A World of Other People (16 page)

The face is the same, but older. And not just physically older. Older in the same way as everybody is. The hair, its wavy floppiness, hasn’t changed. Nor the mannerisms, the sweeping hand gestures and the self-conscious laugh that she imagined would have been blown away by now, but hasn’t been. So familiar, yet changed. And there’s an occasional vacancy in the eyes that wasn’t there before.

All the same, here is the solid face of earth that waited for her after work all that time ago, when she was the
her
and he was the
him
that they aren’t any more. What does
he
see? A different Iris, of course. But how?

They’ve been sitting in a pub off St James’s Park for an hour now, and the conversation stops and starts as she knew it would. He can’t say where he’s been and he can’t say what he’s been doing. And there’s something in the way he says it that confirms that he’s not been doing the usual things, and that his work is probably dangerous. And if she were to press him for more he’d just answer with that self-conscious laugh and she wouldn’t get any further. But the laugh would be a give-away; it always was. And, with that, she realises that she’s concerned for him. No, worried about him. That she
is
the girl back home whom he can write to and who is thinking of him. But it’s the worry, the concern, she realises, that you feel for a close friend.

She asks about his parents and how long he’s got (five days), and all the time she’s fingering the ring in her pocket. He tells her that he’s seen his old history professor. By chance, in the street. Small world. Or, at least, odd to be back in such a small world. He’s been promised a place in the department. This doesn’t surprise Iris; he was always their star. And, he says, he just might take up the offer when everything’s over. He’s been planning a book. A big one. A history
on the making of the English working class, he quietly announces. It’s never been done. Not
really.
Extraordinary to think that. Suddenly he’s animated. Excited, even. The way ideas have always excited him. The way plans have always excited him, for he is one of those who are always making plans. And she always loved that. And she’s no doubt that he’ll do it, and that it will be a great success. But, all the time, she’s judging the right moment to bring up the ring.

While she’s waiting and judging her moment, glimmers of the Frank she first met in that faraway summer of ’39 come and go. Frank then, and Frank now. Same clear eyes that both were trusting and expected trust in return (and which may well have been the reason she felt she couldn’t let him down when he offered the ring), same hands that she held, same lips she kissed. The same, but not quite — and never again. Here they are, there they were. Now back, now ghosts of themselves. He’s still talking about his book, this grand project of his, and she’s still smiling while part of her — her heart, even — is suddenly pierced by the thought that he may not live to write it. But it is a passing pain, for as she stares into those clear eyes she is convinced that they are not
the eyes of someone destined for death. She’s heard people talk like this of others, that some have that air about them — that you just know they won’t buy it. And Frank is one. She’s sure of that now. And she knows, once again, that she never held his fate in her hands. His fate is, and always was,
his
to hold. There is no god of fate, she muses, to make our pledges to. No, there’s just us.

She must have drifted off with her thoughts because she suddenly realises that he’s stopped talking and is staring at her.

‘I’m going on?’

She smiles. ‘When aren’t you?’

They fall silent, her fingers play with the ring, and she takes the plunge.

‘I’ve brought this.’

She pulls the ring from her pocket and it sits in the palm of her hand, as if she were weighing it, or, rather, weighing its meaning. At least, this is the way Frank seems to read the gesture, for he says, light-heartedly, ‘Oh,
that
.’

It is said almost as if to imply that he’d forgotten all about it — which she knows, of course, he hadn’t. But she knows what he’s saying all the same. He’s
releasing her. If you want to give it back, he’s saying, it’s all right. Had a bit of a cheek asking you in the first place. And what could you do? You had to take it. And before she can say anything more, he reaches across the table and plucks the ring from her palm.

‘Here, let me take that from you,’ he says, rolling it round with his thumb and forefinger, then dropping it into his coat pocket. ‘It’s served its purpose. No point hanging on to these things …’ He looks round the pub briefly; it is filling, and judging from the light in the open door as two soldiers enter, the afternoon is slipping away. ‘There’s someone, right?’

And it is then that Iris takes a deep breath and begins to explain. When she is finished, he nods. And it is a nod that says haven’t we all changed and been changed? And my, how we’ve all grown.

