Another part of the wood (15 page)

‘The ones in the bottle?’

‘I need my breakfast.’

‘You shouldn’t eat those pills in the bottle. You should swing on trees.’ Kidney was walking away and Roland shouted, ‘There’s
no food left and they’re all talking about that war.’ He watched
the hungry Kidney push open the door and disappear with lowered head.

The war talk went on for a long time.

May wouldn’t speak to Lionel. She was obviously huffy. She shielded her face with one hand and played with her spoon in the
unappetizing mess of her shredded wheat. She felt exhausted and hideous, with all her make-up on wrong. The mirror was too
small, and when she had done her eyebrows Joseph had made some remark about her warpaint and they had all watched her. She
was sure she had swollen in the night; she felt blown out like some balloon. It was water retention or something horrible
like that. She couldn’t think how Dotty could walk around in that cotton sack in this weather. Lionel had told her to put
on another sweater if she wasn’t warm enough, but she was damned if she was going to add to her already large proportions.
The hairdresser in the King’s Road had sworn her set would last a week – four or five days at the least – and already it was
out. It was dreadful. Those army blankets had given her some kind of skin allergy too, she was convinced of it. She could
feel the little broken veins in her cheeks and there was a rough patch on her neck. Lionel of course looked much the same
as usual, the same as he ever did. He’d pushed his head into that tin bowl of cold water and come up all red and spluttering.
The way he scrubbed his face with the towel it was a wonder he didn’t wear his skin through to the bone. He’d changed into
a checked shirt with a silly green cravat at the throat, with that coin of his hidden behind it and his elderly heart going
boom-boom-boom on the other side. She was grateful it wasn’t summery enough for his appalling shorts, the khaki ones that
came below his knees. It was such a small hut with all these people in it. There wasn’t room to breathe and it was so dark
with the door shut, as if they were in a ship’s cabin with the spray splashing up against the porthole. There was more space
further in, towards that chintz sofa – which was an odd piece of furniture to find in this place – but it was warmer nearer
the cooker. There was
something large and grey standing near the wall, shaped like an unexploded bomb with a metal knob on it. She hoped it wouldn’t
blow up. Lionel was going on about Churchill being a great man, talking about him as if he’d met him, saying he spoke to him
at Malta once. He always pretended that. He never had met him.

‘Great man, a great man of history. I had the honour once of meeting him …’

Balfour said, ‘I watched the funeral on telly. It was sad.’

‘Who are we talking about?’ asked Joseph, looking round with a puzzled expression.

‘Lionel met Winston Churchill, and Balfour saw him on telly,’ Dotty said, miserable without her tobacco. She knew Joseph had
heard Lionel, he was just being awkward.

‘He had a remarkable ability,’ Lionel was saying, ‘to get close to the ordinary man.’

May said, ‘I couldn’t bear that awful siren suit he wore. What did he have to wear that dreadful thing for?’

‘Ah, my sweetheart, how little you understand. The man, Churchill, the historical figure, was behind his siren suit. In his
case, clothes could hardly matter.’

Clothes do matter, thought May, licking away the grains of sugar folded in the corners of her mouth. If she had the money
she would buy a coat the same colour as the shredded wheat, with Italian seams at the waist. With it she’d wear a boy’s shirt
with buttoned-down collar and cream stockings and toffee patent shoes, and beige nail varnish and lip salve, and just a touch
of white shadow above her eyes, on the corner of the lids. It was typical of Lionel not to know that clothes mattered. He’d
gone on long enough deploring the loss of the Empire or something, and he couldn’t see just how British-mad everyone was now,
what with clothes and pop songs and the King’s Road on a Saturday morning. Everyone she knew was dreadfully patriotic, and
especially if you came from Liverpool. She had told Lionel they ought to buy a Union Jack to hang over their bed. Lionel had
just laughed and called her a funny little thing. He didn’t believe her when she told
him that all the best people, even the Armstrong-Joneses possibly, pinned Union Jacks up all over the place. It was the thing.
You could get boxes of matches with the flag on, and tea towels and handkerchiefs and coffee mugs, a shirt if you went to
Carnaby Street – anything if you wanted it. And it really had something to do with being glad you were English – as though
you knew everything was going decadent and awful, and now was the time you could dress up in style and shout you were British-made.

