Mother’s Boy, page 32
Judging from the things he had heard men say over the last few days, ever since word had arrived of MacArthur’s accepting the principal surrender in Tokyo Bay, and people had begun to mock Emperor Hirohito’s understatement in his pre-surrender broadcast for saying, ‘the war situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage’, he had assumed that this final gratification for the victors would be met with ugliness. Charles felt sure someone would shout an obscenity, which would lead to others. He had imagined one of the more hot-tempered Australians might even muscle through to block the admiral and general’s path, and spit. But, clearly, he had watched far too many American films on board, and there was no such break in decorum. The stare of the many as the two were led away was worse than any hurled tomato, the disciplined silence more contemptuous than any insult. And the intensity of the whoops and shouts when the command came to fall in was unlike anything Charles had ever heard.
There was no cheering when they finally took on their first band of POWs later that day. The shock and disgust were too great for that. As the men were brought on board, so many shuffling skeletons and many too weak to walk at all, marked by disease, parasites and cruelty, it was clear why the surrender had been signed first; decorum in the face of the enemy leaders would now have been impossible to maintain.
With the POWs, by some bureaucratic anomaly, arrived a delivery of post. On a ship the size of Glory letters took hours to sort and be delivered, and Charles was only handed his during a noticeably numbed supper; the sight of their starved and beaten brothers in filthy rags had taken the edge off everybody’s appetite for roast pork and boiled carrots.
There was an unwritten naval rule that, though a man clearly had news to share, he was accorded a cushion of incuriosity when handed letters in company. Charles was particularly glad of this tonight. There was a letter from Mother, short as hers often were, but containing an unintentionally funny clipping from the local paper that made him smile as she had known it would. There was a card from Aunt Maggie, which touched him and made him feel bad for not having thought to write to her directly rather than always relying on Mother to pass on any news to her. And then there was a letter from Bucknall. Charles had written to him a while ago, when Glory stopped to refuel at Gibraltar, and immediately regretted that his letter had been riskily indiscreet and, to Bucknall’s cynical eye at least, unappealingly needy and nostalgic.
He didn’t recognise the handwriting because Bucknall had always been at pains never to write him even the most innocuous note when they were both at Cabbala. Now he wrote:
Dear Charles,
Your letter went to my home address, of course, as that was all you had and was forwarded to me on my ship by Sylvia, my wife. That’s right. Sylvia the Jenny who was so keen on the Andrews Sisters. I can only hope she didn’t open it first, knowing her inquisitive nature as I now do. It was very good to hear from you, but you must understand that my life has changed now that I’m a respectable married man etc. I greatly enjoyed our shared time at, (or is it on?) HMS Cabbala and I shall always be grateful for your friendship and for the many things you taught me and encouraged me to try. I suspect our lives will take rather different paths now but do keep in touch, Charles. Just be a little more discreet in what you write in future, matey. There are things the Little Woman would never understand.
All good wishes, yours, Edgar
As the meal progressed, he shared the funny newspaper clipping with his neighbours, making sure it made them laugh. He folded Bucknall’s letter away and experienced a flush of anger, of which none of these new friends would have thought him capable. He would never make the mistake again of contacting Bucknall, but he would keep his letter always, he decided, long after this anger had past, as a kind of insurance and reminder. Possibly, over the years to come, he would reserve the right to send him oddly intimate postcards at random, unsigned, purely to unnerve.
MR CAUSLEY – 1948
It was a bitterly cold, wintry Friday afternoon so Laura was making a fish pie for their supper, one of those comforting recipes she knew so well she could make it with no need for checking details in her notebook. She had been taught it long, long ago by Mrs Ashbridge in the high-windowed kitchen at Teignmouth. She had already boiled two eggs and left them to cool and had now brought the pan of milk to a simmer with a bay leaf, peppercorns and some parsley stalks beneath a piece of salmon and one of smoked haddock. She set the egg timer for three minutes, then took the pan off the heat and used a fish slice to lift the two fish pieces on to a plate to cool. If they still had a cat it would be wreathing around her ankles by this stage. She missed having a pet keenly but felt getting a new one should be a decision taken by them both, and Charles had been too preoccupied by his writing and teaching recently for her to have much of his attention. She knew him so well she could read his moods like a farmer read weather, knew when to ask for favours or decisions and when it was better to hold her peace and bide her time.
The new portable wireless he had given her for her birthday was chattering on, her near-constant companion in the kitchen by day now that she was no longer laundering. The Labour government’s exciting reforms were pressing ahead although Launceston remained as stuck-in-the-mud Tory as ever. Free good health and good education for all and cheaper housing were wonderful things Laura had never thought to see brought in, and yet the attitudes she heard expressed when waiting to be served in the shops of the town sometimes brought her home clenching her fists in indignation. Charles loved this and called her his firebrand.
Now the fish pieces were cool enough to handle, she used a blunt knife to tease the thick skin off them and on to a saucer, which she carried out to the yard. There was a feral cat out there sometimes, and she had taken to feeding it without telling Charles. It was a female, a scrawny, blotchily marked thing with a badly chewed ear. Laura had little hope of taming it. It would take the food she left down for it but yowled if she made any move to approach. It hissed at her fiercely even as she was setting down food for it. It was there now and darted away as she came out, only to turn round, smelling fish. All cats loved fish skin, she knew. Sure enough, the stray darted forward and rose up on its back paws in a kind of beseeching motion even as it hissed warnings at her.
