Live a Little, page 13
“I won’t forget little Pen,” he told me.
“You’re dead right you won’t,” I said. “And rest assured I won’t let little Pen forget you.”
I was as good as my word. “That’s Daddy,” I’d tell the boy when he showed up on television. And when Daddy became a junior minister in the first Wilson Government I got Pen to write him a letter. “Well done, Daddy,” he wrote. “I’m very proud to be your son. I will be coming to stay with you this school holiday and look forward to doing stuff with you.” I didn’t suffer him to wait for a reply. A week later Cyril found his son on his doorstep carrying a suitcase.
I’d dropped him off round the corner in the Roller.
When Pen was fourteen I made him a present of one of Cyril’s vests.
“Have you been keeping this?” he wanted to know.
“Well how else would I come to have it?”
“I mean have you been keeping it sentimentally?”
“In a heart-shaped box, do you mean? No. I am not sentimental about your father’s vests.”
“So why are you giving it to me?”
“He’s becoming an important man. I thought you should understand the fundamentals of his ideology.”
“You don’t like him much, do you?”
“Not much.”
“Did you love him once?”
“No.”
“Did he love you?”
“He’s a socialist. Socialists love only one another. And then not for long.”
“So he doesn’t love me?”
“You ask him.”
Whether Pen did ask him I don’t know. Perhaps he told me and I forgot. I made a virtue of losing my memory when it wasn’t in short supply. And relations between my sons and their fathers wasn’t the kind of thing I made space in the lumber room of my mind to remember. It was enough, I thought, all things considered, that I remembered I had sons. But one way or another Pen worked out a method for winning his father’s love. He became a socialist himself.
Euphoria, reading things she’d rather not, is mystified by the missing son. Mr. Sandy she knows, Mr. Pen she knows, and Mr. Tahan she has heard mention of. But of Mr. Neville, the poor little boy whose daddy was killed in the war, not a word is ever spoken. Did the war tragically kill baby Neville too?
She has begun to hover, the Princess notices. Finding jobs for herself in the Princess’s bedroom or in the living room when the Princess is in her armchair—plumping the cushions she’s already plumped, straightening rugs, dusting photograph frames, all the while stealing glances at her employer as though expecting a request or gathering the courage to make one. The Princess wonders if it’s all her fault for complimenting Euphoria on her beauty. Is she waiting to be complimented again?
“You’re not a housekeeper,” the Princess tells her. “You’re here to care for me, not the furnishings.”
“That’s what Nastya says, Mrs. Beryl.”
The Princess raises an eyebrow. Telling tales at school, are we? But she is more annoyed with Nastya than Euphoria. “You shouldn’t listen to that girl,” she says.
“I don’t, ma’am.”
“She might want to marry a count but she comes from a Communist country.”
Euphoria nodded. “I know, Mrs. Beryl.”
“But she’s right about some things. I’m a bit of a Communist myself. I too don’t want you to be doing the housekeeping. I have a Spaniard or a Mexican for that.”
“She’s from the Philippines, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Wherever. So what’s the problem? Aren’t I enough to keep you busy? Don’t you have enough to read?”
Well that’s the point, Euphoria’s expression seems to say. You keep me very busy, what with having to go through your diaries and filing cards and remembering who’s who….
“Are you telling me my diaries are a chore for you?”
In shaking her head, Euphoria shakes tears out of her eyes. They fall like confetti.
“What is it, for heaven’s sake?” the Princess asks.
Euphoria breathes in deeply. “You remember saying I could talk to you about your diaries, Mrs. Beryl…”
“I can’t say I do remember that, no. I recommended that you make yourself acquainted with them, yes. Do you good. Your own culture is an oral one, I believe. Most admirable, but we like to write things down in this country. It’s important that you get to grips with the way we do things. But I have no recollection of soliciting your opinion either on the contents or my prose style.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Stop being sorry. Tell me what you were going to say. Is the story of my life disgusting you? I’m not surprised. It’s disgusting me. You can stop if you want to. I’ll give them to the tart. Nothing will disgust her.”
“It’s Mr. Neville, Mrs. Beryl….”
“Is that a poem?”
“No, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Is it a riddle then?”
Euphoria puts the duster to her face and makes to return to the kitchen but in doing so walks into the tea trolley she had earlier wheeled in.
“Are you hurt?” the old lady asks.
