by Carys Davies
Qualtrone laughed, and I said, ‘We believe you Needham.’
Then I went into the tent and brought out Needham’s red case and set it down on the wet grass in front of everyone and slid the blade of my knife into the space between the metal catch and the lock. Needham looked very small and alone without Mr. Persian there to look after him. Still, I expected him to jump at me and make a grab for the knife, but he didn’t speak or move, he stared at the ground, shivering in his sodden clothes. I wondered what he’d done with the key, if he’d thrown it in the fire, or into the stream at the bottom of the field. Under his shirt the hard point of his sternum stuck out like an apricot stone. He seemed frozen, and only stood there, a muscle beating very quick in his cheek.
The lid sprang open with a soft sigh.
There was no mirror and no ruched pocket, but the lining was shiny and red as I’d imagined it. The little green towel lay slumped all by itself in the middle, like a small square of thin wrinkled turf.
I told you, I’d never liked Needham. I’d never liked him at all.
HOMECOMING, 1909
SHE WAS THE first woman I saw when we came into port and I knew at once that I was lost.
For a long time all I could do was stare, gripping the rail and wondering if, after all we’d heard, she could possibly be a dream. Some kind of wicked mirage.
She was tall, a large crimson hat slantwise on her head.
But it wasn’t that—it wasn’t her being tall, and it wasn’t the hat. It was the rest of her, the rest of her in her leaf-green dress, looking like nothing I’d ever seen before. Such a comfortable, unrestrained softness in the look of her body, such a loose, easy look—it turned my tongue fat and dry in my mouth, my knees to water.
I thought of Cass, waiting for me in the narrow doorway of our house, the children all clustered around her. Becky, with her sweet smile, reaching up with her little hands and asking me, what presents have I brought?
A cream sash clasped the woman just beneath her breasts; from there the green cloth flowed down in a slender waterfall, a few supple folds; pooled in a narrow circle around her feet, and when she began to stroll along the quayside on the arm of the smart straw-boatered gentleman who accompanied her, I could see the slow, comfortable sway of her waist. I could see the gentle curve of her long back; the softly rounded flare of her hips. I groaned aloud. I bit my lip and began to moan and beat the rail with my fists.
Behind me the crew had begun to gather with their sunburned faces and raggy beards, with their foul breath and their rotting teeth still loose in their spongy gums. Jostling to get a look at the woman in the leaf-green dress and at all the others like her—because there were more, lots more, walking past our poor worn-out vessel on their way to meet the passenger steamer. A whole sea of them, in reds and blues and greys and yellows. All with that same free, easy look.
Next to me, Mr. Mingus, the third mate, pressed a grimy kerchief to his broken lips. Two of the boatsteerers sank down onto the deck. The rest continued to look, spellbound and speechless. Poor goggle-eyed buggers. A whole crowd of Rip Van Winkles, gaping at the world to which we had returned. The women different, not the way we’d left them. Not the way we’d banked on them being when we came back.
Thirteen months of ice and wind and narrow frozen hammocks since we last saw them. Thirteen months of hard bread and salt meat and oatmeal since we saw them as they used to be.
In the hold, our precious cargo. Chased and harpooned and hauled up out of the icy waters. What we wanted, hacked out from inside the giant mouth, separated from the greasy blubbery flesh. Scraped and cleaned and dried. Over and over. A year’s work. Eighteen thousand pounds of whalebone. £25,000 at last year’s prices.
Now this. The nightmare rumours from the other ships—all true.
Not one single woman in a corset.
De-boned, all of them.
‘Mr. Mingus,’ I said, turning away from the rail and laying my hand upon his shoulder.
‘We are lost.’
HISTORIA CALAMITATUM MEARUM
MY NAME IS Patricia Singleton and I am the Latin teacher. By tomorrow, I will have been the Latin teacher. After that, it will be a case of I was the Latin teacher. Lately, I have come to think of my pathway to the scrapheap, my losing battle against Peter Tracey, as a series of inevitably changing verbs. Ego sum. Ego fuero. Ego eram. I am. I will have been. I was. There was a time when I had ten sets of twenty-five girls each, but this year there is only Jenny, and after Jenny, there will be no one.
