by Francis King
The girl gave a little bob, as though rehearsing a curtsey for the Princess, and smiled back nervously. ‘Hi!’ At that, she turned away and sidled off.
The Princess was late. When the ancient Rolls Royce, accompanied by four outriders on motorcycles and two police cars, one behind and one in front, at last came into view, there was some desultory clapping. Revealed through the bullet-proof window was a middle-aged woman in a shiny, pale-blue dress and a dark-blue felt hat the large brim of which swept upwards and away from her face. With marionette-like movements, she smiled, nodded, waved a hand, leaned forward, smiled again.
‘She looks even better in real life than in her photographs,’ a woman beside Lois remarked to another woman.
‘Pity the make-up’s so thick,’ the other woman responded.
The child beside her asked: ‘Mummy, who’s that lady?’
‘It’s the Princess, you little silly!’
Brian was still holding the placard aloft with aching arms. He now tried to step out in front of the stately, hearse-like vehicle to brandish it before the graciously smiling face framed by the window. But a policeman put out a hand. ‘ Stand back, sir! Please, sir! Stand back!’
The Princess continued to nod, smile, wave, nod. But, mysteriously, she never looked at the placard, even though it was so close to her, at the front of the crowd.
Silently, slowly, the Rolls Royce glided on and eventually passed through the high wrought-iron gates.
‘She didn’t even notice!’ Lois cried out. ‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.’
Later, as she and Brian trailed home together, he at last broke their despairing silence: ‘You’d have thought that at least that press photographer would have taken a shot. What’s the matter with people?’
‘What’s the matter with them? They’re all heartless shits.’
He flung the placard away from him on to the grass verge. ‘ It’s disgusting, disgusting, disgusting!’ he cried out. He might have been a bewildered and frustrated small boy.
There were people all around them. But again no one paid any notice.
Every Sunday they drove out to the cemetery. Recently extended, it now also included a crematorium, a Garden of Rest full of meticulously tended hybrid roses, and a café at which luke-warm coffee and tea were served in plastic mugs and the sandwiches tasted of the polythene in which they had been wrapped.
‘Why are there so many people here today? It’s not usually like this.’
‘Easter,’ Brian replied. Despite his thick, dark-blue overcoat, black cap and black gloves, he felt chilled. It was all he could do to stop his teeth from chattering.
‘What has that to do with it?’
‘Well, the Resurrection, I suppose.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Oddly, though Lois believed in a resurrection for Suzie, she had never been able to believe in one for others or for herself.
They had brought with them, in a Safeway’s bag carried by Brian, half-a-dozen pots of primroses, a trowel, a fork, and a dustpan and brush. They knelt on either side of the grave and silently got to work. Brian planted the primroses, Lois swept up the sodden leaves and small twigs that the March winds had blown across from the rowan tree beside the grave. She was superstitious about rowans, as about many other things. It was a comfort that it was there. Weren’t rowans supposed to ward off evil spirits?
It was, surprisingly, Brian, always so down-to-earth, and not Lois, often so sentimental, who had composed what should go on the newly cut tombstone. When she had been in the cemetery for the burial of a neighbour, Dotty had happened to pass the tombstone, had paused to read the inscription, and had then remarked to her husband, a chartered surveyor, ‘Rather naff, don’t you think?’
The inscription read:
IN MEMORY OF OUR ANGEL SUZIE
her wings were still small
but strong enough to bear her to heaven
Now Lois used the brush meticulously to coax every residue of dust and grime out of each of the incised letters. Then, with a cloth, she rubbed at them with energetic fury.
Across the narrow path, a middle-aged woman with improbably fox-coloured hair and a knitted coat reaching almost to her swollen ankles, and an elderly man with a straggly white moustache, were putting some flowers into a glass vase, which the woman had already filled from a tap at the entrance gate. There was a look of resigned sorrow on both their faces.
