He was sitting on his straw bed, she on the hard chair opposite. He looked at her with incomprehension, alarm, almost hostility.
‘What do you mean?’
The beautiful hand drew down her black velvet bodice, and exposed her breasts. ‘I have a wet nurse,’ she said, ‘should I need one, but I have plenty of this to spare.’
For a moment Rudy could say nothing. He, who had relied so much on eating and drinking, had spent many weeks almost deprived of both. He fixed his altered face, so pale and shrunken within its covering of untutored hair, on his daughter’s, beautiful in itself, still more beautified by art.
‘What do you mean, Angela?’
She said nothing, but with a still warmer smile, leaned, full-bosomed, towards him.
Then he took the meaning, and wracked by thirst and hunger, took, like a child, what she offered him; nor did he desist until the shadow of the warder, passing the grille, warned him that the feast must be finished.
He wiped his mouth.
‘Another time, another time?’ he murmured.
‘Yes,’ she said, but before they had time to say more, the warder was in the cell.
‘Now you must go, Madam,’ he said.
*
His daughter’s visit, and her gift of fresh milk, so different from the milk he was used to, so long in bottle and so often sour, completely changed Rudy’s whole outlook. He was not forgotten! He was still in contact with the world outside! And with his own family! Until now he hadn’t realised how much they meant to him; at the thought of them his whole being seemed to revive. He hadn’t time to ask Angela how, or where, her mother was; he hadn’t time to ask her how she had tracked him down; he hadn’t time to ask the hundred questions he wanted to ask. He had been, quite literally, like a baby at the breast, whose one desire is to slake its thirst and its hunger and can only utter inarticulate sucking sounds meanwhile. In the process he lost all sense of shame; he didn’t feel that he, a grown man, should not be finding this kind of sustenance from anyone, least of all his daughter; he didn’t care that the warder, passing and re-passing his cell, could see through the small iron grille just what was happening; his physical need was so great that it quite overcame all civilized feelings. He was a starving animal, and nothing more.
When she had gone his mood began to change. The renascence which her presence, and her present, brought him didn’t at once fade; the first sustained his spirit, and the second his body. It was surprising how much better he felt for both—united to the world, not only the outside world, which he could only dimly perceive through the grating in his cell, or a little more amply, over the shoulders of the surrounding walls—but to the world of the flesh which, in the days of his triumphant health, he had always taken for granted. The idea of being ill was too ridiculous!
But since his daughter’s visit he realised how far he had gone downhill (down-ill, he thought, for he had English in his blood and was still capable of a play on words). Not only was he unattractive to look at, as his little mirror showed him, but his invincible health was failing him. Angela with the benison of her breast, had for a day or two restored it: but when, if ever, could he expect to see her again?
He knew, and had always accepted the conditions of the kind of life he led; but foresight, and experience are very different things.
If only she would come again! It wasn’t only his thirsty mouth that asked this question and his whole physical system, deprived of all the dainties that used to succour it; it was the longing for home, not that he had ever had since he could remember a real home, but somewhere, however transient it might be, where he could expand, take his shoes off, throw his clothes down, asking nobody’s permission, and then expect a good hot meal; and later, if he wasn’t too tired, but he was never tired, the dividing curtain would come down, and Angela would take his place outside and he her place inside, as the case might be.
How far away it seemed from his present life, if life it could be called. Angela’s visit had brought back a whiff of it which recalled the happy past; but as it faded, it left a feeling of unbearable desolation. She would never come again, she would never come again! It would have been better if she had never come at all.
*
She did come, however. The gaoler, with a faint smirk, said, ‘There’s a lady to see you. The same one as last time. Shall I let her in?’
‘Of course,’ said Rudy, hardly believing his ears. But he had to believe his eyes.
She looked too ravishing! Among the prison visitors who could have looked like her?
When the gaoler ushered her in he warned, ‘Fifteen minutes, mind, and no larking about.’
