19

To keep his nerve, Peter told himself that he was on a mission, an intelligence operation behind enemy lines. Immediately he began to see himself from the outside, from a remote perspective, as if he were watching a film. In fact, he was acting on impulse and might have turned back at any point after he left the school grounds if the least thing had gone against him – if it had started to rain, for example. But it wasn’t raining, it was a dry night, warm for October, and there was also a moon – almost a full moon, a bomber’s moon – which meant it was bright enough to see where you were going once your eyes adjusted. Although he’d brought a torch, he didn’t know how long the batteries would last and he didn’t want to waste them.

The fiction got him all the way to Fendlesham, the village nearest school, and some way out the other side into the open farmland that lay beyond it. All this time he came across no one. Then it seemed the fiction had worked a little too well, because the next thing he knew there was the sound of a vehicle and an army truck pulled over by the side of the road just ahead of him. Two soldiers got out. One of them went for a pee. The other, the driver, who was smoking, came over to him.

‘Stan, where you going?’

‘There’s a kid out here,’ said the driver.

‘So?’

‘Just checking he’s all right.’

Peter thought about making a run for it; might have done if there had been anywhere to run to.

‘What you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?’ said the driver. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

Peter was going to lie, but something about the way the driver spoke to him – easy, matey – changed his mind. Instead, he told the driver that he was trying to get home.

‘And where’s home when it’s at home?’

‘Near Whitmarket.’

‘How you planning to get there this time of night?’

‘Walk,’ said Peter.

‘Walk?’ said the driver. ‘Fuck sake – mind my French – that must be a good forty miles.’ He threw his fag end on the ground, where it made a little shower of red sparks. ‘We can take you as far as Skeen. That do you?’

Skeen was a village close to where he lived, known for its piggeries.

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Hop in.’

‘Stan?’ said the other squaddie, buttoning up his flies. ‘Are you clean out of your mind?’

‘Can’t do no harm,’ said the driver.

The truck was a Tilly. It had a spare wheel mounted on the roof of the cab and canvas covering the rear. Peter made to go round the back. ‘No,’ said the squaddie, holding the door of the cab open. ‘You coming with us, you have to squeeze up front with the riff-raff.’

Peter clambered into the cab, with its smell of sweaty khaki, beery breath and tobacco. ‘What’s back there?’ he said to the squaddie. He pictured guns, grenades, ammunition, bayonets.

The driver and the squaddie exchanged a look. ‘Crates,’ said the squaddie.

They got under way. ‘Lucky for you I been eating my carrots,’ said the driver over the dull noise of the engine. ‘You could have got yourself killed. Running away from school, are you?’

Peter thought about not answering this.

While he was thinking, the driver said, ‘The blazer’s a bit of a giveaway, kid, if you don’t mind my saying. To say nothing of the cap and the scarf. One thrashing too many, is that it?’ ‘Frashing’ was how he said it.

Corky had once slippered Peter for tipping ink in the cisterns of the Seniors’ lavatories. He thought that was fair, all things considered. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.’ He added ‘sir’, as he had been taught to do.

‘I hear them schools is worse than the army,’ the driver said.

‘Saying something,’ said the squaddie.

‘My school’s all right,’ said Peter. ‘I’m just trying to get home. My mother’s not very well.’

He wished he had not said this the instant he said it. It might make it true. The whole point of this exercise was to establish the opposite.

Then his mother’s face flickered in front of him, as it had done on the screen in the gym. She was standing by the Martello tower looking out to sea, her hair blowing a little in the breeze, a smile lifting the corners of her mouth. He remembered the director telling her where to stand and where to look.

The Birmingham boys had accents. In their accents, they said the film was boring, boring, boring. ‘Shut up!’ Peter had said.

That one glimpse of his mother had been enough to reawaken a fear that had eaten away at him for months and which he had concealed as thoroughly from himself as new boys hid their homesickness, bunching sheets into their mouths. His mother was dying, maybe dead already, and they hadn’t told him.

