The Convalescent Page 8

It was then as silent as William had ever known it. He remembered that with some drinkers certain subjects had to be avoided. Then he remembered that with many of them they could never be avoided, the subjects possessing then even in sobriety, even while their lives appeared moderate, well ordered. He remembered it well: it was the one thing which, in his tiredness, he could remember about them.

  Later, going to the lavatory, he found on the cistern the remains of the bottle of malt whisky. Under it was a note.

  “Dear Mr Author,

  Here you are. Go on! Drink and be damned.

  Jackson.”

  Very calmly, as though as sorry for the man who had tried to tempt him as he was for himself, who might have been tempted, he poured the whisky down the lavatory and went to bed.

  May 10th, 1975

  I have nothing against my wife – nothing serious anyway. I enjoy most of the occasions she arranges and I like most of the people she introduces me to. It’s just that so many of the occasions are her occasions. Her stamp is on all of them; she is the sole architect. Have I any ideas of my own about how our social life should go? Sometimes I think so, but then I trace them – to Margo. It’s not made any better by the realisation that it’s to her that I owe some of my highest resolves. To listen to more music; to read more; to set aside time for reflection (though I’ve never been entirely sure what I should be thinking about. The virtues perhaps?)

  The feeling that I’m not quite in charge of my own life disturbs me. Sometimes I have thoughts of running wild, of establishing my own terms with a vengeance. For some reason (this disturbs me too) I have few if any thoughts of establishing them quietly, by degrees.

  Today I find myself at my daughter’s birthday party. It is being held, not as one might expect in our own house, but in the house of one of Margo’s friends. This is because it is a shared birthday party; the friend’s daughter is exactly the same age as Kathleen. We are outside on the lawn, watching the children, about thirty of them, play about in a pink parachute. It lifts and flops on the lawn like a giant pantomime sea anemone, now showing its insides, now concealing them, threatening to imprison the children. There are screams: one can see the outlines of desperate or mock desperate limbs.

  The fascination which we feel isn’t one which will fade, to be replaced by boredom, for we began by being indifferent and then, almost against our will, became fascinated. Conversation died as the parachute, seeming to get larger and larger, more and more capacious, possessed the lawn. Only Margo and her friend, laying out cakes and sandwiches on a long trestle table in the background, aren’t looking at it. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see them and their piles of food enveloped also, for I have seen few things as unpredictable as this parachute. It is capriciousness itself.

  Suddenly I notice that Kathleen is trying to get out from under the parachute. But each time she tries she is either dragged back by a child or claimed by a pink fold. I hear her screams, and they seem to me different in quality from the other screams. Pure terror. I walk over to see what I can do and my eye catches a label: Rentaparty Equipment Ltd. I position myself, kneeling, so that Kathleen will see me when the parachute next lifts. Her screams get louder; she has sensed my presence. “Daddy! Daddy!” At last she breaks free, crying distractedly, and falls into my arms. I lead her away. I don’t think that anyone else has noticed. The clumsy will of the huge mobile fungus is still being done and the parents are still standing on the terrace, fascinated.

  Soon however other children come out from under the parachute. Eventually it is abandoned. But it still moves. Indeed, in a sudden gust of wind it is blown against the legs of the trestle table, wrapping itself around them. Now Margo takes charge, dropping onto it half playfully, beating it into shape and docility, preparing it – calmly, confidently, as though she did it every day – for its return to Rentaparty Equipment Ltd. She is wearing a summer frock and at one point as she kneels this is blown over her buttocks. She doesn’t care. Have I ever seen her discomfited? No. There are no pauses between her thoughts and the actions expressing them. Her hours and days are seamless apparently. The children sense it too, for no one dares to eat until, the parachute folded and put to one side, Margo returns to the table. She walks up and down its twenty yards – that fluent, slightly abstracted walk – offering cakes, sandwiches, crisps, biscuits, juice. She does three times as much as Elizabeth, her friend. She is also three times as tanned as Elizabeth, although as far as I know the summer has favoured them equally. Poor Elizabeth: no wonder she opts for unobtrusiveness.

