I for Isobel

by Amy Witting

  Helen opened the door to her and said, out of a pinched white face, ‘Am I glad to see you, I was going mad here by myself. Dan’s away on a trip and Trevor went to the University. He had a tutorial, he thought he’d better do it, he hadn’t had time to call it off. Anyhow, he’s probably better doing something. They’ve been friends since school, you know.’ Talking steadily, she had led Isobel into the kitchen. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee? Did you go to see Diana? How did she take it?’

  ‘Better than you would expect. She didn’t react much at all, really.’

  ‘She probably hasn’t taken it in, yet. I don’t think I have. Did you explain about not coming here?’

  ‘Yes. She seemed surprised that I’d think she would.’

  ‘I hope we haven’t put the idea into her head.’

  Diana would be down at the laundry with her dirty washing, or cleaning up her room, or looking in Positions Vacant. Don’t let’s worry about Diana.

  They carried their coffee into the living room. Isobel would have liked something to eat but felt she could not mention hunger.

  ‘The motorist just didn’t see the bike, apparently. I don’t know whether Nick was speeding—he did sometimes. It seemed like a bit of a joke.’

  Outside, a car stopped, a car door thudded shut. Helen looked alarmed.

  ‘Oh, my God, is it…I thought they were going to keep her at the hospital for the day.’

  The knocker sounded. Helen got up and went to the door, coming back full of politeness and dread, ushering a small, neat, fair-haired woman with a thin handsome face, not at all like Nick. The woman was staring in front of her with isolated eyes.

  Helen said, ‘We would have come to get you. I’m sorry you had to come alone.’

  ‘It’s quite all right.’ The tone of her voice didn’t match the look on her face; it would have done for a more social occasion. ‘There’s so much to be done, you see. I want to get his things packed and catch the night train.’

  ‘But Mrs Drummond…’ Helen looked at her, baffled. ‘Have you had lunch? Can I get you something to eat?’

  ‘No, thank you. I had something at the hospital. Where…?’

  She stood looking about the living room, looking for a door.

  If Helen tries to stop her, she will go quite mad. Isobel looked at Helen, who had perhaps reached the same conclusion.

  ‘Upstairs,’ said Helen. ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘Thank you very much, but I’d rather go by myself. You do understand?’

  She sounded quite social.

  ‘Yes, of course. At the top of the stairs, first on the left.’

  When she had gone, Helen said, ‘I suppose it’s better for her to have something to do. But that stony calm. If only we could do something for her.’

  ‘What could anyone do?’

  They sat, cowed by the silence upstairs. Then the voice started. It sounded thin, wailed without words, then said, ‘No…no, no, no.’ Each time louder and more frantic. ‘No!’ Then it was word and scream together, then a scream without words. Then silence. She began again, almost reasonably, ‘No, no.’

  Helen had her hands over her ears. She said angrily, ‘She shouldn’t have come alone. She ought to have somebody with her.’

  Isobel was thinking, ‘Who would ever risk this?’

  The noise had sunk and grown again. It wasn’t something to hear any more, but something to see, the words like flung stones, the screams like wheeling bird-flight.

  Helen made for the stairs and Isobel followed.

  She was sitting on the bed, mouth stretched in a scream, holding a jacket she must have been folding when despair interrupted.

  Helen began, ‘Mrs Drummond,’ but stopped because she was out of reach.

  ‘Did they give you anything to take at the hospital?’

  She knew they were there but she wasn’t going to admit it.

  Her handbag was on the chest of drawers. Isobel opened it, feeling guilt and pity because opening the poor woman’s handbag without permission was like treating her as a drunk or an idiot, and found a round white plastic box with a label: MRS DRUMMOND TWO EVERY FOUR HOURS. She gave the box to Helen and went down to the kitchen for a glass of water. How glad she was to get out of the room, how reluctant to go back.

  Clinging to the jacket still, Mrs Drummond seemed to be all obstinate denial, but she took the tablets without protest, giving up her revolt against fate.

