Another Part of the Wood Read online

  Lionel was a domestic asset. Without him they would all have sat half stupefied in the nearly dark hut. He washed the supper dishes and refilled the bowl with soapy water and washed out the tea towel, rinsing it carefully and going out into the field to hang it over a bush to dry. He even found a stiff brush and swept crumbs into a small heap at the door. ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ he went, swinging his brush like a golfer, sending a half crust of bread out into the dusk and humming little snatches of songs. Finally he stood in the open doorway and took great gulps of night air. ‘This is the life,’ he cried, expanding his chest, his eyes glowing with happiness. ‘This is the life.’ He needed May to confirm his opinion. ‘Isn’t this the life? Isn’t it, sweetheart?’ he demanded, turning to her.

  ‘Oh, do sit down,’ she told him, annoyed. She caught Balfour looking at her in the gloom.

  Joseph fetched the paraffin lamp from the far end of the hut and lit it. A moth flew in through the open window and dashed itself against the lamp. May shuddered and fluttered her hands in horror. Lionel protected her at once – big protective Lionel. His handkerchief dropped the insect to the table. ‘Don’t be concerned,’ he said. ‘It will not harm you.’ Balfour, startled by the sudden flourish of white calico that had stunned the moth, heard the words and finished the sentence in his head, the verse of the song … ‘It’s only me pursuing something I’m not sure of …’ He knew two popular songs and those not very well. The ‘Don’t be concerned’ one and ‘Talking about my generation’, written it seemed deliberately to parody his own affliction. He didn’t know every word like the lads in the club, but certain lines of each song remained engraved on his mind –

  ‘Hope I die before I get old …

  Talking about my g-generation …

  Don’t want to be a big s-sensation,

  Why don’t you all f-fade away …’

  Dotty was lifting the Monopoly box out from beneath the sofa. ‘Might we?’ she asked Joseph, sure she would be refused.

  But Joseph welcomed the idea. He clapped his blistered hands together and said loudly, ‘Come on, let’s play Monopoly. Do you good, George.’

  George, furthest from the table, said nothing. He had been thinking about Willie, the coffin shape his body had assumed as they carried him feet first through the doorway of his cottage. He thought about the fire too, the possible cause of it. Apart from Willie, only Dotty smoked; but then she had been in the barn or down at the stream most of the time. Willie must have passed that way earlier in the day; it could only have been him. In all those years he had never been careless. But there was always a first time. George would have liked to know what Joseph was thinking about at this moment as he sat with his hands busy with the bundles of artificial money and his head constantly jerking backwards to flick away the falling lock of hair.

  Lionel, laughing in anticipation – it was years since he had played Monopoly – fetched chairs from the dim corners of the hut and grouped them about the table. He had tried to talk to Kidney at supper and failed. He realized that the boy wasn’t altogether there. In an attempt to show that he felt that no blame should be attached to him, he constantly smiled and winked at the unresponsive lad. He sat himself on the wooden bench and patted the space beside him.

  ‘Ever played before?’ he asked, expecting no reply, ready to cover up the silence with a cough or a laugh or a squeeze at the waist of the drowsing May.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Kidney said, and sat heavily down on the wooden bench, his curved thighs trapped under the edge of the solid table, his voice deep with comprehension.

  May, apathetic with country air and boredom, remained where she was, seated opposite the perspiring Balfour. She remembered now that Dotty never went anywhere without her game of Monopoly. In the old days in Liverpool they had played it often. Sometimes it went on for hours and hours. Absolutely endless. Enjoyment depended entirely on who was playing. There was no hope tonight, she thought, looking with amusement at the players about the board, the uncomfortable Balfour and the snooty Joseph, not to mention potty Kidney – or whatever his name was. What on earth was he doing here? She must ask Dotty. Not that it really mattered. She could ask herself the same question and receive an equally unsatisfying reply.

  Joseph was offering the two women a choice of symbols.

  ‘Do you want the boat, the train, the shoe, the car, the hat, the dog, or the iron?’ he asked them, touching the little metal objects with his finger. He himself always had the train.

  ‘Oh dear!’ May exclaimed, wanting a nice hot bath.

