A World of Other People

by Steven Carroll

  It is Saturday night. He has leave. And this pub in Soho is one of her haunts. They’d no sooner sat at a table than the dance started and she joined it. The circle of dancers has slowly diminished. She is still in it and she is still the girl in the ARP coat that he’s looking at. The dancers slowly circle the shelters of the chairs, laughing, smoking and singing along to the piano. Then the music stops, the pub once more erupts into a chorus of ‘BOOM’ and the mad scramble for chairs begins again. Only this time she isn’t fast enough. She has played the game before but the fortunes of the game are fickle. And she is left standing as the echoes of the ‘BOOM’ fade and the piano starts up again.

  Then she is sitting in front of him.

  ‘Gosh,’ she says, her face beaming with life, ‘I’m dead. I could do with a drink.’

  When the dance of life and death begins she flies from her seat and joins the gathering circle just starting to move round the chairs in the middle of the pub. It is sheer impulse and when she looks back to a surprised Jim she shrugs her shoulders and lights a cigarette. The piano is playing a familiar tune about knocking on wood. She likes the song, and when everybody claps their hands three times imitating the knocking, she taps the side of her head with her knuckles. The circle moves. The piano rattles on. She’s played the game before. Any minute, any minute now. Then the music stops and she flies to a chair as the chorus of ‘BOOM’ goes up and reverberates around the pub. Then it starts all over again and she rejoins the circle.

  And it is at this point that she stands, one hand on her hip, draws on her cigarette and looks at him directly, eyes alight, face beaming, and notes that he hasn’t taken his eyes off her. She isn’t usually one for leaping up like this, but tonight she is. Tonight something’s taken hold of her, lifted her from her seat and propelled her onto the pub floor, and she knows exactly what it is without need of thought. This is the look that Jim interprets as saying it takes a lot more than a bomb to stop me. In fact, no such thought is passing through her head. She is not even thinking. At this moment she is pure sensation. Registering not just his presence, but the rightness of his presence. And it hits her like a shock wave from one of those bombs — BOOM it goes. Then the words of course. You.

  Did she know all along? From the first, that day in the park? Did she know from the start that her promise carried none of the casualness that she gave it? Because she wasn’t a casual girl and she never had been; when she gave herself to something she gave herself to it all or nothing. Was this what had been happening? Did her senses, her heart, know this from the start, know it all along, and has it taken her mind all this time to catch up? BOOM. That’s not the pub, that’s her heart, the heart that knew all along. She can hear it, thumping away in her ears. When she went back to the park it was with a devil-may-care attitude. What did it matter? The headstrong Iris was in the ascendancy. She would say what she wanted. Didn’t he, this stranger who’d parachuted into her life? But an odd thing happened. From the moment they started talking names and what they meant, she lost track of time. She was babbling. No thought. And he was laughing, and those eyes that were as intense as she always knew they would be suddenly sparkled and turned playful. And she knew she’d put that sparkle there. Then she looked at her watch and cried, ‘Dear me.’ And it wasn’t the speed at which time had passed that she was noting; rather, it was the distinct feeling that somehow time had collapsed altogether. She should have known then, but it’s only just hit her. And that leap onto the dance floor is the leap of faith she’s just taken. BOOM! — that’s her heart. Thumping away in her ears. It’s going to burst from her entirely, she’s convinced, if it keeps on thumping like this.

  And so when the music starts up again and the circle begins to move she is only vaguely aware of it. The world is a long way away. And she doesn’t notice when the music stops either, and is only faintly conscious of the deafening ‘BOOM’ reverberating around the pub. And much as she’s played the game before, she loses that vital second, that heartbeat in which the game is won and lost, and the chair nearest her is occupied by a redhead in a WAAF uniform with her collar loosened and her tie over her shoulder.

  And so she leaves the circle of dancers, floats across the floor and rejoins the crowd, throwing herself down on the chair she so impulsively flew from when the dance of life and death first started.

  ‘Gosh,’ she says, ‘I’m dead. I could do with a drink.’

  She watches as he rises and moves towards the bar. And as he goes she purses her lips and releases a whispered ‘BOOM’ into the air. And watching him merge with the crowd, she whispers another, almost in a trance. And another. God, she laughs, it’s a blitz.

