The Memoirs of a Survivor

***

Throughout this period, whenever I was drawn in through the flowers and leaves submerged under half-transparent white paint, I found rooms disordered or damaged. I never saw who or what did it, or even caught a glimpse of the agent. It was seeming to me more and more that in inheriting this extension of my ordinary life, I had been handed, again, a task. Which I was not able to carry through. For no matter how I swept, picked up and replaced overturned chairs, tables, objects; scrubbed floors and rubbed down walls, whenever I re-entered the rooms after a spell away in my real life all had to be done again. It was like what one reads of a poltergeist's tricks. Already my entrance into that place was with a lowered vitality, a sense of foreboding, instead of the lively and loving anticipation I had felt on first being able to move there… I really do have to make it clear here that this feeling of discouragement was not at all like the misery that accompanied the 'personal' scenes; no, even at the worst, the disorder and anarchy of the rooms were nothing like as bad as the shut-in stuffiness of the family, the 'personal'; it was always a liberation to step away from my 'real' life into this other place, so full of possibilities, of alternatives. When I talk of 'lowering' here, I mean only in terms of the generally freer air of this region; I could not compare it with the constrictions and confinements of the place, or the time, where that family lived out its little puppet play.

But what laws, or needs, did the unknown destroyer obey? I would find myself in the long but irregular passage, like a wide hallway that extended itself indefinitely full of doors and little enclaves where a table might stand with flowers or a statue, pictures, objects of all kinds, each with an exact place — and open a door on a room next to it and there everything would be awry. A violent wind would be blowing the curtains straight out into the room, knocking over small tables, sweeping books off the arms of chairs, littering the carpet with ash and cigarette stubs from an ashtray which was wheeling there, ready to topple. Opening another door, everything stood as it ought: there was order, a room not only ready for its occupants, as neat as a hotel bedroom, but one which he, she, they, had just left, for I could feel a personality or presences in a room seen through a half-open door. Which, entering, perhaps only a moment later, I might find in chaos, as if it were a room in a doll's house, and the hand of the little girl had been inserted through the ceiling and knocked everything over on a freak of impulse or bad temper.

I decided that what I had to do was to repaint the rooms… I talk as if they were a permanent, recognisable, stable set of rooms, as in a house or a flat, instead of a place which changed each time I saw it. First, paint: what was the use of tidying, or cleaning furniture that would have to stand between such forlorn and shabby walls? I found paints. Tins of different sizes and colours stood waiting on spread newspapers on the floor in one of the rooms that was temporarily empty — I had seen it furnished only a few minutes before. There were brushes and bottles of turpentine and the painter's ladder I had seen during one of my early visits here. I started on a room I knew well: it was the drawing-room that had brocade curtains and pink and green silks and old wood. I stacked what was usable in the middle of the room under dust-sheets. I scrubbed down the ceiling and walls with sugar soap, with hot water, with detergents. Layer after layer of white paint went on, first dull and flat, then increasingly fine, until the last one covered everything with a clear softly shining enamel, white as new snow or fine china. It was like standing inside a cleaned-out eggshell; I felt that accretions of grime had been taken off which had been preventing a living thing from breathing. I left the furniture there in the centre of the room under its shrouds, for it seemed too shabby now for such a fine room, and I felt that there seemed little point in setting it out: when I returned the poltergeist would have flung everything about or thrown muck at the walls. But no, it was not so, this did not happen; or I think it did not — for I never saw that room again. And it was not that I looked for it and failed to find it… would it be accurate to say that I forgot it? That would be to talk of that place in terms of our ordinary living. While I was in that room, the task made sense; there was continuity to what I did, a future, and I was in a continuing relation to the invisible destructive creature, or force, just as I was with the other beneficent presence. But this feeling of relatedness, of connection, of context, belonged to that particular visit to the room, and on the next visit it was not the same room, and my preoccupation with it was altered — and so with the other rooms, other scenes, whose flavours and scents held total authenticity for the time they lasted and not a moment longer.

