In Another Country (19 page)

Then Jay blocked his view and his thinking. So that was Merryn, he said. Caradoc was moved by her singing. He freely admitted that he found it hard to like the girlfriends of his young men but I could see that he did like her. As for you, I must say I like you better now. I thought then that you deserved neither Caradoc nor her. I didn't, said Daniel. I don't. You talked about Rimbaud, Jay said. You had just written on him and he was on your mind. You said it was a pity he let himself go. You said he should have bided his time. You said the
dérèglement de tous les sens
was an abdication of responsibility, he would have written better, more, for longer, for more people, to better effect, had he held on. And he should have known that, he was clever enough. You said it was a waste, it was all too rushed, the later poems already were a solipsistic cul-de-sac. I thought you very bourgeois.

I am. Petty bourgeois. Or you could say I want to stay alive, as lively as possible for as long as possible.

Sort of
bateau ivre
with life jackets and the coast guard standing by?

Sort of. And here's a funny thing. That essay I wrote for Caradoc on Rimbaud, it was far too long, by the end of the tutorial I had hardly finished reading it. He said I should come back, come back that evening at ten, and we'd discuss it then. And that's when I began to get to know him. That was the beginning of what made him say he would meet me in Florence under Michelangelo's
David
and take me to Rome. I think he was intrigued that a boy of twenty wrote in favour of a sort of common sense. And this is the funny thing. I wrote at that essay all of the previous night and to stay awake I got myself something off somebody in College who supplied such things. I was high, my heart and my brain were racing, I had more ideas than I could get out through the nib of my pen, the one and only time I've taken any such thing, and I wrote in favour of not letting go, of holding back, of biding your time, of not giving in to the pull of unrestraint.

Jay sat down, patted Daniel's arm, left his hand lying there for a moment. Then he said: I never took anything, though you might think I would. I was always going up very high, and it frightened me, and down very low, and I grovelled there in terror. I never wanted any drugs. All I ever took was what they force-fed me in the hospitals. So perhaps we are more alike than I thought that night. Here I am still, large as life, all skin and bone but by no means dead. Plenty are. Plenty fell off along the way. Back then and since. I was with that boy who jumped off the crane in Parks Road. He thought he could fly, or didn't care if he couldn't. It was back where your ruined gardens had been. He landed on the scientific concrete. I was up there with him, not very tempted. I climbed down, saw the mess, crept into the parks and lay by the river vomiting. And several since, if not so dramatic equally fatal. The needle, the bottle, the blade. Gone, gone, the damage done. And somehow I didn't. I must have believed what he said: I might love, I might be loved, I might be asked to help and be able to. I drifted this way quite often. He always took me in. Make yourself at home, he said. I did, I had nowhere else. When did you see him last?

Daniel blushed. He was ashamed. Not long before he died, he said. I hadn't told him I was coming here. I had some business of my own. Then I met him by accident in the Lane. He was at the back gate, you remember that door in the wall, he had his own key to it. He let me in there once or twice, as I'm sure he did you, he always made some comment and giggled. But when I saw him last I came on him suddenly and we were both embarrassed. He was fatter, his face had coarsened. Neither of us knew what to say to the other. There was some sunlight and he looked very ill in it, the flesh of his face all pocked and slack. I might say the eyes were still bright, very dark and bright, but they had withdrawn and were staring out as if from a hiding place, backing away almost to where his thoughts were. And his thoughts, like mine, were a long way from the speaking lips. I was thinking how much better he had looked in Italy, the sun was brighter there, he was on streets among people full in the public view, but he was fit to be looked at. Was it only because he had aged? I don't think so. After a little while I left him and walked away quickly. It occurred to me at once that I couldn't be sure whether he was about to go in at the gate or had just come out of it. If the latter, then we should at least have walked into town together; and he would be waiting there now, in the Lane, until he could be sure of not catching me up. Perhaps he was hurrying to the market, to buy the few things to be hospitable to a visitor, as he had been, often, to me.

