Between My Father and the King (27 page)

The hood of Ewart's old Ford was leaking and needed renewing. Would Alf, who had lost both his legs in the First World War and who owned and worked a machine for stitching leather, sew a new hood for Ewart's car? Alf agreed. He also offered to make a new crayfish net for his friend, for he knew the other net was sodden with salt water and ready to break. And would Ewart in return cut Alf's hair? It is hard to get back and forth to the barber's or indeed anywhere when you haven't any legs; anyway it is warmer having
your hair cut at home with a cup of tea close by; and although Ewart protested he was no barber, Alf reminded his friend that he need not go all fancy with crewcuts and pageboys and the likes of things women have. He looked teasingly at his wife who responded with a mechanical reserved smile. She seemed from necessity to have gathered a reservoir of good humour from which she drew smiles, sometimes laughter, a witty remark, with an air of almost forlorn deliberation, like turning on a tap and being sad about it.

‘Yes,' said Alf, ‘a little bit off to make me respectable and less like a violinist or one of them arty blokes.'

Alf admired respectability. His wife and child (grown-up now and planted out like an approved cutting in the town social soil) were respectable and law-abiding and what he called ‘true'. Alf was a neat little man round as a bun but pale. Part of his pride was his thick grey hair which, if one believed the advertisements and warnings in the magazines — and also the testimony of other men of his age, fifty-six this coming summer — ought to be falling out, growing thin enough for him to be able to count the silver threads. Instead his hair flourished without cream or lotion and his only difficulty was to check its burst of glossy silver growth; for it was silver — now I remember — not grey, thick and soft.

‘Yes,' said Alf, ‘an ordinary plain haircut.'

Funny, what he wanted for his hair was what he had always wanted for himself: respectability, plainness, no frills, discipline. He would have liked to have parted and planned and combed his life as quickly surely neatly as his hair; and perhaps his wife realised more than anyone who knew him how deeply he felt the messy bungling untidiness of having no legs, of having to endure the haphazard sprawl of sympathy and pity from strangers, and friends too. And children: What are no legs like, Mummy, why does he hide them?

Yet it all happened thirty years ago or more and does not time smooth and polish to plain the jagged and most lonely mountain
of heart? And time offers a sedative too that none will refuse, a balm called use or habit.

‘Yes,' said Alf, ‘an ordinary plain haircut.'

So the pact was made and there remained only the irksome part of any pact, the keeping of it.

It did not take long for the new hood to be sewn on the car, or the new crayfish net to be made. Ewart drove away well pleased from Alf's place, and though it rained outside the old Ford, he sat upright and dry at the wheel, warm inside, too, with the cup of tea Alf's wife had given him and with the scone like a gold boat sunk in a lake of butter.

He drew forward the clutch. ‘I'll be back next Friday night,' he called, ‘to keep my bargain. Or maybe afternoon, or morning, and I'll bring a pair of shears with me, also a home perm.'

He winked. He liked a joke. He too was a small man, though his vanity made baldness, like paunch and dewlap, a displeasure. His skin was more wrinkled than Alf's yet not shrivelled, for an oiliness and suppleness about it seemed to give his face a warm embalmed look as if he had bathed in oil. He was a passionate sympathetic sort of man, a widower with no children.

But with a car, he thought one day, and a crayfish net and helluva lonely.

He too had fought in the First World War where his fellows had lost eyes and limbs and he had for a time lost pity and faith, but again, that was a long time ago, more of a dream now the trenches and the fat white lice sitting like spies in the seams of his underclothing and also in the torn and sewn places of his mind; and the Frenchwomen, a violet lace handkerchief and Mademoiselle from Armentières — Parlez-vous?

His friendship with Alf had been born suddenly from their first meeting when Ewart had been in the saddler's buying a crayfish net — the only shop in town where they were sold — and found Alf Reder sitting in a wheelchair bargaining with the saddler for the sale of such nets, each one exquisitely made.

‘Are they nylon?' Ewart asked. He had heard of them coming in with nylon.

‘No, waxed thread. But I have made nylon ones.' Alf spoke slowly, with some hesitation at the beginning of each phrase.

Ewart thought and looked, headlong, Poor blighter. The man dropped one of his nets and Ewart stooped instantly to retrieve it. ‘Here, let me.'

The man in the chair regarded him coolly. ‘I have hands,' he said. Then he smiled at the stranger standing there looking ashamed of himself, and Ewart smiled back, eager and sympathetic.

Alf extended his hand; it seemed he would have liked to have offered both to prove again that he possessed hands, five digits on each, a palm with a lifeline and a heartline, a line of fortune and fate.

‘My name's Alf Reder,' he said.

‘And mine's Ewart Cuttle.' (Widower with a car and a crayfish net and helluva lonely.)

And the two were friends.

‘Cigarette?'

‘I can't bear tailormades. I like to make them myself.'

I like to make them myself
. And the way he fingered the tissue and tobacco told why. He was using his hands. He was proud of them. That evening Alf invited Ewart home to tea. Ewart drove them in the car.

‘I'm frightened to buy a new one,' he explained. ‘I can't understand all the gadgets on new ones.'

