The Parasite Person (8 page)

D
ESPITE THE DISTURBANCES
of the night, aggravating, so it might be supposed, her chronic shortage of sleep, Helen found herself unusually relaxed the next morning, and, for once, with time to spare before setting off to school. Martin was still sleeping—it had seemed a shame to wake him after his broken night—and so she had decided to go ahead and have breakfast by herself.

It was incredible, the difference it made. Even while she ate it, sitting at their usual little table with its blue and white check cloth, Helen already felt puzzled by the aura of leisure which had seemed to surround the whole operation. How could it be that making coffee and toast for one could take so
very
much less time than making it for two? And the cereal was even more puzzling. All she had to do in any case was to get the packet out of the cupboard and set it on the table: how was it that even this tiny chore seemed somehow so much easier and less complicated when Martin wasn’t sitting there waiting for it?

It was amazing. Disconcerting, really: and the net result was that well before eight o’clock here she was, breakfast finished and cleared away, and not even any typing to do, because with Martin asleep she did not know what to be getting on with.

It was a shame, it really was. Usually, it was quite a feat of organisation to fit in the half-hour’s typing that she had set herself as a regular task before going to work; and now here she was, at leisure for once, with the best part of an hour ahead of her, and nothing to do.

This was ridiculous. There must be
something.
Goodness knows,
the work was behindhand enough already, without her missing out on her morning’s stint of typing.

Back in the living-room, she went over to Martin’s desk to see what he had been working on last night. If it was something new, then of course she must leave it, as inevitably there would be alterations and corrections still to come: but if, as she suspected, he’d merely been working on the revised version of the
introduction
, then there’d be plenty she could do.

The desk was in its usual muddle, but by now Helen knew well enough where to look for the current work-in-progress. It was always to the right of centre, on top of whatever else was piled there, and the pages were always in reverse order, just as he had tossed them, face upwards, as they came.

But this morning there seemed to be nothing. Just the same old piles of notes, of cuttings from learned journals, and off-prints of other people’s articles. Some of it was even growing dusty where it lay, like the accumulated hoard of an old, old man working on his autobiography which will never see the light of day, but meanwhile serves well enough as occupational therapy for his declining years.

Helen jerked her thoughts to a standstill, horrified. How could she allow such an image to come into her mind?
She
was the one with faith in Martin’s work, she had told him so repeatedly, right from the beginning. It was Beatrice, his wife, who had no faith in him, who mocked his ambitions, doubted his powers, and belittled his every effort to get somewhere in his career.

Martin had been very bitter about it.

“But you’re too old!” had apparently been Beatrice’s first reaction to the proposed PhD thesis; and when he had retaliated with a whole list of distinguished persons who had acquired their higher qualifications at advanced ages—including H. G. Wells at the age of seventy-five—she had laughed nastily.

“Conceited old fools!” she’d commented, adding, for good measure: “And anyway, you can’t even keep up with your routine work, let alone taking on anything else! They’re ringing up and complaining all the time that you’re late with this and late with that and when are going to let them have the other? How you can
imagine that you’re capable of taking on anything extra …!”

And so on and so on. And then, when the sabbatical finally materialised and put paid to that line of argument, Beatrice had merely changed her ground.

“A ‘sabbatical’? What’s that when it’s at home?” she’d
demanded
; and when, painstakingly, he’d explained it to her she’d gone quite white.

“You mean you’ll be at home
all
day
?”
she’d shrieked. “Home for
lunch
?
Every
day
?
For a
y
ear
?
My God …!”

Or words to that effect. No wonder that Helen, hearing for the first time of this mean and despicable behaviour on the part of his wife, had fallen over herself to declare her total and unqualified faith in her lover, now and for ever.

