Keeping the World Away

by Margaret Forster

  ‘You’re tough,’ Parker said, ‘that’s a gift. It’ll see you through, you’ll be glad of it. Look at you, still plenty of muscle. Look at me. Wasted.’

  Sam felt embarrassed. He folded the flimsy letters away and put them carefully into the waterproof pouch he always wore under his vest, tied round his waist. He hadn’t meant to make comparisons between himself and Parker. He’d only wanted to try to express his admiration. They lived in such filth and ugliness in the huts and anything that could lift the atmosphere of weariness and despair was so valuable. That was all he’d meant to say.

  Parker left the camp towards the end of 1943, taken off in a squad of twenty, no one knew why or where to. The day before he was taken, he and Sam were standing at the door of their hut, ordered to be ready at dawn for some task or other. They could hear frogs croaking and birds chattering and the sun was rising over the jungle, a violent red ball. There was a thin mist, patchy, hugging the tops of the trees, curling up like steam from them. Parker nudged him. ‘What?’ Sam asked. ‘Beautiful,’ Parker said, ‘look around. Beautiful. In spite of everything.’ Sam looked, and tried to see what Parker saw and to benefit from it, but nothing happened. He couldn’t see what Parker saw. He couldn’t feel what Parker apparently felt.

  *

  By 1945, there had been no letters from Sam for fifteen months, but Lucasta did not give in to the feelings of dread that threatened to overwhelm her: no news was good news, or so Tom, writing from Australia, assured her. Sam, he reminded her, was tough, and could survive anything. (A bullet? she wanted to ask, but didn’t.) Sam was not a letter-writer, and in any case, situated where he was, it was doubtful that letters could be sent – since the fall of Singapore, the post offices would not be functioning. Working day after day on the land, Lucasta made herself so physically exhausted that her brain seemed numb. She took on extra work willingly, laboured away ferociously in all weathers, so much so that Skelton Wood himself noticed and told her to go steady, he didn’t want a sick girl on his hands. He told her to take time off, she was entitled, and had twice passed up on her week’s leave. ‘Don’t think I didn’t notice,’ he said, ‘making a martyr of yourself. Does no good.’

  She didn’t know what to do with a week off. Obliged to go back to the cottage, she managed to sleep for almost twenty-four hours but then woke feeling weak and ill and incapable of doing anything. Sally called, sent by Mrs Wood to see that Lucasta was all right, and suggested that they should go for a night out to Fowey where she knew a pub that was ‘lively’, where American servicemen, stationed locally, went. But Lucasta didn’t want to be ‘lively’, so Sally went away, telling her to suit herself. But what did suit her? Without work, she didn’t know, she was lost. She went and lay on her mother’s bed and thought it would be easy to cry and never stop, but she didn’t cry, not a single tear. It was spring, a week of hot, sunny days, and it was the weather which dragged her out into the overgrown garden on the third day. Outside, she felt better. Slowly, listlessly, she began weeding, and when she’d cleared a patch of grass she brought an old wickerwork chair out and sat in it, thinking about Sam and about the war. The tide had turned, people said, the war was being won and this year, 1945, would see the end.

  With more energy the next day, she tackled the hut, opening the door wide, emptying the whole place and then sweeping the floor. Next she examined the paints. They were not all dried up and useless. She found a whole set of oil paints in a wooden box which were untouched, and an unused set of brushes still in their cellophane packets. But there was no paper, and no canvases. She could paint over the canvases in the cottage, though, which she now knew to be the work of the woman who had left Mr Stone. Her mother had laughed at them but had let them stay on the walls, saying they would serve as an inspiration to do better. The frames were good. Plain wood, unvarnished and simple. Lucasta went back into the cottage and removed the frame from a still life of roses and an apple. She could paint over it without any feelings of vandalism. Still lifes bored her, however brilliantly rendered. They’d bored her father too, but her mother was attracted to them. She’d liked still lifes, and interiors without figures.

  Lucasta took the canvas into the hut and began to paint over it. When the roses and apples had been obliterated, she sat and stared at the now primed and prepared blank canvas. She could begin. She waited. It would come, if she waited long enough. She would feel it, the excitement, the need to turn this blank square into something.