I saw the same, said Jay, his loneliness, the wrecking of his face, but I swore not to let it matter. I would see through it to the spirit, as Troilus did through poor Cresseid's leprosy. And mostly I saw him indoors. He looked okay indoors. He embraced me, he welcomed me, he opened a bottle. I never saw him in Italy, though I hitchhiked the route he took every summer through France, all the long way down. I mooched around Florence where he picked you up. I can well imagine what you looked like under the statue, waiting. Be sure he saw you first. Be sure he was somewhere spying to see you first. And it rejoiced his heart to see you so burned with travelling, so lightly clad. And in his own good time he strolled across the square, to claim you, his waif and stray. And I know which hotel it was in Rome, near the Spanish Steps, close to Keats's lodgings, he recommended it, should I ever be passing. I was passing, penniless, I saw it from the outside. I went on my way, all the long way down. And when I saw that graveyard under Etna I wished him safely home there when the time should come. For that was always the plan. When Gino met Lucia and when it came to marrying, he told her and her family as he had already told his own that his love for Caradoc might change but would never lessen and was a fact and a certainty and nobody could be bound to him who did not honour that. And they did. Gladly, simply, thoroughly they honoured it. He had a flat in their house. And every year, in his seasons, he would arrive with his reading and his gifts and made provision for the family and was godfather to the three children and when the first, a little boy, died he grieved with them and for a year wore a ribbon of mourning during all his teaching and all his College duties and nobody all that time once saw him smile. You have children, do you?

Daniel nodded. Two weeks after that night it was the end of term and I was very anxious. I didn't know what I dared ask of her. I was fearful. We were out at nights in the gardens and the parks, often by the river, following the tributaries to the big Thames, thinking of it leaving. And we were on the roof high above the streets and watched aeroplanes and shooting stars and the constellations travelling. And we lay under the maps on the sloped ceiling, they showed the possibilities, but I never dared say, We'll go there, shan't we, promise? She seemed free as a bird to me, by choice still lingering where I happened to be. I saw Caradoc several times, but never with her, and when he asked me what my summer was looking like, I shrugged and turned away. The term finished and she hadn't said even goodbye. But back home there was a note for me, waiting. It said: If you want me, I'll be in the Tuileries, by Maillol's
La Nymphe
, 9 July at three in the afternoon. And if you find me we'll go looking for castles in Spain. There's a particular troubadour I'm interested in.

Jay's smile was only faintly sardonic.

Then came again, said Daniel, again and more, the rush of learning. These hands
—
he raised them
—
these eyes
—
he looked into Jay's
—
and whatever and wherever the soul is, how they learned. I came into my own. Into earthly happiness. And you?

Jay shrugged, stood up abruptly. Time I was off, he said. The evening had lingered but was ending. The girl closed her notebook and with both hands rubbed her bare shoulders. At the gate Jay said, Some days I think there was only him. Others, I think he directed me into plenitude and it's up to me to grasp it, bear it, say how it was and is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mermaid

 

 

