Owls Do Cry (24 page)

Nurse was curious.

—Let
me
look, she said, undoing the cap the other nurse had replaced on Daphne’s head. Nurse touched the scalp.

—Ugh, she said, shivering. Ugh.

—Now open your letter Daphne, or I’ll read it to you if you like.

Nurse opened the letter and read,

Dear Daphne, Just a short note, you know how I am with letters. I haven’t written to you since after mother died. But I am really writing now, a short note, to say how happy I am that they are going to cure you, and that soon you will be living a normal life in the outside world. Don’t be afraid of the operation, will you? There is nothing to fear. Do everything the doctor says, and after you are better, and it is all over, we will be able to visit you for we are coming south to live. Now, best of luck Daphne, and remember that when you are better and changed you will be able to live the sort of life I am leading, free and happy, out in the world. Now all our love.

P.S. – Do you get anything nice to eat? I am sending you a tin of cakes, bought, not home-made. These crosses underneath the letter are really kisses, all from the children who keep asking me about Aunty Daphne, though they do not know you. Love. Chicks.

Nurse made to give the letter to Daphne who covered her head with a blanket and sat still, refusing the letter. So nurse left it on the bed, saying

—Remember, we are going to make you nice for visitors.

She went out, locking the door, while Daphne took the letter and tore it to tinier pieces than snow.

They sat in the train, side by side, with Toby near the window, resting his arm on the ledge and staring out at the whirl of stripped willows and dead leaves and ancient logs, trapped and bearded, rising from the dark of pool and swamp; and broken fences dragged with cattle-hair and lumps of earth and river-stained sheep’s wool; and crumbling farmhouses, eyeless, with their door open upon a yellow blotched throat of corridor lined with chains of decayed rosebuds and lilies. There seemed no people in the outside world, only great fearful white and red and grey ghosts of cattle prancing upon a shrivelled earth, and harnessed and blinkered draught-horses, elephantine, waiting to plough, unguided, the furrow of nothing that the luminous filled train moved through on ribbons of iron; and the startled pallor of sheep, their panic and muffle of driven grey cloud.

No, thought Toby, there are no people left.

He looked then at his father dozing beside him, uncomfortable, with nowhere to lean his hand, so that he woke often, dazed and anxious. He opened his eyes now and looked at Toby.

—You’ll ruin your good suit, he said, leaning your arm there.

Toby brushed the soot from his sleeve.

—It’s all right, he said, it’ll come off.

His father moved uncomfortably.

—There ought to be somewhere for the one nearest the aisle to lean, he said. I can’t settle here. You should have given me the window side.

—No, said Toby.
I
wanted the window. I got there first.

His father thought of saying, I’m older, I was born first; but he didn’t bother saying it. He thought instead of where they were going and what they would say and what it would be like. Would he find the right things to say? What if he were afraid? He wore his best suit, and sports coat that had cost four pounds, and a collar and tie, and he had polished his shoes till they shone like blackberries. He held his empty cigarette holder in his hand, twirling it between his thumb and forefinger.

—I’ll have a cigarette, he said. And he opened a packet and planted the white stick like a candle in the silver-rimmed holder, and lit it.

—It’s not a smoking carriage, Toby reminded him.

—Well, I told you to book for one.

—I’ll have to open the window, with the smoke, said Toby, and struggled unsuccessfully with the catch.

—Like all carriage windows, he said in disgust.

—The old type opened better, said his father. It’s these new windows that get stuck. I remember the old type opened and you could put your head out and see something. These new ones are like everything else today, fancy to look at but no use when it comes to working them. Why, the old type–

—Look, said Toby, there’s wattle, or is it wattle, beginning to flower?

Bob Withers leaned to the window.

—Missed it, he said. We can’t have far to go now.

—No. I wonder what time the operation is tomorrow?

—I don’t know, in the morning I should imagine, Bob answered, who really had no idea what time, but felt happier saying something definite. —Yes, it’s in the morning.

—Do you really think Mum would have approved?

—Sh-sh, not so loud, said Bob, looking around secretively.

—We don’t want the whole world to know where we’re going and what’s happening.

