by D. J. Taylor
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty…
‘What’s that?’ Huey asked. He knew the words were not hers and suspected them.
‘It’s a poem we learned at literature class,’ she said. She was proud of the literature class, which took place in a young women’s institute and was addressed by a middle-aged lady who had studied at Bryn Mawr. A few more lines came into her head and she went on:
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
– Till elevators drop us from our day.
The old man in the one-piece bathing costume was not swimming quite so fast. She thought that if she looked at the lines of ships – they were container ships, bringing goods in to the port – then, all but imperceptibly, she would see them move. The sun was burning hotter now and she wished she had brought a parasol.
‘What does it mean?’ she asked.
Huey distrusted the literature class. It was not how girls were supposed to spend their time. But he was fair-minded in his attitudes, had gone with her to see movies he had known he would not enjoy and been proved right, and once to a classical concert. That had been very terrible, but he had gone. Now he said:
‘I don’t know. I suppose it means what it means.’
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high/Over the chained bay waters Liberty, she repeated. It was intriguing to say it, as if all the people on the beach had vanished and there were only the two of them attending to the grave matter of a poem and what it meant. Shedding white rings of tumult, she said again.
‘I guess it’s a seagull flying over the water,’ Huey said, not quite comfortable with all this and fearing its implications. It was hard not to associate it with the new life stretching out before her, of studious girls and unthought-of destinies. He was not insensible to beauty and sometimes cut out poems that had appeared in newspapers and presented them to her.
‘I guess I can come and see you at Wheaton,’ he said. ‘At weekends, I mean.’
‘I shall want you to,’ she said. She had no idea of what it would be like there, or what she expected from it, or from anyone. The sun had risen full into the sky now, and the people beneath it were wilting in its heat. She rose to her feet, carefully brushing the grit out of the folds of her skirt, and walked a little way over the sand to the water’s edge. It was at times like these that she wanted to fling a bottle into the deeps with a message in it saying who she was and where she lived, so that some other girl, in Canada maybe, or perhaps even in England, would come across it on some lonely shore and know that she had written it, and there would be an article in a newspaper remarking on the miracle of this transition, this flight of a sealed-up bottle from one world to another, but she knew that she would never be able to do this, that it was too quixotic, and offended against her sense of responsibility, which of all things was the one she prized herself on the most. When she came back from the water’s edge Huey was sprawled back onto his outstretched arms with one of his feet balanced on top of another to create an extraordinary ziggurat of flesh on which a flag could quite easily have been flown. She had meant to stop talking about the poem, but somehow it was in her head again and she declaimed:
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen
Huey did not respond. He was lost in the majesty of his feet. Still out in the deeper water, fifteen yards away, the old man in the one-piece bathing costume laboured back and forth. The crowd around them was thickening fast. There were shop-girls on their lunch-hours come to sunbathe, old ladies setting out the contents of their picnic baskets, strange, shock-haired children whom no one seemed to be in charge of roaming at the water’s edge.
Foretold to other eyes, she said. The middle-aged lady from Bryn Mawr had suggested that poetry bred up in you emotions that you would not otherwise have felt. There was a poem by Emily Dickinson that had once aroused her to a state of exaltation, and she had recited it to her mother. Mrs Christie, who preferred the verses printed in the Sun-Tribune about the banks of the Wabash, had said it was very nice and gone on measuring out cupfuls of flour. Poetry was all very well, but it went only so far. Huey seemed to have lost faith in the spectacle of his feet. He set them down, side by side, too self-consciously to let the gesture pass, and said with great determination:
‘I shan’t be staying with Mr Dreiser forever, you know.’
At the college in Wheaton there was a special black gown which the girls wore for Sunday church services. She knew that her first act when she arrived there would be to purchase one of these gowns.
‘No, Huey,’ she said patiently. ‘I don’t suppose you will.’ She could never quite decide what amount of faith she ought to place in Huey’s ambitions, whether simple loyalty on her path would enable him to win through and secure his dreams – whatever they were – or whether more complex factors were at work. Mrs Christie had said that Huey was a nice boy, but plain unlucky, that his employers would always die on him, or go bankrupt, or flee to Indiana with their creditors on their tails.
‘What a fellow needs,’ Huey said, with what was meant to be steely determination but in some way fell a yard or two short of this, ‘is a chance.’
There was a sound of heavy footsteps coursing rapidly over the sand. Ten yards away two people – a lifeguard in a yellow shirt and a smaller man in a neatly tailored suit – were running towards the water’s edge. The smaller man looked as if this sharp exercise was inimical to him, a betrayal of his dignity but nevertheless a part of the compact he had forged with the world. There were other people, she saw, clustered around the old man in the one-piece bathing suit, who had fallen to his knees and was supporting himself on his outstretched hands, like a child readying itself for a wheelbarrow race.