J
ack woke, Ev was snoring, but above that sound he could hear the sea, the wind had got up, there was a big sea, the sound of it made his heart beat faster. Gently, gently, he slid out from beside her, crept to the window, parted the curtains a fraction, enough for one eye: no rain, only the wind, a sliver of draught, the sash was trembling and across the street, across the field, there was the sea coming nearer and higher, the white sea. He thought: There'll be some wreck, the breakers coming in like friendly hounds with timbers in their mouths. Glancing down Jack saw that his John Thomas was out, up and out, sticking its head out of his pyjamas into the cold room, stiff as a chair leg. Always the same when a man wakes, especially in the middle of the night if he wakes then, he mentioned it to Stan one day when they were sitting in the Folly Field watching the visitors, and Stan said his was the same whenever he woke, especially if he woke in the night, like a table leg, so that you wondered what was going on down there when you were sleeping, all night long, something must be going on, in the mind at least, but you never remembered it, worse luck. Gently, gently Jack slid in again. The sea. He might get a nice piece of wood. What time was it? Ev had the clock on her side and her teeth, in a glass of water, guarded it, she knew the time and what time to get up and when the alarm went off Jack went downstairs and made the tea, at a quarter to eight. Ev wore a mobcap in her sleep, lay on her back and snored, her sharp little fingers gripping the eiderdown. Jack did the trick he had learned from Stan (it seemed to work): lifted and let fall back his head six times onto the pillow, to wake at six and be on the beach before anyone else, after the wood. Funny how the brain works. Jack was listening to the sea and going down nicely to where the mind whatever it thinks is not to blame, when Ev hit him suddenly on the nose with her hard elbow. The shock was frightful, his eyes wept, he felt at his upper lip whether blood were coming out. Ev snored, the clock was smiling faintly. Marvellous how a woman knows, deep down, even in her sleep, she always knows what's going on in her loved ones.

Jack went out the back way, down the garden, past his shed, into the back lane and round. It was still dark, there was nobody about. A car came by very slowly. He stood on the little street like a malefactor; then crossed, entered the field, hurried to the beach. The sea had withdrawn, the waves were milky white in a dozen layers where they spilled and ended, the widening beach was empty. Jack got to the tide line and struck along it into the wind, shingle and dunes on his right hand, the lights of town far ahead of him on the bay's long curve. The sky, lightening, was enough to see by, and new wood always showed up. He soon spotted a nice length of six-by-four, tugged it out of the slippy dead weight of thong and wrack, dragged it into hiding in the dunes. So he went on—a fishbox, a wicker chair, a useful pole—making caches in the dunes. Nothing like it, nothing else in his life was like getting up early after a wind in the night and scouring along a mile or so for what the sea had left. Everything pleased him, even the plastic bottles and tubes, the women's things in different languages. You never know. He had found a bed once, without its bedding, of course, but a bed all the same, thick with barnacles and weed, he couldn't budge it, there it stayed, for weeks, he felt sorry for it in the daylight and was glad when a gale took it away again, a bed on the sea, all rough and slippery and stinking. At the seawall, that would have taken him as far as the railway station, Jack turned back. Ev would be waking and wanting her cup of tea. It was light. The first masters and mistresses were coming along the wall, out of town, and along the beach, out of the village, with their dogs. Jack took up his best piece, a plank, and shouldered it. Later he would get Stan to come down with the car and fetch the rest. The wet plank under his steadying hand, its rasping sand, its smell of brine and tar, he nestled it into his neck. He would have liked to find some wood he could carve, but mostly it was cheap timber used for packing, or it had been in the water too long. Once he had found a log he thought he might do something with, four or five feet long and about nine inches thick, very smooth, he carried it home, it was surprisingly light. The worms were in it, shipworm, he split it and all the naked creatures, as squelchy as oysters, were brought to light in their honeycomb. Soon the two lengths, leaning against the wall, began to stink, and Ev made him take them back to the beach. He went to the trouble of throwing them back into the water at high tide, but by then, needless to say, the worms in their wooden cells were dead.

Stan said he would get Jack a nice piece of wood to carve. His neighbour had cut down a cherry tree, it was blocking the light. He cut it down one Sunday while it was flowering. Stan said the neighbour's wife was heartbroken. She was a very handsome woman, he visited her sometimes with little presents from the garden, her husband was away, driving around upcountry on financial business. Stan and Jack met in the Folly Field and sat on a bench watching the visitors. In summer they liked to watch the girls going into the sea and coming out again. Stan had a word for the very short skirts they wore: he called them fanny-pelmets. Jack said the word to himself as he walked home and while he was doing woodwork in the shed. The next time he came into the Folly Field Stan was already sitting there with a fat log of cherrywood between his knees. Mrs. Wilberforce's compliments, he said. Most of the visitors had gone, there was nobody much to look at. Here, said Stan, take a look at this. And he slid a pair of nutcrackers from his inside pocket, a carved black woman, naked, as a pair of nutcrackers. The nut goes in between her legs and when you squeeze, it cracks. Ethel won 'em at the Chapel ladies' whistdrive.

