A Very Private Life

by Michael Frayn

  Then, very deliberately, Noli points at her again. At last she understands! He means, did she arrive on a rocket?

  “Yes, yes!” she confirms, pointing at herself. “I mean, ka, ka! Papoom! Ka, ka!”

  Noli turns to the cook-queen and makes a gesture which asks, “Satisfied?” And she seems to be; she softens, even offers Uncumber a tiny dry smile. Clearly it must have been the question of whether or not she’d arrived by rocket that they’d been arguing about earlier. Now this is settled, Noli evidently wants to take Uncumber out and talk to her alone for a little. He opens the door and jerks his head for her to accompany him. She jumps up eagerly. And of course the same thing happens as before—she falls down, shouting with pain, clutching at her ankle.

  At this everyone in the room grows grave again, so sympathetic are they with her suffering. The cook-queen even begins to shout at Noli and wave her knife about once more, she is so upset.

  “Tisi doktoru,” says Noli firmly. He picks Uncumber up bodily and carries her down the stairs. They go right back down to the ground floor—and beyond, into the basement. And there, with a dozen or so kings and children sitting around watching it, is a holovision chamber. With a word of excuse to the audience, Noli switches to a medical-diagnosis channel. He holds her ankle up for the diagnostic machine to see, then listens gravely to the description of the trouble and to its recommended cure. In one gesture he sums it up to Uncumber; his head leaning, with eyes closed, against his folded hands.

  Rest. He carries her back upstairs to get some.

  Just as her father said

  Strange, sad days for Uncumber, sitting about the room in the damp heat, her swollen ankle stretched out in front of her. And the ankle isn’t her only trouble. It’s just as her father always said, the outside world is full of infections, to which she seems to have no resistance at all. For a start, something goes wrong with her digestive processes. She can’t bear to eat, and twenty times a day she has to go stumbling down the stairs, leaning on the stick which Noli has brought her, to the filthy lavatory on the floor below. She feels an astonishing energylessness, as if she is dying from the abdomen outwards. Then a curious prickling starts up in the roof of her mouth. It spreads downwards into her throat, somehow skinning it raw, so that she can scarcely swallow, and upwards into her head, where it swells the contents so that there is no room left to think. Tears are forced out of her eyes; streams of mucus pour out of her nose like water from a tap. Overnight, it seems to her, her personality has entirely changed. She has turned into a mindless mass of flesh; her clumsy, aching, leaking body has expanded to fill the universe, so that she is scarcely conscious of anything else. She lies slumped in the chair by the window all day, like some great swollen vegetable, unable to do anything but wipe her eyes and nose on the corner of the sheet she still wears wrapped around her, and stagger downstairs to the lavatory. The children stare at her; the cook-queen shouts at her; Noli and the moustached king look at her and shake their heads.

  And things get worse. An unbelievable chill comes into the sweltering air, so that she begins to shiver. She shivers more and more violently, until her teeth chatter and her shoulders shake. And yet the air must somehow be hot as well as cold, because even as she shivers the sweat runs off her forehead and down her neck and between her breasts.

  The surprised queen puts her to bed, and as she lies there she becomes more and more terrified at what is happening to her. Her fingers shrink until they are nothing but ten tiny sticks. Then, as she touches them together to feel their smallness, it seems to her that they are not shrunken at all but unnaturally large—great soft, swollen things. She hears the queens shouting at each other and guesses they are arguing about her. But their voices seem remote and unreal, as from another world. Her sense of time becomes confused; it seems to her that she has spent a lifetime in this state. She lies gazing at the brown stains and patches on the ceiling; only they are not stains and patches, they are fat, grinning faces, which come swooping down at her and then seem to suck her into their own tumbling, roaring, terrifying, brown-stain world.

  It is dark, and she is being taken through what she is almost certain is an unreal forest by unreal people. But everything is so muddled! Everything changes so much as soon as you turn to look at it and see if it’s unreal or not!

