Flight into Camden Page 5

  ‘Her men.’

  ‘She hasn’t got any men,’ Michael said.

  ‘And that’s all thanks to you.’

  ‘To me!’

  She lowered her voice so that I shouldn’t hear. ‘You take to pieces any man she goes with. Well, leave her alone with this one.’ Her voice was guttural.

  ‘But this is crazy!’ I heard Michael crash his fist on the table.

  ‘Ay, now,’ my father shouted. ‘You don’t go talking to your mother like that.’ The baby’s crying became insistent, and Nora’s sing-song murmur of easing it. A moment later she brought the baby out, and glanced at me quickly, half-afraid, before she hurried upstairs. I went quietly into the hall, behind the room door, and lifted my coat off the peg.

  ‘You don’t understand it, at all,’ Michael was saying. ‘This bloody chap’s married!’

  3

  Even before we reached the top of the rise we could feel the coolness of the Ponds seeping into the woods, and could hear the cries of children. The path swung round the stone ruins of Lindley Mill, and climbing to the top of the bank we looked down on the three steps of the pools, the lowest one hidden by close foliage.

  We walked round the upper pool, past several families. In the middle a flat-bottomed boat shimmered in the heat, and two men crouched in it like rocks, their fishing rods motionless, the surface unruffled, smooth as ice. At the far side a group of boys were swimming. Their voices echoed in the hollow of the pools, but their splashing was remote and distant in the hot stillness.

  We followed the path down to the second of the Ponds. It was deserted except for one family; the children were trailing nets through the shallow water and paddling amongst the reeds.

  ‘We’ll go right to the end,’ Howarth said. ‘You never know, we might get the place to ourselves.’

  ‘I like seeing people here,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. But just for this once – I’d like to get away.’

  He climbed down the third bank to the smallest of the pools. A rotted boat rested on the pebbly shore, and a small boy looked up in surprise from the shadow of the hull. He watched us until we’d reached the water’s edge, then kicked the rotted timber savagely. Climbing hurriedly up the bank, he disappeared.

  ‘We’ve disturbed a flea,’ Howarth said, laughing at me. He pushed his way along an overgrown path leading round the opposite side. Here he discovered a grassy shelf by the water, and taking his coat off, lay down with a long sigh of relief.

  The light was glaringly reflected from the surface of the water, and hid the other bank. ‘We’ve found our little bolt hole at last,’ he said. His eyes were closed; his mouth was open in a snarl at the warmth and the penetrating light.

  He lay there a while on his back, but moved restlessly. ‘Why don’t you take your stockings off?’ Rolling on to his side, he pushed himself slowly into a sitting position, and unbuttoned his shirt; then pulled it over his head and folded it into a pillow. His body was white.

  He lay down on his stomach. ‘You want to get brown while you’ve the chance,’ he said. ‘We don’t often get a sun like this.’ He spoke with his eyes closed, his jaw moving against the ground. ‘It’s the moisture in the air like today that makes it so browning.’

  I felt through my dress and slid my stockings down. I put them in my handbag. The grass was short and fine, and fresh on my legs. I went to the side of the pool and sat down, my feet and ankles in the water. The whole pool was warm and luxurious, then the water was cold to the touch.

  When I glanced back Howarth was apparently asleep. My eyes ached with the glare from the water. The hawthorn around the side of the pool was peculiarly lifeless too, the small leaves shrivelled in shape, still and absorbent. The whole place hung limp and silent.

  He was completely still, dead, his breathing imperceptible. There were three large scars on his back.

  I stood up in the water and accustomed myself to the coldness in sharp breaths. The bottom of the pool was very soft, so soft I could hardly feel it. I felt the mat of weeds sliding up between my toes, and the soft mud was just like air.

  He lay stiffly. The marks on his back had reddened, and stood out, stark, against the dead whiteness of his skin. It gave his back a strange expression of its own, as if that too had emotions, of which he was unaware. Beneath the surface of the water shoals of tiny minnows weaved, like interminable threads, like flaws in glass.

