Hidden Symptoms (2 page)

Robert also had a duty visit to make that evening, to his sister and her family, the very sight of whose little red-brick terraced house always oppressed him and filled him with a powerful sense of the need to escape; a sense which was, in spite of its strength, vague, abstract, foolish even, when he seriously thought about it. For this had once been his home and he had escaped, he thought; he called only to please his sister, he called from free will and choice. If he really wanted, he need never go to that grim, narrow street ever again. Gloomily he rang the bell and his sister opened the door, beaming in delight when she saw him.

The whole family was at home: Rosie, her husband, Tom, who was watching television and nodded at his brother-in-law, “What about ye, Bobby” (Robert loathed abbreviations); and their little son, Tommy, who was playing with Lego on the floor. Rosie and Tom both
hoped that the baby due in the autumn would be a little girl.

“Tea, Robert?” He refused but she insisted, heaving herself from the chair and shuffling into the kitchen. Tom said nothing. Robert rubbed his hands over his eyes and wanted to flee the place. He ran an eye around the room. Why were these houses so uniform? he wondered, looking at the brown-and-cream suite with wooden trim and the acrylic carpet with its busy pattern of abnormally large autumn leaves. Was there a working-class parlour in Belfast that lacked these fittings? A right tat palace this is, he thought. Above the fireplace was a huge picture in a broad plastic frame of a little boy with tears pouring down his cheeks, a work which should have appealed to none but sadistic pederasts. On the opposite wall was a large block print of Constable's “Haywain” with an excessively blue tint to it. In between were a string of horse brasses and two plates which had been there since before his mother died, one bearing a picture of Pope John XXIII and the other a picture of John F. and Jackie Kennedy. There was a sunburst clock of wood and metal and on the window-sill a clown of Murano glass. Tommy, still on the floor, was now sitting up eating liquorice torpedoes out of a crumpled bag. They look like pessaries, Robert thought dully, and shivered with vicarious nausea as the child slid another little torpedo into its plump, wet mouth. Rosie came back with a cup of tea and two Jaffa cakes for Robert just as the local news was beginning on television, and together they watched the funeral of the RUC reservist. “Good sauce for the bastard,” said Tom,
and Rosie frowned, looking at Tommy, but said nothing. She was sitting by the window, her head near to the gaudy glass clown, and as Robert drank his tea he watched her, wondering what it must be like to see the world through his sister's eyes, unable to empathize with the strange sensibility which could look around this room and perceive beauty; which could see aesthetic worth in, say, acid-green pampas grass.

“More tea, Robert?”

“Thanks.”

When the main points of the news were over, they made conversation together, Rosie claiming that she felt fine. The doctors said that everything was alright and the only worry was that the summer would be a bit tiring, what with the heat and Tommy under her feet all day during the school holidays. Tommy himself said that Goldie, his pet fish, had died. He had made a wormery in the redundant round bowl, and Robert was obliged to go out to the back scullery to see these new pets, visible at intervals between the soil and the glass. Rosie told him innocent gossip about neighbors whom he had almost forgotten through absolute indifference; he said that his work was going well, Tom talked sport and at seven o'clock Robert had fulfilled his duty and left.

After such visits, Robert always liked to go straight back to his flat, which was near the university. There was, he thought, a smell in his sister's house: not a bad smell, but the smell of people and cheap food: a smell of poverty. He felt it clinging to his clothes and skin, and he removed it immediately on his return with a hot
shower and lots of male toiletries which smelt bitter, sexy and expensive. As he dried himself afterwards, Count Basie on stereo, he took comfort in looking around his flat at his possessions: the pale wicker furniture, his French theatre posters and a cunning little water-colour of two deck chairs. In his heart of hearts he despised himself for gaining any sort of peace and comfort from such trivia, but their power as symbols of successful escape from the squalor that was home was, to him, undeniable.

