The Watch Tower (14 page)

Dr. Bell sat behind his desk—a busy, prosperous man of forty-five, with olive skin, close-cropped black hair and serious social aspirations.

Clare Vaizey sat with her left hand bandaged in her lap. Her sister, whom he had seen the night the girl was admitted to hospital, had come back for the last visit with her. She was watching him now—an ordinary, timid housewife, hard-working (he looked at her hands) and short of money (he looked at her clothes).

He turned to Clare. ‘I suppose you know it’s no thanks to you that you’ve still got two hands? If you’d deliberately set out to have that amputated, you couldn’t have done better. Tetanus is no joke, is it?’

She gave him a steady look.

‘You had a good chance of killing yourself right off. You know that, too, don’t you? Yes, I think you’ve learned your lesson.’

She regarded him. This had all happened as he said, and with its happening a great stillness and silence had fallen in her, as though she contained in herself and looked out on the windless fields of eternity.

‘If you give yourself another infected hand I don’t think you’ll start gardening with it in such a hurry.’ He
looked at his notes. The sister had brought up a number of extraneous symptoms and troubles, wanting more than her money’s worth in the usual way. ‘Your sister tells me you still have nightmares about the war. But that’s all over. It’s pure
imagination. Morbid. I’d advise
you
,’
he turned to Laura with condescending facetiousness, ‘to wear ear-plugs at night so that she doesn’t wake you. And as for
you
,’
he looked back at the younger girl, ‘I’d advise you to give up all this reading your sister talks about. Where do you think that’ll get you? I don’t know what you people expect out of life. Get yourself a job with more variety. Go out and get yourself married and have a baby. You won’t have time for books and gardening with poisoned hands then!’

Clare saw that there was no limit to what he felt he might say to her. He was quite fascinating in a way. But of course it was not fair to sit like silent Cassandras in the surgery of an up-and-coming doctor who only wanted to be very rich and associate with the right people.

Catching her eye, Dr. Bell allowed himself to hector her a little more because—well, it was not likely that anyone would stop him. An attractive girl, with those thin brown arms, grey eyes, and fair hair to her shoulders what did she mean by treating him as though he were—just anybody? At the door he repeated, ‘I don’t know what you people expect out of life,’ and gave a short affected whinny. He was a handsome man with
smooth olive skin.

‘“You people!”’ Clare said, unlatching the gate and walking out on to the footpath. ‘What does he know?’ She let her leather bag bump against her knees.

Laura looked at the suburban gardens lining the street, stark new rose bushes, straggly stock. ‘I wish I knew as much,’ she protested.

‘You know more.’

Laura laughed and looked interested. ‘You wouldn’t like me to take out your appendix.’

‘If you’d learned how to do it, you would do it better.’

Flattered, Laura laughed again and pictured herself, white-clad and competent, conducting an appendectomy.

‘But you’ll have to do what he says, Clare. You’ve been very sick. All these weeks in hospital. You’re really very lucky to be alive. Felix has been terribly upset.’

‘I know he has.’

‘We’ve both been very worried.’

‘Yes.’ She allowed that. They had been genuinely startled, and had had something new to say to each other.

They walked along the quiet street. Clare said nothing. What did it matter what Laura said, or the doctor, or what she answered? The uselessness of having plans, taking action, was truly amazing to her. Tendrils of initiative were thrown out for no other purpose, it began to seem, than to be pruned back. She
felt an amorphous, cold awareness of the existence of some force, and not a friendly one, powerful, invisible, voiceless, armed with shears and choppers, ranging the world for hope to kill.

Laura opened the door and two voices came from the front of the house—a lecturer’s cultivated drawl and Felix’s hoarse growl as he argued back at the wireless.

‘
Who
says? You think so, do you? Bloody mug! Bloody professors! Christ, I’m hostile to you blokes!’

In the familiar way, Clare became conscious of her heart in her chest beating unevenly, fatigued, of her blood receding.

‘Go to your room and if he remembers to ask what happened, I’ll just tell him you’ve been ordered to get a different job and stop reading.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if I did it?’

‘No.’

‘He didn’t like you coming tonight. And he’d had a lot even before we left.’

‘Lock the door.’

