Authors: Margaret Drabble
Rose walked. She was not sure where she was going, she walked blindly, through unfamiliar streets. Her head ached and stormed. She had known it would come, she had felt it coming for months, and here it was: quietly she repeated herself, I will live through it, I will live through it. But it was bad, it was worse than she could have imagined. Her head split. If someone had taken a hatchet and split my skull, she thought, I could not suffer more. I feel the blood running in my brain, from this internal wound. My brain is wet with blood. It pours through where my mind is, I bleed, I bleed, I bleed. Let them not tell me we are material beings, it is in the spirit that we know pain, it is in my head, my spirit, it is there, I feel it. I am cut into two by the axe. I bleed, she said, I will live through it, she said, as her feet followed one another on the wet pavement.
She emerged upon the Kingsway, and walked into a coffee shop. It was one where she had been with Konstantin: he had called it the Snake Café, because he had thought that its sign, portraying a swirl of smoke arising from a cup, had been a picture of a snake. She
queued, shuffling, as though unable to lift her feet: took a salad, a cup of coffee, sat down at a glass-topped table on a high uncomfortable stool. She stared into space at the street outside. She saw not the street, but an airport. The airport was in Africa, in Gbolo: it was where she was. She had just got off the plane, and she sat there in the lounge, with nowhere to go, sick and ill from the journey. She saw herself there, as from a distance: herself, sitting there in her mackintosh, with a suitcase at her feet. It was a vision so strong, so real, that she knew she must do it, that there she would be. But how could she be there? She should never have allowed herself to admit this image, it had formed itself slowly and dreadfully, the details gathered round it inexorably: she had tried to blot it out, she had reasoned with it, but its power was stronger than she was. The passport, the plane, the money, the ticket, the departure, the objects in that suitcase. It was a vision, and how could she know whether it was a temptation of God or the Devil? Twice before she had had these visions, and they had been made flesh. She had seen herself marrying Christopher, in defiance of all reason, and it was vision that had walked her to the registry office: the image of herself doing it had been too strong for her. Then again, later, she had seen herself signing the cheque. She had seen her hand writing her signature. God, she thought, had held her hand. He had propelled her fingers. Rose Vertue Vassiliou, he had written: and the oblong piece of paper had been taken from her, had gone up in smoke and fire. She had thought to have no more such visions, she had thought that she had found a humble way to survive them. She had thought, I am too old for these hallucinations, my next house I will not build upon the sand. But it too had crumbled. What is it, what is it, she asked herself, as her coffee grew colder, what is it that forms these acts for me, and what can I do, since they come to me, but submit to their promptings?
She worked it out: she would plan it in detail. She would consult the flights, the necessity for injections. She would find reasons. I will go there, she said, I will live there quietly till the money comes through, I will take a job if I can get one, and by the time the money
comes through I will know what to do with it. I will be sensible, this time, I won’t let it be burned, I’ll find out first where it’s needed, where it can be used. And then I will have done what I must do. And by then, I will know how to make myself useful. And by then, also, I will have travelled further than I will ever travel here, the ways of loneliness and extremity, I will voyage into that dark interior, I will satisfy this spiritual craving, I will see what it is like, that other world, the world of destitution, I was made for it, and there, in that hideous dark misery, which now, here, I cannot imagine, but which there could not deny itself to me – for what else would there be, nothing, nothingness – there I should see it, the unimaginable. It is there, it calls me, I have only to walk towards it, I myself. It is in me to go that journey, so how can I refuse it? Chosen, I was, to go those ways, or they would not so call to me, they would not lie open before me. If I do not go, I will wither and perish for not having gone. I cannot survive my own rejection of this image. It gathers in the darkness of my soul. It is my only chance to appease God himself, who so pursues me with these suggestions, who sends after me his fierce angels with their clattering wings. It is sacrifices that God has always demanded. He demanded Isaac. On the hilltop, the innocent. He shall have my children. On that dingy airport, where I shall be ill, and wretched, and lonely, he shall have myself. And there I shall find him. It is the only way to find him. There he will be, in that loss and solitude, in those nights of anguish. There I shall go. Not many people go there, but to that land I shall go.