I have been writing, with no particular reluctance or lack of enjoyment, descriptions of the realm of anarchy, of change, of impermanence; now I must return to the 'personal' and it is with dismay, a not-wanting…

I had approached a door, apprehensive, but also curious to see if I would open it on the poltergeist's work, but instead it was a scene of clean tidiness, a room that oppressed and discouraged because of its statement that here everything had its place and its time, that nothing could change or move out of its order.

The walls were ruthless; the furniture heavy, polished, shining; sofas and chairs were like large people making conversation; the legs of a great table bruised the carpet.

There were people. Real people, not forces, or presences. Dominant among them was a woman, one I had seen before, knew well. She was tall, large, with a clean-china healthiness, all blue eyes, pink cheeks, and the jolly no-nonsense mouth of a schoolgirl. Her hair was brown and there was a great deal of it piled on the top of her head and firmly held there. She was dressed for company; she wore good clothes, expensive, fashionable, and inside them her body seemed to be trying to assert it self — timidly, but with a certain courage, even gallantry. Her arms and legs looked uncomfortable; she had not wanted to put on these clothes, but had felt she must: she would discard them with a small laugh, a sigh, and 'Thank the Lord for that, what a relief!'

She was talking to a woman, the visitor, whose back was to me. I could watch her face, her eyes. Those eyes, unclouded by self-criticism, like skies that have been blue for too many weeks, and will continue blue and regular for weeks yet, for it is nowhere near the time for the season to change — her eyes were blank, did not see the woman she was talking to, nor the small child in her lap, whom she bumped up and down energetically, using her heel as a spring. Nor did she see the little girl who stood a short way from her mother, watching, listening, all her senses stretched, as if every pore took in information in the form of warnings, threats, messages of dislike. From this child emanated strong waves of painful emotion. It was guilt. She was condemned. And, as I recognised this emotion and the group of people there in the heavy comfortable room, the scene formalised itself like a Victorian problem picture or a photograph from an old fashioned play. Over it was written in emphatic script: GUILT.

In the background was a man, looking uncomfortable. He was a soldier, or had been one. He was tall, and built well, but held himself as if it were hard to maintain purpose and self — respect. His conventionally handsome face was sensitive and easily pained, and was half-hidden by a large moustache.

The woman, the wife and mother, was talking; she talked, she talked, she went on and on as if no one but herself existed in that room or beyond it, as if she were alone and her husband and her children — the little girl particularly, who knew she was the chief culprit, the one being complained of — couldn't hear her.

'But I simply did not expect it, no one ever warns one how it is going to be, it is too much. By the time the end of the day has come I'm not fit for anything at all but sleep, my mind is just a fog, it's a scramble… as for reading or any serious sort of thing, that is out of the question. Emily will wake at six, I've trained her to stay quiet until seven, but from then on, I'm on the go, the go, the go, all day, it is one thing after another, and when you think that at one time I was quite known for my intelligence, well that is just a joke, I'm afraid.'

The man, very still, sat back in his chair, smoking. The ash on his cigarette lengthened itself and dropped. He frowned, gave his wife an irritated look, hastily pulled an ashtray towards him in a way that said at the same time he should have remembered the ashtray before, but that if he felt like dropping ash he was entitled to. He went on smoking. The little girl, who was about five or six, had her thumb in her mouth. Her face was shadowed and bleak because of the pressure of criticism on her, her existence.

She was a dark-haired child, with dark eyes like her father's, full of pain — guilt.

'No one has any idea, do they, until they have children, what it means. It's all I can do just to keep up with the rush of things, the meals one after another, the food, let alone giving the children the attention they should have. I know that Emily is ready for more than I have time to give her, but she is such a demanding child, so difficult, she always has taken a lot out of me, she wants to be read to and played with all the time, but I'm cooking, I'm ordering food, I'm at it all day, well you know how it is, there isn't time for what there has to be done, I simply don't have time for the child. I did manage to get a girl for a time last year, but that was really more trouble than it was worth, really, all their problems and their crises and you have to deal with them, she took up as much of my time as Emily does, but I did get an hour to myself after lunch and I put my feet up for a bit, but I did not find I had the energy to read, let alone study, no one knows how it is, what it means, no, children do for you, they do you in, I'm not what I was, I know that only too well I am afraid.'

