by Jane Gardam
‘Anyway, all swans belong to the Queen,’ said the trolley-lady. ‘I heard it on Gardener’s Question Time.’
‘I’m going crazy,’ said the policeman who had withdrawn to a little distance to talk into his radio-set. ‘If they all belong to the Queen I hope she’ll come and collect this one. I’m not sure I can. Move along now. We have to keep the traffic moving. We can’t hold up London for a swan.’
One or two cars sidled by, but otherwise nobody moved. It was a strange thing. In the middle of the dead dark day and the dead dark street sat the open laundry basket and the shining, mute bird with its angel feathers. The road fell quiet.
Then Henry Wu stepped forward, small inside his padding, and put short arms round the bulk of the swan’s back and lifted it lightly into the basket where it fluffed up its feathers like rising bread and gazed round proudly at the people.
‘Heaven on high!’ said everyone. ‘The weight!’
‘His mother’s a Black Belt,’ said Pratt proudly.
‘That Chinese’ll have to be washed,’ said the trolley-lady. ‘They’d better both come home with us, Jackson, and I’ll give them their tea.’
But Pratt and Henry did not go home with old Nellie on that occasion because the policemen asked them to go back to the station with him and the swan. If Henry would be so kind as to assist him, he said. And Henry stroked the swan’s docile head twice and then folded it down with its neck behind it—and a big strong neck it was, though very arrangeable—and quickly put down the lid.
The Park Warden came to the police station and he and Henry and Pratt and the swan then went on to the park, where the swan took to the water like a whirlwind and faded into the dark.
‘Off you go, 888,’ said the Warden. ‘There’s your missus to meet you. You wouldn’t have seen her again if you’d not dropped among friends.’
‘They can’t take off, you see,’ he said to the two boys, ‘except on water. They’re like the old sea-planes.’
Pratt watched the two white shapes fade with the day.
‘They’re strange altogether, swans,’ said the Warden. ‘Quite silent!’
‘Is it true they sing when they’re dying?’ asked Pratt. ‘I read it. In poetry.’
‘Well, that one’s not dying then,’ said the Warden. ‘Gone without a sound. It’s funny—most living creatures make some sort of noise to show they’re happy. Goodbye, Henry. There’ll be a job for you with creatures one day. I dare say when you grow up you’ll get my job. You have the touch.’
On the bus back over the bridge to Candlelight Mansions Henry sat down next to Pratt on a double seat and staring in front of him said in a high, clear Chinese-English voice, ‘Hwan.’
‘Hwan,’ he said. ‘Hwan, hwan, hwan, swan. Swan, swan, SWAN,’ until Pratt had to say, ‘Shut up Henry or they’ll think you’re loopy.’
DAMAGE
She terrified me. She looked like a fly. Threadwire arms and legs arranged all anyhow across a slatted seat in the Jardin Anglais: the lake cold and thrashing about against the quay, the wind squealing in the shrouds of the wintering boat-yard. Why should a fly terrify? How can a woman on a park bench be a fly? Something mingy about her. Bothersome. Unhealthy. Not poor—rich, rich. Look at her shoes! And all so small, and twisted sideways. Wearing black. Not young. Skinny. And sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.
January. Geneva. And, unusually for me, Geneva on Saturday. For years I have been coming to work in Geneva, flipping back and forth from London. I go to other places—Prague, Berlin, Lisbon, The Hague—but to Geneva mostly. I am a translator. I translate at international conferences and arbitrations, simultaneously with the spoken word. I have four languages and am in much demand. As the speaker spouts out the message from the podium I drink his words into my head and ears and fountain them out again, translated. Tensely but steadily, smoothly, almost unhesitatingly they flow out of my mouth on to a disc at the end of a microphone which is enclosed with me inside a glass bubble fitted over my desk.
My voice is transferred about the room to the ears of those delegates whose language I am speaking. It passes through holes in similar discs fitted to their ears by a band across the head. One day this will be thought very comical and antique. One day there will be a machine and not me beneath the bubble. Perhaps one day we shall all have our brains nipped about at birth and there will be one universal language. Later still there will be perhaps a miraculous speaking in tongues and our heads surrounded not by plastic earphones but by points of fire, and there shall be a new heaven and a new earth and fewer arguments. But, until the ultimate machine or the Apocalypse, they must have me, and those like me.
