Read Another part of the wood Online

Authors: Beryl Bainbridge

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Fiction in English, #Poetry

Another part of the wood (3 page)

The mountain, he realized, looked not unlike Kidney in shape.
Why did he find it so difficult to like someone so fleshily built – or too thin, or too small, or too old? Why was it so difficult
to like anyone for any length of time, let alone love them? He wasn’t sure if he was unable to love because he had no tenderness
for himself or because he felt himself to be perfect and out of reach of compassion. His ex-wife said it was because he was
a selfish bastard, but that was the same thing. She talked a lot of words about love entering and making one grow and how
his particular soul was too small to allow anybody entrance. Possibly she hadn’t always thought he had a small soul. His memory
of his marriage, of his whole relationship with his wife, was so frail that he couldn’t remember for certain why it was they
had separated or how long they had been apart, or the duration of their time together. But then he didn’t remember either
the lengths or the depths of any of his involvements with any one person. He was either absorbed or empty, and one feeling
followed the other.

He thought he remembered his wife when they were first married, the girl in the long nightgown with a sleepy face, broad bare
feet going over the blind-school matting – not going away from him but towards him. He did remember that. He did remember
some things. She was always coming towards him, it seemed, mouth shaping his name, a low-pitched droning sound, full of meaning
and heavy with love, the sound of a bee making for the hive. When they ate a meal she held his hand or laid her fingers on
his knee or leant her head against his shoulder. When he turned his shoulder her hair clung to the cloth of his jacket; if
he removed his hands from hers on some pretext, she looked at him with unbearable reproach and laid her damp rejected palm
down in her lap and bowed her head. Recovering, but denied bodily contact, she would imprison him by the strength of expression
in her eyes. He was forever trying to extricate himself from her touch, her glance, the sound of her voice, all charged with
love, sticky as honey, clinging, like the strands of her hair, to the surface of his life. In bed she had swung her pulpy
thigh across him and laid her mouth to his breast as if to tear out his heart. When she was pregnant and
couldn’t sleep, they had gone for walks along the streets late at night; no doubt he had held her hand. She had cried a lot,
wept over the deficiency in him, over not getting the response that she craved, the safety she wanted, at being cheated out
of her love. He had felt it wasn’t him she loved at all, that it was some anonymous love-source that she believed existed
within him and was determined to rip out of him at all costs. If he bled in the process that was of no account.

His ex-wife had grown fat now. Kidney wasn’t really fat, at least not depressingly white and trembly; but he was feminine
in shape and perhaps his whole problem was one of bulk and excess of tissue and nothing at all to do with a trauma over his
mother. Perhaps all that had to be done was to dissolve the inhibiting flesh and release the prisoner within. Maybe Kidney
would then emerge to function normally, even though there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for him outside. He must insist that
Kidney do some hard physical exercise and see if it made any difference.

Tomorrow without fail he and Roland would climb that mountain. Believing it, Joseph looked for a moment longer at the forest,
at the pattern of light and shade on the mud path before going back inside the hut to finish his unpacking.

In Hut 2 Balfour was watching Dotty. She was leaning against the double-tiered bunks at the end of the hut, her arms stretched
wide in a crucified position. Behind her head, the red curtains, crushed by the mattress, framed a view of trees. First there
were only leaves; and then beyond, part of a trunk, and further still, proportioned by distance, a whole tree, a mountain
ash with arms held out as if in mimicry of the interior girl. Supported by the bunks she moved her arm, and unbuttoning the
breast pocket of her denim jacket withdrew an oblong of tobacco in a silver wrapping and a red fold of cigarette papers. Turning
round now to face the window, she laid them down on the bed and hunched her shoulders

Balfour himself didn’t smoke, but he watched her bent head
and imagined her hands pushing the mahogany grains along the line of thin paper and her pink tongue flicking out to wet and
seal the cylindrical fold. She looked as if she could be weeping, crouched over the side of the bunk bed, a line of hair,
yellow as butter, fringing the collar of her jacket.

