He Died with His Eyes Open (19 page)

'You don't go in for love,' I said, 'only hatred. You're chock-a-block with it, I hadn't realized.'

'It isn't hatred,' she said, 'it's fear. The moment anyone starts digging into me I get afraid, and that makes me a dangerous cow. You're the first man who ever made me react in the sack, you're the first man who's ever got this deep into me. And you're leaving?'

'Put like that,' I said, 'leaving does seem feeble.'

'Well, why don't we have a farewell drink and think it over? The whisky's in the sitting-room.'

When I got back with the drinks she was out of bed. She put her hands on my face and felt the bruise with clumsy, unaccustomed fingers: 'I've never done this to a man before. Am I hurting you?'

'No:

'I'll put something on it.'

'Whisky'll do,' I said, 'it works every bit as fast as iodine.'

She laughed and fell back on the bed; later on we made love.

Afterwards, when we had uncoupled and she had coughed me out I remembered how Staniland had recorded: 'No effort succeeds with Barbara. No effort I make with her means any-thing to her, yet I've got to keep making one, like a prisoner in a chain-gang. Don't choke me, Barbara! Listen! Don't—'

Barbara had put the light out. Wakeful, I fingered the bruise on my face, sensed the leadenness of my body and thought upwards into the dark in circles, the darkness measured by her breathing.

I looked at her sleeping, her body caught briefly in the radiance of the headlights from a passing car. Her face was hard in the white beam, and I was sure suddenly:
She knows who I am and why I'm here.

I couldn't sleep. It was a hot night and the room was too stuffy. I tried in vain to sleep, but found myself thinking of Staniland, as usual. On one of the tapes he had said:

I want to die but I'm afraid to. I have to accept that when I'm dead I shall start to swell and stink—I can't believe it of this body that I'm so used to. But in my last summer at Duéjouls, death came to the village one day in hot weather; the youngest son of the people down at the castle died of a congestion while he was bathing in the icy water of the Tarn; he was seventeen. Despite the difference in our ages, he was a friend of mine; together we used to dig the sheep-dung out of the vaulted cotes underneath the castle, empty it onto his father's trailer and go and spread it on the fields. He never questioned me. He was too intelligent to ask questions.

The day he died, I went up the same evening. I didn't want to go up to the castle only three hours after he had been brought back from the river, but his brother invited me. I went upstairs; his parents and some relations stood in the small stone drawing-room. They wept in the suffocating darkness, the shutters and windows tight closed. They switched the light on so that I could see him for a moment; he was laid out on a bier under a sheet of muslin, in shirt and slacks, with his hands crossed on his breast. His hands and face were pointed and angular, and had turned blue. Then they turned the light out again. I had taken my hat off and was wringing it in my hands. His mother and father threw themselves roughly into my arms and we all held on to each other and kissed and wept. 'Why did God let me have him,' his mother cried, 'when it was for such a short time?' And a moment later: 'He hasn't moved, he still hasn't moved.' She hadn't accepted yet that he never would. Meanwhile, there was harsh peasant whispering in the dark. One woman murmured in Occitan: 'He isn't swelling yet, but he soon will in this heat—its fifty centigrade out there in the sun.' 'They'll bury him as soon as the forms are filled in,' a man said in a loud, comforting mutter. 'Day after tomorrow for sure.' Meanwhile the boy's father whimpered quietly. I had never before heard such a sound from a man as tough as he, and hope never to again.

I had a casual job in the cemetery at that time with another man; the regular grave-digger was off sick. It's hard work digging there, especially in the summer with the earth hard as cement; it isn't the kind of work that gets many takers. But we didn't need to dig this time. To bury the boy in his family's vault we only needed to move a fairly new coffin to a different place, because there wasn't much room left in there. But this coffin had swelled up with gas inside with a pressure so great that the gas had smashed several of the planks. Tough planks they were, too—-mountain oak that my neighbour Espinasse had cut and seasoned and then taken down to the Vayssières' saw-mill; then we shaped them and planed them.
It was the most atrocious business for both of us, moving that coffin, but of course, we managed.

