Castle Of Bone (6 page)

“Grapes,
Grapes
.”

“I bought them,” Hugh said hastily.

“Come buy,” said Penn, “all fresh, all sweet.”

“Who’ll buy . . .” Jean’s voice started on a high note, split, fell into helpless giggles. They were particularly lush, fat, purple grapes, lying on a heap of wood shavings. Hugh’s mother ate three before letting fly at Hugh again.

How could he have had the cupboard since Sunday (Saturday, muttered Hugh) and not put anything away in it? How could he have such a mess in his room? What were grapes of all things doing in his cupboard? (she ate another three). As she went on Hugh’s anger mounted, was beginning to match hers, until he saw Penn giggling ostentatiously behind her back, then he turned his anger, bent it against Penn, let most evaporate in a single glare.

But when, her rage faltering, she had gone, they all fell on and devoured the bunch of grapes. And all, including Hugh, lay round the floor giggling hysterically.

“You must admit it’s a problem,” Penn said finally.

“What problem?” asked Hugh, suspiciously.

“To have a cupboard you can’t use as a cupboard. If you put all your clothes away as your mother said, you’d be nude; you wouldn’t be decent to go in the street. So what are you going to do? She’s bound to come back again.” They all collapsed once more at the thought of Hugh’s nakedness.

“Oh I’ll hide them; stuff them away somewhere and keep the cupboard shut; then she won’t know it’s empty.”

“You can’t get away with it for ever,” said Jean.

“Well we’d better make some effort to tidy now.” Penn climbed to his feet, brushing himself down. “No more cupboard, not for now. All hands to clearing up the place. Get up, Anna, you lazy little beast.”

Anna had been lying under the window on her back, with her eyes closed. She did not stir at first when Penn poked her with his foot. Then slowly and deliberately she opened her eyes wide, and a moment later raised herself on an elbow. She must have been lying on that hand. Its skin had taken on the ridges of the worn cord carpet.

“Get up, lazybones,” said Penn. “Get up and help.”

Anna giggled. “It’s not my room. I’m not going to.”

“You are, you know.”

“I’m not, you know.”

“You jolly well something
are
.” Penn grabbed her under the armpits and began to heave. She left him all her weight and annoyed, he grew rougher, dragging her. “You’re
hurting
,” Anna said.

“Get up then.”

“No.” Anna laughed again.

“
Get
up,” Penn shook her furiously. She stopped laughing abruptly, set her feet down, wriggled round, lashed out, fought with him, Penn’s greater strength quite matched by her fury.

“She was hurting, really scratching,” Jean said to Hugh afterwards. “And kicking. Did you see? I’ve never kicked you like that, or scratched.”

“Well he was brutish enough too. But you wouldn’t call her timid exactly. I always used to think her timid. She scarcely opened her mouth at all.”

“But she is still timid, in a funny sort of way,” said Jean.

The fight had stopped as suddenly as it began. Anna froze, looking at Penn’s watch. “Oh Lord, oh dear, it’s after one already. I promised Mummy I’d be home to help with lunch.” She seemed all anxiety and awkwardness, and left without picking up a thing.

Penn bellowed down the stairway after her. “When we try putting a human in the cupboard, it’ll be you, Anna, you’ll be the guinea-pig, if you don’t damn well watch out.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hugh gazing out of his window after lunch saw Penn and Anna turn out of their gate and up the road. He spent a great deal of time gazing out of his window. It amused and occupied him at least when he had nothing else to do or when a painting was going badly, and at most it left him with an extraordinary, strange, creative ache; a beautiful yet unbearable sense of growing out of himself, exploding skin and bone. He tried to catch this feeling sometimes, record it, pin it down. But always at once it faded, or collapsed like a blown-up paper bag.

It gave him a pleasing sense of power too, gazing out of his window. He felt god-like – seeing people who did not see him, scratch themselves, or mutter or gesture dramatically, unaware of being watched, people with whom he had no need to involve himself, as merely passing in the street he would have had to be involved. Like a god he felt above time even, anticipating event. He knew for instance now, that the car nipping so busily along the road was about to be brought up short behind a trail of cars barred by an oil-delivery tank; and again seeing a poodle shut up in a parked car, a large alsatian approaching on a lead foretold an enjoyable eruption of which no one else was yet aware.

