Sugar and Other Stories (8 page)

He could not remember. He told the only truth he knew.

“He brought me in here.”

“Oh, what can I do, what am I going to
do
? If I killed myself — I have thought of that — but the idea that I should be with him is an illusion I … this silly situation is the nearest I shall ever get. To
him. He was
in here with me
?”

“Yes.”

And she was crying again. Out in the garden he could see the boy, swinging agile on the apple branch.

He was not quite sure, looking back, when he had thought he had realized what the boy had wanted him to do. This was also, at the party, his worst piece of what he called bowdlerization, though in some sense it was clearly the opposite of bowdlerization. He told the American girl that he had come to the conclusion that it was the woman herself who had wanted it, though there was in fact, throughout, no sign of her wanting anything except to see the boy, as she said. The boy, bolder and more frequent, had appeared several nights running on the landing, wandering in and out of bathrooms and bedrooms, restlessly, a little agitated, questing almost, until it had “come to” the man that what he required was to be re-engendered, for him, the man, to give to his mother another child, into which he could peacefully vanish. The idea was so clear that it was like another imperative, though he did not have the courage to ask the child to confirm it. Possibly this was out of delicacy — the child was too young to be talked to about sex. Possibly there were other reasons. Possibly he was mistaken: the situation was making him hysterical, he felt action of some kind was required and must be possible. He could not spend the rest of the summer, the rest of his life, describing nonexistent tee shirts and blond smiles.

He could think of no sensible way of embarking on his venture, so in the end simply walked into her bedroom one night. She was lying there, reading; when she saw him her instinctive gesture was to hide, not her bare arms and throat, but her book. She seemed, in fact, quite unsurprised to see his pyjamaed figure, and, after she had recovered her coolness, brought out the book definitely and laid it on the bedspread.

“My new taste in illegitimate literature. I keep them in a box
under the bed.”

Ena Twigg, Medium. The Infinite Hive. The Spirit World. Is There Life After Death?

“Pathetic,” she proffered.

He sat down delicately on the bed.

“Please, don’t grieve so. Please, let yourself be comforted. Please …”

He put an arm round her. She shuddered. He pulled her closer. He asked why she had had only the one son, and she seemed to understand the purport of his question, for she tried, angular and chilly, to lean on him a little, she became apparently compliant. “No real reason,” she assured him, no material reason. Just her husband’s profession and lack of inclination: that covered it.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “if she would be comforted a little, perhaps she could hope, perhaps …”

For comfort then, she said, dolefully, and lay back, pushing Ena Twigg off the bed with one fierce gesture, then lying placidly. He got in beside her, put his arms round her, kissed her cold cheek, thought of Anne, of what was never to be again. Come on, he said to the woman, you must live, you must try to live, let us hold each other for comfort.

She hissed at him “Don’t
talk
” between clenched teeth, so he stroked her lightly, over her nightdress, breasts and buttocks and long stiff legs, composed like an effigy on an Elizabethan tomb. She allowed this, trembling slightly, and then trembling violently: he took this to be a sign of some mixture of pleasure and pain, of the return of life to stone. He put a hand between her legs and she moved them heavily apart; he heaved himself over her and pushed, unsuccessfully. She was contorted and locked tight: frigid, he thought grimly, was not the word.
Rigor mortis
, his mind said to him, before she began to scream.

He was ridiculously cross about this. He jumped away and said quite rudely, “Shut up,” and then ungraciously, “I’m sorry.” She stopped screaming as suddenly as she had begun and made one of her painstaking economical explanations.

“Sex and death don’t go. I can’t afford to let go of my grip on myself. I hoped. What you hoped. It was a bad idea. I apologize.”

“Oh, never mind,” he said and rushed out again on to the landing, feeling foolish and almost in tears for warm, lovely Anne.

The child was on the landing, waiting. When the man saw him, he looked questioning, and then turned his face against the wall and leant there, rigid, his shoulders hunched, his hair hiding his expression. There was a similarity between woman and child. The man felt, for the first time, almost uncharitable towards the boy, and then felt something else.

“Look, I’m sorry. I tried. I did try. Please turn round.”

Uncompromising, rigid, clenched back view.

“Oh well,” said the man, and went into his bedroom.