I am packing.
I have packed all of Catullus, all of Livy, my complete De Bello Gallico. I have packed the photograph taken on our last trip to Rome. There I am in front of the Coliseum, third from the left, in the floppy straw hat and striped shirt-waist dress. It was taken in the spring of ’96 (the year Peter Tracey arrived here) since when the trips have ceased to be viable, and our little group (five girls, and me) is testimony to my complete failure to maintain the popularity of Latin in this school, to convince the girls, and the governors, and the senior management, that the continuing study of a dead and ancient language is of some value.
Until the early nineties, it was compulsory here up until the third form. Since then, the girls have been voting with their feet, deserting the subject in droves. It hasn’t helped matters that we are now what is called a Technology College, which brings with it from the government the indispensable sum of £100,000 a year, the quid pro quo being that every girl must now spend two hours a week doing technology with Peter Tracey.
God knows I’ve tried.
I have argued myself hoarse in front of the Head and the board of governors, my throat is raw from pleading with them to keep Latin as an option. I have practically killed myself (literally, in the case of the toga episode) over the last few years in my efforts to make the subject fun and relevant.
I have done everything I can think of to entice the girls back. I have held lunch-time sessions on Roman sex, after school Roman cookery clubs. I have told them about Elagabalus, the Emperor who had a secret life as a transvestite hooker, I have told them about the stripper Theodora, who did unspeakable things with geese in public places. I have given them recipes for dormice rolled in honey, for rose hip and calf brain custard, tips on the preparation of peacock and crane. We have cooked and eaten in the dining hall an authentic dish of sole with eggs.
With Siberian winds blowing in under every door, I have worn a toga with no tights in February, only a pair of thin-heeled flip flops between my bare feet and the freezing school lino, leaving me with the mother of all colds until well into April.
We have done Latin shopping lists, Latin letters to Father Christmas.
I have even stooped to a sort of parlour game where I invite the girls to throw at me any word or phrase in English that comes into their heads for me to translate into Latin. For example:
Gag me with a spoon. Fac me cocleario vomere.
My Jacuzzi is filled with Perrier. Meum balineum calidum verticosum cum aqua scintillante fontana Gallica impletum est.
Of all the ruses I’ve tried, this last one has been the most popular, but it is the one that leaves me feeling most upset, most depressed. I end up feeling like a performing monkey, a dancing bear.
One day after one such session, Jenny came up to me at the end. Bless her, I think she finds it quite painful to see me scraping the barrel in this way.
‘Summergimurne, Miss Singleton?’ she asked. Are we sinking?
‘Ita vero, summergimur,’ I said. Yes, we are sinking.
None of it has done any good, and this last year, as I’ve said, there has been only Jenny, and next year, there will be no one.
I have begun to think, Perhaps I am wrong? Perhaps it is more important to know how to make a flashing LED nightlight than to read Manilius on the Vault of Heaven, or to discover that Salmacis and Hermaphroditus are each one half of a seamless whole. Perhaps it is more deeply satisfying to shape and file a piece of blue acrylic into a name p
late for one’s desk than it is to unpick the ending from the beginning of a single word and unravel its meaning. Perhaps I have clung on too long to the wreckage. Perhaps they are right and I am wrong, perhaps it is a useless, impractical language and there are no circumstances left in which you would ever need it.
Perhaps.
Three weeks ago, I bumped into Peter Tracey outside the staff room.
I was standing close to the wall in the small space between the staffroom door and the mineral water dispensing machine.
‘Patricia,’ he said.
I jumped when he spoke my name, the shock struck me like a physical blow. It is so long since the two of us have exchanged even one word. We have settled over the years, while his star has risen and mine has fallen, into what most people here think of as a kind of silent truce.
