The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  ‘I do. Honestly I do. Before you all arrived we were having a long talk.’

  ‘Or he’ll fade out. He’ll absolutely fade out.’

  ‘Don’t you think we look after him well?’

  ‘Look after – yes. Look at him!’

  ‘Why should he fade out? I see him as a sort of dark spark. He can be brought to life all right. But it takes constant fanning. Bellows even.’

  ‘Use them then!’ He went quickly past her into the room where Mrs Imrie had already started the conflagration. Chimneys were crashing in the street, red, green and orange flames unravelled from window to window, and from one a white bundle dropped, then another, to the gasping crowd below. Great swirls of living sparks were being blown for miles along the rooftops. No gush of water could quench these. No hosepipe, however long, catch up with them.

  Mr Abson stayed with the Imries for two months more and then his work, whatever it was, took him to a neighbouring town where he remained another three months. And there he died. Three months ago. They had almost forgotten him. Or at any rate his face was not absolutely clear any more. But the manner of his death which they found in a newspaper, hearing further details from an acquaintance who lived in that town, jolted their memory in a peculiar way. He had failed to get out of the way of a lorry, the paper said. He had stepped out, said a witness, and stood still.

  ‘No, it was not deliberate, if that’s what you mean,’ said Mrs Imrie to a friend who had come in. ‘If it says “failed to get out of the way” then that’s exactly what it means. I wouldn’t say, now I come to think of it, that I ever saw him do anything exactly deliberately, would you, Brenda?’

  ‘Never. It would be that he didn’t know whether to put his feet backwards or forwards. I’ve seen him do just that on the thresholds of doors.’

  ‘You will never really know, will you?’ said the friend.

  ‘Never know what?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s all right.’

  ‘It’s terrible,’ said Mrs Imrie. ‘Poor man, he should have shown more in his face. That would have helped him. It would have helped people to take notice of him too.’

  ‘He would be clear enough to the lorry-driver,’ said her son. ‘It’s going to add another ghastly hazard to life if you’re only visible to motorists if you’ve got an interesting expression.’

  ‘He only thought of things later when he was in his own room. That wasn’t good for him, was it? Like secret drinking or something. I should have interrupted him oftener.’

  ‘Why are we talking like this? Could we help that bloody great lorry bearing down on him?’

  ‘Oh, how I sometimes wanted to give him a push!’ exclaimed Mrs Imrie. ‘If I could have given him a push when he was standing there – one hard push – it would have saved him!’

  ‘Rooted. Rooted to the spot,’ said the girl. ‘What does that remind you of? Are you thinking of a tree?’

  ‘Am I what?’ said her mother.

  ‘If he’d even learnt to dance, oddly enough,’ said the girl. ‘There are people who learn to dance simply to help them move their feet properly – to balance themselves. Did you know that? Hospitals send them.’

  ‘Hospitals now!’ cried Mrs Imrie, holding her hand to her head. ‘So now you make out he was a sort of patient. Some kind of case, I suppose.’

  ‘It never even crossed my mind. I simply remember he sometimes asked about dances I’d been to.’

  ‘Near enough a case,’ said the friend, ‘if he just stood there.’

  ‘What are we talking about now?’ said Mrs Imrie. ‘Has it come round to this again? “Failed to get out of the way” – I interpret that simply as I see it set down on the page.’

  ‘If you can see it simply,’ the friend said.

  During the next few days they could have been no more acutely aware of Abson had be been following them around from room to room over the whole house. His death lit him up for them. He flickered with a red, unnatural light which flared or sank as their feelings about him flared or died. He was not silent. His identity demanded constant discussion and examination. Yet what did they know about him? They had scraped their memories. At the end of the week the girl, for the second time, rang the young man who had sat by the fire.

  ‘You’ll come round and help us out, won’t you?’

  ‘If I can. Are you still brooding?’

