Judith (32 page)

My handholds and footholds were difficult: I could not pay much attention to what was happening overhead: I thought – That is right: I have to be getting on with what I am doing. I imagined Bert to be standing with his arms out like a bird: becoming entangled, or stepping gracefully, on to a hook. I thought – Oh yes, with God that fisherman in thigh-length boots like a woman! There were still all these images, like flies, like pollen: but how difficult it is not to fall! After a time the sound of the helicopter went away. I thought Bert must have gone with it. Would he be hanging in the air, waving – Coo-ee! – from his chariot-rocket to heaven?

The helicopter, I supposed, could have been to do with the army or police: it was more likely, yes, to be to do with Bert's film company.

I was still hanging on to my rock-face: my own face pressed against the wall. There was pain here and there. I thought – I am like someone trying to get out of that cave –

– a hummingbird in front of a flower –

– or I am the child that is hanging on inside me?

When I reached the window – I had imagined that the boundary of the battle-area would coincide with the front of the house, this being the extremity of the piece of land that jutted like a lump beneath the skin: so that it would be, yes, a strange territory on to which I looked out – when I reached the window – pivoting on my hands, my stomach, my feet left somewhere behind me; how slow this was! what an inch by inch effort! – at first it was the somewhat distant view that I saw: this was, indeed, like the substance of a painting: one of those Flemish landscapes dotted with animals like stars: these animals were sheep: they were in a huge green parkland very lush and bright: the light was such that it seemed to come (as it does in such a landscape) not from reflection but from the objects themselves; the sheep and the grassland and the trees dotted here and there appearing to be, yes, their own suns. I thought – And the trees even contain their own shadows: so they are at once darkness and light. This was, indeed, like
some entrance into the content of a picture (the being-at-home in the Garden of Eden by the back way?): the Milky Way spread out and around with each particle exact: it also seemed to be a landscape into which humans (because they feared to carry their own light?) had not yet come.

I had, I suppose, glimpsed such a landscape once or twice before – in the Australian desert; on the plains of Africa where zebra graze. But in so far as this landscape was framed as if within a picture, it did seem to be in this sense at least in a style into which humans had come – in that they were able to be painters of pictures. I thought – And by what strange routes does one get here!

I tried to push myself further into the window so that I could see directly down. I did not have to worry too much now about footholds: I did not worry, certainly, about what I would find below. I mean, there would be no body on the pavement: there would just be, as it were, that empty nest of stones: with Bert, for sure, having flown. Directly beneath the front of the house there was a terrace: the terrace had weeds growing between the stones and a broken balustrade: I thought – You mean, it is the edge of a stage that a body goes over! Beyond the balustrade there were slopes and steps going down to the bright-and-exact parkland. There were two stone lions at the bottom of the steps: they looked out over the sheep and lambs. There was even a dried-up fountain and a statue with roses growing over it. I was on my stomach, balancing, my head and feet in the air. I wanted to say – There, do you see, my little one? In the distance, over by a far line of plantation trees, there was a white figure on a dark horse moving. I thought – She is on the threshold of the landscape? she is already within? I assumed the figure to be that of a woman. I thought – Perhaps she is myself: this is a picture even now being painted, like that one by Anita Kroll?

Now I want to put in here (since I have touched on the subject, and because it took me some time to get back on my way to the American airbase) about a time when I went to visit Oliver – I
mean, not long after I returned to England from my time seven years ago in the Garden.

Oliver was at a place in the country where he had gone because he was ill: I had thought that he might be dying. He himself had often thought about dying. I wondered if he had got used to it.

I went by train into the sort of country where there are wooded gorges with rivers at the bottom and houses stuck on slopes – not a landscape so much as a rock-garden.

The house was a low stone monastery-like construction, built, I suppose, at the end of the nineteenth century. There was a chapel with two gothic pinnacles. In front of the house were wooden seats facing a lawn on which old men were playing bowls.

