The Good Father (7 page)

Chapter 6

Hope hardly spoke in the car. As I drove her to the Redmans' house I tried to think of something to say to her so she'd feel easier about this party. Try as I might, I couldn't; every opening I thought of seemed too stilted or worse, too childish. I imagined telling her about the drawing I intended to give her of the woodcutter's encounter with the goblin. But isn't
goblin
such a silly word? It certainly struck me as such as I drove Hope to the party. And the drawing itself is silly – why would a sixteen-year-old girl want such a thing? As I desperately hunted for something to say, I couldn't help taking my eyes off the road to glance at her from time to time. I thought how lovely she looked in her pretty party dress. She wore a necklace around her slender neck that had belonged to her mother Carol. More and more these days, she looks like her mother. She has the same quiet determination, too; I remember that Carol was always very single-minded in getting her own way.

At last, laughing inanely, I said, ‘Do you think there'll be jelly and ice cream, or canapés?'

She gazed out of the window. ‘I don't know.'

Blundering on, I said, ‘Perhaps there'll be champagne.'

I was ignored. She was resolutely turned away from me, her hands clasping the neatly-wrapped present on her lap. Her hands are very small and white, her fingernails short and round and pink as the inside of shells.

I said, ‘What did you buy her?'

‘Chocolates.' She looked down at the gift, smoothing the wrapping paper before turning back to the car window. After a moment she said, ‘Milk Tray.'

Her necklace was a silver crucifix, the tiny figure of Christ suffering at her throat. Her fingers went to it as if to check that the crucified figure faced outwards, a nervous gesture that made my heart ache with sympathy for her. I know how shy she is, like me, know how difficult it would be for her to walk into a room full of people like the Redmans. I'm afraid I allowed my sympathy for her to run away with me because I said clumsily, ‘You look lovely, Hope, there's no need to feel awkward . . .'

She glanced at me, a sharp, frowning look, only to look away again.

Of course, I couldn't take the hint and be quiet. I was too full of the idea that I could somehow make her feel less nervous, a near evangelical zeal to make her understand that I empathised with her. Too fervently, I said, ‘You imagine that you'll say or do something foolish, but you won't. You are young and lovely and charming –'

‘Could you stop, please. I can walk from here.'

I looked at her in surprise, already slowing the car for a red light. As we came to a stop she opened the car door. ‘Thank you for the lift.'

‘Hope –'

She turned to me. ‘It's not far from here, I can walk.'

‘No.' Dismayed, I caught her arm to prevent her from getting out of the car. ‘I promised Jack I'd see you safely there.'

She pulled back from me as though desperate to get away. The lights had changed to green; the driver behind me honked his horn. Hope jumped from the car and began to walk quickly. Crossing the junction, I pulled the car into the side of the road and got out to stand in front of her.

Hope stopped, then made to walk round me. Following her, I said, ‘Hope, please get back in the car and let me take you to the party as I promised Jack.'

‘I'd rather walk.' She looked at me with the kind of insolent dislike I'd seen so often before on the faces of her schoolmates. She might just as well have slapped me for the pain it caused. I stepped back from her, that familiar sense of humiliation having its usual, shaming effect. I smiled, and it was the kind of creeping, ingratiating smile one gives to bullies, even though this was Hope. Through the pain I felt an even greater sense of shame that she could make me feel so abject.

She moved past me and all I could do was watch her walk away.

Late afternoons have always been the worst time of day for me, the time when I can no longer concentrate enough to work and the evening stretches out ahead of me, time I have to somehow fill with reading, or listening to the wireless, passive pastimes that make me feel as though I've been caged, although when I actually was imprisoned I would long – pray, in fact – for such routine, such small comforts. At times in the camps, I would organise lectures to help pass the dark evenings. The lecturers were only fellow prisoners, of course, men who'd had interesting professions in their former lives and felt up to entertaining us. More often than not we were all too exhausted, too ill and listless either to talk or to listen, but sometimes the effort was made. I look back on those few times with a kind of wonder that we could behave so normally.

