I for Isobel

by Amy Witting

  ‘I think,’ said the dark girl, ‘that you’re being a bit hard on poor old Byron. Granted that he’s facile, he’s done a few good things. What about Don Juan?’ She pronounced it Wahn.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Kenneth. With a condescending tone, a careless movement of the hand, he turned ridicule from Byron onto himself. ‘I don’t condemn him utterly.’

  ‘How kind.’ The girl smiled, showing long, quite ugly teeth.

  The beauty was bored. She appeared to be wondering how she had come to be there. How happy Isobel would have been in her place! If she could only remember her name…Hullo, Oats; Hullo Barley…Vinnie. Vinnie Winters.

  The squat young man pushed his copy back to Kenneth, drank his coffee quickly, put a coin in the middle of the table and said, ‘I’ll be off, then.’

  When he had gone, the dark girl said, ‘You’ve upset Mitch!’

  Kenneth grinned and chanted softly, ‘Where he cannot dom-in-ate, He will not part-i-ci-pate.’

  ‘Mitch wears a dinner jacket,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘Oh, yes. Mitch wears a dinner jacket. Exquisitely beaded, too.’

  They laughed. Three of them laughed.

  ‘But no spangles. Be fair.’

  ‘Oh, no. No spangles.’

  The young man on the other side of Vinnie Winters was beautiful, too, his face as diamond-hard as hers but pale, his eyes dark blue, his hair black and his features neatly insolent. The sight of him nearly destroyed Isobel’s courage, yet she managed to get to her feet, walk across and say, ‘You’re Vinnie Winters, aren’t you? We were at school together. Isobel Callaghan.’

  The beauty’s face, already glittering with bad temper, did not change.

  ‘Perhaps you remember my sister Margaret. She was in your year.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Isobel was regretting her boldness when the deer-like young man opposite, reacting against Vinnie’s rudeness, stood up and pulled back Mitch’s chair. ‘Are you alone? Come and join us. Take a seat, do. I’ll get your things.’ He brought her handbag and her book across, smiling over the Trollope.

  Silence fell, heavily.

  Kenneth said at length, ‘If you were a part of speech, what part of speech would you be?’ He added, blowing on his fingernails in self-congratulation, ‘I speak as a verb, a transitive verb. And Janet there is a conjunction, a coordinating conjunction.’ He turned to Vinnie. ‘And you, my pet, are an adjective, naturally.’ Seeing the necessity, he added, ‘You adorn. You decorate.’

  If the compliment had been a coin, Vinnie would have been testing it with her teeth.

  ‘And Trevor there is a noun.’

  The young man beside Isobel said, laughing, ‘I would have thought myself a verb. In the passive voice, perhaps. Well, then, an abstract noun. I’m not sure, Kenneth, that I care to have you reading my entrails, as if I were a sacred bird.’

  Isobel laughed, too.

  He looked at her kindly.

  ‘And what are you?’

  She said in a racked whisper, ‘I think I’m a preposition.’

  ‘Oh? Do you govern?’

  ‘Only small common objects.’

  The girl Janet smiled at her. That was astonishing.

  ‘I wish I could govern small common objects. Like my latch key.’

  Kenneth looked at her sharply.

  ‘To or for, by, with or from?’

  The question, if not hostile, was at least challenging. She was not to be so easily accepted.

  ‘Oh, come,’ said Trevor. ‘You didn’t specify for anyone else.’

  Isobel said on a bubble of laughter, ‘My landlady’s a preposition. Against.’

  That brought a laugh from them all, even a smile from Vinnie. Isobel felt a little guilty, knowing she would be accepting tea, cake and kindness from Mrs Bowers later in the afternoon. She hadn’t intended malice, either, but she knew she would do as much again, offer up anything that made them laugh. Making them laugh might make her acceptable.

  Janet said to Kenneth, ‘You may be transitive, but I’m damned if I think you’re finite.’

  That jolted him. His mock offence concealed true offence. She ought to sympathise with that. But what did Janet mean? Object, no subject. How clever they were.

  Now Kenneth was staring insolently. ‘I don’t object to claiming infinity.’

  ‘What am I?’ asked the young man beside him.

  There was a flash of satisfaction in Kenneth’s eye at having drawn the question.

