He welcomed the luncheon gong, and in his expectant joy remembered with a smile the Swedish word for this: gonggong. But she did not appear at luncheon. And gradually, his spirits falling and his stomach swelling, Harry ploughed in these difficult seas through the enormous and exquisite Danish meal.
The afternoon was terrible. Nothing, nothing happened. A few odd men came lurching through. Two young Danish fellows sat for a long time laughing over their drinks. Harry went down to pack, but was forced by the state of his companion to complete this as quickly as possible.
An hour before the ship was due in people began to come up exhausted or rested from the sanctuary of their cabins. The ship was steaming close against the English littoral, and the seas were much calmer. Disconsolate, Harry rose from his arm-chair, threw aside the paper on which he had been reduced to writing lists of all the vegetables he knew beginning with the letter ‘p’, and walked round to the little bar for a drink. There she was, bright as a bad penny, perched up on a stool between those two laughing young men.
His heart sank, but he went grimly to the other end of the bar, with his back turned, ordered a dobbeltsnaps. He could not hear what was said, for between high laughter they spoke in the low intimate voices of people telling anecdotes: but he could watch them in a slice of mirror. And … so there! What had he told himself? Hadn’t he been right? She was just an ordinary flirt! She hadn’t talked to these men until five minutes before, and now she was going it hell-for-leather! Easy as pie, pie-in-the-sky! He might have known it! Hell, he had known it! And that’s why (subconsciously of course) he hadn’t gone up to her…. But through this Harry knew deeply and quite consciously that he envied the young men and deprecated his own drivelling loutish cowardice. He turned and took one last look at her. She was wonderful … yes, she was wonderful.
He went downstairs and made ready to leave. In a while the ship docked. He took his bags and shuffled down among the line of passengers to the rail-lined dock. It was a curious relief to feel the land under one’s feet, it brought what felt like a light unheard buzzing to the ears. Then the familiar smells and a further shuffle through the customs.
Suddenly, going through the doorway to the platform, he saw her again. She was clutching the arm of a large ugly elderly man. She was stroking this man. Together the two, the elegant fresh young girl and that obscene old figure, passed through the door. Harry believed his eyes and he was disgusted.
He had to pass them. They stood in the wan light of the old-fashioned station, she fingering about in her bag and at every moment flashing her eyes up at him, he bloated, gloat-eyed, mumbling heaven-knew-what salivary intimacies. It crossed Harry’s mind how strange was the phenomenon of these shipboard passengers one never sees until the last moment, these cabined mysteries—and it struck him again horribly how this applied to those two, the old slug lying down there in the comfortable depths of the ship with his fair, fresh girl….
The girl looked up and met Harry’s eyes. She immediately smiled‚ it seemed in relief, and came up to him. She spoke excitedly, apologetically in Swedish:
— Oh, please do excuse me … but it’s funny I remember distinctly I once saw you in Haga, you speak Swedish? You see, my father and I—we’ve lost our seat reservations. Could you tell me what is best to do? … We’re new here….
Harry’s heart leapt. The lights in the station seemed to turn up, it was suddenly almost sunny. With delight he showed them to the end of the train where he knew there were empty carriages. Together they travelled to London and never stopped talking. He insisted on driving them to their hotel.
Harry and his lady have now been married some seven years. He has never, as far as can be known, regretted the requital.
A Waning Moon
A WOMAN’S long scream cut the night, a sound sudden and curving as a shooting star. Then a splintering of crockery, a coughed sob, a scuffling, a sobbing again that rose clenched and breathless again into that high curving scream. The caravan shook itself and rattled like a giant egg bursting to hatch. And all that time a radio drummed. Yet no other voice answered the scream, it seemed that one person alone was fighting for breath in such a shut wheeled box.
It might have seemed strange indeed to those passing by—a returning quarryman, a fisherman with his day’s catch. These would have passed along the lochside road where the water stretched still and deep and flat towards the island, where inland dark masses of slate-wall towered instantly above the road—and in the moonlit stillness, with not a movement for miles around, they would have seen the one eggish caravan-box yellow with light, shaking and thundering and rocking to burst.
