Visitors (25 page)

‘They take it out of you, don’t they? Kids?’

‘They do, rather. But they make up for it, don’t they?’

Men have feelings too, she reasoned, as the bus approached Baker Street. Quite enlightening, those remarks of Bessie Millington. And that kiss of Steve’s, ridiculous, but all the same … Quite all right to have an early night tonight. Quite safe to take a pill. Their plane will just have taken off. I shall never see Paris again. Once more she felt a pressure behind her eyelids, as memory furnished her with images of her first rapt visit to Paris. She had quickly tired of churches and museums, had gravitated towards the humblest of little squares, in streets far from the centre, had eaten a sandwich for her lunch, had dared only later to ask for a coffee, sitting in the farthest corner of the café in order to watch the people. She had walked all the afternoon, for the sheer pleasure of seeing the lights come on at dusk, for feeling herself to be at one with the workers going home. And she had slept as she had not slept since, without those dreams, those half imagined interruptions that thronged her nights, just when she had always imagined herself to be safe.

Her street, just as she turned the corner from the main road, was, as always, sedately silent, as if no-one lived there. Though the silence should have been welcome after the crowded afternoon, she found it slightly sinister. In her mind she was still in a Paris square, watching a dog drinking from an iron fountain, hearing the splash of the water, waiting for the children to arrive, as they sometimes did, to play in the little sandpit. Instead she was all too soon at her front door, and not a soul
in sight. It was her youth that she missed, when pleasures could be guaranteed to please. In the kitchen she filled the kettle, then sat down at the table. The flat was empty, of that there was no doubt, and she was alone as she had wished. When the kettle boiled she made tea and poured herself a cup, which she did not drink. As if through a camera obscura she saw the young people preparing to defend themselves against the enticements of Paris, or indeed enquiring whether there were seats on the night flight to New York. They too would be affected by their brief stay in London, would feel unprotected, undirected for a while. In that way they might learn a valuable lesson: namely that it is prudent to seek cover. Not courageous, but prudent. This was a lesson that most adults knew, that most families knew. Mrs May bowed her head, recognising her unenviable courage. She hoped that those young people were not too offended by the lights of Paris, and not too lonely, out there, unprotected, on their own.

That night, in her dreams, she had a vision of what she understood to be Heaven, or the next world. It took the shape of a field full of folk, some sauntering absent-mindedly, some merely taking the air, on a sunless afternoon. The light disappointed her: she would have expected splendour, but here everything was reassuringly banal. The setting appeared to be Hyde Park, although there were factory chimneys in the distance. This latter detail, and the self-absorption of the walkers, were faintly reminiscent of a painting by Lowry, although as far as she could see no work was being done. This was leisure, not the leisure of the unemployed but of the pensioned class, enjoying its eternal rest. She recognised no-one, although a man in the foreground, wearing a raglan overcoat and a tweed cap, was vaguely familiar. There were few women: she understood that the women were in another place. The area was fairly thickly populated, but by people on their own; no-one walked with a companion. And their walking was purposeful, as it would have to be in this dull light, in this absence of obvious attractions. There was no sign of Henry: perhaps he too had gone to another place, a more
vivid and spectacular place better suited to one of his temperament. His relations would also be in that place, leaving her free once more to savour the sort of Sunday afternoon which she had once enjoyed. But faced with the prospect of enjoying it throughout eternity she wondered how it had ever convinced her of its desirability.

And yet there was an air of camaraderie in this version of Heaven: one would not fear introductions. And that sauntering strolling silent crowd was one in which she could easily mingle; she would be accepted. It seemed to her that there was a faint questing smile on her face as she prepared to step from solid ground into this slow-moving throng, relieved that there was to be no entrance examination, no stern scrutiny, no tiresome dissection of past misdemeanours. The absence of judgment convinced her that this was indeed Heaven, a place of easy access, and thus a jealously guarded secret.

