Pack of Cards Read online

  At the house, in Frances's sitting-room, on the desk, there was a photograph of her and her brother, Carol's father, in youth. Around seventeen or eighteen. It was a bad photograph, muzzy, and Carol had not at first recognised the faces. Then, her father's familiar features had somehow emerged, but displaced and distorted; the boy in the photograph was him, and yet not him. She thought of this, and of herself; her hands, thrust into the pockets of her school coat, were rigid with cold; it was three o'clock in the afternoon, there was no reason, it seemed to her, why this day should not go on for ever. She stumped behind Frances and Clive, through the sphere of that silent, suspended landscape; it is so lovely here in summer, Frances had said, quite perfect, you must come in August, in the holidays.

  At nights, at school, the other girls planned and recalled; the long thin room in which she slept with eight others was filled with disembodied voices, whispering in the dark of holidays past and holidays to come, of what they had done and what they would do. The limbo of the term was put away; they roamed into other times, other places. And Carol lay silent; to roam, for her, had too many dangers. Recollection must be checked; that way lay disaster. And the other way? She had nothing there, either, to offer; no plans nor expectations.

  The children came running from a field, solemn-faced and important, with a dead bird they had found, a lapwing, bright-plumaged and uncorrupt, its eyes closed by filmy lids. Marian was on the brink of tears. Her father took the bird and they huddled round him, quiet and comforted, as he dug a grave, lined it with leaves, buried the body, marked the place with a ring of berries collected from the hedges. ‘I don't expect it felt anything, Mummy, did it?’ begged Marian. ‘It didn't hurt it, did it?’ And Frances said, ‘No, darling, it would be just like going to sleep, it would hardly know anything about it.’

  In the village, Frances bought things in the warm, cluttered post office that smelled of soap, matches and bacon; the children fingered and fidgeted, their voices shrill and confident. ‘This is my niece Carol,’ Frances explained, ‘who is here for the Christmas holidays.’ And the shop lady, petting the children, giving them each a toffee from a personal store behind the till, hesitated, the open tin in her hand, as also did Carol hesitate; we neither of us know, she thought in despair, what I am, if I am a child or not. The shop lady reached a decision, good or bad, and put the tin back on its shelf, unproffered.

  On the way back, Marian pointed suddenly over the fields and said to Carol, ‘That's Mrs Binns's cottage, down that track: they've got chickens, and a dog called Toby.’

  Carol stared over a grass field, patched with unmelted snow; smoke filtered from a chimney, barely darker than the sky; washing hung limp on a line in stiff geometric shapes of sheets, towels, shirts with outstretched arms.

  On Christmas morning she lay in bed hearing the children open their stockings in their parents' room across the corridor; their high-pitched voices alternated with their parents' deeper ones like a series of musical responses, statement and commentary. She heard their feet pattering on the bare boards, the dogs barking in excitement; the animals too had Christmas presents – bones wrapped in scarlet crepe paper, beribboned rubber mice. The day proceeded through a series of ceremonies and rituals: after breakfast we have presents under the tree, before church we telephone grandmother, in the afternoon we walk to Clee Hill. Frances said, ‘I forgot to tell you, Carol – tomorrow our old friends the Laidlaws are coming. Mark is fifteen so he will be someone for you, I thought – it is dull for you, being always with the younger ones.’

  The children did not like her, she knew. At first they had been shy, the small boys arch, trying to appeal as they would appeal to a grown-up. But they saw her now for what she was, neither fish nor fowl, not exempt like them from adult obligations, but without adult privileges either. Sharp-eyed, they noted her position as a classless person, without position, and exploited their own the more; if she would not join in their games when they wanted her to they complained to Frances, and Carol felt her aunt's resentment, unstated but none the less evident. I have a hundred things to do, her silent back said, the least you could do is help to amuse them for a while. They danced around Carol, more agile in every way; they made her feel lumpish of mind and in body.

  The prospect of Mark filled her with apprehension. He is at Marl-borough, said Frances, he is awfully clever, he has such nice manners, we have always liked him so much.

