by Henry Green
When, at last, his father took him by the hand soon after eleven and asked where they were to go, it was Christopher, now that it had been agreed that they should be together, who suggested the visit they could make to this or that in the grounds. He did this as though he was the one to do the entertaining, cold, unquestioning, yet perfectly happy, and with no comment. He was still too young for chat. In whatever they got up to he was content to stand by while Richard did the heavy work, not helping while he turned over logs or pulled long sheets of ice from the moat. But Richard could not do anything on his own or Christopher would cry, ‘Wait till I come, oh wait.’
Roe had been brought up in this house, among these gardens. The lawns, and most of the undergrowth in the wild garden, the trees, the beds of reed around the moat, all these had become a part of his youth. They had not altered in the twenty years he was growing up. It was he who had changed, who dreaded now, with a hemlock loss of will, to evoke how once he shared these scenes with no one, for he had played alone, who had then no inkling of the insecurity the war would put him in, and who found, when confronted by each turning of a path he knew by heart but which he could never call to mind when he closed his eyes, that the presence, the disclosure again of so much that had not changed and shewed no immediate signs of changing, bore him down back to the state he wished to forget, when he was his son’s age and had no more than a son’s responsibility to a father.
Also, the weather was so very cold. In the end Richard would drift back to the house, and Christopher to the stables. Neither was sorry to go his own way. The boy would be building up memories peculiar to himself. The father had his own of that kind. He could not add to them and, in his case, he found he most wanted to be with his wife back in the more recent life his leave had let him find again, which now tasted fresh to his lips as the fruit off the tree.
So it came about that he did not see as much as he might of Christopher, partly because he had dropped into the old way of doing nothing which made a background to every memory of the place he had, and partly because he found he could not, this time, leave his wife alone.
When she had been training, days at the office were long, evenings brief by such time as he got back from work. At that period, when his life lay ready to hand, he had not bothered, had taken the companionship of wife and baby for granted. Now that he was back in this life only for a few days, he could not keep his hands off her, now that he did not see her every evening, rather mocking, aloof, as gentle as he had been curt always, the touch of her white rose petal skin an unchanging part of what his life had been before, her gladness that she was with him a promise of how they still had each other, of the love they had had one for the other, and of the love they would yet hold one another in, the greater by everything that had gone before.
Because of this, and by the fact that she had not been with him for so long, he could not leave her alone when in an empty room, but stroked her wrists, pinched, kissed her eyes, nibbled her lips while, for her part, she smiled, joked, and took him up to bed at all hours of the day with her, and lay all night murmuring to him.
It is unnecessary to say how Christopher spent the days. Actress was there all the time. He had his own jokes with the men about the place, who were of an age to have been a part of Richard’s youth as well.
In this way the time for father and son passed quickly. Neither was much with the other, the one picking up the thread where the war had unravelled it, the other beginning to spin his own, to create his first tangled memories, to bind himself to life for the first time. But for the wife it was complete in itself, for she had both of them, together again.
So it came to the morning of Richard’s return. His wife went with him for a stroll before the car came to the door.
There was a tall hedge of holly out at the back to hide the stables. Two gardeners were clipping this hedge. One of them came down off his ladder and gave a holloa. He might have seen a fox. Richard saw Christopher come out of the small iron gate. The other man got off the ladder and stood by his side. The two men holloaed together. A third time they did this and then Christopher joined in, his voice high above theirs. At last Actress came galloping, once more from a distance. The nurse came out of the iron gate to fetch him for his goodbye to his father. Then Actress was there. And as Richard turned back, and the car came out of the back drive to go to the front door, he did not know how he was going to get through his goodbye. What he had just seen was so like all he had known and might never find again, and, as he clutched at her arm above the elbow, he shook at leaving this, the place he got back to her.
