The Travellers and Other Stories

by Carys Davies

  Dr. Ray began collecting his things together—various pens and a half-eaten sandwich, the loose papers scattered across his desk. He in turn had the look of a person speaking to someone who is not quite with it, not quite the full shilling, themselves.

  ‘I don’t think so, Peter.’

  It’s true though, what Peter says about my father hating him.

  At thirty-two years old I am still his darling girl, his Lou-Lou. For twenty-six years it has just been the two of us and that, I suppose, is how he wants things to be.

  He has been difficult about Peter from the start. From the very first day I brought Peter home to meet him he has been difficult. I think he sensed immediately that this was it, that Peter was The One. In the months before his behaviour began to change there were already signs—very clear signs—that he would prefer it if Peter were not around. Petty, childish things—never passing on Peter’s phone messages; repeatedly booking only two tickets when I mentioned there was something I wanted to see at the Plaza; cooking only two mackerel when Peter came for supper and making a great drama about dividing them into three portions.

  It does seem almost possible now, when Daddy greets Peter with the thin bewildered smile he has acquired lately, that he is only pretending not to know him—that this is part of a plan, a strategy. A kind of mad theory, if you like, that if he behaves as if Peter is a total stranger, as if he has no recollection of ever having met him, then Peter will eventually go away, he will vanish and it will be just the two of us again, together like before.

  That, or the belief that if he makes himself troublesome enough, enough of a burden, he will simply frighten Peter away.

  Peter and I talk about little else these days.

  I have taken to waking him up in the middle of the night to go over some incident that has occurred during the day—the smallest things: a brief moment, for example, when Daddy’s drifting stare has seemed to harden, when there is a weird clarity in his eyes and they appear to be fixed malevolently on Peter, and then he blinks and the impression is gone, lost. We talk until the early hours about how curious it is that his symptoms only began around the time that Peter moved in, and how much worse they have become since we started talking about looking for our own place. Again and again we analyse what has become known as ‘the tongue incident’—when I caught him in the mirror, sticking his tongue out at Peter, all the way out, like a gargoyle. What sort of action is that? Is that a sign that he has lost all notion of what is appropriate and acceptable behaviour? If so, why was he doing it behind my back? We argue about the £90 a week I’m paying Frannie to come in for a few hours a day to keep an eye on him while Peter’s at work and I’m at the shop. Peter says I might as well be flushing the money down the toilet. I say, yes, I know, but I can’t bring myself to not do it, I can’t let go of the possibility that all of this might somehow turn out to be real.

  We discuss his cooking.

  The chaotic, unkempt, inedible dishes he insists on producing several times a week.

  Daddy took up cooking when he retired. He enrolled in a class at the Adult College and found he enjoyed it. He was quite good; he picked up the rudiments easily—a basic white sauce, short-crust pastry, a good chicken stock—and he soon acquired a repertoire of simple dishes: lasagna, shepherd’s pie, moussaka, toad-in-the-hole. Shortbread, Bakewell tart, apple crumble. Before long he was cooking for the two of us and in the evening when I came home from the shop there was always some interesting smell coming from the kitchen when I turned in at the gate.

  These days his moussaka arrives on the table with the aubergine slices sticking out at odd angles through a stiff floury sauce, all black and crispy and burned. His shepherd’s pie comes drowning under a tide of watery gravy spilling up across crazily zig-zagging furrows of mashed potato.

  Peter thinks this is the crassest, most ridiculous part of his pantomime. Every horrible misshapen offering—each one of them is deliberate, staged, part of the act. A charade. He says he has known people with this illness and he’s sure this isn’t what it’s like, he doesn’t care what Dr. Ray says.

  We talk about the times when Daddy is strangely lucid. What are they all about? Why would he suddenly decide to seem okay?

  If he were really losing his mind, would he suddenly start talking to me fluently as he sometimes does about the distant and recent past, about his old career, about my schooldays, about how much he still misses my mother? About the rain that hasn’t let up since Monday, and how he hates the soft squeaky sound of Frannie’s crêpe-soled shoes on the kitchen floor when she’s here during the week?

