Essential Stories (12 page)

Our last week came. He quietened down.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’ll stay by you.”

“You can’t,” I said. “I’ll be going abroad.”

“You needn’t pay me,” he said. “I’ll stay by you.” It was hard to make him understand he could not stay with me. He was depressed.

“Get me out of here safe,” he pleaded at last. “Come with me to the station.” He could not go on his own because all the people he knew would be after him. He had told them he was going. He had told them I was saving his pension and his last fortnight’s pay. They would come creeping out of cottage doors and ditches for him. So I packed his things and got a taxi to call for us. How slowly we had lived and moved in these fields and lanes. Now we broke through it all with a rush as the car dropped down the hill and the air blew in at the window. As we passed the bungalow with the sun on its empty windows I saw the fork standing in the neglected bed. Then we swept on. Thompson sat back in the car so that no one should see him, but I leaned forward to see everything for the last time and forget it.

We got to the town. As the taxi slowed down in the streets people looked out of shops, doors, a potman nodded from the pub.

“Whatcha, Jack,” the voices called.

The police, the fishmonger, boys going to school, dozens of people waved to him. I might have been riding with royalty. At the station a large woman sweeping down the steps of the bank straightened up and gave a shout.

“Hi, Jacko!” she called, bending double, went into shrieks of laughter and called across to a friend at a first-floor window. It was a triumph. But Thompson ignored them all. He sat back out of sight.

“Thank Gawd I’ve got you,” he said. “They skin you of everything.”

We sat in the train. It was a two-hour journey.

“Once I strike Whitechapel,” he said in the voice of one naming Singapore, “I’ll be OK.” He said this several times, averting his face from the passing horror of the green fields.

“Don’t you worry,” he said. “Don’t fret yourself for me. Don’t you worry.” His optimism increased as mine dwindled as we got nearer London. By the time we reached London he was almost shouting. “I’ll fall on my feet, don’t you worry. I’ll send you my address.”

We stood on the kerb and I watched him walk off into the yellow rain and the clogged, grunting and mewing traffic. He stepped right into it without looking. Taxis braked to avoid him. He was going to walk to Whitechapel. He reckoned it was safer.

THE LION’S DEN

“Oh, there you are, that’s it, dear,” said the mother, timidly clawing her son out of the darkness of the doorway and kissing him. “You got here all right. I couldn’t look out for you; they’ve boarded up the window. We’ve had a land-mine. All the glass went last week. Have you had your tea? Have a cup of tea?”

“Well, let’s see the boy,” said the father. “Come in here to the light.”

“I’ve had tea, thanks,” Teddy said.

“Have another cup. It won’t take a tick. I’ll pop the kettle on . . .”

“Leave the boy alone, old dear,” the father said. “He’s had his tea. Your mother’s just the same, Teddy.”

“I only thought he’d like a cup of tea. He must be tired,” said the mother.

“Sit down, do, there’s a good girl,” said the father.

“Now—can Father speak? Thank you. Would you like to wash your hands, old chap?” the father said. “We’ve got the hot water back, you know.”

“Yes, go on,” said the mother, “wash your hands. They did the water yesterday.”

“There she goes again,” the father said. “Wonderful, isn’t it?”

“No, I don’t want to wash,” said Teddy.

“He doesn’t want to wash his hands,” said the father, “so leave him alone.”

“It’s hot if he wants to.”

“We know it’s hot,” said the father. “Well, my boy, sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

“Take this chair. Don’t have that one. It’s a horrible old thing. Here, take this one,” the mother said.

“He’s all right. He’s got a chair,” the father said.

“Let him sit where he likes,” the mother said. “You do like that chair, Teddy, don’t you?”

“Well,” said Teddy, “you’re looking well, Mother.” This was not true; the mother looked ill. Her shoulders were hunched, her knees were bent and her legs bowed stiffly as she walked. When she smiled, tears ran to the corners of her eyes as if age were splitting them; and dirty shadows like fingermarks gave them the misplaced stare of anxiety. Her fingers, too, were twisting and untwisting the corners of her cardigan.

“Of course she’s looking well. Nothing wrong with her, is there? What I keep saying,” the father said.

He was a bit of a joker. He resembled a doll-like colonel from a magazine cover, but too easy in manner for that.

“I’m well now,” said the mother. “It’s just these old raids. They upset me, but I get over it.”

“We worry about you,” Teddy said.

“You shouldn’t worry,” said the father. “There’s nothing to worry about, really. We’re here, that’s the chief point. We just don’t worry at all.”

“It doesn’t do any good, Teddy dear,” said the mother. She was sitting by the fire and she leaned over to him and gripped his knee hard. “We’ve had our life. I’m seventy, don’t forget.”

“Seventy,” laughed his father. “She can’t forget she’s seventy. She doesn’t look it.”

“But I am,” said his mother fiercely.

“Age is what you make it,” the father said. “That’s how I feel.”

“There’s a lot in that,” said the son.

