Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  He found ways of being near her at work. When he had a trolley-load to take anywhere, he managed to include her line in his route. If he had a message or an errand, he would stroll past her on the way, a triumphant smile on his face, stroking his little golden beard with self-satisfaction. She saw his proprietary airs and found a kind of pride in them. I belong to him, she said to herself, and thought she sensed the envy of the other women. Whenever he had time to kill, or whenever his charge-hand was taking too long over his coffee break, he would be sure to find a broom somewhere and give the floor around them another sweep. The women had laughed at first. Gordon Bennett, what are you giving that poor man? Give us a clue, Dottie love! I wouldn’t mind trying it out myself. Their mockery quickly turned to indifference when they saw how persistent he was. He must be in love, they said, which made Dottie thrill with the memory of his whispered vows while they lay in bed in the dark.

  Mike Butler was consulted by the women, and he felt that something definitive was required from him. He gave Ken several long, thoughtful looks before he agreed with the women. There was no question that they were too far gone for anyone to be able to do anything for them, he said, shaking his head sagely. Best thing under the circumstances, if anybody was to ask him, was just to let them get on with it. For a few days, men and women became the subject of his sermons and disquisitions. It was clear that Mike Butler found men and women puzzling. They negotiated quite unpredictable attachments and entertained inordinately disproportionate obsessions about each other, he said. It was too much for a simple, hard-working man like him to work out. To be or not to be, he declaimed, and winked at Dottie when no one was looking.

  In the evenings they went out, and Ken showed her the city she had been living in for nearly eight years but from which she had cowered in terror. Her round consisted of Balham and Tooting and the bus to Kennington. She recalled rare outings to other places, but they were faded, part of the memory of Sharon. That was all she knew. The rest was a maze of streets and numbers on a map, and legendary sites that were part of the shadowy myths of the city. Ken took her to many of them, the parks and the waters, the arches and the squares. He took his cue from her, laughing with disbelief as she named one place after another. Hyde Park, Tottenham Court Road, Chancery Lane, Kew Gardens. They strolled along the banks of the Serpentine on a sunny, glittering day, and Dottie could hardly credit that such scenes existed in the great, dirty city that she knew. In Richmond Park they slipped into a grove of rhododendrons that was as huge and roomy as a church. In this gloomy bower they lay silently for a long while, drifting in enchanted daydreams. From where they lay they could see the path, and saw people walking past to whom they were invisible.

  She wanted to see City Road where the Micawbers lived when David Copperfield first met them, and go to Highgate where David and Dora spent their brief marriage, and where Steerforth’s mother lived. He took her to concerts and to the theatre, showed her the famous shops and even made her try clothes on that the assistants knew she could not afford. They went to Parliament, the most boring theatre in town, he said. The Members were in recess but she thought the building was magnificent enough. On the evening of her birthday, they had a meal in an Armenian restaurant, and Ken entertained her with tales of his experiences as a waiter in the Italian restaurant in Sydney, the Romantica. The manager was called Guiseppe, he told her, and his wife was called Carlotta. He had a huge handle-bar moustache, which he loved to twirl between forefinger and thumb at the women customers, like an old-fashioned lecher. She laughed at his description, but told him she did not believe him. In the end he confessed that he had made up Guiseppe and Carlotta. The real manager was a lean young man with a cold eye and a short temper, who neither drank nor leered at women, and was not a fit subject for conversation between civilised people.

  When their money ran out, they took long walks on the Embankment and across Westminster Bridge. It was the companionship that gave Dottie the most joy. She talked to him about how Sophie and Hudson had left, and she found release and support in what he said to her. She did not speak freely, although this was not a decision that she had consciously made. His experiences seemed to her so full of adventure and courage, so varied and wholesome, that her own life sounded sordid and mean in comparison. She was not at all tempted to talk about all that. She told him about Sophie and Hudson because it made her feel that she too had a complicated life, and suffered the disappointments that everyone did from undeserving brothers and sisters. She had heard the women at work talking like that, describing the misdemeanours of their loved ones with unmistakable relish. How this one had cheated a grandmother out of gold trinkets that were a gift from a China trip her husband had made way back when! And that one had tried to get rid of a pregnancy without asking for help, and nearly died with the terrible things she did to herself . . . and still never managed to get rid of the little goblin, which would probably arrive with addled brains after being messed around like that and torment her life for years to come. There were tales of parents abandoned by neglectful offspring, lovers jilted by philandering suitors, and husbands who freely swung between adultery and beatings.

  So Dottie told Ken her story as a way of laying claim to her normal share of misuse and family tragedy. Ken listened with interest and asked her questions which gradually began to alarm her with their intensity. They drew her attention to the gravity of the crimes she was accusing her sister and brother of, and she found herself guiltily taking much of what she had said back. Ken said they should go and see Sophie, if it had been that long since Dottie had last heard from her. He admonished her, for God’s sake, not to let her family drift apart. It was not as if she lived very far. Yes, they should go and look her up, Dottie agreed, but neither of them proposed a time when they could do so. They would deal with that when the more urgent pleasures they were engaged in had become less insistent.

