She shivered, uneasily, in her seat. What, in ill thoughts again? As somebody said in Lear. Was it Lear? She had once played Cordelia. Of course.
No, one must continue to behave as though one believed in the accidental. That shows our greatest faith. Molly’s fate is an accident, not a retribution. So I must see it.
There was no point in thinking about these things too much. But how to prevent one’s mind going round the old wheels? In a less advanced age, Molly might well not have survived; nowadays, most families have a physical victim, alive, surviving. But with a morality so punitive, so primitive, that we do not give these people the means to live. We make them scrabble for money, we make their relatives scrape.
Oh God, I am so tired, thought Alison, and shut her eyes. She would sleep. The plane got in at six in the evening: three hours to sleep. I will not think about any of them, she told herself, not about Molly, not about Jane down there, I will empty my mind.
But she could not sleep. The plane was comfortable, old-fashioned, she lay back with her head on the white antimacassar, quaintly embroidered: a first-class ticket that nice man Clyde Barstow had given her, with deprecating mumbles about its being a personal gift. She was back in the world of gallantry and service, of bells to push and telephones that answered, of stewardesses with trays. The seat was upholstered in dark red plush: the whole interior more resembled her notion of a Russian train than of a modern plane. A halfway house.
She could feel the heavy blood flowing from her, and got up, and went to the lavatory: there, for the first time for weeks, she found a Tampax machine. A promise of civilization. And when she got back to her seat, an American businessman leaned over to her and asked her politely whether she would like to look at his copy of Time magazine, another promise of civilization. She accepted, politely, and leafed through it, marveling as ever at her own ignorance about world affairs: perhaps it had been good for her, after all, to be forced, even so brutally, to acknowledge the existence of Eastern Europe. There was, of course, no mention of Wallacia. Not even a footnote. But there was a page and a half on Britain’s economic decline, and the sinking pound, and the dismal state of British industry, and the failure of British firms to deliver goods, and the folly of trying to support workers’ co-operatives with state money, and the inevitability of cutback in public spending, particularly in the Health Service. Reading, Alison felt the usual surge of British patriotism: things were not as bad as that, surely? She glanced across at the businessman: there he sat, pleasant, solid, confident, eccentrically dressed by British standards, but civilized indeed, doubtless well informed, well traveled, well read. (He was reading a novel by Norman Mailer, she could see.) She wondered what he thought about the British National Health Service. Did he think it rotted the spirit of enterprise and self-help, that it demoralized doctors and patients alike? She wondered what she herself thought about the National Health Service. She was herself no socialist, she did not even consider herself to have any political views, but she felt very strongly indeed about the Health Service, and the Social Services.
Because of Molly. She was lucky, she could pay for Molly to go to an expensive private school, where she could learn, from experts, what little she would ever learn. But she was bitterly, painfully aware of the less fortunate, of those that even the Health Service shuffled off into the cellars and garbage dumps of survival, to sprout in the dark like unplanted potatoes, to spring up astonishingly every now and then like indestructible rhubarb, to rot, to decay, to die. She could not understand society. She could not understand how normal people, with their eyes, and their ears, and their limbs all functioning, could refuse to the less well-endowed an excess, a largesse, a sumptuous recompense. To haggle over invalid cars, over paying for night nurses, when it was obvious that out of sheer gratitude for our own health we should give more than we give ourselves to those that lack this elementary blessing. In some areas, society and the law do recognize this: they award to those who lose faculties and limbs enormous sums of damages, hundreds of thousands of pounds, when human error can be convicted. But when the error is God’s, we have no mercy, we are selfish, we are mean.
Maybe it is true that we cannot afford to be generous any more, as a nation? If so, thought Alison, then life is not worth living. And she shut the magazine, firmly, and shut her eyes resolutely, and waited for the plane to land. If Britain went down, she would go down with it. At least it had tried.
When the filthy little train reached filthy Victoria Station, it was eight thirty. She had not really decided where she should go: to Donnell’s empty flat; to Anthony’s empty house to see if there were any more squatters; to friends, even? She stood on the platform, amidst the garbage and the pigeons. After Krusograd, London seemed very large, very frightening, very noisy, very dirty. She wanted to ring Anthony, to say she was safely back, but it seemed better to do it from some safe place, rather than from a noisy call box. Now she was back, she felt, obscurely, frightened. The West did not seem reassuring after all. Could this be home? Yet she felt Anthony’s house might be even more alarming, in its emptiness, and its lingering echoes of Babs. And what if there were squatters, broken pipes, bottles, broken windows, cats?
