Another part of the wood (7 page)

Dotty, hearing the mimicry of Willie’s accent, scowled.

‘Oh God no, I’m kept pretty busy here, you know. Always something to do, there is. Mr MacFarley’s always got improvements
in hand.’ He wasn’t sure that Mr Joseph was listening. At all events he was looking out at the field beyond the open door,
leaning well back in his chair.

‘Plenty to do,’ said Willie, wondering when the girl would roll another cigarette and whether he would be offered one.

‘I haven’t seen old George this morning,’ said Joseph.

‘I have,’ Roland said. ‘He came down to the stream when I was playing with my boat. He told me not to fall in the water.’

‘That’s right,’ Willie told him. ‘Can’t have you falling in the water.’

‘He asked if you were up here,’ said Roland. ‘I said you were. I said you were digging a hole.’

‘Oh, aye.’ Mr George, Willie reflected, was no fool. Not the man his father was, but fairly shrewd. He’d be up here soon to
ask why he was doing the toilet when it had been done only a day or so earlier. He’d best be getting off home soon.

‘How do you get on with George?’ asked Joseph suddenly, abandoning his food, laying down his fork and pushing the plate away.

‘Well, now.’ Willie dropped his cap to the floor. ‘I can’t say that I divine Mr George. I can’t say that I do.’

‘Very apt,’ Joseph said, seeing in his mind the pigmy Welshman standing before the giant George, holding a divining rod towards
the dark and elongated head.

‘You see, it’s like this, Mr Joseph. He was always a trifle odd, but he wasn’t half so odd till he’d been to Israel – ’

‘To Israel?’ said Joseph, startled.

‘When he came back from Israel,’ Willie said, ‘he was a changed being and that’s the truth. Even Mr MacFarley remarked on
the change in him. Like as if he was mesmerized.’

‘What’s Israel?’ Roland wanted to know, eating an orange on the floor.

‘Where the Jews live,’ his father told him. ‘Get up and sit at the table. No one said you could eat on the floor.’

The child stayed where he was, juice running from his lips.

‘What’s the red tree by the barn please, Willie?’

‘The juniper tree, you mean – the one with the dark berries?’

‘I didn’t see any berries,’ said Roland.

‘Don’t go eating any berries, my lad. You’ll get belly-ache.’

‘I think I’d better have one of my pills,’ Kidney said, apparently to Willie. ‘I should have one three times a day.’

Joseph said, ‘I’ve decided to cut them out for a time. See what
a bit of fresh air and exercise will do.’ He began to put coffee powder into mugs of assorted colours.

‘What’s been wrong with Balfour?’ asked Dotty. ‘George said last night he’d been ill for a long time.’ Dotty had been thinking
about Balfour most of the morning.

Willie saw that she had already rolled one cigarette and was in the process of rolling another. In anticipation he said, ‘Something
wrong with his blood, I think, Mrs Dotty. I don’t rightly know what. Thank you, I will.’ He took the thin wafer she proffered
him. ‘He went away to Italy for a holiday some years back and picked up a germ. Kept him off work for quite a time. You see,
it’s like this. He gets sick suddenly – very high temperatures and the shivers, like as if he was turned to ice. All he can
do is hide away and sleep it off.’

‘How awkward,’ remarked Joseph. He had little patience with sickness. How the hell, he wondered, had someone like Balfour
afforded to go abroad. Not to mention George trotting round Israel. He bent and wiped at Roland’s sticky mouth with the tea
towel. If he wasn’t so encumbered with responsibilities he might manage somewhere more exotic himself, though it would probably
be the same wherever he went.

‘Is Balfour ill now?’ asked Dotty. But Willie was lighting his cigarette for the third time and pretended not to hear. He
was a little tired of being the focal point of attention and he didn’t much care for Balfour, hardly crediting why the MacFarleys
had taken up with him in the first place.

‘I think I ought to have a pill,’ said Kidney loudly. ‘I may get a bad headache otherwise.’

‘Nonsense.’ Brusquely Joseph placed a mug of coffee before him. ‘Tell me, Bill, don’t you find there’s a sight too much pill-taking?
Too many drugs and soporifics used today … in comparison with when you were a boy? … Don’t you agree? … Don’t expect you saw
the doctor much?’

‘No … no …’ Dismissing such pampering, Willie blew on his
drink to cool it, looking down at his cigarette with disgust. The bloody thing was out again.

