R.H.I. Page 4

  But what was she worried about? Her feelings were vague; and had she really expected a child?

  10. She had marched with hundreds of others in the city, and linked arms in a chain of women who stood for a few moments indivisible. That hadn’t been a fleeting sense, but carried over even after and despite the disappointment of each then going her own way, away from Parliament, after the rally.

  11. We should ask this: in what way is Joan like us? Why think about this woman? Her times, though well documented, are so different that we can’t quite imagine them. Is it this? We are supposed to be intrigued by history itself, but more so by its characters, the figures that populate it, and not just the famous ones. We are supposed to be attracted by their quirks, by the things that go on—and in real life too! Can we also reach across this divide, across time, across the limitations of our imperfect knowledge, across the somewhat strange tone of this writing, to really get into the minds of these people, famous or common, whose lives are represented by a few scribbled notes and letters? We want so much to believe that we can reach across! Aren’t books there to make us believe that we can?’

  12. Joan’s daughter was born in 1908. She was an only child. The child was light—were they all like that? Lying in what had, until now, been the guest room, Joan wondered why the child wasn’t more substantial. Then the nurse took her. It upset Joan that when she closed her eyes she could no longer see the child. Not a big surprise, of course, but how nothing could have changed—that was the question.

  For now, though, Joan was still healthy. If at times she breathed too shallowly, this was still part of the game she used to play, her identification game, her game of becoming someone else, of practising being someone else. It wasn’t a game she played consciously. It was a game played to hold back time. Hold it back? No, no, she wanted to bring it on, let it flow free! Time could be a great river, a flood, not the trickle it now seemed to be. In her somewhere, the suspicion was growing that it was being held back by her, that she needed only to unleash something. People stood on London’s street corners; the underground trains were stiflingly hot; the King refused to (well, couldn’t) do up his coat buttons. Weren’t the times waiting for something more? The child was looked after by her nurse.

  Shouldn’t life itself have given the child a little more weight, over and above its physical body? Or did life lighten it, and its lightness prove its life?

  The nurse would take the child out for walks, into the park where there was fresh air—Joan told her to avoid the streets as far as possible. Here was a picture: the nurse walking in the park, with a daughter—a daughter of hers. Joan couldn’t help but smile at the thought, and felt now (she would herself walk away to find some flowers to brighten up the house) a quick love for her child, for the whole scene, including the nurse’s hands gripping the perambulator. The flowers cheered up Evelyn when he returned home: he smiled at them with a half smile, as if they were a friend, and gave her the same smile. For these moments, they were worth the hurried walk, hurried in order to be home for the nurse to hand her the child for a minute.

  13. Then, after all, here was time. It arrived, but—strangely—it was early. The world carried on peacefully, but was gripped by war. Her father’s death in 1909. She recognised him in the corpse that lay in the coffin in the front room of the house in Brighton. Things came from all sides: walls and explosions, the whistle of a train. This was it! She hadn’t longed for this. He was cold to the touch. No surprises there. He didn’t move. His skin wasn’t waxy—instead it had a coarse quality like animal hide. There were red patches around his eyes, or so it seemed. She was only pleased with herself for the calm with which she bore the news, with which she touched his cheek, while Molly and their mother stood close, and kept silent. Others, locals, talked quietly in the room. But her father’s corpse was the most real thing she had seen—real not because it fit in with the world, but precisely because it didn’t. It had no place, and was to be buried. It transformed the world, which had been waiting for this transformation. There was no ‘war’, but there was WAR IN THIS STRANGE OBJECT, her father, still beating with life even though a corpse. It was the body only, and it was what he had always been. She wanted to lie down like him (Jones found this very interesting).

  War broke out at that moment. Or was it five years later? Time was behaving strangely. It was 1909 still, no question, but in the streets, which for all she knew were the same as they had been, there was now a rent, a tear. She looked at the world from a past or a future, as if she were displaced, as if she could see everything around her with either wonder or jaded, dreading familiarity. Everything was different, Joan realised, while she talked politely with one of the neighbours. All the trams, carts, the rumbling under London’s surface, the shouts and the buffet of wind would be shifted, louder. This terrible thing had broken her open. Could she say she had wanted it? Of course not. Of course not—she had clung to him, and his fragility had distressed her. Of course (as the neighbour was now saying) maybe it was for the best—now his pain was over. But no one (she thought) could really think that. It was necessary, desired, feared (she didn’t think). Here was a stupid idea, and one that she dismissed without consideration: that she had killed him by wishing it. No, no, she wanted him back! Yes, she half believed he would sit up in his coffin! The world was colder. Her mother was serving tea. Shouldn’t the maid have been doing that? Thundering, she could have swept the whole scene away with an arm. The words in her mouth felt foreign to her, as if, again, she were required to speak German. And that language seemed almost more natural to her, at least in her thoughts. (For conversation with the neighbour, it would have been less than appropriate).

  14. ‘Is it any wonder that Joan’s health began to fail?’

  ‘We don’t know whether it really failed or not.’