We sit in a row—four of us at this arbitration—along the foot of the stage, our lips constantly moving. I have no way of knowing which ones in the audience are listening to me and which to my colleagues. Delegates select their own channels. Once I translated into German for a whole morning not having been told that the German delegates had missed their plane, and my words, my tens of thousands of words, had been passing into air. Or rather they had never existed, as at the beginning of the world when volcanoes, tidal-waves, hurricanes happened in silence for want of an eardrum against which to sound.
Once when I was young and frisky and new to my profession I used to long to take the microphone into my power, spread mischief. ‘Here is an important announcement. Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second of England, is filing a suit for divorce.’ ‘Mr. Gorbachev, having recently contracted the AIDS virus, has announced his intention of seeking the comforts of the Russian Orthodox Church.’ ‘Nude bathing is to be allowed from tomorrow morning along the Swiss shore of Lake Leman. Delegates interested in forming bathing-parties should assemble by the Jardin Anglais at eight o’clock. In the buff.’ Heads would jerk. Mouths fall open. These things are dreams.
I plug on, hard at it, thinking only of words and words.
It is tiring, especially if the case is technical, has its own specialised vocabulary which has had to be worked up for weeks before a session begins and often revised during the hearing in the evenings.
By Friday afternoon at four o’clock I am always exhausted and try wherever I am to get home for the weekend. I have a pretty cottage in Putney, bought with my alimony. I have a very old father in South Wimbledon. On Sundays I go to see him, cook our lunch. He expects me, though he does not greet me. After lunch he sleeps, with the Sunday Telegraph over his face, while I wash up the dishes. In summer I mow his small lawn. In autumn I sweep up and burn the leaves from his trees. In winter I may bake him a cake. He is disappointed in me. He liked my husband.
I go back to Putney after tea—washing, ironing, hair, nails—and late at night or on Monday morning catch a plane that will have me attached to my discs again by ten-thirty their time, nine-thirty ours.
I am always put in good hotels. The very best—and this in Geneva means in one of the best hotels in the world. I am also, I suppose, well-paid, though not so especially well when you consider where the world would be without me. I am usually with the same group of translators, but it happens that we none of us talk much about such things as the pay. We are a curious breed and, though a breed, we do not stick together. Translators have little in common except the kink in the brain and the teaspoonful of heredity that has given us our eerie linguistic memory—though we ourselves find nothing eerie in it. It is simply the ability to sing in tune in different keys. A gift. We tend to be solitaries. Mynah birds. You seldom see Mynah birds roosting together.
At the end of each day’s session we vanish separately from the chamber, each to his bough.
Mine is always the hotel—my bedroom, with its en-suite bathroom and sometimes sitting room; its marbled basins, its coloured telephones—one even upon the bath—its clutches of lights. When I arrive at each new hotel I make solemn acknowledgement of all these, and of the presents: the soaps, the foam-baths, the shampoos, the bath-caps, the
scents, the talcs, the bowl of fruit done up in thick transparent paper with the note saying ‘Welcome’, and, every night, the three round chocolates wrapped in silver paper on the pillow.
And six great fat white bath towels every day!
I pad across the fleecy carpet and open the fridge full of drink—all the little bottles of spirits and liqueurs looking like free samples. I hardly drink, not even the frosted wine crammed in discreet half-bottles on the shelves below, ready for romance. I take it all out sometimes and look at it. And all the soft drinks and bags of nuts! Years of these treats now—ever since my husband left—but I’ve never grown used to such bounty. Such gifts—and nobody looking!
I lie back and gaze at the television. It is nondescript in every country but Britain, but I gaze. I yawn with langour. I twirl my naked foot. I play the switches at my bedside one after another—all the music channels. ‘And when I leave,’ I tell the ceiling, ‘I don’t even have to pay the bill.’ I am thirty. It is my retarded area. My secret sin.
