The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books

by Elspeth Davie

  ‘I’ll have to rest,’ said Paula, breathing hard. ‘They are so steep here. I never knew it would take so long.’ Again with the strange, stiff, doll-like movement of the head she looked back. The man, walking very purposefully now, was taking a deep curve in towards the dunes. He was still a good way down and still going slowly – the black track of his footsteps now fading on the beach into mild, shadowy dents, soft and grey as velvet in the twilight. Now, slowly, deliberately, he started to climb the dunes. Paula put her hand to her throat in order to prevent some sound. It seemed to her that any sound would have been outlandish in this place where three persons were moving in total silence – all separated by their own thoughts and feelings – unpredictable feelings and even, perhaps, interchangeable – the fierce and the fearful, the predatory and passive, the tormented and the trustful.

  It had seemed for a time that Kate had no other thought in her head but an overwhelming tiredness and her tight shoe. Yet once or twice she raised her head and looked high beyond the fields to where a large expanse of brown land stretched up, studded with white and purple turnips. Mild, fat sheep roamed here. Now from their silent hollow and with the sea far behind, the girls could hear the quavering falsetto voices of these sheep as if they had apprehended their intruders even from a great distance away. And now Kate was sitting down, quietly spreading out her jacket like any summer visitor in the sand. ‘We’re in the most sheltered place on the beach,’ she said. ‘If only we’d brought food and found the place sooner we could have had a picnic.’ It was true this place was out of the wind for it was fringed with stiff, rustling grasses and so deep they could scarcely see over the top to other dunes. They noticed that the sky above was now streaked with long pink clouds all hurrying over to join the dense mass of blood-red clouds in the west.

  ‘No, don’t settle yourself,’ said Paula. ‘We’ve got to get on.’

  ‘Are you as cold as all that?’ Kate asked. For Paula was pale. She had climbed half-way up the sand-slope and was staring below her. There was no one to be seen either on the beach or on the dunes.

  Suddenly Kate gave a shout from the burrow and raised her hand – ‘Hi!’ Paula looked up quickly. The man in the grey muffler was walking directly above them along the high, hard ridge of the dunes. He looked down at them for a moment and waved casually. Paula tried to wave as well, but her arm was heavy as if she brandished a sword. She could scarcely move it. ‘Hi! You two!’ the man shouted. ‘Don’t get cold down there. The sun’s gone. You should have been back hours ago!’ He walked on, stumbling from time to time on the crumbling ridge and moving gradually away to be hidden amongst other hollows out of sight. ‘Do you know,’ exclaimed Kate after he’d gone. ‘I could have sworn he’d found that slipper and was bringing it back! Did you think that, Paula?’

  Her friend was silent, looking down. Suddenly she bent and picked something out of the sand at her feet. ‘Look, Kate – a fossil – right up here, after searching the whole beach down there! No, of course it’s not very exciting – the usual dots and dents.’ She held the pebble in her hand for a while. It was a round, light, porous thing. Yet it was dense as the earth. It contained the aeons of time, the fire and the ice, the plant, the fish, the mammal and the man. Fear and ferocity, love, hatred, and brave deeds were here. Here shame and distrust had come to birth.

  ‘Well, at least we’ve got something to show,’ said Kate. ‘But my foot is really hurting now. Scorching and chafing worse than before. How I wish I’d chosen the huge, green sea-boot or even that silly red sandal with the broken strap instead of this. He knew I was vain, of course. He knew I was too vain to put the weedy sea-boot on. I’m not blaming him. I think that man was clever. I think he guessed what we were like. Did you feel that too, Paula?’

  ‘I’ve no idea what I feel now or what I’m like either,’ said Paula. ‘I’m not even sure what you’re like, Kate. As for that man – how can I judge him? Yet the fact is I did judge him – a dangerous man, I thought him, and our enemy too. The wildness and treachery of that sea, Kate! Shattering the whole earth at every tide, confusing every one of us with every wave!’

  ‘Well, it’s flattened every castle on the beach, if that’s what you mean,’ her friend mildly replied. ‘It’s washed out all the names along the shore.’