“But
of
course
you can do it, darling!” she remembered assuring him as they lay in the rumpled bed watching the evening sky change from green to violet, from violet to deepest purple through the square of her bedroom window. That had been in the days when they had still been very new-fledged lovers, meeting only once or twice a week, and when every word exchanged between them was charged with double, with triple significance because of the shortness of the time they had for talking at all. Thus it had almost the quality of a vow, this declaration of faith in his powers. “
Of
course
you can do it, darling,” she’d repeated, over and over; and, “
Of
course
people can go on having new and original ideas after they’re forty! Look at Newton! Look at Bertrand Russell! In fact, I remember reading somewhere that the human brain reaches its peak not in the late teens, as used to be believed, but somewhere between forty and fifty …” Helen was always reading things like that somewhere, and Martin was enchanted.

Anyway, with such a background of passionate assurances, such a history of unswerving confidence, how was it possible for Helen, now, to retract even an iota of this absolute faith in her lover’s abilities? It had been the bedrock of their relationship from the beginning: this it was that had marked her off from Beatrice even more surely than her beauty, her intelligence, her generosity. In her, Martin had found at last the woman he had always needed; the woman who believed in him, absolutely, and whose unwavering
faith in him was going to carry him to undreamed-of heights of fame.

How can a faith carrying that sort of a load be allowed to waver? It can’t. It mustn’t. Tensely, nervously, Helen searched the desk top for signs that he had been getting on with something last night. Preferably something new and exciting, but at least
something.
Three hours he’d sat here, ostensibly working. What, actually, had he accomplished?

The faint, gnawing anxiety which had been growing in her of late took another lurch upward into full consciousness, and her search grew more desperate. She even began ransacking the desk drawers, well though she knew that Martin would never have put away in them anything that he was currently working on.

*

For Helen was no fool. In her heart, she knew, as well as Martin himself did, that something had gone wrong, that the thesis wasn’t progressing as it should. He hadn’t said so, and she hadn’t asked him, but the signs were unmistakable. In her role as typist-
cum-research
-assistant, Helen could not miss them, passionately though she might wish—even try—to do so. Discrepancies;
ill-sustained
arguments; even blatant self-contradictions were
beginning
to appear. And worse than any of these—which, after all, can be remedied once the motivation to do so is available—there was a sense of creeping inertia impossible to ignore; a feeling that the whole thing was coming to a standstill. More and more, the stuff he gave her to type consisted of revisions and re-writing of earlier drafts, or long and only marginally relevant quotations from other researchers. There were moments—and Helen tried not to dwell on them—when she wondered if he was losing his grip on the whole project? Mostly, she consoled herself with the thought that after all she only saw bits of the work, in piecemeal order, as and when Martin chose to hand them to her, and so really she was in no position to make judgements. But all the same, the uneasy feeling was growing in her, day by day, that somehow he was no longer getting anywhere; that the momentum had been lost. Or, even worse, had never been there at all …?

She had learned not to dwell on such thoughts. The important
thing was to keep going. This morning, for instance, she could at least be going over the interview she’d typed for him last night, checking it for minor errors. There were likely to be quite a number of these, for it had been a long interview, and Martin’s shorthand had been at its irritable worst. She could always tell, by a first glance at his notebook, just how fed-up he’d been while conducting any given interview, and with the Timberleys he’d obviously been very fed up indeed, the squirls and pothooks becoming
increasingly
hard to decipher as his boredom level mounted.

“A dead loss,” was the way he’d summed up the Timberley session; but Helen, in her heart, hadn’t agreed with him. She’d found the account of this desperate old couple unbearably moving, and could scarcely endure the way Martin was telling it as a funny story, expecting her to laugh.

And, to her shame, laugh she had. How could she do otherwise, when they were sitting so cosily together, enjoying their drinks, and exchanging idle chatter about the day’s doings? How could she bring herself to wreck the happy intimacy of the moment with what could only look like a holier-than-thou attitude towards the
anecdote
with which he was regaling her?

And so she had laughed: had felt ashamed of laughing, and then, almost immediately, had felt glad, because laughing together had always been one of the wonderful things between them, and there had been, somehow, less of it of late. This was an opportunity not to be missed.

