Alexander Fullerton: Surface!

He hoped that this was the right house: things could be a little awkward otherwise. Even the crash of his entry had caused no sign of life, no voice or footstep. He left the kitchen, explored the lower rooms: in the drawing-room were photographs that he knew: there was even one of himself, at the age of sixteen, a Cadet, a small, undamaged face, clean white tabs on the lapels. The ashes of a fire lay in the grate.

Leaving the house through the front door, he carried in his two suitcases, dumped them in the hall before he climbed the stairs, cream-painted stairs, the carpet thick and soft. On the landing, he knew for the first time that the house held life: he heard a snore. It was a deep snore, a pleasant sound. The Sub opened the door, and his mother shrieked.

Not with fear. His mother had never really been frightened in her life. She came of an old Border family that had in its blood the acceptance of surprise. Now, it was with surprise and delight that she shrieked: beside her, in the bed, lay the man she loved, in the doorway the boy she had reared. Her exclamation woke the General, who heaved himself still half asleep into a sitting position in his broadly-striped pyjamas.

“Well!” The big man drawled the word in a pleasantly soft accent. He had a big, friendly face.

“So there we are. You’re rushing off to God knows where, and I’m expected to stay here like an old maid for the next five years. The fact that I’m ill doesn’t worry you at all, does it?”

“Don’t be an idiot.” Harry, the Engineer, looked wearily across at his wife. “There’s a war on: you know I have to go where I’m sent.”

“Is there a war on, Harry? I wouldn’t have known. Do you think I’m used to living like this?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, it’s all right for you. You come here for a few days and expect to find a loving little wife waiting for you. At least you get about, see people. You’ve got a job to be interested in. What have I got to think about? You think…”

She had the look that said she was about to cry. Harry was sick of tears. There were people who had something to cry about and yet didn’t…

“You could join the Wrens again. The doctor says you’re fit.”

“Fit? For what? This? Oh, I can’t expect you to understand, can I?”

Harry knocked out his pipe. There was little point in trying to answer. He looked quickly round as though he hadn’t known where the door was, and as though he was relieved at finding it, the way out.

“I think I’ll ring Arthur, at the Queens.”

“At this time of night?”

“Pubs are shut. He’ll be just about back. I said I’d ring.” He thought, I’m making excuses, explaining myself now. What happens when there’s no war to go to?

“And you imagine that just because the pubs are shut Arthur’ll go straight back to his little bed?” The Engineer’s wife smiled. “He’s not married yet, you now.”

After a few days at Ambershott, the Sub travelled down to Sussex to stay with the Bishop family. Before his mother married the General, they had always lived there, in Sussex, always known the Bishops. The Bishops were a part of Sussex as rooted as the Downs, as permanent and necessary as the sweep of country that fell clear from the Three Bells to the distant sea. For the Sub, the Bishops were as much a family as his own, particularly when he felt that his mother had a new life of her own to make and that if he married a widow he’d rather not have her children as well.

Major Bishop was known to his friends as Bish. He was a man of late middle age, bald and a little stocky. His heart was in the land that had reared the generations before him, and when the spirits moved him his talk was always of the ‘14 War, in which, he would state in support of any argument, he had “Gone over the Top”. Whenever he made that statement, his wife was inclined to start giggling, and his son and daughter were apt to remind him that they had heard it on previous occasions. In the Sub’s opinion, there was no family in England more wholly English or more completely united in itself than the family Bishop.

Bish was a busy man, these days. Well over military age, he had enrolled as a part-time worker in a local factory that produced fuel-tanks for aircraft. He had become a foreman: intensely interested, he was ready at any time to describe in detail the production problems of a modern factory. Determined to play a full part in his country’s battle, Bish enrolled for night duty as a Special Constable, wearing the helmet and belt with all the confidence of a regular policeman. When he returned home, late in the evening, and laid down these badges of office on the arm of a settee, his family saw the strain in the face of a man who had never played any part smaller than that within his reach.

As the Sub had once said, over a pint of bitter, to a friend in the Ram’s Head, Bish was a lovely man. Now, leaning on the oaken bar of that establishment, he listened and watched while Bishop talked to old Todd. Todd was saying that he’d never known a gentleman like Mr Forster, never, God rest his soul.

“H’m. Handy man with a gun, wasn’t he?”

“’e was that, Major. And I never knew a man wi’ such knowledge o’ fruit.”

“Fruit, eh?”

“Ah. There’s been many a time ’e’d take a seat by that window, and I’d take an apple or a pear, or whatever it might be, out o’ me pocket, and ’e’d look at un, an’ maybe ’e’d take a sniff at un, apple or pear, or whatever it might be, and ’e’d say, ‘Why,’ ’e’d say, ‘that’s a so-an’-so apple or pear’; or whatever it might be. Never known ’im wrong, Major, never.”

Later, walking slowly home, the Sub said:

“You know, Bish, I reckon that men who love the land and men who love the sea have a lot in common. The same sort of love: the same faith, if you like.”

“Daresay you’re right, boy.” Bish looked faintly surprised. Next thing you knew, the boy’d be writing to the papers.

The Sussex evening and the quiet, homely friendship: here, awake and in daylight, he was dreaming again. He was dreaming that this belonged to him, that he belonged here, that roots existed for him as much as they did for the Bishops. He remembered a school report that had worried his mother: it said, “John lives in a world of his own…”

It was easier to dream, to see things as he wanted them to be. He could even imagine, for instance, that his father had also been worried by that report. In his heart, the Sub knew that his father had never had any lasting interest in his youngest son, the product of his second marriage. His father lived in the past, among friends who were already, most of them, dead. They were not dead to the Sub’s father: they lived as hard as they had always done, riding hard, drinking hard, living in the only way that they had ever wanted to live. Only the Sub’s father was condemned to go on living for ten years longer, alone with the past, in a seaside villa with a single yapping terrier and a young family with whom he had nothing in common.

Once he had told them, “I want to live long enough to see my son in uniform.”

Strange, thought the Sub, to have been so thrilled at such a remark! When he heard it, he had felt as though he had been given an unexpected, needed present, his father’s interest. It was the first and only sign of it that he had ever seen. Not that he missed consciously something that he had never held: only that a taste, a flashing glimpse, filled him with longing.

Now, at the age of twenty, the Sub expected no warmth in human relationships. Rather he shunned it, telling himself that it was sentiment, womanly, unbecoming in a man. He had no close ties, now that his mother was making her own life: good luck to her!