The Last Summer Read online

  Colin washed his hands carefully in the basin of hot water, soaping them lavishly, though soap was scarce. When he had finished he went outside and threw the bloodstained water into the grass, watching it for a moment as it soaked in. Then he filled the basin once more, this time with cold water, and washed his face and neck. Malcolm watched the back of his neck, the head inverted over the bowl.

  “Did you hear how Dicky is today?” he asked. There was a gurgle from the basin.

  “No,” said Colin, “I didn’t hear.”

  “Did you go and see him?”

  “No.”

  Colin towelled himself with great force and then removed his dungarees and put on his creased navy blue trousers.

  He said: “I wish I could play the melodeon. I really wish I could play the melodeon.”

  His mother snorted: “What next?”

  Already he had tried to learn the Jew’s harp but he wasn’t very successful.

  “I wish I could play it, just the same,” said Colin, one leg inside the trousers, the other outside, and leaning against the mantelpiece for support.

  “Who’s playing it tonight?” said Malcolm, trying to read more of what the RAF had been doing in Germany.

  “Big Dan, I suppose.” Big Dan was exempt from war service because of his limp.

  Malcolm was listening to the sound of the sea, which he could hear quite distinctly. He put on the kettle without being asked and set the table. Colin was by now standing in front of the mirror, putting on his blue jersey which his mother had knitted. He was bending, looking at himself in the mirror with great satisfaction and concentration. Then he began to comb his gingery hair, very carefully, finally smoothing it back with his hands.

  “Know what I was doing this afternoon?” he asked suddenly.

  “No,” said Malcolm, taking saucers and cups out of the press.

  “Collecting scrap. Me and Dell. We found an old tin roof and a hammer without a handle and two pails. And we went in to old Maggie and asked her for scrap. And we got an old fender. For the war effort, you know.”

  “I’d have gone with you if you’d told me,” said Malcolm, leaning over to read the paper.

  Colin said: “I forgot. Anyway, you’ve got your work to do.”

  Malcolm suddenly felt a wave of affection for his brother. He thought: “I’ll be in university and he’ll be out on a ship on the sea, or if the worst comes to the worst he’ll be working in a mill. And he doesn’t envy me or anything. He always praises me behind my back. And yet he’s much cleverer than me with his hands.”

  His hands shook as he put the butter on the table. The pile of feathers on the newspaper was growing larger. His brother looked very clean and sparkling with health and vigour. The kettle on the fire began to sing.

  “The kettle’s boiling,” said his mother, infuriatingly. Malcolm shifted the Wild Western away from where the teapot would go. It showed a picture of Wild Bill Hickok blasting away at a rather badly drawn villain in a black hat. He could see that the top corner of page six was drawn down.

  “Don’t get tea all over that,” said Colin.

  Malcolm shifted the book over to the dresser. They sat down to their tea. The cock with the twisted neck lay on the paper, on which there was a lot of thick red blood. His brother seemed to have completely forgotten about it, as he cut through a fat scone and spread margarine on it.

  4

  AT NINE O’CLOCK he was still sitting at the table, his mother busying herself with the preparing of the dinner for the following day. She moved about very quietly in the kitchen. Sometimes he sensed that she was watching him, wondering perhaps about the things he was studying, and quite locked away from them. The only subject she could help him with was Gaelic, for she knew old proverbs and old idioms and expressions. One of her favourite sayings was: “Keep a thing seven years and you will find a use for it.”

  Brooding in the light, he turned over another page. He read: “It has already been shown that positive purpose may be indicated by the relative with subjunctive. E.g., legati missi sunt qui pacem peterent.”

  He went back over the sentence again. “Ambassadors were sent who asked for peace.” “Ambassadors were sent to ask for peace.” Each ambassador with his relative subjunctive in attendance. Clearly, through the convolutions of his brain, intertwined with the ambassadors who were asking for peace, he could hear the music from the dance at the end of the road. He imagined Big Dan with the melodeon resting on his knees in the light of the moon, the moon which was ripe and red in the sky. He heard the whoops of the dancers, boys and girls spinning around in the light. “Ambassadors were sent to ask for peace.”

