The Centre of the Green

by John Bowen

  All through the next two days, the feeling of a gap persisted. He tried to push it away into the back of his mind, but this sort of mental gymnastic is bound to fail, since the act of pushing only involves one further in the thing pushed. So he gave up, and decided to analyse his uneasiness instead. It was shame, he decided—shame at having run away. During these meetings, the other members of the group had each stood up to many attacks, but he had run away at the first skirmish. You get right back on that horse, son, or you’ll never ride again.

  It was no worse than the dentist. The group touched on one’s privacy as the dentist sometimes touched a nerve. One’s immediate reaction was to kick. That was natural enough. They were used to that. They expected that. Each of them had done some kicking of his own. But the nerve would be touched; there was no avoiding that.

  So I do not communicate, he thought. That state was not likely to change. He could not feel an involvement with these people. But he could pretend. He could go through the motions, counterfeiting involvement by skilful anticipation. He would pretend involvement, even though the only involvement he felt was to himself, a responsibility to finish what he had begun. He would not be driven away.

  Next Friday he arrived at the Institute a little early. He did not offer an explanation for his absence from the Tuesday meeting, and nobody said anything about it. They did not discuss Charles at all. It was Myra’s turn in the middle for most of their meeting; she had arrived without a hat, and wearing flat shoes. David kept trying to divert the group’s attention from Myra by complaining that nobody ever took any notice of him. He had been reading Arthur Miller’s plays, and he kept repeating, “A man’s got to have respect,” and, “Attention must be paid”. Most of the group was in general agreement with this principle, but Bill Waters said that he personally felt like the man on the wireless; it depended what David meant by respect, and did David mean what he meant, or did David just mean flattery, which was what Bill Waters suspected he meant?

  After the meeting was over, Charles felt a touch on his arm. It was Curly. “I hope you don’t mind me telling you,” Curly said, “but I been thinking a lot about you, Charles. What I mean, it’s no good talking about it really—not yet anyway. But anyway what I think is you need a sort of a shock like. Sort of shake you out of yourself like, and start you going. That might do it.”

  Charles said, “Thank you, Curly. I’ll see what I can do about it.”

  Tap! tap! A blind man’s white stick on the stone flags of his cottage. The closing of the kitchen door behind him. The groaning hinges of the garden gate, which was always kept unoiled so that the blind man had warning of visitors. Tap! through the gate and on to the road, and tap! tap! down the road to the corner.

  Overhead the sun shone from a cloudless sky. The time was high morning. A cat was sleeping on the garden wall. Sparrows perched on the telegraph wires. The pillar-box on the corner was a scarlet splash among the green of the hedges, the grey metal of the road. The blind man saw none of this.

  He could hear the noise of a motor approaching; it was the butcher’s van. The white stick swept forward into the road. The van stopped. A strong arm and the scent of raw meat helped the blind man into the front seat beside the driver. A jerk and roar as the van started again. The fumes of petrol vapour and warm leather. The sound of the wind rushing by. A pig farm. Hay.

  The butcher’s van was bound only to Garrett Apple-down. Once more the blind man stood by the road, listening for a lift. He had not been out of his own village since 1943, when he returned from the war which took his sight, but he was recognized. Ruth Bidford at the shop knew everybody from six villages around. What was he doing away from home? She had tea ready; a cup would do him good; he wasn’t looking so well as he should. But he refused the tea. Ruth Bidford stayed to question him. Where was he going? She didn’t like to see him standing by the roadside in the heat of the morning, and no bus nor nothing due. She sent a child up the road to her nephew, Sam, who would be home for his dinner, and had a motor bike. The arrival of the bike. The blind man climbed on to the pillion, his white stick held under his arm, both hands gripping Sam tightly by the waist.

  Sam had never ridden before with a pillion passenger who couldn’t see the corners coming. It made him feel strange like. He put the blind man down at Colonel Baker’s gate, saying, “I’ll be getting along then,” but the blind man said, “No. Come with I.”

