One another, p.8
One Another, page 8
‘Death-metal drives,’ Anuradha responded. Cheeky. High.
Near the end of their journey Anuradha said something in melancholy tones about her cousin, and the Bradford Twelve, but by then was too tired to explain. Both were coming down, slumping at last from overexcitement into post-concert fatigue. They lugged themselves from the bus, then walked together slowly through the slumbrous streets, all the way back to Whitstead in a darkness that was now mellow, quiet and still.
≈
In July 1880 a steamship called Jeddah leaves Penang for Mecca with 953 Muslim pilgrims on board. On route the ship strikes something that tears a hole in its hull, and begins to take in water. There are only seven lifeboats. The captain and some of his crew take a lifeboat, lower it and float away in the dark to the sound of pleading screams and desperate panic. Those in the lifeboat are picked up and rescued. They say that their ship has sunk. The story of the tragedy at sea, one thousand lives lost, is reported sensationally in the newspapers in London. The next day the Jeddah, floating calmly, arrives in Aden.
The official inquiry notes the cowardice of the white crew and the remarkable labour of the pilgrims in pulling together both in spirit and labour.
Joseph hears this story when he signs on to the Vidar; its former first mate was also the first mate on the Jeddah. One of those who fled.
Successions, replications, the role of the white overlord who assumes his life is more valuable than that of any other. These themes repeat and repeat.
He is secretly afraid. Afraid all his professional life as a seaman that he will not measure up and that at some crucial moment he will make the cowardly choice.
In the novel Lord Jim, Jim has been laid up in a Singapore hospital, half lame from an accident with a flying spar. He hates lying on his back; he is waiting impatiently to return to sea. When he can walk without a stick he heads immediately to the harbour, to seek new employment. He is the son of a pastor, a splendid specimen of English good behaviour and good looks, and he is dressed immaculately in white, from boots to hat. This is a pious voyage with a human cargo, and the ship is a steamship, so that he can manage without showing the limits of his damaged body.
In darkness Jim jumps from the Patna into a lifeboat, leaving behind the pilgrims on their Hajj. He will end up in Borneo with a Eurasian woman and a deadly serious martyr complex. He will meet his death willingly, becoming the hero he wants to be, needing a dramatic end to prove the worth of his character.
Jumping ship. Such a redolent phrase. Jumping ship. Into darkness.
≈
One of the decorous parlour games of the nineteenth century is twenty questions. In Mauritius, aged thirty-one, Joseph meets two charming sisters who tease him with questions written in French (to which he responds with written replies in English). The answers are recorded in the Mauritian diary of one Eugénie Renouf.
‘What would be your dream of happiness?’
‘Never dream of it; want reality.’
‘What would you like to be?’
‘Should like not to be.’
‘What country would you like to live in?’
‘Do not know. Perhaps Lapland.’
‘What’s your greatest distraction?’
‘Chasing wild geese.’
‘What natural gift do you wish you had had?’
‘Self-confidence.’
‘Do you think you are loved?’
‘Decline to state.’
Thinking he is loved, Joseph asks the next day for the hand in marriage of Eugénie Renouf, only to discover that she has a fiancé, and has been cruelly playing with his feelings. He turns from her, humiliated, his face hardening in despair. He strokes his pointy beard, then examines his fingertips, peering critically, as if seeking dirt hidden there. He takes a deep breath. Suppresses his wounded pride.
To like not to be. To live in Lapland. To want self-confidence.
≈
Helen was listless now. After the first flush of emancipation and the concert with Anuradha, she was feeling stranded and tired. She wrote dutifully to her mother and turned up daily to clean hotel rooms. She spent the evenings chaste, alone, in contemplation of her index cards.
She wondered about her direction, no direction home. Unknown. Rolling stone.
In the common room a group of women were smoking and drinking red wine. Anuradha was not among them, but Helen entered when waved in and found that her decision to leave had made the others feel somehow more secure. They were sticking with it. They would each finish their theses. They were all confident, or diligently pretending to be so. It was a smallish group of five, diminished for the summer break, but solicitous and friendly. Helen was handed a glass of wine before she sat down.
