Towards Another Summer (4 page)

At his age!

—I’ve a copy of his book on Dyslexia, Grace had said proudly to Harvey who had replied, fervent with admiration,

—Yes, it takes a lot of courage at his age to venture into new research.

Tom was forty.

—I’ve learned so much from him, Harvey had said.—How to discipline my working - why almost every evening he doesn’t stop until after eleven, and he’s first there in the morning . . .

Yet beneath Harvey’s admiration and gratitude ran the theme, ‘Poor Tom’s acold, poor Tom’s acold.’

Grace shivered, pinged the knob on the base of the bedlamp, turned her back to the window and her face to the darkness, and closed her eyes. Harvey and Sylvia had said they would visit her again before he returned to the States, but she knew they wouldn’t. Grace was used to not being visited. There was always a flurry of it’s great to know you, then disappointment that the woman who wrote books had difficulty in speaking one coherent sentence; then silence, silence.

What else could you expect when you were not a human being?

 

 

 

 

The morning after she received the postcard Grace replied Yes, she would visit Relham for the weekend. She plunged her reply into the metal-mouthed lucky dip Posting Box at the Gloucester Road Post Office, and then worried all the way home that her arm was not long enough to reach down, find her letter, tear it to pieces to be thrown over the fence in bold litter-lout fashion, among the huddled sparrow-grey withered plants and brittle dead leaves of Hereford Square garden.

The Friday before the weekend another stain unexpectedly marred Grace’s progress through her field (she used the word ‘field’ more than ‘paddock’) of ventures: there was to be an interview recorded for the Overseas Service of the BBC.

In spite of her protest that she was habitually unable to answer questions about her work, unless they were given to her in advance, the questions were kept secret from her until she arrived at the studio. Half-heartedly, because she did not keep copies of her books, she had borrowed a copy of the latest from a friend, meaning to study it chiefly to find what it was about; she had flipped through the pages, not daring to read them - God what was the use? Then she had thrust her friend’s copy in the coat cupboard, on the cardboard tray where she kept the spare parts of the vacuum cleaner, the garden trowel and fork, a blood-stained handkerchief, electric light bulbs. Then she had set out for the BBC.

 

Too early as usual, she loitered around Charing Cross Station, in the Ladies’ Room, reading a crumpled
Daily News
found on one of the seats beside an elderly woman who slept and snored, still clutching her bulging shopping bag. Every time the woman moved in her sleep the movement seemed to entice a current of air to pass through her, and her smell came blowing towards Grace, as from a stirred plantation of sweat. Behind the door of the waiting room a notice was pasted, You Need Never Be Stranded In London. It gave the address of a hostel in the East End. Grace looked about her at the women in various stages of sleep and dereliction, and thrusting the
Daily News
Heiress Made Ward of Court Chocolate Bid on to the skirt-polished wooden barred-back seat, she went down the gangplank, holding the brass rail,
to the underground lavatories, was given change for threepence by a stout white-coated stewardess or wardress who flourishing a duster opened one of the doors marked Vacant, leaned in, polished the seat, and withdrew.

Still too early, Grace left Charing Cross Station and walked into the Strand. She crossed the road and passed New Zealand House. A few people stood staring with the usual February wistfulness at the displayed photographs of sun and sky and sheep; thinking, Shall I emigrate, they say it’s a great life out there, the sun, the beach, your own home. Grace felt herself infected by the attentive longing; an impulse surged through her to go to the Emigration Department, enquire, fill in forms. She could see one or two of the spectators swaying with indecision; then they and she turned from the display window New Zealand Land of Sunshine, and walked on through the grey sleety drizzle, the regular mid-morning migration completed through the simplest cheapest most satisfyingly unofficial procedure of dreaming. On impulse Grace retraced her steps for a few minutes. She did not go into New Zealand House. The last time she had gone there to make some enquiry the receptionist had looked haughtily at her,

—Were you thinking of emigrating? Would you like some official literature about New Zealand? You can read up about the country and see whether you might be interested in going there.

