Little Black Book of Stories (17 page)

Now, she crammed her woollen hat onto her springing hair, and set off to help other fraying souls and bodies.

When James was alone, alone that was with mad Mado, he unwrapped Dipsy and handed it mutely to her. She snatched at the doll, held it up, and stared at its mild little face, turned it over on her knee and fingered the towelling. She said,

“They are waiting for us. We’re late. We have to get to the clinic. Or maybe it’s the cobbler. Sasha hasn’t come
again.
They queued half the day for a bit of pork belly.”

Her strong fingers kneaded the doll.

“They wired all the upstairs. They lie there and listen in and make dirty jokes. Sasha thinks it’s funny.”

At the very beginning he had found the sudden presence of invisible people both grotesque and fascinating. He had been married to a woman—met at university in 1939—who spoke like a radio announcer and never mentioned her family. They had married quickly—he was going into battle, they might either of them be cut off tomorrow—and she had said she had no close family, she was an independent orphan, two of their fellow students as witnesses would do for the wedding party. When her wits wandered now the staircases and cupboards filled up with people, people to be accused and berated, pleaded with and conciliated, people who threatened. To some of these she spoke in a rough Cockney voice, shrill and childish, “don’t hit me any more, Ma, I’ll be good, I wasn’t bad,
don’t,
Ma,
don’t.
” Never much more information. When he asked questions about her mother, she said, “I’m an orphan, I
said.”
Then there was Sasha, an undependable friend, of whose existence, past or present, he knew nothing, except that she and Mado were “blood-sisters, you know, we cut our wrists and rubbed it in, rubbed it in,
mingled
the blood, Sasha is the only one and she keeps hiding—” And then there were the wartime ghosts who walked again. Friends bombed in their sleep, friends shot down over Germany, men and women sent out on missions—“Come in Akela, Akela come in—” the old voice beseeched, cracking. He himself was many people. He was Robin Binson, who he had always thought was her lover in 1942, Robin darling, give us a fag, let’s try to forget it all. That to him, James, had been what she said lying naked on the counterpane, as the bombs fell. Let’s try to forget it all. She had forgotten it all, and it all flew about in threads and fragments.

Before the invisible people, there had been bouts of fear connected with shadowy or inauspicious aspects of the visible. Her own face in a mirror, seen through a doorway, who’s
that,
I don’t want her here, she means no good. Involuntary cringing before her shadow or his, cast on walls, or shop-windows, in the days when they still went out. And there had been the endless agitated chatter about Intelligence. It was a word, he reflected in his solitude, in the presence of absence, which had always meant a lot to her. At University it had been her highest term of praise. She knows a lot, she works, but she hasn’t got the essence of the thing, she’s not
intelligent.
Or “I like Des. He’s quick. He’s
intelligent,
” as though the word was interchangeable with “sexy.” Which for her it was, perhaps. They had both been going to be schoolteachers, until the war came. He was a classicist, she had read French and German. When they married she had had to give up the idea of teaching, because married women were not allowed to teach, in the Depression of the 1930s, since they might take work from male breadwinners. Then, as the men volunteered, or were called up, the women had been allowed to take their jobs, even in boys’ schools. She had got a good job in a London grammar school. They had both been delighted, at least partly because neither of them enjoyed the gloom into which she was cast by lack of intelligent occupation. He had been jealous, in his camps and billets, and later as he flew around the Mediterranean, of her colleagues in the staffroom. But she hadn’t been contented. She’d applied to do real war work, and had vanished into the Ministry of Information, where her colleagues were elegant poets, shadowy foreigners, and expert linguists. Her London was burning and hectic. He had supposed that she would go back into teaching, as he did, once it was all over. But she had developed a taste for Intelligence. She stayed on, always secretive about what she actually
did,
earning more than he did, which he tried not to mind.

THE GREY DAY wore on. He gave her her supper, which she whined about. He took her to the bathroom. Another landmark was when, years ago, he had said, “You just go to the bathroom and I’ll get your bed ready.” And she had said, staring with her now habitual suspicion,

“Where’s that?”

“Where’s what?”

“That room you said I’d got to go to. Where is it?”

