Later he was gone from the pavement, and Maureen, too. Soon after that Emily came home. She was very tired and did not try to conceal it. She sank down at once beside the animal, and rested, while I made the supper. I served it, and washed up while she rested again. It seemed to me that my visiting that other house and seeing how much she had to do there enabled her at last to relax with me, to sit and allow herself to be served by me. When I finished the washing up, I made us both a cup of tea, and sat with her on into the dusk of that summer evening, while she sat limp beside her Hugo.
Outside, the noise and clamour of the pavement under a colourful sunset. In here, was quiet, a soft light, the purring of the animal as he licked Emily’s forearm. In here, the sound of a girl crying, like a child, with small fastidious sniffs and gulps. She did not want me to know she was crying but did not care enough to move away.
The wall opened. Behind it was an intensely blue sky, a blue sharply clear and cold, blue that never was in nature. From horizon to horizon the sky stood uniformly filled with colour, and with nowhere in it that depth which leads the eye inwards to speculation or relief, the blue that changes with the light. No, this was a sky all self-sufficiency, which could not change or reflect. The tall, sharp, broken walls reached up into it, and to look at them was to experience their tough hardness, like flakes of old paint magnified. Glittering white were these shards of wall, as the sky was blue, a menacing, hardened world.
Emily came into view, her frowning face bent over a task. She wore a soft blue smock-like garment, like an old-fashioned child from a nursery, and she held a broom made of twigs, the kind used in gardens, and she was massing fallen leaves into heaps that were everywhere on the grass that floored this broken house. But as she swept, as she made her piles, the leaves gathered again around her feet. She swept faster, faster, her face scarlet, desperate. Her broom whirled in a cloud of yellow and orange leaves. She was trying to empty the house of leaves so that the wind could not spread them out again. One room was clear, then another; but outside the leaves lay as high as her knees, the whole world was thickly covered with the leaves that descended as fast as snowflakes everywhere from the horrible sky. The world was being submerged in dead leaves, smothered in them. She turned herself about in an impulsive movement of panic to see what was happening inside the rooms she had cleared: already the piles she had made were being submerged. She ran desperately through the unroofed rooms, to see if here, or here, or here, would be a place that was still covered over and sheltered, still safe from the smothering fall of dead vegetable matter. She did not see me. Her stare, fixed, wide, horrified, passed over me. She saw only the fragments of the walls that could not shelter her, nor keep out the sibilant drift. She stood back against the wall and leaned on her futile little broom, and looked and listened as the leaves rustled and fell over and about her and over the whole world in a storm of decay. She vanished, a staring little figure, a small bright-coloured girl, like a painted china ornament for a cabinet or a shelf, a vivid clot of colour on painted whiteness, the horrible whiteness of the nursery world that opened out of the parents’ bedroom where the summer or a storm or a snow-world lay on the other side of thick curtains.
White. White shawls and blankets and bedding and pillows. In an interminable plain of white an infant lay buried and unable to free its arms. It stared at a white ceiling.Turning its head it saw a white wall one way and the edge of a white cupboard the other. White enamel. White walls. White wood.
The infant was not alone; something was moving about, a heavy tramping creature, each footstep making the cot shake. Thud, thud, went the heavy feet, and there was a clash of metal on stone. The infant lifted its head and could not see, it strained to hold its head up from the damp heat of the pillow, but had to let go and fall back, into the soft heat. Never, not until she would come to he helpless on her deathbed, all strength gone from her limbs, nothing left to her but the consciousness behind her eyes, would she again be as helpless as she was now. The enormous tramping creature came thudding to the cot, whose iron bars shook and rattled, and as the great face bent over her, she was excavated from the hot white and whisked up, losing her breath, and was gripped in hands that pressed on her ribs. She was dirty. Already. Dirty. The sound of the. word was disapproval, disgust, dislike. It meant being bundled about, turned this way and that, between hard knocking hands, like a piece of filleted fish on a slab, or a chicken being stuffed.
