Familiar and Haunting Page 15

  “Deaf,” said the second policeman.

  Then the two policemen began to explain to old Jim by gestures what they intended. In dumb show they explained to him how they would help him into their car and how comfortable he would be; they acted to him how swiftly and smoothly they would drive off, how soon they would get him safely home. Then they stopped to make sure he had understood. Old Jim clapped his hands and smiled, but he also shook his head.

  The policemen started all over again, but in the middle of their performance, one of them—perhaps losing patience—set his hands on the wheelchair as if to push it toward the car, with or without old Jim’s permission. Then old Jim spoke, languidly, almost feebly: “I never like to be awkward, but I wouldn’t like you to take on the responsibility of trying to get me into a car at my age. My joints are stiff, you know. And then there’s my heart.”

  The policemen looked at old Jim carefully. He certainly appeared very frail, and he sounded very frail indeed. Yet they had promised Mrs. Heslop not only to find her father-in-law and her son but to bring the old man home at once.

  “Yet I’d like to be home, too,” said old Jim. “It’s been a strain … at my age … so early in the morning … so far. …” He let his voice die away and closed his eyes.

  “We should get him home somehow, quickly,” said the first policeman, and the second nodded; they both looked anxious.

  In the anxious silence, old Jim suddenly said, “Ah!” so that both policemen jumped. He had opened his eyes, and now he said: “You could tow me home.”

  “Tow you home?” repeated the policemen.

  “Fasten my wheelchair to the back of your car with a towrope,” said old Jim. “Pull me home on a towrope.”

  The policemen looked at each other, neither ever having been asked to tow anyone in a wheelchair before or heard of such a thing being done.

  “It’d be a question for the Traffic Department, probably,” said the first policeman.

  “There’d be rules and regulations about it,” said the second.

  “For instance, he’d have to have his own number plate,” said the first.

  “Aye, he’d have been turned into a trailer.”

  Old Jim, not being able to follow the policemen’s conversation but seeing their hesitation, became impatient. “If you haven’t a towrope, handcuffs would do. You could handcuff the wheelchair to the back of the car. Surely you have handcuffs in a police car.”

  “But you’d be a trailer!” shouted the first policeman.

  “I’d be what?” asked old Jim; it was not clear whether he had not heard or could not believe what he had heard.

  The first policeman shook his head despairingly. “And it wouldn’t be safe, anyway,” he said.

  “Unless, of course,” said the second policeman, “we drove very slowly and carefully.” He seemed to see possibilities in the idea after all.

  “There is that,” the first policeman agreed. “But, however you look at it, he’d be a trailer; I doubt it wouldn’t be legal.”

  At this point, young Jim surprised them by speaking. “But nobody’d see.”

  It was quite true; the hour was still so early that there was small danger of anybody’s being on the roads between Little and Great Barley. On the other hand, the likelihood of such an encounter increased with every minute that the day advanced. If they were to act at all, they must act quickly.

  The second policeman persuaded the first. It turned out, anyway, that they always carried a good rope in the car. With this they fastened the front of the wheelchair—with old Jim still in it—to the back of the police car. Young Jim tucked his grandfather well into the chair and then got into the back of the car. One policeman sat with him, and the other drove.

  They went very slowly—that is, for a car, but much more quickly than a wheelchair could ever have been pushed. From the beginning to the end of the journey young Jim and the policeman with him kept watch through the rear window. Young Jim pressed his nose against the glass until it went white like a piece of pastry, and his eyes were very anxious.

  At first old Jim looked anxious, too, but the faster he went, the more confident he seemed to become. His white hair streamed in the wind, and he began to signal to the two at the back for the car to go faster still. They did not pass his message on to the driver. Already the wheelchair was traveling at a speed it had never dreamed of before; its whizzing wheels gave out an unbroken, high-pitched squeak. “There’ll be an accident!” the wheels screamed. “An accident!”