  ‘You, Nick? You’re an adverb.’ He began to sing. ‘It ain’t what you do…It’s de way dat you do it…’ He laughed loudly. ‘And Diana is a past participle.’

  Nick grinned briefly. Trevor started and looked shocked.

  Janet said, ‘Vinnie, have you made up your mind about the dance?’

  Vinnie shrugged, ‘It’s all right with me.’

  ‘Kenneth?’

  ‘If Vinnie has made up her mind, she has made up mine.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’

  ‘It is the day,’ said Kenneth gently, so that she smiled.

  ‘We’re getting up a party for the Arts Ball. What about it? Trevor?’

  Trevor shook his head. ‘In my present delicate financial condition, no.’

  ‘Nick?’

  Nick had lit a cigarette and was now tearing unused matches one by one from the folder and dropping them in the ashtray. He shook his head without looking up.

  Kenneth said, ‘He is faithful to his motorbike.’

  ‘No sidecar?’

  ‘Positively no sidecar.’

  Nick smiled at that. It seemed that Kenneth and Janet were pleased by the smile.

  Janet returned to the game.

  ‘Speaking of parts of speech, some people would just be expletives.’

  Kevin laughed. ‘Dr Owens!’

  ‘Millie Turner!’

  ‘I can offer you a personal pronoun, first person singular, in the nominative case, and a personal pronoun, first personal singular, in the objective case.’

  Janet said, ‘But that’s all of us, isn’t it? We’d be either the one or the other.’

  Kevin shrugged. They were growing bored with the game. When she knew them better, she understood that boredom was their common problem. When silence fell, it weighed on them.

  She got up, said to Vinnie, ‘It was nice to see you again,’—and so it had been, though not for Vinnie’s sake.

  She walked to the boarding house entranced, full of wonder at hearing her own language spoken in a foreign city. If she never saw them again, she would know, still, that that was possible.

  Mrs Bowers called her into the kitchen.

  ‘Been out with Emma, have you? How is she?’

  ‘Oh, quite well.’

  ‘Sit down and I’ll get you a cup of tea. How’s your cup, Mrs P.?’

  Isobel the born liar was back. She had crept in unnoticed when Mrs Bowers had first greeted her with ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Having lunch with a girlfriend.’

  ‘That’s nice!’

  Mrs Bowers was gratified that every life should have its pleasures. Emma was a plant she kept watered with her interest, so that it grew and flourished. Isobel had met her at Business College. (One didn’t meet anyone at Business College. Business College was strictly business.) She came from the country. (‘Oh, somewhere out West, I think.’—Isobel’s knowledge of the country was limited.) She was going back there as soon as Isobel found the nerve to kill her off. Emma was a grievous discouragement, for there was to be no place for lying in the beautiful room. That was the disadvantage of being a born liar—one lied without thinking, rolled where one had the bias. She had felt that a taste for solitude was something to be hidden, so Emma had sprung up on cue.

  In Mrs Prendergast a memory was surfacing.

  ‘I had a cousin Emma. Second cousin that is. Got put away for a while, poor girl.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘Went very funny after the baby was born. Not
the first one either, the third. Joe that would have been, got grown-up sons himself now. She was very bad for a while. She came out of it all right in the end.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that.’ Mrs Bowers’ tone admitted that Mrs Prendergast was not often the bringer of good news.

  ‘It can take you in funny ways. There was the woman lived opposite us in Mudgee. Six weeks old the baby was and they were getting ready to go out. Her husband called out from the door, “Are you coming, Dorrie?” “I won’t be a minute, dear. I’m just popping the baby in the oven.” He came running in and there was the baby greased all over and trussed up in the baking dish and the oven hot. He just got to it in time.’

  Mrs Bowers shrieked, ‘Oh, my God!’

  Isobel, who had been carrying a piece of cake to her mouth, put it down on her plate. Usually, Mrs Prendergast’s plaintive but placid tone removed her memories and forebodings out of the range of human feeling; this time Isobel was seized with such anguish for the unsuspecting object in the baking dish that she wanted to run away, did not know what she was doing in this kitchen, which now seemed subterranean.

  ‘How’s that old fool in the office? Still getting on your nerves?’

