“Glad? Glad? Why should I be glad?”
“Off the hook, Colin. You’ve felt it, these past few weeks. Or at least, back on the old familiar hook. Don’t people get used to the pain?”
“I expect you mean there’s no chance of us carrying on.”
“Carrying on?” she laughed. “That’s what people used to say, they’ve been carrying on together. Weekend bags and seaside hotels and tipsy hilarity. Well, now they’re not carrying on. Let’s go, Colin, just save the explanations and preserve some dignity and let it go.”
“You sound bitter,” he said dully.
“Do I? Give me a chance. Time hasn’t had a chance yet to do its legendary healing work, but the sooner time gets on with it, the better it will be. How long does it take?” She spoke rapidly, the syllables tripping after each other into a dim future. “One year? Two? Three?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, if it comes to that.”
Triteness was in his mouth like a foul taste long incubated;
but what can you expect from the tired old situations, except the tired old phrases? “I can’t imagine the future without you.”
“You can’t imagine it with me, though.”
“You know I had very little to offer you.”
“And what you had, you weren’t prepared to give.”
“Isabel—”
“Memory will make you a cosy selection. In time you’ll forget the motorway and the field and the humiliating telephone calls. You can give yourself better lines, make yourself more potent.”
“That’s cheap. Isn’t it, cheap?”
“Yes. Ah, what’s the point? We knew at the beginning it would end up like this. We knew but we did it—I did anyway—because there are some mistakes you have to make.”
They sat in the damp darkness of the car, no sound but their steady breathing, almost hoarse, like people who had exerted themselves and were not used to it. He was conscious of their last moments trickling away.
“Give me a cigarette,” she said. He lit it for her. “I want to tell you something. A little story.”
“Bearing on us?”
“No, it has nothing to do with us at all. I tell it to anyone I think might be able to tell me what it means.” She took the cigarette from her lips and smoke curled out of them, out of her body. For a minute he thought he was seeing torments, the damned in hell, smouldering viscera and dripping flesh. He blinked. “It’s a true story,” she said. “I read it in a book when I was a student.” He tried to ease himself back in the driver’s seat, but he did not feel at ease. He took out a cigarette and then pushed it back into the packet.
“Are you running out?” she asked.
“No. I think I might give up.”
“Well, it will save expense. You are making changes in your life. Isn’t it going to be too much for you, all at once?”
“Tell me the story.”
“All right. It was in the war, the last war. There were two people, Jews, in Poland. The man was a weaver. He saw this woman whom he wanted to marry. But she—she wouldn’t have him. Everybody thought it was ridiculous, quite unsuitable. They had nothing in common, they were from different backgrounds, different classes. But he was very persistent.”
“This was before the War?”
“Yes, this was before the War. But when the invasion came the man knew what was going to happen. He had a friend who was a farmer; he wasn’t Jewish but he was prepared to help him. Under the floor of his friend’s farmhouse he made a hole in the ground. He got a handloom, and a lot of wool, as much as he could lay his hands on. Then when the Germans started rounding up the Jews he went to this sort of dug-out and shut himself in and began to weave the wool.”
“Yes?”
“And he asked the woman again, would she live with him? She refused. At first she said she would rather be dead. But soon most of her family had been killed or taken away on the cattle-wagons. She was on her own and there was nowhere to hide. He couldn’t come out of the hole now, but he kept sending messages to her, and in the end she was so frightened, with everyone else gone, that she agreed. She went to join him under the farmhouse floor. But she said she would never marry him, she wouldn’t have sex with him.”
“But that’s asking the impossible,” Colin said. “In that confined space.”
“Look, will you just shut up, Colin?” He turned, startled. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes alight. She snapped another cigarette into her mouth and her anger blazed and flickered in the lighter flame. It began to rain, harder and harder, thundering on the metal roof. “Will you just keep quiet and let me tell you the story?”
“I’m sorry.” He thought, how long will this take, will it turn
to mud, is the car going to start sinking? What will Sylvia say about the mud on the wheels?
“When the man had made some cloth the farmer sold it, and this kept them going, all three of them. But this hole was so small they couldn’t stretch out. Every night they had to take the loom down before they could sleep, and set it up again every morning. The wool was around them all the time, they slept in it and breathed in it, it must have almost suffocated them, I think. Imagine their dreams.”
