A World of Other People (9 page)

The two following letters tell more of the same, one documenting spring and that peculiar transition from football to cricket, and in recalling it, it’s as though Jim can faintly smell the freshly cut grass of a new season — and remember the way in which the two sports dominated so much of his youth: football in winter, cricket in summer, year in, year out. In the final letter he learns that his cousins — with whom he as often as not spent holidays at Christmas, in pilgrimages to beach caravans — are now in the army, one overseas ‘somewhere’, the other in Darwin. Oddly, he can only recall childhood faces when he thinks of his cousins, and can’t imagine them in uniform — as, he supposes, they would not be able
to picture him here. And, what’s more, he doesn’t
want
to imagine them in uniform. In that way some pockets of innocence might yet be preserved at least a little while longer.

All the letters are signed off in the same way: ‘Your loving parents, Mum and Dad’. To Jim, that is the saddest thing in the letters. For whereas once he could have told them anything on his mind — as often as not in a rush to do so — he now couldn’t even begin to find a way.

He puts the letters back into their envelopes and places them in the drawer. A whole world, there to be opened and summoned up and put away at will. Images of his parents linger: his father, in grey dust-jacket, behind the counter, a smile on his face that he never needed to put on, for he was born with the smile of someone who enjoyed the company of people; his mother, eyes focused on pruning the bushes or shaping the hedges of the garden for which she was famous and into which she disappeared for hours at a time. They contain it all, these letters. And their power resides not so much in what they say or don’t say, as simply in the fact that they were written in the midst of that world that was once his. Without
need of describing or naming it, these letters carry that world with them, over land and sea, to the resting place of his top drawer.

He stands at the window looking out over the familiar scene of the base in late afternoon. For the war goes on. The war does not take weekend leave or holidays or tea breaks. And out there at the moment, long trains of trolleys laden with bombs for tonight’s target are making their way to the waiting aircraft. And in a few hours the crews will mount the small metal steps and enter that compartmentalised world of the bomber that shuts out fear. They will assume their roles and think only those thoughts that it is necessary to think in order to get the job done and bring them through safely and back to the base again.

Once more he knows full well that he could never again do it, and not only because he has lost the knack of switching off, but also because in his head and heart he has walked away. The war will continue but he will not go to it any more. Not after the last few weeks. Not after last night. Not after everything. And by everything, he means Iris. Iris, who came from that world he’d lost and who kept her promise to lead him back into it. And so he finds himself detached
from the familiar activities taking place out there on the airfield. He has, too, an odd sense of detachment from the base itself, and the countryside and villages and towns all around it. Even asks himself what on earth he’s doing here. And, for the first time in the five years he has been living in this country, wishes he’d never left home.

While Jim is looking out over the airfield, noting the bombers being loaded with the detachment of someone watching a sport he used to play but doesn’t any more, Iris is sitting on her bed, her notebook in hand. It is not so much a diary as a collection of observations, thoughts, and, yes, things that have happened such as the incident in the park that morning. And she keeps it for a variety of reasons, but mostly because something drives her to. It’s not only because it’s a record of these days, or because they are useful exercises, pen-sketches for something that may come in handy one day, or that it’s a discipline she’s slowly acquiring or even that there’s pleasure in the discipline. She could cite all these reasons and they would be valid, but the fact is she keeps her notebook, and writes in it nearly every day, because something
would be missing from her life if she didn’t and the day would feel a waste.

When she has finished writing it all down she reads over it: the setting of the scene, the nature of the morning, the slow movement towards the pram and the incident itself. And straight away she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like it because it’s false. And so she writes it all down again as if she were talking. Talking to Pip, who is back from her parents’ place in the country, and reading by the window. Then she closes the exercise book and looks at her friend.

‘Can you imagine being in love, Pip? I mean,
really
in love?’

Pip is not surprised by the nature of the question. That’s Iris. She throws these things at you like hand grenades. All the same she is vaguely annoyed because she is immersed in her book and doesn’t want to talk.

‘Is there any such thing?’ she asks, without looking up.

‘My grandfather first saw his future wife on the back of a runaway horse. He rescued her and fell instantly in love.’

‘Really?’

‘But it’s a risk, isn’t it? I mean, how do you know what you’re getting?’

‘Suppose.’

‘All the same, it’s got this pure simplicity to it. I mean, I don’t see how you can
gradually
fall in love. That’s more like friendship, don’t you think?’

‘Possibly.’

