Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  She laughed mirthlessly for a few moments. Still standing behind her, Douglas placed his hands on her shoulders again. They were heaving, her hands clutching, unclutching.

  Larry was nodding quietly.

  “And if we should choose not to go?”

  “In spite of their courtesy, I’m not sure we have that option,” his mother replied. “I really don’t think we have.”

  “Come to the front door,” Douglas said after a silence, “come to the front door and smell the wind.”

  He pushed the wheelchair into the rectangle of light outside the front door. They faced the north-west, the quarter from which, with its warmth and its smell of the sea, the wind was blowing.

  “Smells like spring to me,” Larry said.

  After lunch the next day Larry began to work on something in the back garden. It looked like a wooden hut, Douglas thought, but it could have been a boat. He worked with such urgency, so consumed by the task, that Douglas didn’t ask him what it was, why he was doing it, why – if it was a hut – he hadn’t asked permission. He didn’t know where Larry had got the wood nor where, having got it, he had stored it. He didn’t feel inclined to ask either; it might destroy his concentration, enrage him.

  To begin with they watched from the living-room, sitting well back from the windows so that they could see without being seen. The wind that had risen the night before was still blowing. It was bending the pines and the birches, ruffling Larry’s thin hair, making the clothes line jump as though electrified. There were occasional lulls, and in these Douglas and Edith could hear hammering and sawing which otherwise – Larry appearing to labour as in a kind of dumb show – the wind covered. Douglas had the fancy that it was the sawing that had arrested the wind, the hammering that kept it at bay. Both too seemed to give Larry authority. He knew what he was doing, had worked it out in advance and wouldn’t stop until he had finished.

  Edith said that it put her in mind of his early childhood when, for hours on end, he would work with blocks of wood, building walls and towers, bridges and battlements. Douglas thought that that might be it: building something just for the hell of it or as a kind of therapy, a trick to reduce the burden of time and fate? Neither on the other hand; it was possibly neither. Larry would suddenly stop, for instance, look up and away as if he suspected he was being watched, take out a piece of paper and consult it, place it on the ground, weigh it down with a stone, rub his hands then with glee and astonishment. Didn’t all that suggest someone with plans?

  The wood was new, white mainly and sometimes catching the sun. Larry clearly enjoyed working with it, as well as just touching it, holding it. Douglas couldn’t remember him doing carpentry before, let alone enjoying it. No doubt he had picked it up in his days with the forestry commission. Living wood and dead wood; trees and timber. Probably too that was where he had got the wood. And probably it was his intention, Douglas thought, that his parents should be bothered by such questions. Douglas wasn’t going to ask them though. You didn’t quiz an acrobat in mid-flight. You didn’t do that; you didn’t break such spells if you knew what was good for you.

  What emerged at last from his labours was a hut. If neither Douglas nor Edith had any feeling of anti-climax, it was because the hut, though not quite finished, had been beautifully made. For three whole days – days of high wind and bright sun – Larry worked on it. Each night he covered it with tarpaulin, each morning lifted the tarpaulin off with something approaching reverence. But if the work enthralled him, it also exhausted him. At dinner he didn’t mention it, and nor did his parents. Edith’s view was that when it was completed to his satisfaction – then and only then – would he do so. Again she looked to his childhood for precedents. He had been a secretive child, she claimed, only owning up to his activities when he thought he had perfected them. Birdwatching, fishing, stamp collecting – his parents would be invited to admire only when he believed there was something to admire. So it would be now, with the hut. When the last nail was in, the last surface polished, he would come to them, overcome with pride and excitement. So surely did Edith anticipate it, it was as if she was hoping for a return to the simplicities of childhood.

  The pretence that his parents weren’t aware of what he was doing went to ridiculous lengths. When it was lunchtime, Douglas would go to the front door, wait for a pause in the hammering, the sawing and the wind, and shout to Larry, unseen behind the cottage, that his meal was in. And when at table, sawdust in his hair and on his face, he would refer, not to what he had just been doing, but to the book he was reading at night. As if he was reading all day as well. As if his life had become that of a student, a scholar.

  On the fourth day, they saw him standing back, arms folded, contemplating the hut, and knew that it was finished. Then it was as Edith had foretold, Larry even going so far as to suggest that it had been built entirely for his parents, entirely to their specifications, triumphant outcome of some long cherished family dream.

  Soon afterwards Douglas pushed Edith out into the garden to see it. Birds were singing, the air was warm, and there was a pleasant smell of new wood. He pushed the wheelchair slowly round the hut, leaving it to Edith to make comments, congratulate Larry on his achievement (she had always been much better at this sort of thing than he). Then Larry opened the door of the hut and invited them to look inside. There was a raftered roof, four small windows and a raised wooden floor on which he had laid a rug.

  “The door is broad enough for your chair,” Larry said, “should you ever want to sit inside. I’m going to make a ramp for it.”

  Edith nodded vigorously, as if it was very likely that in the coming weeks she would want to do this.