  He stared unseeingly at the words. He thought of his mother standing many years ago at a fish barrel with the herring in her hand, the salty wind biting in from the sea, her gloves flesh-coloured. He imagined her rising in the darkness of dawn, to make her way with the rest of the girls through the chill reddening air. He heard the terse harsh English voice of the curer. All the girls were young in their lemony rubbery smocks and their long skirts.

  “What place was it you were at again when you were at the fishing?” he asked.

  His mother looked at him in amazement. “What are you asking that for? You get on with your lesson.”

  Then she said, as if unwillingly and with a kind of pride:

  “Yarmouth,” her mouth loosening, as if she were thinking of something pleasant, almost as if she were dreaming.

  Another whoop could be heard out of the moonlit night.

  “The relative with subjunctive is also used to express consequence or result, more commonly used after one of the following: dignus, worthy; indignus, unworthy …”

  “Did you like the fishing?” he asked.

  “What questions tonight. You should be at your Latin. Mr MacMillan will be angry if you don’t know your Latin.”

  Mr MacMillan was a distant cousin of theirs, a quiet slow gentleman, of whom she was inordinately proud but whom the children called Soppy.

  “I don’t have Mr MacMillan this year,” Malcolm said, unwillingly as if making a concession.

  “And you never told me. You never tell me anything. Everyone thinks I’m a fool. There’s Mrs Mackenzie and she hasn’t got a son in the school and she knows more about it than I do.”

  He felt a great weariness and through it said: “It’s Mr Collins we have this year. I’m doing Higher Latin this year. Mr Collins does Higher Latin.”

  “Doesn’t Mr MacMillan do Higher Latin then?”

  “No.”

  She put this away in her brain as one puts money in a purse against a rainy day. Then:

  “Yes. I liked the fishing, but mind you you had your work to do.”

  She sat down on the stool, a woman of fifty years old, thin, with a thin drooping nose.

  “Why can’t I go to the dancing?” said Malcolm.

  “You? Go to the dancing? You’ve got your work to do. You’re going to university, my lad. Mr Macrae told me that you have to go to the university and no nonsense.”

  The music was clearer now and he could imagine his brother Colin with his arm round that girl with the red hair and the pale face. The thought disgusted him.

  “The relative with subjunctive is also used to express consequence or result most commonly used after one or other …”

  “Did you go to the dancing when you were young?” he asked, looking up and taking a walk to the door.

  “Where are you going?” said his mother.

  “For a breath of fresh air.” He opened the door and looked out. The sky was astoundingly clear with that red ripe moon so close to earth it was almost like a balloon that someone had hung out. Everything was wet with dew. The plank across the road was white with light and the road itself moonlit as it wound its way towards the dancers. He could hear the pounding of their feet on the road. Oh God, this night of terrifying beauty. The immensity of it! The boys and girls in each others’ arms.

  “Ambassadors were sent to
ask for peace.”

  He could hear the gurgling of the distant river. On the sea there were some lights.

  He turned back into the room and shut the door firmly. And where was Janet now? Was she dancing at some road end in the neighbouring village, locked in someone’s arms, laughing up into his face. His mother looked at him worriedly as he came in and sat down at the table again, her stringy throat twisting round to watch him.

  “Cicero dignus est qui consul fiat.”

  He closed the book, picked up the Western and looked at it, listening to the music and leafing through the first page.

  “The man on the horse looked down from the brow of the hill onto Dodge City. He had come a long way and now he had reached his goal. Below him in that town was the man he had vowed vengeance on that night three months ago when his kid brother had been gunned down on the sidewalk of a small western town. He stood up straight in his stirrups, his keen blue eyes scanning the whole area around him. Satisfied he …”

  He closed the Western and picked up his geometry book.