  ‘Oh, we’re stuck. It’s hateful. We’d almost forgotten him. And now this. We’ve got to start again, and there’s nothing to go on. He didn’t talk about himself and neither did we.’

  ‘Why not forget him again?’

  ‘How can I? I’ve got to get him clear first, if he’s to be properly washed out. What was he like?’

  ‘Look – I met him once only – at your house.’

  ‘But you had a feeling for him. Say something about him.’

  ‘It’s you who must say it. Or you’ll be haunted.’

  ‘Haunted by nothing! All I can think of is a spark and a tree. And don’t ask why. I don’t remember how they came in or when.’

  ‘Well think of them, then. Think hard!’

  Later that evening, still having nothing to go on, she did think of them; for she was standing outside the open door of his room looking in at the place where, according to him, he had gone over and over things. What things? It was bare-looking now – a small room but with a high ceiling speckled in minute and scabby stars. A tree might grow in here. With an effort she could see it – this dry, grey tree with branches twisted at right angles round the corners of the ceiling and roots that had to bend back to fit the wainscoting. A rustling, creaking, cracking thing, dry to its sapless marrow. At first the dark spark settled lightly there like a crumb of dry ash, dead in the dead, bedroom air. Nothing kindled it here. It needed nothing, but took its life from some stupendous unknown fire blazing away miles from here. And gradually a microscopic speck of red began to burn at its centre. No movement fanned it, but still it expanded, fraying at its edges into palpitating spangles of rose-colour. Suddenly it ruptured, falling away into other sparks which went rolling and spinning along the branches, dropping down and falling apart again, multiplying, sprouting buds and shoots, roots, leaves, blossoms and fruits of green and yellow fire. The tree burned in silence. No part of it was reflected on the walls or the star-scabbed ceiling, and not a spark or speck of ash fell to the ground. At last a single white flame burst from the root and ripped up the length of the tree, reducing it in one flash, like the slashing upstroke of a knife, to ash and blackness. Then to nothing. Spark and tree went out.

  ‘I feel better about him now,’ the girl told her mother and brother that night after supper. ‘I can put him out of my mind.’

  ‘How’s that?’ her mother asked.

  ‘When you put everything together, looking back, you can see he was really alive.’

  ‘Was he?’ said her brother. ‘But now he’s dead.’

  ‘He wasn’t dead all the time though. Not grey as we thought. If he’d been dead alive as well as dead dead – that would finish me! But I can forget him!’

  ‘But he’s dead now,’ said her brother. ‘He stepped off a pavement.’

  ‘I prefer to think of it as going up in flame,’ said the girl. ‘It suits him – the way I’m thinking about him now. The way he was really alive all the time.’

  ‘Prefer all you like,’ said her brother, ‘but that’s the way it was. He stepped off a pavement.’

  ‘Don’t remind me of that fire,’ said her mother with a shudder. ‘Don’t ever bring that up again.’

  A Visit to the Zoo

  THE SHOCKING TITLE, stinging us instantly to attention, was read out one afternoon amongst the usual fortnightly choice of essay subjects: A Visit to the Zoo. We were in the highest class of boys and due to leave school in a few months. After a stunned silence these words were greeted with incredulous whistlings, loud and prolonged hoots, sickened groans and a great shuffling and stamping from the back seats where young men with brillianti
ned hair and narrow shoes were sitting, casually hacking great slivers from the underside of their desks with outsized penknives. Our English master, who was new to the job and unsure of himself, quickly withdrew the subject, explaining that it had got mixed in with a set from some lower form. But the damage was done and it was a long time before the class settled down. A sense of outrage hung menacingly around, ready to ignite explosively with the chalk and dust in the dried-out air at the first hint of further offence. Gradually, however, still muttering savage threats, we sank heavily to the business of writing, after making our reluctant choice between The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Political Career and The Dangers and Benefits of the Space Age – giving only a scornful glance at Whirlpool which had been thrown in as the sop to those who had more imagination than knowledge. Yet throughout the whole hour from its blank beginning to the frenzied bout of last-minute writing, I felt the impact of that subject which had been withdrawn. It was indeed the one topic which for a long time I had been at pains to avoid, but here it was now forcing itself up unexpectedly like something painfully green and fresh amongst all those stony opinions which I was doggedly setting down on paper.