  ‘Dividing us and drowning us!’ Paula cried again. But they were leaving this sea. Above them the sheep’s wool – gathering the last light of the sky – was luminous against a growing darkness.

  ‘So you say we’re all strangers,’ said Kate slowly. ‘You say you know nothing about me now – me, your best friend. No, Paula, we are friends. Remember? We had a picnic by the sea, walked along the beach, lost a shoe and talked to a stranger. That was the day, not so different from any other.’ Kate took her friend gently by the hand and helped her up. ‘Come on, Paula. Whatever it did to you – forget the sea! Look, we’re almost up to the green fields. And the land has forgiven you.’

  ‘Why on earth should I want that?’ said Paula. ‘To be forgiven by the grass, the sheep and turnips, do you mean?’

  She stared into the distance where, far off, the man was limping along, now almost merged into the dark red sky. ‘I wish he would turn round just once again and wave,’ she said. ‘Just once. I could wave back. Then I’d know he’d forgiven me.’

  ‘For what exactly?’ Kate asked.

  ‘For being afraid of him of course,’ Paula replied.

  ‘Perhaps he never even imagined that,’ Kate insisted.

  ‘He guessed everything we were thinking. You said so yourself, Kate.’

  ‘But imagine if he were to come running back, waving or not,’ said Kate. ‘Then it would all start again.’

  ‘I shall never forget him, never,’ said her friend. ‘I’ll forget Bill like a shot, of course. Almost certainly I’ll forget Peter and Charles. And no way I’ll ever remember Tom. I might even forget you one day, Kate. I mean one day a long, long time from now when we’re both very old. But I shall never forget that man. Never.’

  She stood, still watching, with her foot on the path leading up through the fields. The man never turned. Soon he was lost to sight.

  Couchettes

  GRADUALLY THE RUMBLE and creak of luggage carts across the platform, the banging and shouting along the corridor, died down. A full trainload of passengers – men, women and children – were looking for their couchettes. Here and there someone who had just smoothed his sheet, spread his blanket and was attempting to make himself comfortable in the cramped space, would be ejected with curses on either side. He would then climb down the ladder, heave down his bags and continue his wanderings through the train, searching for his own berth. This carriage near the end of the train was already full except for one place. Two men occupied the couchettes on one side. Two women and a young girl lay opposite. The racks above were heaped with rucksacks and bedding-rolls. Knotted black sacks were slung between jackets, oilskins, scarves and boots. Coils of climbing-rope had been flung up there with a jangling selection of kettles, pans, mugs, heating and lamp equipment strung together with wire. The women lay with their few belongings beside them – each with her head on a softer bag stuffed with woollens for a pillow.

  For a time the carriage was brighter and its occupants slowly settled down – preserving their distance simply by keeping their eyes from one another. Remarkably – for this was not an age of privacy – no glance went across the narrow passage between bunks as the passengers got ready as best they could for the short night. At the last minute a young man came in, climbed the narrow ladder with his bags and threw himself down into the last empty berth. Although the place was far from warm he at once stripped off shirt and sweater before lying face down. No sun had touched him. His eyes moved around, taking in the whole carriage, and this glance made him appear vulnerable as if he had accidentally removed the tough protective layer from himself, for he was white-skinned from the waist up. One long, plump arm hung down, almost touching the berth below. Neverth
eless, in this private place where no one spoke, it appeared hardly a human arm, but resembled rather some actor’s limb, overwhitened with luminous powder. The woman opposite wondered at the boldness of this boy who had needlessly bared himself to both curiosity and cold.

  Suddenly every door along the corridor crashed shut. In the carriage it was now pitch dark with only a dim, blue light along the cracks of the door and in the hole of the lock. A sudden, sick claw of claustrophobia caught the woman for a second as she stared at this blue lock-hole. Then she wrapped her scarf closely about her head and shut her eyes. Along the train a few persons were calling goodnight to one another, but already the night and the dark had distanced them.

  In the middle of the night it began to grow cold. The woman, half-awake, imagined the train slowly climbing out of the fertile valleys of Central France where the lowest bunches of the vineyards were almost touching the red earth, alternating on either side with ragged fields of Indian corn – and up into a landscape which was now gradually changing into a higher, rockier country, not yet mountainous, but already swept by a sharp air from the snows. Soon she was rummaging for gloves and another scarf. She sat up to jerk the undersheet about her waist, to wrap the blanket more tightly round her legs. She lay back again and fell into a deep, cold sleep.

