If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  Vic saw movement before him. He prepared to fire. There was a command from Lieutenant Fairfax, and he realised just as he heard it that their own forward company was in retreat towards them. Men were visible not twenty yards in front of him. A fireball engulfed them as he watched. He saw a pair of tanks reverse and turn together amid the apple trees, and then race off towards the left and out of sight.

  And from the left flank, he heard the din of half a dozen other engagements. The two tanks were working back on a new line, and shelling point blank. Once more, great swathes were cut out of the cover, and in between the terrifying reports, rifle bullets zipped and stung as they knocked splinters out of broken stumps.

  Yet by some miracle of resistance with their own mortars and anti-tank Piats the battalion was not entirely overrun. And when eventually night fell, the tanks actually retreated, and the troops they supported appeared to have melted away. But the darkness was charged with danger, and filled with the intermittent groans from the wounded in front. In an earthern trench Vic waited once again, holding his hot rifle.

  At about midnight he heard the major’s voice. He was cursing a useless radio under his breath. One fresh shellburst that lit up the landscape like a flash bulb signalled a renewed counter-attack. Another came in, and another. Ahead there was a tremendous volley of shots and the chaos of hand-to-hand fighting.

  It was then that Vic experienced what he thought must have been a hallucination – an enormous millipede or glow-worm, walking for an instant amid the far-off groves. He put a hand up to his face. He saw it coming nearer, a strange monstrous thing, like a dragon’s tongue. And to the right, a second one appeared, much nearer, its roar terrible now, backed by the chug of an engine.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said a voice. ‘They’re using bloody flame-throwers.’ It was the last thing Vic remembered.

  HE RAN AWAY because he thought he’d killed one of the other boys. It was a Sunday, after breakfast, and they were getting ready for kit inspection. In the dormitory, Rutherford was helping him with his tartan travelling rug. His shorts, sets of flannel shirts, pullovers, underwear, socks, lay precisely arranged on the bed cover. The iron-framed bed was lit through the sash window, and all his corduroy ridges were grey and gold in a sunstream. Far off, there were bending poplars under scudding clouds. It was the middle of summer.

  The Comforter was in its envelope, hidden under the mattress. Signed, Your Loving Father, Victor Warren, it was a letter that didn’t make sense. Since Aubrey had come everything had changed in any case; and now there were flying bombs. And right in Warren’s nose the dust from the tartan rug had a prickling, maddening smell: new wool, old wood, someone else’s mother. He and Rutherford found the folds.

  Then Aubrey started. It was always the same. He came over from his own bed and dodged between the two of them, yanked the coverlet where it never quite tucked in properly. The piles of kit were mucked up. Aubrey thrust his round face with its brat sneer at Warren. Go on, Warren. Get me back. Punish me. You know you want to.

  Aubrey, the six-year-old nose-picker, his finger garlanded. Wipe it on your pillow, shall I? Aubrey the troubled one who knew how to take the room hostage, like an infected splinter. On your bed now, shall I? They should put kids like him somewhere else. They should lock them up.

  If it weren’t for him, Warren might have been happy at the school. There were rules; he’d felt safe. Now his fingers itched for a cane, or a horsewhip. Tavy, their prefect, had been called downstairs. But there was no discipline in the dorm, because Tavy was weak; unlike Briggs, whose slippers were leather and could really hurt.

  ‘Shut up, Aubrey. Bloody cut it out’ Warren took the folded rug from Rutherford, placed it, and began straightening the mess.

  ‘Swearing!’

  ‘Just ignore him.’ Rutherford turned to his own bed. ‘Pity we’re not in Tudor. The people in there know how to behave.’

  But Aubrey put on that cocksure face of his with its grin, a mocking, leering affair of the lips and fat little cheeks – a nursery-rhyme face. Outside, beyond the lawns, the neighbours’ houses stood in their green tufting. A pattern of roofs and chimney-stacks marked the road down to the city. Jack’s father had scoffed at the name, city, that time when his parents had visited. ‘Not much more than a big country town.’ They were his parents, weren’t they? Jack called the letter the Comforter, because in a way it was. The Bible was true. The letter had a regimental stamp on, but it seemed too late, and was too made up, somehow, like a cruel kind of joke; he couldn’t really believe in it. The father said he was on the point of going abroad. The tip of the sharp cathedral spire could just be seen from the school. Soon the distant bells would ring for matins.

