Love, Let Me Not Hunger (24 page)

But Deeter was all absorbed and swollen with his big idea. “To hell with that!” he said. “So they fill their bellies for a couple of hours—how far is six quid going to go? I got something better to do with it. I’d have done it long ago if I’d had it.”

Toby said, “What’s that?”

“Telephone to that bastard Marvel and tell him that if he don’t want a lot of dead animals on his hands to cable us some money pronto.”

The daring, the novelty, and the simplicity of this idea struck them all silent, for they were none of them telephone users or telephone-minded. This means of communication rarely entered their lives. It was not an instrument for nomads. It simply had never dawned upon them that there, marooned on a desert island as it were, in the heart of the great land ocean of La Mancha, voice projection was possible with that far off Britain so many, many long and tedious days of travel away.

“Well, what do you say?” Deeter urged. He tapped his little pocket diary. “I got his number there at Chippenham.”

Mr. Albert threw a despairing glance at the green notes, now clutched in Deeter’s hard brown fist. He said, “But I gave it so we could buy them some food. It’s all I had and I meant it for them.”

Rose, who was looking at Mr. Albert, felt her eyes fill with tears of affection and understanding for the old man. How often in her life she had rejected the temptation to use the worn ten-shilling note she kept hidden away separately upon her person to be spent only in the direst emergency, and how strongly she had learned to resist it. For as long as that note was there she was not destitute.

Toby said, “You’ll get it back from Mr. Marvel when he comes, old man. I’ll see to that.”

Janos wagged his grotesque head and said, “Yo, yo! When he comes; when he comes. And if he don’t coming?”

“It ain’t that,” said Mr. Albert. “Only if we—” And he looked once more agonisedly at the money in the cowboy’s hand.

“Listen,” Deeter said, “what do you want to do, sit here on your asses until they’re all dead? Maybe Marvel don’t know. Maybe something’s happened to him.”

“Wouldn’t it be cheaper to write him a letter?” Mr. Albert queried, and then looked frightened at his own temerity.

Deeter snorted. “I did that ten days ago. There hasn’t been any answer. Now I want to get him where I can tell him what’s what. Okay, so we’ll put it to a vote. For the six quid we can feed ’em for a couple of days or out of it we can phone Marvel and get off this goddamned hook. What about it? All those in favour of the blower?”

“All right by me,” Toby said.

Janos contributed, “Hokay. But if we don’t feed my doks there going to be big trouble.”

Mr. Albert blinked doubtfully, then muttered, “If you say so.”

Deeter looked at Rose. “You?” The girl shook her head in negation.

Deeter’s hard mouth and flinty grey eyes mocked her again. “Well now, I’d have figured you’d have more sense, sister. What the hell are you thinking about?”

Rose replied, “You won’t ever know what I was thinking about,” and then turned her head away, for she herself was confused by the ambivalence of the thoughts and emotions crowding her. She wanted Mr. Marvel back flush with money to restore life to the eyes of the tortured animals and simultaneously she wished him never to return, never to be heard from again. Then they would all remain there together until their end, and if she starved to death it would be in Toby’s arms.

Hourly, almost, during her life in the
finca
from the time when their funds had run out she had been passing from hell to heaven and heaven to hell. Here she had looked upon the sufferings of helpless creatures, unable to help them yet transported through the devotion of endeavouring with Mr. Albert to ease their lot, to look to their sores and injuries and bestow upon them what comfort she could. Rose had never had a friend before. During those days she and the old man lived in a concert of amity and attachment. They loved and pitied one another for the love and pity for the captives who depended upon them. Here, too, she had had total physical possession of Toby and kept his house for him, receiving him to herself each night and suffering the dream that this was how it might always be.

The proposal of the telephone call, the sudden, unexpected bridge to the past, had turned her mind for a moment swiftly and instantaneously back to that place and that time outside the Regent Palace Theatre and her plight just before she had encountered Jackdaw Williams. And so it would be again when Mr. Marvel came back, just as though all the wonderful things that had happened to her, the friends she had made, the home she had created, and the love she had found had never taken place at all. She would be dropped off some place in England to continue on her way at nightfall to the hard bench in the empty, stinking railway station.

