Another part of the wood (2 page)

The car, radio blaring, stopped. Seated beside Joseph was a fair-haired girl, between them a child in a pom-pom hat and in
the back a youth with a rosy face. Raindrops slid off the dark blue bonnet, and P. J. Proby still shouted up into the trees,
long after the engine had stopped, that somewhere there was a place for them.

Joseph got out of the car and went easily over the mud, thrusting his hand forward and saying ‘You must be Balfour. How are
things? How’s George? Everything under control?’

The child in the car clambered over the edge of the door. He said petulantly, ‘Can I have the kite now, Daddy?’ and without
waiting for an answer began to tug at the handle of the boot.

Joseph, stretching his arms high, said, ‘Wait a moment, Roland, just wait a moment. Dreadful journey.’ He lowered his outflung
arms and looked at Balfour, still hunched on the gate. ‘I picked up Roland in Liverpool, you know, but I’ve come all the way
from London. Bloody cold, bloody awful journey.’

‘George is making tea,’ said Balfour, clearing his throat, too shy to look at the girl. ‘He thought you could do with a cuppa.’

Joseph noticed his bad complexion and felt sorry for him. He extracted a kite from the boot. The string was red knitting-wool
bound round and round a piece of cardboard. ‘There’s no wind, Roland,’ he said. ‘Leave it until there’s a wind.’

The other passenger had remained where he was in the car. He sat stiffly and stared at the windscreen. ‘We had a bad journey,’
he said, speaking to no one. ‘We had a bad journey.’ Looking up, he saw Balfour on the gate and blushed.

‘This is Kidney.’ Joseph motioned with his hand at the youth in the car.

The child dropped his scarlet wool into the mud and broke out crying. Balfour got down from his perch and lifted the string
from the path.

Joseph was moving luggage from the back of the car – some cases, a wicker basket, a long red and black cardboard box. ‘Had
to bring this. Dotty can’t live without her Monopoly,’ he said.

Cleaning the kite wool, Balfour nodded, expressing sympathy, he hoped, giving the blonde girl a quick glance. But she was
looking at Joseph, with eyes narrowed, and he bent his head again.

‘Come on, Kidney.’ Joseph addressed the figure in the car severely. ‘Stir yourself, boy.’

Stirred, Kidney opened the door of the Jaguar and stepped down. He looked at the ground and shifted his feet. ‘It was a bad
journey,’ he repeated, face flushed and manner intent. Round and contoured like a girl, buttocks vast in his corduroy trousers,
he waved fat hands in the summer air. Silently he removed things from the seats of the car.

When the car was finally unpacked, they went in single file through the gate, keeping to the path that climbed upwards through
the trees. To the right the pines rose to the edge of an unseen field. To the left the ground fell away to the stream in the
valley below, hidden among the black poplars and the beech trees. The air hummed with gnats. Mrs MacFarley called the valley
the Glen. She called the light at early evening the gloaming. She liked to go Roaming in the Gloaming in the Glen.

They passed a badger’s hole at the foot of a tree and a clump of foxgloves lolling in the breeze. ‘Don’t ever touch one of
those,’ said Balfour strictly, apparently to the child, manoeuvring himself and the Monopoly box round the swollen purple
heads. ‘George wants them to seed.’

‘Really,’ said Joseph. ‘Spot of colour, what?’ He turned on the path, halting his followers, and spoke to his son. ‘You heard
what Balfour said, Roland. You mustn’t touch the foxgloves. George wants them to seed.’

‘George is the biggest man in the world,’ sang the child. ‘George is a giant. I told them at school. I told them George was
a giant.’ He jumped anxiously along the track.

‘How high is he?’ asked Kidney. Behind the bottles of Ribena, he blinked sweat from his eyes.

‘Six foot eight, nine,’ Joseph said. He leapt athletically over a small boulder, gracefully landing with luggage swinging
and beard quivering. ‘Quite a size, Kidney.’

Balfour tried to remember what George had told him about Joseph. He was divorced, apparently, from a wife who painted, the
administrator of a technical college, living with a woman, presumably Dotty: a man, according to George, given to stimulating
talk, a non-conformist. To Balfour, even on such short acquaintance, Joseph seemed the arch-conformer of all time, stereotyped,
well-bred, unemotional. Nothing had been said about Kidney.

