by Anita Desai
Suddenly angered, McTaggart demanded hot water, tea – chai, chai, he repeated, and heard his voice raised, loudly, like a caricature, a cartoon of a British colonial. And the manager’s face, it became the other side of the colonial coin, confused, agitated, helpless in the face of these impossible demands, this infringement on his own life.
He remembered that moment now, that bubble of light in which those small figures had floated in the half-dark of dawn, his desire for it and his anger at it, the way he had shattered it with his voice, made all the fragments scatter and fly.
How strange, how very strange to find that he had changed places with them, so many years later, so far away, so inexplicably. He felt a sudden spasm grip his abdomen. He heaved with surprised laughter as he held his bleeding finger under the tap. He needed to tell Helen. Abandoning the ruined meal, he went into her room, and burst out, ‘Helen, it’s the damnedest thing – did I ever tell you – about that first time I ever went to—’ and then saw her twisted to one side of her bed, her face contorted as she held back tears, and he stood stricken in the doorway.
Behind him, in the kitchen, the woman had appeared with a bottle of milk she wanted to warm for her baby, and shouted out, ‘Hey, the toast’s burning! Mister?’
The two notes of the doorbell sounded through the house again – two small brass apples falling and rolling. Having seen the movement at the window, Jack Higgins had decided to persist. The late afternoon sun slanted out of the western sky and sliced through the back of his neck. He mopped it, waiting with impatience and growing annoyance: he was going to get a room here, he insisted on having it, a cool room where he could wash and change and stretch out to rest, return Meg to a good temper before setting out to walk on the beach, find a pint of lager and some supper. He was not going to return to the car, to the road and the traffic, the heat and the lunacy of an August Sunday by the sea. His ear caught a sound – the brass bell-sounds had rolled up to an object, he heard a click – and he braced himself for the question he needed to ask, and the answer.
‘Hello?’ Bob McTaggart said, opening the door and wrinkling his eyes at the glare of the August sun, the red burn of Jack’s face, the push of his belly against the wilted shirt, ready to enter.
‘Have you a room for the night, for my wife and myself? We want to stop a night before we go on down the coast tomorrow,’ Jack said quickly, even forcing himself to smile. The man in the door looked far from welcoming. In fact he looked as if he did not expect guests at his hotel or invite them and was astonished by the sight of one. Odd. Odd bod. Maybe that was why the woman in the shop below had seemed to recommend him with such reluctance. He narrowed his eyes, waiting for the answer.
Bob McTaggart shook his head very slightly. ‘I’m sorry, I have no room. Try the hotel up the road,’ he said, and shut the door quietly.
There had never been time for those cooking lessons. The changes had all taken place so rapidly. Iraq, Nigeria, oil wells, installations, they had really occupied only a brief and negligible piece of his life, and receded as if blown back by the nuclear force of the news of her illness. When the smoke cleared, she had appeared out of it, pale and staggering, a victim, needing his attention, his entire, total attention. After the surgery, bringing her here to recover, he had felt the seams of his life, at first so drastically emptied by the news, filling out with his need of her, the comfort of her existence.
Perhaps that was why they had never made a success out of the White House Hotel: they hadn’t really cared, couldn’t really bother. They should have: they needed something to work out, to provide, when he threw up his job and brought her to the seaside, somehow believing they could flee the curse that had fallen upon them in the city. Like desperate refugees from the plague, they had also been pilgrims, voyaging in the belief that somewhere lay safety.
Could any place have seemed more of a haven, safe from wrath, than this sparkling inlet of sea, its tiny cottages like white pebbles clustered on the green clifftop, its innocent shops that sold ice cream and lollipops to holidaymakers, its fish and chip shops that filled twice a day unfailingly with the odour of their deep-fried fare? No sign of nightmare anywhere – no glare of lights, blank walls, beds like stretchers or pallets of torture, no gigantic machinery to swallow her out of sight, then return her drained of colour as of blood, exhausted, racked by nausea, only to have some nurse or doctor smile brightly across her corpse-like body and say, ‘There you are! She’s back!’ as if summoning up a mother before her wailing child. He had not wailed, and Helen herself had said nothing, merely let him hold her hand and later, when she could, squeezed it.