  I sat down on the bank and rinsed my feet, then walked over the warm grass to where he was lying. His eyes were closed. A breeze had lifted the haze, and across the pool the boy had returned to the rotten hulk, and was playing in it alone. I could hear the drone of his voice as he talked to himself.

  I felt Howarth move. He was staring up at me. He didn’t say anything.

  ‘What are those marks on your back?’ I asked.

  He seemed to have forgotten. He moved his body, then turned on his side. ‘They’re shrapnel wounds.’

  ‘You were in the war?’

  He sat up. ‘Yes.’

  I wanted intensely to know if he’d suffered.

  I could feel the heat of his body. He stroked away the grass that had clung to his chest, and looked at my legs and feet.

  ‘You’ve had a paddle then.’

  ‘It’s cold. And the water smells.’

  ‘I used to come here when I was a boy. Sometimes we went swimming. God knows how long ago that was.’

  ‘Did you live near here?’

  ‘Four miles away, about. We used to walk here, by the fields. It took us all day, there and back. I remember carrying a frog all the way back home in my hand, spitting on it to keep it alive.’

  He looked at me restlessly, as if suddenly wearied. Then he felt for his shirt. ‘I think we’ll go on,’ he said.

  Shaking out his shirt, he stood up. ‘We’ll have to be going back soon, for the train. What do you think?’

  He looked closely at me, then wiped his hand across his face.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I waited for him, and he walked close behind me, almost beside me, ducking his head to avoid the twigs.

  The path rose up from the Ponds and wound between small steep hills. They gave way to low mounds of grey-blue slag, partly overgrown with silver birch and thin grass. In a large hollow beside the track were four concrete posts round a wooden platform raised on bricks. ‘This is where the pit used to be, before the war,’ he said.

  He climbed up on to the wooden platform, like a stage. ‘Listen!’ He stamped his foot.

  A muffled echo boomed inside the platform; and boomed again as his foot beat on it.

  ‘It’s the old shaft.’ He pulled me up beside him, and then knelt down. There was a crack between the timbers and he searched round for a small stone. He pushed it through the hole, pressing it in with his finger, and we listened to the silence. Then came a faint splash echoing up.

  ‘That’s the other shaft there,’ he said, and pointed to a large, overgrown hole in the bank of the hollow. ‘It’s the diagonal shaft. It goes right down, under the Ponds. That’s why it’s abandoned – it’s all flooded.’

  We stood at the lip of the open shaft and looked down into the blackness. There was just the steady drip of water from the crumbling brickwork.

  Suddenly he cried out and held his hand up for me to listen. His voice boomed and reverberated, then was muffled as if by clay. He shouted again into the hole, and sent cry after cry thundering into one another. They crashed and boomed and seemed real. Then he made me shout into it.

  We listened to our cries going down and down, returning, then disappearing, looking at one another as they fought in the hole.

  He searched round for a stick. ‘I’m going to have a look,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come?’

  ‘No, don’t go.’

  ‘I won’t be long. It’s-quite safe. Are you sure you won’t come? Just a bit of the way.’

  ‘No … and don’t go.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right.’ He tried to reassure
me, and waved his stick at me.

  He walked slowly into the huge burrow, feeling the slope with his stick, and leaning back with one arm to keep his balance on the clay. He went down a few yards, then vanished in the blackness. I could hear his scuffling and the scraping of his stick. Then he called up with a deep booming voice that he could still see me.

  I climbed up to the fencing at the top of the hollow. Beyond it was a railway cutting with a single track, half wild; a faint haze of greenery showed through the fine ash of the track itself and the rails were brown with rust and wear. A thin band of bright steel ran down the centre of each rail.

  Occasionally I could hear fragments of the rotted brickwork fall and roll echoingly down the floor of the shaft. It was liquid. It was as if the inside of the shaft had absorbed him, and it made no sound except the deep liquid gurgling of the crumbled bricks.

  He seemed gone a long time. I went back into the hollow and stood outside the mouth of the shaft. There was just the darkness; I couldn’t hear the noise of his feet or his stick; but the liquid gurgled, as if deep down it was boiling.

