I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (6 page)

‘We had tea about four. Then I went up and packed my kit. Then it was time to go for the train. I said good-bye and started for the station. King's Cross I had to go from.’

There was a long pause, and at the end of it came the doctor's voice asking if that was the last thing he could remember, and the boy's voice telling him that it was, and then there was silence again.

‘That's queer,’ the boy said suddenly into this silence. And now his voice sounded changed, there was astonishment and dismay in it, and the doctor uncrossed his knees and looked at him more closely, asking him, ‘What's queer?’

‘I've just remembered something,’ the boy said. ‘That time I told you about when I left the house, it wasn't the last time, really.’ ‘Not the last time you were in the house?’

‘No. I've just remembered. It's just sort of come back to me somehow. When I'd gone part of the way to the station I found I'd left something important behind, my pay-book I think it was, and I had to sprint back to fetch it.’

The doctor took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lighted one with his utility lighter which never worked the first time he thumbed it, and blew out a little smoke. He seemed in no hurry at all about asking the next question.

‘Can you remember how you were feeling when you went back?’

‘I suppose I felt a bit flustered like anyone would about leaving my pay-book,’ the boy said, defensive suddenly, and blindly suspicious of some unimagined trap.

Looking into the tunnel he remembered fumbling under the mat for the key which was left there for the next-door woman who came in to give a hand. Was it as he came in or as he was going out again that he stood at the foot of the stairs where they crooked in the angle of a dog's hindleg out of the living-room? It was dusk, and he remembered the silence inside the house as though there were a dead person or somebody sleeping upstairs. Yes, she must have been asleep then, he thought: but whether he went up to her was not in the memory, but only the noise of his army boots clattering away on the paving-stones of the court, and as he came out into the high street a church bell was ringing.

The doctor asked, ‘What happened afterwards?’

‘I can't remember anything more,’ the boy said.

‘Nothing whatever? Not even some isolated detail?’

‘Yes,’ he said, after a while. ‘I think I remember looking for the station entrance, and a big bridge with a train shunting on it up high.’

He was aware, just then, of danger skirmishing all about in the green-walled room, and lying there on the couch his eyes were still down where they seemed safe on the pink ends of the tie, his hands clenched now and his neck and shoulders gone tense; and he not knowing if it were through his words or his silence that the danger would strike.

Why did a church bell keep ringing in the tunnel like that? It was a very deep tunnel into which he was being forced. He did not want to go down in the tunnel again. He was afraid. But because of the unknown thing whose immediate agent was the casual, near friendly voice nothing could save him from that black exploration split by the doleful and ugly clang of a distant bell.

‘As if someone had died,’ he said out loud.

‘Who do you think might have died?’

No, no. Not that. Don't let it come, the boy thought, fighting desperately against what had all the time been waiting there behind every word; the worst thing, the intolerable pain, the fear not to be borne. And at once his nerves started to twitch and tears sprang in his eyes in case she might not have been sleeping but dead in the silent room at the top of the steep stairs, investigated or not by him he was, agonizingly, somehow unable to know.

Running in panic along the tunnel he remembered the alley-way, like something in a film he'd seen once, blank walls leaning nearer and nearer to suffocation, and, at the bend, a lamp-bracket sticking out with a dangling noose; only no corpse was at the end of the rope. And always the hurrying army boots and the bell ringing, till he did not know if it was the noise of his own steps or the church bell clanging inside his head. The noise was part of his hunger, and he remembered, further along the tunnel, scrounging about at night where a street market had been and finding, finally, in the gutter, a piece of sausage, grey, slimy, like the wrist of a dead baby, and the terrible thirst that came on him afterwards, and how he drank out of a horse-trough, scooping the water up with his hands, and it seemed all wrong because they killed animals painlessly. Then there
was that open space, a heath or a common, where he had vomited and lain on the ground, his hair in the rough grass. He felt weak and stiff from the vomiting and clouds of insects were round him, settling on his face and hands and crawling over his mouth because he was too weak to flap at them, but in the end it got dark and the insects went away then and left him in peace.