‘Silly thing,’ she said, and set down the saucer. It made short work of the skin, tugging each piece off a little way from her, purring loudly as it chewed it down but breaking off to throw ungrateful glares Laura’s way.
She checked the small amount of washing on the line. It was as dry as it would get outside at that time of year so she unpegged it, draping the clothes over her shoulder as she went and dropping the pegs into the gingham peg bag she had sewn long ago and which must be past thirty now, as old as Charles. Inside, she hung the laundry on the wooden rack near the range. She could iron it in the morning.
Charles had surprised her by taking up one of the further education grants for returning servicemen to spend a year away in Peterborough training as a teacher, then delighted her by taking up a junior post at the old National School just up the hill from their front door. He said he had nearly set by enough now to take out a mortgage so they could own the house rather than continue renting it, and he had insisted she stop working and retire. Or stop working for others, at least.
She realised he had in effect made her the kind of wife she had never been able to be for Charlie, whose work was entirely for her loved ones: cleaning, shopping, cooking, ironing and the rest. Laura could never have been a woman who sat there and did nothing, or who had another woman in to do work she could do better herself, but it meant that her days now were easy compared to what they had been. Charles settled all the bills and tucked money into her purse every Saturday morning: money for housekeeping and for herself.
‘But shouldn’t you be saving?’ she asked him. ‘For when you want to settle down?’
‘Hadn’t you noticed?’ he teased her. ‘I am settled, or as settled down as I’ll ever be.’
He said it with one of his slightly shy gestures of affection, a touch to her shoulder as he passed her armchair to fetch more coal for the fire.
There was a pattern to their weekdays now. Breakfast together was followed by his heading off to school, looking smart and respectable in jacket and tie, yet far more approachable than the teachers of his she remembered. Laura then cleaned the house and shopped, and went to the Women’s Institute if it was a WI day. When Charles returned late in the afternoon, he had tea with her and heard about her day and told her funny stories about his. Sometimes his stories were sad, of course; some of the children were still so poor or neglected, and compassion could make him quite angry. Then he swiftly did any marking he had to do before retiring to his room to write.
He was writing stories and poems. Mainly poems. She had learned to regard the clatter of his typewriter as a good sign as it meant he had finished something and was making a fair copy. If the typewriter lay silent, he would become moody and she would tread with care. She would no sooner have asked about his writing than she would have tried to stroke the feral cat. They spoke about his teaching – he often asked her opinion about this or that child or family, as he liked to say she had a village postmistress’ ability to retain local family histories – but she sensed his writing was mattering more and more to him.
He had never courted in earnest, to her knowledge, and she was coming to feel that was now impossible, for the writing demanded an intense emotional attention, a devotion almost, he could now never spare for a person. There was no more talk of plays. The silk dressing gown phase had passed, apparently. Sometimes, when dusting his room, she read whatever lay on top of the various piles on his desk. If it wasn’t covered, she felt this was allowed. She didn’t understand much modern poetry. She had tried and abandoned his copies of T. S. Eliot. What he was writing, though, didn’t feel like that. It felt as direct and arresting as someone seizing your cuff to tell you something as you were leaving church. It excited and unsettled her, but she had no idea what would happen to it all. She knew writers of romantic novels made a handsome living, but it was hard to believe poetry would ever pay the bills as securely as teaching did. The need for the one was so evident compared to the need for the other.
On Saturdays, Charles often took himself off on excursions, visits to old churches or long walks across Bodmin Moor or out along the coast. Sometimes he took her too, but not always. On Sundays, Laura had church, of course, to which she could never predict his coming. (He said he felt nearer God when a church was empty, which was perhaps just his clever way of letting her down gently.) She never challenged him about this; if ever tempted to, mildly humiliated at the sight of people attending in big family groups when she came all alone, she remembered Douglas saying how the war had killed God for him, and held her tongue. She was fairly sure Charles had seen terrible things in the war, things that gave him bad dreams that would have him shouting out in his sleep or pacing the house in his dressing gown at night, but which she dreaded him sharing with her. They always had a good Sunday lunch together after church, often with friends or family, which was worship of a kind.
They rarely argued. They could have done all the time, because their temperaments were so alike, but she had learned when to step back. Occasionally she mis-stepped, though, and there were, by his fastidious standards, fireworks. One day she had been reading the local paper, as he read the national one, and she read him out a court report because he liked lurid stories about murders and the like. It concerned a group of men being sent to prison for committing acts of gross indecency just outside Callington on Kit Hill. She was genuinely baffled. Whatever could they have been doing, she wondered aloud, to merit such savage prison sentences?
‘Nobody was hurt,’ she told him. ‘It doesn’t mention any victims here.’
‘Mother, if you really don’t understand,’ he said, ‘I am the very last person who’s going to explain it to you.’