‘But it
is
a risk.’

‘Iris.’ Pip suddenly looks up. ‘It’s Sunday.’

Iris nods, folds her hands over the notebook on her lap, and stares out the window onto the Sunday sunshine. The curtain that separates the two halves of the room has been drawn back and it is now just one big space.

This is where they were, she and Jim, whom she feels she knows and doesn’t know. This is where they were. She can still see them. And it’s still the rightness of his being, of his presence in the room, of the both of them in the room, naked and with nothing to hide, that she remembers, as well as the faint echo of a BOOM in her heart that told her that this was it. But where does a runaway horse lead you?

Just then Pip rises and strolls across the room but suddenly stops as she comes to Iris’s bed. She is
staring down at the floor, because there, beside the bed, is a silver cigarette lighter. One that she’s never seen before. It’s not hers and it’s not Iris’s, unless she’s just bought it. So she bends down, picks it up and shows it to Iris.

‘Whose is this?’ she asks with a curious smile.

Iris smiles back. ‘It’s Jim’s.’

Pip nods. ‘Are you going to tell me who Jim is?’

Iris eyes her and pauses.

‘Yes. But not yet.’

And with this Pip drops the lighter on Iris’s bed. ‘Very nice. Real silver.’

She then descends to the kitchen and Iris is left staring at the lighter, contemplating Pip’s question, and wondering if she knows enough of Jim to answer it.

And so while Jim is watching the bombers being loaded for the night’s target, Iris is dwelling on the events of the night before and the morning in the park, at the same time anticipating the ring of the telephone at work the next morning because she made him promise to call, and a promise is a promise.

When the telephone on her desk rings she jumps. She jumps because she is deep in somebody’s file and has entered that level of oblivious immersion that she usually reserves for novels. Or at least real reading. Not work. But she also jumps because the ring of the telephone, the very sound of it, has been transformed over the last few weeks, those weeks since her heart went BOOM and since the incident in the park, into the sound of hope. Especially at this time, late in the afternoon, when Jim phones. Not every day, but often enough. There has been no leave over these weeks and it is only his voice that she has now. So it is with a light heart that she picks up the receiver. But the voice on the other end of the line is a stranger’s, or she takes
it to be a stranger’s until she realises she knows that voice and it is just that she has not heard it for a long time. It is Frank’s mother.

She senses straight away that something is wrong. And then she learns that, yes, something
is
wrong. Frank is missing. His mother says it simply, in a very matter-of-fact way, for they are matter-of-fact people. She knows how much Iris would want to know and so she is telling her straight away — even though they have not seen Iris for almost a year because Iris has not visited them. And immediately Iris remembers that she promised (to Frank’s parents, to Frank and to herself) that she would visit them regularly, but she hasn’t. Her promise has been as empty as those casual promises casual friends make about catching up soon. And so while she is listening to Frank’s mother, she is also telling herself that she is no better than those sometime friends whom she has always looked down on. Missing. That was all his mother knew. But there was hope, and all they could do was hope for the best. And that was it. Two or three minutes. No fuss. There were things to be done. Come round sometime. Often think of you. Bye. And those parting sentiments sting in a way that they were never intended to. Iris drops
the receiver back into place and slumps in her chair. Her day is done, the evening lies in front of her and she’d been looking forward to it. Not now.

She stares vacantly out the window. Missing. She dwells on the word and all its shades of meaning. And, as she does, the absurd, irrational feeling that she is somehow the cause of all this slowly begins to take hold. Like the first faint aches and shivers of a winter cold. In what now seems like another life altogether, this young man, Frank, said he loved her and gave her a ring and she swore to keep it and wear it when he came back. But just because he called it love — is it? She doesn’t know why she took the ring and why she swore to wear it one day, except that she didn’t want to let him down, and because he
called
it love and she had no choice but to believe him. Then part of her said what did it matter anyway, he was going away. They might never see each other again. Anything could happen. And in thinking that, she was almost wishing it so. And if she wasn’t careful, wishing might
make
it so. And from the moment she’d concluded this she felt, in some wild, atavistic part of her being, that his fate was in her hands. That they were bound together, her thoughts and his fate.
She’d made, in short, a sort of pact with herself. In a small church in Maiden Lane. And was God there too? Invisible as usual, but watching all the same? It was ridiculous. She doesn’t believe in him any more, so how could he be there? It was all ridiculous. She made one of those absurd pacts long ago that people do in moments of weakness and then, quite sensibly, forgot all about it. But fate hasn’t forgotten. All the time she’s been going about falling in love, all the time she’s been recklessly pursuing that runaway horse, fate has been patiently waiting. And, noting that she’d forgotten all about her pact or carelessly disregarded it, fate slipped away, did its work, and now chose to make its entrance — for that was fate on the telephone, saying here I am.

