Homeland (2 page)

In the larder Billy found cider, bread and cheese. Sitting in his old place, perched on the chair with the uneven legs, he poured two jars of cider and pushed one across to Stan. ‘So, when
did all this happen?’

‘I told yer . . .’

‘You’ve told me nothing,’ Billy stated firmly.

The old man glowered at him, on the point of arguing, only to hesitate and jam his mouth shut. It wasn’t a retreat exactly, more a pause for thought, but it was enough to give Billy a
small spark of satisfaction. Over the past few months he had rehearsed this scene countless times in his mind – the calm he would show in the face of the old man’s provocation, the
indifference to any mention of the past, the effortless authority he would impose on the conversation – and had pictured the look of surprise and respect that would creep over the old
man’s face as it dawned on him that Billy was a very different person from the one who’d left seven years ago. And here it was, sooner than he’d dared hope: the first hesitation,
the first glimmer of respect.

‘Start from the beginning,’ Billy said.

‘It was at the victory celebrations,’ Stan offered at last, frowning at his glass, taking a sudden gulp. ‘The church bells were rung all morning. The whole village turned out,
gathered there in front of the George. There were tables set up with pies and cakes, and the landlord selling ale at a penny a pint. Jimmy Summers brought his fiddle along, and everyone were
dancing, right there in the lane.’ Stan gave a small snort. ‘Even old misery guts, the Baptist minister, took to shuffling a bit. Lifting his feet up and down like the ground were a bit
hot underfoot. Flor thought it the best thing she’d seen in a long time. Yes, in a very long time.’ Stan pulled a packet of Woodbines out of his pocket and lit up before remembering his
manners. Still avoiding Billy’s eye, he slid the packet a few inches across the table, and watched Billy help himself. ‘Flor, she always loved to dance. Her were light on her feet, oh
yes indeed, light as a feather. Knew all the steps. Well, there she were, dancing fit to bust, whirling round and round, when all of a sudden she stumbles and grabs my arm. I thought she were just
dizzy, yer know, from all the spinning about. But it were the stroke. I caught her just before she hit the floor. Caught her and held her clear. The doctor were fetched, but there weren’t
nothing he could do. The whole of her right side were gone, face, arm, leg, and some of the left side too. She’d lost the power of speech, and the doctor thought she might’ve lost some
of her understanding too. But she understands everything I tell her all right, and no mistake.’

It had happened over a year ago, he said. There had been no change since.

‘You should have told me,’ Billy said.

‘Didn’t know where to write, did I?’

Or couldn’t be bothered to find out, Billy thought. It wouldn’t have taken more than five minutes to look through the bureau in the parlour where Flor kept the family papers and find
his address. She had written to Billy throughout the war, two neatly penned sides sent on the first and fourteenth of every month, regular as clockwork. After Billy’s regiment landed in
France, her letters had sometimes taken weeks to catch up with him, often arriving in twos and threes. He remembered with a nudge of guilt how he had skimmed through them, indifferent to the world
he had left behind. The only letter he’d read more than once was an early one, some six months after he’d joined up. After that, he’d lost interest in the gossip, and his replies
had been at best sporadic, a couple of lines on a postcard if Aunt Flor was lucky. When her letters stopped abruptly, he’d told himself it was because the war was over and she no longer
thought it necessary to write. If he’d felt the occasional twinge of concern he’d ignored it easily enough, for if his early life had taught him anything it was to expect sudden,
unaccountable change.

After a second glass of cider – the cloudy brew slipped down, more bewitching than memory – Billy felt as ready as he ever would be to follow Stan up the narrow stairs to the room
that, during his four years at Crick Farm, he had entered only once, to repair the window.

As Stan opened the door the sound of sickly violin music rose up to greet them. The room was lit by a candle standing low on the bedside table. The candle in Stan’s hand added a spasmodic
flickering glow to the dark side of the room. Aunt Flor lay in the iron bed, propped against the pillows. At first Billy thought she was awake, then he thought she was dead, finally he saw that she
was asleep. The stroke had left her face askew, as though a great weight were tugging down on one cheek. The right side of her mouth was dragging and dribbling, while her right eye wasn’t
altogether closed even in sleep, so that the white gave off a feral glint in the candle beam.

