Sudden Traveler

by Sarah Hall

  Mummy was right, of course. She usually was. She could immediately detect faults, like recoil and embarrassment, in her children, even if she couldn’t find her own purse or shoe, or she’d lost the car, or a bit of bacon grease was in her hair, making it rear up. Dilly sometimes thought that Mummy was like a truffle pig, rooting around and unearthing ugly, tangled thoughts in people. She especially did not like shame or reticence. You had to stride into a room; wear any dress, day or night, like you were at a gala event; speak to strangers without inhibition. Just have a go, Dilly, for goodness’ sake. Engage! By now, Mummy would have swept the degrading parody face away and helped stand Charlie-bo up, with that superhuman little woman’s strength of hers. Even if he were dead, she would have the power to resurrect him. She would buy him a cup of tea in Jarrold’s. Then she’d tell the story, marvelously, afterwards.

  Dilly put her hand back in her pocket. Without warning, Charlie-bo flinched. He jolted, as if struck by an electrical current. The melon tipped over, and a lemon rolled from his eye socket onto the pavement, quite near Dilly’s foot. Charlie-bo grunted, reached up and groped at his head. He looked like someone on the television coming round from an operation, trying to remove tubes. The banana and corncobs fell away and the real face was revealed: discoloured skin with reefs of eczema and cold-burns, a sore, sticky mouth.

  Charlie-bo kept patting his head, making panicked, bleating noises. His eyes—Dilly hadn’t been this close to him before—were a mad yellowish-green. There were watery cysts in his eyelids. His gaze was trying to find purchase on something. The striped awning. Sky. Her. He sat up. He flailed an arm out, brushed Dilly’s skirt, and blurted a sound that seemed fatty and accusing. Dilly took a step backward. She shook her head. No, she thought. I wanted to help. Charlie-bo was looking at her, and through her. He made another attempt to speak. His tongue was oversized, a giant grub inside his mouth. She took another step backward, and a cyclist tinged his bell in warning and flew past. Someone bumped her hard on her thigh with the corner of a shopping bag. Dilly turned and began to walk away.

  Behind her, she could hear Charlie-bo making loud, obscene noises. She sped up, weaving around pedestrians. He might be up on his feet now, lumbering after her. It wasn’t me, she thought. Please please please. She half-ran toward the punt station and Queen’s Bridge, her heart flurrying. She passed Lillian’s boutique. The door was open and she thought someone said her name, but she kept her head down. Before she turned the corner by the wine merchant, she cast a look behind, expecting to see him, his cloak flying, his face hideous with rage. But Charlie-bo wasn’t there. She came to a stop by the river, feeling woozy with relief.

  The towpath was quiet, just a few people walking and cycling. She went a little way along and sat on a bench, waited for her nerves to calm. The river was a rich opaque green. Leaves from the chestnut trees had fallen and were riding along on the surface. The river always made her feel better. It would be lovely to walk that way home, the long way around, watch the swans and the glassy fluid sliding over the weir. But she was probably very late now and Mummy would be getting cross. Mummy had only sent Dilly out for a few items—teabags, cream, jam. It had taken a long time to decide on the jam. Dilly couldn’t remember if Mummy had asked for a particular kind, and she’d begun to fixate on the seeds in the raspberry jam jar. They’d seemed like a million prickly eyes.

  People were coming over to the house for a little get-together that afternoon—it was Dilly’s birthday, actually, though the fact kept slipping her mind. Father Muturi, who was Mummy’s favourite priest at St. Eligius, was coming, and Cleo and Dominic, of course, possibly Peter if he finished work in time, not Rebecca, obviously, though Dilly still sometimes forgot, and a lady was coming who could perhaps help Dilly get a job at a magazine, on the arts column. Dilly had wanted to ask Sam, but it was beginning to look like Sam didn’t meet with anyone’s approval. He’d been a bit too quiet at the dinner last week, and hadn’t wanted to sing when Mummy had asked him to. When Dilly had sung her number, a northern sea shanty, which she’d performed nicely but with the usual mild mortification, Sam had looked suddenly very frightened. He hadn’t replied to Dilly’s last three messages. And he hadn’t been to their French evening class this week.

