Walcot

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘We’re okay here,’ Palfrey repeated in an indifferent tone of voice. He smoothed down the sides of his trap without bothering to look up.

  You tried to speak lightly. ‘This Robinson Crusoe thing is all very well, but we are soldiers, you know.’

  ‘I’m not. Not no more. I’ve had it as far as soldiering is concerned.’

  ‘You are still a soldier, Palfrey. Nominally, at least, under my command. I’m ordering you –’

  He looked up, blank-faced. ‘Fuck off,’ he said.

  Various noises disturbed the peace of the woods. Aircraft frequently roared overhead. From a distant road came more continuous sounds of convoys on the move. The war had not stopped just because you and Palfrey had stopped.

  Your leg grew no better. The femur itself had probably been splintered. You tried to persuade Palfrey you would do better to move into the farmhouse. Palfrey would have none of it: the farmhouse would be a target for the enemy or for marauders, he said. In that he soon proved correct.

  You had hobbled up to the house, hoping for fresh bandages. Already green things were springing up on the walls of the building. Bushes grew from the guttering, hanging down like unruly hair, nodding as you passed. A feral cat was about, running off when you came in sight. In the barren kitchen were rat droppings. Grasses were springing up through the floorboards.

  You were desperate to have news of the outside world. You opened up the back of the wireless set, to find the shrivelled corpse of a little mouse there. You removed the thermionic valves to clean them one by one. The set was powered by an accumulator. You polished up the connections and switched the ‘on’ button.

  The set slowly warmed up and began to speak in French. You tuned it carefully and soon found an English wavelength. A man was talking in a BBC accent. You switched off then, to wait for six o’clock and the news, afraid that the current might fail at any moment.

  You waited in the dimness of the deserted room. Nothing stirred.

  At six o’clock, you switched on again, and so you heard the announcer state, in measured tones, that France had capitulated and had signed an armistice with Nazi Germany. Arrangements were being made to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force.

  You were frantic. You remained in the house that night, listening to sundry scratchings and scamperings, the sharp little destructive teeth of history. You waited for the early morning news, when a BBC announcer would announce the day’s date. You had no idea how long you and Palfrey had remained in the woods. Palfrey had long ago given up marking the days with notches on a tree.

  Morning dawned. You switched on. You learned that the date had crept to the 23rd of June. You had been in the woods for just over four weeks.

  The speech Prime Minister Winston Churchill had made earlier in the month was then repeated over the airwaves. Churchill said, ‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail … We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …’

  The great voice faded to a whisper and was gone as power died.

  You rested your elbow on the old table and your forehead on your hand, and you wept. Your shoulders heaved and you cried your heart out.

  You did not hear the creak of floorboards. Only when a strange voice spoke did you look round, startled. A man dressed in a shabby black suit stood nearby, pointing a rifle at you.

  The new arrival had a long face with an angular jaw emphasized by side-whiskers, black and white in colour. The pupils of his eyes were extremely pale and shaded by bushy eyebrows. He was a narrow man, narrow about the shoulders, shallow in the chest. His age was about forty, as nearly as you could judge, and he said, grimly, ‘We all have reason to weep. You most of all.’

  He was speaking English with a French accent.

  You raised your hands above your head. You turned round in the chair and asked if he intended to shoot you.

  The man seemed to think this a reasonable enquiry. He said, ‘I have been keeping a watch. You broke into this house, which is not yours.’ He paused uncertainly. ‘But foreigners have broken into this country, which is not theirs. There is plenty of shooting. One more shot would hardly need entry in God’s accounts. But perhaps there is shooting enough.’

  You were perplexed by these reasonable remarks, considering that the newcomer kept the rifle pointed towards you and his finger on the trigger.

  ‘Why should you shoot me? If you wish me to leave here, I will. Is this your house? You left it unlocked.’

  ‘It belongs to a distant kinsman. Are you open to reason? If you rush at me, I will certainly shoot.’

