Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘Larry, I have a feeling.’

  ‘Lots of people.’

  ‘Lots of cars parked in the road. There must be a party somewhere near. It makes it so risky.’

  ‘Never mind. They’ll be drinking.’ He took her by the hand and led her forward through the sweet evening air. They walked over the warm lawns together like the college couples she had followed in her youth with her schoolgirl friend, Joan. On perfect evenings, like this one, they had trailed courting couples for yards, for blocks, from one neighbourhood to another, wondering about whether the young lovers were really lovers, what they actually did with each other, and whether they themselves would ever be strolling along like that with a man.

  ‘Voices‚’ Larry said.

  Dorothy heard nothing for a few moments. Then the sound of talk came to her, as elusive as a wind-carried scent from flowering trees in the spring. It seemed to be coming from all directions at once, then suddenly it was gone.

  ‘Where do you think they are?’ she whispered. Instinctively she had ducked down into a crouching walk.

  ‘They sound like they’re where we were before. That big house with the garden and the bamboos.’

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  ‘No, let’s look.’ He pulled her along by the hand. The buzz of voices became clearer, louder, and at last fixed. Soon it was loud enough and clear enough for Dorothy to distinguish whole sentences flung up out of the babble. How people whooped when they got together, and on top of that there were the explosions of laughter or contradiction that involved groups of from three to eight voices. So many rhythms chased each other and scurried through the main rise and flow of sound.

  ‘Is it like the sea?’ she whispered. ‘All the changing sounds?’

  ‘No. Not at all. But I like the thought.’

  Dorothy put her head up against his collarbone and kissed him. She still held his hand.

  ‘Let’s find the bamboo place and the garden sofas,’ he suggested.

  ‘Too dangerous.’

  ‘Just to see if we’d be hidden from sight.’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘You could even go out into the crowd and bring us food and drinks.’

  Dorothy began to giggle. She followed, convulsed by hysterical smothered laughter, as Larry led the way. She held her other hand over her mouth.

  As they approached the bamboo grove, there was less light, and less noise. Dorothy’s giggles stopped suddenly. She sensed a change more subtle than a threat of danger, but just as urgent. It was the kind of feeling you might get from an unexpected alteration of temperature. She squeezed Larry’s hand.

  He pulled up in front of her and stood still. They listened to the distant sound of the party, the nearby rustling of the bamboo, and then a faint sound of moaning. Dorothy was afraid. Someone out there in the shadows was hurt, by they couldn’t help whoever it was without betraying their own presence.

  Larry stepped forward. He seemed to intend going on, whether she accompanied him or not. He dropped his hold on her hand.

  She dashed after him. And all at once her eyes were used to the changed light. It wasn’t really very dark at all. Certainly it was light enough to see the two people – the man almost fully dressed, the girl naked – who face to face were using the garden sofa so athletically and rhapsodically that before Dorothy realized what was happening, her first thought was they they were engaged in some kind of feverish contest or game. The girl was Estelle’s daughter, Sandra.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Dorothy said, pulling away.

  ‘No,’ Larry whispered, ‘let’s watch.’

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘it’s my husband.’ She turned and blundered back through the bamboo.

  Yes, she thought, and I offered to tie his tie, which he still has on. He knows perfectly well how to tie his tie. He said so himself. He was in a highschool play once where he had to tie his tie in front of the audience, as though in front of a mirror: first with one end too long, then with the other one too long, and so on back and forth until finally he got it right. He used to do it at cocktail parties years ago. It looked very funny.

  She hurried off across the lawns. In the darker surroundings she could just see the car when Larry caught up with her.

  ‘Wait – don’t leave me alone‚’ he said. His voice sounded strange. She herself was in a kind of panic. She grabbed his hand and ran. Now she was the one who was pulling. They got into the car fast, slamming the doors.

  She was out on one of the main highways before she remembered what Estelle had told her: that the older married man Sandra had taken on had been Estelle’s lover for years.

  She sobbed a few times and stepped on the accelerator. Larry heaved himself up over the back seat.

  ‘We’re going very fast.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She slowed down. As soon as she saw a place to stop, she pulled over to the side.

  ‘I’m all upset. I don’t know what to do‚’ she said. Larry disappeared behind the seat again.

  ‘There’s a car coming up in back of us.’

  ‘It’s him‚’ Dorothy shouted. She saw the car in the mirror and recognized Fred, and saw too that he had Sandra with him. ‘With that girl.’

  ‘Do you think he saw me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dorothy stood on the pedal and drove the car screaming out into the road. Three other cars swerved to let her into the stream. People were honking at her.

  ‘I can’t let him catch me‚’ she explained. It was really because she didn’t want to talk to him, see him, or even think about him at the moment, but as soon as she had spoken, she realized that there was another reason. ‘If we stop, they’ll see you.’

  ‘I can kill them for you, and it will be all right.’

  ‘No, no, no. It’s all right. I just hope the cops aren’t out checking.’

  Fred’s car followed. Every dodge Dorothy made was repeated. She thought: and besides how are we going to get over the border?

  ‘I guess we’ll go down by way of the coastline. Then you can swim around to the south and join me.’

