The Hide

by Barry Unsworth

  What happened at work then, what was that bit of trouble you mentioned? Mortimer said. So I told him how I was with Marion and we thought we was safe right at the other end of the grounds with everyone on the lawn having their tea and waiting for the raffle so we didn’t bother to hide like, not thinking it worth the trouble and not having much time in any case, she only got away for a few minutes, then I happened to look over Marion’s shoulder and there’s Mrs Wilcox standing looking at us in this pointed hat that was not suitable for a woman her age as I thought when I first saw it, God knows how long she had been standing there, she just stood and looked and I could hear her breathing, well more like gasping, and Marion must of sensed something because she stood away from me and we both looked back at Mrs Wilcox. I dunno what she looked like with this dead white face and her lipstick and that hat. Get back to the house, she said to Marion in a voice I never heard her use before, the words come out like spitting and Marion was off like a rabbit, without a word. Mrs Wilcox looked at me for a bit longer and I was expecting her to say you’re sacked but she said nothing just turned away and went back through the bushes. She didn’t seem to look where she was going because she walked right into one bush and then got round it and disappeared. Well it was quarter to five like, so I just packed up and got on the bus and come down to the Pleasure Park and waited in the cafeteria.

  I expect I’ll get my notice tomorrow, I said. No, Mortimer said, I don’t think so. I know the sort she is, I have got her weighed up. I was expecting him to say a good bit more but he didn’t, and that was disappointing because I wanted to hear his views, he might of given me a lead. I’ll be getting back to my digs, he said. By the way, the old girl said I could come to tea, didn’t she? Ask her if I can come next Sunday. Just ask her. All right, I said, I’ll ask her. Will you be able to get off the stall? I’ll fix that, he said. Are you sure you won’t be coming tonight? Yes, I said. I can’t. I got to meet Marion. Cheerio then, he said, and he walked away. I watched him walking away through the crowd. He was taller than most and he kept his head up. There was no one to compare with him like, in all that crowd, and watching him walk away I felt all alone and I thought, What would I do if Mortimer was going for good like, if I was never going to see him again.

  I might as well of gone with them as it turned out, because Marion didn’t come. I waited for her three-quarters of an hour, till the big picture was half over, but she never come. I could still of gone to the Blue Post, it was only half past nine, but I didn’t feel like it, not with Lionel there. I was afraid Mortimer would be different with me again, if Lionel was there. He might make me drink up, like last time. I had a cup a tea and a sandwich, then I went back to my digs. When I got there I found that the qualified engineer that does the Fairy Lights, by name Mr Walker, had gone, and I was sharing with a new bloke, a little bloke from Derbyshire that he told me he was a miner, he had had an accident down the mine and he come for a bit a sea air, a rest cure as you might say.

  I thought at first it was a bit a luck because Mr Walker is a very fat man and he used to take up all the bed, so when I saw this new bloke I thought to myself, this is only a little ’un, like me, he won’t take up so much room, but it turned out worse than ever because he had a bad hip as a result of his accident and every time he laid on it he jumped and groaned like, and it woke me up. Well, this must of happened a dozen times through the night.

  Next day was Sunday. I wasn’t feeling so bright. About one o’clock I went round to the café where Mortimer usually has his lunch but he never come. I thought maybe he was with Lionel somewhere, having his lunch in a different place that Lionel knew about. All afternoon I was walking, on the front mostly. I had three cups a tea at different places. I never went near the stall a course. I was wondering why Marion never come to meet me. But mostly I was thinking about Mortimer and Lionel together on the stall, getting on together. I thought maybe Lionel isn’t just a typical stall attendant after all, maybe Mortimer is taking up with him. It kept coming into my mind, and I wished I hadn’t of argued with Mortimer and contradicted him. Nine o’clock I waited near the entrance to the Ghost Train, just round the corner from it, where the Guess Your Weight man stands. Mortimer has to come past here on his way home. I was going to say, I’ll have a drink with you tonight if you like, but when he come past he had Lionel with him. They was talking together and Lionel was laughing. I did not let on I was there. I went to bed early but I never got much sleep, what with thinking about Mortimer and Lionel, and then this bloke heaving and groaning all night long.

