In Another Country (27 page)

Seeing Felix's photograph on the Carmel website, seeing him among the jolly American Fathers who clap him on the back and call him Jesus or Midas as they please, it struck me again, said Zoë, how strong the family likeness is between him and you, my Charis. You have the same black greying hair, the same thin face, the same spectacles behind which the black eyes look out like insects backed into a corner and expecting to be trodden on. When I left you in the locked ward, a doctor, passing, said to me, Much better, wouldn't you say? Indeed she is, I answered. Sweet, these physicians who think their suicidal patients want a cure. I saw you playing passably the role of a woman on the mend. But behind your spectacles I saw your cowering eyes. You have the eyes, Charis, the family eyes, frightened.

Having announced on the website that you are a butterfly, said Zoë, Felix phoned me to say that in a vision he had seen you ascending through the stratosphere doing bravely on your frail and beautiful wings. And that you had come to the very house of Mary and entered at an open window and settled on the sleeve of her sky-blue gown. Then after a silence, said Zoë, he asked me in a different voice did I know about the ­ichneumon wasp. Yes, I answered, but he told me anyway. The female lays her eggs in the pupa of the butterfly, the larvae thrive by eating it, the butterfly harbours what is eating her. That's it, he said, said Zoë. That's it, the whole story, plain and simple. But resuming his Mary voice he told me he believed the butterfly could choose to die and by dying stop giving sustenance to the killer parasite and so by self-immolation end the curse. Charis was the butterfly, he said. Charis was brave.

Felix tells me Father arrived in his invalid wagon just in time to see you departing in an ambulance. And I wonder is that why you changed your mind at Didcot. Did you think you would be wasted under a train? So you decided you'd give him a nice surprise when he arrived from Ealing with a duvet and bags of shopping for you in your new home in Martha's attic bedroom? Oh, Charis!

I miss you, Charis, Zoë said. I am quite alone. I fear the family will look more my way now. It weakens me that you are dead. We were arm in arm, whatever the distances. Remember our pact to get through childless so the curse would end with us? You kept your word and I will too. Not that there's much temptation. It seems to me I walk with a clapper in my hand and shout, Unclean! Unclean! I feel I have it cut into my forehead, I am of the House of Labdacus, keep away from me! And any I might have loved and wanted children with do keep away from me. What is it about Felix? Did he take a test? Does he have a certificate saying his seed is good? Pity Allegra. Her best hope is that her fool of a mother—whom Felix has deserted, by the way, he emailed me last week to say the Fathers and their phoney ruins need him wholly—will carry her off to a secret place in a forest or on a boundless prairie or in some colossal foreign city and bring her up with never a mention or any clue of our family name. But you know the myths as well as I do, Charis, Zoë said. One day when she's stopped worrying a messenger will come from Delphi or a man on a train will stare at her and say, I know your face, and they'll be back again, back in the mechanism, and the helpless girl will breed.

In therapy once, said Zoë—did I ever tell you this?—they asked what the worst thing was I'd ever seen at home. And I had to answer quick, not giving it any thought. Up popped the image of Mother in her wheelchair in the open lift ascending out of the living room into the bedroom and halfway up she stuck. Her pasty face empurpled fast with rage, she swiped at nothing in particular with her stick. Father fiddled with the controls fixed to the wall. I heard him whimpering. Mother by then could not make proper words but clearly the blurtings of her mouth were meant as curses. In the midst of it she shat herself. She was halted halfway up, just above my head, I raised my eyes to her, and Father, turning helplessly towards her, did the same. So we stood either side of her thwarted ascension, looking up at her who fumed and stank. Father said he would have to telephone the Services and she would have to be patient a little while until they came or could give him good advice. That was the image that came to mind when they asked me to say, without any searching through my thesaurus of horrors, what was the worst. Mother flung her stick down, trying to hit Father, but of course she missed and when he went to the telephone and left me standing there she slewed her bloated purple face my way and from her mouth, already slavering, she tried to land a gob of spit on me. I'm fairly sure I never told you that, Zoë said. Needless to say, in the leisure of sleepless nights I've thought of much since then to equal or excel what sprang to mind when they said, Say quickly what's the worst.

