But the politics of the room had suddenly changed.
Very slowly she turned her face and stared at him, unblinkingly. He held her stare only for a moment, then, with a shrug, he turned away. He went over to the shelf where they kept the food. He said, ‘Come on, there’s more cheese and bread.’ He said, ‘Anyway you haven’t finished your beer.’ His voice was far from confident.
After a little while, she picked herself up and came across and drank a little. She spread some peanut butter on her bread.
The doctor was anxious to express what had happened. Also to apologise for it. He said, ‘You don’t know your own strength, that’s the trouble. You had me half dead on the floor. Why did you want to do a thing like that?’ Somehow everything he said rang false. Secretly he knew why. She might have made a mistake. But with that last blow of his – that ‘Down, slave’, that ‘Take that and mind your manners’ – he had made no mistake. He had called something up from the unforgotten past. It was therefore for him to say sorry. Yet as soon as he opened his mouth to do so, he knew he had made a mistake. He had confessed to something of which she had not previously been absolutely sure.
‘Look, Cat, I’m sorry if—’
With a single swipe of her hand she removed plates, cans, knife, bread, peanut butter – the whole damned shooting match on to the floor. Everything was smashed and scattered about.
He was shaken and enraged. He stood quite still, white and trembling with anger. She watched him again. With great effort he managed to recover himself. He then said very quickly, ‘You are inviting me to strike you again. I will not do so.’
She stared at him for moments on end. Then she turned away, pulled on her jeans and her big pullover; put on her plastic coat. She lit a cigarette, hummed ‘Strangers in the Night’, and stepping over the debris she unrolled the chain and walked out of the dump.
The doctor was still shaking. He did not attempt to tidy up. He suddenly felt desperately depressed. He climbed on to the bed, rolled a blanket round him and, white man, prayed for sleep.
The next morning broke gloomily with the sky low and overcast. Bad dreams weren’t scattered away. The doctor moved her arm without waking her and stepped over her. He put on his shoes and his coat, still without waking her. He finished an open can of beer and lit one of her cigarettes. Very gently he took the chain off the door. He laid it on the floor, soundlessly. He opened the door swiftly so that it would not creak and closed it similarly, once he had stepped out into the landing.
Downstairs, in the deserted hall, he knew that he had been bluffing; had been praying that she should wake up. So it was only now that he seriously considered his escape.
He had no idea how many days had passed since the night that Angel got away, but he reckoned it must have been the best part of two weeks. The real world outside was still at this moment no more than black shadows seen through the frosted glass on the closed front door, but it frightened him. Patients, like released prisoners, first feel alarmed by reality. He’d forgotten just how much.
He thought the best plan would simply be to bluff it out. Just walk out there, clap his hands, yell ‘Taxi’.
He felt quite unreal as he stepped outside. The door banged behind him. He was scared that it had locked but did not dare hesitate now. He had forgotten the coldness of the wind. It was still coming across the frozen lake. It hit him very hard and took his breath away. Buttoning up, he looked left and right and thought he saw some kind of junction two or three blocks up to the right. He would find a taxi there.
At the first crossing, just as he was about to step off the island towards the sidewalk on the far side he looked up and caught a man’s eye. That man knew him. Whether he was posted there the doctor never knew. He emerged from a doorway and looked. The doctor panicked, at once. There was only one white man in the world.
The doctor was almost run over by a truck as he ran back. He darted and dodged through the coloured men and women struggling up the street against the wind. They must have heard a shout, but most of them were too cold to appreciate its meaning, fast enough.
The doctor found the door. It wasn’t locked. He banged it shut behind him. He rushed upstairs, like a frightened schoolboy: Mummy, Mummy. When he came to the landing he flung open the door. In the space of five seconds, without any words, the pair of them exchanged two chapters.