Oliver was on one of these seats; he had lost his hair: he was very thin. He seemed to have been watching the drive for me. When I saw him I thought I might say – I did love you, you know: I had never quite loved anyone before in my life.

When Oliver smiled he was able to look more wicked than he had ever done before, perhaps because now he was supposed to be holy.

He said ‘Hullo.'

I said ‘Hullo.'

He said ‘You're looking very well.' Then – ‘Can't say the same about me.'

I thought – When people are hollowed out, holy, they are in contact with the dead like those caves that make booming noises from the sea?

We sat side by side on the wooden seat, watching bowls.

I said ‘I thought I should thank you.'

He said ‘For what?'

I said ‘For whatever it was you did, or didn't do, after Desmond died. It couldn't have been easy.'

He said ‘Oh that!'

On the lawn the old men threw balls, and lumbered after them, and veered to one side, as the balls did, before they all came to rest.

He said The thing I had to do, really, as it always is, was nothing.'

I said ‘What exactly is wrong with you?'

He said ‘I'm on this drug.'

I thought – They give you drugs, of course, to combat drugs. Then – What did I mean, when I thought you were a survivor?

He said ‘It's when they give me the drug that I can't do anything.'

He stretched his neck from time to time as if he were reaching for something like an apple; or were being tickled by a leaf, or a shadow, just beyond the framework of a picture.

I said ‘I went away.'

He said ‘I know.' Then – ‘Did you find what you wanted?'

I said ‘Yes.'

He said ‘What was it?'

I thought I must not say – One cannot put it into words.

I said ‘I suppose, a way of looking at things.'

He said ‘What way?'

I said ‘At yourself looking.'

I thought – But this, surely, is what he is doing: stretching his neck, tickling himself, from just outside the picture.

He said ‘The problem is, to get messages through to the muscles from the brain.'

I said ‘Can they cure it?'

He said ‘No.' Then – ‘You've got to do some trick.'

I thought – How would one tell whether or not those old men playing bowls were mad – throwing balls, roaming after them, swerving and coming to rest? –

He said ‘Get them when they aren't looking! Don't give them time to see what you're up to!'

I thought – What? The muscles? People? Bits and pieces in the brain?

He said ‘You've got to pretend to be doing something else: then you've got them!'

I thought I might say – But it's not just a trick –

– This place: there's something outside, that you hook on to?

I began to feel sad. I thought – I suppose I had hoped everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, even with Oliver.

He said ‘You know when I took that overdose –'

I said ‘Yes.'

He said ‘I thought that was quite a good trick!' He laughed.

I thought – Well, was it?

He said ‘I mean, I didn't mean to take the pills. I thought I'd trick you.'

I tried to work this out. I said ‘Then why did you take them?'

He said ‘I don't know.' Then – ‘I mean, I think I simply got bored of tricks.'

I thought – Well then, can I think: That was all right, wasn't it?

He said ‘Also, I didn't think I'd get you.'

I thought – By a trick? Then – Well, you wouldn't, would you?

He stared for a long time in front of him. He stretched his neck.

I thought – The trick is, for it not to be a trick?

He suddenly got up off the seat and started running towards the people playing bowls. He ran at a trot, his arms hanging down, leaning forwards. Then he stopped, some way on to the lawn, and looked back. He said ‘There!'

I said ‘That's good!'

He said ‘Quite a good trick!'

I said ‘Yes, I see that!'

He said ‘You do things: then sometimes something quite different is happening.'

I said ‘But it's not a trick!'

He said ‘No. That's right.' Then – ‘I did get you!'

He was this old man on a lawn, his arms hanging down. He was like some sort of self-portrait. You know how self-portraits
seem to be looking at you: they seem even to be painting you: they are not often, as Oliver was, laughing.

When I got to the American airbase (you need a map of this strange territory? the airbase was a few miles to the west of the battle-area) the entrance was at the edge of a village where, like the village with the railway station, there was a pub, a church, a village green. I thought – These patterns are in our minds: we set them out like toys here and there.