So he took her by the hand. “Don’t
pull.
Wait for Sasha. Sasha’s knickers are twisted.
Wait for
her.
”

He tried to talk to her still. Very occasionally, she answered. He did not know how much of the time, if any, she knew who he was.

Once or twice, waiting to attend to her washing, leaving her bedroom after tucking her in, he had a vertiginous sense that he himself did not know who he was or where he was, or where he had set out to walk to. Once for a dreadful moment he asked himself where the bathroom was, as the dull rooms went round him like a carousel. At twenty he would have known he was tired and laughed. Now, he asked himself—as he asked himself every time he reassured himself that his keys and his money were safe—was it a beginning?

WHEN SHE HAD got to bed he sat and tried to read Virgil. He thought that the effort of remembering the grammar and the metrics would in some sense exercise his own brain-cells, keep the connections in there flashing and fluent. O pater, anne aliquas ad caelum hinc ire putandum est animas. He had thought of joining an evening class, even of doing a Masters or a Doctorate, but he couldn’t go out, it wasn’t possible. Every time he forgot a phrase he had once known by heart, singing in the nerves, he felt a brief chill of panic. Is it beginning? I used to know what the pluperfect of “vago” was. The gruff voice complained from her bedroom and he went to unknot the sheets. He didn’t like going to bed himself for he so dreaded being woken.

So he dozed over
Aeneid
VI and heard the ruffle of his own snore. He picked up Dipsy, who had been dropped in front of the television, and with him the pink ribbon, and a few of the steel hairpins. He began abstractedly to drive the hairpins into Dipsy’s silver screen in his greenish towelling tummy. He stabbed and stabbed.

IT WAS A QUIET STREET, at dead of night. It had a few midnight windows where the square screenlights flickered. There wasn’t much music, or what there was was respectably contained. People didn’t come home late, or natter to each other on doorsteps. So he was surprised to hear running feet in full flight, two pairs, a pursuit. Then his doorbell shrilled. He thought, I don’t go down at this time of night, it isn’t safe. The bell shrilled more insistently. He heard palms, or fists, beating on the door.

He went down, mostly to prevent Mado being woken. He opened the door, on the chain.

“Let me in. O let me in. There’s a huge black man, with a knife, he means to kill me, let me in.”

“You could be a burglar,” said James.

“I could. But if you don’t let me in, I’ll be dead. O quick, O please.”

James heard the other, heavier feet, and opened the door. She was thin, she slipped in like an eel, she leaned against the door whilst he put back the chain and turned the deadlock. They listened, in the silent stairway. The other feet hesitated, stopped. And then went on, still running, but more slowly.

James heard her panting in the shadow. He said,

“Let me give you a glass of water. Come up.”

He lived on the first floor. He led the way. She followed. She sank, gracefully, into his armchair, and buried her face in her hands, before he could see it clearly.

She was wearing black shiny sandals with very high, slender heels. Her toenails were painted scarlet. Her legs were young and long. She wore a kind of flimsy scarlet silk shift, slit up the thigh, with narrow shoulder straps. It was a style the younger James would have identified as “tarty” but he was observant, he knew that everyone now dressed in ways he would have thought of as tarty, but expected to be treated with respect. Her hands, holding her head, were long and slender, like her feet, and the nails were also painted red. Her face was hidden by a mass of fine black hair, which was escaping out of a knot on the crown of her head. He was surprised she could have run so fast, in those shoes. Her shoulders heaved; the silk moved with her panting. He padded into the kitchen and found a glass of water.

She had a sharp, lovely face, with red lips in a wide mouth, and long black lashes under lids painted to look bruised. He asked if he should call the police, and she shook her head, mutely sipping water, sitting more easily in his armchair.

“I didn’t think you’d open,” she said. “I thought I’d had it. I owe you.”

“Anyone would . . .”

“They wouldn’t. I owe you.”

HE COULD NOT THINK what to say next. It seemed ill-mannered to question her, and she sat, still shivering a little, showing no sign of elaborating her story. He usually had something a little stronger than water, as a nightcap, at this time, he said. Would she care to join him? Whisky, for instance, was good for shock.

