I for Isobel (18 page)

She memorised the book: purple cloth fading to a dead leaf brown, paper like dirty old daylight, like the ceiling stain…a little devil thought popped into her head, of teasing him into being really nasty. That would make it so much easier to steal the book.

How her mind reacted to that one, all of a piece, was astounding: like a rabble finding formation to present a firm capital NO like the Harp of Erin on Saint Patrick's Day. Freedom, indeed—she felt as if she had walked into a fence.

A safety fence.

She was going to steal the book, just the same. She slid it into place on the shelf, stood bravely up and walked, without straightening her shoulders or pulling her stomach in (she had her pride) to the chair where her clothes were.

After all, he shut his eyes, so it was no ordeal. That was polite of him—she was sorry she was going to steal his book. Quickly she put on bra and briefs, blouse and skirt, found her comb in her bag and, combing her hair, said, ‘Shall I make a cup of coffee? Would you like one?'

Frail and pained, he murmured with closed eyes, ‘Not for me, thank you.' Then his eyes opened, seeing release. ‘But make one, if you'd like one. You'll find the stuff in the cupboard over the sink.'

‘Thanks.'

She stepped into her sandals, picked up her bag and left it in front of the bookcase (cunning, cunning), and went into the kitchen. Sure enough, while she was looking for the coffee in the cupboard she heard the bathroom door shut. She listened; the cistern roared. When she heard the shower running, she sped into the bedroom, took the book and put it in her bag, loosened books to hide the space, opened the door that led to the stairs and the street and shut it quietly behind her.

She ran down the stairs and opened the front door on to bright daylight in an empty street lined with houses still sleeping, closed on a secret life like the book. That was good, life presenting a mystery. Made it seem alive.

That's a brilliant thought, Isobel, making life seem alive. Well, she knew what she meant, if thousands wouldn't.

That was the kind of thought that set the word factory groaning, grinding and defining, but for once the word factory was out of action, and oh! the peace and quiet.

She stepped out happily until she turned the corner into a broad quiet street of trees and handsome houses that led to a main road where cars were flashing past already. On the far corner, a telephone box.

Memory rose like vomit. Now you remember who you are, Isobel. You're a pervert, a phone freak.

But not any more, not any more. Does time ever pass?

Not for you. For you time never passes. Time becomes space in your mind.

Crimson, pagoda-roofed, the phone box leered like an evil little joss house for one devil worshipper. She forced herself towards it, thinking angrily, ‘What made them listen? Why didn't they put the phone down straight away?' Well, some of them had, and that had become part of the game, fishing up a victim on the end of her invisible line—and in the end there was always a listener, a puzzled voice giving the cues she wanted, not able to free itself in time.

Collecting pennies for the phone had been a dirty private pleasure but the best worst moment had been when the words came, and she shuddered with satisfaction as she let out the stream of hatred. The kind of bang other people must get out of sex.

She bent in misery, remembering the calm scornful voice that had said without pity, ‘What an unhappy person you must be.' She had put the phone down, writhing in defeat and humiliation, had plunged out of the box…she was writhing now, the pain as bad as ever…she felt in her bag, seized the book, held it against her chest.

Christ but it was comic (though far from funny) standing there in the street pointing bone against bone, book against telephone box, but it worked. She straightened up and walked towards the box, in control. And why not? If a telephone box can make you sick to your stomach, why shouldn't a book make you feel better? Coming close to the box, with the book held up solemnly in front of her—she couldn't help guying the situation, it was so fantastic—she felt a needle-thrust of sorrow, remembering the one voice that had answered her with a cry of sadness. That was the one that had stopped her with a real answer; crying ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' she had put the phone down on the dirty little game for ever. Like in a black fairytale, the formula had turned toad—well, not into prince, don't get carried away—but into a human being of sorts. I wish she could know what she did for me, she thought. Perhaps she did know; perhaps the cry ‘I'm sorry' had carried its message.

