by MARY HOCKING
‘Have you seen the house?’ she asked Louise.
‘It’s like a crushed match-box. I wouldn’t go there if I were you, pet.’
Where would she go when she came on leave? Alice wondered. The thought of having no home seemed the worst thing of all.
‘The flowers were beautiful, weren’t they, Grandma?’ Louise said. ‘And it’s not easy to get them now, even in the spring.’ The old woman did not answer.
They went back to Louise’s house. Later, when all the visitors had gone, Claire and Alice looked through the letters of condolence, while Judith sat staring into the empty grate, her face dull and lumpish. They could hear Louise talking to the children in their bedroom.
‘I don’t know how Jacov had the nerve to come,’ Claire said. ‘If it hadn’t been for his mother. Daddy would still be alive.’
‘No,’ Judith shook her head. ‘Rumpus was killed in the kitchen, and if Daddy hadn’t been with Mrs Vaseyelin he would have been soothing Rumpus.’
But Claire was a long way from being able to accept the incredible, fact of death. ‘He would have taken Rumpus down into the cellar,’ she said.
Her face dissolved in an agony of grief. It is quite genuine, Alice thought dispassionately, looking at her sister. She was always sick at once if she ate anything that disagreed with her; I was the one who couldn’t bring it up. She drew her writing pad towards her. ‘Shall I answer the ones from my friends and their parents, Mummy?’
‘Yes, that would be a help, darling.’
Alice wrote. Claire read the letters through, weeping when she came across particularly touching tributes to their father. Louise began to sing to the children. Judith sat unmoving.
Before she went to bed, Alice had a few minutes alone with Louise in the kitchen. ‘What will you do?’ she asked. ‘Will Mummy come to live with you?’
‘She would hate that, and so would I. We’re both too strong- minded to live so close. I think she ought to stay with Aunt Meg and Uncle Harry on the farm. There will be work for her to do there. Uncle Harry says they are so tired at the end of the day, they just go to bed. So there won’t be much opportunity to fall out. I’ll go with her for a while with the children. She won’t go otherwise.’
There was no air raid that night. Alice and Claire lay in bed in that unnatural hush, waiting for the siren. Alice said, ‘Do you remember how we hated coming to Shepherd’s Bush, Claire? We could only bear it with the help of our make-believe family in Sussex. Now our real family will be in Sussex. Why does everything happen the wrong way round?’
They talked about this, each putting out feelers into the unfamiliar territory which lay ahead, seeing how far it was as yet safe to venture; what they must take with them, and what must be discarded.
Claire said, ‘But it will come right, won’t it? The family will be more
important than ever now.’
Alice looked at the moon shining through the branches of the plane tree beyond the window, and wondered whether a time would ever come again when they would be entirely thankful for moonlight, which had proved itself as favourably disposed to destroyers as to lovers. She said, ‘I suppose a lot will depend on what Mummy does now.’
The silence stretched out, tormenting the nerves so that one longed for the certainty of the siren.
Claire said forlornly, ‘At least, we’ll always have each other.’
While they slept, Jacov and his brothers kept vigil beside their mother’s coffin. Alice would not have recognized the place where they stood as a church. It was a room in a private house, upon which had been superimposed the necessary trappings of the church – the altar, sheltered behind a rudimentary icon screen, together with a preparation table and a bishop’s seat. These, set side by side with the three-piece suite and mahogany sideboard, gave an effect as bizarre as if a fairground had put up its booths in a suburban living room.
The hearthrug had been moved to the centre of the room, and Mrs Vaseyelin’s coffin had been placed on it, a strange resting place for one who, in life, had been alienated from such homely comfort. The coffin was open, and they could see that indeed, as St Paul had said, ‘Death is a gain.’ Although her body had been smashed. Death had been kind to Mrs Vaseyelin and had left her face unmarked. As he looked at her, Jacov was reminded that his mother had known happiness; and it was easy for him to anticipate the first words of the burial service, ‘Blessed is our God.’ Her face had something of the serenity of the young woman who had looked expectantly from the window of her grandparents’ house in St Petersburg, at a time when it had seemed that beauty would be sufficient to bring her joy for the rest of her life. It had always set her apart from her children, this fact of having so much to regret. All the time that they had known her, she had seemed abstracted; a person absent from the place where her life was really lived. It had sometimes seemed she was a being fallen from Paradise on whom it would be improper for them, poor earthly creatures, to intrude. They had never come to know her and never would now.