  Would he go out into the garden like he did last week and divide the astilbes and replant half of them quite sensibly in the shade beneath the flowering cherry in the front? Would he engage me in a thoroughly normal discussion about what I thought he should try in the area of dry shadow under the bay window by the front door—some Lilyturf maybe?

  Would he carry on with his reading? Wouldn’t that be something he’d have lost his grip on by now? And yet his appetite is undiminished, voracious and eclectic as it has been all through his retirement. He is always asking Frannie to take him to the library so he can exchange his books for new ones. In the course of the last week he has read The Warden and Framley Parsonage. Get Shorty and Maximum Bob. Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs. Great Expectations, Catch-22, and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle.

  Maybe he’s heard somewhere that sufferers sometimes experience a kind of reprieve, says Peter. Or maybe he simply can’t keep it up all the time, maybe he just decides he wants a break sometimes. Maybe there are some things he just can’t bring himself to give up, maybe he’s just not a very good actor.

  I’ve spoken to Dr. Ray about these things on the phone.

  ‘Is this unusual?’ I’ve asked him. ‘Is it strange that he should have these islands of clarity and competence?’

  I can sense the doctor’s irritation on the other end of the line. His answer is always the same: that we know very little, really, about exactly how the brain dies.

  There are times when I wonder if Dr. Ray isn’t in on the whole thing.

  This past week, ever since the morning he came down without his hand, my father has been very much worse; he seems to have gone into a very steep decline, a sort of free-fall where he appears to be in a state of almost perpetual bewilderment and anxiety. He clutches my arms when I get up to leave the room for the briefest time, and when I come in he is sitting there on the sofa, very still and upright on the cushions, like a frightened bird.

  Today Daddy has been behaving very badly. He refused to get dressed this morning and when I went in to help him he pushed me away quite roughly. He struggled when I attempted to get his vest on over his head. It was very upsetting.

  I could feel Peter looking at me.

  ‘Leave him alone for a bit,’ he said, taking my hand. ‘He’ll be down.’

  Sure enough, my father appeared about half an hour later. He had dressed himself, after a fashion—shoes but no socks, shirt not properly tucked in—and once again he had neglected to put on his hand.

  Peter rolled his eyes.

  ‘Here, Daddy,’ I said, pulling out a chair, ‘Come and eat some breakfast.’

  Later, it being Sunday, we went for a short walk on the promenade, the three of us together, my father in the middle, shuffling along, gripping my arm tightly all the way as if he thought he would fall down and die if he didn’t hold on to it.

  Back home I put the joint in the oven and laid the table. Dr. Ray had brought over some plums from his garden during the week and Daddy said now that he wanted to make one of his tarts for pudding. Behind his back Peter pulled a face and put a hand to his throat as if he were gagging on something vile.

  ‘You do that, Daddy,’ I said. I was exhausted after another night without sleep, picking over with Peter the details of my father’s behaviour, looking for all the things that could be deemed suspicious, inauthentic, trying to figure out what’s going on,
if he’s up to something. I said I was going up for a short rest before lunch and left the two of them in the kitchen, Daddy already busy sifting flour into the big brown mixing bowl, Peter putting away the last of the breakfast things. He winked at me, a bright, encouraging keep-your-pecker-up-girl wink, and said he’d bring me up some coffee in a little while.

  For a long time I lay on our bed staring at the ridges in the ceiling where one piece of wallpaper overlapped the next. I tried to remember the name of the decorator my father had used for the work and couldn’t. All I could remember was how he’d yelled at the poor man afterwards for doing such a terrible job. He shouted so loudly and so furiously that the little decorator had cowered behind his ladder while Daddy told him how useless he was and he wasn’t going to pay him a penny. I can see that some people would think my father was quite an unpleasant man.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  I got up and crossed the landing into my father’s bedroom at the front of the house. I went to the window and looked out at the clump of astilbes now flourishing in their new position under the cherry tree. After a while I turned to look back at his room.

  There was the usual chaos. The bedcovers askew. Mismatched shoes lined up next to his wardrobe. A jumble of assorted items next to the lamp on his bed-side table—a comb and a few biscuits, a sock, his hand. Roy Jenkins’ biography of Churchill. Lieutenant Hornblower. Peter’s copy of Titus Andronicus in its red linen box.

