The Memoirs of a Survivor (10 page)

Emily of course had marked my appearance on the pavement, and was assuming I was ready to migrate. And how attractive it was there with those masses of vigorous people, all so resourceful in the ways of this hand-to-mouth world, so easy and inventive in everything they did. What a relief it would be to throw off, in one movement like a shrug of the shoulders, all the old ways, the old problems - these, once one took a step across the street to join the tribes, would dissolve, lose importance. Housekeeping now could be just as accurately described as cavekeeping, and was such a piddling, fiddly business. The shell of one’s life was a setting for ‘every modern convenience’; but inside the shell one bartered and captured and even stole, one burned candles and huddled over fires made of wood split with an axe. And these people, these tribes, were going to turn their backs on it all, and simply take to the roads. Yes, of course they would have to stop somewhere, find an empty village, and take it over; or settle where the farmers that survived would let them, in return for their labour or for acting as private armies. They would have to make for themselves some sort of order again, even if it was no more than that appropriate to outlaws living in and off a forest in the north. Responsibilities and duties there would have to be, and they would harden and stultify, probably very soon. But in the meantime, for weeks, months, perhaps with luck even a year or so, an earlier life of mankind would rule: disciplined, but democratic - when these people were at their best even a child’s voice was listened to with respect; all property worries gone; all sexual taboos gone - except for the new ones, but new ones are always more bearable than the old; all problems shared and carried in common. Free. Free, at least from what was left of ‘civilization’ and its burdens. Infinitely enviable, infinitely desirable, and how I longed simply to close my home up and go. But how could I? There was Emily. As long as she stayed, I would. I began 
again to talk tentatively of the Dolgellys, of how we would ask for a shed there and build it up and make it into a home … June as well, of course. For from the frantic anxiety Emily showed, I could see it would not be possible for Emily to be separated from June.

And Hugo? The truth is she did not have time for him, and I was thinking that if he had been what kept her here before, this was not true now.

I believe that he gave up hope altogether during that rime when Emily was hardly ever with us, and only flew in to see June. One day I saw him sitting openly at the window, all of his ugly stubbornly yellow self visible to anyone who chose to look. It was a challenge, or indifference. He was seen, of course. Some youngsters crossed the street to look at the yellow animal sitting there, gazing steadily back at them with his cat’s eyes. It occurred to me that some of the youngsters there, the real children of five or six years old, might never have seen a cat or a dog as a ‘pet’ to love and make part of a family.

‘Oh, he is ugly,’ I heard, and saw the children make faces and drift off. No, there would be nothing to help Hugo when the time came for him; no one could say: ‘Oh, don’t kill him, he’s such a handsome beast.’

Well… Emily came in one evening and saw the blaze of yellow at the window. Hugo was vividly there, illuminated by a flare from the late sunset, and by the candles. She was shocked, knowing at once why he should have chosen to disobey the instincts of self-protection.

‘Hugo,’ she said, ‘oh my dear Hugo …” He kept his back to her, even when she put her hands on either side of his neck and brought her face down into his fur. He would not soften, and she knew he was saying that she had given him up, and did not care for him.

She coaxed him off the high seat and sat with him on the floor. She began to cry, an irritable, irritating, sniffing sort of weeping that was from exhaustion. I could see that. So could June, who watched without moving. And so could Hugo. He licked her hand at last and laid himself patiently down, saying to her by the way he did this:
It is to please you. I don’t care to live if you don’t care for me
.

Now Emily was all conflict, all anxiety. She kept rushing hack and forth from my flat to that house, between there and the pavement. June, she had to see June, to bring her the bits of food she liked, to make the gesture of getting her into bed at a decent hour, for, left to herself, June would be in that sofa-corner until four or six in the morning, doing nothing, except perhaps to mark the interior movements of her illness, whatever that might be. And Hugo, she had to make a point of fussing over Hugo, of loving him. It was as if she had set herself the duty of paying attention to Hugo, measured, like a medicine or a food. And there was myself, the dry old guardian, the mentor - a pull of some sort, I suppose. There were the children, always sending after her if she stayed away from that house for too long. She was worn out; she was cross and sharp and harried and it was a misery to see her at it.

And then, suddenly, it was all over.

It was solved: June left.

She got herself out of the sofa one day and was on the pavement again. Why? I don’t know. I never knew what moved June. At any rate, in the afternoons she was again with the crowds out there. She did not seem to be more part of one group than another: her flat, pale, effaced little person was to be seen as much in other clans as in the one that Gerald held together. She was seen, but only once or twice, in the women’s group. And then the women’s group had gone and June had gone with them.

And yes, we did not believe it, did not even, at first, know what had happened. June was not in my flat. She was not on the pavement. She was not in Gerald’s house. Emily ran frantically about, asking questions. At that point she was stunned. June had left, just like that, without even leaving a message? Yes, that’s what it looked like: she had been heard to say, so someone reported, that she felt like moving on.

It was this business of June’s not having said goodbye, of not leaving a message, that Emily could not swallow. June had not given any indication at all? - we talked it over, the crumbs we had between us, and at last we were able to offer to the situation the fact that June had said on the day she left: ‘Well, ta, I’ll be seeing you around, I expect.’ But she had not directed this particularly, to Emily or to me. How could we have understood this was her farewell before going away for good?

It was the inconsequence of the act that shocked. June did not believe we were worth the effort of saying goodbye? She had not said a real goodbye because she thought we would stop her? No, we could not believe that was it: she would have stayed as readily as she had left. The shocking truth was that June did not feel
she
was worth the effort: her leaving us, she must have felt, was of no importance. In spite of the fact that Emily was so devoted, and anxious and loving? Yes, in spite of that. June did not value herself. Love, devotion, effort, could only pour into her, a jug without a bottom, and then pour out, leaving no trace. She deserved nothing, was owed nothing, could not really be loved and therefore could not be missed. So she had gone. Probably one of the women had been kind to her, and to this little glow of affection June had responded, as she had to Emily’s. She had gone because she could leave one day as well as another. It did not matter, she did not matter. At last we agreed that the energetic and virile woman who led that band had captured the listless June with her energy, at a time when Emily did not have enough to go around.

