‘I’m coming with you to the Annexe. I want to have the car today.’
‘I’m sorry, honey, but I’m afraid I’ll have to keep it there. I have to go over to Main Navy for a conference this morning.’ Buses ran from the Arlington Annexe to the Main Navy building on Constitution Avenue, but Vinson never went in buses. ‘Did you want the car for anything in particular?’
‘Oh no,’ Christine said, going wearily downstairs to make the coffee. ‘Nothing particular.’
The day was already sweltering with a sticky heat. While she was clearing up the kitchen after Vinson had gone, she heard the radio telling her that it was probably going to be the hottest day of the year so far, and might also break temperature records for that date. The man who gave out the weather forecasts was always very proud and excited when the thermometer broke a record. As he was spending the day in an air-conditioned studio, it did not incommode him.
It was a damp clinging heat that Christine had never met anywhere else in her life. If you moved at all, sweat stood on your skin and could not evaporate, because the air was as damp as you were. It was a limp heat, a clammy heat that seemed to close you round with stifling hands and wring the moisture out of you. If you took a shower you were wet again with sweat before you could dry the water off yourself. Making up your face was a lost cause. Your skin was never dry for long enough to put a foundation on evenly, and beads of perspiration were starting up between the grains of powder before you had put down the puff.
When Christine went out at half past ten the road lay sizzling in the sun like a griddle ready for pancakes. The air-conditioning fan in the Meenehans’ top window was making a noise that no one but the Meenehans could have lived with. The Kesslers’ dog lay panting on the lawn with no sense or energy to get himself back to the house. As Christine walked down to the bus stop her bare arms burned and she could almost fancy that her brains were bubbling in her head like gravy. She felt sick.
The bus had been standing in the sun at the terminal and its interior was like an oven. The streetcar was slightly cooler, but it was one of those with a radio, and Christine’s ride along Wisconsin Avenue was made hideous by hillbilly music and commercials about scouring powder and laxatives.
In Bethesda, she had to walk two blocks in the sun to get to the building which housed the Immigration Office. Going up in the lift she felt dizzy, and trod on a man’s toe as she stepped back to lean against the wall. The man took off his hat and apologized, which was unnecessarily civil of him, but his clothes smelled as if he had worn them day and night all summer, and Christine could not summon a smile for him.
The operator directed her to a door at the end of a long passage, where people were going busily in and out of doors with armfuls of papers. Constantly coming and going – out of one door, across the passage, in at another door – they seemed to be the same people, in motion all the time to give the effect of a busy crowd, like stage soldiers marching across the backcloth, then dashing round behind the scenes to march across the stage again and give the illusion of an army out of half a dozen extras in helmets and dusty doublets.
The Immigration Office had nothing in common with the passage that led to it. No one bustled about in there. Nothing seemed to be happening at all. When Christine opened the door on the tableau of quiet figures sitting at desks or on chairs against the wall, she had the impression of stepping into a photograph.
The desk near the door was called INFORMATION. Its chair was empty, although a half-smoked cigarette sent up a straight thread of smoke from a brimming ashtray. Christine stood by the desk and looked around. One of the figures in the tableau came to life and nodded civilly at her from another desk.
‘Hullo,’ he said. Americans in shops or offices never said:
‘Good morning’, or: ‘Good afternoon.’ It was always: ‘Hullo’, or even, in the hardware store: ‘Hi there!’
‘Mrs Dent has just stepped out for a moment,’ said the figure.’ Won’t you have a seat, and we’ll attend to your business directly.’
Christine sat down at the end of the line of people along the wall, who were waiting to have their business attended to directly. They seemed to have been waiting a long time. Some were reading. Others were slumped in attitudes of hopeless resignation. A small boy was fidgeting and squirming and falling off his chair, and his mother had tired long ago of telling him to sit still. A man in a black felt hat was tapping his foot and jabbing at his chin with the handle of the umbrella which he had unaccountably brought with him on the hottest day of the year.
