Spring Manoeuvres Page 5
“Without his fancies, a man is barren,” Larry said, picking up his suitcase and making for the car.
Douglas remembered this too: the throwaway maxim that was supposed to stop you in your tracks.
Larry couldn’t make up his mind whether to put his suitcase in the back of the car or in the boot, and made more of it than he need have done. Then he put it down and forgot about it, for a quarrel had broken out between two whores.
It was still drizzling, but Douglas felt no inclination to hurry his son. Perhaps in retirement he had learnt patience. After his illness, a more reflective pace. He wondered if Larry would notice.
“What do you think they’re quarrelling about?” Larry pointed at the whores, as if it wasn’t obvious who he was referring to. “At this time in the morning?”
Douglas shrugged his shoulders, hoping Larry would get into the car. But he didn’t. Instead, hands on hips, he sidled up to the whores like a schoolboy trying to impress his mates. This sort of thing also Douglas remembered: the excruciating miscalculation, insolence backfiring. He wondered if Larry would have done it had he been on his own. Playing to the gallery. It had been in his school reports.
Caught up by a whores’ quarrel. Down to the last detail Douglas could see what was going to happen, so that, when it did – the whores breaking off from each other and turning on Larry as though to rend him – he had a sense of his son as fated. Perversity and mischance. Vexed, he watched as he came back, a slightly shambling gait, shoulders hunched, head rolling.
“Curiosity isn’t appreciated these days,” Larry said, getting into the car.
“There are better things to be curious about around here.” It might help, he thought, if he could interest his son in more important matters. His voice was earnest. “The submarine base, for example, the comings and goings, the strange noises at four in the morning. It’s at four in the morning, actually, that I think the world will end.”
“Probably.” Larry seemed suddenly exhausted. “Whores and the rest of us together.”
“Look at this, for instance,” Douglas said. “A very familiar scene on the roads around here. Nonetheless threatening though. Time and again one is compelled to witness it.”
Jack-knifed at the crossroads just outside the ferry terminal was a huge military transport. A crowd had gathered to watch as, helped by two policemen, the driver tried to extricate himself. But wherever he moved, left or right, backwards or forwards, he had to come back to where he had started, and, each time he did so, the crowd jeered.
“There will be missiles on board,” Douglas said.
Larry had a hand under his chin, as though to support his head. His head was nodding slightly. Douglas couldn’t tell whether he was paying attention to the scene or not.
“They will have come up from southern England,” he continued. “The routes are carefully chosen, and vary.”
Certainly, he thought, he must help his son to move beyond idle curiosity. It was imperative he learned concentration. A sober eye for the dark event. Poise, collectedness. Sitting beside him, aware of his restlessness, he formulated it all quite consciously. A project for his declining years. Coda to his earnestness. He laid a hand on Larry’s arm, nodding at the scene before them.
“The traditional colour for camouflage – mottled dark green. But it looks wrong in the main street of a small town, doesn’t it?”
Larry licked his lips before replying, as if to increase his chances of speaking clearly.
“The feeling I have with these military guys is that, although they’re engaged in something deadly serious, it’s really a game to them.”
“Exactly. And it has to be, otherwise they’d not be able to do it at all.”
“Which means they’re actually unfit for it.”
“Yes. That’s why the players are either never seen at all or seen only rarely.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, recently,” Douglas said, eager to tell his son this, “I saw a submarine. It was returning from one of its trips. It was very black. A black submarine on a beautiful day. For a moment or two I fell into a kind of trance. It was as if I had x-ray eyes; I seemed to see right into it. I could see the crew going about their business. They were very ordinary young men – very ordinary indeed – but what struck me especially was that they and their tasks … had their backs to each other.”
“An agreement not to see …?”
“I think so. It’ll be part of the training.”
“I must say … it’s some place you’ve chosen to retire to,” Larry said after a pause. “I admire you for it.”
“Well, you know us: eager to be in the thick of it.”
“And how are you both? Mother?”
“Holding her own. Remarkable really.”
“And you? You’re looking well.”
“I am. Most days I feel completely recovered.”
At last they were able to follow the military transport out of the town. Douglas’ windscreen wipers were on, drowning out the sound of the transport as, in low gear, it negotiated the bends of the coast road. Always about two bends ahead, it appeared to move with more purpose than any of the vehicles behind, appeared to confer on them a kind of futility, in fact, so that after a bit Douglas felt it would be a mistake to go any closer. He was sitting pressed well back in his seat and out of the corner of his eye he saw that Larry was sitting that way too.
“Talk about setting the pace,” Larry said.
“Don’t worry; we’re close to the turn-off.”
Because of the thick mist Douglas didn’t stop to show Larry the base, as he had planned to. Larry was quiet now, as quiet as he had been talkative. It was always so before reunions with his mother. And it would be the same, Douglas knew, for Edith, waiting in the cottage. A deeply uneasy quietness. In recent years their reunions had been so fiercely emotional he had left them to it. Something in them he couldn’t bear. The son, weeping with relief and gratitude, bending low over his mother, the mother, pale and wasted, clasping the son to her with what strength she could summon. There was no place for a third person, even although that third person bore witness to their reunion with a kind of grief. And he was powerless to calm them then. Only the son could calm the mother, the mother the son.