Peter Tracey is tall and handsome, he wears quite good shirts in a range of pastel colours. He has brown curly hair and a strong prominent nose (which I can only describe as Roman). I would guess he is roughly half my age. He is generally adored, he is thought to be a very fun teacher.
‘Patricia,’ he said, touching his mouth with one of his large, practical hands, as people do when they are about to deliver some unpleasant news, and informed me that he’d been told by the Head that his department would be taking over the last remaining Latin room (my room, where I have been teaching Jenny) from the following Monday, and that I would be given the use of the vacant storeroom in the art block for my few remaining classes.
I tried to accept this piece of news with dignity, but I am no Marie Antoinette, and I found it impossible to withstand this final death blow, inevitable as it was, without bursting into tears.
Tracey blushed slightly and looked at his feet. Perhaps men like Peter Tracey are too young to carry a handkerchief. Anyway, he didn’t offer me one, he just sort of sauntered off and away through the double doors at the end of the corridor.
I couldn’t sleep that night, nor for several nights after that. I felt so crushed after what had happened in the corridor. The night before I was due to move into the store cupboard I lay awake until four, when I finally got up and wrote Peter Tracey a note.
I used a sheet of my best writing paper—laid, cream, A5—and wrote the message neatly in ink, folded it into quarters and wrote his initals, PJT, on the front.
Vae, da mihi veniam vitae, I wrote. Well, pardon me for living.
And felt a little better.
When I arrived at school, I popped it into his pigeon hole before beginning the task of moving my things from my old room into my little cubby in the artblock.
My next note, the following day, took a slightly more assertive tone.
Potes currere, sed te occulere non potes.
I liked this one much more than the first: You can run, but you can’t hide. I liked its symmetry, its edgy concision.
That afternoon Jenny had her last ever lesson with me before the start of her exams. I felt thoroughly miserable. When she’d gone, I spent an hour or so reading and then I collected my things—my cardigan, my mug and my briefcase—and turned off the storeroom light. It was long past the end of the day, and already the school appeared to be virtually deserted.
I crossed over into the main building to return my mug to the staffroom, and as I walked out through the darkening corridor on the ground floor, I saw a light on in the library. I paused, and saw Peter Tracey emerging from behind the bookcase where the dictionaries are kept. He sat down with the small Cassell’s Latin-English English-Latin with the purple cover. I saw him take out my two pieces of paper, watched as he scrunched his handsome face into a frown of concentration, as he licked the tips of his fingers and began to leaf through the pages of the Cassell’s.
He sat for about an hour, alternately staring at the notes and hunting through the purple dictionary. Then he slammed the Cassell’s shut, snatched my notes from the table and began striding towards the doors.
I scuttled away.
Over the past two weeks, I have increased the frequency of the notes to two a day. The first I leave in the morning, after assembly, the second just before lunch. I’ve also begun to vary the messages, both in tone and in length. A few have been quite long, as apart from my packing, there has really been nothing left for me to do, but on the whole I have preferred to keep them quite brief, no more than a single line.
Every day, after school, long after the cleaners have gone and left behind their sweet refreshing perfumes of polish and ammonia, Peter Tracey has been staying on in the library, poring over my notes, of which there are (as of yesterday) thirty-two.
From time to time during the day, I leave my storeroom to go and look at him through the door of my old teaching room. He looks tired and wan. The other morning I saw him snap at one of the girls, which is most unlike him.
Now, I am packing. Tomorrow, I will have been the Latin teacher.
The only objects left in here are my briefcase, my cardigan, my mug, two flat empty boxes (which have turned out to be surplus to requirements), a half-used roll of brown tape, a pair of yellow-handled scissors.
There is also my five volume set of Manilius, which I can’t quite bring myself to pick up off the shelf, it seems to me that when I pack away my Manilius, it will be the end of everything, I will have lost.
I left this morning’s note in Peter Tracey’s pigeon hole about an hour ago. I kept it short and to the point.
Homines tui similes pro ientaculo mihi appositi sunt. I eat people like you for breakfast.
