Another Part of the Wood Read online

  ‘Up the mountain!’

  ‘Me and Kidney, right to the top. We did, didn’t we?’ He twisted in his father’s arms seeking confirmation from Kidney.

  ‘All that way?’ Joseph was amused and delighted. He turned and called triumphantly to Balfour. ‘Did you hear that, eh, Balfour? Would you believe it, right up the mountain.’

  Balfour said ‘Jolly good’, looking at the animated child and the silent Kidney scuffing his boots at the edge of the road.

  Roland rode on Joseph’s shoulders across the field, a conqueror’s return. He beat at his father’s head with his fists and felt giddy. The sky was colourless now, without clouds. It was like riding on the back of an elephant, swaying high above the ground, with Balfour and Kidney following, lurching under the low branches of the elm tree, the sky rocking up and down, his heart bumping. He hoped he wasn’t going to be sick.

  They were all amazed at him. Roland was gratified by their surprise. Dotty made him fried eggs and tomatoes, but he was no longer hungry. He drank several cupfuls of water, but his throat remained dry. ‘It was lovely up the mountain,’ he said, attempting for Dotty’s sake to eat something. ‘You could see all the way to Liverpool … and the sea shining.’

  ‘What about the tower?’ Dotty wanted to know. ‘Was it a real tower?’

  ‘Yes. It was jolly good.’ He looked at his father and said quickly, ‘It was a super tower, really good … One of its walls had gone. Wasn’t that interesting? Kidney told me a story about a king and some children.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Joseph made sure that May had heard. ‘Kidney told you a story did he?’

  ‘Eat your supper,’ said Dotty, not wanting the food to be wasted.

  ‘All about this Lear going off for a walk. It was a good story,’ lied Roland. He dropped his hands into his lap and yawned. ‘I don’t want any more egg, thank you, Dotty.’

  ‘You mean King Lear?’ said his father.

  ‘What?’ The child pushed his plate away. The light in the hut had almost gone. His father’s face was in shadow. ‘Kidney showed me his wee-wee,’ he said. ‘It’s awfully big.’ He yawned again, his eyelids heavy.

  Lionel laughed and wished instantly he hadn’t. You never knew quite where you were with Joseph, all unconventional and bohemian one moment and prudish as they come the next. Lads often did that sort of thing among themselves. Nothing to be shocked about. Perfectly understandable. Of course Roland was a little young and Kidney a little old, but even so. He looked at his wife and was deceived by the expression on her face. He touched her leg with his knee and kept his mouth solemn.

  ‘Did he?’ said Joseph, regarding the child a moment longer before rising from the table to light the lamp.

  May longed to interrogate Roland but was intimidated by the presence of Joseph. She felt uneasiness at the situation not yet explained and satisfaction that her fears had been justified. She looked at Kidney contemptuously.

  Roland’s throat hurt. He found it difficult to talk. ‘My mouth feels funny,’ he complained, letting his jaw go slack.

  Joseph told him he was tired. ‘You’ve been a long way, little soldier. It’s time you were in bed.’ Gently he undressed the boy, wiped his fingers with a flannel and dabbed at the smooth, sleepy face. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s my beauty boy.’

  Roland was too tired to do his teeth. Joseph insisted. The child began to cry. ‘I don’t want to …’

  Joseph disliked the whining protest. He flung down the toothpaste in irritation. ‘Oh don’t bother then. Let them all fall out,’ he shouted.

  ‘He’s tired,’ said Dotty, wanting to take the weary boy on her knee, but not doing so.

  Lionel took Roland to the barn. It was still and silent out in the field. No breeze, the trees motionless, the sky waiting for the moon. ‘Must be careful of the wasps’ nest,’ said Lionel. ‘We mustn’t trip over that, must we?’

  Roland was too drowsy to be frightened. Besides, the man’s strong arms held him sure and safe. His own body felt strange, heavy. Even the tips of his fingers lying on the curve of Lionel’s wrist were leaden and insensitive. He was carried into the barn and laid down.

  ‘Good night, old boy,’ said Lionel, tucking the blankets about him firmly. He rested on the side of the bed and brushed the hair away from the boy’s unseen forehead. ‘No tricks tonight, old boy. No pennies in your ear tonight.’ The child spoke so indistinctly that Lionel was forced to lower his head on a level with the bedclothes. ‘What’s that, old boy?’