‘When I was in Africa,’ Piper was telling Richard in the four-ale bar, ‘it didn’t ’alf cause a rumpus, oh dear, quite usual too. You’d see a number of ’em, with their long sticks, kickin’ up the dust on the compound where they lived, till you could make out only their ’eads and shoulders with all they’d raised. In the end they always got ’em back, yus, nearly always, but oh dear what a rumpus,’ and he laughed his high, cracked laugh. For Piper had got Richard’s name from the copper Pye called to take Christopher home, this copper living along the same street as Piper these twenty years.
It was the evening of the second day in the substation. Richard was too worn out, too bewildered to deny that his son had been abducted. In peace time, to avoid getting involved with this old man, he would not have hesitated. Lying he would have denied all knowledge of Christopher. But now that it was to be war he thought he would say goodbye to evasions, or pretence. He foolishly admitted he had been the victim.
‘When that copper give me the name,’ said Piper, ‘I said to meself I know someone, let’s see, somewheres, why yes, you old bastard, it’s that young feller training alongside of yer at the station. So then I looks you up and it is you. So there you are then.’
‘Yes it was me,’ Richard admitted for the third time.
‘An’ if it ’adn’t been that your nipper would not tell ’im where you lived ’e never would ’ave called the copper but left ’im as if by accident along your street, I don’t doubt. Fortunate to one way of lookin’, but misfortune some ways, according to ’ow things turn out with him in charge of this substation with you in it.’
Richard agreed. He saw there was no escape. It came to him that if Pye were to find out Piper knew, Pye would be sure to suppose that he, Richard, had been talking. In any case Pye must take it out of him. But he was tired, too lost to want more than companionship. And he did not mind what happened. He thought there had already been too much.
Three days before war broke out they had all been mobilised, mustered in a car park attached to one of the big stores, and sent off some hours later to the action stations they were to man. These were commanded by Regulars from the Brigade. Richard was posted to Pye’s station.
It seemed weeks since he listened in to the wireless, did not wait for his red telegram, and went off to this asphalt park, fully dressed in tin hat, dark blue uniform, shiny black gas trousers, rubber boots, with axe and spanner in a blue belt, as soon as he heard the announcer call on the Civil Defence Services to report.
He took a taxi. He told the driver to put him down round a corner so that he should not appear as rich as he was. But when he turned in at the entrance, there, in wait, had been Piper.
‘I seen you, Mr Roe,’ he said, addressing Richard thus for the first time, ‘an’ if you don’t mind, you’re wrongly dressed. I wouldn’t let them see yer like that. The order is uniform caps to be worn, tin hat to be slung on the belt. Boots carried, shoes must be black. An’ where’s yer blankets, with grub sufficient for two nights. I should go back, Mr Roe, they won’t miss no one, I’ve ’ad experience, we shan’t move out of this yard this night, not unless Jerry comes and bombs us out.’
Feeling like any schoolboy who has created a wrong impression on his first day, Richard immediately took another taxi home. He kept it waiting while he dashed upstairs to strip his bed. He gave the between maid a fit of giggles over the muddle he made t
ying his blankets. A minute or so later the cook lost her temper as, in turn, the girl lost her head searching for more string to make a parcel of sandwiches. Thinking he would be too late he had himself driven back right inside the car park. Piper saw him, but there was hardly anyone else to notice. Richard need not have hurried. He was one of the first.
As evening lengthened under a rainy sky, and more and more turned up in their deep blue uniforms, the melancholy light, as it failed, seemed to stretch long as grey elastic.
A balm he had never experienced heretofore spread over him, the blessedness of being without duties or appointments, in the midst of anxious muddlement.
He had nothing to do, and nothing he could do would make any difference. His companions had little to say. For the most part they stood in silence while the officers bawled at each other over their heads. He did not seem able to get away from Piper, that was the one snag, because Piper had seen the taxi. They hardly spoke again except the once, after it had come on to rain, when this man advised him to move his blankets under cover.
For several hours they had all to stand in different groups only to be regrouped, creatures of the utter confusion the London Fire Brigade creates.
