The Grandmothers (36 page)

He also gave a lecture on Modern Poetry, while Donald sat proudly listening, for he was remembering how much James was his creation. And James said so: ‘I owe you a good deal,’ be said, ‘don’t think I’m ever going to forget it.’

‘Oh, jolly good show,’ said Donald.

The end of the war in Europe, so now they could go home -but when? Oh, no, not now, don’t think it, the ships will be full for a long time yet, you must take your turn, it’s not only you, but the RAH boys from all the far-flung parts of Empire, so many impatient young men, not enough ships, wait, wait, you’ve stuck it out for nearly four years, haven’t you? Just be patient a bit longer.

Not all could, or did. In two other camps, where they had been told they would be kept here, in India, to ‘maintain order’ to ‘contain unrest’ to ‘combat sedition’ to ‘preserve the British Empire’, disaffection broke out. ‘We didn’t join up to do the dirty work of the British Empire. “We joined up to fight Hitler. “You were called up and you will do as you are told.’

Speeches, real riots, and the camps were a-boil.

A couple of soldiers, ‘hot heads’, ‘incendiaries’, were court-martialled, but the Authority had listened, had taken heed. In Parliament at Home, questions were asked and speeches being made. And so the soldiers were going home.

Some, who remembered the bad time they had bad on the ship coming to India did not look forward to the sea voyage home. But this time it would not be around the Cape, the long, long journey, but through the Suez Canal.

But James had dreamed of making landfall at the Cape (though luck might just as well have taken him to Durban), and finding Daphne and his son and … there his thoughts became hazy. Yes, of course she had a husband, but she loved him, James, and there was such a thing as divorce, wasn’t there? The main thing, what he had to hold on to, was his child. His son - there could be no doubt about it, a love child, there could never have been more of a child of love than his and Daphne’s. Jimmy Reid, now four years old.

Hundreds of young men who had seen no more of India and the Indians than what they observed of life on the roads, in the bazaars, or the networks of amenities that surrounded the army - servants, Eurasian girls who were spoken of by the sahibs and memsahibs as if they were so much dirt, or the Indian soldiers in the army who intermeshed hardly at all with the white army, or the cleaners at the camp - these young men left India without regrets, at best thinking that the war had given them a glimpse of what travel might be. They filed on to the ship that was to take them away from a continent they saw as thoroughly unwholesome and unsavoury. But this voyage could not be as terrible as that other; only half the length, and they were going home. Home, which shortened the distance. It was rough, and hot, particularly through the Suez Canal, and in the Bay of Biscay, as was to be expected, the waves chopped and churned and tossed them about and they were sick, but home was in sight - and there they were, at last, the white cliffs, as Vera Lynn had promised.

‘How was your voyage?’ asked his mother, and James, ‘Oh, not so bad, could have been worse.’

On a dirty and rattling train James travelled through a land without light, so it seemed, a thin drizzly dark and faint blurs of light, and then in his home town, the street lights were dim and the windows, if not blacked out, showed parsimonious glimmers, and he was watching his feet as he walked. When he switched on the light on the stairs his mother said, ‘Please, only when you have to,’ and on the landing a faded notice said, ‘Save Electricity - Don’t Switch It On’, His old room, where he dropped his kitbag unopened, to get down faster to his parents, was small, well, it always had been, but it was so dingy. The supper was in the kitchen because leaving the oven door open heated the room; once his mother had made a point of eating ‘properly’ in the dining-room. The three sat around the table which had a vase of autumn leaves on it, and Mrs Reid boasted that she had got ‘under the counter’ liver from the butcher, in honour of his coming home. She served three thin lengths of brown meat like leather straps, with onions and potatoes. James had told himself, having grown up, that his father was not an old man, but though he was not much over fifty Bill Reid was an old man now, with a fuzz of white hair around a red face. James’s mother was polite to him and smiled all the time. Her embrace when he arrived seemed embarrassed rather than warm. ‘You have filled out,’ she said. But she could not stop smiling and tried to blink away tears when he noticed them. His father, silent as ever, kept pushing the dishes of vegetables at him, nodding Help yourself, but while his eyes were moist too, he could not talk, even say, ‘Thank God you’re home,’ so the dishes of vegetables had to do instead. ‘Have some potatoes,’ said Mrs Reid. ‘At least we’ve got plenty of those.’ In the dim kitchen the three sat eating and smiling, and felt so powerfully for themselves and for each other that it was a relief when James said he was tired. I le left his mother sitting under the light, the radio switched on, crocheting something, and his father went to the pub.