They spent a happy evening, like two schoolboys, or even lovers, middle-aged, discovering each other. They liked gardening, Alf grew dwarf trees in pots, he had a weeping willow, a dwarf one, from China.

‘My beans are better this year,' said Ewart, expanding. ‘I got the blackfly in time.'

‘You fish?'

‘I know every spot in the river.'

Suggested Alf, ‘I could supply the ingredients, nets and spoons polished to sparkle in any salmon's eye, even pick around for worms, while you catch the fish that never get away.'

One evening Daphne Reder drew Ewart aside in the kitchen. ‘Ewart,' she said, ‘you've made such a difference to Alf. He's happier somehow. You ought to see him cutting the spoons and shining them up, like — like fire.' She smiled sadly, ‘I never made him happy like that. It was always his legs, his legs. Come, you must have a hot scone.'

So they sat in the kitchen, Ewart who had gone to get the book of flies he had bought, and some he had made, Alf and Daphne, eating scones. And after that,

‘Why, how about the crayfish,' Alf suggested.

Ewart had caught them a bag of crayfish. He tipped them from the bag onto the table.

Daphne looked startled, ‘Why, they're the wrong colour,' she said, ‘they're brown. The ones you buy are red.'

Ewart laughed. ‘That's because they're cooked. These are alive. Where's the pot?'

Mrs Reder found a big iron pot which she filled with cold water ready to plunge the crayfish in.

‘Oh no,' Ewart said, ‘hot water, not cold, it's cruelty to animals, if it's cold water they feel themselves cooking all the way. It has to be boiling.'

Mrs Reder looked from Ewart to her husband. ‘Ewart,' she
said, ‘you have the heart of a child.'

She prepared to tip out the cold water and replace it with boiling when suddenly Alf called out, bitterly, ‘Leave it, Daff. They're not like us, them with all their legs, they can't feel.'

Mrs Reder drew from her store of resigned smiles. With a loyal, ‘Of course I'll leave it, Alf,' she lifted into the cold water the struggling crayfish that for an hour felt themselves cooking and then were eaten and enjoyed, Alf insisting on picking off their legs and counting them. Then Daphne went away to bed. ‘You men,' she said tiredly, ‘always burning the candle.'

After she had gone and Ewart was folding up his bag ready to leave, Alf spoke quietly, ‘I'm sorry about the crayfish, all them legs waving in the air and none to spare for me, it's a long time ago but I still feel it because Daphne, well, Daphne has never loved me, Ewart. She's loyal, she'd keep any promise and make others keep any, but there's never been any love, and me with my legs or without my legs, it's been hell. Oh forget it, I'm not feeling so good tonight, need a dose of Kruschens or little liver pills or something.' He stroked back his hair. ‘Remember, I want my hair cut.'

That was a few days after the pact was made and the hood had been sewn. As Ewart bid his friend goodnight he remarked jokingly, ‘Don't forget, I'll be around on Friday, morning noon or night, with a home perm, some butterfly curlers and a pretty little scarf for you to tie around your hair.'

But on Friday morning of that same week Alf Reder was dead. He had died early in the morning. As Ewart drove up to the house he noticed the blinds had been drawn in both front rooms. Sleepyheads, he thought. He tooted his horn three times, as usual, but no one came out. Alf ought to have been sitting in the sun by
now, like a globular spider making his nets. Feeling in his pocket for his scissors and the packet of hairpins he had bought for fun from a shop, Ewart knocked on the door.

He heard footsteps in the passage and Daphne opened the door and peered out. She had been crying.

‘He's dead,' she whispered, ‘the doctor said a clot of blood or something.' She made as if to shut the door then, remembering, said automatically, ‘Come in, I suppose you've come to cut his hair.' She smiled.

‘A pact is a pact,' she said suddenly with the same stolid meaninglessness that a desperate statesman mutters, War is war. ‘Will you cut his hair now, please?'

Ewart fingered the hairclips and scissors in his pocket. He experienced a feeling of revulsion. ‘I'm not really good at cutting hair at all,' he said, in the same dead tone that one uses to a salesman, Nothing today thank you.

She persisted, ‘Will you cut his hair?' It was all she could say, ‘Will you cut his hair?'

So he entered the darkened room where the body lay and she turned on the little plastic bedlight and he leant over his friend and snuffle snuffle whisper with the scissors he snipped off some of the thick silver hair. Some strands fell on the mat beneath him, and clung there. He stood helplessly holding the rest of the clippings in his hand. They felt not soft anymore but like wire, small silver needles.

Daphne appeared in the doorway. ‘Thank you,' she said. ‘Now I will burn them. Come into the kitchen.'

He followed her into the kitchen and sat down in the corner chair, the one with the waterlily worked on the cushion, while Daphne opened the grate and thrust the hair inside. There was a smell through the room, of burning. She opened the window. ‘Don't you feel happier now,' she said, ‘that you have kept your pact. I had a pact to keep. I married a man whom I did not know,
who went away to a war and came back a stranger with no legs. I had a pact with him and kept it. Will you have a scone?'