Joseph put the cases down in the grass and wiped with a handkerchief at the spots of mud drying on the leather of his boots.
Dotty looked at him with hostility.

‘Must keep up appearances you know,’ Joseph shouted to Balfour. Stooping, he picked up the cases and asked, ‘All right, Dot-Dot?
Everything all right?’ He tried to put an arm about her, a case in his hand, and caught her a blow on the hip, knocking her
against him. She scowled, and stepped back to her rightful place behind Joseph and in front of the blocked Kidney.

‘George is making tea in Hut 2,’ called Balfour.

‘Hut 2, Hut 2,’ echoed Joseph, somewhere behind him on the path which had grown steeper and more waterlogged.

The girl said something then, but her words were inaudible to Balfour, as he hastened up the slope hampered by his self-imposed
Monopoly burden. He hoped she hadn’t remarked on his acne. One foot after the other, keeping his balance with difficulty on
the uneven ground, he strained to reach the summit of the path.

Roland began to sing. He piped shrilly under the dripping trees:

‘Buckles, buckles,’ corrected his father, trampling mud underfoot, swinging his elegant luggage high above the damp grasses.

‘We’re there,’ Balfour shouted. He jogged thankfully down the home path, heart thudding in his breast.

Hut 2 was made of wood without embellishments of stone or slate: one long room with bunks at the end and an iron stove opposite
the door, the kitchen through an opening to the right of the stove. There was a bench outside the hut and two wooden steps
at the door. Red curtains hung on either side of the end window. Laid down on the bench outside was a hammer and some nails.
From the path the mountain wasn’t visible. Nor was George.

Balfour put down his Monopoly box on the scrubbed top of
the table and told them apologetically that he couldn’t imagine where old George had got to. He went into the kitchen but
found it empty, and the kettle empty also, the cups still on their hooks above the sink. ‘Must have gone to look at something
or other,’ he said. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, resentful that he should be left in such a position, looking at
Kidney still outside the hut, arms full of groceries. He was aware that no one save himself felt any embarrassment. The girl
had seated herself in the rocking chair by the stove, rugs in a heap on the floor where she had dropped them, arms folded
across her chest. Joseph had found a pocket mirror on the shelf. He was holding it cupped in one hand, face twisted as he
studied his image.

‘I’ve got another cold sore coming. I can’t bear a marked face,’ he told Balfour bitterly, dabbing at his erupting skin with
his mud-stained handkerchief.

Balfour, only partly shielded by the doorway of the kitchen, raised an arm to cover his blemished complexion but dropped it
again: after all, he couldn’t spend the next six days with his face hidden. Though the journey from the entrance of the woods
to Hut 2 hadn’t been a noticeably merry one, he was conscious that the visitors’ spirits had fallen.

Roland came in from his search for George and flung himself against the rocking chair, pushing his head, still in its pom-pom
hat, against the girl’s face. ‘Why don’t we do something?’ he asked. Already he was bored.

His father glanced once about the room and yawned loudly, thinking of all the preparation: the denim outfit bought to make
Dotty feel secure, the choice selection of paperbacks, the sheets freshly laundered, Roland’s kite, all the business of stopping
the milk and leaving the caged bird with the people downstairs. Now that they were here, it was as he had suspected: nowhere
was either better or worse than anywhere else. Most of all he thought of his good intentions. He shrugged his shoulders, trying
to rid himself of dejection, looking at the girl fondling the child’s cheek. Making a determined effort for Roland – for Dotty,
for
himself – he said, ‘Well, troops. Action stations. We better get settled in.’

‘You’re in Hut 4 on the other side of the stream,’ mumbled Balfour. But Joseph was already nodding his head in a business-like
way, picking up rugs and cases in readiness for departure. ‘Come along, Dot-Dot. Mustn’t be lazy.’

‘I don’t think I’ll bother, if it’s all the same to you. You go and get settled in and I’ll wait here for you.’ Deliberately
she leaned her head against the back of the rocking chair and closed her eyes.

Without further comment Joseph left the hut, passing Kidney on the path. Meekly, unquestioningly, the youth turned about,
chin down to the edge of his load, and followed him. Lastly Roland ran out of the door, leaving Balfour alone in the hut with
Dotty. For a moment he stood where he was, waiting to see if she would speak to him; but she didn’t, so he sought refuge in
the kitchen, willing George to return and deliver him. As he ran water into the tin kettle a spider moved across the bottom
of the sink. He removed the lid from the kettle and slopped water against the animal. Dismayed at its clinging persistence,
he put down the kettle on the draining board and with the edge of the washing-up bowl rammed the spider into the plug hole
and turned the tap violently.

