The Convalescent Read online

  “This is the Commission for North Africa?” William asked, not caring if his question should seem like a criticism.

  “It is indeed,” the gruff minister replied. “As you will see.”

  The aircraft tilted against the sun. The pressure of William’s feet on the floor was not that of apprehension but of acceptance, resolve. He was going where he was going. Had he been asked, he might have chosen to go later, but he couldn’t easily have said why later would have been preferable. Who knew where he stood until demands were made? He took it as a good sign that he had chosen to sit beside the gruff minister, and that he was quite at ease with his decision, taken before departure, not to speak much. It didn’t even seem to be an impertinence to read now and then over the minister’s shoulder. “Can The Church look inwards and outwards at the same time? How can two such different but necessary functions be combined without confusion?” Nor did it seem an impertinence to try to gauge the minister’s smell. Aftershave, yes, but what else? What was this desolate dryness underneath? Questions formed themselves in William’s head which, had he been sure that he was flying to his death, he might have asked. “Are you as dry as this because you have forgotten your sins? Never confessed to fear? Never rejoiced?”

  The course of the aircraft was settled. The gruff minister dozed above The Church Times. His hands, tense even in sleep, had thrust the paper into his crotch. William read that it might become necessary for two or three ministers to share a parish. The young lady from Edinburgh three times turned in her seat and smiled at him. He nodded back, soberly, anxious not to make her a fan. Everyone else, composed by the drone of the engines, appeared to be sleeping.

  After his assurances to Sophie (she had been sullen and irritated) that he would return – that he was not embarking on a new career – and his letter to Margo (it was as if the decision to go abroad had emboldened him, made him feel that he had the right to address her) telling her what had been happening to him, William was glad to sit still.

  At the other airport the light was brighter, harsher, and outside it was very still. Through the airport windows the palm trees appeared black, not green. Someone who was to have met the Commission had not turned up. The joker was silent and so was his fan. Now, though, the leader of the Commission emerged, or was thrown up by the setback. He had a sort of smiling meditativeness, as though he too had been a joker once but, denied fans, had decided on the more complicated business of amusing himself. His face was grey, grey and broad, his lips alert even in repose, the folds of flesh about his mouth alert too. The animation didn’t quite reach his eyes, however. His eyes were weary. William found himself admiring the weight of his weariness, his refusal to try and reassure the party that the absent man was even now approaching, pushing through the high glass doors of the airport lounge, looking around as though he knew exactly who he was looking for. No. His example in waiting was such that William was glad to wait with him, near him – though with the young lady from Edinburgh on his left, her hands working unhappily in the pockets of her dress, it wasn’t as easy as it might have been.

  “I’m a nurse, you know,” she said.

  “What precautions should I take against sunstroke?” William’s lack of interest in his own question was startling, however, and prevented the nurse from doing more than open her mouth.

  The ten members of the Commission sat on a padded circular seat of black leather, in the middle of which and higher than their heads were plants of a kind William had never seen before. Huge heart-shaped leaves and a smell that was dense, cold and scouring.

  “What plants are these?” William asked.

  “I don’t know,” the nurse said.

  One of the ministers could have sworn that they had had the same bus driver two years ago. He tried to reintroduce himself, but he wasn’t remembered. He sat down again, his affability, unwanted, appearing in the swaying bus as foolishness. Another said that he recognised the bazaars and even some of the bazaar owners. The joker, breaking a long silence, said that he recognised some of the street girls. But his fan had deserted him and his remark came over as the height of tastelessness. William glanced at the nurse, for she was sitting beside him, as far back from the window as she could, squinting into the glare. She didn’t seem to have heard the joke. Nothing was familiar to her apparently, and in the absence of familiarity she had lost herself. Sensing her condition, the fear within it, William knew that he should speak. Nothing outside the bus and little inside it was familiar to him either, but he hadn’t lost himself. Indeed he realised, preparing to speak, that the time for such foundering – the self at its centre guttered and out – had passed for him. His hand, he noticed, was on the nurse’s forearm: the decent companion.

  “I expect we can relax when we get to our quarters. Even have a little walk. I’d like to convince myself that the palm trees are real. Look how still they are.”

  If, when she turned to him, the nurse responded at all, it was to some agreeable memory his manner evoked. He was sure she couldn’t have repeated his words. Patting her forearm, he smiled, as though, had there been any point, he might have apologised for what was happening.

  The bus was on the open road now – a bad road, made worse by the dead bodies of crows and dogs and by broken sacks. Also on it were jeeps and lorries, some of the lorries empty, others carrying sacks of grain. And weaving in and out, as if wrapped in playfulness, was a white sports car. The bus driver, amused perhaps that this familiar stretch of road was only the first of many unfamiliar stretches to his passengers, was laughing and singing.

