by Julian Gloag
“Hello, Willy. I was just telling Jordan—”
“Yes, I heard.”
“Is that the bag, Mrs. Maddox?” asked the superintendent.
“Yes.”
“Well,” said Tom, automatically rubbing his hands, “all set, then?” As if he were about to lead a team onto a rugger field, thought Jordan.
They trooped out into the hall.
“Goodbye, Jordan.” Willy touched his cheek swiftly with hers.
“Goodbye. Georgia—is she asleep?”
“Yes, I just looked in.”
“Well, take care of her. And of yourself, Willy.”
“And you too,” she said. In the badly lit hall her face seemed softer.
Jordan smiled. “They’ll take care of me alright.”
And then he was outside and Superintendent George was holding open the door of the police car.
As he moved to get in, Jordan remembered something. “Oh, Willy. By the way, I scraped the wing coming in this evening. You might take it into the garage tomorrow and have it fixed.” The last nagging duty done.
“Half a minute, Jordan.” Tom laid a hand on his shoulder. He leaned forward. “Pull yourself together, man, and don’t say a word,” in a whispered hiss. And then, stepping back, cheerfully, “Chin up. See you tomorrow.”
And then they were away, out of the gate and onto the Woodley road.
Jordan sat in the warmth of the back seat, beside Superintendent George. He was exhausted—and potted. But he didn’t feel sick at all.
The car rushed on through the darkness. He smiled. Soon he was asleep.
A Dream of Summer
8
He lay in a kind of dream.
It was so warm in his small, private ward that he was perpetually drowsy. The prison authorities couldn’t be faulted on their heating arrangements, at least not in the hospital wing.
Unbound by any necessity, his mind wandered languidly among great subjects. He moved slowly in a large garden, noting here and there a summerhouse, a pool with swans, a treed alcove or a path of immaculate stone slabs ending at an iron gate in the wall. He was happy that all these things were there, waiting for him, and the knowledge that one day he would investigate them was a pleasure—a promised treat enriched by postponement. He was not in the mood, now, for exploration.
It was the small things to which he gave his attention: the way a dandelion grew among the grass, the dusty-textured branch of an apple tree, the marks of a rake upon the gravel.
He was exhausted easily.
Outside he thought of it as being summer. A summer afternoon. Only his visitors brought the winter with them, and he was glad to see them go. He would come eagerly back to his private prison and lie down again on the bed or do a little more work on Uncle John’s puzzles.
The afternoon was always the best time, for it was largely his own. The business of the prison took place in the morning: the sudden flash of lights, the rising and shaving and dressing, the vast breakfasts brought over from Ben’s Café, the orderly to make his bed and straighten and dust, the scheduled trip to the lavatory, the daily visit of the medical officer, sometimes a pallid chat with the prison psychiatrist, and half an hour of private circular exercise in the prison yard. And always the effort of banter with Prison Officer Denver or Orderly Samson or whoever else was on duty. He was under constant observation, of course, and perhaps they sought to ease the coldness of that by talking, or perhaps they simply thought he needed human company. He hadn’t the heart to tell them he would prefer to be silently observed. But at least the garrulity was a thousand times better then the first night’s horrible proximity of bodies in the large ward. He had not slept, then, at all, but had listened all night to the snufflings and snores and the dreamt obscenities until the glare of lights and the almost immediate jolly pounding of the Light Programme.
They were all murderers, or mad or psychopathic, but it was not this which had—well, yes—frightened him. It was the awful alacrity of their companionship. It was as if they had been looking forward to his arrival. “’ere, can see you never had to make your own bed,” one of them had said. “Want to get the corners squared off, like this”; and he had shown Jordan how to do it. And another had fingered his suit. “Nice bit of cloth there, Maddie. You want to save that, mucker. You want to ask for a prison-issue suit, like mine, see, and put that away.” They had happily shared the breakfast he couldn’t eat. They had been eager for him to play dominoes.
