by Derek Beaven
He wondered, as always, what was inside the building of the church, behind the big door where the comfortable folk went in; what faces the saints wore. Women were married. Something was done to a woman in church that made a child grow inside her belly, every so often. To have it cut out how resolute must she be, once she’d come from the arched doorway.
That night he was dreaming. There was a thump, thump. When he opened his eyes he could hear nothing. He waited. His radiator hissed in the dark. He put out his hand to feel its scalding metal. Then there were muffled shouts from beyond his door, and another hit. Something broke.
He put his head beneath the pillow and pulled its ends about his ears, but it was useless to filter out the sounds. His mother’s persistent pleas or complaints were like the line of a song, savage but indistinct. Punctuated by his father’s outbursts, they forced their way into his head. Eventually, he sat up and threw back the covers. The winter night was mild, and the air in his blacked-out bedroom had become oppressive. A black wind was soughing outside. He stepped from the bed, feeling his way towards the door, his toes sinking with each footfall into the pile of the new rug. Then he reached the bare boards and found the handle. It opened soundlessly. Crouched on the landing next to his parents’ door he could hear the precise words.
‘You’re a liar. You’ve always been a liar, you bloody bitch.’
‘All right, then. Hit me again, then. You know you want to. Kill me. Go on.’
And then he heard the blows land, and his mother’s whimper. There was a moment of complete silence, before the sound of the sobs began, a terrible drawn-out weeping that seemed to swell and then maintain itself as though it might never stop.
There were other noises, too, as of slight ineffectual movements. He sensed his father’s exasperation. ‘Shut it! D’you hear me! Just fucking shut it, all right! Shut it, for Christ’s sake. Do you want some more?’
There was a change. He heard his mother groan. And then his father’s voice came, deeper, softer. ‘Come on, you silly bitch. I’m not going to hurt you. Come on, will you. Come on, Phylly, for fuck’s sake. That’s enough now. That’s enough. Did you think I was going to do you in? Eh? Silly cunt. You know me. Don’t you. Eh? You know me.’
He heard his mother’s faint laugh, gritted and far away, sounding almost as though Jack were still in his own bedroom. Then she spoke. ‘Yes, but I wasn’t fibbing, Tony. All right? I wasn’t. He could be yours. Why couldn’t he?’
‘Could he hell.’
‘I’m telling you.’
‘You’re telling me, are you. Why now? Why now, Phyllis? Why tell me now?
‘I’m telling you, all right. You could have worked it out as well as me, couldn’t you? Eh? You could. If you’d have been bothered.’
JACK WAITED. THEN he sensed that his parents’ door was about to open. As quietly as he could he hurried back along the stairhead to his room, teasing the catch shut behind him, and slipped himself into bed. A moment later, sure enough, he felt the draft as his own door swished wide, and recognised, through lidded eyes, the glare of the landing light. He heard one step, two, of hard bare feet.
A presence was bending over him. He knew his father’s eyes were peering intently at him. He endured the scrutiny of his face, almost X-raying the bone. What was he trying to know? He lay as still as he could, counterfeiting sleep. At last there was the scuff and pad again of the bare feet on the boards, and the door closed once more.
In the morning, he searched his mother’s face for marks while she cooked him breakfast; but she was heavily made up and wore a turban round her newly washed hair, she said, that fitted like a charlady’s closely to her temples. Nor did she move far, or fast. He saw, out of the dining-room window, the birds that came to the strips of bacon rind she’d hung up, sparrows and blue tits, and a bullfinch. And there were yellowhammers that perched, inquisitive, upon the wire fence next to them.
He studied her again when she couldn’t avoid leaning close to him across the table to pick up the milk jug. Her turban seemed to slip slightly to one side, and before she could put the striped china jug down again to set it right there was revealed the bruised end of a split in her skin, just in the hair above her ear. All kinds of impressions flooded him – though he scarcely had an idea of what they were, or what they might portend.
