In Another Country (14 page)

Louise began to talk. He nodded for her to continue, so she did, but his eyes were away on the far wall, staring and desperate. He wore a white shirt in bed with a filthy collar, down which he pushed a finger from time to time. He was damp throughout. Louise talked, not looking at him. She wondered aloud whether she shouldn't just chuck up her job—if she missed many more days they would sack her anyway—and go down to London for a few months. She had a friend down there she thought would let her stay. She wondered sometimes why anyone stuck around in this dump. What she liked about the trains, she said, was that they were always going somewhere, even the slow ones, even the little local ones, and if you got one you could change and catch another, the lines went everywhere, like veins, so she believed, like the veins and arteries that went all over your body.

Slim had it from Peg who had it from Ike that Louise if ever she went rambling on and nobody was paying much attention would absent-mindedly start feeling herself through the gaps where buttons were undone (or missing more like) in her slatternly dressing gown. That is, she liked the feel of her own skin, for which nobody can blame her, so while she talked she gently rubbed with the flat of her hand or searched over herself with her fingertips or scratched with her nails and pushed down naturally off her creamy tummy into her abundant curly private hair and went on talking about getting out of this place and moved her hand up feelingly over her ribs and tickled herself in the armpit and felt the heartside of her lovely bosom and stood in the open doorway leaning back on the doorpost, one foot in a shoddy slipper and with the other, bare, feeling the length of her leg from the knee to the ankle.

On the late evening before the day in question she came up after closing time with a bottle of Bull's Blood and her Mickey Mouse mug. Sunny Jim was in bed, sitting upright. Mind if I come in? she asked. He didn't say no. For once she shut the door. Mind if I light the fire? she asked. I've had a bath. He didn't say no. She had: the skin under her open dressing gown was rosy and damp, blotched here and there with talc. Her black hair, where it lay on her neck, was wet. She knelt and lit the fire. Mind if I open my bottle? she asked. It's my birthday. He didn't say no. He said: There's a knife in there with a thing on it. In the drawer under his books. The knife was the sort a jolly old scoutmaster might wear, dangling from a leather belt on a clip on his hip, a big black jackknife, rough to clasp and having for parts: one blade, one gouge, one corkscrew, sprung like sharks. You do it, she said.

Fastidious fingers with dirty nails—he picked the spiral out—handed the knife back with the tool protrudent. You do it, he said. Louise sat down on the bedside chair, she bored the cork, she screwed, she gripped the bottle between her slippered feet, oh lovely view of her rosy breasts, the folds of her tum, her hairy lair, intensely foreshortened. Our friend had closed his eyes.

The cork coming out made her laugh. You got a cup? she asked. Never mind, we'll share. Glug, glug, glug, glug—you first, say Happy Birthday. When he smiled it occurred to her that perhaps there was something wrong with his mouth, perhaps there always had been and he had tried to hide it with his bits of hair. When he smiled his mouth looked like something a surgeon had made for him. He smiled and smiled and toasted her with the Bull's Blood, cocking his funny head to the right. He handed her the cup and she drank from the other side.

I'm going away, she said, I've made my mind up, no sense rotting in this hole anymore. Did you get any presents? he asked, did you get any birthday cards? That's usual, isn't it? People send things, the postman comes. I was still in bed, Louise replied, I had to get up and answer him. Our friend reached for the mug and drank it off. Thin throat, she thought. He took off his glasses whilst she poured some more. Her nipples, both on show, were pink as rosebuds; his eyes looked like bits of old foreskin. He looked eyeless when he sat there with his eyelids down, as though he were left with two red holes. How have you been? she asked. Oh better, he cried, oh better and better—isn't it obvious? And what have you done all day? I watched the trains. From up on the hill? No, from another place, close to.