When the governor had told him he could have a private ward if he paid for it—and service, and meals sent in—Jordan felt as though he had been granted his life. “You are entitled to anything you may want, Maddox. Within reason, of course.” Major Forster smiled, and his silken smooth lips were at once cut with a thousand tiny vertical wrinkles. “Write and receive all the letters you want. Newspapers, provided you pay for them …”
Not newspapers, no. He hadn’t read a paper since he’d been in. Nor had he once turned on the ancient wireless in his room. He wanted silence and privacy, and, except for the prison ritual which had already become second nature, he got it. They treated him kindly, as an invalid, and he was quite contented.
The termination of all this would be the first, the day his trial began. Occasionally he would get out his engagement diary and turn the pages, day after blank day interrupted only by some royal birthday or a full moon, until the first of May, where he had marked in capitals, TRIAL BEGINS. It was still several days away—but the distance was not to be measured in days, any more than the entry that used to appear in his diary three times a year, TERM BEGINS, had indicated an actuality. For time—the waiting time of holidays or, now, of prison—had no urgency and thus, no measure. It was like God, the God of the Church of England, who was, maybe, bright up there in his heaven but whose reflection in the world was dim and gentle, like the long complex sermons that Uncle Trevor preached on Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. One did not count days.
He put the diary away and lit a cigarette. He was careful to let the ash fall into the cracked white ashtray. Like the brown Bakelite hood of the wireless, it could only have been produced in hideous and inconceivable mass which could not ask, let alone demand, any variety of affection or effort of eye. There was nothing in the small room with its white-washed walls to suggest that any particular person had ever lived there, or would in the future, or, except for the lazily flaunting smoke, lived there now.
He smoked twenty or thirty cigarettes a day, against the ponderous advice of Wilcox and, now, the sprightly admonitions of Dr. Hogben, the M.O. He had read somewhere recently that cigarette smoking was no longer considered harmful in a case of inactive tuberculosis. He’d tell that to Wilcox one day, who would of course grow red and mutter about professional competence. Yet it also pleased Jordan to think that maybe smoking was harmful. It would be a sin of commission at last.
He smiled to himself, as he often did nowadays. He had miraculously recovered the amusement of trivial thoughts, which only now did he realise that he had so long lost. His mind was garrulous, like a child or an old man laughing and nodding as he talked. Perhaps by some circuitous route he had inherited the dottiness of Uncle John.
I have not done the things I ought to have done, and I have done the things I ought not to have done. For him it had always been the first—the meal he could not quite finish, the hair not brushed, the bed not made.
He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old.
He would have no visitors today.
9
“Can I come in, Uncle John?”
John turned his head quickly to look at Jordan in the doorway of the little attic workroom built under the eaves. John’s worktable faced the high dormer window, immediately below which was a narrow shelf arrayed with a long row of small glass jars of tempera, blue and purple and crimson and orange and scarlet and yellow. On the right, easy to John’s hand, were fretsaws and knives and chisels and planes, each in its bracket on the pine plank partition wall in perfect size o
rder. Above them were bookshelves heavy with the faded splendour of military and regimental histories.
“Yes, yes,” said John. “But not a sound out of you. No sound.” He always said this, and the rule would be strictly enforced for five minutes or so.
Jordan sat down with his back to the window, on the chair to the left of the worktable.
Uncle John dipped his paintbrush into the tin of clear liquid and applied it to the rectangle of wood before him with clean, even strokes. There was something almost ferocious about his face as he worked. This was the only time his square military shoulders ever unbent.
The room smelled of wood. Wooden floor, wooden roof, wooden walls, stored wood ranged against one wall and carefully marked for size in Uncle John’s minute handwriting, wooden worktable, wooden chairs. Jordan moved his head slowly (so as not to disturb his uncle’s concentration), enumerating all the wooden objects in his mind. Then he would go to metal, then cloth, and finally human beings. He would not be ready to talk until he had reached this happy climax. He regarded the classification of animal, vegetable and mineral as silly. Wood was supposed to be vegetable—he could just see Aunt Mary serving up a plate of wood with the Irish stew. “Eat up your wood, my dear, like a good boy.” He let out a little giggle. John paused and glanced sideways at him, and then continued his brushwork.
