The night was cold. She stood with her back to the tall black hedge and looked at the house in which her boys slept. They had a routine by now, the three of them, that had been made through the dark nights of that winter. She had put them to bed before seven, read them a story until they were asleep, then closed the book shut and laid it on the table between their two beds, gone out and downstairs, leaving the door open a crack despite the cold of the house, the light on in the passage so that the room would not be dark. Leave the light on, Mummy, won’t you? Jonny always said. This was new, this winter, that he wouldn’t let the house be dark. Of course I’ll leave the light on, I always do. She had bought a night light to put in their room but Richard said that it kept him awake. The light in the passage was a compromise. Night, night, see you in the morning bright, she had murmured, in case one of them was still awake behind his closed eyes. Or was she saying it for herself, to carry herself through to the morning? She had gone downstairs to the kitchen and eaten a little of what she had made for the boys earlier, and spooned what was left into a bowl and covered that with a saucer and put it in the fridge, and cleared the table, and washed up, and tidied, moving this way and that across the kitchen with the radio for company. With only the three of them living in the house the clearing didn’t take up enough time. Then she had called the dog and taken her out. This was one of the things Charlie used to do, taking the dog out before they went to bed. Out the back into the yard. She could see what a fine cold night it was. The stars were bright already. Often she would only stand on the doorstep until the dog had done her business, but this night she had taken her big tweed coat down from the hook by the door, and her hat and gloves from its pockets, and gone outside herself, closing the door on the house and the boys and the warmth. She had walked past the windows of the empty kitchen where the radio still talked, across the lawn that was already crispening with frost.
The hedge was tall behind her, just so much above her head. The dog had run into the flower beds, rustling between the stalks where there must have been some other creature out there besides themselves, or the scent of one at least. The house stood plain against the night sky, the Georgian façade on this side like that of a doll’s house, the window at the end of the passage above the stairs lit bright and a glimmer filtering from the boys’ room. They were there in their beds, exhaling their boys’ breath as they slept. She would look in on them later, tuck them up and breathe in for herself the heavy smell of their sleep. But for now she was cold outside, looking in. As if she might freeze into a pillar before the hedge. She must find herself, pull herself back in, go inside, call the dog in, go back into that light and out of the frost.
Enter the doll’s house, lock the door and bolt it, take off her coat, put fingers through her hair where the hat had pressed it down. The radio was still talking. Switch it off. Turn out the lights. Go upstairs. Tuck in the boys. Hover some moments at their door with the light from the passage behind her. In her bedroom, again, a radio. The Home Service, which talked until midnight and then played the National Anthem and closed down. Reach out into the crackle of emptiness and switch that off too.
Nothing then to mark the passage of the night. Broken sleep tailing away into precarious day. Coming downstairs, putting the kettle on, stoking the Aga. (The stoking had been Charlie’s chore; really she must modernise now that she was on her own.) Waking the boys. Daylight.
The rush of getting them up and off to school.
Two coats.
Two satchels to be found and checked.
Jonny’s turn in the front; Richard in the back.
The day grey. Some of these days were never fully light.
She could quiet their squabbling by having them practise their times tables. Seven sevens are forty-nine. Seven eights are fifty-six.
Behind her, Richard’s voice boomed out. She could let him lead the chant now, sure before his younger brother who became hesitant as the numbers got higher. Nine nines are eighty-one.
Avoirdupois now; weights, pounds and ounces. Even Richard having trouble here. Sixteen ounces, one pound.
She must drive with care on these narrow lanes, reversing to let the milk lorry pass. Measures. One thousand seven hundred and sixty yards, one mile.
A brief silence then, only the sound of the car, the low brick building of the school coming into view, other cars and children ahead of them. She would keep the engine running as they got out and went in the gate, yet holding still a minute longer than was necessary. Until there was no one else to be seen, the doors on the school shut, the yard empty but for the coloured lines painted across it, the other mothers gone. There was only herself, a woman in a stationary car, exhaust clouding in the cold air.
She took the journey home slowly, seeing the frost disperse from the grass and the plough. She noticed the catkins in the hedges which had just begun to loosen and show yellow. It was February. Almost three months gone, the worst of the winter. At a bend in the road she came upon a deer. She was going so slowly there that it was easy to stop. A roe deer, caught in fright, in the centre of the road. She saw the stilled poise of its body, the alertness of its ears, the black depth of its eyes. And what was she? A woman in a car, the engine turning over, exhaust. Was it woman that the deer saw or only car, for all that she felt its look within her? Then it turned its solemn head and slipped sudden and fast as spilled liquid through an opening in the hedge. She watched it run across the bare field in a series of fluid bounds, the white fleck of its rump rising and receding across wet brown soil. And a thought came to her. When Billy comes, she thought, I shall ask him to clear those dead stalks from the borders. Have him clear them now, before the spring. A second deer appeared from behind an oak and crossed the road and entered the field after the first. The brown of its body like that of the other was made distinguishable only by its movement against the plough.
While Billy cut she made a pyre of the stalks and burned them. They flared up and were gone in no time, so long they had been standing.
