The Flying Goat (21 page)

‘Ain't much farther. Little way. Two three more fields. Little way, that's all.'

I saw a farm in the near distance, against the woods. ‘Is that your uncle's farm?'

‘Yeh,' Arty said. ‘That's it. That's it.'

‘Where's the nest?' I said. ‘This side the farm or the other?'

‘Other side,' he said. ‘Just other side. Just little way other side, that's all.'

We walked on for another half-hour and then when we reached the farm Arty said he'd made a mistake. His uncle's farm was the next farm. We walked on again and when we reached the next farm he said the same thing. Then the same thing again; then again. Finally I knew that it was time to turn back, that we were never going to see the thing we had come to see. As we walked back across the fields the heat of midday struck down on us as though it came through glass. Clear and direct and sickening on the sun-baked stubbles, it seemed to take away my strength and turn the tears of disappointment sour inside me.

When I got home I felt pale and weak and my feet were blistered and I felt like crying. Then when my mother asked me where I had been I said, ‘With Arty Whitehead, to find an elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree' they all burst out laughing. ‘Why, Arty isn't all there! That's all it is,' they said, and I knew that they were right, and because I knew that they were right, and that what I had hoped to see never existed, I began crying at last.

Since that day, twenty-five years ago, a good deal has happened to me, but nothing at all has happened to Arty Whitehead. I no longer live in the same town; I have been across the world and I have grown up. But Arty still lives in the same town; he has never been anywhere and he has never grown up. And now he never will grow up. He is now a man of nearly forty but he is still the boy who ran after the bubble as big as a melon.

For the last twenty years Arty has worked for a baker. All he does is sit in the cart and hold the reins and tell the horse to stop and go. He does something that a boy of six could do. At the end of the week the baker gives him a shilling or two and every night he gives him a loaf of bread. Arty understands that. He understands the most
fundamental thing about living: a loaf of bread. He understands perhaps all that anyone needs to understand.

Sometimes when I go back home I go to have my hair cut. Occasionally, as I sit in the barber's shop, Arty comes in. ‘Arty,' the men say as they greet him, and I say ‘Arty,' too, but Arty does not recognise me. I have grown up, whereas Arty's face is still the face of a boy. His eyes are still simple and remote and tender and as the men in the barber's shop talk Arty does not listen. He does not need to listen. They talk about Hitler, war in China, Mussolini, the cup-ties, the newspapers, women. Arty does not know who Hitler is; he does not know where China is or what is happening to China; he does not know anything about women. He understands that he wants his hair cut. He understands a loaf of bread.

And there is also one other thing he understands. I sometimes see him walking out of the town. His glassy simple eyes are fixed on and perhaps beyond the distance. He does not walk very fast but he looks very happy. And because I know where he is going there is no doubt in my mind that he is very happy. He understands the most fundamental
thing about living, a loaf of bread, and he also understands the most wonderful.

It seems to me that Arty understands what perhaps the rest of the world is trying to get at. He understands the elephant's nest in a rhubarb tree.

The Thurlows lived on a small hill. As though it were not high enough, the house was raised up, as on invisible stilts, with a wooden flight of steps to the front door. Exposed and isolated, the wind striking at it from all quarters, it seemed to have no part with the surrounding landscape. Empty ploughed lands, in winter-time, stretched away on all sides in wet steel curves.

At half-past seven every morning Mrs. Thurlow pushed her great rusty bicycle down the hill; at six every evening she pushed it back. Loaded, always, with grey bundles of washing, oilcans, sacks, cabbages, bundles of old newspaper, boughs of wind-blown wood, and bags of chicken food, the bicycle could never be ridden. It was a vehicle of necessity. Her relationship to it was that of a beast to a cart. Slopping along beside it, flat heavy feet pounding painfully along under mudstained
skirts, her face and body ugly with lumpy angles of bone, she was like a beast of burden.

