Late Call

by Angus Wilson

  “I must tell you in all honesty that I do not at all like ostriches. They are greedy and stupid. But we must make our life very often with such creatures, as you know. And they suffered when Hitler came, the poor ostriches with their heads in the sand. The life was hard and rather lonely, especially when the War came and Willi had to leave me on the farm. But I was good to our native boys and they were good to ‘die Falsche Frau’—I imagine they just could not say ‘Polnische’! What they liked was to hear me singing Polish songs. I think it was all the little s’s hissing like little snakes in the Polish language that pleased them.

  “The British took our farm, but they sent us home to Germany free of cost. I can stay if I wish but of course the wife must go with the husband. I did not feel so very grateful, but I didn’t know then how often in my life the British would come forward to pay my fares. Willi’s father was dead, but his mother received us. She was a little old woman, rather humped, do you say? but very powerful in spirit. It was not more than a year before they quarrelled, she and Willi. Everyone was poor in Germany and then she tried to live in the old way with all the peasants and great feasts with raspberries when the neighbours hunted wild pigs. Willi got very angry and said that was not the way that Germany would rise again. He started to read books and such things that the old lady did not like—Red books that were lent to him by a friend in the University at Königsberg, a very clever man, a lektor in Handelsgeschichte. So then they quarrelled very fiercely. ‘A house ruled by a woman is a mockery of law.’ Do you read Strindberg? I know him only in translation. So we went away. I was glad because I did not like to live there in those big cold rooms ‘amid those dark forests and gloomy lakes’ as Mickiewicz says in our great national poem.

  “So then we went first to Königsberg and then to Berlin. Everyone there was so very poor. That was the great inflation time. Willi had only a little work in a bookshop, but we had a room near the Tiergarten and we were very happy. I must tell you that Willi had become a communist. I can see that you are surprised— a von Kragnitz, a former Kolonialburger, a communist! You hardly believe me, I diink. But so things were at that time, everybody was changing their views. ‘The lion brays and the ass roars’, as the old saying is. Our little room was filled now with people all day, talking and smoking and shouting against the Weimar Republic. The floors were covered with pamphlets and lampoons. But I was happy making coffee—acorn coffee you will laugh to hear—and on special days sometimes I would serve some Torten mit Schlane or a little Kompott to all the shouting comrades.

  “But the cloud was not long in coming. A brown cloud! A cloud of brown shirts! I think now sometimes that Willi was secretly much pleased by Hitler’s speeches. But his path was already chosen. It was a Party member. And quite an important man. And you do not leave the Party, you know. Already in 1933 the call came one night for us to leave Germany. I remember it was a very cold night and we had the two children. I put the little top coat with its fur collar on to Britte, but little Dietl had no coat. I could not find it anywhere in our room. So, imagine! he travelled all the way, yes, through Poland and Czechoslovakia and Roumania and Bulgaria (for we had to go by a secret route) many, many days, until we came round to Moscow, with only a little jersey. In Moscow everywhere was snow, although the golden roofs of the Kremlin gleamed. But roofs will not warm a little boy of six years, however golden. Yet as the old Russian fable says—’the little fox is too inquisitive to catch cold’. At Moscow Willi joined us. And then began a long new life. Moving about Russia while Willi is being trained for party underground work in Germany. And I too learned something—to boil the samovar and to make blinis. At last in 1939 we were right down to the Chinese border. And glad for it too, for life was less dangerous then at the frontiers than in Moscow. ‘He stands about the throne today, tomorrow he is swept away! ‘ I don’t remember where the lines come from. Is it Pushkin? And then Willi must go to Moscow, and, with him, Dietl who is now nearly twelve. I never saw them again. That is the price Stalin pays to Hitler—to be rid of some German comrades. Not important ones, of course; Willi was never important. But even we the women, the useless women, must be swept away too—’if the blossom dies, the beetles fall with it.’ I learnt that later in China. Do you know I didn’t understand how it could be until one day in a little village in the mountains near Peking I was sitting and the almond blossom was falling round me and with the blossoms many hundred little blue and green beetles banging on the ground. So must sayings have their sense, I think.

