‘He’s better, but different of course,’ said my mother in answer to my question.
‘How’s that?’ I asked.
‘A slight stroke. He cries when you praise him – shakes with laughter if you scold. Nothing’s quite the same. You’ll come with us tomorrow and see for yourself.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to tell him.’ I turned to the map again. It was strange how colour changed everything. They’d made the Middle East look very sinister by putting splodges of queasy yellow and patches of dirty grey across it. The map of Great Britain had always been green as though it were all sweet grass surrounded by an innocent blue sea. No cities, no smoke, no illness there, no shipwreck.
‘You’re coming with us to see your own uncle,’ said my mother firmly. ‘You can carry the flowers.’
‘I don’t want to. Someone might see me.’
‘Well, what about it?’
‘I’ll carry anything else you want. Not flowers.’
Next morning my mother went out into the garden and started snipping off the last of the roses. They were great, showy, red, pink and white blooms with thick stems covered in huge three-dimensional thorns. Very tough as though hanging on as long as possible to life. It had been a long, chill autumn.
‘Don’t pick them too big,’ I said. ‘Take the smallest, shortest ones.’
‘The best for the hospital,’ she replied.
‘Yes, but please make it a small bunch,’ I begged her. ‘I won’t even be able to carry that lot properly.’ She held up the great bunch under her chin. A sudden gust of wind swept the trees and a few white petals fell on her shoulders. My mother must have been very pretty when she was young. She was brought up surrounded by brothers and sisters in another country. In the early photos she was often in a garden. Even though there were few coloured photos in those days I had the impression of light and colour, swings, flowers and gay dresses. You didn’t need to see the colour. Instead a kind of radiance illumined the faces. I never saw it again outside these snapshots. She was never meant for the grey, suspicious village life. All the later photos after she was married – even the new coloured ones – looked flat and dim as though she’d cramped and clipped herself to suit a new environment where – speaking the same tongue though with a different accent – she was thought almost a foreigner. Now her smiles were duty smiles – nothing gay or flirtatious. No swings, no songs at the piano, no sisters, brothers or brothers’ friends. My father kept a prosperous ironmonger’s shop in those days, so she never lacked the ‘necessities’. What she longed for, however, were the trifles. He was not a hard man but perhaps there was something about the drawers of nails, springs, screws and flints, the saws and hammers swinging from the wall – that had worked through to his bone. He was an elder in the kirk and would help to carry the deep velvet collection bag with its wooden handles up to the altar on Sundays. The religion was tough there, yet the bag was charitably deep, you might say, in that people’s hands were hidden right up to the wrist and beyond it – whether they put in a penny or a pound. To put it mildly, my parents were not suited to one another. In those days of fewer experiments or trial marriages, less living together, people could make the most eerily unsuitable unions. So is it better now? people ask. I’ve no answer to that. But to go back to the early days –my mother only asked to be allowed to charm people and not to harm them. Not much to ask, you might say. But you can say that again. Slowly, slowly she learned better and she learned her part well. Charm was not a thing that was liked or understood much in our part of the world.
Next day, just before two o’clock, we got dressed and my mother placed the great prickly bunch in my hands. The flowers were so unwieldy I had to put both arms round them. Thorns scratched my chin and the insides of my elbows in the thin jersey sweater. The three of us left – my father carrying a large cake in a box. ‘Let me carry the cake,’ I begged again. ‘Now hurry up, Charlie,’ said my mother. ‘Don’t let’s have any more of that nonsense.’
The hospital was at the other end of the town. As we neared it we met lots of other persons carrying flowers and boxes, though there were few children. People were smiling down at me and my bouquet in the too-sweet, kindly way that made my stomach sink a bit as though I’d been given too much creamy fudge. As I said I’d always been fond of my uncle and he of me, and all the more I resented my parents for making me do something that seemed unnatural. It was as though they were trying to force me into the rôle of a good, giving boy – a part suitable to my little brother but one I myself was not cut out for. It reminded me of those awful occasions when my mother – never a particularly happy or devoted church-goer herself – would notice someone without a hymn-book and would push me forward in front of the whole congregation to lend one of our own. Agonized and blushing, like the crimson-faced angel blowing his own trumpet in the stained-glass inset above the pulpit, I would step forward to do my priggish-looking task while one or two persons smiled at one another and at my mother as though they’d been approached by some shining acolyte for the first time. These were the games uneasy grown-ups played simply to divert some virtue or sympathy toward themselves.
We were now at the hospital and had entered a long, crowded ward, already rustling with gift-wrappings. People were coming and going with chairs from the corridor as though assembling for a concert. Those who had no visitors were still anxiously and surreptitiously watching the doors over the tops of newspapers. Fathers, husbands and sons were laboriously slinging their legs over the bed to try on tight, new slippers. Here and there the diabetics were religiously warding away the chocolates, fruit drinks and sticky cakes. My uncle looked rather better than I’d expected. All the same it was true something had happened to him.
