Dottie

by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  6

  In the confusion of that spring, she missed classes for a fortnight. When she missed the first of her two classes for the third week, Estella came to the house after lessons. Patterson answered the door, and left her standing on the threshold while he went to fetch Dottie. They talked outside, smiling at each other in their separate pleasure. Dottie was both ashamed and overjoyed that she had put her friend to such anxiety. She gave some excuse and promised to be there later in the week. Estella was pleased that her busy-body interference, as she had been thinking of it in the process of dissuading herself from calling, had not been misunderstood. ‘Are you all right, though? Is everything okay?’ she asked dropping her voice a little, hatching a conspiracy.

  ‘Yes, fine. I’ve just been very busy here at home,’ Dottie said, laughing at the melodramatic invitation, deflecting her interest. Estella laughed too, her eyes dancing a little in the light of the street lamps, as if she too was conscious of the way their conversation was hovering on the edges of unreality.

  ‘I’ll see you on Thursday,’ Estella said, nodding firmly to indicate that this was a serious matter. ‘I don’t want to lose the best student in my class.’

  Dottie watched her drive away in her noisy VW, and waved away Laura’s anxious face as it appeared at the next-door window. Laura looked arch, assuming a man had called for her. When Dottie went back in, Patterson called to her from the parlour. He was watching television with Sophie, and looked round the wing of the chair when Dottie would not come further into the room.

  ‘Who was that? What did she want?’

  He asked his questions gently, not so much as if he was challenging but rather as if he was commiserating with her for the bother she had been caused. She could hear these white people rippling as an unspoken refrain through the words he had not yet said. She was tempted to say that she did not need to give any answers to him. He was neither her father nor her master, but she was afraid of seeming to be over-reacting. ‘That was my teacher. She came to check with me because I missed my class,’ she said, lifting her chin at him and daring him to say something cruel or mocking.

  ‘Oh Sis, you know you mustn’t miss your class,’ Sophie said in a pained voice. ‘Otherwise you’ll never get that office work.’

  Dottie was close to laughter at the bizarre scene. She felt like an adolescent who had trangressed and was being scolded by her parents. A half-wit sister and her gangster boyfriend were treating her as if she were a child without a mind of her own. ‘She told me I was the best student she had,’ Dottie said as she turned to leave. She heard Patterson’s soft chuckle and bristled with sudden anger at what she took to be his amusement at her attempt to assert herself.

  The arrangement was close to being unbearable. If he would not go, she would have to start thinking of doing so. But so what if she thought about it! This was so obviously an absurd idea – that she should leave a house she had suffered for and planned for – and she could only consider it as an act of desperation, an act of despair. One hundred per cent crazy! Who would look after Hudson? It was her house too. Although most of the money to buy it came from him and the building society, she paid her share of the mortgage. She ate cassava and spinach for it, and went to bed hungry. With each passing day she withdrew deeper and deeper into her resentment, so that she was beginning to find the simplest conversation with them impossible. Some evenings she refused food rather than sit at the table with them, and munched biscuits and raisins that she took to her room. When she came in on them, it was as if she had interrupted them, and they stopped talking or changed the subject. If she was around, Sophie did the simplest things noisily, huffing and puffing with suppressed indignation. She thought they were trying to drive her away, or bring her to heel, like a mad bitch that was beginning to become too much trouble.

  The classes were a solace, and her growing friendship with Estella was a godsend. The other students welcomed her back with smiles and ironic cheers, and Elke gave her a stern talking-to for being irresponsible, then gave her a bag of candy to sweeten her rebuke. The teacher presided over the scene with a complacent smile. Later, in the pub, the talk was about the exams and jobs, which made them all laugh self-consciously, as if they were over-reaching themselves and would soon be cut down to size. In the car, on the way home, Estella invited Dottie to see a play that was being shown at a theatre in Wimbledon that Saturday. Some people she knew were in it, and she had been forced to buy two tickets. ‘It’ll probably be boring. In fact, I’d be completely astonished if it wasn’t, but we could go for a meal afterwards,’ she said.

