The Fledgeling Read online

  ‘You’d better get some sleep,’ she said. ‘If Charlie agrees to help you, and I don’t think he will, you’ll be off again tonight.’

  ‘You don’t think he will?’

  ‘If he does, it’ll be for Nonie. You can go to my sister in Drogheda—but you’ll need money. How much have you got?’

  ‘About eleven pounds.’

  ‘That’ll get you there. But I don’t know what you’re going to do for money once you’re there. There’s not much work in Ireland.’

  ‘You don’t think much of me, do you, Gran?’

  ‘If you don’t think much of yourself—how can others? You’ve always had someone to fight your battles—Nonie and Len. Now both have gone. Nonie to Charlie, and Len—who knows where? But out of this cage we call Life.’

  ‘You’ve said it. It’s a cage all right. Last time I skipped it they gave me a hundred and twelve days for absence without leave. It was terrible. You wouldn’t believe what it was like. I can’t go back. I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t raise your voice. Has Nonie left the blankets on the cot in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then go and get some sleep. You look bad. If you hear anyone knocking or coming in the room, don’t move. It’ll be someone coming to visit me.’

  ‘Suppose the police come—like last time?’

  ‘You’re my granddaughter sick in bed there. Have you ever told anyone up there that you have a twin sister?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure? No one?’

  ‘Only Mike.’

  ‘Ah! Now we’re talking—Mike, why him?’

  ‘Because he asked me. He’s got no family—only an aunt. He wanted to know about mine.’

  ‘And you told him? About Len and Nonie and your father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And me? Does he know about me?’

  ‘Yes. Mike’s got a sort of way with him. Everyone does what he asks them, tells him what he wants to know. . . .’

  The old woman felt again that mounting stab of concern, almost fear, which Neil’s first mention of this youth had aroused in her. ‘You told him too much,’ she said shortly. ‘You should learn to keep your mouth shut tight. You’re no judge of men, I told you that before—I tell it you again.’

  ‘But, Gran—it was you told me to make friends—to try and get away from myself. I was lonely. Mike was the only one who had a decent word for me—the only one who helped me. Why, he’s covered up for me often.’

  ‘Why? That’s the question. Why? He doesn’t sound the kind who’d do it for nothing. How many times have you done the same for him?’

  ‘Not often—I’m not as clever as he is,’ he said reluctantly.

  ‘Then what does he get out of you in exchange?’ demanded the old woman watching him closely. At the wave of dark ugly colour which flooded his delicate face she was agitated.

  ‘Well?’ she insisted.

  ‘Nothing,’ he mumbled unwillingly, his hands clenched.

  ‘Then he’s a decent sort. You are lucky to have fallen in with him. Perhaps I’ve been doing him an injustice. But if you’ve struck up this friendship, I can’t see why you’ve deserted again; or why he should cover up for you when he’s never going to see you again.’

  Neil was silent. He would see Mike again unless he was clever enough to outwit him. That was just it. He couldn’t bring himself to blurt out that Mike of the smiling half-closed eyes and the loathsome hands had become the great looming Fear which blotted out all the other terrors, the punishment cells, the sergeants and every former horror. He could only think now of Mike with a revulsion which amounted to physical nausea. The very mention of his name caused a violent sensation of being trapped, shut in with his own subservience. He put his aching head in his hands.

  ‘Got a headache?’ asked his grandmother, noticing the rather small chin—charming in Nona but giving a look of weakness to her brother—the full sensitive mouth and the blue half-moons under the eyes. ‘Don’t touch those tablets in the aspirin bottle—they’re my pain-killers. Nonie put them in the aspirin bottle because the cardboard pill box was broken. If you want an aspirin they’re on the mantelpiece.’

  ‘I don’t want anything. I’m only tired.’