On the bus to school, he’d forgotten his fare money. The conductress stood him on the footplate at the back, telling him not to worry, an arm resting on his shoulder where the satchel strap went across. He rode, standing, nearer and nearer to the school, past the big houses set back in gardens behind their fences, and on into the town beside the first shops. The satchel bobbed at his back as the bus hit a bump in the road beside the tube station. He remembered the other wound in her head and the man in the garden who had lifted him up – like a father.
He sat in his desk near the window. In a jamjar on the sill there was a stem of pussy willow. He made it sharp and clear, and the sky beyond it through the pane was like a sheet of paper, a background of blue-white. When he looked at the cloud streaks high and fine above the elm tree in the corner of the schoolyard, it was the dusted buds that were doubled, turned to nothing more than dabs of grey on two blurred stalks. He made the effect go back and forth, back and forth.
He remembered Ripple Road, the cut in her forehead, her voice: what’s a war if no one gets wounded? He heard the sound of her voice. Yes, he’d seen her hurt exactly like that before. Not just the ordinary bruises but a bright, clear cut, he remembered, with the drops of blood coming out like buttons, then falling to the floor. At Tony’s place years ago: bright red pennies. Gone to buy a rabbit skin.
His yellow-striped school tie lay against his grey shirtfront. How queer he felt. The house, that new brick house slammed down, so it appeared, beside a peculiar arrangement of creases, gashes, and steep fallings away upon a piece of waste ground; today he could almost taste the pall over it and the school and the bus ride between them.
He sat next to a boy called Timmy Mott. At the double desk, they’d each copied the map of Sinai, and the Red Sea. Underneath it he was writing in ink the words from the blackboard: The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my band shall … His pen had blotted on the word ‘spoil’ and Mrs Penruddock was annoyed. She pulled the hair on the top of his head before moving on to the desk in front. The clouds had rearranged themselves. Jack watched the wisps in the window’s frame detach, and their ends curl upward and round. Then he caught the exact moment at which they moved across the bar in the window into the next pane. So, too, did the movement of the clock hands become visible if he fixed his gaze. The passage of the minute hand between the marks made him feel as though he were floating.
In the distance there was the sound of anti-aircraft guns. All the heads in the class lifted, and then returned to their work. ‘Dagenham,’ Timmy Mott whispered. Now a whole spear of fuller, thicker cloud appeared, and the wisps were nowhere to be seen. There’d been a succession of miracles. Jack knew their names: Pearl Harbor, El Alamein. There’d been a special assembly and thanks to God. Now there was no movement, only waiting. They were waiting for the Yanks to roll up the Pacific. He did not understand. They were waiting for more Yanks to arrive with more tanks and more jeeps.
He began to write again: … destroy them. Thou did’st blow with thy wind, the sea covered them: they sank as lead in the mighty waters.
He could be yours, his mother had said. The words hung in Jack’s mind. A face other than Tony’s, another man’s: with his hammer and nails, he was making a little wooden house. It was in the country beyond the railway bridge. Jack could picture the roses. Their heady smell drifted momentarily upon his recollection. The grass was dry and sharp bladed, straw coloured in the warm sun. It was a strange, higgledy-piggledy town, perhaps in a story, or not a town at all. A bus was a house and had its own chimney-pipe sticking out of it. His mother lay in a garden
, asleep, the bright little cut like a jewel at the edge of her hair. His father …
‘You, boy. Jack Warren. Get on with your work. Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
AS THE UNTIMELY snow melted next morning, its fog rolled northward from the estuary over the coastlands where the Essex marsh merged with the Suffolk shore. Fog began to blanket that whole system of flatted rivers and inlets by which the outflux of the Thames, across a shallow sea, mirrored that of the Rhine.
By mid-morning, it was so dense that Dr Pike, newly arrived, could hardly see the gates of Woodbridge Airbase. He stood in his trilby, scarf and sports jacket, holding the handlebar grips of Ethel Farmer’s bicycle. Quite how he’d managed the ten miles from Pook’s Hill he wasn’t quite sure. Since Martlesham, the landscape had been reduced to guesswork. Now before and behind him the road was only a nuance of metalled grey, its line lost amid the dripping shapes of tall fir trees.