  Tap! of the stick on the gravel. The blind man walked erect, and behind him came Sam, ill at ease and perplexed. Colonel Baker saw them, and moved to wards them across the lawn. “Hullo,” he said. “Looking for me?”

  The blind man stopped, and turned towards the Colonel, holding his stick in front of him like an antenna. As the Colonel reached the edge of the lawn, the stick jabbed towards him. “Hold on!” he said. “Almost had me then, eh?”

  “You’re the Colonel, ain’t you? His father. I got something to say to you.”

  At the words “his father”, Colonel Baker had the feeling of an impending shock, that tiny fragment of time before catastrophe, as when the old woman has already stepped off the curb, the car is travelling too fast to stop, and we do not even know what will happen, but only that something is about to happen. So the Colonel, at those words, felt the world go still about him, and only said, “Julian?”

  “You better keep him at home. What do you think I am?—a bloody fool?” Standing behind the blind man, Sam shifted his feet in discomfort. This was not the language to use to a gentleman, even one without the power of a gentleman. “You tell him he can keep his f——ing books and his f——ing reading an’ all. I know his kind.”

  “What?”

  “I come here to tell you to your face. You ought to be f——ing ashamed. What’s he think he’s playing at, eh? Bloody sex-mad, that’s what it is. What you going to do about it?”

  “I?”

  Mrs. Baker looked out of an upstairs window, and called to her husband. “What’s the matter? Justin, what does this man want?”

  “Wants bloody thrashing.” The blind man was shouting now, and the words thickened and grew hoarse as his rage mounted. Small flecks of foam appeared at the corners of his mouth, and on his throat above the collarless flannel shirt. “Where is he? I come here to give him a bloody hiding. You tell me where he is. Don’t you f——ing try to stop me, I tell you straight. Where is he?”

  “Justin! Justin!” from the upper window.

  Sam, listening to everything that was said, red-faced, gaping, storing it away to tell later.

  The white stick, raised in the air, divided suddenly, blurring into a dozen sticks, like a multiple exposure. Sam’s face—many faces—bits of faces. Everything that had been so clear and sharp on this sunny morning, now broken like a reflection on water disturbed by a stone. “Don’t understand,” the Colonel said. There was a constriction in his forehead—no, not just a constriction, but something alive and bursting to get out. Pain in the head. Everything broken up. Then darkness. “I’m blind,” he said. “I’m as blind as you are,” and fell to the ground, unconscious.

  “Poor old gentleman. He’ve had a stroke, I reckon,” Sam said to the blind man. “You didn’t ought to have gone on at him like that. You better stay where you are, and I’ll go for the doctor.”

  *

  It was Saturday. Mrs. Baker put in a personal telephone call to Charles as soon as the cheap rates came on that evening. “We’re in terrible trouble, dear,” she said. “It’s about your brother. Can you come down tonight?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I can’t talk about it on the telephone, dear.”

  “I’ll come by the midnight train.”

  “Oh…. And Charles.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something else, dear. Your father’s had a stroke.”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing serious, but you must be careful not to worry him. He’s in bed now. The doctor’s been.”

  “Good God!�
�

  “Yes, it’s very upsetting. There’s the pips. Must ring off, darling. I’ll leave the back door open.”

  Charles heard her replace the receiver. “Christ!” he said. A shock. Was this it? He had no strong feeling of love, or even of affection, for the father he had hardly known during his growing years. Besides, he had broken away from all that; he had no share in that any more. Only—and this was what disturbed him—he had never before thought of the Colonel as mortal.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  More Conversation than Pictures

  Colonel Baker’s room was at the back of the house. It was a small room, sparsely furnished. The floor was of polished boards; a small Numdah rug lay beside the bed. The bedstead was of iron. The Colonel had bought it at a sale for fifteen shillings, and it fitted him, being simple and spare and only a little larger than he was himself. The Colonel’s suits were kept in a wardrobe at the top of the stairs, and his old woollen dressing-gown hung on a hook behind the door, so that the only other furniture the room contained was a small chest-of-drawers painted white by the Colonel himself. On this were kept his military brushes and a black plastic comb, a glass of water for his teeth, a bottle of Vaseline Hair Tonic, a framed photograph of his wife, Wells’ Outline of History, The Origin of Life (condensed), and two cheap brown books published in the thirties by The Thinkers’ Library. Colonel Baker had carried these books with him for many years, to bolster what, when you examined it, was no more than a prejudice, for the Colonel’s free-thinking was not an intellectual attitude; it was a simple emotional dislike of cant.