  ‘Come on, make up your mind.’ Impatiently Joseph pushed the iron towards her with the tips of his burnt fingers.

  ‘I hate ironing.’ Childishly May turned down the corners of her mouth, and Lionel said soothingly, ‘So you do, my sweetheart … Poor little sweetheart.’

  Balfour chose the car, but after a moment Joseph took it away from him and gave him the dog. Kidney, it seemed, usually had the car. Reassured, Kidney held it upright on the palm of his hand and smiled down upon it. ‘Once,’ he told Lionel, ‘I won. That’s a fact, isn’t it, Joseph?’

  It was a true claim. Once, in the early days, to give him confidence, they had let him win. Joseph had never asked for rent when the youth landed on his property, and Dotty had kept telling him that the bank owed him money.

  While Joseph laid out the property cards according to value and colour, Lionel reminisced aloud about his Monopoly days.

  ‘In Brighton, long before the war,’ he told them, ‘when the family was at home. It all comes back to me now.’ Its coming suffused his face with a glow of pleasure. ‘We used to play on the billiard table, on a sheet of course – myself and Father and Alice and George and Hetty … after supper on a Sunday, all the family round the table.’

  ‘On the billiard table?’ May winked at Dotty and ran the little iron up and down the pale board. ‘Must have been a big house, Lionel.’

  ‘Quite big,’ he said modestly. ‘Quite big, my sweetheart. Remember? I showed it you once.’

  He had driven her to Brighton one afternoon in the summer, and they had spent a perfectly vile afternoon listening to the band. Not a soul under ninety anywhere around. ‘I might,’ she told him tartly, ‘be prepared to do this sort of thing in the twilight of our life, but not now.’ He had taken her down the road past the house the family had lived in. It might have been the house. It might not. He actually had tears in his eyes as he drove, though it could have been the lingering effect of the military airs the band had played so loudly. He said there was a big garden at the back. You couldn’t see it from the road. Take his word for it, it was as big as a field. Mother had been very fond of gardening; and they had played badminton in the summer. He talked about it at length. The white shuttlecock was like a little feathered bird plopping over the net on the warm summer evenings. Mother brought them long glasses of lemonade. Father kept the score. Ridiculous.

  ‘Highest scorer starts,’ said Joseph, giving a last tidy touch to his row of cards and throwing the dice.

  It did draw them together – the counting of the money, the excitement of landing on Community Chest. Dotty won ten pounds in a beauty contest and they smiled at her and clapped their hands. Even May clapped. ‘Quite right, quite right,’ Lionel cried, throwing the dice so hard it flew from the table and going in search of it on all fours, his mutilated posterior raised high, laughter dribbling from his mouth. On the return journey he tickled Joseph’s leg and was kicked. Both men were convulsed with laughter.

  Balfour dared to speak directly to May. She landed on Mayfair and made no move to buy it.

  Joseph said she was a fool. ‘It’s the most valuable property on the board.’

  ‘Is it really?’ she asked, fluttering her eyelashes, feeling she was being delightfully vague. ‘Well, can I buy it now?’

  ‘No, it’s my turn.’

  ‘Hard luck,’ Balfour said softly, smiling at her. She shrugged her shoulders at him and giggled.

  ‘I wasn’t thin
king,’ she told him alone.

  Joseph managed to acquire Bond Street, Regent Street and Oxford Street. He stopped the game while he bought houses, one on each street. ‘Now,’ he told them. ‘Now, watch out, children.’

  Dotty bought The Strand, and Lionel protested that it wasn’t fair – that he had Trafalgar Square. ‘It’s not on,’ he shouted. ‘It’s just not on.’ She pretended to be spiteful and told him several times she wasn’t going to let him get his hands on The Strand, not if he offered her £500 for it.

  ‘Willie cleaned out the lavatory, did he?’ asked George suddenly. He had bought nothing and hardly seemed to grasp the point of the game.

  ‘Yes, I believe he did.’

  ‘It wasn’t necessary.’ George was looking stern. He held the dice in his hand and stared at the board.

  ‘Come on, man. Throw the bloody dice. You’re holding up the game.’

