A World of Other People

by Steven Carroll

  For she is suddenly struck by the feeling that if all they are going through, this whole, long, draining, wretched war, is going to mean anything, if they are going to come out of it with anything truly meaningful to show for it, then it will have to be something more than just having had a good time. And suddenly, that’s all that falling in love looks like. And perhaps that’s what the poem has done — touched upon this Iris, called to this Iris. Good and proper, sober Iris, who knows the rich and heady smell of churches and who has never entirely left them. Perhaps this is what the poem (with its talk of England and now — lines, she imagines, that could almost have been spoken by Mr Churchill in one of his broadcasts), perhaps this is what the poem, wrapped and sent just for her, almost like a letter, has touched on: a reminder of who she really is, and that there are people out there dying every day — and going ‘missing’, only ever asking for something or someone constant back home to think of. Someone constant and true. While she has been running around having a good time and calling it love.

  Suddenly it all seems petty. Worse than petty. Selfish. And that feeling, that wild, irrational feeling, that overcame her when Frank first gave her the ring that she swore to wear when he returned, that wild, irrational feeling that she somehow held his fate in her hands, comes back to her, more powerfully than ever. That she had held his fate in her hands and let it slip from her. Now, he is missing. And it’s her fault. She made her pact and she broke it. And she knows that she could never live with herself if he did not return: if she took his ring, swore to wear it, then blithely forgot all about it. But, she tells herself, he is missing, not dead. People go missing all the time. There is hope and the situation can be retrieved.

  She closes the small book, places it back on the kitchen table, and stares at it. Her resolve mingling with a faint sense of having been swayed, of having fallen under the spell of a particularly powerful persuader. And for a moment she doesn’t know what to believe, or whom to trust, or who the proper and real Iris may be. But the moment fades as rapidly as it surfaced and she’s back to where she was — holding someone’s fate in her hands. And as much as she tells herself she’s too smart for all this, she knows she’s not. And as much as she interrogates herself, saying can it matter? Can it really, really matter? she knows it does in some part of her that logic can’t reach. She made a pact, in a church. In a church, for God’s sake! And suddenly all that talk in the poem about purifying fires, and the guilt and sinning that come with it, rushes back and she wonders if, once believed in, that invisible witness in the shadows is ever dispatched into non-belief.

  The facts, she reminds herself, are simple. She held his fate, and let it slip. But the situation might not be lost — if she stays true to her pact. If she stays true, a life can be saved. And as much as the Iris who studied philosophy and logic and worshipped only at the altar of reason, as much as this Iris tells her that this is madness, she’s helpless. She is in its thrall, and she feels herself surrendering to the aches and shivers of that winter chill, that winter poem. It’s the war doing this, she half smiles, half jeers, slumped and exhausted in her chair, it’s the war.

  She knows now what she must do. And the poem (and she’s not really sure she even likes it) has confirmed this. Served somehow to confer legitimacy on her reaction to hearing about Frank, brought her to her senses and led her to this resolution which she believes utterly one moment and tells herself is madness the next. But which she is powerless to resist all the same. Perhaps what the poem did, a stern word from her parents might just as well have done. Or a good lecture from the pulpit. All the same, she knows what she must do. It will be difficult. But she must, when next she and Jim meet, make him see that the time is all wrong. That she should never have allowed him into her world because her world was already spoken for. That she should never have allowed any of this to happen. That we should never make casual promises because they will always come back to haunt us. And that she would always be haunted by the conviction that she held in her hands the fate of someone who loved her. And day by day, bit by bit, it would destroy her and Jim until nothing good was left. It’s impossible! He must understand and she must make him see.

  It is then that Pip enters and it all, everything, the whole mess, almost bursts from her in a torrent of tears and words, but she keeps herself in check. Besides, the look on her face alone tells Pip that all is not well.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Why’s that? What’s happened?’ she asks, shutting the door on the laneway outside.

  ‘Oh,’ and Iris eyes the ceiling as she gathers the words together, ‘it’s Frank. You remember Frank?’ It’s half question, half statement.

