A Little Death (11 page)

When we were at school, he—Roland—knew all about my family. You didn’t talk about your people as a rule, but he could have really let me in for a ragging if he’d told the other chaps about mine. Never said a word, though. Of course, he was far more popular at school than I was. To hear my sister talk you’d think I could have played cricket for England, but I was never much good on the playing field and that was where it counted; it was no good simply being clever at lessons. But I never minded school—one had to go through it and
besides, it kept my father at a safe distance. I suppose I must have been a selfish little swine, because I never thought what it must have been like for Georgie, stuck at home with him day in, day out. She made the holidays bearable, yet I don’t think I ever wondered how she got along when I wasn’t there. Because she and my father didn’t speak, you see, and she wasn’t allowed down for meals even when she was old enough. Not that she wanted to come down—and I always longed to have mine upstairs in the nursery with her, instead of downstairs with him. Every night, it was an ordeal. It started when I came back from school the Christmas after Freddie died. I must have been ten or eleven, still far too young to eat downstairs, but he insisted. The relief when I could leave the table was indescribable, but then the next morning the dread would grow and and grow inside me until, the hour before dinner, my mind was so filled up with the meeting with my father that there wasn’t room for anything else. Sometimes I used to wish that something would happen to him, that he would die and then I’d never have to go downstairs anymore.

He sat in his great chair at the end of the long table, with the fire behind him. He never allowed Ada to turn up the gas, and the darkness and the glow of the fire made him look like a huge black hulk. That was how I thought of him, not as a human being at all, but as a giant, an ogre. ‘Boy’ he used to call me. Never my name, always ‘boy’. ‘Cat got your tongue, boy? Why don’t you speak?’ Pushing his plate away, reaching out for his glass. Grabbing it with those great big hands of his, thick, hairy fingers like a giant or a demon king. ‘Say something, damn you!’ Ada would serve the meal as fast as she could. I knew she hated it as much as I did, but I had a terrible feeling of despair when I watched
her slipping away round the door, because then I was alone, trapped. It always began gradually: ‘So, what have you been getting up to?’ He would never mention Georgie and I understood that I wasn’t to either. I’d stumble out a few sentences about what we’d done, saying ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. I couldn’t say half the things we did because you couldn’t do them on your own and I was scared of slipping up—if I mentioned the games we played he might notice it was something you couldn’t do by yourself and then he’d get angry. And always, when I tried to speak, there’d be this awful feeling that I was about to cry, and I had to stop and look down at the plate until it passed off, and that would make him angry too: ‘Stop whimpering! What’s wrong with you?’ I felt as if I’d been struck dumb. I used to rehearse things to myself during the day. If I went for a walk through the woods with Georgie, which was where we usually went because she didn’t like people to see her, I’d make a plan about what I was going to tell him, about seeing squirrels and things. Sometimes I made things up, but it was never enough, he always wanted me to tell him more. There was a measurement he was making about me, a judgement, but I never understood what it was.

He frightened me from the time when I was a small child, when my mother was alive. I was going to say, that was before he started drinking, but even in my earliest memories he always has a glass in his hand. When we were taken downstairs to see him, he had a drink and a cigar, sitting in his chair by the fire, with Georgie and me standing to attention in front of him and marching up and down while he roared with laughter, and Mother sitting across the room, watching and saying nothing. I think his whole character probably came from inside a bottle.

I can’t remember my mother ever touching me and I was too shy to stare at her, although I wanted to, very much. I’ve never understood how she came to be married to such a coarse man as my father. I’ve often wondered if she wasn’t pushed into it by her parents, because that happened a great deal more in those days than it does now. It must have been terrible for her to endure his company, and she wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t been drunk and forced himself on her.

