Among Others (31 page)

His landlady answered right away, and she remembered me. “The little granddaughter,” she said. I’m not little, and it feels weird thinking of Sam being my grandfather. I already have Grampar, the position isn’t vacant. I like Sam though.

After a moment he came to the phone. “Morwenna?” he said. “Is there something wrong?”

“Not exactly wrong, only I’m at the Old Hall convalescing and I thought of you and wanted to speak to you.”

“Convalescing from what?” he asked, so I told him the whole thing and how I thought it had made me worse. “Maybe, maybe,” he said. “But sometimes healing hurts, had you thought of that?”

“They won’t tell me anything,” I said. “Dr. Abdul wanted to talk to Daniel, he wouldn’t say anything to me. I could be dying and they wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“Daniel would tell you, I think,” Sam said, but he didn’t sound sure.

“If they’d let him,” I said.

Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. “Maybe I’ll come down and see you,” he said. “I have an idea. Let me talk to Daniel.”

I had to call Daniel then, and explain, and he sent me off to bed and talked to Sam for a while. Then he came up and told me Sam was coming to see me tomorrow, on the train, and he’d pick him up in Shrewsbury.

It seems odd to think of Sam going anywhere, and odder to think of him here, but he’s coming tomorrow! Daniel says he’s getting to be a very old man and seldom goes anywhere, so I should think it a privilege, which I do.

M
ONDAY
21
^ST
J
ANUARY
1980

Sam brought me a tiny bunch of snowdrops from his landlady’s back garden. “They’re just starting,” he said. Despite the long journey by train and then car—Daniel met him in Shrewsbury—they were in very good shape and had that special scent. Mor used to love snowdrops. They were her favourite flower. We planted some on her grave, I wonder if they’re out yet? One of the aunts put mine into a tiny crystal vase that matches the decanter and I have them on my bedside table.

Sam also brought some more Plato—
The Laws
and
Phaedrus
, which I’ve been wanting because it’s the one they read in
The Charioteer
. They’re not new, he’s clearly had them a while, but he must have spent ages rooting around to find them. He also brought a little blue Pelican paperback book called
The Greeks
by H. D. F. Kitto, which he says will give me context. It’ll give me context for Mary Renault as well as Plato. I hope it’s interestingly written. I still haven’t started the Churchill history I got for a prize.

The other thing he brought was a pot of comfrey ointment, which smells very weird. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but I brought it anyway,” he said. I rubbed some on my leg and it didn’t help at all, except for making it smell peculiar, but I appreciated the thought.

Sam’s real thought though was that I should have acupuncture. There’s a kind of magic about Sam, not real magic, but he’s very solidly himself. It would be hard for any magic to find somewhere to start doing anything to him. It was interesting to see him with the aunts; he’s impeccably polite to them but he treats them as if they’re not important, and they don’t know how to deal with that. He has no cracks for them to get into. If they’d suggested acupuncture, which involves sticking needles into people, I’d have resisted as hard as I could. As it was, they were very opposed to the idea.

“It’s silly Chinese superstition, you can’t possibly believe in it,” one said.

“Morwenna’s terrified of needles, she wouldn’t even have her ears pierced,” another put in.

“What good could it possibly do?” the third finished.

Even this kind of thing doesn’t bother Sam. “I think we should try it. What harm could it do? Morwenna’s a sensible girl, I think.”

He had found a place in Shrewsbury, and written the address down. He wanted to go there right away, but the sisters managed to persuade Daniel that we should phone for an appointment. He made an appointment for tomorrow morning.

Sam spent the afternoon in my room, talking to me. He’s an old man and he’s had a strange life—imagine finding out your whole family had been killed. It would be as if Wales sank under the sea this minute and only I was left out of everyone. Well, Cousin Arwel’s in Nottingham, but just the two of us out of everyone I grew up with. It was just like that for Sam. When he went back after the war they were all gone and strangers were living in his house, and the neighbours pretended not to know him. He saw his mother’s bread-bin on the neighbour’s table, but she wouldn’t even let him have that.

“And they mean nothing to you,” he said.

“Not nothing.”

“They’re strangers. Even I am a stranger. But my family were your cousins. They’re talking, different governments have been talking for years about giving some compensation. But how can anyone compensate me for my family? How can they give you back your cousins that you never knew, and your cousins who were never born, the ones who would be your age now?”

That made me feel it. I could write a poem about that. “Hitler, give me back my cousins!”

I think Sam’s a bit sad that I’m not Jewish, that his descendants won’t be. But he didn’t say so, and he isn’t reproachful about it at all. He said he didn’t stay in Poland because he could feel the dead everywhere, as if they could come around any corner. I understand that. I almost talked to him about magic, then, about the thing I did to have a karass, about Mor wandering around with the fairies. I might have if there had been time. But Daniel came in and said they should be going to catch the train, so I said goodbye.

Sam kissed me, and he put his hand on my head and said a blessing in Hebrew. He didn’t ask, but I didn’t mind. At the end of it he looked at me and smiled his wrinkled old smile and said, “You’ll be all right.” It was remarkably reassuring. I can hear it now. “You’ll be all right.” As if he could know.

I can smell the snowdrops. I’m so glad he came.

T
UESDAY
22
^ND
J
ANUARY
1980

Sam was right about the acupuncture.

It is, in fact, magic. The whole thing is. They call it “chi,” but they don’t even pretend it isn’t magic. The man who does it is English, which surprised me after all the fear of wily orientals the aunts tried to put into the procedure. He was trained in Bury St. Edmunds, which is in the Fens, near Cambridge, by people who had been trained in Hong Kong. He had framed certificates, like a doctor. On the ceiling was a map of the acupuncture points of the human body. I got to look at it a lot, because most of the time I was lying on the table with huge enormous needles stuck in me, not moving.

