A little farther on, just as he had dozed off, having decided that she intended to drive all night, she pulled the car up abruptly by the side of the road and got out. She wandered off out of the range of his vision, and he decided that he too should take advantage of the stop, but could hardly find the strength to move. Finally, he did so: then stood by the car waiting for her to return. They were entirely surrounded by the vast presence of mountains: huge, they towered above the dwarfed car and fell away below it, at a gradient so steep that one wondered how the trees could maintain their incredible, defiant, perpendicular grip. It was alarmingly silent: a bird cried, and there was the faint but very distant sighing of a waterfall. He could hear no movement from her, not a sound or a rustle, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the light he saw her standing at the far end of the lay-by, leaning on the low wall and looking downward. He went towards her, and stood by her, and touched her cheek, which was cold from the night air.
‘You shouldn’t be out in the cold,’ she said, softly, not turning to him. ‘You’re ill.’
‘I’m better,’ he said, and indeed he felt so very strange that it was hard to tell if he were better or worse. Certainly, whatever he had was less locally painful.
‘Where are we?’ he said, after a while, and she turned to him and said, ‘We’re going downward, now. We’re through the mountains, really. We can sleep in Yugoslavia. We said we would.’
‘It’s so quiet, here,’ he said. ‘Listen.’
They listened to the silence, and then she said, ‘I can’t understand it, can you, people being comforted by nature? What use is all this to me? It’s nothingness, without people.’ And he agreed, but as he meekly got back into the passenger’s seat, he thought for the first time in his life (and delirious, possibly, through illness or alcohol) that there was more to it than that, and that those vast moving shapes and abrupt inclines and icy summits were, after all, emblems of conditions, in the grip of which, in her frail human presence, he too moved.
They reached Yugoslavia. She had a moment of exaltation and triumph at the frontier, leaping out of the car, talking gaily in lousy Italian to the frontier people, leaving him sitting there stupefied while she went off to buy him a dry ham sandwich and a bottle of slivovitz: animated, gay, swinging her hair about like a person in a film, laughing. ‘Poor, poor darling,’ she said, as she sank down by him again, sinking her teeth into her hunk of bread, ‘I bet you’re too ill even to think you love me, aren’t you?’ And, incredibly, she laughed.
‘Why on earth are you so cheerful?’ he managed to mutter, as the dry crumbs lacerated his infinitely delicate throat.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, switching on the engine. ‘A sense of achievement, perhaps? Or because I’ve got you so helpless at last. Come on, we’re off to Ljubljana.’
He had completely forgotten where Ljubljana was, so he did not protest: he had no notion of the time, nor of the distances they had covered or were to cover. From time to time, as he lay there, half asleep, a feeble spasm of resentment would shake him: all that waiting for this. The excursion of a lifetime, achieved through a sequence of miraculous coincidences (his wife going off to Canada for the week with all the children, who could possibly have foreseen or counted on that?), and all he could do with it was to shrivel up with an aching head and a painful body and wish that she would let him lie down in a comfortable bed. He didn’t even fancy the whisky any more: dutifully, like a good patient, he unscrewed the top of the slivovitz, sniffed it, and tried a sip. It was quite nice, nicer than he had remembered from his last experience with it years before: dry and fruitlike and tasting very strongly of the pale yellow colour that it was. Why not purple, he thought to himself, as he swallowed another mouthful, why is it not purple like plums are, and that was his last conscious thought before he woke up in Ljubljana and found that she was trying to lift him out of the car, assisted by someone who looked like a hotel porter. She and the man in uniform were laughing: at him, no doubt, and angrily he staggered to his feet. ‘Darling,’ she said, as he swayed a little, clutching at the open car door, ‘we’re here.’ And there, indeed, they were, as in some nightmare or vision: vast glass doors and arcades swam before his eyes, for she seemed to have driven the car more or less into the hotel. There was a deadly silence, as there had been in the mountains, and he knew that it must be very late. She pushed open the doors and he staggered, crumpled, after her, and was pushed into a lift. When they arrived at the bedroom he could see that she had already been up there and arranged everything, for her nightdress was laid out on the bed: she had done it all, she, who was incapable of lighting herself a cigarette in a slight draught. And she had done it all, moreover, while he was asleep in the car: she had left him there, in much the same way as he and his wife had been accustomed to leave small sleeping children while they had lunch in country restaurants. She and the porter seemed on excellent terms, speaking English and Italian and French to one another: they were probably mocking him, but his ears were buzzing and humming so loudly that he could not hear. He sat down on the bed, and finally the porter went away; and when she turned to him from the door, which she had shut and locked, he felt suddenly angry, as though he had been made a fool of behind his back, or derided in his sleep.