  ‘Into Trevor’s room,’ Helen murmured. ‘You must come and rest, you can’t go back tonight. I’ll ring the farm for you, just come and lie down.’

  Together they urged her into Trevor’s room, took the jacket out of her hands but left it on the bed, close to her, took off her shoes, pulled down the blind to shut out the useless day.

  She lay still, waiting for them to leave her. They went out quietly, as if she was sleeping.

  Downstairs, Helen said, ‘Stay a bit, do you mind? Trevor ought to be back soon.’

  She had not thought of seeing Trevor again, would have expected to be overcome with shame if she met him by chance, but that scene was insignificant now.

  ‘I wonder if I should get a doctor for her. I don’t know. I’ll wait and see how the tablets work, I think.’

  Helen spoke languidly, expecting no answer. Then they sat listening nervously to the silence.

  Trevor came in with the grimace of age on his face and nodded to Isobel from the other side of the river. Helen went to him, put her arms round him and her head on his shoulder. He put his cheek against hers and they stood quietly together.

  Isobel went away. She did not belong with them, though they had not shut her out.

  She walked back to the house where she had seen the sign ROOM VACANT.

  When she came into the dining room that night she talked to the kitchen door and said, ‘Mrs Bowers, I’ll be leaving at the end of the week.’

  In the kitchen Mrs Bowers spoke to Mrs Prendergast, a mumble that sounded like ‘Good riddance.’

  Isobel came to the table with tears running down her face, so that Betty said with compunction, ‘Don’t let her get you down.’

  Isobel shook her head. ‘It isn’t that.’

  You could change your name, have your face altered, change your country and your language, but in the end you would resurrect your self.

  Nevertheless, she felt cheerful as she packed her belongings. She was glad to be escaping from a grief not her own, she looked forward to the foolish pleasure of buying a saucepan and a frying pan, a cup and saucer and a plate, a knife, a fork and a spoon and two tea towels. Into the suitcase she put Shakespeare, Keats, Byron (now known as facile), Shelley, Auden. Though she knew the passage of Auden well, she found the place and read it with a grin.

  ‘It’s no use turning nasty,

  It’s no use turning good.

  You’re what you are and nothing you do

  Will get you out of the wood.’

  She shut the book and put it in the suitcase.

  One is never quite alone.

  5 • I FOR ISOBEL

  Isobel woke up out of a blue and gold dream: a sheltered bay, shining water, little boats drifting like thoughts.

  She was staring at a strange ceiling. She shut her eyes and tried to snuggle back into the dream but it was too late; it had dwindled to its source, the breath of the young man asleep beside her as it beat, soft and warm, on her shoulder.

  Eyes open, back to the ceiling: ornate plaster, baskets of flowers linked by swags of ribbon, a stain in one corner, yellow, like…sunshine? butter? honey? paler than pumpkin, darker than pee. Dirty old daylight, if there was a word.

  There are words. Words we have plenty of, nasty little buzzing insects that they are. Awake two minutes and the word factory is at it already. And you at the loom, zoom, zoom.

  It was going to be a bad day.

  It’s a stain-coloured stain and shut up.

  The stain advanced like a finger on the soured white plaster. In the corner a clotted
cobweb softer than dust. Like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake.

  She would have to expect a bad day, after last night. Thrown out, from Kate’s place. Told to bugger off and not come back.

  Well, you were always wondering whether you’d go to Kate’s place or not—that’s one question settled. But thrown out! Ouch!

  Don’t try to laugh it off, it was ouch! all right, walking that long mile to the door with knees unhinged and each foot weighing a ton.

  Just the same, that story Fred was telling was repulsive. Like a long cold snake it slid meandering through an underground littered with the private rubbish of the human body. That was the sentence she had been working on last night, to keep her mind off the story, so her grin must have slipped and that had given Kate the chance to pounce. But she must have been waiting to pounce, beforehand, to pick a thing like that. OK, she was at the bellicose stage but there were other people who were listening with fixed grins, out of politeness.