She was up. She was dressed. She was tidying up. She was half smiling as if to say, ‘I knew you were only bluffing going downstairs and banging the door like that, old man, but I too am sorry about last night. I’ve thought, and you’re right. I was provoking you to behave like a white man, but now we can forget it. I want to forget it, that’s why I’m doing this thing for you. That’s why I’m tidying up the joint.’
And he was saying, ‘Cat, no. No. I’ve gone and torn it. I must have been crazy. You made me feel so safe I got proud. I went out. I didn’t bluff. I went out and they’ve seen me.’ He said out loud, ‘They’re coming.’ And there was the sound of voices, of several men coming together in the street down below.
The black panther is a remarkable animal.
The doctor knew that: knew about panthers and cheetahs and leopards. He’d had quite an obsession about them all his life. He’d always loved animals and the cats, the cat family intrigued him most of all.
These feline animals never run in the way people imagine them to do. They leap and bound forward a little faster than the eye can accurately follow. But they can’t run for long. Not like a dog or a deer. For an instant their power seems to be limitless, its speed infinite. But they can’t run at all.
She took the stairs to the second floor in two bounds. She grabbed the doctor’s hand and pulled him up the next flight as together they heard the front door bang, below. When he stumbled, she yanked him to his feet. She leapt up into an attic area, and pulled him up behind her with both hands. She crashed through a door on to the flat roof. She didn’t give the doctor time to grow giddy. She leapt from one roof to the next over chasms that dropped five storeys to the street. It was icy and slippery.
But in all, they didn’t cover more than half the block. She opened a skylight. The roofs seemed to be a world she knew. She dropped through the skylight and the doctor tumbled after. At once, again, she pulled him to his feet. She closed the skylight. She took the first six or seven down steps in a bound. The doctor rattled behind. Then the next. They passed like this through a house filled with astonished mothers and children, most of whom seemed to be oriental. They simply saw the flash of white plastic coat and the doctor, banana legged, falling behind.
Then they were in a street of dilapidated redstone houses with steps up to each front door. There were still piles of frozen snow, but it was brown and doggy now. At this stage the doctor could have taken over the lead. The cat can’t run. When she stopped at the seventh house he thought she was pausing for breath. He urged her on.
But she had some plan. She looked all the way round. The whole environment, every detail of it from the roof to the ash-can blown in the wind was contained, for an instant, in those unblinking, yellow eyes.
Suddenly she took the doctor’s hand and strode across the street to a house that was labelled dental surgeon.
The house had a double door. The first was unlocked. Inside were the bells for the different apartments. She pressed ‘Consulting Room’ and hummed uneasily as she waited. The doctor had his hand over his side. He was bent forward, trying to regain his breath. The inner door was glazed. The glass plate rattled as the nurse opened it. It rattled again as the nurse was flung aside. She protested too late. The fugitives had arrived. Even the doctor was learning to react fast, like that.
The dentist’s waiting-room was dingy and yet also tawdry with touches of red and gold on curtains and carpet. It was not very clean.
The nurse went to fetch the dentist, who wasn’t next door in the surgery, but upstairs, in his apartment, drinking hot soup. It must have been about 11.00 a.m. and he hadn’t seen any p
atients yet. Meantime, the doctor half sat and half lay on a greasy upholstered sofa while his saviour paced up and down and round the room, much like an athlete infuriated by an unjust decision at the finish of a race.
In crisis, some men, especially frightened men, seem to speak in code. Or maybe some know no other language. They have to approximate their actual reaction to archetypal form. The coloured dentist was thin with horn-rimmed glasses. His clothes didn’t seem to fit him too well. His wrists stuck out of his white coat. His trousers were too short.
He called her by the name the doctor had never heard. It was such an obvious name. He said, ‘Silence, honey, you can’t do this to me, Silence. You got to go. You can’t stay here. You know it. That’s not fair to me or mine, baby. Silence, you got to be on your way.’
She looked down at him and waited until he stopped. Then she led the way into the surgery. They closed the door behind them, leaving the doctor out.