‘Why, Edward, you’re looking much, much better than you were a couple of weeks ago,’ said my father. Great tears came into my uncle’s eyes. ‘Yes, you’re looking almost one hundred per cent,’ said my mother. ‘And he has something for you,’ she added, prodding me in the back. I placed the thorny bunch beside him on the bed. I knew he’d understand it had absolutely nothing to do with me.
‘Sister says we can all go to the lounge today,’ my mother remarked. Two kind-looking nurses set themselves one at each side of my uncle, with my parents and myself going behind. We escorted him through the long corridor and down a side passage. ‘We can take these along with us to cheer the place up,’ one of the nurses had said, catching up the bunch of roses before we left. A few other patients, both old and young, were going along with us – some being pushed in wheel-chairs, others moving, stiff as dolls and glassy-eyed, at funeral pace. The lounge was noisy and full of smoke. People stared into a corner as if they’d never seen TV before. On the screen several couples were shrieking and cavorting, whipped on like dogs by a joky showman, while he handed out the huge presents they’d earned by going through their humiliating paces in public or by answering intimate details of their private lives. I thought how unhappy they looked, stumbling blindly round the stage amongst ovens and organs, waterbeds, motor cycles, record players and fur carpets. One woman had her arms around a refrigerator, tied with pink bows, as though embracing some icy, unyielding lover who would never turn her way no matter how hard she smiled and hugged. Her husband, meantime, was staggering under a great load of high-powered tools, designed for a do-it-yourself addict who would no doubt be building a dreamhouse for the rest of his days. They’d been compelled to adore and demand these things and it was important that millions of viewers should see the humiliation and the gratitude. The thing ended with the newest car of the day – a sleek Supercar – being wheeled on-stage. A honeymoon couple were bouncing and sliding on the shiny roof. The girl was sobbing with joy on the young man’s shoulder though the chances were they’d have moments of terror before the night was out, struck suddenly with the thought of being forever locked together inside a fabulous metal container.
Meantime my uncle had been let down carefully into an armchai
r and my mother beckoned me to place the bouquet on his lap. As I did so my uncle gave a shout and flashed me a sudden sharp look. I knew what had happened. A long thorn had pricked the old man’s knee. At this look, however, a thrill of the old sympathy was established between us. I knew he would get well again – so bright was this look, so clear and piercing. The thorn, keen and sharp as love, had pierced right through the mist of smoke, through the noise, and brazen load of telly gifts, even through our roses and sweet cake – to his former self. I knew he was all right.
‘He’s going to be O.K. now,’ I said casually.
‘How do you know?’ my mother said more doubtfully.
‘Because I pricked him and it hurt. No, he didn’t mind. He yelled out, of course.’ Not long afterwards my uncle, being tired, was put into a wheelchair for the return to the ward. As we went down the corridor all the roses dropped, one by one, from his hands. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake – it’s all my fault!’ my mother exclaimed. ‘I should have tied them up properly. He’s going to lose them all.’ I looked back. Here and there down the long, brightly-lit corridor both visitors and patients were stooping to pick up roses for themselves. No one stopped them or tried to hustle them forward to give them back to us. Light gifts they were, and free as though fallen from the skies. One woman had already fixed a long stalk through the buttonhole of her coat. Behind her an old man was stiffly bending to smell one of the blooms. Warm, velvet petals fell on the cold linoleum of the passage. I saw some children pick them up, press them deep, deep into their eyes and hold them there. It was like watching some kind of cure for sight – a fragrant eye-balm to press out the memory of the ferocious giving and taking on the screen we had just left.
Talking of eyes we saw a blind man on the way home. That was one bit of advice I’d been spared up till now. I mean no one had yet told me to help blind men across streets. And why do they always have to be mentioned in this connection? As a matter of fact, though the others knew nothing about it, I happened to know one blind man very well indeed. For the last two years, at around four o’clock, whenever I took the shortcut home from school between factory and river, I’d met him. A tall, spare, intelligent-looking man, very well-dressed. At first sight there was nothing about him that suggested blindness – no faltering, no white stick. Nothing. Even his eyes looked curiously sharp and of a shining blue. He’d certainly no intention of being helped across anything, not even the narrow overflow from the river that cut across the lane at one point. He always jumped over that. But what he did want was to be spoken to. And so did I. I can say – during all that time – I never spoke to anyone as often or as freely as I did to him. It was a mysteriously calming thing for an awkward and ignorant schoolboy to be invisible – to have nothing between himself and the other except the voices floating out on the air – no good looks or bad, no sex appeal, scarcely even youth or age. It was communication cut down to its essence. I noticed lots of girls spoke to him too, and I could see how it pleased him. These were girls who would no more have gone up to a strange man than fly to the moon. For I was just beginning to sense what women might have to put up with in attempting to talk to men. But these girls were lucky for once in their lives. And so was he. After a while he went to work in a factory in another town. I never saw him again. For a time communication lost all its closeness and mystery for me and became the usual smooth and cautious exchange we sharp-eyed ones have grown used to.
On the way home from hospital my mother murmured to herself: ‘I wonder if I should go round and have a word with the Rev. MacNair.’
‘Why?’ She had the usual uneasy and unhappy voice which would seize her when she spoke about religion.
‘In case he should die suddenly. People have to be spoken to before they die.’