  “But the little beetles got away this time. An official, a very upright man helped us across the border. He wanted to ask his price from Britte, but he had to content himself with the old mother. Just the situation of Schnitzler’s comedy, you know—but not for me so much a matter of laughter. However we were to be in the way of luck. In Sakhalin we met many White Russians, former aristocrats. I thought that they would poison us—such things do happen, you know. The remains of a German communist! but not at all! There was one old general—he heard our name—’But I hunted the pigs in your husband’s forests’—he knew nothing of Willi, only of his family—’I was an honoured guest in your husband’s riches, you must be honoured guests in our poverty’. So we lived there some years—all samovars but no blinis. All the time war was around us. Yet strangely it did not touch us. ‘I heard the guns, I saw the fire; I drank my tea and played at dice’, as your own Byron says. And then all of a sudden the Japanese put us on the move. Hundreds of miles, hundreds of miles each day. The sick and the old died on the road—my Britte died of the typhoid—her lips were swollen like puddings. Then I almost died too. There I could find nothing to live for. We were put to Hong Kong. Do you know here at Carshall, Mrs. Rickard? No? She is friend of Edna. She asked me, how do I find the Zoo at Hong Kong? I answered her I found it all the time, nothing else. I was shut up. And then came the British. The British with their files and their records. Who are you? Where do you come from? Where is your family? For the British and the French, it is always the same—where is your family? And what am I? I am Russian, for Willi was at the last with a Russian passport. But I don’t want to be Russian and the Russians don’t want me. As the play says, ‘Thank you, gentlemen, I am content to be myself.’ But nobody knows who that is. The von Kragnitzs are swallowed by the Russians and the Germans don’t want those born in Poland, and the Hapsburgs are no longer. But the British find out. Oh no, they are not to be refused an answer. Your family is in Warsaw, they say. And it is quite true, my brother Andrezj is in Warsaw—only he is dead and his wife too, and his daughters. But the British are not to be put off. It seems that my brother has sons—Dzislaw and Jerzy—who fight in the battle of Britain and are not killed. ‘The eagle soars, swoops on its prey, and lives to swoop another day.’ Those are the lines of an old poet which I read when I was very small. And now Dzislaw is in Johannesburg. So the old woman must go to Johannesburg, but the British will pay. Do you know Johannesburg? A terrible town, not a town at all, no river—a mine. And Dzislaw is married with an Afrikaaner—Cornelia. You laugh already at the name? But you will not laugh at the woman, the big, fat, blonde mevrouw. She sits all day, eating and shouting at the native boy. No books in the house! From the first day I make rows with her. I remembered my native boys in East Griqualand and how I sang them Polish songs. But in Riverdale, that is where we live in Johannesburg, oh very smart, a vulgar suburb, there is only one native boy who lives in an outhouse in the garden behind the poinsettias. And Cornelia does not like me to sing to him. And then suddenly they say that Willi was a communist and I must go. But the British are very just. If I cannot live in Johannesburg, then they find another nephew for me. And in a New Town it does not matter that an old woman was once married to a communist. I can stay with Jerzy here. And with Edna. So there is my life.”

  As the old woman’s tale had progressed, her English had grown more and more difficult to follow so that at last Sylvia had to strain to catch the words. When it was ended there was a long silence
. “I’ve never been out of England. I really only know foreign people from the hotels I’ve worked in.”

  “So I should suppose.” The old woman sounded quite sarcastic and her eyes had grown sharp and hard.

  Sylvia resented this remark. How could the old woman know she’d been in the hotel business when she’d never let her get a word in edgeways? After a moment of mumbling the old woman got up. Sylvia noticed the hump again, but almost worse the eccentric dirty clothes all held together by safety pins.