  An hour later, she was still sitting there, the canvas still blank, her hands cold.

  *

  Official notification came the day before VE Day: Sam was a prisoner-of-war in a Japanese camp. He was not dead. The war in the Far East was not over yet, but he had survived so far and, as Tom had reminded her, he was tough enough to last it out. Relief made her so happy she allowed herself to be swept up in the girls’ outing to London.

  They were to meet at the station, to catch the first train. There was a thunderstorm that night, but the thunder and lightning only seemed a kind of celebration, and afterwards, in the morning, the air was clear and a fine, sunny day was forecast. The train was packed, standing room only, but nobody complained, everyone was laughing and enduring the discomfort happily. Some of the girls in the party were from other farms and Lucasta didn’t know them but Sally seemed to, joking with them, and sharing her cigarettes. Watching the ease with which her friend socialised, Lucasta thought how different her life would be if she had been born with Sally’s temperament. She felt stiff and awkward in this company, and had to struggle to take part in the repartee, and as always the urge to run away and be by herself pushed her to leave them. But on the train, there was no escape, and once they reached London there would be none either. She’d never been to London, not once. The thought of finding her way about alone terrified her. She had to stay with the crowd, follow it, be part of it. She’d never willingly been part of a crowd in her life.

  *

  They made it into Whitehall just as all the traffic stopped. Lucasta, with Sally linking her arm uncomfortably tight, her skin hot and damp through the thin material of her dress, saw a mounted policeman wipe the sweat from his brow. Big Ben began to chime and suddenly silence whipped through the crowds like a wind, touching every laugh and shout until it was stilled. The silence was extraordinary and startling. Then, through loudspeakers, they heard Churchill’s words and when he’d finished the cheers began, the magic was gone, and the tumult returned.

  There seemed no choice about which direction they should take. The press of people was so enormous that several times Lucasta felt her feet literally being lifted off the ground. They were forced into Trafalgar Square, and round it, everyone singing; around Nelson’s Column couples were dancing, swaying together to a music of their own. Fireworks were going off though it was not dark, and streamers cascaded from the steps of the National Gallery, hurled by groups of excited schoolchildren. Sally still had hold of her arm but there was no sign of the other girls. Lucasta strained to find them, and in craning her neck to look behind, was pulled in the opposite direction to Sally and suddenly her arm slipped away. She cried out and saw Sally wave, laughing, and then they were parted, all in a moment.

  The terror Lucasta felt made tears spring to her eyes and she turned round and round, trying to fight her way through the throng towards the place where she had seen her friend vanish. But she was small and slight and could make no headway. Then she felt her shoulders gripped and she was being steered to one side, guided in and out of the moving figures towards a building on the left. She came to rest in a doorway and turned to find a soldier smiling at her and shouting something. Safe? Was he saying she was safe? She smiled, shakily, and said thank you, but he was gone. The joy in his face had been ecstatic, and here she was, nervous and frightened, completely out of tune with the atmosphere, stranded in a doorway not knowing what to do.

  The sequence of events for the rest of that day always remained confused in her mind. How had she go
t to the station? How had she found Sally? All she clearly remembered was stumbling into the cottage in the early hours of the next morning, and sleeping in her mother’s bed. She was back in her proper place, alone, dependent on no one. This was how she would have to remain, unless Sam could make a difference.

  *

  Arriving back in England wasn’t how Sam had imagined it. On board the ship there was a strange silence as it slipped into Southampton. Nobody cheered, nobody seemed to have the energy to be excited. Instead, there was a tension among the broken-down men, a nervousness, which Sam felt part of. He remembered that when they left Singapore a band had played ‘There’ll Always Be An England’, and everyone had sung. There was no band on the dockside now and few people. They were arriving quietly, almost secretly – was someone ashamed of them? – on a cold, dull, wet morning. The disembarking process was slow, but nobody complained. Everyone shuffled along, collecting clothes and money and tickets without any obvious enthusiasm. Most of the men were going to London and then on to different parts of the country, but Sam was going directly west, to Cornwall, to Lucasta, keeping his promise to himself to try to be a better brother. He felt strange in the suit he’d been given, but was glad to be out of uniform. Women liked uniforms but he wasn’t looking for a woman for now.