  ‘It was bad for a while when I started touch typing. I was so slow. They told me at the College not to type with two fingers and I stuck to that.’

  ‘That’s the way. Show him he can’t have it all his own way.’

  She had discovered also how little Mr Richard counted in the office. To be prepared to endure him was a virtue.

  ‘My aunt’s paying for the lessons, so I have to do my best. I’m typing faster now and the translation gets easier all the time because the same words keep coming up. He doesn’t have much chance to complain.’

  She was speaking absently, still involved with the baby in the baking dish.

  ‘You’re a clever little thing, aren’t you?’

  ‘Tell that to Mr Richard!’

  That was a reasonable exit line. She put her cup in the sink, said, ‘Thanks for the tea,’ and was off.

  All the week she thought of the group in the café. She went to the City Library looking for Orden, in vain, then skipped shorthand (but not typing) to get to the Public Library. There must be such a poet. It could not all be dream. She felt sure that if she found the poet, she would find the group again.

  At last she remembered the name of the other poet—Spender! ‘Said Orden to Spender—I’m just a weekender…’ She found the name Spender in Studies in Modern Verse. ‘Unlike W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender…’ Auden. Once found, never lost again. It was like meeting Joseph, though Auden belonged to everyone, like God and Shakespeare, her Joseph only to her. On the other hand, Auden did exist, whereas Joseph…he had grown in her mind already: tall, understanding, severe and loving. It would never do to set eyes on the real one—she imagined what he might be like, a little whimsical man, plump and spry, with a bald skull and wisps of fair hair, a neat pot under a tight waistcoat…she was making him as unattractive as possible, out of sheer jealousy.

  Next Saturday she was early at the café, reading Can You Forgive Her? with less attention than usual and trying not to watch the door.

  Trevor came in with Nick, looked across at her booth and called, ‘Hello! It’s the Trollope fancier. Come and join us!’

  When she had arrived at the table, he added, ‘I know you’re a preposition, but I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Isobel. Isobel Callaghan.’

  ‘I’m Trevor and this is Nick, as I suppose you’ve gathered.’ He looked at her book. ‘You are a Trollope fancier, aren’t you? What are you going to read when you run out of Trollope?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’

  ‘What about George Eliot? Have you tried her?’

  She made a face. ‘Silas Marner.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Second Year English. A beastly little red book with gold lettering down the back. Don’t be put off by that. You try Middlemarch. You’ll be surprised! And perhaps George Meredith. You may hate him, but it’s a thought.’

  Janet and Kenneth came in together, arguing about an essay topic.

  ‘But you can’t call it fear in a handful of dust just because Eliot’s invoking death…’

  ‘Positively fond of it, wasn’t he?’ said Trevor.

  Eliot?

  They sat down and nodded to Isobel without surprise.

  Trevor said to her, ‘How’s the Leader of the Opposition? Your landlady?’

  ‘She’s not exactly the Leader of the Opposition. That’s Mrs Prendergast. Mrs Bowers is only against men. Mrs Prendergast is against the lot. She’s fond of death,’ she dared, ‘like Eliot.’

  ‘Fear in a handful of dust?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call her a handful of dust. More like fear in a bowl of whipped cream.’ Oh, how she tried! She told the story of Mrs Prendergast’s dream, working hard at the bland, dreaming tone. She must entertain, she must be a success. ‘A fool of a dream, too. I wouldn’t have seen brown veiling on a hat in twenty years.’

  Kenneth stopped laughing to say, ‘You made that up!’

  Janet said, ‘I’d hate to think that she could.’

  ‘Oh, no, not the dream. Who could, except the mind that dreamed it? No, the curlicue. The brown veiling. Did you make it up?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You don’t invent such things, Kenneth,’ said Janet. ‘They only happen.’ She turned a troubled look on Isobel. ‘Are you alone in that place?’

  ‘Oh, no. There are four other boarders and Madge. That’s Mrs Bowers’ daughter. She belongs to a religious sect. They sit around in their nightshirts saying “Oompapa”.’

  Trevor and Kenneth exclaimed together in delight, ‘Om mani padme hum.’

  ‘Om, the jewel is in the lotus. Amen,’ intoned Kenneth.

