“Thank you,” said the German standing there awkwardly. What did he want to know now? When it came to the point he couldn’t not speak to him. His loneliness and good manners had betrayed him, he could not after all stand there and outstare the German and he was angry with himself. What did good manners have to do with war? Had the Germans been good-mannered on mornings such as these, the glaring sun rising ahead of them as they charged.
“Good fish there?” said the German on a rising note, fitting the words together carefully as if each were a stone to be selected with the greatest care.
“Yes,” said David, “the fishing is good,” though he hadn’t been to that river now for many years. His rod was in the shed at the bottom of the field and he never touched it now. So also was his gun.
“Thank you,” said the German again tipping his green cap, and then he was on his way while David gazed after him. From the back the German looked even more ridiculous than he had from the front, meagre and thin, a plucked chicken.
“I shouldn’t have spoken to him,” thought David. “I should have ignored him. I should have stared at him and let him know that he is my enemy, that he was my enemy. But I was too weak and lonely.” He had an impulse to go and shout names after him as children sometimes did with Kenny Foolish if they were feeling in a cruel mood. He would say, “Why did you kill William and Alisdair then? Why did you try and kill me? I was a shepherd and suddenly I found myself in the filthy trenches. There was one time I pulled a pair of boots off a German whose body was hanging on the wire. His face was green but his boots were serviceable. One thing you could say for them, they produced good stuff.” And now that German was going down to the river, to fish in his water, to sit there quietly in the water, and cast his rod for his trout. Was there no end to their impudence?
But, then, thank God there was nothing wrong with his eyesight. He could still recognise a German when he saw one.
And at that moment a pure intense feeling pierced him as if it were the taste of the strawberries that he had once stolen from the schoolmaster’s garden on a day perhaps exactly like this many years ago. It was as if his shoes were peeled from him and he was running on his bare feet towards that same river to which the German had gone, and he and William were dipping their hands into the water in search of the small fish that glanced about it. The shadows from the trees that lined the bank overhung them and he could see quite clearly the network that they cast on William’s face. He could see the pair of white legs trembling, askew in the water, and he could hear a lark singing in the sky, and his own heart ran over with happiness. He heard himself shouting and though he couldn’t make out the words he knew he was speaking and then the two of them were out of the water and dashing along the bank avoiding any sharp stones that they saw, and in search of the nest from which the lark had sprung so suddenly and so piercingly. The two of them were now staring down at the speckled eggs, touching them lightly with their fingers, feeling them warm and inexpressibly delicate, William’s head beside his own, fragile and tousled, his eyes open with wonder: they were on their knees and their feet wet and the parts between their toes muddy. It was the greatest, most radiant, morning of the world and it was as if his heart had stopped for he felt it and not only saw it, and the gush of its advent was heartbreakingly pure. The eggs were so small, so vulnerable, it was as if the two of them were gods with the power of life and death, the world was so open and so fragile, so full of marvels, the sun so hot on their speckled wrists which seemed to echo the freckles on the eggs. It was a treasury to which there was no end, it would always be like this, compact of mornings such as these, which one opened like a box, so strongly scented with the most airy perfumes. The small heart beat in his aged breast, like the lark that had now fallen silent. They had turned away from the nest, and now they were running past the tree with the trembling quick green leaves, dancing in light and in shade, and the sun, a golden eye in its socket, and then it all suddenly changed and it was his wife who was saying, “That box with the powder puff now.” Her eyes were turned on him, faithfully demanding, she had had so little in her whole life: her poverty, echoing his own, made him angry because he couldn’t relieve it. A cloud passed over the day, the pools darkened, her eyes dulled, the fish slid under the bank, and the sockets became gaunt and old. They stared at him out of the box, the matron was putting her hands in his, and his whole body was shaking with a ruined emptiness.
He shook his head like a dog emerging from water with a stone in its mouth and the world steadied again to the habitual landscape which confronted him.
16
“OF COURSE,” SAID Mrs Scott to her husband, “They’ve never really accepted us. That’s just an example, the refusal to lease the church hall.”
“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” said her husband, “not exactly.” He was of course Capricorn and she Taurus and the Capricorns were the quietly persistent ones, ambitious, determined, hard-working, as Gerald had been all his days as bank manager in Surrey and now retired to this village. Taurus people on the other hand were flesh-centred, faithful and constant, and liable to butt their heads at gates.
“The fact is,” he said calmly, “they think differently from us. Their priorities aren’t ours.”
“What priorities?” she asked, placing in the sink the coffee cups from which they had just drunk.
“Well, they preserve their links with the past in a way that we don’t. We have to remember that. And in any case I don’t think Mr Murchison is well.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. I just have that feeling. I’ve been noticing him recently in the pulpit. He’s a good man, you know.”