  And is this it? she asks herself, as she watches him lean towards the barman — this rightness, the rightness of someone’s presence? The rightness of someone’s being in your life? And the BOOM of the heart, where does that come from? As well as everything else — that sense of finally living, and living in rhythm with your time and your place? Is this it, that secret society of love? The doors of which, she imagines, only open rarely … is this one of those occasions? Is this it?

  Why now? And she could name a dozen reasons — the effect of watching a human statue melt in the park, the jumpy small talk that nonetheless told them they spoke the same babble, the conviction that she put that sparkle back in his eyes and thereby sort of … well, saved him, or could — all of which might do. But won’t. The fact is it’s none of these. And Iris, now watching him turn from the bar towards her with their beer, has no idea why she feels so suddenly alive, alive as she has never felt before, and why the portals of that secret society have suddenly opened. It’s a mystery. And she is happy for it to remain so. She has no desire to solve it in case it ends.

  There is sudden shouting in a corner of the pub. A voice, angry and drunk and tired, is yelling something about bloody Poles. Bloody Germans, bloody Poles; it’s all the same, this voice is yelling — who cares? A glass breaks. They turn, and in the corner there is pushing and violent movement. Then the movement ceases, and the violence that exploded like a bomb fades. The pub returns to its former order. As if, Iris is thinking, noting the scene, as if anything can return to its former order. Without speaking they raise their eyebrows at each other and nod. Leaving their glasses on the table, they escape into the street.

  The cold is good. It’s late September, and the night is chilly. It means they have a reason to keep each other warm. When they walk down the street together they can stay close.

  The street is dark (and she’s not exactly sure which street it is, nor does she care), people appear from shadow and doorways or disappear into shadow and doorways, and it is all somehow new and entrancing, familiar and strange, murky and mesmerising, this world at night.

  They emerge in Regent Street and follow it down towards her flat. It’s dark. No moon. Soon they’re the only ones about. It’s their world. They can do what they want. In a deserted Piccadilly Circus, they stop. There’s no need for Jim to reach out and clasp her hand and draw her to him as if she might disappear at any moment, because she’s not going anywhere. And he’s not either. She smiles and there’s a yes in those smiling eyes. I once gave you a rose, don’t you think that deserves … But she never finishes the thought. She doesn’t have to. And it’s the first of many kisses and many stops along the way. Long kisses in the dark. The right kisses. The cold is good.

  As they walk on she is aware of his limp, but over the last few weeks she has become less conscious of it. And when, not long before, she’d ventured to ask how he got it, he told her. But she got the short version. He crash-landed in some country field and lost his crew. That was the essence of it, and he didn’t want to go on. He didn’t say as much, but she could see he didn’t. And so she left it there. There would be time enough for all that. But not yet.

  Their path eventually leads down to a small lane. Just wide enough for two people. It is almost pitch black. They stop and dissolve into shadow. Two people, one form. Moving
together, rubbing against each other. This, she informs him with a grin as she takes her lips from his, is what the girls in the office call a ‘wall job’. You don’t get pregnant.

  ‘You’ve heard of salmon swimming upstream to hatch their eggs?’

  He nods.

  ‘Not many make it. It’s the same principle.’

  She grins again then rejoins her lips with his. She is not so much kissing him as taking gulps of him, and he of her.

  ‘God, why are we talking about fish?’ she says between gulps. ‘God, why are we talking?’

  Yes, the cold is good. The dark is good. And she glances over his shoulder at the dark wall in front of her, the dark sky above. The whole of the dark night all around. So mysterious. Another world. Their bodies move together, one shadowy form in the lane. They’ve arrived at her place. And after a few minutes she slowly turns him round and says: ‘This is it. C’mon, we can’t stay out here all night.’

  In the dark, he can barely make anything out. A door. Upstairs windows. It’s not until he’s inside and the lights are on that he gazes about and takes in the comforts of something he hasn’t seen for a long time. A home. And he is suddenly distracted by sensations he hasn’t felt for a long time. It looks and feels like a home, this flat. Not just a place to dump your kit and a bunk to collapse onto. A home. Cushions, for God’s sake. And armchairs. Prints on the wall. He runs his fingers over the arms of a chair. Strokes the surface of a wooden table, as though the feel of it is releasing a store of memories, of rooms and houses before the war, when everything was … what? Normal. And constant. So normal you took it for granted. So constant, you took its continuance as given. He wasn’t expecting this. For the sight of these few ordinary household objects — table, chairs, cushions and prints; objects that he would never have given a second thought once — he now finds, well … moving.

