“That’s very considerate of you,” said Anthony. “And what about you and Rory? If anything happens to the company?”
“Oh, we aren’t in the same predicament as you,” said Giles. “We haven’t got your commitments. And we’ve both of us got other interests, as well . . . . I’ve been worrying about you, Anthony. I feel responsible. I’d like to feel you weren’t going to come out of this too badly.”
Anthony bent down, pulled up a fibrous sprig of plantain, considered. Giles was a shocking liar, but he is also, Anthony thought, one of my oldest friends. Why should I suspect him of behaving worse than I would behave myself? And whatever Giles’s motives, what a relief it would indeed be, to get rid of one’s liabilities, to stop thinking about those bloodsucking monstrous properties squatting down in London, to forget the whole business, to get rid of one’s second mortgage, to return to being a private person, only a few thousand pounds overdrawn. To begin again.
“I must say,” said Anthony, carefully, staring up at the pink glow, “that it’s a very attractive idea.”
A rook cawed, sardonically.
A little too quickly, Giles said, “If you were interested, we’ve already looked up the details of our original agreement, when we set up the company.”
“Have you got the papers with you?” said Anthony. “I don’t think I’ve got my copy of the agreement here, or if I have, I wouldn’t know where it is.”
Giles hesitated.
“No, I haven’t got them here,” he said. Anthony knew he was lying.
“I’d have to ring you, when I get back,” said Giles.
“I’d better think about it,” said Anthony, who was already thinking hard. “It’s very generous of you, to worry about me so much. Don’t let it get you down, I’m all right.”
“It’s a bad business, about Alison,” said Giles, changing the subject. “What a country to get stuck in, of all the countries in Europe.”
And they talked of Alison, and the politics of Wallacia, and of the pruning of roses, about which neither knew much.
“You make a good country gentleman,” said Giles to Anthony, as they strolled back to the house.
Giles and Pamela left at twelve. The weather was already darkening, and it had turned cold. Anthony went down with them in the car to the village, where they dropped him off. I’ll think about it, I’ll ring you, said Anthony. Thank you for your hospitality, said Pamela. They drove off: he waved, from the little bridge over the river. He was glad to see them go. He stood for a while, staring into the water, watching the weed flow and turn like hair, watching the brown stones and the surface shimmer. He would go back and look at the terms of the original agreement that he and Rory and Giles had made; he had a copy in his desk, and knew which drawer it lay in. It was obvious enough that Giles and Rory were trying to get rid of him, for reasons of their own: but what reasons? There had been, he was sure, a clause allowing for the release of any one of the three partners, but he could not recall the precise conditions. Why, if the company was losing as badly as it seemed, should they want to release him from his share of the liabilities? Did they have expectations they had not revealed—bites, nibbles, even the sight of fish in the water?
It was starting to rain: the sky had clouded over with extraordinary speed and thoroughness. He felt pleased that his weather forecast was vindicated, went into the village shop to buy a couple of tins of soup, and started to walk back up the lane to the house. Great wet drops fell like pennies on the pale dusty road. A bird sang in the hedge, a song of warning, a liquid song. He did not trust Giles, trusted Rory even less, knowing him less, yet what would he lose, if he accepted their offer, except a constant sense of hideous anxiety?
I might, of course, lose the possibility of my share of profits. But how could there be profits, the way things are going? And would I care, if there were? Would I care, if I opted out, and then had to watch while Giles and Rory made a killing?
They have ganged up on me, he reflected. They have conspired behind my back, while I was away. Like Caesar and Lepidus, while Antony was lolling about with Cleopatra. A triumvirate cannot work. It was my mistake, to leave London.
He did not much care. He wondered what Alison would say if she were here. She was far too far away to consult. She would, he thought, be likely to advise him to get out while he could: she had had enough of the strain. She had been game enough at the beginning, but the last few months had worn her out.
But I don’t think I will. I think I’m too stubborn. I think I’ll hang on, thought Anthony. If they can gamble, so can I.