The talk floated back and forth, dreamily vague and inconsequential. This was the ensemble of a particular kind and moment of life, the leisure of study, the time before husbands or babies or adulteries or coming out. The time before needing to earn a living, to put out the garbage, to commit to a mortgage or in-laws or addiction or crime. Activism. Performance art. New hairstyles. Fundamentalism. All in the room were in their mid- to late twenties. All were earnest and clever Newnham women. No vulgarity here.
One of the women rose and collected a round frosted cake from a side bench. Studiously, she cut it into even wedges. Another distributed paper napkins, and they all sat balancing their crumbly segments between sincere drags and puffs of cigarette.
Someone was moving about upstairs; the light tread of another boarder, preparing for bed. The wine in their glasses was glowing dimly.
Outside, late now, the wind was rising with the moon. Helen thought of the bank of trees beyond the building, casting a dark play of shadows on the wall, the path leading away from Barton Road, and the hedge along Clare Road and beyond that, the sports ground, where she had lately stood alone beneath the sky, breathing out and breathing in, and doubting her decisions.
Helen’s glass was topped up. Conversation moved to the misbehaviour of the monarchy, a topic she despised. The cake was spongy and bland. She stuffed it in.
The manuscript for Sylvia Plath’s unfinished second novel, provisionally entitled Double Exposure, or Double Take, written in 1962–63, disappeared sometime before 1970. Another lost manuscript. It was never recovered. Plath lived in Whitstead as a graduate, writing her stringent verse, applying her cherry-red lipstick, falling for broody Ted Hughes. Perhaps she lived in the room that Helen was about to leave. It had never occurred to her to ask which was the poet’s room. Superstition, possibly, or a subliminal wish not to be haunted, had made her incurious.
There was, it seemed to Helen, a strange scent in the air.
She could not make it out. What was that scent, or scents?
She was feeling sorry for herself. The monarchical conversation had expanded to crude speculation on palatial secrets and indiscretions. The cake was like glue. The wine too acidic. Eventually, when she left this place, she would never again, she vowed, listen to talk about the monarchy, or eat gluey English cake.
From her chair Helen could see the night composed in the window. She stared into space and retreated to her wandering thoughts. Plath’s ‘Ariel’: stasis in darkness, substanceless blue. Cadmium red, and the lovely chess pieces, gone. A description of Sadakichi Hartmann’s ‘perfume symphony’, an art of smells staged in a gallery in San Francisco in 1919, the drift, nothing more, no image or word, of invisible mixing that was supposed to produce something artful.
The shaving of moon outside the window seemed to quiver, and to slip.
Tolikenottobe.ToliveinLapland.Towantself-confidence.
≈
A few months before Helen’s return trip to Australia, a young British artist sold a shark suspended in formaldehyde in a vitrine to a dealer in London for fifty thousand pounds. Entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, it featured a shark caught on commission in Australia, off the coast of Queensland, and shipped across the planet to become expensive art. Justin pointed out the Sun newspaper banner, flapping in ragged advertisement in a wire stand outside a newsagent: ‘£50,000 for Fish Without Chips!’ They had both laughed. Justin veered off into a monologue about the perverse economy of the art world and Helen walked beside him thinking about The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. She liked the title. Without the title it was just a dead shark in a glass case. A dead Australian shark.
Predictably, Justin returned to the topic of the shark after a few drinks, expanding on the theme of the madness of art markets. He might invest, he said. He might become a millionaire tosser. He raved on over his beer about the gullibility of the rich and the insatiable capitalist desire for novelty.
Helen was in no mood to defend conceptual art. Nor was she sure what she thought about the infamous shark, beyond the striking suggestiveness of the title. She nursed her wine and took her time sorting what seemed an intellectual challenge. She formed no solid opinion. What in any case could she know, being immersed in Conrad and the wordy fiction of the long nineteenth century. She was almost entirely unmodern. She was in love not with concepts but with the human body, alive and historical. Conrad’s childhood above all: how it moved her, almost maternally. His boyhood terrors and shame, his lyrical complications, his Marlow, his neediness.
