by Jane Gardam
‘I must just get the phone.’
‘I’ve come to pick you up. The taxi’s waiting.’
Not quite asking him in I said, ‘Oh yes. Right. Hang on,’ picked up the receiver and heard Mrs. Aylesford’s voice. I was surprised that after the great pleasure I had just felt on seeing Helmut I could be swept into equal distress that it was not my father.
And there seemed to be something else. Something over my shoulder, some shadow, something black and bad that was considering me carefully. ‘Yes, Mrs. Aylesford?’
‘I’m very sorry to have to say, Krista, I’m very sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but he’s gone again.’
‘But I’m just leaving to catch my plane.’
‘I’m sure I’m very sorry but—’
‘I have to catch it. I can’t let them down. It is the last day, tomorrow. There is nobody else to do my work. He can’t be far.’
‘It is a very dark night, Krista.’
‘Oh, Lord. I’ll ring the police. How long—’
‘I saw him about twenty minutes ago. I took him his tea. He was crying, Krista. I’m afraid he was saying you had been very unkind—’
‘Yes, I see. All right.’
‘I can’t go,’ I said to Helmut. ‘My father’s disappeared.’
He took the phone.
‘This is a friend of Krista. Please explain to me the situation.’
There was an interested pause. Then I heard her voice, hesitant, then more confident, then furiously clacking.
‘We shall telephone you from the airport if there is time, otherwise from Geneva. In the meantime, kindly get in touch with the police. Krista will be back as soon as possible. Goodnight.’
Clack, clack, squawk.
‘Good evening.’
Halfway to Heathrow I said, ‘I can’t possibly go, you know.’
‘The woman Aylesford said that he does this often.’
‘She has never told me that.’ I looked. Short-legged, tight-lipped, fierce-nosed Sir Thomas More. Archetypal immovable lawyer. He said, ‘I pressed her.’
‘But I can’t go. Not knowing.’
Walking behind me in the cafeteria queue (the plane had been delayed an hour) he said, ‘I think that we should now sit down and that you should talk to me. I am right in thinking that you are in some way obsessed with your father and he with you?’
‘No, of course not. What’s the matter with me is that I am going mad. I keep seeing—oh, God! I told you. You didn’t take any—’
‘You told me that you keep seeing a woman who looks like a fly. The name of the fly I suggest to you’—he looked at the postage-stamp-sized packet of biscuits on my tray and added a doughnut—‘the name of this fly is Guilt.’
Eating the doughnut, or rather picking it up and putting it down again, I said, ‘I dare say.’
‘Are we, I wonder, in the areas of child-abuse, incest or cruelty?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Why of course not?’
‘Not in the terrace.’
‘My dear, you little know. Why do you feel guilty about your father?’
‘I don’t know. I told him something once I shouldn’t have done. I said I was sorry. It was just once. I have done all I can for him. I suppose not enough. I suppose I ought to love him more—or show something more. But there seems no more that I can possibly do.’
‘You feel pity?’
‘Oh yes, I do feel pity. You see he is so sane. His trouble is not senility or insanity but a most rare sanity. He really does look steadily at the nature of death and is terrified. He talks about it. What he says is all true. Other people can’t face it. He sounds so dotty but he says what’s really in all our hearts.’
‘There is no need for him however to have destroyed your happy young spirit.’
‘I’m not sure I had one.’
‘Yes, you did. We all did. Sometimes deeply secreted. He has been murderous. Why has he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps,’ Helmut said, ‘the woman you see, the fly, is not your guilt but his? Is there something he may feel guilty about?’
‘Plenty that he should—’
‘But is there?’
And so I told it.
‘It was my husband. He was thrilled by him. He fawned over him. By my marrying important Graham he had bolstered himself. He strutted. He used to say, “They’ll think a bit more of me now.” As if it had been my duty to do it for him.’
‘Did Graham like him?’
‘He loathed him. He couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him. He didn’t see that he was sad or frightened and he never found him funny. He made excuse after excuse not to see him. In the end he said if I couldn’t free myself from my father he was going. And in the end he went.’
