Sugar and Other Stories (21 page)

Fear is perhaps also hereditary. Josephine’s mother had had a mild and for others disagreeable case of agoraphobia, which had worsened as she grew older, with what Josephine’s father, bewildered, socially embarrassed, lonely, called indulgence. When Josephine was five or six her overwrapped mother would take her overwrapped daughter as far as the local school and had been known to go as far as the public library. By the time Josephine was fourteen, at boarding school, Josephine’s mother rarely ventured outside her bedroom, and became giddy even in the back garden. She had never said — Josephine had never supposed it would be worth asking —
what
she feared, and her daughter had been left to imagine. She remembered her mother veering in agitation out of a bus queue in which they had been standing side by side in uncompanionable silence, running up the road, dropping books and paper bags of plums and carrots. What was frightening about bus stops? It was more understandable that the doorbell should arouse terror. Josephine, who had had to negotiate the Kleen-e-ze man, the meter-readers, the doctor himself, saw all these as menacing. How much more menacing were the laughing large girls in the school dormitory, who threw pillows, who launched themselves on each other’s beds, who
ragged and mocked the thin child she was, shaking in her liberty bodice? She had been saved, if she had been saved, by the solitary and sensuous pleasure of writing out her fear. Already in the boiler-room of St Clare’s School she was writing clumsy tales of justified terror, of bounding packs of girls who accidentally squeezed the last breath out of their pathetic prey, of lost, voiceless sufferers locked in cupboards and accidentally forgotten. The boiler-room had been thick with coal-dust: a scree of coke sloped up to a closed and cobwebbed window under the area and the pavement. If she opened the boiler door the flames hissed and roared and the coke-dust glittered here and there. She collected things: a blanket, a bicycle lamp, an old sweater, a biscuit tin, a special box for pens, a folder that lived there. She squeezed into her burrow, through pipe-gaps too narrow to take a larger girl or member of staff. Sometimes she sacrificed bad writing to the boiler, whose angry red turned briefly golden. When she wrote about Simon Vowle the coke-smell came back in its ancient fustiness and bitterness. Simon Vowle was an exorcism. The woman who could make and observe him was not doomed to relive her mother’s curious arrested life —
was not
?

Henry Smee and Josephine sat in front of the kitchen stove, drinking powdered coffee. Henry was eating an apple, a Cox’s Orange Pippin, which Josephine had given him. He looked as though the sound his teeth made, driving through the crackling apple-flesh, distressed or embarrassed him in the silence. He sat on a bench, his knees tight together, his thin ankles in his slippers whitely together. When he was not eating he held his hands together, pointing downwards, between his knees. Josephine wanted to be in bed. She, like Henry, suffered from insomnia, but she would rather have been reading. At three in the morning she fended off fear with long narrative poems, at once difficult verbally and offering another imagined world to enter. She asked Henry how his work was going at the library and he replied that their classification system was crazy and made a lot of unnecessary
work: they think books are just things of a certain size, said Henry.

And then he said, “I read
The Boiler-Room.
”

“Ah yes.”

“Max told me to read it and I read it.”

“Good.”

“Simon Vowle.” said Henry, and stopped. “Simon Vowle.” It was a terrible effort for him. He was shaking. His coffee cup shook and he had to put it down. Josephine, who might have taken pleasure in writing about the pain it was for him to make any direct communication, nevertheless made no effort to help him.

“How do you
know
about Simon Vowle? He — he does little — intimate things — plays little games with himself —
you
know, naturally, why am I telling you? — that I thought only I knew about. I thought only I —”

Josephine was more than reluctant to embark on this conversation. She answered, flippantly for her, “I know by observation. It’s not uncommon. People grow out of it.”

“Oh no,” said Henry Smee. His glasses were steamed up. He took them off and turned to her a blind, seeking, vulnerable face. “The world is more terrible than most people ever let themselves imagine. Isn’t it?”

She should have asked him, what are you afraid of? She was afraid of him. She said, wilfully, “Surely not at St Edmund’s, with people like Max? I sent my Peter there because it was such a friendly place.”

“It isn’t —” He twisted his useless hands in his dressing-gown. “It isn’t — friendly to everyone. It isn’t possible. They are impossible people.”

“I’m very fond of Max,” said Josephine’s respectable voice.

“I wasn’t happy.”