And animal—was Uncle John an animal?
Irish stew was revolting—what awful people the Irish must be. Or perhaps he should feel sorry for them: “We must be charitable to our Irish friends.” Jordan tried a purse-lipped Uncle Trevor face. But the point was, he didn’t have any Irish friends. And what’s more, he didn’t care.
It was a day for not caring, he decided, guiltily defiant of the chilling plate of half-eaten stew that would wait all afternoon for him on the dining-room table. “Go up to your room, my dear, and don’t come down until you are prepared to be sensible and finish what you have begun.”
The afternoon sun shone straight in, glimmering the few white hairs in Uncle John’s tobacco-brown moustache.
“What are you doing?” said Jordan.
“Varnish, Jordan, varnish.”
Uncle John always called him Jordan. With Aunt Mary it was my dear, and Uncle Trevor my boy, and Uncle Colin old chap or, contradictorily, young-feller-me-Iad, in about equal proportions. The maids called him Master Jordan and the postman son or sonny, which was worst of all. But for Uncle John it was always Jordan, except once (when Jordan had almost been run over by a van) when it had been man—“Look out, man!”
Sitting in the attic, he felt mannish.
“Is it a puzzle?”
“Will be. Not yet. Have to cut it yet.”
“Are you going to cut it now?”
“Let the varnish dry first. The third coat. Must be absolutely hard. Hard as a French girl’s heart—ha!—as we used to say.” He drew the brush over the surface of the painted wood in one last smooth stroke.
Jordan was familiar with every step in the making of a puzzle. First the infinitely careful tracings from a plate in one of the books or from an old etching, of which John had hundreds filed in an old chest of drawers. The tiny additions and alterations and, with the aid of different sizes of graph paper, the enlargement or diminution of scenes or even individual figures; the master tracing and the transfer of the whole to the perfectly sanded surface of the plywood. And then the painting—the tiny delicate touches of the brush from saucer to wood, sometimes with the aid of a magnifying glass, and all the time the unyielding ferocity of John’s blue-eyed glare. The painting alone often took as long as three months. The varnishing and the intricate fretsaw work that followed were comparatively simple.
But although Jordan knew all this, he still liked to ask. And Uncle John answered invariably as though he’d heard the question for the first time. Only the subject of the puzzle was taboo until, if it were not to be given to Jordan, the very last stages.
“Can I have a look, Uncle John?”
“No. Mustn’t spoil the fun.”
“Is it for me then? Is it for my birthday?”
“No. This one is for your Uncle Colin. It’s his turn this year.” He squinted up into the sun.
“For Christmas? But that’s miles away. Besides Uncle Colin isn’t my proper uncle.”
“Ah, well, but he’s been seconded, so to speak. To the family. Hasn’t he?”
“But he’s always been sconded.”
“Seconded. That makes him one of us. He messes with us, eh?—when he’s here.”
“Only at Christmas.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you do the trial run on this one.”
“Really? Do you really mean it?”
“Of course I do.” For a moment Uncle John was huffy. “I said it.” He put the brush in a small pot of turpentine. “Got to see it all fits properly, haven’t we?”
“Aren’t I getting a puzzle for my birthday?”
“Yes.”
“What’ll it be—what’ll it be of?”
“Ha—that’s a surprise. Military secret. But it’s a good one, I’ll tell you that. One of the best.”
Jordan was satisfied. He didn’t really want to spoil the surprise. “What’s this one then?” he said.
“Colin’s? Minden. A great battle, Minden. A great infantry victory. Minden day. The Unsurpassable Six …” He stared out of the dormer, and his hands, busily tapping the lid into place on the tin of varnish, paused.
“Tell me a battle, Uncle John.”
“Eh—what’s that you say, Jordan?” He blinked down at the little boy. “A battle now? That’s for lights out. Can’t tell you a battle now.”
“That’s alright then,” said Jordan, knowing that his irregular request had somehow upset his uncle.
