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A frown fleeted across her brow. She touched the place. ‘Oh, that. No, it isn’t. When you drink too much. Like Dad.’ Her eyes were alight. She teased Vic amiably.
Relieved, he went and bustled about, heating the kettle again, finding the scissors and some lint, bringing a pudding basin of hot water from the kitchen. He settled it down beside her. With his one hand he smoothed her hair back, cradling the head on to the pillow. With the other, he hooked the warm lint out in the scissor blades and stroked it gently across the place. Her head felt small and still. There was the warm female smell of her, the damaged female skin. ‘This should help.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘You know, we ought really to get you to hospital. It ought to be stitched.’
She flared. ‘I don’t want someone else touching me. I don’t want to think about it.’ The emotion subsided. ‘Anyway, they’ll reckon you did it, won’t they?’ Her mouth softened and she smiled up at him. ‘Won’t show under my hair. What’s a war if no one gets wounded? More important to get out to the country. Work on the cabin. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you think. You don’t want to be hanging about on my account, do you, Vic?’
‘Well …’
‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘If you’re sure. There.’ He finished with the lint.
‘Now we’ve got a bit more cash.’ Her gaze followed him as he stood to go.
He paused at the door. She was genuinely compliant. Her affection confused him, and suddenly the agreement with Tony presented itself in a new light. Phyllis hadn’t seen the kiss, wouldn’t trouble about it if she had; it was the deal that held power with her. That alone had been the test, the chance to prove himself. What she’d really needed all along was for him to measure up, to show he cared for her. She wanted the gesture – no one would seriously hold him to it.
How grateful he was. Clarice was just infatuation. Some of the sunlight of the day filled his heart and he believed he’d broken through with his wife. There was a chance; the boy was provided for. And Tony, in the only way he knew, had been trying to help.
Soon, Phyllis was behind him on the tandem. In their shorts and shirt tops, they cut a dash in the Barking back streets. Bareheaded, healthy as Germans, they were a sculpture of modern life, threading through to the Longbridge Road with Jack in the miniature side-car they’d bought when he was a baby, holding his miniature fingers up against the breeze. Vic was taking care of his wife and child. Further out they’d be bomb safe – if it came.
Through Hornchurch and on into Upminster they steered the accustomed route. Householders were piling more sandbags, still installing Andersen shelters, digging slit trenches across prized front lawns. Under the Cranham railway bridge scuffed kerb sides gave way to verges where weed bursts frayed. He was excited, almost aroused. When he glanced down he could see her pretty feet in the toe-clips.
Soon enough, real country appeared, bright as a poster. The shorn fields stretched away, dark edged, flawless. Dotted in them here and there the last stooks were browned by the fine weather. Soon, too, solitary old oaks held ground in pastures, with gangs of cattle in their shadow. Ashes and quickbeams stood up from thorn brakes. Greenfinches from the hedgerows looped beside the bike, their beating bodies almost close enough to grab. Grasshoppers shrilled from copper tufts and dun-coloured butterflies meddled with the late white flowers.
In rhythm with the lowland, the road undulated gently, an edge of the tidal basin. Every so often a car passed. Redeemed, daring the bubble to burst, Vic breathed deeply. There was still no job for him at Everholt’s, but if Phyllis was with him he’d find something else. His old bag of tools was strapped to the side-car. And once everything was set to rights they could uproot and do well at the little house, war or no war. He could maybe find a bit of wallpapering, distempering, odd jobs. He could sell vacuum cleaners, superior gas masks. They could live off the land, and she’d be away from the temptations of London. …
The heat was soon freakish; their tyres slicked a little on the tar. At Horndon, women were covering a rick in a cornfield; he heard the sound of a threshing machine in the distance – that, and a flourish of church bells driven faintly on the wind. The Englishness touched him. Then came a run-down, rather desperate stretch. No one could miss the doorless car at the back of a farm cottage, or the unusable tractor abandoned in a field further on, the harrow still attached. Barns and sheds were patched with rusting corrugated iron, doubling for pig pens, degrading into chicken runs.
They overtook a traction engine. They passed a party of hikers, tousled lads who waved, and would soon be holding rifles, being likeliest for the call-up. All along the way, telegraph wires strung out the distances. In a paddock just before the main road a dispirited cart-horse stood in the heat haze. The notion of it troubled Vic like a presentiment, and he was instantly assailed by the truth of the matter, shocked by the situation he was in. His family, all on the same bike, began the slow climb into Laindon.
