by Anita Desai
He went out into the sizzling blaze of light reflected off the sea and sand to his car and wife, twisting the key chain around his finger.
Much as he yearned for the quiet and shade of exactly such a place in exactly such a green glade, he hesitated before turning into the driveway lined with neatly clipped conifers and evergreens. Slipping into the parking lot where the only other vehicle was a green Land-Rover, he turned off the engine rather thoughtfully before slipping out. 'Coming?' he asked his wife, bending in. 'Go and ask,' she told him sulkily, and it was clear this was not the kind of place she had had in mind.
Something made Jack run his hand over his hair, almost nervously smoothing it down, then glance down at his midriff to make sure his shirt was tucked in, before he crossed the parking lot and climbed the white stone steps between pots full of fuchsias to the front door. As he put his hand out to press the shining brass doorbell, he glanced upwards: something had caught his eye—the slight movement of a white muslin curtain upstairs. Someone had been holding it aside, watching him, and now let it drop.
Bob McTaggart turned away from the window,'knowing he had been seen. He would have to go downstairs and open the door. He padded softly down the corridor, his footfall silenced by the grey carpeting. On either side of the corridor, doors stood shut. He glanced at each, at the number painted in blue on the central white panel, between the frosted glass ones: 4, 5, 6, 7. At the end of the corridor, on the landing, there was a small table with a bowl of dried flowers on it, and above it a mirror. He stood and stared at the reflection of the flowers in the mirror which had a blue frame decorated with sea shells. On its slippery surface, behind the solid form of the vase and the splayed stars of the papery flowers, there was a grey shape—his. He could only stare at the middle of it for so long, then he had to glance up, meet his own eye. Almost at once he glanced away, and went quickly down the stairs, to the corridor below. This was carpeted in blue, and its doors stood shut, too: 1, 2, 3. He passed them as if he were swimming by, with slow strokes of his legs, up to the front door. He felt the familiar response to the doorbell rising up his chest which was constricted, making air passage hard. He wanted to shout—and he was afraid he might—'No! Go away! Go!' when he opened the door.
He stood with his hand on the doorknob—wooden, smooth, sensible—fighting back those words as he had done the first time they had had guests come looking for a room. He had just brought Helen back from the clinic that day, where she had had her check-up. He had been putting her to bed, filling a hot-water bottle, fetching her an extra blanket—warm as the night was, she was shivering—when a car turned in at the gate: it was a family of holidaymakers, the first ones of their first season as managers of the White House Hotel. Exactly what they had prepared for and waited for, and now there they were: the children hugging their bed-time dolls and blankets, the parents large and hopeful on the doorstep, impossible to turn away. He had been obliged to get a key from the office, open one of the shut doors into a pristine room for which Helen had chosen the curtains, the counterpane, the ruffles. The children bounded onto the bed, trying out its springs. The father wondered if anyone would give him a hand with the luggage, and the mother asked for a meal. He was flustered, he needed Helen, and she was lying in their room, on the other side of the living room, waiting for the hot-water bottle and the blanket he had promised her. But he needed to calm these people first, stop their invading the house any further. He thought that if he fed them, they would go away, retreat into their room, shut the door and leave him alone.
In the kitchen he bumped into tables and counters while opening cupboards, taking out bread, eggs, ham, cans of baked beans.' He cut his finger on the can, blood ran into the tomato sauce as in a manic comedy show. He wiped both onto the clean teatowels. He and Helen had meant to take cooking lessons together: they had seen an advertisement, and enrolled—but there hadn't been time, and now all he could do was toast some bread, put baked beans on the toast, eggs in hot water, and he was failing.
While the toast burnt, the baked beans bubbled, sizzled and then subsided into a black crust in the pot, eggs split and oozed their gelid whites into the boiling water, he was reminded of the night when he had been the invader, the stranger, in another scene of confusion, chaos—strangely attractive—the night he had arrived in some desert outpost in Iraq where he was to spend three months, installing pipelines.
His firm had only just won the contract and he was the first to be sent out. They had told him there was an hotel near the airport where he was to stay till they built accommodation for all the engineers who were to follow. The airport had turned out to be a strip of tarmac laid across the sand which was quickly reclaiming it even as the small plane taxied down towards the long low barracks—he looked out. to see it scurrying in busy wisps to overlay it. A windsock flapped in the hot white wind like a domestic flag. A man in orange overalls stood waving his two small flags at the pilot, a chequered scarf draped around his head and mouth. With a marvellous dramatic note, the sun, as orange as his clothing, but spherical and not oblong, was setting in a haze that surrounded him forebodingly.
