A World of Other People

by Steven Carroll

  Why, why hadn’t she thought of that? And she’s suddenly asking herself just what has she done? Is this one of those times when she should have stepped back and waited and thought a little more before barging ahead?

  The afternoon passes slowly, mechanically, Iris sifting through one file after another, the phone ringing from time to time, but always the wrong ring. He won’t call. She knows. He’s not the type. And she knows what type he is — the type who, when something is finished, walks away and doesn’t look back. She knows this because she’s the same. And she knows it’s a mixture of stubborn pride and a way of coping. He’s got it, she’s got it. So he won’t call.

  And when she leaves work and walks back to her flat she is remembering their brief time as though it were already the distant past: passing under the Admiralty Arch on the way to his tube stop, the park and the pram; the tiny laneway outside her flat in which they lingered. All thought of as if it were long long ago, and she knows she’s thinking like this because the break is final. A completed act. And it occurs to her that the distance that laughter had given her, and which she had anticipated the previous evening, was already upon her: the distance, and the clarity, but not the laughter. Not this time.

  Inside Pip is making toast and offers some to Iris, who shakes her head and goes straight up to her bed without saying a word. Pip has read everything in her face. Iris knows that and is grateful. No need to explain. No need to go over it, because she hasn’t got the energy. Or the heart. One of the two, or both. She can’t decide. And it’s while she’s pondering this that she turns to her bedside chair and sees it, the lighter. Real silver. And she knows it’s hers now. She picks it up, watches it flame, then snaps it shut. She can imagine it flaming in a year. In two, three years. Then one day it won’t, and what will that mean?

  She wipes her eyes. Once, then again. And again. Tears, bloody tears. She closes her fingers around the lighter and holds it tight. It was always going to end in bloody tears. And so it has. Slowly, the room darkens. At some stage she’s aware of Pip’s drawing the blind, and telling her she really ought to get undressed. And so she does. But she doesn’t say anything, and Pip doesn’t press her. All she wants now is sleep. The oblivion of sleep. But of course it won’t come. Just when you want it, it won’t come. Bloody sleep. Same as those types who walk away and won’t look back. It won’t be ordered about. And so sleep, with its gift of oblivion, takes its own sweet time, and, in the end, she has no memory of finally drifting off.

  When she wakes she knows it is still night by that particular silence that comes with darkness. Or at least she imagines it to be a particular kind of silence. A deep silence. The sort of deep silence the world assumes when it is sleeping. No more raids. No more bombs. No more of those exhausting, nervy, jumpy nights that she is sure she could never go through again. But which, all the same, if she had to endure once more, she would. If she lived. And it is then, half asleep, half awake, that she imagines him dead. A bomb. Or shot out of the sky … supposing he found a way to get himself back up there. Would she ever know? And once again she’s asking herself what has she done?

  Suddenly she’s going over in her mind the package from Shamley Green. ‘To Iris, who was there, T.S. Eliot’. Already, lines from the poem have stuck and entered her life. That sodden, wintry feeling of the poem, which she couldn’t pin down at the time, comes back. Stony, cold churches, condensation rising from lips that form not kisses, but prayers. Grey walls. Grey facades. Grey skies. And that feeling she was left with after reading the poem comes back again, insistent and nagging, that if all they have been through and all they have lost is to mean anything at all, it must be something more than just scatty nights spent chasing the runaway horse of love. Only this time she’s standing back. Knows better, even. For it’s everywhere, that sort of talk. No, it’s not just the poem telling her that. It’s all around her, in the disapproving once-overs young girls clinging to GIs get in the streets and parks. It’s all around her, at the cinema, in the movies she occasionally sees about the good girls who wait and the bad girls who don’t; in posters; and in the maddening sentiments that the naturally miserable offer as simple wisdom — ‘Everybody’s got to make sacrifices’ and whatnot. And this, suddenly, is the maddening thing about this whole wretched war, that it reduces you to cliché. That it makes conformity compulsory. That it gives the naturally miserable licence to inflict their miserableness upon you. And suddenly she hates them all, the righteous armies of the miserable with their thin lips (and it is with this thought that the thin lips of Mr Eliot and those dark, monastic eyes occur to her, and she can just see him in some medieval church lecturing them all about flesh and sin and flame) … yes, she suddenly hates them all with their bloodless cheeks and their miserable bloodless lives. And as she curses herself in the darkness for ever listening to them in the first place she is asking herself all over again … what has she done?

