Play Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Oh, I’m not looking yet. At my age I’ve got to have something other people can’t offer.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fifty. I was born on the day war broke out.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘You want my life history?’

  ‘Why not? This looks like a long wait.’

  ‘It’s not very interesting. My father was a spice importer—it was a family firm. I had two elder brothers. Twins.’

  ‘Still alive?’

  ‘Yes, of course. They’re several years older than me, so I never knew them well. One of them teaches in a Jesuit seminary in Wisconsin and the other one manufactures petrol pumps in Middlesbrough. He’s got five daughters—I know their names but I doubt I’d recognise them if I met them.’

  ‘What happened to the spice business?’

  ‘My father was killed on the retreat to Dunkirk, and the firm went bust in the war. My mother’s still alive. She’s an extraordinary woman. We’d been quite well off till the war, living in Wimbledon with four or five servants in the house, and she’d been just an idle, rather sickly beauty, doting on my father, letting him do everything. His sister told me that, so it may be a bit partisan. I don’t think she wanted to have me, but—this is just something she once said—he knew the war was coming and he had a premonition he was going to be killed, so he wanted to leave as much as he could behind. That was me. Anyway, he’d set up trusts for my brothers’ education, but I was a girl and the war was starting.

  ‘Because of the bombing my mother took me away to live on a farm in Shropshire, and by sheer willpower she stopped being sickly and became tough. She still farms, on the same farm—we were just lodgers at first, but she used the last of the family money to buy it. She’s over eighty. If you were interested in pigs …’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Then you’ll know the name. The McEwen herd.’

  ‘My interest doesn’t extend to British pigs.’

  ‘Oh, well. My mother knows more about Gloucester Old Spots than anyone else in the world. She is the authority. She is totally dedicated. She only consented to come to my wedding if I arranged for it to take place during the Smithfield Show, in a lull in the pig-judging. You should have seen her hat.’

  ‘How did you meet your husband?’

  ‘Oh, at a party, the way one used to. I’d been to the local grammar school. I was quite a clever girl and they wanted me to go on to university but my mother was determined I had to start earning my living. I didn’t mind. All I wanted to do was get away from the farm, and she wanted that too. She’s incredibly superstitious. She mates her pigs according to their horoscopes and she persuaded herself my stars were having a bad influence on them. Really, of course, she wanted me out of her life—I should never have been there in the first place. She gave me an allowance so that I could come to London and learn to type and so on, though I was terrible at it and didn’t take it at all seriously, but I loved scraping by on my pittance. I lived at one of those Girls of Slender Means places and I met Derek at a party given by a brother of one of the other girls. He’d come with a spare ticket for a concert hoping to pick someone up, and it was me. I adored the concert. That’s when I discovered I could have been musical. Anyway, one thing led to another. The only men who’d shown any interest in me before were farmers’ sons, and I couldn’t reciprocate. I’m sorry to hear you’re interested in pigs.’

  ‘It is a blemish on my character. How does your husband earn his living?’

  ‘It’s a very technical sort of ship-broking, to do with difficult cargoes. I expect you know every country’s got different rules. I used to try and get him to explain, but I could only understand the really simple things. Like, for instance, did you know there’s a Central American country—I can’t remember which one—which has rules about the import of step-ladders? The president’s brother died when he fell off an imported step-ladder, so now they won’t let them in if the rungs are the wrong distance apart. But there’s no control over single ladders, so the trick is to import short single ladders and assemble them into step-ladders when you get there. Derek’s firm specialises in knowing that sort of thing. He finds it unspeakably boring but he’s very good at it.’

  ‘Then he is only pretending to find it boring. Go on.’

  ‘Oh. There isn’t much else. We had two children, a girl and a boy. Anna trained as a nurse and married a doctor from New Zealand, who took her back there. She’s got two children. There’s a vague sort of agreement I’ll go and visit them next year, so I’m saving for the air fare. My son, Hugo, works for a firm of law publishers, and I look after his son, Toby. That’s about it.’

  ‘When did you divorce?’

  ‘Three years ago. I don’t talk about it. It’s water under the bridge.’

  ‘But you think about it still?’

  ‘I try not to. Look …’

  He was looking already, directly into her eyes. His face had its mask look, withdrawn, judgmental. The dark eyes told her nothing. But she was aware that if she withheld there would be no more invitations to outlandish concerts, no more of his alarming company. She had been looking forward to this evening for days. She had laid in the calculated makings of an apparently improvised supper. That he should seem to want to see her made her feel and think better of herself than she had for years.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I think about it all the time. Do you want the bedroom details?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I tell people he found himself another woman. She’s quite different from me, not just because she’s younger, I mean. She looks slinky-sophisticated, but I doubt if she’s got much in the way of brains. I can’t stand her. But that isn’t really it—Derek and I had been coming apart for years. In the end it was only music kept our marriage going at all.’

  ‘You’ve left out what you did between the time when your children started going to school and the break-up of your marriage.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, almost. Silly little bits of good works—the Oxfam shop, the local conservation committee. We had a cottage near Banbury—I made quite a good little garden there. I would have joined a choir if my voice had been good enough. I started to learn the flute …’

  ‘And stopped?’