‘Did your father know the reason for his going?’
‘I told him. I told him once. I broke open. I screamed it at him. Afterwards I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Since then he has been much worse to me.’
‘Yes, of course he has. Your father is wanting you to leave him. To withdraw from him. Chuck him.’
‘Leave him? He rules me. He devours me. He weeps to keep me.’
‘He wants you to leave him alone. If he can see you free and happy, then his guilt about your marriage will go away.’
‘You’re saying he loves me?’
‘Yes. But let me tell you, Krista, if you do not do something decisive, when he dies the fly, Guilt, will spawn a disgusting maggot called Remorse who will be with you always.’
‘Since you’ve never met him—’
‘It is not necessary. I know you.’
The plane was signalled. I said, ‘You mean I must not go home tonight?’
‘Your home is not with him.’
‘Helmut, he is out-of-doors, alone, lost in the dark. He is very old. Can’t you think what they’ll all say?’
‘For the love of God, forget what they’ll all say. If ruthlessly, selfishly, wordlessly you do not leave for Geneva now, tonight, you will be damaged forever, destroyed, and he will die a guilty and unhappy man. You have to set him free. Get your passport.’
On the plane he said, ‘All right?’ but I didn’t answer.
At the hotel he said, ‘And now I am coming with you to your room.’ The concierge’s hand paused over the keys. ‘From which we shall telephone together.’ At my bedroom door he said, ‘And be prepared for anything.’
‘You mean—the fly?’
‘Fuck, Krista, the fly. I mean—ah yes.’
The message-light was on. Helmut picked up the phone, dialled downstairs, spoke to the operator. Then said, ‘Your father has telephoned you.’
‘He has telephoned me? Here? Telephoned Geneva?’
‘Now I shall ring the neighbour Aylesford.’
I sat on a chair by the bathroom door and listened, as he listened, undoing his long scarf, removing his gloves, hat, then his coat with all the time the receiver under his chin. Then he put down the phone and said, ‘Your father is safe home. He is in bed.’ He went to examine the fridge, came back to the bed, sat on it and began to unpeel one of my goodnight chocolates.
‘You can’t stay here,’ I said, ‘I’m not having it said that all I needed was a man.’
‘All you needed was an ally,’ he said, removing his shoes. ‘An expert witness. But please, you must pull yourself up, Krista. You are looking most wild and untidy and your mouth is a hole.’
We lay side by side on the bed and I said, ‘I must ring him back.’
He said, ‘In a minute,’ and took hold of my wrist.
‘I love him,’ I said.
‘Wait ten minutes.’
When it was half an hour he said, ‘Ring later.’ And then it was much later, and too late, and then it was morning an
d only half an hour to get to the arbitration.
In the taxi we sat hand in hand, and the lake flying past, the throb of the terrible packed traffic on the bridge—the fact of not having telephoned was the faintest shadow. At twelve o’clock the last, the incredible, scarcely believed-in last session ended without histrionics or perorations, a simple unremarkable end to the years and years of patient argument in Teheran and Rome and here. It ended with a nodding, a relaxation between the parties, a smiling and sitting back among the arbitrators and the pause before the great pack-up of papers for shipment home about the world. The court began to chatter in its different languages, drawing away into groups. Babel once more.
‘And the faces of the translators are suffused with joy,’ said the English arbitrator to Helmut and me, as we stood together. ‘See you in half an hour at the Perle du Lac.’
‘Oh, I can’t. I must get home. There’s a bit of a crisis—’
‘Couldn’t you ring from the restaurant?’
‘You would have heard if there were anything,’ said Helmut.
But at the Perle, with its glass walls against the lake and sudden sunlight on the mountains and the snows, I forgot. We celebrated until the four o’clock plane. Champagne and rosy tablecloths and flowers and Helmut touching my fingers.