It doesn’t hurt at all. You can’t feel them, even though they’re really long and they’re really stuck in you. What did happen was that when the last one went in, the pain stopped, like turning off a switch. If I could learn to do that! One of them, in my ankle, he put in slightly the wrong place first, and I did feel it, not real pain, but like a pinprick. I didn’t say anything, but he immediately moved it to a spot a fraction of a centimeter to the side and I couldn’t feel it. It’s body-magic plain enough.

Even if it just turned the pain off for the hour I was there, it would have been worth the thirty pounds, to me anyway. But it wasn’t. I’m not miraculously cured or anything, but I hobbled up the stairs to his room and I walked down them, no worse than before they put me on the rack. He wants me to go every week for six weeks. He said that today he was just doing what he could for the pain, but if he saw me regularly he might be able to see what was wrong and do something about it. He admired my stick—I’ve been using the fairy one, as it seems to give me more strength than the metal one, as well as being less ugly.

“Take me back to school,” I said to Daniel as we walked back to the car. A pale wintry sun was shining and the rose-gold buildings of Shrewsbury were flushed with it. If we’d set out right away, I could have been in school in time to go off to book club as normal after prep.

“Not until we see how you are tomorrow,” he said. “But how about a Chinese meal, as Chinese medicine seems to agree with you?”

So we went to a restaurant called the Red Lotus and ate spare ribs and prawn toast and chicken fried rice and chow mein and beef in oyster sauce. It was all delicious, the best food I’ve had for years, maybe ever. I ate until I was full to bursting. While we were eating I told Daniel about the convention in Glasgow, Albacon, this year’s Eastercon, and about what Wim had said about the Worldcon in Brighton and how he’d met Robert Silverberg and done nothing but talk about books for five days. He said he didn’t think his sisters would let him get away at Easter, but he agreed that I could go, and said he’d pay!

In a way, I would like to rescue Daniel from his sisters. He has been good to me, and I suppose it might be his duty as a father, but why should he feel any of that? I would like to rescue him, but I don’t think I can, and I think that trying would provoke war with them, whereas if they think I won’t interfere they might leave me alone. Trying to rescue Daniel I might entangle myself. I am my own priority here, I have to be. They’re not going to agree to him going to Glasgow. It’s good that they agreed to acupuncture and a meal in a Chinese restaurant, and they probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for dear old Sam.

With the bill, they brought us fortune cookies. Mine said “All is not yet lost,” which I thought very cheerful. It’s just like the line in the
Aeneid
,
Et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
, “even these things it will one day be a joy to recall.” At first, you think how awful, and then you realise that it’s true, and not a bad thing. Daniel’s just said “You like Chinese food,” which is undeniable. Getting one that said “You are an awful father” would have been unkind.

In the car, when I was putting my seat belt on, Daniel looked at me seriously. “You still seem to be feeling the benefit of the acupuncture.”

“I am,” I said.

“You should come once a week for six weeks, the way he said.”

“Okay.” I finished fiddling with my seatbelt. Daniel threw his cigarette end out of the window.

“I won’t be able to come to school and collect you and drive you here and back, not every week. Maybe sometimes.”

I could immediately see that they wouldn’t let him. He put the car in gear and pulled out of the car park, and all the time I didn’t say anything, because what could I say.

“There’s a train,” he said after a while.

“A train?” I’m sure I sounded sceptical. “There isn’t a railway station. There might be a bus.”

“There’s a railway station in Gobowen. When my sisters went to Arlinghurst they went to it, and were collected there by the school. Everyone used trains then.”

“Are you sure it’s still there?” But it wasn’t in the long list of Flanders and Swann “Slow Train” stations that had been closed by Beeching, so it probably was.

“It’s on the route to North Wales, to Welshpool and Barmouth and Dolgellau,” he said. The only one of those places I’d heard of was Dolgellau, where Gramma and Grampar had been to visit an old vicar who’d moved there, before I was born. North Wales is like another country. You can’t even get there from South Wales, you have to go to England and out again, at least if you want to go on trains, or on good roads. I suppose there are roads through the mountains. I’ve never been there, though I would like to.

“All right,” I said. “That means a bus into town and a bus out to Gobowen, and then a train.”

“I’ll be able to take you sometimes,” he said, lighting yet another cigarette. “What would be the best day?”

I thought about it. Definitely not Tuesdays, because I might not get back in time for the book club. “Thursdays,” I said. “Because Thursday afternoons I just have religious education and then double maths.”

“It seems from your marks that maths is the thing you least ought to miss,” Daniel said, but with a smile in his voice.

“Honestly, it doesn’t matter if I’m there or not, it just doesn’t go in. The maths I do know I know from phys and chem. Maths class might as well be taught in Chinese. It makes no sense to me. I think that bit of my brain is missing. And if I ask her to explain again, it doesn’t make any more sense.”

“Perhaps you ought to have extra tutoring in it,” Daniel suggested.

“It would be money down the drain. I just can’t do it. It would be like teaching a horse to sing.”

“Do you know the story about that?” he asked, turning his head, and incidentally blowing smoke at me, yuck.

“Don’t kill me, give me a year, and I’ll teach your horse to sing. Anything might happen in a year, the king might die, I might die, or the horse might learn to sing.” I summarised. It’s in
The Mote in God’s Eye
, which is probably why it was in his mind.

“It’s a story about procrastination,” Daniel said, as if he was the world’s expert in procrastination.