Of course I shall stink when I die. I shall swell up like everyone else and there'll be nothing left of me. Only, like all truth about oneself, it's so hard to believe, and I couldn't for ten years. But now I'm all right again and have got my strength back to talk lucidly into my machine.

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.

27

The following night we were lying awake in bed; Barbara had been silent for a time.

'You mentioned a man the other day,' I said. 'Someone you used to live with.'

'Yes?' She was alert, I could tell; but she yawned to cover it. 'Why does he interest you?'

'Everyone you've known interests me. It's only natural, isn't it?'

She turned to watch me in the half-dark. 'There wasn't really a lot to him,' she said. 'Not really.'

'Old? Young?'

'Oh, a middle-aged geezer in his fifties.'

'Doesn't sound right for you,' I said. 'Not you. Not when I think back to old Tom in the 84 Club that night and the way you gave him the brush-off.'

She leaned across me and smacked me lightly, painlessly, across the face: 'You're a terrible man, you are. Terrible.'

'Oh?'

'Yes, you're so soft, yet so fucking hard.'

'I don't want to embarrass you with a lot of questions about your past,' I said.

'And yet you do nothing else.' She lit a cigarette, groping for my lighter in the dark. 'I drop a hint of anything that happened to me before I met you and bang, you're onto it.'

I lay down straight in the bed and crossed my arms behind my head. 'If you don't want to talk about this person, then we won't. You've got to understand, I'm not envious, just interested.'

'He was just a drunken bore,' she said, 'and I was between regular fellers, but now I can't think why I ever bothered with him.'

'Perhaps he had brains or something? You like brains in a man, you said.'

'Well, he had them all right.'

'But?'

'But he couldn't seem to do anything much with them.'

'A failure?'

'Yes, a failure.'

'We could all end up as one of them, I daresay.'

'Count me out.'

'All right,' I said, 'well, anyway, I'm going to sleep now, I've got to get up in the morning.'

'Good idea.'

I turned over with my back to her and went through the motions of going to sleep, as Staniland had once done on his mattress over at Romilly Place. Immediately, one of Staniland's cassettes came into my mind. He had recited Shakespeare on it and talked about Shakespeare. He had said: 'Why has anyone really ever bothered to write since Shakespeare? How could I ever express what I feel for Barbara better than the way Hamlet felt for Ophelia?' His voice had broken, then presently he had run on, quoting: 'O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have no art to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu! Thine evermore whilst this machine is to him—Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.'

I said to her in the dark: 'Barbara? Are you asleep?'

'No.'

'That old man of yours.'

'Oh, not
again!

'What was his name? I mean, just his Christian name?'

'Oh, drop it.'

'I had a dream,' I said, 'just now.'

'And what did you dream?' She glided upright in the bed like a pallid snake.

'I don't know, I dreamed he was called Charlie. I dreamed his name was Charlie and that he came to a bad end.' The silence in the room was complete with her listening. I said: 'Is he still alive, Barbara?'

She said softly: 'No. No, I heard he died. I'd split up with him a while before, and I heard he was dead through the clubs, like on the grapevine.'

'And was his name Charlie, this old bloke that came to a bad end?'

'Yes,' she said. She murmured the words through ice. 'I suppose you'll be wanting to know the rest of his name next.'

'No, no,' I said, 'not at all.'

'What are you trying to prove, then?'

'Nothing. Just that dreams can be powerful stuff. And what did he die of ?' I said. 'Do you happen to know?'

'No,' she said, 'but I believe it may have been drink.' I felt her body next to mine; it was as rigid as wood.

'I seem to have upset you,' I said.

'There's some people in my past I'd rather forget, that's all. I wish you'd just make love to me and forget everything that happened before.'

But I couldn't do that; there are parts of your body that refuse what you require of them in disgust.

Later in the night, after we had lain stiffly, for hours it seemed to me, side by side, Barbara started talking about Charlie again of her own accord.

'I don't think you'd have seen much in him.' She sounded worried.

