Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  A bright, windy day, with high white clouds, curdled, crenellated, a fine pageant of sky moving from the north west to the south. Now and then reflections of the clouds showed briefly on the surface of the loch, fragmented, trembling.

  Rounding a bend, Douglas and Larry saw Helen moving in dappled sunlight by the beech trees, a neat figure in a belted brown raincoat. She was scrutinising the spot apparently, as for flaws, imperfections, walking backwards and forwards with strict steps, so absorbed in her task she barely registered their approach. Only when Douglas drove off the road and parked under one of the trees did she look up and saunter towards them, out of the dappled area into one of brightness, right hand raised to shade her eyes.

  Larry was grinning. He said how smart she looked. He couldn’t go wrong with a partner like that. How long did Douglas say he’d known her? He was first out of the car then to greet her, shaking her hand ceremoniously, pumping it.

  “Yes, this is the spot. It’s the only possible one. I think of it most of the time. I know all the rocks, the branches …. It’s in my head, here.” He tapped his head, still grinning.

  “It certainly seems ideal,” Helen said. “You can even hear larks – listen, when the wind drops and there’s no traffic.”

  Larry made a sweeping gesture with his right arm, as of ownership or intended ownership. Then, with the exaggeratedly strict and lengthened stride of one measuring out a cricket pitch, he walked off down the road, head rolling, arms lifted slightly from his sides. He went round one corner and then, where the road doubled back on itself, a second. Then he stopped and stood very still.

  “What’s he doing?” Helen asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s always been one for measurements. As if in measurements is safety.”

  They stood and watched him returning, still with the same exaggerated stride, eyes half shut.

  “A hundred and eighty two yards,” he said, “a hundred and eighty two yards from here to the second corner. I reckon it’ll take them about three minutes to do it.”

  He was breathing heavily, hands on hips.

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to see the second corner from my place on the shore. And I can’t afford to wait until they get to the first corner; I might be seen. I’m hoping for a gap between groups, you see. I’ll launch the raft when this part of the road is clear. It’s the only safe way. That means though that there will have to be someone signalling from the second corner to someone at the first. I’ll take my cue from the person at the first. I know I can see him from the shore.”

  Douglas and Helen said nothing. They might have been waiting until it became interesting or comprehensible before they responded.

  “Could we try it then?” Larry went on, clenching his right hand and punching it into his left. “Dad at the second corner, Helen at the first. I know that, on the day, you’ll be marching, Dad, but just for the moment …”

  “Anything to oblige,” Douglas said.

  “You hold your right arm up – like this – and, when the way is clear, you drop it. It’ll be the signal. O.K.?”

  Helen nodded, lifting and dropping her right arm obediently. Douglas said nothing, thinking that on the day he ought to be far back from the explosion or well in advance of it, not here by the beech trees sensing or even seeing the crouched figure of his son amongst the rocks. He pictured the raft exploding in his face, killing him and some of the marchers. Thick black smoke would cover the bodies and block out the sun but there would be photographs nonetheless in the papers the next day. After that the spot would be silent forever in his imagination. Driving past it would be like losing consciousness and walking past it impossible. Edith would ask to be brought to it however, in all weathers sitting in her wheelchair under the beech trees, not so much in vigil as in expiation, haggard and astounded until death took her.

  Larry went off through the trees, ducking to avoid branches, climbed down a bank to the shore and made his way along a rocky promontory. There, where a bush grew, he knelt down, seemed to examine the water.

  After a few moments he stood up, slowly and reflectively, went round the back of the bush and, as if it was a hut of some kind, entered it. They heard him call out to them then, asking them to go along the road to their positions.

  Of all Larry’s projects over the years, Douglas thought, this was the craziest. Heroic maybe but the craziest; certainly the most dangerous. He asked Helen what she thought of it, now that they were here, by the shore, the American base in sight, its ceaseless and impenetrable busyness coming and going on the wind even as he spoke and she answered.

  “I still think it’s a great idea,” she said, slipping her arm through his and, as though to comfort him, matching her stride to his. “Daring, but with such rightness. You mustn’t try to stop him.”

  “I couldn’t possibly. He can do what he likes. So can you. So can I. So can Edith.”

  “I felt honoured to be asked, actually,” Helen said.

  “I’m glad. I’ll have to be far off, though, when he launches the thing …”

  “He’ll be needing two helpers though. He said so.”

  “I know, I heard him, but I’ll not be one of them.”

  “That’s that then,” Helen said brightly.

  They walked in silence to the first corner, where they parted without a word, Douglas going on to the second corner, shambling a little as he went. It was as though, he thought, they were rehearsing, not just the moves for Saturday 13th, but the feelings and passions as well. Almost certainly there would be fear, anger, estrangement. And suddenly, as out of these feelings and passions, he had a desire to mock.

  “Helen,” he shouted, “shouldn’t you be standing to attention or something?”

  “Raise your right arm,” she shouted back, “and, when you drop it, I’ll drop mine.”