  Since there were no chairs in the room, Charles sat on the window-sill. “Hello, Father,” he said. “Thought I’d come up and see how you were.”

  The Colonel pulled himself up in bed. He said, “Wondered if you would, so I put my teeth in. Chaps have to keep up a front, you know.” The Colonel wore striped flannel pyjamas, and looked clean. Charles was reminded of the old men in hospital, sitting up in just the same way, bright and fragile and waiting for someone to notice them.

  “I’d get up now if your mother would let me,” the Colonel said. “I’ll get up tomorrow anyway. Don’t like staying in bed. Nothing to do.”

  Chaps have to keep up a front, Charles thought sadly. Keeping up a front in this isolated family was something one did all the time. Only the Colonel, even after so long, was not good at it. His jocularity was always a little tentative. But all Charles said was, “I expect she feels you ought to be careful. You gave us all rather a shock.”

  “Did I? Sorry about that. Any thing’s a shock though, if you’re used to something different. I mean, if a branch breaks off a tree in a storm, that’s a shock to chaps who are used to seeing the branch around, but it doesn’t hurt the tree much. Like me. Nothing serious. Chaps say I mustn’t get excited, that’s all—lets loose a lot of chemicals from the glands or something—I don’t really understand it. Gist of it is that if I stay clear of all the ordinary human emotions, I’ll live to be a hundred.”

  “It was this business about Julian brought it on then? Or would you rather not talk about that?”

  “Embarrassing. Makes you feel such a fool—falling down in a fit with everyone looking on. Thought chaps only did it in books. I mean, real fits happen in the loo, or climbing a hill or something like that. All this bearer-of-bad-tidings stuff went out long ago.”

  “Mother asked me to come down, but I don’t know what she expects me to do.”

  “She hasn’t said anything?”

  “Only that you weren’t to be worried.”

  “Oh!” A pause. “And Julian?”

  “He’s reading in the living-room. He says he’s not going back to his teaching job. He won’t even go into the village—won’t go out of the house, as far as I can gather. He says he doesn’t want to see anybody, and he won’t talk about it. You might call it sulking, but it’s more as if he thinks he can make it not have happened simply by not recognizing it.”

  “I am worried, you know,” the Colonel said. “Worried … ashamed….” His mouth tightened at the corners. “Useless!”

  An officer beaten in the field surrenders his arms and goes into captivity. Over and over again, as the days drag on in prison, he will wonder: Should I have gone on fighting? Should I have died fighting? When had the Colonel made this surrender, Charles asked himself, or did he make it anew every day? Sitting there on the window-sill with the sun behind him and the country sounds coming up from the garden below, Charles tried to remember his father in the years before the war, when the parabola of his life must still have been on its upward course. In 1939, Charles was nine years old, the Colonel about fifty-one. Charles strained to remember his father at that time. Nothing. Just odd scraps and incidents of what the police call “a personal nature”—that he himself had disliked brown bread and butter, been taken to Hell’s Angels after a visit to the dentist, put his hand on a snake in a hedge, been unfairly punished by his mother when Julian had filled a woman’s hat with mud, been sick on a day trip to the Isle of Wight. He remembered Bridget, the maid at Catterick who had given him a stencil set. He remembered a private soldier with a wall eye. But he could not remember his father except as something vague and uniformed in the background of life, although the Colonel must have had strength then, and pride, and confidence. When had he surrendered?

  It’s not the primitive pattern of things any more, Charles thought, looking across at the old man in the bed. The sons no longer combine to defeat and tame the father. Long before the sons grow to manhood, the father has been defeated already. “Useless?” he said.

