If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  Later, he smelt food and heard marches playing on the wireless. She brought him up his tea, but he was too apprehensive either to eat or to listen; and when his father arrived with Arthur Figgis, Jack peered down from the stairhead. He watched her explaining what had happened again. At first, his father appeared to lose patience. Jack heard the word ‘encumbrance’ and he saw his mother’s slender wrist held by his father’s strong grip. Next, she was both informing and interceding, and he couldn’t tell whose side she was on. Voices were raised, and he caught his father’s face, looking up at him in exasperation. ‘All right, then,’ she was saying, ‘you can look after him yourself, if that’s what you want. I’ll go, shall I, if that’s what you want? I shall if I like, and you won’t stop me, Tony Rice.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  ‘I’m telling you it’s not my fault.’

  ‘And I suppose it’s mine, is it?’

  ‘Make what you want of him, then. You obviously think more of him than you do of me. Don’t you, Tony? You do, don’t you?’

  ‘Now then, you two lovebirds.’ That was Figgsy’s voice. There was laughter, for there was a job on, and what did it matter? Finally, she came up to Jack, abstracted, and told him not to worry, because this time he’d not be punished any more, and he’d still be going up for his treat. She called it that. Her eyes were far away, because she’d switched herself off from him.

  The men laughed again, down by the open front door. Figgsy called up, ‘Looks like you’ve got away with it, Jacks.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ his father said. ‘Business is business. Keep you both company. Make sure you don’t bloody lose him, Figgsy.’

  Jack followed her back into her bedroom. He was so grateful. She was seated once more at the dressing-table, the side mirrors folded round. She was repeated, there, and there again, and he would have dashed in between and thrown himself into her arms, clung on to her and begged her to keep him, but in the doubling and trebling of her image he felt almost more beaten and overwhelmed than if he had actually been caned. ‘You’re going for your treat,’ she said. ‘You’re a lucky, lucky little boy.’

  Touching at her lips with the precious cotton wool, then painting, then powdering, now dabbing here, now patting the hair at her temple, she would keep looking straight ahead, and there was no use. Only when he said goodbye did she break off to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Be good now, and have a nice time, won’t you.’

  In the back of the car he imagined her practising her songs at the piano in the parlour, in her own world of dressing up and going out, picking out the tunes with one finger, and contemplating her reflected mystery in the music on the page. He imagined her skirts pulled up again, as they had been, and the bare white expanses of skin touched by the falling notes. And the bruises, and how it was his pain that could protect her, the pain that was the business of God, they said in the school, the nails hammered through.

  Then the journey through Hornchurch and on towards Romford drained all its light to the drab sunset in front. The night closed around the car in a long, tight tube, a pipe that swung and roared now this way, now that, to London.

  And though he’d had nothing to eat, he had to be sick into a gutter beside some houses while the car door stood open and the engine idled. Figgsy had on his nasty face. His father threatened to slam the door on his arm if he got any mess on the leatherwork. But then they laughed again as though maybe they didn’t mean it, and joked about a bad penny and a bent copper. ‘The copper’s bent, all right,’ his father said.

  The car pulled up at last. In the glow from the slitted headlamps Jack saw the green tailgate and tarpaulin hood of a lorry. US Army.

  He hadn’t been to the house before. It was a large one left standing in a bombed terrace. Around it, wrecks and roofless shells showed in the faint starlight, black teeth in a bad mouth. There was a smell of old dust and the river. His father huddled him in the flap of his coat on the pavement, to keep him warm, and Jack could peer out past his buttonholes. The shadowy figures were soldiers carrying crates and packages out of the lorries. He wondered if this time they’d finally arrived at the war.

  A policeman held one hand out in greeting; he carried his peaked cap in the other. ‘One jump ahead, eh, Tony?’

  ‘All right,’ his father said in reply. ‘Figgsy,’ he gestured, and Jack felt himself move in the cloth of his father’s coat. ‘Oh, and the encumbrance.’

  ‘Ah,’ the policeman said, affably, looking at Jack.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said his father. ‘That’s right. And the stuff’s all Yank, straight off the pond. Take anything else you want, why don’t you? The joint’s full of it. Before it goes downriver again, or wherever.’

