Another part of the wood (9 page)

‘He’ll be sick if you keep doing that,’ May told him.

‘Not big Roland … not our big Roland … Oh, dear no. No fear of that.’ Lionel was loth to put his playmate down. He held him
in his arms and glowed with pride and tenderness.

‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ Roland said. ‘Nobody said you were coming.’

May sat smiling at the boy and the man, tapping her tinted nails against the surface of the table, not caring whether they
had been expected or not. She’d told Lionel he was a fool to write to Joseph. She’d told him, hadn’t she, that it was just
one of those invitations thrown out after a few drinks and never intended to be taken seriously. And who the hell wanted to
spend a couple of weeks right out in the country miles away from the shops and things? It wasn’t as if they were friends of
Joseph’s. She knew him from the old days in Liverpool, and that fat wife of his and Dotty too – but Lionel hadn’t really known
them. He was almost a stranger, and God knows they had nothing in common. It was just a silly statement made after a few drinks.
She had rebelled at being taken to Kew to look at the bamboo or cactus, or whatever they were, and
had demanded they go somewhere for a drink – not the Cumberland or the Mayfair Hotel or anywhere where she felt lost, but
a proper pub – and somehow they had ended up in the North Star on the Finchley Road. There they’d bumped into Joseph and Dotty.
Lionel had said, in that delighted way he affected, ‘Why, look who’s here,’ and May had had to stop and smile, though she
felt more like screaming, and the four of them sat on those stools that she hated because they made you feel so insecure and
lopsided, and talked utter inanities. Lionel stood them all drinks, of course, which he couldn’t afford, and just before they
were going Joseph said, ‘We must meet again soon,’ and Lionel, the idiot, said, ‘Oh yes, when?’ And so on, until finally Joseph
said, ‘Why don’t you both come down to Wales with me? We Northerners ought to stick together.’

Afterwards in the car May had told Lionel what a fool he was, what an exhibition he had made of himself. ‘Couldn’t you see
that Joseph was bored stiff with everything you said?’ she told him. ‘Couldn’t you see he was yawning his head off?’ Lionel
had just turned to her at the traffic lights with those reproachful eyes and asked if she was feeling tired, if her monthlies
were on the way. ‘Sweetheart,’ were his words, ‘you know you’re due for your monthlies. Don’t hurt me.’ He knew more about
her monthlies, as he called them, than she did herself. Not that there was any danger of her ‘monthlies’ not being due – not
the kinky way Lionel behaved. How she fought him, how she wasted her time trying to goad him and wound him. It just never
got through to him – he was encased in armour. It was stupid really, because all the time she was screaming at him she did
know fractionally that he was good and sincere and normal – yes, even normal in a way – and that he was light years away from
people like Joseph, superior in every way. Yet she couldn’t tell him. She hated him for his rolling belly and the bald patch
on his head and the way he would go on about the army, and deep down, way way down, she was frightened of him and of what
he thought of her. He didn’t even know her, and she couldn’t explain herself how she had come to marry this stranger with
the thinning hair.

When she was a child her mother had told her that she was utterly beautiful, perfectly formed, and that men would love her
for her skin alone. Her mother said she would marry a prince of men with a private income, and here she was at the end with
a skin still flawless and a husband with a pot belly and a nostalgia for the war. She pretended not to know about the war,
but she did know. While Lionel had stripped down his Bren gun and led his men across Italy (she knew the route as well as
he now), she had been a child following her father from camp to camp across England. In the married quarters her mother had
tucked her up in the army-issue blankets and commented on her lovely skin. But despite her complexion, she had ended up with
Lionel. She had met him in a cinema and he had taken her home in his Triumph Herald. She had been impressed by his manners
and by his treatment of her. She felt secure with him. It didn’t matter if her mascara dribbled down her cheek or her hair
came out of set, because she could tell he adored her – and why shouldn’t he with his terrible stomach and his hair gone thin
and that comical moustache all wet from kissing? So they were married, and the Triumph Herald disappeared, and they had to
leave the Bayswater flat, and then the Maida Vale one, and then one after that. He still said he was going to cover her with
jewels. ‘You’ll be worth £3000 standing up,’ he’d told her, fondling what he called her ‘chests’ and pressing his moustache
against her nose.

