Perfect Gallows (24 page)

“Please, A. Please!”

Black embers floated up, bobbling around in the rush of water, and then a larger morsel. He paid no attention, letting her fish the knob out with her unburnt hand; the top of the disc and one side of the head were charred dark brown. He fetched the kitchen stool and made her sit sideways to the sink so that she could keep her whole forearm under the water. He took his dressing-gown off and wrapped it round her shoulders.

“How does it feel?”

“Ow, it's sore. I'm sorry, A. I'm sorry.”

“Keep it in the bowl. I'll be back in a minute.”

In the living-room he checked a number on the card by the telephone, pressed the buttons.

“Fritz? Adrian Waring. Woke you up, I'm afraid. Listen, a fairly serious burn to a hand and forearm … Yes, I did that at once. She's still got it under water … Tripped and fell into the fire … I'd be more than grateful … One second—it's clearly hurting considerably … I've got Codeine … Thanks, old boy. See you then.”

He went to the washroom, took pills from a cabinet and set them to fizz in a tumbler which he left on the table by the sofa as he crossed the living-room again. In the kitchen he soaked a tea towel, wrung it, lifted her limp arm from the bowl and gently wound the cloth around it, bandaging the bundle with a dry roller-towel and finally a plastic bin-liner.

“Other arm round my neck.”

“I can walk.”

But she did as she was told and let him lift her from the stool and carry her to the sofa.

“I'm sorry, A. I couldn't help it. Really I couldn't.”

“So I gathered. Drink that. Fritz will be here in ten minutes.” He fetched a rug to cover her, then went back to the telephone. This time he needed to find the number in a pocket diary.

“Louise? … I won't apologize—we all know New Yorkers have evolved to do without sleep. It's Adrian … How very kind of you. Let me guess. A designer sponge? … Then I'll wait and be astonished. How was the trip? … And Benny. That's good to hear—what did you see? … No, I haven't had a chance. A bit stodgy? … That's why I'm calling—we may not be able to make it—we've had a mishap—I won't go into details … Well, I can't at the moment be sure. I think my understudy might be very good indeed, if Benny would be interested to watch a young man seizing his chance … Oh, I would be desolated to disappoint you both, and it may well be all right. I really called to ask about your movements tomorrow, so that I can get in touch when our problem is clearer. Right … Got that … Right … Oh, I shall know before then … No, you're wrong—I had to take three days off from
Misanthrope
in '81 … Very kind of you to say so, my dear. I'll be in touch in the morning.”

He put the receiver down and turned. She had thrown the rug aside and was starting to rise but he squatted beside the sofa and pushed her gently back.

“You mustn't, A. I'll be all right. I won't even have to cook for you. It can't be serious—it was only a couple of seconds. I could come with you if you like and wear a sling, only you'd have to think of a story.”

“You tripped and fell in the fire.”

“All right. It's not hurting nearly as much. It'll be gone in just a few days.”

“Superficially. There is a phenomenon called shock.”

“I'll be all right.”

“Yes, I think you probably will.”

“Then …”

“But I cannot yet be sure whether I shall.”

He rose and stood looking down at her, warming his calves and hams in the ember-glow, until they heard a car come scrunching up the gravel.

August 1944

ONE

S
houlders back, chin in, head against bar, heels on the ground. Right … You bending at the knees, lad? … Then five three and a quarter's the best we can do for you …”

“Hm … Usual childhood illnesses? Polio? … Know your father's height? … Runs in the family, evidently—nothing wrong with that …”

“Here's one just right for the midget submarines! Only joking, lad. You want the navy you got to volunteer, and you're too late for that.”

Queue to have your chest thumped and listened to. Queue to piss in a bottle. Queue for eye-test. Tempter at your elbow all the time—epilepsy, myopia, nameless wheezings … No! When you were seventy you needed to be able to count on your fingers the performances you had missed through illness. Summon such a familiar now and it might nestle inside you through the years. Pure superstition, but real. He couldn't. He let Adrian rattle off the bottom line of the eye-chart.

Then another wait, this time sitting in a side room till a second batch was ready to join them in the written test.

“'ow much choice've we reely got, sarge?”

“Sergeant to you, lad.”

Interest woke at the voice. The sergeant was Education Corps. Andrew had been wondering how you got into that. Gold-rimmed specs, twenty-fiveish but balding, born to become a teacher. And the voice … it was the tone, not the accent, a Midland whine. There was a deadness about it, as if it was numb with the repetition of its own arguments. Know-all, unbeliever, preacher, fanatic, assassin of Czars, builder of glistening cities … One day … If only …

“Sorry, sergeant.”

“You've got just as much choice as they feel like giving you, if you want to know. Just now I wouldn't say you'd got much. Armour's been suffering over in France, and the way they're running this war it'll go on suffering, and that means they have gaps to fill. Drive a car and you'll find yourself learning to drive a tank. Twenty-twenty vision and you'll be finding out how the gun works. Anything else and you're a fitter, no matter how cack-handed you turn out. That's how they do it in the army. It's what we call a microcosm. If you don't learn anything else you'll learn what the world's really like behind the Saturday football and the Sunday sermons. Them and us, that's the army. Them and us, run mad.”