Dirty, dirty … the harsh, cold sound of the word, to me watching this scene, was the air of the ‘personal’, the un-alterability of the laws of this world. Whiteness, dislike sounding in a word, a frigidity, a smothering, as the air fell and fell, dragged down by a storm of white in which the puppets jerked on their strings … Suppose, then, that the dams were to fill up with ice and the snows came down forever, an eternal descent of white; suppose the rooms filed up with cold powder, all water gone and crystallized, all warmth held latent in dry chill air that shocked and starved the lungs … a scene of the parents’ bedroom, where the white curtains are drawn back, drifts of white dotted muslin. Beyond these the snow is white on white again, for the sky is blotted out. The two great beds lifted high, high, halfway to the smothering white ceiling, are filled. Mother in one, father in the other. There is a new thing in the room, a cot, all white again, a gelid, glittering white. A tall thing, this cot, not as high as the towering beds that have the great people in them, but still beyond one’s reach. A white figure bustles in, the one whose bosom is a full slope, which is hard. A bundle is lifted from the cot. While the two people in the beds smile encouragingly, this bundle is held out and presented to her face. The bundle smells, it smells: sharp and dangerous are these odours, like scissors, or hard tormenting hands. Such a desolation and an alone-ness as no one in the world (except everyone in the world) has felt, she feels now, and the violence of her pain is such that she can do nothing but stand there, stiff, staring first at the bundle, then at the great white-clothed nurse, then at the mother and the father smiling in their beds.
She could have sunk down and away from the sight of them, the smiling ones, the great people held up high there against the ceiling in their warm stifling room, red and white, white and red, red carpet, the red flames crowding there in the fireplace. It is all too much, too high, too large, too powerful; she does not want anything but to creep away and hide somewhere, to let it all slide away from her. But she is being presented again and again with the smelling bundle.
'Now, then, Emily, this is your baby,’ comes the smiling but peremptory voice from the large woman’s bed. ‘It is your baby, Emily.’
This lie confuses her. Is it a game, a joke, at which she must laugh and protest, as when her father ‘tickles’ her, a torture which will recur in nightmares for years afterwards? Should she now laugh and protest and wriggle? She stares around at the faces, the mother, the father, the nurse, for all have betrayed her. This is not her baby, and they know it, so why … But again and again they say: This is your baby, Emily, and you must love him.’
The bundle was being pushed against her, and she was supposed to put her arms out and hold it. Another deception, for she was not holding it, the nurse did. But now they were smiling and commending her for holding the thing in her arms. And so it was all too much, the lies were too much, the love was too much. They were too strong for her. And she did hold the baby: it was always being lifted down to her, against her, towards her. She held it and she loved it With a passionate, violent, protective love that had at its heart a trick and a betrayal, heat with a core of ice …
Now the room is the one with the red velvet curtains, and a little girl of about four, dressed in a flowered smock, is standing over a pudgy open-mouthed infant who sits slackly on a piece of linoleum stretched across the carpet.
‘No, not like that, like this,’ she commands, as the little boy, gazing in admiration at this strong and clever mentor of his, attempts to put a block on another block. It topples off. ‘Like this,’ she shrills, and
feverishly kneels and puts blocks one on top of another, very fast and skillfully. She is quite absorbed, every atom of her, in her need to do this, to do it well, to show she can do it, to prove to herself she can do it. The amiable infant sits there, is watching, is impressed, but to do it is the thing, yes, to do it, to place the blocks one above the other, perfectly, corner to corner, edge to edge: “No, not like that, like this!’ The words ring through the room, the room next door, the rooms downstairs, the garden. ‘Like this, Baby, don’t you see? Like this.’
• • • • •
Things continued to be easier between Emily and me, because of my visit to her other home. I was able, for instance, to comment on her smeared face and swollen eyes one morning. She had not been to Gerald’s place the day before,
and showed no signs of going now. It was already midday and she had not dressed. She wore what she had slept in, a cotton shift-like garment that had once been a summer evening-dress. She was on the floor, her arms around Hugo.
‘I don’t really see what I am doing there at all,’ she said, and meant it as a question.
‘I should have said you were doing everything there.’
She held her look steadily on me; she smiled — bitter, and not self-consciously so. ‘Yes, but if I didn’t, someone would.’
Now, this I did not expect: it was, if you like, too adult a thought. Even while I was privately commending her on it, I was also reacting with alarm, for the other side of this thought, its shadow, is dark indeed, and leads to every sort of listlessness and despair: it is often the first step, to be precise about it, towards suicide … at the very least, it is the most deadly of the energy-drainers.