His letters had come in from time to time, but not often, and she’d dutifully replied and been the girl back home that she’d said she’d be and to whom he could write. Although two occasions in which she’d taken an age to reply (for no good reason, the replies dashed off at that) come back to haunt her now. His last letter had been six months ago and she’d half hoped that he’d either lost interest or found somebody else and couldn’t tell her, or that this new job of his —
which she’d never liked the sound of — kept him from writing. And the ring? It was still in her drawer but she hadn’t looked at it for a long time. And it was with a kind of blank mind that she now contemplated it, tucked away in her drawer, unobserved, as good as forgotten.

Of course, she’d had every intention of telling Jim when the right time arose. Telling him that once upon a time she’d taken someone’s ring without ever really knowing why, and sworn to wear it one day. But that was long ago. Another life altogether. And just when she’d been about to tell him that day in the park, the right moment went suddenly wrong, and she never did. What a mess. She drops the file she was reading before the telephone rang into a tray and contemplates the pile beside her. All around her heads are bowed, pages of files are being turned over, the occasional hammer of a typewriter punctuates the drowsy peace inside the office and suddenly she feels like an insect out of Kafka. All of them insects (the air filled with the hum of insect thinking), all performing some function oblivious of its greater purpose. What’s left of the afternoon passes, the working day ends, the pile of folders beside her remains undiminished, and she
rises as they all do amid short exchanges of farewell and talk of tomorrow.

She’s never heard of a place called Shamley Green and can’t imagine she’d know anybody there anyway. But there it is. A small package from this place has been slipped under the door. But no name on the back. No return address. A mystery. A distraction. And she’s happy to be distracted. Before opening it, she sits and shrugs off her shoulder bag; like nearly everybody else she has stopped carrying round her gas mask. She contemplates the package. Or rather, the place-name. Shamley Green. The word ‘shambles’ comes irresistibly to mind. And she imagines it to be one of those villages tucked away in the countryside where the daily bus makes unscheduled stops at the front gate of two elderly spinster sisters and the postman knows the origins, and, more than likely, the contents of the mail by the handwriting on the letters as well as all the gossip that goes on in the dining rooms of the rambling houses where they serve tea and scones and talk the sort of talk that always comes with tea and scones.

She unties the string and slits the packaging with a knife. The item inside is wrapped in newspaper and
that is sealed with tape, and it’s with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance that she eventually extracts the thing. A book. Well, not even a book, really. Too small. A sort of pamphlet. And with a curious title. ‘Little Gidding’. If it’s a place, she’s never heard of that either. But who could have sent this? Then her eyes fall on the name of the author, in smaller print, above the title: T.S. Eliot. And the further mystery of why on earth he should have sent it to her is only partly resolved when she opens the book and reads the inscription inside: ‘To Iris, who was there, T.S. Eliot’.

It’s quite a shock. But a thrilling one. It is, she assumes, an advance copy, for she has not seen it in the shops or heard talk of it. But what on earth can it mean — ‘who was there’? She settles in the kitchen chair to read, her mind dwelling on the news of Frank but also drawn to the mystery of the inscription. She turns to the first page of text and immediately enters a world of seasons out of time, the blinding light of sunlight on frozen water and snow piled on hedgerows, like blossom out of season. For the first part of the poem she is none the wiser, still mystified as to why she should have received a copy.

Then she knows. Halfway through, and further on again, there it is: the dove, the flames, the descent over the square in moonlight. And straight away she sees it as clearly as she did that night, the sheer improbability of it. You won’t forget me. You won’t forget … But it was only from time to time that she recalled it now and wondered vaguely whatever became of it, that plane with the dove painted on its side, clear in the full moonlight. Like a distant dream. Or a scrap of one.

As soon as she finishes the poem she immediately goes back to the start. And then again, reading it three, four times (she loses track), sitting at the table for over an hour, concentrating, virtually not moving. And when she finally puts the slim volume down it isn’t just with that wintry feeling of cold churches, sodden country fields and smoke at nightfall — for it is a winter poem and the damp chill of winter seems to have seeped into every word. It is also with a sort of resolve. A resolve that has crept up on her. For something has indeed resolved itself while she has been reading. But as much as she thinks about it, she can’t yet say exactly what it is.