She drank. You're a funny boy, she said, I've not met many like you. I'd be surprised if there were any, he said. She shrugged. A train, a slow one. They sat and watched one another through the noise. It's behind his eyes, she thought, behind his red eyelids mid somewhere at the back of his eyeballs. The train was interminable, a laborious clanking. I quite like the slow ones, Louise said. I don't, he said and nor would you if you were me. If you were me you couldn't imagine anything worse than a slow train, and the slower the worse.

They drank in turns, passing the cup. Soon she was careless of which side she drank from. She sat on the chair by his bed, her breasts came out, she covered them when it occurred to her to, her knees poked through, the length of her leg showed as far as the black shadow. It's as though you're poorly sick, she said, and I'm here visiting you. I'm incurable, he said, I'm beyond the reach of medical science. You look like Jesus, Louise said, at least you do when you take your glasses off. He took them off, he lolled his head against the dirty wall. It's the beard, I suppose, she said.

But it's your
birthday
, he said, and you're giving me this Bull's Blood to encourage me, I ought to give you something, oughtn't I? What's he got in this den he could give a girl? she wondered. Not his horrible knife, I hope. In here, he said, patting the breast pocket of his dirty white shirt. Do you want it now? Yes please, she said.

He slid in two fingers, the middle one and the one nearest the thumb, to be exact, and brought out, gripped between them, a flattened ha'penny, held it, turned it this way and that. Have it, he said, my dearest possession, have it and Happy Birthday. Louise took his present in the palm of her hand. It was very thin, no longer quite round, rather pear-shaped. Thanks, she said, are you sure? Wear it there, he said, extending his dirty pointing finger close to her bosom, on a chain if you can get one fine enough, or in a pocket on the left side. I will, she said, copper's supposed to be good for you. The eye of faith, he said, peering very closely, can still discern one of our kings, the bald one, this way up, and tails is a galleon, a ship of hope. But they are flattened and ghostly. It's been under a train, she said. It has indeed, he said, it's been under a great black locomotive of the Duchess class, 46229 Duchess of Hamilton, weight 105 tons. I've had it since I was ten, I kept it for good luck.

There's a place not very far from here, the kids get down the embankment. One way, south, the line is clear, but from the north it comes suddenly out of a tunnel. He was on his own when he did it, of course. He watched the others doing it from the bridge, then when they'd gone he went down himself with his ha'penny in his hand. He watched them listening on the line, they kneeled in a row and all put their ears down. When they'd gone he went and did the same. It was late afternoon, winter. At the age of ten he had no idea why things were like they were and why he was like he was. At the age of twenty he had none either. At the age of ten he was already beginning to doubt whether things would ever get much better. He got down on his knees, bare knees, took off his glasses, laid his ear on the cold rail. There was nothing but silence, the stones dug into his knees, the cold went into his cheek and the side of his head. It was some time before he heard the singing in the track. Ever since then he has heard it coming nearer, the thing that is between a feeling and a sound, a certain terrible frequency, like a light bulb before it goes. He withdrew in good time; as soon as the singing had acquired the definite undertone of wheels, as soon as the track had begun to yelp and whang. He placed his ha'penny and climbed to safety up the bank. The train burst out of the tunnel, he was thrown back by the noise, but clutched with his eyes at the name and number and saw the fire. Then he went down, searched for the coin, and was lucky to find it in the growing dark. Thereafter he wore that copper wafer nearest his heart.

Right, said Louise, I'll be off then and thank you very much. The gas had gone out, there was no point asking him for a shilling. Wait, he said, and touched his watch that lay on the counterpane. Do me a favour will you and wait seven minutes. The sleeper's due and it's generally on time. She didn't say no. She took the mug off him, took up the empty bottle from the floor, put the knife away. Alright, she said, and then I'll go. When she was seated again, facing our poor friend, she clasped her hands in her exposed lap and waited. She heard it first, and seeing her face he saw that her apprehension of the trains was finer then his. It came steadily, she did not close her eyes. She lay back in the chair, the room began to sway. She opened her hands and pressed them outwards between her thighs, she rocked and swayed as though she were travelling. She stared at him, she fixed him, she held him to her eyes and would not let him look away, she watched him through, his eyes never closed, they fixed hers like an insect's, he was seeing the visored head of Death approaching but she held on and smiled her smile and he smiled his and over them both together the noise of iron went and after that, in one long plume, a scream.

