The Hide

by Barry Unsworth

  Fosh . . .

  I NEVER SHOULD of told Mortimer in the first place. Now I dunno what to do. It was just one time when I thought I caught him out like. He said you could tell by watching them walk. Well, I said to him, that is not the case with Marion, it is not appliable. And I told him we done it three times. It was true in a way a course, but he took me up on it. Three times, he said, she would not have let you in three times if she was not used to the chopper, she would have been too sore, Josiah. Besides, he said, what is sexual intercourse?

  I thought he would of been glad. But he took the point of view of a realist. As soon as I finished telling him he started taking the realist point of view. What I didn’t know then was that he had meant it, he had meant what he said about sharing. He had been meaning it all the time. What is sexual intercourse? he said, and he got the same look on his face as when we done that to the bird, before we done it, I mean, while we was talking, exactly the same, and the funny thing was I started feeling the same as I done before, sort of guilty and out of breath, before he even said anything, just from the look on his face and believe it or not I started getting a hard on again, not completely, it just went half stiff, then stopped. I ask you, he said. What is sexual intercourse, what does it consist of? A man and a woman having it, I said. That is only one aspect, he said. You are overlooking buggery and soddery, Josiah. There are people, he said, who regularly have sexual intercourse with a loaf of bread. Never mind, it is sufficient for our purpose. Now tell me, is it brief or of long duration? It is brief, I said. Momentary, the pleasure is momentary, he said. Is it minds or bodies that perform it? Bodies, I said. Very well then, he said, it is one organ achieving a degree of penetration into another organ, that is all. Can you say it is more than that? I suppose not, I said. In that case, he said, it doesn’t matter whose organ it is, does it? I suppose not, I said.

  I will never forget that conversation with Mortimer, standing there, watching his face, waiting for what was coming and feeling sort of tightened up. We was standing against the railing that runs along the promenade. Thursday night it was, Mortimer’s night off. About six, sun well down, they was coming up off the beach with their deck chairs. If I were down to my last crust, Mortimer said, I would share it with you, Josiah. Well, I know that’s true. Is it a go then? he said. What? I said. You know, he said. Doing like the Communists, share and share alike. You mean with Marion, I said. None other, he said.

  Well, I seen from his face that he meant it and a course Mortimer never changes, once his mind is made up, you will never find him wavering like, never. I thought it was something to do with what I told him before, I thought I had brought it all on myself by exaggerating like, so I started trying to tell him what actually happened. As a matter a fact, I said, we never done it three times. We only done it once and it hurt her, I said. That is neither here nor there, he said. That is a mere detail. I hope you are not going to take the sentimentalist point of view, he said.

  Just then one of the blokes working on the deck chairs that I knew a bit come up to us and said he had run out of fags. They was all coming in off the beach with their chairs asking for their deposit money back so he didn’t have no time to go and buy a packet. Mortimer does not smoke a course, but I give him one, and it give me time to think a bit. I said, supposing she don’t want to? But Mortimer only smiled. What I was meaning was that it was not just a question of organs and penetration, but Marion had a will of her own. Suppose she don’t want to, I said. You just let me know, he said, the next time you are going down into the bushes with her, just you give me a bit of notice.

  It was then I started feeling really scared. Up till then I had been thinking in the back of my mind, it don’t matter, it don’t mean nothing, Marion would never agree to such a thing. I mean, I think she was impressed with Mortimer’s intellect and powers of conversation but she said to me several times he was not her type and she never liked it if I talked about Mortimer to her. But now I could see it did not make no difference whether she agreed or not.

  But Mortimer, I said, if we done that we would have to get out. And I looked into his face, hoping to see he was having me on all the time, because I could swear on the Bible that the idea of it didn’t have no appeal to me at all, them sort of things is not in my nature. Mortimer was looking very serious now. That’s all right, he said. Time for a change anyway. You and me on the road together, Josiah, just the two of us together. The day after we do it we’ll get off on the road, bright and early.

