Towards Another Summer (3 page)

A certain pleasure was added to Grace’s relief at establishing herself as a migratory bird. She found that she understood the characters in her novel. Her words flowed, she was excited, she could
see
everyone and everything. She ticked off the days in her diary and thought, Not many weeks now and I’ll be finished my story, then I’ll be able to emerge to prowl the streets and sniff the spring air.

 

It’s like this:

She spoke to herself,

—Ready. Ah, the cameras wheeled into place, the microphones adjusted. She climbs in, looks back. Regrets? The door is clamped shut. The people of the world retreat. Rejoicing fiercely in her aloneness, she is anything now, nothing human - an egg, a hibernating tortoise, a hazelnut; she will circle the earth, like a marble rolled in the dark mouth of the sky; and ha, she’ll soon be in space, she’ll address her body, her food, her instruments as dogs, Down there, Down! The whirling floating fragments rasp like tongues against her skin, seize her flesh; everything rises around her, like vomit; it is the day when space, not sea or earth, gives up its dead. She smiles, she murmurs, What ever moored me?, peering at the stars, the pursuing fires, the earth wonderfully cultivated with plant brick stone and not a sign of moving people, animals, insects, commotions of love. Down, dream, down!

Communication is lost.

A faulty instrument, human error; the private pleasure of the certainty of her death, the public premature mourning for a heroine; on the seas the collection of little boats moving into the area of no recovery to witness the end; flags flying; a regatta;
representatives native and foreign.

Her ship explodes, is burned; flash in the sky, stain in the sea; nothing human recovered. The boats disperse, the representatives native and foreign return to make statements, issue bulletins.

Night. The writer emerges from her dream.

—Oh God why have I been deceived? Which world do I inhabit?

Down, dream, down!

Every few days the cracked-wheat loaf, ninepence halfpenny, has to be bought; on Fridays the milk bill, seven half pints at fourpence halfpenny, paid; half a dozen eggs a week, half a pound of cheese, the daily newspaper, the literary weekly, the Sunday paper, thud, like a dangerous piece of scaffolding, a plank blown by a high wind out of the sky from a never-completed building - what’s it going to be, in the end, you ask. A cathedral, a little house, a railway station, a hangar? It’s too high to see the structure, velvet sky sags with fog, the newspaper with its insertion, the insertion within the insertion within the insertion (ah, technicolour!) lies heavily on the foot and heart.

Also, there are visits here and there to consult the stains in their places of origin - the publisher with the soft voice (a bookie giving a quiet tip) and the aura of after-shave lotion; his peony-faced son with the quenched dark eyes; his head reader; editors, editors, the agent worried over his diet and elimination; visits from people, too. The phone rings. Time after time when the phone rings it is Sorry wrong number, but tonight it is Harvey.

—A friend in the States gave me your address. Can I come over tonight, about nine?

Pause.

An American medical student? That
will
be pleasant. Tête-à-tête, sherry, coffee. Do I look like a writer? I should have straight black hair falling over my shoulders; my face should be pimpled and pasty; my shoes should be split at the sides; yet I should look
interesting
. Do I look like anybody, like myself? I wish I knew what to say, I wish I didn’t dry up when confronted with people. A slight hope; tonight; sherry; tête-à-tête.

Pause.

—Yes, do come. I’ll expect you at nine.

—May I bring my girlfriend?

Pause.

—Do, do.

The old frustrated witch dancing around the cauldron,

Just after nine that evening the doorbell rang and Grace admitted Harvey and his girlfriend Sylvia.

—I’m Harvey.

—I’m Grace.

—I’m Sylvia.

Smiles, everyone established, and while Grace showed them into the sitting room with its floral suite, its lamp standard, desk, reproduction wine tables, electric fire, Chinese prints, Beautiful New Zealand Calendar, postcard of Beethoven (‘Celui à qui ma musique se fera comprendre sera délivré de toutes les misères où les autres se traînent’), she thought, These Americans are fitted with a revolving radar tower for picking up women.