  As he enters the base he is hit by the heady mix of smells — petrol fumes, oil and cut grass. An unnatural mix, fumes and grass, but one that he will always associate with an airfield. All around him the planes are ready and waiting. The bombs have been loaded, ammunition checked, engines tested. But he is only vaguely registering the whole, fluid mechanism. Did he hang up the phone? Yes. They were talking, there was a silence, a long one, there was nothing left to say, and he hung up. That was how it had worked. And then this sadness. A sadness so deep it has left him staring at the spectacle of himself. And it will never go. There’s a whole world out there blowing itself up, day after day, night after night. And tonight people will die in some targeted city or town where the bombs that have been loaded will eventually fall, or in some unlucky village or on some dark road that was never a target at all, but upon which the stray bombs of stray fate will fall all the same. But he’s not thinking about any of it. Only of this sadness. As much as the world might blow itself up tonight, this is all he is aware of.

  On the way back to his room he passes the hut in which he instructs the new recruits, some of whom he sees now and vaguely acknowledges. Then he stops. Out there on the field crews are lounging on the grass in the late afternoon light, smoking and talking quietly or not talking at all. The same field that he lounged upon once, he and the crew of ‘F’ for Freddie, waiting for the trucks to arrive and take them out to their plane. He squints into the distance, watching the smoke rise in the still air. The crews could be lounging on the lawns of a city park in their lunch hour. It’s the stillness and the calm doing that. And it was always the worst part of an operation because it made you feel as though you could be lounging on the lawns of a city park in your lunch hour, when all the time you weren’t and you knew you weren’t.

  Later in his room he hears the muted rumble of engines starting up and the sound draws him back out into the chilly, early evening air. And he stands watching as, in the distance, they queue up for departure, a puzzling mixture of Lancasters, Wellingtons, Halifaxes — just about anything with wings, it seems. And he’s still there as the first of the bombers takes to the sky. There seem to be so many. More than usual. And he wonders if it’s his imagination. But it’s not. For he’ll discover in the morning that he is watching what they will soon call a thousand-bomber raid. Not the first, but one of them. And he will know why all leave has been cancelled. There will be a rendezvous point out there, where they will circle in the air until all the crews and all the planes from all the airfields all over the country have gathered, and they will then move on, across the sea, to some unlucky city where people will die, or not die, depending on their luck. And all the time he knows that she is doing something at this very moment. While he is standing in the half light, watching fat-bellied planes take to the air, she is doing something. Possibly in that pub where they play grim parlour games, talking to friends. Possibly even smiling. Laughing, as if nothing had happened. Whatever it may be, she is doing something. When all around him the world has turned so unutterably sad that he doesn’t know where to take hi
mself.

  Then the sky is empty. How did that happen? He was watching, and then he wasn’t. The sky is empty, and silent. The cold is rolling in with the darkness. The surrounding fields are submerged in night. Then out of the silence a voice calls to someone and brief laughter rings out in the still, dark air. And, once again, it is other people’s laughter he is listening to.

  He returns to his room and collapses onto his bunk, exhausted. He reaches for his cigarettes, for his lighter (his eighteenth-birthday present from his parents), then remembers he’s lost it, fumbles for matches, and suddenly loses the desire for a cigarette. The shutters are on the windows. He switches the desk lamp off, the room is instantly dark and his eyes close on blackness.

  You stand in the wide tree-lined suburban street. It is night. Dark. There is nobody about. The houses have retired for the night, curled up in sleepy shadow. The gardens are still. The moon watches over the scene. There is no war here. The world is not at war. The world is as it always was. And always will be. The scene will never change.