  Sometime, somewhere, in the early hours the train jerked to a stop with a massive rattling and jolting as if lurching across great lumps of iron. Outside, up and down the platform, voices were shouting. Suddenly the doors of the carriage crashed apart and a bright light came on. One by one the sleepers rolled coldly from their dreams to find a black-coated woman official crouching beside them, demanding tickets, questioning destinations. Startled eyes opened. The bare young man, no longer bold, drew up his arm and searched frantically for a while in the round, corded pouch about his neck. From this he first drew out a handful of grey fluff, bits of chocolate wrapping, last year’s bus and train tickets, a thumb-sized photo of a girl, some old newspaper cuttings and a piece of chewing-gum stuck to an envelope. Watched closely by the official, he at last found the ticket carefully folded into a slit of the bag. The woman nodded and knelt to look further down. It was darker in all the lower berths and she flashed her torch about her. There were more sudden awakenings, more desperate searches. For some time she knelt beside the travellers, asking questions, ignoring the stammered excuses in a foreign tongue. Finally all the tickets appeared. One last time she nodded to the bright carriage and left. The place was again in total blackness. The sleeping woman had been lucky enough to find her purse quickly for it was stuck inside the shoe at her side. Again she wrapped herself in the blanket, drew the gloves over her wrists, the scarf about her ears and once more settled herself to sleep.

  Nevertheless she could not sleep at once. It seemed to her that during the last few minutes this dark carriage with its blue cracks of light had changed. Like some ghost train it had moved bodily back in time and space. For trains had played an ineradicable part in the memory of this country, carrying with them those stories of day or night-time journeys which would be suddenly interrupted at any time and in no known place, for no known purpose. In seconds there could be a lightning change of clothes – a fearful pantomime ending in life or death, papers would change hands, be shoved inside caps, inside shoes, under dentures. Instantly expressions must change from wild to bland, while beyond the windows still no indication of place – simply that the overcoats of the guards, entering from the dark, would smell of a frosty orchard or the smoky back room of some remote village. These iron faces would never change, but with luck – a luck which afterwards seemed unbelievable – they might step out at last and the doors slam shut. Impossible to imagine the feeling inside the carriage. The woman’s imagination didn’t go far enough for that. How far then did it go? Did it go to an even earlier time and a different kind of train, no longer, in fact, a train at all? Her imagination from its limited, comfortable life, didn’t go to that, wouldn’t or couldn’t go. Was it not obscene to pretend it could? The train she was forced to think about was no train known to her – a train for animals, yet still with carriages of a kind, packed with death and terror, with degradations, humiliations, she and nobody known to her could properly conceive. Still, she was human, and there was a price to be paid for it – even in having to imagine the unimaginable. And a worse price to be paid for not allowing oneself to imagine anything at all.

  It was now really cold inside the carriage. By lying absolutely still the woman tried to preserve a little heat about her. But she knew that sooner or later she would have to climb out of her blanket and go down to the other end of the corridor. In the last days, eager and greedy for sun, fruit and colour, she had bought the warm peaches from baskets on the street, had tried the ripe grapes and the bursting plums. All about her people had been enjoying their own produce. But the bowels of the stiff northerners were easily loosened. She climbed down, drew back the door quietly and went down the train. The lavatory was cramped, ill-lit and not particularly clean. But how unbelievably lucky she was to have such luxuries! There was running water here, supplies of paper, a basin, paper towels and soap, a door with lock and bolt – a private place where she could relieve herself alone. Nowadays how lightly, how scornfully people spoke of privacy as if it were a thing long out-moded, a state hypocritical and puritanical, with something foolish and even wrong about the need for it. Togetherness and openness were everything, as though the ghastly togetherness of trains, trucks and prison camps had been forgotten.