  He teased her about her name, using it in conversation to mean that she was scatterbrained. ‘What a dotty thing to do,’ he said, laughing and ignoring her glaring look. ‘Couldn’t you have found a better way to shorten your name?’

  ‘That’s my name,’ she said defiantly. ‘It’s how I was christened, Dottie Badoura Balfour.’

  He tilted his head to one side, the way a bird does when it wants to give a worm a good look. ‘Say it again,’ he said. ‘What was that name? The whole thing.’

  ‘Dottie Badoura Balfour,’ she said, still defiant and resenting the broad grin on his face as he asked his question.

  ‘What does it mean? That middle bit,’ he asked, chuckling. ‘Where does the name come from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said sharply, just as annoyed with the question as with the fact that she could not give him an answer. ‘What does Ken Dawes mean?’

  ‘Hey, don’t get annoyed,’ he said, reaching for her and pulling her towards him. ‘I think foreigners have much more interesting names than we do, anyway. Imagine being called Ken Dawes! I suppose its one advantage is that I know that it comes from no further away than Dorset.’

  I’m not a foreigner, she thought, but she did not say anything. The moment after she had thought that and kept her thoughts to herself, she knew that she had left out the Fatma in her name deliberately, because it sounded so obviously and familiarly foreign, like a cliché. Suleiyman the Magnificent, Paddy the Navvy, Sindbad the Sailor, Cohen the Money-lender, Fatma the Belly-dancer. In her preoccupation with the guilt she felt for having so lightly discarded one of her beloved names, she did not realise how plain on her face the grimace of remorse and misery was. A small frown of impatience passed across Ken’s face.

  Dottie was tempted to say something, but then let the moment pass with a defeated sigh. There was no point getting annoyed about such things, not when you knew who was saying them. She would only look a fool. So she let him pull her into his arms and felt the ridge of anger down her back melting under his touch. Later she found herself talking about Leeds, in the most general terms. There was a sw
eet-shop on a corner which was run by an old woman, and she used to go there with one of her mother’s friends. She gave up in confusion as she realised how much she would have to reveal to finish her story. She would have to tell him about the Church of Our Lady of Miracles, and the silent well that stood in the church-yard. And explain that her mother’s friend was the same man who had taken them to the church to be christened. She remembered almost nothing of him, only what Sharon had told her, but sometimes on her own, late at night, there flashed through her mind bright pictures of a tall slim man with a wide smile. Sometimes she saw him with a large dog, walking across a common. She did not strain for the memories, did not conjure them, but when they came she felt them tenderly and hoarded all the small details that the passing of time seemed to throw up. It was strange how clear such pictures became as she grew away from them.

  2

  Ken too talked about the way life had turned out for him, but he spoke more guardedly, looking to find the right emphasis in his narration, ready with a self-deprecating joke if he felt himself becoming too earnest. He had been sent to a public school in Somerset, he told her. It was a famous place, which cost his parents a handsome pile of money, but he hoped its name would mean nothing to her. That was quite soon after the war, for he was five years older than Dottie and was nearly eleven when the war ended. His parents were reluctant to send him away. They both detested the thought of boarding school, especially his father, who had spent some of the most miserable years of his childhood in one. But they thought it would be best for him not to be on the farm.

  His elder brother had been brought back home from the hospital, and he needed to be looked after in every conceivable way. He had been badly injured in an air crash, after the war was over, of all things, when he was being flown to his first posting in northern Germany. It was a terrible blow to his parents, whom he had persuaded against their wishes to let him volunteer instead of taking the university place he had already been offered. Ken was sent away because his parents wanted to save him the distress of living with a beloved brother who had been diminished beyond recognition by the accident.

  ‘He had forgotten everything, a complete vegetable. He could no longer speak or walk, or even understand what was said to him.’ Ken said, then he smiled involuntarily at the memory. ‘The only thing he seemed to take pleasure in was eating as messily as possible, both hands in the plate and food plastered all over his face, like a baby. He loved performing huge defecations in his trousers, preferably while he was eating. He’d have this manic grin on his face while blasting noises were coming out from under him and the room filled with his stink. I swear sometimes I used to think he was doing it deliberately, red-faced from the straining but spluttering with joy. My mother used to be furious if we laughed. She said it would only encourage him.’

  The school Ken was sent to was not too far away, and at first his parents brought him home most weekends. They thought he would be miserable there but boarding did not bother him at all, did not make him unhappy or cause him any of the vaunted traumas. On the contrary, he loved it there, and loved his holidays on the farm. It was during his time at the school that he decided he would become an artist, a painter. His art teacher was very keen that he should go to art college, and encouraged him to behave like an artist-in-embryo, supercilious about his intelligence and vain about his appearance. He even affected a dark cape and cane, and went through a period of starving himself, eating only breakfast cereals in the middle of the night. He told his teacher that he was trying to purify his soul because he could feel the birth of a great work in him, and wanted to be worthy of its execution. The school doctor sent him home as soon as he found out. Later, after he had returned to school, he took a vow of silence and did not speak to anyone for two weeks, and only broke his vow when the headmaster threatened him with expulsion if he did not answer his questions. Even then, all he said to the headmaster was that sensuality disgusted him because it was inimical to the passion of Art. The headmaster smiled and invited him to tea with his family on Sunday. Ken politely declined, saying he hated his own company too much to impose it on anyone else.

