Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. They just do.’

  ‘You mean, they’re telling us lies?’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  ‘But why would they do that?’

  ‘Because they want us to stay.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Does any of it? Look at me.’ She held out her hands. The skin was patched with pink lumps. ‘Look at my hands,’ she told him.

  ‘What have you done to them?’

  ‘I haven’t done anything. They’re itching because of something in this house.’

  ‘Oh, Lisa. I don’t know what’s gotten into you. Try to calm down.’

  She stood up. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Steve and Dora can give me a ride. And now I know how much I’d be able to count on you.’ She snatched up her purse and looked at her wristwatch. It said four thirty. ‘God, I’m late. Oh, God.’

  ‘That settles it.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll see if they’ll still do it. And if they won’t, you’ll have to.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘And if you don’t, we’re through.’

  ‘That’s up to you. You’re going to feel pretty foolish when you look back and see how unreasonable you’re being.’

  ‘And I’m calling the police.’

  He stood up and threw her back on to the bed. ‘Everything you want,’ he hissed at her. ‘Always for you and never for the both of us, never for me. Who’s going to have to build up a career and pay off the mortgage and all the rest of it, hm? You won’t cook for my friends, you won’t do this or that –’

  ‘And what about you?’ she screeched. ‘Leave me there with a list of all the errands I’ve got to run for you: I’ve got a job too, you know. You’re a grown man. You can wash your own goddamn socks once in a while.’

  ‘You aren’t going to give me that Women’s Lib stuff, are you?’

  ‘Just this once – just get me out of here and I’ll do anything. You can come straight back, if you like. Please.’

  ‘Don’t cry like that. Somebody could hear you.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  She sprang towards the door. He followed slowly. They went down the stairs together, Lisa running ahead.

  Isabelle was standing at the foot of the staircase. She was dressed in another long, dark robe and her hair was even more elaborately arranged than on the night before. This time the string of pearls that twined through the pile of stacked braids included a single jewel; it hung from the centre parting on to her forehead. It looked like a ruby, surrounded by tiny pearls. ‘And where are you two off to?’ she asked.

  Lisa said, ‘I’m sorry, Isabelle – I really am. It’s been so lovely here, but we left town thinking it was just for supper last night. I had three people I was supposed to see today, and now I’ve got to go – I’ve really got to. The others are going to be furious. I’ll have to patch that up somehow, but my mother –’ her voice quivered. ‘My mother’s operation comes first. I’ve just got to get back. We should have said straight away. Jim –’ she turned to him; he could do some worrying for a change, after putting her through all this: ‘Jim thought you’d be upset if we refused your hospitality. I was sure you’d understand. He can stay, of course. But my mother can’t wait, I’m afraid. Not even for Mr Kissinger.’

  ‘That’s another disappointment. He just called. He can’t make it tonight. Maybe tomorrow, he said. Such a shame. We look forward to his visits so much.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Jim repeated. He sounded hopeful.

  ‘Not for me,’ Lisa insisted.

  Broderick had appeared at the end of the corridor, the other guests grouped behind him. He began to lead them all down the carpet towards the staircase and the light. ‘What’s this?’ he said.

  ‘Lisa wants to leave us,’ Isabelle told him.

  ‘I don’t want to. I’ve got to, that’s all. My mother’s having a serious operation.’

  ‘When?’ Broderick asked.

  ‘On Friday afternoon they told me it was going to be tonight, possibly tomorrow morning. I’ve got to get back.’

  ‘I can drive you,’ Broderick offered.

  ‘Thanks, but Jim’s going to.’

  ‘I know the roads around here. And I’m used to the fog. Have you seen what it’s like?’

  ‘We waited for you,’ Steve complained. Dora, beside him, asked, ‘Where were you? You said three.’

  ‘I couldn’t find you,’ Lisa said. She suddenly didn’t believe that they had waited, or that Henry Kissinger had ever been on the guest list, or that she was going to be allowed out of the house, which was definitely the wrong house. She put her hand on Jim’s arm. Her fingers, her whole arm, trembled.

