A World of Other People (14 page)

She comes to a stop in front of the black door in the tiny laneway where two phantom figures pressed against each other. She is no longer tired. She is beyond being tired. Everything is suddenly urgent. And there isn’t a minute to lose, for too many have been lost already.

Inside, she sits at the kitchen table and writes. A short letter that says all of this, that her mind had succumbed to nonsense when she last spoke to him on the telephone, that it was now free of nonsense and was clear. Please, please write back. Tell me that there is time, after all. And that if there is, we will live it together, all that time, until it runs out.

She has never written such a letter before. Such letters have been beneath her, written by silly people,
turned silly by love. But as she seals it, and writes Jim’s name and his base address on the envelope, she knows without doubt that it is the simplest, truest thing she has ever written.

It is exactly as the poem said. He follows a dirt road, more of a track really, rough and bumpy, running straight through the bare open fields, perhaps for a mile or so, he’s not sure, the hedgerows covered in a blossom of snow. Blossom out of season. Winter’s bloom. And he’s not even sure what he’s doing here but he follows this rough road up towards a scatter of buildings that calls itself Little Gidding and then comes to a pig-sty. He’s been up all night, and he must look it. But he barely gives it a thought. Besides, tired, washed-out faces are everywhere. Nobody gives you a second glance. Everybody looks like they’ve been up all night. And his night has passed as in a dream. Wandering through dark streets that followed no pattern, hardly knowing where he was, not caring. Beyond caring. What did it matter? That last look of Smith’s made nothing matter. Not any more. That last look, watching Jim back away from the plane as he hammered at the clear perspex window. What was in
that look? He asked himself again and again the same question as he rambled from underground shelter to church courtyard through one dark, twisting street after another, the snow falling steadily all night and he barely noticing it — what was in that look? Nothing other, he concluded, than the blazing desire to live and the utter astonishment that Jim could leave him. Just walk away. Back into the land of the living, leaving Smith to the flames.

Presumably, at some stage, somebody lifted a phone and reported it. A ball of flame doesn’t fall from the sky into a city park without somebody noticing. A phone call, setting in motion a well-rehearsed routine. Fire engines, ambulances, bells ringing in the night. He never saw any of it. Never saw them hose down his kite and reduce ‘F’ for Freddie to a sodden mess of charred remains. Never saw the steam rise from the carcass of the plane, the metal ribs of the fuselage exposed to the moonlight. Never saw it carted off in the first light before anybody could see the broken remnants of the bomber and the charred crew still inside, as though all of it, ‘F’ for Freddie, never existed. He never saw any of that because the world had already turned black.

Yes, it is just as the poem said. Just like a map, a directory. For he turns behind the pig-sty, and there is the church, a chapel really. And the house. The farming fields all around are covered in snow. He barely notices the cold; he has been cold all night. He is beyond being cold. And he is tired and worn out. More than worn out. Spent. He is more tired than he has ever been. And it is the kind of tiredness, he knows, that will not go away. That will leave him tired forever. All he wants to do now is sleep.

Why here? He can’t tell. He doesn’t know, not really. All he knows is that he finished up at the station that he always came back to after leave, from which he caught those slow trains that always took him back to the base. But as he looked around the station he knew he wasn’t going back to the base. He was never going back there again. It was simple really. He’d made his decision. The war, that whole world of bombs and planes and targets, could go on without him. His war was over. He’d come here to this tiny community instead, because he’d felt the overwhelming need for home, and, in the absence of it, this place was the nearest thing to home he could think of. It was as though the decision had been made during the night
in the hidden command post of his intuition, and Jim were just following orders. And now, gazing out over the snow-coloured fields behind the pig-sty, he knows it is the right decision. That there is something deeply satisfying about being here. Logical, even. And that pleases him. That somehow there is a logic to all this. His mind, that mind that took years to train, is still good. He is still functioning.

