‘Norman, the rain’s gone off. Let’s go for a walk.’
‘But the writing is just beginning to go well.’
She put her arms around his neck.
‘Don’t be so solemn. It has stopped piddling for the first time since we arrived. There is even some blue in the sky. Come for a walk to the pier with us.’
Outside, the light had an eerie translucent quality. It was about ten o’clock and the low white sun had come through the cloud out over the Atlantic and was highlighting the gable ends of houses. The road was still wet and shining. The children in anoraks ran on ahead, leaving Norman and Patricia walking together.
‘How’s the toofy-peg?’ Patricia asked.
‘How is its absence, you mean.’
‘Well, if you insist.’
‘Not too bad now.’
‘As night approaches.’
‘You could put it that way.’ He smiled. ‘What do you think?’
‘Yes. Holidays I feel like it more often.’
‘Tomorrow this socket will begin to heal – usually that’s bad news. Isn’t it funny how you can never smell your own breath?’
He reached out and took her by the hand. Her face showed mock surprise but she responded by squeezing his fingers.
‘Of course we don’t have to kiss,’ he said, smiling.
‘Like an egg without salt. A total perversion.’
She leaned over and kissed him as they walked. They stopped in the middle of the road and kissed mouth to mouth lightly, friendly. John whistled wheet-weeo at them from a distance and they laughed. Norman was much taller than she and it was easy for him to put his arm around her shoulder as they walked.
At eleven Patricia turned on the ancient electric blanket at its highest – it had gears, almost, instead of settings – to try to get rid of the damp smell. Norman was reading a journal by the fire. She sat opposite him, her hands empty. A grandfather clock ticked loudly in the corner.
‘One of the ideas of this holiday was that we should talk,’ she said.
‘Uh-huh.’ He turned the page.
‘You don’t talk to me any more.’
‘I’m sorry, what’s that?’
‘We don’t talk any more.’
He closed the journal with a smile but kept his place with a finger.
‘O.K. What would you like to talk about?’
‘Anything.’
The grandfather clock worked itself up to a long whirr before striking a quarter past.
‘The more I think of it,’ began Norman, ‘the more I am convinced that there might be something in what the Prof says – that British philosophy is trying to commit hara-kiri. And I’m not sure that that is such a good thing. I would hate to end up believing the same things as that man.’
‘I would like to talk about us. What we think, what we feel.’
‘Hard words, Trish. “Think” and “feel”. It’s difficult to know what we mean by them. It’s essential that we get our concepts straight.’
‘Bollocks, Norman. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘Why? You said we could talk about anything.’
‘O.K.’ She thought for a moment, then said. ‘Those people who stare over the wall. Do you think because they are less intelligent they have less vivid emotions?’
‘What are “vivid” emotions?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Seriously I don’t.’
‘The kind of thing you find in Lawrence.’
‘That man is a fog of urges. He’s groping all the time – making up words. Blood consciousness; the dark forest of the human soul. Patricia, if you can’t put a thing into language, it doesn’t exist.’
‘Norman, what utter . . .’
‘To answer your question. It’s a problem for physiologists or neurologists or somebody like that. I don’t know what loonies feel.’
‘It’s no wonder we don’t talk any more.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because you talk such utter balls. That someone should dismiss Lawrence with a wave of . . .’
‘Trish.’
‘What?’
‘Trish. Let’s have a cup of tea and go to bed. Arguing will put us off. You can’t make love when you’re seething. Besides this tooth of mine is beginning to hurt.’
‘Absence of tooth.’
‘O.K. If we sit up much longer you’ll go sleepy on me.’
Patricia sighed and made a cup of tea while Norman finished reading the article in his journal.
‘It’s a good question,’ he said, softening his biscuit in his tea and sucking it into the good side of his mouth, ‘but I honestly don’t know the answer to it. Taken logically it would mean that the most intelligent men have the – as you call them – the most vivid emotional responses. That is obviously not true.’