  ‘Warren wants to get me but he’s too wet. Wet Warren wees his willy. He does. Don’t you, Warren? He wets his bed.’

  ‘Damn well don’t.’

  ‘Ooh!’

  None of the other boys noticed quite how far things had come, how bad the Aubrey business was. Pacey and Mortimer complained and jeered, but it seemed not to bother them so much. Nor Bintcliffe, hiding his silkworms under his bed frame in their cardboard box. Aubrey should have been stamped on at birth, crunched like a snail on concrete. Should have been smashed, hammered, fried alive.

  Aubrey was standing on his own bed, the one next to the door, trampolining slightly, prancing on his kit. He didn’t care if he got the cane. ‘Better tidy up quick smart, Warren. Listen. Isn’t that Matron coming? No, it’s the Widow already. Clickey-click high heels. Don’t want to get into trouble now, do we, Warren? Big goody-goody, aren’t you? Yes sir, no sir, my big toe, sir. What about you, Bintcliffe? You’ve got worms, Bintcliffe. He’s got silkworms coming out of his bum. Shall I tell the Widow, Bintcliffe. About your bum?’

  AUBREY HAD COME in the winter. He’d had it too easy, was too young, too recent to know how things were done at the school – behaved still as though there were Mummy and Daddy, and you could push the limits. Warren had warned him. He could get killed. All sorts of ways. One day there’d be another hunt.

  But instead Aubrey mimicked him, mincing and pulling up his skirts. ‘Warren thinks he’s so clever. Yes, Mrs Fairfax, I do say my prayers. See him kneeling beside his bed at night. Yes, Ma Fairfax. He prays to see Ginny all bare. At the keyhole, he saw her hair. They couldn’t get him away. Hairfax, barefax. Ginny barefax, Warren.’

  The other boys laughed.

  ‘Shut it, though, Aubrey, she might be in her bedroom.’ And Bintcliffe eyed Warren as he polished a toecap with his pyjama sleeve. Ginny’s door, with its keyhole, was just across the passage.

  Smythe Minor came back in, the wild one with sunken eyes and hospital breath. His parents were in India. Once he had punched Miss Leeson in the bosom, and got caned for it, of course. He wore an untidy glory. ‘They’re doing Tudor now. That gives us about five minutes.’ Sloping to his bed he parked his towel beside his washbag. ‘I’m about finished. Where’s Tavy?’

  ‘Duty, I think.’ Rutherford took out his handkerchief, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket.

  ‘He would be. That means we have to do his kit. I hate Tavy. I hate the lot of ’em.’

  Warren was worried. For inspection Mrs Fairfax always came, Ma Fairfax in her high-heeled shoes. They would click down the polished floorboards of the passage outside. Then she would appear in the door frame. She was like a steel spring in her perfect clothes. Her face was severely, perfectly painted, her eyebrows plucked, her grey hair permed. And wherever she went in the dormitory, poking at clothes, examining beds, checking, questioning, Matron slipped in her wake, wearing a white nurse’s dress – slipped silently on rubber shoes, white too. They would find the Comforter. They would find something out. His father had called his holdall a johnny bag. The Widow had given him a look.

  ‘There’s a big fart on its way. Could be a Cunarder.’ Aubrey smirked round for approval. ‘Oh, no. It’s Warren. Pooh, Warren.’ He fanned his hand in front of his face.

  One of
the quiet boys spoke, Mortimer. ‘That’s enough, Aubrey. Get down and sort your kit or we’ll all be responsible.’

  ‘Responsible. Ooh, big words, Mortimer. Responsible. What did you say your father was? A country solicitor? In Bishop’s Stortford? A silly-sitter. A shilly-shitter.’

  ‘Yes, and he’ll sue you.’

  ‘I’m scared. How many Germans has he killed?’

  ‘More than yours.’

  ‘Hasn’t.’

  ‘Has. He’s in the Commandos. He’s gone over in the invasion.’

  ‘Where will he sue me, then? In my bottom?’ Aubrey crouched on his bed. As he did so the promised fart ripped out.