  ‘Mind if I ask?’

  ‘He ain’t mine. Figgsy looks after him. He’s an escaper.’ Jack heard the laugh.

  Inside, the house was dim. It wafted thickly of tobacco smoke. A man in uniform pushed Jack out of the way with the box he carried in. Then Mrs Lavender came who was always there before them, and Jack thought he liked her. She had lipstick that was just too big for her mouth and her eyebrows were high, pencilled lines. But her eyes were tired. Her face had small lines on her cheeks and beside her smile, and when she laughed she had a gold tooth. She held out an American chocolate bar for him. ‘Don’t let them see you as shouldn’t.’ Then she said to Figgsy, ‘Electric doesn’t work but the gas does.’

  ‘Needs teaching a lesson, that kid,’ Figgsy replied. ‘Cup of tea would do the trick, Sal.’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. You’d better go in there, son, with Frankie.’

  The girl had appeared. She was beautiful, but Jack felt sick again.

  Pipe smoke in the dark front parlour was so thick it caught his throat. He was coughing. In the grate a fire burnt red. Two gas brackets were on the wall. It was the policeman who sat in a winged armchair, and a tall clock stood behind him. Jack looked round, to run, but the girl, Frankie, was stroking the velvet of the old-fashioned tablecloth. Her hand smoothed the nap. ‘We’re your other family, aren’t we?’ she said. He knew nothing, could understand nothing.

  Figgsy was behind him. Mrs Lavender came in, pouring a mug of tea from a flask.

  ‘For you, Figgsy, darling.’

  ‘That’s the ticket. All right, Frank?’

  ‘No better for seeing you.’

  ‘The night is young.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Not in front of the child, my girl,’ Mrs Lavender said.

  Frankie replied, ‘You’re surely joking, aren’t you?’

  Jack watched Mrs Lavender leave.

  ‘Old witch.’

  He turned back just as Figgsy grabbed him by the collar. ‘Smile for the gentleman, sonny.’ Half-choked he found himself dumped in front of the hearth.

  Now Jack stared into the policeman’s eyes. He saw a cold dead glint with the smile that wasn’t a smile, the red light from the fire making half a mask with the line of shadow from the wing chair. The smoke curled up from the man’s pipe.

  ‘None of your riff-raff,’ Figgsy said. ‘None of the scrawny, snot-nosed two-a-penny scum that run around here, mate. Are you, Jacks? The boss’s own son.’ He coughed behind his hand. ‘We all have to watch our Ps and Qs, don’t we?’

  Jack felt the policeman’s hand on his head, smoothing his hair. Outside in the hall the booted feet tramped with the sound of the crates coming in, and still coming in. He turned his head away. In the murky gaslight between the table and the policeman’s fireside chair there was a box levered open. He saw the American wrappers. ‘Candy, Jack,’ said the pretty young woman, Frankie. She still had her hand on the table runner. ‘He’s got such a sweet tooth.’

  His heart hurt his chest, in the upstairs room, with no light on and the curtains open. Jack fixed his eyes on the jug that stood in the water bowl. He concentrated with all his force on the jug, its black shape with the lip and handle, the full round pregnant shape where it sat in the ewer, wide, drawing a line across l
ike a horizon. Forgive us our trespasses. If he could hold his mind on the shapes, the jug, the bowl, then he knew he could blank out the fact that he was not alone in the room, completely blank out the pain and the bent policeman and the breaking and entering …

  If he could make that picture of the bridge stand in his imagination with the rectangle of bright distance in the frame of it; if he could make his mind keep on running, keep on going from where his body had given up and stopped. If he could do that, then there would come a moment when he might escape through the archway and out into the open country beyond. There was a place he’d known once, a miniature green place, and a man who’d held him in his hands, high up in the sunlight. They were making a house. He could see the sunset stretched against the sky in an intense red gold that wasn’t the war, that wasn’t invasion, where the streaks of cloud caught fire with a slow and kindly flame.

