Waterland (33 page)

Mary takes it; peers inside.

And a strange thing follows. For despite her qualms regarding eels, for which there are very good reasons, she has to admit that, returned to its native element, no longer wriggling and writhing but curled up passively round the bottom of the pail in a state of semi-shock, this eel is not an unhandsome creature. It’s sleek and smooth-skinned. It has little glimmering amber eyes which, for all one knows, could be the windows of a tiny eel-soul. It has little panting gills and, behind them, delicate whirring pectoral fins not unreminiscent of Dick’s whirring eyelashes …

Mary bends over the pail. Dick bends also; draws nearer.

‘Thank you,’ says Mary. ‘Thank you. It’s beautiful.’ As if she means to take it home and feed it, in a glass bowl, on the daintiest titbits.

‘Bootiful,’ says Dick, looking at Mary. A word he’s never used before.

And that’s how Dick began to go awooing along the Hockwell Lode. Or, if you prefer, that’s how Mary inaugurated a course of instruction …

Let’s not go into the details of how, that same evening, Dick wanted to walk with Mary back to Polt Fen Farm. But Mary said no – in his sopping wet state? And with no Wellington boots? But promised to meet him again the next day. Or of how, on Mary’s parting, Dick had no option but to swim back the way he came, across this Fenland Hellespont, to his abandoned and – who knows? – jealousy-smitten motor-bike; and, having to account later for his arrival home in a sodden condition, explained that he had swerved into a ditch to avoid an ill-driven farm truck – a story which might have been more plausible and shown an untypical streak of cunning if only his bike had shown also a splash or two of mud. Or of how Mary, in parting from Dick, strode back, pail in hand, towards Polt Fen, while Dick watched, but as soon as she had slipped from Dick’s gaze, stopped by one of the drains which join the Hockwell Lode and tipped the eel discreetly into it, where, doubtless, recovering from this spell in the limelight of human intrigue, it continued its obscure and anonymous eel-existence …)

But how well does Dick learn? Does he progress? Does he make a keen and responsive pupil? And does Mary prove an able teacher?

And meanwhile, as on Wednesday and Saturday evenings he makes way so generously and tactfully for Dick and waits for the emergence of a new, improved brother, how does little Tom occupy his surplus time? You’ve guessed it, children. In studies of his own. As a matter of fact, in this burgeoning summer of 1943, while the scales of war tip (victory in Africa, German withdrawals in the
east), he’s reading for the first time old Carlyle’s
French Revolution.

Does Dick confide in his seemingly heedless, book-burrowing brother about this enlightening liaison of his? Does he offer, while we begin to win the war, excited communiques of his own? No. But every Wednesday and Saturday evening, on his return from the dredger, he goes through a routine formerly not to be imagined of him. He takes a bath. In our old white-enamel tub, before the kitchen range, he attacks his body with soapy water and a scrubbing brush. With steamy and splish-splashing determination he attempts to expunge from his person, like some incriminating stain, all vestige of that stubborn and degrading smell of silt.

Now see what happens when you dabble in education …

But to no avail. Because, scrub and rub though he might, there is still – others can detect it – that residual whiff of the river-bed; and step though he does after these brisk ablutions into clean clothes, he only wraps himself once more in the old contamination. For Mrs Forbes, a Hockwell matron, who for a weekly stipend takes in the Crick laundry, can never quite, though no niggard with her suds and rinsings, expel from Dick’s garments that tell-tale odour.

But thus, to his mind, cleansed and purified, his hair combed, slicked and even larded with brilliantine, a hasty supper crammed into his belly, Dick rides off, without a word, every Wednesday and Saturday evening. Dad watches. He does not mistake the signs; even regards them with a certain satisfaction (so, he’s normal, in that respect, after all …) But Dad doesn’t know, and it’s just as well, who it is that Dick goes wooing on these twice-weekly sorties. Nor does he know that the reason why his younger son never sees Mary Metcalf after Dick’s return from work is so that Dick’s education—

So, is he learning? For if he’s learning shouldn’t this
course of lessons be coming to some completion? How much longer is it going to go on? To what advanced and proficient stages is it going to be taken? And supposing it’s not such a simple matter of teacher and pupil; supposing Mary’s out to learn a thing or two as well. (Ah, how charity, turning again to jealousy …)

And, if he’s learning, if he’s making headway, why these troubled and baffled looks? For they start to appear, as instruction continues, on Dick’s blank and impervious face which has scarcely registered such things before. Merest shadows, slightest furrows. An outsider might not see them. But a brother can. And who can say what internal tumult the slightest surface ruffles on the likes of Dick might portend? Is he learning that it’s hard to learn? Is there something he doesn’t understand? Is he learning that if he’d never set out to learn he’d never have learnt that it’s all beyond him?

Why does he hang his head and gaze at the ground? Why, returning on these long summer evenings, does he loiter as of old with his motor-bike by the lean-to, tinker with it, whisper to it, as to some chromium-plated confessor?

Can it be that knowledge has indeed dawned and that Dick, for so long ignorant even of this fact, realizes that he’s not like other people? He’s defective; he’s a botched job. And this being the case, perhaps it’s time the truth were faced. Perhaps it’s time (he confides to his long-suffering Velocette) something better were found to replace this abortive experiment called Dick Crick …

Yet he must be learning, or he must be learning and yet not learning, and this whole course of lessons has got more serious – and more dangerous – than we imagined. Because one day, over supper (not eels this time, but spam fritters), Dick asks, as if there’s something Mary’s said he wants to verify:

‘Wh-where do ba-babies come from?’