  I sat and waited. The rain had worn the slag mounds into steps and rifts and along the edge of each step clumps of grey wiry grass were growing, drooping down with their own weight. It overhung the mouth of the shaft and had set itself in the mortar between the bricks. In the shaft I could hear something tumbling and falling.

  He came out quietly, unexpectedly. His eyes were shining and blinded. He blinked them, smiling strongly in the fierce light. His shoes were covered with thick, black mud. ‘You can’t get down far,’ he said. ‘The thing levels off, then it’s all water. Look at this.’

  He held out a stone and a piece of wood: they were scaled with grey crustations. He ran his finger over them as he had over the piece of sculpture. When I gave them back to him he went to the mouth of the shaft and threw them in again.

  I sat on the fence while he cleaned his shoes. He stared down at the track, as though dazed by the seclusion, by the emptiness and the lack of use. The single line cut cleanly through the untidiness of the wood and the mine, its curve disappearing slowly and neatly round the shoulders of the cutting. It was the uselessness that excited him, like the wet and disintegrating darkness of the mine. He gazed through the fence at the cutting while he bent down scraping his shoes.

  Beyond the railway the wood looked thicker and less disturbed. It rose gradually from the cutting and the silver birch gave way to oak and beech. Howarth stared across, his hands grasping the fence. We could still hear cries from the Ponds, and from beyond the woods the occasional guttural roar of a lorry on the road.

  Howarth’s fascination with the place was real. It meant a great deal to him: the crumbled mine, then the wood growing over it, and the ordered emptiness of the cutting. It was bound up with his restlessness.

  ‘We’ll go over there next time,’ he said, and nodded across the cutting. I turned back down into the hollow.

  The heat was going out of the afternoon. The sun was low and bronzed the silver birches. Howarth was tired, suddenly. He didn’t speak as we walked down towards the Ponds, then found the path round. The air was heavy with the heat and the musty smell of ferns.

  He sat beside me in the train. I felt the shape of his body. Black trees lined the track, and the sky was red, and deepening. We moved in a shallow loop towards town, and could see the smoky ridges, like a huge dark castle, with interminable battlements and turrets. Howarth looked at it silently, his nostrils taut and the skin shadowed round his nose as if he were in pain. He pressed against me as the track straightened and we passed over the junction of the old canal and the river, and drew away from the widening meanders. Across the valley the birch woods were dark and smouldering on the ridge.

  ‘You know one of the reasons why you never went to college,’ my mother said. Her ironing filled the living-room; the table was covered with old sheets and the straight-backed chairs were draped with ironed clothes. The fireplace was hidden by the clothes-horse, leaning over on its leather hinges with the weight of clothes, glowing with the fire. She pushed the electric iron searchingly over the sheets, fastidious. The table creaked and groaned. She never expected replies to her spoken thoughts; sometimes she couldn’t tolerate being answered. The habit of her daytime solitude in the house overflowed more and more into those moments when she was no longer alone.

  ‘One of the reasons,’ she said, ‘was our Michael saying it’d be a waste of time and money educating a woman. At least beyond the grammar school. And your dad agreed with him.’

  ‘Why do you start bringing these things up now?’ I said loudly, hoping to startle her out of her dreams. ‘You know I’ve never grumbled about my work. I enjoy it in its way.’

  ‘I sometimes reckon it’d been better if you’d gone to college.’ She searched mechanically for creases and folds, staring at her ironing. ‘At least you might have found yourself, if you know … and gone into something where you weren’t shut in so much.’ She hated me in the house when she was working.

  She disliked having two women contending for the housework. At times she was unwillingly malicious, her small round figure emanating an impotent rage, like a child’s, in her own household. She would be ill with it; with the dilemma of having me in the home, and for half a day she would go to bed, pale and shivering with her imagined exhaustion, while I took over the house. She wanted me to, but couldn’t release herself; and I would try to preserve her domestic mannerisms about the place so that afterwards she wouldn’t dwell moodily on her absence.