  Already a form, a ritual, seemed to have been established, clear enough and insistent enough to restrain Douglas from further mockery. Positioning, timing, vigilance, signalling: on such details Larry’s fate clearly depended.

  He thought that if he were to stand in for the second helper too many times he might find it difficult to back out. Acting the part might make him covet it. The part might claim him. He might see the necessity of it and of the project of which it was a part.

  There were no such necessities and urgencies in the case of the march. You started in one place and ended in another, where there were speeches. What was wrong with that though? Or in his sixties was he still to know himself? Was he a pacifist or not? Should he perhaps not have come today at all?

  After a long silence, Douglas dropped his arm, Helen hers too. Abruptly Larry stood up from his place among the rocks and waved a red handkerchief. He was shouting something, but it was broken up by the wind and borne away behind him, across the loch. Briefly there was a dumb show, Larry mouthing wildly behind the wind’s mask, isolated for a few moments with his desperate convictions, author of his fate but daunted, driven, Helen waving back to him but as though to calm him merely.

  Then she trotted down the road to meet him, Larry coming up through the trees with a sort of embattled urgency, arms waving, head rolling. They conferred in the middle of the road, gesturing, laughing, as though encouraged by the dappled light about them. Douglas strolled towards them, stopping not because he felt it wasn’t his business but because he wanted to see how they looked together. Just that. He thought they looked fine, animated, purposeful, in command. Possible to envy them. Undesirable though.

  “Everything O.K.?” he asked, sauntering up.

  They looked past him, he thought, rather than at him.

  “I didn’t see Helen clearly at the first corner,” Larry complained, “not at all clearly. It’s essential that I do however, not just for timing but for morale. I’d like her to stand four or five yards back therefore, to take her cue there from whoever’s at the second corner.”

  “I’m sorry there are these complications,” Douglas said.

  Again they see
med to look past him.

  “I think I ought to say,” Douglas began, “that if you absolutely can’t find a second helper, I won’t see you stuck.”

  “That’s good of you.” Larry spoke with a kind of pedantic brightness. “I appreciate it. There are some though who wouldn’t have any objections on principle.”

  “True,” Douglas said.

  “I might even advertise.”

  “How could you do that without giving yourself away?”

  “Easy.”

  “Would you have the time though?”

  “The time?”

  “To advertise?”

  “Why not?”

  Douglas looked over at Helen, standing some ten yards away, and found that she was looking at him, her eyes affectionate and cheerful but cautionary. Over Larry’s head, so to speak, a look of love. He realised that he wanted Larry to be aware of it, yet not too directly, for then he might give in to discontent, mockery.

  “Come and see where I’ll be launching it from.”

  Although he spoke abruptly, it was not so much an order as an invitation to come and approve, Douglas felt.

  Stooping, Douglas behind Helen, they followed Larry through the trees and down to the shore, occasional branches whipping back into their faces. On the shore, Larry offered Helen his hand which gratefully for ten yards or so over the worst of the rocks she took, holding it up and out from her as though they were approaching a dance floor. To Douglas, it seemed like an instant of elaborate flirtation, the leader led as much as leading. Why not, if they were to be partners together and in danger too? Hadn’t they earned the right? He commended them in his heart.

  Out from the trees, the air was colder, saltier. They looked across the water. The base seemed about three hundred yards away, Douglas thought – hard to tell though, what with the waves and the dancing light. The usual sounds of activity came and went on the wind: commands, emissions, as of steam, gas, hammering, rolling, dragging, the odd piercing whistle. They listened carefully, as if, with patience, purposes might be divined in this clamour across the water. Douglas realised he had been hearing such sounds for a long time, at all times of the day and night, always scrambled and virtually meaningless but today, for some reason, appearing to be about to come together in momentous significance to disturb and arrest them as they stood on the rocky promontory from which, sideways rather than upwards, the solitary bush grew.

  “My bush and my protection,” Larry said, gesturing. “I hope it won’t be so choppy on the day though. It’ll make aiming difficult. And the raft may take on water.”

  “The base seems so far away,” Helen said, “like a photograph of a very strange place, a place where all the customs are different. I suppose a strong swimmer could reach it quite quickly though, even through these white horses.”

  Larry was gazing at the base with a kind of defiant intentness and uncertainty. Images of defeat and failure, farce and fiasco, were probably occurring to him, his father thought. He had always chosen ventures where failure was as spectacular as success, humiliation as profound as triumph. It was the reason why his life, in spite of its manifest absurdities and indignities, had elements of the heroic almost. The thought astonished Douglas. On the one side farce, on the other the heroic.

  “It wouldn’t be possible to test it somewhere? On a quieter loch to give it a trial run?”

  “No chance. Absolutely not. I haven’t time to make another raft, not to mention fix up another explosive device. Nor the money either. No … we’ll just have to pray for inspiration and calm conditions.” When he spoke again, it was much more quietly. “There comes a point when you can’t do any more. You’re as prepared as you’ll ever be. That’s where I am now. You learn how strange it is to wait, though. It’s very strange …”

  “You know,” Helen said, taking his arm, “I truly believe we’re going to startle everyone in the grandest manner. The march will stop and even your father will raise his eyes to heaven.”

