Towards Another Summer Page 2

  But there was so much air, and how could you communicate with it, to tell it to stop by and help, and how did you know which air to address?

  The man from the magazine came to the flat. From the second armchair of the suite with floral covers he asked Grace questions to which she replied from the first armchair. All was in order. She muttered,

  —I’ve nothing much to say, I can’t talk of anything. Influences? Oh let me see, let me see.

  Silence.

  Philip Thirkettle had the newly-bathed, immersed look of English intellectuals. He gestured readily, he was eager, lively. Grace had put on her blue checked skirt and her blue nylon cardigan with the dipped front and plucked one or two hairs from between her breasts in case they showed when she leaned down, but she needn’t have worried. She had been liberal with deodorant too, gritty white neutral-smelling substance in a small pink jar, but again she needn’t have worried. It was her mind he wanted to reach, and nobody, by conversation, could ever reach Grace’s mind. Like the grave, it was a ‘private place’, and could not be shared.

  Influences?

  Oh the usual I suppose.

  —How do you go about your work?

  —Oh, I, wait a minute, I can’t think, I’ve never been interviewed in my life before, I can’t think, I’m senile - do you think I’m going senile?

  She made tea. They stood drinking it in the kitchen. She waved towards the refrigerator which throbbed like an incubator surrounded by nursery-coloured walls and ‘working surfaces’.

  —I’m not used to this. I’ve just moved in. I’ve never had a flat of my own before.

  He told her about his wife, his father-in-law, the time he had spent in New Zealand.

  —New Zealand? Well, I wouldn’t know, she said, dismissing the country.—I’ve been so long away. This is my home now. There’s gentleness here.

  He insisted. Remember this, remember that.

  —I don’t remember. I wouldn’t know. It wasn’t in my time. That was after I left . . .

  —Don’t you ever want to go back?

  Grace smiled thoughtfully, choosing her answer from an uncomplicated store of samples put aside for the purpose.

  —I was a certified lunatic in New Zealand. Go back? I was advised to sell hats for my salvation.

  A spasm of sympathy crossed Philip’s face. Good God, she thought, I’ve said the wrong thing, the tender mind etc.

  —But don’t you miss it all, I mean . . . don’t you miss it? Don’t you prefer it to - this?

  —I don’t know, I don’t know. I miss the rivers of course. Oh yes, I miss the rivers, and the mountain chains. I’ve never been interviewed before.

  —Forget about being interviewed. We’re drinking tea.

  —I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve never been interviewed before. Philip Thirkettle looked embarrassed.

  —Don’t apologise. Listen, why not come up and stay with us, anytime. You’ll like Anne, you’ll like Anne’s father, he was a sheep-farmer once, you can talk to him about sheep, diseases of sheep, liver fluke, footrot-

  —Pulpy kidney, pulpy kidney-

  —Do come. Anytime. Why not Christmas?

  —Christmas?

  —Think about it. Goodbye now.

  —Goodbye, Grace said, adding desperately as he went out

  —I’ve never been interviewed in my life before!

  3

  A month before Christmas Grace went into hospital, into the wrong zone for her ‘residential area’, and during her four weeks in hospital she was terrified of being spirited away to a different ‘zone’ where there would not be as much kindness or understanding. Intermittently, she felt safe. She learned two songs - ’I want to be Bobby’s girl’ and ‘Let’s twist again as we did last summer’.

  There was much activity - dancing, painting, games. Once Grace played a game of chess with the doctor in one of the side rooms. He had a bald patch as round as a penny on the back of his head. Leaning forward, carefully, deliberately moving his black pawn, he snatched her bishop en passant.

  —I’ll mate you yet, he said.—I’ll mate you.

  The room was small and hot. Grace blushed.

  She left the hospital, returned to the flat, and spent Christmas reading Samuel Pepys, To My Accounts, and only once or twice she remembered the Thirkettles and the hurried notes they had written.

  —So glad you’re coming for Christmas. There’s a train in the afternoon. Book or you’ll have to stand in the corridor. Philip will meet you at the station.

  —I’ve had to go into hospital . . .

