If the Invader Comes

by Derek Beaven

  There was a can-opener on the table. Phyllis’s eyes flicked sideways at it. Her laquered nails stretched towards its handle. She picked it up and looked at it. Then she looked straight at Clarice. The can-opener’s little black knife blade poked ominously out of her pretty fist. Her fingers clenched and unclenched on the grip of it. Then she came forward. Clarice had no idea what the woman was capable of. She screwed up her eyes. Her hands came up involuntarily to shield them. As she backed away, the bright sunlight from the window fell across her knuckles.

  Phyllis came on nearer. Clarice was acutely conscious of the tiny, black, crescent-shaped blade. She felt her cheek already laid open, or her mouth slashed across.

  Then all at once Phyllis reversed the instrument in her hand. ‘Why don’t you kill me, if you hate me so much?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me dead. Go on, then. Why don’t you do it? Here. Take it.’ She thrust the handle at Clarice.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. I don’t want to kill you.’

  ‘You do. You think I’m rubbish. You hate me. If I was dead you’d be free of me. You would, wouldn’t you? And then you could have your precious Vic, couldn’t you? And your beloved Jack? You could make sure his dirty slut of a mother never comes near him, couldn’t you? Then he’d be all right, wouldn’t he? Then he’d be safe. Go on, then. If that’s what you want, you can do it, then, can’t you?’ Now she was holding up the cutting edge between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Take it, then.’

  Clarice swallowed hard. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  ‘All right,’ Phyllis said. ‘If you haven’t got the nerve to do it, I will. I’ll do it for you, shall I? Then you’ll be pleased. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  Phyllis had the blade at her throat. Her two hands were clamped around the grip, and her head was tilted to the side. In the glare that streamed through the window, Clarice could almost see right through the pearl-white skin to the artery. A little peak of tissue was already prised up on the blade’s tip.

  Something finally snapped inside her. She drew her right arm swiftly across her body. Before she knew it the back of her hand had hit Phyllis’s cheek with all the force she could muster. The face jolted. The tin-opener clattered on to the floorboards. Clarice darted down to secure it.

  She straightened up to see her cousin staggering slightly. There was a minute spot of red on the collar of Phyllis’s blouse, and the perch hat was clinging ludicrously by its pins to the hair at one side of her head. Phyllis put her hands up to it. From under the tangle she glared furiously.

  ‘You’d better sit down.’ Clarice pulled one of Vic’s painted chairs out from under the painted table. Sulkily, Phyllis lowered herself on to it and tucked her fine shoes at an angle underneath her. Clarice remained standing. Mistress of the situation, now, she swallowed her outrage at it. ‘Here, take my handkerchief. I’d offer you tea, except it’s something of a palaver. You’d better tell me about Jack, hadn’t you?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘A child is missing. How did it happen? When did it happen? Where exactly did he go missing from?’

  ‘From the boarding-school. A couple of days ago. We got this telegram.’

  ‘Boarding-school? What boarding-school?’

  ‘He got to be … a cause of friction.’ Phyllis looked up from under her ruined hair. ‘That’s how someone like you would want to put it, isn’t it? He started to … Well, we’ve got little Melia to think of, and everything.’

  ‘Melia?’

  ‘The little girl. We put him in this school. A good school, mind. Tony wanted … Tony couldn’t … But that’s all a long story. All very complicated. I … You wouldn’t get it. You wouldn’t get the fucking half of it, dear.’ Phyllis put her hand up to her reddening cheek. The fingertips strayed over the powdered skin, caressing it faintly.

  ‘So what’s happened to Jack? Why has he …?’

  ‘Oh, he smacked open some kid’s head. A scrap in the dorm, so it seems. Runs in the fucking family. His fucking father’s son. What’s a war, eh, if no one gets wounded?’ Phyllis laughed, bitterly. ‘But he bunked off somewhere. And then there was a flap. And the school had to call in the fucking police, didn’t they? And that … well, perhaps you can imagine. Or perhaps you can’t. Let’s say Tony won’t be easy to live with when he gets back.’

  ‘When he gets back?’

