by Nina Bawden
I don’t know why this innocent remark should have provided a spur to anger, but it did. It wasn’t really anger, though, but a kind of sick disgust that seemed to be growing inside me like a fungus, a cancer, that was invading my whole body.
‘Marvellously,’ I said. ‘All’s well that ends well. One useless old woman is dead and another is tucked away in a nice, comfortable madhouse where she’ll never be any trouble to anyone any more, and one African clerk has gone back home so he’ll never bother us again, and because we’ve paid his fare and kindly promised to keep an eye on his child, our consciences are clear. And that’s a good thing, because we’re the important people, the ones who matter, you and Reggie and I. We’re not old or mad or black. We haven’t got any of the obvious disabilities but we’re prepared to be nice to the unfortunate ones who have, because we’re nice people and it gives us a nice, comfortable glow, but it’s really pleasanter when they’re not there, cluttering up the landscape, isn’t it? We’re the flower of the flock – the – the King’s Cows, good, fat cattle grazing in our green meadow and it’s nicer when all the insignificant people, the unimportant ones, are tucked away behind the hedges where they won’t spoil the view or interfere with our digestive processes. We’re for the slaughterhouse in the end, of course, but it doesn’t worry us just now because our bellies are full. One day we’ll be old or mad – or both, probably, but we don’t care, our tiny minds don’t reach so far.’
She was standing now, her expression pained and bewildered. She said, ‘Tom, don’t. Please. There was nothing else we could do. And don’t blame Reggie. He did his best.’
‘I’m not blaming Reggie. Not only Reggie, anyway. You and me. Me.’ I sat up in bed and shouted absurdly, ‘How many neighbours have I loved like myself, for God’s sake?’
‘Tom. Darling.…’ She came close, her face suddenly flooded with gentle understanding. She put her hand on my forehead and said in a worried voice, ‘I think you must have got a temperature.’
Chapter Sixteen
Of course, in the end it did work out rather well. Or, to put it another way, guilt and shame went underground.
While I was in hospital, I was obsessed by terrible images of my mother, lost, torn from her familiar surroundings, heart-broken and weeping. Instead, when I went to visit her, I found her calm and cheerful, planting bulbs in a tiny patch of earth they had given her in a corner of the grounds. It was about ten foot square; she had edged it with white, broken shells.
She did not recognize me, at least she gave no sign of doing so, and when I asked her about her plans for the garden she answered me gently and politely with something of the air of a dowager duchess showing a common member of the public round her family estate. After a while, we sat down on a bench and she went to sleep with the suddenness of the old. She looked relaxed and peaceful in the thin sunlight. She was neatly dressed, someone had done her hair and polished her nails; she looked, not just efficiently, but affectionately, cared for. Yet, watching her, I felt guilt. Why? The feeling was formless, but in a queer way worse than the ordinary shame you feel for some specific wrong you have done. What could I have done for her that I hadn’t done? No one would accuse me. Could I honestly accuse myself? Wasn’t it just pride that produced this nagging remorse – as if I rated myself too high, believed my standards to be better than other people’s?
But no amount of argument could dispel the guilt, which was as pervasive and clinging as mist. I felt guilty about my mother, about Jay.…
Jay did not write for a while, for a couple of months, in fact, but when his letter did come, it was charming: sunny and hopeful. He had been delighted to hear I was well again. All was well with him, he had been promoted and was to spend a year in Nairobi. Agnes had had a daughter and they were going to call her Louise. He hoped this would give us pleasure. He thanked us both for all we had done for him and what we were doing for Philip. He had been proud to make two such good friends and he looked forward with – his writing was difficult to read but it looked like ‘palpitating’ – joy to welcoming us to his country. Naturally he would expect us to spend as long as we could with him, in his new house in Nairobi.
Louise said, ‘I think that’s a very nice letter. You see, he doesn’t blame you for anything.’
‘I blame myself,’ I said.
She looked at me consideringly. ‘You’re bound to feel depressed. It’s natural, after an illness like that.’
‘You think I’m still sick, do you?’
‘Not really. You’ve just got a sort of hang-over. All this gloom and breast-beating and thinking everything that’s wrong in the world is your fault. Healthy people don’t—’
‘Don’t they? I should have thought it was the people who went around saying everything is for the best, who were sick. I should have thought it was healthier on the whole to be chronically ashamed.’
It was meant to make her laugh, or half meant to make her laugh, anyway.
But she said seriously, ‘You believe that, don’t you? Only healthy’s not the word. What you really mean is that you’re so superior a person that your feelings are finer than other people’s. I wish you’d snap out of it. Who do you think you are?’ She shut her mouth with a resentful snap. Then she got up from her chair and came to kneel in front of mine. She put her arms round my waist and her cheek against my arm. ‘Being miserable doesn’t solve anything, not if you make a virtue of it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I felt her stiffen. ‘I don’t want you to be sorry,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘I want you to see. You want to punish yourself because you haven’t lived up to some impossibly grand image.… But you only hurt yourself and that’s pointless, it doesn’t put anything right. Not for you or for anyone else.’
‘Does anything?’
‘I don’t know.’ She sat back on her heels and looked at me, pink-cheeked and with a curious shyness. ‘Unless it’s just going on trying, within one’s limits. Not getting angry because there are limits, or sitting in a swamp of misery. Accepting that things aren’t perfect but believing they can get better and doing something about it, if you can. Being hopeful.…’
‘All right, Mother,’ I said.
