Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

  “Ah, all right then,” he said, and went up. Sleep didn’t come easily. He tossed and sweated and grumbled all night and in the morning, when he couldn’t get out of bed, felt angry and ashamed, unable to remember when he had last been pinned there by illness. Years ago, as a girl, Vera remembered him sleeping awkwardly on two chairs before the fire when he was ill, so uncomfortable that the minute he was able to get up he would do so, stagger out to feed the pigs or get in some coal, breaking himself back into life. Illness was cowardice and weakness, and no man ever let it drive him to bed if he had any guts about him. But here he was gutless and without strength, and grieving that everyone witnessed it. When Mary said she thought he should have a doctor, his answer was: “What do I want a bleddy doctor for?”

  “Because you aren’t well. You know you’re not.”

  He leaned up: “If you bring a doctor up them stairs, I’ll chuck ’im out o’ that winder if it takes all my strength.” George came back from work at the cycle factory: “What’s all this then, dad? Don’t you think it’s about time you got better?” Merton thought so. “We’ll get a doctor to you then,” George said. “Do as you bleddy-well like,” Merton grunted, pulled back into sleep.

  The doctor said they shouldn’t have waited so long. Merton had a severe chill. “Get that stuff from the chemist and see he takes it. I’ll call in tomorrow.”

  The weather kept damp and cold, and despite a banked-up pit-fire in the bedroom, Merton stayed down. When Mary came in with bottles of medicine, he mustered strength to throw them one by one out of the window; they landed on the kennel and caused the contemporary Gyp to rattle into the open and prepare to sell itself dearly. “That’s nowt but bottled piss,” he said to the empty room. He fell to the floor, and only with tremendous effort reached the bed.

  The cold deepened and gripped him in the vice of double pneumonia. The house was silent for a week, and they began to wonder whether he’d get over it—asking the question of themselves at first, but not to each other. George and Lydia, at any rate, remembered the hard times he had given them, the peremptory flames of his volatile temper. Yet talking to each other late one night, they had to admit that they had at times been boggers and deserved it—though their wondering whether or not he would get better was still less interested than Mary’s. In turn they sat with him and talked, told him what news or gossip came from town or factory or coal mine, reassured him that the chickens and garden were being well looked after. Everyone met by George and Lydia on the street—round the district and even in Nottingham—asked about Merton with great concern and weren’t slow in saying what a good bloke he was and how he’d worked all his life for the good of his family and how much of a crying shame it’d be if owt ’appened to such a fine outstanding chap. Well, Lydia said to herself, in one way nobody can deny all that. “But he’ll be all right, ma,” she cried. “He’s as strong as nails.”

  “But he’s a good age, you know.”

  He couldn’t listen long to their talk. Something inside stoked up the fires of his coughing, weakened him so that he lay back stiffly in sleep after a dose of medicine he no longer had strength to sling away. Mary exhausted herself caring for him, wept downstairs in the kitchen while the others were at work, and wondered however he could possibly get better from such a black and wicked cough. The rotten winter had worn them all out, frozen their guts on short rations and the wet cold misery of snow and ice. Now the weather had broken, and brought this.

  The doctor said it was touch and go. But this winter had killed thousands and would kill more, though it was having a hard job with Merton. He slept easier one day, and Mary thanked God he was getting better. “He’s peaceful,” she said to George and Lydia when they came home for tea. “He’ll be all right, mother,” George said. Lydia went out later to the pictures. Mary dozed by the fire, her face wrinkled and tired, her white hair falling down. George sat at the table playing patience, a sheet of uncompleted football coupons held down by a bottle of ink and a wooden-handled pen.