Panic fills Dad’s eyes. He looks at Dick. He looks at
me – an interrogating, almost accusatory, yet strangely pleading look. Outside, beyond the kitchen window, louring summer rain clouds are marauding the horizon.

‘Where do they come from?’ he echoes, looking now neither at Dick nor at me, but frantically around the kitchen as if for inspiration (they’re baked in the oven … they appear one morning in the bread bin …).

At length, laying down his knife and fork, swallowing the lump of spam that has lodged temporarily in the pouch of his cheek, he says, with an air of solemn resignation (no yarns this time, no fibs about storks or gooseberry bushes):

‘They come from love, Dick. They’re made with – Love.’

He releases the mystic word then shuts tight his lips – as if it must do its best to cross the dizzy gulf to Dick and not come fluttering back for assistance.

But Dick wants answers, not more conundrums.

‘Love,’ he says. (He’s heard this bare little syllable before but never—) ‘What’s lu-love?’

At which Dad’s clamped lips open again to form for a moment that old gaping zero.

‘Love, Dick, is a feeling. A good feeling. It’s like the feeling you felt for your poor Mum. Like the feeling she felt for you.’

He looks at his plate. His plate seems to flash back rapid alarm signals.

‘That’s to say – it’s a very important thing. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s the most wonderful thing there is—’

A sudden patter of rain. The first thick drops which herald a May downpour plop on to the vegetable patch and slide lachrymosely down the window. That evening Dad (assisted by Dick) will raise the sluice, cranking with extra violence the sluice engine.

Dick sits at the supper table. His big hands, his twenty years, belie the look on his face of a lost little boy.

‘Lu-love,’ he says. Another difficult word.

33
Who Says?

‘B
UT you’ve got to be kidding, sir. This “one day you’ll be grown up too” stuff, this “one day you’ll be like your parents” crap. Even supposing that’s how it is – who says we’re going to be around long enough to be parents anyway …?’

The Duke’s Head. Mock red velvet. Mock Tudor oak framing mock Georgian coach-lamps. Amidst the period anomalies, electronic growls, TV-game bleepings. How we advance … how we still need our babies’ rattles …

And how our momentarily commiserative and compliant Price has regained his old confrontationary zeal. Only took a single Bloody Mary. He gulps at a second. (Whatever happened to beer and merriment?)

‘And who says if we
are
around that we’ll want to have children – the way things are going? Who says there’s going to be any world to bring them into?’

(But if nobody has children there won’t be any world anyway …)

‘Who says we’ll want to bring children into whatever world there is?’

He looks at me, this founding president of the Holocaust Club, this angry, frightened, and denunciatory kid.

(Yes, yes, it’s our fault, Price. The old ones. We haven’t been vigilant. We’ve let the world slip away. Should have saved it.)

‘Supposing you could have children now, sir, just supposing … would you?’

And forgets. And remembers again at once. And flushes; looks confused, guilty, aghast. Wipes a smear of tomato juice from his lip.

A fruit machine vomits. The space invaders close in.

‘Sorry. I didn’t—’

34
Too Big

B
UT it’s all right, you see, because once I had a child. No, I’m talking literally. I’m not talking about now, I’m talking about the year 1943 (now would you have said that was a particularly rosy year for civilization?). And perhaps I’d better rephrase things: Once Mary had a child. Her menstrual cycle, of which she was so proud and so unsecretive, stopped cycling. She missed a period, and then, bit by bit, things started to happen inside her, just as they’re supposed to. And, at sixteen, in the year 1943, amongst all those not-so-much-older-than-me soldiers, sailors and airmen who were hastily sowing their seed and putting something by for posterity during this time of universal crisis, I too faced the prospect of precipitate paternity.

Or would have done. Had not Dick asked, over the kitchen table, a certain question … Because how did I know, hearing it all from Mary, just how far those lessons were going every Wednesday and Saturday evening …?

He wants to give her another eel. Another gift from him to her. He keeps on asking, his skin scrubbed and his hair glistening, when would she like another eel? So that Mary is obliged at length to say that there are other things besides eels … But then – since they’re speaking of eels (and Dick is there to learn) – has Dick never wondered why there is never any shortage of eels, how you can keep pulling them out of rivers by the trapful but there are always more the next time? In other words, where do all the little eels come from?

At which Dick pricks up his ears. And Mary begins to explain. But quickly realizes she’s picked a bad example; because once she gets beyond saying there are Mummy and Daddy eels (though how do you tell which is which?), she gets into deep water. Because the truth is no one knows exactly how— She comes up against that zoological enigma which so confounded the learned men of old.

And thus I, in due course, make the acquaintance (browsings, on Mary’s prompting, in the Gildsey Reference Library) of the intrepid Johannes Schmidt …

So Mary decides she’d better not beat about the bush. She starts to talk about Holes and Things.

But Dick doesn’t want a biology lesson. What he wants is Lu-lu-love. He wants the Wonderful Thing. Because he asked his Dad. And his Dad never said anything about Holes and Things. And Mary says, but they’re all part (it’s getting confusing) of the Wonderful Thing. And Dick says what’s wonderful about putting something in a hole? And Mary says wouldn’t he like to try and see? Now if he were to show her his …

And the result of all this is that, after much difficult coaxing – for Dick won’t consent at first to such a bizarre operation, and even when he feels an undeniable fire kindling between his legs he’s inclined, as once before, to leap into the nearest water to put it out – the result of all this is that it proves Too Big.