‘But I can still be the girl you write to, can’t I?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you can tell me all about your grand plans.’

‘And you must tell me yours.’ He pauses and empties his glass. ‘It’s got to mean something. The whole shooting match. We’ve got to
make
it mean something.’ He holds the empties up. ‘One for the road?’

When they are outside, the sun is low in the sky.

‘Now, write.’ But even as she says this she is sure he’ll land himself in places where sending letters will be as impossible as finding a red postal box. She doesn’t like the sound of this job of his. Never has.

They embrace briefly. The parting of friends. And as she walks towards St James’s Park, waving to him as she goes, her pocket is that much emptier, lighter, and when she pictures the drawer in her room where she kept the ring all this time, it is with a curious sense of absence that she hadn’t expected.

She watches a dirty red van speed away from her up the street, paused at that point where the narrow laneway meets the main footpath. Then, in easy, strolling steps, she turns towards St James’s Park. It is, this stretch of St James’s and Soho, her favourite part of London. And it will remain, she suspects, her favourite part, if for no other reason than that it’s her patch. For it is in and around these streets and parks that so much of her life has happened. Her walk will take her past places that are neither monuments nor famous buildings, but the places in which she has
lived
. Places like the pub in Soho that they all used to go to but don’t any more (and for no particular reason), where they played musical chairs, where the
public bar would explode into a chorus of ‘BOOM’, but doesn’t any more. It’s the ordinary places such as these that make it her patch. Places that she knows she will pass in ten, twenty, thirty years from now, and which will always remain
hers
and belong to her in ways they can never belong to anyone else. They’re her property, even. She smiles at that as she steps from the park and crosses into St James’s.

And no more than a mile away, in Covent Garden, stands the small church in Maiden Lane, where someone who once existed made a promise to a god who never did. And opposite the church, there’s Rules restaurant, where she promised to take herself if the right someone ever came along.

The winter — and somehow it seemed more awful than all the winters past — has gone, but she still wears a thick coat. And trousers. And although she is perfectly aware that trousers are, in this new world into which they’ve survived, a sign of an independent young woman, an independent spirit, the fact is she took to wearing them through the long, bitter winter because they were warm and practical. But now continues to wear them for their symbolic power. For no other reason, possibly, than for the stares she
receives, from time to time, from the self-righteous armies of the miserable who are still everywhere and who are already missing the war and the times that gave them licence to force their misery upon everybody else.

The flat is still hers, although her friend Pip has married and moved on and Iris now has the place to herself. And this suits her. The rent hasn’t gone up in the five years she’s been there, and just as well. She walked away from her job in the Treasury, and they finally let her go. She makes what little money she has now from teaching at night and writing occasional pieces for the newspapers. But most of her time is spent writing for herself. And, for the first time, she’s made money from it, sweet money. For in the bag she has over her shoulder (and which once contained her gas mask) is her first published story.

She enters Soho and walks through the back streets towards Bloomsbury. The pale sun that is yet to find its warmth, and which greeted her as she stepped from her front door into her tiny laneway ten minutes before, has slipped behind the clouds. There’s a recent letter from Frank in her coat pocket. He returned, of course, without a scratch. He never needed her to see
it through and she never held his fate in her hands. How could she ever have imagined she did? It was the war, she remarks to herself with a faint smile on her lips. It was the war doing that. But the smile fades as she passes a vacant block of land that once contained a house or a business of some sort, of which all that’s left now are piles of bricks indicating where rooms and a fireplace might have been, and over which wildflowers have begun to grow. Everywhere flowers have already begun to bloom and by summer will form entrancing hanging gardens between rows of intact terraces. All over the city. And it is the unpredictable gaps in the terraces that, to Iris, speak of the fickleness of it all: having a bomb drop on you and not having one drop on you, being suddenly dead and not being dead. There’s no pattern, not that she can see. No guardians of fate. Just sheer chance. Just these gaps in the rows of buildings. Whatever she once thought or pledged made no difference.

