The White Family (23 page)

She had never been able to slip out into the open, the quiet, clear space where happiness was. Not joy so much as an end to sorrow, a rest from anger and fear and resentment.

She pushed, a last angry, hopeful little push –

The door opened, and she was in the garden.

‘I went in the Park a few days ago,’ said Thomas. ‘I wanted to tell you that everything was ship-shape. Bulbs looking good. Willow turning yellow.’

‘Was the mesh cover over the pond?’ Alfred asked, anxious, focusing.

‘Oh yes,’ said Thomas. ‘That was all fine.’ (He hadn’t looked; he hadn’t noticed, distracted by the woman stealing bulbs.)

‘Otherwise it gets choked up with leaves … The teenagers. They take it off. If no one stops them. Then they throw things in the water.’

‘No, it was fine, honestly.’ (Darren had said: ‘I’m not bloody fine.’ And there had been the van with the chap from the council, the one who had spoken slightingly of Alfred.) ‘Everything was fine. Don’t worry.’

‘That pond … It’s a special place, that pond.’

Alfred saw it almost hourly still in the hospital, a picture window in the ward’s dull paint. It was a water-lily pond, with fat Koi carp winding in and out of the lily roots, leaves like green plates, reflected clouds. Behind it a terraced rockery with bonsai trees and dwarf rhododendrons. Flanking the rockery, dark cypresses, a magnolia tree which was one of Alfred’s favourites, and the trailing yellow of the tall weeping willow. Once there had been two, but one was cracked apart in the great storm of 1987, and the head gardener had wanted to save it, but the council decreed it had to come down, Health and Safety, rules and regulations, it was simpler and cheaper to take it down, though it would take a hundred years to grow another one.

‘I count the beginning of spring from that pond. Every March for the last ten years or so a pair of ducks have come and settled there. They only stay a couple of weeks but I always say to myself, spring’s here. One year they raised a brood on the pond. I had to stop the children chasing the ducklings. Lovely little things. Like a picture in a book. Comic, really. Going too fast. Always falling over. Just like kids … You don’t have children, do you Thomas?’

‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘I’d like to, one day.’

‘Don’t leave it too late. But of course you’ve got your job. You’ve got your library to think about.’ Alfred was afraid of having hurt Thomas’s feelings. All men wanted children, didn’t they? (And then once they’d got them, they longed to escape. From the mess and the fuss and the bickering.) So he added, ‘You’ve got to keep the books coming, too. May looks forward to you writing another one.’

‘That’s very kind of her,’ said Thomas. He blushed to think of May reading it. He’d tried to explain the title, once, but she’d patted his hand and said ‘not to worry.’ An old woman screamed, suddenly, painfully, far down the ward, too far to see, behind one of the drawn green curtains, and twenty heads looked up, nervous.

Pamela had made it back to her bed. She collapsed on to it, pulled herself up, then swung up her legs, one by one, an endless process of sighing effort, but once she was settled, hands clutching her bedhead, she turned on Alfred a glittering smile. Very brightly coloured – a touch on the puce side. She had taken a detour to do her make-up.

‘Helloo there, Alfred. Is that the famous son?’

‘Wrong again,’ he said, and winked at her, surprising himself with this moment of gaiety. ‘He is a writer though. Thomas, this is Pamela.’

‘Hello, Thomas.’ She waved a clawed hand. ‘I could have been a writer, you know.’

‘Oh really,’ said Thomas, not sounding impressed. Then he tried again, politely: ‘Really?’

‘Novels, poems, I could do them all. My husband said I was a born writer.’

But Alfred had picked up Thomas’s boredom. Women could be boring, it couldn’t be denied. Always butting in when men were talking. When men were talking about serious things. ‘You’ll excuse me if I talk to my friend,’ he said to the woman, with the bluff manner he’d used to get rid of people in the Park. ‘Thomas and I are talking over old times.’

She gazed at him, indignant, then gave a short laugh like a dog barking, and sank back on her bed, where she rummaged noisily in her bag until she produced a radio and head-phones which she jammed on her head and turned up the volume until it was distantly, annoyingly audible.

‘We never allowed transistors in the Park,’ Alfred said quite loudly to Thomas, who smiled, but Alfred could see the noise annoyed him. That was writers for you. Sensitive. Perceptive.