Suddenly the woman lurched up from her kneeling position on a newspaper that she must have brought with her, and approached Lois and Brian. ‘That’s a lovely rose you have there. I wanted a rose like that. White, with small buds like those. But the man at Cassell’s must have made a mistake. What we got came up with some of the largest of red roses either of us had ever seen. You can imagine! Once it produced its first flower, we decided it wasn’t suitable. Not for a grave. Not at all. My mother would have been horrified. So we transplanted it to our little garden. But –’ she shrugged mournfully – ‘it just died.’
‘We felt our rose bush was just right for our little daughter,’ Lois said. ‘ Those white buds. Just right. She was so young when she was taken from us. Those small white buds express her so perfectly.’
Now the woman had been joined by her husband. With a Welsh lilt to his voice, he said: ‘ It’s her mother who rests over there. The wife and her mother were always so close. She was a lovely lady. A really lovely lady. We never had a cross word. She was a dinner-lady at the local school for almost thirty years. The kids loved her.’
‘Which school was that?’ Brian asked. ‘Perhaps it was the one to which my little daughter went.’
Neither answered the question. ‘My mother won a George medal,’ the woman took up. ‘In the War. She was working in a canteen in London at the time and it was bombed. She helped rescue a lot of people. She was a strong woman, always strong. Afraid of nothing.’
‘Our little one didn’t know what fear was,’ Brian said. ‘We think that may be why she died as she did. She may have strayed away from the school party and then …’
The woman cut in: ‘When I was little, my mother had this wonderful hair. Golden. It was so long she could sit on it. Then my father persuaded her to cut it off. I cried and cried and cried. It was the worst day of my life.’
‘We must get our skates on, Marion. Don’t forget Elsie said she’d come by at six.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ The woman turned away, then turned back. ‘Oh, I miss my mother so much. Not a day passes that I don’t think of her. She was one of the old school, you know. She had her principles and she stuck to them.’
Without a word of goodbye, the man hurried back to the other grave and began to pick up the thing scattered around it.
‘Well, it’s been nice talking to you.’ A perfunctory, twitchy smile. Then the woman too had left them.
Lois and Brian completed their tasks in silence. Then they got to their feet. Brian bent down to brush his trousers. Lois held a handkerchief to lips chapped by the March winds, as though she were about to cry. The two of them stood there in silence for a long time, their heads lowered. Then Brian sighed: ‘Well, I suppose we’d better be getting home.’
‘I always think – it’s terrible that she – she can’t come home with us.’
He put his arm round her. ‘I know, I know.’ He felt the same coldness and immensity of grief. But, unlike her, he rarely attempted to put that grief into words.
Lois thought of the isolation of bereavement, as she often did. Here were all these people, dotted around the cemetery. But each little group was totally uninterested in any other little group. No one noticed anybody, she thought. Each group was invisible to the rest. She tried to catch the eye of a woman standing alone by a grave that they passed. But at that same moment the woman turned away, stooped, and tugged at a weed.
Without looking at Brian, almost to herself, Lois said in a low, mournful voice: ‘Everybody is somebody. But to everyone else everybody is nobody’
Br
ian made no response. The two of them trudged on.
Then Brian shivered. ‘ I’m chilled to the bone,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to the caff and have a cup of tea.’
‘You’re optimistic if you think that that dishwater of their’s is going to warm us.’
Nonetheless they branched off along the path that would take them there.
The Miracle
For the Ukraine cruise I had a single cabin on a lower deck. Sonny and Joy, as befitted a couple so rich, had one of the four ‘stateroom suites’ on the boat-deck, each with its own private area for sunbathing. It was to this area that the three of us increasingly retreated, when not ashore. Joy, always a serene, remote presence, would work at her embroidery or would read some work of historical biography. Sonny would talk about the arts, politics or life in general, with the same showy bravura, all too often based on inadequate knowledge or total ignorance, with which he used once to dash off his weekly essays when, both reading English, we had shared a tutor at Oxford. When the ship was docked, it was from this eyrie that we invariably used to look down all the activity below us.
