The Eye of the Storm (34 page)

The woman on the bus was dressed in black: woolly leotards under transparent waterproof cape; over her head, and tied beneath the chin, a scarf in colours which might have looked flaunted on someone less oblivious. The rain had brushed with as much of her hair as you could see, and freshened the long parchment-coloured face, the thin, naked lips, on which the last words spoken still seemed vibrating.

As the empty bus staggered and panted with suppressed speed, the woman's body, her long legs and pointed shoes protruding at an angle from the seat, appeared to derive a weary and in no way voluptuous pleasure from its motion. Facing straight ahead, the half-lowered radiant eyelids and live mouth began to suggest that you might have something to say to each other, only it was up to you to confirm.

On a thumb of the hands laid together in her lap he noticed a ring, the twin of one he had sent his mother some years ago; he had often regretted parting with it, though the gesture had produced material results. As for the woman, she was aware of his interest in the ring, and could recognize a crucial moment.

‘Is it Ethiopian?' He was pointing at the Orthodox cross in the nest of plaited gold. ‘I knew another, exactly like it—as far as I can remember.'

‘I can't say. I haven't asked'; and after a pause, ‘I took it from someone who didn't appreciate what they had. It's the only thing I ever stole—except flowers from over fences.' The bus lulled her
back into silence and a half-smile, though she appeared to take it for granted that it wasn't the end of their conversation.

He was certainly fascinated, if also mystified by the woman across the aisle: ageless rather than old; not a whore as he had suspected at first; probably more willing to receive a stranger into her thoughts than into her still supple body.

Presently she said, ‘If I could choose, I'd lead my entire waking life at night. Well, I
can
choose, I suppose, and I do more or less.' She turned towards him. ‘Don't you feel more aware at night? Of course you must—Sir Basil Hunter!'

Recognition was common enough for him not to feel embarrassed in normal circumstances; but in this instance, a grey stare acted like blow lamps (cold ones) on any hidden flaws. ‘A lot depends on the performance,' he mumbled while looking at his hands, at a place scarred by a forbidden jackknife; he must have been seven, or thereabout, at—at ‘Kudjeri'.

‘Day or night a lot depends on the performance,' she agreed. ‘There are nights when I sit for hours—locked.' She smiled at him with understanding. ‘This is where I change buses.'

Though nowhere near his destination, he got up and followed her down; they both seemed to find it natural, or at any rate she did not behave as though frightened; some women would have wanted to throw him off, star actor notwithstanding. It was simply that there was nothing sexual in their encounter; yet she was leading him, and he could feel himself more subtly possessed than he had ever possessed either Shiela Sturges or the Lady Enid, his official wives.

Her long feet reached for the damp pavement. He was standing beside her. They did not speak again till after she had chosen their bus.

When they were re-settled, she told him, ‘This house where I live—which I inherited—is too big, too demanding.'

Was she after all making a proposition?

She didn't seem to be. ‘Still, it's where I've got to live, and I don't normally complain—only that my dependents make it impossible for me to lead my life wholly at night.'

‘You have a large family?'

‘Not family in the usual sense: various
old
people, women mostly, dotted all over London—who won't die—and at home, animals.'

He thought he wouldn't inquire into the animals; he didn't care for them, except as an English theory he had adopted, and as engravings.

Instead he rounded on her with what might have sounded like reprehensible enthusiasm. ‘Now that I come to think of it, I haven't any dependents—one of a kind, a pathetic
failed
actress to whom I pay what is necessary—no need to the other—nor to my well-balanced, committed daughter. I have no one. I ran away from my family, my country, to become an actor.'

She was waiting.

‘I've done what I set out to do,' he insisted, he felt, modestly.

She didn't disagree. ‘You were knighted by the Queen,' she reminded with appropriate gravity.

When it wasn't his achievement he wanted to recall, but his childhood, from which Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, together with other paler apparitions, had sprung, out of the least likely drought-stricken gullies, brown, brooding pools, and austere forms of wind-tattered trees. Only the bus was not the ideal place in which to begin his invocation; and for once the sound of his famous voice would have made him wince.