Euphoria shakes her head. “I think you’re right. I think it’s better I don’t read your diaries anymore. They upset me.”
Whereupon, as though she too has been involved in a collision, Mrs. Beryl recalls who Mr. Neville was.
* * *
—
LEFT ALONE WITH her little boy after Harris died fighting the Italians, Beryl Dusinbery did as many others had to do in those years and moved out of the city to a safer place. She was fortunate in having her father’s sister living alone in Ribblesdale, equidistant from Haworth and Kendal, the Brontës and Wordsworth, the mad and the sane. Enid was a village schoolmistress. Every member of Beryl’s family educated somebody in something: pedagogy was in their blood. Without the Dusinberys the nation would have gone untaught. Enid wore her hair like Charlotte Brontë’s in the famous engraving, severe but with the promise of steely abandon; though whether that meant she’d moved to the moors around Haworth to be close to someone she already revered, or had adopted the style upon arrival, Beryl didn’t think it was polite to ask, and what Enid had looked like before moving up there she couldn’t remember. Her own hair, in those days, fell down her back like a Rhinemaiden’s as painted by Arthur Rackham. She was a strange vision in this quiet place, a spillage from an unimaginable world. Men lost their heads over her, neglected their farms and businesses, left their wives, took to drink, but she lost her head over no one. Any man worth knowing was in another country, killing or being killed. Only the elderly, the infirm, and the pusillanimous were left. They had a nerve supposing she would unloose her hair to attract the likes of them.
The stone cottage was dark at all hours of the day and so silent, but for the jingling of a bell round the throat of a neighbour’s goat, that she fancied she could hear the guns going off in Normandy. Enid was able to get her some part-time work at the little school and that was enough, since she didn’t have to pay for her board, to keep Neville well fed and cheerful. She wheeled him to school and parked him in a corner of the classroom. Whenever he cried there was a five-year-old on hand to play with him. And back in the cottage in the evening there was Enid. It was good for him, growing up in this place, Beryl Dusinbery thought. She had that English belief in the moral and physical beneficence of running brooks and drystone walls, no matter that there was barely a healthy person in the country. But Enid noticed that she was never quite at ease with Neville, and caught her staring at him sometimes as though he were a disappointment to her. She wondered if Beryl would have preferred a daughter. No, Beryl told her, that was not it.
It. So there was something. Yes, Beryl conceded, there was something, but it’s in me, not the child.
It was as though there were an anterior sadness in her that the boy corresponded to, a preparation for desolation that he confirmed. Had there been some catastrophic loss in the past that foreshadowed some catastrophic loss to come? She didn’t mean when she was a little girl; she meant earlier than that. In the dawn of time, when the patterns for parenthood and happiness were being laid down. Before nations, before cities, before language. Nothing else could explain the piercing grief she felt on some mornings, waking up to the realisation of herself and then the boy, sleeping by her in a wooden cot. Who was the grief for? Harris? Neville? The men over there being killed in their hundreds of thousands? There was a wrongness in it all, an ancient discordancy. And no, it would not end when the war ended.
Then the war did end and she was proved right. Still the waking to grief. By that time Neville had a bed not a cot. He was a boy, not a baby. He kicked balls and threw stones. And when she looked at him asleep she was not touched as of old. Grief? Was grief even the word for it any more? Imperceptibly, the sadness had turned into something more like distaste—not for him personally, no not for him, but for their relationship, their motherandsonness, the whole business of blood and connection, birth and nurturing, love. The horror, she told Enid, who was horrified to hear such words, of being human.
She had never, to tell the truth, much liked the physical side of being a mother. Did she have to? Unnatural not to love the maternal trance, the breastfeeding, the changing, the bathing, the mopping up of everything that came out of Neville’s little orifices, but what kind of a concept was “the natural”? If we were biological accidents then nature was an accident too. It meant no more than going along with the way things had happened to fall out. Only if there were a God with a purpose could “natural” be accounted a virtue. And what God with a purpose would ever have allowed the dying that was going on only a few hundred miles away?
When Neville suddenly turned from a blooming if quiet child to a querulous and sick one she wondered if she were to blame. Had he sensed his mother’s distaste? Could her reluctance to give him the love he had a right to expect have slowed his development, as though he meant to show he was as unwilling to go on with this charade as she was?