  While Larry took charge of the wheelchair, Douglas stepped into the hut. The smell of new wood was very strong, and it was warm and still. On the edge of the stillness he could hear Edith and Larry murmuring. Perhaps Edith was again praising her son’s handiwork, he, bent low over the wheelchair, thanking her. Or perhaps he was now confessing that he had built the hut entirely for her. A retreat for meditation. It struck Douglas that he could build him a new observatory, bigger than the present one and warmer. One hut for the mother, one for the father.

  Nothing had been said about its purpose. For two days, in fact, Larry didn’t go near it. Then Douglas saw him attaching a lock to it, then, later in the day, entering with books, files and what looked like manuals. He stayed for an hour or so and when he emerged looked very thoughtful. Next he took some planks of wood in with him and again there were sounds of sawing, hammering, planing. Sometimes he worked with the door open, sometimes with it shut, and sometimes he worked so vigorously the hut shook.

  One day Edith asked him what it was for.

  “It’s a workshop I’ve made for myself out there. Soon I’ll be building something in it. I’m not sure yet what form it’ll take. I’ll show you when I’m finished – if I’m pleased with it. As with the hut. I hope you understand.”

  His plans seemed to excite him, Douglas thought, but also to disconcert him. He said of course they understood.

  “How long will it take?” Edith asked.

  “Well, I have to have it finished by a particular date.”

  “What date is that?” Douglas asked.

  “The date of the march,” Larry replied. “The date of the march.” He looked from one parent to the other, not so much to scrutinise as to offer himself for scrutiny.

  “You need it for the march?” Edith enquired.

  “Not so much for the march as on the day of it.”

  “I need something for the day of the march too,” Edith said with a kind of studied remoteness, “only I can’t think what.”

  Larry looked at his mother sympathetically.

  “You’re not too keen on marches, are you?”

  “It’s more than just that I can’t march. We’ve reached the stage when it isn’t enough, I think.”

  “I agree,” Larry said, nodding, looking away. “That’s my feeling exactly.�
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  “Can you be more explicit?” Douglas asked. “What’s wrong with a march?”

  “Nobody notices them any more. They’re old hat. Extreme situations demand extreme responses,” Larry said.

  Edith was nodding.

  “Yes: we owe it to ourselves not to become old fashioned, dear.”

  “But what else do you propose?” Douglas asked. “Our powers are not unlimited.”

  “That’s surely up to the individual,” Larry said quietly. “I’ll be working on my plan, quite soon, trying to make something of it, and mother …”

  “Well, hold on,” Edith said. “What options are open to cripples? To sit here meditating for hours on end? To wheel myself from door to door, haranguing?”

  There was a silence before she spoke again, and but for her hands, clutching and unclutching like some creature of the sea-bed, she might almost have been amused.

  “Not to remember that my options are severely limited gets me nowhere.”

  “Mother,” Larry said, reaching out a hand.

  “It’s true. A simple fact.”

  “You could come with me,” Douglas said. “Along the lochside for four miles and into the town. There’ll be speeches.”

  “I’m sorry, Douglas, but you make it sound futile.” She was grinning as she did when in pain.

  “You could join up with me,” Larry said. “I could do with a hand.”

  “But I couldn’t give you one; I don’t have one: I’m a cripple! Why can’t you see that!? Anyway, you’ve not told me what you’re going to do.”

  “I could let you know. When it’s developed a bit further, I could let you know.”

  “Alright. If I can’t see what I’m called upon to do – by God, if you like – and think that this means I’ve no contribution to make, you can tell me. I’ll consider it.”

  “I can’t see what’d be more effective than a march,” Douglas said, speaking quickly, as if fearful of interruption. “I can’t even see what more you could do, effective or not. Short of violence, of course, but that’s unacceptable, I think we all agree.”

  Larry lifted his hands as though for silence. He was smiling. The building of the hut and now the undisclosed project in it had made him proud. His manner was assured, the skin of his face appeared tighter, finer. He took his time before speaking.

  “I think that what I’m planning to do will be an advance on marches. It doesn’t involve violence, though it speaks of it, inevitably.”

  “Can you be any clearer?” Edith asked.

  “I’ll try. What I want to do … is attempt to remind people, much more vividly than a march ever could, of this one fact: that nuclear violence is terminal, that there will be no getting on with life after it’s over. Our situation is uniquely terrible. I want to try and dramatise this. Marches don’t do it, never did do it, not even in the sixties. Apart from the banners, they’re all the same. I hate their passivity. I think that what they show is not the power of people before governments, but their helplessness.”

  “So you’re going to appear dressed up as a skeleton,” Douglas said, more sarcastically than he had intended. “It’s a skeleton you’re making in the hut.”

  “That would be old hat too,” Larry replied. “There’s nothing new about effigies.”

  “Yes,” Edith said, “It would only work, ah … if you were to become a skeleton before their very eyes.”

  “Before whose very eyes?” Douglas asked.

  “Everyone’s. Those marching, those watching from the roadside, on the television … Yes, everyone. A global audience. This is the age of global audiences.”