“Of course. I’m not saying that he isn’t. But this idea of having a sort of outdoor feast is ridiculous. It’s like the loaves and the fishes. And then holding a Sale of Work to pay for it.”
“At least they’re trying, you must admit that they try, that they’re go-ahead.”
“If you say so. Sometimes I wish we had never come here in the first place.”
“I think you’re in a mood, that’s all. It will pass.”
“You admit yourself that they’re different from us. One of them hinted to me the other day, it was that woman Campbell, would you believe what she said to me? She asked me if my father and mother were buried in England and when I said yes she more or less implied that she couldn’t understand that sort of barbarism. That I could leave them there. Imagine that.”
“I can imagine that,” said her husband quietly. “Strangely enough, I can understand it. You see, they are used to deriving their strength from the dead. I saw the minister doing that. I think he himself was surprised that he made the decision that he in fact made. For a moment I thought that he would go the other way but his psychology prevented him from doing so. It was very interesting. It was as if another voice spoke through him and he was in the power of a ventriloquist.”
“What voice?”
“I think the voice of his ancestors. That’s the only way I can explain it. But he did look ill. He was sweating a lot. There’s something wrong with him.”
“Why isn’t he in his bed then?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure that it’s wholly physical. You see, there are strains on a minister that we don’t understand.”
“Fiddlesticks. It’s a job like any other job.”
“No, it’s not, Martha. It’s not a job like any other job. In England one might think the clergy had forgotten their roots, the holiness of their calling. But there’s something thistly here, and something you can get a grip of though it pricks you.”
“How holy for instance is Annie then?” said his wife plumping herself down on the sofa beside him.
“Oh, that’s different. She doesn’t fit and she’s looking for a cage.”
She stared at him blankly.
“A cage?” she echoed.
“Yes. We all need a cage. We can’t be allowed to be free. It’s not good for us.”
Certainly after leaving the bank himself he had felt the terrors of freedom for a long time though he was reconciled to them now. They didn’t peer out at him from unexpected corners as they had done in the past with their hollow haunting eyes. Which was why he couldn’t understand someone like that Murray girl for instance making such a daring leap into the void. She interested him. His own life had been one of routine all his days, clocking in at nine in the morning, leaving at five in the evening, staring through the grille at faces at times delirious with guilt and despair. No, he couldn’t understand that girl and yet when he thought of her some deep sorrow moved in him, as if he had missed in that clean office the fertile bacteria of existence. He imagined her as young and hopeful, casting her rope off, setting off into the blue, a sex-stricken and trampish waif. What had been her thoughts as she had left, that day, as she had made her way through the fields to the train, as she had boarded it, radio in hand? Often he himself had felt like taking the startling leap but he had never had the courage to do it. He had remained in the net, however much his wings had quivered for elsewhere.
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said his wife briskly. “Sometimes I think you are becoming as demented as the rest of them.”
He smiled carefully as if he were putting on a face to a customer, drawing him politely into his little office, sitting opposite him, alert and helpful on his swivelling chair.
He felt sorry for his wife that she was not accepted truly into the community, that she was like a newcomer to an old school, always on the edge of things, and because she was being too brash, too opinionated. Would she never learn that this was the home of the villagers, that they were what they were, and that it was she who must change? Why had she objected to Mrs Murchison’s gathering in the open air? There was something imaginative and Biblical about it. She had only objected to it because she felt she ought to, not because there was anything wrong with the idea itself. He felt protective towards her but at the same time baffled by her almost invincible stupidity.
“I think,” he said in the same calm voice, “that we could find stuff for the sale if we looked carefully enough, and that we should try to adapt more. We should listen more and talk less.”
“Why should I?” said his wife aggressively. “After all if we were living in Surrey people would pay attention to me. Why should it be any different here? The points I made were fair. I only said that it might rain on the day and that the project would be expensive, providing lemonade not only for the Sunday School children but for adults as well. Quite apart from the food.”
It was true of course that such a step into the blue might have come not simply from courage but from a lack of imagination. The consequences might not have been foreseen. Had he foreseen them himself when he had made his leap northward? What had he been looking for? Was it for a change of scenery or for a challenge in his old age? Was it out of a romantic surmise that what appeared simple was best? For in fact this life was far from simple. That was the mistake made, that the life of the country was simpler than that of the town. On the contrary it was much more complicated, as relations within the family were more intricate than with outsiders. Had he foreseen all the consequences himself, as for instance that his wife might not like the life? Had he himself shown stupidity, not made sufficiently precise calculations so that the rocket that had sprung so quickly from the ground had inched, O so minutely, from its proper trajectory to land at last in a direction not plotted?