‘Not in your case anyway.’ She smiled or sneered at him, he couldn’t tell which because he only caught the end of it.
‘But I thought we weren’t going to argue.’
On holidays they had agreed to do equal shares of the housework. It was Norman’s turn to wash the cups, which he did even though he had had a tooth out. While he was in the kitchen Patricia took a burning peat from the fire with a pair of tongs and incensed the bedroom.
‘I love that smell,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come to bed now?’
‘I’ll just wait till the smoke clears.’
As he slowly dried the cups and tidied up, his tongue sought out the jellied cavity and he touched and tasted its coppery acidity. There was no pain in it now. Perhaps he was a better dentist than he gave him credit for. Just in case he took three Disprin dissolved in water before he locked up and turned out the lights.
In the bedroom Patricia lay reading with her bare arms outside the counterpane. Her hair was undone. A strange ululating cry came from the direction of the Mansion House. Norman looked out between the drawn curtains, half expecting to see six heads lined up at the windowsill to watch, but the Mansion House was in darkness. The sound, like a child’s version of a long Red Indian war cry, came again, chilling him.
‘God, what a place.’
He undressed and slipped in naked beside her nakedness. She was still a beautiful woman and, although he had come to know her body, he never ceased to be awed by it in total nakedness. She told him how aroused she was. A simple thing like holding hands earlier in the evening had been the start of it. Her voice was hushed. Her arousal touched him and they made love. Because of his condition he suggested that she did not put her tongue in his mouth. Nevertheless, Norman got the feeling that this was good sex in this strange, lightly creaking bed. When they came together he made an involuntary animal noise far back in his throat and his mouth fell wide open.
‘Agggghrrrrr,’ he said.
The noise he made was followed by an audible click. Patricia, with her eyes closed, was listening to her own breathing subside and touching his shoulders with her fingertips. She opened her eyes and looked at him. His mouth was open and his eyes were staring wide in fright.
‘i aws gust,’ said Norman.
‘What?’
‘i aw. It’s gust.’
Patricia began to laugh, shaking and cupping her ear to him as if she couldn’t hear properly.
‘What are you saying?’
Norman pointed to his yawning mouth and said as clearly as he was able,
‘ock jaw.’
‘I thought you were having a heart attack.’
Now that she understood she advised him with amused concern that the best thing he could do in the circumstances would be to get off her. Norman struggled into a pair of pyjama bottoms and regarded himself in the mirror. He kept trying to close his mouth but nothing happened. Somewhere in his jaw the circuits had fused again. Over his shoulder he saw his wife’s reflection sitting up in bed heaving in suppressed bare-breasted laughter. When he turned to face her with his mouth agape her laughter became sound. Loud, whinnying and vulgar.
‘O
h Norman, you look so stupid. You’re like one of the loonies,’ she managed to say between wheezes. ‘Are you kidding me?’
He turned away from her and tried to remember what the dentist had done. He took his lower jaw in his left hand and pushed. Nothing happened. He tried to push upwards and sideways and sideways and downwards but with no effect.
Patricia had put on her nightdress and was now standing looking at him in the mirror. She turned him and looked into his mouth.
‘You look like the man in the moon,’ she said, giggling. She tried to put it back into place. He had to bend his knees to let her reach up and he had his arms hanging loose by his sides. Patricia stepped back and looked at him, then subsided into peals of laughter again. ‘Better still. One of those monkey moneyboxes.’ She clapped her hands. ‘You put a penny in his hand and he went – gulp.’ She demonstrated. ‘We had one with its jaw broken.’ Norman turned away from her and scrabbled about in the cardboard box of his philosophy books until he found his medical dictionary. He wondered what heading would be the most helpful to read. With his jaw locked open he couldn’t swallow his saliva and it drooled over his bottom lip on to the page. He pored over the book.
‘anky.’
Patricia gave him a handkerchief from the open case on the dresser and he staunched his dribbles.
