A Jest of God (21 page)

I must not think this way. I mustn’t. I thought I might have shed that tic. But here it is.

“I was quite glad to get back,” Willard is saying. “To tell you the honest-to-goodness truth, I’m happiest when I’m here in school. One has a certain sense of – well, I suppose you could call it a sense of accomplishment.”

“Yes.”

“I think we’re going to have a good year. A rewarding year. We haven’t had to change any members of the staff, and I always think that’s a great asset, if one can carry on with the same team. Provided, of course, that the team is harmonious, which I think I can safely say ours here is. Oh, by the way, Rachel, you remember our little disciplinary problem just before the summer holidays?”

“Yes.” I press my palms together and find they slither with a cold wetness.

“I just want you to bear it in mind this year – if you have the slightest trouble with any of them, send them straight to me.”

“I – I’ll remember.”

“Positively no need for you to worry,” he says. “I’ll deal with them.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all,” he says courteously. “It’s a – it’s no bother. That’s what I’m here for. To sort out these little day-to-day problems.”

When he’s gone, I walk to the window and look out at the playground, the gravel, the swings, everything the same as last year. Nothing has changed. Not anything or anyone.

Willard will never know he yearns to punish. And I will hardly ever be certain whether I am imagining it or not. Only sometimes, when I’ve betrayed one of them.

Then I will be afraid. As I am now.

Eleven days. Eleven – really that many? Maybe I’ve miscounted. No, I haven’t. Eleven days. Never before. Two or three, sometimes, when I’ve had a cold or ’flu, or when I’ve been upset. But never this long overdue. Every day I’ve thought –
today
– and kept looking. How strange to have to keep on retreating to the only existing privacy, the only place one is permitted to be unquestionably alone, the lavatory. On a bedroom door other people can knock and force a reply, or even walk in as she sometimes does.

For the first few days, then a week, I couldn’t believe it at all, couldn’t take it seriously because I was so certain nothing like this could happen. God knows why I thought that.
Not to me
– always to someone else, as one naturally thinks of disaster. Not to me –
always to someone else
– as one thinks also of the most wanted.

I would like only one thing – not to have to consider anything except from this, itself, by itself. When I think of it like that, away from voices and eyes, it seems more than I could ever have hoped for in my life. How I feel about it does not depend on how he might feel or might not feel. Whatever he felt, or anyone, it would be mine and I would want it to
be. How could I do anything against it that would not kill me as well? Would I have felt the same if I had detested him, if he’d been anyone and no one?
No.
That I couldn’t have borne. I’m certain of nothing and yet I’m certain of that. I never knew before. That would be more bitter than death, to grow an alien. I never knew before how terrible that would be. If it were Willard’s, say – then everything about me, my deepest inner flesh, would refuse it and expel it. That wouldn’t happen by itself, though – it could grow, however coldly. I never saw before the brutal determination of seeds. But with me, with this, if I did not have to consider anything else, I could feel only warmth at being its place.

All this is irrelevant to here. I open the bathroom window and look out at the dusk hovering around our house. Then back to the white porcelain sink, the bathtub with its griffin feet, the cellophaned bath cubes stacked on the corner shelf beside the toothpaste and the never-used tins of birthday talcum,
Cactus Flower, Scarlet Lily, Young Lilac.
Our bath towels and face towels always match. This week mine are yellow and hers are rose.

What will become of me?

It can’t be borne. Not by me. What am I going to do? It does not matter at all what I feel, or what the truth is. The only fact is that it cannot be allowed to be.

Imagine it. I can’t. I won’t. Yes. Imagine it. Go ahead, Rachel. She would be – how? – broken up, wounded, ashamed, hysterical, refusing to believe it, believing it only too readily, willing to perjure her soul or pawn her wedding ring to be rid it, never able to trust again (she would declare), not able to hold her head up forever after on Japonica Street, outcast and also seeking exile because unable to meet the sympathetic stutterings of the world, and worst of all, perhaps, blaming herself (or
claiming she was) for something unknown and unsuspected in her rearing of me. “What, I ask myself, Rachel, could I have done, in bringing you up, that you would go and do a thing like that?” Bringing her grey hairs with sorrow to the etcetera. And underneath all the frenzy, all the gimmicks, she would mourn really. As though it were a death. And no one could ever convince her otherwise.

