We shouldn’t have come home, she thought, we should have stayed in the dream till the end. What is life after all but taking risks, and is it enough to have life if it is to be life in a tenement?
Though in fact the people in the tenement, Mrs Smith, Mrs Bruce, Mrs Scott, all believed in the rightness of her cause. ‘The British people are behind you,’ they told her while studying her bare rooms with satisfaction. ‘These blacks are getting too big for their boots.’ It was funny how it was the poor who supported them: they themselves were now the poor after being the rich.
Lorna had no grandparents, they were all dead. They had been very proud of John who had had such a big job in engineering. ‘He is the top manager there,’ her father would say, swinging his gammy leg along the promenade, the result of a war wound sustained when he was serving on a destroyer in the Mediterranean in the Second World War. ‘These black bastards,’ he would say, ‘they should all be shot.’ That was at the beginning when they had sometimes come home on holiday, before independence. She remembered her mother’s thin pursed lips, her father’s blubbery ones. They had in their time moved from tenement to tenement, flourishing briefly in shop after shop till finally they had to surrender the last one, as if they had reached the last trench of all. They had had so little, and she and John had had so much.
In fact they had got on well with the blacks, they had been respected by them. They had even voluntarily raised their wages. One couldn’t say that they had not been fair. And now there was that stupid bishop who acted and thought like a child, when it was them and people like them who had fertilised Rhodesia, made it blossom.
What she missed most was the service: now she had to do everything herself. And what bothered her most was the coldness of the weather. Sometimes it took her all her time to get out of bed, to face that gritty British greyness. My heart will break, she thought, I miss the sun so much. I miss the comradeship. I miss the light. But it was John who had made her come back. ‘It is all right for us,’ he had pointed out, ‘but what will it be like for Lorna? And if we stay we will be too old to move. Now we are not, quite.’
She hung the stockings in front of the fire, listening to the voices of children which came into the room in spite of the closed windows. I am back, she thought, to the place where my parents ended at, before John and I took that leap into the blue, and lived for a while in the fruitful garden. She felt like a Cinderella back in the cinders again after her life with the prince had failed. When she saw Ian Smith speaking on the TV with his strong determined face, and heard his flat Rhodesian voice, it was as if she wanted to cry, because she had been such a traitor as to leave. O ye of little faith, she heard, as if it was her mother speaking. In the evening, in summer, the old men walked along the promenade looking out at the sea and the setting sun. If only you had seen our sun, she almost screamed at them. She filled the kettle with water and made coffee for herself.
When I was young, she thought, my mother told me that I must marry well. ‘Don’t take one of the boys from the tenements,’ she had told her, ‘they all want to stay where they are.’ And so she had married John. In those days the walk along the promenade or among the trees two miles away, had been enough. Holding hands in the café had been a heartbreaking joy. And now, my poor John, you are selling insurance from house to house because there is nothing else for you, under the hostile skies of treacherous Britain.
I can never forgive them that, their treachery. Perhaps we should have gone to America, even to France. Once a Pakistani had come to the door to sell clothes but she had shut it in his face. Black bastards, something in her had screamed, black stupid bastard, can we never be free from you? After all we did for you, you turn and spit in our faces. As she drank the coffee she heard her mother saying, After all I’ve done for you, you’re going abroad. But she had forgiven herself by saying that wife must cleave to husband, flesh of the one flesh, and if John wanted to go how could she remain behind? She had left her parents in the tenement, their faces inflexible and set. And now she was back in a tenement very like theirs. History had turned on its wheel laughing at her, as if it was all a wooden decorated fair.
The voices of the children outside were faint yet clear. The socks steamed in front of the fire. Where there once had been carpets there was now linoleum. Someone on the radio was singing ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. She switched it off. Abruptly she left the room and went outside, and standing at the door was dazzled.
‘Mummy,’ Lorna shouted, as she gathered snow in her hands and brought it over to her like a bouquet. A little Indian girl from one of the other closes gazed across at the two of them from the periphery of the snow.
My God, the whiteness, she thought. The coldness and the whiteness. The dazzle. Her mother was calling to her, as she slid down the long slope, but her father was waiting for her at the bottom.
Lorna placed her white bouquet in her arms, the blossom of winter, harvest of crystal, of diamonds. She stared down stupidly at the snow in her hands, watching it melt in the warmth.
As if the scene had been caught in slow motion she saw Lorna with her arms stopped and fixed, her lips slightly open, her eyes wide and blue.
Her father had brought her chocolate mice, and was handing them to her from his layers of clothes. She held them in her hand, stroking them, from head to tail. Their bodies were brown and elegant and beautiful.
Across the field of snow the little Indian girl, perfect and serious, was gazing across at her.