  In the pitch-dark bedroom Merton slept, moaning when a spark shot off the tight ball of his lived life and wheeled towards his eyes spinning away and buried in a universe of impenetrable blackness that in some ways he wanted to enter but didn’t because he knew he’d never come out of it. Then there was a light growing ahead that he tried to reach, something desirable that he sensed he could live within—though not in his lifetime. The pain seemed intent on forcing him to some course of action, but at the same time made him so weak and wish for such complete and everlasting sleep that he couldn’t take any. The light he saw was hardly a light, more a speck of lighter darkness which wasn’t so dark as the other mass of atmosphere. In spite of the prison he was locked in, he reached up to his eyes and felt tears, and knew what they were. He thought of Mary down in the kitchen: “How are you feeling?” she had asked. “A lot better,” he had told her. He thought of Oliver, who had been killed in the war, sensed that he might be about to go, and suddenly the spark of light expanded and blinded him when he fell into it. Maybe I was on his mind as well, Brian thought, as he stopped to take down a call-sign from Singapore.

  He rode in a tri-shaw almost the whole way to the widow’s house, walking the last hundred yards silently through the bushes and climbing into Mimi’s room like a bandit. She took a few days off from the Boston Lights on the excuse of a cold, and they lay in bed, smoking and talking the dark hours away, drinking the bottle of whisky he usually managed to bring in his back pocket. The many hours were sweet, yet when he wasn’t there he wanted them to end and reach the day when, with kit packed, he could feel the slow train move under him on the first mile to Singapore. He wanted to rush away, because he felt ill. It was nothing he could say was eating any particular part of his body, but a slow omnivorous corrosion attacking equally his physical and mental self, so that if the lingering leave-taking of Malaya lasted many more weeks he would walk to the door of the sick quarters and say: “For Christ’s sake, I’m whacked and finished and can’t stand up any more.” Nothing serious, he laughed, watching the dawn soak itself over the palmtops from the door of his DF hut—only hypochondria, or whatever it’s called, or maybe just plain sickness of the sort that this poxetten country is drenched with. As soon as that boat gets into the Mediterranean Sea, I’ll feel fine, quick-minded, and strong again like I’ve always been.

  Malaya was a battlefield whose values had no part of reality, wasn’t life to him any more, and he had to get away by taking a slow boat to England. He hoped the Communists would get Malaya, though he had no more wish to help them at the moment than he had to fight them, having dreamed the bad dream that maybe the same one who had escaped him on the mountain had later circuited back to the acid drop of an aeroplane and taken the fatal potshot at Baker. If anybody was to blame, though, it was, as far as he could see, the government who had seen to it that they were dragged up and bundled like unthinking sackbags to do guard-duty in worn-out parts of the British Empire. Maybe the government’s fed up and weary and don’t know what it’s doing. He could believe that, anyway, having long hours to ponder on such things during empty and interminable nightwatches. But the Communists aren’t weary and that’s a fact, never will be either, because they’ve got an up-and-coming vision that our side can never have any more. They used to spout outside the factory—and still do, according to Pauline’s letters—which is more than the conservatives dare do, because a lot of the Communists are working-men like ourselves and know what’s what. They’d got the kitty right enough—the whole works of his brain and heart spinning—bells, lemons, keys—back and forth like jackpots on a fruit machine. I didn’t much know what I was doing when I let that bloke go, though I’m glad I did what I did, no matter what happened. Only underneath my mind did I really know what I was doing, but that was enough and good and marvellous, because when things occur like that, it must be what I’d do anyway if I had the brains to calculate things properly like sums.

  Out of the confusion of his brain g
rew the tangible and valid fact that between now and England he would have the human warmth of Mimi to help him stay sane and solid. It would end soon and they knew it, so they saw each other as often as possible. He went quickly through the trees to the widow’s house (BEYOND THIS POINT OUT OF BOUNDS TO ALLIED FORCES) even when the widow was there, silently making his blindfold way up the veranda and along to the unlocked window behind which Mimi waited. They lay naked together in bed, Mimi with her long blue-black hair down and her warm well-appointed breasts flattening against him, whispering softly, and both, even in the bliss of love, making no more noise than could be covered by night sounds of Malaya from the bushes and trees outside.

  Often they were conscious of having dead time on their hands, lying in bed in the half-darkness, talking softly because the widow was in her room not far off, and because there was little to say since time was shortening before that big three-funnelled flag-bedecked boat rolled into the straits and narrows of Singapore and he tottered up its gangplank loaded to his forehead.

