by Derek Beaven
‘What’s to stop him?’
‘Surely …’ She floundered.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t come right past your doorstep.’ He smiled again. Then he turned away.
‘Really,’ she said coldly, after him.
Phyllis was speaking. ‘Of course we’re tied to London, as you must understand. Or we’d probably try to move out, too. Tony’s business interests …’
‘Who is Tony?’
‘Oh. Didn’t I say? It’s Vic’s employer. Partner really. So Vic’s business interests keep him close to the capital.’
‘As do your own, of course.’
‘Oh, yes. And that.’
In the evening, after the boy had gone to bed, they played cards.
MY BROTHER, OR half-brother, Jack. His is a voice I never heard. My brother – let me tell you.
If it didn’t rain they’d go and help Boss Hayman out on the fruit farm. Hayman was the name of the neighbours. His Auntie Clarice had promised them a real taste of the outdoors. Jack had asked what the outdoors was. His great-uncle, the doctor, told him he was going with his mother and his father to the farm along the road. All night the house had creaked and ticked until morning came. Then they swept away together in the Lynx.
One field had rows of raspberry canes like a succession of hedges. Another had cherry trees in bright, white flower. A third was bare earth in turned furrows, and Jack sat in the lap of an Uncle Boss behind a tractor smaller than a motor bike. It was a mechanical snail; smoke chugged from its chimney pipe. It pulled him along on the cultivator, and he steered the front wheel, swinging the long rod as far as he could reach, this way, now that, to the furrow. All the time Jack was waiting to see his father, because of what the doctor had said; but he knew both how to wait and how to button his lip. They ploughed the brown earth by the River Stour, wide as a lake. On the water he saw one ship with tan sails, one white, but not a third.
Clarice wore shining clothes, or was there a brightness that came out of her skin? It clung to her arms, and made him want to be caught up by them, held close to her face. She stood with Tony beside the straight ridges. The brightness moved when she moved, it dwelt upon her skirt, upon the edges of her cardigan. As he jogged along on the tractor Jack could only see such light when he didn’t expect to. But he liked Boss’s sons, too. They wore shorts; the hair on their legs curled in dark strands. The hair moved on the wind-blown skin. Jack wanted to be as manly as them both, with their rolled-down socks and large muddy shoes. One wore glasses. He said there was a canoe but that it leaked; and in the canoe Jack thought they would sink until a kingfisher came. The canoe smelt of leaves and water lay under the seat; but though the son pointed and pointed, he couldn’t see what the kingfisher was.
He turned and looked at the shore where Clarice was standing – and from far away she was reflected in the water, until the sudden ripples changed her. He knew a song his father sang when he was sawing wood: ‘Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our king.’ They must get back. On the dry land again with Clarice the birds chirrupped all about: skylark, curlew, thrush, the tree creeper, the woodpecker, crows. She told him their names. She showed him, too, the first leaves coming from branches, small ears of green, unfolding, and the sticky buds. Her words matched what he could know.
Next, there was a low, boarded house in a green space, cool, in a forest. He was tired and hungry, his mother said, and they’d come away because he’d been calling out for his father. Beyond the overhanging trees Jack could still see furrows, hear the tractor’s grumble, smell the pervasive farm smell; and the house was wood – but not small like the summer cabin Rabbit had made. Now Tony was the Vic. This house was old and painted dark green, as though it had grown here of its own accord, with its white decorations along the top of the roof, and a wooden spike at each end. The gable over the front door looked more like the window on Ripple Road, where they lived in the flat, than the poor hutch at Laindon. There were outside steps with a rail. They went up to knock, and his father was lost in one house after another, this one on stilts, look, underneath, where it might flood, or snakes. Uncle Doc, Uncle Boss, Vic – all men grew into a condition, and were lost.