  They came, the Laidlaws; there were kisses and handshakes and the house was filled with talk, with people at ease with one another. Mark, Carol furtively noted, had longish hair that flopped over one eye and was dressed as a man – tweed jacket, grey flannels, grown-up tie. He sat next to Frances at lunch and talked with what Carol saw to be charming attention, listening when listening should be done, taking the initiative when that was appropriate. After lunch he played with the children – an absurd game of crawling on the floor, romping, and he was in no way diminished by it, it made him seem more grown-up, not less so. And Frances beamed upon him.

  He had said to Carol, ‘Where do you go to school?’ She had replied to this. He had asked her how many School Cert. subjects she was doing and she replied to that too. And then there had been a silence, she had searched wildly for something to fill it, and seen that he wanted to get away from her, to get back to the others, that she did not interest him. ‘It must have been awfully exciting, growing up in India,’ he said. ‘What was it like?’ and India swirled in her head, a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and responses, and there was nothing she could say. ‘Yes,’ she stammered. ‘It was … I mean … Yes, I …’, and felt Frances's gaze upon her, observing, regretting. ‘Have you ever seen Gandhi?’ he asked, and she shook her head.

  Later, in the evening, Frances said, ‘The Laidlaws are having a small party for Mark, at the New Year, but of course you will be gone by then, Carol – they were so sorry.’

  It snowed in the night. She drew her curtains and saw the landscape powdered over, not deeply, but shrouded as it were, in a state of suspension once again, motionless. The children, outside, were rushing about trying to scoop up enough for snowballs or snowmen; they came in wet and querulous, their hands scarlet with cold. Their exhilaration disintegrated into tears and fretfulness; Frances was irritable. Later, she had letters to write, and the children wanted to go to the village, to buy sweets. Carol can take us, they cried, and Frances, relieved, said yes, of course, Carol can take you – wrap up well; don't let them run on the road, Carol.

  They met him on the way back. She was walking behind the children, who were quiet now, amiable, tamed by chocolate. He came down the track from the cottage, the gun crooked over his arm, and they arrived together precisely at the gate. Marian said, ‘Hello, Tom.’

  He nodded, ‘Hello.’ And then he looked at Carol and smiled, and quite easily, without her eyes sliding away to left or right, without a problem, she smiled back, He said, ‘Mum told me you were stopping with your auntie.’

  The children wanted to see the gun. But their curiosity was tinged, even at this remove, with Frances's disapproval. In silence they watched him demonstrate its workings; his thin fingers clicked this and pressed that, ran over the sleek metal, caressed the polished butt. He was immensely proud of it; in his light voice, not yet broken, a boy's voice, but with its sudden odd lurches into manhood, he described the make and model. It was not a toy, it was real, serious, it marked him. It told him what he was. ‘My dad gave it me for my birthday. My fourteenth. He reckoned you can learn to use a gun, then, when you're fourteen, it's time.’

  The children were restive, moving away. Come on, they said, let's go, it's cold, let's go home.

  Tom turned to Carol. ‘I'll be going out tomorrow morning, shooting. Early, when it's getting light. Sevenish. You could come if you like.’

  She said, ‘Yes, please’, before she could stop to think. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Come by the cottage then, and we'll go.’

  She walked back to the house amazed; things like this di
d not happen, it was astonishing, she could hardly believe it.

  It was in the cold, wakeful reaches of the night that it struck her she should have told Frances, asked Frances. But now it was too late. Frances was asleep: at seven – before seven – she would not be about. And suppose she said no, or even just implied no? I have to go, Carol thought, I must go, it is the only thing that has ever happened to me.

  She woke again long before dawn and lay looking at her watch every few minutes. When it said half past six she got up, making as little noise as possible, and dressed in all her warmest things. But she was warm already, for the first time in days, weeks, it seemed, and when she crept down the stairs, and opened the back door the air outside was tinged with mildness, she thought. The wind that met her face was not so keen, and the snow, in the drive, had melted. Only in the lee of the hedges it lay still in thickish drifts.

