Little Black Book of Stories (18 page)

“Dido. I call myself Dido, anyhow. I’m an orphan. I cast my family off and other names with it. I like Dido. I must go now.”

“I’ll come down with you, and make sure the coast is clear.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

He wished she would, but knew she wouldn’t.

AFTERWARDS, many things made him doubt that she had really been there at all. Starting with the name she had given herself, Dido, out of his reading. Though equally, she could have picked up his book whilst he was seeing to Mado, and chosen the name of the passionate queen more or less at random. She had known that Po was Eridanus, which he had forgotten, he thought, registering fear at a known fact lost, as he always did. She had some classical knowledge, unexpectedly. And why not, why should a beautiful woman in red silk not know some classical things, names of rivers, and so on? She had known that Mado hated pink, which she could not have known, which Mrs. Bright did not know, which he kept to himself. He must have invented, or at least misremembered, that part of the conversation. Maybe she existed as little—or as much—as Sasha, the imaginary blood-sister. He felt a wild sense of loss, with her departure, as though she had brought life into the room— pursued by death and the dark—and had taken it away again. What he felt for her was not sexual desire. He saw the old man he was from the outside, with what he thought was clarity. His creased face and his arthritic fingers and his cobbled teeth and his no doubt graveyard breath had nothing to do with anything so alive and lovely. What he felt was more primitive, pleasure in quickness. She was the quick, and he was the dead. She would never come again.

In bed that night he was visited—as he increasingly was—by a memory so vivid that for a time it seemed as though it was real and here and now. This happened more and more often as he slipped and lost his footing on the slopes between sleep and waking. It was as though only a membrane separated him from the life of the past, as only a caul had separated him from the open air at the moment of birth. Mostly he was a boy again, wandering amongst the intense horse-smell and daisy-bright fields of his childhood, paddling in trout-streams, hearing his parents discuss him in lowered voices, or riding donkeys on wide wet sands. But tonight he relived his first night with Madeleine.

They were students and virgins; he had half-feared and half-hoped that she might not be, for he wanted to be the first and he wanted it not to be a fiasco, or a worse kind of failure. He hadn’t asked her about it until they were undressing together in the hotel room he had taken. She turned to laugh at him through the black hair she was unpinning, catching exactly both his anxieties.

“No there’s no one else, and yes, you will have to work it all out from scratch, but since human beings always
have
worked it out, we’ll probably manage. We’ve done pretty well up to now,” she said, glancing under her lashes, recalling increasingly complicated and tantalising fumbles in cars, in college rooms, in the river near the roots of willows.

She had always demonstrated a sturdy, even shocking, absence of the normal feminine reticences, or modesty, or even anxiety. She loved her own body, and he worshipped it.

They went at it, she said later, tooth and claw, feather and velvet, blood and honey. This night he relived intimacies he had very slowly forgotten through years of war, and other snatched moments of blissful violence, and then the effacement of habit. He remembered feeling, and then thinking, no one else has ever known what this is
really
like, no one else can ever have got this
right,
or the human race would be different. And when he said so to her, she laughed her sharp laugh, and said he was presumptuous—I
told
you, James,
everyone
does it or almost—and then she broke down and kissed him all over his body, and her eyes were hot with tears as they moved like questing insects across his belly, and her muffled voice said, don’t believe me, I believe you, no one else
ever . . .

And tonight he didn’t know—he kept rising towards waking like a trout in a river and submerging again—whether he was a soul in bliss, or somehow caught in the toils of torment. His hands were nervy and agile and they were lumpen and groping. The woman rode him, curved in delight, and lay simultaneously like putty across him.

And his eyes which had watered but never wept, were full of tears.

THE NEXT DAY, he believed he might have called her up from the maze of his unconscious. But Deanna Bright, putting things away in the kitchen, rubbed away traces of scarlet lipstick from a glass he’d thought he’d rinsed, and looked a question.

“Someone was being attacked in the street. I took her in.”

“You want to watch out, Mr. Ennis. People aren’t always what they seem.”

“We need to change her sheets again,” he said, changing the subject.

