Like a wave of the sea on a rock.
Oh terrible terrible things happened to people, he hadn’t realised how terrible. Not when he was on the ship he hadn’t. You could say what you liked but it was with a deep sense of relief that one left land behind with its infections, its insoluble troubles, and sailed away happily into the blue.
And now here she was talking about babies and signs that didn’t belong to the house, and not recognising him. He would never survive it. He hated her for her senility. Why had she become like this in their old age which was meant to be sunny and relaxed? Why couldn’t she have retained her firm efficient mind? He had been cheated at the end. She was trying to torment him. She knew perfectly well what she was doing. She was pretending all the time, she was deliberately torturing him.
All the time she had been getting his blue postcards she had been growing old. All the time he had been sitting on a chair on the deck writing his letters she had been wrestling with the children, with the cares of the world.
This was actually worse than death, much worse. Death was a clean break, but this went on and on. It would never end.
And he never felt at ease. One day she packed her case and made for the door. ‘I am going home,’ she said. ‘I am going back to my husband.’ And he had to wrestle the case out of her hand for she was very strong, though her mind was weak, sending out its maimed flashes as from a defective lighthouse.
‘You are not going anywhere,’ he said angrily. And she had struggled and then finally given up. It was as if he was keeping her prisoner.
If he didn’t watch he would become like her himself, for she wasn’t allowing him to sleep. In the middle of the night she would hear voices, her mother for instance calling to her. He couldn’t keep this up. He wouldn’t survive it. The doctor told him that he would have to find something to take his mind off her, otherwise he would become like her. ‘You’re not getting any younger,’ he said. ‘And you say you don’t want to put her in a Home.’
No, he wouldn’t do that. If he did that she would remain in her forgetful state forever. So he began to make little ships, as his eyesight was still strong. Tiny ships with sails set, and rigging hoisted. He found that his concentration on his ships was helping him and sometimes he completely forgot she was there. Life became almost peaceful for them and she would sometimes touch his ship and say, ‘Pretty, pretty,’ just like a little girl. She would watch him as he worked, using thin thread for ropes, and her eyes would light up as the ship took shape. He had never been involved in anything in his life so deeply. The tiny ship was so real it looked as if it might set sail.
And now he said to himself, I must try something really difficult. I must try and put my ship in a bottle. I have never tried that before. So he folded the tiny sails and slid the ship in and when it was in he manipulated the threads to raise the masts and sails again. The ship sailed motionlessly inside the bottle.
His wife came over and touched the bottle gently. She was staring at the ship motionlessly carved inside. Tears began to flow from her eyes. ‘The poor ship,’ she said. ‘The poor ship.’ He put his hand around her waist. He didn’t know whether she was weeping for herself or for him. The ship was like a magnet which had drawn the tears from her eyes.
It wasn’t sailing anywhere, he knew. Never again would it see other countries. Never again would it race through the sea. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, patting his wife on the shoulder. ‘It’s all right. It’s quite happy inside the bottle. Perfectly happy.’
That was the moment he accepted he would never be able to speak to her again, that the two of them would travel side by side like ships in the night, without lights, without wireless. And that the truth of their lives was actually what was happening then, at that time, without reservation, without disguise.
In the Silence
The stooks of corn glimmered in the moonlight and boys’ voices could be heard as they played hide and seek among them. How calm the night was, how stubbly the field! Iain crouched behind one of the stooks listening, watching for deepening shadows, his face and hands sweaty, his knees trembling with excitement. Then quite suddenly he heard the voices fading away from him, as if the boys had tired of their game and gone home, leaving him undetected. Their voices were like bells in the distance, each answering the other and then falling silent. He was alone.
The moonlight shimmered among the stooks so that they looked like men, or women, who had fallen asleep upright. The silence gathered around him, except that now and again he could hear the bark of a dog and the noise of the sea. He touched the stubble with his finger and felt it sharp and thorny as if it might draw blood. From where he was he could see the lights of the houses but there was no human shape to be seen anywhere. The moon made a white road across the distant sea.
He moved quietly about the field, amazed at the silence. No whisper of wind, no rustle of creature – rat or mouse – moving about. He was a scout on advance patrol, he was a pirate among his strawy treasure chests. If he thrust his hand into one, he might however find not gold but some small nocturnal animal. Very faintly he heard the soft throaty call of an owl. He was on a battlefield among the dead.
He began to count the stooks and made them twelve in all. It was a struggle for him for he was continually distracted by shadows and also not at all good at arithmetic, being only seven years old and more imaginative than mathematical. Twelve stooks set at a certain glimmering distance from each other. Twelve treasure chests. Twelve men of straw. He counted them again, and again he got twelve so he had been right the first time.
A cat slanted along in front of him, a mouse in its jaws, its eyes cold and green. The mouse’s tail was dangling from its mouth like a shoelace. He put out his hand, but the cat quickly ran away from him towards its busy house, carrying its prey. Its green eyes were solid and beautiful like jewels.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket and began to dry his face. In the darkness he couldn’t see the handkerchief clearly, it appeared as a vague ghostly shape, and though it had red spots on it he couldn’t make them out. This was the quietest he had ever heard the world before. Even the cat had made no noise when it passed him. During the daytime there was always sound, but now even the dog had stopped barking. He could hear no sound of water, not any noise at all. He put his hand out in front of him and could see it only as a faint shape, as if it were separate from the rest of his body.