  ‘Yes, of course I remember Frank.’

  ‘Well, he’s missing.’

  ‘Oh,’ Pip says, sitting at the table with her.

  ‘He’s missing and I feel … I can’t help but feel …’

  But it’s impossible. How can she explain? She can’t. So she stops and leaves it all hanging in the air. Her friend knows this much about her, though. And she eyes her, sizing up the situation.

  ‘He’s missing, and it’s all your fault because you’ve been a bad girl? Is that it?’

  Iris says nothing. She looks around the room, her eyes red and sore, and sighs for an answer.

  Pip nods and smiles. Suddenly the kitchen is small.

  ‘How long have you been sitting here?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘That’s too long. You need to get out. C’mon.’

  As Pip rises, lifting the bag that she dumped on the floor only moments before, she sees the book and picks it up.

  ‘What’s this?

  Iris shrugs. ‘It just arrived.’

  Pip opens it, reads the inscription and raises her eyebrows, then drops it back on the table.

  ‘Well, that explains it. He’s enough to give anyone a bad case of the hoo-has.’

  For the first time all afternoon Iris laughs, and for the moment even feels bad about that, but can’t help herself. If only she had that carefree confidence. To be able to laugh things off like that. To have the sudden clarity of distance that carefree laughter gives you. Oh, to be Pip, right now. And she regards Pip and her self-possession enviously, suddenly seeing her as inviolable; at the same time knowing full well that nobody is. But she’s made her laugh, and Iris retains the remnant of a laugh in her eyes as they close the door and step out into the laneway, the night already dark, and walk, in mutual, unspoken concord, in the direction of St James’s Park and, on the other side of it, to just the sort of pub to take your mind off things.

  There are no chairs in the centre of the pub, no piano and no dancing. It is mid-week and the pub is half empty or, and Iris rolls her eyes (annoyed at even contemplating the silliness of the proposition), half full. All the same, she decides it’s half empty. That the pub has lost its BOOM. She’s flat, no company at all, and Pip drifts off to talk to a small group of friends, poets and artists, just the sort that at any other time would have taken her mind off things. Tonight moodiness sits upon her like low cloud that will not lift, and she knows, and Pip concludes, that she’s better off alone. Iris tells herself that, although she is now committed to a course of action, knows what she must do and has no choice but to do it, there will surely also come a day when she will acquire more distance than she now has, when the madness that compels her at the moment will clarify itself, and she will marvel that she could ever have lost her marbles so completely. One day.

  After an hour or so, she’s not sure, she leaves, noting Pip and their friends breaking into laughter, and she envies them. She’d love to join in. But tonight the world is constituted of other people’s laughter and other people’s happiness. And so she slips away without telling anyone and steps outside into a small street in Soho to be met by thick fog, and pauses for a moment in the dark, wondering where on earth home is.

  That night, in restless sleep, she is wandering those same stree
ts in thick fog. Except that the streets have become a labyrinth. And every turning is a wrong turning. She has left Frank behind in the pub and she is making her way towards Jim. Except she can’t get there. And every street seems to lead her away, rather than towards him. And all the time she knows she has to be back at the pub soon, for she is expected there. Said she would be the girl back home who waited there. But she is also expected at the end of the labyrinth where Jim stands, and she knows she can’t be in two places at once. It’s a hopeless situation. And then, in a moment of blinding clarity, she calmly tells herself: I know, I’ll marry them both. So simple. Why hasn’t she thought of that before? And it is so plausible, so satisfyingly logical, like having solved the most difficult of scientific conundrums with the simplest of solutions. She is suddenly happy in a way, it seems, in the midst of dreams, that she hasn’t been for ages. And just as the fog lifts, she wakes. And the happiness that came with the beautiful simplicity of the solution fades with the dream. She is once more in the dark. And she lies there waiting for the sound of birds.

