Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  There was silence. The fire gave a heave and a sigh. ‘You what?’ said the boy.

  ‘Went back inside. It was bucketing down, cats and dogs.’

  The boy and girl sat quite still, on the far side of the table.

  ‘That was eighteen months or so after my hubby didn't come back from Belgium.’ Her eyes were on the girl; the girl looked away. ‘Tit for tat, I said to Dot.’

  After a moment she went on. ‘Next morning it was still raining and blow me if the bike hadn't got a puncture. I said to Dot, I'm not walking to the village in this, and that's flat, and Dot was running a bit of a temp, she had the ‘flu or something coming on. I tucked her up warm and when I'd done the chores I went back in the wood, to have another look. He must have been a tough so-and-so, that Jerry, he was still mumbling away. It gave me a turn, I can tell you, I'd never imagined he'd last the night. I could see him better, in the day-time; he was bashed up pretty nasty. I'd thought he was an old bloke, too, but he wasn't. He'd have been twentyish, that sort of age.’

  The boy's spoon clattered to the floor; he did not move.

  ‘I reckon he may have seen me, not that he was in a state to take much in. He called out something. I thought, oh no, you had this coming to you, mate, there's a war on. You won't know that expression – it was what everybody said in those days. I thought, why should I do anything for you? Nobody did anything for my Bill, did they? I was a widow at thirty-nine. I've been on my own ever since.’

  The boy shoved his chair back from the table.

  ‘He must have been a tough bastard, like I said. He was still there that evening, but the next morning he was dead. The weather'd perked up by then and I walked to the village and got a message to the people at Clapton. They were ever so surprised; they didn't know there'd been a Jerry plane come down in the area at all. There were lots of people came to take bits for souvenirs, I had a bit myself but it's got mislaid, you tend to mislay things when you get to my age.’

  The boy had got up. He glanced down at the girl. ‘I'm going,’ he said. ‘Dunno about you, but I'm going.’

  She stared at the lacy cloth on the table, the fluted china cup. ‘I'll come too.’

  ‘Eh?’ said the old woman. ‘You're off, are you? That was nice of you to see to my little jobs for me. Tell what's-'er-name to send someone next week if she can, I like having someone young about the place, once in a while, I've got a sympathy with young people. Here – you're forgetting your pretty jacket, Sandra, what's the hurry? ‘Bye then, my ducks, see you close my gate, won't you?’

  The boy walked ahead, fast; the girl pattered behind him, sliding on the dry grass. At the gateway into the cornfield he stopped. He said, not looking at her, looking towards the furzy edge of the wood. ‘Christ!’

  The wood sat there in the afternoon sun. Wind stirred the trees. Birds sang. There were not, the girl realised, wolves or witches or tigers. Nor were there prowling blokes, gypsy-type blokes. And there were not chattering ghostly voices. Somewhere there were some scraps of metal overlooked by people hunting for souvenirs.

  The boy said, ‘I'm not going near that old bitch again.’ He leaned against the gate, clenching his fists on an iron rung; he shook slightly. ‘I won't ever forget him, that poor sod.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Two bloody nights. Christ!’

  And she would hear, she thought, always, for a long time anyway, that voice trickling on, that soft old woman's voice; would see a tin painted with cornflowers, pretty china ornaments.

  ‘It makes you want to throw up,’ he said. ‘Someone like that.’

  She couldn't think of anything to say. He had grown; he had got older and larger. His anger eclipsed his acne, the patches of grease on his jeans, and lardy midriff. You could get people all wrong, she realised with alarm. You could get people wrong and there was a darkness that was not the darkness of tree shadows and murky undergrowth and you could not draw the curtains and keep it out because it was in your head, once known, in your head for ever like lines from a song. One moment you were walking in long grass with the sun on your hair and birds singing and the next you glimpsed darkness, an inescapable darkness. The darkness was out there and it was a part of you and you would never be without it, ever.

  She walked behind him, through a world grown unreliable, in which flowers sparkle and birds sing but everything is not as it appears, oh no.