So now, he said to the American woman at the party, I feel a fool, I feel embarrassed, I feel we are hurting, not helping each other, I feel it isn’t a refuge. Of course you feel that, she said, of course you’re right — it was temporarily necessary, it helped both of you, but you’ve got to live your life. Yes, he said, I’ve done my best, I’ve tried to get through, I have my life to live. Look, she said, I want to help, I really do, I have these wonderful friends I’m renting this flat from, why don’t you come, just for a few days, just for a break, why don’t you? They’re real sympathetic people, you’d like them, I like them, you could get your emotions kind of straightened out. She’d probably be glad to see the back of you, she must feel as bad as you do, she’s got to relate to her situation in her own way in the end. We all have.

He said he would think about it. He knew he had elected to tell the sympathetic American because he had sensed she would be — would offer — a way out. He had to get out. He took her home from the party and went back to his house and landlady without seeing her into her flat. They both knew that this reticence was promising — that he hadn’t come in then, because he meant to
come later. Her warmth and readiness were like sunshine, she was open. He did not know what to say to the woman.

In fact, she made it easy for him: she asked, briskly, if he now found it perhaps uncomfortable to stay, and he replied that he had felt he should move on, he was of so little use … Very well, she had agreed, and had added crisply that it had to be better for everyone if “all this” came to an end. He remembered the firmness with which she had told him that no illusions were pleasant. She was strong: too strong for her own good. It would take years to wear away that stony, closed, simply surviving insensibility. It was not his job. He would go. All the same, he felt bad

He got out his suitcases and put some things in them. He went down to the garden, nervously, and put away the deck-chair. The garden was empty. There were no voices over the wall. The silence was thick and deadening. He wondered, knowing he would not see the boy again, if anyone else would do so, or if, now he was gone, no one would describe a tee shirt, a sandal, a smile, seen, remembered, or desired. He went slowly up to his room again.

The boy was sitting on his suitcase, arms crossed, face frowning and serious. He held the man’s look for a long moment, and then the man went and sat on his bed. The boy continued to sit. The man found himself speaking.

“You do see I have to go? I’ve tried to get through. I can’t get through. I’m no use to you, am I?”

The boy remained immobile, his head on one side, considering. The man stood up and walked towards him.

“Please. Let me go. What are we, in this house? A man and a woman and a child, and none of us can get through. You can’t want that?”

He went as close as he dared. He had, he thought, the intention
of putting his hand on or through the child. But could not bring himself to feel there was no boy. So he stood, and repeated,

“I can’t get through. Do you want me to stay?”

Upon which, as he stood helplessly there, the boy turned on him again the brilliant, open, confiding, beautiful desired smile.

The two young men in the front of the hearse had rolled up their shirtsleeves, very neatly, and opened the windows. They were basking a little, parked on the tarmac. You couldn’t blame them. It was so hot out there, incandescent you might say, if that were not an unfortunate choice of word. Joanna Hope, stepping out of the dark chapel into the bright sun, blinked tearlessly and looked at them with approval. They were sleekly and pleasantly alive. They had brought her mother to that place safely and would not be wanted to take her anywhere else. Behind her Mrs Stillingfleet plucked at her sleeve and said they must wait for the smoke. Mrs Stillingfleet’s eyes were wet and screwed-up, though not flowing. Behind Mrs Stillingfleet Nurse Dawes and the minister were both solemn and dry-eyed. They constituted the whole party.

“The smoke,” echoed Joanna, not at first understanding, and then, catching up, affirmatively, “of course, the smoke.” The garden of remembrance stretched away enticingly in the bright light, still under arching boughs, bright with roses, crimson, gold and white. She had chosen Pink Perpetue to commemorate her mother, who had been very fond of pink, who had lain only ten minutes ago inside her satin casing clothed in a soft pink silk nightdress Joanna had once bought for her in Hong Kong, which she had always declared too good to wear. Joanna looked up at the sky above the chimney; a 1920s brick chimney, slightly cottagey. The sky was a hot dark blue and the air danced a little, reminding Joanna, inappositely, of the simmering heat on the North African desert where she had sat, by the hour, in a jeep, counting the intermittent traffic, six camels, two mules, three lorries, two land-rovers, sixteen tramping, burdened women. She remembered Mike’s wrist next to hers, holding the clipboard,
gold hairs and sweat round the canvas strap of his watch. The smoke, creamy and dense, began to stain the still dancing blue. Joanna fancied she saw fine filaments of papery black in it. Her body shook with an emotion to which, firmly and with shame, she put a name. It was elation. It had been sweeping across her, intermittently and more and more strongly, ever since Nurse Dawes had woken her in the small hours to break the sad news. Her mother was free carbon molecules and potash. It was the end. She had dutifully given her mother a large part of her life, for which she had been castigated and thanked. Now it was over. It was the end. “She’s in a better place now, I know it,” said Mrs Stillingfleet, looking round at the silent rosy alleys. “She’s at peace.” Joanna nodded, not wanting to contradict. For herself, she was absolutely sure that there was no
better
place, that the end was the end. She thought Mrs Stillingfleet, who had borne her mother’s mocks and scorn and disparagement with almost saintly patience, might have been glad to think so too. She had told Mrs Stillingfleet that Molly Hope had left her λ500, which was not true; Joanna had suggested it and Molly had replied tartly that she hardly did enough to earn the very generous wages she received, let alone any posthumous bonus. Without Mrs Stillingfleet, and latterly Nurse Dawes, Joanna herself could not have gone on. She was also beholden to the Economic Development Survey, who had kept her on, during all the years of Molly’s immobility, without insisting that she did any foreign tours or fieldwork. She had mastered the computer, and processed other people’s statistics. She co-ordinated. Now at last the world was all before her, as she had intended, when choosing her profession. Except that now, she was fifty-nine.