  She drags herself through dreary streets full of dreary people to her dreary office. Suddenly everybody seems half dead; everyone’s got that exhausted, can’t-go-on look on their faces. A bus chugs around a corner up Whitehall. Ghosts tramp the footpaths. Something’s gone, lost, some core, and it will never come back. She’s hollow. They all are. Everything’s hollow. And she wonders why the word ‘hollow’ tolls in her ears like a bell in an empty church. Then she realises and the ocean liner beak of Mr Eliot is coming straight towards her, saying: ‘Now, now do you know how it feels?’

  When the phone rings later in the day, mid-afternoon, the slowest part of the day when the hands of the clock above her desk barely seem to move from one hour to the next, when she is on the point of drifting off into exhausted slumber, she knows straight away who it is without lifting the receiver. She is convinced that the ring is different at different times of the day and that the tone is different depending on who is calling. This is him. And she is not wrong, for when she picks up the receiver the voice she hears is precisely the voice she expected to hear.

  And the very sound of his voice lifts her. Jim, her Jim, his voice coming all the way from some phone booth in some village or other. Just for her. But as much as her spirits are lifted, they sink almost immediately. For she knows what she must do when next she sees him. And, for the moment, she hangs on to the sound of that voice while he’s still her Jim — just for a little longer. There is, he tells her, still no leave. Not for anyone. Not for the next week or more. And she is immediately relieved to hear it and her body relaxes. And as she listens to the sound of her own voice she is pleased to note its casual ring. Just as if nothing had happened and she hadn’t been lying wakeful in bed all night mulling over what she knows must be said and done. And it’s while she’s half concentrating on the call and half thinking about what must be done that he seems to break into her thoughts.

  ‘I keep on thinking you’ll disappear,’ he is saying, his voice distant, and not just because he’s on the other end of a telephone line but also because he seems to be thinking out loud. And it’s a jolt. When did the conversation shift? Was she so distracted by her thoughts that she was not listening? ‘That you’ll suddenly come to your senses, if you know what I mean, and realise that this is all a madcap business — that it’s not you. That this is all some silly mistake. You’ll conclude that you must have been tipsy, tipsy for weeks. And that it’s time to sober up and ditch the whole silly business and go back to whatever you were doing before you were interrupted.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’

  He says this with the same edge his voice had in the park, and she knows she should be able to console him and tell him that she is thinking no such thing, when all the time she is thinking precisely this (and how on earth does he know? for he seems to), but she can’t. In the end (and she curses her own weakness as she speaks) all she can say is, ‘Don’t be silly.’

  There is a pause. A long one, and she wonders if the line has gone dead on them.

  ‘Are you there?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, his voice now vague in the way that the preoccupied can be vague. ‘Yes to both. Yes, I’m here, and yes — it is silly. Listen, there’s someone waiting for the phone. I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Ring back,’ she calls down the line, for she has never liked this sort of thing, an abruptly concluded chat on the phone or a conversation cut off in mid-sentence. It’s a bit like sudden death.

  ‘I’ll call later today,’ he says. ‘Or tomorrow. Must go.’

  Then he’s gone and she’s left wishing she’d said more. But in the end all she could say was don’t be silly. When he wasn’t being silly at all. She knew it, and he knew it. Somehow. And she tells herself it was the suddenness of it all that stopped her from saying what she wanted to say. Or had to. She just wasn’t ready. That although her mind was made up, her resolve had not set. Besides, she had decided to tell him in person. But when he called back she would do what she knew had to be done. Just get it all off her chest where it was sitting more heavily than ever. And it is while she is mulling this over that the phone rings and she casually picks it up.

  Something is wrong. Definitely wrong. He is standing in a public telephone box outside the village pub and she has just said, ‘Don’t be silly.’ And somehow it’s not enough. She could have said more, but she didn’t and it has set the devil loose in his head. And her voice wasn’t right. Tense, possibly. Tired, but tense too. Not right. And it is while he is contemplating all of this that he realises he hasn’t said anything and that the silence must be considerable, for suddenly she is asking if he is still there and he hears himself saying, ‘Yes. Yes to both …’

  Then, because it all feels wrong and he needs time to think and work out just what is wrong, he tells her that someone is waiting for the phone when, in fact, nobody is. It’s a cold afternoon and no one is about.