  Almost three years before a young woman had come to live with my family for several weeks. I knew nothing about her except that she was a cousin of my mother’s, that she was convalescing from a serious illness and that she expected to be left quite free all day to go out and in as she pleased. Two or three bottles of brilliant-coloured tonics, placed there by my mother, appeared on the bathroom shelf amongst our normal collection of dingy brown ones, throwing stained-glass wedges of light into the bath on sunny days but remaining corked throughout her visit. Nor did she appear to follow up any of the suggestions being offered on all sides as to the best method of ‘taking her out of herself’. For it turned out that the one and only cure she had chosen for herself was to go often and alone to the zoo which was on the other side of the city.

  I was on holiday – the only young person in the house and it seemed obvious that, sooner or later, she would ask me to accompany her. At first I was both surprised and thankful that she did not; then I grew angry. Later, however, as I watched her going off day after day by herself, I believed that by not taking it for granted that I would have to be asked she had given me a certain value apart from the family and had somehow included me in the adult world where people could be free and separate from one another if they wished to be, with no reasons given. In this way I gradually, silently came closer to her, and indeed believed that I could share the emotions which kept her all day and in all weathers restlessly on the move.

  Then one day while casually drawing on her gloves she flatly enquired with an indifferent glance directed beyond me into the hall mirror: ‘And are you coming out today?’ We walked together to the centre of the city, moving silently and apart, going our separate ways with our own thoughts until we came to the junction of roads where a policeman directed three great streams of traffic. This place where there was hardly a person to be seen but only a steady whirl of glittering cars had for me an unreal and precarious brilliance that afternoon. Even the policeman seemed to take on the authority and abandon of some white-gloved clown who can draw a crazy collection of vehicles after him with a wave of the hand or keep them circling dizzily until he has decided at what corner he will point his finger. I followed with my eyes the direction of that hand down one broad street as far as the eye could see to where it narrowed and a faint green of trees could be seen. They were still the dusty city trees, sparsely planted, and the zoo was still a long way beyond them, but that day, for the first time, I saw this greenness with a painful shock of pleasure.

  Now, day after day, we went to the zoo. Sometimes it was wet and we would be almost alone there, and on the stormiest days gusts of rain fell against the metal roofs of the monkey-houses like handfuls of sharp nails and even the enclosed pools were raked into miniature waves on which old crusts, orange peel and dusty feathers rocked desolately together. Sometimes it was so hot that after we had made a tour of the lower houses we climbed no higher but sat for a long time on a bench beside three empty cages which stood on their own in the shade of the only group of trees in that part of the garden. These cages had no labels; there was no way of knowing whether the animals there had died or been moved to some other part or whether the place was being prepared for new arrivals. In the heat we sat and stared at the dusty straw and the empty troughs wondering what the inmates had looked like, and my eyes would climb up and down the wire netting behind the bars as my imagination moved from ostriches and giraffes down to some almost invisible rodent hiding in the straw.

  ‘I wonder how old you are,’ she said one afternoon as we were sitting in the half-empty tea-house. It was unlike any other restaurant. Half of the roof was glass and on hot days there was an almost tropical atmosphere about the place. All round the walls grew tubs of tall, waxy green plants whose leaves were always damp from the quantities of steam which rose from the tea-urns at one end of the room. The concrete floor was sandy and children would pad silently back and forth carrying flashing glasses of lemonade which they drank holding them above the table, the straws tilted at an angle – thus keeping their chins high enough to see what was going on out of the windows. The smell of elephants penetrated to this place and above the high bushes one could catch an occasional glimpse of the two rows of children rocking by, perched back to back on an ornamental tray which swung like a hammock at every step. Long ago, in another age, I also had swung there. Now I was sitting silently at table opposite a young woman who had been watching me intently for some time while I finished my tea.

