THE FRUIT OF THIS COUNTRIE
Up in the thin blue air Gordon was
free, it was only when he came down to earth that the problems
began. Falling to earth in flames like some metal-bound Lucifer was
easier than facing the narrow future that lay ahead of him if he
survived the war. Gordon didn’t care much either way for his
sisters but he loved his mother and he didn’t want to hurt
her.
He wasn’t thinking about these
things when he met his fate. He was slightly drunk, he’d been at
some club that he didn’t know the name of, the kind of place where
things got out of hand after midnight. He’d been with a group of
Polish airmen and left because he knew he couldn’t keep up with
their drinking. And he was tired, he was so tired, he just wanted
to get back and put his head down. ‘Spot of shut-eye,’ he said,
making his excuses to the Polaks. He was staying with the sister of
a friend and her husband – nice place, very smart in Knightsbridge,
the kind the Widow would have pursed her lips at. The sister and
her husband too. Too modern. Too fast. He never got there. The
clanging of bells and the air full of brick-dust stopped
him.
The fire brigade were already there and a
lot of people standing around. Somebody said, ‘There’s people
inside, you know.’ Gordon could smell the gas from the fractured
pipes but he walked into the broken house, thinking that it must
have had a grand entrance before it was bombed – columns lay broken
across the vestibule and a length of intricate plaster cornice
tripped him up. He started choking on the dust and suddenly felt
very sober. She was standing there, veiled in dust so that you
might have thought she was a life-sized statue fallen from a niche,
but he could tell she wasn’t a statue because she smiled at him and
Gordon lifted her up in his arms and carried her out.
Outside he put her down very gently, as
if she might break if he was too rough with her. When he asked her
if she was all right, instead of answering, she put out a hand and
fingered one of the lapels on his greatcoat and smiled again – a
strange smile, very inward-seeming, as if she had an amusing secret
that she wasn’t about to tell him.
He took his coat off and wrapped her up
in it and she looked up at him, straight in his eyes in a way that
strangers never did, and whispered, My
hero. And the rest of the world around them may as well have
disappeared because the only thing Gordon could see were her
tragic, exotic eyes and the only thing he could hear was the husky
notes of her peculiar voice saying, My shoe,
I’ve lost my shoe, and Gordon laughed and dashed back into the
bombed-out building and actually found the shoe. He knew it was
ridiculous but he didn’t care. She put a hand on his shoulder to
steady herself while she put the shoe on. Her grimy naked foot was
slim with a ballerina’s arch and blood-red toe-nails – erotic and
incongruous amongst the broken limbs and wreckage that was
accumulating around them. One poor chap was brought out on a
stretcher past them as dead as a doornail. ‘Did you know him?’
Gordon asked her sympathetically but she just shook her head sadly,
Never seen him before.
Gordon was afraid she was going to walk
away now she had her shoe and he knew this was urgent. He knew this
was an important moment in his life, perhaps the most important –
full of meaning that he couldn’t quite decipher. He was going to
have to seize the moment, it would be the end of everything if he
made a mess of it. He offered her his arm, ‘Can I take you for a
cup of tea? There’s a café round the corner?’
The age of chivalry
is alive and well, she laughed, and took his arm and he could
feel how she was shaking all over, like a leaf.
Eliza was as mysterious as the
moon, waxing and waning towards him, she had her own phases –
sometimes generous, sometimes mean – and always her dark side,
unreachable, secret, hidden.
He couldn’t really believe her.
Couldn’t believe how easily she’d given herself to him, couldn’t
believe how she felt. Her silk-skin, smooth and cool, pressed
against his hot body made him fear that he was going to die. The
way she crept up from the foot of the bed, her tongue like a cat on
him, but not rough like a cat. The smell of her – the strange scent
that was partly perfume, partly her skin and partly something so
mysterious that he’d never smelt it anywhere before.
The way she said, Of course, darling, when he asked her to marry him.
Just like that, so that he was frightened because nothing this
wonderful could ever last. It would drive you mad if it did. And it
made him as free as being in the blue sky over this tiny green
country, gave him power over his mother, over Arden, over the whole
world. To begin with.