Pleased, yet ashamed at not being recognised as a New Zealander, Grace had said quickly, No thank you, and hurried from the building, glancing about her with a feeling of guilt as she left, letting her gaze rest a moment upon the people sitting in the Reception room reading
New Zealand Air Mail News
. Do I know any of them? she thought. Who are they? Farmers, students, secretaries, lawyers, teachers, doctors? They bore no distinguishing mark. Would they speak to her, saying - You come from New Zealand don’t you, North or South? How long have you been over here? When are you going back? What do you think of life over here?

No one spoke to her. Feeling as if she were an intruder,
cooperatively taking a pamphlet on Immigration from the table beside the desk, establishing herself as a ‘Pommie’, she went out to rejoin the stream of people in the Strand, walking slowly towards Bush House. The chalked placards proclaimed
Frizzle - Freezing rain plus drizzle! New word for weather!
It’s not often, Grace thought, that the language is made a headline.

 

 

 

 

The producer was crisp, the interviewer efficient. Both had notes; Grace held only a glass of water which she twirled in her hand, answering or not answering the questions, breaking off in midsentence, her mind blank. She sighed, repeated Sorry, Sorry in a whisper, shaking her head.

—I don’t know, I don’t know. What are my books about? How should I be able to tell? My style? What does it matter?

She wondered whether these accumulated stains that seemed so much a part of her essentially private ventures would in the end spread over most of her life, sink deeper and deeper, be absorbed as a poison which could be removed only if she swallowed a violent medicine which would force her to vomit her whole life - all her treasured experiences and dreams - and be left weak, unable to digest more of life, sitting, cramped with pain and lassitude, in a bed or wheelchair until she died and was buried here, in London, with a representative from New Zealand House taking time off to trim the frayed thread-dropping embarrassments of untidiness woven when a stranger without next of kin dies ten thousand miles from home.

—Miss Cleave, are you trying to put across a message? It has been said, Miss Cleave, that you resemble . . . Could you tell us briefly the
essential
nature of your work . . . Do you think you will ever return to New Zealand?

 

The interview was finished at last. Humiliated, inarticulate, Grace sat twirling her glass of water. Why couldn’t she speak, why couldn’t she speak?

The producer came from the recording room, opened the door and looked in.

—I’m sorry, Grace said.—I haven’t anything to say, I haven’t anything to say.

The producer spoke crisply. She reminded Grace of the manageress of the dairy at the corner of the street near her flat: an efficient woman who knew which part of the refrigerator held the stale, and which the fresh milk, and who each time chose, automatically, the stale milk. There were stale biscuits too, and wrapped cakes and old pies arranged on the counter; the woman was surrounded by an array of yesterday’s and last week’s food and drink which had to be sold.

—Quite good, the producer said.—We’ll make something of it. (This packet of biscuits is specially reduced - would you like to buy some?)

—Yes, quite good. The silences were
so effective.

 

Grace ruffled her feathers, flapped her wings wildly, went hysterically out into the Strand, found a cafe where she sat on a tall revolving stool, ate bleached cod fillet with chips like a heap of thin twisted yellow nails, and bread brushed with a damp yellow sponge. Then she caught the bus to St Pancras Station. The freezing drizzle had changed to snow, big flakes too extravagant for city distribution, as big as the pages of a huge diary, a month to an opening, fluttering, drifting, the streets full of people hurrying in panic, fearful of burial. Grace almost ran from the bus and collided with a West Indian man standing calmly being snowed on, with a newspaper spread over his head.

—Snow, he said.—Don’t you like it?

Grace was ashamed. Of course she liked it, of course she hadn’t lost her feeling of wonder at the sight of snow - then why had she been running from it?

—Yes I like it, oh yes.

She pulled her rainhat closer to her head and hurried towards the station; convincing herself as she ran, It’s not real snow, it’s only city snow, but when you begin to make such distinctions doesn’t it mean that everything is lost?