  ‘Well get some sleep now—and keep that scarf round your head—just in case—remember that someone may come in to visit me.’ She said it distastefully. It was abhorrent to her to take part in this deceit. ‘All right. Thanks, Gran.’ He hesitated, as if he wanted to say something further, then hunching his narrow shoulders he went towards the door in the wall behind the bed. On it hung a large coloured portrait of the Queen mounted on her horse Winston, and dressed in the uniform of the Grenadier Guards. He saw his grandmother’s eyes on the picture. It had been Len’s. Len had admired the Queen tremendously.

  ‘Put it straight—it’s crooked,’ she said. He straightened the picture and then went through into what had once been a large clothes cupboard, and was now, with ventilation from a small fanlight, classed as a bedroom.

  The old woman lay back wearily. She was suddenly exhausted. The vitality which had so unexpectedly fired her on Neil’s arrival had left her as sap leaves a snapped branch. More than exhaustion was the sudden overwhelming premonition of something evil and menacing brooding over them all. What? The boy had not once looked her fair and square in the face. And he had been lying. His face gave him away every time. And she was probably inviting this menace into closer contact with them by her decision to help him in his escape.

  But supposing she did fight this unknown thing? How did one fight an unknown terror? What weapons did one use against an unknown evil—except prayer? And that had proved unavailing in the past. This was no ordinary desertion. This was not the same as those last two times when he had run away because he couldn’t take it. There was far more beneath it this time. Something stronger than the lad had ability to face up to. He did face up to his fear as far as he was able. He was not one of those cowards who are always hiding behind a façade of boasting and bombast. No, he knew and admitted his deficiencies. Always had. She had tried and tried to put into his frail make-up the seeds of courage; as had Len. Why couldn’t the Army find some pills to give strength and courage to boys like Neil if they had to take them against their wills? She had heard that during the war they did use such tablets. Why couldn’t they use them now? Neil had neither physical nor moral courage, and she felt instinctively that it was the latter of which he stood most in need now. Why couldn’t the Authorities see that he was utterly useless to them. Why must they persist in getting him back each time he deserted adding more and more accumulative time to his service after each savage sentence? The boy must be costing them a thousand times more than his worth to them as a soldier. Yet he had been a satisfactory enough citizen when working in the factory. He had come home on time, brought her his earnings, helped in the home in every way. Why couldn’t they see that some lads just weren’t cut out for soldiering? Taking lads like him against their will to be trained against possible enemies of the State was only succeeding in making of them real enemies of that State.

  Her son, Edward, had ranted on to her about the stupid relentless system, talking of the Military Authorities as criminals who ought to be shot. Len had argued hotly that no State could consider the individual when building its defences. If they exempted one lad they would have to exempt thousands. It was the compulsion itself more than the actual service which went against the grain with most of the conscripts, he had said. Len himself had gone uncomplainingly and cheerfully to do his service and had settled happily into the life there. In the drawer of the small cupboard by the bed where she could lay her hands on them were some letters about her dead grandson. One from his Commanding Officer, and one from the young Lieutenant whose life he had saved. Wonderful letters praising Len.

  The old woman looked up at the picture of the Queen. ‘He served you anyway,’ she said quietly. ‘Maybe that’ll make up in some way for this one who’s too weak. I’
ve sent him back twice, but Nonie’s right, all this prison will only make a criminal of him. I’m sorry—I apologise to you for him and for what I’m going to do. This time I’m going to help him get away.’

  There had been a time when her son Edward, on one of his visits, had wanted to take down the picture of the Queen. It had been during one of his Reddest periods. His mother had been adamant. The picture was Len’s. He liked it so much that he’d saved up for a frame for it. She liked it herself. What business was it of Edward’s who did not pay a penny towards the rent? What right had he to criticise any one of their possessions or what they did with them? The old woman had been so fierce that her son had subsided and never mentioned the subject again.

  She lay in bed now and thought about her son Edward. He had never done a day’s service for any Sovereign. He’d got out of it all—just as he’d got out of his responsibilities to his wife and children and left them to her care and provision. A fine strapping man with broad shoulders and a fine head—Len had been like him in looks—he was to her mind utterly shiftless and worthless. All the education they’d given him at great sacrifice had been used to evade his duties and responsibilities as a citizen and father. An education, she thought bitterly, that had been used for doubtful purposes.

