The Life Situation

by Rosemary Friedman

  His father opened his eyes. “What would I do?”

  Oscar was stumped. He’d never known his father to do anything else except look after the patients. What did people do? Play chess, collect stamps? “Write your memoirs!”

  “One writer in the family is enough. No one can read my writing anyway.”

  “You could dictate it.” It sounded ridiculous as he said it.

  “Let’s be getting back… Miss Cartwright.”

  Oscar put out a hand to help him up. His father ignored it and wriggling to the edge of the bench put his weight on his good leg and his stick.

  ‘Please God,’ Oscar thought, ‘don’t let me get old.’

  He took Daisy for a walk. They walked down the steps from the promenade across the track of the miniature railway which functioned only in the summer, and on to the beach between the fishing boats. They threw stones into the sea and got tar on their shoes. Daisy said Grandma would be cross. In Penny Wonderland (which was a misnomer if anything was) he spent fifty pence on the rifle range before he won a plastic comb for Daisy, and refused to go on the big wheel. They bought crinkly chips in paper cones and read the rude postcards. They walked along the beach path to Black Rock so that Oscar could tell his father how they were progressing with the marina. Daisy moaned that she was tired and wanted to take the bus back. Oscar made her walk. She threatened a relapse and a burst wound amongst other grisly things. He took no notice. She skipped along in front of him like a young puppy, covering twice the distance that he did.

  Grandma had made them buttered crumpets in a silver muffin dish for tea. They ate them with raspberry jam, which she’d made herself, from a tray in the comfortable first-floor sitting-room full of flowers and plants and medical journals.

  After tea he went up to the attic. He noticed that his mother had put everything that belonged to him at one end. There was the microscope his father had given him when he was a small boy, hoping to encourage an interest in medicine. The girls might enjoy that. He blew the dust off the case and put it aside to take home. There were several boxes of his old school magazine. He didn’t know why he’d kept them. On the top was the diary Daisy had been reading. It was true, he seemed to have spent a great deal of his youth in the darkness of the cinema, Wolf’s Clothing, Dangerous Waters, When Knights were Bold (Jack Buchanan), Modern Times, The Gunman, Poor Little Rich Girl (Shirley Temple), The Housemaster, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time…there was no end. Other momentous entries had been when he’d had a cold which always seemed to necessitate a day, if not more, in bed. ‘Had a cold, stayed in bed.’ He was soon up and about again, going to the pictures with Arthur. Can’t keep a good man down. He must have been thirteen when he wrote ‘Grandma died’. Just that. The next day he went to see the Marx brothers in A Day at the Races. He wondered how many times he had seen it since. Other momentous occurences he had seen fit to record were ‘got up late’, ‘very foggy’ and ‘Beatrice cut my hair’. He wondered who Beatrice was and was sure she hadn’t blow dried it. He could see why Daisy had been so interested. He had ‘a hundred lines from Mr Bond’, on the same day he ‘had a headache’, it was hardly surprising. He had two new wheels on his skates; did his stamps; came third in French and fourteenth in maths. Mr Starr had the cheek to give them homework (followed by an exclamation mark); got fifty lines for making a noise in the hall, twenty-five for slinging stones in the playground – perhaps all those lines had given him a taste for writing. Got some stamps at Stanley Gibbons in the Strand, DID NOT GO TO THE PICTURES! (What could have happened?) Ah, ‘Arthur was away.’ He went skating instead at Streatham. There seemed to have been a large market in barter. He had swopped an old fountain (?pen) for Eversharp pencil with Watson; on the previous day he had swopped an old watch for a propelling pencil…it all seemed most confusing. He forgot to bring home his homework. How often had he shouted at Rosy and Daisy for the same thing. Thanks a Million and Storm over the Andes, ‘Couldn’t go to school sports’ but managed to stagger to see George Formby in No Limit. He was kept in by Mr Riddle and missed the first half of The Ghost goes West. People he scarcely remembered came (sometimes for dinner and ‘again for dinner’ and went). They had babies (Gerald) and birthdays. One day he felt sick and had a headache from the pictures. He was not surprised. There was a page for ‘Books Read During the Year’. He’d found time for less than half a dozen. Water on the Brain by Compton Mackenzie (very funny), Valerie French by Dornford Yates (good), Captains All by W W Jacobs (funny), Many Cargoes, ditto author, ditto comment, Sea Fever, ditto author, ditto comment. Literate little bugger! Apart from the odd music lesson which he seemed to have got out of as frequently as possible and the momentous occasion when he had ‘tongue sandwiches for school’ there seemed little to indicate that he had been other than a very ordinary small boy with no particular penchant for school work and a severe addiction to the cinema.

