Spring Manoeuvres Read online

  Indicating that Helen should stay where she was, Douglas moved to the side of the cottage. Not any kind of courage but simple curiosity drove him. Who was it? Was there any connection between the intruder and the smell? He didn’t think there could be, but the thought persisted, perhaps because the smell was so bad now, truly rising as though from the earth. Rounding the corner, he had his hand to his mouth.

  It was an old woman, toothless and so enormously fat it gave her coat, riding up over her backside and stomach, the look of a waistcoat.

  She was grinning and licking her lips and making a humming noise. She was also holding out her hands, as if it was Douglas, not herself, who was the intruder. Her face and hands were rough and ruddy, as though made so somehow by her bulk, and there was no break between her jaw and thick, goitred throat. Douglas expected a strong voice, a definite accent, rustic perhaps. But when she spoke it was with genteel precision. At first he took it to be parody, some kind of parody of the middle classes, and thought that at any moment her real voice would come through. Through exaggeratedly pursed lips however came quaint phrases, genteel inflections. Her handshake was genteel too, a mere hint or caress.

  Then she was walking beside the cottage wall, hugging it. Douglas stepped aside to let her pass. From behind she looked even worse, buttocks huge and the seam of her coat split from the shoulders downwards. She was cackling again.

  By the time she reached Helen, however, she was talking very rapidly. Newly risen from hysteria, Helen looked distressed and astonished behind the spate of words. It was like glimpsing someone through water. Douglas winked at her, raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes, oh yes, I once lived here with my late husband, Arthur. We were so very happy! When he died, I lived on alone. Each day I expected him to return. It wasn’t right without him. Actually it felt very wrong. Still does. When I absolutely knew that he wasn’t coming back, I sold the cottage to a young couple called the Stevensons. They were childless and unhealthy and split up after two years. Children might have saved them; I told them so in a letter, but they didn’t reply. Once later on I met Diane Stevenson in town. She was crying, couldn’t stop. I took her in for a coffee but she was crying so much she couldn’t swallow it. Then there were the Farquharsons, an older couple who kept to themselves and stayed for seven years. He – Macgregor Farquharson – sometimes on summer evenings played the horn, or was it the trombone, in the garden. Just there. He’d stand up to do it. I can hear it still … When he died, his wife Alice sold up and moved to a small flat in Glasgow but died there almost immediately. She’d have been better to stay put, if you ask me. Moving kills. There would have been good ghosts to sustain her, Arthur and I, farming people from the last century … Her daughter rented it out for a while to a naval couple called the Wotherspoons, Ted and Rhonda, but they hated the navy and soon moved to Dorset to start a zoo or was it a bed and breakfast, I can’t remember. It’s been empty since then. I’d buy it back if I was younger, but I’m nearly eighty and Arthur won’t be coming back now. Are you thinking of buying? I do hope so. It’s a happy place, in spite of all. With its own bird life too! There was a heron used to surprise us, sweeping down from the escarpment of a summer evening. First there would be its shadow, then it – whoosh! Owls too, you will find, are wedded to the place, as are martins.”

  “Would you happen to know what the smell is?” Helen asked. “It’s perfectly awful.”

  “In our day everything smelled very natural, as though just created. But these new fertilisers are bad, not to mention all the rubbish that gathers on the shore and that definitely smells in hot weather. Then there’s the nuclear stuff, the danger of leaks and all that. We had some destroyers and cruisers at rest on the loch in the years after the war, very grey, like ghosts they were, but that was all. It was very beautiful then and given a chance could be again. But will it be? Who knows? Oh the rooms will be lovely when you furnish them, I assure you. Now they’re just caves. I’d recommend thick carpets by the way, and thick curtains. The escarpment has a cold breath – we always said that. I should just say that I have a name – Fiona Agnes Flood. How do you do! I’m not really alone, for I have a daughter in Tasmania and two cats. The cats and I live in town. We can see the cottage from the top room. Oh I do hope you’ll put in an offer. I’d say you were made for the place.”