  There was no accident, nor were they observed by anyone—unless you counted a horse looking over a gate beyond Little Barley. He watched their coming, but when they were almost level with him, his nerve seemed to break, for he galloped off, with his back hooves wildly in the air. Old Jim waved to him with one hand, clinging to the side of the wheelchair with the other.

  Not even in Great Barley were there people about or traffic.

  They turned into the housing estate, and the only sign of life was a figure drooping over one of the front gates: Mrs. Heslop, waiting. The police car drew up beside her, and she looked at it, and at young Jim’s face at the window, and at old Jim in the wheelchair behind. He was waving to her, and now that the car engine was turned off, they could hear that he was singing, had probably been singing all the way. “Hearts of Oak” it must have been, because he now broke off at “Steady, boys, steady!”

  Young Jim got out of the car quickly and said: “Mum, I’ve come all the way from Little Barley in a police car!”

  Mrs. Heslop shot out an arm, perhaps to catch him to her, perhaps to slap him, but instead of doing either, she suddenly put both hands up to her face and burst into tears.

  Poor Mrs. Heslop! Already it had been a long and very trying morning for her. She had not been woken at dawn by the gentle sounds of their setting forth, but a little later, waking of her own accord, she had listened to the silence of the house, and it had suddenly seemed to her unnatural in a way that it had never seemed before. She told herself that she was being foolish, and she tried to sleep again, but in the end she had got up and looked into young Jim’s bedroom and found him gone. Then she had found old Jim gone, and the wheelchair, too. Then she had started out wildly to look for them and had only been sent home by the comforting promises of the police. Since then she had waited at the gate.

  One policeman unhitched old Jim’s wheelchair while the other put his arm round Mrs. Heslop’s shoulder and told her there was no need to cry now; everyone was safe and sound.

  They all went indoors, and Mrs. Heslop recovered sufficiently to boil a kettle and make a pot of tea. The policemen stayed to drink a cup and then went off, and then Mrs. Heslop settled down to cooking a proper, hot breakfast for old Jim and young Jim. “Biscuits’.” she snorted, and she served them with porridge and fried eggs and bacon and hot toast and marmalade, and more tea.

  After breakfast, old Jim said that he was not really tired after all and that he would like to sit out in the shade, in his usual chair, at the front of the house, and young Jim made him comfortable there. Young Jim wanted to stay with him, but Mrs. Heslop put her foot down and made him go upstairs to bed, where sure enough, he was soon falling asleep.

  Mrs. Heslop saw him into bed and drew his curtains against the bright sunlight and left him; it was never much use, she knew, to question young Jim. She went downstairs and into the front garden. She planted herself in front of her father-in-law, so that he could not but pay some attention to her.

  “Granddad!” she shouted. “Why did you do it?”

  Old Jim nodded at her and said: “And I hope they’re having as good weather by the seaside. I’ve something to tell young Maisie, too, when she comes back. That reminds me. …” He reached into his pocket and brought out the tape measure. “Here’s your tape measure that we borrowed, my dear.”

  He held it out to Mrs. Heslop, and she took it, but as in a dream of amazement and carelessly. She only held it by one end, so that the rest of the t
ape fell and rolled around her feet, encircling them.

  Mrs. Heslop stared at the tape measure and then at old Jim. “But why, Granddad, why—why?”

  “Aye,” said the old man, “those days…” He laughed to himself. “But what my grandfather would have said to see me bowling along this morning! The best of both worlds—that’s what I’ve had.”

  “You and young Jim …” said Mrs. Heslop wonderingly, still standing within her magic circle of tape, staring at him. No longer was she expecting or hoping to be heard, but oddly, this time old Jim must partly have heard her.

  “Aye, he’s a good boy.” He blinked sleepily into the sunlight. “And you know, although he’s not big for his age, maybe he has the makings of a big man in him.” His eyelids drooped, then rose again. “Maybe he’ll grow to be six foot, after all, like his grandfather.” Old Jim settled himself into his chair; he was going to sleep, and he knew it. “Or even seven foot, maybe, like his great-great-grandfather.” His eyelids fell again. He slept.