SOMETHING HAD CHANGED, however. He had changed. He was afraid of forgetting things, but now he began to be tormented by remembering things, with vivid precision. People and things from his past slid and hissed into reality, obscuring the stained carpet and the wing-chair in which Mado chattered to Sasha, or turned the lime-green dolly in clumsy fingers. He told himself he was like a drowning man, with his life flashing before his eyes, and stopped to wonder exactly how that would be, would you
see
the quick and the dead before your real staring underwater pupils, or would they wind on a speeded-up film inside the dark theatre of the waterlogged head? What happened to him now, was that as he woke out of a nap over his book, or stumbled into his bedroom undoing his buttons, he saw visions, heard sounds, smelled smells, long gone, but now there to be, so to speak, read and
checked.
Dead Germans in the North African desert, their caps, their water-cans. The old woman he and Madeleine had pushed under the table on the worst night of the Blitz, and revived with whisky when she seemed to be having a heart attack. She had had one red felt slipper with a pom-pom and one bare foot. He saw her gnarled toes, he fitted Madeleine’s sheepskin slippers to the trembling feet, he smelled—for hours together—the smell of smouldering London when they went out to survey the damage. Grit in his nose, grit in his lungs, grit of stones and explosives and cinders of flesh and bone. They had walked out after the night of May 10th and seen the damage at Westminster Abbey and the gutted House of Commons, had strolled through the parks, seeing fenced-off unexploded bombs and children sailing boats on the Round Pond. He saw now the fencing and the deck chairs, the rubble and the children.

He remembered the fear, but also the young blood in him driven by the fact of survival and the desire to survive. He had been afraid—he remembered the moan of the sirens, the bang and whine of the big bombs, the grinding drone of the bomber engines, and Madeleine’s wild laughter as the crashes were elsewhere. Death was close. Friends you were meeting for dinner, who lived in your head as you set off to meet them, never came, because they were mangled meat under brick and timber. Other friends who stared in your memory as the dead stare whilst they take up the final shape your memory will give them, suddenly turned up on the doorstep in lumpen living flesh, bruised and dirty, carrying bags of salvaged belongings, and begged for a bed, for a cup of tea. Fatigue blurred everyone’s vision and sharpened their senses. He remembered seeing a mother and child lying under a bench, arms wrapped round each other, and dreading to stir them, in case they were dead. But they were only homeless walkers, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted.

She did not enter these new windows on lost life, Madeleine. The sound of her laughter, that once, was the nearest thing.

When “this” began, he had known that it required more courage to get up every day, to watch over Mado’s wandering mind and shambling body, than anything he, or they, had faced in that past. And he had drawn himself up, like a soldier, to do his duty, deciding that it was in both their interests that he should never think of Madeleine, for his duty was here, now, to Mado, whose need was extreme.

THE FACT THAT HE WAS unsettled unsettled Mado, who became what James and Deanna Bright refrained from calling “naughty” for that implied the impossible second childhood. “Wild” James called it. “Restless” was Deanna Bright’s word. She began to break things and to hide things. He found her dropping their silver cutlery, inherited from his parents in a plush-lined black case—piece by piece out of the window, listening to the ring of metal on pavement. The Teletubbies had odd little meals made of pink splats of custard gurgling from a lavender machine, and “toasts” with smiley faces which cascaded from a toaster. Excess food was slurped up by an excitable vacuum cleaner called Noo-noo. The splatted custard (she hated pink) roused Mado to brief bursts of competitive energy and the carpet was covered with milk and honey, with baby cream and salad dressing. And with whisky. She poured his Glenfiddich into the hearthrug. The smell of it recalled Dido but the libation produced no spirit. James bought another bottle. The smell lingered, mixed with the ghostly smoke and ashes of burning London in 1941.