The fisherman, a magistrate retired into those western highlands and in ways an imaginative man, might have paused and noticed the paradox of such a bubble commotion. He might have thought: This is a cartoon film. An animated caravan goes wild, soon eyes will appear on it, feet will grow themselves, and the thing will be off grunting up the mountains with puffs of steam at its skidding heels. Or he might have thought, more soberly: This great outcropping of slate, this mineral and jagged-shaped land is the moon, a dead lunar basin, and here suddenly has arrived the gondola of a space-ship yellow with the electricity of a sunnier world. But in neither case would he have been quite right—the scene was too desolate, the screams too painful for a comparison as light as a cartoon: and the loch and the slate outcrop, though dark and grave, were never as arid as a lunar landscape.
The quarryman might have been nearer to his guess. He would have thought: caravanners, townsfolk tourists, and the missus giving the old man hell. But then he might have paused to wonder—what about the old man, why didn’t he give her a piece of his mind back? He listened, but hard as he listened he heard no man’s voice. So he passed on, nodding his head and more then ever convinced that there was no understanding such gadabouts from the town.
Yet, all the time, there was a man inside the caravan.
*
Ruth Ross and her husband had driven out of Edinburgh six days before. A holiday in the Highlands. The first for two years. High spirits. And under a full moon they had driven slowly through the last of the lowlands, tasted the first stone-crop, drawn closer together as from the road they looked down from rising highland at their first wide loch—and it had seemed strangely like a second honeymoon driving together into new adventure, and with the caravan jogging behind its intimate insistent song of a home-for-two.
That was the beginning, when the moon was generous and full. But some evenings later the moon was dangerously on the wane, its excitement and its pull were over, the charge in the air was weakening and they had driven that day through the wasteland Rannoch Moor. For mile after mile this sodden brownish flatness had frowned, a place of awful desolation, an endless Flandersland torn and shredded, treeless and split with sad ponds jagged as mirror-scraps, a limitless bog corrupted by the slow bombardment of reed and roving moss. As through this they motored, cramped and silent after a day on the road, the long journey to the horizon lost itself on a wraithing of the sun’s last grumbling red, in a melancholy haze that offered only some hopeless homeless trudge over the end of the earth’s crust into nothing. Such an emptiness echoed the vacuum in Ruth’s evening throat, such a dying sunlight the sulk of boredom mounting. She lit a cigarette, difficult in the car-draught, then drew in the smoke tasteless on a dry tongue. She turned to her husband, drawn-mouthed at the wheel, opened her mouth to speak and instead turned away. The engine vibrated, shook its noise ceaselessly into her ears, into every fibre of her body. And now their road that passed across the moor turned away and struck into the mountains, into the precipitous dark pass of Glencoe.
A heavy coat weighed like too many bedclothes her body, it ached like a bruise: the car’s hood, canvassed and strapped, made an oppressive low ceiling; and now those mountains, peaks bent together like monstrous whisperers in caps of great conical judgment, hemmed in the thin ribbon road and its mite-sized motor. There hung still about the place a story of mas
sacre and death. So with this claustrophobic progression, with the constriction of a day’s drive, and with the old unseen moon itself dying in her veins—Ruth felt a screaming to be out of it and into wider air. The scream rose but was never uttered. Her husband’s voice said evenly:
— Look—there on the right. That’s where they slaughtered them, you can still see the foundations of the cottages … the very foundations….
But there are moments in travelling when nothing is more valuable than a cup of tea, when the unique wonder there at last before one’s eyes may be shrugged away for the moment’s comfort—and Ruth now speeding past the bloody patch of massacre saw no vision of treachery but a few scattered stones and the mountainside split with dry stream-clefts.
— Can’t you for God’s sake step on it?
She saw Ross’s face look surprised, then grow cold and most calmly smiling:
— Nothing would give me greater pleasure. One gets a real feeling for a place at forty miles an hour….
She was then sorry, wanted to press his arm. But she could only manage:
— Thoughtless—sorry, I’m so tired.
— Entendu.