  You follow the footpath to your front gate and gently push it open and step in. A night bird in a garden shrub lifts its head as the gate closes. Nothing else stirs. There is no wind. And you float over the curved path that leads to the front verandah. Two garden chairs look out over the lawn; the canvas awning is rolled up. A magazine has been left out.

  The front door is unlocked (nobody locks doors here, day or night) and opens easily. And from the moment you step inside and close the door behind you the smells and scents of the house greet you: the vase of roses in their second blooming, a hint of tobacco, the sweet remains of the day’s cooking, all fill the hallway. And as you pass the hall stand, draped in hats, caps and coats, you see no change in the face that stares back at you from the oval mirror. There is no war here. Never has been. The hallway, the house, the gardens in which the house sits and the wide tree-lined street outside acknowledge a different history, observe a different measure of time. And so the you who stares back from the mirror is unchanged.

  You push gently on your parents’ door as you have since you could walk, during disturbed nights or with a Sunday treat of breakfast in bed, and see the still figures of your mother and father in deep sleep. Here too there are roses in a vase on a bedside table, the room washed with their powdery scent. Your parents sleep the deep sleep that acknowledges a different history, that acknowledges neither war nor change. The scene is calm. Their sleep need not be disturbed by thoughts of you, or where you are or how you are, because you are here, as you always were and will be. Here, in your first world, where all is well.

  And so as you close the door, as quietly as you opened it, their deep sleep continues undisturbed. As it always will. For it will always be the same — if you were to come this way by night, or by day in the spring glare with the blossoms, like a fall of snow, lighting the hedgerows, or under the sweet warmth of an autumn sun with the roses in late bloom. This place will always be the same, existing in a time unto itself, if you come this way by day or night, in winter or spring.

  In the hallway you pass the kitchen, with the faint elusive smell of the day’s cooking still in the air, and your mother, who is simultaneously sleeping in your parents’ room and emerging from the kitchen, tells you to leave your cup and plate out for the morning, because you are still here. And because you never left, you answer, and she passes along the hallway to her bedroom where she joins her sleeping self already in bed. You call goodnight to the house, turn and tread the hallway runner, and come to your own bedroom door.

  And as you turn the handle the door opens onto that fixed world that you have never left, and everything is there the way it always was and will be: the clothes flung over the bedroom chair, the books scattered on the desk, the worn, polished football — and there, above you, suspended from invisible fishing line, the model aeroplanes, the balsa wood models that took hours of patient assembling. Hours of cutting out wings and supports, hours of constructing the fuselage and tail, before you slowly pieced all the parts together. Everything exact. Everything in its place, for everything had to be in its place or the details, like the tiny perspex cabin window through which the pilot stares, wouldn’t fit. They were the test of your precision, those details. But in the end, they all fitted. Then came the covering of fine paper and the paint and the transfers, until a completed model sat before you on your desk on rubber wheels, ready to assume its place in the crowded sky of the ceiling.

  And so there they are — Bristol Bulldogs, Nighthawks, Siskins and Atlases. You know them all by name. There they are: now still, now turning with the draught that plays about the room. Is this where it all started? Does the room in which you grew up, and in which, over the years, the world shed one mystery and gained another, and another and another, already contain the many selves you will assume, all there just waiting to meet their moment, so that one day the model world suspended from the ceiling becomes an actual one, and the detail of the tiny perspex window through which the pilot stares is no longer tiny, but life-size, and you are that pilot? Was it all decided then? And did that self simply lie in wait in this room, quietly observing the turning models, moving this way and that with the invisible draught, knowing that its time would soon arise?

  And it is then, as you contemplate the crowded ceiling, that you acknowledge you have left after all, and that the uniform you are wearing is that of the visitor, who grew up in, then grew out of, the fixed world of this room. And so you close the door and pass along the hallway, pass your parents’ room in which they lie in deep sleep, and pause at the oval mirror on the hall stand, acknowledging the uniformed figure staring back who is now a visitor in his own home.

