King Billy Is a Gentleman

I cannot get out of my mind, now, the village where I was born, just out of the curl of the city’s tentacles. We were too close to the city for a life of our own. There was a regular train service—not one of those where you have to lie in wait and study its habits. But we did not like the Mancunians. “Urban, squat and packed with guile” I suppose was our attitude; we sneered at their back-to-back accents and pitied their physiques. My mother, a staunch Lamarckian, is convinced that Mancunians have disproportionately long arms, as a result of generations of labor at the loom. Until (but this was later) a pink housing estate was slammed up, and they were transplanted in their hundreds, like those trees plucked up for Christmas whose roots are dipped in boiling water—well, until then we did not have much to do with people from town. And yet if you ask me if I was a country boy—no, I wasn’t that. Our huddle of stones and slates, scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues, had no claim on rural England, where there is morris dancing and fellowship and olde ale flowing. It was a broken, sterile place, devoid of trees, like a transit camp; and yet with the hopeless permanence that transit camps tend to assume. Snow stood on the hills till April.

We lived at the top of the village, in a house which I considered to be haunted. My father had disappeared. Perhaps it was his presence, long and pallid, which slid behind the door in sweeps of draft and raised the hackles on the terrier’s neck. He had been a clerk by profession; crosswords were his hobby, and a little angling: simple card games, and a cigarette-card collection. He left at ten o’clock one blustery March morning, taking his albums and his tweed overcoat and leaving all his underwear; my mother washed it and gave it to a jumble sale. We didn’t miss him much, only the little tunes which he used to play on the piano: over and over, “Pineapple Rag.”

Then came the lodger. He was from further north, a man with long slow vowels, making a meal out of words we got through quite quickly. The lodger was choleric; his flashpoint was low. He was very, very unpredictable; if you were going to see the shape of the future, you had to watch him carefully, quiet and still, with all your intuitions bristling. When I was older I became interested in ornithology, and I brought into play the expertise I had picked up. Again, that was later; there were no birds in the village, only sparrows and starlings, and a disreputable tribe of pigeons strutting in the narrow streets.

The lodger took an interest in me, getting me outside to kick a football around. But I wasn’t a robust child, and though I wanted to please him I hadn’t the skill. The ball slipped between my feet, as if it were a small animal. He grew alarmed by my bouts of breathless coughing; mollycoddle, he said, but he said it with fright in his face. Soon he seemed to write me off. I began to feel I was a nuisance. I went to bed early, and lay awake, listening to the banging and shouting downstairs; for the lodger must have quarrels, just as he must have his breakfast. The terrier would begin yelping and grizzling, to keep them company, and then later I would hear my mother run upstairs, sniffling quietly to herself. She would not let the lodger go, I knew, she had set her mind on him. He brought home in his pay packets more money than we had ever had in the house, and whereas when he came at first he would hand over his rent money, now he dropped the whole packet on the table, and my mother would open it with her small pointed fingers, and give him back a few shillings for beer and whatever she thought men needed. He was getting a bonus, she told me, he was getting made up to foreman. He was our chance in life. If I had been a girl she would have confided in me more; but I caught the drift of things. I lay awake still, after the footfalls had stopped, and the dog was quiet, and the shadows crept back into the corners of the room; I dozed, and wished I were unhaunted, and wished for the years to pass in a night so that when I woke up I would be a man. As I began to doze, I dreamed that one day a door would open in the wall; and I would walk through it, and in that land I would be the asthmatic little king. There would be a law against quarreling in the land where I was king. But then, in real life, daylight would come, a Saturday perhaps, and I would have to play in the garden.

The gardens at the back of the houses were long narrow strips, fading by way of ramshackle fences into gray cowpat fields. Beyond the fields were the moors, calm steel-surfaced reservoirs and the neat stripes of light and dark green conifers which mark out the good offices of the Forestry Commission. Little grew in these gardens: scrub grass, tangles of stunted bush, ant-eaten fence poles and lonely strands of wire. I used to go down to the bottom of the garden and pull long rusty nails out of our rotting fence; I used to pull the leaves off the lilac tree, and smell the green blood on my hands, and think about my situation, which was a peculiar one.

Bob and his family had come to live next door to us in some early, singular transplantation from the city. Perhaps this accounted for his attitude to his land. We viewed with distrust the handful of wormy raspberries the garden produced by itself, the miserable lupins running to seed; the straggling rhubarb was never cut and stewed. But Bob had fenced in his garden like the propositions central to a man’s soul: as if he had the Holy Grail in his greenhouse, and the Vandals were howling and barracking in the cowpat fields. Bob’s garden was military, it was correct; it knew its master. Life grew in rows; things went into the ground out of packets and came up on the dot and stood straight and tall for Bobby’s inspection. Unused flowerpots were stacked up like helmets, canes bristled like bayonets. He had possessed and secured every inch of the ground. He was a gaunt man, with a large chin and a vacant blue eye; he never ate white sugar, only brown.