Pushing back his chair, Joseph said briskly, ‘Right. Everybody out. Lionel will be arriving soon. I don’t care what you do
but leave me to tidy up.’ Energetically he piled plates and stacked mugs. Willie, unable to ask for his tip, went out feeling
cheated.

‘Aren’t you ever going to come and play with me and my boat?’ said Roland.

‘Later, boy, later. Go on, move.’ Joseph pushed both the child and Dotty towards the door. Kidney stood up.

‘Just a moment, Kidney,’ said Joseph. ‘Something I want to ask you.’

Kidney sat down again.

‘I did tell you last night not to disturb Roland,’ began Joseph. ‘I did say to be quiet.’

Kidney stared at him.

‘I did say that, didn’t I?’

‘Yes,’ said Kidney.

‘Well?’

‘I didn’t disturb him, Joseph.’

‘You got into his bed.’

‘Yes, Joseph.’

‘Well?’

‘I didn’t disturb him, Joseph.’

‘But why did you get into his bed?’ Joseph took away the plates and dumped them in the sink.

The boy looked at him as if to speak. Instead he turned his eyes towards the doorway and studied the field.

Trying to reach him another way Joseph seated himself at the table. ‘Why do you think you ought to have a pill?’

‘I usually have a pill after lunch. I always have one.’ Mouth trembling, Kidney repeated, ‘After lunch I have one.’

‘Well, I don’t know if it does much good really, but if you feel you ought to – ’ Capitulating, Joseph decided to let Kidney
have his pill.

‘They said I must.’

‘Who’re they?’

‘My mother’s doctor says I must have one after lunch.’

‘All right, all right.’ Joseph scratched his head not knowing what else to say.

‘They said in hospital I should take a pill after lunch,’ volunteered Kidney. ‘In hospital my mother tried to see me, but
she didn’t see me. The Government wouldn’t let her. Then she came later and I went home. They told me to take my pills three
times a day.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ll get your pill.’ Joseph went to the wicker basket beneath the settee and pulled it clear. He found the
glass bottle. He took out an oblong capsule and replaced the bottle in the wicker basket. ‘Here you are,’ he said, coming
back to the table with the pill.

Kidney swallowed the capsule without water. He seemed anxious to tell Joseph about the hospital. ‘It was a big hospital,’
he said. ‘There was a man there …’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Joseph.

‘He gave me my pills … He was there when I woke up.’

‘In the morning, you mean?’

‘He called me sonny.’

‘That was friendly.’

‘I said I wanted to go home.’ Kidney played with a fork left in the centre of the table. ‘It was night and the man told me
to be quiet.’

‘They have rules,’ said Joseph.

‘The man said: “Be quiet. Do you want a hot thing up you, sonny?” ’

Joseph sat still. He felt distressed. Clearing his throat, he had every intention of saying something meaningful, but he merely
said, ‘You go down to the stream and see Roland. I’ll be down when I’ve washed the dishes.’

It was the disgruntled Willie who saw the smoke. There was a line, black and waving, widening as he watched, rising into the
blue sky.

‘Great God,’ he shouted, running like hell, passing the hut and the curious Joseph standing in the doorway. ‘The bloody wood’s
on fire.’ He jumped like a wrestler on all fours into the bracken on the slope. ‘It’s them damn women of yours,’ he told the
man at the door, voice shrill, pulling out handfuls of grass and nettles in a frantic attempt to locate the water pipe buried
in the ground.

‘A fire,’ Joseph said calmly, a tea towel draped over his arm. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Dropping their bloody fags all over my woods.’ Willie was too far gone to notice the use of the possessive. He was sitting
in the undergrowth now with the pipe between his short legs. ‘Come on up, you bastard,’ he moaned, wrenching the tap further
to the right, spit dribbling down his stubbled chin, his mind shifting from one thought to another, each idea more overlaid
than the last, till all he had in his brain was a pattern of leaves, miraculously veined, each one ablaze behind his eyes.

‘No good mucking about with water,’ observed Joseph. ‘I divine Mr George will be in control.’ He went at a trot along the
path, away from the struggling Willie, and disappeared down the slope.

A little above the stream, the scent of the fire reached him. He forsook the path and plunged down into the ravine, leaping
and sliding, adopting a sideways position with arms wildly waving to balance himself. Boots crushing the black ivy that ran
like main arteries across the curve of the hillside, he lost his tea towel to a low bush and slithering now on the bare rocks
of the lower slopes missed his footing entirely. Guillotining a foxglove with the upwards kick of his boot, he rolled clear
to the bottom of the incline, coming to a halt finally with his head against the wet clay at the edge of the river, his boots
in the thin trickle of water, his fists full of pebbles.

