My Life as a Man (15 page)

The key turned in the lock and the boot lid swung up. The dim light of the interior lamp came on to show the small case. I knew we had to find out what was in it. In the bed-and-breakfast place
the night before, I hadn’t got up the nerve to defy Mrs Morton by opening it. Now, in the secret middle of the night, I didn’t give myself time to think. I slid the screwdriver out of
the tool kit, pushed it under the hasp of the left-hand lock and jerked it up. The same procedure at the other side and the two locks were sprung. I lifted the lid.

The case was full of money.

There was a flicker at the edge of my vision. I jerked my head round and saw a light in one of the upstairs windows. I slammed the boot lid down.

At once the light was gone, so quickly it would have been easy to believe it hadn’t been there at all.

The little square lobby was dark, so lightless I had to feel my way along the wall until I came to the stairs. I went up softly, opened the door on the right, closed it behind me and stood
listening. The skylight had no curtains and in the moonlight I could scarcely see the dim island of the bed. I made out the shape of one sleeper and then I thought there might be two and wondered
if in the dark I had turned myself round and taken the wrong door. I held my breath and heard a sound so soft it might have been the sighing of my own blood in my ears. I crept quiet as an assassin
to the side of the bed.

Mrs Morton was lying on her side. I bent close, and for a horrible second it seemed she had no face. Her face was buried in her hands; that was how she slept. She had shrugged off the blankets
and her nightdress had come up to her waist. With a sigh she turned on to her back, and my nostrils caught the smell of sweat from her sickness mixed with the heavy warmth of her body’s
scent. Step by step, I retreated from the bed.

Trembling, I felt my way down the stairs again, expecting to hear a voice calling that only a thief would creep upstairs in the middle of the night.

When I finally got to sleep, I dreamed that I slipped my hand under the open lid, pushed it between the bundles and felt the money go all the way to the bottom of the case.

Between one moment and the next the windows were pallid with early-morning light. I lay awake, and it came into my head that I wasn’t sure I had relocked the boot. I had to check, and saw
myself crossing the farmyard towards the car. The image was so vivid, I thought I had done it, and started up suddenly as if wakening again out of sleep.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a while and then pulled on my trousers. The fire was out and the room with its thick stone walls was cold. I tiptoed over to look at the shelf of books beside
the chair. In the dim light, it was hard to make out the titles. White and Morrison’s
Geometry
, a blue binding, we’d used it at school; riffling through it, pages of
propositions, each ending in ‘QED’; dull reading it seemed. A thin volume in a dark wine red binding:
Adonis
, by Sir James Fraser. Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury.

I reached for the next book and remembered everything and knew the money was no dream.

As it had in the middle of the night, the front door opened at a touch. In this remote place, there was no need for locks. Who would murder us in our beds? I was smiling at my fears when I
stepped out into the yard.

As I did, the man came into view, straightening up as if he might have been bent over the boot of the car.

‘You’re like me,’ he said. He spoke softly, but it was so quiet each word was distinct. ‘You have trouble sleeping.’

I was holding the keys and put my hand in my pocket to hide them.

‘No, I sleep all right.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I’m not used to the country – being so quiet.’

‘I don’t sleep much,’ he said. ‘But there are consolations.’

When he started to walk, I went with him. Without saying anything, he made it seem as if he expected it. He led the way along the side of the barn on the path Mrs Morton and I had taken the day
before. ‘I’ve seen the world get started every day of my life,’ he said. He seemed a different man from the one who had been so silent and withdrawn the day before. The keys bit
into my hand as I clenched my fist on them. As we went under the trees a wind coming out of nowhere stirred the branches above us. It was like a signal and with every step we took after that it
seemed to get lighter, until by the time we stood by the pool it was morning.

He picked up a handful of small stones and started to throw them one at a time into the water. Ripples from the splashes wove a net across the surface.

‘I missed your name yesterday,’ he said.

I told him Harry, and was about to add Glass when he nodded and said, ‘Harry Morton, right. My name’s August.’

