Another part of the wood (22 page)

Joseph waited at the stile for Kidney to return with the milk. He stood listening to the trees shifting in the darkness. When
he heard Kidney blundering towards him, he called out, ‘Is that you?’

Kidney had stopped in alarm, but recognizing the familiar voice he advanced again. ‘I’ve got the milk,’ he said. ‘I didn’t
drop it.’

‘Now look here, my boy,’ shouted Joseph. ‘I want some straight answers. What did Roland mean?’

There was no reply.

‘You remember what he said,’ cried Joseph. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t. He said you showed him your … wee. Those were his words.’

‘Yes,’ said Kidney.

‘Well?’ demanded Joseph. He wanted to strike the fat youth across the face.

‘I didn’t show him,’ said Kidney. ‘In the tower I went to the toilet. He looked.’

Joseph felt enormous relief, and anger that he had been forced by the others to submit the boy to such questioning. Of course
it hadn’t been as they had imagined. There had never been the remotest possibility. ‘Right you are,’ he said. ‘That’s all
I wanted to know. Over you come.’

But Kidney remained on the opposite side of the stile.

‘Come on, boy. Move yourself.’

‘He took away my pills,’ said Kidney. ‘He said you wouldn’t like me to have them. You do let me have them, I said.’

‘What pills?’ Joseph couldn’t wait to return to the hut and berate May for her stupidity.

‘They told me I should take them every day … he kept them in his hand.’

‘Your pills are in the hut,’ said Joseph. ‘I put them somewhere yesterday.’ He hadn’t the patience any more to talk to Kidney.
It was too exhausting. One step forward, two steps back. Impatiently he bade Kidney hurry up and waited for him to climb the
stile and descend heavily into the field.

At the porch Joseph changed his mind. He stumbled in the direction of the barn. Spreading out his arms, he felt with his hands
along the rough wall to the pane of glass. No sound within. Voices from the hut, water running in the sink, the trees shifting
below in the Glen. It wasn’t much use going into the barn, it wasn’t as if he could see anything. He would take a candle over
later. Kidney was still standing in the porch, the milk bottles clutched to his breast.

George was frying something at the stove. He turned with pleasure to greet Joseph. ‘Got them all done,’ he said.

‘Jolly good,’ said Joseph, not knowing what he was on about. He tried to remember where he had put the bottle of pills.

‘My father’s windowsills are white,’ George declared, turning a piece of bread in the hot fat.

Joseph ran his fingers along the edge of the shelf by the cooker and knocked a box of matches to the floor.

‘First we burnt off the old paint. Then we sanded. Then we undercoated,’ George said.

‘Good, good,’ said Joseph, looking about him. Of course the pills were on the shelf above the door, along with the hammer
and the tins of paint. He reached up with certainty, remembering clearly how he had placed them. They weren’t there.

Dotty saw his expression. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said quietly. ‘What’s wrong, love?’

‘What?’ He glanced at her angrily, unable to hear her above the noise of the fat spitting in the pan.

‘What’s wrong?’ she repeated. ‘Was it your little talk with Kidney?’ Her face glowed with a kind of expectancy.

‘For God’s sake stop muttering. I can’t hear a damned word you say.’

It was so unfair of him. She set her mouth in a tight line of inward suffering and fiddled with the ends of her lank hair.
Offended, she turned her face in Balfour’s direction, so that he might see her humiliation.

May was trying to be nice to Kidney. ‘Please,’ she begged him. ‘Do tell me the story about Lear, the one you told Roland.’
She was thinking maybe it was a pretty odd story at that, not quite like Lionel and his temple but along those lines.

‘A king,’ said Kidney promptly, ‘had nowhere to go, and his three children were cruel to him, but the youngest one – ’

‘I think I’ll just go for a breath of air,’ Lionel said abruptly, rising from the sofa and making for the door.

May was uneasy at his attitude, his prolonged detachment. He looked, she thought, ill, shocked. Surely he wasn’t worrying
about Kidney showing his thing to the child? The man was so inconsistent. She was annoyed that he might be concerned about
someone other than herself. ‘Well, bring back the whisky you keep hidden in the car,’ she said spitefully. ‘We’d all like
a drink.’

Out he went without a word, without even a reproachful glance.

‘ … then his nice daughter came for him and looked after him for good,’ Kidney was saying.

