Читать книгу A Piece of the Sky is Missing - David Nobbs - Страница 10

Sorrows

October, 1946. Robert was a day boy and others of the boys were boarders. Boarders were people who were better than day boys who were people whose noses ran. Boarders knew more than day boys because when the day boys went home the boarders went upstairs and had sin upstairs, whatever that was. You didn’t know everything when you were young.

Robert wanted to be good and serve his God. Sometimes he would fool around and all the boys laughed but this was not what life was for. Life was for fighting against sin upstairs but it would be foolish to admit this to the boarders. Robert was quite a strange boy because he had led a sheltered life, but he thought that people jolly well ought to lead sheltered lives.

One day Big Joan was cleaning the corridor with her mops and brushes. Not only was Big Joan a bit of a tease but she was something to do with sin upstairs. Robert walked past Big Joan and she said: ‘Hey, don’t I get a kiss?’ and he went along the corridor which smelt of rissoles and carrots, and he went through a swing door, which led to the cloakroom where the day-bugs left their coats. There was dark green paint everywhere. His childhood was inextricably bound up with dark green paint.

In the cloakroom were Stevens Major and Sewell and Waller. They were boarders.

Sewell said: ‘Do you love Big Joan, Bellamy?’

Robert said: ‘No,’ and turned red.

‘Don’t you like girls?’ said Stevens Major.

‘No,’ said Robert.

They laughed. They were enemies. Perkins and Thomas and Willoughby were friends and he wished that Bernard Howes was a friend, but these were enemies.

Waller came at him and grabbed his arm. Robert wasn’t afraid of people in ones but there were three of these. There always were.

Sewell grabbed his other arm. He was ashamed of not liking girls, and besides it wasn’t true.

‘I like some girls,’ he said.

He was angry with himself for saying this. He lashed out, but there were three of them and they pinned him against the wall. Sewell smelt of sick and Waller smelt of feet.

‘Which girls do you like?’ said Stevens Major.

He didn’t answer. They twisted his arm. Stevens Major kicked him.

‘Which girls?’ said Sewell, twisting his arm some more. He wasn’t going to tell them, but they kicked him and twisted his arm until he thought it was going to break, and his eyes were full of tears, and eventually he told them.

‘Cerise,’ he said.

They let go. The door opened and Big Joan came in. If he had hung on a bit longer they would never have known.

Big Joan looked at them suspiciously, and smiled at Robert. Her smile turned him to jelly.

The three boarders ran off down the corridor, shouting: ‘Bellamy loves Cerise. Bellamy loves Cerise,’ and behind them the door went boing-boing-boing.

September, 1948. Bernard Howes had come to his new school and now a year later Robert followed him. He wished he could be friends with Bernard Howes, who was superior without being snotty.

After three days of term they met. Bernard was in a different house, and a year senior, but it was all right to talk to him because they had been at the same prep school.

‘Hullo, Howes,’ he said.

‘Hullo, Bellamy,’ said Bernard.

‘I say,’ said Robert hurriedly, before Bernard moved on and was lost. ‘Could we meet some time so that you could show me round. It’d be a terrific help.’

‘I’ll see you this afternoon, after early grind,’ said Bernard.

‘After what?’

‘Early grind.’

A master passed by. They said: ‘Hullo, sir.’

‘That’s Stinky R,’ said Bernard. ‘See you on the corner of Lower Broad half an hour after early grind.’

‘Where’s Lower Broad?’

‘Go down the little lagger-bagger behind the ogglers’ tonkhouse, turn right at Pot Harry’s, and you can’t miss it’.

Another master passed by and they said: ‘Hullo, sir.’

‘That was Toady J,’ said Bernard. ‘O.K., see you this afternoon, Bellamy. Bring your iron and we’ll go for a hum.’

Robert didn’t find Bernard. He didn’t take his iron and they didn’t go for a hum, because by the time he had found out what all the school slang meant it was two hours after early grind.

