Another part of the wood (16 page)

May said, ‘Why doesn’t Joseph play with Roland? He’s a sweet little boy. Just look at him.’

Dotty looked up and asked what he was doing.

‘He’s on the swing, just swinging up and down. He’s bored.’

‘Oh, he’s all right. He adores Joseph.’

She wrote:

She stopped. She had told Joseph that anecdote before, several times in fact. She reread the words written and wished she
had some cigarettes. Or something to drink. Without tobacco she couldn’t possibly tell Joseph what she thought of him. She
couldn’t tell him she hoped he would rot and end up without friends, only a host of women to whom he paid out conscience money.
Neither could she describe in detail her own ugliness or unworthiness – the concentration wasn’t there, she just wanted a
cigarette. She sat looking at May, who was puffing up her hair with one hand, standing at the sink with her cosmetics in a
row on the narrow windowsill.

‘My God,’ May said, ‘here comes the galloping major.’

Lionel entered the hut, carrying Roland on his back. He said he hadn’t been able to spot her lipstick, not in the compartment,
nor on the back seat, or in the boot, or anywhere.

‘Hallow, luv,’ Dotty said, and Roland came to the sofa and fell on to it beside her, leaning his head against her shoulder.
‘Are you a bit bored? Don’t you know what to do with yourself?’

‘I’m all right. What are you writing?’

‘A sort of letter.’

‘I’m just going to spend a penny,’ Lionel told them, frankly, running out of the hut with his cravat slightly dishevelled.

May said ‘Christ!’ and came to Roland, her hand rummaging in the depths of her handbag. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Would you like
to play with this?’ It was her lighter.

‘No thanks.’ He got up and stood at the table, pushing the dishes about to disturb the placid Kidney, watching him drawing
his flowers.

‘Would you like to write to Mummy and I’ll post it?’ Dotty asked, tearing free a page of her writing paper in expectation.

‘No.’ The little boy attempted to smile. Dotty had to go to him then, falling on her knees beside him, pushing his face into
her neck, feeling his lips quivering against her throat. ‘What’s wrong, little boy? What’s wrong, little love?’

He couldn’t speak. He wanted his mother.

‘You want Daddy, don’t you? Poor little love.’ Her voice was angry all at once. She stood up and sat at the table, lifting
him with her, placing him on her lap. She looked down fiercely into his desolate face and wiped a tear away with the tip of
her finger.

May stood uncertainly with the lighter in her hand. Dotty was so emotional with the child, she was as bad as Lionel. The boy
had been perfectly all right, bored perhaps but not miserable. Dotty didn’t seem to realize that Roland was like his mother.
The mother had terribly wistful eyes, really terribly mournful and bereft, and she was as strong as a man and fat as hell.

After a moment Lionel returned and sat down at the table. He and Roland began a game of noughts and crosses.

The afternoon was warm and dry. Dotty was practically silent the whole way to the village, striding along between the hedgerows
with her shoulders hunched and the shopping bag in her hand. She told Balfour she’d be all right when she got her ciggies.

The village, to her surprise, turned out to be a fair-sized market town with a Tesco stores and a Midland Bank. She purchased
at once a packet of Woodbines and said she must have a cup of tea and a sausage roll. They sat in a cream-tiled café and she
lit her cigarette and closed her eyes. He was embarrassed by the sight of a tear rolling out from under her closed lids. ‘You’ve
no idea,’ she told him, ‘how hungry I get. Honest to God, I get that hungry I could scream.’ She ate and smoked at the same
time and colour came into her cheeks.

‘It’s funny,’ she explained, ‘me being hungry all the time, because I don’t really enjoy food and I never put on weight. I
wouldn’t know one sausage roll from another. Joseph says my hunger means something else … But then everything means something
else, doesn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Why do you stutter now?’ she asked him suddenly. ‘You didn’t at first, when we got here … I didn’t notice, anyway.’

He felt awkward and looked down at the table. ‘It comes and goes,’ he mumbled.

‘I didn’t mean …’ She was afraid she had offended him.

‘I did have a very bad stutter when I was a child,’ he confessed. ‘B-but Mr and Mrs MacFarley cured me, m-more or less. It
gets bad w-when – ’ he broke off, not really knowing when it got bad.

She made a list of shopping they could do separately to save time.

‘Are we in a h-hurry?’ asked Balfour, gulping his tea and looking at the clock on the wall. It was a quarter to four.

‘No, there’s no hurry, I suppose … It’s just that there’s nothing for Roland’s supper and we need candles before it gets dark.’

‘There’s gallons of paraffin in the store shed,’ Balfour observed, but she brushed that aside.