  —We’re sorry about this. Why not come when you’ve left hospital? You can stay in bed all day if you wish.

  —OK. Later then, the end of January, early February.

  And then, suddenly, between Part Two and Part Three of the new novel, this card, Come and bask in it. This card, arriving just when the decision had been made which she had been awaiting for years, ever since she ceased being human, ever since she retired to her private world, although keeping open certain necessary vague lines of fatuous communication with the outside world: she was a migratory bird. Stork, swallow, muttonbird? Godwit?

  How could she explain to anyone? How could she go anywhere for the weekend without remarking at some time, in some place, causing everyone to look terrified or sympathetic or embarrassed,

  —You know, of course, that I’m not a human being, I’m a migratory bird.

  She laughed hysterically when she thought of the situations which might arise.

  —There’s a possible explanation, her doctor said wisely when she told him.—Are you eating, sleeping? You must eat, you know. Let me put it on record that you must eat.

  Sitting at the terrible banquet she thought herself like the comedian in the films who waiting in vain for his food, signalling waiters who ignore him, finally seizes the menu and begins to chew it, then starts on the tablecloth, breaks off a leg of the chair or the table, his hunger can’t wait any longer, and what a screaming of laughter from the audience, oh was ever anything so amusing, such eating is so amusing.

  —Of course I eat, Grace said coldly.

  —Fine, fine. I just wanted to put it on record.

  She caught the forty-five bus back to her flat and looked miserably out of the sitting room window at the pile of dead leaves, packets, papers, bus tickets - there was a man this moment passing the flat. There. Screwing up his bus ticket and throwing it over the low brick wall into the garden. Bus tickets, cigarette packets and papers, chocolate wrappers, all kinds of refuse were thrown into the garden. Sometimes Grace took the hard broom from the coat cupboard in the hall and swept vigorously at the pile of tickets, while people passing (clean, affluent, with leather cases and confident glances) looked astonished, thinking, at the sight of Grace, What a treasure of a daily. When the snow had melted and the shocked plants were revealed in all their ragged lifelessness, impatient for signs of green growth, Grace tugged many of them from the earth. Immediately regretting her impulse, she tried to plant them again although their roots were severed. Against the wall of the Offices of the Examining Board the row of severed plants still stood in brave deceit, and no one would have guessed that the sap in their stems had drained for ever, cut off from the source. Grace gave these plants extra attention. When she entered the flat through the garden she was careful to walk just once or twice beside them, in the hope that her nearness would provide the reassurance necessary for resurrection, but it was no use, she had never been deceived in matters of life and death, she could not hope to deceive the plants she had uprooted. News had to be broken quickly, cleanly; snap; a mound of earth or of special care was no concealment.

  4

  A certain pleasure was added to Grace’s relief at establishing herself as a migratory bird. She found that she understood the characters in her novel. Her words flowed, she was excited, she could see everyone and everything. She ticked off the days in her diary and thought, Not many weeks now and I’ll be finished my story, then I
’ll be able to emerge to prowl the streets and sniff the spring air.

  It’s like this:

  She spoke to herself,

  —Ready. Ah, the cameras wheeled into place, the microphones adjusted. She climbs in, looks back. Regrets? The door is clamped shut. The people of the world retreat. Rejoicing fiercely in her aloneness, she is anything now, nothing human - an egg, a hibernating tortoise, a hazelnut; she will circle the earth, like a marble rolled in the dark mouth of the sky; and ha, she’ll soon be in space, she’ll address her body, her food, her instruments as dogs, Down there, Down! The whirling floating fragments rasp like tongues against her skin, seize her flesh; everything rises around her, like vomit; it is the day when space, not sea or earth, gives up its dead. She smiles, she murmurs, What ever moored me?, peering at the stars, the pursuing fires, the earth wonderfully cultivated with plant brick stone and not a sign of moving people, animals, insects, commotions of love. Down, dream, down!

  Communication is lost.

  A faulty instrument, human error; the private pleasure of the certainty of her death, the public premature mourning for a heroine; on the seas the collection of little boats moving into the area of no recovery to witness the end; flags flying; a regatta; representatives native and foreign.