Bicycling the familiar route in the unfamiliar early afternoon Andrew felt not unhappy. He had dreaded the medical, the gateway to his nightmare, but the actual event had been almost neutral. The presence of so many others all going through the same process, none of them liking it, some much more bewildered than he was, had diluted his terror, making it not much different from the others' nervousness. Now there was almost a month before call-up. He had Jean and the play to take his mind off it …

The day was hot and still, with the first reaper-binders clattering round the fields, fighters and fighter-bombers going over a few at a time but all the time. Though the rush of the invasion still crammed the main roads, along the lanes it might almost have been peace again, only without motor-cars and signposts at the road-junctions. He was in no hurry, so walked the steeper hills.

Then everything changed. It was at the crossroads in the woods, where the big ammo-dump had been established under the trees. Each time he had passed it on his week-end trips the seemingly endless ridges of stacked shells had been there, looking as though they were part of the landscape—in a couple of months the leaves would fall and cover them and begin to rot, and in a few more winters they would have become ancient earthworks, there for ever.

The first two ridges were gone.

On his way out that morning he had noticed the lorries turning in to the site but, with his mind on the nightmare ahead, had not been struck by them. Now … It was the speed of the work which appalled him. Lorries were backed up to the third ridge every few yards, with a gang of soldiers at each tossing the shells up and stacking them away. Hundreds of thousands of shells. Shells, anti-tank.

Andrew had little idea what an-anti-tank shell looked like, but in a blink of terror he saw another forest, pines this time, and the uniforms of the soldiers grey, but the shells were the same, hundreds of thousands of them. Many would never be fired. Most that were would miss, but that still left thousands and thousands doing what they were made for … twenty-twenty vision and you'll be finding out how the gun works … in its steel shell, its trap, trundling between French hedgerows … and out in the orchard somewhere another gun-crew, grey uniforms, the sights lining up …

He did not remember crossing the main road. He found himself fifty yards up the lane beyond it, standing on the pedals, slogging frenziedly at the slope. He dismounted, wheeled the bike in among the trees and tried to vomit his terror up. Nothing came.

Back on the road he walked on, pushing the bike. When he had first freewheeled into the shade ten minutes ago he had enjoyed its coolness, but now he felt deadly chill, and even when he trudged up into the open again the sun seemed not to penetrate beyond his shirt into the ice inside him … thrilling region of the thick-ribbed ice … cold obstruction … sweet sister, let me live.

He felt utterly deserted, naked, helpless. Adrian had gone. Adrian had never existed, of course, had never been anything more than a child's imaginary playmate. There was nobody, nothing.

“I thought you were never coming.”

Leaning forward on the handlebars, hypnotized by the front tyre's monotonous reel towards the chalky tarmac, he only knew she'd been there when she spoke—been there all along, sitting on the road-bank with her bike beside her watching him since he'd trudged out from under the trees. She rose, brown and carefree. She was wearing her Land Army uniform, breeches and open-necked shirt.

“Why aren't you milking?”

“I swapped Saturday with Dolly. The binder broke, so she can do it.”

Without giving him time to get rid of his bike she put her arms round him. The slope of the road made her inches taller than him.

“Come to mother, then,” she said.

With the cross-bar against their hips the pose was uncomfortable. She broke off, laughing.

“Cheer up. You're supposed to be glad to see me. Was it foul?”

“Not really. Everyone's got to do it, I suppose. Only …”

“That's never any help. Let's find somewhere a bit private.”

She picked her bike up and walked beside him over the crest of the hill. Twenty yards down a track led off through a broken gate. There was a lark, invisible but singing, high over the thistly rabbit-nibbled pasture, and they could see thirty miles north over a landscape blue and still with summer. The track ended in a chalk-pit with a shepherd's hut on wheels, unused at this season, parked on one side and on the other some rusting farm machinery tangled with briars, but in the middle bare white chalk, too barren for growth. They leaned their bikes against the hut and kissed again. She made herself small for him, holding him tight but pliant to his movements. Her face softened, her eyes became misty. Since that first evening in the eyrie above the dovecote they hadn't kissed seriously in broad daylight—it had always been at least dusk before the Cousins were in bed and he could climb out and steal up the drive to the lodge. Now he was suddenly aware how she had changed in those weeks—no, not changed, but unfolded, opened, at least for him, letting him discover what had been there all along, far more than his original picture of mere childish freshness and romantic sop. She had her own taste, her own odours, which he was the first to explore.

“Keep your mind on the job,” she said, pulling her head away with a joke frown. “It's me doing all the work.”

“I was thinking about you.”

“You think too much.”

Their lips locked again. Her fingers clutched and nuzzled, felt their way in and up under his shirt. There was someone on the rim of the chalk-pit, looking down, benignly amused. Only Adrian, come back. Her right hand slid round between them and felt for her belt-buckle.

“No good,” he whispered. “I haven't brought anything. Didn't expect …”

“Bother.”

The hand had a will of its own. She counted days.

“Let's risk it,” she said. “Just this once.”

“Well, now we're quits.”

“Uh?”

