The Old Jest (7 page)

‘What fun that would have been!'

‘And the grandfather …'

‘I live with him and my aunt. Over there.'

She pointed vaguely in the direction of the railway line.

‘I only left school last term. I'm going to Trinity in the Autumn.'

‘To read what?'

‘History. It seems like quite a good thing to start off with anyway. Aunt Mary says I'll probably get bored with it.'

‘And is Aunt Mary given to being right?'

‘She really wanted me to go to Oxford, but … well … we didn't have enough money for that. She says I need intellectual hounding to keep me at work … and discipline. She says I probably won't get either here. She says …' She stopped and looked anxiously at him.

‘Well?'

‘She says it's probably all for the best that we haven't the money anyway because if there's going to be a war with England … a real war … then I'd be better off staying here. After all …'

‘And does she think there's going to be a real war with England?'

His face was amused.

‘She says they're all such fearful muddlers that there might be.'

A gust of wind threw a burst of raindrops on to the roof. They sounded like pebbles landing and then sliding, and then becoming silent.

‘She's good.'

‘Ah, yes!'

‘She's very good to Grandfather, and she's very good to me. To people, really everyone. Her life is full of order. Don't you think that is a good thing?'

‘Certainly.'

‘You don't say that with conviction.'

‘Nancy Gulliver, you must have been a very trying child.'

She smiled slightly.

‘In the photographs my mother looks very like her. I'd say she was less ordered though.'

‘Why do you think that?'

‘She had me.' She leant towards him as if she were afraid of being overheard. ‘I suspect she wasn't married. That wasn't very orderly, was it? Mind you, it isn't what people say, it's just what I suspect.'

‘Perhaps it would make things easier for you if you believed what they say.'

‘Perhaps.'

Overcome with a sudden hunger she got up and took the satchel off the shelf; she peered into it.

‘Have a banana?'

‘No thanks. I never eat between meals.'

‘Do you mind if I have one? There are three there.'

‘Go ahead. Help yourself.'

She took out a banana and pulled the peel back carefully. The flesh of the fruit was beginning to turn from cream to pulpy brown. Reluctantly she sat down again, stretching her legs out in front of her. She wanted to move them, pace like a lion backwards and forwards in her cage. Her long second toe poked inquisitively through the wet canvas of her sandshoe. She chewed and gazed at it as if she were alarmed somehow at its appearance. He wondered whether he should pick up his book and continue with his reading.

‘What's your name?' she asked after a long, long silence.

‘Haven't we had this conversation before?'

‘It didn't get us very far. One ought … really … technically … to know one's lodger's name. I mean … you're not a … but… anyway.'

He didn't say a word.

She folded the empty banana skin and put it into her pocket.

‘Your name isn't Robert, by any chance?'

‘I've had so many names down the years.'

‘Was Robert ever one of them?'

‘Not that I can recall. It's not really a very interesting name.'

‘My father was called Robert.'

He roared with laughter. After a moment she laughed, too, and their laughter and the wind shook the little hut.

‘Ah now, ah come on now, Nancy! You're not blaming me for that?'

‘Why not? Why not you?'

‘How do you know his name is Robert? After all, if you don't believe what they say …'

‘I know that. Grandfather talks about Robert from time to time, and he's well past telling lies. Anyway, I have this book.' Her fingers stroked an ancient childhood scar on her knee as she spoke. She forever had to be moving. Her hands did not know the meaning of the word peace. ‘It's a Yeats first edition. You know, that lovely soft paper and ragged edges where someone has cut the pages with a paper knife … He must have given it to her … to my mother. It has Helen … that was her name.'

The nod of his head could have meant anything or nothing. She wasn't watching him, though; her eyes were scrutinising the black looped writing on the fly leaf of the book.

‘ … murmur a little sadly how Love fled, And paced upon the mountains overhead, And hid his face amid a crown of stars.'

Silence.

‘I don't really know what it means.'

Silence.

