Caught, Back, Concluding Read online

  He then saw the heraldic deer, the light that caught red in their bead eyes. And the sails, motionless, might have been stretched above a deeper patch of fathomless sea in the shade of foothills as though covered with hyacinths in that imagined light of evening, and round which, laden, was to come the wind that would give them power to move the purple shade they cast beside the painted boat they were to drive.

  In remembering his stand at the counter he supposed he had been trying to see what his son had seen. He imagined that, his pink cheeks grape dark in the glow, Christopher had leant his face forward, held to ransom by the cupidity of boys, and had been lost in feelings that this colour, reflected in such a way on so much that he wanted, could not have failed to bring him who could have visited no flower-locked sea on the Aegean, and yet, with every other child, or boy at school, with any man in the mood, who knew and always would that stretch of water, those sails from the past, those boats fishing in the senses.

  Christopher had been carrying one of these toy boats when he was brought back by the police.

  (He had talked beneath his breath. ‘Not touch,’ the child said, ‘not touch.’ Looking straight in front he did not move his head. His feet, taking him sideways, let his eyes gather the hoard. At scarlet-painted fire engines, and he was so close that he saw them full size, he said ‘dad,’ and was satisfied. Until he came before the boats, ‘ships,’ he had said. He was done. He stood rooted, one finger up a nostril, his hot sloe mouth pressed against mahogany, before those sails the colour of his eyes.)

  In the railway carriage, as he was being carried back, the father imagined his son must have pointed a finger and shouted, ‘I want, I want.’ He said to himself, it is not for us to measure the dark cupidity, the need.

  (When the lady, who sidled by, talked to Christopher he did not answer, or try to break the spell which held his eyes. Words were no means of communication now. It was the same the second time she spoke. But when she pulled at his jacket, he did look up and saw nothing strange in how she was, caught full by the light from those windows, so that her skin was blue and her orbs, already sapphire, a sea flashing at hot sunset as, uneasy, she glanced left, then right. The illumination above, as it might be the late sun on bits of glass about the shores of Greece, stayed sharpened to points on her eyes as she turned these from person to person. She bent down to repeat what she had said. At the angle she now held herself she lost those rose diamonds in her eyes, these were shaded, and so had gone an even deeper blue. He became dazzled by the pink neon lights beyond her features. Caught in another patch of colour, some of her chin was pillar-box red, also a part of the silver fox she wore. Furtively she glanced right, then left, but when, to make him do as she wanted, she caught full at him with her eyes that, by the ocean in which they were steeped, were so much a part of the world his need had made, and so much more a part of it by being alive, then he felt anything must be natural, and was ready to do whatever she asked.)

  (When, finally, she bought the boat his hunger took him close to until it was life size, and the saleswoman had engulfed it in a bag so that he could not see the glory, that is the transfiguration, die in those sails turned back to white canvas once out of the dominion of the glass, then he was finished as he clasped, within the paper that wrapped it, his ship, in his eyes wine coloured yet, still the colour his eyes had been and were now no longer, now that he had turned his back and was moving away, out of the store, led off by this stranger.)

  (The moment they were outside, in the dull light of autumn when rain threatens at late afternoon, the instant the windows could no longer cast over him the storied sea he had never seen in the way a rose, held close, holds summer, sun-laden evenings at six o’clock, then he began to question his surroundings.)

  (In the bus, whenever she caught a woman’s eye, she smiled.)

  (He sat, holding the bag on his knee, gradually losing what he held. The colour was gone out of those sails, although he would not look to make sure until he was back home. He held on to what he was losing by not allowing himself to find the glory had departed. Nevertheless, it made him critical of this lady and, because he had always had meals at regular hours and was now late for tea, he was hungry. ‘Where’s Nan?’ he asked as they went. He was thinking of food. She imagined he must mean a little sister. If she had but known it, he was an only child. ‘She will be coming directly,’ was her answer and, as she did not reveal the mistake she had made, he was satisfied.)

  (Then a short dark walk, and they had arrived.)

  Lying on the carriage seat the father groaned in discomfort. Going over that store in memory, he had just told himself that the light was as though he had been seeing the toys through Christmas cracker paper.

  (The lady took Christopher into a room. It was very hot. It had a coal fire. He was surprised that she did not take off his things. She crouched by the fire. Looking back over her shoulder, she poked it, saying, ‘the darling, the darling.’ She did not turn on the light, so that he could see her eyes only by their glitter, a sparkle by the fire, which, as it was disturbed to flame, sent her shadow reeling, gyrating round sprawling rosy walls. ‘I’ve done right haven’t I, the darling,’ she murmured. ‘My tea,’ he announced, surprised to find none.)

