New and Collected Stories (72 page)

‘Of course it is.' Baxter's sharp tone implied that he ought to realize that they had never given him anything except the best.

There was a school desk in one corner, with an inkwell which must have been regularly filled. The black liquid glittered like the tip of a snake's tail, and he drew back at the old man's voice: ‘I'll leave you to spruce up a bit. I expect a good tea's being got ready. Don't forget to bring the cigarettes. And if you'd like to offer one to your mother, that's all right. It sometimes amuses her to refuse!'

He heard Baxter close the door. There was an old portable gramophone, and a pile of seventy-eight records on a separate table. When he tried to turn the handle he found it fully wound. He'd done nothing for himself, whoever he was. Peter fought off a wish to set it spinning and play a tune. There were foxtrots and tangos, and one or two classical piano pieces under the heap.

He again thought of running away, but what was the point? You always ended by going in circles. In the mirror, he wondered how much longer his lips would conceal the bitterness he felt. But he was happy, while knowing he was trapped. For the price of a few books he was doing a mad old woman a favour.

The uniform fitted, except for a slight pressure at the shoulders. He speculated on what books he would take, and on those he might help himself to on a further visit. Before going down to play his part, like someone who had once fancied himself as an actor, he tried to imagine what sort of person he had been whose uniform he was dressed in. The landscape helped, when he looked out of the enlarged window. The green hill in front was overpowering. Treetops of a copse on either side made a darker smudge, and to the right an unpaved lane led to a thatched farmhouse almost hidden by the thickening vegetation of late spring. Two horses walked across a field, and stopped under a tree to shelter from the rain.

Maybe the other bloke had died with this scenery in mind. He swore, out of pity. Bullets had shattered his plane, a handful of burning coals flung at his back with incredible speed. His parachute hadn't opened, and he had gone like a stone into water, stunned at the impact and dead before getting wet. He had come back to life. Peter smiled at the thought that the sky was his parachute, and would hold him for ever. He had never given into his father's bullying request that he get his feet on the ground. Perhaps he had taken his mother's story too much to heart.

The black shoes fitted. He pulled them off and walked around the room. He was hungry, a feeling which brought him closer to anger than at any time that day. Had he hated this view, and grown sick of looking at it, before leaving for the last time? He put the shoes on again, though they were stiff from lack of wear.

Baxter nodded towards the stairway. ‘He'll be down in a moment or two.'

‘Do you think he will?'

He watched her. She had thought of setting tea in the kitchen where Peter had liked to eat as a boy, but Baxter insisted on the dining room because it would be stupid taking Peter's mind back to those pampered days. He used the word ‘stupid'. There was a war on, and one had to forget such times. He said ‘one' instead of ‘we' or ‘you'. She had to admit there was no going back, and that she was – they were – lucky to have him here at all with so many boys – well, never coming home again. It wasn't easy to make out why he had reappeared when for some time she had thought him ‘missing presumed killed', but here he was and it didn't do to question too much. You must enjoy happiness no matter where it came from, and whatever the explanation might be.

‘No, don't call him.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘Just – don't, George.' She was determined to get her own way. It was so long since she had done so that she couldn't remember when it had last happened. But if she won her point now, it wouldn't matter, except that it wasn't really important. ‘He must be tired.' Baxter noticed how embarrassed she was at saying so. ‘You know he likes a quiet few minutes in his room, even when he can only spend an hour with us.'

She had made sandwiches, and smiled while altering the position of the cake on the table for the third time. He counted them. She wondered where Peter would sit.

He told her. ‘Always by the fire. Even when it isn't lit.'

The photograph on the sideboard was tilted towards the window. There were resemblances in the straight but slightly thin nose, in the same lips and similar forehead. He looked like Helen. But the photograph was of an innocent young man who had loved and respected his parents. He had confided in them and you couldn't have asked for more than that. Pity he had to die. I didn't hang back for my country, Baxter thought, but if only it had been me rather than him. He sighed, having wished it every time his son had come to mind.

