Another part of the wood Read Free Page B

and Roland together. Get the idea? Anyway, that’s no way to treat your clothes. Fold it properly.’
    ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Kidney with effort, and sat down heavily on the sofa.
    Joseph turned to look at Kidney. ‘Do you want to know where the lavatory is?’
    ‘Yes, please.’
    ‘Down the path and through the trees.’
    Joseph got up from his unpacking and taking Kidney’s arm guided him to the door. ‘Down that way,’ he explained again patiently,
pointing along the mud path.
    ‘Down that way,’ repeated Kidney. The width of his trousers so extreme that his limbs floundered in corduroy, he rolled walrus-fashion
along the path.
    Joseph stayed framed in the doorway, gazing before and around him – at the wet field, the slope of damp grass, the thread
of path disappearing under the trees. Out of a brown field rose the mountain, partially obscured by mist. Tomorrow, he promised
himself, he would take Roland by the hand and together they would climb to the summit and explore the tower. He would make
it like an adventure for the boy, like a challenge, like a prologue to all the bigger and better adventures that they would
have one day, like a stepping stone to the real mountains, capped with snow, that they would surely climb. It would be a beginning.
He tried to imagine a grown Roland in a man-sized anorak, and failed. His wife had told him not to take a girl along with
him. How had she put it? … ‘Try to be alone with Roland for once and leave your bloody women behind.’ He studied the mountain
beyond the trees. Of course it was really more of a large hill, but it would do for a start, and Roland was only seven. Or
was it eight? He felt suddenly depressed at the thought of how easily Roland tired, how his clear treble voice asking intelligent
questions could degenerate into a whining request to be carried. Their outing in the end could be a disaster and not a triumph.
    The mountain, he realized, looked not unlike Kidney in shape.
Why did he find it so difficult to like someone so fleshily built – or too thin, or too small, or too old? Why was it so difficult
to like anyone for any length of time, let alone love them? He wasn’t sure if he was unable to love because he had no tenderness
for himself or because he felt himself to be perfect and out of reach of compassion. His ex-wife said it was because he was
a selfish bastard, but that was the same thing. She talked a lot of words about love entering and making one grow and how
his particular soul was too small to allow anybody entrance. Possibly she hadn’t always thought he had a small soul. His memory
of his marriage, of his whole relationship with his wife, was so frail that he couldn’t remember for certain why it was they
had separated or how long they had been apart, or the duration of their time together. But then he didn’t remember either
the lengths or the depths of any of his involvements with any one person. He was either absorbed or empty, and one feeling
followed the other.
    He thought he remembered his wife when they were first married, the girl in the long nightgown with a sleepy face, broad bare
feet going over the blind-school matting – not going away from him but towards him. He did remember that. He did remember
some things. She was always coming towards him, it seemed, mouth shaping his name, a low-pitched droning sound, full of meaning
and heavy with love, the sound of a bee making for the hive. When they ate a meal she held his hand or laid her fingers on
his knee or leant her head against his shoulder. When he turned his shoulder her hair clung to the cloth of his jacket; if
he removed his hands from hers on some pretext, she looked at him with unbearable reproach and laid her damp rejected palm
down in her lap and bowed her head. Recovering, but denied bodily contact, she would imprison him by the strength of expression
in her eyes. He was forever trying to extricate himself from her touch, her glance, the sound of her voice, all