‘He’s a conchie, not a deserter.’
‘I think you’ll agree, when you put some thought into it, that the only difference is one of timing.’
Miriam had never seen her mother angry. She had never seen her overjoyed, either. Even when she was small, she had been very aware that her mother was not like other women; was not like her aunts, with their smothering embraces and pots full of food; was not even like her father with his fondness for old knick-knacks and fairy tales. Her mother rarely praised and rarely scolded, rarely rewarded and rarely punished. She found satisfaction in solitude and dry equations, and Miriam had often imagined that somewhere in London there was a family as mismatched as hers, a family with a loud, round mother who loved bright colours and hated being alone, and a quiet, withdrawn daughter who found solace in numbers.
The woman who was now standing in the doorway with a face distorted by pain and rage was neither her own mother nor that imagined, ideal one, but a madwoman, a madwoman who must have been hiding inside that sensible crystallographer all along.
‘If you are going to live with that man, you need not come back,’ the madwoman cried and tightly gripped the door. ‘I mean it, Miriam. When this door falls shut, it’s shut for good.’
‘You’ve forgotten one thing,’ Miriam said with more weariness than anger, and turned towards the street, suitcase in hand. ‘To be properly medieval, you ought to say Kaddish for me after I leave.’
3
‘You’re a hopeless old sentimentalist,’ Miriam said. ‘And every time you mention grey, it reminds me of that lady . . . Mrs Rye?’
‘Mary Pye. She once told me I reminded her of Moses. Because of my slow tongue, you see.’
‘Well, you don’t have a slow tongue. And also, I’m named after Moses’ sister, so I think we’d better ditch that comparison altogether.’
Miriam’s friend at the munitions factory had an attic room not far from Embankment, which they borrowed for a while. The house stood near the railway tracks and every time a train passed, the entire bathtub trembled. Paul dipped the sponge into the cooling water, wrung it out, dipped it into the water again. A train passed and he washed Miriam’s shivering wet back. Her hair hung down to her shoulder blades in thick black ropes. He gathered them in one hand and flipped them over her shoulder.
It was a white enamel tub and the glaze had cracked in patches to reveal the rusty metal underneath. The water felt too cold now to sit in. At any moment she would suggest they get out. Paul leaned forward and kissed her left shoulder, and then he washed her back again. Like a racoon, he thought: they wash their food not to make it clean, but to make it theirs.
He dropped the sponge and pulled her close so that her shoulder blades pressed into his chest. She had become so thin and brittle, and he wondered what had happened to the spirited girl with the saucepan on her head.
‘There’s this line I’ve had on my mind for so long,’ he said. ‘It comes to my mind every time I see you. “She wants to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world.”‘
‘Have you been reading Wilde?’
‘No. I thought it was a line from a song.’
‘It’s a quote from Wilde. It’s “I want to”, though. “I want to eat . . .” and so on.’
‘Well, I do. I want to eat of the fruit of all the trees, too.’
He kissed her.
‘Urgh. The water’s cold.’ She stood up with much teetering and splashing, laughed and put one hand on the side of the tub to steady herself.
‘Stay like that.’
‘What? I’m about to fall over.’
‘Stay like that . . . one second.’ He jumped out of the tub and dribbled suds and water over the tiles, the linoleum floor, the beige rug. His hands left dark watermarks on the sketchbook but he was too caught up in the moment to dry them. He squatted by the door with his sketchbook and charcoal and captured her in one swift and strong line, her curved back, one hand on the rim of the bathtub, the other covering her breasts. The tub trembled again. He let her get out and rub herself dry with a towel, the smooth texture of her damp skin against the rough weave of the fabric.
‘Stay like that.’ With the corner of the towel against her cheek and one leg propped up on the wooden stool. ‘You’re not cold, are you?’
‘Hardly,’ she said with a brave smile.
He put aside the sketchbook and kissed her leg from the calf up.