  Dottie could not remember much of the play afterwards. She had been too interested in looking round as discreetly as she could, watching the prosperous and happy-looking audience as much as the drama on the stage. The hall was small and draughty, and reminded her of school events she had attended. It was not easy to hear what the actors were saying, but she gathered enough from a distant and distracted view of the action to understand that the play was about a detective inspector who has an affair with a woman who has committed a murder. Another murder! She could not understand the obsession. Bookshops were full of people committing murders, and being pursued by a variety of policemen, detectives and sleuths. The cinemas had their murders too, and so did the television and the theatre. The newspapers were always full of them. ‘Someone might think that was all we did,’ she said to Estella afterwards, when they went for their meal.

  Estella took her to an Indian restaurant in Southfields which was called the Regency. It was the first time Dottie had been to an Indian restaurant and she relished the dimmed lights, the starched damask cloths on the tables and the blood-red flock wallpaper. The obsequiousness of the waiters disconcerted her at first, but they soon left them alone while they attended to other customers. The aromas of food were almost overpowering, and Dottie watched with a mixture of incredulity and fascination as the trays of richly-coloured curries and vegetables were conveyed from the kitchen to the scattered tables in the hushed room. She had been buried away for all those years, ever since Ken left, and had forgotten the unique pleasure of sitting in a restaurant, waiting for a meal.

  ‘What would you like? This is my treat, so you don’t have to check the price. I got paid today,’ Estella said. It was soon evident that the question was beyond Dottie, but Estella was happy to provide advice, and parade her knowledge of Indian cuisine. ‘Don’t touch the dopiaza. It’ll give you indigestion if you’re not used to it, all those onions. And I wouldn’t advise anything that contains shellfish. Aside from the danger of stomach upset, I don’t think the chef here has got the hang of shellfish. If I could suggest . . . they do really nice bhaji here, actually, and a beautiful coconut achar. I think I’ll have the bhoona ghosht with rice and parathas.’ Dottie had the same, and ate every mouthful with delight, until she could eat no more and felt herself bulging obscenely. Without much ceremony, Estella helped herself to what Dottie did not want, talking and laughing with freedom and good humour.

  ‘What you were saying earlier about murder,’ Estella said. ‘Some people would say that that is all we do. Since the beginning of human history we have been killing each other, and have watched while others were killed. It’s safer, in a way, to have it all made into a kind of ritual like this play, or a detective thriller. Don’t you agree? Or do you think I’m talking rubbish? Our fascination with murder is from so many different angles. To see the murderer caught, because that becomes a kind of morality play. The guilty always get their desserts, and killing people is wrong. Or because of the chase, or the battle of wits between the killer and the lawman. Perhaps also it’s a way of living out our own fantasy of being strong enough to inflict that degree of pain. Whole crowds of policemen and pathologists and solicitors and journalists bank on that. I mean that we entertain fantasies of inflicting pain . . . You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? Well, it is also just simply true that people commit murders, many of them. So perhaps all those books and plays reflect
the way we live.’

  She paused for a long moment, holding a roughly-torn piece of paratha in mid-air, forcing time to stand still while she considered. Dottie held her breath. ‘I’m intimately acquainted with murder,’ Estella said, waving the piece of bread for emphasis. Dottie already knew enough of Estella’s rhetorical habits to take this observation in without a whimper. Oh yes, do tell, she might have said. She waited patiently for Estella to go on with her story, to weave the rest of her web. A small, almost imperceptible smile of pleasure played around Estella’s face, a mingling of admiration and disappointment that Dottie was so invincibly calm. ‘It’s true!’ she said, popping the paratha in her mouth, making mock-innocent eyes at Dottie.

  ‘Oh yes, do tell,’ Dottie said, smiling.

  Then it seemed that all of a sudden Estella began to talk about herself in a different tone, putting aside the extravagance and the gestures, and speaking calmly and truthfully, without embellishment. Dottie listened with a sense of witnessing an important moment, and knew without doubt that this was Estella’s token of trust, an opening of accounts of their friendship.