  I picked up the Titus.

  It made me sad, holding it, thinking of the afternoon Peter stepped into the shop for the first time, before any of this business with my father began. I slipped the book out of its red box and took it back with me to my room. I lay down on our bed and began to read. It struck me now as rather a bad play, absurdly violent and full of moments of unintended comedy. I wondered, as others have, if Shakespeare could really have written it; if there was any way you could ever play it other than for the laughs.

  I’d forgotten quite how gruesome the ending is, what a grisly, over-the-top finale Act Five serves up: the old man slaughtering his daughter’s seducers and baking them in a pie.

  Oh honestly.

  For goodness sake.

  From out in the hall I could hear the radio on the other side of the kitchen door. I could hear the pulsing hum of the Vent-Axia, the spitting of the joint in the oven. There was a rich, meaty smell. I went in.

  Daddy was crimping the pastry edge of his tart with a fork, very slowly and carefully, like someone learning to do it for the first time. The pie itself looked like a sort of strange hat with a raised brim, collapsed and squashy in the middle and made of a kind of thick wet lace, decorated with glossy, purplish fruit.

  There was no sign anywhere of Peter. I stared at the pie. At my father. A long elastic thread of pendulous drool hung over the pie from his open mouth, rising and falling slowly with his breathing.

  ‘Daddy?’ I said, but he did not look up.

  ‘Lucy?’

  I turned round. It was Peter. Just stepping out from inside the pantry, a bag of potatoes in his hand. He gave me a cheery smile, went over to the counter and began pouring the coffee.

  ‘There you go,’ he said, passing me a cup.

  My father didn’t seem to be aware that I had come into the room.

  I touched his arm and he looked at me and he didn’t appear to know who on earth I was.

  ‘Daddy,’ I said. ‘It’s me. Lou-Lou.’

  He mouthed the word several times. He seemed distressed and muttered it aloud, over and over again, this name that no one but him has ever called me in my entire life.

  Then at last he seemed to drift off into a sort of empty daydream and after another minute or so, he went back to his pie.

  All through lunch I could feel Peter watching me. Daddy ate like a baby, dribbling bits of food on his shirt and on his chin.

  He’s faking it. I know he’s faking it.

  I look at Peter now, and for a long time we hold each other’s gaze. I look from Peter to my father and I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do; his mean, miserly love breaks my heart.

  PIED PIPER

  MARY OWEN FOUND the baby in the sand on the afternoon of her forty-sixth birthday, a Tuesday. She stepped off the bus in the usual place and walked slowly towards the dunes—very slowly, Mary Owen being by this time a vast and sluggish woman. She left her shoes where she always left them, in the shadow of the wooden turnstile, and continued down towards the beach beyond, the blue plastic bucket for the cockles swinging off the crook of her elbow.

  She always came on Tuesdays to look for cockles. She’d developed a yen for them, dressed in vinegar and eaten with a spoon. (We used to say she was gobbling up her own bitterness with each sour bowl.) Sometimes, the local boys came up from Ogmore to watch the fat lady with her blue bucket, her cotton dress tucked up around her great thighs, bent over the wet sand in search of the little creatures. But today no one had come to watch. Even by Ogmore standards, the grey sea was uninviting. The occupants of a green car were already too far away to observe Mary, and in another moment, their car had disappeared altogether along the curving road to the east, in the direction of Southerndown. Which only left the gulls, and the sheep, nibbling the tarmac in the car park up above the big flat rocks. Mary walked unseen between the clumps of bloomless thistles, crunching the coarse grass under her soft, fat feet, until she came to the edge of the dunes and the beginning of the hard strand where the cockles would be. She was, in spite of the cool of the day, red-faced and perspiring. She stopped to fan herself with the lip of the blue plastic bucket, and there, almost at her feet, where the wind had blown a hollow in the sand, was the baby, waiting for her.