A pall of smog, leaden and acrid, hung over Zaporizhzhya. We had moored opposite a long, narrow beach, in effect a mudflat, crowded with bathers. I could taste the smog on my tongue; it made me wheeze with the asthma from which I had until then been mercifully free on the trip.
‘Who wants to visit the ‘‘Cradle of Cossackdom’’?’ Sonny asked, contemptuously quoting from our programme.
‘What else is there to do?’ Joy asked.
‘Read. Talk.… Drink,’ he added. The last was something that he had been doing increasingly during the past week.
All but a few of the other passengers set off in antiquated buses for the Cossacks’ island; but after a brief protest from Joy, the three of us remained behind, lying out on deckchairs in our privileged space. An ice bucket glinted beside Sonny.
Just as I was about to drop off to sleep, a cooling wind arose to pick away at the pall of smog, until everything was radiant – the brass of the ship glowing, the sea glittering with shards of light, the sky a lucent blue. We began to look down at the youthful people, a few girls among them but chiefly boys, who were diving into the dirty water both from the quay at which our boat was moored and from a suspension bridge that led from the quay across the wide, meandering river to the beach.
‘You’d think they’d get typhoid,’ Joy said to me.
‘We certainly would if we dived into that muck.’
Sonny picked up his Japanese video camera – one of our fellow passengers, a retired solicitor, had remarked to me, with sour envy, that it must be one of the most expensive on the market – and leaned over the rail, filming now one of the divers and now another. Eventually, the divers became aware of what he was doing and they began to vie with each other, climbing higher and higher up the arch of the suspension bridge, before daringly plunging into water iridescent with oil and murky with garbage. ‘ Such beauty in such a hideous place,’ Sonny muttered, as a tall girl with hair bleached by the sun almost to white, gazed up at us, eventually to be joined by a squat boy with a simian face, short legs and swelling pectorals.
Eventually Sonny padded in his espadrilles into the stateroom and emerged with a half-full carton of the Camel cigarettes at which he puffed so frequently that his clipped moustache had an orange tinge to its grey. Now, when a diver performed a particularly graceful or courageous feat, he would lay aside the camera and hurl a packet of the cigarettes down to the quay. The divers always seemed to know for whom the reward was intended. There was, amazingly, no pushing or squabbling.
The squat boy with the simian face was the most accomplished performer. He could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen, but he was clearly a hero even to his older friends. When he had executed a particularly impressive dive, they would clap him, not with any irony but in genuine admiration, before Sonny threw down yet another packet of the Camels. The two guards who always stood watch by the gangway when we were in port, from time to time stared up at us. Were they scowling like that because of the glare or because they disapproved of, or were envious of, Sonny’s largesse?
Having now dived off the highest point of the arch of the suspension bridge, to the cheers of his companions, the squat boy must have decided to find an even greater challenge. As though on an impulse, he raced along the quay and, with a flying leap, straddled the rail of the main deck. The guards rushed towards him but, with a yell of triumph, he eluded them by shinning up the side of the ship, finding a precarious foothold now here and now there, until he was on the next deck. He then raced up one companionway after another, until all at once he emerged, panting, on the boat-deck beside us. He ran towards one of the lifeboats, suspended from its davits over the murky water, and, teeth bared in a grin, jumped on to it. He stared across at us with what seemed to be a challenge. Sonny laid down the camera on the table on which the vodka bottle and glasses were set out and drew his wallet out of the back pocket of his linen trousers. He pulled out a fifty-dollar bill and held it aloft. He and the boy grinned at each other in mutual understanding. Sonny waved the bill back and forth. Then he handed it to me and stooped for the camera.
I could hear the two guards pounding up the companionway. They were shouting something, unintelligible to us but intelligible to the boy, who turned away, braced himself, prehensile toes gripping the edge of the boat, and, arms raised above his squat body, dived.