‘How many years have you been there, Alfred?’ Thomas asked. ‘Of course I remember you when I was a boy –’

‘It was different then. There were six of us then. Six of us, with dogs and uniforms.’

‘Why did you need dogs? Was there a lot of trouble?’

‘There’s never been a major crime in that Park.’ Alfred had said it many times, and he said it now, heavily, proudly. ‘No violence, except the odd ruck when the alcoholics fight over a bottle, or two kids have a go at one another. No rape. No murder. No … There’s never been a death in the Park. It’s a record to be proud of. And a lot of it is down to the Park Keepers. I mean the whole lot of us, over the years.’ He could feel his strength coming back as he said it; he was proud of himself; he was Alfred, the Park Keeper.

‘I’ve always had a thing about parks,’ said Thomas. ‘Places where everybody can go. And people usually look happy. Don’t they? Probably because they’re not working.’

‘Too many people not working nowadays. But you’re right, Thomas. It’s a happy place. Did you know there was dancing, after the war?’

And Alfred began to talk to Thomas, seeing genuine interest in his eyes (he was a nice boy, though perhaps a touch soft), remembering things he hadn’t thought of for years, talking as if there were no tomorrow.

‘Did you know I was born twelve yards from the Park? So it really has been my life, in a way. Of course that house was bombed flat in the war.’

He told Thomas how he’d played in the Park as a boy, when all the shrubberies were ringed with railings and the Park Keepers seemed like gods to Alfred. ‘P’raps I got an inkling even then that that was what I’d like to be. But they were so tall, like men from Mars.’ The boys never bothered with the grown-ups’ end, where the flower-beds were, where people sat on seats. You had to behave, up there, which was boring. Instead they made a den down the very far end, in the middle of the shrubbery, where there was a path that led along by the wall behind the railings to a wonderful-smelling tower of grass-clippings, it seemed like years of grass-clippings, hidden in the middle of the laurel-bushes where no one could see them if they didn’t know (though of course they had to try not to laugh when the Park Keepers happened to patrol nearby, and once Alfred had wet his pants though he wasn’t going to tell Thomas that). They had hollowed out a den like a mouse’s nest. Deep down the clippings were warm, fermenting. ‘The Park seemed like heaven to us in those days. You see the best of people in parks …’

And he was off again among happy memories. The cards and presents he got at Christmas. A ham, mince pies, the odd bottle of spirits which people probably imagined he took a nip of in his little hut, though he never touched a drop till he was off duty … (well hardly ever, he thought to himself). Letters from America, Malaya, South Africa, wherever folk from Hillesden went. Scarves and gloves and cardigans, knitted by some of his married ladies, for he did have a following among the ladies, all perfectly innocent, he assured Thomas, perfectly innocent on his part at least.

‘I’ve dreamed about the place, since I’ve been stuck in here. You’d think I’d be glad of a break, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not a cushy job. Cleaning out the aviary I never liked. I’d give that away, any day. It’s not the little birds like the budgies, they’re child’s play, but the pheasants were always that bit aggressive, and I don’t know what to make of the new foreign birds. Too bright, aren’t they. Too bright for the Park. They don’t look right in an English park –’

‘I like them,’ Thomas put in, mildly.

‘– I don’t trust ’em. They put their heads down and look at me and I think they’re going to rush me. So now I always use my broom. I open the door of their shelter at the back and the little ones fly up into the enclosure and then I get my broom and bash on the door and the big ones scuttle out pretty quick. You have to show them who’s boss,’ said Alfred. ‘With all these things. Show ’em who’s boss.’ Something about Thomas’s face stopped him. He felt less certain. He thought about it. Why did he hate those big yellow birds? At first it was only because they were foreign. But now it was worse, somehow worse.
I hate them because they’re afraid of me
.

‘Tell me about the dancing,’ said Thomas, swiftly. ‘Was there really dancing in the Park?’

‘It was where the kids all ride their bikes. The big ring of tarmac. We used to have a bandstand. A proper bandstand. Thatched, like the café. Lovely. But took an awful lot of maintenance. Anyway, it started after the war. I loved dancing. Still like to watch it. Still jiggle my feet when they dance on the telly.

‘But I was in Palestine, you see. I was out there doing my National Service. Nineteen forty-seven to forty-nine. I used to think about the Park. Out there in the desert. It was like a bloomin’ oven. Nothing growing for miles and miles.’

