Another part of the wood (17 page)

He put his bottle back into the car boot and climbed over the fence, going slowly across the field back to the hut, threading
his way between the grazing cows, looking at their thin legs and their enormous udders.

May was in the barn, alone, changed into a dress of brown linen. It wasn’t his favourite dress, it was too short above her
knees. She wouldn’t speak to him. She bent down to straighten her stockings and he saw the tops of her thighs. He cleared
his throat and lay down on the far bed, his arms crossed beneath his head.

‘What are you following me about for?’ she said bad-temperedly, flouncing backwards and forwards in front of the mirror.

‘But my darling, I’m not. I’m merely resting on this bed.’

‘You shouldn’t have told your filthy yarns all night,’ she snapped. He didn’t reply, and she tugged savagely at her limp hair
with a pink brush. ‘That Balfour heard what you said. Dotty told me. He was absolutely disgusted.’

Still he kept silent. It infuriated her. She wanted to smash things, to set fire to his clothes. Her hair was dreadful, dreadful.
She couldn’t be seen like this. She rushed at him with face contorted, the pink brush raised to strike him. He caught her
wrist just a fraction before the absurd blow came, with his purple cheeks inflamed and his little eyes shining. How close
they were, how her moods drew them together. She kicked her plump legs up and down in the air and screamed several times,
wrenching at the cravat about his throat, clawing at his chest with her long nails. ‘Little spitfire,’ he cried, pinning her
down, trying to get his arm across the round pads of her knees. She went quiet all at once, her head
turned to one side, hair spilled out across the blankets. Roland was shouting somewhere in the field.

She sat upright and pointed bitterly at her stocking. ‘Look what you’ve done.’ She bent forward to trace with her finger the
ladder that sprang from ankle to thigh.

He couldn’t apologize enough. It had been clumsy of him, though there was provocation. She was such a little spitfire. ‘Anyway,’
he cried, puffing out his cheeks, the colour receding now, placing a rueful hand on his face. ‘Look what you’ve done to me.’
He fell back in mock despair with his legs bent at the knee, fondling his scratched face, good-humoured, fortified by the
secret nip of whisky.

‘Oh shut up, you.’ Contemptuous of him, but no longer spirited, she stood up and removed the linen dress, unwearable now by
reason of the torn stocking. She peeled the stocking free, exposing pudgy feet, granules of dirt between her piggy toes.

Dotty had dragged the incoherent Balfour behind a hedge. There was no ditch to be found. She had lugged him under the armpits
through a gate and propped him against the inner hedge, leaving the shopping bag on the road. He kept asking for a ditch as
if they were in danger of being machine-gunned.

She was disturbed at how detached she was in the face of such apparent sickness. She couldn’t really bring herself to believe
that he was as ill as he seemed. She handled him quite roughly and sat down beside him to smoke a cigarette. He leaned forward
over his knees and moaned at intervals, making sounds as if he was going to vomit. She did suggest she might go for help,
either to the corner shop two miles on, or further to the hut and Joseph. Balfour shook his head. Dotty lay back puffing smoke
into the fading light.

Balfour was cold. He bent his legs at the knee and tried to curl over on to his side, tried to get his head down into his
arms, but nothing obeyed him. Dotty tucked the flowered coat about his legs and sat up. It was almost dark, the field blurring
into sky, the
light gone from grey to ash, no stars. If a car came she might run out and shout for help. If a car came it would flatten
the shopping lying in the road. She climbed the gate, sitting perched there like some bird, staring at a rind of daylight
stretched across the horizon.

Balfour was leaning on one elbow clutching the coat about his throat. He spoke in a thin exhausted way. ‘I’m so cold, Dotty.’

‘Are you better, luv?’ She was relieved that he had spoken to her. ‘Shall I go for Joseph now? Shall I go for help?’ She tried
to perceive the expression on his face.

‘I must get warm,’ mumbled Balfour.

‘Yes, luv, of course. We’ll get warm, right now. You leave it to me.’ She knelt beside him, wrapping the extravagant coat
tight against him, pinioning his arms, putting her own arms about his head so that his face was crushed against the denim
jacket, the metal buttons like cubes of ice on his cheeks. She herself wasn’t comfortable. The spongy grass was soaking into
the cloth of her trousers.