  ‘May put your penny down the …’

  ‘Down where?’

  ‘ … wasp hole.’

  ‘May did?’

  But the child slept. Lionel strained forward to catch a glimpse of his features, but the darkness was tight and final.

  He rose at last and walked outside, closing the door behind him. He stood as near to the bracken as he dared. It was so still out there under the trees that he fancied he could hear the wasps moving, like honey trickling, in their nest beneath the leaves. May had thrown his coin down there, May had done that? He didn’t doubt Roland.

  Through a triangle of light shining from the porch a man passed, plodding heavily in the darkness. Lionel listened to the footsteps going over the grass and when the sound finished went back into the hut.

  ‘Gone down all right?’ asked Joseph, wanting peace, distressed by his angry parting with Roland.

  Lionel nodded, not looking at May, going to the sofa to sit beside Balfour.

  She knew something was wrong. His face had in some fashion collapsed. Only his moustache seemed permanent.

  ‘Asleep, is he?’ persisted Joseph, moving restlessly about the hut.

  Lionel nodded once more and fiddled with the cravat about his throat.

  ‘I’ve sent Kidney for the milk. I thought I’d meet him on the way back and have a bit of a talk with him.’ Joseph wasn’t concerned about their opinion of Kidney, only of himself. I’ve spoiled it all, he thought: Dotty’s holiday – poor Dotty, slouched over the table rolling her cigarettes – and Roland’s. He suppressed the desire to go now, at once, to the barn and tell the boy he was sorry about the tooth-brushing.

  May sensed he was vulnerable. She couldn’t help taking advantage. ‘You really ought to have a little talk with Roland. You’d get more information out of him. Anything might have happened, you know.’

  ‘I don’t see it would serve any purpose.’ Joseph tried to be patient.

  ‘Boys of Kidney’s age are very developed nowadays,’ said May. ‘Normal ones, let alone that one – ’

  ‘If you’re trying to suggest Kidney assaulted Roland – ’

  ‘Well, what did he want to show his thing to the child for?’ asked May. She gave a little giggle and Joseph said quickly, ‘All adolescents experiment … If he had harmed Roland, Roland would have told us.’

  ‘If he was my child …’ began May, tossing her head.

  ‘Well, he isn’t, is he?’ he retorted.

  Balfour was disturbed. He was convinced now that they were all different from him, even the foolish May. They must know more, they appeared to know more. Behind everything, they said, lay something else, another meaning altogether. They had such tolerance. They didn’t think it all that important that Kidney might have exposed himself to Roland. Even May’s comments were made only to get at Joseph – she wasn’t concerned about the child. And Joseph, why was he worried about the effect on Kidney? Taking a broad view, he was right to worry about that; but there was something wrong in it all. There was family, and blood ties, and sticking up for your dad even if you did think he was a right yob of a bastard, and not letting on you had no underpants and telling the rent man your mam was out when all the time she was hiding behind the back door, and when it came down to the centre, the core, all the feuding and protecting was pride in your own flesh and blood – well, maybe not pride, but loyalty: there wasn’t anything else. But somewhere along the line Joseph and Dotty and the rest of them, old George too, had cut themse
lves free from that sort of thing, gone out on a limb. They didn’t really feel they belonged to anyone any more.

  ‘One has to be very careful,’ Joseph was telling him – it was Balfour he was looking at – ‘not to suggest too much to a child. One must guard against meddling.’

  ‘Well, he looked a bit pale to me,’ May cried, unable to keep quiet. ‘Not at all well.’

  ‘Rubbish. He was just tired. All that way up the mountain. He’s only a child.’

  ‘He looked more than tired. He didn’t eat any supper.’ She was holding the sprig of heather, rolling it back and forth across the palm of her hand, rubbing the dry buds from the stem.

  ‘That’s mine,’ Joseph cried, snatching the heather from her and sticking it into the pocket of his shirt. He flounced out of the door. They heard him shout a greeting, and then a farewell, and Willie’s voice replying ‘All the best, all the best’, as if it were Christmas.