‘I've seen some of your performances,' she was telling, ‘though I don't make a habit of going to the theatre. I remember your Lear—and I've been to the present thing.'

This drew him. ‘Will you admit it isn't as bad as they said?'

‘No, not bad—in fact good, in its stunted way.'

He could feel himself inwardly bridling; perhaps vanity was the source of his greatest sensual pleasure.

‘But might have been better if you had dared
give
yourself.'

‘How do you mean “give”?' He could hear the anger in his voice; and he looked at her afresh, wondering whether this old bag was leading up to what would materialize as an unmade bed.

‘Nothing physical,' she formed the word with almost prudish
care. ‘I don t doubt you've given yourself physically, night after night, in the parts you've acted—to the wives you mention—mistresses probably (I know nothing about your private life because I don't read newspapers). And I don't mean creatively either, because that's unconscious where it isn't disciplined physical labour. Nor do I mean what used to be called “spiritual” before we shed our
illusions.
Perhaps I should say you haven't yet given yourself “essentially”.'

His mind felt numb, his skin clammy. Was she preparing to introduce him, not to the unmade bed with its coffee stains and importunate ageing flesh, but to a far more daunting prospect: the other side of that grey screen, or backcloth, he had seen in his boyhood as standing between himself and nothing; and which he resurrected even now in times of flux and fallibility. So he armed himself with scepticism against anything else she might have to say.

‘Why I don't go to the theatre more often,' she continued, ‘is because it exhausts and irritates me to watch a set of cast-iron figures trying to drag their weight around in a disintegrated world. Since our conglomerate existence became less conglomerate, less controllable, more fluid, how can we express, or become part of it, unless we flow too, by giving—or losing—ourselves “essentially”?'

Cock, he resisted answering; I have been able to control my own life ever since I learnt the technique of living, which is also the technique of acting; my gift, which is myself, is something no critic, no ratbag witch, no banana skins, only senility or death, can destroy. But what she had said stimulated him to the extent that he would have been tempted to flow with the darkness and the rain, and beyond them, if she was prepared to show him how.

Instead, the bus jolted and stopped. ‘This is where I get out,' she said, looking younger for the moment and unexpectedly shy. ‘My name is Mitty Jacka.' It could have accounted for the shyness.

She got up lugging a string bag filled with awkward, lumpy parcels, which had been lying on the seat beside her. Again he tagged along; at some point on their nightride they had come to an agreement.

The rain had stopped, or rather, he could feel only an occasional flurry of moisture, fine enough to have been shaken in his face by plant tendrils, or out of human hair. The glistening pavement they were mounting rose sharply enough for Mitty Jacka to sound breathless, though she looked more youthful for her breathlessness whenever the lamplight showed her up. He too was breathless, from the strangeness of what he was letting happen.

‘My house will put me to shame,' she said, and you knew that she was being no more than formally truthful. ‘Other people find it dirty.'

‘Other people? I imagined you leading the life of a recluse, apart from those dependents “dotted about”.'

‘Oh, no. They pour in. Droves of them. At all hours of the day. That's why I prefer the night. Night is for the elect.'

Though she gave no direct sign of including him amongst the chosen, he was moved by vanity for the second time since their meeting. He brushed against her, partly by losing his balance, if also a little by intention. She didn't appear to notice, unless awareness was the reason for a sharp clout he received from the loaded shopping bag.

Soon after, they arrived at a gate in a flint wall at which a cat was on the lookout, back arched at first in anticipation of danger, then subsiding into a serpentine blue glimmer.

The cat's purring and the drip of moisture from branches lifted in a gentle breeze made the sound of his voice an inept and impertinent intrusion on their dark surroundings. ‘What's its name?' he asked, stroking air instead of fur.

‘Oh, I don't know—Cat! It was called something in the beginning, but I forget. We're always together, so a name isn't necessary, is it?'