Abhorring her boredom and weariness and the ease with which Laura resumed her armour of apprehension, Clare gave a soundless groan and went to her room. Leaving the door ajar, she leaned against the wall listening, arms and legs crossed in a classic pose of idleness. Bandaged hand, fuschia-coloured carnations in a crystal vase, stool, chair, bed, curtains—the windows were black reflecting mirrors now. Night already. Again. Always night, always day, always
waiting like this—

She was alive and could have been dead with all the slippery acquiescence of the world. She had not aimed as high as death, but she had been prepared to give her hand for her independence.
They
were not to damage her most. In her own way she would be free. In the only way she would outreach them. She would go so far in damaging herself that they could never hope to touch her.

The wireless was turned off. Glass clinked against glass.

‘Her—that thing—what do I care if she goes? Good riddance! Rotten stinking women—fat, filthy—vomit—Don’t you, you—’

Clare listened, without a change of expression, only unfolding her arms because she found it hard to breathe.

I see, I see, she thought, almost politely, as if someone was explaining a new and astounding fact to her. At the same time she wanted to drop to her knees with grief and mourning. And she attended, too, to an idea that emerged from the centre of her mind to stand brightly lighted:
he could kill
.

Words like poison continued to insert themselves in her ears, and she heard them with a faint smile of horror. Dangerous. Even at a distance, he was that. Because thoughts had power. He had the desire to torture and, perhaps, a talent for murder that he had not yet tapped. Carefully, she closed her door, saying
softly, ‘Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.’

Half an hour later, when Laura came tiptoeing in, Clare had her clothes packed.

‘I’m going, Laura. Don’t try to stop me this time. Let me go without—
us—
having to thrash anything out. I just can’t bear it!’

‘No!’ Laura said angrily, glaring at the two suitcases. ‘You’re under age. I’m your guardian legally. Where could you go? You haven’t got a shilling.’

‘What does that matter?’ she said savagely. ‘A little sense of proportion, Laura! Where I’m going if I stay here is insane. I don’t care where I go. I’ll go to a police station. I’ll sleep in a park. What does it matter?’

‘They’d bring you straight back here. I’d ring them up. You haven’t got a job if you leave the factory. You don’t know a single soul to go to. He doesn’t want you to leave, you know that. In many ways he takes more notice of you and what you say than of anyone, and he hates the house to be empty. That’s what’s caused half the trouble—you shut up in your room reading at night, or out walking, or going out with these silly little girls and boys. He wants you to—just—sit in with us at night and listen to him telling the politicians what to do with the world.’

‘Don’t I? It’s all I do! I’m like a prisoner! We both are!’ Tears, anger, sheer incredulity at the madness and stupidity of their lives choked her.

‘I know we’ve heard it all before, but it doesn’t
hurt much. It isn’t much to ask.’

Laura took a clean handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and rubbed at the dressing-table, tremendously defiant.

‘It does hurt. It is much to ask,’ Clare cried passionately, watching her sister’s actions automatically. ‘What about us? What are we? I mean—are we both supposed to exist just as a sort of hobby for Felix? All these years! Maybe you don’t want a life for yourself. I do. I’m a person, too. Not a wooden toy you pick up and put down. I’m a person. Why is my life so much less important than Felix’s? How can you
let
him talk to you the way he does? Oh, Laura. The war’s over. There’s more—there’s everything.’

Laura was watching her with a grim, almost amused, incomprehension.

‘No, listen!’ Clare pleaded, crying. ‘Listen. There are people who are saints, and temples thousands of years old, Laura, and camel trains crossing the deserts. Cities are broken to pieces, and people are climbing mountains and making pilgrimages to Mecca. There’s beauty and terror and so much more than we know. Nothing is this small.’

‘You’re hysterical,’ Laura said contemptuously.

‘No!
There is very much—
life doesn’t have to be like this. I don’t believe it. I
know
it doesn’t.’ Clare turned away, leaning into the corner by the windows.

‘Stop crying,’ Laura said unconvincingly. She was
awkwardly embarrassed, as if an importunate stranger had walked in at the back door and made demands on her emotions. ‘Anyone would think you were losing your mind if they heard you carrying on like this. You’re hysterical. You’re still nervy after being ill, that’s what it is.’ Laura rubbed again at a non-existent mark on the dressing-table, willing the dreadful sounds to stop.

