The Convalescent Read online

  He lay on his bed, utterly exhausted. Had he left it too late? Was he too weak for a job? He couldn’t afford such suspicions. When he woke he would try and reach the store. He could return in the cool of the evening. Food might make the difference. Without adequate food, he knew, he had hardly been living. He had been like the figures, flickering on some periphery, some line between presence and absence, substance and abstraction. Between the creature and its shadow, foundering.

  August 4th, 1968

  I can’t understand why I am so reluctant to meet Margo’s parents. It is time I presented myself. We have known each other for seven months. Marriage is even in the air, though it hasn’t actually been spoken of. Why do I feel it is in the air? Why do I feel – for the first time in my relationships with women – that I have moved from the definitely temporary to the possibly permanent? A grey line, mark you, divides the temporary from the permanent. It is not one I have sought to cross. Indeed some days I feel I have let myself down, straying across it. I don’t relish the new territory, but I can’t deny that it is where I am. Margo is there too, of course. She arrived before me, awaiting me, if not with open arms, at least with little gestures of encouragement. It is a territory in which she moves with confidence, though since (or so she tells me) she hasn’t been seriously involved before, I cannot understand where she gets her confidence. Either she knows me better than I know myself (likes me better than I like myself) or she doesn’t know me at all.

  She is quite highly born, and this may account for some of her confidence. She has been used to the settled society of the highly born. There have been excursions from it, flights even, but she has always returned, and she has always known that she can return. It is one of the things that slightly irritates me about her: her belief that she doesn’t need what enables her to appear so stylishly independent. She doesn’t see it this way, of course. She explains that her returns are the result of affection for those she has left, not of fear. The world has few fears for her, she says.

  It is not so with me. Not at all. Doing well in my job, I am yet aware of being orbited by alternative lives. Sometimes they pass close enough for me to be able to make out features. If they are not quite my features, they are not unfamiliar, either. I have a sense of peril, for it seems to me that it wouldn’t take much to change tracks. Who throws the points? How familiar – if he has any – are his features? I have tried to explain this to Margo, but she just smiles. I suspect that she believes that I will be all right once we are married, and this troubles me. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. One can’t count on it. Should it be a requirement, anyway?

  From this new territory I glimpse a permanence greater than that which can be enjoyed – if that is the word – in particular relationships. And that is in the province of the highly born. I think that it must be my dislike of this province that is holding me back from Margo’s parents. God help me, I am perhaps being unfair, but I seem to be able to trace so much of what I find irresistible in Margo – her capacity for delight, her confidence, her resourcefulness, her irony, her inspired rudeness – to an environment of which I am deeply suspicious. One of the paradoxes that makes one gasp. That defeats deliberation. The flower emerging from the dung.

  What a flower! The frequency with which I think of her (turning in a doorway to cap what I have just said, turning in a doorway very suddenly, as if to catch me beneath myself, turning in a doorway to undress, turning, dancing) is a sign. She is different each time I think of her, as if her will (it wouldn’t surprise me) extends to how she appears in my thoughts.

  We are in bed. She is lying on top of me, playing, I regret to say, with her hair. She does this quite often after lovemaking, and it always disturbs me. What is wrong with my hair?

  It is probably my best feature, brown and thick and wavy. I suspect it is because I don’t satisfy her. Certainly I am not as good with her as I have been with others. I am too quick, and my attempts to overcome this make me quicker still. I was quicker today than ever before. It is partly because of the passion with which she launches herself into lovemaking. She acts as if an immediate climax is her objective. Why so impatient? Whether it is greed or generosity, or partly the one and partly the other, I don’t know, but it is terribly exciting. I can’t deny that, even as I am overcome, I’m glad of it. Not afterwards, however: I’m not glad then. We have just come to bed and she is lying on her back, sighing or silent, or, like today, on top of me, playing with her hair, eyes averted.

  It is a sultry afternoon in early August and eventually we doze. I dream that I am making love to Margo in the grounds of a castle. I am doing it as I wish I could – slowly, passionately. The longer I go on the more she moans and the more concealed figures on the ramparts moan too. When we come, wildly and together, there is an ecstatic chorus of moans and the castle walls tremble before, in the following silence, showing themselves to be stronger than before. Is it polite applause that I hear then, with muffled laughter, or just castle life returning to normal after the little diversion it has enjoyed?

  I wake up to find Margo leaning over me, laughing. It has been a wet dream. In her hand is a clutch of Kleenex and in her eyes light-hearted censure. I tell her about the dream and she is pensive.

  “That is a socio-sexual dream,” she says, and I know that we are about to have one of our pretentious sounding but painful exchanges.

  “I know. What sexual dream isn’t? There are many presences here. Not just my mother.”

  “Who then?”

  “Your father, his politics. Your mother too. The dream would say that I sleep with your whole family when I sleep with you.”

  “You’d be better with a partner shorn of her background.”

  “There are no such people. You know that.”

  “Some women,” Margo says wistfully, “can persuade their partners that they have no pasts. That they have made themselves anew. The contemporary Venus.”