Grace couldn’t bear to lose things; her head was always dizzy with looking for the mislaid, stolen, concealed.

 

 

 

 

At St Pancras Station, after inspecting the notices of arrival and departure and the chalked apologies for delays, Grace performed her usual ritual of waiting. She bought a midday newspaper but discarded it because it was filled with Greyhound News. She went to a lavatory and washed her hands, pressing her foot, as directed, on a lever which set free a spurt of hot air to dry her hands. She said No thank you when the attendant offered ‘A wash and brush up, fourpence.’ She returned to the Waiting Room, warmed herself by the radiator, then emerging into the stark open station she sat on a wooden seat, watching, listening, and it wasn’t soot in her eyes that almost drew tears, it was memories at the sight and sound of the grim blustering grunting panting steam-engines, uttering from time to time their triumphant prolonged Haaaaaa, Haaaaa in a deep exhalation of steam, and releasing from a side valve where their ears would be, had they ears, sudden high-pitched jets and spurts in a white thread of scream. On the platform the people moved through smoke, their silhouettes vague, their bodies merging one with the other, their Scottish voices muffled and smokefilled. When Grace followed the arrow to the enquiries department to make sure of the platform and destination of her train, the clerk leaned over the worn counter and said gloomily, running his finger up and down the smudged column,

—Platform seven, arriving at Relham six-eight pm. Central Station.

He looked accusing.

—But didn’t you read the notice outside?

—Oh yes, Grace said.—But I wanted to make sure.

The clerk sighed.

—Yes, they all do, they can’t trust it in print, they have to hear it spoken. Illiteracy.

Suddenly afraid that even the clerk was not certain, that after all, trust in the printed word had to begin somewhere - perhaps the clerk was not so sure, that here she was, a migratory bird, standing waiting at St Pancras for the train to Relham, and perhaps there would be no train, or perhaps there would be such a crowd that there’d be no room for her.

—Can I book a seat? she asked urgently.

—What? When the train leaves in half an hour’s time? Oh no, oh no, that would be daft. Too late to book.

Slowly Grace walked back to her seat near Platform seven. A young woman sitting near zipped open a briefcase, withdrew a sheaf of papers, took a pencil, and with her pencil poised over the first page she turned towards Grace and smiled.

—I wonder, she began.—That is, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?

Without waiting for an answer she ran her pencil beneath question one on the cyclostyled sheet,

—Will you tell me, are you at all aware of the Campaign to sell the New Fellas Cornflakes?

 

 

 

 

The train was crowded with passengers. It didn’t seem fair that so many were travelling in such weather. They should have stayed home, Grace thought resentfully, finding a corner seat and rubbing clear her small share of window, settling herself to her usual railway dreaming. Suddenly there was a commotion in the corridor, the door was thrust open, and a man and woman, breathless, clutching luggage, burst in, and sat facing each other, the woman in the seat beside Grace.

Slowly the train began to move.

—We just found out in time, the woman said.—Our carriage would have come off at Derby!

—We didn’t know, the man put in.—There was no one to tell us, the train is so crowded we grabbed the first seats we could find. We might have been taken off at Derby!

—Just think, the woman murmured.—To be left behind at Derby!

To them, Derby seemed such a dire fate that Grace looked sympathetic and said, in a suddenly unconvinced tone,—
This
carriage goes as far as Relham . . . doesn’t it?

They assured her that the guard had assured them that it did, and once the fact was settled, the other passengers in the carriage (an open one with tables and dust-smelling crimson upholstery) who had been drawn into the whirl of excitement and uncertainty, withdrew, disengaging themselves one from the other, to preserve what was left of their privacy.

The woman opened a paper bag and took out a pear which she peeled and quartered. She gave one piece to the man and offered one to Grace.

—No thank you.

—Come on.

—No thank you, no really, no.

The man looked up from his newspaper.

—Come on, you’re the only one not having a piece.

—Oh, all right, thank you very much, that’s very kind of you.