  ‘Having a stranger aim a rifle at me makes me reasonable. I’ll get out.’

  ‘No, you won’t. Not until I say so. Ah … remain seated!’ This order because you had made to get up from the chair. He jerked the rifle, so that your hands rose again.

  You recovered from your surprise and became angry.

  ‘What do you bloody well want? You’re French, aren’t you? I’m English. So we are supposed to be on the same side in this war.’

  ‘A supposition is a belief sans proof. In a war, everyone is an enemy. I hope you might prove an ally.’ He bit his lower lip nervously.

  ‘I’ll never prove your ally while you point that bloody rifle at me.’

  He gave you a mirthless smile. ‘I am your friend. See, I don’t shoot you, and I could do it, with ease. Though it is not my habit. A bad habit. Lower your hands.’

  He gave a brief shrill whistle. A woman entered the room, holding the hand of a child who was dragged forward. She wore a dark green dress which hung to her ankles, and what looked like a man’s shooting jacket over it. Her face was pale and pudding-like, as if made of part-cooked dough; her eyes were of a grey-blue colour, bright and intelligent.

  She nodded to you, not in unfriendly fashion. The small boy she was clutching wriggled to get free, but she held him firmly. She told him quietly, in German, to keep still.

  The man said, ‘Schön. This is time for introductions. My name is Gerard Geldstein, this is my wife, Helge, and our little boy, Pief. We are not ill-intentioned persons.’ He gestured towards the others with a slight bow, as he might have done in a theatrical production. ‘We have also a little girl, but she will not come in. She is afraid of you. And your name is, Sir?’

  You introduced yourself, saying that you needed to get to Rennes as soon as possible. Geldstein said that Rennes was already being over-run by the Wehrmacht. ‘It is a risk to anyone human to go there.’

  You exchanged a few words. Pief, the small boy, was released and walked slowly backwards, step by step, until he could jump out of the open door.

  Geldstein’s proposal was that Palfrey and I should accompany the Geldstein family as armed escorts. They needed to travel. He knew of a safe place where it should be possible to wait out the war. Everyone, he claimed, needed an armed escort in these dreadful days.

  Your ambition was to get back to your unit; however, you were still lame, and Geldstein convinced you that the wood in which you were hiding was of small extent, and would shortly be combed by elements of the Wehrmacht, at which point you and Palfrey would be caught and executed.

  ‘Where is this refuge of yours?’

  ‘South, by ninety kilometres. To travel such a distance, we need someone who can seriously shoot under pressure. Like a soldier. Like you, Monsieur Fielding.’

  That made your decision for you. Going south meant being nearer the port of St Nazaire, and the possibility of getting a ship back to Britain.

  So it was that that night, you and Palfrey set off in Geldstein’s small van, accompanying Geldstein, his wife, the boy Pief and his sister, Brenda. Geldstein drove steadily and slowly, not using headlights. When another vehicle approached from ahead or behind, he would pull into
the side of the road; there you would crouch anxiously until the other vehicle had passed. You had your rifle ready and were sitting on the box of ammunition you had salvaged from the destruction of your ghari.

  You travelled south on by-roads. Never had you experienced France as a dangerous wasteland, inhabited by predators. As if Geldstein’s paranoia was infectious, the dense belts of trees on either side of the road, black in the moonless night, became animate beings waiting to close their teeth on passers-by. Just as alarming were the villages through which you drove – seemingly untenanted, without light, squat, blind, waiting to be woken into hostility.

  No sound came from this outside world, except for the bark of a dog when you passed a farm, or the cry of a night bird, giving solitude a voice.

  Once, you passed two men, rifles slung over their shoulders, tramping wearily along in the centre of the road. At the sound of Geldstein’s engine, they ran to one side, to hide among the unwelcoming foliage.