‘Overdid it, I guess,’ Huey said knowledgeably. He was still thinking about his chance. The group of people broke apart – they did this with great courtesy and a little awe – to admit the lifeguard and his companion. A cop appeared from nowhere, planting his booted feet delicately on the sand, and began to shoo the onlookers away. The lifeguard dragged the old man in the one-piece bathing suit out of the shallows and the second man clasped one hand over his chest and felt with the other for a pulse in his wrist.
‘He doesn’t look too good,’ Huey said dispassionately as they laid the old man down on the sand. He was quite motionless now, his face a kind of grey-green colour, like ancient rock from the botanical garden, and did not respond as they worked on him.
‘All a fellow needs…’ Huey began again, and then stopped, aware even in his own distress about Mr Dreiser and the teacher-training college at Wheaton that this was not a time to be talking about chances, his own or anyone else’s. The lifeguard and the doctor – if that was what the second man was – continued with their work, their backs bent in unison. On one side of them the old man’s legs stuck out stiffly in the sand. Once a child’s ball came rolling towards them, but the child’s mother came anxiously running to scoop it up in her hands and bear it away. She realised, to her shame, that she was annoyed by the old man’s falling down like this, for it had given the day a context from which nothing she or Huey could say or do would ever rescue it, that she was, however indirectly, caught up in something from which there was no escape. A hundred yards or so away she could see a pair of men bringing up a stretcher, stumbling in the sand and sometimes almost falling over their feet in their determination to bring it home to port. She had once attended a first-aid course that involved practising mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a splay-limbed dummy, but somehow she did not care to bring this expertise forward in t
he service of the old man.
Huey stood irresolutely at her side, sometimes taking a sideways glance at the old man but mostly staring at the sand that lay in the shadows created by his two thin legs. The cop was saying ‘Nothing to see here people. Just move along, will ya? Nothing to see’ to anyone who came within earshot. Slowly the life of the beach began to resume its original pattern – the children playing with their toys, the old ladies freshening themselves with fans made of rolled-up newspapers – only that the old man still lay at the water’s edge with the doctor pushing every so often at his rib-cage. Once a pause in the movement of the doctor’s hands exposed the old man’s face, and she saw that it was as grey as lead. She found herself thinking about the black gown she would wear on Sundays at Wheaton and the bright sunshine streaming through the vaulted windows of the Episcopalian chapel. In this way great stretches of time seemed to pass, but when she looked at her watch she found that only a few moments had gone by since the old man had been dragged out of Lake Michigan. But the bloom had gone off the day: there was no doubt about it. Huey looked at his monstrous feet again, as if they might have the answer to the problems with which he was clearly beset.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I guess we can’t stay here all day.’
‘No,’ she said, although she knew there was no reason why they should not stay if they chose, ‘I don’t suppose we can.’
They were putting the old man on the stretcher now. She could not tell if he was alive or dead. For a moment his long, meaty, sunburned arm fell away from his body and hung there dangling until the lifeguard jammed it back into place. At the apartment Mrs Christie would have finished lunch and her father would be shuffling blearily around the kitchen drinking black coffee from a china mug. The sunlight was not so clear as it had been and the shop-girls and the milliners’ apprentices who had come here to eat their sandwiches were going back to work. The scent of petrol hung in the air and she thought again, with pleasure, of the college at Wheaton, which lay in sight of the cornfields and the buzzard-haunted prairie grass.
‘We could walk back and look into some of the stores,’ he said.
‘Yes, we could do that, I suppose.’
Back on the sidewalk at the margin of the beach, where grey sand mixed with the cigarette butts and the dropped newspapers, he tried to take her hand, but she did not want her hand to be held. An automobile had leaked oil in the middle of the street, which spread out across the tarmac in rainbow-tinted streaks. There were still gulls tacking back and forth in the thermals, and she remembered the shedding white rings of tumult. And so they set off again into the city’s heart, with the streetcars gliding alongside them like triremes, and Mr Dreiser, the college at Wheaton, the black stuff gown and the grey-haired man who would call her ‘Ruth’ and ‘My dear’ and the company who would call, who would certainly call, on Sunday nights hanging above their heads like the sailing white birds.
—2013
Wrote for Luck
‘It’s still quite light outside,’ Clive said soberly. ‘We could go and have coffee in the garden.’
It was half-past nine in the drawing room of the Allardyces’ house in Wimbledon. Above her head Lucy could hear the rhythmical progress of someone – child? au pair? grandmother? – padding from bedroom to bedroom. Mark, either taking this as a subtly coded instruction, or simply wanting to be polite, got up and began stacking the bowls that had contained the kiwi-fruit mousse into a neat, unwavering pile.
‘What’s happening, in a sense,’ Clive went on seriously, gathering up the fragments of a conversation that Lucy assumed had perished a course and a half back, ‘in a very real sense, is that for the first time you’ve got a squeeze at both ends. In the centre as well. In the old days you had simple rules: cut costs, diversify, watch the margins. This time the top of the market’s getting smaller and the bottom’s splintering. Mega-mergers and fragmentation. Global saturation and niche players. And there’s no middle market any more. You either get larger or you get smaller or you die.’