Although it was a relief to be out of the glaring sun, it was as hot in here as it was in the street; a stale, suffocating heat that sapped the senses and made you drowsy. There was plenty of air space under the high ceiling, but the air had been used up long ago – probably days ago, because the closed windows did not look as if they could ever be forced open without giving yourself a hernia, and none of the Immigration staff looked feckless enough to risk that.
It was a large high room decorated and furnished with a somewhat temporary air, like wartime civil defence offices in England. The windows were dirty, one wall was distempered a different colour from the others, no two desks were the same, and the odd collection of chairs looked as though they had been filched from other offices when no one was looking. The whole place looked as though the Immigration business might come to an end at any moment and the room and its occupants find themselves evacuated.
One corner of the room was divided into a cubicle by plasterboard walls which did not quite reach the ceiling. There was a doorway without a door in both the walls, so that the people sitting waiting to have their business attended to directly could see the man who sat at the desk in the cubicle, and he in turn, by leaning backwards and looking over his shoulder, could see and talk to the occupants of the desks in the main office.
That was what he was doing now. He was talking to a stout man with a perspiring bald head, who sat in shirt-sleeves and a tie like a Gauguin nightmare at a desk nearest the cubicle. They talked a full ten minutes with the sober intensity of two women discussing a confinement.
Christine could not hear what they said, beyond the fact that the fat man was called Aubrey, and the small sandy man in the cubicle was called Elwood. They finally finished with the confinement, and Elwood turned back again to his desk, on the other side of which a woman in mourning sat in a detached way, as if she had given up hope of ever making contact with him. Elwood looked at her pensively for a while as if he might be going to say something, and then the telephone rang.
The two men and the woman at the desks in the main office looked up eagerly, as if the telephone bell were quite an excitement in their day. Elwood leaned back in his chair and said: ‘Shall I get it, Aubrey, or will you?’
‘I don’t mind, Elwood. Just as you like. Unless Miss Hattie would like to take it?’ He glanced chivalrously to the other side of him, where a middle-aged lady in a mauve sleeveless dress, with hair lying in thin coils on her forehead, was studying something which, from the poised pencil and the furrowed brow, might have been a crossword puzzle. She looked up and answered Aubrey’s smile. Everyone in that office was as polite to each other as if they were in a quadrille.
‘No, no,’ she murmured. ‘You get it.’
‘Well, then, will you, Elwood?’ It seemed almost too much to ask.
‘Of course, my dear chap.’ Elwood let down the legs of his chair and picked up the telephone, which had been ringing merrily all through this little courteous exchange. ‘Oh, hullo there! How are you? How have you been coming along?’ Christine heard him say. The woman in mourning folded her hands; and her shoulders lifted in the suspicion of a sigh.
The grey-faced man at the desk beyond Miss Hattie’s, whose occupation was hidden by a barrier of ledgers, got up with a little cough, tiptoed across to Aubrey and whispered something in his ear. Aubrey closed his eyes and shook his head, and the grey-faced man tiptoed back to his side of the room. As he passed Miss Hat
tie he murmured: ‘Hot enough for you?’ and Miss Hattie said: ‘My goodness, yes, Mr Pierrepont’, and fanned herself with a piece of blotting-paper.
Mr Pierrepont looked pleased that somebody agreed with him about something and hid himself behind his ledgers again.
Suddenly there was a whirl of activity. Aubrey looked up from his desk and called out: ‘Next please!’ in a startled tone, as if surprised to find himself still alive. Miss Hattie, catching the infection, looked up from her crossword puzzle and also called out:’ Next, please!’ in the loudest voice her muted throat could muster.
Consternation! Everyone sitting on the chairs along the wall stood up, or if they were women, made the motions of collecting handbags and uncrossing their legs preparatory to standing up.
‘No, no,’ said Aubrey soothingly. ‘One at a time please. We must take you all in order or we’ll never get anywhere. The people at the head of the lines first, you know.’
