Waterland (32 page)

Dick puts the bottle (a slim bottle, dark brown, with a narrow neck) to his lips and drinks. How do I know this? Because I’m over on the other side of the river, hidden behind the crest of the opposite bank. (Now what’s turned this little brother into such an apprentice spy, into such a budding detective?) Dick drinks – the whole bottle in one go. But what he drinks doesn’t make his mother rise up, wriggling and jiggling, alive-alive-o, out of the river. Though its effect is extraordinary enough …

And take that other time, by the banks of the Hockwell Lode, when, after certain feats of underwater swimming, after certain remarkable physiological reactions, Freddie Parr took an eel (yes, there’s something about these slippery creatures) and— And Dick looked at Mary and Mary looked at Dick … Does that moment sink without trace in the amnesiac mire of Dick’s mind? No, it lingers, it reverberates. For what does Dick begin to do, dating from that memorable July day in 1940? He starts to hang around Mary Metcalf, albeit at a tentative distance. He lurks in
Hockwell village, near the station, when the 4.24 train is due from Gildsey, bringing its load of returning school-children, including one who wears rust-brown and, on her left breast, a red sacred heart. He haunts the route used by a certain person between Hockwell and Polt Fen. And when allowed into the circle of the other Hockwell kids (for, ever since that day by the Lode, there has been a tendency to regard Dick less with tolerant condescension than with suspicious, ostracizing respect) he bestows on Mary, should she be there, more of those long, unnerving looks.

So that during that period when little Tom’s undoubtedly blossoming but still innocent passion for Mary struggles through its bashful, early, railway-carriage stages, another soul, his own brother no less (cause for envy indeed), also yearns and pines. Save that while little Tom knows very well what constrains him, though this doesn’t help him to be any the bolder, Dick’s plight is of a more incurable kind. The poor lad doesn’t know what he’s suffering from.

Or so it’s claimed. For throughout these same, so susceptible, so formative months, I see no evidence of Dick’s supposed affliction. Oh yes, now and then he happens to be mooching about near Hockwell School when I (and Mary Metcalf) return from school. But nothing so significant in that. It’s Mary who tells me about Dick’s plaintive condition. And clearly she doesn’t tell me till our relations have achieved that pitch where such candour is possible, till they have reached, indeed, the full-blown, windmill stage. By which time Dick is a mate on the
Rosa II
and seems to be struck on his motor-cycle. So that for a good year and more, either Dick has been more stealthy and more circumspect than might be credited or else – but do I think of this as Mary unfolds her tale of my brother’s secret life? – perhaps the truth is not as Mary says, but the other way round. Perhaps it’s not Dick who bewilderingly yet doggedly pursues Mary, but Mary who, with much
more guile at her disposal, would like to be better acquainted with Dick.

‘You remember – ’course you do – that day when Freddie got that eel and …’

(While the big blue eye of the summer sky looks down on our love-nest; while the sun shines on coppery hairs…)

‘It was big, wasn’t it? No, no – not the eel.’ (Teasingly, curiously): ‘It must have been twice as big as this …’

(While insect-buzzes mingle with the sound of cropping cattle…)

‘What’s he like? Tell me. Did your Dad, or Mum, never … He’s lonely, isn’t he? Don’t you ever feel sorry for him …?’

(While poplars rustle …)

‘Poor Dick.’

‘Yes, poor Dick.’

And it’s true, it touches me – it touches me as it can touch only a younger son with a seniority of fortune, as it can touch only a lover secure (secure?) in his love – the image of my lonesome and benighted brother. Deprived not only of brains and education but of this extra windmill-guarded blessing. He must know, he must learn. If not how to put words together on a page and how to convert them into speech, then this other sort of magic.

Young love, young love. How it can’t remain simple and innocent. How it wants to stretch forth and spread its gospel. (Later it shrinks and dwindles. Later it grows wary and clings to itself as if it might disappear …) But young love, new love, first love— How it wants to embrace everything, how sorry it feels for all those denied its simple remedy …

So how was I, in our Lode-side bower, while far away
the world wrote its chronicle of war, while Mary told me about her widowed father and the sisters of St Gunnhilda (how hard it was to be a little Madonna) and I told Mary of my game-legged and likewise widowed Dad – how was I to avoid giving voice to a pitiful account of my brother? (How envy, growing contrite, turns charitable.) And how was Mary to avoid confessing that, even before that day by the Lode, to be completely honest, to be completely frank, she’d been – curious? And, putting together this pity and this curiosity, how could we avoid forming a plan?

