Another Part of the Wood Read online

  ‘They said I must.’

  ‘Who’re they?’

  ‘My mother’s doctor says I must have one after lunch.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Joseph scratched his head not knowing what else to say.

  ‘They said in hospital I should take a pill after lunch,’ volunteered Kidney. ‘In hospital my mother tried to see me, but she didn’t see me. The Government wouldn’t let her. Then she came later and I went home. They told me to take my pills three times a day.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll get your pill.’ Joseph went to the wicker basket beneath the settee and pulled it clear. He found the glass bottle. He took out an oblong capsule and replaced the bottle in the wicker basket. ‘Here you are,’ he said, coming back to the table with the pill.

  Kidney swallowed the capsule without water. He seemed anxious to tell Joseph about the hospital. ‘It was a big hospital,’ he said. ‘There was a man there …’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Joseph.

  ‘He gave me my pills … He was there when I woke up.’

  ‘In the morning, you mean?’

  ‘He called me sonny.’

  ‘That was friendly.’

  ‘I said I wanted to go home.’ Kidney played with a fork left in the centre of the table. ‘It was night and the man told me to be quiet.’

  ‘They have rules,’ said Joseph.

  ‘The man said: “Be quiet. Do you want a hot thing up you, sonny?” ’

  Joseph sat still. He felt distressed. Clearing his throat, he had every intention of saying something meaningful, but he merely said, ‘You go down to the stream and see Roland. I’ll be down when I’ve washed the dishes.’

  It was the disgruntled Willie who saw the smoke. There was a line, black and waving, widening as he watched, rising into the blue sky.

  ‘Great God,’ he shouted, running like hell, passing the hut and the curious Joseph standing in the doorway. ‘The bloody wood’s on fire.’ He jumped like a wrestler on all fours into the bracken on the slope. ‘It’s them damn women of yours,’ he told the man at the door, voice shrill, pulling out handfuls of grass and nettles in a frantic attempt to locate the water pipe buried in the ground.

  ‘A fire,’ Joseph said calmly, a tea towel draped over his arm. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Dropping their bloody fags all over my woods.’ Willie was too far gone to notice the use of the possessive. He was sitting in the undergrowth now with the pipe between his short legs. ‘Come on up, you bastard,’ he moaned, wrenching the tap further to the right, spit dribbling down his stubbled chin, his mind shifting from one thought to another, each idea more overlaid than the last, till all he had in his brain was a pattern of leaves, miraculously veined, each one ablaze behind his eyes.

  ‘No good mucking about with water,’ observed Joseph. ‘I divine Mr George will be in control.’ He went at a trot along the path, away from the struggling Willie, and disappeared down the slope.

  A little above the stream, the scent of the fire reached him. He forsook the path and plunged down into the ravine, leaping and sliding, adopting a sideways position with arms wildly waving to balance himself. Boots crushing the black ivy that ran like main arteries across the curve of the hillside, he lost his tea towel to a low bush and slithering now on the bare rocks of the lower slopes missed his footing entirely. Guillotining a foxglove with the upwards kick of his boot, he rolled clear to the bottom of the incline, coming to a halt finally with his head against the wet clay at the edge of the river, his boots in the thin trickle of water, his fists full of pebbles.

  On the opposite bank, a hundred yards up the hillside, Balfour and George were beating the undergrowth with sycamore branches.

  Further along the stream, at the bridge, Roland and Kidney heard the stampeding firefighters come down on either side, but saw no one. Roland was busy with his boat, and the reclining Kidney was laid flat on the wooden planks of the bridge, his head stuck out over the edge and his hands folded under his chin, watching the water go over the river bed and the red boat getting nowhere.

  Dotty, who had been in the barn when the raised voices had disturbed her, found Willie sitting in the grass.

  ‘What’s up, Willie?’ she asked, looking down at him, puzzled. His eyes, full of surprise, were fixed on the apex of a bush.

  She moved into the bracken and squatted down on her haunches the better to observe him, staring at the freckles thick across the bridge of his lumpy nose. She thought maybe he was drunk. He sat so stiffly, clutching that iron thing sticking up out of the ground. He didn’t smell of drink, only of grass and smoke and he looked more baffled than stupefied.

