I can only guess at the pleasure she felt during that period before discovery, feeling her way around the most perfect confinement she had ever discovered, one she owned, named for her, but I am certain it was immense. She had an understanding of pleasure, or rather had a talent for it. She knew from the very beginning that it was within her gift. When she called her name she was pronouncing the pleasure at her disposal, pronouncing the vastidity of which she was capable. She could create the whole world with her state of mind.
It infuriated Grace that Abby chose to bury herself every day. I’m pretty sure she suffered from mild claustrophobia, which was never declared but was clear in her face. She hated the mine, feared it, and was resentful of the fact there wasn’t one named Grace. She would pointlessly call Abby’s name, shouting at the top of her voice, knowing full well that it meant nothing to Abby. She had no intention of being summonsed. Invariably we found her drifting along a passage, quietly muttering her name, projecting pleasure onto the intractable seams, and then Grace’s fit of temper would subside and she would eye Abby as if she was more spirit than body, able to occupy elements hidden to us.
The day came though when Abby vanished, even to us.
We went to the mine as usual, going through the routine we always did – Grace angrily calling Abby’s name – but when we searched the passage she wasn’t there. We had no doubts she had been there. Not only was it the place where she always was, there was evidence of her breakfast, a half eaten slice of bread and jam. She was often messy with her food but never wasteful. Besides, bread and jam was a particular favourite. Grace began to whine and said we should go home and tell, but that was impossible. I knew it, knew that couldn’t be. It would have betrayed Abby. I wasn’t old enough to define betrayal but I knew it, knew the trust that existed beneath ground, in that confinement separate to Agnes, Harold and Martha. I told Grace to hush and impressed on her the fact that it was down to us to find her. We were sisters, after all, sisters of a special kind, which had to stand for something.
We went deeper than we ever had before. Instinctively we knew that is what Abby would have done. The only surprise was that she hadn’t sought out those depths before. It was in her nature to go deep into things, the deeper the better. The fear we had was that she might deliberately want to lose herself. We recognised that she was infatuated with the mine. She went there everyday. She didn’t share it with anywhere else anymore. The old haunts were abandoned. Even the sea, which still seemed to me her natural home, no longer enticed her. It stood to reason she might want to stay there forever. There was, however, the nagging evidence of her breakfast. Why had she so uncharacteristically discarded it? It couldn’t have been that she was full. She was never full. She had a big appetite. She had either decided with a sudden fit of pleasure and enthusiasm to go deeper, or she had been disturbed. We had made up so many stories about those passages it didn’t seem unlikely, despite the fact the only evidence we had so far was that they were dead. Without needing to signal it to each other we entertained the possibility she had been abducted, but by what or whom we didn’t dare consider.
Was that still a game, a scary story we shared, or did we already believe in a hostile world?
When does knowing bring a game to an end?
Is this a game, in which case I am only a player?
Is the truth of the matter that someone intrudes on our games and insists on making them real, despite our protestations that we want to remain naïve, shy of life, immune?
Yes, evidently, this is a game, because from the very outset there were always going to be winners and losers.
We rushed along the passage, only pausing when we came up against a choice of direction, or even a dead-end. We signalled rapidly, not stopping to consider, conscious that speed might be everything. What we didn’t think about was the fact that we were becoming hopelessly lost ourselves. It was Grace who first became aware of it. She suddenly stopped and backed against the passage wall, letting the paraffin-lamp drop to her side. There were large shadows on the walls and roof. She didn’t say or sign anything, but by the look of panic shaping itself on her face I knew what she was thinking. Once she allowed herself to consider the possibility all of her suppressed fear came flooding to the surface. Within seconds she was in tears, sobbing that she wanted her mother. The torment in her expression was awful, made all the more twisted by the fact it was lit from below.
