A World of Other People (5 page)

‘You promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Same time?’

‘Yes.’

And while he checks his watch as if only then having become aware of the time — or time itself, for that matter — she is dwelling on the word ‘promise’. On the fact that she has given her promise. And part of her is already insisting that her word is, after all, her word. While the rest of her is saying that next week is an age away and who knows what the world will look like then — or if either of them will still be in it. They might each be thousands of miles away. It’s the war, she smiles faintly, eyes on the horizon, then back to him. It’s the war doing that.

And so, with a faint shrug of the shoulders that says, well, I’m off now, she backs away, a farewell smile on her lips for a moment, then turns. But even when she turns she knows he is still standing there
and that he’s still watching. And part of her wishes he’d just go.

Soon she has left the square and is on the street and the young man (whose name she now realises she didn’t get) is invisibly back there in the park. Behind the trees. Possibly back on his bench. A statue at twilight.

But he is not. He is already walking slowly back through the green square to his stop, just like anybody else, and is dwelling on this thing that has happened. From the world of other people, somebody stepped forward — and the fragment that he had become saw the promise of the whole. Somebody stepped forward. I come from that world of easy laughter and carefree ways that you left behind, she said, and I shall lead you back into it. And as he walks through the park he looks down at the rose he is holding: deep red, rich red, petals like velvet. A rose in war-time, its red deeper, its petals richer for it. Yes, something has happened — to him, to the two of them. Only she doesn’t know it yet … or does she?

Outside the square, Jim (the name that Iris didn’t get, just as he never got hers — because names, jobs
and all the rest didn’t matter; it was one of those moments in which only the essentials matter) eyes the Senate House and the university buildings that he came to before the world decided to blow itself apart. For this is Jim’s London. This is the London to which he came in that distant time only a few years before the war — that playground of easy pronouncements — when he was twenty. When, after missing out on Cambridge and Oxford, he came to study at London University. He might have been disappointed at missing his first choices (especially Cambridge where Mr Wittgenstein taught, the same Mr Wittgenstein who once said to one of his colleagues, ‘Under no circumstances do I talk about the weather’: the same colleague who became Jim’s lecturer and who passed the phrase on), but from the moment he arrived he knew that London was his town. This was where he lived the life of a young man, for after nineteen missions over Germany and France he doesn’t think of himself as young any more. At twenty-four he feels old and tired. The spring in his one good leg has left his step. And for a year he has been neither happy nor sad, just sort of numb, the numbness that comes with unnatural aging. He is no longer in the world as
he was when he first arrived in London, but outside looking in. At least, that was how he felt until just now. Until he entered the park, sat down on a bench, looked up and knew in an instant that something tremendous had happened.

Something tremendous had happened to somebody in a book once. Can’t you feel it? one character had said to another. And the character to whom the question was addressed either couldn’t or wasn’t sure. So she said nothing. And Jim felt the same when he read it. He couldn’t feel it either. Worlds don’t shift. Not like that. Not so fast. No, he couldn’t see it then. But he does now. The book didn’t lie. For when somebody comes along it changes everything. In an instant. You, books, flowers — and he eyes the rose he still holds in his hand. He will keep this rose, and when he can he will press it into the pages of that same book, a deceptively light social satire, the name of which escapes him now, in which something tremendous happened. And there is a lightness, not to his step, but to his whole being, that hasn’t been there for too long. I come from the world of other people, she said, from that world out there that you left behind, and I will lead you back into it. Some
familiar, lost feeling has been roused from a deep sleep. From a long period of hibernation. And as he pauses on a corner, slowly twisting the rose, he realises that the feeling is hope. He hasn’t felt it for so long he’s forgotten what it is like. But here it is, back again, a familiar stranger knocking at the heart’s door, saying remember me? I’m back, open up.