The child on her knee, two or three years old, a heavy passive child dressed in white wool that smelled damp, was being jogged faster now; his eyes were glazing as the world bounced up and down around him, his adenoidal mouth was open and slack, the full cheeks quivering.

The husband, passive but really tense with irritation — with guilt — smoked on, listening, frowning.

'But what can you give out when you get nothing in? I am empty, drained; I am exhausted by lunchtime and all I want is to sleep by then. And when you think of what I used to be, what I was capable of! I never thought of being tired, I never imagined I could become the sort of woman who would never have time to open a book. But there it is.'

She sighed, quite unselfconsciously. She was like a child, that tall, solid, confident woman; she needed understanding as a child does. She sat looking inward into the demands of her days and her nights. No one else was there for her, because she felt she was talking to herself: they could not hear, or would not. She was trapped, but did not know why she felt this, for her marriage and her children were what she personally had wanted and had aimed for — what society had chosen for her. Nothing in her education or experience had prepared her for what she did in fact feel, and she was isolated in her distress and her bafflement, sometimes even believing that she might perhaps be ill in some way.

The little girl, Emily, had left the chair where she had been standing and holding tight to the arm, sheltering from the storm of abuse and criticism. She now went to her father, and stood by his knee, watching that great powerful woman her mother, whose hands were so hurtful. She was shrinking closer and closer to her father who, it seemed, was unaware of her. He made a clumsy movement, knocking off his ashtray, and his instinctive retrieval of it caused his elbow to jog Emily. She fell back, dropped away, like something left behind as a rush of water goes past, or a stream of air. She drifted to the floor and lay there, face downwards, thumb in her mouth.

The hard accusing voice went on and on, would always go on, had always gone on, nothing could stop it, could stop these emotions, this pain, this guilt at ever having been born at all, born to cause such pain and annoyance and difficulty. The voice would nag on there for ever, could never be turned off, and even when the sound was turned low in memory, there must be a permanent pressure of dislike, resentment. Often in my ordinary life I would hear the sound of a voice, a bitter and low complaint just the other side of sense: there it was, in one of rooms behind the wall, still there, always there… standing at the window I watched Emily, the bright attractive girl who always had people around her listening to her chatter, her laugh, her little clevernesses. She was always aware of everything that went on, nothing could escape her in the movements and happenings of that crowd; while talking with one group, it seemed as if even her back and shoulders were taking in information from another. And yet she was isolated, alone; the 'attractiveness' was like a shell of bright paint, and from inside it she watched and listened. It was the intensity of her self — awareness that made her alone; this did not leave her, even at her most feverish, when she was tipsy or drunk, or singing with the others. It was as if she had an invisible deformity, a hump on her back, perhaps, visible only to herself… and to me, as I stood watching her in a way I never could when she was close to me at home.

Emily might not see me at all. So much aware of what went on among her companions, she had eyes for every little outside. But she did notice me once or twice, and then it was odd to see how she would look at me, just as if I could not see her looking. It was as if the act of her gazing out from the protection of that crowd gave her immunity, was a different thing from looking at someone inside it, demanding a different code. A long, level thoughtful stare, not unfriendly, merely detached, her real self visible, and then would come the bright hard smile, the wave of the hand — friendliness, as far as it was licensed by her companions. As soon as she lost sight of me, my existence vanished for her; she was back again, enclosed by them, the prisoner of her situation.

