A Reasonable World

3

In a house on a quiet street in Brussels, a little girl named Marie-Claude was standing on a chair to reach a sugarbowl on the counter. The observer was fascinated by the brightness of the image of sugar in her mind, the memory of piercing sweetness, as compelling as sex was for an adult. She took the lid off and put her fingers in, but the bowl tipped and spilled sugar, sparkling white grains heaped on the counter. A sound made her turn. There was Maman, a red-faced giant. “I told you not to do that!”

Fear was like an electric current that crisped her body. “I didn’t mean to!”

The woman’s hand closed around her wrist, yanked her off the chair. “Now you’re going to be punished!”

Hot tears blurred her vision;, the catastrophe was unattended, unthought of, a reality that blotted out all else. She was being dragged across the floor, held upright by the painful grip on her arm, across the kitchen into the bathroom. Then she was bent across the woman’s lap, and she slipped out across the grey space and in again, and felt the ungovemed fury as she brought the hairbrush down on the child’s buttocks, paf! and again, and again.

In a cold schoolroom in Leeds, Miss McDevitt said, “Quentin, you’re to stay after.”

The rest of them trooped out, some with knowing backward glances, and he was alone with Miss McDevitt. She picked up a paper from her desk. “This was the question,” she said. “ ‘How do you know you have a country?’ And you wrote, ‘Same way I know the world is round.’ ”

Quentin Morris said nothing. He was eleven, skinny in a ragged sweater.

“How dare you!” Miss McDevitt picked up another paper and another. “Sally answered the question without being insolent, and so did Brian, and so did Malcolm and Nigel and all the others.” Her mouth was flecked with spittle. “What makes you so very exceptional? I’d like to hear.”

Quentin mumbled something.

“What? Speak up.”

“I just meant it was hearsay.”

“What do you mean, hearsay?”

“I have a country, and the world is round. I know it because other people tell me.” ,

Miss McDevitt put the papers down and looked at him. “You know very well that isn’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about patriotism, and pride, and love of king and country. But I suppose you wouldn’t know about any of those things, would you, Quentin? All right, you can go.”

As he turned, the observer felt the tears stinging his eyelids, and he slipped out across the grey space and in again, feeling the familiar shock. She watched the boy close the door behind him. He was intelligent, talented no doubt, in a degenerate way—and he was mocking her. The idea infuriated her again, and she thought of all the things she would like to do to the little beast, if the school code did not forbid. Make him sit in a comer with a dunce cap on his head. Cane him.

The room was very still. She thought of her lonely supper, and the papers to be corrected. Moving slowly, she gathered her things, put on her weather shoes, hat and coat, picked up her umbrella, turned out the lights and locked the door behind her. The corridor shone slick and empty, still echoing with the clatter of voices.

Out in the street, the rain was persistent, drenching and cold; it was June, but spring had not yet come. She put up her umbrella and walked past the noisy pupils waiting to board the school buses. She glimpsed Quentin at the end of the queue; he did not look up.

She kept on, past the tobacconist’s and the cube shop, down to the municipal bus shelter beyond the next crossing. In her mind there was a fantasy picture, quite bright and detailed: she had bent the boy over a chair and tied his hands. Now she pulled his trousers down, exposing the piteous pale buttocks. She let him wait awhile. Then she drew the cane back for the first stroke: whack! The bus drew up, spraying sick yellow light from its windows; the doors rattled open. As she climbed aboard, she slipped out with relief and into the driver as she put her card in the slot: he was a Jamaican who hated the country and the weather, and as he closed the door and pushed the drive button he was thinking with hatred of his wife and her eternal fried bangers. At the next stop he slipped out again into a passenger, an elderly accountant named Elkins; there was something wrong with his back, an old injury, and he was belching the essence of the bad fish he had eaten at lunch.

From Leeds the observer went to London by rail in a banker named Forrester, whose recollections of duckhunting as a boy were very interesting; then he found an attractive young woman who wanted to be pregnant, and stayed in her until that was accomplished. Her next host was an elderly painter traveling by Chunnel to Paris; although she was physically frail, her perceptions of color and light were much more vivid than any the observer had yet known, and she cherished them to give to others.

Every human being was a unique blend of thought and emotion. In almost every one, no matter how life had deformed or corrupted them, there was an understratum of love and longing for their wounded planet. They knew so much! but their knowledge was divided: one knew banking, another art, another agriculture. Even when they understood what was wrong, they seemed helpless.

Far more often now than in the past, she found herself in a mind already inhabited by others of her race. It happened in Paris, in the mind of a boulevardier who was thinking rather dull thoughts about his mistresses.

If only they could share as we do! Some do, a little.

But they don’t know it.

Open them up?

Trying, with the newborns.

It’s harder than we thought.

Our parent could have told us

if she had lived. *Sorrow.*

And indeed, there was sorrow in all of them, never quite absent. Their parent, the wise one: how many mistakes were they making because they had never known her?