‘Is that all?’ she asked, disappointed.

‘No, it isn’t,’ Joseph said loudly, delving into the covers of the sofa. ‘Move,’ he bade Balfour curtly.

‘Well, what else?’ enquired May, wondering why he couldn’t sit still but always had to be tidying things.

‘When he finally did go off with his daughter somebody killed her by mistake. It was an accident, but his fault.’

‘How dreadful.’ May followed Lionel in her head, stepping uncertainly through the field.

‘It wouldn’t have been right,’ said Kidney, ‘to have told Roland that. I knew it, but I didn’t say it.’

Joseph sat down on the sofa and looked sideways at the uncomfortable Balfour, as if to say ‘Isn’t that remarkable?’ Beyond
Balfour’s ear he glimpsed Roland’s clothes neatly folded for the
morning, laid down on the stove. He rose again and sat on the stove top, feeling with his hands behind his back for the outline
of the pill bottle in the pocket of the boy’s shorts. No, not there. He went to the sink and took up the stub of candle used
by Lionel the previous night.

Curiosity overwhelmed Dotty. ‘What are you doing now?’

He told her he was going to have a look at Roland.

‘What for? What’s wrong?’

He shouted at her now. ‘Because I bloody well choose. Mind your own blasted business.’

For a moment she was infected by his anger. ‘I
will
mind my own bloody business,’ she said. ‘I
will
mind it …’

But already he had gone from her out of the door.

‘You’ve forgotten your blasted matches. God,’ she screamed, running after him and flinging them into the pool of grass. Then,
spent, she came back into the room and sat down at the table, banging her two fists impotently against her bony knees, the
colour leaving her cheeks.

No one spoke. May was smiling, turning the diamond ring round and round her finger.

‘I shall go tonight,’ said Dotty, forced to speak. ‘I shall go now and not wait for the morning.’

‘That’s right,’ said May, not really caring for the idea. It placed her and Lionel in an isolated position.

‘I must go at once,’ Dotty said loudly, looking at Balfour.

‘Ah yes,’ he said, embarrassed by her impulsiveness and the presence of George.

She seized him by the hand and dragged him to his feet. She was pulling him towards the partition. ‘I must pack my clothes,’
she cried. ‘My clothes and my lovely coat.’

‘Steady on,’ he said, stepping into the cubicle with her, feeling foolish as she closed the partition and bound them in darkness.

‘Balfour, I do have to go … You do see that. I’m terribly sorry – ’

‘It’s none of my business,’ he told her awkwardly. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

He didn’t see why she was apologizing to him. It wasn’t him she was leaving.

Outside in the room May was telling George that the air was very fresh in the countryside. ‘So fresh and breezy,’ she said,
detesting Lionel for going off and leaving her with the giant.

George put his plate into the sink and came to sit at the table, looking at her with that melancholy expression on his face.
He said nothing.

‘You’re used to it, of course. Me, I’m knocked out. All this marvellous air.’ There was daft Kidney staring at her with his
skin coloured like a rose. ‘I think it’s just beautiful round here … so peaceful.’ The way George never answered upset her
dreadfully. She couldn’t bear his long sorrowful face and those sloe-shaped eyes. He always seemed to be judging. She fidgeted
in her chair. She could hear Dotty opening drawers in the cubicle and Balfour’s voice, hesitant and muffled. The girl was
quite mad, rushing off in the middle of the evening without transport. It was unforgivable of her to leave Lionel and herself
alone. She told George she thought Dotty was mad. Still he chose not to speak. She said rudely, ‘I’ll keep quiet, if you like.’
It was like talking to a brick wall.

The partition of the cubicle was pushed back and Dotty came into the room with her suitcase. Self-consciously Balfour stood
behind her, blinking in the light of the paraffin lamp.

‘Well, I’m off now,’ said Dotty, standing there with her suitcase. She had hoped Joseph would have returned in time to prevent
her departure. She had very little money and there were no buses going anywhere.

‘Don’t forget your hat,’ the smiling May told her, thinking how silly the girl was, how irrational. Fancy letting a man upset
you so much that you were forced to walk about the countryside all night. She hoped Dotty wouldn’t meet Lionel in the field
and ask him to drive her to the village.

