Key to the Door (20 page)

“And that's how part one ends,” Brian said. A car crashed through the silence below. Arthur breathed softly. “It's smashin'.”

“What happens next?” Margaret demanded.

“I can't tell you,” Brian said, not yet knowing. “Part two don't come till tomorrer night.”

“How many parts has it got?” she asked.

“Four, I think.”

“Serials at pictures have twelve,” she said. “Sometimes they've got fifteen.”

“Do the coppers get 'em?” Fred demanded from down the bed.

“I'll tell you tomorrow.”

Arthur put his spoke in: “Now.”

“You're ever such a good story-teller,” Margaret said. So he told them more, and went on till no one was left awake.

On his way to sleep Brian heard the whistle from a train rumbling out of Radford Station: like a squeal of surrender in the lead-heavy night, a downward note hurled from a black cavern by some unknown terror. He shuddered, rolled in a half-sleep, suffocated among bundles of bodies. The fearful low piping followed him into over-arching slumber, the train gone, and the whistle alone was an almost visible monster crying in the mouth of the night. “Dad!” he wanted to shout. “Dad!” being afraid, and when he looked from wide open eyes, he saw the Devil on the end of the bed.

The sad long wail sounded again, muted and resigned and more discouraging than before, coming from what was beyond his experience because it was nearer than he to the pits and brink of dying. His fear was of the coalswamps, a million years back and a million years on, the dead already calling from the future behind the black flames of life, as if dying and living were no more than a vast circle broken at one tiny place—where he was. The whistle persisted its soul-in-agony hooting, imprisoned in the dark spaces of his brain, even while his eyes were staring at the Devil on the end of the bed.

The Devil wore a crimson triangular hat, had a grey round face, a snubbed nose, and big loose grey lips. Brian was aware of him grinning, and when the whistle blew again it was part and parcel of him, and the jaggle of trucks on the railway line was chains rattling when his arms lifted (though his body did not move); and they were the chains with which he was to take him away.

The small dark room ignored the silver of moon outside, and shrunk in size until the Devil seemed closer. The squat figure grinned and beckoned, and his chains rattled again, impatient to take him to the owl-whistles and mastodon coalswamps. The grey face leered, and Brian stared at the crimson triangular hat that, even in the darkness, he saw was the colour of dried blood. The Devil had come to take him away, and he didn't want to go. Brian and heart and fibre were against it, and he opened his mouth to cry out. Nothing. Dad! Dad! Dad! No sound came. He couldn't breathe, as if a giant hook were fixed into the mechanism of his lungs, though in a way it seemed more tolerable to cry out than breathe, except that his cries made no sound, and the figure of the squat Devil sat waiting, patient and assured, wearing an oxblood triangular hat and rattling grey chains in grey invisible hands. The whistle stopped, as if the train had fallen sheer over the missing span of a bridge joining two banks of night; and Brian without knowing it dropped into sleep.

He told his father he had seen the Devil. It was only a nightmare, Seaton said. You often have nightmares from eating too late at night. Brian didn't believe it. It was the Devil, who had come to take him away. Yes, his mother said, it was the Devil right enough, and if he didn't behave himself and do all her errands from now on, then the next time the Devil came he
would
wrap them chains around him and take him away, for good. Then he'd never see anybody again, not even his grandad Merton.

CHAPTER 10

After a hefty downward press of his boot, Merton swung back the fork and lifted an abundant root of potatoes, shook them vigorously to the soil, then cast the useless tops aside for Brian to load on the small red barrow.

Brian didn't yet know how hard he worked, was enjoying himself, having been in the garden since breakfast, unplugging weeds and nettles and gathering broad beans for one o'clock dinner. He pronged up potato-tops in Merton's wake with his own quick-working fork, piled them high on the barrow, then fixed himself into the shafts—like a pit pony, as Merton said. He ran a sleeve across his forehead, brought it down mucky with sweat and a couple of squashed thunder-flies. The hot days had lasted a long time, making his face red, then brown, below his close-cropped threp'nny haircut whose front scrag-ends dipped over, turning his normally high Seaton brow into a lower Merton one and falling almost to his angled blue eyes.