  Upstairs in his bedroom, listening in his half sleep to the booming voice from outside, young Jim had begun dreaming of giants and police cars.

  The Great Blackberry Pick

  Dad was against waste—waste of almost anything: electricity, time, crusts of bread. Wasted food was his special dread. Just after the summer holidays, nearing the second or third Saturday of term, “Sun now,” he would say, “frost later, and pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds of blackberries out in the hedges going to waste. Good food wasted: bramble jelly”—their mother flinched, perhaps remembering stained bags hanging from hooks in the kitchen—“jelly, and jam, and blackberry-and-apple pies. …” He smacked his lips. Dad seemed to think he must mime enjoyment to make them understand.

  Val said eagerly, “I love blackberries.”

  Her father beamed on her.

  Chris said, “I don’t. I don’t like the seeds between my teeth.”

  “Worse under your plate,” their mother murmured.

  Like their mother, Dad had false teeth, but he did not acknowledge them. He said scornfully, “In bought jam the seeds are artificial. Tiny chips of wood. Put in afterward.”

  “Nice job, carving ‘em to shape,” said Chris.

  Peter was not old enough to think that funny, and Val decided not to laugh, so nobody did.

  Peter said, “Do we have to go?”

  “Bicycles,” said Dad. “Everyone on bicycles and off into the country, blackberry picking. Five of us should gather a good harvest.”

  “I’ll make the picnic,” Val said. She liked that kind of thing. She looked anxiously around her family. Their mother had turned her face away from them to gaze out of the window. Peter and Chris had fixed their eyes upon Dad. Peter would have to go, although much bicycling made his legs ache, but Chris, the eldest of them, as good as grown up, Chris said: “I’m not coming.”

  “Oh, Chris!” Val cried.

  Dad said: “Not coming?”

  “No.”

  “And why not?”

  “I’ve been asked to go somewhere else on Saturday. I’m doing something else. I’m not coming.”

  No one had ever said that to Dad before. What would happen? Dad began to growl in his throat like a dog preparing to attack. Then the rumble died away. Dad said: “Oh, have it your own way then.”

  So that was one who wouldn’t go blackberrying this year.

  Nor did their mother go. When Saturday came, she didn’t feel well, she said. She’d stay at home and have their supper ready for them.

  Two fewer didn’t matter, because Dad begged the two Turner children from next door. Mrs. Turner was glad to be rid of them for the day, and they had bicycles.

  “Bicycles,” said Dad, “checked in good order, tires pumped, brakes working, and so on. Then, the picnic.” Val smiled and nodded. “Something to gather the blackberries in,” went on Dad. “Not paper bags or rubbishy receptacles of that sort. Baskets, plastic carrier bags, anything like that. Something that will go into a bicycle basket or can be tied on somewhere. Something that will bear a weight of blackberries. Right?”

  Val said, “Yes,” so that Dad could go on: “All assemble in the road at nine-thirty. I’ll have the map.”

  There they were on this fine Saturday morning in September at half past nine: Val and Peter and their dad and the two Turner children from next door, all on bicycles.

  They had about four miles on the main road, riding very carefully, two by two or sometimes in single file, with Dad in the rear shouting to them. Then Dad directed them to turn off the main road into a side road, and after that it was quiet country roads all the way. As Chris had once said, you had to hand it to Dad: Dad was good with a map; he knew where he was going.

  Country roads, and then lanes that grew doubtful of themselves and became mere grassy tracks. These were the tracks that in the old days people had made on foot or on horseback, going from one village to the next. Nowadays almost no one used them.

  They were pushing their bikes now or riding them with their teeth banging in their gums. The Turner children each fell off once, and one cried.

  “Quiet now!” Dad said severely, as though the blackberries were shy wild creatures to be taken by surprise.

  They left their bicycles stacked against one another and followed Dad on foot, walking steeply through an afforestation of pines and then out into a large clearing on a hillside, south-facing and overgrown with brambles.

  You had to hand it to Dad; it was a marvelous place.