The borders lay open for the new growth. She could see the blades of bulbs already rising, even the thicker shoots of herbaceous plants emerging, brown shot with red and green, life within them, unravelling, pricking through the clumps.
When she walked the fields the mud weighed on her boots. If the mud clung to your boots the ground was too claggy to work, the men said.
Men spoke spare words. Words with weight and texture to them.
They made her aware of her own apparent lightness. But she was not light inside. She would be hard and heavy as they. Perhaps she always had been, though she had seemed light. Stronger than they knew. She put on lipstick in the hall mirror before she went out to face them. Put a scarf over her hair. Tied it beneath her chin. Spoke those words, firm as they did.
She must speak men’s words to her boys. Plain words, that was what boys needed.
Boys will be boys, people told her. She looked fragile, even if she wasn’t. The scarf, the lipstick, didn’t convince. People gave her their advice. You have to be tough with boys. She couldn’t argue. She had no brothers. She didn’t know boys before she gave birth to them.
They use sticks as guns. You’ll never stop them doing things like that.
She did not like to see them using guns. She would like to have had no gun ever again in the house. But they lived on a farm, and farms had guns and farm boys learnt to shoot, and her boys were boys on a farm and she must bring them up to be like other boys.
Cowboys, holsters at their hips.
Where are the Indians?
Behind the trees.
Usually Richard made Jonny be the Indian but Jonny did not like always to be killed.
There was Jonny tied to the walnut tree, rope wound about him, handkerchief stuffed as a gag in his mouth. He shook his head at her. She removed the gag. He looked afraid. No, put it back, he said, urgency in his voice. So she did that. Boys would be boys. She mustn’t meddle. Was he Indian now, or cowboy? Horse driven away, tied up
beneath a cactus in the desert. Left to rot in the sun.
She found the two of them lying across the drive waiting for the postman to come in his van. We’re dead, Mum. We’re not here, only our bodies. The two of them were lying with eyes closed and arms crossed over their chests. You can tread over us if you like.
The postman screeching to a halt. Off with you, lads, want to get yourselves killed?
That’s how boys are, the other mothers said. Boys fight. Boys play chicken. Boys play dead. Boys leave their clothes on the floor. Break things. Fall out of trees. You can’t stop them being boys. As if the two of them were a single phenomenon. Wake boys, feed boys, send them to school. Fetch them from school, have them do their homework, put them to bed, the two of them in the same room as since Charlie died they would not sleep alone. Richard said that he needed Jonny to tell him stories so that he could sleep, and Jonny generally did what his brother wanted. And after she had said goodnight Jonny began his stories, his little voice piping up over his older brother’s silence. Don’t listen, Mummy, these are boys’ stories. They won’t work if you listen. No, Mummy, I know you’re standing there behind the door. You’re listening. You have to go away.
Only ten minutes, boys. I’ll time you. Then you have to go to sleep.
Often Jonny’s voice would hush only when he heard her footsteps coming back up the stairs.
Jonny says Daddy killed a tiger. When he was lost in the jungle.
Jonny says Daddy was captured by cannibals. That’s not true, is it? If he was captured by cannibals then he would have been eaten, wouldn’t he?
Darling, I don’t know what Daddy did.
You should have asked that man.
Which man?
Daddy’s friend. The lizard man. The one who came to lunch.
Jack Hussey was the only person she knew who knew where he had been. Who might have known what she didn’t.
Jack Hussey had come from Africa in June, the year after. He said that he hadn’t taken a leave back in England in years. He had been thin and dry the time he had come before, the one time that she had met him; and he was the more so now. His hair was almost gone though there was still a biscuity colour to it, his face sallow and deeply lined, his hands freckled and long and bony. He had a way of stretching his fingers out in the sunshine, which she thought might have been to do with the onset of arthritis.
It had been Jonny’s idea to call him the lizard man. Jonny knew about lizards because someone had given him a book about them. He said the man had to go into the sun to warm up. That was why he came in the summer, even though he was Daddy’s friend and the summer was ages after Daddy died. He had to wait for it to be warm.
He had some colonial position up in the hills in Kenya. He said that it suited him. He had been in India before, in the other hills of Nagaland, in the wilds of Assam, and that was where he had met Charlie during the war. That had suited him too, according to what Charlie had said; the highlands, the natives, perhaps the loneliness. All she knew was that he had loved the place but left it heartbroken after Independence. He had come to see them – Charlie, rather – soon after he came back to England, shaken by it, undecided as to where he should go next, considering retirement, leaving their house unexpectedly almost as soon as he had come to it.
Do you know, she said. Did Charlie tell you, the day you left, the time you came before, was the day Richard was born?
He smiled at that. Oh, I had no idea. Then perhaps I did the right thing after all. I left so suddenly, I felt rude doing that, but perhaps it was meant. And as it turns out I haven’t been back to England since.
I’m sorry I couldn’t have come to see you sooner, he said. This was the first long leave I could manage. I’d like to have been at the funeral.
Jonny was right, she thought. It would have been too cold for him in November. The damp chill. A lizard still on the doorstep, seeking the one pale ray of sun. Freezing when the sun left the cold stone.
His expression of condolence was conventional but heartfelt. It was only that the hands that closed around hers were chilly, even in the English summer.