He began to look confused when anyone talked to him. He cried, he vomited, he held his head, he looked at her with unseeing eyes. There was brain impairment of some sort. She couldn’t even bring herself to listen to what the doctor told her. The brain was the only organ she valued. The horror she had felt previously for the ordinary functioning of life was nothing to the horror she felt confronted with its dysfunctioning. That catastrophic loss she’d dreaded—here was the reason for it, here was the presentiment made actual, here was not just an apprehension of abhorrence but the monstrous thing itself.
It wasn’t that pity for Neville eluded her. She pitied him to the centre of her soul. But didn’t pity rot the soul? He had been delivered to her incomplete, impaired, and that impairment impaired and shamed her. She tore her hair. She thought she should pluck out her eyes.
“You are not a fit mother,” Enid told her.
The girl rounded on her aunt. “I? Not a fit mother? How dare you!”
In the silence that followed Beryl could hear Harris saying, “If it’s a boy we’ll call it Neville.”
He is on the Harley Street run, calling in to collect prescriptions, have his blood pressure read, his heart monitored, his cataracts checked, and the biannual service of his feet. He has his mother’s feet. The moment the chiropodist gets to work on them he sees his mother’s, folded under her on the sofa—frightened feet, he always thought, in hiding. His the same. Where has he allowed his feet to take him? Little Stanmore to Seven Sisters Road; the Finchley Road to Marylebone; North London park to North London park. You have surprisingly soft feet for a man your age, the chiropodist tells him. But then she doesn’t know how carefully he’s tended them.
Every specialist he sees will tell him the same: he’s in remarkably good shape for his age.
Harley Street is like a social club for the infirm at this time of the morning. It can be hard to decide whether this is the last goodbye or the first hello. Are they gathering at the River Styx, waiting for the ferryman, or have they crossed over already? Is this what being on the other side is like—never knowing if you’ve got there yet?
Shimi doesn’t like looking well amid so much affliction. Looking well is to invite retribution. Look well and you have to face the horrible drop in spirits that comes with realising you have so little time left to look well in.
He fills his lungs with air. He should be proud of his strong untried heart and dainty coward’s feet. He should be dancing in the ballroom of the lonely with the Widows who are waiting at every corner of Harley Street for an invitation to take to the floor. Dance, Shimi, for Christ’s sake. Dance with the Widow Wolfsheim whose legs are legendary and who has a ballroom of her own.
He can’t picture himself dancing but he does suddenly remember he is meant to meet her for coffee. He looks at his watch. He is an hour late and when he gets to the venue she is gone. He knows what she’ll be thinking. “Once, Mr. Carmelli, I can excuse, but twice…”
What’s he got against the Widow Wolfsheim that she alone triggers forgetfulness in him?
She isn’t looking for the earth from him. Yes, she’d like to show him off—the only unmarried man in North London who can zip up his own fly. (A hundred times a day, as it happens, but that’s another matter.) But it’s unlikely she wants it to go any further than that. Conversation and cartomancy will do her. So? What in God’s name is so wrong with her?
He doesn’t know. Yes, he does. She’s too familiar. Not too familiar with him, too familiar to him. He has never, in some part of himself, not known Wanda Wolfsheim.
So it’s himself he’s bored with. He isn’t Br’er Rabbit kicking in vain against the Tar Baby. He is the Tar Baby.
* * *
—
HE FINDS A bench in St. Marylebone Gardens and closes his eyes. It’s early to be nodding off but that must be what he’s done. A voice comes to him as in a dream. “Would you help me, please?” But when he opens his eyes he hears it again….
This isn’t happening now, it is happening when he is a younger, stronger man, but it might as well be happening this very minute. A hyperthymesiac doesn’t bother too much dividing yesterday and today. Shimi lives in a continuous present of dishonour….
He can’t see anyone. He rises and walks, as though to his doom, in the direction of the lavatory—there’s always a lavatory in Shimi’s tapestries of woe, even if it’s a lavatory he can’t get to in time—then sees whatever it is, barely a person, a human wreckage, of no discernible age or gender, in a shabby wheelchair. An old blanket covers the place where the legs might just be, but it wouldn’t surprise Shimi if the legs have gone along with just about everything else. Shimi cannot bring himself to look too closely. To tell the truth he is terrified of what he will see. Or, worse, of what he won’t. Just the idea of injury is hard for Shimi to entertain, but the sight of missing parts disturbs him beyond all reason. For weeks after being approached in Oxford Street by a limbless beggar on a skateboard—a mere stub of humanity—he was unable to sleep. It is as though the more that’s lopped off a person the more menacing to Shimi he becomes. He reasons that the problem is metaphysical: a limbless man gives the lie to the idea of an ordered universe. But it’s more visceral than that. Shimi is only just held together himself. The horror of life is kept at bay only by the illusion of wholeness.