‘You could draw a political parallel,’ Mark went on with, if anything, even greater seriousness. ‘Huge alliances all banding together – Europe, South-East Asia, wherever – but at the same time every half-dead barony out of the Holy Roman Empire wants its own set of postage stamps and a seat at the UN.’
Not consciously bored with these exchanges, but feeling over-familiar with an argument that surfaced regularly at dinner parties of this kind, Lucy stood up and went to look out of the French windows. Above, the sky was blue-black, touched up at the corners with crimson streaks. Beyond, the garden stretched out for twenty or thirty yards into the gloaming. You could not afford a garden like that in south-west London on less than half a million a year, Lucy knew.
‘I got a call the other day,’ Clive went zestfully on, ‘from an insurance broker, financial intermediary, who wanted to know how e-commerce was going to affect his business. And I had to tell him – God, Lucy, I felt like a doctor with a cancer patient – the chances were that in eighteen months he wouldn’t have a business.’
Henrietta, Clive’s wife, yawned and put her hand guiltily over her mouth. Inspecting the three of them from her vantage point by the window as the blue light fell over her hands, Lucy was reminded of a tableau she had once seen in a medieval book of hours: the nobleman dispensing wisdom to his dutiful squire, the nobleman’s wife fatly asleep in the corner. Looking at Clive as he sat back in his chair, the candlesticks on either side of his plate framing him in a way that was faintly sinister – he looked like a portrait in a ghost story that might be about to leap down out of its frame – she wondered what it was about him that Mark, inherently sceptical when presented with a newspaper article or a balance of payments forecast, found to admire. Expertise? Panache? Intellect? Having had several opportunities to observe Clive at close quarters, she didn’t think he was particularly bright or particularly astute. Perhaps, in the end, it was a kind of instinct for self-preservation, knowing how to play a game whose rules were being made up as you went along and where your opponent was liable to collapse out of sheer terror.
‘I thought those seminars,’ Mark said, accepting his coffee from Henrietta without looking up, ‘the ones where Gavin and Fred talked about the practical impact of that Far Eastern stuff, were really useful.’ Looking at him as he said this in what had started off as a spirit of moderate scepticism – he was, what was it, thirty seven now and the butter-coloured hair was speckling at the edges – Lucy realised that she had a lot to be grateful to Mark for. Even that joint mortgage on the new house they’d talked about – pretty pointless when you thought about it, Lucy decided, seeing that Mark earned five times what she made at the BBC – came dusted with a thin coating of principle.
Somewhere in the back of the house a mobile phone began to ring. Stepping out through the French windows – the end of the garden was bound up in shadow now – Lucy discovered a second salient difference between Wimbledon and Putney: silence. For some reason the inhabitants of SW19 didn’t spend their summer evenings blasting out hip-hop or skirmishing in the shrubbery. Decorum was all. Thinking about Clive and Henrietta (who ‘kept her hand in’ at the PR department at Laura Ashley, she had explained, with a bit more mock- enthusiasm than was called for) made her wonder about the whole question of admiring people, how often you picked on what turned out to be the wrong quality or detected an element that turned out to be something else, something that said more about what you were looking for than about the thing found. She remembered at twenty one conceiving an intense, unfeigned respect for her college tutor, a middle-aged spinster who had written a famous book on the Gawain poet, coming back to visit her three years later and finding a dowdy little woman living in a tiny house in north Oxford and being neurotic about whether you’d wiped your feet.
They were sitting on a kind of patio now, lit by firefly lights suspended from an overhead trellis, next to an occasional table on which someone had left a fruit-juice carton and a copy of Captain
Corelli’s Mandolin. Catching sight of her face in the window, she was disagreeably surprised by its paleness, the odd point that her chin made against the inky surround. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she heard herself saying, rather startled to hear the sound of her voice breaking out above Henrietta’s murmurs about more coffee, and the faint commotion of a child at an upstairs window, ‘is why all this really has to happen. I mean, I know you can’t do anything about global pressures – at least I know everyone says you can’t – but if two banks, say, are making a profit and employing 20,000 people each, then what’s the point of welding them together so you can cut the workforce back to 30,000? I just don’t see it.’
As soon as the words came out of her mouth she knew – and she had meant this to happen – that it was the wrong thing to say. The mobile phone began to ring again. Henrietta went off in search of it. Clive picked up a teaspoon and banged it against the side of the coffee percolator.
‘It’s interesting you should say that, Lucy, because… let me put it another way, the people who were saying those things five years ago – and they were saying them, weren’t they Mark? Do you remember that proposal we did for Vickers where..? Anyway, the people who were saying that five years ago are mostly… I mean, there are insurance companies out in the Rim running their operations with a couple of hundred tele-execs… You can’t just not take economies of scale when they’re offered to you.’