by Unknown
‘I want things I’ve never had much of a taste for hitherto. I want stability. I want to live in one place. I want to make plans for next year and the one after that and the one after that. I want’ – he lays a hand on her arm – ‘… I want to get married. Are you listening to a word I’m saying?’
‘I’m listening,’ says Claudia.
‘I want to get married. I want to marry you, in case I’m not making myself absolutely plain.’
‘We could be evangelical together,’ says Claudia, after a moment. ‘I’m rather that way myself. You’ve no idea…’
‘Well, all right then, if there’s time. But I shall have to earn a living, which is something I’ve never bothered too much about up to now. I don’t see why you should starve in garrets; I’m sure it’s not what you’re accustomed to.’
‘Well, no. But I’m really quite good at fending for myself.’
‘You can contribute,’ says Tom, his arm now tightly around her. ‘You can write these history books. For myself, I’m going to become a sober citizen. A son of toil. I want to get my hands dirty. Perhaps I’ll be a farmer. I want to live somewhere where it rains a lot and things grow furiously. I want to see the fruits of the earth multiply and all that sort of thing. I want to make provision for the future. I want to lay up riches on earth since I don’t believe in heaven. Not material riches – I want green fields and fat cows and oak trees. Oh, and there’s one more thing I want. I want a child.’
‘A child…’ says Claudia. ‘Goodness. A child…’ She looks up again at the swirling kites; one is now much larger than the others, starting its slow descent upon some selected target.
10
‘Ah,’ says Sister, ‘there you are, Mrs Jamieson. Well, we’ve had a bit of a crisis though I must say she’s rallied marvellously this morning. But it was rather touch and go at one point. Anyway, Doctor doesn’t think there’ll be any more trouble for the moment. She’s asleep now, if you want to sit with her for a bit. She was talking about you last night – not that she was compos mentis really, poor dear.’
Lisa looks through the porthole. Claudia is lying flat, eyes closed; one arm sprouts tubes and brightly coloured plastic pouches. ‘What did she say?’
‘She thought she was in childbirth again, bless her. She kept saying “Is it a boy or a girl?” ’ Sister laughs gaily. ‘Funny, isn’t it – women often go back to that, towards the end. A lot of our old ladies harp on that. She was in a proper state – kept grabbing my arm: “Tell me if it’s a boy or a girl…” So I said – you are her only one, aren’t you, Mrs Jamieson? – I said, “It is a girl, Miss… Miss Hampton, but that was a long time ago.” ’ She clears her throat sharply: ‘Of course the Miss is professional, I realise that, a lot of professional ladies keep Miss and I quite agree that Mizz business people use nowadays is awful. Well, there you are, Mrs Jamieson – you go on in, though I doubt if she’s going to respond much today. But she may well know you’re there.’
No she doesn’t, thinks Lisa, she has no idea. Wherever she is it is not here, not in this room. She is somewhere a long way away.
Lisa sits. She opens the newspaper she has brought and reads. She will stay a quarter of an hour or so, in case. Occasionally she looks at Claudia. Once she gets up and crosses the room to prod the soil around the poinsettia by the radiator; the soil is correctly damp but the poinsettia looks sickly.
It’s quite true, she thinks, you never forget having a baby. I remember every minute of each of the boys. She stands by the bed; Claudia’s withered arms, her sunken face, the slack shape of her underneath the bedclothes fill Lisa with something that is both revulsion and a guilty pity. She thinks of her lover, whom she will see later that day. She savours, for a moment, her feelings about her lover. She thinks – and the thought is complacent – that Claudia has probably never known this feeling. She didn’t love Jasper, certainly – at least not like that; very likely she has never loved anyone.
They have taken off her rings and her gold bracelet and put them on the bedside table. Lisa picks them up and looks at them – the big emerald that Jasper, presumably, gave her, the opal circlet and the diamond cluster (and where those came from, Claudia only knows). Then puts them down hastily; Claudia has always been funny about possessions – no, not funny, downright nasty.
‘Can I have this?’ asks Lisa.
‘Can you have what?’ says Claudia, continuing to type.
‘This. This little box.’