(It looked white, in the heat, Alfred remembered. No colour at all. And the sky was so hot that was white as well. I used to remember the Park, and the dancing. I tried to imagine the colour green. You start to appreciate it then. It’s better than anywhere, really, England, although I had a lot of fun in the army, they made a man of me, Dad said.)

‘I’d met May, by then. I was sixteen when I met her. Nineteen forty-three, I think it was. She was just the girl who matched the shoes to the tickets in the shop where we took our shoes to be soled. She had just left school. She never looked at me. She just took the ticket, and her head went down. But she had big blue eyes. I expect you’ve noticed. And she wore blue ribbon in her hair. I took her dancing once before they called me up.’ (We were shy with each other, Alfred remembered. I had the wrong shoes, she stared at them, and I thought, she’ll want someone better than me, but the music was lovely, romantic, wonderful, and there was a moon behind the trees, and even though in the end it started to drizzle and the band gave up and we had to go home, the memory somehow lasted me, out in the desert, those two dry years.)

‘The day I got demobbed, I was with Reggie, wasn’t I. The two of us had travelled back together. We hadn’t any English money on us, so we walked all the way home from Victoria Station to Hillesden, in the middle of the night. Knocked on the door and my mum stuck her head out of the bedroom window and started to cry. She got up and cooked me a gigantic fry-up which must have used every bit of food in the house, and I didn’t sleep a wink all night, I felt crazy, and I couldn’t get used to not being shot at, I couldn’t sleep in a bed for months … We’d always had to sleep on the floor, you see.’

‘PTSD,’ Thomas nodded, sagely.

Then wished he hadn’t.

‘What did you say?’

‘What they call post-traumatic stress disorder.’

‘Nothing like that. I wasn’t mental,’ said Alfred, annoyed to be interrupted. There was a pause; he sucked his teeth. Mum, he thought. She was a good soul. I wonder if she’s up there waiting for me. As long as Dad isn’t waiting for me – Let’s face it, Dad was a holy terror. Took a leather strap to all of us … I never did that; I would never do that. ‘Am I boring you?’ he asked. ‘I’m talking too much.’

‘No please go on, I’m enjoying it,’ said Thomas, and he really was, despite the appalling discomfort of the chair which the National Health must have put there on purpose to stop any visitors staying too long. The lights were coming on in the ward.

This, he thought, is the real Alfred. Darren’s just worked himself into a state. It’s Susie’s fault. Pure … psychobabble. He eased his legs; the chair farted.

‘Next day I got up and it was English summer. I couldn’t believe the noise of the birds. I had spent the night with my uniform on, and for some reason I got up, put my hat on, I suppose because I’d have felt naked without it, a great sombrero, it was, with a feather, a little cockade thing stuck on the side, not exactly the thing to wear in Hillesden … But I was in no state to realize. And I walked to the Park as if I was asleep. I didn’t decide, I just found I was off there. Like a pigeon, I suppose. Homing. Homing. I hadn’t had breakfast, not even a cuppa. And I walked up the hill –’

Alfred couldn’t continue. Fifty years later he still wanted to weep.

(It was green, so green, and the smell of cut grass, and the shade of the oak trees, dappled shade, rippling over the hill in the breeze, and the wood pigeons billing, it was all like a dream … like the dreams I had dreamed in Palestine, but now it was real, the men had come home. But I lay on the hill, and I felt like a ghost. It was all the same, but I was not. No one knew me now. I was no longer Alfred, but a killer sent from another world, and if anything moved I should have to shoot it … The hill looks out over the burial ground. There seemed to be millions of graves in the sunlight, white and grey stones marching on forever, blurring as I looked across the sweep of the graveyard, as if they’d seeded like weeds in the war years … How many bodies of boys I had known were lying under the ground somewhere, with nothing to mark them, far from home? – names I had known, lost, forgotten – and the peace and the sunshine had come too late? I felt – queer, I felt very alone, I felt guilty, although God knows I had done my bit. But soon as I lay down, I slept, and dozed and dreamed half the day away, waking sweaty and frightened, every so often, and being calmed by the sound of the birds. And the wind in the leaves, and walking feet, not crunching boots but peaceful feet, padding, strolling, human feet, British feet, English feet, those wonderful sounds said I had come home, now I could rest among my people, here in the grass I was safe to sleep.)

Thomas thought Alfred had nodded off, but after a second he began again.