Aftershocks

by A. N. Wilson

  —THERE’S NO NEED TO PANIC, another zoo-keeper was shouting, in a voice which showed she was not following her own advice. DO NOT APPROACH ANY OF THE ANIMALS.

  Ella looked this way and that and could see none of her school friends in the dust and heat. Mr Pollard had shouted at them, all the way on the bus, that whatever happened they were not to get separated, and now she had. Each child had been assigned a Buddy for the expedition, so that, even if they got separated from the bigger group, they would at least have one other person with them. Ella’s Buddy was Stig. A few minutes before the Quake, he had said he was going off to look through the meshing at the crocs. Ella had told him they were seeing the crocodiles and alligators later that afternoon and that Mr Pollard had told them not to go off on their own. Mr Pollard, at the same moment, had been shouting,

  —Ella! Stig! What did I TELL you? Keep up! We are going to see the monkeys now.

  But even as he had said it the teacher had turned to another child and said,

  —No, Gareth, you must wait till it’s dinnertime, and in turning his head, he had lost sight of Stig.

  Ella was keeping her eye on him, and was now torn between keeping up with the other children and holding on to her Buddy. She had opted for the latter course, and followed him towards the crocodiles just as the Quake hit.

  There was an almighty roar, and the fencing around the crocodile enclosure was ripped away. Stig was hurled towards the water’s edge at the moment that two crocodiles were thrown by the force of the Quake into the air. One of them belly-flopped back into the water and surfaced to eye the little boy with drowsy malice. The other crocodile, stunned, but very much alive, landed feet first on the ground, about five feet away from the boy.

  Ella shouted,

  —Come back, Stig. Come here!, but he seemed frozen to the spot.

  She resolutely forced her little feet to stride towards her Buddy and the croc.

  There were two in the tower. But you had come to realize that, reader? Two of them. Now and at the hour of our death. Five minutes before, the ceiling had been rising and falling, almost gently, its four corners were those of a counterpane, shaken by invisible hands. That is to say, it was probably five minutes. One of the things which had happened, however, since the swaying of the room had changed to angry shaking, up and down, was that any concept of time had vanished. It might have been five minutes ago that the huge piece of masonry had come through the ceiling and crashed on to the mahogany table, crunching its thick sturdy Victorian certainty. It might have just been a lifetime ago. Everything had changed now.

  Now the ceiling had disappeared, and large hunks of masonry lay across the room. Where the ceiling had been was a darkness, strewn with electric cables, gunge, muck, lath and plaster, great lumps of dust. Coldfingered Death was very close. Like a petulant child, it shook the room up and down, trying to break it. It shook the Two in the Tower together.

  Digby thought – My book! My life! My book! The years and years I have spent reading and rereading these texts, assembling these notes, putting them into shape for a book, and . . . my head, so full of Greek. Where is all that Greek going to go? Where are all the remembered lines of Homer, Sophocles, Euripides? Death is such a waste – a headful of knowledge, the lyrics of the greatest dramatist in Greek, the hundreds and hundreds of lines of wonderful poetry which she knew by heart, destroyed by one lump of masonry.

  She did not even quite ‘think’ this. Rather, she sat in a slumped, hunched position on the floor and watched – rather than looked at – her twenty years of past endeavour, embodied in that laptop, those notebooks, those blue Oxford texts with their innumerable bits of paper stuck into them as bookmarks. She was floating away from it all. The disaster was lifting her away from the activity which had been central to her life since her late teens, the patient absorption in Greek. Other things had come and gone – feelings, for example: adolescent glooms, irritation with her parents, recognition, as Mum died, of how much she loved her mother, the constant, too close relationship with Dad . . .

  Dad. What would Dad do? Now? Now and in the hour of our death. Dad’s grief at her death. That was unbearable. This would break him. Break him up. How would they tell him? By telephone? No, NO! This could not be allowed to HAPPEN. Dad would pray for her. Would he? Or had they, all along, been kidding themselves? Had Dad lived as a good priest AS IF HE BELIEVED not BECAUSE HE BELIEVED?