They found that Edith, having wheeled herself down the garden path, was fumbling with the aluminium catch of the gate. Through the still air the sound came over clearly. Douglas stopped by the car while Larry hurried over, waving and calling as he went. The fumbling became frantic. Douglas thought he could hear his wife cursing (certainly he could imagine the half dead fingers defeated by the latch), then crying, a crying which briefly became ecstatically welcoming before sinking to a kind of keening or lamentation.
He busied himself with Larry’s case, shut the boot twice, his own door and the passenger door once each. He walked a little way with the case before looking up and seeing Larry bent over the wheelchair in the garden. The gate was open, the ramp which went down from it glistening in the drizzle. He went on slowly, hoping that by the time he reached the gate Larry would be pushing his mother back up the garden towards the cottage.
The gate was only about eighty yards from the car but, as in a dream, it took Douglas a long time to reach it. He didn’t think he had ever moved in such a grave and measured way. His thoughts were peculiar also, to do, it seemed, with emotion, its character, significance. Larry bent over his mother in the wheelchair in the garden, frieze of the family’s troubled heart. But what were they for, these emotions, what did they mean? How did they leave you, once they had passed? Defeated, advanced? Degraded, elevated? Were there emotions which revealed, which penetrated appearances to lay bare the truth behind, and emotions which obscured, confused, misled? How tell the one from the other?
Then he found that he had arrived at the gate and that his hand was on his son’s back. Larry, smiling weakly, was trying to work out how to turn the wheelchair. Edith was making sounds, but they weren’t words. Doug
las reached down to the black knob of the brake and pulled it. Then, bending low, he pushed the wheelchair up the garden path. The drizzle had become rain, Edith’s collar was soaked, stuck to her neck, and her hair was plastered to her skull. He reached dawn to touch her, to wipe away the rain, drawn painfully to the shape of the skull, so rarely seen. Could emotion excite emotion, he wondered, his own set free, by the fearful closeness between mother and son, to range into the past? He wasn’t sure, but the image he had was a simple one, of Edith’s head, hair plastered to her skull as now, being held in his hands. Twenty years ago probably. Maybe more.
“At least it’s warm today,” he said.
The cottage delighted Larry, and taking one of his mother’s hands in his, he said so.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you make it clearer what it was like?”
Some of Edith’s strictness had returned.
“We did. We sent you photographs. You can’t have paid them much attention.”
“They didn’t do it justice.”
“Or you didn’t do them justice. Perhaps you were distracted.”
“Perhaps.”
She followed him with her eyes as he walked about the lounge. This was the next stage, Douglas remembered: after the delirium of reunion, Larry seen soberly, and Larry behaving as if he had been in his mother’s company for weeks, even showing signs of finding it uncomfortable. So much given, so much feared, such advances and retreats.
“You’ve certainly landed on your feet,” Larry said, raising his hands in little gestures of recognition whenever he saw familiar furniture.
“In my case, perhaps you could rephrase that,” his mother said.
She fell silent then. Douglas was silent too. He wasn’t sure of the reasons for her silence, but thought he understood the reasons for his own. Larry hadn’t come when he had his heart attack, hadn’t come when they moved house. He only brought them his disasters, the aftermath of his defeats. And made little attempt to conceal it. Douglas couldn’t remember one simple visit, and, suddenly, it shocked him.
“I hope you’re going to make yourself useful,” Edith said. “There’s a lot to do in the cottage and in the garden. If it’s therapy you’re after, the garden will provide it. But you’re most welcome, of course …”
Some asperity or evasiveness in her manner must have struck Larry as he was about to leave the lounge, for he turned suddenly and sat down. Hands clasped between his knees, he made as though to speak. Edith was wheeling herself towards him.
“Well my dear,” she said, “what is it this time? What has brought you so low in the November of this year?”
By a slight raising of the eyebrows Edith indicated that she didn’t want Douglas to leave the room. He sat down and folded his arms. Larry was still making as if to speak, still failing to do so. Once or twice he looked up at his parents and smiled uncertainly. In the silence – on the edges of which the rain was now falling steadily – he seemed, Douglas thought, exactly what he was – a disturbed and unhappy young man. Nailed by his mother’s strictness, held by her questions, he looked at last to Douglas. Douglas didn’t respond, not because he felt no pity, but because, for the moment, he felt more curiosity than pity.
As the minutes passed, it was as if the helplessness of the son grew in proportion to the curiosity of the father, the curiosity and exasperation of the mother. Douglas reflected that each time Larry had come home, his reasons had been darker. First, he had failed some exams; second, he had failed the resits; third, he had lost his licence for drunk driving; fourth, he had got a girl pregnant and needed money for an abortion.
“Is it trouble with the police?” Douglas asked.
Larry appeared to shake his head.
“Maybe you’re going to have to fall very low before you can rise,” Edith said, watching him closely.
Larry laughed, a high, strangled sound.
“You seem to have persuaded yourselves you’ve got a criminal before you.”