  ‘I’m fifteen,’ I replied, abruptly pushing my plate away from me.

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ she said, ‘but I’m wondering how old you are in other ways. I mean,’ she went on, leaning her elbows on the table, ‘what do you know about people – about men and women? Do you know, for instance, that they can illumine the most dense, the most boring objects or places or people for one another, and then, by one word or even one look, turn the whole world to iron?’

  I looked up quickly. But she was smiling slightly as though to take back a little of the impenetrable hardness, the numbing coldness she had put into that last word, at the same time looking aside again through the hedges, to imply that it was not after all a real question which required an answer but simply a statement of fact which needed only mutual recognition. I had not taken my eyes off her, but now she appeared, in the space of a few seconds, to be quite changed. She was a person who had at last spoken directly to me, who had broken through the restless, drifting indifference of the last few days with something unequivocal as a shout or a fierce gesture of the hands, and I tried to hold her there at the point where this momentary and precarious contact had been made by taking a more careful note of her appearance.

  Her hair was straight and dark, with a faint bronzing of lighter colour at the back of her head where it was intricately plaited and twisted up into a heavy coil like a great unripened blackberry. In front it was brushed well back from a smooth, narrow brow which, while absorbed in some thought, she would often touch, tapping her fingers gently between the eyebrows, then drawing them firmly up over her brow and carefully round the temple down to the cheekbone, as though she found deep lines there corresponding with certain ineradicable grievances in her own heart. She had fine dark eyes but most of the time she seemed to look at things with a peculiarly blank and fixed stare as though she would not bother to see objects unless they presented themselves within a very limited field of vision which for her was usually straight ahead. One had the impression that only at this particular spot were human beings clear or even human before disappearing into the amorphous background from which they had emerged. She seldom followed them with her eyes. Occasionally she would drop her head and tuck her chin down into the folds of a broad scarf of blue silk which she wore even on warm days and drew up over her head if it was wet or windy. In this position, and wit
hout moving her head, she would stare up and down her person from toes to bosom with the same blank indifference with which she might look down at a flat and uninteresting landscape. I remembered all these things clearly now. I also knew in a flash that the extra bottles in the bathroom – the tonics, the laxatives, the vitamin pills – were all nonsense; my mother’s insistence on gritty brown bread, her references to deeper sleep, extra milk and fresh air – meaningless. All these were no more a likely cure for love than a bandage over the finger for some internal injury.

  From that afternoon all the childishness of the zoo disappeared for me, and as the days went by its whole character changed; its cruelty and beauty, its strident colours and harsh cries gradually took the place of all those mild and comic impressions I had experienced there as a child. Now something savage and sad brooded far back in the darkness of the cages we passed. When I stopped to listen I would hear sounds I had not been aware of before – strange rustlings and whistlings from hidden birds, those unidentified croakings and hoots belonging rather to midnight than to noon; and sometimes there came a howl, heart-freezing, yet so distant that it seemed to come, not from the trim confines of the garden, but through the black arctic air and across miles and miles of snow-covered plain.

  Everything that had been associated with earlier visits faded out. The animals themselves had changed. Now it was horrible to remember that I had ever expected them to clown for my entertainment – painful even to stare too long at the yawnings and scratchings, the sudden blows and caresses, or to meet the brooding, yellow eyes which stared back, unblinking, at grimacing human faces. Even the seals, flopping off the hot boulders, or rocking from side to side on their flippers ready for a fish to come hurtling through the air, looked mournfully out of place. No longer hypnotised by the velvety backwards and forwards padding of the lioness, I waited only for the slow, swinging turn she would make at each end of the narrow cell, and heard, with a sinking of the stomach, the soft swish of her great shoulder as over and over again with sickening regularity it brushed the same spot on the wall.