They were mute in a vast asphalted space. The store towered above, pile after dark pile which, gradually, light after light went darker than the night that was falling and which he dreaded. For twenty minutes at dusk the scene was his wife’s eyes, wet with tears he thought, her long lashes those black railings, everywhere wet, but, in the air, the menace of what was yet to be experienced, the beginning.
Earlier the balloons had been a colour of the blade of a knife.
He found he could not think of his family. They had at once grown remote. Life with them, as it all had been, unrealised yet, was an ideal imagined. He was so without anticipation he did not even fear that Piper might be stationed with him, as of course, once they were sorted out, the old man was. He did not suppose even for a wild moment that Pye could be his Station Officer. Indeed, when he did know, the rush and turmoil was too great. He did not care until the evening of the next day, until, as he was listening to Piper in the pub on abduction in Africa and to his own story so inimitably retold, Pye came over. Piper at once got up to let them be alone.
They had all worked hard to get into temporary quarters. They had by now done some of the sandbagging. Pye had got through more than anyone. They were tired out. They expected a gigantic raid any minute. The conversation of hanging, civilian faces in bowler hats up at the counter seemed mostly of the pet they had had put away that very morning, in accordance with instructions issued against gas attack. Or, if they had drowned the dog themselves, then they would ask each other whether the dustmen would reject a bin in which there was a body. One hairless dewlap with mastiff’s eyes spoke up. He said every dustcart was commandeered to remove human carcasses that same night. The black-out, new to all, was of a vault. All this, while he had not specifically observed it, moved Pye to get things over, to speak for the first time, and, as he thought, for the last, directly of his sister to Richard.
‘Being a man,’ he said, ‘I ’ave my feelings, and I don’t discuss family matters with no one. But a human being I was bred up with has wronged your wife, and, situated as we are now, I consider I ought to say to you that I was sorry. Mind you, I’m not saying that I’m sorry now.’
‘Don’t misinterpret me,’ he went on, ‘there’s nothing personal about it. But any system that can send an unfortunate woman into what is jail really, is vile, a filthy system. I know it hasn’t anything to do with you, but they told me I must sign her away like a bit of furniture or they would prosecute. So I did sign, underneath two doctors I ’ad to give a dollar each to. That’s why I’m not sorry now. Not because of the money, no, but the disgrace, the force majewer.’
Roe forbore to reply.
‘Of course,’ Pye went on again, ‘in the station, while you was in the class, there was no cause to speak. But I want you to know that it won’t make any difference you’re being in my substation. There’s many in the Brigade would never allow a man beneath them, as you’re beneath me now right enough, to forget a thing like that. Well, I’m not like that, I’m a man who has educated ’imself. Take education, what is education? I say it is a man’s capability to see rightly for ’isself. I see my mother’s daughter, in a manner of speaking, has wronged your wife, and has not been given leave, or I should say permitted, by the system we live under, to put it right.’
An infinite sensation of tiredness, made fluid by the beer he had drunk flowed over Richard together with the certainty that he could never make this man realise what had passed, mixed with relief at the fact that Pye did not know everything. But he was anxious to keep on the right side so he said a few words to the effect that whatever happened before the war was best forgotten. He ended by calling him sir.
‘Don’t call me sir, Dick, but sub. Only Station Officers and above are entitled to a sir.’
Roe took heart at this use of the christian name and was glad, when the round came up, to find Pye buying him a drink. In a way it was salt that had passed between them.
After Pye left him Richard noticed he was going from one Auxiliary to another, and realised that he was making himself pleasant to each man in turn.
Piper came back. Richard bought him another drink. The old soldier never paid a round. Knowing he was being sponged on, Richard had now to listen to a rambling account of the old man’s fears.
