In Another Country (21 page)

Ev was getting the tea ready, a nice salad. Well? she said, chopping a cucumber. What if I made 'em a bit smaller? said Jack.

Ev put a hardboiled egg in the egg slicer. Cut 'em off, she said.

 

Next day, in the afternoon, Ev had her ladies. Jack took an unusual walk, away from the Folly Field. He walked through the village to the cemetery, and sat there for an hour or so looking out to sea. When it got dark he came home again, though he knew that the ladies would only just be having their tea. He could hear them from the kitchen, they were in the front room and the door was closed, their noise seemed greater than he had ever heard it. Were they more numerous? Had every lady in the Chapel come? He went a little way into the hall. The ladies were in the highest spirits. They beat at one another with their voices. Jack went a little nearer, applied his ear. But nothing very distinct was audible. He bowed himself, he knelt, he applied his eye. He saw his mermaid. She had been brought out of the corner and was standing on her tail in an easy chair. She smiled her smile, without any hope of pleasing. It seemed to Jack that the space within her arms was cavernous. Then she was obscured by a welter of blue and silver and gold. The hairdos of the ladies fitted their heads like shining helmets, their mouths, open for an enormous hilarity, were as red as jam. Jack rose very slowly and out of habit made towards the back door and the garden—but bethought himself and turned and climbed the stairs to bed.

Jack woke in the night, there was a high wind, Ev was snoring by his side, but above that sound he could hear the sound of the sea, the sea had risen, he imagined it foaming white and slung across the bay from point to point. There'll be some wreck, he thought, and did the trick with his head he had learned from Stan. Rose secretly before first light and taking his old coat from the garden shed was soon on the beach along the high-water mark. The tide had turned and was beginning to withdraw, it dragged down the shingle like a death rattle. The weed was a yard high, packed solid. The wind had scarcely lessened and there was rain on it. Jack's small exaltation left him at once. He could see no wood, nor anything else worth picking up. The lights of the railway station and the town looked infinitely beyond his strength, even the seawall was too far, he skidded and stumbled in the weed and on the pebbles. Then it was enough, and he halted. Rolled in weed there was a dead thing at his feet, a seal, and for no good reason he began to tug at the slippery stuff, to free it. He got the head clear and the flippers, then desisted. One eye had gone, the other was beaten in, the head, so shapely on a living beast in water, was monstrous. And all below was dead weight in a stinking winding sheet.

A wet light eastwards over home. Jack stood. In the narrow strip between the shingle and the surf a man and his dog were making their way. Jack moved from the cadaver as though he were guilty. The walker was Councillor Rabbit and his dog, a dachshund, trotted beside him on a lead. Meeting Jack, he cast down his eyes and halted to let him pass. But Jack addressed him. Wet, he said, I'm turning back. Councillor Rabbit was a big man in a trilby, which he had to clutch hold of or the wind would have taken it. He wore a very large herringbone overcoat and polished Oxford shoes. His face, when he allowed Jack to look into it, was as sorrowful as a bloodhound's. It had slipped, it had collapsed. Though Jack had hardly exchanged a word with him in all the years he grasped him now almost familiarly by the elbow and turned him towards home. He did not want the dog to go sniffing at the seal.

Councillor Rabbit was easily led. There was enough room for the two men and the dachshund to walk side by side between the pebbles and the waves. You never let him off? said Jack, nodding down at the adipose dog. Safer the way he is, said the Councillor. Besides, he's going blind. From under the brim of his trilby he was glancing fearfully at Jack. They made their way, exchanging remarks about this and that. What's he called? Jack asked. Billy, said the Councillor. The little dog's belly left a trail on the wet sand. He's not much of a runner, said the Councillor. As they neared the dunes and the wider beach below the Folly Field other dogs and their masters and mistresses appeared. I generally come out early, said the Councillor. You'll maybe want to go ahead. No, no, said Jack. I'm in no hurry. And again he touched the Councillor amicably on the elbow. First came the Minister's wife, Mrs. Blunt, and her alsatian. It was bounding free, in and out of the retreating tide, and others were advancing after her, more or less frolicsome and fierce. The Councillor was inclined to halt, it seemed he might have stared into the dunes until the trade and chapel people had all passed, but Jack with gentle touches to the elbow kept him going. So they shuffled forwards, Jack and Councillor Rabbit and between them, on a tight lead, Billy the little wheezing dog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Asylum

 

 

 

P
rison more like, said Madeleine.

