Another Part of the Wood Read online

  ‘Six foot eight, nine,’ Joseph said. He leapt athletically over a small boulder, gracefully landing with luggage swinging and beard quivering. ‘Quite a size, Kidney.’

  Balfour tried to remember what George had told him about Joseph. He was divorced, apparently, from a wife who painted, the administrator of a technical college, living with a woman, presumably Dotty: a man, according to George, given to stimulating talk, a non-conformist. To Balfour, even on such short acquaintance, Joseph seemed the arch-conformer of all time, stereotyped, well-bred, unemotional. Nothing had been said about Kidney.

  Joseph put the cases down in the grass and wiped with a handkerchief at the spots of mud drying on the leather of his boots. Dotty looked at him with hostility.

  ‘Must keep up appearances you know,’ Joseph shouted to Balfour. Stooping, he picked up the cases and asked, ‘All right, Dot-Dot? Everything all right?’ He tried to put an arm about her, a case in his hand, and caught her a blow on the hip, knocking her against him. She scowled, and stepped back to her rightful place behind Joseph and in front of the blocked Kidney.

  ‘George is making tea in Hut 2,’ called Balfour.

  ‘Hut 2, Hut 2,’ echoed Joseph, somewhere behind him on the path which had grown steeper and more waterlogged.

  The girl said something then, but her words were inaudible to Balfour, as he hastened up the slope hampered by his self-imposed Monopoly burden. He hoped she hadn’t remarked on his acne. One foot after the other, keeping his balance with difficulty on the uneven ground, he strained to reach the summit of the path.

  Roland began to sing. He piped shrilly under the dripping trees:

  ‘Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea,

  Silver bottles on his knee …’

  ‘Buckles, buckles,’ corrected his father, trampling mud underfoot, swinging his elegant luggage high above the damp grasses.

  ‘He’ll come home and marry me-e,

  Bonny Bobby Shaftoe-O.’

  ‘We’re there,’ Balfour shouted. He jogged thankfully down the home path, heart thudding in his breast.

  Hut 2 was made of wood without embellishments of stone or slate: one long room with bunks at the end and an iron stove opposite the door, the kitchen through an opening to the right of the stove. There was a bench outside the hut and two wooden steps at the door. Red curtains hung on either side of the end window. Laid down on the bench outside was a hammer and some nails. From the path the mountain wasn’t visible. Nor was George.

  Balfour put down his Monopoly box on the scrubbed top of the table and told them apologetically that he couldn’t imagine where old George had got to. He went into the kitchen but found it empty, and the kettle empty also, the cups still on their hooks above the sink. ‘Must have gone to look at something or other,’ he said. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, resentful that he should be left in such a position, looking at Kidney still outside the hut, arms full of groceries. He was aware that no one save himself felt any embarrassment. The girl had seated herself in the rocking chair by the stove, rugs in a heap on the floor where she had dropped them, arms folded across her chest. Joseph had found a pocket mirror on the shelf. He was holding it cupped in one hand, face twisted as he studied his image.

  ‘I’ve got another cold sore coming. I can’t bear a marked face,’ he told Balfour bitterly, dabbing at his erupting skin with his mud-stained handkerchief.

  Balfour, only partly shielded by the doorway of the kitchen, raised an arm to cover his blemished complexion but dropped it again: after all, he couldn’t spend the next six days with his face hidden. Though the journey from the entrance of the woods to Hut 2 hadn’t been a noticeably merry one, he was conscious that the visitors’ spirits had fallen.

  Roland came in from his search for George and flung himself against the rocking chair, pushing his head, still in its pom-pom hat, against the girl’s face. ‘Why don’t we do something?’ he asked. Already he was bored.

  His father glanced once about the room and yawned loudly, thinking of all the preparation: the denim outfit bought to make Dotty feel secure, the choice selection of paperbacks, the sheets freshly laundered, Roland’s kite, all the business of stopping the milk and leaving the caged bird with the people downstairs. Now that they were here, it was as he had suspected: nowhere was either better or worse than anywhere else. Most of all he thought of his good intentions. He shrugged his shoulders, trying to rid himself of dejection, looking at the girl fondling the child’s cheek. Making a determined effort for Roland – for Dotty, for himself – he said, ‘Well, troops. Action stations. We better get settled in.’