But he is tired. And all he wants to do is sleep. He looks again across the snow-covered rooftops and fields. It is neither a town nor a hamlet even, but a community. A religious one. They’ve got their own church. It’s an old one, with a plain grey facade, that has the look of a church that is used and cared for. There’s a tombstone at the front, covered in snow. But everything looks shut up. There is a small cemetery behind the church, and as he ambles about it he notices that the same family name crops up again and again. He tries the door of the house, but it is locked. He tries the church itself and it, too, is locked. Nobody is about. Whoever lives here has gone away. He is tired, and he just wants to sleep. I’ve had enough, a voice is saying. I’ve had enough. No more, let me sleep. And he wanders beyond the buildings
to a bare tree in a field that looks back to this small, closed-up community, and slowly, pulling his collar up and wrapping his coat around him, lies down in the hollow of the trunk. It is snug, like a crib. And warm. Deliciously warm. And he is tired. More tired than he has ever been. And from the moment he lies down he feels sleep coming on. From the moment he curls up in the hollow with his coat wrapped about him, he feels his whole body, his whole being, sinking into a delicious sleep. One of those stolen sleeps of childhood: drifting off in front of the fire in the lounge room in that distant Little Germany, in which there is no war and which acknowledges a different history and where the rhythms of sleep rise and fall to a different measure of time; that distant suburb in which he grew up, with the wireless in the background and the reassuring sounds of his mother and father talking quietly in the kitchen. And from somewhere in a sealed-off section of his memory the cries of Smith are released and come to him again, Smith’s eyes wide with disbelief as Jim leaves him to the flames. But they are distant cries. And distant flames. They don’t touch Jim. For from the moment he curls up in the hollow of the tree trunk he feels
his whole being sinking into a delicious, stolen sleep. The stolen sleep of childhood that is sweeter than all the sleep that follows. And the more he sinks into sleep the fainter those cries become. Until they fade altogether. And a voice, calm and reassuring, says: ‘You know what to do. Just close your eyes …’ He is home. He is by the fire once again in that Little Germany. The wireless is playing in the background. His mother and father are talking quietly in the kitchen. The world is as it should be. Everything in its place. The native has returned. The moon glances down upon the scene. All is well. He closes his eyes. Sleep envelops him. And the world turns black.

The field is white with snow. And the snow is still falling. Gentle, even snow. One tree stands in the field. An old, bare tree, its branches white with the blossom of snowfall. The small community is shut up for now, but later in the afternoon when the caretaker arrives, after he has checked the doors and the locks of the house and church, he will stand for a moment and look out over the field, at the tree covered in frozen blossom, and notice something odd. A dark smudge in the hollow of the tree. And as he nears
it he will realise that the smudge is, in fact, a man, hatless, wrapped in an air-force greatcoat, curled up as if in childlike sleep. And the figure will not stir as he approaches. And he will know, as he draws nearer, that it will not stir again.

The snow has stopped and the clouds have parted. The high sun is brilliant. The day is clear. It is mid-morning and Iris has just concluded a long call with a senior staff member. Not that she can remember half of what they said, for her mind is elsewhere, not here. And so when the telephone rings again she assumes it will be the same dry voice she has just been speaking to at the other end, and is surprised, but not particularly concerned, by the sound of an unfamiliar voice.

It is an official voice. A military one; she can tell that from previous work dealings with the military. They all seem to have the one voice, as though they
put it on with their uniforms. He gives Iris’s full name and asks if this is who he is speaking to, and she says yes. And when he’s satisfied he is speaking to the right Iris, he introduces himself. He is a captain and a squadron leader. And there’s something in his voice then that reminds her of the policeman in the movies who stands at the front door and says he has some bad news. He asks if she knows Jim, and he gives Jim’s full name and rank, which throws her a little because he’s always just been Jim. But of course she knows him, she says. She nearly adds that she more than knows him and is tempted to ask can she please speak to him, but she waits, telling herself that there will be time enough for that. And then, after a slight, uneasy pause, he goes on to say exactly what the policeman in the movies says.

It is then that the world goes dreamy. And when she looks back on this call, and the days that follow, she will look for the words to describe it and she will call it a dream. And she will float through these days, blown like a balloon. Life suddenly weightless, as insubstantial as dreams. For the odd thing about death (and she has just been told that Jim is dead, even though the captain doesn’t use that word; that
his body was found in a country field under a tree the day before), the odd thing about death is that it is not real. That it is a dream, almost too weightless to be sad, a dream from which you will surely soon awake. But not at the moment. Not today, not over the next few days or the months to follow, even. For, she will conclude, the sheer incomprehensibility of death takes a long time to absorb. If it ever is. And so from the moment she learns that Jim has been silly enough to go and get himself dead, and that her runaway horse has run away, the world becomes dreamy and light.

The line is silent. The military voice on the other end of the line is waiting. She is staring out the window, too lost in her own thoughts to speak. She’s calmly asking herself why would he do that? Why would he go and die on her? He can’t have. It’s too silly. It really is a dream. And when she looks back to the telephone from the window and finally speaks, her voice, she notes with a certain surprise, is calm and controlled. It hasn’t touched her yet. It will. Oh, it will. But not yet. Where? she asks. And he tells her it is a tiny place she will never have heard of. That nobody has ever heard of. One of those places that
only appear on the most detailed of maps. And it is then that he tells her that her name and number were found on a sheet of paper in Jim’s drawer (he seemed to keep no address book), along with a photograph and a letter (unopened) from her to him, which had been delivered that morning and which somebody had slipped under his door. And it is because of all this that he is calling her. Bizarrely, she hears her voice saying that she appreciates the call, her voice calm and detached. None of the girls in the office has noticed anything out of the ordinary. They pay no attention. They are working, and so, it would seem to them, is Iris. It is a work call. And when he is finished (and she can tell that it has been an awkward call for him, that he is what they call a good type, and notes that sometime during the call that dry, official voice fell away), she asks if she can see his things.