According to the therapist, Zoë said, some go to terrible lengths to command if it can't be love at least attention. Aiming at paraplegia from an upstairs window is not unheard of, so he said. But it takes two, of course, there has to be somebody you can do it to and you have to be sure on some deep level that he or she is fit material for your scheme. It's quite a risk. In the case of Mother and Father, that particular therapist said, and I agree, said Zoë, she must have known that she had in him a man supremely capable of cruel and abject servitude. Who would not fail or flee however vilely she used him. He was her reciprocity in person, superhuman in his lust to be enslaved, and strong, so strong. I have always pitied Father for his fortitude. Would so much bad have happened had it been obvious he could not bear it? Perhaps he excited the Fates to try him worse and worse by the very fact that he stood so tall and had lived so long. There can't be much pleasure in tormenting a man who will give up the ghost at once.

Possessing Father, that therapist said, Mother possessed the children too. He fed her them whenever she said, Do it. Does that make sense to you? the therapist asked. I shrugged, said Zoë. What do you think, Charis? He fed us to her piecemeal on demand, the three of us? And now there's only two.

Charis, Felix and Zoë, spawned at the confluence of two poisoned streams… I wonder, Zoë said, did the ancestors, dragging their heritage, advertise in the Soul Mates columns of the Daily Telegraph? Clytemnestra seeks an Oedipus with a view to further damage. Thyestes, hungry for children, seeks a Medea.

Charis, said Zoë, I plan to disappear. I know it is said to be very difficult nowadays but I intend to do my best. The day they found you I noticed that my passport would soon expire. I hurried to Boots and photographed myself; got the forms from the post office and applied for another ten years, using the Express Service they offer. I can't see why I should be refused, can you?

But what I don't want, Zoë said, is the police out looking for me. Father and Felix, bless them, when they phone and email me and I don't respond, are bound to think, Oh dear here we go again. I don't want anyone looking under cliffs for another missing woman face down on the tide. So I have told Martha, who will surely tell the world, that once I've put my affairs in order I shall walk alone to Compostela in hopes of easing my mind after the terrible events of spring and summer. Of course, she is delighted by this fiction—the first of several I will compose—and agrees I must walk alone. The love feast in the evening and the fellowship of the dormitory will balance me, she says. She drove to see me with a bundle of maps and leaflets and hours of practical advice. Now I could blog my way to Compostela quite convincingly without ever leaving Swindon and this detestable bedsit. But I shan't do that. I'm not sure what I'll do or where I'll go when my passport comes and even when I've decided I might not tell you, Charis. I expect you'll be haunting Ealing and Carmel for at least a year and I don't want you blabbing to Father and Felix in big-sisterly concern. But whatever I do, it won't be clean, Charis. It won't be the cleanness you got to in the end. Wherever I go, I'll still be among the anniversaries, I'll be in the world of Mother's stick and spittle, of Father's liver spots, his rheumy eyes, his terrible staying power, I'll know that Felix still operates in his dark blue suit, his light blue shirt, his moccasins, his glasses just like yours, his snow-white handkerchief, I'll drag the Ealing torture chambers after me, the soil pipe, the wheelchair and the insect walking frame, my Charis. I'll be in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. For a while at least that's where I'll be, perhaps for the duration of my brand new passport, perhaps forever, said Zoë, I don't know. It's not what I want, of course, but it's where I have to start.

I shall be all right, Zoë said. And if I'm not I can do without help from Father and Felix, thank you very much. Bear in mind, Charis, that when Mother gets hungry there's really only me to supply her now. Felix is pretty safe, I'd say, in New England among his Holy Fathers and their reproduction Beaurepaire, so it's me our unholy dad will come for down the fast M4 in his paraplegic carriage when Mother says, Get me a pound of flesh and a pint of blood and a dram or two of soul by nightfall, will you, dear. So I must be off somewhere neither they nor you, sweet Charis, nor any other remnant of our blighted tribe can find me.