An extra five minutes was something. After their embracements, which lasted longer than before, and longer than they ever had in the days of Rudy’s prosperity when the life of action had seemed so much more important than domestic felicity, her right hand, her white hand, moved as before to the black velvet of her corsage, the invitation in her eyes and lips was overwhelming; her left hand, just as white with its slender, curling fingers, lay as it were on guard, in case, in case—of what? Rudy did not ask himself; he stared at his daughter with greedy, staring, incredulous eyes, and eyebrows raised so high that their ridges made semi-circles reaching far up his forehead.
While he was slaking his hunger and his thirst he was oblivious, as he had been before, to what was going on outside; he did not hear the warder’s wary footsteps crossing and re-crossing the door of his cell, or see the helmeted head as it peered inwards.
After a while he drew away like a breast-fed child that has had its fill; and then became aware of the reality round him, his own semi-nakedness which, in spite of its emaciation, still preserved and perhaps emphasized the beauty of his body, contrasting with and yet recalling her fullness and healthiness of form, and the facial likeness between them, as she drew her velvet mantle round her.
‘Aren’t you rather hot in that?’ he asked idly, with a father’s instinctive privilege to criticize, and wiping the sweat off his chest with the weekly handkerchief the prison laundry allowed him.
‘Oh no, darling, it’s much colder outside than it is in here. And besides—’
‘Besides?’
‘Well, I have to be in the fashion. I should be wearing this even if I was on the equator.’
The time was running short. Rudy tried desperately to think of things he wanted to ask his daughter; questions he could ask without risk, and which could be answered without risk, for he didn’t know whether his cell was wired for listening in.
‘How is Trudi?’
‘Very well, I see her quite often. She has people looking after her, I think she’s all right.’
‘And you, Angela?’
‘Yes, I’m all right too. Jacko is a nice fellow’—and she indicated her bracelets and her necklace.
‘And he doesn’t mind you coming here?’ asked Rudy, aware almost for the first time of the claims of personal relationships, as distinct from those of business.
‘He doesn’t know, and if he did, he wouldn’t mind.’
‘You’re sure be wouldn’t?’
Angela made a wide gesture with her arms, her beautiful arms, a very feminine version of her father’s, which had nothing left but the bones and muscles.
‘And you will be able to come and see me again?’
She smiled.
‘Why not?’
The grating of the opening door, the warder’s face, dark under his helmet.
‘It’s time, please,’ he said, though the words were a command, not a request.
Angela rose and kissed her father, and then, bestowing a grateful smile on the grim-faced warder, she departed.
Where has she gone? thought Rudy. In his job it was safer not to ask people their destinations, and still safer not to reveal his own. Safer not to disclose his own locality, little as it mattered, for it wasn’t a destination—if only it had been!—and perhaps he was safer here than anywhere else. He hadn’t been sub
jected to a formal interrogation or tortured, except by the glare of the electric torch, from which his eyes still sometimes ached and smarted, it could have been much, much worse. Deep within himself, he didn’t think he would escape alive. He was stateless, or rather he had too many states, too many passports, to appeal to any single one: they would all disown him, and none of those he had worked for, as he had so often reminded himself, would want to exchange him for another spy. He awaited his fate.
And yet, since Angela’s second visit, his fate seemed less gloomy than before. Not less settled, not less determined; but somehow less lonely, less beyond the scope and reach and sympathy of ordinary mortals, who lived square vegetable lives, hail-brother-well-met characters, with no problems other than domestic or financial—nothing to compare with the aspect of a firing squad, or whatever agent of death awaited him.
And yet, apart from the physical stimulus, greater than the ordinarily well-fed businessman or working-man could conceive, coming from his daughter’s breast, was something more emotional and more spirited—something that might have been experienced by a baby, who was not old enough to have had any other experience. A feeling of security, of not having to depend on others outside his ken, still less on himself, for his livelihood—in both senses of the word—returned to him. It didn’t convince his mind; his mind still knew he was under sentence of death; but it did release, in his subconscious mind, a feeling of hope.