  At every junction of the road, there might be a trap prepared; indeed, at one crossroads, ill-glimpsed, a tank waited. But it too seemed as dead as the villages stranded on the route. This was what invasion brought with it, social life in catatonia, sleep, or paralysis imitating sleep. You might have been feeling your way through a land of horror and the supernatural. The mist gathering after the midnight hour reinforced an illusion that you traversed a territory of the dead.

  You kept watch out of the rear window of the van, anxious about pursuit but, as the kilometres slowly unpeeled, you too were lulled by the monotony of suspense. Despite the chill air, you fell asleep over your rifle.

  When the van had covered ninety kilometres at not much more than twenty kilometres an hour, Geldstein turned the van off the road. The vehicle bumped and dawdled along a firebreak lane between forest trees. Intimations of dawn struggled in the eastern sky, rendering the crusty outline of a ruin in silhouette. The Geldsteins had reached their destination. With a final jerk, the van stopped and the engine died.

  14

  Over the Boundary

  Do you wish to learn more of that other world to which you had belonged?

  No. My mind is locked into that dreadful time I knew.

  You must attend to what was happening. For completeness.

  Both your mother and your father felt grief for the loss of their son. Martin took pride in the black band Mary sewed onto his jacket. Sonia was away in London; they agreed it was best not to upset her by informing her of your supposed death.

  Martin had decided that wartime life must go on as usual. As a Socialist MP his duties included the captaincy of a constituency cricket team, known as the Scallywags. An annual match was played on the field behind the gasworks – the Scallywags versus the Morgan Memorial team. The Mike Morgan thus immortalized had instituted the matches back in the mists of time: 1912, to be precise.

  In this year of 1940, getting two teams together had presented unusual difficulties, with so many men in the armed forces. Martin, now forty-six, had officially retired from the team the previous year. Now he was back at the crease, and was conducting a search for cricketers with the same dedication he showed in hunting for Labour voters.

  The match was traditionally played on the weekend nearest the 14th July, birthday of the legendary Mike Morgan. The captain of the MM team was Pat Atterbury, known to the Scallywags as ‘Pratterbury’. Pratterbury had experienced the same difficulties in raising a team as had Fielding. Nevertheless, on that precise Saturday, the two teams gathered to do battle.

  Meanwhile another battle had begun, the fight for supremacy in the air which became known as the ‘Battle of Britain’. The Luftwaffe pilots in their Messerschmitts were regarded as the precursors of an invasion. The RAF pilots in their Spitfires and Hurricanes rose to the skies above southern England and shot down as many German planes as possible.

  But that afternoon the skies were quiet when Martin Fielding, bat tucked professionally under his right arm, went in to score against the forces of Pratterbury, taking his place at the crease and demanding Middle and Leg of the umpire.

  Among the few spectators were Mary and her brother Bertie, down for the weekend. Bertie had left Violet at home to look after the children. The MM side boasted a spin bowler named Bernard Ames who had once played for Hampshire. Ames was near fifty now, but did not lack cunning.

  Martin and his partner ‘Wiggy’ Wiggington settled in and began to score. Martin became more confident as over succeeded over. The determination grew in him that, if this were to be his last game of cricket, he would do what he had long wished to do, to hit a ball over the boundary. Then he could always remember his success – and perhaps other men in both teams would remember it too, saying to each other in the bar after the match was played, ‘But do you remember that day when old Fielding knocked that pill right over the boundary?’

  His chance came with the last ball but one of an over. Ames had let it go slightly wide of the off-stump. Martin stepped forward and struck the leather with all his might – indeed, with more might than he knew he had. Thwack!

  He stood and watched the ball fly. It was the perfect shot. The MM fielders also stood and stared. The ball flew ever on, high over the shed both teams used as the pavilion, travelling as if it would never stop. It vanished over the fence into a scrap dealer’s yard. A distant clang announced its landing.

  Never had anyone there seen such a shot.

  ‘Oh, well played, Sir!’ exclaimed Wiggy. ‘Right over the boundary, by gum!’