‘I don’t like taking other people’s things,’ she cried, hunched over her empty plate, licking her fingers and stubbing them
against the dish, bringing orange flakes of pastry to her mouth. ‘It’s so awful sponging on people all the time.’

He felt ill at ease, self-conscious at being seen with her in her denim outfit. The waitress behind the glossy tea urn was
staring relentlessly.

‘We’ll get started then,’ he said, jerking his head at the woman at the counter and feeling in his pocket for money.

She wouldn’t let him pay for her. ‘Honest to God, I can’t let you pay for my sausage roll,’ she told him, grimacing as she
dug down into the back pocket of her trousers.

His face burning, he walked along the street. Down a side turning were stalls with vegetables and fruit. There was cheap jewellery
and cheap glass, and further along a rail of secondhand clothing. He stopped on the corner and she caught hold of his arm
with her spiky fingers and asked, ‘Are you angry with me, love? You are, I know you are.’ She wrung her hands in anguish and
passersby turned curiously to look at them.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, walking down the side street with the shopping list crumpled in his hand.

In silence she regarded the trays of plastic brooches and metal rings. He hung his head beside her. ‘You’re just like Joseph,’
she accused him. ‘I irritate you, don’t I?’

‘Please,’ he begged, out of his depth and able neither to proceed nor stand still.

It was then that she saw the clothes. ‘Look,’ she cried, running towards the stall, pushing aside the coats and dresses, the
curtains of hair enveloping her face and her arms flying out as she separated
the hanging garments. ‘Aren’t they smashing? Look at this … and this …’ Her face when she turned to Balfour was bright with
happiness.

‘It might suit you,’ he said, looking at the man’s anorak she was clutching in her fingers.

‘It’s not for me … a present for Joseph … What do you think?’

He thought Joseph would hate it. He thought Joseph would tell her so. He said, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ and felt inadequate.
It was then she saw the flowered coat. It was seven and six and she had to have it. She counted guiltily the money that Joseph
had given her for the shopping, and Balfour on an impulse took out a ten-shilling note and gave it to the stallholder. ‘I
did see it first,’ he said, hoping she wouldn’t make a scene.

She was disconcerted but grateful, her face turning pink, her eyes lowered. ‘Thank you, thank you very much, Balfour,’ she
said formally. The flowered coat was made of some kind of velvet. It rippled and shone. It was orange and blue and green and
black, with a mustard-yellow ground, and there were buttons small as beads going from wrist to elbow. Balfour thought it was
terrible.

He prayed she wouldn’t wear it now. He visualized her stalking, swathed in velvet, through the busy market town, the bell-bottoms
of her denim trousers flaring out beneath the long and violently coloured hem.

They finished the shopping about five. Dotty had bought a piece of best end of neck so large it could only be carried with
difficulty. Balfour thought it wouldn’t go in the oven, nor would it keep fresh for long. He bore it stoically along the street
with Dotty at his side, the flowered coat slung across her shoulders. He was feeling unwell. His head ached and there was
a burning sensation in the pit of his stomach. He refused to admit that it might be another of his attacks coming on. He told
himself he was just tired, and perhaps getting a cold. It was six months since his last attack. As he walked, he looked from
side to side, as if seeking some safe and dark place in which to hide. He mustn’t imagine things, he mustn’t let it become
worse.

‘I think I’ve got a cold coming,’ he said out loud, reassuring himself. Dotty stared at his face and attempted to put her
hand against his forehead. She stumbled. The joint of meat slipped from his arms. As he bent to retrieve it, the road broke
up under him and he fell on his knees.

‘Are you all right?’ She was squatting on her haunches, staring at him as she had stared at Willie, with disbelief.

‘Fine, fine,’ he said with an effort, standing upright, afraid now, sure he was ill. He sensed, rather than saw, the road
stretching ahead, the hedges on either side, recently trimmed, the fields beyond, the far distant hills, all permeated by
the clear and golden light of the afternoon. There was no darkness anywhere, no feeling of shade, nowhere he might hide.

‘I’m so happy,’ Dotty shouted, running ahead, the bag of food clutched in her arms, the flowered coat trailing on the road.
She wheeled round to face him and the coat flew with her, orange and black. She was like a matador before him, poised on the
tips of her feet, hugging the shopping to her breast. She noticed the pallor of his face, the lankness of his hair upon his
forehead as if he sweated. She waited till he was almost level and said, ‘Balfour.’ And he had to stop, for she was planted
on the road in front of him. She stood so close to him she must surely hear the thudding in his breast. He could smell tobacco
on her breath, see a brown shred clinging to her lower lip.

‘Do you want to sit down?’ she said. ‘You look a bit white.’

He shook his head and they walked on.