While I stood there at my window, Hugo watchful beside me, observing her, I saw how the numbers on the pavement had grown: fifty or more of them now, and, looking up at the innumerable windows full of faces, that overhung the scene, knew that we all had one thing in common: we were wondering how soon this throng, or part of it, would move on and away, how soon 'the youngsters' would be off… it would not be long now. And Emily? She would go with them? I stood by the watching yellow beast who would never let me fondle him, but who seemed to like my being there, close, the friend of his mistress, his love — I stood there and thought that any day I could approach that window and find the opposite pavement empty, the street cleaners swilling water and disinfectant, clearing away all memories of the tribe. And Hugo and I would be alone, and I would have betrayed my trust.

She did sit with her yellow animal in the mornings, she fed him his meat substitutes and his vegetables, she fondled him and talked to him, she took him at night into her little room where he lay by her bed as she slept. She loved him, there was no doubt of that, as much as ever she had done. But she was not able to include him into her real life on the pavement.

One early evening, she came in at the time when the life outside was at its most lively, its noisiest — that is, just as the lights were beginning to appear at their different heights in the darkening air. She came in, and with a look of trepidation which she was trying to hide from me, she said to Hugo: 'Come on, come with me and be introduced.'

She had forgotten her earlier experiment? No, of course not; but it seemed to her that things could have changed. She was now well-known out there — more, she must feel herself to be a founder-member of this particular tribe: she had helped to form it.

He did not want to go. Oh, no, he very much did not want to go with her. He was laying the responsibility for what might happen on her in the way he stood up, signifying his willingness, or at least his agreement, to go with her.

She led the way out, and he followed. She had not put him on his heavy chain. She was, in leaving her animal unprotected, making her pack responsible for their behaviour.

I watched the young girl, slender and vulnerable even in her thick trousers, her boots, her jacket, her scarves, cross the road, with her beast following soberly after her. She was afraid, that was obvious, as she stood on the edge of one of the bright chattering noisy groups which always seemed lit with an inner violence of excitement or of readiness for excitement. She kept her hand down on the beast's head, for reassurance. People turned and saw her, saw Hugo. Both the girl and the animal had their backs to me; I was able to see the throng of faces as Emily and Hugo saw them. I did not like what I saw… if I had been out there I would have wanted to run, to get away… But she stuck it out for a time. Her hand always kept down, close to Hugo's head, fondling his ears, patting him, soothing, she moved quietly among the clans, determined to make her test, to sound out her position with them. She stayed out with him as dusk came down and the lively crowds were absorbed into a mingle of light and dark, where sound — a laugh, a raised voice, the clink of a bottle — was heightened, and went travelling out in every direction to the now invisible watchers at their windows, carrying messages of excitement or alarm.

When she brought him in she seemed tired. She was saddened. She was much closer to the commonplace level where I, as one of the elderly, lived. Her eyes saw me, as she sat eating her bean salad, her little hunk of bread, seemed really to see the room we sat in. As for me, I was full of apprehension: I believed her sadness was because she had decided her Hugo could not safely travel with the tribe — I thought her mad even to have considered it — and that she had decided to leave with them, to jettison him.

After the meal she sat for a long time at the window. She gazed at the scene she was usually a part of. The animal sat, not beside her, but quietly in a corner. You could believe he was weeping, or would, if he knew how. He sorrowed inwardly. His lids lowered themselves as crises of pain gripped him, and he would give a great shiver.

When Emily went to bed she had to call him several times, and he went at last, slowly, with a quiet dignified padding. But he was in inner isolation from her: he was protecting himself.

Next morning she offered to go out and forage for supplies. She had not done this for some time, and again I felt this was sort of token apology because she meant to leave.

We two sat on quietly in the long room, where the sunlight had left because it was already midday. I was at one side of it, and Hugo lay stretched, head on paws, along the outer wall of the room where he could not be seen from the windows above him.

We heard footsteps outside which stopped, then became stealthy. We heard voices that had been loud, suddenly soft.

A young girl's voice? — no, a boy's; but it was hard to tell. Two heads appeared at the window, trying to see in the comparative dusk of the room: the light was brilliant outside.

'It's here,' said one of the Mehta boys from upstairs.