This afternoon I drove home and went straight to bed, thinking I could block out the anger I felt with myself – and with Hope if I am scrupulously honest – if I slept. I wanted to sleep the whole of the wretched evening away, sleep right through until morning when I'd have the will to work. But of course, I had to go and collect Hope, risking her scorn again. I found myself staring at the ceiling, going over and over that journey with her in the car and the way she had looked at me on the street with such contempt. I am a grown man and yet I was made to feel like a schoolboy with that look of hers. Of course, my feelings are my own responsibility and she was anxious about that party – this is the excuse I give her to comfort myself with – only to remember that she looked at me as though I was despicable.

But shouldn't I be used to being despised? I have been despised and humiliated by masters of the craft, by true sadists. Humiliation is standing naked before a fellow officer while he slaps you across the face, knowing you have to slap his face in return – a bizarre ritual punishment we all too often had to perform. Humiliation is being kicked up the backside by a tiny Korean guard, and being kicked again when you stumble. It is not merely being dismissed by a young girl in a tantrum. Her eyes were so angry, bright and blazing, her pale cheeks flushed. Even feeling as pathetic as I did, I couldn't help thinking that she was beautiful.

But I
am
despicable, in reality, and possibly she senses just how despicable I am.

Perhaps I should write my story down so that she might read it and imagine I'm ordinary.
Once upon a time
. . .

Once upon a time, a young man of twenty knelt at the feet of a Japanese soldier, the point of a bayonet scratching at his throat. This Japanese soldier – an officer –spoke remarkably good English with the slightest trace of an American accent. Odd what one notices even when one thinks death is imminent. I believed truly that I would be killed right there and then. I trembled. I had been ordered to place my hands on my head so that my elbows stuck out at sharp angles and I trembled so badly I could feel my fearful vibrations through my skull. I wasn't a very edifying sight for my men. They knelt too, behind me and to one side; I could hear Johnson praying softly until one of the Japanese soldiers used his rifle butt to silence him. I spoke then, and I tried to sound reasonable, although my voice quavered and faltered and the bayonet seemed about to slice through my vocal cords. I said, ‘We have surrendered. We are prisoners of war and should be treated accordingly.' I waffled, woolly-headed with fear, although some sharp, defiant part of me wanted to say that if they killed us, they would be murderers. Some men would have said that, I think. Some men would have been beheaded right there and then.

The officer withdrew his bayonet. He gazed over my head, a distant look on his face as though wrestling with his conscience. He looked weary, almost as dishevelled and sweat-stained as we were, and for a moment of absurd naivety I thought he might empathise with us and thus take pity because he had been through the same bloody experience. But then he looked at me, and it seemed he saw for the first time what a pathetic creature I was – an excuse for a soldier. He shouldn't have been demeaned by having to converse with me, nor have his conscience troubled by our continued existence; we should have been lying butchered at his feet – the honourable dead. Because I wasn't a respectable corpse, he drew back his arm and hit me hard across the face. I toppled to the ground and felt his boots smash against my ribs.

What if I were to tell all this to Hope? What if I were to tell anyone, in fact, as I have not spoken about my experiences to a soul. Jack suspects a little, I think. On reflection
suspects
is the right word. It wasn't quite the
done thing
to have been taken captive by the little yellow men in Jack's opinion, I'm sure. Not that he would say as much. We all keep very quiet on this shameful subject.

That Japanese officer broke two of my ribs. I never saw him again, he was just the first in what I began to believe was a never-ending line of sadists and bullies. At first it was hard for me to take in the fact that there were so many such men and none that would take the slightest pity on us. We were contemptible, and the more they starved and beat us, the more ragged and naked and wasted we became, the less it seemed we deserved. Then, as I write this, I remember that of course in their eyes we didn't ever deserve anything, we were merely tools to be thrown away when broken. There was nothing personal, apart from the irredeemable disgrace of being captured in the first place.

I try not to dwell on the past.

Paradoxically, the past has held me captive, just as surely as if this house was surrounded by impenetrable jungle.

Still, I tell myself everything is grand, now. My father is finally dead and freedom is within my grasp. The jungle beckons, full of dangers and rewards.

Then I think of Hope and am as scared as I ever was that the past and all its truths will come out. I think of Carol, her mother, and am doubly ashamed.