  ‘The beginning of the century was a traumatic time for everyone.’

  ‘But isn’t there always a century beginning?’

  15. The soldier was by the side of the road, and doubled over, reliving the attack once more. Or rather, he was doubled over in his imagination, but seen from outside he had merely stopped with a hand on his walking stick, was hunched, looked suddenly older than his years, and dragged at his lungs. ‘Are you … ?’ Did her voice remind him—though it was an English voice, and deeper—of the nurse? He could do nothing but wheeze. His eyes widened, watered at the edges, giving them a liquid spark, before he squeezed them shut for a second as if swallowing something, then opened them to smile at her.

  ‘I’m fine. This happens.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I overexert myself.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Just, coming up the hill. Too fast.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She had a hand on his back, as if she might massage his lungs into health. Lightly touching. She had come up behind him on a road that swung back and forth up the hill, where at each turn was a progressively higher view over a flat, extensive valley. She had her own recovery to contend with, and Jones had recommended some of the short walks, such as this one to a small group of barrow mounds. In his slow walk ahead of her she thought she had seen a hint of something familiar in his stoop: as if dragging something behind him. At the bend he had disappeared, with the road’s curve obscured behind a hedge. She had wondered, no, briefly, what she recognised in him. Did she imagine herself straightening him, supporting him up the hill, allowing some of her energy to rub off on him? Then she had come upon him suddenly and found that his eyes were surprisingly penetrating, alive where perhaps she had expected something dull. They seemed to invite her to something. They seemed to speak some intimacy, and to have some authority with her. No doubt some unconscious fixation of the libido. Now that they stood face to face, her own breath felt short for a minute. He smiled and drew in a full chest of air, made an expression like an apology. They walked on, now side by side. He told her about the attack.

  ‘Thankfully, I’m able to spend time recoveri
ng in a cottage owned by my family. A nurse comes from time to time to help with things and deliver food. But I don’t have to be in a nursing home.’

  ‘I’m also here on a kind of recovery.’

  ‘You seem fit enough to me.’

  ‘My husband is dead.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  In the silence that followed—a rush upwards of birds from the other side of the hedge was audible but not visible, and went hardly noticed—she wondered at her choice of phrasing. Why treat ‘all this’ as if it were a problem with Evelyn (incidentally, not dead at all, but at this moment at his offices, or at a meeting of the bar association, or having lunch)?

  ‘If you would rather walk on alone? I’ll still take my time.’

  ‘No, I want to walk with you.’

  ‘Good then.’

  Something moved in her, or shifted, some rearrangement. Maybe it was something like her husband’s death that she was here to recover from—before she packed up her bags again and went back to him. In the soldier’s difficulty there were signs of life, a struggle, audible in his breathing; how she enjoyed the sound, the battle in him, so that she hardly dared now to interrupt it by asking his name. Nonetheless she did, when they carried on. He was staying in a cottage in Treyford, not far—a half-hour’s walk even at this slow pace—from Jones’s. He was a surprising representative of the world, here, where it seemed so absent. Apart from the planes overhead, so high above that they became their own shadows against the clouds, and the shadows on the ground then mere shadows of shadows, it was hard to believe there was a war. At the crest of the hill there was a sudden wind that tugged only lightly at Joan and her companion, but blew the trees in waves of themselves, gestures that overreacted and snatched at the air.

  She said, ‘I’ve been prescribed walks. Healthy clean air and all of that.’ She stopped again and turned around and looked out over the view.

  ‘Well, don’t dismiss it. It might just do you good. I know it does for me.’

  ‘Well, your problem is your lungs.’

  Was it true that she had been prescribed this? Jones had obviously thought it would be good for her. Maybe, now, here, there were different kinds of truth. Nice of Jones: his own cottage. It suddenly seemed however like just another rest cure, an unpopulated place, free of furniture for her dreams, and she looked at the rural idyll with a sweep of impatience: she didn’t want to rest, but to dig deeper! What trouble would she find? The unconscious remained an unexplored jungle, containing dangers, freedoms, and alongside that country, the neat stand of oaks (even if they hinted at the barrow mounds to be found at their edge, and their prehistoric mysteries) seemed unimpressive. She wasn’t exactly sent. But she wondered why he had sent her (from Jones the offer seemed like a command). She put a hand on the soldier’s cheek, and let it slide down to his neck, but he pulled away.

  ‘Sorry!’

  ‘What for? Come on, let’s walk to the mounds.’

  They climbed one, in what seemed like some sort of transgression. They both laughed a little, maybe each knowing what the other was thinking, as they sat on it.

  She said, ‘These were recommended to me.’

  ‘To me too.’

  ‘They strike me as lumps.’

  ‘Piles.’

  ‘Was it worth the walk?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose it was good for me—’

  ‘It didn’t sound like it. It sounded like you were going to die.’

  He looked at her, surprised. She returned his look then looked away, shrugged, stood up as if to get a better view. What was the view worth? It seemed enveloped, beyond the edge of the embankment, by a light haze that rendered everything false and dusty, a dry echo of itself.