Claudia turns her head. She looks at the ring in the palm of Lisa’s hand, the ring with a little hinged compartment. Her eyes flicker. ‘No,’ she snaps. ‘Put it back where you found it, Lisa. I’ve told you before not to touch the things in my jewellery box.’
‘I want it,’ mutters Lisa. And she does, she wants it more desperately than she has ever wanted anything, the fascinating ring-box with its crunchy silver-patterned lid, its tiny fastener. It is too big for her finger, far too big, but that does not matter. She would keep things in it, very small and precious things.
‘Put it back.’
Lisa opens the ring. ‘It’s dirty inside,’ she reports. ‘It’s got little bits of dirt in it. I’m going to clean it.’
Claudia swings round in her chair. She reaches out and snatches the ring. ‘Leave it alone,’ she says. ‘And don’t touch it again, do you understand?’
Statistically, afterworlds – be they Christian, Greek, Pharaonic – must be populated almost entirely by children. Infants, toddlers. A terrible acreage of swaddled bundles, of little potbellied stick-limbed creatures, of wizened malformed dwarfs. With, prowling among them, a few bearded patriarchs, a scattering of old women, and a regiment of forty year olds. I see it as a scene by Hieronymus Bosch. There would be dragons, too, and devils with pitchforks and monstrous winged creatures. No angels; no heavenly choirs.
One can feel only relieved that one will not be going to such a place – merely to oblivion. And of course not even to that since we all survive in the heads of others. I shall survive – appallingly misrepresented – in Lisa’s head and in Sylvia’s and in Jasper’s and in the heads of my grandsons (if there is room alongside football players and pop stars) and the heads of mine enemies. As a historian, I know only too well that there is nothing I can do about the depth and extent of the misrepresentation, so I don’t care. Perhaps, for those who do, who struggle against it, this is the secular form of hell – to be preserved in forms that we do not like in the recollection of others.
Snide Claudia. Cynical Claudia. And fortunate Claudia, of course, to be granted the circumstances in which to reflect upon the way in which others will preserve her memory. Many would consider this a luxury. The other great proletariat of the afterworld, of course, is the soldiery – those myriads of boy-faces beneath their tin hats, helmets, turbans, bearskins…
‘Hello,’ says Camilla. ‘I say, hasn’t it been beastly hot today? Our fan went kaput in the office and we nearly died. I must have a shower. By the way is it true there’s been a big battle? You always hear everything – do tell. There are all sorts of rumours buzzing round the Embassy but no one’s really saying. Go on… I won’t utter, I swear.’
It is on the news. In the bleak clipped anonymous prose of the BBC – ‘… a number of engagements in the Western Desert in which severe losses were inflicted on the enemy.’ Heavy fighting, says the impersonal voice, took place on several fronts.
‘Isn’t it exciting!’ says Camilla. ‘They’re really at it in the desert again now, aren’t they? Everyone’s awfully keyed up at the Embassy. Apparently poor Bobby Fellowes is badly wounded – wretched for Sally, she’s being terribly brave. But we’re really bashing Rommel, everyone says.’
The phones and teleprinters at GHQ are busy twenty-four hours a day. Everyone is out of breath and impatient. No sorry not now my dear there’s one hell of a flap on… see what I can do for you later… hang around there may be a communiqué at six… come back… wait… let you know as soon as we can.
Mada
me Charlot harangues the cook, in an unbroken monologue that lasts five minutes, a medley of French and kitchen Arabic in which certain words constantly recur – baksheesh, piastres, méchant, mafeesh, mish kuwayyis. The telephone rings. Her slippers slap across the stone floor of the hall. ‘Mademoiselle Claudia… On vous téléphone…’ She returns to the kitchen; her voice – denouncing Lappas the grocer, questioning the absence of white flour, querying the change for a fifty-piastre note – runs parallel to that of someone with unconfirmed news of a tank battle in the Sidi Rezegh area, a withdrawal…
Claudia types, in the white heat of the day. In the next room Camilla sleeps, released from the Embassy for the essential afternoon rest. Down in the garden, the gardener also sleeps, in the shade of the banyan tree, hunched up into a bundle of old rags. Hoopoes pick delicately at the lawn; the petunias and marigolds blaze.