  This, he knows, is precisely what he shouldn’t be doing. Looking back. For it won’t come back. That world. The one that existed before what it is fashionable in some circles to call ‘the business’. Makes the whole war sound like some sort of troublesome dispute. It’s one of those phrases that insists upon not making a fuss, one of those phrases that says the sooner we get through this the better. And part of the whole business of not making a fuss is not looking back. But after an eternity of bare Nissen huts, sometimes not even so much as a bunk or a chair, it is impossible to resist just one backward glance.

  She watches him, knowing exactly what’s going on. Noting, once again, not just his presence, but the rightness of his presence. This is it. She knows. She doesn’t have to ask anybody. Not now. BOOM. And as she stands there she can see the doors, the massive, heavy gilded doors that lead into the many rooms of the secret society of love, opening before her. And she watches as he strokes the surface of the table, aware of him and the table itself and everything around her as she never has been until now. Everything is alive. Chairs, tables, vases, them. Everything.

  As she leads him up the narrow wooden steps she has the sudden, faintly amusing feeling of having brought a lost dog home. For he’s got that look. But mostly she feels his eyes — on her, on the flat, on everything. Just as they were in the pub. Eyes that are as intense as she always knew they would be. But eyes that have acquired a new-found sparkle.

  Then they are standing in one large room with a curtain across the middle, dividing it in two.

  ‘That’s Pip’s room. Well, not really a room. Her … space.’

  Pip, he later learns, being Philippa. Her flatmate. And he stares at the curtain, a look of sudden concern on his face.

  ‘Don’t worry. She’s not here.’

  But he says nothing. Once again he’s noting the half-remembered, half-lost normality of it all. A rug, richly coloured in one of those ancient patterns in which rugs are always woven. A bed, a quilt. And cushions again. And there, standing on the rug, the girl in the ARP coat. And he knows why you can’t look back, for he knows that he could never return to it now. Return to the war. Return to ‘the business’. Knows, beyond doubt, that he could never climb into the hatch and up into a bomber again. Sit in the pilot’s seat, put on his mask and fly off into the night telling himself to concentrate on the job and not think. Because he would be thinking the wrong thoughts. How many times had they done that, ‘F’ for Freddie, all of them? But he knows now, back in this half-remembered normality, that as much as the war may go on he could not go to it any more.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  That voice. The park. The summer sky. I come from that world of other people you left behind, and I will lead you back into it. And so she has. Odd, how we know these things. Decisively. There is no irony in the way she asks him. She asks with the same concern as she first did. Does she fear he will disappear into himself, go wherever it is he goes, and become a statue again?

  ‘Yes. I am. You’ll have to forgive me. I’d quite forgotten what it’s like.’

  She nods as she unbuttons her coat and pulls him onto the bed, that sensation of having brought home a lost dog once more upon her. It is a small bed. And so, crammed and close, they lie there and simply take in the reality of each other: warmth, cigarettes, perfume, beer. BOOM. That, and everything else. Neither, they will later discover, knows much of love. He has, as he has said, ‘done it’ a couple of times; she, a fling or two at university. But nothing more. She does not mention the young man called Frank, who gave her a ring to keep and which, she supposes, she took out of duty. Not yet. There will be time to tell him that later. Not now.

  And though neither of them knows much of love, they know enough to agree, however silently, that they will not rush this night. That they will lie together, still and not still. They will talk and they will be silent. They will kiss, and they will simply be content to look at each other. They will stay clothed, and they will undress. And they will draw the quilt over them, seal the cold out and shivering together enter that separate peace of touch and smell, that mingling of bodies, of cigarettes and perfume, of sweat and sex and sleep. And it will all occur slowly during the night. For, as little as they may know, they know enough not to rush.

  At some stage during the night, in that mythical zone known as the middle of the night, or it may even be getting towards dawn (it’s impossible to tell with the blacked-out windows), they are lying in bed staring into the darkness and she is talking about fire-watching, being careful not to mention anything about flaming bombers because he won’t want to know. No, she keeps it light. And she has just told him, almost in the manner of an afterthought, with whom, until recently (for Mr Eliot spends more time in the country now and lately she has begun to watch for firecrackers from the rooftop at the Treasury with Pip), she watched.