She was past the phone box. Round the corner there was a bus stop and a city-bound bus was coming. She ran to board it, walked past a few passengers, numb-faced with sleep or boredom, to the back of the bus, sat with the book on her knee, thinking, ‘Readable, too,'—which was as funny as if it had been edible. It fell open at a page—she liked that, a sort of ghost-communication—but oh, hell, it was St John of the Cross, not a fun character at all. No joy in the yellowed page, the mean tiny print and St John of the Cross on self and senses:
The soul must of necessity—if we would attain to the Divine union of God—pass through the obscure night of mortification of the desires, and self-denial in all things. The reason is that all the love we bestow on creatures is in the eyes of God mere darkness, and that while we are involved therein, the soul is incapable of being enlightened and possessed by the pure and simple light of God, unless we first cast it away.

Therein—what a fat, complacent word.

She shut the book, wishing she had one or two of the things the saints had cast away. Wouldn't even mind a few desires.

Well, that was a washout.

Once it was shut, the book was a talisman again. Mysterious. Book against telephone box—she knew what the telephone box meant all right, but what was it about the book? The cover? A faded purple cushion? Happiness in a room with purple curtains? In Auntie Ann's house? Purple wasn't in, then. Purple was religion and funerals. If you did know, the charm might stop working. Take what comes and be thankful.

She got off the bus at Central, walked up to the station to get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, then to the Ladies. She had put the book on the ledge above the basin and was doing her hair, looking in the glass and hating her face, as usual, because she had got so much of it from her mother: little mouth with thick full-blown lips; sharp chin and heavy straight eyebrows, a face made for gloom, people always telling her she was sulking when she wasn't, when the face shaped and softened with the beginning of a laugh because she was thinking those features weren't her mother's; she had had the tenancy of them for fifty years but they had been on the go for generations; that nose had taken snuff, sniffed at pomanders, plague posies, smelling salts, rose hip, orris root—things she had never smelt and never would—as well as honeysuckle, gas leaks and lavender, not to mention…and the mouth had prayed and cursed, kissed and said ‘I love you'—it must have, to get so far, it stood to reason…and the eyes—what cities had they seen? What arches, branches, long galleries of leaves becalmed, sober asphalt leading down to drunken sad-breathed seas, spires pointing out of the dirty brocade that sunlight lays on house-covered slopes…

She loved the place, the world, the vast, the multitudinous…blue-white pinnacles, marble mirrored in still water, lost cities overgrown, mysterious altars, forests and castles and the great shining slow-moving glaciers, the infinity of skylines…the wealth of the world and the sense of being nineteen years old, those cells fruiting so precisely into eyes and mouth and all, every one of them nineteen years old, sent her upwards on a Ferris wheel of joy, so that she bent her head forward to hide her shining face behind the fall of hair she was combing till she settled quietly on earth again.

She was still so carried away though that she went without the book, ran back to get it and put it in her bag with such relief—shabby little object that it was—she had to laugh at herself.

And speaking of books…
My Book of Picture Stamps of the World
—India: The Taj Mahal; Peru (Cuzco): The Ancient Temple of the Sun; A Peasant of the Pyrenees…it was out of those sober little stamps that the great wheeling vision of the world had come. How strange, a joy you cellared when you were maybe ten years old coming up so drinkable at nineteen.

Feeling buoyant enough to go back and face her room, instead of drifting about the town, she took a bus to Glebe and walked to the rooming house. Buoyancy was needed when she opened the door on the squalor of the room, the unwashed china and the greasy frying pan on the table, the heap of dirty clothes on the floor in the corner—a person couldn't make such a mess by accident, she must have been trying to tell herself something.

Silence and solitude. Silence had started the word factory, solitude had driven her to the evil telephone game. Squalor within demanded squalor without: she dropped her dirty clothes in the corner and was more depressed to see them there.

One works from the laundry bag inwards. Suiting action to thought, she took the bag from the hook behind the door and put the clothes in it.

She didn't have to be solitary. She could go with Frank to Party meetings, where, he said, she would meet people like herself.

‘I don't try to sell it to people usually, Isobel. I just happen to think it's the right thing for you.'

‘You have to think what they tell you to think.'