With dug-in heels the barrow was heaved from a self-made rut, drawn between flowers and marrow patch towards a dumping ground by Welltop Hill. A series of lorry-like manœuvres sent the wheels climbing a mount of weeds and heads already brown from the sun. Every weekend Merton started a fire under them with a sheet of newspaper, and Brian stood back with him while flame and grey smoke rose, then returned to see the circle of black ash at dusk. He charged like Ben-Hur back to the garden, taking corners at full speed and axle-catching the gatepost as he went by, to see that his grandfather had scattered more tops and carried several buckets of potatoes into the arbour-shed.

Merton leaned on his fork to watch Brian fix another load on to the barrow. He liked to have Vera's lad with him, working strenuously yet not breathing hard, thrusting the fork under a load of refuse and testing its weight to make sure it wasn't too heavy before swinging it on to the barrow. Each sure movement was recognized as an unconscious work-rhythm that he, with his oft-lotioned back, was beginning to lose.

He smiled widely at Brian, who did not know he was observed, admiring him for a good worker, a quality that made him fond of anyone. Yet he recollected him in the kitchen at evenings, head down over a book or pencilling an imaginary map, pastimes he couldn't reconcile with the innate good sense of toil exhibited by the Brian now before him. It was an amusing combination that did no harm, and he didn't suppose it could, as his grandson in yellow shirt, short trousers, and burst plimsolls loaded more weeds and potato-tops.

“Come on, Nimrod,” he called, standing erect and shouldering the fork, “stop doin' that for a bit, and we'll go and cut some rhubarb. 'Appen yer gra'ma'll mek you some custard wi't for your tea.”

After dinner he was equipped with brush and scraper to clean out the pigeon hut, a job he didn't like but accepted because—apart from it pleasing his grandfather—he'd been promised a penny at the end of the day. A scraper-blade in his teeth, he crawled through the low opening and out of sunlight. Letting the scraper fall, he used his mouth for breath after the first force of the smell brought water from his eyes. Gradually he was able to see and move about, pushed his scraper along half-rotten boards, heaping excrement and feathers towards the far wall. He gave up trying not to dirty his clothes, and sat down whenever he felt tired. Working open-mouthed from corner to corner, he isolated the large central patch; then he cut lanes through it and gradually enlarged the island of clean-scraped board in the middle, until only a broken perimeter of filth remained. When this vanished he pushed the scrapings from the door with a dustpan dragged in from outside by his muscular sleeve-rolled arm.

On Sunday afternoon the Arlingtons and Lakers trooped out of their woodside cottages and came over the Cherry Orchard, passing the Nook on their way to Sunday school. Brian leaned over the fence, sleepy from an excess of dinner, waving and calling out. When they returned at five o'clock he would join them as far as the end of the Cherry Orchard, hearing talk about what the teacher had read from the Bible. He couldn't understand why they went to school on Sunday, when five days a week was more than plenty for him. Besides, there seemed something shameful about going to church or Sunday school, a place you went to only if you were a sissie, or if you were posh. His grandmother said he should go. “Why do people go to Sunday school?” he demanded in a tone of contempt.

“To worship God,” she told him. “Besides, if you're a good lad and go every week the teacher'll gi' you a book.” Even this didn't shake his obstinacy. It was a rainy afternoon and he sat in the kitchen, competing for some hearthrug with the cat. Merton had shed his best boots and gone up to bed, leaving his wife to make bread and cake at the table. A saturating drizzle sent water down drainpipes and splashing into waterbutts, and the obliterated landscape edged the whole house slowly to sleep. Even the pigs left off grunting; the dog dozed in its kennel, and the silent cocks were petrified on their perches. Only the rain had energy, suddenly pitting at the windows. “Why do we have to worship God?” he asked in the same tone.

“So that He'll love you.”

“What does it matter if God loves us?”

“Because if He does,” she catechized, “you'll grow up strong and wain't ever come to harm.”

“I don't want God to love me,” he said.

“Ay,” she ended it slowly, “you don't now, but you might some day.” He stood up and walked into the parlour.