When he got back to the house, he was met at the door by Pamela’s ancient little dog. She had left it behind. It looked up at him, with an expression of anxiety on its wizened face. It seemed to expect rejection, hostility. He wondered how often it had been forgotten before. He stared at it, with some irritation. He did not want a dog, least of all this kind of dog. But there it was. He bent down, patted its wiry hard skull. It wagged its tail. “Oh, all right,” said Anthony, aloud. But resolved, in the same instant, to refuse Giles’s offer of release.
On the morning of the nineteenth, two letters, conveyed in the diplomatic bag, were delivered by hand at Alison’s hotel. The ordinary post from England to Wallacia was erratic. One letter was from Molly’s house mistress, Judy Channing. She said that Molly had noticed that Alison had not been to visit recently, and was growing disturbed: they had had to increase her daily dose of Oblivine and hoped Alison would approve. She had had a slight tantrum the night before and had attacked Diane Harwood, fortunately not seriously. Had Alison any idea when she would be back? They didn’t like to make promises that weren’t true, as Alison knew, but it was a difficult time, and it would be nice to be able to say that Mummy would definitely be back for Christmas. It would give Molly something to look forward to. Meanwhile, if Alison could write, Molly did so enjoy getting letters.
Judy Channing, a brisk, sensible girl, ended with her best wishes and her hopes that all would go well in Wallacia; she managed to imply, in her good wishes, that Jane Murray was not deserving of so much time or attention. Judy Channing lived in a small world of sick people. She had no sympathy with the problems of health.
Alison had written regularly to Molly, in fact. Perhaps her letters were not reaching England? It was easy to write to Molly, for one knew exactly what to say to her. What one had for lunch, what for supper. Whether one saw a horse, a cow, a dog. But one of the problems with Molly, tentatively articulated by an anxious Judy Channing, was that she did not understand about time. She seemed to accept the rhythm of her mother’s weekly visits, the alternation of term time and holiday, but it was impossible to explain to her a necessary absence: she could not grasp the concept of “next weekend.” And she was becoming fretful, in Alison’s prolonged disappearance, and had attacked Diane Harwood. Not seriously? It must have been serious, or Judy Channing, by no means a scaremonger, would not have mentioned it.
Judy Channing was a tall girl, with blond hair and a large chin. She looked after thirty children suffering from cerebral palsy, day and night. The children had a wide and alarming range of disabilities: some had severe motor defects, some had visual defects, most had speech defects, most had eating problems, some were incontinent, and some suffered from time to time from akinetic seizures and convulsions. Judy Channing appeared to have no private life, though she would occasionally speak of a distant boyfriend who worked in a juvenile offenders’ home and whom she hoped one day to marry. The day, Alison felt, would never come, for Miss Channing was too subdued to the demands of her children. She took an interest and a pride in them, though she did not claim to love them: she was too sensible for such an excess. Alison liked her better than Mrs. Newsome, the house mistress of last year, who had simulated affection, unconvincingly. Alison knew how difficult it was to feel affection for a clumsy, perverse, and dribbling child, and did not see the point of pretense. Judy Channing preferred to talk about case histories and prognoses and new ex
periments in therapy.
Molly was one of her more agreeable charges. Alison had, naturally, debated long over the wisdom of sending Molly away to school at all, and longer over which school, but it had seemed better for everybody that she should go, and they had achieved a great deal with her: she had learned to dress herself quite competently, to wash herself, to speak more clearly, to eat quite tidily. She had learned songs, a few letters, a few simple games. She could play percussion instruments, and follow the plots of stories. She did better than some of her schoolmates; she was one of the more able, which was good for morale. But at what a cost, Alison would think, on her weekly visits, as she greeted the tragic instances of God’s inhumanity to man: to be so surrounded, to shine in so dim a night.
Judy Channing found Molly’s case history interesting. She had turned out so much better than had been expected. She had been born prematurely, and for the first year of her life had lain like a doll, hardly moving, responding to nothing, watched over by a desperate Alison, who would smile and talk and sing to this nonbaby as though believing that faith alone would bring her to life. And Alison had succeeded, for at a year the baby had begun to kick, to notice, to reach for objects, to smile back, stirred from her deep damaged trance. When she was two, she began to suffer from convulsions, and cerebral palsy was diagnosed. The convulsions were terrifying. This was the stage at which Alison, at her wit’s end, started to contact other parents, groups that dealt with such problems, and began to work for the Foundation for Disabled Children.