THERE CAME A NIGHT when she reappeared and reappeared after he had settled her, whining in the doorway as he tried to construe
Aeneid
VI. “I can’t do it,” she said, “I can’t get it,” but could not say what she could not do or get. For a dreadful moment James raised his hand to slap or punch the moaning creature, and she backed away, bubbling. Time for Teletubbies to go to bed, said James instead, in a jingly voice. He pushed her—gently—into her room, and pushed Dipsy into her arms. She tossed Dipsy back at him, snorting angrily, and turned her face to the wall. He picked up Dipsy by the foot and went back to the Underworld and its perpetual twilight. He found himself torturing Dipsy, winding his little wrist round, and again, driving hairpins into the terrytowelling plump belly. As long as the little unkind acts were harmless, his rational mind said, stabbing.

The doorbell rang. He waited for Mado to respond—if it disturbed her, he wouldn’t open, it would be unbearable. But she was still. The bell sounded again. At the third shrilling, he went down. There she was in the doorway, the dark woman, in the red silk dress, like a poppy.

“I come bearing gifts,” she said. “To thank you. May I come in?”

“You may,” he said, with clumsy ceremony. “You may have a glass of whisky, if you will.”

He imagined the elegant nose wrinkled at the smell of his rooms.

“Here,” she said, handing him a box of Black Magic chocolates, tied with a scarlet ribbon. Chocolates out of the cinemas of his youth, which had somehow persisted into the present. “And here,” she said, lifting her other hand, “for her. I know she’d rather have the red one. Have Po.”

He realised Dipsy and the hairpin were still in his hand. Po was done up in what he thought of as cellophane, a beautiful word, also from those earlier days, related to diaphane, although he knew really that she was smiling out of a plastic bag, also done up with a red ribbon. He put down Dipsy, accepted both presents, put them down on the table, and went to fetch whisky, large whiskies, one on the rocks, one neat.

“I didn’t think you’d come back.”

“Ah, but I had to. And you live so sadly, I thought you might be pleased to see me.”

“O I am. But I didn’t expect you.”

THEY SAT AND TALKED. She crossed and uncrossed her long legs, and he looked at her ankles with intense pleasure and without desire. He remembered Madeleine, running away on moorland, looking back to make sure he could catch her. Dido asked him polite questions about himself, and turned away those he asked in return, so that he found himself, as the smoky spirit rose in his nostrils, telling her about his life, about the returning folk who occupied his flat, mingling with whoever or whatever mad Mado had conjured up. We are quite a crowd, quite a throng of restless spirits, he said, these days, thick as leaves and only two of us flesh and blood. I find myself in odd times and places, quite out of mind until now.

“Such as?”

“Today I remembered packing a crate of oranges and lemons in Algiers. They were lovely things— golden and yellow and shining—and we chose them carefully, the Arab and me, and packed them in woodshavings and nailed the lid down. And a friend who was a pilot brought them back for her, as a surprise, they couldn’t get citrus fruit in the War, you know, they craved for it.”

“And when she opened the crate,” said Dido, “she could smell the half-forgotten smell of citrus oil and juice. And she pulled away the wood-shavings, and put her hand in, like someone looking for treasure in a Lucky Dip at a village fete. And her fingers came up covered with moss-green powder, a lovely colour in the abstract, the colour of lichens and mould. And she took the mouldy lemon out, in its little nest of silver paper, and looked at the orange below, and that simply dissolved into beautiful pale-green powder, like a puff-ball. And she went on, and on, getting dust everywhere, piling them up on newspaper, and there was not one good one.”

“That’s not true. She said it was a—treasure-chest of delights. She said they were—unbelievably delicious. She said she saved and savoured
every one.
”

“She was always a great liar. As you always knew. It was a wonderful gift. It had rotted on airfields and in depots. It was an accident that it mouldered. She thanked you for the gift.”

“How do you know?”

“
Don’t you know how I know?”

“I am an old man. I am going mad. You are a phantasm.”

“Touch me.”

“I daren’t.”

“I said, touch me.”

He stood up unsteadily and crossed the swirling space between them. He put the tips of his fingers on the silky hair, and then he touched, chastely and with terror, the warm young skin of her arm.

“Palpable,” he said, finding an arcane word from the humming in his brain.

“You see?”

“No, I don’t. I believe I believe you are there.” He said, “What else do you know? That I might have known, and don’t know.”

“Sit down and I’ll tell you.”