Jack came in the back way but Ev was at the kitchen window looking out. Jack had the log on his shoulder. It was a weight. He smiled, and pointed at it. Ev came into the garden, wiping her hands. That friend of yours, she said. He had it off a neighbour, Jack replied. They chopped it down, it was taking up too much light. Ev liked the look of the cherrywood. Make a nice something, she said. Take that filthy coat off before you come in. Jack laid the log on his workbench in the shed. Its bark was red and smooth. Such a beautiful length of tree. Jack stroked it, sniffed it, laid his cheek on it. Time you finished me that stool, said Ev when he came in. Nearly done, he said, one of the legs was wrong.

Next day Jack went out early picking mushrooms. They grew in the field across the street. Must have been horses in there years ago, he said to Stan. Funny to think of them nearly on the beach. Jack had a secretive way of picking mushrooms. He was sure he was the only one who knew they were growing in that field. He was out early, but other people might be out as well walking their dogs. He held a plastic bag under his old raincoat. He held on to it with his left hand through a big hole in the pocket. That way he could slip the mushrooms in and nobody noticed. Sometimes he had to stand over one and pretend to be looking out to sea. The Minister's wife was passing with her alsatian. She said: Good morning, Mr. Little. Good morning, Mrs. Blunt, said Jack. He picked a good lot and sorted out the best of them in his shed. They were for Mrs. Wilberforce. The rest he took in for himself and Ev, to breakfast on. Not so many this morning, he said, I dunno why. Your eyesight's going, I shouldn't wonder, said Ev. She was partial to mushrooms with a bit of crispy bacon. When the tea was made and they sat down in the little kitchen by the fire she would become quite jovial and holding up a mouthful of mushroom on her fork would say, for a joke, that she hoped he wasn't poisoning her. How black the morsel looked when she held it up. No danger of that, said Jack, eating his own with relish. He was so fond of the feel and smell of mushrooms when he was picking them and of their taste when he was eating them that he could scarcely believe they were not forbidden him. And what a strange thing to come of horse-piss! It was a miracle you could eat one and not die.

After breakfast Jack went out into his shed. To finish that stool, I hope, said Ev. Later he slipped out to the Folly Field with the mushrooms for Mrs. Wilberforce in a little wicker basket. Give her these, he said to Stan. And thank her very much. She can keep the basket too. I found it on the beach. Stan set off at once. Always glad of an excuse to call on Mrs. Wilberforce, he said.

Jack came in at dinnertime with the stool. It was a four-legged one, quite low. I put a bit of decoration on it, he said, to brighten it up. Yes, he had carved the seat into the likeness of a smiling face. It's the sun, he said. Uncomfortable to sit on, I should think, said Ev. Still, I can always cover it with a cushion, and it will be handy for standing on, to reach the Christmas pudding down.

 

There was not much doing in the Folly Field; most of the visitors had gone. The little fair had shut, all but the roundabout. She's having her morning, said Jack. The house is full. I can tell you what they'll be talking about, said Stan. You heard the news? Jack hadn't. Councillor Rabbit exposing himself in Chapel. Jack shook his head. There's something wrong with us, he said. They were singing ‘Love divine, all loves excelling' when Betty Creeble looked across the aisle and there he was with it out. Of course, when she'd seen it he hung his hat on it. But by then she was hysterical. He'd just been round for the collection too. Jack shook his head. Whatever's wrong with us? The Minister's having a word with him, said Stan. Stan's daughter was coming across the Folly Field with her boy and girl. Down for a week or so, said Stan. She got a husband yet? Jack asked. She was eating an ice cream cornet. Seems not, said Stan, doesn't seem to want one either. The children ran to the roundabout and climbed into a fire engine together. They were the only customers. The girl began ringing the bell. Then they were off. Stan kept up with them and did the circuit several times, prancing and neighing like a little horse. Jack was glad their mother was not wearing a very short skirt, but her jacket was open on a pretty blouse. Dad'll give himself a heart attack, she said. Your ice cream's coming out the bottom, said Jack, if you don't mind my saying so. He felt for a handkerchief to wipe her blouse, but dared not bring it out. Never mind, she said, and put her mouth under the cone where it was leaking. Jack paid for the children to have another ride. Stan went on hands and knees in the opposite direction. The boy looked as dark as a southern Italian, the girl was as blonde as corn. Then the owner gave them a ride for nothing. Jack tugged his beret and said he'd better be off. Not going in, are you? said Stan. You must be mad. I'll be in my shed, said Jack, doing my carving. Tell Mrs. W I'm doing a mermaid.