She returned to this vision or apparition several times in the course of the morning, astonished that it was still so present in her mind’s eye. She could not see that it was overwhelmingly attractive: its main advantage was its specificity. She had found the lack of obvious glory extremely persuasive; as she had always thought, there were to be no angels, no saints, no apotheoses, no Christmas card fantasies. Presumably the saints had already gone to the same glum place, or to whatever equivalent their peculiar make-up dictated. By the same token there were no rewards, an important consideration to be borne in mind, and undoubtedly no punishments either. One abided by the rules because of some innate disposition towards them, not in the hope of compensation. This left a tricky question mark over those who claimed divine sacrifice. Might not the truth lie elsewhere?

There had undoubtedly been an impression of truthfulness,
of almost unavoidable dullness, about her glimpse of Heaven. It was the dullness that made it convincing. It was an English Heaven, framed precisely to satisfy the expectations of those who had grown up in a Welfare State, sparse decent people who wore hats and took healthy walks. It was a Heaven for those who remembered the Fifties, as she herself did, as a time of peace and order. So that this was a retrospective vision, dating back to an era when hospitals were reassuring and songs intelligible. The one necessary qualification for entry was obedience, which was, after all, the defining characteristic of the 1950s. She herself was defined by it. So that all she could look forward to was a return to more innocent times, or perhaps to her own more innocent times.

She had perhaps been unprepared for such tedium as she had identified in the Lowry-like setting. Looking back on it—and the details were still astonishingly clear—she gave more prominence to the factory chimneys in the background. This was above all a workers’ paradise. It was a place of modest weekend pleasures, of a Sunday walk in the park. It bore a moral resemblance to Seurat’s great picture of a summer Sunday afternoon: bodies unveiled and exhibited to the white sky, cautious immersion in the river, and on the horizon the sugar refinery bearing witness to the inevitable Monday morning return to work.

So that perhaps her eventual arrival in this place was not inevitable. It may be, she thought, with a slightly quickening pulse, that this was a warning, that this was what awaited her if she continued to live so unadventurously. Were it not for the fact that she felt some affection for the man in the raglan overcoat and the tweed cap, who was probably a half-remembered neighbour from far-off days, she would have dismissed the whole thing out of hand, together with the business of obedience
and its increasingly problematic morality. She was aware, as perhaps never before, that alternative deaths might be available, that one might progress to a cheerful and inconvenient old age somewhere in the sun, instead of putting up with that resigned half light. Old people in the south, good wine assisting, relied more on being obstreperous than on being polite. She had seen ancient women in Italy, in Spain, in Greece, their legs bowed, their faces deeply wrinkled, rocking along sun-struck streets with a sort of gaiety, raising their sticks in greeting, laughing at babies in their new innocence, babies themselves in the immediacy of their sensations. These people too lived modestly, making do with small rooms, with pensions, having happily divested themselves of most of their worldly goods. They were returning to nature, which was perhaps a lesson worth learning. The revelation—for it was nothing less—was that one did not have to sit down and wait to be transformed. One could, and should, go out to meet nature half way.

She remembered Venice, and the old lady encountered every morning at a bar near the hotel. She wore a shapeless dress and her legs were bare. She drank her coffee black, and exchanged sharp pleasantries with the waiter before ambling off to buy her lunch. And there had been one other old lady in Paris who ate at the same table in the same restaurant every day, and who proclaimed that the stairs to her attic room were extremely troublesome but that once at home she had the same view as Diderot had once had. This particular old girl was loquacious, and in the young Mrs May had found a willing audience. Even Henry was charmed, and had flattered her; his compliments brought out the flirt not yet dormant in the more or less shapeless figure, with her scarves and her hat, her mouth gleaming from her
poireaux vinaigrette
. They had
kept her company for a week, until they were due home; on their last day they had shaken hands and said goodbye. The woman had given Henry a dazzling smile, but to Mrs May she had said, ‘
Que tous vos rëves se réalisent
,’ as if she knew that the story was not yet over. Her secret message—that dreams could yet come true—had been disregarded, confounded with the amiable aspect of Paris as a whole. Henry had cheerfully forgotten the encounter. Yet she remembered it, as she remembered the old lady, wishing somehow to be taken under her wing, or to be admitted to the company of such astute and self-sufficient elders as she represented.