‘Where in God’s name are we?’ he said, looking around him with irritation: the hotel was modern and streamlined, and the bed and chairs were upholstered in a kind of black cushioned leather, of the sort that had always figured largely in his erotic fantasies.
‘In Ljubljana, of course,’ she said: she was calmly getting undressed for bed.
‘You must be mad,’ he said. ‘Why ever didn’t you stop before?’
‘Because we planned it this way,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling, now? Better?’
‘I feel dreadful,’ he said, and she was smiling down at him so benignly that he felt himself on the verge of tears.
‘You’d better get some sleep,’ she said, and started to untie his shoes. He let her take them off, and as she knelt there he was possessed by such a lucid sorrow that he reached out for her and held on to her; she put her head on his knees, and he stroked her hair.
‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, it’s so hopeless, we haven’t a chance, we’ve never had a chance. We’re so kind to each other, but it’s hopeless, it’s entirely hopeless, we might as well give up. What good does it do, to be so careful, to be so kind and careful?’
He made her cry: she started to cry, and he stroked her hair.
‘I don’t mind, I don’t mind,’ she said into his knees.
‘The thing is,’ he said, seeing it quite clearly at last, ‘that if I had you, I’d ruin you. You know I would, don’t you? Or if you had me? There isn’t a hope of people doing anything better with one another. Not a hope.’
‘That’s not so,’ she said. ‘But if it were, it wouldn’t matter.’
‘Of course it would matter,’ he said, aching. ‘We’ve told ourselves for so long that we – if we were given the chance, we …’
But he couldn’t say all the things that they would have been able to have, and to be, and to do: love, harmony, absence of pain and cruelty, absence of absence.
‘But darling,’ she said, and he could feel her shaking with some new kind of emotion, ‘don’t you see, my love, that we simply haven’t a chance of being given a chance? It’s wonderful, really. It’s miraculous. Even now – ’ and she looked up at him, with great rings under her eyes smeared grey with fatigue – ‘even now, when we did have a bit of a chance, you’ve gone and got this horrible illness, so we’ll never know what it would have been like if you hadn’t. We’ll never have to worry about it, we can just carry on being kind, and making promises. It’s amazing, really. There’ll never be any reason to know that we couldn’t do it.’
‘Couldn’t do what?’ he said, though he knew what she meant: he simply wanted to see if she would say it.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, embarrassed by the sim
plicity of the sentiment, rising to her feet and pulling back the covers of the bed. ‘I don’t know. Be happy, I suppose I meant.’
‘I am happy,’ he said, watching her as she arranged her things by the bedside: her glass of water, her book on old people, her pack of cigarettes, her bottle of pills.
‘Do you know,’ she said, conversationally, as he got into bed by her, ‘this is the most enormous place, this hotel, and this modern bit is just stuck on the front of it, it’s not like this at all really, there are acres and acres more of it, very old and faded and peeling, with nineteenth-century murals and dirty mosaic corridors and Art Nouveau windows and God knows what else. They’ve just stuck this black leather bit on for people like you and me. Foreign tourists. You must come and look at the rest of it in the morning. It’s rather frightening, the contrast. But magic. You’ll like it.’