“I go to bed . . . and I lie there listening,” the mother said. “I just wait for it to go. Your father, of course, he goes to sleep at once. He’s tired. He has a heavy day. But I listen and listen,” the mother said, “and when it goes I give him a shake and say ‘It’s gone.’ ”

“I don’t want to sound immodest,” the father laughed, “but she nearly has my—my confounded pyjamas off me sometimes.”

“He just lies there. He’d sleep through it, guns and all,” the mother went on. “But I couldn’t do that. I sit on the edge of the bed. If it’s bad I sit on the top of the stairs.”

“We both do if it’s bad,” the father said. “I get up if it’s bad.”

“You ought to sit under the staircase, not on top,” said Teddy.

“Just in case,” said the mother. “I like to feel I can get out.”

“You see, you want to get out,” the father said. “It isn’t that one’s afraid, but—well—you feel more comfortable.”

“I sit there and I know it’s wrong of me, I think of you all, if I’ll ever see any of you again. I wish you were with me. I never see you all, not together like we used to be . . .”

“It is natural for a mother to feel like that,” said the father.

“I mean if we could be not so far apart.”

“We wish you’d come down to us,” Teddy said.

“I wish I could, dear,” said the mother.

“Why don’t you? You could, easily.”

“I’d like to, but I can’t.”

“I don’t see why not. Why don’t you send her, Dad? Just for the rest.”

“I’ve got to stay with Dad,” she said.

“Your mother feels she’s got to stay with me.”

“But,” Teddy said, “you could look after yourself for a while.”

“I could look after myself all right,” said the father. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“Well,” said Teddy, “what’s against it?”

“Nothing’s against it,” said his father. “Just herself. She feels her place is here. She just feels this is her place.”

His father raised his chin and lowered his eyes bashfully. He had a small white moustache as slight as a monkey’s, and it seemed to give a twist to the meaning of his words, putting them between sets of inverted commas.

The mother read his eyes slowly and fidgeted on her stool by the fire. She nodded from habit when she had got through her husband’s words, but she glanced furtively at her son. She put on an air of lightheartedness, to close the subject.

“Some day I’ll come,” she said. “The Miss Andersons are very kind. They had us down last Sunday when the windows went . . . It’s safer downstairs.”

“You know what I feel?” said his father, in a sprightly way. “I feel it’s safe everywhere.”

The son and the mother both looked at the father with very startled concern and sympathy, recognising that in danger everyone lives by his own foible. Then guiltily they glanced at each other.

“I feel it,” said the father apologetically, when he saw their expression.

“I know it,” he asserted, feebly scowling. Seeing he had embarrassed them, he escaped into a business-like mood. “Now I’m going down to see about the coal for the morning. I always do it at this time.”

“He’s wonderful,” said the mother. “He always does the coal.”

When the father left the room a great change came over the mother and son.

“Come nearer the fire, dear,” said the mother. They were together. They came closer together like lovers.

“Just a minute, dear,” she said. And she went to the curtains and peeped into the night. Then she came back to the stool.

“You see how it is, dear,” she said. “He has faith.” The son scowled.

“It’s wonderful, his faith,” she said. “He trusts in God.”

A look of anger set on the son’s jaw for a moment, then he wagged his head resignedly.

“He always did. You remember, when you were a boy?” said the mother, humouring her son. “I never could. He did from the beginning when I met him. Mind you, Teddy, I don’t say it’s a bad thing. It’s got him on. When one of those old things starts he goes to his room and he prays. I know he’s praying. Really he’s praying all the time, for me, for you children . . .”

“For us!” exclaimed the son.

“Yes, for everyone,” said the mother. “The world—oh, I don’t understand. If there’s a God why did He let it happen in the first place?— but your father, he always did do things on a big scale.”

She was speaking in a whisper and glancing now and then at the door.

“Too big,” she murmured.

“If there is a God,” said the son. “He is pitiable, weak, small. Hardly born . . .”

He checked himself when he saw that his mother looked at him without comprehension. “I am old,” she shivered and he saw the tears cracking in her eyes. “I used to live in hope—you know for the future. You know, hope things would go right, hoping things for you children, but now I haven’t even got hope.” She looked wildly. “It’s gone.”

She stared over his shoulder to the walls of the room and the heavy curtains.

“It isn’t this old war and these old raids,” she said. “Life’s gone, it’s gone too quickly. There’s nothing, Ted, that’s how it seems to me, except if we could just be together as we were.”

“Don’t cry, Mother.”

“No, mustn’t cry, mustn’t let him see I cried. Women do cry. It’s silly. What shall we talk about? Let’s think of something else.”

She became sly and detached like a young girl running away, daring him to catch her. He knew these changes of mood in his mother very well. She began to talk in a bold taunting way.

“It’s the house,” she said scornfully. “He doesn’t like the house to be left. Someone must be in the house. It won’t run away I tell him. Good thing if it was bombed. But his mother was just the same, cling on, cling on, scrubbing, polishing. ‘You can’t take it with you,’ I used to say to her. She used to give me a look. ‘Eh,’ she said, ‘you want me to die.’ I can see her now. ‘You wicked woman,’ I said. And when they carried her out, the men bumped the coffin, dear, on the chest of drawers and I thought: ‘If you could see that scratch!’ Some call it faith. I call it property. Property.”