  “Yes. Chaps ought to be useful, Charles—to themselves, their families, the world. I’m not. Haven’t been for eighteen years.”

  “Father——”

  “No. Really. I’ve carried this feeling about with me since 1940, more or less, hoping that some time, some way, I might get rid of it. I never have.”

  “Was it losing your command?”

  “That started it. I wasn’t all that old, you know. Not reached my middle fifties—plenty of chaps my age held active commands. Quite a knock, when it came. It wasn’t that I enjoyed war or anything like that, Charles; I wasn’t a professional in that sense. I mean, you can’t help enjoying it a bit—doing what you’ve been trained to do, commanding your own chaps in the field, discovering you can depend on them and that sort of thing. But I wasn’t the sort of half-sadist, half-boy-scout kind of chap who enjoys war for its own sake. I believed we had to fight. Sounds odd now that all the alliances have shifted round, but it was right at the time. And when they— when the chaps went off, and I stayed behind, well, it was as if I’d deserted them or something. That’s how I felt. Ashamed … and hurt … and useless. Quite a lot of them were dead before the year was out, and all that happened to me was that I went to India to run a kind of sausage factory. That’s all it was out there. You can’t make an officer in four months, as we were doing; all you can do is package them. This sounds a bit self-pitying to you, I expect.”

  “It’s a long time ago, Father.”

  “Yes. All part of the same story though. I came back. Left the army. I had three sons. Perhaps that doesn’t mean much nowadays—sort of patriarchal idea really, but to a freethinker like me, sons are a … a reaching out into the future. It meant something to me—a husband, a wife, and three sons. Your mother saw things differently. She’d got used to looking after you while I was away, and you’d got used to that too. There wasn’t anything for me to do. I hadn’t planned anything, hadn’t thought about what the Welfare chaps call readjustment; I just expected to take my place in the natural scheme of things. I hadn’t realized that the natural scheme of things is that when fathers aren’t around, chaps learn to do without them. Nobody needed me. No point. Nobody for me to help. All my life I’ve believed chaps ought to be useful or die out. I didn’t want to die out, Charles. I thought about tackling some sort of welfare work, but your mother didn’t want to leave the village. I thought about standi
ng for the council, but we hadn’t any local connections. And after a bit—quite a short time really— I began to wonder if I’d be any good at it. This useless thing cuts two ways, if you know what I mean; if you feel useless for long enough, you begin to be useless. So I just took the chap’s advice in the book, and cultivated my garden. Do you mind my going on like this, Charles? I’ve never talked about it to anyone before—sort of kept it to myself. But once chaps start unburdening, it’s difficult to stop. Real couch stuff, and all that. And you know—bad taste to say this—but when you’ve had a kind of death sentence, even if it’s no more than a reminder, you want to talk about things a bit and get them clear.”

  “Go on, Father.”

  “Now there’s this business of Julian. Like conscience stirring, Charles. An ache. Something for me to do, and I wasn’t doing it. Stupid to say I wasn’t allowed; I could have tried, and I didn’t. I wanted to talk to him like a father, Charles, make him see that he couldn’t run away, get him to marry the girl if necessary, accept his responsibilities. Only I’d given all that up—abdicated like King Lear; that’s what I told myself. I don’t know—it wasn’t easy. How could I tell him not to hide behind his mother, when that was what his mother most wanted him to do? It was all so complicated. I just went on feeling useless and ashamed of it. Gutless, eh?”

  “You could have tried something, I suppose.”

  “Now he’s done this … new thing. Behaving like a— like a criminal, or an idiot or something. It’s—I don’t know what it is. I’m out of my depth.”

  “He’s always been weak, Father.”

  “Weak! Is he sane?” The explosion was only for a moment, a little puff of anger to fill out sails that had drooped for eighteen years. And Charles, seeing his father a full man again, suddenly felt some of the joy of a creator. Why I can save him, he thought, meaning, “What fun! I can play God.” At least I can try.