‘It’s what they think of us,’ Justin said, playing his usual tune. ‘Sharks and snakes. The despised and colonised southlands. Full of bugs and beasties.’
She let him talk on. Gradually his voice became alcoholically smudged and he began stroking her face with the back of his hand. He leaned close, breathing a stink, and saying they should leave while he was capable. She saw at once that he was incapable. She could not respond to him when he talked like this, and knew even then that she should not have been so compliant. The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.
She touched the side of his neck, which became blotchy when he drank too much. She felt the warmth there and wanted to recall what might have been possible, what capacity or possibility she had seen at the beginning, when she looked into his large, expressive face and saw that his braggart demeanour was for show and that in private, naked and vulnerable, there might be something more to discover.
They drank in a pub called the Panton Arms. It was her suggestion, a small pub, and tucked among houses. The barman was a physics student she fancied, Irish and shy. She imagined the West somewhere: Galway, or Derry, up north. He nodded when Helen entered and she gave him a brief smile. The space was cosy, local, with pale wood panels and smoky, Guinness-spiked air. They chose a table and nestled together. After his rave, Justin went quiet and his silence revived her affection. For the time being at least she forgave his crassness; she wanted his good humour to return. And briefly they achieved it, the equilibrium of easy conversation, low-voiced opinions, the ordinary exchanges of coupledom familiarity. Yet both, she thought too, experienced that sinking feeling, the sense of something positive seeping away, lowering to an almost depressive hush.
Then, drinking done, they had walked in a stroll up Panton Street, heading back to the colleges. The days were long and the light was coppery and thin, appearing to stream towards them in currents as they moved along the street, gleaming on the brick houses, giving the appearance of heat when the air was autumnally chill. Justin remained silent. He had knotted his hands in his pockets and was watching his feet walking, his head down like a mourner solemnly following a casket. It was like seeing the future, she thought later. Something about the shuffle and the barely suppressed despair, something about the way he showed in his body that for all his physical strength and beauty, for all his academic success and boasting and promise of a bright future, he was also powerless and unstable.
From behind them came the sound of squealing children. And then, in a flash, two girls and two boys, all about seven years old, rushed past them and sped in a mad flutter around the corner. Boys chasing girls. Not for the first time she thought of how rarely she saw children in the university centre of Cambridge, how adult her world was, how without these voices and this joyous disruption.
The two girls reappeared, giggling, clasping each other, bending over in an exaggerated performance of breathlessness. Their high voices sprang off the brick walls around them. Then the boys too reappeared and with the squeak of a scream the girls straightened and ran off again, their small bodies charging together into the fading light.
Helen was no longer thinking about the shark, or Justin, or the good-looking barman who smiled at her from beneath a plastic globe of jaundiced light. She was thinking about cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, and how she loved the focus on children, running or sitting or playing in poor city streets, and of the way their faces, ever mobile, ever vivid, were filmed as if wholly adored. Vittorio De Sica. The abundance children carry. What it means to look in close-up focus at a laughing or crying face. Bruno, the weeping boy searching for his bicycle in Bicycle Thieves, and his face upturned to his father’s, shining bright with black-and-white film and the fall of hot tears. Justin had called her sentimental, and she agreed. She desired sentimentally to be touched by such images, a boy lost in feeling, the truth revealed in a single child’s face, fulsomely blubbing.
≈
They were lying side by side on the midsummer grass at Grantchester. As if in obedience to a bygone pastoral ideal, Anuradha had supplied a punnet of strawberries and small triangular sandwiches of cream cheese and cucumber; Helen for her part contributed a bottle of cheap sparkling wine and two plastic mugs from the common-room kitchen. The willows seemed almost to drip with humidity; the Cam flowed before them, languid and sticky, its waters yellowish and slow, picked at by swamp birds and hovered over by lurching dragonflies. A decorative girl in a straw hat was punted past by an earnest young man, leaning in precarious balance towards her. There was the tizz of inexperience, or perhaps it was nervous first love: the observers of a punt, Anuradha once said, are always hoping to witness a comic fall. Not to mention the enticement of a gliding cliché.
