Walking up the path toward the high, white, wire-topped walls of the prison, Anthony Keating found himself thinking, I do not know how man can do without God.
It was such an interesting concept that he stopped in the roadway, like Paul on the way to Damascus: not exactly felled by realization, for alas, faith had not accompanied the concept. But it stopped him in his tracks, nevertheless. He stood there for a moment or two, and thought of all those who accept so readily the nonexistence of God, who find such persuasive substitutes, such convincing alternative sanctions for their own efforts. Anthony had never been able to accept the humanist argument that man can behave well through his own manhood. Man clearly does not do so: that is that.
But now was hardly the time to ask for a revelation from his creator. It was hot: the late spring sun beat down fiercely on his bare head. Mad dogs and Englishmen, reflected Anthony Keating, and began to wish he had tried to commandeer a taxi; not that he was tired, but that he feared that to arrive on foot might prove his lack of seriousness and authenticity. He might, he feared, be dismissed as a madman. He felt for the papers in his pocket. Everything was still there. A man without God and without his papers would be truly lost, thought Anthony.
The prison wall was enormously high. Jane had been transferred back to it from the camp in the mountains a month ago, the consul had said. He rang the bell, and wondered if he would really have the opportunity to discuss, the next day, in a civilized manner, with his stepdaughter-to-be, the conditions in a Wallacian prison. It seemed highly unreal, like so much of life.
A porter answered the door. Anthony presented his papers, wishing he had been able to get hold of the consul to accompany him, helplessly aware of his inability to answer back, if refused admission. But the porter accepted his papers, and ushered him into a waiting room. There, Anthony waited.
In half an hour, another official of higher standing arrived, and beckoned to Anthony. Anthony followed him, down a long tiled corridor, to another waiting room. Here, Anthony was asked to sign a paper: he asked for an interpreter, but none was forthcoming, so he signed recklessly, realizing he would get no further if he did not. The higher official disappeared with the paper, and came back in quarter of an hour with a young woman, who offered to escort Anthony to the women’s section. She spoke a little English. As in England, women appeared to be better at languages than men, he noted. As they walked down another long corridor, and through a double locked vestibule, and into another corridor, he asked her if all Wallacian prisons contained both men and women. Yes, she said, of course. The camps, not, but the prisons, yes. He asked if she was taking him to see Jane. No, she said, not yet: she was taking him to the governor. Ah, said Anthony.
The governor turned out to be a woman too. She was a small, heavy, elderly woman, with very short black cropped hair, and a cream nylon blouse and a dark navy skirt. She gripped his hand with both of hers, somewhat emotionally, he thought. She spoke English.
“Mr. Keating,” she said, “how pleased to meet you. What pleasure. Such anxiety.” She was sweating slightly, not wholly from the heat. She shook his hand again, waved to him, with authority, to seat himself. He sat. She fanned herself with a sheaf of papers. “What pleasure,” she repeated. She proceeded to tell him that she had once been to England, to study. Before the war. She talked about England. British Museum. Marchmont Street. Museum Street. Collet’s bookshop. New Statesman. George Orwell.
She was another generation from the deputy minister, with his Beatles and his Rolling Stones.
He listened to her. She asked him questions from time to time, but they could not converse, for although he could understand most of her English, she could not understand his. She asked him about London, about the site of the new British Library, about Emanuel Shinwell, about the British response to Solzhenitzyn. He did not have to worry about compromising himself or Clegg in his answers, for she did not wait for them. After half an hour, she ran down, paused, and said, “But you will want to see Miss Murray.”
Anthony nodded, politely, as though to indicate that he would much rather listen to her reminiscences, but knew he ought not to trespass on her time.
“Come,” she said, rising to her feet, beckoning. Her manner was very abrupt, in contrast with her words. He found her alarming. He followed her. The young woman who also spoke English followed them.
Jane Murray was sitting in a small windowless room on a hard chair, at a table. There was another chair at the table, for Anthony, and one in the corner, for the interpreter. Jane looked up, as Anthony entered the room. She gazed at him. She did not speak. She began to cry.
