Authors: Margaret Drabble
She has to wait for some time. The police seem to have forgotten about her, or maybe they have found more important things to do. But the weather is pleasant, and after ten minutes she gets up and starts to inspect the motorway vegetation with a happier interest. The verge has been coarsely mown for a yard or so, but beyond that yard grows a band of taller plants, waist high, a rich crop of thistle and nettle and dock and ragwort. Faro plucks herself a teasel and starts to gather herself a motorway bouquet. The hot breath of the stream of cars wafts towards her with a Phlegraen stink as she tugs at hairy stems, at woody twines, at hollow culms. She assembles a pretty nosegay of yarrow and tansy, of daisy and cranesbill, of groundsel and camomile, of all the dusty white and yellow and purple survivors. Some she knows by name, some she does not recognize. Her fingers prick but she is happy. The resilience of these plants delights her. Darwin would have liked this grassy bank and its brave fuel-loving adaptations. Passing motorists gaze in wonder at the wayside maiden in blue and white, calmly stooping and bending as though in the fields of paradise.
She ties her bunch of flowers together with grass, and sits down again to wait. By her feet, a glinting object catches her eyes. It is a cheap little brooch of shells and of glass. She picks it up, and polishes it up on her trousers. Its catch is broken, and it is not really very nice. But she feels sorry for it, and she puts it in her pocket with her medallion and her keys. Faro wastes a lot of her time feeling sorry for all sorts of things, animate and inanimate.
When, at last, she gets home, she arranges her flowers in a blue-and-white-striped milk jug. They look surprisingly attractive, and they begin to recover at once from their dusty drooping thirstiness. She can almost see them drink in the welcome London tap water. She too is recovering. Despite the motorway disaster, and the sense that there is only a thin crust of kindness sealing in the violence of human nature, she is feeling pleased with herself and her day. Steve is an ace. She knows she will see him again soon. She can invent questions to ask him when she starts to write her article. She hardly needs an excuse to ring him. They are fast friends, and may become more than friends. Perhaps he will ring her. In fact, she knows he will ring her.
And the phone trills just as she has settled down to watch a spot of restful television. She leaps towards it eagerly, convinced it will be Steve asking her if she is safely home, eager to tell him about her motorway misadventure. But it is not Steve. It is her dark angel Sebastian Jones, who is pleased to inform her that he has just been told he is mortally ill with cancer of the pancreas, and that he expects to see her the next day.
Faro sits underground on the Central Line between Shepherd’s Bush and Holborn with a basket containing her motorway posy, a cold roast chicken, half a loaf of bread, a bunch of seedless grapes and a bottle of white wine. Invalid fare. She is Little Red Riding Hood travelling towards the wolf of death. And she is in a very bad temper. She really cannot believe that Seb is dying. It is some dirty manipulative game he is playing with her. How dare he sink so low? And why is she such a fool as to respond so promptly? She perches her large basket on her lap and stares crossly around her. None of the adverts down here are for products, they are all for financial services. Faro doesn’t need any financial services. Amongst them is a poster with a Poem on the Underground, so she takes refuge in reading that. It is the end of
Paradise Lost.
Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
She is thinking about Adam and Eve and Cotterhall Man and Steve Nieman as the train comes to a standstill between stations. Nothing very unusual in that, though the Central Line is usually more reliable than the Hammersmith and City, which is always loitering in the dark. But the delay prolongs itself for minute after minute after minute, and her fellow passengers start to look at their watches. Faro can’t see hers as both her hands are busy trying to stop the basket from slipping off her knees, but she guesses that over five minutes have passed, and still nothing is happening. Most people are sitting dully, like stunned cattle, but one or two are beginning to rustle and exchange anxious or irritable glances. Fortunately the carriage is not full of dangerous psychopaths or hysterics—the week before on her way back from the office Faro had found herself sitting opposite a youth with an enormous transistor and a broken bottle, with which he was systematically slashing the upholstery while muttering to himself in an unknown tongue. There’s nobody like that on board today. A selection of men in suits, some middle-aged women, some tourist types, a couple of black girls laughing together over a film magazine. Nobody here will run amok.