  Now it’s light, and a worried face belonging to a total stranger is bending over her. The stranger is familiar, in a strange way. She believes he is called Noli….

  Now it’s dark again, and she is back in the forest….

  At some point, either before or after the forest, one thought echoes through her brain with ironic clarity: she has escaped from the privacy of the inside world only to find on the outside a world more totally private than ever—a world entirely enclosed by the limits of her own mind.

  Another trouble

  And then it’s light, and the sweat on her brow has dried, and she has emerged from her private world again. From blotting out the horizon all round, her body has subsided into nothingness; it seems to lie inert and helpless in the bed, while her spirit darts about inside, looking out, pale and clear-headed, at the complexities of life in the room. Her arms are almost too weak to lift a spoon; her mouth has not the slightest desire to try talking. But her eyes follow the kings and queens, tracing the complexities of their relationships. She notes with interest to which queen each child turns to be comforted, and which child each queen picks out for blame. Three of the children belong to Noli and the cook-queen, she decides. The other two seem to belong not to the thin queen whose bed she shares, but to the surprised queen. So presumably it is the surprised queen who is married to the moustached king. It’s impossible to tell from the behaviour of the kings and queens themselves. When the two kings are home they talk to each other, and the three queens seem to huddle together in a silence which is broken only when the cook-queen shouts at Noli. When the three queens are left on their own together they talk and argue incessantly. The cook-queen hectors the other two; the cook-queen and the thin queen treat Uncumber sourly, while the surprised queen joins forces with the cook-queen to brutalize the thin queen.

  As Uncumber grows stronger the complex life of the room first bores and then disgusts her. Always this talk! Always these bodies cluttering the room! Always the arguments, laughter, tensions, slaps, sullen silences, yawns, belches! She remembers her room at home, with its calm and ordered life—quiet images when she wanted quiet images, people neatly encased in the holovision chamber when she wanted people. She remembers the darkness and softness of the walls, and the blessed quietness and stillness of her father and brother, maintained in perpetual chemical equilibrium. And as she thinks thoughts like these she suffers another unexpected set of symptoms. Her throat seems to swell up inside so that once again she cannot swallow. Once again the tears run out of her eyes. A sharp, sweet pain seems to strike down from her swollen throat, through her windpipe into her chest. What strange feelings! How terrible that now she has escaped into the real world all she can think about is the unreal one she escaped from! And what an ungrateful and ungracious occupant of that soft, calm, unreal world she was!

  She feels that it is only the thought of Noli which keeps her from complete disintegration. Sometimes in the evening now he comes and sits on her bed for a little. He smiles, and pats her hand. He feels her brow with the palm of his roughened hand, then nods and smiles. He points interrogatively at her ankle, and when she nods and smiles he nods and smiles too.

  One evening he is wearing a pair of dark glasses. She laughs at this; they look odd on him, now she has got used to seeing him with bare eyes. She tries to take them off, but he won’t let her. She is touched at this unexpected concession to her world, and squeezes his hand and runs the back of her finger through the thick scrubby eyebrows, which stick out above the glasses.

  “Upsid melu tem tem sesevona!” screams the cook-queen at him sarcastically, while all the children stare covertly at Noli and Uncumber from a discreet distance. />
  “Sish!” he says threateningly to the cook-queen, without turning round. She mutters something else. “Sish!” he orders her. Then he smiles sadly at Uncumber.

  “Temni mor,” he says. “Sansan ferolivinil—ao kero sil for, sil ucin.”

  She smiles. He pats her shoulder.

  “Tas loro nomisti ven,” he murmurs and sadly makes his gesture of a rocket going up into the air. “Papoom,” he says sadly.

  “Papoom,” she echoes, smiling at him confidently.

  PAPOOM!! agrees a passing rocket from somewhere up in the reddening sky outside.

