Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  Dottie felt the pressure of his disapproval, and as they walked home without talking she sensed the words of apology beginning to rise in her. She muttered ‘Sorry’ as they entered the poorly-lit Segovia Street, and in the gloom she heard him sigh softly. He pressed her to him, and she felt the tenseness leave her and a smile grow on her face. He talked late into the night when they got back, describing to her the misery of the life he had lived. She lay close beside him, running her hand over his body and stroking his golden hair. In the end, he caught her nodding off, and laughingly smacked her before letting her go to sleep.

  The next morning she woke him, but he shook his head and turned over. He did this again the morning after that, and she came home to find him sitting in a second-hand chair he had bought in one of the junk-shops by the market. He was listening to the radio and reading the evening paper. ‘It’s Nigeria’s independence today,’ he said, moving his feet to let her pass. ‘Perhaps we should emigrate to there. It can’t be worse than this dump. They might make me the big white chief or something.’

  ‘Mike Butler told me today that they don’t want you back,’ Dottie said, irritated by the look of amusement on his face. ‘There’s some money owing to you, and they want you to go and collect it. Did you do any shopping? I haven’t got any dinner. Are you going to look for another job? I can’t support you, you know. I don’t have any money.’ She blurted out one thing after another, restraining herself from storming up to him and hitting him. He was smiling at her, and then he pursed his lips and gently blew her a kiss, soothing her. She saw his lips tremble, as if he was frightened of what he was doing.

  ‘You don’t have any money! That’s not true, is it?’ he said, and pointed to the little jewellery box on the chest of drawers. ‘I ran into your little piggy-bank today. An impressive hoard of sixty-five pounds, to be exact. We can go and have a feast on that. What a miser you are!’

  She glanced at the box and looked angrily back at him. ‘That’s my money. You keep your hands off it,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all there,’ he said, laughing and rising to go to her. ‘You see what a materialist you are. You pass yourself off as this tragic little heroine when you’re nothing more than a greedy little housewife. You thought I’d pinch it and go bet on the horses or something, didn’t you? How crass you must think I am! What are you saving up for? Your wedding? Where did you get that jewellery box anyway? It looks valuable.’

  ‘From Brenda,’ she said after a moment, disliking his question, disliking everything that was happening. She did not want to react angrily, or make a fuss. She was too tired. ‘She gave it to me last Christmas.’

  ‘Who’s Brenda?’ he asked, taking her handbag from her and putting it down on the chest of drawers. He helped her take her jacket off and slid it over the back of the chair, gently brushing dust off the shoulder seams.

  ‘A friend. She was our social worker, but she became a friend. A kind of friend . . . she helped us out,’ Dottie said, feeling a little guilty about Brenda.

  Ken picked up her hand and kissed it as he talked. ‘Social worker! Your own tame white liberal,’ he said. ‘I must say I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have thought you would tolerate one of those. Don’t tell me, she found you that slave-job you’re doing, and helped you find this slum you live in. And at Christmas she gave you an expensive present that she could easily afford. I don’t suppose you realise how dangerous she is.’

  ‘No,’ she said, trying to stop him kissing her hand.

  ‘No?’ he asked, misunderstanding her. ‘Why do you think you’re doing that work and living here? This is where she wants to keep you, a docile little nigger girl doing her bit for the great white race. That’s the white liberal for you, no different from anyone else. As racist as they come, just like all of us, but pretending to be so full of concern.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ she said, snatching her hand away. ‘Stop doing that. Please, I’m tired.’

  Ken dropped her hand as if he had been stung. His face flushed and swelled with anger, and his eyes seemed to light with affront. He looked away quickly and went back to his chair. For a long time he said nothing, looking down at the floor while he stoked his rage. Dottie stood just inside the door where he had left her, not knowing what had made her repel him. She wanted him to go, back to his Diana and his tragic life. But she did not want him to go, despite the way he tormented her.