The doctor could not then hear what the dentist said. He could pick up the perturbed, insistent, not too persuasive tone but he was missing the words, even when he crossed to the door to try to learn more. The doctor was not at all sure where the dentist stood. He had noticed only one thing: the dentist had behaved as if Silence were on her own. He had not acknowledged the doctor’s presence at all, not by the bat of an eyelid. It was as if he were already preparing his testimony to some Moslem inquisition: ‘Sure, Silence came round, but I never saw anybody with her. I saw nobody else, at all.’
The doctor thought he heard Silence moan in a strange way, but the sound was not repeated, so soon he came away from the door. The waiting-room had some kind of central heating which did not make him feel more confident. It worried him after the cold: even made him feel a little sick. And he was troubled with the wound. He had stuffed his dirty handkerchief into place over the ruckled bandage underneath his belt. He dreaded that the wound had opened again. But he stuck his finger down the bandage and there was no redness. Just sweat.
He sat back.
It took him half a minute to recognise the picture which was not a photograph but a painting on the cover of a weekly news magazine. It was lying on the table in front of his eyes. His daughter Lilian was where all the pretty girls hope one day to be; in glorious colour, on the cover. And underneath there was a caption: ‘The girl it’s all about.’
It frightened the doctor. He hardly dared open the magazine. He suddenly didn’t want to know. He felt that there were only bad things to be learnt. It wasn’t that he wanted simply not to read the magazine: he wanted the magazine and the story never to have been. Suddenly he didn’t want to see Lilian again. He didn’t want to go home, ever. He wanted to be back in the room that smelt of paraffin, the room that was newly tidied up. And he knew how much he had been fighting to bury the truth. Just as he had avoided all inquiry about his son, his son also was there in front of him, staring at him. He thought, I cannot read it, even as his eye started down the page. The story occupied three, nearly four pages. It was the national lead.
Angel had got back to tell his version, which wasn’t too untrue. But the doctor couldn’t read it. He turned over the page and there were pictures of himself and Angel and Junior, and of the coloured boy who was dead. The doctor took that in. He still kept skipping the lines about Junior.
Junior wasn’t his only son, he was just the one most likely to succeed. Throughout his school career other men and women used to stop the doctor in the street and say, ‘Boy but you’ve got a winner there.’ Junior played football, came top of the class. A fine boy, doctor. A fine, unsmiling young God who always made the grade.
There was another photograph which suddenly took the doctor’s attention. It was a horrible blown-up snapshot of Silence. She had dark hair cut quite short and it gave no impression of her size nor her dignity. Her eyes looked brown. The caption underneath the picture said, ‘Silence is black,’ in the funny, punning way that magazines favour. The doctor read the paragraph about her. She had a previous record of crime; also of crime with violence. She was one of five coloured men and women whom the police were anxious to interview concerning the murder by lynching in the street, two days after ‘the battle’, of Lawrence Ewing Junior.
The doctor began to shake. He closed the magazine, again. He had somehow already, magically, picked up the truth. He had read the whole article while he pretended not to, and he was left with one blazing impression on his mind. It was of a satin slipper with his son’s blood.
He tried to make himself open the paper again and read all the things not only that the newsmen had reported but what important politicians and international commentators had said. He closed the pages yet again. He began to feel very shivery and weird, then knew suddenly that he was going to be sick. He needed somewhere to vomit. The surgery would have a basin. He rushed through, caught sight of the basin, ran to it and retched; then retched again.
When he recovered he saw that there was nobody in the room. This frightened him more, because his fear was running ahead of his reasoning again. It seemed to be the exposure, the sheer exposure of the story, the simple horror of being involved in all this that most frightened him. His mind would not settle on any particular aspect: on the death of the child; on Silence’s actions; on Junior’s death; on the dentist’s panic; on the sudden disappearance of both the dentist and Silence. Somehow the magazine itself became the object of terror for him. He felt the whole world to be against him; black and white. The doctor knew his physical condition had something to do with it. He recognised in himself some kind of shock but he could not separate the true reason behind it yet. He just didn’t have the energy to be brave. He didn’t even want to cry. There simply wasn’t anywhere in the world to go, he felt, where there would be safety. Nowhere, except to Silence.