‘He’s got to tell his mates you are home,’ she said.

James stood at his bedroom window and looked down at the darkened town. In India lights glared and blared, shadows moved blackly as the sun did, defining the hours. He had returned to a lightless land.

He at once got a job at the Town Hall, but not starting at the bottom, because of his years administrating Camp X. It was a good job. He stayed in his room a lot, reading, ate the meals that were less even than the meagreness he had been brought up with: rationing suited his mother’s nature; she enjoyed eking out the bacon ration and making the meat ration stretch. The drear and dark of post-war England - well, he was home, and that was all that mattered. He thought of India and did not like his memories. Except for Jack Reeves, with whom he had exchanged addresses, and Donald, and Colonel Grant - and of course, the little child of those two visits - he did not care to remember India, which was not so much a place as an emotion of holding on, sticking it out.

Alone in his room, the door locked, he read his letters to Daphne. It took hours. He did not see how he could send them: suppose they were intercepted? Suppose her husband … no, he would give them to her himself. When’ Just as soon as the war’s enormous damage had been absorbed and everything had settled down.

He met Donald, who was already well up the ladder that would take him into politics. He visited Jack Reeves, and Jack came to him fora weekend. He joined a club and played some modest and likeable cricket. And he married Helen Gage, who had been a landgirl and enjoyed it: he could see, when he told her how he had longed for the end of the war, she did not understand, though she said she had too. She was a pretty, healthy young woman, tough and strong after her years of hard labour, and his mother was delighted. She had been afraid he would not marry, or marry late, she had not known why, but that had been her secret dread. She had been afraid of another silent man thrown out by war, a man who could not speak of what he had known. James was not communicative: he did not have much to say about India. But in the ordinary affairs of life he was easy enough - normal. His wife would not have to wake in the night beside a man thrashing about in a nightmare.

He told Helen that he had had a fling in Cape Town and that a child had resulted. She was married. When travelling was easier, lie was going out to see. In fact, he had gone up to London to ask about travelling within a week of getting home. There wouldn’t be air travel for ordinary people for some time, or only for people who could pull strings: did he have strings to pull? No, so he would have to wait. It was not only the soldiers and airmen who were still coming home as the ships became available but everybody was on the move or wanted to be, after years of being stuck because of the war, or because of new jobs abroad. He could reckon on a good wait. Months, no: years, more like it.

It had already been years. He had learned how to wait. Love like theirs would keep, existing as it did out of time. There would be Daphne’s white arms welcoming him and the years in between would be forgotten.

Helen asked him how old his love child would be by now. Generous of her to use the word, and he kissed her for it, before telling her the exact age: years, months, days, Helen had had no cause until now for so much as a moment’s doubt: this was her first shock and it was a bad one. She had touched something deep and dangerous, and she knew it: this was like one of those doors you carelessly open in a dream and find a house, a world, a landscape, wider, larger, brighter or darker than the one you know. Almost, she broke off the engagement then and there. His face as he told her was one she had not seen before, set, inward-looking, into a world she was not going to share. This moment put in high relief other feelings she had bad about James, not easily articulated. She did not try now. She thought, But I’ve got him, haven’t I? She hasn’t. He says he loves me. And she certainly was very fond of him. She had had her adventures too. Wartime is productive of ‘flings’, not to mention broken hearts. Her heart had not been broken, or anything like it, but one of the men she had loved, if briefly, had been killed in Normandy She knew she had got over it, but while she confessed to James, she broke down, much to her surprise, and wept, finding herself enclosed in his arms. She was weeping not so much for a man but for lost men, her lover, her brother (lost at sea), a cousin (at Tobruk), and then there was a friend, a fireman, killed in the Blitz - unlived lives.

