by Derek Beaven
Yet Vic cut a reasonable enough figure in his khaki: the tanned, rather distinguished-looking face, the clipped brown hair. He was tall and strong. There was nothing about him as a man that would make one uneasy. Indeed, to his surprise, Dr Pike was disposed to like Vic very much, and as the day had worn on something of a father – son bond seemed primed and ready to spring up between them. But there was the matter he couldn’t fathom, something Clarice wasn’t telling him. It was too unconvincing that she simply craved his permission.
He hesitated. Clarice and Vic stopped beside him, expectantly. He felt cornered by circumstances, being asked to override a better judgement. He needed to think. ‘I suppose if we’ve come to a natural break in the proceedings,’ he said to Vic, half joking, ‘I should ask you what your prospects are.’
‘I’m afraid that’s a difficult one, sir.’ There was that trace of a London accent, just like the other one.
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is.’ Dr Pike sighed. They walked on together. Vic threw another stick and Bentley plunged after it. The dog disappeared in a streaked green sea which frothed spent cow-parsley heads. Every few seconds a shower of shaken moisture showed his position. Then he returned, panting and empty mouthed. The parted grass revealed damp celandines, and another remnant of the Queen Anne’s lace. ‘Fetch,’ Vic said. ‘You’re supposed to fetch!’
‘He’s completely barmy,’ said Dr Pike. ‘They’re not bred for intellect, setters.’
Vic searched for something else to throw. The dog bounded up, and then crouched excitedly beside him. Clarice walked on a few paces ahead while Dr Pike brooded. His mind turned for the hundredth time to Mrs Benedick, and he wondered in which direction Bolt’s Grove lay from where they stood. With a certain reluctance, he brought his attention back. Clarice looked peaked, certainly no advertisement for love’s young dream. Her happiness lay in his hands; or in Vic’s.
He ran over the facts, hoping for fresh insight. Blindly, blunderingly, but eventually, he’d got her out of the way of the Japanese. Crazily, he and she had managed the threat of invasion together. She’d survived being bombed. Now the war, at least against the Germans, showed signs of amelioration. She’d got off scot-free, hadn’t she? Then where was the problem? Why wasn’t Vic making her happy?
He tried to allow for any jealousy or frustration of his own. Diligently, he sought to put aside his liking for Vic as a man. Vic had striven, he knew, had built his barges and showed brains enough to want to better himself. Did that make him right for Clarice? Dr Pike detected a hint of suppressed violence – there was a holding back, a tension. But then the man was a soldier, and it was wartime; towards Clarice his movements showed nothing but care and affection.
Dr Pike knew he missed the nub of the matter. Some trouble was sapping Clarice from within. That was the problem and for all Vic’s good nature he doubted the young man had much clue how to deal with it. Then again, could he really be trusted? He still wasn’t sure – he felt he had too little to go on. He took out his watch and put it back in its pocket.
Rooks cawed from high up in the elms by Top Barn, and the sharp sound came like a saw down the long air of the meadow. Bentley barked. Vic Warren had already let down one woman in the family. He had been in prison for a serious crime. The whole subsequent situation was so full of legal tangles and familial awkwardnesses, it was irregular even for wartime. Dr Pike found himself coming to his position. Honestly – in all heartfelt honesty – he couldn’t see the way through for her. And if that were the case, it was up to him to say so, wasn’t it, as kindly as possible? To begin, at least, to air the matter?
He took the plunge. ‘Everything I’ve been told, everything that’s been said … Believe me, I have thought long and hard about it. Look, it’s difficult for me to do this, but if you’re looking for my blessing, I can’t honestly say …’
‘We’re not.’ Clarice turned round and glared at him. Everyone stood still.
‘I see.’
‘We’re looking for your acceptance.’