But I knew I was safe from him in Georgie’s room. Even if you couldn’t see him in the rest of the house, you could sense him and there was always a risk that he might suddenly appear, but not in her room. The whole nursery wing seemed to be part of a different building altogether. There was a door at the end of the nursery corridor that led to the big landing and opening; it was like crossing the Rubicon. It always made me think of
Pilgrim’s Progress;
the hall was like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but if one succeeded in crossing it, one could climb back up the stairs and through the door to the Celestial City and be safe from harm. When I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I’d come home for the holidays and wonderful things would appear in my room, things I’d never seen before, things Georgie had found hidden away in the house. She’s always been rather a magpie and I suppose that was when she started it. Really it was all old junk, but it was the way she used to arrange the things that made them special. She had muslin draped over her bed and so many white pillows piled up and eiderdowns and lace that I imagined it as a tent hanging in the sky. I always had to do something in order to be allowed to enter, a trick, or to give her something I’d taken from another part of the house, and there was a different password every day. We used to spend hours lying on the bed, playing games. Georgie
read a lot, and if some description took her fancy she would try to imitate it. I remember once coming home and she’d picked handfuls of lavender and thrown it all over the floor, because she’d been reading about how they put herbs everywhere in medieval times. I’m not sure if lavender was what they actually used, but I suppose it was the nearest she could get. There was another time when she took a helmet and a pair of gauntlet gloves from a suit of armour she’d found in the cellar. I suppose it was from our grandfather’s day, because there’d been a fashion for them, making the place look like a baronial hall, that sort of thing. She laid the helmet on my pillow and crossed the gauntlets on the counterpane, with a red rose tucked between the fingers of each one, and one of her handkerchiefs beside them as a lady’s favour, with ‘To My True Knight’ written on it in red ink. The ink had bled into the cotton in places, but you could see what it said. Georgie’d been reading about the holy grail and I think she was rather taken with the idea. There was a book called
The Well at the World’s End
, which we were both very keen on, about a prince who goes off to find a magic well. That was a medieval sort of thing, I don’t suppose people read it much nowadays, but it was very popular when I was young. Georgie sent me a copy when I was in France during the war. I remember sitting and re-reading it in a filthy little dug-out, water up to the knees, and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a book so much in my life.

Georgie had a game, I suppose it was really a sort of series of tests, the same as the way the knights in the stories were tested. No dragons or anything, it was more to do with finding things: a handkerchief or a hairbrush, objects that belonged to her. She used to hide them somewhere in the house and make up a list of clues, and then I’d have to go and find them. I had to
come back before the hall clock struck a certain time and if Father saw me, that meant I’d been wounded, but I might still go on searching, I remember that. If Father spoke to me, that meant I’d been killed, so I’d failed the test. Georgie never came with me, but sometimes she would appear beside me out of nowhere and tell me I was looking in the wrong place. She had this extraordinary trick of moving silently—I never once heard her coming.

I kept the lady’s favour handkerchief as a sort of talisman. I suppose at some point I must have decided it was childish to carry it about with me and put it away in a case, but just before I went over to France I was hunting for something and I came across it again, so I took it with me. A lot of chaps did things like that, I remember once there was a great fuss in my company when one of the men, a Catholic, lost a holy medal. Turned the place upside down until it was found, all the men helped, there wasn’t one there who didn’t treat it seriously. I gave Georgina’s special handkerchief to Roland… Oh God, the whitewash on the wall, don’t think don’t don’t don’t
wash me in the water that you wash your dirty daughter
oh, bloody hell… They found it on his body.

These things don’t seem to trouble Georgie as they do me. She’ll talk about the present or the future, but never about the past. It’s as if her memory is a slate and she rubs out people’s names. That was what she did with Freddie. For two people so far apart, Georgie and Father were hand in hand where Freddie was concerned; they both behaved as if he had never existed. The summer he died, when I wasn’t allowed home from school, the senior master took me aside and said he was sorry, or something of that sort, and it was never referred to again. For weeks I waited for news from
home, someone to tell me something, anything, about what had happened, but no one did and I began to wonder if I hadn’t simply imagined the whole thing. I think I was half expecting Freddie to be there when I came home for the Christmas holiday, but of course he wasn’t, and everyone behaved as if nothing had happened, except that Father was at Dennys and even I could see that he was different. It tormented me for days. I couldn’t think of anything except Freddie. Georgie never volunteered anything about it and I didn’t know how to bring up the subject. I remember once we were sitting on the floor playing a game and I asked her, ‘Where did they put Freddie?’

‘Put him?’

‘Bury him, then. Where did they bury him?’

‘In the village churchyard.’

‘Can we go and see?’