“Never mind,” Deeter said, “it’s four to one anyway, so we telephone.” He looked around challengingly. “I do the talking.”

No one questioned this.

All of them went into the town together, walking down the tawny dirt roads dusty under the August sun. They passed their old tober and the blackened ruins of the circus tent. Children were playing there now. They went on into the town, and as they moved through the almost deserted streets they were all seized with the strange sensation that perhaps they were dead or ghosts who were invisible, for no one paid any attention to them or even seemed to see them.

Fluttering from a bit of old brick wall they came upon the remnants of a torn poster, a piece of garish coloured three-sheet depicting the white painted, red streaked, bulbous-nosed face of a clown wearing the ridiculous too small hat. Above were the still legible words
CIRCO NACIONAL
. The bitter irony of the leering face was lost upon none of them.

They found themselves hating the town. Not only were the people and the language foreign, but the architecture, the white-washed walls and red-tiled roofs, the monotonous buildings with their iron-balconied first storeys and prison-like walls were alien and disturbing, and so was the secrecy of the houses. All of the dwellings turned blank faces and barred windows to the narrow, cobble-paved streets, refusing to reveal their identity. Yet within, each sheltered a patio with a bit of garden or gaily coloured Moorish tiling. Graceful galleries looked down upon these. Vines and trellised roses climbed them. Here beat the heart of the house, but as closed to the outsider as the heart within the human breast. They felt chilled and homesick and shut out.

The flamboyant central Plaza de Ja Liberacion still showed some of the effects of the great storm. Chimneys and cornices were unrepaired. The towering spire and campanile of the cathedral had been damaged. The ugly town hall and post office were on the far side of the plaza and they went across past the stone memorial in the centre raised to the brave and noble dead of some long forgotten war. The buildings surrounding the square were arcaded, and in the shade of their galleries men in shirt-sleeves stood and exchanged political gossip. Children ran about and screamed and played, and the five felt as lonely and cut off as though they had been walking in the midst of a desert. They changed their money at the bank and trooped into the post office.

The telephone call was one long, uninterrupted nightmare. Two strands of line connected Zalano with Toledo and Madrid, and thence the outer world. One was out of order and the other was rarely called upon to carry a voice beyond the boundaries of Spain. The post office was a squalid old building of stone that reeked of disinfectant and old stumps of cigars and cigarette ends. Its cracked walls were plastered with
avisos
and old decrees, yellowed and fly-specked. Behind the postal counter at a primitive switchboard sat an operator, an old woman in a black dress with a head-set clamped upon her hair that was going patchily white. There was only one ear-piece to it, which was practical, since it developed that she was totally deaf in the other ear.

They listened painfully for almost half an hour while first she tried to reach an operator in Madrid and then make her understand what was wanted. This ended up in a violent quarrel with her opposite number there and slamming down the receiver.

They waited then for an hour. Deeter tried to make the old woman find out what was happening to their call, but she was still angry with the operator in the capital.

Thus, they stood about, anxious, nervous and angry, Deeter editing and re-editing the speech he had prepared for Marvel until it was refined down to one long, steady stream of abuse.

Suddenly at last the buzzer at the switchboard hummed. The operator thrust the plug home viciously and said something in Spanish, and thereupon the whole post office and all its clerks became electrified, and the old, tired, wrinkled face of the woman became transfixed with excitement. She had apparently heard the voice, a strange, alien, exotic voice of an English operator far off in the great beyond of the British Isles. All work in the post office came to a halt while with her head and both arms she signalled for Deeter to go into the booth, for the miracle of connection was about to take place. He went into the narrow box, with Toby jamming in beside him, little Janos pushing between their legs, and Rose and Mr. Albert hearkening at the door. Deeter held the receiver to his ear, but there was only a humming, soughing and crackling in it.

But at last a faint, thin whisper of a woman’s querulous voice, a mere ghost of a sound, penetrated the buzzing. So tenuous was it and far away that Deeter was not certain whether he was not hearing it inside his own head in his imagination and he waited several moments until he was sure of what it was trying to say: “Hallo, hallo! Who is it? What do you want?”