As he picked up the magazine again, there was a noise at the front door. He threw the paper away. He wanted to hide. Then he guessed that somebody was leaving, not arriving.
Very frightened, he tiptoed to the window, and peeping through the side of the curtain, looked down at the street a few feet away, below.
The dentist and his wife and children were getting into their Chevrolet. They seemed to have come downstairs and left the building unnaturally quietly, but now in the street, the dentist seemed anxious to convey the impression that he was starting on a normal family outing, maybe going to the movies, or the ball game, or even a prayer meeting. The dentist was wearing a strangely formal hat with a broad brim, almost like a Dutch Protestant’s. He had to hold on to it, in the wind. It is extraordinary which detail the mind retains.
The doctor should have been able to deduce certain things from his departure. He could not bring his mind to bear on the problems logically anymore. The doctor wasn’t coping very well.
Not well at all. The doctor had often seen patients in the strange state of mind which he had now reached. Usually they were widows who had lost, or felt that they had lost all incentive to live. They operated with extreme inefficiency, constantly busy, but achieving nothing. It was a phenomenon the doctor always watched very carefully, because unless checked it developed into total breakdown or withdrawal. The widow’s mind became fixed upon her husband’s last sickness or the moment of death. The doctor could not take his mind off the satin slipper and the pencilled ring on the photograph he had seen in her paper which had seemed to be of a lynching.
He wandered back into the surgery. He took up the magazine again and read it now, dully, as if it concerned some other family. Yes, the coloured boy had broken his spine. He had died the next day. Yes, Lawrence Ewing Junior had been discovered two days after the battle and had been killed by the mob before the police arrived on the spot. Yes, Angel had given a full and honest account of the whole affair. Doctor Ewing himself was reported to be badly wounded, and few people believed him still alive.
In the dentist’s drawer, there were some surgical instruments, including a very small sharp knife with a blade even thinner than the one which the doctor
had seen for an instant as it passed into his side. The handle of the dentist’s knife was steel. Because it didn’t fold, the doctor wrapped the blade round with some cotton wool, then he placed it in his breast pocket, diagonally, so that it didn’t show.
The doctor wasn’t coping very well. He knew he was incapable of killing anybody else with that knife. He knew he had no intentions of killing himself. It was a pointless acquisition which still he seemed to need.
Then, from the waiting-room he picked up another magazine. This one also had a full report on the ‘Lilian’ affair. But this was a coloured weekly for coloured people. More accurately, a semi-coloured weekly for those coloured people who wanted to enjoy the privileges of the white. The advertisements showed girls with straight smooth hair and firm, straight noses. The doctor looked at the articles in it with vague dismay. They were nauseating. They had nothing to do with Silence and nothing to do with him. Yet he read on, for a while, sitting in the dentist’s chair.
The chair itself was modern. Perhaps dentists can hire them. The rest of the equipment looked old and not even clean.
He began to think that perhaps the dentist had persuaded Silence to leave him. There was logic in that he could see. She had every reason to fear the police but no reason to fear her own people, so long as she remained alone. To them she was no traitor. But seen with him, father of the man she had helped to murder, she was an enemy of the coloured people. The doctor thought, I never before wanted to fall into the hands of the police. I do now. Badly.
The doctor was still sitting, frozen, when he heard the front door open and close. He stood up, like an old man and stared through the open door into the other room, waiting for he did not know what.
When she walked in, he thought, I shan’t mention to her that she murdered my son. He thought that quite undramatically much as if he were at home when his mother called round unexpectedly: I shan’t tell her I have a toothache, it will only involve us in an unnecessary scene.
Household Ghosts Page 44