*
Her drawings were much better than her paintings. He noticed that she was at her best when she had a limited range of materials to work with. A single colour, a single sheet of paper. It seemed to concentrate her skittish mind and bring out her verve and energy in the force of the line. He loved the drama of her confident shading and the expressiveness of her figures captured in motion.
He climbed onto the bed.
‘That’s not fair!’ She playfully pushed him away. ‘I sat for you for ages.’
He rolled her onto her back and kissed her.
The room trembled again, much harder this time, and he could hear the cold water sloshing in the tub next door. What a miracle it was to feel so alive, to feel all that hot blood pulsating through his body. How well their bodies fit together, his cheek against her warm cheek, his thigh between her thighs. They kissed again and with the next tremor she rolled on top of him. He held her tightly and let the tremor shake them.
‘Crikey. Why would anyone buy a flat next to a train station?’
‘That wasn’t a train, you fool.’ She shook her head in exasperation, but her face was soft and friendly. ‘That was another bomb.’
*
She slipped into the room after her night shift. He was fast asleep. There was a pamphlet on the bedside table that he must have been reading just before he went to bed. She had made a pact with herself never to talk about his plans and beliefs, never to ask whether he intended to mop hospital floors until the end of the war. Once he had mentioned something about serving with an ambulance unit but she no longer knew whether he said these things to mollify her. It did not matter. He would not run off and join the army if it meant betraying his faith. His stance raised so many uncomfortable questions that she thought it better not to think about it at all, not to read any of his letters or newspapers, but this time she skipped her own rule. She picked up the pamphlet and read it, first with a sceptical smile, then with a frown.
Three Hundred and Fifty-four Rats
1
It snowed every day. At five in the morning they rolled off their straw mattresses, scratched themselves extensively, then went into the bushes outside or the earth closet at the back of the overgrown garden. The well was frozen over, and by the time they had smashed the ice with shovels and cranked up a few buckets, their cheeks were red and their unkempt hair stood up in all directions: like a gang of Lost Boys.
The twins showed Charlie how to heat the water on the stove and take it to the stable to wash the cow’s udder before milking. At first, he tried to squeeze the teats like a tube of toothpaste, but nothing came out. They showed him how to do it properly, squirt some milk on his palms and then massage the teats: it worked a treat.
‘Why don’t they keep this one with the other cows?’ Charlie asked.
‘It doesn’t get on with the others,’ said Jack, sullen on his low stool, smoking while he milked. ‘It’s a conchie cow.’
It was still dark when they split, Jack to work for a vegetable farmer on the other side of Ulverston, the twins and Charlie to milk the conformist cows at a farm down the road. He liked the cows. Friendly, tolerant beasts. Soon he looked like Jack and the twins, a Woodbine dangling from his lips, his capless head resting on the cow’s side, squirting milk on his grubby palms before working the next udder. The farmer’s wife brought them pints of cold tea and sandwiches. Then they would go off to work in the field, spreading manure with a fork, or they would scatter and repair dry-stone walls. Charlie was astonished to find just how many dry-st
one walls there were around Ulverston. He tried to entertain himself with little fantasies, pretending to be a Chinese mason rebuilding the Great Wall, a foot soldier of Hadrian piling stone on stone, but in the end the monotony proved unconquerable.
At night, they trudged back to the hall, where they stripped off their soiled clothes and washed themselves as briskly and untenderly as they had washed the cows. With icy water instead of warm. How strange to think that water, such a harmless substance, could hurt. Charlie developed a technique of splashing and rubbing that made the process less painful. Their clothes hardened with grime and dried mud: all five of them were useless at laundry. One night Charlie, in a fit of exasperation, threw all his underclothes into an old pot and boiled them on the stove.
Once he tried to liven up the dinner conversation with his impersonation of the Elder of Snotsborough. No one responded, and he had the awkward feeling that the others thought that was in fact how he spoke at home, among his folk, among the peculiar people. In his dreams, he saw Quakers in thick dark coats walking over the moors towards Swarthmoor Hall. Nothing more, just those Quakers in wide-brimmed hats and cloaks walking silently through the storm and rain towards Swarthmoor Hall.