“You should be out on the terrain.”
“I can’t. I’m supposed to be in my room. I didn’t finish my lunch and Aunt Mary sent me up to my room.”
“You shouldn’t be here then?” Uncle John said doubtfully. And then, straightening his shoulders, “Must obey orders, you know, Jordan. First rule. Don’t want to be court-martialled.”
Jordan shook his head.
“Well then. Better nip down to your room, hadn’t you?”
“Yes.” Jordan slipped slowly off the chair and went to the door.
“Jordan.”
“Yes, Uncle?”
“Your birthday. It’s not far away now, is it?”
“June the twenty-sixth.”
“How’d you like to go to Istoke Park and hear the band, eh?”
“Istoke Park!”
“A birthday treat. A good band that day, first-rate—”
“Uncle John—but would Aunt Mary …?”
“Have to clear it with Mary, of course. Don’t see why not, though. It’s your birthday. First-rate. Band of the First Battalion Scots Guards. Doing a tour, I believe. The Kiddies.”
“The kiddies?”
“Nickname. Formed after the Grenadiers—First Regiment of Food Guards then, of course—and the Coldstream. 1662. They were the junior regiment of foot guards until the formation of the Irish Guards. The youngsters, you know. The Kiddies.”
“The Kiddies.” Jordan and his uncle smiled at each other. “Thank you very much, Uncle John. I’d love to go.”
He went down the bare wooden stairs from the attic, humming to himself a tune into which easily fitted the words, “I’m going to see the Kiddies, the Kiddies, the Kiddies. I’m going to see the Kiddies at Istoke Park.”
10
He pressed gently into place the gold chevrons of the serjeant of the Lancashire Fusiliers. It was the last piece. The Dettingen puzzle was complete. Dettingen, Blenheim, Salamanca—he had done each several times. He had remembered, even at his first try, the masses, the colours, the stiff-legged stance of Uncle John’s soldiers. The puzzles were child’s play for him.
He was probably the only person ever to have done any of John’s puzzles. He could not imagine Colin or Uncle Trev
or or Aunt Mary, each of whom in turn had received one every third Christmas for so many years, sitting down to sort out a puzzle. The infinite care of John’s painting—the detail of dress and equipment, of colour and cannon and position—was an unconsidered trifle. But in Jordan’s mind each battle flourished, each drum beat, each bugle blew, each army marched.
Even today, military music—a band playing magnificently on a bandstand—made him want to weep.
He lifted the puzzle on a sheet of paper and slid it into the flat wooden box. He shut the lid and latched it. For the first week he’d had to make do with the prison puzzles—scenes of merry England, garish and ghastly, on poor, thin cardboard. Until at last the governor, bewildered but benign, had permitted Jordan to import his own.
Willy had brought all she could find. Everyone seemed to approve. The puzzles would, as Tom said, “take your mind off things.”
Tom thought it his duty to come at least every other day and “bring the news,” “keep you up to date” with manufactured details of hope. He was due today.
Jordan got up restlessly from the chair. Hope—what did he care? Before these conferences Jordan would be possessed with an irritated impatience to get the performance over with. Afterwards, and sometimes even during the interview, he would be amused at the ponderous sympathy for the man he was supposed to be. How could he tell them that he was quite happy and undisturbed in this place? Here, by himself, he was young, but each visitor made an old man of him.
But he couldn’t let them down.
He had always disliked interviews—the cold, anxiously Christian sessions in the study with Uncle Trevor on “Your new School,” “Why God made us the way we are,” “The University,” “The Sanctity of Love,” “The Responsibility of Marriage”; or those rare moments with Colin when the gruff, kindly tone and the caustic twinkle were dropped to reveal an awkward, sidelong sincerity.
Yet there had been one which had been a pleasure—the most dreaded, perhaps, of all. The scholarship interview. That array of serious faces that could not but be wasting their time on J. J. Maddox, a somewhat doubtful candidate, until that unexpected question on military tactics. He’d lectured them for ten minutes with no interruption.