In my passport photograph I don't look a bit like you or Felix, which must be an advantage to me on my travels, Zoë said. I haven't decided yet what I'll call myself in circumstances where I don't have to prove it with a signature or a document. But it will be something ordinary, something, like Joan or Margaret, that doesn't tempt Fate or raise impossible expectations—Joan Thompson, Margaret Evans, how about that? At nights when I can't sleep I try to calm myself by making up little biographies that in a café, say, or at a bus stop I could come out with to a stranger, as my own. The most I thought I'd say in the general direction of the truth is that I've recently suffered a bereavement, a beloved sister, and think a change of scenery might do me good. Then last night I expanded on this little scrap in a way that gave me a thrill of pleasure. I'll say that I intend to travel abroad but that before I do, to fortify me, I'm going to spend a few weeks with a dear friend on a small holding in the north of England, a woman of my age, recently widowed but determined to stay where she is, high up in the snow, the wind, the rain and the sunshine. Yes, she'll stay up there and manage the couple of fields and the animals just as she and her husband together did. And I say how well she is doing, though profoundly deaf. Charis, said Zoë, I love this bit of a story. I get off a bus high up in a village I've never been to before and there to meet me is my dear friend Eleanor and she is wearing the bright woollen scarf and hat and gloves that she knitted herself in the deep mid-winter with wool from her own sheep, wool she spins and dyes herself in many cheerful colours. And how glad she is to see me! And I believe her when she says in the strange flat voice of the profoundly deaf that I will be good company for her and the sheep, the dog, the cat, the chickens and the ducks. She promises to show me things up there on the fells that I will never forget but will cherish forever, wherever I go, my Charis, Zoë said.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mr. Carlton

 

 

 

A
fter the cremation Mr. Carlton's two daughters invited people back to the house for tea. Not many came and there was none of the hilarity—relief—you sometimes get on these occasions. After an hour or so only the daughters and their families remained. They washed up, cleared everything away, put the table and chairs back where they belonged. Then Mr. Carlton said, You go now. I'll be all right. His daughters weren't so sure. Yes, yes, he said. I've got to be on my own. Best start at once.

As soon as they were gone Mr. Carlton went upstairs and stood for a moment in the bedroom. Then he took the bag he had packed two days before, locked up the house and drove away north. It was midsummer, the long evenings. At the first services, sitting in the car, he sent a text to his daughters: I'll be out of touch for a few days. But don't worry. All will be well. Love, Dad. Not knowing, not wishing to learn, how to send a message to two people at once, he composed his text twice and dispatched it west and south. That done, he got out of his car, fitted the phone under the nearside front wheel, drove slowly over it, reversed, drove over it again. Should be enough, he said to himself. But, to be sure, he retrieved the thing, which was indeed flattened, and walked across to the nearest bin with it. Getting back into his car he noticed that he was being stared at by a woman parked twenty yards away. That's one witness, he said. No matter. And having filled up with fuel he drove off, north.

Mr. Carlton feared and hated motorways. He kept to the nearside lane and only moved out if absolutely necessary. In the middle lane, enclosed in ranks of metal travelling very fast, he felt as vulnerable as a snail among marching men in boots. Rarely did he cross further right; but that evening, just north and west of Manchester, he was obliged to and from there, the fast lane, he noticed that no traffic whatsoever was coming south. As soon as he could, Mr. Carlton crossed back left. Ahead of him warning lights blinked, the whole vast speeding entity slowed, clogged and stopped. In no time at all many miles of track were plated over with many thousands of vehicles come to a standstill. Rapidly the solidifying continued south, every minute another mile of it. The engines idled for a while, then hushed; and this hushing extended down the lengthening lines. A helicopter hurried over, north. Fire, police and ambulances went by on the hard shoulder as fast as they dared. But the stronger feeling was of a gathering silence. Whatever could be done further north was being done. In the long repercussion behind that violent point there was no movement. The evening was mild, stretching itself towards dusk and a distant nightfall. People got out of their cars, lorries, coaches and walked where pedestrians are not allowed to be. They climbed into the central reservation and gazed in something like wonder at the vast and empty southbound carriageway. Others strolled along the hard shoulder, leaned against the crash barrier, smoked, chatted, phoned.

Mr. Carlton stood apart at the barrier. That stretch of the motorway is raised up on columns. They carry it over a flat moss whose chief beauty once was birchwoods, of which there are still remnants. You can also tell which parcels of land had once been drained and farmed. But first Mr. Carlton looked half a mile or so west and saw the feeder road, also raised up and its traffic halted solid and shining in the sun. Had you stood at the junction of that road and the motorway and looked back, your sense of the moss might have been of its opening, widening and escaping; but from Mr. Carlton's viewpoint you saw it narrowing and stopped. But the strange silence and stillness and the mild westering light lay over this segment of surviving land like a blessing or a reminder or a haunting. Mr. Carlton orientated himself in relation to the silenced roads and the moss, felt the queerness of the time and place, and only then looked nearer and down.

