Waterland (36 page)

‘Dick, your mother wants to see you. Dick—’

He won’t let Dick slip back into his cocoon of sleep. He shakes him; pulls off the covers. Makes him stumble out, in his pyjamas, into the freezing draughts of the room. Fetches his dressing-gown from the hook behind the door.

‘Your mother wants to see you. Quiet. Be quiet.’

He leaves Dick to step for a moment towards my bed. I sense him stooping over me. I feign the deep breathing of undisturbed sleep. Outside the wind utters its own restless gasps. Then he returns to Dick and propels him without another word out of our room, shutting the door behind him.

So this is the hour of my mother’s death. Then why only Dick? Then why should Dick and not I—?

But it can’t be the hour of my mother’s death. Because a few seconds later I hear the door across the passage open again, then close, and footsteps make their way downstairs. They’re Dad’s footsteps. So Dick is alone with Mother.

The wind moans and judders at the window, masking other sounds. Your history teacher tumbles from his bed, tiptoes across the floor, crouches by the door, not minding the icy fingers which play about his toes, and listens. He hears the faint, laboured tones of his mother, but distinguishes scarcely a word. However, these are not the tones of valediction but of earnest injunction. He makes out (or does he? Did he supply them six years later?) the words ‘Open’ and ‘Eighteen’. He hears Dick – for it cannot be Mother, she cannot have got so miraculously to her feet again – cross the room and (or so he fits actions to sounds) pull out a drawer in the chest of drawers which stands in the far corner of the parental bedroom, fumble amongst its contents, then return to the bedside. His mother’s voice drops, even from its previous husky level (all this while
Dick, it seems, says nothing); then rises again to a sudden desperate intensity:

‘Dick … Dick … darling Dick …’

And from Dick a single, blockish, vaguely inquisitive, ‘Mummy?’

Now why Dick? Why his name – even when his brother Tom opened the door?

But no time to think further on the matter. No time – as this baffled eavesdropper has almost a mind to do – to burst open doors, to dash across the passage, to fling himself upon his mother’s brittle form and to demand, why not him? Why this exclusion? Some last word for him too?

Because he hears the latch on that farther door being lifted: Dick is coming out. And at the same time he catches Dad’s tread at the foot of the stairs. So all along he’s been loitering there? Straining perhaps, too, to hear?

He darts back to his bed; and almost simultaneously with Dick’s opening the door and entering, dives beneath the covers and resumes the attitude (though with a heartbeat no sleeper ever had) of unbroken repose.

And almost simultaneously with Dick’s reappearance, Dad’s tread hastily mounts the stairs and Dad enters again through the door that Dick has not yet shut. He ushers Dick back to bed, just as surely as he roused him before. And Dick, who throughout this strange episode must have remained in a state verging on somnambulism, so that, come daylight perhaps, it will all seem like a dream, is in no condition to resist Dad’s bidding or to ask him (Dick, who never asked questions – till he asked one big and fatal one) what all this is about.

Yet Dad, while he busily tucks the blankets round Dick, has the unmistakable air of a man who’d like to ask questions, who’d like to make sure of something. Yet restrains himself; thinks twice about it … Better to rely on this sleepy stupor, better to rely on this inveterate ignorance. ‘Go to sleep now, Dick. Go to sleep …’

As if he might be saying, ‘And forget everything, forget everything …’

There’s something Dick knows that perhaps he shouldn’t. There’s something Dick’s come by Dad would rather he hadn’t.

And so there is. Because after Dad leaves – after first checking once more that little Tom is sound asleep – Dick puts something, something that rattles metallically, something that must have been clenched all along in one of his over-large hands, on his bedside cabinet.

A brass key.

I wait for the rhythm of Dick’s snores to return. I creep out of bed and in the shivery darkness feel that mysterious object on the bedside cabinet. A key. Yes, a key. I return to my bed. I lie awake. No more sleep for me that night. I listen to the wind. I hear carried on its blasts and thus rendered somehow crazy and random like the sound of a bell flying through the air, the chimes of Hockwell church. The thinnest of gauzy lights penetrates the room from under the door. So the light is on, across the passage, where Dad sits with Mother. I imagine I hear – but surely it is some trick of this deranging wind – the sound of subdued human sobs.

