Wish Her Safe at Home (28 page)

Authors: Stephen Benatar

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: Wish Her Safe at Home

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But a straitjacket would harm my baby; no way I’d let them use it. I’d explain the awfulness of the mistake—although at present I couldn’t set great store by the intellect of anyone who came from that place.

I thought again, Oh, God, please help. If I go down on my knees, unashamedly bearing witness in front of all these people—will you help me then?

So that is what I did. Although there must have been the germs and the dirt off a thousand pairs of shoes, shoes that might have stepped in any kind of nastiness, and there were also torn-off strips of ticket and a couple of screwed-up tissues and even a scattering of squashed raisins, that is what I did. I went down on my knees in my rose-embroidered silk.

And I said: “It isn’t me I’m asking you to care about. It’s my baby, my son, my small Horatio. Your son, as much as mine. And it’s my duty to protect him. Somehow I’ve just got to get him home!”

I attempted, on the backs of my once-white gloves, to wipe away my tears.

“You see, that’s where I know that we’ll be safe. That’s where I know that we’ll be happy. There are people there—good people—who will always do their best to look after us. At home.”

I tried to curry favour. I reminded God of how, even from childhood, I had hoped one day to find my place in heaven.

But then I corrected this.

“I mean,
our
places. I no longer care what happens just to me.”

Yet now those men in the white coats had boarded the bus and the passengers were again starting to inch forward.

The men were pulling me up off my knees.

But they did it quite gently; and their gentleness released a miracle.

Furthermore, something else did. For one of them held out to me my picture hat—which, during my crazy downhill flight, I hadn’t even realized I had lost. Not a straitjacket at all...
my lovely white picture hat! I now saw why some of the passengers had been laughing. Clearly, my hair must have looked
such
a mess! Apart from its not having been brushed recently, let alone washed, I knew that it required its long-overdue dose of
Love that Blonde!
All its dark roots had to be practically waving for attention.

So with trembling hands I shoved the hat back on and tried to tie the ribbon underneath my chin. But I couldn’t do it—oh, how I’d got the shakes! When he saw this, another of the men did it for me...
although really the sides of the bus were far too constricting to accommodate such a gorgeously broad-brimmed hat. And how everybody laughed—myself included! Indeed, the nature of everybody’s laughter had now altogether changed; even the schoolboys’. All those dear hearts, they were laughing
with
me, not against.

Therefore there had been a splendid reason for the whole terrifying episode. Hadn’t there? Everyone had learned his lesson. The world had become a nicer place.

I truly shouldn’t have forgotten, yet
again
, that this was how it all worked: that this was a new beginning—the kind of new beginning to end every other new beginning I had ever known.

I was crying once more but now my tears were tears of joy. A joy so intense I felt my heart must break—could any mortal bear to be so happy? I brushed from my knees a few of the squashed raisins and I smiled at the men who stood about me: the hat-retriever and the ribbon-fixer in particular, although they had all, all of them, been so exemplary. “I have always,” I said, “depended upon the kindness of strangers.” Didn’t that seem the best, the very aptest way to put it?

And then, just a second or two before my legs finally gave out and I sagged between the strong protective arms that held me, I looked around at my fellow passengers and at the driver and conductor, both as black as your hat, and I flashed them all a rapturous and heartfelt beam.

All movement stilled and they appeared to freeze into a tableau: a tableau brilliantly coloured yet at the same time restful. I saw this busload of passengers now standing in a garden. (Perhaps the bus had broken down.) It was not unlike the recreation garden of my childhood only far more beautiful. And the passengers were far more beautiful—patently I didn’t know them but I would have vouched for great individual transformation—and there came unutterably lovely music from a new and ornamental bandstand. I bestowed on everyone my blessing. Or at least I had intended to. I had wanted to let them know that everything was fine—fabulous—fantastic!

I had meant to say:

“Oh, fiddle-dee-fuck, my dears! Just fiddle-dee-fuck!”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material but in some cases this has not been possible.

“If Love Were All” from
Bitter Sweet.
Words and music by Noël Coward © 1929 Chappell & Co. Ltd.

“I’ll See You Again” from
Bitter Sweet.
Words and music by Noël Coward © 1929 Chappell & Co. Ltd.

“The Boyfriend” from
The Boyfriend.
Words and music by Sandy Wilson © 1954 Chappell & Co. Ltd.

“It’s Only a Paper Moon” from
Take a Chance.
Music by Harold Arlen. Words by Billy Rose and E.Y. Harburg © 1933 Harms Inc. (Warner Bros.) British publisher, Chappell Music Ltd.

“Ten Cents a Dance” from
Simple Simon.
Music by Richard Rodgers. Words by Lorenz Hart © 1933 Harms Inc. (Warner Bros.) British publisher, Chappell Music Ltd.

“September Song” from
Knickerbocker Holiday.
Music by Kurt Weill. Words by Maxwell Anderson © 1938 de Sylva, Brown & Henderson Inc. British publisher, Chappell Music Ltd.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” by Frank Loesser from
Neptune’s Daughter
© 1948 Frank Music Corporation. © Renewed 1976 Frank Music Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

“Dancing in the Dark” from
The Band Wagon.
Music by Arthur Schwartz. Words by Howard Dietz © 1931 Harms Inc. (Warner Bros.) British publisher, Chappell Music Ltd.

“Belle of the Ball.” Music by Leroy Anderson. Words by Mitchell Parish © 1951/53, Mills Music Inc., New York. Reproduced by kind permission of Belwin-Mills Music Ltd., 250 Purley Way, Croydon, Surrey, England.

A Streetcar Named Desire
© 1947 by Tennessee Williams.
Theatre of Tennessee Williams Volume 1
. Reprinted by kind permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Love Scene: Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh
. Published in Great Britain by Angus & Robertson, 1978. My grateful acknowledgements to Jesse Lasky and Pat Silver, who wrote this entertaining book.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Cover photograph: John Rawlings, In the Daguerreotype Manner, 1941; © Condé Nast Archives/Corbis
Cover design: Katy Homans

Frontispiece: Donato Barcaglia of Milan, Street Orderly Boy, Paddington Street Gardens, Marlyebone, London; photograph by John Murphy

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benatar, Stephen.

Wish her safe at home / by Stephen Benatar ; introduction by John Carey.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : St. Martin’s/Marek, 1982.

1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Mental illness—Fiction. 3. Bristol (England)—Fiction. I. Title.