He was aware of the sudden silence all about him. It took a moment for the distant country sounds to filter back: Appleby’s tractor, woodpigeons, the receding army lorry, the rooks. He spread his hands. ‘Acceptance of what, exactly?’ The dog, Bentley, launched himself off after a fieldfare. ‘I’m not quite sure of my duty here. From what you’ve told me, Vic isn’t in a position to ask for your hand in marriage. But my role as your father in that area seems to have been pre-empted by events. As far as I’ve been given to understand, he’s already married to Phyllis. Phyllis, on the other hand, who seems to be maintaining radio silence, showed up here with a different husband – also called Vic. And a goddamned child!’
He saw the pain that crossed Vic’s face and was instantly sorry.
‘Daddy. I thought you’d promised not to bring all that up. Vic and I have already pieced together exactly what must have happened that weekend. It all makes sense.’
‘It may make sense, but where does it lead?’ He stood his ground.
She lost her temper. ‘What about love, Daddy? What about love?’
‘According to the papers, we’re all going to have a new start – apparently. When the war’s over. What about you two? What will you be and what will you live on?’
‘We’ll manage. We’ll sort something out. People do. Daddy, I can’t believe you’re making problems where none exist. Why are you being so difficult? You’re all I’ve got.’ She was staring at him, but she was already withdrawn and her gaze was stony.
He looked away. ‘Why indeed? I’m sure I’ve no idea. Maybe it’s just because I’m an old spoilsport.’
‘It’s not as though you’ve got much of a moral leg to stand on,’ she said. ‘All things considered.’
‘Ah,’ was all he replied, because the thrust was even more telling than she knew – in the light of Mrs Benedick.
‘Well, is it?’
‘Probably not, darling.’ They walked on in silence, following the field’s edge. ‘And we’ve no idea what’s become of the boy?’ he said.
‘Vic’s trying to find him. He loves him. I …’
The church steeple came into view. ‘Yes …?’ he said.
‘I loved him too.’
When the three of them reached the gate into the lane, he said, ‘It’s getting quite late for the trains. You’re both welcome to stay over. Shall I ask Ethel to make Vic up a bed?’
‘No need to worry Ethel. We’ll be quite all right in my room. Thanks.’
Late into the evening, he sat up in his surgery listening for the night bombers. The picture – Flatford Mill – above the couch where a half-clad Mrs Benedick had so recently reclined, flickered with the lamplight. And beside the lamp stood an empty quinine bottle. Since the Japanese army had turned the Far East into a torture chamber and German submarines had made a charnel house of the high seas there was no quinine to be had. Not for love nor money.
He reflected on the long thin Panzer column of General Guderian, back in 1940. Its segments were fine soldiers, winding their way through the supposedly impenetrable forest of the Ardennes, racial ambassadors of the most advanced scientific nation in the world. He thought of the Japanese army – delegates of the most exquisite culture – Lymphangitis in the Malayan jungle, psychotic tourists threading the forest paths on bicycles, raping and killing in rubber gym shoes. He had on his desk a single cutting from an American magazine. It was, he felt the single cutting, for there had been no news elsewhere that he’d been able to discover. A well-placed German industrialist had smuggled intelligence out though Geneva. It concerned extermination by gas.
He’d believed in bloody myths. He’d bloody swallowed them. He’d believed there was peace and that war was parasitic on it. Now peace was the worm and Britain’s dream nothing but a sentimental growth. ‘What about love?’ Clarice had cried out. Either way he’d alienated her. And Mary Benedick, a cruel tag snipped out of a prayer-book, Mary Benedick must be condemned to her diffuse symptoms bec
ause she had the power to strike him out of the register, his life and his living. Feeling bruised, he drew in his horns. Vic and Clarice must continue in their piecemeal love, fine soldiers in a kaleidoscope. Any new start would be long delayed, he knew, and the war would grind them apart. He took up his thermometer to check himself for fever. Sure enough his temperature was 101 degrees, and climbing.
V
The Tempter
MY BROTHER HAD fallen among thieves. Thieves were everywhere. All over the world they were having a field-day, making hay while the law couldn’t touch them. In occupied Europe, thieves were stripping whole populations down to their hair and teeth.
Dr Pike’s fragment of information had turned out correct – within days of him finding it, the story of the Final Solution had broken in the newspapers. Somewhere in Poland people really were disappearing into a vortex. On 17 December 1942, the entire House of Commons had stood in silence with heads bowed over a death toll already estimated at a million.
