Life Times: Stories 1952-2007

The Soft Voice of the Serpent

He was only twenty-six and very healthy and he was soon strong enough to be wheeled out into the garden. Like everyone else, he had great and curious faith in the garden: ‘Well, soon you’ll be up and able to sit out in the garden,’ they said, looking at him fervently, with little understanding tilts of the head. Yes, he would be out. . in the garden. It was a big garden enclosed in old, dark, sleek, pungent firs, and he could sit deep beneath their tiered fringes, down in the shade, far away. There was the feeling that there, in the garden, he would come to an understanding; that it would come easier there. Perhaps there was something in this of the old Eden idea; the tender human adjusting himself to himself in the soothing impersonal presence of trees and grass and earth, before going out into the stare of the world.

The very first time it was so strange; his wife was wheeling him along the gravel path in the sun and the shade, and he felt exactly as he did when he was a little boy and he used to bend and hang, looking at the world upside down, through his ankles. Everything was vast and open, the sky, the wind blowing along through the swaying, trembling greens, the flowers shaking in vehement denial. Movement. .

A first slight wind lifted again in the slack, furled sail of himself; he felt it belly gently, so gently he could just feel it, lifting inside him.

So she wheeled him along, pushing hard and not particularly well with her thin pretty arms — but he would not for anything complain of the way she did it or suggest that the nurse might do better, for he knew that would hurt her — and when they came to a spot that he liked, she put the brake on the chair and settled him there for the morning. That was the first time and now he sat there every day. He read a lot, but his attention was arrested sometimes, quite suddenly and compellingly, by the sunken place under the rug where his leg used to be. There was his one leg, and next to it, the rug flapped loose. Then looking, he felt his leg not there; he felt it go, slowly, from the toe to the thigh. He felt that he had no leg. After a few minutes he went back to his book. He never let the realisation quite reach him; he let himself realise it physically, but he never quite let it get at him. He felt it pressing up, coming, coming, dark, crushing, ready to burst — but he always turned away, just in time, back to his book. That was his system; that was the way he was going to do it. He would let it come near, irresistibly near, again and again, ready to catch him alone in the garden. And again and again he would turn it back, just in time. Slowly it would become a habit, with the reassuring strength of a habit. It would become such a habit never to get to the point of realising it, that he would never realise it. And one day he would find that he had achieved what he wanted: he would feel as if he had always been like that.

Then the danger would be over, for ever.

In a week or two he did not have to read all the time; he could let himself put down the book and look about him, watching the firs part silkily as a child’s fine straight hair in the wind, watching the small birds tightroping the telephone wire, watching the fat old dove trotting after his refined patrician grey women, purring with lust. His wife came and sat beside him, doing her sewing, and sometimes they spoke, but often they sat for hours, a whole morning, her movements at work small and unobtrusive as the birds’, he resting his head back and looking at a blur of sky through half-closed eyes. Now and then her eye, habitually looking inwards, would catch the signal of some little happening, some point of colour in the garden, and her laugh or exclamation drawing his attention to it would suddenly clear away the silence. At eleven o’clock she would get up and put down her sewing and go into the house to fetch their tea; crunching slowly away into the sun up the path, going easily, empowered by the sun rather than her own muscles. He watched her go, easily. . He was healing. In the static quality of his gaze, in the relaxed feeling of his mouth, in the upward-lying palm of his hand, there was annealment. .

One day a big locust whirred dryly past her head, and she jumped up with a cry, scattering her sewing things. He laughed at her as she bent about picking them up, shuddering. She went into the house to fetch the tea, and he began to read. But presently he put down the book and, yawning, noticed a reel of pink cotton that she had missed, lying in a rose bed.

He smiled, remembering her. And then he became conscious of a curious old-mannish little face, fixed upon him in a kind of hypnotic dread. There, absolutely stilled with fear beneath his glance, crouched a very big locust. What an amusing face the thing had! A lugubrious long face, that somehow suggested a bald head, and such a glum mouth. It looked like some little person out of a Disney cartoon. It moved slightly, still looking up fearfully at him. Strange body, encased in a sort of old-fashioned creaky armour. He had never realised before what ridiculous-looking insects locusts were! Well, naturally not; they occur to one collectively, as a pest — one doesn’t go around looking at their faces.