He walked away from the school, anger mingling with depression, the depression urging him to run away, the anger telling him to return and fight it out. He nodded to Clammy L, barely seeing him. Take me away from this horrible place, God, he said.

He walked up the lane towards the heath. I’ll never return. Never never never, he thought. I’ll die of exposure. Then they’ll be sorry.

Twenty minutes later he turned round and went back to school. He got there just in time for late grind.

October, 1948. It was Sunday, he was thirteen years of age, and school wasn’t quite so bad now. He had managed to find Bernard Howes again and this time Bernard had been decent and had given him some useful tips from his Olympian heights. Lessons were quite good and chapel was the best thing of all, although of course you had to pretend that it was absolutely awful.

He went for a walk up the lane again. School wasn’t so good yet that you didn’t need to go off up lanes on your own sometimes.

He reached the heath, and saw one of the older boys walking towards him. He knew that the older boy was up to no good, and expected, being thirteen, that he was going to be beaten up.

‘Hullo,’ said the older boy.

‘Hullo.’

‘You’re a new-bug, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Bellamy.’

The older boy walked along beside him. He was about eighteen and almost six foot. Perhaps nothing was wrong after all.

They were walking down a narrow path which led towards the edge of the heath, through gorse bushes. It was a lonely, windswept place. Robert wished there was someone about.

‘Which house are you in, Bellamy?’ The older boy seemed nervous.

‘Drake.’

‘That’s quite a good house. Spotty D isn’t a bad chap. Where do you come from?’

‘Richmond, but we live in the Cotswolds just now.’

‘What do your parents do?’

‘My father’s dead. My mother’s bought a house in the Cotswolds and she’s modernized it. Now she’s going to sell it, and there’s another place she hopes to get in Sussex.’

The older boy put his arm round him. Robert shrugged it off and began to run. The older boy caught him up and rugby-tackled him. He tried to get up but the older boy overpowered him. He lashed out and struck the older boy one or two good blows, he was the better fighter, but in the end he had to give in because he was more than four years the younger.

The older boy took Robert’s trousers down. The grass was damp and repulsive.

‘I can’t help it, Bellamy,’ said the older boy. ‘I’m sorry.’

It was soon over. The older boy didn’t say anything, just walked away. Robert pulled up his trousers and walked away too. When he got back to school there was bread and peanut butter. He didn’t report the incident.

‘We’re making excellent progress,’ said Dr Schmuck.

April, 1949. It was early afternoon, a traditional April day of sudden spring showers and brief bursts of warm sunshine. Outside, in the traditional churchyard, the traditional rooks were cawing. All was well with the world, except for Mr Randolph Clegg. Mr Randolph Clegg was his mother’s friend, and he looked rather like Hitler.

His mother had bought the potentially charming but ruinously dilapidated Elizabethan cottage for a song – ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’ had been the comment of embryonic funster Robert Bellamy, thirteen, to the mild but gratifying amusement of his colleague Bernard Howes, fourteen. Now she was engaged, in company with Mr Clegg, her ‘business associate’, in knocking down a dividing wall.

At the end of the war his mother, her health much improved, had been kept busy looking after poor Nanny, who had retired permanently to bed, a prey to malaria, bronchitis, rheumatic fever, scurvy, Braithwaite’s Disease and fear of lizards. His mother had nursed her devotedly until she died, late in 1946. His mother, who didn’t need the money, had decided that she must occupy herself, and had gone into the business of renovating old houses. Robert had immediately become a boarder.

Now home for the Easter holidays Robert stood awkwardly in an obscure corner of the cottage’s low-beamed living-room, hoping that his mother would notice him and that Mr Clegg wouldn’t.

His mother was up the step ladder, wearing trousers. She was really rather a smasher. He didn’t know what she saw in Mr Clegg. Adults fell for very peculiar people sometimes.

‘If you’re going to hang around here, son, fetch me some nails,’ said Mr Clegg, handing Robert a box of odds and ends.