HE’D TELL HER NO. He sawed new gabling for the porch, climbed up on his dad’s old pair of steps, and nailed the strips carefully into place. From the roof he could see the river, wide and grey-blue in the distance. Behind him the clutter of cabins, holiday shanties, miniature follies and disused plots stretched over the roll of hills as far as the arterial road and along eastward to the village of Basildon. The locals called the settlement Slum Farm.
But Vic had always loved it. People had made dwellings out of anything, flotsam and thievings, offcuts and salvage. There were clinker-built homes, and boiler-made homes. There were railway carriages and self-assembly kits. Closest to his heart was the converted bus, six plots along the lane, where the Flatman family had lived with their ungovernable brood. Over the open top it had a crazy pitched roof with a stove-pipe sticking out, and barefaced roses groped and wrestled up the conductor’s spiral staircase.
Roses grew everywhere on the encampment. They straggled over cabin porches, trailed under tiny, curtained windows or were clustered upon brick chimney stacks. They made bold and prickly hedges inside the picket stakes. Unpruned, they burst right through the tumble-downs, the failures, scratching at roofing felt and asbestos fibre. Now hip-laden in the Indian summer, they rioted.
Vic climbed down to finish the glazing he’d pinned the previous weekend. He pressed a strip of putty against the pane, shaped it deftly to the joinery with his thumb, and looked over at Phyllis. She was singing a nursery rhyme to Jack, cuddling and kissing him. He caught his breath at the slope of her shoulders, her wrists, the whiteness of her legs. In his imagination he ran his hand all along the flesh from her sandal strap to the cuff of her shorts. She was his wife. He left his work and went to put his arm around her, touching her neck with his lips whenever the boy looked away. In her ear, he whispered, ‘After lunch, eh? Shall we? When he has his nap.’ But Jack was hungry, and Vic stood up to lay out the picnic.
And while they were eating he plucked up his courage, a grown man, and told her that the deal was out of the question. And to his surprise she merely nodded, and frowned, and looked away. Then he imagined it was all right.
Jack licked the jam out of his last sandwich until the red sweetness was the same as his tongue. Always his mother was beautiful when they came to the wooden house. He thought of the slips of complicated words that had just flown between his parents. ‘Twenty quid and my three, Vic. What about that for a night out?’ He held on to the shape of them.
Still tasting his bread, he wandered away from his parents and over towards the little house. By the window where his father had been working he put his hand in the putty tin. ‘The fact is, Phylly, the twenty’s out of the question. You must see that. I’ll have to go and see Tony and give it back.’ The plump, oil-smelling stuff was warm and smooth.
Then his father caught him, picked him up, kissed him too and swung him round. His head high up next to his dad’s, Jack gazed down at her, there, lying in the deck-chair. The putty lump was a feeling squeezed in his hand. She had frowned when they couldn’t keep it. A crease appeared in between her eyes, just to the left of centre, and Jack remembered the cut. On the floor at Tony’s place there had been red blots, as if large wet buttons had come slipping out of his mother’s head and fallen to the floor. And her cream blouse dripping red.
Jack watched her as she lay in the deck-chair, her face clear now, her eyes fallen shut. He struggled to get down, and next thing he was climbing on her, his knee on her stomach, his head down on her soft chest, looking up under the dark wisps of curl.
‘Christ, Vic. I thought you were looking after him.’
But Jack could see it, still there, a small line coming out of her hair and opening the top of her forehead with black and red. He wanted to point to it, put his finger in. Now she had her hand up to touch the wound, the ring on her finger a gleam of yellow, bright as sunshine. She had told him not to tell. He liked the gold, how one point of it shone.
Vic pulled his son off her. He said, cautiously, ‘If I can just stop up that bit where the rain came in over the door. Then we’ll need a couple of new panels for the sides because of that mould. I’ll bike over and order them. Churchill Johnson’s, that place at the station, they’ve got asbestos. Maybe next weekend.’
Phyllis straightened her blouse where it was tucked up. ‘You’re turning Tony down, then.’
‘You can’t seriously expect …’
She, too, seemed to check herself, as though she were fighting her impulses, as though she were really trying. ‘Look, Vic, it’s only me keeping us going, isn’t it? No call for you to be looking down your nose any more at me, or my family. Or my friends. D’you think I like it or what, standing up in that club making a spectacle of myself? Those men, Victor. They do pass comments. If it wasn’t for Tony … You do respect me, don’t you?’
‘I have to give it back, Phyllis. I can’t get involved in all that, no matter how much we need it. …’ He looked away.
‘You say you love me, Vic.’
‘I do love you.’
‘Do you, though? You don’t. You don’t love me at all.’
He sighed and turned back to her. ‘Look, darling. A bloke like me has to stick in the lee of the law. That’s loving, isn’t it? That’s for you.’