To Balfour it seemed as if they had all been in the hut for years and years and never spoken, he on his stool and George,
returned without apology or explanation, seated on the rough bench by the stove, forearm balanced on his knee. Wrapped round
the thick column of George’s neck was a woollen scarf that fell in equal lengths between his knees and touched the floor and
folded once, twice, in knitted bands of maroon and black. As always, he managed to convey both serenity and imbecility at
one and the same time – the first by the purity of his limpid eyes now turned towards Balfour, and the other by the curious
looseness of his never-ending legs anchored to the floor of the hut by his monstrous army boots.

Dotty left the bunk bed and moved between the two men. She held her cigarette aloft in one hand and with the other touched
the lid of the stove.

‘Is this thing lit?’ she asked. Without waiting for a reply she bent at the waist, and putting one end of the cigarette to
her mouth and the other against the surface of the iron stove attempted to draw heat. She tried several times, making little
sucking noises, until George said, ‘No, it’s not lit.’

She stood then, hopeless, the fold of unlit paper clinging to her dry upper lip. ‘Matches,’ she said, and looked directly
at Balfour, who got up at once and fetched them.

‘Better let me keep these,’ she told Balfour, taking the matches from him. ‘I use an awful lot of matches and I do get jumpy
if I don’t get a light.’

Her cigarette now glowing, she seemed fatter and happier.

She tapped George on the shoulder and asked brightly, ‘Don’t you ever light the stove?’

‘At night.’ George shifted his boots about and looked in the
direction of the open door. ‘Only at night. At night one needs the stove. We shut that door and the kitchen door, and we light
the lamps and we all sit round the lit stove.’

‘What else do you do?’ Dotty enquired.

‘We talk or we draw,’ said George. ‘Sometimes we go down to the pub in the village, and we discuss things.’

‘I don’t do any drawing,’ said Balfour abruptly, sweat accumulating under his armpits. He hated to be associated with George
and his artistic evenings round the stove.

‘We’re going to play Monopoly, though,’ Dotty said. ‘I’ve brought my Monopoly set. We play every night at home, every blessed
night. Well, sometimes. Me and Joseph and Kidney.’

Balfour couldn’t imagine what home might be like, but he could visualize a table and three chairs grouped about it, and on
the chairs the pudsey Kidney with rosy cheeks and the debonair Joseph, dressed maybe in a silk dressing-gown, and Dotty rolling
her cigarettes. All of them playing Monopoly.

‘Of course, Kidney doesn’t really play,’ Dotty said, finding herself at the window, viewing the trees and the path empty of
Joseph. ‘But he tries, and Joseph tries to teach him, though lately he’s lost patience.’

‘Is he a relation?’ asked George.

‘No,’ said Dotty. ‘But you know what Joseph’s like – he thinks he’s God. Kidney was referred to the college by some clinic
or other. To do pottery. Joseph just happened to see him in the canteen. He’s got it into his head that there’s nothing wrong
with Kidney.’

‘And is there?’ asked George.

‘Well, he’s certainly thick or something,’ Dotty said. ‘There was a change at first,’ she added grudgingly. ‘When Joseph first
took him over. He got him to come and live at the flat. He played music to him, read poetry, talked a load of rubbish to him.
Kidney really seemed to respond … at first. He even began to play chess.’

‘Chess,’ interrupted George, stamping his boots and nodding his head with pleasure.

Dotty wasn’t to be checked, by chess or by George. She wasn’t so much telling Kidney’s story as her own. ‘But Joseph always
makes the same mistake, every single time. He bought Kidney a book of poems by Donne, with a silly message inside – To My
Friend. It was supposed to be meaningful and it meant sweet fanny-all really.’ Her voice was uneven, but her face was turned
from Balfour and George and it was difficult to tell if it contained anger or grief. ‘I mean, he’s bought the same book for
so many people at one time or another, with the appropriate inscription inside – To My Friend, or My Wife or My Love – and
it’s a shame really because they’re nice poems and you can’t even look at them after Joseph has finished with you. Every gesture
he makes is just a monotonous repeat of a gesture he’s made somewhere else. You see, Kidney really thought Joseph was interested
in him. Really thought he cared.’ She stopped talking. She wasn’t thinking of Kidney at all.