One day over the fence erupted Myra, his wife, about my mother’s immoral way of life; twittering in incoherent and long-bottled rage about the example set to her children, to the children of the gardens around. I was eight years old. I fixed her with my very gimlet eye, words of violence bursting into my mouth, contained there swilling and bloody, like loose teeth. I wanted to say that the children of these tracts of ground—her own in particular—were beyond example. My mother, at whom the tirade was directed, got up slowly from the chair where she had been taking the sun; she gave Myra one cursory unregarding glance, and walked silently into the house, leaving her neighbor to hurl herself like a crazed budgerigar at Bob’s good fences. Myra was little, she was mere, rat-faced and meager, like a nameless cut in a butcher’s window in a demolition area. In my mother’s view, her arms hung below her knees.

I think that before this the two households had been quite friendly. Increasingly, then, Bob and his preoccupations (nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee) became the butt of our secret sniggers. Bob slunk nightly into the garden, to be away from the stewing-cut his wife. When his mysterious grubbings were done, his drillings and plowings, he stood by the fence and lifted lackluster eyes to the hills, his hands in his pockets; he whistled an air, tuneless and plaintive. From our kitchen he could just be seen, through the clammy evening mists that were the climate of those years. Then my mother would draw the curtains and put the kettle on the gas, and bemoan her life; and she would laugh at Bobby boy, and wonder what damage would be done before he stood there again the next day.

For Bob’s fences were not secure. They were elaborate, they were refined, you might say they were highly strung, though this is a strange word to apply to a fence. They were like Stendhal on the shelves of the village library: impressive, but not adapted for any purpose we could discern. The cows would get in; we would watch them nosing softly in the dawn or dusk, lifting Bobby’s neat catches with their heads; and trample, they came, slurping and crunching on his succulent produce, satisfying each of their four stomachs, their ruminant eyes mildly joyous with the righteousness of it all.

But Bob had a low opinion of bovine intelligence. For leaving the gates open, he would thrash his son, Philip. From behind our own stone walls we would hear Bobby’s demented passions pouring out, his great explosions of grief and despair at the loss of his cucumber frames, wails torn out of his gut. This state of affairs afforded some satisfaction to me. I had some friends; or rather, there were children of my own age. But because my mother kept me away from school so often—I was sick with this and I was sick with that—I was a strange object to them, and my name, which was Liam, they said was ridiculous. They were wild children, with scabbed knees, and hearts full of fervor, and intolerant mouths and hard eyes; they had rites, they had rules, and they made me an outsider in the tribe. Being ill was almost better; it is something you must do alone.

When I did appear at school, it was seen that I had fallen behind with the lessons. Mrs. Burbage was our teacher, a woman of perhaps fifty, with sparse reddish hair, and fingertips yellow from cigarettes. She told me to stand up and explain the proverb “Never spoil the ship for a ha’pennyworth of tar.” In those days that was how children were educated. She carried a bulging tartan bag with her, and each morning deposited it, with a plump thud, on the floor by her desk; then in no time at all the shouting and hitting would begin. It was a tyranny, under which we labored, and while we dreamed of retaliation, a year of our childhood slid by, unnoticed. Some of the children were planning to kill her.

There was nature study; while we sat with our arms folded behind our back, she read to us about the habits of the greenfinch. In spring there was pussy willow, which is thought to be of interest to children everywhere. But it is not spring that I remember: rather those days when the lights were on by eleven o’clock, and wet roofs and the mill chimneys shivered behind a curtain of water. At four o’clock the daylight would almost have vanished, sucked away into the dark sky; our wellingtons squelched in the mud and dead leaves, and breath hung like disaster on the raw air.

The children had been listening in to their parents’ gossip. They asked me—the girls especially—searching questions about the sleeping arrangements in our house. I did not see the point of these questions, but I knew better than to answer them. There were fights—scrapping and scratching, nothing serious. “I’ll show you how to fight,” the lodger said. When I put his advice into practice I left tears and bloody noses. It was the triumph of science over brutality, but it left a sick taste in my mouth, a fear of the future. I would rather run than fight, and when I ran the steep streets turned misty and liquid before my eyes, and the marching fence of my ribs entrapped my heart like a lobster in its pot.

My relations with Bob’s children had little to commend them. Quite often, when I was playing outside, Philip and Suzy would come into their own garden and throw stones at me. Looking back, I don’t know how there could have been stones in Bobby’s garden; not stones just lying about, for use as casual missiles. I suppose if they found any they thought they were doing their father a favor by lobbing them over at me. And as he got stranger, and more persecuted, and ate ever more peculiar foods, no doubt they had to jump at the chance to do him a favor.