I tried to put my hands on her shoulders – a gesture I had seen somewhere, though I don’t recall where, that seemed to denote the need for courage, though now I know how mistaken I was – but she refused it. Fear overtook everything and she just stood there sobbing, wanting her mother. I tried to bring Abby back to mind, but Grace had locked everything out other than her own panic. I tried again and again to touch her, as if by laying hands on her I could absorb her terror into me, but it threatened to degenerate into a fight, so I gave it up.
In the end it was a voice louder than her own which quietened her. We heard it along the passage from where we had come. I couldn’t make out any words, just the fact of the voice, and then the fact that someone was running towards us. Grace stopped crying. We were frozen. Even if we had been able to run it was too late. We weren’t going to escape from whomever it was descending on us.
A moment later a man snatched the lamp out of Grace’s hand and extinguished it. He flashed a torch into our faces, one after the other in rapid succession, and then shouted aloud that we could have had us all killed.
He became silent and peered at us intently in the light of his torch, no longer aimed directly into our faces but above us towards the passage roof, its beam nevertheless clearly illuminating us. He had a pointed, sharp face like a bird’s, a small hawk, with a hawk’s intensity of vision, despite wearing small silver framed glasses. He considered us for some time and then appeared to come to a decision, his face becoming even more pinched, his thin lips pressing tightly together. He began to nod his head and mutter something, certainly inaudible to us. A half-hearted smile passed across his lips and he pointed to his right ear with his index-finger then wagged it in front of our faces evidently indicating deficiency. We didn’t respond, but he seemed quite satisfied by his deduction. After that he held up three fingers and tilted his head, posing us a question. He knew we were three, evidently, three sisters, and wanted to know where the third was. Grace began to sob again. He tumbled his hand through the air, sending shafts of light and shadow in all directions, presumably asking whether she was lost. Again we didn’t answer, though Grace continued to sob, albeit very quietly compared to earlier. He flashed his torch back along the passage from where he had come and ushered us along. We didn’t move. A flash of temper crossed his face. Once again he indicated the path he wanted us to take. It seemed better not to argue so we began to make our way in the direction he suggested, following the light of his torch, whilst he remained a step or two behind. In that way, using his torch as a guide he led us back to the surface. It didn’t feel like rescue but eviction. Once we were in daylight he indicated that we go outside and wait. He would go and find the other. He kept his eye on us until we were outside and out of sight.
So, Mr Drake found Abby somewhere in the dark. We never did find out what she had discovered, but there was obviously something, something that changed her love of being underground. We assumed she’d had a fright. She wouldn’t let us touch her when she appeared, but snapped like a little dog, her face full of wonder. As far as I know she never went back to the mine. Maybe Mr Drake had somehow let her understand that it was his domain, not hers, or perhaps he had impressed on her the dangers of subterranean worlds, as Grace’s father had wanted to do with Grace – certainly he gave us a vivid and angry lecture on the likelihood of a paraffin-lamp causing an explosion – but maybe it was altogether more sinister than that. I would prefer to think Abby returned to her natural element, which was always really the coast, because the mine, even if it was named for her, would from then on be marked b
y the possibility of intrusion.
Chapter Ten
I try to imitate Abby’s talent for pleasure, the way she could impose herself on the most seemingly insignificant of things – a cluster of frost on bracken, the colour of sea water, the smell of saline, a flotsam of sponges – but my attempts tend towards lesser thrills altogether, and so often things that do me harm. Though I would say, my darling, vivacious hairdresser does me little or no disservice, not knowingly, anyway, and I would certainly list her as a pleasure. I let her insist I keep colouring my hair, that supposed pale russet-brown which we both know is metallic copper and altogether unnatural. I enjoy the indulgence. I take pleasure – yes pleasure, not disputing the word – when in the middle of relating some exploit or drama with her latest boyfriend, she looks wistfully at me, breaks off and like a reproving parent suggests to me, no tells me, to consider another style. I look patiently at my exposed face, the hair, copper bright, swept right back, smile and shake my head.