  She was smiling too now, not a smile like Larry’s, not assured and composed like that, but startled rather, excited, a smile as of discovery, not consolidation. It irked Douglas that they were both smiling; less and less could he see anything to smile about. They cared so little about marches they didn’t even want to hear why he believed in them, saw them as enduringly relevant, not modish at all.

  He wondered if he could manage a defence. He stood up, more to secure a window against the cold windy day actually than to address them. But he was determined to address them; he believed there were important points to make. Immediately he found though that he wasn’t able to be as passionate in defence of marches as they were against them. Edith didn’t look at him – not unusual, for it pained her to turn her head – but nor did Larry. Yes: they were more ardent in their secretiveness than he in his openness – more dignified, too.

  “I’ve never pretended,” he began, “that marches are momentous in their effects. But what is? The only alternatives, I honestly believe, are nothing at all or acts … probably too close to violence.”

  “In my opinion, marches are almost indistinguishable from nothing,” Larry said.

  Not to seem absurd, standing where he was with so little to say, Douglas moved Edith over to the window, where there was a little sunshine. She thanked him, going along with the pretence.

  “So long as people hold back from marches, they won’t be effective,” he went on, standing by the window with his hands on the back of the wheelchair. “Too few go on them: that’s the trouble. Imagine marches a hundred times bigger. Imagine this Easter march with a million people. Imagine that. Then you’d see how effective they can be. You can’t judge them as they are.”

  “But there used to be bigger marches,” Edith said, “and the reason they got smaller was precisely because they weren’t effective.”

  “Exactly,” Larry said.

  Douglas sat down but kept a hand on the wheelchair. He was becoming a little breathless, he feared, and hoped it wasn’t apparent. He tried to breathe deeply. It helped, he had found, if when you were doing so, you looked at something pleasant. He looked out of the window therefore at the wind in the trees and the tall grasses. The way the wind could flatten the grasses and turn them grey – this struck him particularly. As if colour was not of the world but simply visited it.

  Soon he became aware of two rhythms, an involuntary one, which seemed wrong, unhealthy, and the one he was trying to impose on it, a rhythm of assuaging and ideal regularity. It wasn’t a matter of hoping for the best, he now thought, but of working for it. And indeed, even as he thought this, he seemed to be achieving it, the tight breathing that had threatened his upper chest beginning to give way before a richer respiration arising from below, from depths he was happy to believe were his. His head cleared too, all manner of distractions he hadn’t been aware of as such slipping away, amongst them the idea that if he didn’t persuade Edith and Larry of the importance of marches he had failed, and failed in some fundamental way.

  “We must agree to differ,” he said at last quietly. “I’ll march, you two … make your own arrangements.”

  “Do you want me to tell you what I’m hoping to do?” Larry suddenly asked.

  “You never were much good at keeping secrets,” Edith said. “All right, tell us.”

  “What I’m aiming to do … is present people with a nuclear explosion in miniature. No violence is intended and none will be done. In the hut … are the beginnings of a boat. It’ll be flat, rather like a raft, and powered by a small engine. Not so flat though that it runs a risk of sinking. When the march is passing the base, I’ll set this boat off, across the loch and towards the base. About eighty yards from the base, it’ll blow up – a small bomb, but the explosion will be very loud. Slowly into the Easter sky then a mushroom cloud will rise. It will be very black, its underside spinning, fulminating. Symbol of death, universal destruction. Everyone will hear the explosion and everyone will turn to the cloud. Most probably, in fact, the march will stop. There will be terror at first, I realise, but that can’t be helped. I think actually that for the moment to strike home there has to be terror.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “It’ll not be easy of course, not at all. It’s going to require such co-ordination. The engine will have to start immediately, not stall; it’ll have to get the boat
to the right spot at the right time; and, when the boat gets there, the explosion will have to occur. Needless to say, it’s giving me nightmares. But oh I can hear it now, the explosion, echoing around the low hills! And at the same time the cloud, expanding over the loch, blotting out the sun – an eclipse in miniature, and with all the terror, awe eclipses inspire!”

  He paused again.

  “Another thing. I’ll have to find a place from which to launch the raft. And I’ll have to have it hidden before that. I’ll also have to launch it when no one is looking. You can see why I’m thinking of a helper.”

  Most of the way through Larry’s explanation Edith had been laughing silently. Her shoulders were heaving, Douglas could see. This woman whose will was indistinguishable sometimes from the pain which inspired it was entirely convulsed. Her hands, as in an attempt at applause, made several times to rise from her lap, but fell back, whether from pain or mirth – or both – wasn’t clear.

  “What a wonderful idea!” she said at last in a cracked voice. “How long did it take you to think that up? Or did it come just in a flash?”

  “That’s it – a flash!” Larry was smiling triumphantly.

  “I hope that’s how it’ll be with me,” Edith said. “One gets so tired of thinking. So very tired.”

  “Have faith,” Larry said. “You’ll have your vision too.”