He looked up at the moon which was quite cold in the sky. He could see the dark spots on it and it seemed to move backwards into the sky as he looked. What an extraordinary calm was everywhere. It was as if he had been left in charge of the night, as if he was the only person alive, as if he must take responsibility for the whole world. No sound of footsteps could be heard from the road that lay between the wall and the houses.
The silence lasted so long that he was afraid to move. He formed his lips as if to speak but he didn’t have the courage. It was as if the night didn’t want him to speak, were forbidding him to do so, as if it were saying to him, This is my kingdom, you are not to do anything I don’t wish you to do. He could no longer hear the noise of the sea, as if it too had been commanded to be quiet. It was like a yellow shield in the distance, flat and made of hammered gold.
For the first time in his life he heard the beating of his own heart. Pitter patter it went, then it picked up power and became stronger, heavier. It was like a big clock in the middle of his chest. Then as quickly as it had started, it settled down again and he held his breath. The laden enchanted night, the strangeness of it. He would not have been surprised to see the stooks beginning to dance, a strawy dance, one which they were too serious to do in the daytime, when everyone was watching. He felt daring as well as frightened, that he should be the only one to stay behind, that he should be the dweller among the stooks. How brave he was and yet how unreal and ghostly he felt. It was as if the boys had left him and gone to another country, pulling the roofs over their heads and putting off the switch besi
de the bed.
This was the latest he had ever been out, even counting Hallowe’en last year. But tonight he could feel there were no witches, the night was too still for that. It wasn’t frightening in that way, not with broomsticks and masked heads, animal faces. Not even Stork would be out as late as this, his two sticks pointed at the boys like guns, as he seemed to fly from the wall which ran alongside the road. No, it wasn’t that kind of fear. It was as if he didn’t . . . as if he wasn’t . . . as if the night had gone right through him, as if he wasn’t actually there, in that field, with cold knees and ghostly hands.
He imagined himself staying out there all night and the boys appearing to him in the morning, their faces red with the sun, shouting and screaming, like Red Indians. The sun was on their faces like war paint. They came out of their boxes pushing the lids up, and suddenly there they were among the stubble with their red knees and their red hands.
The stooks weren’t all at the same angle to the earth. As he listened in the quietness he seemed to hear them talking in strawy voices, speaking in a sort of sharp, strawy language. They were whispering to each other, deep and rough and sharp. Their language sounded very odd, not at all liquid and running, but like the voice of stones, thorns. The field was alive with their conversation. Perhaps they were discussing the scythe that had cut them down, the boys that played hide and seek among them. They were busy and hissing as if they had to speak as much as possible before the light strengthened around them.
Then they came closer together, and the boys seemed suddenly very far away. The stooks were pressed against each other, composing a thorny spiky wall. He screamed suddenly and stopped, for at the sound the stooks had resumed their original positions. They were like pieces on a board. He began to count them again, his heart beating irregularly. Thirteen, where there had been twelve before. Where had the thirteenth come from?
He couldn’t make out which was the alien one, and then counted them again and again. Then he saw it, the thirteenth. It was moving towards him, it had sharp teeth, it had thorny fingers. It was sighing inarticulately like an old woman, or an old man, its sigh was despairing and deep. Far beyond on the road he could sense that the boys were all gathered together, having got out of their boxes. They were sighing, everyone was sighing like the wind. Straw was peeling away from them as if on an invisible gale. And finally they were no longer there, but had returned to their boxes again and pulled the roofs over their heads.
He didn’t notice the lights of the house go out as he walked towards the thirteenth stook, laid his head on its breast and fell asleep among the thorns.
The Ladder
Thus it was that one day he stood upright among the roars and cries of mammoths, lions and the rest. His stereoscopic eyes, his new brain, gathered information from the land around him. Standing on two legs was such an achievement that he almost wept with the joy of it. Nor did the small or gigantic animals around him understand what was happening, that his was the empire of the future, but he knew deep within himself, he knew it. On the dim horizon were churches, art galleries, space ships. Beyond the leopards, the bears, the red deer, the reindeer, the wolverines, the musk ox, the arctic fox, the woolly rhinoceros and the arctic ptarmigan they stood out from that blue haze of the early world. What a busy little being he was, such projects in his mind, his hand searching for tools and weapons. Things, beings, beasts, leaped straight out at him and did not stay in their shadowy frieze. Some hunger, thirst, that he did not understand gnawed at him, drove him into the depths of caves. He would climb down an almost vertical abyss and come to a beautiful arcade that led to another shaft round the edge of which he crept on a narrow ledge. And in a very low chamber he would lie on his back and paint a lion on the ceiling that would roar back at him. He would draw a wild determined mammoth, a horse, reindeer. He would create magnificent polychrome paintings in red, black, brown or yellow, holding his lamp close to the wall. He would grind pigment very finely on a stone palette and then fix it with fat. And in the farthest depths of the cave he would paint and draw.