That was lucky, she said, he hooted. And now I'm off. Sweet dreams.

Louise had a bad name, no doubt. Very good of the signalman to marry her, Lilian says. If he has seen the tear-shaped ha'penny, and surely he must have, he'll have read her the riot act about the foolishness of children and how he hopes to God none of theirs'll ever do anything of the sort. He'd be bound to come down heavy on such larks. Ike said, according to Peg according to Slim, that the sight of Louise with her tits coming out revolted him. He said she was only fit to honk on, nothing more. You men are all alike, says Lilian, and a woman has no defence but her good name. You have your way and treat us common as dirt. Mind you, some ask for it. She hopes no daughter of hers would carry on like that. If she'd had one, that is, which she hasn't. But why they think that girl might have done any good is beyond her. Anyone could see he was too far gone and it would take more than a chit of a girl to bring him back. An experienced woman might have managed it, of course, but not that little slut. Still, it is very sad. She'll never forget him standing there asking if she had a room for the foreseeable future, by any chance. An educated voice. What is the point of education if that's what it does to you? The Marquis agrees. Besides, it's not at all certain she made any effort to save him. Her and her Bull's Blood. I don't recollect, says Lilian, you ever saying she pleaded with him. Any normal girl would have pleaded with him. There's some might say she even drove him to it, by flaunting herself, I mean. I mean if he was religious. You said she said he looked like Jesus when he took his glasses off. Touch me not, says the Marquis, in an educated voice. He is about to say he will have another of the same but everyone has paused, everyone falls silent, nobody moves, the Widow clasps her hands on her lurex bosom and above her the tremor starts, among the fairy lights, along the row of pretty glasses, a shiver, a subtle tune, it finds the frequency of everybody's fears, the men at the bar and Lilian who serves them, they bow their heads, wishing the noise itself would come, come quickly, the real noise, come quickly over them while they are silent and thinking only of their terrors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Necessary Strength

 

 

 

T
hat horse makes me nervous, Judith said. I don't like him being here. He's all right, said Max. We can do them a favour, I suppose. Judith said nothing, but in silence took issue with both ‘we' and ‘them'. It was early evening, Max's time for being with his family—a pity, as he said himself, to spoil it by quarrelling. They were in the living room, and against the large west window, full up against it in the teeming sun, the white horse pressed his face. The girls thought him funny; Max said that such a white long head with blinding sun behind it was a wonderful phenomenon; but it made Judith nervous, there was a quite deep gap between the house wall and where the horse stood lunging at the windowpane, and she feared he might fall in there and come through with a smash and a great deal of blood; and besides, his orange tongue and the slaver he made on the window disgusted her.

Megan asked could she ride the horse. Max said he didn't see why not, he would ask Ellie when he saw her next; but Judith said no she couldn't, the horse was too big and being on his own all the time made him peculiar and dangerous. Then the sunny room, with its western view of a bay of the silver sea, was crossed with strains and bitternesses, everyone fell silent and the horse stared in at them.

Judith stood up, with her book. She would go and read at the other side of the house, as far away from the horse as possible, though there was no sun in that room, it would be cold and to read she would need a light on. Max and the girls looked at her. She could wring their hearts merely by standing up, for then her smallness of stature was apparent and, if she took a step, her crippling at the hips. Stay, said Max. It's nicer in here. All three looked at her. The sun was merciless: it showed the cavernous darkness around her eyes. But her eyes were a sapphire blue, shockingly beautiful however familiar they might become to anybody. The alignment of her husband and her daughters, though one of pity, was still an alliance against her, she felt; and standing there she forgot her intention and felt merely apart and sad.

