The Dumb House

by John Burnside

  In the early evenings, we watched television. I had set it up in her bedroom and we would watch it together. Lillian chose the programmes we watched. We liked American shows, especially the ones where people were spontaneous and natural in a quite unsentimental way, the shows that are broadcast between four and seven in the evening, half-hour situation comedies that centre on clean-living families with clever children in neat, middle-class suburbs. I think this was Lillian’s idea of heaven: a boy cycling along a wide empty street in the early morning, tossing newspapers on to front porches; old men sitting on a veranda at dusk in Saratoga Springs or Boise, Idaho; women making pies in wide kitchens, surrounded by dogs and precocious children. It was the houses we enjoyed, as much as the people; each room was a character in its own right. We loved them for the space and the impossible light, the suggestion of woods, just a short walk away, deer in the shadows, coyotes in the hills.

  These houses always contained at least three children. They were wise, and sometimes too clever for their own good; they were always learning small lessons; they always had the best lines. I liked it when they did things together, en famille, things they had evidently rehearsed and perfected over years, little routines, dance steps and songs, sequences of strange, ritualised movements which suggested an infinite self-regard, a bottomless appetite for appreciation. That was their strength, of course: they were appreciators. They appreciated themselves and they were learning to appreciate other people. The routines were there to say to the audience: look at us, look how easy it is to be honest and free and spontaneous, to take nothing less than the best, to meet the world on your own terms. Even when the hard lesson had to be learned, or some tricky situation had to be resolved, they were always ready: the twelve-year-old in the stripy shirt and baseball cap, the girl with freckles and a winning grin, the boy who had tried to duck responsibility – they would gather themselves up to say what had to be said, to do the right thing, to sacrifice their own wishes to the greater good. This was what democracy meant. Lillian and I would sit watching in silence, with involuntary smiles on our faces, happy for a while that the world could seem so right, the way it was supposed to do at Christmas or during childhood holidays, when everybody worked together and tried really hard.

  Strangely enough, though, Lillian’s favourite programme was the news. She would cry when she saw children starving in Africa, or bodies lining the streets of shanty towns in South America, but she never missed a single broadcast. She seemed gifted with an infinite capacity for sympathy: she felt for others at random, from the baby with the hole in her heart to the hundreds or thousands killed in the latest natural disaster. Most of all, she was a sucker for the human interest story. One evening, we watched an American hostage being released. For a time it looked as if nothing would happen: the cameras were all bunched together, filming each other in what looked like a hotel conference room, perhaps recently and hastily reclaimed from a convention of self-improvement junkies, or air-conditioning salesmen. Suddenly, the man appeared: a tall, bearded, suitably gaunt figure, surrounded by uniformed men, looking uncomfortable and out of place in his plaid shirt and trainers. He was blinded for a moment by the cameras, but he kept gazing out into the crowd, as if he expected to see a familiar face – a friend, or a wife, or a daughter. He had probably been briefed about what to expect, but I imagine something else had taken over as he walked free, a basic need to mark the moment, to celebrate or ritualise it somehow. Then he sat down and began to answer questions. What he said meant nothing; it was just that speech was the one celebration that remained to him, the pleasure of speaking and being heard, of speaking his own language and having people pay attention, instead of spitting on him, or striking him in the face with a rifle butt. That was what caught my attention every time: not so much the elation of the freed man, or the anguish of the victims, or the joy and guilt of those who had survived, but the fact that it always happened in public, amongst strangers, amongst people who were only doing their jobs, reporters and soldiers and cameramen, or the merely curious, who have drifted into the frame, distracted for the moment from their own lives. I was always amazed at how easily they talked about what had happened to them, the hostages, the victims, the survivors. I was always amazed by their need to speak, and by the way they adapted their speech to suit what was demanded – the snappy phrase, the truism, the cliché.

  The hostage had been a captive for three years. Most of that time, he had been held in a small room, with no natural light; sometimes he had been forced to wear a hood, sometimes he had been beaten; no one had spoken to him for the first eighteen months, and he had been forbidden to speak. If he asked questions he was beaten. He had never seen the faces of his captors, they had worn masks or hoods when they brought his food. Sometimes that had heartened him: it allowed him to think they were afraid he would be able to identify them some day, when he was freed. But then again, he thought, the masks might be there for another reason entirely. Perhaps they were a means of distancing the terrorists from their prisoner, to avoid any human contact so that, when the time came to shoot him, they could do so without compunction. The hostage hadn’t known he was to be released until his captors left him at the corner of one bombed out street and another, a few days before the press conference.