The house was all in darkness, but next door Mrs. Aylesford’s lights were on. I was alone and walked to her window. She and Myrtle were seated facing the blank television screen, their backs solid, rather stooped. Myrtle was smoking and staring at the floor. Mrs. Aylesford had knitting idle on her lap. On the sofa facing the window and looking straight at me, sat the fly.
THE DIXIE GIRLS
Eighty years ago, or thereabouts, Nell had shared a governess with the Dixie girls, Vi and V. and May, the daughters of a Major in the Blues and Greys.
It was V. who had been the particular friend. Vi had been five years older and bossy, May, three years younger and rather sharp. Nell, the landlady’s daughter, had been in awe of all three of them and fearfully in awe of the parents; Mrs. Dixie, a remote, enduring woman sitting upright and frowning at her sewing in an uncomfortable chair, pursing her Scottish lips; and the Major, a voice, a moustache a lubricious gleam, an Olympian shadow springing down the stairs. Major Dixie had been often from home.
The Dixies had been long-term lodgers with Nell’s mother in the North Yorkshire town of Pickering, a high cold blowy place near the garrison in the middle of moors. It had suited the Dixies well, for they had come from bracing Peebles. Peebles they had so loved that in Nell’s ears it came to be confused sometimes with heaven. She would wonder if she would ever get there.
The governess one day went hastily home to it and after that the governess was Vi, who kept a page or so ahead of V. and May and Nell, reading everything up an hour before the lesson. Nell’s mother was not charged for her daughter’s education but the rent of the Dixies was reduced from twenty-five shillings a week to sixteen (family rate, food, heating inclusive) though this was never mentioned. The Dixies somehow made it clear to Nell that they were being good to her.
They saw to her Yorkshire accent for a start. Nell at over eighty, lying in the dark sometimes, and thinking of her days in the schoolroom—that is to say in her mother’s dining room; cruets on the sideboard, woolly mats, a malicious, razor-toothed plant, dry as buckram on a tall jardinière in the window—Nell saw more clearly than her recent landscapes the Dixie girls all twisting and squirming with glee at her voice. ‘Bread and serrip. Bread and serrip.’ She remembered her blush and sometimes so intensely that she blushed again. Blushing is rare in the old. She saw again behind the rosy bobble curtains and the governess’s wretched face the white light of the moors. She heard the north wind over the scratchy black heather.
The Dixies all went away, following the flag, following the Major. Nell lived on for years in Pickering and kept on with helping at home where officers’ families were always coming and going. During the Great War she married a batman of one of these officers and afterwards settled with him in Leeds. He was a cobbler, a silent man who had survived the Somme. They had a baby daughter.
Nell however did not lose touch with the formidable Dixie family since the one thing that the white-faced governess had instilled in her—apart from the unacceptability of the Yorkshire accent—was the necessity of Correspondence to a civilised life. The first duty of the day for a woman—unless of course she were of the servant class—was to attend to her letters.
This as it happened was entirely to Nell’s taste and she would probably have done it anyway, for she was a creature so formed that she felt nothing to have properly occurred unless she had communicated it in writing. Writing to people about other people was her relish and her huge delight and though she could not manage to write as she had been taught, straight after breakfast and for the first post, after the slop-pails, the scrubbing brush, the possing-tub, the mangle, the range, the scouring of pans with soda, the black-leading of the grate, the brasses, the making of dinner for herself and the cobbler and Hilda the robust baby and the clearing of everything up, down she would sit to her letters. She wrote with a smile upon her face or with lips tight with emotion, with frown-lines of righteous indignation and sometimes even with tears a-flow. The most minute events of the terrace in Leeds were made radiant by Nell and born earlier or later she might well have been advised to branch out and become a novelist, brimming as she did with such immediacy.