  I wish I’d realized what I was doing when I let that bloke go. I’d still have made him scoot; but if only I’d done it cold and intentionally. He felt as if he’d been tricked and laughed at, not knowing how the trick worked or when it began to work or what had caused it to begin ticking away inside him. He had an idea, though, that it all began before he was born, certainly at a time when he was powerless to know or do anything about it. But he couldn’t come to any conclusion, maybe not wanting to, because it might tell him that after all he could blame no one for the trick that had been played on him except himself.

  They heard the widow walking about her house, then silence. “She’ll start sewing now,” Mimi whispered, turning her warm body towards him. “You’ll hear the machine. It’ll go on for hours, I think.”

  “It’s funny,” he said, “me not having seen the old woman. She’s been our guardian angel in one way.”

  “She has.”

  “What’s she like? You never say anything about her.”

  “There isn’t much I can tell. I think she knows you come to stay with me now, but she doesn’t mention anything. We’ve never talked about you, but I just know she knows. Anyway, we won’t speak much. Sometimes I give her American dollar-bills so that she can exchange them for me into Malayan money, and she doesn’t give me as good a rate as the black-market. Still, it doesn’t matter. She is kind, and often she gives me rice or soup, sometimes tea when I come in late and she is still sewing or reading. When I can’t pay my rent, she doesn’t bother me.”

  “Sounds a good woman.”

  “She’s generous, but very careful with her money. I saw her shopping once at the market, and when she buys eggs she takes a bowl, fills it at the market tap, and tests the eggs in front of the stall-holder’s eyes. They don’t altogether like her, but she gets good eggs. Another thing, she goes shopping with her abacus frame and says: ‘I want that, how much is it?’ Tack-tack go her beads. ‘And how much is this?’ Tack-tack-tack. ‘And that?’ Tack-tack. ‘Well,’ she says, tack-tack-tack-tack, ‘that will be so much, won’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ he says, knowing that he can’t even put on an extra cent!”

  Brian reached out and lit cigarettes for them: “Is she happy, or what?”

  “I think so. Why shouldn’t she be? She had shares in a rubber estate, among other things.” Smoke blew across his face. “She has relatives in Pulau Timur.”

  “Why does she live alone, though? Chinese grandmothers usually live with their families, don’t they?”

  “She wants to live alone. I don’t know why.”

  “She’s got you in the house.”

  “We don’t see each other much.”

  “Not to mention me,” he laughed. “I wonder if she’ll be lonely when I’ve gone? To tell you the truth, I used to make up stories as to what she was. I imagined she was some sort of Communist agent or other, getting information, or recruiting people for the cause, a sort of commissar for north Malaya, wreaking havoc among the British occupying-power.”

  She laughed. “How silly you are!”

  “Well, you’ve got to have something to do at the DF hut, or you go off your head waiting for the boat to roll on.” The brief and hidden mention of his departure struck them both into a momentary silence. “Mimi,” he said, “just before we got caught in that ambush up in the mountains I captured a bandit, a Chinese.” The story came out, as he’d known it would before he left her. “I let him go,” he said, “because I couldn’t kill him. And later in the ambush I didn’t aim for anything. I fired where nothing could be hurt. It took some doing, but I held back. I did it.” He talked on, and she listened with such interest that neither approval nor disapproval was written on her face. She sat on the bed, a cigarette smouldering from her hand.

  “Why?” she said at the end of it. “Why?”

  He was angry that she hadn’t understood. “Because that’s how I wanted it to be,” he said. “I just thought I’d tell you, that’s all. Don’t you get it?”

  The last fortnight dragged its slow length along like a chain-and-ball ankle crossing a wide high gorge by a six-inch bridge—with Brian all of a sweat that it might never get him to the other side. The camp lapsed into its state of sordid demoralized siege, and he was always glad to escape from it. Barbed wire was rolled out along the boundaries, sandbags filled and erected at vulnerable places, extra guards mounted until it seemed that only half the camp slept in the night. There was even talk that the privileged members of the signals section were to be drummed into filling sandbags. The final indignity, many said, conscription within conscription—unable to believe it could happen.

