Another Part of the Wood Read online

  Joseph laughed, leaning his head back and bringing his hands down hard on his knees to express his approval.

  ‘It’s more than grass that’s needed,’ Balfour said. ‘It’s not a question of needing to flourish. It’s more just l-living that’s wanted. There’s this woman, Mrs Conran, with a lad called Billy – she’s got a grown daughter with two kids of her own in the same two-roomed flat and Billy suddenly doesn’t turn up at the club or school for that matter. So I go to see her and I say, putting my foot in the door, “Hallo, Mrs Conran,” – they love that – “How’s your Billy? Wondered why he hasn’t been to the club like.” And she says, “Our Billy’s sick, Mr Whatsit.” And I say, “Can I come in and have a word with him, Mrs Conran?” And she says, “He’s sick like, Mr Whatsit.” Anyway I get into the place and in a cot in the room is Mrs Conran’s daughter’s two kids, both under three, sucking milk from a Tizer bottle. Billy Conran’s lying on a blanket on the floor with his face turned to the wall, and a bloody big growth just like a mushroom growing on the plaster above his head, and I say, “Not so good, eh, Billy lad? Wondered why you didn’t come to the club like.” And Billy’s not saying a word because he can’t put two words together anyway, and Mrs Conran says, “It’s like he don’t want to face the world, Mr Whatsit.” Can you beat that?’ Balfour let the words keep coming. ‘And while I’m trying to figure that one out, in comes Mrs Conran’s daughter from the kitchen with a fella and Ma Conran says, “Mr Whatsit’s here, Lil,” and Lil goes back into the kitchen with her drawers in her hand and the bloke goes out of the door and Billy just lies there …’

  ‘There’ve been worse things,’ George said, ‘much worse things. Systematic killing.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ groaned Balfour irritably. ‘Don’t start that again.’ He belched loudly.

  ‘I’ve not seen him like this before,’ said George.

  Balfour raised his head in defiance, but it was suddenly too heavy for his neck and he leaned over his knees, thinking about some baby in a bath that he had wanted to drown. He had wanted to flush the baby down the plug hole, fat legs kicking … going bell-tinkle … whose baby …? ‘Who’s fatty?’ he asked Joseph, suddenly looking up.

  ‘Who is fatty?’ articulated Joseph, smiling. ‘No idea, old chap.’

  The rocking chair thudded forward as George vacated it. ‘I think he’d better go to bed … I think my father would like him to go to bed.’

  ‘Are you receiving telepathic information or something? Is that it?’ Joseph wagged his finger at George, not sure if his voice was sufficiently jocular. He didn’t want to upset George. Changing the subject he asked, as if interested, which he wasn’t, ‘Is his name really Balfour, George? I mean, is it Balfour something, or something Balfour?’

  Hearing his name, the tool-fitter swung his head from side to side.

  ‘The declaration of the Jewish state,’ said George at the doorway, propping it open with his back, watching the sway of his scarf ends in the night air.

  ‘He’s off again,’ moaned Balfour.

  ‘His name is Edgar Balfour,’ said George. ‘I think he ought to go to bed. He’s been ill for a long time.’

  ‘Ill?’ Dotty regarded the flushed Balfour. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Just ill.’

  Balfour tried to concentrate. Joseph was saying something, something about the people due to arrive tomorrow. He must attend. There might, who knows, be a message.

  ‘She’s a blonde,’ said Joseph, ‘and he’s in some sort of business. He used to be in the army. Had his buttock shot off in Italy.’

  George said without reproach, listening to an owl hoot somewhere behind the long barn, ‘You didn’t say there was a woman coming.’

  ‘Didn’t I? Oh well, they’re married, George. It’s not too bad.’

  Dear God, thought Balfour, practically sobered with shock. Not two men but a man and wife – a woman with yellow hair and a man with a mutilated arse, in his hut, sleeping in the same room as himself. He removed his hands from his face and gazed at Joseph hopelessly.

  ‘Bed.’ Joseph yawned, gripping the edges of his chair to lever his body upright. ‘Tomorrow, Mr Whatsit, we really must have a long talk about your social work, old chap.’

  I must try to be cheerful and off-hand, thought Dotty, her fingers still clasping her empty glass. Either that or I must pretend to be asleep.