Ah, wild, pitiless wind, blowing through the small hours of the twenty-fifth of January, 1937. In such a wind St Gunnhilda would have crouched in her wattle cell, hearing the roaring of the Devil. In such a wind old Jacob Crick would have cowered in one of his windmills (its sails removed, tail-pole lashed to the ground), expecting at any moment the whole creaking edifice to be blown to kingdom come …

Dawn breaks on the morning of January the twenty-fifth. Dick – who just as unfailingly as he sleeps soundly at night is unfailingly aroused by the first glimmering of day –
wakes. His clenched eyes part. They stare at a brass key. So it wasn’t a dream; it really happened. Then they stare at me, awake in the other bed, staring also at the key and at Dick staring at the key. And no sooner does Dick’s stare catch mine than a hand shoots out from beneath the bedclothes, grabs the key and plucks it out of sight – as if the very swiftness of this action will make it seem that it never occurred and no key had ever been there in the first place.

Now, if Dick had never caught me staring so intently at the key perhaps he would never have come to the conclusion – or given away so plainly that he had done so – that this key must be a special key.

But I don’t mean to leave things here. I get out of bed. As if to defend his territory, Dick gets out of bed too. The key is either wrapped inside his fist or lodged in some fold of pillow or sheet. His eyes flutter. I am about to say – in a voice neither too importunate nor too mildly disinterested – ‘Dick, what’s that key?’

But I don’t. Because it’s at this precise moment that Dad opens the door and, since he finds us both out of bed and close enough to each other to come within the span of his arms, gathers us in that crushing, never-to-be-forgotten embrace which can only be described as maternal; and with a face already anointed and now turning rapidly again to liquid, says, ‘Children,’ (yes, he called us that) ‘your mother’s gone. She’s gone. Gone.’

Gone.

And so too – because despite this rending announcement everything around us is strangely steady and still: the Leem is calm, the sky beyond the windows is smooth, clear, sea-shell pink – has the wind.

So we buried Mother in Hockwell churchyard. And Dad began to grow flowers in a corner of the vegetable patch to place upon her grave. Though, flowers or no flowers, scarcely a day passed by during those following months
when he did not visit that patch of bumpy grass behind the church and loiter there, abandoning his lock-keeper’s duty for a duty that he clearly regarded as more consuming and imperative. Sometimes I went with him, watched him at a distance, this strange man who was also my father. And during these sorrowful excursions of Dad’s, Dick – excused now more or less permanently from school on account of both his classroom ineptitude and the recent loss sustained by his family – learnt, as he’d begun to do when Mother first took to her bed, to take command of the lock. To acquire (no one told him, it came by instinct) the knacks and know-how of the waterside; to deal with lighters and barges; to maintain that precarious yet vital relationship between river and sluice. And thus it was during this period – this period not only of graveside meditations but of moonlit eel-fishing and sleepless moochings on the tow-path – that the already thin spectre of Dick’s education faded and vanished altogether; that headmaster Allsop concluded and Henry Crick agreed, that if there was little brain there was no lack of serviceable brawn. And that there arose between Dad and Dick, now that they shared the same labours, a kind of special bond; but a bond, which if you observed closely, was built not so much on trust and co-operation as on the desire of the former to keep a close and careful watch on the latter.

Thus, urged by both natural inclination and his father’s attentions, Dick grew up to be a true descendant (so one might have said) of his dogged, water-taming, land-preserving Crick ancestors.

Save that Dick—

But all this is to leap ahead – and to pass over the immediate effects of that terrible January dawn.

Now Dad, it is to be noted, while he clasped us so fervently in his arms, did not utter the word ‘dead’. The word he used was ‘gone’. And throughout the succeeding
days, despite Doctor Bright’s arrival to complete the death certificate, despite Mother’s transference from bed to coffin and, with due accompanying ritual, to her grave, he never let pass his lips either the word ‘dead’ or the word ‘death.’

And while there is much to be commended in the use of that euphemism ‘Gone’ before two sons, one too young perhaps and the other too doltish to understand, there is also much to be questioned. For ‘Gone’, in such circumstances, is a far more elusive word. To little Tom, whose whole life might have been different if his father had told him what his infant heart was already braced to accept – that his own Mum was dead, no more, finished, extinct – this word ‘Gone’ carried the suggestion of some conscious, if perverse decision on his mother’s part, as if she had not ceased absolutely to exist but was somewhere very far away, inaccessible, invisible, yet still there.