Light flared in petal shapes, shifting, on the surface of the water.
‘So?’
Anuradha had asked her again about Tasmania.
William Cuffay, Anuradha repeated, sentenced to twenty-one years for sedition, transported to Van Diemen’s Land at the age of sixty in 1849. He was a Chartist hero; how could she not have heard of him? The son of a slave from Saint Kitts, English-born, black, with a deformity that meant he walked awkwardly and was under five foot tall. He was a tailor by vocation, so dressed natty and fine. He was charismatic and eloquent in the cause of workers’ rights. Anuradha had applied for funds to follow his trail.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
Each caught the other’s gaze.
Helen said again that she had never heard of William Cuffay. And she was loath to summarise her life: what could she say? That she became a reader to escape from Hobart and Tasmania. That in retrospect she understood that their family’s arrival coincided with a period of adolescent depression: why otherwise did she feel the mountain to be everywhere pressing down, and that the hills, famed for their views, inspired a kind of hopelessness within her? Her vision of herself in those years was of always trudging alone, returning from school with her backpack of library books. She bent forward to push past the weatherboard houses, which seemed to crouch behind scraggly clumps of roses and cottage-garden weeds. She hated school and she hated herself. She hated the ladies in the shops, bossy and smug, who somehow knew as soon as she opened her mouth that she was a Mainlander, not an Islander, and therefore ignorable. As she caught the bus down New Town Road towards the city she was pleased to be carried along and away; she would glimpse the ornate post office opposite the cinema, at the top of Elizabeth Street, and think, yes, she would be the one who left and sent letters from abroad. She would be the escapee.
They were both pedants, she and Anuradha, both collectors of stories and life snippets and historical observances.
‘When did Cuffay die?’
‘Eighteen-seventy, in North Hobart. A pauper.’
This man was Anuradha’s attachment, as Joseph Conrad was hers. Perhaps they had developed the same unconstrained imaginings: to place a figure in history, to see him or her there, complicated and vexed in their primary material. A vehicle for private projections. A disembodied romance.
‘Beautiful skies. Hobart has the most beautiful skies.’ Helen was feeling contrarian. Perhaps it was this balmy day and the vaguely cinematic setting, but she was thinking only of contrary weather. How many hours had she spent in a hazy blur, watching the sky? The drama of it, the ‘bridgewater jerry’ fog coursing in a low roll down the Derwent River, the katabatic winds that striped the air with filaments of white, the moody descent of elongated banks of mizzle and cloud. How swiftly the small city changed: a bright day lowered to sudden grey, or a widdershins sweep of white streaks sped from the top of the mountain. And while her father fished, she watched rain wash in from the Tasman Sea. He stood there, impervious, dripping, concentrated, as she waited in the car, shivering with her book, tracking the curtained water as it swept across Opossum or Storm Bay.
Anuradha looked perplexed. ‘Skies?’ It was a challenge. ‘Ah, you’re such a mystery.’
Anuradha did not chide or insist. She leaned forwards and flicked a loose strand of hair back from Helen’s cheek. She let her palm rest there, just for a second, to touch her face.
Helen knew then; she knew what sexual touch felt like. How could she have been so obtuse? In her friend’s face she saw assertion against her own passivity; she saw how Anuradha enacted an invitation in this gesture, how gently and carefully she had made her move.
Helen chose to ignore it. Anuradha turned away, took a final gulp of her sparkling wine, then held up her mug, dangling it from her index finger as if to say: another?
They finished the bottle quickly. Anuradha fell asleep, lying relaxed on her back, her face exposed to the sun, and Helen, all nerves now, self-conscious and questioning, propped herself on her elbows, watched the weekend punters and pulled her sunhat lower, the better to hide.