  ‘You’re tired of me,’ he said at last, his voice small with regret. For a long time after that he said nothing more, and Dottie did not dare speak, waiting to see which way the tide would go. ‘I haven’t been fair to you, have I? Is that what you’re thinking? I should’ve told you that I was going back, that I was on my way back when I met you . . . Don’t you think that’s pathetic? To give in to all that crap about guilt and duty. After all the things I’ve been saying? It was all right to begin with, wasn’t it? I know you liked being with me, didn’t you? Dottie!’

  She saw him smile to himself as he said her name, and a small look of triumph crossed his features. It surprised her, but also gave her the strength not to say something abject, or rush to him with her regrets. He looked at her and grinned. ‘It was all right, wasn’t it? We can part like friends, can’t we?’

  Something Broken in Her Whole Life

  1

  It rained for thirteen days without stopping. In the mornings a pall of fog and mist shrouded the streets and the trees. It hovered on derelict sites and clung to the sides of buildings. Spars and scaffolding rose out of it, parts of a ghostly craft lost in an endless ocean. When evenings drew in, which they did suddenly earlier in October because of the change from summer time, darkness muffled all noise except that of dripping water. The rain made a ceaseless patter on the roofs and window panes. Pavements glistened in the gloomy streets, and the skies glowed with a grey refracted light. Dottie sat by her window in the evenings, the casement open in the unseasonally warm weather.

  Sometimes she heard the sound of a flute coming from the house at the back of them, many yards across the tangled and overgrown gardens. She saw lights there in the early evening, and a door usually opened to eject a large dog. It was some kind of setter, and in the light that shone on it through the glass door she saw that its colour had some russet or red in it. The dog would stand attentively in the patch of light, its head lowered eagerly and its muzzle extended in submission. Even from such a long way Dottie could see fear in the way the dog stood. She imagined that if she was nearer she would see small ripples of terror run quivering through its body. Instead of bounding joyously across the back gardens, leaping the derelict fences, and making a bid for freedom, the dog whined gently, piteously begging to be allowed back inside.

  Dottie wondered if it was love for the person with the melancholy flute that made the dog so selflessly devoted, or if it was knowledge of some later retribution that habitually followed unavoidable wrong-doings that made it so abject. She never saw the person who lived there, could not even tell if it was a man or a woman. The elm tree at the back of the garden, depite losing all its leaves, still obscured a full view of the doorway. Dottie was left to imagine the look of triumph and satisfaction that would cross the face of the dog’s beloved as the animal cringed with restrained joy at being re-admitted.

  At first, in the early days of Ken’s departure, she was tempted to think herself similar to the cringing animal, and she wondered if the look of triumph would be at all like the one on Ken’s face. She had seen a dart of pleasure in his eyes when he spoke of leaving, and when he finally left the following day he was struggling to suppress his smiles. He was eager to go in the end. Was it relief that it was over that made him act like that?

  She was surprised that he expressed no regrets, did not even tell her a lie about how much he would miss her. He seemed cheerful, treating her like a friend he had enjoyed meeting and would be bound to meet again sooner or later. Perhaps this was how he had planned everything all along. When he became bored with her, he brought the story
of Diana out of his kit-bag, and then made himself disagreeable enough so that separation was the only sensible thing. That was what his look of triumph meant, she thought, that he had made his escape, had made his plan work. She knew nothing about such things. She was a complete beginner, naive to the point of embarrassment, a proper baby, and she must have seemed a very simple game to him.

  She hated herself for her persistence in searching for motives and explanations that would condemn her ignorance, and make her gullibility and gratitude for his affection seem part of his plan. The more she thought about how they were, the more she turned the matter over, the more sordid seemed the time they had spent together. She had been a fool. Sometimes she was filled with disgust at her inability to stop worrying at the small humiliations she had accepted at his hands. She told herself not to get carried away with her stories, not to worry everything into squalor.