  One day my father would be saying wearily, after she’d gone to bed, ‘Your mother’s old. You don’t realize. She’ll be in her grave afore you’ll do ought about it. You want to give her more of a hand about the house.’ But the next day she’d be up beating the carpets in the back, shaking rugs, and becoming so busy and intense in her housework that I knew she was wishing violently to banish and exclude me. Like all experienced housewives, she’d learnt how to humiliate or make guilty any one of her family by the direction and intensity of her work. She exhausted herself in order to reproach me. I stayed on at home as if this were the only battle left for me to fight; as if our love were only there to drive us to greater and more outrageous tests of its strength.

  She’d tired of her ironing, and sat down in front of the clothes-horse with her arms resting on those of the chair. Her limbs wearied her so much now: whenever she was tired, each one seemed to have an existence of its own. As soon as she lay back in a chair, they splayed themselves out with her weariness of them.

  This evening tiredness had dulled her, and she glanced at me with awkward, demanding looks. ‘Do you see much of that art teacher?’ she asked, vaguely, yet accenting the last two words with Michael’s own pointed searching.

  ‘Sometimes once a week.’

  ‘And our Michael says how he’s married, and that.’

  ‘You don’t have to believe everything he says.’

  ‘He seems to know.’

  ‘You sound as though you wanted him to be married.’

  She looked at me guardedly, with no sympathy and no hardness. ‘I wouldn’t want you to make a mess of things, Margaret. But it’s not my business, I know.’

  ‘Well, there’s no need to worry, then.’

  ‘You like him,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If he’s an artist and that …’

  ‘He’s not an artist. You listen to our Michael too much at times. Everything he says in this house is God’s truth.’

  I stood up and folded the sheets on the table and unplugged the iron, then put them away in the cupboard.

  She watched me at the table; then she shook her head, wanting to smile. ‘You used to be glued to that blessed table every night about now,’ she said. ‘Scribbling away in that diary. I never could think what you could find to put in it.’

  I pushed the table back against the wall and pulled out the carpet. ‘Oh, I’m still keeping it.’ I couldn’t fin
d anything else to do, so I sat down.

  She stared vacantly at the red glow on the sheets round the fire. The smell of airing clothes filled the room. ‘You write it upstairs, then, i’ bed.’

  ‘I’m not like that with it, Mum. I don’t write in it every night. Sometimes I don’t write anything all week.’

  ‘But what do you put in it, love?’

  ‘Things I’ve done. And how I feel about things.’

  ‘I see.’ She glanced at me sulkily. ‘I remember once your Aunt Joan showing me her diary. It’d be no more’n a month after Jack left her. She was still right upset. It was plain to see in everything she did. She had a way of feeling things with the tips of her fingers as she was talking to you. That absent-minded. She always was.’

  ‘Why did they split up?’

  ‘I don’t know. Your dad’s mother was ever so fond of Joan. She used to call them Jack and Joan – like the rhyme. When Jack took her home, “Jack and Joan flit up the hill, and fetch us a pail of water,” she’d say.’ She patted the arm of the chair and smoothed her hand over it. ‘Anyway … you can’t go carrying other people’s worries on your back all the time. And you can never be sure about things like that: husband and wife. It’s best not to interfere. It doesn’t bear to think about other folk at times.’

  ‘And yet you have to. Or you fade away.’

  She swung her gaze round to me. She’d longed for me to be like her. ‘You don’t have to be that way, Margaret.’

  ‘No, but what’s the choice? To live like this, here, or to live like Alec’s wife, blooming with health and children … and as empty as a tin can.’

  ‘Oh, Margaret.’ She was shaken. ‘Nora’s a fine mother. They couldn’t have a better mother.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be a mother.’

  ‘Love … it’s not like you …’ She struggled to find her words.

  ‘It’s just like me! Why have I stayed like this, like I am? Being a mother – it’s just the end of everything. Just to go on like that … like any dog or cat. It makes nothing of me.’

  She was afraid of her own anger. Her hands lay flat on the arms of the chair and she didn’t look at me. It was too much. ‘You’re a woman, Margaret,’ she said. ‘What d’you reckon you’re talking about?’