The house, now her house, was still full of her mother’s presence. Little sounds, scratchings and rattles, were automatically translated by Joanna as her mother putting down teacups on the Russian metal tray, or rearranging the tooth mugs in the bathroom. She went into her own bedroom, the bedroom of her early
days at the Survey, of her father’s precipitate and still unexplained retirement from the Ministry of Defence. Her own eyes met her steadily from the mirror. A handsome, tall, thin woman in white-spotted navy-blue pleated silk, her well-cut hair heavily flecked with silver. The room was north-facing, and outside was the road. Her parents’ bedroom, and her mother’s later downstairs room, once the breakfast room, faced south onto the garden for which the house had been bought. I shall sell this house, she thought, safely inside this admittedly chilly room. I shall start again. Not precipitately: I need to think things out. The room had no character, and dark green silk hangings. Stairs creaked under no foot. Joanna went out and toured all the empty rooms. They were instinct with her mother’s presence and absence in about equal proportions. The presence was worst inside the wardrobe — some of the small pastel crimplene dresses still held Molly’s increasingly angular shape. In a dark depth she saw her father’s burberry and his gardening jacket. He had been dead twelve years. A tweed hat of his, pale-blue herringbone, gathered dust on a shelf. She herself, over the years, had given away most things, driving down to the Salvation Army with dark suits folded into black plastic binliners. Dark suits were particularly useful to the Salvation Army. They rendered the unemployed respectable for interviews for jobs. They gave them a chance. Joanna had never understood the indifference with which Molly had accepted Donald’s persisting presence, in the shape of his things, after he was gone. She had never even moved his empty twin bed out from beside her own: she lay there at night, under her fringed, clip-on reading lamp, receiving her Benger’s Food from Joanna, sometimes carping, sometimes gracious, and beyond her in the shadows was the square outline of his mattress, naked under a shotsilk counterpane, and an identical reading-lamp, dangling its egg-shaped switch, extinguished.

Both these beds were now empty: so was Molly’s more recent downstairs bed, in the most pleasant room, with its bay overlooking the lawn, and hung with wisteria and summer jasmine. Her
dressing-gown was still across the foot of this bed: her alarm clock still ticked beside it. Joanna, moved by grief and a ferocious need to clear all this away, dropped both of them into the woven cane linen-basket, pale green, braid-trimmed. She heard the clock cluck in protest, and felt an absence of outrage, in which she felt herself expand, as though she could skip in this room, or shout, or whirl around, and no one would hear to condemn. She added the hairbrush. There was something terrible and pathetic in the last shining white hairs in its thick, real bristles. She listened to the empty silence. Outside on the lawn, a thrush churred. She stood in the bay and looked at the bird, strutting busily, staring arrogantly about it. The lawn was white with daisies and pink with fallen petals from the rose pergola. The garden was at its loveliest, in the summer sun. Her father’s ashes had been scattered at the feet of these climbing roses; she and Molly had done it together, in silence and disaccord. Molly objected to the pergola which she called “your father’s folly”. She was right that it was too large and obtrusive for the space it occupied. But he had loved it, had loved Albertine, and Madame Alfred Carrière and Mme Grégoire Staechelin. Joanna liked to think that he now, perhaps, was indissolubly part of these vegetable beauties, climbing and tumbling and breathing over the wooden arch. She had not known him very well and had not understood him at all: he was mediated for her by Molly’s disappointment, disapproval, wrath and disgust. Now in Molly’s empty room she looked out at his pergola and thought of him in peace.