In the barracks the Iraqi liaison officer met him with gold-toothed enthusiasm and insisted on carrying his bag, expressing surprise at its lightness and singleness, he could not tell with what sincerity. Tossing it into the jeep that waited outside, he had taken Bob McTaggart across what seemed an immense parking lot, already overlaid by the blowing sand, to another barracks, half-buried under the grains that had whirled through the air.
That was the hotel—hostel—whatever one might call it. It was clear it had few guests, if any. In fact, the doors stood open and its lobby was deserted as though, newly constructed as it might be, it was already abandoned. The manager, who was eventually summoned from som£ region, beyond, led him down a corridor to his room. On either side there were metal doors, shut, numbers painted on them: i, 2, 3 and so on. McTaggart pleaded travel fatigue as an excuse to decline the liaison officer's invitation to an evening's entertainment, then looked through the door opened for him and saw that although there was a wooden bedstead in the room allotted him, it was hardly prepared to receive a guest: the mattress had no sheets to cover it, only a blanket that looked like army surplus. A single unshaded light bulb hung from a cord to which flies had adhered themselves as though it were a candystick. On the discoloured wall a gecko clucked its displeasure at this intrusion. In the bathroom there was a plastic bucket and a tap but no drop of water. Yet the cistern above the toilet was stained with rust. At least it stank of hygiene—lysol, or phenyle, in quantities.
As darkness closed, in, mosquitoes sailed in through the windows unimpeded because, although they were covered with wire gauze, the frames had wide cracks. He spent the evening lying on the mattress, trying to read the thriller he had bought at the airport for the trip. Then suddenly the generator stopped grinding—he had not even been aware that there was a generator till it did so—and the light went out, darkness whipped across like a blindfold. He wondered how he would get through that night: it promised to be very, very long.
Then, in no time at all—or so it seemed—the dark thinned into grey and the uncurtained window framed a new day, pale with sand. He was cold. He sat up and lifted the blanket about his shoulders. His mouth was dry, his throat scratched, and he felt he could not do without some hot water. He must get some hot water. None came from the tap so he went out into the corridor, huddled in his blanket, searching for the manager to help. The barracks—hotel, hostel—was as empty as the night before. McTaggart blundered into what was clearly meant to be a dining room—it had tables covered with white cloths on which flies clustered and crowded, and chairs with red Rexine seats. The only sign that meals had ever been served here were the plastic salt cellars, the bottles of ketchup, and the stains on the once-white cloths to which the flies adhered.
Seeing a swing door at the far end, he went out through it and found himself on a veranda looking across at a cluster of outhouses. They had to be
inhabited: he saw a curl of smoke rise from a small fire. Standing there in the half-light, wrapped in his blanket, he could make out figures huddled around it. Eventually the fire flared up—it was just made of a few sticks in a tin bucket—and he saw by its light a woman who had slipped off her bodice from one shoulder and was nursing an infant at her breast. Beside her a man squatted with his head thrown back and his teeth bared in laughter as he clapped his hands: a small girl was dancing before them, in a red dress too long for her so that its waist hugged her knees and its hem swung at her feet, while her curls tumbled about her face and she struck her bare feet on the earth, swaying her small hips to the rhythm of her father's clapping.
He stared at them: the woman with her bosom bared for the infant wrapped in her shawl, the man's teeth and moustache and lips and eyes that glittered with laughter and love, and the small girl, her legs, feet and curls swinging to inaudible music. Shrouded in the dust and dimness of day before dawn, intermittently and sporadically illuminated by the small flames shooting up from the bucket, they had about them a quality so fragile, so immaterial and implausible that it could have been a mirage, a dream—a dream he might have had, in fact, of how life should be, how it might be, if it were different, and closer to what he so passionately, in such a rush of overheated blood, wished it were.
'Hallo!' he shouted.
The child ceased to dance, the woman hastily lowered her blouse, the man rose from his haunches in a flurry. Even the fire seemed to waver and go out. McTaggart, shocked at the dramatic effect his voice had had, wondered why he had shouted, why he had broken the fine glass pane of the mirage, and he wished he could withdraw, but the man was hurrying through the whirling dust towards him while the others in the tableau were receding into it. It was the manager, also huddled in a blanket, his face enquiring, and bewildered by the appearance of this intruder.
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 chips 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 ho
spital, 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 blackbirds 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.