  Kathleen is reluctant to go up to the table. I try to lead her, pointing to her mother, to the children I believe to be her friends. She is not encouraged. I take her for a walk round the garden, hoping to calm her. She has perhaps noticed that there is no chocolate ice-cream in a golden wrapper on the trestle table, for it is this that she asks for. I sense the approach of one of her tantrums. These are terrible, terribly embarrassing. I couldn’t bear to have all these parents, now themselves up at the table, choosing their cakes and sandwiches with such deadly niceness, witness one of Kathleen’s tantrums. Margo can ignore them, as the books recommend, but I can’t. I become foolish in my attempts to defuse them: jokes, flattery, presents, entreaty, anger. Why do I bother with them? (Is it my secret hope to be provoked into one myself?) Maybe it’s because at their heart I sense the rawest kind of interrogation of reality imaginable. Who am I? Why am I here? Who will tell me?

  Unseen, I lead Kathleen from the garden. We tiptoe along the grass verge of the drive, avoiding the gravel. Then we are in the road and our stride lengthens. Suddenly Kathleen is tearless, delighted, skipping ahead of me. I am taking her from her own party! She has promised, however, that if I buy her a chocolate ice-cream in a golden wrapper she’ll return to it and eat cakes and sandwiches and play all the games. (Am I aware that it might be thought that I am handling the problem absurdly? That I am dancing to a perverse tune? Yes, I am aware.) We walk on and soon reach a cafe where an obese but deeply patient Italian woman gives Kathleen an ice-cream and asks about the paper hat on her head. I explain – laughing indulgently, for I too am wearing a paper hat – that we are brief exiles from a birthday party.

  Now that she has her ice-cream, I regret to say, Kathleen pays no attention to her surroundings at all. Her shoulders hunch as she eats it, her eyes become hooded. For a moment it seems to me a waste that she has such lovely fair hair. The tantrum and this sullen satisfaction: how upsetting that they are the two poles of her being.

  Again we tip-toe along the grass verge of the drive. It is surprisingly silent. I am embarrassed to see why: the children are sitting on the lawn in a circle, eating chocolate ice-creams.

  Margo is observing me from behind them, standing very still, her dress whipped by the wind, clearly in tension between exasperation and outrage, her eyes dark and her mouth enquiringly open. I realise that I must say something both witty and redeeming. But I am unable to.

  “Is this a rival party or a cop-out?” she asks.

  “She was about to have a tantrum, Margo,” I say.

  “So?”

  “I thought it advisable,” I continue. “A distraction.”

  “Really,” she says.

  “Once round the block and she’s human again.”

  The subject of our conversation has found a place in the circle and is comparing ice-creams with the little boy on her right. At least hers is the only one which has a golden wrapper.

  CHAPTER SIX

  With George Weir’s binoculars William could scan the land from the farmhouse. (Two months earlier, he realised, he wouldn’t have been able to do so, because of his unsteady hands.) A luxury was to do it from bed, in the early morning, his transistor tuned to classical music. It was late summer, the land parched and hard, the slightest wind raising clouds of brown or yellow dust (which, through the binoculars, looked like part of some vast obliterating storm).

  Most days, alerted by these clouds, William got ready to do his job. But
just occasionally – little holidays – he couldn’t be bothered. Then it was the bushes and the trees seen through the glasses that engaged him. Or the hamlets. Or the sky. But above all it was the birds. These he watched intently: crows, plovers, curlews, pheasants, wrens, finches. Watched as they pecked at the dry earth: a deadly dryness, frustrating instinct. Watched as the smaller ones flew off to try again twenty or thirty yards away. Watched as they went round in circles, many barren patches tried in an hour. Watched with pleasure as the bread which it became his habit to scatter on the ground was flicked from beak to beak, eaten.