  All at once the rented car shot forward. They were neck and neck now. She looked unsmiling into Sandra’s frightened white face. The girl was crying. Next to her, Fred was bent forward over the wheel. He looked tense and desperate. Even from where Dorothy sat, his eyes looked all taken up by the pupils. Larry was sitting straight up. Both the others must have seen him. Fred began to try to run their car off the road.

  Dorothy put her foot down harder. She began to pull away. And now Sandra was fighting Fred for the wheel. Suddenly there was a loud crack. Later on, Dorothy found out that it must have been another car behind theirs, which was trying to pass Fred. Behind Dorothy and Larry the two cars hit, parted, crashed and spun, and Fred’s car, with Sandra – so it was said afterwards – twisting the wheel, reared up and out over the centre strip and into the traffic coming the other way. To the wild noises of grinding and tearing metal all around her, Dorothy squealed into a skid, travelled for yards, banged the side tail and bounced to a standstill. In the mirror she caught sight of two cars bursting into flames.

  ‘Keep going‚’ Larry said.

  ‘I can’t. I’m going to have to leave you here. It’s dark. And we’re not too far from the sea. Do you think you can make it?’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Neither do I, but that’s all there is to it. Remember, we’ll meet at the beach. Do you have your sandals with you?’

  She kissed him goodbye. Tears rans down her cheeks. He put on his sandals and stepped out of the car, looking both ways. There was no need for caution. Everyone would be looking at the burning wrecks in the road.

  Dorothy started the car, drove ahead for a while, looking for a place to turn off, and then realized that she would never be able to get anywhere near Fred’s car. That side of the freeway was piling up in a solid mass. Cars were turning off wherever they could, to go in the other direction. If she had stopped to think, she could have kept Larry in
the car and driven him back with her. She could even have kept him there at the house. Indefinitely.

  Drivers around her were honking their horns at her again. She moved forward, heading for home.

  The moment she opened the door the place felt like a house she had never seen before. It didn’t seem to belong to her, or ever have been anyone else’s home. It was strange to think that living people could ever have spent their lives in it. The look, the silence – it was so different, so unlike the house where she had moved through so many years of her life, that she thought perhaps if she had only just come in from shopping and not from the scene of the accident, she would have known in any case.

  She sat down on a chair and waited. She was home a good three hours before the police telephoned.

  When she went to identify the body, Estelle was there in the corridor. She looked like a sleepwalker. She said to Dorothy in a tired whisper, ‘You’ve killed me. We kept it from you for years, so you wouldn’t be hurt any more. We could have been happy if it hadn’t been for you. But you destroy everything around you. Now I’m like you, too. Even my children. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

  Dorothy shook her head. She said, ‘It wasn’t me,’ and passed on down the hall. She remembered that at one time, she couldn’t now recall just when, Estelle had told her that she, Dorothy, didn’t understand the nature of desire. And now she didn’t want to understand it, or anything else, either. She had stopped feeling pity and sympathy for other people. One betrayal covered another. She was no longer ready to forgive. Only the note Mr Mendoza put through the door moved her.

  Suzanne came to the funeral, of course. She brought her husband and children with her. Dorothy phoned up the doctor and made him say that Suzanne and her family would have to stay in a motel, because to have to cope with in-laws at the house would give Dorothy a nervous breakdown. What was more, her doctor seemed to believe it himself. He was very practical too, and left her with a lot of pills, just enough so that it wouldn’t kill her if she took them all at once.

  She drove to the beach every night. He never came. She wondered sometimes whether he had seen her begin to drive on back home and thought she had taken the opportunity to get rid of him deliberately. But he couldn’t think that, surely not. He would have noticed the traffic. And yet he never came. He couldn’t have been captured, or it would have been in the papers and on the news. If he had been hurt or killed, it would be the same. That must mean, then, that there was some reason why he couldn’t come. Either he had been hurt in the ocean, perhaps killed, or he was out there, but waiting.

  The grave was planted. Dorothy visited it regularly. It was almost her only regular visit. She never saw Estelle, or the Cranstons. Most of the time, she took the telephone off the hook. Her lawyers wrote to her about insurance and inheritance. She looked through the want ads and wrote for interviews. Mr Mendoza went away on his vacation. She ordered the tombstone, and was on nodding acquaintance with an old woman at the cemetery who kept the grave – another new one – next to hers. One day the woman opened up with the story of her husband’s life and death.

  ‘Your hubby?’ she concluded, pointing to the grave as though it were something she might sell to Dorothy, if pushed. Dorothy nodded. The old woman looked at the place where the headstone would be.

  ‘Some of these long names‚’ she said, ‘it’s hard to fit it all in. Mine was Jim. James. What was yours?’

  Dorothy hesitated, confused for a moment. ‘Fred,’ she said, and changed her mind, feeling even more confused. ‘Larry‚’ she added. ‘His name was actually Frederick. But I called him Larry.’

  ‘What was it – his heart?’

  ‘Heart, lungs, head, everything. Car crash.’

  ‘Oh, I see‚’ the woman said, losing interest. ‘An accident.’