He had stopped that cold smile, but the posed word punctuated too drily an unpleasant moment. No sympathy, no understanding of her feelings. He drove on wrapped up in himself. Easily found words—‘smug’ and ‘self-satisfied’—pressed her lips thinner and angrier. They drove on then in silence—the woman burning cold, the man distant and self-engaged.
But the pass at length ended, and they were out in the fresh open of Loch Leven. The lake lay grey and smooth to their right, greener hills rose wetly misted on the left; several grey ladylike houses stood surrounded by their moist girdles of fir. They drove past the hotel, past a row of dwarf white cottages, past a group of cyclists flatting along in wide plastic capes. Ruth said suddenly:
— Darling, I’ve had enough. Couldn’t we park down here?
— But heavens—we settled on Ballachulish, it’s wider there, it’s finer …
— Won’t this do? There’s a hotel, it’s sheltered, comfortable—
— There’s a hotel at North Balla.
— I’ve had enough …
— But surely—only three or four miles more? It wouldn’t hurt?
— Three or four too many. I’ve had it.
— Couldn’t you …?
— No.
He braked viciously, skidded on the wet road, recovered, slewed the wheel round, lumbered the car up on to the turf. The engine cut out. In the silence, sudden and heavy after the hours of throbbing, her voice came clear and carefully deep:
— Clever.
— Indeed. And clever always to accept the second-rate by not holding out. Clever to choose any mediocre dump when what you know about can be got with a trifle of patience. Clever, too, to pass up your history at hell’s god-damned miles the hour—
— Oh quiet!
— Right.
And that spoken through gripped teeth, was his last word for a long time.
In silence they unpacked. Ross got out the buckets and, carefully looking away across the lake, went off to fetch water. She was left to light the stove and prepare supper. When the time arrived for opening tins he was not back. She stood with the tin-opener in her hand. Tin-opening comes curiously into the category of ‘a man’s job’. Now, though not helpless, she made herself feel so. A new resentment rose.
She gave a long martyred sigh. Then, crouching a little to see out of the caravan window, still with the silver-shining baked beans and the rusted tin-opener in her hands, she looked round at where they had come to. It was surprising then to see that, though they had arrived with the lake to one side and the green hills to the other, they had in fact stopped on the edge of territory of a very different character. There rose up immediately above them no green hill but instead a high dark buttress of stone and slate, a thing mounting dizzily high as a shipyard crane and like one for the feeling of an engineering work it gave—though as she looked, uneasily, she could not quite see what it was for the dark, she only felt the size and shadow as it buttressed almost vertically out from the hillside. And on the other side of the road, opposite this thing, and forming with it a sort of gateway into some distinct district beyond—rose a high moraine of slate humped like a monstrous animal. Even the character of the lake was changed—a pier ran out, a rotting desolate wooden thing.
She shrugged her shoulders and returned to her contemplation of the lid of that tin. But now, feeling some return to normal things, she jammed in the blade and swiftly and easily made her satisfying circle round the silver-yielding surface. A rattling outside, and Ross was back with the water.
— Hello, she said.
He said nothing, only looked up at her with eyebrows arched, looked at her steadily and then away. His cheeks seemed sucked in. She shrugged her shoulders again and turned away to the stove. He sat down on the side-seat and took out his notebook. In his spare time he wrote touring articles for motor-magazines, and now he began to itemize a skeleton of the day’s passage. Of the arrival at Loch Leven he wrote:
— A sea loch. Tidal. Shallow strands of orange seaweed. Cows in this, swans among cows. Pebble beach to boggish surround. Grass-grown disused jetty. Loch-water (6 p.m.) brown-grey like oiled dark armour. White cottages small enough for dwarfs (cf. Little folk, Scotland last resort of fairy kings?). Hereabouts purest Gaelic spoken. Green-bushed wet hills, half cut off by mist, how high? Clouds low like canvas-weighed balloon….
Ruth passed and looked over his shoulder. She read and made a groaning laugh:
— God, is that the best you can do? Look out there!