The big hotels I stay in differ very little from one another wherever they are and I am not very interested in what goes on outside them. Countries are countries. It’s a small world. My time and money are given to my appearance. Concerts, theatres, dinners are expensive and there need to be two of you. So I work at my clothes, my figure, my skin. For health I walk about a little. I listen to my feet in their Gambazetti pumps making hollow clops about the lunch-time picture galleries. In Geneva, in the evenings, I walk in the Old Town, looking at the lighted shop-windows: spotlight, gold and diamond cluster, twenty yards of velvet backcloth. I examine the objets d’art in the antique shops. They seldom change. They seem covered in golden dust.
The streets of Geneva are quiet at night, exposing it for the little provincial town it is. At midnight on the wide deserted streets all that move are the jujube traffic-lights dotted here and there into the distance. The few people patiently waiting near them—the slowest-changing lights in the world: they seem always to be standing at red—cross over at last. Over they go, left-right.
People who walk alone in Geneva keep their eyes wide and unsmiling. Nobody touches. Ladies sit easily alone, or maybe two or three, very quiet. Very confident. There is gold about. A good many necklaces, bracelets, watches. A great many rings. Always earrings. Always painted faces, however old. A formal city. Waiters—the emblems, the daemons of Geneva, cold, colourless, rich—keep their distance, watchful as policemen. At a loud voice or laugh they look sharply across.
Once or twice a year the waiters stand guard over the empty restaurants as the rest of the city pays to watch from its own streets the millions of dollars-worth of fireworks exploding over the lake in cascades of chrysanthemums, peacock-tails, palms. These are greeted with a drifting, respectful murmur, a shifting of feet, a ripple of milk-and-water clapping, and never a coarse hurrah. Everything is superbly sane, superbly balanced in Geneva. It is a careful city. Careful of its heart. It suits me well.
But on the seat by the boats, on the clipped and colourless grass, in the middle of the evening crowds sat this fly-person, weeping.
I passed her, as everybody else was doing, all of us well-dressed as she was, in her hat and fur coat and gloves and beautiful shoes. After I had passed I heard her start to shout and swear, the sobs separated by foul words in a language we none of us quite knew, but all recognised. We all forged ahead, step, step. Two children were walking with a nurse, the little girl hanging back to stare, the boy marching on. The nurse called to her.
‘But what is it? What is it, nannie?’
‘Oh, come on.’
The child watched but, seeing me watching her, turned and ran to the nurse’s hand. The bark of the woman’s voice knocked about behind us in the trees, and I hurried along the scoured paths, past the dry fountain and the clock which in summer is planted with flowers but today was two metal pointers clamped together against raked earth. She was yelling like Clytemnestra, a hymn of death.
I asked for my key at the hotel foyer and today on duty behind the desk was the head-porter himself, a famous man in Geneva, accustomed to kings. He took his time. I watched the people in the foyer and the lounges, the professional internationals who live with no abiding place, with nothing for every day; whose lives slip off and drop to the ground like a coat as the aeroplane takes off for the next place, who listen with less than half an ear, to messages about the unlikeliness of the aircraft landing on water. Bland and secure. I depend on them for my life.
‘Your key, Madame.’
I found that I was looking at the key in the magisterial hand. I said, ‘Not just at present,’ and left the hotel, crossed the bridge, waited at the time-warp lights, passed the floral clock without flowers and the dead fountain. Only one or two people were left from the short rush-hour, skimpy earwig-people standing watching the choppy lake, the whippy boats. Her bench was now empty.
My father said he didn’t call this twelve o’clock. He liked his Sunday dinner at twelve o’clock. He liked Gardeners’ Question Time.
‘I only got back last night, we were working Saturday.’ (I thought; to anyone else I’d say ‘on Saturday’.)
He said, ‘Working, you don’t know the meaning of working.’
In the kitchen he had laid out the usual meat and potatoes and one vegetable—a huge cabbage—flour for the gravy and the pastry, apples to peel for a pie. The oven was not lit. He said, ‘It’ll be teatime by the time I get my dinner.’
‘I’ve brought the pudding.’
‘Is it one of them French things?’
‘I’ve been in Geneva, it’s a cherry pie.’