  ‘Why don’t you phone the hospital?’ Isabelle suggested. She picked up the receiver from the telephone on the table next to her.

  They were going to try to fake her out, Lisa thought. But she could phone a taxi, or even the police, if she wanted to. Or – a better idea – a friend: Broderick was undoubtedly on good terms with all the lawyers, doctors and policemen in the neighbourhood, as well as any local politicians who lived nearby. ‘That’s a good idea,’ she said. She let go of Jim’s arm and came down the last few stairs.

  Isabelle put her ear to the receiver. She said, ‘Well, wouldn’t you know it? It does this sometimes in a thick fog. It’s gone completely dead.’

  Me, too, Lisa thought. She turned to Jim and said, ‘I mean it. Now.’

  He spread his hands towards Isabelle. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Another time,’ she told him. She shook his hand and smiled. She shook Lisa’s hand too, holding the friendly look and the smile.

  Broderick called after them, ‘Come on back if the fog catches up with you. They can be dangerous. People can actually choke to death in them.’

  *

  All the air outdoors was smoky. They got into the car. Lisa said nothing, although she felt safe already. If they had to, she wouldn’t mind sleeping in the back seat. At least they’d be away from the house. Jim turned the key. He drove the car across the gravel. Lisa waved at the dimly lighted doorway.

  They moved down the drive, along the woodland road and out on to the highway, where almost immediately they hit the real fog. Jim went very slowly. The fog came towards them in long strips like white veiling that kept tearing in pieces or bunching up around them.

  ‘What was all that about your mother?’ he said.

  ‘I had to think of something they couldn’t explain away. It would have looked bad if they hadn’t been sympathetic.’

  ‘Isabelle was very nice about it.’

  ‘She was mad as hell.’

  ‘She was not. She was kind and understanding.’

  ‘And she has Kissinger for dinner just all the time – oh, yes. And what a surprise: the phone doesn’t work.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Those weirdo people holding occult meetings together.’

  ‘They’re wonderful people. They’re studying phenomena that can’t be explained yet by any of the scientific principles we know of so far. How do you think anyone ever gets to know things, anyway? There’s always a time when it sounds crazy and crackpot – when it’s all being tried out experimentally. As soon as a thing’s accepted, then it’s considered normal.’

  ‘You think that house is normal?’

  ‘Well, the heating’s kind of erratic and the pipes don’t work so well, and what do you expect? It’s a big old place down in the country. It’d cost a fortune to fix it up.’

  ‘It wouldn’t cost a fortune to give us tuna salad to eat, instead of whatever that horrible stuff was. It wouldn’t –’

  ‘Wait,’ he said. All the windows had suddenly gone stark white. The effect was blinding until he turned off the lights. He slowed the car to a crawl. ‘If it gets any worse, you’ll have to walk in front, to show me where the edge of the road is.’

  ‘No. We can just stop he
re and sleep in the car. Pull off the road.’

  ‘You heard what Broderick said about the fog.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Well, I do.’

  ‘I’m not going back there, Jim,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he shouted, ‘what’s wrong with you?’ He stopped the car and switched off the ignition. ‘I think you’re crazy,’ he said. ‘I really do. Just like your whole damn family.’

  ‘OK. You can think what you like, as long as we never have to go back to that place.’

  ‘This is the end of us, you know. I can’t go on with you after this.’

  ‘If we just get home, we’ll be all right.’

  ‘You screwed up everything with them. I don’t know how anybody could have behaved the way you did. Completely hysterical, and lying your head off. It was obvious.’

  ‘But does that mean I’ve got to die for it?’

  ‘Die? Nobody’s going to die.’

  ‘And why do we have to split up? Why do they mean more to you than I do? You didn’t even know them before yesterday.’

  ‘I guess maybe I didn’t know you very well, either.’

  ‘Oh, shove that.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Nice.’

  ‘You know me. And you know how I feel about you.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ He opened his window a crack. They could see the white fog creep in like smoke. He tried the lights again. This time the glare wasn’t thrown back, but the lights didn’t seem to penetrate more than a few feet into the shifting areas of blankness.