The other four, straining, could hear nothing. Deeter pressed a finger into his free ear to shut out other sounds and began to shout into the telephone: “Hallo, hallo! Is Sam Marvel there? I want to speak to Sam Marvel.”

The wisp of a voice repeated, “What’s that? Who is it? What do you want?”

Deeter waved an angry arm at the telephonist behind the counter and shouted, in English, “Hey, I can’t hear a goddamned thing! Can’t you get a better connection?”

But she assumed that he was congratulating her and beamed at him and waved back.

“Marvel, Marvel!” Deeter yelled. “I want to speak to Sam Marvel. Who is this? Mrs. Marvel?”

Apparently the name had penetrated through the chaos of atmospherics and ground noises, and then for an instant the connection became somewhat clearer. The woman’s voice was still as from another planet, but the buzzing was reduced. “Sam? He ain’t here.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He’s with his circus in Spain somewhere.”

Deeter felt his bowels suddenly loosen within him at the implication. “Listen,” he bawled, “ain’t you seen him? Don’t you know his goddamned circus burned down to the ground? I’m calling from Spain.”

“That’s right,” agreed the voice, “he ain’t here. He’s gone off to Spain with his circus.”

Frustration empurpled Deeter’s face. All the abuse he had saved up for Marvel was still seething inside him. He screamed into the mouthpiece. “For Christ’s sake, listen to me, you bitch! The circus burned down. Sam’s gone back to England. I want to know where he is.”

The crackling and buzzing had recommenced and far off, weak and indistinct as the voice was, a note of impatience coloured it: “I don’t know when he’s coming back to England. I said he’s away in Spain with his circus—”

Deeter bawled a word into the telephone, and thereafter could not tell whether the woman’s voice had faded from reality into nothingness, or she had hung up, or somewhere along the line the tenuous thread which bound them in their monotonous litany of misunderstanding had been severed. But she was gone now forever. The receiver contained nothing but grating noises. He hung up and cursed again.

“What is it? What did she say? Where is he?” the others clamoured.

Deeter came out of the booth, sweat dripping from him. “He isn’t there. He never went home. That was his old woman. She didn’t even know the circus burned down. It looks like he’s taken a powder on her too.” He went over to the counter. The telephonist was still beaming at him.

“Está bien, Señor?”

Deeter said, “Great!” And then added, “How much?”

It took more than half the supply of pesetas they had garnered in exchange for Albert’s six pounds. Deeter paid, and when he came away from the counter they were all standing in a group watching him. He was still angry from the frustration and failure of the telephone call, and even angrier because he knew he was going to be placed on the defensive. He snarled, “Okay, okay! So it was a washout. But it was worth taking a crack at, wasn’t it?”

Nobody said anything and he pushed on through them, and they followed him out into the glare of the plaza. Deeter would have gone striding on, but the dwarf, running ridiculously on his short, bowed legs, caught up with him, fastened on to his sleeve and twitched him to a stop. “Hoi!” he cried. “What we going do with the rest of them money? You give me for my doks!”

Deeter looked down upon Janos with an expression of disgust curling his mouth. All of the latent fear and hatred of the normal man for the abnormal showed. “To hell with your dogs! We’re feeding the horses!” And he tried to shake him off.

But Janos clung to his sleeve, tenacious, crying, “No, no, no! My doks! My doks!”

Deeter said, “Let go, you little squirt, if you don’t want a kick in the belly.”

Mr. Albert ventured, “I thought maybe we could buy a little meat for the cats.”

Deeter looked at him coldly and said, “Well, we ain’t going to,” and became obscene and vituperative on the subject of Janos’s dogs and Mr. Albert’s carnivores.

Surprisingly, the old man faced up to him for a moment and said, “But it’s my money. That’s what I gave it for, so we could get ’em some meat.”

Toby and Rose stood a little to one side from the three engaged in their squabble and knew that there was nothing they could say or do that would make any difference. If there was hay for the horses there would be some for the starving elephant then too. If there was meat for the carnivores, some of the smaller animals might survive as well. Whichever, there was no solving the dilemma of insufficiency. If strict justice was to be considered, Deeter had a point. Hay was cheaper than meat; their money would go farther. Toby had the family horses to think about as well. Hay meant the increase of their chances to survive.