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  Aubrey sniggered and broadcast his air. He made paddling movements with the backs of his small hands. ‘Will your farter put me in farters’ prison?’

  Warren caught the whiff. ‘You’re disgusting. Why don’t you ever do what you’re told? Just tidy your things, you little …’

  ‘Little what, Warren?’ Grinning, Aubrey straightened up again and pointed a finger towards his nostril. ‘Shall I see what I’ve got in here?’ He searched the finger inside his nose and came out with a trace of slime. It dangled from the delicate, childish tip. He held Warren’s eye.

  ‘Don’t you bloody dare!’

  Smythe Minor hustled back past Aubrey’s bed and peered out of the door. ‘They’ll be here any minute. Cut it out’ Then he went to the triangular sink in Warren’s corner and began sprucing it with the wooden brush. ‘The Widow’s got it in for me. I hate her. I bloody well hate her.’

  Aubrey’s kit and bedclothes were crumpled under his feet. ‘Mine’s killed more than Warren’s, any rate. What does Warren’s father do? Eh, Warren? What does old man Warren get up to?’ He bounced again, slightly. ‘We all know what Warren’s father does, don’t we?’ There was a significant pause. The other boys looked up.

  If the room were not right, they’d be given lines, made to learn a poem, forced to copy out some Holy Bible in the prep study. They would miss games next week. They might even miss swimming. It was not that, though.

  He had lived his double life. But had been equal to it, except for Aubrey. Aubrey would invent an insulting career for his father. Any minute. The boys would laugh in spite of themselves – for most were decent enough. He must do nothing, only endure. One day Clarice would send a letter. Now Mrs Fairfax was coming. The name at the end of the Comforter was Victor Warren. If he could believe in it, it would explain why he, too, was called Warren, while his father’s name was Rice. Mrs Fairfax would find out. She would know. What might she find out?

  ‘Warren’s father …’

  Warren clenched his eyes tight shut. He felt the blood behind them. He could not think.

  ‘We know what Warren’s father does. Yes, Warren.’ Aubrey held his laughter in. His eyes bulged, comically. They were all in the palm of his hand. ‘Warren’s old man does oo-ah, oo-ah with Ma Warren up the bum. Oo-ah. Oo-ah.’

  Rutherford gasped. ‘Christ!’ It was catastrophic. Warren knew. They all knew. The line was crossed by miles. His mother! Tony Rice was in love with her.

  For Warren there was an absolute release. He was standing now on Aubrey’s bed, the little boy’s round, unbearable face right under his jaw, the eyes wide and frightened, but almost satisfied, the kid’s fringe of straight, nut-coloured hair smelling of Warren’s old school in Upminster, of crayons and nature study. The two were wrestling. Then Aubrey’s face made an arc through the air as he toppled.

  Warren didn’t hear the sound of the head hitting the cast-iron radiator. He only saw the blood. At first it was a beautiful red mist in front of his eyes. He wanted to get right in close and taste it. Then he was down from the bed too, somehow, making to finish the job with his fists. But he felt himself gripped all at once, held back by the others. He was thankful for it. He’d seen the mess his father had made of Figgsy. At that moment heels sounded in the corridor. Mrs Fairfax walked in. Aubrey’s body lay across her path, his head crooked up against the flange of the radiator. Red drenched the side of his face and his collar.

  SEVERAL MINUTES MUST have passed. From where he sat in the Widow’s big drawing-room, Warren heard someone in the head’s study. Matron, it might be. She was winding the handle on the school telephone.

  Once the ambulance had gone, he would be beaten. And if Aubrey were dead he would be hanged. Warren perched on the unaccustomed chintz. He sat quite still and there were no tears, no emotions. Rubber shoes squeaked outside, but no one came in. He had always known the room from piano lessons, from long evenings when most of the boys had gone home for the holidays. Sometimes Mrs Fairfax herself had admitted him, kindly, absently, before rejoining on the distant carpet a vicar, a doctor, perhaps a magistrate, holding a delicate china teacup with his back to the fire. On the piano keys Warren’s fingers had faltered. The walls were a deep, religious eggshell blue. Oil paintings in gilt frames hung from the white picture rail. And there were Japanese prints of swordsmen, and bamboo.