  ‘I lost heart. Look, it’s difficult for me to be fair to Derek. If you could understand us both from outside you might get a quite different picture, but from my side I slowly began to realise that he couldn’t bear the idea of me being interested in anything except through him. Even music. He felt he had given me that, but by learning an instrument I was making myself independent of him. I’d joined a quartet, very amateur but we were having fun in our simple way until he started arranging theatre nights and things on the only evenings the others could do, holidays at times when they were all in town …’

  ‘You didn’t object?’

  ‘Not enough. Not in time. For instance it would be a play I really wanted to see, and there’d be a reason why it had to be that evening. He’s a clever man, very amusing to talk to and be with provided he’s in control. It was the same in a different way with the cottage … Yes, of course I should have understood what was happening years ago, fought harder to be myself … I’m not really a fighter, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You had stopped living together before your divorce?’

  ‘He moved in with Veronica. I took in lodgers for a bit in our house, and then we sold it—very well, actually. I was determined to get my share but at the same time not to give him a chance to say I owed him anything, so I got him to agree to almost all of it going straight to the children. We made a settlement on Hugo’s marriage which saved a lot of tax. Then I found my flat and got a job, the first real job of my life, with a company organising coach-tours of historic buildings. I enjoyed that, you know, getting all the details right, coping wit
h dotty little crises without panicking, smoothing people down, all that. Unfortunately the boss had rather grand ideas. He longed to have his own airline to fly the customers in. He never got that far, but he set up a New York office and started trying to cover the whole of Europe, which we didn’t know how to do, and he’d borrowed a lot of money just before the interest rates went up, and soon he was running up a down escalator and of course he went bust. That was a bit over a year ago. I was going through a bad patch for personal reasons—a love affair that wasn’t working, if you must know—and I didn’t feel like looking for a new job. I’d got really depressed, applying and applying and applying, before I landed the other one, and that was only the fluke of actually being in the office for my interview when they needed someone to answer a German telephone call. So when Toby’s nanny left I said I’d do that for a bit. Janet pays me the proper wages. But it isn’t good for me. I can feel myself shrinking. I simply have to find myself a real job or I’ll become like my mother might have been if she’d never got interested in pigs. Now it’s your turn. You can tell me why you are interested in pigs.’

  ‘I made my first money in pigs.’

  ‘Begin at the beginning. Where were you born?’

  He had not apparently expected this. There was a jerk of the head and a shrug, peasant-like, self-exculpatory. She watched him, keeping her face stiff, returning his original look, saying with her eyes that she too wasn’t interested in continuing to meet him unless he gave her a glimpse, if not behind the mask, at least of the processes that had moulded it. The waitress came and took their order. He did not, as Derek would have, use the interruption to escape the challenge, but instead resumed the eye contact. The silence lasted at least as long as any of those between the snatches of music at the concert, but full of tensions which the composer had failed to achieve.

  ‘I am two or three years younger than you,’ he said. ‘I am a Pole by birth, but I was born in Romania, almost certainly in 1942. The Nazis had shipped a group of workers down to Romania for their own obscure, bureaucratic reasons, and my mother, who was already pregnant, had disguised herself as a man in order to remain with her brother. I know nothing about my father. When my mother’s sex was discovered she was allowed to have her baby but I was then taken away and put into a Romanian orphanage. Being Germans, they provided me with documentation. That is how, in the attempts at repatriation after the war, I was sent back to Poland, to another orphanage, on the theory that efforts would then be made to trace relatives who might take care of me. Of course nothing was done.

  ‘The orphanage was a terrible place, heartless and incompetent. It was ruled by the oldest children, brutally. So I learnt to fight. The orphanage in Romania, though the food was scant and the blankets thin, had been run by kindly monks. I yearned for it. When I was about twelve I was big and strong enough for the boys who ruled in the Polish orphanage to decide they had to break my will. I was not prepared to have my will broken, and their other option would have been to kill me, so I escaped and started to make my way back to what I regarded as my native Romania.’

  ‘At twelve? Did you have any money? Any help?’

  ‘No money. No papers. No help. I stole. I cheated and lied. I had reached Slovakia when a man attempted to rape me. I stabbed him with his own knife, and was arrested. I answered all questions in Romanian and gave the name of a boy I had known at the first orphanage—if I’d given my own obviously Polish name they’d have sent me back to Poland. The man I had stabbed had a record of attacks on children. It was obvious I had been acting in self-defence. I was simply a trivial problem to the Slovak authorities, which they solved in the obvious way by transferring me to Romania.’

  ‘Hurrah. Some things work out all right.’

  ‘Not yet. I didn’t even know the address of my orphanage. I had imagined it could be traced through the church authorities, but all such enquiries now had to be made through the communist apparatus, and they were not interested. At twelve, I was old enough to work. I was given identity papers in my new name and sent to a collective. A pig farm. We have this in common—like you I knew in the depths of my being that my future was not in a pig farm. As soon as I could I left, illegally of course, and made my way to Bucharest. I had by now given up hope of returning to my orphanage. That was the past.