  Isobel, who had been intoxicated by their attention, was seized with rage and bent her head to hide it.

  Trevor saw the disturbance and took it to be shame at ignorance exposed.

  ‘It’s a Buddhist mantra,’ he said. ‘Buddhists in Glebe! What a thought!’

  Isobel raised her head, shocked by her rage and baffled by it, too.

  ‘What does it mean?’ asked Janet.

  ‘The jewel is in the lotus.’ Kenneth said, ‘I don’t want to know what it means. I like it just as it is.’

  ‘The individual is enshrined in the universal,’ said Trevor. ‘Sorry to spoil your fun, Kenneth.’

  ‘You’re not spoiling mine,’ said Janet. ‘I still don’t know what it means. Kenneth, what about the ball? Are you bringing Vinnie or do we find another girl?’

  There was a pause.

  His face flayed with rage, his eyes cold as stones, Kenneth recited deliberately:

  ‘I went to Belmont, where I chose

  The golden casket. It contained

  A vulgar message in bad prose.

  I shut the box. The words remained.’

  He was calm again, then. The others were silent, subdued by his moment of malevolence.

  Isobel could hear Frank saying, ‘Get your lubberly frame out of my living space,’ and wondered if the vulgar message was anything like that. For a moment she was afraid she might laugh.

  But Kenneth had Joseph.

  ‘Well,’ Janet said with shaky lightness, ‘it’s very neat but I hope you don’t think of publishing it.’

  Kenneth retreated to comedy. He said loftily, ‘I do not yet know what I may see fit to do.’

  Isobel could see now why Janet had said he was transitive but not finite. Objects but no subject.

  He was telling a story now, face dressed and dancing, hands massaging the air. ‘So I said to him, “Sir, why not devote a lecture to Ford? Don’t you think Ford’s work is a summary of the Elizabethan passions?” “Mr Lyne, I have devoted my last two lectures to the works of Ford.”’

  Ford? Eliot, Ford?

  Kenneth had hung his head in pretty confusion.

  ‘Oh, you are a lazy devil,’ said Janet affect
ionately.

  Isobel resented the affection and disliked herself for it.

  Trevor walked with her down Glebe Road as far as the corner where she turned for the boarding house.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to University?’

  ‘I have to earn my living.’

  ‘Rotten luck.’

  She didn’t think so. There was more meaning in ‘I have to earn my living’ than the surface showed. Her forty-two and six a week and the ability to earn it were fundamental. Besides, their talk of essays, theses and assignments roused no envy.

  ‘Not really. I only want to read books. I don’t want to have to write about them.’

  It was easy to talk to Trevor because he was more like a teacher than a young man.

  She had given him cause to reflect.

  ‘You’re quite right, of course. Literature should be a gentleman’s pleasure, not a hack’s employment. Well, gentlemen are born and so are hacks.’

  He sounded rueful. Could she have offended him?

  But at the corner he said, ‘See you next week, then?’

  She nodded and went on, elated.

  She was really alive now. She went off on Sundays to the Public Library looking for the writers they talked about, read Eliot and Auden, Spender and MacNeice, stayed away from the kitchen, lied without conscience to Mrs Bowers, lived for Saturdays, but lived through them and looked back on them with a strange mixture of feelings. She was really alive and morally as bad as ever.

  She said to Joseph—in bed at night she humped her pillow to the shape of a shoulder and unpacked her thoughts for Joseph—‘Suppose one is born bad—not by choice—the hand of the potter shook, you might say—why can’t one choose to be different? I thought I could. I thought I could make my life into a room and choose what came into it. I was a bit above myself, wasn’t I? That’s what monks and nuns do, with God and prayer and fasting and all that stuff. No job for an amateur.

  ‘Besides, life isn’t like that. It’s more like swimming in a sea, with currents and undertows carrying you where you don’t want to go.’

  The currents and the undertows were mysterious evil passions, rage and envy; most of all an unconquerable sadness—no matter how willingly they accepted her—at being somehow disqualified, never to be truly one of them.

  ‘It’s envy I feel for Kenneth, all right. Because of you. Because he has the real Joseph. I know it’s all nonsense; I know the real Joseph is nothing like you, but there it is. Why should I be angry with Madge?’