‘Yes, poor Dick.’

‘Poor Dick, with only his motor-bike.’

And if you add to pity and curiosity just a touch of fear – for Mary also confessed, not without a certain shiver of delight, that, along with her curiosity, she was just a weeny bit … and I said (so sure) Dick would never hurt a fly— then you have more than a plan, you have the tangled stuff of which stories are made.

So this is the story of how Mary, aided and abetted by Tom, took upon herself Dick’s education, so harshly thwarted in the past. His sentimental education, that is, his training in matters of the heart. This is the story of how Mary tried to teach my mute brute of a brother.

Or, alternatively, of how Mary’s curiosity—

Or, alternatively, of how a little learning …

It’s Mary’s story. Told to me on Monday and Thursday afternoons, in instalments, throughout that summer of 1943. While on Wednesday and Saturday evenings -and sometimes on Sundays too …

It’s Mary’s story, pieced together and construed by
me. So how can I be certain what really—?

Eye-witness accounts have it that when, on alternate evenings on his return from work, Dick took a detour off the Gildsey-Hockwell road on to the track running north along Stott’s Drain with the object of bringing home in the shape of a sack of live eels what, in those wartime days, formed not only our staple diet but a source of clandestine income, he did not merely haul in the traps and bag what they contained. He lingered over this slimy operation. He interrupted it indeed (the Velocette keeping sentinel close by) to sit and stare at the river in a manner that could only be described as meditative, if not forlorn. As if thinking still – though she’s six years gone now – of his vanished mother; or, conceivably, of another subject, also female and tantalizing.

Eye-witness? Yes, because one evening, early in May, there’s someone watching him. No, it’s not his little brother, not this time. And it’s not his resurrected mother. It’s Mary. And it’s I who’ve tipped her off about the see-and-not-be-seen properties of that farther river-bank. She watches, unobserved. But the next evening but one she’s watching again, this time unconcealed. She’s sitting in plain view on the visible slope of the river-bank (knees drawn up, hands round shins, one cheek resting on knees), but so watchfully and motionlessly that it’s some while before Dick, intent on tipping eels from trap to sack, sees her.

And when he does (or so I picture it) he freezes, stock-still, in the shocked and disbelieving manner of people whose thoughts have suddenly taken material form.

Mary shouts across the water: ‘Hello, Dick.’

Dick says nothing. Then, after a volume of river water which can never be calculated has slid between them: ‘Hello.’

‘Got many?’

‘Ma-many?’

‘Eels.’

A difficult point. Since Dick is being asked, by implication, to count. A testing process at the best of times. He can scurry to ten, stumble, with luck, to twenty. At the best of times eels twined together in the bottom of a sack don’t make easy counting. And under those watching eyes…

So he nods. Gives a shrewd answer.

‘S-some.’

Mary lifts her cheek from her knee.

‘You see, if you’ve got any to spare … My Dad’s fond of eels. So am I. We eat fish every Friday, you know. If you could spare a couple? One big one would do.’ She nuzzles her chin on her knees. ‘Haven’t you got a nice eel for me?’

Now Dick understands this, or thinks he understands it – because to understand is itself confusing. That is, he understands not only the simple substance of the request, but something profoundly, amazingly deeper. He understands that he, Dick, is being asked to offer her, Mary – yes, it’s either Mary or a mirage – a Gift. This is something that no person (if we exclude the rituals of family birthdays when Dick – good with his hands – produced for his Mum such wonders as a money-box made from a cocoa tin) has ever sought of him before. A gift. A gift. Something of his own that another would value. And so momentous is this concept that he is rendered quite incapable of making it actual.

He sits on the river-bank, a twitching sack between his knees. The river flows, unblinking, by.

‘Well, never mind,’ Mary says at length, getting to her feet and brushing down her wartime curtain-fabric skirt. ‘Another time maybe.’ And then, perhaps with one of those narrow, knowing looks of hers, which even forty feet of river do not weaken: ‘I can come again, can’t I? You’ll be here – on Friday, won’t you?’