  In such an hour, a priest would pray, no? Here was the Dean, Eleanor Bartlett, who knew that she should pray. Dean Bartlett. Praying did not even occur to her at that moment. All she could think of was the lack of sex in her life, the sheer, stupid lack of bloody sex. And lack of babies. And lack of involvement in the world . . . She was going to die, and she hadn’t, since Doug, had a lover. The light petting with Barnaby did not count. She was forty bloody two and she wanted a lover, she wanted the fullness of life which having a lover brought.

  She thought of the last time they had made love. Doug had been drunk. Oh, I don’t want THIS to be my last memory! Get out of my head, Doug Bartlett, just get out . . . But the memory played itself relentlessly. It was after a college guest night. She knew he was seeing one of his graduates – an American called Sammie, who was doing a DPhil on Dickens and Small Women: the Marchioness, the Doll’s Dressmaker, Little Nell. Sometimes, when he came to bed, Eleanor could smell Sammie. Sammie was small, like Dickens and his women. Small, conceited and smelly. When she made love with Eleanor’s husband, she gave off a lot of post-coital pong. Doug had not even bothered to shower. But on that last night, he had not been with Sammie. Just been sitting up late with some cronies getting plastered. And when he had returned, he had had one last nightcap, some brandy which Dad had given them for Christmas. And after he had blundered into their bedroom, while she was lying there, reading, a novel – it was To the North, she remembered – she had known that he would want to make love.

  She had asked him about the guest night. Their relationship, she sometimes thought, had been smothered by the habits of politeness which she could never shake off from childhood. His brandy-breath and the boeuf-en-daube, already slightly rotting between his teeth, or simply joining the plaque and rotten food already accumulated in his gums, had wafted towards her as he told of characters familiar to them both, rumours that the Master was in the running for a Nobel Prize (Organic Chemistry), thoughts about the Master’s likely successor if she went back to Harvard. And that was how they spoke to one another, she and Doug, most of their married lives.

  Bloody hell, I’m bloody DYING! And couldn’t I think of the cliffs at St David’s and the pounding of the Welsh sea, or remember some uplifting lines of Plato? It’s my LAST THOUGHTS ON EARTH here, and I’m stuck with Doug. Bloody Doug.

  When they had both switched out the light, he had reached over. They did not refuse one another when this happened, even though she was not in the mood, not in the least. So there they lay in the dark, she and Doug, and is there anything sadder in the world than two people who do not love one another, rutting out of routine? When it was over, she had the thought which had never, strangely enough, passed her mind – Well, that’s the end of that. We’ll never do that again. Even he, not the most sensitive of lovers, must have realized an ending had been reached, for there had been a rare energy in the restless last few minutes as he had pumped up and down, and she had felt nothing, except disgust.

  And now the Dean, all these years later, and on the other side of the world, squatted in the corner of a Victorian tower that seemed to be on the point of collapse. And she thought, not of God or the afterlife, but of all the years she had spent not having sex, when she could have done so. That was what passed through the mind of the Very Reverend Eleanor, who was about to pass out of her partial existence.

  The floor, in so far as there was one, was the deck of a boat in a storm. Her feet did not work. She tried to move, and it was like being paralysed. She did not think that she was injured – yet. She thought it very likely that at some point,
very very soon, she was going to die.

  Two in the Tower, Digby and the Dean; the two of them.

  And that other pairing – the body and soul – the slumped, seemingly immobile body, and the thoughts and feelings which were swirling around like a swarm of bees.

  She was not having an ‘out of body experience’. She was, however, strangely detached.

  Me, Ingrid, I’m really sorry, you’ll probably think I’m just constructing a silly, tricksy narrative for the hell of it. This particular joke, however, I’ve been playing on you, people – writing about Digby and the Dean as if they were two separate people – was something which was inevitable. Because, until that moment in the tower, they really WERE two separate people. Probably had been since they/she were little. Being two people was what had kept her cool and balanced, what some people would call sane. For as long as she could remember, she had been the intensely emotional, inner, rather sad person longing to be loved; and the cerebral scholar who derived almost physical pleasure from the mere reading and writing of Greek characters. One of them was Nell, Dad’s little pet, who wanted to be with Mum and Dad all the time, and who never, really, recovered from the ending of that Perfect Trinity of Love, and growing up, and going away to university. And the other – Digby – was never happier than when alone, thinking her often quite destructive thoughts. One was in love with God. The other did not believe in Him. One was happily at home in the ‘grey Aristotelian city’, and loved whatever home Mum had made for them in the bleak rectories of fogbound towns, or in the holiday cottage, ‘Quam Dilecta’, which they rented once a year in St David’s. The other was almost a disembodied spirit, at one with Plato, happy when constructing dialogues – either Plato’s or dialogues of her own making – in her disembodied, detached brain.