There is an advance. There is a retreat. We have lost this many tanks, that many aircraft, so many men have been taken prisoner. The Germans have lost this many, that many. Figures dance on bits of paper, tenuously related to machines, to flesh and blood. There is out there, where these things or something like them are supposedly happening, and back here, where ice chinks in glasses at six and hoses play on the gardens of Gezira.
‘Nothing for you at the moment, my dear, I’m afraid,’ says the Press Officer. ‘Cast your eye over the latest casualty lists if you like…’
‘… A picnic at the Fayoum on Saturday,’ says Camilla. ‘Heavenly. Eddie Masters is coming, and Pip and Jumbo. I say, Claudia – is something up? You look frightfully seedy – would you like an aspirin?’
First there is disbelief, resolute disbelief. No, it is not possible. Not him. Others but not him. And then there is hope because missing does not necessarily mean killed, missing men turn up – wounded, taken prisoner. Or they walk in out of the desert days later, unscathed; Cairo is full of such tales.
Hope becomes endurance – moving through the day, and the next and the one after; lying sleepless through the nights – with this hollow ache within, this tumbling down a cliff-face of fear each time you allow yourself to think, to remember.
Praying. Praying shamefaced in the Cathedral.
‘Mademoiselle Claudia, on vous téléphone…’
‘Claudia? Drummond here – Press Office. You asked us to let you know if there was anything on Southern. Captain T. G. Southern – reported missing. Is that right? There’s a signal here – apparently he’s been picked up now. Killed, I’m afraid, poor chap. Was he a chum of yours?’
The nights are worst. The days pass, somehow, because there are certain actions to be performed. The nights though are not seven or eight hours long but twenty-four – they are days unto themselves, hot black days in which she lies naked on the sheet staring at the ceiling, hour after hour after hour.
‘I’ve sent Abdul out for some more milk,’ says Camilla. ‘The stuff in the jug was foul – I’m sure he’s been topping it up with Nile water. Did we wake you up last night? Eddie brought me back from the Moffats’ party and insisted on coming up for a drink. Aren’t you having any breakfast?’
How? Where? Instantly? Or slowly, lying bleeding into the sand, alone. Too weak to fire the Very pistol. To find the water flask. Just lying waiting.
Please may it have been instantly.
Madame Charlot pounces from her lair. ‘Un instant, Mademoiselle Claudia…’ An outpouring in her maverick combination of French and English – an impassioned account of rising prices and the chicanery of shopkeepers, the deprivations of the moment – ‘this ’orrid war-time’ – necessitating a rent increase ‘mais très peu, vous comprenez, très peu, c’est moi qui souffrirai, enfin…’ So that Claudia has to stand holding the bannister until at last the nausea overcomes her and she excuses herself, runs up the stairs…
Don’t think about it. However it was it is over now. However it was or wherever it was. He is not lying there any more. He is nowhere now. Nowhere at all. Don’t think about it.
‘Cicurel have got some heavenly new materials in,’ says Camilla. ‘There’s a pink and blue crêpe-de-chine I simply can’t resist. A two-piece, I thought, for garden parties. The little Greek woman’s going to do it for me, from a Vogue pattern.’
Is nausea always a manifestation of grief? Who am I to know? I have never been thus before. Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.
The khamseen blows. The windows have to be kept closed. The hot wind rattles the shutters and the kitchen boy sweeps dust from the hall floor three times a day.
The map on the wall of the Press Room is decked out with little flags: red, green, yellow, blue, brown, white. Brigades and divisions make gay patterns upon the contours. The Press Officer’s pointer moves among them, reducing everything to orderliness and elegance. Noise, smoke, heat, dust, flesh, blood and metal are gone; it is really all quite simple, a child could grasp it, a question of dispositions and manoeuvres, flanks and pincer movements, lines and boxes.
‘ “There is a blessed home
Beyond this land of woe,” ’
sings the cathedral congregation. The women sing loudest, in the clear clean precise voices of their race and class; a few tenors and baritones ring out also, confident but not assertive.