  She allowed herself to get into a daze, giving in to the drama of her isolation. Her days passed in a blur while she repeated her grievances to herself with unflagging insistence. Some of the people at the factory tried to talk to her, avoiding the mention of his name, but waxing philosophical on the ephemeral nature of youthful love. Reminiscences of unsuccessful affairs were unfurled in her hearing, and the faith in Mr Right turning up in his sweet good time was emphatically re-affirmed, and casually held out to her as a life-line. Only one woman mentioned Ken by name. She was the unofficial leader of the section they worked in, a tall, fair-haired woman of heroic proportions. She seemed to know everyone and was always laughing and back-slapping with the men. She had hardly ever spoken to Dottie before, and Dottie would not have dreamed of seeking her out. Not only was her appearance and the clatter that accompanied her intimidating, but Dottie had seen the pained look she always assumed when ordering the foreign workers to a task. She had no authority to do this, but none of the workers challenged her, overawed by her imperious ways. It was obvious from her superciliousness that she took some satisfaction in her presumed pre-eminence over them.

  ‘I hear that shyster Ken has left you high and dry. Good riddance, I say,’ she came to tell Dottie, and looked at the rest of the line as if she expected the people there to burst out with applause. ‘He weren’t any good for you. Blimey, anybody could see that!’ After that, Dottie deflected the rest of the women with scowling looks.

  Mike Butler spent three long lunch-times with her. Dottie understood that he was trying to be kind, to show sympathy, but while his face indicated the discomfort he felt at her unhappiness his tongue lived an independent existence. When it came to it, she was an audience and it would be to offend against all natural laws not to accept such juicy morsels of fortune with gratitude. So he told her more about Stepney between the wars, and the journey his grandfather had made from Russia in the 1890s. He described the life of great poverty that his grandparents were forced to live in the slums of East London, and the persecution they suffered for being Jews: riots, beatings, and later Moseley’s dreadful blackshirts.

  ‘They lived through all that, pogroms in Russia, the long journey across Europe and then stretched out and down-trodden in Stepney. But if you saw them, you would never guess that they had seen anything resembling those horrors. They just looked like a couple of old Yids in a gloomy tailor’s shop. It inspires you when you think people can be good like that, doesn’t it?’ The next day he brought a picture of the old people, taken in London in 1936. The grandfather was sitting in a chair, older and more ill than Dottie expected. His wife stood beside him, a smile hovering at the corners of her face. Mike Butler said nothing about the photograph but he smiled too as he watched Dottie studying it.

  When they tired of the photograph, Mike Butler launched into an unstoppable discussion on the best kind of wool for knitting cardigans, a project he was considering taking up. He had learnt to knit in the RAF, he said, but had been out of practice for a few years. It wouldn’t do to let a skill like that go to waste, would it? Dottie listened to him with polite wonder, grateful for his eccentric kindnesses.

  In moments of clarity, sitting alone in her room, listening to the sounds of the house, she was amused at the relish she took in her rejection. There was an acuteness, a wholeness about the pain she felt at her loneliness which was different from the miseries she had known before. She wondered if it was simply a kind of indulgence, something she knew she need not suffer to such an extent but was doing so out of choice. When she went to bed, she could not resist thinking of Ken lying beside her. She sifted through the memories of those few weeks they spent together, and lived again through the ones she relished. And then she wept for his loss.

  Her inclination was to crush the memory of the time with him, pulverise and disperse it to the four corners. She scoffed at his airs and his affectations. You have no idea how hard it has been for me, she mimicked, shutting her eyes to simulate the agony of such recall. How I have wandered the seven seas, racked by guilt and remorse! My life in ruins and my art unfulfilled! Some people were kind to me, but I don’t remember their names because they were soft in the head. They were like big soft animals that whimpered in the dark. If she allowed herself to, she could spend all evening digging out examples of his self-importance, little hard nuggets of his ridiculous selfishness. Then she would tramp and stomp across the floor of her room, snorting with contempt and consigning small, excruciating tortures on him and his farm animals. But she did not often allow herself to go that far. It seemed such a waste, of her strength and of whatever there had been between them that was good. She would just have to learn to keep what she wanted of him, to recall the memories of the comfort and reassurance she had found with him. And trash the rest.