‘You don’t want me. If you loved me you’d do what it takes. You think I’ve got no morals, don’t you? How could I have, where I come from? Down by the docks. That’s what you think. Well, love means more than lying down and taking it, Victor. It’s more than, Yes boss, No boss, Thanks for the sack, boss. A man would be on my side but you never are.’
‘I’d had too much to drink, for God’s sake. I want …’
‘I know exactly what you want.’
‘What do I want?’ he responded crossly. ‘You tell me what I want. Tell me.’ Then he sensed the trap he’d fallen into. ‘No … Phyllis.’
But a line had been crossed. ‘You just want to get rid of me, don’t you? You want me dead.’
VIC FELT EACH colour of the world click off as the frame changed. It was always so sudden, and he always walked in. He knew every detail of what had to come next – and on, and on, until the man in him broke. Her eyes were already glazed over, hard, like an old one. Phyllis had drained out of her; she was terrible, unreachable. ‘Come on. You just want me dead, don’t you? You just want rid of me.’
‘For pity’s sake, don’t start.’
‘You do, though, don’t you? You hate me. You do. Why don’t you admit it? Go on. Admit it. Why don’t you, Vic? Face facts. Well, if that’s what you want …’
‘Please …’ Vic looked at Jack. The boy was playing ostentatiously with the tool bag, trying to save his father. ‘Please, Phyllis. Not now.’ Vic lowered his head into his hands. ‘Look, we’re having a nice day. I thought we were going to …’ The lover’s plea was feeble.
‘Mummy! Stop.’
‘And you can shut it,’ she called. ‘You and him, the two of you ganging up.’
She ran across to Jack and grabbed his arm away from the tools. The boy went limp by her side. Tears began to stream from his eyes. She shouted, ‘Why are you crying at me? I’m your mother. Why are you crying? Eh? Tell me, you ungrateful little brat!’
‘Stop that. He’s only a child. He doesn’t understand.’
‘Of course he understands. He hates me. Don’t you? You both do.’
Vic went to separate them. There was a byplay of hands and arms, a brief scuffle. He took Jack, quivering, and set him in a no man’s land a yard or so off, triangulated between them. Neither should appear to take sides against her.
Phyllis called, ‘Come here, Jack. Come to your mother.’
‘Leave him be, Phyllis. Can’t you see he’s upset? The kid’s crying, for God’s sake. Can’t you see? He’s a child.’
‘He’s my child and I can do what I like with him.’
‘No.’
The stare was icy in her; but Vic watched her attention as it lifted from the boy and was directed back at him. Her fists clenched and unclenched. ‘If you two hate me so much, if you’d both get on so well without me, then I’ll go. That’s what’ll make you happy, isn’t it? The pair of you. You want me out of the way. Come on. You do, don’t you? Face up to it, you’d both be better off without me. I’m dirt. I’m rubbish. It’s a simple fact. Well, I’ll do it for you. All right? It’s only what you want.’
‘Get inside the house, Jack. Shut the door. It’s just Mummy and Daddy talking. Do as I say.’
Vic watched the boy go to the cabin, mute and sniffling. He saw the cabin door shut after his son – the hostage she kept to her demands. It was for the child’s sake he held on. It was for the child’s sake he’d been reduced to this. If he could break down first, she might relent; but the hurt wasn’t yet great enough and nothing he could do would alter the weary routine of what was about to occur.
‘I’ll go then, shall I?’
‘That’s not what we want.’
‘You do. No, listen. If I was dead you’d be free. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, Vic? Vic? Answer me. That’s just what you want. Tell me the truth, Vic. It would solve everything if you got rid of me.’
‘I don’t want to have this.’
‘Why don’t you kill me, then? Then I’d be out of your way. That’s what you think. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘Damn you!’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing, Phylly. Nothing. I didn’t mean it. Truly I didn’t.’
‘I’m evil, aren’t I? You think I’m the devil. All right I’ll go, then. I will.’ She made as if to gather her things. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘You’re his mother. He needs you. We love you, Phyllis. Stay. Please stay.’
Phyllis stood, half turned away with her maroon cardigan in her hand. Vic stepped towards her and took her arm. ‘I need you.’
‘You don’t want me. I’m filthy. That’s what you think. Say it. You’d be better off without me.’
‘I love you.’ He wanted to smash her head. ‘Phyllis. Think of the kid. Try, Phyllis. We’ve been through all this.’ He sank down, holding his face again, turning away himself now and crouching towards the ground as if he were being beaten.