  She says, that I, Ingrid Ashe, was the only one who had seen they were two separate people, and she had never seen it herself, not in that way. Everything I’ve written about them is true – about Digby being a non-believing classicist, and Eleanor being a T.S. Eliot-reading, Chosen Frozen, Early Service believer; Digby fancying Barnaby in his cowboy boots, Eleanor wanting to go to concerts with Charlie Nicolson. They’d never allowed one another to admit, quite, that the other was . . . well, them. The real them, the whole them. They’d lived together all their lives, like twins who had never been properly introduced.

  Longing to please Dad. Not realizing that Dad, with his gentle manners and quiet, shiny face, was actually making all kinds of demands on her, the only daughter, from an early age. With Mum, things had always been more straightforward. Good old Mum. But with Dad, if you wanted to be loved you had to join the Club. O Lord open thou our lips. Nothing opened his. He never spelt things out. But . . .

  My God, am I CRAZY? I wanted to be a PRIEST, for God’s sake!!!! When I’m like Euripides, I don’t believe in the gods . . .

  Digby and the Very Reverend Eleanor had gone by now. Together for the first time, in that tower, the New Woman came into being. Nellie. My Nellie? Oh, I so hope.

  No, Nellie, it wasn’t crazy, your wanting to be a priest like your dad, you weren’t mad. You were responding to a real experience . . . There WAS something happening during those early Masses in fogbound Smethwick and Dudley, here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto thee . . . The sacrifice was a reasonable one. The ‘something’, the still small voice, had been heard by J.S. Bach, seen by Jan van Eyck, articulated by George Herbert and T.S. Eliot. Eliot the greatest poet of modern times – no? By miles and miles? These were more impressive witnesses than nice, genial but silly old David Hume and Freddie Hot Ayer. In the tower, their positions had been reversed. It was DIGBY telling the Dean that, whatever her doubts NOW, here, at the tower of her death, she would still rather belong to the blessed company of all faithful people; if she had to be in a gang, she would rather be in the Eliot-Herbert-Rose-Macaulay-John-Keble gang than in with the easy vacuities of materialism.

  It was Nellie who said to Digby, though, (and they really liked one another! Why hadn’t they dared to speak before now?)

  —But it was all so bloody SILLY, so unreal, so out of kilter with the way everyone else was thinking. Was it surprising that only six people max ever came to those early Masses of Dad’s?

  —Come, now, Nellie – remember Bishop Gore, one of Dad’s heroes – ‘The majority are always wrong.’ I love that about Dad and Uncle Lesley. Two Against the World.

  She thought, Here I am in this tower, which is swaying about and about to fall down, and I’m remembering Dad’s favourite quotations. ‘Proud, pompous and prelatical’ . . . ‘The majority are always wrong’ . . . ‘I know I shall die a penitent Catholic but an impenitent Liberal’ . . . ‘My medieval knees lack health until they bend’. He repeated them so often that she had forgotten that most of them were quotations. They were ‘Dad’s sayings’. Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre. That was another of them. And just for once, one of Dad’s sayings, rather than provoking the light laugh, had an overwhelming effect. Too bloody right, il faut tenter de vivre. That’s what you thought, Nellie, you told me.

  I am going to get out of here alive, I am going to get out of here . . . ALIVE . . . Oh, my dear.

  Deirdre Hadley, with brown breadsticks for arms, jutting from a sleeveless pale green jumpsuit, her brown, bird feet enclosed in ancient espadrilles, her blonde-grey hair tied back with a bandana, specs on her little nose, blue eyes bright and concentrated on her laptop, was in a train bound for Carmichael. It was a five hour journey, which she made once a week, when Parliament was sitting. She refused to fly, which took the inside of an hour. She invariably used the journey for work. Our national Parliament was about to close for its summer recess, and this would have been one of her last visits to the capital for a couple of months.

