No More Meadows (37 page)

‘But this is the form you were telling me I must have,' the Frenchman protested.

‘I?' Aubrey leaned back in his chair, shocked. ‘I certainly never told you that, nor, I'm sure, did any of my colleagues.'

‘Well, it was someone here….' The Frenchman looked cautiously at Miss Hattie and Mr Pierrepont, and craned his neck to peep into the cubicle at Elwood but he lacked the courage to accuse anyone.

‘If you don't mind,' suggested Aubrey, all smiles again, ‘there are other people waiting to be helped, and our time is precious, you know.'

The Frenchman was beaten. He straightened his umbrella, shifted his grip farther down the handle and went out of the room, with bent knees. The eyes of the people sitting by the wall followed him dully to the door.

A woman in a creased linen suit, who was now head of the line, stood up hopefully, but Aubrey had leaned towards the cubicle and Elwood had tipped back his chair and they were off on another of their chummy gossips. The woman sat down again, moistening her lips and trying not to look as if she had made a mistake.

‘Hot enough for you?' Mr Pierrepont asked Miss Hattie, on his way to whisper something to Aubrey.

‘My goodness, yes,' said Miss Hattie. Her smile faded as she turned back to the woman with the small boy, who was sitting at her desk. She was having trouble with them. The woman could not speak English, so everything had to be said to the
small boy, who then translated it to his mother. It was questionable whether he was translating right, for each of his gabbled remarks brought a deeper bewilderment to the mother's face. Her eyes were troubled. She shrugged her shoulders and said something to the small boy, which might have been: ‘If I'd known it was going to be like this in America I would never have come.'

The small boy laughed and looked up at the ceiling, drumming his heels against the bars of the chair. He watched a fly. With one of the sudden
ennuis
of childhood, he was bored with the whole thing. He would translate no more.

‘You – must – fill – in – this – form,' Miss Hattie told the mother slowly and patiently in her useless little voice. ‘Thees form you moost fill een.' Miss Hattie tried it in broken English, but the woman still looked as if she were being asked to explain Einstein's theory. Miss Hattie thrust the form under her nose, and the woman drew back a little as if it were a lighted match. Miss Hattie looked round for help, but Aubrey was still talking to Elwood, and Mr Pierrepont was buried behind his ledgers with only the thinning top of his bony head showing.

‘Take this, dear.' Miss Hattie gave the form to the little boy. ‘Fill it in for your mother.'

‘O.K.,' said the child, very blasé.

‘Can you write, dear?'

‘Sure I can write. What do you think I am?' The boy's voice rose to a whine. He had evidently been in America longer than his mother; long enough, anyway, to pick up the inflections of his schoolmates. He said something to his mother, and she collected the parcels which she had strewn around her chair, smiled nervously at Miss Hattie and followed her son to a table in the corner, where there were inkwells, and pens on chains. They sat down side by side, the mother sitting anxiously on the edge of her chair, as if her son were a defeated general signing a peace treaty, and the boy twisting his legs round the chair, poking out his tongue, ruffling his hair, and attacking the form with all the manifestations of labour he would give at his desk in school.

The telephone bell set Aubrey and Elwood and Miss Hattie courteously passing the buck again. They finally unloaded it on to Mr Pierrepont, who was not privileged to have a telephone
on his desk and had to answer it standing at a window-sill at the back of the room. His legs were crooked and the seat of his trousers was shiny. Christine felt idly sorry for him, but she could not care too much. She was beginning to feel sick again. However, she stood up automatically with the rest when Aubrey, with the air of a man too busy even to look up from his desk, threw out a casual: ‘Next, please!'

It was the woman in the creased linen suit. She had a prim, bloodless face and hair cut like a schoolgirl, although she had not been a schoolgirl these twenty years or more. She was English. She was also kittenish. She did some high-pitched giggling with Aubrey, and then he rose heavily and took her over to a recess in a corner of the office, where a table held some mysterious pieces of apparatus. What was he going to do? Everyone turned their heads to look, as if they were at a tennis match. Aubrey said something to the Englishwoman and she took off her scarf. He said something else and she took off the jacket of her suit. He spoke to her again and she shook her head, apparently jibbing at taking off her spotted voile blouse as well.