*

There weren’t that many errors in the Timberley script, now that she came to look at it by daylight, and this morning, when she was no longer tired, it was easy to correct them. Only one page had so many alterations as to need re-typing, and this she did, making sure to crumple up the faulty copy and toss it in the waste-paper basket. More than once, when she’d failed to do this, Martin had managed to mix up her fair copies with the discarded ones, and there’d been hell to pay.

She’d emptied the waste-paper basket only yesterday, and now it was nearly full again. So Martin
had
been working on something after all, albeit not to his own satisfaction. She leaned down,
curious to see what it could be that he’d brought himself to discard. Usually, Martin hung on to unsatisfactory drafts like a squirrel, hating to see anything he’d worked on actually disappear, despite the extra clutter than this habit engendered in and around his desk.

At the sight of the pin-men, Helen felt her whole heart dissolving in love and tenderness. Poor darling, what a frightful evening he must have had! Writers’ Block, that’s what it was. She’d read somewhere that
all
great writers suffer from this at times, and so why not Martin? Maybe it was even a sign of greatness, that now and again you have to suffer and wrestle in this way with the birth-pangs of inspiration?

Five whole pages of them! When she came to the tripod-like penises, she almost laughed aloud, all her anxieties melting into amusement as she scanned the absurd little figures scampering across the page. They were sweet, it was a shame, really, to throw them away. It would have been fun to keep them, to laugh over them together at some later date, when this temporary Writers’ Block was a thing of the past. But Martin kept too much as it was, she mustn’t encourage him; and so, steeling herself, she stuffed the little creatures back into the waste-paper basket, and carried them, with the rest of the rubbish, down the three flights of stairs to the dustbins.

It was still early, but already a thin streak of sunshine had found its way between the buildings opposite and slanted across the stretch of paving-stones that led to the dustbins. She stood in it for a moment, balancing in its bright narrowness as if on a narrow bridge, and drank in the feeling of winter coming to its end. There was time, this morning, for these odd moments of rare and precious idleness, and she would have sung as she retraced her steps up the stairs if it hadn’t been for the risk of waking the not-yet-up people in the other flats. And Martin too, of course. This was another thing about happiness; you have to be watching it all the time, to make sure it’s not upsetting anyone.

E
VEN THE BUS
was on time this morning, which is the sort of thing which happens when you are in no hurry and are feeling at peace with the world: mysteriously, the world responds in kind.

The bus was less crowded than usual, too, and by going up to the top deck Helen found a seat easily. This was good, because though her feet weren’t aching yet, they would be before the school day was over, and not having to stand on the journey gave them a good start.

Contentedly, she sat looking out of the window, pleasantly conscious that she was aware of the passing scene. Normally, this didn’t happen, because normally she was on the verge of being late every single morning, and therefore needed to concentrate all her attention on making the bus go faster.

Really
!
And she a qualified teacher, too! How could a brain like hers, which over the years had managed to pass all those exams, be incapable now of rejecting the patently absurd notion that by relaxing in her seat and quietly watching the winter streets roll by, she would be somehow delaying the bus on its journey, causing it to loiter at the bus stops, take on more passengers, get caught up in more traffic blocks, and generally fall behind schedule?

An I.Q. of 130 or so ought to protect you from this sort of thing, but for some reason it doesn’t, and Helen had long ceased to fight herself over it. However, this didn’t prevent her enjoying a respite from the obsession when opportunity arose, and it was lovely, this morning,
not
to have to push the whole packed vehicle from fare-stage to fare-stage by sheer will-power. She enjoyed her journey, looking down at the damp, shining pavements and the
scurrying people as if they were brand-new, and had never been there before.

Today, she was going to be at school really early, as she always used to be, before her lover came to live with her and to fill up every cranny of her leisure time. This morning, for the first time in weeks, she would have time to sit around in the staff room before prayers, as she always used to do, listening to the latest gossip; and contributing to it, too, in no small measure, from the inexhaustible store of things which, in those days, seemed to happen to her.