The sound of a lorry made him turn. Its engine was whining in a low gear. He moved hurriedly out of the way as it swung in at the guard post and stopped. A barrier lifted. Two brief red tail-lights were drawn by the truck into the mist, until they, too, vanished.
He peered after them. There was precious little to see of his daughter’s world, nor did the mist make so much difference. The air force, with its ever-increasing network of runways, was in the habit of fencing itself off. They had their own lingo, their own ways, these heroes and their warrior maidens. He hardly knew her.
He felt his fingers patting at his watch through the fob of his waistcoat. Pulling the scuffed hunter out, he opened it and squinted down at the face. His half-moon spectacles were in a different pocket. He fished for them. Clarice had said eleven. It was twenty past. He’d misread her note. He had the day wrong. There were two airbases. Something had happened to her.
Eventually, however, a WAAF emerged from beside the sentry-box. He recognised her outline immediately, the distinctive sway of her body, the carriage of her head. Capped and skirted, she, too, was wheeling a bicycle. Trails of frozen breath appeared from her mouth. Only when she was almost close enough to touch was there any colour in her cheeks or tone to her uniform. He embraced her. And before his spectacles themselves misted up he saw tiny droplets of water on her eyebrows, on her eyelashes, and beaded on the strands of hair that strayed from under her cap brim.
‘Daddy. I’m so glad you could come.’
The two bicycle frames had locked horns. They pulled them apart. ‘It’s so good to see you, darling.’
She needed to explain. ‘A crew of ours had to put down here. I came yesterday with the transport, to pick them up. It’s an emergency field. If they’re limping and losing height on the way back from the Ruhr, this is one of the nearest points. Home, you see.’ She looked up at him. ‘They’ve even got a fog system.’
‘Have they?’
‘Yes. Flares and all that. I’ve had to come here quite a few times actually, since … since we last spoke. It’s part of my job. But I’ve never taken the chance before. To get in touch, I mean. I just wanted to see you. I know you’re cross with me.’
‘Cross with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course I’m not’
She insisted. ‘You are, Daddy. You don’t like Vic. And you think I’m … loose. Don’t you? You think I’m irresponsible. A tart’
‘I can assure you, my dear. Nothing has been further from my mind.’
‘Then why …? Oh, but don’t let’s start. Don’t let’s. If we talk we’ll spoil things. I wanted to see you. Sometimes I feel … low; and you’re the one who can make it better.’
He smiled. ‘I do my best’ The bicycles were unwieldy again. He faced around. ‘If you don’t want to talk, darling, then we shan’t. What about trying to find our way back to the town? There’ll probably be a teashop or something.’
She pointed in the other direction. ‘A few minutes and you come to the shore. I’d really like to see the sea.’
‘Aren’t beaches supposed to be out of bounds?’
‘Who cares?’
At Shingle Street they left the bikes between two cottages and trudged across the wide pebble strand. There was no horizon, only fogged military defences: tangles of rusted wire amid tufts of sea cabbage, and a weather-beaten post warning of mines. The sea marge sloped, and at its foot waves arrived hurriedly from nowhere, lapping and swirling into a diminutive lagoon. There was a short spit loaded with pieces of armoured wreckage, beached as though some failed invasion had occurred which no one dared mention. Stan Pike thought he could make out the black and white of an iron cross.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘What have you been up to?’
‘Oh, the usual,’ he grinned. ‘But what about you? Oh, Lord. You’re a corporal.’
She touched her sleeve and grinned back. ‘Proud of me? I went on a course in Wales. I get to be a duty clerk.’
‘At which station now?’
‘Attlebridge. It’s up near Norwich. All very rustic.’
‘And what do you do?’
‘Everything. Typing. Admin. Making sure A happens and B doesn’t. Getting C delivered. Driving Squadron Leader D here, there and everywhere, and fending off his advances. And every night the boys go up and bomb something.’
‘You’re kept busy.’
‘I enjoy it. How about you?’
‘I practise, though it rarely makes perfect’
‘Very funny, Daddy. And still no …?’
Her question hung in the air. He wondered whether she meant the progress of his malaria, or even if she’d managed to tune in to his feelings for Mrs Benedick. ‘No what?’