I love my squint, thought Theresa, as she tried to gaze at herself in the mirror late that night. The man in the café had seemed distinctly disconcerted by it. It was hers alone, untraceable to any ancestor, unlike her nose and legs, which she had inherited from her mother as definitively as one might make a grandfather clock and a pair of Meissen candlesticks. She found it slightly weird to look at her mother's First Communion photograph, where the little sepia legs below the frock of white watered silk had just such an artful kink in them as her own legs did. Hamlet, I am thy Father's spirit, an' begob it was an' all, for you could tell the young fella off the Da by the nose on him. People even said that she looked like her grandmother, who had died before Theresa was born, and vestiges of that dead face were then looking back at her from her own reflection. How strange and arbitrary it all seemed to be, people marrying, mating and mixing genes; unavoidable choice and chance producing cocktails of children with inherited traits and yet still new people
with their own particularities, like Theresa's squint. She wished suddenly that her father had not died when she was so very young.

I'll probably meet again that man whom I insulted, she thought as she got into bed. Belfast was so small, incestuous almost, in the way paths crossed. And she hated that; she was still bumping into people who sympathized with her, Oh that's the girl, even once or twice on introduction they remembered or at least conjectured, you could see it in their eyes. Only one of hundreds and the case short, obscure: what of those whose losses were famous and had made the English papers,
Newsweek,
history?

A light summer rain beat softly on the window. So little mattered. The temptation to make one's response as big as the disaster had to be resisted, for in truth what could one do, save collapse down to the horror of little details and keep living? She had read somewhere that there was a museum to the Holocaust in Israel, and that one of the exhibits was a tiny broken shoe upon a pedestal. “But what can we
do
?” Inexorable time: often it was truly too late to do anything.

A mere two days later she had her comeuppance. While browsing in a bookshop she was brightly accosted by Kathy, who was her only friend from Queen's, and beside her stood the insulted journalist.

“Hello, Theresa, are you buying, or just looking? Do you know my boyfriend, Robert? He's a writer.” Theresa smiled at both definitions, made with such pitiful firmness and pride.

Robert grimaced. “We met a few days ago, in a café. Theresa didn't think much of my last article.”

“Well, it wasn't very good, now, was it, Robert?” said Kathy firmly. “In all honesty, you have written much better. He's compiling a book now,” she added to Theresa, “a directory of Northern Irish writers. It'll be very comprehensive.”

“How interesting,” said Theresa politely, fixing her strange eyes upon the writer and smiling. He stared back coldly. Kathy, while grumbling about having to remain in Belfast during the entire summer, removed a pen and a little notebook from her handbag. “Come and see us next Tuesday,” she said, leaning on a pile of Royal biographies to scrawl down the address. “Seven o'clock, I'll make dinner.”

“Thank you,” said Theresa, taking the proffered little page. She smiled again at Robert and this time he smiled back, but thinly.

Theresa was glad to see that the address given was evidently that of Robert's flat, and not of Kathy's home in Harberton Park, where she lived with her mother. Theresa's confidence, vacillating when concerned with anything save matters literary, became suddenly and surprisingly firm when faced with the phenomenon of Mrs. O'Gorman. In short, she had the lady nailed, and on the strength of one brief meeting would have said that Mrs. O'Gorman was a ghastly woman with the same conviction with which she would have affirmed that
Ulys
ses
was a good book.

The account of Paddy Dignam's funeral in
Ulysses
always brought Kathy to Theresa's mind. When she read of the unidentified figure by the grave whom a reporter later erroneously named as “McIntosh” (because the unknown gentleman was wearing one), she always thought of her friend who, at college, by simple non-appearance at lectures and tutorials, made a mystery of herself. Kathy who? Her very sex was in question: a notice pleading for an essay appeared on the departmental noticeboard for a Mr. O'Gorman, written by a tutor who thought that the K. O'Gorman who was on his class list but who had attended no tutorials was a lazy young man instead of a lazy young woman. Meanwhile, Kathy's presence was adding sparkle to parties, plays, concerts, wine bars and bedsits: she was in evidence everywhere but the Arts library. She made it a point of honour to read as few of the set books as possible, preferring in their stead things obscure, obscene, quaint and curious, so that she had read
Barrack-Room Ballads,
but not
The Prelude
;
Fanny Hill,
but not
Wuthering Heights
; and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
but not
King Lear
. She also kept an astute eye on the Belfast cultural scene and in conversation would make claims to the friendship of writers, artists and actors with whom, in reality, she was merely acquainted. Possibly her only sincere friendship was with Theresa, who cared nothing for Kathy's considerable prowess as a social climber but who was immensely fond of the kindhearted and sensible person whom she perceived under the exuberant exterior.

