A World of Other People

by Steven Carroll

  The line is silent. The military voice on the other end of the line is waiting. She is staring out the window, too lost in her own thoughts to speak. She’s calmly asking herself why would he do that? Why would he go and die on her? He can’t have. It’s too silly. It really is a dream. And when she looks back to the telephone from the window and finally speaks, her voice, she notes with a certain surprise, is calm and controlled. It hasn’t touched her yet. It will. Oh, it will. But not yet. Where? she asks. And he tells her it is a tiny place she will never have heard of. That nobody has ever heard of. One of those places that only appear on the most detailed of maps. And it is then that he tells her that her name and number were found on a sheet of paper in Jim’s drawer (he seemed to keep no address book), along with a photograph and a letter (unopened) from her to him, which had been delivered that morning and which somebody had slipped under his door. And it is because of all this that he is calling her. Bizarrely, she hears her voice saying that she appreciates the call, her voice calm and detached. None of the girls in the office has noticed anything out of the ordinary. They pay no attention. They are working, and so, it would seem to them, is Iris. It is a work call. And when he is finished (and she can tell that it has been an awkward call for him, that he is what they call a good type, and notes that sometime during the call that dry, official voice fell away), she asks if she can see his things.

  ‘They’re being posted to Australia. Today,’ he adds, almost apologetically.

  ‘But I must see them.’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘I won’t take long. I can leave now. I must.’

  There is a long and, it would seem to Iris, thoughtful pause.

  ‘This is highly unusual.’

  ‘Please, let’s call it a goodbye. We never had one. We quarrelled … Please … I can call it work. We can dream something up.’

  ‘You realise what you’re asking?’

  ‘Yes. But you see, there was so little time and I have so little of his, practically nothing. Only a lighter he forgot …’ It is here that she stammers and almost stops, but she gathers herself. ‘Just a short goodbye, that’s all I ask. Please, I must …’

  He is quiet at the other end and she grasps immediately at the indecision.

  ‘Nobody will know I’m there.’

  And she almost adds that she will float like a ghost in a dream and nobody will see her. Still there is silence at the other end and she waits for it to break, for she can sense that underneath the official voice there is something more human. Somebody who might bend the rules however briefly, someone who’s made too many calls like this one and is saying to himself what the hell, let her say goodbye. Just this once.

  ‘I’ll give you one hour.’

  She breathes out and almost collapses with the sigh.

  ‘Thank you. That’s all I need. Thank you—’

  He interrupts her before she can finish. He tells her the nearest town (not far from London at all) she must go to, and to catch a bus from there to a village a short walk from the base. At the gate she must ask the guard for him and he will let her in. For an hour and no more. And on no account may she tell a soul. This, he tells her, even though she doesn’t need telling, is a military area. And again she says thank you. He reminds her, in response, that she must not tell a soul.

  She hangs up and stares out the window at the cold bright sunshine and feels again as though she has truly entered the unreality of a dream. Knows full well that when she looks back over these days and weeks to come it will be like looking back on some dark fantasia. A country field? Under a tree? Dead? No, it’s not possible. Not like that. And if anybody around her has noticed anything out of the usual, they haven’t said. Nor have they indicated with glances of concern that something must have happened. She has simply taken a call and now she must leave. She tells the woman at the next desk that she has an appointment and doesn’t explain anything more than that. Then she floats out of the office.

  On the street she has a vague feeling of skipping school. The sun lights the buildings and cars and billboards. Everything going on: crowds, movies, traffic. Out there in the country, where she is going, rivers flow and invisible currents carry branches, leaves and occasional dead things down to the sea. This is what the world does when somebody dies. And it is as she mentally pronounces the word that everything touches her in a rush, really touches her for the first time, and death, for a split second, ceases to be a dream and pierces her heart so that she stops suddenly, shoulders heaving, and becomes the spectacle of a woman crying in a public place. Oh dear, she was doing well up until now. But now she needs to sit down and finds a step in front of a building to rest on so the moment, like a river to the sea bearing branches and occasional dead things, can run its course.

  And when it has, she rises, for time is passing, and in the same way as she floated out of the office she floats across the footpaths and streets and is carried by the draught into the Underground.

  The bus from North Huntingdon is on time and she sits staring out the window, wondering how many times Jim took this bus and where he sat and what he thought of, as well as pondering all the little things about him that she never knew and never will. And it’s a lonely picture she imagines. Dreamily, she turns her gaze to a sign in the bus asking her if her journey is really necessary and she stares back at it asking what business is it of yours? Once more cursing the thin-lipped armies of the self-righteous, and all their thin-lipped advice and the mindless nods that come with it. But it’s the lonely picture of Jim to which she returns, Jim on the same bus, not so long ago, but long enough now to be another time.