  Out and about

  Noli makes the surprised queen lend Uncumber some of her clothes to replace the torn and filthy sheet. She feels ridiculous as she puts her arms and legs into all the special holes and does up all the special tapes and buttons. When she first hobbles downstairs in all this rig-out, feeling as weak as string after her illness, she is certain that everyone will laugh at her. But on the contrary; people evidently find her less remarkable in a dress than in a sheet. She has to sit down for a while on the marble stairs in front of the palace to get her breath. But even here, with kings and queens passing all the time, she attracts nothing more than a passing nod.

  With painful slowness she makes her way on down the avenue which leads through the overgrown garden. Here and there at the edge of the road she passes statues like the ones which terrified her that first night, some fallen and lying whitely among the dirty grass, some still standing, with broken noses and features half worn away by time. There is a certain amount of traffic along the rutted track in the centre of the avenue—kings pushing handcarts, queens carrying bundles of clothes on their heads. Several travelling machines like the one she saw in the yard bounce by, roaring preposterously, with blue smoke coming out of pipes behind them. She sees a number of kings apparently balancing on travelling machines with only two wheels; what keeps them up she cannot see.

  At the end of the avenue stand the eroded stone pillars of a great formal gateway. As she comes through it Uncumber finds herself face to face with the sea. She sinks down onto a fallen stone to gaze at it.

  It is unmistakable, of course—flat and vast and bounded by the neat horizon, just as it was on those childhood holidays. But it is not blue, as she had expected, or even green, the way she sometimes used to see it. Under the yellow sky it lies a lurid yellowish grey, shading in some places to lead, brightening in others to silver. Nor is it empty, as it used to be, but studded with complex installations built out of grey steel and rust. Between these installations machines patrol slowly up and down, roaring effortfully, with whirling wheels that sweep flashing wet vegetation out of the water into waiting hoppers. At the edge of the sea, where it moves restlessly against the beach at the foot of the bluff on which she is sitting, there is neither the sand nor the white spume which she remembers from those other seas, but a broad black scum lapping against blackened boulders.

  The section of the shore where she is sitting is desolate and unused. But two or three hundred metres away to her left is a large low building constructed out of rust and disintegrating timber, and all along the coast beyond that the shore is lined with buildings and derelict jetties, stretching out in a great arm around the bay, as if to hug the installations in the water in a huge embrace. She can see men moving through the streets. From far away round the bay there is the noise of metal striking against metal with a regular dull, ringing sound. A whistle shrills. A deadened explosion sounds. So this is how it is, the real outside world. This is how it is.

  She sits on her stone for a long time, just gazing raptly at the buildings and the water. Slowly the harvesting machines creep back and forth across their fields of sea. The black tide edges up the beach. Rockets papoom invisibly by, on their way in and out of the rocketport, which must be somewhere inland behind the bay. On and on she gazes, trying to penetrate the outside world’s secret, trying to seize the essential reality of it all and soak herself in it. But the sheer uneventfulness of the scene, and the sullen warmth of the afternoon, gradually overcome her, and she dozes as she sits. When she wakes the sea has crept under the bluff and the copper disc of the sun swung over towards the west. But the machines are still harvesting, the remote piledriver is still hammering, and men are still moving irregularly along the quays, on foot and on their two-wheeled machines. The sameness of it all begins to frighten her. Once again the picture of her own room at home comes into her head, with its dark, soft surfaces and the sweetly varied forms which processed through the holovision chamber. Once again the familiar swelling pain comes into her throat.

  Life

  Each day she hobbles forth to look at the sea from one vantage point or another; and each day it is the same.

  But she makes a surprising discovery. The unchanging elements of the scene are not unchanging at all if you look at them closely. The earth, the trees, the rocks, the boulders on the beach are all crawling with life. The longer and closer she looks, the more shaken she is. Ants hurry in all directions through the dust, just as they do in metaphor, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them, disappearing into tiny holes leading down into—what? An ant kingdom below the surface, where millions, and millions of millions of them, infest and undermine the still earth? Flies swarm over unidentifiable pieces of dark, stinking decay among the rocks. Clouds of tiny white insects of a sort she has never even heard about in all the rich treasury of metaphor hop up the beach like a dust storm, just ahead of the rising tide. Unthinkable creatures scutter through the sand at the bottoms of pools. The whole world suddenly takes on the aspect of a rank, heaving mass of maggots which appears still and solid only if you stand far enough off from it. So this is what she has been protected from for all these years!