  She sensed, rather than fully grasped, the intimations of cynicism in the lesson she was attempting to force on herself. He had hurt her, so she would not allow herself to think about him. The thought made her shudder with guilt, and brought an irresistible flood of regrets. If she could have learnt to chase away the thoughts that caused her pain, would she not have begun by despatching Sharon? And then Sophie and Hudson? Was that what she had done? In her obsession with finding pleasure for herself she had given no thought to anyone else. She had not bothered to check on Sophie and had not even worried about Hudson for days. And now she was learning the full selfishness of denying the meaning of what had happened to her with Ken.

  She went back to the library, and smiled with pleasure when the librarian who had been kind to her before welcomed her with a delighted grin. She browsed through fiction, and wandered into encyclopaedias for old times’ sake. The thought of Dr Murray brought Brenda Holly back to mind, and made Dottie remember the little kindnesses that she had wrung out of her. She could not have got Hudson back without Brenda’s help. She took out a book called Living, because the title appealed to her. On the way home, she went into the Post Office and rang up Brenda’s office number. They told her that she had moved to Wales. After a long silence, which made the man at the end of the line ask anxiously if she was still there, Dottie asked for an address.

  ‘Are you a friend?’ the man asked. Dottie hesitated, she was not sure if she could call herself that.

  ‘She helped me,’ she said. When the man answered her with a long silence of his own, she did not know what else to say. At last, he sighed and told her to wait while he went to look. She had to put in another coin, and then another, but at last he came back.

  ‘Look, I hope you’re not going to bother her,’ he said. ‘She’s having a bad enough time already. You know she’s retired. She doesn’t work here any more.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dottie said, wishing he would just give her the address.

  ‘Is it about work? Have you got a problem?’

  ‘No, it’s not about work. What’s happened to her?’ Dottie asked.

  The man came back after a brief silence. ‘Her husband’s dying. She gave up her job so she could look after him. So they could have some time together. I hope you’re not going to be a nuisance or anything.
’

  ‘I was only going to greet her, to say hello.’

  ‘I shouldn’t really do this,’ the man said. ‘But if you’re a friend . . .’

  She realised as she walked home that she had not thought of Brenda as having a husband who could die, of having a family that could suffer just as much as she could. Who comforted her when her turn on the rack came? There were times when she had hated the smugness with which Brenda had quoted official rulings to her. This can’t be done because regulations utterly forbid it, but out of the goodness of my kind, long-suffering heart, I will allow you to do such and such. It bears no relation to what you really wanted, but it’s the best I can do, my love. Dottie had thought to herself at such moments that a woman like Brenda Holly could not possibly have any understanding of what it was like to live with any of the things that burdened her. The friendship that grew up between them was only a stunted and accidental one, quickly crushed by Hudson’s tantrums. But as she pored over the remains, and followed the vestigial life-lines on the rock, she knew that perhaps that was another opportunity missed. So sure had she been that everything sought to wound her that she had taken no care how she herself lashed out.

  She tried to express some of this in her letter, to give an inkling of her regrets and to tell Brenda that she understood more now of what help she had tried to offer her, but in the mood she was in her effort came out as abjectly miserable and self-pitying. In the end she wrote only a few lines of greeting, saying that she had only just heard about her move.

  2

  The next day Sophie came. It was late on Sunday morning, and Dottie was lying on her bed reading and listening to the sounds of the house. Someone downstairs had acquired a sewing machine, and she guessed it was the Indian woman on the ground floor. The family had moved in only recently. At first Dottie thought that the older man was the woman’s father, but later she found out that they were husband and wife. Andy, the landlord, had told her on one of the few occasions he still came round for rent. More usually he sent a young cousin of his to collect what he could. Times had changed for Andy and fortune no longer smiled on him. His wife was divorcing him, he told Dottie, put up to it by her brothers, who were envious of him. Well, she couldn’t really divorce him, he explained, but she wanted a settlement so she could set up on her own in Cyprus. Business was bad and money was short, and all they could think of was how to steal everything they could out of him. So hard had life become that Andy could no longer afford to dress like a dandy. His clothes had a ragged look and were not always as clean as they used to be. Sometimes he had a stubble of a beard on his chin and his breath smelled stale.