“Jane,” said Anthony. “Jane. Don’t cry, it’s all over.”
She buried her face in her hands, but he had already seen her swollen lips, her puffy eyes, her dark bruised face. She was as thin as a scarecrow: her clothes hung. Her hunched shoulders stuck out of her cotton jersey. Her hands, covering her face, were taut and oddly spotted, like the hands of an old woman. She sobbed and sobbed. Anthony sat down and reached out and patted her: she reached for his hand, and squeezed it. Then she looked up at him. It was Alison’s face, haggard, distraught, sick. “Never mind,” said Anthony, “never mind. It’s all right, I’ve come to get you, we’re going home tomorrow.”
It was clear that she had not been expecting this. She stared at him, disbelieving, then croaked, “Home? To England?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. Her voice sounded terrible: whatever had they done to her?
He did not know what to say to her; he told her Alison was well, told her of his flight, of the hotel, of his walk up to the prison. She could not speak, so he talked, patiently. He was still talking when the governor arrived, with another batch of papers. She seemed agitated. He feared bad news, some setback, some delay, but instead she beckoned him out on the door and said, “Mr. Keating, you go now. Take her now.”
“But I thought—” began Anthony, then stopped himself. This was no time for fair play; it was time to get out, while the going was good.
“I have telephone communication, from Minister,” said the governor. “You go, now.” She seemed in a hurry.
“All right,” said Anthony.
And an hour later, in an official car, with Jane’s few things packed up in a bag, they went. They went back to the hotel: Anthony tried to ring the consulate, again without success, then tried the embassy in Beravograd, also without success. Then he rang the airport, to see if he could change the tickets for the plane that evening but they were having their lengthy siesta, and answered him in Wallacian on answerphone. He rang the hotel desk, and inquired about planes: there was nothing, anyway, until the next morning, they told him.
Jane, meanwhile, lay on the bed. He wanted to ring Alison to tell her he had got her, but there was clearly no hope of getting an outside line, least of all to West Gonnersall, whither he presumed Alison had gone. West Gonnersall seemed a thousand miles away. And was.
Jane slept. He unpacked her bag. There were the things she had had with her eight months ago, carefully preserved and labeled, a pathetic collection. A pair of sandals. A Marks and Spencer’s bra and three pairs of knickers. An Indian cotton skirt, a sweatshirt labeled University of Neasden, two packets of Tampax, unopened, a packet of contraceptive pills, half used, some postcards of Istanbul, her passport, a pack of cards, a diary, a purse, a pair of Levi’s, laundered but bloodstained, and two books: a paperback of the Theban plays of Sophocles, and a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A ballpoint, some travel sickness pills, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and, strangest of all, a plastic Phillips Planisphere. He thought of himself and Alison, discussing the difference between dippers and gray wagtails, the common rowan and the Hupeh rowan. Her mother’s daughter. His.
There she lay, crumpled, shriveled, asleep. He thought of the girl in labor, who now lay, beyond his knowledge, dead. He thought of waking Jane, making love to her. It was the only way to comfort a woman that he knew. She would accept it: he could tell from h
er earlier tears, from her grip on his hand, from her whispering, that she would accept it. She wheezed and stirred and mumbled in her sleep. He gazed at her dark face. Had she not so, in her loss of adolescent weight, resembled Alison, he would have done it, he later thought, and it might not have been the wrong thing to do. In the past, such things had sometimes turned out well, sometimes badly: one could never tell. But she was so skinny; one ought not to force one’s way into so brittle a frame. It might, for all he knew, have been as painful as the tube down the esophagus. And she was so profoundly asleep, though restless: through shock, he supposed. He decided that she needed sleep more.