How extreme a case of insalubrity is now being presented to him Shimi doesn’t want to know. There is a bad smell, though whether of a rotting body or unwashed blankets he cannot say. The voice, too, when it repeats its plea—“I’m desperate, please help me”—is a history of ruination. A sunken chest cavity, torn vocal cords, a mouth clotted and malodorous.
Shimi instinctively puts his hands in his pockets to see if he has spare change, then realises in time that this is not the assistance he is being asked to provide.
“What do you want me to do?” he enquires, still not knowing if he’s addressing a man or a woman.
“Help me with the toilet.”
Shimi goes cold. “I think it’s free,” he says.
Yes, he knows how that sounds.
“It’s when I get inside that I can’t manage,” the person says.
Manage!
What would be worse, Shimi wonders, helping a man, or helping a woman. He wants not to put a picture to the words, but a picture forms. Helping a man, he decides, pushing the pictorial details from him, helping a man would be far worse.
I am not capable of this, he acknowledges to himself.
Who doesn’t wonder how he will be in the final extremity, when called upon to show extraordinary courage, or just extraordinary forbearance? Shimi has often wondered and never doubted he will fall short. And this isn’t the final extremity.
He looks around to see if there are others better equipped to meet this trial, but there is only him, the chair, and the wreckage in it.
He makes as though to take the handles of the chair, but even that is a connection too far. An apology, he decides, will only make matters worse. An explanation, even supposing he can find the words for one, will make them worse still.
There being nothing else for it…
* * *
—
WHEN HE GETS home he finds the message light winking on his answerphone.
No one ever leaves him a message.
Ephraim, he thinks.
A thought he hasn’t had in over half a century.
When you fear the worst it will be the worst.
Shimi’s mother used to tell him that. It was a piece of wisdom she’d brought all the way over from the Carpathians. As a little boy Shimi imagined the Carpathian Mountains as a place where everyone lived in dread of calamity, day and night.
“You’re dead right you won’t,” I said. “And rest assured I won’t let little Pen forget you.”
I was as good as my word. “That’s Daddy,” I’d tell the boy when he showed up on television. And when Daddy became a junior minister in the first Wilson Government I got Pen to write him a letter. “Well done, Daddy,” he wrote. “I’m very proud to be your son. I will be coming to stay with you this school holiday and look forward to doing stuff with you.” I didn’t suffer him to wait for a reply. A week later Cyril found his son on his doorstep carrying a suitcase.
I’d dropped him off round the corner in the Roller.
When Pen was fourteen I made him a present of one of Cyril’s vests.
“Have you been keeping this?” he wanted to know.
“Well how else would I come to have it?”
“I mean have you been keeping it sentimentally?”
“In a heart-shaped box, do you mean? No. I am not sentimental about your father’s vests.”
“So why are you giving it to me?”
“He’s becoming an important man. I thought you should understand the fundamentals of his ideology.”
“You don’t like him much, do you?”
“Not much.”
“Did you love him once?”
“No.”
“Did he love you?”
“He’s a socialist. Socialists love only one another. And then not for long.”
“So he doesn’t love me?”
“You ask him.”
Whether Pen did ask him I don’t know. Perhaps he told me and I forgot. I made a virtue of losing my memory when it wasn’t in short supply. And relations between my sons and their fathers wasn’t the kind of thing I made space in the lumber room of my mind to remember. It was enough, I thought, all things considered, that I remembered I had sons. But one way or another Pen worked out a method for winning his father’s love. He became a socialist himself.
Euphoria, reading things she’d rather not, is mystified by the missing son. Mr. Sandy she knows, Mr. Pen she knows, and Mr. Tahan she has heard mention of. But of Mr. Neville, the poor little boy whose daddy was killed in the war, not a word is ever spoken. Did the war tragically kill baby Neville too?
She has begun to hover, the Princess notices. Finding jobs for herself in the Princess’s bedroom or in the living room when the Princess is in her armchair—plumping the cushions she’s already plumped, straightening rugs, dusting photograph frames, all the while stealing glances at her employer as though expecting a request or gathering the courage to make one. The Princess wonders if it’s all her fault for complimenting Euphoria on her beauty. Is she waiting to be complimented again?
