‘You can hit as hard as you like and it won’t hurt.’ Sam whispered the rehearsal as he laid out the big boxing gloves like a bouquet on the table. The words would be addressed to his son but they were aimed at his wife.
The training gloves, blood red, almost new, glistening in the weak white gas-light of late winter afternoon, were nuzzled close, the four knuckle to puffy knuckle, as if waiting for the bell.
Sam stood back to admire them. Nothing in the room compared. Even the thickly berried holly, which Ellen had refused to take down on Twelfth Night with the other decorations, was eclipsed. The berries might be ‘red as any blood’ but the boxing gloves were redder and bloodier and spoke for a power beyond the holly, as Sam knew. He stoked the fire and settled the kettle on it, took the News Chronicle and lit a dog end. But he could not keep his eyes off the snuggling of the large glistening gloves, almost alive as the faintly hissing light played over them; reminded him of new pups. He hummed as he waited -'Give me five minutes more’. He wanted to extend the time for himself alone with this magnificent present. ‘Only five minutes more in your arms’. Blackie air-lifted into his lap so lightly it was almost an embrace, and when Sam stroked her under the chin she purred to match the quiet murmur of the kettle. Sounds full of peace: he felt his mind untense in this quietness that screened no threats.
Joe crashed in first, his face rose-glazed from the raw weather. To Sam’s delight he noticed the gloves instantly, a glance of disbelief at his father, and sprang on them. By the time Ellen had taken off her scarf, put down the shopping basket, slipped off her coat and focused, the cavernous gloves were on Joe’s seven-year-old paws. He stood there, not much higher than the table, the gloves like gaudy footballs fantastically stuck on the cuffs of his navy blue mac.
‘How are you going to get your coat off?’
Joe grinned at his mother and shook his hands. Despite the laces tightly pulled, the gloves dropped to the floor. He unbuttoned, unbelted, flung off his coat in seconds and went down on his knees to cram his hands once more into the hugely padded marvels, which he could not believe were to be his.
‘You can hit as hard as you like but it won’t hurt - not with those.’
‘Ding ding. Seconds out!’ said Joe, as he took swipes at an imaginary opponent, taking care to clutch hard to the glove on the inside so that it did not fly off.
‘I thought boxers were meant to hurt each other,’ Ellen replied.
‘Special training gloves. Look at the size of them! From Belgium.’
Sam seemed transfixed by Joe’s childish flailing. He wanted to kneel down and coach him but first there was Ellen.
‘It’ll help him learn to look after himself without causing damage.’
‘You’re the one who wants those gloves, Samuel Richardson.’
He looked at her directly and her laughter set off his own. Her eyes were lustrous in the light of the small room. He could see that she was taking him on.
‘Charlie Turnbull,’ he confessed, and held up a hand to ward off the flak.
‘When was Charlie Turnbull in Belgium or anywhere else? He was always up to no good.’
‘There’s nothing on the fiddle.’
Ellen shook her head but held off. The unusual high humour between Sam and Joe was too good to spoil. She picked up the two remaining gloves from the table, pretending to be alarmed by Joe’s self-absorbed punching the air. She pressed them gently to her cheeks.
‘They are soft,’ she conceded. ‘I like the smell …’ She inhaled deeply, her eyes closing.
Sam stirred towards her and then checked himself. ‘I buffed them up.’
She opened her eyes and held out the gloves, two succulent globes pressed together, stretching the shiny leather tight. She offered them to him. ‘Put them on,’ she said, and smiled down at Joe. ‘You can’t wait, can you?’
‘Come on then, Joe.’ He knelt down.
The boy sailed in and Sam let the pneumatic blows rain on him. Then he pushed his son away.
‘Joe Louis wouldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘Straight left then make a move. Remember?’
The boy skipped around a father in rare indulgent mood.
‘One-two,’ said Sam. ‘This is a one-two.’
Ellen caught his eye deliberately and held it for a message. Fair enough, the look said, but you will not have it all your own way. He winked. And she laughed but maybe because Joe had used the unguarded moment to land a blow directly on Sam’s nose.