  Order and growth, thought George, staring out into the dark field, thinking of his remembrance trees, his thousand memorials, each one named in memory of a Jew who had never reached the Promised Land.

  They moved in several directions to bed. Kidney was dispatched to the barn, taken to the door by lamplight and thrust inside. ‘Don’t wake Roland,’ hissed Joseph fiercely, shutting him away for the night.

  ‘Good night – good night,’ they told each other, close now that they were about to separate.

  George lit a candle for Dotty and Joseph because he needed the lamp to guide the unsteady Balfour down the slope and across the stream to Hut 2. ‘You can have carpets you can afford at Cyril Lord,’ sang the stumbling Balfour in the darkness.

  3

  Willie came across the fields from Calfin shortly after seven o’clock the following morning. He took his time, not on account of his years but because there was no need to hurry and because, since his retirement from the mines, he had begun to suffer increasingly from shortness of breath. While the wife still slept he had struggled into his clothes and gone down the narrow stairs into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. He hadn’t bothered to eat. He found he had three Woodbines left from the night before, and the visitors over at Nant MacFarley might possibly tip him for cleaning out the toilet. He would buy some bacon at the corner shop for breakfast on his way back from the Glen. He let himself out quietly, treading gently down the path so as not to disturb the wife. She would probably want to know why he was going and where and what for, and he didn’t want to discuss it. He had married late, after the death of his mother, and mostly he confused the two women in his mind.

  At the crossroads his footsteps faltered as if, by rights, by habit, his boots should go left towards the pit. He spat frequently into the grass as he went, walking with legs well-bent at the knee, eyes darting from side to side under the colourless brim of his cap, seeing little pictures – a brown bottle, unbroken, upright in a patch of thistle, a line of sheep two meadows distant, pouring like grey milk through a gap in the hedge, the mountain humped behind a scroll of mist. His lips moved as he climbed, telling himself it was a good morning, over and over like a prayer, letting his body go with the flow of the hill so as to conserve his energy.

  The cows in the top field were still lying down across the daisies. He didn’t see the daisies, but he saw the cows out of the corner of one pale blue eye: seven cows in a lump under an elm tree.

  He rested a moment astride the stile above the Big House. Removing one of the three saved Woodbines out of his jacket pocket, he rolled it between his fingers to coax it back into plumpness.

  He liked to keep an eye on the Glen when the MacFarleys were away. He didn’t consider Master George man enough to be responsible, not being a married man, and there were so many jobs likely to be overlooked. In his working days he had come to lend a hand on a Sunday after chapel, and every day on his paid week’s absence from the mines, even when he was off sick, if he could manage to get away without the wife nagging him too much and going on about him being dishonest to the company. Since his retirement he came and went as he chose. Some people had their clubs or their bingo or their dart matches: he had his Glen.

  Spitting shreds of tobacco from his flat lips he shambled down the slope, skirting the Big House and George’s bedroom, not wanting to be greeted until he had introduced himself to the visitors in Hut 4, going down into the valley with lips still moving and chest still heaving.

  George, though not the first to wake, was the first to leave his bed some few minutes after Willie had passed the wall of his room.
He dressed and folded his sleeping bag neatly before going through to the kitchen of the Big House. There he washed his hands and face. He was happy because Joseph was in the Glen and there would be things to talk about. George had had a solitary childhood, albeit in a boarding school, and a solitary manhood, though he wasn’t conscious of any deprivation. He liked order and he liked company of a sort, Joseph’s sort. Joseph on occasion had discussed Art with him in a way that he found suitable and in conformity with his own sense of order. If he had known that Joseph was to all men all things and to his own self nothing, it wouldn’t have spoiled his pleasure or diminished his admiration.

  *

  Balfour had woken shivering an hour or so earlier, minus his boots but otherwise fully clothed, with parched mouth and gelatine eyelids. He burrowed into his sleeping bag, handsewn by George, thought once about the one-arsed brigadier due to arrive that day, and drifted again into sleep.

  Joseph and Dotty were lying side by side in the single bed in Hut 4. Their two faces were cold under the beamed roof. On the chest of drawers Joseph had stood his after-shave lotion, a bottle of green scented water with a spray given to him by his ex-wife at Christmas. It looked like a floral arrangement with a single bud, propped against the brown wall of the cabin.