“You’re not a housekeeper,” the Princess tells her. “You’re here to care for me, not the furnishings.”
“That’s what Nastya says, Mrs. Beryl.”
The Princess raises an eyebrow. Telling tales at school, are we? But she is more annoyed with Nastya than Euphoria. “You shouldn’t listen to that girl,” she says.
“I don’t, ma’am.”
“She might want to marry a count but she comes from a Communist country.”
Euphoria nodded. “I know, Mrs. Beryl.”
“But she’s right about some things. I’m a bit of a Communist myself. I too don’t want you to be doing the housekeeping. I have a Spaniard or a Mexican for that.”
“She’s from the Philippines, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Wherever. So what’s the problem? Aren’t I enough to keep you busy? Don’t you have enough to read?”
Well that’s the point, Euphoria’s expression seems to say. You keep me very busy, what with having to go through your diaries and filing cards and remembering who’s who….
“Are you telling me my diaries are a chore for you?”
In shaking her head, Euphoria shakes tears out of her eyes. They fall like confetti.
“What is it, for heaven’s sake?” the Princess asks.
Euphoria breathes in deeply. “You remember saying I could talk to you about your diaries, Mrs. Beryl…”
“I can’t say I do remember that, no. I recommended that you make yourself acquainted with them, yes. Do you good. Your own culture is an oral one, I believe. Most admirable, but we like to write things down in this country. It’s important that you get to grips with the way we do things. But I have no recollection of soliciting your opinion either on the contents or my prose style.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Stop being sorry. Tell me what you were going to say. Is the story of my life disgusting you? I’m not surprised. It’s disgusting me. You can stop if you want to. I’ll give them to the tart. Nothing will disgust her.”
“It’s Mr. Neville, Mrs. Beryl….”
“Is that a poem?”
“No, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Is it a riddle then?”
Euphoria puts the duster to her face and makes to return to the kitchen but in doing so walks into the tea trolley she had earlier wheeled in.
“Are you hurt?” the old lady asks.
Euphoria shakes her head. “I think you’re right. I think it’s better I don’t read your diaries anymore. They upset me.”
Whereupon, as though she too has been involved in a collision, Mrs. Beryl recalls who Mr. Neville was.
* * *
—
LEFT ALONE WITH her little boy after Harris died fighting the Italians, Beryl Dusinbery did as many others had to do in those years and moved out of the city to a safer place. She was fortunate in having her father’s sister living alone in Ribblesdale, equidistant from Haworth and Kendal, the Brontës and Wordsworth, the mad and the sane. Enid was a village schoolmistress. Every member of Beryl’s family educated somebody in something: pedagogy was in their blood. Without the Dusinberys the nation would have gone untaught. Enid wore her hair like Charlotte Brontë’s in the famous engraving, severe but with the promise of steely abandon; though whether that meant she’d moved to the moors around Haworth to be close to someone she already revered, or had adopted the style upon arrival, Beryl didn’t think it was polite to ask, and what Enid had looked like before moving up there she couldn’t remember. Her own hair, in those days, fell down her back like a Rhinemaiden’s as painted by Arthur Rackham. She was a strange vision in this quiet place, a spillage from an unimaginable world. Men lost their heads over her, neglected their farms and businesses, left their wives, took to drink, but she lost her head over no one. Any man worth knowing was in another country, killing or being killed. Only the elderly, the infirm, and the pusillanimous were left. They had a nerve supposing she would unloose her hair to attract the likes of them.
The stone cottage was dark at all hours of the day and so silent, but for the jingling of a bell round the throat of a neighbour’s goat, that she fancied she could hear the guns going off in Normandy. Enid was able to get her some part-time work at the little school and that was enough, since she didn’t have to pay for her board, to keep Neville well fed and cheerful. She wheeled him to school and parked him in a corner of the classroom. Whenever he cried there was a five-year-old on hand to play with him. And back in the cottage in the evening there was Enid. It was good for him, growing up in this place, Beryl Dusinbery thought. She had that English belief in the moral and physical beneficence of running brooks and drystone walls, no matter that there was barely a healthy person in the country. But Enid noticed that she was never quite at ease with Neville, and caught her staring at him sometimes as though he were a disappointment to her. She wondered if Beryl would have preferred a daughter. No, Beryl told her, that was not it.
