A light clicked on automatically as she took the last flight of stairs. She set her small suitcase down on the carpet outside her door, found the other key on her keyring, turned the porcelain knob with its flowery flecks. How so simple a thing as a doorknob could tell you so absolutely you are back in another country.
Someone had been in her room. Her chair, which always she set square against her desk, was at an angle. The two books at its centre had been moved aside. A piece of paper lay beside them, its edge held firm by the weight of Clinical Tropical Diseases. The note was signed by Mrs Beardsley. Lisa had not known until she read it that her landlady’s first name was Iris. The note told her there had been a phone call from home. On Sunday, at eight in the morning. Her father would like her to ring back when she came in. Mrs Beardsley said she would not return from her sister’s in Kingston until Wednesday, but Lisa must use the telephone in her sitting room, not the coin phone in the hallway. She had left the door unlocked.
Lisa removed her coat and the beige jacket she had bought only the week before. She thought, it can only be bad, whatever Dad has phoned about cannot be something I want to hear. She had called home on her mother’s birthday two months ago, but that was the only time in the past year. We are hardly a family, as she told Murray less than a day before, to let emotion off its leash, feeling she had surely to tell him something after his own so warmly talking of his sisters, his father on his cane farm that was a shit of a life, at least to a librarian it was, and the family together, Jesus, it was like a rugby scrum, the amount of hugging and embracing it went in for. You had to go back to his grandparents before you’d hear a word of Italian, but it came through all right. Even his father.
‘We don’t like touching much,’ Lisa had said. ‘Our lot.’
She checked her watch, allowed for the twelve hours ahead it would be at home. She asked the exchange to put her through first to the shop, the surest lead she could have of something bad as she heard the ring keep on and on, in the dispensary she could have described in detail, shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer. It was almost as much that she meant by home as the white house with the dark red eaves, the matching front door, in the Crescent. Where he must be now. She imagined the burring—a different sound entirely from the shrill calling in the shop—of the phone at the end of the kitchen bench. After Babcia died, Dad had the ringing tone tamped down for Eva’s sake. She said she hated the loudness of it.
And there was Daddy, as she called him at once when he raised the receiver, announcing as he always did, ‘Ross speaking.’
‘I’m just back, Daddy.’ The line so clear they might have been calling from one house in the Crescent to another. ‘Just back from Paris.’
He told her Eva had died on Friday, the funeral had been yesterday. ‘At Waikumete,’ he said. ‘An inquest, yes, there’ll be all that.’
‘Your mother,’ he kept calling her, although he had seldom spoken of her by anything but Eva, even to the children. His voice as level as though he spoke to a customer. She guessed what effort it must have taken him. He gave her the details, as far as they knew them. Dick Horgan, she’d remember him, the police sergeant who lived in Warnock Street, coming down to the house early Sunday morning, although of course he and David had sat up all night when they got home and her mother wasn’t there. It was a matter of confirming what they knew.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Your mother didn’t leave a note.’
And then the long pause Lisa hated, and could do nothing about, because she no more than her father was up to clichés, to comforting when there was no room for comfort to take root. They respected each other too much to come at that. Nor did he say would she like to speak with David, and she did not ask if her brother was there.
She could come back, she said. Would he like that?
He insisted she was not to think of it. Then the longer pause when Lisa thought for a moment they had lost the line. Her realising he was crying in that arcing silence between where she stood in the English night and he would have been looking out to early light.
‘In the kitchen,’ Stephen said. ‘I’m standing at the window.’ As if it were important that his daughter could imagine that. To know where Dad was this very minute. At the window where between the house next door and the bare section behind that, there was the wedge of sea Eva liked so much to look out on. It would be blue and sparkling at the moment, because he had said to her, without being asked, ‘It’s a perfect day here, Lisa. The summer goes on and on.’
The story Lisa will hear fragments of at different times, but never all of it together, from her father later on and more from David, and Mrs Patterson who lives next door, and what that other woman told her, the neighbour who phoned the sergeant on his home number. At first she was not surprised to see the tall quiet woman who often walked alone, down the track to the beach when the weather was good, even at times when it was not. But on Friday it was fine. Down the grassy track in the dip behind the houses, Mrs Ross walking slowly enough at first the woman thought she must have lost something and was hoping to find it. First along the track and its verges tall with dry grass that was never mown, and on towards the little causeway you had to walk across to get down to the strip of sand, to the small beach below the shallow cliffs, a place so safe mothers could leave a child to potter there and lie back and close their eyes. So the woman in the highest house thought nothing of it until minutes later she again looked out from her window. It was early afternoon. Although schools had broken up for Easter, the beach was empty. There was no one else to see the tall woman in her blue plastic coat and her sandals hold a branch to balance her as she stepped down the last few feet of the track onto the sand. She removed her sandals and set them neatly side by side. ‘I saw that,’ the woman said. ‘The way she took a few steps and then came back to make sure they were straight, one against the other.’ She wore only her underclothes beneath the plastic coat, not that such a detail was available until later. She then began the long walk towards the black stretch of low volcanic reef a hundred yards out. The beach was famous for how gently it tilted, even at full tide. This afternoon it was quite some walk even to get to where the water began to lap, and Eva’s feet splashed into the glassy shallows. Then another thirty yards perhaps—the woman said she was guessing now, the distance was not important to her, held as she was by what she now realised was taking place. Until the water was at Eva’s waist, and the light sides of her unbuttoned coat rose to either side of her, floating beside her. She slipped her arms free from the coat that then drifted from her, you could hardly tell the colour of it from the sea. From the shore she would have seemed a woman in a bikini, willing to walk a long way to bathe. Then supposing—it is Lisa now supposing it, the picture unchanged from that first imagining—that when the water was high enough for her to cast herself forward to swim, Eva continued at the same slow and now impeded pace, until the tide was level with her throat, and her head there for several moments, as though floating on the utterly placid reach of the upper harbour, and then disappeared. The woman who knew Mrs Patterson had rushed to the phone, and the sergeant had to tell her to say whatever it was again more slowly, and he had driven to Ross’s Pharmacy, and arrangements were made to look for her.