She looked at me with genuine fear. ‘Don’t laugh at me,’ she said.
‘I’m not. I said, all right. It’s all right.’ I got hold of her awkwardly and held her tight. ‘Only don’t leave me alone, that’s all.’
‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘I won’t, darling.’ She hung onto me tightly. ‘It’ll be marvellous going to Africa with you,’ she said.
Reggie came with us to the airport, largely to sustain Julia. Railway stations, quay sides and airports always brought her to a quivering pitch of emotion. When our flight number was called, her tears welled to the surface like a spring and she turned to Louise, whom she had snapped at throughout the car journey, and clung to her.
Reggie, standing manfully apart from this scene, shook hands with me ceremonially. He nodded at Philip who was to fly out with us for the summer holidays and return – his own wish – for the autumn term. He was sitting on a bench, smiling back sweetly whenever anyone smiled at him and clutching the new cricket bat Georgiana had given him and an enormous bag of sweets. From time to time he popped one in his mouth and sucked reflectively. He looked sleepy and replete.
Reggie said, ‘I hope he’s not sick all over you.’ He looked pensive. ‘Poor little beggar. Living in two worlds. He won’t know where he belongs, will he?’
‘You don’t have to be sorry for him. He’ll be one of the New Men. Hopping round the world the way you and I caught a country bus. He’ll belong everywhere.’
‘I suppose so. Won’t even stand out, I daresay. Everyone’ll be coffee-coloured by then. Coffee-coloured and classless. Only not in my time, thank God.’ He gave a loud laugh. ‘You can’t help how you feel, you know, you can only admit it might be wrong, sometimes. Give my regards to Mr Nbola. Tell him Rootes are bringing out a new station wagon this autumn
that he might like to have a look at.’ He glanced at Louise who was gently disengaging herself from her mother and collecting her hand luggage. ‘Women are funny,’ he said, and then, as this remark raised up a disturbing echo, looked at me shamefaced. ‘You never asked her about that – that business?’
‘No.’
‘I was sorry about it.’ His face was red with effort. ‘Oh – she put me through the hoop. Then, and afterwards, when I told her I’d told you. I’ll never understand what she thought she was up to.’
‘Me, neither,’ I said, to comfort him.
The Dutchman said, ‘But there is no colour bar in French territories, surely?’
It was one of those planes with facing seats. The Dutchman was sitting opposite us, but this was the first time I had heard him speak. He had my sympathy, though. The Englishman next to him, a big, tanned man with an Ancient Mariner eye, had been talking to him ever since we left London and though I had dozed on and off his voice had been a constant irritation, like a fly buzzing in a bedroom. Nearly at Rome now, we were fastening our seat belts and the Dutchman was beginning to look weary. He said, with faint desperation, ‘So the hotelier could not properly refuse to take in your African friends, could he?’
‘Ah,’ said the Englishman. ‘Not legally. Nor did he. He made it clear that he would have been happy to accommodate us all if he had had single rooms vacant. But there was only this dormitory free, you see, and he refused to let me share it with them. Of course, I argued the point.’
‘I am sure you did,’ the Dutchman said.
‘I said, what was he against? If it was blacks, then he had no business to be running this hotel. If it was homosexuality, then colour made no difference, for heaven’s sake! But, d’you know, I couldn’t budge him an inch!’
Beside me, Louise began to laugh. She laughed until she choked on the boiled sweet she was sucking.
I gave her my handkerchief, thumped her on the back and whispered, ‘For heaven’s sake – it wasn’t that funny.’
She blew her nose loudly. When she looked at me, her eyes were almost tearfully bright. ‘Wasn’t it?’ Her lips twitched in a small, self-satisfied smile. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said.
I did, though.
We got out of the plane and walked across the tarmac. Philip dragged at my hand, rubbing one fist into his eyes. I said softly, ‘Was it like that, with Reggie?’
She nodded. Her face looked drained and corpse-like under the blue, airport lights. ‘Sort of. Oh – it sounds so silly, I couldn’t tell you. I was hopping mad, actually. He said he hadn’t liked the idea of Jay coming in the first place, for my sake. Black men, you know, so potent, so randy … I said if I was inclined that way, black lodger, white lodger, what was the difference? He went all pompous and red-faced and said there was a lot, but he didn’t intend to discuss it. So I said there wasn’t any difference, I knew. I wanted to hammer it home. I felt such a fool, afterwards.’
‘You deserved to.’
Her hair blew sideways across her face as she turned to look at me. ‘You didn’t believe him, did you?’
‘Not for a minute, love,’ I said.
The sun was shining in Nairobi, beating down on the flat, tawny plain with a clear, dry heat. Philip ran ahead of us, his school cap crushed in his pocket, his grey socks dangling round his thin ankles. His arms waved like a small windmill in a gale. I saw Jay with Agnes beside him, waving from the low airport roof. She was wearing a green dress; their faces were split open in welcome. ‘There they are,’ I said, to Louise. She put her hand under my arm and we advanced towards the building, waving and smiling too.
Then Jay stopped waving. I saw him turn and speak to Agnes.
Louise’s hand tightened on my elbow. ‘I wonder what he’s saying,’ she said.
‘Probably, “My God, they do look white”,’ I said, and laughed.
Copyright
First published in 1964 by Longmans
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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ISBN 978-1-4472-3612-2 EPUB
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Copyright © Nina Bawden, 1964
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