It. So there was something. Yes, Beryl conceded, there was something, but it’s in me, not the child.
It was as though there were an anterior sadness in her that the boy corresponded to, a preparation for desolation that he confirmed. Had there been some catastrophic loss in the past that foreshadowed some catastrophic loss to come? She didn’t mean when she was a little girl; she meant earlier than that. In the dawn of time, when the patterns for parenthood and happiness were being laid down. Before nations, before cities, before language. Nothing else could explain the piercing grief she felt on some mornings, waking up to the realisation of herself and then the boy, sleeping by her in a wooden cot. Who was the grief for? Harris? Neville? The men over there being killed in their hundreds of thousands? There was a wrongness in it all, an ancient discordancy. And no, it would not end when the war ended.
Then the war did end and she was proved right. Still the waking to grief. By that time Neville had a bed not a cot. He was a boy, not a baby. He kicked balls and threw stones. And when she looked at him asleep she was not touched as of old. Grief? Was grief even the word for it any more? Imperceptibly, the sadness had turned into something more like distaste—not for him personally, no not for him, but for their relationship, their motherandsonness, the whole business of blood and connection, birth and nurturing, love. The horror, she told Enid, who was horrified to hear such words, of being human.
She had never, to tell the truth, much liked the physical side of being a mother. Did she have to? Unnatural not to love the maternal trance, the breastfeeding, the changing, the bathing, the mopping up of everything that came out of Neville’s little orifices, but what kind of a concept was “the natural”? If we were biological accidents then nature was an accident too. It meant no more than going along with the way things had happened to fall out. Only if there were a God with a purpose could “natural” be accounted a virtue. And what God with a purpose would ever have allowed the dying that was going on only a few hundred miles away?
When Neville suddenly turned from a blooming if quiet child to a querulous and sick one she wondered if she were to blame. Had he sensed his mother’s distaste? Could her reluctance to give him the love he had a right to expect have slowed his development, as though he meant to show he was as unwilling to go on with this charade as she was?
He began to look confused when anyone talked to him. He cried, he vomited, he held his head, he looked at her with unseeing eyes. There was brain impairment of some sort. She couldn’t even bring herself to listen to what the doctor told her. The brain was the only organ she valued. The horror she had felt previously for the ordinary functioning of life was nothing to the horror she felt confronted with its dysfunctioning. That catastrophic loss she’d dreaded—here was the reason for it, here was the presentiment made actual, here was not just an apprehension of abhorrence but the monstrous thing itself.
It wasn’t that pity for Neville eluded her. She pitied him to the centre of her soul. But didn’t pity rot the soul? He had been delivered to her incomplete, impaired, and that impairment impaired and shamed her. She tore her hair. She thought she should pluck out her eyes.
“You are not a fit mother,” Enid told her.
The girl rounded on her aunt. “I? Not a fit mother? How dare you!”
In the silence that followed Beryl could hear Harris saying, “If it’s a boy we’ll call it Neville.”
He is on the Harley Street run, calling in to collect prescriptions, have his blood pressure read, his heart monitored, his cataracts checked, and the biannual service of his feet. He has his mother’s feet. The moment the chiropodist gets to work on them he sees his mother’s, folded under her on the sofa—frightened feet, he always thought, in hiding. His the same. Where has he allowed his feet to take him? Little Stanmore to Seven Sisters Road; the Finchley Road to Marylebone; North London park to North London park. You have surprisingly soft feet for a man your age, the chiropodist tells him. But then she doesn’t know how carefully he’s tended them.
Every specialist he sees will tell him the same: he’s in remarkably good shape for his age.
Harley Street is like a social club for the infirm at this time of the morning. It can be hard to decide whether this is the last goodbye or the first hello. Are they gathering at the River Styx, waiting for the ferryman, or have they crossed over already? Is this what being on the other side is like—never knowing if you’ve got there yet?
Shimi doesn’t like looking well amid so much affliction. Looking well is to invite retribution. Look well and you have to face the horrible drop in spirits that comes with realising you have so little time left to look well in.
He fills his lungs with air. He should be proud of his strong untried heart and dainty coward’s feet. He should be dancing in the ballroom of the lonely with the Widows who are waiting at every corner of Harley Street for an invitation to take to the floor. Dance, Shimi, for Christ’s sake. Dance with the Widow Wolfsheim whose legs are legendary and who has a ballroom of her own.