Come now, said Mr. Kramer.

If I run away they bring me back, said Madeleine.

Yes but, said Mr. Kramer.

 

Mr. Kramer often said, Yes but to Madeleine. Something to concede, something to contradict. Now he said again how kind everyone in the Unit was, all his visits never once had he seen any unkindness and couldn't remember ever hearing a voice raised in anger against any girl or boy. So: not really like a prison.

 

Then why's she sitting there? said Madeleine, nodding toward a nurse in the doorway. The nurse did her best to seem oblivious. She was reading a women's magazine.

You know very well, said Mr. Kramer.

So I won't suddenly scratch your face and say you tried to rape me, said Madeleine. So I won't suddenly throw myself out of the window.

That sort of thing, said Mr. Kramer.

 

The window was open, but only the regulation few inches, as far as the locks allowed. Mr. Kramer and Madeleine looked at it. She'd get through there, he thought, if she tried. Not that I'd ever get through there, said Madeleine, however hard I tried.

 

The walls of the room were decorated with images, in paintings and collages, of the themes and infinite variations of body and soul in their distress. A face shattering like a window. A range of mountains, stacked like the hoods of the Klan, blocking most of the sky, but from the foreground, in a red zigzag, into them went a path, climbing, and disappeared. Mr. Kramer liked the room. Waiting for Madeleine, or whoever it might be, he stood at the window looking down at a grassy bank that in its seasons, year after year, with very little nurture or encouragement, brought forth out of itself an abundance of ordinary beautiful flowers. At this point in his acquaintance with Madeleine it was the turn of primroses. The air coming in was mild. Behind the bank ran the wall of the ancient enclosure.

 

Asylum, said Mr. Kramer. What is an asylum?

A place they lock nutters up, said Madeleine.

Well yes, said Mr. Kramer, but why call it an asylum?

Because they're liars, said Madeleine.

All right, said Mr. Kramer. Forget the nutters, as you call them, and the place they get looked after or locked up in, and tell me what you think an asylum-seeker is.

Someone from somewhere bad.

And when they come to the United Kingdom, say, or to France, Germany or Italy, what are they looking for?

Somewhere better than where they've come from.

What are they seeking?

Asylum.

And what is asylum?

Sanctuary.

Sanctuary, said Mr. Kramer. That's a very good word. Those poor people come here seeking sanctuary in a land of prisons. An asylum, he said, is a refuge, a shelter, a safe haven. Lunatic asylums, as they used to be called, are places where people disordered in their souls can be housed safely and looked after.

Locked up, said Madeleine. Ward 16, they took Sam there last week.

So he'd be safer, said Mr. Kramer. I'm sure of that.

Madeleine shrugged.

Okay, said Mr. Kramer. A bit like a prison, I grant you. Sometimes it has to be a bit like a prison, but always for the best. Not like detention, internment, real prison, nothing like that.

Madeleine shrugged.

 

Mr. Kramer's spirits lapsed. He forgot where he was and why. His spirits lapsed or the sadness in him rose. Either way he began to be occluded. An absence. When he returned he saw that Madeleine was looking at him. Being looked at by Madeleine was like being looked at by the moon. The light seemed to come off her face as though reflected from some faraway source. Her look was fearful, but rather as though she feared she had harmed Mr. Kramer. Rema says Hi, she said. Rema said say Hi from me to Mr. Kramer.

 

They both brightened.

Thank you, Madeleine, said Mr. Kramer. Please give her my best regards next time you speak to her. How is she?