  ‘You’re in Hut 4 on the other side of the stream,’ mumbled Balfour. But Joseph was already nodding his head in a business-like way, picking up rugs and cases in readiness for departure. ‘Come along, Dot-Dot. Mustn’t be lazy.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll bother, if it’s all the same to you. You go and get settled in and I’ll wait here for you.’ Deliberately she leaned her head against the back of the rocking chair and closed her eyes.

  Without further comment Joseph left the hut, passing Kidney on the path. Meekly, unquestioningly, the youth turned about, chin down to the edge of his load, and followed him. Lastly Roland ran out of the door, leaving Balfour alone in the hut with Dotty. For a moment he stood where he was, waiting to see if she would speak to him; but she didn’t, so he sought refuge in the kitchen, willing George to return and deliver him. As he ran water into the tin kettle a spider moved across the bottom of the sink. He removed the lid from the kettle and slopped water against the animal. Dismayed at its clinging persistence, he put down the kettle on the draining board and with the edge of the washing-up bowl rammed the spider into the plug hole and turned the tap violently.

  When Joseph reached the stream at the bottom of the valley, Roland immediately wanted his red boat to sail in the water. After an argument, Joseph unzipped the bag handed to him by his ex-wife in Liverpool and ferreted out the required toy.

  With instructions as to how to find Hut 4 and how not to fall in the water, he and Kidney continued their climb up the path and left the child to play. With only Kidney to care for, Joseph withdrew into himself and strode up the rough slope, yawning repeatedly. At the hut he kicked open the door with his foot and put his cases down on the floor, instructing Kidney where to put the grocery box and the wicker basket, in a voice perfectly polite, his body active and his mind empty of everything save the business of settling in. Expertly and tidily he laid out the luggage and snapping the locks of the pigskin cases told Kidney to unpack his clothing.

  The youth began slowly to do as he was told. He laid his pullover down on the narrow settee and stared at it. Empty of him and newly washed, it looked too small. His mother had knitted some part of every night for almost three winter months. Occasionally the ball of wool had fallen from her knee and rolled away under the sofa and then he had gone down on hands and knees to retrieve it for her. He would press his head sideways against the frill of the sofa and let his hand crawl in the darkness over the soft pile of the carpet. Grunting with exertion, he would place the wool back on his mother’s lap and sit again in the armchair, hands still curved. The nights his mother had gone out to her bridge, or to cocktail parties with his father, the knitting lay pierced by its steel skewers on the top of the television set. He had looked at the pictures moving on the screen and up at the woollen shape, and sometimes it seemed as if the flickering images were just an extension of the needles flashing and his pullover was growing without his mother’s help. When the compulsion to touch became too strong, he would go upstairs to the bathroom and clean his teeth. Once he hadn’t been able to and had pulled at the knitting needles. Under his fingers the stitches began to dissolve away. His mother was angry and threatened never to finish his present, so he stopped watching television the nights she went out. At Christmas when he had unwrapped it from the patterned paper he had felt only disappointment at its fat completion. Here in the hut with Joseph he began to f
eel protective towards it again. He folded the pullover carefully. Once he glanced up to see if Joseph was watching him. When he saw he wasn’t, his eyes filled with tears. Frowning, he tied the arms in a knot and bundled it into a drawer.

  ‘Not that drawer,’ said Joseph. He rose and strode over to the chest of drawers, pulled out the offending jumper and threw it back on to the settee. Bending down to finish his unpacking of the wicker basket, he said by way of explanation: ‘That drawer is for Roland. Next to mine. Me and Roland together. Get the idea? Anyway, that’s no way to treat your clothes. Fold it properly.’

  ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Kidney with effort, and sat down heavily on the sofa.

  Joseph turned to look at Kidney. ‘Do you want to know where the lavatory is?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Down the path and through the trees.’

  Joseph got up from his unpacking and taking Kidney’s arm guided him to the door. ‘Down that way,’ he explained again patiently, pointing along the mud path.

