The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  ‘I am worried about tonight.’

  ‘I don’t think you need to be.’

  ‘If he doesn’t turn up soon, I’m going to look for him. If I can’t find him right away, I shall tell the driver.’

  ‘I think you’ll find him in his room the same as every other night. On the bed or on the floor.’

  ‘I don’t care where he is as long as he’s all right.’

  ‘You know where his room is?’

  ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘Before your apple pie? They won’t keep it for you, mind – nor your coffee.’

  The younger woman stared hard at her companion, who returned the look with a shrewd glance. ‘Let me know if you need me,’ she said at last.

  ‘No, I shall tell the driver. I’m not looking for trouble – only to set my mind at rest.’

  ‘To set your mind at rest!’ said the grandmother, smiling grimly at the cleared space before her. ‘And when was ever a mind at rest?’ But she nodded affably enough, calling after her, ‘Have you your torch with you?’ and following with her eyes as the other moved quickly down the long table and out through the door, which opened momentarily on a black wedge of night.

  The quietness was still upon those at table. But some conversations, though subdued, had begun to revive. ‘The whole night will be put out of joint,’ murmured the man whose forehead still showed the line of a tight elastic band. ‘This great gap between courses on top of arriving late. By the time the prizes get going, it’ll be nearer eleven. And I’m whacked, I don’t mind admitting it. The point is I’m no use for another day in the bus unless I get a good eight hours on my back.’

  ‘Don’t talk about it,’ said the cardinal’s wife. ‘I’m terrified of a Morning Head – what with a late meal and all the rest of it. And I don’t mean an ordinary headache, mind you. When I say head, I mean a Sick Morning Head. And only those who’ve had it can know what that means. Yes, my God, if I get that, they can just count me out. They could set me down all alone in the middle of a saltpan and leave me there for all I’d care!’

  Outside, the woman who had left the dining room was walking along by the side of the building, walking in the darkness and in the total silence of the Australian night, seeing bright eyes from the bush, seeing the star-stream of the Milky Way above – far denser and whiter than in northern skies. The silent land with its white eyes, white sand and salt and dust was part of its vast spiral. But to stand still was to become part of dust, to lose all heart to go on. She began to move more quickly past the windows and the locked bedroom doors, and round the corner to where one lit, curtained pane threw a yellow square on the ground. Outside this window the heavy brown moths were circling, thick in the air, thick on the ground – moths whiffling their way up the pane, dropping on the outside ledge and beating their way silently up again, spinning, dropping and crowding in ceaseless, urgent drive towards the light. The woman knocked at the door, and stood waiting there in a dust unstirred by breath of wind, amongst the hundred wings that made no sound. She knocked again, then turned the handle of the door, found it unlocked and went in.

  In the dining room the restlessness had increased. It had not come to a beating of spoons on plates or a stamping of feet, but there was growing impatience at the long wait for the sweet. Soon however, this changed to the more urgent longing to be released from the hard chair to a bed – any kind of bed so long as they could lie flat. They began to discover what the hours on the road had done to their backs, what the dust had done to the throat and eyes. By ten o’clock another wave of expectant chatter had died away. Two couples, encouraged by the rest, had marched boldly through into the kitchen like ambassadors of reconciliation into territory which might, for some unknown reason, have turned suddenly hostile. They found no one there. Only the great, still-steaming pots stood round with the remains of meat, and empty soup tureens with their outsize ladles. A platter piled with red bones lay on the draining-board and dirty dishes filled one sink. In the other, the water was still lukewarm and at the bottom, through foam bubbles which were still fresh, they glimpsed their own knives and forks shining. On a shelf above stood the neat row of untouched tea-and coffee-pots. From the back of a chair two aprons trailed, with their white cords dangling, and a tangle of dishcloths as though hastily flung down in passing. Was this so strange? They admitted themselves it was no more than might be found in any large kitchen at the heaviest end of the day when a sudden rush has hit the house. What was strange, what had made them hold their breath, was the newly-created emptiness of the place, as if – had they started in pursuit – they could even now make up on the owners, who might be running off into the distance as fast as they could go from their guests. For a few minutes they called and whistled, rapped on the table and clattered the saucepan lids. No one answered. At some distant door a dog was howling.