“Rachel, where are you going?”

“I’m not going anywhere. Just out for some cigarettes.”

“Oh. Then you’ll be going to the Regal?”

“Yes, or the Parthenon. Do you want anything?”

“Well, if you could get me just a bar of the plain chocolate. Not the milk, you know, the plain.”

“Yes. All right.”

“Thank you, dear,” she says. “I don’t often have a sweet tooth. Just from time to time. Somehow tonight I –”

“All right. I won’t be long.”

Japonica Street is silent, only the late sparrows speaking, and on River Street the sidewalk is gritty with dust, and the first blown leaves of autumn make their small wind-compelled assaults against my ankles. The store windows have their lights turned out, mostly. Only here and there one has been left burning as an advertisement. In Simlow’s Ladies’ Wear, I am faced with a brown orange-speckled tweed suit for autumn, and a charcoal white-piped smock and matching skirt labelled in Ben Simlow’s unlaughing printscript –
For the Lady in Waiting.

Nick? I would just like to see you for a little while. I wouldn’t mind if I couldn’t touch you. I would accept that. I would just like to speak with you. That isn’t asking a great deal.

– The hospital smells of disinfectants and subdued sickness, but this ward is apart and not peopled by the sick. Her hair is slightly damp with perspiration, and spread long and loose
across the pillowcase. Her face is composed, owning herself. She is absorbed in her own thoughts. The nurse, white and rigidly upright as a bleached board, stands by her bed, softening momentarily. “Someone to see you – will you?” She has no idea who it could be, but she nods yes. He comes in, frowning, sceptical of all this, not liking the surroundings, and then he sees her, one bed among six (ten? twelve?). “Rachel.” Yes. Hello. “You might have told me before, darling.” I thought you might not want to know. “Is that really what you thought? You’ve got it all wrong, darling. I saw him – you know? I’ve seen him already. Not bad, eh? You did pretty well, darling.” Did I? “Rachel, you know I can’t help talking about everything as though I didn’t mean it – don’t you know what I mean, darling?” Yes, I know, it’s all right, I know, everything’s all right now –

The wind, whipping dustily, circles in a cold chain around my feet. Parthenon Café. The letters are in crimson neon, daring the dark street. I don’t want to go in. It will be full of teenagers, and perhaps one of them will say “Hello, Miss Cameron,” a carried-over politeness from when he or she was one of my children. The Parthenon is beside the Queen Victoria Hotel, and there is a door from the hotel lobby which leads into the café. If you sit in one of the Parthenon’s front booths, you can look through and observe the oak counter, the wheezing horsehair chairs and the brass spittoons that are considerately kept there for the old men who congregate each afternoon and evening to parse the past, put it in its place and establish their place with it. The management suffers them. There aren’t so many of them now. Only three tonight, I see as I open the door and slip into the nearest booth. Only three old men, quite uncommunicative, hard as iron spikes. The door into the hotel lobby is open, and I’m relieved that the old men aren’t speaking. I remember once being embarrassed by
hearing an old man in there singing in a creaking voice as light and brittle as mouse feet on straw –

What I thought in those days was – whatever you feel, don’t say or sing it, because if you do it will mortify me. If I went in there now, unbidden, young to them, strange in my white raincoat, and said
Forgive me
, they would think I had lost my mind.

“Yes?”

“Oh. Coffee, please.”

The kids of sixteen and seventeen are not actually dancing, but making as though to do so. They look so assured, so handsome. If only they don’t look in my direction, it will be a stroke of luck for me. Am I bent over my coffee cup? No, damn it, I won’t. Haven’t I as much right to be here as they have? I know this, but I don’t believe it.

All right. I know, I know. I know I have to do something. I can’t bear it. I have to get rid of it. I guess that is the phrase which is used. Get rid of it. Like a casual itch which one could scratch and abolish. I have to get rid of it. Excess baggage. Garbage. If I could just get rid of everything, and belong to myself, and not have to consider anything else. I have to get it out of me.