She rang Kitty Friedmann. Kitty, of all the world, could be guaranteed to ask her round at once and mean it, which she did. “Dear girl, dear girl,” she kept saying, “you’re back again, thank the Lord, you’re back.” It wasn’t until she was in the taxi that the full realization of what she had done entered Alison’s mind: now, suddenly, in ten minutes, unprepared with things to say, she was going to have to look at Kitty Friedmann’s leg. Her ears began to sing and hum with panic.
The door of the neat white house in St. John’s Wood was opened by Sadie, one of the seemingly numberless Friedmann family circle. She was a cousin, or a second cousin, a large woman from Manchester, and she greeted Alison with effusive warmth, grabbing her case, grabbing her coat, ushering Alison, before she had time to think, into the lounge, where Kitty lay on the settee, surrounded by several other Friedmanns. Kitty cried out gaily from her couch, “Oh, Alison, what a treat, how nice of you to come and see us, it is kind of you to think of us—isn’t she looking lovely, Danny?”—for it was one of Kitty’s principles that all women needed to be told constantly that they looked lovely.
“I can’t possibly be looking lovely,” said Alison, stooping to kiss Kitty’s well-powdered cheek, “I’ve had such a long day, I feel filthy. But you”—it suddenly seemed very easy to say, being true—“you really look remarkably well, Kitty.”
She pulled up a stool, sat herself down by Kitty’s elbow.
“I am well,” said Kitty. “I’m fine, aren’t I, boys? Now, my dear, let Sadie go and find you something to eat, you must be starving”—for another of Kitty’s principles required her to offer food to any visitor at least once every half hour.
“I’d love something to eat,” said Alison, “but don’t hurry, there’s no rush. I’ll go and help myself to something soon.”
“No, no, you sit there, you must be exhausted. What a terrible time you must have had, dear. Tell us all about it. Just you sit back and relax and tell us all about it.”
So Alison found herself an armchair and sat back, and kicked off her tight shoes, and looked around her, and talked, and ate. Sadie brought her a tray full of chicken soup and chopped liver and cold chicken and cold salmon and salad and fruit and gherkins and water biscuits, and Alison made her way through it, for it seemed the healthiest food she had encountered in months, infinitely digestible, infinitely reassuring, like the room itself, with its thick white Chinese carpet, and its velvet braided curtains, and its gilt mirrors, and its deep chairs, and its profound bourgeois peace, which not even death and mutilation had been able to disrupt. The Friedmann clan sat around, loyal, cohesive, a united front: behind Kitty’s back they might bicker and squabble, but in her lounge they behaved themselves, at least for a stranger. Alison was always rather surprised by how much she liked Kitty’s house
. It was not her own taste, there was not an item in it she would herself have chosen, but it was unmistakably pleasant, put together by a loving eye. Whereas Kitty’s clothes, alas there was no doubt about it, were on the whole rather frightful. Perhaps the explanation was that Kitty cared a great deal about her home, and not at all about her personal appearance? Her makeup was often applied in so random a manner that one wondered whether she had bothered to look at herself in the mirror while applying it. Perhaps, when buying clothes, she simply bought whatever the saleswoman recommended, not caring enough to have any notions of her own.
When Alison had eaten her supper, and finished her saga, she tried to ring Anthony, but his telephone was out of order. The operator on the Blickley exchange said it was a terrible night up there, terrible winds, perhaps the lines were down. Alison returned to the lounge and reported this news, and the gathering fell silent, and behold, there was a strong wind in London too, but they had been too absorbed, too cocooned in their double-glazed interior to notice it: but when they listened, they could hear it in the trees in the garden, rattling the lids of dustbins in the street. Outside, a long way off.