Anna and Penn were just ahead of the dog, walking slowly, their heads together. Whatever did they always have to say to each other, Hugh wondered, with annoyance. In company Anna was so silent usually and Penn critical of her or teasing.

The poodle sprang against its window barking furiously. The alsatian leaped explosively, thunderously, almost dragged its startled owner down. Penn and Anna jumped apart, Anna scuttling in at the gate, Penn almost scuttling too, but then pausing and shaking himself and walking in with dignity, while Hugh laughed himself silly in strangely malicious triumph and amusement.

“I saw it coming a mile off,” he explained.

“I saw it too,” said Penn aggressively.

“Rubbish,” said Anna, “neither of us did.”

“Well are you ready, Hugh, anyway?” Penn asked.

They were going to the Royal Tournament, a military display; not a function Hugh would have chosen for himself or indeed any of them, except Penn just possibly.

“It’s hardly for pacifists,” Hugh commented.

“Well I’m not a pacifist. Why? Are you?”

“I’m thinking of it. I was last term.”

“I bet you’re not. Rubbish. It’s just affectation.”

Penn’s father had been given four tickets by some business acquaintance. “It’s free entertainment, isn’t it?” Penn said. “It won’t entertain me in the slightest,” protested Hugh, and indeed when he walked into the exhibition hall that afternoon and saw tanks and guns lined up, the array of dowdy yet lethal armaments, he almost retreated and went home at once.

He resisted everything at first; the marching, the patterns made by the marchers on the arena floor; the sound patterns made by the armorial bands. He felt that disliking the belligerence for which these stood, he ought not to allow shivers to run up and down his back. Yet he could not have come to an event more suited to his, to all their present states of mind, because of the noise and glare and ritual; and though he did not want to be carried away and lost, soon fell into a state of dream which came dangerously near to it.

Looking down on the arena, an oval of orange sand, Hugh felt above time again, anticipating event; except that here, the formations moving, advancing against each other, he would have anticipated collision rather than their actual neat enfolding, row on row, each rank sliding whole through others and emerging whole. The lights changed ceaselessly. The troops were all green one moment, then white, then pink, then scarlet, then all colours together at once. The lights and music jointly hypnotized him. By the time the gun race started – two teams of sailors from different naval ports dragging guns and gun-carriages over an obstacle course – he was yelling like everyone else and totally overcome. And when it ended, with a crash of cannons and a cloud of bitter smoke which touched their faces and hung pale against the darkness overhead, as against a tangible, solid surface, the pleasure he felt was out of proportion to the event. He seemed to explode with light and relief and joy.

“Well, I think we can say that went off with a bang, ladies and gentlemen,” said the voice of the avuncular colonel in the commentator’s box. Penn and Hugh looked at each other derisively, shrieked with irreverent laughter. They leaned across Jean and Anna who were sitting between them and shook hands solemnly.

“What an absolutely
sooper
bang,” they said all but simultaneously, with exaggerated army accents. Just as Hugh came out of cinema feeling bold or reflective or poetical, according to the film, so now he took his mood from the tournament. He felt splendid suddenly, glittering, a match for Penn any day, using words for weapons, flinging them along the row, across both Jean and Anna. “Don’t mind us,” said Jean indignantly. And twice, somebody behind Hugh leaned over and tapped his shoulder, and told him, authoritatively, to keep still, be quiet.

“And now,” proclaimed the relentless jolly colonel, “we offer you a dangerous and stunning event. Every week, ladies and gentlemen, these brave teams suffer a broken bone or two, practising on your behalf, to entertain you now. We present to you, proudly, on motor-cycles, the Army Daredevils!”