“We miss you, Helen,” Wendy Parsons, a colleague from the Geography department, had reproached her recently. “It was much more fun when everything kept going wrong for you, and this Martin of yours kept not turning up, and not staying the night and things; and you asked us whether a man who lay in your bed phoning his wife in the middle of the night could really be properly in love with you? Remember? And all of us advising you whether to give him up or not? Ah, those were the days!”

“Not for me they weren’t!” Helen had retorted, though she could not help joining in the laughter. “They were hell on earth! Give me
Now,
any day! I’m
happy
now, Wendy, can’t you see that I am? Really happy, at last!”

At this Gillian Crane, the classics mistress, had looked up from her Cicero, and had shaken her neat grey head pityingly.

“But that’s just what Wendy’s complaining of, isn’t it?” she commented. “You’re living happily ever after before your time, Helen!” And of course everyone had laughed again, including Helen; and then the bell had gone, and that had been the end of it.

They hadn’t meant it seriously, of course. They were only teasing her. They were her friends, and of course they were glad, in a general way, that she should be happy. But all the same, since her love affair had attained its happy ending, a barrier
had
been created, though of what, exactly, it consisted was difficult to say. Helen herself was aware of it, and at times it puzzled her. It cannot really be that happiness, in itself, necessarily cuts you off from ordinary human contact, that would be absurd. Happiness is not a disease, like leprosy. By rights, it should enhance, not impoverish, the other areas of your life.

Partly, of course, it was simply a matter of having so little time. Since her lover had come to live with her, Time had become Helen’s Enemy No. 1, and the battle against this adversary never ceased, either at home or at school. Rushing out in the lunch hour to shop for food; crouching over exercise books all through her free periods so as not to have to take work home with her; struggling to keep up with her share of those little extra duties which fall to the lot of any teacher. What with one thing and another there was never a moment left for idle chatter these days: and even if there had been, what was there, now, to chatter about? We had a lovely evening, Martin and I; no, nothing special, we just made love, and washed up, and I helped him with his Correlation Tables…. What sort of entertainment is that for an audience conditioned to the excitement of the chase—
your
chase? You can’t expect them to go on being astounded for ever about the size and splendour of your catch.

Never mind. All this was about to be remedied, at least for this particular morning. Not only would she be arriving at school good and early, but for the first time in weeks she had something new and amusing to tell them.

As she walked from the bus stop, she found herself rehearsing the little scene:

“Such an extraordinary thing happened to us last night!” she saw herself beginning; and once again, as in the old days, the faces would turn to her eagerly, expectantly, hungry for the next
instalment
of her once-exciting life. She felt like a television personality back on the air again in a popular series that for some reason was suspended.

After all this build-up, it was a little deflating to find no one in the staff room but Mr Maynard, the senior maths teacher. As always, he was deep in
The
Times
crossword puzzle, and did not even look up when she came in. It was a bit of mystery why Mr Maynard, a married man (
very
married, Wendy reported, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment) should always arrive at school earlier than anyone else, and leave later. It could hardly be excessive devotion to his job that motivated him, as he seemed to spend an absolute minimum of time either teaching his pupils or
correcting their work, and he never talked about them. Unlike the other teachers, he neither complained about the tiresome children nor discussed the prospects of the more able. When he wasn’t doing crossword puzzles, he was usually reading some terribly technical manual on how to do something, like restoring old china.

If he had problems in his life (and his face, lined and haggard far beyond his forty-eight years, suggested that he had), he never spoke of them. He contributed nothing to the pool of staff-room gossip, and drew nothing from it. It wasn’t expected of him. It wasn’t his duty to have adventures as it was Helen’s, and so for the most part he was left to brood in peace over his mysterious preoccupations.

Helen certainly wasn’t going to waste her precious anecdote on so poor an audience as this, and so it wasn’t until several of the others had arrived, including Wendy, clutching her loose-knit woollies about her and muttering about the school’s heating system, that she launched into the story of last night’s adventure. The arrival of the mysterious visitor in the small hours; her unwashed hair and her insolent behaviour; and what Helen had deduced from it all about her being an old flame of Martin’s.