  ‘He’s out with some of the blokes looking for the boy. Pick him up before the coppers do.’

  ‘I see,’ Clarice said.

  Phyllis continued. ‘I just needed to get away.’ She nursed her face. She was so plausible, now. ‘And do you know, it did cross my mind that my son might have found his way here. He might have done, mightn’t he? It’s where we used to come, after all. Why not, Clarice? Eh? Why not? And all along, myself, I haven’t had the luxury of getting away, you know. Not so very often, you see.’ She forced the breath out again through her nose. ‘Because my husband as is,’ she sighed, ‘because my husband likes to know exactly where I am. At all times. And that I’m doing exactly what he wants me to do, and what he tells me to do. You see?’ Phyllis paused and dropped her gaze. ‘Where I come from it’s what we call bettering ourselves. Well, you have to try. Don’t you?’

  ‘You should go,’ said Clarice.

  ‘“Where?’

  ‘Don’t look at me. You’ve made your bed, Phyllis. Hadn’t you better lie in it?’

  ‘He’ll kill me.’

  ‘A couple of minutes ago you were asking me to.’

  Phyllis stood up. ‘I’m two weeks late, you know.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘It’s Vic’s.’

  Clarice screamed, ‘Get out! Just get out, will you!’

  ‘All right, I’m going. That’s what you want, isn’t it? I’m doing what you want’.

  She watched Phyllis pick up her handbag and go meekly enough, out through the doorway. She saw her step down on to the path. Shaking with anger, she went to the door frame and stood there looking after the ridiculous, dangerous, carefully dressed woman who picked her way on her heels past the thorns. Some strange sense of kindred stirred for an instant in her breast. She called, ‘Phyllis!’

  Her cousin gave no sign she’d heard. But at the gateway to the lane, she turned and looked round. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You could come to my father’s with me. If you …’

  ‘I know where I belong, dear.’ Phyllis jerked her head towards London. ‘But don’t you worry. I expect a buzz bomb will get me. Us.’ She laid a hand to her belly. ‘You’ll be happy then, won’t you? You will, won’t you? All right, I’ll go then.’ She turned her back again and disappeared behind the hedgerow.

  Clarice shut the door after her. She didn’t know whether she’d witnessed Phyllis’s true self or her true insanity. She didn’t really care. Yet again, she’d been terrified, cornered, forced to take part. Her cousin had succeeded, once again, in rattling her to the core with her vicious drama of poverty and need, her tendentious victimhood, and had left her feeling trashed. She might have wished she hadn’t hit her – but then she had asked for it.

  Still shaking, she dropped down beside the bag of dreams and picked out a few of the notebooks at random. They were almost indecipherable. They were nothing, nothing at all, and she could make no sense of anything that had happened to her. Whatever glamour the world might once have possessed for her had all fallen away. She’d no heart left, no feelings. Words had almost lost their meanings.

  It was like the ending to the shadow play, she recalled. She’d gone behind the screen – a mere tablecloth stretched up in the jungle clearing – and what had she found? After the clashing of cymbals and beating of drums, nothing but a toothless old man sitting beside his pressure lamp with the sweat rolling down his face, with his leather cut-outs, his sticks and instruments, his different swazzles and pipes for mimicking the gods.

  She stood up. Mechanically,
she smoothed the curtains, straightened the mats, placed the chairs beside the table.

  In about half an hour’s time, once the reaction had set in, she’d probably have to put up with another crying fit. She stooped to pick up her kitbag, ready to leave. Then a detail she’d forgotten struck her. The shadow man had given her one of the cut-out, jointed puppets to look at. On the side away from the lamp, the leather was fully painted, the features and dress intricately picked out in extraordinary, detailed colours – colours that would never be seen by the audience. He had only smiled and shaken his head, shrugging his shoulders.

  VII

  Remedy

  A COUNTRY PATH ran along the whaleback of land towards Erwarton and Shotley. For the last two years Dr Pike had refrained from taking it, because it led past Mary Benedick’s house at Bolt’s Grove.