  She turned then and went into the cottage. They could hear her going from room to room, muttering to herself, cackling. Helen gripped Douglas’ hand. When she came back, she seemed bigger than ever, almost too big for the front door, her breath white on the whiteness of the mist, her mouth making a sucking sound.

  “Goodbye then.” As if she regretted now having gone on at such length, she spoke quietly. “God bless.”

  She moved quickly for a woman of her age and bulk, once or twice, as though impelled by her weight, venturing a little trot. Soon she had gained the road and her car. Its headlights pierced the mist. Then she was gone.

  By the time they set off for the afternoon ferry, the mist had lifted. Pale sunlight fell on the still waters of the loch, making them look oily.

  At once poignant and grotesque, the episode with Fiona Flood had shaken them out of themselves. They laughed at it, laughed at her overcoat and her accent and her cackling and her turns of phrase. They even laughed at the terrible smell, the way in which, as though a product of old age and obesity, it had seemed to leak from her pores.

  Douglas took a road he hadn’t noticed before. Wooded on one side, steep and rocky on the other, it ran for about five miles. At regular intervals on the steep side there were dark slits in the hillside, silos, Douglas knew, waiting missiles. An ancient hillside put to new uses. He could see trenches, wire, embankments. Rather like the anti-aircraft posts of the Second World War, he thought, some of which still survived.

  They didn’t speak, feeling as though they were being watched. One or two patches of mist clung to the higher slopes. Douglas looked closely, to see if they weren’t perhaps sheep. No sheep here, of course. None at all. As if some dream of pastoral ease was mocking him, though, he continued to see them as such, the silos as sheep pens. The absurdity of it made him laugh. Worse than absurdity. Helen laughed too, more wildly than he. She had a hand on his arm as, going very slowly now, peering from side to side, they came to the end of the glen, began to emerge from it, its calamitous stillness.

  When it left the glen, the road went sharply downhill, through hairpin bends, to the shore. The mere fact of descending, of falling away from something towards sea-level, brought relief. The loch was flat calm, colourless, without traffic. To their right, hundreds of seagulls rose suddenly from a ploughed field and flew away raggedly before them. Soon they had settled on the loch, briefly as motionless there as the water itself, but before Douglas and Helen arrived they were off again, some going for the far shore, some for the open sea. For a few moments their cries – casual, violent, beguiling – were all that could be heard, and, when they ceased, Douglas thought that he could hear the echoes, now before him, now behind him, tearing at the silence.

  “I’ll make a bid for it,” Helen said suddenly. “In spite of the smell.”

  “I would, if I were you. Anyway, smells can be treated.”

  “Yes.”

  At first they had the road to themselves, but after about two miles they came on a queue of cars. There were flashing lights at the front – blue, orange – and men in uniform, police and American navy personnel. Douglas turned off the engine; they were in good time for the ferry and could sit quietly. The flashing lights made it difficult however. Then they heard shouting, sounds rather than words, but after a while words as well – “no business!” “Yanks!” “no favours!” They were the voices of young men. Douglas became uneasy – something to do with the pitch of the voices, some quality of stubbornness and intemperance they had, seemed to be exulting in. Helen, who had been looking out of the window, reported that two young men were being marched towards them.

  Marching and shouti
ng, Douglas mused – you rarely heard them together. It was one or the other. Now, for instance, when the marching stopped, you would probably hear the shouting again. Exactly so. The marching did stop, abruptly, decisively, as though commanded to, and instantly the shouting came again, louder than before, wordless and raucous and with its own impetus, putting Douglas in mind of underground streams, muddied and impure, gathering further impurities as they went, surfacing now here, now there.

  If the voices were familiar, it was, Douglas believed, because he had heard such voices raised in anger over so many years. In the schools he had taught in; in the streets; on television; in the dead of night. They all sounded the same and wearied him now.