At the end of that ‘course of treatment’, as it was called, he had made the decision, consulting her, of course, every step of the way. A new beginning in a new place. Somewhere quiet where they could pay attention to each other. What he meant was: pay attention solely to her, no distraction of going to work, catching trains, planes, going abroad. And after a few weeks in Mrs Bedford’s B & B – Helen had not been able to resist that name, it made up for the lines of washing, the dishes in the sink, the sand on the floor – they had found the White House Hotel for sale. Although warned about its inauspicious lack of a sea view, they had bought it in the conviction that it would provide that shelter where they could be together and not be parted for a day or an hour. Its green hummocks of lawn, hedge, thickets and shade, its calm, its quiet, made it a kind of burrow for them to be safe in. In those early days when he needed to go and consult electricians and painters, or collect tiles or mirrors or carpeting, she had laughed at his reluctance to leave her. ‘D’you think something would happen to me while you were away, here?’ An unlikely setting for a nightmare, she had meant, but he had wanted to guard her, be certain that the illness could not approach her again, as if it were a crab scuttling sideways out of a crack between the rocks towards her.
He had not guarded her: he had failed to halt its approach, its invasion. There had been her pathetic attempts to hide it from him, to postpone the visit to the doctor and the clinic that confirmed its re-emergence; of course that had not lasted. Then she had tried to persuade him that people sometimes lived years in this condition – went into hospital, came back, had remissions; it was no more, she said, than a chronic cough, or asthma. She had gone on insisting that, while she shrivelled up on her bed into something smaller, more gaunt and emaciated by the day. Towards the end, not even a drive to the clifftop to look out at the sea was possible: they might as well not have been at the seaside.
Only one pleasure had been left and every evening he had carried her out onto the patio where their chairs stood side by side (those for hotel guests had simply been stacked and set aside along the wall). Settling her onto the wicker chaise longue, he had gone back to the kitchen for the bag of scraps, brought it out and sunk down beside her, holding her hand and not speaking. The black-birds sang till it was dark. Down in the glen, the choughs circled over the elms till finally they sank down out of sight. Sometimes a fox cried. The sound of cars swishing by on the road dwindled and ceased. Sometimes there was a moon and sometimes a wisp of mist. They stayed very still, waiting, and then from the dark under the hedges around the lawn, the figures emerged, slipping along low on the grass, surreptitiously – dark, furry, with black bands drawn over their eyes as if convinced that these would provide camouflage. First the largest, heaviest, the one they felt to be the father, the patriarch of the set, and after him some that were smaller, more slender. Bob would empty out the bag of scraps a few feet away from the patio, on the grass, and they came sniffing delicately, hesitantly; but when they found the food there was a sudden tumble, a seething, a pushing aside and climbing over before they became engrossed in the eating, seeming to disregard the figures on the patio. Bob and Helen were not deceived; they knew they were being watched as keenly as they themselves watched, and sometimes one of them gave a shiver at the closeness of these dark, furtive creatures, the close sharing of the silent evening with the badgers.
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Once Bob had almost spoken. Seeing two of them who had remained lower down in the garden, by the hedge, apparently playing games with each other, he had been on the verge of saying, ‘What do you bet we’ll see a whole brood of young ones in the spring?’ and in time remembered the crassness, the cruelty of alluding to time, to the future, and he had bitten back the words.
There had been young ones in spring. The parents had brought them out to feed, moving disappointedly around the edge of the patio, sniffing. Bob had stood by the window indoors – it was cold, the nights frost-edged – and watched without moving. He could not bring himself to go to the kitchen and fetch them scraps. He had let them go hungry. Let them go and find the bugs and worms they live on, he’d thought, why should I feed them? What for?