I knew Carol before Jack did. We met one fine Sunday afternoon when I was sketching the ducks on ThorpPark lake. She stopped and stood a little behind me, watching, and so of course I became self-conscious – I would never sketch in public nowadays. I eventually put my pencil and pad down, wanting to pretend I had not been doing anything as ridiculously pretentious as sketching. But she went on standing there and I was so aware of her eyes on me that I hardly dared move, afraid that if I did she would laugh or make some jeering comment. My ears began to burn. On the lake, the ducks began to gather, swans too, because if people stop near them they expect bread as much as I expect ridicule. At last, she came to stand in front of me.

‘Have you finished it?'

‘Pardon?'

She nodded her head towards my sketchpad. ‘Your drawing – it's very good. I wish I could draw. I can't draw a thing! Stick men, maybe, stick men standing outside square houses with triangular roofs.'

The pad had begun to flap in the breeze and I held it down on my knee, my hands covering it so she couldn't see my drawings of mallards. To my surprise she sat down beside me, gazing at the ducks. ‘Will you draw the swans, too? They're so elegant.'

‘They're vicious,' I said, and blushed.

She smiled at me. ‘My name's Carol, by the way. They called me Carol because I was born on Christmas Eve – isn't that horribly embarrassing?'

‘No, not really.'

‘Well, I think it is. Silly, anyway. If I had been a boy they would have called me Noel. Dreadful. Still, they're all right, really.'

‘They?'

‘Mummy and Daddy.' She twisted round and pointed to the big houses behind us, their gardens running down to the park's boundary. ‘I live there, in that house with the flagpole. Daddy's
very
patriotic. I have no brothers or sisters, do you?'

‘No.'

‘Rotten, isn't it? They both have
masses
of brothers and sisters, but they all went to live in India or Canada or Australia – I have an uncle in South Africa, even. He sent me a real-life Zulu's shrunken head – would you like to see it?'

‘I don't think Zulus shrunk heads.'

‘It wasn't shrunk by a Zulu – it
belonged
to a Zulu, as it were . . .' She trailed off, puzzled for a moment before her face brightened again. ‘Anyway, it is rather interesting. Horrible, but interesting. You're probably right though, being a boy.'

I laughed, astonished by her because I had never heard anyone talk so freely, so happily about nothing very much. She wore a bright pink and green tartan tam-o'-shanter and a matching scarf and mittens, muffled up like a little girl, her cheeks pink with the cold. Her eyes were the clearest, most brilliant blue, as lively as the sunlight on the lake. A strand of her thick, golden hair fell out from beneath her hat and she pushed it back, smiling at me.

Later – years later – the day I was sent overseas, she told me that in the park that afternoon she had wanted me to say something, ask something, just so she would have to stop talking. ‘You know how much I talk . . .'

‘No.' I kissed her. Held her face between my hands and kissed her again and again, her mouth, her eyes. She didn't return my kisses. She was crying, and I tried to comfort her, to say that I would be home in no time, no time at all. She only drew back from me, placing her hands on my chest as if to ward me off, her palms flat against my chest, pushing gently, her head bowed because she couldn't meet my eyes.

Quietly she said, ‘Keep safe.'

I laughed. ‘I will, of course. You know me.'

‘Yes, I know you. I know that you don't realise how precious you are.'

Precious
. As if I was a stone dug from the earth, a hard, inanimate thing without feeling. I should have told her that I loved her. That, in fact, I had loved her since the moment in the park when she first smiled at me. I thought she didn't want to hear me say that; perhaps she did.

In the camps sometimes we would receive letters, rarely, but sometimes the Japanese would allow us a little contact from home. For many men it was a great comfort; they would go off on their own to find a private place to read their letters from wives and sweethearts, from mothers and fathers. Needless to say, I received no letter at all. She thought I was dead. That's what she told me, that was her excuse. She thought that I wasn't the type of man who could survive. I was a will-o'-the-wisp, a fey boy who drew ducks in the park. She looked so shocked when she saw me on the street a few weeks after my return. Her face paled so dramatically I thought she was about to faint.