‘I’ll come and see it,’ he said, ‘if I’m not dead by then.’
‘Do you want me to read to you, or are you going to sleep?’ she said: she had actually opened her book at the bookmark.
‘You’re amazing,’ he said.
‘Yes, I am, aren’t I,’ she said, complacently, smiling without looking at him. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing. You’ll never ruin me, because you’ll never have the time to set about it properly. It takes time to ruin another person.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ he said, and shut his eyes, as she started to read her book: images moved through his mind in confusion, pine trees, road signs, passing cars, hillsides, and he could never decide whether he and she were people who had the stature to cope with the disasters that had befallen them, and why it was that she had been asked to deal with that child, and how gloriously it had hardened her nature (perhaps it was stature that he had glimpsed as he sat by her looming above him in the car – she had forgotten to ring London, he would remind her in the morning to ring London), while all that he had to bear (all, why all?) was a chill caught from going to bed with his hair wet and a frigid hysterical wife: but perhaps, after all, it was ridiculous to measure in this way, because both tragedy and love are not human possessions, they are not allocated, and they fill the air, they are the backdrop like the pine trees, and there is nobody alive who does not live in these perpetually ebbing and flowing conditions, so that her sorrows were in a real sense his, and everyone’s, and he was not coldly caring for them or using them or manipulating them as he had sometimes feared, any more than she was him, because they were all a part of the same thing, joined as this black leather was to those faded frescoes; a mystic sense of the unity of all sorrow filled him as he lay there, delirious with influenza and alcohol, and if this was so then how could he abuse, or ruin her?
In the morning, he could hardly remember what had gone through his mind the night before, but he remembered, solicitously, to remind her to ring London to see how things were: and she thanked him, although she had, of course, remembered herself.
And oddly enough, long after they had returned to England, years after, he had only to think of pine trees and Alpine landscapes to be reminded of something half realized, a revelation of comfort too dim to articulate, a revelation that had lost its words and its fine edges and its meaning, but not its images. He thought of pine trees, and he thought of her, and the memory (why should he not choose, even for himself, a word of some dignity?) – the memory sustained him.
(1969)
6
The Gifts of War
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Aeneid, Book II, I.49
When she woke in the morning, she could tell at once, as soon as she reached consciousness, that she had some reason to feel pleased with herself, some rare cause for satisfaction. She lay there quietly for a time, enjoying the unfamiliar sensation, not bothering to place it, grateful for its vague comfortable warmth. It protected her from the disagreeable noise of her husband’s snores, from the thought of getting breakfast, from the coldness of the linoleum when she finally dragged herself out of bed. She had to wake Kevin: he always overslept these days, and he took so long to get dressed and get his breakfast, she was surprised he wasn’t always late for school. She never thought of making him go to bed earlier; she hadn’t the heart to stop him watching the telly, and anyway she enjoyed his company, she liked having him around in the evenings, laughing in his silly seven-year-old way at jokes he didn’t understand – jokes she didn’t always understand herself, and which she couldn’t explain when he asked her to. ‘You don’t know anything, Mum,’ he would groan, but she didn’t mind his condemnations: she didn’t expect to know anything; it amused her to see him behaving like a man already, affecting superiority, harmlessly, helplessly, in an ignorance that was as yet so much greater than her own – though she would have died rather than have allowed him to suspect her amusement, her permissiveness. She grumbled at him constantly, even while wanting to keep him there: she snapped at his endless questions, she snubbed him, she repressed him, she provoked him. And she did not suffer from doing this, because she knew that they could not hurt each other: he was a child, he wasn’t a proper man yet, he couldn’t inflict true pain, any more than she could truly repress him, and his teasing, obligatory conventional schoolboy complaints about her cooking and her stupidity seemed to exorcize, in a way, those other crueller onslaughts. It was as though she said to herself: if my little boy doesn’t mean it when he shouts at me, perhaps my husband doesn’t either: perhaps there’s no more serious offence in my bruises and my greying hair than there is in those harmless childish moans. In the child, she found a way of accepting, without too much submission, her lot.
