The Bad Samaritan (3 page)

“I'm very interested, er—sorry, I don't know your name.”

“They call me Stan here.”

Rosemary was about to say that didn't sound very romantic, but she thought she might give the wrong impression, so she simply said, “Good night, Stan,” and watched him open an unmarked door and bound up the poky stairs to his room in the attic.

The next morning, after a leisurely breakfast in which she admired Stan's dexterity with five or six plates and his excellent memory for orders of great complexity, Rosemary walked down to the lower part of the town. Here she could see the other Scarborough: whelk stalls, fortune-tellers, amusement arcades and streets littered with takeaway cartons. Come the summer holidays and there would be people in funny hats with slogans on them, fat women in skimpy cheap dresses, screaming children with snotty noses. “There is nothing for me here,” Rosemary said to herself and walked on to the beach and down to the sea's edge.

The sea should have put her in mind of eternal things, but it did not. She was niggling away at her previous thought:
why
had the lower town nothing for her? It was a loud, vulgar, happy kind of place in its way, yet she shrank from it, hated the harsh music with the heavy bass issuing from the arcades, hated the misspelt and mispunctuated hand-painted advertisements and shop signs. Here am I, a vicar's wife, she thought, someone who ought to be in touch with all sorts of people. But the sort of people who come on day trips here in summer are totally alien to me—or if not alien at least foreign. There are no people like that at St Saviour's—there are in the parish, but they don't come to church. Of Paul's parishioners the people I like and the people I dislike—Dark Satanic Mills and Mrs Harridance, for example—are all
middle-class. Am I simply a snob? And if so have I always been one, or have I been made one by Paul's congregation?

She was struck by a horrible thought: people seeing me here, standing by the water's edge, could probably guess that I am a vicar's wife. I dress like a vicar's wife: sensible jumper and skirt, with flat or low-heeled shoes. I have my hair done like a vicar's wife: sensibly tied back so as not to need too much attention. I make up like a vicar's wife: very discreetly. I am a vicar's wife
type
. I can be pigeonholed.

Disturbed, she turned and walked in the direction of St Nicholas's Cliff.

She walked very slowly, keeping close to the sea, stopping now and then to look at the boats. How much more activity, she thought, there would have been out to sea in Anne Brontë's time. And when the Sitwells used to spend their summers here as children. She reached the bottom of the funicular railway and was just wondering whether it was warm enough to sit and read for a bit before finding somewhere for a sandwich and a cup of coffee when she saw the figure of Stan, sitting on an anorak spread out on the sand, gazing abstractedly out to sea.

He looked slight, sad and very vulnerable. Her heart was touched by pity for him, and she felt maternal in a way she could no longer feel for her own son. He was so far from home and so terribly separated from his loved ones. How could one explain what was going on in Yugoslavia? How could European, educated, civilized people do such things to each other? What did it feel like to be one of these people and to have loved ones caught up in the conflict? She found she could not stop herself going over and sitting beside him.

“Hello,” she said. “It's a lovely day, isn't it?”

He looked up at her and smiled shyly.

“Yes, lovely. For England.”

“Would you rather be home in Bosnia?”

“No!” He said it violently, and there was fear in his voice too. “How could I want to be there when things are as they are now? But I would like very much my family here with me.”

“Of course.”

“I would even like to know where they are.”

“You don't know that?”

“No. The last I hear, they are in a camp, my wife and little girl. But that was nearly three months ago. And it was not very far from the fighting. You see why I am so worried?” He shrugged. “What people we are.”

“
How
can that kind of thing happen today?” asked Rosemary passionately. He shrugged again.

“It go back to the war. More back, to when we became Yugoslavia. More back, to the Austrian Empire. More back, more back. Too much history, too many people, too much religions. We all have—what is the word?—things we want revenges for.”

“Grudges.”

“Grudges, yes. We have so many. We want to pay back things our fathers suffered, things our grandfathers suffered. Too many peoples, too much history.”

Rosemary thought it all sounded much like Scottish history in Stuart times. Or Irish history at any time since the Settlements. To change the subject she said, “Have you got a picture of your little girl?”

He nodded, dived into the pocket of his threadbare jacket and shuffled through a pile of snapshots in his bulging wallet. He handed a picture to her. It was a baby in white at its christening, a crucifix in the background.

“She looks lovely . . . . Are you a Christian?”

“Oh yes. But my grandmother is Moslem. We are a bit of everything in my family. Is true of many families in Bosnia. That is
what is so mad, you see: when we fight each other we also fight part of ourselves.”

He put the snapshot tenderly back in the pile of memories and stood up.

“I must go and get ready for lunch. I have one hour free only in morning.”

“They work you hard.”

He shook his head.

“Is good. I not complain. It stop me thinking.”

“Thank you for talking to me, Stan . . . . Do I have to call you Stan? It's a slightly ridiculous name. No young man is called Stan these days.”

“I am Stanko. Call me Stanko.”

“That's better. I'm Rosemary.”

“You not come to lunch, Rosemary?”

“No, I'm on half board. I prefer dinner.”

“Is sensible. Lunch is often offle!”

He raised his hand and disappeared into the tiny station just above the beach. Rosemary stayed on the rock, looking out to sea. She did not take out her book, but for some reason her thoughts strayed to her reading of the night before: to Dr Manette reverting at moments of crisis to the shoemaking he had done for years during his long incarceration. This had reminded her of things learnt at teachers college: of Dickens's own obsessive returning, over and over in the books, to his months in the blacking warehouse. We are all prisoners of the most terrible times in our past, she thought. The child victims of sex abuse, the adult victims of rape, seem never able to put it behind them. What chance was there for Yugoslavs of all races in the future? What chance of Stanko's little girl ever managing to put the experiences of civil war behind her?