  George threw.

  ‘It’s a chemical toilet of course?’ Lionel wanted to know, lowering his voice.

  ‘Did you give him any money?’ asked George.

  ‘Didn’t have time,’ Joseph said. ‘Smelt the fire and that was that.’

  Kindly, Dotty told Lionel that it was a chemical toilet.

  ‘Well, don’t give him any money next time you see him. My father sees to that.’ George put his elbows on the table and cupped his head in his hands, letting his eyes close behind the railings of his fingers.

  Lionel said, ‘I’ll take care of the toilet paper. I’m used to that sort of thing.’

  The corners of his wife’s mouth trembled. She put the back of her hand against her lips, observed by the spying Balfour.

  ‘It’s a question of careful planning … Taking that every man functions normally and performs once a day for seven days, that’s four sheets per person, times …’ Lionel counted the group around the table, stabbing the air with one large finger … ‘times six – no seven, mustn’t forget myself.’ He shook with merriment, licked at his moustache, controlled himself and continued … ‘Twenty-eight sheets per day, times seven …’

  ‘Only four sheets per man?’ said Joseph mildly.

  ‘Oh shut up, Lionel, shut up and don’t be so disgusting.’ May couldn’t bear it. How dare he talk about her going to the lavatory once a day for seven days in that revolting way. It was both presumptuous and nauseating. ‘You’re revolting,’ she cried, clenching her fists and banging them down so hard on the table that one of Joseph’s little green houses fell over.

  ‘Steady on. Mind the bloody board.’

  ‘Forgive me, sweetheart.’ Lionel attempted to pat her knee under the brim of the table. ‘You had to know that sort of thing in the war, sweetheart – ’

  ‘The war, the war,’ she mimicked, and two lines appeared on either side of her stretched wide mouth and she turned her profile to Balfour, poking her head forward angrily on its quite short neck, pecking at the still spluttering Lionel, telling him he was a fool, an utter fool. ‘You’re grotesque, Lionel … You’re utterly grotesque …’

  Lionel flung up his arms, pretending fear, cowering back on his wooden bench, hunched against the stolid Kidney. ‘Kamerad,’ he said … ‘Kamerad.’

  ‘Going on about your disgusting toilet drill and your dreary war … Who the hell cares about what you did in the army … Who do you think you are? D’you know,’ she added, turning her attention to Joseph, ‘d’you know what he told me on my wedding night?’ Her head tossed indignantly, and the shadow of her hair trembled across the Monopoly board. ‘He actually told me how to dismantle a Bren gun.’

  ‘Very useful,’ Joseph said, not bothering to look at her.

  She giggled. Joseph always made her laugh, even if he was so affected.

  Lionel mistakenly guffawed his relief. Instantly he aroused fresh resentment.

  ‘You find it funny, do you?’ said May. ‘You think that funny, you big fat bore?’

  ‘Flattery will get you nowhere, May,’ ventured Joseph.

  Lionel turned his beaming face from his wife to Joseph and back again. His voice sounded full of tears as he tried to extricate himself. ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart, it’s not …’

  ‘Stop calling me sweetheart. Stop it.’ She could have wrenched the nose from his face in her anger. Indeed her hand, with the diamond ring encircling the pad of her fourth finger, flew upwards from her lap towards him.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he cried, leaning away from her.

  ‘Joseph has brought six toilet rolls with him,’ Kidney said slowly. ‘It ought to be enough.’ His morello lips stayed open as he tried to remember how many sheets of paper he had used. He quite liked Lionel with his wish to be helpful about the lavatory. They all ought to be responsible for something.

  Two spots of colour burned on either cheek of the weakened May. Her eyes under the thick lashes, shone. Her mascara had smudged, giving her face a bruised appearance. They were all fools. They made her sick. She looked sideways at her husband and inconsistently found him less foolish than the others.

  Lionel fingered his moustache, as if to reassure himself that it grew on him and wasn’t pasted to his lip. How she abused him. How he loved her.

  ‘On no account,’ George said, ‘must you give Willie any money, Joseph. You mustn’t tip him. You do understand that, don’t you?’ He hoped Joseph did understand, did realize the power money had to corrupt.