  Now he set out from Pook’s Hill and turned deliberately eastward by the gate to Appleby’s top meadow. The walk would take perhaps forty-five minutes. He squared his shoulders. All around him the midsummer air was twitched at and tugged by the activities of birds. A single oak hung over the hedgerow. Bright feathered streaks darted up from the bushes, until the fat, serrated leaves above him gossiped and whirred.

  His route took him under the eaves of Appleby’s barn. He stopped to bend down and touch sorrel and herb Robert. The fragile plants, growing by the foot of the wall, delighted him. A few rabbits bolted from the nibbled clearing opposite, their scuts bobbing up. A yard dog barked. Dr Pike walked on, skirting the mud that lay between the farm wall and a nettle bed. He was going courting at last.

  He’d been strictly ethical. There had come a point, more than a year before, when he’d declared there was nothing more he could do for Mrs Benedick. He’d referred her to Dr Molson at Shotley Gate. Once he’d said his piece a poignant silence had fallen between them, by which he’d guessed that she too was quite aware of her emotions.

  Nevertheless, he’d done his duty. Dutifully, too, the lady had borne her complaints away. He’d thrown himself into the care of the ordinary patients who were left on his panel; and he’d tried to meditate generously upon the coming of the welfare state.

  The path ran through a wood. Chequered light fell upon the strewn floor, and his shoes cracked dead twigs. Ferns rustled. He’d worked hard; there’d been consolation in that. He had patients enough who were suffering from enforced separation, whose present loneliness or sexual frustration was none of their own choosing. He’d been the better able to sympathise with the lovelorn.

  For how the woman at Bolt’s Grove had captivated him, with her soft eyes and puzzled, delicate ways. There’d been no denying his feelings for her. They’d hurt him. He’d wanted Mary Benedick in his life: speaking, touching, intimate, and had been required to set her aside.

  Still under the trees, the path joined up with a cart track. He was relieved not to have brought Bentley along – it would hardly do to arrive flustered and bespattered. Nervous about his appearance, he stopped to stroke down what was left of his hair. He adjusted his collar and licked his lips. For a moment the sensation on his tongue of the luxuriance of his old-fashioned moustache embarrassed him, and he wished he’d shaved it off. Then he remembered her smile. Fighters from Martlesham droned invisibly overhead. A solitary stag beetle clattered its wings brusquely across his path like some small pilotless weapon.

  Without her there had been compensations. He’d made friends. The goatish Wellbridge had left the vicinity. Dr Pike was even on wrangling terms with the vicar, Colin Passmore, and Nora, his wife; and had become quite used to taking a harmless glass of black-market Scotch with them. The feeling of being at one with his society, rather than at odds with it, was intriguing. He’d made the effort to savour in wartime what years of peace had never brought.

  And he’d kept his old eye upon hidden events. For months his greaseproof-paper map of Poland had sat on the window ledge of his surgery. Then had come President Roosevelt’s declaration. Intelligence now confirmed both the systematic Nazi extermination policy and the limitless Japanese war crimes.

  He hadn’t been in the least surprised. What did surprise him was his body’s reaction. Hearing the incredible made official, he’d been physically sick. How should one respond? History itself was changed, metaphysics had invaded the everyday. Even now, as he made his way seaward, the sheer scale of the wickedness let loose gave him pause. Did he – did anyone in such times – have the right even to think about the embraces of a woman?

  He thought about her all the time. He wanted her. He wanted to be with her. It was as simple as that. On occasions when he must meet her socially, implication darted between their eyes, he was sure of it. It was blindingly obvious. He smiled, now, on the dry track across a patch of heath. Bees hummed. Small clouds of gnats smoked above the standing puddles. He’d been scared of trying again; that was all.

  Once he’d made up his mind, though, he’d sent her a note directly, asking permission to call. She had replied at once. Now he walked between the tall flowering grasses, and saw with gladness the hordes of meadow brown butterflies attending the thistle heads. Clovers were both white and pink among the stems. Trefoils made bright points of yellow beside the path. The air buzzed and hummed again; it smelt of cattle, and of salt. He climbed a stile. In the next field he felt all the agitation in his stomach of a glassful of neat adrenalin.