After identifying him on the bus, she hadn't addressed him by name, and he felt pretty sure he would never venture to call her by hers.

All around them were wet, needling branches, patches and trailers of faintly moonlit ivy; he caught sight of an irruption of fungus on
the scaly torso of a tree. Here and there he had to stoop, not always successfully, to avoid being hit in the face. She too, was tall, but there the difference began: she had been initiated into the ways of darkness, while he might remain the blundering intruder.

As soon as her key grated in the lock, there were sounds from inside the house: of scuffling, and snuffling, and a pop pop popping. Then, by light, a brace of pugs had begun to seethe around them, laying their faces flat against a stranger's ankles, squeaking joy for those they were re-discovering.

Mitty Jacka was no demonstrative dog lover; she allowed devotion to flow around her, which it did: her pugs were ecstatic. After his experience with the cat Cat, he suppressed an impulse to ask their names. Instead, he was learning to adapt himself to the flow, if not to the smell of rubber hot water bottles and peanuts, evidently the distinctive smell of pug.

He sat with a glass she had brought him, filled with something sweet, unacceptable, finally insidious, while she went about her animal business. Around him smouldered an upholstery of garnet plush, against panelling which looked like ebony, but couldn't have been. At least it was an ebony pedestal on which a figurine stood holding its curve under an ivory parasol. He found he had begun smiling into his sweet and fiery drink, while the voice of Mitty Jacka in the distance flung a few ritual ‘darlings' to her animals.

He realized she was with him again on seeing her drop a piece of paper about the size of a visiting card into an urn on the shadowy outskirts of the room.

‘What was that?' The drink inside him made him feel less brazen than spontaneous.

‘Oh—an idea I might decide to use.' She sounded unwilling, even a bit sour.

Then she was gone, followed by her anxious retinue. He continued sitting. Perhaps the smell of raw liver she left behind deterred him from investigating her ‘idea'. Instead he waited: for what? His future as an actor of some importance no longer seemed relevant.

When she returned, not to settle—her behaviour suggested she
might never do that, anyway during the hours of darkness—she freshened up his drink, more of which he had meant to refuse. As she moved about the room a cigarette she had lit for herself trailed its streamers of smoke, or described more elaborate arabesques as she stopped to look at and sometimes re-arrange objects she might have been seeing for the first time. She smoked so furiously that he was more drugged by her cigarette than drunk by whatever was in his glass.

From adding up a couple of her remarks he decided to risk her displeasure again. ‘I gather you write.' Carefully composed, the words shot out of his mouth like a handful of independent marbles.

She drew harder on her cigarette. ‘I hammer away.' The smoke she blew looked peculiarly solid. ‘Sometimes it takes a recognizable shape—or one which
I
can recognize, though more often than not it isn't what it was intended to be. Yes, I write verses,' she added, by way of obeying a social convention. ‘And all my life I've been putting together I don't know what you would call it—a work—which will convey everything there is to express—if I can extract and compress it—or if in the end I don't find it has melted down of its own accord into the word I started with.'

Surrounded by the smoke with which she had been filling the room, he began telling, ‘When I was a boy—I forget how old, but quite young—I had an illness—no, I must have broken my arm: I can remember the sling, and the clammy feeling of my skin from the arm strapped against my unwashed body—in bed. They had fixed me up for the night—tried to make me comfortable. My father lit one of the night-lights left over from when we were smaller. And stood a screen across one corner of the bedhead—to keep the draught off, I imagine. During the night this screen began to terrify me. The fall—the broken arm—must have left me a bit delirious. As the night-light flickered I kept trying to turn—the strapped arm made it agony—to watch the screen. It was of a pale grey, or some nondescript colour, with the skeletons of trees stencilled on it. Or that was how the light made it appear. As the night dragged on and I became more desperate, I longed to look behind the screen, but
was too afraid of what I might find. I was running with sweat. I suppose I fell asleep in the end.'