Drown My Books

by Penny Freedman

  And then there is the way he treats Miranda, his daughter, and that’s what I want to discuss with Dora this afternoon. In place of forgiveness in his heart, Prospero has a plan to marry Miranda to Ferdinand, son of Alonzo, King of Naples, who helped Prospero’s brother to usurp his throne. Miranda and Ferdinand conveniently fall in love at first sight, as soon as he is washed up on Prospero’s island, but is Prospero happy? No. He puts obstacles in their path, as well as harping unpleasantly on the possibility that Ferdinand intends to ravish this girl whom he obviously worships. I won’t suggest to Dora that Prospero is a cold-hearted, vengeful, controlling bastard because that will make her cry, but I would like her to think about it.

  The results of my gentle probing are surprising. Dora actually argues with me. When I ask whether she thinks Prospero enjoys power for its own sake, she says no, he always has good intentions. ‘Even when he clicks his fingers to make Miranda fall asleep?’ I ask. ‘Just because he wants to have a private conversation with Ariel?’

  ‘He does everything in care of her,’ she says firmly. ‘In scene two he says so. I have done nothing but in care of thee. Of thee my dear one.’

  She does know the text – I can’t fault her there.

  ‘But he treats Ferdinand badly, doesn’t he?’ I suggest. ‘He threatens him and makes him carry piles of logs as though he’s punishing him for loving Miranda, when all the time his plan is that they’ll get married.’

  She has an answer for this, too. ‘Prospero says he doesn’t want it to be too easy for Ferdinand to get Miranda. She doesn’t know to hold back,’ she says, ‘and be modest. She has no experience so she tells him right away she loves him. Prospero has to make difficulties or Ferdinand won’t value her.’

  She looks so earnest sitting there that she almost persuades me but I have one more go. ‘But he says he’ll hate her if she speaks up for Ferdinand. He’s always threatening people – Caliban, Ariel, Ferdinand and even Miranda. He does like his power trip, doesn’t he?’

  She turns tragic dark eyes on me. ‘He didn’t want to be cruel to Caliban, but he had to protect Miranda. Caliban would…assault her otherwise. Prospero has to make him very afraid. He is a father. He must protect his daughter.’

  I am so delighted by her eloquence that I decide to leave it there and let her enjoy the feeling of making her point. We’ll come back to the unengaging soliloquies and the unsatisfactory forgiveness another time. We spend the rest of the lesson on the less contentious themes of masque and magic.

  As I open my front door to let Dora out into the gusty, rain-laden evening, I find that there is a man standing on my doorstep. He looms so surprisingly out of the dark that I give a foolish little squeak of surprise before I see his face in the light from the hall and recognise him as one of my students from my other job, the one I don’t get paid for.

  Dover, just along the coast, teems with asylum seekers. After God knows what travails to get here, they find themselves a precarious toehold there, crammed into decaying B&Bs, forbidden to work or earn, prey to all kinds of violence and corruption, waiting for judgement: the dubious paradise of staying or the predictable hell of returning. They meet with plenty of resentment from the local population, but one redoubtable couple has been moved to action on their behalf. They have persuaded their local church to let them have its hall a couple of days a week. There, asylum seekers can come for the traditional British comforts of tea, biscuits and talk. The couple help with form-filling and interpret the language of officialdom, as far as they can and, just recently, they have started offering English classes. Which is where I come in. They called for volunteers, in an article in the local paper, and I put my hand up.

  It is the hardest teaching I have ever done – harder, far than strong-arming the trainee criminals who made up the D and E streams at Marlbury’s least-favoured secondary school, where I taught for ten years. There are technical difficulties because the level of English they already have varies hugely, so this is mixed-ability teaching to an epic degree, but these are nothing to the issues of motivation and commitment. Most of them turn up sporadically, don’t do homework and fall asleep in class. Sleeping six or seven to a room, always on the alert against being robbed, knifed or raped, how can they possibly muster the energy or concentration to sit in a classroom for two hours, learning a language they have only the slimmest of chances of putting to use? The Immigrant Removal Centre, a bleak stone fortress with walls topped with barbed wire, stands on the skyline and lowers over the town, sending out a clear message: one way or another, in the labyrinthine process of asylum-seeking, a reason will be found to send them back.

  Farid, the lad who looms on my doorstep this evening, was secure here until last summer, a student from Syria, studying medicine at one of the London colleges. In June, though, his life collapsed. After a rocket attack by government forces on a suburb of Damascus near his parents’ home, his father, a doctor, went to help the injured and was killed by a sniper, positioned, presumably, precisely for the purpose of punishing such blatant acts of humanity. So Farid lost not only his father but his right to be here. There was no one now to pay his fees so he was out on his ear, his student visa cancelled despite his being a model student. Universities, it seems, do not engage in blatant acts of humanity. His immediate reaction was that he should go home to look after his mother, but she – a strong-minded woman – has insisted that he should stay, so he has applied for asylum, planning to work his way through the remaining years of his medical training.