  The Pill-Box

  THE WRITER of a story has an infinity of choices. An infinity of narratives; an infinity of endings. The process of choosing, of picking this set of events rather than that, of ending up here rather than there – well, call it what you like: craft, art, accident, intuition.

  Call it what you like, it's a curious process.

  I teach Eng. Lit. Consequently I try to point this sort of thing out to the young. Life and literature – all that. Parallels; illuminations. I'm no mystic, but there's one thing that never ceases to astonish me: the fixity of things. That we live with it, accept it as we do. That we do not question that the course of events is thus, and never could be other. When you think of how nearly, at every moment, it is not.

  Think of it. Stare it in the face and think of it.

  I come out of my front gate, I bump into old Sanders next door, we have a chat … Shift the point at which I emerge by ever so little, and I do not meet Sanders, we do not have a word about the cricket club dinner, he does not offer to drop over later with his Black & Decker and fix that shelf for me.

  I cross the street, looking first to right and left, a lorry passes, I alight upon the pavement opposite.

  I cross the street, not looking first to right and left; the lorry driver's concentration lapses for a second, I am so much meat under his wheels.

  Some bloke is gunned down in Sarajevo. In another country, evil is bred. And then and then and then … A tired voice comes from a crackling wireless: there is war. ‘May God bless you all,’ he says.

  A trigger jams. Elsewhere, a mad house-painter dies young of polio. And then, and then, and then … 3rd September 1939 is a fine day, sunshine with a hint of showers.

  Oh well of course you say, any fool can play those games. Intriguing but unproductive. We inhabit, after all, a definite world; facts are facts. The sequence of my life, of your life, of the public life.

  Listen, then. I went up to the pill-box this evening – the wartime pillbox on the top.

  The pill-box is on the brow of the hill and faces square down the lane. I take my time getting up there; it's a steep pull up and the outlook's half the point of the walk. I have a rest at the first gate, and then at the end by the oak, and again at the gate to Clapper's field. You get the view from there: the village down below you and the fields reaching away to the coast and the sea hanging at the edge of the green, a long grey smear with maybe a ship or two and on clear days the white glimmer of the steelworks over on the Welsh coast.

  It was sited to cover anything coming up and heading on over the hill. Heading for the main road – that would have been the idea, I suppose. It would have had the village covered, too, and a good part of the valley. Very small it looks now, stuck there at the edge of the field: barely room for a couple of blokes inside. I never know why it's not been taken away – much longer and it'll be a historical monument I daresay and they'll slap a protection order on it. The field is rough grazing and always has been so I suppose no one's felt any great call to get rid of it. Dalton's field, it is; from time to time you find he's stashed some cattle feed away in the pillbox, or a few bags of lime. It comes in handy for the village lads, too, always has done: get your girl up there, nice bit of shelter … I've made use of it that way myself in my time. Back in – oh, forty-seven or thereabouts. Yes, forty-seven, that spring it rained cats and dogs and there was flooding right left and centre. Rosie Parks, black curly hair and an answer to everything. Lying in there with the rain coming down in spears outside; ‘You lay off, Keith Harrison, I'm telling you …’ ‘Ah, come on, Rosie …’ Giggle giggle.
>
  The rain started this evening when I was at the oak, just a sprinkle, and by the time I got to the top it was coming down hard and looked set in for a while so I ducked down into the pill-box to sit it out.

  I was thinking about the past, in a vague kind of way – the war, being young. Looking out from inside the pill-box you see the countryside as a bright green rectangle, very clear, lots of detail, like a photo. And I've got good eyesight anyway, even at fifty-seven, just about a hundred per cent vision. I could see the new houses they've put up on the edge of the village and I was thinking that the place has changed a lot since I was a boy, and yet in other ways it hasn't. The new estate, the shop, cars at every door, telly aerials, main drainage; but the same names, by and large, same families, same taste to the beer, same stink from Clapper's silage in hot weather.

  I can see the house where I was born, from the pill-box. And the one I live in now. The churchyard, where my parents are, God bless 'em. The recreation ground beside the church hall where we used to drill in 1941; those of us left behind, too old like Jim Blockley at sixty-odd, too young like me at seventeen-and-a-half, too wonky like the postmaster with his bronchitis, too valuable like the farmers and the doctor.