“Though the funny thing is,” she concluded, “I had this feeling that I’d met her before somewhere, though I know I can’t have. I’ve never met any of Martin’s ex-girlfriends. I don’t know what it was—something in the way she talked, I think—all that missing out of auxiliary verbs, and ending every sentence with ‘or something’ …”

“Oh, they all do that these days,” said Gillian Crane scornfully. “Haven’t you noticed? Nobody under twenty-five can frame a sentence correctly any more: another couple of generations and there won’t
be
any sentences—just grunts and gestures!”

“I expect that’s why they’re teaching computers to speak,” Wendy suggested cheerfully. “So that language will still survive even after humans can’t speak it any more. A sort of sacred relic, like Stonehenge, or the statues on Easter Island! No, but seriously, Helen, don’t you think you were overdoing the broad-mindedness bit? I mean, not being jealous is all very well in its place, I couldn’t approve more, but all the same I’m damn sure I wouldn’t leave
my 
old man canoodling in the kitchen with an ex-girlfriend at three in the morning while I just went to sleep!”

Perhaps you’re not as short of sleep as I am, Helen reflected. Aloud she said: “They weren’t canoodling. They were quarrelling. I told you.”

Wendy raised her eyes to the ceiling, incredulous.

“Really, Helen! I’ve never heard anything so naïve! Be your age! Surely you’ve learned by now that quarrelling is the surest sign of …”

“Yes, Wendy’s right, you know, Helen,” someone else chipped in. “It was like that with me and George. It was only when he started shouting at me again that I could feel sure he’d given her up for good …”

They were loving it. This was the old Helen back with them, as if returned from the grave; and at break, two hours later, she found herself once again surrounded by a little knot of listeners, eager to make the most of her brief resurgence.

Their questions, though kindly meant, were not always easy to answer. No, he didn’t say her name, I didn’t ask him. No, of course we don’t have secrets from each other, he just didn’t happen to have mentioned her before, that’s all. No, of course he would have, if she’d been important … Well, I could hardly ask him there and then, could I, with her standing there listening? And by the time she’d gone … No, I told you, he was asleep. Yes, he was still asleep when I left …

So why didn’t you wake him, then? Oh, to hell with his broken night! What about
your
broken night? What about Women’s Lib? “You’re too soft with that man, Helen, I’ve always said so. Much too soft. You’ll lose him that way.”

Did
you lose a man by not being Women’s Libby enough with him? And if this was so, did it not make Women’s Lib just one more ploy for getting and keeping your man, on a par with lipstick or hairspray?

Aloud, she said, “Well, I did keep going in and out of the bedroom, getting dressed and things. I wasn’t specially trying not to wake him. I was surprised, actually, that he
didn’t
wake up, he’s usually a very light sleeper.”

“It sounds as if Miss No-Auxiliary-Verbs must have dropped something in his tea,” suggested Wendy cheerfully. “You know; Revenge. Jealousy. That sort of stuff. Was he breathing, Helen, when you left?”

They all laughed; and Helen, though laughing too, felt a sudden unexpected little twinge of anxiety.
Was
he all right? Wendy’s light-hearted fantasy about a drug in his tea was all nonsense, of course, but all the same, it
was
unusual for Martin to sleep so soundly, and so late. Maybe it would be a good idea to telephone him just to make sure. There was just time to do it now, before her next lesson.

*

No answer. She let the telephone ring and ring, for more than a minute. It was impossible that it wouldn’t wake him, shrieking on and on, right into his ear, from the little table by the bedside.

Of course, he might have gone out already, though it seemed most unlikely, in view of his habitual morning lethargy.

Vaguely anxious now, Helen went to her class, and it was not until lunch-time that she had a chance to telephone again. This time, to her relief, the receiver was picked up almost at once.

“Oh, darling, I was really getting quite worried,” she began, her voice lifting with relief. “I tried to get you earlier, but—”

He’d hung up on her. Softly, deliberately, he’d replaced the receiver and cut her off without a word.

Or someone had.