  Always something new and something ending with an ‘ism’. He could talk—and that had been his undoing. Words just flowed from him as rain did from the clouds; he was enchanted, intoxicated, by the sound of his own voice, delighted with his own eloquence. He had that power—for good or evil—of making men listen to him. They listened in spite of themselves—unable to tear themselves from that golden voice.

  When he had first discovered this gift of his for oratory, his mother had gone to listen to him. She had been enthralled, dismayed and terrified at the possibilities conjured up by his visible power over his listeners. But her fears had soon evaporated, for he changed in his views, his aims, his sympathies as frequently and as quickly as the winds did. She was intelligent enough to see that in such a variable and uncertain quality he was more of a danger to himself than to others. And yet, that he could and did inflame the vacillating minds of some of them was undeniable. He worked only for some Cause, and that Cause, whatever it was, paid his expenses and on these he lived, content that his wife and children should be left to the care of the State which he constantly abused. Had it not been for his mother, his children might well have been brought up in one of those same Homes in which she herself had been brought up.

  She had worked for her grandchildren, and after her daughter-in-law, Connie, had run away with a more steady reliable man, she had adopted them as her own. She hadn’t blamed Connie who, delicate after the birth of the twins, had needed some comfort, some love. Both these were unknown to Edward, who, continuously caught up in the fire of some wordy argument or some ethical point, seemed deliberately blind to the physical and spiritual needs of his wife and family. They had become the grandmother’s family—they were hers, for Connie hadn’t lived to enjoy her new comfort for long. She had died, two years after running away from Edward; but at least she’d had two years’ comfort with a man who had loved her and the old woman had not grudged them her.

  Edward had come home when Len had been killed. He’d seen the paragraphs in the newspapers. Len’s heroism in saving the life of his officer had been made much of—and it seemed that he was going to get a medal. It was going to be given posthumously, and she, his grandmother, would be the one to receive it for him. She was not going to allow Edward to have anything to do with the Investiture—after his Communist tirade about the Monarchy. He had delivered a long oration about murder of the young by the State. He’d even gone on about the medal which the papers had said that Len would certainly be awarded. He’d implied that it would be interesting for him, feeling as he did, to go to the Palace and receive it. She had turned on him then, furiously. She was the one who would go and receive it. Len had always given his grandmother as his next-of-kin, his father having often not been seen or heard of by his family for years at a time.

  Edward had concluded his oration on Len’s death with an outburst about freedom. Of how man had been made before all the rotten man-made laws and religious conventions had bound and enslaved him, and that before long he must wake up to the fact that he had lost his freedom by his own stupidity.

  ‘What d’you want then?’ his mother had demanded fiercely. ‘D’you want to revert to the Garden of Eden when there was no good or evil?’

  ‘It’s not a question of good or evil. It’s a question of a lot of laws and conventions which, made by us, now enslave and enmesh us so that we are indeed the prisoners of our own achievements,’ he had replied. And from there he had begun another rippling stream of words, which just flowed from him without a break.

  Miss Rhodes, the social worker who had been visiting her that afternoon, had been excited and impressed by Edward when he had blown in with his pockets full of newspaper cuttings about Len. ‘Seen these? And these?’ he had demanded, his eyes blazing. It’s nothing but murder—plain murder. Murder by the State for its own doubtful ends. . . .’

  ‘Of course I’ve seen them,’ his mother had snapped. ‘And the other side too—the letters from his officers and fellow Servicemen—and his last letter to me. He liked it. He loved the life—read his letter for yourself. He wasn’t like you, thank God. He was a fine boy—and you did nothing for him.’

  ‘I did more than a woman like you can realise,’ he had retorted coolly, refusing to read the letters. ‘If I can make even a few people see that we are all bound—and becoming more and more bound—by chains of our own making—by our own folly and greed, then I shall have done far more for Len than you could ever have done by filling his belly and covering his body.’

  Miss Rhodes had been excited—not only at the oratory but at the ideas expressed by Edward.