Near the end of their journey Anuradha said something in melancholy tones about her cousin, and the Bradford Twelve, but by then was too tired to explain. Both were coming down, slumping at last from overexcitement into post-concert fatigue. They lugged themselves from the bus, then walked together slowly through the slumbrous streets, all the way back to Whitstead in a darkness that was now mellow, quiet and still.
≈
In July 1880 a steamship called Jeddah leaves Penang for Mecca with 953 Muslim pilgrims on board. On route the ship strikes something that tears a hole in its hull, and begins to take in water. There are only seven lifeboats. The captain and some of his crew take a lifeboat, lower it and float away in the dark to the sound of pleading screams and desperate panic. Those in the lifeboat are picked up and rescued. They say that their ship has sunk. The story of the tragedy at sea, one thousand lives lost, is reported sensationally in the newspapers in London. The next day the Jeddah, floating calmly, arrives in Aden.
The official inquiry notes the cowardice of the white crew and the remarkable labour of the pilgrims in pulling together both in spirit and labour.
Joseph hears this story when he signs on to the Vidar; its former first mate was also the first mate on the Jeddah. One of those who fled.
Successions, replications, the role of the white overlord who assumes his life is more valuable than that of any other. These themes repeat and repeat.
He is secretly afraid. Afraid all his professional life as a seaman that he will not measure up and that at some crucial moment he will make the cowardly choice.
In the novel Lord Jim, Jim has been laid up in a Singapore hospital, half lame from an accident with a flying spar. He hates lying on his back; he is waiting impatiently to return to sea. When he can walk without a stick he heads immediately to the harbour, to seek new employment. He is the son of a pastor, a splendid specimen of English good behaviour and good looks, and he is dressed immaculately in white, from boots to hat. This is a pious voyage with a human cargo, and the ship is a steamship, so that he can manage without showing the limits of his damaged body.
In darkness Jim jumps from the Patna into a lifeboat, leaving behind the pilgrims on their Hajj. He will end up in Borneo with a Eurasian woman and a deadly serious martyr complex. He will meet his death willingly, becoming the hero he wants to be, needing a dramatic end to prove the worth of his character.
Jumping ship. Such a redolent phrase. Jumping ship. Into darkness.
≈
One of the decorous parlour games of the nineteenth century is twenty questions. In Mauritius, aged thirty-one, Joseph meets two charming sisters who tease him with questions written in French (to which he responds with written replies in English). The answers are recorded in the Mauritian diary of one Eugénie Renouf.
‘What would be your dream of happiness?’
‘Never dream of it; want reality.’
‘What would you like to be?’
‘Should like not to be.’
‘What country would you like to live in?’
‘Do not know. Perhaps Lapland.’
‘What’s your greatest distraction?’
‘Chasing wild geese.’
‘What natural gift do you wish you had had?’
‘Self-confidence.’
‘Do you think you are loved?’
‘Decline to state.’
Thinking he is loved, Joseph asks the next day for the hand in marriage of Eugénie Renouf, only to discover that she has a fiancé, and has been cruelly playing with his feelings. He turns from her, humiliated, his face hardening in despair. He strokes his pointy beard, then examines his fingertips, peering critically, as if seeking dirt hidden there. He takes a deep breath. Suppresses his wounded pride.
To like not to be. To live in Lapland. To want self-confidence.
≈
Helen was listless now. After the first flush of emancipation and the concert with Anuradha, she was feeling stranded and tired. She wrote dutifully to her mother and turned up daily to clean hotel rooms. She spent the evenings chaste, alone, in contemplation of her index cards.
She wondered about her direction, no direction home. Unknown. Rolling stone.
In the common room a group of women were smoking and drinking red wine. Anuradha was not among them, but Helen entered when waved in and found that her decision to leave had made the others feel somehow more secure. They were sticking with it. They would each finish their theses. They were all confident, or diligently pretending to be so. It was a smallish group of five, diminished for the summer break, but solicitous and friendly. Helen was handed a glass of wine before she sat down.