  Shivering, she went back along the corridor. From the windows she saw a few lights pricking the high villages of a distant landscape, straggling out into remote farms – lonely places where no doubt people had been sheltered for a night or two before being sent on their way one morning to an unlikely escape. She drew back the carriage door as quietly as she could, but the light from the corridor shone momentarily on the place. Again there was an uneasy movement in the couchettes as, one above the other, bodies rolled over – some on their stomachs, others on their backs. The faces, pinched and strange, looked up. Here and there a begging or protesting hand was flung out, the fingers open like claws. The blinking eyes, with startlingly black pupils, were turned towards the door as if fear were just below the surface of all human dreams. The woman, as she wrapped herself up, saw that the carriage had changed again. It would not, could not now take on its ordinary rôle – that of an apartment carrying workers, students, travellers and holiday-makers like herself. It was not a carriage, not a truck, but a series of close-set death-bunks. She moved over towards the wall, turning away from the remembering, from the imagining, from the believing, not feeling she had to confront it again. For hadn’t endless other horrors happened since then, would go on happening again and again? Who could keep up with it all? She drew the blanket up to her chin, icily separating herself from the idea of this death. But for this separation there was a price to be paid. It was necessary for her to become dead herself. And if becoming dead to degrading death – then dead also to the living landscape going past, to the sunbaked earth with its people bending amongst vines, dead to this whole land, once lost and given back again by acts of unbelievable courage, and finally dead, totally dead to all those in the nightmare shelves, some of whom had been able, with their last breath, their last gesture, to offer human warmth to the other.

  She sat up with a groan and immediately like an echo of her thought, came a voice from above: ‘Are you all right? Do you want tea? I’ve still a mouthful in the thermos. I saw you go out and come in. You looked white in the passage.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Only it’s freezing cold out there.’

  ‘You’re not faint? You want me to call the guard?’

  The woman below laughed quietly to herself at the mention of guard. ‘No, it was nothing.’

  There was a breathing, a rustling, and a woollen cardigan dropped down. ‘Take it. I’m wearing two. And there’s other stuff in the rack. No, you must take that, I’m warm, you s
ee. And better lie back and go to sleep. The best way to survive.’

  But no. For the woman below knew how easily she herself could sleep comfortably in the present, could stiffen and die to the past. Everything can be forgotten, should be forgotten, some said. Even now, rattling and jolting through the night, she felt she must stay with the last one awake. There was no difficulty about that. But to survive as human was a different matter. To do that she must set forever this compartment – warm enough, comfortable enough – against those other carriages and bunks. It would be necessary to be on the look-out and wide-awake for the rest of her life. ‘To keep watch’ was how she imagined it. In less than ten minutes she was asleep.

  Thorns and Gifts

  WHEN MY FATHER and mother came back from seeing my uncle in hospital I remember they were quieter than usual. I was having my tea – swotting for the first school exams of the year, with a map of the Middle East propped against the teapot.

  ‘Well, how was he then?’ I asked. I prided myself on being his favourite nephew. And it was something to be proud of. For he had other nephews of course – my Canadian cousins whom I’d never seen, though he had visited them several times. We ourselves were a family of five. I had one grown-up sister, newly married and living in England; a younger sister and an older brother, the one several classes below me and the other above me in school. And the youngest boy was only six, a delicately darned and patched, disarmingly scruffy child who still had the choice of every bit of cast-off clothing in the house – yet never complaining of his weird mixture of tight shorts and baggy pullovers, even deigning to accept the occasional shiny belt or clip from the girls’ wardrobe. I can still see my mother doing him up more and more cautiously in a jacket which would soon be too tight over his plump bottom. Passively he took over my navy blue shirts which hung on him like the voluminous smocks on a diminutive painter. My mother’s fingers would move, tentatively, flutteringly over the buttons as if she sensed the day of reckoning was coming very near, the day when the great strip-off rebellion would begin. He knew nothing yet, of course. He was still dumb and mild. His butter-smooth hair and pink cheeks had made him automatically into the Good Boy of the neighbourhood. We didn’t resent this. Indeed we were rather proud he’d managed to keep it up for so long, just as we were proud of our little cream cat who’d kept sleek and clean, sweet-tempered and pink-pawed while wandering across jagged tins, around dustbins and through hedges for the same number of years.