“I still think,” he repeated, “that it is we who must change.”
And what was that girl doing now? He had met her once purely by chance as he was coming home by train and she had sat with him in the same carriage. She was wearing green slacks and a green jacket. All the way she had been reading a woman’s magazine, pausing only to light cigarette after cigarette. Once their eyes had happened to meet and at that moment he had been questioned not by a mind but by a body totally aware of its own power, intensely and shamelessly inhabited. Their gazes had dropped away from each other and she had gone back to the magazine while he himself had read his Guardian and the carriage became the neutral cage in which the two of them momentarily existed.
“Why don’t we invite them here some night?” he said.
“Invite who here?”
“The minister and his wife. They might easily come. And why shouldn’t they? After all I am an elder in the church.”
“Of course they’ll come,” said his wife.
“Well then, we will have to give them something to eat, won’t we?”
“Naturally,” said Martha.
“In that case we’ll do that.”
Adapt, adapt, or go under. That was the demand that the world made on one continually.
“That’s settled then. See how easy it is.” And he smiled at her.
If one examined the options then one would come to a decision and that was all that was required of one, and the picture of the girl taking the train so headlong into the city faded like smoke from his mind.
He took out his diary. “What night shall we say then?”
17
EDDIE’S PLACE WAS as untidy and crowded as ever. They were all standing about in a large unfurnished room, the stuff from which had been cleared into the lobby, with the boxes of books, the bin full of rubbish, and clothes, even, flung on the floor. A record player was blaring and there were bottles on the table which was the only piece of furniture in the room apart from a greenish sagging armchair. Terry was talking to a girl who was wearing a long kaftan dress, and holding a bottle of whisky. When he saw her he waved the bottle above his head like a boxer.
“Enjoying yourself?” said Eddie.
She shook her head as if to clear it.
“Yes,” she said wanly.
“Fine, fine, that’s just fine.” She thought that he spoke with a false American accent.
“Have some more. What are you drinking?”
“Gin,” she said bravely.
She glanced at her watch. It was one in the morning. She drank rapidly from the glass that he put in her hand.
The record player was switched off and Eddie went to the centre of the room.
“Lorna will now play for us.” There was a clapping of hands and the girl with the guitar took up her position in the silence that descended afterwards. She was wearing a lace shawl and a long green dress. She played Country Roads. “Mountain mama,” she sang in her fake nasal American voice. Chrissie felt sick. She stumbled out into the corridor over the bodies of people who were sitting on the bare wooden floor. She turned right, staggering a little. She pushed open the door of the bathroom and locked it behind her. She leaned over the basin and tried to be sick. Green bile threaded the water like shredded grass. She tried to drag the sickness from her stomach but it wouldn’t come. She knelt on the floor in front of the toilet bowl, clasping it with both hands.
She stood and stared at her white face in the mirror. It seemed to her that her head was like a skull. She went back to the toilet bowl again, but couldn’t be sick. She thought she was going to die and she was frightened. She drank some water and then staggered back to the room where the girl was still singing.
“West Virginia,” she sang, her eyes closed, her voice wavering between her native Glasgow accent and the American one she had heard on television and on records.
Chrissie stood at the door watching. Hump-backed Eddie was leaning against the wall, his head swaying to the music. Terry had his arm around the girl in the kaftan dress. Now and again he would take another swig from the bottle of whisky. Chrissie felt sick again. If she wasn’t sick she would die. She turned away from the room and went blindly into the corridor. All around her was a becalmed wreckage of detritus, which however swayed as she swayed. A chair stood in front of her slightly askew and she stared at it owlishly. If she could only sit on it, but she couldn’t, for it was among such a lot of boxes and dusty carpets. She opened the main door of the flat and went outside, pullin
g it behind her. She stood on the landing and leaned on the bannister. She looked down into the spiralling vacancy below her and imagined herself falling and falling, spinning over and over like a doll. Very carefully she made her way down the stair clutching the bannister. It seemed that she had walked for hours when she finally reached the bottom. She walked out of the close and saw along the streets the black bags full of rubbish which the wind was shifting. She walked towards the main street and turned left. She waited. If only a taxi would come. She looked up into the dizzying sky and saw the room where the party was taking place. Shadows moved against the light. She began to gulp fresh air into her lungs. If necessary she would walk. The street itself was deserted but when she raised her head to the sky she could see the moon, a half boat tilted in the sky and below and to the right of it Venus which was burning brightly. She walked on steadily and heard the hollow echo of her heels on the road. But there was no one to be seen, only the street lamps were burning with their sickening yellow light. In the eerie light she could see the tenements rising like vast black cliffs from the road towards the sky.
A Field Full of Folk Page 8