When he was carving Jack always thought of school. It was in the country, the boys came in from the farms. They were slow at words and figures, but it had happened every year that a boy in one or other of Jack's classes discovered he could use his hands. Never knew I had it in me, they used to say. They did some lovely work, Jack had some in the attic still, it was better than his own, and when they outdid him he was proud of them, he had shown them they could do it, that was his part and he was proud of that. They made serviceable things, he guessed there must be hundreds of useful household things still being used in that region of the country in the homes and perhaps taken elsewhere by now as families moved, perhaps even abroad. And if a boy ever asked him specially and they could get the wood Jack let him carve whatever he liked, a bird or an animal, for a present. During the war there was a camp near the school, for prisoners of war, Italians, they were marvellously good with their hands. Jack slipped them pieces of wood whenever he dared and they gave him back what they had made of it with their clasp knives, in exchange for cigarettes. Once he had a crib given him at Christmas: an ox, an ass, the manger, the baby Jesus, Mother Mary and Joseph and a couple of shepherds, all simple, warm and true, they were lovely to feel in the hands. They must be still in the house somewhere, Ev had never liked them much, he thought every Christmas of giving them to somebody with children.

Jack knew that his own hands were not especially skilful. Mrs. Wilberforce's log of cherry was too good for him. But he had an idea, he knew what he was trying to do. It was common knowledge what a mermaid looked like. She must have long hair and a fishy lower half and be carrying a comb and mirror. Jack thought he could do the fish scales pretty well, like leaves, like a low long skirt, and it was there that he had begun, below the waist, and she was taking shape. Time passed him quietly by. When Ev called him in for dinner he started like a guilty man and hid his carving under a pile of potato sacks.

I hear the illegits are down again, said Ev as they ate their cod. Jack admitted that he had seen them on the Folly Field. The man gave 'em a free ride, he said. I wonder she shows her face down here, said Ev. I wonder Ethel gives 'em house room. Seem nice enough to me, said Jack. They would to you, said Ev. But it's the mother I blame. Poor illegits, how'll they ever manage, I'd like to know. I wonder Ethel can look me in the face. Jack finished up his cod. He was thinking of the children on the roundabout, one blonde, one dark, and of the young woman's blouse and how she had stood next to him and given him a friendly smile. Then he wondered what Mrs. Wilberforce would have to say about the illegits, and whether she was really interested in his carving. I see you put a cushion on my sun, he said. Looks better, said Ev. Behind her, on the wall, was a piece of marquetry he had done when they were married. It showed the church they were married in. He felt a crumpling sadness at the sight of it, and a sort of pity for them both. He rose. I'll see to these, he said, taking the plates, which were green and in the shape of obese fish. You'll want a nap after your morning with the ladies. There's pudding, said Ev. You know very well I always do a pudding. When she came in again—it was spotted dick—Jack said, wishing to smooth her: Bad business at the Chapel, so I hear. No woman's safe, said Ev, not even when she's singing hymns. Who told you anyway? That Stan, I suppose. I'll see to these, said Jack, as soon as he could. You'll be wanting a nap after your ladies.