by A. S. Byatt
“When it happened, they got Noel, and Noel came in and shouted my name, like he did the other day, that’s why I screamed, because it — seemed the same — and then they said, he is dead, and I thought coolly, is dead, that will go on and on and on till the end of time, it’s a continuous present tense, one thinks the most ridiculous things, there I was thinking about grammar, the verb to be, when it ends to be dead … And then I came out into the garden, and I half saw, in my mind’s eye, a kind of ghost of his face, just the eyes and hair, coming towards me — like every day waiting for him to come home, the way you think of your son, with such pleasure, when he’s — not there — and I — I thought — no, I won’t see him, because he is dead, and I won’t dream about him because he is dead, I’ll be rational and practical and continue to live because one must, and there was Noel …
“I got it wrong, you see, I was so sensible, and then I was so shocked because I couldn’t get to want anything — I couldn’t talk to Noel — I — I — made Noel take away, destroy, all the photos, I — didn’t dream, you can will not to dream, I didn’t … visit a grave, flowers, there isn’t any point. I was so sensible. Only my body wouldn’t stop waiting and all it wants is to — to see that boy. That boy. That boy you — saw.”
He did not say that he might have seen another boy, maybe even a boy who had been given the tee shirts and jeans afterwards. He did not say, though the idea crossed his mind, that maybe what he had seen was some kind of impression from her terrible desire to see a boy where nothing was. The boy had had nothing terrible, no aura of pain about him: he had been, his memory insisted, such a pleasant, courteous, self-contained boy, with his own purposes. And in fact the woman herself almost immediately raised the possibility that what he had seen was what she desired to see, a kind of mix-up of radio waves, like when you overheard police messages on the radio, or got BBC I on a switch that said ITV. She was thinking fast, and went on almost immediately to say that perhaps his sense of loss, his loss of Anne, which was what had led her to feel she could bear his presence in her house, was what had brought them — dare she say — near enough, for their wavelengths to mingle, perhaps, had made him susceptible … You mean, he had said, we are a kind of emotional vacuum, between us, that must be filled. Something like that, she had said, and had added, “But I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Anne, he thought, could not be a ghost, because she was elsewhere, with someone else, doing for someone else those little things she had done so gaily for him, tasty little suppers, bits of research, a sudden vase of unusual flowers, a new bold shirt, unlike his own cautious taste, but suiting him, suiting him. In a sense, Anne was worse lost because voluntarily absent, an absence that could not be loved because love was at an end, for Anne.
“I don’t suppose you will, now,” the woman was saying. “I think talking would probably stop any — mixing of messages, if that’s what it is, don’t you? But — if — if he comes again” — and here for the first time her eyes were full of tears — “if — you must promise, you will tell me, you must promise.”
He had promised, easily enough, because he was fairly sure she was right, the boy would not be seen again. But the next day he was on the lawn, nearer than ever, sitting on the grass beside the deck-chair, his arms clasping his bent, warm brown knees, the thick, pale hair glittering in the sun. He was wearing a football shirt, this time, Chelsea’s colours. Sitting down in the deck-chair, the man could have put out a hand and touched him, but did not: it was not, it seemed, a possible gesture to make. But the boy looked up and smiled, with a pleasant complicity, as though they now understood each other very well. The man tried speech: he said, “It’s nice to see you again,” and the boy nodded acknowledgement of this remark, without speaking himself. This was the beginning of communication between them, or what the man supposed to be communication. He did not think of fetching the woman. He became aware that he was in some strange way enjoying the boy’s company. His pleasant stillness — and he sat there all morning, occasionally lying back on the grass, occasionally staring thoughtfully at the house — was calming and comfortable. The man did quite a lot of work — wrote about three reasonable pages on Hardy’s original air-blue gown — and looked up now and then to make sure the boy was still there and happy.
He went to report to the woman — as he had after all promised to do — that evening. She had obviously been waiting and hoping — her unnatural calm had given way to agitated pacing, and her eyes were dark and deeper in. At this point in the story he found in himself a necessity to bowdlerize for the sympathetic American, as he had indeed already begun to do. He had mentioned only a child who had “seemed like” the woman’s lost son, and he now ceased to mention the child at all, as an actor in the story, with the result that what the American woman heard was a tale of how he, the man, had become increasingly involved in the woman’s solitary grief, how their two losses had become a kind of folie à deux from which he could not extricate himself. What follows is not what he told the American girl, though it may be clear at which points the bowdlerized version coincided with what he really believed to have happened. There was a sense he could not at first analyse that it was improper to talk about the boy — not because he might not be believed; that did not come into it; but because something dreadful might happen.
“He sat on the lawn all morning. In a football shirt.”
“Chelsea?”
“Chelsea.”
“What did he do? Does he look happy? Did he speak?” Her desire to know was terrible.
“He doesn’t speak. He didn’t move much. He seemed — very calm. He stayed a long time.”
“This is terrible. This is ludicrous. There is no boy.”
“No. But I saw him.”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know.’ A pause. “I do like him.”
“He is — was — a most likeable boy.”
Some days later he saw the boy running along the landing in the evening, wearing what might have been pyjamas, in peacock towelling, or might have been a track suit. Pyjamas, the woman stated confidently, when he told her: his new pyjamas. With white ribbed cuffs, weren’t they? and a white polo neck? He corroborated this, watching her cry — she cried more easily now — finding her anxiety and disturbance very hard to bear. But it never occurred to him that it was possible to break his promise to tell her when he saw the boy. That was another curious imperative from some undefined authority.
They discussed clothes. If there were ghosts, how could they appear in clothes long burned, or rotted, or worn away by other people? You could imagine, they agreed, that something of a person might linger — as the Tibetans and others believe the soul lingers near the body before setting out on its long journey. But clothes? And in this case so many clothes? I must be seeing your memories, he told her, and she nodded fiercely, compressing her lips, agreeing that this was likely, adding, “I am too rational to go mad, so I seem to be putting it on you.”
He tried a joke. “That isn’t very kind to me, to imply that madness comes more easily to me.”
“No, sensitivity. I am insensible. I was always a bit like that, and this made it worse. I am the last person to see any ghost that was trying to haunt me.”
“We agreed it was your memories I saw.”
“Yes. We agreed. That’s rational. As rational as we can be, considering.”
All the same, the brilliance of the boy’s blue regard, his gravely smiling salutation in the garden next morning, did not seem like anyone’s tortured memories of earlier happiness. The man spoke to him directly then:
“Is there anything I can do for you? Anything you want? Can I help you?”
The boy seemed to puzzle about this for a while, inclining his head as though hearing was difficult. Then he nodded, quickly and perhaps urgently, turned, and ran into the house, looking back to make sure he was followed. The man entered the living-room through the french windows, behind the running boy, who stopped for a moment in the centre
of the room, with the man blinking behind him at the sudden transition from sunlight to comparative dark. The woman was sitting in an armchair, looking at nothing there. She often sat like that. She looked up, across the boy, at the man; and the boy, his face for the first time anxious, met the man’s eyes again, asking, before he went out into the house.
“What is it? What is it? Have you seen him again? Why are you …?”
“He came in here. He went — out through the door.”
“I didn’t see him.”
“No.”
“Did he — oh, this is so silly — did he see me?”
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 hea
d 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 NEXT ROOM
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.