On the opposite bank, a hundred yards up the hillside, Balfour and George were beating the undergrowth with sycamore branches.

Further along the stream, at the bridge, Roland and Kidney heard the stampeding firefighters come down on either side, but
saw no one. Roland was busy with his boat, and the reclining
Kidney was laid flat on the wooden planks of the bridge, his head stuck out over the edge and his hands folded under his chin,
watching the water go over the river bed and the red boat getting nowhere.

Dotty, who had been in the barn when the raised voices had disturbed her, found Willie sitting in the grass.

‘What’s up, Willie?’ she asked, looking down at him, puzzled. His eyes, full of surprise, were fixed on the apex of a bush.

She moved into the bracken and squatted down on her haunches the better to observe him, staring at the freckles thick across
the bridge of his lumpy nose. She thought maybe he was drunk. He sat so stiffly, clutching that iron thing sticking up out
of the ground. He didn’t smell of drink, only of grass and smoke and he looked more baffled than stupefied.

‘Willie,’ she said, almost afraid, and put her hand on his two clasped ones, stroking the speckled skin upwards to the wrist,
fingering his pulse though she didn’t know what it might signify, and wishing he would look at her. She tried to remove his
hands from around the pipe, and as she struggled he suddenly released his grip and collapsed on his back into the bushes.
His cap fell off and he lay there staring up at the sky in that surprised way.

‘Willie,’ she said again, not very loudly, and stood up and didn’t know what to do for the best. Then she ran away down the
slope towards the stream, shouting, ‘George, George,’ feeling excited and fearful and important all at the same time.

George told Joseph he’d better bring the Jaguar round to the field road in case Willie needed moving urgently.

Perhaps it’s a stroke,’ Balfour suggested. ‘It c-could be that by the sound of it.’

‘Perhaps,’ George said. ‘Possibly it’s hunger. He’s been about since dawn. Still, you’d better go and bring the car round.’
Authoritatively he strode up the path towards the stricken Willie with Balfour in pursuit.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Roland, as his father and Dotty crossed the bridge.

‘Just to the car, boy.’

‘May I come?’ Already the child was scrambling out of the water, boat forgotten.

‘No,’ Joseph said, not turning round, going very fast up the slope to the Big House. His hands were quite sore – not burnt,
possibly blistered from all that sycamore-wielding. His head ached and his eyes hurt. It accelerated him the more. He swung
his arms in a fury and leapt up the path.

‘Do you think Willie’s dead?’ Dotty cried, sure he wasn’t, but feeling sick as she tried to keep pace with Joseph. It wasn’t
like Joseph to rush in an emergency. More like, he was running away from her.

‘Almost certainly,’ he shouted, grinning to himself, holding his smarting hands a fraction before him.

Stubbornly Dotty ran behind him, both of them pursued by a black spiral of gnats.

As they drove up the hill in the Jaguar, a green Mini turned the corner. The narrowness of the lane forced Joseph to slow
down. ‘Can’t stop, old man. Somebody’s died on us,’ he called and drove on at speed.

‘Was that Lionel?’ shouted Dotty.

Joseph heard the upward inflection of her provincial voice and found it objectionable. Dotty twisted in her seat in time to
see the green Mini halted and lost in the hedge-rimmed lane. At the crossroads Joseph turned right and drove half a mile to
the corner shop. She was left sitting in the hot car staring at a border of pinks in the small garden.

Joseph came out of the shop with several bars of chocolate and a tube of cold cream.

‘What’s wrong with your face?’ Dotty asked, looking at the colour of it, glowing red and smudged with black.

He didn’t reply, sitting at the wheel smearing grease into the smarting palms of his hands.

‘What have you been doing? You’re all dirty.’

He reversed the car up the lane, looking over his shoulder as he did so. The breeze blew something from his hair.

‘You’ve got bits of leaves in your hair,’ she said, puzzled.

‘I’ve been having it off with old George in the bushes,’ he shouted, lips drawn back to show his teeth, and she thought she
saw the small endings of his beard shrivelled up in the bright light, as if singed by the sun.

The green Mini was at the crossroads. There was Lionel’s elbow in a white sleeve sticking out from the window like a flag
of truce. As the Jaguar sped past, Joseph pointed his arm to the sky, spreading his blackened hand against the cool breeze.
He didn’t turn his head.