  ‘In Bucharest I learnt to live in the cracks of the system. All systems have these places, and the less flexible the system the more cracks. Eventually such systems are bound to collapse. This is what we are seeing happen now, in these very days, in Eastern Europe. They are like the crust of the earth, these countries, with the various bureaucratic elements in them floating like huge, inflexible plates on the mass of the people below. They grind against each other, causing tensions and crumplings, which must eventually build to a point where the whole system erupts and the people burst through. This is what is happening now. But until that point of eruption, inevitable but unpredictable, there are these interstices between the plates in which it is possible to survive. The system positively depends on them, because they provide the lubrication which allows any movement to take place at all.’

  ‘They’re saying Romania’s the one place where there isn’t going to be a revolution. What’s-his-name has got it all buttoned up.’

  ‘Ceausescu. They are wrong. It will erupt, with worse violence than we have seen elsewhere, very soon. There will most likely be a full-scale civil war. Take it from me. I have very good information.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please go on. You were lubricating the system. With pigs, somehow? You said that’s how you made your first money.’

  ‘Yes. At the collective I had of course heard all the grumblings about the system, and seen how everyone who had any authority used it as far as they could to feather their own nests. Because Romania had an extremely inflexible system it positively demanded corruption at every level to make it work at all. So the managers would falsify the numbers of pigs and have some slaughtered on the collective instead of being sent to the state abattoir. They would sell some of the meat on the black market, keep some for themselves, and use the rest to bribe the inspectors who came to see that they were not doing any such thing. The state abattoir was so inefficiently run that many animals died before slaughter, often of starvation waiting to go through the sheds, or else meat would wait for transport until it was unfit to eat because the refrigeration system had broken down or the generator fuel had been sold on the black market. It was extremely easy to write off imaginary carcasses. But all this cheating was unsystematic, small beer. Those who tried to operate on a larger scale were too stupid and greedy not to get caught, and shot. By the time I was sixteen I had set up an organisation, at first with a single collective and a single abattoir but later with a whole network, under which they co-operated­ to their mutual benefit. I ran the distribution, which was much the most difficult part. I found that I understood what was necessary without having to be shown or taught. I knew, as if by instinct, that I had to have a lot of small outlets and also had to maintain a balance of supply and demand so that my customers were satisfied, but at the same time I kept the price of pork as high as the market would stand.’

  ‘It sounds absolutely hair-raising. What would have happened if you’d been caught?’

  ‘If I’d been officially caught, and so unable to bribe my way free, I would have been shot. I was a criminal, an enemy of the state. I say this with no shame—in fact I say it with pride. You see, I and my friends and others like us were the only honest operators in the country. The official system and the people in it were totally dishonest, corrupt beyond belief. Truth was alien to their beings. But we kept our word. We had to. Everything depended on that. At the very simplest level my customers knew that they were getting clean, fresh meat from me, whereas if they bought from the state there was every chance that it would be diseased, rotten and underweight. You must also understand that in a system like that everybod
y accepts the necessity of lubrication. Everybody is on your side. The chief danger was in attracting the awareness of the secret police, the Securitate. They knew, of course, that a black market existed, and were happy provided they got their rake-off. What I had to keep from them for as long as possible was that a single organisation was now controlling the illicit pork trade. As soon as they learnt that they would move in and take the machinery over, for their own profit. I operated under fifteen different names. I kept myself as far as I could in the background. I became a Securitate informer and was then able to buy information about the Securitate itself …’

  ‘Did you inform against anyone?’

  ‘About one in five Romanians is an informer. I informed against other informers, against customers who tried to cheat me, and people like that. One has at that age and in such a milieu a very hazy concept of moral priorities. Yes, certainly I did things which I would now much rather not have done. Be that as may be, I judged my time and got out, carrying a suitcase full of dollars. I was about nineteen.’

  He shook his head, rueful, nostalgic, almost like an Old Boy looking back on the irrecoverable months of sixth-form fame. Poppy thought he would now stop. He’d told her more than enough to repay her own mild self-revelations, but he was in a mood to remember.

  ‘I didn’t go far—only as far as the student quarter,’ he said. ‘I knew I intended to come West in the end, but I wasn’t ready and nor were the times, so I decided to learn English. I had fresh, good papers, and bought myself a job as cleaner at the university, where I paid a professor for lessons. She was half-French and had married an Englishman before the war. She and her husband had been with the partisans. They were both communists, but the Russians immediately deported him and from then on denied his existence. Now the climate in Russia has changed and I am having fresh enquiries made.’

  ‘He can’t still be alive.’

  ‘Highly unlikely, but I wish to know. As I told you, I had barely any contact with my mother and not even knowledge of my father, so at the age of nineteen I chose my own parents. Natalie I came to know well. She played me music, lent me books, talked about the world, and also things which may exist beyond the world. She had no faith in any religion, but you felt when you were with her that there were concerns of immense importance, eternal matters to which we give names such as truth and beauty and justice, without which we would indeed have been what the regime in that country was organised to make us, automata, ants in a nest, will-less and blind to any objective beyond the survival of the nest. She inhabited her own cavities in the system, different in kind from mine, crystal caves. But we recognised each other all the same as allies.’