An affair
The boy woke up early that summer morning. The vague netting of dawn lingered over the garden outside his window, coiling round the intricacies of the formal beds directly below. His room was at the top of the house – separate and distant in the attic, though there were more than enough bedrooms in the main wings. He had asked for the attic room, and Mother had replied with amusement ‘If you want it, you funny little child’. She often replied like that – attached the epithet ‘funny child’ to the ends of sentences instead of his name, faintly raising her thinly pencilled eyebrows. He could tell by carefully watching her eyebrows the state of her mood – whether she would carelessly stroke his cheek in a brief moment of amusement and faintly awakened interest or whether he was intrusively infringing on her thoughts.
Barely controlling his impatience for the possibilities of the day to begin the boy sat cross-legged by the window, listening to the sounds of the birds outside. Despite the cacophony each tune was distinct in its unabashed purity of sound, scything through the clean air with bold freedom. During the long summer months the boy became obsessed with birds, watching them freewheeling across the wide expanse of the farm fields. He knew each type of bird, its song, the appearance of its eggs. Thirsting after ornithological knowledge he felt somehow able to inhabit their world a little, with its reliance on the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun and the dependable rhythms of nature. Gradually their sounds became less insistent and eventually the pearl-like coolness of the air was transmuted into the beginnings of a hazy summer’s day. The boy could hear the labourers entering the fields on the farm just beyond the house, the whistles and bursts of song permeating the cold stateliness of the quiet indoors.
The farm and the house were two different and distinct worlds in his mind, almost antagonistic in their separation. The dark and weary isolation of the house could not be reconciled to the warmth and working thrum of the farm, a place the boy felt more at home in. It was a part of the familiar cycle of the seasons that charged the indistinguishable melding of the days until it was time to return to school, when the Autumn leaves began to fall. Jolted out of the reverie the birdsong had lulled him into he sprang up and began to run downstairs, slowing his pace as he passed the corridor along which Mother slept. Breakfast was waiting on the side table of the breakfast room, the bread, small quantity of margarine and egg sitting in splendid isolation. It always made the boy feel slightly ridiculous to see the way the food was still presented, compared to the meals before the war had broken out. Though Mother never came down for breakfast she still insisted on the display, while she herself was served upstairs in her bedroom.
The morning was occupied with roaming the woods and fields adjacent to the house, where the boy and his dog could revel in the disordered tangle of nature. The woods were quiet and cool; the peace occasionally shattered when the dog spied a woodcock in the bushes and sent it flying out of a bush or tree, encouraged by the boy’s war whoop. He felt a barely recognised weight lift from his shoulders when he reached the beckoning shadows of the wood each morning, born of the possibility to be both unseen and unjudged, letting his voice raise itself to a shout of sudden unrepressed high spirits. The careless animalistic cries as he came upon a foreign enemy, after tracking for several days, were mirrored in the curvetting physicality of his wolfhound as they circled each other. The wood itself seemed again another realm, another separation from his life at home. Home was tightly bound up in the eyebrow admonishments of his mother, the rules and regulations she imposed with barely a glance. In this no-man’s land of imagination and riotous freedom the boy was released from the urge to please and placate, the difficulties of puzzling out what this placation would fully involve. The wood in summer was a place of clarity, where the shadows were dark and the spaces between the trees clear pools of hovering light, where thought became suspended like the shafts of amber sunshine. The boy felt a palpable sense of belonging in this untroubled, uncomplicated world of sun and shadow, this cool realm of unoccupied space. And no one told off the dog for high spirits and his unquenchable tendency to utter short, sharp barks with devastating frequency. The gradual increase of the intensity of heat of the summer’s day told the boy that lunch was approaching, and he called the dog as he made his way out of the wood.
Entering the house he was immediately struck by a blast of air in the entrance hall, a chill breeze that quietened the slowly melting exhilaration of the morning. ‘Charles’ – the low and crystalline voice pierced the cool shadows of the hall. The boy slowly walked across and into the dining room with the dog panting quietly at his side. ‘Good morning Charles’, Mother said again, in faintly reproving tones. The boy sighed and led the dog out of the room, before returning to the table and seating himself at the right side of his mother. He stared down at his reflection in the dark polished wood, then wiped the small streak of dirt on the side of his face before stealing a glance at Mother to see if she had noticed. Luckily her eyes had a distant, distracted look in them, as if her thoughts were far away. Never forthcoming, she had seemed particularly unreachable of late to the boy, and even more unconcerned with him than usual. He noticed the way a tendril of dark hair escaped from her chignon, disrupting the classical perfection of her calmly composed face. She reminded him of a Greek statue he had once seen in a book on the lost city of Atlantis. The picture had been of a statue of Aphrodite buried underwater, from a little distance above, and the slight blurring the artist had achieved gave Aphrodite the impression of being caught in a dream, half reality and half mirage. She looked towards him without really seeing and in cool tones told him to take his elbows off the table. The meal passed quickly and in silence.
‘You’ll be going down to the farm I suppose after lunch?’
‘Yes.’
‘Try not to get too dirty’; this with the thin eyebrows raised a little.
‘Yes’.
Silence.
‘You may get down from the table’.