  As I watched, I wondered what he had thought about during the three years of his captivity. At first, I imagine, he had missed his family, his own house, his bath, his kitchen, his bed. Then, perhaps, he thought back on his home town, his first lover, days he had enjoyed, moments that shamed him. I imagined him examining his life, letting it run in his head like an old movie, a movie he had seen once before but hadn’t watched with such close attention to detail. Perhaps there were moments, during those weeks of self-examination, when he felt liberated, able to make peace finally with his dead, or understand the motives of those who had hurt him years before, for no reason. Surely he would have learned something about himself during those weeks. Yet, just as surely, he would have moved on to something less coherent, a disjointed sequence of vague memories and half-thoughts, and I wondered if, by the end, he had elected to be changed by his experience, or whether he had come back determined to have his old life back, just as it was. What had he missed? What had he promised himself in the dark hours when he knew for sure that he was going to be killed? What had he promised in the moments of hope, when he believed he would be released? I wanted to know. I imagined myself in his position, thinking of the pleasures to come: the smell of new books, the taste of coffee, snow on a pine tree, birdsong. These were the pleasures I imagined for him, but his imagined pleasures would have been different and, for that moment, I wanted more than anything to know what they were. Most of all, I wanted to know how he had talked to himself in his captivity, what he had said, and how he had said it, what linguistic choices he had made. I wanted to know if he had ever suspected himself of deliberately creating a lie, the myth of an ordered life, using words and silences to make things tidy and neat and clean. Surely, that would have been inevitable. Under such circumstances, an ordered illusion is necessarily preferable to the chaotic truth of the world.

  I glanced at Lillian. She was gazing at the close up of the man’s face with an awed expression, but for once, she wasn’t in tears. She looked happy. She looked inextinguishably happy.

  It was winter. The house was sealed away again, behind a veil of snow, invisible from the village. Lillian and I grew closer, and as the relationship developed, I felt closer to everything else too, more in tune with the world. There were places in the house I had never really understood: the airing cupboard, the shelves under the sink where Mother had stored shoe-black and oven cleaner. One afternoon, when the sun emerged, Lillian took the laundry out and left it there all night, so our clothes froze solid, and seemed to take on a life of their own. It was a long time before they thawed, standing in the kitchen sink, or dripping icy water on the floor of the scullery. All that night, it was as if the house was peopled with the ghosts of oursel
ves, the shapes we would make, if we were to step out into the cold and walk away.

  Nobody knew Lillian was with me. My visits to the library at Weston had ceased and, though I am sure Miss Patterson wondered where I was, I am equally certain that she would not have suspected anything out of the ordinary. Now, instead of spending one day a week at the library, I would go shopping, wandering for hours through the supermarket aisles, where I had once sailed by, picking up convenience foods and basics. Now, with Lillian in the house, I paid more attention to this weekly ritual. Suddenly, I was tempted by new products, by the scent of fresh fruits, the crackle of packaging, the compact feel of things when they are cling-wrapped or packed tightly into fours and sixes. I bought oranges in net bags, exotic yoghurts, tropical fruits, boxes of dates, round-shouldered jars of cherry jam and acacia honey. I bought every variety of peanut butter. I bought Turkish Delight, asparagus spears and crystallised ginger. I bought foods I thought Lillian would like, the kinds of food you might buy for children, sweet things, buttery things, things dipped in chocolate of Marmite. I looked for things she might never have tasted: pawpaws, partridge, dressed crab. Most of all, I bought things for their names, for the wording on the packets, for the promise of health or self-indulgence they suggested – the more transparent the ploy, the more readily I seized upon it.

  In the same vein, I bought her soaps and talcum powders, perfumes in atomiser bottles, fruit or herb-flavoured shampoos, because I liked the names, or the pictures on the bottles, or the tasteful design of the labels. I would spend a long time comparing, pondering, declining, returning, giving in. I was fascinated by soaps: they came in such infinite variety – the unassuming, the blatantly overpriced, the pure and simple, the transparent, the medicated, the exotic. Cucumber. Aloe vera. Elancyl. Wheatgerm.

  No doubt anyone watching would have been amused – but there is a safety in supermarkets, a feeling that, no matter what you do, you won’t be held accountable when you leave the store, as long as you pay your bill on the way. People would go there for days out, amazed at the range of things you could buy. Each week, a new line appeared: children’s clothes, videos, romantic books, alcoholic lemonade. One afternoon, I watched an elderly man work his way through a display of collectors’ postage stamps, trying to decide what to buy. The packs were arranged by theme and by country, or they came in mixed batches of fifty or a hundred. Systematically, the old man removed each pack from the rod, lifted it up very close to his face, raised his glasses and peered underneath at the contents. Then he set that pack down on the floor, so he could get to the next. Finally, when he had worked his way through the entire display, he replaced each pack in order, and walked away. Later I saw him picking through the children’s books. It seemed to me that he was one of the dispossessed, someone who only wanted to be close to goods, to touch them, to imagine their purchase, in order to feel complete. He was carrying a basket: it is always a sign of real or virtual poverty, to be carrying a basket, rather than pushing a large, well-laden trolley. He was a thin, round-shouldered man; his shoulders were flecked with dandruff and when I moved closer, to see what book he was about to choose, I noticed the smell of stale sweat and greasy hair. He became aware of me then and turned. I looked away, but it was too late: taking up his basket the man stalked off, offended and shamed. I felt as if I had deprived him of some basic right, a vital human dignity, a sense of himself as viable in a world of slogans and catchphrases, and words that meant nothing, but expressed the most precious of our dreams and aspirations.