The snow dazzled her eyes, it was so miraculously white and stainless, the first manna of the year. The desert had suddenly flowered, the greyness had disappeared. She knelt down and touched it with her fingers, as if it were indeed a gift from heaven. Borne to her on the flat windless air, were the voices of other children elsewhere. Some of them were poor and half naked, some of them were rich and warm, and yet their voices were all similar. Come in to your dinner, she heard her dead mother saying, and her father winked at her secretively. Lorna and the little Indian girl were talking seriously together. They had both inherited the magic world of the snow. Unexpected, unheralded, it had come. With his insurance books under his arm John trudged through it, arriving at one house, then walking along the road again. His shadow was black on the white snow. Her eyes began to stream with tears as if the light was too strong for them. Through the tears she saw the two little girls talking to each other, consulting each other on some tremendous matter, as if it were a treaty or a manifesto. Her tears flashed in the whiteness, and then it was for a moment as if everything became black and she was dizzily teetering on her heels as she bent down, like a prospector, about to die.
Then the blackness cleared and there was the whiteness in front of her again. She stood up and shouted to Lorna, ‘Don’t be long now. Your dinner will soon be ready.’ Then she went back into the house, leaving them to their grave flowing secrets.
In the Corridor
I see from the paper that Whippy’s dead. He died in the Eventide Home, or so it says here. At the age of seventy. His real, full name appears to have been Charles James Macewan, but we called him Whippy, when he was teaching us in school, I mean, and as I look at this bare announcement without pity, without the necessity of flattery, my eyes suddenly flood with tears. She really looked so ugly and splay-footed to a boy of eleven as she walked away that day along the corridor, so ugly, and he . . . Of course he wasn’t very handsome himself, though silver-haired then, and I always think of him as old, at least sixty, but comparing my own age with his, as it appears here, I think he must have been only forty-five then. But then people of forty-five look ancient to boys of eleven. Whippy taught me Science and he was called Whippy because he was in the habit of getting into tearing sudden rages and giving people six of the belt, though strangely enough no one disliked him or hated him or anything like that. I don’t think he was a good scientist: he belonged to those days when the only equipment in a science room was a bunsen burner and some test tubes and an old sink in the
corner. I myself was very good at science (still am) and Whippy used to stare at me in amazement when I would finish a problem he had set in three minutes flat. He would seem so unsure of himself, gazing at me as if I were some prodigy whom he both feared and distrusted. I can still remember that look of puzzlement private to the two of us. And yet I was only eleven and in those days I wore a brown woollen suit.
My story is not long, it consists only of a single moment, but then such moments perhaps reveal a whole life. And what was Whippy’s life? Obviously he never married and he ended up in an Eventide Home as the notice of his death, bare and abbreviated, reveals. In those days he was perpetually engaged to a Miss Hewitt who taught in the French Department, an ugly splay-footed woman who seemed even older than he was. I never was taught by her and I never spoke to her in my whole life. All I can remember is the sight of her walking along a long corridor one afternoon in sunlight, so many years ago. And it all comes back to me now and I find myself crying. The human heart, how deep, how frightening it is, how reverberant with footsteps, how bright with almost extinct suns.
There were jokes of course about the two of them, and we all knew about the engagement. It had been a tradition in the school for many years, passed on from pupil to pupil, from class to class. It even occurred to us that his sudden rages were caused by tiffs with his loved one, for they were so quick and so maniacal, dying then to calm zephyrs so that one did not blame him really, but thought of him as one subject to an inexplicable illness. Once during one of them I saw him throw a huge book (perhaps an encyclopaedia) at a girl, missing her by inches, the book hitting the discoloured wall. He was tall and white-haired even then, his face red and pale by turns, fairly well dressed in a navy blue suit and, as a teacher, dedicated though limited.
It happened one particular afternoon. For some reason he had taken a liking to me or perhaps it was that he wanted me on his side. Just as the class was leaving the room he called me and asked me if I would go down town for him to buy some Beecham’s Powders. I took the money, thinking to myself how I would tell the other pupils that there was something wrong with old Whippy’s stomach, and amazed that he should show his weakness so openly to a boy of eleven. I thought the incident comic but of course I didn’t show anything to him and truth to tell he spoke so quietly and so nicely that I was quite happy to go, quite apart from the fact that I would be able to dawdle about a bit downtown. I think he gave me a penny to buy something for myself.
Also in my minute pitiable way I was glad to be going an errand for a teacher.
Anyway I did go down to town and I bought the Beecham’s Powders but in fact I didn’t buy anything for myself though he had given me the penny. When I returned to the school I went along to the office to find out where he was and I was told that he was along in the staff-room. I walked along to the staff-room (even now I can see that small figure in its brown suit making its way rather fearfully along that stony road) and as I did so I looked along the long corridor and he was standing there looking after Miss Hewitt whose back was to him and to me, and who, squat and splay-footed in her dim suit, was about to disappear round the far end.’
‘Sir,’ I said as I came up to him, but he didn’t appear to hear me. I spoke the word again and this time he turned round. His face was dead white as if he had been hit about the heart. His eyes didn’t seem to be properly focussed. Then he seemed to realise who I was and who he was. He seemed to straighten and gather himself together as I looked at him and held out his hand for the Beecham’s Powders and the change which I still clutched in my warm sweaty hand. As he did so a ring fell from his hand and on to the stone floor of the corridor. It bounced about, glittering, and rested a good distance away from us. I made as if to pick it up. It didn’t occur to me that there was any significance in the ring, I didn’t think about it, I didn’t connect it with the disappearing Miss Hewitt. The only rings I had ever seen were small Woolworths rings with bright red stones. As I moved to pick it up he said, ‘That will be all right, boy, that will be all right.’ I ran along to my class, as I wanted to tell them all about the Beecham’s Powders.