  The bushes were often more than a man’s height and densely growing, but with irregular passages between them. The pickers could edge through narrow gaps or stoop under stems arched to claw and clutch. For most of the time they wore their anoraks with the hoods up.

  The blackberries grew thickly. They were very big and ripe—many already overripe, with huge bluebottles squatting on them.

  “Eat what you want, to begin with,” said Dad. “Soon enough you won’t want to eat anymore. Then just pick and go on picking.” He smiled. He was good-tempered. Everything was going well.

  They separated at once, to pick. They went burrowing about among the bushes, meeting each other, exclaiming, drawn to each other’s blackberry clumps, because always someone else’s blackberries seemed bigger, riper.

  They picked and picked and picked and picked. Their teeth and tongues and lips were stained, but their fingers were stained the most deeply, because they went on picking—on and on and on—after they had stopped eating. Dad had been right about that, too. But himself, he never ate any blackberries at all, just picked.

  The brambles scratched them. Val had a scratch on her forehead that brought bright blood oozing down into her eyebrow. “Nothing!” said Dad. He tied her head with a handkerchief to stop the bleeding. The handkerchief had been a present to him; it was red with white polka dots. When he had tied it round Val’s head, he called her his pirate girl.

  Then he looked into her plastic carrier bag. “Why, pirate girl, you’ve picked more blackberries than anyone else!”

  When Dad had gone off again, Peter began to dance round Val. “Pirate girl! Pirate girl!” Val didn’t mind; no, she really enjoyed it. She felt happy to have picked more blackberries than anyone else, and for Dad to have said so, and to be wearing Dad’s handkerchief, and to be teased for what he had called her. The Turner children appeared round a bramble corner, and she was glad of the audience. Peter was good-humored, too. His legs had stopped aching, and he had forgotten that they would ache again. The children were in early-afternoon sunshine and blackberry-scented air, they had picked enough blackberries to be proud of, the picnic would be any time now, and Dad was in a good temper.

  “Pirate girl!” Peter teased. He set down his basket of blackberries to pick a solitary stem of hogweed, dry and straight and stiff. With this he made cutlass slashes at Val.

  There was no weapon near to hand for Val, so she used her carrier bag to parry him. She swung the bag to and fro, trying to bang his
stem and break it. The weight in the carrier made it swing slowly, heavily, like a pendulum. Val was getting nowhere in the fight, but she was enjoying it. She hissed fiercely between her teeth. Peter dodged. The bag swung.

  Dad came back around the bushes and saw them. Val couldn’t stop the swinging at once, and at once an awful thing began to happen. The swinging was too much for the weight of the blackberries in the bag. The bottom did not fall out—after all, the bag was plastic—but the plastic where she gripped it began to stretch. The handle holes elongated swiftly and smoothly. Swiftly and smoothly the plastic around them thinned, thinned out into nothingness. No ripping, no violent severance, but the bag gave way.

  The blackberries shot out at Dad’s feet. They pattered impudently over his Wellington boots, nestled there in a squashy heap. Val, looking down at them, knew they were wasted. She had gathered them, and she had literally thrown them away. She lifted her eyes to Dad’s face. His brows were heavy, his lips open and drawn back; his teeth showed, ground together.

  Then he growled, in his way.

  She turned and ran. She ran and ran, as fast as she could, to get away. Fast and far she ran; now, as she ran, there were pine trees on either side of her, an audience that watched her. Then she tripped and fell painfully over metal, and realized that she had reached the bicycles. She pulled her own bicycle from the heap and got on it and rode. The way was downhill and rough, and she was riding too fast for carefulness. She was shaken violently as though someone were shaking a wicked child.

  She followed the track by which they had come, then diverged into another. The way grew smoother; she passed a farmhouse; the surface under her wheels was made up now. She took another turn and another and was in a narrow road between high hedges. She cycled on and came to a crossroads, two quiet country roads quietly meeting and crossing, with no signpost saying anything. Without consideration she took the turn toward the downward sloping of the sun and cycled on more slowly. She knew that she was lost, and she was glad of it.