‘Gone’, in other words, echoed with mystery. Whilst ‘dead’ is a blunt and natural phenomenon. ‘Gone’ – awesome and open-ended – required explanation. It made your infant history teacher’s mind – which was getting on quite well with ‘What’ and ‘How’ first throb to the gong-beat of Whywhywhy. (And we know what that led to.) It made him set out, in ways of which he was scarcely conscious and over which he had scarcely any control, to find again, at least to revive in some new form (ah, bashful, yearning railway journeys …) the image of his departed Mummy.

And thus little Tom’s reaction to his Mother’s death, for all its protracted after-effects, was perhaps no different in essence from the crude response of his brother, which had it ever been voiced – amidst all his blinking bafflement – might have amounted to: ‘Well, if she’s gone, when is she coming back?’

And as for Dad: had he used that word ‘Gone’ merely out of consideration for his children? For if he really believed himself that Mother was no more and not
somewhere where communication, if ever so distant, were still possible, what was he doing making those repeated trips to the graveyard and standing there, with his lips moving
as if he were talking to someone
; and telling us, furthermore, about a far-off place called heaven?

And so all three surviving occupants of the Atkinson Lock cottage were perhaps united in a common belief: that Mother who was dead wasn’t really dead at all, that from some hidden vantage point she still watched over them and held the cottage under her protection.

Ah, Fenland superstition. The dead are dead, aren’t they? The past is done with, isn’t it?

But sometimes there are ways of unlocking that sealed-up domain, of exposing to the corrosive air its secret contents. And Dick had a key.

Which he hid. For when, after making that fateful if ill-judged announcement, Dad led us both across the upstairs passage – because he wouldn’t deny or spare us this final privilege – to take our last look at Mother, little Tom fell into such a fit of wailing and blubbering – which did nothing to help Dad’s own steadily welling tears – that he quite forgot about that hastily snatched-from-view key. And before grief allowed him to remember it, Dick plainly took steps to conceal it. For – while Dad is in mournful conference with Doctor Bright and Dick carries out more ice-chipping on the lock-gates – Tom conducts a distraught yet rigorous search of Dick’s bed and its surroundings. He feels for lumps in the pillow and among the blankets; lifts the mattress; scans every inch of floor beneath the bed; explores the frugal contents (several cocoa tins, the skull of a water rat) of Dick’s rickety bedside cabinet; checks cupboards and drawers.

No key.

Yet one day – to be precise, five days after Mother’s death and only two after her interment in Hockwell
churchyard, by which time that word ‘Gone’, which on the occasion of that final view of Mother perhaps held for Dick no tearful implications (Gone? But she’s right there. She’s only decided to lie still for a while) had begun to exert its power – I hear Dick mount the attic stairs. I hear Dick and I hear the wind. For it’s come back. But it’s not the wind that’s making those creaks. From the foot of the main staircase I hear those tell-tale sounds which I am destined to hear years later from behind a locked and barricaded door. Dick descends. I mount the main stairs, feigning a casual need to go to our bedroom. Dick’s hands are empty. But his eyelids are twitching, less, it seems, at coming face to face with me (even eyelids have their nuances) than on account of some inward puzzlement or disappointment.

And one day, after school, ascending again to our bedroom, who should I discover within it but Dad, who starts guiltily at my entrance, as if caught in some stealthy act, as if he were
looking for something
, and to cover his confusion yet no doubt with another purpose too, says: ‘I was thinking. Perhaps it’s time you had a bedroom of your own. Perhaps it’s time we moved you into the back room.’

And then (by now Mother’s been gone nearly three weeks and still hasn’t come back) Dick makes another ascent to the attic. He should be dutifully exercising his newly acquired office of deputy lock-keeper. For Dad has left once more to walk through Hockwell village (where curtains will be plucked and people will observe: There he goes, there goes poor Henry Crick again) to his rendezvous in the churchyard. But scarcely is he out of sight than Dick leaves his post of trust and, with an air of resolution rare for Dick, enters the cottage and climbs the stairs.