  ‘Willie,’ she said, almost afraid, and put her hand on his two clasped ones, stroking the speckled skin upwards to the wrist, fingering his pulse though she didn’t know what it might signify, and wishing he would look at her. She tried to remove his hands from around the pipe, and as she struggled he suddenly released his grip and collapsed on his back into the bushes. His cap fell off and he lay there staring up at the sky in that surprised way.

  ‘Willie,’ she said again, not very loudly, and stood up and didn’t know what to do for the best. Then she ran away down the slope towards the stream, shouting, ‘George, George,’ feeling excited and fearful and important all at the same time.

  George told Joseph he’d better bring the Jaguar round to the field road in case Willie needed moving urgently.

  Perhaps it’s a stroke,’ Balfour suggested. ‘It c-could be that by the sound of it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ George said. ‘Possibly it’s hunger. He’s been about since dawn. Still, you’d better go and bring the car round.’ Authoritatively he strode up the path towards the stricken Willie with Balfour in pursuit.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Roland, as his father and Dotty crossed the bridge.

  ‘Just to the car, boy.’

  ‘May I come?’ Already the child was scrambling out of the water, boat forgotten.

  ‘No,’ Joseph said, not turning round, going very fast up the slope to the Big House. His hands were quite sore – not burnt, possibly blistered from all that sycamore-wielding. His head ached and his eyes hurt. It accelerated him the more. He swung his arms in a fury and leapt up the path.

  ‘Do you think Willie’s dead?’ Dotty cried, sure he wasn’t, but feeling sick as she tried to keep pace with Joseph. It wasn’t like Joseph to rush in an emergency. More like, he was running away from her.

  ‘Almost certainly,’ he shouted, grinning to himself, holding his smarting hands a fraction before him.

  Stubbornly Dotty ran behind him, both of them pursued by a black spiral of gnats.

  As they drove up the hill in the Jaguar, a green Mini turned the corner. The narrowness of the lane forced Joseph to slow down. ‘Can’t stop, old man. Somebody’s died on us,’ he called and drove on at speed.

  ‘Was that Lionel?’ shouted Dotty.

  Joseph heard the upward inflection of her provincial voice and found it objectionable. Dotty twisted in her seat in time to see the green Mini halted and lost in the hedge-rimmed lane. At the crossroads Joseph turned right and drove half a mile to the corner shop. She was left sitting in the hot car staring at a border of pinks in the small garden.

  Joseph came out of the shop with several bars of chocolate and a tube of cold cream.

  ‘What’s wrong with your face?’ Dotty asked, looking at the colour of it, glowing red and smudged with black.

  He didn’t reply, sitting at the wheel smearing grease into the smarting palms of his hands.

  ‘What have you been doing? You’re all dirty.’

  He reversed the car up the lane, looking over his shoulder as he did so. The breeze blew something from his hair.

  ‘You’ve got bits of leaves in your hair,’ she said, puzzled.

  ‘I’ve been having it off with old George in the bushes,’ he shouted, lips drawn back to show his teeth, and she thought she saw the small endings of his beard shrivelled up in the bright lig
ht, as if singed by the sun.

  The green Mini was at the crossroads. There was Lionel’s elbow in a white sleeve sticking out from the window like a flag of truce. As the Jaguar sped past, Joseph pointed his arm to the sky, spreading his blackened hand against the cool breeze. He didn’t turn his head.

  Dotty swivelled round and waved at the Mini. ‘Not long, not long,’ she cried, kneeling in the passenger seat, her hair blowing about her face.

  The Jaguar turned into an opening at the side of the lane and stopped in front of a five-barred gate. Lionel turned too, manoeuvring the Mini carefully, and switched off the engine. He let the little silver ignition key dangle between his fingers, sitting there with pleasure and good humour on his flushed face, waiting for Joseph to greet him, his darling wife May safe beside him.

  ‘Glad you made it,’ said Joseph, coming to the car. About to shake the hand held out to him, he drew back. ‘Sorry, bit of a fire down in the Glen … Hands a bit sore.’ He wiped his cold-creamed hands on the side of his trousers and looked at May. ‘Ah, the lovely May. How are you, darling?’

