Another part of the wood (8 page)

Dotty swivelled round and waved at the Mini. ‘Not long, not long,’ she cried, kneeling in the passenger seat, her hair blowing
about her face.

The Jaguar turned into an opening at the side of the lane and stopped in front of a five-barred gate. Lionel turned too, manoeuvring
the Mini carefully, and switched off the engine. He let the little silver ignition key dangle between his fingers, sitting
there with pleasure and good humour on his flushed face, waiting for Joseph to greet him, his darling wife May safe beside
him.

‘Glad you made it,’ said Joseph, coming to the car. About to shake the hand held out to him, he drew back. ‘Sorry, bit of
a fire down in the Glen … Hands a bit sore.’ He wiped his cold-creamed hands on the side of his trousers and looked at May.
‘Ah, the lovely May. How are you, darling?’

May giggled and stepped out of the Mini in her new pink trews and her gingham shirt, a white silk handkerchief tied casually
about her neck. She turned her powdered cheek for Joseph’s gallant kiss, moving past Dotty with a jangling of the charm bracelet
on her rounded arm and stood at the barred gate looking about her at the view.

Lionel said the Mersey Tunnel hadn’t been too crowded. Better than expected, in fact. Dotty hadn’t met him before. She thought
he was nice, because he shook her hand and said he was glad to meet her. He seemed an unlikely partner for the restless May.

May said how pretty the scenery was. ‘So unspoilt and countrified.’ She giggled, because she wasn’t a fool, and the remarks
faded into the summer air as they followed each other over the gate. She very nearly fell on her knees on the far side.

Lionel opened his mouth in alarm. ‘Take it easy, my darling,’ he cried, attempting to take his wife’s arm, but she stepped
away from him.

Over the brow of the hill came Balfour and George, carrying an iron bedstead with the body of Willie laid on a striped mattress
splotched with damp.

When the two groups met, the bearers halted and lowered the cot to the grass, and Dotty said ‘How is he?’ looking down at
the sunken mouth and the stubbled chin – all that was visible of Willie, for his eyes and nose were covered by his cap.

‘I think he’s all right … just a bit dazed. Been overdoing it.’ George sat down on the mattress and laid his white fingers
on the Welshman’s knees. ‘Home soon, Willie, home soon.’ He hung his head, still touching Willie, and appeared not to see
the new arrivals.

May had never seen anyone quite so tall as George. She stood with one hand, the one with the bracelet about her wrist, gripping
the bars of the bed, and smiled into the field. Lionel adopted a tragic expression, bending his head low as if in church,
though he wasn’t sure why there was an old man lying on a bed in a field, and not sure who the tall fellow was or the other
shorter one with the spotty complexion. He had understood from Joseph’s letter that there would be just Dotty and themselves
out in the woods. Of course, Joseph, being arty, was often vague. May had wanted to go abroad, or to a hotel on the coast
at least, but he simply couldn’t raise the money and he thought it safer to take her somewhere secluded, rather than expose
her to the twin temptations of casual acquaintanceships and drink. It was something he often told her.
‘Any casual acquaintance could have you in drink. You simply have no sense of responsibility.’

‘Is he ill, poor old fellow?’ Lionel asked, standing stockily in his good suit with the rather wide trousers and his white
stiff collar tight about his neck.

‘I believe so,’ said Joseph, not interested, wanting to sit down somewhere. He told Dotty, ‘I think I ought to go and see
about Roland.’

‘Ah, Roland.’ Lionel jangled pennies in his pocket, remembering the vanishing tricks with money that he had shown Roland a
year earlier. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing Roland.’ He meant it. ‘Coming along all right, is he?’

‘You’ve got to drive Willie home in the car,’ George said.

‘Of course, of course,’ Joseph agreed, genuinely ashamed of being so forgetful. He took Balfour’s place at the foot of the
bed, and he and George carried the stretcher towards the gate. Lionel marched ahead in his shiny brown shoes, anxious to be
helpful.

Balfour was astonished by May. She was the living reality of the mound of old dreams dreamt in puberty of fair women coming
to lie down beside him. He was fearful to speak lest he should utter obscenities.

Seeing his glance, May, with eyes lavender blue, smiled in his direction, at which he blushed and turned to follow George.

‘Isn’t he ghastly,’ said May, playing with her charm bracelet and looking at Dotty.