‘I’m getting to interpret your grunts quite well,’ she said. Norman could find nothing which related to his case except under tetanus which he was fairly sure he didn’t have. He thought of going to the square and phoning from a callbox for the ambulance plane, until he remembered that he couldn’t even speak and they would think he was drunk. Patricia would have to do it. He imagined arriving alone in the infirmary at Glasgow or somewhere in his pyjama bottoms and trying with gestures and groans to explain the complexities of what had happened. With great difficulty he told his wife the thought.
‘If you’re going out,’ she said wiping the tears from her cheeks, ‘we’ll have to put a coffee-tin lid in your mouth to keep the draught out.’ She fell on the bed and rolled about. ‘You’re agog,’ she shrieked. ‘Agog describes you perfectly. Norman, you’re the perfection of agogness.’
‘or ucks ake Trish,’ he said, ‘ee serious.’
The ululating noise from the Mansion House came again, ridiculing him.
Patricia was by now as inarticulate as he was. She was becoming almost hysterical and Norman, even in the midst of his trouble, wondered if he should slap her face to bring her out of it. It was obviously a nervous reaction to what had happened. As if he didn’t have enough to cope with.
He went to the bathroom to see if a change of mirror would help. Sexual pleasure had reduced him to a slavering moron. He thought of D. H. Lawrence and Patricia’s admiration for him. He pulled and pushed and wiggled at his bottom jaw. He looked and felt like one of the men who had peered at him over the wall. To be like this for ever. In the distance the grandfather clock tolled midnight. He had been like this for the best part of half an hour. He would have to go to hospital. There was the dentist but he didn’t know where he lived. He didn’t even know his name. Then suddenly he remembered that the Prof’s wife had been a practising dentist at one time. He could phone him long distance and ask her advice. Again he remembered that he couldn’t speak. It would only give the Prof another chance to say, ‘Noyes, you’re full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’ The bastard.
All Patricia’s squawking and hooting had wakened John and he came, puffy-faced with sleep, to the bathroom. He peed, forgot to flush it and walked past his father as he stared in the mirror.
‘Hunggh,’ said Norman. The boy turned. Norman pointed to the lavatory.
‘What?’
‘uh it.’
The child stood not understanding, holding up his pyjama trousers by the loose waist. Norman took him by the shoulders and led him back to the lavatory. A little saliva spilled on to John’s head and Norman rubbed it.
‘uh it.’
‘Daddy, what’s wrong?’
Norman lifted the child’s hand and rested it on the handle – then pressed both hand and handle. The lavatory flushed noisily and the child staggered sleepily back to his bedroom.
‘What’s wrong with Daddy?’ Norman heard him ask in the hallway.
‘He’s having a long yawn, dear. Now go back to bed.’
Patricia came in with the medical dictionary opened at a page.
‘Look, this is it,’ she said pointing to a diagram, ‘down and out and then up. Here, let me try.’
She set the book on the Vanitory unit, stood on tip-toe, still consulting it over her shoulder, and took his jaw firmly in her hands. She pulled downwards and towards herself. Norman agghed and she pushed hard. There was a gristle-snapping sound and his mouth closed. He tried it tentatively, partially opening and closing it, like a goldfish.
‘You’ve done it,’ he said. He wiggled it laterally just to make sure. ‘I was imagining all kinds of terrible things.’ He laughed nervously.
‘But you looked so funny, Norman. I’m sorry for laughing.’ Her shoulders were still shaking.
‘You have a strange sense of humour.’ He wiped the shine off his chin with the handkerchief. ‘The next time I get my foreskin caught in my zip I’ll let you know and we can have a night’s entertainment.’
Back in the bedroom Patricia imitated a chimpanzee with her mouth open and arms dangling and said,
‘Poor Norm.’
When they were settled in bed he sighed.