Now he turned away from the door and walked down the tunnel of the corridor, its doors shut on either side. Going into the living room, he picked up and folded the newspaper that was lying on the table where he had thrown it earlier – Cornish Panther Found to be Domestic Cat read one headline – and tapped his cold, full pipe against an ashtray, then carried it into the kitchen to dispose of the ashes in the rubbish bin. The ticking of the clock was loud here, demanding to be looked at; he had always meant to change it for another, silent one. It was an authoritarian clock: telling him what to do, how to live. He probably couldn’t do without it. He opened a cupboard, took out a loaf of bread, a tin of sardines. He placed slices of bread in the toaster, he fetched a can opener and opened the tin of sardines. Then he put all the ingredients together on a plate: they made a meal. He pulled up a chair to the kitchen table and sat down to eat. His eyes wandered restlessly across the table while he ate but there was nothing to meet his look: the blank face of the plate, the gleam of stove and refrigerator, all stationary, all featureless. He got up, went into the living room, fetched the newspaper and brought it back to the table, folding it neatly beside the plate so he could read while he ate: Cornish Panther Found to be Domestic Cat. He stared at the headline and the blurred grey photograph, stirring the crumbs on his plate for a long time. But eventually he had to rise from the table, wash the plate and stack it. Then he washed the sardine can before dropping it into the rubbish bin. He stood at the sink, vaguely aware that he had left something undone, and only after a long moment remembered he should have eaten some greens, that Helen would not have prepared a meal without some green ingredient. He considered washing some lettuce and eating that as an afterthought, but the prospect was so daunting he abandoned it.
Picking up the newspaper, he padded out to the living room again. Sinking into the chintz-covered armchair he waited for time to pass, looking out through the open door onto the patio where the garden sloped down into the glen. The summer evenings stretched so long, the daylight seemed never to fade, even after the sun was gone. For a while he wondered what he might do: mow the lawn, clip the hedges, trim the evergreens. Go into town and pick up some groceries. Or drive further out to a farm where he might get fresh eggs: that would be an outing, the kind of outing Helen enjoyed – small, trivial, undemanding. Just the sight of poppies blowing in the fields along the way, or the sky-larks rising up above the meadows into the sky to trill, would give her enough pleasure to make it worthwhile. Then the fresh eggs would mean so much to her. ‘We’ll have a nice omelette for our supper,’ she would say with the greatest satisfaction. To be satisfied with something so minor, so meaningless: how? He ought to have asked her, to have learnt himself. It was not enough to have observed and envied her that innocence. With shame he remembered how, in his earlier life, it had irritated him to come back from Iraq, from Jordan, to have seen all that he had seen, and then come home to find her so placid, so limited he had thought then – and now it seemed more than he could ever accomplish. The poppies might have been beetroots, the eggs might as well have come in a box from the supermarket for all he was concerned. How had they brought that peach-coloured fuzz of pleasure to her face, a suddenly light, girlish motion of delight in acceptance?
He had tried, when summer came around again. Collecting carrot tops, greens, scraps, whatever he had, he had gone out in the evenings and scattered it out on the grass with abrupt, bitter gestures. You might as well have it, then, was what he wanted to say. They’d come creeping up, glancing at him nervously, snatching at the pieces, scurrying off with them. Did they notice that Helen was not there, his mate? He disliked them for not noticing, not caring. But the habit remained. It was something to do.
So now he gathered a meal for them, and scattered it on the grass, then settled down on the patio with his pipe, to watch the blueness well out of the hollows of the hills and slowly swallow the brightness of the daytime meadows. The hedges along the sides of the lawn swelled with darkness. A blackbird sang and sang as if to pierce right through the walls of his heart, then stitch them shut again. But the song became gradually less intense, less fervent, watered down, and finally disappeared. The choughs had already settled and even their grumbling and scolding had subsided. He sank back, his pipe unlit, wondering if his visitors would come tonight. He was tired – tired of doing nothing at all all day – and wanted to go up to bed, read a few more pages of the detective novel he’d bought in town, go to sleep. But he did not rise, he stayed there, one of those moments when movement became totally impossible having come upon him. He could scarcely breathe, the effort was beyond him, and he felt a weakness flooding through him like dark, or rain. He felt himself dissolve, become one with the silent evening, having no existence apart from it.