  “Some men are foolish.”

  It is the end of the conversation. The dream has sobered her. She stops playing with her hair and lies quietly beside me. She is perceptive and cannot pretend otherwise. Even in her occasional imitations of sluts there is some flair and intelligence. She cannot help it. I suggest to her the August Bank Holiday weekend would be an appropriate time for me to meet her parents. She says all right, but in a low, almost reluctant voice. But then embraces me, half crying.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The heat wave continued, week after week, June into July. William found it exhausting, but he feared any change, for regularity had come to obsess him. Regular weather, regular meals, regular exercises (press-ups and knee bends), regular tours of inspection, regular hours in bed, regular times in the lavatory (even if only straining). Regularity: it alone would make health possible, himself coherent, the world a presence again. There should be as many emblems or reminders of it as possible, therefore – the convalescent’s icons – such as the sundial he had found in the garden (how he missed a good watch, though, regularity itself), the old cracked barometer he had found in an outhouse, the chart of milking times he had come across in a steading.

  But there were days when he was sure he had left it too late. He would not reclaim himself now. There would be moments of terrible weakness then, William lying on his jacket in a field, still unable to hear birdsong, able only occasionally to smell grass. But he didn’t allow himself to remain stricken for long (nothing more absurd than the selfconsciously prostrate figure). He would stand up and continue on his tour of inspection, spots before his eyes (silent flies? he once wondered), a ringing in his ears, his nostrils as good as useless, walking still with a trace of the drunkard’s teetering. Walking on eggs (his wife’s description); peripheral neuritis (the doctor’s): a condition, he knew, which could be fought with vitamin B. And so, tokens of his will to reclaim himself, to be a steady guardian of these fields and their machinery, bottles of pills he had taken from a cabinet in Mrs Mclehose’s bathroom stood on a small table he had carried to
the kitchen from one of the outhouses. They were ranged according to his sense of their importance: vitamin B, vitamin C, iron, calcium. It encouraged him, not just to take the pills with his meals, but to touch the bottles gently between meals, whenever he passed them.

  He became sunburned, and the sight of his sunburned face in the cracked mirror pleased him. All signs of agreeable change held him. He watched admiringly as flowers in the garden bloomed and were gone, as the grass which he was still too weak to scythe and mow grew longer. Sometimes he looked so intently, like a man actually entranced, that it was as if he was trying to catch nature in the very act of renewing herself – discern the hand of God, even, in the splendour of the light.

  Aware that his walk betrayed his past, he set out to change it. He tried out several walks, determined that if he found one that suited him (because it spoke, somehow, of what he hoped to became) he would keep it. His experiments took place mainly in the garden and were like rehearsals for a play that consisted simply of a prologue – a very confused one at that. He tried a pensive stroll, pensive down to the arm movements, but it wasn’t right for an outdoor life like his and it embarrassed him deeply. He tried a forceful, rangy walk, but because it suggested a state more fiercely ambitious than any he could imagine himself ever reaching; it embarrassed him also. He tried a bright but modest walk, but, probably because it betrayed a sort of indiscriminate willingness, a sort of sweet servility, it caused his energy to go after about forty yards, and it sickened him anyway. The one he finally hit upon surprised him: brisk, semi-military, neat, the walk of one used to discipline and responsibility. Measured but alert, self-possessed but responsive. He practised it in the garden and around the house (up and down the stairs like some trainee adjutant) until it satisfied him almost entirely. He decided to try it out on a tour of inspection, one which would take in all four groups of outhouses and which would involve a check of all the machinery (over a period of three weeks he had made an inventory of the contents of each outhouse, right down to pails and stray spanners).

  He thought of the groups of outhouses as hamlets, each with its own character. The first unsettled him, with its broken pump, its dead echoes and its unseasonal chill. The second he found welcoming – probably because of the cat which hung about there, the bright red and green woodwork and the generous spaces between the machines. The third troubled him – the harvesters so close together, the ploughs pointing outwards like weapons: it was like a stockade, and, in it, William kept turning round, coughing into the back of his hand when he saw that there was nothing there. The fourth he found welcoming also: its steady silence, the way it seemed to be visited by gentle breezes, its impression of having been abandoned with some dignity years before the others. His tours of inspection were painstaking, but there were days when he couldn’t bring himself to visit the first hamlet at all and when he could only bear the third for a moment or two. He was sure that if he were to hear the sound of engines in the middle of the night, the clank and clatter of machinery, it would be from one or the other of these.

  Trying out his new walk (believing that it was already giving him the measure of the alien hamlets), William approached the first hamlet, wisps of grass floating upwards on the thermal currents. He paused as he always did before entering the steading. And heard voices. To begin with he couldn’t locate them; they might have been distant but sounding close or close but not really sounding so. He couldn’t make out any words, but he had an impression of casualness. Then there was a clang of metal on metal and he knew that there were men in the yard. Stooping, he moved to a position from which he thought he could see without being seen.

