"Almost" Part 2: Chapters 4-6

Chapter 4

In the confusion and horror of her war years, Ruth found herself unable to educate her children about right and wrong. Every word she imagined speaking seemed hollow in her own ears. The evil of the Great War, the ghastly effect it had had on her own family, own marriage, own soul – lent scant weight to the little ethics, from which grow the great ones. Ruth did not greatly care if Tom lied, or stole, or ate too much, and so his education was left to Reginald.

But children can never really teach other children about right and wrong. The only lesson children can inflict on each other is conformity, and this was about as far as Reginald got before Tom abruptly wrenched the rudder from his hand.

At first, Tom was so naturally compliant that sometimes, when he stood in front of wallpaper, Ruth half-expected him to assume its colour and texture. He was very different from Reginald, who was rarely compliant, rarely rebellious, and fundamentally quite cold.

Through the haze of her loss, Ruth still strove to understand her eldest son. Reginald’s coldness was hard to penetrate. He was often attentive, high-spirited, and could be very funny, but he had all the spontaneity of a statue. He gave dry kisses and distant hugs; his eyes never shone, and his cheeks rarely flared red or white. He has an old soul, thought his mother – and if he did, it had a lot to do with her, who was from the old world, and was full of old corpses too long unburied.

Ruth’s general exhaustion (or, as Quentin put it, her ‘lack of resources’) was not helped by the fact that she had given birth to one morning child and one night child. Reginald got up early, and would sometimes drag Tom out of bed in the half-dark of dawn to play with soldiers or read comics or build a Sopwith Camel biplane out of balsa wood and black thread. Tom enjoyed all these things (especially building aeroplanes), but did not like to get up until the third call for breakfast.

Almost like a photograph, Tom developed in the dark. Unless he was extraordinarily tired, he could never fall asleep before one or two o’clock in the morning (and if he did get to sleep early, his rest would be broken by endless bouts of waking, so that it seemed that night had been little more than a passage of dark, jumpy dizziness). Being a prisoner of the general cult of morning people, he was not allowed light at night and so he developed excellent night vision, and good games of semi-darkness.

One of these was ‘arctic explorers.’ In the blue moonlight of his window, his sheets looked like vast fields of ice; his pillow, properly plumped, was a glacier or ice mountain. His blanket, a dark frigid sea. His toy soldiers? Intrepid Arctic explorers, or secret Swedish commandos. Their goal? An ancient weapon locked in the depths of ice, which would end the war and bring ’em all home. Tom’s imagination was detailed to the point of near-gruesomeness. A fair number of his toy soldiers lacked hands, arms or legs, which was because the intrepid Arctic explorers had a habit of getting snowed in (a white gym sock, laid across their sleeping forms) and ended up eyeing each others’ frozen extremities with narrowed and hungry eyes. One had even eaten himself, and was just a head.