You were married to a good man.
They drank a sherry before lunch. That seemed the right thing to offer, only later she remembered that he had drunk whisky the time he came to see Charlie, and rather a lot of it. The boys were playing out on the lawn.
Your older one has a look of him.
Yes, she said.
They talked of this and that. How things were in England nowadays. How lovely the garden was beyond the open window. After lunch, she said, I’ll take you round, if you like, if there’s time before your train. They talked plants. He said that he grew many of the same things in Kenya; had done in India too, in fact. You could grow all sorts of things up in the hills. Roses he thought grew better in Kenya than almost anywhere else. Ah, she said, with a kind of disappointment. She had thought Africa was all exotics, flame trees and jacarandas. Yes, we have flame trees, but no, it’s not all like that, then he paused and said, I’m sure it’s not like you think, and his faded blue eyes met hers and he wasn’t speaking of gardens any more. There was one thing she wanted to ask, which she thought that he, perhaps, of all Charlie’s friends and acquaintances, might have been most able to answer. She didn’t have to ask it.
It wasn’t the Japs, he said, putting the green sherry glass down on the side table before they went to the dining room to eat. Charlie didn’t have a hard time with the Japs.
She thought of Charlie as he had been in those November days the year before, seemingly absorbed in the work of cultivation, the scent on him of soil and diesel, no sign in him that she could see of any other purpose or preoccupation. And yet …
No, of course, I suppose I knew that, she said; though that wasn’t quite true, perhaps in truth she had allowed herself, almost as a platitude, a commonplace, to blame it on the Japs. I know, she said, it wasn’t as if he was a prisoner or on the railway or anything. Yet somehow she had blamed the Japs. It was easy just to think what others thought, to hear the weight and cruelty in the word as others spoke it in those days, and let its implications carry. To leave it at that, in a simple monosyllable. No need to think further, deeper, for all the decade and more they had lived together.
He had nightmares, you know. He used to wake in the night.
Other women she knew spoke of that, that too something of a commonplace. It was what happened to so many of the men when they came home. So many of the men about them, recovering from the war.
A stalled moment then, before she called the boys and they went to eat. The glasses down on the table, they standing before they moved to the door. Things she wanted to ask but perhaps they were things that couldn’t have been told.
I was never in action, Hussey said. Though I saw quite a bit of the consequences. Some men took it hard. But really, none of it is quite what one thinks.
He stood back to let her through the door first.
There was something else, though, wasn’t there? She might have asked and he might perhaps have told her, but what would she have asked and what did she want to know? It was history now, all history, the war over, he gone, the two of them here, the place where he had been, India, gone too, in a way, no longer that place where he had been, that he had seemed to hold in him.
There was something else, wasn’t there? Out there where you were? That was what she wanted to ask. All she said was, Come again, as she drove him back to the station. The boys had to come in the car with them as there was no one at home to mind them. You must come and see us again, next time you’re in England.
He said that he didn’t have much connection with England any more.
At least the boys weren’t fighting. So often they fought in the back of the car. She took a look behind her. They had the windows wide open and were leaning out, each on his own side, feeling the wind and the land passing. It was so green this moment of the year. Was it as green, she wondered, where Jack Hussey lived? If he could grow
those plants then she supposed it must be, though the Africa she imagined was quite other, vast and brown and open to a blue horizon. She drove on, came to a crossroads, waited for another car to pass. There was so much that she had not asked this man, that she sensed he might have said, if she had asked, and now he was leaving.
So you’ll stay in Kenya?
For the foreseeable future.
But is it safe? I read these awful things in the papers. She had read of an uprising, atrocities, white farmers killed in their beds. It’s frightening, she said, what’s going on.
It’s not what you think, he said. Again, he was saying to her, it’s not what you think. He spoke forgetful of the boys in the back of the car. She supposed that he wasn’t used to being with children, didn’t know how much they picked up in adults’ talk. I know what they say here at home, he said. But it’s not us they’re killing, it’s each other. Blacks being killed, horribly, and blacks killing blacks, not whites. And there’s worse. There are terrible things going on, that don’t get into your papers at home.
Terrible things, he said, looking out of the window at the green land passing. Things you see that you never forget.
Then they were drawing into the station and he was buying his ticket and his copy of The Times, and since they were early they were all of them going onto the platform to say goodbye, as if he was some favourite long-loved great-uncle. She thought how they had spent more time talking of gardens than of what mattered. The other thing. Not only the horror. That she thought she could perhaps imagine. But something else. Whatever it was that Charlie longed for after he had come home. She had seen it, though he had tried to disguise it, some yearning in him. The not wanting to be here, but there, wherever. The same yearning she sensed in Hussey, who seemed anxious again to be gone. She shook his hand again slow and cool in hers, seeing him off back to his blue hills and the boys bringing him tea on the veranda. He was a studious and thoughtful man, Charlie had said, if a little dry and academic, a classicist by training, an ethnographer by inclination. Surely such a man had observed, and could have told her what he and Charlie knew, which he might have explained to her, intelligently and rationally, coolly as a man does who knows Latin and Greek? If she had asked.
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