‘Then I’ll miss my tart.’
He turned the radio up loud so that there was no need to converse. I cooked and tidied after myself—peelings, cabbage stalks—in the threadbare kitchen, opened the back door to see to the dustbins that had to be carried through the house.
His cats slid under my feet. He began methodically, unnecessarily to remove furniture, clear a path for me and the rubbish to pass through to the front-door. I said, ‘I think I’ll do them when I’ve finished cooking. I don’t want to touch food with rubbishy hands.’ He said, ‘Good God, it’s in bags, isn’t it? You know it’s your first job, the rubbish,’ and went back to the fire. ‘I’m powerless in my own house now.’
Flour and fat congealed in the bottom of the meat-tin, slowly thickened; slowly re-liquified as I added cabbage-water. ‘Bring the wireless in,’ I yelled. ‘It’s ready.’
‘I don’t like listening and eating,’ he said, stumbling forward, carrying the radio by its strap on the front of his walking-frame, placing it before him on the table, adjusting the volume upwards. We ate, meat, gravy, cabbage, potatoes to the accompaniment of the instructions about the heating of greenhouses. He said, ‘It’s not a bad pie.’
I said, ‘You don’t have a greenhouse.’
He said, ‘Pastry’s a bit oily. It’s not your mother’s pastry.’
I said, ‘Pity you never told her you liked her pastry when she was alive.’
He said, ‘I dare say I’ll be getting a greenhouse. Maybe a couple. I’ve a mind to take up market-gardening.’
I wash up. Make him a sponge-cake. Do the rubbish. Wash his clothes. Put them in the drier and it throbs gently. The fire crackles, the 1930s wedding-present clock ticks.
He says, ‘Driers. Your mother never gave the time of day to one of them things. Hung them all across the yard. Sweet they smelled, like her French childhood.’
‘It’s snowing. Anyway, there’s not the time.’
‘Off again, are you? I’ve had my ration. Flying off to Monte Carlo. Some people know how to make out. Me all alone. I’m a great age, you know. You’ll be sorry when it happens. Never see a soul one week to the next.’
‘There’s hundreds come to see you. All the neighbours.’
‘Fools. Loads of rubbish.’
‘Loads of filth.’
‘I must go now.’
‘Aye, aye.’ He sits rocking forwards on the walking-frame, crouched over it, like me in my translator’s kiosk. The enclosing bubble is invisible but it’s there. Not looking at me he says, ‘If I sold this house I could go round the world.’
‘Goodbye, Dad.’
‘Off again. First-class in the morning then, eh?’
‘Club-class.’
‘Might go on a cruise. I’m thinking of it. Goodbye, then.’ Still not looking at me but vaguely toward the door, sliding a glance he says, ‘Bye, you’re getting fat.’
‘I’m eight stone.’
‘Putting on a fair load of weight. All the rich living.’
As I close the front-door I say, ‘I may not be able to come next week.’ I say it every Sunday, and every Sunday I try not to turn and wave to him from the gate.
All the next week I avoid the Jardin Anglais but on Friday afternoon I am given a ticket for Un Spectacle which is to be held in the Parc La Grange and can only be reached by walking along the quay. For weeks, posters have been attached to most of the lamp-posts in Geneva advertising this function, and as the arbitration has not risen until five o’clock today, just too late for the evening plane, I accept it. In my room I telephone to change my flight for a Saturday one and find that all are full. So I must stay the weekend. I bath, change, manicure my nails. I had lunch so that I do not need dinner. Nothing to do. There is still an hour before I need leave for the concert and I telephone my father, direct-dial, to tell him that I shan’t be home unless I can get a cancellation tomorrow evening. There is no reply. I decide to help myself to gin and tonic from the magic supply. I eat nuts. I ring again. Nothing.
I set off for the Spectacle, which is to be held in the Orangerie of the park. In the dark the cold lake splashes. There is snow about in the Jardin Anglais, triangles of it swept up against the boles of the thin trees. Ice bulges out of the fountain. All the park-benches are empty and I pass the fly’s bench carelessly, the singing boats, the gates in the walls of the park, and see the Orangerie shining out across frosted flower-beds.