  All these adventures and crises confirmed to Ken that going to art college was the proper decision for him. His parents preferred that he should go to university, and blamed themselves and the boarding school for his craziness. ‘What they really preferred was that I stop being silly about being a painter and do something about educating myself, or at least acquiring a useful skill,’ Ken said with a laugh. ‘I told them that what I really wanted was to live on the farm and paint, and indulge the capacity for tragic feeling that I had discovered in myself, but Dad said the farm was no good any more and would not provide a living for all of us. They were quite insistent, my parents, so I thought I would go to university first and become a painter later.’

  It did not work out like that. His examination results were terrible. Repeated attempts to retake them came to nothing. He had played around too much and now could not get himself out of the habit of loafing away the hours he was required to spend on study. He was so poorly prepared that he need not have bothered to turn up for some of the examinations. Comparisons were made with his brother, who at the same age had shown remarkable talent and self-discipline. By this time the brother had been moved to a little annex at the back of the house which he shared with a wretched-looking woman who was his nurse. Ken had no fear of comparisons with him. In the end, he was persuaded to try a crammer college in London. ‘In Kensington. It cost a fortune, another fortune. I stayed with some relatives of my mother in Kilburn . . . but that didn’t work out either. So a little while later I signed on for my first voyage.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll still be a painter one day,’ Dottie said, filled with admiration. She could not imagine herself with such an ambition, and certainly could not see herself treating life with such cavalier disregard. ‘When you’ve found your farm . . .’

  ‘Never mind all that crap,’ he said, laughing with a careless toss of his head and then turning away with a pained expression. ‘It’s the things that we do that matter. All the stuff we have in our heads is just confusion, striving to make permanent the things that we see in our fantasies. Instead of all that we should live our lives to the full, live them as they come. This hankering after what is beyond us misses the point.’

  Dottie was thoughtful, seduced by the light-hearted disdain Ken advocated but also made uneasy by it. As if it was that simple to toss the burdens off! She was certain that it was possible to live a better life than the one she had lived, dead certain. She knew she wanted to do much more than she had done. If life was to be lived to the full, did that mean that she should no longer aspire to what would make her happier, or freer or more knowledgeable about what was around her? It seemed like a concession to defeat, as if one was unwilling to keep on because the rules did not suit. She was not always with Ken when her unease came to her with such clarity, and her few attempts at explaining to him her worries sounded confused and laughable. The last time she tried, he did actually laugh at her, then pulled her into his arms and gently slapped her behind. She did not dare say to him, since he took her so lightly, that she sensed in his words and in his voice feelings of pain and despair.

  ‘They’re still there on the farm, the lot of them,’ he said to her, chuckling with derision. ‘Still living their vegetable lives, making manure for the land.’ Dottie heard the hollowness of that mockery but did not dare press for explanations, and she felt the tone of self-pity running like an undercurrent beneath his cynicism. She was silent beside him, wanting to say something that would disperse his gloom but not knowing what she could say. She wanted to stop him from saying more, before he began to poison the feelings in her that he had stirred into life.

  ‘Never mind that crap,’ he said.

  3

  The following evening he stayed in while she went to the launderette. When she came back he was already in bed, listening to the radio. They made love in the dark, h
urriedly and in silence. Afterwards she heard him sit up. She lay quietly, not speaking, waiting for what she knew he had to say. He sighed heavily, ending with a catch in his throat that was something between a groan and a laugh. She wished then that she had not resisted the temptation to interrupt him with a cheerful generality that would have prevented him from speaking. A long silence came between them, and again and again Dottie thought she should speak and prevent the explanations she could feel trembling on his lips. She had wondered at that tremulous quiver of the lips, and she knew she was about to have an inkling of its meaning. What she feared was that it would make him realise his distance from her, would return him to whatever he had fled from.

  ‘There’s more,’ he said gently, when the silence was no longer bearable. ‘I stayed in Kilburn for two years, working for an estate agent and living with my mother’s cousin and her family. She had a son about my age and two daughters. They treated me like one of them, and included me in everything they did. I was one of the family, they told me, and their home was mine too. The father was a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, and he often came home late. After I’d been there for two years I married one of the daughters. We’d been sleeping together secretly for over a year, whenever we could, whenever the house was empty. We hardly ever talked about it, even when we were on our own. It was stupid . . . She became pregnant. They would’ve killed me if they could. They would’ve loved to punish me in some way. Her family.’

  Dottie did not want to hear any more, because she knew that after telling her all this he would go. She did not think she needed to hear more. She did not want him to go. It was not difficult to guess the rest, she thought, and she was not curious about the details. ‘Ken,’ she said, thinking to stop him, but she could not say the words.