  He was on his honour not to escape. But his head was filled with confused thoughts. He, Jack, was Warren. His father’s name was Rice. Until the Comforter arrived, it was a difference he’d always known about but never understood. One more queer thing – no one had ever questioned him on it.

  He thought of what hell would really look like, and of the filthy image of his parents that Aubrey had summoned up. He thought of The Pilgrim’s Progress which they had read in class, and Ginny Fairfax, the Widow’s daughter, and this elegant room, the trim lawns outside it, the Latin-Algebra-Scripture-Games. He was shocked with himself.

  And then he found himself walking across the room to one of the pairs of french windows. His legs seemed to move of their own accord. The brass handle turned easily. Why should the Widow have had them locked, after all? She knew he could never dream of running away.

  He shut the latch behind. There was no one on the lawn between the steps and the shrubbery. Before long he was right in the far corner of the grounds, close to the swimming-pool, concealed among laurels, camouflaged amidst rhododendron blooms. The pool was clearly visible through the branches, a circle of concrete in which the water lay dark green in some parts, in others a sky-bright mirror, ruffled now and then by the wind. Leaves lay on the top, bobbing occasionally, or skidding sideways.

  He recalled the pool’s strange taste, like a trapped river, woody, leafy. It was just water from a pipe, which ran for a week at the start of summer. Each day the boys would look to see how far it had crept up the stained concrete walls. As it did fill, slowly and teasingly, so it turned yellow-green and became eventually quite opaque. He was filled with regret, for his friends the other schoolboys.

  A green ambulance was in the lane, ringing and screeching its tyres, racing along the fence behind him. Then it turned into the school drive. Warren skirted along the inside of the fence, and, taking advantage of the commotion, slipped out of the school gates in the other direction. He ran as fast as he could.

  THE COLCHESTER EXPRESS hammered a streak right under Warren’s escape, where the school lane crossed the railway track. Grey sulphur billows broke over the parapet. While the carriages raced and drummed beneath him, he threw his tie over. The swirl caught and snagged it on a carriage-top vent, where it streamed out like a pennant just as the train swept it under the bridge. Turning, he saw the trapped smoke roil up the cutting slope on the opposite side.

  Then, just for one moment, he let himself look back to the schoolhouse, the top of which he could see through the trees. He made out Ginny’s window, so close to the scene of the killing. They’d be searching the building, scouring the grounds. He hadn’t long to get away. The Widow would get the police. All the masters would be summoned up to hunt him in earnest, just as the boys had hunted the Jew, Wiseman, on his first night. He imagined Cathcart and Cicero with sticks rampaging after him in their hopeless trousers.

  But at Ginny’s window he saw a figure. He ducked behind th
e brickwork and then peered cautiously back. Surely Ginny Fairfax was waving from her bedroom, standing up in her best dress. He was mistaken. There was nothing but the movement of her curtain in a gust of the breeze.

  A man cycling behind him said, ‘Aye aye?’ but Warren hardly turned his head. He stared again at the schoolhouse framed by chestnut trees and their blown leaves, and then turned and ran as quickly as he was able. A knot of village kids came out from behind the shop. They had dirty faces, unbrushed hair, scruffy clothes. He burst through the middle of them.

  ‘Sorry!’

  ‘Oy, oy! Watch out!’

  They were caught too unawares to give chase, and he was well away before they began even to jeer, spotting his uniform grey and the clean backs of his knees. It wasn’t until he passed a baker’s horse and cart loaded up with sacks, towards the roundabout and the village end, that he paused to draw breath.

  Across the dual carriageway stood the thin village church, hemmed in by trees, with the vicarage behind it. But Jack made automatically for the sports field. Sharp left, it was about half a mile further on at the foot of the hill. The boys trekked there every afternoon for rugby or cricket. He coasted down easily, while a car or two swished past on his right. There was a lorry as well. The first few sports of rain began to fall.

  A ditch ran beside the road, full of willows and scrub, and once all the boys had seen a man and a woman right inside the bushes, lying down. The rickety five-barred gate stood always open. Here, the sports field, a soft, green sea, the rain suddenly leaping and bouncing up out of its surface, stretched in the low between road and railway embankment. At the far corner like a small white ark stood the cricket pavilion.