The horse turned, and chased away. Judith sat down again with the girls, and drew them in close, to look at their paintings. Esther's was of a house, any house, with flowers, a welcoming path, a curl of smoke; Megan's was of a loch, its blue surface almost snowed over with water lilies. What a sight! said Max at the window. The horse was by the far fence, where the ground fell away to the rocky beach. A white horse, and the sun getting more and more red. In him, like a reflex, whenever Judith had moved him to love and pity, came concern for himself. Soon then, rather sooner than usual, he said he must work and the girls went to kiss him good night. That done, he climbed the aluminium ladder out of the living room into the loft above it, where he worked. He took very little time to settle, they heard his movements on the floor, their ceiling; then nothing. He was working.

Judith sat on, with the children. She loved that room and was glad not to have left it. It was where she taught the children in the mornings while their father slept. There were charts on the walls and posters and work the girls had done; vases of flowers and grasses on the windowsills; and in a corner, almost too small now even for Esther, stood an ancient cramped school desk. She took Esther against her and sang softly in Yiddish. The girls were hard to get to bed in summer. Even gone midnight it was never properly dark. Megan left off painting and went to the window. That horse is crazy, she said. Esther was asleep. Had Judith been stronger she would have carried her away to bed. As it was, she sat there, dozing herself, and the ancient songs continued in her head. She wanted strength, she was dozing, soodling, and worrying at the question of the necessary strength when
­
suddenly—a shock to her—she heard Max cross the floor above and saw his feet coming down out of the hole that was the entry into his own space. It was a shock, she could not remember when he had last broken off work and come back down into the living room while his wife and children were still there. Megan at the window turned his way in amazement. What's the matter? Judith asked. Esther woke up. The sunset is extraordinary, said Max. We must go out and look at it.

Judith was angry. All the sunsets at Acha were extraordinary. Why come down for this one? But because he had, the children were excited. If he came down, as he never had before, it was an occasion and they must all go out. Esther was wide awake. Megan felt curious, thrilled, apprehensive.

They all went out. The house stood in its own field, that sloped away to the fence and a gate above the beach. The ground was rough, the children ran ahead, Max came after with Judith whose progress was slow. Halfway down she halted. This will do
, she said, and contemplated the sky. There was a bar of luminous cloud across the whole view, but no sun visible, so that for a moment she thought Max must have been mistaken and the show was finished. No, wait, said Max. It's just beginning. And he laid an arm around her shoulders and so ushered her into a proper contemplation of the phenomenon. The sun drooped like something melting, all out of shape, down from the band of cloud. Slowly it eased itself into the gap between the cloud and the line of the sea, and there recovered its roundness and intensified its colour. The rays came over the water, over the fence, over the field almost horizontally, a queer orange light. The children were at the fence, on the low ferny cliff above the sea, and into the light, from nowhere as it seemed, approaching them, flushed by the sun, came the white horse. Judith started forward but Max held her back. He's all right. Only look at the sun on him. There was a breeze off the sea and in thin clothes Judith was shivering. The sun seemed to have halted. The horse, leaving the children, walked towards her and Max in a very measured way. Phenomenal, said Max. The creature was aureoled around by an orange golden light, but Judith said: I'm cold. It would be twenty minutes before the sun, and all its extra­ordinary after-effects, finally vanished. See, said Max, it goes down on a slope. It would dip for only a couple of hours below the rim, and in its descent was dragged off the vertical by the pull of the north. So beautiful, said Max. I'm going in, said Judith. Night after night was beautiful. Why come down for this? Why bring everyone out? Why excite the children so late? Keep them away from the horse, she said. And you put them to bed. She limped in. Max turned to watch. She was too small for such large effects, and the tufted ground threw her from side to side. But her thin white blouse took colour like the horse's coat, and the house's windows blazed.