“I can’t imagine. Why don’t you just tell me the facts?”
“The facts only? But these must have been the facts. This little hole, no air, no light, the clay and the fleece all around them. Sometimes I think I am not sure of the facts.”
“What’s the point then?”
“The facts were in dispute anyway. Do you think they told the same version afterwards? Long, long after, the story came to light. Who couldn’t imagine? You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t try.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“The hole was under a trapdoor inside the farmhouse. The floor of the farmhouse was made of earth. Soldiers came a few times, but they didn’t find it.”
“How was it ventilated?”
“I don’t know. Barely, it must have been. They couldn’t cook down there.”
“What did they eat?”
“Raw vegetables.”
“God,” Colin said. He turned his face away and looked out at the rain. “I’d better move the car.”
“Yes, you’d better.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you.”
“It’ll keep.”
“Where shall we go?”
“Just drive me home.”
“Do I have to?”
“I think that would be best.” She stared at the stub of her cigarette, greedily, and wound down the window to hurl the glowing end out into the night. She put on her seat belt.
“Will you finish the story?”
“For a year they didn’t have sex, and then they did. They say—he, the man, said—that she had lost her will to live by then. At least he had the work, weaving, putting up the loom and taking it down. She had nothing except the earth and the wool, and thinking over the past and hating him. All this time, you have to remember, she hated him. But she says differently, that he threatened to drive her out of the hole if she wouldn’t have sex with him.”
“He could have raped her. Who could she have complained to?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps he did. After another year they had a child. It was a girl.”
“But how could they?” He was aghast. “How could they, in that hole?”
“You fool,” she said bitterly. “Now do you see why she didn’t want to have sex? Do you think she could pop out and go to the chemist’s for something? Sometimes…very occasionally…they went up into the world and walked about. Only at night. Not very often. They wanted, you understand, to scream at each other, just scream, but the farmer said he’d throw them out if they didn’t keep absolutely quiet.”
“But the baby must have cried, mustn’t she?”
“They put their hands over her mouth. For a year and a half. For a year and a half, the mother had milk, but then it gave out. The baby had to eat the raw vegetables. But you see then, the mother couldn’t kill herself, could she, she couldn’t walk out of the hole. She had the baby.”
They were on the main road now, driving through town. An odd figure under an umbrella scurried away from their
sight. A gang of boys huddled under the yellow lights of a shopping centre.
“Shall we stop for a drink?” He looked sideways at her. “Anywhere. It doesn’t matter now if we’re seen. Anywhere you like.”
“Better go home, I think. Shall I finish the story?”
He sighed. “Yes, go on. It’s a terrible story. I don’t like to think about things like that.”
“None of us likes to think of other people’s hells. We avoid it if we can.”
“But you’re paid to do it, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but even so. You see there was food of a kind, shelter, and it was warm—at least it was warm. That’s how they survived. And nobody found them, they did survive. The Russians came. They were sent to a Displaced Persons Camp. I think, later, they went to America, and the couple split up. I don’t know. The end of the story isn’t important.”
“But what about the child?”
“Well that’s what’s most horrible. She was like a wild animal. When she was brought out of the hole she screamed and clawed and attacked people. At other times, she was completely mute. As if they still had their hands over her face.”
“But they’d had to do it. I suppose. Or her existence would have destroyed them all. But later—what became of her?”
“Oh, she went from one institution to another. No one could keep her. I told you, she was like a wild animal.” She paused. “What is the point?”
“The point?”
“Of the story.”
“I don’t know,” Colin said. “I wish you hadn’t told it to me. It’s one of the most horrible things I’ve ever heard.”
Isabel looked at him appraisingly. “Would it have been more bearable if the child had grown up in some other way?”
“Normal?”
“Yes, normal.”
“I suppose so.”
“At that time, when they were buried in the hole, the people above them were much worse than animals. Animals have no cruelty; we always defame them. At least, whatever became of the child, she had no opportunity to become cruel.”
“But you can’t speculate…you don’t know about these people. To survive like that you would have to be a different breed.”