It is only now as I read this story in the newspaper that I realise what must have happened. She had broken off her engagement to him. I can still see her large, splay-footed body making its way steadily down the corridor to its far end, illuminated by shafts of sunlight coming in through the windows. And I think now, as then, how ugly she was. And that is why I cried there for that moment because she was so ugly and old and he didn’t want me to pick up the ring and because he was standing there dazed, seeing ahead of him at that moment the exact announcement, bare and pitiless, that I have just read in this newspaper and whose necessity arose from that ugly splay-footed woman walking away from him down that long corridor with the school windows set at intervals, dusty and old, along one side.
Christine
She found the geriatric ward very interesting and weird. There was fat Mrs Ross whose husband had been dead for ten years and who believed she was going to have a baby.
‘I think it will be a boy this time,’ she would say to Christine. ‘We never had a boy. It was all girls.’ Then she would look proudly down at her big belly and say, ‘Can you not hear him move.’ Her grey hair straggled on the pillow.
There was Mrs Simmons who dressed up every day and stood waiting for the taxi which would take her back to the tenement she had lived in nine years before and which no longer existed.
‘Hugh is not usually late. I can’t understand it,’ she would say, and then, ‘I can’t find my handbag.’
Outside the window the birds were singing and the trees had put out their first leaves of spring.
‘Have you done your homework?’ said Miss Leggat, who had been a primary teacher.
‘Yes,’ said Christine as she tucked in the sheet.
‘Well, then,’ said Miss Leggat, ‘I think you should do your physical jerks. Legs together, legs apart, legs together.’ And Christine would do her exercises till Miss Leggat was satisfied.
‘I wonder why my bed is wet,’ Miss Leggat would say.
‘That is because you have wet it yourself,’ said Christine.
‘Not at all, not at all, that woman must have been in my bed,’ and she pointed to the occupant of the next bed who was staring into space.
‘Make sure that you do your homework. How else will you get on in the world?’
Christine sang as she moved about the ward.
Miss Campbell called her by the name Helen and thought that she was her daughter.
‘When are you going to take me out of here?’ she would say.
‘It won’t be long now,’ said Christine.
Miss Leggat talked regularly to her mother who had been dead for twenty years.
‘I am sorry,’ she would say, ‘I’ll come in when I’ve finished playing.’
Her face became dreamy and lost and she would speak to her dolls.
‘I don’t know my own name,’ Christine would say to herself, but she was happy for she liked working with old people. Her own mother had died when she herself was fifteen and she was now eighteen. She had died of cancer. Her father had wept for a whole day and then had gone fishing as he had done in the past. But what was worst of all he had begun to drink heavily.
‘God is a bugger,’ he would say. ‘What else is there to do?’
‘Is that not my taxi now?’ said Mrs Simmons but it was actually a taxi to take the nurses to the dance.
They left her with no handbag standing beside the door, crying gently.
‘If I stay here long I shall go off my head,’ said Christine to herself as she emptied a bedpan while the sun poured in through the windows.
‘My child is due any day now,’ said Mrs Ross. ‘He will be a big bouncing boy. I just know it.’
Her daughters never visited her, and she would sing Scottish songs when it came into her head. Sometimes she would whisper a lullaby very low.
‘Is this what we are going to come
to?’ said Christine to herself for she did not want to go home especially as her father was drinking so heavily. She remembered the day her mother had been buried. The young minister had worn a black cloak, and she had seen the sheep nuzzling at the bushes not far from the graveyard. The other fishermen had been there in their black clothes, standing solidly on the earth, after the swaying motion of their boats. The coffin had descended among a hum of bees. A black head had lifted itself from the bushes.
‘I will now take your name,’ said Miss Leggat opening an imaginary register.
Christine nearly said Helen but caught herself in time.
‘Christine,’ she said. If only that taxi would come. But then taxis were black as hearses.
‘And what are you going to be when you grow up?’ said Miss Leggat brightly.
‘I shall be a nurse,’ said Christine.
‘A nurse. That’s very good. That’s very good indeed. But will you like a hospital?’
Her father stumbled in the door and went straight to the bathroom and vomited. There were scales of fish on his hands.
The sea heaved about her, and through one of the waves she could see her mother’s face twisted in pain.
‘Helen,’ said Miss Campbell, ‘I wish you would come in earlier. And what was that I found in your room last night?’
‘It was nothing at all,’ she nearly screamed. ‘And anyway it isn’t your business.’
She looked around her, frightened that she might actually have spoken.
‘Is there anything wrong?’ said Sister Hogg. ‘You should go out more. Why don’t you go to a dance?’
‘I met your mother at a dance,’ said her father tearfully, ‘She was wearing a yellow dress. We danced the Highland Schottische.’
His vomit was as yellow as the sun and he writhed in her arms as she tried to put him to bed.
The Black Halo Page 59