by Joan Aiken
That was because I fought against the rigid rules enforced in the kids’ ward. Sick children must be firmly disciplined, Sister Coverdale said, or their treatment can’t be carried out properly. Maybe she was right. Children’s wards are where young trainee nurses are broken in, because if you can stand it, you can take anything. But it turned out that I could not take it. I was permanently in a rage over what seemed to me inhumanity and stupid, thick-skinned inflexibility; either that or I was passing out cold on the floor.
“Oh, God: Smith’s fainted again,” I was continually hearing as I came to on the pale-green composition tiles among chromium legs and rubber wheels. Smith was the name I had adopted then, Mars-Smith being too much of a mouthful for the hospital staff. But Cathy Smith is a hopeless name for the theatre, you might as well call yourself Miss Blank Blank; besides, there were half a dozen others on the Equity roster when I applied, so I reverted, for stage purposes, to Masha’s maiden name, and called myself Cat Conwil.
Oddly enough, I haven’t fainted since those days.
Though glad to escape, in most ways, I felt sorry and ashamed at being defeated by the demands of nursing. As a discipline it interested me. Passing the exams was no problem. I guessed that Papa would have been disappointed in my failure, but he was off in his own realms by then, out of human touch. — First, there had been the embarrassing incident in Yetford church. At the moment when he should have begun preaching one of his solipsistic sermons he began, instead, slowly and fumblingly removing his clerical regalia. Then, before the alarmed and startled eyes of his small congregation, he removed shirt, trousers, and the expensive thermofibron undervest that Masha made sure he always wore. Then, off came the thick socks and full-length thermofibron underpants. Then — but why go on? It was too disgusting and upsetting, for the congregation at least. Masha, I’m happy to say, took it in her philosophical stride. “What does it matter what people think?” was one of her maxims. — But she did hate having to leave the big peaceful roomy vicarage at Yetford, and the patch of blue squills under the cedar tree. They moved into a dismal little residence on the outskirts of Reading, funded in part by some Trust for the support of ailing indigent clergy, and in part by me. Papa never noticed. By that time he was living on an imaginary desert island. “It is very inconsiderate of you,” he would say crossly, “to summon me at this moment when I was contemplating the immensity of the Ocean.” Sometimes the island appeared to be Bermuda, sometimes Iona. Masha chuckled about it, but I felt that this bizarre, self-created liberation of his came particularly hard on her. She had always passionately longed to travel, to see Delphi, Rome, Santiago, but in the days when he would have been well enough, he was too busy to get away, and later their straitened means made travel out of the question.
Masha longed for wilderness. Brought up among Welsh mountains, she craved the Rockies, the Andes, the Urals, the Himalayas. One of the postcards she kept stuck up in the knife-rack in the pantry was a painting by the nineteenth-century American, Bierstadt (Tasha had brought it back from a New York ILO conference)—view of a mountain, monumental, majestic, tree- and snow-clad. “Oh” I can remember my mother sighing, “do you suppose that place still exists?”
I knew what she meant. Things change so fast now. You go back to a place, it has been razed, gutted, and high-rise monuments erected over its grave. One has a feeling of total insecurity, that this might happen to any loved thing: suppose, for example, that you picked up Hamlet and found that it had been completely rewritten, as the city of Worcester has been disembowelled and rebuilt, that the original play had been lost for ever? What a nightmare.
“Oh,” breathed Masha wistfully. “If I had a car, and could drive, I’d get into it and drive away, on and on, and never stop . . .”
I think that was the only rebellious remark I ever heard her make.