The face was certainly curiously human and even expressive, but looking at the body, he decided that the body couldn’t really be called a body at all. With the face, the creature’s kinship with humans ended. The body was flimsy paper stretched over a frame of matchstick, like a small boy’s home-made aeroplane. And those could not be thought of as legs — the great saw-toothed back ones were like the parts of an old crane, and the front ones like — like one of her hairpins, bent in two. At that moment the creature slowly lifted up one of the front legs, and passed it tremblingly over its head, stroking the left antenna down. Just as a man might take out a handkerchief and pass it over his brow.

He began to feel enormously interested in the creature, and leaned over in his chair to see it more closely. It sensed him and beneath its stiff, plated sides, he was surprised to see the pulsations of a heart. How fast it was breathing. . He leaned away a little, to frighten it less.

Watching it carefully, and trying to keep himself effaced from its consciousness by not moving, he became aware of some struggle going on in the thing. It seemed to gather itself together in muscular concentration: this coordinated force then passed along its body in a kind of petering tremor, and ended in a stirring along the upward shaft of the great black legs. But the locust remained where it was. Several times this wave of effort currented through it and was spent, but the next time it ended surprisingly in a few hobbling, uneven steps, undercarriage — aeroplane-like again — trailing along the earth.

Then the creature lay, fallen on its side, antennae turned stretched out towards him. It groped with its hands, feeling for a hold on the soft ground, bending its elbows and straining. With a heave, it righted itself, and as it did so, he saw — leaning forward again — what was the trouble. It was the same trouble. His own trouble. The creature had lost one leg. Only the long upward shaft of its left leg remained, with a neat round aperture where, no doubt, the other half of the leg had been jointed in.

Now as he watched the locust gather itself again and again in that concentration of muscle, spend itself again and again in a message that was so puzzlingly never obeyed, he knew exactly what the creature felt. Of course he knew that feeling! That absolute certainty that the leg was there: one had only to lift it. . The upward shaft of the locust’s leg quivered, lifted; why then couldn’t he walk? He tried again. The message came; it was going, through, the leg was lifting, now it was ready — now!. . The shaft sagged in the air, with nothing, nothing to hold it up.

He laughed and shook his head: he knew. . Good Lord, exactly like — he called out to the house — ‘Come quickly! Come and see! You’ve got another patient!’

‘What?’ she shouted. ‘I’m getting tea.’

‘Come and look!’ he called. ‘Now!’

‘. . What is it?’ she said, approaching the locust distastefully.

‘Your locust!’ he said. She jumped away with a little shriek.

‘Don’t worry — it can’t move. It’s as harmless as I am. You must have knocked its leg off when you hit out at it!’ He was laughing at her.

‘Oh, I didn’t!’ she said reproachfully. She loathed it but she loathed to hurt, even more. ‘I never even touched it! All I hit was air. . I couldn’t possibly have hit it. Not its leg off.’

‘All right then. It’s another locust. But it’s lost its leg, anyway. You should just see it. . It doesn’t know the leg isn’t there. God, I know exactly how that feels. . I’ve been watching it, and honestly, it’s uncanny. I can see it feels just like I do!’

She smiled at him, sideways; she seemed suddenly pleased at something. Then, recalling herself, she came forward, bent double, hands upon her hips.

‘Well, if it can’t move. .’ she said, hanging over it.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ he laughed. ‘Touch it.’

‘Ah, the poor thing,’ she said, catching her breath in compassion. ‘It can’t walk.’

‘Don’t encourage it to self-pity,’ he teased her.

She looked up and laughed. ‘Oh you — ’ she parried, assuming a frown. The locust kept its solemn silly face turned to her. ‘Shame, isn’t he a funny old man,’ she said. ‘But what will happen to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, for being in the same boat absolved him from responsibility or pity. ‘Maybe he’ll grow another one. Lizards grow new tails, if they lose them.’

‘Oh, lizards,’ she said. ‘ — but not these. I’m afraid the cat’ll get him.’

‘Get another little chair made for him and you can wheel him out here with me.’

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Only for him it would have to be a kind of little cart, with wheels.’

‘Or maybe he could be taught to use crutches. I’m sure the farmers would like to know that he was being kept active.’

‘The poor old thing,’ she said, bending over the locust again. And reaching back somewhere into an inquisitive childhood she picked up a thin wand of twig and prodded the locust, very gently. ‘Funny thing is, it’s even the same leg, the left one.’ She looked round at him and smiled.

‘I know,’ he nodded, laughing. ‘The two of us. .’ And then he shook his head and, smiling, said it again: ‘The two of us.’

She was laughing and just then she flicked the twig more sharply than she meant to and at the touch of it there was a sudden flurried papery whirr, and the locust flew away.

