Players at the Game of People (21 page)

" Go!"
And drove his hand which held her arm downward against the thumb so that
he exclaimed with pain. Before he recovered she was poised anew to inflict
damage, this time with karate blows.
She said, even as he realized he was looking at her unfist weapons,
"I had to learn this. Sometimes men who couldn't get it up thought I
was to blame."
Use the flex on her! The thought came welling up from his subconscious,
labeled URGENT.
He disregarded it because he wanted to know why she was insulting him.
He said so.
"Why are you insulting me? Have I tried to rape you?"
She was near the door now, eying it, afraid -- visibly afraid -- it would
not open when she wanted to run through it. For as long as he cared to
remember, being aware that something was impossible had been a cure for
terror. Accordingly he spoke to set her mind at rest.
"It'll open. When I decide to let it."
And had the inverse effect from what he had intended. Until now she had
maintained a mask of remarkable calm. At his words it began to crack.
Edging ever closer to the door, regardless, she said in a thin voice,
"Going to make me a prisoner, are you?"
"Of course not! I just want to know -- "
"For Chrissakes, what is it
this
time?"
And -- what was it?
Godwin stood foolishly comparing possible questions in his mind: "What do
you think of me?" "Why are you so frightened of me?" "What have I done
to make you so upset?" And the repeated one, "Why are you insulting me?"
She reached the door and set her back to it, breathing hard.
"Let me go," she said. And added in a whisper, "Please."
That catalyzed his confused thoughts. He was able to say, "But why do
you want to run away from me?"
"Are you going to let me out?" was her retort.
"But -- " He took half a pace toward her, fists clenched, innocent of
the least impulse toward violence; this was mere frustration. "But if
you go now you may never know where your daughter is!"
It felt like an inspiration. But she shook her head, her face very pale,
her voice thin and tense.
"If she's turned into someone like you, I don't want to know about it."
"What the hell do you mean?" he roared.
"What the hell do you think I mean?" She had been fighting tears; now
they spilled down her cheeks. "I never thought it was possible, I never
dreamed it could be real, but now you've shown me, and like you say,
it's no more and no less real than anything else!"
Straightening her back with a kind of pride, drawing herself to attention,
though not straying from the door which, from where he stood, framed her
as though she were a full-length portrait of herself, she stared at him
with blazing eyes.
"You've sold your soul, damn you, and for good measure you've sold my
daughter's too!"
A few seconds later he heard himself saying feebly, "But it isn't like
that. That's not the way of it at all."
Even as he spoke, he was conscious of uncertainty. Over the years since
he made his bargain, since he realized what he had actually done with his
life, he had had ample time to think and reflect and study. He had no need
to earn a living; he was occasionally obliged to invent a new ambition,
but that happened seldom, and once conceived, a single ambition often
lasted him for several years.
Echoing in the background of his mind, however, was the memory of how
he had felt discarded -- rejected -- abandoned.
Something in the eyes of this woman who (how?
How?
) corresponded to
the child he had once rescued was telling him unwelcome news. Somehow --
he groped for phrases that might explain her to him -- somehow, despite
all the suffering and the misjudgments and the privation she had told
him about (and how close all that was to, yet how fantastically different
from, the version recounted by Gorse!) she
had
found an identity.
Nothing to do with a name; she had borne Gallon and Tupper and Simpkins
and stuck to Barbara, the wild woman.
Nothing to do with advantage in the world; she had known misery of the
kind he fled from at twenty, ten years later in her life . . . and instead
of fleeing from it, built on it.
Something to do, perhaps, with pride?
Do I have pride?
He looked about him -- looked anywhere in the grand apartment except at her
-- and asked, for the first time: "Did I create that? Did I earn it? Did I
invent it or conceive it or design it?"
And felt the chilling knowledge overtake him:
Of course not. I simply accepted it when it was given.
Who have I been all these years? And, worse yet:
What have I
been?
He said at last, from a dry throat with a tongue that felt thicker than
normal, "The door's open. Leave if you want to."
She stood there, looking at him; a glint of light shone on her wet cheeks,
and almost as though it were independent of her will, her left hand sought
the door handle and turned it.
