Cushing's Crusade (10 page)

‘You flatter yourself. I didn’t want to spend an afternoon afloat with Mrs Cushing, Master Cushing and my brother. The
alternarives
were loafing about on my own or coming with you. I enjoyed this morning so I opted for a trip to Truro.’

They drove on in silence and were soon on a main road driving along the barren central spine of the county. They passed a granite quarry, the ruined engine houses of several tin mines and ugly little groups of bungalows. To the south-east the sun picked out the strange white pyramids of china-clay waste, making them shine like distant snow. Since he did not wish to talk about
himself
, he told her about his father; a necessary chore since she would soon be meeting him. He explained briefly about his work in Malaya and then about Gilbert Cushing’s current personal interest in the years immediately preceding the fall of Singapore. Since the subject would have been meaningless without it, Derek mentioned his mother’s death and his own lucky escape.

‘Do you remember much?’ Angela asked in a hushed and gentle voice.

Derek thought she was looking at him with greater interest now that she knew he had suffered as a child. For a moment he was tempted to play along with her and paint lurid pictures of a sky black with Japanese bombers and three weeks at sea on a small life-raft waiting for rescue, but instead he said brightly, ‘I was a boy hero; brought down five Jap planes with my catapult.’ He smiled. ‘No, I left before the last week when it all started happening. There was bombing, no worse than in London, except in Singapore people used to rush out to look at the planes. Lots of black smoke; a direct hit on the oil tanks at the harbour. The shops were open, hotels functioning normally, water in the taps. I missed the looting and the unburied corpses. The ship I was in wasn’t dive-bombed. The last time I saw my mother was waiting in a mile-long queue outside the shipping manager’s
bungalow
. She was trying to get a passage for her parents. I don’t remember crying at all.’ A long silence and Angela looking at him with solemn sympathy.

‘Did your father remarry?’ she asked at last.

‘He did. She died a year ago of cancer of the colon.’ Derek’s tone had been detached, light and ironic. He had wanted to avoid melodrama and false emotion by being matter-of-fact, and yet the
result disgusted him. He wanted to answer again and do it
properly
and honestly, but the time had passed. They were entering Truro.

According to Derek’s watch, they were no more than ten
minutes
late at the station, but there was no sign of his father either in the booking-hall or on the platform. Since Gilbert often failed to keep appointments, Derek did not think it worth waiting for the next train. His father might come the following day; he might even have caught an earlier train. The only rational thing to do was to drive to the
Three
Pilchards
at St Mabyn, where Derek had booked a room for his father. He could then find out if Gilbert had cancelled, and, if he hadn’t, leave a note for him. St Mabyn was only five miles from Charles’s house, so the detour would cause little trouble.

They were leaving the town when Angela asked him to tell her about his Malayan childhood and so Derek obligingly extracted little vignettes for her: the Tamil
ayah
, who looked after him till he was six; Ngah, the gardener, who had hated pulling up
cabbages
because he thought them more beautiful than other more familiar plants; and Che’ Sulong, the
syce
,
who drove the Humber in spite of being cross-eyed. There were animals, like his pet armadillo, the house itself with its polished teak verandah and the bamboo blinds in the nursery that rattled like castanets when a ‘sumatra’ was blowing. Angela seemed disappointed. Derek supposed she had wanted him to talk about his mother.

*

A sunny June morning in 1942. Derek and his father eating breakfast in a Battersea flat. Gilbert saying, ‘Don’t look so glum. The Japs aren’t as bad as they’re painted. Most of it’s just propaganda.’

Gilbert didn’t give up hope of his wife’s ship having reached Java till late in August. By then the news of atrocities in Hong Kong and Singapore had been confirmed. Derek had been sent away to school in the country to be out of the bombing during term-time. One holiday his father had bought a packet of seeds of the coleus plant, Derek’s mother’s favourite on account of its beautifully coloured leaves. The seeds had been placed by the
sunniest window in the house but had failed to germinate. No news came and letters which Gilbert had sent to Java were returned unopened. Derek imagined her being tortured; to hear she was dead would have been a relief.