“I think they must have been terrible people, to breed such monstrosity out of desire for life. But not different.” She turned her head. “Do you see how he made her suffer, by loving her? When she had the child she could not even walk out and go to Treblinka. Now I know all about it…the stifling power of love.”
They had reached her front gate. Colin stopped the car. He was afraid to look at her, knowing that he had failed to find any meaning in the story, to give anything at all back to her.
“I didn’t know such issues preoccupied you,” he said. “Have you found some moral in it to apply to me?”
“I hadn’t thought of it in that light, but now that you speak of it—”
“Isabel, kiss me, don’t just go.”
She unclipped the seat belt, swung open the door, and paused halfway out of the car.
“Now that you speak of it, when you are so spiritually stifled, what kind of life can you hope to give birth to?” The door clicked behind her. “I’ll miss you, Colin. You think I won’t, but I will.” She walked around the back of the car and bent her face to his window. “When you are fifty you will be able to tell people what a gay dog you were. What an untrammelled life. And look at the heap of ashes you live on, and blame Sylvia.” He stretched out a hand but she pulled away almost playfully, and with a little smile turned and walked in at the gate. She was playing all the time, Colin said to himself.
Hunched in his seat, he sat for fifteen minutes watching the front of the house; lights going on, upstairs curtains drawn, light finally switched off. She has slipped through my fingers, he thought. He drove home.
Muriel looked pale. Suspecting her to be undernourished, Evelyn got her coat on, picked up her purse and her basket, and set off for the butcher’s shop on the Parade. When she got to the door she saw that there was quite a queue waiting to be served. Her first thought was to pretend she had not wanted anything and walk away down the street. But she hesitated for a moment, and heard a voice behind her:
“Liver looks nice. Hello there, Mrs. Axon. I thought I saw you passing.”
She would have to go in now. After all, nobody looks into a butcher’s window for idle amusement, they would think she didn’t have the money, they might talk about her. Evelyn turned her head stiffly. Josie Deakin from number four, a woman of forty-five in her brown leather knee-boots and pixie-hood. She heaved up to Evelyn, bustling with her shopping bags, edging her into the shop doorway.
“Nasty weather, Mrs. A.,” Josie said cheerfully.
Mrs. A.? Evelyn thought. As if she were the subject of an experiment.
“Seasonable,” she replied.
“How are you keeping then?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“And Muriel?”
“Very well.” Some residue of social unction oiled her tongue. “And you, Mrs. Deakin?”
“Can’t complain.” Mrs. Deakin took off her woollen gloves and rubbed her hands together. “Haven’t seen Muriel about for a bit. Too cold for her, is it?”
“Yes. Too cold.”
“I used to see her last summer, striding along, you know, not a care in the world, and very nice she looked in that pink angora cardigan. You do keep her lovely, Mrs. A. I said to Dennis, Mrs. Axon keeps Muriel lovely, to look at her you’d never know. Well, I said to Dennis, if people only knew. I bet Muriel’s got more about her than people give her credit for.”
“And what did Dennis say?” Evelyn enquired.
“Well…I expect he said, I agree with you. I don’t remember exactly what he said but he certainly agreed with me. To tell you the truth, Mrs. Axon, it is a coincidence me running into you today like this.” She craned her neck to look at the counter. “Oh, aren’t they slow in this shop! The thing is, do you still do seances? Only Uncle Bill’s passed on, end of September, liver complaint, he’d had it for years—and Auntie Agnes—she’s my father’s sister, you remember our Ag—she’s mislaid one of the policies.”
“And so she wants to get in touch with him?”
“Well, I know you do that sort of thing.”
“I’m afraid I don’t any more.”
Evelyn was careful to keep all colour out of her tone, all emotion off her face. And no doubt, she thought, this about Dennis Deakin thinking Muriel attractive, it was something and nothing, a passing fancy. She imagined Mr. Deakin coming softly down the path in his bedroom slippers, putting his hand on Muriel’s arm, guiding her down the garden to the shed; the smell of grass cuttings, compost, the lawnmower oil, and Muriel’s dumpling thighs exposed in the broad sunlit afternoon. No, he could not be the father, flies undone amongst the diving swallows, Ena Harkness rotting softly towards midsummer. Deakin’s beds were orderly ones.