  Just you and me? I said. Certainly, he said. Well, it was what I had always thought about, me and him travelling together, just the two of us. I even pictured what clothes we would be wearing, things like that. Well, I dunno, I said.

  As a matter a fact there was another feeling growing up in my mind all this time, and that was surprise. The thing that Mortimer was suggesting was somehow or other surprising, I did not know why at the time, I only knew it wasn’t what I would ever of expected of him, it didn’t go with his character, not this particular thing. For instance when we done that to the bird there was nothing surprising in it at all, it was something that had to happen. But this was different.

  Listen, Mortimer said, you have got to see things steadily and see them whole. It is only a corporeal question, he said. That is what you must get into your noddle, Josiah. If you take the philosophical view, he said (I am giving his own words now). And that is why I want you to be there and see it happening, so that you will be able to take the philosophical and realist view in future, and understand it is only organs. We will despatch into limbo, he said, all this romantic sludge. I dunno what you mean, I said. Define your terms. In any case, I said, I don’t want to do it.

  Oh, you don’t, don’t you? he said. Take Lionel now, there is a case in point. Oh yes, I said. Lionel is a realist, he said, after a fashion. He is leaving soon. Oh, I said, I didn’t know that. Yes, he said, he is fed up with the stall and I cannot find it in my heart to blame him. He tried to fiddle a few bob the other day, and old Mrs Morris caught him out. Now he is feeling a bit disenchanted. He is going to Skegness where according to him the streets are paved with gold. He wants me to go with him. Oh yes, I said. Are you going then? I was trying to speak casual like, but my mouth got that numb feeling straight off, thinking about him and Lionel together.

  Well I don’t know really, Mortimer said. It depends on you. Then I saw what he meant, he would go with Lionel if I didn’t agree to this other thing, and I knew in that moment that I had made a big mistake only telling Mortimer the facts about Marion and not trying to make him see her as a real person like. I should of told him more about her feelings, like the way she makes herself into two persons when she is having a bath, them sort of things. Then she would of been a real person to Mortimer like she was to me and he would not of had this idea.

  Listen Mortimer, I started trying to say, but my face didn’t feel like it belonged to me by this time, listen, you know one funny thing Marion said, she said how do the clouds keep the rain in? They must have skins, she said, or they couldn’t keep the rain in. . . .

  I was trying to catch up but a course it was no use, I should of been telling Mortimer these kind of things ever since I first met Marion. His face did not change at all, and all he said was, You’d better make up your mind, Josiah.

  I dunno what to do now. Last night after I left him I walked round for hours, thinking what to do. There is no one to ask.

  Simon . . .

  IT MAY SEEM strange but I did not at that time associate Audrey’s outburst of weeping with the Major’s visit at all. I had seen knowledge in her face when she refused to follow me any further; and because I was myself occupied with the problem of ousting the gardener, I tended to relate my sister’s behaviour to him. I thought simply that she had suppressed her feelings during the visit for propriety’s sake and that immediately on the Major’s departure they had risen to the surface.

  It was not until some weeks afterwards when my sister was almost well a
gain, though, of course, permanently disabled, that I learnt what the visit had been about. Audrey herself never once mentioned it though she proved willing enough to discuss other things that had happened during this period.

  I had gone down to the Post Office to despatch some letters for Audrey, who though strong enough now to get about herself, still evinced a strong reluctance to appear in public; understandably enough, in view of her appearance and the rumours that had been circulating. So I used to go out and do these little errands for her. I met the Major while I was standing at the far end of the counter licking stamps and sticking them on the envelopes. We were both dressed in mackintoshes as the weather had turned rainy, and he wore in addition a fawn corduroy cap. It was the cap I became aware of first, hovering, as it were, beyond my right shoulder, then I detected the Major beneath it. ‘How are you, ugh, ugh?’ I said, immediately beginning to emphasise by a series of grimaces the unpleasant taste of the glue on the stamps. Such encounters are hurdles after all, at least they are so to me, one must get over them somehow, and the more activity generated, by gesture, grimace or contortion, the better and easier it all seems to go, by the time physical order has been restored, the encounter is over, people are saying farewell, hurrying off. Or so it seems to me. For this reason I made moues of distaste throughout the Major’s opening remarks. He asked after Audrey and said how sorry and so forth and his eyes under the cap did not look happy. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Yes, well . . . of course, it was to all of us, ugh, ugh. . . .’