  Otherwise he scanned the land carefully, made regular tours of inspection (his adjutant’s walk less apparent, though, after his meeting with the captain and the lieutenant). But day after day he had nothing to report. Week after week, nothing. Nothing. Another might have been reassured, concluding that, like nomads, the enemy had gone elsewhere, or lost interest. But for William the silence was ominous. The longer he waited, the more he felt there must be something he was waiting for. That was how it presented itself: something. A word without hint of form or feature, teasing the imagination but not yielding to it. Vandals deriding him; the Territorial Army advancing on the farm in the middle of the night; Sheila Weir arriving with fruit and vegetables: it was above such obvious threats and consolations. Towards evening, weary, his hands starting to tremble just a little, he had occasionally had the fancy that in a particular dust cloud, arising more suddenly than usual, apparently without wind, he had found what he was looking for. But no dust cloud lasted for more than fifteen seconds.

  His transistor went with him on his rounds now, jostling for position with the binoculars on his chest. There were concerts and plays and cricket commentaries and talks on the political scene. He felt extraordinarily remote from them all, however, walking in the fields. It wasn’t just the great silence of the countryside, in which as from other eras almost, he would hear a Mozart symphony, be told a cricket score, hear of some terrible event in Africa. Nor was it the occasional poorness of the reception, the moments when it went altogether. What seemed to be measured as he listened was the length of time since he had last concerned himself with such things. The years of his indifference; the extent of his ignorance. He had slipped from the world for a decade. By what path had he come back? What had enabled him to recover the simple pleasure of lying on dry grass under a blue sky? The complex one of listening to music at dawn? The ability to ask such questions?

  His mother’s murder. The only path he could see emerged from that; emerged from the shallow grave between the rhododendron bushes. He permitted himself the thought – they were the words in which it came to him – that she hadn’t been butchered in vain. He spoke it aloud, slowly, carefully, as if testing himself for infamy. The burden the words placed on him was great: he wished he hadn’t spoken them. But he had; he had held them up to the light. And the place where he had done so – the steading of the second hamlet – would have the power – always now – to admonish or approve. And might become memorable.

  Many of the names he heard on the transistor would have been familiar to his mother. But they meant nothing to him. Some of them, however, would be his contemporaries. He was discovering them in mid-career, their stride lengthening. Reputations. Household names. Positions. Who, for example, was this speaking from Whitehall with such studied earnestness? Who was this making forecasts about mortgage rates? Why was he so given over to the subject? Who had taken over in Uganda, and why had human heads and torsos been found in fridges in his palace? He would have to inform himself. He would have to catch up with his era, its local and international celebrities, its opinions, whims, barbarities. That meant newspapers. He hadn’t read one for years. The piles of them in the general store, so neatly laid out (so suggestive of comprehensiveness), had affected him oddly. They were for those who had remained loyal, who had kept going. You read them if you were in the world, doing its business or discovering good reasons for not doing it (proposing a higher business). But if, neutered, you crawled from the world, you had no need of reports, opinions. And returning, waiting in the wings (was that what he was doing?), you had to be careful. Newspaper readers were comparatively tough. How did you know when you were ready to rejoin them?

  “Not even the hermit or the nun,” a voice on the transistor had said one day in the yard of the first hamlet (its dead acoustics framing the utterance), “is without politics. Not even they – whatever they may say to the contrary. “I am political,” he had therefore written, in the summer dust on one of the tractors. “How though?”

  The programmes he couldn’t bear were the ones about family life. He would come across them – there always seemed to be one being broadcast – on his way from one programme to another, and he would give them a moment’s horrified attention.

  “The children of gamblers are apt to see the world as a lottery, to be won or lost by chance, not by serious endeavour. Such children …” “The families of drug addicts have higher anxiety levels than …” “The children of working mothers, during the critical hour after school, tend …” “Families who go to church together score more highly on the happiness scale than families who …” And women’s problems: he couldn’t bear to hear about those either. It wasn’t just the fact of their sufferings that upset him; it was the way they were presented. The women-experts announced their findings so angrily and then gave advice so confidently. Sometimes he was afraid to change stations in case he came across a clever London voice theorising about premenstrual tension, post-natal depression, menopausal resentment, the superiority of orgasm by masturbation. Yes, in his world dominated by the transistor, women and the family were the dark spots – into which he feared he could be easily drawn. They had the power, he noticed, to make him shake again, curse and stumble in the dry fields, even weep. (Sheila Weir, it was true, had had a baby and left hospital after three days. But that was a simple fact. It hadn’t been claimed by the gurus, doctored; it didn’t rebuke him.)