Coming out of the house, raised up even above the level of the small hill, she stepped into a country of wide horizons. This fact meant nothing to her. The world into which she moved was very small: from six to nine she cleaned for the two retired sisters, nine to twelve for the retired photographer, twelve-thirty to three for the poultry farm, four to six for the middle-aged bachelor. She did not think of going beyond the four lines which made up the square of her life. She thought of other people going beyond them, but this was different. Staring down at a succession of wet floors, working always for other people, against time, she had somehow got into the habit of not thinking about herself.

She thought much, in the same stolid pounding way as she pushed the bicycle, of other people: in particular of Thurlow, more particularly of her two sons. She had married late; the boys were nine and thirteen. She saw them realizing refined ambitions, making their way as assistants in shops, as clerks in offices, even as butlers. Heavily built, with faces having her own angular boniness, they moved with eyes on the ground. She had saved
money for them. For fifteen years she had hoarded the scrubbing-and-washing money, keeping it in a bran bag under a mattress in the back bedroom. They did not know of it; she felt that no one, not even Thurlow, knew of it.

Thurlow had a silver plate in his head. In his own eyes it set him apart from other men. ‘I got a plate in me head. Solid silver. Enough silver to make a dozen spoons and a bit over. Solid. Beat that!' Wounded on the Marne, and now walking about with the silver plate in his head, Thurlow was a martyr. ‘I didn't ought to stoop. I didn't ought to do nothing. By rights. By rights I didn't ought to lift a finger.' He was a hedge cutter. ‘Lucky I'm tall, else that job wouldn't be no good to me.' He had bad days and good days, even days of genuine pain. ‘Me plate's hurting me! It's me plate. By God, it'll drive me so's I don't know what I'm doing! It's me plate again.' And he would stand wild and vacant, rubbing his hands through his thin black hair, clawing his scalp as though to wrench out the plate and the pain.

Once a week, on Saturdays or Sundays, he came home a little tipsy, in a good mood, laughing to himself, riding his bicycle up the hill like some
comic rider in a circus. ‘Eh? Too much be damned. I can ride me bike, can't I? S' long as I can ride me bike I'm all right.' In the pubs he had only one theme, ‘I got a plate in me head. Solid silver,' recited in a voice challenging the world to prove it otherwise.

All the time Mrs. Thurlow saved money. It was her creed. Sometimes people went away and there was no cleaning. She then made up the gap in her life by other work: picking potatoes, planting potatoes, dibbing cabbages, spudding roots, pea picking, more washing. In the fields she pinned up her skirt so that it stuck out behind her like a thick stiff tail, making her look like some bony ox. She did washing from five to six in the morning, and again from seven to nine in the evening. Taking in more washing, she tried to wash more quickly, against time. Somehow she succeeded, so that from nine to ten she had time for ironing. She worked by candlelight. Her movements were largely instinctive. She had washed and ironed for so long, in the same way, at the same time and place, that she could have worked in darkness.

There were some things, even, which could be done in darkness; and so at ten, with Thurlow and
the sons in bed, she blew out the candle, broke up the fire, and sat folding the clothes or cleaning boots, and thinking. Her thoughts, like her work, went always along the same lines, towards the future, out into the resplendent avenues of ambitions, always for the two sons. There was a division in herself, the one part stolid and uncomplaining in perpetual labour, the other fretful and almost desperate in an anxiety to establish a world beyond her own. She had saved fifty-four pounds. She would make it a hundred. How it was to be done she could not think. The boys were growing, the cost of keeping them was growing. She trusted in some obscure providential power as tireless and indomitable as herself.

At eleven she went to bed, going up the wooden stairs in darkness, in her stockinged feet. She undressed in darkness, her clothes falling away to be replaced by a heavy grey nightgown that made her body seem still larger and more ponderous. She fell asleep almost at once, but throughout the night her mind, propelled by some inherent anxiety, seemed to work on. She dreamed she was pushing the bicycle down the hill, and then that she was pushing it up again; she dreamed she was scrubbing
floors; she felt the hot stab of the iron on her spittled finger and then the frozen bite of icy swedes as she picked them off unthawed earth on bitter mornings. She counted her money, her mind going back over the years throughout which she had saved it, and then counted it again, in fear, to make sure, as though in terror that it might be gone in the morning.