  What he saw at first were two figures stumbling in silhouette against the pale, gently shimmering loch. In another age they might have been flagellants, he thought, but in this they were two of the insulted and injured.

  Then he saw that one of them was Larry. He and his companion, arms twisted behind their backs, were being pushed along the grass verge by two policemen. Military police followed.

  “It’s my son,” Douglas said. “It’s Larry.”

  Larry looked as if he had been in a fight. His clothes and face were dusty, his hair was sticking out in tufts from his head, and he was breathing heavily. His recognition of his father was so long delayed that Douglas wondered if he was trying to ignore him. But, when it came, the recognition was immediate and profound. Taking Douglas’ hand, holding onto it, he explained to his companion (how typical that Douglas didn’t know him) and the policemen that this was his father. He said it strangely, with a kind of dry emphasis. A crowd of about a dozen heard him and seemed to approve.

  “Is this true sir?” one of the policemen asked.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Father and son were still holding hands. They made a little joke of it now, lifting their hands in mock triumph to the crowd.

  “Then I have to inform you that we’re arresting your son and his companion for disturbing the peace.”

  “It was a peaceful protest,” the companion said in a loud voice.

  “Larry?” Douglas asked.

  “Certainly it was peaceful, until two Americans butted in, that is.”

  “That’s right,” one of the policemen said.

  “Then why haven’t the Americans been arrested too?” Larry asked.

  “Because in our opinion it was you who started it.”

  “If you can believe that, you can believe anything,” the companion said.

  “I must ask you to come along to the station now. You can come too, sir, if you want.”

  “Certainly I will. There seems to be some confusion.”

  “Oh I wouldn’t say that, sir,” the policeman said.

  Dusk was beginning to fall and mist to rise again from the loch and fields as they followed the police car into town. Larry and his companion sat in the back, squashed between the two policemen. Douglas drove with his eyes glued to the back of his son’s head. He was looking to see if even in the back of a police car and under arrest the head would roll about. It did. Probably he was trying to make light of the occasion. He would be cracking bad jokes. The other heads were completely still. He pointed the phenomenon out to Helen, adding that the head had been rolling about like this since birth. He had never seen such a head.

  “Heavy with brains,” Helen said.

  “More brains than judgement.”

  “Oh?”

  “Whether it’s women or politics, he miscalculates.”

  “He’s not miscalculated just because he’s been caught.”

  “I know.”

  “At least he’s done something.” She seemed to give in to some private vexation. “You must see that.”

  “He had a girlfriend recently, I think,” Douglas said, speaking very slowly, as if for the moment he couldn’t be sure of anything, “but he didn’t keep her. He never does.”

  “Too eager?”

  “Eagerness can be attractive, but not in him.”

  “What d’you mean exactly?”

  “In him it becomes something else, a kind of monomania, I fear, everyone to dance to his tune. Except that he’s not really got a tune.”

  He was surprised to hear himself talking about Larry like this. He didn’t know what he was trying to do: apologise for his awkward son in advance, or brace himself for the possibility that the “peaceful protest” had been quite ridiculously botched. Both perhaps. If Helen imagined there were elevated motives, she would be disappointed, almost certainly. On the public stage Larry would probably always be a ludicrous figure, idly curious, mimicking gravity. “Public stage” wasn’t even an appropriate image, for Larry would never choose to go on it. He would be dragged, following a ruse which had gone wrong, he would be tripped.

  The police car drew up at a long low building in a street near to the ferry terminal. Larry got out and made as if to go over to his father. But was called back. Certain things weren’t permitted now apparently. He was told to stand by his companion. With his foot then he traced something in the dirt by the pavement and smirked. His companion ignored him. He traced something else, again was ignored. Douglas wondered how long they had been acquainted. He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that they had met only that day, in a pub at lunch-time perhaps, to be arrested together some hours later for abusing American servicemen. Or for staging a protest. What sort of protest though and in what sort of spirit staged? The answers to these questions might never be found, he realised. Larry might never be able to come clean.