He took the cigarette from his mouth and held it, end up, so that the holder looked like a brown and silver twig with a white bud growing out of it, and on fire with a curl of smoke.

—You get fined if they catch you, in a non-smoker, said Toby.

—We’ve talked over this before. Your mother would have approved. I know your mother would have approved. The doctor said this brain operation was the only chance of making Daphne into a normal
human being, a useful citizen, able to vote and take part in normal life, without getting any of these strange fancies that she has now.

It was a long speech, and it frightened Bob to hear himself say it because it seemed unreal and not himself speaking. It was what the doctor had told him, the man with the long white coat and the dark glasses, in the room where a cabinet stood in the corner, filled with files. The doctor had found Daphne’s file and run his finger up and down the pages, like a man in a bank, working out sums, though nowadays there were machines to add up accounts; and he had turned to Bob Withers and spoken sternly, almost accusingly, using long words that Bob could not understand and that frightened him. And Bob had glanced hurriedly at the paper, and signed for the operation, taking the doctor’s word for it, for after all, the doctor
knew
. And going out the door Bob Withers had called him Sir, he felt so afraid of him. He was glad none of his former workmates had seen him, Bob Withers, the bouncy little chap who could hold his own at smoke concerts and whose wife slaved for him. They said she even cleaned his shoes every morning.

What a wife!

—Yes, said Bob. Your mother would have approved. Daphne will be changed, sort of. I mean–

He didn’t know what he meant so he sighed and closed his eyes, pretending to sleep, but listening to the train saying a tongue twister he had learned as a boy –

A lump of red leather, a red leather lump

A lump of red leather, a red leather lump
.

Then it changed to –

Three tired toads trying to trot to Tilbury Towers

but somehow the whole sentence would not fit in, so he made the train say

Tired toads, tired toads, tired toads trying to trot
.

And he felt a heaviness and weariness so that he would have liked to sleep for ever and not wake up because Amy was dead and there was nothing.

The train stopped suddenly, and Toby and Bob, both dozing, opened their eyes. Toby peered through the window.

—Not yet, he said. It’s only refreshments. Do you want anything? A cup of tea?

—Could do, said Bob, not stirring. He felt cold and damp, like a toad.

So Toby went to the refreshment rooms, fighting his way through the people, and bought two cups of tea and two sugar buns. He sugared the teas, using the teaspoon chained to the counter, and returned to the carriage. He too felt sick and strange, and the tea as he drank it, tasted like waterweed and clay, as if it had been brewed in a world of no people.

Why, he thought. It doesn’t taste civilised.

He looked out the window at the throng of people struggling at the counter of the refreshment room, and the triumphant line of them outside, fulfilled and rested and dreamy, leaning upon the wooden bench beside their empty cups and fizz bottles and strewn crusts of sandwiches, and he thought, in his rising fear, It isn’t civilised. They are not people. There are no people. And as he watched them they seemed like the heavy cattle and the doped and scared sheep
they had passed, miles away now, in the waste paddocks and swamps. The train was going, in half a minute’s time, the man said through the loudspeaker, but the dazed people seemed to take no notice, they seemed too tired to move, filled with clay and waterweed and red effervescent swamp water. But the train whistle blew, and certainly there were people in the world, hurrying to the carriage doors and crying out shrilly, one to the other, in a code of goodbye.

The train moved again, and Bob put his cup and saucer on the floor.

—We could slip this in our bag and no one would notice, he said.

Toby did not answer. Then he said,

—It’s the next stop.

—Why do you have to keep telling me, retorted Bob. Of course it’s the next stop. I didn’t say it wasn’t did I?

They pulled down the small bag from the rack and sat upright. Bob put on his overcoat, the tweed one Nettie had sent when her husband died. She had written Bob a letter, saying,

—Come and help me burn everything.

And Bob had journeyed down to the city and watched Nettie, his sister, the overseer in the coat factory, burn the remains of her dead marriage.

—Why, bottles and bottles of bath salts she put on the fire, he had said to Amy when he came back.

And Amy said,

—What could she have wanted bottles and bottles of bath salts for? And to burn them? The girls would
have liked them, Daphne or Chicks. But think, bottles and bottles of bath salts. What kind, Bob?