The first light after the ending rain would be seen from there, and while waiting for it he put “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles” softly on the gramophone. He looked at the picture above the mantelshelf. “If you love me as I love you, nothing will ever part us two.” He used to think the boy and girl were his grandparents when they were young, but now it looked as if the girl with the auburn hair could be Brenda Arlington in a few years' time, and as if he might grow into the youth who was trying to give her a bunch of flowers. But not likely. They didn't live in his world, had no connection with his brain just vacated by “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles,” were people who lived beyond his boundaries of school and tips and house and Nook and the swivel-eyed dole-packet that kept him alive and kicking. And while he gave his brain over again to the green-hearted spinning rhythmical record, the sky grew lighter, and beyond the window huge clouds were marshalled away like obsolete continents by the wind, and the sun like a drowned rat asserted itself over green and dripping fields.

Like the sun, the dog dragged its chain and came out of the kennel, and cockerels were letting it rip from behind their high wire. Mary took bread and cakes from the oven, and went out with a shovel for coal before the fire went too low. Merton pulled on his shoes and fed the grunting pigs. Brian sat down with them to salmon and cucumber and lettuce, rhubarb and custard, and jam pasty.

Merton said one morning: “They're comin' to mow the field nex' week.” Blue flowers lay around the hedges, and corn was ready for cutting. The weather was dry and hot, and Brian had stayed at the Nook the whole five-week holiday.

“Are you gooin' to 'elp lik yer did last year?” he asked, having seen him, tall, strong, wielding a long scythe, the high corn falling heap on heap in front. Merton's white-spotted handkerchief wiped tea from his mouth. “Nay, Nimrod, I shan't. Not this year. They'll cut it wi' a machine and when it's finished all they 'ave to do is pick up the stooks an' stak 'em, then wait for 'osses to cum an' tek it away.”

“Can I watch?” Brian asked, mopping bacon-fat from his plate with a piece of bread.

“As long as you don't get in anybody's way,” Merton said. “Your grandmother'll be busy. Farmer 'Awkins is goin' ter send flour and bacon so's she can mek the farm 'ands' dinner. They'll eve it in the yard 'ere.”

Bay rose and poppies were pictures of midsummer fires that surprised him at the turn of each hedge corner when crossing to spread the harvest news among Lakers and Arlingtons. He walked between white mats of daisies, rugs of buttercup, patches of yellow dead-eyed ragwort peeping from hedge bottoms, and entered the territory of a herd of cows. A breeze came between sparse prickly bushes and he whistled away the too-hard stares of the big dumb animals that slowly surrounded him. He could easily imagine becoming afraid, but walked whistling on, till the brace that stood in his path moved to one side and changed the circle into a horseshoe, leaving him free to walk out to the Arlingtons' cottage.

“Is Ken in?” he asked.

No, he wasn't, but his mother stood in the doorway, holding a colander of shelled peas, a small woman harassed from too much work, whose sharp, quick eyes reminded him of little Miss Braddely at the dinner-centre. “He's gone to get some blackberries.”

Brian made for the dark glades of the wood, treading an undergrowth way from point to point of a map pockmarked on his mind, until the protesting scream of Brenda leapt to him through a belt of bushes. Ken and Harry were monkey-swinging on a branch that barely held them, while Alma and Brenda filled their frocks with blackberries below. Brian broke himself a stick, ripped away twigs and leaves. Harry Laker came down to earth, doubled from the impact and sprang straight like a Japanese doll. “They're playing,” Brenda protested again, “while we work; it ain't fair.”

She was on tiptoe, stretching her fingers for the richest clump. “I'll get them,” Brian said, plucking two at a time. He hadn't given Brenda time to reply, and she spurned his offer, retorting: “No, don't bother, I can get them,” but she slipped and clawed her arm so that blood and blackberry juice mixed on it.

“Wipe it with my hanky,” he said.

Crimson with shame and anger, she sucked away the blood as if it were milk. “I don't want your hanky.”

“All right then,” he said, “don't have it.” Ken had a claspknife that cut through wood like chocolate, so they made bows, and launched into a game of Robin Hood. With aprons of blackberries Brenda and Alma sat on a tree trunk by the stream, and when the game of Robin Hood had worn itself out Ken shouted: “Let's see'f they've got many berries yet. That's not many,” he said, breaking through the bushes. “I'll bet you've been eating some.”