LITMIR.BIZ

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out the cake, with its six candles on the kitchen table, and some biscuits and little cakes. While Martha moved about in these pathetic preparations, Paul stood just inside the kitchen door, watching them: Mark, trying to engage Paul’s attention, played with a wooden train on the floor. From time to time the two grown-up people exchanged glances of helplessness, and of shame, because things could have been allowed to reach this point.

      There was a heavy knock on the back door; and the little boy, crying ‘There she is! There’s my mummy!’ rushed to open it. Two men stood there. One was the journalist of yesterday, looking angrily sullen. The other was a large smiling man.

      ‘Where’s my mummy?’ shouted Paul.

      The two looked at each other, then studied Martha, arranging cakes, and Mark, playing trains.

      The large man said: ‘Take it easy, son, take it easy. Your mummy’s not coming, you know.’

      ‘Why not, why not?’ screamed Paul, and flung himself down. Lying face down, he banged his head hard on the floor while his face exploded tears.

      ‘Is this Colin Coldridge’s boy?’ asked the sullen man, bending to examine him for describable details.

      Mark now scrambled up off his knees, and advanced on the journalists. Yesterday’s man was suspiciously angry. The large man was smiling, ingratiating. The child continued to bang his head, crying noisily. Mark, with his eyes wide, his mouth open, his face white, appeared comic.

      ‘Take it easy,’ said the large man again, and backed away, in a parody of fear: he was making fun of Mark.

      The self-righteous man was now making mental notes about the kitchen. Having done this, he returned his attention to Paul, who was writhing at his feet, and said accusingly: ‘Why didn’t you tell the boy about his mother?’

      At which Paul shot off the floor and grasped his uncle around the knees, so violently that Mark staggered and leaned sideways to catch hold of a chair-back. ‘Tell me what?’ screamed Paul.’ Where’s my mummy?’

      ‘Your mummy’s …’ The journalist stopped; unable to say ‘dead’ to the child’s face.

      With a mutter of inarticulate disgust, he backed out of the door. The goodfellow, smiling deprecatingly, said: ‘Here’s my card.’ He laid a piece of card on the table by the cake. Miles Tangin. The Daily – ‘If you’d co-operate, Mr Coldridge,’ he suggested, ‘then it would be better.’

      ‘I’ll complain to your editor,’ said Mark over Paul’s head. The child was sobbing noisily, and gripping Mark’s knees, so that Mark had to hold himself upright with one hand on the chair-back while with the other he tried to soothe Paul.

      ‘You do that,’ said the first man, all contemptuous bitterness.

      The two went out together.

      Mark carried the sobbing child up to bed.

      In bed he was quieter, whimpering a little, while he watched them both. He was waiting.

      ‘Where’s my mummy?’ he asked at last. Martha said: ‘She’s dead, Paul.’

      Paul took it. It was a fact which marched with the events of the last week. ‘And is my daddy dead too?’

      ‘No,’ said Mark, with emphasis. But both he and Martha knew that of course he would not believe them. They had been lying to him: they were probably lying again.

      ‘He’s away,’ said Martha. ‘He’ll come back.’

      Paul said nothing. He lay staring at them, with his black, untrusting eyes. Then he turned his face to the wall, and shut them out. They stayed with him. Hour after hour passed. He was not asleep. He kept dropping off, but he whimpered in his sleep, and this woke him. It was nearly morning when at last he fell into a deep sleep.

      Their days were now spent with Paul, the child who could not trust them. He had gone silent, evasive, listless. He spent hours curled in a chair in the kitchen, sucking his thumb. He usually did not answer when Martha or Mark spoke to him. This did not look as if he were trying to be a baby again, wanting to be fed; but as if he really could not take in the existence of food, of mealtimes. He would sit listening, or apparently listening, if they read to him or told him stories. He sat quietly for the children’s programmes on the radio. Put to bed, he slept. When he looked out of the back windows, the front windows, and saw the groups of reporters waiting there, he examined them, then looked at Mark and Martha for explanations. It seemed he was afraid to ask questions. But they wouldn’t have known how to answer.

      In the evenings, the two sat in Mark’s study. Mark’s white face had acquired a staring mask-like look; as if wide-eyed at the incredible, the impossible. He did not believe what was happening. This was because he was Mark Coldridge, to whom such things could not happen.

      Yet he was also Mark Coldridge who had written that book about war which came from the heart of an understanding of how such things happened – must happen. Martha was waiting to talk to the man who had written that book: but he was not there.

      Mark was saying things like: ‘We must get Paul to school so that he can get over it.’ Or: ‘When it’s blown over, I’ll take Francis and Paul for a holiday somewhere.’

      He was still talking in terms of a situation normal enough to blow over. He could not bear to see that a deep harm had been done; and that they, or at least, he, must expect the results of it, and that the results were for life.

      But how could Martha blame Mark when she caught herself thinking several times a day: Before Sally killed herself, before Colin went away – the double event which her nerves, geared to laziness, still felt as a water-shed. And it was as much her fault as Mark’s that Paul had not been told the truth (as much truth as could be told to a child of six) so that now he trusted no one; it was as much her fault that the affair had been handled so that the truth had come through journalists scavenging for news.

      And what was the use of feeling guilt, blaming herself and Mark, when they still did not know how to act, still sat night after night in the quiet book-lined study, with a decanter of old brandy on the desk, and when they did act, absurdity or worse came of it. For they had lost a sense of the ordinary machinery of life.

      One afternoon they had watched through the windows a couple of Press men rummaging through their dustbins in search of incriminating documents.

      One of them was Miles Tangin. Mark telephoned the editor to protest, could not get through, left a message that he would like to be rung back, was rung back by – Miles Tangin. The telephone number then had to be changed again.

      Martha suggested that he should ask the police to guard front and back entrance, to keep the journalists off.

      Mark was furious. ‘I’m not being guarded by police in my own house in my own country because of a lot of … I’ll get Margaret to tell the editor what’s going on. She must know him.’

      He rang his mother’s home in the country. It was only when it had been ringing for some minutes that they realized it was after two in the morning. After a long wait, John came to the telephone. He was polite of course. Mark spoke to the colourless husband of his mother, a man whom he despised, though of course, he had never been anything less than polite to him. Martha sat on an old brown sofa, feeling velvet rub soft under her fingers. She was watching Mark clutch the telephone as if the machine itself could come up with sense, or protection. In the last couple of weeks he had lost over a stone. His clothes were hanging on him. His fingers were stained with nicotine to the knuckles. He looked half crazy.

      John said that Margaret was asleep after a hard day. The Press had been out to the house, and the telephone was never silent.

      ‘I want to speak to her,’ said Mark.

      ‘I’ll tell her in the morning that you rang.’

      ‘Then tell her to get hold of those editors and call off their dogs,’ said Mark.

      A short affronted laugh.

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