‘Hey-up!’ He rubbed his nose with the fat cigar thumb of the glove.
‘What was it?’ Ellen said, as she swung the kettle off the hob. ‘You can hit as hard as you like but it doesn’t hurt?’
Sam smiled and Ellen was moved by the intimacy such a simple reaction could reveal. Then his attention switched. ‘I’ve got a real little warrior on my hands.’
Joe felt himself swell with giddy confidence. ‘Come on, Daddy,’ he said, squaring up. Tight me.’
Ellen wanted to calm his all but feverish excitement, but that would douse feelings she saw surging so warmly between the two who had often clashed since Sam’s return. Now Sam was smiling approval. Joe was almost dancing, fists raised, suddenly and blissfully - with the gloves on - unafraid of his father.
Tight me now.’
She put a small piece of holly on the fire and listened. The flames leaped at it but she judged that the sound would not disturb Sam who lay in the bed a few feet away, spreadeagled in early sleep for the six o’clock shift at the factory. She had checked upstairs and stood over Joe, his head nesting on the great gloves, his small face above the blanket, pale in the pillowed red plush frame. He too was sound.
Sam’s present had got to the heart of something deep in their son, she thought. It pleased her that there should be that understanding and firmly she pushed back the shadow that threatened to spoil it. For the six years of the war Joe had been hers alone: she had to let Sam find his place now. A boy needs a father, she said to herself sternly, as she had repeated endlessly since that almost miraculous moment when Sam had jumped from the train that would have taken him alone on the first leg of his passage to Australia and come back along the platform, hand in hand with Joe, come back to her. To her. Even now, after a few months, the memory of it made her hold her breath.
She had not fully absorbed it. It was like a present, almost too good to open and, when opened, too good to use. It was a second chance and better for it. They had just made love in something of the old way, though the necessary silence constrained them with Joe just above them - sleeping?
She missed the pliable umbilical presence of the child who had slept with her into boyhood. And although Sam had subdued his son’s cries to retain the shared bed he had enjoyed until the return of the father he had been schooled to love, Ellen knew that Joe’s longing was scarcely abated, that the severance was a wound. She observed the boy struggle with the burden of expected love for the stranger who had come back to redeem his fatherless condition. She saw the bewilderment, the hurt, the anger that this father to whom he must kow-tow and wanted to, must love and wanted to, be grateful to and was, should displace him so conclusively, overrule, oust him.
Awake as the father and son slept, feeding the fire with the richly ruby-berried holly, which she had found in an overgrown lane less than two miles out of the town, Ellen let herself drowse. The fire burned, lightly, on her face and as she leaned forward her loosened hair swung down, swaying sensuously, an indulgence secretly cultivated - swaying languorously as she moved her head to the rhythm of the song she hummed low, like a lullaby. She could picture the small town all about her in the cold bleak January dark, its yards, alleys, runnels, streets, people, all so familiar she could sketch them in her mind without effort, all ready to be conjured out of the midwinter blackness, swaddling her in this cradle of her life. The town was her captive dream. It was so comfortingly easy for her to call it up but she resisted that temptation, as she had fended off the shadow provoked by Sam’s fighting gift of the gloves.
Sam and Joe. She let their names surf on ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’, which surged gently through her mind. Joe and Sam. Ebb and flow. Her face now glowed from the fire thrown up by the holly and glowed too from the scent on her, the recent weight of his body on hers, the nearness of that complete loss in pleasure. The leaf, the berry and the thorn. Aware of herself alone. And Sam. And the sight of Joe - his face in that halter of bulging red leather, his copper hair outshone, splayed on his back in perfect sleep.
Ellen frowned at the realisation that this luck was so little appreciated by her. What was here was world enough. Their one-up, one-down house absorbed all the town and fields and land and country around it. The place was in her and the three of them were safe.
She hugged herself as the last of the holly fed the dying fire, hugged herself tightly, digging her fingers into her shoulder-blades, holding it in.