Dark and quiet inside as the hollow tree of a story, a tall clock ticking slowly the beats, the darkness of wood, closed, still, no room, no dad. Then Jack looked everywhere in case of barking: the fire in the grate, the mantelpiece, the carved rosettes in the armchairs, the cupboards brown with china inside. The dark table legs were made into shapes, and a flat piano balanced in the air – all the wood hummed and breathed so secretly he hardly dared yawn or make his own sounds. His eyelids tried to close though he held them wide. There were thick cloths and covers, the smells of rugs, and of a real dog. He knew how always the world might turn itself away and slip into something else in a moment, and yet the patterns kept making the same shape. There were black wooden eyes in the corner near the clock, in a huge head, and Jack turned to run but his mother caught him. ‘Sorry. He’s always a bit difficult at first. He’ll settle down.’
‘It’s Boss’s cello. He’s frightened of the cello.’ The old woman knew and picked up the great face to show him what it was.
‘A Cox’s orange pippin.’ Uncle Boss cut a piece of a large apple that was wrapped in straw. He gave it to him, like the witch his dad read about once, and it tasted of orange and smelt of straw. ‘You make the most of that, boy. We shan’t be seeing many oranges for a while.’ Then the uncle smiled, the skin of his head moving tufts of white hair sticking up. There was a real cat there, too, in the dark house.
His mother wore a very short white skirt of Aunt Clarice’s. ‘Oh, I really couldn’t. Are you sure? But I’m so out of practice.’ Jack could see her knees. They were a small bump at the front and then white widening legs going up, and such a strange extent of skin without hair or feature, until they were hidden behind the hem, as if he were looking at her body for the first time.
The men had on old plimsolls. They’d be going to the farm again and he wanted to ride on the tractor. But they all went away without him and he thought he’d been left alone for ever with the woman, the witch aunt, her face with the small red veins, and the round lump on her lip. She smiled. His mummy and daddy would be playing tennis. He said his daddy was in Pentonville.
‘Is he, dear?’
‘He got three years.’
‘My word. That’s a long time.’
Then he was to go to sleep, there, on the leather settee. She gave him some cake because he’d had his dinner, and the sun shone in through the small window. He saw the man-jug sitting on the sill next to the china dog. His father would come soon because he was playing tennis.
In the crook of the piano his mother sang. The quiver in her voice came out of her head and was in the room. Everyone clapped. She smiled at Tony. Auntie Clarice stood up. ‘Wonderful, Phyllis.’ Uncle Boss sat with the cello between his legs. Jack’s mother and Tony sat on the old leather settee. There were cello shapes under people’s chins, and then the music came, the sounds overwhelming, full of scrolls and curls, like the cello itself, and next fierce like a saw. Clarice’s arms lifted one by one from the keyboard into the air, and struck down. He wanted them to stop, but they wouldn’t and the wooden room with its olden time shook and curled and filled up until it seemed there was nowhere for the music to go except inside his head and he was crying. His mother took him outside.
He looked under the house and it smelt of oil from the sons’ car, a little ruby-red car with one engine cover up, the oil can on the ground, the smell of oil and mud coming up from the ground, the old dog asleep. The chain lay along the side of the stilts and was nailed up to the back of the kennel. Aunt Clarice came out too.
‘You haven’t forgotten my offer, have you, Phylly? Heavens, the poor slum children went, didn’t they?’
‘And came back, a good half of them.’
‘He’s very welcome, you know. I’d really like to have him.’
<
br /> ‘It’s very kind of you. I’ll think about it, but I can’t imagine it’ll be necessary. Evacuation was just one of those silly scares, wasn’t it? I don’t believe in all this politics. You know me. It’ll be all right on the night.’
‘At the very least a holiday for him. I mean, if the noose tightens there’s still a chance they’ll risk the gas option. On London. If they get really rattled, don’t you think?’
‘Suit yourself.’
There was suddenly an ear-splitting drone. Jack thought for a moment the music was starting again and put his hands over his ears. Then three huge planes came low over the trees blanking the evening sky while they seemed to scrape at the hair on his head. He screamed and then stared as they disappeared. The grown-ups smiled at him because the aircraft were theirs, but his dad wasn’t playing tennis at all and bombs would fall.