But I sidestepped with: ‘Very true. True for every one of us. But that doesn’t mean to say we can all stay in bed I But the thought in my mind is, why do you feel like this now? This moment. What triggered it off?’
She smiled - oh yes, she was very quick, very shrewd: “Well I’m not going to cut my throat!’ And then, in a complete switch of level, a plunge, she cried out: ‘But if I did, what of it?’
‘Is it Maureen?’ I asked. I could think of nothing else to offer.
My stupidity enabled her to check herself; she was back again, on her own level. She looked at me; she looked - oh, those looks, which I took one after another, light mocking blows. This one meant: Oh, a melodrama! He does not love me, he loves another!
‘Maureen …’ she let slip out of her, like a shrug, and did in fact shrug. But then, condescending, she allowed: ‘It is not Maureen, actually, at this very minute it is June.’
And she waited and watched, with her little sour smile, for my ‘What, nonsense, it can’t be!’
‘It’s not right, is it?’ she mimicked.
‘But she’s - how old?’
‘Actually, she is eleven, but she says she is twelve.’
She was smiling now, and out of her own, her real philosophy: my energetic disapproval was feeding energy into her, and she even sat up and laughed. My tongue was rejecting, one after another, an assortment of verbalizations, not one of which, I knew, could earn anything less than mockery. Finally, she did mock me again with: ‘Well, she can’t get pregnant, that’s something at least.’
I wasn’t going to capitulate. ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘it can’t possibly be good for her.’
Her smile changed: it was a little sad, envious perhaps; it meant: You forget we are not in a position to afford your standards. We are not so fortunate, remember?
Because of this smile, I stayed quiet, and then she said: “You’re thinking, Oh she’s just a child, how wrong! - that sort of thing, but I'm thinking, June was my friend and now she isn’t.’
And now I really was silenced. For what nonsense was this? If June was not a friend now, she would be in a week, when Gerald went on to one of the others. In one moment -and it seemed that this happened a dozen times a day — Emily had switched from a realm of sophistication far beyond me (making that word mean an acceptance, an understanding, of how things work) to being a child, really a child, and even as they used to be … I shrugged, leaving her to it. I could not help it, this switchbacking conversation had been too much for me.
Emily felt the shrug as a condemnation of her, and she cried out: ‘I’ve never had anyone before, not anyone really close, like June.’ And her face was turned away to hide a child’s tears.
And that is how blind one can be about a thing. For I had been seeing the child June adoring the ‘older woman’, as was natural, and is a stage in every person’s growth. I had never understood how much Emily depended on that thin, sharp-faced waif, who not only looked three years younger, but was in a different realm altogether, as different as childhood is from young womanhood.
I could only offer: ‘You know he will get tired of her and you will be friends again.’
She almost shrieked in her exasperation at my old-fashioned ways and thoughts: ‘It is not a question of getting tired.’
“What then. Tell me.’
She looked at me, in her turn shrugged and said: “Well, things are quite different, aren’t they … he just has to -make the rounds, I suppose. Like a cat marking his territory.’ And she laughed, a little, at the thought.
‘Well, whatever your original and brilliant new customs are, the point is, June will be free quite soon, surely?”
‘But I miss her now,’ she wept, a little girl again, thumbs sweeping tears from her eyes; but up she jumped, and said, as an adult: ‘Anyway, I have to go there, whether I like it or not.’ And off she did go, red-eyed, miserable, full of a suppressed anger that showed in every movement. She went because her sense of duty would not let her do otherwise.