  You would think it was a simple enough case but it is not so in the eyes of the Border Agency. The stumbling block is that Farid can’t prove that he would be in danger if he was sent back home. A raging civil war in which, at a conservative estimate, 200,000 people have already been killed, and a father shot on his own doorstep for doing his job are not sufficient indicators of peril, it seems. I don’t know how Farid manages to keep his temper with these people; I would have battered someone over the head with a box file by now. As it is, he has to be content, for the moment, with being my star student. He doesn’t actually need the classes; he is well beyond the English language level he needed to study medicine here – a score of 7.0 in the International English Language Test System. He says it helps to be learning something, though, and he doesn’t seem to mind the boredom of sitting through others’ struggles. I find him more challenging stuff to do, bring him books and newspapers. We shouldn’t have favourites among our students, of course, but I can’t help liking Farid.

  And now, here he is on my doorstep, looking anxious.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘This is rather rude, I’m afraid, and I wasn’t sure about knocking.’

  ‘How did you get here?’ I ask – ungraciously, I realise as soon as I’ve said it.

  ‘I walked,’ he says.

  ‘But it’s thirteen miles!’

  He smiles. ‘I have time on my hands,’ he says.

  I usher him in and he and Dora perform one of those little dances as each tries to make way for the other in the narrow hallway. Then she ducks past him and almost runs out of the house. He watches her go.

  ‘One of my A level pupils,’ I say and show him into my living room.

  ‘Are you in trouble, Farid?’ I ask.

  He looks startled. ‘No. Oh no, nothing like that.’ Then he shrugs. ‘Well. No more than usual.’ He looks round the room. ‘So many books,’ he says, ‘just like you told us.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes. Last week. You described your unusual house.’

  ‘And you thought you would come and see it?’

  ‘I – I like to walk. It gets me out of the hostel. When I’m walking I can think. So this afternoon I thought I would try to find your house. You told us how it is along the coast, right by the sea, and about the Greek church right by, so I thought I would walk until I found it.’ He smiles. ‘You can’t get lost
walking along by the sea.’

  ‘It must have taken you hours.’

  He looks at his watch. ‘Nearly four hours,’ he says.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ I ask.

  ‘Please don’t trouble. A glass of water will be fine.’

  ‘It’s no trouble. You need a hot drink. Have a seat by the fire. It’s a pathetic thing but it will warm you up.’

  When I come back with tea and some rather punitive flapjacks I made with jumbo oats, he is looking through my copy of The Tempest.

  ‘Very hard work,’ I say as I pour tea. ‘You might find this more accessible.’ I pick up my copy of Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife and hand it to him. Then I attack a flapjack and watch him as he leafs through the poems. If you don’t know the book, it’s a series of poems written from the point of view of the wives and girlfriends of famous or legendary men: Queen Herod, Mrs Midas, Frau Freud, Anne Shakespeare née Hathaway, Queen Kong, the Kray sisters, and so on. I love it and I’ve gone out on a limb a bit to set it as the next book to be read by our book group – more of which later.

  Farid asks, ‘These are real people?’

  ‘Some of them are – the men, at least. Or legendary. A lot of them come from Greek myths.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know them.’

  ‘No reason why you should. Have a look at Mrs Darwin, though. That might make you laugh.’

  He finds it and reads it while I finish the demolition job on my flapjack. He hands the book back to me.

  ‘British humour,’ he says, ‘is hard to learn.’

  When he has drunk his tea and crunched his way through a flapjack with apparent enjoyment, I offer him the use of the loo and the bus fare home. He accepts the first but adamantly rejects the second.

  ‘In that case, borrow my bike,’ I say.

  ‘But you will need it.’

  ‘Actually, not,’ I say.

  I am embarrassed to admit this but my bike, which used to take me everywhere, has languished here. I either walk the few hundred yards around St Martin’s or I get the bus into Dover. I don’t go anywhere else. I had good intentions of cycling to and fro to Dover but you’re going East on the way there and you’re nearly always going into the teeth of the wind. There should be compensation coming back but I found the vigour of the wind behind me quite scary so, after a couple of attempts, I gave up and the bike is rusting, despite its plastic cover, among the vegetables in the back garden.

  ‘I don’t use it,’ I say. ‘Keep it if you want to, or you can bring it back some time when you feel like an outing.’

  ‘It would be stolen,’ he says mournfully. ‘Everything is stolen.’

  ‘I don’t think any self-respecting thief would want it,’ I say. ‘I’ll give you a padlock but if it does get stolen it really doesn’t matter. It’s had its day, I’m afraid.’

  He is resistant but when I take him out into the garden and run a torch over the bike he can see that this is not a great treasure I am handing him and he accepts. I find him a new battery for the back light, which isn’t working, and he raises the seat, which is set for my stumpy little legs. I stand with him in the garden, holding the torch for him. With his face turned away in the dark, he asks, ‘Your student who was here, is she English?’

  ‘Greek,’ I say. ‘Her father is the priest at the church along here.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ he says.

  I wave him off from my front door and watch him go. Do I feel a niggle of misgiving about what I may have set in motion? I think perhaps I do but it is momentary, forgotten as soon as he disappears from sight.