‘Ghastly?’ said Dotty. ‘Balfour’s not ghastly at all. He’s rather interesting. He’s very funny when you get to know him. He
got tight last night.’

‘I mean Lionel, my Lionel. He makes me sick,’ said May.

Willie, warm in his womb-world under the covering of his cap, breathed in odours of silk linings and something else, something
that was vegetable. He thought he was on his way to the annual hot-pot dinner given by the mine owners for their employees,
at the Herbert Arms. He could smell potatoes and gravy, and he
was aware of an intense hunger. He could hear the voice of the boss come up from Liverpool in his grand expensive car, the
car with the green hood, asking how he was. He struggled to touch the brim of his cap, and his wife was telling him he’d made
a fool of himself as usual, or was it his mother? ‘Drunk you are, Willie,’ she said, but how was a man to resist free drink,
dressed in his Sunday suit, brown with a white stripe in it, and the boss making a little speech, standing there on the stone-flagged
floor in a pair of plus fours the colour of tobacco, handing them all a cigar and telling them the directors were very pleased
with the work done. They dug barytes out of the ground and somewhere along the line it got put into gallons of paint – God
knows what it did, though no doubt it made someone a heap of old money. He didn’t doubt that. You didn’t give close on forty
men a hot-pot dinner and as much beer as they could drink, not to mention the cigars and that damn big car with the headlamps
shining, unless there was money in it somewhere. The boss only ever went into the mine once and that was to take his little
daughter down, and she put on a white helmet on her head with a candle at the front and all her hair falling down about her
shoulders. The little girl used to come to hot-pot do’s as well, and each year she got a little taller and her hair a little
shorter. He could still hear the rattling of the stall chains as the cows shifted about in the shed in the pub yard. He could
almost hear the sound of the men pissing against the wall and see the rivulets of urine running out across the yard. ‘Disgusting,’
the other folk in the pub called it, but who gave a damn after all that drink, and they wouldn’t let them upstairs to use
the lav. Couldn’t blame them for that. Anyway, the stairs in the pub were waxed like glass, weren’t they? There’d have been
nothing but broken legs and damaged skulls. There were quite a few breakages as it was. Mugs and the like and one or two plates
falling on to the stone floor and old Davis shouting out to be careful of that case of stuffed birds in the corner – a damn
big glass case full of birds, like none you ever saw in your life. Coloured like beetles they were, scarlet and blue
and bottle-green, all perched on a bit of tree. ‘Mind them birds,’ Davis would shout. ‘Just you be careful of them birds.’
Course he had a thing about birds – not live ones at all, but stuffed birds and painted birds on plates. Old Davis had a job
to get them out of the pub. Some of them would go right through to the back into the old kitchen and climb up the steps to
the loft to sleep the drink off, sleeping up there in the straw with the dog – nice little bitch, that dog – with the sides
of bacon hanging up on the beams to remind you flesh was mortal. They were grand times. The men worked hard enough, God only
knows, and they did have lonely lives. There seemed one long leap of loneliness from the time they were lads to the nights
of the hot-pot suppers. Most of them had been boys in the same school, such as it was – with church twice on Sunday, fishing
down at the river, a bit of football in the winter, a couple of outings to Shrewsbury – and then it was all over, and they
all went away from each other into houses in the village and took wives and got lads of their own. Then it was as if they’d
never been boys at all. Responsible they all were, men they all were, till hot-pot supper night. Everything was different
those nights, somehow. There was the church in the daytime you hardly even noticed, grown big as a cathedral with a graveyard
like a battlefield, and the ivy climbing up the side of Albert Price’s house and Albert at the window with his shotgun telling
them all to go to the devil. All the lads stumbling through the churchyard, shouting out to each other like boys, linking
arms in the lane and laughing dirty-like seeing the light go on in Mrs Parry’s window, knowing old Freddie White was creeping
in, like as not, with his boots in his hand. Everyone knowing each other, a funny kind of knowing – though it was a daft way
to think, because didn’t they still know each other, though some were dead? He was so damn hungry.

He tried to sit up and someone pushed his head down again and he could swear he was lying on the leather seats of the boss’s
car.