Behind my flowery wall was a straight-upstanding, a tall, fine, white-shining house. I looked at it from some way off, then came closer, noting that this was the first time I had approached a house from outside, instead of finding myself inside another building from the moment I crossed the mysterious frontier. It was a solid and well-kept house, in style rather like the Cape Dutch, whose every sober curve speaks of the burgher, the bourgeois. The house shone, with a peculiar soft glisten. It was made of a substance which was familiar in itself, but not when shaped into a house. I broke a piece off it and ate: sweet, dissolving on the tongue. A sugar house, like the one in fairy tales; or if not sugar, then the edible substance they once used to wrap bars of nougat. I kept breaking off bits and earing and tasting … it was compulsively edible, because it was unsatisfying, cloying: one could eat and eat and never be filled with this white insipidity. There was Emily, breaking off whole pieces of the roof and cramming them into her healthy mouth; there, too, was June, languidly picking and choosing. A fragment of wall, a piece of windowpane … we ate and ate our way into the house like termites, our stomachs laden but unsatisfied, unable to stop ourselves, but nauseated. Eating my way around a corner I saw a room in that region I knew was the ‘personal’. I knew the room. A small room, with strong sunlight coming through the window. A stone floor, and a cot in the middle of it, and in the cot, a child, a small girl. Emily, absorbed, oblivious. She was eating -chocolate. No, excrement. She had opened her bowels into the freshness of the white bed and had taken handfuls of the stuff and smeared it everywhere with quick shrieks of triumph and joy. She had smeared it on sheets and blankets, over the wood of the cot, over herself, over her face and into her hair, and there she sat, a little monkey, thoughtfully tasting and digesting.
This scene - child, cot, sunlit room - diminished sharply, dwindled in the beam of my vision, and was whisked away to be replaced by the same scene made smaller, reduced by the necessity to diminish and so to contain pain; for suddenly there were heavy clanging steps on the stone, a loud angry voice, slaps, heavy breathing - there were low mutters and then exclamations of disgust, and the child yelling and screaming, first in anger, and then after an interval when she was half drowned by the vigor with which she was scrubbed and swished about in a deep and over-hot bath, in despair. She wept i
n innocent despair, as the big woman snuffed and sniffed at her, to see if the stink of shit had been washed away but found (still, in spite of the too-hot water that had scalded and burned, in spite of the scrubbing which had left the fragile skin painful and red) a faint tainted odour, so that she had to keep on exclaiming in disgust and in fright. The mother was exclaiming over and over again in dislike of her; the child was sobbing with exhaustion. She was dumped down in a playpen, and her cot was taken out for a scrubbing and a disinfecting. Alone in her disgrace, she sobbed on and on.
A child crying. The miserable lost sound of incomprehension.
You are a naughty girl, Emily, naughty, naughty, naughty, disgusting, filthy, dirty, dirty, dirty dirty dirty dirty, a dirty girl, Emily, you are a dirty, naughty, oh disgusting, you are a filthy dirty dirty girl, Emily.’
I wandered looking for her in adjacent rooms, but never finding the right one, though I could hear Emily’s misery sometimes very close. Often I knew her to be through a single wall: I could have touched her if there had not been a wall there. But, following that wall to its end, it led beyond the ‘personal’ and I was out on a bright green lawn or small field with summer trees standing about its edges. On the lawn was an egg. It was the size of a small house, but poised so lightly it moved in a breeze. Around this brilliant white egg, under a bright sky, moved Emily, her mother, and her father, and - this was as improbable an association of people as one could conceive - June too, close to Emily. There they strayed, contented in the sunlight, with the light breeze moving their clothes. They touched the egg. They stood back and looked at it. They smiled; they were altogether full of delight and pleasure. They laid their faces to the smooth healthy slope of the egg’s surface, so that their cheeks could experience it; they smelled it; they gently rocked it with their fingertips. All this scene was large and light and pleasurable, was freedom - and from it I turned a corner sharp back to a narrow and dark passageway and the sound of a child’s crying … of course I had been mistaken, she had not been behind that wall at all, there was another one, and I knew exactly where it was. I began to run, I ran, I had to reach her. I was conscious that I was also reluctant, for I was not looking forward to the moment when I, too, would smell that faint contaminating smell in her hair, her skin. I was setting myself a task as I ran: I was not to show my repugnance, as her mother had done with her sharply indrawn breath, a controlled retching, the muscles of her stomach convulsing again and again, her quivering dislike of the child communicating itself down through the arms which lifted Emily up and away from the scene of her pleasure, and dropped her sharp and punishing into the bath where the water, from the need for haste, was still cold, but where very hot water was flooding and the two streams of very hot and very cold water swirled all around her, scalding and freezing her legs and stomach. But I could not find her, I never did find her, and the crying went on and on and on, and I could hear it in the day, in my ‘real’ life.