He still promised her things. He still went out daily and returned at six o’clock to tell her his shares were looking up –
they always looked down the following day. He lectured her on her personal hygiene and put up with all her cruelties and abuse
and disloyalty. When he came in at night he took off his good suit and changed into his pyjamas and sat on the sofa while
she made a cup of tea. It was the extent of her wifely duties. He changed so as not to crumple his suit. His feet stuck out
and his neck was marked at the throat by his collar stud. She only wanted him to touch her when he was dressed as the business
executive he pretended to be. She could take the caresses of the man of the
Stock Exchange, soon to make his million, but she despised the tubby husband panting on the mohair settee in the expensive
flat with the yellow brocade curtains and the plastic tulips on the windowsill. He never made jokes, he never tried to fight
back at her. There was no fun and no victory in hitting a man who so pitifully lay down. He made her wear dresses with high
necks and complained that she deliberately wore her skirts too short, and he wouldn’t let her see her old friends. He followed
her round like a hospital nurse, plumping up cushions behind her head and washing out her nylons and cleaning her shoes. ‘In
the army,’ he told her, ‘you got to realize what cleanliness was. It’s just not on to polish only the tops of your shoes.
The instep also must be shone.’ He’d done it in the trenches apparently – those Italian trenches – to set an example to his
men. He’d made an effort to shave before consuming his tins of bully beef or whatever, because ‘it’s the little things that
make a gentleman’. Even his war wound had been ridiculous. A piece of shrapnel from a shell scored through the ample flesh
of his bottom. ‘Did it hurt?’ she had asked him idly, thinking of him clutching his behind on the road to Rome.

He would prepare their evening meal in his pyjamas and arrange it daintily on a tray. Then they watched the telly, and he
sat her on his knee and began to whisper those things into her ear, never realizing how incongruous was the change from Gentleman
Jim in the trenches to Dirty Dick on the rented settee, as he mouthed those dreadful words into her brain as if he were demented.
She didn’t altogether dislike it. There was a certain thrill to be experienced. It did make her feel she wasn’t entirely living
out her life in a wicker basket under a barrage balloon floating high above the rest of the world. If only he would call her
May instead of Sweetheart, if only he would give her a name. ‘What will I be worth lying down?’ she would ask him brutally,
as he foraged in the whorl of her ear, and he would moan, ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart, how I love you. How you love me.’

‘Sweetheart,’ said Lionel, placing the child on the floor, ‘I’ve brought your cigarettes.’ He handed her the packet with a
tender smile. Dotty put cups on the table and Balfour stared out of the doorway. Presently he said, ‘Roland, there’s your
dad,’ and the child ran out into the sunlight and across the field.

‘Who,’ asked May, ‘is that huge lad wearing the football scarf?’

‘It’s George,’ Dotty said, making the tea. ‘George MacFarley, who owns these woods – him and his parents.’

‘It’s probably glandular,’ May remarked, beginning to open her cigarette packet and watching Lionel’s hand go to the pocket
of his suit for his lighter. Deliberately she put the packet down again.

‘It’s nothing glandular,’ said Balfour. ‘H-his father and his uncle are very tall men. Broad too. They both look like gods.
When he grows a bit, he’ll be l-like them.’

May laughed and Balfour bent down to scratch at his ankle. He hadn’t actually looked at her face yet. He daren’t. She was
pink and white like a carnation, and heavy with scent.

The two women began a conversation that was incomprehensible to him.

‘That tall one who gave us a lift – ’ said Dotty.

‘The one you liked – ’

‘The one
you
liked – ’

May chose to deny this emphatically. ‘I hated him. I told him so. He wore bicycle clips.’

‘He never. Not the tall one.’

‘In the Hope Hall. You said he was nice and I said he was awful.’

George and Joseph entered the hut and Dotty poured out more tea. She was relieved to see Joseph making an effort to be polite
to Lionel, shaking him by the hand and introducing him to George.

May took out a cigarette and said, ‘Might I have a light, Lionel,’ and he replied, ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’ and was ashamed
of himself for having to be asked. He hadn’t noticed that she wanted a light – he had been too busy being introduced to the
tall fellow. He had thought she needed a light several minutes earlier before that odd conversation about the Hope Hall. Sounded
like something
to do with the Salvation Army. It wasn’t like May to accept lifts from strangers. Anyway, she seemed to have hated him, whoever
he was. She’d said twice she’d hated him. He hoped it was a long time ago.

George and Lionel, surprisingly, had a lot to say to each other. George wanted to know if he had been to Palestine. Lionel
had. He was there in 1946. Had he been to Cyprus? There too. George sat stiffly in his rocking chair, his hands still black
from the fire, folded in his lap. His slanted eyes, shining and mournful, shifted from the army man with the little brown
moustache to the green field beyond the hut, and back again.

Losing himself down a maze of streets with exotic names, some mispronounced, Lionel named comrades and regiments, gave his
impressions and his opinions, his head inclined solemnly.

After a while Joseph took Roland by the hand and left the hut. May and Dotty went into the barn and May combed out her hair
in front of the mildewed mirror. ‘What on earth is there to do round here?’ she asked peevishly.

‘It’s not too bad, love. The thing is, the air knocks you out and you sleep a lot.’ Dotty remembered where May was to spend
her nights. She said, ‘You know Balfour, the one with the pimples, the one that can’t look you in the eye – well, you and
Lionel are sharing a hut with him.’