  Her ship explodes, is burned; flash in the sky, stain in the sea; nothing human recovered. The boats disperse, the representatives native and foreign return to make statements, issue bulletins.

  Night. The writer emerges from her dream.

  —Oh God why have I been deceived? Which world do I inhabit?

  Down, dream, down!

  5

  Every few days the cracked-wheat loaf, ninepence halfpenny, has to be bought; on Fridays the milk bill, seven half pints at fourpence halfpenny, paid; half a dozen eggs a week, half a pound of cheese, the daily newspaper, the literary weekly, the Sunday paper, thud, like a dangerous piece of scaffolding, a plank blown by a high wind out of the sky from a never-completed building - what’s it going to be, in the end, you ask. A cathedral, a little house, a railway station, a hangar? It’s too high to see the structure, velvet sky sags with fog, the newspaper with its insertion, the insertion within the insertion within the insertion (ah, technicolour!) lies heavily on the foot and heart.

  Also, there are visits here and there to consult the stains in their places of origin - the publisher with the soft voice (a bookie giving a quiet tip) and the aura of after-shave lotion; his peony-faced son with the quenched dark eyes; his head reader; editors, editors, the agent worried over his diet and elimination; visits from people, too. The phone rings. Time after time when the phone rings it is Sorry wrong number, but tonight it is Harvey.

  —A friend in the States gave me your address. Can I come over tonight, about nine?

  Pause.

  An American medical student? That will be pleasant. Tête-à-tête, sherry, coffee. Do I look like a writer? I should have straight black hair falling over my shoulders; my face should be pimpled and pasty; my shoes should be split at the sides; yet I should look interesting. Do I look like anybody, like myself? I wish I knew what to say, I wish I didn’t dry up when confronted with people. A slight hope; tonight; sherry; tête-à-tête.

  Pause.

  —Yes, do come. I’ll expect you at nine.

  —May I bring my girlfriend?

  Pause.

  —Do, do.

  The old frustrated witch dancing around the cauldron,‘and like a rat without a tail,

  in a sieve I’ll thither sail,

  I’ll do, I’ll do and I’ll do . . .’

  Just after nine that evening the doorbell rang and Grace admitted Harvey and his girlfriend Sylvia.

  —I’m Harvey.

  —I’m Grace.

  —I’m Sylvia.

  Smiles, everyone established, and while Grace showed them into the sitting room with its floral suite, its lamp standard, desk, reproduction wine tables, electric fire, Chinese prints, Beautiful New Zealand Calendar, postcard of Beethoven (‘Celui à qui ma musique se fera comprendre sera délivré de toutes les misères où les autres se traînent’), she thought, These Americans are fitted with a revolving radar tower for picking up women.

  She remembered her own American, pleasurably inhabiting her past; their impulsive loving over a period long enough for it to gather rainbow tints, reflections, absorbing sea and sky and almond blossom before it became the usual miraculous bubble-nothing, and she and he, surprised, spread their wet fingers, breathed on them, blew them dry, and there was not a sign anywhere that anyone might know; nothing; only the shadow, the preserved memory; already the acid in which it was embalmed was corroding it; she had hoped that wouldn’t happen, but how could she have prevented it? How could she have made love with someone who at the moment of climax began to recite Gunga Din? Perhaps that was not so unfortunate - he could have recited lines from If, ‘If you can keep your head when all about you . . . if you can walk with kings nor lose the common touch . . .’

  The common touch.

  Although Grace had prepared her information on Klinefelter’s Syndrome, it seemed that Harvey was now pursuing a different line of research. His girlfriend lectured in Economics, she said.

  He was dark, inarticulate, and looked frail.

  Grace poured sherry. The other world intruded. She could say little.

  —Nice flat you’ve got here. Where Sylvia stays there’s a skylight in the bathroom and the snow falls on the lavatory seat-

  —It’s been snowing a long time. Will it ever stop?

  —Weeks. Do you know marihuana?

  —Who?

  —Marihuana.

  —I’ve read somewhere, I’ve heard, you can grow and harvest it in London. Where I lived in Ibiza- (Ah, now she would talk to them, she would tell them of the moonlight sharp as flute-music on the cobblestones.)