Below, barely thirty yards from the nearest concrete column, was a house and home. It was a brick house, it stood in its own close, hedged all around, a comfortable rough square, with a gate on the far side into a kitchen garden, more raggedly fenced and a scarecrow hoisted and tilting over the produce. In the far corner of the close there was an apple tree and a swing by it with a green iron frame and a red seat. Washing hung on a line down the dandelion lawn. And there was more, oh much more. Mr. Carlton felt himself presented with something he would not have the time to take in. It was an interlude, he would have to leave, he would never come back, his knowledge of the place would be small and so poorly ingested how should it do any lasting good? What do they grow there? He could distinguish runner beans and broad beans and at least four rows of potatoes. Those might be beetroot, those were surely carrots. Raspberries and currants in a coop. That was the toolshed, with a pipe from the guttering into a water-butt by which stood the can. A wheelbarrow, a compost heap, a patch of nettles and docks. What fuel do they burn? Behind the house Mr. Carlton saw a coal bunker. Who would deliver to such a place? Mr. Carlton found a track, it departed from behind the house and proceeded, with many right angles, towards and then alongside the feeder road, south. Would a lorry manage that track? In the wet, in snow and ice? Perhaps the man of the house had to fetch the sacks himself. From where?

Mr. Carlton had just noticed a means of transport, a squat black car, parked outside the south hedge of the kitchen garden, when a man joined him at the barrier and pissed through the bars of it steadily in a bright gooseberry-­yellow arc, towards the house but falling far short, of course. That's better, he said, zipping up. Then: Fucking silly place to live. I suppose they were there before the motorway, said Mr. Carlton mildly. I suppose they were, said the man, pulling up his white T-shirt to wipe his neck. But who in their right mind, he wanted to know, would stay? He had a hairy belly, over-folded. That there, he said, pointing at the black car, that there is a Ford Popular 103E. I know a man who collects them. Mebbe I'll come back here and buy it and sell it him.

An old woman came out of the house with a basket and a bag. She wore a floral dress and heavy shoes. She moved the foot of the pole back just far enough to bring the line down within her reach, then worked her way along it, clothes into the basket, pegs into the bag. When that was done she turned, holding the full basket with the bag of pegs on the top, and looked up to where the traffic and the spectators stood. But she gave no sign of any thoughts or feelings, only turned and went back into her house. As though we're not here, said Mr. Carlton to himself.

An old man came out. He wore boots, faded and quite baggy blue trousers, a smock of a darker blue and a brick-red cap. He took away the clothes pole and laid it flat and close under the gable end; came back, untied the line from its two posts, coiled it and took it to his wife who was waiting at the door. She took the coiled line from him and went in. He crossed the close into the kitchen garden, fetched a hoe out of the shed and with his back to the motorway set to work.

You married? asked the fat man who had pissed. Yes, said Mr. Carlton. Yes I am. He said this aloud in answer to the question, said it without any hesitation, feeling it to be true. And having said it, he felt he must abide by it, in a sort of reservation within himself, and certainly mustn't try to be more exact, in the world's terms, with a stranger. I was, said the fat man. Still am, sort of. They were side by side leaning on the barrier, watching the man below at work in his kitchen garden. Swallows flashed out from under the concrete of the motorway, dipped up under the eaves, adhered there briefly with an audible twittering, and flitted off hunting again. Heavens, said Mr. Carlton. Swallows live here too. The man in the garden leaned his hoe against one of the six wigwams of canes that his runner beans were climbing and went to fill the watering can. She fucked off and left me, said the fat man at the barrier. Mr. Carlton turned to face him: his eyes were bulging and watery. Took the kids as well.—I'm sorry, said Mr. Carlton, face to face. Thank you, said the deserted man. You meant that, didn't you?—Yes I did.—Dozens of people I've told it to and never one till now, till you, ever said they were sorry. Mostly they look at me and it's as clear as daylight they're thinking, Can you blame her? Why wouldn't she fuck off and leave you and take the kids? And they're dead right, of course. Why wouldn't she? But at least you said you were sorry and I believe you when you say you meant it.