She contemplated the vision. It seemed real, it seemed solid, it breathed life. And then, to test it, she conjured up the image of her children. They too seemed real and living. Incompatible, incompatible. She could not make them lose colour, her children, their faces would not fade on her, they were as real, as insistently real. Her mind started to divide again, sickeningly: the pain started up again. She had read once that the mind is indeed in two halves, and that some people have the halves divided, so that the right hand truly does not know what the left hand is doing. She experienced division. But the two sides did not obliterate each other, they collided, they continued to co-exist. It was unendurable. She could feel a cold
sweat standing out on her skin. She prayed for the angel that appeared to Jacob. Oh God, oh God, she prayed, release me, be merciful, send me an angel with a sword, tell me what I must do. Restore me, restore me, I cannot endure a moment longer. They will cry if I leave them, God, they will cry for me, I love them, they love me. Take away your message. Take it away.
But God was not particularly merciful. All he sent to her was another tag, leading to the desert.
(It was largely desert, Ujuhudiana, an unfruitful land. Cracking plains of mud, dryness, dust, where small people had washed themselves humbly like saints in their own urine, stinking, defenceless. And over the border slouched Man the Murderer, swinging his long arms.)
If ye will not give up wife and mother and children to follow me, he said, unhelpfully, cruelly, ye shall in nowise enter into the kingdom of heaven.
I must be mad, thought Rose, shaking her head, eating a mouthful of lettuce. I should see a psychiatrist.
I don’t want this vision, she thought, crossly. I really don’t want it. It’s silly and useless. What good is twenty thousand pounds to an economy like that? My other vision was quite good enough. Living in Middle Road, like a quiet person. What was wrong with it? Was it that it had got too agreeable? Was it not melodramatic enough? Perhaps it is the melodrama that is the temptation, after all. Could I not convince myself that it is my own neurosis that prompts me? Be reasonable, now, you know it is neurosis. What else could it be? Look at your background, woman. Look at the spectacular uselessness of every gesture you have ever made. Why do you think this new one will be any better? It is nothing, it is part of the pattern. You could break the pattern now, if you tried. You could sit it out, as Simon said. You could resist. You could, now you are a grown woman, refuse to listen. Blot it out.
The woman in the airport paid no attention. She sat there grimly, refusing to be dislodged.
You realize, of course, what you’ve done, said Rose, mother of three children, to that unpleasant martyr, that faithless missionary.
You’ve simply constructed for yourself the most horrible renunciation your mind can conceive. That’s all you’ve done. It’s silly, it’s pointless.
But the woman in the airport looked up from her dusty shoes, with a tight dismissive smile of contempt, and said No, no. I didn’t construct it. Christopher and God constructed it, they connived at it, they left me nothing else to do, don’t you remember?
I don’t believe you, said Rose.
Ah, said the woman. Refuse to believe. Abandon me. The choice is yours.
Oh God, said Rose, munching her salad angrily. I don’t care. You can die for all I care. I’m going to go back now, and soon I can collect Maria and Marcus from school.
And the woman rose to her feet, white and wailing. In Rose’s mind she wailed, like a soul in hell. On the bottom right-hand corner of the day of judgement she wept and wrung her hands, across the continents.