No, you lively, wonderful child, I have no inkling to hide myself, and it isn’t necessarily lack of stamina, though at my age that can’t be discounted, just something I have to do, reveal that face for all its crimes and misdemeanours, though I would say it is remarkably free of the evidence of my former habitual pleasures, namely Rothmans and London Gin. I can lie to myself that my yellow, mahogany tint is either natural colour, or a deficiency in applying makeup. Natural is simply a register of lifestyle. The child, young girl, born with a certain colour, certain style, can’t hope to survive. So confidence gives way to doubt, joie de vivre to helplessness, pleasure becomes cigs and gin.
Yes, ciggies and gin – and not just gin, my tastes growing in sophistication year by year, and quantity as well, what need is there to deny it now – were my pleasure, somewhat tawdry I would agree. Urban pleasure, pleasure that goes with a comfort in streets, which maybe isn’t pleasure at all, but a delightful, exquisite fatalism. In all but reality I have become a Londoner, feel at home there, if not exactly ecstatically at peace.
In the city I hear an undifferentiated hum, a pleasing confluence of enmeshed sound, a chorus of wordless song denoting reason and desire, soul and body. I am one kind of natural object among others. I am never lonely in London, though sometimes sad, weighed down by voices speaking within voices, speaking of possession, occupation, ownership. Ownership disturbs me. I would eradicate it if I could, yet would protect the territory of my own slice of it to my dying breath. The rules of the game force us into some very crazy situations.
I love my little corner of Camden Town. I am self-sufficient these days. The days of the midwife and the nun are long gone. My space is my own. I say it with pride. I am privileged in the crowd. I have my walls, my taste – which is commented upon – and time; time to go to my hairdresser and keep alive this pleasure seeker, Judith Salt.
It is so different here, watching the waves, though only hearing a murmur because I have removed my hearing aid, which seems the right thing to do, though I don’t have the energy to work out why. Sometimes we have to accept our instincts without question. – I have questioned myself enough over the years, so much so that I am a positive interrogator, but still don’t understand why anger makes me cry. – In Abby’s places, inland or coastal, everything seems so finished, yet incomplete. It reveals its history without explaining it. It’s as if history were abandoned, thrown up, because it wouldn’t work out.
There are weathered posts for gates abandoned in the middle of fields, maybe a rut or escarpment indicating an old track, which might or might not be man-made. Decrepit sheds, drainage channels and spoil create a cryptic landscape. Stone and brick underline human activity, but the purpose, the product, the result is forgotten, as if amnesia were necessary because human kind can’t stand too much memory, too much awareness of the labour endured in its name.
The past is a forgotten country, a despised destination, a mistake.
I try to say I am through with it. After all, it never gave me pleasure, but no matter my little corner of city life, the terrible sea calls to me, calls from depth and weight, a name, her name, her pleasure, pleasure maker.
*
In a true love-story the object of love has to be somehow forbidden, I know that, but then if Donald and I, despite ourselves, managed a true love story who was the one forbidden? Was it me, because I was the one with the difference, the one who could turn off a great portion of the world with a flick of a switch? – The first time I ever wore a hearing aid I didn’t like it at all, the re-acquaintance with the sound of life, hush having become such a peaceful norm. – Or was it him, with his fleshy skin with its buried, dormant freckles, firm yet liable to sag, who was really out of bounds? Or was it a part of both of us, the body we produced, the baby that made it prohibited? Donald certainly didn’t know what to make of the baby. At first I thought it was because he wanted to be grown-up but still a boy at the same time and couldn’t appreciate that the two were irreconcilable, but maybe that was generous.
He insisted we keep to our routines and patterns, so we still went to pubs and restaurants around Camden, Donald more convinced than ever that it was because of him we were able to do it. My reluctance, now I knew I was pregnant, only served to confirm his view of things. If not for him we would have festered together, under the same roof as the nun and the midwife.