‘I thought I was a goner. The dentist says I must have a weak muscle.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your muscle, darling,’ she said and snuggled in to his side. The fine rain had begun again and he heard it hiss off the roof and the surrounding trees. He would never understand this crazy woman he was married to. It was hurtful to be laughed at. But he was grateful to her for putting his jaw back and, in a kind of thanksgiving, he resolved to take the whole family for a walk along the beach the next day to light bonfires, whether it rained or not.
He turned out the light. The yelling from the Mansion House seemed to have stopped but he couldn’t be sure it would not begin again. In the dark, as they were drifting off to sleep, Patricia shook the bed with giggles in the same way as shudders remain after a long bout of crying.
III
THE GREAT PROFUNDO 1987
WORDS THE HAPPY SAY
AFTER HE HAD cleared the breakfast things he guided the crumbs to the edge of the table with a damp cloth and wiped them into his cupped and withered hand. He took out his board and laid it on the cleaned surface. Some people liked to work at a tilt but he had always preferred it flat in front of him. From his back window on the third floor he could hear the children moving along the driveway into the primary school. Because it was summer and the large lime tree, sandwiched between the blackened gable ends, was in full leaf, he could see them only from the waist down. He noticed the boys with rumpled socks and dirty shoes always walked together. Girls, neat in white ankle-socks, would hop-scotch and skip past in a different group. If he stood on tiptoe at the window he could see down into the small backyard but he no longer bothered to get up from his work for the diversion of seeing the new girl downstairs getting a shovel of coal.
He arranged his inks and distilled water and set his porcelain mixing-dish in the middle. Each shallow oval indentation shone with a miniature reflection of the window. He looked at the page he had been working on the previous day and his mouth puckered in distaste. He was unhappy that he had started the thing in English Roundhand and thought of going back again and beginning in Chancery.
‘We, the Management and Staff of V.R. Wilson & Sons Bakery Ltd, wish to offer our heartfelt thanks and sincere gratitude to MR VERNON WILSON for all he has done in the forty-two years he has been head of V.R. WILSON & SONS BAKERY LTD . . .’
He worked quietly for an hour getting the Indian ink part finished, listening to the soft, pulled scratch of the pen, forming each letter in a perfect
flow of black and at the perfect angle. He was always impatient to rub out the horizontal pencil guide-lines but took the precaution of making and drinking a cup of coffee before he did so. A page could be ruined that way. The rubber across damp ink could make a crow’s wing of a down-stroke. He settled to drawing in pencil the embellishments to the opening W, then painted a lemon surround with tendrils of vermilion. He had to paint quickly and surely to avoid patchiness – a double layer of colour.
Suddenly he lifted his head and listened. There was a hesitant knock on the lower door. He rinsed his brush in the jam jar with a ringing sound and went down the short flight of stairs. He opened the door and saw a woman standing there.
‘Are you the man that writes the things?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’
‘No.’ He felt he had to invite her in. He went up the stairs behind her and when they came to the landing she was unsure of where to go. To show her the way he went into his kitchen in front of her but realised that he should have let her go first for the sake of manners. She stood holding her basket not knowing what to do.
‘Sit down,’ he said and sat with his back to the table and waited.
‘You do that lovely writing?’ she said again. He smiled and agreed. ‘I saw it in the church. That thing you did – for the people who gave money for the stained glass window.’
‘The list of subscribers?’
‘Do you do anything? I mean, not just religious things?’
‘Yes.’
She was a woman about the same age as himself, maybe younger. Her whole appearance was tired – drab grey rain-coat, a pale oval showing just inside her knee where she had a hole in her tights, her shoes scuffed and unpolished. She looked down into her basket.
‘How much would . . .?’ She seemed nervous. ‘Would you do a poem?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much?’
‘It depends on how long it is. Whether you want it framed or not. What kind of paper.’
‘It’s very short.’ She took a woman’s magazine from her basket and flicked through it looking for the page. She leafed backwards and forwards unable to find it.
Collected Stories Page 25