  Outside the hut trod Willie, spitting his phlegm into the undergrowth, noting that the washing line had gone from its place slung between the blackthorn thicket and the elder bush. He scratched his neck under the band of his cap and saw the rope hanging from the high elm at the boundary of the field. However did it get up there, he asked himself out loud, looking up into the sky? Puzzled, he shook his head and went down the path.

  Only Kidney had made use of the shed in the bushes. In the night Dotty had woken fretfully and fumbled awkwardly under the truckle bed for the chamber pot placed there by Mrs MacFarley. As if triggered to wake at just such a moment, Joseph had risen invisibly in the blacker-than-black night and said ‘Out, out’ and folded like a wing to the mattress again. Obediently Dotty had gone and squatted under the dark sky, pissing reproachfully into the damp grass. Moth-pale in her voluminous nightgown, she had crouched with splayed knees, thinking that no doubt Roland and daft Kidney would be permitted the solace of a chamber pot, but not she, being female. Waddling experimentally forward, she had felt like some duck threading its way through platters of water lilies in a pond. She stood, trying to list all the animal names of the stars that swam about day and night above the earth: the winged horse, the dolphin, the eagle, the horned goat, the scorpion, the serpent, the bull, the little bear. Little bear gone away, she had told herself fancifully, climbing back into bed beside the superior Joseph, thinking of the dreams he must be dreaming.

  Willie first of all took off his coat and hung it on the inner door of the lavatory. Then, bending low, as if to perform a Russian dance movement, he embraced the pan with his two short arms and lifted it from the cement hole in the base of the shed. He carried it up the slope past Hut 4 to a place behind the long barn. Grunting, he put his burden down on the wet patch of ground and rested a moment with hands to his side before going to fetch his spade from beneath the uprights of Hut 4. He began to dig a deep hole.

  Roland opened his eyes in the middle of a dream about the baby who belonged to the people next door. He saw the baby’s face on the pillow beside him, larger than it should be and crowned with hair, but with the same crumpled mouth and the same skin, shiny as the white candle his mother had in the brass holder in the living-room. He blinked his eyes, and then saw that it was only Kidney’s face after all lying there above the sheet. He sat up in bed and looked about him at the barn. It was a bit like a ship, he thought, with all those wooden walls and the planks joined together by nails big as sixpences. There was a clothing rack hanging just beneath the arch of the roof, tethered to the wall of the hut by a rope wound in a figure of eight about an iron hook. He trod along the side of the blanketed bed, careful not to step on the baby-faced Kidney, and climbed over the black-painted bars to the floor. He took his trousers and his jumper in his arms and kicking his sandals before him opened the barn door and stepped down into the grass.

  The place had changed completely from what he remembered. For one thing, there was a smell of something, and there were trees everywhere – no longer grey, but all sorts of colours. Among the bushes near the barn there were pieces of flowers, blue and white, and just by the front step of the hut in which his father was sleeping a marigold grew in the grass, a wasp flying about its head. Bravely he approached the hut door from the opposite side, leaning across the wooden step, fumbling with the knob, keeping his eyes fixed on the spiralling wasp. Dismayed, he dropped his clothes and retreated further away from the marigold, never letting the insect out of his sight. He could hear someone digging behind the barn, but he didn’t care to go that far, without his sandals. Spinning round and round in the field, he shouted ‘Daddy, Daddy’. In the middle of his pirouette he saw the swing his father had made in the elm tree and righting himself he ran to the loop hanging above the grass.

  Facing away from the barn and hut, he sat on the horizontal bar, which was wide enough for him alone, and pushed with his muddy feet at the bumpy ground, rocking forward into the field. After a time he rose above the level of the tangled hedgerow and saw the mountain in the distance. Mouth open, he slid backwards through the leafy field and wriggling his body from side to side slowed the swing. At a point nearest the ground he jumped clear and rolled down the wet slope. Forgetting the wasp, forgetting his fear of snakes and worms, he ran round the back of the hut and squatting on his haunches banged with his hand on the small window behind which he knew his father lay. ‘The mountain,’ he shouted, pushing his nose to the pane of glass, seeing Dotty with her face turned towards him and her eyes closed but no sign of Joseph. Fist clenched, he continued to beat at the window, heart pounding with the vision of the mountain he had seen.