Aubrey rolled up his sleeves. He took hold of her bare arm above the wrist and the Englishwoman wriggled a little and fluttered her eyes. Was he then going to ravish her in the recesses of the Immigration Office? But no. Firming his grip, he guided her hand on to a pad on the table and pressed down hard. He was only taking her fingerprints, but from the coy way he handled her, pressing one finger after another on to the pad as if he were playing This Little Piggy Went to Market, and from the squirmings and gigglings with which she half acquiesced, half protested, they might have been playing a most daring game between the sexes.

When it was over and Aubrey perspiring with achievement, the Englishwoman was left holding her inkstained hands daintily away from the spotted blouse and looking at him with helpless feminine appeal.

‘Where can I–?'

‘Just down the corridor on the left,' he whispered. ‘Do you think you can find it?'

‘Oh yes,' she said, lest he might offer to accompany her.

Gallantly he threw open the door for her, and she tripped out of the room, still holding her fingers delicately extended, as if she were passing the cucumber sandwiches at the vicarage fête.

This little episode seemed to have sapped Aubrey. He sat down at his desk and mopped his forehead and brooded, and would not call out: ‘Next, please!'

Christine shifted on her chair, leaned forward and surreptitiously hung her head down, because she was beginning to feel faint. Would they never get to her? Miss Hattie was now occupied with a voluble Austrian woman, who was pouring forth a recital of her trials and tribulations in the land of liberty. Her nerves were bad, she was telling Miss Hattie hoarsely, and no one could understand that sinking feeling which came over her. Miss Hattie listened with fascinated sympathy, although what the Austrian woman's nerves had to do with the business of the Immigration Office it was hard to see.

The cracked, breathless voice seemed as if it would go on for ever. The woman and the small boy were still sitting at the table battling with the form. Elwood was telephoning again. His client in mourning had disappeared. Perhaps she had only been a figment of the imagination in this unreal vacuum of a world. Mr Pierrepont asked Miss Hattie if it was hot enough for her, then he coughed, got up and tiptoed crookedly to the door, murmuring: ‘I think I'll be going to lunch. ‘He said it to no one in particular, and no one answered him.

When Elwood had finished his telephone conversation he tipped his chair so far back that he was in danger of falling and breaking his spine and said: ‘I'll go and grab myself some lunch, Aubrey, if that suits you.'

‘Fine, fine,' said Aubrey. ‘You do that. I'll be following you myself as soon as I'm through with all this.'

But how could he ever be through? He had a young Chinese boy at his desk now. People were gradually being taken off the top of the line, but more people were coming in all the time, all races, all shapes, all accents. Christine was now half-way up the line. If she could hold out, they must finally get to her and she could get the extension to her visa and go home and Vinson would not know that she had ever been an undesirable alien without a permit.

The door burst open and a round, rosy woman with her hair curled like a poodle and odd bits of colourful clothing hung about her pranced in with an exuberance that disturbed the turgid waters of the office like a flung stone.

‘Hi there!' she greeted Aubrey and Miss Hattie.

Miss Hattie beamed and Aubrey answered: ‘How's it coming, Mrs D.?' and took new life from her vitality. They were pleased to see her. She was evidently the life and soul of the party, the office Merry Andrew, who was everybody's friend. She threw a jolly glance round the room, put a lot of parcels and a loaf of bread down on the desk which said: INFORMATION, and began, chuckling, to read a note that somebody had left there for her. Perhaps it was Mr Pierrepont. Perhaps he was secretly in love with Mrs D., but dared not Speak, so he had written her a love-letter and escaped to lunch before she came back.

Christine looked at her watch. It was long after her usual lunch-time. Her doctor had told her to eat at regular hours. Perhaps she felt faint because she was hungry. Conscious of the gaze of the other people waiting in the line, she got up and went over to Mrs D.'s desk.

‘I've been waiting such a long time,' she said diffidently. ‘Do you think I might get attended to soon? I really am in rather a hurry.'

It was an innocent enough remark, but Mrs D.'s eyebrows shot up as if at an indecency.