Ten minutes pass. There is no announcement. A murmuring revolt seems about to begin. One passenger starts sniffing the air and says he can smell smoke. This is not helpful. Everybody, except for the tourists, is thinking of the King’s Cross fire, in which so many lost their lives underground. Faro can’t smell smoke, but she can smell a nasty black oily fuel-like smell. Perhaps it’s only the stinking newsprint of the
Evening Standard
being read by the fat chap sitting next to her, whose bum and left elbow are encroaching on her body space. How long are they all going to sit without protest? Why had they come down here in the first place? Faro doesn’t look forward to arriving at her destination, but she doesn’t want to be suffocated or smoked or burned to death down here either. She resolves not to panic, and to think of higher things.
Henri Bergson argues, if she remembers rightly, that consciousness is a by-product of mobility. Most plants draw their sustenance directly and unmediated from the ground in which they live, but animals are obliged to move in search of food and prey, and they become conscious as they do so. The vegetable is condemned to rooted torpor, the animal to hungry movement. And thus we evolve, and they stay where they are. Bergson had made some interesting points about those halfway species, the fungi and the insectivorous plants, but Faro can’t remember what they are. Was it Bergson who had called fungi the blind alleys of the vegetable world? Maybe the human species has evolved too far, maybe we all move around too much, too pointlessly, and consciousness will implode upon itself.
Faro doesn’t know what Bergson would make of modern restlessness. Freud had thought that travel and transport were bad for the health, and on the present showing, he would seem to be right. It can’t be good to spend too much time on the London Underground. But maybe Bergson would have argued that the impulse to travel is an evolutionary necessity, that we are seeking ways to jump the planet and escape entropy. We are working out our escape, even as we sit underground in the dark.
Bergson had suggested that we might learn how to escape death itself. Freud would have made short work of that suggestion. But Bergson may have been right.
Faro sits tight, and starts, despite herself, to think about Sebastian Jones and his pancreas. She has looked the pancreas up on the Internet, that twentieth-century magnet for the hypochondriac, and has found little comfort there. True, there are accounts of successful pancreas transplants, with prices given in dollars, and there are portraits of sections of benign tumours, but these are outnumbered and outweighed by grim statistics. Faro has stared at slides of marbled, blotted and blotched cellscapes, representing
Malignant Tumour, Ectodermal, Excellent
and
Malignant Tumour, Ectodermal, Good.
She can’t see anything very good about them. The pancreas, which in its natural state is light tan or pinkish in colour, has been dyed in virulent laboratory shades of purple and green and red. Its cells splurge and cluster. A transplant, without an accompanying kidney, costs somewhere in the region of two hundred thousand dollars. Symptoms of a diseased pancreas include abdominal pain or pressure, relieved by leaning forward, which she supposes may account for Seb’s habitually hunched and bowed posture. Also one may expect a yellowish skin, weight loss, weakness and darkness of the urine. Faro has never seen Sebastian Jones’s urine, and does not wish acquaintance with it now.
Faro pictures Seb sitting on his couch, hunched into himself, as though his body would cave in upon itself and devour its own entrails.
Faro is not up to comforting a sick man, but she is even more incapable of refusing to try to do so. It is all very unfair. Why isn’t his mother there, looking after him? Surely vicars’ wives are trained for that sort of thing? Faro had had enough of deathbeds with the death of her father Nick Gaulden, the first anniversary of which is fast approaching.
The train moves on, eventually, and carries her onwards, towards the condemned man. When she gets there, she finds Seb isn’t in bed at all, he’s sitting, alert and intent, on his unspeakable couch, watching a video. He doesn’t even switch off as she lets herself in, though he does grunt in acknowledgement of her arrival, then waits to the end of a sequence before pressing the pause button. He is watching an early black-and-white version of
Frankenstein.
The high-browed balding frozen monster peculiarly resembles Sebastian himself, Faro cannot help thinking.