‘No backslidings. The bottle.’
‘Oh, that. God, no. A glass now and then. Nothing immoderate, I assure you. Poor Selama …’
‘You still think of her.’
‘Of course. And she of me, so it feels sometimes.’ His voice tailed off.
Clarice turned to the left. They began to trudge once more along the shingle, following the line of the breakers.
A stir of wind caught the back of Stan’s hair and lifted the brim of his hat; and another. The mist began to move, tearing and forming clumps.
‘No more bloody paper cuttings everywhere, though,’ Clarice said.
‘On the contrary. I keep an eye on things, and have my scraps laid out on my desk. Ethel relentlessly tidies them. I relentlessly weight them down with my more embarrassing gynaecological instruments. In the hope of scaring her off.’
‘Does it?’
‘Heavens, no. She has a stronger stomach than mine. Rural life, you see. What has been bothering me recently, though, has been a shortage of material.’
‘Isn’t there enough bad news for you?’
‘I mean specifically about one thing.’
‘Ah. The atrocity stories. I’d rather you spared me the details, if you wouldn’t mind.’
He put his arm around her. ‘Yes. I quite understand.’
‘Do you, though?’ She spoke angrily. Then she turned in mid-stride and hugged him so that they both nearly fell down the pebble bank.
He found himself staggering wildly amid a grind of stones. ‘Hey, look out!’
She laughed at him. ‘Sorry. Sorry about that. It’s just that I do love you, Daddy. And I get cross with you – because I always think you’re cross with me.’
‘Well, I’m not. I’ve told you I’m not’ He scrambled to rescue his hat from down near the water’s edge. ‘I just want what’s best for you, that’s all.’
She linked arms when he returned. ‘And that’s what we said we weren’t going to discuss. My, my. How difficult it all is, not to talk of things.’
‘My point exactly – that it’s fishy. The lack of information. After so much last December. The ghettoes. The routes taken by the trains. It’s bloody fishy, darling.’
‘Please! I have to be getting back, soon. And look, the mist’s clearing.’
The mist ripped apart even as they watched. It was heapi
ng back upon the pine woods inshore, and suddenly there was a view right through to Orford Ness. They looked, and then turned to walk back. Within minutes it was a spring day. Against a bright blue sky, Bawdsey radar masts were visible, and the Martello towers.
Along the road, glistening water-meadows lay beside the streams. They crossed small, flat bridges. He couldn’t refrain from asking her, ‘How are things with Vic?’
‘Vic’s fine,’ she said. ‘And so am I. Look! There are the flares, still burning on the runway.’
She pointed across the distance. Far off there was the wire boundary fence of the base, and through it, evenly spaced, a row of minute, delicate fires could be seen kindling in the furze. Stan Pike sighed to himself. He was unable to make things better for his daughter at all. She would set flames, as it were, around herself, and there was no approaching her.
ONLY NOW, FOR some reason, did Jack’s mother begin to remark in the evenings that it would be for the best if he were to be evacuated, ‘like all the other children’. She said the Germans had started bombing schools.
There had been no really serious raids since the one in January, when the very first snows had lain all about. On that frozen night, the gaggles of bombers had once more been audible overhead. Jack had watched from his window the play of searchlights, and the streaked colours of ack-ack going up into the darkness. A German bomber had been caught, the topmost point of a pyramid of white rays. He’d seen the brilliant shells exploding round it, like starbursts, while he was supposed to be asleep. There’d been nothing like it since.
No, there were always noises in the air, but hardly ever the menace of bombs any more. And another thing. He’d never seen Tony Rice, his father, put out before. The man he was used to, and scared of, the man who had that sardonic way with him, and that decisive opinion about everything, the man who would spend several days of each week absent ‘on business’, so his mother said, had always been inclined to wear at home a certain smile. The mouth in the smooth face was very clearly shaped, and there’d been many a tense supper time when Jack would look out of the corner of his eye at it, while the man ate. He would try to read the mouth’s movements – until Tony, his father, turned and stared ironically back at him.