  IT WAS A cold, damp morning. Dr Pike held his watch anxiously in the palm of his hand. He expected his daughter and her boyfriend at any moment – indeed, they might already have arrived.

  He opened the surgery door. His last patient of the morning was Mrs Benedick, from Bolt’s Grove. At the sight of him she stood up and came forward; but as she did so, Clarice entered the waiting-room from the hallway. Dr Pike caught a glimpse of the soldier with her and smiled involuntarily. Mrs Benedick smiled back, and he felt awkwardly exposed between the two.

  Blushing, though he had no reason to, he nodded to his daughter, ushered his patient in, and closed his door. Mrs Benedick, in her threadbare but exquisitely tailored brown suit, hovered. A pretty little hat perched sideways on her head; she was an elegant, well-preserved woman who’d taken obvious pains. Her gloves and shoes were stylish, banded with fawn suede. Yet with a gesture that verged on the ungallant, Dr Pike indicated the upright chair and turned away to extract her file from his cabinet.

  Seated once more at his desk, he attempted to collect his thoughts. He had no fever this morning. He was certainly more himself, these days. Since he’d entered practice again, the months had begun to hurry by. Mrs Benedick was a problematically menopausal woman – so he’d always thought. He was sure he had no fever.

  She waited demurely in front of him. Something about her always unsettled him. She was the widow of the local landowner’s agent. In his mind, he’d almost made a point of being unkind to her. He’d invested her, for example, with political prejudices he’d no evidence she actually held, simply on account of her deceased husband’s profession. For some reason it suited him, this failure to see her as a woman in her own right. He’d found himself sketchy with her, reluctant to offer her his due attention. As a result she continued to present herself.

  He peered above his half-moon spectacles at the composed, rather delicate little figure. She was putting her own spectacle case into her bag. An apprehension prickled the hairs on the back of his neck. Mrs Benedick was in her early fifties. Her features were good; rather than detracting, the faint lines in her complexion added distinction – a handsome woman, even. She was known to live modestly; her son ran what was left of the business.

  For a moment he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Then, when she lifted her own gaze, he felt again caught out, and turned away, patting his waistcoat and pretending to reassure himself about his watch. He made himself skim her notes. Clarice had written to say she was coming over on a day’s pass. Her last letter had sounded buoyant enough, but she masked her difficulties; there was an undertone. He’d be relieved, at last, to see the young man and have the chance of forming his own opinion. Last time he’d been too hard on her.

  When he looked up again his eyes met those of his patient, and once more veered apart from them. But Mrs Benedick’s expression was warm, and trusting. Instantly he regretted the unprofessional comments he’d made only the previous week, at a reunion dinner in London for the benefit of a couple of long-lost fellow students. Glancing back at the lady now, he wondered what he could have been thinking of to have misread her so. She appeared almost stately, and he’d been churlish.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Benedick. What seems to be the trouble today?’

  Mrs Benedick looked down at her gloved hands. The suede was very fine; one of the seams had come unstitched. ‘I’m not entirely sure, doctor. I still don’t believe everything’s quite as it should be.’ She went over her symptoms for him. They were vague, shifting discomforts. Her voice was cultured, liquid. She’d hurt her knee on last winter’s ice and after so long it still gave her pain.

  He was moved. ‘It’s a sad fact that as we get on, Mrs Benedick, our bodies take longer to heal.’

  ‘But if one could discipline one’s thoughts, Dr Pike, surely that would help. I find I sleep so badly, what with everything: the world, the news. Even the successes. Perhaps because of the successes. This over Rommel, say … Certain distressing items, they will insist …’

  She’d hit it exactly. Certain distressing items: no more than his own thoughts. They turned constantly to Seremban, under Japanese occupation. But the woman herself … Only last week he’d baulked at a full examination, having convinced himself she was perfectly healthy. She was not neurasthenic. Nor did she complain of the precise discomforts of the natural process. Instead of flushes and mood swings she produced a disorganised malaise, and, as a rule, he gave such patients short shrift. Yet once again today he saw her in a different light. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  She smiled. The ready play of her mouth was touching, and honest.