  I can see the road, too – the road that takes me daily to work. Ten miles to Scarhead to try to drum a bit of sense and a bit of knowledge into forty fifteen-year-old heads. Full cycle. Back then, mine was the empty head, the bloke at the blackboard was … was old Jenkins, Jenks. It's not been a mistake, coming back. I'd always thought I'd like to. The day I saw the advert in the Times Ed. Supp. I knew at once I'd apply. Yes, I thought, that's it, that's for me, end up back at home, why not? I've always thought of it as home, down here, wherever I've been – Nottingham, up on the north-east, London. Not that it's local boy made good, exactly. Teaching's a tidy enough occupation, they reckon down here, but not high-flying.

  Farmers do a sight better. I don't drive a Jag, like Tim Matlock who was in my class at the grammar and farms up on the county border now. Not that I care tuppence.

  I lit a pipe to keep the midges off; the rain was coming down harder than ever. It looked as though I might have to pack in the rest of my walk. I opened the newspaper: usual stuff, miners reject pay offer, Middle East talks, rail fares up.

  When I heard the first voice I thought there was someone outside in the field – some trick of the acoustics, making it sound as though it were in the pill-box.

  ‘They're bloody coming!’ he said.

  And then another bloke, a young one, a boy, gave a sort of grunt. You knew, somehow, he was on edge. His voice had that crack to it, that pitch of someone who's keyed up, holding himself in. Shit-scared.

  ‘Can I have a look, Mr Barnes? Oh God – I see them. Heading straight up.’

  How can I put it? Describe how it was. The words that come to mind are banal, cliches: eerie, unearthly, uncanny.

  They were there, but they were not. They were in the head, but yet were outside it. There were two men, an old and a younger, who spoke from some other dimension; who were there with me in the pill-box and yet also were not, could not be, had never been.

  Listen again.

  ‘Give me them field-glasses … They've set Clapper's barn on fire. There's more tanks on the Scarhead road – six, seven… They'll be at the corner in a few minutes now, son.’

  And the young chap speaks again. ‘O.K.,’ he says. ‘O.K., I'm ready.’

  The voices, you understand, are overlaid by other noises, ordinary noises: the rain on the roof of the pill-box, sheep, a tractor in the lane. The tractor goes past but the voices don't take a blind bit of notice. The old bloke tells the other one to pass him another clip of ammo. ‘You all right, son?’ he says, the boy answers that is he all right? There is that high sharp note in his voice, in both their voices.

  There is a silence.

  And then they come back.

  ‘I can see him now. Armoured car. Two.’

  ‘O.K. Yes. I've got them.’

  ‘Hold it. Hold it, son …’

  ‘Yes. Right …’

  ‘Hold it. Steady. When they get to the oak.’

  ‘O.K., Mr Barnes.’

  And everything is quiet again. A quiet you could cut with a knife. The inside of the pill-box is tight-strung, waiting; it is both a moment in time and a time that is going on for ever, will go on for ever. I drop my tobacco tin and it clatters on the concrete floor but the sound does not break that other quiet, which, I now realise, is somewhere else, is something else.

  The old bloke says, ‘Fire!’

  And then they are both talking together. There is no other sound, nothing, just their voices. And the rain.

  The boy says, ‘I got him, my God, I got him!’ and the other one says, ‘Steady. Re-load now. Steady. Wait till the second one's moving again. Right. Fire!’

  ‘We hit him!’

  ‘He's coming on …’

  ‘Christ, there's another behind!’

  ‘Bastards! Jerry bastards!’

  And the boy cries, ‘That's for my dad! And that's for my mum! Come on then, bloody come on then …’

  ‘Steady, son. Hold it a minute, there's a …’

  ‘What's he doing, Christ he's …’

  ‘He's got a grenade. Keep on firing, for God's sake. Keep him covered.’

  And suddenly they go quiet. Quite quiet. Except that just once the old bloke says something. He says, ‘Don't move, Keith, keep still, I'm coming over, I …’

  He says, ‘Keith?’