I assumed there was something entirely natural about it all. How could a baby be a reality to a man? It could only be speculation, particularly as he had no real experience. His brother had two children, a girl and a boy, and Donald was Godfather to the second, though he didn’t seem to take it too seriously, birthday and Christmas presents, nothing over and above the usual. He never really spoke about them, and certainly didn’t express any desire to see them. There was something stale in that, something I presumed Calvinist, without needing to understand it. I suppose I thought reality would change everything and that a living, feeling child would breathe away the sterility. Donald’s silence was simply wonder, time to think.
That didn’t explain the amount he was drinking, though – I admit, I still joined him with more than an occasional gin – nor did it account for the determination he had to be out in those pubs and restaurants. Common sense should have suggested that he obviously didn’t want to be alone with me, but how could I have worked that out when there was no sense to it? If he had been uncertain about the baby then surely he would have wanted the opportunity to talk about it.
The truth is, he wasn’t really uncertain about the baby, not a baby, just this baby, our baby.
I realised that the night we went to Hampstead. It was a few weeks to Christmas, only a matter of weeks before I would return to the shore for Abby’s birthday, born under Pisces – three sisters, born in the same village, in the same year, one under Aquarius, Judith Salt, the elder, then Abby, and finally Grace, the prettiest, a spring and summer child, born under Gemini, the third sign of the zodiac, denoted II, meaning, disturbingly perhaps, two children – having just celebrated my twenty-fifth year.
Donald suggested Hampstead – for a change, he said; he would take the car. I wasn’t sure. He was straight away annoyed. It was only Hampstead, for God’s sake, he declared, just up the road. It had nothing to do with the distance, but Donald driving, but he was too impatient with me for me to be able to suggest that. I just shrugged: neither acceptance, nor refusal. He said I had to snap out of it. I shrugged again. He was inventing me, creating me to suit his own purpose. I might as well have been a doll, and then he could have told stories about me to his heart’s content, without the problem of contradiction, of reality. Of course, he told good stories. The nun and the midwife liked them.
It was obvious we were going to go. He was in that mood. Anything less would have been taken as a criticism or, depending on how far he wanted to take it, a betrayal. I was to be flaunted, though no one would care, no one would look, only him, guarding me, extolling me.
Despite the fact the pub was packed and noisy we man
aged to get a small table to ourselves. It was impossible to talk so we didn’t try – I couldn’t have heard in such an atmosphere, anyway. In fact, the noise was painful so I turned off my aid. I should have taken it out, but he wouldn’t have liked that, not the mood he was in. So I left it, pointless as it was, for him. We just looked around, watching other people’s parties, other people’s pleasure – people already celebrating Christmas. He drank quite a bit, though I didn’t realise just how much. He must have been having them at the bar. He would signal with his empty glass, I would shake my head and off he would go. Having no ability to speak I guess all he could do was drink.
During one of his visits to the bar – I don’t know how many times he had been by then – a young man approached and asked me something. Naturally, I couldn’t hear a word. He had a pleasant face, something appealing in his eyes, its outline sadly spoiled by a thick bush of hair that hung onto his forehead and cheeks. I just looked at him. He tried again. Eventually I reached to adjust my hearing aid. It was absurd not, absurd simply enjoying his attention, absurd and wrong. He could have been asking anything. He straight off made signs of apology and indicated that he was only wondering whether the chair was free. He was shouting, trying to make himself heard. He was shouting when Donald returned, his drink already half gone. Donald stiffened and demanded to know why the other was shouting. He was shouting about someone shouting. I could hear all that. I was sorry I could.
The young man shrugged and moved away. I watched him go. He stood over a table where a group of boys were sitting. He was the only one standing. He had obviously only wanted a chair and had assumed I was on my own.
I stood up and told Donald I felt sick. In answer to his sceptical frown I pursed my lips, signalling that the cause was obvious.
We didn’t speak either going to the car or once we were in it. I wanted to suggest he shouldn’t drive, we could easily have taken a tube or bus or even a taxi, but I knew it would have been taken as criticism and I didn’t feel able to chance that.
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