She stood there with the stick in her hand, half afraid of it again, and appealed, unnerved as a child, ‘What happened? What happened?’

There was a moment of silence.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said irritably.

They had forgotten that locusts can fly.

The Amateurs

They stumbled round the Polyclinic, humpy in the dark with their props and costumes. ‘A drain!’ someone shouted, ‘Look out!’ ‘Drain ahead!’ They were all talking at once.

The others waiting in the car stared out at them; the driver leaned over his window: ‘All right?’

They gesticulated, called out together.

‘ — Can’t hear. Is it OK?’ shouted the driver.

Peering, chins lifted over bundles, they arrived back at the car again. ‘There’s nobody there. It’s all locked up.’

‘Are you sure it was the Polyclinic?’

‘Well, it’s very nice, I must say!’

They stood around the car, laughing in the pleasant little adventure of being lost together.

A thin native who had been watching them suspiciously from the dusty-red wash set afloat upon the night by the one street light, came over and mumbled, ‘I take you. . You want to go inside?’ He looked over his shoulder to the location gates.

‘Get in,’ one young girl nudged the other towards the car. Suddenly they all got in, shut the doors.

‘I take you,’ said the boy again, his hands deep in his pockets.

At that moment a light wavered down the road from the gates, a bicycle swooped swallow-like upon the car, a fat police-boy in uniform shone a torch. ‘You in any trouble there, sir?’ he roared. His knobkerrie swung from his belt.

‘No, but we’ve come to the wrong place—’

‘You having any trouble?’ insisted the police-boy. The other shrank away into the light. He stood hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, looking at the car from the street light.

‘We’re supposed to be giving a play — concert — tonight, and we were told it would be at the Polyclinic. Now there’s nobody there,’ the girl called impatiently from the back seat.

‘Concert, sir? It’s in the Hall, sir. Just follow me.’

Taken over by officialdom, they went through the gates, saluted and stared at, and up the rutted street past the Beer Hall, into the location. Only a beer-brazen face, blinking into the car lights as they passed, laughed and called out something half-heard.

Driving along the narrow, dark streets, they peered white-faced at the windows, wanting to see what it was like. But, curiously, it seemed that although they might want to see the location, the location didn’t want to see them. The rows of low two-roomed houses with their homemade tin and packing-case lean-tos and beans growing up the chicken wire, throbbed only here and there with the faint pulse of a candle; no one was to be seen. Life seemed always to be in the next street, voices singing far off and shouts, but when the car turned the corner — again, there was nobody.

The bicycle wobbled to a stop in front of them. Here was the Hall, here were lights, looking out like sore eyes in the moted air, here were people, more part of the dark than the light, standing about in straggling curiosity. Two girls in flowered headscarves stood with their arms crossed leaning against the wall of the building; some men cupped their hands over an inch of cigarette and drew with the intensity of the stub-smoker.

The amateur company climbed shrilly out of their car. They nearly hadn’t arrived at all! What a story to tell! Their laughter, their common purpose, their solidarity before the multifarious separateness of the audiences they faced, generated once again that excitement that so often seized them. What a story to tell!

Inside the Hall, the audience had been seated long ago. They sat in subdued rows, the women in neat flowered prints, the men collared-and-tied, heads of pens and pencils ranged sticking out over their jacket pockets. They were a specially selected audience of schoolteachers, who, with a sprinkling of social workers, two clerks from the administrative offices, and a young girl who had matriculated, were the educated of the rows and rows of hundreds and hundreds who lived and ate and slept and talked and loved and died in the houses outside. Those others had not been asked, and were not to be admitted because they would not understand.

The ones who had been asked waited as patiently as the children they taught in their turn. When would the concert begin?

In an atmosphere of brick-dust and bright tin shavings behind the stage, the actors and actresses struggled to dress and paint their faces in a newly built small room intended to be used for the cooking of meat at location dances. The bustle and sideburns of a late-Victorian English drawing room went on; a young woman whitened her hair with talcum powder and pinned a great hat like a feathery ship upon it. A fat young man sang, with practised nasal innuendo, the latest dance-tune while he adjusted his pince-nez and covered his cheerful head with a clerical hat.

‘You’re not bothering with make-up?’ A man in a wasp-striped waistcoat came down from the stage.

A girl looked up from her bit of mirror, face of a wax doll.

‘Your ordinary street make-up’ll do — they don’t know the difference,’ he said.

‘But of course I’m making-up,’ said the girl, quite disstressed. She was melting black grease paint in a teaspoon over someone’s cigarette lighter.