  Joseph thought he heard crying outside the hut. He went to the door, opened it and listened. A sound like the sea rolled over the dark field towards him. He held up his hand behind him for silence, tilting his head.

  ‘It’s the wind,’ Dotty said.

  He trod carefully across the grass to the side of the barn, leaning his face against the wooden planks at the point just under the window. The wood was still warm from the day’s sun, and he raised his eyes above the black shapes of the trees and saw a small moon, the colour of a lemon, dragged by clouds across the sky. Moons, he thought, were so that men like himself would know they lived on earth. He fluttered his arms in the wind, imitating the branches all about him, and wheeled across the grass, smiling, entering the narrow doorway sideways with one arm stretched high, almost to the ceiling, casting a long shadow over the group at the table, so that May shrieked in alarm.

  The game went on and on. The little metal objects were moved round and round the squares. No one took any notice of Kidney. He threw the dice and counted his spaces but was never fined. Time and again he landed on a row of red hotels bought by Joseph, and once he said, ‘Do I owe you any money, Joseph?’ and Joseph replied, ‘What? Money? No, shouldn’t think so. Your go next, George.’ Kidney withdrew into himself, because he knew the rules of the game and he knew he was playing alone.

  May was out first. She said, ‘Thank God,’ and shortly after Balfour followed, and then Lionel. Lionel put the kettle on and May sat slumped behind the brass paraffin lamp and yawned and yawned. While waiting for the water to boil, Lionel went outside into the field. May could hear him out there under the moon, flooding the grass, and she snapped her mouth shut in the middle of a yawn, and water seeped out of her smudged eyes and the mascara spread across her cheeks. Lionel returned with a fleck of hair curled rakishly about one ear. He ran the tap at the sink and rinsed his hands noisily. Unable to find the tea towel, he took out his useful handkerchief and dried his fingers one by one, pushing back the cuticles of his nails. Looking up, he saw his wife’s besmeared face in the lamplight. He came towards her with his forefinger embedded in a damp sheath of material and bent over her, wiping at the stained skin beneath her eyes. She made no resistance. Amusement and anger had long since drained away leaving her detached and apathetic. ‘There, there,’ he crooned tenderly, cradling her chin in his fingers, making his wife’s dirty little face clean and wholesome once more. He put away his soiled handkerchief and rubbed his hands together boyishly, a job well done, telling Balfour it was a grand night. ‘A grand night,’ he said, with his brown-suited back to the table and still-moist hands holding
the teapot beneath the cold water tap. ‘A grand night, a lovely moon. You used to get those sorts of nights in Italy – during the war, you know. There were cypress trees of course, but the same old moon.’ He cleared his throat, regretting instantly his mention of the forbidden subject. He couldn’t help himself, the best of him had lived through the war. He simply had no notion of himself before 1939. Though he talked to May about Father and his brothers and sisters, he couldn’t be sure that his memories were exact. It was as though he were chronicling the recollections of someone he had known, but never intimately. This person had played badminton, he was certain, and there were those holidays in Eastbourne. Like a photograph shown to him, there was Father in a blazer, his trousers rolled above his knees, planted on the shore with the sea showing between his bow legs. He didn’t deliberately mean to falsify his rememberings of the time before the war. It was just that one had to play fair by the past. There was a certain code – honour thy father and thy mother and all that. It couldn’t have been easy for Father supporting a large family on a bank clerk’s pay, though food was cheaper then, and if he’d been strict and tyrannical with the girls and Mother it was doubtless with the best intentions. It wasn’t for Lionel to judge. He had a great respect for Father – did have – a grand man in many ways. He must have been. Anyway, Father had long since passed on. Lionel had been back several times to Brighton to look at the grave. Once only he brought flowers, and each time it occurred to him that it was a very small grave for such a stern and strong man to spend his time in. The flowers when he next saw them had turned black. The headstone gave his full name, William Robert Gosling, making no mention of the word ‘father’ at all. In some ways the omission shocked him almost as much as the decayed blossoms. It was as if Father were denying their kinship, as if Father was saying they’d never met.