  The king strikes a blow

  Uncumber begins to feel that the three queens would gladly tear her to pieces if they were not so much in awe of Noli; even the surprised one would probably help, she thinks.

  Their deference to him is surprising; his wife, the cook-queen, frequently shouts at him, and the other two women often seem to ignore his presence altogether. But he is undoubtedly the head of the household. When he expostulates with them in his mild way, they may shout defiantly or turn their backs on him—but they end up by doing as he says.

  One evening Uncumber sees an extraordinary scene, which shocks and frightens her, and which perhaps explains Noli’s ascendancy.

  They are all sitting around the table eating their evening meal. The cook-queen is hectoring on in her usual style, casting angry glances at everyone in turn around the table, while Noli keeps his face down near his bowl, gobbling his food and saying nothing. And then, when the cook-queen pauses for breath, the surprised queen makes some mild remark. She says it so quietly, her eyes cast down indifferently, that it’s difficult even to guess at the sense of it. But Noli at once puts down his eating tools and stands up. He hitches up his trousers, leans across the table, and hits her.

  He hits her very hard, with his closed fist, on the side of her face. She jerks back to absorb the blow, and her chair goes over backwards. In absolute silence everyone watches her sprawling on the floor, struggling to get her feet disentangled from the chair. Uncumber gazes at Noli, a great chill of astonishment and fear running through her. He is quietly sitting down and starting to gobble up his food again. She looks at the other two queens, to see how they have taken the incident. To her even greater surprise, they are both nodding slightly, as if satisfied by the justice of it.

  The surprised queen takes her place at table again and continues to eat, her face red, the livid mark of Noli’s knuckles still visible over her left cheekbone. Uncumber pushes her food away, feeling sick. She would like to stare at Noli, to try to incorporate this new aspect of his character into her general image of him. But she daren’t even glance at him. The world suddenly seems an infinitely more complex place than she ever supposed. It’s not that her confidence in Noli is in any way diminished; she accepts at once th
at this form of behaviour is correct. It’s just that she wonders fearfully what other great gaps in her knowledge of the world and of her lover’s character will come to light as the days go by—what other dark corridors she will be led down with no guide but her confidence in Noli.

  In fact she doesn’t have long to wait for the next surprise. That night she sees the cook-queen getting into the bed which the surprised queen usually shares with the children. She looks round in astonishment for the surprised queen. She is sharing Noli’s bed! And in the dark that night there are muffled gasps, and whispered words, and the rhythmic squeak-squeak-squeaking of rusty bedsprings. So the surprised queen is not Noli’s sister but his mistress! Of course; she sees it now. She lies rigid, with the covers over her head, trying not to listen. Down the long, dark corridor she goes, certain now that there are many more ahead.

  Sisni

  Uncumber begins to evolve a new way of thinking about Noli—perhaps a new theory of human understanding in general. The nature of his relationship with the surprised queen was completely unexpected; she freely admits that to herself. Of course she can absorb it into her understanding of him in retrospect; she can feel with hindsight that it was unsurprising and entirely natural. A lot of one’s feeling that one understands someone, she decides, consists not in the ability to know what they will do before they do it, but in the ability to accept their behaviour after the event. She doesn’t know much about Noli, she sees that now. She thought that she knew everything about him after that first meeting on holovision. But she still doesn’t know exactly where he goes during the day, or what he does. She doesn’t know exactly what network of relationships and obligations surrounds him. But in some way, she feels, she knows him direct, the way she knows the feeling of sadness, or the sound of an oboe. Some current, she feels, arcs brilliantly between the inmost him and the inmost her, jumping the unexplored tangle of circumstances between them.