The man in the kitchen garden was watering his beans. The water showed pure silver in the lowering sun. Plainly the job contented him, he took his time over it, so much time he had. Mr. Carlton felt he had never before witnessed such leisurely and contenting work. Three times the man went to fill the can again. The sound of it filling, the changing tone of water filling a can, lifted like a memory of itself as far as Mr. Carlton at the barrier. And the man in the garden stood with his hands on his hips watching the water leave the green tub through the black tap and enter the green can. He watched; it entranced him. The deserted fat man offered Mr. Carlton a cigarette. No thank you, said Mr. Carlton. The fat man lit one for himself. I'll toddle over and see what's doing, he said. And he added, leaving, Before she left me I wasn't this bad. I didn't always look as bad as this.

The woman came out of the house and walked through the close into the kitchen garden. Now she wore a dark shawl over her shoulders. She stood with her husband. If they spoke it was too softly for anyone on the motorway to hear. The swallows came and went, at speed, intently, with a clean skill and grace. A blackbird sang from the apex of the roof. Was it so or similar, changing with the seasons but in essence just so, all fitting, all in place, all pleasing, was it always so even under the usual traffic?

A helicopter flew away south. Did that mean anything? Mr. Carlton wondered whether the swing meant grandchildren visited now and then. The colours were bright, the seat and the ropes looked strong. Would children mind about the noisy motorway? Was there anything to interest them outside the house and its bit of land? Mr. Carlton began to look for paths. Towards the south, where the moss widened, he thought he could make out a way which, like the carriageable track, advanced in right angles, perhaps to find bridges over ditches. He saw a couple of trees that did not have the appearance of birches. They might be ash or sycamore and a house had stood there once. If the children had been his grandchildren he would have taken them looking for frogspawn in the ditches. Surely the man and his wife knew where to find whortleberries and mushrooms. A moss was a rich place if you were born there or if you came in as a stranger and got to know it.

The old man had finished watering. He put the can back by the water-butt and the hoe back in the shed. The light coming over out of the west was golden now and almost level. All visible things partook of it and became truly themselves. Most astonishing, from under the motorway itself, the route the swallows were familiar with, half a dozen fallow deer appeared. They paused and were illumined; then moved sedately in single file around the north edge of the close and at greater speed bore away south. The old man and woman, her arm in his, watched them out of view and continued standing there in no hurry to leave the light.

A young woman came up to Mr. Carlton at the barrier and said, You wouldn't lend me your phone, would you? I'm very sorry, said Mr. Carlton. I don't have a phone. Oh, said the young woman, so you haven't told anybody you're stuck, you'll be late, they needn't worry? I had already told them, Mr. Carlton replied, that I'd be out of touch for a few days. I was speaking to my husband, the young woman said. Then my phone gave out. It frightens me being stopped up here. My husband was telling me not to worry. But what if we're here all night? I've never left him for a night before. Perhaps that helicopter was a good sign, Mr. Carlton said.

The old man and woman had left the kitchen garden. They were crossing the dandelion lawn towards the house. They halted, looked up, the old man pointed. Bats, said Mr. Carlton. It's not us he's looking at. He has seen the bats. The swallows have roosted, the deer have gone to where the moss is wider and perhaps there is still woodland for them to hide in. Did you see the deer? I've been watching the swallows. And now the bats. All those creatures have come out from under the motorway. I'm pregnant, the young woman said. I only found out yesterday. I went to tell my mum and dad. I wanted to tell them face to face. And now I'm stuck here. I don't want to be away from home in the night.

The old man and woman went into their house. In rooms to the left and right of the door the lights came on. Oh they've gone in, said the young woman next to Mr. Carlton at the barrier. They've shut the door. In the room on the left, on view, the old woman busied herself for a while. Then that light went out. She appeared at the window of the room on the right, stood there for a moment, now without her shawl, then drew the curtains.

The young woman at the barrier took Mr. Carlton's arm. I'm frightened, she said. You don't mind, do you? What do you think has happened? It must be very serious to close both carriageways. I heard a man say it was a fire. And somebody else said ten minutes earlier we'd have been in it. My husband said not to worry, they'll clear it eventually, if we're here much longer they'll bring food and water round. He's right, said Mr. Carlton, patting her hand that was gripping his arm. We're quite safe here. How still it is. I was wondering do they have grandchildren who visit occasionally. I hate it when you're on a train, the young woman said, and you stop in the middle of nowhere and after a long time they tell you there's a fatality on the line. Yes, said Mr. Carlton, that is a horrible expression. And everybody's only wanting to get home, the young woman continued, and they don't care about the fatality in person. But it's horrible sitting there knowing that someone is chopped to pieces further up. And this is worse than that. It has blocked both carriageways.