  He was preoccupied for the rest of the journey: what was he looking for, now the war was over? Peace. Rest. Comfort. True, but he wanted more, he was greedy for more. Six years of his life had been wasted and they had somehow to be compensated for. He’d been part of a family and had never appreciated what this meant. He’d deliberately left it, and so had Tom, long before the war, gone off and never given them – his parents, his sister – a thought. He’d hardly written, hardly phoned. He didn’t understand how he could have been so unaware of what he’d rejected. But then, if the war had never happened, maybe he would have come to value his family and reclaimed his place within it. He’d have grown up, stopped thinking only of himself. Too late now to cherish his mother and father, but not too late to love his sister. Maybe he could live with her in Cornwall. Looking out of the train window, he thought about becoming a farmer. Why not? He’d never wanted to be a farmer, but now it suddenly seemed attractive, satisfying, to work on the land, using his fitness and strength that way. There was a point to it. Producing food was worthwhile, it was easy to see where all the effort went, and for what. In his post-war state there needed to be a point to things. Maybe he’d always thought that, maybe it was why what his parents did had baffled him when he was growing up. His father’s pots were hardly useful; he didn’t make many ordinary cups and saucers and plates, but instead turned out weird urns and ornamental bowls. And as for his mother’s paintings and drawings, they gave pleasure to some people but it was fairly fleeting. He’d once begun an argument with his brother about art not having any point, while they were still both at home, and clever Tom had come out with some quote from a Russian writer about ‘man cannot live by bread alone’. Couldn’t he? Sam thought he could. Man could live by bread alone, and would be safer doing so.

  The countryside changed when the train crossed the Tamar. Plymouth looked terrible, bombed to bits, and he’d shut his eyes till they were past it, but now there were fields and trees and eventually the sea. There was no sun, but the sky had lightened and the dullness was tinged with silver. There were more stretches of cultivated land than he remembered. He wondered if he and Lucasta together could work a farm. He hadn’t a clue what to do, but she would know. Were farms expensive? He owned no land, so he would have to be a tenant farmer. But who would give him a chance? He was only a returning soldier with no experience, and his strength might count for nothing.

  Nobody at St Austell Station to greet him, of course, but then he hadn’t let Lucasta know when he would arrive. She wasn’t expecting him on any particular day and he preferred it that way. He had wanted to surprise her. Now, standing for a moment on the platform, he felt unsure. His mother was dead. There was no family home any more. The reality of this seemed to dawn on him for the first time, and he felt momentarily dizzy, his head spinning with forgotten images rearing up to confront and mock his situation. No real home here to go to, that was it. Slowly, he set off down the road. The way lay towards the sea. He thought of the recluse, the man who had lived in the cottage where his sister now lived, a figure he and Tom had always been intrigued by and slightly afraid of. They’d see him on the cliff path, struggling up the steep bits with his stick, and make up stories about him and his war wounds. How little understanding they’d had of that war and how his wounds had been inflicted. Once, they’d even fired pellets from their airgun at his windows – God knows why – and he’d come out in a fury, screaming and brandishing his stick. Some people said he was mad, a loony. Their mother told them to keep away from him, he had suffered much. Sam distinctly recalled those words – ‘he has suffered much’ – because they had sounded so odd. He’d had a sense that his mother had not been referring to war wounds. He and Tom had called him Scarface, never thinking what had caused the scars.