He wondered what to do with her. She looked as though she must certainly need medical, if not sexual attention, but this was certainly no time or place to seek it: she would have to wait till next day, in London. He wondered what he would need most if just released from prison. Food? A bath? A drink? Someone to tell? It was hard to imagine. Jane was wearing a worn and shapeless green skirt, not, he thought, her own, and coarse stockings, and laced canvas shoes, and a white cotton jersey, baggy around the neck. He looked at her, and looked at his watch. It was seven in the evening. It had been a long day. There was a flight out at midday. He wondered if he ought to try to get a room in the hotel for Jane, but some instinct warned him that it would be better to advertise her presence as little as possible: she could have his bed, he would sleep on the floor. Or perhaps he could borrow a bed off one of the journalists? The man from Le Monde had a twin-bedded room, he said. Jane began to sit up: at the sight of her face, he thought no, I will stay with her, and keep an eye on her, I’d better not leave her on her own.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. Jane attempted a smile.
“Not too bad,” she said. Her voice croaked, agonizingly, and she clutched at her throat. “Sore throat,” she said. “You haven’t got anything for a sore throat, have you?”
“I don’t know if you ought to have anything, without seeing a doctor,” he said. What on earth could one give a girl with a scraped esophagus? Lemon and honey pastilles? Tablets designed for the English influenza?
“You could have some Disprin,” he said. He had some in one of the zip pockets of his travel bag: they had been there for years, but he supposed they were still potent. He took them out: there they were, in their rather crushed cardboard pack, each wrapped in its little silver foil case. He took two out and went to get a glass of water from the bathroom, and when he came back, he found Jane examining the pack with a kind of wonder. She drank the water with the dissolved pills, swallowing hard.
“How long is it, since you had a meal?” he asked her, wondering if he ought to try to find soup, or coffee.
“Oh, I’ve been eating for days,” she said. “They made me eat. That’s why it hasn’t got better, I think.”
“I could find you something liquid. Some soup, perhaps? You probably ought to have something.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to be a nuisance,” she said.
He wondered whether to point out that she had already been the most astonishing nuisance, and that fetching her a bowl of soup would be neither here nor there in the international scale of nuisance she had caused, but he refrained.
“I really think you’d better have something,” he said. “I don’t want you collapsing on my hands. You sit here quietly, and wait for me to get back. I won’t be long. Look, here are your things,” and he handed her the bag. “Or, if you’ve read those books already, here’s mine.”
He was still reading the John le Carré lent to him by Humphrey Clegg: he had made little progress with it, and could not follow the obscure plot. He laid it on the bed by her, along with her own possessions, and made his way downstairs. It had occurred to him that it would be cheering to speak to the journalists, though he had better not admit that he had already got Jane, or they might want to interview her. But a quick drink and a quick briefing would do no harm, surely. Then he could get some soup, direct from the kitchen. He knew better than to try the nonexistent room service: it was always quicker to get things oneself. There was a man in the kitchen who was quite helpful.
There were two journalists in the bar. He joined them, bought them each a vodka, and one for himself. They told him that there had been several explosions during the day, all in the Vratsik quarter to the east: the military were out in force. There had been a demonstration of some sort in Beravograd, so far peaceful. It was rumored that the President was about to sack the Minister of the Interior. Tomato growers in the southern region were sending a delegation to Beravograd to protest about rising food prices. Telephone links with the British consulate had been restored. The Krusograd evening paper claimed that a member of an extreme religious sect, illegal of course, had claimed responsibility for the assassination of the British consul, Clyde Barstow, and had been apprehended. “If something more interesting doesn’t happen soon, I’ll get recalled,” said the man from the Examiner. He had already written his in-depth report on life in Wallacia, based on a few chats with the barman and a taxi driver or two, an interview with a man in the Housing Department, and a visit to a nursery school. “Something will happen tomorrow,” said the man from Le Monde. “I’ll be gone by tomorrow, I hope,” said Anthony. They asked him how his interview with the deputy Minister of Social and Public Order had gone; he replied, cagily, thinking of Jane sitting upstairs in his bedroom. It had been stupid of him to remind them that he was hoping to get her out and away tomorrow; they would be sure to want to speak to her, and she was hardly a good advertisement for life in a Balkan prison. Not that Anthony cared about the reputation of Balkan prisons, but he did not wish to be reapprehended at the airport for spreading malicious gossip about the state. The more he thought about it, the more surprised he was that they had released Jane at all, looking as she did. How could they have been so certain that he would be too nervous to display her before returning home? What did they expect, what did they want him to do? Or had they got more important things to worry about than Jane Murray?
