Silver Birches Page 5

  I guessed that in Peter’s world such verbal structures as “don’t give me bloody Scripture” tended not to be part of normal conversational currency. Indeed, the combination of comment and pistol-shot slap had left him pop-eyed and pallid. Looking at his face reminded me of the time when a visiting preacher came to speak at the little service my wife and I used to organize at the local nursing home for mentally impaired geriatrics. We had warned him in advance that the response might be a little less than orthodox, but possibly he had failed to fully absorb this information. In the middle of this worthy person’s very worthy talk a fluffy-haired, saintly looking lady who had been sitting decorously by the door raised her head and inquired in a resonant, pleasantly conversational voice:

  “Why don’t you sit down and shut your gob?”

  My wife had giggled more or less discreetly and whispered her opinion that the wider church was in urgent need of this lady’s services. She suggested we could earn extra pocket money by hiring her out to congregations who wanted to criticize their minister’s preaching but lacked the nerve.

  Thinking about my wife was a mistake. It made me want to weep with sick horror at the prospect of going home to face that empty house on Sunday night. Going home? There was no more going home. There was never going to be any more going home. Why on earth had I come when I knew that it would be followed by the hell of going back? I decided to distract myself by rescuing Peter, but before I could open my mouth I was forestalled by Jenny’s kindly, lilting tones.

  “Mike, you said that Peter used to, erm — well, you said he was a reassurance. That was the word you used, wasn’t it? I’d love to know what exactly — sorry — I’d love to know, broadly speaking, what you meant by that?”

  “Yes, I was going to ask that,” said Graham, twitching with interest like a mouse scenting cheese. “I — I think I can guess what you’re going to say, but — well, go on, and I’ll tell you if it’s the same.”

  Mike leaned forward to place his empty glass on the table. Nobody moving to fill it up had the quality of a very definite movement. After a sideways look at Angela he picked up the bottle himself and dribbled a small amount of wine into the bottom of his glass. Then he sat back, squirming into a comfortable position and squashing his pigtail against the chair so that the very end of it poked out at the side of his neck. Poor little boy, I thought absently. Poor little Mike. Never got what he wanted from his daddy.

  “He was a reassurance because — well, I suppose because he was one of the ones who were so sure about everything.” He gestured around our half-circle with his arm. “Oh, come on! We don’t need to pretend any more, do we? You all know what it was like. You went along to the meetings on Thursday and Sunday evening after church and you sang choruses and listened to what everyone else said about hearing God speaking to them and what was being revealed through the jolly old Scriptures and all that. And you said a few things yourself in the right sort of language, just to — you know — show that you were a fully fledged member of the club. Did a couple of testimonies now and then — beefed ’em up a bit to keep everyone happy. And you thought, we-e-ell, it doesn’t really matter if I haven’t felt or experienced all the right things up to now, because other people, and especially people like old Peter here, have got enough confidence and faith and whatever to keep us all going. And one day, I used to tell myself, when the right time comes — ’cause we knew God’s timing was perfect in those days, didn’t we?” He waited for us to react. “Well, we always said that, didn’t we?” Only Graham nodded uneasily. “One day, it’s all going to happen for me, and when it does I shall be just like old Peter and everything’ll be all right. The trouble was...”

  He broke off. I wondered if he was worried that ending his sentence might drive him to a far more significant and final conclusion.

  “The day never came?” suggested Graham sadly.

  Mike gave no indication that he had registered Graham’s comment. He was staring, wide-eyed, into the fire, apparently hypnotized by the blue and yellow flames that skipped and pranced like neon dervishes on Angela’s swiftly disappearing birch logs. A sudden violent gust of wind filled the whole house with groans and whistles as it pushed and probed at gaps and structural weaknesses in the ancient building. I shivered, partly from fear of huge slavering monsters coming from the darkness outside the firelight to eat me up, and partly because my back was cold. I had forgotten the effect of sitting in front of an open fire in a large room with no central heating. Mike never took his eyes from the blaze as he began to speak again, his voice much softer and more reflective now.