'I wonder,' I said. 'I had a friend once, when I was a young man—Jack. Jack had an elder sister called Ivy. She was about sixty when I knew her. She went to our local in the Fulham Road and had charred for a living ever since she came over with Jack from Wexlow. Always a joke and a smile, buy you a drink. We knew she was too frail for the work. Well, one day she was in her usual place in the little bar that looks out on the street there, and she didn't seem able to drink her bottle of Guinness. Didn't suit her today, she said; she left half of it. This went on till one day Jack, who was my mate, made her go for tests over at the Chester Beatty Hospital just up the road. Well, she had stomach cancer, and they were too late to catch it. When they told her she said to the doctor, yes, all right, I've been in pain for a while, but what was the point of making a fuss about it?

'Well, she went into St Stephen's Hospital; Jack saw her into bed there. There was nothing anyone could do for her. She just lay there in that awful ward, her face like paper, death round her mouth, no strength to fight with; it was going to be quick with Ivy. But she kept on smiling; she was a lovely Irish lady. Well, one day I went into the pub and had a light and bitter with Jack in the little bar and he said, well, cheers, and I said, how's Ivy? Well, the fact is she's dying, he said, it's for today or tomorrow, the doctor thinks, but she isn't in any pain now. I shall miss her, he said, she was like a mother to me when we were kids. I'll miss her too, I said. Well, he said, we could go over if you liked (the hospital was just across the road). He said, I went to see her this morning, and what she really wants is a plant to have by the bed, you know, a flower growing. I said to him, well, there's that plant shop just down the road. So we finished our drinks and went and bought her a geranium, two quid, in a pot, and took it over to her. Pleased? She was so happy! Oh, you are a pair of darlings, she said, what a lovely colour it is. Sit down both of you and hold my hands, it's cold in here. But it wasn't cold. It was a baking hot summer's day, July.

'She lay there just looking at the flower. Her spectacles had got too big for her face, but she was the same lovely Ivy, really.

Then Sister came round and said it was the end of visiting time because she had to have her treatment, and anyhow we'd all three of us run out of anything to say. So we kissed her and cuddled her for a bit until the nurse came round with the trolley and then we left; it was opening time by then, five-thirty. We asked could we bring a drink over for her later, but Sister said in a prim sort of way not to. I thought what the fuck difference does it make, and I said so to Jack, and he happened to have a quarter bottle of Scotch in his pocket and he gave her some when Sister's back was turned. But she choked it up and died at ten that night, so we never saw Ivy again. They said we could have the geranium back, but we left it for the other patients in the ward.'

'Well, you're like Charlie in one way, at least,' Barbara said. 'You care for people. Too much so, in Charlie's case. You're another of these geezers that think too much.' She yawned. 'He liked poetry. I'll tell you the only bit I remember—"and now just rest in my excellent white bosom, etcetera.'" After a while she added: 'Pretty that, isn't it?'

I dreamed that Staniland had a third eye and that Barbara said: 'We could dance forever, but when the music's over you never hear it again.'

28

When I woke up, perhaps as a result of something else I had dreamed but couldn't remember, I found myself thinking about an event that Staniland had described on one of his cassettes. I looked at Barbara, who was still asleep. Staniland had said:

August 1940. How that German plane burned! At first it lay there at a slant, green-grey, uptilted in a furrow of the field next to our house. It was a Heinkel 110; it lay there with its foreign numbers on it. It was seven in the morning and already boiling hot, and I was woken by it zooming into our field, throwing up a mass of earth. When I arrived there was a stink of petrol over everything where it had burst a tank. The crew was in there, a lieutenant and a sergeant; I knew all their uniforms. They sat wearing their goggles, looking grim and practical. They smoked, but not cigarettes. They smoked all over, soaked in petrol; the fumes simmered in the sun. They sat there, slowly smoking. After a while the village policeman arrived on his bicycle; he was covered with sweat and had his helmet on the back of his head. He made the first sound; everything had been as quiet as a church before. The policeman looked into the cockpit, too, but reeled back from the fumes. The people inside didn't care; they just went on smoking in a very deliberate way, staring stonily ahead through the windscreen. The bobby told me: 'Let's get clear of this, son, it's bloody dangerous, the ignition's still on.' We just had time to run like hell before there was a spark somewhere in the cockpit and the whole lot went up.