The photograph hadn't been in place for twenty years. They had never mentioned his name. There was no need to. She must have hidden it, and looked at it every day. He hadn't known. There was no reason why he should. Their grief occupied separate regions. He had been deceived. She had once gone to the clinic and forgotten to take one of the many paper bundles, and so had stayed twice as long. Now he knew that it must have contained photographs of Peter.

She was in the kitchen filling the teapot. He heard her trying to get the lid on, so went across the room to pick up the frame. The glass was about to crack in his grip. She would see the blood. He heard the tread of Peter coming along the hall and down the stairs, before the pressure could split his fingers.

She had changed her clothes, Peter saw, wore a white blouse and a pale grey, rather long skirt. Her nails weren't grimy any more. He took the heavy pewter teapot, wondering why her husband had let her fill and then carry it.

Her fingers shook. ‘You always were kind.'

Baxter leaned against the chair, and Peter saw him looking at his wife as she walked around the table fussily re-laying it as if nothing would ever be right. Every time her fingers touched a plate her smile made her seem younger.

He felt that Baxter didn't like her smile. It made her look more normal, and therefore unusual. A visitor altered the atmosphere. He was afraid of what lay behind it. Lack of perception meant loss of control. An expression of hesitating tenderness was noticeable in Baxter, as if he saw an unpleasant aspect of her that he'd thought would never come back.

Peter held her chair, then sat down himself. Looking across the table he saw the major nod and smile. The drifting veils of rain had gone, and a shadow-line of sun crossed a pile of magazines in the window. He found it painful to watch her hand shaking when she tried to lift the pot. A trivial upset, such as the dropping of a spoon, would send her back into a state of fragile helplessness.

When he went to her she slapped him playfully away: ‘If your mother can't pour you a cup of tea, then what use is she?'

Helen wondered why Baxter was so restless – though it didn't disturb her as much as when he was calm. He found it too peaceful, in fact, and had learned to tread carefully because in such tranquillity conflict was always imminent, and at such moments he thought about war with a touch of passion half concealed. Watching Peter and his wife, he knew there was something vital in life he'd never had, though he wasn't sure exactly what it might have been. Yet he knew that the love he had for his son was greater than Helen's. He smiled at the word ‘eternal', and Helen reacted to it as if to mimic him when he turned for a moment from Peter. Whatever he hadn't got, it was obvious that Peter had, and had come back to stop him having to the end, though Baxter was willing to go without so as to give Helen the serenity she hadn't enjoyed for so long. There was nothing he would not do so that one day they would be able to talk about their dead son. But he was beginning to see that everything had its price.

He had learned in prison how to get secrets out of the walls, how to see through windows that did not exist, so it was easy to surmise, walking around the trap of his namesake's room, where the hide-outs of a tormented mind could be located. The diary rested on a ledge up the chimney, wrapped in layers of brown paper and pushed into the sort of canvas bag in which he took his gym shoes to school.

Careful not to pull down soot or pebbles, he carried it to the open window and shook the grit away. There had been no cause to start it before August, but after so many years he could smell his elemental panic through the faint pencilling when he did: ‘Mummy and Daddy turned her away. I didn't write to them beforehand because I knew they would, though I had hoped they wouldn't. I can't believe it, but it's happened, so I have to. They didn't say why, but were quite firm about it as soon as they saw her. I didn't have the opportunity to tell them what she meant to me, but it wouldn't have made any difference if I had. I'm sure of it, but it doesn't make me feel any better.'

No fires had been lit in the grate. Such comfort might have spoiled him. Everything instead had been lavished on hobbies and education, which made the chimney a good place in which to keep his diary.

He read her full name scripted vertically down the page of half a week: Cynthia Weston, common enough with probably a few in every phone book in the country. Some days after her visit, and before Pilot Officer Baxter went ‘missing presumed killed' there were more entries, but Peter was called down before he could read them. At the major's shout he anxiously placed the diary back in the soot, and stood up to make sure there was no sign of it on his uniform.

His mouth was half full of chicken-paste sandwich. Even the tea was good. No teabags here.