  And so Merton had died, and he remembered it again, how he had taken to the earth with so little resentment after nearly fourscore years of staying in life like a fire that matched the glowing coals of his forge. His wife went six months later, drifted off into an afternoon sleep and never woke up. By which time Brian was already in Malaya, in distance even beyond their wildest dreams of Abyssinia, the limits of the fantastic world they had laughingly taunted him with on those far-off rainy evenings as a kid. When he read Kubla Khan or the Blessed Damozel and other anthological bits and pieces in the bottom-nightwatch of the DF hut, the mood cast over him equalled that tranquil dream recalled from a long way back, the mirrored image of a winter’s childhood when, one peaceful afternoon, he sat looking out of the window at another fire reflected, as if it were held up by some beneficent god for him to see as proof that there were possibilities of comfort even beyond the warmth of his own house. What had fired off this barbed harpoon, sent it zigzagging back on a tenuous line of cord, may have been his night-long reading of the poems, but it was the first time he realized that he had a past, and had not evolved out of a dream. He could say: “I remember that time walking across the Cherry Orchard ten years ago and meeting Alma Arlington,” ten years being no longer a meaningless massive chunk of time, but something that could be dissected and sorted out, and called a past. In a week he would be on that boat, going back in a way to join himself up with this past, and the idea of it was one alternately of fear and distaste, as well as one similar to the feeling that came over him when reading the poems. Nevertheless, little of the past was yet visible; and neither had he much vision of the future, but at least he knew that both existed. “This time in Malaya is a big slice out of my life,” he said to Knotman over a table crowded with bottles in a Muong bar. “Maybe it seems like that now,” Knotman argued, “but I’m telling you, you’ll look back on it in ten years and it’ll seem like a dream that lasted a few days.” “Well, I can’t imagine that,” Brian said. “You will”—Knotman filled their glasses.

  Those from the signals billet were rounded up with clerks, cooks, drivers, and orderlies to fill sandbags. Brian had no confidence in what they were being made to fortify, believing that sooner or later, even if they built a stone wall ten yards high, the whole lot would crumble. But he worked hard and for a long time and, though not particular
ly tired, knew he was in a fever. Sometimes he spoke a word out loud to isolate the sound of his own voice, and once when he got an exact image of it, had to thrust it away for fear of running insanely towards the sea. Surrounded by many people, he felt entirely alone, worked within the clearly defined circle of his own actions. They had been on the go since seven, with only two breaks, and he dug at the sand mechanically, sometimes getting a light shovel that slewed against the embankment, at others finding the load so heavy that some had to be tipped off. His throat ached for a drink of water, a walk under shady trees to spend a few minutes away from filling sandbags. Those farther along the embankment had the worst of the job since they were in sight of the guard-house and had to keep on working, unable to skive off for a drink now and again, as he had done. The sentries were monuments of perspiration. “What did you say?” Kirkby demanded. “Nothing,” Brian replied; “I must have been thinking aloud.”

  Down by the long huts a man walked out of the shower-house, a white towel around his lobster body, slopping his feet along in wet sandals and whistling a Malay love-song popular on Radio Timur. It was an image of clarity, but when it vanished, the aches came back into the bones of Brian’s chest.

  The whole thing won’t last much longer, he thought, seeing, even more vividly than Baker’s death, the vision of the aeroplane hanging dead between the trees like an enlarged piece of carcass in a butcher’s shop. It was clearer in his eye than the face of the Communist he had let loose and the ambush later, something he had dreamed around more than once, seeing the plane hanging between tall buildings—a dead whale blocking streets, and suspended also in Serpent Wood, where he used to play in the past that was no longer an unrememberable dream, its broad fuselage tied between trees above the small brook he spent hours trying to dam and divert until, in the dream, the plane fell to the soil and caused him to wake up.