‘It's nice though … good. “Helen,” it says then “from Robert.” So you see.'

‘Yes, I see,' he said gently. ‘And I assure you it was not I who wrote those words.'

‘Oh well.' She spoke with resignation in her voice.

‘It shouldn't be so important, you know.'

He bent down and ground out the remains of his cigarette on the sole of his shoe. He held the butt in the hollow of his hand like you might hold a tiny dead animal.

‘When you are young, there is today and tomorrow. A lot of tomorrows. It's only when you get to my age that the past begins to play a part in your life. Uninvited. Willy nilly.'

‘I'd just like to know what is inside me. What sort of a person I might expect to turn out to be.'

‘That's rubbish, child.'

‘Surely ingredients must be important?'

‘Irrelevant. We can do nothing about them but forget them and get on with the job of maturing, exploring and expanding our faculties.'

‘Is that what you've done? I mean, are doing?'

He looked down at the butt in his hand.

‘Just throw it on the floor,' she said.

He got up and went over to the door; as he opened it a gust of rain burst its drops on the floor. He threw the butt out on to the sand and shut the door again quickly.

‘I'm not what you might call old.' He smiled and corrected himself. ‘Not what I might call old, and yet … all the time now … willy nilly, as I said before, the past impinges on me. Nudges its way constantly into my life. Uninvited. I no longer seem to have time for contemplation. I find it very unnerving. I find I can no longer act unimpeded by voices from the past.'

He was talking to himself, standing quite still by the door, his face a pale blur in the darkness;

‘The whole structure of my life begins to tremble, like this funny hut when the wind blows.' He held his hands out in front of him in a sudden gesture, and she saw that they also were trembling. ‘So, for the first time in years, everything I do becomes tentative. I have to pretend, fool people. I used to be sure, devastatingly sure; now I have to squash doubts, sharpen constantly the edges of my thoughts. Perhaps to become lost is the fate of the middle-aged and the middle class. It might be compared with the loss of Faith.' He looked at his hands for a moment and then let them fall slowly to his sides. She felt she was eavesdropping.

‘Oh dear!' he said. ‘I'm sorry. I don't usually meander. Another symptom.'

He came and sat down again beside her.

‘I don't mind,' she said. ‘I don't know what you're talking about, but I like listening to you.'

‘The perfect person to have around.'

He said it gently, without irony.

‘I've never had Faith,' she said.

‘I expect you will someday, in something or other; even yourself. It doesn't have to be in God, you know.'

‘I often wonder if it helps … Faith in God, I mean. Does it make life easier? Less … well … full of dark corners?'

‘I'm afraid not. I'm not really a God man myself, so I wouldn't like to mislead you. I can say with conviction, though, that it's very important to feel you have a reason for being alive.'

‘I've always hated caves. When we used to go on picnics … when I was … well young … you know … a …'

He nodded encouragingly.

‘They all used to go rushing into any caves that might be around. Hurray, they'd shout, lovely lovely caves! I couldn't bear it. I used to stay outside. I could hear them calling and laughing inside. I knew I was missing something, but I couldn't go in. They used to tease me when they came out. You sometimes find terrible things in caves.'

‘True.'

‘And mazes and locked rooms that haven't been opened for years and cellars. And dark secret passageways. I hate being frightened.'

‘You seem to have no sense of adventure. Most young people get a thrill from being scared. They sometimes even find it stimulating. Not you?'

‘No.'

‘What do you get a thrill from?'

She thought for a moment, gnawing nervously at a fingernail.

‘I like throwing stones into the sea.'

‘A noble occupation.'

‘Sarcasm,' she said angrily. ‘I'm trying to tell you. I think I must be a mutt of some sort. Words. I get a thrill from words. Written, spoken, words just jumbling themselves round in my head … hardly even thought, like shadows, but making their own noise. Do you understand?'

‘I think you're probably in for a hard time, young woman.'

‘I'm starting out with a lot of advantages.'