  “Do any of you remember The Railway Children?”

  “Book or film?” I asked.

  “Film,” he answered, without looking at me, “the one set at the end of the last century with Bernard Cribbins and that girl who played the sixteen-year-old daughter and then played the mother part when they did it again on television awhile ago.”

  “Jenny Agutter?” suggested Angela.

  “Mm, that’s right, that’s the one. Did you all see it?”

  A low, slightly puzzled murmur of assent from the rest of us.

  “Soppy film, really, but it always made me cry.”

  “Me too,” I acknowledged, as an image formed in my mind of the way Jessica would have looked up and grinned at me on hearing what Mike had just said.

  “Stupid, eh? Remember the bit when the old bloke — the old gentleman on the train had promised to do something about getting the father out of prison after they’d falsely accused him of something or other?”

  “Stealing secret plans, was it?”

  Mike looked at Angela.

  “Yeah, something like that. It was generally that sort of thing in those days, wasn’t it? Sherlock Holmes and all that. People always leaving naval treaties and things lying around. Anyway, in this scene near the end, the mother’s got the kids at home one morning doing their lessons as usual, and the oldest of the three — ”

  “Roberta.”

  “Roberta, yes — Bobby, they call her. She asks her mum if she can be excused from lessons, doesn’t she, and she wanders down through the fields toward the little local railway station in a bit of a daze, as if she’s got a vague idea something’s going to happen but she’s got no idea what it is. And when she gets to the station there’s this kind of— atmosphere. Everyone she meets is excited and expectant, but no one quite gets round to actually telling her what’s happening. And then this train pulls into the station and there are great clouds of steam so you can’t see anything for a bit, and the girl’s standing at one end of the platform still wondering what’s going on. But then all the clouds of steam part, and there’s this man standing there with his bags and stuff. And Bobby — she shouts ‘Daddy! My Daddy!’ really loud, and runs toward him. And it’s...”

  Mike took a deep breath and then sat very still, every muscle in his face clenched against the growing storm inside him.

  “And it’s what you’ve always wanted,” said Angela gently.

  At that, Mike buried his face in his hands and wept. He sobbed and sobbed, that sad little pigtail of his bobbing up and down on the back of his neck in time with the rhythm of his grief.

  I did feel compassion for Mike, and I did my best to radiate at least a bit of it. I probably succeeded to an extent. But alcohol-based emotion is notoriously unreliable, and I actually felt rather jealous as well. Fancy being able to let it all out like that. I never could. Never would. Not ever. And look, there was Angela, bright and attractive as a fire herself, kneeling down beside his chair, one elegant, red-clad arm round his shoulders, bringing comfort to an old friend who was suffering.

  In that instant I wanted and needed an eye to catch across the room as a drowning man needs oxygen. It was one of the things I had so fiercely missed since Jessica’s stupidly early exit from this world had taken them away from me. Those moments when we were able to communicate without words in a room full of other people, hugging to ourselves the knowledg
e that, later, we would laugh together over the silly ideas that had come into our heads. I knew what she would be thinking on this occasion. She would be wondering if the process we had just been through with Mike would need to be repeated for each one of us before the weekend was over. Rather wearing, if so.

  “It certainly won’t happen with me,” I whispered soundlessly to my dead wife. “I don’t want to talk to them about you. I don’t ever want to talk to anyone about you. If I do that, Jessica — you might really die...”

  Mike was much calmer now. Jenny had fetched him a glass of water from the other end of the room to sip from, and he was mopping at his eyes with tissues supplied by somebody else.

  “Sorry, everybody,” he mumbled. “Got a bit — ” He waggled his head as if trying to clear it. “I got a bit upset. Sorry. I was just all filled up with wanting it to be like it was — like I thought it was — well, like I always thought it was going to be one day.” He sighed mournfully. “Even back in the old days I always felt a bit like those kids in that film. Okay, I’d got a father, but he wasn’t here. He was away somewhere. Everyone said he loved me and really cared about me, so why didn’t he ever come home? See, in films they can make it happen, but in real life it didn’t — doesn’t.” Some of the strength returned to his voice as he went on. “If God genuinely cared about me he wouldn’t be making me wait all my life for the bloody clouds to part so that I can see him and really know he’s there.”