She wrote to him, it was true. But you could write letters in bed, you could write if you were ill, it wasn’t like lifting heavy weights or playing games or coming to visit him at school, things that you had to be fit and on your feet to do. Letters could be forged, anyway. He was quite a good forger himself. His mother’s handwriting wouldn’t be very hard to copy. It wasn’t italic or anything like that.

‘Sorry about your mum, kiddie,’ the driver was saying. ‘What’s the matter with her?’

Peter cast around for an illness that he didn’t mind bringing down on his mother’s head. ‘I think it’s her nerves.’

‘Plenty of nerves around these days,’ said the squaddie, and the driver laughed.

They didn’t talk much after that, which was a relief.

Some while later, maybe an hour, maybe less, Peter nodding off, they turned down a narrow rutted lane bordered on either side with hedgerows that scraped against the side of the truck. ‘What’s the time?’ said the driver.

The squaddie shone a torch on to his watch. ‘Coming up for twenty-three hundred.’

‘Twenty-three hundred,’ said the driver. ‘What’s that in shillings and pence?’ There was a gap in the hedge. He drove the truck through it, backing up in front of a long, low building, and killed the engine. ‘You know where you are?’ he said to Peter.

‘Are we in Skeen?’ He rubbed his eyes.

‘Just outside. You keep on that lane, and you’ll come to it in about ten minutes or so. Then you want to take the left fork by the church. Don’t take the right. They got a roadblock on it.’

They all got down from the cab.

‘Thanks very much for the lift, sir,’ said Peter.

‘Left fork, not right, remember,’ said the driver. ‘Off you pop now.’

Peter set off down the lane, stumbling a little on the uneven ground. He could smell the high, sour-sweet stink of pigs, hear snuffling and truffling, the hoot-hoot of an owl. He was trying to get used to the blackness, unlit now by the dimmed headlamps of the truck, when he realized he had left his torch behind on the seat of the cab.

By the time he returned to the gap in the hedge, the squaddie and the driver had got the doors of the building open and were unloading the truck.

‘You’re soft, Stan,’ the squaddie was saying. ‘That’s your problem.’

‘He didn’t see nothing.’

‘He might have done.’

‘Well, he didn’t.’

What they were lugging out of the truck were not crates. They were jerry cans.

At school, Higson the caretaker kept a jerry can in his shed, along with a stash of greasy magazines he thought was well hidden. The jerry can contained petrol – for emergency car journeys, the emergencies having not yet arisen – and not much of it.

From the effort the soldiers were making, Peter could see that these jerry cans were full. There were a lot of them, too.

‘You hear something?’

‘Give it a rest, Fletch,’ said the driver. ‘You’re jumpy tonight.’

‘Wasn’t my idea to pick up that tyke.’

‘Couldn’t help it. He reminded me of my little brother. Trudging down the road like that on his tod.’

‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ said the squaddie, heaving another jerry can off the back of the truck ‘but your little brother ain’t a toff. That kid squeals, and I’ll swing for him.’

Peter stole away from the gap in the hedge. Further up the lane, he ran.

Peter didn’t know exactly how far Skeen was from home, but Harry, whose sister lived in the village, could walk there and back in a morning, with plenty of time left over for a gossip, and Harry didn’t walk fast. He came to the church, took the left fork, and before long he could smell the sea blown on a salt wind across the marshes. A little later, he imagined he could hear it too, then he found himself walking past the cottage hospital where long ago the doctor had put stitches in his head.

The hospital, the cottages, were irregular shapes silvered here and there by moonlight. No one was about on the bumpy, cobbled streets. From unseen gardens came the trilling song of blackbirds.

When Peter reached his house he realized that he hadn’t thought the next part through very clearly. If he had imagined anything, he had pictured arriving sometime during the day, spying on his mother through a window or shadowing her around town as she went to the shops. But the lift, which had been good in one way, had created a difficulty he had not foreseen. It was now very late. No peeking in windows when the blackout was up, and nothing to see even if it hadn’t been. At this time of night his parents would be in bed.

He went around the side of the house and let himself in the back door. At once, all the smells of home rushed to say hello. School smelled of disinfectant, farting competitions and boiled cabbage – the farts and the cabbage smelled the same, more or less. Home smelled of ironed bedlinen, baking and clean windows.