He can’t picture himself dancing but he does suddenly remember he is meant to meet her for coffee. He looks at his watch. He is an hour late and when he gets to the venue she is gone. He knows what she’ll be thinking. “Once, Mr. Carmelli, I can excuse, but twice…”
What’s he got against the Widow Wolfsheim that she alone triggers forgetfulness in him?
She isn’t looking for the earth from him. Yes, she’d like to show him off—the only unmarried man in North London who can zip up his own fly. (A hundred times a day, as it happens, but that’s another matter.) But it’s unlikely she wants it to go any further than that. Conversation and cartomancy will do her. So? What in God’s name is so wrong with her?
He doesn’t know. Yes, he does. She’s too familiar. Not too familiar with him, too familiar to him. He has never, in some part of himself, not known Wanda Wolfsheim.
So it’s himself he’s bored with. He isn’t Br’er Rabbit kicking in vain against the Tar Baby. He is the Tar Baby.
* * *
—
HE FINDS A bench in St. Marylebone Gardens and closes his eyes. It’s early to be nodding off but that must be what he’s done. A voice comes to him as in a dream. “Would you help me, please?” But when he opens his eyes he hears it again….
This isn’t happening now, it is happening when he is a younger, stronger man, but it might as well be happening this very minute. A hyperthymesiac doesn’t bother too much dividing yesterday and today. Shimi lives in a continuous present of dishonour….
He can’t see anyone. He rises and walks, as though to his doom, in the direction of the lavatory—there’s always a lavatory in Shimi’s tapestries of woe, even if it’s a lavatory he can’t get to in time—then sees whatever it is, barely a person, a human wreckage, of no discernible age or gender, in a shabby wheelchair. An old blanket covers the place where the legs might just be, but it wouldn’t surprise Shimi if the legs have gone along with just about everything else. Shimi cannot bring himself to look too closely. To tell the truth he is terrified of what he will see. Or, worse, of what he won’t. Just the idea of injury is hard for Shimi to entertain, but the sight of missing parts disturbs him beyond all reason. For weeks after being approached in Oxford Street by a limbless beggar on a skateboard—a mere stub of humanity—he was unable to sleep. It is as though the more that’s lopped off a person the more menacing to Shimi he becomes. He reasons that the problem is metaphysical: a limbless man gives the lie to the idea of an ordered universe. But it’s more visceral than that. Shimi is only just held together himself. The horror of life is kept at bay only by the illusion of wholeness.
How extreme a case of insalubrity is now being presented to him Shimi doesn’t want to know. There is a bad smell, though whether of a rotting body or unwashed blankets he cannot say. The voice, too, when it repeats its plea—“I’m desperate, please help me”—is a history of ruination. A sunken chest cavity, torn vocal cords, a mouth clotted and malodorous.
Shimi instinctively puts his hands in his pockets to see if he has spare change, then realises in time that this is not the assistance he is being asked to provide.
“What do you want me to do?” he enquires, still not knowing if he’s addressing a man or a woman.
“Help me with the toilet.”
Shimi goes cold. “I think it’s free,” he says.
Yes, he knows how that sounds.
“It’s when I get inside that I can’t manage,” the person says.
Manage!
What would be worse, Shimi wonders, helping a man, or helping a woman. He wants not to put a picture to the words, but a picture forms. Helping a man, he decides, pushing the pictorial details from him, helping a man would be far worse.
I am not capable of this, he acknowledges to himself.
Who doesn’t wonder how he will be in the final extremity, when called upon to show extraordinary courage, or just extraordinary forbearance? Shimi has often wondered and never doubted he will fall short. And this isn’t the final extremity.
He looks around to see if there are others better equipped to meet this trial, but there is only him, the chair, and the wreckage in it.
He makes as though to take the handles of the chair, but even that is a connection too far. An apology, he decides, will only make matters worse. An explanation, even supposing he can find the words for one, will make them worse still.
There being nothing else for it…
* * *
—
WHEN HE GETS home he finds the message light winking on his answerphone.
No one ever leaves him a message.
Ephraim, he thinks.
A thought he hasn’t had in over half a century.
When you fear the worst it will be the worst.
Shimi’s mother used to tell him that. It was a piece of wisdom she’d brought all the way over from the Carpathians. As a little boy Shimi imagined the Carpathian Mountains as a place where everyone lived in dread of calamity, day and night.