She pointed through the window. For a moment startled beyond his reticence he glanced up, saw the dark landscape just visible beyond the curtains. But only looked her coldly in the face, moved the scalp on his head as if smoothing the thought of her away, and returned to his notes. She raised her voice:
— It looks like scree, it’s all jagged and broken and loose. Scree. Is it?
He sighed, but made no other answer. He wrote:
— Along the lake lies Ballachulish, slate-quarrying town. Agglomerations of broken slate like slag heaps. Truck-shoots, harbour, railhead—
Put out, to change the subject she moved away and grumbled—just as if she had been waiting with the meal for some time:
— Well for God’s sake come and have your supper. Your supper’ll get cold.
Quietly he shut his notebook and moved along the cushions to where a flap-table was lowered. She had neither finished laying this table nor even started putting out the food—and so it was four minutes before his plate was set before him. During this time he sat doing, with much point, nothing. So that in fact he did much—he sat staring exactly at one point of the cellulosed wall in front of him, never for a moment moving his head, while on the cloth his left hand circulated in silence a wooden pepper-pot. When his plate arrived he took up instantly his knife and fork and started. No sighs of ‘at last’, no grimace—the rhythm of relaxing just when the plate arrived was enough.
Ruth frowned, filled her own plate; cleared up a little round the stove, rattled her meaning, and finally took the seat opposite him:
— Now perhaps I can sit down.
He said nothing, nor interrupted his eating. She looked at his plate and saw how he had mashed the fried potatoes wet into brown sauce. She shuddered. Together then for some minutes in silence they ate.
He had opened his notebook again, his eyes never left the page, he forked the food into his mouth sideways without looking at it. He read and ate without hurry, apparently absorbed, showing no sign of irritation, nor taking any notice at all of her presence. But several times she looked up at him—and now saw only those features that disgusted her. In other moods she would have chosen to see more affirmative features—but now there was only the odd length of his jaw, a scurfed dryness of hairs at his neck, the fountain pen clipped on the outside breast pocket of his papery tweed
coat. She saw the sickly hot brown mash of sauced potato going into the pink of his open mouth—and watched the slow relish with which he tasted and slobbered it down inside.
In such a cellulose box there was little room. The night outside, the clear country of fresh smells stretched wide and free somewhere far off. The polished cream walls bent down, on the narrow table their plates touched, their bodies grew in her cramped mind to fill the small space, there seemed not air enough to breathe. Yet even then—worse than his physical presence was his mental absence. To be ignored so easily, plainly with no acting effort on his part, grated up on her the need to strike.
So that suddenly, first as a gesture but in the same second gathering true force, she dropped her knife and fork clattering and staining the cloth, leant back heavily against the wall, jerked the table—and his knife cutting meat slipped. He looked up, eyes blank in remote question, stared at her long and steadily then turned again down smoothly to his notes. She gripped her teeth, quietly swore and flung her hand back at the cupboard handle above the cushion. Without turning round, still staring at him, she opened the door and had her fingers on the whisky bottle.
She poured herself a half-glassful and drank it off. Then began, grumbling up to a shout:
— I suppose I’m not worth talking to? I suppose I’m some sort of a dummy? I’m only your bloody wife. I only cook the bloody food. Go on, stuff your bloody self full of it. You wouldn’t sit there like that with any other woman, Christ would you? WOULD YOU?
He looked up, again long and steadily, then without any sign of recognition turned back to his notes. She leaned forward, a greedy reckless mouthing on her face:
— You wouldn’t sit like that if I was your precious Elizabeth, would you, your precious bloody blonde Lizbitch. Would you? WOULD YOU?
The skin at his temples flinched back, he looked now too smooth, he was holding himself. Too carefully he turned, too soundlessly, a page. Once, discussing at what seemed a trustful objective moment their two past lives, he had mentioned Elizabeth, an early love: she had never forgotten—and Elizabeth, part of the past and unattainable, a kind of golden age myth to Ruth, had become a repeated subject of explosion. In fact, he had almost forgotten what this Elizabeth had looked like—and so Ruth’s emphasis, because it had nothing to do with a truth, became on top of its dreadful repetition doubly exasperating. It was meaningless. And always on and on she went:
The Stories of William Sansom Page 21