Robert hunted through the box. There were no nails. Mr Clegg would blame him, silently. Mr Clegg would take one look at the box and find nails galore. Vicious, spiteful, disappearing nails.

Robert liked to help, and at first his mother had encouraged him, but lately, seeing that he was never any help at all, she hadn’t bothered. Robert knew that he wasn’t by nature helpless. He was only helpless when Mr Clegg was around. Mr Clegg rendered him mute and helpless.

‘What do you think this is holding up?’ said Mr Clegg.

‘I was wondering,’ said his mother.

‘Nothing, if you ask me.’

‘I don’t see what it can be.’

‘Well, no. I mean, look, it ends there.’

‘Yes.’

Mr Clegg was standing very close to his mother, just touching her back with his front. She turned and gave him a look which said: ‘Careful. Not in front of the boy’. He gave her a look which said: ‘Blast the interfering little brat. You think of him too much. He wouldn’t notice anyway, the steaming great loon. Look at him, standing there all thumbs. Hasn’t found a single nail, even. You can’t spend your whole time worrying about him’. She gave him a look which said: ‘Now, Randy, we’ve been through all that’.

Robert had once heard his mother say: ‘If you’d only try to be nice to him, Randy.’ Mr Clegg had said: ‘But I do. I try all the time. I’m just not a child person, Emmie,’ and his mother had said: ‘He is taking to you a bit, isn’t he?’ and Mr Clegg had said: ‘I’ve tried to get him to call me Randolph. He won’t. It’s Mr Clegg this, Mr Clegg that. He does it to hurt me. I’m a sensitive man, Emmie. I’m easily hurt. You know that. I have delicate feelings. The boy knows that. Children sense these things. He calls me Mr Clegg to hurt me. He hates me.’

Robert would have been prepared to call him Randolph if he was even remotely Randolphish. That would have been only fair. But he never was. He was Mr Cleggish, and the more Randolphish he tried to be, the more Mr Cleggish he became. You will not have my mother, vowed Robert.

Mr Clegg began the simple task of removing the short length of wood which was holding nothing up. Robert felt that it might be dangerous, but they knew better than he.

Twice Mr Clegg’s hands touched Robert’s mother and paused momentarily before passing on. That sort of thing gave adults a big thrill. They really were the most extraordinary people. Especially since Mr Clegg’s hands were like uncooked fillets of plaice.

The length of wood was so rotten it came away in their hands. Two cross beams and a whole section of the ceiling collapsed with it. One of the beams struck his mother across the head. Mr Clegg fell in a shower of plaster.

Half his mother’s money went to Mr Clegg and half to Robert. Half of Robert went to Aunt Maud and half to Aunt Margaret. It was the fairest solution the family could find.

September, 1953. The first dark night at Catterick. Lectures from the hut sergeant and the two hut corporals. Practice at making bed-packs. Your bed-pack is not considered to be up to standard, probably because you have a refined voice. Out it goes on to a soaking flowerbed. Finally at 12.30 a.m. the lights are put out. You make your bed in the dark, and struggle into the damp sheets. Your bed smells of wet earth. The hut smells of huts. In the morning you are awakened at 4.14. After two and a half hours devoted to making straight lines round the barrack-room floor with boot polish you are allowed five minutes for breakfast. After two days of this sort of thing you have to wear your denims for the first time. They have been issued without buttons, and you have to sew the buttons on yourself. To you this smacks more of sheer inefficiency than of inspired character building. You begin to sew them on. Your efforts do not meet with success. You begin to master the technique, but it is too late, and you find yourself on parade with safety pins in place of fly buttons, and your trousers held up by the thread from your spare pair of green drawers cellular. As you march the safety pins stick into your genitals. This hurts. The trousers begin to slip. You look down. A voice yells out: ‘You can look down when your trousers fall down, Bellamy, and not before, yunnerstand?’ The voice says: ‘You can look down now, Bellamy.’ You pull your trousers up.