  He never returned to the farmhouse with the transistor on, however, always entering it in silence. The bareness of the place meant that its silences were grave, still. Sometimes, crossing the threshold after one of his tours of inspection, he had felt exceptionally light, as if to open a door on silences like these was to be promised something. What? Perhaps he believed that by circling the house and then very gently pushing open the front door he might happen upon some intoxicating truth. Emptiness rather than silence, however, had met him. Apparently it was not up to him to take the initiative.

  Forty-four years of age, his face in the cracked mirror evenly tanned, his eyes, even when looking at themselves – searching for traces of yellow – reasonably steady.

  The dark, circular dust cloud in the vicinity of the second hamlet struck William as a harbinger of winter. Was it the last day of summer? He ran, arms held low, binoculars jumping, thinking only that he must find out how it had arisen. It circled the hamlet almost entirely. It was as though the earth was breaking up, being drawn upwards, thinning as it went. Near to the ground it was brown, but about twenty feet up white, white and beginning to drift in the direction of the farmhouse. Looking at it through the binoculars, William had the thought that it was the summer going wrong: it had been too long and too hot. He had heard of small whirlwinds, under such circumstances, storms so localised as to have the appearance of omens. He ran on, more crouched than before, left arm swinging across his body, right hand restraining his binoculars. Between a phenomenon to be explained and a sign to be read he saw it, moving outwards in slow possession of the land, a vast graininess. It would be upon him if he went further; and he was going further. He folded his handkerchief in a triangle and tied it across his mouth. His eyes had begun to smart.

  He ran on, into wind and dust and gathering darkness. He was running mainly with his eyes shut, which would account for the sense of darkness, but even when he opened them, there didn’t seem to be much light. One moment he believed he was running in a st
raight line, the next that he was going round in a circle, a widening circle. He was also aware of a sound of moaning and determined to find its source, for it was definitely a sign of distress. Then it came to him that it was himself, moaning behind the mask of his handkerchief. What surprised him was that this discovery didn’t make it any easier. As if utterly separate from himself, the sound continued. Powerless to subdue it, to stop it, he ran on, moaning as the disturbance around him spread. Sometimes he was conscious of a wind in his face, sometimes there seemed to be no wind at all. He lost all sense of where he was, all sense of boundaries. The dust cloud might have been enveloping the whole county; there might have been birds caught up in it, small ones and large ones, darting about him in terror …

  Then he heard that the moan had become a scream. He was screaming as he ran and apparently running round himself at the centre of the turbulence. Again he was powerless to subdue the sounds which came from him. It was as if he was inhabiting a stricken being as it ran towards the limits. The fact that the being was himself was astonishing. In thrall to himself at his most abandoned, rushing towards a place where light returned fitfully, if at all, and the land fell away into greater emptiness still.

  He realised then that the scream had stopped, torn from him as though forever. There was gasping now, his own gasping. He was tugging at the mask to free himself, but feared for a moment that it wasn’t happening, that the mask was entering his mouth, to choke him. He heard himself, as from a great distance, addressing someone, then understood that the someone was himself. He was talking to himself, simple instructions, reassurances. “It’s all right, William.” “Take it easy.” “You’re not far away now.” “Soon you can rest.” “Here, here.”

  He managed to tear the mask from his face at last, the same moment as the light returned, or not so much returned as seemed suddenly to have been there all the time, though not quite, for behind him a low dust cloud was receding, darkening the landscape as it did so, the same vast graininess he had entered some time ago, how long ago he couldn’t have said.