  You close the front door behind you, follow the garden path that cuts the trimmed lawn in two, then hear the click of the front gate as it shuts once more. A bird lifts its head from under its wing, notes the shadowy visitor by the gate and follows, with keen night eyes, as the figure steps back into the wide, tree-lined, suburban street. All is hushed and still. The moon glances down and with the faintest of nods acknowledges the brief return of the native. There is no war here. Not in these wide, peaceful streets. The world is not at war, for the inhabitants of these streets sleep the deep sleep of a different history and the rhythms of their sleep rise and fall to a different measure of time.

  The drone of engines enters the world of quiet, peaceful streets and his eyes slowly open to a dark room and, out there in the night, foreign fields. He has slept long and deeply. It is almost two in the morning and the raiders he saw depart are now returning, one by one. And he counts them, knowing that their number will not be the same as when they left. And as he counts them in he is contemplating the question of which of the crews that left will not be there in the mess for breakfast.

  Awake now, he steps outside, taking in the stragglers still landing, the revving of lorries driving out to the drop-off and pick-up zones and the distant glow of the runway lights stretching into the darkness like so many party lanterns on a pleasure barge. Then he is peering out over the farming fields, and further again, over land and sea, over mountains, deserts and jungles, to that world of wide, tree-lined, suburban streets and sleeping houses that acknowledges none of this.

  And all the time, he is aware that she is doing something. Right now. And sadness, like the darkness, falls upon him. And this world of thousand-bomber raids, unfortunate villages and unlucky death comes down to this: the insistent thought that she is doing something, right now.

  PART FIVE

  December 1942

  7.

  LITTLE GIDDING

  Winter has come and the air is bitterly cold. Surely it will snow soon. Perhaps tonight. His overcoat and hat don’t keep the cold out. South Kensington isn’t exactly Jim’s patch, nor is a poetry reading his idea of a night out when he’s on leave, but he saw the notice in the newspaper. A small one, saying that Mr T.S. Eliot would read from his latest poem. And it gave the name of the poem, but he’s forgotten
it. And as much as Jim likes poetry, he would rather read the stuff than have someone read to him. It takes something away from the experience, he muses as he leaves the Gloucester Road Underground and walks towards the church on the other side of the street, rather than adding to it. Too much to look at, too much to take in. Too many distractions, that’s it. No, there’s nothing like the experience of just the page and you. His studies in philosophy have told him, and he knows the idea goes right back, that stories and poems are best told. Or read aloud, presumably by someone practised in the art of storytelling. That words are meant to be heard. That there is written language and spoken language and that spoken language is better. It reunites us with that tribal experience of gathering in a hut or a cave and listening to some bloody hunting story or other about spearing a mammoth. We hear the words, sense the tone of the storyteller’s voice and see the gestures and whatnot that go with it. Reading a book alone in your room is supposed to rob us of this. But it’s all a distraction to Jim. He’d rather just the book and his room any time.

  But he’s here now, and he stands in front of the church, St Stephen’s, reminding himself that he’d rather just read the thing and hear the voice of his own making. In short, he’d rather a private experience. But he knows that this is Iris’s church. Or, rather, the church she attended when she went to church. This is also Mr Eliot’s church. He learned this, too, from Iris. And the poet’s presence here tonight just might bring her back. So the fact is he’s not here for the poetry or Mr Eliot or anything of the sort, but in hope. That she might be here. He can’t call her, or he is convinced he can’t. She doesn’t want to be called. But if they were to meet accidentally, if they were to bump into each other ‘accidentally-on-purpose’, as the phrase goes, that would be different. And so here he is, for the sadness that is too deep for anger and which will not go away has brought him here. He has never seen the church before, but since their separation it has assumed the status of a special place. Where she was to be found once. And where there still might be something left of her. Or where she might be found again. He lifts his coat collar and looks up, noting that light snow has begun to fall. For the air cannot stay this cold and not become snow.