In the summer exams every year, Kathy would scrape
a minimal pass, dependent always on the copious notes which Theresa gave her to photocopy and cram. It was through the operation of this favour that Theresa had the misfortune to meet Kathy's mother.

Kathy and Theresa never socialized in each other's homes at Theresa's implicit request, and so when she went to Harberton Park one day to retrieve some lecture notes which she needed urgently, it was the first time that she had ever seen the large, elegant detached house which was the O'Gorman home. As Theresa ascended the steps, the mirthful sounds of half a conversation were audible through the open door, drowned suddenly by a peal of barks, both deep and shrill, as three dogs rushed out of the house and began woofing and snapping at her ankles. One was a Dalmatian, one an Afghan hound, and one an ugly little thing with a mashed face, like a genetically defective cat; and all three barked constantly, the Dalmatian jumping up and putting its large paws on her skirt. She was too shocked to run or scream and only realized how frightened she was when a fourth bark joined in: “Toby! Prince! Down, boy!” Mrs. O'Gorman called off the two larger dogs and scooped up the ugly little one in a jewelled hand. “Who are you?” she snapped. “What do you want?”

“Kathy, please,” said Theresa weakly, conscious mainly of the blood booming in her ears, and the startled beats of her heart.

“She's not in.”

“Poetry notes,” Theresa whimpered, and the woman turned her back and went into the house, returning a
moment later with the tatty folder of yellow cardboard which contained almost everything Theresa had ever learnt about Augustan poetry.

“Thank you,” she said, but she was talking to air. The woman had gone and the telephone conversation was resumed. Theresa left quickly, for the two large dogs were still on the top step, panting and slavering hungrily.

Kathy later apologized for her absence.

“You did get the notes?”

“Yes,” said Theresa, too embarrassed to elaborate, although she soon discovered that such conduct was not without precedent. Mrs. O'Gorman was an ill-mannered snob who treated her daughter with scant regard, much less her daughter's friends, and so Kathy tried to keep friends and mother as far apart as possible. Although the two lived together, it was in a constant state of acrimony. Kathy was an only child: she told Theresa that her father had died when she was a baby and she had an inferiority complex about her lack of family life.

For a long time after the incident with the dogs, Theresa had a perverse fascination with the event. Such conduct in a mother was so strange. Common sense told Theresa that being a mother did not automatically free one of ill-temper and boorishness, and so of course she knew that it was wrong of her to use her own mother as a rule-of-thumb for the world — as wrong as it was irresistible. Everyone could only but be found wanting.

One day, years previously, a hoary old man named Harry, six foot two and with hands like a mole, had come to do odd jobs in the house, and when Theresa returned
from school she saw in the kitchen a plateful of enormous scones, each one about four inches across.

“Sufferin' Isaac, Ma, what's wrong with the scones? Did you lose the small cutter?”

But her mother had replied no, that their size was intentional, because she had made them for Harry and she had thought that big scones would be easier for him to manage than dainty little normal ones. Theresa always remembered setting down her school-bag and gazing at the scones with something approaching reverence. Universal love on a thick delft plate with puce roses: she had thought then, “I shall never be better than this, I shall never be anywhere nearly as good.” Thoughtfulness to the humble level of an old man's dexterity in eating scones. Never neglect the little things in life. The rest of the poor world could only fall short.

(Mrs. O'Gorman fell further than most: Theresa imagined her forcing Harry to eat his own sandwiches outside. In a thunderstorm.)