‘Yes. But you must realise that sometimes those advantages can get very much in the way.'

There was a long silence between them. A gull landed on the roof. They could hear its claws scraping impatiently on the wood until it found a position to its liking.

‘And yet,' he said eventually. ‘You're not afraid of me?'

‘Should I be?'

‘I am as unknown to you as a locked room might be.'

‘People don't frighten me. Only the very clever ones who seem to know everything.'

‘But you must know they don't.'

‘I feel they can't really, but I'm never sure.'

He put his hand into his pocket and pulled something out. He held it out towards her. It was a gun.

Inside her stomach some very disagreeable thing jumped. She neither moved nor spoke until whatever it was had settled itself back into its appointed place again. Her heart was beating very fast.

‘Well?'

‘Is that all you're going to say?'

‘What do you want me to say?' Her voice was angry, rather shrill. May I live, may I live, may I live!

‘Are you going to kill me or … something?'

‘Of course not.' He put the gun back into his pocket.

‘Why … why …? '

‘I carry a gun. I just suddenly thought you ought to know.'

‘You … have you …? '

‘I use it if I have to.'

He put his hand once more into his pocket and she braced herself to see the gun again, but he took out his cigarettes instead. He took one from the box and tapped it for a moment on his thumb before putting it into his mouth.

‘I make no apologies if I have upset you.' The cigarette nodded in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. ‘The first fact of life you have to grasp if you want to get anywhere at all is that life isn't full of sweetness and light and gentlemen standing up when ladies come into the room. On the contrary, it's full of violence, injustice and pain. That's what you're afraid of seeing when you open those locked doors, peer into caves. The terrible truth.'

‘No,' she said. ‘No, no … oh …!'

‘Once upon a time …' His hand groped again in his pocket, this time for the matches. ‘They gave me a lovely uniform and a gun and exhorted me to go and kill the enemies of the people. I did my duty. I was a damn good soldier, Nancy, probably because I don't really have a fear of dying … I know that sounds grandiose, but it's true; my fear would be of being trapped by eternal life, like your grandfather … I became a major. I was no heroic child, like so many poor fools, just galloping into middle age. Four bloody years in a Field Artillery brigade. I watched men die for what some of them thought were the rights of the small nations. Slaughter. Young men, old men, heroes and devils and just poor sods who thought they were doing their duty.' He struck a match and the flame was reflected in his eyes. Three flames trembled. ‘I thought at first we might be striking a million blows for justice. A purge of some sort might be taking place, but of course I was wrong … One thing I learnt though.' He shook out the flame on the match and in his eyes and took a deep pull on his cigarette. ‘I know the true enemies of the people. The true enemies.' He laughed suddenly. ‘I suppose you think I'm a little touched?'

‘You could be.' She spoke cautiously. ‘A little.'

‘I probably am. Ranting. Spouting mumbo-jumbo foolishness at a young person who may never care, never be ruffled … by … by … after all, why should you?'

Smoke began to trickle out through his nose and mouth. She stared at his thin face. Dying, she thought viciously, soon; I hope you die soon. The cigarette drooped between his fingers, hardened by years of pulling the trigger.

‘My war,' he said the words gently, ‘will never end.'

She stood up.

‘The sooner you get away out of here the better and ‥ and … don't think I'll bring you any more bananas … or anything. I jolly well won't.'

He leaned his head back against the wall and laughed.

‘It's no laughing matter. Get away. Go away. You …'

‘I don't mean to offend you. Believe me, I'm sorry. I just find things funny.'

‘Don't you realise that I will probably go to the police. The army … we … know officers in the …'

‘I don't mean to sound patronising, but you go ahead and do that, if you feel you have to. That's all right with me.'

She walked across the room and opened the door. Rain and wind burst turbulently in. The gull on the roof, disturbed by her movement, shifted its position. Its feet clawed impatiently, waiting for calmness again. She turned and looked back at the man. He leant against the wall still, a smile on his face.