Early in 1943 Gilbert had met Margaret, or that was when Derek had first seen her. One day he saw them kissing. What would happen if they fell in love? Would Derek be sent away? Fear made him conciliatory. He tried too hard to be friendly to Margaret. She found his efforts embarrassing, especially when he had tried to make her laugh. He believed she resented him being around; his relationship with her was one long apology for existing.

Three days after his tenth birthday Derek heard that his mother was dead. No tears at all; in four years she had died too many times already. Just a chill, numbed feeling, more anger than grief.

‘You’ll marry Margaret, I suppose,’ he said to his father, more as a statement of fact than as a question. Gilbert had shaken his head and mumbled about having no plans.

‘But you will, you will,’ Derek had shouted. Later he
apologized
and tried to pretend he wanted Margaret as a step-mother. When he did finally break down and cry, it was more for himself than for his mother. She was dead, but he had to face the future. In retrospect he was sorry for his father, who had felt obliged to postpone his second marriage for almost two years.

*

They had been silent for half an hour when they reached the point where they had to turn off the main road and thread their way through the network of narrow lanes that led to the river. Derek felt that he ought to make conversation but couldn’t think of what tone to adopt. Thinking about the past no longer pained him, but memories could still lead to depression. He could see Angela smiling at him.

‘Do you know those large gorillas,’ she said, ‘that chatter like mad and leap about crazily for a while and then sit down for hours, without moving, looking constipated?’

‘I look just like one. Many thanks. My hairy hands on the
wheel, my tiny black eyes darting back and forth and my jaws working a mouthful of orange peel.’ When Angela laughed, he felt better at once. Absurd to be so easily restored by a bit of female laughter. He shook his head. ‘I know what you mean but I’m more like a car with faulty plugs; sometimes I fire on all cylinders and sometimes I won’t start at all.’ He gave her a long mournful look. ‘A man haunted at times by an inexpressible melancholy, he seemed like a prisoner trapped deep within
himself
in a dark region far beyond rescue.’

She was looking at him with such amused tenderness that he found it hard to believe he was the cause of it. But who else? Diana rarely laughed at or reacted to what he said.

‘I was wrong about gorillas,’ Angela said seriously. ‘You’re more like a sad teddy bear.’

Derek’s elation vanished. A teddy bear. That fey toy. Could ever an animal be more impotent? More harmless and futilely good-natured? Taken to bed by children and trusted to do
nothing
naughty with the dolls or golliwogs. No hybrids in the nursery. A far cry from frozen pine forests. Perhaps the
description
was apt. Hair falling out in chunks, becoming worn and tired, far from new—definitely a used bear, ill-used.

‘One glass eye and my stuffing coming out. I’d rather be a gorilla any day. Imagine being able to snarl and gnash one’s teeth as they do. They look unhappy all right but I wouldn’t mind being able to vent my rage like they do, hurling myself about against the walls and beating my chest.’

‘I suppose it might be rather impressive.’

‘Of course it would. Imagine Diana’s face if I told her that I knew and then started bouncing myself off the walls and
thrusting
whole apples into my mouth.’ Angela laughed. ‘Of course I’d be put down humanely. It’s one of the major evils of modern life, you see, no rituals for anger and grief. Nobody tears their hair any more or covers themselves with ashes. Once they
respected
that sort of thing. I haven’t got a bible in the car but my memory’s not too bad. “He stripped off his clothes and
prophesied
before Samuel and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore they say: Is Saul also among the prophets?”’

Derek pulled out to overtake a bread van and narrowly missed the travelling library coming in the opposite direction.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Killed by several tons of Enid Blytons. A nice death for an archivist.’

Derek gave her a fleeting smile but did not laugh. The night before she had seen him as an aggressive pedant but now he had become the comic teddy-bear archivist whose wife mucked him around, whose father couldn’t even arrive on the right train.

‘You find archivists funny?’ he asked.

‘When they’re killed by travelling libraries I might briefly enjoy the irony of it.’

‘You needn’t be apologetic about it. They are funny and slightly pathetic. There’s very little use in guarding, sifting and cataloguing huge quantities of documents.’