  Chapter Two

  THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

  Tuesday 11th February 2014

  My morning ritual is invariable; I find I have to impose discipline on this life that is so free of external constraints. This morning is no exception, though life has been a bit bumpy in the two weeks since I introduced you to Dora and Farid, and gave Farid my bike. Caliban and I are, as ever, out for our walk by eight-fifteen. As ever, as I close the front door behind me and cross the road towards the sea wall, my phone gives its chirpy little signal of an incoming message and I ignore it. It will come from Orange and it will welcome me to France. I can’t tell you how irritating I find this. It is not just that I am so clearly not in France, with the whole of La Manche spread out between me and it, but that I don’t find the French connection at all exciting. I am, at heart, a Francophobe. I refuse to do the British cultural cringe about their wonderful food, their glorious wine and their oh-so-chic fashion; in my view, their food is fussy, their wine overpriced and their fashion chic only on women who are intensely slim and chic to start with. Italy does all three better – and Italians don’t shrug. The French language is wonderful, of course, but it’s not enough to make me want to be there.

  I could avoid the irritation of the morning message beep by not taking my mobile with me, but I have a superstitious fear that the day I decide to do that will be the day I fall down the steps onto the beach and need to summon help. The steps are steep and made of unforgiving stone. I worry for Caliban, who is an ungainly beast, as well as for myself, but they are the only route onto the beach. Once down there, we lollop over the pebbles or gambol along the sand, depending on the tide. My practice is to walk into the teeth of the wind first so that we get aerodynamic propulsion on the way home. This usually means walking east first; on the odd occasions when I turn west first Caliban gets flustered and tries to head me off. He doesn’t seem to understand about the wind. When we have both had enough, I put him on his lead, we climb back up the steps and we walk away from the sea, inland, to the village shop to collect the newspaper.

  Kelly Field, who runs the shop, is the reason why Caliban and I don’t go onto the beach until eight-fifteen, although we have been awake for some time. Kelly swims every morning, without exception, come fog, tempest or blizzard. She comes past my house at half past seven, without fail, and the slap-slap of her flip-flops under my bedroom window rouses Caliban to noisy outrage. (Yes, I admit it, he sleeps with me. Not on the bed – that is understood between us though he still gazes yearningly at it from time to time – but in his basket. He sleeps quietly. He is less trouble than most sleeping companions I have known.) I dare not take him down to the beach until I am sure that Kelly has gone, because he hates her. I’m not sure that he knows that she is the owner of the slapping feet, and it would be uncanny if he did, but he growls at her in a way he does at no one else. Even the postman gets a better reception from him.

  So, I don’t attempt to take him into the shop, but tie him up outside, where he slumps down, a picture of reproach, and I have to admit that he does have a point about Kelly – she is not terribly likeable. She is mid-thirties, I suppose. She used to run the shop with her father, who was already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s when I moved here, and has now gone into a nursing home, leaving Kelly with the shop and the flat above it. It can’t be much fun for a young woman, I suppose, and she certainly doesn’t seem to enjoy it. She has recently dyed her hair purple, which ought to make her look funky, but it just accentuates her bad skin and the sour droop of her mouth. Although I come into the shop every morning and we are both members of the village book group, she greets me, as she always does, with barely a flicker of recognition. Well, two can play at that game. It would be natural for us to discuss the harrowing thing that happened yesterday, but if she’s not going to mention it, neither am I.

  ‘Guardian, please,’ I say.

  She hands it to me and takes my money without a word, and that would have been that if there had not been, suddenly, the rush of heavy feet on the stairs and the arrival from the flat above of a young man toting a large sports bag and in the process of zipping up his tracksuit top. It is my A level student, Matt O’Dowd. The implications are obvious and neither of them attempts to deflect me from the obvious. I knew tha
t Matt delivered the papers for her in the mornings but not about the bonking afterwards. They look at each other; the colour rises under her sallow skin. Matt grins and hands her a book. It is a copy of The World’s Wife

  ‘You were looking for this,’ he says. ‘I found it under the bed.’

  He turns to me. ‘I didn’t look at it,’ he says, ‘but I guess it’s one of those women-getting-their-own-back books, right?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I say. ‘Never judge a book by its cover.’

  ‘OK,’ he says, hitching his bag higher onto his shoulder. He pushes the door wide open, startling Caliban.

  She calls, ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he calls back as he starts to jog away

  She runs to the open door. ’Fucking better,’ she yells to his back. He doesn’t turn round.

  ‘Nice lad,’ I say as she turns back into the shop.

  ‘That’s all you know,’ she says.

  I untie Caliban and walk round to the library.

  A visit to the library is not part of my regular morning routine and when I do go there I don’t normally take Caliban with me, but I have something I need to discuss urgently with Lorna, who runs the place. The library is attached to the primary school, both built in the optimistic sixties. Three years ago it fell victim to the first round of local government cuts and Lorna started organising a band of volunteers to keep it open. I joined them as soon as I realised how necessary the library was going to be to my new life of austerity and I’m on duty most Saturdays, having no family here in the bosom of which to spend my weekends. A year ago, I proposed starting a book group based on borrowing sets of books from the county library service, and it’s the book group I need to discuss with Lorna this morning.