Hugh changed from boots to shoes in the conservatory. ‘I wanted to visit you in Nottingham but your mother said you wouldn’t like that, though she needed to see you more than I did. She seems to know you better.’
Herbert felt horror at the notion of such a visit: ‘This is my landlady, Mrs Denman. She mothers me a bit too much, I’m afraid. And this is Frank, her fancyman. Yes, it is a small room, but it’s all I need to sleep in, and when I come back from the factory, or totter up to bed half-drunk on a Saturday night. I’m sorry, Mother, but for that you’ll have to go downstairs and across the yard.’ ‘It wouldn’t have been a good idea.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I only have one room, and it’s hardly the place to entertain anyone, believe me.’
‘That’s nonsense, and you know it. I wouldn’t have cared if you were living in a cave. You should have seen some of the mud holes I had to live in for weeks at a time in Burma. If my mother had been able to call on me I’d have welcomed her with open arms! You’re a grown responsible man from a good family, and you know perfectly well how to go on.’
The row had started earlier than expected, his father wanting to bluster him into the ground. Herbert felt awe, even a shameless fear, stepping back to knock against a column of telescoped plant pots. He straightened them. Bert gave Herbert a nudge, stiffened him not to be afraid of the old bastard, told him he could even be conciliatory. He envied Archie having a father who didn’t know when he was coming out of the army. ‘I’ll get a flat soon, then it’ll be marvellous for both of you to come and see me.’
‘That’ll be a move in the right direction.’
Herbert looked at him, getting towards seventy, frailer perhaps than he thought himself to be. It wouldn’t do to feel pity, though a tinge went through him, and straight out again. Better if they were to go into the house where his mother might soften their talk, but Hugh stood upright among the potted plants and puffed away as if to gas them both with his smoke. ‘We don’t see you from one year’s end to another, and I know your mother suffers from it. She doesn’t say so, but when she suffers so do I, which is totally unnecessary.’
A knife for cutting string lay on the slatted table, and Herbert turned his eyes away, disturbed at such a murderous thought. His father only missed him because his mother did. If she wanted to call on him alone in Nottingham it would be all right, though the thought of them walking up Mrs Denman’s staircase was intolerable. He re-harnessed his self-control. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘Well, never mind. Let’s go in. You didn’t come here to cross swords with me.’
He should have expected they would be more concerned about him in their retirement, been old enough to realize their cloying wishes for his wellbeing, but if guilt was all they could make him feel they could get stuffed, especially when Maud showed him to a large room on the first floor looking across the paddock and orchard, a vague hint of metallic sea in the distance.
He took in the commodious luxury, the perfect appointments of a double bed, a wardrobe, two tables, an armchair, a large sink with steel taps, and heavy pelmetted drapes to close off the world, as well as a bathroom for himself alone next door. ‘It’s yours, whenever you come to see us, though we’d like you to live in it all the time, no questions asked. Me and your father have talked about it. We’d make you an allowance. And if you want to cut yourself off I can get an electrician to put in a kettle. You’d be quite cosy in here. I know you would be.’
It was the ideal refuge, perfect and long wanted. ‘Thank you, Mother.’ He could sit in peace and write, totally cared for while heaping up the pages of a novel. ‘Scribbled much today, you dark horse?’ one of them would enquire, not knowing that the other had said the same an hour ago. He would be an infant again, till they arranged for men in white coats to come one morning and cart him off. You only went home again when you died, not at twenty-five. So the room wasn’t for him. Nor could it ever be, with his parents so close. Would Isaac have called him a fool to refuse? No doubt about it, but a fool was always the master of two imperfect worlds, saw neither clearly but survived the perils of both. ‘I’ll be going back tomorrow.’
She sat on the bed. ‘Oh, Herbert, so soon?’
‘I must be at work on Monday morning.’ He hardened himself against her wanting to make him cry tears of chagrin for the way the trap was closing. If he stayed an extra twenty-four hours he might hang on forever, and the thought made him so blindingly angry that he had to fight off his berserker mood. Easy. Huge efforts were no efforts at all, but the minor annoyances were dangerous.