‘But what they tell you is right.'

She wanted a cause to live for but could not adopt one; the cause would have to find her.

Sitting on the bed, she looked around her, considering how to make the room more liveable. The worst thing in sight, apart from the dirty dishes, now that she had (so easily!) removed the heap of clothes, was the flap of wallpaper hanging loose above the table. She had tried to glue it once; the glue had failed and she had resigned herself to it, though it nagged at her with the urge to seize it and rip, making things worse. She could trim that off and hide the patch, tack up a colour print from a magazine—she was caught by a longing for richness, for padded satin stitch glowing in crimson and russet, a panel of embroidery.

You could make one.

Of the dogs of the past that were always yapping at her heels, one nipped her so that she winced. Well known for her exquisite embroidery, our Isobel. Miss Harman the sewing teacher. Bitch. ‘Now bring out your work, Isobel Callaghan.' (Free design for a flower in long and short stitch, or filled-in stem, choose your colours from the cotton box, girls.) Out she had bustled, expecting praise (Miss Harman's tone having promised the class a treat) for the big shining flower with streaks of pink and scarlet radiating from its crimson centre. Not warned by all the others with their demure roses shading from pink to cream, their yellow-eyed white daisies.

‘And what kind of flower is this, Isobel?' Miss Harman's lips had twitched. ‘Is it a rose? Do you think it is a rose, girls?' She had held it up for the class to see (as Isobel had foreseen, but so differently). ‘No, I don't think it's a rose.' The class had begun to snigger, perceiving that it was invited to a moment's holiday. ‘I don't believe I've ever seen a flower like that, and I'm sure I would have remembered.'

Shouts of laughter and Isobel not knowing what to do with the smile on her face. She had to get rid of it as best she could, knowing that its slow fading would be the best part of the joke, so she widened it and pretended to go along with the laughter. That had made Miss Harman furious. She had handed back the piece of cloth saying, ‘Go back to your place, you stupid girl. There is nothing funny about vulgar bad taste.'

Saint John of the Cross was right up the pole. The obscure night of mortification of the desires and self-denial in all things—what came of that was people like Miss Harman. Saints that get drafted. Compulsory sainthood.

Well, she had put Isobel off embroidery for life.

But why? She still felt in her fingers the pleasure of placing the silk thread deftly and precisely. Miss Harman was far away, perhaps dead, and Isobel could embroider flowers in any colour she liked, pink, purple, whatever. This was known as freedom. She began to laugh, then looked at the clock. Ten to eleven; she could make it to Grace Brothers and shop before closing time. She jumped up, ran to the loo and back, picked up her bag and was off again, crazy for the embroidery panel.

She came back gasping with fatigue after a rush of shopping and dropped her parcels on the bed: a book of embroidery designs, carbon paper, tracing paper, pencil, ruler, scissors and needles, linen, silks (no purple after all—bronze, gold, crimson, cream, pink, olive green, dead-leaf brown). She opened the book of designs to the one she had chosen, a stylised tree bearing an improbable miscellany of flowers, fruit and birds.

How much she had to do before the desired moment when she would thread her needle and set the first stitch: trace the design, enlarge the tracing, trace the enlargement onto the linen. Also wash up, eat, wash up, find out what the book meant…

Working on the tracing went well with pondering.

One thought she had been dodging—suppose it was religion that gave the book its power? If it was, too bad. Religion was out. She used to think a lot about God; then, one day, she had asked herself if He existed, and that had been that. But she had had a religious craze once—she must have been quite small, for the plaster feet with their painted blood and the ghastly nail driven through them were at eye level when she had knelt in front of the big crucifix. It had been kid stuff—God the imaginary friend—going in to pray, or to visit, before she went home (one might well). She had given it up quite soon because as an imaginary friend God was limited. You couldn't tell Him everything, you had to be on your best behaviour. Besides, she hadn't liked Him, and the more she had dealt with Him, the less she had liked Him. No, it couldn't be religion. What the book meant, the atmosphere…aura…shut up, this is important…the book meant friendship, company at least. Communication and understanding.