  At the village she crosses the common along a track leading to the base and asks herself again how many times he took this path. It is a longer walk than she expected, but she is still floating and is only vaguely aware of distance and time. At the gate a soldier eyes her curiously when she gives the captain’s name, then goes to a booth and makes a telephone call. A few moments later a young man, much younger than the voice on the telephone, approaches the gate and shakes her hand, and the barrier rises. She has, he reminds her, one hour. He will escort her.

  There’s little to say that this was his room, or that it will be the room of anybody in particular in the future. It is a room in a hut, one of those huts that bear the name of their inventor, Mr Nissen, and which can be found on any airfield anywhere around the country. And there is something about that, the anonymous nature of the hut and the anonymous flyers who will pass through it for however long they have, that speaks of these days more than anything she’s seen before. She learns that this captain who has more or less smuggled her in was the one who sent them up on the night that Jim’s plane copped it. That he’d waited out there on the strip most of the night. But their plane never returned. And when Jim came back to them weeks later, smashed ankle and all, he pulled strings. Jim wouldn’t be part of a crew any more. No more ops for Jim. He was an instructor, and an officer. Besides, the Jim who came back to them wasn’t the same Jim who’d flown out that night. So he pulled strings, got him a promotion and got him a room. And this is it. May not look like much, but it’s better than most. There’s even a desk and a comfortable chair.

  And it is then that he opens the drawer of the desk and the few possessions that were Jim’s are on display. The captain says he’ll leave her now for a while. And though she’s not aware of how she looks, she realises later that he must have seen from her face that she’s shaken, her eyes still red from crying, and that under the heavy coat she’s wearing she’s shivering, whether from the cold or everything else. So he suggests she sits down, and she nods, and drops into that comfortable chair, staring at the contents of the drawer. They also found these, the captain says just before leaving her, in his pockets — and he points to some folded papers on the bunk. By the way, he adds, if anybody happens to ask, she is a politician’s wife, here to organise a charity dance. And she nods blankly once more as he closes the door.

 
Before she examines the objects, she looks around the room — bare walls, bare window, bare floor. No wonder he touched and stroked everything in the flat that one and only night they had together, with the air of someone who’d never seen cushions or rugs or quilts before. No wonder, when this is where he took himself. Where he came to and from. But wouldn’t any more. And the sheer incomprehensibility of that single fact still renders the events of the day a dream. And it is in the dreamy daze that she has been trapped in since the telephone call that she looks down and turns her attention to those few possessions that were his before they are posted back to those parents on the other side of the world whom she will never meet and of whom he spoke little. But soon they will receive them: Jim’s things, Jim’s war. Which ended under a tree in a country field.

  There are letters from home, for she notices the Australian stamps and the return address on the backs of them. Melbourne. Another world altogether, she imagines. Another Jim. And she puts the letters aside, for she feels she has no right to read them. They are private, even in death. Especially in death. Words passed between the parents and their child: their child, who must have seemed too young to be going out into the great world, let alone getting involved in its wars; their child, whom they would always have held fast to seeing again. And it is as she lifts the letters and puts them to one side of the drawer that she sees it. The rose. Petals dried, flattened even, as though at some time they had been pressed into a book. And with the rose back in her possession so too is the moment in the rose garden of the park when she offered it to him and said, ‘Here, give this to someone. Now, I really must—’ Then the clasp of his hand. Love, like faith. And she knows now, and she knew even then (if she’d cared to admit it to herself) that this was one of those moments that never go. That stay clear in the memory. One of those private moments that define and shape the private life in the same way as a meeting between leaders can define and shape the histories of countries. For the private life too has its ententes, its treaties, pacts and epoch-making moments. And this was one. This was theirs, sealed with a casual promise. She picks it up gently and brings it to her nose, but as she does a petal falls from it and, fearful for the rest, in case the whole thing disintegrates, she puts it back down as gently as she lifted it. Part of her will always be offering that rose, saying, ‘Here, give this …’ and never finishing the sentence.

  Under some loose coins and an unopened pack of cigarettes is a slim bound volume, and she opens it at the title page. The Tractatus. Wittgenstein. The same Wittgenstein who, Jim was reliably informed by his lecturer (and Jim passed the anecdote on to her), under no circumstances discussed the weather. She flicks through it, noting that it is well read, sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs, underlined. The last sentence especially, underlined three times: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’ It almost reads like poetry. And whatever it may really mean, she suspects it had its own private meaning for Jim. She glances at her watch and notes that she has already used up much of her time, and she slides from the back of the drawer an envelope containing, she discovers, a half-dozen or so photographs.

  The first is one she knows well, for it is a photograph of her. One that Pip took before she ever met Jim and which she gave him because she thought it was a good photograph and she always photographed badly. If he was going to be looking at her while she wasn’t there this was how she wanted to be seen. Then there were shots of a late middle-aged couple she assumed to be his parents, standing in a suburban garden, on a suburban lawn, with a large, solid suburban house in the background, with a broad sky above: the mother with her gardening gloves in one hand, the father holding his spectacles. In one photo Jim is standing between them, just before he left perhaps. It has that look. A last-get-together look. There is sadness in the mother’s eyes and stoic resolution in the father’s that this day, when their child, their only child, would go out into the great world without them, had always been coming, but did it have to come so soon? A quick look at the back of the photograph confirms this: ‘Mum, Dad and me in the garden, July 1937’.

