Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  “Let me help you get ready, dear,” Douglas said. “I feel the call of the day.”

  Larry left the room with the trays. He was smiling again, as if everything that was happening was happening to plan.

  In his pyjamas, Douglas knelt by his wife’s bed, pulled back the bedclothes and, with the utmost care, moved first her right leg, then her left, then her right again towards the edge of the bed. He could tell that she was in pain; she was trying to act as if her body wasn’t really there, as if the physical was an illusion, the most stubborn of all.

  The way he bowed his head, it might have been an illusion Douglas regretted being unable to share.

  The small engine Larry had attached to the back of the raft had started each time it had been asked to. He had no reason to doubt it, he said. The explosive device hadn’t been tested – he couldn’t afford a second one – but he had reason to have faith in it also. His main concern was that he hadn’t tested the engine on water, merely in the privacy of his hut. He didn’t think that being on a raft-like structure travelling over water would make much difference though, particularly since the loch was as still as he had ever seen it, with no waves to lap into the engine and harm it.

  “Let me show you,” Larry said, opening the boot and lifting off a cover.

  The raft was smaller than Douglas remembered, neater, more compact, with a curved bow and a raised stern. The explosive device had been strapped to another raised area, in the middle, two fuses running through plastic tubes to the stern. There were two fuses, Larry explained, because one might be extinguished, though with the plastic tubes this was very unlikely. The fuses were slow burning, and would take four minutes to reach the device. He had programmed the engine so that the raft would be about thirty yards from the base when the explosion took place.

  He explained it all in a low voice, now and then gesturing, once looking in the direction of the base. If he had any feelings of regret or apprehension that the period of planning and preparation was over, he didn’t show them. He seemed given over rather to a kind of willed triumphalism.

  Douglas himself had mixed feelings – anticipations of success, yet regret, anxiety – and thought that Edith would have too. What would it be like afterwards, when they didn’t have this day to look forward to? In what state would they pass beyond it? What fruits would it bear? What shadows cast? He leant against the car, listening to Larry, his excited explanations.

  “Even if it veers a little left or right, it’ll be near enough. But I don’t see it veering on a day like this. Have you ever known such calm? Have you ever?”

  Douglas began thinking of Helen. They were to meet her later, at the beech trees. He found himself picturing her as she might appear through binoculars – through Edith’s, for instance, if her vantage point was closer. A trim figure in a tightly belted overcoat, legs slightly apart, hands deep in pockets, collar turned up as in expectation of rain or coldness.

  Whenever he had thought of her recently, for some reason, he had thought of her like this, as through binoculars, before the beech trees, the loch behind, a high spring sky above, moving as though enthralled or possessed. It was wonderful to picture her so; he couldn’t seem to do it otherwise. It was like a fragment from a saga, a fragment by which the saga would eventually be known, illuminated.

  No such particularity would be possible for Edith from the hilltop, of course. She would see the long line of the march curving along the coast, she would see the beech trees, the loch, opaque and dazzling, the explosion, the cloud, the mid-afternoon darkness. Again as through binoculars Douglas seemed to see her beholding it all, head in the wheelchair flung back in shock and pain, a dreadful agitation.

  “Oh well,” he heard himself say, “this is it. Time has got us here as it will surely take us beyond it.”

  Larry nudged him. Having looked the raft and explosive device over carefully, Edith was trembling, appeared suddenly exhausted.

  “Let’s get you settled, my dear,” Douglas said, moving the wheelchair round to the side of the car. “Are you cold?”

  “It’s not cold that I feel,” she said. “I may be cold but I don’t feel it. No, it’s not that at all.”

  She seemed concerned to say more, but didn’t. Settled in the passenger seat, she was very still, still in both face and body. Douglas couldn’t think of anything to say: anything would have been an interruption. He thought of embracing her, but she was too remote for that also.