At the age of four, Molly began to speak; single, disconnected, hardly comprehensible words. But speech, nevertheless.
It was hard to assess her I.Q. The school did not approve of subjecting children to constant tests. On the other hand, it did not accept children who were severely subnormal, mentally. One or two of them were thought to be very bright: one sixteen-year-old boy had mastered an electric typewriter and had started to write poetry. Alison had found journals to publish it. Molly would never reach such heights. She would never learn to read, although she could recognize symbols and even one or two words. Her own ignorance frustrated her. She wanted to learn, but could not. Sometimes Alison looked back to the days when she had lain immobile in her cradle, her placid eyes gazing at nothing, and wondered whether she had been criminal to nag and tease and catch at her with maternal love, to drag her into the land of the conscious, only to find herself one of the helpless of the earth. Judy Channing said that she would probably have surfaced anyway, without Alison’s attention, but Alison, remembering those hours of tears and imploring by the cot side, took leave to doubt this. She felt that she herself had summoned up this stumbling ghost. And she loved her, hopelessly, tenderly. At times it seemed worthwhile. At other times, not so. Either way, there was no choice. It was so.
If only Molly could understand, that she was not staying away on purpose, out of malice or neglect. If only one could write and say, I would come back tomorrow, if I could. But Molly was like a perpetual infant, suffering an everlasting repetition of separation trauma. There was no reassurance one could offer. One could not say, I cannot come because your sister Jane is a bloody fool and is sitting in a prison hospital with her leg in plaster and I must stay here to be with her, even though I am wasting my time.
Molly had adored Jane, once. But she had learned to be cautious, the hard way. She had learned to keep out of Jane’s way.
I don’t know what I ought to be doing, thought Alison. I don’t know where I should be, or what I ought to be doing.
She opened her next letter. It was from Kitty Friedmann. Kitty said that she had not really much to say, she just wanted to tell Alison that she was thinking about her, and what a brave good girl Alison was, what a wonderful woman and a wonderful mother, and she was sure Alison and Jane too would both be home again safely soon. P.S. I am getting on fine, and will be home myself next week, I hope, said Kitty.
A wonderful woman and a wonderful mother. Yes. Alison stared at the two airmail letters. People were always describing her as a wonderful woman and a wonderful mother. Why? Because she let Molly come home for the holidays, instead of dumping her all the year round, as so many did? Or in the hope that, if so described, she would continue so to behave?
Alison had known Kitty for years; she had known her before she had met Anthony, before Molly had been born. An elderly aunt of hers had married Kitty’s widower cousin: it had been a mixed marriage, a scandal, and Kitty had been, of course, the mediating angel between the two angry families. Kitty could not see why people could not be friendly and sensible, in this day and age. And so, bowed by necessity, and bribed by hospitality, they had all become sensible and friendly and Kitty and Alison had become and remained good friends.
Kitty was a keen theater-goer. She had been upset when Alison gave up the stage. But had admired her for it, or so she said.
I wonder why I did stop working, thought Alison, for the first time for years. She folded the two letters up and put them back in their envelopes. It was not wholly on account of Molly. Even at the beginning, I did not imagine that the Foundation couldn’t do without me. Or that it would do much good with me.
She had done it because she did not want to compete with her husband, Donnell. Competition had made him angry. So she had withdrawn, and he had still been angry. One cannot win.
Alison stood up, and walked around her hotel room. It was small, and she felt caged. Though, of course, she was not. She could go out, and would go out. She had nothing to do until the afternoon, when she was due to have tea with the consul, to discuss what, if anything, to do next. The consul seemed to think that the authorities were about to fix a date for the trial. She hoped that that was true. She wondered if she would dare to ask him more about conditions in the prison camps he had visited. The chief problem, he said, was that the camps were remote, and that prisoners would be moved from one to another without warning, apparently to inconvenience any visitors. There had been few British subjects held in the jails of Wallacia, and none of those had been women. “If she is sentenced,” Mr. Barstow had said, on their last meeting, smiling apologetically at the very idea, “she will probably be sent to the Maritza Camp. It’s up in the mountains. It’s very beautiful scenery there,” he had said. “Quite Alpine.”