  I think Peter might have been on the verge of saying something in reply to this, but before he could get the words out everything was eclipsed by the most unholy, drawn-out, grinding, agonized screech of a noise, at the conclusion of which the whole world seemed to be shaken to its core by one almighty great slamming crash from somewhere in the yard outside the back door. Peter gripped the sides of his chair, Andrew ejected vertically from his seat like a controlled rocket, and Graham gasped and clapped both hands against his chest as though he feared his heart might try to fly from its cage. I froze.

  “What in the name of — ?” Jenny’s eyes were like dinner plates.

  Only one of us remained totally unmoved. Angela levered herself elegantly to her feet, smiling and shaking her head a little at the expressions on our faces.

  “I’m truly sorry if this disappoints any of you,” she said, “but that appalling noise wasn’t God expressing his wrath, nor was it the devil giving Peter a round of applause. It wasn’t even one of our common-or-garden ghosts. I should have warned you. Sometimes when the wind’s really bad it gets in through the back of one of the old barns in the yard and pushes the door open so that it screeches across the cobbles. Then it smashes it back against the wall. You’d be amazed at the power of the weather in these parts — that door’s quite hefty. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to do something about it. The stuff in there will get blown to kingdom come.”

  Leaning across to pick up the flashlight she had used earlier from the sill of the deep-set eighteenth-century window beside her, she tested it against the back door at the far end of the room. Then she turned a speculative eye on us.

  “Come on, David!” Taking me by the crook of my arm she hauled me to my feet. “I need at least one good strong man at my side. Get your coat. I’ll lend you some wellies. Help yourselves to more wine, everybody. Not Mike. No more wine for Mike. Somebody put some coffee on.”

  Outside, the weather was throwing itself around like an enormous child having a tantrum. Perhaps, I thought in a rare moment of whimsy, because it wasn’t being allowed in. There were only snatches of rain in the air, but the wind was unbelievable. To our left, against the faint lessening of darkness above the horizon, the heads of those huge trees on the slope behind the house thrashed their branches furiously and blindly at the lowering sky. I thought of G. K. Chesterton’s childhood belief that it was not the wind that moved the trees, but the tossing of the trees that created the wind. I wanted to share the thought with Jessica, but, being dead, she wasn’t there.

  Instead, Angela was there, shouting against the racket of the wind, putting her mouth close to my ear, and clearly enunciating every word.

  “We have to wait for a gap between the gusts!”

  “Okay!”

  “You grab the edge of the door near the ground—that’s the toughest bit — I’ll get the top, then when I give the word, push like hell! Okay?”

  “Okay!”

  In the first available lull we pushed like hell. The door screeched back into its closed position with less trouble than I’d expected, the big wooden bar on one side eventually falling into its iron slot on the adjoining wall with such weight and finality that it was difficult to see how the wind had ever been able to shift it in the first place.

  “Well done, us!” bawled Angela into my ear again. “Now— we need to go in through the side door and somehow fix it from the inside. You hold the flash and I’ll have a look round for some rope!”

  “No ghosts waiting for us in the barn, then?”

  She smiled grimly.

  “None that would dare get in my way when there’s something to be done, no. Besides, I’ve had Orkin in. Here, grab this — come on!”

  It took several minutes of stumbling and crashing around among boxes and bits of wood amid a sea of straw to find a rope and lash it securely from the inside handle of the door to a convenient iron ring on the back wall.

  “There!” Breathing heavily with exertion Angela patted the taut rope with one gloved hand. “If that doesn’t hold there’s nothing else we can do. The whole blessed lot can come down if it wants to. Let’s go and see if they’ve finished the wine.”