  Unintelligible though most of the old woman’s story was, Sylvia felt a wondering respect for someone who’d been through so much. The vision of the woman’s dirty, ragged skirt remained with her as one of the warning horrors of those days. Yet there the woman was—a picture of what got served up to women in this world; and, since the least we can do is to stand by one another, Sylvia tried once or twice to speak to her again. But the old woman, her story told, avoided Sylvia. So there it was and just as well really.

  She described the old woman to the family and it appeared that she was a very well-known figure locally. Both Ray and Judy called her by the name which was used by all the schoolchildren —old Humpy. But only Harold had any information about her.

  “She’s been one of the banes of Sally Bulmer’s life. Apparently her children or whoever it is she lives with are a model couple. The girl’s a hardworking little cockney and he’s one of the decent Poles. It’s really very good of them to put up with it. There have been all sorts of shindigs. The old lady’s quite round the bend—accusations of poisoning and heaven knows what else! Sally offered to get her into an old people’s home, but they wouldn’t hear of it. So she does her bit by going round there and listening to the old woman’s stories. She says they would make another Arabian Nights and they’re never the same from one week to another. Though no doubt, as she says, there’s a substratum of truth in it all. The rulers of the world can’t disregard the speed limits without causing casualties.”

  The old parson had said keep on through the darkness until you come into the light. But, no doubt, he had left out all those like the old woman who kept on through the darkness and through darkness and through darkness and hadn’t come out anywhere; that was no part of his message. Or those like Miss Priest, who walked bang out of a long bright day into the blackness of night.

  As Sylvia continued her aimless moochings, the May weather grew especially warm. People began to hope for one of our freak good summers, the sports grounds were filled; Harold ordered all classroom windows to be kept open; Ray bathed each evening on getting home before he joined in CarshalPs crowded social life; Miss Castle told Judy and the other “A” level candidates not to be rattled by the heat; Muriel Bartley wore a bikini in the garden; Sally Bulmer showed bare arms; even Lorna Milton shed her excess woollies; and the farmers complained of drought. Only Arthur seemed unaware of the heat, though his eye caught with pleasure the summery look of the girls of the New Town—indeed in the warm evenings the streets of Melling, as of all Carshall, offered up an endless dalliance of youth.

  Warned by spells of giddiness or of sudden shortness of breath, Sylvia took her walks at a slower pace, rested more under the hedgerows, made her sandwiches last out for two or three little snacks in this or that shady lane or wood. She set out earlier, telling herself that to explore further at slower pace, she must give herself more time. But where further was she seeking to go? On occasion she would find herself at some unfamiliar country pub with a small green table and chair set up before a bed of wallflowers or tulips, or she would come upon an unexpected pond overhung by willows in which the boatmen scudded over the green slimy weed and the first tips of yellow lilies showed above the water level. Yet even by these distinctive landmarks she stood unsure whether or not she had been there before, or, just when she knew that she had not the landlady would say ‘A soft boiled egg you said last time, I think.’ But she told herself that at least she’d gone ‘further afield’.

  So Sylvia didn’t brush the face powder off her jacket, she didn’t clean her brown suede shoes, she didn’t mend the tear in her skirt, she didn’t wash the eggstain from her blouse—or rather, she often didn’t do these things. For, although she already saw herself a jumbo-size Humpy without the hump, Judy said one evening, “Caroline Ogilvie saw you right over at Burpitt on Wednesday, Gran. They were out there riding. She said you looked dressed for Oxford Street.” So thät was all right really; or rather, judging from Judy’s tone, it wasn’t. And again with the shopping, the many little household jobs—you could get away with it once, take people in twice, paste over the cracks three times, but in the end you were bound to fall into lies and little secret hiding places, into inventing conversations that you’d never had in the shops.