‘No need to bother with moustaches and things,’ the man said to the other men. ‘They won’t understand the period anyway. Don’t bother.’

The girl went on putting blobs of liquid grease paint on her eyelashes, holding her breath.

‘I think we should do it properly,’ said the young woman, complaining.

‘All right, all right.’ He slapped her on the bustle. ‘In that case you’d better stick a bit more cotton wool in your bosom — you’re not nearly pouter-pigeon enough.’

‘For God’s sake, can’t you open the door, somebody,’ asked the girl. ‘It’s stifling.’

The door opened upon a concrete yard; puddles glittered, one small light burned over the entrance to a men’s lavatory. The night air was the strong yellow smell of old urine. Men from the street slouched in and out, and a tall slim native, dressed in the universal long-hipped suit that in the true liberalism of petty gangsterdom knows no colour bar or national exclusiveness, leaned back on his long legs, tipped back his hat, and smiled on teeth pretty as a girl’s.

‘I’m going to close it again,’ said the fat young man grimly.

‘Oh, no one’s going to eat you,’ said the girl, picking up her parasol.

They all went backstage, clambered about, tested the rickety steps; heard the murmur of the audience like the sea beyond the curtain.

‘You’ll have to move that chair a bit,’ the young woman was saying, ‘I can’t possibly get through that small space.’

‘Not with that behind you won’t,’ the young man chuckled fatly. ‘Now remember, if you play well, we’ll put it across. If you act well enough, it doesn’t matter whether the audience understands what you’re saying or not.’

‘Of course — look at French films.’

‘It’s not that. It’s not the difficulty of the language so much as the situations. . The manners of a Victorian drawing room — the whole social code — how can they be expected to understand. .’ — the girl’s eyes looked out behind the doll’s face.

They began to chaff one another with old jokes; the clothes they wore, the slips of the tongue that twisted their lines: the gaiety of working together set them teasing and laughing. They stood waiting behind the makeshift wings, made of screens. Cleared their throats; somebody belched.

They were ready.

When would the concert begin?

The curtain screeched back on its rusty rings; the stage opened on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

At first there was so much to see; the mouths of the audience parted with pleasure at the sight of the fine ladies and gentlemen dressed with such colour and variety; the women? — gasp at them; the men? — why, laugh at them, of course. But gradually the excitement of looking became acceptance, and they began to listen, and they began not to understand. Their faces remained alight, lifted to the stage, their attention was complete, but it was the attention of mystification. They watched the players as a child watches a drunken man, attracted by his babbling and his staggering, but innocent of the spectacle’s cause or indications.

The players felt this complete attention, the appeal of a great blind eye staring up at their faces, and a change began to work in them. A kind of hysteria of effort gradually took hold of them, their gestures grew broader, the women threw great brilliant smiles like flowers out into the half-dark over the footlights, the men strutted and lifted their voices. Each frowning in asides at the hamming of the other, they all felt at the same time this bubble of queerly anxious, exciting devilment of over-emphasis bursting in themselves. The cerebral acid of Oscar Wilde’s love scenes was splurged out by the oglings and winks of musical comedy, as surely as a custard pie might blot the thin face of a cynic. Under the four-syllable inanities, under the mannerisms and the posturing of the play, the bewitched amateurs knocked up a recognisable human situation. Or perhaps it was the audience that found it, looking so closely, so determined, picking up a look, a word, and making something for themselves out of it.

In an alien sophistication they found there was nothing real for them, so they made do with the situations that are traditionally laughable and are unreal for everyone — the strict dragon of a mother, the timid lover, the disdainful young girl. When a couple of stage lovers exited behind the screens that served for wings, someone remarked to his neighbour, very jocular: ‘And what do they do behind there!’ Quite a large portion of the hall heard it and laughed at this joke of their own.

‘Poor Oscar!’ whispered the young girl, behind her hand.

‘Knew it wouldn’t do,’ hissed the striped waistcoat.

From her position at the side of the stage the young girl kept seeing the round, shining, rapt face of an elderly schoolteacher. His head strained up towards the stage, and a wonderful, broad, entire smile never left his face. He was asleep. She watched him anxiously out of the corner of her eye, and saw that every now and then the movement of his neighbour, an unintentional jolt, would wake him up: then the smile would fall, he would taste his mouth with his tongue, and a tremble of weariness troubled his guilt. The smile would open out again: he was asleep.