The tale was at once too true and too shocking; the furore it caused ended as soon as it began. When no new facts emerged a silence fell, and the subject was no longer reported. To the English, in the first weary months of another war year, the technicalities of melting the last shred of value out of a human being remained a mystery. Most still preferred not to believe in them.
Jack was already seven, and God saw whatever he did. The barn was dim and the straw stacked up in fraying steps. The stalks were sharp. On his shins they left scratch marks that were thin and red. On his arms, too. The shape of them, curving away into wisps at the end, reminded him of wind-blown vapour trails left in the sky by American bombers. His actions had become overlaid with guilt; some great responsibility lay on his shoulders.
Still the war would not truly show itself. Sometimes it was a thing of air, of theirs and ours. Through dud slats in the wooden walls farmyard smells came in with the chickens. Jack watched them, the muttering clockwork hens, pecking at trodden stalks beside the two farm machines. Colin, the other boy, jumped down to scatter the creatures, chasing one bantam over a pile of sheaves. Then he sat on the seat of the horse-hoe and pretended to be firing a machine-gun. Sometimes, the war was a toy drama of tanks and sand in comic books, a game of win or lose. Sometimes it was the sound of guns and of buildings rocking – a woman’s hand sticking out from a pile of bricks.
Now, even inside the barn the air was discoloured, and somehow rotten, like snot, or phlegm. No excitements. Jack thought what a joyless drudgery it was at the little red school. These days he envied the younger ones, the tots who played so carelessly in the smaller playground. He was a miscreation who couldn’t get his breath.
The straw prickled and itched against the skin where his clothing was disarranged. He was certainly not like his classmates. He watched Colin, now darting after this chicken, now chasing that. Colin ought not to chase the hens. The farmer might come. They must go.
Jack pulled on his balaclava. Grabbing his coat, he scrambled down from the stack of straw. He called to Colin and they took straw kindling and dry sticks, buttoning them inside their jackets before slipping out of the great creaking barn door and into the farmyard. There were puddles with ice on them, and wisps of corn were frozen into the ruts. More chickens strutted around a tractor; in his stall the cart-horse stamped. Jack regretted the jaded outbuildings, the mud, the dung clamp, and the pile of jag-iced hardcore beside the open gate. Picking his way across muck and worn concrete, there was no relief.
He remembered a puttering tractor in a place beside an estuary. Far away, one ship had tan sails, one white. Aunt Clarice had taught him the names of birds, of the leaves and buds, and the emergent flowers. And beyond the railway arch, a lost land, forever fleeting.
Then he understood something. It came like a buzz in his head, mixed up with the buzz of cars and lorries from the Southend arterial road. He and Colin were at the end of the long lane that led up from the farm, and the thing that had so perplexed him, the yellowness, the persistent tainting of the town he’d come to live in – that was the war. Why hadn’t he realised? All along it had been right under his nose, the word grown-ups used so casually. He’d taken to heart what they took for granted. Now, as he and Colin walked back along the cold track towards his house, he didn’t know if he knew too much, or too little. He was set apart. What about the words Clarice had whispered in his ear, that day on the lorry?
I see my poor brother, through the gap in the years. The child thrown back on himself is never-endingly thoughtful, and maybe there’d be no philosophising at all but for unhappy children. Who’d have to fathom the world but those for whom it makes no sense? Who’d invent systems but those subject to strangeness and disruption? Jack had lost his youth in the move from Ripple Road. Now he was filled with sin – they said so at the school.
HE TRUDGED WITH Colin back up the steep rise. The morning’s frost still lay in pockets behind the hedge. There were spider’s webs with drops of water clinging to them. They were strung between the thorn branches and headless stalks beside the path. Jack took out one of his sticks to slash them through, clamping the rest more tightly with his arm against his body. His house came into view.