‘But why do you work in a factory, Herbert? I don’t understand it.’
He preferred to pity her rather than shout, which made him say, the first time loud and clear to anyone but himself: ‘I’m thinking of writing a novel about it.’
‘Ah! I see.’ The knowing smile told him he’d said exactly what would satisfy her. A report of it might even mollify his father, which made him regret having spoken, since he didn’t know whether he would ever be able to make the claim good. Lying to make someone happy was a crude ploy, and he wished it unsaid. If he didn’t want it to be a lie he would have to write the bloody book, which would give them some control over his future. He wouldn’t put up with that. Only if they were dead could he follow his path with a quiet mind, but they seemed so full of life he was sure they would live forever.
‘And after you’ve written it?’
He laughed, glad now that the idea had shot up from more or less nowhere, while knowing there could be no such place. ‘No use thinking about that. It takes years to write a book. A good one, anyway. Another thing’, he went on, ’is that I’m working in a factory because I feel easy being among machines. It’s my métier, it seems.’
‘I’ve always loved machines as well,’ she said, ‘right from when my father bought his first motor car. I still tinker when I can. If the lawnmower goes bang it’s always me who mends it. I suppose that’s where you get your fascination from, which is very gratifying. I understand perfectly well but, all the same …’
They were so close in spirit that she knew when to stop talking, and he realized how pleasant it was to be with someone who sensed your thoughts as much as you were aware of theirs. ‘Let’s go down and have tea.’ She sprang from the bed like a girl of twenty. ‘Your father likes it exactly at four, and so do I. Mustn’t disappoint him.’
‘I have to wash off the grime of travel first.’ He loved her now, with no vicious afterthoughts, and gave her a few minutes to go down and repeat what he had said to his father so that there would be less pain and mystery as to why he had immersed himself in a factory, though he hoped they would not make his stay comfortable enough for him to regret leaving.
There were so many flowers surrounding the Old Hall that, looking down from the window, their various scents and colours – bees working among roses, honeysuckle, lupins and bougainvillaea, and many whose names he didn’t know – gave the impression of being in a vast undertaker’s parlour.
He wanted the visit to be over, though couldn’t decently depart for another twenty-four hours. Every minute was torment, and ought not to be, he knew, if only he could learn to accept being there. It was hard not to look every few minutes at his watch. This itching to get clear, to flee along the lanes and back to the train, was against his deeper grain, an unnecessary burden, and especially irritating since the St Vitus yen existed only on the surface, a weak mesh of impulses dominating the stronger part of him which was capable of enjoying the stay and being made much of. If they hadn’t been his parents the problem wouldn’t exist, and anger at the inability to overcome his aversion made it even more difficult to do so.
Having recognized his disorder he went downstairs feeling more calm, yet was embarrassed at the homely and affectionate way they were so absolutely at ease with one another, at seeing how his father adored his mother, and she him, as if they had met only weeks ago. After tea in the lounge Maud said: ‘I do wish you w
ouldn’t puff all the time at that pipe, my dear.’
Hugh reached over to smooth her wrist, and gave a great laugh. ‘When I give up smoking, my love, call in the doctor, though there won’t be much he can do for me then.’
‘And Herbert’s smoking, too.’
‘So I notice.’ Hugh winked at his son. ‘I have a couple of cigars for us to demolish after dinner, the last of my Burma cheroots. I came back with boxes and boxes. Then again, though, there are those Havanas you found for me last Christmas.’
‘Oh, so I did.’ She smiled.
Herbert, remembering, took a piece of orange cleaning cloth from his jacket pocket and unwrapped a highly polished brass lighter. ‘I meant to give you this, Father, a present I cobbled together at my machine in the factory.’
Hugh rolled it over in his big hand and then, flame first time. His features gave off a mischievous flicker at Herbert’s siding with him against Maud. ‘You made it all on your own?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Beautiful. A bespoke lighter. I shall treasure it.’ He pressed it twice more to get a flame, before slipping it into his waistcoat pocket, then stood from the deep armchair without using his hands as support. ‘Excuse us, Maud, I shan’t keep him from you for long.’