It would be a perfect dive, I remember thinking, thrilled, as always, by an athletic prowess beyond me even when young. But then it seemed as if some invisible, malevolent hand reached out and nudged the plunging body sideways – so that, instead of arrowing straight down into the murky waters, it veered at a slight angle and crashed on to the quay. Joy beside me screamed. Others, below us, also screamed.
‘Oh, Christ!’ It was like a bellow of pain from Sonny.
He met the first of the guards at the top of the companionway, pushed the man aside, and raced down.
Joy, as horrified as I was, placed a hand on my arm. ‘Do you think …?’
I shrugged helplessly. I thought for a moment that I was going to vomit. I had already decided that the boy must be dead.
The two of us stared down, as a crowd, composed not merely of the divers but of people from the beach and even from the road beyond it, grew larger and larger and more and more clamorous around the motionless, sprawled body on the jetty. Suddenly the ship’s doctor – a retired Russian gynaecologist, with huge feet and a spade-shaped white, tangled beard – had appeared on the scene. Sonny gripped him by his arm, saying something to him. The doctor pushed Sonny aside, knelt by the boy, raised his arm and felt his pulse. The boy’s face was unnaturally twisted askew, the one visible eye shut. Something dark and glistening was forming a triangular pool to one side of it.
‘What a crazy thing to attempt!’ I said to Joy.
‘And Sonny egged him on. Oh, God! It was his fault. What an idiot!’
An ancient ambulance, bell jangling, eventually arrived, and two medics, a gaunt, middle-aged man and a young, busty woman, both in long, grubby white coats, hoisted the body on to a stretcher.
The doctor clambered into the ambulance and then turned to push aside the tall girl diver with the sun-bleached hair – she was hysterically sobbing – as she attempted to follow. To my amazement Sonny now also attempted to board the ambulance. The doctor barked something and Sonny, vigorously shaking his head, yelled something back. For a while, they argued. Then both disappeared into the ambulance. Bell again jangling, it jerked towards the bridge, bumped across it and gathered speed.
‘What use does the fool think he will be?’ Joy asked. Usually so placid, she amazed me with the tone, harsh with anger, with which she asked the question.
I shrugged. ‘I suppose in some way he feels responsible.’
‘Of course he feels responsible! He ought to feel responsible! If he hadn’t encouraged that boy … And now he’s dead. That’s clear. H
e’s dead.’ Suddenly she began to sob with a gulping, jerky frenzy. Then she rushed into the stateroom, leaving me alone. I went to the rail and stared down at the crowd. More and more of them began to stare up at me in still, silent hostility – as though it were I who had held out that fifty-dollar bribe.
When Sonny at last returned, I expected him to be shaken and shocked by the realisation that, however indirectly, he had been the cause of a death. When, to my amazement, he revealed that the boy was suffering from nothing worse than concussion and a shattered cheekbone, I expected him to show the jubilation of relief. What I never expected was his air of stupefied bewilderment. Frowning out at the by now deserted beach, across which the shadows of the straggly trees behind it were lengthening as the huge sun sank, he would answer each of our questions – Was the hospital far away? Would the shattered cheekbone require an operation? When did they think that the boy would come out of his coma? – with two or three tetchy words. It was as though he were trying to work out some difficult problem and did not wish to be interrupted. Eventually the gong reverberated tinnily for dinner. He picked up his glass of neat vodka – it must have been his fourth or fifth since his return – and said: ‘You both go. I’ve no appetite.’
As we walked towards the dining-hall, Joy said: ‘What a relief! He could never have lived with himself if the boy had died.’
‘But it’s so extraordinary. I felt sure that he must have broken his neck.’
The ship was to sail at midnight. Sonny and I walked along the deserted quay, until all at once I glimpsed that triangle of blood, now no longer luridly glistening but dried almost to black.
‘I thought he was dead, I really thought he was dead.’
Sonny halted, turned to me. Although the night was cool and we had been merely ambling along, there were beads of sweat on his forehead. ‘He was dead,’ he said. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. The doctor told me he was dead. He was dead.’