The man with the umbrella and the woman with the small boy advanced towards the desks. ‘But I was before her,’ complained an Italian voice farther down the line. ‘Just because I sit in the wrong place –’
He did not complain very loud or very long, however. There was something about the doldrum atmosphere of the Immigration Office which was catching, and stifled rebellion. Everyone sat meekly down again. The woman next to Christine, whose tight head scarf emphasized the dominance of her nose, told her: ‘Yesterday I come, I wait two hour. Today I wait already one hour, but what can you do?’
What indeed? Christine sat on her hard chair and felt like a displaced person. Her first irritation was subsiding. It was too hot to go on fuming. She began to drift into a sort of coma of waiting, melting gently in the heat like a forgotten jelly, watching the slow happenings in the room with half-focused eyes.
The man with the umbrella was sitting at Aubrey’s desk with the black hat tipped over his eyes and the umbrella held straight up between his knees, like an old gentleman in the pavilion at Lord’s. He did not sit there nearly as long as the old gentlemen do, however. He sat there for two minutes. After squaring his shoulders and applying himself with heavy breathing to the form which the man with the umbrella had brought, Aubrey discovered that it was the wrong form, and told him that he must go back to his firm and get another.
The man leaned the umbrella carefully against his knee so as to be able to spread his hands in a Gallic gesture. ‘I am waiting here two hours,’ he said. ‘Two hours I am waiting, and now you are saying I must go away and come back again. It’s not O.K.’
‘But look here, my friend,’ said Aubrey, with a charming smile. ‘It’s not my fault if you make a mistake. You have the wrong form, that’s all. You can easily get the right one and come back.’ He spoke as if a second visit to the Immigration Office would be a pleasure.
‘But this is the form you were telling me I must have,’ the Frenchman protested.
‘I?’ Aubrey leaned back in his chair, shocked. ‘I certainly never told you that, nor, I’m sure, did any of my colleagues.’
‘Well, it was someone here….’ The Frenchman looked cautiously at Miss Hattie and Mr Pierrepont, and craned his neck to peep into the cubicle at Elwood but he lacked the courage to accuse anyone.
‘If you don’t mind,’ suggested Aubrey, all smiles again, ‘there are other people waiting to be helped, and our time is precious, you know.’
The Frenchman was beaten. He straightened his umbrella, shifted his grip farther down the handle and went out of the room, with bent knees. The eyes of the people sitting by the wall followed him dully to the door.
A woman in a creased linen suit, who was now head of the line, stood up hopefully, but Aubrey had leaned towards the cubicle and Elwood had tipped back his chair and they were off on another of their chummy gossips. The woman sat down again, moistening her lips and trying not to look as if she had made a mistake.
‘Hot enough for you?’ Mr Pierrepont asked Miss Hattie, on his way to whisper something to Aubrey.
‘My goodness, yes,’ said Miss Hattie. Her smile faded as she turned back to the woman with the small boy, who was sitting at her desk. She was having trouble with them. The woman could not speak English, so everything had to be said to the small boy, who then translated it to his mother. It was questionable whether he was translating right, for each of his gabbled remarks brought a deeper bewilderment to the mother’s face. Her eyes were troubled. She shrugged her shoulders and said something to the small boy, which might have been: ‘If I’d known it was going to be like this in America I would never have come.’
The small boy laughed and looked up at the ceiling, drumming his heels against the bars of the chair. He watched a fly. With one of the sudden ennuis of childhood, he was bored with the whole thing. He would translate no more.
‘You – must – fill – in – this – form,’ Miss Hattie told the mother slowly and patiently in her useless little voice. ‘Thees form you moost fill een.’ Miss Hattie tried it in broken English, but the woman still looked as if she were being asked to explain Einstein’s theory. Miss Hattie thrust the form under her nose, and the woman drew back a little as if it were a lighted match. Miss Hattie looked round for help, but Aubrey was still talking to Elwood, and Mr Pierrepont was buried behind his ledgers with only the thinning top of his bony head showing.
‘Take this, dear.’ Miss Hattie gave the form to the little boy. ‘Fill it in for your mother.’
‘O.K.,’ said the child, very blasé.
‘Can you write, dear?’