Then the white bands of their fur started up out of the dark, and their movements stirred upon the still lawn. The big one was leading, as ever, slipping closer to the patio by the minute, till it came close enough for him to look the creature in the eye. ‘Hey, Brock,’ he breathed out, the breath he had been holding back for so long that it hurt, as if his saviour had arrived. The creature paid no attention, its snout busy with a crust, but the slimmer, smaller one was slipping along through the dark and approached now. She came close enough to snatch at a bit of crust but, before she did, she too glanced in his direction, so secretively that the look could scarcely be discerned, and ‘Hey, Helen,’ he whispered, ‘here, Helen.’
Having thrashed about for an hour, trying to sleep, Jack Higgins let out a groan of resignation, flung his arm over his head and pillow to touch Meg’s head: the narrow bed made for a proximity that was far from comfortable on such a still, sticky night. Besides, the sounds of the revellers on the promenade below, screaming with laughter and curses, kicking beer cans along the pavement, made it seem like trying to get to sleep in a tube station. The window had to be left open to let in air and a street-lamp directly across from their window blasted the dark with its glare.
‘Remember that odd bod in the White Hotel?’ he asked Meg, who was yawning in frequent small gulps beside him.
‘What was so odd about him?’ she enquired, scratching at her neck and tossing her head about on the pillow.
‘Bet that whole place was empty,’ Jack murmured, ‘and he wouldn’t let us have a room. Now I wonder why.’
Meg did not seem to care. She jerked up her knees as if in anger. ‘If that’s so, he’s got to be daft,’ she said flatly, and resumed her scratching and yawning.
‘Daft’s right,’ Jack Higgins sighed, thinking regretfully of that small green backwater, the shade of the tall elms across the lawn, touching the slates of the roof even in the blaze of afternoon. ‘Daft as a—’ and searching for the right word, he drifted into sleep.
The Man Who Saw Himself Drown
Paying off the taxi in the portico in front of the hotel, he went up the steps, nodded to the doorman, picked up his key at the desk where the receptionist was talking dreamily on the telephone, evidently to a friend not a customer, and took the small elevator up to the second floor. Letting himself into his room, he saw it had been cleaned during the day so that it looked uninhabited: everything was put in its place, out of sight, and the bedcover had
been stretched over the bed and smoothed immaculately. He tossed his briefcase into the armchair – there, now the room knew someone had entered it and made it his own – and went into the bathroom to wash. It was what he had looked forward to all through the long drive from the business centre to the hotel. In the creaking old taxi with its seats slick with usage, going through streets where people and traffic pressed in from both sides, and from front and behind too, so that he felt they were being carried forward by it. All the grime and soot of the city had seeped in at the windows and under his clothes, filling in every crevice and fissure of his body. Now he luxuriated in soaping his hands and face and then washing off the suds and splashing his ears and neck as well. ‘Ahh,’ he sighed, wiping himself with a clean, rough towel. Ahh, now he was himself again.
He went back into the room, drew aside the curtains and opened the door which led to a veranda. Here there were wicker chairs and potted palms lined up against the white wall, and he chose one under a slowly revolving fan. Lowering himself into it, he uttered another ‘Ahh’. But immediately he realized that he lacked something and had to get up and go back to the room to ring the reception desk and ask for a bottle of beer to be sent up. Then he went out onto the veranda again and settled down to wait.
He spent the evening on that veranda, drinking the cold beer that was brought to him on a tray. Gradually it grew dark. Small bats began to skim through the veranda and out into the garden that lay below, the crowns of trees filling it first with shadows, then with darkness. Small electric lights were strung from one to the next; these came on like buds opening all at once. He could see some of the hotel guests sitting in their light with drinks. Music was being played, but softly, unobtrusively, as he liked it.