At ten, the Friedmanns began to leave. They did not keep late nights. Sadie was staying; so was a nurse, who had taken the evening off, and who came in as the others left. Kitty did not approve of the nurse, but the family had bullied her into having her. “What do I need a nurse for?” said Kitty, heaving herself up, reaching for her crutches, bidding Alison good night, begging her to stay longer—“Stay a few days, dear, have a good rest”—and finally hobbling off, up the stairs, with the nurse’s arm to support her. Sadie, switching off lights and fires on her departure, shook her head, said, “She’s very stubborn, you know. You wouldn’t think it, would you? We wanted to make a bedroom for her downstairs, but she wouldn’t have it. She wanted her own room. Stubborn, that’s what she is.”
“She seems so well,” said Alison.
Sadie snorted. “Well! She’s as well as can be, I expect.” She stood, with her finger on the last light switch. “We always said of Kitty, if anyone spat in her eye she’d say, sorry. And now, look at her.” She snorted again, and Alison could not tell if it was with admiration, or impatience. As she went upstairs to her guest bedroom, and ran herself a bath, she thought about Kitty: was it unnatural, to adapt so well to such a double loss?
She lay in the guest bath, looking through the open door into the bedroom, the bed with its satin cover, the white wardrobe with gilt knobs, the Utrillo reproduction on the wall. (Downstairs, there was a large Keith Vaughan, bought by Max in a spasm of cultural benevolence; everybody hated it and derided it, but there it hung, because Max had bought it, and Max had said, with increasing defiance, that it was good. Now it would no doubt hang forever, in deference to the dead.) She thought of Jane, in prison; of Len Wincobank, in prison; of poor Anthony, imprisoned with Molly in his remote eyrie.
The family is a good, multiple, reparable fortification against death: when one member dies, the gap is filled by another. A communal survival. But the individuals die, nevertheless: Max Friedmann was dead, although his relatives contrived to cluster so thickly that his absence was not noticeable.
Alison’s family had not been like that at all. She clambered out of the bath, thinking of them, noting with dismay that she was still bleeding heavily, onto the thick blue towel and the white tiled floor. They had been separate, distinct, alone.
I must do something, Alison said to herself, as she climbed into the wide soft bed, I must do something to bring to an end this terrible fear. It would be better to be dead than to suffer such terrible fear. How long can I go on pretending not to feel it?
Kitty Friedmann was getting quite good at unstrapping her artificial limb. She had been clumsy to begin with, but one can learn anything, if one puts one’s mind to it. She sat on the edge of the bed, neatly folding the straps. She would have liked to have spent some time practicing walking, as she usually did when she went to bed: there were also exercises she was supposed to do, given her by the physiotherapist. But she was afraid she would make a noise if she did them, and disturb or alarm Alison. She would hate to upset poor Alison. She looked pale and tired, and no wonder. I don’t know how I would bear it, thought Kitty, if such things had happened to my children. First Molly, and then this terrible thing with Jane. I simply wouldn’t be able to bear it, if such things happened to my children. Thank God that mine are all healthy, all well.
She heaved herself into the wide double bed, and took a sleeping pill, and thought of her children, and her grandchildren. She did not think of Max. She did not dare to think of Max. Max had been exiled to the black outer wastes of incomprehension and impossibility: he lived out there now, with the six million Jews, and those who died in the Soviet labor camps, and those who were languishing now in camps and prisons. The black wastes, where the winds of hell perpetually howled.
In here, it was warm, and safe, and comfortable. The wallpaper had a pattern of roses and honeysuckle, the carpet was thick and white, the dressing table was white and gilt, and on it lay the silver-backed brushes of her wedding day, the little powder jars, the scent bottles, the little china ring tree. Her artificial leg and crutches leaned incongruously, crudely, against the rose-colored button-backed chair. She wished she had remembered to drape them with her dressing gown, as she usually did. They were not pretty objects. But it was not worth getting out of bed. She looked the other way.
The house was solid and quiet. The walls were thick. Outside, the wind blew, and for a moment, before she fell asleep, Kitty imagined that the spirit of Max was pouring in the gale and streaming against her outer windows, beseeching entrance. But the house was well insulated, and she would not, could not admit him. If she admitted him, she could not survive, and she had to survive. For the children, the grandchildren.
Anthony lay in bed listening to the howling of the wind, wondering what damage it would do next, wondering where Alison had got to, telling himself that there was little likelihood that this gale had tossed her airplane into the high mountains or the fields of France. She had no doubt arrived, tried to ring, been frustrated.