  Politeness cropped up in some funny places.

  Not with Kate, though.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are, sitting there with that superior look on your face? If you don’t like what you hear at my place get out, go on, bugger off and don’t come back. You only come here anyhow to see what you can pick up.’

  The hideous speech rang in her head again and she thought a hardy ouch! to drown a whimper.

  Superior. If they only knew!

  The funny thing was that Kate didn’t seem to think much of the story either, and by the third paragraph Fred was sounding strained and needed rescue. As for picking people up—that was why quite a few people went to Kate’s, but Isobel knew that what was tolerated in other people was not forgiven in her. She very much wished to know why this was so.

  The remark about picking people up must have sent this Michael after her, to wander about the streets, the conversation wandering too, inconclusive, till he said, impatient as if that was what they had been talking about and for too long, ‘Well, are you coming back to my place or aren’t you?’ You couldn’t blame him for being casual, ‘no’ being the word it was, but still…O lyric love, half angel and half bird, or ninety-nine per cent bird.

  She turned her head to look at him, remote in sleep: delicate sallow oblong face, fluted upper lip, light-brown crimped hair drifting across his forehead…Listen, you don’t have to paint his portrait.

  Doctor, I have this problem. Some people count lamp posts, I describe them. You don’t think that’s a problem? You should try it sometimes, like five lamp posts one after the other, a word picture of each, to be handed in nowhere at the end of the day…

  She changed position carefully, not wanting the young man to wake. When they woke, you had to start guessing, how to look, what to say, what they wanted you to be. Always guessing wrong.

  There was the young man who had said, ‘Why can’t you be yourself a little more?’

  That got right under your skin and it’s still there like a splinter, because what to answer?

  I am the vacuum Nature abhors. And not only Nature, come to that.

  Kate was drunk. Don’t worry about Kate.

  That’s when the truth comes out.

  What to answer?

  Nobody home.

  She had bent to look at the child in the stroller, had started back from the white triangular idiot face sagging against the canvas. The stout nursewoman wheeling it had tapped her forehead and murmured, ‘Nobody home.’

  That was Isobel’s story, if she knew where to tap. Not the head. Plenty going on there, the word factory spinning and spinning and what for? Thoughts running like mice on a treadmill and a door held straining against memories…

  She bolted out of the bed, made for the bathroom and sat on the loo, staring at a different ceiling, this time as narrow as a corridor and slightly concave…

  Panic. There she was, exposed to the public, peeing, naked, her clothes far out of reach—a horror dream, in daylight.

  She laughed. It was the ceiling. Something about the ceiling, size, shape and colour, had set her up in a train compartment. There was a mind for you, darting about on its own adventures, giving the owner the fright of a lifetime. Lucky you got a laugh out of it now and then.

  She washed her smiling face in cold water, wiped it on the edge of a dank towel and went back to the bedroom.

  There was a bookcase against the wall by the door. She knelt in front of it: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, An American Tragedy, The Oxford Book of English Verse, Pylon, Sanctuary, Penguins, colour-cued to the young man’s interests, drawing a map of his mind’s country, where she wished, fleetingly, she could meet him. Not much chance of that.

  From the bed he said, ‘I wouldn’t have taken you for a bookish type.’

  His cool, inexpressive voice made her think with regret of the blue and gold dream. Her voice came jovial and too loud.

  ‘You can’t tell me by my cover either, you see.’

  ‘And—just—what—cover—would—that—be?’

  Oh, hell. Rich with contained amusement, the voice. And the pauses even more so.

  She heard herself say with mad politeness, ‘Do you like Faulkner? I’ve only read Light in August. I was most impressed.’

  Graciously. If anything could make it worse. Like putting a hat on. More naked than ever, she plunged for cover into a book. Four inches by six, dizzying disparity, but old and shabby, therefore her own. She sat staring at a page, not reading. He might have a thing about nakedness—she had a thing about it herself now that she knew what it was. Adam and Eve weren’t in it. She must have been thinking about fig leaves, grabbing a book that size.