Peter Tracey doesn’t knock. He pushes open the door and for a moment he just stands there.
His appearance is dishevelled, there is a bright sheen on his upper lip, a twitch tugging at the skin over his right temple. As he comes towards me, he seems to fill my little room completely.
His narrow, good-looking face is very close to mine now, I can see the veins in his handsome brown eyes. He grips my shoulders, my silence seems to produce in him an almost animal rage. He is shouting now,—screaming, I would say—I can feel his furious breath on my tightly sealed lips.
‘Fucking tell me!’ he bellows, ‘Tell me what they fucking say!’
METAMORPHOSIS
TELLING ME THE news about Alice last week in the library, Arthur was rude to me for the first time ever.
Arthur who is never rude, who never has an unkind word to say to anyone. Arthur who in all the years we worked together was never anything but the most perfectly courteous old-fashioned gentleman.
He told me that Alice is pregnant, due in April, and then he said I should stop all this nonsense with the bird books, the videos. That everyone at the library knows it is just a pretext so I can come in and try to speak to Alice or say something abusive to Meakin. He said I am making Alice’s life a misery and if I really cared about her I would stay away.
‘But I am interested in birds, Arthur,’ I said.
I wanted to explain to him that my bird research is a good thing. It is an occupation. I enjoy it and it takes my mind off Alice and Meakin for quite long periods during the day. It gives me a sense of purpose and usefulness.
But when I began to speak Arthur put his finger to his lips and said, ‘Quiet now, Howard. This is a library,’ as if he thought I might be about to start shouting.
He date-stamped my video and my book, looking with distaste at the photograph beneath its protective plastic cover: an African crowned eagle ripping open the stomach of a large vervet monkey.
I caught a brief glimpse of Alice, talking to Gail over by the hessian-covered screens which divide the children’s section from the rest of the library. I didn’t think then that she looked particularly pregnant. She looked the same as always: tall, pale-ish skin, dark hair tied back in a pony-tail with a plain elastic band. It is worse though, her being pregnant. The thought makes me nauseous, ill. I’m really not sure I will be able to cope with Alice having Meakin’s baby.
She flushed when she saw me and whispered something to Gail. Then she walked brisk
ly away between the reading tables where the newspapers and periodicals are laid out, stepped into the storeroom and closed the door. She always does that when I come into the library. She hides in the storeroom until I have gone. Meakin I hardly ever seem to see. I think he hides from me too.
Philip Meakin is a strong, stocky man in his early thirties with short brown hair, no grey in it yet. How I hate him.
The best thing that has happened over the last few weeks has been my coming across the video, The Flight of Eagles. So far I have watched it twenty-three times. Useful as the books are, the video represents, I think, something of a breakthrough.
I used to work at the library, with Arthur and Gail and Alice and Philip Meakin, but when Alice and Meakin got married I found I couldn’t stay.
My interest in birds—my need of them, if you like—began when I left.
I didn’t resign in any formal way because until the moment I walked out I hadn’t planned to go. I was standing at the front desk with Arthur. I must have been crying because Arthur looked so appalled. His small pale eyes were wide with sympathy but, being Arthur, he was shocked I suppose by my complete collapse, my total loss of control.
‘I think I’m going to have to leave, Arthur,’ I said and picked up my things—my green corduroy jacket draped over the back of the chair there, my newspaper and my bag.
The bird book was in my bag. I had put it there because the spine was badly broken and I had planned to mend it slowly at home, a few pages every evening.
It was the middle of the morning, a strange time to be at home in my kitchen. I opened the battered little book and began reading. The reading calmed me, and it was interesting. All of it. It was new to me and I found it quite absorbing. I had lived for forty-eight years and could only identify perhaps half a dozen common birds—magpie, pigeon, crow, robin, a few more maybe. I would not have been able to identify with any certainty a thrush or a swift or a lark or a nightingale, let alone anything more unusual, a buzzard, say, or a cormorant.