  Beyond, the start of the desert was marked by a dull haziness. Where sky and sand met, an obscurity.

  In the evening, unbelievably, toasts were drunk by some of the company to absent friends. One of these was the Reverend Alan Walsh. A Church character, apparently. Without him the Commission might not have got started, it seemed. What a tragedy that a man with such vision should have ended up ill and in a backwater! So said the gruff minister, and there were murmurs of approval. William was asked to say a word or two.

  “I don’t think it’s right to regard homes for the elderly as backwaters,” he said, remembering the minister’s pride and closeness, his nose for weaknesses, the sound of his footsteps in the corridors of the Montgomery. “Don’t worry, though: I’ll give him a full account of the Commission’s findings. If you like, you can think of me as Walsh’s eye.”

  “It is William, isn’t it?” the little nurse whispered, still too timid to risk more than the simplest exchange.

  “It is,” William said.

  “I’m Helen.”

  They were not the only Commission in the area. When William got off the bus the next morning he saw other groups like theirs. Briefly and awkwardly they eyed each other. The expectation seemed to be that there would be someone to show them around; but there wasn’t. The minister who had emerged as the leader at the airport walked off on his own. Thinking that it was manifestly a setting in which to stick with the group would be wrong, William walked off alone too.

  He walked down a little street or lane, on either side of which were tents, huts, trestle tables, piles of sacks, buckets. Everything seemed to have been bleached, and he had the impression that this was why those he passed appeared to be finding it difficult to make decisions: they were in an element which frustrated their need for colour. Another impression he had was that almost anyone would have been welcomed as a helper. One could have entered any of these tents and registered oneself as willing.

  Willing? Was it a co-ordinated operation that was taking place in the colony, or a series of operations – rival ones at that? So many different languages were being spoken that William didn’t know. In the second street that he entered he heard English, American, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, and many languages he couldn’t identify. There was a great amount of shouting, but the reasons for this – beyond the fact that the colony or encampment meant crisis, disaster – weren’t clear. But the shou
ting was in street after street, as though, continually throughout the day, bad news and worse news and better news and no news was passed from one to the other, right through the colony. It struck William as self-indulgence – a kind of international melodrama – the more so because he felt like shouting too. He walked with his left hand pressed to his chest. At least, if he did start to shout (what would he shout?), it wouldn’t be noticed. He would be just another member of the vast confused chorus. He struggled to restrain himself, however. And, struggling, became exhausted.

  The line of starving children was long. William wondered why they had to stand. The terrible docility he thought he could grasp, but not the standing. They were naked also, which made the uniforms and badges and footwear of the helpers seem like vain credentials. Stopped before the line, he felt his toes in their sandals curl against grains of sand. All he was able to notice were the joints and the eyes. The knees in particular.

  Knees and eyes. Towards and past the enormous container (soup? porridge?), knees and eyes. Knees and eyes. But wasn’t he just looking? He moved abjectly on, looking, not looking. Starvation, he thought, had made the children look alike. Beings he could hardly tell apart, their features as if drawn upwards into their eyes. Eyes. Knees. The white hands and white sleeves of the women giving out the food.

  He went back to the bus at noon. Lunchtime. The plan was that, having eaten and shared their impressions, they would continue their work in the afternoon. What work though? Were they to wander about watchfully for three or four weeks, now in one part of the colony, now in another? Making report when they got back home, recommending? William asked the gruff minister and Helen and another young woman, called Grace, what they thought. Grace was crying bitterly, so he looked to the other two. (He didn’t feel that tears, under the circumstances, deserved any respect.)

  “Well look,” the gruff minister said angrily, raising his voice against the shouting which could still be heard in the background, “we’re the only ones to have come back for lunch. What do you think Geoffrey and Paul and Andrew and the others are doing – just watching? Ecclesiastical voyeurs? Anyway, I’m eating because I’m diabetic. What’s your excuse?”

  “But why shouldn’t we eat?” Helen asked. “What good will it do anyone if we don’t?”

  Nonetheless, William flung away his sandwich, a lettuce sandwich, the lettuce and the bread coming apart in mid-air. On his way back to the colony he dug them both into the sand with his foot.

  Walking back into the dust and the shouting of the colony, William had the odd sense that the shouting would never die. That even after the colony had been disbanded and starvation driven from the earth, it would be there, an echo of death, of death and frenzy.

  In the following days, each member of the Commission found something to do. But, as if these activities were perversions of a kind, they weren’t spoken about. Each returned in the evenings as if sworn to secrecy about his day. It had to be imagined what had distressed the distressed; fatigued the fatigued; excited the excited.

  Only the airport leader wasn’t ashamed to admit what he did. He had attached himself to some Swedes, he said, because he had always admired Swedes, their cool practicality, and because he spoke a little Swedish. He did anything they told him to do, however menial. The lack of shame and embarrassment with which he described how he had been affected (moving among the ill and dying, he had vomited, apparently, fainted, even fouled himself) seemed to William almost masochistic. The reserve of the others then seemed to be the result either of fear – they weren’t doing enough – or of pride – at last they had found themselves.