  It was almost dark. The sky was streaked with light in the east; dark clouds lay like great fish along the horizon. She walked down the road and there was no one else in the world, except her; she was alone, and it was quite all right, she felt confident, at ease with things, she walked briskly with her hands in her pockets and there was beauty in the landscape that wheeled around her, she could see that. It was still and quiet, clenched in its winter state, but there was a flush of reddish brown on the plough, where the snow had melted, and the bare shapes of the trees on the skyline were of amazing delicacy, they held the suggestion of other times, the ripeness to come, summer.

  She hesitated outside the cottage door; there was an easy murmuring of voices from inside, and the chink of crockery, and smells of toast and something frying. And then a man came out, at that moment, in old jacket and muffler, his trousers clipped ready for a bicycle – Tom's father, presumably – and told her to go on in, Tom wouldn't be a moment.

  Mrs Binns gave her a cup of tea, but she could not eat the food offered; she felt in her stomach all the instability of before a journey, before an event. But it was good, it was the best thing she had known, beyond things which must not be remembered, things from other times. Tom said little; he attended to the gun with oil and a rag and a stick, and when he had done he got up and said, ‘We'll be off now, Mum,’ and Carol rose too, in a state still of amazement. She felt quite comfortable, quite in place. I have a friend, she thought, and could hardly believe it.

  He led her over the fields, up a shallow hillside. Out of the cottage, he became talkative. He told her about the ways of rabbits, and how you must go after them downwind, towards their burrows, towards the slope where he knew they would come out to graze around now. He had shot two, he said, the week before, and Carol said, no, three your mother said, and he corrected her, carefully – two it was, one I missed, I told Mum, she got it wrong. I'm not good with sighting, he said, seriously, not yet, and I've got a shake in my wrist, I'll have to work on that, and she nodded, intent, and stared at his wrists. They were bony wrists, white-knobbed, sticking out from the frayed sleeve of his too-short jersey. His hair was cut short, almost cropped, like the soldier in the London train. He spoke with the accent of the place, this place to which he belonged, where he had been born, where his parents had been born; sometimes she could not quite follow what he said. She thought confusedly of this, as they climbed the hill, the ground wet and springy under their feet: of her own speech, which was quite different, and of the place where she had been born, none of whose many tongues she spoke. Once, climbing a gate, he gave her the gun to hold for a moment; she felt the sting of the cold metal on her hands, and cradled it gingerly, with reverence.

  They reached the side of the field where, he said, the rabbits would come. It ran downhill from a small copse, and she could see the brown markings of burrows at the top. He edged cautiously along the ditch until he came to a place in long grass where they could lie and wait. ‘They might have heard us,’ he said. ‘We'll have to sit tight a bit, and they'll come out again.’

  They lay flank to flank on the wet grass. She could feel its damp and cold creep through to her skin, and the faint warmth of his body beside hers. Their breath steamed. Occasionally they whispered a little; it was better, though, he said, to stay quiet. He seemed to expect nothing of her; if she had not complied, if she had infringed the rules in any way, he did not let her know. He let her hold the gun again, and she peered down the long barrel into the field and saw, suspended cinematically beyond it, the cropped turf with its dark enigmatic holes and scrapings of rich earth and pockets of snow. He said, ‘They're a long time about it, usually they come out quicker than this, once you've sat quiet a bit,’ and she could feel the tension in him; the rabbits mattered, they were the most important thing in his life just now. She said suddenly, amazed at her own temerity, ‘What is it like, killing something, do you like it?’ And turning to look at him, saw with shock that a slow tide of colour had crept up his face.

  ‘I don't like them dying,’ he said, mumbling with his head to the ground, so that she could hardly hear. ‘I hate that. The first time I came out with my dad, I felt sick, I didn't want to do it. I couldn't say, not to him. He gave me the gun, see, for my own. Now it's all right. They die quick, it's over just like that.’ He looked at her, his face still red. ‘It's not for the killing, it's not for that.’

  She nodded. There wasn't anything to say. And then suddenly he touched her arm, pressed his fingers down on her coat, and she looked out towards the field and there was movement on the turf, something brown shifting against the green – two, three of them. One sat up, nosing the wind, and she saw its pricked ears, and, as it turned, the white scut.