As it was, she had a very happy time and the Dixie girls as the unselfconscious pages flowed forth from Leeds into India, Kenya, Malta, Basingstoke, Cyprus, Aden, Cheltenham and Singapore called out to each other, ‘Here’s dear Nell again,’ raising amused eyebrows. They always read the letters, often two or three times, and V. who was the chief recipient kept many of them in a box. ‘Dear Nell,’ they all said to each other. ‘Such excitements.’ There was a slight uneasiness in their voices sometimes—or at least in the voice of Vi or May—that Nell should be so entertaining, so articulate, so full of gusto. Was it not just a bit forward of her to write with such self-confidence? But V., who was nice, said not at all. She looked forward to dear Nell’s pretty handwriting on an envelope. ‘Well, she owes that to us,’ said Vi.
V.—it was short for Victoria—replied to Nell’s letters very dutifully, as she too had been taught; never starting a paragraph with an I, always answering information received point for point before presenting anything new, always remembering to send messages to the cobbler and the baby—never forgetting the baby’s birthday. Sometimes she enclosed sprigs of colonial vegetation—a silken purple poppy-flower pressed almost transparent like a butterfly’s wing, or a squelched hot orchid from Kuala Lumpur or a dry little shower of bay. The Dixie girls communicated best in symbols, being not much hands at describing. V. alone could now and then wax voluble on the subject that meant most to her, which was her health—or rather her sickness and the sicknesses of others.
Sickness and death. These were the enemy. The Dixie girls who had so upsettingly to their parents not been boys had need of enemies, enemies through whom, though they could not be despatched by sword or shot, they could demonstrate their bravery.
How very bravely for instance V. set out to do down the onslaughts of the flesh. She ate little, she lived in cold houses, she walked far in bad weather on fragile ankles, she spent almost nothing on clothes; and after her parents’ death she returned to England to a freezing address on the Kent coast spending her evenings sewing sides-to-middles of old sheets for charity, and darning for herself, and often writing her delicate letters with fingers blue and pleated at the tip. The Major had died of drink and Mrs. Dixie of desiccation. There was no money left. Said V., ‘We are in penury.’ Vi had taken a job as a teacher at a dubious private school near Wokingham and May had ‘taken a job’ moving pieces of paper about in an office that had something to do with a kind godfather, and had a bed-sit in Ealing. ‘We are fallen on hard times,’
wrote V. to Nell from the pretty Kent cottage beneath her father’s fine portrait and before a fire of one small coal. ‘It is a very good thing that we are Dixies, or we could not bear it.’
Nell found this statement totally unsurprising. She had believed for so long that the Dixies were significant that their superiority to everyone she knew was notched in her brain. Dixie to her meant Hohenzollern, Battenberg and Teck. She knew that had the Czar or Charlemagne or the Prince of Wales come riding by and stopped in front of her she would have been perfectly all right so long as the patrician Dixies had been at her side. They knew the rules.
Once, when she was thirty or so Nell was invited to meet V. in London to witness the marriage procession of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. She and V. arrived early upon the Embankment and took up positions in the front row. Nell carried a little flag to wave hurray. V. in her threadbare coat of ancient design simply stood, but as the carriages came by it seemed the merest accident that V. was on the pavement and not bowing and twirling her wrist from the inside of one of them. ‘Such a pity about the hat,’ she said. ‘The Queen knows never to wear a big hat. She knows that we all want to see her face. Poor Marina of course is Greek,’ and she led Nell off to a Lyons tea-shop for a little something. V. had to eat a little something every three hours, otherwise she fainted. ‘Oh poor V.,’ said plump Nell. ‘And you’re so terribly thin.’
‘All Dixies are thin.’
‘But you are really frighteningly thin,’ said Nell. ‘I do hope you’ve seen someone.’
‘Oh, dear me yes. I’ve seen half a dozen. The girls took me to Harley Street.’
‘That must have cost—’ said Nell before remembering that prices are never mentioned. ‘And what did they say?’
‘They said,’ said V. looking across the small sandwiches, ‘they said I was to eat something every three hours.’
‘But couldn’t you eat more?’ asked Nell who after twenty-four hours in May’s bed-sitting room (which had turned out to be a very nice flat with three bedrooms but a kitchen with only a kettle) was famished. ‘Couldn’t I—well, wouldn’t you let me buy you something substantial? Some baked beans?’