She remembered her own American, pleasurably inhabiting her past; their impulsive loving over a period long enough for it to gather rainbow tints, reflections, absorbing sea and sky and almond blossom before it became the usual miraculous bubble-nothing, and she and he, surprised, spread their wet fingers, breathed on them, blew them dry, and there was not a sign anywhere that anyone might know; nothing; only the shadow, the preserved memory; already the acid in which it was embalmed was corroding it; she had hoped that wouldn’t happen, but how could she have prevented it? How could she have made love with someone who at the moment of climax began to recite
Gunga Din
? Perhaps that was not so unfortunate - he could have recited lines from
If
, ‘If you can keep your head
when all about you . . . if you can walk with kings nor lose the common touch . . .’

The common touch.

Although Grace had prepared her information on Klinefelter’s Syndrome, it seemed that Harvey was now pursuing a different line of research. His girlfriend lectured in Economics, she said.

He was dark, inarticulate, and looked frail.

Grace poured sherry. The other world intruded. She could say little.

—Nice flat you’ve got here. Where Sylvia stays there’s a skylight in the bathroom and the snow falls on the lavatory seat-

—It’s been snowing a long time. Will it ever stop?

—Weeks. Do you know marihuana?

—Who?

—Marihuana.

—I’ve read somewhere, I’ve heard, you can grow and harvest it in London. Where I lived in Ibiza- (Ah, now she would talk to them, she would tell them of the moonlight sharp as flute-music on the cobblestones.)

—Yes I know someone who lived in Ibiza. He’s a writer.

—You mean, Sylvia, he
calls
himself a writer. He’d like to stop by and see you sometime.

—Oh?

Grace poured another sherry. She could feel a flush spreading over her cheeks, making its centre furnace in two spots on either side of her nose.

—No, I don’t smoke.

—You don’t? Sylvia doesn’t, do you Sylvie?

Sylvie!

—And I don’t care for it myself.

Observing them carefully, Grace knew a sudden feeling of superiority. They were young, flowing, so conventionally wanting to be unconventional. There was a small element of hero-worship, too, in their attitude to her, although perhaps it had been stifled by their discovery that she, a writer, lived in a flat which held a three-piece suite with floral covers. They had
been disappointed that she hadn’t much interest in marihuana. They fitted so neatly into the psychological classification
Post-Adolescence
that Grace began to doubt their ability ever to escape, to struggle through the bleak unfriendly no-man’s-land, risking starvation, wounding, death, to the next acceptable age-area prepared for them.

(Feeling for a moment the lonely chilling wind between her shoulder-blades, Grace drew her breath in a quick gasp and shiver.)

They stared at her. She was silent. Dare she lean forward, she wondered, and ask, as one who had escaped,

—Harvey, Sylvia, do you intend to be wedged for ever? Wedged. What do you mean?

—Can you move quite freely where you are? Sure? When you get to no-man’s-land you will be able to run, dance, shout, starve, die. Don’t you feel cramped?

Immensely superior, free, a member of another generation, Grace refilled the sherry glasses, slopping a little over the edge of the glass-topped table.

—Oh, the carpet!

Yes, the carpet. The agent had been careful to state that it was new and of good quality. The carpet, the chairs, the floral covers, the Chinese print above the mantelpiece, the reproduction wine tables . . .

 

Harvey and Sylvia were talking together. Grace thought, I must try to listen, to concentrate, to make some intelligent remark. After all, I’m a writer, and many writers are intelligent, and didn’t I manage quite successfully with those tests at the hospital, matching patterns, fitting blocks together, emptying and filling five and seven pint vessels, striking out words and ideas which did not apply?

—You go to the theatre much?

—No, Grace said quickly.—I’m meaning to, some time. I saw
Macbeth
. Yes, I saw
Macbeth
. Duncan was an old man wandering around in a nightshirt.

—Oh? (Politely.)

Perhaps they’re not interested in Shakespeare, Grace thought. They’re more interested in the avant garde plays. They do madmen very well on the stage these days. I
know
. But to me, if I consider the matter, the avant garde plays are as much behind the times as Shakespeare.

—More sherry? Oh, sorry, there’s no more. Coffee?