‘Yus, I went to find out me action station for meself the moment I seen we meant business. As soon as ever they told me it was here I asked them ’oo was to be the officer. An’ when the sub officer that told me comes out with this ’ere Pye’s name I says to myself, “well, it’s all up with you this trip, you silly old bastard, you’ve landed in it this time, that man don’t like yer, ’e’ll make it uneasy, you old fool, ah,”’ and he slapped the back of his own head, too hard, Richard thought, ‘So ’e will. Soon as I gets back to my buildings I said to the Mrs, I says, “Well, mother, your old man’s in trouble again,”, and at this point he tried a laugh, ‘Well, ’ere’s the very best,’ he said, raising his pint glass, ‘Yus, ’e’s found ’isself trouble again I says, posted to a station where the officer can’t bear the sight of ’im, oh, you unlucky old sod you,’ he cried too loud, striking himself again with a board-hard hand.
It appeared that Piper could not understand why Pye disliked him. Richard investigated, found the old man was ignorant of the effect his interrogations and echoing had on the lecturer. Roe left him in ignorance. Then he heard Piper, at a time when everyone was expecting instant death, ask if he thought it the right moment to put forward a friend, a someone called Mary Howells, as cook.
‘Depend upon it,’ Piper said, ‘we shan’t always take our meals at this ARP canteen. I shall be sorry, mind, we’ve none of us ’ad grub like it at the price,’ this when Roe had been too nervous to eat, and had not yet touched the sandwiches he had brought, ‘but they’ll give us cooks by what I understand, an’ I’ve known ’er a number of years.’
‘It’s a bit soon, isn’t it?’
‘Well, maybe it is a trifle previous, but if this sub officer was one you could talk to then I wouldn’t mind puttin’ in a word to nudge things along, like, and do meself a bit of good because I’ve known ’er years, she lives just along our street. Now you’re a man I prize, what d’you think, Mr Roe?’
Richard advised delay. They were called out to do more sandbagging. Piper did twice his share, sometimes carrying as many as two full bags on his thin, wide, hollow shoulders.
Pye, when he took his rest, at the end of one more chaotic day, was no less calm than this old soldier; nevertheless, the imminence of war action physically excited him.
Pye also had been out in France last time and had known the earth he fought over cold, wet, frozen, thawed or warm, whichever it might be by the sky above, in mud, or cracked and dry, but, on occasion barely moist, cool so that it crumbled leaving
hardly a stain on the fingers.
Yes, he had been close to the earth then, and it led him back to the first girl he had known, not long before his father took them away from the village in which their childhood was passed, for that too was of the earth. In the grass lane, and Pye groaned as he lay on the floor, his head by a telephone, that winding lane between high banks, in moonlight, in colour blue, leaning back against the pale wild flowers whose names he had forgotten, her face, wildly cool to his touch, turned away from him and the underside of her jaw which went soft into her throat that was a colour of junket, oh my God he said to himself as he remembered how she panted through her nose and the feel of her true, roughened hands as they came to repel him and then, at the warmth of his skin, had stayed irresolute at the surface while, all lost, she murmured, ‘Will it hurt?’ Oh God she had been so white and this bloody black-out brought you in mind of it with the moon, this blue colour, and with the creeping home. He had been out hunting that first night right enough as he came home, her tears still on the back of his hand, with the cries of an owl at his temples, like it might be the shrieks of that cat on the wall over there, bloody well yelling for her greens.
He was too tired to sleep. His mind switched from one thing to the next. The bank against which he had pressed her led him to worry about his wall of sandbags, which he had hoped they would have finished that same night. He had wanted a clear run the next day, sandbagging windows but, close on half past eleven, when they had all had just about enough, the wall collapsed. Well, he said to himself, my lads are all in, and Trant, the District Officer who was his immediate superior, can go drown ’isself, they can none of them do more tonight.
Then he turned to the asylum and the letter he had received, asking how much he could afford to pay towards his sister’s upkeep. Surely, as a ratepayer, he was entitled to that free? They could force him to send her in, but no power in the country could make him pay out money for her.