Frank’s professor at Cambridge was as good as his word and that’s where his letter was sent from. He is teaching, and he likes it, he says. He likes being alive too. And, he goes on to say (for she remembers most of his letter), he’s going to make this life, this life that
he feels lucky to have,
matter
. It is, he adds, a sort of duty. A sort of duty to all those who weren’t lucky enough to keep their lives, but lost them. Odd phrase, he says, and she can just imagine the wry smile on his face as he wrote it. Odd, because it makes it sound like carelessness. Or a throwaway line from a light comedy. But the death he saw was never careless. It was sudden, nearly always sudden. But never thrown away or carelessly dropped the way you might drop and lose a wallet. So he will make this life that he has managed to keep matter. And he has begun, he says, with an energy and enthusiasm that come right off the page, his history of the English working class. It is a long project that will take years to write, just the sort of project to which a whole life can be dedicated, and through which it can be made to matter. And there is something uplifting in the very thought of a long project, Iris imagines, for a long project has its eyes on the future. Has its eyes on
life
. At twenty-five she doesn’t feel young any more, but the idea of setting out on the long project of life brings with it the sense of being young again, the sense of a second youth, almost, to make up for the one they were all robbed of.

Before she knows it, for she has been lost in thought, she turns a corner and there, in front of her, is Russell Square. The sandbags may have gone from the fronts of buildings and from footpaths, but years of dust and grime have settled over everything. It’s as though it will take a giant wave to wash everything clean again, and she imagines that such a deluge would almost be worth it just to see everything sparkle. For the moment, at least, all the dust and grime are draped in brilliant light. For at some time during her walk the sun came back, but she missed its entrance. The tops of the trees are lit up and the shade is an inviting, summery green.

She pushes on across the street and follows the footpath round the park and stops on the far corner. Nothing has changed. The building looks the same, the rooftop upon which she stood through the long hours of so many nights is the same rooftop. And, no doubt, it will all be the same in ten, twenty or fifty years’ time. The building, the whole square for that matter, has that sort of look. A sort of complacency that rules out the prospect of change.

It is rather odd to be here in peaceful daylight, and with people about, even if behind doors and curtains and blinds, presumably doing the usual things that
people do in a publishing house: sitting behind desks, reading manuscripts, answering telephones and whatnot. She’s mostly been here after hours when only her fellow watchers and the ghosts of her heroes were about. Now she goes through the front door and pauses, taking in the stairs that she remembers so well and up which she marched so often until she entered Mr Eliot’s room and stepped out onto the rooftop.

In the downstairs office a portly gentleman has his back to her and is telling the secretary, who has the plump, beaming face of youth and who seems to be new, that if ever Mrs Eliot comes in (a highly unlikely event, he adds, in a tone that says there is a story there but you need not concern yourself with it), she must be told that her husband is out. She will not believe it, he continues, and once again the information is conveyed in the manner of a newcomer’s being briefed, but she will have no choice. And it is then, when he is finished, that the gentleman turns and notices Iris for the first time. He looks her up and down quickly through his spectacles, apparently summing up the situation. Another young hopeful, another manuscript. And he’s almost right. He nods to the secretary and leaves without speaking further.

Iris’s story has been published in a university magazine. It is nothing grand, of course. But it’s a start, and she’s happy with that. And she is not submitting it; she is, rather, passing it on to Mr Eliot, who may or may not be interested. She pulls the magazine from her bag, the pages containing her story marked.

She doesn’t need to read it. She knows it almost word for word, so often has she written and rewritten it. A small group is standing on a rooftop at night; they cast shadows under the moonlight like figures in a surreal painting. There is a sound and they all turn towards it — a frozen tableau, ears straining into the night. Then something breaks through the clouds, a plane, a bomber, one flaming engine burning bright. It passes over them, close enough to touch, a dove painted on its fuselage. Then the flaming dove disappears and plummets into a city park not far away. All around — the silvery, moonlit trees, the windows of the terraces, a passing fox — all are watching. All witness (and she knows a passing fox is stretching it, but the fox insisted) to the extraordinary event of a flaming object falling from the heavens. The rooftop figures stare at each other in speechless wonder. Then, after a time, there is a
distant explosion … Inside the plane the second pilot is slumped in his seat as the flames begin to engulf him, his mask on, his wool-lined jacket unzipped, his stomach opened up, his intestines falling over his lap like strings of sausages in a butcher’s window, his eyes staring blankly into the night, indifferent to the flames. Then the fire is hosed down, the charred remains are carted away and by morning nothing is left, as though it never happened. But it did. And this is its story. This is the reality, the messy, anarchic truth on the other side of metre and rhyme, totem and symbol.