“You will grow out of it. We all have to.”

“Oh no. You don’t — understand. No — you do — you wrote — You won’t understand.”

“I get tired at three in the morning.”

“Of course. I’ll go to bed. Of course.”

He rose jerkily and made off, a shuffle, a tentative stepping. Max had sent him to her for help. She had not helped. She put his apple core in the bin and wiped and wiped her softly shining table top.

After this, she became continuously afraid of Henry Smee. When she was working she listened for his quiet tread in her house, when she was cooking she waited for him to slide round the door and stand uselessly erect just inside it, waiting for something or nothing defined. She felt above all threatened by his reading of Simon Vowle. Simon Vowle was herself, was Josephine Piper: there was no room for another. Writers are commonly asked what reader they imagine. There are writers, believe it, and Josephine Piper was one of them, who can only function by imagining no reader. Simon was her own fear, circumscribed and set up independently. Henry’s presence in her house, reading Simon and, terrible phrase, but here for once peculiarly apposite, “identifying with” Simon, was a blow at her own carefully created, carefully worked, independent identity. She developed, for the first time in her busy life, a writer’s block. All the people she invented had Henry Smee’s face, his nervous mannerisms, his soft scornful-frightened voice. Her freedom had gone, the freedom with which she had imaginatively looked out from inside the other skull of Simon Vowle, seeing the other boiler-room, the different coke-heap, smelling through his nostrils the fustiness and bitterness.

Josephine was her own creation, as was separate Simon, as were the troop of other precursors and avatars of Simon. Josephine had made herself, with an effort of will, in opposition to her mother’s fear, and what that might have made of her. She had said to herself, there
will
be a warm, friendly house, people
shall
come freely in and out, they will be made welcome amongst nice things. The warm and welcoming place, which now existed, was
not, she knew, a true expression of herself. It was what she knew must be. What she was, was the obsessive hider in the boiler-room dust. Her husband, Peter’s father, after five years of living in the warm place, eating the good food, had left her for a sillier, more slapdash woman, who did little or nothing with her time, who laughed a lot. People had asked each other, and had even asked Josephine, how he could do this. Josephine did not ask herself. She knew. He had found her out. She did not mind the loss of him too much. A strain had gone, as well as a motive for living. She had had Peter still. She made a home for Peter.

Peter had been so cheerful. So outgoing. Even as a little boy he ran fearlessly up to people on buses or railway stations. He brought friends home, one after the other, and seemed in no doubt that they would go home well-fed and well-entertained. She had had her guard up: had never let him see or sense her fear. She had talked to Peter, only ever really to Peter. He had become so involved in the selection and entertainment of the Lost Boys. She had perhaps not noticed that he had other fears. He did not have the uncompromising intellect of Josephine and Henry Smee. Exams were hard for him: he struggled to become qualified and went off to do a course, carefully selected by him and Josephine as “human”, in Communications at a polytechnic in a southern port. It was not until it had been going on for some months that Josephine learned that he was attending no classes, and then not from him. He spent all his time helping a group who brought soup to ragged sleepers in parks and subways, who helped squatters to break into empty council flats or bourgeois houses, who were not above taking what they saw as necessities from supermarkets. Josephine went to see him once: he was living in a squat himself, long-bearded in layers of holed and smelly sweaters and cardigans. Josephine said “Why?” and Peter simply smiled pleasantly and told her he was happy enough. As though something was self-evident that to Josephine was not self-evident at all. He seemed unnaturally
easy
— easy-going, his body shambling and over-relaxed. Was this a new form of fear? Were the meths drinkers the
logical culmination of the Lost Boys? Had he, later than his father, sensed that it was all made up, the warm firelight, the clean clothes, the open door, the smell of cooking? He smelled, her son, of old drains, of dirty wool, of damp ashes. Josephine blamed herself, but without her usual clarity about how and where precisely she had done wrong. Perhaps she had not done wrong. She simply was wrong.