Balfour waited to help Lionel carry his luggage to the huts. He sat on the bed vacated by the delirious Willie and watched
Lionel doing things with a dustpan and brush to the interior of the car. Now and then the tidy man would bob his head over
the top of the car, his face one big apologetic smile. ‘Won’t be a tick, old man – just want to get the car spruced up.’ May
had dropped sweet papers everywhere, and ash from her du Maurier cigarettes, and there was a frosting of face powder on the
felt floor-covering beneath the passenger seat.

‘The little woman loves her sweeties,’ Lionel told Balfour, emerging at last with the dustpan in one hand and brush in the
other. About to scatter the contents of the pan into the hedge, he stopped abruptly and said, ‘Wrong thing to do, don’t you
think? Honour the country code and all that.’ Contritely he put the pan and brush away in the boot of the car and took out
a black leather suitcase and a holdall in tartan cloth. ‘Food,’ he told Balfour, putting the holdall down on the bed. ‘Eggs
and stuff.’

They left the gate open for Joseph and George to shut on their return.

‘Nothing to get out anyway,’ remarked Lionel. They carried the bed at breast height, Lionel’s red face smiling through the
bars at Balfour walking backwards through the field. ‘Not going too fast am I, old chap?’

‘No, no it’s all right.’

‘Marvellous air, marvellous.’

Balfour agreed.

‘Been here long?’

‘Yes – well, a c-couple of days that is.’

‘I see.’ Lionel thought perhaps he was shy. It was odd how some people found such difficulty in communicating. He himself
had always been able to communicate. His army training, he supposed. Good fellow though, he thought, looking at the marked
face and the well-developed shoulders. Salt of the earth, that kind. He prided himself on being a good judge of character.
Had to be during the war. Make one mistake in a chap’s ability and it could
mean a platoon wiped out. The thought bursting out beneath his ginger moustache, he confided: ‘Reminds me of the old days,
this. In the war, you know. Carrying supplies up to the line. An army marches on its stomach and all that.’ Short of breath,
sweat dripping into his eyes, he shot a blind glance at his companion. ‘Before your time, of course.’

‘I never even got to do my National Service,’ admitted Balfour.

‘Oh, how’s that?’

Without waiting for a reply, Lionel puffed on. ‘Best training a chap could have, best discipline in the world. Quite indescribable.
Seen all types from all walks of life, and – make no bones about it – it separates the wheat from the chaff.’

Balfour was unhappy about the night before them. He hoped somebody would explain to Lionel the sleeping arrangements. Even
if Lionel did seem to care for barrack-room life, he would hardly approve of his wife dossing down in the same cubicle as
another recruit. Balfour hoped he would take it upon himself to separate the wheat from the chaff and allocate another room
to himself and his spouse.

‘Ho, there,’ Lionel shouted, face scarlet with exertion. They were almost at the hut. ‘May, sweetheart.’

Behind his back Balfour heard May reply, ‘I’m here, Lionel.’ She was leaning against the door of the hut. Through the window
Dotty could be seen filling the kettle with water.

‘Isn’t it marvellous, sweetheart?’ asked Lionel, gazing about him at the greenness and the shade.

Lionel spoke the endearment in a natural way. Balfour recognized that. It wasn’t just a word tacked on to a sentence that
was banal. She was his sweetheart. ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’ Lionel would continue to name her when they were alone. But then
they weren’t going to be alone. He, Balfour, would lie close to them. ‘Making tea, Dotty,’ he called, unable to go into the
hut for the upwards swell of May’s breasts and the perfume that covered her like a cloak.

At that moment Lionel, as if overcome by the quality of the air
and the scenery about them, ran away from his sweetheart in the doorway and went hopping towards the trees, his brown shoes
dancing under the leaves and a white moon of baldness, not previously seen, rising across the slopes of his ginger head. Sounds
came from him like an elephant trumpeting.

‘Goodness,’ May said and went into the hut, perhaps in disgust, leaving only Balfour to see Roland running straight into Lionel’s
arms. The child was swung into the air and down again and held against the grandfatherly moustache and kissed and borne with
gusto and hilarity back to the hut and up the steps.

‘Look what I’ve found,’ Lionel said archly, holding Roland like a baby.

‘Hallo, Roland,’ said May.

‘I’ve found a Roland, and such a big Roland. My word he’s a big Roland.’ The big Roland was swung upwards again to the ceiling.
‘Too big for tricks now … much too big, aren’t you?’