The talk floated back and forth, dreamily vague and inconsequential. This was the ensemble of a particular kind and moment of life, the leisure of study, the time before husbands or babies or adulteries or coming out. The time before needing to earn a living, to put out the garbage, to commit to a mortgage or in-laws or addiction or crime. Activism. Performance art. New hairstyles. Fundamentalism. All in the room were in their mid- to late twenties. All were earnest and clever Newnham women. No vulgarity here.
One of the women rose and collected a round frosted cake from a side bench. Studiously, she cut it into even wedges. Another distributed paper napkins, and they all sat balancing their crumbly segments between sincere drags and puffs of cigarette.
Someone was moving about upstairs; the light tread of another boarder, preparing for bed. The wine in their glasses was glowing dimly.
Outside, late now, the wind was rising with the moon. Helen thought of the bank of trees beyond the building, casting a dark play of shadows on the wall, the path leading away from Barton Road, and the hedge along Clare Road and beyond that, the sports ground, where she had lately stood alone beneath the sky, breathing out and breathing in, and doubting her decisions.
Helen’s glass was topped up. Conversation moved to the misbehaviour of the monarchy, a topic she despised. The cake was spongy and bland. She stuffed it in.
The manuscript for Sylvia Plath’s unfinished second novel, provisionally entitled Double Exposure, or Double Take, written in 1962–63, disappeared sometime before 1970. Another lost manuscript. It was never recovered. Plath lived in Whitstead as a graduate, writing her stringent verse, applying her cherry-red lipstick, falling for broody Ted Hughes. Perhaps she lived in the room that Helen was about to leave. It had never occurred to her to ask which was the poet’s room. Superstition, possibly, or a subliminal wish not to be haunted, had made her incurious.
There was, it seemed to Helen, a strange scent in the air.
She could not make it out. What was that scent, or scents?
She was feeling sorry for herself. The monarchical conversation had expanded to crude speculation on palatial secrets and indiscretions. The cake was like glue. The wine too acidic. Eventually, when she left this place, she would never again, she vowed, listen to talk about the monarchy, or eat gluey English cake.
From her chair Helen could see the night composed in the window. She stared into space and retreated to her wandering thoughts. Plath’s ‘Ariel’: stasis in darkness, substanceless blue. Cadmium red, and the lovely chess pieces, gone. A description of Sadakichi Hartmann’s ‘perfume symphony’, an art of smells staged in a gallery in San Francisco in 1919, the drift, nothing more, no image or word, of invisible mixing that was supposed to produce something artful.
The shaving of moon outside the window seemed to quiver, and to slip.
Tolikenottobe.ToliveinLapland.Towantself-confidence.
≈
A few months before Helen’s return trip to Australia, a young British artist sold a shark suspended in formaldehyde in a vitrine to a dealer in London for fifty thousand pounds. Entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, it featured a shark caught on commission in Australia, off the coast of Queensland, and shipped across the planet to become expensive art. Justin pointed out the Sun newspaper banner, flapping in ragged advertisement in a wire stand outside a newsagent: ‘£50,000 for Fish Without Chips!’ They had both laughed. Justin veered off into a monologue about the perverse economy of the art world and Helen walked beside him thinking about The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. She liked the title. Without the title it was just a dead shark in a glass case. A dead Australian shark.
Predictably, Justin returned to the topic of the shark after a few drinks, expanding on the theme of the madness of art markets. He might invest, he said. He might become a millionaire tosser. He raved on over his beer about the gullibility of the rich and the insatiable capitalist desire for novelty.
Helen was in no mood to defend conceptual art. Nor was she sure what she thought about the infamous shark, beyond the striking suggestiveness of the title. She nursed her wine and took her time sorting what seemed an intellectual challenge. She formed no solid opinion. What in any case could she know, being immersed in Conrad and the wordy fiction of the long nineteenth century. She was almost entirely unmodern. She was in love not with concepts but with the human body, alive and historical. Conrad’s childhood above all: how it moved her, almost maternally. His boyhood terrors and shame, his lyrical complications, his Marlow, his neediness.