“It’s our son before us,” Edith said quietly, “our son who always comes like a thief in the night.”
“As bad as that?” He was scratching his head as in an attempt to find a way of dealing with his parents. “Really?”
“You fly to us rather than come to us,” Douglas said, more indulgently than he had intended. “We’ll always be here, of course, but … should a young man be quite so often in need of sanctuary?”
“Point taken,” Larry mumbled. “A sanctuary on the Holy Loch.”
“Call it what you like,” Edith said, “you can’t stay here and not come clean.”
“Come clean?” Larry responded, as if the words were barely intelligible. “Come clean?”
He threw his right foot onto his left knee and clasped it at the ankle with both hands.
“As good a time as any, don’t you think?” Unusual tension in his neck and chest, Douglas had set himself to breathe deeply.
Larry said something about his parents speaking with one voice – a slightly biblical one at that – laughed, fell silent again. Edith wheeled herself over to the window and looked out. Douglas went to the kitchen, where, after a few moments, he fancied he heard sobbing, mother and son collapsing again, another paroxysm. But he knew it couldn’t be so; Edith would never let herself go twice in one day.
He returned to the lounge with the tea tray. Neither Edith nor Larry had moved. Once the tea had been poured, however, Larry said that, if they would bear with him, he would explain himself, or, since he wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, try to do so.
“I think I’ve always tried to get on in the world,” he began, his voice unsteady, his hands describing vague shapes, his head, as though unusually burdened, held to one side. “I’ve always felt I owed it to myself, and to you, to do so. And so it’ll remain, I’m sure. Why play safe? Why be a spectator? The world is for participants, not spectators. It’s participants who make it what it is. But my way of participating seems to be unfortunate, to say the least. It’s taken me some time to realise it, which is unfortunate too. I’ve kidded myself I can go it alone, daringly and decisively, that I don’t need others. But actually I’m on the lookout for allies all the time. All the bloody time!”
For the first time since sitting down, he leant back. It was as if he had at last seen how he might account for himself. He looked at his parents, but, as though to keep their concentration, they didn’t look back.
“Yes, it seems I’ll go to any lengths to get allies. I think my disasters have a pattern. In search of allies, intimates, I overreach myself. I don’t think I’m careless about right and wrong, but when it comes to winning a friend, securing an ally, I become prone … to a kind of cheating. It’s as if, when the crunch comes and an ally is there to be won or lost, I’m prepared to do anything. And for a time I can persuade myself it’s not wrong! This last episode, for instance. Well, let me tell you about it. Don’t spare me: nothing to be gained by that, I think you’ll agree.”
A wind had risen, blowing rain against the windows. A shutter creaked and a door banged, but Douglas and Edith, as though trying to imagine the worst that Larry could tell them, didn’t stir.
“We were planting a fir forest in Northumberland. It meant staying in caravans for two months. John Livingston, our supervisor, thought he’d invite his wife down, because the weather was so good and they’d not had a holiday. She came, but she wasn’t particularly amused. John was away all day, you see, working on drainage, and when he came back in the evenings he was exhausted. Although my caravan was quite a bit away from theirs, I could hear them arguing each night. Actually, I could see them arguing, for if you have a heated argument in a caravan, the caravan shakes.”
He paused, smiled a little, then continued.
“At the end of the first week, John asked me and another of the workers, Peter Paterson, if we’d like to have a meal with him and his wife. We agreed because, well, there’s nothing to do in these places. The caravan was barely big enough for the four o
f us, though with the door open and the night warm, it wasn’t too bad. Janet, John’s wife, had gone to a lot of trouble. She had a pink dress on, pink with white spots, and I thought, I thought, how odd to dress like that in a caravan. After the meal, we played cards until, around midnight, Janet said she’d had enough. Peter and John then brought up the problem of the drainage again – it hadn’t been fixed, you see. Ten minutes of that and Janet jumped up and said she was going for a walk. For some reason, she wanted me to go too. She was exasperated with her husband and she’d not taken to Peter. Not that I want to suggest she’d taken a fancy to me – not at that stage anyway. Now here’s the funny thing: I knew I shouldn’t go with her. Even although John made a joke of it, saying it was quite all right, I knew it wasn’t, absolutely knew it! I knew it as I know … you don’t lift a melon from a stall and go off without paying for it.”
He had been speaking with increasing animation, but suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands, and seemed to appeal to his parents. When he spoke again – as out of a dream of confusion and defeat – it was in a low voice. A helicopter passing over the cottage obliged him to pause, then speak loudly, his voice rising against the blows of engine noise striking the sides of the cottage.
“I’m sure you can imagine what happened. Janet quickly got it into her head that I was superior to her husband. A superior companion, more knowledgeable about trees and forests and drainage, and, she was soon implying, probably a better lover too. She even insinuated that if I played my cards correctly, I might get her husband’s job. It was just a matter of waiting.
She knew things about her husband, she hinted, that would be to my advantage. Well, we went around together for a few weeks, apparently with John’s approval. He’d have done anything to keep her quiet, you see, to stop her from complaining.”