This being, this strange new being.
Sometimes in sunset he would see a ladder of light and in his imagination he would climb it. High, high into the sky which arched himself and his kind – and the others. The others were for his service, he was their master.
Nothing, and again nothing.
Uncle Jim is singing his song again and telling us about Dunkirk. Aunt Jane is inviting us to see her new flat. She has Doulton figures, crystal, a new coffee set of silver.
Night after night the explorer stares at the stars. Into the limitless spaces.
Have you another Cartland, Plaidy? That one was so nice. I enjoyed it so much, it kept the wolf from the door. I do so like a historical novel.
Klonk, take that. What a spiffing day for Bowman of the Lower Fifth. The wind is on his skin. The trees are a glorious tent around him. He can hear nestlings, roars, cries. But not yet see the sea. Not yet set his sail west, not yet hear the humming of the rigging and the cordage.
Nothing, and again nothing. The wind at the door. The tiger sinking into the pit. And himself hammering with a boulder let down on a leather belt. And the scents everywhere. What a world, what a new world. And the clouds coming to visit him.
There she is knitting again. She knits all the time now. Last night they found her naked at midnight. In the village. And someone said, laughing, ‘She wasn’t much of a picture.’ The nurse bends down, arranges the pillow, her fanged mouth gapes.
With his briefcase in his hand he stalks along the road. With his sword at his side he sleeps in the church. At first there was armour everywhere. Our history is an unpeeling of armour to become like eggs.
Do you know this one? This is an Irish one. MacCormick used to sing it. Do you remember MacCormick?
I know she doesn’t have a certificate. She thinks she can deceive everybody, but I know for a fact that she wasn’t in college.
A bit too left for me, you understand. The children will have to be brought up in their faith, the other faith. They’re adamant about that. And their priests, by God if you cross them.
He climbs steadily, he climbs. He speaks.
Hooded he is, his eyes follow you, he stretches his tiny hand out. Pink is the monkey’s palm, hanging from the bar, jumping, clutching.
Raphael he is, in the depths of the caves, not far from the icy water, the profile of the horse, the bear springing out at you from the wall. Lord, what a new world.
Nothing, and again nothing. But a lot can be done with these flats even though there is woodworm and damp rot. Have a surveyor in. Let him probe.
Fire burns and the wolverine draws back snarling. But the others knit by the fire, they do not mind the new red beast, glittering with wings, Titian red.
He gnaws at the marrow bone of the mammoth.
Tiptoe he sees the world and beyond that there is another part and then another. There is no end to it. Ledges, steps, ladders, grades, genera. Sometimes he sees one of the tribe sleeping. For days he sleeps, months. He will never wake up. The flesh peels from his bones. And slowly the expression on his face becomes a snarl. The lightning flashes at the tips of the nails, beyond the ——.
Nothing, and again nothing. Coffee, bingo, bridge. What are we going to do about the young ones? They are like wild animals playing their records in caves by themselves.
Let not your heart be troubled. It is Mrs Bett’s turn to arrange the flowers. Never have red and white in the one bowl. Unlucky. Anyone could have told her that, but she never asks. Never.
Tiptoe on the earth, the wind nuzzling at his cheeks and hair. And in the calm post-Ice-Age the paintings hang out like washing, in a naked gallery becalmed.
Higher, higher, higher than the dinosaur with its small reptilian head. Higher than anybody, than anything. As high as a cathedral, tumbling into orbit, singing. Deeper than the salmon, the herring, everywhere.
Ivory hairpins, lamps made out of reindeer skulls, whistles m
ade from the bones of deer, ivory chisels, bone discs, decorated pebbles, toilet boxes of ivory. And that body asleep, flaking, with the tiny ring of bone on its finger, so many years ago, so many fresh wounds ago, that dawn, that trembling dawn.
Tommy
He wore new corduroy trousers, two jerseys with Scottish badges on them, new shoes: all these he had been given on his travels. He had a little brown dog which he kept on a lead. He had been trudging all round Britain on a sponsored walk.
He believed that he was a great poet: he believed this because he had nothing else to believe in. His childhood had been one of the most extreme poverty: he had stolen food in order to survive: he had been in prison, and in prison he had begun to write poetry.
He arrived at ten o’clock at night: at first I thought he was a tinker or a Red Indian: he had long black hair and was carrying a blue bag. In the bag we later discovered he had a tape recorder on which he had recorded conversations, monologues, poems. He read us one of his poems. He believed that though he was English he was the reincarnation of Robert Burns. People, he said, called him the Rabbie Burns of England.
We listened to his poem. One of the verses went as follows:
When Burns arrives in the Highlands
make sure you look after your strays
for Burns loved always the lassies
and knew them and their ways.
That is my best poem, he told us, taking a coffee. (He loved coffee and drank a great deal of it.) I met some Americans on the Mull boat and they took a copy of my poem. They gave me money for a pint. Mull is Paradise. You could write a lot of poems on Mull. I could live on Mull, only I don’t want to be tied down.
The Black Halo Page 65