She lay in bed, angry, brooding on Max's descent into the living room out of his upstairs lair. How he could do as he pleased, to trouble her; and all the old griefs revived. There had never been any discussion over whose the new room should be. The girls could have had a room each. It was wonderfully light, a skylight, a west and a south window. Now she never went up there, the ladder hurt her, it was too steep, as he must have known it would be. For months, her hips worsening, she had not been up there, not even climbed high enough to poke her head in and see what work he was doing in that place apart, that den all his to climb up to and climb down from above the living room in the family house. She heard him come in and put the girls to bed—or heard him instruct Megan to put Esther to bed. Then heard him go downstairs again, not looking in on her; heard him in the kitchen making coffee; heard him go through to his aluminium ladder. Slowly the room darkened, but never completely. There was a cuckoo, all night; and worse, blundering in among her dreams, she heard the horse in the gap or trench behind the house, rubbing and banging against the outside wall. He had all the field under a vast summer sky, but chose instead to shove and snuffle around their dwelling where it was darkest and where he did not belong.

 

Max was working. In very fine pencil he was drawing bones. He might spend a whole night on a couple of sheep's vertebrae, or on the mechanics of its upper leg, the jointing. On a skull, on the wriggling script where the segments fitted, on the accommodation for the eyeballs, teeth and spinal cord, on the chambers, passages, apartments, all the housing, ­easily he could expend a month of silent nights. He learned the precise form and fit of these components, but also their texture on the surface and inside, healthy and in the pitting and delicate honeycombing and filigree of decay, clean as a whistle or stained in peat, bracken, weed. Nearly all his sorties from the house were in search of bones or bone-like things. On the beach he got dry claws and carapaces and the ridged and stippled casings of sea urchins. In summer, more restless, at three or four in the morning, in the queer light with the sleepless crying birds he went out foraging, he crossed the thin pale road and entered the pathless wasteland of mauve rock, black peat, every shade of boggy green, and tumbling white water. Up there he found antlers, some still bloody at the base where they had left the living head, others cast years ago and shortened by corrosion. He found pebbles of quartz, like fossilized eyeballs, and lichens that are the dryest and least ample life there is. Up there the roots of the old Caledonian pines shone in the golden bog-water like giant starfish. Wood like that he approved of: hard and pale as bone. There was a particular river which, disregarding its Gaelic name, he called the Bone River. High up in it a carcass had lodged, and over months, by water with the help of a few crows, all the weight and stink and fleshly substantiality was got away and the animal disarticulated and passed downstream and Max collected it in pieces for his work.

Once he found the skull of a horse, came home with it under his arm, re-entered the sleeping house, climbed out of the living room into his working space and there and then, until the children woke and it was time for him to go to bed, he began to draw the find that was as long, large, intricate and fascinating as many an animal entire.

In winter he made almost no excursions but kept to his upper room, and the dead but brilliant moon shone in at him through the skylight. He worked, on a high stool at a draughtsman's tilted desk, clamping the bones at the angle he wanted them, lighting them as he liked, and transferring them as exactly as his eye and hand and the fine tip of a pencil could do it, to paper. And when he had got them exactly, on scores of white sheets, then out of them in colours that were barely colours, using brushes sometimes as fine as a nerve end, he composed the pictures that were his speciality. He took bone, precisely observed, as his base and real material, and lifted out from it into beautiful chilly abstractions.

Now and then, while he was sleeping, the girls climbed up into his space. Megan fingered and weighed the white objects—they were all around, on every shelf and surface—and looked through the folders thoughtfully. Esther made a cosy home in the corner, with her dolls. But Judith never came up, and he knew she did not. Her crippled hips would have made it very difficult; and besides, as he knew, she had grown to loathe his work.

