A Piece of the Sky is Missing

Robert had once heard his mother say: ‘If you’d only try to be nice to him, Randy.’ Mr Clegg had said: ‘But I do. I try all the time. I’m just not a child person, Emmie,’ and his mother had said: ‘He is taking to you a bit, isn’t he?’ and Mr Clegg had said: ‘I’ve tried to get him to call me Randolph. He won’t. It’s Mr Clegg this, Mr Clegg that. He does it to hurt me. I’m a sensitive man, Emmie. I’m easily hurt. You know that. I have delicate feelings. The boy knows that. Children sense these things. He calls me Mr Clegg to hurt me. He hates me.’

Robert would have been prepared to call him Randolph if he was even remotely Randolphish. That would have been only fair. But he never was. He was Mr Cleggish, and the more Randolphish he tried to be, the more Mr Cleggish he became. You will not have my mother, vowed Robert.

Mr Clegg began the simple task of removing the short length of wood which was holding nothing up. Robert felt that it might be dangerous, but they knew better than he.

Twice Mr Clegg’s hands touched Robert’s mother and paused momentarily before passing on. That sort of thing gave adults a big thrill. They really were the most extraordinary people. Especially since Mr Clegg’s hands were like uncooked fillets of plaice.

The length of wood was so rotten it came away in their hands. Two cross beams and a whole section of the ceiling collapsed with it. One of the beams struck his mother across the head. Mr Clegg fell in a shower of plaster.

Half his mother’s money went to Mr Clegg and half to Robert. Half of Robert went to Aunt Maud and half to Aunt Margaret. It was the fairest solution the family could find.

September, 1953. The first dark night at Catterick. Lectures from the hut sergeant and the two hut corporals. Practice at making bed-packs. Your bed-pack is not considered to be up to standard, probably because you have a refined voice. Out it goes on to a soaking flowerbed. Finally at 12.30 a.m. the lights are put out. You make your bed in the dark, and struggle into the damp sheets. Your bed smells of wet earth. The hut smells of huts. In the morning you are awakened at 4.14. After two and a half hours devoted to making straight lines round the barrack-room floor with boot polish you are allowed five minutes for breakfast. After two days of this sort of thing you have to wear your denims for the first time. They have been issued without buttons, and you have to sew the buttons on yourself. To you this smacks more of sheer inefficiency than of inspired character building. You begin to sew them on. Your efforts do not meet with success. You begin to master the technique, but it is too late, and you find yourself on parade with safety pins in place of fly buttons, and your trousers held up by the thread from your spare pair of green drawers cellular. As you march the safety pins stick into your genitals. This hurts. The trousers begin to slip. You look down. A voice yells out: ‘You can look down when your trousers fall down, Bellamy, and not before, yunnerstand?’ The voice says: ‘You can look down now, Bellamy.’ You pull your trousers up.

The squad halts and the corporal summons you to the front. He recognizes you as someone who makes the others laugh and is dangerous. He would like to break you. The corporal is a little tin god and a sadist. When he makes a joke, you laugh. When you make a joke, he does not laugh. He permits you to do up your trousers, commenting: ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. He’s tying himself up with his green drawers cellular.’ Obedient titters from F Squad. ‘You think you’re bloody funny, don’t you, Bellamy?’ says the corporal. ‘Yes, corporal.’ ‘Right. Then we’ll all laugh at you.’ The voice is calm, spiteful, holding great power in reserve. He is not altogether an unsubtle operator. He has a sense of rhythm, and even rations his swear words. ‘You will all go ha ha ha by numbers. Squad will laugh at Bellamy by numbers, squaaaaaaaaa – wait for it – squaaaaaaaaaaa krwghaaaarrrh. Tups three. Ha. Tups three. Ha. Tups three. Ha ha ha. Tups three. Stand at ice. Tups three. Stand easy. Are you funny, Bellamy?’ ‘They seem to think so.’ Titters and gasps. ‘Shurrup. They seem to think so what?’ ‘They seem to think so, corporal.’ ‘I suppose Mummy thinks you’re very funny, Bellamy, does she? I suppose the mater thinks you fraightfully amusing.’ ‘My mother’s dead, corporal.’ ‘I don’t care what she is, Bellamy, you’re in the army now. Any more impertinence you’re on a charge, yunnerstand, yunnerstand?’ ‘Yes, corporal.’ Your breath stinks of fascism. ‘Now listen, Bellamy, I can break you, I can break you just like that, yunnerstand? Yunnerstand?’ ‘Yes, corporal.’ ‘I’ve broken wogs, I’ve broken krauts, I can fucking break you, yunnerstand?’ ‘Yes, corporal.’ ‘If I have any more trouble from you I’ll shove your rifle so far up your fucking arse you’ll be coughing point two two bullets. Yunnerstand? Eh? Eh? Eh?’ ‘Yes, corporal.’ ‘What’s wrong? Itching, are you? Got crabs? What do you think you are, the London Zoo? Eh? Eh?’ ‘No, corporal.’ ‘God help me, he’s got safety pins in his balls. What’s wrong with you, Bellamy? Eh?’ ‘Nothing, corporal.’ ‘Potential bloody officer? You’re not fit to be a potential bloody sanitary inspector. Now get fell in.’