‘Put the coat over my h-head,’ Balfour whined, struggling to free himself, slumping away from her into the grass.

‘What coat? Do you want my jacket? Is that what you want?’

‘The Joseph coat,’ he whined. ‘The dreamer’s coat.’

She placed it about him like a shawl, tying the arms behind his back to hold it in position, manoeuvring herself so that she
was supported by the hedge, stretching him out on the ground with her jacket under his buttocks and his swathed head resting
in her lap. ‘Is that any better?’ she asked hopefully, not knowing what more she could do.

Balfour seemed to be asleep, his face half covered by the coat, his hands clasped together as if he prayed. After a time he
said, ‘I’m sorry about this. I didn’t have time to warn you. It just come on like. No idea when it’s going to happen.’

‘Oh don’t you worry. I don’t mind. Honestly. It’s quite nice here. I’m quite cheerful really. I’m just thinking about things.’

She didn’t really understand what it was that ailed him. He couldn’t really explain it himself. The doctors didn’t know for
sure.
Some kind of virus picked up on holiday abroad, some bug in his bloodstream. There was no treatment, no real possibility that
he would ever completely recover.

‘You mean, like the flu?’ she said. ‘Only much worse. Something you catch?’

‘It’s not catching,’ he reassured her. ‘At least not from me. I caught it all right, but it’s sort of dormant in me. It won’t
pass to you.’

‘I didn’t mean …’ she said and stopped. She was thinking how Joseph had influenced her, how through him she found sickness
distasteful, or thought she did. I do love Joseph, she thought. It was terrible the way he wouldn’t let her love him any more.
Even after a lifetime of domestic trivia she would still love him, though she wasn’t going to be allowed that. It was like
the virus stirring in Balfour. She would never completely recover. She would always mourn for what she had lost. What a miserable
thing she was, everything suspended by worry and introspection, no laughing or singing or dancing, no trees or flowers. The
world was all lovely on the outside, white and green and red, and black as death within. How could she be this way unless
it was some disease that gripped her?

She was bending low over Balfour, free of the masculine jacket, wearing a top of some soft woollen material, no bra beneath;
he could feel the bounce of her breast against his temple. Dim and dreamy, with a temperature of 103, Balfour craned upwards
and kissed her on the lips. He was kissed in return.

‘Nice boy,’ said Dotty, a little embarrassed and stroking his face with more assurance now that they had been so close. ‘Isn’t
kissing nice? It is nice, isn’t it? Are you well enough to go home? It must be awfully late.’

There was one steady stream of wind coming across the black field, blowing hard and steadily right into her face.

He sat up slowly and struggled to his feet, scraping his head against the hedge as he rose. Staggering, he set off down the
road.

There was no air in the hut. The wood had burnt quickly and with great heat. Already the pile cut by George that morning had
been reduced to ashes. There were only a few logs left on the sofa occupied by May. She quite enjoyed being alone with three
men – four, if she bothered to include the peculiar Kidney. It made her feel something of a queen. It was odd Dotty wasn’t
back yet from the shopping expedition. It was getting on for midnight. Perhaps they had gone to the pictures. Lionel had irritated
her earlier by wanting to set off with a lantern to look for them. It was obvious Joseph wasn’t worried, only furious she
hadn’t returned with the food.

George was talking to Lionel about architecture. He said, ‘Today the modern architect is a constructor as well as a designer.
He can’t, however, expect to combine all the engineer’s functions as he did before the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary
construction is too complex.’

‘Quite so,’ Lionel said respectfully, fumbling inside the neck of his shirt for the comfort of the penny. The chain had gone.
He sat there with his face politely inclined in George’s direction waiting for the words to end, for the man’s mouth to close.

Gone, but where? It had been about his neck that morning when he changed his shirt. The water he had liberally splashed against
his face had run from the edges of the coin down to his belly. He had shivered with the sensation.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to George. ‘I’ve mislaid something, old boy.’ He stood upright, slapping his hands against his stomach,
wriggling his knees violently in his creased flannels.