‘Who does the caring for her?’ Billy asked in a rough whisper.

‘Why, myself, that’s who,’ declared Stan, as if this should have been obvious.

Billy didn’t like to imagine what was involved. He would have turned away but his gaze was held by the drooping eye. It reminded him of a girl he and his mates had dug out of a house in
Belgium. The girl’s eyes had been rolled back under half-closed lids, the whites coated in a film of dust, until she was carried out and dumped in the sunlight when the whites gave off an
unearthly, almost sinister gleam. The girl had been pretty, her body unmarked. Except for the eyes, she too might have been asleep.

‘I’ve come to fetch my mum’s stuff,’ Billy said over the sobbing violins.

Wordlessly, the old man turned for the door.

‘Will you tell her that?’ Billy said, following him out onto the landing.

‘You can tell her yerself,’ said Stan, starting down the stairs.

‘What, now?’

‘When she wakes.’

‘When will that be?’

‘In the morning.’

‘But I’ve told you – I’m not staying.’

‘Please yourself.’

In the kitchen, Billy said, ‘Tell me where my mum’s stuff is, then.’

‘Couldn’t say, could I?’

They exchanged a hostile glare, and for a moment it might have been the old days again. Going through to the parlour, Billy made a quick search of the bureau before accepting that he had lost
all chance of getting away that evening. He dug out papers and letters of every description, some old, some new, many still in their envelopes; he found birth certificates, mementos and
photographs, but nothing belonging to his mother. In a pigeonhole he came across the cards and letters he had written to Flor during the war. They were tied in bundles, placed next to the letters
from the son in Canada. Another son had died as a child, while the daughter lived in Plymouth, bogged down by children.

By the time Billy got back to the kitchen it was in darkness and the old man’s footsteps were creaking overhead. Picking up his rucksack, he climbed the stairs to his old room under the
eaves. Ducking under the lintel, setting the candle on the table, he had a fleeting memory of his first sight of this room, with its sloping ceiling, low-set window, and sturdy oak-framed bed. He
was fifteen then and had been living rough for a year. Caught pilfering from a market stall – apples, of all things – he had been ‘saved’ from the full force of the law by
these two relatives he barely knew. The magistrate had told him he was lucky, but Billy wasn’t fooled. He knew that it was a punishment by any other name and the sentence hard labour. And
nothing about that first night – not the warmth of the mug of malted milk in his hand, nor the fullness in his belly, nor the unaccustomed smoothness of sheets against his skin – had
done anything to alleviate his sense of injury. He’d been deceived by a large meal and a soft bed once before when at the age of nine he’d been carried off by his Aunt May to a life of
prayer and moral correction in Bridgwater.

Now, all these years later, he could see above the bed the same mysterious bulges in the rose-and-columbine-patterned wallpaper, and on the ceiling the same crusty rings erupting from the
whitewash like lichen blooms on rock. There was no getting rid of the damp down here by the moor, and it was only fools who tried. Its fusty fragrance filled the air and misted the wooden surfaces
and rotted the curtains. On the bed the starched linen had subsided limply onto the topography of the mattress. He guessed that Flor had made up the bed a long time ago, ready for his return. Well,
it was no good, he wouldn’t be staying. And the way Flor was now, she wouldn’t know enough to care.

The unaccustomed silence kept him awake for some time. When he finally slept it was to be roused at least twice by the hooting of an owl, then, much later, by the banging shut of a door. He had
the impression of sleeping little, yet when he woke it was to full light.

He lay back with a sense of indulgence. There’d been no staying in bed in the old days, no missing of the morning. The old man had been a stickler for getting to work sharp at six, winter
and summer. But this morning Stan wasn’t calling impatiently from the kitchen, ‘Let’s be seeing you!’, he was clumping about in the bedroom opposite, to the muted strains of
dance music. Billy shifted indolently on the pillow and watched the sunlight trickling in through the unwashed glass, casting hazy beams over the edge of the battered chest of drawers which had
housed all his worldly possessions, reflecting dimly in the wall mirror from whose crazed and mottled glass his uneasy adolescent frown had glared back at him each morning. The only visible remnant
of his four-year occupation was hanging on the back of the door, an ancient railwayman’s jacket that Aunt Flor had found for him that first winter, bartered from the crossing keeper for two
months’ supply of eggs. She hadn’t thought him worth the expense of a new one, not then.