‘And where do you intend dragging me to?’ Herbert smiled, also standing.
Hugh did a ‘With my head chopped off, underneath my arm’ walk to the door. ‘Come up to my study, and you’ll see how I spend a lot of my time.’
Glad to avoid a stultifying melt into nothingness, Herbert followed, his father’s back as upright as ever, though his tread up the stairs was slow enough. He had been through trench warfare in France, and fought in the jungles of Burma, leading his battalion and later shuffling the wreck of his brigade against the Japanese to great effect. He envied him for having done so much, wanted to take all his experiences into himself.
The table was covered with overlapping maps, some neatly folded in stacks, others opened from rolls and pinned down by piles of army notebooks. Wads of yellowing papers, ragged at the edges and stained with mud (and maybe even blood) were not yet arranged in any order. ‘Don’t tell me,’ Herbert said. ‘You’re writing your memoirs.’
Hugh leaned against the enormous glass-fronted bookcase. ‘It was your mother’s idea. Well, I always knew I would, one day, but I let her think she set me on to it. If I don’t do them for publication I can give all this to the Imperial War Museum. Or to you eventually, if you’re interested.’
He realized he was. ‘I’d be glad to have them.’ Yet would he? They’d probably get mildewed in Mrs Denman’s shed, until forgotten, or the ragman carted them away – a prospect that gave real pain, however.
Hugh unfolded a map and bent over, lowering his magnifying glass to the close brown contours, then shifting its circle to the yellow of cultivated areas. Herbert smoothed over the exquisite colours with his fingers. ‘What a lovely map.’
‘Of course it damned well is,’ Hugh snapped. ‘Don’t you know that the British soldier always died on the best of maps? But look at it closely, though, and you’ll see what abominable country we had to scramble about in.’
‘I don’t see any roads,’ Herbert said.
Hugh ringed a ford and a hamlet with a soft black pencil, stood up straight. ‘Roads!’ He let out an expressive guffaw. ‘There was never any such thing. It was a hundred degrees up from awful. Mud tracks for donkeys, if you were lucky.’ His mouth came close to Herbert’s ear, who had the presence not to move away. ‘When you get married,’ Hugh whispered, ‘as I’m sure you will one day, always keep your wife happy. Let her think everything that’s good about you is because of her. In my case it happens to be true, but even if it weren’t that’s what I would do. Another thing is, though I don’t know whether I need tell you, is that you never, never, never ever say any of the bad things that come into your mind, either about her or about anything, but especially about her. Only the good things, and even those you must think about carefully in case they can be taken wrongly. A wife is the most precious thing a man can have, and if you live by that, or make the attempt at any rate, your wife will think the same of you.’
‘I’ll try to remember,’ Herbert smiled.
‘There are so many difficulties in life that marital discord ought not to be one of them.’
He stood away, and looked again at the map, gazing with affection and appreciation, as if all his speculations about human nature had their origins in his ability to relate the contours of a map to the shape of the land itself. ‘There are less paved roads in that kind of terrain than the other, except those perfectly paved ones that you make yourself and spend your whole life maintaining.’
Such longspeaking indicated to Herbert how difficult being married to his mother might have been. Some of the times in his father’s life must have been absolute boils and blisters. A photograph of Hugh and his staff showed them standing by a twin-engined transport plane, a row of palm trees behind. Hugh, taller than the rest, was grinning as if he owned the aircraft as well.
‘I’ll remember all you say.’
Hugh put an arm on his shoulder. ‘I’m sure you will. You’ve always been a sensible chap, and we won’t bother you in your life. Everyone has to make his own way, and we’re sure you’ll do well in the end.’
It was a strange world, where only utter agreement made everyone happy, and all was in terms of ‘we’. Whatever the old man said could make no difference. He walked downstairs and into the garden, scent from rose bushes taking him to the grounds of his first school, the perfume of gratuitous cruelty rushing back, though too much in the past to be more than a reminder of days which led to him being where he was and even possibly how he was.