  “In a triangle ABC whose mid points are D, E and F …”

  He began to work, absorbed in his task while the clock ticked on, his mother now looking at him in a more satisfied way. He wrote: “Let the two lines AB and AC be produced to …”

  His gaze concentrated. The music faded away. The world became a set of straight lines unbroken by moonlight. The cock was cooking gently in the pan on the fire. A kind of simmering was set up in his brain.

  His mother was listening to the music which reminded her vaguely of her youth. She was wondering what time Colin would be in. She was wondering what coat she would wear at church the following day. She had only two coats but thought she would wear the black one with the ruff. She was thinking: He will become a teacher or a minister and then let Mrs Campbell look out. She was thinking: I wish I had been clever in school.

  The world of the school and the world of the village didn’t meet. The school was twelve miles away and he travelled by bus every morning, returning home in the evening. All the good scholars from the outlying villages attended the big secondary school, standing old and tall and brown-fronted among the trees and leaves on the outskirts of the town. He had friends in the village and some in the school but they never met. When he was at school he could talk about his Highers: when he was in the village he would talk about fish and peats; and football. The only common factor was that he played football in both. Every morning at eight o’clock he would make his way to the bus, climbing an old wall and an old fence on the way, till he came to where the bus would pick him up.

  Apart from the pupils there were regulars on the bus who went to town to work. At the beginning of the war there had been Dabby who worked in an insurance office. He would sit beside Dolina, a tall pale girl with spots whose livelihood, such as it was, was gained in an agricultural office. Whenever she came into the bus Dabby would put his hand on the seat below her bottom and laugh out loud. He was the kind of person who always had a new joke. One day he would have a joke about an Irishman, another day one about a Scotsman, for he was not a racialist.

  “Did you hear this one?” he’d say, and there would be a universal roar of derision and contempt from all the scholars, making the driver, the conscientious Norry, turn round in the tall red-leathered seat and look at them with his grave gentle face.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Dabby, “there was this Irishman, see, and he was in the First World War and he was making his way to the front. So he was walking along and he heard the firing, see, and he saw the flashes and he didn’t like it. So this Colonel came up just as Paddy was running away for all he was worth and this Colonel, see, sitting on a white horse he looked down at Paddy and he said: ‘And where are you going, my good man? Don’t you know that your place is among the fighting?’ And Paddy turned to him—very pale you understand—and said: ‘Fighting, bejasus, they’re killing each other.’ ”

  And he’d roar with laughter while the scholars would look at him with simulated scorn. Actually, Malcolm quite liked that joke.

  Norry didn’t like Dabby. He thought he was a bad influence. Norry himself was a serious spectacled man who did some lay-preaching in the evenings and on Sundays. He wore a watch with a chain, and his hair was always perfectly combed back from a high but rather wrinkled forehead. It was fun on the bus. There was always laughter and shouting and argument. Malcolm liked the bus. The other passengers didn’t like it because they said it was too noisy. He remembered quite well the day the war broke out. He was coming home across the field, having climbed the fence, and the corn was ripe and golden, the red flowers growing in it, and he was swinging his satchel over his arm. And he saw Tinker with the scythe in his hand, the great wicked blade flashing in the sun, setting up semaphoric signals.

  He signed for Malcolm to come over, and came up to him very close, so that Malcolm could see the teeth discoloured with the chewing of tobacco.

  “Did you hear?” he said, speaking in a half whisper, some spittle at the corner of his mouth. “Did you hear?” he said. “The war’s started.” Malcolm looked at him in amazement and a secret joy. He didn’t know what to say, his bag full of Latin books.

  “Ay,” said Tinker slowly and with relish, “they’ll be going away right enough. Ay, the lot will be going away and then we won’t see the end of it in a hurry.” He looked down at the crooked scythe as into a mirror.

  It was such a fine day too, such a fine blue day. Malcolm didn’t know what it all meant, except that he thought it would be fun, as everything was fun on the bus. It would be like something out of P. C. Wren, heroism and high adventure.

