Cushing's Crusade Read online

  Angela touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers and said very quietly, ‘I don’t care.’

  Derek turned off the engine. Above them the wind sighed in the telephone wires. White wispy clouds moved across the deep blue sky, grasshoppers chirped in the hedgerows. A cow stared at them mournfully from a nearby gate. He reached for the door-handle but didn’t open it. Unless I can get out … Fear. The same tightness in his chest that he had felt with the panic but different now, mixed with the tearful yearning ache he sometimes knew when listening to music. On the brink, as they say. Have you ever been kissed? Like this? Or this? This? What is this disproportion, under my diaphragm this adrenal flutter? I want to put my arms around you—no, more—I want to crush you in my arms. To hell with sophisticated inhibitions and the doubtful pleasures of the mind. No strategy, no premeditation: a simple need. Your body, my body, now. He was breathing heavily, gulping air like water. Pink like prawns.

  ‘Would you care,’ he said and stopped. ‘Care if …’

  ‘Please do,’ she whispered moving round in her seat. He breathed out with a long sigh, more like a moan. I am thirty-eight next month, moderate in my ways. Glasses. Must take them off. As he reached towards them she lifted them away for him and their faces met and more than faces for he had swung round and pressed her back against her seat; before he could think of how to perform the manoeuvre he had done it; one knee on the handbrake and the other awkwardly in mid-air. His sudden fierceness had surprised him. No cool and hesitant beginning this as he pulled open her shirt. How long? Twenty, thirty seconds before they parted and held each other’s eyes as though incapable of looking away until they had kissed again.

  ‘Not often,’ he murmured, meaning never before, fearing never again the same. I have misused my life on occasions too numerous to mention, but never better.

  ‘Perhaps another place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The cow still observed them from the gate.

  ‘There?’ Derek pointed. She nodded and they climbed over as the cow backed away. A field of rough grass. Bees in the clover. A tractor far away. Thank God for high hedges. Improbable nude photography in rural places. The ground was hard and dry under its covering of grass. Derek laid his shirt down for her. To think he might have caught that train. Praise be to God for unreliable fathers. She took off her trousers without waiting for him to fumble with zips. He took off his own. Socks? Men look stupid just in socks. Feet look worse? He took off his socks, she her pants. Hips wider than Diana’s, legs longer, hair fairer. The cow watched from a distance their proceedings. She lay down and stretched out her arms. The ground was hard under his knees and elbows but no bed could have compared. In a field! In the sun! Minutes after discussing the historian’s use of facts.

  ‘This is a fact,’ he whispered as they began to move together and for answer she kissed his lips and did not move her mouth away.

  Though troubled briefly by a bee searching out clover near his rump, Derek enjoyed Angela and himself without guilt, fear or foreboding. Happiness had not come often enough of late for him to risk questioning its rare appearances, however bizarre. Why complicate and explain when there can be such slippery solace in a field, such unexpected sights and sounds? Play-acting in the past; pretence, convention and reserve no more than thistledown on the breeze. Tenderness without sentimentality, lust without regret and country pleasures rediscovered in their proper setting: matter for gratitude and wonder but not for rational thought.

  Afterwards they lay together awhile, but the grass tickled and the ground felt hard; lewd flies embarrassed them. They kissed briefly before dressing. Thank you for having me, thank you for being had. Faunacation with Flora. Brisk and to the point; now where were we? Two miles south east of St Mabyn in the county of Cornwall. As I was saying before my genitals interrupted me … Words in unsatisfactory combinations were no help to him. Unable to think of anything appropriate to say, he looked at his watch; unless time had stood still for several hours it had stopped. Angela laughed easily.

  ‘Did you time us?’

  Post-coital clichés formed in his brain: all right for you? You were marvellous. No regrets? Winding had no effect on his watch.

  ‘I think I got water in it this morning. The prawning did for it.’

  ‘What a bore for you. Salt water rusts terribly quickly.’

  ‘It’s not a good one.’

  Derek sat down next to Angela and put an arm round her.

  ‘You don’t have to, you know,’ she said.

  ‘It meant a lot to me.’

  ‘What did it mean a lot of?’