  His collection of copies of Picture Post remained untouched; Neville Chamberlain in white tie and tails, making history as the first British premier to visit the Soviet embassy in London. The last carefree Wimbledon before matters of larger importance obliterated its memory. A Nazi Germany in which SS men looked on while elderly Jews wearing the star of David scrubbed the streets on their hands and knees. It had meant nothing to him at the time. He had, of course, been a very small boy but had it meant anything to anybody except the very, very few who kept the public conscience in every generation? What did Bangla Desh, Korea, Vietnam, even Northern Ireland mean to him? And if it meant anything what did he do? Paid his subscription to Amnesty; conscience money. At the same time he accepted royalty cheques from Germany, South Africa and Turkey; went to Spain and South America for his holidays. Along with most of the other people he knew he subscribed to the bourgeois culture of promise; promise of a world that made sense, a world whose good things could be enjoyed by all alike with a clear conscience. He had discovered mankind’s unhappiness, yet did not stand up in the streets and shout ‘I have been cheated. There is no promise.’ He pretended along with the rest of them that the future… It was easier that way. To believe in the promise. He put back the Picture Posts and turned to his records. It was a wartime collection. ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye cheerio, here I go on my way.’ Not on the pleasure cruise you would think from the sentiments, nor on safari, but to be killed or mutilated for ‘Rose of England’; to be beaten and starved and tortured ‘Till the lights of London shine again.’

  His war, apart from the tin hat which he treasured and the gas mask slung round his shoulders, had been the poetry of Sidney Keynes, the paintings of John Piper, the voice of Frank Sinatra and, of course, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. And the haunting white-faced mime of Jean-Louis Barrault’s Les Enfants du Paradis. Strangely enough, however, more than the films, Target for Tonight and Desert Victory, Brief Encounter and Mrs Miniver, the war had meant Vera Lynn, Dinah Shore and Anne Shelton with their unctuous false messages of hope. ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day’. He’d seen the telegram about Arthur, ‘the Air Ministry regret to inform you…’; read about Dunkirk, about Tobruk, about Arnhem. What price Vera Lynn ‘Comin’ in on a Wing and Prayer’ and ‘Kiss me Goodnight Sergeant Major’ and ‘When the Great New World is Dawning’? Or ‘I Left my Heart at the Stage-door Canteen’ when it was more likely your guts in Tobruk. ‘I Haven’t Said Thanks for that Lovely Weekend’…when it had meant strafing from morning till night, vomiting with fear till with relief they finally peppered you with nice little bullets. Oh, he hadn’t realized at the time, not then. Had anyone, left behind; too young or gaily rolling bandages or playing gin rummy on rooftops watching for incendiaries. He had honestly believed that ‘spring’ might be ‘a little late, this year’ that the ‘great new world was dawning’ and that there’d ‘always be an England’. He hadn’t an inkling, together with 99.9 per cent of the rest of the population, how nearly there wasn’t. The realization had come
later. Much, much later. At the time, together with the rest of the gang, he had declared in all sincerity that he was going to ‘Hang out his washing on the Siegfried Line’, believed that all that was necessary was to ‘Let the people sing!’

  Who said it was the British were crazy? Hitler was on their doorstep and the big heroes were poor old Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and the Andrews Sisters. France fell, brave little Holland went underground and England listened to Sandy Macpherson on the cinema organ and Albert Sandler’s Palm Court Orchestra.