It was impossible for Jacov to understand how hard his mother had, in fact, tried; he could not know the cost of her frail striving to live for the sake of her children; how, every morning, she had to make an effort to open her eyes. On the days of her headaches, on the days when she would not get up, on the days when she turned her face to the wall, she was fighting in her own fashion. Suicide had been a constant temptation, which she had steadfastly resisted. Her life had been more than a long backward glance; and it was in triumph that she lay here now.
But he knew none of this. He searched for something on which to rest his mind, and found nothing. In the candlelight, her face wavered like a face under water. She is at peace, he told himself – it was a concept beyond his understanding and brought him little comfort. Perhaps now she was with her daughters, Sonya and Katia? Sonya, perhaps. As he recalled, Sonya had been a true Russian. Katia, alone of the children, had resembled her Jewish grandfather, a thrusting creature, full of restless energy. He could not imagine her lying, still and composed, as his mother was now. He would never be able to think of her as at rest.
The twins were silent, standing close together, each holding a candle. What they felt, he had no idea. As first one blow and then another struck their family, so they withdrew further into their private world. To Jacov, they seemed incomplete, aspects of each other, and yet not adding up to one entire person. Sometimes he was not sure which was which and it didn’t seem to matter.
Their father, Stefan Vaseyelin, who had joined them, as he always did for anniversaries and deaths, wept. Leaning forward in the candlelight, he resembled the figurehead at the prow of a skeleton ship, the white hair frothing like sea-spray about the massive skull which seemed to exist independently of the shrunken body, tapering into the shadows. He had something of the grandeur of the archetypal mariner who can never again put into port. Jacov thought how odd it was that, in spite of his desertion of his family, he should make it seem that grief was his prerogative, drawing it greedily to himself, leaving nothing for his sons. The validity of his grief was somewhat marred by the fact of his weeping so frequently, usually for himself. He had cried throughout the twins’ only birthday party. His store of self-pity was fathomless. Jacov, not given to making judgements, reminded himself of his father’s unexpected courage. A man of his rank, his dignity, who had known the Czar, to play the violin outside the tube stations and picture palaces! Unlike others, similarly afflicted, he did not sponge on anyone, owed no man anything in terms of money. Jacov had only once visited him in one of the houses where he had lodgings. His room had been cheerless and bare – no vodka bottles, even. The only thing he cherished was his violin. Watching his father weeping, Jacov wondered why the dead moved him when the living failed to make any claim on his emotions. It was all in the past – the answer to everything about his mother and father was locked away in a past that he knew little of. Their children had been a cruel complication of their already complicated lives. The mother, at least, had tried to
care for them in spite of her unsuitability. The father had simply walked away. Yet, the violin playing must have helped to provide for them. Jacov, unprepared for hatred, as for any strong emotion, set himself to respect his father for this.
But he could not love his father. He had loved Mr Fairley because Mr Fairley wanted to be loved. It distressed him to think that the misfortune
experienced by his family might now overtake the Fairleys. Their home had been smashed, the father killed; the war would separate the girls. What would be the outcome?
Mr Vaseyelin cried out: ‘Christ is risen and the demons have fallen. Christ is risen and the angels rejoice . . .’ In the light of the candles, his three sons looked down, impassive, like figures in an icon, not the likenesses of real people.
Outside in the street, footsteps hesitated, negotiated a barrier, went on briskly. A girl’s laughter shrilled briefly. Further away, there was the rumble of a train. Unconnected noises. Nothing connected. Stefan Vaseyelin played his violin outside Earl’s Court station, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Olympia; he made no connection between the places. To him, they were islands on which he stood to play. And even Jacov, who went often to London, had never realized that he could easily walk from Piccadilly Circus to Leicester Square. For him, too, nothing connected.