  When the four came back to the dining room, they were greeted with a cheer which was quickly suppressed at sight of their doleful faces. There was little sympathy for them, however. Up and down the table the discontent grew. Why had they not penetrated further into the back regions? Had they knocked at every possible door? They could at least have searched harder for pies and puddings. Was it beyond the power of practical persons to start making tea or coffee themselves? Well yes, but there are some people, aren’t there, very helpful and willing at the start, but at the end of the day found to be timid, lacking in enterprise, not really serious at all. Yes exactly, we’ve all met them. It’s all smiles at the start and all leading to what? Exactly nothing. All promise and no action. The will isn’t there, you see. And after all, the appetite doesn’t last forever, does it? The stomach sort of caves in. Like a plastic bag turned inside out. Painful. I don’t want it now. Couldn’t care less. It’s too late, you see. If I had a mouthful of pie now I’d be ill, really ill. Tomorrow morning you could all leave me behind in this God-awful place. And then what? Right now I don’t give a damn what. Only don’t give me any food now.

  There were no further volunteers for the kitchen. Soon, even the discontented murmur died down. Through the windows a brilliant scatter of stars could be seen against the blackness, and a visitor from Britain was heard to remark cautiously how strange it was to see Orion upside down from this side of the world. But it was no time for astronomical observations. Long ago the magician had removed his magic cap and with it all interest in the heavenly bodies. There was complete silence over the room. It was the former cheer-leader who had brought about the final drop in spirits. Even as he had whipped up the cheer, so now, by staring at the kitchen door with a face serious as a judge, he established its opposite. Silently they watched with him. Few expected anything else to eat now. What they did expect was not voiced aloud. A strange curiosity mixed with dread had caught them. Had they perhaps been totally deserted? Left in a place of scrub and desert without food. And don’t forget, the pessimistic one had said, don’t forget we are not to drink from the taps.

  Smoothly, noiselessly, while they watched, the swing door like a small whirlwind suddenly spun round. From its still centre stepped the proprietress. It spun again and over her shoulder two other faces peered. All three were white.

  ‘I have an announcement to make,’ said the woman, looking up and down the silent table. ‘Your driver is dead. Mr Bill Creevy is dead. A doctor will come when he can. The best driver … for years and years he has brought the bus across … now suddenly the heart … the best driver … and a friend. Everything will be done to make you comfortable tonight. Another driver will be sent as soon as possible. And you will get off tomorrow … naturally it will be later, but you will get off. Thank you. Tea and coffee will be served directly.’ The door spun round again, and the three disappeared.

  For a few minutes no one spoke, but here and there along the table the one or two who had not yet doffed their hats now took them off. Only one other person moved. The elderly woman had risen to her feet abruptly. Quickly she made her way down the side of the table, looking neit
her to one side nor the other, but straight ahead towards the door. A streamer from a discarded hat caught her skirt and was nipped off. A paper rose rustled under her foot and she bent to put it back between the plates. Otherwise her back was straight, her brown face impassive. Through the door at the end she went out into the night, and began walking along by the side of the building with its locked doors and drawn curtains – a place neat as a village street set down in the wilderness. She passed on her right a few bushes of large red flowers which the night had made black. Beyond them there was nothing but space and the great, brilliant stars which glittered right down to the rim of the horizon. The woman walked on round the corner of the building, and there for a moment she stopped. At the end of the row, shining between dark doors and windows, she saw the one square of light throwing a yellow patch on the ground beneath. Towards this yellow light she now walked quickly till she came to the door. For a second time she waited. She knocked discreetly. But at once the voice of her travelling companion called: ‘Yes, yes. Please come in!’