  ‘A slice out of time, a moment of …’

  She was laughing again. ‘Just your watch. Other things too. A slice out of time, a magic moment. A good screw. Why dress it up? A smashing, spur-of-the-moment fuck.’

  ‘We had a good time, we fancied each other enough and so when the opportunity arose we leapt over a gate and had a good screw, a smashing fuck.’ Derek jumped up and slapped his thighs. ‘Right, what’s next? Let’s be getting along.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to feel obliged in any way. I wasn’t trying to devalue anything.’

  Since there are no obligations I think I’ll leave you here. You won’t mind walking home. Now that I’ve had my bit of fun you’re as much use to me as an old apple core. No point in being sentimental about simple bodily functions; people do it the whole time in many remarkable places and positions and think no more of it than slipping out a casual turd. Why, only this morning my wife, finding a convenient wood, did it just like that and will probably do it again when the opportunity offers.

  ‘Because such things happen to me rarely,’ he said, ‘I like to savour the after-glow a little; I like to believe it unusual and special because it may not happen again these next few years. Because you are ten years younger, and I am not an Adonis in any conventional sense, I felt gratitude, surprise and elation. I have seen young lovers in parks going through the preliminaries and have thought: there but for my thinning hair, my wife and child and thirty-eight years would I be still, but now the repetition of such novel pleasures is hardly likely. I wanted to express some of this when I put my arm round your waist. I had not thought of obligations.’

  Angela stared at him with the sullen look he remembered from the evening before. ‘The last fling of a nostalgic lecher,’ she said. ‘Well, count me out of all that sweet sadness because I’m not going to be anybody’s substitute for adolescent passion, a sort of take you straight back to by-gone vigour. It’s now or nothing.’

  ‘Now has a habit of quickly becoming then. It happens every second, every breath we take. You can’t experience now till you think about it and by then it’s already in the past.’

  She got up abruptly. ‘I meant I’d rather you thought about me and now, rather than about groping little Annie or Wendy in 1894,’ she said angrily.

  ‘It’s possible to have more than one thought in one’s head at a time. Because of other things I thought of you and because of you I thought of other things. You try and concentrate on a single idea for more than a minute or two.’ He started walking back to the car, quite prepared if she did not follow him, to drive off without her. But when it came to it he waited. When she had got in he switched on the engine.

  ‘Turn that bloody thing off.’

  Derek did so and sat in silence, waiting. She leant over and kissed him on the cheek. The wind in the telephone wires again. While they had been fucking, a hedgehog had been run over a few yards down the road where it lay crushed and bleeding. Angela studied her knees.

  ‘I’ve been a bitch, haven’t I?’ Derek, correctly assuming the question to be rhetorical, said nothing. She glanced at him defiantly from under slightly lowered eyelids. ‘I just couldn’t bear you bleating out bogus endearments and telling me lies.’ She paused dramatically. ‘Do you want to know how many men I’ve had since I left John?’

  Derek felt sick and angry; mostly angry. Perhaps she wanted him to. Perhaps
, in spite of all her down-to-earthness, all her sex for now, she felt it was degrading and got her own back by humiliating her humiliators. Perhaps … God knows what she wanted. Since you’re so much in demand I’m extremely grateful that you managed to fit me in at such short notice. She would expect surprise and indignation from him. Derek said in a flat voice, ‘Do I get a colour television or a week in Rome if I guess the number?’

  ‘Is it so funny?’

  ‘Remarks intended to hurt people rarely are. Go on, tell me. Enough to form a rugger team or staff a large department store?’

  She put her head in her hands and sighed.

  ‘I was trying to tell you why I had to stop you talking about slices out of time and magic moments. I felt guilty, so I tried to make you look insincere.’

  ‘How very precise you are.’

  ‘Somebody who knows what she wants and how to get it.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘I wish I was. I wasn’t happy with John but I wasn’t much better when I left him. Promiscuity’s a sort of loneliness, didn’t you know?’

  Marmalade’s a sort of jam. He hadn’t imagined that a taunt about her numerous affairs would turn into a plea for sympathy. Surprise did not diminish his anger.