  She said, ‘When you got up for that drink of water last night, where did you go?’

  ‘Down the hall to the bathroom.’

  ‘You were with somebody else, weren’t you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But it’s a good idea.’

  The whiteness became all-enveloping. The temperature began to drop inside the car. The sound of rain seemed to be coming from somewhere, though they couldn’t see any.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘how you could have let us get into all that.’

  ‘It was too foggy to drive back. It was like this.’

  ‘And this morning, when I asked you for the keys?’

  ‘This morning you were already crazy; people grabbing you left and right. If this doesn’t clear soon –’

  ‘We sit it out.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He was about to cut the lights, when something dark thudded against the windshield and was gone again.

  ‘A bat,’ Lisa called out.

  ‘No. It didn’t look … I think it was rounder. Maybe a bird. I guess the light attracted it.’

  There was another sound as two more of the things struck Lisa’s side window. She undid her safety belt and moved nearer to Jim.

  He was watching the glass in front of him. Several more of the dark shapes hit. They sounded like rubber balls being thrown against the car, all over the metal parts suddenly: on the roof, too. He leaned forward. ‘Frogs,’ he said. They were everywhere, bouncing up and down, lying still, or slithering across the glass.

  ‘Not frogs,’ Lisa moaned. ‘Toads.’

  ‘Jesus, will you look at them – there must be hundreds.’

  ‘Thousands,’ she said. ‘Oh, my God.’

  He turned off the lights. It didn’t have any effect. The toads continued to bombard the car.

  ‘Maybe if we start moving again,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t. They’re jamming themselves into the exhaust. Can’t you hear them?’

  ‘I could really step on it and blow the muffler off.’ He switched the engine on again, turned the lights high.

  Now the toads were all over. They blocked the view from the windows. They were also a great deal bigger than before. When one of them landed, it sounded like a soccer ball.

  He started to drive. The exhaust pipe roared, the car inched forward. He tried to use the windshield wipers, but the toads hung on until the blades stuck in one position. There were swarms of the animals, uncountable. Clusters of them lay squashed or flattened on the windows. And the big ones crashed down on top of them. A dark liquid began to run over the panes.

  ‘Could they break the glass?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s safety glass. They might be able to bang into it hard enough, if they all jumped together.’

  ‘They’re carnivorous,’ she said.

  An Artist’s Life

  Axel and Eino met only because one morning Axel turned his head; he’d heard the cry of a bird – a sea-bird of some kind. The wind whipped into his face and he pulled down his hat. At that moment he saw ahead of him on the bridge a young man, walking towards him, who made a similar gesture and then put up his other hand to adjust a scarf around his throat.

  The next day at about the same time Axel caught sight of the man at a different spot, this time beyond the bridge; he was hurrying forward, his head down so that it was impossible to see his face, but Axel recognized the clothes he was wearing, which were copied from the Bohemian Paris of earlier decades.

  Axel, whose family was more than three-quarters Swedish and had money and houses and land, wore French and English clothes of good quality and cut. He might have been mistaken for a Parisian. He was tall, grey-eyed and brown-haired. He had the languid demeanour – in fashion at the time – supposed to denote good breeding; among those who adopted it, at any rate, the attitude was a sign that they thought so.

  Eino was of a different stamp: very blond, round-headed and burly. He walked quickly, with a jerky, bobbing gait. He held the upper part of his body – shoulders, back and arms – like a man who was strong. On the first day Axel saw his face, Eino looked ready to kill someone. He must have been cold as he turned against the wind.

  On the third day, Axel saw him after crossing the bridge. Eino was searching the gutter for something. Once more he had his head down and Axel noticed the clothes.

  He didn’t see Eino for a while after that and when he did, he heard him first: he heard a voice saying in Finnish, ‘Do they think we’re idiots?’ and he stopped.