  The older woman, her grey head circled by a spinning veil of moths, opened the door and went in. Her face was grave and seeing this, the other quickly said in a low voice, ‘Yes, you were right. He had almost passed out – probably knocked himself out against the edge of the wardrobe. Thank God not what I was afraid of! Only a cut over the eyebrow, but deep enough. He’s sleeping it off. We can safely leave him now.’

  The woman in the doorway looked down at the man sprawled on the bed. One foot was over the side, with a loosened shoe held dangling on the joint of his big toe. There were bottles and a mug on the floor, clothes on the table. On the back of the door his jacket, loaded with loose change in one pocket, swung crooked from its hanger. The young woman had put a narrow pink towel round his head, winding it at a slant over the cut eyebrow and eye. With his ears flattened down under this turban, the engineer’s head looked small, his body larger than before. And now, while the woman beside him had momentarily lifted his head to ease the pillow further underneath, the other – still with her hand on the door – said: ‘Our driver is dead.’

  The woman by the bed withdrew her arm and let the head fall. She stared first at the sharp brown face in the doorway, and then behind it to the thorny outline of a distant bush, and beyond again to the low-shining, unfamiliar stars – her eyes quickly changing focus from the near to the unknown, as though invoking an answer from further and further out. At last she stood up and, still with her eyes on distance, picked up her torch from the table, carefully smoothed back the strands of hair which had come loose with bending in the heat of the room, and slowly walked over to join the woman at the door.

  Meanwhile, the man in the crooked turban had raised his head and with his unbandaged eye, wide-open as the Cyclops’, he stared across at them. The women had been ready to go, but now for a moment the grandmother looked back. The engineer, supporting himself on his elbow, shoved away the towel from his other eye. Still the women waited. There was something of changed roles in their aspect. It was now the younger who watched the more impatiently, accusingly. The other – as though drawing upon years of waiting, of dryness, of working over wasted ground – was giving him some further chance. Under her scrutiny, with its distant hint of goodwill, the man drew his foot onto the bed and with a casual half-kick attempted to get the loose shoe back onto his foot.

  ‘Never mind the shoe,’ said the grandmother. ‘It’s that thing on your head. All the rest back there have taken off the hats, the funny hats. Why don’t you take off yours?’

  For a moment the unbelieving eyes held her own. Then his hand groped about his head, fumbling for the fold tucked in over one ear. Slowly he undid the narrow towel, dropping his head from one side to the other as it unwound, and still with his eyes fixed on hers. The towel came loose and fell on one shoulder. The engineer brushed it to the floor, then swivelled himself to the side of the bed and swung both legs cautiously to the ground.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the woman, calmly, as to an awkward child – and still waiting. The engineer rose unsteadily to his feet, supporting himself with a hand on the bedside table the better to get a long, clear look at her – a look no woman had got from him for many years. For her part the woman bent her head, as though accepting – not for herself but for the dead – some token of respect, long overdue. ‘Goodnight then,’ she said. ‘I hope you sleep well.’

  The man leaned further forward to look. But there was no irony in the face. She was, when all was said, a grandmother. The good, the sore, the punishers, the ill-behaved, all deserved sleep. The women turned away and stepped out again into darkness. The younger, who was behind, didn’t wait to secure the door but started to walk quickly off in the direction of the main building. It was the older woman who turned back and discreetly drew the door to – eclipsing at once its pointing yellow shaft and mercifully shutting out the haunting eyes of night.

  Pedestrian

  A GREAT PATCH of scoured and gravelly land at either end marked the approach to the motorway café. Beyond that were flat fields and a long horizon line broken here and there by distant clumps of trees. At no point on this line was there a sign of building. A glass-sided, covered bridge joined the car park to the café, and people if they wished could stand in the middle and look down onto the road below. The four lanes of the motorway carried every sort of traffic. The long vehicles were the most spectacular and there was no limit to their loads – lorries carrying sugar and cement and tanks of petrol went past, carrying building cranes and wooden planks, barrels of beer, cylinders of gas, sheep and horses, bulls in boxes, hens, furniture and parts of aeroplanes. There were lorries carrying cars and lorries carrying lorries.