‘What about?’
‘About this life and the life to come.’ Her voice trembled slightly on the last three words because of the awful uncertainty of it.
‘Two very different states,’ said my father ponderously. He was not particularly comfortable himself about the turn the talk had taken.
‘But he’s not going to die,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t the Rev. MacNair speak to him years ago. He was always hard up for people to talk to. He told me so.’
Although we seldom saw eye to eye on things nothing would have pleased me more than to be able to reassure her on the matter of afterlife. She’d married very young, had brought up five of us, and was never done excusing herself for every penny she spent. The only time she took a taxi she apologized to the taxi-driver for not walking two miles in the pouring rain. I silently planned a magnificent afterlife for her full of gallant men, sunny gardens and wonderful holidays, plus nights and nights of unbroken sleep. There would be plenty of children of course. But I’d also made plans for the special nurseries, the crèche, the kibbutz – loving places, of course, and run in a heavenly way. Ours was not a street you were ever likely to miss the morning-till-night, night-till-morning tiredness of women, at a time when they had little choice in their own lives.
As we neared home black clouds with silver rims were coming up over the low roofs. Although my parents were not comfortable together they were always full of optimistic and comfortable sayings. I dreaded to hear from them how every cloud had a silver lining. Yet I had to admit these clouds were obviously crammed to the brim with the stuff. I eyed them suspiciously and they let fall a few drops of rain. By the time we got home it was almost a cloud-burst. The last of the top-heavy roses were looped to the earth and some of them were lying flat under the stormy yellow light.
‘What a good thing we picked the best of them earlier,’ said my mother who’d obviously forgotten how swiftly the hospital flowers had changed hands. ‘Well, you’d better sit down and get on with your revising,’ she added.
Upstairs my young sister was howling because she’d forgotten to bring back her Arithmetic exercise book from school. An ink exercise. That made it really bad. She knew she’d not only get the big row first thing on arrival, but double the work for the next night.
‘I wish I was dead,’ she said when she saw me.
‘Don’t say that. There are so many dead people around.’
‘Are you talking about the hospital?’
‘Oh no, they don’t keep them lying about there. Everything’s neat and tidy.’
‘How’s uncle Edward?’ she asked, getting up on her elbow.
‘He’s fine.’
‘There are all those years in front of me,’ she said. ‘If there are going to be many nights like this it’ll be pretty horrible. And we were going to the cinema tomorrow night too.’
‘We can go the night after.’
‘Does it all get better or worse?’
‘Depends how you choose. It’s your own life after all. You’re supposed to be free.’ I gave her a short, brisk lecture on freedom.
As I went downstairs I heard her begin, mechanically, monotonously, repeating the word. She seemed to like the sound of it, though the solid way she struck the second syllable made it sound heavy as lead.
‘The accent on “free”!’ I shouted up. But the heavy ‘dom’, ‘dom’, ‘dom’, now partly stifled in blankets, went on like a muffled drum from above. It sounded all wrong, of course – still only a parrot cry, simply the distorted echo of a fellow prisoner shouting about freedom. She’d even managed to waken the little boy who shared her room. And yet, in spite of everything, this word sounded so loud, so confident! I believed it just possible she would one day reach the lightness and balance of that precarious state.
Accompanists
THE PROGRAMME NOTES of this recital have attempted to make everything plain. The theme is there: Songs of Love and Seeking. They come under three headings: The Search in the Mountains; The Search at Sea; The Search in the City. The singer – nearing the end of his search in the mountains – is giving it all he’s got. But the audience also has its work cut out, for the songs – most of them ancient and unfamiliar – are all sung in the language
of their country. The French, German, Italian and Spanish are easy enough for some, of course. All the same there has also been a brief search in Russia, amongst the snowdrifts of the Ural mountains. A lake in Finland has been looked into. Even some high Hungarian villages have come under the fruitless survey. To complicate the programme, each song is written down with its translation alongside, and during the short interval between songs the linguists in the audience have been busy comparing the two columns. A few scholars are picking great gaps in the translation. The more serious among them have decided to forego the first coffee-break and get down to a thorough examination of the text. Altogether there is a lot of reading to be done. Even on the platform the accompanists appear to be studying the words, though by this time after years and years they must surely know them by heart. There are two of them – a middle-aged woman at the piano and beside her a young girl who turns the pages of the song-book.
The first group of songs is nearly ended. A Spaniard, an Italian, an Icelander – all have been looking for the ideal beloved in the highest regions. It has been a strange, cold, melancholy search – a recital of slippery paths, stumbling horses and straying donkeys. The unlucky ones, unable to get hold of a donkey, have fallen down precipices and into waterfalls. The cow-bells, sheep-bells, church-bells that seemed to summon them on have led only to endless glaciers and lonely mountain huts. Their shouts are lost in the hurricane. Strangest of all, a woman would occasionally be glimpsed on a mountain peak before the mists hid her again for ever. At the end of the day the searcher – his songs and sonnets still in their folder – would find himself back in his stuffy tent or in the dismal room of some local inn with only alpine flowers or the small mountain animals to talk to.
The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books Page 30