  Mummy was making scones for the tea party, which was quite a production; things would be getting tense at home, even though scones, as far as Dilly could tell, were not very difficult to make. She should really go. Get on, Dilly! She should be thinking of interesting things to say to the lady from the arts magazine, and sorting her face out. But the river was so smooth and lovely. It felt very receptive. She’d walked along it with Rebecca in the summer, on a very hot day, and had tried to say kind things. She’d said that, as Peter’s little sister, she knew him as well as anyone did, and, even if he seemed a bit other, she was sure he did care. It wasn’t a disloyal thing to say, she’d hoped. Rebecca had been crying on the walk, silently, her face was soaked, her unwashed hair pulled back under a headband, and she hadn’t replied. Rebecca had cried a lot last summer, because of the baby. And because of Peter, though Mummy maintained Peter had done nothing wrong, that he couldn’t take leave from work willy-nilly, and that Rebecca had been crying to a worrying degree and might be becoming a rather difficult character. It was hard to know what to think about it. Or feel about it. Dilly had written a few letters to Rebecca, but had thrown them away. It couldn’t be spoken about, unless raised by Mummy, and then certain agreements were made.

  A good party story to tell would have been how she’d helped Charlie-bo, how she’d intervened, stopped the ridicule. It was so hard to make yourself the hero of your stories, be witty but still seem humble—Mummy and Cleo were masters at that kind of thing. Dilly looked downstream. It was the usual scene. Houseboats with bicycles mounted on their sides. Joggers. The metal bridge—Sorrell’s—the only ugly bridge in the city. There were some newly built houses with chalet-style balconies that Edward liked. Who lived there, she wondered. Different people. The common opened out, and the river trickled away to nothing on the horizon.

  She became aware of a light rain falling. Her skirt was damp and the towpath now had a leaden sheen. The swans were tucked away, heads under their wings, holding so still in the current they could be pegged underwater. She’d forgotten to take an umbrella from the house, of course. Her hair was difficult if the rain got it for too long, unmanageable, which would be a problem later. She stood and began to walk back towards the punt station. The drops were already getting heavy; she could feel them trickling on her forehead and around her eyebrows. The punts were parked in a row, hooded and chained. Four or five people were looking over the edge on the bank opposite, up above the weir. One person was pointing. Something was probably caught in the froth at the bottom of the water’s curtain. It was one of Mummy’s peeves, all the junk being tossed into the river—riparian fly-tipping, she called it. Suitcases, bin bags, toasters. Almost as bad as the uncleared dog mess and barbecue scorches on the Green.

  Dilly didn’t have time to stop and look. She turned, walked over Queen’s Bridge and continued up the road, past the charity shop, which always had lovely blouses on its mannequins, past the Blue Bell, towards Monns Patisserie. Monns was very difficult. There was a kind of pastel, underworld glory to the window. The cakes were tormentingly delicious, with such delicate architecture and sugar-spun geometrics, candied fruit, chocolate curls. She often found herself gazing at them and getting lost. It was best not even to look. But she couldn’t help it. Today, the cakes seemed so perfect and beautiful that she began to feel emotional. Her throat hurt. She wanted to sit down on the pavement and hold her knees.

  She was hungry; that was it. An egg for breakfast was all Mummy had allowed, no toast because Dilly was currently off carbs. Lunch hadn’t seemed to materialize. Instead, there’d been a little debate about what to wear to impress the lady from the magazine. Several skirts were rejected, and there had been a lot of frustration in the room. Mummy and the lady, h
er name was possibly Marion or Beatrice, had fallen out a few years ago over something written in an article. Now they were friends again. That was not uncommon with Mummy’s acquaintances.

  One of the cakes in Monns seemed to have a waterfall of glittering cocoa powder on its edge, almost hovering, suspended in the air. How had they done that? Perhaps her eyes were blurring in the rain. Do buck up, Dilly. Soon there would be scones, Mummy’s speciality: warm, soft, comforting, with cream and jam. It might be possible to slip an extra one on to her plate unseen. There was an art to second helpings: you had to be confident and move fast, look as if you were helpfully clearing crockery. Dilly wondered if Charlie-bo was hungry. There was the question of alcohol, which might take priority. Of all the homeless people in town, Charlie-bo was best known, cherished even. He’d been a student at the university, studying Heidegger, or the eleventh dynamic of space, something very avant-garde and awfully difficult. He’d been in contention for a Nobel, people said. Mummy maintained Charlie-bo was from a small northern village, just like her—an un-belonger, a bootstrapping scholarship boy. Too much studying, or a drug trauma, or a stroke—some calamity had done for him, and he’d begun his descent. For a while he’d been a brilliant celebrity of the streets and shelters, until his mind dissolved. A casualty of genius. At least, that was the story.