During the day, he thought of George Fox, the very first Quaker, who had roamed these hills and valleys as a wandering preacher, had crossed Morecambe Bay until he reached Swarthmoor Hall and the pious woman who lived there. Charlie tried to picture their early meetings for worship, which would have taken place in the draughty stone hall across the corridor, a gloomy place that made his teeth clatter when he thought about it. He still found it hard to understand why his parents clung to a faith that was so deeply odd, that valued silence and plainness when surely the greatest human accomplishments were speech and art. Yet even if he did not understand it, he began to like it a little more than before.
All this he thought while smashing the ice on a bucket of water; while writing Georgina’s initials in the condensation on the kitchen window.
*
There were moments of beauty, too. Walking over the moors just as the sun began to rise. Watching snowflakes drift past the lattice-work windows. Taking pleasure in the one moment when he felt warm, genuinely warm: crouched on his milking stool, his forehead against the soft flank that rose and fell with the cow’s snorting breath, his legs warmed by steaming manure, his hands massaging the warm teats until milk shot into the pail with a satisfying tinkle.
Every night, he heard the scratching, rippling sound of tiny claws scurrying past his ear. He borrowed poison from Georgina and laid it out according to her instructions.
For a night or two, there was silence.
Then they came back. Not two, not three, but dozens, dozens, he thought: dozens of rats racing along the rafters, tunnelling through the rotting walls, nesting and mating and ejecting naked pink litters under the floorboards.
Charlie developed a habit of giving his stew or soup a couple of vigorous stirs with his spoon before eating the first mouthful.
‘Worried something’s drowned in there?’ asked Jack.
‘Mind your own business.’
They had their meals by the fire, which gave off little heat but was comforting to look at.
‘If you as much as touch Georgina,’ Jack said one night while they were washing their clothes, ‘I’ll pin you to the barn door with a pitchfork.’
‘Oh dear,’ Charlie said, and tossed him the soap, ‘that does sound unpleasant.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I,’ said Charlie. He walked around the house, took a pitchfork from the barn, walked back to the courtyard and planted the pitchfork in the mud, right at Jack’s feet.
The punch took him by surprise and knocked him over.
Jack was above him, ready to deliver another punch, but Charlie managed to grab his face with both hands and force him onto his back. They grappled in the mud, rolling into puddles and over crunchy sheets of ice, swearing at each other and rubbing each other’s faces into the frozen ground, and then they were laughing but still went on beating each other, until they were exhausted, lay on their backs for a few breaths, then helped each other up.
‘I’m going to put the kettle on for a hot bath,’ said Jack, and they went to the kitchen, filled a tub with boiling and icy water and took turns bathing and chucking water over each other with tin buckets. Charlie decided that there was nothing more pleasurable in the world than sitting in a metal tub of scalding water with only his head sticking out.
That evening, Georgina tried to inspire Marx to another performance on the kitchen table, but the cold had numbed his revolutionary ardour. All he said was: ‘Do you even know what Soviet means, Georgina dear? Do you even know?’
‘Coffee, Marxy, darling. It means coffee.’
After dinner, Jack drew up behind Charlie and whispered in his ear: ‘You do realize she’s slept with all of us, don’t you? Me, bonkers Marx, and even that quiet little Engels, who suddenly got rather loud when they were at it. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind at all,’ Charlie said loudly. ‘It wouldn’t make a difference to me if she’d slept with all of Ulverston, which admittedly has a fairly small population, so – I wouldn’t mind if she’d slept with all of London. You see, I’ve freed myself from that sort of petit bourgeois constraint.’ And he laughed right into Jack’s furious face. A feeling of freedom and carelessness bubbled up in him that he had not experienced since he made love to Rosy, a barmaid, in a rented room in Holborn. He felt as if anything could happen, anything could be said, and he might as well make it happen himself, say it himself.