  ‘Down that way,’ repeated Kidney. The width of his trousers so extreme that his limbs floundered in corduroy, he rolled walrus-fashion along the path.

  Joseph stayed framed in the doorway, gazing before and around him – at the wet field, the slope of damp grass, the thread of path disappearing under the trees. Out of a brown field rose the mountain, partially obscured by mist. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would take Roland by the hand and together they would climb to the summit and explore the tower. He would make it like an adventure for the boy, like a challenge, like a prologue to all the bigger and better adventures that they would have one day, like a stepping stone to the real mountains, capped with snow, that they would surely climb. It would be a beginning. He tried to imagine a grown Roland in a man-sized anorak, and failed. His wife had told him not to take a girl along with him. How had she put it? … ‘Try to be alone with Roland for once and leave your bloody women behind.’ He studied the mountain beyond the trees. Of course it was really more of a large hill, but it would do for a start, and Roland was only seven. Or was it eight? He felt suddenly depressed at the thought of how easily Roland tired, how his clear treble voice asking intelligent questions could degenerate into a whining request to be carried. Their outing in the end could be a disaster and not a triumph.

  The mountain, he realized, looked not unlike Kidney in shape. Why did he find it so difficult to like someone so fleshily built – or too thin, or too small, or too old? Why was it so difficult to like anyone for any length of time, let alone love them? He wasn’t sure if he was unable to love because he had no tenderness for himself or because he felt himself to be perfect and out of reach of compassion. His ex-wife said it was because he was a selfish bastard, but that was the same thing. She talked a lot of words about love entering and making one grow and how his particular soul was too small to allow anybody entrance. Possibly she hadn’t always thought he had a small soul. His memory of his marriage, of his whole relationship with his wife, was so frail that he couldn’t remember for certain why it was they had separated or how long they had been apart, or the duration of their time together. But then he didn’t remember either the lengths or the depths of any of his involvements with any one person. He was either absorbed or empty, and one feeling followed the other.

  He thought he remembered his wife when they were first married, the girl in the long nightgown with a sleepy face, broad bare feet going over the blind-school matting – not going away from him but towards him. He did remember that. He did remember some things. She was always coming towards him, it seemed, mouth shaping his name, a low-pitched droning sound, full of meaning and heavy with love, the sound of a bee making for the hive. When they ate a meal she held his hand or laid her fingers on his knee or leant her head against his shoulder. When he turned his shoulder her hair clung to the cloth of his jacket; if he removed his hands from hers on some pretext, she looked at him with unbearable reproach and laid her damp rejected palm down in her lap and bowed her head. Recovering, but denied bodily contact, she would imprison him by the strength of expression in her eyes. He was forever trying to extricate himself from her touch, her glance, the sound of her voice, all charged with love, sticky as honey, clinging, like the strands of her hair, to the surface of his life. In bed she had swung her pulpy thigh across him and laid her mouth to his breast as if to tear out his heart. When she was pregnant and couldn’t sleep, they had gone for walks along the streets late at night; no doubt he had held her hand. She had cried a lot, wept over the deficiency in him, over not getting the response that she craved, the safety she wanted, at being cheated out of her love. He had felt it wasn’t him she loved at all, that it was some anonymous love-source that she believed existed within him and was determined to rip out of him at all costs. If he bled in the process that was of no account.

  His ex-wife had grown fat now. Kidney wasn’t really fat, at least not depressingly white and trembly; but he was feminine in shape and perhaps his whole problem was one of bulk and excess of tissue and nothing at all to do with a trauma over his mother. Perhaps all that had to be done was to dissolve the inhibiting flesh and release the prisoner within. Maybe Kidney would then emerge to function normally, even though there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for him outside. He must insist that Kidney do some hard physical exercise and see if it made any difference.

  Tomorrow without fail he and Roland would climb that mountain. Believing it, Joseph looked for a moment longer at the forest, at the pattern of light and shade on the mud path before going back inside the hut to finish his unpacking.