  Even the opposing players burst into applause.

  Next ball, Martin was out, bowled middle stump.

  The Scallywags won that memorable match by twenty-one runs. Celebrations followed. Martin was the hero of the hour. The ball he had struck into the scrap yard was never found.

  Wiggy was not only a cricketer. As the Reverend Archie Wiggington he was the vicar of the local church. He had an idea he put to Martin over a pint of Courage.

  His suggestion was that Martin should write a pamphlet to be called ‘Over the Boundary’, which would describe his epic of sportsmanship, and lead on into a discussion of how Faith played a part in the great game of life. He intimated that Martin might go as far as to declare that worship of God would ensure that one was never bowled out.

  Martin saw that by writing this pamphlet he could further disseminate his name; that as a Socialist it would do his reputation no harm to be linked with both religion and the manly game of cricket. He agreed to Wiggy’s proposal. Wiggy would see that the pamphlet was printed and properly disseminated throughout the diocese.

  Back home with Mary and Bertie, he discussed the matter.

  Bertie had little to say. Martin asked if Violet was all right.

  The answer Bertie gave was oblique. ‘Not much demand for architects in wartime. You can’t control women any more than you can control the weather. I’d join up if I weren’t so old. Did you ever think that most of us pass our lives quite inarticulate? I mean, about the things that really matter to us?’

  Martin gave a chuckle and said that he was not going to be inarticulate: he was going to write about his life for the vicar.

  Later that evening, when Bertie had caught the train back north, Mary reproached her husband. ‘He and Violet have fallen out a bit. He says she spends too much money on clothes.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be tiresome, Marty. There’s a difference between men and women when it comes to clothes. Couldn’t you sense he and Violet had fallen out?’

  ‘I saw something was up.’

  ‘Well, try not to be so thick-skinned.’

  ‘What’s he mean, “inarticulate”? He was always a bit of a chatterbox, wasn’t he?’

  Martin sat down to write the opening paragraphs of his Boundary book later that very evening.

  Next morning, the BBC announced that the RAF had shot down twenty-five enemy planes over the counties of Southern England.

  15

  Le Forgel

/>   The chateau in the Forest of the Bouche had been destroyed by fire some years previously. It had been abandoned and was now being consumed by a different agent of destruction, the ivy. The calloused walls were covered by the plant’s green tendrils. Within the walls, however, a shelter had been built from fallen timbers and other materials. It was into this shelter that Gerard, Helge, Pief and Brenda Geldstein, together with you and Palfrey, moved, early that July morning.

  In the manner of those who are stranded anywhere in any wilds, you all set to to expel from the new premises any wildlife that had entered there, from spiders and earwigs to rats and foxes.

  Geldstein wanted his van to be concealed from the air. To this end, you and he went into the woods to cut down some young trees. As you worked, you studied Gerard. He had taken off his shirt. His white body glistened with sweat. Dressed, he had seemed rather puny. Naked, he appeared more solid; apart from a brief curl of hair on his chest, he could have been made entirely of bone. After each stroke of his axe, he would stand still, a hand cupped to his ear, to listen for any suspicious noises signalling an enemy approach. When the trees were felled, they were dragged to the walls of the chateau and the foliage propped there to conceal the van.

  An amount of mistrust existed between you. Gerard had taken your and Palfrey’s rifles and the ammunition. He did not confide and remained forever watchful, saying little. Nor did Palfrey’s behaviour reassure him. Palfrey remained unfriendly and had increased his ‘wild man of the woods’ aspect. He would not sleep in the chateau shelter with the others, having constructed a secret lair somewhere in the forest.

  So it came about that, missing company, you talked more and more to Helge Geldstein. As you grew accustomed to her, you saw that her face was not unattractive, while her serene personality gave her eyes and general expression a pleasant air. She was stern with her two children, but you saw good reason for that, surrounded with hostility as the Geldsteins understood themselves to be.