It was not his affair. His affair was to get Jane out of the country, on the next possible plane.
When he returned to his room, with a jugful of chicken soup for Jane and a plateful of tepid meatball and rice for himself, Jane was in the bath. It cheered him that she was taking a bath. Perhaps it would make her look more presentable, too. While she was still in there, the phone rang: it was Hopkins on the line, from the consulate. Hopkins, seemingly regardless of the possibility that his line or Anthony’s line might be tapped, said that he heard Jane had already been released, and what a relief that was. He would send a car in the morning, to take Jane and Anthony to the airport. If the car didn’t turn up, Anthony should make his own way. He would have come to see Anthony off, in normal circumstances, but a lot of work had accumulated during the day, because the telephone lines and indeed the water supply to the consulate had been severed during the day by incompetent roadworkers re-laying sewage pipes, and there were a lot of things to straighten out. Might he wish Anthony a good journey, and how glad he was that the affair had been settled so satisfactorily.
Anthony sat on the bed, and ate a mouthful of Oriental meatball. He tried to inspect the picture of the road to the consulate in his mind. It showed a bomb crater, untidy, jagged, surrounded by anxious men in uniform, and an overturned car. He tried to turn it into a peaceful scene of roadworks and sewage pipes. Perhaps a gas main had blown up?
Jane emerged from the bathroom. She was wrapped up in a towel, and she looked marginally better. She collected her own clothes, and came back in a moment wearing her Levi’s and the Neasden sweatshirt. They hung on her. “I’ve lost weight,” she whispered hoarsely. It was a joke.
She drank most of the soup, slowly and carefully, while Anthony munched his way through the rice. Then she began to talk, to whisper. She told him how extraordinary it was to use soap that made proper lather: the soap in the camp had been huge great yellow blocks that produced nothing but a harsh yellow scum.
Anthony’s Palmolive was fantastic, she said. And to find lavatory paper that didn’t scrape. Anthony, who had thought the hotel lavatory paper, by Western European standards, extremely rough, began to get a good picture of her past few months. She told him more: of the cabbage soup, of the bitter cold and the beautiful trees up in the mountains, of the camp workshop where she had made cardboard boxes. “You wouldn’t believe,” she whispered intensely, “how difficult it was to get the hang of making those boxes. I felt so stupid. And there were all these women around me, assembling them so quickly, and I was messing about; I simply couldn’t get the idea. I felt such a fool.” She paused. “Everything made me feel such a fool,” she said.
The worst thing, she said, had been the fear that she was pregnant. She seemed afraid of embarrassing him by telling him, but unable to desist. He found her own embarrassment the most endearing feature he had so far encountered in her. Perhaps it would be possible to like Jane, after all. She’d been on the pill, she said, but she had to admit that she sometimes forgot to take it, and anyway she’d heard that even the pill wasn’t a hundred percent reliable. And then, after the accident, she just never had another period. I was dead scared, she said. I didn’t dare tell anyone. I kept hoping that it was the shock, I know shock can do funny things to you, but I’ve never had that before, I’ve always been like clockwork, so for three months, I thought that was it, and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell anyone in the camp—they’d have made me have an abortion, and they might have killed me, I know. I used to sign on for these revolting sanitary towels—sorry, Anthony, what a horrible story for you to have to listen to—and then throw them away unused, because I thought if I didn’t sign on they’d spot something was up, and examine me. It was pretty risky anyway, because there were no doors on the lavs. I wanted to tell Mr. Barstow, but he was so—well, you know what Mr. Barstow’s like, he’s so serious and old-fashioned and sweet, I just didn’t dare tell him.
The Ice Age Page 30