She looked past his head to the shaggy rim of grass above the white walls of the pit. They lay naked, belly to belly on the narrow strip of their clothes they had spread to protect them from the rubbly floor. The sun baked down. Even in the shade of the hut it was very warm.

“It's a sort of amphitheatre,” she said. “Like the one at The Mimms, only steeper. Glad there wasn't an audience. Do you know …”

“What?”

“I was thinking. All that stuff about being certainly a maid and so on, and how vital that is …”

“Prospero needs it to make his magic work. It's sort of in the rules.”

“But I used to feel so stupid saying it—I mean when it was true—and now it isn't I shan't turn a hair. I'll rather enjoy it, I think. Isn't that funny?”

“Told you so. What did you mean, quits?”

“Did I look like anyone?”

“When?”

“Just now. Come on, guess. At the flicks. We argued about her all the way home.”

Dorothy Lamour? Nothing like, and anyway they hadn't. The week before?
Somewhere I'll Find You—
can glamour compensate for ham acting? Discuss.

“Oh, her … I could have told you apart in the street.”

“Don't be clever. I want to know. Did I?”

“Give or take a freckle, I suppose so. A bit.”

“I was trying to. For you. It was a present.”

“Thank you very much. Is there anyone you would like in exchange?”

“You've given them all already, except one. I know I can't have him.”

“Who?”

“Andrew Wragge.”

Before he could answer she rolled him on to his back and pinned him down. He was off the clothes and the gravelly chalk hit into his shoulders. Her green eyes looked down into his.

“The invisible man,” she said. “I was thinking about us, waiting. I came out because I knew you needed me. I felt it last night. You were so frightened. The real you, the person inside. Poor darling, I thought, I'll bike out and meet him and cheer him up. And then you didn't come and you didn't come and I started to think. About us. I've always sort of supposed you'd go into the army and do your bit and then the war would be over and you'd come back and we'd get married and that would be that, like it is in the flicks, but then, sitting there waiting, I suddenly understood it wasn't like that. This is part of the war. It'll all be different when it's over. We'll be different too.”

Four planes, Beaufighters, drummed north above, going back from whatever they'd crossed the Channel to do.

“It was like when somebody switches on a light in a dark room and you suddenly understand the shape of the furniture you've been bumping into,” she said. “I wonder if you love me at all.”

“I love you.”

“Yes, but who's saying that? I know what it's like to love somebody because I love you. I know how much it hurts. I don't think you do. I don't think you can. You've sort of arranged yourself so that nothing can hurt you. You can't risk really being in love. You'll always have to act.”

“So does everyone. Lovers have to act being in love, just like Hamlet has to act being Hamlet. That's what the play's about.”

“It isn't a play. That's what you're never going to understand. You're a magician. You think your magic's real. I suppose it is. You wanted to see if you could use it to seduce me, didn't you? And it worked. You didn't cheat. You kept telling me you were only acting, only I was too stupid to understand. But just now it was the other way round. I was acting Lana Turner for you just now, on purpose, thinking about it, the way you do. And you weren't, not this time. You needed me, didn't you? Not just wanted, really needed. That's what I meant about being quits.”

He lay inert. Their faces were inches apart. Her breath was moist and sweet, like one of her cow's. Her soft weight pressed on his chest, forcing the sharpness of the pit floor into his back. The joint heat of their bodies made the sweat stream down his cheeks. He had no strength in any of his muscles to throw her off. But Adrian was back, close now, hovering above them.

“If you're a magician then I'm a witch,” she said. “I'm going to put a curse on you. It goes like this. One day somebody else is going to understand you, and love you in spite of understanding you, like I do. And you won't know what to do.”

He summoned his selves together and bent his mouth into a smile.

“Was it a good-bye present?” he said.

She lowered her head and licked the tip of his nose, a long stroke like a cat grooming its kitten, then rolled away.

“Just a present,” she said. “But don't you forget—from now on I know your secret, Mr Magician.”

TWO

Stooking looked idyllic, from a distance. Now that the harvest had started Andrew worked at the farm most days. It was expected of him, not just by Mrs Althorp, greedy for unpaid labour, and Cousin Brown with her strong sense of duty, but by everybody, himself included. You were free, so you gave a hand with the harvest. As well as the usual farm people there were often four or five others working in the golden fields, a couple of Italian POWs, an off-duty bobby, the vicar's son, home from Lancing, Jack to manage the horses—there was a war on, wasn't there?

Around nine o'clock—no point in starting till the dew had begun to evaporate—the horse-drawn reaper clattered round the edge of the field, leaving a swathe of mown oats laid flat. Two workers followed, raking them into bundles; behind them two more, each of whom picked up a dozen stalks, twisted them and used them as a cord to tie the loose bundle into a sheaf. It was a knack. Dolly did it without thinking, without even watching what her hands were up to. Being no good at it Andrew took one of the rakes. There was a knack here too, in nudging the mown stalks into a gatherable bundle, which even Brian managed better than Andrew. All this in the quiet of the morning, with the dew-smells, and the cow-smells from beyond the hedge, Dolly humming at her work, the whirr of disturbed partridges fighting away, the coo of pigeons, the last bombers going home.