  Lionel was watching his wife sitting in her chair, separate from him, head lowered to scrutinize her polished nails. Beneath the darkening roots of hair lay her little pale-grey brain, hidden, secretive, beyond his reach or influence. His vicious wife. How often had he met old comrades from the regiment who seemed at first the same comrades, untouched by time. Only later, after some conversation or longer acquaintance, one found they weren’t the same but altered beyond recall. They had taken up smoking or given up drink, learnt to drive or become religious, adopted a new style of speech, an unfamiliar mannerism. The same yet no longer the same. People changed and in changing affected others, were affected in their turn, a continual process of addition and subtraction. Cut the communication lines and contact was broken, no information could come through. If the breach was serious enough, the lapse of time long enough, one could be fired upon by one’s own guns.

  9

  Joseph waited at the stile for Kidney to return with the milk. He stood listening to the trees shifting in the darkness. When he heard Kidney blundering towards him, he called out, ‘Is that you?’

  Kidney had stopped in alarm, but recognizing the familiar voice he advanced again. ‘I’ve got the milk,’ he said. ‘I didn’t drop it.’

  ‘Now look here, my boy,’ shouted Joseph. ‘I want some straight answers. What did Roland mean?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘You remember what he said,’ cried Joseph. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t. He said you showed him your … wee. Those were his words.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kidney.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Joseph. He wanted to strike the fat youth across the face.

  ‘I didn’t show him,’ said Kidney. ‘In the tower I went to the toilet. He looked.’

  Joseph felt enormous relief, and anger that he had been forced by the others to submit the boy to such questioning. Of course it hadn’t been as they had imagined. There had never been the remotest possibility. ‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘That’s all I wanted to know. Over you come.’

  But Kidney remained on the opposite side of the stile.

  ‘Come on, boy. Move yourself.’

  ‘He took away my pills,’ said Kidney. ‘He said you wouldn’t like me to have them. You do let me have them, I said.’

  ‘What pills?’ Joseph couldn’t wait to return to the hut and berate May for her stupidity.

  ‘They told me I should take them every day … he kept them in his hand.’

  ‘Your pills are in the hut,’ said Joseph. ‘I put them somewhere yesterday.’ He hadn’t the patience any more to talk to Kidney. It was too exhausting. One step forward, two steps back. Impatiently he bade Kidney hurry up and waited for him to climb the stile and descend heavily into the field.

  At the porch Joseph changed his mind. He stumbled in the direction of the barn. Spreading out his arms, he felt with his hands along the rough wall to the pane of glass. No sound within. Voices from the hut, water running in the sink, the trees shifting below in the Glen. It wasn’t much use going into the barn, it wasn’t as if he could see anything. He would take a candle over later. Kidney was still standing in the porch, the milk bottles clutched to his breast.

  George was frying something at the stove. He turned with pleasure to greet Joseph. ‘Got them all done,’ he said.

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Joseph, not knowing what he was on about. He tried to remember where he had put the bottle of pills.

  ‘My father’s windowsills are white,’ George declared, turning a piece of bread in the hot fat.

  Joseph ran his fingers along the edge of the shelf by the cooker and knocked a box of matches to the floor.

  ‘First we burnt off the old paint. Then we sanded. Then we undercoated,’ George said.

  ‘Good, good,’ said Joseph, looking about him. Of course the pills were on the shelf above the door, along with the hammer and the tins of paint. He reached up with certainty, remembering clearly how he had placed them. They weren’t there.

  Dotty saw his expression. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said quietly. ‘What’s wrong, love?’

  ‘What?’ He glanced at her angrily, unable to hear her above the noise of the fat spitting in the pan.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she repeated. ‘Was it your little talk with Kidney?’ Her face glowed with a kind of expectancy.

  ‘For God’s sake stop muttering. I can’t hear a damned word you say.’

  It was so unfair of him. She set her mouth in a tight line of inward suffering and fiddled with the ends of her lank hair. Offended, she turned her face in Balfour’s direction, so that he might see her humiliation.

  May was trying to be nice to Kidney. ‘Please,’ she begged him. ‘Do tell me the story about Lear, the one you told Roland.’ She was thinking maybe it was a pretty odd story at that, not quite like Lionel and his temple but along those lines.