  ‘That would make loneliness a sort of promiscuity which might surprise a few old ladies. I’m often lonely too; we all are.’

  ‘I was only trying to explain,’ she replied quietly.

  ‘So you did it because you were lonely and apparently I did it because of a few gropes fifty years ago. It levels the score a bit. Wouldn’t a few endearments have been better? Isn’t the obvious generally right because it’s obvious? Your honesty’s a waste of time and energy: a hard way to achieve more misunderstanding and new fallacies.’

  ‘Or phalluses.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘Not much of a joke.’

  ‘Phalli,’ he corrected her.

  ‘How very precise you are,’ she returned with a bright forced smile.

  *

  St Mabyn consisted of a single straggling street. A village with none of Tregeare’s picturesque charm. Three small shops, a Methodist chapel with a corrugated iron roof, a garage with two antiquated pumps and the village hall: a green Nissen hut. The Three Pilchards was next to the garage, set back from the road and overlooking a dusty forecourt. No charming little country pub with a thatched roof and low, overhanging eaves, but a very ordinary red-brick building embellished with bright yellow doors and window frames. In the forecourt was a tall white pole and, hanging from it, a painted sign with three silver fishes suspended improbably in mid air above a flat, pale blue sea.

  Derek didn’t for a moment suppose that his father would be inside the pub but since they had come he decided to look. He would leave a note for him in case he came later in the week. He got out of the car without bothering to ask Angela if she wanted to come too. The Three Pilchards was hardly a place of architectural or historical interest. He was halfway across the forecourt when he saw a bicycle leaning against a tub of tobacco plants to the right of the door. The bicycle looked familiar. A second glance left Derek fairly certain that he had ridden the very same machine into Tregeare earlier in the day. Had it been stolen? Perhaps Charles’s gardener had borrowed it. He stopped. His father had arrived at the pub and had phoned Charles’s house. Giles had ridden over to meet him. The thought of a pleasant evening drink with Giles, Angela and his father was not immediately attractive. He was about to hurry back to the when he caught sight of his father’s face at a ground-floor window. He had heard the car draw up.

  Derek went into a cream-painted hall and opened a door to his right with a small notice on it saying Lounge. The two of them were sitting over by the window. Gilbert Cushing got up.

  ‘Better late than never. You weren’t at the station.’

  ‘You weren’t on the train.’

  ‘Which train? I didn’t walk.’

  Derek imagined the salt water in his watch slowly destroying it.

  ‘I may have been late,’ he conceded.

  ‘So I came by bus; just the thing with these high hedges. I could see over them and there are some excellent views.’

  Derek imagined a whole busload of people peering over a hedge and seeing himself and Angela setting about each other. But another thought came to him as well: Giles bicycling along the road that led from Tregeare to St Mabyn via Faddon. The boy sees a familiar car parked by the side of the road. He assumes his father to be near at hand and goes in search of him. He climbs over a gate and sees … Such splendour in the grass. Derek sat down heavily. His legs felt very weak.

  ‘Which way did you come?’ he asked Giles.

  ‘There’s only one way; or there’s only one direct way.’

  ‘Through Faddon?’

  The boy nodded. Derek looked at him carefully but could learn nothing from his face. He wanted to ask him how long he had been at the pub but thought better of it. If he’d seen anything he wouldn’t be able to conceal it. A sensitive boy of barely thirteen unmoved by the sight of his father’s naked body spread-eagled on the equally naked body of his host’s sister? Was that likely? In any case coincidences like that simply didn’t happen. Across the table Giles was calmly sipping a coke; no mental anguish there. The extent of Derek’s relief made him feel like laughing. He suddenly realized that his father had been telling him something.

  ‘Well, aren’t you surprised?’ Gilbert asked impatiently.

  ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.’

  Gilbert looked at him critically and pursed his lips. ‘I said that I left all my notes on the train.’

  Derek shut his eyes. ‘Do you want me to drive you to Penzance to see if they’ve been handed in?’

  His father pushed away his half-pint of beer and leant forward across the table. He seemed extremely excited.

  ‘No, that’s what I was telling you. I don’t want them back. I’m going to tell you instead.’