—Oh, lavender, with flowers on the outside. And old Easter eggs and boxes of chocolates that had gone stale and smelt like straw and cardboard.

And Amy had said, wondering,

—Oh dear.

And Bob had shown her the overcoat and the patches from the factory, and the other things Nettie had given him. And Amy had said,

—It’s your size, Bob. Wear it.

And Bob said,

—I’ll be dead before I wear this fancy-looking coat.

And there he was wearing it now and not dead, he did not think.

They sat afraid and silent on the edge of a long form of leather, with no back rest, so that their backs ached; but continued to sit upright, staring ahead at the hard fire that burned brilliantly and coldly like a coloured glacier. No warmth came from the fireplace, and Toby and his father shivered, gazing past the heavy fire-guard to the flames leaping remotely and ineffectually behind their iron cage.

Toby spoke.

—It’s cold, he said.

The old woman sitting next to him on the couch answered him.

—It’s warm. There’s that lovely fire, she said, pointing to the blaze.

She had come to visit her daughter, she said, she came every week and knew the routine and was used to the strangeness. She had beside her a brown paper bag full of
cream cakes and a thermos flask filled with tea, made at home. She and Alfreda were going to have a picnic.

—We have a picnic every time I come, she said to Toby. Alfreda is so fond of these cakes and she likes tea made at home, instead of the hospital tea. You can understand that, can’t you?

She spoke the last sentence to Bob who sat holding tight to the basket he and Toby had carried between them up the hill, fighting like children to carry it,

—Let me, no, let me. Why do you want to hold it?

—Well, why do
you
want to hold it?

—It’s something to hold.

Their basket held a bag of oranges and bananas and a cake of chocolate.

—Yes, it’s cold, Toby repeated.

The woman glanced curiously at him. She was going to remind them both, him and the old man with him, who seemed to be shivering yet sat muffled in that smart-looking tweed overcoat, that there was a lovely fire in front of them, and what more could they ask for on a cold day like this with the winter still hanging on?

—The winter seems to be hanging on, she said.

Toby said in a loud voice,

—
Yes, the winter is hanging on, its teeth are indrawn like the teeth of an eel and that is why it is hanging on. Whatever it swallows will never escape from the black coil of winter
.

The woman looked uncertain, and thought, It must be in the family. Some of these visitors, I’ve noticed, are queerer than the patients.

Bob said suddenly,

—Don’t, Toby. For God’s sake keep quiet. Don’t say things out loud like that! Think of your poor mother!

The other visitors in the room had stopped talking and were watching Bob and Toby. And then the nurse brought Alfreda, and Alfreda’s mother moved along for her daughter to sit beside her. Alfreda was a dwarf, three feet high.

—Hello, slut, the dwarf said, in a hoarse voice, and dived for the bag of cream cakes which she swallowed, one after the other, without stopping to talk, while her mother sat watching her. When Alfreda had finished the cakes she held up the thermos flask.

—What’s this?

—That’s tea, her mother said. Real home-made tea. We’ll have a cup, shall we?

—Go to blazes and keep your tea. What else have you brought?

—There’s a new pair of pants for you, from Aunty Molly.

—Pants, pants, can’t anyone think of anything else but pants? And when am I going home?

She leaned to her mother, her eyes intense, her face full of scorn. Her mother smiled,

—The doctor says quite soon, Alfreda.

—Oh, go to hell.

And Alfreda got up, went to the door and called for the nurse.

—What did you dress me up for visitors when it’s only that old slut, she called. Let’s out of here.

The nurse, who was never far away, took Alfreda back
to her ward. Alfreda’s mother picked up her bag and smiling cheerfully at Toby and Bob, she went, with the remains of her picnic, to the nurse at the door to be let out.

And Toby and his father sat waiting for the nurse to bring Daphne. Bob Withers, looking about the room at the groups of visitors and patients, each, seemingly, with its separate picnic, thought, Daphne won’t be like them, anyway, she’ll be different. She won’t swear and go on, she’ll be quite different. What shall I say to her? How did she take her mother’s death, I wonder? Should I say something about that? Good Lord, no.