Lionel was now talking about treaties and organizations. ‘South American powers,’ he said seriously, ‘Asiatic powers, European
powers, known collectively as the Great Powers.’

‘I only know Tyrone Power,’ said May.

Joseph laughed.

‘Silly child,’ said Lionel indulgently, a little annoyed at her interruption but charmed by her gaucherie and the fact that
she had at last spoken. It made him feel freer. It allowed him to speak more personally about the war, his war. He started
a long rambling account of his experiences in Malta leading up to his meeting with the Great Man. ‘When the show first got
under way,’ he began. ‘After Mr Shickelgrueber had shown his hand …’

May saw that Dotty was gazing at Lionel, not fluttering her eyelashes at him – she wasn’t feminine enough for that – but eyeing
him all right. She’s so drab, thought May; she’s no idea how to exploit her sex. All those ghastly boys’ dungarees and sneakers
on her feet – size nine, by the look of them. She hadn’t been born till the war was over. Fancy that – not even a war baby.
Where was that place, she wondered, with the injured soldiers everywhere? They had lived there for a year during the war,
after her father had been sent overseas. Southport, was it? The place with the fairy lights in the trees. The soldiers were
all dressed in bright bright blue, some on crutches and some without an arm, and a terrible man with a burnt face, candle-pink,
and a strip of waxy flesh for a nose. It looked comical really – not the burnt man, poor devil, but all of them, hobbling
and limping down the street, under those trees with the lights not on because of the war, just the black bulbs
stuck up there like fruit spotted with bird droppings. Some of the wounded soldiers pushed each other in wheelchairs. She’d
never liked soldiers, never – they reminded her of Father. They always looked so awful when they put on civilian clothes and
couldn’t hide behind the uniform any more.

She had an uncle, though, who had been in some regiment that made him wear a kilt, and he came on leave once and played the
piano, with his legs all bare and the tight little pleats flaring out all round the piano stool, sitting there playing ‘Silver
Threads Among the Gold’.

Lionel was looking at Dotty with wonder and shaking his head from side to side. ‘Incredible,’ he said, ‘I keep forgetting
– not even born.’

‘She’s too young. Aren’t you, Dot-Dot?’ Joseph said, patting Dotty’s hand.

May smiled too, regarding her husband fixedly, positively daring him to dwell on the youthfulness of Dotty. She didn’t pretend
to be younger than she was. She wasn’t as old as her birth certificate said. She couldn’t be. It was a cruel mistake.

‘I had a cousin who was killed in Germany,’ Dotty volunteered. ‘He was shot down over Dresden.’

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Lionel said. His grief seemed genuine.

‘I never knew him,’ Dotty explained. ‘I’ve seen photographs, but I never knew him.’

Lionel pushed the dead relation out of his mind. ‘Clever lot, those Germans. Good soldiers, especially under Rommel. They’re
a nation of soldiers – it’s the Prussian influence. They have an instinct for it, just as we had an instinct for colonization.
The warring instinct of the German nation.’ He paused. His fingers fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. ‘I have here,’ he
said, clutching something inside his shirt, ‘a symbol that may illustrate what I mean. I don’t often show it to anyone. I
regard it as sacred.’

‘What is it?’ Dotty was sure he was talking about the coin, the Blakeley Moor token piece. She couldn’t look at May.

‘A coin,’ said Lionel, ‘an old coin. I took it from around the neck
of a German officer in Italy. There was a small nick at the edge and beneath the coin a round hole in his breast.’ He allowed
them a glimpse of the metal chain, but that was all.

‘A dead German, I hope,’ Joseph said, not greatly caring, looking at the still-munching Kidney, who had eaten half a loaf
of bread. He wondered whether he should give him a pill now.

‘Very dead. He was little more than a boy. Same age as myself actually. But make no bones about it, he was dead.’

How awful, thought May, in part believing the story, seeing the lifeless German and a callous Lionel, little more than a boy,
snatching the chain from about his neck. He was so persuasive. Sometimes she wondered if Lionel had ever got further than
the Isle of Man. He had told her once that his father, the buried William Gosling, cashier of the bank, had given him the
coin, and on another occasion that he’d found it on the windowsill of a farmhouse in France – when he was occupying some place
or other, when he was winning the war. The last story he’d told her even after she knew it was the Blakeley Moor token for
one penny only.