  His daughter was waiting. But with Mrs Benedick he’d been too hasty too often. ‘I think I ought to have a proper look at you, then, don’t you?’ he said. ‘And we’ll see if we can do something about that knee.’

  He set the screen around the couch and waited at the window until he heard the springs creak. Then he hung his stethoscope round his neck, stuck the heavy manometer box in his coat pocket and opened the screen’s end panel. She lay in her underclothes upon the couch beneath the unglazed reproduction of Flatford Mill. Her slip was pulled up and her hands were laced loosely together under her bosom. He hovered like a lover – the word went off in his head like a gun. That damned intuitive gift of his, it ran so contrary to science. The sight of her bare neck and shoulders made him blush, right to his unstarched collar. Her thighs, even with their slight sag of flesh, perhaps even because of it, were quite beautiful.

  Lethargy; diffuse pain; headaches; lesion in right knee owing to fall, failure to mend. He tried to remain clinical, and failed profoundly. For, once he’d touched her, nothing could block the true diagnosis that had evaded him all along. Indeed, one slight, involuntary movement of Mrs Benedick’s leg taught him in a flash what he should have seen months ago. Unfortunately, there was nothing medical about it. She – her head just turned away and the line of the underside of her jaw made visible – was attracted to him. Ten times worse, it was quite on the cards that he – judging by certain unmistakable sensations occurring parasympathetically with the contact – felt exactly the same.

  He folded her slip back down in haste. He checked her breathing. All he could hear was his own heartbeat. He took her blood pressure but his hand tingled from her pulse and he broke off with the mercury unread and the band dangling from her arm. He went to wash. ‘I can find nothing specifically wrong, Mrs Benedick.’ His voice quavered, formulaic. ‘But I’ll try you on a different tonic, if you like. We’ll see if that suits you better. And we could have some blood tests done, if things don’t clear up. Of their own accord, I mean.’ His throat was dry. ‘The aches and pains … Well, we must all come to expect that sort of thing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Thank you, doctor.’ Her own sound was sweetness. From where he stood by the ewer and basin, he heard her get up. He heard her hands smoothing her linen. She didn’t reposition the screen. In the corner of his eye he caught her adjusting her lace hem. She stepped into her skirt, fastened it, and then pointed her toes into the worn brown high-heeled shoes. As she bent down to
tie the laces he saw the bodice of her slip fall just a fraction away from her breasts. And when she stood up the soft, grey-streaked hair rolled upon the nape of her neck.

  He moved to his desk to write up her notes. She emerged from the other side of the screen, buttoning her blouse and pulling on the fitted suit jacket with its moth holes in the lapel. There was nothing knowing or coquettish about her. She thanked him again, and he was desperate she should go at once, desolated that she would. He’d send the prescription. She thanked him once more, decorously. In leaving she gave no sign that she thought tuppence about him. Yet he knew he was right, and when he’d recovered himself, he was tempted to laugh out loud.

  Dr Pike hadn’t remained entirely impotent; it was more that he’d grown used to regarding himself as something of a hopeless case in that department. Now it seemed his long penance had ended. But even as he emerged from it, so the old difficulties loomed, as fresh and unresolved as if he were somehow picking up exactly where he’d left off, with Mattie, with Selama. Here stood the same moral dilemma, of forbidden territory. Mrs Benedick was his patient, and therefore sacrosanct. For that he was tempted to groan out loud. To complete the recurring picture there impended, of course, the matter of his daughter.

  THAT AFTERNOON, THE black specks of American Flying Fortresses were visible, climbing in jagged formations up the November clouds and out over the North Sea. It was their raiding hour. And from the lane at the edge of the field came the inevitable growl and camouflaged canvas roof of an army lorry.

  They were walking in the top meadow, Clarice, Vic and himself, wrapped up against the damp, still air. There was a hint of mist gathering. Bentley, the dog, visited them every so often before tearing off after some scent or flicker. Ethel Farmer had followed a rationing recipe in which grated carrot and powdered egg featured prominently. Now they were all uneasy with each other, trying to make light.