'I've seen him at the window,' said a black youth. I had observed him often with the others on the pavement, a slim, lithe, likeable boy. A third head appeared between the other two: a white girl, from one of the blocks of flats.

'Stewed dog,' she said daintily, 'well I'm not going to eat it.'

'Oh go on,' said the black boy, 'I've seen what you eat.'

I heard a rattling sound; it was Hugo. He was trembling, and his claws were rattling on the floorboards.

Then the girl saw me sitting there, recognised me, and put on the bright uncaring grin the pack allowed outsiders.

'Oh,' she said, 'We thought…'

'No,' I said. 'I am living here. I haven't left.'

The three faces briefly turned towards each other, brown, white, black, as they put on for each other's benefit we've made a mess of it grimaces. They faded outwards, leaving the window empty.

There was a soft moaning from Hugo.

'It's all right,' I said. 'They've gone.'

The rattling sound increased. Then the animal heaved himself up and crept away, with an attempt at dignity, towards the door into the open kitchen, which was the farthest he could go from the dangerous window. He did not want me to observe his loss of self-possession. He was ashamed of having lost it. The moaning I had heard was as much shame as because he was afraid.

When Emily came in, a good girl, daughter-of-the-house, it was evening. She was tired, had had to visit many places to find supplies. But she was pleased with herself. The rations at that time were minimal, because of the winter, just finished: swedes, potatoes, cabbage, onions. That was about it. But she had managed to find a few eggs, a little fish, and even — a prize — a strongly scented, unshrivelled lemon. I told her, when she had finished showing off her booty, what had happened. At once her good spirits went. She sat quiet, head lowered, eyes concealed from me by the thick, white, heavily-lashed lids. Then, without looking at me, turning herself from me, she went to find her Hugo, to comfort him.

And then a little later, out she went to the pavement and stayed there until very late.

I remember how I sat on and on in the dark. I was putting off the moment of lighting the candles, thinking that the soft square of light which was how my window looked from across the street, would remind the cannibals out there of Hugo. Who was back in the place along the wall, where he could not easily be seen. He was as still as if asleep, but his eyes were open. When I did light the candles he did not move or even blink.

Looking back I see myself sitting in the long room with its comfortable old furniture, with Emily's things in the little space she allotted for them, and the yellow beast lying quietly, suffering. And there for backdrop was the ambiguous wall, which could so easily dissolve, dissolving, too, all this extraneous life, and the anxieties and pressures of the time — creating, of course, its own. Shadowily present, there it stood, its pattern of fruits and leaves and flowers obliterated by the dim light. That is how I see it, see us, that time: the long room, dimly fit, with me and Hugo there, thinking of Emily away across the street among crowds that shifted and ebbed and thinned and left — and behind us that other indefinite region, shifting and melting and changing, where walls and doors and rooms and gardens and people continually recreated themselves, like clouds.

That night there was a moon. There seemed more light outside my room than in it. The pavements were crammed. There was a lot of noise.

It was clear that the crowd had split into two parts: one part was about to take to the roads.

I looked for Emily with these people, but could not see her. Then I did see her: she was with the people who were staying behind. We all — I, Hugo, the part of the crowd not yet ready to make the journey, and the hundreds of people at the windows all around and above — watched as the departing ones formed up into a regiment, four or five abreast. They did not seem to be taking much with them, but summer lay ahead, and the country they were heading for was still, or so we believed, not yet much pillaged. They were mostly very young, people not yet twenty, but included a family of mother and father with three small children. A baby was carried in the arms of a friend, the mother took an infant on her back in a sling, the father had the biggest child on his shoulders. There were leaders, three men: not the middleaged or older men, but the older ones among the young people. Of these two went at the front with their women, and one came at the end with his: he had two girls attached to him. There were about forty people altogether in this band.

They had a cart or trolley, similar to the ones that had been used at airports and railway stations. This had some parcels of root vegetables and grain on it, and the little bundles of the travellers. Also, at the last moment, a couple of youths, laughing but still shamefaced or at least self-conscious, pushed on to this trolley a great limp parcel which exuded blood.