  He had put out the light last night before they had undressed. She had thought it funny, groping about in the dark for the chair to put her clothes on.

  ‘Now I wonder,’ he said vaguely, not wondering, ‘about girls like you. I wonder why you do things like this.’

  What does he mean ‘things like this’? There’s only one thing like this.

  That’s the question, though. The one with the hundred inadequate answers.

  There’s the connection with love—the dubious connection.

  You do it because you can. Two ways to do it and our Isobel would get it wrong.

  You like to join the human race on the only level you can manage.

  There is a deeper reason, but it has no words. It is a landscape, an unlighted desert strewn with epic lumber, dead machines, stopped clocks. All my own work. Call it INERTIA.

  Wouldn’t he gape if you said it was a religious rite—perform it often enough and the god might descend.

  ‘I might wonder why you do things like this. But I don’t think I would have asked.’

  Who said that?

  You did, and in a tone you didn’t know you could use, detached and easy.

  It was the book. There was no doubt about it, the calm she felt flowed into her from the solid little faded book in her hand. She read the title, Words of the Saints. Mysterious.

  A feeling of freedom, of stepping out of chains.

  He said, ‘It doesn’t mean much to you physically, that’s obvious.’

  Oh. He had caught on to that. Even on that level, you can’t really join the human race.

  She said, ‘Is that a real question? I mean, do you want to know the answer?’

  ‘I would hardly have asked if I didn’t.’ But he sounded shaken, defensive.

  ‘You might have wanted me to know that you disapproved of me.’

  The bedsprings squawked. To be accused of disapproval was a keen thrust.

  You’re not yourself, Isobel. You’re somebody a whole lot smarter.

  And that was a reason for leaving him alone; if she was smarter than he was, she could afford to.

  He wanted her out before he got up. Knobbly knees. Her legs remembered them like sharp enormous knuckles inside her own. It was a bit sad, really, the approach that was half joke and half quarrel, then working and moaning and gasping together in the dar
k (and one of them putting on an act, at that), avoiding all signs of love, and what they had in common, the map of the mind and dislike of their bodies, not to be spoken of.

  Meanwhile, she was testing the mysterious quality of the book. She put it down, panic threatened. She picked it up and was calm.

  Amazing. I wave this wand.

  Well, she had to go and get her clothes from that chair on the other side of the bed and she couldn’t take it with her. What a traverse! But if she didn’t move they would be found there, two corpses dead of starvation, one in a bed and the other in front of a bookcase.

  She memorised the book: purple cloth fading to a dead leaf brown, paper like dirty old daylight, like the ceiling stain…a little devil thought popped into her head, of teasing him into being really nasty. That would make it so much easier to steal the book.

  How her mind reacted to that one, all of a piece, was astounding: like a rabble finding formation to present a firm capital NO like the Harp of Erin on Saint Patrick’s Day. Freedom, indeed—she felt as if she had walked into a fence.

  A safety fence.

  She was going to steal the book, just the same. She slid it into place on the shelf, stood bravely up and walked, without straightening her shoulders or pulling her stomach in (she had her pride) to the chair where her clothes were.

  After all, he shut his eyes, so it was no ordeal. That was polite of him—she was sorry she was going to steal his book. Quickly she put on bra and briefs, blouse and skirt, found her comb in her bag and, combing her hair, said, ‘Shall I make a cup of coffee? Would you like one?’

  Frail and pained, he murmured with closed eyes, ‘Not for me, thank you.’ Then his eyes opened, seeing release. ‘But make one, if you’d like one. You’ll find the stuff in the cupboard over the sink.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She stepped into her sandals, picked up her bag and left it in front of the bookcase (cunning, cunning), and went into the kitchen. Sure enough, while she was looking for the coffee in the cupboard she heard the bathroom door shut. She listened; the cistern roared. When she heard the shower running, she sped into the bedroom, took the book and put it in her bag, loosened books to hide the space, opened the door that led to the stairs and the street and shut it quietly behind her.