  They looked like farm labourers returned out of curiosity or nostalgia to their old place of work, but he knew that they were not. There were four of them, one standing, leaning against the pump, the others sitting. They had pulled a plough to the centre of the steading and were dismantling it. The one on his feet was smoking, and gave occasional advice. None of it was taken, but no one seemed to mind, neither the one standing nor those sitting. They made a practised foursome, their intent steady, their movements quiet and informed. So much so that William wondered if they might not have been sent out to service the machinery – a visit of which someone had failed to inform him. The placidity, the intentness: it wasn’t easy to hold to his initial sense that they were doing wrong.

  Exaggerating his walk, he entered the steading, smiling. He hadn’t intended to smile and feared that it was the smile of one unused to command. He had also not intended to walk straight up to the young men but to address then – sharply, perhaps scathingly – from about fifteen yards. But, as though his new walk with its military overtones had given him the idea that they were soldiers lounging on duty, he found himself face to face with them. They didn’t appear threatened however, and, for some reason, he didn’t feel threatened either. He had expected defiance, abuse, but they were as practised at seeming innocent as they had been at dismantling the plough. He hadn’t spoken; he had forgotten what he had planned to say. Too bad. With movements which might have suggested capitulation but for their astonishing insouciance, the young men turned away, two shrugging their shoulders, one smiling, the fourth, the one who had been smoking, stubbing out his cigarette on the concrete yard with his foot. William followed, confounded. Who were they? They left the steading and started running. Twenty yards, fifty yards, a hundred yards, two hundred yards: black shapes in the heat, angular, mercurial, in and out of dance, vanishing, reappearing, finally vanishing. William was still shaking when he got back to the farmhouse, but he was pleased, for it was the healthy shaking of fear, not the ignominious trembling of debility. He made himself some tea, and then, briskly, like one who has been awaiting the opportunity for years, he rang George Weir to make his report.

  George Weir took a dramatic view of the matter, arriving in the afternoon with his wife, Sheila, who was pregnant, and launching into an immediate search of the house and garden. Sheila, fanning herself with a paperback, looked on silently. William stood beside her, looking on also. After a few minutes, however, he realised that it wasn’t her husband she was regarding, but the landscape, the summer day (as if too used to these overreactions to pay any attention). So when George, unseen round a corner of the house, called out in his deep voice “Nothing!” or “Nothing here!” or “Not a trace!” it was impossible for William to respond. All he did was look to his left, at Sheila, as though for a cue. But – a musing and imperturbable profile – she gave him none.

  “D’you mind if I sit down?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry. Come inside. It must be particularly hot for you. How long to go?”

  “Three weeks,” she replied, entering the house, still fanning herself. “Not that I’m impatient. I like being pregnant; I always feel very well.”

  Sheila was small and dark, and moved easily in spite of her condition, wearing a white maternity dress and sandals, the sandals flapping on the bare floor of the kitchen. The kitchen seemed to amuse her; she stood in the middle of it, fanning herself, smiling. Respectfully almost, as for an opinion on which his sense of himself might depend, William waited behind her. She was wearing her hair up, but some strands of it, he noticed, had escaped from a comb at the back of her neck. As she fanned herself, regularly, rhythmically with the paperback – beads of sweat on her forehead, her nose and under her eyes – these strands or wisps moved lightly above the brown skin of her neck. A perfect brown. Admiring, William became aware of her scent, the first he had caught in months. It was a dry one, derived from musk, he supposed, and as he tried to convince himself that he was really smelling it, it filled the kitchen. Either you didn’t smell it at all or you were overwhelmed. Either you sensed nothing or too much. What did it mean – that he was damaged or erratically recovering? Set to sensationalise the world or receive it fairly? Sheila turned to him.

  “But you’ve nothing here,” she laughed.

  “To be frank,” he said quietly, “I’ve nothing much anyw
here.”

  “If you say so,” she said, with a studied absence of sympathy which yet struck him as a kind of sympathy. “What is George doing? Do you suppose he thinks they’ve planted bombs?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve no idea what he’s doing.”

  “Nor have I. Is there somewhere we can sit down?”

  He had found two deckchairs in the garage and these he set up for George and Sheila opposite the broken leather armchair he sat in each evening. Legs apart, appearing (now that she was sitting) as though stranded by her huge belly, islanded, Sheila lay back, watching William. It was clear that she regarded him as a curiosity; she couldn’t conceal it. Not even by fanning herself. She lifted the paperback to do this, but, as if suddenly irritated by the artificiality of the movement, she dropped it again, her hand and the book trailing on the floor.

  It was a book on breastfeeding, William saw, on the cover a breast and a feeding infant submerged together in a sea of pink. He couldn’t make out whether the breast was dominating the infant or the infant the breast, and cocked his head to see more clearly. Sheila lifted the book and flourished it.

  “What do you do here? Read?”

  “Not yet,” William said, aware that he wanted to be as scrupulous in his account of himself as he was in his tours of inspection. “I find concentration difficult still. But it’ll come back, I hope. I did read once though – quite a lot. So you can ask me about that, if you want, but whether I’ll remember much is a different matter.”