And so when he looks upon these streets and buildings and rooms all around him it is with a new-found, or rediscovered, tenderness. Almost like a fond revisiting of childhood sites — even if his childhood was lived in another place thousands of miles from here. For Jim, as the letters on the shoulder of his uniform told Iris, is from the other side of the world. The Antipodes. That part of the world, on the other side of Wonderland, that Alice speculated on. The ‘Antipathies’. From the city of Melbourne, which often as not now feels like some mythical land that once existed but doesn’t any more. A sort of Atlantis. An Atlantis that sank beneath the waves the moment he left, for the place he left, he now knows, will never be the place he returns to. If he ever does. And when he left he was never sure if anybody in the rest of the world had heard of it anyway. When he first arrived in England in the summer of 1937 he
always added ‘Australia’ after ‘Melbourne’ whenever somebody asked where he was from, convinced that nobody would know of it unless he put it in a wider geographical context. More precisely, he is from the north of the city. From that Little Germany north of the river with suburbs bearing the names Brunswick, Coburg, Heidelberg and Essendon.

Jim’s suburb is Essendon. Essendon is Jim’s Melbourne. It was there that he grew up, there that he took for granted the wide open spaces of the suburb and the countryside that lay a short bicycle ride to the north and about which he has become more nostalgic over the years than he has cared to admit (and as much as Iris may have felt it a silly question to be asking about openness and space, and the brevity of his answer may have implied as much, it wasn’t), and it was also there that he practised his sport. For Jim is not just a sportsman. He is a very good one. Or was (his limp will never go and he will never play again). He was a footballer. And he played for that part of Little Germany that calls itself Essendon. He’d been thinking, at various times over the hour or so that he sat on the park bench, of those days when he was seventeen and eighteen, those two years that he spent
playing football on the oval that somebody years before, in an inspired moment, had called Windy Hill. It was a good name. Poetic, even. Though with the hint of a child’s storybook that told him, as if with his ankle he needed reminding, that those days had finished for him now.

As he leaves his old student area behind, he looks down at the rose. A few minutes ago he was alone in the park, now he’s wandering the streets with a flower in hand. The fragment has glimpsed the promise of the whole; somebody has come along from that world of other people and will lead him back into it, even if she doesn’t know it yet. All things happen at just the right time. This is his time, and he is ready now to re-enter the world.

He disappears into his tube stop, which will take him to King’s Cross and then north to his base in the Cambridgeshire countryside where he is an instructor. No more ops for Jim, not with that limp. Not since his plane crash-landed in the countryside north of the city.

She watches from the rooftop as he leaves the park. The others, Mr Eliot and the retired officers with
whom she shares her duties, are smoking and talking quietly. For the moment, though, she is removed from the group. Distracted by this strange young man whose life, in a small way, she has now entered. Or is it small? Perhaps this is what distracts her. This feeling that it is not small. The feeling that she is already being drawn in by him, this strange young man who cries in public parks.

She can pick him out, even from this distance. The blue of the uniform, the limp. Besides, the rooftop has a good view over the park, and the street corner around which a red bus is turning. He pauses from time to time in front of this building and that and she is curious. What thoughts accompany these pauses? At one point he looks down at an object he is holding and she realises it must be the rose. As he continues to walk into the distance she peers after him, shaking her head slightly. As much as she tells herself that she will simply forget this day and its events (the image of him standing before her with a rose in his hand still vivid), another part of her suspects that she won’t. That in entering this young man’s life she has also allowed him into hers. That, in short, something has happened. But what? She knows about flings and
boys and fumbling nights in college rooms, but little, it still seems to her, about love. For Iris, love is still something that other people discover and fall into, but not her. Yes, she’s had ‘flings’, as has her friend Pip, and they compared notes afterwards and both concluded that it hadn’t been ‘it’. ‘It’ remained a mystery. And though there is the ring in her drawer and the letters from Frank, that too has remained a puzzle. Whatever else her feelings for Frank may be, they’re not ‘it’ either.

As she watches the young man move on, pause at the corner, then pass from view, she asks herself vaguely if this is the way ‘it’ comes along. Does it creep up on you, then pounce? Not, she tells herself, that she feels remotely pounced upon, but this meeting, this brief encounter — as the phrase goes — has prompted these speculations. It was an odd encounter, of course, and she’s not just thinking of his hand suddenly clasping hers, which she still feels. But was there something beneath the oddness? She shrugs, as if to say who knows and who cares? I don’t. Enough. Glad to be out of it.