‘They’re being posted to Australia. Today,’ he adds, almost apologetically.

‘But I
must
see them.’

‘I’m sorry—’

‘I won’t take long. I can leave now. I must.’

There is a long and, it would seem to Iris, thoughtful pause.

‘This is highly unusual.’

‘Please, let’s call it a goodbye. We never had one. We quarrelled … Please … I can call it work. We can dream something up.’

‘You realise what you’re asking?’

‘Yes. But you see, there was so little time and I have so little of his, practically nothing. Only a lighter he forgot …’ It is here that she stammers and almost stops, but she gathers herself. ‘Just a short goodbye, that’s all I ask. Please, I must …’

He is quiet at the other end and she grasps immediately at the indecision.

‘Nobody will know I’m there.’

And she almost adds that she will float like a ghost in a dream and nobody will see her. Still there is silence at the other end and she waits for it to break, for she can sense that underneath the official voice there is something more human. Somebody who might bend the rules however briefly, someone who’s made too many calls like this one and is saying to himself what the hell, let her say goodbye. Just this once.

‘I’ll give you one hour.’

She breathes out and almost collapses with the sigh.

‘Thank you. That’s all I need. Thank you—’

He interrupts her before she can finish. He tells her the nearest town (not far from London at all) she must go to, and to catch a bus from there to a village a short walk from the base. At the gate she must ask the guard for him and he will let her in. For an hour and no more. And on no account may she tell a soul. This, he tells her, even though she doesn’t need telling, is a military area. And again she says thank you. He reminds her, in response, that she must not tell a soul.

She hangs up and stares out the window at the cold bright sunshine and feels again as though she has truly entered the unreality of a dream. Knows full well that when she looks back over these days and weeks to come it will be like looking back on some dark fantasia. A country field? Under a tree? Dead? No, it’s not possible. Not like that. And if anybody around her has noticed anything out of the usual, they haven’t said. Nor have they indicated with glances of concern that something must have happened. She has simply taken a call and now she must leave. She tells the woman at the next desk that she has an appointment and doesn’t explain anything more than that. Then she floats out of the office.

On the street she has a vague feeling of skipping school. The sun lights the buildings and cars and billboards. Everything going on: crowds, movies, traffic. Out there in the country, where she is going, rivers flow and invisible currents carry branches, leaves and occasional dead things down to the sea. This is what the world does when somebody dies. And it is as she mentally pronounces the word that everything touches her in a rush, really touches her for the first time, and death, for a split second, ceases to be a dream and pierces her heart so that she stops suddenly, shoulders heaving, and becomes the spectacle of a woman crying in a public place. Oh dear, she was doing well up until now. But now she needs to sit down and finds a step in front of a building to rest on so the moment, like a river to the sea bearing branches and occasional dead things, can run its course.

And when it has, she rises, for time is passing, and in the same way as she floated out of the office she floats across the footpaths and streets and is carried by the draught into the Underground.

The bus from North Huntingdon is on time and she sits staring out the window, wondering how many
times Jim took this bus and where he sat and what he thought of, as well as pondering all the little things about him that she never knew and never will. And it’s a lonely picture she imagines. Dreamily, she turns her gaze to a sign in the bus asking her if her journey is really necessary and she stares back at it asking what business is it of yours? Once more cursing the thin-lipped armies of the self-righteous, and all their thin-lipped advice and the mindless nods that come with it. But it’s the lonely picture of Jim to which she returns, Jim on the same bus, not so long ago, but long enough now to be another time.

At the village she crosses the common along a track leading to the base and asks herself again how many times he took this path. It is a longer walk than she expected, but she is still floating and is only vaguely aware of distance and time. At the gate a soldier eyes her curiously when she gives the captain’s name, then goes to a booth and makes a telephone call. A few moments later a young man, much younger than the voice on the telephone, approaches the gate and shakes her hand, and the barrier rises. She has, he reminds her, one hour. He will escort her.