And now she herself was an old lady, living in fairly gracious circumstances which were suddenly intolerable to her. The flat in which she had once taken such a pride seemed to her now like a prison. She had, as far as she could see, two choices. She could either continue to live as she had always lived, and thus accede to that bleak Heaven of her dream, or she could do something entirely uncharacteristic. What this might be she did not yet know: she rather thought it might involve taking a few risks. Curiously, the dream had had another effect; it had removed all fear of death. If the next world were to be as homely as her half-remembered girlhood there was no cause for fear or alarm. If she wished for anything more enriching she must go out and find it. That was the dream’s secondary and more important message. It was time to take flight.

Moving effortlessly through the day, as if already in that so clearly defined limbo, she concluded that it would be unnecessary to take a walk, since if she believed in dreams and portents (and she now did) she was condemned to walk through all eternity. Something further was called for. She had as yet
no idea what this might be, but found herself thinking insistently of the old lady in the Paris restaurant, quite inexpensive, her gracious manners so at odds with her battered appearance, her shrewd eyes taking in the ill-matched couple, and whom she alone perhaps perceived as ill-matched, the bon viveur and his inexperienced companion, draining her glass of red wine and calling for a large black coffee: ‘
Un double!
’ Henry had appreciated the young woman buried in the old woman’s tired flesh; she in her turn had responded to his gallantry. Mrs May had wondered what she did with the rest of her day before descending once more from her attic room for dinner. On the lookout even in those happy circumstances for hidden or suppressed feelings, she imagined solitary afternoons with only Diderot’s view for distraction. She felt an imaginative sympathy which, she knew, would be repulsed with hauteur, her relative youth dismissed as mere ignorance.

Now an old lady herself, her reaction was one of grim amusement, as if it were no longer necessary to show mercy, pity, even sympathy, as if it were in order to be sharp and realistic. Even her stance was deferential, she thought, catching sight of herself in the glass, her invariably blue-clad figure concealed by suitable clothing, her grey hair tactfully groomed, even her lipstick an inoffensive pastel. And the hard thinking that even her modest appearance entailed! Whereas that old girl, who was clearly well educated and might even have been well born, was slightly dirty, decidedly badly put together. Her ancient black coat had seen better days, her hat, which she knocked back impatiently from time to time, was quite shapeless. She represented freedom from the desire to please, and was for that reason infinitely attractive to one of Mrs May’s hesitant disposition. Even then, with Henry beside
her, she had felt a faint envy. Now the envy was no longer faint, but it had metamorphosed into something more benevolent. What she felt now was appreciation.

Before making any decisions as to her future conduct she had an immediate problem: she had taken the last of her pills on returning from the wedding and now needed a new prescription. The logical thing was to ring Monty Goldmark, but this she shrank from doing. It was not simply that Monty was retired; it was rather that she had never quite trusted him. He had been in a state of semi-retirement for so long that any service he performed was viewed as a favour, not least by Monty himself. He had dealt gracefully with Henry’s last illness by not pretending that treatment would be useful, and for this they had been grateful; his manner, half cajoling, half fatalistic, had, on this occasion at least, been appropriate. But she had encountered him too often at Kitty’s dinner table to feel entirely frank with him. In society he was heartfelt and weary, as if burdened with the world’s illnesses, whereas he went to his rooms in Harley Street on only two days a week, and rarely, if ever, made house calls. His energies came into play when he flirted with Kitty, as if this were an old-fashioned doctor’s proper function. Excessive if mocking sympathy was expressed; nothing was taken seriously. This was his main therapeutic tool: his conviction, invariably imparted to the patient, that his services were not really required. Hands were patted; an arm was put round a shoulder: Kitty was mollified, and the consultation was concluded. ‘Doing too much’ was his diagnosis, entirely reassuring, and, more important, carrying no threat of morbidity.