‘Just a moment,
please
,' she said. ‘I've only just come in. I'll see to you directly if you'll just have a seat.'

‘I've been just having a seat for nearly two hours,' Christine said. ‘I was only asking. After all, your desk does say Information.'

Mrs D. did not think this was funny. She went to a cupboard at the back of the room and hung up her hat and jacket and began to rearrange her curls in the misted mirror on the wall. Aubrey finished with the Chinese boy and ambled over to inspect the trophies of her shopping expedition. Miss Hattie, drawn by the lure of parcels, left her Austrian confidante and went over to have a look too. They made a cosy little scene, examining and exclaiming, while the line of aliens waited
listlessly against the wall like the debilitated inmates of a concentration camp waiting to go to the ovens.

When Mrs D., revived with fresh powder and lipstick, went back to her desk, Christine went to her again to ask what the chances were of getting a visa before the winter set in.

‘All will be attended to in their turn,' Mrs D. said cheerfully. ‘We can't see everyone at once, you know. We're very busy.' She made the motions of fluffing up some papers on her desk, but after Christine had sat down she did nothing at all except twist her hair round her fingers, hum little tunes, and throw coquettish remarks across the room to Aubrey.

The door opened and shut, opened and shut. People came and went. White people, yellow people, coloured people. One by one, at deadly intervals, the people in the line were seen by Miss Hattie or Aubrey, or sent about their business because they had the wrong forms. Christine was moving gradually towards the top. The atmosphere in the office was stifling. The heat was unbearable. The woman next to her in the tight scarf had begun to pick at her nails, and the man on the other side was seized with a fit of yawning which sent garlic out on the air every time he opened his mouth. Christine began to yawn too. Her eyes glazed over. She could not focus properly. Her head swam, and she had that terrible heavy feeling as if all the blood in her body was pooling together in the pit of her stomach.

She managed to get up, and walked uncertainly over to Mrs D.'s desk. ‘Do you think I might have a glass of water?' she asked. Her ears could hardly catch the sound of her own voice.

‘There is a water cooler in the corridor.'

‘I wonder – could you get it for me? I feel so queer–'

Mrs D. gave her a penetrating glance which seemed to see right through Christine to the baby within, shrugged her shoulders, got to her feet as if it were a great effort and went to the door, sweeping a look from Christine to Aubrey and back again which seemed to say: ‘Whatever next? Whatever will they ask of us next?'

Christine leaned against the desk. She could not get back to her chair. She looked at Aubrey, and as she looked the top of his bald head seemed to lift slightly and float from side to side. The walls of the room swayed and reeled. A mist like a rushing
wind swept across her eyes. She thought she cried out, but the roaring in her ears drowned all sense or sound.

When she came to she was lying on the floor surrounded by feet and bending bodies and shrill foreign cries of alarm. It was the most stirring thing that had ever happened in that office. Everybody was giving useless advice. Aubrey was wringing his hands and Miss Hattie was letting out little peeps of dismay, but Mrs D. came back with a paper cup of iced water and set the whole scene to rights.

She pushed back the crowd, helped Christine to her feet and lugged her into Elwood's cubicle. Her blouse smelled hot and unpleasing and her arms were fat and squashy, but she was a solid help and Christine clung to her until she was lowered into a chair with a torn leather seat in the corner of Elwood's little den. Like a policeman, Mrs D. stopped the rabble from coming in after her and got them back in order to their places against the wall. Christine leaned back and closed her eyes. She had never felt so weak in her life.

‘What shall we do with her?' she heard Aubrey whisper.

‘We must get someone to take her away,' said Mrs D. as if Christine were a corpse or a barrel of garbage.

‘Can we telephone someone for you?' Her voice was suddenly close. Christine opened her eyes. Mrs D. was bending over her. ‘My husband …' She forced herself to think of Vinson's office number. Aubrey, chivalrous to the last and anxious to play some active role in the drama, took over the arduous job of telephoning Vinson. Christine heard him at his desk giving the most hair-raising account of what had happened to her: ‘Your wife has been taken ill…. I think you should come at once….'