  By another big oak, he came to the ridge that gave a clear lookout over the Stour estuary. The river lay in its mud-flats before Harwich on the far bank. Two open boats, oared like naval insects, were scuffing their way towards Shotley Gate against the incoming tide – new recruits at the infamous old shore school. He was inclined to linger. He felt his journey across a mere two or three miles of the peninsula had been transected not just by reverie and desire, but somehow by the trace of every event that had followed from the suicide of Selama Yakub.

  Could he be mistaken about Mary? Clarice had arrived home, cracking up, just at the instant he’d decided to pursue his own love. The coincidence was an omen, wasn’t it? He brushed the thought aside.

  And his worn brown brogues, polished up today as best he could, and protruding from the turn-ups of the only good pair of tweed trousers he had left, seemed to insist upon his appointment. They strode him on towards Bolt’s Grove; and, as he went, he prodded the dry ground with his ivory-handled stick.

  JACK SAW BOATS were moored up under the church. He went down to the waterside. There were masts and a bend of water opening out. Beyond that, as far as to the horizon, reed beds grew up from rafts of floating grass and from strands of mud. He played wishful games with his knowledge: that this was Ipswich already and that by some miracle he’d managed to walk as far as the sea. The gold-lettered sign on the board outside the church said ‘Maldon’.

  He was cold from the rain that had soaked him under a tree. He was very hungry. As he walked back past the church and up the slope into the town, he tried to make it appear to anyone who looked that his grey shirt and corduroy shorts were nothing out of the ordinary in that part of the world. There were knots of inquisitive children hanging about in the main street. He knew he must steal food before the shops shut.

  That deed was done right at the edge of town, and just as he was on the point of giving up. There was a metal bridge. Some yards before that, an isolated wooden building stood next to a pair of petrol pumps. It called itself a general store, but there was nothing on display in the dingy window except a large black cat and a sponge cake. The one was asleep on the other.

  A notice on the door said ‘Closed’. Jack tried the handle. The door opened, and a bell on a spring jangled. He darted in. As the cake came out from under the cat’s head, its claws caught his hand and drew blood. And that was the only price of his meal. He was out of the door and clean away. He didn’t look back until he’d crossed the bridge.

  There was a place called Goldhanger. Under a broken haystack, he ate the last piece of his prize. It tasted of carrots and artificial egg. The sky had
cleared and there were stars just beginning to appear. His father was not Tony Rice. His father was called Vic Warren. That was why he, Jack, was also called Warren. Once, at Christmas time, his father had gone out and not come back.

  Aunt Clarice had said he could come to her – at Ipswich. He’d remembered the name because it was so odd. If he could get to Ipswich the people there would know where to find her. And she would know where his real father was. He watched the stars come out, one by one. He was sure she held the key. Soon the bombers would be going up.

  In the morning he stood by the roadside until an American lorry gave him a lift. The driver said he was lost, too, and trying to find the route to Heckford Bridge. What sort of a name was that? So why didn’t Jack come along and they could both get lost together. This was a lame-brained country where the roads wound like cart-tracks and led to goddamn nowhere. The driver had upside-down stripes on his shirtsleeve. He had enough pieces of airplane on board, he guessed, to think about trying to get up his own raid on Berlin. Unfortunately, though, if the regular flyboys didn’t get the parts by midday, he’d get his ass quite badly bitten. Did Jack like cold frankfurters? Jack did.

  The lorry lumbered on across the flat salt land. Near a spinney beside a farm gate, a single signpost pointed to Tolleshunt D’Arcy, Great Wigborough, Layer-de-la-Haye and Colchester. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ the driver said.

  I HAVE WRITTEN myself into it. My pilgrim brother, Jack, runs between earth and sky; and, for all the unlikeliness of my own start in life, this is a tale of redemption.

  Jack is for ever divided from me. I never had his nerve, nor his opportunity; you’ve seen enough of my mother to get the picture. I was Vic’s child raised in Tony Rice’s world and my early life was what Jack escaped. But something unites us, my brother and me. My story picks its way between snapshots and I shape myself inside it. As the family that should have been mine assembles under my hands, I make a portrait of the father who doesn’t know me, because I’ve no other way to reach him.