Behind the back fence, a scrub-lined gully ran through the waste ground. There, out of sight of windows, the two boys lit their fire. Flames ate into the pieces of old magazines, Picture Post and Reveille, and the newspapers a deserter had left smeared from wiping his backside. White rime lay upon the single empty beer bottle. A sardine can had the lid wound back on the metal key. When the bottle smashed on the sharp pointed stone, the pieces flew like shrapnel.
Suddenly, at the crest of the gully’s wall, two other boys were standing, watching them. He hadn’t heard them sneak up. Their pullovers and trousers had the stained grey colour of poor kids’ clothes and their legs were marked over with mud smears. One had a glue of snivel hanging from his nostril. They came down and started talking.
Jack was glad when the fight started, trying to wrestle the kid’s legs out from under him. But he still couldn’t reckon the seriousness. How would it end? There were shards of glass on the floor. He identified a blade-shaped sliver lying next to the sharp stone. He might be able to stretch and pick it up.
He could glean nothing from the look in the kid’s eye. When he got him down, he jammed his mucky head against the stone until he cried out. The other one was kneeling on Colin’s arms, ready to punch his face.
‘Let him go or your mate gets it.’
Jack let his victim up.
The boy was shocked. ‘Grind my head, would you?’
The newcomers swapped positions and started punching. Jack put his arms up to protect himself. He let the other boy’s fists land on him, soaking up the thumps until, beside his shoulder, he heard Colin start to cry. His first assailant broke off to kick out their fire.
‘Come on, Rodge,’ he said. ‘His dad’s Rice. That kid’s Tony Rice’s son.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘He is, Rodge. Come on, that’s enough.’
Rodge kicked Jack in the leg, swore, and put his boot on what was left of the embers. ‘Lucky for you then, mate. Or you’d have got smashed.’ Then the two scrambled back up the bank the way they’d come, agile as monkeys. At the top Rodge turned and looked down.
‘Cunts!’ he called, loud enough for the sound to carry to Jack’s house, and for his mother to hear. ‘Fucking cunts, you are!’ They laughed and ran off.
Jack wanted to run after them, and burn the backs of their necks with one of the stick ends from the trashed fire. But he would not. And once more he’d failed. Because the other children at the school made light of the war, and wanted a fight, and would have made friends afterwards and known where they stood; while he had to make do with Colin.
In his house, the new baby, Melia, was crying upstairs. A man in uniform was still putting up wallpaper in the front room and the tang of his cigarette smoke hung in the newly carpeted hallway. Past the clutter of stacked f
urniture, Jack made his way to the kitchen. As he did so, he thought of the man with the light behind him who was making a house. More and more the picture came to him these days, of how he had been held up in those arms.
IN THE RECREATION ground the witch’s hat was draped in April snow. At an angle off the black central pole, it made the long white lines of a wigwam. Freak snow lay an inch thick on the roundabout. It was already melting on the slide and had fallen into a heap at the chute bottom.
Blue straggly hyacinths, dripping, pressed up out of the unexpected covering. The sky was grey and heavy; and from all around came the faint noises of the thaw, the patter of the drips. He could sense the give of collapsing crystals. Further off, a white mist shrouded the trees by the fence and it screened the flint church walls.
Jack cleared the snow from a swing. As he touched his feet to the wet ground the cold soaked to his skin through the seat of his trousers. He took from his pockets the three German cartridge cases and the piece of twisted shrapnel. The hymn they’d sung at the school kept cropping up in his head. The song forced him to see its pictures. A far green hill was stuck through with daffodils, their fraught colour and soft, earthen perfume. Pennies of blood dripped on to them. He could not bear it. Harmonies out of the ill-tuned piano in the school hall made him feel sorry.
The headmaster had exhorted the children to take up the cross. How brave the other children seemed. In the playground they marched and shouted, unabashed by the duty that was laid on them: to die. They would gladly go to the sacrifice. But he, Jack, was frightened.
He made himself stay put on the swing, trying to gauge his discomfort. His fingers were numb. His legs were chapped from where the trouser hems rubbed his thighs. None of these counted. In church they gave the children something. There was some secret, perhaps, that took away the pain. That was how they got courage enough to fight. That was what he’d missed out on, coming from London.