I knew, though it was below the level of communication, that she was deeply disappointed when Papa gave up medicine and went into the church. For she hated waste, above all things. I’d had a sort of cockeyed notion that my becoming a nurse might redress this balance again. (Though whether it is better in the eye of God to drive a Bentley and take a pleat in somebody’s cortex every other day, or preach to five rheumatic old ladies every Sunday in a damp village church, who can say?) Anyway after my second hospital fiasco I moved to London, took various jobs in department stores, found that earning a living is no problem if you are single-minded about it, which I was, because of sending money to Masha; and then by degrees I shifted into theatre circles. I discovered that I could make extra money by modelling at art schools, a friend at the Slade recommended me for a TV commercial, and I began attending night classes in acting. Oddly, my main driving force was Masha. Stout by now (on a poor diet of stodge, the best bits of meat always for Papa), solid, weathered, round-faced as a babushka, with a peasant’s craggy, landscaped features, my mother would have seemed the very last person to nurture hopeless longings for a stage career. Yet she had been an active member of the university dramatic society at Cambridge, and gave talks on the Drama at Women’s Institutes — talks which ought to have been way above the heads of her hearers but were presented with such lively humour that villagers flocked to them.
I was her safety valve. She made no secret of her delight when I began making appearances on TV even if it was only to press a tube of Molarbrite denture cleaner into the hand of my sceptical husband. Masha, utterly unassuming herself, was consumed with fiery ambition for me and longed for my name in lights on Shaftesbury Avenue. I tried to persuade her to transfer these aspirations to Fitz — but, though she loved him so deeply, it was hard for her to identify with the urge to write a treatise on the structuralist elements in Heidegger.
These and other thoughts of Masha made me sorrowful as I drove back towards Knoyle Court from Dorchester. I would be glad, I thought, when we finished location shooting and returned to the clatter and sociability of studio work in London. The emptiness and silence of the country remind one too forcibly of loss and loneliness, the haunting green landscape — and the landscape of Dorset is particularly haunting, the comma-like curves of those sharp little hills are set at improbable uptilted angles like the waves and volcanoes of Hokusai, the land looks as if it has been deliberately rumpled up by some almighty inspired fist on one of His more inventive days — all this ravishing countryside made me feel humble and sad.
A sharp clatter of gunfire broke out as I turned the car south-eastwards towards Knoyle, reminding me that one reason for the landscape’s idyllic emptiness lay in the presence of the Army who had somehow got their clutches on vast acreages of ridge-land just north of the coast.
ROAD CLOSED TO CIVILIAN TRAFFIC proclaimed several signs on minor roads to my left as I drove seawards, and other signs, even more forceful, said KEEP OUT! UNEXPLODED SHELLS. Wild-life, they said, throve in these army-occupied regions, birds, badgers and wild flowers multiplied and proliferated; so perhaps it was of no importance that humans were not allowed there to strew broken glass, plastic, filthy paper, rusty cans, weekend cottages and caravans along the coastline; people have wrought all the havoc they can elsewhere, one should be thankful to the Department of Defence for sparing this area from their destructive presence. Armoured personnel carriers and target practice were things that foxes and primroses could come to terms with, as they could not with Homo Domesticus.
Steering away from the KEEP OUT signs I bore westwards again, avoiding the road to Caundle Quay. Such a charming name, but I had been there once, and once was amply enough. The dismal desolation of Caundle Quay entirely justified any claims made by the Department of Defence that their use of the Dorset countryside was far more desirable than that of H. Domesticus.
Caundle Quay ought to have been a coastal hamlet of seven houses and a pub set snugly steplike down the zigzag windings of a brook which had carved itself a steep stairway through the folded cliffs to the sea. But thirty years ago a speculator acquired half a
dozen fields at the top of the village and bought himself permission to put four hundred trailer caravans into them. The brook was now choked with filth from April to October; the grass and rocks by the sea’s edge were grimier and more trampled than the pavements of Oxford Street; even in winter a squalid indestructible legacy of plastic, rubber, and dirty nylon rags festooned the brambles and hazel bushes for half a mile round the site.
I had gone there, long ago, with Fitz and Masha, thinking that the place looked inviting on the map; but it made her so sad and him so disgusted that the very name on the signpost now made me press my foot down on the accelerator.