  ‘Eliot?’

  She doesn’t need to see the incredulity on his face; she can hear it in his voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Mr Eliot?’

  ‘Always Mr Eliot to me. Tom to the others. But I can’t call him that.’

  She explains about the church and how it all came about, and when she’s finished there’s a long silence, a thinking silence, and she can almost predict the next question when he finally asks it.

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘To meet him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And once again the room descends into dark silence, not because she is gathering her thoughts, but because she is creating the appropriate dramatic pause before replying.

  ‘It’s like having the Queen Mary coming straight at you — very slowly.’

  ‘You didn’t say that.’

  She smiles in the dark.

  ‘No, a poet friend did. Eliot rejected his poems, but invited him into the office. He told him he liked what he saw, and would like to see what he did in the future. To keep him in mind, for heaven’s sake. It’s like saying, “Not tonight, dearie. But you’re on a promise.” We were all very impressed. I didn’t let on about the church and already meeting him in a churchy way. Bit embarrassed about
the church thing, actually. So I sort of played along when everyone asked, “What’s it like, meeting Eliot?” And that was when he paused — as if he were thinking long and hard when you could tell that he knew we’d ask this and that he’d prepared his answer and that he wasn’t thinking long and hard at all — and said, “It was like having the Queen Mary …” And it is, it really is. That nose, it’s like the prow of a great ship. And those eyes, my God, they look straight through you. Spooky, if you must know, that’s what it’s like.’

  She stops, taking his hand in the dark, and this time she really is gathering her thoughts.

  ‘You meet him, and you talk to him, and you walk away wondering who on earth he is. And this happens every time. Every time you walk away wondering the same thing. You get this voice, the voice you hear on the records. That sort of utterly-above-it-all voice that you imagine nobody could possibly use, not in everyday life, not with their hair down … but he does. And I wonder if he ever lets his hair down. Or if it’s always parted just so. And all the time those eyes are looking at you as if he’s getting on with the job of thinking something else altogether. As if somewhere behind all the talk, the real thinking is going on. And you’ll never know what it is. And I wonder if anybody ever has. Spooky, that’s what it’s like.’

  Again she pauses, yawns, and just when he thinks she’s finished, she adds sleepily: ‘Sometimes I think he’s the loneliest man I’ve ever met. That he’d dearly love to drop the whole game, but can’t now. And you wonder if he ever will. If he will ever just be. Just babble, without thinking. Find someone who will just babble back. Pack in the poetry, and discover babble. But I think it would take someone extraordinary to make that happen. A sort of magician.’

  That is when he shakes her hand gently. ‘Magicians exist. And they don’t always say abracadabra.’

  But she’s asleep. How can that be? Talking away one minute, and dead to the world the next. He carefully lets her hand go and hears it flop faintly onto the bed. The infinite darkness enfolds them. He can’t see the walls and he can’t see the ceiling. He wouldn’t be surprised to find stars above and around him. The only sound is the deep, steady breathing beside him. The rest is silence, inside the room and without. And he’s not used to that, for there’s always something going on at the base: voices, engines, footsteps in the dark. But he can’t hear a thing out there. And he can’t sleep. Without thinking he reaches for his cigarettes and his lighter on the chair beside him in the dark. The lighter flares, the room is cast in shadowy light for a second or two, and he snaps the lighter shut and drops it onto the floor. He doesn’t know how long he’s been lying there when he hears it. Distant, then nearer and nearer. Engines. Up there in the sky. Theirs or ours. He can’t tell. And he can’t decide if there’s any point in waking her. He concludes he can’t, or shouldn’t. That her sleep is so deep she needs it. Besides, the engines are closer and he now recognises that sound. How could he not? Wellingtons. Somewhere up there a pilot is peering out into the night, the navigator is plotting a course to a runway that will stay lit up for them while the rest of the crew are quiet for the last leg. The bomber light from having dumped its load, and now it’s home for bacon and eggs to round the night off. Where have they been? Wherever it is, whatever the target, he’s been there too, and he could never go back. Not now. He’s lost the knack. That knack of switching off. Of stepping outside himself and looking on. That knack of saying it’s not me doing this, it’s him, and believing it for the time it takes to get you there and back. He’s lost it. And couldn’t get it back even if he wanted to. Not now.