  In Hut 2 Balfour was watching Dotty. She was leaning against the double-tiered bunks at the end of the hut, her arms stretched wide in a crucified position. Behind her head, the red curtains, crushed by the mattress, framed a view of trees. First there were only leaves; and then beyond, part of a trunk, and further still, proportioned by distance, a whole tree, a mountain ash with arms held out as if in mimicry of the interior girl. Supported by the bunks she moved her arm, and unbuttoning the breast pocket of her denim jacket withdrew an oblong of tobacco in a silver wrapping and a red fold of cigarette papers. Turning round now to face the window, she laid them down on the bed and hunched her shoulders

  Balfour himself didn’t smoke, but he watched her bent head and imagined her hands pushing the mahogany grains along the line of thin paper and her pink tongue flicking out to wet and seal the cylindrical fold. She looked as if she could be weeping, crouched over the side of the bunk bed, a line of hair, yellow as butter, fringing the collar of her jacket.

  To Balfour it seemed as if they had all been in the hut for years and years and never spoken, he on his stool and George, returned without apology or explanation, seated on the rough bench by the stove, forearm balanced on his knee. Wrapped round the thick column of George’s neck was a woollen scarf that fell in equal lengths between his knees and touched the floor and folded once, twice, in knitted bands of maroon and black. As always, he managed to convey both serenity and imbecility at one and the same time – the first by the purity of his limpid eyes now turned towards Balfour, and the other by the curious looseness of his never-ending legs anchored to the floor of the hut by his monstrous army boots.

  Dotty left the bunk bed and moved between the two men. She held her cigarette aloft in one hand and with the other touched the lid of the stove.

  ‘Is this thing lit?’ she asked. Without waiting for a reply she bent at the waist, and putting one end of the cigarette to her mouth and the other against the surface of the iron stove attempted to draw heat. She tried several times, making little sucking noises, until George said, ‘No, it’s not lit.’

  She stood then, hopeless, the fold of unlit paper clinging to her dry upper lip. ‘Matches,’ she said, and looked directly at Balfour, who got up at once and fetched them.

  ‘Better let me keep these,’ she told Balfour, taking the matches from him. ‘I use an awful lot of matches and I do get jumpy if I don’t get a light.’
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  Her cigarette now glowing, she seemed fatter and happier.

  She tapped George on the shoulder and asked brightly, ‘Don’t you ever light the stove?’

  ‘At night.’ George shifted his boots about and looked in the direction of the open door. ‘Only at night. At night one needs the stove. We shut that door and the kitchen door, and we light the lamps and we all sit round the lit stove.’

  ‘What else do you do?’ Dotty enquired.

  ‘We talk or we draw,’ said George. ‘Sometimes we go down to the pub in the village, and we discuss things.’

  ‘I don’t do any drawing,’ said Balfour abruptly, sweat accumulating under his armpits. He hated to be associated with George and his artistic evenings round the stove.

  ‘We’re going to play Monopoly, though,’ Dotty said. ‘I’ve brought my Monopoly set. We play every night at home, every blessed night. Well, sometimes. Me and Joseph and Kidney.’

  Balfour couldn’t imagine what home might be like, but he could visualize a table and three chairs grouped about it, and on the chairs the pudsey Kidney with rosy cheeks and the debonair Joseph, dressed maybe in a silk dressing-gown, and Dotty rolling her cigarettes. All of them playing Monopoly.

  ‘Of course, Kidney doesn’t really play,’ Dotty said, finding herself at the window, viewing the trees and the path empty of Joseph. ‘But he tries, and Joseph tries to teach him, though lately he’s lost patience.’

  ‘Is he a relation?’ asked George.

  ‘No,’ said Dotty. ‘But you know what Joseph’s like – he thinks he’s God. Kidney was referred to the college by some clinic or other. To do pottery. Joseph just happened to see him in the canteen. He’s got it into his head that there’s nothing wrong with Kidney.’

  ‘And is there?’ asked George.

  ‘Well, he’s certainly thick or something,’ Dotty said. ‘There was a change at first,’ she added grudgingly. ‘When Joseph first took him over. He got him to come and live at the flat. He played music to him, read poetry, talked a load of rubbish to him. Kidney really seemed to respond … at first. He even began to play chess.’