On Friday evening, Simon sat at home. The evening seemed endless. The children were sitting up late, as there was no school the next day: he had promised the boy that he could watch the late sports programme. The girls were bickering, monotonously, over a packet of felt pens, each claiming it as her own, neither sure whose in fact it was, and whose had been lost. Julie was watching a play on the television, and doing some crochet work. It was much in vogue, crochet. Simon himself was trying to reply to a letter of his mother’s: she had written to him the week before, which she rarely did, expressing interest in the USTK case, a desire that the family would visit her for a few days in the summer, complaints about the bad weather, assurances (which could only mean the opposite) that she was in good health. He could not concentrate on his reply, because the atmosphere in the room was restless. Julie had wanted to go away for Whitsun, and he had refused, saying it would be too expensive, so soon after Easter, but she knew as well as he did that the refusal was arbitrary, and in revenge she had been difficult about the possibility of visiting his mother. Her irritation conveyed itself to
them all, without words. He sat there, staring at the sheet of paper on his desk, at the words: Dearest Mum, Thank you so much for your letter, I was glad to hear … He was thinking of Rose, and of the cowardly and utterly characteristic way in which he had let her go. He was insistent enough on some occasions: he had won a case he should have lost, when his sympathies had been engaged (he might as well now admit it) the other way. His sympathies had been engaged with Rose too: was that why he had let her go? Because the truth was that he had known what she had been talking about. Nonsense it had been in some terms, but it had made sense to him. He had had no right to answer his telephone and to allow her to escape. He should have taken her hand from the door and shut it. He should have declared himself. Irrelevant it might have been, his declaration of interest, for what could Rose want with his affection at such a time, but nevertheless he should have done it, because that was what he had been prompted to do. There was no point in behaving reasonably on such occasions. She had not behaved reasonably in looking to him for assistance and advice. She had wanted him to say something to her. She had shown some form of trust and he had betrayed it.
He wondered what would have happened if he had spoken. He constructed, shamefully, a situation in which he had done so. A fantasy, it was, an image. He had done it before. He said to her, in this fantasy: I love you, I admire you. And she responded, if not with emotion at least with relief, with pleasure, with some feeling. And then they would hold together, after this declaration: they would marry, they would set up house together, they would eat and talk and watch the television and discuss the world together. Where the children were in this fantasy he did not know: sometimes they were with them, all six of them, sometimes they had disappeared, along with Julie and Christopher, into the outer darkness. He saw only episodes, as though picked out by the unnatural spotlight of hope: himself and Rose sitting together quietly in her dingy house, or walking in the country, or visiting his mother (why this returned so insistently he did not know) or going together to a dinner or a party. Talking over the headlines in the paper. Discussing his cases. Africa.
Trades Unions. Politics. Students. Other people. The future. And the ironic thing about these visions was that they were not at all, in terms of character, in terms of their own selves, improbable. He and Rose were similar, he knew it. She was not one of those sexual fantasy women in vulgar black underwear: she was, in person, no less and no more attractive than he was himself. And in character, in interests, they were alike. There was nothing visionary about an image of their conjunction. It was sober, real, possible. It would even be productive and useful. They would be a good combination, good companions. He thought of the marriages he knew, marriages that he admired and envied, based on a community of interest, a common purpose. Most of them were second marriages, one had to admit. And there was the fatal flaw. For how could one soberly, quietly, responsibly, ever build such a thing upon destruction? Upon dead Julie, dead Christopher, upon the weeping of infants? The Mexicans (he thought it was the Mexicans) used to cement the foundations of their edifices with the blood of slaughtered children, for their greater security. And that was a logic which he did not wish to pursue. Nevertheless, beyond some gap in time and action, he and Rose sat down to supper together, with books perhaps beside their plates upon the table, looking up from time to time to compare notes, smiling as they pushed each other the butter, salt or bread.
The play on the television ground to a morbid close. The two girls were pushed, protesting, up to bed. Julie accompanied them, saying she had no wish to watch what was coming, and Simon told Dan that he could sit up and watch
Sportsnight with Sykes
, after the News. He himself sat and watched the News. It was dominated, for him, by an account of a case in which an Italian father, who had been given custody of his baby in the magistrate’s court, and refused it on Appeal, had disappeared to Italy with the child, saying that he had no interest in the British law, he was going to keep the child, in Milan, and bring it up a good Catholic. The English mother was interviewed: I want my baby back, she said plaintively, to the man from the BBC But it was as clear as day that getting the baby back, physically, was going to prove an immensely difficult task. Mr Calvacoressi
had the weight of Italian public feeling behind him, as well as the undoubted advantage of having the child in his possession. What do I care for the Court of Appeal, he had told the newspapers. Simon watched the account of this with growing alarm. He got up, went out into the hall, and rang Rose. There was no answer.