  ‘Stamps have a nasty taste, have they?’ he said, very sympathetically as though it were part of the condolences. He stood by, coughing and touching his moustache while I finished the letters, then he accompanied me out on to the pavement. Here we stood for some minutes more.

  ‘I feel myself partly responsible,’ he said. ‘To some extent that is. Just before your sister . . . some days before it happened, I had the unpleasant duty . . . as chairman of the committee. . . .’ He looked sideways at me and I nodded and smiled a thin distasteful smile.

  ‘Surely not,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I am still chairman.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I meant surely not responsible.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘She was very keen, we all know that. And of course had I known at the time how seriously she would take it. . . . The fact is, it fell to my lot to tell her that the producer wanted her out of the play. Insisted. Yes. No, she had no acting ability whatever. Not a scrap, you know. We had only just engaged the producer and we didn’t want to upset him over the first play he was putting on, Ibsen’s Ghosts it was, your sister was to have played Mrs Alving. The part was beyond her you know. Quite beyond her. I went along. . . . It fell to my lot to go along one afternoon and tell her. She didn’t seem to take it too badly at the time. But it occurred to me afterwards you know, perhaps it weighed on her. . . .’

  He looked at me again, almost furtively. He wanted to be told by me, the next of kin, that he was not to blame. I remember the squeezed look on his face as he went up the drive that day, holding the carnations. Why that look, as of someone breaking bad news, if he hadn’t known how seriously she would take it. . . ? The committee had known perfectly well how much she minded, but had preferred to placate their producer, some small-time actor out of work, who would normally have been washing dishes at one of the hotels on the front. I had after all been fighting for my life, whereas the committee. . . .

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘What you told her probably had its effect.’

  It occurred to me now that other people might well have been conducting a campaign against Audrey. Other than myself, I mean. How did I know for example that this visit of Major Donaldson, in the course of which he had destroyed my sister’s dramatic ambitions, was not simply one stroke in a calculated series—the only one in which he had been detected? Looking now at his moustache, his full red lower lip—somewhat fuller than formerly with umbrage at the tone I had taken—it seemed to me likely enough that he had been machinating against Audrey. Perhaps Gravelin had too, and Dovecot and Miriam and even a person like Spink. Perhaps everybody was machinating against everybody else, by accident the attacks on my sister had been too concerted, she had succumbed.

  ‘It must have seemed very ungrateful to her,’ I said. ‘Particularly after the way she had worked for your wretched—for the Dramatic Society, which I must say I thought exercised an, er, baneful, influence on her from the beginning. Don’t forget the garden party, the way she organised that raffle. You would otherwise have had to hire a hall, Major Donaldson.’

  ‘I am not likely to forget,’ he said, in a tone which was now so full of anger that I felt frightened. Nevertheless I felt impelled to go on, mainly I think to allay my own feelings of guilt about Audrey but at least partly in repudiation of the Major’s obvious belief that in such situations a gentleman does not gratuitously exacerbate another gentleman’s bad conscience.

  ‘And then to be cast off,’ I said. ‘Like an, er, old boot. Ugh! No, my dear Major, I’m afraid you must be held in part responsible. . . .’

  This was only after all what he had begun by saying, but he gave me an outraged glare. ‘Very well, sir,’ he said. ‘Very well.’ And he turned on his back and went off at a spanking pace up the High Street.

  This happened a good three weeks after the event. And so, that afternoon, watching the mystic obeisances of my sister’s weeping, her wet, blind face, I attributed everything to her feelings about the gardener. This ignorance I urge in my turn as an extenuating circumstance. It was no part of my intention to drive Audrey to any desperate action. I wished only to ensure the dismissal of the gardener. . . .