‘Been bitten?’ Joseph wanted to know, drawing lines on a sheet of paper at the table. He was trying to make a graph of his
subconscious. His toil of the afternoon had been of little use in regard to solving the problems of his dream. George had
talked to him at length about the use of shoddy materials in housing projects. He had enquired about Joseph’s own property
and about his ex-wife’s flat in Liverpool. He said that some of the property in the cathedral quarter of the city was in a
bad state of repair. He said
that housing conditions were directly related to delinquency and neurosis. The dream had been pushed from Joseph’s mind, to
be replaced by guilty thoughts of Roland growing up in the dilapidated city, far away from the green fields and the clean
air. Lionel had played with Roland in the field before the boy had been put to bed. May had helped him clean his teeth and
combed his hair, telling him he had very smart pyjamas. Roland had looked at her listlessly, without enthusiasm. Joseph had
meant to play with Roland himself, but he had been too whacked after the day’s exertions to do more than cuddle the boy on
his knee.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ May was looking at Lionel standing there with his arms slack at his sides, his mouth open beneath
his auburn moustache.

‘I’ve lost something.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘My coin.’ He shook his head, crestfallen. ‘I had it this morning. I distinctly remember I had it this morning.’

‘Oh, that.’ She settled herself more comfortably.

‘The dead Jerry’s Reichsmark?’ Joseph asked. ‘You’ve lost it? What a bore.’

Joseph wasn’t all that attractive, May thought, seeing him above the arm of the sofa, seated at the table with his head bent.
Nose too flat and mouth too big. A plum mouth, not attractive in a man. Dotty was a fool, suffering agonies over a man like
that. She was just too inexperienced to know that there were hundreds of men to choose from – better than Joseph with his
snub nose and his high voice, always going on about education and the meaning of dreams. She let herself remember all the
men who had found her attractive. Some of them. It was strange how the good and solid ones evoked no response in her, no feeling
of being a woman. All those dreary kindly men, ending with Lionel, wanting to give her security and a nice home – while the
other kind, the unstable ruthless ones, who treated her like a whore, slapping her bottom and flinging her on to the bed at
the first opportunity, exerted such power over her.

‘Lionel,’ she said, ‘do you remember that day you came home and I was out and I said I’d been to see Christine? Well, I hadn’t.’

He looked at her distracted, hardly hearing, trying to think where the coin might be.

‘I didn’t go to Christine’s. I got picked up by a man and went home with him.’ Defiantly she swung her foot up and down in
the air.

The barn, thought Lionel, that’s where it must be. He remembered the tussle with his sweetheart in the barn. He didn’t suppose
Joseph would like him to go in there now. ‘Joseph, old chap,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could possibly come into the barn
with me?’ He appealed to Joseph, standing there at the table, his face yellow in the lamplight.

‘Dear me,’ said Joseph, looking up from his paper. ‘Do you fancy me, darling?’

May giggled.

‘I’ve got a feeling I left my coin in the barn earlier this afternoon.’ I’m almost certain. May and I were in there having
a little chat this afternoon.’

‘Look where you like. It’s not my barn,’ said Joseph.

‘I was thinking about Roland … being in beddy-byes.’

‘Don’t you wake him up for God’s sake.’

‘I’ll be terribly quiet.’ Gratefully Lionel turned towards the door and opened it and came back again. ‘I’ll have to take
the lamp,’ he said apologetically.

May bounced on the little sofa and waved her hands about. ‘Oh, sit down. Leave it till the morning. What a fuss about nothing.’

Joseph was looking at Kidney. ‘Hold on a tick,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time Kidney went to bed.’ He stared at the youth, whose
eyes were closed. ‘Kidney, do you hear?’

The boy opened his eyes at once.

‘Bed for you. Come on.’

Kidney rose obediently at the command and blundered towards the table. ‘My pill,’ he said. ‘Please, my night pill.’

Joseph handed him one, putting the bottle back on the shelf above the door, standing over him while Kidney wiped his face
with a flannel and cleaned his teeth. Kidney took a long time, brushing assiduously, gargling and spitting. At last he went
out into the night with Lionel, leaving the others in darkness.

‘Don’t forget to pee,’ Joseph shouted, slamming the hut door and finding his way back to the table.

May gave a little squeal in the darkness. She didn’t mind being alone with Joseph, but George gave her the creeps. ‘Isn’t
Lionel awful,’ she said, clutching her bare toes, bending right over to touch the floor. ‘Doesn’t he make you sick?’