His words had been mild enough. He hadn’t sworn, which he sometimes did, like the sailor he had been, when something truly angered him. But the tone he used had been withering in a way that frightened her into an awkward silence, which was only broken when he mercifully turned on the wireless for a discussion programme he was keen to catch.
She was half way through carefully straining the fishy milk for the pie’s sauce when there was a knock at the door. She was on her way to answer it when she remembered she was still in her housecoat. She swiftly unbuttoned it, hung it on the back of the kitchen door, checked in the little kitchen mirror that her hair wasn’t wild, then went to see who it was.
A sailor stood there, his uniform just visible beneath his regulation duffel coat. He was a big man, perhaps a bit older than Charles, though with a blue-eyed, open countenance that let you immediately see the trusting boy within the weather-beaten man. He doffed his hat as she opened the door, revealing a fuzz of close-cropped auburn hair, and stepped back a little.
‘Hello?’ she said.
‘Mrs Causley?’ His accent wasn’t local.
‘Yes,’ she told him.
‘You don’t know me, though I feel I know you from all Jan’s stories. I’m his friend Cushty. We sailed on the Starburst together.’
‘Cushty, hello. Come in. I’m afraid he’s still at work, but come in and wait in the warm. He won’t be long.’
‘Are you sure? He’s not expecting me.’
He was so much bigger than Charles that he fairly loomed over her, but she felt entirely unthreatened.
‘He’ll be delighted. And so am I. He’s never had any of his navy friends visit and nobody’s ever exactly passing Launceston.’ She waved him past her. ‘Let me take your coat.’ It was heavy and smelled of man and tobacco. She had not long persuaded Charles to drop the smoking habit the Navy had encouraged with all its free cigarettes, but it was still a smell she quite liked out of doors. ‘You’re a petty officer like Charles was,’ she said, seeing his uniform.
He glanced down at his sleeve. ‘He got there well before me.’
‘But you’re a proper sailor. I mean—’
‘I’m in it for the long haul,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve been in the Navy since I left school.’
‘Goodness! Don’t your family miss you?’
‘They’re used to it.’ He shrugged. ‘Plenty more where I came from. Where’s Wang?’
She told him Wang had died two years ago and was surprised he knew of his existence.
‘Oh, we often laughed about his name,’ he said, and cleared his throat.
She led him to the front room where he sat in the armchair across from hers, Charles’s chair. She sat too, waiting for the kettle to boil.
He asked about Charles’s teaching and was amused at the thought of his working just up the road in the same school he’d gone to as a little boy.
‘It’s very Cornish of him,’ she told him. ‘Men here travel the world but then they come home and don’t budge much. Cornish roots run deep and hold fast. How long is your leave, Cushty?’
‘A whole two weeks this time,’ he said, ‘as we’ve been away so long. I thought I’d look Jan up before I head back up to Liverpool to see my folks again. I feel bad leaving it so long, but I’ve been away so much and, well, he never gave me his address.’
‘However did you find us, then?’
‘Took a while,’ he said, ‘as I didn’t know Lanson and Launceston were the same place.’
She smiled at his attempt at an upcountry accent.
‘But once I realised my mistake and got a train here from Devonport, all I had to do was say the name and there was fairly a rush to betray you. Funny, though, hearing Jan called Mr Causley, like he was a bank manager or a doctor.’
‘Why did you call him Jan?’
‘ ’Cause of Janner, I suppose. Officially. London ears hearing no difference between a Cornish accent and a Plymouth one but, well . . .’
‘Yes?’
He looked at her to gauge her reaction.
‘Jan suits him,’ he said with a grin. ‘He could be a bit prissy sometimes.’
She laughed at her own mischief. ‘He still can!’ she said. ‘You should have heard him at sixteen, though.’
He chuckled. ‘I can imagine.’ He paused, looking at her, his blue eyes shining. ‘You are so exactly as he described you, you know.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘No, in a good way. He thinks the world of you. Your strength and, what’s that word, stoicalness? I used to get quite jealous, homesick too, hearing him talk about you and this place. If you can miss a place you’ve never been. I’m very sorry about your little dog.’
‘Well . . . Wang was a good age and he went very fast, which was kind. I hate to see old dogs dragging themselves around when their back legs go.’
The front door opened and shut, and Charles called out a brisk hello as he always did.
‘In here,’ Laura called, adding, ‘You’ve a visitor,’ as she knew he disliked surprises. She stood to meet him, thinking to give him her chair as she gathered the tea things.
She had always thought it just a figure of speech but when he came to the doorway and saw Cushty she truly saw the blood drain from his face. She half-thought he might faint.
‘Hello, Jan,’ Cushty said. ‘Or is it Mr Causley now?’
Charles just stood there. ‘I . . . I thought you were dead,’ he said.
‘Charles!’ she rebuked him.
‘But I did,’ he snapped. ‘I was told the Starburst was blown in two and all hands lost.’
‘You never told me that,’ she protested.
‘Yes, well, there’s a lot of horrible things I never told you, Mother.’
‘She was,’ Cushty said. ‘Blown in two. But I wasn’t on her, was I? After Alex, I was promoted and transferred and . . . well.’ His words ran dry on seeing Charles again.