 

Ellie came down to ride her horse. Judith watched her return, along the sea's edge at a canter. Yes, she was fit to be looked at. She was the image of freedom and well-being. On impulse, when she had stowed away her gear in the shed as Max had said she could, Judith invited her in. It was early evening. Max was still sitting with his family in the sunny living room. Here's Ellie, Judith said. Suddenly she took an interest in this girl and began to question her, gently but to the point. Why had she given up university? What did she think she would do in Acha, where there was no work, nobody her age, nothing to stimulate her intelligence? Ellie was not averse to trying to answer, but in the course of every attempt she glanced repeatedly towards Max, to see how she was doing. How beautiful she is, said Judith to herself, and she is in love with him. Ellie had found university harsh and cynical. There was no one you could talk to about things that really mattered, the boys only wanted sex and her teachers were always making fun. In the end it upset her, she stopped eating, she had come home, she was still not better from it. Sitting there in the beams of the sun, continually pushing back her heavy dark hair, she looked, Judith thought, too beautiful for her own good. Her face, flushed from riding when she came in, was pale as the moon now, luminously pale, her skin of an almost transparent purity. Still without vehemence Judith pressed her. Women needed their independence, they had to be competent, get qualifications, be always able to take their own lives in hand. Ellie shrugged, was lost for words, looked to Max. Ellie loves this place, he said. Don't you have to work? Judith asked him, and when he said no, not for a little while, she stood up and with a decisiveness that quite outweighed her lameness she left the room and came back with whisky and three glasses. She poured out, and said: If you're not working, I'll play. I don't like to when you work. You could, he said. It would help me. Well I don't, she said, but now sat down at the piano close to the foot of the aluminium ladder, and began to play.

Max saw how thin her hair had become, how dark with fatigue and pain her face, how slight her wrists. Ellie, when Judith turned, saw the shocking brilliance of her blue eyes and the bright chic clothes she had made herself, and when she began to sing that was the sense of her entirely: brightness, energy, a lively force, in her rapid fingers, in the lift of her head, in her more and more confident voice as it remembered the songs of her mother tongue and gave them out. Pour another, Max, she said, and get your violin. He did as he was bid, poured another three glasses, nimbly went up the ladder behind her and was down in a trice and tuning his instrument to her playing. Now Ellie, wholly of the audience with the two children, watched husband and wife revive their old unison. Judith led, but Max was quick on the uptake and adept at developing what she began. They filled the living room with the peculiar gaiety that comes when a sociable skill is practised recklessly. Outside, another extraordinary sunset was under way, and against it the white horse came and stood at the window peering in. Judith raised her voice and sang at him. Max skipped across and serenaded him. They did not lessen his solemnity. He twitched at the shoulder, the flies teased his eyes, but he stared in steadily from under his fringe and his hot breath misted the pane. Judith sang and played, the children clapped and joined in, and under Judith's quick tuition Ellie was enabled also. They drank more. Ellie looked from Max to Judith in a rather breathless admiration. She was seeing them in a new light, but Judith especially: Judith seemed inexhaustible, and was indeed, as she sang, marvelling at how rich she and Max had been. Things she had composed herself, years ago, he remembered, and when she brought them back he worked up a new accompaniment. In build and appearance he was like her: slight, quick, with a girlish mouth, his good looks were as fine as a girl's. Over the violin, while he played, he watched her keenly, with a touch of fear. Her blue eyes disconcerted him, he felt mocked by them. At last, sensitive to what she wanted, he fell away into the audience, and, facing the wall, showing them her back, she sang something he did not know, something none of her audience knew, but he knew the tone and sense of it, and the three girls, in their different fashions, comprehended it too, it came up out of her in a dialect stranger and more ancient then hers at home, bitter, inconsolable, mocking its own beauty, harshly insisting that beauty is no redress, and yet still beautiful, but sadder, more stricken, more outraged than it was beautiful. Then briskly she said: You will be wanting to work, Max. And to Ellie: You are a fool if you stick around in Acha. And she limped to the children, took one by each hand, and swayed and stumbled like something smitten across the backbone, out of the living room.