  —Yes I know someone who lived in Ibiza. He’s a writer.

  —You mean, Sylvia, he calls himself a writer. He’d like to stop by and see you sometime.

  —Oh?

  Grace poured another sherry. She could feel a flush spreading over her cheeks, making its centre furnace in two spots on either side of her nose.

  —No, I don’t smoke.

  —You don’t? Sylvia doesn’t, do you Sylvie?

  Sylvie!

  —And I don’t care for it myself.

  Observing them carefully, Grace knew a sudden feeling of superiority. They were young, flowing, so conventionally wanting to be unconventional. There was a small element of hero-worship, too, in their attitude to her, although perhaps it had been stifled by their discovery that she, a writer, lived in a flat which held a three-piece suite with floral covers. They had been disappointed that she hadn’t much interest in marihuana. They fitted so neatly into the psychological classification Post-Adolescence that Grace began to doubt their ability ever to escape, to struggle through the bleak unfriendly no-man’s-land, risking starvation, wounding, death, to the next acceptable age-area prepared for them.

  (Feeling for a moment the lonely chilling wind between her shoulder-blades, Grace drew her breath in a quick gasp and shiver.)

  They stared at her. She was silent. Dare she lean forward, she wondered, and ask, as one who had escaped,

  —Harvey, Sylvia, do you intend to be wedged for ever? Wedged. What do you mean?

  —Can you move quite freely where you are? Sure? When you get to no-man’s-land you will be able to run, dance, shout, starve, die. Don’t you feel cramped?

  Immensely superior, free, a member of another generation, Grace refilled the sherry glasses, slopping a little over the edge of the glass-topped table.

  —Oh, the carpet!

  Yes, the carpet. The agent had been careful to state that it was new and of good quality. The carpet, the chairs, the floral covers, the Chinese print above the mantelpiece, the reproduction wine tables . . .

  Harvey and Sylvia were talking together. Grace thought, I must try to listen, to concentrate, to make some
intelligent remark. After all, I’m a writer, and many writers are intelligent, and didn’t I manage quite successfully with those tests at the hospital, matching patterns, fitting blocks together, emptying and filling five and seven pint vessels, striking out words and ideas which did not apply?

  —You go to the theatre much?

  —No, Grace said quickly.—I’m meaning to, some time. I saw Macbeth. Yes, I saw Macbeth. Duncan was an old man wandering around in a nightshirt.

  —Oh? (Politely.)

  Perhaps they’re not interested in Shakespeare, Grace thought. They’re more interested in the avant garde plays. They do madmen very well on the stage these days. I know. But to me, if I consider the matter, the avant garde plays are as much behind the times as Shakespeare.

  —More sherry? Oh, sorry, there’s no more. Coffee?

  Harvey stood up. He had been sitting on the sofa. Grace had been surprised when they sat in different chairs, she had expected them to sit together, to embarrass her with exchanged glances and entwined limbs, but they had separated and established themselves each in a prim attitude on the edge of the sofa and chair. Grace had been disappointed that they did not fit in entirely to her classification . . . didn’t everyone know that all Americans . . . all students . . .

  Harvey would make a good psychiatrist, although his face had not yet that certain expression which betrays the necessary constipation of feeling.

  —It’s late, he said.—I have to pack, I’m leaving in the morning.

  —Leaving?

  Grace was dismayed and alarmed. He should have told me, she thought.

  —Oh I’d no idea you were leaving, if you’re leaving, well, you must be off-

  —Yes, we must be off now, it was nice meeting you, and thanks for the sherry. At Sylvia’s place there’s-

  —Yes, and at Harvey’s place there’s-

  See, already they were exchanging identities, like practised lovers. Grace supposed they had made love. She was pleased at the thought. Ah well, she thought recklessly, a little jealously, How young they start, what a wonderful fleshy confusion it all is, and it’s theirs by right, oh oh, and my dressing-table is so tidy, hand lotion, talcum powder, and my bed so neat with the candlewick bedspread cleaved beneath the pillow . . .