Putting the black sou’wester on her unkempt hair, making a clumsy gesture of farewell, Dotty went out of the hut. She was
surprised to see a full moon, white as milk, risen above the trees, bathing the field in light. How bright it was, how romantic.
The size of her nose wasn’t important. She could see the delicate glimmer of the young birch trees lining the path down into
the Glen.

Joseph had lit the stub of candle and placed it on the washstand. The barn was cluttered with beds: the one that had done
duty as a litter for the collapsed Willie propped on its end against the far wall, Kidney’s bed, Balfour’s mattress still
on the floor, blankets crumpled, the cot shared by Lionel and May. He had to climb over the cot to reach his son.

The child lay on his stomach with one hand raised in protest against the pillow, face turned sideways. When Joseph stooped
down to smooth back the hair from the boy’s brow the skin was cool to his touch. Roland slept peacefully. In the morning he
would wake refreshed and they would go down to the stream together and he would say where he had hidden the bottle of pills
and why he had done so. It had only been a childish prank. Relieved, Joseph snuffed out the candle flame between his fingers
and shut the barn door. There was Lionel walking across the grass.

Lionel had encountered Dotty behind the stile and had shaken her hand formally He had expressed no surprise that she was leaving,
nor did he offer to drive her anywhere in his car. He was in a no-man’s-land. ‘Take care of yourself, my dear. Mind how you
go.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ Awkwardly she had nodded her head and let go of his hand. ‘Please tell him I’m sorry,’ she called impulsively.
‘Please tell Joseph I love him.’ But already he was climbing the stile and he didn’t turn his head.

It’s true, she thought, wading the shadow of the haystack and seeing the road set like a river between the hedgerows. It’s
the truth that I love him. Still, she was glad to be free – if not yet emotionally, then geographically. A great burden had
been lifted from her. The relief was such that she imagined that if she spread
her arms she might yet fly above the ground. She had escaped. She swung her suitcase back and forth and began to skip along
the luminous road.

May had seen Lionel approaching from where she stood at the window. She could hear him talking to Joseph, gravely, all the
bounce gone out of him. She cried out sharply, ‘Did you get the drink, Lionel?’

‘There wasn’t any whisky,’ he said, entering the hut.

George boiled a kettle of water and carried it outside to the bracken. He rested the kettle on the grass and squatted on his
haunches, probing with his fingers for the exact location of the wasps’ nest.

Kidney stood in the doorway and watched George curiously, looking at his great boots that reflected the moonlight and the
metal kettle that glittered in the undergrowth. When George poured the water down through the tangle of leaves and fern, Kidney
raised one arm above his eyes as if avoiding a blow. He didn’t understand what was happening. He moaned, overcome with dread,
rubbing his arm against his eyes. Joseph shook him by the shoulder and asked him what was wrong. He looked beyond the distressed
youth to George and told Kidney there was nothing to fear.

‘Dotty’s gone,’ said Kidney. ‘She ran away. She took her hat.’

‘Oh.’ Joseph shrugged and turned away, hardly concerned. She wouldn’t go far.

When he came back in with the kettle, George suggested they should play another game of Monopoly. He looked from one to another
of their faces. ‘I should enjoy it,’ he said in his calm and weary manner.

Joseph had involuntarily shaken his head in refusal. He stood in the centre of the room and said undecidedly, ‘Well, if you
feel like that – ’

George said he would fetch some paraffin from the store shed first, as the lamp was burning low. ‘Set the game,’ he told May,
taking up the polythene container from beside the cooker.

‘Shall we?’ she asked, once he had gone, looking to Balfour for a decision. Joseph had climbed on to a chair and was searching
the shelf carefully.

‘Hold the lamp up for me,’ he told her, and she did as he asked, keeping it away from her face, disliking the smell of the
drying wick.

‘Roland took my pills,’ Kidney said, watching them both. ‘He took away my bottle.’

Joseph looked down into the upturned face of May, the calculating eyes softening with alarm, the mouth, black under the held-aloft
lamp, opening to shout an accusation, a criticism. ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘They’re about somewhere.’

The harsh tone of his voice and the contempt in his eyes silenced her. She set the lamp on the table and bent her head to
hide her feelings, which were mixed. She was instinctively certain that Kidney had given the child the pills. She thought
Joseph was a fool, he would dismiss as nonsense anything she might say. Well then, let him take the consequences.