His mother’s eyes became sly and malicious. She laughed.

“Oh, there are things I could tell you,” she cried recklessly, looking at the door. “When it starts and I hear the guns, I think of you. Things you don’t know about, you were just a baby at the time. No one knows them. It’s my life. All those years. Can you hear him? Is he coming upstairs?”

“No, I don’t hear him.”

“No, he’ll be another minute or two. Quick, I’ll show you something. Come along.”

She got up and seizing her son’s sleeve she nearly ran with him from the room.

“You’re not to say anything,” she said.

“His bedroom,” she said. “Look at it.”

It was simply a bedroom with too much furniture in it.

“Three chests of drawers,” the son said. “What does he want with three?” A look of wicked delight came into his mother’s face, a look so merry that he knew he was saying what she wanted him to say.

“Two wardrobes,” he exclaimed.

“Three with this!” exclaimed his mother, touching a cupboard in the corner, as if she were selling it.

“And then—just in case you want to read,” his mother said satirically. She pointed one by one to several reading lamps by the bed, on the chests, on the dressing-table.

“What’s he want five for?” said the son.

“Shave?” said his mother excitedly, opening a heavy drawer. Inside was a number of razors and shaving things of all kinds. She bent to the drawer below.

“Locked,” she said. Undismayed, she led him to the far wall. “Count,” she said. The son began to count. At seventeen he stopped. There were many more than seventeen pairs of boots lined up, and at the end the son stopped with astonishment.

“Riding-boots. When does he ride?”

“He’s never ridden in his life, my dear.”

“Waders, climbing boots . . .” the son began to laugh. “He never fished, did he?—”

“When did he buy all this gear?”

“Oh, we haven’t begun, dear. Look at this.”

One by one she opened the wardrobes swiftly, allowed her son to glance, even to touch for a moment, and then swiftly closed the door. She showed him some thirty suits of clothes and more hats than he could count.

“I’ll try one on,” said the son laughing.

“No,” said the mother, “he’d know you’d touched them.”

“What’s the idea of this hoard? It’s madness,” he said.

The word madness came to his head because, at this triumph of her secret-telling, she looked mad herself. Her eyes stared with all the malice of the mad, intent on their message. Then quickly as a mouse she scurried to the door and listened.

The son stood by the fireplace when she went to the door and looked at a picture over the mantelpiece. It was the only picture in the room. It was a picture of a tall, bareheaded, austere man in ancient robes, standing in the shadows of a crowded place, alone. And in those shadows crouched a prowling group of lions, their surly faces barred with scowls of anger and fear.

“Daniel in the Lion’s Den. He loves old Daniel,” said his mother, coming up behind him. “He’s always talking of Daniel.”

The son gaped at the picture. The room was filled with his father’s life, but this picture seemed to be more profoundly his father’s life than anything in the room. He suddenly felt ashamed of being in his father’s room.

“Let’s go back to the fire,” the son said.

“Look, dear,” the mother was pulling at his sleeve. “Something else, quick.”

She took him to a chest of drawers and opened the drawers one by one.

“Pants,” she said in her deceptive voice, and as she spoke she carefully lifted one or two of the garments. Underneath them was a silver cruet.

“Solid silver,” she said. “Wait. Two dozen teaspoons. A set of fishknives. All silver.”

“Come along, Mother. I know, I know.”

“Silver tea-tray. Kettle,” she was at another drawer, ignoring him.

“Fish-knives, spoons, ink-stands . . .”

“Mother, stop . . .”

“You move this. It’s heavy. Look at this one. Shirts.” She was lifting the shirts and revealing under them a cache of silver cream-jugs, hot-water jugs . . .

“Oh dear,” said his mother. “We never use them. We never see them. He thinks I don’t know. He just comes home and goes straight to his bedroom and slips them in.”

“Where does he pick up all this?” said the son.

“Ask no questions, hear no lies,” said his mother.

“No, seriously, what’s the idea?”

The old lady’s face was marked suddenly by all the bewilderment of a lifetime. She was helpless.

“Don’t ask me, dear,” she said. “It’s him. It’s how he’s always been.”

She looked at her son, exhausted and enquiring. She had suddenly lost interest. She was also frightened.

“Come out, in case he comes. You see, dear, how it is. We couldn’t leave all that.”

She turned out the lights and they walked back into the sitting-room. “You’re looking tired, dear,” she said, in an unnatural voice, making conversation. “Do you sleep well?”

She went over to the curtain again and peeped out as she said this.

“Pretty well.”

She came back to the fire.

“I know. You dream. Do you dream? I dream something chronic. Every night. Your father doesn’t dream, of course. He just sleeps. He’s always been like that. Sometimes I have a terrible dream. I dream, dear, that I’m in a palace, a king’s palace, something like Windsor Castle, and I go into a great hall and it’s filled with—treasure: well, things, beautiful—you know, armour, pictures, china, and I stand there and I can’t get my breath and I say ‘Oh. I must get out.’ And I go out of a door just to get air to breathe . . .”