She loved the child: she loved him with so much passion that a little of it spilled over generously onto the man who had misused her: in forgiving the child his dirty blazer and shirts and his dinner-covered tie, she forgave the man for his Friday nights and the childish vomit on the stairs and the bedroom floor. It never occurred to her that a grown man might resent more than hatred such second-hand forgiveness. She never thought of the man’s emotions: she thought of her own, and her feelings for the child redeemed her from bitterness, and shed some light on the dark industrial terraces and the waste lands of the city’s rubble. Her single-minded commitment was a wonder of the neighbourhood: she’s a sour piece, the neighbours said, she keeps herself to herself a bit too much, but you’ve got to hand it to her, she’s been a wonderful mother to that boy, she’s had a hard life, but she’s been a wonderful mother to that boy. And she, tightening her woolly headscarf over her aching ears as she walked down the cold steep windy street to join the queue at the post office or the butcher’s, would stiffen proudly, her hard lips secretly smiling as she claimed and accepted and nodded to her role, her place, her social dignity.
This morning, as she woke Kevin, he reminded her instantly of her cause for satisfaction, bringing to the surface the pleasant knowledge that had underlain her wakening.
‘Hi, Mum,’ he said, as he opened his eyes to her, ‘how old am I today?’
‘Seven, of course,’ she said, staring dourly at him, pretending to conceal her instant knowledge of the question’s meaning, assuming scorn and dismissal. ‘Come on, get up, child, you’re going to be late as usual.’
‘And how old am I tomorrow, Mum?’ he asked, watching her like a hawk, waiting for that delayed, inevitable break.
‘Come on, come on,’ she said crossly, affecting impatience, stripping the blankets off him, watching him writhe in the cold air, small and bony in his striped pyjamas.
‘Oh, go on, Mum,’ he said.
‘What d’you mean, “go on”,’ she said, ‘don’t be so cheeky, come on, get a move on, you’ll get no breakfast if you don’t get a move on.’
‘Just think, Mum,’ he said, ‘how old am I tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, ripping his pyjama jacket off him, wondering how long to give the game, secure in her sense of her own timing.
‘Yes you do, yes you do,’ he yelled,
his nerve beginning, very slightly, to falter. ‘You know what day it is tomorrow.’
‘Why, my goodness me,’ she said, judging that the moment had come, ‘I’d quite forgotten. Eight tomorrow. My goodness me.’
And she watched him grin and wriggle, too big now for embraces, his affection clumsy and knobbly: she avoided the touch of him these days, pushing him irritably away when he leaned on her chair-arm, twitching when he banged into her in the corridor or the kitchen, pulling her skirt or overall away from him when he tugged at it for attention, regretting sometimes the soft and round docile baby that he had once been, and yet proud at the same time of his gawky growing, happier, more familiar with the hostilities between them (a better cover for love) than she had been with the tender wide smiles of adoring infancy.
‘What you got me for my birthday?’ he asked, as he struggled out of his pyjama trousers: and she turned at the door and looked back at him, and said, ‘What d’you mean, what’ve I got you? I’ve not got you anything. Only good boys get presents.’
‘I am good,’ he said, ‘I’ve been ever so good all week.’
‘Not that I noticed, you weren’t,’ she said, knowing that too prompt an acquiescence would ruin the dangerous pleasure of doubtful anticipation.
‘Go on, tell me,’ he said, and she could tell from his whining plea that he was almost sure that she had got what he wanted, almost sure but not quite sure, that he was, in fact, in the grip of an exactly manipulated degree of uncertainty, a torment of hope that would last him for a whole twenty-four hours, until the next birthday morning.
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Page 9