Not all the way, though. She released it with a jerk.
"But before I go," she said in a thin, faraway voice, "you must give me
Dora's address. At least!"
At that moment he admired her more than anyone he had ever met, for
he had finally reasoned out what she thought was happening to her.
She believed herself to be in the jaws of hell. She believed herself to
be the victim of a plot by Satan himself. And still she wanted to hear
news of the daughter who so grandly mocked and spited her.
"Were you raised as a Catholic?" he grated.
"Oh, sure! Of course I was -- eternal fires and the lot! And I thought I'd
escaped from all that. I thought I'd been deluded by fairy tales. Until
I met you, and now -- oh, I take my oath on it -- now I believe in the
devil again, now I believe in the sale of souls!"
"You see evil in me?" he said, in genuine astonishment.
"See it?" She gave a harsh croaking laugh. "Hear it, smell it, taste it
practically! I never met a monster before -- I thought I had, but you're
real and the rest were just pretend!"
"But
why
?" he barked. And she gave him the unanswerable response.
"Because you don't know what I mean when I tell you what you are!"
After a short eternity he was saying again, with dogged persistence,
"But it isn't like that! It
isn't
!"
She had calmed a little; she had regained enough confidence to sidle
away from the door, as though she had worked out that someone sold to
the forces of evil need not be totally evil, any more than a lion is
a predator directly after a filling meal. She drew closer, timorously,
and took his hand.
"I want to run and hide," she said. "And -- and it wouldn't break my
heart if I did lose Dora. I've expected her to cut loose and start her
own life for years. I mean, it runs in the family. But there's one thing
I can't stand, and that's the way you look. Your face! It's still the
face of the man who saved my life, and he was called Ransome, and he
must be old or dead by now and I can't
help
thinking you're him!"
She took a deep gasping breath.
"You wear the face of the man I fell in love with when I was ten. I wish
it weren't so. I wish I could throw away my memories. But I can't.
I'm haunted. Perhaps it's because I know what it is to be haunted that I
don't want to rush out and slam the door on somebody who's sold his soul."
Godwin said gratingly, "You wear the face of the girl I fell in love with
when she was ten."
Quickly, defensively: "But I -- "
"I know, I
know
! You weren't ten when I did what I think I did. When
you were ten, it wasn't me who did it. But who remembers properly? Whose
past is real and vivid like the present? I remember -- not my past --
what my past used to be like: permanently blurred, written more in cuts
and bruises than any mental record."
Even up to her last remark, Barbara had shown traces of incipient
drunkenness in her sibilants, thanks to the beer and sake she had had in
Hawali, on top of the margaritas which had gone before. Now, however,
she spoke in the cold analytical tones of a social worker faced with a
difficult client.
"And in those days," she inquired, "could you have talked about it
like that?"
"No," he said after a momentary hesitation. "No, I couldn't possibly."
"Why not?"
"I didn't . . . " He licked his lips. "I didn't have a vocabulary for it."
She urged -- no, coaxed -- him to the chair she had formerly sat in, and
reversed their roles, sitting down at his feet and staring at him with
fascination. She kept hold of his hand, and he detected that her skin
was moist with the cold sweat of fear. Yet she was compelling herself
to remain.
"So what the hell is it like?" she said at last, having made herself
comfortable. "I mean, you've shown me a bit of what's possible for you.
But I want to know -- I want to believe -- that . . . Oh,
shit
!" She gave
her thigh an angry slap. "I want to believe that what you've done to Dora
isn't bad!"
"You want to believe I didn't sell her soul?" he gibed.
"Wouldn't anybody want to believe that?"
"Me," he said with a shrug, "I never knew what a soul was or even whether
there was such a thing."
"Me neither, after I fought free of the Catholic chains they put my mind
in," she said, fishing out a cigarette and finding matches on a nearby
table which Godwin was unaware of. The alarming thought crossed his mind
that perhaps she knew his home better -- already! -- than he did.
But after so many hundred versions . . .
Against the impulse he said fiercely, "Well, I tell you one thing straight!