  In the depths of her immobility then he thought he detected a smile, or not so much a smile as a disposition to smile. He couldn’t be sure, but turning to fold up the wheelchair and put it away, he had that feeling: submerged, a sort of palimpsest, spirit beneath flesh, there had been a smile.

  In the back seat Larry was writing in a notebook, making calculations. Douglas looked over to see what they were, but the notebook was snapped shut, put away. Larry was then almost as silent as his mother.

  Mindful of his cargo, Douglas drove very carefully. (He was doing everything very carefully, he realised, as for the first or last time.) Too carefully, Larry suddenly said. At this rate they would be stopped by the police for slow driving. Not even new drivers went this slow. He went a little faster, wondering if he was the only person on the roads today with something to hide. The rear-view mirror was largely filled with Larry’s head, wobbling nervously. His son. His son the mastermind.

  They approached the hilltop from which Edith was to witness the afternoon’s events. It worried Douglas that she hadn’t spoken since getting into the car. Normally the motion of the car had the effect of relaxing her a little. Larry was obviously worried too; he was leaning well forwards, a hand on his mother’s arm, stroking it, massaging it, now and then saying something, immediately looking to see if there had been any effect. But neither words nor touch was getting through. Twice she did clear her throat, as though to speak, but didn’t, which suddenly made it seem not so much a failure of will as of capacity. She was, for the moment, dumbstruck, literally so.

  Douglas put out a hand also, resting it on Edith’s thigh, steering very precisely with the other. He couldn’t be sure that she felt it though, almost couldn’t be sure that she heard. He simply hoped that she did, that she was aware of their concern, their patience and their love, their goodwill.

  They settled her in the silence of the hilltop, under the solicitous pines. To one arm of the wheelchair binoculars had been attached by means of a rod, to the other a video camera. Larry trained them on what he called “his patch” of water. All Edith had to do to look through them, he explained, was lean six inches to the left or six inches to the right.

  They waited with her for about half an hour, talking quite simply. How there were more cars now than there had been earlier; how bright and clear the day was, how still; how they wished she could be with them, either on the march or helping with the raft, the explosion; how each group would have its own banner – “Dumbarton C.N.D.”, “Lochgilphead C.N.D.”, “Belfast C.N.D.”; how from the stillness of her hilltop she might be able to hear snatches of song, songs of the sixties for the middle-aged, songs of brotherhood and hope and love, songs of threat and defiance from the young, bitter, mordant, jesting.

  Larry mentioned he was counting on a certain rowdiness among the marchers to give him cover. Nothing would drown out the sound of the explosion of course. On the contrary. All would be silenced and humbled. All eyes, Edith’s especially, would be on the loch, the base. To some it might seem then as if hours passed before the march got under way again. Those at the back would have to wait for word to be passed down the length of the march. How long that would take Larry didn’t know, but, people being what they were, the story would be changed as it was told, as it travelled.

  Edith alone would be in a position to give a true account. Larry was counting on her. An oral account and the video. She could write it up afterwards. He and Douglas and Helen would be too close to know, too excited, too frightened. He held her hand tightly as he spoke,
stroking the top of it, almost as though he was trying to get her to make a vow. She bore it with good patience.

  When the time came for them to leave, Edith found her voice, but not the voice they were used to, not low, thickened by pain and medication, slightly rasping. It was cleansed and refreshed, light and quiet, extraordinarily even, issuing as from some imperturbability of childhood. Stooping to embrace her, Douglas wondered if it was to repossess her voice so astonishingly that she had been silent for most of the morning – to repossess it and say what she now proceeded to say.

  “Whatever happens today, however it turns out, it’s been worthwhile. Your project is a grand one, Larry, and your decision to march is immensely worthy too, Douglas. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be perfectly safe here, watching with the greatest pride. I have my binoculars and a flask of tea, I have the camera. It’s very peaceful here, no distractions of any kind, no ugly sounds, no ugly smells. The only ugliness is the base, but we’ve come to terms with that, I think, in our different ways. No, up here I’ll be just fine. It’s like returning to the elements actually. What more could I want? What more?”