  He lifted the gun, aimed; she was clenched in excitement, breathless. And then he pressed the trigger, and the noise was startling, louder than ever she had imagined, but in the second before, in a fraction of a second, something had happened out there and the rabbits had bolted, homed back on their burrows, gone. The field was empty.

  She said, ‘Oh …’ He sat up, breaking the gun apart angrily, unloading. ‘Won't they come out again?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not for hours, maybe. That's done it, that has. Something scared them.’ His hands were shaking, she could see that, they had been shaking earlier too, when he lay still on the grass, aiming. Now he seemed almost relieved. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Have to get back. Mum'll be wondering.’

  They ran down the field; there was no longer any need to be quiet. At the gate he showed her how he could vault over it, and she, who was unathletic, who lumbered hopelessly around the games pitch at school, found that she could do it also; there was no end, it seemed, to the surprises this day held. There are bits of me I know nothing about, she thought, I am not so clumsy after all, I can talk to people, I can feel part of something. The sky was crossed and recrossed by ragged flights of birds. ‘What are they?’ she asked. ‘What kind of bird is that?’ and he told her that those were rooks, and these on the plough, in the field, were lapwings, surprised at her ignorance but uncritical. ‘Mum said you grew up somewhere else,’ he said, ‘somewhere foreign,’ and she talked about India; she brought heat and dust and the sound of the place on to this wintry Suffolk field and it was painless, or almost so.

  At the corner of the track to the cottage he asked her if she would like to come out again the next morning; she had half-expected this and yet not dared to hope. Such coincidence, in the normal way of things, of what you would like and what was available, did not happen. She said, ‘Yes please,’ and thought it sounded childish, and blushed.

  Back at the house, she was amazed to find it past breakfast-time, Frances clearing the table, the children staring as she came in at the kitchen door, Clive reading a letter. Frances sounded annoyed. ‘There you are, Carol, we were beginning to wonder, where have you been?’

  She had prepared nothing, given no thought to this moment. She stood, silent with confusion, and then one of the children said, ‘She's been shooting rabbits with Mrs Binns's Tom. We heard him ask her yesterday.’

  Frances swept t
hings off the table on to a tray. ‘Oh, really. I can't imagine why you should want to, Carol, I must say.’

  ‘Did he kill any rabbits?’ said Marian.

  Carol muttered, ‘No.’ She could feel her face scarlet; the day, and all that it had held, died on Frances's kitchen floor; she felt dirty.

  ‘Goody,’ said Marian. ‘Can I go out now?’

  Clive had not spoken; he had put down his letter and was playing with the dog, gently pulling its ears, mumbling to it; Carol, catching his eye by accident, saw it go cold, excluding her. ‘Well,’ he said to the dog, ‘walkies, is it? Walkies for a good girl?’ The dog beamed and fawned and swished its feathered tail.

  All that day was sourly flavoured with Frances's disapproval; nothing was said, but it hung in the air at lunchtime, in the afternoon, over tea. Mrs Binns did not come, for which Carol was grateful; there would have been references, Tom would have been mentioned, and that she could not endure.

  In the afternoon there was a letter from her father, enclosed in one to Frances. She read it by the drawing-room fire, and it seemed to come not from another country but from another time; his familiar handwriting, speaking of the house, the garden, neighbours, referred to things that no longer were, they had perished long ago. ‘Poor Tim,’ said Frances, reading her own letter. ‘He is so anxious to get home, pack things up out there. It must be trying for him, but it is not long now, he has booked his passage.’ Carol read that the bulbuls had nested again in the bush outside the laundry, that the cannas were a lovely show this year, that the rains had come early; it was as though he were frozen in another age, her father, in an imagined world. She asked, in sudden panic, ‘Will he really be here this summer, here in England?’ And Frances, preoccupied now with the demands of the children, of the hour, said that of course he would, he was bound to, the house was sold, the furniture to be packed and shipped. If you are writing to him, she went on, you had better put it in with mine, and save the stamp.