If Angela had twice come to see him, might she not come a third time, bringing with her the inestimable benefit of her breast and the different but equally inestimable benefit of her presence?
She did come again, quite soon, within a week; and in the joy of their reunion it didn’t occur to Rudy that this was odd, considering, as he knew, that the prisoners were only allowed visitors once a fortnight.
‘Don’t tell Trudi where I am,’ he whispered, as his daughter was letting fall her dress, silk this time, for even she had come to feel that comfort was preferable to fashion, but black still, because it suited her and showed off her white skin and her lovely hands. ‘I’d rather she didn’t know where I was, just tell her I’m alive.’
Angela nodded. She was now wearing her hair in a new style, piled up on the back of her head: it suited her nose which (like Cleopatra’s?) was a shade too long; and the coronal of hair, into which she had introduced fragmentary gleams of shining metal, perhaps silver, balanced it.
Of this Rudy, intent upon his meal, was no more aware than a baby would have been.
Afterwards she lingered with him, talking about the outside world, which had become almost an illusion to Rudy, so distant was it from his personal experience. And then he heard her say—an interpolation in a quite different context—‘I know the way out.’
He nodded in answer, for words might be overheard, and soon after, the door opened to its minimal extent, and the warder said, glancing at Angela, ‘I’m afraid you must go now, Madam.’
Rudy kissed his daughter; after all that was allowed; and surrendered her to the warder. For some reason for which he couldn’t rationally account, he put his ear to the grille which gave him little vision of what was going on in the passage, but did allow him to listen to their retreating footsteps.
Angela’s third visit had renewed his interest in existence: he thought of himself as potentially alive, not as dead. Is it always a blessing to exchange resignation for hope? Rudy couldn’t tell, but he knew that hope was stirring in him. ‘I know the way out,’ Angela wouldn’t have said that inadvertently. ‘The way out’ of what? There were so many predicaments to know, or not know, the way out of, with many of which Rudy was familiar; emotional situations, financial situations, all sorts of situations. Did she mean the way out of prison?
Lying on his palliasse, under his blanket, more heavy than warm (sometimes he threw it off because of the heat) he tried to make sure what Angela meant. As a rule a good sleeper, and still a good sleeper now that he had accommodated himself to his chains, he tossed and turned, and suddenly one of his hands came free from its manacles. He could hardly believe it, but so it was; his right hand was loose, it could do whatever it wanted, or he wanted it to do, scratch him, stroke him, anything. Amazing! And suddenly it came to him why, and how this had happened. Several weeks—months?—of semi-starvation had so reduced his physical frame that his hands and wrists, which used to be larger, as well as stronger, than most men’s had shrivelled, had shrunk to under-handcuff size. He hadn’t freed himself; his captors had freed him, to a certain very limited extent, simply by not giving him enough to eat.
Cautiously, because he still couldn’t believe it, he tried with his left hand. A little wriggling, and out it came from its iron clasp. His arms were free!
He lay in or on his bed, moving them about, touching parts of himself that had long been out of touch, his feet, his legs, his chest, his chin, his head, the small of his back, all the anatomy of himself which for so many weeks, so many months, had been as unreal, as meaningless, as a map of the world—his world—long out of date.
Leaving the gyves and the chain which connected them under the diseased blanket, he got up and walked about his cell, exulting in his freedom. But only for a moment; although it was dark it wasn’t safe; he could hear the gaoler’s footsteps, perambulating outside; and although the gaoler must have heard many a sleepless prisoner pacing his cell, it wouldn’t do to awake suspicion. Rudy went back to bed (if the phrase is not too misleading) and after some effort, fixed on his handcuffs again. He waited for a while, to enjoy his sense of freedom; but when he realised that without his familiar bandages he wouldn’t sleep (let alone the danger of being found without them in the morning) he put them on again. How blessed can confinement be, once one is used to it!