‘ “Where trials never come
Nor tears of sorrow flow.” ’
And when they have done with singing they pray, to the Lord God of Hosts. Gloved hand to their brows, one knee upon the stone floor, they humbly beseech Him to abate the pride of their enemies, assuage their malice and confound their devices. And, that done, they rise, discreetly straightening trouser creases and smoothing silk dresses over knees, to sing once more.
‘ “Onward Christian soldiers,
Marching as to war…” ’
‘You ought to get away for a bit,’ says Camilla. ‘Go to Alex for a few days. You must be run-down, the way you keep being sick all the time. There’s a sweet little pension near the corniche I can give you the address of.’
It is like travel. You journey from the event and as it becomes more distant it becomes less potent and more poignant, like a remembered home. As the weeks go by the knife turns differently.
And there is something else now to think about. With amazement at first, then with apprehension, with wonder and with awe.
‘Oh my goodness…’ says Camilla. ‘Well I mean I did wonder you did seem to be… um, well sort of filling out a bit and of course you seemed so run down, I see now… But somehow the last person one would expect… I mean not like Lucy Powers or the Hamilton girl – with them one honestly wasn’t surprised, but you, Claudia… What rotten bad luck. How absolutely foul for you. But why didn’t you… I mean, couldn’t you have… You’re going to have it? Well, goodness I do think you’re brave.’ She stares, incredulous; it is the most extraordinary thing she has heard in weeks.
The nursing home is surrounded by a big shady garden. Gravelled paths wander among palms – the stocky domesticated kind with textured trunks – and casuarinas. Ambulant patients wander also, and others recline on basket chairs on the lawns and the verandah, patrolled by nurses. The nurses are all very starched – coiffed in sparkling white like nuns of some esoteric order. They are also unremittingly cheerful. Claudia is received by a freckle-faced Irish sister whose uniform crackles down corridors and into lifts. ‘Not much further, dear,’ she keeps saying. ‘We’ll have you tucked up in bed in a jiffy. Not feeling too bad? How’s the pain now?’
‘I’m all right,’ says Claudia, who is not. The pain in fact is intense; she clenches her stomach muscles, trying to hold it back.
There is the sound of a baby crying. They pass a door with a wide glass screen through which can be seen rows of cots. Claudia stops.
‘Now then,’ says the nurse, ‘I wouldn’t, dear… Better get yourself to bed.’ Her cheerfulness wavers; this is an unforeseen hitch. ‘Not that everything isn’t g
oing to be fine, Mrs Hampton, in a few months time we’ll be popping your baby in there too.’
‘Miss,’ says Claudia. ‘Not Mrs.’ She stares through the glass screen. Only the babies’ heads are visible, some fringed with hair, some not, so that they are just tiny scraps of red flesh at the top of a bundle of wrappings. ‘Why do the cots all have their feet in tins of water?’
‘It’s because of the ants. If we didn’t do it you’d have the ants getting to the babies. It’s a terrible country, this. The climate and the insects, I never knew anything like it.’
She puts her hand on Claudia’s arm, covering her discomposure with confidentiality. ‘You’d hardly believe it, but I’ve been told – it was before my time, see, quite a few years ago – there was a girl didn’t keep the tins topped up and they found one of the babies dead. The ants had got it. Eaten the little thing’s eyes out. That was how they found it – the eyes gone and the ants all over it.’
Claudia moves away. She stands for a moment as though in thought and then turns to the bowl of sand in which people are supposed to put out their cigarettes; she is violently sick into it, in paroxysms that go on for several minutes.
‘You’re having a miscarriage my dear,’ says the matron. ‘As I imagine you realise. We’ll make you as comfortable as we can.’ She looks down at Claudia; her expression is blandly impersonal – a professional face. ‘I imagine,’ she goes on, ‘that under the circumstances you may be feeling it’s the best thing. Doctor will be along to see you again in a few minutes.’
Claudia is lying with her legs clenched together. Some animal is gnawing her within. She stares at the woman and then rears herself up in the bed. ‘No,’ she whispers. She has intended to shout but her voice comes out as a hoarse breath. ‘I’m not going to have a miscarriage. It is not the best thing and it is not for you to say so. You must do something.’