  The café itself was filled day and night with a periodic inrush of people and changed its whole appearance from half-hour to half-hour throughout the twenty-four. It had its empty time and its time of chaos. Habitual tough travellers of the road mixed here with couples stopping for the first time for morning coffee. Here buses disgorged football fans and concert parties, and stuffed family cars laboriously unloaded parents, children, grandparents, for their evening meal. The cars far outnumbered other vehicles. And no pedestrian, as opposed to hitchhiker, was ever seen here, for it would be nearly impossible to arrive by foot. Any person unattached to a vehicle was as unlikely as a being dropped from the skies. There was no place for him on the motorway.

  Nevertheless there were still pedestrians in everyday life. A married couple who were queueing at the counter of this café one evening found themselves standing beside a man who admitted to being one himself. The couple had been discussing car mileage with one another and they kindly brought him into it. ‘And how about you?’ asked the wife. ‘How much have you done?’ The other smiled but said nothing. He had obviously missed out on their discussion, and she didn’t repeat the question. From his blank look she might have just as easily been asking how much time he had done in jail. Behind the counter a woman with a long-armed trowel was shovelling chips from a shelf, while her companion dredged up sausages from a trough of cooling fat. ‘Sorry,’ said the man suddenly, ‘I didn’t pick you up just now. No. I’m not in a car. I’m in the bus out there. Long distance to Liverpool.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said the woman’s husband. ‘Good idea to leave it at home once in a while. No fun on the roads these days. No fun at all!’

  ‘No, I haven’t got a car.’

  ‘You don’t run one?’

  ‘No, never had one.’

  ‘Then you’re probably a lot luckier than the rest of us,’ said the man after only the slightest pause, at the same time giving him a quick look up and down. He saw a well-set-up fellow, well-dressed and about his own age. Not a young man. This look, however, cost him an outsize scoopful of thick, unwanted gravy on his plate. He slid cautiously on towards a bucket of bright peas. His wife, who had kept her eye on her plate, now bent forward and asked politely:

  ‘Have you ever thought about it?’

&
nbsp; ‘Thought about …?’

  ‘Getting one.’

  ‘No, I can’t say I have.’ The woman nodded wisely, blending in a bit of compassion in case there was some good reason for it – a physical or even a mental defect. For a moment the hiss of descending orange and lemonade prevented further talk. The three moved across to a table which had just been vacated by the window. From this point they had a straight view of the bridge and a glimpse of the road beneath. Every now and then, in the momentary silences of noisy places, they could hear the regular swish of passing traffic. On the far side of the bridge glittering ranks of cars filled one end of the parking space with lorries at the other. Long red-and-green buses were waiting near an exit for their passengers.

  ‘You don’t mind if I go ahead?’ said the man from the bus. ‘There’s only twenty minutes or so to eat.’

  ‘No, go right on. Don’t wait for us,’ said the woman. The couple were occupied with some problem about the engine of their car and the unfamiliar sound it had been making for ten miles back. They discussed what kind of sound – tick or rattle or thump – and with almost musicianlike exactitude queried the type of beat – regular or irregular? There was the question of whether to look into it themselves, have it looked into or go straight on. Even now they were careful to include the other in the talk in case he should feel left out. They let him into the endless difficulties of parking, of visiting friends in narrow streets, or of visiting friends in any street, wide or narrow, because of the meter. They told him how much for twenty minutes, how much for forty minutes, how much if you were to talk for an hour. They discussed the price of petrol and of garage repairs and the horrors of breakdown on the road.

  ‘And the hard shoulder can be a very lonely place on the motorway,’ said the woman. ‘All those cars rushing past you. Have you ever had to pull over yourself?’