Rudy had been used to it, at any rate resigned to it, until these irruptions of his daughter’s presence renewed his taste, not only for the taste of her bosom, of which, much as he relished it and felt the better for it, he was secretly ashamed, as for the free world outside these walls, where he could express himself as a man should and even order his own food!
Meanwhile he dared not take off his manacles, except in the privacy (the only privacy he had) of his bed, and didn’t know what to do with his new-found freedom.
The next time Angela came she was dressed to kill. Even Rudy who like many men (and many women, for that matter) could hardly believe that a relation so close to him as a child, could be outstandingly beautiful. Trudi was a good-looking woman; Rudy as he had cause to know, was or had been, a fine figure of a man. But that between them they should have begotten this wonderful-looking creature! For almost the first time in his life Rudy had a sense of physical inferiority. Other kinds of inferiority he had often felt: social inferiority, financial inferiority, mental inferiority; but physical inferiority, no. With his clothes on, or without them, he had always been as good as, or better than, the next man.
And then to have sired this worshipful creature!
‘A poor thing, but mine own.’ Rudy didn’t know the quotation, but he had the humility to feel, just as an equal, perhaps greater, number of people have not, that a home-made product is less to be esteemed in the eyes of the world than a shop-made product which has had the advantage of advertisement and public acclaim. Angela had neither: she was just the daughter of him and Trudi, and the idea that she had looks to attract general attention, such as a film-star might have, had never occurred to him.
Yet why had the gaoler given her and him these special privileges, for today no time-limit had been set on their intercourse?
Something moved in Rudy’s mind, and when their lunch(?), tea(?), dinner(?) was over, he wiped his mouth with his weekly handkerchief, and said, and meant it, ‘I am so grateful to you, darling.’ He stopped, shocked and astonished at this verbal expression of emotion, which he had perhaps remembered from some film. ‘What I mean is,’ he amended, ‘it is good of you to come and see your old dad, who isn’t like what he used to be.’
He gl
anced at himself, as much as he could see; the famous muscles were there, especially the bunch of deltoid like a cricketball on his right shoulder, of which he used to be proud, and which was the more in evidence now that his flesh had receded from it. ‘You’ve been kind to me, Angela,’ he ended lamely, ‘and so has Trudi, though I don’t want her to know, as I told you, where I am. I don’t know how you found out, for that matter.’
He didn’t expect an answer, but he suddenly felt a slip of paper in his hand, and a flood of light dawned on him.
‘Eat it, and when he fetches me, hit him as hard as you can.’
They looked at each other. Rudy swallowed the paper and realised what a woman, whose beauty was taken for granted by him and many others, might mean to a sex-starved prison-warder.
It explained a lot; it explained why Angela had been admitted to his cell, more often than other visitors would have been. It explained why their times together had been prolonged beyond the statutory limit. It explained—
Rudy put on his jacket to cover his nakedness, or semi-nakedness, for he still had his trousers, and his shoes, the white gymshoes he wore for exercise.
‘Do I look all right?’ he asked, buttoning up his jacket.
It was then he remembered his handcuffs. He was still wearing them, the chain between them sagged over his thighs. Many times since he had learned how to unloose them he had practised the art, and the art remained. With his hands on his knees, the chain between them, he looked like a prisoner in irons, but he could release himself at any moment.
‘Do I look all right?’ he repeated.
‘Of course, dear Father, you always look all right.’
As the sound of the warder’s footsteps, between their five minutes’ interval, died away, he gave his daughter a meaning look and twitched his shrunken wrists and claw-thin fingers which the handcuffs no longer held.
Their eyes met: she understood what he meant.
Rudy pulled down the sleeves of his worn-out jacket; he thought of the days when it had served him in awkward moments; reinforced by his daughter’s physical help, his being knew what to do in case of a fight. He had had many fights in his day; he knew where to plant the blows, he knew where the pressure-points were—under the elbow, behind the shoulders, in the groin, and he memorised them, while he and Angela were talking.
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 88