Harvey stood up. He had been sitting on the sofa. Grace had been surprised when they sat in different chairs, she had expected them to sit together, to embarrass her with exchanged glances and entwined limbs, but they had separated and established themselves each in a prim attitude on the edge of the sofa and chair. Grace had been disappointed that they did not fit in entirely to her classification . . . didn’t everyone know that all Americans . . . all students . . .

Harvey would make a good psychiatrist, although his face had not yet that certain expression which betrays the necessary constipation of feeling.

—It’s late, he said.—I have to pack, I’m leaving in the morning.

—Leaving?

Grace was dismayed and alarmed. He should have told me, she thought.

—Oh I’d no idea you were leaving, if you’re leaving, well, you must be off-

—Yes, we must be off now, it was nice meeting you, and thanks for the sherry. At Sylvia’s place there’s-

—Yes, and at Harvey’s place there’s-

See, already they were exchanging identities, like practised lovers. Grace supposed they had made love. She was pleased at the thought. Ah well, she thought recklessly, a little jealously, How young they start, what a wonderful fleshy confusion it all is, and it’s theirs by
right
, oh oh, and my dressing-table is so tidy, hand lotion, talcum powder, and my bed so neat with the candlewick bedspread cleaved beneath the pillow . . .

Going out the door Harvey smiled shyly and drew a brown-paper parcel from inside his coat. He undid the wrapping.

—Will you sign this? Do you mind?

It was her latest published venture. She felt angry and embarrassed.

—Oh dear. I don’t like to be faced with it so suddenly. I usually hide them away in a cupboard.

Harvey and Sylvia looked at her. They seemed puzzled and disappointed. A writer not wearing tight black slacks, not having long black hair, living in a smart flat with a three-piece suite with floral covers (
floral covers
) in the sitting room, not smoking marihuana, and now ashamed of her writing.

—You ought to be proud, Harvey said.—This friend of ours who calls himself a writer sat up all night reading your book.

—Did he?

She tried to sound enthusiastic.—Did he? That’s nice. I’m pleased about that.

She
was
pleased.

She took Harvey’s copy of the book.

—What shall I put in it?

—Oh, just your name, you know, compliments from the author, that sort of thing.

Feeling ashamed once more she wrote From Grace Cleave, shut the book quickly, and gave it to him.

—If you’re writing to Tom, Harvey said,—give him my regards. He works too hard, you know. We’re all worried about him.

She said goodbye, shut the door, locked the Chubb lock, murmured Oh God, Oh God, returned to the sitting room, rearranged the cushions, took the sherry glasses into the kitchen.

Another encounter with people successfully concluded without screams or tears or too much confusion.

I’m doing fine, she said to herself, as if she were one or two days old and had finally mastered the art of breathing.

 

 

 

 

As she lay in bed that night she thought of Tom. ‘Poor Tom, poor Tom’s acold.’ It was he who had given Harvey her address. She
and Tom were of the same generation. Harvey had said he was ‘worried about Tom’ as if Tom were an old man not used to the traffic, not quite right in the head, not knowing what was ‘best’ for him, in the irritating manner of old men. It was an effort for Grace to think of Tom in this way - to her, at least until a year ago, he was the handsome blond University student who had (miraculously) sat beside her at a lunch-hour music recital, admired her coat (if only he’d known it was the first coat she’d ever had!) and asked

—Are you going to Phyllis Hall on Wednesday?

With her characteristic obtuseness she had replied,

—I’ve never been there. Where is it?

Tactfully he explained that Phyllis Hall was a pianist, and would Grace like to go with him to the recital.

Grace shivered with delight and said No.

Although her picture of Tom had been brought up to date by his visit to her in London a year ago (tonsils out, ulcer removed, haemorrhoids under control, spectacles fitted, hair thinning) she still thought of him as the romantic young man who played
Isle of the Dead
on the Music Department gramophone, who lectured at the local WEA and caused a sensation by wearing red socks; whom all the men envied because the women swooned over him . . . And now here was one of his research students worried about his long hours of work, his health, his unwillingness or inability to refuse demands to lecture at conferences, his courage in moving at his age to a new line of research.