The squad halts and the corporal summons you to the front. He recognizes you as someone who makes the others laugh and is dangerous. He would like to break you. The corporal is a little tin god and a sadist. When he makes a joke, you laugh. When you make a joke, he does not laugh. He permits you to do up your trousers, commenting: ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. He’s tying himself up with his green drawers cellular.’ Obedient titters from F Squad. ‘You think you’re bloody funny, don’t you, Bellamy?’ says the corporal. ‘Yes, corporal.’ ‘Right. Then we’ll all laugh at you.’ The voice is calm, spiteful, holding great power in reserve. He is not altogether an unsubtle operator. He has a sense of rhythm, and even rations his swear words. ‘You will all go ha ha ha by numbers. Squad will laugh at Bellamy by numbers, squaaaaaaaaa – wait for it – squaaaaaaaaaaa krwghaaaarrrh. Tups three. Ha. Tups three. Ha. Tups three. Ha ha ha. Tups three. Stand at ice. Tups three. Stand easy. Are you funny, Bellamy?’ ‘They seem to think so.’ Titters and gasps. ‘Shurrup. They seem to think so what?’ ‘They seem to think so, corporal.’ ‘I suppose Mummy thinks you’re very funny, Bellamy, does she? I suppose the mater thinks you fraightfully amusing.’ ‘My mother’s dead, corporal.’ ‘I don’t care what she is, Bellamy, you’re in the army now. Any more impertinence you’re on a charge, yunnerstand, yunnerstand?’ ‘Yes, corporal.’ Your breath stinks of fascism. ‘Now listen, Bellamy, I can break you, I can break you just like that, yunnerstand? Yunnerstand?’ ‘Yes, corporal.’ ‘I’ve broken wogs, I’ve broken krauts, I can fucking break you, yunnerstand?’ ‘Yes, corporal.’ ‘If I have any more trouble from you I’ll shove your rifle so far up your fucking arse you’ll be coughing point two two bullets. Yunnerstand? Eh? Eh? Eh?’ ‘Yes, corporal.’ ‘What’s wrong? Itching, are you? Got crabs? What do you think you are, the London Zoo? Eh? Eh?’ ‘No, corporal.’ ‘God help me, he’s got safety pins in his balls. What’s wrong with you, Bellamy? Eh?’ ‘Nothing, corporal.’ ‘Potential bloody officer? You’re not fit to be a potential bloody sanitary inspector. Now get fell in.’

When you aren’t marching you’re up to your elbows in cold greasy water in a cookhouse sink, and when you aren’t up to your elbows in cold greasy water in a cookhouse sink you’re picking the loose leaves off the trees so that passing officers won’t be struck and possibly seriously injured by falling leaves. Three huts down the row there is a suicide.

January, 1956. All he remembered about Sally afterwards was that she had dark hair and a perfect physique. He met her at a party. She made a pass at him. Therefore he took her home. She was drunk, perhaps also a nymphomaniac. She kissed him with tremendous pressure and perfect teeth. She forced him back on the divan and ran her body over him as if he was a harp and she was a musician’s passionate fingers. They asked no questions about each other.

It was easy. She practically did it for him. He could have stopped at any moment, but didn’t. After all, he was only giving her what she wanted. It wasn’t hard to imagine a society in which she would get him on the national health.

Afterwards he wondered who had been using whom the most. He felt for Sally a disagreeable mixture of disgust and pity. He felt very young and small. He felt both a sinner and a prig. He lay in bed, no longer a virgin, ready now for Sonia, and he wondered just how much he had lost. Nothing, he suspected. And that was terrifying.

November, 1966. ‘She was a good woman. We shall all miss her,’ said the Rev. J. W. Scott.

‘I know I shall,’ said Robert.

‘She never came to church, but she was generous in her support of all our activities,’ said the Rev. J. W. Scott.

‘So I believe,’ said Robert.

‘She has been called to a better place,’ said the Rev. J. W. Scott.

‘She’s dead,’ said Robert.