Angela gave him a puzzled look. ‘Historical facts aren’t trivial.’

‘Documents aren’t facts,’ he replied, recognizing and
regretting
his fastidious tone, but then feeling the need to justify it. ‘Historians analyse a number of documents and deduce facts from them. Archivists just catalogue and describe. Documents without historians are so much lumber to stuff attics with.’

‘What are historians without documents?’ she asked innocently.

‘Out of a job,’ he conceded.

‘Charles said you’re doing some big research job.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘That you were considered brilliant when you …’

‘When I was younger?’ he cut in. ‘Since I can’t easily draw conclusions from the evidence of my own life, Charles is a liar.’

‘Is that a fact?’ she asked with a hint of a smile.

‘You’re making fun of me,’ he replied.

They were passing the mudflats at the head of the river, but now they were almost entirely covered by the tide. The fire they had lit before lunch would be several feet under water.

‘As though I need to make fun of you,’ She laughed. ‘I’ve never met anybody who makes so many jokes against himself. Give him a knife and he stabs himself in the back even when his
hands are tied.’ Her amusement had gone and he could sense her concern and sympathy. It made him feel angry, just as her
faultless
analysis of his acquiescence and self-mockery had done a moment before. Did he make himself that obvious? As he changed down for a sharp corner, he felt her hand on his.

‘I didn’t mean to annoy you.’

‘Are my moods so transparent?’

‘No, just your efforts to conceal them.’

‘Did Colin like your honesty?’ he asked viciously.

‘You shouldn’t be unkind about him,’ she replied with a frown.

‘Why not? He’s ten years younger than me, with no erring wife or thinning hair. I don’t feel obliged to be nice.’

‘No, Colin didn’t care for honesty. He’s rather a hypocrite.’

‘Did that annoy you?’

‘Hypocrisy’s no worse than bad breath.’

‘Bad breath isn’t incurable. I had pyorrhoea, so I ought to know.’

She shook her head and smiled sadly. ‘Another sharp,
self-inflicted
stab in the back. Why should I pay good money to be whipped when I whip myself so nicely?’

Derek tried to laugh but was surprised to feel tears coming. Tears on such a sunny afternoon? They had just passed a
signpost
and he had not seen it properly. He reversed back towards it. The place indicated was called Tresithian. He started searching through his road map as though his life depended on it. ‘The last village we went through was Faddon. Another couple of miles on this road and we’ll be at St Mabyn. He probably won’t be there, and if he ever was, he won’t be still, and either way we’ll have gone for nothing.’

Angela touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers and said very quietly, ‘I don’t care.’

Derek turned off the engine. Above them the wind sighed in the telephone wires. White wispy clouds moved across the deep blue sky, grasshoppers chirped in the hedgerows. A cow stared at them mournfully from a nearby gate. He reached for the
door-handle
but didn’t open it. Unless I can get out … Fear. The same tightness in his chest that he had felt with the panic but
different now, mixed with the tearful yearning ache he sometimes knew when listening to music. On the brink, as they say. Have you ever been kissed? Like this? Or this? This? What is this disproportion, under my diaphragm this adrenal flutter? I want to put my arms around you—no, more—I want to
crush
you in my arms. To hell with sophisticated inhibitions and the doubtful pleasures of the mind. No strategy, no premeditation: a simple need. Your body, my body, now. He was breathing heavily,
gulping
air like water. Pink like prawns.

‘Would you care,’ he said and stopped. ‘Care if …’

‘Please do,’ she whispered moving round in her seat. He breathed out with a long sigh, more like a moan. I am thirty-eight next month, moderate in my ways. Glasses. Must take them off. As he reached towards them she lifted them away for him and their faces met and more than faces for he had swung round and pressed her back against her seat; before he could think of how to perform the manoeuvre he had done it; one knee on the
handbrake
and the other awkwardly in mid-air. His sudden fierceness had surprised him. No cool and hesitant beginning this as he pulled open her shirt. How long? Twenty, thirty seconds before they parted and held each other’s eyes as though incapable of looking away until they had kissed again.