  The following day Dabby said: “Well, lads, I’ll be off after the Nazis soon.” But behind the jollity of the tone there was the shadow of worry.

  Someone shouted: “Bet you’ll be like the Irishman.” It was meant as a joke, but Dabby burst out: “Ay, you’re too young. You’ve got the best of it. You’ve got the education. I didn’t get any education. You’ll be exempt.”

  There was a silence on the bus, then in a shamefaced manner he muttered: “You’ll see me in the cinema, sinking the ‘Bismarck’.”

  Norry didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have to go to war because someone must drive the bus. Anyway, he was against war on principle. The New Testament said that we must love one another and, in a way, he was glad to see Dabby leaving. He was an immoral influence, an unchristian person.

  One day Norry was carrying an old helmet and a great-coat in the bus. He had joined the LDV. “I’ll be driving the truck for them,” he announced, with eyes shining.

  Dabby looked at the back of his neck for a moment and then said: “Ay, old Norry will keep you safe. He’ll look after you, make sure that you don’t miss your Latin. When the Germans are finished with France and want a bit of fishing they’ll come here and Norry will show them the best parts with his truck.”

  Dabby did join the Navy and was drowned six months afterwards on convoy duty.

  Malcolm used to take his dinner with a relative of his mother’s, who stayed in a tenement. He would take slices of bread with him and they would supply his tea. Instead of sugar he would use saccharine. There were no sweets to be had except on coupons. Books too were scarce though sometimes he might buy one or two in Woolworths. He would buy the Listener and try the crossword, but he could hardly ever do it. He hated going to his relatives for lunch and sitting there with his sandwiches, while the others were having a proper meal. Though they often invited him to share it, he didn’t like to.

  On the mantelpiece there was a weather thing and when the day was fine a man and a woman dressed in Dutch clothing and with round apple cheeks would come out; but when the weather was wet they didn’t come out at all. They reminded him a bit of his two relatives, the man and the wife.

  Food was scarce in those days but sometimes he would buy kippers and salt fish and take them home. He didn’t like doing messages, but he seemed to be always doing them while his bro
ther did very few. They bought fresh butter at a house about a mile away, paying two shillings for a pound. The man of the house was a fisherman and the wife was small, brisk and kind. They had only one daughter and no sons. The name of the daughter was Sheila and she was small and dark, about a year younger than himself. Sometimes on a Saturday night he would get milk for Sunday morning and play draughts with the old fisherman while Sheila watched the two of them. She herself didn’t play, but seemed to be interested, and her father and mother were quite happy to see her watching the game.

  It was fine on the bus on a summer morning when he would stand on the deck waiting to jump off, his open-necked shirt stirring in the breeze. He liked jumping off when the bus was going at great speed and often wished Janet could see him. Though she belonged to one of the outlying villages, Janet didn’t travel by bus but stayed in the Girl’s Hostel. Norry didn’t like him doing this for he was responsible if anything happened, but there Malcolm was, hanging out, swinging on the silvery bar as the bus careered round the corner. Dabby had once told a joke about it.

  “Did you hear about the hunchback on the bus?” he said. “Well, there was this hunchback and he was waiting on the deck of the bus to get off and there were others behind him. And one of them said to the hunchback as the bus was drawing up, you know he said to him: ‘Hurry up man, what are you waiting for?’ And the hunchback said, do you know what he said? He said—pointing to his back, you see—’What do you think this is? A parachute?’ ”

  Norry thought this was shameful, absolutely shameful, especially as he himself had a brother who was a bit hunch-backed. The sooner Dabby was away in the war the better. They’d sort him out there, he thought virtuously. But then he was doing his bit, too: the LDV was a useful organisation and one of these days they’d teach him how to fire a rifle. He might be able to kill a rabbit now and then. His wife would like a rabbit for her Sunday dinner, freshly killed.

  5

  “WHAT DO YOU mean by it?” said Mr Twigg, staring hard at Malcolm, his little red eyes burning in his pale face, and flecks of foam on his lips. “What do you mean by it?”