Slowly, Seb heaves his feet off the couch, and sits there, leaning slightly forward, hunched, in what Faro must now consider his pancreatic position. Then he pats the fraying foam cushion seat next to him, inviting her to sit. She goes to sit by him, and takes his hand in hers. It is white and cold and dry. He lets her hold it. She massages it, gently, trying to impart warmth, trying to transmit the vital spark. Seb shudders and does not return her friendly pressure. She continues to squeeze and rub, and sighs heavily.
‘Oh Seb,’ she says, ‘who would have thought it?’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Seb.
This uncharacteristic remark convinces Faro that he is not faking. But he follows it up with a request so dreadful that Faro is confounded.
‘Descend with me,’ says Seb. ‘Descend with me.’
A pulse of hysteria leaps through Faro’s head and flickers in terror.
Descend with me?
What can he want of her? A nerve twangs at the base of her skull, and the small sharp pain shoots upwards to lodge behind her left eye. Whatever she does, whatever she says, will be inadequate, trivial, risible. How dare he trap her and test her like this? Will he play with her as a cat with a mouse? Is this the waiting game he has been playing throughout their unsatisfactory and pointlessly protracted relationship?
Faro is a healthy young woman who does not want to have to think about the last things. She does not want to descend. She likes the light and the sun. She wants to sit on a sunny bank with butterflies about her. This gloomy apartment is as near the grave as she wishes to go. All the things that are in it speak of death—the unwashed sheets on the unmade bed in the poky little bedroom, the shower room with its dirty plastic curtain, the kitchenette with its unwashed plates, the piles of old sci-fi and horror magazines stacked in corners, the 1988 wall calendar portraying a street scene in Kampala. They all mark time for ever. The dust which lies on ledges, the London grime on the windowpanes of the old-fashioned broken-corded sash windows. Faro is not a tidy person, but her flat shines like an advertisement for Mr Muscle Home Cleaner in comparison with this place. Faro looks around her, desperately, as though the room itself will rescue her and give her some lines.
‘I brought you a chicken,’ croaks Faro at last, letting go of Seb’s hand.
Seb grins, his skin stretching. His teeth look too big for his face.
‘I’m not so ill that I can’t get to the pub,’ he says.
‘I’m not going to the pub,’ says Faro, suddenly leaping to her feet and going to stare out of the window. ‘I hate that pub. I’ve always hated that pub. I’ve never been able to see what you see in that pub.’
Seb’s flat is on the second floor back of an eighteenth-century terraced house which has seen better days. It looks out onto a small courtyard, in which grows a small thorn tree. It is overlooked by the backs of tall buildings of the sixties—an office block, the service area of a cheap hotel. It is a little corner of old London, and it is dying, even if Seb is not. Faro stares out stubbornly at the tree.
‘OK,’ concedes Seb. ‘We’ll have some chicken.’
So Seb and Faro sit at Seb’s cluttered little table, which is almost as unhygienic as Auntie Dora’s, though its layers are differently constituted. It is strewed with dirty ashtrays, cigarette packets (and yes, like all diseases, cancer of the pancreas is linked to heavy smoking), bottle tops, paperback books, a bruised apple, a spotted banana, ballpoint pens, paper clips and two potatoes, green and sprouting transparent waxy fingers from their many sickly eyes. Faro eats a mouthful of cold chicken and wonders if she dreamed those words she thought she had heard.
Descend with me.
No, people do not talk like that, in the late twentieth century. They talk and they live in the upper reaches, in the rapid shallows. Nobody goes down there anymore, not even the dead and the dying. There is nothing down there anymore.
Cotterhall Man with his long yellow shanks appears to Faro, as she silently chews on the dry white breast. He had been killed by a blow to the head. Seb, it seems, will die a lingering and medicated death. It’s a sort of progress.
Nowadays, thinks Faro, as she clears up the dishes and piles them into the dirty sink, we go in for grief management and all that kind of nonsense. Or we write newspaper accounts of our mortal illness, or we die on camera. It’s a very long time since people believed in God, and the Resurrection of the Body, and the Life Everlasting. If they ever did. All this horror trip, thinks Faro, is a religion substitute.
Descend with me.
Where to, for Christ’s sake? Faro shudders, tosses her head, and splatters water from the balding washing-up brush, as she flutters about restlessly like a stuck moth trying to free itself.