I thought it was a joke but fortunately didn’t smile for he went on perfectly seriously, ‘Like the month.’

I followed the flight of another stone.

‘Up there,’ he said. ‘See?’

The bird was a speck hovering at the end of his finger.

‘A sparrowhawk. Watch now.’

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the hawk folded its wings and dropped. It came down on the opposite bank in a cloud of feathers, the bird it had struck in its swoop held in its
claws. The hawk stood on its prey, looking around. The victim was bigger than the hawk that held it down, a fat brown bird with a white collar, fluttering its wings as the predator dug in its
claws. With an effort, the hawk got a better grip and rose again into the air. As it did, the pigeon or whatever it was tore itself loose. I watched the two of them beat off in different
directions. One to live another day, the other giving up on a kill and curving away in the opposite direction.

After calling it to my attention, he seemed to pay no heed to the drama playing out in front of us.

Another stone went into the water and he asked, ‘What age are you?’

‘Nineteen.’ Nearly. Three weeks would take me to my birthday.

‘And you’ve left school?’

‘Yes!’

‘As soon as you could. Hated every minute.’

I didn’t much care for the way he said that.

‘I liked French.’

‘What’s the French for hunchback?’

‘No idea.’

‘
Bossu
.’ He shook his head. ‘Just as well you gave up. You’d never get Higher French if you don’t know the word for hunchback.’

‘Right.’ I looked for a smile; there wasn’t the faintest trace.

‘Schools matter,’ he said. ‘In Norway the Nazis took all the history books out of the schools. They wanted to have their own books instead. The teachers refused. It shows the
power of ideas. Those teachers knew that ideas matter more than guns.’ I more or less knew where I was with that. It had the sound of a sermon; the church service to end the school year;
Bible Class, that kind of shite. But then he surprised me. ‘We think in this country we won the war,’ he said, ‘that all our guns and armies defeated them. But there’s no
telling whose ideas will shape the world that’s coming.’

‘We won,’ I said. ‘We won all right.’ I didn’t have the courage to say to him he was talking rubbish. ‘I saw the pictures of Berlin. In the newsreels, at the
Roxy in Glasgow. Berlin was flattened. We flattened it.’

‘Ruined cities . . .’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve had plenty of them before, from Troy to Warsaw.’

All I could think of to say was ‘I never saw pictures of them.’

The last ripples from the stones were settling against the sides of the pond.

‘This is a favourite place for us,’ he said. ‘When the weather’s good, we often walk down here after supper. For swimming, sometimes. But it’s deeper than you
think, so you have to be careful.’

‘Safe enough when there are two of you.’ I suppressed a cartoon image of them ploughing solemnly back and forward.

‘Like you and your mother. Lucky for her you were there.’

Realising he thought Mrs Morton had been rescued by me, I hesitated. But then, when I didn’t say anything, he smiled and I wondered if he knew perfectly well what had happened. It was as
if he’d set a trap and I’d fallen into it.

‘My wife won’t swim,’ he said, ‘because she can’t be sure of being private. Not that anyone ever comes.’

For a moment, raw-boned and unsmiling they were naked in the cartoon.

‘What happened to the teachers?’ I asked.

‘In Norway?’

‘I just wondered.’

‘They were shot.’

Of course. What else had I expected?

‘If you want to carry on with your walk,’ I said. I yawned, giving an impersonation of a man who wanted to get back to his bed. ‘I’ll maybe go back and try for another
hour’s sleep.’

The fake yawn set off the real thing. Great gaping teachings for breath stretched my jaws.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Young man like you, once you’re up you should stay up. I’ll walk back with you.’

He picked up a stone, small and white like the ones he’d thrown into the pool, bent to wash it, and then rubbed it dry between his palms. He held it out to me, white and pebble-sized.
‘Souvenir.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Keep it for luck. You could have died here.’

‘Go up and see her,’ she said.