  He looked around. The man who had made the remark was standing with his back towards Axel; he had his hands in his pockets and was shifting quickly from one foot to the other. He was examining the objects in a shop window. The awning above protected him from the light drizzle that had begun to fall. Axel had his umbrella.

  He knew that he’d seen the stranger before, although he hadn’t thought the man would be a fellow countryman. He walked up to the shop window and stood beside Eino, to look at a large, pink ostrich feather and a set of stands stacked with jars of cosmetic cream. Ribbons had been made to cascade from top to bottom of the display, so that the separate groupings seemed like bouquets of flowers. Several coloured sketches of young women illustrated the beneficial properties of the ointment.

  ‘Who do they think they’re fooling?’ Eino muttered. ‘If the woman’s good-looking, she doesn’t need anything.’

  ‘And if she isn’t,’ Axel said, ‘it wouldn’t help her.’

  ‘Exactly. Women like that must be weak in the head.’

  ‘They have hope. They might start to look better because they’re in a good mood.’

  ‘But the stuff is worthless.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Half the damn things you see in shop windows are worthless.’

  ‘But – they sell.’

  ‘Because people are fools.’

  ‘The ones who buy, perhaps. What about the ones who sell?’

  Eino laughed. ‘Swindlers. All of them.’

  ‘It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘It’s worse.’

  Axel moved away. He was far down the street and thinking of other things when he was pulled from behind. He whirled around, to find himself staring at Eino, who said, ‘You were speaking Finnish. I didn’t realize. Talk to me. Talk to me in Finnish.’

  Axel repositioned his umbrella. The man looked desperate as well as poor, but was about his own age, which – a
t his age – seemed to make him all right. ‘We’ll go to a café,’ he suggested.

  ‘I don’t have any money.’

  ‘I think I’ve got enough to buy you a beer.’

  ‘No,’ Eino told him. ‘We’ll walk.’

  Axel agreed. He went as far as the café on the street corner across from the park and then said, ‘If it were better weather, we could sit here, but as it is, I’m finding it difficult to keep in step with a man who doesn’t have an umbrella. If you won’t come into the café and let me buy you a drink, I’ll say goodbye.’

  They went in together. Axel ordered tea and biscuits. Eino drank coffee. There were four other men in the room, all old and all reading the papers.

  ‘I’ve walked by this place plenty of times,’ Eino said, ‘and never gone in. I’ve never even wondered what it was like inside.’

  ‘There must be thousands of cafés in this part of town.’

  ‘I love big cities. You never get to the end of them. Every street has a row of new places you’ve never explored.’

  ‘The whole world is like that,’ Axel said.

  ‘Some of it. Not the part I grew up in. Not Finland. You grew up in town, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing like this. A small university town in Sweden, a village in Finland; a few summers in St Petersburg when my grandparents were alive – that was the nearest I got, but I was still a child then. Paris was always my dream.’

  ‘Has it lived up to what you expected of it?’

  ‘Yes, completely,’ Axel said.

  At the beginning it had been even better than the expectation, except in one important respect, but he didn’t know Eino well enough to talk about that: it hadn’t fulfilled his hopes for the erotic, as well as the romantic, life. He’d imagined that it would be simple to meet women who were easy to ask, but so far he’d managed to find only the places where all the girls were too obviously professional, and that still made him a little nervous.

  He’d had two affairs with girls down in the country and one with a scandalous young woman who’d said she was getting a divorce from her elderly husband: that one had been the most fun. It had lasted throughout the summer and ended because Axel had made a scene when he’d found out that he wasn’t the only man she was seeing. She’d screamed at him that he was unsophisticated. And the next week, when he’d gone back to apologize, she’d laughed at him while the maid stood by the door, holding his coat and listening to everything. After that, he’d had a steady, once-a-week meeting with a married woman in her late thirties: Martha. She’d been in love with him. For him the meetings had been merely a convenience – he was always looking for someone else. But for her they became the centre of life and she couldn’t help showing it. As she kept wanting more of him, he retreated. By the time he broke it off, he could barely stand to be near her. He didn’t even care that – as he’d once feared – she might try to commit suicide.