And he never did think it would
last and he wasn’t surprised when it didn’t because someone like
Eliza was never going to be happy with the meagre slice of life he
ended up offering her and he hated her for that so much that his
brain hurt with it sometimes. His failure with Eliza was his
failure with life and her contempt and her scorn were what, in his
heart, he knew he deserved. When he put his hands round her neck he
felt how easy it was to stop her, to make her quiet – to have power
over her. It was astonishing, he could squeeze the life out of her
as easily as if she was some small animal – a hare or a dove – and
he wanted to say to her, ‘There, aren’t you sorry now?’ but she was
gone and he’d destroyed the only thing that meant anything. That
was the measure of what a failure he was.
She was enchanting, spellbinding.
‘Oh she doth teach the torches to burn bright,’ Gordon said with a
self-conscious laugh to the Widow, when he first told her about the
momentous thing that had happened to him (Eliza) and watched the
Widow’s lip curl ever so slightly at this fancy talk. Gordon
couldn’t help himself, it was like being possessed. It was all he
wanted to talk about at dinner and supper, and while being paraded
around the neighbourhood by the Widow when he was on leave. Words
about Eliza fell unbidden from his mouth. ‘She’s just not like
other people,’ he said eagerly to his mother as she folded caraway
seeds into dried-egg cake mixture. ‘No?’ the Widow said, raising a
grey caterpillar eyebrow. ‘And that’s good, is it?’
Eliza stopped time. She took you into
some bright circle with her where everything stopped, time and
fear, even war. ‘Cheap glamour,’ Vinny muttered over the sacks of
flour in the storeroom. ‘Oh no,’ the Widow said balefully, ‘it
comes very expensive, believe me.’ It clutched at the Widow’s
strong heart to see her own perfect manly Gordon being fooled by
something as tawdry as sex. How could he be so gullible? So stupid?
It pained her that he couldn’t look at his own mother and see the
pattern of a good woman, but that instead he’d been seduced by all
that knowingness.
Gordon had to feel sorry for his mother
because it was obvious that she’d never experienced anything like
this, not that he wanted for one minute to think of his mother like
this and even if he wanted to think about it he would have been
incapable of imagining it. His mother may have been young once
(although he couldn’t imagine that either) but she had surely never
been like Eliza.
Eliza was a miracle, her human
geography sublime – the long curve of body, the hills and vales,
her face buried in the pillow so that all he could see was the
forest of black curls on her head. The matching copse of hair
between her thin legs, the extraordinary cupolas with their
dark-brown aureoles – the kind of breasts that Englishwomen would
have been embarrassed by, the kind of breasts that Gordon had only
previously seen on foreign prostitutes.
The look of her – the seed-pearls of
sweat that glistened on her pale apricot-fruit skin, the damp
tendrils of hair sticking to the back of her long neck, the faint
down on her thin, round arms, the perfect white half moons of her
fingernails (rarely glimpsed except when she was removing her nail
varnish), the lazy smile. The smell of her – perfume and tobacco
and sex. The taste of her – perfume and tobacco and sex and
salt-sweat.
Sometimes he lay awake half the night
just watching her sleeping, pulling back the sheets and studying
the different parts of her body, the neglected inner crease behind
a knee, a perfect clavicle – thin like a hare-bone, the fragrant
inside of her wrist with its vulnerable dark blue veins. Once he
took her nail scissors and clipped a curl from her hair without her
knowing and felt strangely guilty for days afterwards.
You wouldn’t find her match anywhere in
Glebelands, in the whole of the north (‘Not outside of a brothel
anyway,’ Vinny wrote to Madge).
Even the crudest bodily functions
took on a kind of sublime meaning. The Widow would have been
disgusted. ‘I worship you,’ he whispered in her ear and she rolled
over and gave her strange laugh, burying her head in the crook of
his arm. Gordon wondered if he sounded ridiculous. She was sublime,
transcendent, not an earth-bound creature at all. ‘You can’t put
your wife on a pedestal, Gordon,’ the Widow warned, chopping
cabbage with her enormous knife. ‘There’s more to marriage than the
physical side,’ and Gordon blushed at the idea that his mother
could even begin to imagine the things he did with Eliza.
Mothers and their
sons, Eliza laughed (rather spitefully), how they want them.
‘I don’t know what you
mean.’
Don’t you? No, I
don’t suppose you do.
And in her room the Widow took off her
layers of strict underwear and viewed her saggy, baggy wrinkled
body with her ancient dugs and her chicken neck and cursed
Eliza.
Eventually, inevitably everything
that was once new and precious became everyday and familiar. ‘No
honey in that hive any more,’ Vinny wrote, ‘only a nest of
hornets.’ Why couldn’t Eliza settle for the ordinary and the
familiar, for the daily round of meals and work, the comfort of
children? Gordon craved ordinariness now. He wanted her to be
normal, like everyone else. He didn’t want other men looking at her
because he knew every man that looked at her was thinking about
what she would be like in the bedroom and he knew what she was like
and that made it worse.