There’s little to say that this was his room, or that it will be the room of anybody in particular in the future. It is a room in a hut, one of those huts that bear the name of their inventor, Mr Nissen, and which can be found on any airfield anywhere around the country. And there is something about that, the anonymous nature of the hut and the anonymous flyers who will pass through it for however long they have, that speaks of these days more than anything she’s seen before. She learns that this captain who has more or less smuggled her in was the one who sent them up on the night that Jim’s plane copped it. That he’d waited out there on the strip most of the night. But their plane never returned. And when Jim came back to them weeks later, smashed ankle and all, he pulled strings. Jim wouldn’t be part of a crew any more. No more ops for Jim. He was an instructor, and an officer. Besides, the Jim who came back to them wasn’t the same Jim who’d flown out that night. So he pulled strings, got him a promotion and got him a room. And this is it. May not look like much, but it’s better than most. There’s even a desk and a comfortable chair.

And it is then that he opens the drawer of the desk and the few possessions that were Jim’s are on display. The captain says he’ll leave her now for a while. And though she’s not aware of how she looks, she realises later that he must have seen from her face that she’s shaken, her eyes still red from crying, and that under the heavy coat she’s wearing she’s shivering, whether from the cold or everything else. So he suggests she sits down, and she nods, and drops into that comfortable chair, staring at the contents of the drawer. They also found these, the captain says just before leaving her, in his pockets — and he points to some folded papers on the bunk. By the way, he adds, if anybody happens to ask, she is a politician’s wife, here to organise a charity dance. And she nods blankly once more as he closes the door.

Before she examines the objects, she looks around the room — bare walls, bare window, bare floor. No wonder he touched and stroked everything in the flat that one and only night they had together, with the air of someone who’d never seen cushions or rugs or quilts before. No wonder, when this is where he took himself. Where he came to and from. But wouldn’t any more. And the sheer incomprehensibility of that
single fact still renders the events of the day a dream. And it is in the dreamy daze that she has been trapped in since the telephone call that she looks down and turns her attention to those few possessions that were his before they are posted back to those parents on the other side of the world whom she will never meet and of whom he spoke little. But soon they will receive them: Jim’s things, Jim’s war. Which ended under a tree in a country field.

There are letters from home, for she notices the Australian stamps and the return address on the backs of them. Melbourne. Another world altogether, she imagines. Another Jim. And she puts the letters aside, for she feels she has no right to read them. They are private, even in death. Especially in death. Words passed between the parents and their child: their child, who must have seemed too young to be going out into the great world, let alone getting involved in its wars; their child, whom they would always have held fast to seeing again. And it is as she lifts the letters and puts them to one side of the drawer that she sees it. The rose. Petals dried, flattened even, as though at some time they had been pressed into a book. And with the rose back in her possession so too
is the moment in the rose garden of the park when she offered it to him and said, ‘Here, give this to someone. Now, I really must—’ Then the clasp of his hand. Love, like faith. And she knows now, and she knew even then (if she’d cared to admit it to herself) that this was one of those moments that never go. That stay clear in the memory. One of those private moments that define and shape the private life in the same way as a meeting between leaders can define and shape the histories of countries. For the private life too has its
ententes
, its treaties, pacts and epoch-making moments. And this was one. This was theirs, sealed with a casual promise. She picks it up gently and brings it to her nose, but as she does a petal falls from it and, fearful for the rest, in case the whole thing disintegrates, she puts it back down as gently as she lifted it. Part of her will always be offering that rose, saying, ‘Here, give this …’ and never finishing the sentence.

Under some loose coins and an unopened pack of cigarettes is a slim bound volume, and she opens it at the title page. The
Tractatus
. Wittgenstein. The same Wittgenstein who, Jim was reliably informed by his lecturer (and Jim passed the anecdote on to her),
under no circumstances discussed the weather. She flicks through it, noting that it is well read, sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs, underlined. The last sentence especially, underlined three times: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’ It almost reads like poetry. And whatever it may really mean, she suspects it had its own private meaning for Jim. She glances at her watch and notes that she has already used up much of her time, and she slides from the back of the drawer an envelope containing, she discovers, a half-dozen or so photographs.

The first is one she knows well, for it is a photograph of her. One that Pip took before she ever met Jim and which she gave him because she thought it was a good photograph and she always photographed badly. If he was going to be looking at her while she wasn’t there this was how she wanted to be seen. Then there were shots of a late middle-aged couple she assumed to be his parents, standing in a suburban garden, on a suburban lawn, with a large, solid suburban house in the background, with a broad sky above: the mother with her gardening gloves in one hand, the father holding his spectacles. In one photo Jim is standing between them, just before he left perhaps. It has that
look. A last-get-together look. There is sadness in the mother’s eyes and stoic resolution in the father’s that this day, when their child, their only child, would go out into the great world without them, had always been coming, but did it have to come so soon? A quick look at the back of the photograph confirms this: ‘Mum, Dad and me in the garden, July 1937’.