  Joseph woke from a dream. He sat up and saw his son outside the window. ‘Hallo, boy,’ he mouthed, leaping from the bed clad only in a string vest. He was furious with himself for letting Roland see Dotty and him in the same bed. He picked up his clothes hastily and ran to unlock the front door, stubbing his toe as he did so. He kissed the boy with a great show of cheerfulness, making a lot of incidental noises, hissing with feigned hurt and holding his foot in the air, saying ‘Ooooh’ with pursed lips, spitting with laughter as Roland jumped in his arms.

  Roland had never, to Joseph’s knowledge, caught him in bed with a woman. Joseph didn’t believe anyway that a child of eight – or was it seven? – equated bed with sex. Still, he was upset as he wrestled with the child. Hastily he dressed, hopping in the grass with Roland clinging to his ankle. Somebody coughed beyond the hut. Taking Roland by the hand, Joseph went to investigate.

  Behind the barn he saw the old fellow who worked for the MacFarleys – the odd-job man, Bertie or Tommy or someone.

  Touching his cap, Willie said, ‘And how are you, Mr Joseph?’

  ‘Fine, fine. Musn’t complain. Digging, I see.’

  ‘Just emptying the toilet for you, Mr Joseph. Start clean, as it were. Mr MacFarley likes me to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘We’ve not actually gone into production yet,’ said Joseph. He wondered how much the old chap would expect to be tipped. ‘Go and get your clothes on, Roland,’ he ordered.

  ‘Got your hands full,’ said Willie, leaning on his spade, taking in Mr Joseph’s trousers and jacket. Best London style, he thought: bit of a dandy – and a woman back there in the hut very possibly, if he ran true to previous years.

  Sensing criticism, Joseph said, ‘He’s no trouble, we get on very well.’ Nodding to Willie, he went into the hut, and after a moment Willie followed him.

  When Dotty got up she found Joseph in the kitchen making breakfast. Roland was at the table, eating fried bread and bacon. Thankfully she saw the old man drinking tea. Joseph was always better in the morning if there was someone else around, someone he wasn’t on i
ntimate terms with. It meant he wouldn’t start telling her she was a lazy bitch, which she suspected she was.

  ‘This is Dotty,’ Joseph said, coming forward to pat her shoulder.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Willie, not looking at her long face nor her long hair. ‘Come up from London, have you?’ he asked, stamping his feet and wheezing.

  ‘Yes, from London,’ Dotty told him. She sat down beside Roland at the table, looking at his half-consumed fried bread and bacon longingly. She was always hungry and she always felt guilty at being hungry – not at home with her parents, or in a café, but anywhere where Joseph was. He made her feel greedy or something. She asked him for a cup of tea, keeping her face turned away from him, because there hadn’t been a mirror in the cubicle and she didn’t know whether her make-up was grimy from the night before. Her hair, she knew, was untidy, but she wasn’t sure where her comb might be and even if she had known Joseph would be irritable if she did her hair in the kitchen and more irritable if she left the room just as she had entered. He could run in and out like a restless sheepdog and trim his beard over the bacon and eggs, but then he was male and therefore not disgusting. She asked Roland if he had slept well.

  ‘Yes,’ the child answered flatly, crunching fried bread in his mouth.

  ‘He’s been running about the fields in his pyjamas since dawn,’ said Joseph. He added meaningfully: ‘Couldn’t get in at the door, so he banged on the window.’

  ‘It wasn’t dawn, it was day, and I didn’t run around. Actually, I went on the swing,’ said Roland.

  ‘My God,’ cried Joseph, face animated above the spitting fat. ‘It was the swing – that was it.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ Willie said. ‘I saw you took down Mrs MacFarley’s washing line.’

  ‘I dreamt about Kidney playing with a rope – not here, back at the flat,’ said Joseph. ‘He was sitting on the floor, the studio floor, coiling this rope round and round his waist. He had a funny expression, Dotty, really very strange.’ Needing her interest, for the toilet-cleansing Welshman couldn’t possibly understand the special significance of such a dream, Joseph gave his full attention to the famished Dotty. ‘There was a record on the gramophone – I can’t remember what record – and there was someone else there …’ Joseph frowned, wrinkling his forehead, holding the pan of bacon away from the stove.