  So, on through that lovely May, heavy with lilac scent and with the sound of nightingales at midnight from despised Gorman’s Wood (the town planners certainly knew their onions), Sylvia carried her heavy body and her heavy thoughts about the fresh green fields without more than a passing notice from home or abroad. In the last days of the month the air grew intolerably heavy with stale, hovering warmth which had collected in every corner during the many past windless weeks. Sylvia’s vague glooms were startled now and again by random rolls of thunder. How tired and scratchy everyone seemed!

  One afternoon about four o’clock—time to start thinking where she had come to and how to get back again—Sylvia sat on the edge of a copse in the shade of a high gnarled elm tree. The world appeared to be absolutely still; and, on looking round at the trees behind her, she could not see a ripple in all the far-stretching ocean of green leaves, patched in contrasts of near black and softest jade as the strong sunlight chanced to strike them. Only the growing host of midges spiralled ceaselessly in shimmering cones around her; and even from these there came not the slightest sound. Far on the horizon, across the fields away from the wood, clouds were gathering, shapeless as yet and light grey-white. She sat, keyed up to the coming storm, yet uncertain whether to flee the lightning or the rain. Under the trees or out into the fields? The first quiet rustling in the leaves grew louder as the wind surged towards her; with it came immediate and intense memories of other storms—of pressing her face against the hard rock in terror as she sheltered in a cave near Minehead, of making a sudden, frightened rush towards the French window at Bognor to shut out with heavy curtains all sight of a storm’s terrors, of (shamefacedly covering the steel knives on the dining-room sideboard at Paignton. She knew at once that she feared the lightning, however remote its dangers, more completely than the Flood itself. As though to confirm this knowledge a forked tongue whipped out and cut the sky above her; she was almost on her feet before she heard the bang and roar that followed. Stumbling across the ridges of tender wheat—a farm girl’s remembered sacrilege—her bucket bag clattering against her side, locks of mauve-white hair falling from under her wide-brimmed straw hat, she saw before her a vast field which offered no threat of treacherous shelter. The clouds by now had swollen up from the horizon, swollen and broken into huge lowering black, fog yellow and smokey-grey shapes. Soon they would burst and drench her, but at least she was safe from the lightning that flashed and cracked on every side. But not from her terror of it—a terror inspired in the main by the thunderous roars with which the lightning made its threats. All the pressed in, tight packed nervous terrors of the past months burst out with the storm’s explosion; yet at the same time all wandering fragments of nightmare came together in one sudden overwhelming flash and roar. Whatever it was had found her, driven her from cover, and now would strike her down. She ran, stumbled once, fell, cut her hand upon a stone, with difficulty raised herself, pushed back her hair with her bleeding hand, then ran again, calling—she heard herself with fogged amazement —”Arthur! Arthur!”

  It was only as the rain began to fall, swamping the world, that through its clatter she could hear a voice screaming, not in words, but in sheer terror. Turning, she saw that where the field sloped away to he
r right, one tall crumbling, leafless, ghostly-fingered oak tree had been left to decline and fall in its lonely sovereignty over the landscape. There, clinging to the tree trunk, with face pressed close to the lichened wood, the little girl might have been guardian in a game of grandmother’s steps, if it had not been for her hysterical, agonised yelling all on one high note of panic. Sylvia had just time to speculate whether with those strange knee-length shorts and close-cut hair this was indeed a little girl, before the child’s real danger drove out every other thought from her mind. There was scarcely a second’s interval now between the vivid flashes and the bangs. Leaving one shoe behind as she waddled-ran across the field, she seized the child’s arm and tried to drag her away from the tree. Screaming with renewed terror, the child clung more closely to the trunk. “You must come away from the tree, dear. It’s dangerous there.” Sylvia found at last a soothing, maternal calm voice. Memories of Iris flooded through her to steel her will. In a minute the child yielded and now in turn she pulled the fat stranger back into the open field. There, herself shivering with the cold drenching rain and with shock, Sylvia held the small trembling girl to her until they seemed to merge into one sodden mass. And then, whatever it was struck too late, as a jagged blinding flash zigzagged across the field and the rotten oak went down in a moment’s flame and a long plume of funeral smoke.