Harry was snoring in her room off the kitchen. The cat brushed against his legs and almost startled him into speech. Then he tiptoed into the hall, feeling his way around the familiar furniture, holding his breath when he bumped into a chair and its legs scraped on the floor. A whimper came from Mabel. He waited: nothing more. His father always said spaniels weren’t much use as watchdogs.

It occurred to him then, listening to the household sleeping around him, that there was no reason why he shouldn’t go upstairs to his own bed. It wasn’t as if anyone expected him to be in it. The school wouldn’t realize he was missing until the morning, and by then he would know what to do.

The plan put his mind at ease. It also suggested a new plan, which was that he should first find himself something to eat. It had been hours since tea and he was starving. He had been starving before tea too, and as usual tea hadn’t done much to change that.

He was discovering how difficult it was to raid a larder in the dark without the aid of a torch when the hall light came on and he heard voices and footsteps coming down the stairs. The voices were low, the footsteps careful.

He had spent so many hours in moonlight, darkness and near-darkness that colour came as a shock. Peering round the kitchen door, the first thing that struck him was the golden wallpaper in the hall. He had never paid attention to the wallpaper before, either in the hall or anywhere else in the house. At school there was no wallpaper, only walls. It seemed to him quite a miraculous sight at that moment, and he thought how strange it was that he had been standing in the hall only a minute before and it had been hidden from him.

Then his father came down the stairs with Mrs Spencer.

Her red hair was the second shock or rather the shock of seeing her in the house so late with his father was muddled up with the colour of her hair.

Mrs Spencer was his mother’s friend. What had she been doing upstairs? Visiting his mother on her sickbed? Paying her last respects?

Peter watched his father take a coat from the hallstand – a green coat – and hold it open for Mrs Spencer to slip her arms into. He strained his ears to hear over the wild pounding of his heart.

‘You’re certain you don’t want me to walk you home?’ said his father, who didn’t look ready to walk anyone home, as he wasn’t wearing a tie or a jacket or shoes.

‘No need. It’s hardly far.’

‘I hate this creeping about. It’s so underhand.’

‘It’s a small town – what can we do?’ Mrs Spencer reached up to touch his father’s face. ‘You don’t feel guilty, darling, do you?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘Good. Nor do I.’

Mrs Spencer pulled a scarf from the pocket of her coat and tied it round her head. The red hair was hidden. ‘You know, I think it’s time you told Peter.’

Told me what? thought Peter. Told me what?

‘No,’ said his father. ‘Children are best kept out of the divorce court. The time to tell Peter is when things are settled.’

‘That can’t come soon enough for me.’

His father put his arms around Mrs Spencer. ‘A year ago, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m beginning to feel Julia did me a favour running off with that dreadful man.’

What dreadful man? Where was his mother? Where had she gone?

‘Did us both a favour, darling,’ said Mrs Spencer. ‘Mmm. You know, I think we’re going to be very happy in the bed department.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said his father.

She laughed. ‘No regrets?’

‘None whatsoever. Birdseed is welcome to her.’

She laughed again. They kissed. Then Mrs Spencer left, and his father went back up the stairs and turned off the light.

Peter leant back against the door frame and pressed its ridges hard into his back. His mind tumbled over itself; there wasn’t enough air to breathe. There was no going upstairs now. No staying in the house a moment longer, although where he belonged he didn’t know any more. He felt his way round the kitchen to the back door and came out numb into the night.

What he had witnessed – what he hadn’t been supposed to witness – did not fit the story he had come home to prove or disprove. It made a different story. A terrifying story, where his parents turned out to be people he didn’t know, who told lies and were not good.

Peter’s childhood had been no more or less innocent than anyone else’s. But, at eleven, some things made more sense than they once would have done: the caretaker’s greasy magazines, for example, along with private urges and inklings that he kept to himself. This was why it didn’t take him long to work out what Mrs Spencer had been doing upstairs with his father. Only later did he realize who ‘Birdseed’ might be. Then anger came flooding in to curdle his shame.