When Joseph reached the stream at the bottom of the valley, Roland immediately wanted his red boat to sail in the water. After
an argument, Joseph unzipped the bag handed to him by his ex-wife in Liverpool and ferreted out the required toy.

With instructions as to how to find Hut 4 and how not to fall in the water, he and Kidney continued their climb up the path
and left the child to play. With only Kidney to care for, Joseph withdrew into himself and strode up the rough slope, yawning
repeatedly. At the hut he kicked open the door with his foot and put his cases down on the floor, instructing Kidney where
to put the grocery box and the wicker basket, in a voice perfectly polite, his body active and his mind empty of everything
save the business of settling in. Expertly and tidily he laid out the luggage
and snapping the locks of the pigskin cases told Kidney to unpack his clothing.

The youth began slowly to do as he was told. He laid his pullover down on the narrow settee and stared at it. Empty of him
and newly washed, it looked too small. His mother had knitted some part of every night for almost three winter months. Occasionally
the ball of wool had fallen from her knee and rolled away under the sofa and then he had gone down on hands and knees to retrieve
it for her. He would press his head sideways against the frill of the sofa and let his hand crawl in the darkness over the
soft pile of the carpet. Grunting with exertion, he would place the wool back on his mother’s lap and sit again in the armchair,
hands still curved. The nights his mother had gone out to her bridge, or to cocktail parties with his father, the knitting
lay pierced by its steel skewers on the top of the television set. He had looked at the pictures moving on the screen and
up at the woollen shape, and sometimes it seemed as if the flickering images were just an extension of the needles flashing
and his pullover was growing without his mother’s help. When the compulsion to touch became too strong, he would go upstairs
to the bathroom and clean his teeth. Once he hadn’t been able to and had pulled at the knitting needles. Under his fingers
the stitches began to dissolve away. His mother was angry and threatened never to finish his present, so he stopped watching
television the nights she went out. At Christmas when he had unwrapped it from the patterned paper he had felt only disappointment
at its fat completion. Here in the hut with Joseph he began to feel protective towards it again. He folded the pullover carefully.
Once he glanced up to see if Joseph was watching him. When he saw he wasn’t, his eyes filled with tears. Frowning, he tied
the arms in a knot and bundled it into a drawer.

‘Not that drawer,’ said Joseph. He rose and strode over to the chest of drawers, pulled out the offending jumper and threw
it back on to the settee. Bending down to finish his unpacking of the wicker basket, he said by way of explanation: ‘That
drawer is
for Roland. Next to mine. Me and Roland together. Get the idea? Anyway, that’s no way to treat your clothes. Fold it properly.’

‘Sorry,’ mumbled Kidney with effort, and sat down heavily on the sofa.

Joseph turned to look at Kidney. ‘Do you want to know where the lavatory is?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Down the path and through the trees.’

Joseph got up from his unpacking and taking Kidney’s arm guided him to the door. ‘Down that way,’ he explained again patiently,
pointing along the mud path.

‘Down that way,’ repeated Kidney. The width of his trousers so extreme that his limbs floundered in corduroy, he rolled walrus-fashion
along the path.

Joseph stayed framed in the doorway, gazing before and around him – at the wet field, the slope of damp grass, the thread
of path disappearing under the trees. Out of a brown field rose the mountain, partially obscured by mist. Tomorrow, he promised
himself, he would take Roland by the hand and together they would climb to the summit and explore the tower. He would make
it like an adventure for the boy, like a challenge, like a prologue to all the bigger and better adventures that they would
have one day, like a stepping stone to the real mountains, capped with snow, that they would surely climb. It would be a beginning.
He tried to imagine a grown Roland in a man-sized anorak, and failed. His wife had told him not to take a girl along with
him. How had she put it? … ‘Try to be alone with Roland for once and leave your bloody women behind.’ He studied the mountain
beyond the trees. Of course it was really more of a large hill, but it would do for a start, and Roland was only seven. Or
was it eight? He felt suddenly depressed at the thought of how easily Roland tired, how his clear treble voice asking intelligent
questions could degenerate into a whining request to be carried. Their outing in the end could be a disaster and not a triumph.