  Once or twice – if only to get her to say what she had been up to, William thought of telling Helen what he did. Did they have the same perversion? If not, were they complementary? He didn’t ask; and she didn’t say. He simply wondered if all the commissions were like this, their members, nursing such virtues as they found in themselves and struggling to keep down their vices, falling strangely silent as the days passed. Did others, like William, find that they could do little unless close to the inspired, to those who, among the afflicted, were light, imperturbable, humorous even? And did they, like him, find that they cursed themselves for this dependence, hoping earnestly that, with time, they would learn self-reliance?

  Sometimes, though, the fact that the visit was only for a few weeks sobered him. Mightn’t it be more modest not to think of improving himself? He thought that it might be, and then he would be calm, abiding with the knowledge of his weaknesses and sleeping tolerably.

  But some nights he slept intolerably. Waking, he wondered if he had shouted out. It was the same dream each time. In his parents’ garden were four figures, dressed in white. White masks and long loose white sleeves. The light was odd – a sort of pale amber twilight – and the garden had been recently dug, readied for strange seeds. One of the figures was to sow these, the others supervising, but he could never get his arm out of its sleeve. It wouldn’t lift. The others, frustrated and angry, turned away. At which point William – a neat, eager teenager – stepped forwards and tried to release the arm that wouldn’t move. But it proved not to be an arm at all, only a stump. A stump with boils and sores and something that looked like a mouth. There was laughter then, at William’s terror and amazement, making him flee across the freshly dug garden, leaping the hollows that awaited the strange seeds, fearful that unless he was careful he would wake up one morning to find that he too had blasted limbs.

  At a place on the edge of the colony some jeeps were parked. They had long, open backs and in these were stretchers, mattresses, cushions, blankets. There was a strong smell of disinfectant, but there was also a smell of sickness, and if you looked at the air above the backs of the jeeps, William believed, you could see a shimmering, as of disembodied fevers. A hot wind blew in from the desert, and in the midsky, above this wind apparently, some heavy black birds hung.

  The woman who fed the starving here did so with the minimum of display and feeling. And she did not seem to look at those she fed. That was William’s first impression. But as he watched her give out the porridge and touch the head of each child that passed he felt otherwise. The movements which made up the small ritual seemed to be the result of a patience greater than any he had seen before and made possible, moment by moment, a greater patience still. The head touched; the porridge scooped from its container; the bowl filled; a smile, nonetheless intense for being quick; the head touched again. William didn’t think that the children looked any better for the meeting, though. But why should they? Why shouldn’t they pass on as if this was to be their last meal ever? (And to whom did they pass on? A group of men, presumably their fathers, who might have been a hundred but who were probably only twenty-five and who walked as if stilts, very thin stilts, had been grafted on to their ruined limbs.)

  When the last child had been fed, the woman rose and slowly – it seemed an expression of regret – straightened her headscarf. William went up to her. She was a little tense now, a little tired, but she smiled warmly when William asked her what he could do. She sat down again on the low stool from which she had been feeding the children, and, bowing her head and massaging her neck, carefully considered his question. When she looked up it was as if to praise him for appearing at that particular moment. Appalled by the size of their task yet reverent towards anyone who was prepared to try and reduce it, she encouraged William.

  “You could go out with the boys,” she said, her accent American. “They’re done in. And one’s sick today. Over there.”

  Between his enquiry and her answer a vitality had come to him, at which – as though he might be tempted to use it licentiously – he blushed.

  “The boys” went out several times a day. Sometimes they saw no one and came back empty. Other times they found more than they could carry in one journey, having to make several trips in quick succession. Some of the starving, one of the drivers explained to William, wouldn’t accept lifts. They had to be pointed in the dir
ection of the colony and watched until they reached it. William’s task was to help them onto the back of the jeep and sit with them during the journey, which could be ten miles or twenty miles. Deaths occurred quite often on the backs of the jeeps. It was hard for newcomers to spot the actual moment: between starvation and death from it there didn’t seem to be a definite line. William felt insensitive beside the others who could spot the moment even before it came. And he wouldn’t have much time to learn.

  One day William and the driver came upon just one person. It was evening. Several times William had had the feeling that the desert created disaster in order to be respected, and he had it again now. One moment there was no one, the next the figure was there, born from the dunes, famished, flung forth. The driver, fatigued, stayed in the jeep while William helped the man aboard. These skeletal frames were hard to handle: the bones were elusive, William found, shockingly so, and the skin either too tight or too loose. His judgement of their terminal needs was poor. Sometimes his clumsiness had made his charges wince, wriggle away.