The Broken Chariot (24 page)

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.'

Poor things had no one else to talk about. His father's study was just as he had seen it in the afternoon. In the attic he found a fort and fire engine broken and dusty, toys from his childhood. Finding his way in darkness to the kitchen, he hated the night. Night was inhuman, antipathetic, no good for him. After five minutes of fresh air he made back for bed, his only refuge. Night was a black cloth covering all romance, and he slept as if utterly worn out. When he woke up bits of dream were stamped on by the boots of daylight.

The morning was dry and blustery, and at breakfast Hugh said they would go out with the Purdys. ‘See if we can bag a rabbit or two down by the river.'

Energized, ready for anything, Herbert chose a pair of wellingtons from the hall by the kitchen and, with a bandolier of cartridges hanging from his shoulder, and the gun pointing down, followed his father to the lane. Like two soldiers on patrol, Herbert thought.

High stinging nettles bent over the track, a thick hawthorn hedge and a ditch on the other side. The carmine blue and gold of an overflying painted lady stopped Hugh for a moment in his stalking, and Herbert all but ran into him.

By a pink blaze of rosebay his father signalled for stealth, which put both at the crouch and immobile. He straightened, gun at the same time coming to his shoulder. Herbert went down with equal slowness on one knee to take aim, and the question came as to whether he should put a stop to his father now, in the back, at ten yards range. He pressed off the safety catch, stroking the cold trigger.

Two mature and confident rabbits came from under a laden bramble, furry snouts at the twitch, facing each other as if for a round of boxing before loosing themselves for breakfast in the rich pastures. A large white butterfly made a hypotenuse up from his sights, and he lined his gun on the left-hand rabbit, assuming his father would take the other.

For no reason he could think of Archie's face printed itself on his mind, enough of a glimpse to make him wonder if such a powerful almost sexual urge to blow a hole in his own father should for a moment be morally contemplated. He decided that Archie was too primitive and too civilized even to think of such a murder, and in any case so was he.

The rabbit spun over, and he hit the other before it could run. A third report from a higher elevation brought a wounded pigeon flopping on to the Pliocene soil. He was astounded that his father had not all along intended to fire at either of the rabbits but had left both to him, confident of being understood.

The shots alerted wildlife for miles around, so that in spite of another hour's tramping and a few wasted shots, they downed nothing more. ‘Two rabbits and a pigeon ain't bad,' Hugh said. ‘That was a good bit of shooting, by the way.'

‘So was yours.'

They stood under a half-shed chestnut, Hugh wielding his pipe for a well-earned smoke. ‘I have so much faith in this little lighting-up machine you made at your factory that I didn't even carry matches this morning.'

He said ‘Your factory' as if Herbert owned it, which for some reason pleased him. Light brought out autumn's colours, a blade of sun catching a clump of Scotch pines. Herbert liked the sound of birds embellishing the day. His father leaned, holding a flame over the bowl. ‘Do you remember that cheque for twenty-five pounds I sent you? It was years ago.'

‘Yes, Father.'

‘Why didn't you cash it?'

Why ever not? He'd long forgotten it. ‘I was waiting for a rainy day, which hasn't come yet.'

‘Well, in my youth I'd have made the bloody rain pour down so that I could have had a whale of a time on it. So cash it. Stop waiting for emergencies.'

‘I promise I will.'

They climbed the stile from the lane in silence, then Hugh laughed as he opened the gate to home. ‘Ah! I can smell something good for lunch.'

Maud drove him to Norwich in their Vauxhall Velox Saloon so as to shorten his journey home. ‘I wish you would make your home with us, though. Or in London, at least. Your father could get you a job in insurance, or shipping. You must have enough material for your book by now.'

The prospect of being alone in the train lured like a gleam of paradise. ‘Not quite.'

She overtook a farm wagon on a bend. Another such manoeuvre, he smiled, and all our troubles will be over. ‘I'll need a year or two yet.'

After a mile of ointment-quiet she came in with: ‘I can't think why you torment yourself so. It's not like either of us.'

Luckily the engine drowned his sigh. ‘It's how I am.'

‘I know. But I worry about you.'

He touched her hand at the wheel, a natural almost loving gesture that felt strange to him, though there was nothing behind it but the action, which made him free of her as well. ‘You don't need to, believe me.'

‘All right, I won't. But write now and again.'

‘I promise.'

‘And come whenever you like.'

He wouldn't, unless some reason hard to imagine impelled him. ‘I shall.'

He had an impulse to sling the bag of apples out of the train window, but decided they'd make a present for Mrs Denman. She liked fruit. At the station there was time to send a postcard to Isaac, as proof that he had done his duty.

Thirteen

Mrs Denman thought the excursion had done him little good, wondered whether he had been to Norfolk at all, but had gone instead to London and fallen into bad company. As for the apples, he could have bought them at a stall, though in the end she had to believe him, since he was too proud a person to tell a lie. ‘Was your parents well?'

‘Yes.'