‘
Will you speak the truth
?’
Venomous, piteous, Clare’s voice rose to a scream as she turned from the wall, tears pouring from her eyes. ‘You never, never can admit the truth. I want to be free! That’s not unnatural! I do not want to make artificial flowers in a factory all my life. Why should I? You want me to abase myself before him the way you do. I won’t do it! I hate him! I won’t do it! I’m too—’

In a way, she was wonderful. She felt she was. She could do anything. There was something she had to do.

Laura said uncomfortably, ‘I know he’s been nasty tonight, and you’ve been very sick, but he didn’t mean to be. Stop crying. You shouldn’t have been listening. I told you not to. What would have happened to us, anyway, if it hadn’t been for Felix?’

‘For God’s sake! Can’t you be honest for one moment? What has? What has happened to us?’

‘Lower your voice! And I won’t have any of that language, Clare, if you don’t mind. Look at this lovely room! Look at—At the very least he kept you till
you started work. Our own mother didn’t do that. Felix did.’

‘
You
did.
He
didn’t. You’ve worked harder even than you did before you married him, and still had to be under an obligation because of me. But anyway—’

She sat on the bed and wiped her face with her bandaged hand.

‘Here.’ Laura tossed a box of ‘Kleenex’ over to her impatiently, but it fell disregarded to the floor. Laura unknotted and knotted the green silk scarf at her throat. This abandoned display of emotion made her feel pestered and unclean, but not agitated, not sympathetic. The result of all this, the result, was what she cared about.

Clare gave a shuddering sigh. Head hanging, eyes closed, she sat in a dull trance, empty of everything but deep spasmodic sighs. With the need for air she raised her head at last, and Laura’s shaking fingers fiddling with her scarf halted her listless eyes. Empty, salty, laid waste, not a person at all, Clare nevertheless kept her eyes focused on her sister and without thinking began to be aware of certain facts about her. Laura looked queerly mortal. Insubstantial. She was almost innocently shifty and scheming—desperate. But underneath that she was supplicating. Clare’s heart turned over with compassion.

‘If I have kept you then,’ Laura said, breaking away from Clare’s pitiless observation, ‘you might do
this for me. Not worry me like this. Think of someone else for a change. How can I let you disappear into the city? If you went, I would never want to see you again, Clare. That’s the truth. Felix would hate it, too. In his own funny way, he thinks the world of you. Even at the factory they’ve said to me that you could do anything with him if you handled him the right way.’

‘Handled.’ Clare moved her shoulders uneasily, beyond revulsion. They had said that, and more than that. They said it as if she should be flattered. If she would only pander to Felix, everyone would be happy. How could Laura exact this of her in the first place? And in the second, had she forgotten that he
was
pandered to? And what was the result?

Out of a deadly misery and extreme physical weakness, she began to cry again till it seemed inconceivable even to Laura that there should be no consolation for such unhappiness. But she watched with distaste and curiosity. Through the bedcover, through her ears, skin, fingers, alarm began to reach Clare. Heaving herself up she looked about and saw her staring sister and almost groaned with outrage and anger. ‘Go
away
,
go
away
.
Leave me alone, for God’s sake!’

Laura spoke hotly for two or three minutes, then went out. Clare took her hands from her ears, rose and locked the door and, switching off the light, went to the window and opened it wide. She knelt down and leaned out into the night, breathing the smell of darkness,
grass, trees and sea. (There
was
consolation.) The sky was exceedingly dark, vast and high; without light. The moon had not risen. The stars were merest points.

Clare stared up into the cold blackness and heard the wind rising and felt its bombardment against her head and arms and chest. Blackness all about and above. The night existed, forbidding, unfeeling. Anything was bearable. The wind was clean and undemanding. Blotted out in the tremendous night, in the midst of it, she was at home. In a way, all she had was herself and the sky. If she looked down from it, there were asphalt streets, cement footpaths, tight little bungalows, ripe gardens, and scratchy ones, hovels, crowded reverberating streets in the city, advertising, dust, nothing wonderful, no work of genius, only the monotonous harbour, dead from being over-admired by its suburban landlords. But this wild and unconsoling view of the universe, with its everlasting indifference could do much—do much—