And Iris has no desire to attack Mr Eliot. She just wants to point this out to him. To put it on the record. That when he turned to her on the rooftop that night, his eyes, his whole face alight with rapture, taking in the entrancing spectacle of flames, the dove and the wondrous improbability of it all,
this
is how it really was. That inside that luminescent, flaming dove the string of sausages that was the second pilot’s intestines had spilled out over his lap, and his blood and various white and yellow pieces of skin, tissue and bone were splattered all round the inside of the cabin, smearing the perspex through which the pilot
stared. And even though she doesn’t particularly like Mr Eliot’s poem with its cold, lifeless, thin-lipped prayers, its draughty churches and medieval gloom, her story is not, all the same, offered as a criticism. It is just a way of saying that on the other side of that neat, stained-glass world of symbol and image, of the unities of time, space and sentiment, of fancy and imagination,
this
is how it really was. To have at least that much acknowledged.

She passes the magazine to the secretary, who promises to pass it on to Mr Eliot when he is in. Inside the cover the inscription reads: ‘To Mr Eliot, who was there, Iris’.

Outside the office she strolls across the street and into the park, still lit up by the early spring sun which for a few hours washes the grime from everything. She sits on a bench. A weight has passed from her. His fate was never in her hands, but his memory and the registering of what took place,
they
were. She is still, motionless, mesmerised by the sun. And she feels light. She has told his story, the one that Mr Eliot never saw but which she did; the one that he never knew, but which she does. The one the poem doesn’t tell, but which she has. There is a
grave at Little Gidding in front of which she recently stood. A new one, beside the chapel. For he died there, and the inheritors of the community buried him there. The headstone small. Shy. Not wishing to draw attention to itself. A name, ‘James Edward Anstey’. And two dates: ‘1917–1942’. A gravestone tells a story: a name, two dates and the fact of death. But not the ‘why?’.

This is where it all ended. This is where the stuff of inspiration lay down in a country field, its moment come and gone, its job done. Where it lay down, unseen, unnoticed, useful for a time but no longer so, and where it drifted off into sleepy anonymity. All that now remains are the two things that it was fashioned into. A poem. A story. Iris has not sent the story to his parents on the other side of the world for the same reason that she retrieved her photograph from his belongings. They don’t need to know. Let them have the comfort of the official story: that he died from the effects of crash-landing in a country field after a raid. And, in a very real sense, he did.

She looks back from the green square to the building on the corner that she has just left. Her eyes move up to the rooftop on which she stood for
so many nights, looking for firecrackers that, in the end, never came. Then to the room at the very top. Mr Eliot’s room. There is no window onto the street, and she can’t tell if he is in or not. But she imagines he is. Up there. In his nest. Perched at his desk. The bespectacled eyes forever seeking, the eagle’s beak of a nose sniffing out, the quarry of the ‘real thing’, of the annointed, the chosen few of a new generation of poets, like, quite possibly, her friend who met Mr Eliot and who’s on a ‘promise’, and who spoke of meeting Mr Eliot as being like watching the
Queen Mary
coming at you … very slowly. He’s up there, Eliot, where he will always be. Above the streets, above the city, above the world. Above it all. Utterly — and a faint wry smile lights her eyes — utterly above it all. Which is all the more reason, she declares, looking up, for these communications from below.

The park is awash with light. The spring leaves sparkle, tender shoots seek the sun. Today, she imagines, it is a world made new. A weight has passed from her. She is light. Then she is crying and has no knowledge of how long she has been crying for. Suddenly someone is standing in front of her.

‘Are you all right?’

She looks up from the shiny brown shoes before her to the concerned face of a young man, who just a year ago would have been wearing a uniform of some sort, but who now wears once more the casual trousers and the corduroy coat of the student he would have been before everything started.