  ‘A king,’ said Kidney promptly, ‘had nowhere to go, and his three children were cruel to him, but the youngest one – ’

  ‘I think I’ll just go for a breath of air,’ Lionel said abruptly, rising from the sofa and making for the door.

  May was uneasy at his attitude, his prolonged detachment. He looked, she thought, ill, shocked. Surely he wasn’t worrying about Kidney showing his thing to the child? The man was so inconsistent. She was annoyed that he might be concerned about someone other than herself. ‘Well, bring back the whisky you keep hidden in the car,’ she said spitefully. ‘We’d all like a drink.’

  Out he went without a word, without even a reproachful glance.

  ‘ … then his nice daughter came for him and looked after him for good,’ Kidney was saying.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked, disappointed.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Joseph said loudly, delving into the covers of the sofa. ‘Move,’ he bade Balfour curtly.

  ‘Well, what else?’ enquired May, wondering why he couldn’t sit still but always had to be tidying things.

  ‘When he finally did go off with his daughter somebody killed her by mistake. It was an accident, but his fault.’

  ‘How dreadful.’ May followed Lionel in her head, stepping uncertainly through the field.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been right,’ said Kidney, ‘to have told Roland that. I knew it, but I didn’t say it.’

  Joseph sat down on the sofa and looked sideways at the uncomfortable Balfour, as if to say ‘Isn’t that remarkable?’ Beyond Balfour’s ear he glimpsed Roland’s clothes neatly folded for the morning, laid down on the stove. He rose again and sat on the stove top, feeling with his hands behind his back for the outline of the pill bottle in the pocket of the boy’s shorts. No, not there. He went to the sink and took up the stub of candle used by Lionel the previous night.

  Curiosity overwhelmed Dotty. ‘What are you doing now?’

  He told her he was going to have a look at Roland.

  ‘What for? What’s wrong?’

  He shouted at her now. ‘Because I bloody well choose. Mind your own blasted business.’

  For a moment she was infected by his anger. ‘I will mind my o
wn bloody business,’ she said. ‘I will mind it …’

  But already he had gone from her out of the door.

  ‘You’ve forgotten your blasted matches. God,’ she screamed, running after him and flinging them into the pool of grass. Then, spent, she came back into the room and sat down at the table, banging her two fists impotently against her bony knees, the colour leaving her cheeks.

  No one spoke. May was smiling, turning the diamond ring round and round her finger.

  ‘I shall go tonight,’ said Dotty, forced to speak. ‘I shall go now and not wait for the morning.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said May, not really caring for the idea. It placed her and Lionel in an isolated position.

  ‘I must go at once,’ Dotty said loudly, looking at Balfour.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, embarrassed by her impulsiveness and the presence of George.

  She seized him by the hand and dragged him to his feet. She was pulling him towards the partition. ‘I must pack my clothes,’ she cried. ‘My clothes and my lovely coat.’

  ‘Steady on,’ he said, stepping into the cubicle with her, feeling foolish as she closed the partition and bound them in darkness.

  ‘Balfour, I do have to go … You do see that. I’m terribly sorry – ’

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ he told her awkwardly. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

  He didn’t see why she was apologizing to him. It wasn’t him she was leaving.

  Outside in the room May was telling George that the air was very fresh in the countryside. ‘So fresh and breezy,’ she said, detesting Lionel for going off and leaving her with the giant.

  George put his plate into the sink and came to sit at the table, looking at her with that melancholy expression on his face. He said nothing.

  ‘You’re used to it, of course. Me, I’m knocked out. All this marvellous air.’ There was daft Kidney staring at her with his skin coloured like a rose. ‘I think it’s just beautiful round here … so peaceful.’ The way George never answered upset her dreadfully. She couldn’t bear his long sorrowful face and those sloe-shaped eyes. He always seemed to be judging. She fidgeted in her chair. She could hear Dotty opening drawers in the cubicle and Balfour’s voice, hesitant and muffled. The girl was quite mad, rushing off in the middle of the evening without transport. It was unforgivable of her to leave Lionel and herself alone. She told George she thought Dotty was mad. Still he chose not to speak. She said rudely, ‘I’ll keep quiet, if you like.’ It was like talking to a brick wall.