Getting up at last, he went to the chest and pulled open an upper drawer. His adolescent paraphernalia was still there: fishing hooks, string, cigarette cards, penknife, pencils. And in a lower
drawer his old working clothes, neatly folded and smelling of mothballs. He tried on a thick woollen shirt that had always been too big but now fitted quite well. The trousers, though, were tight
at the waist, and he had to leave the top button undone and use a belt. Down in the porch he found his old gumboots at the back of a shelf, covered in dust. The rubber was dry and cracked, but
there were no obvious holes.

By the time he stepped outside it was almost eight. The yard was a sight. The mound of withies he’d almost tripped over in the darkness was all canker and rot, while the frame that
stretched the full length of the yard was stacked with bundle on bundle of withies, which, going by the coating of lichen on the weather side, had been put out to dry a long while back and not
touched since.

In the woodshed, amidst another almighty jumble, Billy found a thick layer of coal dust, a scratching of coal nuggets, and some two dozen apple logs. The peg where the axe used to hang was bare.
He hunted high and low, shifting sacks, kegs, barrels and a wheelless barrow before unearthing the axe on the floor beside a paraffin drum. Even then it took a good five minutes with the whetstone
before the blade would split the wood the way he liked it, clean, in a single stroke.

He rifled the mound of cankered withies for kindling, but gleaned only mulch. The porch offered better pickings: a brittle apple basket, the base frayed and sagging, and a clutch of spraggled
withies, ripe for burning.

He was crouched in front of the range, nursing a meagre flame, when he heard Stan’s tread on the stairs.

‘You’re still here then,’ the old man said.

They took a fresh gawp at one another.

The light, slanting upwards from the window, revealed fresh crags and fissures in the hillocky landscape of Uncle Stan’s features. Born and raised in the last century, too old for the
Great War let alone the one just ended, he’d always seemed ancient to Billy, though even now he was probably little more than seventy. Despite a back bowed and calcified by a lifetime’s
withy cutting and lungs that were clugged up from a steady sixty a day, the old man had always kept an almost impish energy. But now this too had faded; Billy saw it in the labour of his breathing
and the droop of his eyes.

‘Managed to stay in one piece then?’ the old man said.

‘More or less.’

‘Well, you look well enough on it, at any rate.’

Billy tried to see himself as Uncle Stan must see him: taller by a good inch, broader in the chest, muscled by a steady diet of meat and potatoes. And more worldly. Yes, that would show too.

‘I’ll just get it warmed up in here, all right? And then I’ll be off.’

The old man tipped his head towards the range. ‘You’ll not get it to draw properly,’ he said with a pull of his lips. ‘Chimney’s buggered.’

‘What’s the trouble?’

‘Jackdaws. Soot. Lord only knows.’

‘I’ll give it a jiggle then.’

‘It’ll take a lot more than a jiggle.’

‘Haven’t lost your sunny outlook then.’ But the remark was lost on the old man, as Billy had known it would be. Returning with some willow sticks, he found Stan putting a match
to a small Primus stove.

‘Is that how you’ve been cooking then? With paraffin?’

‘She can only take porridge or broth. It’s good enough for that.’

‘Paraffin’s not going to warm anyone’s bones, though, is it? Not in the cold. What’s happened to the coal?’

‘There ain’t no coal.’

‘Well, I can see that, can’t I? What’s the problem?’

‘Officialdom, that’s what. Little Hitlers, the lot of them.’

Unbolting the port in the flue, Billy thrust a stick up the chimney and, lashing a second stick to the base of the first, soon came up against the blockage. After a few jabs, a cascade of soot
and lumps came tumbling down the flue, filling the range and billowing into his face.

Half an hour later he had the fire drawing, the kettle on the hotplate, and his face and hands cleaned up. By the time Stan came down from giving Aunt Flor her breakfast, he’d made a pot
of tea and poured the first cup.

‘Don’t have tea at this time of the morning,’ Stan cried fretfully.

‘Well, you’re getting some today.’