When you aren’t marching you’re up to your elbows in cold greasy water in a cookhouse sink, and when you aren’t up to your elbows in cold greasy water in a cookhouse sink you’re picking the loose leaves off the trees so that passing officers won’t be struck and possibly seriously injured by falling leaves. Three huts down the row there is a suicide.

January, 1956. All he remembered about Sally afterwards was that she had dark hair and a perfect physique. He met her at a party. She made a pass at him. Therefore he took her home. She was drunk, perhaps also a nymphomaniac. She kissed him with tremendous pressure and perfect teeth. She forced him back on the divan and ran her body over him as if he was a harp and she was a musician’s passionate fingers. They asked no questions about each other.

It was easy. She practically did it for him. He could have stopped at any moment, but didn’t. After all, he was only giving her what she wanted. It wasn’t hard to imagine a society in which she would get him on the national health.

Afterwards he wondered who had been using whom the most. He felt for Sally a disagreeable mixture of disgust and pity. He felt very young and small. He felt both a sinner and a prig. He lay in bed, no longer a virgin, ready now for Sonia, and he wondered just how much he had lost. Nothing, he suspected. And that was terrifying.

November, 1966. ‘She was a good woman. We shall all miss her,’ said the Rev. J. W. Scott.

‘I know I shall,’ said Robert.

‘She never came to church, but she was generous in her support of all our activities,’ said the Rev. J. W. Scott.

‘So I believe,’ said Robert.

‘She has been called to a better place,’ said the Rev. J. W. Scott.

‘She’s dead,’ said Robert.

Chapter 8

Hopes

He was ninety minutes late. It had been a hard day at the office.

‘I’ve missed you, Robert,’ said his wife, a delicate warmth and charm softening her severe, almost feudal Emmentaler-Battenburg beauty. Can this superb creature really be mine, thought Robert. I, dull gross fellow that I am, can I really have won the hand of the fairest daughter of the most gifted family in all Europe?

They had met on a steamy July day in the Bavarian Alps. He had paid his 1 mark 50 pfennigs and had joined the small multi-lingual party waiting in the hall to tour that unrivalled gem of the baroque, the Schloss Hohenbattenburg, sometimes affectionately known, after a disastrous dinner party of legendary fame, as the Schwarzkartoffelnhof. Who should be his guide but the youngest daughter of the house herself? He could never remember afterwards whether he fell in love in the Festsaal, with its famous musical chandeliers, or in the Crystal Grotto, but he was certain that they became engaged in the Huntsman’s Lodge. He gave her a 20 pfennig tip. That night she played all ten Beethoven symphonies exquisitely. Beethoven had bequeathed his Tenth Symphony to her family on condition that its existence was never revealed to the world. Robert was the first foreigner ever to be entrusted with the secret. They were married four days later in the family’s summer chapel high in the mountains, the tiny Battenburger Maria-Kapelle, to the tinkling of mountain streams and cow-bells, and the thundering of a massive organ.

Did she really renounce all that without hesitation, and come back to Kentish Town, and so charm Mr Mendel that he gave them the whole top two floors of Number 38? Could it all be true? Yes, it’s true, says her smile. Yes, echo her sweet lips. Yes indeed, whispers her slight but infinitely appealing Adam’s Apple.

‘I’ve missed you too,’ he said.

‘See what Kate has done,’ she said, handing him a beautifully simple and wonderfully flattering portrait of himself.

‘Bless her, the lamb,’ he said, lighting the rough but effective pipe that Tim had made for him in woodwork.

‘I’ve done you some Trout Battenburger Art and Emmentaler partridge with grapes,’ she said. ‘But first you must go upstairs and tell them a bed-time story.’

‘I don’t want to leave you.’

‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said, handing him a large sherry in the rude but serviceable goblet that Michael had made for him in pottery.

‘But on the other hand I want to see them,’ he said.