  (He imagined this was a party. He could not think where the other children could be playing. He began to unwrap the boat. She came across to unbutton his jacket. Her fingers trembled. She had difficulty. Her shoulder blotted out all direct light. The sails were now as dark as the shadows of her face. He had to bend his head down to his knees to see the hull. A movement of her arm and, in a flickering reddish light, as though in a show of dark rose petals, all his boat glowed at him for a moment, no longer blue, but as if revealed by a beacon afire on foothills above a dark ocean. Another movement of her body and he could no longer see the sails, or no more than a glint. She breathed quick. She muttered, ‘the darling.’ He was too hot. She went on at his coat. Then on a sudden he threw himself back. She had fumbled too much. ‘Don’t,’ he cried out. Having voiced it he was very afraid. So much so that he did not at once begin to bawl and yell.)

  (He screamed, ‘don’t.’ She snatched away her hands which, outspread before her face, wrists against mouth, fingers pointing at him, shook with urgency. ‘Hush dear,’ she said quiet, ‘oh hush.’ ‘Nan,’ he shouted out. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said and gulped, ‘your little sister’s coming, d’you hear.’ Then he saw. For he knew he had no sister.)

  (He took a great breath. He opened his mouth wide. He yelled. In horror at the noise she leant back, letting the firelight full on to his face. This was now entirely round, red and so round that both eyes disappeared in his frown. His pointed tongue curled up, dull red. Bubbles were blown, then burst, then were blown again over his enamelled wet teeth. ‘Look,’ she said low, ‘your lovely boat.’ She held it up. He smashed, with one swipe of the wrist knocking it out of her hand. His ship fell mast first on to the carpet, and did not break. He did not watch. He drew another great breath. This time the yell was louder, higher. It cost him more effort, even made him twist his body. He lay sideways after. She put both hands over her mouth, which was wide open, and so left, in the shadow, a dark hole between firelit fingers over a dark face. He saw from her eyes, from a single, sly smirk, that she was looking at the door behind. Screwing up his eyes he took an even deeper breath, he swelled, he grew, bunched his hands up into fists, in his terror became years younger than his age, and, making an arch of his spine, he let out an astounding screech of hate and fright.)

  (At that moment the door opened. Whoever it was came in, took the lady out. Christopher sobbed. Then, or almost at once, was quiet. Out of breath he sat up, gathered his vessel and, gasping, eyes floating with salt water which overflowed in huge tears, he fingered the bowsprit. He choked. He snivelled a bit. And then all was over, forgotten seemingly, done with.)

  Roe leaned forward to scratch the calf of his right leg. Before he lay down once more, he blew his nose. He was smirk
ing, that is to say embarrassed, because he did not know what Christopher had been through, the child was too young to be able to tell, because it was his Fireman Instructor, Pye’s, sister of all people, and because, when the boy had been returned by the police, holding his boat tight, Roe was not in the house to put the questions expected.

  He groaned as he remembered the upset. The police told Dy they had found Christopher seated comfortable in front of a fire. But if that were so, why was it that the boy could never play with a sailboat again? And why did Dy never refer to this, even when there was the scene with a tanker, painted tropic white, that Christopher simply hurled away from him not three weeks later? He groaned once more as he remembered the situation when at last he himself had returned that fatal afternoon.

  ‘I do wish you had been here,’ she said, ‘so unlucky,’ and then went on that he would have thought of all kinds of things to ask. Then she told him the story as she knew it, but so brokenly, so interrupted by her imagination, by her feeling for the boy’s feelings in surroundings she could not grasp that she was extremely vague, giving him no picture at all. On which he made her go over all the ground again. This time she had been more explicit, speaking something after this fashion:

  ‘Well, when this man,’ she meant the fireman Pye, ‘came back from his work, they say he said he found my true darling absolutely all right, perfectly happy really, sitting there, you see, where she left him, good as gold. She went out to get some milk, or something. But I don’t believe a word of it. I’m sure they were both of them preparing something awful, oh isn’t it dreadful, the poor little pet. Oh yes, I forgot to tell you, that beast is a fireman. Richard,’ she had said, and this time he moaned where he lay at the recollection, ‘when are you going to finish with this Fire Service business?’

  He had not known that Pye had a sister. For days after he did not dare go to the station, telling himself there must be many of the same name in the Brigade, but experienced enough to know that there was no escape. The moment she told him he had known. Later he had asked if she were sure, and what station this Pye was supposed to come from? As he lay in the carriage he gave one short laugh at the thought of how he had tried to evade the inevitable so soon.

