  Still he kept silent. It infuriated her. She wanted to smash things, to set fire to his clothes. Her hair was dreadful, dreadful. She couldn’t be seen like this. She rushed at him with face contorted, the pink brush raised to strike him. He caught her wrist just a fraction before the absurd blow came, with his purple cheeks inflamed and his little eyes shining. How close they were, how her moods drew them together. She kicked her plump legs up and down in the air and screamed several times, wrenching at the cravat about his throat, clawing at his chest with her long nails. ‘Little spitfire,’ he cried, pinning her down, trying to get his arm across the round pads of her knees. She went quiet all at once, her head turned to one side, hair spilled out across the blankets. Roland was shouting somewhere in the field.

  She sat upright and pointed bitterly at her stocking. ‘Look what you’ve done.’ She bent forward to trace with her finger the ladder that sprang from ankle to thigh.

  He couldn’t apologize enough. It had been clumsy of him, though there was provocation. She was such a little spitfire. ‘Anyway,’ he cried, puffing out his cheeks, the colour receding now, placing a rueful hand on his face. ‘Look what you’ve done to me.’ He fell back in mock despair with his legs bent at the knee, fondling his scratched face, good-humoured, fortified by the secret nip of whisky.

  ‘Oh shut up, you.’ Contemptuous of him, but no longer spirited, she stood up and removed the linen dress, unwearable now by reason of the torn stocking. She peeled the stocking free, exposing pudgy feet, granules of dirt between her piggy toes.

  Dotty had dragged the incoherent Balfour behind a hedge. There was no ditch to be found. She had lugged him under the armpits through a gate and propped him against the inner hedge, leaving the shopping bag on the road. He kept asking for a ditch as if they were in danger of being machine-gunned.

  She was disturbed at how detached she was in the face of such apparent sickness. She couldn’t really bring herself to believe that he was as ill as he seemed. She handled him quite roughly and sat down beside him to smoke a cigarette. He leaned forward over his knees and moaned at intervals, making sounds as if he was going to vomit. She did suggest she might go for help, either to the corner shop two miles on, or further to the hut and Joseph. Balfour shook his head. Dotty lay back puffing smoke into the fading light.

  Balfour was cold. He bent his legs at the knee and tried to curl over on to his side, tried to get his head down into his arms, but nothing obeyed him. Dotty tucked the flowered coat about his legs and sat up. It was almost dark, the field blurring into sky, the light gone from grey to ash, no stars. If a car came she might run out and shout for help. If a car came it would flatten the shopping lying in the road. She climbed the gate, sitting perched there like some bird, staring at a rind of daylight stretched across the horizon.

  Balfour was leaning on one elbow clutching the coat about his throat. He spoke in a thin exhausted way. ‘I’m so cold, Dotty.’

  ‘Are you better, luv?’ She was relieved that he had spoken to her. ‘Shall I go for Joseph now? Shall I go for help?’ She tried to perceive the expression on his face.

  ‘I must get warm,’ mumbled Balfour.

  ‘Yes, luv, of course. We’ll get warm, right now. You leave it to me.’ She knelt beside him, wrapping the extravagant coat tight against him, pinioning his arms, putting her own arms about his head so that his face was crushed against the denim jacket, the metal buttons like cubes of ice on his cheeks. She herself wasn’t comfortable. The spongy grass was soaking into the cloth of her trousers.

  ‘Put the coat over my h-head,’ Balfour whined, struggling to free himself, slumping away from her into the grass.

  ‘What coat? Do you want my jacket? Is that what you want?’

  ‘The Joseph coat,’ he whined. ‘The dreamer’s coat.’

  She placed it about him like a shawl, tying th
e arms behind his back to hold it in position, manoeuvring herself so that she was supported by the hedge, stretching him out on the ground with her jacket under his buttocks and his swathed head resting in her lap. ‘Is that any better?’ she asked hopefully, not knowing what more she could do.

  Balfour seemed to be asleep, his face half covered by the coat, his hands clasped together as if he prayed. After a time he said, ‘I’m sorry about this. I didn’t have time to warn you. It just come on like. No idea when it’s going to happen.’

  ‘Oh don’t you worry. I don’t mind. Honestly. It’s quite nice here. I’m quite cheerful really. I’m just thinking about things.’

  She didn’t really understand what it was that ailed him. He couldn’t really explain it himself. The doctors didn’t know for sure. Some kind of virus picked up on holiday abroad, some bug in his bloodstream. There was no treatment, no real possibility that he would ever completely recover.

  ‘You mean, like the flu?’ she said. ‘Only much worse. Something you catch?’

  ‘It’s not catching,’ he reassured her. ‘At least not from me. I caught it all right, but it’s sort of dormant in me. It won’t pass to you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean …’ she said and stopped. She was thinking how Joseph had influenced her, how through him she found sickness distasteful, or thought she did. I do love Joseph, she thought. It was terrible the way he wouldn’t let her love him any more. Even after a lifetime of domestic trivia she would still love him, though she wasn’t going to be allowed that. It was like the virus stirring in Balfour. She would never completely recover. She would always mourn for what she had lost. What a miserable thing she was, everything suspended by worry and introspection, no laughing or singing or dancing, no trees or flowers. The world was all lovely on the outside, white and green and red, and black as death within. How could she be this way unless it was some disease that gripped her?