Emily could not take it in.

And then, she began to cry. At first the violent, shocked tears, the working face and blank, staring eyes of a child, which express only: What, is this happening to
me
!
It’s impossible! It isn’t
fair
!
- Floods of tears, noisy sobs, exclamations of anger and disgust, but all the time the, as it were, painted eyes, untouched:
Me
,
it is
me
sitting here, to whom this frightful injustice has occurred … a great fuss and a noise and a crying out, this kind of tears, but hardly intolerable, not painful, not a woman’s tears …

Which came next.

Emily, eyes shut, her hands on her thighs, rocked herself back and forth and from side to side, and she was weeping as a woman weeps, which is to say as if the earth were bleeding. I nearly said
as
if the earth had decided to have a good cry
- but it would be dishonest to take the edge off it. Listening, I certainly would not have been able to do less than pay homage to the rock-bottom quality of the act of crying as a grown woman cries.

Who else can cry like that? Not an old woman. The tears of old age can be miserable, can be abject, as bad as anything you like. But they are tears that know better than to demand justice, they have learned too much, they do not have that abysmal quality as of blood ebbing away. A small child can cry as if all the lonely misery of the universe is his alone - it is not the pain in a woman’s crying that is the point, no, it is the finality of the acceptance of a wrong. So it was, is now and must ever be say those closed, oozing eyes, the rocking body, the grief. Grief - yes, an act of mourning, that’s it. Some enemy has been faced, has been tackled, but a battle has been lost, all the chips are down, everything is spent, nothing is left, nothing can be expected … yes, in spite of myself, every word I put down is on the edge of farce, somewhere there is a yell of laughter - just as there is when a woman cries in precisely that way. For, in life, there is often a yell of laughter, which is every bit as intolerable as the tears. I sat there, I went on sitting, watching Emily the eternal woman at her task of weeping. I wished I could go away, knowing it would make no difference to her whether I was there or not. I would have liked to give her something, comfort, friendly arms - a nice cup of tea? (Which in due time I would offer.) No, I had to listen. To grief, to the expression of the intolerable. What on earth, the observer has to ask - husband, lover, mother, friend, even someone who has at some point wept those tears herself, but particularly, of course, husband or lover - “What in the name of God can you possibly have expected of me, of life, that you can now cry like that? Can’t you see that it is impossible,
you
are impossible,
no one
could ever have been 
promised enough to make such tears even feasible … can’t you see that?’ But it is no use. The blinded eyes stare through you, they are seeing some ancient enemy which is, thank heavens, not yourself. No, it is Life or Fate or Destiny, some such force which has struck that woman to the heart, and for ever will she sit, rocking in her archaic and dreadful grief, and the sobs which are being torn out of her are one of the pillars on which everything has to rest. Nothing less could justify them.

In due course, Emily keeled over, lay in a huddle on the floor and, the ritual subsiding into another key altogether, she snuffled and hiccuped like a child and finally went to sleep.

But when she woke up she did not go back to the other house, she did not go out to the pavement. There she sat, coming to terms. And there she would have stayed for good, very likely, if she had not been challenged.

Gerald came over to see her. Yes, he had been in before, and often, for advice. Because his coming was nothing new, we did not know that his problem, our problem, was anything new. And he didn’t, at this stage.

He wanted to talk about ‘a gang of new kids’ for whom he felt a responsibility. They were living in the Underground, coming up in forays for food and supplies. Nothing new about that, either. A lot of people had taken to a subterranean existence, though they were felt to be a bit odd, with so many empty homes and hotels. But they could be actively wanted by the police, or criminal in some way, feeling the Underground to be safer.

These ‘kids’, then, were living like moles or rats in the earth, and Gerald felt he should do something about it, and he wanted Emily’s support and help. He was desperate for her to rouse herself, and to energize him with her belief and her competence.

He was all appeal; Emily all listlessness and distance. The situation was comic enough. Emily, a woman, was sitting there expressing with every bit of her the dry: You want me back, you need me - look at you, a suitor, practically on 
your knees, but when you have me you don’t value me, you take me for granted.
And what about the others
?
Irony inspired her pose and gestures, set a gleam of intelligence that was wholly critical on her eyelids. On his side he knew he was being reproached, and that he certainly must be guilty of something or other, but he had had no idea until this moment of how deeply she felt it, how great his crime must be. He was searching his memory for behavior which at the time he had committed it he had felt as delinquent, and which he could see now - if he really tried and he
was
prepared to try - as faulty … is this, perhaps, the primal comic situation?

He stuck it out. So did she. He was like a boy in his torn jersey and worn jeans. A very young man indeed was this brigand, the young chieftain. He looked tired, he looked anxious; he looked as if he needed to put his head on someone’s shoulder and be told, There, there! He looked as if he needed a good feed and to have his sleep out for once. Is there any need to describe what happened? Emily smiled at last, drily, and for herself - for
he
could not see why she smiled, and she would not be disloyal to him in sharing it with me; she roused herself in response to the appeal which he had no idea he was making, the real one, for he went on logically explaining and exhorting. In a short time they were discussing the problems of their household like two young parents. Then off she went with him, and for some days I did not see her, and only by fits and starts did I come to understand the nature of this new problem, and what was so difficult about these particular ‘kids’. Not only from Emily did I learn: when I joined the people on the pavement everybody was talking about them; they were everyone’s problem.