‘Joseph always says I can’t walk anywhere,’ said Dotty. ‘I can walk … I can walk miles. Not with him of course … not any more.
We did go for a walk together once, a hell of a long way, talking all the time … all about children and the future and nice
things. When we came to a signpost we just walked right round it – in a circle, still talking – and started back home again.’

Balfour thought everything she said seemed personal and embarrassing. He asked, ‘Don’t you go walking any more?’

‘We don’t do anything much any more,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes
we go out in the car round Hyde Park and things … I quite like that … except for Stephen Ward.’

‘For who?’ Balfour was glad now of her chattering. It forced him to keep moving. It postponed the moment when he must lie
down at the side of the road.

‘Stephen Ward,’ said Dotty … ‘that poor man. I always think of him when I’m going round Hyde Park. There’s so many posh cars
and everyone’s wearing such expensive clothes … I keep thinking he must have driven round the park, all dressed up, with Mandy
Rice-Whatsit beside him. All those parties … all those weekends in the country. Joseph says he was a victim, a sort of present-day
martyr. They used him. Joseph calls him St Stephen.’

‘D-does he?’ Balfour hadn’t meant to shout.

‘I don’t go that far,’ said Dotty. ‘I mean, I don’t know if he was a victim or not. But he must have thought life was smashing.
He felt so in with all that rich crowd and he thought they liked him. When they closed their ranks, he couldn’t believe it.
He thought he was one of them. Lord Denning said Profumo and that lot were misguided. He said Ward was evil.’

Balfour made some sound, a grunt. The blood pounded in his ears. He held the joint of meat tightly in his arms to stop himself
from trembling. The light was growing stronger all the time. It was filling his eyes, obliterating shapes and distances.

Dotty was walking ahead. ‘I bet you Joseph hates my coat,’ she called. ‘I bet you he says something nasty.’ She turned to
look at Balfour, her face forlorn, her features blurred.

The hedgerows reeled backwards. He said indistinctly, ‘Ditch, quick … quick.’

‘What luv? What luv?’

He could feel her arm about his shoulders. She was too heavy for him. She was pushing him to the ground. ‘Please,’ he begged,
his cheek on the surface of the shifting road. ‘Please – ’

During the afternoon, Lionel went for a brisk walk across the fields, returning via his Mini to take a few sips from the whisky
bottle
secreted in the boot. Though he wouldn’t call himself a teetotaller, he wasn’t a drinking man – or hadn’t been until his marriage
to May. He found increasingly that a small drink gave him the uplift he needed to face her at the end of his day. There was
a lot she expected of him – and why not, loving him as she did? He had wanted her to accompany him on the walk, but she had
refused, preferring to lie down on the chintz sofa, with only the thumb-sucking and silent Kidney for company. Roland had
gone to the stream. Lionel would have liked to show one of them, wife or child, wild flowers, tell them what they were called.
There was a certain poetry in the long Latin names. He sat in his hired car, holding the whisky bottle between his knees,
the interior darkened by the haystack that towered above the metal roof of the car.

He remembered a childhood holiday taken at harvest time, when he had been allowed to help the men to stook the corn, holding
the sheaves upright against his perspiring face while they bound the bundles with thin silver wire – four bundles to a stook.
The corn smelt of dried clean paper, scratching the skin of his face, filling his ears with dust. Round and round the bleached
white field went the harvester in ever-decreasing circles, the reverse of the stone dropped in the pond, till all that was
left was a patch of yellow corn waving slowly in the bald field. The men took sticks, waiting for the rabbits to break cover.
He had run with them, leaping over the ground, raising his arm with the peeled white stick held against the sky. The rabbits
ran out, lumpy, slower than he thought possible, disorganized and cowardly, so that he closed his eyes lest he should see
what he did, beating at the clumsy scattering things. The killed rabbits smelt of nothing, there was no blood. Their eyes
soon filmed over and stared straight up at the sky. When hung, they were like sacks of money, all the weight in the belly,
swinging and stupid. He hadn’t forgotten, even now, that first struggle. It had made more impression on him, that first slaughtering,
than the other butcherings he had seen, the human killings enacted in the war. The deaths he had witnessed weren’t terrible,
only the woundings achieved a degree of brutality. Such
killings as he had known had been fragmented, comical – a man blown to bits by a shell, a reconnoitring party of six disintegrated
by a mine. No blood, no after-life in death, nothing to show they had been there; in the ragged trees perhaps or strewn about
the hedges. The wounded, of which he had been one, had smelt of smoke and excrement, lying swollen or shrunken with eyes screwed
up and mouths slack. Spittle at one end and urine at the other. Messy business in the warm and fruitful landscape of Italy.