For a time Roland played with his boat in the stream. It was a lovely colour, his red boat, bobbing up and down. He moved
his bare feet roughly to slap small waves against its sides and it still rode the water. He didn’t care for the feel of the
wet mud beneath the soles of his feet and there were sharp things down there, stones and a fragment of glass and a piece of
something blue and gold that seemed to move as the water rolled over it. It wasn’t a fish and it wasn’t a jewel. He would
have touched it if he hadn’t been alone. Once a strand of wet moss clung to his ankle and he hated that. He put his fingers
in the stream and pulled, and it wrapped itself round his wrist like a green bracelet. He held his arm up in the air, water
dripping from the sleeve of his blue jumper, and shuddered with revulsion. The moss fell into the water and slid away downstream.
He picked up his boat and climbed on to the wooden bridge and put on his sandals, rubbing his wrist against the cloth of his
trousers. ‘I don’t like that,’ he said out loud. From somewhere behind him he could hear voices, high up on the hillside,
up there where the pines grew. He twisted his head and
thought he saw pieces of another hut, painted white, fragmented by the branches of the trees. He began to run up the steep
slope towards Hut 4.

He had to stop after a time; he was just too tired. He wasn’t cold any more. His cheeks burned and the fringe of hair clung
to his forehead. Everything was motionless about him, everything just like a painting he might do at school: all the leaves
on all the trees exactly in their places, bits of green paper cut into ragged shapes and gummed against the sky. The hut was
up there beyond that beech tree and if he climbed the slope he would be there, except that he must go by the path because
the other way there might be nettles and nests of wild bees and perhaps even a snake. His father would never bother with the
path, or George, but then his father had big rubber gumboots that crushed the nettles underfoot and George was the tallest
man in the world and nothing could harm him.

Slowly he continued along the path. His mother, he thought, would probably be missing him now or having a rest on the Victorian
sofa in the living-room, all her hair in little curls about her neck and one fat hand clutching her handkerchief. When she
woke she would call his name and then reach for her cigarettes; they would be near but he wouldn’t be. She had told him over
and over to be nice to Joseph and give him lots of kisses and not to tire him too much. Lots of kisses, he told himself, watching
his sandalled feet go along the path, curving round the hillside towards his father.

Then he remembered that Balfour had mentioned that there was another hut beyond the bushes, above the path. George had made
it himself out of planks of wood, and inside there was a lavatory – not a proper one but a big can with a chemical inside
that killed all the germs. Roland looked at the grass, pressed flat by the recent rain and thought of all the germs multiplying
beneath the trees. Balfour had said that George had made all the huts in the forest, with the help of Mr MacFarley and Willie,
the odd-job man from the village. Roland looked beyond the bushes and saw
the square black hut with its door swinging open. He approached it from the side and searched with his hands on the rough
wood for the heads of nails, but he couldn’t feel any. Then he bent down and looked under the hut and saw that it was built
against the hillside at the back and that the front was propped level with red bricks. The grass underneath had died; it was
colourless like glass. Between the mortar of the bricks he could see a spider’s web, the same shade as the dead grass. He
put his head on a level with the ground and looked for the spider, but it wasn’t there. Something moved within the hut.

He saw Kidney, frowning and ham pink, seated with his corduroy trousers in folds about his ankles.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m on the lavatory,’ said Kidney. Earnestly he gazed past Roland at some point beyond the trees.

‘You have got white legs.’ Roland looked at Kidney’s knees. In the gloom of the little hut they glowed. ‘Funny,’ he said,
‘because you’ve got such a red face.’ He stepped back and examined the hut again. ‘You do look nice, Kidney. All those leaves
round the door and you in your little house sitting there.’

Kidney shifted himself on the seat but said nothing.

‘Have you got any toilet paper?’ Roland asked him.

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Are you sitting on the germs?’

Kidney wouldn’t answer.

Roland kicked at the door with his foot and it swung inwards and back again.

‘Go away,’ Kidney said.

Obediently Roland ran away up the path to Hut 4 to find his father. He found him on his knees beside the wicker basket. With
a nail file Joseph was turning a screw in a white plug.

‘What’s that for?’ Roland squatted down beside him and watched the shiny screw come loose.

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