‘It’s what they think of us,’ Justin said, playing his usual tune. ‘Sharks and snakes. The despised and colonised southlands. Full of bugs and beasties.’
She let him talk on. Gradually his voice became alcoholically smudged and he began stroking her face with the back of his hand. He leaned close, breathing a stink, and saying they should leave while he was capable. She saw at once that he was incapable. She could not respond to him when he talked like this, and knew even then that she should not have been so compliant. The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.
She touched the side of his neck, which became blotchy when he drank too much. She felt the warmth there and wanted to recall what might have been possible, what capacity or possibility she had seen at the beginning, when she looked into his large, expressive face and saw that his braggart demeanour was for show and that in private, naked and vulnerable, there might be something more to discover.
They drank in a pub called the Panton Arms. It was her suggestion, a small pub, and tucked among houses. The barman was a physics student she fancied, Irish and shy. She imagined the West somewhere: Galway, or Derry, up north. He nodded when Helen entered and she gave him a brief smile. The space was cosy, local, with pale wood panels and smoky, Guinness-spiked air. They chose a table and nestled together. After his rave, Justin went quiet and his silence revived her affection. For the time being at least she forgave his crassness; she wanted his good humour to return. And briefly they achieved it, the equilibrium of easy conversation, low-voiced opinions, the ordinary exchanges of coupledom familiarity. Yet both, she thought too, experienced that sinking feeling, the sense of something positive seeping away, lowering to an almost depressive hush.
Then, drinking done, they had walked in a stroll up Panton Street, heading back to the colleges. The days were long and the light was coppery and thin, appearing to stream towards them in currents as they moved along the street, gleaming on the brick houses, giving the appearance of heat when the air was autumnally chill. Justin remained silent. He had knotted his hands in his pockets and was watching his feet walking, his head down like a mourner solemnly following a casket. It was like seeing the future, she thought later. Something about the shuffle and the barely suppressed despair, something about the way he showed in his body that for all his physical strength and beauty, for all his academic success and boasting and promise of a bright future, he was also powerless and unstable.
From behind them came the sound of squealing children. And then, in a flash, two girls and two boys, all about seven years old, rushed past them and sped in a mad flutter around the corner. Boys chasing girls. Not for the first time she thought of how rarely she saw children in the university centre of Cambridge, how adult her world was, how without these voices and this joyous disruption.
The two girls reappeared, giggling, clasping each other, bending over in an exaggerated performance of breathlessness. Their high voices sprang off the brick walls around them. Then the boys too reappeared and with the squeak of a scream the girls straightened and ran off again, their small bodies charging together into the fading light.
Helen was no longer thinking about the shark, or Justin, or the good-looking barman who smiled at her from beneath a plastic globe of jaundiced light. She was thinking about cinema, Italian neorealist cinema, and how she loved the focus on children, running or sitting or playing in poor city streets, and of the way their faces, ever mobile, ever vivid, were filmed as if wholly adored. Vittorio De Sica. The abundance children carry. What it means to look in close-up focus at a laughing or crying face. Bruno, the weeping boy searching for his bicycle in Bicycle Thieves, and his face upturned to his father’s, shining bright with black-and-white film and the fall of hot tears. Justin had called her sentimental, and she agreed. She desired sentimentally to be touched by such images, a boy lost in feeling, the truth revealed in a single child’s face, fulsomely blubbing.
≈
They were lying side by side on the midsummer grass at Grantchester. As if in obedience to a bygone pastoral ideal, Anuradha had supplied a punnet of strawberries and small triangular sandwiches of cream cheese and cucumber; Helen for her part contributed a bottle of cheap sparkling wine and two plastic mugs from the common-room kitchen. The willows seemed almost to drip with humidity; the Cam flowed before them, languid and sticky, its waters yellowish and slow, picked at by swamp birds and hovered over by lurching dragonflies. A decorative girl in a straw hat was punted past by an earnest young man, leaning in precarious balance towards her. There was the tizz of inexperience, or perhaps it was nervous first love: the observers of a punt, Anuradha once said, are always hoping to witness a comic fall. Not to mention the enticement of a gliding cliché.