Alison shivered. The thought of Jane, living on fishbone stew and cabbage, and sewing mailbags in an Alpine prison, was not heart-warming. She would forget it. She would go out. It was a fine morning, frosty and blue. Mrs. Bourlatos, the American wife of a Greek businessman, and one of the few English-speaking people in Krusograd, had advised her to try the museum, as an outing. “It’s surprisingly undull,” she had said. So Alison Murray put on her fur coat and her fur hat and her kid gloves and picked up her lizard-skin handbag, and marched off to look at the museum. What else was there to do? One could not even window shop in Krusograd, for there were so few shop windows, and in those that there were, the stock did not change: no new arrangements tempted the eye or the purse. The same objects sat, dumped, undisplayed. Even the greengrocers and butchers seemed to have caught the prevailing esthetic apathy: the fruit and vegetables were plentiful, but arranged to look meager and dull and as unattractive as possible, and from the butchers’ shops, with their great hairy sides of meat, their messy heaps of entrails, their untidily severed heads, one had to avert one’s eyes. No, this was not a country for the window shopper, and Alison was rather glad she did not have to do any other kind of shopping in it. She had been obliged, on one occasion, to look for a drugstore to buy herself some Tampax, but the word Tampax, which she had thought as universal as Coca-Cola, produced no response at all from the shop assistant, and she had been obliged to walk out empty handed. She had visited the town’s only sizeable department store, in search of the same product, hoping to be able to point rather than to speak, but the store, which resembled nothing so much as a wartime Woolworth’s in Croydon (the nearest hometown of her childhood), did not seem to stock Tampax either, and she had been
forced for the first time since her last pregnancy to buy old-fashioned cotton sanitary towels. Inspecting them, in the privacy of her hotel room, she was not at all sure that they were not even so old-fashioned as to be washable. Walking down the street she thanked God that she lived in a consumer throw-away flush-away advertising society, and wondered idly what the dynamic Len, whose enthusiasm for trade and advertisement and shop frontages bordered on the comic, would have made of this fine display of apathy. How he would have longed to develop the High Street of Krusograd. What opportunities, what undiscovered riches.
The museum, however, was far from shabby. An imposing modern building, it stood confidently, a tribute to the superiority of culture to commerce. A proper sense of values, it no doubt considered itself to manifest. Alison entered. It was, of course, free, even to capitalist foreigners. (But then so, thought Alison defensively, is the British Museum.)
Alison Murray was not a very well educated person, so she looked for the striking objects on display, rather than those of historical importance: she would have been hard pushed to find anything less undull than old flints, of which there was a copious supply. The descriptions were anyway incomprehensible, written in Wallacian, a language which remained for her a cluttered splutter of unusual consonants. So it was inevitable that she would find herself staring at the glass case containing the most spectacular exhibits. And they were spectacular. For one thing, they were golden. Made of gold. One does not often see gold in such quantities. There was a huge golden bowl, with two handles: plain, solid, vast. There was another golden bowl, of the finest fragility, beaten thin, papery, delicate, slightly crumpled after centuries of concealment (the dates at least she could read: they dated from the fourth century B.C., and had been found in 1960). There were more ornate gold objects—buttons, rings, bracelets, vials. And, most beautiful of all, there was a wreath, shimmering and quivering, golden, perfect, light, bright, insubstantial. She had never seen anything so lovely. The perfect adornment. It was made of laurel twigs, with thin beaten leaves; one could see the delicate markings of the twig. The leaves shivered in the artificial light; they quaked as she moved nearer the case to look, responding to her slightest movement on the marble floor. Hanging from the twigs, on neat little golden loops, were golden berries. The wreath stood, poised on its stand in the dark air, between the two bowls. She gazed into the bowl. It was filled with yellow light, filled with lightness, not shining like the wreath in its glinting, but still, absorbent, deep, dull.
The Ice Age Page 12