She had one relaxation. On Sunday afternoons she sat in the kitchen alone, and read the newspapers. They were not the newspapers of the day, but of all the previous week and perhaps of the week before that. She had collected them from the houses where she scrubbed, bearing them home on the bicycle. Through them and by them she broke the boundaries of her world. She made excursions into the lives of other people: tragic lovers, cabinet ministers, Atlantic flyers, suicides, society beauties, murderers, kings. It was all very wonderful. But emotionally, as she read, her face showed no impression. It remained ox-like in its
impassivity. It looked in some way indomitably strong, as though little things like beauties and suicides, murderers and kings, could have no possible effect on her. About three o'clock as she sat reading, Thurlow would come in, lumber upstairs, and sleep until about half-past four.

One Sunday he did not come in at three o'clock. It was after four when she heard the bicycle tinkle against the woodshed outside. She raised her head from the newspaper and listened for him to come in. Nothing happened. Then after about five minutes Thurlow came in, went upstairs, remained for some minutes, and then came down again. She heard him go out into the yard. There was a stir among the chickens as he lumbered about the woodshed.

Mrs. Thurlow got up and went outside, and there, at the door of the woodshed, Thurlow was just hiding something under his coat. She thought it seemed like his billhook. She was not sure. Something made her say:

‘Your saw don't need sharpening again a'ready, does it?'

‘That it does,' he said. ‘That's just what it does. Joe Woods is going to sharp it.' Thurlow looked
upset and slightly wild, as he did when the plate in his head was hurting him. His eyes were a little drink-fired, dangerous. ‘I gonna take it down now, so's I can git it back to-night.'

All the time she could see the saw itself hanging in the darkness of the woodshed behind him. She was certain then that he was lying, almost certain that it was the billhook he had under his coat.

She did not say anything else. Thurlow got on his bicycle and rode off, down the hill, his coat bunched up, the bicycle slightly crazy as he drove with one tipsy hand.

Something, as soon as he had gone, made her rush upstairs. She went into the back bedroom and flung the clothes off the mattress of the small iron bed that was never slept in. The money: it was all right. It was quite all right. She sat down heavily on the bed. And after a moment's anxiety her colour returned again – the solid, immeasurably passive calm with which she scrubbed, read the newspapers, and pushed the bicycle.

In the evening, the boys at church, she worked again. She darned socks, the cuffs of jackets, cleaned boots, sorted the washing for the following day. The boys must look well, respectable. Under
the new scheme they went, now, to a secondary school in the town. She was proud of this, the first real stepping-stone to the higher things of the future. Outside, the night was windy, and she heard the now brief, now very prolonged moan of wind over the dark winter-ploughed land. She worked by candlelight. When the boys came in she lighted the lamp. In their hearts, having now some standard by which to judge her, they despised her a little. They hated the cheapness of the candlelight. When they had eaten and gone lumbering up to bed, like two colts, she blew out the lamp and worked by candlelight again. Thurlow had not come in.

He came in a little before ten. She was startled, not hearing the bicycle.

‘You want something t' eat?'

‘No,' he said. He went straight into the scullery. She heard him washing his hands, swilling the sink, washing, swilling again.

‘You want the light?' she called.

‘No!'

He came into the kitchen. She saw his still-wet hands in the candlelight. He gave her one look and went upstairs without speaking. For some time she pondered on the memory of this look, not
understanding it. She saw in it the wildness of the afternoon, as though the plate were hurting him, but now it had in addition fear, and, above fear, defiance.

She got the candle and went to the door. The wind tore the candle flame down to a minute blue bubble which broke, and she went across the yard, to the woodshed, in darkness. In the woodshed she put a match to the candle again, held the candle up at eye level, and looked at the walls. The saw hung on its nail, but there was no billhook. She made a circle with the candle, looking for the bicycle with dumb eyes. It was not there. She went into the house again. Candleless, very faintly perturbed, she went up to bed. She wanted to say something to Thurlow, but he was dead still, as though asleep, and she lay down herself, hearing nothing but the sound of Thurlow's breathing and, outside, the sound of the wind blowing across the bare land.