Suzy was a hard little madam, with an iron-wide mouth like a postbox; she hung on the gate and taunted. Philip was older than me, perhaps by three years. He had a modified coconut head and a puzzled narrow gray eye, and a sort of sideways motion to his neck, as if constantly in training to avoid the blows he got on account of the cows; perhaps he was concussed. As for the missiles, it didn’t give me much trouble to stay out of the small range of his accuracy; but when I evaded him once too often, when I saw I was making him look a fool, I would get myself indoors, because I saw in his face a sort of low destructive rage, as if some other creature might break through, a wilder beast; and it is true that I have seen this look since, on the faces of large intelligent dogs that are kept tied up. And by saying this I do not mean that I thought Philip was an animal, then or now; what I thought was that we all have a buried nature, a secret violence, and I envied the evident power of his skinny sinewy arms, veined and knotted like the arms of a grown man. I envied him, and loathed his subject nature, and I hoped it was not my own. Once I scrabbled for clods of earth and sticks and hurled them back howling like a demon, with all the invective I had at my command from the books I had read: varlet, cuckold, base knave and cur.

As the months passed, Bob grew more vacant in his expression, more dangerous in his rages; his clothes, even, seemed to share his lack of coherence, flapping after him dementedly as if trying to regain the security of the wardrobe. He bought a motor scooter, which broke down every day at the top of the hill, in front of the bus queue. The queue was for the bus to the next village; it was the same people every day. Each morning they were eager for the spectacle. At this stage Philip used to approach the fence and talk to me. Our conversations were wary and elliptical. Did I, he asked, know the names of all the nine planets? Yes, I knew them. He betted, Philip said, I only knew Venus, Mars. I recited them, all nine. The planets have satellites, I told him. Satellites are small things that revolve round big things, I said, held in an orbit by forces beyond themselves; thus Saturn had among others Dione, Titan, Phoebe, and Mars had Deimos, Phobos. And as I said “Phobos” I felt a catch in my throat, for I knew that the word meant “fear”; and even to speak it was to feel it, and summon up the awkward questions, the lodger, the door in the wall and the shadows of encroaching night.

Then Philip threw stones at me. I went inside and drew pictures sitting at the kitchen table, watching the clock in case the lodger came home.

Now, Philip and I did not attend the same school. Our village had its division, and while the grown-ups were tolerant, or perhaps contemptuous of religion, immersed in football pools and hire-purchase agreements, the children kept up the slanging matches and the chants, the kind of thing you might have heard on Belfast streets, or in Glasgow. Suzy sang out in her tuneless cackle:

“King Billy is a gentleman.

He wears a watch and chain.

The dirty Pope’s a beggar

And he begs down our lane.”

Irish pigs, Philip said. Bog-hogs. Petrol ran in my veins; my fingers itched for triggers; post offices were fortified behind my eyes. Philip threw stones at me.

My territory was shrinking: not the house, not the garden, not home and not school. All I owned was the space behind my ribs, and that too was a scarred battleground, the site of sudden debouchments and winter campaigns. I did not tell my mother about the external persecutions. Partly it was because she had enough to bear on her own account; partly because of a sneaking pity invading even my own hard heart, as the misunderstanding about the cows grew keener, and Philip’s head shrunk more defensively on to his neck. Bobby took the motor scooter behind the house and kicked it savagely; we no longer knew where our duty lay.

Our neighbor then ceased to keep regular hours. He paced the length of his plot, furrowed, harrowed. He lay in wait: for Philip, for the beasts, for Revelations. He crouched by his fence in a corner, skeletal in his blue overalls. The cows never came, when he watched for them. My mother looked out of the window. Her lips curled. You make your own luck, she said. The neighbors discussed Bobby now. They no longer watched for my father’s return; by comparison he lacked interest. Bobby weeded and hoed with one eye over his shoulder. Our circumstances are improving, my mother said: with application, you will go to the grammar school. Her dark shiny hair bounced on her shoulders. We can pay for your uniform, she said; once we couldn’t have managed. I thought, they will ask more probing questions at the grammar school. “Where is my dad?” I asked her. “Where did he go? Did he write you a letter?”

“He may be dead, for all I know,” she said. “He may be in purgatory, where they don’t have postage stamps.”

The year I took my exam for the grammar school Bobby was growing cress in pots. He stood at the front gate, trying to sell it to his neighbors, pressing it upon them as very nutritious. Myra, now, had not even the status of the scrag from the slum carvery; she became like one of the shriveled pods or husks, from dusty glass jars, on which Bob eked out his existence.