‘Saw a couple of Heinkel One-elevens over France yesterday. Got one of them at twelve thousand feet. A cannon shell scraped my starboard aileron, but there was no trouble getting back.'

‘It must be dreadful, for those poor French people,' she commented.

Baxter grunted. ‘Didn't feel much for them in the last war.'

Her torment lasted till Peter came again, but on some visits she was uncertain who he was, and had to make up her mind whether or not to acknowledge that he was Peter whom she thought she had lost. The more hesitation, the greater her fuss when she did recognize him – Baxter had observed. At her distressed moments she knew him from his walk rather than his face. Sometimes he didn't even look like his photograph, poor boy, which was because he worried so much. The war seemed as if it would go on for ever.

‘It looked beautiful from up there, those fields spinning under me. I saw the Heinkel hit the deck before any parachutes came out. Sorry about it, though.' He had practised reducing his smile to a look of ruefulness. ‘I hate killing.'

‘Didn't we all?' Baxter added that he knew those fields. ‘We drove around there before the war. Don't you remember?'

‘They were wonderful days,' Helen said. ‘But so short.'

‘On our way to the Loire.' Baxter usually smoked cigarettes, but occasionally lit a short well-worn meerschaum. He calmly released smoke away from the table: ‘Stayed the night in Bapaume. Showed you my old sector on the Somme.'

Peter was tired of watching them adore each other, and suspected they only indulged in it when he was in the house. ‘Of course I remember. I found a piece of shrapnel by the lane that led to the War Memorial.'

Baxter looked at him with suspicion, yet was grateful for such sharpness, with its hint of generosity towards his mother. Must have seen it in the drawer of
his
room. ‘You've still got it, I suppose?'

‘It's in my desk upstairs, wrapped in cotton wool, in a tobacco tin with an old ten franc piece.' There was no use denying anything. They could have whatever part of him they wanted – except that which would not even share its secrets with himself.

‘You're too thin. I do wish you'd eat more.' Helen spoke as if all her troubles would be over if only his appetite improved.

He lit a cigarette with the crested silver lighter found on the bedside table. The flint had lost its roughage, but went at the second go. ‘I'm really too full for anything else.'

Baxter disapproved of him having left nothing unturned in Peter's room. Peter smiled. Of course he had been through his things. What did he expect? Neither of them could dispute that they belonged to him.

‘In the last war we couldn't get enough to eat,' Baxter said.

To get into a Spitfire and spill around the sky at over three hundred miles an hour was the perfect antidote to such a home life. Every takeoff was a farewell. They hadn't even got his ashes back, not an ounce of salt or soil, only an ex-jailbird and con-man a score of years later to remind them of him. He touched her wrist, and picked up another sandwich. ‘You're right. They're so good.'

‘Your old school phoned the other day,' Baxter remarked, as if he too must play his part.

Helen poured more tea with a steady hand. ‘They were really glad to hear about your adventures.'

‘The headmaster read your letter to the boys.'

The notion of having grown up to become a credit to his school, not to mention a prime example of self-sacrifice, pleased him in a way he didn't like, though he put in: ‘I only wrote what I felt. I just thought they'd like to hear from me.'

‘You made them so happy,' she said. ‘And us.'

However convincing he was, the little play had gone on long enough for today. The pendulum clock ticked sanely by the doorway. Didn't she know who he was? It was hard to imagine it could be otherwise. He felt sorry for her, but she wasn't the first person in the history of the world to have lost an only son. When he was fourteen a friend's cousin had run from the garden gate to be struck dead by a speeding car. He was an only child. His mother was a grey shadow, walking the streets but avoiding everyone when she could. She felt no offence when dodged in turn by those who saw her as too stricken for them to say anything that would make either them or her remember it without embarrassment. They were abashed at their helplessness, and she was too agonized to believe that any verbal contact would comfort her, or indeed that she would ever be sane again. Six months later she was working as a secretary in a solicitor's office – thinner, greyer, yet willing to talk about her disaster.