  And as she stares at it — the garden, the lawn, the house and the three figures — it gradually assumes the air of a lost domain. One that she never possessed, but could have; now lost all the same. Her eyes drift to that broad sky above the suburban scene and she’s suddenly remembering those questions she asked him about his home in the park that first time when she was making comforting conversation, those questions about space and big skies that seemed so silly at the time, but which, she’s now thinking, may not have been so silly after all. For the sky is wide, the garden and the lawn broad. The world, beyond the borders of the photograph, going on and on and on. So, she tells herself, staring intently at the scene, that’s Australia.

  It is not so much an observation as an exclamation, and one that bursts from her. As though for years she’d only ever entertained a vague and theoretical notion of the place (whenever she thought about it at all), a vague notion reinforced by images such as deserts and leaping wildlife and endless beaches, images that ensured that her conception would have nothing more than a travel poster reality. But here, here was someone she had known (and she notes the past tense and the fact that already she has consigned him to the grammar of the gone, to the ranks of those lives, like those actions, that have become completed acts and are spoken of using the completed past), yes, someone she knew, there in front of her, surrounded by home and family. Just people. People like her, and not like her. Just a house, and a garden in which somebody potters, hitting on thoughts and losing them with the distracting entrance of a butterfly or whatnot. Just a house and a garden, like any other, and yet not like any other. And with that exclamation, that burst of sudden understanding, the whole picture acquires an actuality and an intimacy that takes her by surprise. Like suddenly ‘getting’ a line of poetry that you’ve only ever half thought about before. Yes, that’s it, she nods to herself, that’s the place. That’s Jim’s Australia.

  At first she is simply curious when she turns to the next photograph. For it is a shot of his crew and they are all standing in front of their plane. All six of them, arms around each other’s shoulders like a sporting team of some sort just before a match. And smiling, for God’s sake. Smiling. And it is while she is slowly shaking her head at those smiling eyes, and the young, impossibly young faces; it is while she is slowly shaking her head at it all that something more than sad curiosity overcomes her and she realises that the photograph contains something disturbing. Her eyes rove from face to face, trying to locate the source of the disturbance. It is a crew before take-off. They are smiling and their smiles are sad. Deeply so. But not disturbing. And it is only when her eyes shift from the faces of the crew to the plane itself that she sees it. Painted just below the cockpit. A dove. A white dove. Either ascending or descending. And if she weren’t seated she feels sure she would have fallen, for the blow is almost physical. You won’t forget me, you won’t forget … Him. All the time him. This is what happened to him. And she turns the photograph over and sees that it is dated: ‘“F” for Freddie, May 11th 1941’. And she knows that date because it is in her journal, and because she was there. And the sight, the sheer improbability of the spectacle, swoops over her again. The plane, the flames, so near you could almost reach out and touch them. And the dove. You won’t forget me, you won’t forget … Was this why he was in the park that afternoon? Not for the lawns or the trees or the sun, but for the rooftop that his line of vision told her he was staring at? The rooftop that he couldn’t take his eyes off, even if he didn’t really know why? Was that it? Did he know what he was staring at? Or was it some dim impulse that brought him back? How often had he been there before that day? She stares down at the photograph, at the smiling face of Jim, recognising that this is the Jim she never knew. That this is the Jim who existed before. The Jim who died that night along with his crew. The Jim who never really came back.

  Her watch tells her that the minutes
are dwindling. That the ones remaining are precious. And as she packs the photographs back into the envelope she notices that there is a second shot of the crew. Standing in a line, Jim in the centre, all smoking and smiling in front of a hedge. A sign with an arrow pointing to the Officers’ Mess at the foot of the hedge. A glance and she puts it back in the envelope with the others. Then, knowing her time is almost up and that she will have to leave soon, she stands, relieved that her legs can lift her, and turns to the papers on the bunk, those few things found on him. Things that he held and looked at and folded only two days before. And as she picks the things up the incomprehensibility of it hits her again. And death is a dream from which she will one day wake. And it is as she is turning all this over that she unfolds a small notice on yellow church paper. And not just any church. St Stephen’s. And she has no sooner asked herself what on earth he could have been doing with this than she sees it is an advertisement of sorts for a public reading at the church by Mr T.S. Eliot of his latest poem, ‘Little Gidding’. Of course, of course. Then the door opens and she is staring blank-faced at the captain whose name she has completely forgotten, for although she has only been alone for forty or so minutes, she is looking at him as if he is somebody she met years before and whom she is desperately trying to place.