The priest came, for the annual Religious Examination; the last time for me. He sat on the headmistress’s high chair, his broad feet in their brogues set deliberately on the wooden step. He was old, and his breath labored; there was a faint smell about him, of damp wool, of poultices, of cough linctus and piety. The priest liked trick questions. Draw me a soul, he said. A dim-witted child took the proffered chalk, and marked out on the blackboard a vague kidney shape, or perhaps the sole of a shoe. Ah no, Father said, wheezing gently; ah no, little one, that is the heart.

That year, when I was ten years old, our situation changed. My mother had been right to bank on the choleric lodger; he was an upwardly mobile man. We departed with him to a neat town where spring came early and cloyed with cherry blossom, and thrushes darted softly on trim lawns. When it rained, these people said, lovely for the gardens; in the village they had taken it as one more bleak affront in the series life offered them. I never doubted that Bob had dwindled away entirely among his mauled lettuce rows, out of grief and bewilderment and iron deficiency, his bones rattled by our departing laughter. About Philip I never thought at all. I wiped him from my mind, as if he had never been. “You must never tell anyone we are not married,” my mother said, blithe in her double life. “You must never talk to anyone about your family. It’s not their business.” You must not taunt over the garden fence, I thought. And the word phobos you must never say.

It was only later, when I left home, that I understood the blithe carelessness of the average life—how freely people speak, how freely they live. There are no secrets in their lives, there is no poison at the root. People I met had an innocence, an openness, that was quite foreign to my own nature; or if once it had been native to me, then I had lost it long ago in the evening fogs, in the four o’clock darks, abandoned it in the gardens between the straggling fences and tussocks of grass.

I became a lawyer; one must live, as they say. The whole decade of the sixties went by, and my childhood seemed to belong to some much earlier, grayer world. It was my inner country, visited sometimes in dreams that shadowed my day. The Troubles in Northern Ireland began, and my family fell to quarreling about them, and the newspapers were full of pictures of burned-out shopkeepers, with faces like ours.

* * *

I WAS GROWN up, qualified, long gone from home, when Philip came back into my life. It was Easter, a sunny morning. The windows were open in the dining room, which overlooked the garden with its striped lawn and rockery; and I was a visitor in my own home, eating breakfast, the toast put into a rack and the marmalade into a dish. How life had altered, altered beyond the power of imagination! Even the lodger had become civilized, in his fashion; he wore a suit, and attended the meetings of the Rotary Club.

My mother, who had grown plump, sat down opposite me and handed me the local newspaper, folded to display a photograph.

“Look,” she said, “that Suzy’s got married.”

I took the newspaper and put down my piece of toast. I examined this face and figure from my childhood. There she stood, a brassy girl with a bouquet that she held like a cosh. Her big jaw was set in a smile. At her side stood her new husband; a little behind, like tricks of the light, were the bowed, insubstantial forms of her parents. I searched behind them, for a shape I would know: Philip slouching, vaguely menacing, half out of the frame. “Where’s her brother?” I said. “Was he there?”

“Philip?” My mother looked up. She sat for a moment with her lips parted, a picture of uncertainty, crumbling a bit of toast under her fingers. “Did nobody tell you? About the accident? I thought I told you. Did I not write to you and let you know?” She pushed her small breakfast aside, and sat frowning at me, as if I had disappointed her. “He died,” she said.

“Died? How?”

She dabbed a crumb from the corner of her mouth. “Killed himself.” She got up, went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, rummaged under table mats and photographs. “I kept the paper. I thought I’d sent it to you.”

I knew I had been pulling away; I knew I had been extracting myself bodily, piece by piece, from my early life. I had missed so much, naturally, and yet I thought I had missed nothing of consequence. But Philip, dead. I thought of the stones he threw, of the puzzled squint of his eye, of the bruises on his gangling legs below his short trousers.

“It’s years now,” my mother said.

She sat down again, opposite me at the table, and handed me the paper she had preserved. How quickly newsprint goes yellow; it might have come from a Victorian public library. I turned to read, and read how Philip had blown himself up. All the details from the coroner’s court: and the verdict, death by misadventure.

Philip had constructed, in Bobby’s garden shed, a sugar and weedkiller bomb. It was a fad of the time, making bombs at home; it had been popularized by events in Belfast. Philip’s bomb—the use he had for it was unknown—had blown up in his face. I wondered what he had taken with him in the blast: I pictured the shed splintered, the stacked flowerpots reduced to dust, even the cows in their field lifting bemused heads at the noise. An irrelevant thought slid into my mind, that Ireland had undone him at last; and here I was still alive, one of life’s Provisionals, one of the men in the black berets. Philip was the first of my contemporaries to die. I think about him often now. Weedkiller, my brain says back to me: as if it needed replication. I am burning on a slower fuse.