  ‘What you’ve been saying is something like Existentialism,’ she had declared to Edward. ‘Their theory is that man should be absolutely free to decide his own actions; that he should not be influenced at all in his decisions by any psychological or metaphysical contingencies . . . I have been reading Sartre on the subject.’

  ‘And you approve of all that nonsense, Miss Rhodes? My son is a Communist—do you realise that?’

  ‘Was . . . was, Mother,’ Edward had said coolly. ‘I’m not so convinced now. That business of Stalin shook me . . . considerably . . . and now this Hungarian business—not the sort of thing one can ignore. No, I’ve been shaken, Miss Rhodes—very shaken.’

  ‘Your convictions are so often shaken,’ said his mother, drily. ‘You’re far more shaken by the exposure of a mass murderer than you are by the fate of the victims, or by the death of your own son in a brave action under great danger.’

  ‘It’s only a small mind which can’t admit it can be shaken,’ he had retorted. ‘The fact of a son being a son is physical not spiritual. The tenets to which I have been adhering are spiritual. They must affect millions—Len’s death affects only a few—those closely related to him.’

  His mother had been indignantly silent. What was the use of arguing with Edward? She had left it to Miss Rhodes, and the two of them had carried it on spiritedly and at length. She’d heard Len and Nonie arguing for hours with their father. He loved argument—glorying in words with which he vanquished all their protests and theories. Miss Rhodes had not been vanquished so easily, and the old woman had noted with amusement the effect of Edward’s fine head and noble brow, his dark flashing eyes and the great plume of almost white hair which he swept back with a gesture both practised and calculated. Miss Rhodes had been impressed by everything about him. When he had talked like that about his own son’s death his mother had been furious.

  ‘You’re inhuman,’ she said angrily, ‘devoid of any normal natural feeling and of any affection. You never had any as a child.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Mother,’ Edward had said patiently, as if to a child. ‘It’s becau
se I have so much feeling for humanity that I can accept Len’s death as I do. As a sacrifice to our crass stupidity and blindness; to the chains in which we have allowed ourselves to be fettered.’

  After he had gone, Miss Rhodes had said excitedly. ‘Your son is very intelligent, Mrs. Collins.’ ‘Think so?’ the old woman had said smiling. ‘You’re surprised to hear such words and expressions and opinions uttered in such a place—isn’t it that?’

  Miss Rhodes had looked hot and uncomfortable, but her eyes had gone round the damp-marked walls, the thin threadbare piece of carpet, the cheap bits of furniture, and then to the large portrait of the Queen. The old woman could devise what was passing through her mind. Mrs. Collins drew the Old Age Pension plus that bit extra which the Assistance Board allowed her. That she had a son obviously highly educated and clearly able to support her if he wished surprised the welfare visitor.

  ‘Edward’s always been a man of words,’ said the old woman grimly. ‘And words don’t earn you your bread unless they can be adapted to the requirements of people. Edward’s too lazy and too changeable to adapt his to either the radio or a newspaper. What he’d like to do is to make hundreds of records of his own voice holding forth on his usual rubbish—and sell them for thousands of pounds for posterity. But they are his means of livelihood just the same. Words are his weapons—he uses them unscrupulously on behalf of any organisation who needs their men worked up to make trouble, strike or go-slow and the like. And if you don’t call that despicable, I’d like to know what is! Words, words—I hate them, hate them. Sometimes when I’m listening to the radio I could scream at the endless spate of them. Words. They mean something different to each of us. To me they mean Edward.’

  And today was Wednesday, Miss Rhodes’ day for visiting this area. She would come this afternoon, as she always did. She would come at exactly the same time and would knock on the window so that Mrs. Collins could hand her out the key, if she were too unwell to get up, and she could unlock both the front door, unless it had been left open, and the door to her patient’s room. This afternoon Linda might come too. At the thought of Linda the old woman’s eyes went to the window. It was no longer so grey; there was a bright ray of sunlight coming through the double net curtain which they had been obliged to hang over the window because of Neil.