  7

  Her father was a Frenchman who had come over to Britain after May 1940, shaken and devasted by the collapse of France. He had just been called up when the Germans invaded but the bureaucratic wheels had ground slow enough for him to be still in basic training when the surrender came. He had come over to Britain with hundreds of others, and was billeted in a bleak Scottish wilderness north of Aberdeen. He met Estella’s mother in Edinburgh, when he was on war manoeuvres or something. They were always doing military games like that, to keep their spirits up. There seemed nothing else to do. Sometimes they raided the Polish barracks down the road from them, and sometimes the Poles raided them.

  Estella’s mother was also French, and Jewish, and had fled France with her younger sister, sent packing by a frightened mayor who had chased away all Jews from his little town to avoid the wrath of the approaching Germans. Estella’s father, whose name was Marcel, spent all his leave in Edinburgh after that, courting and winning Georgia Simon – that was her mother’s name – after only brief and token resistance from her. They talked of marriage, perhaps after the war, for with all the talk of the invasion being imminent there was no point in forcing Georgia to become a widow when they could wait until they were sure of the future. Estella was born while they were still waiting.

  Marcel went over to Normandy and survived, and returned to Edinburgh to marry his young love. They moved to Birmingham, where a cousin of Marcel ran a silversmith business. The cousin and his wife invited them to live in their house, and Marcel and Georgia, with her younger sister and Estella in tow, moved in. Perhaps one day, they thought they would go back to France, when the chaos had subsided. But things went wrong for them after that. Marcel took to spending a lot of time away from home, with French friends also marooned in England. Georgia thought they disliked her because she was Jewish but Marcel dismissed this. Some nights he slept out with his friends, or travelled to other English cities. Georgia became distraught and suspicious, and accused Marcel of no longer loving her. She became convinced that he was seeing another woman. Marcel reassured her, and, when he could no longer laugh off her tirades, sought an ally in Georgia’s younger sister. All that that achieved was Georgia began to suspect her sister too. She may even have had some grounds, Estella said, but by now Marcel had lost sympathy with his wife and mocked and made fun of her. Slowly he withdrew into an angry and resentful silence, which goaded her into violent fits of shouting and rage. Eventually he started to beat her, and once he started he beat her for everything. He beat her when he was drunk, when Estella was dirty, when he did not like the food or if she spoke disrespectfully to him. He beat her because he could not find work and because he disliked living in England. Her sister Madeline told her it was her own fault and moved out, going to London to look for work as an actress.

  Eventually, Marcel’s cousin begged them to return to France, to try again there. They could leave Estella with him and his wife in Birmingham for a while, until they had settled. Georgia found the idea of starting again irresistible, especially if they could have a few months on their own without the baby. They went to stay with Marcel’s family near a tiny village called Buz, in Provence, which was not what Georgia had expected. The few days extended into weeks, and soon it became impossible to discuss the idea of looking for a place of their own. Marcel was back in his home, and either ignored Georgia’s grumblings or put a stop to them in a suitably manly manner. Even his family became disgusted with him, but it seemed there was nothing Georgia herself could do but put up with beatings and abuse. They lived a poverty-stricken life on the tiny family farm, perched precariously on the flinty hillside.

  In the end, Georgia took the gun her father-in-law kept in his room and shot her husband. He did not die at once, but staggered round the house like a wounded animal, tearing lumps of flesh out of Georgia’s face when he caught up with her. She shot him again. He fell to the floor, panting and heaving with terror and desperation, clinging to life until the very last moment.

  Her lawyer got her off on grounds of diminished responsibility, and even the judge secretly sympathised with her for the treatment she had had to put up with from Marcel. The local newspaper was less forgiving, playing up her Jewishness and making open hints about the possibility of Marcel being slowly poisoned or bewitched.