She only knows that Mr Eliot sent her this copy himself. Went out of his way, singled her out. He is
not the sort of person who says things directly to you. So, in a sense, he is speaking to her. Telling her something. In his way. She can’t say exactly what that something is. Only that it is part of her now — something she can’t quite pin down, but which is there all the same. And isn’t that just the way poetry works? While the front door of deliberate conscious thought is grappling with meaning, meaning, unseen, slips in through the back door. And you’re left with a feeling, as Iris is now.

For she is suddenly struck by the feeling that if all they are going through, this whole, long, draining, wretched war, is going to mean anything, if they are going to come out of it with anything truly meaningful to show for it, then it will have to be something more than just having had a good time. And suddenly, that’s all that falling in love looks like. And perhaps that’s what the poem has done — touched upon
this
Iris, called to
this
Iris. Good and proper, sober Iris, who knows the rich and heady smell of churches and who has never entirely left them. Perhaps this is what the poem (with its talk of England and
now
— lines, she imagines, that could almost have been spoken by Mr Churchill in one
of his broadcasts), perhaps this is what the poem, wrapped and sent just for her, almost like a letter, has touched on: a reminder of who she really is, and that there are people out there dying every day — and going ‘missing’, only ever asking for something or someone constant back home to think of. Someone constant and true. While she has been running around having a good time and calling it love.

Suddenly it all seems petty. Worse than petty. Selfish. And that feeling, that wild, irrational feeling, that overcame her when Frank first gave her the ring that she swore to wear when he returned, that wild, irrational feeling that she somehow held his fate in her hands, comes back to her, more powerfully than ever. That she had held his fate in her hands and let it slip from her. Now, he is missing. And it’s her fault. She made her pact and she broke it. And she knows that she could never live with herself if he did not return: if she took his ring, swore to wear it, then blithely forgot all about it. But, she tells herself, he is missing, not dead. People go missing all the time. There is hope and the situation can be retrieved.

She closes the small book, places it back on the kitchen table, and stares at it. Her resolve mingling
with a faint sense of having been swayed, of having fallen under the spell of a particularly powerful persuader. And for a moment she doesn’t know what to believe, or whom to trust, or who the proper and real Iris may be. But the moment fades as rapidly as it surfaced and she’s back to where she was — holding someone’s fate in her hands. And as much as she tells herself she’s too smart for all this, she knows she’s not. And as much as she interrogates herself, saying can it matter? Can it really, really matter? she knows it does in some part of her that logic can’t reach. She made a pact, in a church. In a church, for God’s sake! And suddenly all that talk in the poem about purifying fires, and the guilt and sinning that come with it, rushes back and she wonders if, once believed in, that invisible witness in the shadows is ever dispatched into non-belief.

The facts, she reminds herself, are simple. She held his fate, and let it slip. But the situation might not be lost — if she stays true to her pact. If she stays true, a life can be saved. And as much as the Iris who studied philosophy and logic and worshipped only at the altar of reason, as much as this Iris tells her that this is madness, she’s helpless. She is in its thrall, and
she feels herself surrendering to the aches and shivers of that winter chill, that winter poem. It’s the war doing this, she half smiles, half jeers, slumped and exhausted in her chair, it’s the war.

She knows now what she must do. And the poem (and she’s not really sure she even likes it) has confirmed this. Served somehow to confer legitimacy on her reaction to hearing about Frank, brought her to her senses and led her to this resolution which she believes utterly one moment and tells herself is madness the next. But which she is powerless to resist all the same. Perhaps what the poem did, a stern word from her parents might just as well have done. Or a good lecture from the pulpit. All the same, she knows what she must do. It will be difficult. But she must, when next she and Jim meet, make him see that the time is all wrong. That she should never have allowed him into her world because her world was already spoken for. That she should never have allowed any of this to happen. That we should never make casual promises because they will always come back to haunt us. And that she would always be haunted by the conviction that she held in her hands the fate of someone who loved her. And day by day, bit by bit, it would destroy her and
Jim until nothing good was left. It’s impossible! He must understand and she must make him see.

It is then that Pip enters and it all, everything, the whole mess, almost bursts from her in a torrent of tears and words, but she keeps herself in check. Besides, the look on her face alone tells Pip that all is not well.