  He remembered eating cakes made with liquid paraffin and one egg a week (two really because of course his mother gave him hers), and two ounces of butter…my God, Daisy put that much on her toast every morning…and Woolton pie. It had all seemed a great lark really. The blackout and ration books and the siren with its banshee wail that got you automatically out of bed and into the dark night and the shelter. The buzz bomb that stopped buzzing near his school while they were having dinner and shattered the windows despite the criss-crosses of tape that were regulation and sent splinters of glass into the strawberry jelly.

  And when it was all over! The parties and the dancing on VE night and the bonfires and burnings of Hitler’s effigy, while those who no longer had husbands or fathers or sons stayed quietly home and locked their doors and wept for what was perhaps the first time as the finality of the thing hit home.

  He had not been old enough to know the full horror of the war years. In his late teens and early twenties he had read every newspaper, every piece of literature concerning the subject he could lay hands on. It was unbelievable. Firstly that they had won the war at all with anything to save, secondly that no lesson had been learned. The horrors, if horrors there had been, it was now hard to believe, had quickly receded together with the First World War belief that they were building a world fit for heroes. Now to look at the evidence before him, Very Lynn, not Violette Szabo atrociously tortured for refusing to betray the secrets of her country (did anyone even remember her name?), was the heroine. He could not blame Rosy and Daisy for their fascination with the televsion scenes about prisoner of war camps in which at worst the Germans were wicked uncles with hearts of gold. What he could not understand was how the programmes managed to rivet those who had lived through it; magnetized him, whom though too young to appreciate its obscenities, had been alive.

  Medals, and regimental reunions, Armstice Day parades and poppies. Did one recall with sadness or glorify war? Douglas Bader with his stiff upper lip and no legs; Richard Hillary, another sacrificial victim, words flowering ‘Like crocuses in the hanging woods’; the ‘triumph’ of plastic surgery, ‘bouncing bombs’, ‘Hershey Bars’ and ‘radar’. The ultimate disgrace of Hiroshima with its unforgettable giant mushroom of smoke blotting out for a merciful moment only the evidence of man’s inhumanity to man it left behind.

  What was the use?

  Don’t you cry when I’m gone,

  Wear a smile and carry on,

  Till the lights of London shine again.

  “Oscar! Oscar!” His mother’s voice. “Oscar, are you up there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you said you were going to the station to meet Karen?”

  He looked at his watch. It was ten to six. Almost two hours and he thought he had been in the attic five minutes. He felt exhausted, drained.

  “Can you hear, Oscar? It’s ten minutes to six!”

  “Yes. I’m coming.”

  He relinquished Vera Lynn, brittle, 78 rpm, with her big teeth, her padded shoulders and the external smile, on to the top of the box; the symbol of the forties; the look, the sound, the feel.

  Don’t you cry when I’m gone,

  Wear a smile and carry on,

  Till the lights of London shine again.

  Fifteen

  Oscar sat at the feet of Marie-Céleste in a state of utter contentment. With her advancing pregnancy their relationship had entered a new stage. To his surprise he had found her swollen and misshapen body more desirable than her original coltishness. He loved the roundness of her belly and liked to bury his head between her deep maternal breasts. As far as she herself was concerned her condition had aroused in her new depths of sexual awareness, released passions previously unaroused. It was a time of great happiness for them both. He saw her almost every afternoon but they did not always make love. Often it was enough to sit and talk at peace for the moment with the world and with each other. It was a plateau of fulfilment he seemed never to have achieved with Karen. When he made love to Marie-Céleste there were no small hands trying the locked door and screaming through the keyhole when he was on the point of orgasm. “Hurry up Daddy you promised to find me a picture of a Roman soldier!” When they sat talking in the quiet sunlight-filtered drawing-room insulated by the double glazing from the world without there was no doorbell no bills that needed paying no domestic drama to interrupt the moment. He would not admit not even to himself that he might be living in what Marie-Céleste would call ‘cuckoo-cloud’ land; that it was no more than present reality. There was something else. His book was gathering momentum like leaves before the wind. Each morning he sat at his desk and within half an hour the words faltering and slowly typed at first would tumble on to the paper in an avanlanche blotting out all extraneous matter in a fall of tumbling type. Taking down the dictation from his head his fingers frequently had trouble keeping pace with his thoughts. By noon some days earlier he found that with no conscious effort two thousand words or more had printed themselves indelibly on the page furthering his story immaculately and leaving him empty. The feeling was good. He rang Benthorpe’s and assured them that Death on the Riviera would be delivered to them by the time he took his summer holiday.

