THE WEATHER BUREAU FORECAST sun. It was not mistaken. All day for five days it sizzled in the heavens and down below the city of London simmered. People who had hoped for summer wished now for a breeze and a little respite. Only at night did Ellen feel cool. Watering the garden and then sitting in the stone alcove. Provident stone. It gave back the warmth taken throughout the hot day and she saw it as something human – the mother who reserves love for when it is most needed. She often sat for an hour, caressing the stone, listening for the sounds of her child if he happened to be sleeping in her house, listening anyhow, which is what one does alone at night in a garden hushed by darkness. It was the best hour, sitting there, warmed, and calm, and a little sad. But next day it would be boiling again. The child’s father decided that they would go into the country. They would camp out he said, and make fires and go fishing and do things the boy wanted to do. It only took a day to get the various necessaries and they were ready to leave on Thursday.
In the shade end of the kitchen they sat, drinking tea, she from her mug, he from the blue china cup reserved for guests; hardly speaking. Through the glass half of the kitchen door they watched their child, putting up the tent in the garden. It was already fixed on two poles, a bright blue, flapping back and forth like a flag. The father had done that bit and now the child was putting the pegs in, and giving instruction to George.
‘Well into the ground, George,’ the child said. George was nobody. The child invented him three years before when he was five. It happened that a George came to visit them but very quickly got bored with a child of five and made an excuse about having to go home because of a pain in his head. But the child kept conversing with him after he’d left and held on to him throughout the years.
‘It’s a beautiful blue,’ she said, looking through the glare of the sun as the child pulled on a rope and the canvas bellied out.
‘They undercharged me,’ her husband said, piling sixpences, shillings and two-shilling pieces in separate banks on the table, reckoning what he had paid for the tent, the fittings and the two Lilos. Always slow at adding, he reckoned things up when he got home and for some reason he was invariably undercharged. ‘Because of his contemptuous face,’ she thought, ‘because he frightened shop girls and set them astray in their tottings and possibly one or two of them would think him attractive.’
‘I got away with nine and elevenpence,’ he said.
‘You want me to take it back?’ she asked.
‘Nonsense.’ He despised petty honour, but no longer thought it his duty to correct this or any other flaw in her.
‘Look,’ she said and pointed. The tent had swollen out now and as the child pulled on the last bit of rope it rose like a cone of bright blue towards the sky where the light was fiery.
‘He’s a strong child,’ she said, ‘to be able to do it.’
‘I believe in teaching him these things,’ her husband said, jumbling the various coins together and putting them in the pocket of his jacket which was spread over the back of his chair. Once when visiting her he hung his jacket on a nail and she went through the pockets for clues, reverting to wifedom again. He must have known. He kept his jacket close to him ever since and picked it up and took it with him even on the short journey through the scullery to the outside lavatory.
‘Anything you want for your trip?’ she said, guiltily. No, he’d seen to everything. In the boot of the car there was tinned food, Primus stove, sleeping-bags, seedless oranges, Elastoplast, disinfectant and various medicines which he’d transferred through a funnel from big economy bottles to littler bottles, suitable for packing. He was far-seeing, careful and exigent. There was nothing left for her to contribute but a tin of shortbread.
‘You could come with us,’ he said flatly as she got out the shortbread and assured him untruthfully that it was home-made. Still cowering. She shook her head to his invitation. It needed a less insipid approach than that to bring her back. They’d separated two years before and the child was shared between their two homes. Out of necessity he invented George. They’d got over the worst part; the acrimony when she first left and when he posted broken combs, half-used compacts and old powder puffs in his campaign to clear out her remains. They’d got over that and settled down to a sort of sullen peace, but they talked now as she always feared they might, like strangers who had never been in love at all.
‘He’s calling us,’ she said, relieved to escape. The child was saying, ‘Mama, Dada, Dada, Mama,’ in a shrill and happy way. She went out and raptured over the tent and said what a genius he was.
‘Now you can take it all down,’ his father said soberly. He’d got the child to put it up as an exercise.
‘I’ll help you,’ she said, kneeling down not so much to help as to get nearer to him, to kiss his clean hair and touch his cheek and take full advantage of the last few minutes of contact. He would love her to join them. He would hug her and say, ‘Good old Mama,’ but she couldn’t. Anyhow she consoled herself with the thought that he was happy. If she went there would be gloom and she could not bear the thought of night and her husband appointing their sleeping positions – he and her at either end of the new Lilos, the child in between, tossing and turning in the heat. For the last year of their marriage he avoided her in bed and she did not ever want to re-live that. The days would be testy – no music, no telephone, no floor to sweep, nothing to fill in the hours of treachery between them. She could not go.
‘You’ll write me sloppy letters,’ she said to her son.
‘Not sloppy,’ he said, as he uprooted the pegs, flushed from work and self-importance. Still giving orders to George.
At exactly four minutes to three they set off. She looked down at her watch to appear practical. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the sunshine fell in a spray over the grey motor as they drove away with the child in the back seat squeezed in between a lot of luggage. His father always put him in the back seat in case of accident.
‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ the small hand on the window delivering kisses. The fingers on the glass tapping. The face wrinkled up because it was embarrassed and might also cry.
‘Goodbye, goodbye.’ She could hardly keep her eyes on them.
She came in the house, picked up the underpants and vest that the child had peeled off, held them, looked at them, smelt them, and finally washed them and hung them out to dry. Then she sat at the kitchen table, and put her face on her arm. The sandals he’d discarded were on the table. A prong missing in the buckle of one. His father said to keep them, they might come in useful. They might or they might not. She sat there, feeling, out of habit, for the missing prong, her head on her arm, her arm wet from crying, darkness coming on again. The silver fish that had got in with a grocery order were darting over the floor in search of crumbs and spilt sugar.
‘Goodbye, goodbye.’ They were a long way off now; they might even have pitched tent and settled in for the night, the child fast asleep, the father sitting outside, breathing and gratified, a tarpaulin spread on the grass, because of the dew. He liked the country and was a very light sleeper.