  “Would it be one of your intentions, by any chance, to shock us so deeply we can’t see the point of resuming the march?” Douglas asked, uncertain whether he was trying to rebuke his son or pay him tribute.

  “I want the whole damned world to sit up,” Larry said. “There will be nothing to cap it.”

  “I mightn’t have done anything at all, you know, if I hadn’t met you,” Helen said. “I’m very grateful.”

  “Mother may not do anything at all,” Larry said. “She won’t like that. She’ll find that hard to bear.”

  “There’s that air about the base,” Helen said, “of expectancy …”

  “We’re all waiting,” Larry said. “I feel very strongly about this: we’re all waiting, even those of us who don’t realise we are.”

  “It’s afterwards I worry about,” Douglas said, as much to himself as the others. “To reassemble ourselves afterwards – that’ll not be easy.” Going from rock to rock, sometimes teetering, sometimes falling back, they went to the end of the promontory. Some of the rocks were slippery, and in between there were little pools, with crabs, starfish, barnacles, shells, their surfaces fretted by wind. Now and then they were caught by sea spray, ice-cold, iridescent in the late afternoon sun.

  The further out they looked, the brighter it seemed, until it was impossible to tell where the sea ended and the sky began. No-one spoke. It was as if they were held, not by particular features but by the absence of them, the loch drawn out into the sea’s immensity like mist into the atmosphere or the earth. There were no small craft about, no dinghies or rowing boats, no yachts.

  Months ago, Douglas reflected, he would definitely have been expecting submarines, black shapes emerging into the silence of the loch from the layered silences of its depths as though to give it form and purpose, green and white and blue sea water laving the moulded blacknesses of the bows, the flanks, the conning towers. The surge of the liberated bows had especially held him, the proud towers also, the generous flanks.

  Now, however, he could not have said what he was expecting. The sense of expectation was high though. He could not stop himself gazing at the horizon, examining the opposite shore, looking up at the high white clouds tinged now with the pink of evening.

  The day before the march Douglas and Larry visited the spot again. This time Edith accompanied them. Conditions were perfect: bright, windless, quite warm. And due to remain so, Douglas reported, punching the air. He was regularly in touch with the Met Office.

  In a heavy hat, thick scarf and tartan rug Edith suffered herself to be pushed along the coast road by Larry. Several times he leant forwards, as if to share a joke or confidence with her. If she did not respond, and if Douglas, walking alongside, now and then had to reach out a hand to steady the wheelchair, it did not appear to discourage him. His mood was exultant, impervious.

  He was outrunning the occasion, Douglas thought, as well as himself. An excess of zeal. Edith seemed to think so too, her swollen hands held tight into her midriff as if it was there today she was feeling pain, there especially. Her face was white and she was squinting into the sun, mouthing something.

  After a bit Douglas noticed that now and then, grimacing and trying to twist, Edith made as if to rise in the wheelchair. He had never seen her do it before. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought she was trying to escape. So single-mindedly did she do it, in such a consumed way, he thought better of asking could he help, was there anything wrong. He simply let his hand rest on the arm of the wheelchair as it was pushed along the rutted verge.

  He wondered then if he was abandoning her to her pain. He enquired about it less, he suspected, than he had before. He suspected also that his will to distract her from it had weakened. If her illness had made her less sensitive to others – quite often now he thought it had – it had probably also made others less sensitive to her, her family especially.

  It was not a thought he had had before. But as he walked beside her, trying to come between her and their son’s dreadful e
xcitement, he thought it strongly. He had let her go. He had let her go.

  “I know we’re out here this afternoon to see where the raft’s to be launched from,” Edith said suddenly. “I know that. And I’d like to say that I admire the spot Larry’s chosen. My spirit is there already. I know too that we’re going to have a drink in town – a kind of bon voyage it seems, doesn’t it? But before that we absolutely must find a place from which tomorrow I can see the march and, most important of all, the raft and the – explosion. I must be high up, very high, looking down. I will be a hawk, an eagle.”

  What stopped her talking, it appeared, was a fear that she was becoming shrill and dictatorial, a little hysterical even. She made a little gesture of apology.

  It had been explained to her that Larry and a friend would be working together, the friend giving a signal, Larry launching the raft. It was what they had thought best, all things considered. Then they would join the march, for purposes of camouflage, and go to the town square for the speeches.

  She had received it quietly, almost a joyful quietness, Douglas thought, as if, having foreseen all the options and weighed their virtues, she could rejoice in whichever was chosen. In such moods of equanimity she discounted almost nothing.

  It was imperative that they join the march, Douglas thought. Larry especially might otherwise be spotted. Jumping on the promontory, dancing among the trees, darting about on the road: he could imagine it easily. They could join it quietly a few hundred yards down the road and claim, if need be, that they had been on it from the start.