  I never seen Marion till the Monday afternoon. Mrs Wilcox never come near me, she never brought no tea and I did not like to go near the house so I did not get my tea-break. Then about three o’clock Marion come down to where I was working near the front hedge. She was wearing the dress she nearly always wears about the house, pale brown with three-quarter length sleeves and a belt. I was going up to her like, but she said no, don’t, I don’t feel safe any more, since Saturday. I’m sorry I didn’t come on Saturday night, she said. I waited, I said. I waited an hour. Oh I am sorry, she said. I didn’t think you would wait so long. But she was pleased, I could tell. More like an hour and a quarter, I said. What happened, then?

  Well, it was Mrs Wilcox, she said. She never spoke to me or looked at me till after supper. I did the washing up and tidied up in the kitchen as I always do. Then I went upstairs and started getting ready. When I was in the middle of it, the bell rang. I went down to the sitting-room and she was was in an armchair with just one table lamp on and she said, Get me two aspirins will you, I have a terrible headache. So I went and got them and a glass of water and I put them on the table beside her. She had her eyes closed all this time. I was going away again when she said, Please don’t go. She must have heard me. Stay and talk to me, she said. I didn’t say anything straightaway and she opened her eyes and looked at me, well she must have noticed that I had changed my dress because she said, Are you going out? I said, Yes, it is Saturday night. Oh yes, she said. I had forgotten that. She was as white as a sheet. Marion, she said, since your mother died I have felt as it were, responsible for you. I stand to you instead of a parent, she said and I don’t want you to think I haven’t got your interests at heart, you are so young and inexperienced and there are people who would take advantage of that. Life is full of pitfalls she said, for a young girl like you. Are you going anywhere special? she said. Only to the pictures, I said. She closed her eyes again. I asked her if there was anything else and she said no, so I went back upstairs. Then half an hour later, I was just about ready to go, she rang again. She was still sitting there, the aspirins were still there beside her. Marion, she said, I want you to stay at home with me tonight. I am feeling unwell, she said, and I need you here. She said this in a sharpish sort of way and I was going to say well, it is Saturday, but when I looked at her face I saw she had been crying. Just sitting there crying to herself. Well I wanted to see you, I really did, but I had no choice really. I had to stay with her.

  Yes, I said, a course, that’s all right. What was the matter with her, then? Oh, she said, she cheered up after that, she didn’t say much to me at all. I sat there listening to the wireless and she played patience.

  She wanted you to stay in so she could play patience? It don’t make no sense to me, I said. Anyway, never mind, there is always another time. I don’t want to meet you in the grounds any longer, not after what has happened, she said. You see that don’t you. But I can’t go all day, I said, without seeing you. Do you really mean that? she said. A course I do, I said. How can I go a whole day without seeing you? I wish I knew if you meant it, she said. Honest, I said. Honest I mean it. You don’t look so well yourself, she said. Your eyes are a bit bloodshot. Have you been drinking? No, I said, it’s not drinking, I haven’t been getting my sleep. I told her about the new bloke I was sharing with. I made it seem funny like, imitating how he heaves and groans, and she laughed quite a bit. It is funny, I can make people laugh sometimes,
but I can never make Mortimer laugh. He don’t laugh often a course. You will have to change your sleeping partner, she said. Yes, I said, I’d like to do that, and I gave her a look. Who would you like to have instead? she said, pretending not to know what I meant. You know who I’d like to have, I said. No, I don’t, she said. If you don’t you ought to by now, I said. Would you sleep any better? she said, and I tried to get my arms round her, but she stepped back. I’d better be going, she said. It’s time I was getting the tea. But where can I see you? I asked her, if you don’t want to come into the grounds. She looked at me a minute, still laughing like, from what we’d been saying, then while she looked at me her face went serious and I could see in them big brown eyes of hers that she really liked me. I know a place, she said.

  Simon . . .

