Learning to Talk: Short stories. Hilary Mantel

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. We might call the NSPCC, my mother said. For Philip? We might, I said, call the RSPCA. Bobby took the motor scooter behind the house and kicked it savagely; we no longer knew where our duty lay.

      Our neighbour 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 neighbours 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 neighbours, 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 shrivelled 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 laboured; 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, greyer 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 quarrelling 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 civilised, 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