And this drops into Dick’s scheme of things yet another monumental notion. For not only does it suggest that this
creature on the far shore takes an interest in him and watches his movements (but then hasn’t Dick watched hers?), it suggests something more astounding and unprecedented still, so astounding that in order to appreciate it, Dick has simultaneously to discover for himself previously unimagined mental territory.

It has the air of what other people call (though Dick’s never heard the word) an assignation. It unveils that heady realm, known already to countless initiates (including young Tom), to which the password, when uttered in a certain breathy way, may be some such innocent phrase as ‘Meet me …’, ‘See you …’, ‘I’ll be there if …’

It’s something you can’t get from motor-bikes.

‘Ye-yes,’ he says. ‘He-here.’

She leaves, with a darting smile, before he can say more.

And there’s something strange about her departure. She goes, but she doesn’t go, exactly. There’s something left behind. A feeling. A beautiful feeling. It lingers in the soft evening air. It lingers as Dick rides home, along the Hockwell road, on his back the sack of eels which are in no situation to be experiencing beautiful feelings. And it lingers that evening in the cottage (I observe but don’t tell Mary), where Dick, with lashes working furiously, picks and pecks at his eel supper and Dad is driven to ask: ‘What’s up, Dick? What’s the matter – not well?’

Now when did Dick ever lose his appetite or ever find anything exceptional in a May evening?

Once again (that very Friday) Dick visits the eel-traps at Stott’s Drain. Once again the creature appears, like some conjured genie, on the far bank. Once again, the river flows mutely between them, evoking the plight of Hero and Leander. Again the creature asks, in her maidenly and water-borne voice, for the gift of an eel. And this time she has something with her. A pail. A milking pail (into which before now, before Harold Metcalf’s reproving hand slapped hers for stooping to such
lowly work, Mary has attempted to squirt the frothing milk of her father’s Friesians).

Now clearly she means business. She means to have her gift of an eel. Because she’s brought something along to take it home in …

‘That one,’ says Mary, ‘that’s a nice one.’ As Dick, like a gormless fishmonger, holds up, item by item, the contents of his sack.

‘You wa-want?’

‘Yes please – if it’s all right. Please.’

Though how do you convey an eel across a river? For, certainly, the last thing it will do is swim across and deliver itself.

Dick looks at Mary, gift in hand.

But Mary has an answer to this too. She’s been counting on this. She puts down her pail. Settles into her knees-up position.

‘You can swim. I’ve seen you swim – before.’

And – if indeed it has ever sunk completely into the Lethe of Dick’s brain – it returns again now, it rises, buoyantly and pungently, to the surface: that memory which disturbs and confuses, goads and exacerbates the beautiful feeling. Another eel, in a certain position of intimate proximity …

At least six swarms of May midges float over the river, at least a dozen swallows flitter like cupids along the surface of the Leem, taking their evening sips of water and exposing their cherub-breasts to the evening sun, while fixed and still, Mary stares at Dick and Dick stares at Mary. While, far from still, the chosen eel (it’s not so big, but it’s no tiddler either) squirms and strains in Dick’s grip. And while, if the truth be known, Mary too, beneath her skirt, squirms and tenses just a little (possessing a very good memory). For though it may not be clear from her present behaviour Mary doesn’t entirely like eels. Hasn’t liked them ever since—

But there’s nothing to say that we shouldn’t be drawn
by, even desire, what makes us recoil …

Mary moves at last. Turns her head in a gesture of impatience and disappointment as if about to make her departure. And no sooner does she do this than Dick, with his free hand, whips off his Wellington boots and plunges, torpedo-fashion, into the river. Not only plunges, but in the very same instant, it seems, reappears on the farther side, without having broken surface in between, and clambers out, streaming and mud-stained, still grasping, what’s more, in his right hand, a quite dumbfounded eel (it’s a remarkable grip that can not only hold an eel but keep holding it under water); so that Mary leaps up, squeals, steps back then forward again, giggles at her own squeal, laughs away her giggle, before recovering her former poise.

But now Dick must present his gift and Mary must receive it. He picks up the pail (yes, he guesses its purpose), half fills it at the water’s edge, and drops in the eel. Then, eyelashes beating so hard that they turn into spray the drops descending from his hair, he hands the pail to Mary.