  By the time she got to Northumberland Road, Dilly felt wet and dizzy. The rain had done a very thorough job. Her hair stuck to her temples. The bottom door of the house was locked—its key had been missing for a while—which meant she wouldn’t be able to slip in unnoticed. She trudged up the steps to the front door and through the window saw Father Muturi in the lounge, standing at the fireplace and talking to Edward. Father Muturi liked to stand by the fire and say how cold England was. He would say things like African children learned to walk younger because it was warmer there.

  If Edward had been called down, Dilly was very late. She waited outside for a moment, very close to the front door, perhaps only an inch from it. She could feel her breath against the wood. The smell from her mouth was like pickle. She could see cracks in the red paint. Inside one was the tiniest insect—its legs poking out, awkwardly. She put her hand on the knob. She took it off again. Sometimes doors could seem impossible. Impossible to open. Impossible to walk through. She felt as if she was the door, as if her own body was shut. Her hair was wet and stupid. Her coat was dripping. Lordy! Have you been for a dip at the river club, Dilly? She could hear cars on the street, the squealing brakes of a bicycle as it slowed at the bottom of the hill.

  Recently, Mummy had arranged a session with Merrick, the psychoanalyst who lived at number 52, to talk about things like this, and give Dilly “a bit of a boost.” You can tell me anything you like, Merrick had said. Anything about anything. It had seemed almost like a riddle, the way he’d said that. Should we start with why you came back from London? Merrick had been wearing terrible socks with orange diamonds on the ankles, perhaps in an ironic way. It was strange seeing him away from Mummy’s parties, where he was usually dancing, or flirting with Cleo. His practice was in the basement of his own house, and Dilly could see the shoes and legs of people walking past on the street above. She even saw the red-tipped, winking underparts of a dog. The furniture wasn’t leather; it was suede, mustard color. There was a painting on the wall that was abstract but looked like a woman with a whirlpool in her stomach. Was it supposed to look that way, Dilly had wondered, or did it look like different things to different people? Was it, in fact, a kind of test?

  Dilly had prepared things to say to Merrick, all very carefully thought through, but she hadn’t said much in the end. After my bag was stolen, I didn’t feel very safe in London. The truth was, no single cataclysmic incident had occurred. It was more a series of daily stumbles, problems she couldn’t solve alone. The forgetting of meals, not forgetting exactly but being defeated by so many options, and rent payments, not making the milk convert to perfect, solid foam in the cafe where she worked. Merrick had looked rather skeptical and bored for most of the hour, then, towards the end, disappointed. He’d finished the session with a little talk about boundaries and identity within a family, he’d used a fishing-net metaphor, and Dilly had felt uncomfortable and was glad when it was over. Mummy hadn’t asked her about the session.

  The rain was coming down, pattering, darkening the pavement. She would be spied any moment, by Edward or Father Muturi. The scones couldn’t be served until the jam and cream, which were in the bottom of Dilly’s bag, had been delivered. Mummy liked Dilly to make up the tea tray for guests, using the Minton set. Dilly couldn’t exactly explain her lateness; she never could. It was, it would be, more a question of absorbing the annoyance. Letting Mummy’s words come into her without feeling them. One possibility was to tell the Charlie-bo story; somehow amend it and seem less uninvolved. If she told it interestingly, earnestly, with the beautiful sneer and radio tone of Cleo, or with something approximating Mummy’s comedic affront, that might be good enough. She might hold the room. She would, of course, be asked about her level of activity. Didn’t you do anything, Dilly, for goodness’ sake? Perhaps she could say she had done something. Mummy would. Mummy could change a story or revise history with astonishing audacity, and seemed to instantly believe the new version.

  Edward was waving at her through the window, mouthing door’s unlocked, which of course it always was, even when they all went off on holiday. She pushed it and stepped into the hallway. There were voices in the lounge, Edward’s affable small talk, and Father Muturi’s lovely Kenyan laugh. I just need to take these, she called. She heeled off her boots and went very quietly downstairs to the kitchen. Ghost steps: she was an expert. From the kitchen came the gorgeous, golden smell of baking. The table was in chaos, bowls of spilling flour and dribbling eggshells, some lilies still wrapped in plastic dumped in a jug. The tea tray was not set up. Mummy was turned away, bent over the open oven. There was a white handprint of flour on her skirt. She had on fishnet tights and heels, which meant Dilly would have to find a pair of heels too.