The telephone wires and the electricity had all gone at once, while he and Tim and Molly were watching an old Peter Sellers movie on the television. Complete darkness descended. Molly screamed, understandably, and Anthony comforted her, and found some candles, and a flashlight, before setting off to see what had caused the damage. He switched on his car headlights, and could see at once that the wires had been pulled down by a fallen tree: the big elm in the lane that had for generations housed the rooks. The gale whipped through the fallen branches: he could see, in the light of the flashlight, savage white splinters, a gaping wound. It was too cold and, he felt, too dangerous to stay out for long, for who could tell what might go next? All the trees were straining and groaning; he was anxious about the roof, the outbuildings. But what could he do? He went back in, and persuaded Tim and Molly that it was time for bed: then he wondered whether he ought to drive down to the village to report, but of course he could not, for the lane was blocked by the elm. It would have to wait till the morning.
Somewhere in the kitchen there was a little paraffin lamp. It had been left by the previous owners, or more likely their predecessors, for precisely such emergencies, he guessed. He looked for it, by candle, found it, filled it, lit it. A quiet glow emanated from the lamp like a spirit. He took it up to bed with him, and watched it for some time, then read for a while by its unambitious gleam. Outside, the storm raged. He liked the lamp. But the truth is, he said to himself, that one cannot turn the clock back. What on earth am I playing at, lying here in the middle of nowhere, by a paraffin lamp? Playing, yet again?
As most of the buildings of Scratby Open Prison were only one story high, the storm raged safely over them, despite the site’s exposed position. Len, playing a game of snooker, found himself wondering, somewhat to his surprise, about the fate of his little trees in their greenhouses. He enj
oyed the howling of the wind: it added variety. Not everybody, however, seemed to appreciate the free show of the elements as much as he did; one or two who ought to have known better were looking rather jumpy, and one even admitted that nothing in the world frightened him as much as thunder and lightning. Len, in a helpful spirit, pointed out that one’s chances of being struck by lightning were exceedingly remote. Others produced stories of rare coincidences and unlikely deaths. Len, as often, marveled at the superstition which surrounded him. It was astonishing.
The man who seemed most deeply disturbed was old Callander. Usually Callander kept himself to himself, spending his spare time alone reading, but the storm had upset him: he hung around the common room, evidently in search of reassuring company. Every time the thunder crashed, he started. Len watched him for some time: nobody spoke to him, naturally enough, as he had never bothered to speak to anybody. Most of the men regarded him with mingled awe and contempt: awe, for he was an educated man, a man of standing, once of authority; and contempt, for he had been weak, had blamed others at his trial, had groveled and wriggled. And could not mix, could not say the right nothing, find the right small change. He looked remote, broken, stunned. The men resented his withdrawal. They suspected that he considered himself as a member of a class apart. As, indeed, he was. So now, none of them would speak to him.
Len knew he would have to. He somewhat resented the duty: it would do him no good with his mates. But he had known Callander in his former, brighter days, had visited him in the luxury mansion which had proved part of his undoing, and he could not now let him twitch grayly in a corner. He had never much cared for him, as a man: he had always even in his days of success had a peculiar air of ingratiating superiority which had not been much Len’s style. Nobody had liked him much: maybe it was an awareness of this that had made him willing to purchase friendship at the cost of bribery. Though he and old Jackson had been real friends, it seemed, as well as fellow conspirators. Jackson (now serving his five years in the South) had said at Callander’s trial that any offers he had made to Callander had been made not with a desire to corrupt, but in a true spirit of friendship and goodwill. “He was my closest friend,” Jackson had said, and then, looking at the colorless figure slumped in the dock, had added, as though to give substance to his evidence, “You may not be able to imagine it when you see him today, but when I first knew Tom, he was a wonderful man, a kind and lively and generous friend, a man of real stature. I looked up to Tom. I still do.” Callander had wept in the dock. How could anyone ever see what two men see in one another? It is as obscure as the bonds of marriage, thought Len. Feeble Callander, and Giant Jackson. Maybe they had really liked each other, maybe the money had, as they claimed, been a secondary issue.
The Ice Age Page 18