Faster and faster he ran to escape from the tunnel and the tolling noise of the bell. And at last he was outside, the tunnel was getting smaller and smaller until it vanished, and there was respite from the tolling, nothing left now but the room with the doctor quietly smoking, sunshine outside the window, the calendar on the wall.

The boy was not lying on the couch any more but bending over with hunched shoulders as if hiding from something, his head on his raised knees in the posture a person might take crouching under a table: and though he was crying he was no longer thinking of the tunnel or of the dangerous secret thing which had scared him so terribly, or about anything he could have put into any words.

‘It was like a blackout. A blackout. I can't remember,’ he kept on hopelessly mumbling, amongst the tears.

GLORIOUS BOYS

W
HY
do I do this? she thought, walking with Mia in the cold London dark vibrant with the resonance of out-going bombers. Why do I ever go to a party, not knowing what to say or what to do with myself? Hands were easy with glasses and cigarettes, but the rest of the body, embarrassingly material, intractable, and absolutely unwilling to dissolve itself into a dew; how did one cope with it? How did one recognize the correct moment for putting it into a chair, opening its mouth and emitting appropriate sounds, propping it against the end of a sofa, getting it up and moving it across the room to confront some stranger's alarmingly expectant, or self-assured, and in every case utterly inaccessible countenance?

The terrifying independence of the body. Its endless opposition. The appalling underground movements of the nerves, muscles, viscera, upon which, like a hated and sadistic gauleiter, one unremittingly imposed an implacable repressive regime, threatened eternally by the equally implacable threat of insubordination. The perpetual fear of being sabotaged into some sudden shameful exposure.

Ahead the house waited uncompromising, the imminent dark objective. Why did I come here?

It was Mia, naturally, who had brought her. Mia, like a little infanta, like a little fantastic princess, not quite human exactly, daughter, not of a golden shower, but of a black-pearl passion, smoky dark hair and cheeks the lustrous blurred pink of the inside of those very elaborate shells, bright dress and improbable buckled shoes. Mia shooting her arrowy kindness not of earth or humanity into the heart: no warmth but only darting gleams from the progeny of a pearl. Why was I persuaded?

Can't say no, she was thinking while Mia opened the door and the noise, the special noise, smell, atmosphere, of a party came down to them from the top of the short white staircase leading directly into the large light smoky room. Can't say no; non
specific depressive trait. The tedium of these everlasting psychological pigeonholes. And it wasn't true in her case either; at least, not entirely true. It wasn't only slackness, weak moral fibre, whatever you liked to call it. There was that other thing too, the force always driving one to open every door, cross every bridge, walk up every gangway.

They added their coats to the winter coats already piled and slipping from hidden pieces of furniture at the foot of the stairs. Now I would like to stop here for a little, the back of her mind reflected. Now I would like to spend a little time with the coats, knowing them, knowing their different characters, textures, smells, getting the feel through my fingers of the essential essence of coat, getting to know how it feels to be fur or tweed. But it won't do. Or rather, it isn't done. It simply is not done in normal society to waste time feeling oneself into a pile of coats. Odd how normal people have no time except for other people. Unless you're alone it's practically impossible ever to get to know the non-human things: it simply isn't allowed. There's something queer about you, people said if you tried to explain.

‘Let's go in now,’ the little clear voice of Mia said, rather high, like some blithe warm-country-frequenting bird; the jewelled kinglet, perhaps?

‘I'm ready,’ she said.

The preliminary staircase was much too short. Through introductions she was still back there on the stairs watching Mia's newly combed hair floating so fine and like a darker smoke on the cigarette smoke thickened air. The dark downward smoke drifted past backs and bosoms; with confident and infrangible sprightliness the buckled shoes twinkled into the crowd.