  And there is nothing more.

  I went on sitting there. The quietness left the inside of the pill-box, that other quietness. The tractor came back down the lane again. The rain stopped. A blackbird started up on the roof of the pill-box. Down in the valley there was a patch of sunlight slap on the village; the church very bright, a car windscreen flashing, pale green of the chestnuts in the pub car park.

  I knew, now, that from the first moment there'd been something about that young chap's voice. The boy.

  Mr Barnes. Joe Barnes worked the manor farm in the war. He left here some time ago, retired to Ilfracombe; he died a year or two back.

  I was in his platoon, in 1941. I've not thought of him in years. Couldn't put a face to him, now. He died of cancer in a nursing-home in Ilfracombe. Didn't he?

  Or.

  Or he died in a pill-box up on the hill above the village, long ago. Him and a boy called Keith. In which case the pill-box is no longer there nor I take it the village nor the whole bloody place, at least not in any way you or I could know it.

  No young fellow called Keith ever put his hand up the skirt of Rosie Parks in that pill-box, nor did another bloke, a fifty-seven-year-old teacher of English, walk up that way of an evening for a smoke and a look at the view.

  I came out, filled my pipe, looked down at the village. All right, yes, I thought to myself – interesting, the imaginative process. The mind churning away, putting pictures to a line of thought. I dozed off in there.

  Later I knew I did not imagine it. I heard it. Heard them. So what do you make of that? Eh? What can anyone make of it? How, having glimpsed the possibility of the impossible, can the world remain as steady as you had supposed?

  Suppose that the writer of a story were haunted, in the mind, for ever, by all those discarded alternatives, by the voices of all those assorted characters. Forced to preserve them always as the price of creative choice.

  Then suppose, by the same token, that just once in a while it is given to any one of us to experience the inconceivable. To push through the barrier of what we know into the heady breathtaking unbearable ozone of what we cannot contemplate. Did that happen to me? In the pill-box on the hill on a summer Monday evening, with the world steady under my feet and the newspaper in my hand, telling me what's what, how the world is, where we are?

  Customers

  MAJOR ANGLESEY and Mrs Yardley-Peters worked slowly up and down the aisles of the chain store. They picked up garments and held them aga
inst each other. Mrs Yardley-Peters undid her coat, and Major Anglesey tried blouses around the broad slope of her bosom, measuring them carefully armpit to armpit. Mrs Yardley-Peters pondered over a red paisley dressing-gown, chest forty, looking from the pattern to the Major's rather ruddy complexion and gingery toothbrush moustache. Rejecting the blouses and the dressing-gown, they paused at the hosiery counter, where Mrs Yardley-Peters selected three pairs of tights (Brown Haze, Large) and paid for them at the nearest cash desk. They hesitated for a long while over ladies’ v-neck lambswool sweaters, eventually deciding on a light grey size sixteen which Mrs Yardley-Peters popped into her shopping bag.

  At Men's Accessories, Major Anglesey held various ties under his chin and decided on a red and navy stripe, which he folded tidily and put in his pocket. From there they wandered to the shoe section. Major Anglesey tried on a pair of brown brogues, took a step or two and shook his head, returning them to the rack. Mrs Yardley-Peters, meanwhile, had put on some black pumps – size four since, although a stout woman and not short, she had surprisingly small feet. The Major nodded approval and Mrs Yardley-Peters slipped her own shoes into the shopping bag, keeping on the pumps. Major Anglesey, at this point, glanced at his watch, said something, and the two of them moved rather more quickly to the food department where they filled a wire basket with a carton of coleslaw, two portions of cooked chicken, a packet of jam fancies and a jar of powdered coffee, lining up with those at the checkout.

  The store detective, having joined them at the time of the red and navy striped tie, stood discreetly to one side. She was an unexceptional-looking woman, wearing a brown crimplene dress and fawn anorak, with a basket over one arm. The basket held, today, a bunch of bananas and a packet of Kleenex. She tended to vary the contents; meat, of course, would not do, being inclined to go bad in the heat of the store, over a long day.