‘A hut? Really.’ May didn’t care. She asked spitefully, ‘Still not married to Joseph?’

‘You know damn well I’m not,’ said Dotty.

May said, trying to be nice, ‘Anyway, you’re better off than I am with my Lionel. He’s a fool.’

‘I think he loves you.’

May shrugged her shoulders, doing things now to her eyelashes, spitting on a little brush to moisten the mascara, blinking
rapidly at the mirror. ‘I don’t know what he thinks. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’ Her mouth sagged wider as she
worked at the splayed lashes and she leaned forward to see her reflection more closely.

It’s true, Dotty thought, and was frightened. She said, ‘I don’t know either. Honest to God, isn’t it awful?’ Frowning dreadfully,
shoulders hunched, she paced up and down behind the titivating May. ‘It’s all so silly … this love business.’

‘I never tell Lionel I love him. I don’t think one should.’ May looked critically at her reflection. ‘Lionel cut all the stuffing
out of my bras, you know.’

‘What for?’

‘God knows. He does all sorts of funny things. You wouldn’t believe it. All about how he’ll kill me with a karate blow to
my womanhood, and all that stuff about the army. You just wait till he takes you on one side and tells you about his coin.’

‘His what?’ asked Dotty.

‘It’s a coin he keeps on a chain round his neck,’ May said. ‘He pretends it’s very special and private, and he tells everyone
about it at the drop of a hat. It’s supposed to be valuable and dreadfully historical, and it’s really a metal token for one
penny issued by the Blakeley Moor Co-op in 1827. God knows where he got it. It looks ridiculous when he hasn’t got his shirt
on. He’s never without it, never.’

‘Does he wear it in the bath?’ Dotty saw him fox-coloured beneath the water, the Blakeley Moor coin moving gently across his
primitive chest.

‘He keeps saying I’ll be worth £3000 lying down.’

They both started to laugh – Dotty loudly, with her mouth wide open and her two feet set in a circlet of sunshine. May with
pink lips compressed and shoulders wriggling.

Roland went to bed that evening without complaining. For one thing Lionel had played with him in the field after supper –
the sunset field with everything cool and the darkness growing. The trees flapped like rags. When Lionel pushed him high on
the swing the air rushed at his sunburnt face, its chilliness covering his bare arms with goose pimples. He dropped from the
swing and ran round and round the hut, screaming with excitement as the fat man chased him, until he flew into a patch of
bramble and lacerated his leg. He bent his head and watched the blood beading on the surface of his leg. Lionel held his ankle
in one big hand and dabbed at the scratch with his handkerchief, transferring the three pinpoints of blood on to the white
square of cloth. Even as Roland looked, his disappointed mouth open, the spots of redness reappeared again. He scrambled free
of the man’s hand and ran about the field triumphantly, shouting for Lionel to catch him. ‘Catch me, catch me,’ he cried,
falling into the long grass with his flushed face close to the cooling earth and his leg forgotten. The other thing that made
going to bed so pleasant was the two-shilling piece Lionel had found in his ear. Lionel had sat him on the table among the
dirty dishes and magicked his toothbrush into the biscuit tin on the draining board. ‘Dotty, Dotty,’ he had said, ‘see if
Roland’s toothbrush is in the biscuit tin.’ And Dotty had got up from her chair and Lionel had said, ‘Go on, go on, find Roland’s
toothbrush,’ and Dotty opened the biscuit tin and indeed his toothbrush was there. ‘Aaaaaahya-ya,’ said his father, yawning,
champing his lips together and trapping pieces of his beard. And then Lionel had placed his hands about Roland’s head and
touched his ears and neck, till he squirmed on the table top and laughed and nearly upset the plates, and Lionel said, ‘What’s
this in Roland’s
ear?’ His probing fingers tickled his right ear, and he wriggled still more because everything about Lionel was so warm and
friendly – the warm breath coming out of his mouth, the little coloured moustache quivering, and his face smiling, smiling.
And there was the two-shilling piece: a silver coin, two shillings in one, an old one with a King’s head on, not the picture
of the Queen sitting on her horse. ‘A two-shilling piece in Roland’s ear,’ Lionel had shouted. ‘All for Roland. Finding’s
keepings.’ May had given a small laugh as if she thought it was funny, which it was, and Joseph had yawned again and said
at the end of it, ‘Come on, boy. Bed for you.’ Off he went, still feeling the prickles of Lionel’s moustache against his ear,
the silver money clutched tight in his hand – a lot of money, though of course he knew there wasn’t any more to be found like
that, not in his ear, or up his nose or anywhere. It wasn’t really magic. There was an explanation. But he was drowsy and
he slipped from his father’s arms like a fish being loosed in the sea. He fell asleep at once.