  May giggled and stepped out of the Mini in her new pink trews and her gingham shirt, a white silk handkerchief tied casually about her neck. She turned her powdered cheek for Joseph’s gallant kiss, moving past Dotty with a jangling of the charm bracelet on her rounded arm and stood at the barred gate looking about her at the view.

  Lionel said the Mersey Tunnel hadn’t been too crowded. Better than expected, in fact. Dotty hadn’t met him before. She thought he was nice, because he shook her hand and said he was glad to meet her. He seemed an unlikely partner for the restless May.

  May said how pretty the scenery was. ‘So unspoilt and countrified.’ She giggled, because she wasn’t a fool, and the remarks faded into the summer air as they followed each other over the gate. She very nearly fell on her knees on the far side.

  Lionel opened his mouth in alarm. ‘Take it easy, my darling,’ he cried, attempting to take his wife’s arm, but she stepped away from him.

  Over the brow of the hill came Balfour and George, carrying an iron bedstead with the body of Willie laid on a striped mattress splotched with damp.

  When the two groups met, the bearers halted and lowered the cot to the grass, and Dotty said ‘How is he?’ looking down at the sunken mouth and the stubbled chin – all that was visible of Willie, for his eyes and nose were covered by his cap.

  ‘I think he’s all right … just a bit dazed. Been overdoing it.’ George sat down on the mattress and laid his white fingers on the Welshman’s knees. ‘Home soon, Willie, home soon.’ He hung his head, still touching Willie, and appeared not to see the new arrivals.

  May had never seen anyone quite so tall as George. She stood with one hand, the one with the bracelet about her wrist, gripping the bars of the bed, and smiled into the field. Lionel adopted a tragic expression, bending his head low as if in church, though he wasn’t sure why there was an old man lying on a bed in a field, and not sure who the tall fellow was or the other shorter one with the spotty complexion. He had understood from Joseph’s letter that there would be just Dotty and themselves out in the woods. Of course, Joseph, being arty, was often vague. May had wanted to go abroad, or to a hotel on the coast at least, but he simply couldn’t raise the money and he thought it safer to take her somewhere secluded, rather than expose her to the twin temptations of casual acquaintanceships and drink. It was something he often told her. ‘Any casual acquaintance could have you in drink. You simply have no sense of responsibility.’

  ‘Is he ill, poor old fellow?’ Lionel asked, standing stockily in his good suit with the rather wide trousers and his white stiff collar tight about his neck.

  ‘I believe so,’ said Joseph, not interested, wanting to sit down somewhere. He told Dotty, ‘I think I ought to go and see about Roland.’

  ‘Ah, Roland.’ Lionel jangled pennies in his pocket, remembering the vanishing tricks with money that he had shown Roland a year earlier. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing Roland.’ He meant it. ‘Coming along all right, is he?’

  ‘You’ve got to drive Willie home in the car,’ George said.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Joseph agreed, genuinely ashamed of being so forgetful. He took Balfour’s place at the foot of the bed, and he and George carried the stretcher towards the gate. Lionel marched ahead in his shiny brown shoes, anxious to be helpful.

  Balfour was astonished by May. She was the living reality of the mound of old dreams dreamt in puberty of fair women coming to lie down beside him. He was fearful to speak lest he should utter obscenities.

  Seeing his glance, May, with eyes lavender blue, smiled in his direction, at which he blushed and turned to follow George.

  ‘Isn’t he ghastly,’ said May, playing with her charm bracelet and looking at Dotty.

  ‘Ghastly?’ said Dotty. ‘Balfour’s not ghastly at all. He’s rather interesting. He’s very funny when you get to know him. He got tight last night.’

  ‘I mean Lionel, my Lionel. He makes me sick,’ said May.