Her bedroom was hers in a way the rest of the house was not. It was a small cell. She had moved calmly out of the conjugal master bedroom to what had been a servant’s small box, next to what might have been the nursery, a place where a nurserymaid might have heard crying in the night and come. She had her old childhood bed, with cast iron head and foot, a small chest with a mirror over it, a table with a reading lamp, a peg rug on polished boards. She had not even a bookcase — books were brought in and out of this little place, but their soft colours brightened other walls. One night, perhaps a week after Henry Smee had brought himself to try to speak of Simon Vowle, and had been discouraged, she came home from a dinner and listened fearfully at the foot of the stair, as the mini-cab drove away, for Henry Smee’s inexorable tentative tread. The kitchen was dark and empty, the stove cold. She went up, sighed, closed herself into her small room and began to scream. He was doing nothing very fearful: simply studying his own face, sitting on the end of her bed, in her square of mirror, in the light given by the street lamp. As she came in what she in fact saw was his reflected image staring at her out of the square of dark glass, lit up oddly by the light from the landing, through the door over her own shoulder. One of her drawers was slightly open, as though he might have been seeking out gloves or stockings, trying them on for fit, though this was entirely in her imagination, this trying-on, this appropriation. The only evidence was the open drawer, and she might have left that herself, in a hurry to leave. It was unlike her, particularly in here, but she might. His moon-face in the glass was distraught and
glittering, eyeless because his glasses reflected reflection. His mouth was open in a great cry, but he made no sound. All the sound was her own screaming. He was white, and she thought again, he has taken my make-up: there was a faint smell of eau de Cologne and violets. But the white was surely his natural whiteness, the Simon Vowle paleness she had used to such good effect, lit up by the sodium lighting in the street.

“Get out,” shrieked Josephine Piper, losing the self-control which, with the rhythm of her sentences, was what she most prized in herself, “get out, get out of my house, I can’t bear any more of this, I can’t bear your creeping, get out of my house now this minute or anyway tomorrow.”

He closed his mouth, then, and smiled a small circumscribed and satisfied little smile.

“Of course,” he said. “Now this minute or tomorrow, of course I’ll get out.”

“It was shock,” said Josephine as he edged round her. “Only shock.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Henry Smee.

He went, the next day. She did not try to stop him. In a month or two Max McKinley rang to break it to her, which he did with circumspection and tact, that Henry Smee was dead, that he had swallowed a bottle of aspirin, just before he was due to take up his place at university. For a moment Josephine’s imagination presented Henry Smee to her, as though there still was a Henry Smee, the pale creeping, the compressed mouth, the thin legs in drooping trousers, the outside of Henry Smee whose inside was unknown and unimagined. Whose inside she had refused to imagine. But Josephine could not go on, quite apart from feeling that it was indecent to go on, to imagine the making of the decision, the number of aspirins, the waiting. Her imagination tidied Henry Smee into a mnemonic, a barely specified bed, a barely specified bottle, a form with one outflung arm. She said to Max McKinley, “I didn’t know, I never got a sense of what drove
him, he was so closed-in, how terrible.” And Max said, “We failed him, we all failed him.” And Josephine agreed.

But the writing-block went. The next day she was able to start again with nothing and no one between her and the present Simon Vowle, a writer at work, making a separate world, with no inconvenient reader or importunate character in the house. The ghost of those limp yet skilful hands, just that, attached itself to the form of the present Simon (whose name was in fact James) but not so that anyone would have noticed.

“The mean sea-level pressure at Brize Norton was one thousand and twelve millibars, steady. The outlook for Thursday; sun and showers, some of them heavy, with the chance of thundery outbreaks in places. Thank you for calling.”

Mrs Sugden put down the telephone reluctantly. Today’s voice was the reassuring good schoolmistress, her favourite. She preferred the female voices, which included also the breathy young thing in a hurry and a slightly doleful Midland bus-conductress type. The men included a military rasper, a stumbling student and a cheeky Liverpudlian who enjoyed frightening her with hail and gales, who livened up perceptibly with prophecies of disaster. Sometimes, shamefully, she listened to the schoolmistress twice, for company, although her memory was not failing and she had taken in all the information the first time. It was shaming in the way her increased television-watching was shaming. In her schoolteaching days she had always urged the children not to sit passively in front of the box. Make your own lives, she had said, see real friends, do real things, your things. Now she saw the insidious pleasure of the company, the voices in the room. She watched a brilliant ribbon of gardening and death-dealing, skating, Shakespeare and endless news. She drew the line at chat shows. She hated compères who smiled at her, sucking her into the front row of their perpetual stalls, or invading her private space with their horribly public intimacies and preening. Voices was one thing, false friends another. Those were the real fantasies.