‘Why don’t you kill me, Vic? You know it’s what you want.’ She cast about as if for some implement. His bag lay in the long grass. She bent to rummage in it. He heard the scrape and edge of his tools. ‘Here, then.’ She had hold of a large, one-inch-wide chisel. ‘Here, Vic’ She held it out to him by the blade, thrusting the yellow handle at him, its hammer-burred top fractured like the crown of a wooden dandelion. ‘Take it!’
‘Phyllis!’ He tried ignoring her, presenting his back. But he needed to watch what she did as she jabbed words at him.
‘I’ll do it for you, then,’ she said. ‘If you’re too weak. If you’re not man enough, Vic, to do it yourself, I’ll take it out of your hands. I will, Vic. If that’s what you’re after, I’ll save you the bother. Save you the trouble.’ She clamped both her hands on the chisel. ‘Here. It’s just what you’ve been hoping for all this time. Haven’t you? Eh? Look.’ Gripping the shaft of it with both hands, she poised the blade at her neck, forcing him to look.
‘Phyllis!’
‘It’s what you want, Vic.’
‘It’s not what I want. Listen to me.’ He dared not move. ‘Let me talk to her. Let me talk to Phyllis. I know she’s still there. I love her. I don’t hate her.’
‘You want me dead. Don’t you? Then I’ll do it. I’ll give you what you want. I’ll give you exactly what you want.’
He was on that edge for minutes. Then he broke out and grabbed a wrist. ‘No! I love you, Phyllis. You know that. Sweetheart. Come on, let the thing go. Can’t you? Please.’ He tugged at her forearm. The chisel glinted. ‘For pity’s sake! Stop it!’
‘Mummy!’
Vic caught a glimpse of the little face in the window he’d just glazed.
Then, once again, nothing else was alive in the garden but the chisel and a voice, half stifled, grinding, coming remorselessly out of the fixed features.
‘No. Think how much better things’ll be. Think how much you want rid of me. See, I’m doing it for you. Why don’t you let me? Then you’ll be happy. Won’t you, Vic? Won’t you? You’ll be happy. With me gone.’ The chisel stood, pent in the inches, juddering at her throat.
All at once Vic saw himself through Jack’s eyes. His one arm was around her shoulders, and he was using all the force in his other against her two hands with their woman’s strength conjoined, endlessly driving the chisel towards her own throat. ‘See! See! This is what you want!’
She would succeed. She was determined. This time he fully believed she would finish herself, and he felt excruciated, invaded; his soul would burst and there’d be hell to pay. He had brought her to this. At last, to his infinite relief, the pain and despair broke out of Vic’s eyes. He wept in terrible, gasping sobs.
‘Oh, Vic. What’s the matter, love? It’s all right.’ It was as though she knew nothing of the steel in her hand. She ignored it, and broke her grip. The tool swung down. She might have been holding the rolled-up newspaper she’d used to chase a wasp. She wouldn’t have hurt a fly.
Slowly Vic straightened and, smiling, dashed away the tears from his face. ‘I thought you meant to do it that time.’ His good humour was automatic, once the punishment had stopped. He wanted to soothe her, to tell her it was all right. He was strong, strong enough for both of them. Strong enough also to hide the guilty secret that in his thoughts he had held on to Clarice.
They were standing together. ‘Oh, come on, Vic. Don’t be so bloody daft. You know I didn’t mean it.’
‘I didn’t know, Phyllis. I didn’t.’
‘Course you did.’ She smiled.
Her smile was like a blessing. He was so grateful.
‘Yeah.’
‘Vic? When Tony comes.’
‘All right, Phyllis. I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever he wants.’
‘There,’ Phyllis said.
Later, Jack watched his father sitting in the doorway to the wooden house with his long, safe legs tucked up under him. His dad was pumping the Primus until flames lapped up the sides of the kettle. In a tin box which he called his tinder-box there was a piece of thin metal, spoon pale with a wire in it which his father took and poked into the middle of the flames. The Primus roared suddenly, and hissed, and the fire turned blue so they could see holes in rows. The flame was a blue flower that never went away.
‘There we go.’ His father smiled at him and pumped the pump again. The metal had the same shine as the ring on her finger. Jack loved the hot smell of the Primus, the heat on his cheeks.
Much later still, when the sky was colouring up, he was clutching a piece of wood like a stick. His mother was sitting on a box drinking a cup of tea. Jack must get the wood into the cut on his mother’s head. Needing both hands, he tried to bring it down from above in one clear swipe but she was too big, too high above him for it to be right. His stick was too heavy and he couldn’t reach.
She smacked him hard and put him in the side-car. Then it was getting dark. Her shorts were next to him, moving. The sound was the hum, hum, of the tandem back to Ripple Road. The cars had their faint lights on. Up high were stars.