  When I returned, I found Lillian in bed. She seemed worried and unhappy, and all my gifts for her made no difference. At first I thought she was ill. She looked pale, and she had been off her food for a couple of days. I asked her if she wanted a cup of tea, and she nodded, so I started for the kitchen, wondering what I could do to make her feel better. I was halfway down the stairs before I realised what was happening. I rushed back upstairs and tumbled into the bedroom. I was sure that my intuition was correct. Now I knew why she had looked so worried.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  She sat up in bed, gazing at me, like a pet that feels it has done something wrong, and is waiting to be punished.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I repeated. ‘Really. I don’t mind. Not at all.’

  She seemed unsure for a moment, perhaps wondering if I really had understood. I nodded happily, and then she saw that I knew, and she smiled.

  I walked over to the bed and laid my hands on her shoulders.

  ‘It’s going to be fine,’ I said. ‘You’ll see. Everything’s going to be fine.’

  I really believed that. I really did think it was true. I had no reason to worry, after all. Lillian had no family, as far as I knew, and as for Jimmy – well, I assumed he would just disappear. It was obvious, from his behaviour in the churchyard, that he was basically a coward, the kind of man who feels powerful if he has a woman to beat, or weak friends to follow him, like the men I had seen in the pub. I had encountered his kind before, men who slept rough in the churchyard or the park, and sat there all day, drinking cider, crouched amongst the headstones or sprawled out on the grass, men who fought in the filthy corners of the town, nailing at one another drunkenly, urinating behind the church – these men were virtually sub-human, and almost incapable of meaningful thought. They spoke, of course, but their speech was nothing more than a stream of sound, a barrage of noise and curses, as insignificant as the trails of urine they left against the churchyard walls. Their lives were meaningless, and they knew it. Their only power lay in the fact that they had nothing to lose. Nothing had any value for them.

  For quite a while, there was no sign that Jimmy had traced Lillian to me. Then, one morning, after an early snow, I stepped into the garden, to take out the rubbish. It was a bright, cold morning. The snow was beginning to crust and turn to ice, but I could see that someone had walked the length of the path, from the front gate to the corner of the house, leaving a trail of dark, hard footprints. He must have come in the night or the early morning, when the snow was still fresh; now the tracks were old, beginning to fade into the ice. They were surprisingly small, barely a man’s prints at all, more like the tracks left behind by an animal – but then, I remembered Jimmy’s hands, how small they were, how delicate. I was sure he had been my visitor and I wondered what he had seen, or if he had taken anything. More importantly, I was alarmed that he had found us: if he could trace us to the house, then others might. I could only imagine the problems, and the danger to the future of the experiment, if the so-called authorities found a pregnant Lillian under my roof.

  If that had been an isolated incident, I would have put it out of my mind. Further action was, as yet, unnecessary. There was no sure proof that it was Jimmy, after all. Though I had jumped to the conclusion that the tracks were his, I reminded myself that my nocturnal visitor might have been any vagrant looking for a place to sleep or something to steal. I checked the house for signs of forced entry; I checked the shed to see if he had found his way in there. Nothing was missing, there was no hint of attempted burglary, and I managed to put the incident out of my head. It was coming up to Christmas, and I was thinking of what I would buy for Lillian. I wanted to make the occasion special. I had even considered giving her some of Mother’s jewellery, or some perfume, but that seemed too much like sacrilege – better to go into Weston for something. If nothing else, I could use the visit to see if Jimmy was still there, or whether my suspicions were unfounded. I decided to drive over that morning.

  Lillian was still asleep. She looked strange, lying in my bed, like a thin animal, with one hand raised to her mouth, as if she wanted to suck her thumb, and was only just managing to prevent herself. I watched her for a while: there is a real pleasure in watching another person sleep, listening to their breathing, wondering what they are dreaming, and what happens between the dreams, in the long dark gaps when absence takes over. I would have given so much to enter her mind, just for an hour, while she was sleepi
ng. I think I would have preferred seeing her dreams to seeing her thoughts. I sensed a potential there, a possibility of real light and movement, a vividness which her thinking probably lacked. In many ways, in fact, I suspected Lillian of not being a thinking creature at all: she gazed at pictures, she watched television, she cried when a programme was sad, she smiled at a sentimental or conventionally beautiful image, but there was little evidence of a thinking response. Not that I liked her the less for that. There were times when she was almost beautiful, lying asleep, or staring into space, and I believe the effect was heightened by her simplicity. There were times, I know, when I felt a genuine affection for her and now, more than ever, she was precious to me, for the part she was about to play in my life’s work.

  I spent the morning in Weston, trailing from one shop to another, buying odd gifts, for Lillian and for myself. I wished I could have taken her with me, so she could pick what she wanted, or so I could watch her try on the dress I would give her later, when I reached home. I wanted to know if she was ready to make her own choices, or whether she would still rely on me to pick things out for her. I wanted to buy her maternity clothes, and things for the baby.