by Anita Desai
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 garbage can. 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 garbage can. 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 skylarks 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 learned 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 streetlamp 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 in
to 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 realised 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.
When his business associate telephoned to invite him out to dinner, he made an excuse: he was very tired, he wanted to go to bed early in order to be rested and ready for the meeting tomorrow. Actually, he could not stand the thought of spending the evening in the company of the man who had been annoying him and irritating him all day. Although it might have helped to discuss their business privately over a meal before going to the meeting tomorrow, he could summon no interest in it at all: it seemed no more important to him than anything he had been doing for the last twenty-five years. He would go through the motions tomorrow but he could not pretend that he thought it important enough for him to give up an evening like this. He sipped his beer, ate the sandwiches and potato chips they had brought him when he decided not to go out to dinner, and contentedly watched the lights bob and sway in the pool of darkness below the veranda.
What he found he could not do was go to bed and fall asleep early, after an evening so relaxing and calm. He was not sleepy at all, in spite of the long, frustrating day at work. He was, instead, totally relaxed but wide awake. So he decided to go for a stroll, although the evening was warm and humid, telling himself a little fresh air would help to make him sleepy. Besides, he might as well take a look at some other part of the city before returning home tomorrow night.
The hotel was in the residential district, not the business quarter of the city. In fact, it had once been a private residence—a large villa, with a garden—and essentially had remained itself. So the street outside was as streets are in such an area: lined with trees, the lamps dim, few passersby and little traffic. The houses showed their lights through screens of trees, and over high walls. He whistled as he walked down those streets because he felt so calm and at peace.
Then he came to a great avenue where many lines of traffic moved. Here neon lights flashed, the cars' headlights beamed, and there was both noise and confusion. He waited on the pavement for the traffic lights to change, then crossed the avenue and found himself on the edge of a great park in which dark trees loomed as well as the pale bulbous shapes of the monuments for which this city was known. He had seen them by daylight, driving past, but they had seemed tourist sights then, both intimidating and slightly disappointing. Now at night, in the dark, they appeared more intimate, closer to him and his life. Again, he felt a happy calm and whistled, although he was also growing a little tired and his feet moved slowly over the dry grass. Sometimes someone would appear out of the shadows at his side, hiss at him, 'Psst! Psst!' and make suggestions or threats. He strode past them, refusing to stop and listen or be turned back by fear.
In this way he came to another avenue, also wide but with less traffic. The big lamps blazed on what was mostly empty tarmac. He crossed it easily and found it was lined on one side with boats, and that he had come to the bank of the tidal river that flowed through this city and that the tide was running high. A breeze sprang up, salt and sticky because it came from the sea but also murky and swampy because it was the delta. The sails of some big, flat-bottomed boats flapped with heavy, dull thuds against their masts. Small lamps burnt on decks, here and there, the wind making their reflections shiver in long snakes across the water.
He walked along and now his calm was ruffled by a sensation of adventure, of both fear and delight. Seeing the water glint, the waves heave, the boats lift and sink, he had a mad idea: what if he stepped onto the deck of one, untied its ropes and let the boat carry him up the river! It was ridiculous, at his age, to have this boyish, this childish urge, and he almost laughed out loud. He, even clambered up onto the bank, looked at the distance between it and the deck, trying to gauge the length of a jump. His body impelled him forward but at the same time he threw himself backward to avoid the jump and the fall. He lost his balance for a moment, then righted himself, looking around to see if anyone had observed him. No, there was no one and he walked on, rapidly.
But he had to slow down and halt soon enough because a little further up, where there were broad steps leading down to the water, a group of people had gathered. From their attitudes and gestures, he could see they were agitated—they were crowding around something that one or two of them were dragging out of the water onto the bank. Water gushed from the object they lifted and from the men who raised it, and everyone was drenched. But they crowded around and called out in high, excited voices.
He didn't want to see, or hear. It was evidently a drama, and a moment ago drama was what he had longed for, but now he shrank back, ready to turn—he did not want to be drawn in. A shrinking and dwindling of his former urge overtook him, and he wished miserably that he had stayed back at the hotel, on the veranda, safely drinking beer.
But he had been seen. One of the people, a young man, called out, 'Police? Police? Will you go for the police?' Another, of a practical nature, shouted, 'Do you have a car? Can you take—?'
First he shook his head. Then he said 'No!' very loudly, 'No, no,' and thought of turning around and hurrying away. Just then the men who had lifted the drenched, streaming object from the river pressed past him as they laid it on the bank. He found himself, along with the others, in a circle around it, standing over it and peering down.
The body lying in the mud on the bank was of course sodden, and water ran from it in streams, but it could not have been in the water long, it was intact, and what I saw was a man five feet ten inches tall, with straight black hair that the river had swept off his face, a face that was square and brown, that had a cleft in its chin, a somewhat flat nose, and a mouth that parted slightly to show his teeth. Although it was dark, I could make out that the man wore a short-sleeved white shirt and the pants were of khaki material—that is, not very dark but not white either. He had taken off his shoes for some reason but still wore socks. The socks might have been green or black, I could not tell in the dark and the wet.
I stared at him, taking in every detail. Then I stared again, harder, and more details came into, focus: the Tissot watch with the metal strap, the ball-point pen still attached to the shirt pocket. The face with the hair swept away from it, the flattened cheekbones, the cleft in the chin, the eyebrows black and heavy, the teeth uneven, crowding each other here, parted from each other there, and the glint of a filling. Every detail, in every detail, he was myself: I was looking at myself—after having spent half an hour, or an hour, underwate
r, sodden with river and mud—but it was I, in every detail, I. It was as though I was lying full-length, suspended in mid-air, and gazing down at my reflection below, soaked and muddy, but myself, I, after an accident in the river.
I do not know for how long I stared. But gradually I became aware that I was alone in standing stock-still, staring, that the others were all talking, hurrying away and hurrying back, bending over the man, touching him, and talking to each other in rough, rapid voices. Police, doctor, telephone, call ... I heard these words, and then I saw them bend down and lift him up, three or four men putting their arms under and around the corpse, and together they hurried down the bank towards the lighted road. I did not follow them but stood on the bank and watched as they carried it away, shouting to each other in the dark.
It was only when they managed to stop a vehicle—or perhaps they had summoned it and it stopped deliberately—and lifted the body into it that I became seized by agitation. Just as I had felt a few moments ago when I contemplated leaping onto the deck of a boat, now one part of me felt impelled to run after them, and plead to be allowed to go with the body—my body—and another part of me. held back, pulled back with violence in fact, and once again I stumbled because I had made a clumsy, lurching movement, although whether forwards or backwards, I really cannot say. I think I may even have fallen on my knees at that moment; later I discovered the knees of my khaki pants were muddy, and that my hands were also dirty. By then I had walked away, in another direction. As I hurried along the lighted highway, I was in great confusion, wondering if I should have followed the body to the morgue and claimed it, or whether I was right to flee from the scene.
I did find my way back to the hotel—I remembered the address clearly—and I did spend the night in the safety of my room and my bed. Next morning I might have dismissed the whole event as a nightmare—a delusion caused by the unfamiliar scene, the darkness, the solitude—but when I was brought my tea in in the morning, and a newspaper, I tried to divert my mind from the horror of the night by reading the news while I drank tea and ate toast.