  ‘What? Tell me what?’

  ‘Not now. It’ll take a bit of time.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  Derek heard the door open and turned to see Angela come in. Gilbert was saying, ‘I was distressed at first but then I realized that it was intended.’

  ‘What was intended?’ asked Derek absently, as he saw Angela joining them.

  ‘That I should tell you in person.’

  Derek got up. ‘This is my father. This is Angela, Charles’s sister.’

  Angela came forward smiling. ‘Derek’s told me so much about you.’

  Gilbert Cushing cleared his throat. ‘I can’t imagine why,’ he replied with sudden annoyance.

  Angela sat down beside Giles and said, ‘Because I asked him. How’s your history of the Malayan campaign going?’

  ‘It’s gone,’ cut in Derek. ‘He left it on the train.’

  Angela tried to look sympathetic but then she started laughing helplessly.

  ‘If I’d been able to make young women laugh so easily when I was younger, I should have led an interesting life,’ put in Gilbert drily.

  Angela dabbed at her eyes. ‘You’re very kind not to be cross. I apologize.’

  ‘Since I have no idea what amused you I can hardly feel offended. Perhaps I could buy you a drink?’

  Derek laughed with unashamed relief; his father was not pleasant company when angered.

  ‘The mellowness of age,’ he said with a chuckle.

  ‘Mellowness nothing,’ retorted Gilbert. ‘A general softening of the critical faculties; that’s why old men are so affable. Nothing to do with mellowness. What’s so mellow about spindly legs, deafness and incontinence?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were incontinent,’ said Giles.

  ‘I’m not. Good God, Derek, you want to teach your son some manners.’ He winked at Giles and returned to Angela. ‘I offered you a drink before I was so rudely interrupted.’

  Angela asked for a whisky and Derek allowed his father to buy him a pint of beer. The loss of his notes had certainly had a startling effect on the o
ld man. Confused already, Derek became more so when he tried to imagine what his father wanted to tell him. In spite of, or possibly because of, Angela’s unexpected laughter, he seemed determined to be jovial. Derek wondered whether, when he was bald, beads of perspiration would stand out on his head with the same beautiful pearl-like definition as they did on his father’s shiny skull. Gilbert bowed slightly to Angela as he handed her her drink. He was clearly going to treat her to a dose of old-world gallantry. Derek returned to scrutinizing his son’s face.

  Gilbert sipped his drink delicately. ‘I came up with an excellent man in my compartment,’ he said. ‘Good in every sense of the word. Runs boys’ clubs in the East End, that sort of thing, builds adventure playgrounds with his own hands.’ He shook his head and compressed his lips. ‘He was vile. Rude, short-tempered, and bitter. Poor chap had an in-growing toenail. All those years of goodness up the spout because of that. Incredible.’

  ‘He probably hadn’t cut it right,’ said Giles, ‘toenails should be cut straight and not shaped like fingernails.’

  Gilbert made a fine show of perturbation and slapped his leg energetically.

  ‘Damn it. I didn’t tell him that. There he’ll be limping about in Penzance not knowing how to cut his nails.’

  ‘He’ll probably have to have the nail off in any case. That’s what happened to a friend of mine when his toe went septic,’ replied an unsmiling Giles.

  Hadn’t he normally realized when his grandfather was joking? Derek said, ‘He was being funny, Giles.’

  ‘Lattimer didn’t laugh when they took his nail off.’

  Angela was trying to stop herself laughing when she caught Gilbert’s eye and burst out afresh. Giles was looking at her with a mixture of incomprehension and hostility. Because she’d laughed at him or because … Impossible, Derek reassured himself as he took a gulp of beer. He thought of Giles spending hours at home learning jokes to amuse his friends. The memory made him suddenly feel close to tears. Was it his fault for being too serious? Had he killed the boy’s sense of humour? Or had Diana done it by laughing at his stones and fossils? He imagined his son as the geologist on an earnest mining engineering project, on some uninhabited Pacific island, telling the drilling consultant the one about the old lady’s embarrassing moment with the plumber. Angela was saying, ‘Three generations of Cushings and it’s hard to tell which is the funnier.’