III
The Borderland
JUNE. DR PIKE followed the defeat of France with astonishment, as though it were a dream. All at once the Germans had sidestepped the Maginot Line and were through the Ardennes. While Paris seemed none the wiser, the French Ninth Army fled in rout, throwing away their rifles, joining the streams of civilians fleeing west across the fields of Champagne and Picardie.
He and Clarice saw all this at the cinema in Ipswich, the roads out of the war zones clogged with refugees, pushing carts, herding children, carrying suitcases. Strafed by Stukas and buzzed by Bf109s, lines of people were chased along a single road by the endless column of General Heinz Guderian’s XIXth Armoured Corps. The Blitzkrieg was hypnotic. The mere sight of the thin string of panzer tanks struck terror into every heart. What was to be made of it, this extraordinary débâcle? The French Army was the largest in the world.
Its preparations had been intensive, he reflected, coldly, clearly, suddenly not drunk at all. Intensive, and yet fatally, almost wilfully flawed. Within living memory France had been attacked through the same forest – the precise spot of Guderian’s crossing, Sedan, on the Meuse, was the scene of her surrender to the Prussians in 1870. Doctor Pike had learnt that at school. He had learnt, too, that the Germans were a Brothers Grimm nation of woodmen. Oak leaves and lightning were their military emblems. And yet the French had left the routes through the Ardennes undefended. The long panzer column had even been detected from the air, and allowed to advance unhindered.
In the subsequent days, at his radio, or in the newspapers, a slow-motion sequence unfolded: of the encirclement of the armies of the north, of the exclusion of the RAF, and then of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. He’d seen boats go out from Ipswich docks. Not so slow after all, the sequence – for it accomplished within a matter of days what the Great War had failed to do in four years. So the two great Continental enemies, Germany and France, reformed in a line across the whole of Normandy, from the Maginot Line in the east to the Seine in the west. Outnumbered, overflown, and eventually fully engaged to the last fighting unit, France’s young men gave up their lives once again to her serial assailant.
As a member of the public, very little of this last information was available to Dr Pike, for the conflict on French soil was far less reported than the rescue from the beaches. Nevertheless, by a dogged assembly of sources, he read between the lines of official broadcasts. The collision’s rolling and attritional slaughter took the casualty figures for both sides into line with the Great War battles, the devastations of the seventeenth century, or the old Roman campaigns when troops unblest with gunpowder contrived to stab, poke or chew each other to death in their tens of thousands. So my great-uncle estimated; for such facts as these he had also learnt at school.
France was lost. Now the Empire he’d served, cursed, and even loved a little bit, whose myths, attitudes and mosquitoes had infected him, that arrogant, well-intentioned, shakeless guarantee of a certain way of doing things, lay exposed. Prepared all along against the bombing of her cities, Britannia had never dreamed of invasion. It had been, in a sense, unthinkable.
All at once the mother country had proved to be nothing more than a small island made chiefly out of coal – so he joked to Clarice – on which he and his daughter had been washed up. It had a traumatised army with no guns, a mauled air force, and one or two grey boats. The world was there for the taking, and stood on the brink of the new order. Stan Pike shook himself awake. But the worst thing was that he hadn’t been sleeping.
The fall of France did put a stop to his drinking – that, and a worrisome dwindling of the funds he had left over from his imperial service. He finally grasped that Selama Yakub was dead. Reality came rushing in on him, just as it rushed upon everyone else. He wanted to feel the pain. Stopping the Scotch was a way of punishing himself for her loss, because his decision to bring his daughter home now looked even more like the supreme idiocy of his life. Events had not only proved him as wrong as could be, but culpable: he’d killed one woman and placed the other in worse jeopardy.
‘I’m impressed,’ Clarice said. ‘Though it’s not one of the suggestions listed here.’ She held in her hands a government leaflet – ‘If the Invader Comes’. ‘That other one mentions Scotland but not Scotch. Still, worth a try, perhaps. If there’s time.’
‘You’re a cynical girl,’ he replied.
‘I thought I was just terrified.’
He went outside and smashed his last bottle into the dustbin. The dear fluid ran over the ash and eggshells. He saw it leak like golden urine through a rust hole at the bin’s base, only to lose itself between two stones and a tuft of grass. A succession of fighters from Martlesham Heath flew overhead, angrier and more piercing than the Wattisham bombers.