  Dorothy went for two interviews and was told that they would let her know. She wrote a short letter to her parents and told them to stop worrying because it was beginning to make her worry too. She packed up most of Fred’s clothes to send to Suzanne, and saved one or two things to give to Mr Mendoza for his cousin in Chicago who ran the shop. She listened to the radio, but there were no special messages now.

  She drove in the evenings to the beach. Sometimes by moonlight, and sometimes only by starlight, she stared at the line where the water ran over the sand. He never came. She came out of the car and walked up and down the beach, hour after hour. The water ran over the sand, one wave covering another like the knitting of threads, like the begetting of revenges, betrayals, memories, regrets. And always it made a musical, murmuring sound, a language as definite as speech. But he never came.

  I See a Long Journey

  Flora had met James when she was going out with his younger brother, Edward. She’d been crazy about Edward, who even then had had a reputation for wildness where girls were concerned. She’d been eighteen, Edward nineteen. James was thirty-one.

  She’d liked him straight away. He was easy in talking to her: relaxed and completely open, as if they’d known each other a long time. In fact, in a way she did know him already – not just through Edward, but from her older sister, Elizabeth, who had gone out with him for about two months a few years before. He had had many girlfriends and mistresses, naturally. He was agreeable and amusing, well-known everywhere and well-liked. He was also the most important of the heirs.

  When he proposed to her, she thought her decision over carefully. She wasn’t in love with him but she couldn’t think of any reason why she should turn him down. He’d become such a good friend that she felt they were already related.

  After the marriage, Edward changed along with everything else. The barriers came up all around her. Where once, on the outside, she had felt shut out of their exclusive family, now – on the inside – she was debarred from the rest of the world.

  There had been a time at the beginning when she had fought. If it hadn’t been for the money, she might have succeeded. Their quarrels, misunderstandings and jealousies were like those of other families. And she was like other girls who marry into a group of powerful personalities. She was tugged in different directions by all of them. They expected things of her. They criticized her. They tried to train and educate her. When she was pregnant for the first time, and when she had the child, they told her what she was doing wrong.

  But that was the stage at which she found her own strength: she clung to the child and wouldn’t let them near it. They had to make concessions. It was the first grandchild and a boy. She was sitting pretty. She could take her mother-in-law up on a point in conversation and make her back down.

  Shortly after the birth a lot of pressure was taken off her anyway; Edward formed a liaison with a girl who sang in a nightclub. He was thinking of marrying her, he said. He wanted to introduce her to his parents – her name was Lula. His mother hit the roof about it. She described the girl as ‘an unfortunate creature: some sort of half-breed, I believe’. Quarrels exploded over the breakfast table, down in the library, out in the garden. In the kitchen, of course, they were laughing.

  She met Lula. Edward took them both out to lunch. Flora wasn’t nervous about it: she even tried to put the other woman at her ease by saying that she too had once been an outsider to the family. But Lula wasn’t going to accept anyone’s sympathy. She put on a performance, talked loudly, looking around at the other people in the restaurant, pinched Edward under the table and went out of her way to throw as many dirty words as possible into every sentence. Then she stood up abruptly, declared that it had been so very, very nice but she had to run along now, tugged Edward by the hair and left.

  ‘She isn’t like that,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. I could see. She’ll be all right when we get together next time.’

  ‘She really isn’t like that.’

  ‘I know. I told you – I recognize the camouflage. I liked her fine.’

  ‘I think you made her feel unsure.’

  ‘And I’m the easy one.
Wait till she meets the others. She’ll have her work cut out for her.’

  ‘They gave you a rough time, I guess.’

  ‘It’s all right. That’s over now.’

  ‘It’s mainly Mother.’

  ‘It’s the whole deal.’

  ‘But things are OK between you and James?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘But we’re in the thick of everything. If you and I had married, we could have escaped together.’

  ‘But we didn’t love each other,’ he said matter-of-factly. It upset her to hear him say it. Someone should love her. Even her children – they needed her, but she was the one who did the loving.

  ‘Besides,’ he told her, ‘I’m not sure that I want to escape. Even if it were possible. And I don’t think it is.’

  ‘It’s always possible if you don’t have children.’

  He said, ‘It’s the price of having quarterly cheques and dividends, never having to work for it. Think of the way most people live. Working in a factory – could you stand it?’

  ‘Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. If you were with somebody you loved.’

  ‘Love doesn’t survive much poverty. Unless you’re really right down at the bottom and don’t have anything else.’

  Was it true? If she and her husband were lost and wandering in the desert, maybe he’d trade her for a horse or a camel, because he could always get another wife and have more children by the new one. It couldn’t be true.

  ‘I’m sure it would,’ she said.

  ‘From the pinnacle, looking down,’ he told her, ‘you get that romantic blur. Wouldn’t it be nice in a little country cottage with only the birds and the running streams? It’s the Marie Antoinette complex.’

  And at another time he’d said, ‘Love is a luxury for us. If I were on a desert island with the soulmate of all time, I’d still have the feeling that I’d ducked out. I guess it’s what they used to call “duty”.’

  ‘There are plenty of others to take over the duties,’ she told him.