  The scone smell was almost unbearable. She was so hungry. If she could have just an apple before trying to make polite conversation with the lady from the arts magazine, things might be OK. But the fruit bowl was empty except for a glove. Mummy was naturally slight and trim. Her children were all taller and heavier, like their father with broad Dutch genes, and their intake had to be watched. Daughters, anyway. Peter and Dominic were allowed to finish the roast when they were home, then play tennis afterward to work it off, while the girls cleared up.

  The oven fan was whirring. Classical music was playing on the stereo. Mummy hadn’t noticed Dilly; she was busy flapping the scones with a tea towel. Her hair was spilling from its blonde nest. Dilly put her bag quietly down on the table, removed the jam and cream. She placed them behind the flower jug, where it might seem they’d been sitting innocently for an hour, then backed out of the kitchen. She ran upstairs, past the hall mirror—yes, she looked a mess, mascara smudged, lips pale, drowned-cat hair—up to the second floor and into the bathroom. She shut the door, moved the laundry basket in front of it. She looked in the bathroom cabinet for a volumizer, some kind of lacquering spray. There was a box of half-used hair dye, magazine sample sachets of face cream, Edward’s cologne and an old splayed toothbrush. Nothing helpful.

  Below, the doorbell rang. More party guests arriving, probably, though there were always people coming and going for other reasons. She half-expected to hear Mummy’s voice calling up—Door, Dill-eee—as if Mummy might sense, might even see, somehow, that she was home. Dilly picked a towel up off the floor, sat on the toilet lid, and rubbed her hair. There was a comb in the bathtub and she scraped it through her bangs, tried to create something chic to one side of her head. She was sure she had a nice lipstick somewhere, a dark, sophisticated red, given to her by Cleo, who was always being sent free cosmetics. It had come in a little metallic sack, and was called something strange that didn’t suggest c
olor at all, but a mood, a state of fortune. Advantage. Ascent. She sat for a while thinking, but couldn’t remember the name.

  The lounge was extremely warm when Dilly went in. A furnace of coal glowed in the fire’s cradle. There was simmering laughter and conversation, the gentle clanking of cups on saucers. Everyone had arrived: Cleo, Dominic and his wife, Bella, Peter, who was in his officer’s uniform, the magazine lady, or at least an unknown lady in a black dress, and some of Mummy’s other friends. Dilly tried to enter the room with a combination of subtle grace and moderate drama, to be seen and perhaps admired, but also pass into the throng without much notice or comment. Mummy was beside the table pouring tea into cups on saucers held out by Bella. Bella was very good at helping, and she seemed to have doubled her efforts since Rebecca. Mummy had on a little blonde fur stole and a black cardigan. There was still a faint white flour mark on her skirt. Next to the tea tray sat a plate of perfect, mounded, bronzed scones. The jam and cream had evidently been found and were set out in matching bowls. Dilly was desperate for a scone, but Mummy was right there, so she moved toward Edward, who, more often than not, would give up his plate if he saw a lady without.

  As she was making her way around the perimeter of the group, Cleo turned and took hold of Dilly’s elbow. If it isn’t the mystery birthday girl, she said. What have you been up to? Spying for the government? She kissed Dilly on the cheek. Cleo smelled heavenly, some kind of antique French talcum, or a salon-grade shampoo. Her hair, tresses and tresses of it, was piled high. She had on a silky maroon item, not a dress, nor a sweater; it draped perfectly from her shoulders and was belted at her waist. Her face was dewy, flawless. Goodness, you do look beautiful, Dilly, what a fabulous combination, very laissez-faire. Dilly had put together long, wide suit trousers on loan from Lillian’s shop, part of the new winter range, and a pink silk shirt rifled from Edward’s closet. In her haste to get ready, the combination had seemed a stroke of casual sartorial humor. But when Cleo gave compliments, you could never quite be sure whether there wasn’t another message. Cleo lowered her voice, conspiratorially. Just a moment, there’s a tiny bit. She raised her top lip and pointed to her front teeth. Cleo’s teeth were slightly gapped, making her somehow seem both sexual and childlike. Dilly licked around to remove the lipstick. Thanks. Cleo tutted. Bit of a dull crew this afternoon, isn’t it? Her mouth rode upward. She looked like the most beautiful snarling show dog. Shame Sam couldn’t come. But probably it’s not his kind of thing? Let’s say hi to the boys.