How strange, how frightening it is that, for so many thousands upon thousands of years, people had lived in Dorset, in Iron Age and Bronze Age hamlets, had done remarkably little harm, dug a bit of metal out of the ground, made a few weapons, killed a few of each other, herded cattle, tilled fields, piled up earthworks, fought a few battles, but not to excess; the balance of man in his surroundings remained stable, even when the Romans arrived, even when Hadrian attacked Maiden Castle and broke open its defences. Even in the last two thousand years slowly urbanizing man made little difference to the green curvy landscape; it is only twentieth-century man, homo moriturus, homo in articulo mortis, who in his dying frenzy has done such terrible damage.
Why has it happened? What cancerous death-wish made us multiply so fast, so wildly, made us begin inventing and creating at such a hectic pace, expanding, colonizing, consuming, covering the ground with our dwellings and our detritus?
Thinking these glum thoughts, longing for the comfortable matter-of-factness that Masha would bring to the subject, or the calm logic of Fitz, I recalled that I had on me, as a kind of talisman, his last letter to Masha. I had phoned him in Cambridge, Mass. and begged him to write to her; he had complied but the letter arrived too late. I bore it as a luck-bringer, a link with them both.
Beloved Masha, he had written in his clear beautiful hand, I am writing to you from a bench in Washington Square, having hitched a ride to New York for the weekend. What am I doing in Washington Square (which still looks like the place Henry James knew, though it is not)? I am watching men with wrinkled faces play chess on stone tables. What else is going on? So much that it would take a four-hour documentary film to record it consecutively — and then all the open endings would have to be left out. Two huge fat police armed with huge fat guns are cruising in a huge slow-moving car, watching everybody. A desperate penniless drug-user is roaming hysterically about, pleading “Smoke? Smoke?” No one pays any attention. Drug peddlers in bluejeans and leather jackets and black glasses are ignoring him, standing in a loose, sinister group looking for custom. A man who might be Russian with a shock of pale-grey hair and bushy beard sits under the stone Washington Arch playing a slow mazurka on a piano of which the case is missing. How did he manhandle the piano to that spot? What will happen if it begins to rain? A small crowd politely listen to him. He can’t be heard except near at hand for, in the middle of the square, two different rock groups with amplifiers are kicking up a terrific racket. East of them, roller skaters are operating on a clear paved space, bobbing, bouncing, and wheeling exhibitionistically. A man in white leather kneebreeches is particularly expert. The skaters zip past each other as if they must collide, missing by inches, like water-beetles on a pond; perhaps they wear bow-waves of air that act as buffers. A fat man in red breeches and jacket is balance-walking along a railing with a lot of bounce and waggle and arm-waving to conceal the fact that he is really very skilful. Dogs are everywhere and so are their turds; you would hate that aspect of New York, Masha dear, but you’d love the children who are completely fearless and candid, leaping intrepidly off the swings and climbing-frames, calling each other in clear uninhibited tones, very different from the quenched English children you so much deplore. Some are on skateboards. They are as stylish as the adults. The black ones are so beautiful they make one feel God made a mistake inventing the white races. A spotty young white man in a pink velvet shirt just strolled past me; he looked sixteen and he was saying earnestly to his girl friend who looked fourteen, “It’s a strange thing but my father gets on much better with my son than my mother does with my daughter,” and she was nodding sympathetically and comprehendingly. Shabby moth-eaten squirrels are shooting about, up and down trees and across the grass (which has an artificial crumpled neatness like a green doormat); some of the squirrels are black. They have hostile, mean expressions; you would not want to meet them at a disadvantage, they might hold you up to ransom. A sad black man just passed me, he was saying to nobody, “It’s disgusting! But never mind!” I think of the village of Yetford where we lived for what seemed half my life; more has taken place in this square, in half an hour, than happened in Yetford in twelve years. I wonder if the actual texture of life varies from one century to another? What do you think, Masha? Does time go at a different pace? Has it accelerated recently? If you were here I’d skip the discussion forum on German nineteenth-century philosophy and we’d have dinner on top of the 104-storey World Trade Center and look at the view. I know you like a good view.