There were slim bundles of reeds on the cart — these were hawked from door to door by then; and three girls carried them as flaring torches, one at the front, one at the back, one in the middle, torches much brighter than the inadequate, when it was not altogether absent, street lighting. And off they went, along the road north-west, lit by the torches that dripped dangerous fire close above their heads. They were singing. They sang Show Me the Way to Go Home — without, or so it seemed, any consciousness of its ludicrous pathos. They sang We Shall Not be Moved, and Down by the Riverside.

They had gone, and left on the pavements were still a good many people. They seemed subdued, and soon dispersed. Emily came in, silent. She looked for Hugo — he had returned to his place along the wall, and she sat near him, and pulled his front half over her lap. She sat there hugging him, bent over him. I could see the big yellow head lying on her arm, could hear him, at last, purr and croon.

Now I knew that while she wanted more than anything to be off into that savage gamblers' future with the migrating ones, she was not prepared to sacrifice her Hugo. Or at least, was in conflict. And I dared to hope. Yet, even while I did, I wondered why I thought it mattered that she should stay. Stay with what? Me? Did I believe it mattered that she should stay where she had been left by that man? Well, my faith in that was beginning to dim: but her survival mattered, presumably, and who could say where she was likely to be safest? Did I believe that she should stay with her animal? Yes, I did; absurdly, of course, for he was only a beast. But he was hers, she loved him, she must care for him; she could not leave him without harm to herself. So I told myself, argued with myself, comforted myself — argued, too, with that invisible mentor, the man who had dropped Emily with me and gone off: how was I to know what to do? Or how to think? If I was making mistakes, then whose fault was it? He had not told me anything, or left instructions; there was no way at all of my knowing how I was expected to be living, how Emily should be living.

Behind the wall I found a room that was tall, not very large, and I think six-sided. There was no furniture in it, only a rough trestle around two of the sides. On the floor was spread a carpet, but it was a carpet without its life: it had a design, an intricate one, but the colours had an imminent existence, a potential, no more. There had been a fair or a market here, and this had left a quantity of rags, dress materials, scraps of Eastern embroideries of the kind that have tiny mirrors buttonhole — stitched into them, old clothes — everything in that line you can think of. Some people were standing about the room. At first it seemed that they were doing nothing at all; they looked idle and undecided. Then one of them detached a piece of material from the jumble on the trestles, and bent to match it with the carpet — behold, the pattern answered that part of the carpet. This piece was laid exactly on the design, and brought it to life.

It was like a child's game, giant-sized; only it was not a game, it was serious, important not only to the people actually engaged in this work, but to everyone. Then another person bent with a piece chosen from the multi-coloured heap on the trestles, bent, matched and straightened again to gaze down. There they stood, about a dozen people, quite silent, turning their eyes from the patterns of the carpet to the tangle of stuffs and back again. A recognition, the quick move, a smile of pleasure or of relief, a congratulatory glance from one of the others… there was no competition here, only the soberest and most loving co-operation. I entered the room, I stood on the carpet looking down as they did at its incompleteness, pattern without colour, except where the pieces had already been laid in a match, so that parts of the carpet had a bleak gleam, like one that has been bleached, and other parts glowed up, fulfilled, perfect. I, too, sought for fragments of materials that could bring life to the carpet, and did in fact find one, and bent down to match and fit, before some pressure moved me on again. I realised that everywhere around, in all the other rooms, were people who would in their turn drift in here, see this central activity, find their matching piece — would lay it down, and drift off again to other tasks. I left that tall room whose ceiling vanished upwards into dark where I thought I saw the shine of a star, a room whose lower part was in a bright light that enclosed the silent concentrated figures like stage-lighting. I left them and moved on. The room disappeared. I could not find it when I turned my head to see it again, so as to mark where it was. But I knew it was there waiting, I knew it had not disappeared, and the work in it continued, must continue, would go on always.