  She found the strength to embrace her husband and son in turn. Then they were off, Douglas driving slowly and in silence down to the coast road. Now and then he caught a glimpse of Edith in the rear-view mirror. She seemed to be staring out to sea.

  It took him only a few moments to reach the beech trees, but in the course of them he realised that spring had come. It caught him by the throat, made him immediately walk away from the car after he had got out of it, leaving Larry to greet Helen, lead her to the car and show her the raft.

  Held by what seemed the authority of spring, he came close to regarding them as a pair of cranks, welcoming each other with comical eagerness, too many grins, too many gestures. Of course, he must seem odd to them too – disengaged, irresolute, a little foolish. He didn’t mind: for the moment his question to himself was whether it mightn’t be possible one day to make a life of such disengagement – beyond the dialectic and rhetoric of protest and opposition to live evenly and sweetly. As though in thrall to spring and his wife’s parting words – to her temper on the hilltop above all perhaps – he considered it, was still doing so when Helen sought him out among the trees.

  “How are you then?” she asked. “Palely loitering? There’s the raft to help carry.”

  “I know, Helen. I know.”

  She looked at him impatiently. He smiled in a way he knew would irritate her, indulgently, as if she was not quite making sense. She turned and walked briskly away. He didn’t like the briskness; it seemed out of place.

  He couldn’t see what made the raft so heavy. It may have looked like a big toy but it didn’t feel like one. It sobered him, carrying it through the trees to where Larry had decided it should lie, hidden by branches, until it was time for it to be taken further, to the bush on the promontory.

  He drove the car a little way up the hill then, parking it in a line of cars – early marchers, he assumed – and went back to the beech trees.

  Larry and Helen were gazing out across the loch, as carefully hidden by the trees, Larry was claiming, as the raft was by branches. There was no need to worry, he said: it was a friendly copse, one of the earth’s good places. It would not allow any harm to come to them. Helen said nothing, whether agreeing with him or humouring him, Douglas could not tell.

  The loch was as glass, the light off it glittering, blinding. They could hear traffic on the other side, cars, buses and motor-bikes going to the various assembly points, their sounds as clear to the ear as the trees and clouds reflected in the loch were to the eye. From the base came the usual noises, purged just a little of their usual unpleasantness, Douglas fancied, by the day’s stillness. Voices could be heard, accents distinguished: Bronx, Texan, Deep South. And sometimes there was laughter, echoing around them in the trees and so detached from its causes as to sound crazy.

  “Listen to them!” Helen was sitting with her arms hugging her knees, her knees drawn up to her chin. “D’you think they’ll even notice the march?”

  “Who knows? They’re certainly very used to them. But that’s all to the good: it’ll make their shock all the greater.”

  “It will, you’re right.” She turned to him. “You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, as if it wasn’t the time for compliments.

  Douglas had nothing to say. Now that they had hidden the raft, he could attend once more to the spring. He couldn’t think of a better place; here if nowhere else the seasons would run true. Yet it was the place chosen by the Americans for their base, by Larry for his demonstration. Such interlocking worlds: for the moment, it seemed, he couldn’t take it. These offences at first hand, how they troubled the heart.

  Edith had said she was returning to the elements. Something like that. Did he understand what she meant? See the possibility of it? He thought he did, and wondered a little about the march, the sense of it. On the very verge of it to lose resolve though. Possibly he didn’t believe in anything very much. That might be it. Uninspired, he circled the inspired to see where they pointed.

  Perhaps then he should have stayed with Edith? She had seemed closer to wisdom today than he or Larry or Helen. Up there on her hill she had struck a rich vein somehow. She would be hearing the birds and noticing the light, the windless clarity. She would be readying herself. The eloquence of her recovered voice.