Common sense argued that history would be indifferent to Dr Pike’s blood alcohol levels when the Wehrmacht tramped over his corpse on its way up from Shotley Gate. But he recalled Selama’s insistence on the religious duty to keep judgement unclouded. ‘Who knows when the devil will jump out on us, Stan?’ she once had said.
Now the devil had jumped out, and so abstinence was both a way of honouring her and her religion, and of arming himself. In fact, one way or another, Selama’s spirit had been whispering over his shoulder all the time since her death, and he’d been just too soused to hear. It pleaded that one man’s self-control might be as important as all the precious cannon, tanks, aircraft, and armoured cars the Army had been forced to abandon in France. It argued that the fool God saw drinking himself into oblivion at the world’s moment might just turn out to be the one real fifth-columnist. Dr Pike smiled, and then choked on his emotions; but he hardened against being that fool.
THERE WERE TWO old shotguns in the boxroom of Pook’s Hill, a double-barrelled twelve bore and a rusty, single four-ten. He stripped them down on the dining-room table and oiled them from a long-spouted can he found among the cobwebs in one of his sheds. There was a bottle of Johnny Walker hidden in the sideboard, at the back of the shelf. He’d known it was there all along. He brought it out and stood it next to the unscrewed locks, stocks and barrels, in order to make ready to hurl it after its companions into the dustbin. But for a while he regarded the rectangular form, since it seemed such a shame.
There came a knock at the front door. Clarice was in Ipswich where he’d sent her to buy up cartridges, and Ethel Farmer had the afternoon off. A touch guiltily, he answered the knock himself – to a gentleman in sporting tweeds from Manningtree, who gave his name as Wellbridge, and came in.
Mr Wellbridge wondered had Dr Pike considered joining the Local Defence Volunteers.
Dr Pike hadn’t.
Mr Wellbridge thought the two dismantled guns were a jolly good show, and seeing the Scotch he didn’t mind if he did. It had turned out fine again, though no doubt they’d have to pay for it.
They took a glass each, and at first Dr Pike warmed to the idea of becoming involved with his neighbourhood and at one with his fellow men. Having lived for so long on the fringes of society – and of the world – because of his unorthodox heart, he felt a re
al attraction in the prospect. The Scotch tingled on his tongue.
‘After all, it could be any day now, couldn’t it?’ Wellbridge was saying.
‘So it would seem,’ said Dr Pike. ‘One really ought to join. I’d had the idea the only thing we could do would be to evacuate the women and children and prepare to sell our lives as dearly as possible. Can I possibly be of any use?’
‘Good Lord, yes. There’s plenty of fight in the old dog yet. We’ll need people to keep watch, sound the alarm.’
‘But the German army, tanks and so on.’
‘There’ll be parachutists, first of all. They’ll need rounding up.’
‘Ah yes. The paratroops. I’ve read about them, dressed as nuns.’
Wellbridge looked quizzical, as though some old wound troubled him. Then he carried on. ‘They do use disguises, yes. We’ll need all our wits about us. There’ll be training sessions, and drill. By the way, you’re planning to hang on to those guns, are you?’
‘I’d thought so.’
‘It’s just that we’re rather short, until the rifles come through. You’d think the coast would be top priority now, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes. I suppose you would.’ Dr Pike laid a protective hand on his twelve-bore action.
‘Please yourself,’ said Wellbridge. ‘But until Jerry does come there’s the internal matter, of course. We’ll be needed for guard duty.’
‘The internal matter?’
‘Traitors, doctor. Spies. The enemy within. France was undermined from the start; she never stood a chance. It’s our first job to make certain the same thing doesn’t happen here. Do you know, that’s remarkably good Scotch. One so rarely has the opportunity, these days.’
‘Have another.’
‘Well, yes, why not. If you insist.’
Mr Wellbridge took his second glass. Dr Pike still sipped his first. The taste worried him. He said, ‘And who exactly are these …? Where shall we find them?’