Can't tell with her, said Madeleine. She's such a liar. She says she's down to four and a half stone. Her hair's falling out, she says, from the starvation. She says she eats a few bean sprouts a day and that is all. And drinks half a glass of water. But she's a liar. It's only so I'll look fat. She phones and phones. She wants to get back in here. But Dr. Khan says she won't get back in here by starving herself. That's blackmail, he says. She might, however, if she puts on weight. Show willing, he says, show you want to get better. Then we'll see. She says if they won't let her back she'll kill herself. Thing is, if she gets well enough to come back here, she thinks they'll send her home. Soon as she's sixteen they'll send her home, her aunty says. But Rema says she'll kill herself twenty times before she'll go back home.

Home's not a war zone, if I remember rightly, said Mr. Kramer.

Her family is, said Madeleine. They are why she is the way she is. So quite understandably she'll end it all before she'll go back there.

 

Rema told me a lovely story once, said Mr. Kramer.

Did she write it?

No, she never wrote it. She promised she would but she never did.

Typical, said Madeleine.

Yes, said Mr. Kramer. But really it wasn't so much a story as a place for one. She remembered a house near her village. The house was all shuttered up, it had a paved courtyard with a sort of shrine in the middle and white jasmine growing wild over the balconies and the wooden stairs.

Oh that, said Madeleine. It was an old woman's and she wanted to do the hajj and her neighbours lent her the money and the deal was they could keep her house if she didn't come back and she never came back. That story.

Yes, said Mr. Kramer, that story. I thought it very beautiful, the deserted house, I mean, the courtyard and the shrine.

Probably she made it up, said Madeleine. Probably there never was such a house. And anyway she never wrote it.

 

Mr. Kramer felt he was losing the encounter. He glanced at the clock. I thought Rema was your friend, he said.

She is, said Madeleine. I don't love anyone as much as I love her. But all the same she's a terrible liar. And mostly to get at me. Four and a half stone! What kind of a stupid lie is that? Did she tell you she wanted to do the hajj?

She did, said Mr. Kramer. Her owl eyes widening and taking in more light, passionately she had told him she longed to do the hajj.

So why is she starving herself? It doesn't make sense.

I told her, said Mr. Kramer. I said you have to be very strong for a thing like that. However you travel, a pilgrimage is a hard experience. You have to be fit.

Such a liar, said Madeleine.

Anyway, said Mr. Kramer. You'll write your story for next time. About an asylum-seeker, a boy, you said, a boy half your age.

I will, said Madeleine. Where's the worst place in the world? Apart from here of course.

Hard to say, said Mr. Kramer. There'd be quite a competition. But Somalia would take some beating.

I read there are pirates in Somalia.

Off the coast there are. They steal the food the rich people send and the people who need it starve.

Good, said Madeleine. I'll have pirates in my story.

 

Madeleine and Mr. Kramer faced each other in silence across the table. The nurse had closed her magazine and was watching them. Mr. Kramer was thinking that from many points of view the project was a bad one. Madeleine had wanted to write about being Madeleine. Fine, he said, but displace it. Find an image like one of those on the wall. I have, she said. My image is a war zone. My story is about a child in a war zone, a boy half my age, who wants to get out to somewhere safe. Asylum, said Mr. Kramer. He seeks asylum.

 

Tell me, Madeleine, said Mr. Kramer. Tell me in a word before I go what feeling you know most about and what feeling the little boy will inhabit in your story.

 

The sleeves of Madeleine's top had ridden up so that the cuts across her wrists were visible. Seeing them looked at sorrowfully by Mr. Kramer she pulled the sleeves down and gripped the end of each very tightly into either palm.

Fear, she said.

Mr. Kramer might have taken the bus home. There was a stop not far from Bartlemas where that extraordinary enclosure, its orchard, its gardens, the grassy humps of the ancient hospital, touched modernity on the east-west road. He could have ridden to his house from there, almost door-to-door, in twenty minutes. Instead, if the weather was at all decent and some days even if it wasn't he walked home through the parks and allotments, a good long march, an hour and a half or more. That way it was late afternoon before he got in, almost time to be thinking about the cooking of his supper. Then came the evening, for which he always had a plan: a serious television program, some serious reading, his notes, early to bed.