‘Sure I can write. What do you think I am?’ The boy’s voice rose to a whine. He had evidently been in America longer than his mother; long enough, anyway, to pick up the inflections of his schoolmates. He said something to his mother, and she collected the parcels which she had strewn around her chair, smiled nervously at Miss Hattie and followed her son to a table in the corner, where there were inkwells, and pens on chains. They sat down side by side, the mother sitting anxiously on the edge of her chair, as if her son were a defeated general signing a peace treaty, and the boy twisting his legs round the chair, poking out his tongue, ruffling his hair, and attacking the form with all the manifestations of labour he would give at his desk in school.
The telephone bell set Aubrey and Elwood and Miss Hattie courteously passing the buck again. They finally unloaded it on to Mr Pierrepont, who was not privileged to have a telephone on his desk and had to answer it standing at a window-sill at the back of the room. His legs were crooked and the seat of his trousers was shiny. Christine felt idly sorry for him, but she could not care too much. She was beginning to feel sick again. However, she stood up automatically with the rest when Aubrey, with the air of a man too busy even to look up from his desk, threw out a casual: ‘Next, please!’
It was the woman in the creased linen suit. She had a prim, bloodless face and hair cut like a schoolgirl, although she had not been a schoolgirl these twenty years or more. She was English. She was also kittenish. She did some high-pitched giggling with Aubrey, and then he rose heavily and took her over to a recess in a corner of the office, where a table held some mysterious pieces of apparatus. What was he going to do? Everyone turned their heads to look, as if they were at a tennis match. Aubrey said something to the Englishwoman and she took off her scarf. He said something else and she took off the jacket of her suit. He spoke to her again and she shook her head, apparently jibbing at taking off her spotted voile blouse as well.
Aubrey rolled up his sleeves. He took hold of her bare arm above the wrist and the Englishwoman wriggled a little and fluttered her eyes. Was he then going to ravish her in the recesses of the Immigration Office? But no. Firming his grip, he guided her hand on to a pad on the table and pressed down hard. He was only taking her fingerprints, but from the coy way he handled her, pressing one finger after another on to the pad as if he were playing This Little Piggy Went to Market, and from the squirmings and gigglings with which she half acquiesced, half protested, they might have
been playing a most daring game between the sexes.
When it was over and Aubrey perspiring with achievement, the Englishwoman was left holding her inkstained hands daintily away from the spotted blouse and looking at him with helpless feminine appeal.
‘Where can I–?’
‘Just down the corridor on the left,’ he whispered. ‘Do you think you can find it?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, lest he might offer to accompany her.
Gallantly he threw open the door for her, and she tripped out of the room, still holding her fingers delicately extended, as if she were passing the cucumber sandwiches at the vicarage fête.
This little episode seemed to have sapped Aubrey. He sat down at his desk and mopped his forehead and brooded, and would not call out: ‘Next, please!’
Christine shifted on her chair, leaned forward and surreptitiously hung her head down, because she was beginning to feel faint. Would they never get to her? Miss Hattie was now occupied with a voluble Austrian woman, who was pouring forth a recital of her trials and tribulations in the land of liberty. Her nerves were bad, she was telling Miss Hattie hoarsely, and no one could understand that sinking feeling which came over her. Miss Hattie listened with fascinated sympathy, although what the Austrian woman’s nerves had to do with the business of the Immigration Office it was hard to see.
The cracked, breathless voice seemed as if it would go on for ever. The woman and the small boy were still sitting at the table battling with the form. Elwood was telephoning again. His client in mourning had disappeared. Perhaps she had only been a figment of the imagination in this unreal vacuum of a world. Mr Pierrepont asked Miss Hattie if it was hot enough for her, then he coughed, got up and tiptoed crookedly to the door, murmuring: ‘I think I’ll be going to lunch. ‘He said it to no one in particular, and no one answered him.
When Elwood had finished his telephone conversation he tipped his chair so far back that he was in danger of falling and breaking his spine and said: ‘I’ll go and grab myself some lunch, Aubrey, if that suits you.’
No More Meadows Page 28