The boy slid off his chair and walked carefully out. As soon as he passed through the august front door he broke into a run, whooping and catcalling as he ran down the dusty lane towards the farm. The sun had intensified into the hard brightness of mid-afternoon, and the distant shapes of the cows and hay bales were swimming in the heat. Approaching nearer to the stanchion barn, where from the sounds of mooing the cows were being milked, he hung over the gate. From within the gloom a dozen voices called out in a cacophony of cheerful greeting ‘Ciao Carlotto’. He didn’t like the name ‘Carlotto’ – it sounded like a girl – but from the mouths of these tall, sunburned men who worked on the farm and worked with gusto he accepted it. ‘Ciao’, he called back. ‘Can I help?’ The man nearest to him, Julio, he knew and liked particularly well. Julio always milked the most difficult cow, did the most strenuous jobs on the farm, spent the longest cutting, tedding, raking and baling out in the field while the sun beat down. Sometimes the boy wondered if he got his energy and power from the sun, and that it fuelled his silent strength. The boy wanted to be like Julio when he grew up. ‘Si Carlotto’ he smiled back, ‘But only if you concentrate hard, so il piccolo can return to pasture quick, si?’
The boy frowned, to show he was ready to concentrate to his utmost.
He loved being on the farm. The rawness, the bold colours of the yellow bales, red brick barn and burning blue sky; and then when it rained watching the sleet sheets from the musty comfort of the hay, hearing the drops beat down on the roof. He felt an unexplained sense of belonging, community, industry – in a word life, life that moved and changed and shifted but in a comforting and unchanging cycle. Simplicity. And he liked the men who worked on the farm. When he thought about his rough liking for these strange new workers he felt confusion. He’d heard the servants talking about them when they first arrived as ‘the enemy’, and saw the way they were treated with suspicion when they came up to the house to eat at midday. He was fiercely patriotic – he knew that the men who had left to fight the Jerries were heroes and the Germans and Italians they would vanquish were the villains. And yet he couldn’t help but like them – when they gathered at the end of the day smoking over the main metal gate he felt an urge to be one of them, with tendrils of blue-grey smoke wreathing round a creased, suntanned face. Their lunch was later than expected because of the increase in work to get the hay bales made in time, and only now were they allowed their break. Julio often disappeared around this time though, so the boy chatted with the other workers instead.
Suddenly he remembered the new bow and arrow he had wanted to show the men, and which he had been telling them about for weeks. Mother had always firmly told him that during the afternoon he should stay away from the House, particularly at this hour when she had her nap. To disturb her nap was the biggest error of all, a mistake he had made once and after which his mother’s subsequent coolness had prevented any repetition. He decided to risk it, running all the way from the farm to the house with eager vigour. Entering the hall carefully he heard the murmur of voices from the sitting room, and a low laugh, his mothers. He listened with pleasure – she barely ever laughed with him, but when she did it was as though a brief curtain of warmth enveloped him in faintly felt security. As he silently walked towards the grand staircase he caught a brief glimpse of the room through the half-open door and stopped in blundering confusion. She was sitting with her back turned to him on the primrose yellow sofa, next to the table with the family pictures displayed in awful array, with his father in military uniform to the fore. Inexplicably, on the arm of the sofa was Julio, bending over her with tender familiarity and something else in his eyes, a something the boy didn’t recognise but made him think of the summer heat outside and the overwhelming radiance of the deep blue sky. He watched, trying to decipher the codes of thought and behaviour before him into some kind of meaning, trying to meld these two worlds in his head, a collision as startling as an imagined meteor he had read about plunging into the soft incomprehension of the earth. He watched in fascination as his mother arched her neck with the sensual grace of a swan, and kissed Julio’s neck with ardent pressure.
The boy felt another wave of confusion hit him with sweltering force. His mother had never before shown any spontaneous emotion in front of or to him. Perhaps Julio had performed some special task, some monumental act of fealty…and yet a vague unease crept upon him and he thought suddenly of his father with anger and loyalty, though he could not quite think why. His mother laughed again and then turned away from Julio with graceful playfulness, her eyes alighting as she did so on the still form of her son, framed in a taunting frieze in the door way. For sixty seconds their eyes locked, and the flicker of fire in them – shame, apology? – was quickly replaced by blankness. She slowly and deliberately got up, directing Julio’s attention to the window as she did so, and crossed over to the door. Another moment. For a shocked second he saw unfamiliar messages in her eyes – a kind of desperate plea, a vulnerability that bound him to her impenetrability more firmly than a whole explanation. The door closed, leaving the boy, feeling but uncomprehending, alone outside.
He slowly trailed up the staircase, feeling more uncertain and alone than ever before, reaching his attic room to sit down on the bed, pondering the scene he had just witnessed. He knew that his mother shouldn’t have been alone in the room with Julio, and yet he felt an urge to explain to himself and an imaginary father standing stiffly before him, why this was a perfectly reasonable. A tear slid down his face, which he brushed away angrily, and he stared down willing his hand to still its slight trembling. He felt as though his whole world had had a slight tremor, like a barely-there earthquake. He stared into the cool silence.
The next morning he awoke early again, but this time the birdsong was merely noise. The morning passed with a teasing slowness, as he lay on his bed attempting to read Boy’s Own, counting down each long minute before lunch. When the time came he entered the room with his eyes down, expecting something to be different – he didn’t know what. ‘Good morning Charles’; the same implacable tones. The meal passed with its usual monotonous regularity, though this time his mother occasionally made a small movement of suppressed energy and concealed frustration. At the end: ‘You’ll be going down to the farm I suppose after lunch?’
‘Yes.’
‘Try not to get too dirty.’
‘Yes’.
Silence.
‘You may get down from the table.’
The boy hesitated. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Yes mother’, he said, and left.