The stadium suddenly went black. The sour smell of horse urine drifted up from the arena floor. People waited, rustled, coughed a little. A roaring grew from somewhere – lights went up suddenly – it was as if that made sound as well as light, for the noise grew furious, the great doors flew away, with a roar and a rush in dashed a chain of motor-cycles – two, three chains, one behind the other; black motor-cycles, black-clad riders, They roared to the far end of the arena and back again, split, wheeled round and rode diagonally across each other, missing by hairs’-breadths, then returned with mighty, restrengthening roars. Even sceptical Hugh held his breath anxiously.

“Want some more, gentlemen?” inquired the colonel.

“No,” yelled Hugh and Penn together, and looked at each other grinning. “They’ll crash, they’ll crash,” Jean was saying frantically. “Oh I wish they’d stop.” But Anna seemed to like it as much as Hugh and Penn. She gripped the seat, her face open, full of life.

“You haven’t seen anything
yet
,” bellowed the commentator. “Now for a mid-air crossover,” – and then in a moment, when it was over – “Want it again?” he asked.

“Oh I hate it, they’ll crash,” wailed Jean, as the motor-cycles dashed once more on their opposite diagonals, rode up ramps and jumped, missing others by inches in mid-air.

“Miss,”
whispered Penn. “Come on,
miss,”
whispered Hugh, and heard an echo, it must have been Anna, sighing, “Miss . . . miss . . . miss.”

Jean watched no more, just turned miserably away. When the cyclists, having crashed through walls and leapt through hoops of fire, departed at last, leaving an obtrusive silence and petrol fumes, her relief broke out in furious irritation.

“I’m sick of you leaning all over me, Hugh. If you and Penn have to be so stupid, why don’t you just sit together. I’ll move up.”

She shuffled along into Hugh’s place while he climbed over her. But there was still a space on her other side. Anna simply had not moved at all. Hugh looked at her, puzzled, and waited for her.

“Budge up, Anna, there’s a love,” he said to her at last.

“Budge up, Ann,” hissed Penn more urgently. A new event was expected in the lit arena. From behind came murmurings, protests, as people shifted and craned their heads.

“Sit down, will you,” ordered a louder voice, behind.

Hugh, desperate, climbed over Anna as much as it was possible, Penn beyond having squeezed up as far as he could. They earned more disapproving glares from Penn’s other neighbour, but Anna still had not moved at all. Since the motor-cycles went a light might have gone out in her. She gazed straight ahead, expressionless. Hugh sat down firmly, anyway, partly on Anna, partly on Penn, which was effectively uncomfortable for Anna shifted, only fractionally, but enough for him to fit, just, into the space between her and Penn. Her eyes never strayed from the arena once. She sat very straight and held hands demurely with herself, her left thumb tucked inside her right fist, the fingers folded on top of it. Hugh noticed a tell-tale chewing movement in her cheek.

Then at last he looked back to the arena. And saw what, despite newly added props, had been there all the time. And yet he had not consciously taken it in. It was as if till now he had not been allowed to take it in; it was as if, just as with the button box, his eyes had refocused, slightly shifted vision. He saw a castle, another castle.

He leaned over the still unyielding Anna and snatching the programme they had bought from Jean, leafed through pages of advertisements to find the table of events. “Event Number Twelve. The Attack,” it said. “The siege and storming of an English Castle. A re-enactment of medieval warfare, staged and presented by Colonel Bassett-Brown M.C.”

Hugh returned the programme to the indignant Jean, and looked back into the arena; at what his eyes, his mind and something less obvious had contrived to keep from his consciousness. There was a crudely painted castle on the end arena wall, around and above the entrance doors. It was two-dimensional, apart from turrets on either side, battlements which jutted a little way into the arena and a drawbridge across a simulated moat. Three-dimensional, it would, however, have been a square castle.

The teams of men working in the arena fell into line now, and in line ran off. The light changed, dramatized itself. To the sound of trumpets an army entered from the opposite end of the arena, headed by a man on a black horse bearing a standard. His armour was silver, but his flag, shield and tunic were a dark holly green with scarlet devices on them. Archers appeared on the castle battlements. The drawbridge was lifted. The invaders brought scaling ladders and a battering ram. The attack on the castle began.