It will be infinitesimal. It couldn’t be seen with the human eye, it’s that small, but the thing will grow. That is what will happen to it and to me. It will have a voice. It will be able to cry out. I could bear a living creature. It would be possible. Something you could touch and could see that it had the framework of bones, the bones that weren’t set for all time
but would lengthen and change by themselves, and that it had features, and a skull in which the convoluted maze did as it pleased, irrespective of theories, and that it had eyes. It would be possessed of the means of seeing.

“Want anything else?”

“No. No, thanks. That’s all.”

The coffee is pallid and lukewarm. I have to drink it. It seems to be a peculiar medicine.

The tall and handsome children dance very restrained, now, as though the world were too terrible to be tackled outright and had to be held at arm’s length instead. And I admire them.

Rachel. You must decide what to do. Do I have to? What will you do, else? I don’t know. I don’t know what will become of me.

“Could I – could I have another coffee, please?”

“Certainly, madam.”

Madam. Ten years ago Miklos would have said Miss. He has a built-in acclimatizer to take note of the years without having to notice.

The machine music whirls around me, and I hear it and don’t hear it. I don’t know where to go. I know what I have to do, and what I have to have done to me. But how in hell am I going to do it? I don’t know where to go.

Let us be practical, because in the last analysis that is all that matters. Could I go to Doctor Raven? What would I say? Look – I want you to recommend to me someone who is willing to perform an act that is classified as criminal and illegal?
Obviously, Doctor Raven isn’t quite the man for the job. So – what else? If I go to the city, any city, what difference would that make? Where do I begin? I am not accustomed to this kind of thing. Of whom, not knowing anyone, could I enquire? A taxi driver? A waitress? Pardon me, but could you tell me where I could go without fuss to find an angel-maker? I do not know where to go. I’ve read all the articles in magazines, saying so-many thousands are performed every year and isn’t it dreadful and so on.
How do all those women find out where to go?
I would be willing to pay. But I don’t have the address.

Even if I could find a hangman ready to my hand, could I have it done? Would it kill me, in one way or another, even if I went on living?

Nick – if I couldn’t speak with you, all right. I would accept that. If only I could be with you and hold you. If I could lie very quietly beside you, all night, and then the pain would go away.

He called Julie’s first husband prince of the highway. I said “That’s terrible.” Meaning, to die like that, in a game. And he said, “Why? He got what he wanted.” Hector Jonas said my father got the life he wanted most. I don’t know what they’re talking about. As though people did get what they wanted. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Left to myself, would I destroy this only one? I can’t bear it, that’s all. It isn’t to be borne. I can’t face it. I can’t face them.

The faces of the dancing children are hovering around me, but I don’t seem to see them clearly. Do I know them? Do they know me? It doesn’t appear so. They don’t look at me. They are looking at one another, naturally, and don’t see me. Thank God for that, anyway. I’m anonymous, as though I
weren’t here. And now I feel I’m not here, and I wouldn’t mind if they looked in my direction, whatever expression was on their faces. It would prove something.

In the lobby of the Queen Victoria, I can partially see the three old men. They’re drowsing, I think, and their eyes are closed. That’s why I can’t see them properly, because their eyes are closed.

What am I going to do? I’ll have to write to him. He’ll know. He’ll know where I can go to get it done. Why would he know? There’s no reason why he should. He wouldn’t know any more than I, likely. How can I write, anyway? What would I say? I didn’t do anything to stop this happening – or next to nothing – and now it’s happened and it is my fault but save me anyway. Help me.
Nick – please –

No. He can’t. No one. There isn’t anyone. I’m on my own. I never knew before what that would be like. It means no one. Just that. Just – myself.

–
Rachel.
She looks up, startled, and he is standing there. Standing here, right in the Parthenon Café. His face shows a concealed anxiety and also relief. “I’ve been looking for you – it’s not going to work, all this running away, is it, darling, neither on your part or mine – we’re just going to have to –”