  “I can see you don’t take your son’s actions very seriously,” Helen said. “You know him as well as anyone, of course, but … may he not have come of age today?”

  “I don’t think I follow you,” Douglas said, although he suspected he probably did. “Come of age?”

  “By making a protest. Simply that. By objecting to the American presence here.” She was looking at him very directly, her colour high, her eyes moist.

  “That’s possible, I suppose, but it’s more likely to have been a drunken whim.”

  “I can imagine something starting as a drunken whim becoming serious. Can’t you?”

  “Come and meet him anyway,” Douglas said, thinking that in some respects Larry and Helen had more in common than either had with him.

  He hadn’t imagined that they would meet for some time. But now they shook hands as if they had been hearing good reports of each other for years. Larry then introduced them to his companion, David, a young man with glittering eyes and an uneasy manner who looked from Douglas to Helen and back again.

  “All we did was tell them they had no business blocking the road for so long,” David said. “You know those long articulated lorries they drive with those missiles nobody in their right mind wants? One of them. We were polite.”

  “That’s right,” Larry said, “but if your opinions aren’t acceptable, you’re in trouble if you express them.”

  “It’s not a free country,” David said.

  “It never was,” Helen added.

  Meeting Larry and David had excited Helen. Douglas couldn’t remember seeing her like it before. Under the bright lights of the police station he could see that she was flushed, a flush which had spread right up to her scalp where, under her thin white curls, it suggested a birthmark. Hugging her handbag, moving from foot to foot, she seemed to be trying to ingratiate herself. Douglas felt uncomfortable. The radicalism of middle age trying to befriend that of youth. One of the phoney alliances, he feared.

  He stepped back and away from them, wondering why they were still standing outside the station. He asked one of the policemen who replied pointedly that since there had been several such incidents in the course of the day, the station was full. They would have to wait their turn.

  Out of her excitement, Helen suddenly announced that she would have to go. Her ferry was approaching, she could see its lights from where she stood. She shook Larry and David by the hand, wished them l
uck and said that she hoped very much to meet them again. Then, kissing Douglas lightly on the mouth, she ran, neatly and self-consciously, still hugging her handbag, towards the ferry terminal, once stopping to wave, the wave as excited as her departure, a kind of irreverent flourish in the gathering dusk.

  “Nice woman,” Larry said. “Who is she?”

  “Later,” Douglas said. “Let’s get this sorted out first.”

  When they came out of the police station, Larry and David charged with disturbing the peace on a public highway and resisting arrest, it was dark and raining heavily. David asked to be dropped off at a housing estate on the outskirts of the town. He said he would give Larry a ring in a few days: they could have a drink, talk things over.

  Almost as if they had achieved something long desired and planned, so that there was now nothing to say, Douglas and Larry drove on in silence.

  “I suspect your mother has been in a lot of pain recently,” Douglas said after a bit. “I don’t think this evening would be the best time to tell her about this afternoon. I think we should wait.”

  “Have you ever considered,” Larry suddenly burst out, “that it’s never quite knowing, not being properly told, always being so considerately kept in the dark, that’s made her ill? Or, if not exactly that, that’s keeping her ill and may be making her worse? She can’t move, in that sense can’t act, so the very least we can do is keep her informed, tell her what we’re up to, down to the last detail let her share in our efforts, our daring, if daring it is. She believes that we who can walk don’t do enough with our mobility. Did you know that? Did you know that she thinks that? She can only go into the world, go at the world, through us, so we must be a lot more active than we are and we must keep her informed! We must let her use our legs, direct them even. Do you understand? Do you understand what I’m talking about? Do you know how cruel it is to keep people in the dark?”

  “For me,” Douglas said, “it’s a balancing act, between telling too much and telling too little. Too little can cripple, but so can too much.”