She turns from the railing and joins the group. But she is conscious of not being the same Iris who,
for the last year, has shared their company. No, this Iris is preoccupied as she smiles into the eyes of Mr Eliot, fire-watcher, church warden. Mr Eliot, familiar but distant; near, but forever out of reach. And as she watches him engage with the others — and he does engage, this she has noticed, but he engages at a distance — she glances back over the railing towards the park and the street, a ghostly, deserted air having settled on them, and once again asks herself if something has happened, and whether there are such things as casual promises.

In peace time the train ride from London to the town near his base would take less than an hour. But everything is slow now. The journey uses up the dregs of the afternoon. And what ration of light there is left is low enough to call dusk. It’s not dark, but the twilight is fading and he considers stopping at the local pub for a weak beer and something to eat, but with his sandwich still in the bag in his coat pocket he pushes on, taking the short cut across a farmer’s field as he so often did with his crew on the way back from forty-eight-hour leave. And it’s on occasions such as this that they re-assemble around him and walk that
mile or so to the base with him: Fleming, the second pilot; Smith, the front gunner; Barnes, the navigator; Swift on the wireless and Collet, the tail gunner. ‘F’ for Freddie. Eighteen ops. And not a hitch. Scarcely a bump in the night. Then, in the blink of an eye, gone. All of them. But on evenings like this they’re back again, seeming just as they always were. Not real, but not ghosts either — alive enough to be company. Like a gang,
his
gang. He can hear them. This could be any one of those evenings they trooped back together from the local over the same farmer’s field, taking exactly the same track that Jim is taking now. The same deserted farmhouse in the distance, the same rusted tractor that was always there; this very field where the dead feet walk. Words, favourite phrases, old jokes, the sound of familiar laughter, the same raised eyebrows that say just as well you can fly, Jim, because you can’t tell a joke, all only vaguely taken in at the time — but now coming back with a clarity they never had then. All of them, alive as they ever were, more so for being dead. Gone one minute, back the next. Especially at this hour with the sun down, the day done but night not yet begun, the hazy zone between the two that phantoms favour. How many
times did they all wander back along this path? And was he watching, was he really watching, or was he looking away? Likely as not, after the meal at the local, he was dreaming, not watching: dreaming of a giant steak and thick, buttered bread to mop up the juices. The likes of which he’d last had at home, and which he imagined he wouldn’t see again until he returned. For all his philosophical propositions, and for all those student hours that he spent in the realm of the abstract, Jim is a basic man. Or was. And would like to be again. He doesn’t think of giant steaks any more. He barely notices what he eats or drinks. When once he was famous for it. But that was another Jim. In another world. Or was. Until today.

For the world came back today. At least, the promise of it did. Enough to give him hope. I come from the world out there, this young woman who simply appeared before him had said, in a voice both familiar and soothing, almost like that uncanny fourth come to life. I come from the world out there and I will lead you back into it. But of course she won’t. Because she won’t be there when he returns. Why should she? Who is he to her? Some stranger in a park. And what a stranger, at that. He could
tell she just wanted to get away. And when you just want to get away you’ll say anything. No doubt she’s forgotten about him and their meeting by now. For what she experienced and what he experienced were two different things. His world has shifted; hers was merely interrupted. She will return to hers; he will not to his. If that brief encounter has done anything, it has done that. Nudged him back into the world, if only to leave him standing in it alone. But at least in it. No, she will not be there, and he will sit and wait on that same park bench at the appointed time next week until the light begins to fade, and he will rise and leave. That is how it will be. For if she remembers him at all it will be as the subject of a story, the centrepiece of an amusing anecdote, an odd type that she was foolish enough to inquire about. He the curiosity in a curious tale. She just wanting to get away. And saying anything to do so. No, what he experienced, what she experienced, are two different things. And the idea of a shared experience is a fantasy.