I’m staying with Charlie Greaves’s mother, DON’T WRITE. I know you know the address, but the trouble is you’re not the only one who knows it. All incoming post is opened. I don’t want you in this any deeper than you are already. And I’m not treating you like ‘the little woman’. There’s got to be people they don’t know about, otherwise there’s no safe houses, and no network to pass people on. Speaking of which, I sent a lad to your Mam just before Christmas. Did you happen to bump into him? I wondered afterwards if I’d done the right thing. Not that I’ve any doubts about him, he’s a good lad, keen as mustard, but he does get carried away. I don’t suppose it matters, but if you write to your Mam you might mention it, though I suppose he’ll have moved on by now. How is she, by the way? I wish we could get Tommy out of there. He’s not doing her any good at all.
I’m writing this in bed, which is a big brass one, masses of room, and bouncy. It’s tippling down outside and the wind’s blowing, and I’d give anything to have you in here with me. Soon.
All my love,
Mac
It seemed strange to Prior to be reading his friends’ private letters, though these had all — with the exception of Alf’s letter and its inconvenient mention of dogs — been read aloud at the Old Bailey. Even Hettie’s little nursery rhyme had boomed around No. 1 Court, as the Attorney-General argued it implied her involvement in the conspiracy. No, there was no privacy left in these letters; he was not violating anything that mattered. And yet, as the train thundered into a tunnel and the carriage filled with the acrid smell of smoke, Prior turned to face his doubled reflection in the window and thought he didn’t like himself very much. It was the last letter he minded: the gentleness of Mac’s love for Hettie exposed, first in open court and now again to him.
They’d found that letter in the pocket of Hettie’s skirt when they went to the school to arrest her.
EIGHT
Harry Prior was getting ready to go out. A clean shirt had been put to air on the clothes-horse in front of the fire, darkening and chilling the room. Billy Prior and his mother sat at the table, she with her apron on, he in shirt and braces, unable either to continue their interrupted conversation or to talk to Harry. He bent over the sink, lathering his face, blathering and spluttering, sticking his index fingers into his ears and waggling them. Then, after rinsing the soap off, he placed one forefinger over each nostril in turn and slung great gobs of green snot into the sink.
Prior, his elbow touching his mother’s side, felt her quiver fastidiously. He laced his fingers round the hot cup of tea and raised it to his lips, dipping his short nose delicately as he drank. How many times as a child had he watched this tense, unnecessary scene, sharing his mother’s disgust as he would have shared her fear of lightning. Now, as a man, in this over-familiar room — the tiles worn down by his footsteps, the table polished by his elbows — he thought he could see the conflict more even-handedly than he had seen it then. It takes a great deal of aggression to quiver fastidiously for twenty-eight years.
He thought, now, he could recognize his mother’s contribution to the shared tragedy. He saw how the wincing sensitivity of her response was actually feeding this brutal performance. He recalled her gentle, genteel, whining, reproachful voice going on and on, long after his father’s stumbling footsteps had jerked him into wakefulness; how he had sat on the stairs and strained to hear, until his muscles ached with the tension, waiting for her to say the one thing he would not be able to bear. And then the scuffle of running steps, a stifled cry, and he would be half way downstairs, listening to see if it was just a single slap, the back of his father’s hand sending his mother staggering against the wall, or whether it was one of the bad times. She never had the sense to shut up.
But then, he thought, his face shielded by the rim of his cup, one might equally say she had never been coward enough to refrain from speaking her mind for fear of the consequences. It would be very easy, under the pretext of ‘even-handedness’, to slip too far the other way and blame the violence in the home not on his brutality, but on her failure to manage it.
As a child, Prior remembered beating his clenched fist against the palm of the other hand, over and over again, saying, with every smack of flesh on flesh, PIG PIG PIG PIG. Obviously, his present attempt to understand his parents’ marriage was more mature, more adult, more perceptive, more sensitive, more insightful, more almost anything you cared to mention, than PIG PIG PIG PIG, but it didn’t content him, because it was also a lie: a way of claiming to be ‘above the battle’. And he was not above it: he was its product. He and she — elemental forces, almost devoid of personal characteristics — clawed each other in every cell of his body, and would do so until he died. ‘They fight and fight and never rest on the Marches of my breast,’ he thought, and I’m fucking fed up with it.
His father had got his jacket and cap on now, and stood ready to go out, looking at them with a hard, dry, stretched-elastic smile, the two of them together, as they had always been, waiting for him to go. ‘I’ll see you, then,’ he said.
There was no question, as in the majority of households there would have been, of father and son going for a drink together.
‘When will you be back?’ his mother asked, as she had always done.
‘Elevenish. Don’t wait up.’
She always waited up. Oh, she would have said there was the fire to damp down, tomorrow’s bait to be got ready, the table to be laid, the kettle to be filled, but all these tasks could have been done earlier. Prior, once more lowering his eyes to the cup, tried not to ask himself how many violent scenes might have been avoided if his mother had simply taken his father at his word and gone to bed. Hundreds? Or none? The man who spoke so softly and considerately now might well have dragged her out of bed to wait on him, when he staggered in from the pub with ten or eleven pints on board.
Leave it, he told himself. Leave it.
After his father had gone, Prior and his mother went on sitting at the table while they finished drinking their tea. She never mentioned France or Craiglockhart. She seemed to want to ignore everything that had happened to him since he left home. This was both an irritation and a relief. He asked after boys he’d known at school. This one was dead, that one wounded, Eddie Wilson had deserted. He remembered Eddie, didn’t he? There were deserters in the paper every week, she said. The policeman who found Eddie Wilson hiding in his mother’s coal-hole had been awarded a prize of five shillings.
‘There was a letter in the paper the other week,’ she said. ‘From Father Mackenzie. You remember him, don’t you?’
She found last week’s paper and handed it to him. He read the letter, first silently and then aloud, in a wickedly accurate imitation of Father Mackenzie’s liturgical flutings. ‘“There may be some among you, who, by reason of your wilful and culpable neglect of the Laws of Physical development, are not fit to serve your country, but —” Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ He thew the paper down. ‘Some among them carry their wilful and culpable neglect to the point of getting rickets. If he’s physically well developed it’s because his mother could afford to shove good food in his gob four times a day.’ And goodness wasn’t he well developed, Prior thought, remembering Father Mackenzie in his socks.