There was a road along the side of a high wire fence within which were the concrete buildings of the airbase: the land was at the top of a slightly convex plateau so that you could not see more than a certain distance inside. On the horizon the noses of one or two aeroplanes poked out as if they were those of animals in a zoo.

The demonstrators were assembled on the side of the road opposite the gates: there was a crowd on the village green and stretching each way along the road. There were, I suppose, some four or five thousand demonstrators: they carried banners and balloons; there were babies on people's backs and in push-chairs. On the green were groups having picnics. It was like some sporting occasion or a pop concert, or the location for an epic film.

On the edge of the crowd, and dotted amongst it, were police. The police seemed to be acting as if the demonstrators were not there: the demonstrators were acting as if the police were not there. I thought – Actors think they have to act as if their audiences were not there.

Sometimes two or three demonstrators, as if deliberately, would stand very close to the police while they talked. It was not clear whether they wanted to make the point that they thought the police were, or were not, there.

The gates across the road were a high wire construction with sentry-huts inside. A few senior policemen stood chatting in the roadway. Within were five or six soldiers standing and not talking. I thought – Soldiers do not have to talk because they carry weapons.

Further along the road in the direction beyond the village there was an estate of modern red-brick houses where, it seemed, the families of the American airmen lived. This was not fenced off (the animals were not dangerous?): every now and then a car or small bus would move, carrying people between the houses and the airbase. The vehicle would stop at the gates: those inside the bus would not look out while a policeman looked in: then a soldier would open the gates and the car or bus would move on.

At the other side of the road from the group of houses, where the perimeter fence of the airbase left the road and went off into a wood, there was a path which led (so I guessed and learned later) to the camp of the women who had been keeping a vigil outside. These women had previously been encamped near the gates: they had been moved on, with some violence it was said, just before the demonstration. The women had fled into the woods like witches. They reappeared here and there in twos and threes: they could be distinguished because for the most part they wore padded jackets and loose trousers and Wellington boots. They moved among the police and the demonstrators as if they were showing, impartially, that they recognised neither group to be there.

I thought – People do only recognise things similar to themselves?

– But still, each is only here because of the other that they do not recognise: they are reacting to phantoms; they are not looking at themselves.

I could walk amongst them as if I myself were unseen. This was a desire I remembered having in childhood. I thought – But an agent in occupied territory, there to recognise without being recognised – that would be looking at herself?

I saw Lilia on the far side of the road. She was talking to the policemen by the gates. She was wearing white dungarees, a white scarf and white boots. I thought – She is an angel of life or death; it was not her I saw riding in the battle-area?

Or – She is that angel, off-stage, waiting to go into a courtyard.

Of course, I had known Lilia would be at the demonstration. I had not expected to come across her so easily.

I thought – We should meet in one of those amphitheatres of Greece: to shout at each other across the stage; with blood on the floor like the setting sun.

– What was the name of that girl who took Jason from Medea?

I had expected Lilia's child to be with her. I thought it was odd she was not with her child.

Beyond the gates, in front of which Lilia was talking to the policemen, there were the burrows with the noses of planes and missiles peeping out.

Lilia turned away from the group of policemen. I wondered if I could make her look at me. I might do this if I could get myself not to try to make her look at me – and so on.

The crowd was lining up to march off somewhere – perhaps to the local town; perhaps to another airbase. There were clergymen and a bishop or two at the head of the column (this was, after all, a demonstration on Easter Saturday: well, what do you think was happening in that tomb?). I thought I might say to Lilia – Of course you want to kill me! Of course I have wanted to kill you! but we can all come alive, can we not, at the end of Act III? There was a group with guitars around the bishops; they began to play; the column moved off. I thought – It is on Easter Saturday, is it not, that there is the Harrowing of Hell? Policemen had formed in a line on either side of the road; demonstrators flowed like a river between them. The police were guarding both the airbase and the village; the demonstrators would run down safely and be lost in the sea.