  Of course, a cripple, she had no option. Did that mean her disease was her salvation? How could that be? He imagined her, able-bodied, sitting with Larry as Helen was now, talking in low tones, proudly conspiratorial, looking forward to the explosion, possible martyrdom.

  He found that he was holding himself tightly, rocking a little in the dappled shade, and thought, “No wonder!”

  And Larry. Probably he felt only contempt for his father today. Douglas looked to see if it was so, but there were no signs. All he noticed was that in profile he resembled his mother, some compactness about the mouth, bold, ruminative. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Would he have spotted it the other way round, searching Edith for signs of impatience, contempt?

  It was Saturday, April 13th. There was a Sabbath softness to things however. He wondered at his dreaminess, the march and explosion so close. It was like a last turn in the ways of idleness.

  Turning to his companions, he found that they had moved further away. Helen was telling Larry about her husband. What struck Douglas was the care with which she was selecting the details. He had heard them all before, but never in this order, with this highlighting. Of course, who you told your story to affected how you told it; affected what you thought it was; affected who you thought you were even, telling it.

  Her tone was earnest, excited. It was as if, Douglas thought, she was trying to account for how, married for so long to a man like Barnie, she had come to be here on the Holy Loch doing dangerous business with a young man she hardly knew, his father her lover perched on the sidelines.

  “When I married Barnie, he seemed older than me. After five years of marriage, though, he seemed to have got younger, or I older, I was never clear which. Towards the end, then, he got much older again: decades seemed to separate us. When he died, it was of old age. Death just came to get him. He’d never had much initiative: it was I who supplied it. He didn’t mind, though. Being bossed about was what kept him going – he admitted it! Another man might have resented it – your father, for instance – but not Barnie.”

  “What was the age difference?” Larry asked.

  “Twenty-two years.”

  “My lifetime roughly.”

  There was a pause. Helen looked over her shoulder and made as if to smile – most oddly, as though she was offering goodwill to Douglas in case he should be in need of it. He didn’t think he was, however. The smile seemed forced, merely dutiful, and he thought she turned away from him more easily than she had turned towards him. Quickly she resumed her talk about Barnie, t
he day of his death, the manner of it, the kindliness of undertakers, the unsatisfactoriness of cremation, the enigma of dust and ashes.

  Larry didn’t seem to be listening any more, however, or seemed to be listening to something quite beyond Helen’s words. It made her seem gauche, Douglas thought, guilty of a kind of silliness. He would have reached out a hand to her had she not been fifteen yards away, sitting next to his son.

  “The march,” Larry said. “I think I hear it. Listen!”

  To begin with, Douglas couldn’t hear anything. Ears not what they were. He sat with his head cocked, thinking, “I wasn’t there at the start. I’ll join it later.” Maybe he had been mistaken about the starting time. No matter. Time today was as long as the coast road, with as many pockets, as many pools. You spun your own time within it. There was room for most.

  Not so much entering the silence, then, as emerging from it, spun from it, a sound as of distant waterfalls. Quite a light sound at first but becoming heavier, graver, more measured. Then, as out of silence the sound of treading, marching, had come, so now out of that voices arose, a kind of subdued hubbub accompanying movement, fitful though, fitful in spite of the stillness.

  For a moment Douglas felt strange, as though troubled by the fancy that the march was coming as much out of the past as from the west, where the loch began.

  Larry and Helen were listening intently. They might have been at prayer, so bowed their heads and motionless. It wouldn’t have surprised Douglas to find that they were holding hands. He didn’t look; their endeavour was not his, their energies not his either.

  The longer they sat in the copse, the stiller it became, confusingly so, a stillness within the overall stillness, as it were, a sort of rival stillness.

  Some time later – how much, Douglas couldn’t have said – they became aware that the earth beneath them was trembling. The march was approaching. Shouts could be heard, a sort of drumming too, reverberation at once heard and felt.