To read this letter in greater comfort I had parked my borrowed car in a wide gateway which led to a recently-cut stubble field. The stubble was a mild ginger-colour, inter-seamed with some fragile creeping green weed. In the middle of the field was a small dip, relic perhaps of an ancient burial barrow. To avoid observation from the road, I laid myself down in this dip. I was wearing, as it happened, a ginger-and-green dappled raincoat (for the weather, as usual in the south of England in August, was damp and misty) so snuggled into the dip with an agreeable feeling of protective coloration.
Peacefully reading Fitz’s letter to Masha, I fell peacefully asleep.
I was woken by a growing roar of sound so shatteringly loud that I thought I must be dreaming about Washington Square, and that the police had opened fire on the drug-pushers. My eyes flew open. All they could see was sky. Instinctively I shrank lower in my burrow. At that moment the whole sky above me blackened, a tremendous gale of wind whipped the sheets of the letter from my hands, and the noise intensified to a level far beyond what was tolerable.
Before I could make any sense of these events, they were over. The sound diminished, slightly, the sky cleared again. A helicopter landed, with rotors gradually slowing into visibility, about twenty feet away from me. It opened its hatch, put down a doorstep, and somebody got out.
By this time I had sprung to my feet. I remember once sleeping on the cliffs near Yetford and waking to find an adder coiled asleep beside me; I shot from horizontal to vertical with about the same degree of precipitance as on that occasion.
A furious voice accosted me: “Of all the idiotic places to lie down! What do you think you’re doing? I might have killed you! Lying slap in the middle of a field like that!”
With equal fury I retorted, “I’m idiotic? What about you? Couldn’t you see me?” with shaking hands trying to retie the green scarf I had knotted over Rosy’s hair.
“No, I could not!”
“Why land here, anyway?”
“Why not?”
“And you made me lose a letter which was of particular importance — look —”
The rotor blades had not only whirled away the pages of my letter but shredded them; they were now blowing away over the distant bank which gave, I knew, on to cliff and sea.
My voice shook with rage, fright, and general upset; I really hated losing that letter.
“Serve you right,” said he unsympathetically, “for choosing such a daft place to read it.”
His voice, clipped into a fashionable upper-crust executive crispness, retained in the vowels just a smidgen of north-country flavour.
Turning, he glanced after the disappearing fragments of my letter. He was, I judged, something over six feet tall, dark-haired; he wore a sheepskin jacket and flying boots. Seeing the letter was gone beyond recall he tu
rned again to glare at me. I glared right back; we were thoroughly displeased with one another.
The first thing I noticed was his eyes. Anybody would notice them first, because of their size and unbelievable blueness. Wide-set, stony, huge, round as owls’ eyes, they blazed at me like two circular holes drilled right through his head and out to the blue sky beyond. (For it had become blue while I slept.) I have never, on any other person, seen such an intensity of colour; they were luminous, incandescent, ferocious. Did they look slightly mad? Or just wholly detached? One imagines that successful religious leaders must stare about them with such fanatical dispassion. Above the eyes rose a high forehead crowned with a crop of thick dark hair. His ears were large, well-shaped and delicate; the mouth, wide, full, but sharply indented at the corners was compressed, as if he wanted to rearrange the line by pulling in the upper lip and flattening the lower. Perhaps it might show a trace of weakness if he did not take it firmly in hand? His eyebrows were thick and level, his nose jutted out formidably from a thin face with sharp-angled jawline.
Looking back at the eyes again I discovered they were deepset under triangular eyelids. He wore side-whiskers, a current affectation which looked silly on the forward-thrusting determination of the face. The whiskers, I noticed, were faintly grizzled, though he seemed young, early thirties I’d guess . . .
“Anyway,” he said, “what’s a letter? You can always have it replaced. People always keep copies of letters.”
He spoke with impatience; in his world people always did keep copies of letters. It had not occurred to him that there might be lost tribes or regions where this necessary precaution was omitted.
I shrugged. The letter was gone; I must accept that loss along with the rest; no use to argue. Putting aside my grief for later I wondered who this bossy stranger might be? A Head Boy from Pyramid no doubt — judging by his manner and mode of arrival. Had he come to tell us that further funding for Rosy and Dodo had been withdrawn?