  Waiting for her—that’s how she thought of it. She’d always believed (in spite of everything her mother had told her) that life should be fair, and it hadn’t been fair to her. She was sad and disappointed, and we all said it was disappointment that had made her fat. At twenty, she’d been a slip of a girl, but then she’d married Will, who loved her but couldn’t seem to give her a baby, and slowly she began blowing up. Every year, thick new layers of herself settling around her resentful heart like the rings of an ageing tree. Her face hadn’t changed so much—it was much the same face Will had fallen in love with twenty-six years before. It was recognisably the face of the girl in the photo on the gate-legged table in the Owens’ front room. It was only, now, slightly overwhelmed by its surroundings, and there was a look of shock in the round blue eyes, shock at the way life had turned out. The look Mary had was not unlike the small face you see on a coconut, full of sadness and surprise.

  Later, watching the Tuesday sun sink behind the mountain, Will would wonder how his wife could go off on the number 12 bus with only cockles on her mind and come back with a baby. But he was wrong, of course, about his wife’s mind. Childlessness had ferried Mary into another world. She was ill, wasn’t she? Ill with craving.

  The baby, a boy, was still mucky from its birth and daubed all over with sand. His skin darkish under its redness, his hair fair in the places where it had been dried by the wind. He was quiet—only his arms flailed in the salted air, as if he thought he were falling and was trying to hold onto something. He was wrapped in a length of clean, white linen which the breeze from the distant water had blown into loose coils around him. More sand blew in gentle gusts off the sloping dune, and had begun to drift softly against him in the hollow. It occurred to Mary that with a little more wind, he might have been quite buried in the sand if she hadn’t come. It occurred to her that she’d been guided to this place.

  Even so, crouching uncomfortably over the infant, she hesitated. She caught the sour scent of her own anxiety in the air. Grains of sand clung to her warm cheeks. Smooth and unlined in spite of what she’d had to put up with, they had grown slick in the cool sunshine. It was a long time since she’d taken anything that didn’t belong to her and tried to keep it as her own. As a girl, she’d taken things. She had a longing for the ni
ce things other people had in their houses, like Ruth Pritchard’s mum’s jewellery (a jet necklace and a gold ring set with a huge, milky opal). The Pendelphin rabbits Mrs. Bessant had sitting on doilies in her front window. Daffodils from the Gaynors’ garden. But Mary’s mother had always discovered her daughter’s crimes. She’d reminded Mary of the Commandments. Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not steal. Even the daffodils had to go back, laid on the flowerbed in the Gaynors’ small garden with a note of apology tucked into the wet soil. The only stolen thing Mary had ever managed to keep was the chocolate she took once from the Co-op at the bottom of the hill, and that was because she ate it straightaway, wolfing it down in gulps behind her hand, right outside the shop on the pavement before anyone could come and make her take it back.

  It plagued her now, the idea that she’d only be allowed to borrow the baby, that one day she’d have to give him back. While she continued to stoop, and to hesitate, a gust of wind tugged at the length of white linen around the baby and it unfurled like an escaping kite until only a corner remained secured beneath the boy’s tiny, flat feet. Mary saw then that the piece of linen resembled a tablecloth, embroidered along one edge. Where it was hoisted high into the air by the wind, she saw there was a half-embroidered flower, one blue petal and the toothed edge of a leaf. A needle, and a length of blue silk thread, fluttering from the spot where a second petal had been begun next to the first. She’d rather this had not been the case. She would rather the linen had been a piece of rag, or an old sheet, because she was no fool. She knew, as she stood there in the cool sunshine, that there’s a tendency among babies abandoned at birth—babies tucked into bull rushes, babies cast upon the barren flanks of mountains—to come swaddled in invisible complications. And the cloth, with its piece of interrupted sewing, struck her then as a possible complication.

  But there was nothing in the whole world she’d ever wanted as much as she wanted this half-buried boy. In the chilly, rising wind, he pursed his blue-brown lips against the dry whipping of the sand. His wrinkled face, not much bigger than an orange, puckered and prepared to cry. He repeated the frantic flailing with his arms in the air. She couldn’t help herself. Her hot, swollen heart was pushing up into her throat, telling her that this baby was a thing she was meant to find and to keep. Quickly, she gathered him into her large hands, and carried him, bound warmly now in the tablecloth, back up over the dunes. At the turnstile she slipped her shoes back on and walked carefully up the road to the bus stop.