  Willie, warm in his womb-world under the covering of his cap, breathed in odours of silk linings and something else, something that was vegetable. He thought he was on his way to the annual hot-pot dinner given by the mine owners for their employees, at the Herbert Arms. He could smell potatoes and gravy, and he was aware of an intense hunger. He could hear the voice of the boss come up from Liverpool in his grand expensive car, the car with the green hood, asking how he was. He struggled to touch the brim of his cap, and his wife was telling him he’d made a fool of himself as usual, or was it his mother? ‘Drunk you are, Willie,’ she said, but how was a man to resist free drink, dressed in his Sunday suit, brown with a white stripe in it, and the boss making a little speech, standing there on the stone-flagged floor in a pair of plus fours the colour of tobacco, handing them all a cigar and telling them the directors were very pleased with the work done. They dug barytes out of the ground and somewhere along the line it got put into gallons of paint – God knows what it did, though no doubt it made someone a heap of old money. He didn’t doubt that. You didn’t give close on forty men a hot-pot dinner and as much beer as they could drink, not to mention the cigars and that damn big car with the headlamps shining, unless there was money in it somewhere. The boss only ever went into the mine once and that was to take his little daughter down, and she put on a white helmet on her head with a candle at the front and all her hair falling down about her shoulders. The little girl used to come to hot-pot do’s as well, and each year she got a little taller and her hair a little shorter. He could still hear the rattling of the stall chains as the cows shifted about in the shed in the pub yard. He could almost hear the sound of the men pissing against the wall and see the rivulets of urine running out across the yard. ‘Disgusting,’ the other folk in the pub called it, but who gave a damn after all that drink, and they wouldn’t let them upstairs to use the lav. Couldn’t blame them for that. Anyway, the stairs in the pub were waxed like glass, weren’t they? There’d have been nothing but broken legs and damaged skulls. There were quite a few breakages as it was. Mugs and the like and one or two plates falling on to the stone floor and old Davis shouting out to be careful of that case of stuffed birds in the corner – a damn big glass case full of birds, like none you ever saw in your life. Coloured like beetles they were, scarlet and blue and bottle-green, all perched on a bit of tree. ‘Mind them birds,’ Davis would shout. ‘Just you be careful of them birds.’ Course he had a thing about birds – not live ones at all, but stuffed birds and painted birds on plates. Old Davis had a job to get them out of the pub. Some of them would go right through to the back into the old kitchen and climb up the steps to the loft to sleep the drink off, sleeping up there in the straw with the dog – nice little bitch, that dog – with the sides of bacon hanging up on the beams to remind you flesh was mortal. They were grand times. The men worked hard enough, God only knows, and they did have lonely lives. There seemed one long leap of lo
neliness from the time they were lads to the nights of the hot-pot suppers. Most of them had been boys in the same school, such as it was – with church twice on Sunday, fishing down at the river, a bit of football in the winter, a couple of outings to Shrewsbury – and then it was all over, and they all went away from each other into houses in the village and took wives and got lads of their own. Then it was as if they’d never been boys at all. Responsible they all were, men they all were, till hot-pot supper night. Everything was different those nights, somehow. There was the church in the daytime you hardly even noticed, grown big as a cathedral with a graveyard like a battlefield, and the ivy climbing up the side of Albert Price’s house and Albert at the window with his shotgun telling them all to go to the devil. All the lads stumbling through the churchyard, shouting out to each other like boys, linking arms in the lane and laughing dirty-like seeing the light go on in Mrs Parry’s window, knowing old Freddie White was creeping in, like as not, with his boots in his hand. Everyone knowing each other, a funny kind of knowing – though it was a daft way to think, because didn’t they still know each other, though some were dead? He was so damn hungry.

  He tried to sit up and someone pushed his head down again and he could swear he was lying on the leather seats of the boss’s car.

  *

  Balfour waited to help Lionel carry his luggage to the huts. He sat on the bed vacated by the delirious Willie and watched Lionel doing things with a dustpan and brush to the interior of the car. Now and then the tidy man would bob his head over the top of the car, his face one big apologetic smile. ‘Won’t be a tick, old man – just want to get the car spruced up.’ May had dropped sweet papers everywhere, and ash from her du Maurier cigarettes, and there was a frosting of face powder on the felt floor-covering beneath the passenger seat.

  ‘The little woman loves her sweeties,’ Lionel told Balfour, emerging at last with the dustpan in one hand and brush in the other. About to scatter the contents of the pan into the hedge, he stopped abruptly and said, ‘Wrong thing to do, don’t you think? Honour the country code and all that.’ Contritely he put the pan and brush away in the boot of the car and took out a black leather suitcase and a holdall in tartan cloth. ‘Food,’ he told Balfour, putting the holdall down on the bed. ‘Eggs and stuff.’