  ‘How should I tell what station,’ she said, ‘darling? She’s his sister or so he says. It’s insane, the whole thing’s mad. How can things like this happen nowadays? When you think of all the money that’s spent on clinics and hospitals where people get treatment and still children are taken away, I’ll never not believe any story like this again. But the darling’s all right, the doctor is perfectly satisfied, isn’t he darling, he didn’t tell you anything, did he, I mean when you were taking him to the door the last visit, and that you haven’t told me, did he?’

  She made him promise the doctor had not told him anything that he had not told her. And she had gone on about the fire station. Oh dear, and then she had gone on. And then the tears.

  All this came to pass long before the war, in the days when he was still training to become an Auxiliary. Rolling uncomfortably on to his back, he turned Pye over, chewed the cud on Pye.

  He called Pye to mind, the Pye of those days, the happy Pye on his pet subject. He was a small, dark, powerful man who, once each week, would make an address, it might be in the middle of a lecture on elementary hydraulics, but always in roughly the following muddled terms.

  ‘I don’t hold with the necessity of the AFS,’ he would say, ‘because I don’t hold with the necessity for war. But our parents didn’t ask us if we wanted to be born, they couldn’t ask me or any of you. When I got to an age when I could use my mental processes, I found I had grown to be a man in a world other men had made to their own advantage. Now, I have fought all my life to improve conditions in this job through the Fire Brigade’s Union, though it’s done me no good with what they once described to me here as ‘the powers that be.’ And what I’m getting at is this. We find ourselves in the condition that the right to live, or what is the same thing, the right to work, is put into the melting pot for the gain of a few. But if we do have a war, and mind you I’m not saying we shall ’ave, or that we ought to, because I don’t think anything need be settled by killing innocent men, or their wives and families, then I say that there must be something like an AFS organisation. But I don’t hold with it.’

  ‘No, that’s right,’ an old recruit called Piper would say at this point, nodding his head. This man echoed, or put in a few words to shew that he agreed, whenever the instructor drew breath, or paused to disentangle the thoughts that rose like magic bean stalks in his head.

  ‘Now there’s many downstairs,’ Pye would go on, referring to his fellow firemen, ‘that don’t like the idea of your coming into the Job. They think it may come to an attack on the conditions they exist under. Take a fireman’s wage, it’s not an abundance. But as I say to them in the messroom below, we can’t expect to deal with the fires that may be started as a result of war action, not on our bloody own we can’t. Yet some of them are like that, they’ll hardly speak to a lad until he’s three years out of the drill class, till he’s been three years a fireman. And they’re the kind who think this war, if there is one, will be like the last. I think they’re mistaken. And I like to take an interest, I’m not afraid of new faces as some are, even educated men. My father could not give me a better or worse education than what many of you have, but I like to meet strangers, I take the position they may teach me something I don’t know. Still there’s a prejudice against you lads, you might as well know, it’s only fair to you. And yet there’s many like me have said right along that we in the Brigade must make the best of it with all of you which I’m bound to say I don’t think necessary, because war is not an alternative, not with civilised human beings, or shouldn’t be.’

  Then Piper would say, ‘of course it shouldn’t.’

  This was before Christopher had been abducted, at a time when Pye could speak freely in Roe’s presence, without ending almost every period, because he was always talking, by a dark reference to his sister’s little trouble. Piper’s echoes had been doubly embarrassing then.

  Piper was older than the rest of the volunteers. He did say he was fifty-nine, but then he might well have been drawing his old age pension.

  He had a narrow, dark face, not healthy, and coloured as is the sole of a shoe after walking dry streets in summer, whether by dirt, or ill-health, or both, it was hard to tell. Talking of the war that impended he would say if ‘this bit of trouble’ came to anything, it would be his ‘fifth campaign.’ At lectures he dodged the instructors with approving comments. These men had learned by heart that which they had to give. Piper would hush any recruit who shuffled, and then would repeat the last few words of what he had just heard. At first he had been called on by Pye for confirmation, probably because he was so much older than the rest. Pye might be reciting:

  ‘By virtue of the fact that you get gas before you know or you can realise, when I was out in France I have met lines of men coming back in single file, their hands on each other’s shoulders, blinded. Is that right Piper?’

  The old man would nod his head, which was newspaper white. He had thick dark eyebrows, with a yellow white moustache. His hair was short, so that the skin, dry and pied, and as though travel stained with dust, came through in places.