The party, she said to herself, following on reluctant. I must be in the party. No more dreaming now. She had always dreamed too much in her life, dreamed when she ought to have been attending to people, and so lost all the prizes and antagonized everyone.

She thought how she had antagonized Frank by dreaming herself into this that seemed a crazy journey to him, to this country, away from safety and warmth, all across the world. She thought about
being alone in the raid on the night she arrived, the night the post office was hit. She had stood watching out in the street, and while the big building burned, and she was feeling the anguish of exploded walls, burst roof, tom girders wrenching away, smoke, flames, blinding up, spouting up through the crazy avalanching of stone, the crashing, ruinous death of all that mass of stone and durability struck down with a single blow, a warden had shouted to her from the post not to stand woolgathering but to get under cover away from the shell splinters that were coming down. There had been rage in his voice to blast her out of the dream. But the warden's anger and Frank's anger couldn't be helped and were irrelevant really, since she knew she could never cure herself of the woolgathering.

The man talking to her now had a red face and his hair was curly, sandy and grey mixed, like wool.

If only he doesn't start asking questions, she thought. If only he doesn't know or care that I've only been over here a few months. If only I don't have to try and say something convincing. As she was merely doing her own work and was not on a war assignment, people wondered why she had come all that difficult voyage from the safe underside of the world. For the questions which followed then she had no adequate answers. All her life the force had been operative in her, the insistent unknown thing that drove her to open the doors, to walk up the gangways, to leave security when it became familiar, in no spirit of gallant adventure, but terrified; though the terror, certainly, was inside the dream where also the inexorable voice commanded, Move on there, traveller; other places, experiences, wait for investigation. It was obvious that no explanation was possible.

Someone gave her a glass with punch in it, hot and faintly steaming, and she felt the comfortable warmth of the glass in her hand and lifted the glass and smelled the sweet, warm, raffish smell of the rum which had a curl of apple peel floating in it. There were lighted candles about the room and silver stars because it was Christmas time.

‘They've got some interesting pictures here,’ she said. And because it was all right and allowed to be interested in pictures
and to get to know them she moved over to stand in front of the canvas, pale bird's egg sea, sand, and a pink house – it looked like a Christopher Wood, and the woolly man moved too and looked for a moment and murmured and moved away, set free to talk to some more congenial guest.

What exactly is it that's wrong with me? What is the thing about me that people never can take? her thoughts wandered, although she knew the answer perfectly well. It was the woolgathering, of course, the preoccupation with non-human things, the interest in the wrong place, that was so unacceptable. People took it as an insult. Intuitively they resented it even if they were unaware of it. And fundamentally they were right; it was insulting from their point of view. But why did she care what they felt? There was nothing to be done anyway. The woolgathering was far stronger than she was.

She stood and looked at the picture a little; gradually, as she saw no one noticing her, allowing her eyes to stray to less approved objects, the candelabra, the stars, the pagodas on the long yellow curtains. A carnation pinned to a dress with the coloured badge of a regiment came between, and behind this the known and utterly unlikely face from another country suddenly sprang out at her in the room like a pistol pointed over the noise and smoke and the atmosphere of a party and for a second she felt cold and confused with the countries running wildly together.

Then he came forward, blocking out the carnation and standing in front in the blue flying uniform that was different only in the word on the shoulder from the uniform an English pilot would wear. He had a very young face and bright bloodshot eyes that did not look quite natural. His face still looks so young, she thought; but his body was different. Over there his body had been selfconscious in uniform and had looked inappropriate in that dress, but now the uniform was part of him and did not look strange on him in any way. He and she and Frank had laughed together about the uniform over there, calling him the blue orchid, but now there was nothing to laugh at at all and she wondered how it could ever have seemed funny that he should be wearing it.

‘I don't believe it. I just don't believe it's you,’ he was saying.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘What an incredible meeting. What are you doing here?’