That night she decided she ought to ring her husband. She left
it till after ten, when she knew he would be back home, and since she preferred to be entirely private she went out into the street and used the nearest phone box.

“Fine,” she said, in answer to her husband's first questions. “Lots of fresh sea air, not too many people, food perfectly acceptable . . . . I had a phone call from the children last night.”

“Oh dear, I rather thought you might,” said Paul, sounding terribly guilty. “Both of them?”

“Yes, they were apparently off to see
Carousel
together. I suspect Mark had mainly gone to London to make sure the new boyfriend, Kevin, is totally acceptable.”

“I'm sorry about saying anything to them, but Janet rang, and was curious, and . . .”

“That's perfectly all right. Janet I love and can cope with. I did object, though, to being given good advice by Mark. How did we manage to produce a son with such a plummy voice and such a smug manner?”

“He
has
blotted his copybook! You sound very out of love with him.”

“Of
course
I love him . . . . Oh dear, I sound like so many parents I've heard saying
of course
they love their children but they don't actually
like
them very much. Do you think it's possible to love someone without liking them?”

“I'm sure it is. A lot of married couples feel that way about their partners.”

“It sounds very uncomfortable. I'm glad I don't feel that way about you.”

“That's a lovely thing to say. Thank you.” Paul hesitated. “Mark's coming up on Friday.”

“Is he? I hope you told him not to bring his washing.”

“He's welcome to bring it and do it himself in our machine . . . . I rather think he wants to have a serious talk about you.”

“You don't surprise me one little bit.”

“Shall I tell him you're working at the problem?”

“No, tell him to get lost . . . . Oh, I am thinking about it on and off, Paul. But I won't have either of you, and especially him, acting as my spiritual physiotherapist. Prescribing spiritual exercises and suchlike.”

“Have I?”

“No. But if I hadn't taken a strong line from the beginning you might have.”

She finished her phone call as she saw Stanko wandering down the street. She left the phone booth, smiled at him, and together they walked back to the guesthouse.

“I walk about a bit at night,” Stanko told her. “Is nice—quiet and nice fresh air. You been phoning someone?”

“My husband. I've been off-loading my irritation at my son. Children—who'd have them?” She saw his face and immediately began apologising. “Oh Stanko—I
am
sorry. How thoughtless of me. I wouldn't for the world . . .”

“Don't you worry, Meesa Rosemary. Don't you think about it again. You have a nice day today?”

And they went upstairs talking naturally and normally, as if, Rosemary thought afterwards, they had known each other for years.

I
n the next few days Rosemary settled into a comfortable routine, varied by special treats. The treats included a visit to the theatre (an Ayckbourn, of course) and the first film she had seen in a cinema in years (she found she had simply lost the habit). She visited the art gallery and took some trips out of town by bus, sometimes walking back to the guesthouse.

Otherwise she read, relaxed on the beach or the cliffs, had long afternoon naps if the weather was rainy or windy, and watched some television.

She found she liked to be down in the lounge either for the twenty to six news or the six o'clock one on the BBC. This often meant exposure to Australian soaps in the minutes before. She decided that the appeal of the soaps was that everyone seemed healthy, good-looking and clean—they depicted a sort of hygienic Elysian fields. All the young people had rather nice manners too: she actually saw one ask to get up from table at the end of a meal. Did young people in Australia, she wondered, really ask to get up from table? Did they still sit down at table for meals?

She was watching for news of Bosnia. At home she tended to turn away or turn off, finding the scenes unbearably painful. Now she wanted to know where the fighting was, and who was fighting whom. This was not easy to discover from the television reports. On some days there was no item from what she still thought of as Yugoslavia at all. On others a situation was focussed on, but with hardly any background information, as if knowledge of it was assumed—or perhaps because the reporter had despaired of ever explaining the situation to viewers, or even of understanding it himself. It was like the Schleswig-Holstein dispute: everyone who could explain it was either dead or mad or had forgotten the explanation.

She asked Stanko where the camp was from which he had last heard news of his wife and child. She listened for it, but never heard it mentioned. Finally she bought a pocket atlas and asked him to point out its location to her. Then she listened for mentions of the nearest towns, but when they came they were unilluminating. Some days she bought the
Times
and the
Guardian
, but their reports were mostly about the peace talks in Geneva, and since the only people who seemed to want peace were outside Yugoslavia these seemed futile and doomed. Had the newspapers no longer got reporters where things—horrible things—were actually happening?

“Do you understand what's going on?” she asked Stanko.

“I know
who
is fighting who,” he answered gloomily. “I not understand
why
.”

They got into the habit of having little talks together. Rosemary would go down late to dinner, so that by the time she was drinking her coffee she was the only one left in the dining room. Stanko would sit opposite her and together they would swap little tidbits of information about their former lives until the proprietress came in looking disapproving. Sometimes they would
meet out walking. Once they found they had the television lounge to themselves in the evening after Stanko had finished work for the day, and there they had a good talk which Rosemary felt she really learnt something from. They were falling into a routine.

“I must remember I've got to go home,” said Rosemary to herself.

She was reminded of this on the seventh day of her stay by a phone call. It was Sunday, and she had not gone to church, enjoying instead a breezy walk on the North Cliff. She was savouring a better-than-usual pudding when the proprietress, Mrs Blundell, came to tell her there was a phone call for her.

“Probably my husband,” said Rosemary, spooning into her mouth the last of the crême brulée and getting up.

“No, it's a . . . woman,” said Mrs Blundell. Rosemary knew she had been about to say the word “lady” but had been prevented from doing so by her strict standards of gentility. Rosemary suspected it would be one of Paul's more militant or more gossip-hungry parishioners.