  As we were removing boots and coats in the porch Angela said, “You didn’t mind being press-ganged, did you, David? I didn’t exactly ask, did I? Just dragged you off.”

  “Oh, no, Angela.” I injected remoteness into my voice as I stood on one leg, tugging at a Wellington that seemed to have superglued itself to my foot, “I didn’t really mind at all — honestly.”

  She grinned as though I had said something quite different.

  “Oh, good. Well, anyway — thanks.”

  I had no intention of telling her that in those few minutes of physical activity in the middle of a raging storm, I, one of the least-practical people in the world, had felt more real and alive than at any time since Jessica’s death. It would have sounded absurd. And it was absurd. Forget it.

  May I say something?” inquired Andrew politely, his stern, pointed face quite expressionless.

  It was a few minutes later. The half-circle around the fire was complete again, the drama of Mike’s emotional spilling-over replaced by an atmosphere of drowsy flippancy. A huge plastic container of a popular brand of assorted chocolates, contributed by Jenny, was being passed with pleasurable laziness from person to person. Mike himself appeared to have undergone something of a miraculous change of mood. It was rather disconcerting. After downing the coffee that our hostess had so sternly prescribed, he had managed to get his glass filled with wine again. Now he was joining in with light comments and laughter as though that earlier outburst of his had never happened.

  Andrew’s question was unexpected, partly because it altered the mood of the evening, but also because Andrew had been even less vocal than me since the group’s first encounter. What on earth could he be wanting to say that was so deadly serious?

  “Yes, of course, Andrew,” said Angela, “go ahead.”

  Mike managed to waft his glass in Andrew’s direction without spilling any. “As long as it’s not some juicy little anecdote about me that I thought was buried in the past, mate, because there are one or two hot little tales that are best forgotten.” He chortled tipsily. “I bet old Graham was a bit of a dark horse as well. Eh, Gra?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, not dark...”

  Graham blushed purple. Possibly he was making an attempt to look like the sort of person who had once been a bit of a dark horse, but it was a failure if so. Not so much a dark horse as a transparent,
leaping gerbil, I thought to myself.

  “No,” said Andrew, still very politely, “I don’t particularly want to tell any stories about the past, but I do want to complain about what seems to be happening this evening. In fact, I might as well tell you, my greatest fear is that this weekend will prove to be a complete waste of time.”

  Crash of gears.

  Somehow the politeness made it worse. I sensed the Englishness in our group being turned up several notches. I couldn’t tell what was happening to Jenny’s Welshness. Into my mind flashed the image of a boy called Brian Robinson who had been in our class at junior school. Brian’s specialty was reminding us, just when we were beginning to enjoy ourselves, what a dim view our teacher or parents would take of the mild, junior-style villainy we happened to be engaged in at the time. The problem was that his voluntary policing succeeded in making us — or me anyway — feel both angry and guilty. He spoiled the innocent joy of being bad.

  No one in charge. But we all looked at Angela. After all, this whole singular exercise had been her idea, and it was her house. I sighed. Pathetic.

  “That’s fine, Andrew,” she said calmly, “say whatever you want.”

  “I’d like to start with the things Mike said.”

  Mike playfully lifted both arms up level with his face like a barrier and ducked his head behind them, pretending to hide.

  “Uh-oh! I’m in trouble, folks!”

  “Mike, you said Peter hadn’t changed at all. In fact, you said something about him still being a block of concrete. I don’t want to misquote you. Are those the words you used?”

  “Ye-e-es. But I didn’t mean anything, did I, Pete?”

  Peter waved a hand in dismissal.

  “Don’t worry, no offense taken. Just glad you were able to — you know...”

  He meant it. Annoying though he certainly had been at times in the past, Peter never had been one to take offense.

  “Well,” went on Andrew, “I agree with you in a way about Peter being like a block of concrete, or, as I’d prefer to put it, like a rock. Over the last few years he’s been like a rock for me in two or three very difficult sets of circumstances. You may not like the way he talks about what he believes, but I happen to know that he works very hard to live it out as well.”