  ‘Do you miss him terribly?’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Your husband.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It must be such a shock.’

  ‘But you—you’ve had war. You’ve had death all around you. You’ve really been amongst it, all the violence, as if something’s been unleashed. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine it’s just your lungs that need recovery after all that! … No, I’m sorry. But it must be terrible.’

  ‘Of course. And it’s not just my lungs that need recovery. How did he die?’

  ‘He was sick for a long time. It wasn’t entirely unexpected.’

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have …’

  ‘What’s hard to imagine is that under here there are people long dead.’

  It wasn’t so hard to imagine, and she’d said it precisely because that was what, at that point, she was imagining. Sometimes things said meant their opposites, or a thing and its opposite weren’t so different. The difficulty wasn’t in the imagination but in the mention of it. She supposed that (of course) some unconscious censoring had made her say it was difficult. She reached a hand down to him to pull him up.

  16. It was tempting, sitting in the archive, to wonder what was wrong with her, as if I were a doctor. Could I diagnose the bits and pieces? Not with some medical name but with some explanation of her inner workings. Of course, instead, I found myself working like a dermatologist might, with skin and its textures which were also the textures of paper and also, I supposed, the textures of history as it presents itself to us in places like this.

  17. What was wrong with her? It’s not clear what her symptoms were. Maybe she could have pulled herself together. It was all too much for Joan. But she wasn’t afraid of the planes—instead, she was afraid of a certain RUSH THAT SHE FELT WITHIN HERSELF when they flew low enough for her to see the glint of sun on the metal of their wings. Their speed didn’t frighten her. Anyway, they were usually flying high, and out of sight. Why did she think of them? She didn’t. Everything seemed to happen now with a certain speed, but here that speed was reduced to crawling slowness by distance.

  The years before the eruption of war were missing. Joan had woken one day to the word of its outbreak, and had shaken herself. Evelyn had looked at her with his serious look, the look that accompanied ‘news’ and involved a specific arrangement of the eyebrows. It was a bad business—but while he said it, it was clear that it was a ‘business’ that had, at some level, been expected. The nations of the continent had been precariously balanced, their cracks papered over. Their daughter could now talk, and was busy with her governess. But of course Joan remembered the missing years: remembered her daughter’s progress, remembered the unease she had felt from time to time with no particular cause. The tension of those years: waiting, so much waiting, and how can you wait for what has already happened? Her daughter and her husband were waiting; out, walking in the park, she was surrounded by London people whose faces revealed nothing but their waiting. She wanted to say to them that it wasn’t her fault. They would have looked at her as if she was an idiot—and they would have gone back to their waiting.

  Something owing—someone coming to claim what was owing. Was this what everyone was waiting for? What this how you waited for what had already happened? The imminence of the debt collector infected her vision and made everything seem inadequate; would the debt collector have the face of her father? How wonderful it would be to see that face—but not, we can guess, if it were only to demand repayment. Seeing him (if only she could) she would be on tenterhooks, she would still wait, wait for him to speak. What would he say? It could cast her into despair or raise her to heaven. Well, what is all this about? Did Joan just need more sleep?

  18. Joan had visited her relatives in Cambridge. Here, young women gathered under the porticoes and conversed. She had wanted a change of scene, and had said as much to Evelyn—there was no reason she couldn’t leave them for a week or two, was there? The girl hardly needed her now, and the current help seemed good enough. But more: wouldn’t it (she didn’t say this) help her to cope with the mounting tension, the problem, the slip, the breaking wave of time that held itself back, that threatened to tumble, and tumble her? Events passed without passing, without going down in history. Her fathe
r’s death slipped away just when she had a hold on it. The world ground around in its orbits, its rotations, possibly liquid at its core. Yes, a trip away.

  As soon as she had arrived, she remembered it, as she always had. The young women were younger, were ‘young women’ of the sort that hopeful schoolmistresses wished to turn out. It was all too much like her own school days: their independence and spirit was hollow, their obsessions, their small rebellions, their shared secrets, even as they were modelling themselves precisely on their teachers. The environment made Joan remember—a feeling weighing in her chest and shoulders—her own young self. It made her collapse into herself, even as, to the young women, she must have seemed confident, independent. Well, she didn’t speak with them, but was simply visiting her aunt, who taught at the college.

  But she had known that there would be a meeting of the Society. At their meetings people said the most outlandish things about the mind. They would hope to speak without speaking or commune with the dead, and, while doing so, would fiercely concentrate until they broke out into a sweat and veins stood out, disturbingly, on their necks. There was a lot of waving of hands, and Joan enjoyed all this very much. The meetings ‘were’ her aunt and uncle, more so than anything else they did or said, than any of the rambling walks they took together to some neighbouring village. The room at the front of the house, well-lined with books, where Joan sat while her uncle and aunt were out teaching, was transformed from something gentile into a place with secrets—even if the secrets were themselves preposterous, dragged out of nowhere by the assembled group. There was otherwise none of this in her life; none of this open discussion of ideas, this probing of how things might be.