A track led across the paddock to an orchard where a branch had been split off by the weight of large reddish apples, some pecked by the birds or bored into by wasps, but most ready for picking. The one he ate was a blend of tart and sweet, and he tossed the core up towards heavy clouds sending down the first drops, soon steady enough to enrich the smell of bent-over grass between the trees. The whole place wanted going over with a lawnmower.
Not visible from the ground floor of the house, he let the water flatten his hair and run down his face, saturate his jacket, get through to the skin, an icy clamminess connecting him to an area of the sky from which a real self looked down on the marionette specimen he felt himself to be. Such rain made tears invisible, unnoticed. He shivered with exhilaration – regarding the elements as nothing compared to the volcanic compound of misery and defiance inside the armour which no downpour could penetrate. The experience was perversely enjoyable, a dose of self-induced reality, and however long he stood in the rain he would stay no other than who he was, no matter how many spirits attached themselves to him.
‘Herbert!’ Maud’s cry splintered him back, and he saw her in oilskins and wellingtons, basket over arm and parting the brambles. ‘I need some apples for a pie. You must take some back with you, unless you catch pneumonia and have to go to bed for a month. I say, you’re soaked.’
‘Am I?’ He took the basket. ‘Let me do it.’ When it was filled she gripped his elbow and guided him to shelter in the house. What a peculiar idea, he thought, imagining someone like me getting pneumonia, recalling summer days in the factory when he had walked out into the breeze soaked in sweat.
A bath freshened, and cleansed away his uncertainties, till he felt as if he’d lived in the house all his life, hadn’t left it for a day. The Rayburn dried his clothes, and upstairs he took off his father’s heavy checked dressing gown before putting on a clean shirt for dinner.
When he walked into the lounge, Hugh came from behind his Daily Mail to offer him a sherry. The tall old man stood stiffly with the decanter and poured a tumbler three-quarters full, Herbert deciding that the best way to get through the evening was to soak in as much as was given him to drink. ‘It’s good,’ he said, after a slug of the golden liquid. ‘Dry.’
‘Can?
??t stand the sweet stuff.’ Hugh poked at the logs, though the room was warm. ‘Your mother tells me you’re writing a book.’
Another swig lightened the seriousness of the issue. ‘Well, you can say it’s in the planning stage.’
‘Not an easy thing to do.’
‘I’m going to do something that hasn’t been done before: which is write about people who work in factories. Do it properly, though, from the inside.’ The words rolled out, oiled by drink. ‘I know them so well by now, there’s nothing else I really can write about.’
Hugh refilled both glasses. ‘Are they worth it, do you think?’
‘Everybody is.’
‘I expect you’re the best judge of that.’
Maud looked at them as they linked arms and walked in for dinner. ‘How much sherry have you two had?’
‘A couple of little ones, but we’ll go easy on the wine.’
They did, though all three went back to the lounge afterwards and drank several Martell brandies, so that by ten Herbert could decently say he was tired, and would they excuse him if he went to bed?
The silence of the dark was unnerving. If he put on the light the ceiling would revolve. An owl struck the night with its note, and he felt apprehensive, as if the room had no walls. He put on the light and read a few poems from Other Men’s Rowers, but one that was anti-Semitic reminded him of Isaac, and he put the book away.
He would wait for the dawn, though it was only eleven o’clock. The floor was cold to his feet and, wearing the all-embracing dressing gown of his father’s, he opened the door so as to make no squeak at the hinges. Sliding a finger along the wainscot to keep a straight course, he navigated towards a splinter of light, at the other end of the corridor. No one could accuse him of sneaking about, because he was going downstairs to stand in the fresh cold air and get some of his drunkenness blown away.
He was not a prisoner, in any case, and put an ear to the door through which light showed. ‘Nor me,’ his mother said, ’but I’m sure he won’t turn out to be a bad egg.’