He had been a man who attracted women easily, at least in his RAF days with his gold moustache. He had long ago told himself that he must understand when it was all over and abandon it gracefully. There would have been no problem in offering her a nightcap if she had not been beautiful. He told himself that he would have asked her easily enough if she had been fat and toothy.

“Whisky is what I need,” she said lightly. “On the rocks, if you don’t think that’s vulgar.”

“Drink is drink,” said James, who indeed never put ice in good whisky.

WHEN HE CAME BACK from the kitchen with the glasses, she was pacing the room, looking at his bookshelves, at the photographs on his desk, at the laundry basket in which Mado’s paraphernalia was heaped at night, at the wing chair over the back of which the pink ribbon was carefully laid out for tomorrow, in the seat of which Dipsy sprawled, lime-green and softly smiling. He went across to her and handed her the clinking glass. They raised their glasses to each other. The tendrils of hair in the nape of her briefly bowed neck were still damp. She flicked a scarlet finger across Dipsy and looked a question at James. He turned away, and at the same moment a crash and a howl from Mado’s room set him running along the corridor.

Mado stood in her doorway, wound somehow in her sheets, like a toga, or gravecloths. Her teeth were chattering. Her grey hair spilled over her face and shoulders. “You crept into my room,” she said, “but you don’t respond, you mean to hurt me I know you are a bad man, I live with a bad man, there’s no help . . .”

James said, “Hush now, let’s get back to bed.”

Mado became quite frantic, staring over James’s shoulder, making wild signs of warding off violence, cowering and gibbering. Behind James the red silk dress ruffled. He said,

“My wife is ill. I’ll need a moment or two.”

“Get that out of here,” said Mado. “That’s a wicked witch, that means
bad
to us all—”

“I’m sorry,” said James to his visitor.

“No need,” she said, retreating.

IT MIGHT HAVE TAKEN HOURS, or all night, to settle Mado, but that night the life and fight went out of her as the other woman retreated; she allowed herself to be put back into a reconstructed bed, after the necessary visit to the bathroom. James went back, feeling ashamed, for no good reason, and diminished, from civilised host to freak.

“I’m sorry,” he said, apologising generally, for life, for Mado, for age, for the fusty smell of his home, for inexorable decline. “I’m sorry.”

“Why? You’ve nothing to be sorry for. You’re kind, I can see, it’s hard. How long has she been like that?”

The ease of the question drew a sigh of relief.

“Five years since she knew who I was,” he said. “I do my best, but it isn’t enough. We are neither of us happy, but we have to go on.”

“You have friends?”

“Fewer and fewer, as much because I can’t stand them as because they can’t stand me, that is, her—”

“Have you any more whisky?”

She sat down again and he fetched the bottle. She asked light little questions, and he told her things—things like the avocado stone, things like the Intelligence, and she smiled but did not laugh, acknowledging with her attentive, mobile face the aesthetic comedy, and its smallness compared to the smothering bulk of the whole.

“I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I don’t ever talk.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “There’s no need. No call to be
sorry.
”

AFTER THE NEXT GLASS she began to roam the room again, the red silk fluttering round her thighs. He thought one compliment would not be misconstrued and told her she was wearing a very fetching dress. This caused her to throw back her head and laugh, freely, lightly, so that then they both froze and listened to hear if Mado had stirred. She went back to the wing chair and picked up the pink ribbon, running it between her long fingers, testing it.

“She doesn’t like pink,” she told him.

“No,” he agreed. “She hates it. She always did. Babyish, she said. Wouldn’t wear pink panties or a pink slip. Ivory or ice-blue, she liked. And red.”

“She liked red,” said the visitor, picking up Dipsy. “You could have got the red one, Po, but you got this bile-coloured one.”

“I did it for myself,” he said. “A harmless act of violence. It does no hurt.”

The young woman swung away from the chair, leaving doll and ribbon in place.

“Dipsy’s a daft word,” she said.

“Po is even nastier,” he said defensively. “Potties it means. Pot-bellies.”

“The river Po is the River Eridanus, that goes down to the Underworld. A magical river. You could have got Po.”

“What is
your
name?” he asked, as though it followed, a little drunk, mesmerised by the flow of the red silk as she paced.