I never sold my soul, or hers, or anybody's! I know what goes on, and
sometimes I think I'm the only one!"
Very softly, turning so she could lean on his knee and gaze persuasively
up toward his face, she said, "Then explain.
But it had so little to do with words it defied his first attempt . . .
although he was at least relieved to find that when he did try he was
not instantly afflicted with the pangs of punishment.
Sensing his frustration, she suggested, "Well, how did it start?"
He was on the verge of saying, "I don't recall . . ." -- when he realized
he did, although indistinctly and as though at a great distance. A shiver
ran down his spine. He had a momentary vision of Irma removing other traces
of the past from him -- from his brain as well as from his body -- and was
seized by a brief spasm of pure rage. But getting angry was pointless.
Remembering, and in detail, and talking about what he remembered: that
was urgent.
How could he possibly have wondered whether he had counterparts who
also undertook recruiting? How could he have let recollection of his
own recruitment slide so far to the edge of awareness that months,
maybe years could wear away without him thinking of the subject?
That too got in the way. He said harshly, "There was a woman called Eunice.
Lived in St. John's Wood, in a tiny but exquisite house built by some
Victorian businessman for his mistress. She painted her face too much
because it was the fashion, but her body was incredible. She used to
say she'd been a ballerina, but once she admitted she was actually a
circus acrobat, and I believed that much more readily. She could twist
into positions you wouldn't believe. She was incredibly vain and got
her charge from keeping a string of adoring teenage lovers. There must
have been dozens of them. I don't know what she saw in me -- I mean,
the first time we met I was throwing up in the gutter outside a pub --
but I was the lucky one. She used to take me to Le Touquet and Deauville,
and Cannes in the winter -- all the smartest places. And she introduced me
to ballet and the theater, good food, good drink when and where it was
safe . . . Of course that meant at her place or our friends' places.
I wouldn't dare drink so much as a half of bitter anywhere else. Even
now." He repressed a shudder, gazing into the past.
"Christ, it was incredible, being exposed to a world like that. I couldn't
drive, of course, and I wanted to, so she got me taught by a friend who
used to race Alfas. Then I wanted to fly, and she arranged that too --
I used to go to Croydon or Stag Lane practically every day, met all the
people who were making headlines with speed records and long-distance
flights . . . It was marvelous. That's the only word for it: downright
bloody
marvelous
."
"And this is the same kind of thing you're doing for Dora?" Barbara said
after a pause.
"Well . . . Well, not me, exactly. But all of us."
"It sounds as though the magic can wear thin."
"I was doing fine until you walked into my life!" he snapped.
"My fault now, is it? The hell with that idea!" She had regained her
self-confidence completely; it was impossible to see in her the person
who had panted in terror before the door, begging him to let her out. "If
you're so convinced that what's happened to Dora is the best thing in the
world, why are you at such pains to try and convince me? Just because I'm
her mother? You don't give the impression of being a family-minded type."
He felt the need to justify himself at all costs. It was true that
sometimes he had wondered whether he had made the right decision;
however, every time he had come to the conclusion that there had been
no better choice. His life would otherwise have been a disaster: the
brief and hideous existence of a drunken tramp. He should have been
invulnerable to this sort of attack.
But it offended him dreadfully that this woman, who was (how?) the
counterpart of the little fair girl in the Blitz, should accuse him of
evil. How could what he did be evil? Gorse herself -- Dora -- could have
wound up on every possible kind of dope in a year or two, selling her
body for no more than the next shot of heroin!
He wanted desperately to say so, yet he was afraid she might close her
ears against him. Instead he muttered, "Because you said I sold her soul,
and it's
not like that
!"
"For the second time of asking," she countered, "what
is
it like?"
"Mostly it's like -- well, more like a rescue operation, you might say
. . ."
He made a helpless gesture, groping in the air for words he had never
expected to need. The possibility of explaining himself to a stranger had
never crossed his mind; it was not specifically forbidden, but without
such prompting as she was giving him it would automatically have been
dismissed from consciousness. The whole pattern of his existence had
for so long been dictated by the need to avoid being noticed.