‘For your mother,’ her father kept telling her. ‘So many people came to help. When they found her on Saturday it was right across near Chelsea, near the Sugar Works.’
No, Lisa wrote to her brother, a few evenings before she left the room that had been home to her for the past three years, no, she had no expectations of any kind, regarding the place she was leaving for. ‘So I can neither be pleased with what I find nor be disappointed. I am simply a doctor going to practise what I have some training for, and what goes on outside the surgery does not interest me as much as you might expect. Not even if the book you promise to send me turns up before I leave.’
One of David’s heavy, condescending jokes. He wrote how he thought their father was having him on, announcing she was about t
o become a missionary! He said he would send her Heart of Darkness to while away the evenings, supposing the Tilley lamps burned that long, and the tom-toms did not disturb her. She wrote back, matching his weighty humour, ‘I may be several hundred miles up-river, or a day’s paddling by canoe from the nearest synagogue, but I shall make sure I recite the verses written in my heart.’ Even in writing so much more easily to her father, there was really little enough to say. ‘A year, Dad, pretending to be a doctor, rather than the researcher which of course I am, even in what we think of as a remote part of the globe (which is, I remind myself, right here and now for those who live there, we so easily forget that). And in a religious settlement at that. Which can’t be a bad thing to broaden me a bit before I settle back to a life stuck to a microscope, and the rare stroll around a ward. I need to know a little more about people.’ She then told Stephen what she thought might amuse him, recalling a student in her years in Dunedin after her time in Athens, the years when she ‘straightened out’. There was a girl she knew, a dour netballer from Palmerston, who decided early on to specialise as an anaesthetist to be spared the fag of talking with patients. ‘At times I feel a little like her, but without quite her degree of self-knowledge.’
She knew how deeply she would miss the library where she now sat, where she liked to spend evenings when the big handsome room often was almost empty, when the laboratories and the lecture rooms at the School of Tropical Medicine were closed for the day, the cafeteria below the grand marble entrance hall silent apart from the cleaners who quietly moved from floor to floor. In these months after her father’s phone call, when she had stood in her landlady’s sitting room with its heavy furniture, its aspidistras in their dull brass pots, the broad drooping leaves of one of them tapping at her arm as she spoke and listened, so much had changed. The image she could not dispel and that oppressed her, of her mother quietly borne by the harbour’s currents, across the late summer tides she imagined in Auckland brightness, but more often their persistent threading beneath the darkness she looked out on from her bedroom window, the glint some nights of the seemingly still but always nudging sea.
She knew she had ‘drawn into herself’, that phrase she guessed her friends in the labs down here in Keppel Street, the staff from the wards in the great Victorian jumble across at St Pancras, were likely to be using of her. More and more she opted out from the Friday evening drinks round the corner in Store Street, and found excuses when her Scottish friend suggested some play he’d heard good things about, the sort of thing he knew she would like. Her friends understood and were too kindly to press her. More and more the library was where she preferred to sit alone. Her paper, she would say, her paper on something she worked up on epidemiology, was proving more of a struggle than she’d bargained for. There was truth of a sort in saying so. More accurate would have been to admit the rare contentment she felt in the long, high, elegant room, the gallery of shelves that ran three sides in front of the high handsome windows, the design of the 1920s metal rails and their now slightly embarrassing ornamental swastikas. From up here on the first floor she liked to look out to the massed exuberance of the summer trees, the backs of the tall brick Victorian houses, the slow fading of the evenings, the sky still clear and sharp above the streets when the library closed. She loved those occasional minutes when a gust rose and the trees stirred and thrashed in a sudden hurl of wind, the feeling of such rightness, such excitement. It was while she sat there one evening in August, a time when several of her acquaintances and friends at the School were off tramping in Norway, lolling in Greece, that her friend Professor Goldberg took a chair from the next table and placed it facing hers. He came quickly to the point. He made light of it, ironically using such quote-mark phrases as ‘healing the ill’ and ‘succouring the afflicted’ with dull professional ones, ‘extending clinical competence’, even ‘going into the field for a spell’. He knew she intended to stay on at the School, that they would be glad to have her, ‘to research as you so seem cut out for, rather than walk the wards’. She had worked with him on two publications; they had co-authored a paper on inoculation variants for a new Swedish journal, Sub-Saharan Medicine. She knew his respect for her, as she now guessed that although it might seem by chance, he had planned coming into the library when she was alone. ‘You’ll forgive my interfering, if it seems that.’