Light flared in petal shapes, shifting, on the surface of the water.
‘So?’
Anuradha had asked her again about Tasmania.
William Cuffay, Anuradha repeated, sentenced to twenty-one years for sedition, transported to Van Diemen’s Land at the age of sixty in 1849. He was a Chartist hero; how could she not have heard of him? The son of a slave from Saint Kitts, English-born, black, with a deformity that meant he walked awkwardly and was under five foot tall. He was a tailor by vocation, so dressed natty and fine. He was charismatic and eloquent in the cause of workers’ rights. Anuradha had applied for funds to follow his trail.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
Each caught the other’s gaze.
Helen said again that she had never heard of William Cuffay. And she was loath to summarise her life: what could she say? That she became a reader to escape from Hobart and Tasmania. That in retrospect she understood that their family’s arrival coincided with a period of adolescent depression: why otherwise did she feel the mountain to be everywhere pressing down, and that the hills, famed for their views, inspired a kind of hopelessness within her? Her vision of herself in those years was of always trudging alone, returning from school with her backpack of library books. She bent forward to push past the weatherboard houses, which seemed to crouch behind scraggly clumps of roses and cottage-garden weeds. She hated school and she hated herself. She hated the ladies in the shops, bossy and smug, who somehow knew as soon as she opened her mouth that she was a Mainlander, not an Islander, and therefore ignorable. As she caught the bus down New Town Road towards the city she was pleased to be carried along and away; she would glimpse the ornate post office opposite the cinema, at the top of Elizabeth Street, and think, yes, she would be the one who left and sent letters from abroad. She would be the escapee.
They were both pedants, she and Anuradha, both collectors of stories and life snippets and historical observances.
‘When did Cuffay die?’
‘Eighteen-seventy, in North Hobart. A pauper.’
This man was Anuradha’s attachment, as Joseph Conrad was hers. Perhaps they had developed the same unconstrained imaginings: to place a figure in history, to see him or her there, complicated and vexed in their primary material. A vehicle for private projections. A disembodied romance.
‘Beautiful skies. Hobart has the most beautiful skies.’ Helen was feeling contrarian. Perhaps it was this balmy day and the vaguely cinematic setting, but she was thinking only of contrary weather. How many hours had she spent in a hazy blur, watching the sky? The drama of it, the ‘bridgewater jerry’ fog coursing in a low roll down the Derwent River, the katabatic winds that striped the air with filaments of white, the moody descent of elongated banks of mizzle and cloud. How swiftly the small city changed: a bright day lowered to sudden grey, or a widdershins sweep of white streaks sped from the top of the mountain. And while her father fished, she watched rain wash in from the Tasman Sea. He stood there, impervious, dripping, concentrated, as she waited in the car, shivering with her book, tracking the curtained water as it swept across Opossum or Storm Bay.
Anuradha looked perplexed. ‘Skies?’ It was a challenge. ‘Ah, you’re such a mystery.’
Anuradha did not chide or insist. She leaned forwards and flicked a loose strand of hair back from Helen’s cheek. She let her palm rest there, just for a second, to touch her face.
Helen knew then; she knew what sexual touch felt like. How could she have been so obtuse? In her friend’s face she saw assertion against her own passivity; she saw how Anuradha enacted an invitation in this gesture, how gently and carefully she had made her move.
Helen chose to ignore it. Anuradha turned away, took a final gulp of her sparkling wine, then held up her mug, dangling it from her index finger as if to say: another?
They finished the bottle quickly. Anuradha fell asleep, lying relaxed on her back, her face exposed to the sun, and Helen, all nerves now, self-conscious and questioning, propped herself on her elbows, watched the weekend punters and pulled her sunhat lower, the better to hide.