  And as he is walking away he is suddenly possessed by a desire to have it all out. Whatever it is. If it is. Here and now. That was no way to end a conversation, leaving it dangling like some hastily dropped receiver. And he stops in the street, staring back at the telephone box. Yes, the devil in his mind is loose and will have its way. And so he turns back to the box, no clear sense of what he will say, but with the dim conviction that when she answers he will know.

  This time her intuition fails her. For when the phone disturbs her thoughts it is with the ring of just anybody. And it is with a shock that she hears his voice again. So soon. As though there’d been barely any break at all. Just enough for her resolution to set.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ he says.

  ‘They’ve gone?’

  ‘The phone’s free.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, now understanding, ‘they’ve gone.’

  Then there is a long, awful silence which is only concluded when he speaks.

  ‘What’s happened? Something has, hasn’t it? Tell me.’

  There is no point in saying ‘What? What do you mean?’ For they both know what he means. Yes, something has happened. And as much as she knows she shouldn’t be thinking this she is glad that this conversation is taking place on the telephone. But how does she begin? Was it only a few weeks ago that her heart was going BOOM? Not knowing how to begin, these are the first words she offers him — that she doesn’t know where to start. And as soon as he hears this he slumps against the wall of the phone box, noticing for the first time that there really is someone standing outside, pointing to their watch and demanding to use the phone. And he is on the point of telling the old fool to go to hell when she begins and he closes his eyes and just forgets all about him.

  There is someone, he hears her say. There’s always been someone. She’d meant to say something about it all along but the time was never right. She does not say that she had every intention of telling him on that Sunday morning in the park but that the pram incident made that sort of confes
sion impossible. For to say that would be, in part, to blame him, when she blames herself. And so he hears, at length, about this someone, about the ring, the letters between them (in her drawer in her room with the ring) and the news that he is now missing. And as soon as he hears this he knows that it is over. And, what’s more, that he understands. It is unthinkable to go on as they were with that hanging over them. And when she is finished, and he can tell that every word has been dragged from deep within her, that she is speaking the words nobody wants to speak unless they have absolutely no choice, this is exactly what he says. That he understands.

  ‘Are you angry?’

  ‘No, no, no …’ he says, and he means it, for he is left only with a sadness so deep that it has gone beyond the pettiness of anger. She continues, and he hears her voice coming to him from out there beyond the village and the fields, but he has stopped listening. And when he looks back on this call, he will not be sure if he said anything more. For there is a silence, a long pause when she is finally finished, and it seems as good a time as any to hang up. So he does.

  ‘Some bloody people think they own the world!’

  Far from telling the old fool to go to hell, he barely notices him as he pushes the phone box door open and steps back onto the high street of the village. I come from the world of other people you left behind and I shall lead you back into it, her voice had told him once, but he has just hung up on that voice and will not, he knows, hear it again. Something momentous happened when he first heard that voice, he reminds himself as he passes the windows of shops and houses, and now something momentous is happening again.

  The line goes dead and she realises he has hung up. He must be angry. He said he wasn’t, but he must be. She drops the phone back on the hook. And it is only as she lets the receiver drop into place that the finality of what has happened begins to dawn on her. It’s not as though they’ve just had an argument or a tiff and will patch it up later, because there will be no ‘later’. And there will be no ‘later’, she suddenly recognises, because she can’t contact him. Or can’t imagine how she could. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She sits at her desk, perfectly still, staring out the window at the sky, seeing nothing. He’s on an airfield, for God’s sake. How do you phone someone on an airfield in the middle of a war? It’s always been Jim who has phoned her. If he doesn’t want to be contacted, he won’t be. She could write to him but he wouldn’t reply. Not now. And she can hardly drop in on him. No, he’s disappeared into the crowd. She’s sure of it. Gone from her. The cord that connected them, she is convinced, has been snapped. And she has snapped it. She leans back in her chair, the realisation hitting her that she has set in motion something irreversible.