Yet, the tableau they made, standing around the still figure in the coffin, had the unity of people drawn together by a master hand; something fixed within the flux of life. It was the fussy little room which seemed insubstantial; the noises in the street of no more consequence than a dog barking at shadows.
Chapter Five
October 1941-February 1942
Ben, leaning on a rail of the troopship, reflected that ever since he joined the army he had had no elbow room. He hoped Africa would provide space, if nothing else. This apart, he expected little from the Dark Continent, and had no appetite for desert life. His knowledge of the desert was gleaned from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Beau Geste, neither of which he had found either credible or congenial. He thought Lawrence a charlatan, and Beau Geste an upper class twit. His perceptions might be different from those of Alice, who relied on the film Pepé le Moko, but they were no more authentic. It would have surprised him considerably to know that it was Alice, and not he, who would have the opportunity of revising the picture. He was at the beginning of a very long journey.
Guy was in the desert. His letters to Louise barely disguised the fact that he was enjoying an unfamiliar freedom. Louise had shown one or two of these letters to Ben, who had been unexpectedly touched by their innocent high spirits. He had also noticed the strange lack of physical fear, which made him more aware than ever of the large question mark hanging over himself.
He had not tried for a commission, an odd decision from one so
ambitious. Louise had teased him that it was easier to criticize from the ranks, and there was some truth in this. There was also the fact that such sympathies as he had were with the underdog. But what really held him back was an uneasy feeling of having already gone too far from his roots.
The sea was lively, with ridges that formed and dissolved and formed again, shifting mountains with sides of silk and peaks frothed with lace. He watched the other ships in the convoy. The nearest one seemed to have a particularly vocal complement; it sometimes sounded as if they had an entire male voice choir on board.
‘Welshmen – all from my valley,’ a cheerful voice said at his elbow.
‘How can you possibly tell?’ Ben asked, amused. At this stage of their acquaintance he regarded this man as a compulsive story¬teller rather than an inveterate liar.
‘They have a particular lilt to their voices, see?’ Gomer Tandy was a jocund, plumped-up little robin of a man, guaranteed to liven up any gathering, and generally popular. One might have imagined pleasing others to be his one aim in life; their happiness the only reward he asked.
‘Here’s our entertainment come now,’ Tandy said to Ben.
Boat drill was carried out regularly, but always gave rise to a certain amount of confusion, so that it had come to be regarded by the soldiers as a welcome break in the monotony of the voyage. On this occasion, members of the Royal Navy draft were taking part. The sailors scrambled into one of the rowing boats while two of their number stood by waiting the order to lower the boat. ‘Going to get your feet wet, are you?’ Tandy shouted. This remark distracted the attention of the harassed young officer in charge of the exercise, and he neglected to give the command ‘out pins’. He had two men of different types at each end of the boat – the one a stickler for the letter of the law, the other a believer that it was the spirit which counted. The spirited sailor took out his pin, and the other did not. The boat assumed the vertical, scattering its occupants upon the face of the waters. Amid much shouting of commands and counter-commands – and cheers from the watching soldiers – another crew was mustered and a boat launched without mishap. As it rowed towards the men overboard, it appeared, however, to be getting lower in the water. ‘We’re sinking, sir,’ a voice called desolately. ‘Nonsense! You can’t possibly sink!’ came the angry reply. The boat laboured on until the rowers resembled some antediluvian seabird flicking its wings perilously on the surface of the waves. Presently, rowing ceased and bailing ensued. ‘They haven’t put the bung in!’ Tandy leant against the rail, crying with laughter. Eventually, after an apoplectic old salt had elbowed the incoherent young officer out of the way, the occupants of both boats were rescued. ‘We know what we’re in for now, if we run into any trouble,’ Ben said.
