She did not like to see them using guns. She would like to have had no gun ever again in the house. But they lived on a farm, and farms had guns and farm boys learnt to shoot, and her boys were boys on a farm and she must bring them up to be like other boys.
Cowboys, holsters at their hips.
Where are the Indians?
Behind the trees.
Usually Richard made Jonny be the Indian but Jonny did not like always to be killed.
There was Jonny tied to the walnut tree, rope wound about him, handkerchief stuffed as a gag in his mouth. He shook his head at her. She removed the gag. He looked afraid. No, put it back, he said, urgency in his voice. So she did that. Boys would be boys. She mustn’t meddle. Was he Indian now, or cowboy? Horse driven away, tied up beneath a cactus in the desert. Left to rot in the sun.
She found the two of them lying across the drive waiting for the postman to come in his van. We’re dead, Mum. We’re not here, only our bodies. The two of them were lying with eyes closed and arms crossed over their chests. You can tread over us if you like.
The postman screeching to a halt. Off with you, lads, want to get yourselves killed?
That’s how boys are, the other mothers said. Boys fight. Boys play chicken. Boys play dead. Boys leave their clothes on the floor. Break things. Fall out of trees. You can’t stop them being boys. As if the two of them were a single phenomenon. Wake boys, feed boys, send them to school. Fetch them from school, have them do their homework, put them to bed, the two of them in the same room as since Charlie died they would not sleep alone. Richard said that he needed Jonny to tell him stories so that he could sleep, and Jonny generally did what his brother wanted. And after she had said goodnight Jonny began his stories, his little voice piping up over his older brother’s silence. Don’t listen, Mummy, these are boys’ stories. They won’t work if you listen. No, Mummy, I know you’re standing there behind the door. You’re listening. You have to go away.
Only ten minutes, boys. I’ll time you. Then you have to go to sleep.
Often Jonny’s voice would hush only when he heard her footsteps coming back up the stairs.
Jonny says Daddy killed a tiger. When he was lost in the jungle.
Jonny says Daddy was captured by cannibals. That’s not true, is it? If he was captured by cannibals then he would have been eaten, wouldn’t he?
Darling, I don’t know what Daddy did.
You should have asked that man.
Which man?
Daddy’s friend. The lizard man. The one who came to lunch.
Jack Hussey was the only person she knew who knew where he had been. Who might have known what she didn’t.
Jack Hussey had come from Africa in June, the year after. He said that he hadn’t taken a leave back in England in years. He had been thin and dry the time he had come before, the one time that she had met him; and he was the more so now. His hair was almost gone though there was still a biscuity colour to it, his face sallow and deeply lined, his hands freckled and long and bony. He had a way of stretching his fingers out in the sunshine, which she thought might have been to do with the onset of arthritis.
It had been Jonny’s idea to call him the lizard man. Jonny knew about lizards because someone had given him a book about them. He said the man had to go into the sun to warm up. That was why he came in the summer, even though he was Daddy’s friend and the summer was ages after Daddy died. He had to wait for it to be warm.
He had some colonial position up in the hills in Kenya. He said that it suited him. He had been in India before, in the other hills of Nagaland, in the wilds of Assam, and that was where he had met Charlie during the war. That had suited him too, according to what Charlie had said; the highlands, the natives, perhaps the loneliness. All she knew was that he had loved the place but left it heartbroken after Independence. He had come to see them – Charlie, rather – soon after he came back to England, shaken by it, undecided as to where he should go next, considering retirement, leaving their house unexpectedly almost as soon as he had come to it.
Do you know, she said. Did Charlie tell you, the day you left, the time you came before, was the day Richard was born?
He smiled at that. Oh, I had no idea. Then perhaps I did the right thing after all. I left so suddenly, I felt rude doing that, but perhaps it was meant. And as it turns out I haven’t been back to England since.
I’m sorry I couldn’t have come to see you sooner, he said. This was the first long leave I could manage. I’d like to have been at the funeral.
Jonny was right, she thought. It would have been too cold for him in November. The damp chill. A lizard still on the doorstep, seeking the one pale ray of sun. Freezing when the sun left the cold stone.
His expression of condolence was conventional but heartfelt. It was only that the hands that closed around hers were chilly, even in the English summer.
You were married to a good man.
They drank a sherry before lunch. That seemed the right thing to offer, only later she remembered that he had drunk whisky the time he came to see Charlie, and rather a lot of it. The boys were playing out on the lawn.
Your older one has a look of him.
Yes, she said.
They talked of this