‘He’ll come for you, if you go there.’

I didn’t understand what she meant by ‘he’ll come for you’, but it frightened me and I never asked again. I suppose I’d just wanted to see where he was, that was all. Then I asked her if she’d cried about Freddie and she said she had. I don’t think I believed her, but I didn’t want to argue with her because I thought she might get angry and banish me from her room. I think she told me she’d cried because she thought that’s what I’d expect from a girl. During the war, I used to think how lucky girls were, being able to cry. I mentioned that to Roland once—I’m not sure why, I suppose I must have hoped he’d agree. I remember it because it was such a tremendously difficult thing to put into words, and hard to speak the words because it wasn’t the kind of thing one usually said. We were in part of a trench that we’d just cleared of the Boche, waiting for the barrage to lift. I forget why Roland was there, I think his lot must have
come unstuck, because there were several men in a very bad way and only Roland and one of the signallers not wounded. It was a dreadful mess: our wounded, dead Germans all over the place, knocked-out guns, and the rain pouring down on the lot of us. But for once in my life I felt I’d done something right—it was practically the only occasion in all the time I was out there that I felt I’d managed to do what I was told to do and not made a bloody hash of it, because we’d captured this trench.

When we’d done what we could for the wounded men, Roland and I sat down to wait it out. We had a rather odd conversation, and I explained the business about weeping. I don’t know what I expected Roland to say; in fact, I can’t imagine what else he could have said except what he did say: ‘People will think you’re a pansy if you talk like that.’ Because you couldn’t do anything to upset morale, distress the men. If one of them got the wind up it would spread like wildfire and then you had a problem on your hands. And if you were an officer, of course, as we were, one was supposed to set an example. After that, I remember giving Roland Georgina’s handkerchief which said ‘To My True Knight’. We shook hands over it and then there was the most terrible racket and Roland’s signaller came crashing down on top of us. He’d tried to leave the trench for some reason and taken a bullet in the throat.

I didn’t know why I wanted to give Roland the favour and I’m still not sure. People do queer things in those circumstances and besides, I never thought I’d be here now to try and explain it to myself. In my mind, it wasn’t a question of ‘if I die’, but
‘when
I die’. That was what made it so hard afterwards, one couldn’t see why one should be alive, when there were so many others… When I gave the favour to Roland, he said
‘Thanks, old man’ and looked a bit puzzled. He didn’t know why I’d done it any more than I did. But you see, he died because I gave it to him. I know that. If I’d kept it, as I was supposed to, as Georgina wanted me to, I would have died, but I wanted Roland to have something—I wanted to give him something, an important thing, because it was a way of saying… well, saying that you loved someone, I suppose.

I wonder what Roland would say if he could hear me now. He’d probably tell me I’d turned into a pansy.

The first time I saw Mr. James, now that was funny. We had a man at Dennys called Thomas; he used to come up from the village and do a bit round the garden. Mr. Lomax wouldn’t have anyone else near the place, but for some reason he never minded this man Thomas. There came a time… the King—King Edward—was still alive, I do remember that, so I would have been what? Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? And Miss Georgina about seventeen. And she was beautiful, no doubt about it. If she’d been going out in society, I’m sure she could have had an earl or a lord or anyone she fancied for a husband. She was so lovely she could have had the pick of them. About this time, Mr. Lomax told me he’d pay the bills and I was to give all the housekeeping matters into his hands, the money side of course, not the rest. I didn’t understand it. I’d been managing well enough, but he’d decided in his mind that folk were swindling him at home as well as in the business. I think that
was
true about the business—well, judging from what Master Edmund has told me there was money being stolen from him behind his back. As I say, only a few came to see him, and I think some of them did go off and cheat him once they realised how matters stood. But it made him start to see thieves everywhere, even me. I used to bite my tongue. Least said, soonest mended, and besides,
I
knew I’d done nothing wrong. He’d never have
wanted to do my little accounts if things had been as they should, but a man’s got to be master in his own house and if doing a few bills gave him the feeling of it, where was the hurt? Except that he got it into his head there was too much food being ordered, so there was nothing for it, we had to cut back. He didn’t tell me any of this, mind you. He went and told Thomas and said for Thomas to tell me, which didn’t please me.