There was not much to laugh about during the next two days.
Enormous seas built up. Even the crew was sick. Worse than this, German submarines had wreaked havoc on a previous convoy and soon the ships were steaming through a sea so laden with wreckage that at times it seemed they were making their way amid the ruins of a sunken city. It was only too easy to hear the cries of drowned men in the howling wind. Ben had not tasted fear until now. In an emergency, the crew would be at their posts. The men on draft were cargo.
As soon as it became calmer, Ben went on deck. It was late afternoon and the light was beginning to fade. He felt very queasy, but grateful to be alive. The voices of the male voice choir drifted across the water, a little more subdued. Ahead, a spray of altocumulus looked like a sheaf of corn laid across the sky. There was the least emphatic of swells, and the deck moved as though the ship was carried on the back of a slow, deep-breathing animal. Somewhere near the water line a galley hand was throwing out brown cardboard cartons and remains of uneaten food. Many of the soldiers had gone below; but not far from Ben a man from his own unit was sitting on a pile of emergency rafts absorbed over a piece of paper. Ben had not taken note of him before. All soldiers, by nature of their uniform, tend to look fairly ordinary chaps. Geoffrey Burt would have looked ordinary whatever clothes he wore. He would have been the casting director’s choice for the Geordie on a night out, the Paddy in the shebeen, the fisherlad on his boat, the collier walking his greyhound. The only adjustment that might have been needed was an occasional change of headgear, a cloth cap, a sou’wester, a tam o’shanter. He would have done
well in advertisements, too, because although the face was ordinary, the disposition of the features was sufficiently individual to hold the attention – the distance from nose to mouth rather longer than usual, the eyes not quite aligned, giving a wry cast to the face. At the moment, as he gazed at the view before bending over the paper, his face expressed the mild good-humour of the man presented with a brimming beer tankard.
Ben, looking over his shoulder, saw that he was sketching. ‘Pictures from the ark?’ he asked.
‘That will do nicely for this series.’ A school-teacher’s response this, Ben thought, rewarding the apt pupil whose initiative must be encouraged. ‘Are you good at captions? I could do with a collaborator.’
‘You’re doing very well on your own,’ Ben said shortly.
‘In fact, I’m not doing at all well
. I’m lonely. That’s one of the reasons that I do this.’ He spoke so easily of loneliness that Ben knew it was not a condition which troubled him.
‘What are the other reasons?’ Ben put the question as if Geoffrey. Burt was a witness whom he intended to discredit.
‘I’ve got a bit of a talent, I suppose.’ From the evidence on paper, Ben
was not disposed to challenge this assertion. ‘Mainly, it’s because I’m so bloody scared. Not of all this . . .’ He swept a dismissive hand towards the sea and the long line of ships with the cruiser weaving ahead. ‘I’m scared
at finding myself in the Army – even more scared of losing myself. I’ve always done work that I was suited for until now.’
‘You’re not alone in that.’ Ben was quick to put down
presumption.
‘No, of course not. But that makes it worse in a way. We all sweep each other along.’
‘The students really educate themselves?’
‘Exactly! Though I doubt if Sergeant-Major Quarry sees it that way.’
‘Why didn’t you apply for a commission, if you feel like that?’
This time it was Geoffrey who asked the question. ‘Why didn’t you?’
Ben looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You have just given the answer to that, haven’t you? I was afraid of losing myself.’
It was becoming very cold. Geoffrey folded his drawing carefully. He had made an offer and it had not been taken up; perhaps he regretted this, but it was not of much significance. Ben was dismayed to find that it mattered to him. He said, ‘I’d better see the other stuff you’ve done. That is, if I am to write some captions.’
Geoffrey had done a few drawings each day of his service life. They were neither particularly imaginative, nor sharply satirical; no appeal was made to the emotions, and there was no message. They were exact, factual records of people and places. In spite of the horrors of this voyage, there were no dead men, and no bloated human bodies floated in the water. ‘I haven’t seen a dead man yet,’ Geoffrey said.