Joseph fetched the bottle of pills from under the settee. He kept the container hidden in his palm, not able to make up his
mind about the problem of Kidney – medicine versus exercise. He was going to go vista-clearing with George and he wasn’t going
to have time to see that the youth did press-ups or ran round and round the field. Those half-dozen slices of white starch
Kidney had just consumed weren’t exactly the best way to start a day. He fretted that he couldn’t concentrate on Kidney, couldn’t
be singleminded enough to be of real help. He fretted that he was again postponing taking Roland up the mountain, though the
child seemed to have forgotten the whole idea.

Lionel was still carrying on about the battlefield and the gunfire. His voice was breaking with recollection.

Joseph, putting the bottle of pills high up on the shelf above the sink, said roughly, ‘Come on, George, let’s get cracking.’

The tall man rose slowly and Balfour quickly joined him.
George lowered his head at the doorway, to step down into the grass.

When the three men had gone, May said she had left a lipstick in the front pocket of the car and wanted it. She told Lionel
to go at once, waving her hand at him imperiously, and he did as he was told, leaving the two women alone with Kidney. May
didn’t mind him being there. He didn’t count. She jumped to her feet and peered into the mirror, giving a small scream of
disgust. ‘Ugh.’

‘Do you want some hot water?’ Dotty put the kettle on and lit the Calor gas.

‘I hate him, I hate him … It’s all his fault.’ May fell on her knees and dragged the suitcase from under the table, pulling
out several dresses and some sweaters.

‘That’s super.’ Dotty picked up a skirt, held it against her waist. It looked like an apron on her.

‘Well, I can’t wear it … Look at the creases in it.’ May snatched it away and bundled it into her case. She sat back on her
heels and buried her head in her hands.

‘Oh come on, love. It’s not as bad as that.’

Kidney was looking earnestly at the writing pad abandoned by Joseph among the dishes. He turned its pages and began to draw
something.

When the water was hot Dotty poured it into the bowl for May and found the soap. The woman was so helpless in many ways, she
felt compelled to do things for her. May washed her hands and placed her damp fingertips against her face as if the water
might do her an injury. ‘It’s all stinging,’ she complained. ‘It’s those bloody army blankets.’

‘What happened last night with Balfour and you?’

‘Me and Balfour?’

‘He seemed a bit upset. He said Lionel told a dirty story.’

‘My God.’ May hid her ravaged face behind the towel and turned to the mirror. ‘Did he hear?’ she asked. ‘What did he say?’

‘He just said Lionel told you a story.’

‘He tells me stories every night … I don’t listen any more … they’re always the same.’

‘What are they about?’

‘Lalla Rookh and some temple.’

Dotty giggled.

‘When he first told me them – ’ May was spilling the contents of her handbag on to the draining board, fumbling for her foundation
cream, unscrewing the gold top on the black tube – ‘it was a bit of a shock, I can tell you, but I’ve got used to it now.’
She wasn’t going to tell Dotty that Lionel never made love to her, never actually had intercourse. Dotty would probably tell
everybody. She said, ‘If he can’t make love to me, he tells me stories.’ She caught sight of Kidney’s face in the mirror,
his blue eyes fixed on her. ‘Is he listening?’ she asked, turning round to look at him.

‘Shouldn’t think so.’ Dotty was reminded of the farewell letter she was going to write Joseph, telling him everything in her
mind, everything. ‘Joseph won’t touch me,’ she said, searching on the shelves in the inner room for her writing paper. ‘He
says I revolt him.’

‘Really?’ May tried to express sympathy and incredulity, but she was too absorbed in her make-up, barely listening to the
girl.

‘I’m going to write him a long letter,’ Dotty said, sitting down on the settee.

‘Oh yes.’ May’s mouth stretched wide as she applied colour to her lips. There were freckles, gold-coloured, on the bridge
of her tilted nose.

Dotty wrote:

It was true. She wrote him so many letters but she never went.