  WHOSE THE WINNING number was I never sought to enquire. I did not return to the garden party after betraying Marion and the gardener to Audrey. I was too overwrought. I spent the remainder of the afternoon and the evening in my room. So I do not know how she managed the situation, how she conducted herself among the guests afterwards. That my plan had failed, however, that she had not dismissed the gardener, became clear to me during the following week as I watched him go about his business quite as if nothing had happened. She appeared to avoid him for a day or two, but my hopes were finally dashed on Wednesday morning when I saw them sitting together on the terrace looking at a book, one of those books which are now lying everywhere about the house, large and lavishly illustrated, dealing with Roman coins or Etruscan figurines or Hellenistic bronzes. The gardener’s education had obviously been recommenced. On Thursday evening he stayed on after work and was given drinks in the drawing-room.

  Audrey at this time took to dressing more youthfully, in square-necked, short-sleeved blouses and high-heeled shoes. She wore her hair too in a softer way now, not drawn back but framing her face. She did not, however, regain the look of happiness that she had had before the garden party. Her mouth seemed to have thinned, lost fullness, and there was a constant slight furrow of harassment at the point where the top of her nose merged into her brow. She was not exactly more amiable in her manner towards me, but vague—as if I did not really impinge very much on her consciousness, as if I were some faintly disagreeable entity on the fringes. The time for me to leave the house was well past, but she did not refer to it, seeming in fact to have quite forgotten that there had ever been any question of my leaving. I kept out of her way as much as possible so that the sight of me should not remind her. The days passed and she said nothing and I began to lose my fear. All I had to do now, I felt, was get rid of the gardener and my life could follow its accustomed courses.

  With this end in view I kept a close watch on the movements of Marion and the gardener but did not again succeed in surprising them together. They seemed, in fact, to have stopped meeting.

  In the grounds he had worked to some effect on the periphery: he had clipped the hedges all the way round and along the front of the grounds where they abut on the road had cleared a belt of about fifty yards in length and a dozen in depth; also he had cleared the edges of the drive and reset the kerb stones and from among the trees he had collected dead wood, sawn it up and stacked it in one of the outhouses at the back. But the interior of the grounds, beneath which my tunnel lay, from the area of the pond back on the right side of the drive up to the beginning of the birches, was a wilderness still; now at the height of its tangled luxuriance, its summer apotheosis. Within this area the germination was almost overpowering. Bees tumbled madly about among the convolvulus, the great swathes of honeysuckle, the bramble flowers; blue and orange dragon-flies darted over the vivid green weeds at the edge of the pond; briar and bramble shoots lay athwart one’s path with thorns like arrowheads often concealed in tangles of grass and willowherb and cow parsley, while underlying this rankness, like a reminder of a more elegant epoch, one was aware at times of Howard’s cultivation, rose and magnolia and peony continued to flower, and from the herb garden, invaded now by chickweed and dandelion, the indomitable odours of mint and lavender added to the effluvium.

  I continued to spend certain parts of each day crouched in my corner of the grounds with the field-glasses, perpetually harassed by small clouds of flies, straining to watch through whortleberry and hazel the activities of the woman in the bungalow. In the heat she wore loose dresses insecurely attached and nothing of much opacity beneath, so that for considerable periods I was racked between divining and seeing her nudity. Once when she was standing on a chair, cleaning her large front window, perhaps it was something to do with the glass against which she was standing, or perhaps she had indeed omitted to wear underclothes—it being so hot and she so far from the road—I was able swooningly to discern through her white dress a pubic darkness. That was a highlight, of course.

  Also I watched the young robins, fledged now, cheeping and fluttering about in the hedge near the nest, with the thrushlike striations down the breast which showed their immaturity. There were still only four of them. I never did find out what had become of the fifth. My hide was still in position and I should have liked to study their feeding patterns now they were out of the nest, but the gardener was always somewhere about and I could never really relax sufficiently.