‘It is never that, Leonard.’
The suggestion then, it was already there to be taken up. The professor had a friend, an old colleague, a serious Christian as it happened, which he mentioned only for its relevance to what he proposed. His friend would arrange it like a shot. A year at a hospital in Tanzania, say. That was a possibility. His friend was on more boards and committees than you had fingers to count on. They were always on the look-out for young people to spend time at hospitals, stations, missions, whatever you wanted to call them. There were choices enough. He said, ‘Amazing how the human body surprises when it’s not just under a microscope.’ As if she had not already spent time in the tropical diseases wards, she reminded him.
‘I’m overstating, of course.’ His watching her, more concerned for her than actually found words. She might like to think about it? When he was her age a spell in Sierra Leone made all the difference. To him personally, he meant. Insect-transmitted encephalitis was his thing at the time. There was no marked decline in various problems once he left, he wasn’t claiming that, but it gave him perspective. Served for a lifetime. The chance to see statistics as people. Hear case studies speak back. He apologised for going on. He stood as suddenly as he had sat with her. ‘Let me know what you decide.’
‘I have already,’ she said. She laughed and for a moment she felt his awkwardness, as if he may have harried her a little strongly. Leonard, the one man she had ever known who wore spectacles without arms, a black ribbon falling to one side, as though he had stepped in from another century.
‘Right then. I’ll phone my friend in the morning.’ He waited for her to collect her papers and settle them in the canvas shoulder bag that advertised a bookshop. She smiled to her elderly friend as they walked towards Tottenham Court Road. ‘It might just be the making of me.’ They walked on, as if once the important things were taken care of, there was little enough else to speak of. Close and yet curiously distant. Would she always feel that way with people who mattered to her? Then Leonard surprised her, suggesting he might buy her a glass of wine as they came to the pub on the corner. She was at a turning point, after all. Wasn’t that something to celebrate?
He raised his glass of Bordeaux to her. A lozenge of orange light fell across his thinning hair. Lisa felt her friend’s own shyness, that mystery of another person that sometimes strikes us so forcibly for no more than a few seconds, yet we feel we have seen more deeply than at other times, when he said, looking about the bar with its locals and regulars and the beat from a jukebox with the curved bright canopy that already looked from another era, ‘They’ll be no more strange to you out there, Lisa, than this lot is to me.’
As she later wrote of it to her father, ‘People surprise you at times with their kindness.’ She sealed both letters home and put her address and three small kisses on the flap of one of them, a childish habit she knew Dad would like. She imagined him with the big Times World Atlas on the table beside him as he read what she had written. She explained she would fly to the capital, change to a shorter flight, and travel by bus to where a man in a jeep would meet her and take her to the Mission. Everything arranged even down to that. A phrase came back to her that Stephen used to jolly them along as children when the thought of an afternoon drive to the fountain at St Heliers, or to a walk in the Waitakeres, bored her and David to tears. Wot larks! she now wrote, beneath the kisses. He would know exactly the tone of voice she used to mock him, knowing how his lips would part a little as he read, and laugh in that quiet way of his. I must have picked that up, he would say, from my boss in Finchley Road, who gave David his name.
She had promised t
hat once she was there in ‘the Compound’, as she already knew the Mission called the enclosed space where the long low buildings of the hospital and school and dormitories stood on a gently sloping rise, she would keep him up with the play. How her father liked that phrase too. ‘Wherever you are you must keep me up with the play.’ But how hard that turned out to be, to find the sentences to carry across the world to him what her life became, once she was past the exotic details she so laboured to catch for him, the yawp and clamour of the bush, the trees whose names she would never learn, the harsh vividness of whatever caught her eye. ‘The utter strangeness,’ as she wanted to tell him, ‘not so much of what I see or the work imposes on me, but what I have become in seeing them, and in so short a time.’
Sentences as she wrote them that struck her not as insincere, but as though she tried to write of someone else and not herself. She would tear up page after page, and wrote instead what she feared read baldly as an impersonal report. Names, timetables, occasionally of how much or little she could claim to understand. The merest sketch of a life, not the pulse and breath of it. She feared her father would be disappointed. How to tell Stephen he mattered too much to her for her to mock up travelogues, chatter, ‘interesting things’, when what she was most aware of was so much paring down in herself. Of wanting to get things right, vague as those words might seem even to herself. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to speak of. She did at least tell her father that, yet in a way that puzzled him, holding her letter as he looked out to the sea from the big window in the bach. ‘So hard,’ she wrote, ‘to work out what is worth keeping, what is not.’ She added, knowing it would amuse him, ‘Don’t let David read this. He is sure to misunderstand it.’
All This by Chance Page 14