  He could smell the sea in the air, or thought he could. He closed his eyes and lifted up his face and breathed in deeply. No stench of death, no whiff of decay, just wind-borne salt and a hint of wild herbs. God, it felt good, pure. This was the place, his home terrain, to tuck himself away and start again. He walked slowly in the direction of his sister’s rented cottage, remembering all the times he and Tom had cycled down from the pottery to try to cadge a trip on one of the fishing boats. He should write to Tom, find out what he was doing. Nerves made him hesitate when he reached the gate of the cottage. It was broken, hanging on its hinges as it always had been. He wanted so much for everything to be easy but dreaded the awkwardness there would surely be. He hadn’t seen his sister for seven years, years during which they had both changed in ways impossible for the other to imagine. He couldn’t even be sure exactly how old Lucasta was when he last saw her – sixteen, seventeen? In his memory of that final visit home, when he went to tell his mother he was joining up and had come to say goodbye, Lucasta was only a shadowy presence in the background. It was his mother he remembered, everything about her that day, her tears, her embrace, all the emotion of his leaving. He’d had no time for his sister. It suddenly occurred to him that he might not even recognise her. And his own appearance might scare her. Looking in mirrors wasn’t something he’d done much of, lately, but he knew how he looked – battered, hardened, slightly threatening. He’d aged in more ways than mere years, as had most of his contemporaries who’d fought alongside him. They looked like men in their forties not their twenties. He wondered if he now looked like their father, and if this would shock Lucasta, and whether she had turned out like their mother, which would shock him.

  The young woman who opened the cottage door, while he was still standing at the gate, was nothing like their mother, but she was instantly recognisable all the same. She stared at him long and hard, but there was no shock in her expression, only the same uncertainty he was himself experiencing. Finally, he pushed open the gate and made his way up the path and she smiled and said his name, but it was not easy to embrace her. She did not relax into his arms, or hold him tight, but instead put her own hands up and held his face, as though to be sure he was who she thought he was.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘an odd place to find you, little sister. Do you remember Scarface?’

  She nodded, gestured for him to come in. ‘Tea?’ she said.

  ‘I’d rather have a drink, if you’ve got one.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘OK, tea, then.’ It gave her something to do, and himself time to struggle with his uncertainty.

  She was slim, fine-boned, graceful. Her hair was long, tied back on the nape of her neck with a ribbon. No make-up. The eyes still arresting, still watchful, still making him uncomfortable, but then how could he not be uncomfortable after such a long time.

  ‘So,’ he said, when he’d been given the tea, ‘so, how are yo
u? How have things been?’

  She smiled, and sipped her own tea, still standing beside the cooker. ‘I’m fine, considering. And you?’

  ‘Fine, considering. Considering quite a lot, eh, for both of us?’

  She nodded, came and sat at the table with him, then asked him the obvious questions, about when he’d got back, how bad had things been, and he answered, keeping his answers factual and shrugging off the deeper implications. All the time, he was studying her, trying to grasp what she was like, but he could guess very little about her state of mind. Something was needed to connect them but he couldn’t produce it. Then she said, ‘Are you here for long?’

  ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Depends.’ He wanted her to ask, on what, but she didn’t, merely giving one of her funny, grave little nods.

  ‘Depends,’ he was obliged to repeat, and then add, ‘depends on you, really.’

  ‘Me?’ She was startled, suddenly wary.

  ‘Well, I thought maybe we could farm together.’

  She laughed, and seemed relieved. ‘Joke,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘No, not a joke, not necessarily. Could be serious, I mean a serious idea. What do you think?’

  Now she was frowning. ‘You never wanted to be a farmer,’ she said, almost accusingly. And then: ‘You can’t just decide to be a farmer, not like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about farming.’

  ‘I could learn.’

  ‘It takes years.’

  ‘I’ve got years, I hope.’

  ‘But where would you start, where would you find a farm? It’s not like buying a house.’

  ‘You could help me. We could do it together.’

  ‘But I’m leaving, don’t you remember? I’m going to London. I’m taking up my place at art college.’

  After that, they were both quiet. Disappointment and a sense of having been clumsy kept Sam silent. It must have showed in his face because Lucasta murmured that she was sorry. It was going to be like this, he thought, coming back from the war, thinking he could walk into people’s lives and assume nothing had changed for them when everything had changed for him. He would have to learn not to take anything for granted. Finally, he found his voice again and began asking Lucasta about herself, about how she was managing, whether she had enough money, where she was going to live. He questioned her, too, about who owned the farms around them, who might look favourably on him. She said there was always plenty of work for unskilled labourers, emphasising the unskilled. And suddenly the whole idea seemed ridiculous, and he laughed, and said he must have been mad to entertain it for even the length of a train journey – romantic nonsense, nothing more.