  After a year in a psychiatric hospital, Georgia was released, and she went to live with the lawyer as his housekeeper. Estella went to visit her there many years later, when she was nearly fourteen, and found a scarred and dishevelled woman who was unmistakably deranged. Instead of speaking she growled like an animal, and would have attacked Estella if the lawyer had not stood up and started to take his belt off. Estella herself was adopted, in due course, by Marcel’s cousin and his wife, who had had only one child of their own when they had wanted more. ‘They gave me their name, for which I’m grateful,’ she said.

  Estella invited Dottie back to her flat after the restaurant, and they sat in her large living room, in chairs that seemed to Dottie to be miles apart from each other. Estella made coffee, and smiled to see Dottie looking with admiration at the furniture and ornaments. ‘This is Madeline’s flat,’ she said. ‘My mother’s sister. She lets me stay. She’s in Canada at the moment, and then after that she’s doing a season in New York. Madeline Cooper, the actress, you may’ve heard of her.’

  Dottie shook her head. Estella shrugged. ‘I probably wouldn’t have either, if she hadn’t been my aunt. It’s not her real name, you know. She changed it to Cooper because of her work. My parents . . . my adopted parents . . .’ she paused for a moment, and then smiled to acknowledge the confusion. ‘I always call them my parents because they are the only ones I know. The other two are Georgia and Marcel. Anyway, my parents thought it was like a betrayal when Madeline changed her name. I challenged my mother about having to change her name to become a Hoggar, but she waved that away, telling me not to talk nonsense. They are very proud of their name, and cling to it despite attempts to persuade them to make it manageable. Here in England every name is put through the mangle and has to come out with a recognisable shape and sound, like Cooper or Hoggarth. Hoggar . . . I think it must be after the Ahaggars in Algeria where an ancient ancestor arose, don’t you think? Who would want to change that to Hoggarth?’

  It was past midnight when Dottie reluctantly suggested that she should go. She could have stayed the whole night. Estella had already invited her to, saying there was plenty of room. But Dottie knew her sister and Patterson would worry, and there was Hudson to look after. Estella drove her home in the noisy VW.

  ‘The car’s Madeline’s too,’ she said with a little shame-faced grin. ‘Do you know what Madeline says about Georgia? She says that the reason she became as she did was because she had no ambition. There was nothing she wanted to be, and nothing she wanted to do. Everything aggravated her because there was nothing she wa
nted for herself. When they first came from France, Georgia had to take responsibility for both of them, Madeline and her, and later for Marcel and me. By then she had got into the habit of offering herself for sacrifice. Life was a burden she had to bear and after all that time she became used to it being like that, became dependent on the misery. I’m not saying she didn’t have talents, but she got into the habit of crushing any feeling of aspiration in herself. She thought that would make her selfish. In the end she lost the means and the will to persevere because there was no point in doing so. Nothing to live for except more self-sacrifice and abuse. Even little Estella must’ve seemed like another one who would turn into a torturer when her teeth were fully grown. That’s what Madeline says. I think it makes sense, don’t you? Don’t you?’ she asked, turning to look at Dottie as she drove along Brixton Hill.

  Dottie nodded. She wondered if Estella had guessed what went on in her life and was intending that she see the lesson of Georgia’s story. That could not possibly be so, Dottie told herself, rebuking herself for her paranoia. In any case, she had already seen and grieved for the poor, deranged woman who had taken on burden after burden until she had turned into some thing grotesque and obscene. Perhaps she had done something a little like that too, although hardly on the same scale. Anyway, Estella could not possibly have guessed such things about her life! She never talked about the life she led to anyone, and probably would not do so even under torture.

  ‘Have you got an ambition, Dottie?’ Estella asked, pulling into the kerb outside the house. She was smiling, turning the question into a joke. ‘I’m almost certain I do. I know I don’t want to be a teacher, I can’t think that anyone does. It’s so mechanical and unfair to the students, like a kind of play-acting. I keep coming up with ideas, but nothing sticks. It’s worrying. Something should’ve made a showing by now, don’t you think? Anyway, that was a lovely evening. I hope I wasn’t too boring with all the stories. We must do it again soon.’ She leant forward and touched Dottie’s hand.