‘Engels,’ he shouted in the general direction of the kitchen, ‘I hear there are times when you get rather loud?’ And then he laughed again and slapped Jack’s back.
2
Spring came and the frozen well behind Swarthmoor Hall thawed. The nights and early mornings were still cold but around midday they could feel the northern sun. Hard Red Winter, Western White and Northern Spring were the names of the farmer’s wheat varieties, but Charlie read them as captions for his life at Swarthmoor.
Jack and the twins showed him the deep pool where the stream widened, just behind a stone bridge: the water was cold but they stripped off their clothes and jumped in, wrestling and dipping each other under the water. Jack was the strongest of the four. He challenged them to handstands, then challenged Charlie to a hand-walking race. Charlie collapsed before they reached the bridge, lay on the wilted grass and watched Jack walk on his hands to the stone bridge and back, stark naked, his cock and balls dangling limply over his toned stomach.
*
Quiet Engels let Charlie in on his secret, a miniature distillery made from an old pressure cooker and a rubber tube. He kept it in a closet next to the cow shed, concealing both the contraption itself and the ripe, sweet-sour smell of fermentation. Fed with molasses stolen from the farmer during the previous year’s silage, the distillery yielded a steady trickle of spirit that they mixed with fruit and poured into the clerks and farmhands of Ulverston, until, through the alchemy of profitable transactions, they succeeded in converting their initial drum of molasses into a pedigree Wessex pig.
A neighbouring farmer showed them how to butcher it: messily, bloodily. Charlie fried the lungs in a cast-iron pan until they whistled. The kidneys went into a pungent pie. They took turns rubbing salt into the bacon and hams once a day. He had some idea that a stew could be made by boiling the feet with some carrots and onions; the leftovers cooled into a salty jelly that they ate with spoons. By the time it was sunny enough for Charlie to lie in the garden and press his cheek against the warm grass, not a bristle remained of the pedigree Wessex pig.
*
When the German bombers whined overhead, they sought shelter by the apple crates below the great hall, and hoped that the bombs would not blow up the house, especially since the cow was still in it.
And it was after one such night, when Charlie was washing himself in the stream,
that Georgina chanced upon him. She waded into the water, fully dressed, with her hands over her eyes and said: ‘I didn’t see anything!’
‘And anyway there isn’t much to see,’ Charlie said, remembering her comment from long ago, which still stung.
She lowered her hands.
‘On the contrary, there’s a lot to see.’
He was so taken aback that he slipped on a slimy rock and crashed into the water. She giggled, scooped up some river mud and flung it at him. He retaliated and his glob of mud hit her on the shoulder. She drew him into a slippery water-fight that left her soaked from her draggly blond hair to her blue utility dress, and then she told him to turn around as she would have to take off her dress and leave it to dry in the unreliable spring sun; and that was how one spring morning Charlie found himself on the riverbank, vigorously fucking the rat girl.
She seemed to know all the abandoned barns in the area, all the secret storage cupboards at Swarthmoor Hall, and Charlie could not help but wonder whether Jack, Marx and Engels knew them, too. She had read Lady Chatterley, she confided in Charlie as she guided his head towards her lap. Jack had given her a smuggled copy, and she had developed an irrepressible longing for the pleasures experienced by the heroine.
Charlie did his best to keep up with Georgina’s requests for unusual positions, up to the point where, mid-coitus, looking back over her shoulder, she urged him to speak to her ‘like a rough northern farm hand, just like a rough northern farm hand.’
She showed him how to lay out rashers of the pig’s bacon for the rats: rasher, rasher, no rasher, poisoned rasher. At first they shunned the poisoned rasher. He thought of them sitting in their rat holes and scheming against him with twitching whiskers. They shunned the rasher, but they ate the jellied pig’s feet. It was humiliating to be outmanoeuvred by a rodent. Only when Georgina gave him rashers that were just a little bit rotten did the rats finally yield, unable to resist this particular delicacy. They fed it to their young back in the rat hole, and the house went quiet.
Of Love and Other Wars Page 20