Not that she was like that any
more, not with Gordon at any rate.
Gordon remembered some things – he
remembered putting his hands round her thin neck, he remembered her
ridiculous laugh, gurgling and bubbling in her throat, he
remembered how he felt when he hit her head against the tree,
shaking the life out of her – exultant, triumphant at his victory
over her. He wanted to say, ‘See? See – you can’t win every fight,
you can’t always have your own way, you can’t drive me to madness
and get away with it.’ But it was no good because she couldn’t hear
him. His triumph melted into nothingness, without her there was
nothing. And then – nothing. He had no idea what he’d done all
night, he must have wandered round the wood, everything forgotten,
even his children. In the cold light of day it was beyond
belief.
‘I have to go to the police,’ he said as
soon as the Widow had given the children breakfast (‘First things
first’) and got them to bed. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ the Widow said.
‘You’re not going to hang over her.’ But
Gordon didn’t care. They could have erected the gibbet right there
in the kitchen of Arden and he would have mounted the scaffold.
‘No, Gordon,’ the Widow said grimly, ‘absolutely, definitely
not.’
‘The best thing’, the Widow said
(for she was completely in charge now), ‘would be for you to go
away for a bit. Maybe abroad.’
‘Abroad?’ said Vinny, who’d never been
further than Bradford, of course.
‘Abroad,’ the Widow said
firmly.
‘My baby!’ the Widow thought out
loud. She always knew Eliza was trouble, would drag him down into
the mire with her. She was better off dead. Poor Gordon, under the
spell of a slut. Who was going to miss her? (They’re all dead, darling.) Nobody, that was who.
Gordon could go abroad and they would say he’d died – dreadful
accident or something. Asthma. Something. And the Widow would never
see him again, but at least he would be safe. Anything was better
than the noose. ‘My baby!’
Vinny was more annoyed than she’d
ever been in her life. She’d spent most of the night wandering in
the wood, having taken the wrong path after going off to do
you-know-what and, all in all, had probably had the worst time of
her life, even counting her wedding-night.
The wood had been so much more than a
wood for Vinny, it had been an ordeal by twig and bramble, spectre
and will-o’-the-wisp and for this she entirely blamed Eliza. If she
hadn’t finally stumbled into Gordon after hours of wandering and
weeping she would have undoubtedly gone mad. Although, of course,
what happened then was almost as bad.
Vinny was glad she was dead. That’s what
she said to herself anyway, but she couldn’t forget the sight of
Eliza’s rag-doll body under that tree. Vinny had touched the blood
on her hair, felt the ice on her skin. Vinny had done something she
never thought she would do – she’d felt sorry for Eliza.
Vinny would very much like to
forget these things. She would like to forget Gordon clutching her
arm as if she was a life-belt, dragging her over to the tree, tears
streaming down his face and sobbing, ‘What am I going to do, Vin?
What am I going to do?’ I never wanted to go on a bloody picnic
anyway, Vinny thought crossly.
Eliza had been trouble, right from
the beginning. Trouble with her big eyes and her thin ankles and
her stupid voice, Oh Vinny, darling, could you
possibly … always laughing at poor Vinny as if she was stupid.
But that didn’t matter now, they must all save themselves as best
they could.
And Gordon went. Walked out, left
everything behind, even the murder of his wife. And he put it all
away in some dark place that he never threw light on and he’d gone
on and worked hard and grown weather-beaten and become a different
person, had met Debbie at a dance, courted her, quickly married her
– she couldn’t have been more willing even though ‘Mum and Dad’
didn’t really approve – after all he was a divorced man. That’s
what he told them, that’s what he told everyone, ‘divorced’ with
such a sadness in his eyes that no-one wanted to probe further,
except for Debbie, of course, for whom Eliza was a dark and unknown
rival, the first Mrs Fairfax.
And then suddenly he had to go back. He
had to see his children. His mother. He had to go back to England
and find the old Gordon. He didn’t realize that none of these
things were the same any more.
He’d got what he’d so stupidly
wished for. He’d got an ordinary life. He didn’t need to go to
prison for murder, didn’t need to hang for killing Eliza, he had
his punishment every day. He’d lost his treasure, greater than a
king’s ransom. He’d lost Eliza.