It was a tiny room. Apart from the narrow bed, there was space only for an old wardrobe and a chest of drawers, a chair piled with the clothes she’d been wearing and the big suitcase on
the floor with its lid propped open against the wall. Seeing me look at it, she said, ‘Take what you need. We’re going to have to be here one more night.’

‘What’s wrong?’ I couldn’t manage anything better by way of sympathy.

‘I can see two of you.’ She frowned and narrowed her eyes as if trying to focus.

‘We could go back to Inverness. Find somewhere better than this, somewhere you’d be comfortable.’

‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t travel.’

‘This is a miserable place to be ill.’ The skylight was grimy with dirt on the inside and shaded on the outside with long, caked streaks of dried birdshit. The blue paint on the
walls had faded to the colour of an old man’s eyes. You could tell it had been put on over paper because a long ragged strip had come loose and hung down in the corner by the door.
Incongruously, the clock that sat on the chest of drawers was made of marble with a statuette on top of a woman in a toga with naked breasts. ‘It feels as if it’s never been heated.
Don’t you feel the cold?’

She was sitting half up and her nightdress left her shoulders bare.

‘I’m burning up,’ she said. She rubbed her hand across her mouth. ‘Could you get me something to drink?’

When I came back with the glass of water, she was lying with her arms by her sides breathing through her mouth. I could see her nipples under the nylon, and the curves of her breasts. She opened
her eyes and held out a hand for the glass. When she sipped from it, water ran down her chin.

I didn’t know what to do. ‘Maybe if you ate, you’d feel better,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to bring you something?’ Eating was my solution to feeling unwell. I
knew nothing about illness.

‘I’ll lie down. Feel better if I sleep.’

When I went down, the man, August, had eaten and left already. The woman had put a bowl of porridge on the table. There was a jug of milk and I poured some into the porridge and added a lot of
salt to make it palatable. At home we ate corn flakes. Even when my mother was with us, she’d never fancied porridge. I wondered if she made it now for her lawyer husband in Aberdeen. I sat
spooning up porridge and staring into the bowl.

The woman spoke twice before I came to and realised she was asking me how my mother was.

‘She lay down again. Maybe she’ll feel better once she’s had a sleep. If she does, we should go back to Inverness.’ And I added diplomatically, ‘We could find a
doctor there, if she still feels ill.’

‘My husband says you’ve not to think of moving her till she feels better. And not to worry about money, he says. We won’t charge for putting you up, not when there’s
illness.’

I didn’t feel grateful. I felt trapped.

I wanted to check if the car boot really was unlocked, but when I went out August was working in the yard. He glanced at me and went on piling up logs under the overhang of the nearest shed.
After a minute, I made up my mind and went over and stood behind the car. Ignoring him, I found the right key and slid it into the lock. When I turned it there was a click and the boot
wouldn’t lift. All night, then, it had been unlocked. I took out the key, pulled at the handle to make sure the boot was locked now, and went back inside.

In the kitchen, the woman poured a glass of water and said I should take it up. ‘She’ll need to drink,’ she said.

I didn’t knock the door in case she was sleeping, but surprised myself by being glad to find her awake. When I showed her the glass, she edged up and made little gasping noises as she
sipped the water. I wondered if I should offer to take the coat from the chair and put it back round her shoulders, but realised the little room was warm; the sun had come high enough to flood it
with light.

‘The woman says we can stay until you feel better.’

‘When she was helping me into bed – it was just yesterday, wasn’t it? We came here yesterday? She told me her name’s Beate. That’s right, isn’t it? I
didn’t dream it?’

I shook my head. I couldn’t remember being told a name.

‘Maybe she was embarrassed. And she spelled it for me.’ She spelled out the letters. ‘A German name, I thought. Or Dutch.’

‘His is as bad,’ I said. ‘August. Like the month, he said. Is that a German name?’

She gave a little shake of the head as if she was too tired to answer. And standing there with my head bent under the low ceiling, because I couldn’t think of anything else I told her of
our walk to the pool.