After the first act, the others, the people from outside who hadn’t been asked, began to come into the hall. As if what had happened between the players and the audience inside had somehow become known, given itself away into the air, so that suddenly the others felt that they might as well be allowed in, too. They pushed past the laconic police-boys at the door, coming in in twos and threes, barefoot, bringing a child by the hand or a small hard bundle of a baby. They sat where they could, stolidly curious, and no one dared question their right of entry, now. The audience pretended not to see them. But they were, by very right of their insolence, more demanding and critical. During the second act, when the speeches were long, they talked and passed remarks amongst themselves; a baby was allowed to wail. The schoolteachers kept their eyes on the stage, laughed obediently, tittered appreciatively, clapped in unison.

There was something else in the hall, now; not only the actors and the audience groping for each other in the blind smile of the dark and the blind dazzle of the lights; there was something that lived, that continued uncaring, on its own. On a seat on the side the players could see someone in a cap who leaned forward, eating an orange. A fat girl hung with her arm round her friend, giggling into her ear. A foot in a pointed shoe waggled in the aisle; the people from outside sat irregular as they pleased; what was all the fuss about anyway? When something amused them, they laughed as long as they liked. The laughter of the schoolteachers died away: they knew that the players were being kept waiting.

But when the curtain jerked down on the last act, the whole hall met in a sweeping excitement of applause that seemed to feed itself and to shoot off fresh bursts as a rocket keeps showering again and again as its sparks die in the sky. Applause came from their hands like a song, each pair of palms taking strength and enthusiasm from the other. The players gasped, could not catch their breath: smiling, just managed to hold their heads above the applause. It filled the hall to the brim, then sank, sank. A young woman in a black velvet headscarf got up from the front row and came slowly up on to the stage, her hands clasped. She smiled faintly at the players, swallowed. Then her voice, the strange, high, minor-keyed voice of an African girl, went out across the hall.

‘Mr Mount and his company, ladies and gentlemen’ — she turned to the players — ‘we have tried to tell you what you have done here, for us tonight’ — she paused and looked at them all, with the pride of acceptance — ‘we’ve tried to show you, just now, with our hands and our voices what we think of this wonderful thing you have brought to us here in Athalville Location.’ Slowly, she swung back to the audience: a deep, growing chant of applause rose. ‘From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you, all of us here who have had the opportunity to see you, and we hope in our hearts you will come to us again many times. This play tonight not only made us see what people can do, even in their spare time after work, if they try; it’s made us feel that perhaps we could try and occupy our leisure in such a way, and learn, ourselves, and also give other people pleasure — the way everyone in this whole hall tonight’ — her knee bent and arm outstretched, she passed her hand over the lifted heads — ‘everyone here has been made happy.’ A warm murmur was drawn from the audience; then complete silence. The girl took three strides to the centre of the stage. ‘I ask you,’ she cried out, and the players felt her voice like a shock, ‘is this perhaps the answer to our juvenile delinquency here in Athalville? If our young boys and girls’ — her hand pointed at a brown beardless face glazed with attention — ‘had something like this to do in the evenings, would so many of them be at the police station? Would we be afraid to walk out in the street? Would our mothers be crying over their children? — Or would Athalville be a better place, and the mothers and fathers full of pride? Isn’t this what we need?’

The amateurs were forgotten by themselves and each other, abandoned dolls, each was alone. No one exchanged a glance. And out in front stood the girl, her arm a sharp angle, her nostrils lifted. The splash of the footlights on her black cheek caught and made a sparkle out of a single tear.

Like the crash of a crumbling building, the wild shouts of the people fell upon the stage; as the curtain jerked across, the players recollected themselves, went slowly off.

The fat young man chuckled to himself in the back of the car. ‘God, what we didn’t do to that play!’ he laughed.

‘What’d you kiss me again for?’ cried the young woman in surprise. ‘ — I didn’t know what was happening. We never had a kiss there, before — and all of a sudden’ — she turned excitedly to the others — ‘he takes hold of me and kisses me! I didn’t know what was happening!’

‘They liked it,’ snorted the young man. ‘One thing they understood anyway!’

‘Oh, I don’t know—’ said someone, and seemed about to speak.

But instead there was a falling away into silence.

The girl was plucking sullenly at the feathered hat, resting on her knee. ‘We cheated them; we shouldn’t have done it,’ she said.

‘But what could we do?’ The young woman turned shrilly, her eyes open and hard, excitedly determined to get an answer: an answer somewhere, from someone.

But there was no answer.

‘We didn’t know what to do,’ said the fat young man uncertainly, forgetting to be funny now, the way he lost himself when he couldn’t remember his lines on the stage.