  ‘That’s right,’ he would say, ‘in file, caught before they rightly knew they ’ad it.’

  He was the prize bore. It was not long after that he was repeating unasked. Worse, he began not to understand. He echoed wrong. So it came about, when they were doing ‘knots and lines,’ that Pye asked one of his long rhetorical questions, as follows:

  ‘Now take a fire, you are in attendance, you’ve got inside, and there is a man flaked out at your feet, perhaps he’s just by a window, it might be one of your own mates. You’ve got your lowering line handy, there may be no other means of getting him down, very likely the staircase will be burned out, well you would do the obvious, you will low
er him away out of that window, or have a dab at it. Now then, what knot would you use?’ ‘Why you would make a yachtsman’s purchase,’ Piper put in too soon. For the first few times Pye kept his temper. He would say no more than, ‘No, you will use a chair knot, or the bowline on a bight, you all know what a yachtsman’s purchase is for, or you should, to strengthen a ladder. But try and be a credit, don’t speak out of turn.’ Piper said, ‘That’s right.’ ‘When they come to give you the examination,’ Pye went on, ‘I shall get a bottle, they’ll blame me if you pretend to more knowledge than you have required. Don’t give them long answers if they should ask you. You can’t know everything in this job. So don’t get me a blister. For God’s sake pipe down.’ At this the class would laugh dutifully, none louder than the ancient, his voice high and cracked. But, once started, nothing would stop Piper and before long he was saying ‘That’s so,’ or ‘Of course,’ every five minutes, nodding his parched head in agreement, looking sideways.

  ‘And how would you get a lowering line suppose you had gone in without? You can’t send a message because your means of escape is cut off. Fire moves fast, as you’ll find, it swirls and gets behind you. It makes a wind, that’s a strange thing.’ ‘It would do,’ from Piper. Pye went on, ‘The man who loses his mental faculties is the one to get left. What’s left of him will be his axe and spanner, and the buckle of his belt. I’m not telling you a story, there’s the museum at Headquarters, you’ve only to ask the bastards there, and if you’re lucky, very, they’ll let you in. You’ll find the label with his name on they got from the number stamped on ’is axe.’ ‘That’s right,’ said Piper. ‘Well, all right,’ said Pye, and continued, ‘you don’t want to fry, or do you? What would you do?’ Piper said, ‘I would throw down me bobbin line.’ ‘Yes, your bobbin line, carried in a leather pouch on the belt, one hundred and twenty feet of the best unpolished sash cord wound round a reel. Now, when you go to drop this bobbin line, don’t throw it out, or it will come back and smash the window directly below, and likely enough get caught up there. No, just drop it out quiet and easy, let the reel fall from your fingers, and you’ll find it will unwind lovely. One of your mates on the ground will bend you the lowering line on the end. Now then, when you have raised the old lowering line, what would you make do? Remember, you’re hot in where you are, you want to get out, you aren’t an Indian, you daren’t try the rope trick, though that’s just superstition that story, my father only gave me what he could afford, namely a working man’s ordinary education, but there’s nothing that is heavier than air can manage. Well, what would you do?’ He did not pause here, he went straight on, still, so it seemed to Roe at the time, concealing the question to which he had already demanded an answer. ‘You want to get out, this is not such a wonderful world for some of us, but the instinct in the ’uman animal to save itself is stronger than the ruling class can credit, now then, suppose you were up there and inside,’ then at last he brought his question out again, ‘what would you make fast to?’ ‘Why, to the door, I don’t doubt,’ Piper said, before anyone else had time to answer. ‘You would,’ Pye said, and fell silent. He looked at his shoes as he sat on the edge of the table. Then he went on, ‘a door swings, it’s in the nature of them to swing, it’s on ’inges, what’s worse the landing outside is well alight, the door may be burned through, and Piper would go and make fast to the knob.’ Now it would be the turn of the whole class to laugh. ‘To the bloody knob,’ he continued, ‘with a lowering line an inch and an eighth in diameter made of best Manilla hemp and fourteen stone sliding down to the ground.’ ‘I get what you mean,’ the old man said. ‘You keep what you get to yourself,’ Pye replied. ‘You’re dead, you’re a smell, you’ve fried.’ Again they could all laugh. ‘Come on now, what is there in a bedroom?’ After several suggestions he would get his answer. ‘Why yes, the bed. And round the middle part, bringing the bed up to the window, making fast to the middle where it will jam across the window frame. Not the foot, or the head, but the middle, the business part,’ he concluded and everyone, including Piper, laughed their appreciation again.