  As well as many letters and emails relating to constituency business, Deidre was preparing for a summer conference, to be held here in Aberdeen, about the Man Drought. Her own paper to the conference was entitled Does It Matter?

  In Deirdre’s lifetime, the imbalance between the sexes had become more marked. Although overall, it was only something approaching forty-seven per cent versus fifty-three per cent, this was to take the divide between all male human beings and all females. In the employable educated classes, that is, among graduates between the ages of twenty-five and sixty, the difference was much greater, with only forty per cent males to sixty per cent females.

  There were a number of implications which would be explored, she hoped, by the conference. One was employment. The numbers of those studying traditionally ‘male’ areas of expertise, such as engineering, architecture, experimental science, remained overwhelmingly male. There was already a shortage of Huia engineers, and research scientists necessitating the import of experts from overseas. Such figures usually, though not always, came with their partners or wives in tow, to ready-made jobs in Carmichael, Aberdeen or Derby, our three main cities. This increased the numbers of middle-class females who could be described as surplus to requirements.

  Deirdre did not herself feel surplus to requirements in any respect other than the emotional one. Her work upset her, because for so much of the time, she was unearthing scandals or abuses which politicians, businesspeople, speculators, builders and investors were doing their best to suppress. She had made many enemies, and for much of the time, she was frightened. Nevertheless, she had no doubt that her work was worthwhile. And her professional success could not but satisfy her. She had moved from being a teacher who dreaded going to school every day, to being a public servant with a mission: to open the eyes of her fellow Huias to the environmental and other catastrophes which awaited them if they did not heed the warnings of conservationists such as herself.

  This did not stop her feeling an emotional emptiness which was all but unendurable. She still saw Barnaby from time to time. They were meant to have become ‘friends’ in a very ‘civilized’ way, and he so
metimes, for example – despite Bar’s attempts to make him ban Deirdre from his life altogether – brought Stig for tea. Stig enjoyed Deirdre’s company. He liked George Eliot, who was surprisingly tolerant (by her own exacting standards) of Stig. Quite often, the three of them bathed naked in the Windrush, from the jetty at the end of her very long thin garden. She still could not tell whether it was better to continue to see Barnaby on some terms or other, or whether she would actually find it easier not seeing him at all.

  When he was leaving, he was sometimes clumsy enough to hold her spindly arm, and even to stroke it, as he used to in the old days, and to ask,

  —All right, hun?

  How was she meant to reply? Sometimes, she wanted to say,

  —I am NOT all right. I think about you with yearning every hour of every day.

  This would only have made him run away from her. It would also have been so much an understatement as to be untrue. She yearned for him, not every day, but every second, all the time. His moving out of her house, shortly after Stig was born, had caused her pain of which she did not believe herself capable. It was far more upsetting than when her father, or various much-loved pets, had died. And infinitely more upsetting than the ending of any previous affair.

  Until Bar had begun to prove so unreasonable, Deirdre had mapped out a strategy. She was prepared to share Barnaby. She was prepared to give him infinite licence to love other women, to sleep with them, even to bring them to live in her house in Harrow if this was what he needed to do. She was completely willing to help bring up Stig. She simply could not bear to lose him. He was the air she breathed, the life she lived.

  When he had first come to be her lodger, she had noticed within herself a change which was something quite unlike any previous ‘falling in love’. Not only was the sexual desire enormously stronger, but she felt herself surrendering emotionally, very very rapidly. Within days of his having moved in. She kept these feelings hidden for well over a year, and only slipped into his bedroom occasionally, and shared his bed, when he had made it clear that he was between girlfriends and was feeling lonely. The rapture they had enjoyed for two or three years had been something completely extraordinary. Perhaps such feelings cannot be expected to last, though she saw no reason why, in their case, they should not have lasted until one of them died. When he walked away from this rapture (and she knew that he had felt it too) she had felt baffled as well as hurt.