  Marie-Céleste put a hand on his head. He removed it and kissed her fingers.

  “Sometimes happiness is frightening.” (The punishing conscience.)

  “You think so? Do I make you happy?”

  “You; the book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I never tell.”

  “Never?”

  He knew she meant Karen. “Never.”

  It was true. To tell would be like the blurb on the jacket accurate but false. The difference between ‘words’ and ‘literature’; a denial of each writer’s unique method of unfolding his plot which had to do with language and experience and was betrayed on each occasion by the bald statement; ‘…in which Jane X faced for the first time in years with being alone because her husband…’ It claimed to summarize but was a betrayal. The quality of any writer’s work was incapable of being conveyed in a handful of words. It was no better if one wrote them oneself.

  He could not explain this to Marie-Céleste.

  “You will have to wait until it’s published.”

  “Shall I have to buy it?”

  “I will give you the first copy; inscribed.”

  “What will you write?”

  “To my wife.”

  “I am not your wife.”

  “We could go away. The three of us.”

  “Three?”

  He patted her belly.

  She joined in the game. “Where would we go?”

  “You choose. I’d be happy anywhere with you.”

  Whenever he dreamed of himself and Marie-Céleste it was in the English countryside, paradoxical because he did not care for it. He wondered who would do the cooking.

  “Karen is going away for the night on the sixteenth,” he said. “Rosy will be in Brittany and Daisy in Norfolk.”

  “And?”

  “I should like to spend the night with you, my darling.”

  “What about Ernest?”

  “He is definitely not included in the invitation.”

  She opened her handbag and took out her diary.

  “I had a feeling the date was familiar.”

  “Why?”

  “I have two tickets for the new Peter Sellers film; charity performance. The Queen will be there.”

 
“You can be feeling not well or something. Ernest…”

  “Ernest isn’t coming. He’ll be in Paris. He told me to take a friend.”

  “What could be better?”

  “He meant a girl friend.”

  “Do you realize we’ve never been out together; properly. Shall we be daring?”

  “I feel so happy I hardly care.”

  “Me too. We’ll slip in when the lights go out.”

  She laughed. “You have to be seated half an hour before Her Majesty arrives.”

  “So be it.”

  It was the afternoon of his talk to the Disabled Club. As he dressed in a black polo-necked sweater he realized that he was viewing the occasion with more than his customary ambivalence. Firstly he had always disliked public speaking. It did not come naturally to him and he usually read what he had to say. Secondly, it meant the loss of an entire afternoon with Marie-Céleste who was using the opportunity to visit Dr Boyd.

  For the umpteenth time he read the letter confirming his telephone conversation at the beginning of the year with Miss (call me Kate) Smith. The letter had not arrived until April. She realized that it was rather rude not to have written before and apologized. She went on to confirm the date and to explain that the meeting consisted of an informal talk (‘more of a chat really’) of approximately half an hour followed by questions and discussion. At 4 p.m. they had tea and at 4.30 p.m. members were taken home. She hoped that he would perhaps talk about his writing career and explain why he chose to write the Death series ‘so popular and so often asked for’. His audience she assured him, would be made up of eager readers and a few professional and amateur writers (Lord preserve him!); they were mainly elderly and all disabled in some way. She was sure that he would find them enthusiastic and interested. She looked forward to meeting him and whilst thanking him for his kindness in agreeing to come remained his sincerely Kate Smith (Miss).

  He wished as always he had not agreed so readily. He picked up his thirty pages of typescript. The fact that it was to be an ‘informal chat’ was their problem; he was totally incapable of ‘chatting’ off the cuff to an audience for thirty seconds, let alone thirty minutes. They would have to listen to the same old guff which started by disillusioning them of the fact that authors were anything special to look at (superfluous) then went on to trace his career from rejected manuscripts to his present-day popularity attempting to explain, on the way, how it was ‘done’.