  Later that afternoon it rained quite heavily. Audrey remained in her room. There was no sign of Marion anywhere downstairs either. I wandered round the house rather aimlessly for a bit. I thought of going out into the grounds but it was still raining, a thin steady rain now, that showed no signs of abating. The gardener was nowhere about and I supposed he had gone home. I was thinking of going upstairs myself, when I heard voices from above. I went out into the passage that leads to the back of the house. I advanced a few paces towards the back stairs. From here the voices were louder, I could distinguish Audrey’s sharp tones and Marion’s more muted ones, but the words were impossible to make out. My sister’s voice rose, fell, rose again. A door shut sharply. The voices stopped. I went hastily back into the drawing-room where I stood looking out through the french window at the rain. After a few minutes someone entered the room. I turned and it was Marion. She was very flushed and I saw after a moment that she was close to tears. Evidently Audrey had been upbraiding her. She smiled at me in her usual uncertain way and said she had left her knitting somewhere.

  ‘What is the matter?’ I asked her. I have a soft spot for Marion, though lately she has begun to horrify me rather; the light-coloured clothes she wears have become associated in my mind with sacrifices and also grave linen. She has lain in the gardener’s embrace, in her white dress, with her shoe dangling off. I cannot at all reconcile this image with her present one, flushed and weepy, bony-shouldered, looking for her knitting. She was also the creature in that charmed area of the bushes, lying there, the smoke from his cigarette curling up, the sun glossing the leaves. It suddenly brought home to me how inscrutable we human creatures are, what a mystery inheres in every follicle.

  ‘What is the matter?’ I said, but she only shook her head, and smiled again and went out.

  Fosh . . .

  I WALKED ROUND a long time, trying to think what I should do. I couldn’t think of nothing. The bloke with the bad hip woke me up early, it was just getting light. He went back to sleep again but I couldn’t. I started thinking again. Then it come to me all of a sudden that Mortimer might of been right about her way of walking. I mean I argued with him and contradicted him like because he said it in front of Lionel, he was taking the piss. I didn’t argue with him about her way of walking, not really. It is not a thing you take a lo
t of notice of anyway, not unless there is something special about it, like a limp, say. But after I thought for a bit I seemed to remember that Marion does walk with her knees turned out a bit. And if it is really true what Mortimer said, and I got no reason to disbelieve it except it seemed to hurt her when we done it, a course she could of been putting that on. . . . If it is really true then maybe it don’t matter so much, I mean maybe it would not matter so much to her. But why should she of been putting it on? . . . Mortimer and Lionel off up the motorway, off up to Skegness. He would turn Mortimer against me, Mortimer would be sorry we was ever friends. . . . She does walk funny, more I think of it. . . . No good saying she could of had Plastic Surgery, she probably couldn’t afford it, you can’t get it done on the National Health. . . . And why did she want to go down there in the first place? Into them bushes. It was her that suggested it. Asking for trouble. I might of been anybody. That means she don’t care who it is so long as she gets it and that is just what Mortimer says. I see now that Mortimer is right. I can see it from the realist point of view it is just a question of organs. So long as I don’t think about them eyes of hers looking at me, only at me, when she said she knew a place. . . . Mortimer will make me stay and watch, I know he will. Friday, three o’clock.

  Simon . . .

  THIS MORNING IS fresh and odorous after the rain in the night. Walking through the grounds I get the cuffs of my trousers stuck all over with wet grass seeds. There is a blackbird singing somewhere close by, as I take up my position in the corner of the grounds. Across the fields the bungalow sleeps. The early sun shines gently on its bow windows, gleams on its grey slate roof. The field between it and me is darkened with wet, thick with daisies and meadowsweet. Beyond is the great sweep of the cornfield, a uniform green-gold to the horizon now that the poppies and cornflowers have been submerged by the rising tide of wheat; the whole extent of it shimmers in the sunshine, simmers in the light wind, a spectacle of great beauty. From among and beyond it the songs of yellow hammers and larks tangling together so that individual accents are not distinguishable. Dove-grey clouds round the sun, thinning from moment to moment. It is going to be a glorious day.