  At the end of the week, on the Sunday afternoon, the gardener brought a friend to the house. I did not see them arrive, but when I emerged on to the drive at the side of the lawn I saw the three of them—the gardener, Audrey and another man—having tea on the terrace. My first instinct was to pass on down the drive, affecting not to have seen them—I knew that Audrey would acquiesce quite gladly in that course of action—but it was too great a departure from the normal; I had to know what it meant, moreover I was properly dressed for once, so I stopped and looked across and smiled, and smiled again and waved until my sister was obliged to smile back and as soon as she did this I went up the steps on to the terrace.

  ‘Josiah, of course, you know,’ Audrey said, in her most patrician tones. Her face was very flushed. ‘And this is Josiah’s friend, Mr Cade, this is my brother.’ I did not offer to shake hands, such contacts are distasteful to me, but I nodded with a benign intention. The young man’s face did not appear to have adapted itself yet to the presence of a fourth person. Nothing at all had happened on that face during my appearance on the terrace and the introduction and my sociable response. It had regarded me solemnly, indeed rather grimly. ‘How do you do?’ it said now. A long big-nosed face with very definite features, a curiously bloodless-looking mouth, steady grey eyes. He was sitting stiffly, but not in any apparent discomfort, in one of the basket chairs my sister had deemed appropriate for the terrace. His body was thick and square-shouldered. There was an undeniable power and even authority in his posture, in the way that, by refusing to recline in his chair, he rejected it and us all. He was several years older than Josiah.

  ‘I was just remarking to Josiah, as we came down your drive,’ he said, in a rather harsh voice, with an indefinable accent, clipped and Northern but difficult to identify precisely, ‘it must be very satisfying, in this day and age, to have your own private park.’ It was difficult to know whether this was intended seriously. His face did not relax when he spoke nor when his remark was greeted by my sister with fluttering, unnatural laughter. ‘What a quaint way to describe it,’ she said, and I should have known by this remark, even if there had been no other indications, that she was inwardly disarranged, not properly in control: to criticise the mode of expression of such a person was a major blunder, even if, as now became apparent, she disliked him.

  He looked at her deliberately and she at him. She was still flushed and wore the remnants of that false merriment still on her face, and the antagonism between them was suddenly palpable. Then he looked away at Josiah and smiled, showing discoloured teeth. ‘Quaint,’ he said. ‘That’s a good word. There’s enough land here for a housing estate.’ The gardener smiled back immediately. I had not believed him capable of so much
animation. His blue eyes glittered and he was looking at all our faces in turn.

  ‘Isn’t this land then?’ Mr Cade said, indicating the area behind him by jerking his head. ‘Aren’t you the proprietor of it?’

  ‘It’s only an oversized garden really,’ Audrey said. She had stopped smiling herself now, and her face looked blank as though at some private consternation. It was funny really, difficult to avoid smiling when I thought of how Audrey must have reacted in the first place to the suggestion of entertaining this person to tea. Oh yes, that is a nice idea Josiah, by all means ask your friend for Sunday, I should very much like to meet him. You assumed of course that some awed, deferential little creature would turn up, to whom you could have dispensed largesse, consolidating at the same time your influence over the gardener. How could you have envisaged any friend of his capable of disparaging you? Capable, moreover, of this sustained disparagement which compels you to be explicit in denying the very pretensions you had hoped over the tea cups so graciously to convey. Really it was funny. . . .

  ‘Snakes,’ the gardener’s friend said in his harsh voice. ‘Aren’t you the gentleman who told Josiah there were deadly snakes hereabouts in large numbers?’ For a moment or two I did not realise that he was speaking to me. Then I was thrown into considerable confusion, and did not know how to reply.

  ‘That’s right,’ Josiah said. ‘Small but deadly snakes you said, particularly in the shrubbery, you said.’

  ‘There are no snakes in this type of country,’ Mr Cade said, rather derisively it seemed to me. ‘It is too much frequented.’

  ‘Too much what?’ Audrey said. ‘What is this about snakes, Simon? Anyway, never mind, what I really wanted to ask you Mr Cade is whether you realise that Josiah is a very talented young man. With training and encouragement I think he could be a considerable artist. I know something about these matters and I give that as my definite opinion.’