 

On his walk that mild spring afternoon Mr. Kramer thought about Madeleine and Rema. It distressed him that Madeleine was so scathing about Rema's story. How cruel they were to one another in their lethal competition! For him the abandoned house had a peculiar power. Rema said it was very quiet there, as soon as you pushed open the wooden gates, no shouting, no dogs, no noise of any traffic. The courtyard was paved with coloured tiles in a complicated pattern whose many intersecting arcs and loops she had puzzled over and tried to follow. The shrine was surely left over from before Partition, it must be a Hindu shrine, the Muslim woman had no use for it. But there it stood in the centre of the courtyard, a carved figure on a pedestal and a place for flowers, candles and offerings, and around it on all four sides the shuttered windows, the balcony, the superabundance of white jasmine. The old woman never came back, said Rema. It was not even known whether she ever reached Mecca, the place of her heart's desire. So the neighbours kept the house but none had any real use for it. Sometimes their cattle strayed into the courtyard. And there also, when she dared, climbing the wooden stairs and viewing the shrine from the cool and scented balconies, went the child Rema, for sanctuary from the war zone of her home.

 

Mr. Kramer was watching a program about the bombings, when the phone rang. Such a program, after the cooking and the eating and the allowance of three glasses of wine, was a station on his way to bed. But the phone rang. It was Maria, his daughter, from the Ukraine, already midnight, phoning to tell him she had found the very
shtetl
, the names, the place itself. He caught her tone of voice, the one of all still in the world he was least proof against. He hardly heard the words, only the voice, its peculiar quality. Forest, memorial, the names, he knew what she was saying, but sharper than the words, nearer, flesh of his flesh, he felt the voice that was having to say these things, in a hotel room, three hours ahead, on a savage pilgrimage. The forest, the past, the small voice from so far away, he felt her to be in mortal danger, he felt he must pull her back from where she stood, leaning over the abyss of history, the pit, the extinction of all personal relations. Sweetheart, said Mr. Kramer, my darling girl, go to sleep now if you can. And I've been thinking. Once you're back I'll come and stay with you. After all I cannot bear it on my own. But sleep now if you can.

Mr. Kramer had not intended to say any such thing. He had set himself the year at least. One year. Surely a man could watch alone in grief that long.

 

The Unit phoned. Madeleine had taken an overdose, she was in hospital, back in a day or so. Mr. Kramer, about to set off, did the walk anyway, it was a fine spring day, the beech trees leafing softly. He walked right to the gates of Bartlemas, turned and set off home again, making a detour to employ the time he would have spent with Madeleine.

In the evening, last thing, Mr. Kramer read his old notes, a weakness he always tried to make up for by at once writing something new. He read for ten minutes, till he hit the words: Rema, her desire to be an owl. Then he leafed forward quickly to the day's blank page and wrote: I haven't thought nearly enough about Rema's desire to be an owl. She said, Do you think I already look like one? I went to the office and asked did we have a mirror. We do, under lock and key. It is a lovely thing, face-shaped and just the size of a face, without a frame, the bare reflecting glass. I held it up for Rema. Describe your face, I said. Describe it exactly. I was a mite ashamed of the licence this exercise gave me to contemplate a girl's face whilst she, looking at herself, never glancing at me, studied it as a thing to be described. Yes, her nose, quite a thin bony line, might become a beak. Pity to lose the lips. But if you joined the arcs of the brows with the arcs of shadow below the eyes, so accentuating the sockets, yes you might make the widening stare of an owl. The longing for metamorphosis. To become something else, a quite different creature, winged, feathered, intent. Like Madeleine's, Rema's face shows the bones. The softness of feathers would perhaps be a comfort. I wonder did she tell Madeleine about the mirror. Shards, the harming.

 

The Unit phoned, Madeleine was well enough, just about. Mr. Kramer stood at the window. The primroses were already finishing. But there would be something else, on and on till the autumn cyclamens. It was a marvellous bank. Then Madeleine and the overweight nurse stood in the doorway, the nurse holding her women's magazine. Madeleine wore loose trousers and a collarless shirt whose sleeves were far too long. She stood; and towards Mr. Kramer, fearfully and defiantly, she presented her face and neck, which she had cut. Oh Maddy, said Mr. Kramer, can't you ever be merciful? Will you never show yourself any mercy?