He comforted her, she him, but she knew that something was biting at his heart she was not going to know about. How old? ‘Nearly six - five years, eleven months, ten days.’

A wedding, restricted by post-war shortages.

They did everything right. Every Sunday they went to lunch with James’s parents, and they visited her parents, who lived far away, in Scotland, for holidays. They had a child, a girl, named Deirdre, because of James Stephens’ poem about the Irish queen. Helen liked this poem but joked that it was asking a lot for their little girl to be as beautiful as that. But Deirdre was pretty enough.

Eight years after the war ended James told Helen he was going to South Africa, He could have gone before, but that would have meant a ship, and he would never set foot on a ship again - never. It had to be the air, and when they could afford it. She knew there was no point in minding. He never mentioned Ins other child unless she asked, but then he promptly told her, ‘He is seven years, three months, ten days,’ or whatever it was. Sometimes she checked just to see if that invisible calendar was still running there, in him, marking . , . but she did not know what. This was not merely a question of a child’s exact age.

James’s plane descended at Khartoum, Lake Victoria, Johannesburg, with leisurely time at each for refuelling, restocking. This cumbersome trip seemed to him miraculous, when he remembered that other voyage. Then Cape Town, spread out over its hills, surrounded by sea. He found a modest hotel from where he could look down at the sea, the now innocent sea, full of ships, one being a passenger liner sparkling with new paint. Then he put a thick paper parcel under his arm and walked up through streets he remembered not at all to what he did remember, the two ample houses side by side in a street of gardened houses. On the gate where there should have been the name Wright, was the unknown Williams. The gate post for next door was still Stubbs. I le retreated across the street to stand under an oak, and he looked for a long time at Daphne’s house, which in his memory lived as zones of intensity, the little room he had been given, Daphne’s bedroom, and the stoep, all else being dark. On to the verandah - the stoep - came an old woman, with a book. She sat in a grass chair, put on dark glasses, and gazed down at the sea. There was no sign of other life. Then he as carefully examined Betty’s house, of which he remembered only the garden. He could see movement through the windows that opened off the verandah. A maid? A black woman with a white headscarf. But he couldn’t see her properly He moved across the street, cautiously pushed open the gate, and stood under the tree which he remembered spreading over trestles, full of food and drink, and a crush of people - soldiers. The companion tree in the other garden would live in his mind for ever because of the two beautiful young women, one dark, one fair, standing in grass, under it, wearing flowery wrappers.

Someone had come on to the Stubbs’s verandah. A tall woman. She shaded her eyes to peer at him and came slowly down the steps towards him. He did not know her. She stopped a few paces off, let her hand fall, and looked forward to have a good look. Then she straightened and stood, arms loose by her side, in a pose it did seem he remembered. A tall thin woman. She wore a short well-fitting blue and yellow dress in small geometrical patterns, with a narrow gold-edged belt, and some little gold beads. Her face was thin and sunburned and her dark hair was waved in neat ridges. On one thin wrist hung a gold bangle. Yes, now he knew - it was the bangle -this was Betty. She spoke: ‘What are you doing here?’

This question seemed to him so absurd he only smiled. He thought that the stern face - she was like a headmistress, or the manager of something - almost smiled in response, but then she frowned.

‘James - it is James? - then you must go away.’

‘Where is Daphne?’

At this there was a pause, and then a quick expulsion of breath - the sigh of someone who has been holding it. ‘She’s not here.’

‘Where is she?’

She came a step closer. He was thinking, already afflicted with anguish, that this tall dry uncharming woman had been that lovely creature he remembered as all dark flowing hair and loose soft gowns.

‘I must see Daphne.’

‘I told you, she’s not here.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She doesn’t live here now.’

‘I can see that. It’s on the gate. Is she in Cape Town?’

A tiny hesitation. ‘No.’

So, she was lying. ‘I could find out where she lives/This was not a threat, but a reminder to himself that he was not dependent on her for information.